Podcast: Play in new window
In this interview we get to hear from Brad Flynn, a business coach operating under the ActionCOACH brand.
We touch on:
- marketing,
- branding,
- advertising,
- knowing your target customers,
- tracking and measuring your marketing, and
- some tips that you can put to work in your business right now that would take you less than 15mins but give an ongoing improvement.
If you are a plumber, sign maker, physio, builder… you know that the skills required in your trade are trainable. Lucky for all of us ‘running a successful business’ is also a trainable skill set. Its not something that you are born with or without.
Listening to interviews like this with someone like Brad that gets to see inside multiple businesses is going to help not only your mindset but focus in on some of the skills to push yourself on.
At the end of the interview Brad makes the offer to email him at bradflynn (at) actioncoach.com if you would like a copy of an extensive list of new lead opportunities for you business.
If you have questions about the interview drop them in the comments below and between Brad and I, we’ll attempt to answer them for you.
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Brad: First of all, a business coach, it’s a lot like the name suggests when you think about a coach. A coach, you can think of a bus or whatever, is to get you from one point to the next. Essentially that’s our job, is to help a business owner get from where they currently are to where they would like to get to. Generally the people that I work with, usually they’re in pain and they’re in pain for 2 reasons – they’re in pain because they are going out the back door and they don’t know what to do or they’re in pain with their business, have gotten to such a level that they want to grow to the next level but they don’t know how to get there. I help them get from where they are to where they want to get to.
Mick: I imagine a big part of that is accountability, because I’m thinking again we’re trying to put the whole coaching in context like in athletics or things like that, where you’ve got to turn up because the coach is there waiting for you and you’re going to get a slap on the wrist if you don’t do your practice right, I think so. I don’t know, is that a big part?
Brad: Big time. I would say probably 60% of the process is about accountability and the sports analogy is a great one. Having someone there who’s sort of pushing you to do the things that you wouldn’t normally do and that they’re watching you, can’t see the forest for the trees. They’re above you, they can see the things that you’re doing that you may not be able to see. There’s 3 elements – there’s accountability, there’s education and then there’s some motivation, inspiration as well I guess for times when people are struggling. They have got to get out there and get at it. They’d be the 3 things.
Mick: ActionCOACH, how’s that sort of fit in?
Brad: ActionCOACH was started about 22 years ago here in Brisbane by a guy called Brad Sugars. He started out of his mom and dad’s granny flat out the back, down in Sunnybank. Brad’s a pretty driven sort of guy. He’s an accountant by background but he soon realized that he’d rather count his own money than somebody else’s and from there he went on and did a bunch of learning about different businesses and what made successful businesses successful and he went out to test his ideas and went from there to ActionCOACH but it’s interesting when we he first started it was an educational business. He used to run seminars all the time but what he found was that he had all the information that people needed. He’d do a seminar, teach it to them and then they do nothing with it. That’s kind of how the coaching model came out. Brad, he pretty much pioneered the business coaching side of things because he can see that people, the education was great but unless they had some of that accountability, there was no actual work getting done and they weren’t growing and getting to where they wanted to get to. He went on then to sort of systemize the business, turn it into a franchise and we’re now, I think we’re up to about 51 countries globally, all over the world, right through Europe, through Asia Pacific and we’re even in China these days and India. Apparently we put on a coach every week in China. That’s how fast that’s growing in China.
Mick: Being a franchise model, each individual coach, it’s almost like their own small individual business.
Brad: That’s right.
Mick: You’re doing all the same marketing, all the same things you’re working with other people, you’re doing it as your own individual franchise.
Brad: Exactly. We have to eat our own dog food, essentially. It’s one way to put it. We’re business owners as well, we don’t get any handouts or anything like that. The stuff we teach, we’re doing it ourselves. It’s pretty cool.
Mick: Just so we know your background, so where do you come from? Very quickly can you give us how you ended up here today?
Brad: My experience with ActionCOACH started about 12 years ago. I saw Brad Sugars speak, probably it was about 12 years ago. I decided to go into my own business, not long after that and pretty much I sucked at it. I was really, really like a lot of small business owners, working my backside off, getting nowhere, I had a struggling relationship, my health wasn’t so good and the rest of it and I decided to get coached. I did some work with Brad Sugars himself at the time, as well as my other coach who helped me get there and as a result my business that I had at the time was a gym in Sydney that I built it up and I sold it for about double what I paid for it, all in the space about 18 months with my coaching work.
