Why Most Marketing Fails for Service Businesses | Ryan Chute

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this episode of The Profitable Creative, Christian Brim sits down with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads to unpack the psychology behind “externally triggered grudge purchases” — the unavoidable services customers don’t want to buy but absolutely need.

Ryan shares his journey from working in his family’s furniture business to becoming a partner at Wizard of Ads, where he now leads an eight-figure agency helping service-based businesses grow through relational marketing, strategic messaging, and value alignment.

This episode is packed with practical insight for accountants, contractors, consultants, and any business owner selling services people have to buy rather than want to buy.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

•  Why most marketing fails to connect emotionally 
•  The difference between transactional vs. relational businesses 
•  How fear, trust, and timing influence purchasing decisions 
•  Why service businesses must market differently than lifestyle brands 
•  The hidden role fulfillment and operations play in marketing success 
•  How to align business values with customer values 
•  The importance of empathy and competence in service industries 
•  Why “brand vs. lead generation” is the wrong framework 

Join our community of creative entrepreneurs and get a free copy of our No-BS Guide To Making Your Creative Business Actually Profitable delivered straight to your inbox. We’ll share smart, simple tips to help you keep more of what you earn—no boring accountant talk, we promise.  
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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:00.245)
is dark. Welcome to another episode of the Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Porter Ranch, California. I have this vision of a ranch, a horse, and a post office. I don't know, maybe it's bigger than that. But in any case, thank you for listening.

Joining me today Ryan shoot of Wizard of ads Ryan Welcome to the show.

Ryan Chute (00:30.892)
Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Christian Brim (00:32.845)
And I realized it didn't verify the pronunciation of your name. So I hope I got that right. Okay. I guess it chute wouldn't sound really. Yeah, that wouldn't make sense. so Ryan, I would love for you to share with the audience your, your origin story, how you became Gandalf the gray.

Ryan Chute (00:36.856)
Yes, right as rain.

Ryan Chute (00:51.402)
Indeed, yes. I started off in the world of selling and my family's been entrepreneurs their entire lives, my grandfather, father, parents, all had that entrepreneurial spirit. And so I grew up in the gulags of retail and and had to do all of the classic things that you might think that you do in retail. And it wasn't the most pleasant of of experiences, a lot of friction.

lot of transactional thinking and surviving and that's a challenge, right? And that was the challenge that I needed addressed in my life when I was a younger man. So as I evolved my careers and had the opportunity to meet Roy Williams, the Wizard of ads from Austin, Texas, he has a fantastic Academy and

in Austin, Texas, where he has a 16th century Spanish tower and all kinds of beverages to partake in thinking about things magically. We got to know each other and I became a partner with him in 2017. Well, that very first meeting, I thought I might be doing writing or those types of things. And I quickly learned that that's not going to be what I do. These guys are absolute

elite in the things that they do. I quickly transitioned into selling and strategizing for Wizard of Ads. And I've been doing that now for a decade. Now I run a eight figure agency out of out of that company out of that agency. And we effectively are helping mostly service based businesses.

Christian Brim (02:26.606)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (02:39.119)
Okay, so clarifying question, when you said you were in retail, what capacity were you working in retail?

Ryan Chute (02:45.646)
I started off as a family business, right? Furniture store. you know, from cleaning toilets and huffing furniture around the warehouse to selling, management, went to university and went through all of the administrative roles that you'd expect in the furniture store and then moved over to the corporate world for a couple of years to learn how the big boys are playing.

Christian Brim (02:48.505)
Okay.

Christian Brim (03:10.169)
So how did you end up with Wizard of Ads in Austin? Like what was that connection?

Ryan Chute (03:17.304)
Yeah, the late 1990s, early 2000s, Roy released three bestselling books and my father gave them to me as as part of the, you know, the things to read and learn about when doing business. And I'd followed him on the Monday morning memo ever since the early days of the Internet. We used to get his faxes prior to that sent into the furniture store. Right. So, yeah, it's it was it was something that I'd always followed because he's an incredible writer and really was able to kind of

Christian Brim (03:36.931)
Bye.

