Jeremy Weisz 18:21
And people don’t want to do it. Right. I mean, they don’t want to go around and check all that they don’t want to have their team gone and check all that every month.
Cash Miller 18:30
And yeah, that’s exactly it. So I was offering to do it. And we would just develop a route where we could do it quickly. You know, and hit five restaurants, you know, a rep or annoyed, someone would go out, get 10 restaurants in a day or something, do all the inspections before they open the doors and make sure they’re all kind of clustered together. So you get to them quickly. Yeah, and then come back and say, Okay, we have 1000s of dollars for the work. And I got signed off on what to do already. Yeah. And then we would just schedule it out over the next week. Yeah, so having something of an angle in business is important. I would
Jeremy Weisz 19:04
I love to hear the equivalent of inspections, these inspections to increase inspections. That was for the Miller casino services to what is the equivalent in agency life like I get up these and I just want to point out some of the stuff that you did you work with the Hard Rock Las Vegas Hilton MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay, and you did re upholstery work for these companies. And but I’d love to hear what’s the equivalent of the inspection idea that gets you in the door.
Cash Miller 19:40
Probably I would equate it to traffic. So one of our standard practices is when we launch we build a lot of websites. Okay. You know, I’ll build 150 to 200 Every year, you know, for companies, custom sites, insurance sites and whatnot. But what we do on the back end is we’ll install Google Analytics on every site, regardless of whether you’re doing SEO or anything else. And the reason we do it is because we if we track a history on that, then we can go use though that data as a reference point to, you know, they’re already a client, which case, I can take the data and say, okay, you’ve got this great website and such, but you’re not doing anything to drive traffic to it.
And I have the proof. Right? So if you want to be able to get more out of it, well, you need this is the service, you know, that would work for you in your particular case? So do you want to, you know, your website is a tool, you want to take that tool and make it more productive? Yeah, if you do, then it might be a paid ad service, it might be SEO, whatnot. So that’s one of the things by having the stats. So it’s a standard practice for us every launch, we automatically whether they ask for it or not, we’re going to install the stats so that we have the record. And then we can go dig into those records and then approach those clients.
Jeremy Weisz 20:59
I love that. Yeah, I mean, even if you offer to someone say, Hey, do you have Google Analytics installed on your site? They’re probably like, No. And we’ll install it, and we’ll analyze it, there you go. But obviously, you’re gonna have a prescription according to what you see. Do you want us to check your restaurant once a month and see what’s broken?
Cash Miller 21:24
Yeah, basically, you know, I say, we will get one, one or two requests out of the entire year for people that, you know, asking us to actually install it, you know, because they’ve set up an account, they’ll provide the code, the rest of them don’t do it. I’m like, okay, you know, we have a more advanced platform for people that are actively doing marketing and stuff, and then we’re able to pull that data in through an API. But, you know, if they’re not set up that way, you know, that way, we already have it. And also, if they come to us and say, hey, you know, do you have something on it?
Because occasionally, we’ll get the request, yes, we can pull the data we have, you know, we’re going to have it no matter what. But yeah, it’s one of those things, too, you know, there’s also some other things too, like we use website scanners for potential new clients, so that we can basically give them an audit and we’ll go through the audit, there’s other companies that do the same kind of thing. You know, where it’s, Hey, we’ll show you all the potential improvements you would be able to make on the site, which can improve your traffic, your SEO, and so you know, the different things that are going on, because depending on what you’ve got, so we’ll do that on the front end. But you know, the data and stuff is going to be on the back end for existing.
Jeremy Weisz 22:32
We’ll talk about so first of all lesson is, if you’re feeling burnt out, as entrepreneur, you should join the army and get deployed to Iraq now, just as a solution to your burnout. We’ll talk about how you write that information parlayed into the Titan Digital, but I just want to for a second, if you’re listening to the audio version, there’s gonna be a video version two, and I’m pulling up here, Titan digital.com, so you can see their website. But it’s funny because I was researching Cash before we did the interview. I already knew you did without doing any research as like this person did something in casinos. Okay. Your first name is Cash, first of all, okay. But there’s a book I forgot what the book is called. But I was looking up the research. And there’s research on why it’s not weird that so many dentists are named dentists.
And there’s actual research showing that people are likely to have names that are related to their occupations. And so there’s actual scientific research on this. I forgot the book talks about this and popularized it a little bit more, but there’s a higher percentage of if you look at all the dentists and their names, the high percentage named Dennis, so that popped in my head. I’m like, he had to do something with casinos, because his name is Cash and that actually turned out to be true.
Cash Miller 24:06
Yeah, actually, people ask, you know, my name after Johnny Cash and stuff, and I don’t know. I like him. You know, I love his music and stuff, but I’m not named after Johnny Cash. I like to say, you know, like my dad, he was trying to predict the future when he named me. I’m named after a James Garner movie character where the movie was named Cash, McCall. And it’s from like, 1965. I’ve probably watched it like 20 times. But the character in the movie that James Garner plays, he is a business mogul that buys and sells companies. He takes them. He buys distressed businesses. He fixes them up. And then he sells them. Yeah. And it’s James Garner and his prime. He was probably about 35 or something. We did the movie. Yeah. So yeah.
