Marketing That Actually Drives Growth with Matt Jonza

You need to invest in your future and not the past. I think the starting point is how much is going to be direct response. So name, number, person for your salespeople to talk to versus branding.

On today's episode, we have longtime podcast sponsor, a good friend, client of mine, Mr. Matt Jones. And we're going to dive into all things marketing.

You got to truly know your numbers of what you sold from what category, because then you can justify it. Spending more or less on any marketing source. That natural anxiety of not competently knowing your numbers leads to underspending and underdelivering, like, what your sales team's capable of.

Matt Jones, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

I'm excited to, to have you. Sorry your Vikings did not have the kind of year that you were hoping for this year. But your Timberwolves look great right now so far.

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully the Timberwolves can break the curse for us. That was classic Minnesota sports to have the future Super Bowl champ on our team and say, nah, don't need him.

Don't need him. Don't need him.

Watch Kyler do the same thing. Just watch. He'll probably—

I know.

We'll let him walk and yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, it's been a little bit since we've had you on the podcast, and so like, I really look at you. Obviously, we've known each other for a really, really long time. I look up to you personally and your insights of kind of the broader state of marketing, I think is really, really important. And so what I wanted to do to frame this conversation as a starting point is because it has been a while, obviously, certainly AI is advancing a lot. People's buying behaviors, researching behaviors for products and, you know, whatever that, that they're buying has certainly changed. But that's a broad brush approach. I don't know actually how that started to affect small business owners and their marketing, what opportunities now exist, but also what changes have to be made. What is your pulse, so to speak, on the broader landscape around marketing for small business owners? Obviously I'm talking about digital marketing specifically.

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I'll do my best to give you the lay of the land. Um, I think the last time I was on this podcast was like 2019 or 2018 or some— something.

It was a while.

And I think back then Google was introducing the ability to use AI to bid on your ads, right? So when you do a Google search, that's called a search ad. And before you used to say, I want to buy this keyword for this amount of money, and then you hope you beat somebody else, right? And back then they introduced, well, you can kind of let our algorithm do it. And I think I made the analogy back then that The future of marketing is we will be the pilot, the commercial airline pilot. Hopefully you never need us, but we still got to definitely know what we're doing to bring us where we need to go. And I think that in— when you think about digital marketing has continued, the big change from then to now is nothing manual is relevant at all anymore. You absolutely need to be leaning in on all the different AI-related bidding systems that Google offers. And then you need to know how to set up the recipe and then of course fly the plane safely. So any Google Ads search campaign for generating phone calls or generating website traffic and form fills or quote started, that without a doubt has to be AI-driven. And then you got to sort through all the mess that AI can give you. So does that make sense for just the—

It does. It does. I actually really like the— is that an analogy or metaphor? I don't know. Either way, I like that. That, that's super helpful about being the commercial airline pilot. You're right. I just want them to be competent. I want to make sure that I get from Huntsville, Alabama to Minneapolis, whatever it is, safely. Okay, now let's bring it from, for just a second, high level down to tactically. What are some of the things that a business owner needs to do to be able to start— like, what are the— I think a lot of people refer to it now as AEO, so instead of SEO, so answer engine optimizations. So what are the things that people can do to try to optimize so that when people are searching for their agency or for their product or for their business or for their service, that they are showing up in those search engines? I mean, Chad has talked about having ads. Well, we can maybe get to that down the road, but at least as of right now, what are the things that I can actually do to optimize myself to be able to show up?

Yeah, another great question. SEO and AEO actually have a lot more parallels and similarities than you might think. A lot of the core SEO best practices just still remain with generative AI being here. So making sure you have fresh content, right? Social media or SEO, you need to make sure that you are routinely updating, providing new content. Content that's relevant and fresh and deleting and trimming the old stuff that doesn't make any sense to be there anymore. So practically speaking, at least a couple new photos on your Google Business Profile every single month, right? And maybe the things from 5, 10 years ago don't, don't need to be there anymore, right? Posting. But I think the biggest thing that like, for example, State Farm agency owner or an insurance agency owner could do is you need to make sure that you have your Q&A section filled out. A lot of ChatGPT, Gemini, all, all the different tools there are looking for question-answer type responses. So making sure that you have relevant, up-to-date Q&A section would be an important tip. Beyond that, the typical stuff, I'd say, you know, making sure that you are getting Google reviews at a frequent and similar pace each month. It's like a snowball rolling down, rolling down a mountain until it's this giant, giant thing. You just need to make sure you're always building your reputation with reviews and then providing—

