How to Grow a Digital Marketing Business

Welcome back, everybody. It is the next episode of Fix Your Business. I've got a fantastic guest with me today. It is Jo Clark, the founder of Mustard Media Solutions, who are a digital marketing agency based in Hereford. Welcome to the show, Jo.

Hi, thanks, Robin. Thanks for inviting me.

It's a pleasure. I don't think you quite know what you've let yourself in for, but this is gonna be fairly fast and furious. We're gonna get through this in about 20 or 30 minutes. You talked about sort of off air about sort of getting a focused plan together for 2020 and 2021. That's what we're gonna be kind of focusing on to start off with. Just so everybody knows, the midsection, we're gonna be talking about pricing and how you said to me that you undervalue yourself fairly regularly. So hopefully we're gonna start to fix that part specifically. And then I've got a little curveball. So if you're watching this live, it will be worth your while staying on until the end of the show because we have got a nice little curveball which I'm gonna throw in there. Jo has a mountain of knowledge that I don't think she's fully aware of at the moment, so we're gonna tap into that as well. So, right, Jo, so we talked about off-air that your current turnover for the business, obviously crisis aside, is typically about sort of £2K per month.

Yeah, that's correct.

Fair sort of assessment, okay. So, and where you would like to get it to, sort of just as a starter for one, £3K would be nice, but is there a potential that we could grow it to £5K to £10K?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the more the merrier, but for the main priority for us is sort of sustainable growth.

Great. So talk to me and listeners about, in terms of Mustard Media Solutions, what sort of services do you offer at the moment and how do you charge for them?

So Mustard Media Solutions started off a couple of years ago and we provide small to medium-sized businesses, mostly in Herefordshire and the surrounding counties, although we do have a couple of other clients for further afield as well with anything related to digital marketing for their businesses. So whether that be social media management, content creation, photography, videography, email campaigns, we work with a select group of other providers. So things like websites that we can provide as well. We mostly specialize ourselves with social media management and content creation. So we specialize with businesses who perhaps for whatever reason don't have the specialist skills or the time to be able to manage their own social media accounts. Maybe they feel they want to learn more about social media, but they want someone to help guide them through that process. We mostly work with businesses who have got less than 15 employees, just because we find that that's the level of business that we find that need the most help with— perhaps we consider sourcing their digital marketing services elsewhere. They can't necessarily afford to have a full-time person specialize in doing all of their digital marketing for them, but they can afford to be able to outsource that service to someone else like ourselves.

Cool. And in terms of— I know this is going to be very much a broad brush sort of question here, like how long is a piece of string? How do you charge for your services?

Basically per day. So we've worked out with our packages that we provide, say for example, using social media management as an example, we know how much time it takes to create 3 posts a week, 5 posts a week, 7 posts a week for a particular business. And we also know how much time on average that content takes to create and also implement and then manage their social media accounts for them. We take that time. It works out as generally anywhere between a day, 2 days, or a week per month. And then we price those packages as a day rate. So they—

What's the day rate at the moment?

So it's £186 per day for our time. And so, for example, that's our basic rate. So it takes about a day to create a month's worth of content for any business, implement that content, and also do things like community engagement, outreach work, that sort of thing. Cool.

So I don't know if you've probably read and watched some of my other videos, but I have a theory around day rate and hourly rates. And I believe that it is fundamentally unethical. Do you want me to explain why?

Go for it.

So let's say, for example, I mean, you kind of touched upon sort of websites and things like that. So imagine if you have an inexperienced web designer who is charging £50 an hour for a website and he quotes you 20 hours. Right. You're like, cool, okay, let's go for it. So that's going to cost me £1,000. So he comes back several weeks or months later because he's not terribly good at what he's doing. He's only just started. The website doesn't look great. It's not terribly functional. It doesn't really— it doesn't really plug into like Google very well. And he comes back and says, Joe, I'm really sorry, I've used up my 20 hours. Would it be— it's going to take me another 10 hours, but you've got to pay for it. Is that okay?

I'd be like, no.

Right. So however, if you get a really experienced web designer who is just putting together, you know, brochure-style website, you know, it's the same, same amount of work, same outcome as what the junior developer was going to— designer was going to put together. But he does it in 10 hours. But because he doesn't know much about pricing, he just charges what everybody else charges. He also charges £50 an hour, but it's better. It's more functional. It plugs into Google and gets found in the search engines, but it's half the price. So why should the guy who is more experienced get paid less for doing a better job?