Ryan Chute (03:47.086)
move the imagination. In 2015, I saw that he was thinking about stepping back and thought, well, I'm just going to go experience this for myself and bought a plane ticket and a course spot and the rest is history.

Christian Brim (04:03.225)
So you didn't have any formal education or experience in marketing before you did this or did you?

Ryan Chute (04:09.474)
Yeah, my experience was on the ground real life marketing. was it was picking the radio ads, approving creatives, choosing the prices, doing all of the nuts and bolts of what you have to do to to market your business. And we fundamentally just kind of flew by the seat of our pants. And being that it was retail, it was a lot of transactional getting into the automotive space after that. My parents had sold their business and it was

even more transactional. And I was I was good at it. So I just kind of dealt with it as as part of the transition. Then I got into the automotive training space where we were doing both the marketing and sales training for companies all across the world. I was in nine countries through four continents, training all kinds of people how to how to do this while building out their marketing to run those events and and show them

real life how we sell.

Christian Brim (05:11.383)
Okay. So is, is wizards of ads, a franchise model or what?

Ryan Chute (05:16.27)
No, no, it's a partnership. It's a, it's a traditional partnership. We have a LLPs with Roy Williams himself, and there's 87 of us that each individually have an LLP with him. And ultimately we then collaborate together and use our teams as assets to service each other. They basically provide all of the accounting and training aspects.

Christian Brim (05:40.281)
So they handle the back office and then you do everything else.

Ryan Chute (05:45.691)
Pretty much pretty much. Yeah, and they do a fantastic job of training and and and you know creating a system and infrastructure that is absolutely second to none

Christian Brim (05:56.015)
So do they provide any other types of employees like designers or copywriters or any of that stuff?

Ryan Chute (06:04.098)
Yeah, we've found so Roy's very particular about who he brings on. he he's he's hand selected all of these individuals and he has people who are extraordinary graphic designers, people who are digital people. We don't have a lot of digital people. We tend to focus mostly on strategy and mass media. Our biggest, you know, I guess biggest mover out of everything that we do is our writers. Our writers are our

Christian Brim (06:31.843)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (06:34.202)
a handful, just a whole bunch of really, really brilliant minded individuals who are very artistic and abstract in the way that they think about things and produce creatives in a way that that kind of fits with what it is that Roy's teaching us about campaigns over cute and clever and the power of repetition and how neuroscience factors into the way we build our mass media decks and all of those other components that

that have us perform at an above average pace.

Christian Brim (07:08.847)
So you said you primarily work with service providers. Was that your choice or did you kind of just end up there? Like what was that decision like?

Ryan Chute (07:15.191)
Yeah.

Ryan Chute (07:19.214)
Yeah, I chose service providers. Having come out of the automotive space, I was a bit exhausted from from that space furniture before that. So what I recognized from those spaces was how hyper transactional they were. And frankly, how many of the operators were just absolutely terrified of of any taking their foot off of the the paper lead kind of gas.

that makes them naturally fairly twitchy individuals in the first place. And it's often driven by the OEMs that that are forcing these things down their throats. It's very hard to see the force for the trees when you're in that space all the time and being exposed to it. And frankly, they make lots of money. So it's really hard for them to to recognize that a relational play would be more, more effective. So spending time trying to convince them of that is exhausting. I'd rather

work with people who wholly and holistically rely on relational operations. So plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, insurance companies and other things that require you to have typically a higher average ticket, typically something that is not pleasant, like they're not choosing it. It's not an easy sale, right? The harder the sale for me, the more I enjoy it, I find.

And it's because you're coming from that weird space of negativity and we're trying to make them feel good about your brand.

