Great Marketing Starts With Honest Numbers And Clear Focus w/ Joe Brugeman

Search is turning into a single question, ad platforms keep getting more expensive, and “going viral” still does not guarantee sales. So what actually cuts through the noise and drives growth for a real business in Charleston? We sit down with Joe Brugman, Director of Sales and Strategy at Media Beast Marketing Group, to unpack the practical side of modern digital marketing: what matters, what to ignore, and how to lead clients with honesty when the numbers get uncomfortable.

We talk about the BEAST framework Joe uses to explain what strong marketing looks like in the real world: budgeting, expertise, attribution, strategy, and transparency. That leads to the messy parts agencies and brands have to face, like why better cost per acquisition does not always mean you should lower spend, how to avoid novelty over function, and how message gaps show up when your culture and service delivery do not match your brand promise. Joe also shares a smart competitive tactic for positioning: read your competitors’ one-star reviews to find what the market hates, then build your differentiation around fixing it.

The conversation goes deeper with a nonprofit marketing sprint from Campaign In A Day, including lessons from building a sensitive, community-driven campaign for the Ari Foss Foundation. We close with a clear-eyed look at AI and marketing, from “search everywhere optimization” to why AI raises the floor but not the ceiling, and what marketers can do now to stay credible as the landscape shifts.

Subscribe for more Charleston marketing stories, share this with a business owner who needs a clearer strategy, and leave a review with your biggest question about AI, ads, or brand growth.

South Carolina Research Authority (SCRA) is a public, nonprofit organization that fuels South Carolina’s innovation economy by supporting technology-based startups, academic research, and industry partnerships. Through funding, coaching, and its investment arm SC Launch, SCRA helps early-stage companies grow, commercialize ideas, and scale within the state’s key innovation sectors.

King & Columbus is a full-service marketing and advertising agency based in South Carolina that helps brands grow through a mix of creative storytelling and data-driven strategy. They offer everything from branding and content creation to media planning, digital advertising, and PR—focused on delivering measurable results across digital, social, and traditional channels. https://kingandcolumbus.com

Transcript

Welcome And Sponsor Thanks

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, brought to you by the Charleston AMA and broadcasting from our friends at Charleston Media Solutions Studios. Thanks to our awesome sponsors at CMS, we get to chat with the cool folks making waves in Charleston. From business and art to hospitality and tech. These movers and shakers choose to call the low country home. They live here, work here, and make a difference here. So what's their story? Let's find out together.

SPEAKER_03 1:08

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, powered by the Charleston AMA. We're coming to you from the Charleston Media Solutions studio. Massive thanks to them, as always, for supporting Kama and the show. We've got to thank our sponsor, South Carolina Research Authority, for the annual sponsorship, plus King and Columbus for jumping in with us in Q1. Shout out, as always, to Jerry Feels Good for the Beats. I'm Tom Kepler. I'm founder of Obsidian Comms Content Coaching, ChooseObsidian.com. I'm thrilled to introduce my very special co-host today, Roland Speer. Roland, why don't you introduce yourself a bit and tell us who our guest is today?

SPEAKER_02 1:44

Absolutely, Tom. Uh like you said, my name is Roland Speer. I'm a graphic designer and brand artist here and the creative director with Charleston American Marketing Association. So I've been responsible for the fresh new visual update that we've been doing.

SPEAKER_03 1:59

Yeah, and beautiful Charleston AMA website.

SPEAKER_02 2:02

That's that's your doing, isn't it? Yeah, the the website, the uh the social media branding for each of our events, giving them all an uh a fresh new flavor. Um yeah, today is a a special, very special episode. We are joined in the studio by our very own Joseph Brugman or Joe Brugman.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Either one works. That's fine. Brugman. I don't hold anybody responsible for how they pronounce my name. It's like I don't either. It's my uh I don't worry about it, but yeah, it's Joe. Joe is the preferred, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 2:31

Yeah, you're the uh you're uh with Media Beast. What's your your exact uh position there?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

I'm the director of sales and strategy at Media Beast Marketing Group, which is a Charleston-based full service marketing firm.

SPEAKER_03 2:42

That's great. Uh let me read your full bio here. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

It's fascinating to me.

From Navy Nuclear To Radio

SPEAKER_03 2:46

It'd be fun to find out where you got all this from. You're a self-professed marketing nerd, communicator, and the digital Sun Tzu. Strategy wins, baby. It's your public speaker and a presenter extraordinaire with high business acumen, exceptional communication ability, pup uh people skills, and management, a teacher at heart, a relationship builder by nature, and a challenger by training. Joe, welcome to the show. We're thrilled, Dan. Thank you. That could not have been a better introduction if I had written it myself. You did write yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

No, it's that's the that's the LinkedIn bio, but a lot of that stuff is stuff I've picked up from uh my time working at Media Beast and my time working in media and also things that I gathered before I decided to move into this sphere of my life.

SPEAKER_03 3:28

That's awesome. It's a great door opener. I appreciate it. Uh we'd love to hear your origin story. Where where'd you grow up? What'd you study? What led you to Charleston?

SPEAKER_02 3:36

So what your most irrational fears are.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

My most irrational fear fist fear, just the one that on paper makes the absolutely my most irrational fear is ladders, and it's it's really it's true because and I worked on a submarine for a long time, so all the stairs are basically ladders, and but I have this irrational fear of really high ladders. It comes from an incident when I was four years old, and my mom was in the garage and she was fixing something in an attic above the garage, and I saw her start to slip, and then as she was slipping, the ladder fell over. And so I couldn't get up there to help her. So there's this deeply embedded fear of ladders. So it didn't make it deep though. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I'll fight a snake, I'll wrestle a bear, but if you put a ladder in front of me, you're dead. Good luck. You're on your own. I can't help you.