And you were destined so desperately trying to Yeah, my father was trying to predict the future by naming me after a guy that would end up in business and my, my family as a whole has an entrepreneurial bent anyway. Yeah, we don’t really we, what did your dad do? My father and while ended up in Vegas he ran multiple companies over the years. I took over the business when I got out of the army the first time because he’d become a commodities trader actually doing his own brokerage. But he moved to Vegas because of the sports books. Yeah, he was a handicapper. And could figure out, you know, who was winning and stuff. And he had done it since, like, 1980. Wow, I never took to it. My uncle though did and I have a cousin that did.
Jeremy Weisz 25:46
Yeah, I know. It’s amazing how spot on those are, and how they know that stuff. I have zero idea.
Cash Miller 25:53
Well, what it was was reams of memories of the old like Collmenter pads and stuff, you know, the grade with all lions on him and everything, books and books and books. But he was really good at predicting. And in sports, if you can win, and it’s like, 52.7% of the time, as long as you don’t change your bed, you will make money. So, yeah, he was really interested in that. And that’s why I ended up in Vegas to begin with as a kid.
Jeremy Weisz 26:19
So how did Titan Digital start?
Cash Miller 26:25
Titan Digital came along as my exit plan from the army. This is the second time. So because I was learning SEO, you know, one of the things I learned early and building out this website was that I didn’t want to write all the content. Now that’s a lot of work, right? So I started looking at places where I was publishing to get the backlinks since that show, back in the day, it was the days of like E zines and stuff, which still exists, but they’re not, you know, were very effective anymore. But I was, you know, publishing content there. So I started looking around. And I said, Okay, who else would be an expert in this particular subject of management accounting? I started contacting business coaches. Yeah, I’m like, well, they’re gonna know and they were writing content.
So I would start reaching out to them, and eventually I had about 25 or so that were allowing me to publish their stuff, you know, and I would give them the backlink, so I wasn’t having to pay for it. But some of the pieces would, you know, become popular and everything it was before the days of duplicate content and stuff. Yeah. So I developed a few relationships with those people. And in a few instances, the coaches asked me, you know, what, because eventually, my traffic numbers were getting pretty good. And they were asking me what I was doing for it, and I would explain to them, and they would be like, Can you do it for us? And I’m like, Well, sure, you know, you pay me some money. It’s, you know, it was a little bit of side freelance stuff, but it kept allowing me to practice and test more things. Towards the end of my Army Enlistment. Yeah, I was actually I was in Afghanistan
Jeremy Weisz 28:02
You’re charging people, you’re in the army at this point, and you have a side gig basically charging people for SEO service.
Cash Miller 28:08
Okay, yeah, I’ve got my own side, hustle, hustle going on and stuff before, you know, it was everything was a side hustle. So, I’m in Afghanistan, and I had actually right before we deployed, I managed to land a client that was an m&a company, a mergers and acquisitions company. And they wanted me to run Pay Per Click ads. And I’m like, Sure, I can do that. It was like a referral from somebody else. And I’m like, Yeah, I can run, you know, pay per click ads, no problem. And, but they didn’t know I was in the army. I wasn’t telling anybody.
Jeremy Weisz 28:42
You could take a picture. And here’s where I’m at right now. Here’s me in the middle of the night.
Cash Miller 28:48
Right. And now the internet was spotty out there, of course, but we did have access and stuff. And we’d have the, like, the MWR, we places where, you know, computer banks and stuff, you know, go get a terminal work for a little bit, do whatever you’re doing. So what I would do is in the evenings, I would run, you know, Google Pay Per Click ads on Google AdWords, you know, as it was known back then. And so I would go in the evenings. And I would work on their account, I would get on one of those computers, I would access it from our base in Kandahar. And I would work on that account. And I remember, it was hilarious, because the client wanted me to get on a call. And we didn’t have like, you know, like we have now with Zoom and things like that. So that stuff didn’t exist. And I didn’t have a phone, you know, out there.
But some other people brought one and they were super expensive, you know, to have the minutes and everything because I said it’s Afghanistan, right? So I said, Okay, I will and a buddy said I’ll loan you my phone, you can call them up. So I’m here on this base in the middle of Kandahar, at 11 o’clock at night using a satellite phone. So I called back and they had no clue and I’m discussing their account. And I’m actually not even in a Building I like, under the stars and stuff, because it was the quietest place I could find. It was actually to be outside because it was late. Yeah. And yeah. And I got nothing around me except for, you know, a bunch of rock and stuff in the walls. So yeah, I’m like discussing their, to their account and everything and they’d never had one. No idea. I have no idea at all that I’m in the middle of this like, yeah, and Afghanistan, and I’ve been managing the account the entire time. Yeah, I’m like, Well, if I can make it work here, I could probably because as I get close, I’m like, maybe I can make a living at this.
