Nick Gedda: Why Home Service Brands Stop Talking to Customers

0:00 · Nick Gedda's role managing lifecycle marketing across seven brands

Nathan Smith:0:01
All right, what's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Why Marketing Sucks podcast. We have Nick Jeddah here, one of my good friends. Looking forward to diving into everything with him. Nick, how are you doing today?

Nick Gedda:0:12
Do well man. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Nathan Smith:0:14
I'm doing fantastic. So Nick, tell me a little bit about you. What's your current role? What's your experience like? And we can go from there.

Nick Gedda:0:23
Yeah. we just want to open it up to like what I'm doing currently, lifecycle marketing manager for a company called Intermountain Home Services. It's a home services platform where PE backed, we help I mean help about seven brands operate. I think that's what our portfolio is at now. and I am part of like the shared services team within IHS. So we run internally like essentially an agency model where We are doing marketing for all seven of the brands. My role specifically within the lifecycle is managing customer communications, retention, looking at opening up referrals, handling a lot of the website and SEO side of things, and then online reputation management. So there's a lot that goes into it, but it is all centered around the idea of making like a customer sales experience. a little bit more transparent, smooth, frictionless, and then walking them through the process, I guess to convert a little bit faster, retain them longer.

Nathan Smith:1:29
So it sounds like you got a lot going on. So you basically work for a company that operates like a marketing agency.

Nick Gedda:1:35
Yeah. That's a simple way to put it.

Nathan Smith:1:37
So what is what is your main objective in your role in terms of like on the marketing side?

Nick Gedda:1:44
is internally for the company, it's to grow the customer lifetime value. So just you know to squeeze as much money out of all of our customers as we possibly can, which is a selfish way to look at it. So from yeah, from the external standpoint, you know, because marketing is all customer facing and providing a positive experience.

Nathan Smith:2:00
Revenue.

Nick Gedda:2:09
Essentially it's giving our customers as much education as possible for them to make the decision of do I need this or do I not need this? And I think especially in our industry, we notice that customers don't have the education about their home that, you know, somebody who's working in the industry would expect. And so there's a lot of things they either don't know they need, which causes problems later down the road and it's usually a costly ticket. so my job is to make sure to at least So they at least know that that exists. but yeah, it's it's revenue at the end of the day.

2:12 · Growing customer lifetime value through homeowner education

Nathan Smith:2:45
What does your team look like? And are you leading the team?

Nick Gedda:2:48
I am not. we have a CMO who is leading our team. We are a team, I think, of about six right now that's separated between like lifecycle and customer communications. SEO is under me. And then we have Design ARM, we have content writers, photographer, videographer, and some PPC performance marketers who rock.

Nathan Smith:3:16
So you guys are doing a lot of different basically you're going, you're covering a lot of different marketing channels. What would you say right now is the one that's actually working the most?

Nick Gedda:3:27
that that answer changes every week. right, like it's it's hard to it's hard to tell and it's easy to tell. It's hard to tell from a seasonality perspective of something that's gonna work a month ago might not work now. the need of the urgency that homeowners have to repair problems, you know, does it change upon the weather, it changes upon the season, it changes upon

Nathan Smith:3:30
Yeah.

3:43 · Managing multichannel marketing strategy and seasonal lead changes

Nick Gedda:3:54
The price of our units. And so as much as we like try to market and drive leads, the reality is like we can't control seasonality. Does somebody even need to repair their AC, their furnace? Is the weather is it stable or is it fluctuating where their system's gonna have to be used a lot? so the obviously that is an uncontrollable aspect from our side. And so where we like to control it. Obviously within the paid side is where we can pull the most levers, right? And we can measure it on a daily basis. but you know you guys are helping us from the SEO perspective. probably not something that we should leave out of this conversation is like you guys are playing a huge role in that. and I think year over year we're starting to see a lot of traffic Like it's it's rising. but to answer your question on like what's working the best right now, I would have to say it's just like the fact that we are trying to be in all places at once. So that year over year, our overall like brand recognition is just growing in the Salt Lake area. And so that some of those decisions on who to call becomes a little bit easier. but you know, yeah.

Nathan Smith:5:06
So I mean, that's a great answer. The way you said that is because we're doing all of it, basically, you're allowing yourself to be successful. That is where a lot of brands are falling short, especially if they're hiring an SEO agency, if they're just hiring a PPC agency, or they want to focus on social media, they want to focus on email marketing, whatever it is. Typically, what people are doing now is they choose one or two out of, let's call it five.

But it sounds like you guys are trying to tackle all of them at once and basically get in front of people as much as humanly possible.

Nick Gedda:5:40
Yeah, but I'm not saying that's necessarily the right answer either. you know, I think we have the resources and the capabilities to at least have our hands in the majority of the places that we need to. I think there's there's pros and cons to that. You and I have both seen it where sometimes picking one channel, one message and driving it as hard as humanly possible. is a better answer than trying to be in a million places at once and have nothing be cohesive or thoughtful or even resonate with your customers or have coherent messaging. And I would I guess be misspeaking if I said that we weren't running into that as well. You know, with being all over the places like, is everything cohesive? Are we seeing the results that we're supposed to see with everything going on? Are we making sure that everything is talking to one another, that paid is talking to organic That design is talking to life cycle and customer communications. You know, there's gaps there. And so I think with us having the ability to be all over the place, we don't see as much of the gaps as we would if we're only focusing on one or two channels. but I do think that, yeah, at least it would be misspeaking to say that we're doing it right by doing that. I think there's some nuance to that question.

Nathan Smith:7:04
I mean, yeah, there is with anybody. And I don't think there necessarily is a perfect answer because it's really just trial and error for everything. Like you can run a campaign for three months, and if it doesn't work, but then you try it again three months afterwards. And like you said, for the companies that you're operating with, it's all seasonality. So out in Salt Lake City, I'm in Denver and it's relatively similar weather. It's hot as shit. So, like, if the companies are looking for more furnace, obviously jobs or something like that, nobody's looking for that right now because it's all AC.

If you're looking for plumbing, people might be prioritizing spending money on their AC to keep their family cool rather than worrying about their toilet flushing or something like that. So like how do you go about making sure that the people looking for the jobs that they need to fill are actually getting those jobs when they need it?

Nick Gedda:7:51
yeah, it's I mean it's a lot of trial and error. I think there needs to be a question of cost in there as well, or at least understanding that of like consumers are cost conscious. Some of our brands are more on the cost.

Effective sides. Some of them are more premium brands that make it a little bit harder to sell specific item systems during certain times of the year. that's I mean we have a call center who's great, they sell like animals. they're calling all day, they're running text promotions, we have email campaigns launching for our offers every day of the week.

