S1 Ep 26: Why I Shifted From Marketing Agency To Marketing Education

Welcome back to the Marketing Muscle Up podcast show. I'm Richard Turney, founder of Com Marketing and also host of this podcast show. If it's your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular guest, thank you so much for tuning in regularly. I hope you've been enjoying the concepts, the ideas. And I've got Ev joining me here. And if you don't know who Ev is, Ev sometimes gets on those podcasts a little bit earlier to introduce some of them. So, you'll definitely hear her. She's got a really good podcast voice as well. Hey, Ev.

Oh, well, thank you so much. Hello.

Yes, we were talking about previously. Focusing on how to get in the zone in what you do. And we're just talking about voices and hats and glasses and how do you get in the zone of what you actually do. And today I wanted to talk about, Ev, how does a small business get in the zone of creating really good marketing? Hmm. And I wanted to kick it off with maybe instead of telling, just sort of talking about a story that I went through the last 10 years.

Yeah. I think we haven't— I don't think we finished your full story. I think we got up to kind of about 10 years ago when you had MYPT, which is Meet Your Personal Trainer. And then that kind of, you know, lost a lot of SEO rankings and that kind of thing. And so you were also there's a lot of kind of these personal trainers who had directories, like, and, you know, were on the directory, but then, you know, were asking about other kinds of marketing. And so that kind of led into where we kind of are now, right? Which is with ComMarketing.

Yeah. ComMarketing. Back then it was called Complete Online Marketing.

Oh yes. The good old days.

Complete Online Marketing. The good old days. And we did have a name change Probably four or five years ago, I would say.

Yeah.

And we can talk about name change in a different day. However, I want to talk about this: the journey of your business, and and also I'll relate this on the journey of my current business, Com Marketing, and how you've got to figure out the right path in your business. And so with Com Marketing, we actually started off Ev. This may be before your time. We started off in the same office you met us in, in Alexandria. That's how we met, Ev. Rent an office out. You were doing some digital marketing and we were selling. In fact, our very first client was— I started this with a business partner, actually, Complete Online Marketing. I started with a business partner. And that was an amazing ride, an amazing journey, and that's probably something for another day I'd love to share a bit more on. However, we started off building websites, and that's how we first started building websites and doing SEO at the time, search engine optimization. The reason being is because, because our directory Meet Your Personal Trainer ranked really well, like first positions for terms like personal trainer Personal trainer Sydney, personal trainer Brisbane. Naturally, our clients of that directory would ask us, hey Richard, could you do that for me? And that's pretty much how we started com marketing, just kind of duplicating what we did to other people. And that's how we kicked off having hundreds of SEO clients and a whole bunch of people doing websites because brand, you know, still is and is a huge item. And websites were a big thing kind of back in the day. People didn't have them. So we did that for many years. And, you know, you go down that path of getting people's rankings to the top of Google. And the reason why that was such a popular service is because that was before Instagram, Facebook was around, but it's certainly what it wasn't— was today. And so how you generate leads was through a thing called search engine optimization, which is ranking towards the top of Google. And so the journey of your fitness business is very similar to, you know, the journey of com marketing, is that you do the things that's working at the time.

Yeah.

And we did a lot of different digital marketing attributes, but there was one thing that we had a problem with, is that when we were charging a client let's say $1,000 a month to rank their rankings towards the top of Google, that was to a small business a lot of money.

Yeah.

And when you're dealing with $1,000 or it could be $500 and there's all different price packages and things, the business operator has to go, well, I've only got this amount of money for marketing. What am I going to spend it on? Now, back in the day, you could just say, I'm going to throw it all on SEO and I'm going to rank to the top. I'm going to get all the leads because that's how that was with less platforms. You do that. It's like when TV before Foxtel or TV before digital, you had 7, 9, and 10 if you're listening in Australia, and you had 3 places to advertise. So it's the same thing with digital marketing. You had SEO, you had Google Ads, and that was where you pretty much advertised. And so you can rest assured that if you put $1,000 to pay for a company to rank the top of the top of Google, you would win the game, which they did. However, as we know, the game has dramatically changed in digital marketing. And so things that you're listening to this and things that did work once, worked, generate a whole bunch of leads easily, don't work now. And so it became very apparent to us that We have to change our tact. People are asking about different things. What about this Facebook? I think it was Facebook opt-in boxes they had at the time and we created Facebook opt-in boxes, I believe.

