Maven Marketing with Brandon Welch

Million Dollar Growth Right Under Your Nose

• Frank & Maven

Share episode

Send us a text

The Million-Dollar Growth Hiding in Your Business

Not every breakthrough requires more marketing. Sometimes, your next big revenue leap is already in your building—or your truck.

In this episode, Brandon and Caleb break down a real client case study where a small profit center became a million-dollar growth engine… with zero added ad spend. How? By asking the right questions and using curiosity as a strategy.

Inside this episode:

  • A real-world growth strategy uncovered in 30 minutes
  • Why the yesterday customer is your secret goldmine
  • How small pricing and service shifts lead to massive gains

If you’re looking for low-risk, high-impact ways to grow—this one’s for you.

Maven Marketing Mastermind → https://www.mavenmethodtraining.com

Get a copy of our Best-Selling Book, The Maven Marketer, here:
https://a.co/d/1clpm8a

Our Website: https://frankandmaven.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frankandmavenmarketing/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@frankandmaven
Twitter: https://twitter.com/frankandmaven
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/frank-and-maven/

Host: Brandon Welch
Co-Host: Caleb Agee
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy

Do you have a marketing problem you'd like us to help solve? Send it to MavenMonday@FrankandMaven.com!

Get a copy of our Best-Selling Book, The Maven Marketer Here:
https://a.co/d/1clpm8a

Brandon Welch:

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I'm your host, brandon Welch, and I'm joined by Caleb. You're not a taco, ag. Hey, you're not a taco. You're not a taco. But you know what? I've never met a person who didn't like you. There's a lot of people who don't like me. Oh my gosh.

Caleb Agee:

I'm sure there's somebody out there, but that's a sign I have in my office. Actually, my wife bought it and she didn't. When she had an office, that's what she had in her office and then I was like this deserves to be in an office, staring at people. So it says you're not a taco, not everyone's going to like you. Yes.

Brandon Welch:

Well, what are we going to talk about today?

Caleb Agee:

That's not your problem.

Brandon Welch:

I like it. Well, let's chip in here and get it going, because this one's called hey, by the way. By the way, this is the place where we answer your real life marketing questions so you can eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream. Just in case you didn't know where you were, this is the Maven Marketing Podcast and we have the Maven Marketing Mastermind, which is like the podcast plus. Yes, If you've got a business you are trying to grow, or if you have a person working for you that is trying to grow your business. Or if you have hired this marketing thing outsourced for years and you're not quite sure what's working for you and you want to get just a little bit better at it want to get just a little bit better at it.

Brandon Welch:

Or if you're just bored on a Wednesday afternoon and you want to hang around, caleb and I and talk about other companies or yours, and grow the Maven Marketing Mastermind is for you, for a fraction of a fraction of what you would pay to work with us directly and the team that is growing companies all over the United States using the Maven Marketing principles real life case studies Like we've spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and would you like to learn from that? Would you like to learn how to not make mistakes? Would you like to learn how to do what is working for you even better? We just get bonkers excited about that and the mastermind is going so well.

Caleb Agee:

It is. We're rounding. We're past month two now. Yeah, and that's pretty wild to even say out loud, but we would love to have you in the mastermind. Everybody's literally getting their actual answer, the questions answered. We're reviewing copy. We're reviewing ad plans, reviewing-.

Brandon Welch:

Entire strategy approaches for whole businesses. Yeah, like, how do I grow this wing of my business?

Caleb Agee:

Marketing strategy. We're seeing new ideas come for product lines and how to package your products and your services. It's really, really cool that happens. There will be two calls a month. There's a community of people who are going to help you grow beyond just the calls that you have with us, and we're building a bucket of resources that come up during those calls that you'll also have exclusive access to. Yeah, some exclusive trainings for Caleb and I. So go to mavenmethodtrainingcom. You can sign up there. You can read a little bit more about it. If you have any questions about it, you can email themavenmonday at frankenmavencom. We'd love to help answer your questions if you have any questions. Yeah, love it, MavenMethodTrainingcom.

Brandon Welch:

But until then we're going to talk about the million-dollar growth that is right under your nose, and I have a story. A few weeks ago we had a client that we love dearly. They're in a lot of different things. They're actually anchored to a nonprofit, which is even cooler, but they have a wing of their business that they do appliance removal. They have some trucks and they basically they kind of have some contracts where they'll come out and either take your old refrigerator or they'll take your mattresses, and we were just kind of looking at what the next year looks like for them and this little profit center of their business. I'm going to generalize some numbers here just to keep them anonymous, but it's around the six-figure mark, so let's just call it $100,000. Okay.

