What's Wrong With Small Business Marketing?

[Music] they said we're thinking of putting a chainsaw on a robot and we said how about we do that on thursday hello everybody i am lauren feldman your host welcome to a 21 hats conversation we are here today to talk about marketing although marketing from a a slightly different perspective i've been talking to business owners and entrepreneurs as a journalist for i don't know about 20 years now and i don't think i've heard them discuss a more vexing problem than what to do about how to get more customers and how to handle all the different marketing options that exist the the platforms the gurus the you know you name it there's somebody out there trying to sell you something and you're trying to figure out what to do and worst of all just when you think you got it figured out everything changes or an algorithm changes and you got to start over today i have two really impressive guests to introduce to you who have kind of been through that process and figured out a different approach that is working for them my two guests are sean bucy who is ceo of kinesis and david nichols who is ceo of loop uh they're both based in portland and as i said they've come to a slightly different more holistic approach to marketing that i think is going to take us in a number of interesting directions sean let me let me start with you tell us how things changed for you around the time that you we hit the great recession and what you were doing wasn't really working sure yeah yeah thanks for thanks for having us lauren excited to hear some of the questions from your audience and you know i'm just a huge supporter of small businesses which really kind of gets you to what kinesis does which is we help small businesses to really be their most remarkable self and you know i'd say our journey has been almost the same length as yours we've been around for about 21 years i've worn 21 hats throughout that journey uh for sure thank you for doing that appreciate that sean you know and i'll you know i'm going to compress a lot of time into a really short period here which is essentially that in 2009 2010 we got hit by the great recession after having been in business for about a decade it really caused us to question sort of everything phone pretty much stopped ringing overnight and the the vaccine question i had or the paradox was that our customers were marketers our customers were in-house marketers mostly at small to medium-sized businesses some some corporate players as well and what were you helping them with at that point what were you doing you know all the all the tactical stuff you know branding positioning website development logo design you know we were really the shop you hired if you needed to get marketing done and we were relying on the in internal marketer to set the course for where they wanted to go and then we just essentially followed their lead which is a it's an okay model you know as far as business models go there's a lot of marketers that need a lot of help and a lot of people want to help them um but what i found to be really fascinating and a little bit saddening was that when the economic situation went south a lot of businesses their first fire was to eliminate their marketers and then maybe shortly thereafter their sales people which was really strange to me right because these are the people who are supposed to help bring customers in the door and to help you know create revenue opportunities uh so it was it was it was a tough moment right because you sort of take for granted that this is what their job is and that you thought that that's what they were accomplishing and yet owners clearly didn't have enough confidence in them to do that to do that work to invest in them and and that got that started me on this really long journey of really asking the question like what's wrong with marketing for small businesses and like why do so many of them struggle with it over and over and over again to where they're scared to invest in it or you know they just they don't they don't want to go all in you know and i i'm really interested in answering that question or it was and i figured a few things out along the way you started asking the question i think you know maybe it's not just about the marketing maybe you need to look more holistically at what the company is doing what what prompted that well you know first i realized like all these folks were getting fired and and then i just started thinking about okay let's put myself in the shoes of the small business owner and i realized that two things were happening one is that the owner wasn't doing a very good job of connecting to the marketer to communicate what their vision and purpose of the organization was where they wanted to take it and that's a really hard thing to do let alone whether the person you're working with can do it for you so there is a gap there and what was happening was marketers were just doing stuff right making websites creating new logos running social media campaigns sometimes that stuff worked and other times it really wasn't producing any kind of tangible results that the owner could see and more importantly they weren't connecting to the owner's vision and purpose so that was problem number one and then problem number two is that the owner themselves actually had struggled really hard to stand out in a crowded marketplace and so even though the marketer might be a really great marketer what they were marketing the thing that the business did wasn't actually that remarkable to a buyer even though it could be it could have been but that there was a gap there in creating that we would just call it remarkability so doing lots of activity not have something you know to really worth paying attention to or or at least set in a way that the customer gets it that was the big gap that i saw and then when i realized that i was like oh let's figure out what a company stands for first let's go like from the inside of the company and work outwards as opposed to outside in which is what most marketing does that was our that was our big epiphany that's why we wrote the book that's our whole marketing from the inside out framework and in that journey when you realize that really purpose starts here and then radiates outward you realize purpose also needs to touch your employees and that you need to hire employees that align with what your vision and purpose are and then they touch your customers and create a remarkable experience so then we started getting into things like recruiting and retention and culture and amplifying going through that process you so far you've basically framed it in terms of the companies that you were working with but what impact did going on this journey have on you and and your business what did you change