#13 - You're Paying Your Vendors to Waste Your Time

Ever feel like you’re doing your vendor’s job for them — and still footing the bill? In this episode, we pull back the curtain on the hidden costs of poor vendor relationships. From endless back-and-forth emails to fixable mistakes, to the time you spend double-checking work that should’ve been right the first time, we explore how inefficiencies chip away at your bottom line.

We’ll talk real-world examples of how trust gets eroded, why “white-glove” often means “we hand you the mess,” and what to look for when choosing partners who actually make your life easier — not harder. If you’re tired of managing the people you hired to lighten your load, this episode is for you.

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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Everyone is wasting your time day in and day out and what you can do to break that loop and make your life more efficient. Let's face it. We face it and I know you face it. Every day we take time logging in, re-logging in. Resetting passwords, dealing with vendors that have poor SOPs, dealing with other vendors that have good SOPs, but they're so big that they don't really work well, dealing with uncaring technical support people, dealing with the never-ending tickets, looking for answers. You can feel the weight of this, can't you? I know I can. I deal with it all the time. So if you could imagine the amount of times that you may go into using something like two-step authentication or validating with your phone number or your browser forgetting its password and then having to reset it and redo it. You can imagine what I go through on a weekly basis dealing with all the customers we deal with and trying to not only manage ours, but help them navigate their processes as well. Now, When we look at it from an agency standpoint, or I look at it personally, I mean, let's forget agency standpoint. Me as a person, I hate it. I hate every bit of it. I hate every bit of going to try to talk to a vendor that we spend a lot of money with and getting put into an AI loop where it sends me to a forum. And on the forum, it's a page about two, I don't know, 2,000 characters long with a bunch of steps that I have to go through. I try to go through it, and then sometimes it works, sometimes it's outdated. I end up going back into it. Then I end up trying to get a real person. You know, you know the situation. Oh, yes, I do it, too, where I go in and I try to just give me a real person. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So the question is, is what do we do with this? I mean, last week, I'll give you an example. We've been partners with Google forever. I mean, in Google Workspace and Google Ads. When it came to Google Workspace, they reset our business information because we needed to for various reasons. And then what happened was they reset our business, our payment profile. We didn't get a lot of notifications. And prior to doing this change to our business, everything was on autopilot. Everything happened every month. It automatically happened. Everything worked great. Then after the change, They just deleted our payment profile altogether. No notifications, no warnings that we saw or picked up on. And they just let that go until it got to a point where basically it was in our partner portal that, hey, you've got to make a payment. Well, believe it or not, Google does not take credit cards for partners. So what you have to do, well, at least now they used to, So now what you've got to do is you've got to go through a wire transfer process. So once you do the wire transfer, first of all, you know what you've got to do. They've got to send you a little bit of money. You've got to validate it. Then you've got to wait. And then you can transfer money, and then you're in this holdback loop where you're dealing with the accounting department and everything looking to see if the money is cleared. And then you're just in this wait mode, and you wonder what's going to happen. That's a situation that happened to me literally last week. Another situation. I was going through Dun& Bradstreet, and they have a system now where they give you an extra layer of verification. I got the email, so it's like$300 to do it,$300 a year. And I went in and I thought, well, I want to do it because, you know, we like to have, we want people to trust us. And we thought, well, if we have that extra layer of certifications, it's just one more feather in our hat, probably not a very big feather for most people we work with, but it's something. So we went in or I went in and simply bought a certification. Oh my gosh, it was amazing. probably five hours, maybe longer. The information they have was completely wrong. They put wrong information in there unverified. But when you try to correct it, guess what? They want you to prove it. They want you to verify that information. So they put things in that are unverified, but then you have to change it with verifications. Then once you change it and submit it, then they have to go through their internal processes. I don't know what those are. Then you're in a wait loop. Then you're waiting on them to get back to you. Then once they get back to you, then they tell you that it will be an additional amount of time before the public sees what they've privately approved. So essentially I paid them$300 for a simple little icon to put on our site. And it ended up costing me a lot of time, effort, energy, and unmeasurable frustration. I hope you can feel the intensity when I say that because it's there. So I know you go through these things. I'm sure you have vendors. I'm sure you have partners. I'm sure you have people that work outside of your company that provide you services. And I'm sure it's a mess because if every one of your vendors, and they do, take five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes to require you to do a reset, to require you to log back in, give a phone call, submit a ticket, all those things, you multiply that out, you're losing a lot of time every single day. And if you compound that with the, um, challenges of marketing. A lot of times, a lot of