Scaling a Small Business Without Losing Your Freedom | Adrienne Wilkerson

What does it really take to grow a small business from two people in a tiny Alaska office to a 30-person, multi-state digital marketing agency?

In this episode of Small Business Pivots, host Michael Morrison interviews Adrienne Wilkerson, co-founder and CEO of Beacon Media + Marketing, a nationwide digital agency specializing in mental health and addiction recovery marketing. Adrienne opens up about the struggles of entrepreneurship—burnout, hiring mistakes, and control issues—and how she learned to scale by defining roles, building systems, and hiring for culture.

You’ll discover:

• How to scale your small business without losing your freedom
• Why defining roles (instead of people) helps break growth bottlenecks
• The importance of constructive conflict and tough conversations as a leader
• How systems and SOPs actually increase creativity instead of stifling it
• The latest shifts in digital marketing: why AI is the new gatekeeper, how to adapt with Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and why social media ads now outperform Google Ads

If you’ve ever felt stuck in the grind, overwhelmed by employees, or unsure how to pivot when the market changes, this conversation is packed with practical strategies and encouragement to help you push through the “messy middle” of business ownership—and build a company that lasts.

Adrienne Wilkerson: Co-Founder & CEO of Beacon Media + Marketing

Website: https://www.beaconmm.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriennewilkerson/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beaconmm

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beaconmm/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BeaconMediaMarketing

#SmallBusinessPivots #AdrienneWilkerson #BeaconMediaMarketing #MichaelDMorrison #BOSS #BusinessOwnershipSimplified #OklahomaCity #SmallBusinessCoachOKC #SmallBusiness #Entrepreneurship #BusinessGrowth #BusinessCoaching #BusinessLoans #Leadership #ScalingABusiness #DigitalMarketing #AIandMarketing #MarketingStrategy #SystemsAndProcesses #GenerativeEngineOptimization #GEO #SocialMediaMarketing #SmallBusinessSupport #BuildYourEmpire #BusinessCoach

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Adrienne Wilkerson of Beacon Media
• 6:05 From Wearing All Hats to Defining Roles
• 16:09 Clarity is Kindness: Creating Role Clarity
• 25:15 Pivoting Through Industry Changes
• 32:05 Systems and Processes for Creatives
• 45:16 Digital Marketing Shifts and AI's Impact
• 56:55 Book Recommendations and Final Advice

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, Welcome to another Small Business Pivots. We are over the 100 episode mark and we just continue to keep getting more and more guests from around the world. Today we have a very special person, but our listeners know that no one can introduce themselves and their business like the business owner, so I will let you have the stage to do that.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Thank you so much, michael. I'm really honored to be here today to talk to all of you guys. My name is Adrienne Wilkerson and I am the co-founder and CEO of Beacon Media and Marketing. We started at kind of the beginning of the whole inbound marketing digital marketing world in 2012, way up in April, alaska, and now we've grown to work with clients all over North America doing digital marketing, specifically in the mental health and addiction recovery space, and we've got employees all over the country and it's been quite a journey, along with digital marketing evolving and learning how to start a business. It was my second business that I started, but learning how to evolve from being a co-founder to a CEO and from going from just two people to 30 has been quite a wild ride and from all being in one office to now scattered all over the country in four different time zones and it's been a great ride. I've loved it and hated it and excited about it and cried my eyes out over it and lost sleep and celebrated.

Speaker 2: 1:31

I think probably most of you in the audience have heard that I can relate to that piece for sure.

Speaker 1: 1:36

Absolutely so. Listeners, we're fixing to introduce the show, but she said it's been a wild ride, so y'all might want to buckle up while we're introducing the show and we'll be right back. Welcome to Small Business Pivots, a podcast produced for small business owners. I'm your host, michael Morrison, founder and CEO of BOSS, where we make business ownership simplified for success. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. All right, welcome back to Small Business Pivot.

Speaker 1: 2:27

So you mentioned mental health and those are the clients you work with. So I want to touch on that a little bit, because I didn't realize the types of clients and I know that in today's times a lot of business owners are dealing with that. So I know you're not a therapist, but since you work with them, you might have some insights on that. But I first want to tackle. You mentioned the different roles and, as a business coach, when business owners come to us, a lot of them haven't even heard that. In fact, when I explain that, they're like I don't know what you're talking about. All I can think about is what Lucy does and Michael does and John does and I'm like no, no, no, no, take the names out. So can you kind of share from personal experience how important that is and how that has helped you evolve in two, from two employees to 30 plus.

Speaker 2: 3:06

Right, yeah, no, that's a. That's a fantastic question. I think I could write an entire book on on that in and of itself. But you know, when you're starting a company, especially, like I said, it was just me and my co-founder and I think we had maybe one or two people when we first started, but you wear every hat, you know, and, and for us, at the beginning of the transition from like, if you want to call it, traditional advertising to inbound marketing, especially in Alaska, it's like 18 months behind the rest of the world on a good day, Unless you're talking oil technology and then we're right up there with Texas and, you know, everywhere else. But we were.