Brandon Welch:

And we're looking at what hopefully everybody is stopping at least once a quarter to look like is what needs to grow next. A lot of business and a lot of marketing ends up being just haphazard and like getting caught up in the motions, and that can happen to you, it happens to us, um. But we insist when, when we have clients on our roster, that we're at least stopping quarterly to look at what strategy looks like. And so topic of this was how do we grow this um, or this quarter strategy was how do we grow this profit center? Uh, that is kind of like their appliance removal thing.

Brandon Welch:

And so most marketing people like when you're in a marketing room talking about marketing, it's like how do we grow it? Well, we probably do some more marketing, but what you're going to do first instead of that is you're going to stop and say I'm going to put strategy first and say is there something I can do that doesn't include marketing that would grow my business? And so just to illustrate what can happen when you do that, we first looked at what would we have to do to grow without increasing the marketing budget, because 100 grand doesn't really support a whole lot of ROI.

Brandon Welch:

Now it is true you have to spend ahead of your revenue goals, you have to invest before you get it back. But before we did that we're like what can we do to just kind of improve it as is?

Caleb Agee:

As is yep.

Brandon Welch:

And so most marketing firms would either say, well, we've got to do a market study on that or we have to gosh, I don't know. We have to test something and see if it works. And I was like we have a marketing research department, her name is Riley, and so we fired up their three. Well, we fired up three competitors, that kind of sort of did what they did. And I said, riley, call these three people up and ask them what it costs to do this and this, and let's just check our prices. It's fair, right, we could have done that in other markets, we could have done that with some fancy GPT stuff. But dude, we have the numbers right there. It took her 15 minutes. We found out in 15 minutes that they were undercharging by 30%. They could still be the lowest price provider in the market, just by- by raising their prices 30%.

Brandon Welch:

And so we're like boom. So right there, $130,000. Just found 30 grand, 30 grand. Okay, that would pay for some fancy advertising for sure, and virtually no expense added right.

Brandon Welch:

So from there we said, okay, how can we expand our current offering? We went to the yesterday customer, which, by the way, we talk a lot about the today and tomorrow customer on this podcast, because, frankly, that's where a lot of people waste money. But where we start in our four walls is always with the yesterday customer. Yeah, and so we're asking who could we sell? How could we sell more to the people that already love us? Yeah.

Brandon Welch:

And we figured out they're kind of in the category of junk removal and so it's kind of an idea that had been maybe thrown around in the past. But I'm like, no, let's really look at that, like how much are we leaving on the table Because we've got the truck, we've got the guys, we have the insurance?

Caleb Agee:

You're picking up right now only two things, yes, two categories of things. Yes, what if we could pick up more.

Brandon Welch:

And frankly, because of the name they have for this service, they're really only getting those calls to begin with. And so I happen to have a project going on at my house right now and I needed some junk removed and I said, you know what, I'm going to just do a little bit of down and dirty market research. When this fellow comes out, I'm going to ask him hey, out of 10 calls, your last 10 calls, how many of those were just for one appliance or a mattress? You know what his answer was.

Brandon Welch:

About one and the other nine were junk removal Okay Meaning and, by the way, this is a big provider for junk removal services, so pretty safe sample size. This guy has been doing it a while. He's been out of my house a couple times. We could just extrapolate that there's probably 90% more business on the table If he's in the same pseudo category we're in. But he's doing other calls and he's getting 9 out of 10 of those are like actual junk removal. So take your $130,000, divide it by 0.1, and you get $1.3 million. Obviously there's work to be done here, obviously there's processes. But hey, before we lifted a finger on marketing, just asking how could we get more from what we already have? There is a true and real potential for a million-dollar growth in not that long a time for this little private center.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, yeah, and I think that's if we're capturing at this point. We're capturing one out of nine potential junk removal if we want to widen the category junk removal customers and to leave the other nine on the table. Or maybe they're ignoring us because we've put ourselves in this corner.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah.

Caleb Agee:

That just opens you up so much more with just a minor tweak to your service offering.

Brandon Welch:

Yes, so now, if we don't do another thing for them the entire year? And just because we got to that conversation, I'm not trying to make us look like heroes here, but I'm just saying how much money are you spending on doing things with complexity, with ad spend? And the only ingredient we had in this room was curiosity about 30 minutes of it. And then, like a couple days later, I was like just curious and asked the dude right, yeah, so now we could have just as easily called a to be maybe fair and not like grimy about it. We could have called a junk removal company in another market and said we're just, we're just, we're a research firm. We're just curious what percentage of your business is appliance only? We'll we'll share our results with you. We're going to call five of them.