these guys are getting away with doing very minimal work and making it look like they're doing a lot of work. Now, if we zoom out, let's look at realistically what the world has turned into. Yeah, this may be a complaining session, but I got some good stuff at the end, so hang with me. So the idea is if we zoom out, In marketing, at least, what we're finding is that the whole world is obsessed with providing a service to a business that has minimal overhead. So they may build this place, this thing, that helps your business out theoretically. And what they want to do is give you the keys to the car. You log in, you set it up, you do everything that you've got to do. Basically you manage it. You do everything. They have no overhead other than minimal overhead with AI. They may have a couple people, they may have a ticket system, but they try to reduce that whole part. And then what they want to do is collect your money every month for the thing that they're selling you that you have to self manage. Now, If you compound that on top of everything else I've described, now you're dealing with some serious hours every single day where you're jumping in, jumping out, doing all this junk that really distracts you from your business. While the companies that are giving you these services are not giving you, you're paying for it. They're making out like bandits because they're not really supporting it in any meaningful way. So all the work, you become an employee for the people that you're paying for services. Now, you know this is true. Now, the reality is, is freelancers and everyone, they try to get away with as little as they can get away with. And a lot of them, honestly, from my experience here recently, are really not prepared for what's getting ready to happen with artificial intelligence. They're using old practices, but that really doesn't surprise me because a lot of these agencies, they're still using techniques that were like valid 10 years ago. You know, you still have people talking about things like reciprocal links and SEO. And so no telling what else is going on out there. So you're a business owner. I'm a business owner. And the idea is we want to maximize our time. We want to do a good job for our clients and not be distracted at the same time. And we don't want to have to deal with all this stuff, right? but yet we have to deal with all this stuff in the world today. We're being forced to work for other companies that we pay for services while they make more money, reduce their overhead and do better. So the tendency is for owners like you and me to go, okay, how do we jump on that bandwagon? How do we jump on it to where we do less work and make more money? But you see, that's the problem because that premise is not right. The premise is, is that we're seeing the Tower of Babel start to shake a little bit. We're seeing it where even the big tech companies are starting to flounder because they're outsourcing all their technical support. They're frustrating people. But here's the thing. Some people go, we're big enough. We don't really care. That's what they're really telling you. We're big enough. We don't really care. We don't care how many tickets you go through. We don't care how much headache you have, how much stress you have, how slow we go, how much we hold your business up, how much we cost your business, as long as we make what we're supposed to make. See, that's an unfair relationship, isn't it? It's kind of like them saying, we're going to provide a service to you. We may support you. We may help you out. But all in all, we're just, you know, we're here and we'll do what we can do. And now this leads to another layer of problems, obviously. Imagine the morale of the people that they put on the front lines. I mean, I feel so sorry for the people that are on technical support on the phone lines. I mean, a lot of these companies, they hire people that aren't good at speaking the native language of the people that they support. So a lot of times, what happens is that the person who owns the business after being just tired and frustrated and angry, after looking at tickets, after trying to solve it on their own, going through processes, clicking a button that doesn't work, and then they call somebody, finally get a hold of them, probably after 30 or 45 minutes of being on hold, and that person is the front-line person. That person is the cannon fodder for that frustration. That person is the outlet where the person brain dumps all the problems that they've had. And that person has to handle that. Now, what's more disrespectful to a human being than to put them in a situation where they're going to receive those phone calls and have to deal with those situations? It doesn't matter if they speak your native language or not. That's a real problem. And so there's this layer of, it's not the guys who make the decisions. It's not the guys on the golf courses you're talking to. It's not the people that are building the SOPs that are driving you crazy. It's the poor people that are working for minimum salary, probably really minimal overseas, because they work for pennies on the dollar. And they're the ones that have to take those calls. So you see, It's really just a horrible, horrible situation. And I feel sorry for people who are in technical support. I feel sorry for those that are the front lines. I feel sorry for the ones that are so marginalized by companies that, first, they put them in situations like that, but then, secondly, they're looking to replace them with artificial intelligence to completely put them out of work. And you know, I don't know the answers, but as a human, I can tell you that I feel sorry for those people. Now, what does this mean for you? Well, first you, again, you're probably relating to everything I'm saying right now, and you probably understand, and you're probably just like me. You get on the phone and you're exasperated. And the first thing you say is, man, that website is horrible to work with. Um, you know, it's just horrible. Oh, and if we want to couple it all off, I'll tell you one more I've run into. A lot of times, you know how hard they make it to cancel