Brandon Welch 0:06
welcome to the very first Maven Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I’m here with Caleb Agee, and this is a huge moment for us. Throughout the history of our company and growing small businesses all across America, we’ve been trying to get to this point where we’re not just serving people one on one, but we’re giving them knowledge and inside information so that the entire world of entrepreneurs can be more confident in their growth. That is really our mission. That is why we’re here, and that’s why we’re going to be here two times a week. So much planning has gone up to this moment, so much organization and just format and thought about how we deliver the most value, and I cannot wait to share the episodes we have coming up with you for the months and years to come. So if you are a small business owner and you are questioning any part of your growth, how do I grow faster? How do I get a little bit more for my money? Is my advertising working? Am I saying the right thing? Am I buying the right media? This is the place for you. Yeah,
Caleb Agee 1:02
and what we found is that eight out of 10 business owners don’t know how their marketing is working for them. They can’t say confidently that it is working for them and that is broken. Broken, broken. We surveyed
Brandon Welch 1:14
1000s of business owners across America. We were doing research for a book that I published a couple years ago, and over a trillion dollars are spent in marketing in America, and eight out of 10 business owners aren’t confident that they’re getting their money’s worth.
Caleb Agee 1:28
Yeah, name a product that will work on a 20% success rate. I don’t know of
Brandon Welch 1:32
one that’s a failure, but we do it because I think business owners and entrepreneurs always have a sense of optimism, and they always are ready to roll the dice, and they feel good about something, they want to grow this thing they have, but then the results are murky at best, and we have just built an entire company fighting that phenomenon, and that’s why we’re here for the people we can’t serve inside our four walls at our consulting agency. We want to give it away. We want to give our best stuff away for free, so that you can confidently grow and eliminate the waste in your advertising and ultimately achieve the big dream. And you’re going to hear us say that a lot, a lot. So I want to share a little bit about what our company was built on, not because this is an important story about me, but because I have been where you are, and if you have been forwarded this podcast, or you came across it, there’s probably some area of your growth that you are questioning. And I grew up in a family business. My parents were extremely hard working, and just got to witness all these things. We were in the automotive business in a lot of different ways, and just got to work all these little jobs, starting when I was probably like nine or 10 years old, and I’d worked in every corner of the company when I became just like my early adulthood, I took the job of being the marketing guy for our company. Yeah, and many of you listening, you know, have had that journey throughout, you know, either somebody else’s company or you, and you’re in this marketing sales position. But we had, we had a nice business. We had 30 employees, we had multiple locations. We had all these things going on, and they gave me the reins, and then the checkbook when, you know they wanted me to grow it. This is my parents. And then there was, you know, some other principles of the company, yeah. And if you’ve ever been in a small business where it’s now your job to advertise, you know exactly what happened to me at this moment, it’s like, Hey, do some advertising. And so you put this, put this, like, little inquiry out into the world. Hey, I’m looking for advertising. Maybe. Looking for advertising, maybe a call radio station or billboard company. And here they all come descending, and they’re, there’s this experience of when people know you’re trying to market, everybody will try to sell something to you. And there’s, there’s nothing wrong with that, because these are awesome people like these are people we work with all the time, that is people that are in this company, but they have a product to sell, right? And so it’s not that any one of them are bad, or any product is bad, but it’s just this overwhelm. And what do I do? And so there’s a gazillion people saying, Hey, if you just buy this, your business will grow, right? Yeah. And now enter the world of, you know, Google and digital sales and just all of these fancy things we can do with marketing. And it’s like, wow, how do I spend my money? So I was on that journey about 15 years ago, and I tried all of these things, and I went along with the honestly, really exciting pitches and ideas and, you know, media things that these people were showing me, and I wound up in a place where none of it was working, seemingly, wow, yeah. And it to the point it was, it was in the hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And so that’s where things got really tough. This happened to coincide with oh 809, we were trying to do a lot of things in our business, and had just a ton of money invested, and all of that money I had spent on marketing started to be a real problem. And all of these things that I thought I was doing well started to be a real problem because we weren’t seeing that revenue. We weren’t seeing that profit. So I was getting conflicting advice. One person