And just basically trying to do anything that we can from a capacity perspective to make sure our boards are full. we run a very strong membership program. about a year ago, we revamped all of our memberships, we took away tiered pricing, we simplified the offers, we made it really easy to say, like, hey, I'm gonna pay this one flat rate for an annual fee. Here's all the benefits I get. It includes free maintenance visits, it gives them a ton of value, it gives our technicians a reason to get into the home.

And so, you know, those maintenance visits, four of them a year, kind of books up the boards in a way to keep them busy, gives them the reason to upsell, cross sell, and be present in the home. But I think also that's been a huge contributor to making sure that our capacity never sits at zero.

8:19 · Simplifying membership pricing to secure recurring maintenance appointments

Nathan Smith:9:20
Do you want to go back to something you mentioned on the education side in terms of like educating customers? So obviously, you've called out that like my agency runs your SEO. I can go into like the top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel stuff that we do for all of your brands from that perspective. But let's say they don't even really necessarily know and they're not going to search for these things right now. But you want to get in front of them before the seven even season even starts. Like, how do you go about that?

Nick Gedda:9:27
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:9:44
Mm-hmm.

Nick Gedda:9:50
Yeah, your team is helping us do a majority of that with like our location service pages, specific landing pages we're running. we're doing a lot on the paid side, driving traffic to specific location, specific services, and essentially trying to wrap up traffic to things that are coming two to three months ahead. so that way when the need arises and all of a sudden it drops to twenty degrees, ten degrees below zero and the furnace goes out and you don't have heat in your home, you've at least been seeing one of our seven brands for the last two or three months. if not even earlier for a different product. So the education side of things like we're We're not perfect, but we're really trying to play the game of like two to three months in advance as seasons change to make sure that when that peak season arrives, we're not starting the conversation. We're in the middle of it.

Nathan Smith:10:49
So each, I mean, these brands have been around for a long time. And you guys probably have a ridiculously long list of customer contacts, whether it's email or text messages. Do you guys send out like text messages or emails of like, hey, for like an AC tune-up or coming in winter season for like a furnace tune-up? Because for me, like I'll even tell you right now, I've I've never owned a house. I rent like every somebody takes care of that shit for me. So when I go purchase a house,

Nick Gedda:11:06
Yeah.

Nathan Smith:11:18
And I have to do all this myself. There's gonna be a lot of things I don't even know I need to do before it before those things happen. So how do you go about that?

Nick Gedda:11:23
Correct.

Nick Gedda:11:27
Yeah, so like you said, we have from like a customer marketing side, we have a huge database of previous customers. we renew our offers at least on a quarterly basis based on the seasonality. We have flash offers, we have deals to get at least people to understand that they need maintenance, service, replacements. And so from an email text message side, those are running non-stop year-round. we're always trying to highlight potential needs, upcoming weather. reasons why maintenance now is gonna save a bunch of money in the future. That's obviously from like just a revenue and sales side, but from the education perspective, we are constantly trying to be in their inboxes one way or another, letting know that now is probably a good time to make some changes. you asked me something else that I can't remember what the response was going to be. But yeah, essentially we're I mean Reaching that was back to the membership piece is what I was gonna mention, is like the benefit of it, especially for first time home buyers, is it's built out to be annual and there's something included there for like all seasonality, potential maintenance things, anything that might need to be fixed or repaired.

And so with the purpose of that membership, it's like you don't have to think about it for the year. We're gonna reach out to you to book those maintenance visits, to do certain system checkups, and just and be in your home and take some of that pressure off. So we found a lot of success just by offering a product like that.

Nathan Smith:12:57
Now, does the pricing of that differ than like what it normally would in terms of like do they get a discount over signing up for the year?

Nick Gedda:13:04
Yeah, they have I mean I think the I think the monthly and annual pricing is is pretty similar, to be honest. I think we should work on the pricing a little bit, but the value is undisputably great. So

Nathan Smith:13:19
I mean, I could see that even if the pricing isn't too different or it's the exact same, one, they probably don't even know. and two, it just makes everybody's looking for to make their life easier. Like if you just get a text message in April or whatever it is saying, or I guess coming into like March, like, hey, we need to come make sure your AC unit is ready for summer. We're gonna do a quick maintenance check and that's it. Can we come tomorrow?

Where like you don't have to think about it. You're getting the you're getting the message from the person who needs to be doing it for you. I think that is extremely smart.

Nick Gedda:13:52
I mean we pack in stuff like service discounts, we waive dispatch fees, like a lot of really small things that can tend to add up to a couple of hundred dollars that becomes just the price of the membership for an annual in total. yeah, which is really like a no brainer. I think since introducing the membership last year we've grown it by like two hundred percent at a minimum in total membership sales. yeah, it that was almost pretty immediate, so

Nathan Smith:14:21
So a lot of your role in previous experience comes around to like customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value. Has though have those memberships increased that?

Nick Gedda:14:27
But I mean yeah, but

Nick Gedda:14:33
We are not at a point where we are collecting that data yet, unfortunately. so it would be all anecdotal. And you know, I would I believe so, but I can't tell you that.

Nathan Smith:14:45
I think it would.

Nick Gedda:14:47
I yeah, I b I mean I believe that it is. but our we are currently building an entire in house data infrastructure that I don't have the numbers at this point.

Nathan Smith:14:59
I'm sure I'll find out eventually. Actually, something I want to ask you real quick because you and I haven't talked about this in a long time. I don't know exactly what the brands are doing from like a physical marketing standpoint. Do you guys do billboards? Do you do ads like it local ads on TV, radio, anything like that as well?

Nick Gedda:15:01
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:15:17
Yeah, so I am a bit more removed from those conversations now as far as everything that's going on. really heads down into the customer communication, like website and organic space. I do know that we're running billboards constantly. We used to do some print and radio, but I'm not sure if that is still going on. If it is, I think it's at a minimum. there's a few contracts we had that were little bit longer term. But Billboards for sure, and we put a lot of emphasis. Like we just re-wrapped all of our trucks. so those are all over the place, which is like a huge piece of physical marketing for us, but so we're playing in that space, but it's not necessarily like dominant and hard to forget. We we are I think four or five of our brands are exclusive sponsors for the Utah Mammoth. So we are in the stadium for Utah Mammoth Games. We sponsor the youth sport programs. Yeah, like so we're all over the place in Utah during hockey season. Which is a massive sponsorship. Yeah.

Nathan Smith:16:13
I just gonna say

Nathan Smith:16:21
Okay. That's why it came to mind. I remember seeing it, I think it was the same day. I remember seeing it an ad like around the hockey rink or something. While I was I saw it on TV, I was like at a restaurant, just caught my eye, and I was like, I know that brand. And I texted you and I was like, How often do you guys do that? That's what made me think of it. Because I think the most valuable and the most important aspect from like a local service client perspective, think of it like a lawyer, and I'm sure you're obviously aware of this.