Mm-hmm.

It doesn't make sense. So hence the reason, the mere fact that— I mean, most people are moral, ethical, upstanding human beings. So, you know, we would never— if we promised something to somebody, we would probably never come back and say, could we have more money, please? But the mere fact that you could tells me that charging by the hour or by the day isn't the right way to do it.

I mean, to be fair, our pricing is based on a daily rate, but that's just the way that we price our packages. We're not charging our clients on a daily or an hourly rate. They are paying a fixed rate. If it takes us more time, well, that's on us, that's not on the client.

But that's just where we've got to. Sorry, I was going to say sorry to talk over. So where we've got to get you to is to a point whereby we're getting you solidly focused on outcomes and results. Okay, I think before we go into sort of unpicking that side of it, I think we've got to kind of start to look at the goals which you've set for your business. I'm just going to share my screen a second. Here we go. So you've kind of, at the moment, one of the things which you said, you don't have much of a plan. So I bet your life probably looks a little bit like this. So imagine each one of these crosses here is an activity which you have to do in your business on a day-to-day basis. So whether it's like an email or a telephone call or coming to do a ridiculous video with Robin or just onto Facebook to do some social media marketing, or getting a Google review, or picking up the phone and calling one of your clients, or doing a bit of work, or fixing a problem one of your staff have kind of, you know, given you. But what is that starting to kind of look like?

A vegetable bed.

Yeah, it's— I kind of have a bit of OCD, so there's a bit of a pattern there, but it is actually a bit of a mess if you think about it as a to-do list. So what you've actually got to do is start to give it a bit of a sense of direction. And the only way really to achieve that is to have one specific goal in mind. Okay? Because then what we can start to do is these activities that are over here, we can decide, well, actually, that's not going to get us closer to our goal. So for everything that we do in our business, is this going to get me close to my goal or not? And this will start to make a little bit more sense in a second when I make it relevant. And the things which aren't going to get us to our goal, we just don't, we decide not to do. One of the challenges is though, down in this sort of bottom third here, there's a lot of activities going on. This email which we're gonna send out here, is that gonna get me close to my goal? And the goal could be something like, well, and I'm gonna be a bit, I know you said you wanna get to $3K, but I'm gonna push you a bit and see if we could get you to say $5K a month, right? But is sending that email out gonna contribute to that $5K a month? Well, I don't know, but my gut instinct is telling me, well, it's a good prospect, we've built up a good relationship, so actually I'll follow it through. And maybe what we'll do is we'll get them booked onto a consultation. We'll grab some information from them. We'll sit the consultation. And so you kind of have this very noisy space down here where we're trying to kind of just piece together stuff. But as you can start to see, there's a customer journey. You know, this will all be something which you'll be talking about with your clients as well. And we can start to kind of piece it together. So then we get the proposal sent out. We start to get a little bit more sort of clarity around like what our clients want, what we want out of our business, whether it's contributing to our $5K a month or not. And then finally, somewhere sort of round about here, the message finally hits home and we close one of those clients. So now this is a tougher question. On average, how much a month do your retained clients pay? On average?

On average, £200.

Oops. So £200. So have you got capacity to work with 25 clients?

At the moment, no.

How many could you work with?

15.

Okay, so not too far adrift then, actually. But to give yourself an extra bit of bandwidth, really what I think we need to be doing is somehow shifting that average from 200 a month up to something more like probably 400 a month. Okay, so then we can set our capacity at 12.5 clients. If they, if they kind of come in in that sort of form, or just to make the numbers round, could we get it up to sort of £500 a month? Or, you know, and what we're talking about here is there might be some clients on, say, £1,000 a month, some on £500 a month, some on £250 a month, for example. Now I know you want— we're gonna come on to pricing. I know you want to work with micro businesses, SMEs who maybe don't have necessarily the, the resources themselves, but— And now you asked me about, you whether you should have a notepad ready, there is one thing which I want you to write down. You have to become— oh, panic.

This is why I was asking if I needed to make notes.

