Ep. 7 Adam McChesney
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[00:00:00] Corey Quinn: Welcome to the Vertical Go-To-Market podcast, while you'll discover new opportunities to grow your business. From seven figures to eight, from the world's most successful B2B SaaS and agency owners and execute. I'm your host, Corey Quinn.
[00:00:18] Today I'm joined by Adam McChesney. Welcome, Adam.
[00:00:22] Adam McChesney: Corey, thanks for having me. I'm super blessed for this opportunity. Excited to be here and pour into the audience today.
[00:00:29] Corey Quinn: Beautiful. would you mind introducing yourself to those listeners who may not be familiar with your yourself and your background?
[00:00:35] Adam McChesney: Absolutely. So Adam McChesney here in St. Louis, Missouri, born and raised, lived here pretty much my entire life. My background is in medical device sales, so I worked for a company called ResMed for five years, sold C P A P equipment. And ventilators did that. Corporate America medical device sales was really what I thought I always wanted to do and manage a 25 million a year territory.
[00:00:59] So it was very [00:01:00] successful at, at a pretty young age in that space, and ultimately back in 2018, decided to find. Ways to make money online and I came across the, the terminology is rank and rent. So I started building websites and ranking them online and kind of acting as a digital landlord of sorts and built 200 websites that I owned and operated before I actually did anything for other companies.
[00:01:26] And then in the pandemic in 2000 and. Decided to take a leap of faith as that side business kind of started to, to gain some steam. Eventually ended up pivoting more to the traditional digital marketing agency side of things, and July, 2020 left and, uh, jumped headfirst in full-time to entrepreneurship.
[00:01:46] And, uh, it's been a journey ever since. Ran my own. Uh, since partnered with Hite Digital, I'm a franchisee. Uh, we're the only agency in the space that operates in that franchise model, but, uh, do a little bit of everything when it comes to lead [00:02:00] generation and digital marketing. But I've scaled our agency from doing essentially $0 in revenue when we started in 2020, all the way up to seven figures in our first 15 months.
[00:02:10] Corey Quinn: Fantastic. That's great dude.
[00:02:12] Adam McChesney: Consistently grown ever since. And so I'm very passionate about entrepreneurship, personal branding, digital marketing, and uh, everything that comes in it and in between.
[00:02:22] Corey Quinn: Beautiful. And I'm familiar with some of the media that you put out, and I could tell the listeners that that is absolutely authentically true, that you love what you do. It's clear.
[00:02:31] Adam McChesney: I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
[00:02:33] Corey Quinn: So tell us about Hite Digital. What does, uh, what does your agency do?
[00:02:37] Adam McChesney: Yeah, so we do everything from website design, logo and branding, search engine optimization, and then paid advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Uh, we are the only agency in this space that operates in this franchise model, true franchise model, as it's determined by the F D D. But, uh, we have 25 locations.
[00:02:57] So I'm an owner partner, I run height digital [00:03:00] St. Louis. We have. All over the country. Uh, I got about 140 clients in our agency and, uh, seven full-time team members of Height St. Louis. But we have access to 200 employees throughout the Hite model that are all in-house. So some of our clients get the, the access to a larger team within a smaller organization.
[00:03:20] Corey Quinn: And what is your role as the owner of the St. Louis
[00:03:23] franchise?
[00:03:24] Adam McChesney: right now it's c e o . So I, uh, I just elevated to that role within the last six months when I made that transition over to, to height, it was very heavily involved in the sales. So, um, basically up, up until we did about 150,000 a month in revenue, I, uh, that was me doing all of the sales. And then after 150,000, we finally hired someone to run our sales.
[00:03:47] And so I'm still a little bit involved in that, but that's kind of the one aspect because of my background, because of, of me building it from the ground up, that's where, where I tend to, to spend some time.
[00:03:56] Corey Quinn: Sure. And I imagine with your medical sales [00:04:00] background, you're familiar with the sale and, and, and the dynamic of how to do sales. So that's probably a natural way to grow. Personal opinion. That's the only way to build a business as a founder is to, you know, do all the, all the jobs, including sales is probably the most important as you're starting.
