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(00:30): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Angelo Ponzi. He’s a marketing and branding strategist that works with small to mid-market companies as their fractional chief marketing officer, fractional CMO. His company Craft focuses on three strategic pillars for success, insights brand and plan to develop effective and efficient programs for building enduring brands and sustainable business growth. So Angela, welcome to the show,

Angelo Ponzi (01:03): John. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

John Jantsch (01:05): So I still think there’s a lot of confusion around it, like a lot of terms in marketing. So I’m just going to go ahead and say, if somebody says you, you’re a fractional CMO, what is that? How do you describe that? How do you define that term?

Angelo Ponzi (01:17): Yeah. Well, I think simply it’s a part-time outsource contract situation. So for me, fractional being that it’s not a short-term contract, it’s a long-term engagement where I’m going into the organization or depending on my remote client, where I’m engaged on a weekly basis, sometimes daily basis with them. And so think of me as the guy down the hallway, not the guy across the country. Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:48): So I mean, would you describe a business that you think is a typical great fit for that? I mean, most people are familiar with the C-Suite roles, a chief marketing officer inside of an organization, but what kind of business or what kind of challenge are they facing that you think makes an ideal fit for a fractional strategic marketing hire?

Angelo Ponzi (02:10): Sure. In most of the companies that I’ve dealt with, they have some kind of a marketing manager or a team in there. Typically, they tend to be a little more transactional in nature, just tactically oriented. And so I hear things like, our sales aren’t growing, our messaging is not correct. Our competition is eating our lunch. And so looking at those kinds of issues, so they can’t get to that next level with someone who’s more of a tactical transactional person. So they may start to think of a strategic person, however, a full-time CMO doesn’t necessarily come cheap. And so they wrestle with how do I get a senior person without having to have all that expense? And that’s typically what get engaged or when they’ll call me, because again, depending on the client, how much time I’m engaged, but I sit in that C-suite level and helping develop strategies and directions and messaging and competitive differentiators, and then drive those down into the people that actually execute.

John Jantsch (03:21): Do you get yourself in engagements where they’re like, Angelo, this is great, but who’s going to do all this? I mean, is there ever an expectation that you are going to do the work or that any strategic, if somebody hires A CMO, do they feel like they’re also hiring an implement mentor, or is it strictly separate functions?

Angelo Ponzi (03:43): Yeah, well, that’s always the dilemma for me. It’s my nature to tend to go across the line and start facilitating and doing, but I’m pretty clear upfront is what my purpose is. If someone calls me and says, look it, I need a website, I need a social media or digital campaign, my reaction is let’s talk about your messaging, your strategies, and if that’s not correct, I have to start to the left, right? I got to talk to your customers that look at the competition, examine the marketplace and work our way towards execution. So I like to refer to myself sometimes as an architect, I’m building that foundational strategy. And then once the plans are in place, then I will sometimes call myself a general contractor and therefore I’ll bring in outside people to execute or work with the internal teams. But I do cross the fence, but a lot of times they’re like, I’m not going to pay you to frankly write a blog. It’s too expensive.

John Jantsch (04:44): Yeah. So do you find internal teams, I hear this a lot. Do you find that sometimes there’s some turf? Like, wait a minute, I thought that’s what we did. Why are we bringing in this outside person doesn’t know our business? Is there ever some turf wars sometimes, even though you’re brought in maybe to help them orchestrate better?

Angelo Ponzi (05:03): I can honestly say, actually, I can honestly say it’s only happened maybe once or twice where I’ll spend, I’m thinking of a technology company. A couple of years ago they brought me in, the marketing person was out of college for a couple of years. He had his own vision. They brought me in, I revamped everything, redid all their messaging, their plans, and then here’s the plan to implement. And within three months, he was back doing what he wanted to do because they didn’t know how to really manage him. But I would say in most situations, I’m very collaborative, so it’s not my way or the highway. So I find that even after I leave, they’re implementing. I have a company in the streaming space that I helped them when they launched. That was five years ago. When I see him constantly, he’ll be the first to say, I’m still working on the strategies you gave us five years ago. And so that’s really rewarding. But yeah, that is always a challenge, right? Because not invented here, somebody wants to put their own mark on it.

John Jantsch (06:08): Yeah. I’m sure there are some cases, I’m going to assume there’s some cases you’ve run into where they’re considering hiring you versus considering hiring a full-time strategic hire. If you were trying to help somebody work through the pros and cons, besides the cost component, which is obviously a huge selling point on the fractional approach, what are some other things that you might suggest that why the fractional CMO model is a good idea for them?

Angelo Ponzi (06:39): Well, partially too. It’s really what does that strategic leader need to do and what is the long-term play with that leader? Are you going to have somebody who’s who can totally stay engaged throughout the time and do all the things that you need ’em to do, otherwise they start to gravitate into the tactical and then you don’t really need that. I have a current client where we’re looking, I’m filling the strategic leader role, and at the end of the day, they don’t need a full-time me, but they need more worker bees, if you will. And so my recommendation is keep me engaged. Of course, that’s what I would like, but instead of hiring someone like me full-time, take that money and then let’s invest in more people at the real marketing level that the tactical level that needed to get things done. I was brought in last year with a consumer products company that had a CMO.

(07:35): They let him go, and he called me and said, Hey, I’m thinking about hiring. I think I need a fractional. And then about three weeks later, he called me and said, no, you know what? I decided to go. And then three months later, he called me and said, I haven’t found anybody. I think my original idea was great, come in for 90 days, help me. And I was there for eight months before we brought in. I helped bring in my own replacement at that point in time. They really needed somebody there. And there was a situation where I was there three days a week, so I literally was in the office and spending the majority of my time working for that organization.

John Jantsch (08:12): Do you find that to me, one of the benefits I think too, is a lot of times you bring in that CMO, well, they’re going to say, we need to build a team internally. And so they start kind of down the traditional path of hiring, whereas I’m assuming that in many cases you kind of look at this and say, no, we just need this expertise to do this one thing, and then we can rent this to do this one thing. And I mean, you’re really able to put together a much more affordable approach for exactly what they need, aren’t you?

Angelo Ponzi (08:41): Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s current client, they had a digital firm primarily writing blogs, and I analyzed it, and every blog had to be rewritten. And after eight, nine months, you would’ve thought that they understood the business. So I tried to engage with them, and ultimately we ended up parting ways. But instead of hiring another firm just like them, I went out and found a content writer that for a fraction of the cost, I could have twice as many blogs for literally a third of the money that I was paying them already. And so that is one of the things I look at. To me, I always look at any client I work with is my business. I was fortunate to, over the years, I grew a couple of businesses, I was fortunate to sell them, and I understand that a dollar is a dollar, and if I have to watch it for me, I have to watch it for you. So it’s really about maximizing the talent and the dollars that we have.

John Jantsch (09:42): I have been doing this approach probably for 15 years, but didn’t use the term fractional CMO because it didn’t mean anything to a small mid-size business at the time. Are you finding there’s a much more recognition of the concept and the term when you go out and talk to particularly mid-size business owners?

Angelo Ponzi (10:00): Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll go back. I mean, I’m heading into my 10th year, and in those first three or four years, it was like, I don’t understand what a fractional is. Are you contract? Are you outsourced? What are you, right? So there was different terms floating around. I haven’t had anybody really recently say they don’t understand it. I just say, you’re renting my time basically during the course of the week. So I think it’s better understood. I’d even think some of the value of having someone like myself that clients find now versus because it’s a tough decision, do you spend that kind of money? I had a client the other day that, again, looking at bringing in more workers than strategic leaders, and he said to me, well, what if we could hire you? And I suppose my answer was, you can’t. It’s not what I want to do because I knew I would eventually, I would just be pulling my hair out because they don’t need someone full-time like me.

John Jantsch (11:00): So as you’ve grown this and scaled it yourself, are there some hard lessons learned that you might share to say these are some of the landmines that you might look for?

Angelo Ponzi (11:14): Well, I think first of all, for me, and unfortunately it was a very hard lesson. I had an opportunity back in maybe 17, I think it was, to go in as a fractional, but it was like an eight month contract. And I was like, this is great. The money was great. I was excited, and when the contract was over, I was sitting there. I have no business. I wasn’t doing any marketing, I wasn’t keeping the pipeline. So anybody out there listening, if you’re doing what I do or something even similar, having your own agency, I mean, it is a constant balance of doing new business while you’re servicing the clients. I personally now, I would say in the course of the week, I spend a full day throughout the week, but networking, doing my own marketing, doing stuff like this and just making sure that I’m staying ever present, because you just never know.

(12:09): I mean, I have one prospect that I pitched in February. He literally said, you’re hired, but there’s no contract yet. Now it’s August. I still think you’ll come around, but I’m on his time. He’s not on my time. So that’s probably the biggest lesson that I’ve learned and making sure that you have a point of view and you put yourself out there. I mean, I have a blogging program, a newsletter program. I do emails, I do LinkedIn, I do public speaking. I just want to be able to have content. It’s all content to me to refer

John Jantsch (12:44): People too. Absolutely. Yeah. We actually teach people how to start this model, and I tell them, especially when they’re just getting started, I said, the thing nobody tells you is about 50% of this job is selling, but that’s true of really any business. When you start it, that kind of leads to one of the challenges I see a lot of people, how do you scale this model? I mean, in the traditional sense, somebody’s A CMO, they jump out on their own. They go, I’m going to be a fractional CMO, and they end up selling a fourth of their time and basically saying, I’m fully employed. I’m getting paid well for my time, but I can’t really scale a business. Have you run into that? Have you addressed that?

Angelo Ponzi (13:25): Yeah, it’s a really interesting challenge. So before I formed my agency, for example, this was many years ago, I actually, they didn’t call it fractional, but I broke off as a consultant. And so I left an agency, decided to be a strategic planner for agencies, and then eventually I came to the conclusion after about three years, why am I doing this for you? Why don’t I do it for myself? And so I kind of scaled that. So in this particular model for me, I have identified other CMOs, fractional CMOs or VP leaders, if you will, that are out on their own that I can partner with. One of my biggest clients last year is actually a competitor, but I have a background in research. So they don’t do research. They don’t do really branding and messaging and positioning. They’re more kind of internal management. And so we compliment each other.

(14:28): So one of the things that I did to scale is I identified in my trading area who my competitors are. I’ve literally met with every one of ’em trying to figure out are we really competitors or can we work together? And I would say the majority of ’em I can work with. And so I’ve also identified in some of the other key areas. So I have a business analyst that works with me that I pretty much dominate. I have a data scientist that works with me. I have a brand strategist that actually I worked with for years, even in my own agency that happened to, I lost their job during covid and now works for me as kind of a behind the scenes. So I’ve been scaling by putting other people in place, frankly, to do some of the work that allows me to continue to devote some of my time to networking and building the business, but also when I have to be in front of a client,

John Jantsch (15:23): The mistake I see some people make is just like, you get 25% of my time, what do you want? And it’s like they’re dictating. There’s no scope in agencies. We’d scope things out. And I see a lot of people when they do these consulting things, they don’t do that. And so they’re sort of at the whim of a client who doesn’t really know what they need. And I think that’s a key change that I think can allow people to scale this.

Angelo Ponzi (15:51): Yeah, well, one of the things I did to get around that is I created an assessment that I give at the beginning of every engagement just to really try to understand where they think they are, where they really are, where they think they are, but also among the team, I look for alignment, internal alignment. And so that has allowed me to actually through the analysis to say, okay, here’s where we’ve got some real issues and some problems you want to be, I’m just going through this with a client now where when I joined them back in February, they had a $5 million goal for this year increase in revenue. Well, as I started to dig into the data, it’s like, where’d that number come from? Your average growth is only 8% over the last three years. How do you go from 8% frankly to a 37% increase?

(16:39): I don’t see how you’re getting there. So some number was picked out of the air. So trying to bring, creating strategies, now that’s giving me guidance as opposed to, what do you think? If I would’ve just said, okay, I’m going to support a 37% increase, which I did originally, and then eventually I’ve swung them back to say, okay, how are we going to get, maybe it’s 15%, not the eight, but the 15. And I literally just said this to one of my marketing managers today. There’s an endless amount of things to do in marketing. You’ve got a plan and you always go back to the plan and just if you got, you are unsure of your messaging or somebody in sales is pushing back on you, try to understand what’s happening with them. Go talk to them, go listen to a call. So I find that sometimes in that marketing manager role, they tend to go, oh, well, that was my assignment. I did it and now what do I do?

John Jantsch (17:34): Yeah. It’s interesting. I find that we spend as much time, especially early on telling people what not to do as opposed to what to do, because always this temptation to say, oh, there’s a new thing out there. We have to do it. As opposed to doing any of them, right?

Angelo Ponzi (17:51): Yeah, exactly.

John Jantsch (17:52): And that’s what I was going to ask you kind of halfway answered it anyway, but let’s say we get through the assessment. Obviously the assessment’s going to tell you maybe some direction, but do you typically focus on, do you find that you end up focusing on the same thing pretty frequently? What to fix first, so to speak?

Angelo Ponzi (18:10): Actually, no, because they have, it’s like our sales aren’t growing or we’re not achieving, or we think we have an issue. And I have found that if I can execute my assessment in the process that I do, I can uncover things that they’re not thinking about. Good case in point, this was last year working with a manufacturing rep organization, been around for 70 plus years. And so in talking to them and say, our clients love us, they’re mechanical engineers, they know us. We’ve been, we’re a focus. We’re always included, but I got them to agree to let me talk to their customers. Originally it was like, wow, I don’t waste your time. What we found is that they were right. Everybody knows them, everybody includes them. However, their primary customers were about ready to retire. The new generation of engineers had no idea who they were or knew them, but they were now thinking about environmental products and sustainability products, not the gas guzzlers, if you will, that are being put out. And so all of a sudden we identified a potential opportunity that they would’ve never seen until it happened. So now they were able to get ahead of it. So it’s that kind of stuff that we get to uncover, but that wasn’t one, that wasn’t something they told me to go do. That was just something that came, cream of the cop came rising up and we able to tackle it.