Speaker 2: 3:48

It was something that was very prominent in the rest of the United States, but not quite so much in Alaska, and so there were no employees that knew how to do what we knew what we needed to do. There were great graphic designers, there were great writers, but nobody really had knew how to do this whole digital marketing thing. So it was so extreme for us that my co-founder and I at the time, we would literally learn how to do digital marketing at night and teach our employees during the day. So we were literally wearing every hat there is to wear. And so now, when I have, sometimes when we have challenges with employees, I'm like I've done your job, I understand what I'm asking of you because I've done this job. You know it's evolved a lot since I did it, but I you know, but I understand, you know what you're going through in this role. So, yeah, that was one of the things that I read Michael Gerber's book, the E-Myth, way back before I actually started my very first business, which was a graphic design branding business, and that made a huge impression on me, because he talks about that entrepreneur, that solopreneur that gets in. And examples in his book are the carpenter who builds rocking chairs and it was a great story and all they want to do is build rocking chairs and eventually they end up.

Speaker 2: 5:05

So the idea of that you need multiple roles with different focuses really made a huge impression on me. I am great at leadership, I am great at operations, I am terrible at books and bookkeeping and accounting, and yet I had to do it because we didn't have the money to hire an accountant and I, you know they'd say there's very few things, but there's certain roles you need to have. You need to have an accountant, you need to have a banker, you know you need to have, and I'm like I get it, but we don't have the funds. I mean, we started on a shoestring budget. It was just Jennifer and I's whatever we had in our savings at the time, which was next to nothing to start this thing, you know. And so it's like you just wear every hat.

Speaker 2: 5:47

But always in the back of my head there's like, okay, if we're going to grow, there's going to be a point where we're going to have to start identifying these roles and naming them and having people step into them. And I always pictured myself as somebody, you know, with 18 hats on. There's some book I read as a kid, some child's book, where this guy walked around with a gazillion hats. So that mental picture was always in my head that someday I'm going to have to start taking these hats off and giving them to other people in the company to wear. And those hats had names in my mind. It was accounting, it was legal, it was, you know, an operations manager. It was sometimes it was our blogger. I did all the blogging at the company for a long time. It was the graphic designer. I'm like, okay, I don't know who's going to wear this hat yet. So I didn't always have a name, but I had a role title that I was going to have to give these hats away. That visual helped me to be like somebody else is going to have to wear this hat at some point and so.

Speaker 2: 6:49

But it has always been a struggle for us to not think of roles as people but think of them as roles.

Speaker 2: 6:56

And especially once you get somebody into that role, the danger is adapting that role to that person instead of holding that person accountable to the role, and we fell into that a lot. That was a struggle and I would say it took us a long time to get really good at that, where we actually created role descriptions and accountability and what do we want this role to accomplish, and stopped talking about the role as a person, like you said, like Sally, as opposed to our bookkeeper, our finance manager, you know, and it was hard at first because it felt like we were being very impersonal and separating ourself from that person. But what somebody said recently clarity is kindness, and I was like man. I wish I had a better idea of that early on, Because I think a lot of the kindness that we did created more confusion than clarity. The kindness that we did created more confusion than clarity because we would okay, well, we want you in this role. We can't.

Speaker 2: 8:09

You're about all we can afford in this role early on and then the company would grow and evolve past that person and it was often a I think it was a disservice to the people to not have more clarity around the roles and not have some of those tough conversations. And so we would kind of couch those conversations and, you know, kind of like, well, we want you to grow into the role. Well, they'd already been in the role for a year and we'd already adapted the role to where they were at. And now then to try to grow the role and them was often, I will say it very rarely worked, so it would end up being very much more painful conversations later. And I think that's one of the big things that I've learned over the years.

Speaker 2: 9:04

Like, at the moment, that painful conversation doesn't look, feel like something you want to face, but it's going to be way worse later if you don't have that conversation now. And so I call it constructive conflict. Like it's better to have conflict when it's going to be constructive than later on when you've avoided it. And now there's very little that can be constructive about it now it's really just disciplinary, and that's never where most business owners ever want to get, especially small business owners, because we develop relationships with the people we work with, they become our family. We spend more time with them than we do our own family and so, like you, know their family. Oftentimes you know that if you fire them, wife's going to have to go back to work or something like. You understand the consequences oftentimes and that clouds our decisions, but oftentimes I don't think it serves the employee well.

Speaker 1: 9:59

Can Adrian, can I expand on that part right there? Because this is where a lot of business owners get stuck. So, first of all, they never know when to get their first employee and when they finally do, that person becomes that person that I don't know what we would ever do if Lulu left and I'm like, yeah, you're never going to hire another Lulu because you showed her how to do this and this and this and this. And, yeah, no one knows how to do all that. You trained them. So can we expand right there? What did you do at that point to have those hard conversations and transition into roles? Because that seems to be where a lot of business owners get stuck. They're like, well, it's just easier to do it myself and so true.

Speaker 2: 10:44

I think for me personally, part of it was when I realized I wasn't seeing my family anymore because I was working all the time. I mean, my son was, I think, going into kindergarten when Jennifer and I merged companies in 2012. And I mean I would work till six, seven, you know well till dinner time, take a half hour hour break, make dinner, have a few minutes, put kiddo to bed, wave at the husband and go back to work. You know, at the home office after I'd been at the regular office all day and it was there was a come to Jesus conversation between my husband and I where he's just like we don't see you anymore and he's like, even when we do see you, you're not here, you're not present.

Speaker 2: 11:31

And I never wanted to be that mom, I never wanted to be that wife, and I realized I hadn't talked to my friends in months and months. Some of them had gotten engaged and it was like I liked it on Facebook and that was about the most that I had done and it was like this is not the life I wanted. This is not why I started a business. I started a business to help people and, honestly, to have freedom and control, and I realized I had no more freedom and I had no more control. And that was a pretty serious wake-up call for me that I needed to start letting go of control, because it really was a control thing for me. It wasn't that I didn't have people that were capable, I just didn't always trust them to do it the way I did it.

