We Kind of Live or Die by Google

[Music] hello everyone welcome to what used to be the 21 hats podcast and is now the business Advantage TV podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman in this week's conversation our business owners talk about their approaches to digital marketing after years of relying on Google AdWords as his only form of marketing Paul DS tells us that he stopped his $12,000 a month spend on AdWords a couple of years ago choosing instead to rely simply on organic traffic what happened when he stopped paying for marketing his sales actually went up but now with fewer people looking to buy high-end boardroom tables because of the crisis Paul's considering shifting tactics again I'm wondering whether I should sort of go on the offensive he tells us and try to increase my Marketing in the face of these declines and sales or whether nothing I do would make any difference at this point in this episode we also talk about whether it's better to manage your own digital marketing or to hire a specialist our panelists disagree even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly convers ations will if nothing else let owners know they are not alone in facing these challenges this week's lineup features Karen Clark Co who is CEO of blink a user experience research and design firm in Seattle Paul DS who is founder and CEO of Paul Downs cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables and Laura Xander who is CEO of Jimmy Bean wool a digital version of a neighborhood yarn shop that is based in Reno Nevada and also has a wholesale supplier mateline TSH in Fort Worth Texas the episode is titled we kind of live or die by [Music] Google Karen we haven't talked to you in a while welcome back what's been going on I've missed you guys let's see we're uh looking at the numbers and you know for me I'm trying to get a a sense a bigger sense of how the covid has impacted Us and how it will impact us so we're largely trying to create um crystal balls have you learned anything if you figured it out where are we going my feeling is that we're gonna for us anyway in the services business we're going to have a busy uh second half of the year it's becoming The New Normal of how to adjust and how to deal with it and how to go on living our lives and so um certainly that's the way it is where I live in Seattle there's you know you see now everybody just is out and you know I've got 20 masks for each outfit and we embrace it and you just wear them and so you know and going into the office used to be well I'm going to wait until we don't have to wear masks that's what was the general you know feeling but now it's like oh no we we're dying to get back and see some other people we're going to wear a mask we don't care it's normal now have you fully opened up your office again um in Seattle we are open in our California offices we're still not allowed is everybody coming in no um so we're still encouraging all employees across the country to work from home home as much and whenever possible until further notice and so you know we're thinking that's the end of the year at least um but in but we have some in-person research that needs to happen and our clients want to get going on that so we we opened the office in Seattle as soon as we were allowed to by the governor which was um beginning of July and so that's still limited you know there's only people in the office who a really want to be there or who need to be there for their work do you have any thoughts long term on how you might reconfigure things are you still figuring it out yep trying to be creative so it's an incredible Global experiment that we've been able to participate in which is can we get work done from anywhere and the answer is for us yes absolutely um is it what we want and like not necessarily no I mean everybody's still we're we're hearing over and over and over that our employees they still want to come together they miss each other we're looking at changing some of our office space to be more open type meeting rooms so having uh whiteboards as dividers instead of walls so there still is free moving space so people feel more comfortable coming in there and then we're looking at other ways to use our space so we're renting part of our space out to a client who needs it which we wouldn't normally have done I have an idea to a sublease yeah what I think you need some really nice boardroom tables lot oh are you selling Paul is she volunteered that's a good segue uh Laura Paul last week you told us that you were uh seeing the initial signs of a collapse of your sales anything new this week well yeah I started to to to actually trim costs uh if you think about our whole uh company is a series of different functions and a job passes through these different functions when the work starts to dry up from a drop in sales then the project managers Engineers are sort of at the head of the snake and then the the shop Flor can still be busy working on stuff we've already committed to so I spoke to my two project managers this morning about moving one to part-time and reducing the salary of the other and you know everybody has been warned for for weeks and months now that uh in our particular business it's unlikely to be thriving for a while and so I've shown them the numbers and told them it was coming and today was the day and it it seemed to a it wasn't a surprise to either of these people and they took it they took it uh very well and so um what's the lesson I was try to give people a a view of what I see on the horizon and then keep them updated as