Joe
Yeah, man, I love a couple things that that you said I want to I want to point out and make sure that everybody got a look. I love the full circle analogy right. And really plugging into Practice Management and systems and really understanding what's happening in the business because I feel like most agencies, they stop, right as soon as the lead is delivered, right? Like they're not, they're not doing any coaching at all with the front office staff. They're not doing any coaching with anybody that's handling the phone or looking at any other parts of the business, and they just stopped there. And I see most agencies, I feel like fail their clients at that level, even if they're doing their job, bringing in leads so to speak, doesn't mean that that's profitable for the local business that they're working with.
Adam
Yeah, I mean, the the challenge is that if you don't, if you don't look at everything throughout the entire system, you can't, can't justify your worth in a lot of cases. And you don't know if it's really worth I mean, everyone says they have the best marketing solution out there. I think in a lot of cases, a lot of people do a pretty good job. It's very similar. They're just Be able to show them the business, how it works, and that and that it didn't work or it's not working and why and where they were fix where the issue was. So, you know, if if they're the agency is just sending people to a website that you know, they've got a website, they've got ads, maybe they do some call tracking, because it's easy to put a tracking number on the site and then say, your doctor or your business owner, go listen to this, which these these calls, which they won't do you know, that then, you know, you're just kind of at a disadvantage because you don't really know your numbers and you don't really know like, you know, maybe maybe the website isn't converting, maybe the message is off. Maybe there's something else going on.
Maybe your call tracking numbers broken. I don't know. I've seen it all though. Or the person on staff. They hired somebody new and that person while they think they're doing everything, right, there's they're missing stuff. We've seen it all and if we can solve for that, then we provide more value, but we can actually then correlate the revenue we generate. Because even if your website is, you know, if you're an agency and you put up a great ads and you've got a great website and you're driving a lot of leads, but the practice isn't seeing that they're not able to basically quantify that or, or attribute what that has done to the growth of their practice. And they're gonna blame you for it. And I mean, I've seen more cases, cases where the, the actual patients coming in from the internet, were going up. But you know, retention, or the churn rate went also went up from other areas or they stopped, the practice stopped doing other types of marketing, but the agency didn't know about it. So then the practice owner says, Well, I'd do the same amount of revenue as doing a year ago and I'm not making more money.
Well, you're in this area, but nobody tracks you don't know. So that you know, having that that information can really help educate that practice. Some of it isn't as business savvy, to say, Hey, listen, this is working or Here's the issue that we're identifying, here's how to solve what we need to do. And then like I said, we had a guy, dental practice, they brought him in as a brother that recently had an MBA and thought he knew it all. And he came in and made a bunch of changes to the operations. And just over the course of one month, they were losing like 80 K and collections.
And I mean, they called up brother called up y'all on the team, you're blaming us and our data showed like we haven't. We haven't changed anything, the number of leads are still coming through we could do. We actually had analytics into the software, the tracking the software tracking into the pack semantic software, and we could tell it that rondon patients were still coming through it actually was a back end issue. They didn't know it because they didn't know what to fix. They didn't know what to solve. And that just happens like you know, dentists go to school to be dentists not to be business owners, a lot of times, they don't know and so once we're able to show them that Then we we sent in a coach and helped help them get that stuff fixed. But you know, initially we we took the brunt of the blame and had nothing to do with us.
Joe
Speaking of upsells, as obviously with that, you see sales funnels, you see lots of what's working, what's not? What's kind of the 80/20 in terms of upsells, somebody running an e commerce site right now, or helping a business run an e commerce site, and they're not doing any upsells. What would you advise them to do?
