INBOUND 2016: Scott Meyer "Own Your Niche: An Agency Content Model"

Thank you, everyone. It's so great to be here among so many weird people. And I say that lovingly because this is my crowd, the weird people. You're weird enough that you guys can get a niche. You can master that niche and really have an impact on the world. And that's what we're going to talk about, how to do all those things. But before we do that, I want to do a little experiment. So I'm going to jump down. I didn't get to meet you yet. Tell me your name. Ani. Are you familiar with golf claps? Does that mean anything to you? Ok, you failed. So what's your name? Jody. Jody, are you familiar with the golf clap? Yeah. Okay, perfect. So let's just. Can you do it for everybody? Just kind of show them. This is what you do on a golf course. Right? Very appropriate. So could everyone give me a little golf clap right now? Just keep it. Yeah. Excellent. Now I want you to keep it going. A little golf clap. Now let's double it. Yeah. Now double it again. One more time. And now go nuts. Yeah. Okay. Now we don't have to go from golf clap to nuts. We can actually start with golf clap. So go golf clap. And now go nuts. Now this, this is why you guys are going to want a niche and want to master it. Because the difference between golf clap and nuts is the increase in profitability you guys are going to have with a niche. Okay? Is that cool? It's also the cue I'm gonna give you when I need applause. Right. So that works in two ways, which is really exciting. But I know you guys can master this niche because it's worked for generations. In fact, it worked five generations ago from my ancestors. They came from Norway five generations ago. They took the train as far west as they could in the United States, which at that time was Yankton, South Dakota. They floated up a little river, the James River. They disembarked on a little piece of grass called Carter's Landing, and then they waited because there was a few Norwegians who were supposed to pick them up. And in South Dakota, we like to tell jokes about Norwegians, one of which is they don't know how to tell time. And that was very true in 1876 because they didn't come for a day and a half. So the first day in a brand new country, my great great grandparents sit outside next to a river with lots of mosquitoes. If you've ever been to South Dakota in the summer, lots of mosquitoes next to a river. And it's just complete darkness, right? It's just grassland. There's nothing. Amazing stars. And somehow these people, my ancestors said, we made it. This is exactly where we want to be. Which is nuts, right? They had this vision of possibility in this nothingness. And this bold vision is what helped them build a community, a family, a church, a life, right? And this bold vision is what we need to have as agencies. You know, the Romans would always say, fortune favors the bold. I really like the quote from Paulo Coelho in his book the Alchemist, which says, if you have a bold idea, the universe conspires to help you achieve it. And I think if we have bold visions, we can achieve them. And that's what we're here to to do today. So a few really quick housekeeping items. The bottom of every slide, there is a webpage there. Anything I reference from Paulo Coelho to the slides to links are all available there. You can go download everything whenever you want. There's also, I guess it's not on that slide, but it will be present on most slides. There's also a hashtag we'd love for you guys to use that get questions on there. Because if I don't get a chance to answer your question, if you're an introvert, I'll answer it later on social media. So definitely share and answer those. Now, when we talk about boldness, I want to introduce you to a few of my friends that really represent this to me and give me inspiration to choose a niche and master it. The first of which is Gary Greff. Gary returned to his home in Regent, North Dakota. Population this room, there's about 125 people in Regent, North Dakota. And I'm talking to you guys in 252 as well. I know you're there, right? So I hope you're golf clapping along. But Gary came back to his hometown and he saw a community that that was dying. So I'm going to let him pick up the story and tell you a little bit about it.

And I saw that the town was dying and I thought, okay, if this small town, if you don't do something, it's going to be a dead community. With that in mind, I thought, what do I do to help keep Regent alive?

Now, most of us, if we were faced with this challenge of how do we get a community to be vibrant, we would say run for office, donate to a local charity, join a chamber of commerce. But instead, he looked around and he saw an opportunity. At the time he moved back, the state of North Dakota was Paving a road to Regent. This is blacktop now. We're getting no more gravel. They actually can drive on blacktop asphalt 30 miles from the interstate to region, North Dakota. So he saw this opportunity, and he looked around, he said, what do people in this area do? What do they like? What's really interesting about them? And he noticed that the farmers and ranchers in the region, they knew how to weld. They had to weld to fix things, right? And in their free time, they would take scrap pieces of metal and actually weld together. Little metal men, they would call them. So sometimes in the rural areas, you'll see these little metal men or statues in the fields. He said, what if we put these together and created sculptures to bring people to region, North Dakota. But not just any sculptures.

