137 - Choosing the Perfect Legal Marketing Partner with Fractional CMO Josh Ramsey

Ever wondered how to select the perfect marketing partner for your business? This week we chat with fractional CMO Josh Ramsey, who brings his vast experience to the table as we navigate the complex world of marketing partnerships, with an emphasis on comprehending the value of your investment beyond just the price.

Our conversation takes a deep dive into working with ad agencies. Josh speaks of the importance of having a clear strategy and vision before you shake hands with an agency. In the same vein, we also look at the value of leads for your business. Josh even shares some priceless tips about the kind of questions businesses should be asking their vendors to set the right expectations.

We also throw light on the intricacies of hiring marketing managers. The conversation revolves around the critical need for both analytical and creative mindsets in your marketing strategy. We discuss the challenges that come with finding the right person for this role and circle back to the role of a fractional CMO in this regard. To wrap it up, we highlight the need for both a visionary and an executor in your team, which can be a game-changer in reducing the workload of the business owner. So, gear up for some strategizing, setting KPIs, and making swift decisions to seize opportunities.

Learn more about all the things he does by visiting www.jrcmo.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

This podcast is brought to you by Spotlight Branding. Whether your firm only gets a few referrals or it's 100% of your business, you have the opportunity to double your referrals through educational, informative content. The pros at Spotlight Branding can help you create that content through blogging videos, email newsletters and more All designed to help you increase your referrals and attract the kinds of clients you want to work with. Visit spotlightbrandingcom slash pod to learn more. That's spotlightbrandingcom slash pod.

Speaker 2: 0:53

This is Center Stage putting your firm in the spotlight by highlighting business owners and other industry experts to help take your firm to the next level. Hey everyone, and welcome to Center Stage. I'm your host, john Henson, and this week we are talking about how to find the right partner for your marketing, and we're going to talk about or we've talked a lot about before how you, as the firm owner, should not be doing it yourself. You should be doing the thing that you went to school for, or that you are known for, or getting paid for, not all of this other stuff. But how do you actually figure out who you're going to work with and I promise this is not going to be like a 30 minute sales pitch for why you should work with spotlight branding or anybody else. I want to help you make the most informed decision that you can and what makes the most sense for you.

Speaker 2: 1:43

So that is why I am joined by Josh Ramsey. He does a lot of fractional CMO work. He's helped all kinds of businesses with their marketing and I'm excited for him to be here. So, josh, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 3: 1:55

Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, looking forward to the chat.

Speaker 2: 1:58

Absolutely. So yeah, I gave the bare bones kind of intro there. Tell us a little bit more about what you do and some of the experience that you had.

Speaker 3: 2:10

Yeah, so again, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I love sharing the message because most people are not understanding or even aware that a fractional CMO exists. People understand the concept of a marketing strategist and they understand a marketing consultant, but oftentimes a marketing strategist or consultant is someone that's just going to say go do this or go do that. But a fractional CMO is really meant to get their hands dirty, to not only get the vision, but to put their hands on it, put their fingerprints on it on behalf of the CEO. So it's someone that sits at the executive table, gives the vision, but then gives the vision based on the CEO's dream and then executes or makes sure that the execution is done. Now, that doesn't mean this is also clear to understand. It doesn't mean that they're going to build your website. The fractional CMO understands how a website should be built and the structure of the marketing system and gives the vision, but doesn't do it. Will you indulge me on one quick story on the explanation?

Speaker 2: 3:18

Absolutely.

Speaker 3: 3:19

Absolutely so. I literally just finished an email this morning to one of my clients and I have a marketing team that reports to me and the conversation I had this morning with the client. If I back out for just a second and explain the client, they have something good to say, but they don't say it well, but they try to say it often. So it has something good to say. Say it well and say it often. The conundrum that they're in is the storytelling. It's the explanation of what they do well and explaining it to the audience that they want to reach. It's easy to say it often once you have a good strategic message.

