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Episode 244 - How to Survive a Business Downturn
284 Plays10 days ago
Today's guest is Susie Bulloch of Hey Grill Hey, my absolute favorite for grilling, BBQing, smoking website. This is an interview I recorded while at Kit's Craft and Commerce event this year.
This episode is sponsored by BDOW!, formerly Sumo, the very best intelligent form and pop-up tool for your website. Use the code DAVEYANDKRISTA to save 20% on your subscription.
As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check 'em out over at https://daveyandkrista.com/how-to-survive-business-downturn-btb-244/. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Brands That Book Show
00:00:00
Speaker
Facebook videos at the time were new, and I was able to start making really terrible videos, by the way. They weren't good videos, but the bar was low because nobody was doing it.
00:00:11
Speaker
You're listening to The Brands That Book Show, a podcast for creative entrepreneurs who want practical tips and strategies to build engaging brands and craft high converting websites. We're your hosts, Davey and Krista, co-founders of a brand and website design agency specializing in visual brand design and show it websites. You're listening to The Brands That Book Show.
00:00:33
Speaker
Today's interview is with Susie Bullock of Hey Grill Hey, my absolute favorite grilling, barbecuing, smoking website.
Interview with Susie Bullock of Hey Grill Hey
00:00:41
Speaker
This is an interview that I recorded while I convert kids craft and commerce this past year. And I've been following Susie for a long time, like before she had her own line of barbecue products in grocery stores.
00:00:52
Speaker
So I jumped at the opportunity to meet her while I was at Craft and Commerce, so and she graciously agreed to let me interview her in the midst of a busy schedule, which included her giving a keynote at that event. Shout out to my friend Mike Pacchione for introducing us.
00:01:08
Speaker
But seriously, if you're into smoking meats or barbecuing, you got to check out Hey Girl Hey. My two favorites are her sweet heat chicken marinade and her sweet rub seasoning. I actually think you can get her sweet rub seasoning in some grocery stores. Unfortunately, not in one's close to us, but that recipe is online.
00:01:26
Speaker
Anyway, we chat about her journey, building Hey Girl Hey and the importance of building a mailing list. And I hope you enjoy this conversation. As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check them out at DavianCrista.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider re leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts. It really helps.
00:01:44
Speaker
Today's episode is sponsored by Badal, formerly Sumo, the very best intelligent form and pop-up tool for your website. Deliver the right message to the right visitor using our advanced targeting rules. Whether you want to display a pop-up to only new visitors or generate a unique discount code for those who subscribe to your list, you can get the job done using Badal.
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One of my personal favorite features is the show a tab function. Basically how this works is when visitors close the popup, it minimizes to the bottom of the page so that visitors can open it back up if they'd like, but it also remains out of their way while they browse. You can check out how that feature works over at the Davey and Krista website. Also use the code Davey and Krista to save 20% on your subscription.
Susie's Blogging and Grilling Journey
00:02:34
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Create an experience on your website using Badao.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, I'd love to chat with you a little bit more about your story. I know you already shared it this morning. So I don't know if you're tired of sharing the story. Never. Yeah, but I'd love to hear about how you got started. And like I said, I've been following you for at least the last few years. And you were one of the people at the conference. I told Mike this, told Kayla this. I'm like, there's a lot of people here, but I want to make sure that I talk with Susie.
00:02:59
Speaker
Yeah. Like a lot of way cooler people yeah know that are here. Yeah. So nobody with that chicken marinade recipe. That's right. The sweet heat chicken marinade changed my life. So anyway, but I'd love to hear about how you got started.
00:03:12
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So I'll give you a little bit of pre-Hey Grill Hey backstory, because I think it's important to have a little bit of context. I've been in the blogging industry for over 15 years, maybe even longer. I mean, I started on Blogspot just writing a family update list before there was Facebook. Like Facebook wasn't a thing that we knew about, but we had a family blog where we wrote our updates about our life and our baby and our family and all these fun things.
00:03:39
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And I had a friend who was writing a coupon blog. So she was telling people, hey, if you match up these grocery store coupons, you can save a bunch of money. I was so broke. We had a new baby. We were living off of one income. Saving money was like the dream scenario. And she said, I need help writing these match-ups. And I was like, well, I'm already using them every week anyway. I could totally do that. Applied, got the job, and then turned that into like a series of side hustles working for Other website owners, other bloggers, I worked doing social media management and customer service emails, and I kind of dipped my toe into what is now known as the creator economy in a bunch of tiny different ways that I was just using to help supplement my family's income and give me a little bit of something to do on the side while I was raising babies.