There's only this one thing which you've got. I mean, this is being recorded as well, obviously. So this is really important. You have to become a master at working out the return on investment, the ROI, that your clients are going to get when they invest in you. So one of the— and this is where we're going to start to get into the coaching side of things— if I were to ask you To guarantee your results. How would you feel about that?

I could provide guaranteed results.

Yeah. So if we were to do a 3-post-a-week package on social media with a couple of blogs and maybe the odd video or 2 thrown in, and maybe it's sort of £500+ a month, using your experience, you probably know that that should generate between 10 to 20 warmish sort of leads or inquiries.

Yeah.

Yeah. So we can't, we can't necessarily guarantee that result. I mean, the client also has to get involved as well. You've got to obviously make sure that, you know, but, but what you can say to somebody is, well, look, how about, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna cost you a bit more, but we're good at what we do and we're fairly confident having worked with businesses similar to yours that we can get you, you know, 10 to 20 leads a month through, through our silver, silver social media package. Because then they can start to calculate. And imagine if they're a coach like me, for example, who is doing somewhere between 10 and 20 grand a month. Well, if I just get one extra client, I've got a 5x ROI on my monthly spend with you. That's one extra client a month through us working together.

Mm-hmm.

So I can justify spending £500 a month with you, you know, and provided we're getting people joining the Facebook group and we're getting some engagement there and I'm able to send some messages back and forth and book people into meetings. Now, obviously, it does rely on me able to do my part of the deal, which is to actually, you know, book meetings and close clients.

Yep.

So that's the thing. So your guarantee stops where my responsibilities start. But you can start to see that actually $5K a month is unrealistic charging what you currently charge because you don't have the capacity to deliver more. You also don't have the resources to be able to pay somebody full-time to actually deliver the extra workload, if that makes sense. So that's starting to give me a clue here that you're undercharging yourself. Okay. So, but the idea is that once we've kind of created this, this kind of, this customer journey, that it becomes systemized, repeatable. You can see from this as well that actually at £500 a month, you only need 10 clients.

Mm-hmm.

Yep. Which is more than reasonable. Imagine if you got one client a month for the next 10 months. You're at your £5K goal.

Yeah.

Yep. And it might mean that you've got to turn away 2 £250 a month clients. So say no to a couple of people or create a package that's appropriate for them, um, in order to say, to create the room, the space, uh, to be able to charge a bit more for that one bigger client. Does that make sense? So that's— we're going to come on to the pricing in a second, but that's one of the first places where people start to feel the fear. What? I can't afford to turn clients away. I need the clients. Okay. Does that kind of resonate with you?

Oh, no, I'm quite happy turning people away.

Good. Well, that's a good thing. Some people really struggle with it only on the basis of fear of rejection, fear of not finishing what they started. You know, are we going to lose face by not doing the work and things like that? But fundamentally, you know, every business has an inherent amount of failure kind of built into it. So You being in charge of the no is super important, and I'm glad you got that nailed.

So part of the reason for that is that we've kind of had an in-company policy of not working with competing businesses anyway. So for example, we have a firm of accountants on our books, and we were approached by another accountancy company in Hereford to do their social media for them. And we said to them, you know, terribly sorry, but we don't work with competing businesses. And we did look to see if the service that we could provide, if we could make it so that it wasn't actually directly competing. But there was no way around it, unfortunately. So we, we have in the past had to turn, you know, turn down offers of work due to that basis anyway.

So one of the other things that you could do as well, because I bet there's an element of like front-loading in terms of the work you do.

So— What do you mean by front-loading?

So let me— I'll go back to the screen again and then we can kind of go through it. So at the moment, so imagine we just For argument's sake, we're running the Ford factory and we only have one product. It's the Model T Ford. So let's say, for example, you have a £500 product. Now that creates your sustainable sort of recurring revenue on what we call the backend.

Mm-hmm.

But it might be that when you go through that initial kind of fact-find with a client and work out, like, get to know their brand, understand what content they're putting out, listen to the voice, which the tone of voice which they use in their content. And then you start to kind of create the content plan. There's a whole load of work which has to happen first before you actually get into the regular posting and content creation.

Yes.

So what you have is like a front-end product which is neatly backed up by this back-end sort of ongoing revenue model here.

Oh yeah, yes, I do. Yeah, I mean, for example, we work with a client for a minimum of 3 months to start off with because that then accounts for the amount of time that we need to spend with a client at the start. To be able to then be able to have these front-end services that we can then work with later on.

