This week Tony Wright, the co-founder and CEO of Wright Imc, sits down with BluShark Digital Founder Seth Price to examine the best practices for running a digital marketing agency and share their best tips for catering to various clients while balancing resources. Each with marketing agencies of their own, Tony and Seth debate the benefits of flat-rate models versus billable-hour models and their preferred hiring strategies to scale an agency, answering the ultimate candidate question – is personality or skill more important?
This week Tony Wright, the co-founder and CEO of Wright Imc, sits down with BluShark Digital Founder Seth Price to examine the best practices for running a digital marketing agency and share their best tips for catering to various clients while balancing resources. Each with marketing agencies of their own, Tony and Seth debate the benefits of flat-rate models versus billable-hour models and their preferred hiring strategies to scale an agency, answering the ultimate candidate question – is personality or skill more important?
BluShark Digital
Welcome to the SEO insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of Blushark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price
Welcome, everybody. We are thrilled today to have Tony Wright, the co-founder, and CEO of Wright IMC. Welcome, Tony.
Tony Wright
Thanks for having me, Seth. I appreciate it.
Seth Price
You know, Tony, I followed you for years. You know, I've admired your sort of tenacity and both as well as generosity within the agency community. I know that when there are issues online, and somebody says, Hey, how do you? How do you do this? You've been there, try that, you know, made a mistake and always happy to share it. So for my personal growth as an agency owner, it's been great to have you out there. And I'm just thrilled we have a few moments to chit-chat today.
Tony Wright
Well, thanks. Thanks. Yeah, I definitely, wear my heart on my sleeve. I guess you might say.
Seth Price
Well, tell our audience a little bit about your story because I know where you got to. But how did you get there?
Tony Wright
Sure. Well, um, gosh, years, it was, I started out in journalism actually wanted to change the world, if you will, with writing and took the job out of newspapers right out of college. I loved it. It was great. But the pay was horrible. And I saw, actually, what I saw were the people that were where I wanted to be and how their lives were. And I decided that that was just not for me. So I actually quit my journalism job and ended up getting a TA position at Texas Tech University. Teaching journalism while I finished and got my master's degree in advertising turned out to be a great experience. Then I got a job at Weber Shandwick, which is the largest PR firm in the world, running, they're on their digital team. And this was in, like, 99. So 98, 99. And at that time, if you actually understood HTML, you had every startup in the world offering you $200,000 if you're 21 years old, but I was, I guess, I was lucky in that I, I was kind of well grounded. And I was like, Okay, this is a good job, I'm not going to leave, but everybody else left. And so they put me in charge. At 24, I was in charge of the global division hit of digital at Weber Shandwick. And I ran it for eight years, up to a $20 million budget, and it was great. But eventually, they decided they weren't doing enough searching for me. And that's kind of what I had fallen in love with, was search even, you know, we were doing everything from email blasts, to you know, building little websites, everything else. But I left through a couple of different things and started my own agency almost, almost 14 years ago, I started out with just me and my garage, a buddy of mine, who was doing marketing at Sherwin Williams, and I'd known from Texas Tech, decided to come on board a John Kafir. And he and I've been running this thing ever since. And we've been very, you know, I guess moderately successful, you know, able to, to pet to have a nice living and pay for a lot of other people's living. So that's kind of how it started.
Seth Price
That's awesome. You know, it's funny, because I lived a parallel track on the legal side. And I saw that I left big law in like 98 to join that first.com bubble where everything was. And so you saw people bailing out of law firms, and like mid-six-figure jobs to go stake their fortune. And I think it's funny because one of the things that probably served you well is by not jumping ship and staying with one of the more traditional groups was that after 911, and you know, the bubble had burst before that, that the world was all topsy turvy, to have a place where you didn't have to bounce around with a business model that works. That's pretty, pretty neat that you got that experience at a time when a lot of people were sort of scrambling, I sort of did a lot of sell. I had made a little bit of money during that first.com bubble, but not enough to retire and sort of was like okay, what do I do next? And that's similarly when I sort of sort of pivoted with my knowledge from US law, which was sort of my world. You love search, and I love this sort of legal local, it was my jam. So as you built it up, you know, you seem to have touched many different, you know, you seem to have a smattering of different clients, which in one sense, I'm sure is awesome because you don't get bored. But talk to me a little bit about the different sort of pulls and tugs of different type from national clients to local clients. How do you balance it and what are sort of the strengths and weaknesses of having those types of people as clients?