Founding Hey Grill Hey: A Woman in Barbecue
00:04:25
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And one of the jobs that I landed was a job developing recipes for a grill and smoker company. I did not have a barbecue background by any stretch of the imagination. nation I was born and raised in Utah. Barbecue to us was like hamburgers and hot dogs on the propane grill, right? yeah Like that was, you were coming over for a barbecue. I did not know about the world of like barbecue, like wood fired smokers, charcoal. It was an entire,
00:04:53
Speaker
realm of food that I had been unexposed to. But they dropped this grill off on my porch. It was a wood-fired grill. They gave me their existing recipe book. Because when you bought the grills 10, 12 years ago, yeah there wasn't recipes online. They just gave you a little booklet with the product. And like the little Weber card. Yeah, yeah. And they were like, here's 12 to 15 recipes that you can start cooking right now. They said, we'd really love to digitize these recipes.
00:05:17
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And then once you're through these ones, we want like maybe five new recipes a week. Like if you could start Monday, that'd be great. I'd never even fired up a wood fired grill or smoker before. So we spent that weekend kind of playing around fiddling with it a little bit. And I like to say it was kind of like a baptism by actual fire because I had to jump in and learn everything that there was to learn about cooking on this type of grill. And I fell in love with it.
00:05:45
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It kind of changed our family culture a little bit. It changed how we ate as a family. People started showing up around dinner time. I would have people just talking to me and they would ask me barbecue questions and grilling questions. And even just within our circle of friends in our neighborhood and our family, I kind of became this like go-to spot for barbecue and grilling information because that's what I was doing in my little side hustle. And I loved everything about it.
00:06:15
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After doing that for a couple of years, they brought like an in-house content team. I'd been working remotely and I didn't want to apply for like a real job and I didn't want to go work in an office. I loved working from home. I loved that I could cook at home, feed my family, take care of my kids, all of the benefits that that kind of like.
00:06:34
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remote contract work offered. I didn't want to give that up. And at that point, my husband had been working in accounting for six years. His career was a little bit more like stable and progressed. And he said, you know you have an opportunity here.
00:06:49
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What do you want to do? My youngest was a year old and so I started thinking like, do I go back to school? Do I get a job job? Or do I take this opportunity to maybe start something new? And I really had found such a passion in the barbecue and grilling space.
00:07:10
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I wanted to keep sharing those recipes. Not just a passion, but I kind of had this, not to sound like braggy, but I had this really unique talent to write recipes for people that had never cooked barbecue before. And I think that came from me being a person that had never cooked barbecue before. yeah Because barbecue recipes on the internet a decade ago, they assumed you knew so much. They assumed you knew what type of wood to use or what temperature to cook at. They would just say, like put the rub on it and smoke it until it is done. and like It was one step and that was the recipe. It was like looking at recipe cards from like your grandma's church cookbook from the 1950s. That's how barbecue recipes were written. It assumed a lot about the person cooking. like You must know so much already, but a lot of people didn't yeah lot of people didn't grow up with a backyard barbecue experience. They didn't grow up with
00:08:03
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a granddad that would throw wood on the on the pit every Saturday. And I was able to kind of bridge that gap between the people who know and the people who don't. And I was able to write recipes that anybody could follow. yeah So I found that I had this knack for communicating with that maybe new enthusiast in the barbecue space. And so I told them, I think I want to start my
Building and Expanding the Hey Grill Hey Brand
00:08:27
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own food blog. And then I want to start a barbecue food blog.
00:08:31
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I was super passionate. I had the resources. I kind of had the information. I'd been working for this other company for a couple of years at this point and had already written probably hundreds of recipes for them. So I felt like, okay, I can do this maybe if I can figure out how, but I had the passion for it. And that's really what pushed me off the ledge to start Hey Grill Hey. And also I think there was a little bit of kind of some discontent with what I saw in the barbecue industry at the time as a female. It was very male dominated. It still kind of is, but I feel like it's shifting rapidly, which is phenomenal. yeah There weren't a lot of women publicly represented in the barbecue and grilling space. There would be one or two on a TV show with 12 people. or one cookbook author on a shelf of 50 books that was female. And I had a daughter at the time, she was six, almost seven. And I thought, what kind of world I wanted her to grow up in. And if I really believed at my core that women could
00:09:33
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step into any space they wanted to occupy and they could do anything that they dreamed was possible. I had to be the person to emulate that for her. I had to embody that idea for her. So it was kind of the nudge that I needed to go from years of working for other people, years of helping other people on their websites to actually owning my own thing and stepping into that entrepreneurial space.