and I've heard on that one in particular, just to just to double tap on the reviews. I say I've heard. I think I actually had AI tell me. Actually, I think Claude told me one day because I asked it this question is that not only is it asking now for reviews, but even the quality of those reviews. And here's what I mean. I don't mean 4-star versus 5-star. I mean, if it's 5-star and has comments, like actually some comments around the experience that they had, or the product or whatever it is, those are now viewed even heavier weighted than just somebody tapping, sure, I'll give you a review, 5 stars, and that's it. Those, those, those are not weighted as much as that. Have you— is that true?

Extremely true. Yeah.

Yeah.

If you can coach your clients to leave a more in-depth review, it's a lot better. And you see evidence of this everywhere, right? If you go and you look up reviews for any business, and then you— it shows you the most relevant at the top, right? Even if you're on Amazon, and it's almost never the guy who said, 'This was great,' you know, that's not the first thing you see. You see a lot more context and detail. So totally agree, if your clients can provide a longer review with what you help them with, and then your response is listening to them and providing not a generic response but a real response, really shine. Yeah.

Do you recommend— I, I did this organically with a client, so I, I can't say that this has been something I put into motion. So I'm, I was curious to your thoughts on this. Um, do you think that it would make sense for someone to like not Google themselves but search themselves in, in AI for the business that they're in and then be able to see what AI comes up with, or do you think it's more valuable to maybe have somebody else do it? Because like the LLMs can, would probably get to know you and would know your business. And so if you asked it, it may would serve you up kind of thing when you're like, well, you know that that's what I do. You know, I'm a host of a podcast. So of course you're gonna offer me as, you know, the up there with Joe Rogan. I'm not as good. I'm not even close to Joe Rogan, you know, me, Joe Rogan, and Chris Williamson. Yeah, I'm obviously joking, but, but do you think it's valuable to get somebody else to like, hey, can you go to ChatGPT or can you go to Claude and, and ask it to search for the top 5 businesses in the industries I'm in and see what it serves up, and then ask it, why did you not offer me or my business up, to get to see what it's actually asking? What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, another really smart piece of advice. Yeah. Every AI, once you use it, you have memory and personalization turned on because we're their customer, right? They want to show Above the Business above every other podcast because that makes you happy, right? But no, you definitely want either somebody who's unrelated to you to do the search, but an easier way to do it, like when you're working with a marketing company, they should have a tool that looks at all the major LLMs and gives you that data by different phrases and search terms. And it is agnostic to who their client is. It's programmed to have no memory. And then you can get a true response or ranking on AEO.

So what is the— what have been some of the actual results, the change in results that you have seen, uh, the last, say, 3 years? Let's just go back 3 years. What are some of the actual changes you have seen with clients' results? Are you seeing higher cost of leads? Are you seeing a higher volume? Are you seeing, like, what, what is, what has evolved and changed the last few years in terms of actual outcomes?

Yeah, great question. Um, I think the biggest thing— so let's, let's segment it out, right? Uh, when it comes to SEO and AEO, that hasn't changed as much as you would think. I'd say the, the biggest change there is the frequency of photos and fresh content, and Google reviews have just become even more important. There's like a pie chart of what's important when it comes to SEO, and that keeps expanding. So, um, results have been strong there and continue to get stronger. When it comes to ads, there has been, uh, driven by this shift to use more AI bidding, um, when it comes to calls, for example, you can now get a significant amount more calls for a cheaper cost but the percentage of quality calls is lower. Okay, but that's not what matters. What really matters is the overall cost of a good call when you're putting money into ads to make your phone ring, right? But that, that used to be maybe 6 out of 10 were good calls. Now we're pretty pumped if we're 4 out of 10, but the cost of the call is significantly lower because we're letting the AI find people and there's just more stuff that sneaks in, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

When it comes to website leads, that cost has increased across the market. Conspiracy theorist in me, there's just Google inflation that kind of hit all, all of the US. But yeah, without a doubt, the cost of leads has gone up when it comes to leads received in your, in your CRM.