Jeremy Weisz 30:34
Let me put all the barriers possible. Lack of internet, no phone, living in a barracks bombs around me. I could probably do it in the US, though, right?
Cash Miller 30:45
Yeah, yeah. If you can get it done that way, you can definitely make it work in the US.
Jeremy Weisz 30:50
So because you could have stayed in the army? So you left at what point? Do you decide, okay, I just need to, I need to do this.
Cash Miller 31:02
I ended up in Afghanistan for like six months. And I kind of decided at the time, yeah, the army comes to me and says, look for an extra $500 a month. Yeah, because our deployment was 12 months, the army, when I was in Iraq had something known as stop loss, which kept people from leaving until the deployment was over. But the army had ended the practice. And I had seen, you know, where I met a lot of guys, I knew a lot of people that hated them, they were being forced to stay longer than necessary. And I’m like, and there were a number of us that over the period it, what they were going to have to do is release us from the military, you know, they would send us back home, so we could out process like normal and everything. And we had, there’s about 20 of us in my company, or something that ended up doing that $500 a month, my job is literally to go on the road, every other day, on average, to go to a you know, like a dozen different bases, to take supplies and stuff.
And we have to go through the middle of Kandahar, and you’re gonna pay me an extra $500 to continue to do that for another six months, like an extra 500 bucks a month for six more months. So you won’t give me three grand to keep doing that. Where you know, it’s IEDs and stuff, and people want to know, I can go home and I can get out or I can make a few extra dollars and risk my life now. I’m good. I’ve done enough risk, you know, there’s a point where you feel like, you know, you’ve gotten lucky, you know, you’ve known because I knew people that weren’t so lucky, you know, friends and stuff that, you know, that were killed while we’re over there. And I was like, I have a family. And by then I had a daughter too.
And I’m like, I can’t risk it, you know, there’s no way. And that, and also the constant deployments. You know, I, out of those four and a half years, I was in the second time, I was literally gone from home over to have it. Yeah, you know, between training deployments and stuff. So I’m like, I gotta, I can’t keep doing this. And by then I was really starting to understand what I was, you know, looking at from, you know, I got into this SEO thing. And I, you know, I’m starting a business from scratch. That’s a different challenge. So it was like, yes, yeah. So I knew before we even deployed that I was going to come back early. Yeah, before the rest of the unit, because I was not going to extend there’s no way. I say it’s just that it was too much of a risk. So, you know, I can’t
Jeremy Weisz 33:29
Cash, you know, that’s another big motivator, I bet. Which is, you know, just being away from family.
Cash Miller 33:37
I know, with the military. It’s totally, it’s huge. There’s only so many people that go full careers. It’s a real strain on family life. And there’s a lot of people who end up divorcing and stuff because of it. It’s just a lot to deal with, you know, so anybody that makes it a career, you know, I applaud them for being able to stick it out. I do wonder how much you know, that they’ve kind of paid the price for that? Yeah, I’d say because I always love when I hook up with veterans and stuff. And we kind of talk, you know, our own experiences and everything. Yeah. And I’ve run into people that I’ve crossed. You know, I have a client that just signed today. And he served in Germany and left two years before I was there. Yeah. And so we do some of the same places and stuff. And it’s always an experience, you know, talking with them.
Jeremy Weisz 34:18
I want to talk about the evolution of the services. Also the evolution of the pricing, right. So in the beginning, it’s SEO, then someone’s like, Hey, can you do this PPC thing? You’re like, Sure. And then in the beginning, how do you decide how to charge versus now?
Cash Miller 34:38
It’s really a lot different. And I see this with a lot of, you know, I’ve talked to other agency owners that are just getting their start. Yeah. And pricing is an issue because they’re trying to get whatever they can I, you know, I literally just a couple of weeks ago, I talked with a guy that’s, you know, starting his own deal up and he’s actually a 20 year army retiree that just got out like a year or so ago, and he’s trying to make a go of it, and we were talking pricing is, it’s a struggle. When I first got out, I would take any project that I could. And I started with just SEO, because that’s what I knew. What I did not know was how many people I would run into at the time. This is 2011. How many people I would run into that didn’t even have a website. So I’m like, Well, I can’t SEO something that doesn’t exist. Yeah. So that is you talking about the evolution of services. I started offering websites.
Yeah. Because we build everything on WordPress and stuff. And at the time, you could get templates. And, and you still can, of course, but then, you know, you will learn the back end. You know, with most businesses, the best managers are the ones that don’t have to be an expert at any particular thing. But at some point, it helps if they’ve dabbled in it, you know, and understand that we’re in our workings like, to this day, I still do a bunch of the SEO on our site. Yeah. Because I know it really well. Yeah. And so you take it as an evolution. And then eventually you have clients that start asking you can you do this and most full service agencies now said, at some point, they just had to say, yes, you know, when social media started becoming big, hey, can you do our Facebook posts?