would say this, one person would say this, but all. Came down to this. This is my product strength. This is why you should buy my station or my doodad or my technology or my website or whatever. And I was just caught in the middle of that, and I had this enormous weight of my family’s company on my shoulders, and we went bankrupt, man. And so at a very young age, I was dealt with this failure of I thought I was talented, I thought I was writing good ads, I thought I was making all these right decisions, and it just came crashing down on me so very accidentally. After that moment, I lost my job, our family lost our company, if you can imagine that tragic, right? Yeah, but I accidentally ended up back in the industry of marketing and sales, and I went and became one of these advertising sales people, and I was very lucky to work for a fantastic company, the best of the best, yeah. And I sold TV and digital advertising, and I learned a ton in a very short amount of time. But having had that experience, which which I imagine many people listening have had of just being in this like, failed experiment of advertising, or this angst of, like, man, it’s not working. Or, how do I know it’s working? I had very fresh eyes as to I was looking for what I had missed as a business owner, or the working for my family’s business, right? Yes. And I just realized that there’s nobody really familiar with that question inside that industry. And so these, there’s these awesome people, and they’re doing awesome things, and they have the very best of intentions, and they’re very, very good at the media side of things, but there’s a lot of people who know how to sell media, and far, far fewer that know how to make it work. And so my little weird like, conviction, origin story became like, how do I figure that out? And I just kind of ruthlessly started studying people who had gotten it right and what what worked for them and what didn’t work. And I was also selling advertising as it was my job. So I got to see all these things working and not working, mostly not working at first. And it was this whole other guilt thing on me, and yeah, had a couple of clients that just allowed me to try some really counterintuitive things. And in that process, I really finally got this glimpse of like, oh, this is probably I’m onto something, right? This is probably how it’s supposed to be, yeah. And so rinse and repeat a couple years, and I found this thing I was pretty sure was working, and then we just went on this on fire mission. I left my job, started a company to share that with as many business owners as we can possibly share it with, yeah, because it’s such a problem, yeah.
Caleb Agee 7:39
And that, what he’s alluding to is what we call the Maven method. It’s really our way of approaching marketing and advertising and the the process, the order of operation that we want to make sure every team member inside of our building, they all follow it logically, sometimes literally on paper. They’re they’re walking through it as they approach anything with marketing. Yeah,
Brandon Welch 8:01
for about the last decade, that’s what we’ve been doing, is building a team that can confidently take this method, apply it to, you know, business owners from whether they’re doing million bucks a year or 100 million dollars a year, and just get so much more of the advertising and marketing equation. Yeah. But now we want to take this method and give it and demonstrate it to as many people as possible, the world, really? Yeah, the world and Brandon
Caleb Agee 8:27
did write about this. And the Maven marketer, it’s his book best seller on Amazon. You can pick that up just search for the Maven marketer. And so we would love for you to grab a copy of that. He outlines it in deeper form at the highest level, I’m going to go just to our order of operations. We would say, it’s strategy, message, and then media. So very often, Brandon, you saw this, probably when you were approaching this in your family business, very often, people would say, we need to grow. We should do TV, right? We should buy we should buy some radio ads. We should do this Google thing that, you know, whatever it looks like. Then they say, great, what should it say? What should our ad be about? Well, what you know, tell us about your things. And so then six months down the road, somebody asks, okay, we just spent $50,000 $100,000 is it working? Is it working? Is it working? And and really, if you look at that, that’s just backwards in the order they went from media to message to strategy. We want to flip that on its head and make sure that this is a major problem in a lot of marketing conversations, even with agencies. Unfortunately, they’ll just, they’ll see the media as the solution, and it’s a part of the solution. And so we want to flip that on its head. We’re always going to start with strategy. What are you trying to make happen? And who are we talking to? And then the message is next, what do we need to say to offer them a better life? Are the voids that our product actually fulfills? And then last is the media. And really the media is it’s a third of the equation. It’s a very crucial part. And there are different medias that work with different strategies. So you. Have to align those all the way through. But the media is really an equation of where can I find the most people that align with this strategy for an efficient amount of money? Because there are lots of places you can spend lots of money, but you need to know what you’re expecting.