John Jantsch (19:41): Yeah, I have had so many insights over the years by talking to people’s customers. I mean, they know very little about why their customers buy from them sometimes. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? Or they make assumptions that are wrong

Angelo Ponzi (19:53): Or what the salespeople tell ’em. Right? Right. There’s a question I always like to ask is I ask the clients, do you think your clients are buying, are aware of all the products and services you sell? And almost always they say no. And to me it’s like, well then what are you doing to educate them? You could be leaving a lot of money on the table if they just knew more. And then we find out I asked those questions on the flip side, and almost across the board, the client will say, now I don’t really understand all the stuff they sell. I only know this. So right there, there’s a gap, right. So anyway,

John Jantsch (20:30): It’s fine. Yeah, that’s actually some easy money sometimes, isn’t it? Well, Angela, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. You want to invite people to connect with you anywhere or find out more about your work.

Angelo Ponzi (20:39): Sure. That would be great. The best place, of course, is to go to LinkedIn. You can connect with me there. That’s the easiest. Also, all my contact info is there. As far as my website, I actually encourage people to sign up. I do publish a newsletter through LinkedIn every couple of weeks, and so do that. And that’s the best way to find out more about me.

John Jantsch (20:59): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments out of your day, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Angelo Ponzi (21:05): Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.

How to Translate Your Passion Into Your Purpose with Liz Elting

How to Translate Your Passion Into Your Purpose with Liz Elting written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Ducttape Marketing Podcast with Liz Elting

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview(ed) Liz Elting. This week, we´re going to be re-gifting you your favorite episodes! Liz is the co-founder and CEO of the award-winning TransPerfect. TransPerfect is the world’s largest provider of language and business solutions, boasting over $1.1 billion in revenue and offices in over 100 cities around the globe. Additionally, she founded the Elizabeth Elting Foundation, a non-profit organization created to break down systemic barriers and foster systemic change for women and other underserved communities.

She has been named one of Forbes’ Richest Self-Made Women every year since the list’s inception. She is the author of the upcoming book DREAM BIG AND WIN: Translating Passion into Purpose and Creating a Billion-Dollar Business and a contributor at Forbes and SWAAY. Relisten and Enjoy!

Key Takeaway:

Almost any dream can become a reality with the right mindset and strategies. Learn how setting goals with deadlines, embracing constant innovation, and empowering women can lead to billion-dollar success. Liz’s journey from starting TransPerfect to her philanthropic endeavors is an inspiring roadmap for aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders. Dream big, take action, and win!

Questions I ask Liz Elting:

(01:12): What motivated you to establish TransPerfect, and how does that tie into why you wrote your book?
(04:05): What were some of the most challenging lessons you had to learn as you grew your company?
(08:17): How would someone take it beyond just the dream into reality?
(10:20): How do you balance or weigh the importance of taking risks?
(11:26): What advice do you have for those aspiring to launch the next Google? Where can they find big ideas?
(12:50): How have you adapted TransPerfect to meet changing global trends? How can others do this?
(15:03): Was philanthropy a goal or a happy side effect of your success?
(17:40): Do you see being a woman in your field as an advantage or disadvantage? How has it shaped your experience?

More About Liz Elting:

Liz’s book: DREAM BIG AND WIN: Translating Passion Into Purpose and Creating a Billion-Dollar Business
More about the Elizabeth Elting Foundation
Liz’s website
Connect with Liz on LinkedIn

Get Your Free AI Prompts To Build A Marketing Strategy:

Download now

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:29): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Liz Elting. She’s the founder and c e o of the Elizabeth Elting Foundation is an entrepreneur, business leader. I didn’t know they threw this word in there for me. Lingo, file, philanthropist and feminist. Liz is the founder of TransPerfect World’s largest language solution company with over $1 billion in revenue and offices in more than 100 cities worldwide. We’re going to talk about her latest book, dream Big and Win, translating Passion Into Purpose and Creating a Billion Dollar Business. So Liz, welcome to the show.

Liz (01:08): Thank you so much, John. I’m so excited to be here.

John (01:12): So we’re going to get into the book, but I want to go back in time a little bit because it’s relevant, I think, to you writing the book. What led you to start TransPerfect?

Liz (01:21): Well, I had always loved language. I mean the English language and then languages. I had the opportunity to live in a number of foreign countries, Portugal when I was little, then Canada when I was 10 until college, and then I did my junior year in Spain and I worked in Venezuela, and I was able to study four languages, so Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Latin loved languages. Went to school, decided to major in languages and didn’t know what on earth I would do with it. That was the concern because I was very practical. But I ended up getting a job shortly after my internship in Venezuela, which was shortly after graduating from college. But I got a job at a translation company in the late eighties, and it at the time was the world’s largest. It was about 90 people, and I realized, wow, what a beautiful way to combine language and business and what a perfect way to do.

(02:13): So I was there for three years. First I was in production, and then I moved over to sales, and I thought, what a wonderful industry and what a necessary industry, but I think it can be done better. I saw a real gap between what clients needed and what was available in the industry. So went back to school, got my M B A from N Y U and had a very brief stint in finance. Felt like I had to try out finance just because I had my M B A from N Y U, and that’s what people from Y U did. 70% of majors went into were finance majors, and I tried it, tried it out. So briefly after six weeks I left and I thought, wow, I loved the translation industry, and I had a thought on how it could be done better and this finance is not for me. So with that, that’s kind of the moment I decided, okay, I’m going to start TransPerfect. And really with the goal being to build the world’s largest language solutions company. At the time, there were about 10,000 other companies. That’s what I did. But they were tiny. They were mom and pop.

John (03:15): Well, I was going to ask you that. You halfway answered it anyway, so I’ll let you really tee it up, but did you really started thinking, I can do this big giant thing, or was it just like, Hey, I can do this better?

Liz (03:26): Yeah, no, it is a great question because you never know how big you can make it. But I think what I thought was, as I said, there were 10,000 translation companies out there in 1992 when we started, but they were really companies that were started and run by translators who were enormously talented, but they were busy doing the translation work, so they couldn’t scale their companies. So I thought, if I’m going to do this, I want it to be different and better. And the biggest, I just figured if I’m going to not use that M B A and take the risk, I’m going to go for broke. And so that was certainly the goal.

John (04:05): I always love to ask entrepreneurs this question. A lot of times it’s because they can look in the rear view mirror now to answer this, but what were some of the hardest lessons that you learned or had to learn in growing? Obviously many people don’t get past a million dollars, let alone another zero on there. What were some of the hardest lessons?

Liz (04:23): So learned a lot of things. Did many, many things wrong. In the early days. We worked so hard on selling and just realized we had to sell. We needed to bring in revenue as quickly as possible. We didn’t have funding. So to some degree we were able to do that, and that was wonderful. We brought in business, so we needed to hire quickly, and we brought in some people who were excellent, and actually some who were amazing, and then some who weren’t so good. But what happened was we were working so hard on selling that we had too much work because we could only find people so quickly. Back then, in the early nineties or even the mid nineties, people didn’t want to work for a startup. We didn’t have the big name. We were this tiny company with a lot of work, crazy hours, and we were asking a lot of people and we thought, okay, well, we’ll just pay them a bonus.

(05:12): We’ll just pay them more money and they’ll pull that all nighter. But we had a lot of turnover in those days. We lost a lot of people because you can’t do that to people no matter how much you pay them. They need their life. And we learned quickly that we needed to scale carefully, make sure we were trying to grow, but we also needed to make sure we brought in the right people and then we gave them a reasonable situation. So we learned from that to basically set up shifts. We had what we called T one, T two and T three different shifts so that people were not working through the night. We also opened other offices in different time zones, and we had those time zones cover for the other time zone, and then finally comp days. But we found ways around it, but we had a lot of turnover in the early days because of the situation.

John (06:03): I think most businesses, especially if you grow rapidly, I mean you had never run a company of that size mean, so you were learning on the job. And I think that that’s an area that sinks a lot of businesses. I mean, the people management part is probably the hardest part when you grow rapidly, isn’t it?

Liz (06:20): Yeah. And I think it’s the hardest part no matter what, right? I mean, yes, when you grow rapidly, because in the end, I mean, we grew pretty quickly, but we did this for 26 years, or actually, I did this for 26. It didn’t feel so rapid at the time, but we couldn’t bring in good people. We couldn’t bring in people quickly enough who, and we didn’t figure out how to manage their hours. But you’re right. You’re right. When you’re growing quickly, it’s hard. But I think finding, developing and retaining great people is the hardest part of every business. I’m sure you hear that and you know that we hear it all the time. That is the hardest.

John (07:00): Well, and you were kind of pre-internet, a pre global economy mean, so you needed people all over the world, and they were not as easy to find as they are today. You didn’t have the marketplaces where you could find ’em. I’m curious, Wiley is your publisher on this book, right? Is that right? They

Liz (07:15): Are. Did

John (07:15): I remember? Yeah. So was there any wrestling over the title? And the reason I ask that is there’s some people that the thought of creating a billion dollar business just doesn’t even seem on the table. Did you have any, I’m just curious if you had any discussion with your editor on that title?

Liz (07:33): Yes, we did. Because I think you’re right. A lot of people think, well, that’s just out of the realm of possibility. Why would I even bother? And this book, certainly it’s for everybody. It’s for people who want to create million companies and 5 million companies and 10 million companies. So we did, but I think we put it on there ultimately because we wanted to show, you can do this. You can dream big, and I mean, dream very big, and you can create a billion dollar company. And I tried to share lessons I learned from what I did and the many things I did wrong, and you can get there. And it was to inspire people to realize they can reach for the stars and they could well make it. So that

John (08:17): Was idea, dream big and win and maybe make more money than you’re making today is probably not as inspirational, right? Right. So there are a lot of books that talk about dreaming big. I think one of the things I really like about your book is so few of them have the and win component because to some extent, it’s easy to dream big, isn’t it? So how do you take it beyond just the dream?

Liz (08:43): Right? And I’m so glad you said that because some people feel like they don’t want to talk about winning. Winning is a bad word, but for a lot of us, we’re very competitive, and if we’re doing it, we’re playing to win, and that’s who this is for. But the answer is it’s easy to dream. A dream without goals, with deadlines is just a wish, right? I mean, it’s all about goals with deadlines. And I talk a lot about that in the book about the daily goals. We had things like make 300 phone calls a day and send out 300 letters, and maybe now it would be emails, but every day and not letting the day pass without doing those things for an extended period of time. And I did it when I started the company and we had all of our salespeople doing it and held them to it.

(09:34): So that’s an example of goals with deadlines that we really had to adhere to. Another example is when we thought, okay, we’ve got to scale this to the next level. Basically we set out quarterly goals for when we’re going to open offices, and we said, okay, Q one, San Francisco, Q two Atlanta, Q three, Washington, DC Q four Chicago. And then we forced ourselves to do it. We didn’t give ourselves an out. And that sounds like that might be actually quite difficult, especially without funding, but we basically hired one person at a time. They needed to achieve certain sales goals, and then they could add a person and so on. But yes, I think goals with deadlines is the key, and that’s what a lot of people don’t want to do. But if you do that, I think it’s so key.

John (10:20): I think there’s a misconception out there with people who aren’t entrepreneurs that every entrepreneur is just this massive risk taker. I’d make the case that it’s actually riskier staying in a nine to five job for somebody. But talk a little bit about, I mean, because you took some big risks, talk a little bit about what you think the role or the balance or the importance of risk is.

Liz (10:43): Yes. No, you’re right. And I agree with you. It can be more of a risk if you’re working for someone else, because then you’re at their mercy. That’s right. Which boss you’re going to get. You don’t know what the boss is going to ask of you. You don’t know what’s going to happen going to happen to the company. Plenty of companies go out of business, they lay people off, whatever it is. So yes, whereas you can control your own destiny if you take what some people might consider the risk, and I agree with you, it’s not a risk. If by chance it doesn’t work out, you learned a lot along the way and then you can go start something new. Or if you really don’t want to, you can go back to corporate life. But I agree with you. I think it’s more of a risk not to.

John (11:26): I’m sure people that will read this book will say, okay, I should dream big, but what do I need to start the next Google? Or where do I find the idea for my big?

Liz (11:37): Yeah. And I love that question or that, yes, because I feel like you should not confuse being an inventor with being an entrepreneur or being an entrepreneur with being an inventor. Basically, you can be wildly successful creating something entirely new. And certainly that was what we did. As I mentioned, 10,000 other companies were already doing it, but the idea was to do it better and differently. And there are all kinds of ways to do that, whether it’s with more urgency slash faster, whether it’s with more of a service orientation, really spoiling the client, whether it’s with having a global presence, whether it’s creating a one-stop shop. I mean, there’s so many ways to do it. And I always think about how Steve Jobs did it with the iPhone. It was originally the Blackberry, which had some issues. The screen wasn’t too big. I mean, there were a number of issues, and he wanted it to be able to do a lot more than just have its email usage. So the point is, yes, I think it’s the better way to go because there’s so many things out there that are being done, but they’re not being done as well as they could. And it’s finding that hole, finding that problem to solve.

John (12:50): So every new wave of technology potentially presents challenges for established businesses. I would venture to say that the translation business is going through a bit of an evolution because of ai. So how would you advise people, in some cases, it’s going to gut their profit. In other cases, it’s going to make them have to pivot altogether. I mean, how did you look at that kind of changing world to pivot or think about how you had to change the company?

Liz (13:25): Just to mean, and you probably know this, but I did sell five years ago, but still,

John (13:31): Yeah, I was using that as an example. Oh,

Liz (13:33): Yes. No, no, absolutely. Because machine translation became a part of things during my time in the industry, and you’re absolutely right. So what we did is we tried to incorporate it in any way that it could be helpful. And it was whether it was machine translation, cat tools, and now it’s ai, and I’m sure they’re using it to their advantage and making it so that it is helpful. But the other piece of it that we did, and I recommend doing it, is constantly innovating. And sure, we did it with starting as a company that had almost no technology because in 1992, you could barely mode something. I mean, there was no technology. It was crazy. But then along the way, we really incorporated technology. But as far as other things, we started a litigation solutions division. We started a staffing solutions division. We created technology solutions.