So we're gonna change this slightly. So I've left a little gap at the top here. So we're gonna create a new front-end product for you. So you get paid for that time upfront.

Ooh, that'd be nice.

Okay. So it doesn't have to be like totally outrageous or ridiculous. But let's say, for example, it was £1,000 to do all of the fact-find setup, bit of workshopping to go through, make their content plan with them. You know, that could be something nice which you could get the client really heavily involved with. Go and spend— not obviously virtually at the moment, but when lockdown finishes, you can go and spend half a day or a day in their office with them, kind of going through a really structured, like, 7-point content plan creation day, you know, all that sort of fun stuff. And off the back of it, you could have a year's worth of content planned, right? But we're gonna charge—

That's great because we basically, we do that at the moment, but we don't charge for it.

Yeah. So we're going to do £1,000 and that's paid for upfront in advance so that you're starting to build that trusting relationship there. They're coming to you as an expert service provider and the words you use are, and if somebody's ever worried about paying £1,000 upfront for a social media manager, there's something wrong with that because actually if this is how you work and you've got— you deliver enormous value in that workshop. The idea being that technically somebody could do this. that initial workshop, get the report from you, and then if they wanted to, go and get it, get the content done elsewhere.

Mm-hmm.

So we give them a highly valuable product. Now, the thing is, so one of the reasons why this is really pertinent is because one of my mentors, when he was— he used to run a— this is way back when, but a product packaging business. So they would do the design for free at this, you know, before he discovered what he's taught me now. And then they would have a big warehouse, you know, manufacturing plant where they would go and make all the nice boxes and plastic cases and stuff like that. But everybody— what used to happen was they do all this free design work and then of course everybody would go off shopping around and find the cheapest place to do the packaging. So what they did, bearing in mind this was back in like the 1970s, they charged £25,000 for the design process. Nobody ever charged for design for it. And of course the first thing people say when you charge a lot for something like that is?

Why?

Okay, why? But more often than not, oh gosh, you must be good.

Okay.

So they make an assumption based on this value that we've created, perceived or otherwise, doesn't matter. So not only that, but when they then delivered the design piece, who do you think they then went to to get their packaging done?

Them.

Because they've already invested. They've doubled down. They've invested already. So it made sense to stay with the same company. Now, the beautiful part of this was that because the design was very heavily— well, both parts of the business became very heavily process-driven. Obviously, the manufacturing side of it was already, but they productized the design side of it. So this workshop we're creating for you and that front-end piece, what it means is that— well, what it meant for them was that they had 40 people in the factory making the packages, the boxes, And they had 4 guys in the design studio, but the design studio was 10 times more profitable than the warehouse where they were making the packaging. So for you, this could be a really nice way to start to drop an enormous amount of value for your clients straight off the bat, get paid handsomely for it, but then also once you build that trust up, it's a no-brainer for them to then come in and actually implement it. And actually, one of the things you could do, I mean, I've put £1,000 in there. It depends on, you know, your confidence in your ability to sell, and we're gonna come on to pricing in a second. But let's say, for example, now it's £1,000 plus a minimum of a 3 or 6 month commitment at £500 a month. You've just increased the lifetime value of a client dramatically. So imagine now if you had just In the next 2 months, so throughout May and June, you sell 1 front-end package a month plus 1 back-end package of £500 a month. In 2 months, you've just hit £2K.

Mm-hmm.

Yep, with 2 clients. Now you could start to get a little bit, and this is where we kind of go into, could be beyond the realms of possibility. This is mostly going to be down to sort of your confidence. Around pricing. What if that was $2K? Okay, I'll give you an example of this. So we used to do a 1-day branding workshop. Well, originally it's a long convoluted design process that would take months. We worked out the steps that went into delivering it, so we compressed it down to 6 weeks. Still wasn't good enough in my eyes. I wanted to make it a 1-day branding workshop, get the client in, they leave with a logo, legal searches, domains registered, Branding guidelines, the works, everything. So we would just double down on the day's effort. And the old logo design process, we used to charge— I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be like, this is before I know what I know now, but £50 an hour. Like, you know, and it would be about 10 hours worth of billable time, so £500. For our one-day branding workshop, I launched it at £1,500. No resistance. 3 times the price. Same, well, even a better result because we got it done quickly, efficiently, with the client there. They got exactly what they wanted. We had a money-back guarantee on that. So if at the end of the day, they didn't feel that they'd received their value that we'd promised, we would just hit the refund button and send the money back to them. And we were doing about 40 or 50 a year and had zero people ask for a refund.