Nick Gedda:16:33
Yeah. Every game.

Nick Gedda:16:49
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Smith:16:50
But the more you put the n the name of the brand in people's minds, the more likely they are to think of it when they need it rather than, or especially like our job is to sh for you guys to show up on somebody's searches for either that service or a question around that service that they want to answer to. And if they see those trucks driving around, they see the the ads or the brand logos in the hockey ranks and they get your text messages and they see different things around the brand when they actually need somebody to come fix their AC.

Nick Gedda:17:07
Mm.

Nathan Smith:17:20
One, they might just remember that brand. And then technically they're organic user, they're just gonna Google that person. But they saw it from maybe a physical ad or an email. Like there's all kinds of different touch points that you guys are going after that I think is extremely important to touch on and why you guys are so successful.

And then if they don't necessarily convert there, you guys have ads running where you can retarget them. Or if they do show up eventually, basically what I was coming back to is if they've seen the brand previously and then they see you again at Google, they see you again in ChatGPT, or they see an ad, they're more likely to, hey, I've already they're they're well known in this area. I see them everywhere. I trust them, I'm gonna call them. And I think that's what a lot of brands aren't necessarily doing because they think spending the money. and not getting the instant return isn't worth it anymore.

Nick Gedda:18:16
Yeah, I think I agree with you. it's also a very simplified approach, right? Because those those brand recognition pieces cost a lot of money. And in order to work you have to be very consistent.

And so it's not necessarily like a drop in the bucket and it's like, hey, we can be at all these spaces. I think there's something to be said from a digital infrastructure where, you know, it's it's not easy, but it's a bit more controllable from like an SEO organic space to try to be everywhere when you go into like the physical in person elements. They're they're very expensive. You have to be consistent and they're hard to measure. Almost impossible to measure. any conversion. So I think I think it's important. I think even internally we struggle to understand the full effects of some of those efforts. And there's a real reality where we could be losing out on a lot of money or cost from those avenues. And until we have the data solidified, it's gonna be tough to know.

Nick Gedda:19:23
But that being said, I think it comes more into like what you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the the necessity for organic versus paid and the idea that like the brand has to have some kind of organic authentic presence if you want to pay for traffic and have it convert properly.

Or well or to even have customers with high intent. Is that what you're saying? We're getting it.

Nathan Smith:19:55
Yeah. So there's I mean, the world you even touched on a little bit is there isn't a way to necessarily track like you're doing tr if you're doing traditional marketing, billboards, whatever it is, there's no way of tracking how many phone calls you got from that unless you put a just like a unique number on there. That's the only number that's listed on. It's the only way you could do it.

Nick Gedda:20:15
Yeah, but you're not expecting people to convert from that anyways.

Nathan Smith:20:19
Yeah, it's more so just putting the brand in their mind so the next time that they need that service, then they're gonna go Google it. So basically there's different touch points that, especially with organic, but pretty much in every marketing channel right now, they're all disconnected. So even with traditional marketing and everything else, you kind of lose the customer journey now more than ever. So especially if you're looking for like let's say those different touch points.

They see a billboard, they see, or just literally the truck driving around their city. Then they go and they look for a plumber near me. And then that same brand is showing up on the first page of Google. They then recognize the fact that they've seen it around, they trust that brand, they know other people that have used them and they're showing up. Maybe they didn't convert right then and there. Maybe their journey ended that day. But then the next day, they're like, hey, how do I fix my toilet? And it's just a simple question.

But then that brand could also be answering their question through an article. That article is related to the obviously the area that they're in. And then they see that brand again. Now that's four, five different touch points that we talked about. They might even go to ChatGPT or they might go straight to Google and be like, hey, what are the top, what are the best plumbers in Salt Lake City? That brand's listed within that list as well. So that's five different times they're seeing the brand before they even make the decision to get in touch with them.

That's what I think people to understand is in terms of like the customer journey is no longer just instant gratification. They might go to three to four to five different sources before they make a decision. And it might not be in that same time period in terms of like that same day. And that's where you lose the ability to track which channel it actually came from.

Nick Gedda:21:54
Mm-hmm.

Nick Gedda:22:10
Sure. I think well I mean for starters, right, you're a hundred percent correct. The buyer's journey is crazy and it's nonlinear and it becomes impossible to track. But I don't think it's a net negative and I don't think it's actually a complication. I think the complication is that most marketers are still beholden to needing data in order to make an assessment or to perform. And so there's analysis, paralysis, and because marketers can't accurately see a customer journey from all touch points into final because they don't know whether to use first touch or last touch attribution because they're simply not talking to the customers when they're selling them on hey what was your experience with finding us what was your experience with other brands they are left in this position of like I don't have data and so the customer journey feels very sticky to me because I'm not willing To try to understand what this customer journey actually is from like an anecdotal or like human point of view, and I'm trying to do it all through online, that marketers feel very frustrated or businesses feel very frustrated that they don't understand their customer or that the journey is too messy in order to make decisions. Right. So I think that becomes more the issue. And it's not that the customer journey is becoming more messy than it was before, or that the data's not there. It's that marketers and business owners.

Have been so they've been told they can rely upon, they're trying to rely upon software, CRMs, data attribution for informed decisions. And the reality is they're now talking to the customers.

22:37 · Stop relying on software and talk directly to customers

Nick Gedda:23:50
They're not understanding that in reality, it doesn't matter if they went from billboard to a paid ad to searching the brand on Google and converting. What matters is that that customer converted. And when they called, they didn't have 400 questions and it didn't take two weeks to close them. They showed up, they knew what they wanted. And if you ask that person why was it so easy to sell, they could say, hey, I've been looking for something for six months, but I saw that you said X, Y, and Z on one of your ads on your website, and that's actually what converted me.

Right, from the marketing point of view, who cares how many other touch points they had? You heard that they saw one thing that solidified or solved the problem they needed and they were ready to convert. It's great. I'm gonna go take that and put it way earlier in the buyer's journey now because if more people need to hear that and it took six months to find it, I'm gonna make sure that's the most visible thing for everybody else who might be in a similar spot.

Right. So it is it's important to be everywhere for the sake of like you never know what the customer journey is gonna be. I think it's interesting point to make that like you are right that everybody thinks it's becoming more complex and more difficult. But I think the reality is that marketers and business owners are too beholden to software, is too beholden to data, and they've stopped talking to the customer, they've stopped trying to understand what the important parts are, which is like why did they convert? Who cares what channel they came through? What did you say? Talk to them. Get Get in their head, understand the customer. And I think I think that's mixed. Or it's missed now, sorry.

Nathan Smith:25:13
Yeah, I love that.