as this became clear to you about kinesis well yeah i mean i went from having a kind of mediocre business with an offering that lots of people could do you know to be totally candid to having a business that had something that nobody else was really doing and that we had what you would call kind of a proprietary way of working and so that shifted us from being viewed as more of a commodity to being viewed as a strategic partner which meant you could charge more for your services that were more reflective of the value you were providing and so that was a massive transformation to go from being a commodity or thought of as something that lots of people could do to something that only you could do that's a huge huge pivot and then in terms of the market like we went from being like kind of flat to mediocre growth every year to just like take it off you know we were like fastest growing awards year and year out really just this like kind of rocket trajectory and how did that happen was it the result of marketing word of mouth how did how did you grow so fast so a lot of it is don't ever underestimate when a market wants something and after the recession people were deathly afraid to hire another marketer and because they hadn't produced results before right so we had an outsourced solution so for a scared business owner who who realized like i gotta do marketing i'm reluctant i don't know what to do but i gotta do it i would raise my hand and say i tell you what you know we're outsourced if we're not working for you you can like cut the court any time you don't pay payroll taxes on us you know i got all these benefits to being an outsourced solution that are really great and the model was what the market was really excited about and so i that cannot be under understated and then i would also say in those early days it was really easy for us to say we can make your marketing remarkable and make it work and so we could optimize on seo we could give talks about what marketing from the inside out looked like you know so it was a combination of strategies to get out into the market that worked really well david nichols tell us uh about loop what does loop do well i i hope i don't brutalize the the beautiful kinesis copy of our of our mission statement but i mean they they made it really easy for people well we should say you you have been a client of comedians i've been a client and a friend of sean yeah for a while now and uh really grateful for kind of them you know teaching us how to run their playbook on our business and and like um i'm so excited about what it's done for us and like the kind of possibilities that it's open and that's why i think sean wanted me to come along because it's been a lot of fun to work together a really good collaboration the one word mission for us is revolution we want to revolutionize robotics and automation we work in manufacturing automation robotics anything that's cutting metal or drilling holes in airplane wings or making kitchen cabinets or putting things in boxes stacking up boxes like any kind of manufacturing automation where there's robots moving things around you make the robots and sell them to manufacturers who actually make the gates you're referring to how much time do you have because like the quick way to think about it is like you can think of us as kind of like a magical r d workshop for for new kinds of machine designs so a lot of times you know company like we have several supplier awards from boeing for example where we we've consulted with them on designing new equipment for their uh for their production facilities we've uh we also work with a lot of equipment builders just on consulting bases like we have a lot of different ways of like making money from doing that um but basically it's a bunch of smart machine design nerds that that work together to to do amazing things tell us about your trajectory when it comes to marketing uh yeah what were you what did you try initially and how did it evolve well i would say that it started when i went to engineering school which uh which was sort of they weren't dismissive of marketing they just they just they were sort of unaware you know they didn't tell you that it existed the customers show up someone should have really mentioned someone should have mentioned that to me because when i was like i'm so excited about this work we're doing i love these machines we're building we have this awesome you know like the team is great the work we're doing is great like we're really amazing awesome engineers like really good at our craft of that and then we would i occasionally i would have these moments of well i want to do this more i want to have a bigger team i want to have cooler toys and facilities so i guess i need to grow sales because i need more customers um and so the the kind of very basic analysis was like let me try to do that with sales people i was trained to be a salesperson even though i was really an engineer and i did that okay but then i thought like let's just let's just try to grow sales i need customers like i need sales like sales people it's right in the name like of course that's how you do that and that turned out you know to be effective in some ways and now that i know really what sales people do and what they're great at like we know how to apply that but we were using a sales person to do all outbound communication all relationship development every aspect of this like really complex client interaction process and you know sales people are great but they're not they're not good at every single step of one of those steps like no one is um and so what we i really but i'm also very determined and extremely willful so i tried really hard to do that for a couple of years and i would just like he is he tried hard like i i don't try so hard anymore because now i recognize that it's like a sign that i'm probably pushing on like a immovable object but anyway like after kind of like laying down to die after one of these like failed attempts of like version five of like our sales team i was like maybe we should figure out how to communicate what we do again i couldn't say this at the time i what i said was i think we need marketing and also needs to know what marketing is so like that was where the journey began for us and we had done some work on just sort of you know again we had been a company for a while we have been a company maybe 10 years before we really started to get serious about this kind of work because we were great engineers like people would hire us because of that and like that was enough for like to go through a certain you know beginning phase of our company but when we really wanted to branch out from that we like really hit these plateaus where like we can't take it any further doing what we're doing um and