Tony Wright
Sure, but the way that I feel about it, you know, I've had numerous consultants that I've talked with that, like you need to focus on one vertical, um, The lesson that I learned is actually from my father, who ran an accounting firm in Dallas, he was a CPA for 55 years. When I was growing up, all he did was oil and gas CPAs, he was a CPA for oil and gas. It was good until about 1986. And he went from having 65 employees to down to less than five in four months. Wow. I watched that happen as a kid and watched my dad had to pivot and he actually, he was able to pivot to he pivoted to healthcare. Took him a little while, obviously. But after that, even though he kind of was majority healthcare, he maintained clients in lots of diversified. For me, you know, have we've had some practice areas. We've talked about verticalization. But frankly, every time I'm thinking about where do we want to vertical, I said, Watch the market dip in that area, it seems like, and so I've, we've been very successful. And actually, you know, I haven't had a I love big clients, but I like having, you know, $32,000 a month clients. Because when he leaves, you don't feel it?
Seth Price
Well, absolutely. And that's it's so funny because, again, parallel lives, I'm not diversified as far as subject matter. And, you know, in one sense, with legal, we have sort of the big hit that's taken, you know, hospitality and travel, and all of that has not hit there. So I get the diversification, I'm sure, like, there were markets that you had that you're gonna have to make up some revenue, but it's a percentage, not a whole thing. But that's so funny to talk about that because that's true, whether it's your law firm, and not having one client that makes or breaks you or as an agency, very similarly, that, you know, when you start getting to those higher dollars that can make your month or quarter, it changes the dynamic and the client relationship, I think, to a certain degree, it's great to have the revenue, and you have it, it's awesome. But it's one of those things that can be pretty, pretty stinging if, if it goes south.
Tony Wright
we had, I mean, probably one of the worst days I've ever had as an agency owner when we lost our large, you know, $40,000 a month client. And the thing was, it wasn't just one day, though, because I could see they were, you know, slipping, over you know, three or four months, it's like, Okay, we got a new, we got a new marketing manager, this guy is not quite as friendly as last week, you know, and you're seeing that in the stress that led up to that, because I knew that when they left, you know, no matter what we're gonna have to lay some folks off, and I hate doing that.
Seth Price
Yesterday, it's something that that I've struggled with. So again, I'm giving you mine just as a point of comparison. So I spun out of Blushark, which is what I love from a division of lower-dollar people, right? And SEO for lawyers has one price point. There's a lot of labor that goes into building content and links and, you know, you know, technical, etc. But there was clearly a market that was in the one $2,000 range that wasn't being served. And I was concerned that with volume comes opinions and just, you know, unhappy clients, you know, so on the law side, you know, there are people who like to get rid of those low dollar clients, they're the biggest pains, and they cause the most problems for the least money. You know, yes, it's great to have $32,000 clients, but my guess is a lion's share of complaints come from that department just statistically. So how do you couple levels, one from a reputation management point of view, I'm curious your analysis. And secondly, when you're used to dealing with mack daddy clients that have you they're paying for and have a confident expectation, one of my fears internally was making sure that resources are not disproportionately placed on lower dollar clients because you hire people who have to be able to service the higher dollar clients who are badass, and not that you don't want badass people, your $2,000 class, they're thrilled to have it. But for you to be profitable, there has to be a moderate amount of resources put. Otherwise, you'll be upside down. How do you balance that?
Tony Wright
Well, that's the way we're built is. Again, you find people that disagree with us. Everything we do is time materials. Everything we do is hourly. I mean, we're a law firm basically. So it's $160 an hour, whatever client that is being worked on, whether that client is paying me $30,000 A month or $2,000 a month. So the client is 12 and a half hours, $2,000 a month is getting 12 and a half hours.
