211: Bruce Rowley — All Things Marketing

Well, we all need to get better at marketing, and I'm sure that you have often thought that you'd like your marketing to do a better job for you. Today's show is all about some simple things that you can do to greatly improve your marketing right now. And they're immediately actionable. It doesn't need they're not particularly clever or requiring any special creative mojo. This show will really help you to improve your marketing right away. Listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Bruce Rowley. Bruce, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Bill. Great to be here.

So Bruce is a founder of RSM Marketing and they do data driven outsourced marketing services. They've been on the Inc. 5000 list a few times. So anyway, I thought it's a great. We always need to talk more about the world of marketing and so much is done so sloppily in this area. So I thought Bruce would be a great guest on the show. Welcome to the show again.

Thanks. Sloppy is a great word to use for a lot of the stuff that we see.

Yeah. Just let's try this, let's try that. Let's just fiddle around with things. Meanwhile, we're pissing away hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes.

Sure. Not to mention the opportunity cost.

Right. And the noise that you create, the missed attention. So it's really great. And I know that you work in particular with some of the online marketing stuff. So talk to us before we get into the core of it and some of the example stories that you've got to share, but about your background. Tell folks where you came from, how you got in this line of work and like that.

Sure. So I grew up in old style advertising. I actually have been in advertising my entire life. I was born into it in Kansas. My father and mother ran an ad agency. They had 30, 40 people working for them. They were doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And I watched my father literally make stuff up at night at the kitchen table and sell it the next day. And I would see his ideas that started as scribbles appear, you know, in the newspaper and on TV and in big brochures and direct mailers and all kinds of stuff. And it amazed me that he had this power to dream stuff up and people would pay him money for his ideas, and then I would see them out in the real world. And so I was infatuated with that. I went to school to study that and I moved to Los Angeles and I got my first job on a little startup team and, and I called my parents, very excited to tell them that I was going to be working on this launch of this luxury Japanese car. You know, this was 1989. And my parents simply said, do you have a backup plan?

It's a standard parental applied to everything, I think.

Yeah. So I was welding.

Could you do that?

Right? Yeah. You know, the post office is always hiring. Um, so, you know, I was quite lucky. We, we ended up. The name of this Japanese brand was Lexus. And it taught me an amazing lesson early in my career because I, I thought I knew a little bit about marketing, but what I hadn't, you know, you can study it, but then when you see the power that it can have and you know, the, the launch of Lexus was devastating to some other brands in the industry and the marketing was so brilliant and the, the product was just right. And that was stunning for me right out of college to be a part of a team that for 18 months in a row, more used Mercedes were traded in for a new Lexus than new Mercedes were sold in those months. And that was incredible to watch the, the market share shift by the shovel full from one brand to the other every single month. It was, it was an amazing experience. And it, it kind of got me hooked on this idea that, you know, you don't have to, you don't have to settle for marketing being, you know, 5% growth or, you know, generating a, you know, any positive ROI is good that, you know, you can really shoot for the moon, you can really shoot for breakthrough and get there.

You know, it's really funny, I saw the then CEO of BMW talking at a, at a meeting conference about that time and he was just incredulous that people would want to buy a premium luxury car and expect it not to need any maintenance.

Yeah, you know, there's so many.

Their whole mindset was around this thing's got to be cared over by a precision craftsman every few minutes and go through all these periodic things. And he was comparing it to, you know, jet aircraft and things like that, or any aircraft for that, in the need for regular periodic maintenance, which is good and valid. But in the, the other mindset was like, we can create a luxury product that requires such less maintenance than. And of course that became a more and more driving thing. Like, here's a simple thing that you don't need to think about as much.

Well, here's two really interesting things that I think people enjoy thinking about. When it came to the Launch of Lexus way back then. First of all, the number one reason why people were leaving Mercedes and going to Lexus from a product standpoint, which I'm sure drove some engineer in Stuttgart out of his mind.

Yeah.

Was cup holders.

Cup. Right.

Because at that point in time, okay, you could buy a hundred and ten thousand dollars Mercedes S Class and it had no cup holder.