And can you run our ads? Well, you know, I’m doing this other stuff. So it’s natural, I’m gonna say yes to that, and then I’ll figure it out. And then eventually, you get good at it, you know, and, you know, we start taking on employees that over time, they’re experts in particular areas, but services, you have to be careful that nobody starts out charging what they really should. Yeah. Because they’re trying to land business. Yeah, over time. You have to evolve. So the tricky thing is like, Okay, you start to realize, I look at services from the standpoint of hourly, we charge set feet, okay.
But when I’m judging how long, like what that fee should be, I have to look at it from an hourly standpoint of how much time we’re going to have to put into it to make it successful. Yeah, so I have to keep that in the back of my mind. So if we’re predetermining fees on the front end, yeah, I’m calculating, I’m doing the math on the back end. Yeah. And when you think about any service, I don’t care what business you’re in, the more you learn about it, the better informed you’re going to be when you start to determine it, you know, what that ultimate price point should be? And I mean, we charge five times, six times, you know, what we did when I first started out? Yeah, and, you know, you talk about, like, salaries and stuff have gone up, you know, you know, there’s a trade off there. So you have to consider I can be on the more experienced end, but it’s going to cost me more with people, which means I gotta charge more for I can be on the less experienced, yeah, so I can keep my costs down. Now. So pricing is a mind game that you actually have to play, not necessarily with the client, you’re playing it with it. To see what you’re worth
Jeremy Weisz 37:57
You mentioned Cash about, I want to highlight a little bit about what you do. And I want to talk about the franchise piece, too. You mentioned, obviously, you have a wide variety of types of companies that you help. Yeah, I was reading like from Harley Davidson, to women’s health, to insurance to attorneys to you mentioned the truck driving schools I want to talk about, I know you help a lot of independent insurance agencies, I want to talk about Ace Hardware, because that’s helping also kind of franchisees and what you did there, then I’d love to talk about Titan digital and what you’re doing with the franchise space, but start with just Ace Hardware. What do you do with them?
Cash Miller 38:44
Well, in the case of ACE, a few years ago, I actually bought an agency. We’ve got multiple locations, one of which is in Colorado. Yeah, I’m in Tennessee, and we’ve got another office in Missouri. And we’ve also got staff in Costa Rica, you know, we’re spread out quite a bit. So in this case, Ace Hardware actually came along, because I bought the other agency, and it had a couple of 100 accounts and, and the owner of that one had managed to figure out a way to get nice hardware, he had a lot of contacts.
And so when we took over those accounts, what you know, what we found was, it really goes down to, you know, what are their goals, Ace Hardware, itself has their own programs. Yeah, and they want to be, they want their franchisees using those programs, but a lot of the franchisees have really built up their own like many empires, and they want to have more control over that and Ace allows them to have that control. So with franchisees, you know, of any Indian, you know, whichever chain it is, right? You have to kind of see what structure that they have that they don’t allow.
What we deal with email marketing is heavy. Yeah, because they have a lot of rewards programs. So you have to see what kind of assets that you have. Well Getting those, you know, emails, people signing up for rewards was an asset. And then you know, they are big on branding, because you know, as we can hear the commercials all over the place and stuff and have forever. Yeah, well, they aren’t really pushing specific products, what we’ve actually done is we’ve got some clients where we’re rebuilding sites and stuff and replacing them, we’re putting focus on the brands they deal with, you know, rather than it because they don’t run ecommerce stores.
ACE has their own eCommerce ecosystem, so they prefer to just push them over there. And then they’ll get the credit through a CA through referral codes and stuff now that comes through the URLs. So what they’re looking at is, you know, you want to be able to push the walk in traffic, programmatic advertising, advertising is huge in that, you know, the real really own your market, I’m real big about, you know, small businesses. You know, if you’re an Ace Hardware, yes, you’re part of a larger ecosystem, but you in many towns have 2030 40,000 people and stuff, they are the primary hardware store, you know, and there might be some other ones, you want to let everybody know, you want to own that market.
And I say, regardless of what type of business, it’s very possible to do that, it’s harder to do it in a place like Nashville or something, right? But a smaller town, like I know, I’m in a town of about 170,000 People just south of Nashville, we’ve got one Ace Hardware, but that ACE has to compete with a Lowe’s and a Home Depot. So for them to really put their brown brand out locally is very important. In which case, we combined the email with the programmatic. And then we’re highlighting these big brands that they carry, rather than, you know, individual products or departments, let’s say because they’ve got high margin stuff, lawnmowers and things like that. So it’s like, Okay, what’s really going to be the driver that’s differentiating you from? Like, safe because we know how brand loyalty can work, including to individual products. So if you say, Hey, we’re carrying like, they carry steel. Now, which is the STIHL? Yeah, so they carry that brand, and they have all sorts of outdoor lawn care stuff, you know, blowers and trimmers.