Christian Brim (08:52.299)
Yeah, I have said this multiple times, but I kind of came back to it in the last couple of weeks, having some conversations about our industry. And the reality is most business owners view their accountant relationship similar to an individual views a dentist.

they don't really want to go, but they, know they need to go. And they're certainly not going to, you know, raise their hand to say, I, I need to find a second opinion or like, I mean, you just think about it personally, like, yeah, the dentist says you need a root canal. Maybe you might go see another dentist, but it's kind of like, I'll just, you know, bite the bullet and get it done. It's, it's, it's not a, it's not a,

I would say it's a negative sell and it's if that's what you're calling a negative sale, but it's primarily driven by compliance and fear of like, I've got to get this right for the government and I don't want to screw it up. But I just got back from a conference last week where I was talking about to a group of business owners about

You know, everybody has to have that stuff done, right? But the real power of the numbers is helping you make business decisions future, like, you know, or in the current, like looking at the numbers, learning the story that they're telling you, and then helping it advise your decisions in the present and the future. But it's like so much bandwidth in the industry is sucked up by compliance.

Ryan Chute (10:40.408)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (10:45.997)
that those conversations are rare and most business owners don't even know that that's possible.

Ryan Chute (10:52.43)
Right? No, 100 % and frankly, an awful lot of them don't believe it even it's even a real thing. A different way to frame the type of sale that we that I personally enjoy the most of the marketing that we do is externally triggered grudge purchases, something, something out some outside forces forcing us into this spot where we have to do the thing, whether we like to or not.

Christian Brim (11:19.833)
So like your HVAC, your air conditioner dies. You gotta get it fixed. Right.

Ryan Chute (11:24.396)
your accounting needs to get done. You can kind of do it yourself or right up to the point where you can't, right? It's as things get more complicated, so do the requirements for you to make sure you're in compliance.

Christian Brim (11:36.463)
Have you heard the comedian Nate Bergazzi? He's talking about the guy coming to replace his hot water tank. And he goes, yeah, I've heard it's pretty bad out there for hot water tanks. Like, you he knows nothing. I'm like, I'm that guy. So give me that term again. said externally. And why the word grudge?

Ryan Chute (11:39.63)
Love the guy. He's amazing.

Ryan Chute (11:44.878)
Thank

Ryan Chute (11:57.14)
Externally triggered grudge purchase.

Ryan Chute (12:02.956)
Well, because they don't want to write no one no one wakes up on Saturday morning and goes, Hey, honey, let's go buy an air conditioner. This week, we've got other things to do. Now everyone in the world is happy to buy themselves a shiny new car that makes them look cool. But there's no identity attached to to your air conditioner aside from your self worth of making a good purchase decision and keeping your family cold. These these are very low on the what moves the who gives a shit meter.

Christian Brim (12:04.759)
Okay.

Christian Brim (12:08.847)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (12:18.415)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (12:29.593)
Right.

Ryan Chute (12:30.126)
versus the car where the whole world can say, wow, you really have good tastes and are an affluent individual. You've seemed to have obviously not only kept up with the Joneses, but far surpassed And we believe that you're probably next to godliness. So this is what the human condition is seeking is recognition for themselves, their inner tribes, their outer tribes of their value and their worth in this world.

Christian Brim (12:56.451)
So, so phrasing it that way, framing it that way, it's kind of, it would seem to me that the compelling thing with your externally triggered grudge purchase is, is like not making the wrong decision, not, it's not an extension of yourself or a fulfillment of yourself. It's really more of the fear of making the wrong decision. Is that fair?

Ryan Chute (13:21.226)
Yes, in a number of different ways. Right. So there's there's three different times that you can make a purchase before failure, during failure and after failure. There's the wrong purchase in the sense of being taken advantage of, to making the buying the wrong piece of equipment to being sold something that you didn't need to be sold. All of these are factors that are that are have been rampant in home improvement and home services for decades. You know, the the

Christian Brim (13:34.702)
Right.

Christian Brim (13:41.187)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (13:50.826)
scoundrels that are out there doing questionable things.

Christian Brim (13:51.663)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (13:57.529)
So how do you tackle that problem then?

Ryan Chute (13:59.694)
First and foremost, we identify where people's values lie and and the value is disproportionately different than a belief. A belief is easily interchangeable. You can you can believe that justice and mercy are both valuable and are true in their truest of senses. But it really depends on which side of the table you're sitting on, you know, and it to be the to be the accused murderer, you want mercy and to be the the victim's family, you want justice. But what happens when the

Christian Brim (14:21.103)
Hmm.