so it's really out of like curiosity and kind of like i almost describe it as a sort of like near-death experience we're just like we have nothing to lose like we might as well try some of this stuff it turns out when you work with professional communicators they know how to communicate what's awesome about your work why you're excited about doing what you're doing they can you can talk blah blah blah blah blah like for hours and they can say did you mean revolution like how did you do that like and that turns out oh that's their skill set like that's what they do so let me let me stop you there for a second because you're right about professional communicators when they're very good at what they do but they aren't all great at what they do and you you have to find the right ones um okay same with engineers okay fair enough so uh how did it work for you how did you connect uh i assume you're referring to sean how did you figure out that this was uh the right person in the right direction sure so we had run experiments like we had it wasn't like our first or it wasn't like the first moment i had this notion i called sean and it was perf you know perfect match it took us a while to to find each other um and and at the time again we were like well we're still investing on at the time at the scale we were at it's like we could hire one more engineer or we could have a marketing budget and we would always hire another engineer i like because engineers were like we knew how to hire them we knew there we knew the ones that were good like we knew it that's a very common route a very common path you're describing you're not right and so there was a certain scale thing and so at first we were like we needed to like take these like tiny bite size steps and and even some the initial conversation with sean sean was like this is what it's like this is what you know he was educating me on how to how to hire different types of marketing company not just his but like this that was a sort of like here's here here are your choices right like and we're one of them but like and so we started off with this kind of like project based kind of thing right like a car like i think a lot of agencies probably want to offer that to people to give them this like smooth on-ramp to be like if we do great work we could build from there and and so we did like a website we did some core values work which again excellent work so good in fact our core values were from those workshops that we had done with these little bite-sized marketing yeah and to be clear like that wasn't with us you know so all right david and i met over like hamburgers and you know i was sort of like here's the landscape and here's all the different things you could hire and we're in that and he went off and hired some people that actually did like really great work for him so i think that's a you know it's a testament like to your your point lauren like there are people out there that kind of suck and there are also good people out there and and figuring out which is which is really the hard part and how did you wind up hiring someone to help you with core values david i mean were you aware you needed core values or were you on this path looking for marketing and you ran into somebody smart who said you need to figure this out first well i talked to people and i said i need more customers and they say have you ever heard of marketing and you should talk to these people who know how to learn know how to tell people stories and i was like oh yeah that does sound good that does sound like what we need and just kind of talking to people who you know i think we even might have talked to people about like you know i'm trying to grow sales they're like how do you do marketing you know because they were they they could see that i was going in the wrong order right yeah or like for us and so we did good project work with them but again and they're a great team great awesome team great but the way that our company fit together with their company didn't didn't like couldn't hit that critical mass we did not have an internal marketer to sean's explanation earlier that could guide like an external like project organization that could deliver a website according to like what the internal marketer was doing that fit into like we had nothing like we were 10 engineers period like and maybe one admin right and so there wasn't anybody to direct to that type of organization to be like this is the next project this is the next project this is the next project like when so we didn't have the appropriate interface between our companies right even though they did amazing work when we when we were able to get these projects together but i was the ceo and acting as the internal marketer and i just like did not have the bandwidth to like piece by piece pick what project was gonna happen next right so we got to the end of the year and we like we hadn't spent our marketing budget which was like how is that possible like that seems impossible seems like the easiest money to spend in the world but because it would take too long to like figure out what project to do next right and so with the way shawn's team saying like we're gonna you know and and this this was what i wanted which is like here's the whole budget like for market for marketing and like your team needs to decide you can talk with me and we'll i'll be on that team but they need to decide what project to do next help with the strategy what what's the sequencing of it and like that was like just a different interface that really worked well for us where we weren't having to like figure out what to do next because we don't know what to do next we're not marketers right now we are but like at the time at the time we weren't at all and that i mean david puts his finger on like one of the most critical things which is that the industry in general is designed to interface within with a marketer so you have you know research which industry in general the marketing the marketing industrial complex you know right whether you're talking pay-per-click every specialist function every function it is designed to work with an in-house marketer and so if you don't have an in-house marketer it's it's like friction it's a lot of friction and then and then the problem i described from the great recession was even if you do have an in-house marketer often the marketer and the owner are not um peers uh often marketers are elevated up from an administrative role and so they're almost often thought of in this sort of sub level of professionalism almost subconsciously that happens or small business owners often under fund the role so they'll hire somebody right out of college which you know they'll be earnest and work really hard but they have no mentorship or peer support and so you're