Episode 18 - Are You Growing At The Rate You Imagined? If Not Listen Closely

If you are a local business owner and you want to grow your business, then you've come to the right place. The Local Voice is a show dedicated to sifting through the noise and sharing practical steps to help you achieve your goals. Welcome to another episode of the Local Voice, hosted by Jeff Harrison, a practitioner in the world of digital marketing. Get ready to take some notes. Let's begin.

It's not very, or I should say it's rare if, when I speak to a new potential client, I ask them what their goal is and it's always to grow their business. And it's never, it, it's never too far from number one. And so my follow up question is, what are you, what have you been doing to grow your business? And invariably most of the people that I work with are, are smaller local businesses and they are working in their business, not on their business. Now what does that mean? Well, to me that means this. You're on a daily basis, you're involved in the day to day. You know, you're running errands, you're picking up equipment, you're, you're doing service calls, you're doing the accounting, you're writing the checks for your employees, you're answering customer service, you're involved in your business, which means you have very little time to work on your business. And it's one of those things, it's like you're constantly like that. There's an, there's an old fable of, you know, a dike holding water back that is constantly springing leaks and you're just sticking your finger in those leaks. You're not building a new dam or in this case, a dike that is bigger, stronger, better. So today I want to talk about, you know, the topic is are you working on your business or in your business? And I want to encourage you to, to. And you can't go cold turkey. So it's not like, hey, after you listen to this, starting today, you're not going to any, no longer do the things you do to make your business work. But what I do want to encourage you to do is start identifying. Maybe it's an hour, maybe it's one day a week that you can say, hey, I am working to grow my business. I'm working on my business instead of in my business. Let me give you an example. So a few years ago I joined an outside group, it's called bni. And that was my effort to say, I'm going to work on my business, building my referral partners with the other people in my group and getting other ideas and doing one to ones, those kind of things. That's working on my business. Another thing to do might be, hey, writing content. Maybe you love to write. No one knows more about your business probably than you do. But rarely do I come across a client who has the time to create their content. Whether it's a video like this or it's an audio podcast or it's a written blog, or they kind of hire that stuff out, or they just don't do it at all. Nine times out of 10, they just don't do it at all. And they wonder why they're not growing. And it's because you're busy doing the busy work. Now. I don't want to discount it. We all have that. I'm a small business owner myself, and there are things I have to get done right. There are times where I have to write an email for a client, There are times where I have to create an ad for a client. But the majority of things I've done is I've started adding staff and outsourcing that to people who love doing those things. And I'm not saying I don't like it, but there are people out there that are a lot better than I am at doing certain things. So what I'm going to encourage you to do is say, hey, can I first, Can I pull myself out of my day today so that I can work on my business? It might be going to a chamber of commerce, you know, mixer. And while you're there, your goal is to meet three or four new people, get three or four new cards of people who might be a good referral partner. And if you're curious what a referral partner is, I did talk about that in one of my previous. But basically it's somebody who, who has your ideal customer that you want to build a relationship with, who whenever something comes up about if you're a roofer or a plumber, it doesn't matter that you are the person they refer to, that they're their customer. And because referrals are so much stronger than cold calling, your chance of getting business is much higher. And also the profit margins are better because they're probably not out shopping and they're now not to the point where they're just saying, hey, it looks like everybody's kind of the same. So the winner is the one who gives me the best price. Try to stay out of that pool of fish, because those fish are sharks. And it's very difficult to succeed. So look and say, hey, can I now put myself out in a different market that allows me to grow my business, to work on my business. I mentioned earlier that I'm a member of a BNI group. That's a great place to go there. There are thousands of those across the country and across the globe. I would look at your local area and say, hey, do they have those in my area? And look them up. You can go there as a guest and it costs you nothing. You can do it a couple times before you have to make a decision to buy or, excuse me, to become a member. But it is well worth it. My BNI group has now, you know, far exceeded what I paid to be a member there. It is. It's literally gold for me to be a member there because of the referrals and the business that I've gotten from there. So that's another thing that's working on your business. When I say on, it means you're growing your business. What are you doing to make it grow? Another thing to do is, as I mentioned, is.

Content. So one of the things I want to share with you, and this is, this is something that's just. Just recently started happening. I've been doing the local voice, this podcast now for about nine years. And. And I did it really as an outlet for me. Yes, it's working on my business, but it's also a great way for me to get to know other people. Often I'll have guests on the show, the type of people that I will invite on the show. A lot of times they're that referral partner, or possibly my referral partner. It gives me a chance to know them better, them know me, and we build up a little bit of a relationship. So if something comes across my desk that works for them, I can refer them with confidence and vice versa. So that is something that I'm doing because my question is, hey, what actions are. And I say daily. What actions are you doing daily to help work on your business? And if you're just starting, every day may seem like overwhelming, but it could be one of those things where. Here's an example. One of my clients, his name is Joe, and he has a pest control company, and they hired us in January of 2025. And. Oh, excuse me. Yeah, January of 2025. And. And since then, we've been doing their. Doing their work. And he stood up in my BNI group and shared how because of the content that we created for them, and there were their reviews going up that they got a large piece of business. This was something that he said, hey, we need to have it done. And we've been talking about, you know, doing this now for a couple of years. But it wasn't right at that time, and I wasn't pushing anybody. It was like, let it be the right time. Well, that turned out that that one piece of business.