Ryan Chute (14:28.814)
When the victim's family murders the murderer, all of sudden they want mercy. And this is the duplicity of beliefs. They're relevant and they're valid. They're true. They are right and they're virtuous. But that does not make them worth anything. It's because there's no consequence. So when we think about values, what are you willing to die on? What hills are you willing to die

Christian Brim (14:46.937)
Hmm.

Ryan Chute (14:58.456)
What are you willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the customer? That's what customers see as value in any business, regardless of what you're doing.

Christian Brim (15:09.519)
Okay, so play the, you're dealing with some pretty esoteric thoughts here. Bring that down to an HVAC contractor. Like what does the application of that look like?

Ryan Chute (15:20.152)
Well, sure. I'll bring it down to both an HVAC contractor and if I may even a marketing company. So an HVAC contractor, if we don't show up within the hour, we'll pay you $1 for every minute that we're late up to 60 minutes. So you're getting 60 bucks from us if we don't show up on time because we respect your time. Right? That's an example of taking a consequence in a marketing company.

Christian Brim (15:26.402)
Okay.

Christian Brim (15:40.399)
Okay.

Ryan Chute (15:46.53)
We actually kick back 100 % of the commissions that we get paid from all of the media companies, media sellers that sell us things. We do not take a single penny from something that will cost our customer, our client money on their expense. Why? Well, because when you are motivated to sell as much of the media as you possibly can to pad your pockets, then you're completely disaligned or misaligned with your customer's goal of profiting and growing.

So just because you win because you've said spend more money on your crappy paper click that we're managing on a subpar basis so that we can get the actual dollar amount up for you. That's what customers see and whether it's true or not, because there's lots of really great companies out there not doing that. But I don't know of any of them who say spend less, right? Particularly when they get more when it's attached to the to the expense. So

How do you grow? Well, you spend more. No, that's actually not true. We have a considerable amount of companies that don't spend any money on pay-per-click and are growing at 40 and 50 percent.

Christian Brim (16:58.959)
So what you're describing there is an alignment of values. this is what I value. I value my time or I value my profitability. And so you're lining the service offering up with or some consequence of getting it wrong with that value.

Ryan Chute (17:01.804)
alignment of values.

Ryan Chute (17:18.381)
Mm-hmm.

Well, there's there's three treasures that all human beings have three things that they covet and put in their vault money in the various forms, be it a paycheck or how much they spend on something energy. And that's ultimately the default that everyone is trying to protect or trying to feel better about something and not bad about others and time. Right. One of the very first things a person will pay us is their attention, not their money. And that allows us to access more of their energy and time.

Christian Brim (17:46.499)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (17:50.857)
if we're worth it. So time is a test.

Christian Brim (17:54.713)
Hmm. Yeah. Yes, that's very true. And I think about going back to the dentist analogy, you know, a long time ago, we were we were thinking, well, we'll we'll give you a free review of your prior your tax return, right? See what what the recommendations are. It's like, on the surface, that sounds fine, right? But an application like

Ryan Chute (18:03.022)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (18:24.047)
the time element and the energy element, it's like going to get that second opinion on the dentist, it just doesn't rise to that level. It's like, yeah.

Ryan Chute (18:35.766)
Right. That's exactly it. And and and that's the truth about everything. That's why so much marketing is absolute nonsense. Because you're not you're not breaking the who gives a shit meter scale right until you've busted past what matters actually matters in the moment of the customer. It's no different than like when I mentioned before during and after failure, and failure can show up in a variety of different ways.

that the the service department of a car dealership is far different than the than the sales department. Well, if if it's before nothing feels broke, then no one's going to be moved to do anything right there. They're not situation or problem aware of anything and they're they're very unwilling to to move. Then the second one is the the actual moment of failure with that now people are feeling stuff and it's all of sudden an emergency. Well,

Christian Brim (19:09.761)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (19:16.544)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (19:34.274)
That's where we're going to spend most of our budgets because why in the world are you going to try to convince people who don't feel like they have a problem to do something about the thing they don't know about or care about? Right. So as opposed to selling blue lemon pants, right? You can make somebody intimately aware of the desire to make your butt look fabulous. Right. And all you have to do is advertise that way. That's not how air conditioning works. Right. And that's what makes

Christian Brim (19:43.149)
Right. Right.