You know, a business owner, they don't want to do SEO, they don't want to do AEO, they don't want to do PPC. And as a matter of fact, they don't want to do any of it. They want to grow their business. That's what they want. They want customers, okay? And they want customers as, um, affordably and profitably as they can, as they can get them so they can grow. One of the things that, you know, obviously, we've known each other for a long time, and we'll talk about business. But like, you and I've talked enough that we're very aligned principally about how to kind of approach marketing. And I want to kind of draw this contrast that a lot of times, and this, it felt this way very much for me for a long time, is that it was just like into the fog. Like, I don't know, spaghetti on the wall. What are you doing? Okay, well, I guess I'll do that. And so I didn't know how to set a budget. I didn't know how to measure any of the success. I didn't know what the benchmarking success metrics actually of marketing looked like. I didn't know how to do any of that. Okay, broadly speaking, let's take a million-dollar business owner. Okay. Million-dollar business owner, you can apply your numbers as a whole. You and I are aligned. You're probably— if you're wanting to grow, you're probably investing about 10% of your top-line revenue, like whatever number you're shooting for for the year. So let's take that business owner that's wanting to go from $1 million to $1.2 million. It's— I went to Auburn. It's easier math for me. And so they're saying, I want to hit $1.2 million this year. I'm going to invest 10% of that number in order for me to be able to grow. So I got $120,000 budget. Okay, that's good. That's healthy, healthy budget.

Right.

I don't know where the heck to put it, Matt. I don't know what to do. So I get— I mean, I'll come to you guys. And but I don't know how to kind of structure. How much do I put in SEO? How much do I put in PPC? How much do I do billboards? How much do I do TV? You know, like, it's, it's a mystery. And it's not necessarily a math problem. So I've teed this up long enough. How do you philosophically believe about it, and how do business— how should business owners begin to approach it?

Well, first off, we're aligned because you've taught me so much, and I wouldn't be— I would not be where I'm at without you. So just quick shout out and a huge thank you, Bradley, for everything you've meant.

$100 bill coming to you, okay? I'll DoorDash you some Starbucks.

Uh, And I want to call out one thing you said that could have been missed that I think is a key point of alignment. And then I'll answer your question. You need to invest in your future and not the past. So when you think about your marketing budget, a lot of people think 10%, to use your example, of previous year's revenue. And you have to be keeping that ratio for next year's revenue. Yeah, anticipated revenue. So it's extremely important. After that, to answer your question, I think the starting point is how much is going to be direct response. So name, number, person for your salespeople to talk to versus branding. And let me give some examples of that. In the insurance world, there's internet leads, live transfers, Google call-ins, leads from quote landing page, Probably a couple other things like that, but where you are literally buying that person talking to your salesperson and that's direct response. Branding is all the rest of it, right? So it's your, it's your direct mail, it's this podcast, right? It's, it's any sort of display marketing where you can actually measure a lead. It's anything like that that you can't tie back and attribute to somebody you quoted directly, even though it helps.

Yeah, that's, that's so true. And so let's contrast. Okay, this is, this is, this is great. This is super helpful stuff for people to kind of not make it, not make their marketing feel like it's a mystery so much. Okay, so let's contrast a business owner that's in their third year. Okay, let's talk about third year. We'll get past the first couple of years. They're running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but then they're in third year, third, fourth year, something like that. They got a little bit of traction, built a little bit of a team, starting to figure some things out. Okay, got that. Then let's go to 5 times down the road in terms of 15 years. They've been doing it 15 years. So we're more established. They got a bigger team.

Okay.

What— how do we take that branding and direct response and obviously probably have different revenue numbers that you're, that you're at and that you're targeting for. So how should they, those two different, uh, business owners in terms of tenure approach it potentially?