Seth Price
Right. So basically you're keeping, is it was more important to keep your staff honest. You could, probably in theory, and like I've worked off a flat fee model, which I'm happy with, because I know there are ups and downs and I have to get the job done. But our buddy Mike Ramsey, who just had a nice exit, he has talked repeatedly, and he's one of the guys in the legal space. You need to follow your model because it's one of the easier ways to scale. Because you know you're not going to get hurt. If you need more resources, you pay more money or you don't get it.
Tony Wright
I've done it both ways. And I can tell you, from my perspective, the hourly rate works much better for me as far as for everything for hiring, because I can set I can create a capacity report, and know exactly how many hours that we have to give out to work, and then know how many hours that we have scheduled to work each month. So I can sit there and look, when I get to 85 to 90% capacity, that's when it's time to start hiring. The thing is, is that I start getting whining from microwell. whining, I get my team starts complaining about 65% capacity, oh, we're gonna need help, we're gonna need work. And I can look and show them the numbers. This is where we're at. This is when we can hire. And they all know it we go over capacity every single day.
Seth Price
So what is capacity? what capacity do you have to be at?
Tony Wright
We will start looking for a position and start looking for what the position is once we hit 80%. And we can move pretty quickly up to 80 to past 100. I mean, that takes just a couple of clients, you know.
Seth Price
I get it, I know the legal billable world, but I'm less more of a novice on this. What do you consider full capacity for like, how many hours a day are your people billing?
Tony Wright
30 billable hours a week because I figured that there are 10 hours of work that you need to be doing actually, it's more than that, you know, but nobody works a 40-hour week.
Seth Price
But the work they do, they may work the 40-hour week, but it's not a billable, 40-hour week, internal meetings and things like that, right? Business Development
Tony Wright
Research, but that gives us 10 hours, well, and business development. That's, you know, my team really doesn't do a lot.
Seth Price
Depends on the person, I'm just saying whatever it is, well, you may be a project they're doing. It could be a speculative thing, which I wrote. It's so funny as you look at different industries because in the legal space when you're at Mega firms, they expect closer to 40 hours a week, 2000 hours a year for the Mega firms where there, they charge they pay big money. And people work a lot more than 40 hours a week to get that working 50 to get their 40. But you know, it's funny because most of the business consumer world the people like family law trusts and estates, that is essentially what they're billing is 1500 hours a year, which is what your 30 hours a week is because that's a human amount, it gives you a 40 hour week minus breakage, so to speak.
Tony Wright
I mean, when I was at Weber, it was the same basic model. But we were expected to bill 40 hours a week.
Seth Price
Understood, but you also didn't, you know, you work weekends, you work nights as a part of the culture? Oh, absolutely. And it's much harder, and they're also paying, I don't know about there. But in general, the law firms that expect those numbers generally are paying at a much higher number of incentivizes somebody to do that.
Tony Wright
Exactly, you know, I saw that my brother is an attorney and he was at a larger law firm that he's now a partner in a smaller firm that you know, business law and, and the reason I will tell you that the reason that he doesn't do that anymore is because he has kids and he wants to see him.
Seth Price
Exactly. And if you're billing 2000 to 2200 hours a year, you're missing a lot of stuff, you're working till eight o'clock every night minimum and you are nights and weekends beyond that, it's not nothing. So, gee, so interesting. So with this, this gives you more transparency for you to see. But the issue I assume is if you lose a big client that is you know, you have those hours, you either resell the hours to somebody else, or you have to figure something out.
Tony Wright
Right. And you know, my guys know, I've said if you know if you're not billed, if you're sitting there and you're only billing 10 to 15 hours a week, then you might need to be a little bit concerned about your job.
Seth Price
And it just felt you know, but it's better than you know, again, I admire that because I wouldn't have as much there's a definitive metric for you. Again, you have the flip side is somebody is filling the hours but not providing value. That's a whole nother story. Are you have to have your own internal KPIs to make sure that's not happening? Let's talk about the sausage making a little bit, you know, when we started this thing, you know, and I can speak for myself, I was sitting there, and to me, it was the art of finding links of getting high-quality content up there, etc. As you scaled talk to me a little bit about the process of scaling, what was inside of your noggin into an expanded team across multiple different industries?