Ryan Chute (20:03.85)
not all marketing advice the right advice and most of it is towards ex internally triggered inspirational or emotional identity purchases.

Christian Brim (20:13.643)
Yes, yes. So where's the after in your externally triggered grudge purchase?

Ryan Chute (20:22.188)
Well done, right in home services. It's for the big sales, it's for the installations and replacement equipment. As an example, it's for the next sale, right? What marketing are you doing between the time that they did the purchase of a service or repair replacement install, whatever, through to the next time that they need it. This is a relational business. And most marketing companies spend their time doing give me more, put more money in my hand, like a man pet you as teenager, right? And and not

Christian Brim (20:33.772)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (20:51.724)
being charming or pleasing or pleasant. It's right. It's like it's it's no different than courtship, right? When we when we're constantly begging for the for the thing that that is the treat, not the not the reality, not the everyday, right? You have to fill it in with the conversations and the love and the care and the what's not in it for me, but what I can do for you that doesn't doesn't cost you anything. That's all of the stuff that we talk about in the after. And that's where the nurturing

Christian Brim (20:57.487)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (21:20.8)
That's what the relationship occurs and we often forget that.

Christian Brim (21:27.503)
Yeah, because it doesn't, you know, using, using the, old marketing mantra. Well, that takes time. You know, that seems like what every marketing person I've ever dealt with. So, you know, this is a long game. Um, and it's, it's, it's, it's really hard to attribute and, or draw an ROI conclusion on, right? Like I, I don't think I have, uh,

Wasted the most money on marketing out there, but I've wasted enough to have an opinion that's for sure and It's You know, I think the marketing I think marketing in general is Probably the hardest business problem to solve Because you're dealing with humans and human behavior and humans are unpredictable

And you're dealing with the you know, if you're doing marketing, right you're dealing with emotions which are also squishy Right and and so But I you know, the the conversations that I mentioned earlier Were Centered around a workshop I did with Christopher lockhead who is

Ryan Chute (22:27.469)
Thank you.

Ryan Chute (22:33.101)
Yes.

Very nice.

Christian Brim (22:57.697)
an old Silicon Valley marketer turned consultant that he's developed the category design or category creation model. and it's really, from his standpoint, it's really about identifying the market and then designing the product around it as opposed to, I've got this product or service, and then I'm going to go find, I'm to go market to the people that I think might want it.

And, you know, I think, as I've said on this show multiple times, I think the biggest problem to solve for business owners is having a clear idea of what problem you solve for your customer and the value of it, because that makes the marketing so much easier. Otherwise it's a lot of effort and not a lot of

necessarily payback.

Ryan Chute (23:59.478)
Yeah, it's like trying to start a start start a fire with sticks in the woods. It's it's it's just a fervent amount of of flutter and not a lot of flame. I've broken it down into into two kind of big buckets. And this comes from me not being a marketer doing marketing things. And the first one comes into the relational marketing model and

This comes from David Packard, who once said, marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department and wiser words have never been said, particularly when you hang out with people who do marketing all the time, who are just absolutely convinced that the moon sets and rises on the sunsets and rises on them. And respectfully, so sales is also like the salespeople are going to feel the exact same way. And fulfillment's over there going like, why doesn't anyone ever love me? Right? It's it's

The truth of it is that marketing is permeated into advertising, selling, and fulfillment. So marketing is difficult because fulfillment isn't in marketing, but marketing is in fulfillment. Because the people who fulfill need to fit the brand as much as anything else. The people who deliver the culture, know, if you deliver the culture, the culture will deliver the buying experiences is my perspective.