[00:04:15] So That's awesome.
[00:04:16] Adam McChesney: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that has led me to be so successful. Cuz we have, you know, 25 other, or we have 25 LA locations in total and a lot of the agency and I can, I talk to agency owners all the PO time and a lot of them are digital marketers. Turned. Owners, you know, they might build websites, they might do seo and, and some of them, uh, don't love the sales process.
[00:04:40] And, and so I love digging into that and that's what's allowed me to grow as quickly as I have is because that's, that's what I'm accustomed to. And I ended up learning the other side of the coin on the digital marketing side, which kind of brought everything full circle.
[00:04:54] Corey Quinn: Brilliant. Do you focus your franchise location on a specific vertical?[00:05:00]
[00:05:00] Adam McChesney: So we pretty much work in the home services and contracting space. So that was, that was the kind of the first, uh, industry or industries I guess you could say, that I was really, um, involved with heavily. In working with a lot of businesses from the ground up, so I'd say 95% of our clients are in that direct industry with some of the outliers just being in random industries from referrals.
[00:05:24] But our brand is built around contracting.
[00:05:27] Corey Quinn: That's awesome. Uh, I don't know of any business that's purely in one vertical, right? You're always gonna get some referrals. And as any good business owner, you're, you're gonna say yes to most revenue that comes in the door. Not all of it. And I'm a fan of saying no. But it's, it's, uh, it's, it's common sense.
[00:05:46] So, sounds like, oh, let me ask you, did you verticalize. Or did you focus on the home services vertical as you were building, or did that happen sort of as a result of getting going in that sort of that that grew organically?[00:06:00]
[00:06:00] Adam McChesney: So I think it grew a little bit organically, um, in the beginning. So I was, you know, back in 2018, I was testing out so many different things and, and I don't know if, if I, if we talked about this last time, but one of the. Sites that I actually built was an Autoglass company, which is obviously not in-home contracting, but I actually ended up turning that into its own business.
[00:06:20] So I was throwing all these different things at the wall trying to figure out what I liked, what I didn't like, what people liked. Once I started selling leads and doing digital marketing full-time, and I just gained the most traction early on with contracting, and I loved talking with those, those owners.
[00:06:38] I also loved the idea. They were selling higher ticket projects. So obviously when you're doing SEO or or any type of digital marketing service, the higher the ticket, the, the bigger the opportunity for quicker return on investment, as well as more long-term return on investment. So I liked the numbers aspect of those industries, and then I really [00:07:00] just took it and ran with it.
[00:07:01] Corey Quinn: Beautiful.
[00:07:02] so you grew the business organically into home services. Um, is it that you were specifically targeting them or is that really what kind of started coming in the door?
[00:07:13] Adam McChesney: It was a combination of both. So I started building like sites and I started getting connected with people that were in the contracting space. And then I started asking for referrals. And then I started getting tagged in Facebook groups and then all of a sudden I was starting to put out content and people were reaching out saying, Hey, I saw this post, or I saw this, uh, this website that you built, and I'm interested in doing it.
[00:07:36] So I think with any good approach, as you start to verticalize. You, you start to organically go that way. Um, and then you obviously start to get some stuff fed to you as well. So I think it, it was kind of just a, a, a perfect storm, um, once I started to really go a hundred percent down that direction and try to try to capitalize on it.
[00:07:56] Corey Quinn: That's awesome. I love that you don't always see that [00:08:00] Adam, actually, you see
[00:08:01] Adam McChesney: the
[00:08:01] Corey Quinn: people getting way over diversified and then getting in the deep. Deep end on that, and then they have to kind of figure it out. So I think that's really great that you figured it out early and that you saw the patterns. That's really cool.
[00:08:14] So tell me about your. Sales and marketing approach. I know you have a very u I would consider to be unique approach to how you market yourself and your agency. Could you share a little bit about, uh, how you do marketing for your agency?
[00:08:29] Adam McChesney: Yeah, absolutely. So in medical device sales, I had one competitor, so I essentially had to be better than one other company. And it's so funny that when I made that transition, especially in that first month of being, not only being an entrepreneur, but being in a completely different market. Then medical device sales.