it moves closer so that if it's good news or bad news at least it's not a surprise and I think that uh people appreciate that maybe or maybe they go and as soon as they leave my office then they have a very different reaction I don't really know Paul how do you do you find people worry more than they should though that's what I found is that balance is really delicate of giving people the right amount of information so they're not too worried about it I don't know the answer of of of exactly where the line is my my bias has always been to give people more information and try to be more transparent and I think I'm probably one of the most transparent business owners you'll ever meet and I haven't experienced any downside of that with the people I've had working for me I think that I would not recommend that everybody do this for every employee because it's a big world out there and there's different businesses and different situations and maybe it's not the right choice but it works for me and my company you have any sense that what you did today is Rippling through the uh through the office that others are worried that more shoes are about to drop probably and you know we're going to be having a meeting uh that we normally have on Friday afternoons uh with the project managers the engineers and the shop floor managers and I'm going to tell them at that meeting I mean it's going to be a topic of dis discussion because it's going to change uh how the the team works one of the team members is not going to be here as often and we're going to reconfigure what she does so that she's doing a slightly different job it's like you can't hide it anyway so so why not just why not just get it out there and talk talk about it and uh so we'll see how it goes um everybody knows that that there's a problem in this world right now it's not our fault but we do have to react to it and I've made clear to all of them that the company has to survive and that's the best chance for all of us so they'll they'll connect the dots I want to move on to our main topic uh which is a topic Paul and Laura you guys brought up last week just as I closed the podcast uh one of the worst things a human being can do I don't know why you did it to me but really the wor but I'm gonna give you another chance I think Lauren leades a very sheltered life frankly yeah seriously we we all know that's true you guys started a really interesting conversation about digital marketing Paul I think you started it by uh talking about uh some issues that you're considering for your business well we kind of live or die by Google and uh I have had a long relationship with Google over the years and um I'm wondering whether uh I should sort of go on the offensive and try to increase my marketing uh in the face of of these declining sales or whether nothing I do would make any difference at this point and it's just a question of waiting it out where to are you leaning I'm not leaning yet I'm still in the in the looking phase I spent some time just doing Google searches on various things over the last few days and I do know or I'm noticing that what appears on the screen is really really different than it did in my memory a few years ago or again in my memory when we started off with Google in 2004 and so that you it what I saw in the search strings that matter to me which which revolve around uh boardroom tables and custom boardroom tables is a lot more ad presence before you get to any organic results and then also a cluttering of the page uh with um shopping results image results I mean it was literally a scroll down before you saw a single thing that was what you would call a traditional organic result and that makes me think oh you know what do I do here because we have over the years uh both bought AdWords I did that for a long time and spent a lot of money on it and then also shifted to a strategy that was mainly about maintaining an organic presence and not heavy on AdWords for the last three years how did you do that how did you go about maintaining an organic presence well we've always had an organic presence that's that's one of the main things that that I think is an under appreciated lesson of digital marketing is that uh the organic search results favor the incumbents heavily that the person who's been who was number one last week and last year in any given search string is likely to still be there unless they really unless they really screw it up because they got to be number one probably through a a combination of luck but also being a pretty good search result and so the concept that you can just knock that person out of position strikes me as being questionable uh although many digital marketing firms will promise that you will move from wherever you know whatever obscurity you're in today up into a good position I just don't see that as being feasible in most cases are you saying that you pretty much just stopped buying AdWords and just started relying on the uh SEO that you'd built up over the years I did and I I believe it was the beginning of 2018 um from 2004 till 2018 I had a monthly adward budgets that would run between 10 and $12,000 a month and you know I spent I gave Google a lot more money over those years than I ever made myself and uh I decided to just stop it and see what would happen because even though 12 Grand a month sounds like a lot of money to Google it's literally nothing and so uh they don't have anything other than their robots um you know managing my account it's not like there's some person who I call and we chat about my my ad spend no that