Out of that, I realized that this gym business isn’t for me and I kind of really resonated with the whole education and coaching thing and from there went on to get into the coaching game and since then I’ve been privileged enough to work with literally hundreds of businesses, probably spoken to thousands of them in my time I guess, but working one on one with group seminars in the hundreds and it’s a lot of fun to take a struggling business from really questioning why they’re in business to such a point where one of my clients recently they finished coaching with me because they now do a 6-figure profit every quarter as well as their wages and they don’t actually have to go to work if they don’t want to. That’s the end game for what I help people to achieve.
Mick: Alright, let’s get stuck in on the marketing side of things then. When you take a high level view of a small business and look down, where do you see marketing fit in? What are the big chunks in a business and how does marketing relate to that?
Brad: Yeah I guess for a lot of small business owners, they find marketing really quite confusing and overwhelming because they know they’ve got to do it but they don’t really know where to start or how to do it or what they’re trying to achieve a lot of the time. I guess I start off with my clients by explaining to them that marketing is basically it’s a matching process. You’ve got a product or service that you’re really good at, that makes good profit for you. Marketing is about matching that, what you do into the marketplace and putting the messages in the right place rather than work or spray and pray, which is blast it out to everybody, sit back and keep your fingers cross and hope that something works. It’s about being really specific about who your ideal client is and even to the point of having an idea of what your end game is with your marketing because again a lot of people dive into some sort of marketing without really considering what their outcomes are that they want to get. Being really clear on how many new clients do you want to generate from your marketing this year? What about your existing clients? Because a lot of people think that marketing is all about just getting new clients whereas our definition of marketing starts well before the first purchase and finishes well after the last purchase. Marketing is also about educating the existing customers that you have and helping them to stay longer.
Having clear outcomes and then working on where are we going to go fishing. Marketing is a lot like fishing. If you talk to a good fisherman and one of my clients he loves his fishing, and I said to him when he first started, I said “when you go fishing do you pretty much know what fish you’re going to catch when you go out?” He says “yeah I sort of plan it that way.” He says “I know what bait, what time, what moon, what hook, what sinker, everything involved to get that particular fish” and marketing for small business is a lot like that, is being really clear on who you want to catch, how many of them you want to catch and then it’s matter of taking your particular product or services that you’re unique in or you’re really good at and then putting that message in front of the right people within the marketplace.
Mick: Okay. Lets look at the terminology even, so what’s the difference between marketing, sales and advertising? What are those different buckets and how they relate?
Brad: Yup that’s a good question. Marketing as I said is about fundamentally initially getting one of your target markets to respond, actually you do some form of marketing and they put their hand up. They say “yes I’m interested in your product or service.” From that point you go into sales. Now we’ve got someone who’s interested in your product or service. Now it’s our goal to convert them into a regular buying customer from us. Advertising kind of falls under the marketing banner I guess, as a way to get someone to raise their hand. And then also as I said, marketing, just because they bought from you once, then they make that transition from a prospect into an actual customer and then beyond that point then we’re marketing to them to keep them educated about what we do, how we grow and change our business and to make sure they keep coming back.
Mick: With the businesses that you see and because you get to see different areas in a sort of generalize for a small business owner, what are the hard parts about marketing or what do they do poorly? Where do they struggle the most when you first see things?
Brad: I think it comes back to this [9:17], they’re just trying stuff. They get approached by the local newspaper to put adverts in it, they get approached by the companies who got bus adverts on them and there’s Google AdWords coming and knocking on their door all the time and they’re really flying blind. They’re just going to try something and I have a simple saying about marketing, is you don’t have to be a marketing guru. You have to be a test and measure guru. If you’re going to do some marketing, make sure that you can measure the impact of it, so you need to be able to measure if it works or not. I can’t remember there’s an ad executive back in the 50s or somewhere there who said that the thing with marketing is 50% of it works and 50% of it doesn’t work but you’re just never sure which 50% it is. To be blunt, in this day and age, that’s just utter BS. With that much digital technology we have out there now, you need to be able to measure the results of your marketing to know if it’s working or not. That would be the first thing.