[00:08:48] I realized there's hundreds of thousands of options obviously, that are out there with digital marketers. There's agencies of all sizes. There's freelancers, part-time, people like the, the list goes on. [00:09:00] And one of the things that I had seen over the past, Couple of years while I was doing this. On the side is it's one big cold calling in sales pitch, whether it's people cold calling in cold emailing, or it's all over social media, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and you go to a digital marketer's profile and they're just putting out.
[00:09:20] Spam type posts, they're just DMing random people, guaranteeing you know, the world and, uh, millions and millions of dollars, all those amazing things. And I decided to invest in a mastermind that kind of helped me understand personal branding. Because I, I knew that one of the reasons why I was so successful in medical device sales was who I was as a person and my ability to connect with people and to really help them understand why our products and services were good, but why the service that they were gonna get from me was even better than anything else that was out there.
[00:09:56] And so once I started to implement some of those things, it [00:10:00] really helped me understand the difference in the market that I had, which obvious. Digital marketing is digital marketing for the most part, but that they were getting me. And so what I de try, what I ended up doing, and it was very successful and continued to do to, I produce a ton of content across all the different platforms, but I do 90% of it that has nothing to do with digital marketing.
[00:10:24] And what I do with 90% of my content is it's really the day in the life of an entrepreneur and talking about the ups and downs of that, both personally and professionally. And I kind of. Pull back the curtain and let people know who I am, because at the end of the day, in home services specifically, it is a completely different industry than digital marketing.
[00:10:44] But where most digital marketers go wrong is those. Contractors and those home service owners don't want to get sold all day long because they're already being sold all day long. They get calls, emails, text messages from everybody trying to sell them. [00:11:00] And at the end of the day, they want to do business with those people that they know, like, and trust.
[00:11:05] And they are human beings just like us as digital marketers at the end of the day. So most of the people. That do business with me, have seen my content. I just had somebody sign up last week that's been following me literally since August of 2020, almost right when I literally started doing this content on social media.
[00:11:26] And so it's not an overnight success on my sales and prospecting side of stuff, um, but. It, it compounds. So we literally brought on more clients in our agency in December than I had in total of clients in April of 2021. Literally just 15 months prior. And the reason is, is because all of this stuff compounds, compounds, compounds.
[00:11:50] And so people tend to, by the time they wanna work with us, they've seen my stuff, they understand that we're different, but at the end of the day, they understand that our [00:12:00] culture. And our values are we want to treat each individual business owner as a human being, and we go deeper in the strategy. We go deeper in just getting to know them, so that way they feel confident in hiring us.
[00:12:13] And they know that at the end of the day, this is my business and I take everything that we do very seriously, and I'm not just gonna try to sell them on something that isn't gonna work.
[00:12:23] Corey Quinn: Do you recommend this strategy to your clients?
[00:12:26] Adam McChesney: I do. Yes. So what, regardless of what industry you're in, there's always a need for the personal branding side of things. Because what happens in this online world that we live in is social media is one big highlight reel. And that's all people try to put out there. My, the 10% of the time that I actually make digital marketing posts are some of my least engaged posts because when I do talk about the digital marketing stuff, I still try to obviously tell a [00:13:00] story.
[00:13:00] I try to make it unique. I try to do all those things, but people don't like to be. They like to have a feel good story or they like to connect with the story even if it's not positive. I think underlying letting people know some of the negatives and the hardships about running a business, or I've even opened up about some struggles we've had in business and that tends to get me more clients than the posts that I'm raving about client success or anything like that because most people go wrong.
[00:13:29] They try to make it seem. The one case study that they have or, or the, the two clients they've gotten amazing results for is the norm when really it's like the exception to what's going
[00:13:41] Corey Quinn: it's like a resume, right? You, you, um, you load, you load it up with all the best stuff, , and you don't put the, the stuff you don't want people to know about in there.
[00:13:50] Adam McChesney: So I tell everybody to do it. I even tell, you know, I, I speak to, to digital marketers all the time. I'm actually going to a conference next week in Florida and speaking on the same thing, [00:14:00] and everybody thinks it's too good to be true. When I talk to about, it's, when I talk about it the way that I operate things, I'm like, you have to stick out from the crowd some way.