Speaker 3: 4:00

So this morning one of the initiatives that I've started was our operators came up with a solution on a problem. I outlined the vision of how our marketing project managers need to clearly communicate that and then I'm training them and teaching them. This is how you leave a story. So this is what the operators did, here's how we define that, here's how we engage that into a storyline, and then it's easy to again communicate it. There's all sorts of various as I call it tactical marketing outlets to speak your message to. But if you're not engaging enough and you don't have a good storytelling of what your inside reality is, that becomes a problem. So that's what a CMO does is say, ok, we have something good and here's how we weave that story, give it to a team to weave it, I approve it as the CMO and then we execute it. So maybe that helps understand us a little bit more.

Speaker 2: 5:01

Yeah, yeah, I mean you. It's essentially in the name. You are the chief marketing person. You are handling everything Doesn't mean that you're literally doing it all yourself, but you're facilitating and making the decisions that the owner would otherwise have to do on their own.

Speaker 3: 5:20

Yeah, exactly that's it.

Speaker 2: 5:23

Yeah, so we're talking about marketing vendors because I think that's where a lot of people start, especially smaller businesses and trying to get some of that marketing help. So, especially you maybe even work with some vendors or vet some vendors as a CMO. What are some of the biggest frustrations that you've seen business owners or even you have had with marketing vendors and I promise I won't get offended by anything you say- Well, thanks for not getting offended, but you know what I mean.

Speaker 3: 5:55

I never mean to offend, but one thing about myself at least, and understanding myself, because psychology is a big part of marketing. It's understanding the human nature, why we buy what we buy. And ultimately, if I just broke that down, no matter what you sell, there are three levels that a business owner needs to understand, and this kind of leads into hiring the right marketing person or agency vendor. And it starts with benefits of ownership, objections to that ownership and then vendor selection and too often we sell on price not quality of overcoming the objections and explaining the value, which is advantage. So everything that we buy, from a stick of gum, bottle of water to a Ferrari, it it's all wrapped into those decision making that we make. So I think the first part is expectations. When we hire somebody, both employees in-house and also vendors Oftentimes I see it that there's not a clear expectation and what I often refer to as the KPI, a key point indicator. That way the benchmark is set and we all know what has to be done.

Speaker 3: 7:10

Now a lot of people will hire myself as a fractional CMO to make sure we set the right KPI and that it's not dictated by the agency alone. Yes, so having the right expectations is very important, as I work on the inside of a company and look at the agency. So I would look at you and say, ok, what do you see that needs to be done? I love and value people's opinion. Now I go off of my confirmation bias of is that opinion right or wrong? Now I love some conversations that we had of build the foundation first. So when you come to me and who would be my CEO and you said that to me, I would say absolutely like build that foundation.

Speaker 3: 7:55

Now where we might disagree is what is the foundation. But now that's a finer point that most CEOs don't know. They just love the buzzword. That's where I come in and say, look, let's set the KPI of what is the foundation and what is the right timeline to meet that foundation. And then that second leads into the expectation of budget. So now, when you are pouring a budget into it, when should your expectation or your KPI be met and associated with your budget? So I mean I can go down a budget strategy if you'd like, but that again trying to keep it high level for a short podcast here. It's kind of the two top things there.

Speaker 2: 8:42

Yeah, and I love that you talked about making sure that the vendor doesn't dictate the expectation, right, because I think something that I see a lot and I think what frustrates a lot of people is they go work with like a PPC vendor, for example, a Google ads vendor and they'll say, yeah, we'll get you 100 leads a month and you know, you get started and maybe you do get 100 leads a month, but 98 of them are junk and they're not even relevant and then you go to the thing and you're like you're not producing what I said.

Speaker 2: 9:14

And they're like, yeah, we got you 100 leads per month. We're doing exactly what we said we were gonna do, you know.

Speaker 3: 9:19

I'll give you two quick stories on that, because I love that. You say that and you're dead right. You know, I've one guy that just hired me and I literally have a call later today with his ad agency and what he already told me is I went through the discovery process is that his vendor, the agency that he hired, he's paying over four grand a month to Now for his small business relatively small business. That's a big chunk, but he's looking at it as this, as an investment. So when we look at it, what I'm here to do is get the maximum potential out of that ad agency. So, in discovery, he's getting phone calls from people looking for information on a project that's already started. But he's showing up in pay-per-click for things like Home Depot and he's a remodeler and he's going you've already started this project, you're not a valid lead. So he calls the agency and the agency casted such a wide net that they burned through his budget in two weeks. That was meant to be four weeks and he got nothing from it. Well, I'll give you another quick story. Well, so, on that one, to wrap that up, we're having a discussion today to fix that and to modify and manage his budget better.