subscriptions now? Have you seen that? I mean, sometimes you can't just hit a cancel button. They intentionally make it to where you'll hit cancel sometimes. Like I'm in this one site, and it says you hit the cancel button on services. And it says, are you really sure? Yeah. We'll call this number to cancel. And then you're on hold for an hour and a half. They do this intentionally. They do it intentionally because they know they're going to frustrate you to a point where you go, you know, it ain't worth canceling that$10 a month. I just don't have time to do it right now. And anyway, it can be fun. Then you call your credit card company or you put a block on it and then that takes even more time. You see the problem here with businesses is by the time we're done, we're working for our vendors. We're chasing a bunch of ghosts. We're trying to get answers we can't get answers to. We're hurting people that shouldn't be hurt. And we're adding frustration and reducing the number of days we're going to have on this planet. In marketing, it even gets worse. I mean, not from my perspective, but from your perspective. Because you're faced with people... A lot of times who don't know what they're talking about. They're selling you dreams. They're selling you what you want to hear. And because the language is so technical, you go based on the best sales pitch. And you know that's not the right thing to do, but you end up doing it because probably what you're doing is not working. And you're hoping that the next guy that makes you a promise, you know, may be able to provide what they're telling you they can provide. You see, one of the great things about owning a boutique agency that's solely based in the U.S. is the fact that we just sell the truth. And believe it or not, most people who come to us are ready for the truth. So the question is, how do we deal with this world we're in today where we're being forced to not deal with people and the people we do talk to are not incentivized enough to do a good job? They're just kind of going through the motions. So here's some here's some ideas. This is what I do. So you may want to follow this. You may not. The first thing that I do, I minimize the number of people that I work with. It doesn't matter how good it is. I really think hard, not just about the offer. OK, the offer is one thing. But I look at the amount of time that I deal with that person or potentially have to deal with that person, organization or service as overhead on the business. are overhead on my life too. And then I go, is it worth it? It's just really, really worth it. And then what I do is I look at what they're, I look at their background. I look at what they provide. I never, ever, ever, ever reply to one of those spam emails because that's just junk. That's just junk. It's junk for me. It's junk for you. Anyone that spam emails you is basically throwing their hands up in the air and going, I don't have a clue how to market to you. All I'm doing is sending you a cold spam email intruding on your life for 15 minutes. And I'm hoping that you will respond to me and take advantage of whatever I'm offering that obviously doesn't work. Okay. So that's the reality of it. Don't ever answer those things. But then once you qualify, then the next thing that you want to do is you sign up for it. And then I start looking for flags right out of the gate. How is our customer support? Was their sales team qualified? Very engaging. But then when you walk into the sausage factory, everybody disappears. Now I'm forced to talk with bots. Now I'm in this confusing system. Now I'm waiting a day for an answer. I start looking for stuff like that or longer, right? It's not usually a day. Normally it's a couple of days. And normally the answer that you get is incomplete and you have to respond. Or worse yet, they close a ticket and you have to reopen the ticket. That also happened with Google.

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Okay.

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So restrict the number of people that you work with. Find ones that are good people trying to do a good job and stick with those people. You're going to have to work with some of the big companies. That's just a fact of life. Now, maybe and maybe not in your case. Okay, in my case, I have to. I have to work with big tech companies. In your case... If you work directly with them, then yes, you're going to have to. But if you work with a boutique agency like ours, we usually have a lot of the big tech stuff figured out, like the complexity of Google ads. We never talk to the person sending you a, hey, I'm your partner. customer contact person for Google ads. By the way, they rotate those people every 60 or 90 days. So just when they start to understand your business, they're looped out and then you get somebody else. So don't ever do that. That's just a tip. They're just there to get you to increase your budget, put everything on full automation and then make more money. That's all they're out to do. That's why they rotate. They don't care about your long-term success. So the idea is number one, you want to mitigate that. You want to mitigate the number of people that you work with. You want to start looking at the amount of headache as the cost of doing business with that particular company. If you find out that you're on large delays, you're having to yell, scream, kick, do whatever in order to get help, then that company probably is not the company you should be working with. And you should start looking somewhere else. The next thing is you're going to need to look for... I'm looking here at my notes here. Talks about one of the comments that I'm looking through my notes was talking about tools or practices that can help reduce time spent on administrative tasks. Now, this is good. This is actually a really good thing because we do use a lot of tools that help us out quite a bit without impairing our ability to work with people on an individual basis. So one of those tools we have is a project management tool. And what we're able to do is have one consolidated place where all of our communications go to where both the customer, you, could