Being Authentic Makes You More Money. | Business Bootcamp

Hey, everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing with you a couple tips about your marketing and as we head into 2019, what you can do to be more authentic with your branding and how that's going to move the bottom line and increase your revenues for this year. Before we get into today's show, a big thank you to today's sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't already, check them out@gusto.com Boot Camp. You're going to be able to try their software for 90 days and that software is going to allow you to have a platform where your employees can see their wages, see what's being taken out by the government, see all of their benefits, and really create transparency with your everything to do with compensation and your employees. So check it out today, go to Gusto. That's G U s t o.com boot camp for that free 90 day trial. Now today I'm going to be sharing with you something that I've been talking a lot about in landscape business course and with some of the private kind of mastermind group that I do with Pro Plus. And so it's something that I think is very important, especially for small businesses, especially for businesses that are just starting out in terms of their marketing and the way that they position themselves in the marketplace. And so what I find a lot of times kind of a seductive way that we're all kind of seduced into in terms of marketing is appearing like a big brand, appearing like a big company, has it all together, it's been around forever. And that comes across in the way of really clean advertisements in terms of like print marketing or even Facebook ads, having everything just perfectly right when in reality you're just starting out. And so what I mean by that is it came about by a small business that was doing print ads. And on that print advertisement, I looked at the ad and I could not tell what the authentic story was behind it. In other words, I didn't know if this was a mom and pop. I didn't know if this was a national conglomerate. I could not tell whether or not this was a local company, whether it was a franchise. It was just a very generic piece of marketing. And so what I encourage these business owners to do was to tell their story, put a picture of themselves on it, tell everyone that, hey, we're just starting out. We're not the biggest, we're not the best, we don't have the best equipment, we don't have all our systems in place. We haven't figured this out necessarily, but we are absolutely dedicated to you as our customers. And there's gonna be pros and there's gonna be cons to working with us in comparison to a big, big competitor of ours that might have all the scale and all the manpower and a lot nicer offices and all the other fancy equipment. And so what I encourage every small business owner to do is be authentic to you and be authentic to the story behind your brand and your business. Don't try to put on some sort of facade. The reason I say that is this is because if you are positioning yourself with your advertising and your marketing as some polished, very sophisticated and established business and seems like, hey, their logo is perfect and their marketing, their print advertising is just spot on, their website is absolutely spot on. And you literally could think this is a $10 million company when in reality it's doing $200,000 in revenue. I feel like there's going to be a lot of negative consequences to that. Number one, what's going to happen is someone is going to contact you. Three, thinking that you are a $10 million company, and they're going to expecting office staff, and they're expecting you have offices that they can walk into and multiple locations. And they're going to expect that you have systems in place and people in place and teams in place and everything nailed down exactly right. And so they're going to be disappointed right from the get go. Then you're going to miss out on those individuals that are wanting to hire some someone that is not a national conglomerate that doesn't have everything buttoned down. They want to support small local businesses. And you're going to miss out on that business because you weren't authentic to the fact that you are actually that person for the job. You are the person they're looking for, but you were trying to position yourself as something that you aren't. And so regardless of whether you're small, medium, large, it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, I feel you should make market to the authenticity of your brand. Are you small? Are you trying to figure things out? It's okay to tell people that. And what I told these business owners is like, look, you're just starting out. People are going to be buying from you because of you. Not because of your trucks, your equipment, not because of your offices, not because of your nice print advertisements and slogans. They're gonna be buying this because they know you, they like what you're doing. In the community, they know your other employees, they might know your family, your, your story. And so you know, that might not work. That definitely will not work. When they're a 10 million dollar company, have 2, 300 employees, and then they can't just throw a picture of themselves up on their advertisements. They can't necessarily tell their story of how they're starting and what their hardships have been and where they're coming from and what their goals are for the company. That might not work in a $10 million company. When you're attracting a