Seth & Phil Singleton: Entrepreneurship & Finding a Niche Audience

BluShark Digital

Welcome to the SEO insider with your host Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.

Seth Price

Welcome, everybody. We're thrilled to have Phil Singleton here. He is a web designer and SEO expert and award-winning author since 2005. Phil owned and operated a digital agency in Kansas City. In 2016, Phil and his partner John of Duct Tape Marketing, co-wrote SEO For Growth, the ultimate guide for marketers and web designers and entrepreneurs. SEO for growth is an Amazon best seller, and has been listed as a top marketing book by Mashable, Oracle and the Huffington Post, and was named by Forbes as the number one SEO book on the list of essential SEO books for every startup to read. Wow. Aside from running a successful multi seven-digit agency, Phil also owns or CO owns two media franchises, to home service businesses, and a niche marketing agency called Podcast Brokers that helps business owners and executives get powerful backlinks for SEO while building their authority and personal brands. Welcome, Phil.

Phil Singleton

Hey, Seth, thanks for having me. This is awesome, man.

Seth Price

This is quite, quite a, quite a bio. You know, we have a lot to talk about, and it was great to be on your podcast, we're going to be able to get to some, some more questions. But the thing I wanted to start off with, because we are on a podcast and I do two video podcasts where we take the video and strip the audio. Talk to me about the service you have where you help people get visibility, which I love, both from the brand building but also from the SEO side. Tell me about how you work with entrepreneurs to get them visibility through podcasts.

Phil Singleton

Yeah, so a few years ago, we got to step far back to John Janssen of Duct Tape Marketing. I've been in his mastermind marketing group; we're going to call it, he's got a network of about 150 certified Duct Tape marketers, I'm one of them. I've been in there for probably six or seven years. But John wrote this book, I think in 2005, called Duct Tape Marketing, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, kind of got him to be a marketing influencer before we were calling it marketing influencers, but long story short, as he always kind of attributed his whole critical mass and the trajectory of his whole career to podcasting because he was one of the original business podcasts. Of course, social media came in after that, and podcast kind of fell back, but then, all of a sudden, in the last few years, podcasting has come back and kind of really never going to no turning back now. So, I had always kind of wanted to get into it but I just always felt like writing a book, before I wrote a book I was like, gosh, it's, it seems like this is a great career goal, but it's, it seems too far out there, too much work to do. But it's like anything else, I mean, podcasting takes some some work and whatnot, but once you get into it, it's not as bad as you think, it's almost kinda like writing a book. So, long story short, I figured, you know what, before I start my own podcast, because I took, it took me several years even kind of get it back onto the plate, I was like, gosh, wouldn't it be easier maybe to test the waters and, and maybe get on other people's podcasts? And I started looking around and behold, I found out there are other companies out there a few of them that were getting people booked on third party podcasts. I started doing it but I did look around, I was really upset with the way, actually, it's funny. In my, in my life, there's been a few times where I've been so upset by a business dealing that I've started a company to kind of, that was the motivation to do it and that was one of the reasons I was so turned off by one of these.

Seth Price

You, wait, you went to one of these other companies and said, hey, I'll be your client, and you were just so turned off by how...

Phil Singleton

It was such a bad experience and this, the way the whole process went, and I was like, I really want to do this, I want to....

Seth Price

This is, this is funny, I got, I took one of those pitches, but not yours, but another third-party company, and I remember thinking to myself, a good friend of mine went through that process, and two funny stories, one, I, to me, I have a very clear vision of what I want for myself by brand people I want to hit. I'm not sitting here with, like, a generic national product that everyone in the world needs to know, when the more eyeballs, the better. And so, to me, I didn't want something where they're making money just by getting me anywhere, it gets good for SEO, you get a link, but look, links are not, links are links, and you can get them much easier than spending an hour of your time talking to somebody, but I get it and the idea that a thoughtful one that sort of matched up what was intent. Ironically, I just, this is a person I've had on one of my two podcasts several times, I just got the pitch from that company to get this person onto our podcast, I got to send back saying hey, they've been on our, on our family of shows twice, we love them, but it demonstrates that, you know, it's the, to me partially, this is the what you have to get over, right? It's the Jakeem, it's the Groucho Marx concept, why would you ever want to be a member of a club that have you as a member? So, you are doing digital PR but if it's done well, it's freaking awesome. If it's the lowest, if you're just trying to fill the beast and get yourself anywhere then you're just talking aimlessly into the ethos.

Phil Singleton

And that was my experience. I had found somebody to get me on a- been booked on 100 shows. I was like holy cow. I started getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in new business, to the fact that I had to stop doing it because we had other things taken off. So, that was great. I didn't do it for that, I was doing it more for like, okay, I want to test this thing out, then I started getting the group together to be like, hey, I want this service for my own customers, because a big part of what we talked about, Seth, before part of our processes, we do the websites, you know, we do these keyword research, we build a content calendar, the content calendar turned into blog series, blog series turned into books, and we use the books to get people booked on the podcast. While podcasts, people look at podcasts rather than real people, when they, when they first come to us everybody is always thinking about I want to get into big podcasts, like, and that's it. They're just thinking about the one-dimensional thing and how big is the audience type of thing. But the big, the big podcasts are the Joe Rogan podcast.