Tony Wright
Sure, it is, it can be difficult, but we have a process whereby, you know, the first, and this is one of the reasons that I also like the hourly model, it goes back to that we, what I do is I tell a client, you know, this is your, it basically works as a retainer. So you get X amount of hours from my team's time to do whatever needs to be done. So we sit down with each client once a month and go over what the priorities are for the next month. So we always have kind of a list, and we use Asana, you know, a list of everything. And so we'll have these tasks lists are made every month. And those, we have a, we call them an account owner that assigns those to whoever needs to do them when and sometimes, you know, we try to assign them based upon interest based upon how well someone can do something, it doesn't always work that way. But like, for instance, we just got a new client that is really interested in high value, almost like Wall Street Journal style links, that's a totally different program than the guy that I was just working on. Before I got on here, which is an electrician with 10 offices in the Dallas Fort Worth area, you know, he doesn't need links, very many links at all. So but what we've done there is I've got people assigned to creating those relationships with those other folks and, and I've kind of I'm helping supervise that. Whereas the electrics, the electrician, I will talk to the guy to sell him, and then I probably won't even talk to him anymore. And it just, it tends to work out, you know, and then I work with the team, once a quarter I get together with start talking about, okay, what's the next hire, we need to make, like, we just did this actually, and, you know, the next hire we need to make, we have got to get another writer on board. You know, as soon as I get to capacity, that's what we're going to be looking at. So that's where the majority of the time is being spent. And I can look at the reports and see what kind of tasks are being done. But either way, we're cross-training the team across the board all the time, always, you know, .
Seth Price
No, I was gonna say so you don't have like, again, my world with local search, we're so focused on local search, you know, everything is content doesn't mix with links doesn't mix with local, they're each its own little fiefdom. You have people that might be doing content one day and link-building the next is just your all around talent that you believe in that could they can
Tony Wright
Yes I believe in hiring people that can be cross-trained. I've done the siloing my entire career, you know, when I was at Weber Shandwick It was funny like, what is? Okay, we can't do that. That's advertising. And what was funny is I was in the same building as the terminal in McLean TM. And I ended up working for both of them, because I was straddling that fence of advertising and PR, I always thought it was silly, how there were lines drawn in the sand for those types of things. And sometimes it's even hard to understand, okay, is internal link building? Are we trying to how we're classifying this and, when a lot of times I found when we get into that, we get into that's not my job, which that is probably the biggest curse word you could say, at my agency. Anybody who ever tells me that's not my job, they're probably not going to last at my agency very well.
Seth Price
That's awesome. So one of the things that I mentioned the beginning that I really enjoyed following you online was you do wear stuff on your sleeve, talk to some of the sort of first some of the biggest sort of mistakes I find we can learn a lot and you've shared some but what are some of the things you're like, Man, if I had known this 10 years ago, this would have made this journey that much easier.
Tony Wright
Oh, definitely. There's been some, I found that hiring based upon personality is much more is much better than hiring based upon skill set. There's been some high profile hires we've made I guess, people that you know, you would think would be amazing that are that just didn't work out either because of ego or they were not quite as advertised. I would much rather have hired some buddy who I can train. That's a big one. And I actually I am big on personality tests.
Seth Price
My follow-up question. So which ones do you like?
Tony Wright
I like culture, we use Culture Index, which I found to be extremely accurate, once you understand it, you have to kind of, they give you training, and you have to go through it. And you have to really understand it's not, you know, you can't just pick it up. It's not like a, you know, Myers Briggs, where you can just kind of understand it, it's, you really need to understand what the dot mean, and how that works. But I really, since we've done that, either, every single time we've hired somebody that and gone against what the culture index told us, it's turned out to be a mistake.
Seth Price
And yet we still do it.
Tony Wright
Well, there, you know, what I'm horrible at, I fall in love with a candidate.
Seth Price
Well, and that's something that I've sort of talked about on this show, and others, you know, the idea of that there are people interview well, and there are people that are good employees, and that has been sort of, I think, something that I've put, you know, all the truisms hire slow fire fast, you know, all that stuff. Great. On a recent podcast, I was this one, talking to Jack Newton, who founded Clio. And they have like 500 plus employees. And he was really big on the back door references that they ignore the references they're given. And their job is to find out who the person is. And I think it's sort of part of this, which is, you know, if you're in an organization, the thing that I sort of came to grips with early on, was that in my market, GC, there are so many nonprofits, associations, think tanks, that if you have SEO on a resume, you can take, you can get a six figure job, you may know nothing about SEO. And so for me, I was unable to hire at a cost effective rate, anybody with talent locally, and that the only way I could do it would be to bring people in and train them up. Not just because it was cost-effective. But because I couldn't I would be paying for somebody who didn't even know what they were doing at the higher level. And that's sort of what sort of MIT created our process. You know, did you have you over the years brought in lateral talent? Or is it mostly homegrown talent that you've put your thumb on?