Ezra
So the thing to really understand about e commerce is there's only three metrics that matter. First one is cost per customer acquisition, how much it cost you to acquire customer, you should never pay ever more than double the amount of profit that you make on an order to acquire somebody in the cold pillar. So there's three pillars. The way I view businesses in three pillars of advertising awareness, people don't know about you yet. retargeting people who've engaged and not bought and loyalty people who bought before in the awareness pillar where you bring new people in the door You should never pay more than double your profit. If you make $40 profit on an order, never pay more than 80. Because you won't make that back on the back end. If you pay 80, you can make that back. If you pay 90, you're not making that back. So never pay more than double for your cost per acquisition. And the goal is self liquidating customer acquisition. If you you show me a business that can acquire customers for the same amount of profit they make on that first order. I will turn that into an eight figure business because you have customers coming in the door and you're not paying for him.
They're just coming in free. Now you got all these people you can engage upsell, cross sell. So average order value, sorry, cost per customer acquisition, CPA. Next is average order value, which is the question you asked about e commerce. whatever way you want to do it. You want to do it online, you want to do it on Shopify, you want to do it on Amazon, you want to do it in the tactical market. You want to do it in the baby market, whichever way you want to do it. Three out of four customers who buy you'll never see him again for the rest of your life. Ever. So average order value is the second most important metric in all of e commerce, you have to get your average order value up, which means upselling and cross selling at every stage of the sales cycle, on the product page in the shopping cart post purchase one click upsells offering bundles, you have to do it because that three of those four orders are never coming back. And then the third metric is lifetime customer value. And that comes down to the 25% of people who do buy once or do buy twice, can you get them to buy three, four or 5678 times and that comes down to your ability to do content marketing, product launches and sales campaigns.
So those are really the only three things you ever have to focus on an e commerce cost per customer acquisition, average order value, lifetime customer value, and then the tools that you use to increase those things like average order value or upsells and cross sells which just go to zip fi.com zpify.com and now I've got a whole business based on how to Get the average order value up through upsells and cross sells. But it's better it's more important to understand the higher level of it than the actual technical tactical was only got 30 minutes here and I can teach it technical tactical on my site, but I have to get you to understand the reasoning for it.
Joe
So I like those metrics, you know, double is good. Usually you want to be dating or as close to it as quickly as possible. And I never really thought about the three quarters are gone forever. That really, they're never coming back.
Ezra
So again, they're gone. And and, you know, I have a 40% repeat customer rate on boom, which means 40% of my orders come from people about before, but that does not mean that 40% of people buy twice, it means that a quarter of people buy twice and some of them buy 345678 times, right. So you're losing, you're losing 75% 80% of people, they're gone. They're never coming back. They buy one thing from you and that's it. And that's in any business. Like that. So that makes it like much more important that you figure out how to, you know, increase that average order value through offering add ons through offering additional products through bundling products through offering discounts right after they buy via one click upsells you gotta get good at that. It's so important.
Joe
A hundred percent agreed. All right, so in February, at the mastermind where we reconnected you made a awesome little quick presentation That I got really fired up about, about dynamic keyword insertion or DKI. And for those of you guys that don't know this, if you're running Google ads, this can be a game changer. I'd love to have you share quickly what DKI is what it means. And then I know that you shared with the group, the key thing that that plugin and the tech that you are actually using to get it done. So from for me, I've been using, as we talked about DKI for many, many years. We always build out the sites in just PHP and HTML because we didn't know how to do it in WordPress. And then you know, I'm at this mastermind and Lyn's like look at what we're doing in WordPress with DKI and I'm like, Oh, that's possible. And I've tried lots of plugins for it, but I was never able to really pull it off well, so super excited to have you share a little ninja hacker ninja tip with us.
Lyn
Yeah, cool. I mean, that's that's sort of the the nerdy side of me is I love that the, you know, the technical side, but at the same time, we've got to make these things, you know, we would we would build every site and just PHP or straight code if we could, and we wouldn't have any plugins and, and but at the end of the end of the day, the client won't be able to use them. And so we've had to sort of balance, you know, code, the size of the code and whatever with the ability for the client at the end user to be able to use the site. You know, when we, it's interesting when you actually do what you say you're going to do, and you can actually deliver websites in the way that you say they're going to do. Other agencies start asking you, what else can you do? how, you know, I had an agency Atlanta, I had lunch with my family the other day, and it was the first time in so long that I've relaxed, because I know we finally have the best product on the market. And that's just a reflection of the fact that we're delivering their websites for them. And so That's, that's a really good feeling. And then then that guy says, Hey, could you do our SEO for us? Or, you know, where else can I cut, I was able to cut here, cut there.