different clientele and when you are actually a $10 million business, that should be advertising as such. But when you're a small business, I actually believe there's a huge amount of leverage that you can take into the marketing game by being authentic to yourself. When I first started my lawn care business When I was 11 years old, my brother and I produced a piece of marketing material, a flyer that had never. I've never been able to duplicate the level of interest in that marketing material in that it was a flyer, 8 and a half by 11, created on Microsoft publisher. Absolutely horrible when it came to design. Now that I look back on it. In hindsight, however, creating that piece of marketing was. First of all, we had never done it before. We were just starting our business. We had never mowed lawns before. We literally had a mower that was $200. It was a piece of junk. Like we were not going to be able to advertise that we were the best, most quality, gonna be the fanciest equipment. We didn't even have a vehicle, we couldn't even drive. We literally would walk to people's houses and mo lawn. We would take our push mower pile on a blower and a weed eater and push it around the neighborhood. They were not going to be having a nice shiny pickup truck pulling up to their property. And so to position ourselves as the highest quality or that our customer service is so fantastic to do that in that piece of marketing material, we would have never seen the results that we did. We put out like 220 flyers in our neighborhood. We mailed them all out and we literally had about 30 customers from those 200 flyers. Now, I have never been able to duplicate that level of return on investment when it comes to marketing. For mail, email, you know, for mail marketing, for print marketing, you know, 200 pieces of mail, you know, let's say each of them cost us a dollar. That's $200. $200 to get 30 mowing clients is unheard of. Like people are out there paying $200 to get one mowing client in the world of marketing and online media right now. And so what I found is that to be authentic to oneself and to one's business is going to play out. Now, I could not make that same piece of marketing right now and expect it to perform well. Because now that Augusta is established and it has a brand, it has a reputation and blah, blah, blah, yes, it needs to have insurance and yes, it needs to have an identity of being professional and needs to have an identity of having actual vehicles that show up and not just people with a lawnmower walking down the street that would no longer fly. And so now the advertising and the marketing and the branding that has been created evolves with the business. But what I find is that most of the time, it's not that your branding and your marketing, your advertising lags behind your business many times. Us as entrepreneurs, us as big thinkers, blah, blah, blah, trying to think outside the box. We are so far ahead of our business in our marketing that we fail to capitalize on the early adopters that are out in the marketplace that want to hire a small business, want to hire a young entrepreneur, want to, want to hire some young guy or gal that's just getting started and they're willing to pay a premium and not expect the best result, not expect the highest quality, not expect a big, nice shiny office or equipment or multiple team members to show up at their house or service their account or whatever industry you're in. I promise you that if you're true to who you are, you will not disappoint people because they're not going to come to you with some preconceived notion that you've built in their mind, buy your advertising and then be, be disappointed by them. That not being the true case. And what you're going to find is you're gonna find people that are going to be buying into your concept, buying into your business, buying into the why of your business. It's so much better. Like on that piece of marketing that we did when I was 11 years old, we said on there, look, we're two young guys, we're trying to pay for college and we promise to be the lowest price. Cause that's what we were. It's not a bad thing to be the lowest price in your market. And if you're gonna be, make sure you realize that that is your go to strategy, that is your usp, your unique selling proposition. Walmart every single day brags about the fact that they are the lowest price competitor and they are willing to match other people's prices, and they've made billions of dollars doing it. So it's not a negative thing to say, hey, look, we're the lowest price in the area, but you have to be true to your brand. You have to be true to the business. So we said, look, we are gonna be the lowest price. We didn't say we're gonna be the highest quality or the nicest trucks or the bunch of brand reputation or that we've been around since 2001. There was nothing like that to stand on. We just said, look, we're two young guys, we're saving money for college, and we're in your local area and we will match or beat everyone's prices if that's a problem for you. That's what our brand was at the time. And so evolving now to today, I truly believe that we've made marketing, advertising, promotional materials far too. What's the word I'm looking for? Far too sterile. So when it comes to your business and you say, okay, well, I want my brand image or my business image to stand on a logo or stand on some sort of purpose or mission or whatever your business is. What I find too often, though, is that we take away the personality from the brand and