Yeah.

And that, that just drove people crazy. So if the cars, you know, if.

People felt that, well, the European mindset was like, why would you ever eat or drink while you drive? Stop and be a civilized human being. Take a cappuccino with your friends and.

No, of course. That's why I think it's so funny just imagining this engineer in Stuttgart saying, put down your big Gulp and have a coffee. So that was the first thing that was cool. And the second thing you actually just hit on, which is they built that car. They engineered that car to win the JD Power Initial Quality Award. They looked at years and years of those J.D. power reports and built the car to win that award.

Yeah. Yeah.

It was not an accident.

Yeah. We talk about this all the time in the world of scaling up, of like, nailing a few key points, getting an influencer involved or a key partner, and that like being game over. And certainly one of them could be winning a critical award upon which much decision and press is based. Right? Sure.

So if, if we win the JD power and they win the JD power, but our car has cup holders and it's $40,000 less, that's a tough, that's a, that's a tough pill for, for people looking for cities to swallow. Right.

If it's brand new, too, like the, the new entrant. Right. New novel gets more attention and news than, than worthiness.

Sure. But the number one concern with people with something truly new. Right. It's a new brand and a new model. Is. Is it any good? So the right thing for them to win. To, to answer that question, all we had to do was win the JD Power Quality Award. And that was good enough for nearly everyone to say, oh, well, I guess I don't need to worry about that. So now we can just move right on to price and features.

Yeah. So say a little bit more about your story. So eventually you decided to start your own firm and you move to Kansas from Los Angeles. You couldn't take enough of the sunshine.

I moved from Los Angeles to Hong Kong and I launched and I helped Lexus grow in China and Hong Kong. And I worked out there through the financial crisis of 1998, which was, yeah, interesting. And so I learned a lot about, I had worked in, in this sort of big branding, lots and lots of money. You know, it was very 50,000 foot level what we were doing.

Yeah.

And when I got to Hong Kong, it was, every day was an absolute street knife fight. And that was, I learned a lot and I, it was really grateful for that. And then I lived in Singapore for quite a few years and I worked again on a global scale with some very large brands. And I, and I learned there a lot about how marketing is the same basically wherever you are in the world, people are people. And if you understand what people want and you can listen to the market and you can answer what the market is saying it needs, you can make a lot of money. And so I learned a lot about that there. And then I moved back to Kansas.

Is that where the family's from? Is that where you grew up?

It is, yeah. So we had, you know, by then we had acquired a couple of shipping containers worth of stuff and a dog and a son and a daughter on the way. And so we moved to Kansas partly because we thought, you know, this will be a good place to start a business. It's, it's got a, you know, we'll have a long Runway, it's a low cost. We can, we can operate all the way around the world from here. You know, we, we had experience with that being overseas. So we weren't, we didn't really think we needed to be in a, if we were going to think big. We didn't need to be in a, necessarily in a big city that, that we would have access to clients all over the place. And so I did that for a few years, got scooped up by a giant multinational company, did another few years of traveling around the world over and over and over again. And then I finally gave all that up for good and started RSM nine years ago.

And how old are the kids now?

So my son is 19, he goes to college in Boston. He is stuck in the Minneapolis airport right now having missed his connecting flight. And my, my daughter is 17 and, and headed out to college this fall. So it's been a long ride.

Both my kids are in their 20s. It's a different time as they, as you start to see them getting ready to move out like your 17 year old and then the 19 year old out and you start to manage and support them, be a different kind of a parent than you were when they're small and you need to tell them to put their shoes on and, or put them on.

So far I enjoy this. I, I enjoy this type of parenting more than the, you know, put your shoes on the right way type of parenting.

But yeah, in general I would agree with you. There are some times where I, I wish I could just go back and alleviate some of their pain. Things that they have to go with as through adults like just take.

Humans. Got to learn the hard way. It seems a lot of things.

Right. Yeah. So let's talk about your clients and the work. Right. The main subject of our show and I think it's always great to lead with the story. So I don't know, talk to us about the health club or the quick serve restaurant or tell us some stories.