almost setting them up for failure in that environment because now they're part of the marketing industrial complex and the market industrial complex will like basically take advantage of that where that in internal market or a more sophisticated one can help the owner realize their vision and appropriately pick from the right um service providers so i'm imagining people listening to this conversation sean saying uh yep that's me um i i hired that kid out of college or i hired my nephew or uh what whatever it might be what do you tell someone who knocks on your door in that situation but realizes it's not working and it's looking for something different i mean first of all i just try to empathize with them you know i used to get really frustrated with the marketplace because it was just not working well and and as i got older i just tried to become more empathetic and and realize like most owners they're not themselves marketers and so they're trying to get help which i that's awesome that's super noble and they're also trying to give people opportunities so that's really great too so first i try to recognize that intention was usually good um if the person's still on the team and and they have some strong fundamentals you know we can come in and basically be that mentorship and full team to support that person and train and help them elevate that internal marketer i love doing that like i mean i come from a teaching background and we love to help people grow and become better uh if they've gotten rid of that person out of frustration or they just sort of like that often that person turns over themselves the average tenure of a marketer is like two years like literally industry-wide and the reason is is marketing personas tend to like new things and small businesses often have one thing they're doing um so the turnover is really high so let's say that marketer is selected out in that case we say let's let's build a good strategy that supports your vision let's figure out your values your purpose your one word mission statement let's let's do all the the hard work that you could never hire a junior person to do and then we can either help you implement and execute on it like we did in many cases with david's firm and still do maybe there's enough volume where you need to bring in somebody and we can help hire that person i'm a big fan of of hiring folks internally especially to do at the beginning the administrative activities of marketing and sales of which there are a lot and mostly underestimated so that's often what i'll recommend and and i almost never recommend for a small business that they hire well this isn't totally true but occasionally uh if it is appropriate to hire a very senior person but i caution them around that because i say it's not that salary that you need to worry about um although it's going to be high it's all the people that that person wants to hire and surround themselves with so if you're going to go that path get ready um because that person will want to hire junior people to do the work they don't want to do and they're going to want to hire agencies to up level their professionalism and to build their empire so you think it's a hundred and twenty thousand dollar marketing budget that now is going to turn into a 250 to 500 000 marketing budget um or you lose that person i mean you know both outcomes are terrible yeah david speaking as a business owner too and and like being coming out of a really pure engineering background is the foundation of our company there were entire departments that like i didn't know how they worked and i was forced to learn right and marketing is one of the more recent ones for me but like one of the first ones that business owners relate to is accounting which which people just like oh yeah that's accounting um and but within accounting you have your bookkeeper you have your cpa you have your cfo you have your you have your controller these are all very different skill sets and personalities and experience levels if you ask your bookkeeper cfo questions you're not going to get appropriate answers because they're not qualified to do that and so like when you you know i don't know which one of these like the nephew or niece and the marketing department like would directly relate to but it's that kind of a problem right like you have an entire team of people if that function in a company is going to be operating really well you need strategy people you need you know you need to administer you do need administrative people but like don't ask your bookkeeper cfo questions they won't be able to they're not qualified to answer them right and so that's another reason where for us like we really needed like a big like a team that could take on like those different divisions at you know i don't i even at our scale now i i can't put that that size of a team inside onto mine i just need a fraction of sean's team to do that right so so david i suspect that a number of the people who are watching this saw the video that i posted in the 21 hats morning report uh a video that you created and uh put on youtube showing uh a bunch of robots cutting a tree with chainsaws is that a marketing video and uh of course it is of course i thought that was going to be yours i think you just answered your own question how is it a marketing video and how did you get how did you make the leap from where you were initially that you've already described to the point where you are posting videos of chainsaw robots well i i talked about being being a team of great engineers and wanting to do interesting work and that putting a chainsaw on a robot is something that we would have been excited to do at any point in the company history right that's just obviously extremely fun and cool to attend and it would have like years ago or before like before i learned some things i know now i would have thought of it as like this is a guilty pleasure like this is something i'm doing it's really fun and it's exciting and it's it's like connected to what we're about but but it's like it's not serious it's not like real work right like i should be i should be like dealing with like clients or something and what what we came what we really embraced or what was really powerful and fun for us was sean and the work that we did with the brand like to really dig into like what are we doing here why are we here what are we about like who are like what is the purpose of this company right like we have a really firm handle on that now and so now when someone says we want to put a chainsaw on a robot because we want to do all these things that weren't possible before it's like instant match yes that's what we do like that's perfectly matched to what to what the purpose of our company is because they're like we we had these other