Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Timothy Douglass | Never Trust a Wizard

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On this week’s Blue Collar Culture Podcast, we speak with Tim Douglass, Co-Owner of Fidelis, a full-service creative agency comprised of blue-collar creatives. One of the things that a lot of businesses struggle with is being really effective at getting their message out in front of the right people so that they can generate leads, grow their business, hit their revenue goals, hit their profit goals, and really have a business that they’re proud of. Through Fidelis, Tim helps businesses do this every day.

“In digital marketing, specifically, there’s a myth that there are wizards or gurus out in the marketplace and they can make you be better and your business will be awesome, but that’s not how we roll; we want to grow with our clients. So, when we’re having a client conversation, if I get a sense that they’re just looking for the wizard to make it work, it’s a real moment of pause to say, hey, I want you to know that we are real people on the other side of this and there are real efforts going into it. It’s not magic and it’s not going to turn on overnight,” says Tim.

We chat about marketing myths, as well as:

  • Some of Tim’s marketing success stories
  • The importance of core values
  • Why the 50/50 rule doesn’t apply to digital marketing
  • “Never trusting a wizard”
  • And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Ryan Englin: Welcome back to another episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast. I'm your co-host Ryan Englin and I am here with Jeremy Macliver today.

Jeremy Macliver: Welcome back, everyone.

Ryan: I'm really excited to speak to today's guest. One of the things that a lot of businesses struggle with his being really effective at getting their message out in front of the right people so that they can generate leads so that they can grow their business so that they can hit their revenue goals, hit their profit goals, and really have a business that they're proud of. And our guest today helps businesses do this every single day. He's got three young kids at home, loves sci-fi, and is a huge fan of Affogato. I want to welcome Tim Douglass to the show today,

Tim Douglass: Oh, man. Thanks, guys for having me. That was a, that's a heck of a lead in right there.

Ryan: Hey, we set the bar high here. So let's jump into something that I love hearing from our guests on here in marketing. I'm a fan of marketing, but there are a lot of, there's a lot of misinformation about marketing. There are a lot of myths. There are a lot of things that people either should be believing that they don't or shouldn't be believing that they do. So help me break down, what is one of the biggest myths about your industry?

You Can Know What’s Working and What’s Not

Tim: So there's a, man, there's a lot of myths out there. The one that has prevailed over the, I don't know, centuries now, is the 50/50. You know, the old saying your marketing's working 50% of the time, you just don't know which half, right? That's not true. And it doesn't have to be true. It is only true whenever you go in without determining what you want out of it. So if you're okay with that result, not knowing, it can be true, but it doesn't have to be.

Ryan: How is that? Like you said, I think that 50/50 misnomer came out of the days before digital and so it was a lot harder to measure than it is today. But how can you know what's working and what's not working today?

Tim: So, we are big fans of tracking, not just in the digital sense, which makes it really, really useful and easy. But tracking all the forms of marketing, if you put out a billboard, you're able to look at the metrics on, I mean, even text, it'll give you the amount of traffic that you're getting seen. But then there's mechanisms that allow you to track the efficacy of those pushes.

So tracking from that billboard, where do you want it to go? Do you want it to go to a phone or to your website? From there, can you track that, what that lead all the way into your sales department? Over time, you're able to determine, oh, man, that was a good call, or no, that was not a good call, and adjust.

Ryan: Got it. So if you're working with a marketing person today that says we can't track it, that might not be entirely true.

Tim: Oh, yeah. I mean, anybody nowadays that might say something like that, I would say that's a big red flag.

Ryan: Okay. All right. So, if I'm going to invest in marketing, there's also a lot of, I would say, misnomers about what your ROI should look like? How does that return work? What do you tell people is a good ROI for their marketing spend?

Tim: So, oh, man, that's a really good question. When we look at it, we look at the bottom of the sales funnel we look at, okay, the lifetime value of a customer is this, we want to go after, you know, this big of an audience. And so we sit down with our clients and say, Alright, if we hit five lifetime value customers, if we hit 500 lifetime value customers, whatever it is, those are the goals that we find and hold ourselves accountable to.

So you can sit down and look at the ROI, which is a historic look in the accounting world or the accounting parlance, but we like to look at it forward-facing and say we want to go after, and by the end of the year, we're hoping or aiming at closing this many contracts. it's a time orientation, different way of approaching it.