never happens uh and I know a couple of business owners who spend 10 times what I do every month and they don't have any personal interactions either yeah but I was just going to sorry Paul why is that why aren't you talking to um an account manager there on a monthly basis I've never never met an account manager at Google never heard from Google I've spent more than a million dollars at Google and the only the only unsolicited interaction I ever had with them was they sent me a travel mug once but you've never reached out to them either and just said hey I I want somebody to talk to once a month to help me review my results I did have one interaction in 2012 that was prompted by a column I wrote in the times and I signed an NDA about it so I'm probably about to get sued or something but it was uh in I I went to Google Headquarters spend a day with their team and came away with sort of an impression of them that was pretty negative to be frank uh people who were focused on the sort of automatic aspects of Google and had no feeling whatsoever for The Human Side of any kind of commercial interaction and um you know I could talk about this at length but let's just say that if I was spending that amount of money at an airline or Casino or any other business other than Google they would have assigned someone to me and that person's job would be to keep me happy and uh and the fact that they never did that you know it's like I just and and this may be may be naive but I view Google as being sort of like the volcano God they're there and you have to deal with them you don't have any rules for how to deal with them you just got to hope for the best and sacrifice and some way you hope is acceptable do things that you believe are going to work but you don't actually get any information about whether whether it's working or not other than you know whatever results you have well Laura tell us have you done what you just suggested have how how has that worked for you that hasn't been our experience so well at all so good I'm about to learn something this will be great tell us about it well I mean ours and I haven't talked to um an account manager directly in years um but our social media manager she has a monthly call um my husband who set up all the AdWords and stuff I mean he used to have a call constantly um and I'm trying to think we used to spend about 25 ,000 a month and now we're down to about 12,000 but we're getting better results than we did at 25,000 because of the calls that we're having because we have you know the the be the flip side to what you're saying I understand like the machine um has no feelings and is a big robotic entity but a lot of these account managers are you know they're trying to get promoted they're at the beginning of their career and they're hungry you know and they want to have really good results and be really helpful so we have people in the change when did you start when did you start doing that oh 2007 and that's when you were assigned an account manager um I don't remember exactly I'm sure from the very beginning but we're not I mean I'm it sounds like I have a different I'm not eastern Pennsylvania so I'm a I'm Southern which means that if I want something I'm just going to go get it um so didn't wait we don't wait for somebody to assign somebody we call and say hey what do you got that I can have um that's kind of our whole approach what did you call Google what what phone number is Google Mr Google yeah I called Sergey how did you find Sergey um there you can the internet yeah Google I Googled them um I would have to dig in and look and see exactly but probably just I don't know I mean we probably called 10 different numbers until we got somebody there's an AdWords Department I'm sure they have a small business division Laura can you tell us a little bit about those conversations what in information were you looking for from them what did they tell you how did they help you refine your search did they really help you save money totally yeah absolutely and I just say that it's the same thing with Facebook and I know that Facebook is not um your audience Paul in terms of trying to sell but you know they have the same thing I mean if you spend enough money they invite you like you said they invite you to trainings they you know you have multiple account managers you've got all kinds of stuff um but you have to push for it you know you have to pitch yourself that you're important that you could grow or whatever it is um from the Google standpoint and again I've only been on one or two of these calls myself um my team has been on them uh but it's just how to adjust the words and what picking keywords yeah it's picking keywords picking um budgets looking at the trends looking you know how to use the tools um they have so many tools so that it could be self-service um you know I spent a lot more time on the Facebook side of it and Doug spent more time on the Google side of it but they all have trainings you know you can get certified in Google AdWords and so you go through that process and become certified yourself and then you've got somebody that you can ask and um yeah so I don't have the super specifics about it other than our manager Alex she reports every month she's just like holy cow our Roi this month was blah blah blah which is you know just as much as it was the previous month they're I know that they have been very very helpful in helping us trim our budget on the stuff that's not working you know so they're for in our case selling yarn we've always been better off having putting more budget