Mick: Before we leave that bit, is there something they can actually take action on, what are the types or things you can measure? Also your coupon codes or asking how did you find us, things with that.
Brad: They’re the main ones. Anytime you get a new prospect raise their hand, if it’s a face to face thing or a phone call or an email, you must ask them how did they hear about you. Whether it was Google or a friend like in a referral or a newspaper, out of whatever it is, every single new person that contacts your business in any way, shape or form, you must ask them. If you’ve got different digital strategies, if you’re using Facebook and those sorts of things and you’re getting someone to actual give you their email details, then you’ll know where they’ve come from as well. You need to be able to analyze that as well as make sure that you can understand where your prospects are coming from, whatever it is that they’re doing to get to you.
Mick: Brad how do you, I’m just thinking about it, it could be a leading question here, but as far as actually embedding that, it is a system in the business rather than saying “okay, let’s go over that” you’ll do that once or twice and then sort of the figure falling over, do you have a little sales script for the phone?
Brad: Yeah absolutely. You’ve got to have, by the phone, if most of your leads come in via the phone, sitting right by the phone you’ve got to have a tally sheet. The old fashion gate post, 4 strokes and a line through it type scenario, making sure that you’ve got the different ways that people hear about you. If someone walks past your business, if it was a referral, whatever it is down the left hand side and then along the top of the table you have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. As people ring in, so if it’s Tuesday, someone walks in, the first thing once you’ve had a bit of chat a chat to them and you say to them “by the way, how did you hear about us?” It has to be an integral part of your business. With the clients that I work with, when they first get started that’s one of the accountabilities. They’ve got to send me at the end of every week their test and measure sheet, so that I check on what’s working and what’s not working.
It’s funny because a lot of the times when people do this, they think that their advertising works brilliant and one of my clients was doing a lot of money in a particular newspaper and discovered we weren’t getting any leads from it, even to the extent that he hadn’t had any leads from it. They’re really good with their testing and measuring, they just weren’t checking it. He was kind of flushing a whole heap of money down the toilet without getting any return on it.
Mick: I think I side tracked you there, so you’re basically talking about challenges for small business owners, so the first one is test and measure. Next?
Brad: Yup. I guess the next one then is if you are going to do some marketing, what I see most business owners is the standard name rank serial number type advert, which back in when they first had newspapers was really good because we didn’t have a whole bunch of marketing messages. If you needed a blacksmith, you probably get out the newspaper and look up blacksmith and that was it. These days it’s a very different ballgame. We’re bombarded with something like 15,000 marketing messages a day.
Mick: Yeah, radio ads and billboards and all of them together.
Brad: Yeah, it’s crazy. Your adverts or any type of marketing you need to be able to stand out. The old name rank serial number just won’t cut it anymore and particularly in today’s day and age you’ve got to be able to get the attention of whoever it is that you’re looking to get for your audio customers and having a reason for them to call you, because with 15,000 marketing messages coming at you a day, if you don’t stand out and give someone a compelling reason to pick up the phone, log on to your website or something like that and something that’s truly valuable to them, they’re not just going to act. That’ll be the second thing, is that they don’t have a compelling reason for someone to give them a call.
Mick: Here we go, I’ll simplify here. By listing those 2 points as 1, I guess our scenario here is if you need the right newspaper ad for your business for tomorrow. What most business owners will have like a big logo at the top, the name of the business and all sorts of stuff, and then a list of the 20 services dot pointed that they provide and then a number at the bottom. 2 things in, let’s look at the top of the ad and the text around the phone number. Top of the ad then, instead of a business name, what’s your suggestion?