Speaker 3: 10:32

Now I'll give you another quick story. I have a client who I have an ad agency and my agency was generating leads for him and the problem became he quickly bounced back and said you know, hey, you generate all these leads. You got 15 in one week. This is great, but they're all cracked. And I said, okay, explain to me why. Right, because now it's setting the clear expectation of the value of a lead, of why is it garbage? Right, I'm cool with saying, hey, I produce garbage, but if there's no communication, now the expectation is unrealistic. Not trying to rhyme there, but the expectation is unrealistic because there's no communication. That's why, for myself again, every client's different, but we use a CRM with agencies to get that information sharing. Where a business owner has to bounce back and say this specifically is why it's bad. And then any agency can work on that. Well, I say any. If they're an agency of value, of good ethics, morals and values, they can fix that right. But that's some of the challenges that I know other business owners have faced.

Speaker 2: 11:50

So yeah, Well, I mean, even we've faced it right, Because we don't do any pay-per-click ads as a service, but we wanted to market ourselves through that kind of channel. We worked with another agency and their default was to maximize impressions and get the lowest click rate that they could, and that's kind of their default. That's how they help people. And we started seeing that people were reaching out to us thinking that we were lawyers, Because obviously we do marketing for lawyers. But somehow people were reaching out to us thinking that we were lawyers, and so we're like no, okay. And then we got to the point where we were like, look, we wanna get really focused on this. We are totally okay with a higher click rate and lower impressions if those are just all being targeted right people, and they could not wrap their head around it and so we just don't work with them anymore.

Speaker 1: 12:44

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 12:46

So can I speak to that just real quick? Yeah, yeah, yeah, what people fall into that they're not oftentimes aware of is what are called in ad words, pay-per-click ad words is what's called search terms and a search term. When you put in a keyword, you have three variables. You have broad match, exact matching, phrase match. Now I'm not gonna go brain you right, for the sake of time here. But when you understand that you have a keyword and you have these three variables of how that search term has worked, and then you can see what people are actually typing in, that's where I would come in as a fractional CMO to you and say let's look at our search terms. Look like I don't disagree that we're gonna pause and we need to change strategy.

Speaker 3: 13:27

But this kind of goes into when you hire an agency, one of the top questions. So let me put a big exclamation point on this Huge, massive. Everyone hear me Find out who their strategist is and what their experience is, because agencies will hire pay-per-click managers and executors and designers. But when you comes to, let me simplify in a quick explanation. When you simplify this, it comes down to three brains that build a website or do marketing, you have design. Think about the brain and the lifestyle of a designer. Then think about the coder, who actually has to create what's gonna happen. And too many times we stop there. The third brain is super important. That's the strategist.

Speaker 3: 14:16

And the strategist looks at it and goes okay, logically, what was the disconnect in between all parties? And we go oh well, they were searching for attorney law. Well, you showed up as marketing attorney law. Your search term wasn't set right. So then we go market as a negative and we market as a negative keyword. Boom, we keep running the campaign. It's just we took away the biggest sore spot. Rather than hurting the entire campaign, we took away one little sore spot that everyone's going. That's the pain point. And we say don't kill the campaign right, don't kill the messenger, change the messenger's route right and get there a different way.

Speaker 2: 14:57

Yeah, absolutely so. You're talking about setting expectations right, and so what and we've mentioned a couple of different things already Are there any other specific questions that business owners should be asking these vendors to make sure that they're getting on the same page and setting the proper expectations?

Speaker 3: 15:18

Yeah, that's a great question, but I'm gonna be a little vague on this one. So you first need to set your strategy and your vision internally before you work with an agency. So an agency is meant to sell what they're good at Right, I mean anyone listen to this or watching. You are meant to sell what you're good at. You're not gonna say To a level. You're not gonna say oh yeah, you should go do that. Instead of this, you're meant to sell what you're good at In the marketing world.