Well, sure. So I was really lucky. Again, luck matters. And when we, when we started off, I had met a guy a few years back who had gotten involved in a restaurant deal and he contacted me and, and said, can you come help us? And I didn't know really what was going on. So I, this was maybe a few months actually after we had opened our business and I went down the street and I met he and his two partners and it, they had opened 20 stores and they were doing very well and they were getting ready to franchise and, but they hadn't really figured out what their brand was or how to market it. They were just making really good food and, and they knew that if they were going to scale it, they needed to master the brand. And they had just signed a franchising agreement to start selling franchises and they knew that they didn't really want to be bothered by that part. They were very focused on the finances and the operations of how to scale this thing. Right. Which is difficult. You know, these guys make their money $5 at a time. That's a, you know, and your margin is, you know, you're making $0.70 a transaction. That's, that's a, that's a hard, hard road. And you got to, you know, you don't have a lot of room for error. So they wanted to be very focused on their operations. They hired us to be their outsourced marketing department. And for the next six, seven years we rode that with them to 500 stores and coast to coast. And in the end they, they ended up being big enough that they needed to bring some people in house. And we had a very amicable parting and you know, it was a great example for us and for our team here of, of how we can support a high growth company and be a part of their success. And, and then in the end how we can maintain a friendship. And you know, we certainly still advise them on things, but they, they did outgrow us to a certain degree.

Well, that's an interesting lesson in and of itself, maybe less related to marketing, but each stage we outgrow, if we keep growing, we outgrow people, partners, systems, tools, even sometimes customers. Right. As we grow and move through stages, what's the takeaway lesson for our folks about marketing? What did you learn or innovate with them that's relevant to the scaling up listener?

Well, we built, I guess I could say we built marketing engines for them. And I would call it a marketing engine because eventually we started it and it sort of runs on its own. So we tried to build, we didn't just make one off things for them, we built entire processes and systems for them that they could a scale up store by store by store. So right away, when a new store opens in a new market, there was a whole playbook that we had written for that. And so that, you know, the franchisor and the franchisee could sit down in this new market and say, okay, here's how we're going to do it. They didn't have to figure it out from a blank sheet of paper every single time.

That's a key idea, having a playbook. Right. You talked about at first they were focused on the playbook for operations. And for sure, if you're going to scale any business, but in particular a franchise, when you want to develop operational playbooks, systems, routines, flowcharts, checklists, things like that. Right. But you also probably ought to have a playbook for sales. We've covered that a couple times. And a playbook for marketing. What is the flow of your thing? And I heard you talking about this launch playbook for a particular store. So a store opens, they add a new franchise, they open a new store, they've got some stuff to do there. Did they also have some national or regional things that were not store specific?

Yeah, so we built, we just tried to create even simple things like these people were in the frozen custard business. So we built annual things that they knew were coming every year. Right. So we knew that we needed to build a birthday event every year based on the birthday of the founder. And we knew, you know, we found simple stuff like we went out and discovered when is national frozen Custard Day. And then we built a whole program around National Frozen Custard Day that happened every year. Fortunately there was already one, otherwise we would have created one. But you know, it doesn't mean that we stop thinking. It just means that we, when we find things that work, whether it's nationally or in specific markets where that market is at a particular stage of development, we can plug those things in. And that gave us the freedom to constantly be thinking of all the other things that we needed to deal with. Whether it was individual markets that might be having particular problems that we hadn't identified before. You know, we could chase down all those loose end problems or chase down, you know, individual opportunities because we weren't constantly just trying to keep things running on a day to day basis.

Yeah, so you've got your playbook for the store openings, you've got all the regular things and then you can find the opportunities in between.

Well, sure. I mean bandwidth is one of the, you know, that's the thing that a lot of people don't understand is, you know, ultimately bandwidth will, human bandwidth will be a great limiter. And if you're using up your bandwidth, just redoing this, you know, resolving the same problem over and over and over again, you're never going to grow to get beyond that, that stage.