Nathan Smith:25:17
It is missed. Everybody just relies on either their marketing agency or their team to set up the tracking and make sure that like every little every little conversion is tracked and every little channel is basically just put into a spreadsheet. And it's like these are the numbers. But your point is one of the most valuable points I've heard in fucking weeks, if not months. Just go talk to the customer. You're already on the phone with them, or you're already at their house servicing their AC unit.

Nick Gedda:25:45
Take two minutes. And care. And care. Don't ask them to check a box. So they go, you were cheaper than the other guy. Well, it's like, all right, if I was cheaper than the other guy, let's say that I'm not, let's say that I'm more expensive, but I'm still solving this problem. Would that be worth it to you? Yes or no? And say those are those are priceless pieces of information to try to understand who in our market is buying. But when you have a conversation, it's like, hey, leads are down and we need to fill our board and we need to get leads up.

Nathan Smith:25:47
That's it. Yeah.

Nick Gedda:26:13
Alright, so we'll pull levers in PPC, we'll do some stuff on SEO for the upcoming weeks, we'll send out an email blast. But if we don't know why leads are down, or we don't know why we're getting leads to convert in the first place, and we're not having those discussions on a at least a weekly basis, and now we need to go get more leads, what's our messaging gonna be? What's our positioning? What product should we be pushing now instead of a different product in order to boost sales? That all comes from the customer. and yeah, I think I think business owners are struggling because they want their problems to be solved with technology. And it's a human to human transaction.

Nathan Smith:26:52
And having that human touch point and just that, like you said, that two minute interaction, how much more valuable is that to that person that would make them call that same brand again the next time they need somebody?

Nick Gedda:27:07
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a huge part a lot of my role is online reputation. there's parts that I can control and there's parts of that I can't. But getting somebody to pick up a phone once versus having a great experience in the home and only pick up the phone to call you in the future is a massive difference in businesses who grow by point five percent over the next year and who grow by five hundred percent over the next year. It's like what What what's the service like? What's the level of care? How much are you talking to the customer about how their life could be improved?

Nathan Smith:27:45
How often are you guys doing this at IJS?

Nick Gedda:27:49
It's a tough question to ask. I don't think enough, right? Like you're a pretty large organization. I think it's IHS is an interesting spot. We are growing a lot, especially in this last year. I mean, we grew our marketing team from two to ten people.

And we have seven brands. So I think the sales reps are doing a better job of getting that customer information in the home. They're definitely doing a better job of improving the customer experience. I mean our number of reviews and number of five star reviews has quadrupled. so from that point of view There's aspects that are being met. As far as being relayed back to the marketing team, like it's still a gap for us. We're trying to figure out a smooth way for not only sales to ask the right question in the home or the technicians to ask the right question in the home, but then to make sure they're getting the proper answer and then to relay that answer back to the marketing team. To my point about technology.

Nathan Smith:28:48
Think that

Nick Gedda:28:51
Yeah, so point about technology is like everybody wants it to be simple. It's like, give me four check boxes for reasons that they booked that I can check. And so all the data is aggregate aggregated into one clean list. And it's like, what if the reason they close isn't on that list? Or what if they said something and you just decided it was going to be bucketed under this and now you're operating from SKU data? So we're making changes. it's nowhere near perfect, but I think just knowing that that Those are things that we have to fix, but it's in a really good position.

Nathan Smith:29:24
And think there's a huge opportunity there. Like there's obviously from my agency that tells you guys what to do and some like what we can't do, mainly it's just reviews. Like we can't go get reviews for you because it's gonna look like shitty. You guys are gonna get suspended. so like we'll tell you which profiles, which areas you guys should go get more reviews on and have your technicians like prioritize that and all the different tools that you use for it. But there is a disconnect and if you if you got the questions from those technicians or the salespeople, like how are you gonna give it to my team?

And I think there's an opportunity there for like a tool to be built. Whether it's just like an app on your phone, like you said, it's either a checklist. Hell, I don't care if it's it could be a voice message or you just like take a quick video and you just like submit it, and then that goes through AI and then like it all gets tracked and just it's gets submitted to the marketing team. And then you just kind of break it down from there. But there is definitely a huge opportunity there that you just made me realize I haven't thought of.

Nick Gedda:30:13
Mm-hmm.

Nick Gedda:30:22
I mean, sure. and power to you if you can build it and you can get adoption to utilize it. I think that that comes down to leadership because technicians don't feel it in the home. They feel it three months later when sales become faster, easier, quicker. they don't feel it when they have to pry the customer with questions. I would say like I've seen it work really well without needing anything. Like you and I worked at an agency together and our sales rep every single conversation was taking handwritten anecdotal notes of verbatim of what the customer was saying during the sales process that I could take and turn into content. Right? Like I'm using the customer's words that were jotted down and reversing it and saying, This is our messaging now. This is the problem we solve for people. This is what information they need to understand that we're the right fit for them or we're not the right fit for them. And so I think it takes I say that because we watched that grow really we're a brand new agency. We went from, you know, seven thousand dollars a month to five hundred thousand dollars a month in sales and That's a big portion of it, is like how much do we understand the customer? I say that because I've also been in organizations where I bring that to the table and they say, What's our marketing messaging? What's our positioning? How are we gonna talk to our customers? And I say, Collect it anecdotally. Ask them, what was the first time you heard about us? What was the last thing you heard that made you want to work with us? What problem are we solving for you? And they say it's too much friction. Nobody's gonna close if we ask them those questions. I said, Great. Then if you guys don't want to do it, you're gonna miss out on all of this. But I it comes down to how much. the business is willing to do. And I think the theme of this conversation is it's not it's not softwares, it's not lead flow. It's businesses are too lazy to understand their customers and they think technology is gonna solve it.

Nathan Smith:32:12
It is. And I think we'll go back to what you said. I think it's more so after they close, you ask those questions. But going back to like the previous agency you and I worked at, there so you and I had two different roles. And it's funny because to you, that was actually done correctly. But in my role it wasn't. I never got enough information from the sales process and the customer conversation.

Nick Gedda:32:18
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Smith:32:39
Of what they were looking for, what they wanted, what the expectations were, and all that. That was never clear clearly communicated to me to pass it off to the team for execution and delivery. That was always like the disconnect. And it literally goes back to the exact same thing we're just talking about with fucking technicians and the same thing with the marketing agency going into their eck their delivery team. There is always a gap in that literally the most valuable piece of information that the entire team needs to be aware of.

Nick Gedda:32:40
Mm-hmm.

Nick Gedda:33:08
Yeah, and I think right, that's also there's a case to be made that that's something that happens in the onboarding phase versus the sales process. Or, you know, those levels of customer communications like great. We were able to showcase our expertise that we've done it before, that we're somebody we can trust to solve a problem that our customer has, and that's enough to get them in the door and say, Great, here's money, solve it.