(14:27): And I think the point there is you get the client base and you work with these big companies and you see what else they need, and then you see what the needs are out there as time goes on, and you just keep innovating for your client base. So we kept working with the same clients. I mean huge global companies, but they needed other things. And it’s anticipating the client’s needs before they know they have them. It’s constant innovation. And I think that’s what we did during those 26 years that I was with the company. But I think I’m sure that’s what they’re doing now and what every great entrepreneur and every great C e O is doing.

John (15:03): Yeah, I mean, no question. Easier to sell more to people who already trust you than to go out and find new companies or new business. Absolutely. As people might’ve noted in the intro, in your intro, the first part talks about your foundation. So was philanthropy always a hope, a goal or kind of a happy side effect of what happened in your mind?

Liz (15:26): I think it always was a goal. I learned early on that I wanted to help people. I liked helping people. I mean, I did volunteer work, a lot of us did. But during my years as an entrepreneur, I didn’t have time like any entrepreneur that you barely have time for your company and your family, and that’s it. So I did figure eventually when I had more time, I would focus on the issues and I saw issues. I saw issues with women and how they were treated, how marginalized populations were treated, or people from marginalized communities were treated, and then all kinds of other issues. And the longer I’ve been doing it, the more issues I’m seeing everything from heart disease to cancer to hunger to gun safety. So now I did think, okay, I had a plan early on, and I’ll tell you partly why I had a plan.

(16:22): One thing that happened to me when I was 14, it was kind of the big event of my life. It was life changing. I was hit by a car. I was walking across the street in Vermont, and I flipped over, had a fractured skull, was unconscious for three days. My parents didn’t think I was going to wake up. And then they were thinking, okay, well if she wakes up, she’s probably going to have severe brain damage. Not being able to be able to talk or not be able to walk or something or both. Anyway, after three days, I was fortunate I did come out of this coma, but there was someone else with the exact same injury. So I realized, oh my gosh, I’m the lucky one. I need to do something important here. I could have just as easily lost my life. And then of course, I was lucky with having parents who encouraged education and supported me through it, and being able to be an entrepreneur who hired amazing people. I mean, we in the end had an amazing team that really built our company. So I was one of the lucky ones. So now here I am trying to help people who don’t come from situations where they can get the education. So work a lot on financial aid or try to encourage people to be entrepreneurs or I’m trying to help in all the areas that I just am more good fortune with, and some people don’t have it. So that’s the idea.

John (17:40): So talk a little bit about, you started to mention this a little bit, but did you see being a woman doing what you did as an advantage or a disadvantage?

Liz (17:51): I think

John (17:51): I have four daughters, so that’s maybe why I posed the question that way, because I’d love your take. No,

Liz (17:57): Absolutely. I think the reason actually what prompted me to start the company that I left out, I was trying to move along my answer. I know people don’t have all day, but when I was at the other company, shortly after getting my M B A where I was trying out finance, I was the only woman. And first thing that happened is whenever the phone rang, all the guys would yell Liz phone, because I was the woman. And I quickly realized, okay, that atmosphere was not for me. It felt sexist there, it did. Now, that was many years ago, going through the years as an entrepreneur and as a C E O or Co c e O, yeah, it was tough in a lot of ways, being a woman, people assumed that my partner was the c e o when they first met us, when we just walked in, and I was his assistant because I was the woman.

(18:48): And then I felt like as we grew the company, I think it can be harder for women because when women are tough, they’re considered mean. Whereas when men are tough, they’re considered great leaders. I definitely felt some of that. And then I guess the other issue I saw is not so much that it affected me over time because I was in that leadership role, but other women that I saw at other companies, sometimes in our company, I think they weren’t always treated the way they should be. So I thought, okay, when I’m finished with this, I’m going to help them and support them because in many companies and in many parts of the world and in politics and throughout, it can be tougher for women. And so that’s why I’m focusing on it. And the wonderful thing for your daughters is this. In the nineties, we didn’t have a lot of groups, women’s group support.

(19:40): Now at companies, we ultimately had a women’s group at our company, we started one. There are so many amazing networking groups outside where women are supporting women and some wonderful men are supporting women too. And it’s much better, but we still have a ways to go. And I think as far as your daughters, one last thing is obviously they may find a terrific situation. There are wonderful companies out there, but I also think it’s great when women go and start their own companies and they can create their dream environment. And so I’m a huge proponent of that as well.

John (20:11): Well, I’ll brag a little bit. One of them has started and sold a company already, and then the other one is, one of my other ones is actually runs my company. So Oh

Liz (20:20): My gosh. Oh wow. So they’re entrepreneurs already

John (20:24): And very

Liz (20:24): Successful ones.

John (20:26): I love that

Liz (20:27): They don’t have to deal with these issues, or

John (20:30): Hopefully not, but Liz,

Liz (20:32): Wow, thank you. I said you had kids. I wasn’t imagining they were old enough to do that. You’re much two young

John (20:38): For them. I’ve got seven grandkids, so Oh my gosh.

Liz (20:41): You’ve accomplished a lot. Pretty more than I have.

John (20:43): Well, I wouldn’t go there, but, well, Liz, I appreciate you stopping by the show today. You want to tell people where they can maybe connect with you or find out more about your work, especially the foundation, and then clearly pick up a copy of Dream Big and Win.

Liz (20:57): Oh, thank you. Thank you so much, John. Yes, so my website is https://lizelting.com/, and my website is https://www.elizabetheltingfoundation.org . And then the book, dream Big and Win can be bought on Amazon. So dream Big and Win. Liz Elting, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or whatever your preferred retailer is. But yes, thank you so much, John. This was wonderful.

John (21:21): Well, I appreciate you taking a moment, and hopefully we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road.

Liz (21:26): Oh, that would be amazing. So great talking to you. And so great talking to everybody.

Weekend Favs September 28th

Weekend Favs September 28th written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

AdCreative.ai – Generates high-converting ad creatives using AI, tailored to your audience preferences, for platforms like Facebook and Google.
Ocoya – Combines content creation, AI copywriting, and scheduling, allowing marketers to streamline the entire social media content lifecycle in one tool.
Mutiny – Uses AI to personalize website content for each visitor, increasing conversion rates by automatically tailoring the messaging based on visitor data and behavior.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

Gain Client’s Trust by ensuring Cybersecurity

Gain Client’s Trust by ensuring Cybersecurity written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Zach Kromkowski

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Zach Kromkowski, co-founder of Sention, about the importance of cybersecurity for small businesses and marketing firms.

Zach’s cybersecurity journey began with a passion for problem-solving and a talent for turning ideas into reality. Blending intelligence, tenacity, and a love for community education, he simplifies cybersecurity through webinars, workshops, and consultations, helping MSPs and enterprises easily enhance their security.

We discuss best practices for system hardening, managing security in a distributed workforce, and the significance of password management and compliance standards. The conversation also touches on the risks AI poses in cybersecurity and the necessity of implementing two-factor authentication and VPNs. Zach emphasizes that adequate security doesn’t require a large budget and offers practical steps businesses can take to enhance their security posture.

Key Takeaways

Cybersecurity is crucial for marketing firms and small businesses.
System hardening can be done without a large budget.
Managing security in a distributed workforce requires clear policies.
Google Workspace users should regularly review linked accounts.
Password managers are essential for secure password storage.
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a must for all software.
SOC 2 compliance is a common standard for businesses.
AI poses unique risks in cybersecurity that need to be addressed.
Adding layers of security can deter potential attacks.
Educating employees about security risks builds trust.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction to Cybersecurity and Marketing

[02:00] Best Practices for Small Businesses

[04:59] Managing Security in a Distributed Workforce

[07:59] Enhancing Security with Google Workspace

[10:58] Password Management Best Practices

[13:58] The Role of VPNs in Security

[16:59] Understanding Compliance Standards

[18:10] AI Risks in Cybersecurity

[21:52] Conclusion and Resources

More About Zach Kromkowski:

Add Zach Kromkowski on LinkedIn
Check out his Website
Subscribe to his YouTube channel

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

(00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM world slash scale. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Zach Kromkowski. I was so worried about the last name that I’ve messed up. You

Zack Kromkowski (01:15): Overthought the last name and you got the first name. No worries.

John Jantsch (01:19): Kromkowski. Here we go. He is a force in cybersecurity driven to make system hardening both effective and accessible. Co-founder of Ion, he and his team developed an innovative platform that automates hardening for workstation servers and browsers to CIS standards, streamlining compliance and security. So we’re going to talk about security cybersecurity, I suppose more specifically. So this is a topic that is not necessarily marketing very related to what we do as marketers, very related to what we do as business owners. So Zach, welcome to the show.

Zack Kromkowski (01:54): Yeah, thank you for having me on. And I mean, you kicked off right there, John. Why is this relatable to marketing firms and owners? I mean, our little pre-session banter, it’s like us marketing firms, and when we work with clients, they’re telling us a lot of their ip. They’re telling us their brand, their image. All of these details is how bad actors might be able to create a more targeted phishing email or a more targeted, more persuasive email that isn’t real. So even though we’re talking about security on a marketing podcast, it’s all related. So I really appreciate the pre-show banter we had, John.

John Jantsch (02:30): Yeah, well, and not to mention, I mean, we have clients that their cousin’s, ex-boyfriend set up all of their passwords on things and they just have ’em on a spreadsheet and they give ’em to us. And as a marketing agency, in some ways that makes life easier because I’ve got all the keys, right? But it’s also should be very scary to anybody that is taking that data. So let’s kind of back up and can you give us some best practices on the typical small business we can get into? The agency maybe is a little different, but the typical small business, what are some of the things they need to be doing as just routine practices? Not because the sky’s falling, just but because lots of things happen, right? You’ve got bad actors, but you’ve also got disgruntled employees. Maybe you’ve got lots of things that can happen in the world because stuff happens. So let’s kind of start there. What are the basics?

Zack Kromkowski (03:26): Yeah, I mean, there’s risk to anything. Again, in that pre-show we talked about as Duct Tape Marketing, you have your own third party vendors. What can I do to protect myself? And you shared a little bit about that. So

(03:37): Talking to those basics, there’s a misconception with security that you have to invest hundreds, thousands of dollars just to have security. And I’ll be the first vendor to admit, you don’t need to spend a ton of money on security. There are things you can do specifically called system hardening. So this is one of the first things, in my opinion, any business owner, any SMB can really focus on. This is a concept of understanding. Where are your assets? Where are your computers? Where is your server? Maybe you have one, maybe you don’t. Where are your computers? And the next step of saying how are they configured? What software is installed on this computer? How can I configure that new software to be more secure? So talking about some of these easy examples, something every small business owner I talk to always and my parents, right? My family, for example, they want to save their passwords to the browser. This is universally just accepted. This is what everyone does. But the browser, the Google, the Microsoft Edge, these are not security first browser password storage methods. There are literally companies that dedicate their entire business model just to saving the password. So that’s like bit warden LastPass.

John Jantsch (04:58): And

Zack Kromkowski (04:58): When I talk about hardening, you can’t write a policy and say, Hey employees, I don’t want any of you to save your password to the browser and expect them to do that. When I talk about hardening, we literally remove the ability to save a password to the browser. That way that policy is enforced and happens by nature. There’s no way around it. So that’s one aspect of hardening, John.

John Jantsch (05:22): Yeah. Awesome. So what about, I guess, outstanding on that same topic. What about the fact that in my particular case, there is no server, there is no central office. In a lot of cases, people are using their own devices to connect to many of the assets. So how does somebody who has a distributed workforce, is that going to be different or are we really just going to run a much higher risk?

Zack Kromkowski (05:50): So this is another good follow up. It’s this concept of risk and being able to communicate this as a marketing or that owner is really important because if you can educate and talk towards your risk, it’s going to build more trust. And this trust, if I’m outsourcing my marketing as cion, I have to trust the person that I want to work with. So let’s say there is a distributor distributed network, BYOD devices. It’s my personal computer and my work computer. What can we do? One of the things, and I’ll stay on the topic of browsers, browser security, browser hardening is very important. You can write a policy to say, Hey, for work, you have to use the Google Chrome browser for personal use. The other one, the Edge, the Firefox. Or if you want to set up a Google workspace, if you have a little bit of budget to invest, you can create a Google Chrome profile and you configure the profile to have company standards and then the personal one they manage on their own. There is a level of risk to that decision because they still have access to the other profile. Worst case scenario, that profile is compromised and they find a way to get to the other one. But you at least have that segmentation to add an additional barrier to that bad actor. So when I talk about hardening, again, the key thing is here not to have default settings. If your settings are in defaults, a bad actor will know what the settings are before they get there.

(07:25): So if we can change some of those settings and create even the smallest barrier for that bad actor to have to invest 10 minutes instead of 30 seconds, they might just bypass you and go to the next target. They may not even try to hack you anymore.

John Jantsch (07:40): Yeah, a great example of that, not necessarily on a server, but many of our clients are on WordPress.

Zack Kromkowski (07:45): And

John Jantsch (07:47): Just a simple thing like changing the page name of the admin login does that same thing because they’re out there knowing that 90% of the sites out there, it’s admin, wpa, admin. And so if they’re not going to find that in the one second bot search, they’re probably going to move on. So

Zack Kromkowski (08:05): That is a really good example. And we talk about WordPress, but we can also talk about Microsoft in the same respect. So there’s also an administrator account on the workstation, on the laptop itself, and that admin account, I mean, we could talk about Fortinet firewalls, right? The password and newsrooms, if we just take that five minutes to change these default choices, it adds an extra layer of effort. And this is by most intensive purposes, the most important takeaway from the show is by adding layers of difficulty, even just one layer makes you a target that they probably won’t want to hit.

John Jantsch (08:42): Because you see a lot of these things are obviously being done by bots in a lot of cases. So the bots just told, ping this and so it’ll move on.

Zack Kromkowski (08:51): Exactly. That’s exactly right, John. That is a perfect way to say it.