Brad: Even before we get to that stage, you got to be clear that the newspaper is the right thing for you. I’ll be asking your existing clients “do you read the XYZ newspaper and do you ever actually respond to any of the ads in it?” That will be the first thing to check, particularly your better customers. Let’s assume that we’ve got enough of an indication from our existing customers that “hey yes, I do respond to the local newspaper.” So then your advertising is about the heading and I use the analogy as you’re reading a newspaper and looking at the different articles, how do you choose which article you’re going to read? And most people will say things like ‘well it’s the headline’ and that’s exactly how it works for advertising. You’ve got to have something that gets your audio target market’s attention. Let’s say you’re a motor mechanic and you’re looking for Toyota drivers. If you own a Toyota and you’re reading the paper and you see a sign that says “attention Toyota car owners” or something like that, immediately your eyes are going to be drawn to it because it’s something you’re emotional about. You actually own a Toyota, so it gets your attention. Then as you go through the ad, it’s about not so much your list of products and services. If you’re a mechanic, people are going to fundamentally understand all the things that you do but what’s in it for the person reading it? It’s about “how can you help them” rather than “here we are, aren’t we good? Here’s the list of things that we do”, all or most businesses usually have. It’s got to be about what is going to get the reader’s attention. At the bottom of the ad, always make sure that the phone number is really big and wide. Don’t worry too much about your business name. We have a simple saying “the only person who cares about your business name is you and your mum” so don’t get too carried away with your business name but make sure that you got the phone number clear and also an offer, something that is going to get someone to pick the phone up. Let’s say you’re a mechanic and for this month only we’re going to be doing wheel alignments as part of the service, say $49 or whatever it is. When you do something like that, people immediately will picture the $49 or probably a $50 note in their mind and they’re probably more than likely to be working out “I just saved $50, what can I go and spend that on? Great, I’ve only got to end of the month, better ring up and book now.”
Mick: A bit of an urgency or scarcity as well.
Brad: Scarcity, something that’s compelling and usually has got a limit on it, only 5 available or first 3 to call or by the end of the month, something that puts a finite definition on that availability.
Mick: Okay, I’ve seen a bit of these; sometimes it’s just a phone number. Sometimes they will say “call now, number” and then next one is “call now, number, and ask for such and such.”
Brad: Will mention this ad. That’s the thing, with this advertising, only have that offer displayed in that one place because if you put it across all your different advertising mediums, you can’t work out which one works out. They’ll ring up and say “hey I’m ringing about the offer or whatever it is.” You should ask them but generally try and have a different offer for different marketing mediums to make it easy to work out which ones working.
Mick: Make sure where they came from. Alright, we’ll go back to the initial question but you brought up there the fact that no one cares too much about your business name, it’s the problem you solve for them, what’s in it for me type of thing. Let’s talk about direct response versus branding because I’ve had a couple of conversation with people who say when I think of this category in a local area, I want them to immediately think of me and the conversation has been around “okay, that’s going to be quite expensive.” Do you want to describe direct response?
Brad: I think it depends on what it is that your business, or your product or service is. If you’ve got a business that has an immediate response, like a plumber, you got a blocked drain and you need it now, then I think that instant response advertising is more relevant. If you’ve got a product or service that is going to take a bit more time and is generally going to have a higher level of investment I find, there’s going to be some education that needs to take place to your target market. There’s a statistic, I can’t remember what it was, 80% of people make a purchase on the 5th to 12th contact. This is really relevant if you’ve got a high dollar value type product or service. You’ve got to be constantly making contact with them in some shape or form because they’re actually ready to actually make a purchase from you. That’s more when branding comes in. Over time, they’ll start to know you but even with the branding, you’ve always got to have an offer there available because you never know when they’re going to make that decision. Let’s say we’re dealing with an electrician and the last time you dealt with an electrician he gave you a bad experience, so they’re going ‘too bad for him I’m going to go somewhere else’ and you need to be front of their mind when they actually make that decision. Branding is more about the longer term education perspective and making them aware that you’re there whereas if you’ve got a shorter term response time I guess, that’s more direct response advertising.
Mick: A direct response style ad fails if they don’t actually put their hand up or they don’t take an action, then that’s failed for what you’re looking for because you drive pass like a bus sign here, it’s got like the sign for the commonwealth bank, it’s just like a big diamond saying ‘can’ and the Commonwealth Bank name on the bottom. They never ask any action and that kind of works with Pepsi and Coke and banks and things like but if you’re a small business trying to replicate that, it’s a quick way to blow out your budget.