SPEAKER_03 4:17

Wrestling a bear comes right after the show, so be get prepared. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Yeah, that's what I was told we would have to do as part of the entrance exam for the AMA. But no, I started. I was uh I was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and I grew up there. I'm an I'm a military brat. And when I was 18, I joined the service and I wound up in the nuclear field uh studying here in Charleston. And then I went down to Kings Bay, Georgia. I did two back-to-back tours on ballistic missile submarines. So my submarine badge is right here. Yeah, that's my actual submarine qualification. That's important thing. Thank you very much. Thank you. And it's a they're very, very different fields in many ways, but there's some similarities that I'll get into when we get kind of to the end of the story. But I went into that field, and when I came back to Charleston, I was an instructor at the nuclear field A School over here, which is the big kind of it's over on the now what is joint-based Charleston, but then it was the actual naval weapons station. And I taught electronic fundamentals, and it's a very science and academically heavy community, and you come from a very rigorously academic community there. And I had the choice of do I stay in the Navy and continue this process and move move down this career path, or do I seek something else? And I had always wanted to be in radio. So I said, I'm gonna go into radio. I started doing an internship right before I left the service, and I actually got hired on as a morning show producer at a place that doesn't sponsor the Charleston AMA podcast. So we won't mention them. But I did some time in radio and that was fun. And uh I wound up leaving radio because radio is a compressing industry, and so if you don't have an advocate in the building, it's hard to promote into your own show. And whenever you see a job opening in radio for a morning show host or a producer or something like that, they kind of already have in mind who they're gonna fill that role with. And so they put the job out as kind of a courtesy, but I started to realize that if my advocates were out of the building, then my career was kind of where it was.

Why Media Beast Works

SPEAKER_04 6:05

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

And I decided that I wanted to get a little bit more acumen in terms of business and be able to better explain the things I was learning as I was working in radio. And so I went back and got my master's in business administration from Charleston Southern.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

And then I did an internship with the Harbor Entrepreneur Center, which is another Charleston shout out, that I wanted to learn more about how to grow small business. That's where I thought my passion was people who were wanting to do something good for their community with their business, but didn't have the business savvy because they had experience in their technical field. While I was doing that internship, I interviewed with Media Beast because they were renting space right there at where the Harbor Entrepreneur Center was located. So I had an interview with my boss that was eight and a half years ago. I've worked my way from junior account manager to account manager to director of sales. And it's been a wild ride because thinking about the nuclear community and how technical and how administrative that is, you wouldn't think there would be as much crossover with marketing. But understanding numbers, understanding data, having integrity with your clients, all of those things are things that I learned in the military. And then I've just taken them into the marketing world and used them to my advantage as best I can. And it's been a great opportunity with Media Beast because the company is small enough to where your skills can fit you into a place where you can chime, but it also has high enough standards in a way that I'm familiar with in the military that that was not an uncomfortable environment for me. And also wearing multiple hats is not an uncomfortable situation for me.

SPEAKER_03 7:32

So well, the possiorgy is of uh the possibility of meltdowns.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

It's uh the the joke is, and I will I will let you guys in on a secret about naval nuclear power, and this may or may not help you sleep better at night. Uh, the reactor protection systems are there to protect the reactor from you, not you from the reactor, because the human will make the bad decision, right? So the pilot, the plane is gonna do what the pilot tells it to do. And that's why when a pilot when a plane crashes, most of the time they say it's pilot error. The reactor will do what the people tell the reactor to do. And most of the reactor protection systems are there for when you tell it to do something very stupid. Looking out for that ID 10 T. Exactly, exactly. The ID 10T. Yep. And that was my job. I maintained and and worked on reactor protection systems. So I was always checking on things that made sure I didn't do something incredibly stupid. And I made it through the entire program and made it through my entire career with zero meltdowns, and we're good to go. So we'll take that as a win.

SPEAKER_03 8:28

That's great. And and keeping meltdowns at bay, uh that it's gonna be part of your your day job now, too, right?

What BEAST Stands For

SPEAKER_01 8:34

It's to some extent, yes. The there's not as many emergent situations. I don't get calls in the middle of the night to get what we call racked out. I don't get thrown into an emergency situation, but there are client needs. And so my my day-to-day now at Media Beast, I still wear my account manager hat. I still deal directly with specific clients that I manage their campaigns. And then the other part of my job is that sales director job. And what that is is determining is this company going to be a fit for Media Beast and what we do and how we do it? And do we have exclusivity? And that's one of the things we pride ourselves on. If we take on a vertical here in Charleston, we will not work with anyone else in that vertical. So we won't run two HVAC companies against each other. You are our HVAC partner, you are our roofing partner, you are our lawyer and whatever legal field partner, because we don't want the expertise to only, or we don't want the level of service only to be determined by budget. So we want everybody to get the full maximum expertise. So I still wear my account manager hat, I still edit Google ads, I still look at Facebook ads, I still look at Google Analytics every day. I'm still writing reports to my boss about the status of every single account, still hitting budgets, things like that. And then on top of that, when I can get the chance, I go out and I prospect new potential clients for Media Beast and see if they're fit for us. That's awesome. It's a it's a it's a busy day.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

So yeah, yeah. It sounds like the the the stakes are way lower. But um the the crossover of like the discipline, the competence, and you bringing this the safety stakes are way lower for sure.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Yeah, if I screw up at Media Beast, like nobody, no reactor's gonna melt down. But it's a weird thing because in an in an organization like the Navy, you do understand that you're a small cog in that organization. But in an organization like Media Beast, for a startup culture like that, you realize you're a big part of that wheel. Your mistakes can compound quicker than you think. So there's in many ways it's easier and in many ways it's tougher because you're much more accountable for every single thing you touch because you are designing the safety system as the company expands. So it's a great environment for people who want to learn and really understand uh marketing as kind of like uh an art and a science in terms of that, and really learn to prioritize. Okay, this is what the client cares about, and this is what we have to do as a company, and how do those two things align? So, but it's a great opportunity, and I'm I'm incredibly thankful for it.

SPEAKER_03 11:29

That's great. Now, media beast, that's a pretty bold name.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

I didn't choose it, it was there before I got there, but yes, it is a bold name.

SPEAKER_03 11:37

Yeah. Uh what does it mean to be a beast in today's media landscape and and what separates predators from prey in digital marketing these days?

