Agency Forward

Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Matt durante. Matt is the head of B to B marketing at nectar, and specializes in helping mid sized businesses and startups break through scaling barriers, particularly in B to B markets. His approach focuses on creating scalable, measurable and meaningful growth through marketing and operational strategies. Matt is one of my favorite follows on LinkedIn for his creative content around marketing, and I was excited to explore some of those themes together. And for those of you who stick through the episode, you will hear me talk about a unicorn, and the story is obviously not true, as I looked up certain things afterwards. So goes to show exactly what I was saying is is true. In this episode, we discuss how to uncover the biggest impact points in your business. Why Matt avoids using AI for content creation, how to scale your business without losing sight of measurable outcomes and more. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. There are lots of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool. They're from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement the project management tools while streamlining operations so your team can move from chaos to clarity. You can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com/forward, and now let's welcome Matt durante, it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. You okay, what's the biggest mistake that companies make when hitting a wall scaling?

Speaker 1 1:49
Biggest mistake that companies make when hitting wall scaling is, let's back up, because what I have to do is to explain what happens exactly in scaling walls. And I'll hit the one that I come up against, which is usually early on in a company, when things start to take off. And you, when you start a company, you start with the founders, and you start with a few, we'll call them the scrappy crew, right? And everything gets done because they got an idea. They've got a market that they can sell to whatever the solution is, whether it's an agency, software as a service, or even manufacturing, you've got a small group of subject matter experts who can provide a solution for a customer. And at first, people are willing to pay for that. They start taking off. They get more and more customers. And at some point, here's what happens. They the the amount of business they're getting, and it's a good problem to have outscales, their ability to micromanage things. So what ends up happening is you have a few individuals who know everything about everything, who almost have, like an intuitive communication with one another, because they've grown the thing from scratch, and they know where everything goes, what needs to happen, who needs to communicate, what? And there's a lot that goes on set, a lot that gets taken for granted, and the problem with that is, you're doing it by necessity. You're not necessarily knowing that you want this thing to grow really big. You're not necessarily knowing that it's going to grow big. And you're doing things as they pop up, whack a mole, trying to give the best solution, the best service, to the customer, while acquiring other customers. Again, it's all through sheer willpower. Now, after you hit a certain wall of like, oh gosh, I need more people to help me with this, you end up doing a segmentation and a specialization of your functions, instead of just a few people doing everything, and that's when you start having your call, your production department, your marketing, your sales like, and then everything starts splitting apart. But in doing that now, everybody doesn't know everything. They don't know how all the pieces go together. They only know their piece of the puzzle. And the root cause of this is like not putting systems first. And I don't think that by me saying this all of a sudden, we're gonna we're going to go, oh well, we should systemize everything first. No, I don't believe in a magic silver bullet here. People are going to still make this mistake over and over again. The trick is this, when you hit that first scaling wall and you start to add more individuals, you must put the systems mind in place. And what I mean by this is the mistake that I'm actually referring to is when. When the company outgrows your ability to micromanage everything that needs to happen, don't just go get more people who can micromanage also, because that's what we see. We go, we go, Well, I just need more mes who can get in here and micromanage these these processes, and that's duplicative. It's wasteful in the long run, but it seems like the easiest and fastest thing to do in order to get to the next place, but you'll run into this wall over and over again, where I think we see a lot of individuals churn in this situation where you get talented individuals, even who come into a situation and they're they're just still not doing it the way that you would do it, and they're not doing they're not getting it done exactly, and they're forgetting everything, because, guess what, they're still supposed to be specialized in this thing, and they still don't know everything that the founders knew, and the original group knew, and so they will continue to run into a wall where they are under performing in the original group's eyes, if you don't solve for the systems. So I know that's a long way to say you get you get to micromanaging, and then you try to put more micromanagement in place. And a lot of people trick themselves into thinking that that's not what they're doing, but that is, in fact, what they're doing.

Chris DuBois 6:29
Yeah, yeah. I think I can see it. The we actually had this an obstacle when I was in the army, where it was a thing was called the German wall. I don't know if it was named after something specific, but basically, it's just a series of walls that kept getting progressively bigger, and you had to get everyone over the walls. And the first couple, you can get over yourself, like, there's a wall there, and you got to kind of, then you need eventually, right? But then, yeah, by the last one, like you're you need to stand on someone's shoulders to be able to reach the top, and people are pulling you up, and it's kind of the same, same thing happening here, where it's like, there's, there will be another wall, and it's that wall is going to require something else in order to get over it. And so being able to acquire that situational awareness to and personal awareness right to know this is what's happening right now, and what I need to do can go a long way.