Nearly doubled, or, excuse me, half again made his company larger. It's a huge piece of business. How do they find it? Because it was a digital footprint. When they start doing their reviewing or, excuse me, when they. When the business started looking at, hey, who out there is doing this? And. And because of the reviews they got and the footprint and their activity in the digital space, they won that bid. So it's kind of exciting when my customers come back and say, hey, this is because of the actions you did. That's exciting. I love that. So what actions are you taking on a daily basis to.

Grow your business, to work on your business? One of the things that we do in BNI, and you don't have to be a BNI member to do this, I do this with LinkedIn, people that I meet, people on Facebook, in other businesses, people in the chamber of commerce. I find people who could be a great referral partner or who may know my referral partner. And I'll do a call of one to one. These are generally about an hour. And in that hour.

I will have that person share with me for about a half an hour. You know, who they are, what they do, how can I help them grow their business? And then I'll spend a half an hour doing the same thing. Now we both have some invested interest in each other's success. And now when I'm out and about, all of a sudden it's made my hearing different because all of a sudden somebody will say something like, I use pest control, something about, hey, what do you do about termites? And all of a sudden I'm like, wow, I just met with this guy named Joe. He has pest control company, and we talked about that. That's what he does. I can now speak with some level of knowledge and authority and suggest Joe's business. That's how that works. So it actually gives me a wider depth of knowledge that I can do things besides just talk about the weather or an ache and pain. I can actually say, hey, here's an idea. And this is what his business is. Because it's fresh in my mind and I can tell a story about their business. People like that. It's not just a. It's not just a cold. Well, I Got their card at a function and I really didn't meet them. But yeah, they do this. This information. No, that's not a good. Working on your business. So one to ones joining. Joining a networking group. I like BNI because it's only a, what I call a one category group. There's. If you're a real estate agent and you do residential, you're going to be the only one in there. If you're a banker or mortgage company, you're going to be the only one in there. So it's, you're not competing against each other. I've been in one where they've had multiple seats for that and it does make a little challenge and sometimes awkward because it puts pressure on a member. Like, you know, I don't know, should I give it to Jeff or should I give it to Joe? It's kind of uncomfortable. So consider bni. Now the other thing I want to talk about is do your actions make your boat go faster? Do your actions make your boat go faster? What I'm talking about is if, if you now are going, let's say, let's say you go to a chamber of commerce and, and you just go there and you hang out with the same people you always hang out with, that's probably not going to make your boat go faster. As uncomfortable as it can be for some people, including myself, to go outside that circle and go meet somebody over there I've never met or go walk into a circle of people and start having a conversation with them. It's not easy, but that's the action I need to take if I want my boat to go faster. Am I writing an article about something that I do to show my expertise and submitting it to the chamber or to the local newspaper or, you know, anybody help get distribution out there? Am I posting it on my blog? Blog post? Am I putting pieces out on social media? These are things that help others see value in being, in being in a relationship with me. This podcast I mentioned as an example, I will have guests on here and we'll, we'll join minds, if you will, for 30 minutes to an hour and we'll talk about their business, who their ideal customers are, what the challenges have been through building their company and then, hey, how can we get a hold of you if we want more information? It's a great way to say hey. In bni, it's called Giver's gain. We give before we ask. So. So if I can give them a platform to be shown by more and more people it gives them an opportunity for their business to grow. That's a good win for them. So if you're interested in that, you live in the Coachella Valley or you're a digital marketing company, quite frankly, and you're not using a lot of artificial intelligence, I'd love to have you on the show. This would be a great platform with you. And that brings up the next one, the story of AI.

This is. This, I think this is a fascinating story about. Now, it's been about 16 or 17 months ago.