Brad: In that particular thing, yeah definitely. The marketing, I guess, comes back to that education thing, getting someone’s details and just regularly sending them information of value. It’s not about getting your name out there and that would be one of the biggest myths I’ve seen in advertising, so many small business owners say “I just got to get my name out there.” It doesn’t work like that. Getting your name out there is just a way for advertising companies to make some money out of you.
Mick: Alright let’s wrap that up and bring it back to some actual things folks can do. We’ve talked about, one straight away of having next to your phone and have a couple of columns there and start tracking where things are coming from. Surmise that things of, that not everybody out there is going to be a customer. Only a tiny fraction of the people you drive pass the road or read the paper or whatever it is, only a tiny fraction of people will ever, ever going to buy from you and so your marketing has to be kind of talking to that Toyota owner or that person you want to deal with. Let’s talk about others, for mechanics they can obviously deal with Toyotas, several different brands. Would they be better off running two separate ads for 2 different brands of cars and try and hit up and aim for everything?
Brad: Like I said, you don’t need to be a marketing guru but you need to be a test and measure guru. The fact is that 80% of your marketing campaign probably won’t work so making and trying a bunch a different things to find out what does work for you is the only real way. There’s no silver bullet answers for anyone, as much as advertising people will say “we’re a sure fire thing”, a couple questions to ask them is do they guarantee their results, can I speak to someone who is using their advertising that’s getting great results and also tell me a bit more about what the likelihood of responses I’m going to get from this advert, and most of the time they’ll fluff away from it and won’t be able to answer it.
Coming back on getting clear, the fundamental thing is be clear on who you want to get. One of my clients, it can be as simple as, this particular client we’ve been through an exercise to work out who their ideal clients wherein we have a list of business names and I was at a shopping center on a weekend and saw a vehicle from this company or sign up and so forth, no one even put a business card under the wind screen. Monday came, they got a request to do a quotation for 30 grand and they had the job by the end of the week. You don’t always have to have big flashy advertising and heaps of Google AdWords or websites; it depends on what your market is looking for. That’s one of the big myths I see. These days, you kind of do need to have a website but it depends on what your target market, how they find you. If they don’t look for your product or services on the web then maybe you don’t need to spend too much on your actual website.
To look at a couple of different examples of effective marketing that I’ve seen with my clients in the marketplace in general, it comes back to I guess how quickly someone needs the product or service. To use as an example I’ve got one of my plumbing companies do a lot of yellow pages advertising because if somebody is using yellow pages, they’re pretty much going to buy. They’re not usually doing their research. They’re generally ready to buy. They put a lot of investment into getting at the top of the yellow pages ranking. That’s a short turnaround type scenario I guess. Then you go to something like more construction industry type things where they’re not necessarily going to be responding to an advert. That’s probably going to be more about relationship building, which is even that’s marketing as well. We’ve got to find out who the decision maker is, make contact with them and just subtly but genuinely add authentic value in the communication with them so that they can see you’re an expert in what you do. I guess for something more medium term, something that’s a little bit quicker, probably even something like if you’ve got workshops that you can put on. Again, this is a really good way to get your target market to come in and learn more about you. Your target markets are never going to buy from you unless they know who you are, like you and they trust you. Workshops and those sorts of things about something that’s really valuable for your target market is great because straight away they’re going to know you when they come in, out of the presentation, unless you really do badly, they are going to like you and you’re going to have an element of trust that you’ve built up as part of that process.
Mick: There’s also attention. If you’ve been up there for a talk or whatever, you’ve had their attention for hopefully most of that, as opposed to a couple of seconds.
Brad: Yeah very true, and if you’ve done the presentation right, you’ve understood what the pain points are for your target market, what their frustrations are, and you’ve been able to solve some of their problems or at least you’ve got the solutions for them and you can get them a certain amount of emotion where they’re thinking “yes, if I work with this person I can see how my business is going to be much better.” It’s going to be a lot better than putting an ad in the newspaper and spending a whole bunch of money on it where the likelihood that someone’s going to see it, even anyone who’s done some Facebook advertising you’ll see the impressions and thousands and thousands of impressions and you might get a dozen clicks.
Mick: Yeah, click rates are terrible but at the same time there’s heaps of impression.