Speaker 2: 12:18

And I had to come to grips and part of it was I had some really impactful mentors and coaches during that time that really helped me walk through that. To you know, coach me through. You have to understand this is there are people out there that will do it differently than you and it might be better, it might not, but it's just because they're not doing it like you did. It doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just different. And if you never give people the option to do it their way, you'll never see what they're capable of and they might fail and you might have to pick up the pieces again. But that's not the end of the world. You give them feedback and you train and you move on.

Speaker 2: 13:00

So I would say having those mentors and coaches in my life and that come to Jesus was all very impactful to be able to help me work through, because I'd get stuck in my own head. You know, and it's a small business, and you got your head down. You're just plowing, you got payroll to make, you've got, you know all these things and you're probably not taking home a paycheck, but you're paying everybody else. If you've got employees or you're barely making it, you're paying all the bills for the company and then taking whatever's left and it's really not sustainable.

Speaker 2: 13:37

And I think that's what I had to come to grips with is what I was doing was not sustainable. It wasn't sustainable financially and it certainly wasn't the lifestyle that I wanted. I was going to drive myself into an early grave if I wasn't careful, so that was so for me, it was kind of hitting that rock bottom, if you will, of just you know, really, things have to change. So, and even once I realized that it wasn't like change happened overnight, like it was a process and it was grueling and it took a while and it was having to trust people and then not be upset with them when they failed and had to give them the grace to fail and to give them feedback and to learn again. And it's not easy and it takes twice as long as doing it yourself. But if you don't train them and give them feedback and help them know and understand what you're wanting from them and what success looks like in their role, you're never going to be able to multiply past yourself and you'll be stuck in that place of that grind and that emotional like millstone around your neck forever. And so I think part of it is really deciding do I want to stay small and micro business and just me. Or do I want that freedom and do I want that control over my time? Maybe not so much you know what all's going on at work, but that control over my time. Maybe not so much what all's going on at work, but that control over my time.

Speaker 2: 15:10

And if you do, then you have to make some really specific decisions and stick with it, because it's not going to work right away. It's going to take a while, but that doesn't mean you failed or it was the wrong decision. It's going to take a while, but that doesn't mean you failed or it was the wrong decision. It just means you kind of got to push through that period where it feels like you're creating more chaos than solving anything. But that's just.

Speaker 2: 15:35

That's the middle. You know, they always say change is exciting at first, it's hell in the middle and then it's great at the end. And so that middle place, I think, is where a lot of us get stuck because we're like this isn't working I can do it better myself and we take back over and we don't push through to the other side, where it's actually now working and I can say after 13 years, I've pushed through and it is better on the other side. It is worth the hard middle part, but don't quit when you're in the slump. You got to stick with it until it comes out the other side.

Speaker 1: 16:09

It is worth the hard middle part, but don't quit when you're in the slump. You got to stick with it until it comes out the other side. Wow, you sound like every business owner I've worked with. This is truth. People, this is truth. We all go through it, even as a coach and having owned businesses since, for over two and a half decades now, every new business, we still go through it. I know it's coming, but let me ask so do you feel when you were in that stage we'll move on after this but when you were in that stage of rock bottom, saying something's got to change, and then you tried to let go but you still had control Would you say that the quality of people you were trying to find was not there? In other words, I hear business owners saying, yeah, but I can't find any good employees. Do you think it was the employee shortage or do you feel like it was you being the bottleneck, the problem?

Speaker 2: 17:07

being the bottleneck, the problem oh, that's a loaded question. I think it was both. As leaders, we always have to look at ourselves first and so, yes, I think there was a lot that I could have done better. I could have let go of control and not snatched it back. You know, kind of hindsight's always 20-20. As far as the employee side, I think one of the biggest things that I learned was to hire for culture first and train the skills. Now there's some skills you're just you need to hire somebody that's got the culture and the skills at some point. But when the culture's there, when there's a values alignment between the employee and the company or the owners of the company, almost everything else is details and that's going to work out. Might be bumpy, it might be messy, in fact it probably will be both, but that part can work out when you've got the alignment and got people that are as excited about your why as you are Now.

Speaker 2: 18:09

Granted, I think this is another trap small business owners fall into. Your employees are never going to be as excited about the business as you are. They're your employees. They don't own the business like you do. That was a hard lesson for me too, of like why aren't they as excited about as I am? They are, but you're giving them a paycheck.

Speaker 2: 18:30

This is a job. This is not their passion, this is not their baby. They did not sacrifice. They don't lose sleep over this like we do, and that's okay. But we as business owners have to understand that we cannot expect our employees to be willing to sacrifice at the level that we are. But I think business owners get a little disillusioned with that and get upset sometimes with their employees who are passionate but at the end of the day they don't have their life savings invested in this, they don't have their name on this and it's a different buy-in and again, that's okay. But I do think it's both. I think it is finding the right people, but sometimes, especially when markets are tight, hire for culture, train for skills. The culture piece is going to withstand a lot that the skills part won't, as far as business challenges and the ups and downs that just naturally happen.

Speaker 1: 19:33

One of my all-time favorite mentors. He was a coach to me. He said hire on character. Because why do we usually fire people Character? It's usually their tardiness. They stole something. They're on their phone all the time, Don't follow directions. And so I think that's great advice, Everything you said. So was there a system that you followed so you recognize you were at rock bottom. Something's got to change. You started defining roles, but how did you lay that out? Because most business owners still don't have money to hire an accountant and a designer and a blog writer to hire all those roles. So how did you transition into that? Did you have a system or a process, or got lucky?