Speaker 3: 15:52

What a CMO does is it sits with the CEO and says what are we good at? What are we trying to do? What? How do we want this to come in? And therefore I help business owners dictate to the agency this is what we should do. I mean, one of my offshoot campaigns that I'm trying right now is working with agencies to be their strategist. So I go under contract with them that I'm not gonna go resell to another agency, but I'm gonna work as the strategist and not be a fractional CMO. I'm gonna be the CMO of an agency to be the lead strategist to say here's what we do. And a lot of agencies are working with me on that because they don't have a strategist. They understand the problem here.

Speaker 3: 16:35

So, again, let's back out of that rabbit hole for a minute and come back to your question, the question being you know what's the expectation? Well, you need to set that properly internally, with your own KPIs, then interview and, just as a quick point of reference, we haven't chatted about it. We could talk about it as needed, but I published a book back in 2019 and the first chapter gives you five points on how to hire the right agency, how to set the right KPIs, how to interview an agency, and I kind of kind of call it a manual or a guide that you keep in your back pocket, you've reviewed. Then you ask a list of questions to the agency and you go back and see if they match your KPIs. And and that's where, again, I try to be a little bit vague, because everyone has their own problems. Everyone has their narrative, right, if you speak psychologically, we all have our narrative and burnt, burnt times, hurt times, paying times and they're all gonna be different for everybody. So that's why there is some ambiguity to that.

Speaker 2: 17:36

Yeah, and you know you also probably think about, like you know what, like you said, like what's important to you, you know, and again, just making sure that you know you both have the same working definition of the results, that that you expect to have. One other thing that you mentioned and and I want to get this because we get this question a lot you mentioned budget, you know, a few minutes ago. Is there, is there any sort of set guideline or or recommendation in terms of, like, what percentage of your budget should be going to marketing or is it one of those it depends sort of things?

Speaker 3: 18:16

So I use a law called law of diminishing return and Let me kind of give another quick story here. Yeah, and the story is of a garage door company and they came to me. We were working together for several years. You know the full life cycle of most agencies with companies is about 18 months. The average that I work with is over four years.

Speaker 3: 18:40

A lot of that I attribute to just being very blunt and honest, which some business owners don't like. They want to be told and pat it on the back that they're right. And I'm just not that guy. I'm a very like. What you really want is money. We all do, right, like that's why we're in business is to make money. So I look at business owners before we even get started and I say, look, do you want to make money or do you want to feel good about yourself? Right, like you know, go feel good about yourself once you've made money.

Speaker 3: 19:08

But back to my story with the business owner in the garage door company. They came to me, we were working for several years and and they came to me one day and they said look, you know, we turn off paper, click and our phones die. And we have business, but our phones die and we turn on paper click and we're spending all this money. We should cancel you, josh, as SEO and we should just do paper click be done. And I said, okay, I don't disagree, but let's take some confirmation bias and look at the data right. Let's be analytical about this. So long story short. After doing some quick research, it only took me about two or three days to pull all the numbers together and verify them. At the end of the day, they were right. Their volume of calls was way up on paper click. They were spending. However very important to know, they were spending $180 for a closed deal with paper click. Now, that fit their margins right, like when you, when we ran their gross profit margin, their cost, we ran all the numbers on the budgeting and, like I said, that's a whole nother story that I could walk through it at another time. But when we walk through this, this number 180 was still below their threshold of Revenue that they could spend for a sale. If I recall right, it was about 250. Was was their top line. But when we looked at SEO, seo was 50 dollars. Now they were getting a smaller volume, less calls, but they were more qualified and and they were selling at a better rate at 50.

Speaker 3: 20:46

I could give this same story again and again in different industries and different things that we've done. But here's the thing to understand law of diminishing return. They said, well, josh, can we get rid of the paper? Click and spin it on SEO. And I said law of diminishing return, no, because they were already spending about $2,500 a month on SEO.