I said, hey, I want to build an automation workflow using artificial intelligence. And at the time I just started learning how to use a platform called Make M A K E to do that. And I learned how to do it, but I chose that that was not the highest and best use of my time. So I hired somebody out of Portugal to, to actually build it for me. Now, I had been using AI. We've been using AI and swingpoint media for probably two years prior to that. And we've seen it continuously evolve. You know, we say, hey, it's growing exponentially and it's changing all the time. Back then it was, it was pretty bad, in fact. It would create something for us and we spend a lot of time cleaning it up. Now, not so much. And, and so anyway, so we built that and we became more and more known as being involved in AI. Now, keep in mind, I only built that to take care of our customers in house. So I was a test model and it would do things like this. It would write content like a blog post, it would create a video script. It would do all the SEO on the blog post, the SEO on the script for the video. It would make images for the blog post, as well as a thumbnail for the video. It does five days a week. It does social media posts on four different platforms, and it does all the titling and the customization for each platform, whether it's a hashtag or it's a keyword. And then of course, it even gives us an email that we can send out every week. And we use artificial intelligence to do that. Now the one thing we don't do is we don't rely 100 on AI. So we have Melissa, who's our project manager, and she is a. She's a whiz when it comes to editing is she will proof all of that to make sure it's right. And then within each one of those areas, like if we need somebody to make do something with the videos, we have somebody in the video area or if an image or that type of thing. The bottom line is we've started leveraging that product and we, or AI and we've started talking about it. Well, what this has done is it's starting attracting more people into our world. That said, hey, can you help us with this with artificial intelligence? Like right now we're getting involved with, with voice agents now we've, we've done chatbots and you've seen them, they're down on the corner of your website and somebody can click those and it'll have a conversation. I will call those, you know, last year's chatbots, the new ones we call modern. They are much more interactive. In other words, we can design them so they'll. As an example, if somebody clicks on one of yours, it can answer an array of questions based on the knowledge base. In other words, how do we give them information? And it can have a conversation with them. But we can also say, hey, that goal of that particular chatbot is designed to convert people into making an appointment or to sign up for a free presentation or whatever it is. And we can design that from the very beginning. And it will now it will answer the questions but it will always be seeking an opportunity to them for take that, that action. It's always closing, if you will. And the cool part about it is every conversation is recorded so we can go back and look at it and say, and it captures your information. So we know if Debbie at, Debbie, you know, @aol.com has been, you know, interacting with our bot, then we have that follow up information. Now we can tie that into followup where it, it says okay, if they've interacted we want to put them in our database for emails. We can do all of that. These are the things that we, we started talking about and making video about. Well, what's happened in the last couple of weeks is all of a sudden we have been, people been reaching out to us and say hey, we see you've been in the space and can you help us with this? Can you do this? And I just recently had a, a fun invite from a, a gentleman and he, he's out of, he's originally out of London, he lives here in the Coachella Valley now. And because I do AI, I was going to do a program called the AI Incubator and he signed up for it that it didn't work out. But he then invited me to a pro to be part of a program at the University of California, Riverside. It's ucr and we do what we call Office Hours, and we get to talk about this kind of stuff because, let's face it, we start talking about, about chatbots and we start talking about voice agents, and we talk all this stuff. Artificial intelligence, a lot of times we're doing it in a silo, meaning there's not many people out there to discuss this with. And so it sometimes can be kind of lonely. And at the same time, we're always kind of creating the ideas in our head where now this will give us an opportunity to actually vet some of these things and, and talk with other people and hear some ideas like, oh, I didn't think of that, because they're in a different world. So I'm excited with that. My point is I'm working on my business, not so much in my business. And by working on my business, these new opportunities keep coming along. So the bottom line is, and what I was talking about before is called a content accelerator. It allows you to work on your business, not in your business. Because sometimes I've had clients where they say, well, they want to write the content themselves. I said, hey, no problem. I think that's great. But what happens is I come back to them and said, hey, we want to post your weekly blog post. Oh, I haven't got time. I've been so busy. They're working in their business. So over a period of time, we convince them that we don't need them to make the content anymore. Because now, again, with, with artificial intelligence, we can take older, old videos or old written content, and we can train that particular model to sound and act, tonality, voice, sentence structure, everything just like them. And then we feed in, what do we want them to talk about or what piece of content want to create. And all of a sudden it's like they look at, they're going, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. That's exactly what I would have said. That makes it easier. That allows that piece to be working on your business and attracting customer. Just like I explained with Mark with artificial intelligence, for you to get more business. So keep that in mind. That is designed to help local businesses and doesn't have to be just local business. It could be a digital marketing company, quite frankly, who makes content for other businesses. This could help their process. And because it's taking the process of creating all that content, the blog post, the video, all the assets that go with it, the social media posts and the email is taking it down from about four or five days of creation down to one day. And so it allows even a digital marketing company to say, I would like to use it for my clients. Certainly do that. If you're interested, you know, you can get ahold of me. I'm@swingingpointmedia.com I'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, I'd like for you to go back and think, hey, are you working on your business or in your business? If right now you're 100% in your business, carve out 10%. It may seem crazy, it may seem overwhelming. Carve out 10%. A dear friend of mine, he's a mentor, he said hey when he would. He never went to lunch alone. Like, what are you talking about? You know, sometimes I need to go to lunch by myself because I need that distraction. He says, no, I'd never go to lunch alone. I would take somebody out that either a was a potential client or knew my potential clients, and he ended up being very, very successful. And so I want you to think about that every day. Are you working a little bit on your business? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And until next time, my name is Jeff Harrison with Swing Point Media, actually on the Local Voice, and I look forward to hearing you see. Excuse me. Seeing you and hearing you next time. Thanks.

There you have it. Another episode of the Local Voice with Jeff Harrison sharing practical marketing advice that is working in today's busy climate. For more on Jeff, Visit him on LinkedIn or the website swingpoint media.com until next time, do the things that produce results and leave the rest for your competitors.