And I think there's another level of you know not only understanding the customers' issues enough to get them through the door, but then once they become a customer, their life's gonna change. Our work is gonna change, our priorities are gonna change, what we decide to work on or what works is gonna change, Google's gonna change, AI's gonna change, customers' needs, like I said, are gonna change. And so with all of that happening at once.

What you signed on the dotted line for three months ago is not going to be the same work that's probably gonna get done now, based on all things that are changing it. So if there's not a great level of customer communication or understanding, question asking, and just being aligned, there's forever gonna be a gap. which is why you see agency relations break all the time. And like what's the average agency churn rate? Like a year if not less. So it's it still comes back to the understanding the customer and trying to provide value in the best way.

Nathan Smith:34:41
I it's funny because I was just having this conversation with somebody yesterday in terms of like I see it, especially when I was when I was starting at the Optimize. I see it as basically agencies have two different paths to take. There's two different people that you're gonna work with, or the two different people that you want to work with, and you're only gonna work with one of them. One is automating your entire agency and basically having everything automated with AI and all of that. You're missing the human touch point, you're missing the personal approach to it.

You can scale and everything could be faster, but there's no human attached to it. You lose the relationship that you can create. The other one is how I built SE Optimize, is the complete opposite. Yes, we have automations. Yes, we have all that, but it's internal. Every message you get is from my team. Every meeting you have is from my team. You receive videos from me personally explaining what the fuck we did, why we did it, what the results are, and all of that.

So there's two different paths agencies agencies can take, and there's two different people that you're marketing for. Some people don't want to talk to anybody, especially if they're paying for a service. They just want it to be done. They just want to know it's done. Whether how many times they get told it's done or whatever it is, some people care, some people don't. My thought process is people are gonna get sick of that very, very quickly. Just getting automated messages, automated updates, nothing's personalized.

And they want that relationship that they can actually communicate with the person that is actually doing the job that they're paying them to do. And I think that's the split in which the world is going. Some people love it and some people hate it. I obviously love one and hate the other.

Nick Gedda:36:21
I think you're right and wrong. where I And maybe you I don't think you're right and wrong. I agree with you in the sense that like I tend to be a black sheep in a lot of businesses and marketing teams because I have a very strong philosophy that the best marketing is not scalable. Right? It it's exactly what your team is so very good at, which is Human to human, it's thoughtful, it's meaningful, it's problem solving, it's taking time, it's understanding, it's being a master of the craft, it's doing work, it is all of those things together that somebody turns around and goes, you know what, I paid for a service or I paid for a problem to be solved, and not only what it was it solved.

But it was handled with care and I feel educated, I feel knowledgeable, I feel secure because of the way that this precious thing that I just paid a lot of money for has been handled with respect. to that point, you're absolutely right. Of people want things to be automated and they want to pass it off and they want work to be done for them.

I believe there's also a very strong human condition within all of us, including two of us. It's like we don't know what we want. Something that sounds good today does not sound great tomorrow. So even if I tell you to handle it for the next year and bring me leads, I'm gonna have a problem with the leads you're bringing me. I'm gonna have a problem with the close rate. I'm gonna have a problem with some of the rankings, whether it's the right keywords, the wrong keywords. I'm gonna change my mind about what's right and what's wrong next week. It's it's human condition. And I think there's a lot of strategies.

Nick Gedda:38:11
That break because things change. And that's the way it goes. So, right, there's a point of people wanting things to be automated, and I don't think that's ever going to work. from a business standpoint, from a sales side of things, you're totally right. to be able to for me to go online, book an appointment. not have to talk to anybody, not think about it. And tomorrow at 3 p.m. for the time that I assigned, somebody shows my house and solves my problem. Right. And so I think on the front end of the sales process, the least amount of friction is usually the way to go. But once that person's in my home, you can't scale that. That's the one-to-one relationship that's going to take you from a $100 million company to a $500 million company.

Nathan Smith:39:02
I agree. No, I love that you said Yeah. I mean, well, that doesn't apply for every business.

Nick Gedda:39:03
In my opinion.

Nick Gedda:39:10
No.

Nathan Smith:39:11
But I do love that you said you agree with me and disagree with me. Definitely you don't have to agree with me.

Nick Gedda:39:13
Yeah.

Most times I do.

Nathan Smith:39:19
But I mean, there's a lot of different things here that we talked about that I've like, I have so many questions now, but we don't have time for all of them. But I do have one question going back into this kind of lead us into everything else that I wanted to discuss with you. You mentioned IHS has gone from a two to ten person marketing team. So are you guys more focused on building the marketing and doing the services in-house?

Or you still prioritizing third party like agencies to do that or combination of?

39:47 · Transitioning from agency reliance to building internal marketing teams

Nick Gedda:39:54
Yeah, I think we we had been agency driven for a very long time. Four the four or five years prior to me joining IHS. A lot of the companies had agencies. Some of them had the same agencies, other ones had their own unique agencies to the point where when I started I think there were seven or eight different agencies managing for all of our brands. which is chaos, right? Like try to have them communicate to each other who's right and who's wrong and where spending should go and where it shouldn't go. It like you're never everybody wants all the money and they want all the power and they want all the decision making opportunity. And so it's it's very tough. On top of that, so we needed to cut that down for a lot of reasons, right? Like one of them being cost, one of it being effectiveness, how long have these agencies had contracts that nobody was even looking at. They were just checking a box and saying SEO's handled and walked away from it. but the other part is like we're we're a P owned company. We are trying to build something that I think someday is going to sell. and with that comes standardization. I mean, and this is anecdotally from me and what I believe to be true about the organization. This is this may not be company-wide. But that yeah, things have to be standardized. So bringing things in-house.

That we have essentially like 24-7 control over. We can set processes, procedures, things that can be replicated. Knowledge can be completely transparent across to everybody. We have seven brands, and what we do for one kind of has to be replicated for what we do for another from a standardization point. It's also very informative that if we see something work for one brand, we can easily replicate it for somebody else. So from all those standpoints, Going in-house is or has been the main trajectory. And I think a lot of it comes down to overall control and flexibility, agility to be able to kind of like move pieces around and say, hey, we're good over here. Let's just move those and place them over here now.

Nick Gedda:42:11
And I think we're also at a point where we've kind of done that for the last year and a half and have like built the team and kind of seen how it's looked. You're still looking at seven brands with you know ten people. it's hardly a person, a brand, to do all of the marketing for them.

It's not a lot of time. And so, you know, there are places where like you fit in and cover our SEO, which is like it's a massive lift. We want to be confident that there's an expert in that seat. it doesn't necessarily take 40 hours a week to get everything that we need to get done to be successful in the way we need to be successful. So that relationship works out. and we have a similar one on some of our web development. side of things as well where it's like we don't really want a full developer in-house very expensive and don't know that we have the full work form on a on a weekly basis and so we have an agency there. So there's nuance. and it was kind of a long-winded answer, but I think it's important that a lot of businesses are trying to make the decision to like go the agency route or in-house. And I think it just comes down to what the goals are. but obviously for something like SEO, which it's a long play game, it can tend to be very expensive and not only is winning important, but not losing is equally important. Right? So yeah, something to outsource.