toward specific Search terms versus really General Search terms so we don't spend much money on yarn um or how to knit we spend money on mateline Tosh vintage yarn because that's a very specific thing um so they've really helped us with the strategy of that of when to be specific and when to be generic um and then help give you the data to support that and make those decisions why would you spend money on a brand name like that wouldn't isn't your client likely to find you if they're searching by mine Tosh aren't they likely to find you anyway sure but I mean aren't they more likely to remember you if they if you show up a few times I see you know so it's just brand impressions well uh let me react to this I it's my own personality is that I always like to do everything myself like if you if you dropped me in the cockpit of a 747 I'd start pushing buttons and seeing if I could get the thing to fly so that may have just been a bad strategy for this world um but but you know we've been doing Google for a long time and I don't recall ever having any approach I mean there was a few times we would get an email and it' be like click to to to see this or that and it always struck me as being incredibly generic advice uh I have been on the phone with Google people because they would call you know there was a period of time time was probably about 2010 when they did some Outreach and they would have somebody call and that person never knew as much about the interface as I did so I never got any sense nothing about my interactions which are just clearly went down a different path than your interactions uh ever led me to to think that there was any point in asking for help well okay so let me ask you that totally makes sense and when we were talking offline last week you had asked you were like should I hire a digital strategist and I'm like no Paul you're smart um you're obviously very intelligent uh in most ways um so I think you could learn it yourself there's no point in paying somebody to figure this out however what I mean by that is um learn it yourself like you said and then we use our Google person as a coach and we have definitely and again same thing with Facebook we've definitely had some people that don't have the highest IQs and they don't really get it and they haven't been super helpful so you just have to keep pushing and deal with it and maybe ask for somebody else or you know if you if you find somebody um that or you have to suffer my experience because with the Facebook side of it which is what I know better than the Google side of it I as Lauren will tell you years ago like I spent nine months just study learning how to fly that 737 um and so I got to a point where their CMO was like God you know more than most heads of agencies that said I still would talk to whoever my Facebook adviser was and there was always just one little thing that they would bring up in our 30 minute conversation that I didn't know or that would change the way I thought about things especially because stuff is changing so fast I would say at least the way I think of it is one as long as I can get one little thing out of it that rounds out my knowledge and two in your world this is kind of like a this is sales right I mean yeah you when you're selling a table just because the first person that you talk to at a company maybe doesn't seem like they're going to want to buy it it doesn't mean you stop talking to them you keep pushing you keep pushing until you find if you know it's a good idea until you find that one person that is going to make a difference and so that's how you that's my experience is how I've had to approach it with these large companies is that eventually you will find somebody it's just like hiring you know it just takes a while sometimes you have to work through some Duds well that's great advice I'll tell you what Lauren here's the project let's see over the next few months whether I can actually make Headway from where I am today and uh become Google's pal and get some useful help out of them if it happens that could change my life it'd be great thank you this is one of the most valuable things I've heard in months do I get a board T I'm gonna get a boardroom table I want to hear from Karen Karen correct me if I'm wrong but I think you've told us in the past that that Google is your primary um means of marketing uh blink um any thoughts on this back and forth especially the idea of whether it's best to do it yourself or to go out and hire a guru I'm the polar opposite to both Paul and Laura I prefer to do nothing myself and to Outsource everything so I've always felt that way um I I love to bring in the experts and you know and have people who are very specific in one Niche and so we over the years had various people inhouse my business partner in particular was the our internal SEO Guru and he would be buying AdWords and constantly monitoring them and um spending a pile of money um and and then we sort of decided to okay we got to take marketing more seriously and we built up an internal marketing team but the problem is uh they they never got the support that they needed within the company to be able to be really effective so in the last year we changed our whole approach to the thing and we just decided to Outsource the whole department minus really one person to really coordinate everything that we're doing externally and we farmed out everything and so we have you know like one one firm for our SEO strategy another one for our content creation another one for more and we all of this for us falls under sales and