[Top Agency Series] Automating Client Journeys: Insights From Brad Martineau of SixthDivision

Brad Martineau is the Co-founder and CEO of SixthDivision, a brand empowering entrepreneurs to build a successful business by providing the tools to get better reporting, visibility, and more clients. With over 14 years of experience building small businesses, his expertise lies in simplifying complex concepts and bridging the gap between theory and execution.

As the sixth employee at Infusionsoft, Brad played a pivotal role in creating the marketing automation space for small businesses. In addition, he is also an accomplished basketball and entrepreneur coach passionate about teaching and helping people understand challenging concepts.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:52] Brad Martineau introduces SixthDivision and what it does 
• [07:47] Entrepreneurship lessons Brad learned growing his business
• [19:31] Brad talks about the six core values in their company
• [22:59] SixthDivision’s customer success stories 
• [32:43] Who are the ideal clients for SixthDivision? 
• [41:12] The service evolution of SixthDivision
• [49:34] Brad discusses their business model helping clients in automating client journeys
• [55:16] Entrepreneurial lessons from his basketball profession

In this episode…

Running a business is no easy task; it requires a lot of hard work, dedication, and perseverance. The most challenging aspect of running a business is managing multiple tasks simultaneously. From marketing to sales, every aspect of your business demands your attention. So, how can you satisfy your clients while making your team’s life easier?

Serial entrepreneur Brad Martineau says businesses that leverage tools and software build and deliver a better client journey. However, very few have the expertise to efficiently and effectively implement them in a company. He recommends working with an expert to help you streamline your clients’ journeys by automating the process and ensuring your clients receive the best possible experience. It not only enables you to retain customers, but also attracts new ones.

On this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Brad Martineau, Co-founder and CEO of SixthDivision, to discuss how companies can launch automatic client journeys. Brad talks about SixthDivision and what it does, entrepreneurship lessons learned from growing a business, SixthDivision’s customer success stories, its service evolution, and its business model.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Brad Martineau on LinkedIn
• SixthDivision

Special Mention(s):

• Keap

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Giver Series] The Power of Video Storytelling to Transform Your Business with Ian Garlic of StoryCrews” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Set and Achieve Goals With Ian Garlic, Founder of Video Case Story” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Entrepreneurship and life is a never ending exercise of figuring it out.”
• “Any good idea an entrepreneur has is only because they’ve done it wrong at least three times.”
• “Decide, act, learn, repeat.”
• “Leadership is more about casting a vision of the outcome and the work and then requiring that employees do the work so that they can earn the outcome.”
• “The people that are really good don’t ever take their foot off the accelerator.”
• “To achieve success and maintain success, you have to consistently, constantly be in a relentless, neverending attack mode.”

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Brad Martineau, he is the Co-founder of SixthDivision. And Brad before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast and I had on Ian Garlic. Ian actually, I’ve known about you in the company for a decade now. But he formally introduced us and he runs Video Case Story. So you could check out videocasestory.com He talked about Brad actually is interesting how he runs his agency, what’s good with a customer success story and also how his dad had lived dolphins his dad was an entrepreneur in a restaurant, and they live dolphins in the restaurant. Now, you think the restaurant was in Florida, it was in Wisconsin, so that was not always that abnormal, but that’s abnormal for Wisconsin. But there were just some creative ideas from an entrepreneurship perspective there. Jason Swenk was another one I had him on twice. Brad knows Jason, he built up and grew his agency over eight figures and sold it and then he then talked about how he’s been buying up agencies and talked about valuation and just really good conversation about running a business. So check out those on inspiredinsider.com. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25 and at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect their dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that we actually help you run your podcasts, we’re an easy button for a company to launch or on a podcast, we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. Brad, we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that make it look easy for the hosts in the company so they could run their business and also just build amazing relationships and create great content. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I’ve found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com, email us at [email protected]. And I joke around and say almost everything in my life is good, tracks back to a podcast. And I did not meet my wife on a podcast. So that’s the only exception. But Brad and I originally met from a distance because I was working on Mixergy and Andrew Warner and at the time this was maybe over a decade ago, I don’t know was he was contemplating what do I do? How do I systematize it and really what I’ll formally say in a second. But Brad and his company are experts at the client journey and automation. And Andrew was looking at getting help with that. So he flew to Brad and his company to get help with that. And I remember that. So maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that. But Brad is a co-founder, as I mentioned CEO of SixthDivision and they help entrepreneurs launch automatic client journeys. And they help them leverage marketing automation to make it easier. Because there’s so many things to manage with the business, there’s so many aspects of that business so that entrepreneur can feel in control their business and produce better results. And most importantly, he’s a basketball coach. Right. So, Brad, thanks for joining me.

Brad Martineau  3:40 

Thank you excited to be here. Excited to be here.

Jeremy Weisz  3:42 

So just talk about SixthDivision for a second and what you do. And I don’t know if you remember when Andrew Warner came and that is relevant to this journey.