Nathan Smith:43:48
No, I I mean all of that's super interesting. I think one of the main things that you touched on that I probably would say you guys feel the most is over the last several years, if you guys are working with multiple agencies, however many countless agencies agencies you've worked with, you don't necessarily know what they did or why they did it or what worked or what didn't work. So you can't necessarily replicate it. And then if that agency stops working or they stop communicating to you and then you have find another one, then they have a ramp up period. then they have to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And then if they didn't communicate that process to you, because most agencies won't give you those answers, they won't give you basically their their systems and their strategies around it, then you and you lose an agency again, you're restarting. So is there a piece of that that like has kind of driven the internal aspect of taking things over? Like you said, having the power, having the control.

Nick Gedda:44:34
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:44:41
Yeah, we've swapped I mean we've changed so many agencies over and have like lost things or there was only one marketing person internal at IHS before I started. everything in their head. Like there was no project management software, there was no documentation. there were like for what was going on for which brand was essentially on like sticky notes and memorization. And so like we came in to try and start and it's like we have nothing. Like where do we have access to these things? Can we track down passwords, old emails, do we have information?

And it's like that was internally, and then especially for the agency side, it's like, what have we been paying for for the last four years? If business is stagnant and we have a $20,000 a month contract out there somewhere, what is going on? and so I'd be like, you were around for our SEO transitions, and prior to you, we had changed from one SEO agency to another in that ramp up period. with the middle agency was long and nothing happened and every week it was like, here's the problem, here's the problem. And so we wasted essentially like four or five months. Brought your team on. Still is another like two to three month ramp up period to make sure we had everything that we needed to fix all the issues that that other agency created. which like yeah, that puts on a six month timeline where I mean realistically if we hired two people internally to handle web dev and SEO from like a strategy and content writing perspective, we could have avoided all of that, but here we are.

Nathan Smith:46:17
Yeah. You could. I think the one thing that people I mean, I could say this because obviously I know. I think the one people I think the one thing people don't understand about SEO is like PVC, yes. You could have one person handle f seven different brands, all of their campaigns, run all of it, maybe might need two, but one person could pretty much daily manage all of it. In terms of like a one to two person team for SEO for especially seven different brands.

Nick Gedda:46:31
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:46:45
So yeah, it's not possible. that they would be working eighty hours a week.

Nathan Smith:46:48
Yeah, somebody like that one person has to, or there's two people, let's call it one, has to be able to do the strategy. They also have to be a good writer. They also have to be able to write it without just fucking AI. They have to be able to publish it. They have to make the landing pages, they have to design the pages, they have to find the PR, they have to do the backlinking. Like for one person, because trust me, I've fucking been there for one person to do all of that for over seven brands, you literally don't sleep. And to pay that person as much as you

Nick Gedda:47:05
Okay.

Nick Gedda:47:11
That's a lot. No.

Nathan Smith:47:17
You would literally have to pay them way more than anybody would agree to. In terms of like the people who make the decisions of signing the checks, you'd be like, we have to pay this person $150,000 a year. And you're like, why? Because they're literally doing the job of seven fucking people.

Nick Gedda:47:23
Yeah. Which doesn't make any sense, but

Nick Gedda:47:31
Yeah. you'd have to I'd pay honestly pay more than that, yeah. Yeah, I think it's from an in house to agency conversation, it there's certain places where it makes a lot of sense. Like internally, if we wanted to hire an SEO team, it would be four people. we've had conversations, we've drawn it up, I've put a org chart together that includes that. And then immediately it's like, what's this gonna cost? I'm like, a lot more than our agencies. So

Nathan Smith:48:00
Yeah. It always comes back to that. Like once you draw it down, you're like, We could do it and then you're like, I'm gonna have to spend two to three times more than what I'm paying now. Yeah, it's

Nick Gedda:48:00
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:48:14
Correct. Yeah.

Nathan Smith:48:18
All right, the other thing real quick, I know we don't I know we're running out of time.

Nick Gedda:48:21
you're good. I have all the time in the world, so you're good.

Nathan Smith:48:27
actually, yes, this is what I wanted to ask you. Because I was a part of your transition period. I did help you with your last agency and kinda identified all the fuck-ups that they had and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This question I'm gonna ask it knowing it's not probably the right thing to ask you because you're literally answering it to me. But I'm gonna ask it anyways, and I want you to be brutally honest. I want you to be brutally fucking honest.

Nick Gedda:48:48
I'll be honest. I will.

Nathan Smith:48:54
The issues that you've had in with previous agencies in terms of like what they were doing, why they were doing it, what their strategies were, anything related to that. Have we successfully done better?

Nick Gedda:48:57
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:49:09
Have you done better? Yeah. I mean, I think doing better is not a conversation that's even needed to have. Right. Like you guys have picked up every issue and have willing to be like go above and beyond to get us where we want to go. and so I don't know if that's the right question to ask.

Nathan Smith:49:32
ask it in a better way. because this is how I usually frame it. I don't care about the I don't care about the good things. I want to know the bad things. What could we do? What could we do better?

Nick Gedda:49:36
so have you?

Yeah. Yeah. So like have you solved all of our problems? No. But I think this this is the conversation of like in house versus agency again, right? From a If you ask if you ask me from a standpoint of value or happiness with your team, the honest answer is like yes. I trust you to do everything. do I care how much it costs? Not really. I think the results have been there. and if there's a world that we could increase spend, it would be great.

But like you guys are doing all the things that we've asked you to do. We're seeing the results. We're seeing a lot of organic growth. It's wonderful. The issues that are still ever present that not only do we do with you, but with the rest of our agencies, is that growth is linear, meaning if we want more, it costs more. Right? So that's immediately a bottleneck or a cap. the outcomes are delayed and uncertain. And so if price goes up.

We don't know if it's gonna be worth it. our data in-house is not perfect or a hundred percent trustworthy, meaning that if you guys show results, are we gonna see them on our end? Are the stakeholders gonna believe what is going on? Are we gonna be able to tie that all into the bigger picture where it's like we have that lack of control versus it's like, hey, we do really want

Nick Gedda:51:20
To have the best SEO presence in Salt Lake City for all seven of our brands. And we can't afford it because we have no way to prove that spending $200,000 a month to do all of this work and have 12 people work on these projects is going to come back in return to a greater extent. and so I answer like that because like I think for what were available or approved.

To spend within this channel, we're getting results that justify that spend. It still puts us in handcuffs when we say we want to do this faster and more aggressively, that now we have to get approval for even more budget, and the results are delayed and uncertain.