Speaker 2: 20:23

I would say a lot of trial and error, a lot of mistakes, a lot of learning from my mistakes. I now tell my people the mistake is not the problem. Not learning from the mistake is the problem.

Speaker 2: 20:36

And that is very much what I experienced when making mistakes is part of business, it's part of life. If you're not making mistakes, you're not pushing the envelope, you're not trying new things. The problem is when you don't learn from those mistakes, when you're not willing to figure out what was a mistake, what can I do better next time? What part did I nail? What part did I miss? So I read a ton of books. I mean, I have shelves and shelves and shelves of business books. So there was a lot I took from scaling up. Um, that was a really good system. It was too big for us as a small business. I think it's a little bit more set to maybe medium or enterprise level businesses, but they do have, um, a chart in there. That's that identifies a lot of the key roles in a business and they have a place where you're supposed to write who's responsible for that role and they're like watch out, when you have a role that has four people's name by it or you have one person's name in like eight different roles. Well, that was what ours usually was and that was a really good visual eye-opener for me of like, okay, I need to start defining these roles and removing myself from certain ones. So that was a really good one. I read a lot of like I said, a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts, worked with a couple business coaches that helped me define.

Speaker 2: 22:06

I think one of the big mistakes that I made back then is I didn't find a coach that was more familiar with my industry, and that was hard to find because my industry was so new. There wasn't, and so I would try to adapt stuff from traditional advertising world. About 40% of the time it worked. And so I would try to look at other businesses that were similar to what I wanted to build and I'd literally go to their webpage and look at their staff profiles if they had our team tab and start to look at what other companies were identifying as roles. So I'd try to find companies that as near as I could tell on their website were like the next step or two ahead of me and I'd see what roles that where they were using.

Speaker 2: 22:56

And then the small business administration was a really big help for me. I would go to our local group and they would kind of help me develop some of those very first job descriptions. That was super helpful, but again, there was almost nothing that was specific to my industry. So that was one of my big challenges to overcome. That doesn't really exist now, but 10 years ago we were making it up as we went along, yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:24

I think most of us are, regardless. If the information is out there, that's great. Information, though, is to go check your competition that's bigger than you. You can even do that today for these smaller businesses and just see, okay, what roles am I going to need in the near future, that I should be start putting some money back or whatever to hire them, and I also wanted to clarify just a little bit um on the small business administration for those listeners that that's also referred to as the SBA, so they might see the SBA a lot more than they will. The small business. It's the same thing, and that's a great resource, because most of their stuff is free, and then, I think, don't they still have SCORE Are you familiar with that where they do the free coaching?

Speaker 2: 24:04

Yes.

Speaker 1: 24:04

Some cities have SCORE I think it's called SCORE. That's also by the SBA, so they have a ton of free resource. That's a great point. I forgot all about them. Um, so you're moving along and through this transition. The name of the podcast is small business pivot. So what were some pivots that you made along the way? Because you were in a new industry and it's like, oh crap, that's not working. We need to go do this.

Speaker 2: 24:29

Anything like that happen industry and it's like, oh crap, that's not working, we need to go do this. Anything like that happen Constantly. Okay, definitely.

Speaker 1: 24:36

Because we not only have business. You're listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is produced by my company, boss. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. Now let's get back to our special guest. What were some pivots that you made along the way? Because you were in a new industry and it's like oh crap, that's not working. We need to go do this. Anything like that happen.

Speaker 2: 25:15

Constantly Okay, definitely, because we not only had business pivots but we had industry pivots. So, like we had one, this one was definitely stands out very clearly for me and it's more industry specific. But I think all industries have their versions of this. So for us, when we were first doing marketing, I mean, facebook ads didn't even exist. Google ads were in their infancy. Now they're like standard, but Facebook didn't even have ads. So it was all organic content.

Speaker 2: 25:48

How good you wrote that post, how well your hook was. It was all based on quality. That's how you got followers, that's how you got engagement and all of our clients. You know we'd monitor all of our clients and how everybody was doing and all of our stats were, you know, doing this. But they were moving in the right direction and literally from one week to the next, everything started tanking. We hadn't changed a thing and yet our engagement was down. People weren't seeing our stuff like they were. It was just the very thing clients were paying us for was not happening.

Speaker 2: 26:25

From one week to the next, it was panic city. I mean, it was just scrambling to figure out what in the world happened, because at that point Facebook was not telling anybody what they were doing. They were still figuring it out too, and so we found, 18 layers deep, some memo that went out to Facebook employees. I don't even know how we found it Somewhere on the internet. We found it to Facebook employees. I don't even know how we found it Somewhere on the internet. We found it probably dark web. Anyway, we found it, and it was telling them that they were shifting to pay-to-play and you now had to boost your posts if you were expected to have anybody view them. And so they were literally saying that they were going to be basically penalizing people who weren't paying to boost posts. So this was even before ads came out, and so that was insane, because now we had to go back to all of our clients, because not only did they have to pay us to create the social media posts, now they had to pay Facebook to boost them, or what we were doing wasn't going to make any difference at all. So how do you go back and tell your clients from one week to the next? Now you got to pay us twice as much as you were last month or last week.