Hmm.

Because they got enormous value from it. One of these days, so we used to limit it to 3 people One day somebody asked me if I could go up to York the next day to deliver this. So like, whatever, it's 300 miles, 250 miles. And there would be 23 people in the room as I did the workshop. So I said, yeah, I'll do it. That'll be $10K. And they said yes. Okay? So you can start to create enormous value from having some kind of a front-end product, a workshop, something like that.

Mm-hmm.

Like I said, If you, if you're selling that at $2K, you've only got to sell like one a month or one every other month, you know. But you've got to be clear on exactly what outcomes and results people are going to get. So this, this has to be very, very much about outcomes and results. Remember what I said, um, be able to calculate the ROI that your client's going to get from working with you. So outcomes and results. Let's talk about pricing. Okay, what's— how do you feel about charging £1,000 for a planning workshop?

I think that's absolutely possible, so long as, like you said, you were very clear as to what the client was going to receive as part of that. It's about— yeah, like you say, it's about return on investment.

So there's, there's a few kind of very simple steps for it because you probably already do elements of it already. So to get them to that, like, that ready phase where you can start delivering the content for them.

Mm-hmm.

So what you need to do is you need to kind of reverse engineer those steps that it takes to get them to that point where you then flip into the monthly kind of like, you know, cranking the handle stuff for them. So like the design, our one-day branding workshop, for example. So we had— we did an exercise around core values. So it's just a word association game basically around like what the core values were for the various different stakeholders in business, the customer, the products, their business themselves, and the employees within the business. So 4 different stakeholders in the business. And then we would move on to then doing sort of a mind mapping exercise just to come up with like some more creative words. So for example, my original business was called the Coconut Group. And the reason how we came up with that name was our core values around is around growth, this notion of taking our clients on the journey. It was we wanted our business to be fun, etc., etc. And then we went into the mind mapping exercise and Coconut kind of brought those words together. So that's where it came from. So step number 3, we then moved into the legal searches. Step number 4, we then start to get into concept design. We'd get out sheets of paper, crayons, pens. Us and the client would just start sketching out ideas. We'd have a couple of books which I've still got knocking around here, like sample logos, you know, and we come up with like— and we gradually start to reduce it down to sort of, I don't know, 2 or 3 like really good ideas that we all agreed on that would work for their brand. From there, we would then start to go into creating the electronic versions of the logos, fine-tuning colors, fonts, etc., etc. And then finally, we would then look at photos which would be— would fit, you know, nicely associated with the brand that we were creating. So we had this whole sort of visual focus for it. And it was when we identified those 7 steps that we could start to refine each one of those steps and make it shorter and shorter and better and better and more efficient and more efficient and get a bigger bang for our client's buck.

Mm-hmm.

So I think for you, if you can start with that workshop, it's a matter of, right, break down the steps you're currently doing. How can you smash them out in a day? Like, take them through a journey, you know, those 7 steps in a day, or your version of the 7 steps in a day. And what are the deliverables going to be? So it would be, right, well, here's, here's your content plan for the next 12 months.

Well, it's interesting you say that because we, we already have that technically because we did a course through the local college. We were offering a course on digital marketing and branding and that sort of thing. And we have those steps already. They are basically the steps of the course that we did. We just never really implemented it with our new clients. Because we never really had the time, you know, because the time was not paid for to be able to do it. So we were still doing it, we just weren't getting paid for that service.

So we're gonna get you paid for it. So what this looks like, and I'm not gonna go through the full product architecture, I'll do the first bit. So we— I talk about something called a breakthrough product, which is going to be your, your 1K planning day. So 1K planning. You can— we can always touch base sort of offline if you want help designing this. You're then gonna from there be selling people into one of 3 to 5 core products. Okay? So I know at the moment you have like, you do video and you do blogs and you do websites and you do lots of different things, but as an expert, you know that for most small business owners, businesses with less than 15 people, There's probably 1 of 5 things that they, like, collect. Like, it might be an amalgamation of different stuff, but 1 of 5 packages that they could choose that will get them the desired outcome. These 3 to 5 core products will satisfy 80 to 90% of the marketplace. Now, you've probably had them, clients who come and go, well, that's great, but do you think you could do this for me? And do you think you could do that for me? And you think, right? Those are the 10%. They're called pain-in-the-ass factor clients, right, who we don't want in our business.