Jeremy Weisz 42:12
So it’s like, Hey you get them in for like fertilizer, and then they may want the high margin high profit lawn mowers or something like that.
Cash Miller 42:19
Yeah, exactly. In which case, I say and you show that brand loyalty, I want that brand. I don’t want the generic one. I don’t want to, you know, it’s the great value Walmart, I don’t care about that. Why do people still buy, you know, I say something that’s going to be a lot more expensive. Because they get to build brand loyalty. That’s why brands build up their stuff. So we try to we’re trying to leverage that loyalty to those individual brands that Ace Hardware actually sells.
Jeremy Weisz 42:42
Let’s talk about then you decide, okay. I’m getting good at this stuff. We have a lot of clients, and you have a franchising model. So talk about the decision to do that and how that works.
Cash Miller 43:00
The franchising is, you know, the, I like to say, so in this particular in the digital marketing field, right. In the digital marketing field, what you have is a very low barrier to entry. What we find is everybody’s an expert right? Now, at one time, I was an expert, I knew SEO and stuff. And so I started up an agency. It was just me, and, you know, now I’ve got, you know, 30 plus people, but it is an evolution to actually become an expert. So the barrier to entry into this field is not very high, everybody, you know, watch some course on YouTube or something. And suddenly, you’re an SEO expert. Now or, you know, I don’t know how many times I’ve run into somebody who says, Well, my, my brother and or my, you know, my brother in law or something is
Jeremy Weisz 43:48
It’s like, my niece uses Facebook. I think she could run my ads.
Cash Miller 43:52
Exactly. You know, so that’s still this, like, very common occurrence and like, okay, yeah, sure. But while the barrier to entry is really low, the barrier to success is extremely high. Yeah, we managed to make the Inc 5000 list for this most recent year and stuff. And it took a while to get there. Yeah. Everybody, I was on a podcast, or not on one, but listening to one yesterday. And they mentioned that, in this particular field, they see the hump as being about $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Yeah, as being the point that people can’t get beyond and they’re right. That’s like one of them. You actually will have multiple if you try to build a business in this field, because as soon as you get beyond yourself, the money you’re making on the accounts is just gonna go to pay employees. So what we’ve done because in the digital marketing space, franchising has not really happened.
I say, we’re a very fragmented industry, and it’s, you have some really big companies and such. And you have some companies that were like former Yellow Page companies that got into the space and said stuff, so there are a few big corporations. And there’s tons of small, you know, agencies 123, peer to person jobs and stuff. But there’s not really much in the way of franchising. And the idea with the franchising is that we will act because the barrier usually is fulfillment of the services, if you’re a single person, right? Like when I first started, okay, I had to go out and I had to sell. Yeah. And then once I did the selling, okay, now I gotta go back, and I got to do the work. And if I’m doing the work, I can’t sell more. But if I’m working, you know, if I’m selling, I can’t do the work, you know, so I’m stuck in between. So a lot of freelancers end up taking on a project, and they do the project, and they gotta go find the next project. So with us, the concept is, will act as the fulfillment. Okay, you can focus on the selling, I like to equate it to like State Farm farmers, things like that, right?
Yeah, State Farm is writing the actual policy. Okay, they’re providing it. But it’s the agent that builds the relationship with the clients, making sure that they want to stay on board, what more can they do? Expand the relationship and build as many of those relationships as you can? Yeah, and then they’ve still got to act, you know, they still have to deal with the State Farm. Yeah, they still have to make sure that their policy is going to be correct and stuff. So we act kind of like that. We’re the fulfillment. So if you end up getting a service, you know, if you’re doing paid ads, you need a website, whatever, our staff is going to take care of putting that together. And under the franchise model, we can deal directly with the client. Yeah, in our field, there’s a lot of like white label services and stuff, it’s somebody selling it, but somebody else is actually doing the work anyway. But the problem is, those people can’t communicate, you know, whoever’s actually doing it. So you’ve got you’re running paid ads, well, they gotta go contact the owner, who then has to contact the client so much, versus
Jeremy Weisz 46:56
There’s a lot of middle people and middle communication that can be cut out.
Cash Miller 47:01
Exactly. You’ve got those middle people. So the idea is, I will give you a permanent project manager that works with your projects, the clients you bring in so that you can build a relationship with the project manager, but they can deal directly with the client. Same thing with account managers and stuff. If you need a paid ad strategist, you need somebody to help close a deal.