[00:14:10] If you just go and do what everybody else is doing, you, you're not gonna stick out from the crowd. And I, and I tell my clients the same thing. Home services, there's so many different options that are out there. It's getting more and more competitive as well. So you might as well try to find something that helps you stick out from the crowd so that way you can be top of mind.
[00:14:29] Had somebody sign up last week that said, Adam, not only have I been following you is he had only been following me for a couple months, but he says, I can literally not. On social media, on any given platform and not see your stuff. He's like, so when I knew that I needed a new website with seo, he's like, you were top of mind.
[00:14:46] He's like, and I didn't even contact anybody else. I didn't even, you know, say anything on price. I was essentially like, here's my credit card . And I was like, that's, that's the point.
[00:14:55] Corey Quinn: It's funny, I used to run marketing for an agency, uh, [00:15:00] years ago. now it's funny. We, we would get a similar comment, but it was because of our remarketing ads.
[00:15:05] Adam McChesney: Yep.
[00:15:06] Corey Quinn: You guys are everywhere. You guys are following me around. How do you do that? Right. These are not very sophisticated buyers that we were selling into home services and attorneys and whatnot.
[00:15:15] And so it, we would get the same thing, but I think, um, you know, the world has turned since those days in, in, in that the work that you're doing and the investments that you're making are not in necessarily in remarketing ads, but they're in just creating content what is good content today in your mind.
[00:15:33] Adam McChesney: So I think one of the key things that I do is I, I really know who my ideal clients are, and I know where they hang out. I know who they follow from an influencer standpoint. I know the types of books that they read. I know the types of processes and systems that they have with inside their business. I know what's important.
[00:15:52] I also have a very good pulse with my account managers, my vp, my Director of Client success, all the conversations that [00:16:00] they're having on a daily basis, as well as the conversations that I'm having. So I keep a running notes tab of a variety of different topics broken down by different things that I talk about in my.
[00:16:11] So that way I make sure that I'm talking about what matters most, and I think most people go wrong, is they try to put the content out based on what's important to them and not what's IPO more most important to their ideal client or the people that they're trying to sell. And so I like to start with the end in mind, what's most important with my ideal audience and work backwards.
[00:16:33] And then obviously I, I, you know, will give and take based on the, the responsiveness of that content and things like that. But I think that's what's led me to be successful as well as I'm not just putting out what I feel is important, but I'm also taking into consideration what I'm hearing, what I'm seeing.
[00:16:50] I'm very good at paying attention and taking action based on what I see and learning from others from a
[00:16:56] Corey Quinn: how do you get sales today? Is it mostly inbound or do you [00:17:00] do, uh, outbound sales? Like how do you, how do you generate new sales?
[00:17:04] Adam McChesney: It's about 95%, uh, inbound. So, uh, I would say most of it is all social media. A lot of it happens in the dms, people reaching out on any of those platforms. We get some from referrals. Um, And then I would say, you know, actually we do, we are starting to get quite a bit, so our website's on the first page for digital marketing in St.
[00:17:26] Louis. Now, G M B I, we got 40 plus reviews on our GM B, so we're getting a couple leads a week from that. But most of it is all through our content.
[00:17:37] Corey Quinn: is that generating enough inbound interest that is meeting your goals or.
[00:17:41] Adam McChesney: Yeah, so it's been meeting our goals. We're, we're eventually gonna be starting, uh, potentially, potentially gonna be doing some cold calling and things like that. Um, not loving that idea cuz it's. Different than anything that we've ever done. Um, my problem right now is as we're trying to grow out a sales [00:18:00] department, it's the, the numbers and the quotas and the things like that start to grow above and beyond what's capable for me to do.
[00:18:07] So right now, it's been really sufficient for an owner that has been selling. But as we try to grow and scale and do all those different things, it's becoming a little bit more of a challenge. But still to this point, I mean we, we sold $75,000 in new revenue in December. We did about 60 in January. And comparatively to the other Hite franchises, that's more than they're doing in total revenue.