Speaker 2: 27:37

I mean, we thought our world was over at that point. It was just like, well, we did it, we figured it out. We had some great clients that were just like, well, that sucks for you and for us Pretty much, pretty much, yes. So we just owned it. We were super transparent with our clients and just we're like we're all figuring this out together, and we had some clients get pretty upset and fire us. Actually, many of them came back because they're like, oh okay, you guys weren't just blowing smoke, this is going on everywhere. Okay, you guys weren't just blowing smoke, this is going on everywhere. But that was one of the and we've had many pivots like that through the years with our industry, because every time Facebook changes or Instagram changes or Google changes, we have to shake up all of our services.

Speaker 1: 28:23

Which is more often now.

Speaker 2: 28:25

Way more often. And now AI, I mean it's like one day to the next, like we're laughing with QuickBooks from five o'clock one day to 7am the next. Yeah, and so we've had to do a lot of pivots. I think some of the role pivots have been some of the most challenging, where my co-founder and I had to, you know, move more into our lanes and identify what those lanes were. That's been really challenging as well, to think of ourselves in our role in the business and not as an owner, because an owner, you stick your nose in everything. You know you're the owner.

Speaker 2: 29:08

But if, in your role as CEO, I have different responsibilities and expectations and if I don't let my CMO do her job or my marketing person do their job or my client account manager do their job and I get involved, I'm not going to keep them as an employee for very long and they're not going to be effective at their job if I keep sticking my nose in it. And they're not going to be effective as they're at their job if I keep sticking my nose in it, and so it's hard to sit back and be like, okay, but have you called the client yet? You need to call the client. Have you called the client yet. And so do not micromanage and let people make mistakes, let people learn, um, and so, yeah, that one, that one's been very challenging, um, those kind of.

Speaker 2: 29:52

Again, you're almost keep moving back and farther and farther from your clients and from the day to day, because I used to know every single employee. I'd interviewed every single employee. I have employees now that I have never met in person and they worked for me, some of them for years, and I've talked to him on zoom, but I've never met him in person. And they worked for me, some of them for years, and I've talked to him on zoom, but I've never met him in person.

Speaker 2: 30:13

and that's weird from going, yeah that is everybody and being intimately involved in their lives. And we're we're still all pretty close, but it's yeah it's a real.

Speaker 1: 30:26

It's a real business now, so you got to treat it like a real business.

Speaker 2: 30:29

We had to grow up. Yeah, we had to start acting like adults here.

Speaker 1: 30:35

Yes, absolutely. Well, I have a. This might be probably a subjective answer to this question from many, but I have found the more clarity that people define their roles, the better employees they find, and, from my perspective as a coach, I believe that's because the great employees want to work for somebody that's got their stuff together. I don't want to go figure out your mess. Do you find that to be true or similar in your industry? Yes, if you find better employees, the more clear you are on their expectations, their role, their description.

Speaker 2: 31:12

Yes, and I think a big part of it is because we got the right people for the right job, and oftentimes, when we didn't have clarity around our job descriptions or job roles, we'd get somebody who wasn't at all qualified for it, and that was more our fault than theirs, because we hadn't done a good job of telling them what we were hiring them for, and so they would come in thinking they were doing this. We're like oh no, no, no, it's this over here and they're going that wasn't on the job description. I'm like, oh no, it was, but it was my understanding of it.

Speaker 1: 31:43

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:44

Not maybe an industry standard version. Maybe an industry standard version or that was the weird thing of when they read the same job description. I wrote. What they understood from what I said wasn't always what I understood from what I wrote and that was funky, like their expectations. So I got to the point where I would have people that were in a similar role in the company read my job descriptions before I put them public and go what do you understand? This means Because they would come back with stuff. I'm like you read that into that you know kind of thing they're like well, yeah, when you said this and I'm going, oh okay, I never in a while, just dreams thought somebody would take that from what I said. So having some of those kind of double-checked was really helpful.

Speaker 2: 32:34

Now with AI, oh my gosh, it's amazing. You can run stuff through chat, gpt or perplexity and it's making things so much faster and simpler. But having clear job descriptions, I think, attracted the right people for the right roles. Having clear job descriptions, I think, attracted the right people for the right roles and so they made for better employees, like you said. Yes, the better employees they tend to pick better companies. They're more qualified, they're more skilled. They've done this before. They've got experience, I think they can recognize sometimes the job descriptions. These guys don't know what they're doing, but now employees will vet you on a whole nother level than they used to.

Speaker 2: 33:13

We do a lot of recruitment marketing and this is what we warn employers is that your potential next employee is going to look at all of your social profiles, both you personally and your company. They're going to want to see if your culture is right for what they're looking for. They're going to look at your website Are you active? Is your website current? Does it look like something they can connect with? And this is the really fun one. They will go direct message on social media your employees and interview them to see if this is a company they want to work for. So you need to know what your employees are going to say about you, your existing employees, because people that are looking for jobs are looking for jobs in a whole different way than they used to. So by the time you get face-to-face with them in an interview, they've already interviewed you and pretty much done a background at least social media background check on you, and they've probably talked to at least one or two of your employees.

Speaker 1: 34:12

Yeah, those are solid points and I will share with business owners that say I continue to hear them say no one wants to work anymore. And yes, there are certain people that don't, but the majority of people you're talking about they don't go. They learned how to live without during COVID. They don't want to go through the trouble of working for a cancerous, toxic company again. They will wait it out until they find the right company. So that's what I found for those business owners that keep saying that, okay, so we've moved through pivots, we've got organized. Do you systemize anything like systems, processes, sops? Can you share a little bit on that of how a business owner, how important those are and how you got to that place?