chainsaw testing machines before but they have all these problems and like they're not flexible enough and we're like yeah we're in we're all in so you put the chainsaws on the robots in response to a request from a client or you dreamed it up because you thought it would be a good marketing video okay we did a client did ask us to do that but they weren't a client when they asked us to do that they said we're thinking of putting a chainsaw on a robot and we said how about we do that on thursday because we also want to change the robot yeah and you know a lot of organizations they would have been yeah well let's talk about the project like let's work towards some like mid six figure bid of how we're going to build this thing for you scope of work yeah i've got to have a scope of work and yeah and we were like uh we will try that like we'll test that like that'll take a day that'll take a damn day or two of our time to test by the way potential client you need to go talk to your people because we need the footage clearance we're not we won't ask you for any money we just want permission to share the footage and they were like okay that's fine so again it's one of those things where it's just a pr priceless thing to do but i mean there's other things like working with robot dogs and other things like that where like there aren't necessarily clients asking us to do things we just know that it's the coolest thing ever and that's that's a good enough reason to do it right and it's aligned squarely to the purpose of our company that that's the last piece that a lot of people don't get they think oh well david's got access to robots of course he's got cool marketing what he actually has that i think is more powerful than anything else is he has the power of decision making which is informed by his mission of revolution so if an opportunity comes along he looks at it i don't want to put words in your mouth but i think it's you look at it through the lens of purpose does this align with our mission of revolution and changing how the industry works if yes we'll do it and i think that's the biggest problem with most quote unquote marketing is that most owners don't actually have a good filter they don't have a good way to make decisions as to you know should we do this thing or that thing or nothing and often they default to nothing or predictable and boring and so by having a really powerful mission he can make good decisions and know what to drive towards as opposed to spending energy on everything i i don't know dave like years ago i would have said like i need more leads right i need more customers i need more leads and and like right how are we going to build something to deliver that and it's like well if you know what you are and you know what you're doing and you know what you're about and you blast that out as loudly as possible to the world then like the people that really relate to that and are going to appreciate that they just get sucked in like a magnet like i mean that in a good way right because we get together and we're like we do great work together so it's like that's really how i think about the communications is like that's squarely aligned with what we're up to here people that see that that relate to it that they're that's the right kind of people for us to to know about so no business owner i've ever spoken to feels he or she has too much money to spend on marketing there's a budget it's a problem to be solved they're concerned with return on investment and that's true whatever type of marketing they choose to use it could be you know print advertising it could be pay-per-click they want to know the results and sometimes it's really really hard to tell it seems like it would be especially hard to tell with a robot chainsaw video how do you know that was effective marketing um yeah i think we we how do i know that um i don't have a spreadsheet that can prove that um so let me just admit that piece right away what i know is that people who are the right kind of people to work for this company message me on linkedin and they say i want to work for your company say you're a perfect fit here right so it's like that and that the thing about like roi and like especially the kind of like trying to put a closed feedback loop around it is that the like communicating the purpose of a company is way more complex than can be captured in that transactional type of analysis right it's way more complicated and so it's not possible to make like a linear regression that matches that again i know from building really complicated models like it's not possible to build a model of it right it's more like and that's where people talk about intuition or people talk about you know like these like what they're talking about is very complicated things that where an answer comes out and you're like yeah it's working right like and it's people are like well that's not that's not quantifiable it's not and it's like well yeah you're quantification there's no way that it's possible to quantify it is there's way too many complexities involved it's it's just not possible to put onto a spreadsheet but there are things where we would start we would do a little bit and then we would get this like signal back that's like people there'd be this huge reaction to it either internally people be like that's amazing or like they would be excited about it like people don't consider that in it that's also not on your spreadsheet right like when you're like whoa like that's so cool like people don't people that doesn't appear in a marketing roi analysis and yet it's the most important thing right people are like when people are really feeling it then those those are the people your customers see those are the people that show up and want to work for you those are the you know those that's going directly into your client experience like that's going to help us make plenty of money like i'm sure right like that's that's kind of the long answer to your question it's intriguing to me that the most concrete example you gave of the result of that video was not a customer coming to you but of potential employees reaching out to you and i'm curious when you created that video was that a a deliberate goal were you looking to attract more employees was it that kind of marketing that you had in mind or was that just a happy uh side benefit that's the really fun thing about about when it's aligned on purpose when it's aligned on purpose that is directly showcasing a product that our company sells right it's an it's directly an advertisement for uh for robotic arms that we are the local distributor and dealer up which is like if someone sees that it looks like good robot arm i'll buy one of those instant sale right it's a direct client request from a potential new project that