Speaker 1 7:21
Absolutely, absolutely and and systemizing is harder than just getting another person in place. It's, it's it because it, it seems like an admission of defeat sometimes, because the thing that got you successful in the first place, your first success is no longer working. And that doesn't mean you still can't do it. It just means you can't you're not doing it at scale anymore, yep. And so you can't just duplicate that. It'll still work at scale, but you really need to do the work to figure out, or go the 3p of any single process. First off, you got you have to map everything to see how it's actually functioning, right. That's the discussion of productizing your service and whatever. But then there's only three things that go wrong for an organization at any given time, all right, there's a lot of things that can go wrong, but if I probably just grouping things together the three Ps that can go wrong at any given place. And this is my old manufacturing hat at work here, but it's it works for everything. You have your parts that can fail you, and that can be the raw materials that you're using, the equipment that you're using, or, if you're in a remote first company, the software solutions you're using, your monday.com your asana or whatever like, do you have the tools to get the job done appropriately at scale? And sometimes that needs changing. That's an easy fix, and sometimes it's the wrong fit. Sometimes your people aren't trained properly on it, whatever. You're not using it the right way. Then there's the other P which is people, are my people actually performing properly? Are they doing what I hope, what my expectation is of them to do, given their role and responsibilities. And then the last one is the hardest one to address its process right? Like it's it's making sure that you're making the recipe the same way every single time, consistently, and then training the people to the process. If you have a set process that you know works, and you train your people to it, then you have a baseline of understanding of what is and isn't working. I think that a lot of places don't have process, and process also sets expectation. You. Lot of places don't have process and then they get upset when the people don't perform well, and then it's like, but what's your expectation of them? If you don't have that processualized, then you don't even know that they're doing poorly, but it's a lot easier to blame a person than it is to go, Oh, my process just sucks, because one's a lot more work.

Chris DuBois 10:31
Yep. And I've seen two sides to some of this, where, if you have the right people, when you're kind of a smaller size business, the process doesn't matter as much, because if you have the right people, and they're going to figure it out right and then hopefully they can get that great result to document how they got it. The other pieces that I see a lot of is that they don't do exactly that. They don't document great results. They just document a process to get a result, and so now we're replicating mediocrity. And when we can't get those awesome results for our clients, you have someone saying, Well, why? Why is this what you're doing, right? Why aren't you getting me a better result? And it's like, well, the process is set up to get us that specific result. And so yeah, we're gonna keep getting more of it. And

Speaker 1 11:20
the further you get away from center, from that original group of very talented individuals, the more you're you're again, segmenting and specializing, until eventually you've got a little bit of, you know, there's, there's more levels to your company, and you have a guy, Gal, whatever, who's whose job is to just do this one thing over here, and if you don't have it systemized, so that she plugs into the rest of the company the right way, so that communication isn't appropriate, so she doesn't so that she understands what her work is going into and what the expectation for that is. Well, you, you'll end up with a bunch of places, parts that aren't speaking to each other smoothly, and then, and then, and then you, you really start to see the cracks because, because, again, it just goes, Oh, I've seen this. I've seen this countless times, actually, where the founders are going, but we, we're, we're landing all these big customers now, and I don't understand why it's so much harder now than it was. Was on the service level you go, we got all these new so we must be flourishing. And it's like we didn't used to have all these problems. No, you didn't, but this is a good problem to have. You've simply outgrown being able to keep all of it in here, do everything you know, there's so many moving parts, there's a capacity you can go back and but, but then you have to admit a like a carrying capacity for your organization, or, like a I cannot go past this number of clients. I cannot offer more than this number of, you know, services and so on,

Chris DuBois 13:10
right? Yeah, it's the span of control. Yeah, right. You can, I mean, we use it in the military a lot, where you could have three to five direct reports any more than that, it was you were gonna have diminishing returns, and what you were actually able to process and keep track of, and then to to few right then you're, you're just not optimized for, for efficient, like you have more capacity we can, we can have you doing more stuff while working one of the things so something I see a lot is, like the the initial business founder is has a hard time moving from being the individual contributor to, like a managerial role, being the leader of the organization. You find even with, like the kind of that starting group that they're with, do the other individuals in this have the same hard time as they kind of grow with the organization. You don't see a lot of people like writing reports and things about the other people who might not necessarily be the founder, but are tied into like that first inner circle and stay with the company.