Speaker 3: 21:05

And I said, if anything, we need to start scaling that back because we've already reached the threshold, or we need to change from what we were doing and use a different type of SEO because, again, a lot of people don't understand there's different types of SEO. I mean, at the core, it's link building and it's content building right and it, those kind of go together, but they are different. So that's the law of diminishing return that we have to be aware of is, at some point you got what you got and you move on from it. And then, as far as budget goes, I created something called the crystal ball of marketing and it truly dictates Exactly what you should spend and what you're gonna make, and it's it's a beautiful mind type of tool that Works 100% of the time. When you input the right data. It will output for you exactly what you need. But I think that answers at least the beginning of your question, right?

Speaker 2: 21:59

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think so many people get focused on just the hard line numbers that you know I there it is. It goes so much deeper than that because there's so many other things to take into consideration in terms of the different kinds of marketing that you're doing like. You can't just put a blanket number over it. You know and expect that to go. Well, you got to really look deeper into it.

Speaker 3: 22:25

Yeah, yeah, there's.

Speaker 2: 22:27

there's so much to that, but you're right on with it, yeah so on the other side of that, you know we talked a lot about vendors and you know something that we see, you know is, you know, a solo or small business, they will work with a vendor for a time, they will grow and then they'll get to a certain kind of revenue number and At some point, you know, they'll kind of think like, okay, well, I'm spending this much on a vendor, which is more than the monthly cost of Having someone in house, and then they'll bring that person in house. So you know, in your experience, you know, is there a right time to bring marketing in house, to hire a full-time or a part-time person To handle it, or what have you seen?

Speaker 3: 23:14

Yeah, you know that's such an absolute loaded question, and one thing that I've learned in my experience of doing conferences is that people sometimes take what I'm about to say and they take it as the holy grail. At least when I teach conferences, they do this and then they do it. And then they call me six months or a year later and then yell at me and say you lie, you're full of it. So I try to walk delicately about this. So if anyone comes to me later and says or to you and says you know your guest lied to me.

Speaker 3: 23:47

Let's take this as a grain of salt, right? Oftentimes we'll use trigger words where I'll say something like you know red cup? And that means like, remember red cup? I told you that this isn't the holy grail there's. There's things around it, right? But yeah, I mean when to bring someone in versus keeping outsource, again, it's going to number one, go to your strategy, right? Because if, especially with if you've dedicated your time to pay for click, let's just say and that's all you're going to do, then at some point to bring in a manager is going to be important, but then set the expectation is the manager going to manage the agency, pay them a little less. Is the manager going to take?

Speaker 3: 24:33

over what the agency does. Make sure that they have the right qualifications. Right, you need to look at case studies, just like you would hire the agency, you need to look at what they've done. And let me talk about case studies real quick. Start asking agencies for the worst case study. Ask them who is your worst client and why?

Speaker 3: 24:55

Right, I like to ask clients how do I get fired? And they're like what? Like we, you're about to get hired. Why? Because then if the expectation meets properly, where I know, if I don't do this, I'm out the door, right, but I would even reverse that when I hire people, how do you think you're going to get fired? Like, I'm hiring you so I don't want to, right, but where is that expectation met?

Speaker 3: 25:21

So, again, when you bring someone in setting the same thing the KPI, what is the expectation? Tell them this is what gets you fired. If you don't get this done, then I got to let you go because it's not worth it. So there's just a lot to that and I know I'm not giving you the real answer of this is when you do it, but I think it's different when you go SEO or website maintenance versus pay per click, versus. Can they do everything, but I think at some point, whenever the business owner I'll leave it on this when a business owner gets so overwhelmed that they're spending you know, I would call it again this is a vague number 35 to 45 or more percent of their time in marketing. They need to find some type of manager, some type of manager or fractional CMO to step in and manage that percentage for them so that they can focus on higher level and then only spend 15 to 20% on the marketing side.