Ryan: So it's not a simple you spend $1 you make $3. It's, you really look at their business, what profitability looks like, where they're generating their revenue and helping them figure out this dollar should equate to this new customer.

Tim: That's right. Yeah. So. And the really fun part is when you exceed all of those goals. So if, before we start, let's say that we're going after 12 lifetime value customers and these are $10,000 each. So we have $120,000 from marketing goal. But if we're able to hit 12, or 15 different customers and really improve those numbers, man, that, then we're really in business. That's really a lot of fun.

Ryan: That's cool. So let's talk about that then. So I imagine you've got some wins or some amazing results you've gotten for clients that you love to share. What are a couple of those and how did that work out?

400X?!

Tim: I'm not sure when this will air but right now, we're in the middle of COVID. Right now we're all quarantined up. And I have several clients that got hit really hard. But one of my, it's kind of a hard story, but we had a friend of the shop is what I'll call him. And total book of business went down overnight 100%. All of the contracts that they had, and they have a contract lead time that takes about a year to close a deal. But overnight, every one of them got cold feet and completely dried up. And so they had, you know, they had the referral network type of marketing completely nailed down.

But we're like a week into this and he's asking me what we can do. So we turned on some like, we started working inside of LinkedIn. We started working with some of his, we had done some branding with him, some brand workshops. So we started playing with his language. And it was within a month that we had actually brought in I think it's that for, roughly about $50,000 contracts. Outside of this COVID moment, a lot of those, that old business turned it back on. And so now he's looking to have one of the best years ever just because he got proactive in that moment.

The other thing that, the other really fun story is that we have a landscaping business that's in our book and at, you know, they also were pretty freaked out during all of this. And because it was regular and it was paced and it was a predetermined type of budgeting and type of marketing, we were able to keep things going. And so right now, we're looking at, we did one week where we 400x their dollars. We're running at like six weeks in a row right now where every, for six weeks, we've been able to 100 x every dollar that they've spent, which is just stupid numbers.

Ryan: Those are unbelievable numbers.

Tim: I know. And if I didn't, sometimes it's hard for me to believe them too.

Ryan: Those are those case studies that you question whether or not you put on the website cuz you're like, will people really believe this?

Tim: I know. And so one of the things is we, and I would, of course, never show this on the website, but we've been able to track, the client has been really great with us because of this situation. And they've allowed us to go in and put the people, like the actual names from the invoices on the lead. So we've actually tracked it from start to finish with a human name and a $1 amount. And so, yeah, I mean, it's pretty fantastic.

Ryan: I imagine that really helps figuring out what's working and where you're getting the results when the client, or in this case, the business is really transparent with the data and really helps you with tracking and reporting and those kinds of things.

Tim: yeah, which is a high level of trust. And so I honor that whenever I'm talking about them or talking with them. I'm just super appreciative of that kind of level of communication.

Ryan: That's awesome. And that's great that you have that kind of relationship with your clients that they're able to trust you. And you're able to trust them as well. I think that's awesome. So in all of this marketing stuff, we don't always get it right. I mean, I tell people, the one thing I can guarantee you is that we're going to get results. The results might not be good but we'll definitely get you something. We'll get you answers. So what is the best mistake that you've ever made, either in marketing or in business, that you'd like to share with us?

Tim: It, for me, it always is about business. Marketing can flow and you can adapt, and you can change what you're doing, you know, given enough time. But in business, that's where my steepest learning curve has started and has always been. And for me, I think the biggest, besides having made probably all of the mistakes you can make, the biggest mistake we've made is in communication.

So now, we are very proactive about setting expectations and working through all of the potential issues. There was a time where probably, honestly, it was just, it was probably out of a good place where I wanted to help and so it was a jump in, figure it out, kind of mentally. But unbeknownst to me, we had a client that had just the highest expectations and probably smelled a level of disorganization in that.

And so, you know, you learn that with disorganization and high expectations, usually you can get really taken advantage of. And so they were taxing on our team and on our hours and I think we ended up over-servicing the client by about 200 hours inside of two months. But we were just trying to make it right but didn't quite understand that that wasn't what the issue was. I know this is kind of a fuzzy story. I'm not sure if it's helping.

Ryan: Yeah, no, actually it's actually got me thinking about a great transition into something we were talking about prior to the show because inside of communication, when a team is really communicating well, it's usually because there's a consistency in values in the way we approach a situation, in the way we think about a client. And we were talking about core values earlier.