One of the companies that we worked with was an operator for hair franchise and she was running a company and the franchisor was a chain like a few in that category doing a lot of similar kinds of things. And so this operator had an idea for doing something a little bit differently with store launches. And she tried something and she made a change in the pricing promotion structure that dramatically changed the payout and that enabled her to buy or build more stores faster and fund them more with less leverage and dramatically led the growth of her business. Of course, over time the others in the group figured it out, but she made a tweak to that base playbook that they had established for their operators.

Well, and you bring up something that we deal with that still. It's funny, it surprises people that, that we work with and, and it's so important to remember that, you know, the marketing should be connected to the biggest opportunities that you have. By biggest, I mean the most profitable and the biggest. Right. So dollar wise, what are the biggest margin, biggest opportunity things that you can, that you can grow and you know, if you have to leave a few other things on the side, that's fine, but don't fail at everything because you're trying to chase them all down. Focus on the biggest, juiciest opportunities. Right. So even with that, that restaurant chain, you know, right away we understood, we came to understand with them what are the highest margin products that they have and what are the. What are the products that they have that. That they could sell much more of right now? And try to figure out how do we focus our time on those rather than just everything in general? Right. You know, we understood the margins on their products, and that's something that we do today. Sometimes it throws people when we first start working with them and they're thinking, we're just going to be talking about pretty pictures and advertising and some ads. And, you know, we always want to have a conversation about. Talk to us about your margins. Talk to us about where you have the greatest opportunity to make more product or more. Or deliver more services with an advantageous margin. Where are the areas where the more you sell here, the better your margin gets? Show us where we can create the maximum value, and that's where we want to dig in.

Of course, this points to something that you really need to know is the differential margin on your products and services. If you don't know where you make more money or less money and you focus only on the volume, you may make some very big mistakes.

Or here's. Here's another one. You know, it actually leads into another story that we had with this health club that was doing very well. They had plenty of clubs. They were growing. But when I asked them, how much do you guys spend to get a new.

A new member acquisition cost?

Yeah, they, they said, well, you know, our cost per conversion on Google Ads is this. And I said, okay, that's nice, but how much do you spend to get that? Well, that's how much we spend. I said, okay, well, but it's not. I mean, you have TV running, you have radio, you have salespeople closing these. I mean, there's a lot of other costs involved. Well, we don't really track that. I mean, how can we track that? And I said, look, it's very simple. Give me your entire marketing budget, then give me the number of new members that you added, divide this number into that number, and then we'll know. And they had never looked at it. And once they did, it led to a whole process of cutting out some of that stuff and experimenting to figure out what is the optimal mix. How much is it really costing us? And the interesting thing that came from that, from a business standpoint is not only did they. You could say, well, that's great because they got a lot more members and they spent less money, but it also meant that they. The cost of growth for them went down a little bit and it freed up cash that they had so that they could actually pursue two strategies. So today they have both an organic strategy of winning new members, growth through marketing, but also a strata and an acquisition growth strategy because they. They're out acquiring new markets and, and buying competitors. So they're growing both ways. And when they buy those new competitors, the first thing they do is bring this new playbook into that market and start understanding how are they spending the money, what is their cost per new member? They understand what it should be. It has allowed them to grow from really a couple of dozen clubs in. In two states to now they're in seven states. They have more than 100 clubs. And, you know, that's not just marketing. That's marketing enabling the business to pursue additional strategies as well.

Yeah, I think, you know, that's a really. I love the lesson of that, that focusing, that tuning it, honing it gives you, as you say, and as we have often said, growth eats your cash. So you want to use it really carefully. And if you don't know the return on this stuff, you're just throwing money at things and hoping something sticks. But I've seen that cost, like entire marketing budgets for companies where they burn through stuff that seem like there's no way this can't win. And these are top people doing this work, and it's gotta kick in. And everybody would've looked at it and said, that's gotta work. And sure enough, it failed horribly, inexpensively. And there was their whole year's marketing budget burned before they'd done any testing and validation and tuning on it. And maybe a small change in creative would have made all the difference, right?

Sure. Or maybe.

Or maybe it was the targeting that was wrong, or who knows?