And so, so then, you know, we've expanded, you know, now we do some white label SEO, we do white label, pay per click, and so on and so forth. And part of that part of that pay per click, obviously, as you very well now is having great landing pages. And, you know, anytime you're trying to do any of this stuff at scale, you've got to get really creative and you've got to get really smart about, you know, sure you could build 100 different landing pages but who wants to so we found a, we found a plugin, it's called DKI you know, and drop a link somewhere so you can share it with your, with your listeners. It's, I mean, it's really inexpensive and allows you to do DKI right in WordPress. And so we're building out really nice landing pages. You can DKI just about anything in so we're we're dropping in the city names. we're dropping in the service. We're trying In the actual keywords and we're filling those things out onto the page and you know, if you know anything about quality scores, having having, I mean the quality scores everything, it's, it's, it's the, you know, it's the difference between paying $10 a click and $2 a click because your quality score and so getting the quality scores right getting the landing pages, right getting the right words in the text on the page, and really optimizing those things out is going to be a game changer for anybody doing Pay Per Click
Joe Troyer
So you said to two brilliant things there, you talked about niching down. And I want to make sure we talk about that a little bit. And then you talked about growing through acquisitions. And I definitely want to break out on that a little bit as well. So when you think about niching, down and you think about your your first agency versus now and what you're doing with childcare, what do you think niching down has afforded you to do like, what what are the benefits at the end of the day, because I rant and rave about this all the time with agencies that I work with. But it's always nice to hear somebody that's actually has an agency and they're, they're reaping the benefits and the rewards actually give give their perspective, instead of me just saying, Yeah, you should niche down.
Michael Tasner
Sure. So I mean, with the first agency profitability was among the biggest weakness, and the reason that we never could really continue to sustain profitability was that every time we got a new client We were having to invent a completely new process. So there if we were doing Google AdWords, we were having to research the industry we were. So like, when we got this big financial advisory firm, we knew nothing about FINRA compliant like all these. So like, we thought we could write ads that said, firm is gonna help you make 20% a year without any. Like, we didn't thankfully run those, like when we submitted our first set of ad copy, and the VP was like, This is none of this, I can get your compliance and I said, What do you mean compliance, said, and that kind of started to show our inexperience so we were constantly reinventing the wheel. So the beautiful thing with having the niche is that you have repeatable ads that work you have repeatable copy. You have testimonials and that same niche because now more than ever, people are feeling like they're going to get burned constantly.
Almost everyone that we've worked with has worked with an agency before and usually they say, I had a bad experience. So show me other childcare centers you've worked with. Show me I want to see some of that. But the other thing that without getting too techie is that obviously that whole facebook pixel, you're gathering all that data. And you really become more of a data engine and you're able to leverage artificial intelligence, you're able to build a master pixel. I mean, a lot of things that if now all sudden you're working with 100, landscapers, for example, and you've got all this data, you're able to start to see, well, what are the ideal prospects look like for all these different landscapers and leverage that data so you get your ad cost down. But you can also start generating results faster. So rather than it taking so when we're launching clients that weren't in the niche I'm in it might take 45 days to get up and running, if we're having to do all the research, figure everything out from scratch, whereas if you've got 100 clients already, or even 10 clients, you're putting a couple of buttons, you're taking stuff live and you're already driving stuff through Facebook, through Google etc. So it definitely from a profitability stamp. point from a quality check standpoint. Because if you're not if you're taking clients in all different niches How do you establish benchmarks, you don't know if the lead should cost $50 or if it's $500 lead because it's a bankruptcy attorney, I would have absolutely no perspective unless I was leveraging someone that's already been in the industry.