But I thought, well, nobody's going to stop for normal sized sculptures, but they just might stop for the world's largest. And that's how I started creating the world's largest metal sculpture.

So Gary Greff is on a mission to create the Enchanted Highway. He spends three to seven years to create one sculpture. No education, no background. He goes into the abandoned school that's shut down, lays out a grid onto the gym floor, makes the model, and then goes outside and builds the big version. He's not getting paid to do this. It's his bold idea to save his community. And my favorite one is called Geese in flesh.

The one that's in the Guinness Book of records is 110ft tall, 150ft wide, and weighs 78.8 tons.

And what is it?

It's called geese in flight.

And that's yours?

That's mine.

So Gary started this parade, this bold vision. What's really fun is when you don't have permission, you just do something. Other people have to fall in line. So the state of North Dakota, the chamber and visitors bureau, now they're all posting photos of it, giving him money to create more because this is creating a destination.

There's a stretch of road that's 30 miles long. I wanted to create a sculpture every three miles. I've got seven of the sculptures created. At this point, I've got four more to do. And that's what we've got.

That's what we got. In the next 20 to 30 years, Gary will finish this project, building the Enchanted highway from the interstate to region, North Dakota. And now, if you guys are ever driving across the country, I guess you might want to see it, right? But this is this idea of building.

I'm sort of living proof you can do whatever you put your mind to it. You know, I never laid a bead of weld, and now I'm welding the world's largest metal sculptures. I never had an art class. I basically say, if you want to do it, you know, and go ahead and do it, because it just takes a little persistence and make up your mind you can do it and move forward with it.

And that's what we need in our agencies is persistence and vision. You know, I think Gary represents this better than anyone I know. I think about that story all the time. And in agency parlance and as we call it in this session, we would call it a niche, right. If we want to be more jargony. And I love this photo because it really reminds me of my friend Ben, who I just met. Where are you at, Ben? I assume, Ben, you made it to Germany last year for the international beard growing competition. Just missed it. The fact that there is an international beard growing competition blows my mind, right? There are people like Ben who spend years growing facial hair to win a competition in Germany for people with the best facial hair. And of course, the winner last year, you guys maybe know him. He's from Portland, Oregon. No, no. Is it you? Is that you? Oh, my goodness. You pasted it on your head. That's fantastic. But he won, obviously, for color and size and cut, as you would imagine, Right? But the fact that he can find a competition about beard growing, I think that you guys can find a few customers that are more niche than B2B software, right? Like, this isn't that hard. We can actually find people. And I think another person that represents this to me is a friend of mine up in North Dakota, again in Ada, North Dakota. And I called her up because she has such a weird niche. I was like, I can call her up and talk to her about this. But like any good entrepreneur, she put me on hold. So this is what I got when I called my friend Enie Ramsford for about, like, literally two and a half minutes, listening and listening, But I finally got through to her. And Amy is this person who fell into a niche. So I think this happens to a lot of us, too. That's kind of what happened in Nine Clouds. We started working with an automotive client and later on started to focus. But I want to introduce you first to her, Edie Ramstead. And she lives in Ada, North Dakota, and has a unique challenge as well. Small town, population is 1,000, and it's a, you know, rural farming town. I'm the very first non agriculture, manufacturing business in the county ever. She's the first business ever in her town that's not a farmer. Right. And she had a unique path her whole life. She was a jeweler, she was a goldsmith. She would make earrings and bracelets and necklaces. And when she retired, she got this unique request that she took. I retired and that lasted for about two weeks and I got really bored and I met a lady that needed about a six to ten hour a week job and it was just supposed to be a couple hours a week. And it just kind of ended up being an international company. Real quick. Real quick. Edie and her partner started making little rings for someone who had contacted them about a Renaissance festival. So if you don't want to know what a Renaissance festival it is, it's people dressing up like knights, pretending to hit each other with spears. That'd be my. And eating lots of turkey on a stick. That's my impression. And so they made custom chain mail for someone going to a Renaissance festival, which is, you know, the garb underneath with a bunch of rings. Word spread, right? Someone else orders a custom chainmail outfit and another person and pretty soon she is working in We've got mail W e a V e got M A I L L e which is really punny. But they are the international leaders of making custom chainmail. They might be the only people making custom chainmail, but they're getting clients from pretty high places, right. HBO is contacting them to make custom chainmail for Game of Thrones. And that's what happens when you're the best at your niche, right. You get found. And if you're in Ada, North Dakota, if you're in Regent, North Dakota, if you're in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where we are, you don't have an alternative, right? If I want to live in a rural community, I need to stand out to people outside of my community. There's not the work there. And so I think people in rural areas have an advantage because you don't have this temptation to, to just work with people down the street. You have to focus and stand out. And that's what we want to help you guys do. And so I think that both Edie and Gary are great examples of what we call the long tail. I like to call it why Borders went broke. So I'm going to check. I like to check the ages of people on this. So tell me your name. Kelsey. Kelsey. Do you remember what Borders was? No. No, she doesn't. Okay. Shock and awe, right? Welcome to the Wheels of Time. How about you? Ben 26. Ben the 26th. Do you remember what Borders was? Bookstore. A bookstore, perfect. Tell me your name. Peter. Peter, do you remember what a bookstore was? Yes. Ok. All right. So Borders was a bookstore. And like every in person business, they have a problem which is they only have so much shelf space, right. If you're a bookstore, you're going to carry the Bible, the Guinness Book, you're going to carry 50 shades of gray, you're going to carry Harry Potter series, stuff that sells. If you're Borders, you're not going to carry things that don't sell well. And so whether you're a bookstore, whether you're a hardware store, whether you're a shoe store, you carry the 20% of stuff that moves off the shelf. So this is the idea of the long tail, written by Chris Anderson in 94, I think. But beyond this 20% of stuff that's really popular, there's this whole long tail of stuff, really unique products that people want, but they're probably just not standing around your store asking for. And I know this personally because about five years ago I wrote a book called the Travel Hacking Guide to Norway. I made $181.93 last year from this book. Yeah, give it up. Golf clap.