We love all our clients.

Oh, we love all of our clients.

We don't have any pain-in-the-ass clients.

But we don't have to love the prospects who are potentially going to become pain-in-the-ass clients.

Yeah.

Yeah. So what we do is through your sales process, you will— first of all, you'll be saying, right, so how we work is we have a 1-day planning workshop. We go through absolutely everything. We go through your setup, you know, and you get a 12-month report off the back of it, blah, blah, blah. That's going to cost you £1,000. And from there, Or we can discuss it now, but from there we'll be recommending whether you go for package A, package B, or package C, or our silver, gold, or platinum package. And what we do is during the sales process, you'd say something along the lines of, well, hey, listen, you know, based on what I've seen so far during the consultation, the package I'd recommend for you would be our gold package, and these are the reasons why. You're a 5-person business, you're looking to grow your turnover by $20K per month, And, you know, that package is our £500 a month package. So we'll do the breakthrough day with you and then we'll get you onto that package. We have minimum 3-month retainer. I'd increase that. I'd go for 6-month retainer personally. So you can see all of a sudden that now that's, you know, you've created what we call, so, customer lifetime value of somewhere close to £4K. Yep. So £1,000 upfront, 6 months of £500, that's £4,000 a client. Okay, whereas probably at the moment it sounded like, so £200 a month was your average, minimum 3 months. Your average customer lifetime value is currently £600. And they probably stay for longer because it's good value for money.

Most of our clients stay for much longer than that. I mean, a lot of our clients we've been working with for the 2 years since we started. But you are right. in so much as that sort of short-term period. There's a lot of time that goes into that. And in theory, it could only just be £600 return on that.

Yeah. So there we go. So we can increase your customer lifetime value from £600 to £4,000. You can switch that on today. If you have a prospect, you could pitch this today. Okay. So this is where we get into— this is where we get into pricing validation. Okay, so what tends to happen is when I start to put out these ridiculous figures to people, they're not ridiculous at all actually, I think that'd be more than reasonable, and I bet you deliver amazing value. You'll go and pitch this this afternoon, your confidence is a bit wobbly, and you'd be like, one person will say, oh gosh, that's expensive. You won't quite know how to handle it because maybe you haven't had sales training, and you'll be like, oh, Robin doesn't know what he's talking about, and you'll go back to what you were doing before. Despite the fact that you don't feel it's working for you. Okay? The trick to validating at new price points is it might be you don't sell it for— if a grand is too much, don't sell it for a grand. Maybe go for £500 for the planning one, but then get them into a higher retained fee. And we gradually move up the scales of initiative until we get close to, right, okay, I'm feeling confident. I'm gonna pitch a grand today. And the idea behind it as well is that you get to a point whereby you You need to pitch this £1,000 product to a minimum of 10 to 20 people. The reason for that is people are very unpredictable, and I can guarantee that, you know, a good close rate is 1 in 5 to 1 in 3. Okay. For most businesses, if you're higher than 1 in 3, you're too cheap. Just a little hint.

Yeah, I'm kind of realizing that.

Yep. So, but I can guarantee if you like 1 in 5 close rate, the first 8 people will say no. It will be the last 2 who say yes. So it's all about data validation. You have to pitch it and pitch it and pitch it and pitch it. And I can guarantee if you do that to 10 to 20 people, they'll say yes. Okay, so how does that feel?

Yeah, sounds about right. I worked in sales for 10 years before going into marketing, and those, those figures were exactly the same figures that we were originally taught as well.

Great. So, so there we go. So we talked about, we talked about goals, talked about how we could potentially create a business that's going to get you to $5K. We've talked about how you might price those products, and it's now— excuse me— it's now down to you to probably go and do a bit of design on that. And you're welcome to kind of feed it back to me in the group and ask questions. That's absolutely fine. So we've covered goals and pricing. I talked about curveball. Are you ready for this?