It's my personal belief that in the insurance space in particular, that third-year agency, they got to be like 90% probably on direct response. Like, yeah, those are the lean years, right? You're way underpaid at the beginning to be overpaid later. They say that's the saying. In the lean years, you need a name, a number, a quote, a sale.

Yeah.

Not to say you can't not do the core stuff, like you need to have a social media presence. You need to make sure you're getting 5-star reviews. I would still recommend SEO, but you probably don't need to be spending a bunch of money on like golf tournaments and direct mail and things like that.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Yeah.

Don't you also on SEO, not to loop us back, but on that point, don't you also think that SEO is, is an investment in a long-term future too? Meaning like you do have to kind of put some stuff to it because like long-term it builds up, you know, all of this collateral that is going to pay off down the road as well. So it's almost like a, an investment that you're making over a long period of time. Do you agree with that?

SEO is a whole life contract. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, that's a great way to put it. It—

you don't get much in the very beginning years, but you need to start earlier because it'll keep compounding and growing on itself, and before you know it, it's one of your best sources.

Yeah, that makes, that makes sense. Yeah. Um, okay. So earlier on, we're going to be more heavily weighted on, on the direct response. Can we put money in and get leads out? Right. So you can, you can make sales. And then over time, as you get more mature, you can start to make more of those investments in, you know, a billboard or a signage somewhere just to, quote, get your name out there. But don't you think— have you seen— have you guys seen me? You've worked with so many business owners. Where they actually approach it the opposite, that they think, oh, I got to get my name out there. So they spend a lot of money in branding and it's not actually given kind of the returns early on that they want.

Extremely common. And it's just one of the, I think, natural mistakes that people make. They, they're excited. They're excited. Their name's on the door. So I get wanting to brand for like, you know, the guy that you went to high school with saying, oh my gosh, like I saw that, that's cool. Yeah, but it is not the best use of your capital at that stage in the game and you're going to have more of an effect later when you're an established business and then they start seeing your name more and more and more. So that shift over time, that 15-year agency, I mean, they can be pushing 30, sometimes even 40% of their budget going towards branding versus direct response. And that's the evolution of, you know, more, more revenue, number one, but then also more legitimacy.

Yep. Now I think that this leads us to a point that we can touch on briefly to kind of give a little bit more. So we've got that, that percentage, um, of, of a revenue. By the way, I just happen to use 10% as kind of a proxy. What are your thoughts on percentage of revenue or percentage of projected year's revenue? Okay. What is your range that you feel like a business owner should stay in? Okay. Oftentimes, you're going to hear 5% to 10%. I think you're a little bit more on the higher end. You like to be a little bit more weighted on that? Talk about that part of it too, and then I'll kind of come back to my next question I was going to ask.

There's, there's still nuance to it, and it comes back to where you're at in your career. I think when you're trying to rapidly grow, you got to be at least 10% or more. 10 to— I mean, I think you're crazy if you go beyond 14%. I think that's probably a little clinically insane. But, you know, somewhere, somewhere in there, you need to be spending a lot more aggressively when you're rapidly scaling your business, I think even for that established agent, to go back to your 15-year example, I personally feel like 7% should be your floor. Anything below 7% of next year's projected revenue, and I think you're likely starving your salespeople.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. I— if somebody was going to push me into a corner and say, give me the percentage, I'd probably say 8%. I mean, like, I mean, that's safe number. But I mean, I think it really has a lot to do with how fast do you want to grow. Like, I mean, if you're wanting to grow 25, 30% year over year, I mean, you got to put fuel in that engine to be able to, to get there. And that's typically going to be in marketing and a team. Okay, now how then, then do I balance though, Matt, quality of lead and quantity of lead? Like, everybody wants, everybody wants 1,000 leads and they're all great. Okay, well, marketing doesn't work that way. How do we balance quality and quantity and how are those even defined? Even— Yeah.