Okay.

Middle. I like middle clap. Even better. So this book, you know, my mom bought it, a few friends bought it, and if you search online for Travel Guide to Norway, there's no chance you find me, right? If you search for how to get to Norway, no chance. But if you're searching Travel Hacking Norway or How to get to Norway for Free with points and miles and hitchhiking, that's my book, you're my people. And every year I probably get 15 to 20 people from around the world who contact me and are like, hey, I'm going to Norway, gonna meet the in laws, I don't have any money. I got your book and it's like, cool, right? Like, that's my audience, that's my tribe, as Seth Godin would say. And so this book is just an example of there's stuff way out on the tail, but people want it. And so what we want to think about is how do we put our agency out on the tail so we can stand out instead of being these dying in person businesses that don't know what to put on the shelf, right? And the beauty of the long tail is not only that you stand out on Google and when people are trying to find you, but you actually make more money. So research that was in Tim Williams Book who spoke this morning. Research from Walsh and Fern show that the more mastery you have, the more you can charge. So on the left hand side of this graph, you see the price index. So one would be market rate 1.2 would be you're charging 20% higher than market rate 1.4, 40% higher. Are you good? Sam, Was it? Sam? Kelsey. Shoot. Sorry. So no, you're not good. But yeah, now you are. So a typical business if you look at the volume share, if you're a boutique business, you have just a tiny percent of the market, you can actually charge a little bit more. You have more service, right? More hands on, you can charge a little bit above market rate. But if you are a master, if you have expertise, if you have efficiency based on your mastery, you can charge 20 to 30% higher. And that's what's known as the premium due to equity. So you're a high equity business, as the academic jargon would say, basically you know your shit, right? That's what we're talking about. So you can charge more, but what's great is it's not just about charging more, but a little bit of increase in price is a massive increase in profitability, which is what we're really after as an agency. And so the research shows if you increase your price 5%, you're gonna have a 50% increase in profit. So you can't tell me it's not worth your time to become a master, right? To choose a niche and really get good at it. So you can increase your price a little bit, increase efficiency a little bit, and have a massive profitability increase. That's really what we're gonna be going after. And I know this firsthand because about two years into Nine Clouds, we spun off our design business. We at the time of Nine Clouds, when we started, we started creating infographics pretty early on when that was kind of, you know, a big viral thing. And so we spun out a business called Lemonly. All they do is make infographics. And because they're focused on custom design infographics, they work with Fortune 100 companies, people like Marriott, people like the Grammys, and even less successful organizations like the Green Bay Packers. So they're able plays so much better in Minnesota, but yeah, there you go. Yeah, but this idea of Nichiness helped them be based in Sioux Falls and work with people around the world. Right? And so I hope that you guys are all here because you believe in that concept of a niche of being weird. You guys sure look the parts, right? So I think you guys can own it. But how do we get from knowing we want to be a niche to actually being a master? That's what I want to lay out now at Nine Clouds. This is a photo from our retreat about three, four weeks ago. What we started with is this Google idea of 20% time. So at Google, they supposedly give their employees 20% to basically fiddle, try to create new products and ideas. At 9Clouds, we say we're going to book in 20% of our employees time to become masters. So that means researching, that means writing for our own blog, creating ideas within a niche. And that means we don't have to hire people who are experts at automotive marketing, which is what we do. We can hire people who are able to write and able to think critically and then train them on the industry. And it gets people excited because they want to be on the phone and be the smartest person on the call. It was actually fascinating to me just a year and a half ago. We had our retreat and we said, are we really going to do this? Do you guys actually want to wake up every day and work on marketing? Car dealers? That's exactly what they said. And it was because they wanted to know what they were going to do when they got to work and be the smartest person on the call. And what's been fun is that as we've become masters, we've been able to create more interesting things. So their jobs actually got more interesting and they having more fun at work. And hopefully, as some employees here in the front will say, is that they enjoy their jobs. Right. And so we kind of stumbled upon a blueprint, what we call the model of mastery that I want you guys to steal and use. It took us about two to three years to do this. I think if you were focused in your own agency, it could take six months if you knew what you were doing. We didn't really know what we were doing. So there's two