Or maybe it was working better than they thought and they were wasting money. I once worked with a company that they were convinced that their growth was coming from being at trade shows. So I spent $100,000 to be at this trade show. The guy says, we get 100 leads every year out of this trade show. And, you know, we. We close 50% of them. And I said, okay, great. So, you know, you get 50 leads out of this trade show, it costs you $100,000. So that. That's costing you $2,000 per lead at this trade show. He had never thought of it that way. And I. He said, well, I mean, yeah, I guess so. And I said, okay, so let's look at this other strategy over here that you're doing, and that costs you $150 per lead and you're complaining horribly about that, he says, well, yeah, but we only close a quarter of those. And I said, yeah, but it doesn't matter. You're still only paying, you know, what is that, $450 or something per lead for that? You're paying 2,000 for this other thing? Yeah, you know, light bulb.

I love the shows where you can generate leads and, or sales. And yet again and again, I notice over time how trade show marketing has declined so much for so many. Now, there are some awesome exceptions to it, but when you think about the cost to travel, to set up, to have a booth, to exhibit to all the other things that go along with it, and then to promote within the show to get people to actually stop by your booth on the way of what, whatever. And all the things that go, they become very, very expensive to maintain shows. And I know the last business that I worked with, we would do like 16 plus shows a year. And some of them we wrote a lot of business and others we were like, why are we here again?

Right. Well, you know, if you're going to be. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to be at any show. And even in that business, they continued to go to that show, but they went knowing what the cost was, understanding what the return was, and they had other reasons. You know, they said, look, we do recruiting here. We're visible to our existing customers here. You know, there's other values for us to be here. But you know, they, they at least stop kidding themselves saying we should be doing more shows and less of these other tactics that, that were more cost effective.

Yeah, I think that's a key point is what is, like, what are all the metrics that are going into it? What's the value of the customer? What's the relative margin? What's the lifetime of the customer? Is it A1? Are you selling a particular event or are you getting an ongoing client. Customer out of it? Whether it's a show or a campaign of some kind or a channel.

Well, sure. Lifetime value of the customer. I mean, do you really, have you figured that out? It's not hard to figure out. It's again, one of the things that we try to figure out with our customers early on so that we understand what, what, what is the score here when we win, how much is a win worth and how much therefore can we spend to get that? Because if I'm, if I'm spending, you know, sometimes if I just say, oh, it's $1,000 for every new customer, people are like, oh man, that's really expensive. Well, what's the lifetime value of that customer? Well, on average, it's $75,000. Oh, well, okay, That's. That's a pretty good ratio.

Yeah. Knowing and seeing where it. So talked about the growth of your own business. How have you applied the lessons learned working with clients? And yeah, for the companies.

That'S been super exciting and sadly, one of the more recent things, because what we're all in my industry, and I'm sure others are like this, we're guilty of. We get very codependent, and our people laugh about how they warn our clients that we could have an unhealthy attention to the health of their business, even beyond our own health, of our business or our personal health. Our people take it very personally getting a win for a client. And so we, We. We didn't necessarily apply a lot of this to our own business until the last few years. And. And I just started really preaching here what we preach at our clients. And. And we started being methodical about understanding what our costs are, understanding what our cost per client is, understanding who our client is, what is their pain, where do we find them? What are the. How do we talk to them? How do we explain this? And then once we experimented with that for a while, started setting some goals for ourselves, and we started very small. We said, hey, let's see if we can get one new client every month from the marketing that we do. And that year we got 15. And then the next year we said, okay, let's double it and see if we can get two. Well, that was this last year. And we ended up with just under 40. So this next year I sat the team down and said, you know, well, next year we got to do 80. And they said, they didn't freak out. They said, okay, well, let's go look at the numbers and figure out what is it going to take to get there? What's that going to look like? And they immediately started modeling that out to show how we're going to get there, not through luck and not through hope, but through a really methodical approach. I'm trying to remember his name at. He was. He ran P and G a few years back and he had a saying. I should. I should look it up and remember his name, because I say this all the time to my team, which is what gets measured, gets done. And we live by that here. So we set our measures and we set our goals, and then we measure, measure, measure, measure, measure, and we get there.