is like we could build a ton of engineering services and consulting around right it's also something that looks incredibly cool and would be fun to do um so it helped like even just as an internal experience like who's going to get to do that cool thing that is just some speculative project like it's almost like a fun thing for the team internally and then when you make a video and put out in the world like there's no telling who would see it and like be like that's really amazing so like there's like six potential lottery ticket outcomes from from one from one activity yeah right so i'm not i don't care which lottery ticket cash is they could all cash it's fine like or not or none of them right but um there are plenty of those are all things that like again intuitively we we would have in mind right about like why this is a good thing these are there's like eight pos potential amazing outcomes that could come from this one one um specular projects well just one thought on this one of the things that i really admire about david aside from his robotic wizardry is that he has this idea of a non-linear return so so much of the conversation on market is marketing is i do this thing i expect to get this result from it and you know the idea that david's communicating is like we're going to put a lot of bets out there and some of them are going to return in really big exponential ways and some aren't going to do anything and so there isn't actually a direct correlation but as long as you continue to do the things that are your purpose you are going to find people who align on that purpose and i think the mistake most businesses make is that they don't really spend enough time figuring out what that awesome thing is or how to communicate that awesome thing and that's often a bigger challenge than anything is that they might actually be doing something great but they're kind of a best kept secret i say that all the time and people are like oh yeah that's us so i want to ask you about that sean you're talking about that awesome thing that you want to get the word out about that's a particularly obvious case here with david i mean the chainsaw robots are indeed awesome and it's it's it's cool it's special most of us have never seen anything like that before that's not the situation most businesses find themselves in and i'm thinking about that typical business owner you described early on who might be looking at this and thinking oh you know great robot chainsaws there's not a lot in that for me to help me understand how to market my business do you see a a principle behind this that does translate for uh people who are in you know less uh awesome fields than david i i just think it's easy to underestimate the potential um it has been my experience that the vast majority of businesses actually that i meet with there is something there that's there it might not always be the thing they do right um you know i've got a former client that was one of our very first experiments i'm sure they would appreciate being thought of as an experiment but it was a successful experiment and we we tried the marketing from the inside out framework on them very early on and transformed their culture and changed they work they do hvac equipment like they put you know blowers and ducting and stuff in buildings and you might say well that's not a robot or a chainsaw it's not that interesting but if you start digging into things that they're doing with culture and they're doing around you know environmentalism and recycling the things they do there are really fascinating and so i think it's often a lack of imagination amongst those professionals that are brought in to help with the problem um they they go immediately to some tactic or building a new website when there's not actually something awesome to put into the website but whether you know we've worked with plumbers we've worked with people who build houses we've worked with you know very non sexy and in fact i kind of like those industries because i find them to be often very genuine and earnest and so helping them uncover what's awesome about them is really rewarding yeah if you have a company that doesn't instantly die then there's something something about your company is that's that's worthy of attention and interest in cultivating it like it's so hard to know what it is sometimes like i know from my own experience being very experienced because again often you're so close to it you don't even know how to describe it because again you're not a professional communicator you're just a really good engineer right that's not a job you have experience with if you are around and you you are able to sustain anything even just from like whether you're a plumber or an engineer or even florist you know like there's something there that like you could really cultivate and bring to people that's important and special and and also like i think what we're doing is really cool but all in automation like it's like companies are trying to be boring on purpose so i don't i don't think you'd be really surprised like certainly boston dynamics and there's some like superstars in terms of like people doing amazing things but a lot of them are very conservative very afraid to try things don't want i again and i we're obviously doing everything we can to subvert that but i mean it's not it's it's there's a lot of pressure to sort of like yeah kind of go right boring down the middle with even with this stuff that i'm like do you see how cool this is like why don't more people be like why aren't more people talking about it that way um so yeah i think that's true for for many industries including ours for sure yeah i would second that as a as a journalist i mean it's a little bit different but i have uh the same kind of confidence that you express sean that in talking to pretty much any business owner i can find a story something interesting that's different than finding something to market but but similar and related um i mean i you know just as a counterpoint i i have a client they're a steel fabricator and even though they make really amazing things they don't actually hang their hat on the amazing things they make part of the reason being from a competitive landscape lots of other steel fabricators make amazing things too where they hang their hat is on career development and taking kids out of high school and nurturing their development as apprentices and talking about the opportunity for the skilled trades and going up on the ted like so that his passion is really around elevating up folks into that career space and his website is filled with that stuff and then that attracts other people who care about that stuff right like say a contractor who might want to hire him and so his website isn't it's about steel fabrication but