Christian Brim (24:59.62)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (25:06.958)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (25:21.73)
And that's all people, right? And then of course, you have to convince all the other people on the other side, those who you see as prospects to buy into what it is that you're presenting. So the second is your relational advertising framework. And I say relational because that's what I'm in now, not everybody should be doing that doesn't need to do relational marketing. They don't need to go back for the second sale. A roofer needs to show up.

in some sort of level of integrity, which is fairly thin in the the roofing world and and do a great job and the chances of them ever selling to that customer again are basically zero. Right. So the best thing they can get is a referral. And that's where the relationship really needs to end. They don't need to spend a lot of time in the follow up. So different marketing. Right. It's a different marketing, which is also a home service. Right. Roofing than garage doors or

HVAC or plumbing, right, where you're going to be showing back up in the customer's house periodically to somewhat consistently in HVAC where you have filters to change and system, twitchy systems, and it's the biggest piece of mechanical in your house and it causes problems and you have a hot area or cold area, you need to solve those things. So maintenance, right? Most people aren't maintaining their roofs, right? And if they are, they're

probably don't spend more than two or three years doing that before they realize they don't need to do that. So you end up having these different dynamics. So advertising is a big piece. Sales is marketing. Don't tell the salespeople this, but sales is marketing. It's all people. It's all talk. It's all communication. It's all persuasion, right? Marketing and sales or advertising and sales don't sound the same. One of the biggest lessons I learned coming in was what you say in advertising.

Christian Brim (27:04.899)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (27:13.346)
has very little to do with what you actually say in sales. And that's why most salespeople are terrible at marketing or advertising if we were to be more specific. But operations needs to fulfill on those promises. So that's equally as much marketing as anything else. So when you think about advertising, which is what most of the people that are on this podcast are listening to, it breaks into three buckets. And this is research done by Benet and Field, famously well-

researched individuals out of the UK, talking about the marketing mix in a different way. And it comes down to brand building and sales activation. Well, those are the messages that we focus on. And frankly, brand building and sales activation is lead generation. Those are the things that generate a lead. They are not the things that capture a lead. The rest of your budget has to go over to that spot where people go.

looking for what you what you sell or for you specifically because they like you and they want to buy what you sell. That's lead capture. So if we really look at the framework from a different perspective now it's not branding versus lead generation that you have to spend your money on it's lead generation versus lead capture and how do you spend that money wisely? Well 60 % of the messaging towards brand building 40 % towards some sort of lead

sales activation be it offers promos or or even just letting a person know what the heck you do and Then you have to be where people go looking right and spend that money wisely

Christian Brim (28:50.657)
Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think, I think what you're saying is, very intriguing because you're talking about perspective shifts. and that's, that's also what Christopher Lockhead was, was talking about is that, you know, you, you spend the majority of your, time talking about the problem and, and the emotion there.

And then you, you know, via a story paradigm, bring in the solution. And then at the very end, you talk about yourself and your product or service, but it's, it's really, that's kind of like the tail end of it as, and most people lead with, you know, features and product, and this is, this is what we do, but never talk about the problem.

Ryan Chute (29:32.938)
Yeah.

Ryan Chute (29:48.216)
Right. Yeah, or the pain that comes from that problem, frankly. And there's nothing more painful than an externally triggered grudge purchase because you didn't put any money in the wallet to spend on that. Right.

Christian Brim (29:50.678)
Exactly.

Christian Brim (29:59.713)
No, most households don't have a sinking fund. No.

Ryan Chute (30:02.924)
No. So it becomes this paradox of like, how the heck do we solve our customers problems and in respectful and ethical way. it comes back to those things that people value. And the first thing that people value from you is your empathy and your competence. They want to know that you're showing up for them, not for you. And then they want to be able to get it done conveniently based on what they define as convenient.

It doesn't get much more complicated than that in the very philosophical sense. It gets much more complicated as we start to break it down and get carried away, which is my nature as a rule.

Christian Brim (30:43.513)
So I'm going to pivot here for a second. building this eight figure agency that you have, what was the, what comes to mind when I say what was the biggest unknown that you didn't know that you had to learn? Like what, what was the like moment where you're like, shit, I wish I had figured that one out earlier.