Tony Wright
We have brought in some, and it's typically someone that either really fits the profile, or we've had excellent success, bringing in people that I know.
Seth Price
Right, so that helps. You're very influential in the circuit, I assume you get to know people over time. And that's one less again, it always changes once they're in the door, but at least you have one good touchpoint,
Tony Wright
Right. I mean, we just, you know, one of my, the guy who was pretty much almost my COO, for eight years, he actually left us because he semi-retired, moved out to the country. But he actually now is working for one of our clients. But he was one of my good friend from college. And then he worked at American Airlines and was my client there when I was working with him. So he, you know, that's the example of the type of person you know, and I've hired people that I've known from, you know, the circuit, or people that I've known over the years that I think could do the work. There's one, there's one girl, that is a good friend, a good family friend, our kids are the same age. I've hired her three times. And then she keeps quitting because she wants to be a stay-at-home mom, and then I get into some sort of pickle. And I'm like, Carrie, can you come back for a little while and, you know, and I'll hire her again, because I know whatever I throw it, or she can get it done. But most of the people that, you know, we hire are young, either younger or career in career changes. You know, I don't like to just say we're hiring younger people, because we just hired someone who made a career change who was a realtor for 20 years, you know, but it's great, great with clients.
Seth Price
You know, with this whole pandemic and the idea that we're all at least in our market, everybody's working from home. Have you seen a shift in mentality Are you now willing to go nationally, whereas before you wouldn't talk to me about that?
Tony Wright
Absolutely. that's probably been the biggest change for us. You know, in March, there was one day I just finally looked at around the office that we had this big office I said, okay, everybody worked from home until I say, No. Everybody left. We all work from home and actually I was so scared of it and it worked. Everybody was doing their job.
Seth Price
Whether this is gonna last year or two is another story. But the piece, one of the pieces, I don't know if you've had this, but internal drama is something that I've seen in multiple different iterations of my business life, particularly with some younger employees, even older employees. And that is the one thing we may lose, you know, we've lost commute times, and we've lost internal drama. There may be other issues. But those two things I'm not going to miss.
Tony Wright
Exactly. Yeah, we actually, we got really lucky because somebody wanted to sublet our place. And so I just, I said, take it, and I got a little virtual office, and we're there. We have conference rooms if we need them. But I don't know what's going to happen in a year, you know, we can move back into an office if we need to, but we actually have now hired two people that are not in Dallas.
Seth Price
Right and my guess is most people are moving in that direction. I still, I'm old school, I'd love to have the people there, you know, but again, they're not in Dallas, but they can fly in for training, and they're going to be as productive. You know, thankfully, technology is there. There's software that sort of monitors. There's as a business owner. There's that fear, am I completely getting ripped off?
Tony Wright
I'll tell you. I'll tell you that. It's that $8,000 a month in rent that I don't have to pay is a pretty good sell.
Seth Price
Yeah, you know, but to me, like, first of all, our rents higher is even higher for less space, But that said, I don't mind. To me, rent has always been one of those things that like I don't say it's a good thing. But it is always been a stabilizing factor. When you started again, if you think back on the digital side, a lot not far as far along. But when there's a physical place where there and again, we have national clients, I don't even have local clients, that's how inept my business model is, in the sense that I, you know, I don't have local clients for the most part very, very few, because we don't want to have the conflict with our law firm. So all of our clients come from around the country. And so but having that facility is, you know, that people come to and feel a part of, there is something to it, and I've had to cut it out with this recent surge, but the idea of sitting down outside the office, socially distant with people, when you hire people that have never been to your office before, it's kind of it's trippy, right? I mean, like, people who don't know what was there.