John Jantsch (08:55): So what about many people? I don’t know what the percentages are these days, but a lot of, especially virtual companies have turned to Google Workspace as really a lot of their internal storage, their email, their calendars. What are some best practices for that? I know super admins have some security things they can set up. So what are some best practices to make sure that even if it’s not the most secure thing, you can make it more secure?

Zack Kromkowski (09:24): Absolutely. So this is going to go into more piss. You’re a Google House, you want to use single sign on, you just want to click sign on with Google, that’s great. But we do that so often. We’re just signing up for this free trial of that. It builds up so much. So my recommendation here would be one, look at Google had a recent update. My CISO is extremely excited, but you can actually see now all of the accounts that are linked to your single sign-on,

John Jantsch (09:54): And

Zack Kromkowski (09:54): You can easily remove that from having access, because again, this is looking at the layers of security. If your single account is unfortunately compromised, now they have access to everything

John Jantsch (10:07): And

Zack Kromkowski (10:07): Even things you don’t use or don’t need anymore. So doing that asset inventory review allows you to reduce your tax surface and reduce the things that have access. And let’s talk about the flip side of that. If that third party company, the one you did use single sign on to sign on with, and you don’t even need it anymore, they get compromised now, they can leverage that to attack you because you still are authenticated. You still have the permissions because you never removed it. So that first most important best practice would be to review what you currently have available via that single sign on.

John Jantsch (10:44): It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required. Just visit activecampaign.com/duct tape. That’s right, duct Tape Marketing podcast listeners who sign up via that link. We’ll also receive 15% off an annual plan if purchased by March 31st, 2024. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to ActiveCampaign today. What about users? Are there policies that you should have all of your users adhering to?

Zack Kromkowski (12:05): This is a good one. So this goes towards disabled browser password manager. So that one example is the most relatable to everyone because everyone knows what a password is. Everyone knows how to save a password. I’ll go high level on this, but there’s an organization, it’s a free nonprofit. It’s called Center for Internet Security, CIS, and they have free downloadable PDFs on how to configure your Google Chrome, how to configure your Microsoft Edge. And that setting, I gave the example of with passwords, that’s about one setting out of a hundred some different settings.

(12:41): So another example is when executing a download, you have to explicitly say, download it to this folder, right? It makes you do one extra click because for that fish, without that in place, that fish, you click automatically done with the extra layer. Now the user says, okay, I’m going to click this. Oh, now it wants to trigger a download. That’s not behavior I expected. And it allows your employee, it allows your clients, it allows you to take an extra second to say, is this what I thought would happen? And maybe that extra second prevents the worst from happening.

John Jantsch (13:21): A little bit about password management as it relates to certainly to Google, but then you also mentioned some of the password managers out there. Are there best practices for password management in general?

Zack Kromkowski (13:31): Yeah, so this one’s good. So two FA, I’ll say this on every single episode I go on. For any field password managers are critical. Save your passwords there, but let’s talk about getting into the password manager. This has to be the most unique password because you can’t put it in their password manager. You can’t, if you don’t know this password, you can’t sign into it to figure out what it is, right? So you need to know that password, and that is something you should treat like your social security number, whether you have it written down and put into a safe, or you just have it memorized, which memorizes, of course, the best practice. But making sure this has at least 20 different characters. And when I say characters, I’m referring to letters, numbers, and symbols. Those are the things that make a strong password. And because this is a password you use nowhere else, it’s a single password. This is actually not something I would recommend to rotate or change. This is just your forever password

John Jantsch (14:29): Until

Zack Kromkowski (14:30): Your safe gets broken into, until you get an alert saying possible password compromise. You never have to rotate this password. This is your single source of truth to get into your password manager. And yeah, on top of that, I’ll say it one more time. The two FA, every piece of software, everything that you have access to always go through and just see, Hey, in the setting section or the security and option section, do they have a two a option available? Do you want me to go a little bit deeper into why that’s important, John?

John Jantsch (15:01): No, but I do want to explain, not everybody knows the acronym two FA. So two factor authentication. So we’ve all got some, all the financial folks have gone to almost forcing that. So you log in and then it says, all right, we’re not sure this is you. We’re going to text you a code, or you need to use an authenticator or something. So basically it’s just a second hoop, if you will, to somebody could have your phone, they can have your password, so they could authenticate it, but it just adds an extra hoop for somebody that’s out there in some far away island that’s trying to hack into your stuff.

Zack Kromkowski (15:38): And I think that’s a great point, and I’m glad you called me out for that. I do my best to speak all of my acronyms. It’s alphabet soup in the security world. But

(15:48): This is a cool thing, and relating it again, back to the marketing departments and marketing teams and doing sales, right? If you were trying to sell ION or a security company, Hey, I want to do your marketing. I need all of this brand information, I need all of your value props, I need whatever, to build the perfect messaging. If one question I would probably ask, Hey, how are you storing this? Right? So marketing departments may want to take half a step into enabling their sales team to say, Hey, if it ever makes sense, feel free to let the prospect know, Hey, we secure our data this way. We have managed browsers, we do use two FA. If a marketing firm said that to me and leaned into MySpace as a security vendor, I’d be impressed. I’d be like, Hey, maybe they’re not experts, but they took that half a step to at least try to appeal to what I care about, and that would mean a lot to me.

John Jantsch (16:42): So here’s my other topic. I’m going to throw this one in here. This might just mix up the soup a little bit, but where do you stand on VPNs? So again, since we’re all over the world and all doing, we’re all logging into Google to do X, should we all be using virtual private networks that mask our ips?

Zack Kromkowski (17:01): Yeah, I mean, this again, goes towards that BYOD. If you are an enterprise who can only access certain things via the on-premise domain, you have to be connected. You have to be onsite in order to obtain certain information, you’re going to be inherently required to have A VPN. Now, the debate kind of comes in, okay, we can only access the data onsite. We have no one remote. Do we really need a VPN? In that case, you probably don’t. I mean, more is always better, but in that case, it’s probably overkill. If everyone is already working on site, the computers never leave the business, everything has to be done there. There’s not a lot of value because the data’s never leaving that secure built environment. Now, to your point, a lot of people are B-O-I-O-D. We’re all remote nowadays. So yeah, they really do become that backbone to say, if I don’t lock out some of that business data and require A VPN in order to reach it, anyone can reach it,

John Jantsch (18:08): Right?

Zack Kromkowski (18:09): So it’s going to depend on your business model, your business setup. But yeah, VPNs are critical for those remote environments. But if you are on site, probably not necessary.

John Jantsch (18:21): So you talked about if somebody was wanting to do your marketing, if I went to a company and they were asking, in fact, we’ve had this happen before where people have an IT company that they work with and they’re like, Hey, here’s our checklist of security standards. Do you meet them? So is there kind of a, I wouldn’t call it the gold standard, but maybe even a minimum standard that if I went to them and just said, oh yeah, we are BXYC compliant. Is there one sort of compliance level that say a small business should strive towards?

Zack Kromkowski (18:54): So there’s an easy answer that comes to mind here, and that’s going to be SOC two compliance, which is maybe what you’re leaning towards.

John Jantsch (19:00): And

Zack Kromkowski (19:00): It’s definitely one of the most common and most understood compliances to me. And it would mean something to me. It would definitely say, well, they at least did that. That means they care about it To some extent, the follow-up question. And if you do take the approach of getting a SOC two, which yes, that’s a good approach. ION has one, right? We’re doing all this, but be able to say, not only do we have one, this is what we got it for. So that’s the very unique thing with SOC two. I can get a SOC two on the ION website, but the ION solution itself has no security certification. So if you intend to take the approach of leading or injecting at some point during the sales conversation as a marketing firm, hey, we have our SOC two, be sure to be ready for that follow-up question and say, what’s your SOC two for?

John Jantsch (19:52): Because

Zack Kromkowski (19:52): That is something that we would ask if anyone ever said that to us.

John Jantsch (19:56): And I believe that’s SOC two, right? It is,

Zack Kromkowski (19:59): Yep. And I think it’s the Roman numerals two is usually how it’s, yep.

John Jantsch (20:03): Alright, if people want to look that up. We’re 18 minutes and 38 seconds into this recording. Let’s talk about ai. Oh boy. So does ai, where are the risks, I suppose, posed by AI that we need to at least be thinking about?

Zack Kromkowski (20:19): So risk especially in the relation to marketing and the business field that you cater to. John, you are a goldmine to a bad actor. Why? We talked about this a little bit at the start, but you have multiple companies, brand multiple companies, points of context, multiple companies, just image if an ai, if you were to be compromised, and I already heard you have your layers of security, so kudos to you on being able to talk towards that very good conversation. But let’s talk about if worst case scenario you were compromised that AI can now ingest hundreds of companies, unique branding, colors, branding, verbiage, branding, everything, and it takes that data and then can target the next business your customer. You have a similar risk profile to a managed service provider. So a managed service provider will typically manage the IT and security and has more access. So they can be a direct point of breach, they can take advantage of things, but you’re the next layer. You’re the layer still hugely valuable to an ai because that AI now is tailoring, its messaging, becoming you talking to that end client. And it’s going to be hard to tell the difference, John. I mean, that’s the end of the day. Our AI are becoming so trained and so tailored. If we inject it with the appropriate information, which marketing firms already have, how are your clients going to know the difference?

John Jantsch (21:51): I actually saw somebody post, and again, there are definitely a lot of people out there trying to lead with the fear factor, but some of it’s real. And they were suggesting that if you got a phone call from somebody and your boss, your spouse, and they were asking you for something that you thought was a little odd, but it sure sounded like them, that level of fake is going to be out there and that people were actually talking about having your own sort of password with each other.

Zack Kromkowski (22:22): I love the stories. So when we call partners and sometimes they don’t always have our number saved, and a lot of, I mean just you guys, we’re all in marketing here, right? We’ve done the cold calls, we’ve done the customer calls, and they may not recognize the number. Some security companies will take an edgier take to this and have a little AI recording or AI interface to almost annoy the person on the other line. They simply pretend to be a real person, but you’re actually talking to a computer the whole time, and that’s just one piece of ai. Now, you take that kind of a comedy scenario that satire like, oh, it was just used for goofy, but you actually allow it to now make outgoing calls, make those outgoing fakes. Having that key password phrase makes a difference. I think my biggest point here is, Hey, can you remind me what, so-and-so’s story was right? Doing something personal that an AI probably doesn’t know. And I’m going to be honest, I’ve had to do that. Hey, this conversation has been going for 45 seconds. I haven’t felt anything real out of it. I’m going to put a very personal question here to see how it responds, and sure enough, it couldn’t, it just went back to the replay loop.

John Jantsch (23:37): Yeah. Wow. So Zach, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. We obviously a wide range of topics. It probably just stirred up more questions than answers. Happy to come back, but you want to invite people where they might want to connect with you and maybe find out more about some of the things we talked about if they have some concerns.

Zack Kromkowski (23:58): Yeah. So my name again, Zach Kowski. I’m very active on LinkedIn. You can find that at security, Zach as the profile name. But the big thing I want to shout out here is you don’t need a security budget to do security activities. The things I talked about today is knowing what software you have, knowing what hardware you have, and then changing settings. If you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what these settings do, we have free documentation across YouTube and our resource hub to say, this setting does that. This setting does that. And you can take advantage of this a hundred percent free offering to do some of these steps without paying anything. Now, if you do want to do this at a mass scale, ion automates all of this. That’s the plug. But there’s a lot of free steps you can do without even investing a dollar.

John Jantsch (24:46): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Picture This! Marketing in [just] three Elements

Picture This! Marketing in [just] three Elements written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode, I discuss my framework for creating a one-page marketing strategy called the Duct Tape Marketing Snapshot. The framework is divided into 3 core elements: brand strategy, growth strategy, and customer strategy. Within each component, I ADRE, such as mission, vision, values, ideal client definition, unique value proposition, marketing channels, lead capture, lead nurture, trust-building, lead conversion, customer onboarding, customer experience, customer retention, customer expansion, customer referrals, and partner referrals.

Key Takeaways

The Duct Tape Marketing Snapshot is a one-page framework for creating a marketing strategy.
The framework is divided into three core elements: brand strategy, growth strategy, and customer strategy.
Each element has several components that must be addressed to create a comprehensive marketing strategy.
The framework helps businesses simplify and organize their marketing strategy.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction to the Duct Tape Marketing Snapshot
[02:24] The Three Core Elements of a Marketing Strategy
[03:15] Addressing the Key Components of Brand Strategy
[05:36] Building a Growth Strategy: From Awareness to Lead Conversion
[09:48] Mapping the Customer Journey in the Customer Strategy

This episode was brought to you by:

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

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Duct Tape Transcript

Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM world slash scale. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John janz and no guest today. I’m doing a solo show. I want to talk about something that I’ve been working on maybe for 15 years, but I finally got around to actually creating a framework that I would call as my version of taking marketing strategy and putting it onto one page.

(01:25): One page that really gives you the ability to capture all the essential elements of your marketing strategy. So certainly to use as an internal document, but I think it’s a great tool to also use as a creative brief or as a way to explain to somebody your business that you’re maybe trying to get to do some marketing work for you. Now, there’s a lot of research that goes into the various elements of this, but a lot of times we do marketing strategy and we spend days, months, weeks developing it, putting it into a document, and then that document goes into a drawer somewhere because it’s 40 pages or something. And so what I wanted to do was create something that could be something that you would come back and it would be the overview, if you will, that one-on-one page that you could share with people.

(02:12): You could print out, you could hang up, you could do lots of things with, I call it the Duct Tape Marketing Snapshot. And I want to go over the various elements in that. And I’ll also invite you, if you would like us to do this with you, go through an exercise with you. If you’d like to just see a copy of it, you can always reach me, reach out to me at john@ducttapemarketing.com and just put in the subject line marketing snapshot and I’ll send it out or we’ll discuss how this might apply to your business. But essentially what the snapshot does is it is broken up into, and those of you that are watching the video version of this in places like YouTube, we’ll see a graphic right now, which is the actual form itself that we created called the Marketing Snapshot. Those of you that I said will actually have it there if you want to go to the show notes as well, those of you that are just listening, otherwise, I will do my best to describe it as visually as possible.