And so I would love to jump into core values for a moment because that impacts communication on so many different levels. How we communicate, when we communicate, what we communicate, what we say and what we don't say. There's so much into it. And you've got some really cool core values. And one of them is actually very close and near and dear to my heart and I'm sure Jeremy's heart as well because has to do it blue collar. Can we dig into some of your core values for a moment?

Memorable and Story-Backed Core Values

Tim: I would love to. That's one of my favorite subjects. Yeah, for sure. We have six core values and we had a friend help us with crafting those. We're always looking at helping clients understand who they are about to work with whenever they're engaging with us. And so we didn't want these to be generic, we didn't want them to be forgettable and we wanted them to all be story-backed. So when we were looking at our core values, yeah, that's how we started crafting these.

So one of these core values is called Blue Collar Creatives, which is why I am so deeply connected with you guys because I'm like man, Blue Collar Culture. It's right where I'm at. So Blue Collar Creatives is about the idea that in the world, whenever you say that we are a creative agency, there's an immediate like, pause because creatives are typically what, you know, my dad would use the word artsy-fartsy. So we tend to have our own agenda as creatives whenever it comes to the business. We want it to look like something that we care about or that we're proud of.

And so creativity gets a real bad rap because it's not always in line or it's not always effective. But that's what we wanted our shop to be about. We wanted it to be more focused on the client, their needs, what would work and doesn't work for them. And we just made it a point. It's our agenda now that we're not going to let ourselves get in the way of the client success. So when we hire people, we make sure that hey, we know that you're very talented. We want to make sure that you're okay with this.

Ryan: Yeah, no, I think that's cool. And I love that. You know, we talk about blue collar being results-oriented, results-focused. You know, we get our hands dirty, we're not afraid to get into the trenches and get things done. And, you know, that's a, it's an industry that's near and dear to both mine in Jeremy's hearts, but also, we take it just kind of like how you're doing here. And blue collar is much more than just that traditional mindset of, it's the plumber.

It's the construction guy. Anybody that goes and gets their hands dirty and is just really down in the results is in some sort of blue collar business. So you had mentioned using your values when you're building your team when you're hiring people, and super near and dear to my heart. It's the primary focus of the work that I do with clients is helping them get really clear on who they are as an organization so that they can go then find the right people.

But I want to ask a question about values because I know they're important to you. How important is it when you're working with a marketing company that their values and your values have some sort of alignment or synergy? Does it matter? They don't matter on the employee side but when shopping for a marketing company, does that matter?

Tim: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I would, so a lot of the companies that we deal with will often have, they'll have a generic or a handed down from the heavens kind of mission statement and core value set. And not every employee totally understands them or cares. But for us, which is why we spend so much time putting ours out into the world, for us, we're looking for that core understanding of business, we're looking for that core understanding of how you do things. Character and integrity are very important. And so the reality is, is life gets crazy and it's going to get hard.

You're going to be swimming along just great and then suddenly there's going to be a pandemic. And it's in those moments that when you're not feeling awesome, right? When you're not feeling like you're the industry leader, that you have to have something to fall back on. Some sort of language set. And core values are huge. I mean, that's, as we are working through things, whenever you're choosing any vendor, I would say, you really need to look at theirs and you need to look at yours and make sure that they align.

Ryan: I absolutely agree with that. For me the values, we call them core values, but they really are core. They're central to who you are as a company. And I coach my clients that all decisions should be made against your core values Because you never want to do anything that's out of alignment there.

Tim: We have, one of our core values is called never trust a wizard.

Ryan: Tell me about it.

Never Trust a Wizard

Tim: Yeah, well, it, so we've all seen Wizard of Oz. And we know that a wizard is a short, chubby guy who's like, pulling levers to give himself a big head. And the whole time, the real magic, the real courage and heart and loyalty is really right there on your own feet. So, in digital marketing, specifically, there's kind of this, it's another one of these myths that there's these like wizards or gurus or shaman or whatever, out in the marketplace, and they can make you run and make you be better and your business will be awesome.

But that's not how we roll. We want to grow with our companies. We want to grow with our clients. And so when we're hiring or when we're having a client conversation, if they, if I get a sense that that's what they're looking for, they're just looking for the wizard to make it work, it's a real moment of pause to say, hey, I want you to know that we are real people on the other side of this and we are, there are real efforts going into it. It's not magic and it's not going to turn on overnight. So, yeah. That's

Ryan: I love that. I love to use analogies. And I hear that, you know, I have done this before, personally. I hired a personal trainer and I was mad at the personal trainer because I wasn't getting the results I wanted. So he asked me, he goes, are you eating your broccoli? And it was probably all sorts of other stuff. And I was like, No, I hate broccoli. He goes, well, that might be the problem. There's no magic wand here. Like we have to work together if you want this to work.