parts to the model of mastery. Self mastery and industry mastery. So self mastery refers to the fact that you are going to train yourself on becoming an expert. You don't need a client. You could say, I'm going to be an expert in creating yoga shoes for people who overpronate. You can go research that, become that expert, and never even have made a shoe. Right. But industry mastery refers to the idea that you have expertise. You're a practitioner, essentially. Right. So first you can start with self mastery. You can start that tonight in your hotel rooms. Here's what I would recommend to become a Master, choose a service and an industry and combine them. And that's going to be the first inflection point that you focus on. So an example from Nine Clouds would be the automotive industry, automotive marketing and Facebook ads. That's a service we provide for our clients in the industry we work in. How do we own that intersection? We start by creating 12 blog posts. A couple reasons for this. First of all, you start to exist on Google's map, right? If I write 12 blog posts about a pretty specific topic, people will start finding me who are searching for that long tail term. Second, more importantly, as you research and write those articles, you become an expert. You start to learn about that thing in that industry. And this could be one person on your team. This could be a combination of your team. But you're putting enough time in to create these blog posts. I would say two hours per blog post. We might be talking 25, 40 hours max, 500 to 1500 words. Now this is going to be your content foundation for everything else we do to become a master. This is your way to learn. With very low risk, very few people are looking and we always think we want attention, but actually we don't really want attention until we're good. Right. We want to fail when no one's looking. And then when they look, then they can look at us. So do it now. Do it on the blog. It's pretty low risk. Once you have those 12 blog posts, we're going to roll those up into higher value content like an ebook. And HubSpot's great at promoting this, right? So I see good success with one ebook with three parts. Each part has four of those blog posts, right? So 12, 4 1, 12, 3 1. However you want to do it and you put a nice intro, a nice outro, you design it. You're basically giving people the same thing you already wrote. But it's easy to digest, it's easy to share, easy to download. I love ebooks that give half email gate, partially email gated so I can for free look at the summary and then I can give you my email to get all the details. That gives you SEO benefit because people will still go read the summary and link to it, but then you still get the leads when they're filling it out to read the whole thing. Does that make sense? You're good. Cool. So once we have the ebook, you know, probably one ebook with three parts. This is a little look at one of our ebooks about Facebook ads. You can see how it looks. Not a ton of text, right? Really Visual, easy to read. Now we have the foundation for our webinars and at nine Clouds, this is what we've seen. The greatest conversion for leads is from the webinars that people attend. Three webinars based on the three sections of our ebook, right? 20 minutes each. Pretty, not overwhelming, digestible content, but it's a chance for people to see that there's a person behind the curtain. There's an actual human being working at this company. They can talk to you, they understand you, you're personable, you know how to use technology. Like really basic trust factors that some people need. And there's a secret about the webinars that I always encourage people to do is use the poll feature, whether it's goldlebinar, Citrix, Citrix, whatever else you use. There's a feature where you can ask a question, have people vote. So on every webinar we ask them, would you like a free digital audit? And we make them feel really guilty. Yes, please, let's sell more cars. No, I hate free stuff. Those are the choices, right? But the digital audit for us is our way to qualify a customer for us. Basically I say I'll look at your website, your marketing and give you three to five tips on how to improve it. So it's the whole inbound philosophy, right? You just let me know if you want to get on a 20 to 30 minute call, I'll tell you how to improve. Go on your merry way. I know that 20 to 30% of those people come back and buy from me. So we close one out of four of people who do a digital audit, 25%. So if I can get even 15, 10, 15 people on a webinar, I can give four of them to get on audit. I get a customer. This is direct conversion. Now what's fun is that you're going to record that webinar, right? In the webinar software, you're going to have video. You're also going to have audio, which people forget. You can strip the audio out of that video, transcribe it on a site like SpeechPad, and all of this is on that link. If you want to get links to these tools, we transcribe our webinars to SpeechPad. So now we have 60 minutes of speaking into text form. We have 60 minutes of video and we roll that into a course. Now the reason why we love to roll it into a course is because a, it provides a second stream of revenue. So we charge for our course, we send that to people if they come to us and they say, you know, we want to learn more about Facebook ads, but we can't afford you. Or I get on a call and they're