Seth Price

They don't want to hear it from us.

Phil Singleton

Totally not. It's not really about that, it's about finding your niche audience, find some small group it's almost like a virtual, you know, speaking to her town hall, speaking to where you can get in front of a bunch of people that are, that are somewhat...

Seth Price

And when you get in front of those great ones it works. It's amazing.

Phil Singleton

Just direct, just direct it works, I mean, but that's still not really why I want to do it, what I love about pod is if you do it right, you target the right companies in their, in your niche and they're in business. You get, this is how we target, other people don't do- as we're trying to get it on shows that our advanced marketers, they've got email lists, they've done over 50 podcasts, they're, they're setting up episode pages where they're doing a whole personal branding campaign on their website that includes, you know, a graphic and a backlink or several backlinks back to the website. So, in that case, it's going out there and just having other people say, if you do it right, like how I sent you my bio, you read what I sent to you on purpose, because hopefully, you'll put that up on your website and Google's gonna hear you saying Phil Singleton is an expert, and they heard over 100 times he's advanced marketing, people that are in my niche saying, Phil's an expert, Phil's an expert, my content then become, I see this working already for us and our clients, it does work when they can sense the signal that you're an expert, the content that you're associated with goes up all the way around. So, that's the way that we're doing, it's a little bit different, most of the podcasts are going to just trying to get you booked on podcast, they don't care if the show is being hosted on Lipson, we don't want hosts- shows hosted on Lipson or other places, we want to host it on their website so that center of gravity goes on a place where...

Seth Price

Which is, obviously, not every, you know, it's pick, your pick your poison and look for myself, you know, we have two, one is on our company website, which is decent, you know, cobbler shoes or SEO site is not, you know, mega influential cause we don't make our money through that. But you know, our other the law firm growth one, it really yeah, there's not that much value to those links, ironically. So, you really, you know, if you're doing it for SEO, it's a very different agenda than for something else and it works for both, both can be right.

Phil Singleton

Right, it's like a thing that we do, you're trying to get, if you do anything these days, I think one thing is that we're pretty strong, or maybe it's my personal gift, is trying to get 10 wins instead of one so it doesn't get booked on a podcast, you know, we get back because we want the backlink with the episode page, want to make sure that domain rankings are 20 or above, we also want to make sure that people are gonna share them on their social media, share them on their email list. But we also got a program, we go back and say, hey, let's send an email back to the host and ask them was good guest on your site? Well, would you mind going and give me a LinkedIn review or a Google review. So, you know, like a third of my Google reviews are people, hosts on popular shows saying that was a great guest on this thing, well, all sudden now, your Google, your map rankings go up. So, for that $167 pitch on the show. You just got 10 wins that for a bang, for a buck standpoint, it's just unbeatable. So, we did it internally, I did it for my own clients, basically, I built up a team and then we're able to scale it now. We've got, I don't know, hundreds of. over hundreds of clients and a lot of them are our own clients, we build, build on them. I think we've got 12 full-time Booker's but I just do it because it works.

Seth Price

Wow, full time Booker's.

Phil Singleton

Yeah, we just do it because it works, I mean, it's just a massive bang for the buck If, if you line it all up and have a strategy. What ends up happening with anything like you tell people blogging works, they go through a bunch of blogs and blogs don't work because there's no strategy behind it. You can say podcasting works, I do think podcasting is probably one of the most powerful things in SEO, but it's not if you just go do podcast, you have to kind of have a whole strategy and then if you can do the hour, half hour, for that time, I think you can really get as much bang for the buck. If you line up all the ducks. If you don't, you're gonna be wasting your time just like trying to do volume-based link building volume-based blogging, whatever it is. So, that's how we started podcast Booker's and it's growing really fast. I think it's starting to kind of get a little more popularity in even the SEO community is still, it's the SEO, a lot of the SEO stuff that you get pitched on is still backlink guest blogging driven, right?

Seth Price

Right.

Phil Singleton

But if you think about what you would pay for, you know, you know, $200, $300 for a backlink and you just get the link, and maybe a keyword versus getting a whole personal branding page that has very shiny-And also, the other thing I like about one of those, I'll leave with is that, Seth, is that, in our case, not only is it very powerful, but by nature of it, our client is getting involved with their own marketing, and they're doing some of the work for us. That's really another reason I like it. If they're getting on a regimen where they're getting on a good podcast, it's got, you know, some traction on it and does the episode page, and they're doing it twice a month, or once a week, they're out there doing work that's going to work for them, and they're doing some of the work for us. So, that's another reason I think agencies should do it more. It's like, it's not a big stuff.

Seth Price

No, I just sold, I love it. So, look, I know this was the last thing on your Bible, we got a lot more to talk about here.