doesn't list all the equipment he has and what he can weld and all the beautiful welds it's actually about the potential for human development in the skilled trades and that's a really exciting story like you could write about that in forbes but it's also a commit compelling set of values that matter to his customers um so so i'm i'm not scared at all um i think you can you can do it almost with any business like david said if it's not dying interesting so let's go to this question sean which is basically i don't know if you've had a chance to read it but yeah yeah the the question is uh what would you suggest to kind of uh help develop the internal marketing people that this business has hired and also to help them stand up to the engineers uh that they they work with maybe david can help out with that uh in some ways you know david probably has some strong feelings about this i'm guessing but i see this dynamic a lot where you have the tension between the quota and i hate this term the billable people and the staff or the the overhead that's the worst term to describe them and you know boy if i could talk to the owner and say like first lose the mindset like that's a terrible place to sort of think of like people who don't do things that are billable to customers it demoralizes them and you want them to be excited to do the work but if you've got a junior staff charged with marketing i would encourage the owner to look at investing in them if he's committed he or she is committed to having them be successful look for mentors and other guides to support them out in the marketplace maybe have them join something like a the american marketing association um you know find more senior people help them find more senior people to coach them and guide them along the way and most owners don't make those investments and i and i think that if they really want to get some value for that employee and and have them for the long haul that they have to be prepared to do that to offset the fact that they're bringing in junior people yeah i'll answer going back to purpose too which is that in whatever organization if there's if it's it's up to the leadership if that's the ceo and a small business or that's sort of the founder of the company it's up to them to make the case to their entire team like this is why this activity is critical to what we're doing as a company like and if and and that's so that they can that can be clear across you know it's easier when like it's like well those these are the people who we bill that's sort of you know that that that is how we make that is where money comes from sort of but that's not like we need this other function over here which is like helping communicate what we're about helping get you know get us out there and promote what we're trying to do here at this company like that's just as important right like it's up to the leadership of the company to sort of like not like cover for them but just to talk about how that activity fits into like the broader purpose of the company so that those those teams can look at each other and like respect each other's contribution right like again like it's maybe i'm being a little too high-minded about it but but i don't think so like that comes from the top like that junior person can't do that for themselves like they can't do that yeah on behalf of their department like it's up to the it's up to people on the top talk about like this is why these people are here this is why it's important and engineers you know you're spot on on that because they're reconciling the recession the recession problem i described earlier right it's like they they don't know why they're there other than to do marketing which is actually not a really compelling purpose for being in a company um right and engineers like i related to in my own story like they don't they're not being malicious they just don't understand like they just have they don't have a point of reference to like the power of that activity right because they they have such specialized technical education that they have too many engineering classes to to be also taught about that right like that's just basically what happens like in their in their and then when they get into these organizations where like just a continuation of that right so like it's not it's not out of any sort of like ill intent like it just it takes a special kind of engineer to be able to like or an experience to be able to like see that as like fitting in right it took me a long time and i was trying really hard so for what it's worth it's not just engineers who aren't taught these things i mean yeah others aren't taught lawyers aren't taught it journalists certainly aren't about it it's one industry after another david let me ask you this did you go from figuring out marketing and figuring out videos right to chainsaw robots or did you have to experiment were there videos that didn't work as successfully what was that process like uh the so my answer to that question is like and it has to do with magic which is that sean sean taught us like one of the archetypes in human society and in mythology is the magician right and he's like you guys are kind of like magicians right and and if you study magicians or you learn about magicians it's there's there's like there's it's just a trick right like and you had just have no idea how many times they shuffled that deck of cards right like you would not believe how many hours they sat by themselves in the room shuffling decks of cards to be able to be like to do that that under under shuffle or like some little trick that you know you can't see they have so much practice right like and so like when you see us put out a video it's from like you would not believe how many videos we've done right and the early ones are not good right like i can hardly watch them now right but they were fun to do they were interesting it was like for me personally what kept you going well it was interesting to play with like i was building stuff that was fun and i thought it was cool looking and i was like how do i how do i capture this again and also i found an excuse to like bring like a lot of like hobby photography skills to bear on and players like that i turned out didn't seem like would be relevant right like or i didn't do it from that point of view right it just turned out to be applicable were you behind the camera yes and editing and just like i remember being like i should buy a goat maybe i'll make a gopro i don't know it's a few hundred bucks well i know my business partner was like yeah it'll be fun maybe maybe he'll do something and just like over and over and over and just ship it ship you know just like ship stuff all the time to when then when the then when they're like hey we want to put a chance on a robot