Brandon Welch:

We'll share them back with you and see if that's maybe information we there's a lot of ways you could have gone about getting that information, but the best marketing decision was made from curiosity. Not clicks, not conversion rates, none of that stuff. It was just plain old curiosity. And so the question we have for you today is what kind of growth. Could you?

Brandon Welch:

find by just looking around for it. You are a research firm. You have an insane amount of valuable actionable intelligence at your fingertips and McKinsey actually did a study on this. 70% of growth could for the average company. 70% of growth could come from doing more with your current customer base, not new customer acquisition. Isn't that crazy? 70%, 70% and it's like that is pennies on the dollar for advertising. So ironic that a podcast about advertising and marketing is talking about not spending more money on advertising and marketing. No, Is that weird yeah, well, that's.

Caleb Agee:

Um, this is a maybe a crass example, but somebody was an older marketing guy that we talked to. He said his radio station called him, station manager called him one time said, hey, if I doubled rates, how many of your clients would stay on? He had several, several clients advertising on this thing and he's like, oh, you know, probably lose about half of them. He's like, okay, so I'd be, I'd be even on that, and he's, and he, he's like, oh, that's. But the reality was, yeah, if I double my rates and keep half, I've done half the work and I've got twice the inventory now, probably with half the salespeople and all that yeah.

Caleb Agee:

And so there are lessons. Now, that's a pretty dramatic example. I'm not saying go double your prices or anything like that. The market may not support that or you may tick some people off. Obviously, that's the reality. But there are ways. If you look around, there are ways to get a little bit more juice for the squeeze.

Caleb Agee:

There are ways to find efficiencies that you're ignoring, and a lot of times I would say we were talking about this, you know, actually, with our thumbnails, we were talking about how hard it is for ourselves. This is in our last episode, but a lot of times it's hard to look at yourself objectively and you need some outside eyes, somebody who's going to come in and say what about that? But what about this, what about that? And you are, you are so used to seeing everything you see, you're walking past that, that big pile of dust in the corner, that you just don't even see it anymore. You've, you've seen it every day and your eyes can't process it, and there are pieces of your business that you are ignoring that. If you will maybe let somebody else in, let them peek behind the curtain, they'll be like what about that thing over there? You're like oh yeah, I forgot. Obviously, I'm speaking abstract right now, so that it applies to everybody.

Brandon Welch:

But let's talk about some specific things you could do. Maybe you're not just able to add a service leg, but you could look at offers that other competitors are doing in other markets. And if you've seen like use the Facebook ad library, Just type in ads library on Google for Facebook and just type in the names of some companies and other markets maybe big ones.

Brandon Welch:

And if you've seen that ad running on Facebook. It probably means it's working. And just hey, is that offer maybe a good thing you could try? You can use Google Trends and Keyword Insights to find what people are searching around you. Maybe you're a roofing company and you're like we, do roofs, but a lot of people are searching for gutter clean out. Maybe that would be your lead into getting more roofs. Like maybe in the wintertime, when there's not a whole lot of roof replacement going on, you could sell Gutter cleanups gutter guards Just to pay your people.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, Gutter guards possibly. Yeah, Maybe you could look at just a competitive analysis and go, wow, am I a market leader here by looking at job listings that are out in your market? We actually do that. We kind of want to see where talent's moving in our local market. We keep an eye on those sorts of things. You could definitely use chat GPT Just say, hey, I'm this kind of business. I've been around this many years. This is my average customer value. Compare me to the national average, Show me what insights I might be missing and then give me 10 ideas for improving the key metrics in my business. Gpt would spit out something that would be like oh, I should probably do that.

Brandon Welch:

Maybe we could try that. I don't like this one a ton. I don't like misleading people, but if you were willing to pay for a good service from a business that you're interested in or that you could learn something from, maybe higher competition or similar businesses, similar home improvement companies Cullen, Rochefeller, 00,00 I will say a lot of. There was a really, really great HVAC company here before. We had a lot of home improvement business and I learned a lot from just their customer experience that we ended up consulting and taking to companies all across the US. They were kind of really innovators and how they were communicating and I was like I've learned some of that.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, you guys need to go get some of these tools and some of that. Yeah, I think the biggest lesson here is for secret shopping or for market research, for all these things. You kind of imagine this fancy big city firm like a research firm. Or you imagine some secret shopping. Like I have to pay a firm $10,000 to go drum up random people to do this and I'm not big enough because I'm a small business, I'm a family-owned business. I don't have enough money to go do all of this thing you do. You just have to be creative about how you do it and you'll find the answers to some of those questions.