(03:07): So essentially it’s broken up into three core elements, which are really the three core elements that I think a marketing strategy has to address. And that is your brand strategy, your growth strategy, and then your customer strategy. And this is really following the customer journey, if you will. It’s how people become aware of your brand. It’s certainly how you grow and turn them into customers and then what you do after they become customers. So it is a way for us to really address all the key areas and make sure that we’re not leaving something out. And I think that’s one of the things that’s the hardest about talking about marketing strategy to folks, is that it’s very confusing what it is. So I’ve tried to simplify it. I think marketers make marketing overly complex. So I’ve tried to simplify marketing strategy into those three buckets.

(03:53): Brand strategy, growth strategy and customer strategy. Alright. And then within those, there’s a total of 16 elements that we want to address. And these are things that they’re not going to be new to you necessarily, but I think that organizing them, I should say in this fashion, hopefully will give new light to how they apply to your business. So under the brand strategy, I mean we’re going to make considerations like mission, vision, values there. What’s the brand personality? I mean, how do you want to be perceived by your ideal clients by the market? What are some ways that you’re going to ensure consistency and messaging and visuals and customer interactions really across all the channels? Those are things that have to be part of your brand strategy, but clearly defining who your ideal client is. Certainly a component of it, and not just the demographics, but really what they believe, what they fear, the value that they’re looking for, how they like to buy, where they find their information.

(04:50): Those are all parts of that definition. I lean very heavily on this concept of core message. That is another key component of this idea and that is not the message that says who you are or what you do, but the message that clearly defines your unique value proposition, the promise to solve your ideal client’s greatest, greatest problem. That’s what we want to see in a core message. It is certainly useful to write down your mission, your why, really defining the underlying purpose of the values that are driving your business. I think that belongs in brand strategy certainly, and that belongs in something that any tool that you’re going to use to communicate your business and what it stands for. Certainly being able to share that publicly is great. And then the last piece I put in brand strategy is a consideration of what are the primary marketing channels that we are going to use to reach our ideal client?

(05:47): And I believe that this belongs in brand strategy because a lot of our reaching there is going to be just to create awareness, is going to be to build trust, and we want to make sure that we’re at least making a consideration about what are the most important channels for us to pursue and by comparison, what are the ones we should be leaving out of the mix? And I think that’s just having that consideration can be very helpful. Alright, now we move to the next category or the next big row or section in this, and that’s growth strategy. This is essentially how you plan to scale and grow your business. We’ve got the brand locked down. We know who we’re targeting. We know the message that we’re going to use to attract them and where we’re going to use that message. So now we need to say, okay, how do we create awareness for the brand?

(06:38): How do we attract new prospects? How do we get people to know about us? You’ll see in this tool that I heavily sprinkle in our concept of the customer journey called the marketing Hourglass. And its seven stages of know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat and refer. Awareness is all about quite often getting people to know you and consequently, hopefully to what you’re doing or what they see. And then ultimately to get them to trust you enough to want to go deep enough to find out if you can actually solve their specific problems and challenges. So after awareness plan, we have lead captures. So once somebody finds out about you and they start coming and visiting and maybe you’ve invited them through your social channels to work with you or to get some new, to get a checklist or to get an ebook or to get some content, then what’s your lead capture plan?

(07:30): How are we going to actually start capturing those leads so that we can continue to market to them or maybe a better way continue to build trust so that they want to go deeper. We have something on there called the brand love plan, and this is really just an admission that we need to intentionally think in how we’re going to foster a deep connection between our brand and our customers. I mean, what are some of the things that we can do to create advocates to create exceptional value, to create exceptional experiences? Having a thought about, wow, how are we going to wow people when they start to come in and surprise them and delight them? AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power.

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(09:21): So let’s consider that for ourselves. The lead nurture plan is the next element on here under brand love and that’s really what are we going to do to build trust and relationships really with the leads until they’re ready to buy. I mean, it is a journey. A lot of times people talk about how much marketing has changed and granted it’s changed a lot, but the thing that’s really changed the most is how people can buy now, how they choose the options they have available to them. And so a great deal of building trust enough to charge a premium to be seen as the obvious go-to is a lot about what you do in nurturing. Then we intentionally have, I think for a lot of businesses, trust is probably the most important element. It’s often not looked at as an intentional one, but what are we going to do to establish even the credibility and trust with an audience enough for somebody who is now looking at us deeply to say, okay, I’m going to exchange my money with you.

(10:20): And to me, the trust category to a lot of points, a lot of businesses that actually charge a premium that if you’ve ever paid more to get something because you trusted the result would be there, you trusted the brand was going to be there. Many of us have done that. Many of us have paid more and are willing to pay more when we trust that we will get the result from who we’re working with. So what are the ways that we’re going to build trust? Testimonials, case studies guarantees, transparent business practices, even who we associate with social proof. I mean, those are all things that are part of really the overarching marketing plan. That’s why they show up here on the snapshot. So the last two pieces in, or the last piece I should say in the growth plan is then your lead conversion plan.

(11:06): I mean, how are we going to convert those nurtured leads into paying customers? We need to have an actual process that can be taught that’s certainly aligned with what the customer needs, but then also aligns with the core message that we’re communicating that creates the buying experience itself is often where referrals and repeat business happen because even if we get a result for somebody, but the experience of getting there was not that great, we’re going to lose a lot of trust. And so what is our lead conversion plan that not only results in us converting a higher number of leads, but it’s also something we can scale, that we can start teaching to others. I think that’s where a lot of businesses really struggle is when the founder has been really good at selling and they end up being trapped because they’re the only ones who can sell because they’re really not even sure how they do it or why they do it and why they’re so successful at it.

(12:01): So when it comes time to hiring a sales team, they really flounder because there is no real process. So great to have at least a process. It doesn’t have to be the most perfect one. You’re always going to be refining it, trying to make it better. But if you don’t start with at least here is our process or our plan for lead conversion, you’re going to struggle. Alright, now we’re going to go to the third stage, which is the customer strategy. So this is where we’re going to map out the journey of everything that’s going to happen or that we hope happen once somebody becomes a customer. So we’re going to start with new customer onboarding plan. What’s the way that we’re going to create the most positive first experience for a new customer? So these are onboarding orientation. It’s amazing how often people don’t give this some thought and every new customer is brought in, has different expectations, a different experience, and it really dilutes the brand.

(12:59): So we’re going to map out what’s going to happen when somebody says yes when they become a new customer. It’s obviously going to be different for every business, but having a plan allows you to again, delegate and scale because everybody learns the plan and how to deliver the same experience, but it also really creates consistency in working with your business. And I think that a lot of times customers really crave that consistency and that’s part of the experience. Knowing what to expect and having it delivered as promised is really a great part of the experience. Speaking of experience, that’s the next one. What is going to be our overarching customer experience plan? So how are we going to ensure a consistently positive experience throughout the journey? So really mapping out everything we want to do. But this is also the place where getting feedback from existing customers to look for ways to continuously approve, having SOPs as part of the experience.

(13:56): We talked about the new customer, but certainly the ongoing fulfillment as well. The next two components of really are kind of the repeat bucket and that is your customer retention plan. What are we going to do to keep customers engaged, keep them coming back, retain them, sell them more. Maybe sell them other products, maybe sell them on another tier or layer of products and services. So really having tactics in place that are going to focus on, certainly measure, but focus on customer retention and things like loyalty programs and check-ins and just ongoing continuing education. That should be part of your plan. Don’t just wait for customers to call you and say, I need something. You should have a way that keeps you top of mind, keeps them coming back, keeps you in front of them in a way that allows you to introduce how you discover frankly, and then introduce how you can do more with them.

(14:51): And then what’s your customer expansion plan? How can you take your existing customers and increase the lifetime value, increase what you’re doing for them? One of the things I’ve discovered over the years is that about 20% of my customers would, and I’m not saying I’ve nailed this, about 20% of my customers would do five, 10 times the business they’re currently doing with me. If I intentionally take the time to discover what else they need, discover how else I can add value, discover how else I can solve more problems, bigger problems for them, there won’t be your entire customer base, but we all know that it is much easier to do more business with somebody you’ve already established trust with than it is to really jump or make people jump through all the hoops to become a new customer. Alright, the last two elements, your customer referral plan.

(15:45): I wrote an entire book called the referral Engine on this topic. It’s one that I’m very passionate about turning satisfied customers into brand advocates. You essentially through a referral are borrowing trust. How many times you’ve done this yourself? Somebody you said, boy, I need to find somebody to do X. Somebody says, Hey, don’t look any further. They solved this problem for me, or here’s how they did it. They’re awesome. The end of the sales journey, we stop. We call ’em up and say, when can you start? So that borrowed trust, that removal of risk is what makes referrals such a potent, we all know this, right? You all know it is such a potent channel. So having a plan to intentionally generate referrals from customers is how you really amplify your referability. You’re not going to get referrals unless you deserve them, but certainly once you deserve them, you have to really amplify that.

(16:41): And then the last piece of this is, it’s another element of referrals, but what I call the partner referral plan. So these are strategic partners. These are non-competing businesses that also serve your ideal client, that you could actually add value to their client base, add value to their business, to their offerings by working together in some fashion. That really gives them an incentive to put you in front of their audience. The right customer might have two or three referrals that they could give you, which is awesome, but the right strategic partner might actually fill your pipeline because they’ve got hundreds of potential folks that they could put you in front of. All right, so that’s it. That is the marketing snapshot. You can find it in the show notes. Or if you want to just reach out to me at john@ducttapemarketing.com, I’m happy to talk to you about how we could do that for your business as part of the strategy first process.

(17:38): Or if you just want to see a copy of the Marketing snapshot yourself, we’re happy to make it available to you in one way, shape, or form or another. So that’s it. Thanks for tuning in today. We love those reviews. If you give ’em it to Spotify or Apple or Google or wherever it is you get your podcasts, I’d love to hear from you. So if you just want to say hi, it’s also just John at Duct Tape Marketing. All right, take care, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Weekend Favs September 21st

Weekend Favs September 21st written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

INK – AI-powered tool that combines SEO optimization with content creation, helping marketers improve organic search rankings while generating high-quality copy.
Hotjar – A behavior analytics tool that uses AI to analyze user interactions on websites, offering insights into customer experience and conversion optimization.
Predis.ai – A content creation tool that generates social media posts, hashtags, and content plans based on marketing goals.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

Master the Family Business Dynamic: Proven Strategies for Growth and Harmony

Master the Family Business Dynamic: Proven Strategies for Growth and Harmony written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Michael Mirau

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Michael Mirau, a seasoned business coach and consultant specializing in family business coaching and business growth for middle-market companies and nonprofits. Mike shared insights from his newly released book, The Family Business Manifesto: A Roadmap to Peace in the Family and Prosperity in the Business.

During this conversation, Michael dives deep into the critical challenges that family businesses face, such as balancing personal relationships with professional responsibilities. He offers actionable strategies to ensure leadership transitions are smooth and provide a roadmap for long-term business growth.

Key Takeaways

Family dynamics add complexity to business operations, requiring clear boundaries between personal and professional roles.
Leadership transitions in family businesses need careful planning to avoid resentment and conflict.
Successful family businesses set clear expectations and treat family members equally to foster respect and accountability.
Healthy relationships are crucial for long-term success and business growth in family-owned enterprises.
Mike’s strategies focus on creating sustainable systems that promote both family harmony and business prosperity.

Chapters

[00:00] Who is Michael Mirau and what are Family Business Dynamics
[02:59] Challenges Unique to Family Businesses
[05:57] The Importance of Healthy Relationships especially for family business
[09:00] Navigating Leadership Transitions
[ 12:01 ] Example of How to Compete as a Service Business
[14:30] Intentional Succession Planning
[18:50] How to connect with Moreau and resources for family businesses

More About Michael Mirau:

Add Michael Mirau on LinkedIn and X
Check out Michael Mirau’s Website
Grab a copy of his book, The Family Business Manifesto: A Roadmap to Peace in the Family and Prosperity in the Business.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.128)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mike Mirau. He is a business coach and consultant specializing in middle market companies and nonprofits. Through his proactive strategic excellence process, he has helped organizations become healthy, scalable, and focused on growth. Today we’re going to talk about Mike’s new book, The Family Business Manifesto, A Roadmap to Peace.

in the family and prosperity in the business. It’s just been released and you’re going to be able to get it wherever you buy your books. So Mike, welcome to the show.

Michael Mirau (00:36.13)

Great, thank you John, it’s pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (00:38.888)

So are there a category of differences between a family business and, I don’t know, let’s call it a regular business? I mean, are there certain things that are inherently different about a family business?

Michael Mirau (00:50.68)

There are actually, and what’s really interesting is when we started our research, we actually started researching for this book about four years ago. And through a series of interviews with family business owners, we identified some very clear differences between a normal business and a family business. And, you know, some of them are kind of, yeah, right. Duh. Yeah. They’re, definitely different, but the, the,

dynamics of a business dramatically change when you have family involved. And so what we found when we did the research was that they, they experienced the same challenges that a normal business has. Like, how do we grow? How do we be more efficient? How do we be more effective? How do we hire and retain top tier talent? All of those, all those issues are the same, but when you add a family member,

You add a relationship dynamic. I mean, literally John, I just got an email from a client whose husband is a husband and wife that working in this company and the husband just resigned because he and the wife could work together. That’s it. That’s it. And, it’s so, it’s so interesting. And he was a key member of the leadership team.

John Jantsch (02:05.972)

I’m either going to resign or we’re going to get a divorce, right?

Michael Mirau (02:17.132)

You know, he carried a lot of the administrative responsibility of the organization and you know, we’re sitting here trying to schedule our next meeting and he doesn’t want to participate. And I’m like, okay, he declined the meeting. And then I get the email saying he’s resigned from the leadership team. And I’m like, my gosh, what’s going on over there? So that’s an example of the kind of stuff that you encounter when you have the family dynamic. You said it well, do we work together or do we get a divorce?