Number one rule, don't do it by feel. I think too many small business owners tend to just cling to anecdotal feedback from their, from their team. Like one key salesperson says, I love this type of lead. Then they just buy more of that or do less of something else. I think you need to truly look at your numbers and do your channel performance. And not just even like big category. If you can get a little bit more granular and look at the lead type within, say, an EverQuote, right? Home leads. They have all these different profiles, auto leads, all these different profiles. So that's the first thing. Second comment is weigh the actual ROI that you get once you do the analysis on real numbers. With the impact it has on your team and the feasibility of what you want their lives to be like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because nobody wants to make 200 phone calls for the next 10 years outbound, even if that ROI might be the best at 100 phone calls a day. Is that the best long-term move for your agency? I think it depends on the person. And the salespeople you have, but you gotta weigh that in with the quality over quantity decision.

Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I guess I'm asking you to give me kind of a broad answer here, but I mean, I would assume that it's probably way more common than not that people with their marketing, even if they've established a marketing budget, our example, I'm at $1 million. I'm trying to go to $1.2. 1.2%, I got $120,000. OK, great. But then if you ask the question, what is the effectiveness? What is your return on investment from that $120,000? Do you feel like the majority of time it's just like they're winging it? It's kind of a guess. They just like, I have no idea. I have no idea. This is what I'm supposed to do. So I'm doing it. We're growing, we're selling. So I guess it's working. Do you feel like that that's the common experience.

It is common. It is really common. And it's something that, you know, DirectClicks definitely tries to help people break that habit. Right. You got to truly know your numbers of what you sold from what category, how much money you put in, how much revenue you got out, because then you can justify spending more or less on any marketing source.

So, yeah, that's so true. Well, Coming up, you have gladly said, and I'm grateful that we're actually going to do a workshop where we're going to break down some of those numbers. So for those of you that are watching this on YouTube or listening to this, we'll put the link, but it's workshop.blueprintos.com is the link, and you can register for the workshop totally free. Matt and I are going to take this conversation and for a couple hours go a lot deeper into the marketing numbers part of it, like cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, okay, knowing how much you can spend and lifetime value. Matt, you have scaled truly. I mean, you've scaled to small businesses. Can you just talk about There's a lot of different ways we could go with that. We could talk about leadership. We could talk about developing people around you, et cetera. That's for another time. But just around how valuable it has been for you personally to be able to know your numbers, to be able to grow and scale. Can you talk, speak to that?

Yeah. Knowing your numbers, I think, just gives you confidence. Um, without it, you always have that anxiety in the back of your head that, well, I think it's working, but am I overspending? That, that sort of thing. And that stifles growth for a lot of people. That natural anxiety of not confidently knowing your numbers leads to underspending and underdelivering, like what your sales team's capable of. So I think properly feeding them so that they can grow the business faster, and that's the key right there, is understanding those underlying numbers.

Why do you think that when a business starts to go sideways or slip backwards, why do you think one of the very first things that they cut is marketing?

Anxiety. Things aren't going the way they want. It's a very controllable, easy button to push to save some money. Um, I think that's just human nature, you know, nerves, and then you want to keep what you can.

You know, I got an interesting question. I mean, I'm not even joking. I got this on Voxer this morning. Small business owner said, do I grow and develop my team first, or do I fix my marketing first? That's basically his question. I was like, well, you can market all day long, but if you don't have the team to deliver on it, it doesn't really matter. I was like, you gotta have a team, team first. But I mean, they're not, it's not necessarily dominoes. I mean, you're kind of effectively trying to do both. I mean, you, you've gotta have a team to be able to execute, and then you gotta be able to have some marketing to bring, you know, leads into the business so that you can actually grow. But for somebody that— if somebody was just asking you that question, how would you answer that? Both.

I would yell both at them immediately. It's really hard to expect a team to succeed if they don't have marketing.

Yeah.

And then vice versa, how is an untrained team ever going to succeed with leads if they haven't been trained properly? So you got to do both at once. They are locked together. They just have to be.