And so you guys can't solve that problem for us. And maybe you can. And if you figure out a way to do so, let me know. And I will gladly increase our monthly retainer. But I think that still becomes that still becomes a roadblock. All right. So it has nothing to do, I think, like with the work you guys do, the performance, the communication, that's all there. It's still that relationship of to do more, cost more. And at what point is it diminishing returns?

Nathan Smith:52:42
D dude, no, I fucking love that answer. Thank you. No, I I was trying not to frame it in a way of like, yeah, just give it my team fucking praise because that's not what I was looking for. That was perfect. Thank you.

Nick Gedda:52:44
Got it.

Nick Gedda:52:53
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Smith:52:56
So there is actually that I mean that brings up an interesting fucking point too, is like there is a world in which some of that is hard to communicate between your team and my team. Because we could see that, like, hey, one of those brands got 150 phone calls last month through organic, through the Google Business Profile, through the website, whatever the fuck was. But then those we don't know how many of those phone calls resulted in actual revenue. So we could look at it like, hey, there's been a 30% increase in overall organic conversions.

Nick Gedda:53:00
Yeah.

Nathan Smith:53:25
But you guys could look at it as there's only been a five percent increase in revenue this month compared to last month.

Nick Gedda:53:33
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Smith:53:35
Which brings up your point of yes, we are bringing we could be bringing more people to you, but is that resulting in the revenue? So we could be doing a good job, but that does that actually translate into spending more money to do more or like a better job in other places? No, you frame that in such a good way that like I don't think I thought about it that way. So thank you.

Nick Gedda:53:55
Yeah, this

Nick Gedda:53:59
But this comes back to like what we talked about earlier, which is right, it's having the right data. And you just brought up a problem that can now, because of the way that you framed it, can only be solved with technology. Right? If we see the leads come through and we're trying to pair it with revenue and we don't have an accurate representation, what's the answer? And what's then we're facing now? We don't know, so we're not gonna do anything.

If we can't know, we're not going to make a decision. We're not going to spend more to try and see what happens. Realistically, we're probably going to spend less and see if we can do more with less, which is counterproductive. Or we're going to say, let's just leave it as is and change the strategy until we see results that we can accurately tie together, which isn't going to come because technology is still withholding. We're stuck. and so what I'm

Nathan Smith:54:52
There

Nick Gedda:54:53
so what I'm trying to do internally is frame it in a way where it's like Leadership internally at IHS and with the brands has to be aligned and like what matters? Is it leads or is it revenue? Because it can't be both. Because sometimes leads are gonna drop and revenue is gonna go up, or leads are gonna drop and conversion rate's gonna be better, which means our messaging's better, intent is better, or leads are gonna be really high and conversion rate could drop. Ideally leads go up, conversion rate goes up, revenue goes up. but it's That there has to be an understanding of what the goal is. What does that goal mean? How does it tie to business growth and success? What are the actions we're doing to try to get customer like the lead is great, but what are they calling for? Are they calling for maintenance visits? Are they calling for job opportunities? Are they calling for full system replacements? All that stuff matters, but if we're not if we don't understand the customer, it doesn't it doesn't work.

Nathan Smith:55:52
Yeah. Dude, I'm I'm so glad I have this conversation. Like, this is the conversation that agencies, business owners, like fucking anybody needs to hear. Because just because you increase numbers doesn't mean the business actually feels the impact. And if your agency isn't communicating that to you, which brings me back to like the fuck that the fact that we used to do that and we don't do it anymore. You guys used to give me the actual numbers and we would do that on meetings or beforehand in Slack. We need to get back to that. because I'll add that to your scoreboard. If you give me the actual number.

Nick Gedda:56:11
Mm-hmm.

Nick Gedda:56:17
Okay.

Nathan Smith:56:20
I'll show you the conversions, you give me the actual dollar amount that you have on your end. We'll add that to your scoreboard and we'll track it each month. We got to do that. but no, I think that conversation, every literally all of the factors that you just brought up, most business owners don't understand that. Most business owners don't understand the fact that they think they should they're paying five thousand dollars a month. They should be getting more than five thousand dollars back. The issue that I see in I actually do this a lot.

Nick Gedda:56:25
Mm-hmm.

Cool.

Nathan Smith:56:49
You guys are a little bit different because you are such large brands and there's so many different like jobs and stuff that you guys get every single month. And we can't talk about each one. But like on a smaller scale, in terms of like some of the clients I have, like we literally will go one by one in terms of like the form fills or whatever that they got, and we'll break it down in terms of like this one was shit. This one we actually touched. This one has potential to be a $300,000 project next month. And then we add all of that up. And then basically it boils down to, well, you pay me five grand.

You have almost half a million dollars in potential revenue through our channel. Whether you and then right then and there, they're like, okay, cool. Like they stopped thinking about that five grand. Now they only think about that half a million dollars that they can go close on. The issue with organic and PVC, or really any agency experience that or any agency offer or service, is the fact that we can bring as many people as we possibly can to these businesses, but we have no. control over who they close or how many people they close. And I've actually I remember like there was times in our previous roles that we've dealt with that in terms of like, well I've more so dealt with a but at previous agencies. We had clients like that where like we were sending more people their way, but they just weren't either I've had fucking clients where I know there was one, he sold pools. He did pool construction. And he wouldn't call them or like get in touch with them until like a week after.

Nick Gedda:57:58
Could heal it?

Nathan Smith:58:16
So we'd be like, Hey, we got you like Yeah, we got like hey, we got like ten leads, how'd that go? And he's like, I haven't even called him yet. I'm like, dude, they already found somebody else to build their fucking pool. What are talking about?

Nick Gedda:58:16
Speed delete, baby.

Nick Gedda:58:27
Yep. Yeah, it's I mean obviously you run that with SEO, but I think across the board it comes back to a level of care from organizations.

I think you get certain organizations where you have a sales team or a call center who's busy or isn't tied directly to the product and they don't care if they only make five calls today or if they make 50 and they don't feel the impact of waiting 10 minutes to call somebody back. we're in the process of finding technology to solve some of that. we are going to leverage AI to do like immediate text and calls from all inbound leads that come through. in order just to like solve that problem of saying like, hey, you know, if we don't have humans who are working fast enough, we need to make sure that somebody submits a lead or some level of interest and intent to work with us that within a minute, we're in their inbox. We sent out a text message. If they don't respond to the text message in four minutes, we're gonna give them a call. Cause if we don't get there in 10 minutes, they're making other phone calls.

Nathan Smith:59:35
That actually brings up an interesting thing that I saw somebody else doing, I forget who it was. But like the forms you guys have on your websites, I don't remember what order in which the fields are that the person has to give their information. But if you guys are gonna build, like let's say the first two fields that they have to give you is their name and phone number. But then they don't actually fill out the rest of the form, but you got that name and phone number.