marketing which is pretty standard and that for us it's absolutely the way to go because now all of a sudden you know we don't have a couple of people who are limited in budget and you know bandwidth and all the rest of it and now we have these armies of people because they're small consulting firms and in some cases bigger but they are so good at what they do that they come in and it's their job to be up to speed on how Google changes by the minute and well let let me ask you about that Karen because I I've heard so many nightmarish stories about people trying to hire the right firm uh everybody pretends or claims to be a a guru everybody promises to get you to the top uh of the results uh but I but I've heard you know one nightmare after another it sounds like you found uh the right people how'd you do it well it's like it's like hiring right you don't always get it right the first time but you have to be very careful and do a lot of vetting a lot of interviewing and know what you want and and Trust the people that it's you know it comes down to relationships in the end did you figure out the right question to ask how do you find out if somebody really is a guru well can I just say results it comes down to relationships but it also comes down to money I mean yeah right you're paying people like you're running Hospital way cheaper for us to do this than to hire internally so we it's exactly how we looked at it it's like okay the salaries of the two people that we were paying we take those salaries and that's all of a sudden our budget for these external firms and and we have it and yet we're getting you know like like three or four times the value because these teams they're they're efficient they're optimized they know and the results are are you know they're measured on these results and if they're no good then we'll fire them for sure so I have a question what's what percentage of your revenues do you devote to this 10% 10% just on the market yeah 10% of your revenues is not very much to you EXA look sales sales and marketing combined that's what I'm talking about okay that's different I'm asking just the marketing piece just what you're talking about here I'm just curious cuz I know how much I'm spending on it so what I'm talking about here though is it's it's mixed in right because we have some sales training that's that's part of it like we see it as as really connected um and this is but this does not include the salaries you pay to your or whatever you pay to your actual salese correct 10% well yeah and I let me now you're making me question that but it's roughly it's it's roughly in that order of magnitude okay how many people do you have Paul Ken 14 140 people you're you're $15 million year company and you're spending 10% on that we're at 30 million yeah okay you're spending three million bucks a year on that which is fine but you're you know like you're not in the regular world with the rest of us here why why is that Paul that's my point yeah that's we're talking about hospital she's she's spending even she's spending 78% of my revenue on that so you know I'm I'm in a world where talking percentages we're not talking dollars here right so we're we're talking about percentages what's the difference I'm just the difference is it's a percentage of how you run the company and you can hire you know individuals you don't have to hire firms and so we we need to hire you know we're hiring bigger firms because we have you know bigger things that more stuff that we need them to do the volume is higher and so as we were smaller though we would hire individuals to do this very same thing I'm not knocking on you we're just we're having two different conversations because Paul and I live in a different world um Paul and Jay and Dana and I live in a different world than Karen does um right but I've been there I mean we were a 10 person company for a long time and how we did it then also is you know while I said we had different we tried everything we tried doing it ourselves we tried creating a small internal team we tried um Outsourcing to companies to firms to individuals we've tried it all and I just mean that you have a scale you have a scale that we don't so even first of all we can't spend 10% because we have cost of goods sold you know that's 50 I mean our gross margin is only 48% or 42% of our Revenue you know or whatever that is so all the because you're a services company right so you you're going to spend more money on services and on creating those Services um and then the other point is that for us even if it was 10% or my 10% is just simply not going to buy as much as your 10% Like I keep can't I can't get three4 of a person you know I can't get a half a person I kind of can but I can't get the same quality sure you can you can hire a consultant for 10 hours a month um yeah that's way better than than having a person work 10 hours a month right because because they're actually going to be really focused and they're ready to go and they're more efficient yeah but do you understand like if I hire a consultant for 10 hours a month and they suck after six months the risk for me is significantly higher than the risk is for you so it's just a scale thing you know every investment is a riskier investment when you're small like we are so every dollar yeah I mean mean I'm operating on a 40% margin 60% goes into cogs and so we just don't have that much money left over no and you have to just be so careful and obviously Karen's doing something right I mean you know we're the ones who are suffering and she's the one who's driving