00:09:57
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Yeah, yeah, and if I remember your story correctly, you stepped into this entrepreneurial space, you started this food blog, and it was an overnight success. yeah Yeah, immediately successful, millions of dollars. No, it was ugly and hard. I knew nothing about building websites. I'd worked on other people's websites, but I knew nothing about starting from scratch. I think I spent $36 on my ah URL and my hosting through GoDaddy for a year. I hosted on GoDaddy for probably two years before I was like, oh that There's other hosting? You don't know what you don't know, yeah but that is one thing I didn't know. I built my own theme. It was horrible. It was hard to navigate. It was so clunky. It was not fast. A lot of the beginning steps of the journey were very ugly. It was like toddlers taking their first steps. and I laughed because I really had been doing this type of work for six years. like
00:10:49
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I think that I would have known more than I knew when I really started. But I did have some pieces and bits of education that I took with me that really helped me, I think, start off on maybe a stronger foot than some people who are starting out from the bare minimum. Yeah. And what you know those reflecting back on those early days, what do you think are like some of the most important lessons that you carried with you? Because you know I found you through research. I didn't know who you were before. like I didn't find you on Instagram or something like that, right?
00:11:17
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I googled chicken marinade, pork, you know, pork rub, you know, that sort of thing and came across your site, made one of your recipes, loved it, right? And so now you have this huge readership. But reflecting back on like when you got started, what are some of the most important things that you carry with you? I think the biggest turning points for my business actually becoming a brand were a few opportunities that I took advantage of that were kind of innovative at the time. So Facebook videos at the time were new.
00:11:47
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And I was able to start making really terrible videos, by the way. They weren't good videos, but the bar was low because nobody was doing it, right? So I started making these videos, jumped on a trend early and was able to really turn that into a decent amount of traffic. But that was almost two and a half years into building my business. So I had a really good library of content. And I think that's another good lesson was consistency.
00:12:12
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Like I did have the viral payoff, but it wasn't until after I'd published and published and published and published with maybe my mom and four other people reading it. I built a library of really good recipes, tested recipes. They worked, they were written well. And so while it was, we were getting kind of traction in a couple spaces. Like I had some cool TV experiences and stuff like that. The blog itself really wasn't getting a ton of page views.
00:12:40
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But once we had those virals on Facebook and people landed on a website that had really good recipes and a good library of content, they started coming back. yeah They had a great experience and they wanted to see what else was there. So that kind of started laying the foundation of our brand extending outside of just the website or outside of just these couple little news segments that I had been doing on TV. And I think the next thing that really helped kind of establish our brand Maybe I'm trying to think how far into this journey was building out a little bit on the ways that we were getting traffic. So Facebook, great, sent us a lot of traffic, but you know, Virals don't last, right? It's kind of a flash in the pan. But after we got that flash in the pan, I started seeing traffic coming from Google.
00:13:29
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which I had never had but before. yeah There was a little bit of social proof that came with the viral where Google was like, oh, people are going here on their own. That's pretty cool. Maybe this website has something to offer. So my my recipes and my posts started ranking on Google. And I thought, well, that's nice. How can I have more of that? Because I didn't have to really do anything after writing the initial post to keep getting this continual traffic. So I dove into the world of search engine optimization and started building my website for speed. I got off of GoDaddy. I found a better host. I made sure my website was fast. I installed a recipe card so that my recipes were marked up appropriately for Google to find with the schema and all the things I was hand typing in recipes without a recipe card. For so many recipes, I had to go manually move over all of my recipes to a recipe card format.
00:14:18
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but I thought there was a lot of potential in the SEO space to help people who were looking. And that's what I really noticed about Google is if you don't know somebody to ask in person, where do you go?
00:14:33
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search engine Most people go to search engines, right? And that's kind of shifting now with AI and all these video platforms. But for the time, search engines was kind of like, that's where we're headed. We're going to go look there and say, how do I do this? How do I make this? Give me a recipe for that. So I optimized really heavily for SEO. And that's really when I feel like we started to gain kind of that traction, that that brand awareness.
00:14:57
Speaker
people were finding us independently of me being on a TV show or independently of me being on social media. So those were kind of two big turning points for us was like catching that viral Facebook trend early, having a really good library of content to fall back on and building out our SEO strategy.
00:15:16
Speaker
Yeah. And so now your brand, I mean, it's so much more than just the recipes you can find online. You have products in stores. When did that start happening? And did you always want to do that? Like, is that always an area you wanted to expand out to or just taking advantage of opportunities that sort of came?