look at what we're doing from a marketing perspective, but then also we can see it as well. And what it does is it streamlines emails, you know, make sure that there's verification. If something was sent, it was sent, and you can see it, refer back to it, and do things like that. And so when you're dealing with it, think about... You see, I wrote something a long time ago, and it was about the concept of time. And this is really important because the one thing, you can always make more money, right? You can always do certain things. But the one thing you can never do is put more time on your clock of life. You just can't do it. You can take it away. I mean, if you're stressed and you're aggravated and everything, you can never do that. But you can never replace the time you have on this planet. It could be five minutes. It could be 50 years. It could be 100 years. But you can't replace it. And any time that someone forces you to use your time, they're taking time away from your business while you're trying to accomplish, but they're also taking away the most invaluable resource that you could possibly have on this planet, and that is your time. It's something no one with an infinite amount of money can buy more of. They might be able to string it along with transplants or something like that, but you get the point. The time that they have is the time that they have. Okay, so... Here's what we do as a boutique agency. And maybe this is a blueprint that can help you with your business. Now, there's some give and take. So I want to hyper focus on the whole idea of marketing at this point. OK, so, you know, this problem exists well beyond. It's your banks. It's everything. But you want to streamline it. You want to make it as efficient as you possibly can make it. And there comes a point where you just need to break the relationship. Period. If you're not being heard, if they're not doing what you need them to do, quit beating it up. Quit going back to the girlfriend cheating on you or the boyfriend cheating on you. Hang it up. Go somewhere else. Call it a day and find someone better and ask better questions before you connect with that new company. Don't just jump into it out of frustration. I mean, that's one of the biggest things I can give you outside of marketing. But let's focus on the marketing leg of the thing. Okay, so... Here's what we do for our clients, and maybe this will help you out. First thing is we are the point of contact, and we provide a portal where the client can upload images, assign us projects, we can assign them projects, we can communicate through it, and we can also communicate via email, via text, via whatever. Our agency does not use AI support systems. Now we may be behind the eight ball before it's over with, but I have this crazy idea that people like dealing with people. The other thing that we like to do is we're the middleware between all that frustration because we've bridged a lot of those gaps and we intentionally built our SOPs And we use software for 99% of the company or 99% of our clients that we understand intimately. So when we develop websites, we use similar processes across the board to where our team is fully aware of what's going on so we can fully support it. We don't pull in plugins we don't understand unless we have to. And then we charge accordingly to make sure that we can properly support it. If you deal with a lot of web agencies, a lot of them will just put whatever they can put into a website online. put whatever theme they can get into it, put whatever plugins they can get into it, get it over the goal, but they don't understand that software. And so then they're not able to support it. Well, then that draws out your problems when you have them. And that makes a 15 minute problem, a week problem. And again, it's just because people are trying to just do things as short and quick as they can thinking that somehow they're, they're being more efficient in reality. They're just causing you headaches. So we've become that middleware, uh, between those situations. And so with Google Ads, for example, it's incredibly complicated. Running your own account, God bless you. But I'm telling you that to run Google ads effectively, a lot of agencies don't run them effectively. A lot of them over promise. A lot of them give you fake metrics or they stack the cards or they make it look like they're doing more than they are. And there's just all these games and stuff that happen when people are doing those things. So the idea is we're that place. We're that place where they can communicate. They can talk to you. We have a real person that answers the phone. If there is some kind of interaction with the system, we typically do it. And then we reconcile the billing to where the client pays us so that they don't have to deal with, okay, I need multi-language credits. How do I go in and buy those credits? Okay, now I've got to do it, and then I've got to figure out who will apply And then we save you all those times. And so I think the reason that we have such a high customer retention rate is because we do all those little minor details and then give the client more time. Now, I don't know if the clients are even aware of how much time we're saving them by preventing them from having to do all the additional two-step authentications, paying for stuff, all the stuff we've talked about. But it's what we do as an agency and our clients typically align with us and they like that. And so from your perspective, what I strongly recommend is finding someone that can handle all that. and reduce the amount of, and I don't know, maybe there's a term we can come up with, time overhead. I don't know. That's not very clever, is it? But it's the overhead on your time. And then if that can be reduced, then you've got more time to have crazy ideas like spend an evening with your family or going out on a date night with your wife or doing the things that really matter in the world versus the things you have to do and, worse, the things that you're doing for free in order to pay somebody else money, which it blows my mind when you really think about this. Okay. So, um, but you have