Yeah, well, we can provide that extra extra expertise, that support that you need when you ask for it. Yeah, because it’s all under one individual brand still. But you’re also going to be able to build your agency up at a quicker pace, you’re going to scale it easier. And you’re going to build equity and value in that. Now that the beauty of you know, if you build up a State Farm, you know, or something along those lines, is you’re building up something with equity. If you’re working for one of these big corporations, and you’re selling and stuff, you’re the rep, you’re not building any equity for yourself, though, there’s no way there’s no payout, you know, the economy, we all know, it’s like been kind of weird and can’t nobody can quite figure out what he wants to do.
Yeah. Well, if those companies change course, and they decide to lay people off, you’ve got nothing. Yeah. Versus if you are building up an agency of your own, then you’re going to be able to build equity in that. Yeah. And that’s the problem is the guys that are doing it, one two person and stuff. They can’t get over the hump. You know, I say the guy I talked to who was a 20 year old, got retired. Luckily, now he’s made it to the end. He’s trying to start something up. But he’s got a freelance graphic designer, and somebody else helping with SEO, they’re still in the army. So he doesn’t really have a staff. Yeah, and that’s the problem. And he’s trying to sell to the next person and he’s got to do a bunch of the work himself.
Jeremy Weisz 48:44
I’d love to hear who is an ideal franchisee, but I mean, it’s almost like, you’re picturing yourself in the barracks, and you just wish, okay, I’m gonna just get the client and just hand it to a company to take care of the rest, almost. So who’s an ideal franchisee? For Titan Digital franchising?
Cash Miller 49:05
Well, I picture myself, like about a year in, of actually doing this? Yeah, because when I first started, literally, yeah, they talked about putting a shingle out and stuff, I ran it in an office, I said, I gotta make this, you know, I have to do this. So the ideal person is, comes in two forms actually with us. You know, they’re like, I mentioned that there are large corporations that do digital marketing, but when you’re so people that are doing sales and those large corporations, what they’re learning is not just that product, they’re learning to understand what digital marketing is because we do something that people don’t often appreciate how complicated it can be to get the right strategies and make them work. You know, and that’s, there’s a lot that goes into it, whether you’re running an ad, you know, like say, you know, if you’re, you’re doing ads for programmatic or pay per click, yeah, I think you know, people think oh, add some keywords into a paid ad.
And then you’re going to Write some descriptions, you’re doing ad copy. Okay. That’s what you’re doing. You’re doing what’s the teaser to get someone to click the link is a little more complicated than just hey, yeah. Because they say anybody can write a Google paid ad. Okay, yeah, anybody can, and I’ll show you how much money they’re going to lose, you know. So, you know, for a number of reasons. But what you do, like I say, if you’re working for one of these large companies that have gone into digital marketing, that might have been a phone book company at one time and stuff, you’re learning that ecosystem, you’re learning what things you know, the ins and outs of websites, paid ads, SEO and stuff, you understand how to talk about it, because you and you understand what goes on.
So your education is there. And that makes a really good candidate, because, you know, what you don’t want is you’re tired of probably the corporate life, right? You know, you’re tired of answering to somebody that you’ve never even met in person. And so you’re tired of that, you know, you want the independence to make your own schedule, you know, they have an entrepreneurial bent, but they want to have the support system, you know, they work for a large corporation because of the support structure. Yeah. But they’re tired of all of that, there’s a lot of headaches that would come with working for large corporations, you know, there’s a lot of drama and stuff and things that go on.
So that’s one. And then the other one would be, yeah, agency owners, that are running into those comps, you know, they’re smaller, 123 people and stuff, and they’re running into the hump of how do I take this to another level, they can’t figure it out, it can be hard, you try to get to, you know, you get to one, you know, you think you’re over it. And then you go backwards, I say, you take on, you know, you land and account your dream account, and then you’re trying to figure out how to get it done. And you’re spending so much time on those accounts, that you can’t sell more, so you can’t grow. Let’s say you’re stuck.
You’re one of the things that helped us years ago, is for about five years, I actually had a partner. And this I didn’t take the partner on until I was about a year and a half in, but I was hitting the hump. So I brought on somebody that knew sales, I was good at sales, but I also needed to get the production done. So I partnered up, we’re not partners anymore. You know, we’ve since parted ways, and we’re friends. But the You know, you have to have something right, you have to change the dynamic to be able to grow, you know, and that’s, that’s who makes the ideal franchise owner, you know, they understand that they’ve hit the home.
Jeremy Weisz 52:32
How does it work? I know the franchise model, typically, there’s usually an upfront fee. And then a percentage. How does that part work for someone interested in it?
Cash Miller 52:45
Yeah, so we charge you know, there’s an upfront fee, yes, we do in house financing on those fees, and stuff to make it a little easier, especially we understand coming from a corporate job. Now we’re looking at that you have that knowledge. Yeah. So you do want to be prepared as a franchise owner knowing that you’re going to have to build your book. And that can take a little while, you know, and it really depends on how aggressive that’s why we like people that already have experience, if you have someone that starting from scratch, and they don’t know the industry, and they’re going to really struggle, and we’re not going to want to like, we’ll try to help you, but you’re not really the ideal candidate, because we know what it’s going to, you know, the struggle that you’re gonna go through. And you’re and I don’t want to set people up for failure now. So you’ve got to consider that the royalty fee is really low. It’s like 3%, is all we’re doing. Because what we’re looking at is the fulfillment.