Remember those?

I don't remember them, but I know that we did a lot of hundreds of clients on that. And I think they were a mini website on Facebook.

I think so.

Yeah. I think that's what they were and they would be customized. So we did that. many years. And we did a bit of Facebook ads and we did lead generation. We just created the leads. We just gave leads to somebody and they just paid for the lead. And these were all good and they all worked at the time. However, they all had downfalls. Even lead generation, people wouldn't answer the phone or they would think that we were the company. And there were so many different scenarios here. But what I'm getting to is that with small businesses, when someone asks you, hey, what's your marketing budget? I know what I say. I put my hands in my pocket and I go, there is none. I've got $10 in my pocket. That's about it, if you're lucky.

Right?

And so I hated when agencies—

Many small businesses, they don't have marketing budgets.

When a marketing agency called me up and said, hey, what's your marketing budget? It was just, I felt inferior. I felt insecure. It made me feel weak. It made me feel like I wasn't a success. it made me feel like I didn't know what I was doing and it made me feel like I had no money because I had no money in a marketing plan. But maybe I didn't even understand what you need to put into it. So if that's you, it's okay. And so what we found out sort of halfway through about 5, 6 years ago, probably a bit longer, is we started to test the theory called, I mean, more education. And I remember one of my first education seminars I gave, I created an SEO course. It was a 6-week online SEO course, and this was probably going back 10 years ago. And I sold that and people learned how to do SEO, and it was a raving success because most of the things that SEO providers give you or ask you to do You actually can do yourself.

Yeah.

And it's all free. And it was like when I started to tell this to our client, I said, listen, your SEO provider, what they're doing is they're providing backlinks and they're asking to write blogs. And they said, yeah, but if I, if I stop working with them, will I drop off the face of Google altogether? And that was really challenging to reeducate someone to say, no, you won't. And this is how they're doing it. And this is what you can do. And you don't have to pay your $1,000 a month to an agency. And in fact, it was kind of hurting our business because that's what we were doing. And so, you know, to be honest with your clients, you just say to them, well, you could probably do a better job yourself because you can write better blogs, you can connect with partners to get backlinks and so forth. And so it naturally became a way where I, I was a small business owner. I've always been a small business owner. So I don't, you know, I don't want to charge anybody that you can do it yourself for because I know when you have no money to market, forking out $1,000, $500 a month to get someone to do one task in marketing for you is probably taking food off your own table. And it hurts. It hurts a lot when you don't have that.

Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, like, I mean, you know, like you think about a website, for instance, like you can probably like round up the money to like get a website. It's something tangible that you can see and that kind of thing. But when you're paying like monthly kind of agency fees, and I mean, we have done the same, you know, at Calm. Like there's times when we've, you know, got specialty people in and that kind of thing. But and you just, it's like a con— it's like a constant subscription every month. Yeah. And you're paying that on top of lead costs, Facebook, you know, you're paying Facebook, you're paying this. And I think like, you know, for most small businesses, it's just not necessary, but agencies will make you think that it is. And they'll make you think they're doing all the work kind of like for, to get those leads and that kind of thing. But I think We really wanted to, I think, empower business owners in marketing.

Yeah. And then they have to be empowered because agencies do serve a purpose. However,

I

don't believe they serve a purpose in small businesses. They serve a purpose in the medium-sized businesses that you're either going to employ somebody full-time for that skill and you'll pay them whatever a full-time salary you're willing to pay. and they'll produce an activity for you. However, as we know now, the game of marketing is very diverse. It's very rough. It's always changing. You got to be everywhere and you need a very clean marketing strategy and plan. So we came up at Com, as you know, we came up with the 8-step process called the Com Process. Yeah. And that was taken from years of tests and trialing and errors. And now everybody who comes into our world, we go through an 8-step process and we educate people what they need to know and give them the confidence and the inspiration to actually go and do it themselves. Because a lot of the time you just don't have confidence knowing where, what to do and where to go and where do you start. Yeah.