Speaker 1 14:13
I think that that's really individual based. I mean, like you're talking about the personality of the individual. I do think that once you settle into a way of doing something, no matter who you are, say, you say you're on board into a company for high level managerial position, however they're doing things, once you find your circle of comfort, it become, once you find your groove and how to do some things, even if you've just been there for a week, it becomes immediately difficult to change to another way of doing it, just because you've found your way. So I think that that original group, even if they're the smartest, most talented people in the world. I will have an incredibly hard time once you tell them, Oh no, actually, you have to click this in Asana every time you do this individual task. Now, but why I didn't have to do that before, like I was just controlling everything I knew what was happening. They're some of the biggest offenders at following process, because they're above it, even though they really, they really want it, they really do. But I don't know you the the personality thing in terms of like the founders who are like the individual contributors, I think that if they want to keep existing in that capacity, you just have to make that a reality for your organization and but, but kind of limit what that sphere means. Like there has to be an expectation two ways, because you want to be an individual contributor, and especially right now with, like, founder led growth and things like that, like their individual contributions are in proportionately important to the organization and its growth. So you can't deny that. But that being said, like, if they really want to be the team player and understand what their part in the growth is, you have to define that as well. Um, and that's that's really just getting back to the basics of like, do whatever you're going to do, but know why it is that you're doing it, not just doing something for the sake of doing it. Like anything can make sense if you contextualize it the right way, or you really get to the bottom of why you're you're doing something. I think that for any system, the requirement for it to change, whether that's via duplication or adding more resources to it, like not enough people understand their I think everything can be explained from S curves right stacking S curves. So organization is doing well. It takes off. You add a new tool, a new person, a new resource, and you get a benefit from that, and it takes off and it goes but obviously this benefit is kind of logarithmic. On the top end, it approaches a zero point right like there reaches a point where the acceleration of the benefit from it tops off and then you're burning you can get more out of it, but it no longer makes sense for the effort. You know, the juice isn't worth

Chris DuBois 17:33
disproportionate.

Speaker 1 17:35
And I don't think enough people really measure whatever that zone is like when I'm here. What's the top top level for this? Because once I reach the top level of that S curve, I've got to start thinking about what's the next move. Am I adding another person, or am I inventing the wheel? Is there something here that's commodified, that's not special to me, that I can just make it, get a tool for and and have it repeat, not manually, and that's for everything, and that's for every benefit that you give a customer. It's It's stacking S curves, and if you're not looking at things that way, you get too close to it, and you just, you're just, you're not looking at it from a distance. You're just grinding and banging your head up against the wall and wondering why you're not getting more for doing the same thing as you were before. And you just would back up. You're like, oh, it couldn't work. It couldn't work. Why am I not? I have not been measuring it this way. So,

Chris DuBois 18:41
yeah. So, well, actually, one thing that I just want to pull out from that, the having the context right, as he said, is, is one of the most important things to be able to make those decisions. Just finish the interview with Tim Gilroy, where that was literally what he was he was pushing was, uh, essentially, context is king, right? It's no longer SEO is king or content is king. It's context, right? You can provide that context. A lot of things fall into place and and so I like that. It's echoed here again. But this is also probably a good time to shift into and then, if we're talking s curves and even stacking these, let's get into content creation and how we can kind of align that content creation with business goals while being able to measure the results of those because I think that's something a lot of businesses in general struggle with. And I know you have a perspective on this, so let's Yes.