Brad Martineau  3:52 

I do yeah. So very quick. I believe one of the phrases I picked up that I love from Frank Kern is a mercifully short introduction. But so SixthDivision was born out of the hours of the sixth employee at Infusionsoft, which is now called Keep and they’re one of the automation tools that exist out in the world today. And I was there for about eight years or so. And one of the two questions I heard over and over and over and over again, while I was there is what are other people doing that works? And then number two is how do I do it? Like how do I do it faster? How do I implement it? And those are the two hurdles that every entrepreneur is always wondering, like, what should I do in my business? And then how do I get it implemented faster? And with the advent of Infusionsoft now Keep started it. There are a lot of other tools now that allow you to do that everyone calls it automation, a client journey, automation, whatever. The advent of that is like, oh, I can make my business run like a well-oiled machine. The challenge is that there’s no school, there’s no class, there’s no curriculum for how to actually organize all the different things you could do decide what you want to do, then create a plan and then actually go get it implemented. And so it ends up creating a lot of headache and nightmare so SixthDivision was born out of when I left Infusionsoft, and I like to say I got fired, I really just got laid off as part of a round of layoffs. But saying I got fired, it makes it way more dramatic. I looked around I’m like, well I know this really well, there were really no other competitors outside of that particular tool at the time, like, I’m going to create a company that makes it easy for people to use this automation. In fact, I still have my initial like mission statement document that I made at the time. And it was to demystify what it takes to use Infusionsoft. And over time, that has evolved to demystify what it takes to automate your client journey, regardless of what tool you use, because there’s plenty of tools that are great, depending on what market you’re in. And no matter what tool you use, you’re still going to face the same thing, there’s an unlimited number of ideas that every guru has, is going to tell you what you should do. And you have to be able to take all those ideas, filter through them, and then create a plan of how you’re going to implement it and then actually go implement it in a way where you’re not leaving this like deck of cards, it would fall apart if one person changes one thing. And also, it’s got to be organized, where if somebody leaves, you can bring somebody else down. And it’s not going to take eight years for them to figure out what the heck the other person built when they were there. So we are in the world of just just like you read helping people launch automatic client journeys. And the reason why we call them automatic client journeys. And we don’t say we’re in the world of client journey automation, is because the goal, the outcome is to have a client journey that goes from eyeball to hand raised to sales, conversation, or sales environment, to giving money to smiles and being happy. And whatever you want to have happen. It happens like clockwork, so it’s automatic, some of that may be automated, but some of it might require a human. So what we’re looking for is an automatic client journey, every step that I want to have, it’s going to happen regardless of whether human does it or whether software can just pull it off, and actually automate it. So, we’ve been around, we’ve worked a lot of people, we’ve ridden the wave of the agency, and we’ve learned lots of lessons as a result of my own stupidity. And we’ve gotten better and here we are today, really trying to figure out continue to try to figure out like, how can we continue to simplify, we exist to simplify what it takes to leverage tools and software to build and deliver a better client journey. So you can get more clients make them happier, while simultaneously making you and your team’s life easier. So like, that’s like the mission of hey, there’s got to be even a better way to do it. So that’s what we beat our heads against, we beat our heads on every day to try and make that better and better and better.

Jeremy Weisz  7:25 

Brad, I want to have you walk through what you did with a dentist, because it’s very instructive on, it’s a service professional, but also they used it beyond their dental practice. Before we get there, you mentioned lessons of stupidity. So I have to ask, what were some of those lessons of stupid?

Brad Martineau  7:47 

Well, that’s like a whole different podcast app. So it’s the same lessons of stupidity that everybody has in the run a business. And I think we mentioned before, came up, we were talking before Alex for Mozi. And he’s got one of his Tweet, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, wherever else to place it gets real, it gets posted. He’s got one that says, entrepreneurship in life, something to the tune of entrepreneurship with life is a never ending exercise of figuring it out. So it basically is like, so stop feeling bad, because you don’t have it figured out like that is life is the figuring of it out. And so I mean, I could go on and on, like the wrong business model. Or trying to scale a business model beyond how far it could actually go to the way that you set expectations for team members to how you price things like it’s, I tell if you’re ever a client of mine, and you’re on any of our calls, you’ll hear me say this all the time, I’ll say one of two things. I’ll remind you that any good idea I have is only because I’ve done it wrong at least three times. And so that’s where it comes from, because I made all the stupid mistakes that we all make like, oh, in hindsight, it’s always, that was really dumb. And obviously, hindsight is always 2020. Also will either say that, or I’ll say asked me how I know. So anytime you give me advice, like ask me how I know. And then today actually at a call a client’s done right before this one, I said, ask me how I know. And I said actually don’t because I’m not really in the mood to relive painful memories today. So there’s just lots of lessons of things that when you’re trying to grow, it means you’re trying to go into a place where you’ve never been before, which means you have to make decisions. So, behind me, I’ve got this as my mantra, it’s on my hat to dollar which is decide, act, learn, repeat. This came out of the fact that I used to feel embarrassed or ashamed of like, how did I not get everything perfect from the beginning? And then I’m like, well, no, that’s not actually the process of life, the process of life and the process of progresses, decide, take action and then stop and pay attention. And if you screwed up and then you repeat and then you make a new decision based on what you learned, and you’ll get to success faster, the faster you can go through this cycle, rather than sitting around and trying to guess what the best answer is, so I say that half-jokingly but if we really wanted to, we could dive into I could give you lots of lessons of stupidity,

Jeremy Weisz  10:06 

What’s the top one that sticks out to you?