Yeah, I think that's. There's a. You can only have your attention on so many things. So put your attention on the right things, measure them, track them. I hear turning a creative process into a repeatable, scalable process in this thing and honing in on that, not focusing so much on the magic of it. Right, right.

Well, and there's still room for the magic. We have fun with some of that, but that's the stuff that happens, you know, that's not the starting point. That happens along the way after we've set those numbers and we're measuring what's happening. And we all have to be willing to. To try lots of different things and measure and hone and repeat and measure. That's what we've discovered here in our own business, and it's certainly what we preach with our clients.

Yeah. So you're breaking stuff down into that. Well, I hear a few things here. Right. So the need to know where to. Where to put your efforts. So understanding, understanding where the marketing opportunity is, what the relative value of things are, what it's actually costing you for things is about honing the marketing effort more so than any one particular trick or any one channel or method or anything like that. It's that.

Yeah. Again, it's the building of the machine around it and understanding how all the pieces fit together. And the interesting thing about marketing, marketing today, of course, is it reaches deep into the operations of the organization, not just here, but with our. With many of our clients as well. You know, from an example here, you know, our marketing. Our marketing efforts are connected all the way through to the quotes that we send out, which are autumn. When. When a client here accepts a quote, it automatically put in their credit card information. It automatically bills them. It automatically connects into our accounting, which connects it to QuickBooks. It automatically then triggers tasks that get sent out to our. To our team members. So we've. We've connected our operations through finance and production, directly to the marketing effort, which has made the business a lot more. Well, is. It certainly made it more efficient, but more importantly, it's made it more nice, nimble. And it's, it's. That has enabled us to grow at a rate where if I had told our team that we were going to grow this fast a year ago, they would have said that's crazy, we could never handle that. And today we're onboarding and doing more and more of what we love and we're doing less and less of the work in between.

It's interesting. We talk and we open with marketing and people think first about strategy but in reality, we're really talking about good execution here. Measuring, tracking, managing, setting expectations, tweaking, honing, refining stuff over time.

And that's where we start frankly, with most new client engagements is I know that people want to move right to the really super sexy stuff they want to talk about. Should we have a tick tock talk channel? You know, what should we be doing on Snapchat or whatever it is. But we always start with a lot of really basic blocking and tackling because if we don't have all the basic marketing elements optimized and working together and connected into the operational elements in the business, as well as an understanding of the dollars and cents and how this impacts their business doing, creating the next big hit Snapchat campaign or TikTok video is not going to get it done.

Yeah, there's so much more value in that, just basic repeatability of, of that world.

So I can hear listeners right now saying, TikTok. What is TikTok?

If it annoys you, I could probably tell you how old you are. Oh, like why are people making these videos? Who's watching this? Everybody. They're just younger than you?

Pretty much. Yeah.

TikTok trailer. All the different things that we could spend time, we think about. There's generation today whose primary video exposure is not broadcast TV but is YouTube.

Oh for sure. My kids, we, they never watch TV. They, everything's on the, on YouTube and on their phone. And you know, it is. I've had the, the pleasure of watching them over the years and having at least a connection to how that group is, is, is, is, you know, getting all their information. And that is actually takes me to one of the big drivers for what has driven our business is the fact that marketing has changed and expanded so much that, and it's changing so rapidly that businesses, many businesses, even very large businesses, find it hard to find. They are overwhelmed with the sheer volume of content that has to be created and pushed out across all these channels. Because the key word here is and not or you know, these other things, they don't go away, right? Facebook comes along, Instagram comes along. You don't have you, you don't stop Facebook because Instagram comes along. You just add Instagram to the lineup, you add YouTube to the lineup. Pretty soon you add TikTok and Snapchat to the lineup. The amount of things that have to be done in marketing has expanded to the point where we have a lot of businesses that have said, I surrender. I want to hand this all off to somebody else who has A team of people who understand what this is and they can understand how to apply it to my business to get me the maximum advantage through marketing that I can get. And that's why people who hire us to be their outsourced marketing department, that's why they show up at our door and say, I can handle some of this, but I need you guys to help me with all this other stuff.