Joe Troyer
So what you just brought up there at the end to lead cost and lead quality is Uber important right? And unless you've been in a niche for quite some time, there's no way for you to really know what that's supposed to look like. And I find that most marketers then rely just on what the client says the equality said look like this phrase should look like this or and and they only know their campaigns, their results and what their kind of goals are they don't understand what's happening in other states and other cities. They don't understand you know, the the market as a whole, like an expert like yourself, entire child care what
Michael Tasner
exactly and it's it's one of our Biggest competitive advantages that I mean, I'm able to say very quickly that we know your industry. I mean, we know what things should cost. We know how long it takes, we know the seasonality. And a lot of us, myself included, have shiny object syndrome, especially when COVID hit one of my first reactions, and I started going down the path until I caught myself was I need to add another niche immediately. So I'm like, Well, what are the niches that are recession proof or that aren't affected by well, medical and attorneys? But I'm like, why wouldn't we want to double down and continue to serve the clients that we're already working with? Because now they need us more than ever rather than us kind of not turning a blind eye but just because some of them are really struggling and a lot of childcare centers. They're getting hammered right now. And it's not an easy time for them, but it's the singing can last forever. I mean, it's we're going to come out of it and so I'm Made my same mistake again. So I think history sometimes repeats itself but I, once I started telling my team that like, hey, let's pick another niche and let's start doing some lead gen like what are you talking about? You need to stop that. So I'm glad they they cautioned me on that and taught me right in my tracks.
Joe Troyer
That entrepreneurial ADD will get the best of us all the time
Joe Troyer
So I want to talk about what you are doing with With social media and your repurposing, I think that you guys are doing a killer job. I don't know if you're doing it, Jim, whoever is doing the repurposing for you guys is crushing it. I think you're doing great with that. But before we do, what do you think I'm missing? Potentially Jen, like, what's the 80/20? or What haven't we talked to yet about in terms of podcasts that you think potentially we're missing in this conversation?
Jim
It's really the the opportunities outside of the podcast with the content of the podcast and I think that's where you're going with it that you know, there is so much opportunity for the content from the podcast and that was what I mentioned earlier is I have a different goal, right and my goal is authority. And, and so taking the content that you create and repurposing it is, is a the core of all of our our marketing efforts. From what we repurpose with our book to what we repurpose with the podcast to what we repurpose with With our monthly webinars, everything that we do, all of the content is repurpose, and distributed over and over and over again on on multiple channels. And just to gain exposure, so it's impression share and our impression share is high.
Joe Troyer
So that's awesome. I absolutely love that. I think you guys are doing a brilliant job of that. I'll make sure to link up in the show notes. You guys on social and your blog and where I'm seeing it being posted. You guys are doing a great job with that. What do you think is what do you think? Is that the 80/20 of that? What's important? What are the systems like what what are the things that if you could say like Joe just do this or do just do these one or two things? What would you tell me in terms of distribution and repurposing?
Jim
So so the first thing that I did, which was the easiest thing, and that was I used, I used an app Headliner, to cut to take cuts out of my podcast. So I created an image, you know, an image background and then you just go Headliner in a lot of times I think headliner has a podcast integration now where you can actually pull your episode up and chop it up. Right? So the the, the the macro is you take your 30 minute conversation or hour long conversation and you take is my goal is to take as many 59 second clips out of that as possible. So 59 second clips are Instagram clips, but they go out on Facebook, we push them on LinkedIn, we push them on Twitter. And so those 59 second clips out of every every every conversation that I have with a podcast guest, I get between 25 and I think the highest I got was was close to 60 pieces of content from that episode. So now we have the large piece of content. right we have the podcast episodes. So now we have 12 podcast episodes. We probably have 400 pieces of content that have that have come from those 12 podcast episodes
When you look at strategies at FreshBooks and what you've been able to accomplish at FreshBooks, I'm curious, like thinking back, like what do you think has been the 80/20 of building links like either from the most powerful links, the best quality links the the most volume of links, like just what stands out? Like what's what's your, you know, top one or two strategies?