Speaker 1 19:41
Well, let's also not, let's not mix up content efficacy and effectiveness with attribution. I think that to people like people will construe, misconstrue that and go, I. Oh, 10 people click this and then put in their email address, therefore it equals whatever your click through rate and your conversion rate is, and that has to be measured. Don't get me wrong, every channel that you exist on, every distribution channel, every piece of individual content, has all of the health metrics that you would expect it to for me, I'm old school. If I, if I make a blog, and I see 100 people read it over the last month, I go, what's the bounce rate for it? Are people actually staying on it? Are they doing the next thing that I intend them to do? Are they coming here? Oh, I'm here accidentally. And they left, and then from there, just like anything you have, you can zoom in on why that is either it's mis targeted, maybe I misrepresented it when I presented it. Is context again, back to context. Why did I post it in the first place? I think that you can never go wrong if the content that you create actually has value. I know that sounds like such a simple blanket statement, but 90% of the content that businesses, specifically, businesses are creating, I don't care what business that you're in, they're making the content for the sake of making it, because that's what we, quote, unquote, should be doing. But they are not doing it because it adds value. They they're lying to themselves. No, no marketing leader would ever come to you and say, Oh, we're not making value added content. Of course, they would say that it's making value added content. But and let me define what value added means. When value added means, if I am your target audience, your ICP, and I click your article, your case study, whatever the hell it is, and I was looking for something, or I wanted to be informed about something. Does that actually happen? I think that we massively overstate that this is happening, and it really isn't right, like, when's the last time you really clicked on a business or a software as a services blog post and went into it, it actually answered your question? And this drifts into the AI discussion, really fundamentally, because people were already doing that problem before, as in making things, just going through the motions, hiring content writers that man, you can get me round up here. So if you're going to hire marketers in the first place, one problem that I see is that you've got all the expectation on, like, almost, like quota, like materials, like, we got to put out this much stuff every single month, which fine, have that internal expectation. But I would look at it like, how much, how much value can I add to the market? What am I actually saying? Why am I doing this? If you can't answer those questions, and if your marketer actually has no most marketers and people that you hire to write things won't necessarily natively understand your business at first, so you need to massively increase the amount of onboarding that you do for them, the amount of access that you give them to materials, give them time to research, and you'll be surprised what a good marketer will come up with in order to show to the audience. But if they don't have a fundamental understanding of your customers, you know your Sol, I joke around about this. I used to do a bunch of freelance work, and one of the freelance things that I did was because of my manufacturing background. I wrote white papers and blog articles and ghost wrote for a company that did software for a manufacturer, and I wrote this big white paper exactly the way I would have wanted it, as the COO of that former company, and I gave it to them, and they're like, no, no, no, this doesn't sound like and they punched it up and they made it all like tight marketing jargon, and I'm like, but you just ruined it. But fine, you paid me. It's fine. You're moving on. And so this just exacerbates, like, are you doing this because you want somebody to get value from it, or you're doing it because it's the thing that you think that you need to do. Now, I think that the future of content creation is gonna be different. It's gonna be slowed down if you. Want to succeed. And the reason I say this is that we already see kind of a wall being hit with AI content creation. Everybody's churning out a billion AI blogs. Everybody's churning out a billion AI articles. Videos are next. They've got all of their images from Ai, but let's leave the images and all that stuff alone. I will try to stay off of my pretentious, like, artsy, fartsy writery, like all of the things that I really burn me up about, like, dudes who are like, Oh, I'm an author now, because I wrote two sentences and a prompt, and I created a book. It's like, No, you didn't, man, just because you Yeah, it's, it's, it's annoying. Anyway I feel Yeah, I get it. Let's, let's watch Optimus Prime being romantic with, you know, Mufasa from Disney in the style of Claude Monet, and then write a script for it, like Quentin Tarantino would do, and then just throw that into an engine, and I'm sorry, man, that doesn't make you creative. Just, it's just, you know, I look at it, it's like a neat card trick, you know, it's like in any content creation thing, like any new technology that comes out that's for communication purposes has a period of novel tea to it where, like, Oh, this is a new trick for me to show you. But if you if you had a magician stand in front of you and show you the same trick 100 times in a row. Eventually you'd be like, Okay, I get it. This is lame. Now let's move on. And that's the blocks. And my question, my my fundamental question, is, if you're punching it in and AI is using it, is making it. Why wouldn't I just ask AI in the first place? Why would I come to your website at all? And I mean, that's the basics of it, and the way you get around that is by using real expertise instead of the AI's expertise. The AI just munches on what's already existing. So to be truly original using AI is pretty much impossible. It can't be you can iterate things, and I get that you can do things at scale in a way that are attractive to businesses, but a lot of meaning gets lost there. I think AI has great functions for, we'll say safety, things being used in medical sciences to detect cancer, vision systems, I said safety, but again, like there are a bunch of vision systems that are that have massive safety implications and efficiency implications for businesses. Research at scale can be done really well with AI, but only in the hands of experts when you fundamentally understand how to use it. Right now, we have a bunch of people out there who are calling themselves experts and using AI to perpetuate that, but they don't actually have the foundational knowledge in the first place, right? They ask a question, they make it leave, they polish it up, maybe, maybe they touch it up, go through a few iterations, but they actually don't possess the original knowledge to validate whether what they're talking about is true or not. Then they put it out

Speaker 1 28:48
and they take credit for it. And what this is resulting in is not only more content that raises the vanity level of the bottom level of content up because things are grammatically correct. Now, things are grammatically correct and polished to a certain degree, but it's real, real fluffy. Real, real fluffy only goes one layer deep in terms of knowledge when you really needed to go three or four levels deep. And in order to go three or four levels deep knowledge wise in any given content piece, and really answer questions and really be original and deliver value, there needs to be fundamental understanding in the first place, and maybe one day AI gets there. But like I really think that to differentiate now, you almost have to back off of using it in order to slow down and give to establish yourself more.

Chris DuBois 29:46
Have you heard of the DI kW pyramid? No, so I just had to pull up a graphic I had made for for a course the you got me thinking. Of this with AI. So like, one of the questions then you would want to ask when using AI is, What can I offer that AI can't right? Because if you can figure that out, and then it's like, well, let me create the content around this, because it's something that no one else is going to be able to replicate. But when looking at the sort of di kW, and there's probably a dick wa or something, I don't know, it's essentially how you process information and stuff. So it starts with data, then the next. It's a pyramid, so data, information, knowledge, wisdom. But in order to move from data to information, you need to be able to apply context, and to go from information to knowledge, you have to apply meaning, and then meaning to wisdom, apply insight. There is no way that AI can provide insights to create wisdom, because it can't collect insights, right, right? And same, even moving from information to knowledge, you have to apply meaning, but it can only infer meaning. It can't actually understand the meaning behind something yet. And so