responsibility. Okay. There's, there's a responsibility on your end if you want that. And I think you should have that. Now we can't support everybody listening to this podcast. I mean, we're, the podcast is growing and there's obviously not a thing. And honestly, uh, we had to, uh, not take on clients for a month because we've been so busy, uh, just with the, the normal, uh, flow of clients that we have. So this is not me going call Integris to design and book with us. That's not what I'm asking you to do. I'm just saying if you can find someone that does that, then I think your life's going to be a lot easier, especially with marketing. But here's a trick. There's a couple of tricks, actually. First is to find somebody that will actually do the work and know what they're talking about. And unfortunately, a lot of people, I found her talking a really good game. Man, there was this company in Tennessee, a marketing firm. And we were qualifying that marketing firm. And that guy went on for like 45 minutes about the stuff that they do. And they were charging like$1,000 a month. And I knew the tool he was using. It's a tool that resellers get for, if you buy in bulk, it's like$30 a month. And basically what you do is you put all the... the heavy lifting, either it's done by artificial intelligence or it's just, it's just this thing. And they were just charging the client a lot of money for it. So you got to find somebody that doesn't just show you a snazzy, uh, portal and says, Hey, look at the shiny new toy. It's not someone who does that, but it's somebody who really knows what they're talking about. Someone who can talk the game. Uh, I met with the company yesterday. I love these people. I look forward to working with them. And, uh, we talked for an hour and a half. And they ask a ton of questions. And I showed them tools where we could look at their competitors. We could look at how their website should be structured, their digital marketing processes, how it all ties together to make one seamless experience for clients no matter where they're at. And so I was able to go through that with them. And so part of that, which I've still not figured out how to qualify for, real businesses other than credibility certifications, the amount of time they've been in business, look at their website address, go to Google, look at ICANN, and then look up their web address to see how long they've been in business because a lot of these guys are fly-by-nights right now, and they've actually started up in less than a year ago. So there's all kinds of weird games going on. But finding that person is going to be important because you need to be able to trust what they're doing because a lot of times there is a lot of planting seeds and not reaping, especially early on in a game. And I call it the snowball effect. It's where it takes time to build the snowball, push it up the hill to where it starts to gain momentum. And the more you're involved in it, the better it is. But of course, the less other people want you to be involved because you guessed it, that's overhead on them. So you need to find somebody who's willing to listen to you. Now, in exchange for that. you'd have to pay the agency. So here's the thing. Our agency, we're more than happy to work with the customer. But let me share a story with you. We deal with mom and pop shops. We deal with large companies. We deal with huge corporations. We deal with the whole nine yards. And what we love are the people that engage with us because they're the most successful. It combines what they know with what we know. And This isn't a shot against small businesses, but we're dealing with one particular company, and it's a small mom and pop, but they keep asking the same questions. They keep asking us to do the most mundane, small task. Even when we provide like a 30-second video or a two-minute video on how to do something, they still ask the questions and say they watch the video. Now, it's literally type in this address, click this button. So you can imagine how simple those things are. And we can certainly help out. And we can be that person that goes, okay, let me walk you through that. Let's jump into a Zoom meeting. Let's do those things. But we can't do that for nothing. And so those kind of services come at a cost. And you should expect to pay the cost because what you're paying for is you're paying to get out of this world of junk support services Let me send you a link to a web page that's 400 miles long on how to solve something. That's what you're paying to get out of. You're paying for quick answers. You're paying for someone that cares about your business and cares about your time. And so the idea is that you should expect to have to pay for that one-on-one service as opposed to some junk AI system. And so on your end, there's the accountability of watching the videos and referring back to those videos, if they're little small videos, asking for clarifications, but then turning the corner and moving on. If not, then just be aware that you should expect a larger bill, but that can be there to fully support you. So what I've seen from our perspective is is over the last several years the people are are getting more frustrated because they're getting a lot of promises that aren't really true they're disillusioned they're jaded and they want instant answers because they get instant orders on amazon and they want instant help they don't want to pay for it and they equate personalized support with the junk support that's out there, or even the people you talk to. Like you call certain companies and they ask you for your number. How much support can they give you if they're going to go through and know you by a number, go back and look at a couple tickets, you re-explain it, and then they just try to get you over the goal and get you off the phone? That doesn't work either. So the idea here is you do want to respect that person's time, but also you need to be able to trust that person as well. Because, you know, you think about it, if you go through an explanation process every month about what's going on and then you have to re-explain it or you don't trust that person or