Speaker 2: 34:58

Yes. So I, as a creative myself and as somebody who owns and runs a creative business, I was very anti systems and processes. For a long time I felt like, as often as our industry changes and shifted, it seemed like we were messing with our processes. Every other day I'd write a SOP and two days later it wasn't valid anymore. So it got a little discouraging to write those. But I was talking to an operations coach actually. But I was talking to an operations coach actually and he said something that really made me stop and think and really evaluate.

Speaker 2: 35:35

And he, just because I was complaining about well, we're creatives, the more box we put people in, they're not going to be creative anymore. And he's like you got it completely backwards. And I was like what? No, I don't have. You know, I've lived, this'm not, this is backwards. And he goes no, you need to switch your mindset. Because he's like the more you have solid systems and processes in place, the more creative your people can be, because they're doing what they you hired them to do. They're doing their actual creative job and they're not having to stress about how they do it or who does this go to next once I'm done. He's like it's all written out for them. They've got a box. They can be as creative as they want within the box, but when you don't have a box, all they're thinking about is the lack of a box. They're not thinking about what they get to do in the box. And that was like mind blowing for me to have to shift that mindset. And so we went all in on systems and processes after that and I have to say he was 100% correct.

Speaker 2: 36:41

So we use a system called Confluence. It's actually an Australian based company and it's an Australian-based company and they've built this kind of online. I don't even know what to call it. It's almost a database, but you can put PDFs in there, you can put Word documents in there, you can type things out, things hyperlinked to everywhere else, and it's got a great search function, and so that's where all of our systems and processes live.

Speaker 2: 37:11

So there's, you know, there's spaces they call them for each department, and within that they've got they can have all their pages and sub pages. And so now there's, you know, and then we can hyperlink between departments, because we've got stuff that'll start in graphic design, move to web and then have to move to social and then have to move to paid ads. So there's interconnected systems too, not just systems within. This is how you write a social media post, you know, kind of a thing. So that really was transformational for us, and what we did was we incentivized each department-ish. At that point that was like one person wasn't a whole department. We called it a department because we were trying to think like a more company To be big, you have to think big.

Speaker 2: 38:03

Right. So it's like we've only got one person doing paid ads, but you're the paid ads department. They're like oh, I'm a department. We're like.

Speaker 1: 38:12

I got a title finally.

Speaker 2: 38:13

Yeah, yes, and it actually was. It was powerful, it was effective and we're like help us build this company. What do you do every day? That is repeatable, and so we started having the team own their own space within Confluence and we would actually we paid for. We expect about five to 10% of our employees' times per month to be invested in education and helping us maintain their systems and processes for the stuff that they work on every day.

Speaker 2: 38:53

Because it's one thing if I come in and write a system or an SOP I only really know this much anymore but that employee who's doing it every day and is on the front line, when they get to own their own system and writing it now, it still has to get reviewed by me or now reviewed by their supervisor and approved because they could be totally out to lunch. But when they own what they're doing, there's a whole different level of buy-in that if I hand them this SOP and say this is what you have to do from now on, there's instant wait. You're telling me what to do. You're telling me how to do my job that you hired me to do. Why did you hire me then? Like they might not say that, but that's the internal dialogue that's going on. And so when you empower them to write down what they do every day, there's such a different sense of pride of like wow, look what I do all day. This do every day. There's such a different sense of pride of like, wow, look what I do all day. This is a lot, this is really cool. And you can reinforce that. Be like man, I didn't even know you were doing this, that's really cool. When did you start doing that? Like, oh well, facebook changed this or that, and so I had to adapt and do this and that. And you're like that's really cool. So you get to reinforce that innovation and that ownership of what they do every day.

Speaker 2: 40:11

And that was how we were able to actually now go back and document what we did, because there's no way me, as a CEO and a business owner, had the time to write all those SOPs Right. I mean, it was hard enough reviewing them and I'd go back. I'm like, okay, I don't even understand what you're talking about, you know. So there were moments of that too, of like, okay, facebook's clearly evolved, google ads is clearly evolved.

Speaker 2: 40:36

Um, but that was, that was how we actually did it, because at first, I was trying to do it all because I do like systems and I do like processes and I do like structure, which is odd for a creative. But that's part of what makes me good as an operations person trying to do it all because I do like systems and I do like processes and I do like structure, which is odd for a creative, but that's part of what makes me good as an operations person. Right, I can talk to the creators and talk to the engineers at the same time, so, but I try to sit down and do all the SOPs and I'm just like I hate my life right now.

Speaker 2: 41:05

I like systems, but I don't know. So once we empowered the people to do it and it was rocky at first people were like why are you giving me something else to do? And I was like no, we want to see what you're doing. We want to see how well you're doing it. You're succeeding at this job. It's not my role to come in and tell you what to do when I'm already seeing that you're succeeding. So I want to bring your expertise to this SOP. And when we reframed it that way, that shifted a lot of mindsets and we still had some that loved it and dug in and just took it somewhere I never even imagined, so far beyond what I could imagine.

Speaker 2: 41:44

And others are like no, just no, whether they said it to my face or whether they you could see it Right, or passively, aggressively, just didn't do it, yeah, so we eventually ended up putting a position in place just in the last few years, of somebody who actually owns. They are our systems and processes coordinator, and so part of their role is actually to be that support to the people that really struggle with SOPs. They might be really into their job especially the creatives but they don't think in terms of systems and processes and it kills their soul to have to sit down and write out what they do every day. In a system. We'd get some stuff back from creatives and it's like okay, you have a z, f, g, p, oh, and there's m, but none of it's in the right order.