That's so true. You know, that I hadn't even thought to bring this up until what we just were discussing. But when, when a business owner, let's say that they're fairly established and then they have now gone to a second office or even a third office, and now the sales team has gone from 2 people to 4 people to 8 people, there has to be— not only are you adding the payroll, right, and you're adding the commission plans, okay, and let's say that that's locked in. How have you also approached and also recommend another business owner to think about how the marketing also has to go up in, in, in, in, um, to coincide with the new sales rep? So in other words, you bring on 3 new sales reps, well, the current marketing may not be enough to be able to support them. How, how do I think about that?

Uh, great question. There's 2 major keys in my opinion. Number 1 is with the actual people. Um, I think it's extremely important as you grow and scale and add locations to have like 3 benchmarks from day 1 of each person you hire, which is like, this is acceptable. This is the target and this is the goal. And that way, when you add sales staff, your goals naturally go up and everybody expects it. And it's commonplace, right? It's just built into your accountability. We do that through a monthly team bonus at my agencies. And that has been maybe the best business decision I've ever made is, is learning that from another agent and just implementing it.

Well, on that, I have talked about that on the podcast, given you specifically credit for that. You have implemented that in other businesses as well. Maybe can you just expand upon that a little bit more about just culturally? I mean, every time we've ever hopped on a call, you know, hey, we've hit team bonus X number of months in a row or something like that. Like it really is a way of doing business now culturally across your companies. Like, there's no question about it. I mean, this went from like a good idea to like, this is how they do business kind of thing. And I give you full 100% credit for that. It has absolutely shifted my mindset to the point to where now, because of that, I've implemented it in my own companies. But can you just talk about how important that that has actually been? I know this is around marketing, but I think this is important.

It's, it's the number one, it's the number one most important thing, period. Like, I just can't even, I can't even explain how important it is to what we do and how fun it is. So, so we do, uh, it's, it's an NBA Jams, like, heating up on fire team bonus structure. So if we all win, we all win. If we all lose, we all lose. We're playing the game together, even in the midst of the internal maybe competition between salespeople, right? But it's not just the sales department. It's everybody on my account development team as well. Right? So it's just a multiplier. So before I said acceptable target goal, right, we take the target number and we multiply it out. So X amount of raw new auto policies, X amount of financial service policy premium issued, and then one Google review minimum per month per person, right? So that way when we grow the staff, the goal goes up, right?

Yep.

Secondary cool piece of that is if Tommy has a great month and Brad has a bad month, well, Tommy can pick up Brad's slack and we can still all win. Yeah, there's hot and cold months in sales and that creates this amazing dynamic of anti-sandbagging too, right? Everybody's going to the finish line every single time. And we looked at it at the turn of the year in the insurance agency for the last 3 years, we had hit 31 out of 36 team bonuses in that time frame. When you miss it, though, the money drops down and it takes 4 months to rebuild. So everybody's trying to do the same thing. Over and over and over together, and we get to stack those wins together. And there have been some buzzer beaters, uh, you know, 6:30 on a Friday. Yeah, the weekend type buzzer beaters that I never—

well, we're recording this at the first of the month too, so that's like, uh, uh, hopefully there wasn't— had to be buzzer beaters in March Madness as there was in the Duke-UConn game. But, uh, yeah, um, yeah, I think that like you can tell in your enthusiasm around this and how much it's impacted the team. When I've shared this with people, again, 100% give you credit for this because it personally impacted me and my thought process around it. And I know you've talked to other people about it. What's interesting is that people intellectually get it. They get, they get it. They don't, it's not a hard con— they're like, oh, team bonus. OK, that sounds good. Put this thing where if we hit it 2 months in a row, and it kind of starts to build. And OK, so they get it. But what's interesting is I, you get a lot of, not, it's not pushback, Matt. I'll have people that they just start stumbling over, like, well, what about this? And what about this? And what about the— and they start kind of overthinking it a little bit, to the point to where they don't even do it. They just don't do it because they're like, well, I don't know how to make the number where everybody participates. And, you know, well, what about this scenario? What about that scenario? Have you seen that of people that you've shared this with?