we take away the identity from the brand. We, when we try to remove ourselves too much from the business. So what I mean by that is we're afraid to tell our story. We're afraid to tell everyone why we're doing what we're doing. So in that first print marketing campaign, we were telling everyone, look, we're two young guys. We're trying to save up for college. And so what I found in the past couple years is with Augusta Lawn Care, I started pulling myself away from the brand so much that there no longer was that continuance of the story. And so we would tell the story in our promotional material, small, little bit on our website, but it was as if the story was in the past and how it started, but there was no more story in continuance. And so what I ended up doing is actually inserting myself and the story back into the brand somewhat and sharing more about what I'm doing now, what I'm doing outside of Augusta, the mission behind Augusta, what we want to see in the future from Augusta and making that personal connection. Making a connection, maybe not personal, but a connection beyond just the business or just the service or the product that you sell. And so now, for example, I talked about that presa marketing that we did when I was 11 as a flyer basically. Fast forward to now we're doing Facebook ads. That's where we do most of our marketing. And instead of doing some icon about lawn care and saying some something about something, buy one get one free or get your first mowing free or whatever. Now basically what we're doing is trying to insert personality and story into the brand. So what am I doing? I'm literally taking a GoPro, holding up in front of my face and giving them a quick shop tour within one minute so it fits on Instagram and Facebook, giving us quick one minute shop tour. I'm introducing them to the office staff and kind of the front entrance of our shop and just saying, hey look, spring's coming, we'd love to do your lawn. I'm the owner, I actually say that. Which is for a couple years there I had really pulled myself away from associating with the brand. And so I'd really encourage you. Try not to become too sterile with your marketing. Try not to remove yourself so much that you become some corporate entity and it loses the heart and it loses the personality that you started the business with. And if you're starting your business right now, embrace it. Embrace the fact that you're small. Embrace the fact that you're not gonna have the best, the most shiny equipment, the best quality like embrace the fact that you're going to know every single one of your customers names. For some people, they're willing to pay you over some big competitor that has everything buttoned down because they know that you're going to know their name, they know that you're going to answer the phone. They know that you are going to know everything about their account. And they're not going to have to talk to 20 different sales reps or 20 different account representatives. They're going to know you and create a relationship with you. Now you might lose that customer as your brand evolves and you have hundreds of customers and multiple employees and multiple offices. You might lose them as a customer down the road. But that's okay because now you'll be still being true to your identity and picking up new customers that are going to fit with your model at the present moment. So I encourage you in this short episode today to be true to your identity, to be true to yourself. If you're small, if you're just trying to figure things out, it's okay to tell people that there's going to be people that will repel away from you. But guess what? They're not going to be a happy customer with your business anyways. If you're trying to market yourself as a $10 million company, and so therefore, a client comes with a $400,000 project to your business, and yet you've only done 100 grand in revenue. You've never seen a client like this. You've never done a job or done a proposal or sold something of this size. And now all of a sudden, you're being asked to do this massive task. If you try to fake it and you mess up, they're gonna be completely disappointed that you're gonna have a mad customer in your hands. Now, if you just were true to yourself and said, look, I've not done this before. I've never done a $400,000 project, but I'm willing to give it a try, I'm gonna service your account better than any of your competitors. My competitors. I'm going to be able to. Every single time you call, you're gonna get me on the phone. You're not gonna get some associate or some person in Japan or some person on the other side of the world answering the phone. You're gonna get me every single time. I'm gonna service your account better than any one of my competitors. Now, you might actually get that account if you're just true to your story and true to the fact that you are just trying to figure it out. There's people out there that want to support small business. There's people out there that want to support people that are just getting started. So if that's you and that's your true identity, that's really who you are. Don't shy away from it. Don't try to pretend or try to put some facade on that you're some bigger or that you figured it out or you're down the road. I promise you that being true to yourself, telling your story, and being authentic in your marketing will pay massive dividends. You've been listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. I'm Mike Andy. Until next time. Be great, because nothing else pays.