[00:18:37] So we're not behind the ball by any means. My, for my expectations and where I'm trying to go, we're gonna have to, to level up as well and get outside of our comfort zone.
[00:18:48] Corey Quinn: The reason why I ask that, uh, is that, inbound is something that is somewhat out of your control. Clearly, you have a formula, you know what works. You're putting out content [00:19:00] daily, multiple times a day. on the right channels, you know, the icp, you know, what they care about. And so you've got that all dialed in.
[00:19:08] However, there's, and this is probably my, you know, my, my belief, you may not share this belief, but that there's a limited ability or a limited market or addressable market who's actively going inbound, who is actively, uh, has a, has a need and is looking for a solution to their need. In this case, digital marketing agency.
[00:19:26] Whereas, you know, outbound, Sort of taps into that market where people who are maybe not actively looking, but they need to be
[00:19:33] Adam McChesney: Exactly, and it's also hard to scale me, and that's been the problem with my content is, is scaling me. So that's one of the things that we're trying to, to figure out is what is that other lever that we can go and pull? Because again, it, if we want to stay where we're at in continually, inch, inch, inch, you know, get better.
[00:19:51] We're in a great position. Nothing to complain about, but a as visionaries, as entrepreneurs, as someone trying to push the layer. There's always [00:20:00] gonna be another opportunity out there that I'm looking for, so we're open to it.
[00:20:04] Corey Quinn: Yeah. And that's, that's beautiful. And, and by the way, massive growth is not always everyone's on, on everyone's agenda. Some people want it, some people don't. Some people want a flavor of that. I used to work for A C E O who. Was hellbent on Growth
[00:20:21] Adam McChesney: Yep.
[00:20:22] Corey Quinn: and we all knew it and we were all like help helping him to grow and that was pretty wild.
[00:20:26] Have you gotten involved in any home services type of associations or conferences? from a content perspective, maybe.
[00:20:34] Adam McChesney: So we're actually, our team's gonna be heading out to, uh, Clipon, which is a Christmas lighting, uh, installation conference in Vegas next month. And so a lot of, uh, we work with a lot of businesses that are offering that as an additional service. Uh, during the slow time, obviously projects tend to slow down on the outdoor side of things.
[00:20:53] And so we got invited out to that conference. We're a preferred vendor, uh, for their community. I'll be speaking at, uh, a couple more [00:21:00] trainings of theirs throughout the rest of this year. And then we were at, uh, a junk removal conference as well, uh, back in October. And then have a couple other, uh, ones, uh, that we're potentially looking at in the, in the roofing and H V A C space here throughout this year.
[00:21:14] Um, but yeah, tho those conferences and things like that have been amazing for us from a brand standpoint and. Getting industry knowledge and information from the source. I think again, that's kind of where once you do start to, you know, get very, very deep with inside verticals is the ongoing education and the ongoing communication with the pulse of the market.
[00:21:39] That is a huge thing that we're trying to do, to take it to a deeper lever level, to understand the trends within inside the industry from the people that know it best, from the people that are, are continuing their education as well as,
[00:21:51] Corey Quinn: what in your mind is a good conference strategy or what has worked for you when it comes to going to conferences?
[00:21:57] Adam McChesney: So I think it's all about having a plan and, and [00:22:00] truly understanding what you're trying to get out of that. So we went to Junk Con last year and uh, we ended up getting, I think, Eight or nine clients directly at the conference out of it,
[00:22:12] which was, which was pretty significant with a couple more, uh, that ended up coming in within like the next 60 days, so that was in October.
[00:22:20] But we had a very clear strategy on what we were trying to hit from a return on investment standpoint, and then also getting very clear on the types of clients that we were wanting to take. So I think the other problem is when you go to these conferences is there's people of all, there's businesses of all shapes and sizes that are there.
[00:22:39] We have seen consistently that between the budgets of clients that are, are, are, are businesses that are between zero and 18 months in business. And doing a certain dollar amount in revenue and have a certain employee set that those are not the people that are best suited for where we're at in our agency.