Tony Wright
You know, that's what a little bit what I am worried about over time. I mean, we only had, we only had a few hires, since the pandemic that I'm, you know, even with those guys, what I've been doing is doing one on one zooms with them, you know, kind of zoom lunches once a week. And until I get, you know, feel like I know, I'm a little bit because in the office, I would just walk over to their desk and talk to him.
Seth Price
Walk over to Starbucks with him at least, but you know, it's like, yeah, you could get a lot of one on one time, right. And it's easier when it's physical, it takes more thought. And, you know, again, in one sense, it shouldn't be, I don't think I'll get rid of it. But I love the Google Hangout, everybody's on Slack person, but the idea that you're just on your email, and you push a button, the person's there. To me, that's a that's an underutilized piece.
Tony Wright
And I wish they hadn't started allowing backgrounds, because now, my gosh, we're all doing weird stuff.
Seth Price
You know that that should be our biggest issue. It's making sure that people are on camera and engaged, you know, I have three kids zooming school, right next door, and thankfully, they haven't interrupted us too badly. But, you know, I have to yell at them to stay on Zoom like, well, what's the difference? The teachers there, you want to be engaged, you know, they have a whole setup with like, an extra chair and a blanket, and they're sort of like a, you know, a lifelike first class seat. I'm like, no, like feet on the ground with the camera on, if you're not engaged in active, it is very easy to, you know, sort of fall out of that, because part of it is, you know, our clients are counting on us to get stuff done. And if that level of intensity is not there, you're not going to be as productive as when it is.
Tony Wright
Absolutely. I mean, there definitely is a mindset, and I think we'll see, you know, after, hopefully, the pandemic ends in the near future, and then we can all make decisions. But, you know, I worry about some of my clients and friends and in commercial real estate, what's going to happen? I don't know, you know, they're all actually optimistic. But I think that there's definitely a I don't see how there's not going to be a trend to going more virtual.
Seth Price
And it looks like anything, I'm sure it'll trend and like we've seen some people, I mean, Yahoo, for example, they went to that and zoomed back now, is that Yahoo or is it a defective business model? You know, that was there, you know, but I think what we have seen at least short term is there's some huge benefits and if that is in fact the case, you know. Our wish coming out of this for the agency would have like a clubhouse, you know, with a couple offices, you need an office, have a conference room and have some, some places like hotel style. But do you need people in the office every day, there are a lot of advantages of it. There's a serendipity that happens with within those four walls. You know, I'm, I love the idea of being able to hire nationally, and I think it's going to be some sort of a blend. But whatever that blend is, it's not going to be at the same point we are now we're not going back to this point. So whether it's commercial real estate's down 10,20, or 50%, jury's still out, but we're not the genies not going back in the bottle.
Tony Wright
No, I agree with that.
Seth Price
so any thoughts? You know, we have whole, you know, the people listening. You know, I've gotten to hear you from the stage many, many times. Right now, what are the two or three things, as we conclude that are sort of, you're seeing in the digital space that you're putting assets towards that you think are moving the needle currently?
Tony Wright
Well, I know, you know, since you're big and local, I've been really evaluated. We've been utilizing for reviews management, a number of different tools. And I don't know what you're using, but you know, we've been big fans of GatherUp, because I like the way that they're creating a process, as opposed to kind of trying to manipulate things or you know, I don't mind like the trust pilots of the world and stuff. But it feels a little bit like that could become an issue, you know, initially.
Seth Price
Plus you're building reviews somewhere else. And again, based on the industry, and look, there was a point when those trust pilots were getting new stars, you couldn't get otherwise little games, like if there's a third reason. But you know, Mike Blumenthal is a recent guest, and I'm bit of huge fan of hits from day one. So it's not surprising, you know, in our space, there are about four or five, like GatherUp that are really quite good. And we've stayed agnostic. As far as you know, our clients have their favorites. And it's not like a gym membership. They're all great as you use them. You know, it's like, you could be at a $10 month. And so, but I think what you're saying is, hey, reviews are key, you've got to have some finite strategy behind it and not just have it happen.