not interested. They say, well, we have a course, 157 bucks. Go download it. You get everything you need. Go run wild. I know about 1 out of 10 people will come from that course and then hire us because they start getting into it and they're like, wow, this is a lot. I want to hire you. Right? But at the very least, I'm not saying no, I'm just saying no. But, but, right, no but, like, go read this cool thing. It'll help you learn. So there's a great software tool called Teachery Co again that's on the link. And if you guys want, you have free access to this course until Sunday. I mean, you'll have it forever. But if you want to sign up by Sunday, we have a version of the Facebook ad course just for marketers. So we basically tried to cut some of the auto specific stuff, but you guys can go into that course, kind of see how it's formatted and, and what you'll notice is a lot of it's from the webinar. Right? So I'm not cutting new videos, I'm just repurposing what I already have. So now we have blog to ebook to webinar to course. And it's really basically the time it took to write the blog, redesign the blog post, and do 60 minutes of webinars. So it's a great way to build mastery. And none of this requires a client, right? You can do all of this now. And I think the biggest question you guys probably have is like, should I make the jump to be whatever? I think the answer is make the jump when it's ready. You can start this without leaving all the other clients or niches or whatever you're doing. Right? You can build the landing pad before you jump, and that's what you can do with self mastery. So that's how we get to the top of the self mastery pyramid. It's a great model. It's been working well for us. It's something we've kind of stumbled into. But the second piece of mastery is becoming a practitioner, actually doing the work, because that's what a lot of clients want to see to succeed. And so to get started on becoming a practitioner, you need to start with case studies. And these can be very simple. Look at HubSpot's examples. You can go look at our examples on our website. It's basically what was the challenge, what was the proposed solution and what were the results? Three questions. So these are based on actual activity with clients. Sometimes it's as short as a one week campaign. So we say how did our Facebook campaign do? How did this email campaign targeting a different way. So it doesn't have to be a year long campaign commitment, but it gives people a taste of how you work and what success looks like. Right now we publish these as pages so people can get to them at any time. But then you can also use write blog posts to lead them to it. You know social media content, you can use these in your webinars. It becomes very easy to send. And when you're trying to close the client, when you send the people that they should talk to, you can include the case studies as the final. We know what we're doing, right? We are experts. So case studies are a great way to start. My favorite one is this one, which is research. Now when you're doing your self mastery, you're quoting, you're researching, you're reading other people, right? You're quoting the Forrester report, you're linking to other blog posts, you're learning from other people in the space. But how do you become that person that everyone else learns from? I think the key to that is doing original research, not just regurgitating what everyone else is talking about, but actually coming up with your own data. And HubSpot gives us a great model with the state of inbound. Every year they create the state of inbound. They survey thousands of marketers around the world. They ask them what they're using, how it's working, and they create graphs and interesting data that people then share on their blogs and link to. So at nine Clouds we said, let's just steal this. We actually called HubSpot had three calls with their head of research to talk about methodology. My background's in research methodology. And we said, you know, we have the team to do this. So we surveyed 117 automotive marketing managers. Since we were in a very specific niche, we could have a smaller sample size. That really helps. So the more niche you are, the smaller your sample size can be. And we asked them basically the same questions. What's working? Are you using inbound or not? You know, what do you expect your budgets to do in the next year? We created the state of automotive marketing. Again, that's on the page. You can link to it. But it gave us really great data points. Like if you're doing inbound marketing in the automotive industry, you're twice as likely to have a positive ROI than people who aren't. And little facts like this are gold, right? This is stuff now you're putting in your blog post. Now you're sharing with clients. What you're doing is you're moving the industry towards your bold vision. If you believe that whatever industry you're interested in should be here, the research is going to give them justification to go there. And hopefully wherever they're going is where you already are. Right? So you guys are creating a niche and a strategy on where the industry should be, not necessarily where it is today. You guys are vision casters. You're the bold visionaries like Gary and Edie, right? That's what research can help us do. Now, when you have original research, then you get asked to do cool things. You get asked to do public