SPEAKER_01 11:45

I I predators and prey isn't is is maybe not how I would phrase it, but we'll get to that in a second. I I always end when I'm talking to somebody and I'm giving my elevator pitch, I say, if you want to tame the media jungle, you need a media beast. And what it means to be a beast, we have a five, it's the word beast actually is an acronym. So it's budgeting, expertise, attribution, strategy, and transparency. And that's how we break down what we do to help explain to a client like this is our competitive differentiator. We're a beast because we're gonna start with the most important problem you have, and we're gonna solve that first with the best tactic and channel to solve that. And then we're gonna move on and hit your ancillary problems that we discover as we go. And so it's not about telling people we're the best marketing agency. I have two general rules about marketing and about the universe of marketing is I never speak ill of another marketer. Everybody's out here doing their best with what they got, and I never call the baby ugly. I never show up and see the campaign and go, Well, what idiot purchased this. Yeah. Because that's really an insult. People buy things in good faith. So to be a beast is to come in and say, we think, based on our experience, this is the best tactic that's going to work, and we're gonna deliver the best campaign we can. And we've got years of experience with that. And on top of that, the person that's accountable for your results, you're gonna have their phone number. You're gonna be able to text them at any time, you're gonna be able to communicate all the time with them. You have a direct contact with the actual person doing the job. And so that is putting your own reputation on the line is really what it means to be a beast in media in a lot of cases, where it's not a system or a profile or a product. It's the people that work on it. And then as far as predators and prey, I think one of the benefits that's coming up with how much media saturation we've had in our environment for as long as I've been in the business. There's always been new products and new cool hooks and things like that. I think the public getting jaded on the opportunity to buy advertising and realizing that everything is a marketing pitch is a benefit to honest and transparent marketers because it's going to trim out and filter out a lot of the people that don't actually want to buy marketing and they're kind of magpied to a shiny object.

SPEAKER_04 13:47

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

I don't want that situation. And I don't want to have to explain to you why this isn't something you should or should not buy. So there's actually fewer prey in the in the market for people who are predatory in their nature, but ultimately there's so many testimonials about I did this and it worked. You at the moment you sign a contract with a client, you are up against that benchmark of knowing that there's a competitor out there that can do that work for them.

SPEAKER_04 14:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

And so you've got to be honest. And so it's not, I wouldn't describe it as much as a predator-prey relationship, but in the case of what we do, you are clearing out a lot of fluff and you are getting to the real point. And small business, a lot of times, I see this all the time when I prospect clients, and I think you you guys probably have seen it too. Sure. They sell 10 things and they want to sell all 10 things, but then you look at their sales, and three things sell 90% of their 10 things. Yeah. And it's well, do you want to concentrate on these three things? Do you want to throw gasoline on a fire that's there, or do you want to start a new fire at a new vertical? Because one is way more expensive, and the other is something you've already got some momentum with.

SPEAKER_04 14:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

So help me understand your strategy. And that's when you start to have those conversations with a client. So it's more about being a beast in terms of like being honest with the numbers and where you are and where you're starting and what your rational direction is in your marketing than just I I would love to go into a client office and kick over trash cans and turn over tables and just I was I was hoping that's what you did. Uh, you know, if the if I'm a salesperson at heart, if the situation calls for it, I will body slam people. That's our next commercial. It's just is this your marketing agency? And Rob Macho man, Randy Savage, oh yeah, brother, and then I just power bomb him through a table.

SPEAKER_03 15:21

And then snap into a slim gem.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

And then I yeah, exactly. Yeah, snap into results, media beast, that beep taste. Love it. I could I I could never pitch that commercial in a million years, and I would never be the first. I I appreciate that, but that's more novelty than actual that would that would get us a lot of novelty. We'd get a lot of views, maybe not cite a lot of clients from it.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

Yeah, so that's a really great perspective, really inspiring the two rules that you mentioned there. Um yeah, that's that's one thing I love is like when we bring people together and they have that that abundance mindset. We're working together, we're not working against each other and just trying to get as much as we can for ourselves. We're all in this.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Well, and all of our clients are competing, right? So if we're sitting there, if I represent a company and let's say it's an HVAC or a home service business of some sort, something very bottom of funnel, right? I represent that company. Everybody that goes into Google and searches for that category search, there's a thousand companies fighting for the results on that category search. And all the marketers that are fighting for that category search have access to the exact same tool that I do. So to smack talk them and say those guys are the problem, they're the problem, they're the problem. I would rather say this is what I would do. Does our strategy align with what you want? And then we go into the formula because that beast mode, that budgeting expertise, attribution, strategy, transparency, that's a reporting formula for clients we have. But when you start with transparency, it's actually an auditing formula for clients we don't. So we work it backwards. Transparency, then strategy, then attribution, then expertise, then budget. Yeah. And you talk about budgeting last, as a sales rule, you talk about budgeting last, but it's really about developing value for the client. So when you're reporting to your clients, you start from budgeting because they're spending money. Make sure that you're a good steward of their money. And then you go all the way out to transparency of everything that's happened and you work your way through that process. When you meet somebody for the first time, I just like to tell them tell me your story about your marketing. Tell me what you've been doing, tell me what somebody said to you. What's working, what's not. Exactly. And then we start looking at the numbers, and maybe something they think was working really isn't. And that's fine. That's absolutely fine. You've got to be ready for that conversation, though. And that transparency and honesty in the sales call sets up a kind of standard of integrity and commonality between you and the potential client that helps them work their way through the rest of that process and decide if they want to work with us. Yeah. When you're honest on day one, when it benefits you nothing, people tend to look at that as a valuable thing. And I think that's a great thing for marketing. And I think the way the industry is expanding, it's going to go more towards that integrity because you won't be able to hide anything anymore. And I like that idea. Puts all of us on an even footing.

SPEAKER_02 17:50

So I love that. I did want to ask you. So I've heard that you can take the media beast out of the media jungle, but then you take the media jungle out of the media beast.

Budgeting And Transparency In Sales

SPEAKER_01 18:00

You know, my wife wishes you could. Uh she wishes I wasn't always prospecting. But yes, it's it's very funny. I I joked with my wife that my wife is a video editor and animator. She's a post-production specialist for a company in Chicago. And they don't do a lot of marketing, they do more internal corporate videos. But I said, You and I could be millionaires if we just took your editing skills and copied local commercials and then just re-edited them to make them better and walked into the business and said, Here's a new version of this commercial for a thousand dollars. She could do it in about five minutes of editing and we could make a thousand dollars off of that. So every night I go home, I'm going, I just look at her and go, Are we millionaires yet? And she says no. And I say, Your fault, that walk that hot.