Phil Singleton

If you're going to work with somebody, and have a marketing partner, it really has to be relationship based, right? Because they're only human. In fact, one of the ways that we pitch our relationship to new prospective clients and clients is almost like, you want to probably look at us at some point, like a legal, like a lawyer, like the relationship you have with your CPA, or the relationship you have with your lawyer who you had for years, right? You're looking to them for advice, they're part of your team. It's not this vendor base relationship, where you're writing check in, they're doing something in the back room. So, we actually kind of use that analogy or metaphor, or whatever you call it to kind of explain, this is kind of the relationship we need to have, it needs to be a partnership and we need to be in the communication, and we need to kind of value each other that way, because one, we're only human right? You see this all the time, right? When somebody, and this is again, this is guys, our agency more than, you know, I'm just speaking from my, I guess, my own experience, which is, we may have clients that pay us on the high end, that maybe don't try to treat us more like a vendor, not as motivated to work for that. Maybe something we've had for years we haven't raised the price up that really treat us as part of the team, super motivated, going the extra mile, really happy to do that. I think that's something that all businesses should learn, to someone you're gonna get more because you're just working with humans, right? What, how do you, what do you think? Do you agree with that?

Seth Price

No, absolutely, Phil, I feel like you've tapped into the two issues that I've seen, both good and bad. The first is yes, working as a partner, It is human, It's not an SaaS base. There are people that have bought one of my friends companies, got bought by a SaaS based company. Yeah, you don't really care if it's all machi- machine learning and AI, then yeah, you could probably treat people like crap, and it'll work anyway, maybe I don't really buy into that for SEO, but put that aside, you know, to me, what, what I, what I see is yes, it is about relationships, and the people doing the work, It cuts both ways. Let me take you as an agency owner, though, because you talked about something, Legacy contracts, I can speak to the legal space, I'm curious about your world. Once people set a number for SEO, it is rare that it goes up, you may add PPC to it, you might do paid search, you might add something to it, but the action, when I started, there was a moment when I received clients from some of my favorite people in the space, but there's no way, these people were excellent, there's no way somebody should leave, and then I looked, and you mentioned this, that people can eke out a lot from a legacy contract and a number that's way too low. What you charged when you first started for a monthly retainer is much different for the same type of project that you do now. So, now you have an issue where you can hold on to people that you'll be able to squeeze more because people love them. That's not actually good for the business and the ROI, and, you know, if you're looking at EBITA, or something like that, your margins aren't going to be great, because very little money in the people are spending a ton of time. And on the flip side of that, you know, you know, so how do you make sure that this is the opposite question, which is for something where there's X amount being spent not 3x, it's only X? How do you make sure that your beloved client doesn't take so much in the form of resources, that it's actually unprofitable? It's a tough balance and I wonder, how you approach that?

Phil Singleton

Well, it's really, we've gotten really good about this year. In fact, we've gotten some to some point where I had to go back and say, look, you're not paying market rates, and this is what we charge new people when they come in, we have to get you closer to where you work, because it's not like it was five or six, or seven years ago. We just lost one, I think this week that I had, it's an outdoor service, outdoor home services and really exceptional results, great leads up every single day to this time, but what happens when you charge the right- now, what I've seen on the struggle that we've had, you get somebody and they get used to almost excellent. So, they get used to like rankings and leads like it's theirs now and there, it's, they're paying for something that they feel like they're entitled to or they just have without you, and they're gonna learn pretty soon that it doesn't, that's one thing I've noticed about SEO in the last few years, it is used to stick longer. I'm seeing with clients that, the few clients that we do, we do some of our attrition over the years, they fall faster than they did 10, 5 or 10 years ago because they stopped doing it.

Seth Price

Right, that's true. We also see, we've, we've seen some of that but I also had the frustration as an agency owner, we sometimes see the opposite where you do so much work and somebody cuts it off, and that work doesn't stop, there are links that are being indexed and things that happen in the AD domain so that there are times ironically that after you stop, you're paying dividends for what I've done, and so it does cut both ways. You know, you asked me this question, I'd love to hear your thoughts. As far as you're now in end, you're not just an SEO, but you've now invested in a number of businesses where you're sort of, and again, I literally the other day, my backyard, my grass is not great. My kids rip it up, I have a couple boys that destroy it along with a daughter, and my, my next, my across the back fence, neighbor, her father-in-law gardens all the time for them, their lawn is spectacular. And she looks over the fence and says to me, wow, your grass is so beautiful, and I'm like, you, lady, you realize you're the living embodiment of the saying the grass is always greener. So, you, I went from one to the other, you've gone from SEO into entrepreneur, and business owner, tell me about what you have learned? Because you're now seeing it from the other side as well. What have you learned, as you've looked at the, the, you know, the as an, as a business owner now receiving SEO services from an agency, I know it's all within an entity, but it's still, you know, you probably, any lessons you've learned seeing what it's like, as you put your, your pro forma for those two franchises?