a Bentley but well she also has I presume you have repeat clients too and that's a different ball game and so do you Laura and we don't I mean we do somewhat it's about 20% of our business but we have to go find new people every day and so it's a it's a different business model Paul have you ever tried going outside Outsourcing it I have outsourced aspects of it but um I mean we have SEO efforts through my website designer they do SEO too and I they they actually I think have done a reasonably good job um I've done I've separated out the AdWords because uh I've never really heard of anybody who who had someone who could do SEO and AdWords and website design and give you know be affordable for someone like me so um I was approached by someone an AdWords consultant a couple years ago and I can't remember why he did he found me but he had some recommendations about how to get better results in terms of just Roi that were very good one of the other things that that happened was a couple years ago working with my website guys we were able to build coding into our site that allowed us to really pinpoint who was calling us from what kind of sources so we could for the first time see okay you got this call from organic and you got this one from this email or this and so we started to see what these what these campaigns were actually producing and then then we set up our own internal tracking to look at the people who came from organic and the people who came from adwards and see how many of them actually bought something and it turned out that a huge percentage of our something like 90% of our our tra of our actual calls was coming from organic and of the AdWords you know the total effort and spend produced only one job in in the year We examined and so it's like well a just isn't really doing anything for us and so um this was prior to cutting the budget too and so uh cut the budget from 12,000 a month to 500 a month and and then start looking to see what happened and one other thing about digital marketing uh something that that I could be wrong about this I'm learning a lot today but uh um I'm very wary of making a lot of changes to an AdWords campaign uh because there's so many buttons in that cockpit that if you start pressing them all all the time and then you look at the results you don't have have any idea which thing you did um change the needle and so you have to sort of do things one at a time and then wait and see for a little while to see whether that thing made any difference and uh at least that's my perception of how how you would go about trying to evaluate your efforts so we found that that cutting the budget by 98% had no immediate effect uh it did start to cause a decline or it was correlated with a decline in in the traffic of about 3% a year over the next two years and but uh that period was also a period immediately after I stopped writing for the New York Times and so it was really it was like which one was it that's causing this decline in traffic who knows there's really no way to figure that out when you cut your budget 98% did you put that money into another form of marketing I put it into my pocket cuz I hadn't been making any money and I was better off yeah because the company wasn't profitable and then we stopped doing that and I started doing some other things and suddenly I've got money that's a happy outcome yeah and sales did not go down they went up we actually invested in internal processes to make this the a better use of the calls that were coming in and uh a bunch of different internal things and the company became much more profitable and it wasn't it wasn't all because of me cutting the AdWords budget it was a it was a packet of things but at the end of the day my income tripled so you know that's good for me I like that and um I having seen this slow decline in the organic I went to my web guys and I said well what can we do about this and they said well let's do 10 things and they were all little adjustments to the website and and and tags and and file names and all kinds of little tiny things to make the whole thing stickier to organic and it worked uh we turned that decline around at the beginning of last year and uh we were starting to grow it again at again about 5% a year and it was going fine until Co hit us makeing that story what you will but that's that's been my experience yeah I just wanted to pop in and say one last thing with um Karen you know with the way that you guys spend money I totally get that and I totally so I'm not criticizing I want to be really clear about that but I just it's really important to me um as I have watched too many small business owners in our industry making let's say grossing a million even um get really burned by Outsourcing and finding some person who says that they're an SEO expert or that they're a digital expert and you spend thousands of dollars um you know if you are making a million bucks a year and even you are able to put 5% in that's 50 grand for your entire advertising and marketing budget you can easily eat that up with a consultant and my experience has been that and we have outsourced but most consultants for that are willing to do work for a small business they're not the same Consultants that are going to be willing and interested in working for somebody like kieran's company and they just don't have the same strategic mindset um and they don't provide the same value because if they did they would go work for somebody like kieran's company you know where they would work for a firm that's going to be charging 300 bucks an hour 500 