SPEAKER_03 18:38

Yeah. Even if you just specialized in personal entry law, you know if good clerk, oh, and there's a there's a marketing agency for every vertical.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

I saw an ad on Facebook, and I this this has stuck with me for better or for worse. So it might have been an effective ad. It was a marketing agency for dog walkers, and I and that's such a vertical niche specific. But in the case of the the argument between specialization and generalization, I can see how they went after that.

SPEAKER_03 19:03

Oh, sure.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Because there's enough of those people out there.

SPEAKER_03 19:05

Well, in the return to office movement, I mean that that was a boom time. That still is a boom time for dog walk, right? There's a market opportunity in every decision.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

If you're willing to have a low cost per acquisition on dog walking, there's enough people who need their dogs walked.

SPEAKER_03 19:20

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

But is there enough of a competitive environment to sign four or five dog walkers in the same market that you're then now competing them against each other? So that's the that's the problem with specialization in a market, and as opposed to the problem with generalization, which is people want to know do you have experience working in that vertical? Yeah. So you know, you it's six in one, half dozen in the other. That's how it goes.

SPEAKER_03 19:41

So uh we you and I got to meet uh just a couple of weeks ago at the Campaign in a Day uh event, which which was sponsored by the Charleston American Marketing Association in in coordination with the College of Charleston. Uh, could you sum that up for our listeners? That was a cool day, Weblis.

Campaign In A Day Recap

SPEAKER_01 19:57

It was an incredible, amazing day. I got to work with two, uh, one's a junior and I believe one's a senior, Sarah and Connor. And uh they are wonderful human beings. They're gonna be great marketers one day. Both of them are incredibly stellar at what they did. Uh, and I got to work with Christy Boudolph, who is a phenomenal marketer as well. It was a it was an amazing day to do this. Uh, the summary of the day would would kind of go like this: you're given eight calendar hours or nine calendar hours, it was really closer to 12, but to come up with an entire marketing campaign for a nonprofit. Yeah. And all of the things that you've ever faced in marketing, it puts all those problems in microcosm and it puts them right on your plate at the moment you start. And I think you you would testify to this as well. All the things that you're concerned with, what's the tone of our presentation? Can we vary? What's our bandwidth as far as what we can do for this nonprofit that will stay within what they're trying to accomplish? And then in our case, the brief we got from our nonprofit was very general. And so we had to make specific choices, which I found a wonderful challenge because that's real marketing. When I work with some clients, they say, Well, what can we do to get more leads? And that's a very open-ended question. Anything you do should get you more leads, but it's what can we do that's most efficient? But they never put that most efficient part in there. They just ask you, what can we do to bring in more leads? Yeah. And so it was great for them to understand how to translate marketees into English, which is something we all have to learn how to do. And then it was great for them to work on a deadline. And I think they put out a really good, um, a really good presentation. We had, I would argue, the toughest nonprofit because tell us more about it. Yeah. So it's the Ari Foss Foundation, and I hope we tag them in this when we post this on socials. Sure. Uh it's a it's an amazing foundation. Ari Foss was an infant that was stillborn in 2014, and his parents have set up this foundation to help with some of the some of the financial burden for people who are facing what is arguably the saddest time in their lives. Sure. Because the if you think about the emotional shift from anticipating having a child, which is every parent, every single parent I've ever heard say, My proudest day is when I had my children. Well, you went from your proudest day to the saddest day of your life, just like that. Instantly. And so the last thing you're thinking about is, do I need to start prepping for a funeral? And you went from being potential parents now to funeral planners. Yeah. And that is such a hard thing to do. And so we had to approach this from a standpoint of how do we maintain that sensitivity to the topic? And then how do we give the respect to the existing charity that's already there? But they asked for higher levels of engagement and higher levels of kind of social awareness. And awareness is such a broad term in our industry that I didn't want to just say, let's just put the Ari Foss name on everything and you know, here's a koozie with Ari Foss Foundation on it. That doesn't create awareness. We're reading the story of Ari Foss, and one of the lines that stuck out was Ari never took a breath. Yeah. And so we came up with this TikTok campaign of take a breath with me. And it's just something simple that we all do every day involuntarily, and he never got one. And our idea was to compile all of those breaths into an amount of time that we gave back to Ari. Now that's the emotional content reason. The marketing reason for that is it's a very low barrier to entry to create awareness. How hard is it for you to stitch a TikTok video and take a breath? It's not. And so one of the things that's the hardest thing to do in the nonprofit space is how. You generate a big enough audience to create a small sliver that's willing to actually give some financial donation. And so that awareness is why you have the ALS ice bucket challenge. It's why you have the breast cancer walks. It's why you have all these things. Our thing was if you we could just get people to take a breath, even if they don't, people would see these videos and there would be higher levels of awareness. And then to move that into something tangible, that was how we would use that social media side. Then we created a virtual memorial wall where people could sign. So people who didn't want to say, because it's such a sensitive topic. I don't expect you to post a video about losing a child. That's so hard. So we created a virtual memorial wall where you could sign. We created a form for that. It was a functional form, and people could sign if they knew somebody, if they had experienced this them, had experienced this tragedy themselves. And a lot of that was another low barrier to entry way to get more engagement from the community. And then finally we came up with some audiences that are under-targeted for this, which is grandparents and family members, aunts and uncles, who now don't have because the parents are obviously in an incredibly tragic situation. Yeah. So who's really going to help them out? It's the family that steps in to help the parents that really should be kind of the principal donors and the principal givers in that campaign. And so targeting aunts and uncles, grandparents, little league coaches, educators, people who have sympathy for children by the very nature of their existence was the targeting and marketing level of that. And then we came up with some really good videos. Shout out to Connor. He made some beautiful videos. And what we came up with with a slogan was it takes a village to remember a child.

SPEAKER_04 25:00

Yeah.