be like we'll do that video bang like that because we'd invested so much in developing that skill that it at that again did it it took one day but it also took you know years of experience like making videos to be like how are we going to do this um so yeah that's that you don't see that you don't see the other i mean you can see them on our youtube channel if you go scroll way back you can see this we're all gonna race there yeah yeah that's a great that's a great point david i mean i one of the things that i love about our business is that i don't think of us as like prescriptive we didn't come in and say david you need to make videos and you need to start today so in three years you'll be good enough to do it it's more like journey i mean one of david's values is trust and collaboration which is like probably one of my favorite values of any company i work with because the idea is like you work together and you build things that are based off of each other's strengths and you create new things that are compounded as a result of those two things so you know david's excited about the camera we're like well maybe you could be this issue we start working on things together and it's like folks will often ask me did you do that thing for your client i'm like well kinda like we actually did it together and and i think that's a piece of marketing that's really marketing or just making awesome businesses is to build things together with whomever you're trusting to communicate to the outward world like i think about this the the comment for example from kay it's like she's positioning as the engineers versus the marketers like what if they all were working towards the same thing and that i think david does really really well and i would encourage other owners to think that way too interesting so we gotta wrap this up i think sean i have one last question for you by the way i i finished reading your book last night uh it's it's a terrific book marketing from the inside out i highly recommend it it's kind of a guidebook to thinking through what you're trying to get out of marketing and it becomes you know much more about um how you build a company with a culture that warrants being marketed and you have a lot of great kind of case study examples one of my favorites early on is the one of the doctor who thinks he needs more leads but the problem really is that he's got an office that's mishandling all the leads that come in and he's got to find a way to figure that out and understand that and and i think that's a doctor and we can all imagine why that would be a particular problem for for a doctor but i think it's you know there are a lot of businesses who struggle with that my last question for you is what happens when somebody walks in your door and i imagine it happens occasionally who has solved those problems they've got the business running pretty well and they really do just need marketing help where do you begin that conversation yeah i mean what's really cool about small businesses i doing it for 20 years is i've actually seen things get better meaning that you know owner i see owners more and more talk about why they care about the culture why they care about their employees you know that becomes more of a de facto agreement and that did not used to be the conversation so in the beautiful scenario you described where somebody comes in the door i was like you know our culture is killing it we have a great offering maybe the market doesn't know about it enough we need to get it out there more then often it's a like what are the creative ways to push things out there and and i think what is happening is especially with covid is everybody's gravitating towards the same tired solutions right everybody's sending out email spam more and more and more and more because they can't like go to networking events or they're all paying google more and more and more money and it's an arms race and so my challenge to that type of a business would be or to challenge them would be to say like what what could we do together to build something that's truly remarkable and different in a way to communicate with our right fit customers not with all customers our right fit customers and i find there's a lot of room to to grow that i that mindset and then i would say the second piece is even if they've got everything figured out very few have i come across that are doing what david is doing where the activity he does that attracts customers is actually the same activity that attracts great candidates and he gets unsolicited resumes and so most businesses that are doing really well from a financial standpoint and even a growth standpoint are still struggling with hiring and getting great people in the door and connecting those dots is a is a real opportunity i think in the marketplace that's doing well last question for you david where are you on that continuum do you feel like you've got this all figured out or do you still have frustrations um one of the unsolicited one of the unsolicited linkedin messages i got today was i stumbled across your company i can't believe how cool what you're doing is i had no idea that you existed which is really surprising because i followed this kind of stuff and i was like right no one's heard of us still so you know no i don't think we have it all figured out i mean i i think we have some really important things figured out that are going to serve us well and like you know some some like lucky break could happen where all of a sudden we have you know 100 times as many linkedin followers or whatever however you would measure it but no yeah we have a ton more to do a lot more to do can you give me an example of something that you would like a problem you'd like to solve well yeah it's it's like how do we make the magnet bigger right again we're talking about just building this giant magnet like it's like this is lit a little piece of it and it's like getting more and more powerful so it can like pull in things from further away like and that's just that's a great thing to focus on because we we know what we're doing here and and so it's just like how do we but how do we how do we get to bigger audiences how do we get in front of more people where the right kind of people will see it be like that's a cool chainsaw robot i've never seen this company like how do we how do we have that happen 100 times more often i don't i don't i haven't figured that's what i really like to figure out and there's still some puzzles there for us david nichols of loop that's l-o-u-p-e if you're looking him up or trying to find him on linkedin to apply for a job and sean bucy of kinesis k-i-n-e-s-i-s thank you both for taking the time really appreciate it great conversation thank you lauren cheers and thanks for joining us everybody take care you