Speaker 1 30:56
positive, like we having access to all the data that we do now is a boon. Is a positive. It's a net positive. Should be, anyway, but there are people who are skipping a few steps in that pyramid, or at least purporting to, by manipulating the data in such a way for false insight, almost. It's just not, it's not really there,

Chris DuBois 31:22
yeah, when I think they're so when you have the data, you need to apply context to it in order to get what you want. But the only way you can really apply context is by having that external source coming in and saying, This is how I want you to view it. So an example I like using, I had hurt my calf a couple years ago, and like to the point I was limping everywhere. And so I'm finally all right, I got to do something. So I, I called a friend who is a physical therapist and asked, asked for advice, like ice it stretch it out, be good to go. So I should have done that that night. Did not but the next day, when I went to the gym, because it's not going to stop it from running. From running the gym. It was also connected to a physical therapist office, and so I just walked in there. I'm like, Hey, can someone just take a quick look at this for me? And I knew one of the therapists, so he checked it out, and he just put his thumb in the muscle. He's like, Oh, this is torn and and so I told him, like, well, you know, my buddy had told me to stretch it out. He's like, do not stretch out your torn muscle context, right? And so it was like, it was one of these instances where the advice that I got initially wasn't wrong, it just lacked context and stuff. And so by being able to actually apply that context now have the right information, I was able to heal up and get back to it. But yeah, that context is, like, so critically important. And I think that is what's missing with a lot of this, even with with AI, is that we can take all the data, can scrape every article out there and stuff, but it's never been in a client meeting to actually understand what you're thinking about for your like, this is our strategy. This is how I'm engaging. This is what I need to get them to do. It's it might take the transcript and, like, if you feed it the transcript, to add it to the data and do all that, but it still doesn't necessarily know the context. And so I think there's going to be a lot lacking.

Speaker 1 33:10
Yeah, I think I don't know how to solve for this, because I get why people are do I get the appeal and the I understand why people think they're giving themselves a shortcut, right? Why would I want to spend years toiling away with this information to get the insight, when I could just churn this out and make it look like I had that insight already? Toil is not an attractive thing. But I was like, there's a great statement where everything that you want is on the other side of something that you don't want, and toil is a part of that. Call it what you want, struggle. Yeah, I would not know what I know had I not been like an ERP coder for years and gone through like the root cause analysis of the 1000 manufacturing problems, and then put that that type of information into marketing systems to understand how everything touches together. And, yeah, writing things out by hand is tedious, and it takes a little bit more to polish things up. And yeah, sure, I use Grammarly, you know, to make sure that I'm not

Chris DuBois 34:26
You don't sound like an idiot too many comma splices. But

Speaker 1 34:29
you know, I am a pretentious writery person who is who's too wordy for the type of stuff that I that I do. I always have to chop out way more words than I originally put in. But yeah, what I worry about maybe this gets outside of the scope of what we're talking about with AI like I did. I wrote up this exam. I wrote an essay about how I. The way AI works in large language models work. They're basically much the same way that we actually do, just far dumber than we are, in terms of pulling disparate things and then assigning like proportional value to them and then deciding this is the correct thing to say given all these variables, and then it spits this back out at you. And most of the time when you read it, it looks generally correct, but if you have a sense to validate it, a lot of times it's really wrong on a lot of the really basic stuff. Never mind if you're having it do some sort of iterative task. I think you'll find that if you, if you're not really systematic about things, and have like a proper algorithm or rubric in place, if you do something that's iterative, it will drift further and further and further from the original thing that you ask it as you, as you've done, and so that's a good time to say that I am actually taking this clay AI agent course with that Jordan Crawford made. He's been coming up in popularity. It's really fascinating, but it really maybe validates some of my concerns for using things in the first place, because, because, man, if you're not putting actual expertise up front, then it's going to get away from you, and you're not going to even know what you have. You're not going to you're not going to know whether it's correct or not. You're just going to assume it is. And if that happens, the essay that I wrote is this, if an influencer who has a billion followers, makes an article and they wrote something that says, you know, elephants used to be pink in the 1700s and they write an article and they're just taking it. They don't know anything about elephants. They're just taking at face value that this is a fact that is correct, that came out of and then they post it, and they have a billion dumb followers too, who also do this with AI, and all of those people go, oh yeah, you know, such and such, who I trust, who is a source, because they have a billion followers, says that elephants were pink in the 1700s and then you have this snowball effect where, like, several people are referencing this thing that isn't true, and we already do this in real life without AI being a thing. So it's dangerous, right? Well, subsequently, if this somehow becomes codified and sourced enough places, AI will munch it again on its next time around, and really think that it's true, not just authoring it for the first time. And and then, you know, the doomsday conspiracy theorist, and he goes, don't be surprised if in 15 years, a medical textbook or an anthropology textbook has this strange little sighting that says, Oh, by the way, turns out that in the 1700s elephants may have been pink. And it's not true or at all. It's not based on anything at all, except for the fact that people didn't do the due diligence, the the kind of strong academic rigor that you would hope for when people are shooting off at the mouth. Everybody has a platform. Everybody should have a platform. I have no doubts about that, but there's no, there's no quality check on that, right, no internalistic