Yeah, is that we’re partnering with you to make sure that those services are taken care of, you know, we’re allowing them to price whatever they want, we have suggested prices, you know, we have set fulfillment fees, you know, for handling those services and stuff. So we give them plenty of margin room, you know, to be able to work with clients and different situations, which is really important. Because like I said, they’re going to be building their own book of business, you know, and they’ll find what services are best fit. I don’t, I was talking to somebody earlier today. And they were like, we can only sell this package and this package, you know, like we it’s these packages where they have no no way of doing any kind of ala carte, you know that to situate. So they’re literally forcing clients to buy products and services that the client doesn’t actually need because it’s part of the package. And there’s no flexibility there.
Jeremy Weisz 54:28
You know, in the end, like you mentioned, white label versus franchise, you take a bunch of risk also, because of your reputation, right, they’re representing Titan Digital at this point. So how do you get, are you going to vet people? You know, because someone may have the money, but they’re also representing your brand at this point. Right?
Cash Miller 54:51
Right. So we want to look at how long they’ve been doing this, you know, in the case of coming from like a large corporation, we’ll end up talking to some of the people they deal with references and stuff. Because what we need to see is temperament and ability to, you know, stick it out, because it’s going to it’s like any business, I don’t care if you’re a franchise as a it’s, it has a ramping-up period. So what we’re looking for is that you’ll have the perseverance, you know, usually the people we’re kind of looking at if they’re working with a large corporation, have they been there? 234 years, they’ve had the perseverance, they’ve been able to build the book once. So they’re going to have confidence in themselves to build it again. Yeah, it’s, and this time, they’ll be more motivated, because they’re doing it for themselves, you know, versus, you know, turning those accounts over, you know, the corporation takes care of it. And that’s, and it says, Hey, go find the next one.
Yeah. So because we want you working with these owners and stuff and building them up, you don’t have to do a lot of heavy lifting. So we’re looking at that we’re looking at, in the case of existing owners, that are running small agencies, you know, that’s a conversation of what you’ve been doing with them, you might want to talk to a couple of their clients and stuff just to see, you know, what, you know, are they good to work with, again, we want references and such. But if you’ve been doing it for a while, then it’s a matter of like, what have you been offering? Yeah, how has it worked and stuff. So it’s kind of a review of the agency to a small degree, you know, to see exactly what they’ve been able to accomplish and save the startup?
Jeremy Weisz 56:24
Cash, first of all, thank you. I want one last question. Before we ask it, I want to just point people to check out more if you want to learn more. You can go for the franchising piece. It’s Franchise.TitanDigital.com. If you just want to check out their website, TitanDigital.com. Last question. Cash is my favorite tool and software. This is a great topic. agency owners love this topic. I know you mentioned a couple of the ones like Google Analytics website scan, or what are some other of your favorite tools and software for agency owners
Cash Miller 56:58
When it comes to running an agency, one that we’ve taken to I mentioned a couple of agency analytics is one that’s become pretty good, one pretty big for reporting tools. Yeah, I’ve used probably half a dozen over the years and stuff, you know. And agency analytics is the one it’s a little pricier. Yeah, from that it’s about $5 per account, you put on something like that. But it’s got a really big advantage for what it’s able to display data wise, because they’ve got API feeds for most everything. So we’re able to show you what you’re doing with your program. Yeah, and your Facebook ads and your SEO, we can pull keyword data and stuff as far as rankings, things like that. So it’s very all encompassing. And what it does, two things I like is you can automate the reporting, just send out to everybody on a set schedule, right.
And it’ll always have that latest data, whatnot. But they do have a dashboard function that you can send them, you can set up the dashboard, and then share the link with the client. And they can see everything real time whenever they choose. Yeah, so that’s a really important piece. And, and so it’s got other things, the other thing I really have taken to is for years Pipedrive is I like to think of it as like Salesforce Lite, Salesforce can be very complicated. And Pipedrive has become an all encompassing tool, where it used to be from a sales standpoint, it is still that, but it’s got a very good CRM in there. Yeah, and on top of that, they’ve added project management software. So everything is pretty seamless. You start with the deal, which helps create the organization. And it’s very customizable, we got all sorts of fields to track different things. And then you can have the project in there. And they use the, you know, where you can slide everything, you know, from stages and such one stage to the next, you can just move them over the different projects you’re working on.