Phil Singleton

Sure. Well, the franchise was a little different because that actually came in with a team, with a client base, we were able to restructure something for, I bought it, it was not profitable, and last year was very profitable. But I think what it taps into more is I think more interesting as an agency owner standpoint is, I think, I think that companies like yours, and mine on the digital side, and again, this is me as a 50-year-old looking back doing this for 20 years, 15 of it exclusively, really. I think that if you're really good, if you're good at marketing are really good at marketing, you can never charge what you, your worth down the road. And there's several companies that we've taken from 400,000 to 4 million, 4 million in some cases, the 40 million, not able to charge the fees along their growth path, right? They just think that they're, I haven't been able to, I haven't been able to charge a $4,000 month, $40,000 or $50,000 even though they're, they theoretically could support that or more. So, what's been frustrating to me as an agency owner, but I think really this is a message to all marketers is, we're never ever going to be able to charge I think what we're worth, this is me looking back, if you're able to deliver a strong ROI for your clients, so that got me thinking, you know, I'd much rather take a risk and take part of a business or invest in a business or buy a business where I can own 30%, or 40% or 50% of it, and then maybe instead of a $4,000 a month, that's how I can get my $40,000 or $50,000 a month upside that I want. And I'm really risky thing but I'm in that nice space now, kind of like you are where you've got a business, it's supporting itself, it's coming in, you've got a system in place, I can take some risks like this, still have a nice, you know, living here over on the agency side and some of these other businesses that I have, but take some risk and some of these other companies. So, that's what the motivation was to do that and a little risky company. So, what I found is, here in Kansas City, particularly St. Louis, we've got some really special lead generation systems that nobody else has, we do have an unfair advantage in these markets, and in that case, the problem that I've noticed on the other side is, okay, you come in with a lead machine, like I did with this one a deck business that we have, and we're literally bringing in probably day one, you know, a $5 million a year lead flow, when you've got a startup team, tons of pressure, tons of pressure to come in and have to deal with leads coming in and on organization, not having a system in place and you kind of live by the sword, die by the sword. So, when people are coming in, they want to buy from you because you're a business and you're ranking while you're getting leads. And you don't get back to them, you run the risk of having a death spiral on reputation because they go on Google and say, I called these guys and they haven't responded to me in two weeks type of a thing. So, there's all sorts of risks like that, then it comes into the people side, which is really good, I've had the advantage of kind of hiring team getting really good people over the years, and like you said, we, you know how it is for every, probably, really good for me anyway, for every good person that we hired to our team and it maybe takes one or two other hires to get to that person that really is a good fit. That's been my kind of experience. Most, some people probably do better than that with their hiring practices, but that's kind of the same thing with a new, new business coming in with the people who can scale, who is going to care about the business, who is going to and building a team fast enough to take care of the lead flow that you might be able to bid, so there's kind of like that double edged sword there.

Seth Price

Yeah, you're right, and, and add to that, that this is not your full-time gig. So, while in theory, if you said, you know what, I'm doing nothing else but I'm going to monetize those deck leads, you probably take it would be $5 million, maybe 8 million that you'd squeeze out of them, and you'd run it really effing well. Margins aren't, I'm sure they're fine, but you're like, well, but you're running, you know, this entire media empire at this point, and you got these things, and it's sometimes hard. I run; I have another podcast called Max Growth Live and my co-host is famous for that, we have a concept that we take, well, we get these ideas, and we have to put them, you know, off to the side, they have to go into quarantine for a certain period of time, he needs a longer than I do, it could be anywhere from three days to sixty.

Phil Singleton

I'd love to take a look at your GoDaddy account, probably looks like mine of all the websites that your domains you bought for.

Seth Price

Exactly, I've gotten better. I've actually finally, finally after all these years, I've let all those domains go. If I ever wanted them, you could just buy them back. They weren't, they weren't like magical, they were just meaning they were the best of what was available, but as we know, it's not the domain with rare exceptions that's going to make it, you can always find a domain that will make you money, you know, that, you know, with your GEOS in your deck, you know, there'll be something that, that is fine. That the...

Phil Singleton

Thank goodness, right? Because back in the day, it made a big difference, but yes...

Seth Price

No, no, no, no, but I'm saying, even back in the day, someone was in our head, meaning you could add the word dot before, you could get a dot there was your, your, it's in your head that you had to have that perfect domain, and you could always flip into something later if you had, but I guess my point is, it is, it is definitely something that I've seen as an entrepreneur that, like, you start to see stuff and you start to, like, as you walk through the world. One of my favorites, favorite baseball players. Lately, baseball players is child has a barn, I've literally, a fan group, and I see this thing, and it's a disaster, and I'm like, I know that with an hour of my time, I could get this poor kid adult in much, much better shape, and you start to see these, you start to see stuff differently, was a beautiful mind, you know, like, I could do this, I could do that, but you also have to be careful because if you go off in too many directions, you really, like you can go crazy, and may say you got to go crazy, but like, you'll start to lose it and then you look to the- deck place, you know, like, I'm getting $5 million for the leads a year, but like I'm not- I'm taking nominal money out because I have to, they're, they're sloppy because my thumbs on it, if you were in that deck place every day, they'd be crushing it but, like, as you, as it's sort of like another one of your businesses, and again, you, when you see I'll flip it back to this, you see, like even from like Shark Tank, you know, they are now at the point x number of seasons in where they have a whole pyramid of people to be able to put their finger on each of these businesses, because there's no way any, one person could touch all that in a meaningful way. And I feel like to for yourself, have you scaled sort of an ops team so that it's not just your labor, but that there's somebody that's not you that makes sure that these things, not just obviously running the deck place, which is a given, but, like, how have you scaled the investment?