whatever, that also eats a lot of time up, yours and theirs. And so you want to be careful about that. Okay, so what's the lesson here? First lesson is you want to minimize the number of vendors that you work with. Realize bigger is not better and realize that the game today are people that are trying to sell services that you pay for and they want you to manage it and they poorly service it. That's the game. So when you think about it, think about that situation and are you willing to pay somebody to to have another layer of that thrown in your life. If you do and you think it's worth it, then give it a shot, but know what you're getting into, but also have your exit strategy. Don't go throw everything into it because what they want to do is get you completely immersed where it's almost impossible to get out of it. So have a strategy where you're going to test it, but then not be fully immersed in it where you can't get out of it easy because then you're so far deep you can't get out. Next thing is, is really start looking at your time. Again, I've said this a million times. Do not respond to those emails asking you if you need help with your website. They solve problems. Can they give you 500 million leads in a week and only do it if they prove it? Do not respond to those, okay? Period, ever, ever, ever. Never respond to those. It's junk. If they could market, then they would market to you. They wouldn't have to send you spammy emails, okay? They wouldn't have to send you LinkedIn invitation. They wouldn't have to do these things, okay? So if you're doing that, you're chasing ghosts. I have never seen that situation work out where someone says, you know what, that cold email was the best thing that ever happened to me. I've never heard that. You may be the one out there that has that experience, but not me. And so the idea then, of course, is to minimize, have your exit strategy and be ready to get out and then look at your time as a valuable resource. Don't look at your time as not having monetary value. Think of your hourly rate and think of the time that it takes for you to do that extra login step every time or two if they're down and you have to go back in and then think about it and then go back into it. Think about all that stuff and then if you can get rid of those things, get rid of them. Start throwing things out. Look at the movie Armageddon. Watch Bruce Willis in the scene where he's going through that moon vehicle or that meteor vehicle, and he starts throwing things out, going, you know, what is this thing and what is that thing? Get rid of it. Get rid of all that overhead that doesn't mean anything to you. If it doesn't contribute to your business, lose it. You're going to save time. You're going to save money. You're going to save headache. That would be the big one. I recommend you work with a boutique agency when it comes to marketing because then you deal with real people who care about you Large companies are less invested in you because they have a lot of you. And if you go away, you have very little pull. You have very little ability to make things happen because, honestly, they don't care. They just want to get you off their line so they can mark their support ticket as closed, and then that support ticket is one of the indicators that they're doing a good job. So you don't want to get into that situation. Plus, a good agency has already built and crossed a lot of bridges, and they already have processes. A really good agency uses consistent software all the time, and that Consistent software makes support even easier. On your end, be really careful and cognizant of following through. This is a big one. Make sure that if you're asking the same questions over and over again or if you're not able to do something or don't have the technical ability to do it and want someone to do it, Those come at a cost. And so if you need more help and more support, then you should expect to have a larger maintenance package. But remember, what you're getting in exchange for that is time. You're getting less headache, you're getting less stress. You're not killing yourself chasing these things and you're able to focus on your business more. So that'd be a good way to look at that. Last thing is, is find someone that you trust. Absolutely find someone you trust and do not go for these sales pitches Don't just be enamored by the technical language that they throw at you. Don't go for that. I have, again, I've debated at the end how you qualify a boutique agency. I know I'm a drone pilot. I know you're certified with Google Ads, Google Workspace. We're partners with Constant Contact. We have a slew of certifications and verifications. We're a business. We're an actual business. We're not just operating out of our house under an assumed name or whatever. We don't do it as a hobby for weekend projects and work other jobs. We're dedicated to it, and there's a lot of work that goes into it. And there's a philosophy behind why we do the things that we do. And so one of the things I suppose you could do is just make sure you ask a lot of questions early on, especially. Oh, and then the last tip, of course, is pay attention to the pre-sales, post-sales experience. Pre-sales experience, sales experience, they're out to sell you something. The post sales people, these are the people that you're actually going to work with. And so if they're heavy on the sales end, but light on the support and infrastructure end, or they send you places you don't want to go to for support, then those are all flags as well. So anyway, as a fellow owner of a business who deals with this all the time, I thought I would just complain today. and share with you my frustrations with it as I go through my day. And I'll probably go through about 20 or 30 two-step authentications. I'll probably reset a few passwords and do a couple of other things. And I'm constantly, constantly looking at that next person that's wasting time that I need to let go, a vendor or whatever may have you. So, to your success, thank you so much for listening to Over the Bull, and this was the topic of the week. God bless.

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