bucks an hour whatever it is I actually totally disagree that's not my experience and yes right but but you and I are two people and and the and the world is big and so I don't think it's fair to generalize about all consultants and generalizing about all Consultants well you Consultants the ones that I have worked with and okay but you say that but but you said all consultants and I don't think that's fair because I think if you you have to vet them very carefully and of course there's ones that are bad and you've got it just like hiring Fire fast and and expect great results and if you don't get them then you know you got to leave them and so we've had over the years there's lots of great independent Consultants who are happy to they don't have to work for my company and we were not always how we are now I keep saying that over we were 10 I know Karen but you have a sexy like tech company Paul and I don't have an even Jay nobody who is aspirational and ambitious and blah blah blah very few of those people want to help sell yarn online they don't want to help sell a you know a boardroom table they want the sexy startup tech company they want to interface and do stuff with Google and blah blah blah they don't want to do this stuff The Pedestrian stuff you know the mom and pop businesses that's my experience I'm sure there are some people I want to throw in one more data point there's a member of my business group who uh went on a digital strategy of hiring consultants and did grow his company from 4 million a year and he just sold it at 26 million um and he did it by hiring consultants and uh and sort of just like I'm going to hire you what do you want to do here's the resources did it work yes you continue to work no you're fired where's the next guy he was very brutal about it but he got the results but a big part of that was that he was able to get his manufacturing operation to the point where it was producing 60% gross margins and um so that he had money to pump into this he didn't take much money out of the company himself and he was had a single-minded focus on growth that that uh played out in a lot of ways but it's not something that personally I would want to replicate but it could be done so I I and it's not a sexy industry he makes custom spiral staircases so I think that there's truth in both sides but one is that the if you're stuck at at a million a year and you're counting on hiring a consultant to get you out of that it's a very Longshot proposition and uh just because almost everything is stacked against you and I would be very curious to hear whether uh Karen whether you think you got you know you at you're 10 people which I gather would be about 2 million a year now you're at 30 million was it just hiring a Google consultant that got you out of that fix or what else did you do no of course not it's it's a piece of the puzzle absolutely again I just I I want to be I want to make sure that like the people that are listening some of them are smaller independent don't have that 60% gross margin and can't you know just not throw the money but they can't reinvest those large amounts of money in um and I've just witnessed too many people throwing it away what what should they do Laura a lot a lot of them don't have the the skills themselves either what what is the right course for that size business in your opinion that's a great question I don't think that Lauren I don't think that there's any guaranteed path to success particularly not on that road and that the reality is that the vast majority of businesses who are stuck there are going to stay stuck there forever and that's just the way the world is and it's yeah I mean and the way that I looked at it then and now is that you know when you talk about having the knowledge learn it's that my time is way better spent focusing on the deliverables that we're producing as a company so the actual Consulting work that we're doing and for me the the marketing side of is like I I it's not a good use of me to try to figure that out because there are people who are way better and way is smarter at it which is why we would bring in individuals back then and why we bring in small firms now um and and by the way while I'm on here I just want to clarify I did get clarification that that 10% includes our salaries for the BD team that I I wasn't sure if it did or not so it does we are out of time this was a really interesting conversation best of all I got it on tape this time so thank you all for that um I think we're going to come back to this our pleasure and I'm GNA try to call Google I'm going to see if someone will answer the phone that's going to be my project for the next week if they don't you call back every hour on the hour and tell them that you won't stop until they give you what you need okay we'll see how that works I'm with Laura I'm with Laura you got to ask for what you want over and over and over until you get over and over and over again yep all right guys thank you very much thanks for listening everybody this episode was produced by Jess thubron founder of blank word Productions remember we started the 21 hats podcast to help business owners feel a little less isolated to let them know they aren't the only ones fighting these battles if you got something out of this conversation please help us reach more people tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcast follow us on Twitter at 21h hats and let me know if you have a question or a comment or a topic you'd like us to cover my email address is L Feldman 21h hats.com see you next time [Music]