Go for it.

So offline, Jo, before— I recognize I've talked an awful lot— offline, Jo, you mentioned you had a YouTube channel, which I found really fascinating. Not only that, but you've got So tell everybody about the YouTube channel.

So the YouTube channel is just my hobby. It's just, for those who know me, I'm really into craft, and I was always very into craft groups on Facebook and that sort of thing. And I started finding that I was— the same questions were being asked on Facebook crafting groups, you know, how to do this, how to do that. So I found that I was finding that I was asking— answering the same questions again and again. And at some point I thought, blow this for a lark, I'm just going to make a video so that when someone asks the same question I can just send them straight to the video. That was— I think I started making videos about 3 or 4 years ago, and I think the last time I checked we had just shy of 11,000 subscribers. I'm making quite a good income from my craft tutorials, and certainly at the moment, up until the point where I'm now going to be charging more for my time, I'm actually getting paid more for my income from my craft tutorial videos than I am from my day job. So yeah, that's—

Right, is it fair to say, because I mean, I was blown away when you told me, when I had a quick look at your YouTube channel and you've got 11,800 or 10,800 subscribers, you're making a few hundred pounds or even more some months, you've got hundreds of thousands of views off just, I think it's about 40 or 50 videos. You know, so that you've clearly built an audience there. It's engaged and it's earning some revenue, which is absolutely amazing. I was in awe of that. As a digital marketer, what is the one thing that every small business owner should be doing right now?

Video.

Video. Without a shadow of a doubt. Little story, actually. This is just a slight aside, bit of entertainment value for everybody. I had a guy who came up to me at an event a few months ago and he said, Robin, Robin, Robin, He said, your profile's brilliant, love your book. I've got a couple of quick questions for you if you've got time. He said, what is the one thing that I should be doing in my business right now in order to kind of like grow it and market myself? And I said, video. Just video everything, create a YouTube channel, get Facebook Lives going, blah blah blah. Just do absolutely everything. And he looked at me, scratched his head for a bit, and he went, Robin, what's the second most important thing I should be doing in my business? I was like, no, you've missed the point. It's video. A lot of people are very afraid of video, but also I think it's not just It's not just the technology, but it's also the process of uploading it and optimizing a YouTube channel and various things like that. You have mastered those skills quite effectively and you've managed to monetize it. Now, for a lot of small business owners, they don't need to monetize it. They just need to get— for it to get leads for their business or grow that, raise their profile. Why are you not— why do you not have like a program for teaching business owners how to master video?

That is an excellent point.

Because that knowledge—

I think it's because as part of our package, we do whatever we possibly can to make our clients' social media as successful as possible.

Key thing, key thing, right? But you're gonna have to go with me on this one. I said it was a curveball, okay? But this is gonna be a massive shift for you. You just said, we do whatever we can for our clients.

Mm-hmm.

There's 3 different types of products out there. There's done for you, which is what you're doing at the moment. Client says, need some work doing on my blog, can you do it for me? Yeah, sure, we can do that. So it's done for you. Time for money exchange means you're tied, more importantly, to the client base that you've got. And you've got to meet people and you've got to have all those discussions. Obviously, we've got Zoom and stuff nowadays, but done for you is quite a— it's resource heavy. Resource hungry, sorry. You've got done with you, which is more of a coaching product. It's what I do. So I will sit down and help you make your plan, but it's up to you to then implement it. And then you've got the third option, which is DIY. So there's a lot of people making courses, especially right now, and there's going to be a dearth of good courses and a dearth of really shit courses out there. On the whole, there's going to be an awful lot of courses, but it means that, you know, it's maximum leverage of your time because it's like produce a good course and you can just sell it multiple times without Like having to really lift a finger if you can master advertising copy and all the good things that you do. So my suggestion is you shift potentially. I mean, you could do both. You could still do both. So you've got your done with you. The business is flying. You know, you keep on doing social media and digital marketing for your clients, but you should have a coaching product teaching business owners how to master video. You can do it as a group format, not one-to-one. So they have some element like blended learning. Like an online portal. Here's how to create a video. Here's how to upload a video. Here's how to optimize it on YouTube and get more views and subscribers and things like that. If you want to monetize it, you can. Here's how you optimize it to generate leads. Here's how you integrate it with your website. So when you upload a blog article, you embed the video within it, etc., etc. And then you have a weekly or monthly coaching call with your clients whereby they can ask you questions about their YouTube channel. Now imagine, imagine if you just— and this may sound like a lot, it may not. Let's see how it lands. Imagine if you had 100 clients paying you £100 a month.