So

if we empower confidence and give them, then they can start to get leads and then they can start to actually get clients. And that's where the education part came from in our business.

Yeah. That's funny because yesterday is— Wednesdays are my coaching day. So I was talking to one of our clients who's coming to our scale program. And she said she just feels really confident knowing what works. And I remember when she came in 8 months ago and she's like, I'm kind of doing this. I don't know if it works. I'm doing that. And I think that's the thing. It's like they do come in, they, you know, we teach tactics and strategies and all that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, they do walk out with a confidence knowing that they're doing the right things or even if those things aren't working, knowing how to kind of like, you know, like shift and like pivot and all things like that. So I think confidence is a really You know, it's really nice. Like, you don't see that as an agency, right? Like, when you're, when you're, you know, just giving people leads or doing Facebook ads, you're not—

you

don't see that, like, human aspect.

Well, yeah. And we, when we were doing it, we were probably spending a good part of most of the hours really educating our personal trainers, our fitness owners on, on, you know, what this all meant. And so it kind of naturally spilled into, if you're a small business owner and it's you and could be, that might be a trainer or 2 trainers, maybe your husband and wife or partners helping you in the backend with the books and the admin, it's much easier to learn it. And then if you feel like you want to get someone specialized in it or you want to train your better half up on it or your kids on it, whatever, you have the ability to do that because you know what works and what doesn't work following a framework. And it's the same framework the agency did. So, you know, we turn most of our business around to education and we still have the agency side, but however, just for things that we believe shouldn't be done as a regular, like a website or a logo. I never, my focus is not to go and learn how to be a graphic designer. Don't learn how to be a website developer. Get an expert to do it. Get it built professionally so you look professional. And then focus on the items that you can do daily, which is your Instagram, your Facebook, your lead generation, your email database. And there's a whole bunch of trainings that we provide here, but that's the, that's the focus. If we can just create the 5 things, the 5 funnels, we don't have to pay $1,000 for each funnel. We're actually saving ourselves, you know, like $50,000 at least a year if you were to pay an agency $1,000 a month each for each of those funnels. And so we've got to look after small businesses because they're kind of the backbone. And that's really the attitude that me and Joey had when we kind of launched that. I remember Joey. I mean, Joey's come from an education background, so she's a PD health PE teacher, as you know. Well, that's her training, Bachelor of Education. She's the smart one in the family. She's got 2 degrees and I've got a Year 10 qualification.

Certificate.

Certificate. Yeah. So she was the educator.

Yeah.

And I was the marketer. And, you know, when you've got a Year 10 certificate, you've got to get very creative how you market. And so I can always market and sell but she could always educate well. And just because you can market and sell definitely doesn't mean you can educate anybody.

No.

And it's a syllabus and it's a process. And she's amazing at that. She knows what to do and how to write up items to get someone to understand it and learn from it because that's what she did. She writes out programs after programs after programs. And You know, I know you know a lot about teaching and it's different to marketing when you've had, oh, I've had a great experience with marketing and then you think you can go and teach that. And it's the opposite, isn't it?

I really had to learn, I think, how to coach and teach. Like, I'm a technical person, I'm an executor. I love to like get in and do the things. But then when you go try to explain that to somebody, like, I remember my first few workshops where I'm like explaining like, you know, like the depths of Facebook ads and like having these eyes glazed over of like, what is she talking about? And so I think like, I actually think like for you, like you, you help me and Joey, like, you know, you're always coming up with these like strategies or you're talking to clients or that kind of thing. And then Joey's really good at like the structure of the education and the program and that kind of thing. And then I kind of come in and bring like this like structure to some of the thoughts. And I draw, I like to draw things and like create like systems and things like that. So yeah, it's an interesting mix of like of everyone bringing their thing.