Marketing A Sensitive Nonprofit Story

SPEAKER_01 25:00

And that really we thought that spoke enough to something common. It takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to educate a child. Well, it takes a village to remember a child. Yeah. And that commonality, it does it without leaning into kind of overly dramatizing what actually happened. And then Christy, hat tip to Christy, came up with all these beautiful letters for reaching out to organizations about how to ask for donations and how to get in contact with these people. And she structured all these beautiful outreach and PR pieces. So it was a really brilliant uh experience working with the four of them. And I wouldn't trade any of that, even though we didn't like how our presentation turned out at the end. That was the weakest part of our entire day was our presentation because we didn't prep as much for it as we should have. And our team would say that. And I would take that as my responsibility, as one of the that's my lesson learned for next year. Right. Is when I get the college kids in the room, work on your presentation now. Start start slide one right now.

SPEAKER_03 25:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

But the two kids who presented, Sarah and Connor, did a brilliant job presenting for what we had. They did a brilliant job telling the story. And I think the Ari Foss Foundation, when we sent them some of the ideas, apparently they were very touched by the scope of the ideas. And I had tip and give all the credit to Christy and Sarah and Connor.

SPEAKER_03 26:13

That's incredible. I I I was I was mentoring a competing team, right? And so so my my best interest was in in competing against you and and and your your wonderful team that pulled on the heartstrings so much for me. And it was just such an emotional moment. So I I would I would contest that your presentation was not strong because it was very emotional for me. And I'm not even a parent. Um so uh uh tip of the hat to you and to your team. You did a wonderful job.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

It was a it was a real honor to work for them, and hopefully the Ari Foss Foundation can use some of the things we did in their actual marketing moving forward because they're a small foundation, and hopefully it spurs the point of that was to help them spur their own ideas to continue on and do better for these foundations that make a big difference in our society and in our local community. So yeah, I gave something back with my marketing skills, which feels great.

SPEAKER_03 27:01

There you go. I hope we do that event uh again. I'll I anticipate that we probably will. And anyone who's listening, if you want to get involved, contact the Charleston AMA and get involved.

Brand Breakthrough Mistakes And Message Gaps

SPEAKER_01 27:10

That was and I got to shout out Roland for the graphics help because he was he was floating between the teams and giving everybody some help and creating that visual language. And in the world we live in, that visual language is so important. And we created one that was sober and uh honest, but not sad. Yeah, and I think that was really well done on your part in helping us with that, and it helped create the right amount of emotional pull without creating this overly uh I would say there's there's there's a fine line to walk there between cheesy and trying to manipulate someone's heart strings as opposed to telling an honest story about what happened. And it's so emotionally powerful just by telling what happened, you shouldn't try to overdo it. And Roland was a big help with helping us find that that tone.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

No, it was it was a lot of fun, and it was a privilege to be able to like go from team to team and stop it and just kind of like get a sense of where each team was. Yeah. And then like where their like at least graphic choke point was, and then like help the team and kind of get involved and like and create assets, make sure like the at least the the the assets that are created aren't going to be dragging down the campaign and and dragging down the presentation, making sure everyone gets that little that little boost.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

And I can tell you I was so happy when I walked in because the room that we had was surrounded by whiteboards, and I am because of the the Navy, everything you do is on the whiteboard. So I learned nuclear power on a whiteboard. So if I have a whiteboard and two colored markers, I could solve any problem in the world. So I was throwing markers at my team, like, write everything on the board, throw it all up there, and Roland walks in. And it looked like we were trying to find the map to the holy grail, like we were putting all the information. You just looked around this horseshoe of a room with multiple colors and ideas, and there's erase marks, and it looked like we were really trying to build a time machine in there.

SPEAKER_02 28:50

But it was yeah, for younger generations, for younger generations, it was like the Pepe Sylvia and me.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

It was awesome, it was fun though. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 29:01

Uh so you're uh get getting back to your your your day job here, not your volunteering uh core expertise. Uh you know, look, we're we're all fighting for attention here. What's what's the biggest mistake the brands make when they're trying to break through?

SPEAKER_01 29:15

Uh I well, I wrote this is the one that I wrote down multiple answers to, so I'm gonna read them. Novelty over function, right? A lot of people are trying to be creative for the purpose of being creative, not for the viral without any conversion, right?

SPEAKER_03 29:27

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

There was a there was a campaign a while ago, and it wasn't really a campaign, it was just a bunch of social media posts from a Chevy dealership, I believe, in New York, and it was a mock-up, a send-up of the office. And people were tuning in like it was the office because the lead girl was very funny. Yeah. And um, and I I gotta give it to them. It was brilliant. I don't know how many cars they sold from it, but I read an article that said we didn't really see too much of an increase in sales, but a lot of people want to come work for us. And in my mind, that's brilliant, that's great. But when you start looking at a campaign, what's the function of the campaign? Yeah, and so in some extent or to some extent, because it's organic social media, sure, you wanted to sell cars, but if you generate that much buzz, then it's perfectly fine because your your expenditure is time. Whereas if you're trying to put out a commercial that you want to actually convert customers, don't sacrifice function for novelty. There's still a lot of power in have a good call to action, have a good reason for someone to do business with you, and specify the problem you solve and why you're the best solution for it. Right. So if I was pitching Media Beast, I wouldn't just say we're a full service marketing agency. Everybody's heard of a marketing agency.

SPEAKER_03 30:37

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 30:37

It's I I actually did a parody commercial on our LinkedIn, and it's like, we're gonna make the phone ring for your business. We're not gonna do any of this corporate speak. We're gonna make the phone ring. Something simple, something that sticks. And then as you can expand on that, but that simplicity, I think, and that that sacrificing function for novelty has there's a line to it. You can be funny, you can be memorable, but it will also convert. And that's really where you kind of need to keep that that space. Now, the other things I wrote down was if you're if you're a brand and you're starting out, or if you're a brand and you're trying to grow, look at the weak points in where you can conquer competition, right? I tell people when they're starting a business, the first thing you're gonna want to do is take your 10 biggest competitors and read all their one-star reviews because that's gonna tell you what they're all doing wrong. Brilliant, but I love those. Take your 10 biggest competitors, read their one-star reviews, read what everybody's complaining about, then start reading their five-star reviews about what they do right. But I can tell you that if the industry is common, then the good things about the industry are gonna be common. If it's, let's say it's a lawyer. Why does a lawyer get a five-star review? They won the case, they got some money, they were always available. Availability and outcome, that's how lawyers win. Right. So the the how you came by that lead is important. But what you did with that lead and what you did with that case as an attorney, that's equally important because that's where you get the five-star review, which is essentially a recommendation to the entire public. Right. So across industries, a lot of the five-star things are going to be common. What makes a restaurant a five-star restaurant? Great food.