Ryan Chute (31:09.57)
Well, I mean, there's the obvious one of pricing models and structures and what what true value we do bring to the to the table. And it was pretty astounding to see how much impact that we actually had. When you started to do it on the aggregate and see how it would actually affect revenue and profitability, but getting more tactical, you know, the biggest things

Christian Brim (31:14.009)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (31:34.83)
as I did the research and did the studying and and and push through all of the different ways that we look at, at branding messaging and structuring out the relational advertising framework. I came up with the framework I'd been in fields stops at at messaging, brand building and sales activation. And I always struggled with that. It just wasn't. It wasn't quite all accounting for everything, right?

there was a missing part on the balance sheet. And that was the infrastructure. When you set up a paper click campaign, it is neither a sales activation or a brand building, but it is still a cost on your on your PNL. So looking at it from an operator standpoint, which is really how I kind of put put the lens through of entrepreneurship, I don't look at it as a consultant, I look at it as, as a guy sitting in the seat, dealing with these things, and also having to pay payroll on

Christian Brim (32:03.907)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chute (32:33.206)
Friday. And the truth of it is, is like, No, no, I have these expenses. And like you telling me this, this fancy stuff about messaging is great, but that doesn't do anything. So I had to reef, reef, kind of have to work through it. And that took a couple of years, and I had a lot of pushback. And, you know, you're, you're, an absolute lunatic until you're a genius. And sometimes you never get to be a genius. So genius is only just spending more time with a problem than other people do. And I just spent more time with this.

Christian Brim (32:33.251)
Right.

Ryan Chute (33:03.118)
It's fascinating to come to that realization because that realization makes all the difference in the world and how I decide to structure out my business, how I structure it out strategically for clients and who we bring into the mix. We rarely bring our own digital people into the mix, so we're often using outside people. We're often using outside production houses when it comes to graphic designs or other assets, but they follow our creative directives.

So we do a creative brief and we go through the iteration process together. Ultimately, this helps us get a lot clearer on where the money needs to be spent and how much needs to be spent so that we stay on budget on task and get the highest result for the money being spent.

Christian Brim (33:51.627)
Okay. Can you dumb that down for me? I think I understand what you're saying, but I'll ask the question again. What was the lesson you learned there? And you, you, you started talking about pricing and models. like, give me a simplified version of that.

Ryan Chute (34:07.854)
Mm.

Ryan Chute (34:12.302)
regardless of which marketing company or agency that you're a part of, stay in your lane and be the best at what you can be in that lane. Just know what your role is. And don't think that that us as a strategist is the boss of you kind of thing. That's not how we think of ourselves. We're very humble. From that perspective, it's we need a Michael Jordan and a Scottie Pippen and a Dennis Rodman on every single team to win the championship.

The only goal I have is to win the friggin championship for my clients. So paper click essential graphics people essential all of the different roles and the value that you bring to the table. Absolutely important. If it it shows up it matters. How do we put that together? But don't try to be something that you're not because man I'll tell you I have seen some messes that we have had to clean up for people who are claiming that there's something that they're not.

And it's tragic. Like it's, big money, both, in what you make and what you, what you spend and frankly, some cases what you lose.

Christian Brim (35:19.321)
So not only are you Gandalf the Grey, you are also Phil Jackson, is what I took from that.

Ryan Chute (35:24.654)
I hope to be at least a Midland mentor to others, to be a bit of a guide and to give some clarity on things because if we can work as a team, going to win.

Christian Brim (35:38.007)
I love that. Brian, how do we find the Wizard of ads if we want to learn more?

Ryan Chute (35:44.366)
That's well, Wizardofads.com.org. Wizard Academy is our school that we have in Austin, Texas to teach people.org. And you can find me at RyanChute.com and also Wizardofads.services for my sub-site that's all about me. What we're doing. I do have, yeah, I have RyanChute.com and that pretty much takes you pretty much everywhere.

Christian Brim (36:03.501)
And of course your own website, have ryanchute.com.

Christian Brim (36:11.331)
Perfect. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, hit the little message button, tell us what you'd like to hear and I'll get rid of Ryan. Until next time, ta ta for now.