Yeah. Bringing all the concepts into one because again, we can educate all day long and education's, I don't think it's ever going to go out of fashion. I mean, there's universities, there's schools. I mean, Education is huge. And then you've got digital is massive because the digital attributes get there. But it is, it is the sweet spot in the middle. And, and yeah, you're right. Once you can kind of get in between me and Joey and, and create that concept there, we can educate, but we can also then teach them and show them if they apply the marketing attributes to that, they will get the results. Because otherwise it's just being on the sideline thinking you know everything, like thinking what Facebook is or thinking you know how to boost a post or thinking, oh yeah, I send a newsletter. And in fact, you do know what it is. However, it's just, are you getting the right ideas and concepts or you're just getting the secondhand knowledge of sitting on the bench and thinking that you know the game plans, but you don't? And that's the big differences here that we have to work with.

Yeah, and I think we've really worked hard over the years just to not have it be just like knowledge education. So you're not just like, you know, just coming and it's not lectures. Like, I wouldn't call that— I wouldn't call what we do lecturing people like, you know, like you're in university. Like, we, you know, you got to get out there, you got to like put it into practice. You know, we work really hard at like, actually, like, you know, making it really actionable and outcome-focused, I think. And I think I think that's the key. It's like you could learn all you want. You could go back to university if you want and learn about marketing, but I can tell you, you're not going to learn a lot about practical marketing with a marketing degree.

Oh yeah. When you've got, when you're up against the wall and yes, you want to learn, but at the same time too, you need to get results. There's no time just to learn, study, and implement. We have to learn, implement, study, look at the results. Do we win or not? And go back to that concept. And that's pretty much what content marketing is today. It's ensuring that we're getting a real tangible result, i.e., income increase and things like that. And that's the— that's ultimately why you get an agency in the first place. You get an agency because you want not leads. Nobody wants leads. I'll tell you that right now. What people want We want to ensure that we have a good business, that we're not digging into our savings, that we're helping the many people out, and we're able to generate consistent leads and consistent business without being a sleazy salesman, without making it really hard, and doing what we love to do, which is training people and inspiring and being in the community. We don't, we don't want much. It's not that we want much. I mean, nobody wants much. We just got to make it work. And so really at the end of the day, that's the inspiration why we do more education to deliver the same result and a much better result, mind you.

I think it is a much better result, but I am biased. Well, I think we all are. But I do think you're right in that you can put that same amount of money into an agency that does one thing. And that was our problem. It's like, you know, like a small business has a limited budget. They have to choose one thing, a Facebook ad, a website, this or that. Whereas they can put that same budget into learning about a whole lot of things. And I often find that, like, I mean, I used to do things like social media management, you know, like in writing people's social media posts and stuff like that. But actually, When you teach a business owner how to do that and the frameworks and all of that, it actually takes them less time than somebody, than employing, you know, an outside person to do that.

Totally.

And so it actually doesn't take you that long. Like marketing takes you a long time because you don't know what you're doing. You don't have proper frameworks and systems and things like that. But when you get all of that in place, actually it doesn't take you a great amount of time every week or every month to build that into what you do as a business owner.

Hold that thought, Ev. Hang on, someone at the door.

That's kind of funny. Weird.

It was a miracle that was the audio guy coming to put my HDMI cable in.

Ah, right.

That guy that never gives my stuff. I said, you don't come now, it's going to be framed up and you can't get in there. All right, so cool. How's it going, this interview?

I think good. I'm just gonna, um, I thought I'm just gonna ask you about like, um, like how we went from, um, like we used to do this in person to, uh, to now virtual. And then kind of wrap up from there.

Yeah. Okay, cool. It's kind of an advertisement, but it's a story a little bit too.

Yeah.

Okay.

I think it's got some good parts in it like that people will resonate with, like paying agencies, that kind of thing.

So, okay. Yeah. Yep. All right.

I don't think it's a full ad. Okay. All right. So it actually wasn't that long ago and I think we've forgotten kind of This part of the story is that we actually used to do this in person every single month in our office in Alexandria, like the olden days.