SPEAKER_03 32:09

Taste and service.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

Exactly. Like service will take your numbers down, but a lot of people will leave a five-star review and not mention service. They'll just say the food was amazing because it's a restaurant.

SPEAKER_04 32:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:20

And so uh there's a focus on, or that focus on what is right about your service. That's fine and good. And a lot of people work in on that, but it's gonna be kind of the same across the industry unless you have an incredibly differentiated product. So work on the one-star reviews, find out what you can do to be newer, better, different in a space that people are already familiar with. And then I also put uh what did I put down here? Oh, do message gaps. Okay, message inconsistency is really big. Yeah. So it's it's the simpler, right? The simpler your message and you can repeat it top down throughout the business. If you have a slogan in your business, if you have something that everybody should be saying in your business, everybody should be saying it. Yeah. And that's culture. And so if you have a slogan, you don't have a culture. You just have what is effectively like the appearance of a culture. It's a stage dressing for a culture. But if you have an idea that we are going to be the best at X, then everybody in your organization needs to buy into you're the best at X. And everybody needs to be working towards that goal. That's that commonality. And what a lot of businesses are scared to do is pick one thing that's X because they want to offer everything to everybody. Differentiate or die. Go after X, go after X hard. Be the business that does this better than anyone else. And people will find a way. People buy things emotionally, they justify logically. They will find a way to emotionally connect with whoever's the best at something. They like that idea that they're purchasing the best. It's an automatic value proposition. And when your message is gapped, when your branding doesn't look the same, when people answer the phone differently, when your service is different no matter what you're doing, when service is different between one employee and another and they don't buy into this concept, you have major message gaps that people don't psychologically acknowledge, but they know.

SPEAKER_04 34:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

And it does create an opening for a competitor to come in and steal that business from you. Because there's only two types of customers out there. There's the customers you paid for and the customers your competitors paid for. That's it. And so if you're paying for it with time, have a consistent message and have everybody buy into it. And then what's the final one here? Uh just message gaps and inconsistencies. Yeah, that that's kind of covered. So inconsistencies across the board. Uh, a lot of people have staff turnover and things like that. Create that messaging the moment they come on board, even if it's cheesy and it's it's cheesy sometimes. You gotta buy into it. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 34:41

Right. Buy into it. But focus on culture, not the slogan, right? Exactly. And and then culture can address that turnover issue. It can uh it can shore up those inconsistencies because everybody's sort of happy to be singing from the same hymnal, so to speak.

Hard Client Talks About Rising Costs

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Uh, slogan is not a strategy, right? So, yeah, like yeah, you're right. So if everybody you you go to a church to sing from the same hymnal, you go to Catholic church because you want the mass, right? You want the litany, you go to a Presbyterian church because you want whatever. You go so the the same reason we differentiate on other choices in our lives are the reasons we differentiate between businesses that we choose to do business with.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

And so that culture, that consistency, people will buy into that, especially when they already know your brand. They know your brand colors, they know your slogan, they know your words, they know your jingle, they know. And so they're just inviting themselves to become part of this experience. And the moment that experience doesn't live up to what you've pitched, that's when you've lost that customer potentially for life.

SPEAKER_04 35:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

And so that's what I would say is like as far as the the breakthrough, break through on culture and strategy, and your breakthrough will be legitimate. If you break through on a single viral ad, and then you can't keep up with the business that it creates, well, then you didn't really break through.

SPEAKER_03 35:52

Right. Or you go viral, but it's not making the phone ring. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

It's just, hey, that's a really cool ad. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:57

Okay. Well, cool ads are cool. Yeah, your dealership seems fun. Yeah, I I'm not in the market for Chevy.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

I love I love a good video on YouTube. I'll watch a lot of videos on YouTube. You're not gonna convince me to buy anything from those people, but I'll watch the video.

SPEAKER_03 36:12

So yeah, make it appropriate as well. I I had a boss once upon a time who always used to say, Nobody wants the funny pilot.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

Right, right. Even though I do love like a funny pilot, but that's okay. That's yeah. I understand that the seriousness of the of the mission or what they're doing should not be undermined by the tone of their brand. You know, it shouldn't be wacky's hospital.

SPEAKER_04 36:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Right. We want to be the wacky hospital. You want to be out of business, is what business is right.

SPEAKER_03 36:39

Yeah, absolutely. Um, what's what's the hardest conversation you regularly have with with clients?

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Oh, um, what I let me see what I wrote down, and then I'll I'll kind of make sure I cover that. So, okay, here's the here's the hardest one, and I'm glad I wrote this down. Marketing, I hope that didn't resonate through all the microphones. I slapped the table. Little slap A. I I speak with my hands a lot. I'm sorry. That's fine. Google, Facebook, TikTok, all of these things, these are products. They're channels, but they're products. And all the products in our economy are becoming more expensive. So every single client that I had last year had a reduced cost per acquisition over 2024. I made the phone ring for cheaper, but that does not mean you do not need to spend more because those product costs are going up commensurate with everything else in the economy.

SPEAKER_04 37:24

Sure.