Steve Toth 25:32
I would say that I'm trying to get links from pages that are like, focused on the topic that you're focused on. So if that's, you know, a link to an invoice templates page like that, that article that you're like, you know, trying to, that you'd love to get a link from is also talking about invoicing and invoice templates particularly, and that it's not just like some article about, you know, I mean, nothing wrong with it, but like, not maybe just not as powerful. It's an article about, you know, starting a business and then like account invoicing is just like one thing in many aspects of that article that talks about. So yeah, I try to get those those links from from pages that are like highly focused.
Joe Troyer
So very, very topically related or very, very focused. What what's what what would your pitch or your outreach method or your message be right to somebody that has a page about invoice templates, like how have you guys been able to make a pitch that's appealing? Right, that gets you guys that beloved link, but also is you know, a value add or maybe it just isn't a value add? That's, you know, you just asked enough people that it's, you know, happened enough times what's what's kind of been your strategy in terms of getting that link then
Steve Toth
Yeah, I'll give you an example. Not specifically for that, but also just like, we approached link building. So we get a lot of links, like we, you know, one of the things I think, I've been thinking about recently is like, you know, what are real world signals that show Google that you're an authority? It's probably you know, all those blogs that talk about best tools for entrepreneurs, best tools for small businesses, and like, you know, things like FreshBooks, QuickBooks Zero or like, obviously, like mentioned a lot on those types of blog, right? Like, those are like really strong signals that you've got all these sort of entities laddering up to one topic. And so we identified I can't remember but it was something like 2000 blogs that mentioned FreshBooks in this fashion. So we actually just like reached out to them again and said like, Hey, thanks for so much for for mentioning us here, we've also got this free tool around invoice templates that we think like, you know, if somebody's not ready to, to subscribe to the software that this might be useful to them to, you know, would you mind mentioning that?
Joe
All right, man. So let's change the interview up a little bit. Man. Let's talk about testing. Like you're obviously widely known as as an SEO ninja right and breaking down tests and what's working, talk about what working now like, what's the 80/20 of SEO in the marketplace right now? And don't get me? And I know you won't. But for our audience like Kyle is not going to give us any of the bullshit that we get from so many other SEOs, right? Because he's testing this stuff. He's gonna tell us what's working, what's not like, what are your priorities right now? Like, what are the big important things that you're like, man, like, we got to get in POP, or our users are just crushing it with with these features inside a pop? What's the 80/20 right now, man?
Kyle Roof
Well, the thing that I think it's important for people to understand is that when Google does updates, you know, and then we just had the May update not that long ago. They're not going after the core of Google. You know, when you think of a bell curve, there's, you know, that 70 80% in the middle, and then there's maybe like 10 or 15% on each side. That's the part that they're going after, where people are really trying to gain something. But it is too cost prohibitive to change how Google actually works in the main sense they can't do it, and also who's complaining about Google results, very few people, SEOs, you know, but like the the general populace that that is using Google is pretty happy with it. Otherwise, they would be using something else. And they're not. So clearly the results are good. You know, so Google, while they might have the ability to do AI, or they might have the ability to do deep machine learning, and they might have some aspects of it. That's not the whole thing. Because what they originally started with is still working quite well. So it's a matter of like, when they do these updates, they're trying to get the stuff on the outside. So the biggest thing I like to tell people is don't overthink it. You know, don't overthink what you think Google can or can't do. At the end of day, keep in mind, the Google can't read. we prove this console. Now Google can't read what is on your page, it has to look at it how a computer looks at words. And that's that's from a math perspective. So
Joe Troyer
I gotta I gotta stop you real quick. I gotta stop you real quick. You're telling SEO is not to overthink SEO
Kyle Roof
Yeah. Don't overthink it. You know, you have your target keyword
Joe Troyer 2
is there. Is there any market that has overthought anything more than SEOs is overthink SEO?