Caleb Agee:

Now, I would not get stuck looking to the right and to the left, there's a reason racehorses wear blinders and you need to the left. There's a reason racehorses wear blinders, yeah, and you need to be aware. That's the dark side of this whole mindset is you need to be aware of your competition. You need to be aware for the sake of making yourself better. That's why we're aware, for the sake of growing our business, like, oh, they're doing that. I can learn from that, look at Steve Jobs.

Brandon Welch:

He didn't invent anything, he just said ah, these devices are cumbersome Intel's doing that.

Caleb Agee:

Oh, let's grab some of this.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, he just said this kind of sucks. I want to make it more beautiful. That is a good springboard, right. So what can you do to be the best option available in your market? Why you should do that. But also, just publicly available data is better. Yeah, it is. We grabbed a stat here from Forrester 68% of small business decisions can be improved with freely available public data. Manta is a great way to look across industries and figure out who's doing what man any more. Just plug it into GPT or Gemini and just ask them to find insights for your industry and it's going to save you hours and hours. But, point being, you are already a research firm. There's information available to you that, before you lift a finger to do more in the marketing and budgeting department, you could just find some pretty dang good ideas that would make an impact on the P and L. Uh, and then with that, it's always going to have something to do with your yesterday customer.

Brandon Welch:

That's always the more profitable one.

Caleb Agee:

That is the cheapest customer to get, because you already have them.

Brandon Welch:

Yes.

Caleb Agee:

It's already a customer.

Brandon Welch:

Uh, as Caleb says, you are not a taco. Not everybody's going to like you, but you do have a fan club that's already placed an order.

Caleb Agee:

That's right Bunch of taco heads. Caleb H.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, exactly so. So, yeah, guys, look around at your market. Just be doing this three or four times a year with your team, saying how do we be better? Just spend an hour? How could just look around our company? How could we make it better? Just spend an hour.

Brandon Welch:

Just look around our company. How can we make it better? Where's money that's easy to grab? Actually, I'm going to rephrase that Where's impact that's easy to deliver on? Just because you were already in front of the customer and you already have the talent and the people and the skills and maybe a little bit of resources, but just the willingness and the drive to be a good force for your company and the money will follow from that.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, and I'm going to take a quick sidetrack before we wrap If you don't have a dedicated set of time to work on your business, you are missing out, even if you're just a marketing director. I say just a marketing director If you're an in-house marketer-.

Caleb Agee:

God bless you if you're a marketing director, yeah, but especially if you're the business owner owner or leader you need to dedicate some hours every single week to spend on the business, to make it better, to write processes, to look at the things that need to be better and then go invest time into those things. They will not have an immediate result most of the time, but these are the kinds of things that you will realize a massive we're talking millions of dollars in gains, but more than that, you'll realize a better, more efficient, more polished, more valuable business from everybody, from your team, from the customers that get to receive the service and the products that you get to bring them. So make sure you set aside that time. These are the kinds of things you'll find when you do that and they equal big results.

Brandon Welch:

Love it. Confucius reminded us that he who asks a question is a fool for a moment. He who does not ask is a fool for life. Ask good questions, Stop question what you're doing and, if you want a little help, join the Maven Marketing Mastermind. See if we brought that back.

Caleb Agee:

Oh, bring it on, I like it.

Brandon Welch:

We will make sure that at least once every other week, you are stopping for an hour and a half to focus on your business and learn from other people who are doing the same. Last two weeks were short episodes If you couldn't figure out. We did a bunch of them in a day because I, by the time you're listening to this, I am celebrating my 15-year anniversary with Valerie. So I'm in a different part of the world right now. That's right.

Brandon Welch:

That's what you need to know. But thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for showing up to work on your business and make your business better for the world. I love what Tim Miles says about his work as a consultant. He's in our space. He says our job is to help good people find good companies. He wrote a book called Good Company you should absolutely get a copy of. But that is what we're doing here. I've never found a better way to say it myself. So thank you, tim, for that. But think about what you get to do.

Brandon Welch:

You are an owner-operated company. You have so much impact on your community and the people that live and work in your community and just by deciding to be a little bit better, you make lives easier. You make employees and team members grow. You make missions possible. You fund ministries and you're feeding the hungry and you're keeping out national and you're you're keeping out national and possibly international interest by being excellent. You are doing so much more than just the work you do today and it's our pleasure and our true joy to help you grow that and do more of that. So podcast our book, uh, the mastermind, all of that. That's. That's why we are here and we say this every week, but we will be back every Monday, every Monday, to answer your real life, marketing and growth and culture and strategy questions, because marketers who cannot teach you why are just a fancy lie.

Brandon Welch:

Have a great week.