Like face-to-face, face-to-face, like in an office? That must have been post-2021 for sure. 2020, right?

For a majority of our program's time, it's been in face-to-face. People flew in and yeah.

So, this is interesting. What happened in our program? Yeah, we have an office in Alexandria. We, so we started the education, as you know, of like, I think it was you and Joey, we built a custom table from Anastasia. She, she was my assistant at the time. Father built this custom table and it held, it held 8 people, 8 chairs. We bought 8 red chairs. We thought, okay, this is going to be great. And we'll build a room around the 8 and we'll do small groups and 6, 8 people. Great. And we were— and we kind of made a mistake because it just wasn't big enough at the time. We just started and then we grew. And so we had to knock that wall down. We made a bigger wall and then that wasn't big enough. And so we knocked another wall. So we had 3 renovations in the space of kind of 2 years trying to figure out our flavor. And so eventually we had an office there with 2 TVs, like about 30 people, 30 red chairs. If anybody's been to the comm office, always had red chairs. They weren't the most comfortable because they're the only red chairs that you get. They didn't have padding on. So that was always the problem. But when you bring people together to learn, and you're talking about people are flying in every month, they're flying in every month for 8 months and they come for a day and they learn and they walk away like fully inspired, fully educated, and boom, they're just getting onto it straight away. So when you see people face to face, And you hear the hallway conversations that this is where a lot of, I guess, the credibility piece comes. A lot of people understand that they get the confidence by talking to other people, other business owners. And so it all, you know, you can see it happening. And so when we had to move online, all our programs are online and we run Q&As each week. I feel like we see each other way more now.

Oh, so much more.

Like daily, like all the time.

Yeah.

Which is great. You know, we are doing the 3 times a year face-to-face in our immersives.

Yeah.

When we can squeeze through borders and lockdowns.

We were lucky one time this year.

Lucky. Yeah. Lucky this time in Melbourne. That was great. And so I guess coming from a face-to-face environment and you're looking at business owners who aren't digital and then obviously pandemic hit and, you know, personal trainers who didn't get Zoom now had to get Zoom because we had to teach people how to use it. You know, obviously there's, there's opportunities there where we can now go further and faster and help people in the regional areas that, you know, I remember one of our clients, Phil, he drove a good 7 hours to get to our office each month, 7 hours back. Yeah. And that's just what you did. That's what you did to help your business grow.

Yeah.

And I think that's still— I mean, yeah, I love the face-to-face. I know a lot of, a lot of people love the face-to-face too, and it's not ever— it's never going to go away. However, we still need to grow through this time. So now, yes, we run all online, all digital, um, Zooms and, and, and different online attributes. However, the results are even better. Yeah.

Well, and I think like, I mean, I think about it now, like we were a Sydney-based company. And so a lot, most of our clients were from Sydney. And we had like, you know, we did have people flying in. Now, like some of our biggest states are like the states like Melbourne. We have like a huge Melbourne contingent in our program. We have so many people from regional areas, Toowoomba, Cairns, Orange, like so many people that like you just wouldn't be able to. We wouldn't have never been able to kind of meet them and be able to help their businesses, which is so cool. And I think you know for our clients, like like yeah, we spent a long time, you know teaching people how to use Zoom and do Zoom sessions for like months on end. But you know, as I spoke to one of our clients who's now. launching their on-demand yoga classes this month from all of the Zooms that they did. So I think there's just like, it's just cool to see the opportunities that open up to people.

Yeah, totally. And I'd love to know, you know, what are the opportunities? That's probably my question for this podcast. What are the opportunities you've seen in your business, not just necessarily through COVID, but through the times of having the flexibility to change? Like for us, it was going from agency, realizing that that model not going to work if we want to try to continue to attract, you know, small businesses, especially fitness. And that's why,

you

know, probably back early days, we were working with a whole different bunch of different industries, you know, real estate and finances and all those different industries. You know why? Because they were the ones that could afford it. However—

Yeah.

