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