You know, so sometimes people in families, the, the, the relationship carries into the business and it has an impact and you’re, you’ve got a family business. You, know, exactly what I’m talking about.

John Jantsch (02:59.806)

Yeah. I do. I do. do. don’t think I started it as such. You know, a lot of people really do. mean, my, my daughter essentially runs our company, but, you know, it was a surprise to me, that she even had any interest. You know, I didn’t, I didn’t kind of lay awake thinking, you know, my legacy is through, you know, another generation. but I absolutely love having her in the business.

Michael Mirau (03:17.281)

Right.

Michael Mirau (03:25.494)

Yeah. Well, I own a small printing company, that is a specialty printing company has a very distinct niche. And we talk a little bit about this in the book, my daughter and son -in -law run that company. Okay. I am very much on the peripheral. help when I, when I need to, but it’s their business, so to speak, but yet I’m still actively involved. And, and so.

John Jantsch (03:44.691)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:48.116)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Mirau (03:53.506)

There are certain things you can talk about with family and you don’t talk about with family. And what’s really funny is when we get together with my daughter and son -in -law, the very first thing my wife says is don’t talk business. You know, let’s, let’s talk about family stuff, not business stuff. And that’s the challenge that you run into is, is everything kind of the whole universe kind of evolves around the business. And that’s one of the challenges that we found in our research is, is.

John Jantsch (04:06.184)

Yeah, right, right, right, right, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:12.104)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:21.618)

Yeah, there’s no off.

Michael Mirau (04:22.802)

It’s hard to turn the business off and deal with the family stuff. So it’s really interesting, the dynamics and there’s all kinds of stories in the book about situations that don’t go well and situations that do go well. So it’s not a doom, doom book. You know, if you’ve got a family business, you’re, you’re in trouble. It’s actually, it should give people confidence that if you can figure out how to navigate some of those dynamics.

John Jantsch (04:25.384)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:37.736)

Mm -hmm.

John Jantsch (04:42.844)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Michael Mirau (04:52.78)

You can have the peace and the family that we talk about.

John Jantsch (04:55.762)

Yeah. I wonder how important, and I suppose every relationship’s different, but I wonder how important, know, people that, that, you know, sometimes people don’t have the healthiest relationships, as a family. but yet, you know, it’s like, no, you’re going to work here and whether you want to or not, you know, maybe in some cases. So I wonder how important it is. Like, like my daughter and I have a great relationship outside or at least I like to think so outside of the business. and so I feel like we work together.

Well, inside the business, but do you think that that’s crucial?

Michael Mirau (05:29.1)

I think it is. and, you know, it all comes down to trust and how much we ascribe motive to what people do. And what’s really interesting family, just family dynamics. I tell people this all the time. If you looked up the term dysfunctional, you could put my family tree and my wife’s family tree right there. And you would see dysfunction all the way through on both sides.

John Jantsch (05:30.707)

Yes.

Michael Mirau (05:57.73)

And, and so we’ve had to deal with that. You know, both of our parents divorced, some of our siblings have divorced and we’ve seen the dynamics and the impact of that on the kids, on the extended family and things like that. And when you bring in dysfunction that already exists in a family, gets multiplied in the business. It’s almost like it’s shines a spotlight on it and says,

John Jantsch (06:24.264)

Yeah, yeah.

Michael Mirau (06:27.704)

Let’s blow this up. And it plays out in behavior. You see that. so it all comes back to the relationship. I think you said it right. And what are we doing to nurture and develop that relationship? And we try to put some, in the book, we try to put some boundaries around that and say, you know, one of the very first keys, we talk about five keys to having a successful family business. Key number one is you check the relationship at the door.

John Jantsch (06:29.448)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:58.152)

Right. Right. Right.

Michael Mirau (06:58.186)

Okay. When we’re at work, it’s not father daughter. It’s not father son or husband wife. It’s who’s in charge and who’s doing what. Okay. You do your job. I’ll do my job. And if I’m the boss, if I’m in charge, then you have to respect me as the boss. Okay. And you know, having a daughter, I don’t know about your daughter, but my daughter went through this period of time where

John Jantsch (07:08.68)

Right. Yeah.

Michael Mirau (07:26.028)

You know, dad was just an old guy, didn’t know anything. And then, then all of a sudden she realized, Hey, I’m maybe do know a little bit about some things. And she was more open to some of the conversations we were having, but every once in a while that, kind of rebellious daughter kicks in, dad, that won’t work here. We can’t do that. Well, we, rarely ever have to play the authority card, but sometimes you have to.

John Jantsch (07:51.218)

Yeah. It’s interesting you say that because I mean, I think probably one of the mistakes people make is that they don’t do your best practices that you do in any kind of business. Right. mean, just like you said, leadership is leadership and you know, delegation is delegation and reporting and accountability are, you know, parts, right. And, and to actually just say, no, I know them, I trust them. They’ll get the work done, but everybody else is held to, you know, a report card. So, so really that’s probably one of the big mistakes, isn’t

Michael Mirau (08:01.175)

Yeah.

Michael Mirau (08:10.051)

Yeah.

Michael Mirau (08:14.958)

Sure.

Michael Mirau (08:20.888)

Assumptions are one of the biggest challenges that we find is that, I just assumed they would come in and work hard for the family business. Yeah. Good luck. Good luck with that. we, mean, there, and there’s some stories in there about, and you know, the thing is, especially when you’re a parent and your, your child, comes into the business, you know, we love our kids and there’s nothing we wouldn’t do for our children.

John Jantsch (08:28.404)

Right,

Michael Mirau (08:50.344)

And, sometimes when we play parent at work, we let them get away with stuff that other employees would not get away with. that’s, but I guarantee you, and it just, we talk about this in the book, you know, the, the, the five keys are check the relationship of the door, have clear roles and responsibilities. Third one is treat everyone the same.

John Jantsch (09:00.44)

But they’re seeing, but they’re watching.

Michael Mirau (09:17.762)

You can’t have them coming in late and leaving early and skipping days work. Everybody else thinks, I can do that too. And they lose respect for the family member and that, that causes it. does, it does has a huge impact on the culture.

John Jantsch (09:25.374)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (09:29.904)

And kind of destroys the culture too, doesn’t it? Yeah. What about transitioning to leadership? I know that that’s, know, lot of times a family member will come in and, they’ll come in as the intern maybe even, as, as, you know, whatever role, but you know, probably there’s some hope that they’re going to rise up and learn to business and want to stay. is there, you know, I think for a lot of leaders actually transitioning out of the leadership, you know, is hard.

Michael Mirau (09:57.368)

John Jantsch (09:57.524)

Is it harder in a family business or are there certain things that you need to do to really make that a smoother transition?

Michael Mirau (10:05.432)

Yeah, first of all, starts with, they have a desire to do that? We can’t say, boy, it’d be good for you to take this over. Honestly, that’s where we’ve seen the success in the research was those families where the kids saw their future as part of the business as opposed to feeling like they have to work in the family business. Now I grew up in a family business.

John Jantsch (10:09.138)

Right, right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (10:29.864)

Mm -hmm.

Michael Mirau (10:31.982)

Okay. My father, we ran a service station in farmersville, Texas. And so at the age of 12, dad said, get up, you’re going to work.

John Jantsch (10:40.724)

I’m envisioning the two pump station on the corner of a dusty dirt road, right?

Michael Mirau (10:46.254)

Texaco. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was a highway, but, it was, it was plenty dusty, no doubt. And, and it was, we had, we were a full service gas station. So we pumped gas, cleaned the windows, checked the oil, aired up the tires. mean, we did everything and it was really funny. One of the great lessons I learned from my father was number one, the work ethic. Okay. I got to watch how he worked.

And, and he was a brilliant man. mean, he could create anything out of, mean, he was MacGyver before MacGyver existed. I mean, he could come up with ways to do things, create tools, things along those lines, but it was really interesting. I saw one of the key lessons I learned from my dad was how to compete with other, other folks. was a Texaco station about three miles up the road from where we were.

And this was a time when full service stations were converting to self -service gas. Okay. And it hasn’t always been self -service. You know, the, the, generations, they’re, they’re not used to somebody coming out and pumping their gas and Oregon, Oregon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:01.672)

think there’s still a couple of states that do that though. it’s, yeah, Oregon and I want to say New Jersey maybe even that it’s actually mandatory. Yeah.

Michael Mirau (12:09.324)

Yeah, I got in trouble in Oregon at the airport because I was pumping my own gas and got come out. What are you doing? I’m putting gas in the car. But what happened was this station up the road decided to go self -service. My dad said, you know what? We’re going to lower our gas price to equal theirs, but we’re going to still deliver full service. We got all the gas business and all the mechanic business because of that. See, he figured out a way for us.

because we didn’t make money on gas. Gas is low margin, but where we made money was in putting tires and fixing flats and front end alignments and brake jobs and all that. And we got all of that because they were buying gas from us. And so it was really an interesting lesson of how can you position yourself and deliver more value so that you can beat the competition. That was one of the lessons I learned. And that’s one of the great things about

John Jantsch (12:40.147)

Yeah, the

John Jantsch (12:45.961)

John Jantsch (12:51.07)

Yeah.

Michael Mirau (13:07.395)

family members coming into the business is there’s no better way to learn how a business functions than from somebody who’s been doing it their whole life, who are the, as Michael Gerber calls in the E -myth, great technicians. Okay. And, and so they can have an opportunity to come in, but they got to want to do it. I mean, there was a HVAC company that I worked with where the dad and mom basically worked in the business.

John Jantsch (13:18.643)

Thanks

John Jantsch (13:22.121)

Right.

Michael Mirau (13:35.842)

They had eight technicians and one of the conversations we were having was about succession. He wanted to retire and we’re like, okay, were you, you plan to sell the business? What do you, what, what are you going to do? And he says, well, I want my son to take it over. I said, does your son want to take it over? The son was a baseball coach. He was a baseball coach at a high school, very successful.

And they called him one day and says, we want you to stop being a baseball coach and come work for the business. You know, and of course, being a faithful son, great relationship with his father. He fully trusted that his father had his best interests in heart. This guy knew nothing about the air conditioning business. And so bring brought him in, put him in charge of the cruise. Well, immediately the crew didn’t respect it because he didn’t know anything.

John Jantsch (14:26.964)

Yes. Right.

Michael Mirau (14:28.298)

And, and he was, he was set up to fail from day one. And honestly, his heart was never in it. He never felt like this is what he wanted to do. And so what eventually happened and it’s, it’s kind of a tragic story within about a year after that happening, dad dropped dead of a heart attack. Just fell over dead one day. And so mom called me and says, I don’t know what to do. I said, well, is, is Joe going to.

John Jantsch (14:47.7)

Mmm.

Mm.

Michael Mirau (14:57.25)

going to stay with the business. She goes, he hates this business. And so we talked through our options. Eventually they made the decision to sell the business. And so even though, the, the father’s desire was for the son to take it over and perpetuate and turn it into, and it was a very profitable, very lucrative business. They were doing very well, but the son just didn’t have the desire. And so you’ve got to get their buy -in to going that route.

John Jantsch (15:00.861)

Mm.

John Jantsch (15:21.694)

Yeah.

Michael Mirau (15:25.196)

That’s the beginning. Cause if they, have this, this, feeling of, I don’t have a choice or, I’m made to do this. There’s always some hidden dissension in their, in their process. And that plays out into behavior.

John Jantsch (15:42.59)

You know, one of the things, you know, sadly still in this country at least, you know, business leadership is male dominated. However, family business is a tremendous opportunity, I think in many cases, or at least a unique opportunity for a woman to really, you know, easily move into a leadership role. Yeah.

Michael Mirau (16:01.262)

Totally agree. Totally agree. And that’s one of the plus sides we talk about in the book is that, that a family business is one of the greatest ways to accumulate and perpetuate wealth in a family, whether it’s sons or daughters. Some of the most successful family businesses I’ve been a part of have women leaders where the women are the, the, the CEOs and, and they have, and this one, I was just talking to you about.

The wife is the CEO. Okay. The husband was the C O O and, so that creates some unique dynamics when, know, in the home, the husband is typically recognized as the head of the house, but at work, the wife is the head of the business. And, and so you’ve got some, some natural conflict there, but the, the perpetuating the business that the kids got to want to do it.

And, you know, we, we, we share this example in the book for the, 15 years of my corporate career. worked for a family business, very large, multi -billion dollar corporation. And it, you know, and then because there’s really a big family business, you know, like seven of the top 20 fortune 500 companies are family businesses. Walmart exactly. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:19.38)

the

John Jantsch (17:24.884)

Yeah, Walmart, BMW, BMW, mean family businesses.

Michael Mirau (17:29.41)

Yeah. Walmart, the richest, some of the richest people in the world are the family of the Walmart kids. Okay. And so the, but what, happened at, at, it was interstate batteries and what norm did, and I thought this was brilliant. His son wanted to be in the business, but he really didn’t have that, that background. Okay.

John Jantsch (17:34.824)

Yes, yes, yes.

Michael Mirau (17:56.226)

So he wasn’t ready to step in and take over. That would have been a disaster if that had happened when he first came into the business. So what Norm did was he asked Scott to work in every department in the business for a period of time. He actually worked, I was in the IT department and he worked in our group for a while and then he went to marketing and then he went to accounting. This guy probably had a better knowledge of all the inner workings of the organization, but it was by design.

It wasn’t accidental. was to get Scott ready to take over. And he did. And what happened was when, when Norm stepped out and became chairman, and they had had a, a CEO in between, that helped grow the company and had done good stuff, but the guy had had kind of damaged some relationships, with the distributor base.

John Jantsch (18:49.961)

Mm.

Michael Mirau (18:50.638)

Eventually, no one felt like he needed to make a change in order to, get those relationships back. So Scott comes in, rebuilds those relationships and they have the greatest period of success in the history of the company. And Scott did an amazing job for 10 years as the CEO. And just recently, like in the last couple of years, Scott has stepped down and they’ve got a new CEO. That’s not a family member, but it’s really interesting when I went to work for them.