AI Changes Search And Marketing

SPEAKER_01 37:25

Spending, if you're spending$5,000 a month this year, that's the same as spending$4,500 last year. Yep. And your your competition if you're lucky, your competition is buying into that at levels that they know some of them are scaling budgets just commensurate with interest rates. And they understand that this is a product as well. And it's been one of the hardest things because efficiency bites you in the butt. If you can reduce your cost per acquisition, well, my same budget bought me more leads. I'm sitting pretty. So, but you have to have that conversation of eventually you will be priced out of that market for that service. And then that's where you get into the ROI conversation of this phone call made you 20x ROI on what you spent on generating it. So we should buy more of these phone calls. And it's really transitioning from pitching myself as a results master on these are the phone calls we generated, this is how well our campaigns are doing, to a strategy master of now's the time to buy leads because they're cheaper and the price of leads is about to go up, just like the price of everything else. If you're a supplier of anything, the gas prices affect exactly how much business you can do. And that's totally out of your control. If you're sending things out into the world, gas prices affect your bottom line. Well, in the case of marketing, if you're sending things out into the world like marketing, platform prices affect your bottom line. That could be competition, that could be all of Porter's five forces for all of you who remember that crap from business school. Like all the external pressures can drive greater costs in any platform. And on top of that, there's structural changes to the way the platforms are being delivered that will increase costs for certain ads goals. And so it's one of these things where you can no longer afford to not have a reasonable strategy in place for uh to be ready for AI and to be ready for how search is changing and to be ready for how social is changing. So these are things it's it's a really hard conversation to tell a client because it means I'm or it it uh it implies I'm asking for more money. Sure. But in reality, I'm telling them the best strategy that it's money going back to what I said. If you don't spend this money, your competitors will. Yep. And they will buy your customers right out from under you.

SPEAKER_04 39:32

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

And so it's where you are in the market, what volume you want to be. And so sometimes that's a hard conversation. Uh the hardest conversations that are what you would think would be the hardest conversations are when my campaigns have a down month. But if you are honest with your clients, they can take bad news a lot easier. If you're if you've been going to the same doctor for five years and every day, every time you show up, he says, Oh, you're super healthy, see you next year. And then you show up one year and he's like, Well, I mean, I won't see you next year. Yeah. Where's that coming from? Yeah. What why would you wait? Why would you delay the bad news? So being transparent, telling them if there's trouble with the campaigns, telling them if you're struggling, then they know that you're already looking at that and you're not going to wait until they discover that their campaigns are slow. So being proactive in that, that makes that conversation a little bit easier. And that's one of the harder ones. But the real hardest one is understanding that marketing as a product is a product. Yeah. And therefore the channels are. Obviously, the strategy is not a product, but you can monetize it. But the channels themselves will increase in cost and complexity. And so we need to be ready for that. If we're not going to buy that channel, we need to have a strategy to counteract who is going to buy that channel.

SPEAKER_03 40:36

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

So that's the harder sometimes complex.

SPEAKER_03 40:38

Well said, this is sophisticated stuff.

SPEAKER_02 40:40

Yeah. So maybe jumping the gun. I know you've got a question about this later, but like, is AI making those channels cheaper at all? Or is making any part of this process cheaper?

SPEAKER_03 40:48

And if you want to talk about that later, we can we can nope. I uh now it's just as good a time as any. Let's talk about AI.

SPEAKER_01 40:54

Okay, I have three things I say about AI, and I'm gonna work them, and you guys I hopefully you guys will believe this when we say it. Uh, number one, AI is the worst it's going to be right now. It's only going to improve. Number two, AI is going to raise the floor, not the ceiling. A good idea is still going to win. So AI's ability to be a time scaler and a force multiplier for people who are already in the workforce is going to take one employee and make them able to do the job of three or four employees. And then finally, what's happening is the traditional marketing funnel and flywheel is being shrunk down to a single question. So search has become ask. So we used to say, I want to find a plumber near me. And Google would say, Here are 10 plumbers that decided to buy ads with Google. Pick the one you like. And then my job as a marketer was to make sure that as frequently as possible, my plumber was picked. Well, now people are going to chat GPT saying, I have water on my floor.

unknown 41:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

Okay, well, here's the valve, here's what you do, here's how you check it. And if you can't do that, here's a plumber. And here's a list of plumbers. And uh we where Chat GPT and large language models find that information is scattered across the internet. So now it's it's now uh search everywhere optimization as opposed to search engine optimization. So you've got to have some presence on everything. You've got to create credibility, which fortunately for a lot of what we do, the Google Business Profiles, things like that, they help in that process. But when you start looking at what AI is doing to marketing, the first thing is it's doing what Google did to marketing, it's turning everybody into a marketer. Everybody can go to Chat GPT and say, write me a marketing strategy. And there is such implicit trust, people will just buy into what ChatGPT says. Right. And I would say, yeah, exactly. I've seen ChatGPT say wrong things before, I've seen it do bad math, but there's so much implicit trust. That's the new frontier is breaking, in some cases, breaking or using the implicit trust in AI to your advantage as a marketer. And when your customer's having a bad month now, they can go to a device, and I've got ChatGPT on my home screen. They can go to a device, they can speak into it and say, I don't think my marketing's working. Here's what I'm doing. Can you suggest a better strategy? Chat GPT will answer that question.

SPEAKER_03 42:59

Always.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

And it does, it's not always a better strategy, but you had better be ready as an account manager and a marketing representative for your clients to answer that question when Chat GPT says, I would move money from Google into Facebook. Well, okay, but that's implying that Facebook will convert at the level of Google and find you the right traffic. And so you've got to be ready to have those conversations. So those three kind of pillars of AI, it will only get better. It will become more agentic, meaning like it's going to do more things without you having to tell it. So it's only going to get better. It's going to raise the floor, not the ceiling. Everybody's going to have access to kind of the minimum basics, no matter how stupid you as a person are. You're going to be able to do the base level AI understanding. And then marketing funnels have now become almost instantaneous through the concept of asking Chat GPT for something. They're still valuable, but all of that shifts. It's funny because with all this new technology, it has shifted us back to the days of Mad Men. And now we've got to be memorable in your brand strategy. So people don't go to the AI, they go right to your business. I want to go to Roland's plumbing as opposed to I need a plumber.

SPEAKER_04 44:02

Yeah.

Charleston Marketing Maturity And Pricing

SPEAKER_01 44:03

And so there's a lot more value now in brand strategy and putting the correct brand out there for the right reasons and solving problems and getting your name in front of people. There's infinitely more value out there as AI becomes more and more focused. And now ChatGPT is about to roll out ads. And it's, I've read what ChatGPT is doing with ads. Uh Google should not be worried just yet. But the fact that they're experimenting with it and they'll find a way to do it is substantial. Yes. And it's you've got the smartest people in the world working on this, and you go, oh, they'll never figure out how to add ads to Chat GPT. I'm like, why would they not? Right. They wrote artificial intelligence, which we've all been scared about since Terminator One. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:40

So intelligence and artificial intelligence working in their favor. How could we count them out?