It's interesting and it evolves too, right? There was one point where MySpace was an important channel and it actually did die. Others have come along like Facebook still exists and is still an all powerful behemoth, but younger folks are never really there so they've ignored it. But when I think about a lot of our my followers, my community, Facebook's still really relevant, right? Sure, Yeah. I far more enjoy Instagram personally. Less political postings and nonsense going on there than I see over on Facebook. Where do I get more response is actually on Facebook. Where do I get nothing? Twitter. Some people run for president on Twitter.

Hey, that's an idea.

Rappers start little attention fights on Twitter. There's all kinds of different groups who use these things for different purposes and they will keep going. Right. Then you're going to have to refine and put that into the mix.

There's a funny thing that happened a few years back that really definitely finds. I think about this a lot. We sat with a bank, the senior VP of marketing at a billion dollar Midwestern bank probably, geez, six years ago. And we're talking to her about Facebook and we're talking to her about how she has to update her website and we need to be doing Google search and she probably should be doing some YouTube videos and this was pretty basic stuff back then. And she just stared at us and then she turned and looked out the window of her office and I wasn't sure what was going on. I thought, is she going to throw us out? I mean. And she, without even saying it to anyone necessarily in the room, she stared out the window and said, I was hoping to retire before it came to this. And I just thought that summed up a lot of how some people still feel in this market, which is really overwhelmed.

Yeah, it can be fatiguing. Like oh, I was just getting to where I knew and understood that thing. I actually played a trick on some kids a few years ago and I told them, because I work with tech companies, that kind of thing. There was this new invite only thing called Snapgram and they needed to talk to their friends and see if they could get invite because you know, like the coolest folks out there were getting on this thing and it was really cool and took the best of all these things. And I got, I just ran it for a few minutes, but I got them convinced and asking their friends if anybody had heard of Snap Grin.

I love it.

I suppose if I'd carried it far enough, somebody would have launched it.

But yeah, I'm buying the URL right now, Bill.

Snapgram. Get it. Well, it's invite only.

That's the key. That's what makes it hot.

I'm verified just as long as I'm verified out the gate.

Well, you know, come on. Twitter, Chick Fil a and Popeyes made quite, quite. They made a lot of hay out of Twitter recently. Just, just when I think Twitter is kind of no longer really that it's more for politics, something like that happens.

Yeah, there's, yeah, there's, I have friends who are very active there and who have following and community there. But like, that's useless for me. Although we put, put stuff out there, but. All right, well, we've talked about enough. So listen, if you don't know the value of a customer, the length of a your customer acquisition cost, the return on your things, the relative margin of your products and services, the relative return of your different marketing activities, that'd be a good place to start, right? Build a view of it before you start to tweak it. Bullets before bombshells, as they say. And if you want to find out more about Bruce rowley, go to rsmconnect.com and you'll find his from there. And some of that, if you want to get in touch with them or learn more about their work, you'll find us here every week. ScalingCoach.com with a new conversation about Scaling up. Everything to do in the world of Scaling up. Clients, fellow coaches, thought leaders, authors, etc. All of the things in our world of scaling up. Scalingcoach.com the back catalog of all the stuff is there. Tool downloads, even a free copy of the Scaling up book if you just pay the shipping handling. So thanks again, Bruce, for joining us on the show and we'll talk to everybody again next week. All right, special thanks to the original growth guru starter of all things Scaling Up, Vern Harnish. The show is produced by Lucy Summers. Audio production is done at Podfly Productions. The audio is edited by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Ayan Kodina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you got any value out of the show, please give us a review, tell us what parts you liked, say something nice over at iTunes. Probably think we could do the most for us and then like it and subscribe so you get them every week. And if you want to let us know the parts that you loved or what you want to hear more of, or if we can help you with something, connecting with coach in your area or whatever, drop us an email info@scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening. Keep scaling up. Sam.