Tons of people. Yeah. I think the most common thing is people look at the numbers that we use and they want to make it a lot higher. And I think we set our target at like a B-minus, you know, great for, for a reason. Right? We want the goal to be something higher than that. But I think, yeah, people definitely— it's a little bit of a slow adoption to it sometimes. And I think the other thing too is you just don't give it enough energy and focus. Like our team bonus, it's taken a lot of time and effort to get it there, but the last 2 weeks of the month, it's practically daily that somebody who's not named Matt is giving an update. And oftentimes it's like a countdown where everybody's involved celebrating the entire way to the finish line. Um, so it just comes down to like making it the most important thing over and over and over. And people get rally behind each other because it's all, we're all winning.

So, um, I, I know we're on marketing, but I, I would be remiss I would be remiss if I didn't ask you this question.

Okay.

There are two things, and we just talked about one of them, that to me are the most overarching. And I guess as Cooper, my son, would say now, I'm going to glaze you for a second. But I'm saying this because I genuinely believe this. Okay. So for people listening to it, hang with me for a second. 2 things that I've learned from you is number 1 is the team bonus, and the 2nd one is how much training you actually give your people. Okay? I asked you a question a few weeks ago. I said, how many people do you think you've put on a performance improvement plan over the years across businesses? And you were like, I don't know, 60. First of all, for a lot of people, they hear 60. Okay? Then I said, "Well, how many people have actually made it through on the other side?" And you're like, "I don't know, 80%?" 80%— most people on the other side of that 80% have left after a performance improvement plan that they've been put on, a PIP. OK? And I said, "Why is that? Why have you been able to do that?" You're like, "Because we triple down, we double down on the amount of training and development." And whenever I talk to a small business owner and they're struggling, their team, they're struggling with their team, the team is not doing, that's underperforming, a team member's underperforming, Matt. In the back of my mind, whether it's conscious or subconscious, I think to myself, and it's almost always true, they are not giving that person enough training. They're not really training them at the level that it takes. Can you speak to that and maybe give some people some tangible things of like how much you allocate of your time still to this day in a pretty big organization to actually training and developing your people?

Yeah, when it comes to performance plans, um, I think the first thing that we've gotten really good at is it's never a surprise. At least that's always the goal because we have clear front-end expectations, nobody's surprised if they end up there, right? And then the second piece that I always coach my leaders on is we're just getting started showing to them that we believe in them if we have to do that, right? And so, we need to provide a couple extra hours a week of additional coaching, training, assistance, once a performance plan comes out, because number one, it just feels better to know that we always believed in them and we showed up for them. And if it doesn't work out, we pulled— we put 110% into it. And then second, I just think it's how they feel about getting it, because I think for a lot of, a lot of Sometimes I talk to small business owners and a performance plan comes out and yeah, they're, they're basically, they're just doing the due process to get to the end result of, of that person leaving. And I think you got to take the opposite mindset. To come back to your question, though, about training, we try to have a really structured training at the front end of somebody joining the organization.

Everything almost an academy. In some, in some respects.

Yeah, everything is segmented out by categories and topics, subtopics. And then we have— we try to measure it as I kind of understand it, I pretty much get it, or now I've got expert. And then that, that new person needs to continually update their checklist of where they stand on these important topics. And then for once you're more tenured, weekly one-to-ones is where we learn about what else do you need to work on? What do you need to continue to improve on? So the leaders will meet with them and, and learn this, this structure and format from you, right? But the one-to-one will be small talk, wins. What are you proud of this week? A scoreboard with 3, maybe 5 important metrics. And then we call it a projects or stuck section. And in that I'm asking, like, if Bradley, you're on my team, I'm saying, what are you working on? Like, where do you need some extra help? Where are you stuck lately? And then we try to have a discussion and then coming from that, we'll calendar some additional training and that should happen 1 to 4 times, at least, you know, a couple of times per month. Where that even tenured person gets some extra help on something that's special to them.