Chris DuBois 38:30
Integrity, which I mean, all right, so I might be completely uh, misremembering this story, so I'm not trying to do the pink elephant thing. But there was a gentleman from the UK way back when, like hundreds and hundreds of years ago, who had taken a trip around the world and was in India and saw a statue of a unicorn. And when he went back to the UK, he was convinced this is a real animal, because there was a statue. Why would they have a statue? Like, I just didn't see the animal. I saw what they had. And so that's a kind of the myth of the unicorn started to be created. And again, I can't validate that right now, but I'll go look it up after this. But it's like, the same exact thing, right? Like someone just took this case a certain way, and then, yeah, just ran with it. Now we just have AI to do it on mass. But kind of another layer here is, I'm wondering, How much is it okay? So like, I I like writing, like, my degrees in English, folks in creative writing, I want my ideas to get out, and so I've tried using AI to help me with writing content. It's okay for, like, piecing together an outline, but like, it's not my it's not me, right? Like, I need it to be me when I write something. However, for my, like, featured images on post, I don't care, like it is, like I could go scroll, you know, any of those sites with Unsplash or whatever? Or right looking for the right image to tag in here, and I'm just going to waste all of my time. Or I can go to mid journey and be like, hey, I want this. And it'll just give me something. I'll throw it in because I don't care, like, for me, it's just not important. Maybe someone could argue, right, it is. And you, I know the artist in here is like it is. But I wonder how much people are doing that with, like, other things, they just, they're saying that's not important. I'm still doing the stuff that is, which is maybe mass output.

Speaker 1 40:28
Sure, I think, I think we get into the, I mean, we drift away from the business aspect of it. You just get into the Philip like, where philosophically do you stand on art versus business and this and this, that and the other do. I don't, you know, like, my insides say I don't want to read a literary novel written by AI. I just don't, I don't want to. It's just tasteful. Eventually, I think the reality is, AI will be able to make something that we can't distinguish. That's just going to be the techno curve, but I still will have some sort of guttural rejection to it on my insides, um, and I mean, I've messed around with mid journey too, and did it for a few I there was a streak there where I did a few main images for nectar posts and things like that. And I just, I got away for it, because, because, again, I just saw everybody doing it, and I was like, I'd rather, I'd rather back off of this. And also, I have good artists in the company. Like, uh, that's, that's kind of like, I guess I get, I don't know where the the balance is here. Like, so you, like, who don't care where to get the images from, or like, don't care to draw or make them yourself. Like, why wouldn't you go and just grab something? Why wouldn't you I get it and also, like, for your own personal blog, you're not gonna necessarily every time like, spend money to have somebody make it doesn't make any sense. It's not cost effective. I guess it's just a matter of, like, where do what do we what bucket do we put that in? Like, everything is gonna, you know, come around and obviously, like, even if you in mid journey, made an original thought that turned into something that looked Neato. It's just a question of, like, philosophically, I know that I can't put that in the same bucket as somebody who painted it in real life. You know what I mean? And, and I'll never be able to equivocate the two things in my in my mind. I can't, I can't do it. And for record, I'm kind of a writer too. I'm in the middle of an MFA program right now, so, so I definitely see those things. And like, if you talk about using AI for writing to those people, you'll be you'll be ousted from the group. You'll be thrown outside the tribe into the cold, never let back in here again. And I kind of feel that way to a certain degree for certain functions, um, but I think that we see like for writing specifically, the the more you get back to it being you doing the writing, the more likely it is to resonate with certain people now, I'd say to you, like traffic volume and things like that, is almost a separate issue from whether it's good or not. It's It's not like nectar has the nectar as an example, like your bigger agency now, and we have some really big names, we also put a bit of ad spend behind things initially. So there's a lot of organic traffic, but a lot of it is accelerated by ad spend at first. And I think the same is true of many people. Or if you're like a celebrity or like an influencer and you put out a blog, it's to be expected that things get read, but that's not an indication of whether they're good or not. So like conflating the two things is interesting. I think that once you get at scale, you got to do it, do the both good and put the extra behind it. I don't know, but for you, like I would say you'd get you'd still be better off using your original voice than watering down whatever that voice is with whatever the AI is, and solving for the question of, how do I get more people here? That's a just two different problems,