Kyle Roof
Well, you know, if you come at it without a framework, you know, if you don't have any kind of baseline, what I find is a lot of SEOs are scrambling, month to month to come up with something to give their clients. You know, and maybe it's the latest and greatest, I heard this. And I heard that and I've been guilty of this as well, where it's almost like you're auditioning for your job every month. So you have to come up with some wowzers sort of thing. And it usually is off base, you know, or like, there's some form of it on base. But you know, if you just really just stayed in your lane, and just did solid SEO, we're just not to say that I hate the word good content, but just writing good content, and then coming back and editing for SEO so that you're gonna hit with the algorithm wants. They're gonna do way better. than then half of the SEO schemes out there just with that, you know, and then what if you build some content that supported that page that was topically relevant? That answered a question about that, and then you link from that page to that page. That's not rocket science. But you know, interesting is that the test constantly prove that that works. That's what's really interesting to me is that we constantly prove that the things that are the most basic, or the most straightforward, almost always are the best thing. And then we think about time, budget, energy, those types of things, you're you're limited so there's only so much you could do in a day, regardless of the size of your team and there's only so much money you can spend for a particular client. If you just do the the main stuff you're going to win most of the time. And then the test the test show that all the time and it's not sexy.
It's not sexy at all and it's not out of control and I don't think it's a satisfying answer for a lot of people because they want the sexy you know, they want that thing that is just mind blowing like you know, we found this still works Then we found that still doesn't work. You know that that kind of stuff. And it's just like, I guess I gotta keep doing my job. You know, a lot of people are just wanting to be able to push one button and it all SEOs or they have like some magic hack that gets it all done, and really is just doing it right. And I think that'll always be, as long as there's an algorithm as long as it's not manually curated. There's always gonna be a need for SEO. And I'm pretty sure within that bell curve, it's all gonna stay about the same.
Joe
For any entrepreneur, do you think that this is the route or do you think that you know buying and building versus starting from scratch is for different types of people, or do you think it's for everybody or who's right for this model? Who's maybe not?
Walker Deibel
Oh my god. Great question, Joe. So I think, okay, so yeah, buying existing companies is absolutely not right for every business model. Okay. Um, first of all, I want to back up and kind of understand venture capital for a minute. Okay. So if you really look at venture capital, we all have these dreams early in our career, that it's like, Okay, I've got this idea. And man, it is so good. I'm going to take this idea. I'm going to pitch it to venture capitalists, and you know, we're going to raise millions of dollars and run out and try to do this. Okay. Slow down. Number one, venture capitalists don't really care what your idea is. Okay. myth busted. Okay. Number two. What they're really looking for is they're looking for adolescent markets. In other words, they're looking for markets where the timing is just right. And it's going to be a land grab over the few years ahead. Okay. The concept is, is they want to pull in the single best team in the world to execute on that exact, right adolescent growth, and that's who they want to fund. Okay? Even in those situations, 75% of VC backed firms go completely to 00 only 25% get an exit at all, okay?
But, you know, you look at, you know, the companies that have defined our time, okay, you look at, you know, Uber, Facebook, you know, even Amazon, you know, it's like, it's like companies where, you know, these were these were, you know, very you know, the word disruptive I feel like is a little off but, but they were, they were very unique, game changing kind of deals that only work with network externalities and a large gas tank, okay? You can't start Facebook by buying My Space. It doesn't work. Okay. That being said, You know, you look at something like, you know, you look at Elon Musk. Elon Musk is credited for being you know, a member of the of the PayPal mafia. He's He's credited for the founder of Tesla. Let's back up. He actually didn't start either of those. He bought them.