Brad: That’s right. If you can get your target market into a space and give them a lot of value, that’s generally a really great way to get some powerful response from them. Getting clear on your marketing outcome and one of the things I work with my clients on is building a marketing machine. We know that every year we’re going to have a certain percentage of businesses that return and based on whatever your profit goals are, that means you’re going to need certain amount of new clients to come into your mix. It’s about building your machine that is going to take care of your existing clients but also to the point where you know it’s going to generate new clients for you. The clients who just finished with me recently, they literally with their business, on a daily basis because of the nature of it, can turn on and off Google AdWords to top up their marketing machine. They know what their profit targets are and to the point that they know for every dollar they invest in their marketing, on average they get $4 profit. Once it’s been through, you’ve been there right to the bottom line. That’s the ideal end game you want to get to, where you can literally predict what money is going to come out of your marketing machine based on what goes in the front end of it.
I just want to talk about marketing, the testing and measuring, you need to be a test and measure guru, because once you’ve built your machine then that’s the biggest challenge for a lot of business owners, they don’t know how to build it.
Mick: I guess you can turn around and sell your business, it’s got to be your customer list and if you got some kind of machine placed on the front end, that’s going to be your good will and the value of the business.
Brad: That’s right. 2 most valuable assets of your business are your customer list and then the systems because if I’m the investor looking to buy a business, I don’t want to have to get involved in it, because then it becomes a job; whereas if I’m looking at a business that has a marketing machine that has got demonstrable results with a return on investment, they put $10,000 a month and get $40,000 back, then it’s a bit of a no-brainer.
Mick: Excellent. I was just remembering, as you’re talking about the attention before and the Toyota ad, as I drive home from the school each day I pass a sky rise with a sign that says “schnauzer clipping” with a phone number on it in front of a house. I’ve seen the sign for the last 6 months and just been blind to it. 2 or 3 weeks ago, we got a schnauzer-poodle cross puppy and so for the last couple of days driving past the sign, I’ve noticed the sign but it’s been there for 6 months. It’s about attention and where your target market is.
Brad: That’s the thing. The market and individual people within the market are going through different phases of their life. That’s a classic example with you’re driving pass it every day and then all of a sudden you see it because you’ve got something you’re emotional about. It’s the same with the guys I told the story about, with the business card under the windshield. If they hadn’t got clear on who their target market was to such a point that they had this list of businesses, they would have walked through that shopping center car park and never been the wiser about seeing that vehicle there.
The elements of marketing being clear on your target is worth 10 times as much as the quality of the ad that you actually write. The quality is important but if you’ve got the target right and you’ve got a compelling offer for them, you can still have spelling mistakes in your ad and they’ll still ring up and get it right. Just make sure you’ve got the phone number right. Nothing worse than wrong phone number in ad advert and it happens. Actually our office, Vista Blinds put the wrong number in the yellow pages so we got all these calls for Vista Blinds on yellow pages. If you are yellow pages advertising, make sure you get the number right because it can cost you a lot of money in your business.
Mick: We’ve covered a bit of ground there, with a few good tips the folks can always action this week, if nothing else just a pad beside the phone will be something to start and it all starts with one action. If people wanted to dive deeper or query on some of the things we’ve spoken about, what’s the best place that they can find you?
Brad: The best thing is probably to send me a quick email. You can Google me. You’ll find me on the internet. My email address is [email protected]. That’s generally the best place to get hold of me. As a bit of a special offer today, what I’ve got is part of the ActionCOACH system is we’ve got a list of over 282 profit-building strategies, so if anyone’s interested on there, there is 78 lead generation strategies, just a list of them. People if you’re interested, flick me an email and I can send that back to you and I’m sure you’ll get plenty of value out of that as well.
Mick: Yeah it’s an awesome offer and again start sending your email. If you’re listening to this on the actual website itself, below this will be the comments section. I’m sure Brad, if folks leave a comment there, he’ll be happy to answer them in there as well.
Brad: Yeah definitely.
Mick: Awesome, thank you so much Brad. I really appreciate that, it’s great.
Brad: Thank Mick, I really enjoyed talking to you this morning.
Mick: Cheers.
This is the Redcliffe Marketing Show. If you’re looking for tips and tricks to market your business better, then catch up with today’s guest or you can go to redcliffemarketinglabs.com.au