Speaker 2: 26:20

Yeah, and I love that you bring that because I think I know when I think about this, I think about it more on the execution side of things, because that's just how I'm wired. My default is just I'm going and I'm just getting things done, and one thing that I've seen in marketing is that you really need two very different kinds of people. You need the analytical minded person who understands data and can really go through that and make decisions, and really informed decisions based on all that data. But then you also need a creative mind who can create compelling copy, who can speak to your audience's needs, who really understands that emotional and creative side of things, and finding one person who does both of those things very well is extremely difficult.

Speaker 3: 27:09

It's almost impossible because you're almost talking about left brain, right brain, but there are a small, select amount of people that can do both and I would raise my hand and say I can do both. But I am definitely more of the analytical side of here's the data. But I understand how to communicate that data right Now. If you asked me to design something, I would be terrible. I'm not great at that. I'm going to go look at examples and be like this is the direction we should go, and then I hand it to a designer and say go, make this happen. But I understand the strategy and what we're trying to do within that. So I mean we could talk so much about just what you said, right, because I mean there's like probably 10 bullet points that I could write down and go through a few on that, right? Yeah, I mean you're talking about these different mindsets and again that kind of goes back to the coder versus designer versus strategist and what you're talking about. I'll leave it on this and we can move whatever direction you like, but when you're talking about the person that gets it done, now you're talking about the visionary versus the execution, right? So as a fractional CMO, I understand what the execution should be and the process, that if you are working, if we are working together, I'm going to look at you and say, go, execute. Here's the vision. But I understand how it should be executed and understand because of my background and experience and how long I've been doing it, which is over 20 years.

Speaker 3: 28:32

I know I'm relatively young, but over 20 years, being in my mid 40s there's something to say of. I've seen how it's executed. So I've seen what project managers have done right and what they've done wrong and the best way to do it. And it doesn't mean that I can give or always dictate the best way, because I'm always learning. But I can say look, this is a pitfall and I know you're going to fall into that pit if you do it this way. But you got to have that executor. And I'll tell you right now, as a fractional CMO, it's not my job to be an executor and I don't want to do it. I want to stay in my lane. This is what I'm good at. And then I've hired people around me that can do and execute what I either don't want to do or what I'm not good at.

Speaker 2: 29:15

Yeah, and that's. You know, the more conversations like this I have, the more that I see is just everything is so layered and interweaves so much together. Because, again, as a business owner, it goes the same way that you're saying Business owners is the, you know, a lot of times has to be the visionary, is the visionary, but so many, especially smaller ones, they're also trying to execute as well and that's just not really sustainable, Like you have to be able to delegate a lot of that stuff off. And so the one question, one more question I wanted to ask you before we wrap up here.

Speaker 2: 29:55

You know, if anyone has been following us at Spotlight Branding for any amount of time, you're aware that we have like an anti SEO report.

Speaker 2: 30:02

We had like kind of this anti SEO stance for a while, and not that we've tapered off of it, but you know our whole idea around it was you know that's not where you start. You need a lot of supporting marketing to help make that sort of thing work better. But I know in our industry, especially legal marketing industry, the majority of marketing companies out there that's the service that they push first and that's what you know. Everyone says, oh, you got to do this. You got to have SEO. You got to make sure your rankings are optimized. Your ranking is okay. So for people who are going to try to add that to their marketing strategy, what is your approach to it when you're working with someone new, Right Like, do you, you know, do you go find a local company to do it? Do you find a national company to do it? You know, is it something that you even handle yourself in terms of you know, talking about the execution side of things? Like, where do you go with that sort of thing?

Speaker 3: 31:00

Yeah, so the first thing is understanding the core, and the core has really changed, and not a lot of people are aware of this, but if you think about this, is always a fun exercise, right? So everyone close your eyes and really process this, and I mean that in seriousness, because when you close your eyes, you get rid of distractions and you clear your brain to take a deep breath. So if you close your eyes, you take a deep breath. Here's what you think about. Think about how you did a search in 2018. How many words did you put into Google when you did a search? Now, today, when you've done a search, or you do a search after you listen to this or watch this, how many words do you put in? And, on average, the words have more than doubled and most of the words have transformed into language of how do I? So?