speaking. Public speaking is by far the best way for us to generate leads. And when I speak at an industry conference, that's where we get our clients, right? So here I can just give away all the secrets because. Because I know you guys can take them and go do them in your own industries. At an automotive conference, I say things like, you're two times as likely to do this. And then people are writing it down and contacting me to learn more. And so when you create that research now, you can apply for speaking opportunities and you're going to stand out. You're not saying, I know a lot about Facebook, have me speak about Facebook. You're saying, here's what the data says and where the industry should be. And I know about that because I'm an expert. So I'm speaking in March on stage next to Gary Vee. Right? And it's so funny because when you think about that self mastery. He gets paid more to speak at Inbound than me because he's an expert in public speaking. But I think if an auto client came to Gary, I think I could get paid more to market them than he could. So we all have our little piece of the universe that we can work on, and if we own it, we get opportunities to go on stage and not only speak, but also get invited. So about a month ago, we were invited to Facebook headquarters with about 30 other marketers in the automotive space. So they have three employees at Facebook. All they do is automotive. And, you know, we have now one on one conversation. There actually are humans at Facebook. If you've ever tried to contact them with problems, it's really hard. Let me know, I can hook you up. But because of that, we have early access to tools. We have Someone to talk to. We're beta testing products. And so now my mastery is actually growing from competitors, right, Because I have access to stuff they can't get, all. Because we're willing to take that leap. You know, I think books are still the new business card. We published a book a few years back. We haven't done it in the auto space. I think we probably should. And as you start getting into a niche, you start to find problems, right? We can do it faster if we could do it better if. And so at 9Clouds, we believe inbound marketing is where car dealers need to be. Right? Forget that stereotype of them trying to shove a deal down your throat. It should be them teaching you about why you need a car, why you need to service it, so that you'll come in and work with them. But we realized that one of the problems is that CRMs that auto dealers use are archaic. They don't integrate, they have no API. So we just built a connector from HubSpot to these RKX CRMs because we needed it internally. So as you get in a niche, you're gonna find things that you need to make your agency work better. And what you might discover is that what works better for you is gonna help other people. Now you have a product, right again, another stream of revenue. So as you worry, are there enough people to come to Regent, North Dakota to visit my sculptures? The answer is no right now. But they'll come when you build it, right? If you build it, they will come. And so that's how we can become practitioners and industry masters. But I don't think we just want to be masters for the sake of calling ourselves a master. And we probably never will because we're always learning. But what we've discovered is that mastery leads to impact both for your business and I think, more importantly for your community. And so that's why I especially want to push you guys to become masters. So first, let's talk about what it's done to the Nine Clouds business. Not to brag, but just to show what's possible and also some of the pitfalls. So on the left hand side, you can see our income. On the right hand side you can see the number of blog posts we created and the number of automotive specific blog posts we created and how many and the year. So 2009, my brother and I, we get a grant from the state of South Dakota. I'm living in the northern part of Norway, he's living in Minneapolis. We fly back, we, we see my mom take this phone Book down to order pizza and we just freak out and we say we should train people to use social media. We should train people to use the Internet. So we start this business. Nightcloud's thinking we're gonna train people to use technology. Our first client pays us 50 bucks to fix their hard drive. I don't fix hard drives. But we weren't making any money. We move into an apartment together. We're working at our kitchen counter. You know the classic story, it's not in a garage, it's in a fourth story apartment in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. But in 2010 we start making a little bit of money. We have our first marketing clients. They're hiring us to do web development, which we don't actually do but we know some friends so of course we can do it right. We're taking whatever we can get. We actually get to move the business out of our apartment down the road a little bit. We still live together. Bedrooms with a 3 4th wall, which was not good for social life. But we made it through it. We actually in 2010 finally put the right phone number on our business cards. All of 2009, we had the wrong phone number. Didn't realize it until 2010. 