The first day I was there everybody in the office asked me, are you related to? I’m not related to anybody. Well, how’d you get the job? It’s like everybody in the company was related to somebody. But it’s a great example of how that succession worked out and it’s being intentional about it.

John Jantsch (19:25.15)

You

John Jantsch (19:29.486)

That’s right.

John Jantsch (19:38.878)

Well, Mike, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where can people find out more about your work and the family business manifesto?

Michael Mirau (19:49.038)

Well, it’s available on Amazon. and I’ll, I’ll be happy to send you the link to that. The, and right now we’ve got the, the, Kindle version is available for like 99 cents. So this is a good time to, to, get a copy. The, the other thing is, we’re, starting a, a new coaching program and it’s called family CEOs. And they could go to family CEOs .com.

John Jantsch (19:54.932)

Mm -hmm.

John Jantsch (20:02.164)

Okay. Yeah.

Michael Mirau (20:16.546)

and find out about what we’re doing there. And there’s also a link there to the book and, and that’s where they can get in touch with me if they have some questions or, or want to talk about their business.

John Jantsch (20:28.709)

Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Hopefully we’ll run into you soon one of these days out there on the road,

Michael Mirau (20:34.592)

you bet john it’s pleasure man

The Problem: Marketing Has Become Too Complex

Simplify Your Marketing: How the Marketing Snapshot Can Transform Your Business

Simplify Your Marketing: How the Marketing Snapshot Can Transform Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing is a word that can stir up a lot of emotions for business owners. For some, it’s excitement – the thrill of attracting new customers and watching your business grow.

But for many, it’s more like frustration, confusion, and even dread. Why?

Because marketing today can feel incredibly complex. There are countless channels to manage, strategies to execute, and metrics to track. It’s no wonder so many business owners feel overwhelmed.

But what if I told you that marketing doesn’t have to be complicated?

What if there was a way to cut through the noise and focus on what really matters?

That’s exactly what I’m going to show you today with the Marketing Snapshot – a simple, yet powerful tool that can transform your approach to marketing and set your business up for success.

Table of Contents

The Solution: A Simple, Systematic Approach

Breaking Down the Marketing Snapshot

Why the Marketing Snapshot Works

How to Get Started with the Marketing Snapshot

The Problem: Marketing Has Become Too Complex

Let’s start with a harsh truth: most businesses overcomplicate their marketing. It’s not your fault – the marketing world is filled with shiny objects, new trends, and endless tools that promise to deliver incredible results. The problem is that chasing these trends often leads to fragmented efforts, wasted time, and frustration. Instead of clarity, you get confusion. Instead of results, you get noise.

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of working with small business owners: the best marketing is simple. Simple because it’s focused. Simple because it’s consistent. Simple because it’s based on a system.

Marketing Snapshot Training With John Jantsch

Tired of feeling overwhelmed by marketing?

In this hands-on training, I’ll guide you through creating a clear, actionable one-page Marketing Snapshot that cuts through the noise and sets you on a path to success. Learn the key elements of a winning strategy, and leave with a personalized plan you can put into action right away.

Let’s simplify your marketing and get results.

The Solution: A Simple, Systematic Approach

What if you could distill your entire marketing strategy onto one page? What if you had a clear, concise plan that guided every marketing decision you made? That’s the idea behind the Marketing Snapshot.

The Marketing Snapshot is a one-page tool designed to capture the essential elements of your marketing strategy. It’s not about cramming everything you do onto a single page – it’s about focusing on what really matters. It helps you identify your ideal client, craft a compelling core message, and choose the right channels to reach your audience. It’s a simple, systematic approach that brings clarity and direction to your marketing efforts.

Breaking Down the Marketing Snapshot

So, what exactly does the Marketing Snapshot include? Let’s walk through each section.

1. Ideal Client

This is where it all begins. You can’t create an effective marketing strategy if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach. The Ideal Client section helps you define exactly who your best customers are – not just in terms of demographics, but also their needs, challenges, and behaviors. By understanding your ideal client, you can tailor your marketing efforts to attract more people like them.

2. Core Message

Your core message is the heart of your marketing. It’s the promise you make to your customers – the reason they should choose you over your competitors. In this section, you’ll craft a message that resonates with your ideal client, speaks to their pain points, and clearly communicates the value you offer.

3. Core Channels

With your ideal client and core message defined, the next step is to figure out where to reach them. The Core Channels section helps you identify the most effective marketing channels for your business. Whether it’s social media, email, content marketing, or something else, this section ensures that your efforts are focused where they’ll have the biggest impact.

4. Brand Strategy

Your brand is more than just a logo or tagline – it’s the perception people have of your business. In this section, you’ll define your brand’s mission, vision, and values, and ensure that everything you do aligns with your brand identity. A strong brand strategy helps you build trust and loyalty with your customers.

5. Growth Strategy

This section is all about scaling your business. Whether it’s through new product lines, expanding into new markets, or increasing customer lifetime value, your Growth Strategy will outline the steps you need to take to achieve your business goals.

6. Customer Strategy

Your marketing doesn’t end once someone becomes a customer. The Customer Strategy section maps out the entire customer journey – from awareness to advocacy. It ensures that you’re not only attracting customers but also nurturing them into loyal, repeat buyers who refer others to your business.

Why the Marketing Snapshot Works

You might be wondering, “Can something this simple really make a difference?” The answer is a resounding yes.

The Marketing Snapshot works because it forces you to focus on the most important aspects of your marketing strategy. It eliminates the distractions and helps you see the big picture.

Here’s why it’s so effective:

Clarity: With everything distilled onto one page, you gain a clear understanding of what you need to do and why. No more second-guessing or getting lost in the weeds.
Focus: The Marketing Snapshot helps you prioritize your efforts. Instead of spreading yourself thin across dozens of tactics, you focus on the strategies that will have the biggest impact.
Consistency: Marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. The Snapshot keeps you consistent by providing a roadmap to follow, ensuring that your efforts are aligned and working together.
Simplicity: There’s beauty in simplicity. The Snapshot cuts through the complexity of modern marketing and brings you back to the basics- the things that really matter.

How to Get Started with the Marketing Snapshot

How can you start using the Marketing Snapshot in your business?

The first step is to take a step back and assess your current marketing efforts. Are they aligned with your business goals? Are you targeting the right audience? Is your message clear and compelling?

Once you’ve answered these questions, it’s time to fill out your own Marketing Snapshot. If you’re not sure where to start, don’t worry – I’m here to help.

I’m offering a free training where I’ll walk you through the process of creating your own Marketing Snapshot. By the end of the session, you’ll have a clear, concise plan that you can put into action right away.

Marketing Snapshot Training With John Jantsch

Tired of feeling overwhelmed by marketing?

Let’s simplify your marketing and get results.

Start Transforming Your Marketing with the Marketing Snapshot

Marketing doesn’t have to be a headache. It doesn’t have to be complicated. With the Marketing Snapshot, you can simplify your approach, gain clarity, and start seeing real results. It’s time to stop chasing trends and start focusing on what really works.

If you’re ready to transform your marketing and grow your business, I invite you to join me for this free training. Let’s make marketing simple, effective, and fun again.

The Senior Living Marketing Boom and How to Get Smart(er) with Your Strategy

The Senior Living Marketing Boom and How to Get Smart(er) with Your Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Debbie Howard

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Debbie Howard. Howard is the co-founder and CEO of Senior Living SMART, a full-service marketing agency serving the senior housing industry. She and her partner, Andréa Catizone, have successfully grown the agency from a startup to a team of 40 employees over the past 12 years and recently celebrated by publishing her book Smarter(er) Marketing for Senior Living Communities.

During our conversation, we explored the essential strategies that senior living communities need to thrive in an increasingly competitive market. We discussed the importance of using smart marketing automation, effective strategies for attracting the right prospects, and why your website is the most important asset for lead conversion.

Whether you’re involved in senior living marketing or looking to optimize your overall strategy with quality automation and a robust online presence, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

Key Takeaways

The senior living industry is booming: With the aging population driving demand, senior living marketers must differentiate themselves from the crowded market. A strategic approach that combines automation, personalization, and a strong online presence is key to standing out and capitalizing on this growth.
Debbie’s SMART Marketing framework: Strategy, Marketing Automation, Analytics, Resources, and Technology.
Strategy is the foundation of successful senior living marketing – Understanding the specific needs of your audience is critical to crafting messages that attract ideal prospects. In senior living, that means targeting not just potential residents but their families too.
Marketing automation enhances efficiency – By automating processes like lead nurturing, senior living marketers can save time while providing personalized experiences. This allows sales teams to focus on higher-intent prospects.
Your website is your most important marketing asset – With 90% of potential residents and their families visiting websites during their decision-making process, having a mobile-first, user-friendly site is crucial for lead generation and conversions.
Not all leads are created equal – Senior living marketing needs to focus on generating the right leads. Automation helps qualify leads over time, ensuring that sales teams engage only with prospects ready to move forward.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction to Senior Living Marketing
[02:42] Understanding the SMART Marketing Framework
[05:16] The Role of Strategy in Senior Living Marketing
[08:35] Differentiation in a Competitive Market
[12:49] Aligning Marketing and Sales Strategies
[16:59] The Critical Role of Websites in Sales
[19:56] Introducing Smarter Marketing Certification

More About Debbie Howard:

Add Debbie Howard on LinkedIn
Check out Debbie Howard’s Website
Grab a copy of her book, Smarter(er) Marketing for Senior Living Communities

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

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Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.01)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jance. My guest today is Debbie Howard. She is the co -founder and CEO of Senior Living Smart, a full -service marketing agency serving the seniors housing industry. She and her partner, Andre Catazon, have grown the agency from startup to 40 employees and are celebrating their 12th anniversary by publishing the first book that we’re going to talk about today, Smart Err, that errs in parentheses.

Debbie Howard (00:26.058)

you

John Jantsch (00:30.384)

Marketing for senior living communities, how to work smarter, not harder. Debbie’s also, by the way, a member of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. So we’ve known each other a long time. Welcome to the show, Deb.

Debbie Howard (00:42.912)

Thanks, John. Great to be on and be chatting with you today.

John Jantsch (00:46.694)

So there have been, over the years, a number of folks in the network have published books. Actually, there’s another one that I’m interviewing tomorrow that has book also coming out. What would you say, I mean, goals, or I should say books are a great tool for a lot of reasons. What would you say are your goals for publishing a book?

Debbie Howard (01:08.096)

Yeah, I would say number one, it’s because there’s been such a pivot in the really in the prospect, if you will, for senior living. we just the industry in general is just really hitting that leading age of boomers coming in. And there’s just a recognition that, you know, the way that our industry has marketed in the past is not going to be effective and is not going to work moving forward with this new generation of buyers that has very different expectations.

John Jantsch (01:19.42)

Mm.

Debbie Howard (01:36.066)

So really wanting to get ahead of that. We can only serve a certain number of clients in the senior living industry. There’s more need than there’s our ability to really serve them from a partnership level. So it gives us a greater reach to help more people. frankly, not everybody can afford a full service marketing agency of record. And so we hope it kind of levels the playing field. Maybe serve.

for some folks that are doing marketing on their own or using a marketing agency that doesn’t have senior living expertise. And then I think just selfishly, I do think that a book is also great for being able to get those keynote speakers and get on the conference stage and we’ll be developing a course as well with the option to either do it as just self -paced learning or really to do it from a certification standpoint with submitting to our

John Jantsch (02:10.599)

Yes.

Peace.

John Jantsch (02:18.46)

Mm -hmm.

Debbie Howard (02:33.61)

team of experts as they work through the course in order to kind of pass to that next level and achieve an actual certification.

John Jantsch (02:42.074)

You have, as the book…

denotes smart or marketing. have a smart, maybe your business as well, living smart, smart marketing framework. Is there a way to kind of break that quickly down what that is?

Debbie Howard (02:59.136)

Yeah, I think so. So SMART is an acronym. We’ve used it in our business since day one, but as it applies to the book, the S is strategy, the is marketing automation, the A is for analytics, R is for resources. That really encompasses content. And then the T is for technology. And in this case, it’s really more about that more tech stack and getting the right technology and then getting everything connected.

John Jantsch (03:14.14)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (03:24.779)

Right. So let’s start with strategy. One of my favorite topics, the S word, as you’ve called it. Why is that the, mean, this is a stupid question for me to be asking you because you and I have had lot of conversations about that. But for those out there listening, why do you, why do you call strategy the foundation of all effective?

Debbie Howard (03:49.794)

mean, especially for our industry, I think people have to focus on the strategy to attract their right and ideal prospect. You know, I think the industry is really fortunate that we don’t have to create any demand for ourselves. There is plenty of demand that’s created just by an aging population, right? We’re not out there having to, you know, really create that. But what we do have to create is a way to attract the right residents for each of our brands.

John Jantsch (04:04.594)

Hmm. Right.

Debbie Howard (04:19.008)

And I think in general, in the past, we’ve been able to just be better than a nursing home. And that was OK. The next generation of buyers wants a lot more than that. And so we really just can’t serve up the same messaging to attract the kind of prospect that’s going to be ideal in this next generation. So super easy to turn on lead generation.

John Jantsch (04:26.044)

Mm. Yeah.

Debbie Howard (04:46.722)

just open up the floodgates and you can just be inundated with leads. We have clients that have over 200 leads a month. They can’t possibly work the number of leads that they have, but it’s really about getting the right leads that are going to be right for your brand, that are going to engage, that are going to advance and turn into residents. And that’s really the part of the strategy that I think the industry has been lacking because everyone’s pretty much serving up vanilla ice cream with different color sprinkles.

John Jantsch (04:56.018)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (05:00.347)

Right.

John Jantsch (05:16.535)

Well, and not to mention, because you talked about demand, demand is actually growing, right? That demographic is growing, you know, at least for the immediate period of time. And so a lot of competition has jumped into it, right? A lot of people saw dollars and, you know, private equity as, you know, playing a big role in it now. So a big part of strategy, I’m guessing for you is helping people differentiate, you know, because there are now so many players in every market.