00:15:29
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I
Launching a Product Company and Adapting to Change
00:15:30
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think early on in my website, my husband, I shared a little bit about this. It's not a journey that we talked about a lot, but I think it's an important piece of this story. My husband was working as an accountant full-time and he hated his job. Not just hated his job, but like hated his life and who he was having to work that job every day. He's a really creative person and spreadsheets were just not his thing, but it's what he had to do every day. And so I set a goal. I'm like, okay,
00:15:59
Speaker
within a year, you're going to quit your job. And I needed to generate enough revenue to make that happen. So I started looking at additional revenue streams outside of just monetizing the website with ads. And when you start looking at how do I monetize a blog, right? There's a ton of resources. You can do a million things. I kind of settled on, okay, sponsorships are going to help us.
00:16:21
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There are a lot of people in the brand space that wanted to work with women in barbecue and I realized I could start charging for that type of interaction. So that was one avenue that helped us kind of in those early days really establish that.
00:16:33
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income. I also leaned into a digital course that I built. It still is. It's amazing. It's called the Grill Squad. yeah It's an online barbecue school. So you can just pay for like a single class and there's workbooks that go along with it. So if you've never cooked a brisket before, like I will help you cook an amazing first. I need this because I feel like the brisket to me is like it should be simple. It seems like on paper it should be simple, but I've never gotten it right because they're big and it sounds lucky and a little bit complicated and kind of intimidating. Yes. So I started the grill squad to help people bridge that gap because there's only so much I can tell you in a blog post. Right. yeahp
00:17:12
Speaker
So I started kind of collecting this, this knowledge in a database and launched a subscription model called the grill squad, which kind of helped bridge the gap and fill in some of of those additional income streams. And then then we launched the product company and the product company was.
00:17:27
Speaker
Everybody that I knew was resistant, like don't do it. It's a bad idea. yeah I had seen friends with food blogs start and fail at food product companies and branded products and all of these things in conjunction with their food blogs. They're like, people don't want products from food blogs. They just want to show up, get the recipe and leave. And I thought, maybe.
00:17:47
Speaker
But maybe I can figure it out. And my audience was asking, one of my most popular recipes is my sweet rub. And it was one of my first viral recipes that really did well on social media. One of the first things I found. Yes, it's everywhere. It's really popular. I think it was groundbreaking at the time because nobody was sharing their rub recipes. It was like, secret.
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah. That was the special sauce. so his Grandpa dies with the rub recipe. You don't share the family rub recipe. So nobody was posting it. There was one guy that was posting online. He was charging $4 for you to buy this rub recipe from him. And people were paying it because there was nothing else out there. And they're like, this is a really good rub recipe. yeah So I started sharing mine. It did really well. And people were saying, you know what? I'm making this by the bucket full. Could you just bottle this? Like my life would be so much easier if I could just buy a bottle from you. And we were like, Oh, well, maybe we should try that. My husband's like, no, I audit companies that have products. It's a terrible idea. It's so much work. Don't do it. But after enough of those messages, I would like screenshot and send them to him. Like, look, another one wants it. Another one wants it. Like here's proof, right? Yeah.
00:18:52
Speaker
he was like okay let's do the product thing and he had kind of quit his job at this point and so i said great remember that company you didn't want to run you're running it yeah so i kind of put him on the product company and between the two of us i was able to run the blog and he kind of took on the product company and we were able to build that into an additional revenue stream and honestly a real brand builder for our business as well Yeah, that's amazing. One of the things I want to chat with you briefly about is kind of the ever changing landscape of SEO, you know, and that being a big part of your business. Now with AI, things are changing. You had mentioned during the conference presentation that you lost, you know, half your traffic from search overnight. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What what does it look like dealing with that? And I guess what are some of the ways you're trying to insulate your business just to deal with that?
00:19:38
Speaker
I mean, it's exhausting, honestly, but I think anybody who's a creator has had a similar, if not identical experience, whether it's a social media platform that changes its algorithm and all of a sudden you're on top one week and you're just not.
00:19:52
Speaker
the next, yeah or your Google traffic falls through the floor, or your YouTube channel gets demonetized. like We all have these moments as creators of businesses, especially in the online world, where something that we thought was a sure thing, something that was working, stops working. and Luckily, I had already been building these diversification channels because I knew, I grew up in an entrepreneurial, my dad was very entrepreneurial, but it was pretty volatile.