2011, we start making these things called infographics. We hire a student who's a designer. She gets really good at them and we say, hey, this could be a business. So in 2012 it spins out. We actually lose money in 2012 because we spin out the infographic business and we get, you know, we have a few employees but we're not making money or having much time to write. I don't know what we're doing, we're just not doing well. But in 2012 is when we become a HubSpot partner. We have our first retainer client, so, so we start to build the foundation. Unknowingly in 2013 we get our first automotive client. We're writing about automotive now. We actually make a little bit more money. We have our first ebooks, we have our first book that's published on social media which is basically the death kneel of. We're not going back to social media now. We're going to be something else more specific. So in 2014 we start to create more high value content, the webinars. We start creating more ebooks in the auto space. We're still writing about auto, but you can tell we haven't gone all in, right? We're like, we're like 1/8 auto in our content creation. So in 2015 we get together As a team. And our team says, yes, let's go for it, Scott. Stop holding us back. And so we finally go for it. We create research projects, we create courses, we create 21 webinars throughout the year, 11 different e books. And as you can see, almost all of our content is automotive focused. And then in 2016 through August, so this is just through August, we're about half. Half. We have products, we have research projects, we have courses, we have webinars, we have ebooks. And what we found is that 80% of people who don't come to us from a referral, so not a word of mouth person, 80% of them have read our high value content or done a webinar before they come to us. So all of our customers are coming to us from those little bubbles at the top. But the trick is it took all of those dots to get us there. Right? We needed to create this blog content specifically in the automotive industry to be able to create this high value. If we weren't joking around for six years not knowing what we were doing, we could have got there way faster. But that's my mba, right? Six years to get my MBA in the real world, but it's working. But you guys, I didn't hear any claps. What? Come on. Yeah, yeah, no, it's exciting because this is what you guys can do. So we're going to look at it one other way because I think something that we maybe don't think about is if we niche and master that niche, we can actually have fewer clients and make more money. And so let's do a really fast one just from our automotive experience. So on the left hand side you can see the number of employees. On the right hand side you'll see number of clients and revenue in the green. So in 2013, four employees, 42 clients doing random stuff for them. Right. In 2014, we lose a few clients. We grow employees just slightly to 5 in revenue starts to grow. 2015, we go all in. Right? We cut the number of clients by about 10%. We grow by double our revenue doubling. And then in 2016, we go all in. We're up to 11 and a half. Actually 13 by the end of the year. Now we only have 25 clients and we're making money. Yeah, a day in my life. Right? Beatles reference there. So that's the impact that it can have. And I strongly encourage you to go this route. You don't have to dive head first. As you can see, it took us a number of years to get there, but Obviously, the more you buy in, the faster it'll go. Right? And it doesn't stop with your business. It goes beyond that. Because as a business, you have employees, and your employees live in the world. Ergo, you influence the world. Right? And at 9Clouds, we realized this pretty early on. We have an amazing CEO, Sarah, who's over here, and she helped us really think about what is it that we stand for? Because we're not just looking for auto dealers. We're looking for auto dealers who believe what we believe. Right. You guys have probably all heard the Simon Sinek talk. People who believe what you believe are going to be the good clients. Otherwise, they're going to come in, you're not going to get along, they're going to leave. So we drafted up our manifesto. It's on our website. And it's not just about marketing. It's about our place in the world. Our place in rural America. Our place. Our history of teaching people how to use technology is still really important to us and how we interact with our clients. But what this has done is help me realize that I don't actually have that much impact in the world. It's not what I do that matters, but it's who I inspire. Because if I can get my employees to care about their communities and do amazing work, if I can get other entrepreneurs in my community to get excited, their impact and their reach is going to continue long after I'm gone. Right? And so we are cheerleaders starting the parade like Gary, and hoping people get behind us and keep it going. Right. And so I want to just talk a little bit about how that manifested itself in my hometown of Brookings, South Dakota. As you mentioned, I'm really involved in the community. I came home to. To start the business and town of 20,000, railroad town in South Dakota. The community wasn't what I was looking for. I spent six years traveling the world trying to find the perfect place to live. And I don't think it exists. Sorry. Maybe Portland, Newcastle, Australia. Okay. I haven't been. So that's the problem. So everyone can move to Newcastle, and then it won't be cool anymore, though. So then we'll have to go somewhere else. But we have this idea that we need to find the perfect place, make the perfect agency. But the truth is, we can create it. And it's much more rewarding when you have dirt on your hands and you've created what you're enjoying than if you just walk into it. And so in Brookings, I walked in, and with three Friends, we said, why don't we just put together a little event to get cool people together? So we hosted TEDxBrookings. So it's a local version of TED Talks. We had about 70 attendees, six speakers. We planned for three weeks, and it was awesome. People got so pumped. So we said, let's do it again six months later. So we have TEDxBrookings2. 