Speaker 2: 42:44

Nobody could follow what this was, and so we did have somebody who's a very systems operational minded person to come in and almost just tell me what you do every day. Yeah, tell me how you do this and be able to document it and then organize it and and make it something that somebody else could follow. Um, and that's part of how we did it too. It's like you want to take vacation time, we want to give you a vacation time, but if we don't have a system so that somebody else can cover you. You're never going to get to go on vacation.

Speaker 1: 43:20

And you're going to get phone calls if you do.

Speaker 2: 43:22

Right, you're never really going to be able to go, and we want you to go. We want you to be able to go and we want you to go. We want you to be able to take down time. You work hard. We want you to be able to have time with your family, but we need to know what you do, so that also, you're not having to come back to a huge mess and stress the whole time you're on vacation.

Speaker 1: 43:38

Yeah, that's uh. You shared some golden nuggets there, and I want to pull out two of those bullet points because so many business owners just don't have the time for that. And so one of my great friends, he wrote a top seller book called Systemology Systemology. His name's David Jennings. It was forwarded by Michael Gerber of the E-Myth and he at the time of this. Recording his new book actually comes out tomorrow, which I got a proofread before it came out. Recording his new book actually comes out tomorrow, which I got a proofread before it came out.

Speaker 1: 44:11

And so he talks about a systems champion, which is exactly what you're doing. Let someone else be in charge of that. They don't have authority, they don't hire, they don't fire, they just make sure it's organized. And that was the second bullet point you talked about was using Confluence, because there are several platforms out there. Using Confluence because there are several platforms out there.

Speaker 1: 44:29

If you're a business owner and your systems and processes aren't sticking, it's probably because you print them out, put them in a binder and it's on the coffee shop one day, or the coffee table the next day, the owner's desk the next. No one can find them. If no one can find them, they're not going to use them. So, confluence, but before we go, I want to make sure we talk about you, your business and marketing. So, um, yeah, tell us a little bit about your business, what you do, maybe some insights on digital marketing that can be helpful for business owners, because I know a lot of them are struggling right now with lead generation. Their websites aren't working. Almost your description of Facebook how everything tanked. Well, I know, with all the latest Google algorithms, everybody's websites are tanking. Do you got any tips that can help people?

Speaker 2: 45:16

Yes, so you're absolutely right. Website traffic is tanking across the board, especially if it's you know your traffic is your primary lead gen tool. If it's, you know your traffic is your primary lead gen tool. So some of the things that we're doing for our clients that we're seeing make a difference in. That is one you kind of have to start changing your mindset about the purpose of your website. It used to be the hub of all your marketing is what we would say. Whether you're marketing on social or doing paid ads, or content or videos or whatever, it all should direct back to your website. That is your lead gen hub.

Speaker 2: 45:55

That isn't entirely gone, but now what's happening, as you identified, is with AI, people are asking chat, gpt or perplexity the question instead of Google and perplexity or whatever is not necessarily sending you or sending your potential client to your website. They're not giving that listing. They're taking information from your website to educate them to give a good answer to the end user. So we have this blocker between the client or the potential client and your website as a small business owner. And the same thing's happening with paid ads, because people aren't going to Google as much anymore, so they're not seeing paid ads with used to be gold in the lead gen world. If you wanted leads quick, if you wanted to get people at the bottom end of that funnel, they are ready to make a decision. Paid ads, especially Google ads, was your ace in the hole. That's not the case anymore.

Speaker 1: 46:57

It's almost like there's a gatekeeper Back in the day. Cold calls, you got to get past the gatekeeper and it sounds like that's what's going on now.

Speaker 2: 47:05

That's a great term for it. Ai has become the gatekeeper. So one of the pivots that we're seeing be more effective right now is actually shifting over to ads on social media platforms, because people are still scrolling, whether they're doom scrolling or not, they're still scrolling right. So ads on social are becoming more valuable than they used to be. They, you know, used to be meta ads were nowhere near as effective as Google ads, because they were more awareness and branding ads, whereas Google ads were like bottom of the funnel, like I said earlier, like decision making, you know right then. But so we're seeing a shift there to we're getting a lot more direct traffic from meta ads, from social ads.

Speaker 2: 47:51

You know, whether it's LinkedIn or TikTok or whatever platforms you want to embrace, instagram is now being indexed by Google, which this is brand new. This just happened within the last couple of weeks. Google never used to index Instagram, so AI plays off of whatever Google does, because they're using Google's platform and Bing and all those to do all their searching. So now AI can essentially index anything that's posted on Instagram. They could do that in the past with Facebook and whatnot, but not Instagram. In the past with Facebook and whatnot, but not Instagram. So Instagram's power effectiveness has skyrocketed very, very recently. So it's become more than just a kind of lifestyle casual. Let's post some fun videos, kind of, or pretty pictures of me hiking, or here's my food. It's evolving now to become much more of a powerhouse.

Speaker 2: 48:48

So one pivot a company can make is to focus more on your social media ads than maybe you did on Google in the past. So that's one pivot. Another one is you need to think of the content on your website, your articles, your blogs, as educating AI as much as they are interacting with your potential customer. So the term that's emerging we'll see if it sticks is generative engine optimization, so GEO, which is confusing because geo-targeting was a term. So again, we'll see if it sticks. Another one that's emerging is AIVO, so artificial intelligence I forget what the visual optimization I think. So there's a lot of crap about it out there. We've got some blogs on our website at beaconmmcom, talking about how businesses can leverage and pivot with GEO to accommodate what AI is doing.