You gotta love what you do. And we didn't really love, love, love working with finances, finance teams and property developers and I mean, that was the world for so long. And then we came back to, you know, what we loved is really to serve people, to help that if we can impact more people and it can sound sort of saying something fluffy, but at the end of the day, it's always been the same concept is that we want to help people get healthier. Now we do that through helping studio owners to grow their community so that community can get healthy. And so if we can impact people that way, it's the same mission. And it sort of goes back to your mission of your business. What is your mission in your business? And sometimes it can be, okay, I want to get people healthy and fit and that concept, but that concept can be done many different ways. And for us, it was the agency. Then it was the face-to-face in the office. Now it's online. And who knows, maybe it's going to change differently. But we went into business for the outcome. How you serve your clients is a little bit always changing. And so you want to be flexible in that way, knowing that you've got your clients' backs. And they've got to trust you that this is the best scenario for them at this current climate, whatever it is. So, so yeah, it's, it's a story like probably a lot of people's story, Ev, where if you don't change— I love this quote— if you don't change, you die. And if you don't grow, you die. I think the quote is, if you don't grow, you die. But growing is changing a lot of the time. And I think that's tough for a lot of people who aren't naturally ones that want to change. I know, Ev, that's not your You're not a real changer until now. I remember when I met you and it was tough to make some changes, but—

I say I like change if I'm creating the change.

Yeah. So create the change, be the change that you want to see. I think that's the big thing here. And don't be scared to look for those opportunities, especially now. We are in a different world. And so

again,

We're evolving in our business and I'm really excited for the new wave of people wanting to learn and grow their business. And I've recently moved to Sunshine Coast, as you know, and I've started connecting with a few studios up here. You know, you drive past some places and you see some places, then I— and then I see them, that they've opted in to get some information about what we do. And I go, oh, I just went past their place. And even being up here, we've been heavily focused in Sydney, but we work around Australia and New Zealand. However, I see that even Sydney to Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast in Queensland, I see that the market's different up here. The education is different up here. The offers are different up here. And I see that You know, when we go— when we work with clients in Bondi, for example, heavily dense, populated with gyms and studios and very competitive. And we've had a lot of clients in Bondi, as you know, pretty much every studio in Bondi I've worked with, and they've got great results, but it's competitive. And, and I come up here and I go past some studios here and I go, wow, not as com— not as competitive as Bondi, I can tell you that right now. And so This— I see so much opportunities and I'm just excited. I may be digressing here a little bit, but I'm just excited that there is a lot of opportunities wherever you are. But you've got to be, you've got to be looking for how can we continue to serve your clients? How do you continue to serve your clients? How do you continue to serve your clients? And the opportunities are right in front of your eyes.

Absolutely. And I think you hit it on— hit the nail on the head with like, you know, like keeping your why in focus. Means that whatever you do, like however that looks, you always have your why. And that, that means you're always looking for new opportunities. And, you know, if that, if that means kind of shifting a little bit, or, you know, like a lot of our clients kind of look or looking for new opportunities as well as like, you know, training their clients, doing weight loss coaching and all sorts of things like that because they know their why and they're really solid on it. And they're always looking for ways to like You know, continue that on.

Totally. Well, I'm inspired. And if you're listening to this, I hope you look for what opportunity you have changed or willing to change or going to change to continue to serve your clients. If you have liked this episode, be sure to share it and tell someone about it. I think that's the best thing that you can do because that helps to inspire a healthier nation and world and help a fellow small business owner who may be going through tough times and maybe not sure where to get to. So share the episode with them or share your favorite part of this episode and say, you know, listen to 10 minutes and 30 seconds. And I've done that many times, uh, with people that are close to me because sometimes, you know, you just gotta— you think about someone, you go, oh yeah, I thought about you in this part here. And that really helps them to get inspired and get going again. So, um, sharing is caring. Thanks, Ev, for jumping on this, um, podcast. It's been good to jam with you on this session. And team, if you want to leave a review, leave a review. Tell us your, your thoughts on this podcast. Love to know them. Until next time, bye for now.