150 attendees, 40 speakers and volunteers. And we said, how do we challenge the community? So we do yoga before the event to get people thinking physically as well as mentally. We have an opportunity to showcase artists and local students. So the drum line for no Reason comes out in the middle of the show and performs a drum number. We highlight interesting people in our community, like Jen Anderson. She's working to make Brookings the breastfeeding capital of the United States. So every business in Brookings will have a place for mothers to breastfeed inside the business. Yeah, there's a more than golf clap. And we put this talk up seven days later has 20,000 views. And before every single view. Brookings, South Dakota. Right. So we're projecting this image of inclusivity and big ideas. And we celebrate our ethnic diversity. We celebrate the people in our community who don't always have a stage. Because what you guys maybe don't realize is you're creating a spotlight. You can put other people into it, like your employees, like people in your community. And people were so excited, they said, why not do this more often? Why do we have to wait every year to do this? And so we started a weekly gathering called One Million Cups. This is a place where someone stands up for six minutes. They share what they're working on. The audience has 20 minutes to help them finish it. We started with 20 people in a restaurant. We're now up to 100 people in the Children's Museum every week. And it's the welcome mat to our community. It's a place people share ideas. So we said, we need to put a name on this. We need to get people excited. So we proclaimed Brookings the creative capital of the North. So the north, if you don't know, is Minnesota. North Dakota. South Dakota. And we made T shirts, which means that now we are that thing. And all of a sudden, magazines and traditional media start covering it as the creative capital of the North. And we just made it up. It's so great. It's so great. If you put a name on something, people get excited. Yeah. Middle clap. Middle clap. Yeah. But what's awesome is that it inspires people right Creativity is great because it's pretty nebulous. That can mean, you know, creativity and the visual arts. It can be business, creativity. And so people start making stuff themselves. Someone put up a before I die wall where you write what you want to do before you die. This went on. A building that had been burned down for six years had just been empty, right? And someone just put it up. Urban Canvas is what they now call it again. It got a name and now people are putting up more art and people are visiting Brookings to see what's going on. But they. We just have to tell them, like, we just did it, right? Like, we started because we had a bold vision. So this is a photo of my shoes, first day of city council. And I was so pumped that one of my friends said yas about city council. Like, how cool is that that people are getting excited about government? Because we realize that entrepreneurs are great citizens. If you guys are entrepreneurs, you're used to solving problems. And so if we can inspire people to be entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial even in their own businesses, they're going to make our communities better because they're going to see a burned out building and say, we could have a piece of art there. They're going to see a road where a lot of bikes go. And they say, we could build a bike lane. That's one of the first things we did when I got on council. Now we're a bronze level city for bikes, the second highest rated in the state. Just because someone said, we can do this, right? And so this is all for visionaries. These are for people with bold ideas. You guys can start a parade, you can start a movement and people will get behind you and it's going to be good for business and it's going to be good for your community. You know, Gary's bold vision helped save his community. It's now on the map. People come there. He runs a hotel as well, because so many people are coming to see the Enchanted highway. Wouldn't you want him as your hotelier? Right? This is a smooth sailor. You know, Edie. And my parents, my ancestors, they had a bold vision to build something basically in the middle of nowhere, right? They saw this plan, black grassland, and they said, this is where we're going to start our family. And you guys have bold visions too. And if you execute on those bold visions, you actually go for them. I do believe that the universe will conspire to help you. And what could be better than growing a business, making your community more vibrant and having a dent on the universe. Just because you embrace how weird you guys are. That's really what we want. So thanks for coming. I'd love to take your questions.