[00:22:59] [00:23:00] And that took a lot of trial and error and testing and, and trying to figure that out because when I first started, I was a much smaller agency. I was. Less expensive than I am now. There was all those different things where I could work with those types of businesses, and as over time those things change and so we got very clear and we're asking the right questions in terms of just having conversations and spending that time with people, I think that's another key aspect is asking those questions about where they're at in their business and then making sure you're not spending, you know, an hour plus talking to a person that is not even in business and thinking about getting started next.
[00:23:37] Corey Quinn: Correct. Totally agree with that. How do you know which conferences or associations. Involved with.
[00:23:43] Adam McChesney: So we're still trying to figure that out. Uh, to be quite honest with you, I think, uh, a lot of it comes from our, our clients in asking them those questions on our, in our, our ideal clients. So, hey, what conferences are you going to? What has the turnout been? And then also speaking with [00:24:00] some of the other vendors that are going to those events as well.
[00:24:03] So I think kind of a, a full fledged approach from that aspect is really the best way to, to kind of figure that out. But we're still, we're still in that phase, our.
[00:24:10] Corey Quinn: Awesome. let's talk about word of mouth. How do you define word of mouth?
[00:24:14] Adam McChesney: Other people's perception of the caliber of your services and their willingness to either refer or not refer to you. Because I think when people think about word of mouth, they always think of, oh, hey, that's a positive thing. It can be just as nega as as evenly as if not more a, a negative thing. And so it's, it's very important of reputation management, of making sure that, you know, Hey, when people are talking about your business, what is it?
[00:24:43] What's being said? And how is it being said? And how is it being portray?
[00:24:47] Corey Quinn: So how do you create word of mouth?
[00:24:49] Adam McChesney: I think by delivering an exceptional customer experience. So our core values within our agency and the core values that I live, my, my life are around, are the core [00:25:00] values of the acronym of trust. So it's take action, results matter, utilize resources, set expectations, and transform lives. And so that set expectations part.
[00:25:11] In digital marketing and marketing in general is so key. So we set expectations on every single call, whether they become a client or not, and then we set expectations with every ongoing meeting. So that way when we know when something might be a little bit off, well where was it compared to the expectations that we set and what are we gonna do in order to figure out.
[00:25:33] How to overcome that. And when you set expectations properly and reset expectations consistently as things change, that's when you get that exceptional cu uh, user experience or customer experience. That's when you get that exceptional word of mouth. We have 41, I think we just got our 41, uh, 41st, uh, Google Business Listing Review all five stars.
[00:25:55] There are agencies here in St. And I've been doing this now again for a year and a half. There are [00:26:00] agencies in St. Louis that have been in business for 10 plus years that don't have nearly as many Google reviews as we do. So it's all about setting expectations again, and resetting expectations and making sh making sure that you're delivering a quality product.
[00:26:14] But that customer experience is even more important than anything else,
[00:26:17] Corey Quinn: That's awesome. And. Setting and meeting expectations is a big part of
[00:26:21] that.
[00:26:22] Adam McChesney: absolutely.
[00:26:23] Corey Quinn: in, in my experience, a lot of home service businesses don't understand. digital marketing to the, clearly, to the level that someone like yourself or or someone my, like myself would, and they may have expectations that are not founded or based on some YouTube video or whatever, you know, wherever they get their ideas.
[00:26:42] So by, by helping to set like what's possible, what to expect, what not to expect, having that conversation up front,
[00:26:48] Adam McChesney: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:49] Corey Quinn: you know? Yeah, it's great. It helps everything. creates five star reviews. Um, What in your, in your perspective, creates, sorry. What in your perspective, are [00:27:00] the positive aspects of verticalizing a business?
[00:27:03] Adam McChesney: I think you become the expert. So everybody says, you know, don't be the generalist, be the specialist. And specialists get paid a lot more than generalists, . So I think it creates that expert within the market, but it also allows you to charge a premium because when you are doing. A specific industry or specific services all day long, you can become really, really good at that.
[00:27:30] If you're kind of dabbling in multiple different things, no one is going to look at you as an authority. They're gonna look at you as as an okay option. Might be great at doing a little bit of everything, but when people want the best of the best, even if people can't afford the best of the best, they're gonna go to the best of the best first.
[00:27:48] They're gonna be like, Hey, I just want to see what I can get from the premier option from somebody that specializes in my industry. And if you're not doing that, you're not gonna be looked at like that. So I think it's [00:28:00] very key to be that expert, to be that specialist. And there's a ton of rewards. I mean, again, it's not overnight.
[00:28:06] It's easy to be a generalist. Everybody can do that, but it's really hard to be a specialist.
[00:28:11] Corey Quinn: What are the negatives to verticalizing a business?
[00:28:14] Adam McChesney: I think you, you end up turning a, a away a lot of business. So that, that's been one of the hardest parts for me. Like we get a ton of opportunities in other industries. We get a ton of opportunities in e-commerce and just random businesses that, that have a lot of money to spend. And they're like, we are, we're okay.
[00:28:31] Like testing this out and knowing that it might not work, but for us, it takes us away from what we're good at and all business isn't good business. And so I think that is one of the hardest parts, especially as you're getting started now, it's easier for us to just say no, like we've said no three times today that have came across my Slack channel, where we all collectively come together and are like, this isn't not not gonna work, even though they're ready to pay.
[00:28:59] But when you're [00:29:00] just getting started or you're kind of in that growth phase, you want to take every dollar and opportunity that you can. And so I think that's probably one of the biggest negatives. Um, as well as it really takes you off course when it comes to trying to build your ideal offering. So if you're spending time doing research on other industries, it just takes away from you getting even better at what you're already good at.
[00:29:23] Corey Quinn: Let's say one of the listeners is maybe a generalist today, they're an agency, not in St. Louis, but in some other geo, and they're a generalist. They're thinking about specializing or verticalizing their business. , uh, what advice do you have to, to them?
[00:29:41] Adam McChesney: So if they're currently a generalist today, I would say take, it depends on how many clients you have, but I do this exercise with our business in terms of like truly identifying the characteristics as I well, as well as I tell this to other digital marketers into our clients. Take your last 10 clients and take your best 10 [00:30:00] clients and write up pros and cons.
[00:30:02] List to each of those and then merge those characteristics that are what you want to be working with. And so that's the industry, that's the services that you're providing. That's how much they're spending, that's how much revenue they're doing per year. There's all of the different ways that you can go and do it.
[00:30:23] But that right there will give you your idea of what industry or industries, if you're still trying to figure that out, you need to be focusing on, but also what services that you need to be offering. For example, we offer Facebook ads. We have 140 clients and we have two clients that we do Facebook ads for because they're outside of the contracting space.
[00:30:45] We just don't do Facebook ads for contracting anymore because it's such a difficult. Market to be advertising right on with all the craziness of the algorithms. We figured that out over time, but if we weren't consistently auditing even as a specialist, [00:31:00] we would've never truly figured out that, Hey, it's just not working.
[00:31:03] We're also spending a lot of time and energy here becomes a headache. Let's focus on SEO and p c.
[00:31:09] Corey Quinn: b. Last question. What's your motivation?
[00:31:14] Adam McChesney: So my motivation is to create a life that I wanna live by design. And so I think the freedom aspect of entrepreneurship and really in digital marketing as well, because you don't have to, I mean, our clients are all over the country. My team is all over the world. I think the freedom aspect is what excites me the most.
[00:31:33] And with all this stuff, the sky is the limit. But I'm able to, as you mentioned, You can grow as much as you want or as little as you want to because it's, it's truly in your hands. And I've grown a lot and I've also not grown at times as well. And so there's different seasons where something's gonna be more important than others, whether it's family relationships, whether it is the business that is taking precedent, all of those different things.
[00:31:57] I think the freedom aspect and just the ability [00:32:00] to create the life that I want to by design is really at the forefront of everything I.
[00:32:04] Corey Quinn: Awesome. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. I know the listener's got a ton of value out of this, so thank you.
[00:32:12] All right, folks, that's it for today. I'm Corey Quinn, and I hope you join me again next time for the Vertical Go Go-To-Market podcast. And if you received value from this show, I'd love a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast. Thanks so much.
[00:32:28] We'll see you soon.