And you can template a lot of stuff. So you know, if you’ve got a certain way of doing your projects, you know, create the template and then automatically load that for the different types of projects. So we’ve got projects for SEO versus websites versus paid ad, you know, campaigns and stuff to get them up and running. So it’s extremely versatile. They’re still moving along with the project. But we’ve been happy with it. And one of the things that we’ve liked is because we’re an early adopter for their project stuff, we’ve used it for years for the deals, but they were willing to listen to us as we kept making suggestions. You know, it’s like, hey, we needed to do this and this and this. And they’re like, Okay, give us a little time. And they’ve got a pretty good community of people that are also providing more info and they’re giving up you know, out updates and stuff as they get things situated and say, hey, now we got this. So Pipedrive has been really good. Again, a little pricier depending on where you’re at and your own stage and stuff.
Jeremy Weisz 59:58
They’re really robust. I mean Yeah, I mean, you could use 5% of it and be good or you could use, you know, I found out that you could drag people to different columns and send automated emails. I mean, they do a lot of functionality. I actually had the founder, one of the founders on my podcast, who had 10,000 customers. Now they’re over 100,000 customers. And yeah, they, they know what they’re doing over there. Yeah,
Cash Miller 1:00:23
they really do. And we were from a, like CRM slash, I hate to knock a company. But we were using Zoho, which I know is very popular. I think it’s a 90 day difference for us, because the different functions are way more seamless. That’s the big thing is your projects working much better, because everything on the other platform was more of operating individually. And I needed them all to talk to each other. Yeah. So you can set up a project and it will pull deal data as a reminder to my project managers, hey, somebody’s got some money due when we get to this next stage, you know, things like that are in there. So that’s become one of our favorite, real big things.
And it was a bear to move over to this thing, because we had to get the entire company to reorient on their training and stuff on what they were doing. And we spent months getting it together. So no, you’re making a switch from a different software. I say you have to be prepared for it because it’s going to take a minute. And but if you’re patient and you’re willing to learn it, it becomes very intuitive. The big thing that really surprised me was how intuitive it actually was.
Jeremy Weisz 1:01:31
Yep. Um, any others are your favorites.
Cash Miller 1:01:42
Those too, and, yeah, honestly, like, We use Office 365. I’m not gonna say that I’m a huge fan of Microsoft and whatnot. But I do like the team’s function. Yeah. And one of the things I like is the fact that because it’s larger, and yes, Google, I know, there’s a difference between the two, that I’ve always found is because of SharePoint, I don’t know if Google has changed their structure. But we had a problem on that end, somebody created a file. And if they were to leave the company or something, they’re the owner of the file, and it was extremely hard. And SharePoint, you can keep everything, there’s no owner, yeah, to it. So the document can keep living, regardless of who’s using it and stuff. So that was one of the things that we preferred, but one of the things I like about is actually the team itself. Things like Pipedrive.
They have integrations, you know, and of course, Zapier is a great thing for integrating, you know, they integrate into pretty much everything you can think of now. But we’ve been able to set up Pipedrive notifications that tell me on teams, so I’m able to have Pipedrive notify me through a team’s channel that says it’s from Pipedrive. And teams has other integrations like that, you know, for other software, but it’s able to tell me when a deal closes, a project stage changes, whatever I wanted to basically, I’ve been able to set up automations to notify me so I can keep track of stuff without having to dig into everything. Yeah, so I like that I can just check the channel that’s sending me the notifications. And I can look through the last days worth of stuff. And I can see, you know, we signed a new client, we lost a client, a project moved along the stage, the project finished all of it, I’m getting updated, and I don’t have to go digging. And I don’t have to go ask.
Jeremy Weisz 1:03:25
Yeah. What about project management? Because I know you have a lot of clients, you have a lot of moving pieces. What do you like from a project management standpoint?
Cash Miller 1:03:40
Well, we’re actually using Pipedrive, we’re using Piper’s for the project management, I say Pipedrive only came out with the project management about, I want to say two years ago, something like that. So it’s still got some work to do. But what I like about it is it is seamless with the sales and the CRM. Okay, that’s the thing, because I go into an organization, I can find all the deals that were ever created, but I can also find all the projects we ever worked on. Now for that, and that was the problem. That’s the issue of multiple pieces of software.
I say we were using Pipedrive from a sales standpoint. But we were using Zoho from a CRM standpoint, which didn’t talk to our project side. Yeah, not very well anyway. And these things are, like, say seamless, they all talk to each other. And they can pull data from different areas. And that’s the thing, I can create a project in Pipedrive. And I can pull specific data from the deal side, you know, and pull it into the project. So that the project manager knows certain pieces of information. For example, if there are benchmark payments and stuff, I’m able to pull that data, but they can also pull in who the original deal creator was, you know, who sold it, and stuff. There’s a lot of things you’re able to do.
Jeremy Weisz 1:04:54
Gosh, First of all, thank you. This was fantastic. Thanks for sharing your journey and check out like So Titan digital everything they’re doing and more episodes of the podcast and thanks, Cash. Thanks everyone.
Cash Miller 1:05:10
Thank you for having me.