Oh, that's, that, that's so good. Boy, somebody's gonna go back and listen to that last 5 minutes. I need that because that's, there's so many little things you shared. Even that last comment that you said, we're gonna calendar it instead of like, yeah, we'll get to that. No, actually calendar it so we can, we can actually execute on the thing that we wanna be able to give some support to somebody. All right. Last question. There has been a shift I've seen with team. And you, you, you have, you have a big team. You're, you're always growing and expanding in your team. There's been a little bit of a shift to where I've seen— I think this would probably only occur if you're north of a million, maybe even a little bit bigger than this. But here's the shift I've seen. You tell me what your thoughts are on this. You might disagree. I've never asked you this. That people are hiring talent. And they're like, I want this person on the bus. I'm getting them on the bus. We're going to put them through our 90-day, like, academy. And then we'll figure out the seat that they're going to go in. Like, I don't know. I don't know if they're going to be an account manager service role. They're going to be in sales. This person's got talent. We're just bringing them on. And then we'll figure out a spot for them to go. Obviously, if you're a small, really small business owner getting started, that's going to be harder to do. But what are your thoughts on that approach? Do you agree with that? Have you seen a similar thing?

I'm trying to learn that. I'm trying to learn that. I, I haven't personally hired somebody without a specific role in mind. I think we might be getting there because the larger the operation, the more specializations that can and should exist. It's, it's hard within an insurance agency to know everything. So the more you can like slice down, you do just this little thing really, really well, the more success you're going to have. So I think we might get there someday, but I haven't done that personally. David Peterson, he does it all the time, like, and talking to him, he'll just like somebody and then figure the rest out later. And it works really well for a lot of the big agencies out there. That's a leap of faith I haven't quite made yet.

Yeah. That's why I asked you that question to see if you had thought through that because I had not really approached it that way. I've always like, what's the gap in the business? What do we need? Go hire for that. And then, you know, we'll go from there. But it has been a little bit more of a shift to people just like, I'm going to get talent on board and then we can figure it out. From there. Obviously, when this is dropping mid-April, on April 21st, you and I are doing a 2-hour marketing workshop totally for free. We'll drop the link in for the podcast and YouTube for people to be able to come to that. But if people want to know more about DirectClicks, connect with you personally, I understand you're a big TikTok star. Is that, is that what I understand? No.

No social media at all for me, which I know is bad.

I'm just kidding. But where would you point them to, Matt, to learn more about DirectClicks and what you guys do?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, DirectClicks has social media, as they should. So you can always look there. But no, I think the website would be the best place to go.

Www.directclicksinc.com. So awesome. Yeah, Matt, it's been a pleasure. Look forward to the, uh, to the workshop with you, my man.

Can't wait. Thanks again for having me on and looking forward to it.

Well, I told you at the beginning that that was going to be a fantastic episode, and it always is. I really enjoy being with Matt. If you want to come to our workshop that we're going to be hosting workshop.blueprintofwest.com. Totally free, 2 hours. We'll get into the numbers of marketing, help you to make sense of your marketing spend, things like lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, so many more important metrics, not just cost per lead, although that is a metric to know, but also what is the thing that you need to do next in creating a marketing dashboard, et cetera. So look forward to seeing you at our April workshop, Tuesday, April the 21st. Workshop.blueprintos.com. And if you want to learn more about DirectClicks, DirectClicks the company, go to directclicksinc.com/above-the-business. directclicksinc.com/above-the-business. Also, I want to give a shout out to our other two partners, Coach B Consulting and Autopilot Recruiting. Look, David and Alex have done a great job of growing and scaling their own businesses and now have gone on to many other different businesses as well, and they've built great companies. Coach B Consulting, you get the coaching as an insurance agency owner. Your team also gets around other small business owner teams that are doing, you know, trying to do the right thing, trying to learn and develop themselves, learn the right products, learn the right process behind the scenes of what actually is working. Sometimes you just need to get yourself and your team in the right rooms. You can do that with Coach B. Consulting.com. And then obviously we know how important it is. He talked about, uh, in the episode with Matt where he talked about his team and the culture he's been able to build. But you got to have a team and you got to have solid A players. And to do that, it starts with a consistent recruiting system that you may have and some of the processes in that. Well, Autopilot Recruiting can help you with that. autopilotrecruiting.com. Autopilot Recruiting. Com. All right, everyone, look forward to seeing you at our workshop. Till next time, lead well and go be great.