Nick Gedda:59:57
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Smith:1:00:02
You can build it out with AI where they instantly within 10 minutes send them a text message. Hey, we saw, you know, you didn't complete this form. You could see the landing page in which it came from. Like, hey, do you do you it's ninety seven degrees outside? Do you guys need help with your AC? Like, I don't know how the fuck you'd word that. but I think there's an opportunity there.

Nick Gedda:1:00:10
Yeah, like an abandoned cart flow. Yep.

Nick Gedda:1:00:19
Yeah.

Now we have some abandoned we have some abandoned card stuff that goes out. tends to not convert super well. That's you know, candidly it's a disconnect I think we have internally between between marketing, between technicians, between the call center, between dispatch. four different areas, totally different needs and focus points of like what information they need to do their job properly. and I think there's a lot of friction in some of that stuff where it's like if somebody does show up and there's a ton of stuff to to answer. It's like I'm bouncing. I'm gonna make a phone call. But they could call instead of fill out the form and then if somebody doesn't answer you run to the same problems they call somebody else. There's a lot to be said, but Speed delete is it's number one. Somebody shows interest, leaving them sit out is not gonna work.

Nathan Smith:1:01:19
Yeah. Especially like I mean, I'm literally sitting here sweating my ass off because my AC's not fucking working. So as we're talking about this, I'm like it's I'm like I know I am like that customer of like if somebody if I called somebody right now they didn't answer, like dude, I if you would have answered, you would have been at my you could have been at my door ten minutes from now. It's very hot, yeah.

Nick Gedda:1:01:25
That sucks.

Nick Gedda:1:01:34
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:1:01:39
Is it hot in Denver?

Dang. I'm in Chicago at seventy six. Yeah.

Nathan Smith:1:01:45
All right. Well, seventy six, dude, it's probably close to ninety still here.

Nathan Smith:1:01:53
Well, we'd have to wrap things up here soon, but I'm gonna ask you the same question I ask everybody in terms of obviously the name of the podcast is why marketing sucks. But I wanna know from your perspective, does marketing suck?

Nick Gedda:1:01:56
You got it.

Nick Gedda:1:02:08
From my perspective, yeah, marketing does suck. besides being a thankless job. no, I like.

Nick Gedda:1:02:20
Obviously marketing doesn't suck. I think similar to my point early in the podcast is just

Nick Gedda:1:02:31
It's overcomplicated. Right? It's it's being it's being made into something that is more complex than necessary. I told you a firm believer the best marketing isn't scalable. I love the approach of one message, one channel, and burn it out before you switch to a new one. Right? Those are two very simple methods that are proven to work. Do they take a little bit longer?

Yes. Do they set you up for longer-term success? Also, yes. And so I think with AI, shiny object syndrome, you have business owners who are either new business owners or are trying to adapt to a changing environment, thinking they need to do it all, they need to be everywhere. They don't understand it themselves, so the decisions they try to make might not be accurate because they're just trying to do something rather than nothing. all of a sudden you have twenty moving pieces, it costs a lot of money, you don't have access to your data, you can't tie everything together, it feels like nothing's working, and you're burnt out, marketing sucks. But if that's doesn't need to be the case. And so I think there's The overcomplication of marketing for the sake of having to keep up with the Jones or the comparison of what your competitor is doing, you don't know if what the competitor is doing is turning into dollars. and you don't know if the customers are resonating with their message. You don't know if their ads are working. And so I think it's important that like as much as marketing seems complicated until it feels like it sucks, it's very easy to make simple and and to do well. It just tends to not be scalable.

And I mean yeah, it takes a lot of work.

1:02:35 · Why marketing sucks when strategy is overcomplicated

Nathan Smith:1:04:18
That it does. I've learned to just ask that question and stop and then just see how people go about it. Cause like you do marketing sucks for everybody at at some capacity in some portion of their life. But marketing is also super fun. Like it's one of the most enjoyable things you can do. You don't have a business without marketing. You don't have a brand without marketing. Nobody knows who you are without marketing. Like it sucks because you literally said the exact words. Like it's a lot of work.

Nick Gedda:1:04:25
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:1:04:30
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:1:04:34
Yeah, it's a blast.

Nathan Smith:1:04:46
But it is one of the most fun aspect of the job.

Nick Gedda:1:04:47
Yeah.

Or it's overcomplicated. Like I I first graduated from college and was self-employed for like two years. I did this like marketing cohort that costs like five hundred dollars a month and anybody can join and I just called doing dope shit. And it was like a marketing class for like an hour a week and all we talked about was like write a dream list of all the things you wish you could do for your brand from a marketing perspective.

Nathan Smith:1:04:52
It is definitely overcomplicated.

Nick Gedda:1:05:17
And then we just spent the next few months executing and like turning that list into marketing initiatives where it's like, it was a blast. And then you have people out there who like are making money from the things you're doing. They're running podcasts, they're hiring design teams, they're hosting events, and it's like, yeah, this is all working out. Yeah, have fun with it. You don't need to slave away at like AI to decide how it's gonna automate your outbound calling and be miserable for two months. Like

Nathan Smith:1:05:25
Yeah.

Nick Gedda:1:05:46
I there's solutions around it to make it very fun, but I guess if you ask me if marketing sucks, no marketing's very fun when you simplify it. It sucks when you get shiny object syndrome and it's overcomplicated.

Nathan Smith:1:06:01
It's very fun when you execute the things that you are good at and allow the people who like not everybody's good at every aspect of marketing. So if you allow the people who actually are good at those aspects that you aren't to execute those portions of it, then it becomes fun. Because if you're not doing all the things that suck, and obviously you're if you're starting up with a new business and all of that, you don't have the resources, like you're gonna have to do the sucky portions of it for a long time. That's completely fine. That's how you learn, that's you grow. But

Nick Gedda:1:06:16
Correct.

Nathan Smith:1:06:31
I mean, it all just boils down to what you like, what you don't like, what you want to execute, what you want somebody else to execute, and just really is it something that you want to be doing? If not, hand it the fuck off.

Nick Gedda:1:06:41
Yeah. I'm with you man. Marketing is complicated, but winning is fun.

Nathan Smith:1:06:46
Hell yeah. All right, Nick. We've spent a lot of time here. I appreciate you joining. For everybody listening, this is the Wide Marketing Sucks podcast. I'm Nathan Smith, the founder of CEO. This is Nick Jetta. Nick, do you have anything that you wanna leave the audience with before we jump?

Nick Gedda:1:06:54
You got it, man.

Nick Gedda:1:07:05
Nope. Left it all in field. Cool. Thanks, Ben.

Nathan Smith:1:07:07
Sweet. I appreciate you, Nick. All right, everybody. Till next time.