Phil Singleton

That's a great question. And the way I've done it, which I think some people might look at this, it's kind of strange, but for instance, on a couple of franchises that I bought, I bought them 100%, they were already existing, that was in Kansas City, Missouri, St. Louis. I actually gave week one 49% of the business away to a guy that I had experienced running. Would you do that? Because he's been doing, he knew how to do it. He was the GM, I didn't want to touch it. I wanted to bring my clients to it, and now he runs the seven or eight people that run that, I have no day to day whatsoever.

Seth Price

No, right, and he owns it. So, like you'll be operating, some people do 25%, some do 30, some do 49, but, like, you're essentially that because with that, you know that it will be run and run well, and without it, you probably would end up being, you know, you know, roadkill. Now, hopefully not, hopefully not, you would still be fine, but you know you only have so many hours in the day and then if somebody else is waking up in the morning thinking about going to sleep, and thinking about it, and can check in with you on a periodic basis to get your, you know, your, your genius into it, great, but that's it.

Phil Singleton

That's totally, it's exactly, he's in this case where somebody is like completely running the entire business and has for 10 years. That's different than bringing somebody in as a GM that's running part of it, or some of it, you know, maybe that's a 10 or 20. So, you're right, it's the person, the perspective run but some of these other things like the deck business for example, totally another guy's taking complete operational PC, already runs other home services business. So, you know, in that case, it just...

Seth Price

You, you won't theoretically with 49% of the business out you're not going to get that phone call saying, hey, my GM just got a better job. That's, I'm now sitting over the deck play selling decks.

Phil Singleton

And in all my businesses, nobody takes a penny out unless we take $1 for dollar, so there's no sal-, there's, you know I'm talking about, so we all, this other situation there was a GM salary and all this kind of stuff, now here's the deal, and that's how I work, it work and it seems to work out really well because we're all focusing profit stays in the business, we share at the end, we make decisions to grow it. That's how it's working for me.

Seth Price

But I have to read into this, this is not your partner's only venture, which means you now have the issue, your issue is now his issue, which is how is that allocated there and this is the, like, the squeaky wheel is always my issue, which is go to where the money is, if the money is not there, then they will, they won't, they won't follow it. Meaning if it turns out so that all works well, as long as you get to critical mass where there's enough money to be interesting to him, whereas if it's going to be four years before there's profit, I'm making that up, because you're investing into the business, then that doesn't work because, you know, unless this guy sees that same four year horizon, but then it goes back to SEO, people do until they're nine months in and say where the hell are my leads, and this may be like, yeah, that's all great, but it's nine months, and I need to pay a mortgage, you obviously have to know you're talented, you're getting, but it's not a panacea if you're in like each situation, you obviously know your numbers, you know what you're getting and it may be that you invested in the franchise by buying it that came with that ready, steady, cash flow, right? But that, but it's, but if you don't have that, and you mean, you can do that by investing in something where you're, you're actually you didn't just say here, here's a franchise, I'm starting a flat footed, you're buying an existing one where you had pro formas, you knew what you were getting, so you would say, hey, this is what's going to be split, so he knows essentially what his quote, salary is, and this is what we can invest back into the business and you're not going to get as much of a push for a higher salary, because he knows that he, when/ if you ever sell this thing, when you sell it, that he'll be getting the upside from that.

Phil Singleton

Well, the goal for that one, honestly, is to bring somebody in, it would be kind of a GM and self-run, so you come in and just give me another. So, it's really interesting how you do these, you said, obviously, I think the end of the day is we set them up basically how, each case is different, each case is different basically.

Seth Price

But doing it, but doing it with the, in these franchises you, it sounds like you were driven to them because of the SEO side but at the end of the day, that drove you to things that were not SEO.

Phil Singleton

Oh, I didn't really care if the franchise business it's a media coverage, it's essentially a magazine that goes out 120,000 homes here in Kansas City and St. Louis, I didn't care if that one was totally breakeven. Now it makes really good money, it makes, it's not making us millions, but it's making us hundreds of 1000s. That's gravy to me, what's, what I really wanted was the lead generation that's going to feed the businesses that I'm acquiring right now, that's really good, because that's the bigger...

Seth Price

Okay, so you're getting free, you're getting the front page of the magazine for your guys, and you, you pay for it with everything else.

Phil Singleton

The rest of the community that's making it and creating its own profit center.

Seth Price

If you are the dex, you get the HVAC guy and the air vent guys paying to be in this magazine.

Phil Singleton

And each one of these magazines will usually have three, or we try and keep it tight, but there's not just one person, but there's not five either, it's usually like three or four. So, it's a great thing that gets out there. It's another lead generating piece, but that's what, that was a strategic investment, for me, I was like, hey, you know, I can do this? Yes, it's a couple two and a half million-dollar business, the margins aren't nearly as high, If we work on, we can get it up, which we did. It's still not a great business in which I would say quit everything but it's a great business in terms of what it can do for the other businesses that I own. And its back end...