Yeah.

To have you coaching them YouTube videos, and you do it all your time. All the time that's required for you is a few sales calls a week plus one blockbuster Q&A. Or you could do more than that if you wanted to, but one blockbuster Q&A a week.

But is, is 11,000 YouTube subscribers a gauge of success?

Massively.

Yeah?

Massively. I've got 1,400 subscribers. I get clients through my YouTube channel. Right? It's a game changer for small businesses if they adopt it now. Because the challenge is to business owners, if anybody's watching this, is there anybody who is going to be looking at this in 12 or 24 months' time wishing they'd started 12 or 24 months ago. I can guarantee most people watching this will be thinking, I should have started video a year or two ago.

I can definitely recommend it. It's great going into your Google Ads account and seeing how much they're paying you. Yeah, it's really encouraging.

So I've thrown this in at the end. We're kind of coming to a sort of a close now, and I want this— I've thrown it in there just because I want you to now get the creative juices going and to start thinking about it. Think about it, 100 clients a month. Now, we didn't share it at the start, but one of your goals was kind of location independence, ability to travel, you know, things that you were kind of doing before lockdown and whatnot, and, and to kind of get a bit of that life back. But what that requires is doing less of the done-for-you stuff because there are natural ties to that.

Yeah.

You can coach, you can coach from anywhere in the world. You can create content from anywhere in the world, doesn't matter. But you need 2 things. You need the financial independence and the location independence. And 100 clients at £100 a month is actually more than feasible, especially with your marketing knowledge. You should be able to attract a lot of people in, and video is a hot topic.

Yeah.

So there you go. There's a big opportunity for you there if you're open to it.

Oh, I'm open to it.

The other cool things as well, it doesn't have to be 100 clients at £100 a month.

You—

there's— I'm gonna, I'm gonna do an industry— I'm gonna unlock the tin now, can of worms, on industry secrets around coaching products. Okay, we have something called a high-ticket offer in the coaching world, and that's where you could charge 3 grand for a course, but then you can package that up however you like. You can take payments however you like. You can include whatever time you like within it. So rather than 100 quid a month, And people kind of like maybe after 3 or 6 months, they're kind of like, oh, I think I've got everything I need now and leaving. And then you're having to kind of do the sales marketing. You know, I call it the sales cycle of doom. Sell, deliver, sell, deliver, sell, deliver. Oh, you know, something happens to me. I can't sell anymore. Don't get any more clients. I would actually look to maybe introduce a YouTube training product that was somewhere in the region of £1,500 to £3,000 that you can just, you know, just once you've set all of your assets up, course is built, you can just passively just wait for people to come to you. I bet there's a ton of people in your crafting community who would love to learn how to do what you've done.

Yeah, quite possibly.

Who would be immediate clients. Because think of the return on investment for them. They invest £1,500 in a course that is going to produce them £500. You know, it's going to take them a while, but £500 a month's worth of revenue in AdSense.

That's a good point, actually. I mean, there's certainly a lot of businesses, there's a lot of crossover. The size of business that I would usually be working with with Mustard Media, those who are already within the craft industry, they could definitely benefit from the YouTube income revenue.

Yeah, ton of opportunity. Cool. How was that for you?

Brilliant, excellent. Yeah, you've— I've got lots of ideas firing off in my brain and I'm looking forward to working with you further. Awesome.

So that was what I wanted to hear. I'm glad you enjoyed that. So if anybody else is watching this and they want to take part in the Fix Your Business series, best way to do that is to either message me on Facebook or drop me an email, robin@fearless.biz. So that's robin@fearless.biz. Or you can just hop onto the fearless.biz website and you can go and grab yourself a free copy of Take Your Shot if you want to. There's tons of stuff, tons of value on there. Thank you, Jo. That's an absolute pleasure. I hope you— it sounds like you found that helpful, so that's great. Thank you very much for being a guinea pig on the Fix Your Business series.

Anytime.