Speaker 3: 31:54

When you think about it that way, what I first of all suggest is create phrases, and we created internally, I created what's called a bubble map of keywords, and the bubble map of keywords are built more around blogs of phrases that we want to rank for, and then we want to work on that angle of these phrases we want to rank for rather than a keyword, because a keyword can still get a lot of search volume but a phrase gets a lower search volume. It's a longer tail, but it's a higher transactional keyword rather than a navigational or informative keyword, right, which is the desired content of the searcher. So you know, as a, for instance, if you Google fractional CMO, I don't show up in the top 100 of national ranking. But if you type in fractional CMO Dallas, austin, houston, oklahoma City, salt Lake City, boise, denver, miami, hawaii and I could go over 32 keywords that I rank in the top five. Top five If you use that term. And I know I've got CMOs out there that are chasing me because they want that word and I look at it and go. You know what I want someone that says local. So when you ask local or national, let me give you another quick story and a quick fact yeah, most big brands, when they hire a CMO, they hire from outside, not inside. So two on that and everyone go do your research. They hire big brands hire from the outside, not in their industry, to bring them in their industry.

Speaker 3: 33:36

So there's a double edged sword to that and the answer is it's more about the KPIs and the relationship that you can build with the agency and can they meet those KPIs more than is it? Is it if they know your niche or don't? It's more about what is what do they do? Because I don't specialize in one thing, I specialize in a lot, because I'm looking at what do we want to achieve and what are the KPIs, what are the measurable KPIs, and when we all agree on them, I don't miss that target. That's one thing I'm very confident. I don't miss targets and if I do, it's not by much, because I'm watching along the way as the arrow goes towards the target and I know how to redirect that arrow to get it to land where we want it to land.

Speaker 3: 34:21

So I think that answers your question in a little bit of a roundabout way, but it also gives a little bit more education as the key words and where they've tailed off to Right, yeah, I mean, for me, I think the biggest takeaway is just take the time to vet and set the expectations and really feel good about who it is you're working for.

Speaker 2: 34:40

Now I will say this people in our industry they take a lot of time to make a decision. Like, don't draw it out to where you're starting to miss opportunities. Like, you know, do your due diligence, absolutely, talk to different agencies and do all that. But you know, don't wait weeks and months at a time to where you start to forget these conversations that you had and it becomes more of a recency bias sort of situation rather than you know getting the right solution from the information that you gathered.

Speaker 3: 35:11

Right. But on that right we're saying the same thing Internally set your KPIs, set your expectations internally first. Then when you interview the agency, pull the trigger. What today's market they say hire fast, fire faster. So I hope this doesn't go against your philosophy, but I would say get those short term contracts, get that three or four months. In my professional opinion I look and I even do a four month engagement and then after that it's a 45 day cancellation so they can get rid of me very quickly if they choose to.

Speaker 3: 35:44

If I'm not hitting the cusp and there are clients that I'll tell you right now that I will disengage with because either personality disagreement or vision disagreement or KPI being unrealistic, I'll back out and say look, I'll do respect. I want you to go somewhere and spend your money where it's wise. So take off. You know what I mean. I'll make a smooth transition. I'll hand everything over. You know I'll make sure that everything's there. I'll answer your questions up to a point, but I'll say this is what we got done, this is where we're at. Here's the handoff, here's the baton. But, yeah, make, set your KPIs right. I mean, know what you want to achieve and what's realistic, interview the person and move forward Right.

Speaker 2: 36:26

Yeah, and more often than not, like you still make progress, you still, you know, get forward a little bit and, worst case scenario, you walk away with the knowledge of hey, ok, this isn't for me, this doesn't work, I can go try something else now. And so you know, definitely, you know, sitting around trying to think of a decision to make isn't helping. You know. You got to make those fast decisions and learn something at the very least along the way. Before we wrap up here, tell everyone how they can get in touch with you, learn more, and also to check out the book that you mentioned.

Speaker 3: 37:01

Yeah, so my book is on my website and I would encourage everybody to first Google fractional CMO and put in your city that's near you See if I show up. But my main website is jrcmocom, so that's Josh Ramsey, chief marketing officercom. So jrcmocom. On there there's everything that's unique. There's a book download, there's free information. I have the world's largest SEO library that I've compiled. It has somewhere over 160 different strategies that you can implement or research.