Seth Price

Locally, have you used that as lead gen for the digital where those people may need a PPC campaign, they may need an SEO campaign? That's the, locally, I know has done that. And it's not high-end SEO, like, you're kidding yourself. Do you think you're selling $3,500 websites to each of the guys? The reason they're in that magazine is it's a finite amount of money, they get their money back, you know, with some ROI, but have you been able to cross sell those into digital at all? Those potential.

Phil Singleton

Yes, both ways, more so, more so going from our agency and doing the SEO cases the other way. Yeah, because what I'm seeing is, I didn't know I was a digital, I was a digital snob, basically, but then I saw the numbers and the calls coming in and I was like wow, and then over the years, what I've really started to see is the more holistic it is, you do some outbound stuff that creates some demand, demand comes back to the internet and you start plugging these things in, and there's 10x instead of two or 3x. That's what's really helping to me locally, as I plug the plug on the PPC, the SEO, some form of demand creation with whether it's Radio, TV, in my case, it's this magazine that goes into high end homes every month, it kind of makes, it creates some sales that are already there because people are like, oh, we should, our deck is ugly, we should do something, they weren't searching for, right then it created one, somebody's got to do some demand creation. But what I've noticed is for the people that we have here in the Midwest is when we have kind of a full thing that includes some demand creation, it really starts to skyrocket things. In fact, as I think I've mentioned before, we've had two outdoor remodeling clients here that have done phenomenally well, that have gotten the attention of these large vendors that are now bringing us into other cities, and the reason why that happened is because they've seen what, what this is really explosive growth in terms of leads generations, how are you doing it? They both pointed us to here in Kansas City and I showed him this is what's working. We do this with the home man in the city, we do this with PPC, we do this with them. I call it, like, award marketing, you know, we've got our own kind of version of HomeAdvisor and that kind of stuff, which really...

Seth Price

It's similar, it sounds like you've done that across. That's how we originally met, right?

Phil Singleton

Right. Right. Right.

Seth Price

You put, you put, your- people love awards, US News is the geniuses, right? Just...

Phil Singleton

Award marketing, or whatever you want to call it with the top 10 lists dominate doesn't matter if it's legal, or whatever it is, it's all, they're all taken up half the page or more, you know, for local search results, but when you have your own, so that's why I say in here, in Kansas City, I got my own platform for that, I got my own platform for, for the media, and I've got my own knowledge and stuff with, with PPC and SEO, that kind of stuff. So, when you have that magic really can't happen but, but yeah, it does work, it does work, I think, I think I was a digital snob on that piece. And I think when you get in front of people in front of something that's quality, especially now with COVID, and stuff, people aren't opening up their mail, it really does work and you- call rail stuff or whatever you're using, you can see that it pays for itself. So, I've gone the other way now, and just like it's not really to me about SEO or PPC, or anything. All it boils down to right now is lead generation. That's all.

Seth Price

Okay, let me ask you, this is what happens in the legal space, right? Their guys in the mass tort space that are like the highest end PI, the highest end of the single event and your criminal and family, all that stuff. But one of the things that frustrates me as an agency owner, I'm curious to see in the home services space is, okay, you make the phone ring, that's really freaking hard, you get it to ring, but they don't end up monetizing. They're not squeezing the juice out of the orange. And so do you end up, like this is something I've seen is predicting the mass torts, based on my friends in that space. They went from getting leads, but saying, screw it, these guys aren't answering the phone. So, we're gonna have to answer the calls, right? So, now you're selling them, you know, actual viable, now, are you booking appointments? Now you're booking the appointment, well, fuck it, I might as well have the guy building the deck, and you start end up getting to the point where you're just like it each of these stages. Now thankfully, what we try to do, at least on the legal side is these guys have some ability, and you really just try to coach bring them answerings, vendors, everything you can, because if they don't, you know, how often have you had a client come to you and say, hey, I'm not getting ROI, and you, and you look at the call rails, you're like, what the fuck?

Phil Singleton

You didn't answer the phone, you were rude.

Seth Price

It's just like, and so it's got to be, again, bring you back to the idea that you've now seen it from both sides. You know, there's a with...

Phil Singleton

You had what I didn't have, you already, I have now I'm looking at the full customer journey as an owner, you are already there years ago, this is what's really opened my eyes up and been like, wow, I mean, so much is focused on the phone right now. I was like, can't believe that we take all this here and look at the callrail, and listen to it, and I'm just like sweating.