Debbie Howard (05:45.12)

Yeah, there are a lot of people coming in because they’re looking at the demographics and the age wave and saying, I want to get in on this, but they have no experience in the industry. you know, it’s very difficult industry to actually operate in. So a lot of it is helping people to find, you know, their brand voice and their differentiator. What’s your better and different story? You always talk about not just listing your services and amenities, but really what is the problem that you’re solving?

John Jantsch (05:51.964)

Right.

Debbie Howard (06:13.534)

And not everybody is right for every operator. Some people really want a small, cozy environment that’s more home -like. Some people want the chandeliers and the brand new communities that have all the bright and shiny technologies. And so it’s really about drilling down to understand what’s the story that you have that nobody else has out there. Because everyone has the dining and the transportation and the care, and everyone says it’s the best.

John Jantsch (06:23.922)

Debbie Howard (06:40.634)

But at the end of the day, they don’t have your story, your residence, your culture, your mission, your values. And so that’s what we really focus on to attract more people who look like the same people who chose that brand historically. So we do a lot with, you know, persona interviews and focus groups and all of that to really get to their special sauce.

John Jantsch (07:02.896)

understand what they do that’s unique. There’s a great listeners are probably getting tired of me using this quote because I use it all the time. But you know, when it comes to that kind of brand and differentiation, there’s a Dolly Parton quote that she said, just discover who you are and go be it. And I think that that’s a lot of there’s a lot of truth in that. mean, everybody has a brand. It’s just whether or not it’s intentionally communicated or developed. It’s you it you know, you

You can’t say, you know, we want to be this or be that. You are that, right?

Debbie Howard (07:36.93)

And as being okay with being that, right? So if you are a 25 year old building, you’re experienced, right? You’ve been serving the neighbors for decades. You probably have larger apartments, because guess what? 25 years ago, they built bigger apartments and suites, right? You probably have the A market, because now all the A locations are taken. So the new construction has to come in on a busy road or in a more industrial area, because they don’t have that.

John Jantsch (07:39.258)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:47.514)

Right.

Debbie Howard (08:06.178)

If you’re new, you’re only going to be new for a short period of time. So, you know, use that. But I do think that there’s always that resistance of having marketing help us pretend to be something that we’re not. And that’s, think, for brands, really, they just get in trouble. know, people who say to me, know, Deb, we want, we want the younger, older people in here, the people that are 50. We want you. I had a client who said, you know, I was relating that I had

John Jantsch (08:19.546)

Right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (08:31.527)

Yeah.

Debbie Howard (08:35.648)

gone through this experience with my mother and finding a community. And they said, well, you know, no disrespect, but we don’t want your mother. We want you. And I was like, okay, so if you want me, I work full time. You know, do you have, you know, a workspace for me? You do you have a shared office space? Do you have a conference room? You know, I like to do pottery. Do you have a craft studio? Can I, do you have a kiln? Like, do I like play pickleball? Do you have any, you know, pickleball courts? And they’re like, no, we don’t have any of those things. I’m like, well, then how do you think you’re going to get me?

John Jantsch (09:05.07)

Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So the next two letters were marketing automation. it’s kind of a double edged sword or can be certainly, for, for folks because we can use it as a way to, not have to actually talk to anybody, for example. So how do you balance the fact that I’m guessing, the buyer in your particular case really wants to talk to something. They want to know who’s going to be, you know, helping mom, right? so how do you balance kind of that marketing automation with the need for so much human interaction?

in this type of environment.

Debbie Howard (09:37.858)

Yeah, great question. Because I think especially this leading edge of the boomers, they want to remain anonymous and autonomous for as long as possible. So it’s really up to marketing. think marketing gets the sale 70 % closed. They expect a lot of transparency. They want to go download guides and ebooks, and they want to watch videos and virtual tours. And it’s a very long journey. it’s

John Jantsch (09:46.247)

Right.

Debbie Howard (10:02.402)

you know, depending on which level of care, if it’s active adult and independent living, it’s over a year. If it’s assisted living, you know, it can be more than six months, 22 to 28 touch points along that journey. And the sales team cannot possibly do 22 to 28 touch points for every single prospect that they have in their pipeline. So we look at marketing automation as being a compliment and nurturing the not yet sales ready leads, those marketing qualified leads.

John Jantsch (10:14.034)

Mm.

Debbie Howard (10:32.018)

They’re not opting in to schedule a tour or clicking to call. But if we let them download a brochure or a funding guide, a family decision toolkit, they will opt in and then we nurture them. And there should really be no dead ends to the prospect journey because it is so long. But you’re right, when that prospect is ready to talk to sales, they expect to talk to sales immediately.

John Jantsch (10:58.639)

Yeah

Debbie Howard (10:59.99)

So it takes a long time to get somebody to pick up that phone and to make that advance from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead. But I think that’s what marketing automation does so well. And we look at reverse engineering the move -ins and where did they come from? What was the original attribution source? But also how many of them entered in with an intent to talk to sales? So we’re able to take that subset of people who’ve gone all the way through the journey, become a resident in that community, and we’re able to look at every single touch point.

John Jantsch (11:21.394)

Hmm.

Debbie Howard (11:29.826)

the way. And what’s interesting is about for most of our clients, about 35 to 45 percent of the move -ins, the actual residents did not start out having intent to talk to sales. They progressed all by themselves with marketing automation without the sales team having to do anything.

John Jantsch (11:50.982)

Yeah. And I think that’s a part of lot of people underestimate too, is how much of that is going on without our knowledge, right? I mean, and that we can actually lose the sale before we had ever had the opportunity to make the sale, you know, without really understanding that people need, people want to go on parts of that journey on their own, you know, because nobody really wants a sales presentation, right? They quite often want to know how something’s going to work and be reassured that, you know, what you promised is going to happen.

But that happens very late in the journey a lot of times. how do you, and you and I have talked about this before, so I know a little bit, how do you align then that marketing approach with sales? Because a lot of times sales, my mother and father and mother -in -law father -in -law were in assisted living facilities and sales pretty much looked like whoever was walking by the phone when it rang.

So how do you get that, you alive?

Debbie Howard (12:53.642)

It’s actually a friction point that we always have to work through with every client because salespeople think if they have every call and every lead, they’re going to do better. But the reality is not everyone is ready for a sales interaction. And if you force it, you will lose them and they will go somewhere else. So it’s really a matter of respecting the prospect and allowing them to decide how they want to engage with you.

John Jantsch (12:56.081)

Yeah.

Debbie Howard (13:20.06)

and allowing them to raise their hand when they’re ready for that sales interaction. So how it usually goes is when we’re kind of talking to a new client, we’re talking about how marketing automation is a compliment. It does a lot of the rote and repetitive administrative work that the sales team doesn’t have to do. Somebody can go on and schedule a tour. They can pick a date and time. Marketing automation is gonna confirm their appointment, thank them for scheduling, remind them that they’re coming tomorrow.

And then after the visit’s over, maybe ask them for a review. And so we want to get the salespeople the right leads at the right time. They can only manage so many. So we want them to have those high intent, ready to advance prospects, but we can’t lose the pipeline. So at first the sales team likes that, right? That sounds really good. I’m gonna get the high intent, ready to convert leads. I’m gonna get fewer leads to work.

can spend more time with them and do what I do best, building relationships and report. It sounds great until 70 % of their leads disappear.

And then it’s like, well, where’s my leads? I want more leads. Well, these are all the leads that you threw away. These are the leads that you moved to loss. These are the leads that you moved, that you tried to reach twice and then moved to cold. But there’s a little bit of a panic that sets in until they start seeing that the pipeline is advancing. Marketing automation is delivering them month over month. These sales qualified leads. And what’s interesting is when you look at the length of stay,

John Jantsch (14:28.144)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Debbie Howard (14:55.298)

for somebody who comes in as a sales qualified lead with lots of urgency, like I got to move in today, mom’s getting out of rehab, we need something immediately. Their length of stay is far shorter, which means your revenue is far less and they’re higher acuity, it’s more stress on the team. The people that actually have the longest sales site nurturing cycle and start as marketing qualified leads end up having almost double the length of stay.

John Jantsch (15:02.364)

Mm, right.

Debbie Howard (15:23.2)

So double your revenue, they stay longer, they have a better experience and it’s not a crisis situation.

John Jantsch (15:30.108)

That’s an interesting observation that could probably apply to a lot of industries. I sometimes talk about almost making people jump through hoops, making them consume certain content, making sure that when they do show up, they’re educated as much as like why we’re a good fit. I know some people push back on that. like, no, I just want the phone to ring. you really do, there’s a qualification process that goes through that. I know that’s not exactly what you were describing, but

But I think that’s interesting.

Debbie Howard (16:00.61)

think it is because I think that the assumption is, and we get a lot of people who say, I just want sales qualified leads, like just give me phone calls and tours. Sales qualified means they have an intent to speak to sales. It doesn’t mean they’re financially qualified or they’re going to be a good fit. And so there’s always has to be that additional, you know, qualification that happens in sales.

John Jantsch (16:07.246)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (16:17.808)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Debbie Howard (16:26.934)

for those people that have that urgency. But I think sometimes people have a very warped definition of what a sales qualified lead is. They think you’re handing them somebody who’s gonna tour today and move in tomorrow. And when they find out, know, they’re not a fit either from a health perspective or a financial perspective, it’s like, what has marketing done for us? Well.

John Jantsch (16:35.729)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:39.483)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:48.498)

Yeah. Yeah. And, and another element I’m sure that they have to deal with a lot is the 50 year old oldest daughter of the family has never bought this product before. Right. Really.

Debbie Howard (16:59.008)

and probably never wanted to and hopefully wouldn’t have to. And it’s disruptive and it’s expensive and it’s emotional and all of those things.

John Jantsch (17:05.586)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I know we fight with a lot of folks over websites. was one I was just looking at today. They were like, we need you to improve our website. was like, your website’s a complete takedown. You know, it is basically a brochure from 20 years ago. well, how do you explain to people the role, that their website plays in the sales process?

Debbie Howard (17:27.474)

We just tell them it’s their most important marketing asset. end of story, hard stop. And so if they haven’t done anything in three years, they need to do something. Now, they don’t want to hear that. And they want to talk about a refresh. Will it cost us more to refresh a bad website than it does for us to stand up a brand new, contemporary, mobile first, responsive type of a website?

John Jantsch (17:30.374)

Yeah.

Debbie Howard (17:54.434)

You know, every marketing channel in our industry drives people to the website. That’s where the conversion happens. That’s where the attribution happens. And that’s where the nurturing begins. So, you know, 90 % of people looking for a senior living community will visit the website during their journey. So we feel like it’s the number one most important investment.

John Jantsch (18:14.266)

Yeah. Well, and I think what a lot of people underestimate too, is like what you just said, that’s quite often where they start. Because again, you got to start somewhere. That’s the easiest thing. We sit down at a desk and we do a little research and that’s where we’ll start. But what I think a lot of people underestimate is as I get more involved in the journey, I’ll come back, but I have different objectives now. I’m there for a different reason now. Right. And so I think a lot of people underestimate that is just like, no, it just needs to have our phone number on there. Tell them what we do. But you know, no, I’ve got different

questions and objectives my third for time there.

Debbie Howard (18:47.394)

100%, it completely changes. We look at the three stages, the weather, the stage, the where stage and the when stage. And people in the weather stage are just trying to figure out, know, whether it’s now or, you know, the new year, whether I can afford it, whether dad’s going to get the veterans benefit. There’s all those weather questions. And then there’s where questions that are about, you know, the brand and then the when is about the urgency, but you need content, content, content to, for every single stage, every question.

John Jantsch (18:59.079)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:06.097)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:15.76)

Yeah. You, are, mentioned the course, but you were actually going as far as a smarter marketing certification. want to talk about that and maybe why, why you decided to go down that route.

Debbie Howard (19:28.298)

Yeah, well, you we think that there’s so much opportunity for education. We don’t have an industry certification in marketing. You know, we do have other things like a certified senior advisor. There are certain things, but we just felt like there’s a real opportunity in the industry to create some good standards and benchmarks. And really, for me, it’s always about how do we make this a better experience for the prospect?

John Jantsch (19:37.116)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (19:56.668)

Yes, yes.

Debbie Howard (19:57.694)

And if we can help people deliver a better experience, it’s gonna be a better reflection on the industry because to a large degree for people that are serving the assisted living and memory care part of seniors housing, they are selling a product that nobody wants, hopes they don’t need, have never bought, don’t know how to do it. And it’s challenging and it’s a heavy lift. So we feel like we can deliver a lot.

John Jantsch (20:15.122)

Mm -hmm.

Debbie Howard (20:25.514)

a lot of value to the industry. And we allow people, if they just want to take the course just for learning, just to do a better job internally or maybe holding another agency accountable, they can do that without the certification. But people that are really serious, each of our subject matter experts will be doing the videos, teaching their part of the course, and then they will review the work. So for instance, if somebody’s doing a class on persona development, right, they’re gonna have to submit.

their focus groups and their interviews and their outcomes and their persona documentation. And someone on our team will review it and then pass them or give it back to them for some more work.

John Jantsch (20:54.642)

Mm -hmm.

John Jantsch (21:08.71)

Yeah. And I think I’ve always believed the more education you can do, even with somebody who turns around and becomes a client, they’re a better client, right? Because they understand why you’re doing what you’re doing or why you’re asking them to do what, what you need to do. That’s always been my, my point of view. Yeah. Well, Debbie, it was great getting to some time with you. you want to tell people where they might connect with you, obviously find out about the certification and pick up a copy of smarter marketing for senior living communities.

Debbie Howard (21:23.746)

Yeah, absolutely.

Debbie Howard (21:37.184)

Yeah, thank you, John. I’m on LinkedIn, very active on LinkedIn, so you can definitely find me there. Senior Living Smart is the website. The book will be published on Amazon, so available on September 17th, which is next week.

John Jantsch (21:53.298)

Yep. Yep. Depend upon when you’re listening to this September 17th, 2024. bet you believe it or not, Debbie, people come back and listen to these years later. So I always like to get the date sort of out of their relative at least, but anyway, well, congratulations. And again, hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Debbie Howard (22:10.486)

Thanks, John.