Brandon Welch 10:15
So that whole alignment is is really the secret of what I found was under serving business owners, and we built an entire company around it now, but strategy is just getting very serious about what you’re trying to make happen. And there’s, there’s a path for every business result you want. But this whole idea of want to grow, buy some ads, then I grow, is really, that’s just really not reality. Yeah, it’s missing a lot of factors. So we we have detailed that, like, completely how I learned it, why it works, the stories of business owners going from, like, little, tiny businesses to literally achieving all their dreams, multi, multi, multi million dollars of the growth the method has made millionaires. And we are so proud to see not that money is the end all goal for everybody, but we’re so proud to see the impact that good marketing and good strategy can do. So proud. And so get the book and read it. And I have an audio book coming out soon. But more importantly, your business owner, you might not have time to read books. I love to read, but I don’t always have time to finish one or absorb one, and I might be in pain now about something, and it’s like, I can’t read a book and learn that. So what we want to do here, and the reason it’s all led to this moment, is we’re taking your real questions, and we are demonstrating what we know, problem solving, watching or learning by watching in real time, and things that, honestly, business owners pay us very good money to do for them. We’re doing that live or free with your questions, if you just have the courage to submit them Yeah, and say, This is what I’m going through. Yep. And our hope is that you walk away from every episode a little more confident in how you grow with a little fresh idea about the impact you want to make on the world, and most of all, you’re avoiding this waste that these eight out of 10 business owners in America. We want you to be the two out of 10, and frankly, we want everybody to be the 10 out of 10. That is just on fire about Yeah, it’s working. So we’re going to do that in two ways. One is Maven Monday, and that is the question format. We’re going to take two to three questions a week and just it could be, hey, I’m looking at buying this advertising. What do I need to know or to teach you about rating points, how to negotiate and things like that. Or could be, I’m not getting the leads I’m supposed to be getting off this budget Google campaign. How do I set a budget? Man, ad
Caleb Agee 12:35
writing. How do you write the ad? Yeah, in a way that persuades, oh, man, there’s so many things podcast on just ad writing, yeah, probably several, several, yeah. We probably will send us an ad if you want us to review it. Yeah, um, yep. So that’s Maven Monday,
Brandon Welch 12:49
maybe Monday, and you, you just need to submit questions to Maven Monday at Frank and maven.com and we’ve already got dozens that have already come in and preparing for this. And yeah, we’re picking the ones we think are the most universally relevant. So starting next week, the episodes that start coming out are going to be these questions that we’re getting from people who have heard about us and have seen, you know, their friends, companies have grown, or they’ve bought our book, and now they’re going, Hey, Frank and Maven, can you grow us? Yeah, and and so these are real things we know you’re experiencing, but also, if you’re having something in your little corner of the world or your industry, there’s really not an industry we have not applied this method to E Comm, so true, retail service, professional service, legal, medical, automotive, anywhere you are in the world. The beautiful thing about this method, we discovered is that it’s universal. Yeah, it’s based in human psychology. So that’s Maven Monday, frankly, Friday is a little bit different. This is something I’ve been doing for a lot of years in writing format and just just kind of being at one with this journey that we’re all on, trying to make things happen. And the remarkable people I’ve been blessed to have around me, and Caleb is one of them, but these phenomenally big dreamers that come in our world because they want us to help them grow their dream, we learn these little bits of wisdom, and we try to boil these down to punchy little actionable things. And these are like five minute max. You can call them rants, or you can call them just observations, but it’s going to be on the topic of leadership and communication and being a dad and being a human being in this weird kind of world that we’re in. And I want you to walk away challenged and encouraged, and that is the goal of, frankly, Friday, yeah, so if you’re needing just a little bit of jostle, that is what we put a ton of effort into those. I’ve got years of them, yeah, just, you know, in my psyche, in my experience, and I it’s really a joy to be able to hopefully help you get inspired, stay inspired, do a little more with a little less, and come out feeling better, yeah, with what? Mission that you’re on, and that is what the Maven Marketing Podcast is all about. Yeah,
Caleb Agee 15:04
if so, if you want to start your week with that practical question answering, very, very down to earth, what do I do here? That’s where we’re going to start your week. At the end, we’re going to we’re going to speak to your heart. We’re going to encourage you with, frankly, Fridays. So we encourage you just to hit that subscribe button so that you can get updated every time we drop an episode. We’re really excited to do it. If you have any questions at all that you’d like submitted for Maven Mondays, we would love to hear them. That is Maven Monday at Frank and maven.com we’ll send
Brandon Welch 15:36
you a response right back, yes and say, Hey, we’ve got the question. Sometimes we’ll just answer an email format, yeah, but we’re gonna try as for as many as we can to get them on this and answer live and expound on it, and we’ll
Caleb Agee 15:48
let you know when we answer it. We’ll shoot you that email back and and get you on there. Absolutely
Brandon Welch 15:52
so thank you so much for listening to the first episode. I want you to know where we’re coming from, why we’re here. This is not about more attention or more business for our agency. This is about a real mission for us, to help you confidently, grow your business, eliminate waste in advertising, and achieve the big dream, and that’s where I’m going to land it. We will see you guys very soon. Thanks.