Tim: That's right. That's right.

Ryan: That's the picture that was going through my head when you were talking about that, that wizard value. And, you know, I think the other thing too, marketers get a bad rap a lot of times because I think there's this mystique about marketers that says, hey, they have all the answers. They know how to make it all work. They never messed up. Things always go as planned. And then the first sign of something being wrong or something not working right, people get scared and go.

Well, it's really hard to trust marketers. Because they spin things for a living, you know? They could make reports look a certain way and they can do all this stuff. But I love that you're rooted in those values where you're like, Hey, we're honest, working men and women here and we're pedaling like crazy behind the scenes to make this work for you. There is no magic wand and understanding that, I think that's great.

Tim: Yeah. So one of the ways that we use that and express it out in the world is in our reporting is when it comes in. We have, there is this tendency to take because it is a complicated world and we do geek out about these things, there's a tendency to overwhelm clients with numbers and with the reports and data and like, get really excited about the things. But that's where it comes down to, here's what you care about. Let's report on that first. And we can go as deep as you want to go, but we don't have to.

Ryan: I think that's great. So, I mean, and that could be the answer to the next question I have for you. What's one thing you could challenge our listeners to do this week that could help them get better results from their marketing or just even get some clarity around the marketing that they're doing?

Examine Your Marketing Expenses

Tim: Yeah, that's a great question. So we immediately, I mean, if you had to do a thing today, I would say go talk to your bookkeeper or talk to your QuickBooks person. Pull up, do this, pull up all of your expenses that have been designated as marketing and have a solid look at it. Look and see its effect. And if you can't match $1 to the end result you wanted to see, one, you need to fix that. But two, see if it can be better.

We had a client that, they had taken on three different people in payroll, and, but they never held those people accountable to actually be bringing in business. So, you know, that's, you know, quarter-million dollars just in people cost right there. But being able to prove that result of those people was really difficult because they had never actually outlined any goals for them. So, you know, Dave Ramsey, I'm a big fan of Dave Ramsey, and he talks about how money is like little soldiers and you have to give them marching orders. It's true here too.

Ryan: Got it. So, I mean, I just heard a marketing guy say one of the first things you should do is go talk to accounting. I don't hear that too often. So that's great. Let's say someone does this. And they're having this conversation with accounting and they're both just like, You know what? I know Tim was telling us to do this. I'm not quite getting it.

Maybe Tim could help us. Maybe he could get us clear on this. Maybe he could even help us with some marketing. If people wanted to reach out to you and say, Hey, Tim, help us with this. Help us either understand what you were talking about with the accounting piece. Or maybe you could even help them with marketing. How do people get a hold of you?

Tim: Oh, man. We've got phone numbers and emails all over our website. I'm on LinkedIn.

Ryan: You're an easy guy to find, then.

Tim: I'm an easy guy to find. Absolutely. I mean, you can put my phone number in the description of this podcast if you want to.

Ryan: Alright, well, we will definitely make sure that there's links to your website and everything else. But yeah, that's great. And then do you have any kind of free offer for our listeners? Something they might be able to download that helps them with some marketing or even some of the stuff we talked about today?

Tim: We are developing three different tools right now, but they're not quite ready to go. So what I can offer is free consultation with me or one of our team members. They're happy to take you through this.

Ryan: All right. And they can just go to your website for that?

Tim: They can. Absolutely.

Ryan: All right. And some of those tools may be ready by the time this airs, so I'm sure they will be as easy to find as Tim is. So once they're out there, definitely take advantage of some of that free stuff. Well, hey, Tim, I've really enjoyed our time today. I love talking about core values. It's one of my passions in business. So I really enjoyed that part of the conversation.

Yeah, and anybody that's listening that struggling with marketing or wants to approach things a little bit more systemically working with accounting, a marketing and accounting working together, I just don't hear that too often. So make sure to reach out to Tim. Guy's a wealth of knowledge. Got some amazing results for clients. I mean, hundred x. I still don't believe it but I'm going to trust him. So I think we all can. Tim, thanks for being our guest today. I've really enjoyed it.

Tim: Oh man, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you guys for having me.

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