Speaker 3: 37:35

I have just a ton of information. And then my call to action is I work with people for free for at least the first two hours. I'll work with them for free to prove my knowledge, to prove that I have the experience and to help them get the right vision, because I do what Google wants to do for everybody and that is create the best user experience. Because what I've proven to myself and a lot of people that I know, if I come in and give you the best user experience and show you my knowledge and everything that I have to give you and I can point you on the right track, people come back. People will come back to me, learn from me, want to work with me, and I've seen that time and time again.

Speaker 3: 38:17

I picked up my biggest clients over the years just from that word of mouth of someone going yep, that guy's good, yep, that guy's got experience. Yes, that guy is ethical and moral and he's going to be honest with you. So again, jrcmocom is where the book is at, where other information is at. You can also, I think on my homepage it says, solve your biggest marketing headache, although we do a lot of AB testing, so you may show up and see it, say two hour free consultation or solve your biggest marketing headache, but you can always contact any way through that website and we'll get you set up with a meeting.

Speaker 2: 38:53

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean just sitting here and talking to you for the last 35 minutes or so, I can tell you know your stuff, because there's so many different rabbit holes we could have gone down. I mean this could have been a seven hour conversation just covering all the different areas of marketing strategy. So you know, I'm looking forward to coming back. Oh, yeah, we can. We can absolutely make that happen. So one final question here before we end the show if you had one final piece of advice for our audience, what would it be?

Speaker 3: 39:24

Man. Again, that's so hard because everyone is so different. But I would say, start with your narrative, identify in your narrative what's worked well and what has failed you. Then I tell employees and you can even use this with the employees I tell them, give me your 30 day, your three months, your six months and your one year goal and then go a little bit step beyond and give me your five year. But I think when you create this goal path, both for yourself, from your employees, from your agency, it starts to paint a picture of where you should go.

Speaker 3: 40:00

And a lot of times we live today in a narrative of we make choices based on our past and sometimes that's a fail point for us. So understanding the psychology of why we make decisions is really important. I feel like I should write a book about it. There's probably a book out there that I haven't found yet that's written about it, but it is psychologically based. Where we make decisions, we have arguments, we buy things all based on our narrative. So understanding where you've been is just as important as where you're going and why you're going to make those decisions. So I guess I would probably, at least for this conversation, leave that as a focal point of really drawing out your narrative, and if you haven't ever looked this up, there's something I think it's called the egg diagram or the egg chart, and you draw an egg and in that egg you write out the most impactful moments of your life and you do it with a picture rather than a word and you tell your story to someone that's close and confidential to you.

Speaker 3: 41:05

But when I did that for the first time back in 2018, I think, or 2019, I mean it blew my mind of the things I kept remembering and I left it on my wall for 30 days and it really helped me understand why I make decisions now, from my birth and my first memory all the way up and I think that can help both in business and in personal, because they all interweave and then you start to make better decisions based on understanding the hurts and the fail points both in your personal life and in your business life, and understanding again.

Speaker 3: 41:39

Trying to sum this up, you made a bad business decision. Why? Understand the why and the narrative of why you made that decision, back down to when your business started. Therefore, you don't make that decision again and I'm going to tell you right now I still make those bad decisions. Right, I look at it like I should not have done that, but when you have that chart up in front of you, you can then remember that narrative and try to make better decisions. So hopefully that's maybe a good stopping point for us. Again, I mean, that's a whole nother conversation to understand that as well.

Speaker 2: 42:13

Absolutely no. All of that, just absolutely great. A lot of great insight, and I know that you know I say this a lot. I know when I walk away learning things and with some new ideas. I know our audience gets a ton of value out of it as well, and so really do appreciate it and I appreciate all of you for continuing to listen. Please leave a rating and review wherever you're listening, if you have not done so yet. It helps the show grow and really is a valuable to get that feedback from all of you out there. But that's going to do it. Thanks so much for joining us, josh. Thanks again, thanks for listening. To learn more, go to spotlightbrandingcom slash center stage.