Chris DuBois 44:38
right? Yeah. And so when I started creating a lot of content to try driving business to myself, was not getting a ton of traction, because it's really hard to generate, like, SEO results initially and stuff you need, you know, the main authority, right? It's a challenge. And so I wasn't getting huge traffic numbers. I was getting some stuff from people finding me via LinkedIn. In and all these other places. But everyone who hired me said they went through all my LinkedIn content, my blog content, podcast and said that's what convinced them to work with me. And so now, if I had taken the How can I do, you know, do this at scale with quantity approach to get more out, I probably could have reached more people, but it wouldn't have hit them at such a deeper level, right? So, yeah, definitely

Speaker 1 45:27
consistency. Always use the analogy of only all my poor above ground pool people can understand this. I got one. I mean, same.

Speaker 2 45:45
It ain't gonna work in the in the in the deep end the shower, but if you go into the middle of the pool with a floaty device

Speaker 1 45:51
and you just start bouncing on it like this, yeah, takes a while to get going, but eventually you've got a massive storm in the and it's pouring over the edges, but the only way you get there is just by tapping on it consistently, rhythmically, uh, and there's, there's really no shortcut for that. Like, I think you could put out a billion things at one time, but, like, it's the consistency over time that's going to get you there. Yeah, we can. We could prove that by doing, uh, 300 blog articles with with SEO perfect stuffings, you will see an initial increase in the search engine and and see a benefit of organic traffic. But my real rubric for whether that's good or not is the traffic that goes there. Do they stay there? And are they healthy inside of that? I think that on the I use the term 300 SEO stuff blog posts, because I see all these technical SEO people who I follow doing these very interesting things about doing, like, 30 versions of the same page, localized for an area, like, just kind of layered on top of each other. And I do a little bit of that for nectar, um, but then I look at the the numbers for, like, the blog articles that we wrote by hand that actually like, Oh, I just want to know this. If I was my customer, like a guide that has really detailed information that I haven't even put any ad spend behind, that I haven't put out in any like, it's interesting. Like, the ones that have real value have like, a sub 40% bounce rate, which meaning, like people are scanning them, reading them, Scrolling back up, reading it again, coming back to them, without any help from anything at all. And the proof is in the pudding of, like, I really do mean that. Like, it's a lot. It's the logic. Like, you can get more people to come to your website, that's great, and nobody's gonna deny that that's a bad thing. But like, on any given page, any given place, what are you trying to get them to do? And what's the point of them being there in the first place? You can, you can trick them to, there's 1000 ways to get more to trick more people to coming into your website, paid, organic or otherwise. But once they're there, what do you do? What are you doing that's wasting an opportunity. If you if, if they come there and they're just like, why am I here? Was it just a trick to get them into your ad retargeting system? I mean, you can do that too. Then you're just kind of badgering them and appearing everywhere. So it's, it's got to be a little bit of of all of it. But I said this, like you can get more out of 30 articles or case studies, whatever you're going to be that were done with solid, honest intention, with real expertise, than you can with the 300 uh, SEO perfect blog posts,

Chris DuBois 48:56
agreed. Yeah. So what I can appreciate about your perspective is that I've been noticing on LinkedIn, there's a almost like a line where we can delineate marketers who are very focused on the numbers and marketers who are very focused on the creative side, and they really focus in on what they're good at, and it's like the other side doesn't matter, right? They say, like, well, the metrics don't matter if you can't get something that books people, and then the metrics people are saying, it doesn't matter if the numbers are off and but it's like, what if you could, could actually pay attention to both and realize that they're actually intertwined through all of this, right? Yeah, we need the numbers, but we need the creative elements to make this work.

Speaker 1 49:37
Yeah, nobody's denying that you you're even one of the long form posts that I'm talking about that are highly specific and value added, still needs to be using SEO best practices into your channel and your distribution plan properly, and again, like each individual piece of content has its own health. Health Metrics, and you see how that fits into the distribution of that on each of them of the social channels. And each one of those things has a set of health metrics that you need to pay attention to to see if you can optimize for it. And then you need to check the interrelatedness of all of these things. If I target over here, and you click it, and then you get retargeted on Facebook. How's that working? All of that gets played into it. And then zoom out even further, I saw, I saw, you know, one of the pure creatives that you're talking about. I think I consider myself a creative, but I'm also in the reality of like, oh man, if I'm gonna get somebody to spend $300,000 a year for a business, because you have a very expensive price point that is, you know, they get return on investment, but it's still, it's different than selling a $5 a month software package. I can still get attribution on that, because the decision cycles much shorter. I can't do it for the high price thing. So it's like I have to scrutinize things, and I really do have to keep in mind what my customer acquisition cost is like. And enough people don't decide in marketing organizations, it's not that they're always doing the deciding, but they have to know what that cost that cost is. They have to know what we are willing to spend. Am I willing to spend $10,000 for somebody who's going to spend 300,000 with me over the next year? Yeah, absolutely. But you have to plug that in, in a way that's that's reality, and not enough people start off with that in mind. When they when they take off, yeah, you have to be able to measure it. And at the same time, sometimes the very clear black and white attribution that you want towards things isn't apparent. So you got to measure all of it and just look at it as a system and see what's working, what's not working. Zoom in, fix, zoom out. How did that affect the system? Zoom in, fix, and over and over again,