Brad Martineau  10:10 

The top one that sticks out would have to be. So there are two that come to mind immediately as the biggest ones that had I was let’s just call it the biggest impact. And the first one of the foundational one is how long it took for me to actually sit down and with practicality and clarity, define what I actually wanted. And then require that the business and everything else aligned to it. And there’s two pieces. One is actually it takes courage for you to declare out loud what you want, courage that you can actually go get it and then also courage that you don’t care what somebody else says about it, I actually think the biggest amount of pressure we have, and we’re going to decide what we want is not isn’t enough, it’s actually sorry, it’s actually what people will think that we’re actually setting the bar too low. Like, we’re not really comfortable just saying, you know what, if I made a half a million dollars, or $250,000, a year or $150,000, whatever it’s like if I made that for the rest of my life, and I could work this number of hours or whatever, like that would work for me, because what I really care about is whatever, whatever, whatever. And we allow ourselves because of the way the gurus talk in the grind culture and whatever. It’s like, well, I can’t do that. And I feel like a cop out or whatever. It’s like, no, I’m really clear that like, for me, I’m really clear that I get into the office about 10:00, because I’m up at 6:00, sometimes 5:00, playing basketball, and then I go coach basketball. And that is a piece that I’m committed to. And I will sacrifice the eight figures of income, the multiple seven figures of income, the whatever, like I’m okay with it, because I’m really clear how much I actually need to not need to survive, but need to live the life that I want. And it took me a while to get to that point. One because I was embarrassed to admit that the number was lower than like a really sexy number that you would post on social media. And I didn’t understand that just because I said that’s the bare minimum. Or like, I’d be fine at that level.

Jeremy Weisz  12:15 

It doesn’t mean you can’t grow beyond that.

Brad Martineau  12:18 

Exactly. That was the other piece. It doesn’t actually it’s not a ceiling.

Jeremy Weisz  12:22 

Because I’ve heard people on the show Brad like exactly that. Like, they initially go, I’d be happy if I was replaced my salary for $50,000. And then they get to that point. And they’re like, huh, what’s next? What’s next? So it doesn’t — like you’re saying, does it limit?

Brad Martineau  12:40 

Right. So? And so the other thing that led to that challenge for me was that I wasn’t aware of any like, tactical or like practical tool to capture it. So we created one, it’s called the return document. It’s the thing I started with, with every client, they’re like, hey, what should I do here, here? Here? I’m like, I don’t know, what are you trying to make happen? And essentially, it defines. It defines your return in the three currencies, I believe there’s only three currencies that we have to spend. And we’re only trying to get three currencies. And I believe it’s in this order, time, energy and money. So time, how much time do I want to be spending in the business energy has to do with what’s my role? So when I’m spending that time, what am I spending it on? The last one is how much money and you’re defining a floor, not a ceiling, which goes to your point of you set the number, and I look at it through the lens of if I would like right now, if I could picture a future, I hit this time, this type of role and this amount of money. And I could write that for 30 years what I could do with it. Now, I’m probably not going to be good with it for 30 years. But when I define that, all of a sudden, this is what happens only like 99% of the time when we get entrepreneurs to define it is they’re like, oh, I’m way closer than I thought I wasn’t like You’re welcome. Now you can get all the head trash you had about how far behind you are. So that would be the first one is just it took way too long. Because I was embarrassed of how small it was to start. Like I was just embarrassed, like, oh, I’d be content with $100,000 or whatever it was. And then but once and I still remember the day I was on a walk, just like thinking through in my head. And I actually said it out loud to myself. And I don’t remember what the number is irrelevant. Remember what the numbers were, what the hours were or whatever. It was like, no, this is what I actually want to do. And saying it out loud. There was like, oh, and I don’t actually don’t feel ashamed. I’ll go into any meeting with a bunch of people that have like eight figure businesses that are talking about their multi seven figure incomes be like no, like, I’m not preaching that you’re wrong at all. And I’m really comfortable that this is what I want. And I’m totally content with it. And in the amount of time that I work, I’m going to try and make as much money as I can. So that was liberating. So that was one big mistake and then every time I get away from it, I had spent the mistake that we relearn again. It’s like oh, wait, I need to go back to this and remind myself, I’m not actually behind just because I started to listen to podcasts and got excited about what I might be able to do. Let me just come back to and that honestly, for me, it’s probably once a quarter, I have to go and I rewrite it all out actually regenerate it all. So I can get…

Jeremy Weisz  12:47 

I think I’m a slow learner too. I think I’m a slow learner. It is probably once a week.

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