Seth Price

That's most of it. Look at my intake team, which has been through ups and downs. I run a 14-person team. We're dabbling with a little bit from overseas at the law firm, so, it's mostly domestic, but I'm trying to layer some, some people, especially for the bilingual, like why am I paying like US prices for a bilingual answering person. But one of the things I may have mentioned to you is like so a friend of mine, he's, he's a jack of all trades, interesting, interesting character, he has his own sort of Home Improvement group, does a lot with like higher end condo associations, and he's like, dude, there's so much money in roofing, you live in the suburbs, and his mom needed a roof and some guy comes knocks on the door. It's like $18,000 for a roof that, you know, was about $3,000-$4,000 worth of goods, and he's like, you know, he knows that they would have gone down to 10 If she negotiated but like, people just take it at that 15 to $18,000 number. And then I'm like, well, look, I, you and I we can, we can make the phone ring for ruse, it's not rocket science, couple, you know, good, good, well optimized site and some Google reviews, you know, next thing you know, you'd be in business. But you also know that this only goes as well as the phone being answered, and if you do all that stuff, how are you gonna pay? He's never gonna pay me what I need per month. So, now I'm back to you, am I going to be the 50-50 partner with some guy or 1/3 partner with some guy who is there? Yes, he'll be motivated, unless he's not, but they're not, you know, this is, these are lifestyle people very often, where once they making their X amount, they're, they're happy. They're not, you know, looking at how... So, anyway.

Phil Singleton

Comes to people. I mean, totally. Right, and that's...

Seth Price

You know, I've seen, I, the partners and I like legal is that it gets me away from some of the riffraff and I say riffraff in the sense of the widget that may or may not be monetizable but as we see in home services, one of the areas I'd love to break into at some point, there's tons of opportunity, but the question is, it's almost like choosing your partner the other way. You want viable people, because there's no shortage of HVAC, or electricians, or roofers, or Deckard, there's plenty of that. But the question is, can you find somebody where it will be a symbiotic relationship? Because the number they want to pay, the upfront, so you almost like, you almost wish that you could, you know, Shark Tank in reversing? Hey, this guy is a 32-year-old guy with a family he knows how to scale a business, good business sentences shoulders, I want to be able to, you know, I'll take a piece of it because he's never going to pay me the $33,000 it's going to take to truly SEO this, if we SEO this and put some reviews and own, you know, you know, Washington, DC roofing, like there's no there's no reason...

Phil Singleton

That's why I love SEO and people worry about saturate. I want the most competitive stuff; I want the saturated. If you're good at what you do, you're gonna get up there, there is a reason why it's competitive.

Seth Price

Correct. It goes, it cuts both ways though. There's like, I always want to sort of like Moneyball it because there are places where it takes real resources. You don't just, you can't snap your fingers and come into a saturated market, as we see in legal. So again, there's, if it is, there's FU money in it, absolutely, If you're in the highest end suburb, what's the place with the promenade by you guys? Overland Park?

Phil Singleton

Overland Park, yeah.

Seth Price

If you'd have been like, you know, I'm sure there, there's a number of Home Improvement people there where, you know, you can get premium pricing, and it's, it's a beautiful thing. At the same time, you know, you, it's a, you may be able to go to the suburb where the prices are a little bit more sensitive, but you can walk in and own the joint, and then do three more. And so, that's always a back and forth between, do you own one? Do, do, do you dominate this? Are you sort of, you put yourself out there, in order to take advantage of the fact that there's a much less perfect market? Once you move away from some of the money.

Phil Singleton

One of the things on that point, as I will say is, this is again, the other side of the table. I still think almost all of our clients, almost all of our clients, I think this is, you probably see some of this as well. Most people look at marketing in terms of what they need to spend, or how little they can spend, or they want to do it. When I'm buying companies right now, I'm looking at how much I can spend, I want to go in there and dominate, I want to get a footprint, I want to get the thing going, I want to see, because I know I'll turn it into, I'll turn $100,000 into a million for sure, maybe $1,500,000, and I'm just looking at where I can spend, where I can put stuff and it makes me excited about investing in the market in that way.

Seth Price

Are you buying actual businesses in these places, once you know it? Or are you starting them up from...

Phil Singleton

I'm look, I'm looking for, what I, right now, which I think is what I'm really, really looking for is, because there's a ton of them, is the baby boomer businesses that have the guys in their 50s or 60s, and 70s, or whatever it is, that have a one or $2 million business that don't spend anything on marketing and they just have a nice consistent flow and a good team. And then turn them into a marketing, I call marketing agency mentality because...

Seth Price

Look, it's no different than the legal space, you have these guys who have these beautiful referral practice, they make good, and this is the issue, and I'll tell you from legal, you tell if it's true in the home services. The issue that I see in legal is that I have a heart to heart with some of these guys because I know I can do it, but unless they change their mentality, it won't work, and I'll give you an example. So, if you're gonna own the business, fine, if you're buying it, but if you're just saying, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna help turn this well, not so fast. So, my dad is still practicing law, he's 85, he still loves it. He does it every day. And I, you know, he has a practice in New York and I, affiliates with my firm for some work, but I sent him a criminal case, on Friday afternoon, a guy walked down the hall from him, does criminal, he was like that, you know, here's a freely, hopefully they make some money, so he calls me back to Friday for calls back Monday at 10am to get, somebody else got to them first. I'm like, of course they did. That's that changes. So, what I would say is you can, you can do that but if the, if the business itself thinks, hey, this is the same, I'm just adding marketing, It's not. When your referral place, and somebody calls you for deck saying, hey, they love the job they did for my friend, they'll wait five days for you to call back. But if somebody's calling from your coupons, or from, you know, from your magazine, or from a, from a, even worse, from a digital, you know, something that they've clicked on, it's an ephemeral lead, and that if the business doesn't work, A, from the answering point of view, B, from the customer service point of view, C, from the ability to just give immediate gratification. I look at our lawyers as we're plumbers and if the hot water heater in the basement explodes, and you need it fixed, that's the relationship that we have there, and if you, if you pause or don't pick up the phone, or don't take care of them, they're on to the next. And so, to me, I'm curious, have you, when you've done this, have you, you know, it's not just buying a business because you need to be able, I guess if you're taking out the ownership, that's great, but if the ownership stays, that's not an easy transition.