Chris DuBois 52:11
okay, and then, which brings us back to scaling walls. I guess, which those numbers that you're looking at and measuring and are going to change as you continue progressing. And so being able to have that awareness of what to look at for every stage is going to help you out there.

Speaker 1 52:30
Yeah, and it depends on what what business that you're in. Again, like I said, for an expensive agency, it's different than if I'm sent, if I'm selling, there's like a price point drop off where I for if I I've done both, like the the basically old fashioned click funnel, where you're just trying to get email addresses, and I've also done what we're doing now, which is like a much longer nurture sequence over time, which is like, just be available and be useful and and keep adding value, circling them into our founders circle of influence. And then when they're ready, they they ask for their own meetings, and that that way is much less stressful now that it just keeps happening over and over again. But there's a lot of like waiting and not knowing, and the only thing in the meantime to do in that waiting period is to lean into the customers that you do have and make them a shit ton of money or solve for whatever efficiency, whatever your solution does for them, because they're your best marketing while that's happening. Awesome, yeah, all right. Well, Matt,

Chris DuBois 53:55
good conversation. I got two more for you with the the first being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?

Unknown Speaker 54:05
Oh my gosh, well, all of Max trailer stuff.

Chris DuBois 54:12
He's got good stuff. Just pulled this stuff out for something I don't know.

Speaker 1 54:16
I haven't there too. I found him completely by accident, just using the feed, by the way. And you know, I've talked to him a few times since, but it's I did plug it because, like the he made me have this eureka moment in terms of the idea of getting away from being the commodity and putting the value back in the strategy side. We all say that we're doing strategy right, but like a lot of us, really aren't. We're providing a thing that's commoditized. And if you're providing a thing that's commoditized, you're replaceable as hell. Yeah, and so I think getting that across is an important thing. Similarly, I think that scaling Well Max didn't necessarily provide this but in a similar vein, sit at the strategy side of the table, as opposed to the commodity side of the table. And to do that, you have to be really honest with yourself with what you're special at and what you're not special at. That sort of honesty is difficult. And then the other main thing is you have to learn how to be a forecasting type of organization, as opposed to a reporting organization. When you first start out, you're flying by the seat of your pants, and you're reporting, reporting, reporting the numbers, reporting the numbers. And then when you hit those scaling walls, the curious thing happens, where you first know things are falling apart is, oh no, I'm surprised by this bad number.

Unknown Speaker 55:59
Oh no, I

Speaker 1 56:00
am surprised that I did not hit the goal that I set right. And sometimes you're not going to hit goals. Market conditions change. Different things change. I don't care what industry you're in, you set. You should set ambitious goals for yourself that are going to be tough to achieve every single time, and sometimes you fall short, but you should never be surprised that you fell short. And so So putting things in place that allow for the forecasting and making sure that you're sitting at the strategy side of the table to affect change ahead of time, even if you're still going to fall short, you know where to improve next time. That's my answer to that. In a nutshell, that's

Chris DuBois 56:44
a good one at a colonel in the army who essentially said the same, we should never be surprised by something. We should yeah, things will change, like on the battlefield and whatever plan we make, like, forever surprised. There's a real problem.

Unknown Speaker 57:02
Exactly, exactly. That's part of it. Awesome.

Chris DuBois 57:04
Last question is, where can people learn more about you? I'll

Speaker 1 57:09
just go to my LinkedIn page. Man, that's the easiest thing these days. I'm so focused on nectar, but nectar isn't me necessarily. My LinkedIn page is the number one place I have my own writing page right now. That's not anything for any of you to look at, though. That's my embarrassing wish you washy stuff. Get people

Unknown Speaker 57:32
ready for it.

Speaker 1 57:33
So I had a consultation page up for the longest time. It's in the middle of a big redo right now. So it's, it's down, it's not anything to do. And that's, I took that down about a month and a half ago. I will be open for business because I'm actually in the process of productizing a bunch of things. Awesome.

Chris DuBois 57:57
Boom, boom. All right, thanks for thanks for joining

Speaker 1 58:03
Yeah, no, thanks for having me. This is fun. I could talk about this stuff forever. Yeah, later.

Chris DuBois 58:16
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits you click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai