In this episode of the LeverUp® Podcast, we welcome John Maher, founder of Victoriam Group and expert in performance marketing. John breaks down the art and science of data-driven marketing and shares how he helps businesses, particularly in the financial services and lending sectors, achieve sustainable growth by optimizing their marketing efforts and reducing customer acquisition costs.
With over a decade of experience, John has worked with a range of businesses, from small startups to large financial institutions, helping them run hyper-targeted marketing campaigns and significantly improve their lead generation processes. Throughout the episode, John shares his HTHG (Hyper Target Hyper Growth) strategy, explaining how it’s helped clients increase conversions, drive revenue, and scale without adding unnecessary overhead.
In addition to his marketing expertise, John also opens up about his entrepreneurial journey, from starting his first business at 16 to facing personal challenges along the way. He discusses the lessons learned from overcoming adversity and how resilience played a crucial role in shaping his success.
—
Listen to the podcast here
The Science Behind Effective Marketing Strategies [S2:E3]
Introducing John Maher
We’re sitting down with John Maher, founder of the Victorium Group. Thank you for coming and making the trip from Pittsburgh down to Saint Petersburg. I am looking forward to talking to you. First, give us a 30-second view of your background.
Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be down here. I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. The only job I’ve ever had in my life was being a lifeguard. I founded my first company at sixteen, marketing consulting for brands targeting Gen Z. I went through some periods in my life, which we will discuss, but I always had that marketing background. I am currently focusing on marketing and financial services, particularly on the lending side of things. I have my hands in a couple of other ventures as well.
What inspired you to start Victorian? Tell us first what the Victorian Group does and then what inspired you to start that.
Victorian Group focuses on financial services abroad. When we initially started, we were getting our foothold. We did a lot of work in private. We still do some consulting there, but our wheelhouse is performance marketing for lenders, especially small businesses in the $3 million to $10 million range, sometimes smaller lines of credit, and things of that nature. We’re working alongside lenders, coming up with marketing strategies, developing marketing campaigns, and specifically running, managing, and optimizing hyper-targeted campaigns for their ideal client segments.
You said small business lenders and $3 million to $10 million checks. What is your core value prop to those organizations, feeding the funnel?
Yeah. I would say feeding the funnel and a lot of these lending groups don’t have great internal marketing teams, as we’ve discussed before. They don’t view it as a great growth lever. They’re able to not take on more overhead or more risk of trying to hire and train people. We have an experienced team. We bolt right on, learn their business, learn their objectives, and then they’re able to carry on with their internal resources. We fill their funnel and, do market research for them. We compile all the data and learning from our campaigns, and bring them more clients.
Breaking Down The Marketing Campaign
Give me an example. Set the stage. I’m an industrial guy. I’m going to do a lot of marketing and a lot of branding for float switches for industrial tanks. I had a nice conversation a while back about selling a business. What does a campaign look like? Why do people need more leads? How do you get them more fuel for their business conscience?
I’ll answer this in two parts. When talking about a campaign typically in marketing, you’re thinking about a specific ideal client profile, ICP, a specific message, and a medium to deliver that message. Let’s say you are targeting med spas in California. We’d go through what is the best channel., where med spa owners are congregating, and where we can reach them cost-effectively.
It might be media buying on Facebook, then you get into the message and creative testing and development stage. What videos are you using? What are we saying in these static ads? What are the calls to action? What’s the value proposition? Creating all of that. Do the media buying and testing, and you’re optimizing as you go. I’m not going to use optimizing because it’s a buzzword. What that means in this context is let’s say you’re lacking on a certain click-through rate, you’re running these ads, you’re paying for people to be shown to your ideal clients, and you have what 2% click-through rate. For every 100 people, you see two clicks on it.
Where the separation from good to great comes into effective testing, where you go, “If we want to get this to 3%, 4%, 5%, or 6% click-through rate, where are the words? What are the words? What are the logos? What’s the message? How can we tweak it? A lot of it is very scientific in a way. When you think of marketing, it sounds like the qualitative hit me on the couch Mad Men, “Bro, what if we do this.” What a lot of it is exhaustive testing of here’s one video. Here are 26 different headlines. Here are 15 different subheads, and here are 12 different calls to action. How do we put these in a vacuum and cost-effectively test each one and allocate the budget towards the winning campaign?
For the lender that you guys are working with, describe their clients to me.
I gave you an example earlier in our discussion that was targeting one of our clients, which I won’t go by name. They lend to a wide range of industries. There are probably fifteen different verticals that they’re in. They write cheque sizes from $500,000 up, potentially up to $50 million. That’s very rare for them but in that $500,000 to $15 million range. Their internal marketing team is getting coverage on all these different verticals, so there’s a lack of resources to hammer down. It’s like, “Here’s an ad we’re running, a poster, here’s an ad. How are we going to juice this ad and get it as profitable as can be?”
What’s your key client at a lending agency or debt shop? Who is your key client?
Key client as far as for our side?
Who calls the bat phone and says, “John, fix my problem.
Largely, it’s people who had business development. More so now you’re saying the head of growth is a new CRO, Chief Revenue Officer. Typically in those sub-100 person or sub-50 head count shops. Typically, if it’s not the CEO president, it’ll be the growth person. CRO, growth guy, head of BD, whatever the title may be. It’s going to be that first in command when it comes to business growth aside from CEO and president.
Hyper Target Hyper Growth Playbook
They come in. Let’s assume they’re new on the bus or maybe not and they go, “I have a problem in that my new leads aren’t going very well. I need some more leads. My calendars aren’t full.” What are the metrics you look at? What do you diagnose? Do you guys have a playbook you run? How do you get in there and say you need to do X, Y, and Z to start the campaign process?
The playbook we run is called HTHG, Hyper Target, Hyper Growth. Let me answer your question first and we’ll get into that. When it comes to diagnosing a lead problem and a growth problem, there are two kinds of clients we work with. One is like, “We do well in marketing. We just want to be better. We’re doing XYZ. Can we do a little bit more? Is there more growth?”
What is a little bit more?
They might say, “We’re growing 25% year over year. If we spend a little bit of money, can we be at 27% or 28%? Those are hyperbolic numbers. Many of our clients are near that level, but I’m saying after incremental growth when they’re already doing well. They have a great closing. Their operations are very strong. That’s one situation.
The other situation is their lead problem goes beyond that. There’s a fundamental lack in their marketing where they don’t have a great internal team. They don’t have a great foothold on what their client acquisition channels are. That’s what’s different. We will do some advisory work depending on the extent. If it’s a foundational issue, before we can even start putting the building blocks in, there are systemic things that need to be solved.
They need to understand, “What are we willing to spend? What are our customer acquisition costs? What are the current costs per lead? What are we willing to spend as far as cost per lead goes? Do we have a strong closing team? Can we nurture leads? Are you getting leads but you’re not nurturing them properly? If they’re not getting close immediately, they fall out of the CRM. They’re not getting followed up with. I would say my answer varies, depending on whether it is a business problem or a good business with just a marketing problem.
Lending is never going away, but people come into lending businesses in different ways. When someone calls you, what metric are you going to deliver for them that they’re going to say, “This made me happy that we called you guys.”
Lower customer acquisition costs. It varies in lending because it can vary on loan size. These are made-up numbers. Our average client is going to make $40,000 on a $20,000. Now with you, we know we can get clients from $1,900 all in cost, then they go, “We can spend an extra $50,000 or an extra $100,000, so nailing down that number of what’s your cost per lead and what’s your customer acquisition costs, it lets them when done correctly and if you’re doing a profitably, it’s a growth level, where they can predictably invest continually in the marketing and grow their leads and grow their clients base.
Nailing down your businesses’ customer acquisition costs, when done correctly and profitably, allows lenders to predictably invest in marketing and grow their leads. Share on XDo they know their customer acquisition costs most time?
That’s a great question. In my former world of direct-to-consumer eCommerce, you will die if you don’t know your customer. Everything is customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value. That is the founding pillar of that business.
I never looked at it that way.
That’s fair. It’s a very different industry in industrials. That makes sense. In performance marketing, especially if you want to utilize social media and look at it as a growth lever, I think customer acquisition costs, the way to do it well is you’re dividing by various cohorts of what you’re lending to. If you take a firm that’s lending anywhere from $200,000 to $400,000 checks to $20 million checks, having a singular customer acquisition cost I think misconstrues the facts because you could have unprofitable ways of getting those small customers. You have to segment down your client base, but customer acquisition cost, if you can nail it or have a pretty good ongoing idea of what it is, frees up and helps you understand what you can now spend and how profitable you are every single time you’re running out.
Does that inform your work? It’s part of your work on the analysis phase. Walk me through what the analysis process looks like. How long does it take? I’ve had some questions on Twitter next about marketing. This is a hole in my playbook. No shit about it. Walk me through what the analysis looks like. Give me an example, benchmark lender, what was their situation, how did they give you a call? Walk me through the analysis, whatever the time it takes and let’s go through the case study.
You mentioned Twitter. Here’s a great example. I won’t name the lender but I’ll tell you after. I had been tweeting as my normal stuff, my jibber jabber about marketing financial services.
We both have the jibber jabber.
I started getting DMS from an anonymous account asking about cold email outreach. Their company had spent $35,000 in the past year trying to get a profitable cold email outreach, set up, and manage it, and they had failed completely. They’d spent $35,000 and had nothing to show for it being profitable. This anonymous account starts picking my brain, asking for advice. How are you verifying the leads to send to? How are you doing the messaging? How are you remaining in compliance?
They are due diligence-ing you. Trying to get free advice.
They are not opting for free advice, but we’ll get there. I came to find out that it’s about 100 headcount lending business. We started having phone calls and this began a month or two process where I started due diligence-ing them and vice versa. I’m giving some free advice but there’s that knowledge of I don’t know how to fix a car. Someone can tell me how to fix a car. I’m probably not going to do well.
That began a back-and-forth where they realized, “We’re not going to figure this out-of-house, or if we do, it’s going to be so much of a pain in the butt. It’s not going to be worth it. Can we bring these guys in?” They brought up it to seniority. We went back and forth in negotiations. During this time, we’re doing our own diligence. Who are you targeting? What does this look like?
A hundred-person headcount for us is a pretty big client to work with as far as the sheer size goes. We started getting their internal information and getting their internal metrics. What’s interesting is not all companies are the same. They may prioritize 1 or 2 things. Other companies may be really focused on collecting as much data as they possibly can.
To answer your question, the analysis depends on how well is the client keeping their books on the marketing side of things. For this particular case, they had a really down path on their marketing side. They could tell us, “Here are eighteen different client examples we serve. This is what we know about each platform we’re on, etc.” For us, we came to the conclusion of actually going after the dentist’s office, interestingly enough, it’s smaller loan amounts but the volume is high and easy to close on. The financial profile of the average dentist is creditworthy for what they’re looking for, so they can do no financial, just app-only loans.
What’s the dentist spend on CapEx? What’s the app-only loan?
The dentist spend on CapEx is more on their side of things, where I know that they like the financial profile because we’re filling the leads. We’re not typically getting that granular unless they need to. They already have a team that does the financial analysis. They know who they want to lend to or not. The question is the horse is there, now load the wagon, so to get a dentist. I don’t know the answer in specifics but they wanted to do the cold outreach side.
Typically, we run a lot of ads, but cold outrage is something we’ve ventured into and I’ve done it successfully in the past. Once that was settled and we realized we were going to go after dentists, here are the ten states we’re going to target. We took over from there, cut an agreement with them, and went through everything from compiling the list and contacts, triple verifying them, and having enriched data of here are 35,000 dentist offices, here are all the decision-makers, here are the numbers, here are the emails. We then go through the process of buying and warming up email domains. The way it works is you can burn domains and everyone hates cold email. I’m sorry for people tuning in. We participate in the hell that is called email at times. It can be very profitable and effective.
It is effective.
For $2,000 a month, I can send 10,000 to 20,000 cold emails.
As we talked to founders and did cold outreach for industrial businesses, we were warned ad nauseam to send 30 to 60 emails a week max.
That is true and that’s why you end up buying hundreds of domains. This is what happens. This is where it gets more complex and maybe you can see why businesses would say, “You guys just do it.” You have to buy 25, 45, 50, or 75 domains and warm up each one of them. Warming up means you have emails sent to them. You’re sending 2 to 3 three emails a day from them and you’re building up what’s called the domain reputation and getting that email legitimized.
It’s going to bypass the spam folder.
That’s correct.
I know something.
That’s what we call the “technical” side of things, but it’s getting making sure of that. You can burn all of them. If you burn all of them, you have to restart from ground zero. We’re doing all that for the client, then we get into the real marketing side, which is what’s the messaging? How are we going to test it? We’re split-testing emails and calls to action, and we’re split-testing landing pages. If we’re sending a cold email, “We want to support local dentists, blah, blah. Here’s a testimonial,” social proof and we click them onto a landing page.
It could be a situation where 40% of our emails get opened, 17% or 15% of them click on the link that’s in the email and then it all dies, then it’s a landing page problem. We then have to go back and have multiple emails, testing multiple calls to action, and multiple landing pages, testing the words, testing the messaging, all of the graphics, all of that, you’re constantly interchanging collecting the data, and optimizing around to find winning campaigns.
Why Graphics Matter
You said graphics. Why in the world does graphics make a difference?
It shouldn’t. Guys like you and I would say, “This is stupid. What are the numbers? Is it a good transaction for both parties or not?” The reality is that’s not how the human brain functions. When someone gets a cold email, they see an advertisement, they click through, and they go to a landing page, especially in the digital age, we have as you see hundreds of thousands of pieces of content a year probably, or over the years. It’s an endless amount of stimuli.
You start building that internal radar for BS or “This doesn’t look right. This doesn’t look legit.” You could see someone who goes on a website and says this looks sketchy. You might say, “How does it look sketchy?” “I don’t know, but it looks sketchy.” The reason they say that is because they’ve seen thousands of other examples and they’ve built up that. What you’re doing is playing to try to legitimize it where if someone looks at a page for two seconds, they go, “This looks legit.” It is qualitative but there are ways of doing it. That’s where little things like graphics matter. I have examples for you. Here’s an interesting thing. Rounded buttons on landing pages are clicked far more often than the square button.
Rounded buttons on landing pages are clicked far more often than squared ones. Share on XThat’s bananas. Do you know why?
I don’t know that I could not give you the true neuroscience of that, but it’s a fact. I have friends in direct-to-consumer eCommerce who take a landing page with the same words, the same pictures, and the same calls to action. Bolding some words, making the font size bigger, moving the buttons around, or making the button bigger will change the conversion rate by 6%. If a website is say a big skincare product and they’re doing $500,000 a month or their landing page. A 6% change is going to be 30,000 a month. It’s going to be $360,000 a year. In over three years, it’s going to be over $1 million because that landing page had the same content, but the words were bigger or smaller, the images were bigger or smaller, and the buttons were placed here instead of there. It can be million-dollar differences.
We’re getting into a human factors discussion. You guys employ twenty NASA PhDs and all have the little buttons configuration like what’s the most optimized.
A lot of it is this. You have frameworks. I can tell you this this is a better starting campaign. When I say campaign, think of this. What’s the message? Who is it going to? What are we telling them to do? That’s a campaign, and then the means of that campaign are different. Thirty years or forty years ago, that was a magazine. Now it’s Instagram, but it’s the same principles. It’s a process.
Marketing-Efficiency Ratio
I’m a small business owner. Let’s move out of your lending practice. I’m a grass cutter. I’m in a landscaping business and I have 20 landscaping employees and I want to get to 60. Do I call you first? Do I hire them first? Do I buy trucks first? What do I do?
On a more nuanced level, there has to be more information as far as their current CapEx, its profitability, and all that stuff. We’ll look myopically through the marketing lens for now. Through the marketing lens, that’s where establishing your customer acquisition costs is a great example. If you say, “I have 20 employees. They do $200,000 a month and they are running out of a 25% net margin. It’s $50,000 a month,” they need to know how much they can spend on marketing and what their ROI is.
This is more finance guy talk. You go, “How do I know what the return on investment is?” It’s understanding your customer acquisition cost, but then the broader term is marketing efficiency ratio MER, which is what our revenue and what we spend on marketing. That’s the marketing efficiency ratio. I can dive deeper into that question.
I feel like the ratios you’re talking about are very important for a company with 20,000 employees. You also said we have 100 people here at a lending agency. Is the founder of a lending agency looking at the marketing efficiency ratio or are they looking at the revenue at the door?
They are looking at the revenue at the door, but I’m sure some look at the marketing efficiency ratio. I would suggest it’s something that’s good to look at because if you can develop it as a lever and it’s not easy, it becomes a sword that you wield where if you want outside capital, you can get outside capital. If you want to take on your own loans to grow, you can do that. If you know confidently that if I spend $10, I’m going to get $25 back, that’s interesting.
That’s what the marketing efficiency ratio is. You can look at it as your capital efficiency, especially if marketing is a big lever. I have plenty of friends who are at a 3.5 marketing ratio. Every $100,000 they spend, they get $350,000 back. Especially is the eComm, that’s where those numbers are. It’s so centric on marketing and paid media. That’s where it’s important.
Marketing will always be this side thing unless you make it not necessarily the main thing. You make it important enough that you get the juice out of it. It’s like going to the gym. If the gym to you is a once-a-month thing or twice-a-year thing, it’s not a lever you can pull to get in shape. If you’re willing to go six days a week and die, it becomes a massive lever for your physical health. It comes down to a question of how you are prioritizing it.
Marketing will always be a side thing in business until you make it necessarily the main thing. If you make it important enough, you get the most juice out of it. Share on XA lot of times marketing is looked at as it’s this graphic design thing or whatever. When you have competent people in the room who understand the math side and the financial side of marketing, and again, for all Industries, it doesn’t work. Industrial is a great example. That’s going to be a lot of enterprise-level B2B, or you’re working with procurement officers. It’s different. It’s very much sales-driven, but in other Industries, I think marketing is underutilized as an effective growth lever that you have a lot of control over internally.
What I heard from the consumer team when I was at my previous firm or even the consumer team is they never underwrote marketing upside. They were viewed as a cost center. Tell me why that’s dumb or not optimal. I guess that’s the way to say it.
That’s the correct thing to do if you don’t prioritize marketing. Plenty of businesses can do this. They go marketing is that thing we have to have. If they don’t know their customer acquisition costs, they don’t know their customer lifetime value. If they don’t know how to spend marketing dollars and consistently and predictably generate new profitable business, then it’s an expense.
With other businesses, that depend case by case, who do look at marketing as this is a pillar of growth for us, then it’s an upside. You’re under the upside of marketing. It comes down to this decision of how you are going to treat your marketing, looking across the background here, there’s the Morgan & Morgan sign over there. Morgan & Morgan know their marketing numbers.
That’s interesting. They do know them.
I’m damn sure they know their customer acquisition cost and I’m damn sure they’re underwriting the upside of marketing for them because they exploded because of marketing. Again, there’s that headcount. You are investing in systems. That’s not discounting the other parts of business development, but more so, it actually can assist business development where I say, “We’re going to spend X dollars a month on advertising and we’re going to bring in predictably with a plus-minus of say 10% this many leads.”
Now we know how many new SDRs we need to hire. Now we know how many new fulfillment people we need to hire because we have more control over our growth. I have plenty of friends who have great companies. They take off like a rocket ship. When they’re growing too fast and they can’t keep up with training and hiring, all they do is go on Facebook ads and lower their spending. They can control their funnel that way.
They use that as a knob for demand.
Exactly, so they can turn it on demand. It’s not like, “Just do this.” This is a complex thing that’s hard to get done well, but when it’s done well, the reward is so high that for a lot of small medium businesses and to go back to your landscaping example, to finish that thought, is if they are targeting area and let’s say they have great marketing, they have great content, social proof, SEO, we will take that as a given. They say on Instagram ads and Facebook ads, you can get other ad networks and we’ll get way more complicated than we’re getting now but we won’t for this example.
If for $105 we’re getting a cost per lead or say we lower it to $50 cost per lead, and the average draws going to be $1,000. To quote, we’re going to close 30% of those. Our customer acquisition cost is going to be $267 of $340 and they’re doing up to $100,000 a month now in revenue and say they have $30,000 or $25,000 at the end of every month.
They say, “We’re going to spend $10,000 of that and that’s going to equate to 3 times 10 roughly or predictably maybe close to 30 new clients, which are going to generate $30,000 more in revenue. Again, these are broad numbers for illustrative purposes, but that’s the power of even a smaller business leaning into that side of their own performance marketing if they can get the traction to do so where it lets them scale up in a far more predictable way.
Small businesses should lean into their own performance marketing so they can get the traction to scale up in a far more predictable way. Share on XIf I’m a landscaping company, this is the benchmark. I know that’s not your core business. What does it cost to get me going in this?
Let’s say you are a landscaping company, that can vary. Landscaping companies can be two brothers and a pickup truck. It can be you have a little warehouse and you have fifteen people working there. The cost of entry is much lower than you think. I would say when you’re first starting out if you have very limited capital, watch a lot of YouTube videos. They are on YouTube content.
Go on X for free resources and start doing things yourself as best you can. A great way to start is if you’re watching YouTube and I keep using the Facebook example, of course, there are other ad networks, but Facebook is the easiest probably to understand. There’s every single type of person you could imagine on Facebook, even though CPMs across the industry.
Is that the best benchmark? Is Facebook more homogeneous than Instagram for the landscaping business?
I jumped in front of myself. I said Facebook because most homeowners are going to be above 45 years old. They’re going to be on Facebook.
You hid the demographic map.
We’ll send that out, but you can start by doing it yourself for sure. It may not be as complex but it’s going to save you a lot of money. Honest to God, if you have $1,000 to spend a month on marketing and maybe when you start, you’re not going to do it great. You have a website. You can even build on Facebook ads straight book-a-call page.
You could go on Canva and make ten different static ads for free. Write the words on it, “We’re a neighborhood lawn care 101. Here’s our little offer. For $200 a month, we will cut your lawn up to five times a month,” or something whatever. Type in your credit card information and start running those ads. That’s how simple it is and again that’s far from optimal strategy but it’s not something where if you want to start dipping your toes in it and getting that data, you need to have $100,000 to spend.
I told you when we were having the pre-discussion that I spent a lot of investable dollars on marketing spend and got zero. Why was I an idiot? What did I do wrong? It’s B2B.
B2B, I’d be very curious to know what they did and what their plan was. Part of that could have been did you feel there were clearly-aligned incentives between them and you?
Absolutely not. It was a black box of like they were marketing magic.
I think for the marketing agency or consultant or whatever you’re going to work with, it’s good to have a very clearly laid out roadmap of this is our final destination. This is what we want to do with this. This is our desired outcome and then reverse engineer it. Here’s how we’re going to get there. Now, to get there may certainly not be a short bet. Like anything we do, it is not a 100% hit rate. There’s no absolute that it’s going to work 100%, no doubt. Very few things in life are. What you can do is let’s say for you, what would have been your goal? What were you selling?
Figuring that out, and then where are these people congregating? Who are they? Who are we targeting? What’s the ICP? What do they need to be told? Do they need to be educated? Do they already have a familiarity with your product and you just need visibility? What’s the call to action? It’s getting those leads. How are we keeping them engaged? Do we have a system to follow up every week or two weeks or three weeks of email? Are we booking a discovery call? Whatever it may be.
I would have wanted if I were you to see what is the laid-out game plan. What’s the timeline? What’s the budget? A great question is how does this not work? Where do things go wrong? With the landscaping example, none of the ads start working and we’re having a hard time figuring out why. We keep testing but we don’t have a lot of cash runway to test more and we don’t know how to fix it. That would be a great example of where this can go wrong. Another example is you get leads but you’re closing team sucks.
That was always the carve-out. The carve-out was we had to test this hypothesis and refine it. We don’t know. We’re going to deliver this and also, this may not work. I was interested in getting them. I was interested in taking a shot. What do you say to that approach? Do you underwrite your upside? Can you confirm your guarantee? These are weasel words. What does that mean? When you tell your clients and your investments about marketing, how do you think about that?
When talking to clients, it’s important to break down case studies, understand what they’re doing, and then align with that, “We’ve done this in the past for very similar cases. Here are the numbers to what you might expect, but we’re very clear with here’s where it could fail and why.” I think clients tend to appreciate that because as you know now in the social media world, there is so much BS from like we don’t even call ourselves a marketing agency because people hear the word agency and they cringe.
Whereas it’s like, “Do you want 60 qualified leads in 30 days for $1,000?” If you could go to any business and get them 60 qualified leads in 30 days for $1,000, you would be driving around in a Bugatti. No one believes it anymore. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. When we talk with clients, a lot of it is a more I don’t want to say sophisticated breakdown, but a more sophisticated look at what are you guys willing to do. What are your expectations? Here’s what you can expect with what you’re investing into this.
We always keep expenses low. We want to backload the investment because the more we spend upfront on their paid media budget, the less we have to invest on the line. Because we get paid largely on performance, we have skin in the game. This needs to work. We can’t screw the pooch and then walk away. We lose out financially when that happens. When everyone says, “I’ll treat your money like it’s my own,” that’s true for us because when they give us, “Here’s $20,000,” we don’t want to spend 15 tests. That’s where it comes down to how are we effectively testing and optimizing on a low budget as possible.
In a way, it’s like day trading where you’re putting money into the algorithm. You have your thesis and all the facets of your campaign and you are literally bidding on advertisement slots every single day and you’re actively in real-time managing what’s our CPM cost per thousand views, what’s our cost per click, what’s our cost per lead, and all that stuff. It’s like day trading.
The crazy thing is on the financial side of it, I have friends who are media buyers who manage $5 million to $10 million a month. It’s like running a prop desk. They’re spending $10 million a month and every single second of the day, for the most part, there are swings in the efficacy of those dollars. In real-time, they’re making adjustments to try to maximize the profitability of their spending. That’s something where I think a lot of finance guys look at marketing as that person down the hall who does the silly stupid stuff.
It feels very hokey.
It feels hokey but when I tell you that you’re in real-time managing millions of dollars of capital and are stewarding your clients’ money and are responsible for generating either their losses or their profit and how much property you generating, the performance side of marketing is math-driven. It is not a hokey thing. It’s very focused on performance and if you can’t perform, you die.
You tell me button circles versus button squares.
It sounds hokey.
Are button circles and button squares also not hokey?
It’s hokey but the money is real. It’s the stupid little things like that that can make the difference to the tune of millions of dollars.
Building Brand Visibility
I would put you on the spot. We have an equity situation in the field service business. We roll trucks to client sites and fix their problems or service their maintenance. It’s all industrials. What do we do? I need to feed the funnel at this place. They do maintenance. They do repairs.
We can do a quick little run-through test.
You’re coming to me as a client. I’m confused. I have to feed my funnel. I need more revenue.
A few questions to ask you. One, who’s your ideal client profile? Who are you selling to?
My ideal client profile is a large property manager.
What are you currently doing for your marketing?
Attending trade shows and networking events.
How much competition are you facing? Do you feel like you have a unique value proposition?
No. It’s fungible. It’s a race to the bottom on price and it’s not a great service on anybody. There’s a dearth of labor to complete the services and it is arguably a commoditized service. It shouldn’t be, but the market has made it commoditized.
To understand the service better, I heard you, but this is so out of my world.
It’s an industrial service.
That’s okay. When it comes to your ideal client profile, you’re saying commoditize. Are they mostly going to be motivated by the bottom line?
By the bottom line.
What I would think about is establishing your brand visibility. We’re taking this from the very top. You’re doing nothing with marketing. I would say, one. Check off the fundamentals. You need to have a website, basic stuff like that. Two, writing out in the same way you would write out an investment thesis. You should be able to write out a 2, 3, or 4-page memo of “We are targeting these decision-makers at these firms. They’re highly motivated, highly cost motivated. Here’s the analysis. This is what we’re selling, here’s our competition. Here’s how our competition is reaching them. Here are the industry benchmarks, yada, yada, yada.”
Do the whole spiel, then I would think about let’s say you have a budget of $50,000. It might be much lower. It might be much higher. How do we most cost-efficiently, one, get into contact with these decision-makers? That could be cold emails. They might hate cold emails. How do we get in contact with them? Let’s say it’s going to be email.
Two was what are we going to say to them? If it’s, “Our services are cheaper. Here’s what we offer,” great. Maybe that works. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you need to get them into your ecosystem. For example, you do a phenomenal job with the Sweeney group, making sure you have Discord going. You have the chat and you have all that. People know who you are. You have that ecosystem.
If you’re building that ecosystem, which might not be possible, but there are common interests, how are we appeasing these decision-makers? Can we send them a brochure? Can we send them something of value to them? “Here’s an 11-page eBook about what you need to know about 2024 and 2025 when making decisions in this space,” but becoming a point of authority. Let’s say, we’re going to reach them directly through email. One, compiling a list. That’s going to a dialer. That’s going to ListKit. Zoom info was a great one. If you establish that list, then I would say we want to get a 30% open rate.
Explain open for our guys.
They clicked open on the email. That’s as simple as that. Let’s say we have 1,000 people we’re going to try to sell to. You get this list of 1,000 people. The first effort is going to be reaching out to them. We’re going to reach out to them and we’re going to say, it could be a lead magnet or a lead nurture thing, “Here’s a little one-pager. Here’s our company. This is what we do. This is what we might cost. Here’s the call to action. Call for a free consultation, estimate,” or whatever it may be.
That is the foundational starting point I would look at. I could talk for another 30 minutes about doing all the analysis, all the research, and the messaging. This is an abridged example of what I would do in actuality. I would start with that because it’s capital cheap. You could do this for a couple of thousand bucks. Do you get any response on that? Is there any hope? If you get nothing, you know you failed but you have a lot of your marketing budget left. That’s a good step one.
The real work comes in on the side of what motivates them, who are they, do we have internal connections there, and how can we build that relationship. Those are lofty conversations of all that. The simple part is getting that message to them. With the lack of information, what I would do is probably hire a marketing consultant to come in for a few days and do a full in-depth write-up on who are we selling to and how we sell to them.
That may even involve interviewing current clients you do have, “What do you think about this? What are your thoughts on this coming year? I’ve done this with contacts in the past. Show them marketing material and go, “You work with us now. You like working with us. If you would have seen this, do you think it would be our client right now? Do you think you would have clicked on this?” They’ll answer that, many of them. Some may buzz off like, “Screw you. You’re my cheap vendor. I don’t want to talk to you.” I think that’s where taking away the word marketing and viewing it as that step process of the who, the why, the how, and the where.
Marketing Advice For Entrepreneurs
I think that hang-up is the word marketing. The word marketing is hokey. You have value for entrepreneurs. You are focused on lenders. What do you recommend entrepreneurs? Marketing, I define, I think getting your message out. What do you recommend to entrepreneurs to get their message out, to get their brand out, to get customers? Maybe they’re a tech person who has an app, or maybe they’re the grass-cutting guy, a kid in high school who has a truck and a half.
You said marketing is getting your message out. I would say marketing is defining your message, and then getting it out profitably. That’s what I like to say. That’s a little different. What we’re seeing now, especially in the young entrepreneurs’ space is going to be a lot of SaaS guys and tech people. It is a lot more founder-led marketing because they’re able to grow their audience online at zero or very little cost generally speaking. You are a great guy in the marketing space. You kill it at organic marketing, You’ve grown up a huge community, relatively speaking, in a very short time frame. You are I think unknowingly very good at content marketing.
It’s a labor of love.
My advice for founders would be to define your intent. For other founders, it may be, “The point of my Twitter is to sell my SaaS tool.” One, what are you doing? What is your actual identifiable outcome? Two, it comes back to the simple building blocks, the who, what, why, where, and how. Now, how do I do that? Here’s a great example. Chris is a Tampa guy. He was a marketing guy who found a company named ListKit, which is a lead sorting list. You can go on there and say, “Give me industrial companies with less than twenty employees based in Minnesota.” You can get that list and get their contact info.
The way he does his content, all of his content is how do you use ListKit? What are the success stories? Yada, yada yada. He’s educating one current ListKit user and two people who aren’t using it. He’s grown up a great audience and his organic content provides an awesome funnel for ListKit itself, which is a monthly paid Saas tool. He’s an example of founder-led marketing.
To answer your question, if you’re a one-man shop, I would lean into getting good and consistent with your organic marketing on your LinkedIn, on your Facebook, on your Twitter page, whatever it may be, which is very different than enterprise-level marketing. Don’t try to do too much too early. I think too many people try to go, “I’m going to mark it on five platforms at once. I’m going to make all this content,” and it becomes too cumbersome and they end up quitting or doing a lot of things poorly.
Do not try to explore five online platforms all at once. Making content for that many areas is too cumbersome and could force you to quit early. Share on XYou can scale an app, a Saas service, or even human service to multiple seven figures on a single client acquisition channel. You can do that. A great example is Kill Crew, an imperial brand popular with Gen Z and young Millennials. They blew up through Instagram. They became a nine-figure brand through Instagram and Instagram paid ads, and they did that in four years. They’ve sold $100 million more clothes and four years with 90% of sales being driven through Instagram. It’s not as much of the platforms because platforms will change over time. MySpace started and it’s dead.
Do you know who is on Myspace now? Justin Timberlake.
They tried to do that revival a few years ago.
Big plans for MySpace.
Don’t get so caught up on what platform. Platforms are important. You don’t want to be on Google forums for doing your organic content, but think more about the who, what, why, where, why, and how. Who are you, what’s your message, what’s the desired outcome for you, and then it’s engineering that middle part. Who are we talking to what are their pain points, what interests them, and then how do we weave in their pain points and the solutions they need with what we do?
It’s a marriage of the two of those. It’s that intersection. Over time, you will have your desired audience because you could have a big audience which sucks. You need a great audience, which is one that you can monetize, and then they’ll come to you. With your ex now, you have people who come to you. They look at your stuff and go, “This is a guy I like.”
I receive 100 DMs a week. I don’t even know what to do.
You broke past that critical mass point.
Maybe escape velocity.
Escape velocity is a great term for it where there are enough people that talk about you, tweet about you, and repost your stuff. That now becomes a machine. Imagine if instead of doing what you’re doing now, you were selling something much different. All of a sudden, you’re getting 100 DMs a week. Those 50 of them could be qualified prospects.
I didn’t even think about it.
My thing is if you were in a different line of business, think about how big of a growth asset your Twitter would be.
Level-Up Discussion
We have spent 45 minutes on technical competence. The highest technical competence question. I’ve done a couple of ChatGPTs on some words you’ve said, which is good. I’m going to pivot you into our LeverUp discussion. You’re four times an entrepreneur. I feel like we have this halo effect or this overnight success effect.
Not the case at all.
It doesn’t work, but Instagram, Facebook, VC. What advice would you give to founders who are frustrated and are kicking up the hill? I have had plenty of success. Going to venture, this is the most successful venture you’ve had.
By a long shot. You’re three times in the toilet. I would say one moderately, two terribly. One terrible, two okay, and one very good. This is the thing, you have to define this. To be clear, when people say four times founder, it wasn’t four times that I went and raised $150 million of venture capital per se. That’s important to clarify, where people look at the founder and you have that association with Silicon Valley. I’ve never had some huge 8, 9, or 10-figure exit in my life. Not yet, Hopefully, cross your fingers, one day. I started my very first business. I founded it in my high school classroom and we were doing consulting for brands selling to Gen Z.
When I was seventeen, we did a national campaign with the college board promoting the SAT. At the same time, I was a terrible student. At the same time, I was running a national campaign marketing. Taking the SAT, I was not studying to take the SAT. There was a great irony in that. That business went well, given the context. I was seventeen. We weren’t given the time. We made some money, we had some pretty cool clients, we went up to New York, we went to Chicago and Pittsburgh, and we went to speak at conferences. I mentioned to you, I think one of my last weeks of high school, we got written about in a Forbes article.
I look at that as a success in a way in a way. Did it make me a multimillionaire at eighteen? No, but that went well. As that died down, I got into college. We’ve already talked about this. I have a very hyper addictive personality and so I got hooked on drugs and alcohol. I went at 17 or 18 years old and not having made the big bucks yet, but I was on a very unique trajectory, where people would have thought that by 21 years old, this kid is going to be in a Bentley and have twenty employees. I 100% thought that would be the case. What I didn’t realize was getting hooked on drugs and alcohol at twenty years old, I would be kicked out of college. I would be dying. I would be drinking three-quarters of vodka a day. I was drugging on amphetamines.
I lost everything. We’ll be clear, I didn’t lose my family. I had very supportive friends, so everything is an overstatement. I want to qualify for that there were people who have gone through much worse things than I have in my life. There’s no question. I’m not a martyr here, but I’m saying this for people who are maybe going through something similar. I became where everything that I wanted in my life had vanished, and I had accepted the fact that I was going to die and I was okay with that.
There were many nights when my blood alcohol level was above 0.4. I was sitting in bed, I was too weak, I’d be throwing up blood, and I thought I was not going to wake up tomorrow morning and I’m in such hell. I’m okay with that. I quickly changed from this young hotshot who was on this fast track to do cool things to now I’m not just ahead of everybody around me. I’m way effing behind them and I’m in hell.
By the grace of God, family members convinced me to go to rehab. I went to rehab, got sober, and relapsed twelve days later. I went to another rehab. It was such terrible conditions. They were so mortifying in the way that they treated their patients. I left against medical advice and I’ve been sober since that day. Crazy story. It was so bad. One of the workers there realized my mistreatment, and they let me walk out into the snow in the middle of winter, knowing I had no money, and no plan to get home, and they let me walk out and said to figure it out.
She had her husband come and pick me up, and drive me to a U-Haul rental place to rent a U-Haul to drive home for six hours in the middle of the night. This rehab center, I don’t want to say left me for dead, but let me walk out knowing I had no family close to me, knowing I had no money to go anywhere, let me out in the snow. This woman, thankfully, saved me and had her husband come and get me. Amazing things.
I get home and it’s not like you’re better now. You’ve done two years of damage both physically to yourself and your brain. You’re going through the emotional process of what my life looks like now that I’m not centering all of my actions around when was my first drink, when was my last drink, and how I get my next one. At that time, I probably never went more than three hours without a drink. It’s hard to say this now in the sense that I can’t believe I was that person. I can’t believe that was my life because my life is so dramatically different now.
Several months after getting sober, I got back into college and I started to get that itch again and feel like that old John of like I know what I want to do. I want to get back in the game. I think I still have the talent for this. How do I do it? I contacted a guy named Will Dzombak, Wiz Khalifa’s manager. He gave me my seed funding to start. He took a shot at me, a kid that he had known a little bit from years past. He took a shot at me, gave me a little bit of starting capital, and got me on my way.
This is my advice to founders. I went from sober to that in about a year or so, and then I went and got my ass kicked for the next fifteen months because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. You get that moment where I have a ton of things to learn. I don’t have the connections I used to have. The playing field has changed. The math has changed. Even the algorithms from 2016 are much different from 2021 when the current was 2022. I didn’t have mastery over myself. I wasn’t disciplined enough. I had the work ethic but I wasn’t a good worker. Meaning that I had the great ambition and hunger to work very hard, but you can exert yourself a lot very inefficiently.
I spent that first fifteen months learning the market again, learning where there is demand, what niches we can serve clients well that, one, I have the capital for, I have the knowledge for, I have the ability to sell to, and is somewhat scalable. Now, what I do is not as scaleable as selling iPhones but I needed something scalable enough that I could build it, make a living, hire people, and all that stuff.
That equation was very painful to figure out. I spent many nights thinking this isn’t going to work, I’m a crazy person, and I never going to be able to pull this off. Many sleepless nights. There was a six-month period where every single morning I woke up, I was in a full panic because I had weeks or days of runway left. I had no conceivable way of how to pay my next bills and I somehow did it, and I pulled through all that.
I tell people if you can stomach having a W-2, take that path.
I made the conscious decision and this is why I think I like to compete with others. I had faced death. I had accepted I was going to die and I was very close to death. My body was shutting down. I knew what getting comfortable with death felt like and I figured I would die before I quit. People say that, but people don’t mean that all the time.
I got two Navy SEALs out there and three Special Forces guys. They know.
They know better than me. They certainly know better than me. They’ve done things in life that I can’t dream of doing, but that’s when I crystallized myself. It was in those moments of I had six days of runway left. I have no idea how I’m going to pay my next bills. I’m a complete failure. I wasn’t good enough to do this.
That is a question I get the most. How do you tell yourself it’s going to be okay when you tell yourself it’s going to be okay, but you don’t believe it? I’ve gone through moments at the beginning where I didn’t believe it. Now, I believe it. How do you do that? How do you make that pivot?
Two answers. One is you don’t tell yourself it’s going to be okay. Again, I’m willing to die at my desk and everything might go to hell but I’m either going to be dead or I’m going to be alive and I’m going to keep trying.
Do you know the Stockdale Paradox?
I’ve heard of that. I’ve heard you say it, so say it.
Admiral Stockdale back in the ‘90s ran as the vice president candidate for Ross Perot. Admiral Stockdale was the highest-ranking officer in Vietnam. They got captured and he got asked a question like, “Who didn’t make it through being a PW?” He said that’s easy, the optimists. He said, “You have to accept the brutal reality of your current situation while also knowing that in the end, you will prevail.”
That is I think in the foreword of Jim Collins’ Good to Great.
It comes from Good to Great. I was in the Navy talking about Good to Great.
I forgot the name, but that’s a great thing. The way I look at life is it’s a path and at the end, we’re all going to die. Also, in 300 years probably no one is going to remember anything I’ve ever done or any of us have ever done except for the 0.00001%. With that knowledge, I go, “I know what I want, I know I won’t give up, so no matter how effed up the situation is, I’m going to keep trying and that’s that.”
That’s the way I look at it and in those dark moments, like soul-crushing moments, It wasn’t a feeling of, “Wait. Here’s the bright side.” It was, “Here’s the dark side and I can get through it no matter what.” That’s what pushed me through, not that the grass was going to be greener, but more so accepting I’m going to learn something about myself in this space. I’m not even learning about business. I’m going to learn about myself and how can I react to these circumstances.
No matter how messed up a situation is, just keep on trying. You will eventually get through those dark, soul-crushing moments. Share on XWe could go do Joe Rogan stop right now, which we will do at some point. What’s the most impactful book you’ve had in your life? Tell me why.
The very first business book I ever read was called The Power of Self-Discipline by Brian Tracy. Brian Tracy is ‘80s and ’90s. Very Amway kind of guy. I probably read that book when I was in seventh grade, sixth grade maybe. I had a political blog when I was thirteen.
I was always like a baby Ben Shapiro.
I don’t know how smart I am. I often questioned that, but the one thing is I’ll try and I’ll try early. That’s my MO. That was the first book I read that talked about success, what success means, and how can you emulate yourself. I would say that had an impact on me. As far as books that took me back, it was The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier, and then also Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.
I read some Cybernetics when I was 21 or 22 in the Navy and it was an interesting book. You gave three recommendations. What’s the most impactful one?
If you’re going to read one, The Enigma of Reason is great and it is by Hugo Mercier, a Harvard researcher. Whether you’re religious or not, you believe in evolution, whatever you want to do, it’s an interesting thesis. It’s looking at human reason from an evolutionary standpoint and not a gifted wish of we just have a reason. What is the reason? It talks a lot about how is reason effective, when are we rational and certainly, when are we awful at being rational, and where we lack reason. It’s very interesting.
This is a marketing book.
You have a PhD so it’s not a marketing book by nature, but it’s good at understanding marketing and it’s good at understanding a lot of the weird BS that happens in the world, in the stock markets, and you go “Okay,” understanding a lot of the fallacies and psychological concepts of mass thinking, the lack of mass reason. I would say that’s a book that not a lot of people read and not a lot of people have heard of but it’s something that people will be greatly affected by having gone through.
Episode Wrap-up
Where can we get in touch with you? This is the most technical conversation I have had. He can fix your business. Where can we get in touch with you?
They can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, John Maher. On X is @RealJohnMaher77. You can shoot me a DM and give me a follow. I’m happy to have some talks. Thank you.