SPEAKER_01 44:45

How are we going to sit there and say this won't? Because I guarantee you, two years ago, you said there's no way a program could respond in my voice to my emails. Well, I have bad news. Yeah. It can respond in your voice to your emails. Yeah. Sorry.

unknown 44:58

Imagine that.

SPEAKER_01 44:59

Yeah, it's crazy. So don't count it out. But for the marketer side of this, don't be scared of it, right? Adopt the tool early. The more of an early adopter you are, you maintain your credibility because you're not the person clinging to the yellow pages when Google shows up.

SPEAKER_03 45:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

So adopt the technology early. Find as many. Uh and there's a lot of good YouTube tutorials and things about the nature of AI. Before studying AI platforms, I would study the nature of what an LLM is. kind of levels of it from simple asking, give me this answer to workflows to agentic AI. Study all of that and be aware of what it is. You don't have to be a master at it, but just be aware of what it can and can't do because then you can start pursuing platforms that will do that for your clients and you can continue to be a thought leader in that process.

SPEAKER_03 45:41

Love it.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

So that's what I would tell marketers.

SPEAKER_03 45:43

Yeah. The second to last question uh and we'll we'll end with your coordinates and how people can get a hold of you. But we'd be remiss not to ask a Charleston specific question since we are the Charleston American marketing podcast. How sophisticated are Charleston brands when it comes to digital marketing and where where are we behind? Where are we leading the way?

SPEAKER_01 46:03

Well I was in Vegas a couple months ago.

SPEAKER_03 46:05

I'm sorry.

When To Invest In Brand Early

SPEAKER_01 46:06

And so I no it's okay. It was on purpose. Uh the uh I went there and I saw a digital marketing agency advertising on a TV screen at a Vietnamese cafe. And so I was like well that kind of market penetration isn't happening in Charleston. I'm not putting ads for my agency on a TV screen in a Vietnamese cafe in Charleston. It won't convert but they needed that level of brand awareness for their digital marketing agency which all fine and good. I think we are commensurate with other markets our size. I think we're a little bit more sophisticated and a little bit more expensive because we do have some big brand strategies in this market. And larger competitors are moving in large people with larger budgets. But what I would say is and I don't want to name names but certain brands in this market I've seen brands stand up that have stood up with a good brand strategy from jump. And that is pretty sophisticated. That is somebody getting a hold of somebody who understands marketing and saying what do I do before I start my business and uh but I've also seen a lot of franchises move in and franchises have their own problems with brand strategy and their own internal marketing. So I'd say we're pretty commensurate with other markets, but I like to think we're a little bit more sophisticated especially if you work with my agency. I like to think we're a little bit more plug. Yeah you're welcome. I like to think we're a little bit more sophisticated because we're a highly competitive environment and I also like to think we're a little bit expensive because some of the industries that have been established here your your uh personal injury attorney lead here is as expensive as Tampa Florida. I've run those campaigns in both markets and Tampa Florida is a much bigger market with many more personal injury attorneys. But to get a personal injury lead in this market was as expensive as Tampa Florida. So we are a little bit expensive for certain industries I think we're a little bit sophisticated. I think we're moving in the right direction with our move towards building a better tech environment in Charleston. I think we'll be better off with that. So great.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

Yeah it has like a little follow-up question based on something you said there. You talked about a product that was launched and like from the get go they brought on someone who had the expertise. Is it is it better to do that or is it will it work if you don't know what you're doing and you're bringing a product to market and you just sort of like scrapping it together as you build it okay to get to that point.

How To Reach Joe And Wrap

SPEAKER_01 48:17

So what hire some for for people in the the nascent stages of a business or putting out a product or putting out a website or something or creating some business entity at the very first stage it is more important not to get it wrong than it is to get it exactly right. Right. Because you can there's a little more play there. You haven't fully established your brand but if you go into a product launch or a business launch or anything with a fully fleshed out brand strategy that leads to the things we talked about earlier. Now you've got a culture now you've got an identity now you've got something that differentiates you automatically not just I'm the best ex. Right. So those two things are tied together. It's not as urgent in the first few months but the moment you go to hire another employee or the moment you go to expand, you better have your brand set because you're now about to bring in a culture whether you like it or not, you're going to bring in a culture and you're going to rely on strategy the moment someone else is working for you. And so before it becomes that point, before somebody's buying something from you consistently or somebody else is working for you, I would think it would be smart to have all those pieces in place. Gotcha front loading the development of decision making and the analysis and exactly and one of the things that I would specify and this is something we've recently brought out at Media Beast because we started off as very much a lead gen agency is having video as part of your brand. Short form video is king and that is something that you can do from the beginning to test out how your brand feels and I would recommend everybody do that. Be be playing with social media and be experimenting with how the public responds to your brand because branding in in to take the marquees out of it and speak English, branding is closing the distance between what the public thinks you are and what you think you are. And so if you think you're the best in service and whatever and the public doesn't, well branding is closing that distance. So start experimenting with how to close that distance and how to create those assets that will promote that and then creating that culture where that's consistent and longitudinal and creates growth based on that culture and that strategy almost on autopilot once you've got enough employees in the building and enough business going for you.

SPEAKER_03 50:18

Beautifully said I'm sure plenty of people listening want to would want to continue this conversation with you. How do people get a hold of you? How do people learn more about you and about Media Beast well you can go to the MediaBeast.com to contact us.

SPEAKER_01 50:31

If you want to get a hold of me I'm available on LinkedIn. That's the best way to get a hold of me I do most of my networking my online networking through my LinkedIn so that's B-R-U-G-E-M-A-N and I am that person it's Joseph Brigaman comma M B A on LinkedIn I just have to be that guy I'm proud of that achievement so I put it in there uh but then if if you can't find that then we can we can make contact to you through there and we'll we'll talk about what you need to do for your business.

SPEAKER_03 50:55

That's great. Joe thank you so much Roland a pleasure to co host with you my friend absolute pleasure being here. All right thank you guys I hope everyone has a wonderful day. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you soon. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 51:08

Appreciate it