Tony Wright
We've seen a little surprising to me how many people have been coming in the door that has absolutely no review strategy. You know, and so that's a big, that's a big one on the local side on the, you know, on the SEO side, it's pretty much, you know, this, it's the same old, same old forest, you know, building, you know, I call it the five C's, you know, the code of the site, the content of the site, the connections, which are the links, the communication, which is the social and then we call it capture, which is the data on the analytics side, I'm tired of sem rush and Google Analytics, changing their interfaces, because I'm old, and I can't find things. But other than that, you know, I've been really happy with with kind of the, the tool sets as they're evolving, I like the fact that, you know, we've been able to really hit him with some, some great tools and some dashboarding. And, and even because I'm really big on transparency with my clients. Now, sometimes Transparency can get you into trouble. And sometimes, clients just don't care.
Seth Price
They don't care. But there's also ebbs and flows. And, you know, you know, we have times where Google isn't loving something, whether it's any could be, you know, they're they're just ups and downs, we don't, you know, we're not soothsayers,
Tony Wright
I always say that I'm not, you know, we're not, if somebody comes to me, and you know, they've had this million times, hey, could you work with us for six months and train my team on how to do this? And say, well, we're not a training company, but we will educate you on what you're seeing. And we'll make it so that you can go in and look at, you know, we're not going to, you know, tell you try to make it look better, we're gonna say, here's the dashboard, here's the data, you can go in and make your own interpretations. And now, we'll argue over time about what's good, what's bad, etc. But that has been, I think, the some of the dashboarding the stuff we've been doing with Google studio. And, you know, obviously, on the paid side, I could talk about that for hours and hours. You know, some of the rises in programmatic what we're seeing in some of the new shopping feeds, some of the new ad units that Google's running out Facebook, you know, what we're seeing on that Facebook is driving me a little crazy with their targeting going, you know, back and forth. But it's still working. We're still seeing great results from it. So you know, I think the biggest thing for me is what can I do to be transparent and education and educate my clients so they can understand what's going on. And then what's the value of the the newest thing that I need to be making sure, I don't want to be cutting edge. But we also don't want to be laggards.
Seth Price
So far, that's been my philosophy there. You know, if you had given $2,000, to every guy who was doing geo fencing, you would be very poor. It was like, meaning every single guy came along and said, I got the CD, it's gonna be on the special app, and this and that's nonsense. We're getting closer and closer. But it's never quite been, you know, at least in the local space, it's always some guy who used to work at yodel is going to now make his money with a geofencing company, right? That's been the pattern? Oh, no, absolutely. And so it goes to your point, like, Hey, you don't want to be behind the curve. But I also don't want to put valuable resources towards something that is experimental, you know, happy to experiment my own dime, and test stuff at my law firm as an incubator for others. But I really, you know, as you know, our clients hold such a high standard, that when you go too risky for people, X number of percent of time is not going to work. And then you're left with this thing where you've spent X number of hours and you don't have that value to show.
Tony Wright
Well, that's also some of the reasons like for instance, I'm a huge, huge believer in CRO and conversion rate optimization. And my team knows the basics, and we're good, we can usually improve. But when I have a client that really needs some CRO, I have partners that I go to, when I have a client that needs affiliate marketing, I don't do that. I've got you know, go to people, yes, I have people that I will go to for that. And I'm not going to invest in hiring the people on my team, you know, to come on my team to because I've got really great partners, there's no reason for me to employ those people, especially when we haven't sold it before and I don't know if we're going to sell at the future.
Seth Price
Like anything else, and if you had 20 clients who all demanded it you figured out right but it sounds like what It sounds like you have the benefit of diversity and the sort of great thing that gets you out of bed that there's everything is new and different. But you know, it's making sure that you put some blinders on the side so that anything beyond that you're you're getting some help on.
Tony Wright
Exactly. I learned a long time ago to stay just even though, you know, we're not having vertical-specific, definitely. The more I stay in my lane, the better.
Seth Price
That's awesome. Well, Tony, this has been awesome. I'm sure we could talk for hours. And I wanted to thank you so much for your time today. And just over the years, everything that I've sort of gleaned just from both the stage and from social, you're definitely very generous and I hope we get to return the favor sometime soon.
Tony Wright
Thank you, Seth. I appreciate you having me on.
Seth Price
Have a great day. You too.
BluShark Digital
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. episodes are available to stream directly on Blushark Digital's website.