Speaker 2: 49:57

So the weird thing that's happening not weird, it's a natural evolution. But people will maybe ask perplexity or chat GPT what are the best five Thai restaurants near me? So instead of going to Google and searching for that. They're asking AI. So AI will give them a list now and may or may not link to your actual business. So then what happens is the consumer is then searching for you, usually by name. Consumer is then searching for you, usually by name. So they're actually looking up you know, thai Corner Cafe or whatever it is, because that's one of the ones that AI recommended to them. So then they're looking and they're going to your website to see. So they're still going to websites.

Speaker 2: 50:44

So you still need good user interface, good user experience. You still need to optimize what you want people to do when they get to your website. Is it call you, is it fill out a form, is it book an appointment, whatever that is? But your articles and your content need to be optimized for AI, and that's we could probably talk for two hours on that, which is why I say go check out our articles because we're talking about that in more depth and give you actual bullet points for how to adapt your content to get picked up by AI. It's so new and raw that we're slinging a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks, and anybody who tells you different is selling you something it's probably not going to work, tells you different, is selling you something, it's probably not going to work.

Speaker 2: 51:31

So there's a lot of people out there just like there always has been with the SEO that says we can get you to the top page of Google. You just do this. There's basic principles that are important, but there is no guarantee. It's this weird amalgamation of writing content so that AI wants to pick you up, which is answering questions. That's the number one thing. People don't search keywords in chat, gpt. They ask questions. So think about what are the number one questions you get asked as a business owner and answer those questions in your articles and blogs. That is the simplest basic answer for what can help make this transition. And that's been true in the past, but we also did a lot with keywords and all of that, and that's not going away. But we're adding another layer to it, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 52:27

Yeah, yeah, it's graduating. It's going into its master's degree.

Speaker 2: 52:33

Maybe a PhD at some point. Phd yeah.

Speaker 1: 52:35

Because, and for business owners I know a lot of small business owners haven't even dove into AI other than maybe ask chat, a simple question just to see what it does. But for those of you that are listening, this information could be changed in just two months or two days because it's moving so fast. So go hire an expert, which is my next thing for you. How do people get a hold of you? What can you do for them?

Speaker 2: 53:03

Absolutely Well. Like I said, our website is beaconmmcom and we're on all the social media channels. Usually it's at beaconmmmediaandmarketing, so two, ms, it's usually how you can find us on any of the social channels. We try to stay on top of this. For business owners, we try to talk about what's working, what's not about what's working, what's not. So even if you're just looking for good information about what to do and what not to do, we'd love for you to follow us. We'd love to ask questions of what you would like to hear more about, because we're kind of all learning together right now from that standpoint.

Speaker 2: 53:42

So we help small and medium-sized businesses with digital marketing. So that's Facebook ads, like I said before. That's Google. That's building out your website, keeping your website optimized as a lead generation tool. We do graphic design, so we'll build out your brand for you. If you're wanting to rebrand or update that brand, we do all of that stuff. We do all the social media stuff too, so we can represent you on social media. Make sure that you're getting stuff out there constantly and being in front of your potential customers where they're at, in a way that connects to them and really makes them feel heard and like they want to pick you, as opposed to your competitor, because you connect with them.

Speaker 1: 54:25

Yeah Well, I encourage all of our listeners to reach out to you. I know a lot about you and the company, so I know your quality and one of the things you said that was key and I will share this with business owners because they don't know. We don't know what we don't know. If any marketing company of any kind is promising a guarantee of any kind, 10x top of the, those are the people you need to stay away from. There are no guarantees in the marketing world. There are practice, best practices, there are things that we test right AB testing and do things, but if there's a guarantee, that should be kind of a red flag for you small business owners, maybe to find somebody else like yourself. So I always end with one last question and that is if you're in a room full of business owners, different seasons of business, different industries what is one applicable piece of advice, a quote, a book, anything that you could share that could be applicable for all of them?

Speaker 2: 55:25

I would say the two books I would, or maybe three that I would really encourage everybody to read. If you haven't read Michael Gerber's E-Myth, I think, especially if you're a smaller business or you're looking to graduate to the next size of business, that one is foundational. I mean, I've probably got a million books, but another one is Simon Sinek's why.

Speaker 2: 55:50

Because if you don't know your why, it's really hard to market, it's hard to hire the right people, it's hard to get your butt up in the morning every morning when times get tough, if you don't know your why. And Simon does an amazing job of helping you figure out what your why is. And then another one that I really recommend is either Reset or Switch by Dan Heath, and it's talking about change and how to affect change in your company, especially when change is hard, and they get really good into the psychological levels of how to motivate employees beyond just the stick, because that's usually where we go right. So change is the most constant thing we have, along with death and taxes. So these books have really helped me through the years in that evolution of really trying to affect positive change in the company and not lose my mind through it.

Speaker 1: 56:49

Yeah, great advice listeners. I encourage you again to go follow Adrienne, go check out her website and their services. You will not be disappointed. And, adrienne, thank you so much. You've been a blessing to many and a wealth of information.

Speaker 2: 57:03

Thank you so much, Michael, for this time. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 57:05

My pleasure. Thank you for listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is created and produced by my company, boss. Our business is growing yours. Boss, offers flexible business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. If you need help growing your business, email me at michael at michaeldmorrisoncom. We'll see you next time on Small Business Pivots.