Phil Singleton

They stay, you know, they stay for a little while in terms of being able to just transfer some stuff over.

Seth Price

Were, they're doing the, you want the relationships, you don't lose the other piece, you don't want to throw away, God bless, the relationships. There's nothing better than that, but if you're trying to layer stuff on, it's a different, it's almost like a separate business where...

Phil Singleton

Legal might be a little different in that case, I mean, I'm, because this is, I'm looking at home services, you know, a lot of times the, the owners, you buy them out and they leave than the next or whatever, and they're the people that are actually doing the work. You know, you can theoretically come in there and make somebody who's been doing stuff and files, and papers, and put them on a CRM, or a job, you know, management system.

Seth Price

And some will make it, some won't, right?

Phil Singleton

Right. So, yes, it's really, it's not something you just go, that's a great pic, I'll kick that one up and put that one up, but no, but there is an, a lot of the businesses that are a million, $2 million, it's, the business walks away with the father, the father and the son. So, you can't buy and that's, the biggest thing is, is there somebody in there, you got to bring somebody in to run it because I couldn't buy a company that doesn't have, I can't do the day to day for any of the business up my own.

Seth Price

Right. My guess, my guess is I would love to see, I see that in the legal space. If the son really wants it, you could sometimes get away with it. I don't do that where you could thread the needle, whereas the dad has taken it, the son wants the innovation, and then you're there. But it's tough because, you know, in that world, you know, what a non compete, now you're suing somebody because they open up across the worst. Have you had anybody ever open up with a similar business after you bought them?

Phil Singleton

Not, no, I mean, no. The other part of this too, I think is I had a post on this recently, the cause is, there's the existing businesses that come with hairs, I still think they're kind of interesting because there's all sorts of reasons why you can kind of start, you know, with a, really a team to execute stuff, especially in home service. So, that's, you got to have somebody that's gonna go out there, if you're gonna get a bunch of decks, somebody has to build the decks into them, right? But one of the other ones I'm really excited about is, I think this is a great time for the millennials, or whatever, to come out, and literally, I'm doing this right now for a guy who's worked 15 years for a big national company, he's an expert in the space. He is literally, I mean, we just put a temp site, he's gonna come into this market in Kansas City, right? And he's gonna build a multimillion-dollar business this year because he has the production and he has the ability to sell and close, and I'm going to get them, I'm gonna send them leads and, you know, basically, day one. I think there's a huge opportunity for people to come in, that they can leverage and scale, and find people to do the work and stuff, is the but again, they're unicorns, and then enable them to build business, essentially, still market is really it's, it's kind of, it's almost like a opportunism, arbitrage where you can just steal market share. I think there is a huge, huge opportunity for that, but you have to have the production in place. Some of these guys had a lot of the home services, they are subcontracted out a lot. So, if you can get a good subcontract painter in the space, some of these young guys can leave, hang up a shingle, find a powerful marketing from the kid that has the ability to generate leads for them, either as, it is where it kind of comes, it's really interesting. In this case, the guy has his own funding so there's no problem, there is no equity type of thing, but I do think there's a big opportunity for kind of millennials or whatever the, the generation is coming up behind them to take market share away because most of these guys are not paperless. They're not marketing, they don't have the agency mentality and you can do it, I'm doing it right here. I mean, we literally are taking $5 million out of the deck market and putting it in a brand-new company just because we know how to market and we've got the team to do it, that can be done with anything I think roofing, any home services, any businesses in general, if you can, if you can do it and execute, because getting that, like I said, look, getting the leads is just one thing. If you can't execute, the whole thing falls apart. And I got a whole story about the deck thing that did fall apart the first time till we got the right crew in place, and now it's thriving, you know.

Seth Price

That's awesome. Well, this is awesome. I feel glad we got to spend some time together.

Phil Singleton

Totally. Let me, let me wrap it up on my end with just asking you, where, I mean, where can people follow you? What do you got going on?

Seth Price

Sure. I am, you know, I'm pretty easy to find. Seth at BluShark Digital, B L U Shark Digital no E, and Phil, how about, for my fan base, where do they find you?

Phil Singleton

Casey Web Designer is kind of my home base, you know, for the digital stuff, SEO for growth as a company I started with John Jans where we're gonna redo some of the podcast, booking stuff and some of the things related to SEO nationally. And then yeah, if you want to check out maybe Heartland Decks, as an example or, or the HOMAG in Kansas City and St. Louis, those are two places where you kind of see some of the other things, business ventures that we got, gonna follow and see how those go along.

Seth Price

Awesome. This is, this is great and can't wait to connect in person.

BluShark Digital

Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's website.