He the dude literally bought them. Okay, so there was two guys that started Tesla, he came in with a bunch of money, fueled it from his PayPal days, right. And then and then ultimately became a founder of Tesla co founder of Tesla through that he even got sued for it for changing his title to that. Secondly, in PayPal, his company was called X, I believe, X.com maybe, and he was competing with PayPal. And what happened was PayPal was doing so well and growing so well that they ran out of cash. X wasn't doing that well. So they had all their cash. So they bought PayPal. So one of these were even in these extreme startup examples, you still see acquisitions, you know, occurring at the basis. So to answer your question, Joe, I think that most entrepreneurs are not doing something completely disruptive. Okay? It's like, hey, I want to, you know, I want to sell a product on Amazon and just like live the four hour workweek. Great. I want to start an SEO company in St. Louis, Missouri, or there's already 20 of them. Okay, great. Hang your shingle, do it, you know, but why would you just go out and like try to buy four of them? Like it's, it's a faster way to getting those customers and getting that infrastructure and you don't have the pain of that of that early growth. And you get to dodge all of those startup pillars across along the way.
Joe
So man, I've been holding back trying to get the complete story and get caught up. But man, I want to I want to know all about this headline, man. The 250 k in one month from COVID. You know, and how you were able to really, you know, rally during COVID I'm excited to break down a little bit. I got to know how to do it.
Jim Huffman
Yeah, well, yeah. So like, given like the context like we were, I think like a lot of people super excited about 2020 is like The year it's gonna be a great year, we're gonna hit all of our goals. And we were seeing like, our pipeline was looking pretty good. We were finally closing deals that were the right deals, the right clients, the right price, whereas most people starting out, you're just trying to take whatever, but we were finally getting selective. And so we're literally about to make two hires, and then all of a sudden, you know, COVID hits, and it hits quite significantly with us, as I said, some of our clients raised a round of funding. So right away their cash flows a little fragile, so COVID hits and it just wipes them out. So we lose half of our business, worth seven figures, we lose half of our business in 48 hours, and I'm just like, wow, that hurts, like two years of work in your pipeline to make that happen. And so, and not only that, but our pipeline just completely dried up. So many clients that weren't essential products, just just evaporated. So we're, you know, trying to figure out what to do. And it's interesting because I don't know about you, but most most ways when you think about growth, you're like, I want repeatable and scalable. You know, I need things for the long haul. And I completely flipped that script. I'm like, no, I care about non scalable and immediate, you know, I don't care if it's repeatable, let's just kind of fill the pipeline. And so one thing, I think a lot of people whenever you have a problem or an issue, you kind of like think you have to take an all on by yourself. And I'm like, you know what, I'm not smart enough for that I should probably find the smartest people I know. I'm just gonna lay out my situation, lay out a strategy and get their feedback. And so I did that I have like an executive coach. I have kind of like a marketing mentor, who's like a high up at a publicly traded company and like a kind of a founder mentor. He's actually younger than me, but he's been in the game longer and I get really good advice from him. So I just went laid out. Okay, here's the situation. Here's what I'm thinking and we kind of came up with the plan. And so we decided to so many people are looking around for advice, like how can we be thought leaders right now. So whether it's like a point to gather data that we're seeing from the landscape that we're in.
And also doing historical data on, you know, coven hasn't happened before. But huge downturns have happened before what companies emerged out of that successfully. And what are the things they did, so we started just talking about this, we started doing webinars, we started doing virtual lunch and learns. We have an email list. That's not huge, but we were just hitting it up with just content trying to add value. And by doing that, we slowly started to get the conversation going. The other thing that we did, we got very aggressive with account based marketing, meaning the companies and industries that were actually impacted positively by COVID, we started doing pre ads to them and doing essentially email outreach to them. So and we started spending more on ads. So those three things started to get like that pipeline moving again and we got lucky that the online education space started to prove very well for us. And same with some e commerce companies and food delivery companies where you could kind of position them as essential right now. But yeah, that those were kind of the three ways we tried to write the ship and were able to close some deals because because our average retainer, you know, is between 7500, 10 grand a month, so, if you close three to five companies with a small business like us, that's significant.
Joe Troyer 24:28
That's huge, 100% Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That's awesome, man. Congratulations, and way to rewrite the book, so to speak, right, like completely 180 turn.
Jim Huffman 24:39
Well, I'm still paranoid. So we'll say man, every morning you wake up, it's like what's going on? So we'll see.