00:20:22
Speaker
And so I grew up knowing that things can change at any moment and the things that are sure things aren't always sure things. My dad was a hotel administrator and he owned hotel groups during 9-11 and the amount of people that stopped traveling overnight from something that was completely outside of his control changed the dynamic of our family pretty significantly. And so I knew that entrepreneurship was risky. I knew that owning your own thing was risky. I knew that having one income stream was even riskier. So I kind of built in these ways for us to have multiple knobs so that if anything dropped off, I could kind of crank the knobs on something else and hopefully keep us afloat. And honestly, that's what we did. So when my Google traffic fell through the floor, we started turning the knobs on other channels. We increased our promotion and sales for our grill squad.
00:21:11
Speaker
for our subscription platform. We started you know increasing focus on marketing our product company. We turned up the dial on sponsored posts that we were able to take on as a brand. So we had these additional revenue streams that while it was devastating that we lost that kind of consistent income that we'd been experiencing. yeah We had systems already in place.
The Power of Email Lists and Audience Relationships
00:21:35
Speaker
for us to be able to turn the knobs. And I, one of the proudest things of my life in surviving that downturn as a business owner is I didn't have to lay off any of my employees yeah because we couldn't afford to pay them. I mean, my husband and I took home a lot less and we survived on a lot less, but we were able to keep our team together through that journey. And that was something that I'm i'm really, really proud of. And it's because we had other knobs we could turn. Yeah. And I think even beyond that, I mean, it's a testament to the brand that you built, you know, and as another one of the speakers said here at the conference, you know, the brand is the moat to a c certain extent, right? And so you're able to turn the knobs on those other aspects of your brand. And it's still a recognizable brand and yeah a brand that's built a lot of trust over the years. so The last thing I want to ask you about is your email list. Yeah. And we're here at crafting commerce, right? And I want to know how important is that or how important has that been to your business? And when in your journey as a blogger and so much more, did you start building your list? Yeah.
00:22:29
Speaker
Email list is important i feel like it's one of the more underutilized avenues in my business i started an email list early and i think it's because i had this prior experience working for these other companies right i did customer service emails and social media management for another company so i was like oh.
00:22:46
Speaker
emails, emails matter. But also when I was looking into starting my own food blog, I literally was like, how do you start a food blog? And I feel like like so collect email addresses was one of like the checklist items. So I think I went to MailChimp and signed up for a free account and built in a subscription box from the get go. Cause I was like, Oh, every website has an email box. Like I just, in my mind, it was just something that you had to have. It wasn't something that I really built with intention until a couple of years into my business. And I think I went to a conference where somebody was like, you know, you can just like send emails to people. And I was like, yeah. And they were like, and they read them. I was like, Oh,
00:23:29
Speaker
They read the emails. You can talk to them just in their inbox. like You don't have to go through these social channels. like They gave you their email address. It's more than just a button click to follow you on social media or stumbling across your post on Google or finding you through an algorithm while they were doom scrolling one night.
00:23:50
Speaker
They took the time, like they typed out that email address and they hit the enter button. And I really hadn't thought about my email list as that relationship based transactional, interactional space until that point in time. And then I really doubled down and started focus on how can I really gather my people in this space, people that want to hear from me.
00:24:16
Speaker
people that are excited when I have a new product launch, people that are excited when I share a new recipe, people that can't wait to cook the thing that I just posted that week. And so it's taken a few years, but we've really been able to build a list that has a great open rate. We got great click throughs. We have a really engaged and dedicated audience base on our newsletter. It's called the barbecue beat. We send it out every Friday and It's really been a fun avenue for me to be able to connect with my audience in a slightly different way because it's a little longer format than you'd see on social media or you know other platforms. So I love my newsletter. And I bet it helps a little bit insulate against some of these other you know changes in algorithms and ah SEO and stuff too. Yeah, I mean, if you're just a content website, I think it's hard to monetize a really large email list, because sometimes those large lists get pricey yeah to have a large list, unless you are really good at driving clicks to your website, right? yeah But since we do have the other avenues, we do have the online subscription company, we do have the product company, we're able to market and really, I don't know, make the most of that communication yeah outlet and really let those people
00:25:30
Speaker
be a part of our brand story and be a part of the Hey Grill Hey, you know, ecosystem and experience. And like I said, it's a very relationship based. Every time I send out an email, I get emails immediately back from people. Thank you so much. I love the recipes this week. Hey, I just noticed something in the newsletter. I had a question about this and it's a great interaction piece for me to be able to communicate directly with my people.
00:25:53
Speaker
Yeah, amazing amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And yeah, you know it's so fun meeting people in in real life, especially when they line up with you know who they are online. Cool. Really admire you know your story. And thank you. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Thanks for tuning in to The Branchette Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, leaving a review on Apple Podcast, and sharing this episode with others. For show notes and other resources, head on over to DaveyandChrista.com.