Jeremy Weisz 16:09
No, it’s interesting. You know, you grow into your spaces by being flexible and innovative with okay, we’ll, you know, we could bring in partners and they could rent a desk here, that we’ll have a boardroom, people can bring in their clients and we’ll meet other people in the community, other businesses, other, you know, potential partners. Talk about your some key hires.
So it’s you and John, you’re in a spare bedroom. All right. And it doesn’t have to be people. But just like, position wise, take me through a little bit of the evolution of hiring. So after the spare bedroom, who was the next key position that you hired for?
Because at this point you’re getting clients and you’re kind of partnering with these other agencies. And you guys did a great job of kind of staying lean and profitable throughout these years. What was the first key hire?
Dave Taylor 17:02
Yeah, that first hire is actually still with us, which is just honestly a success story all on its own. And we’re so fortunate to have Matthew kind of stick with us. And he hung on for probably six months waiting to work with us and, and you know, I think it was just timing and life works out sometimes. And he was just coming out of school and double major in business and in marketing and was looking for an opportunity and so, you know, contacted me through LinkedIn. Did a very informal hey looking for an opportunity.
Jeremy Weisz 17:38
Why did he contact you?
Dave Taylor 17:41
I’m you know I’m going to say he probably contacted a bunch of different agencies and I you know I do have a voice on, on LinkedIn. So, you know, I think that there’s probably just something that I maybe posted that he was following and, and whatever, at the end of the day, you know, most likely it was just a happenstance where he was reaching out to others. And so it took us six months really to make the decision. And, I’ve said this on a couple of different interviews, but if you’re having that conversation of what’s the right time to hire, you’re probably past it. You’re probably past that real good time.
You’re overloaded with work. You’re running things all on your own. You don’t have that person to share or voice with or or or help. And it’s going to simply come down to you just got to make the decision sometimes to do it. And bringing in people sparks growth all on its own, because you all of a sudden have this free time to network more and get into the community more and ask for more referrals and, and cold call and do outreach.
And so that was a great hire. And he’s elevated himself to really helping teach the people that we bring in for media buying and managing data and building reports. And really he works directly with clients. He’s very open to building strategy with them. He’s not sitting there kind of going, I’ve got a job and this is my job. He’s built himself right into the business. And you know, I feel like we’ve given him the opportunity to do that. But, you know, we’re in a place now where we’re about to have another conversation about what does the future look like for him, because he wants to be here. And it’s great to say that after this long.
The other, you know, I guess key for us and, you know, I look across the board and I think that we’re really, really lucky to have everybody who’s here now. But, you know, John, my business partner here had a right hand man when he was, you know, at the previous job. And we courted this individual for a few years, honestly, until they were ready. And now, you know, they’ve moved into an operations role with us and really streamlined some stuff and really has become a go to for everybody when it comes to our internal communications, just making sure work is getting done. You know, project management and tasks.
So you have, you know, a key component when it comes to buying media and managing data. And then we have a really key component when it comes to internal operations and managing projects. And it allows people that, you know, come in who are new to really just find their lane, find their role, stick within it, and then once they get comfortable, there’s other opportunities. And you know, our onboarding is a little bit simpler now.
Jeremy Weisz 20:47
So I could see operations are key. So you definitely wanted to put in someone who’s helping streamline with operations. When Matthew first came on, what was the position that you, did you create this position for him or what position did you have in mind before he came in?
Dave Taylor 21:06
Yeah, it was a support. You know, John was underwater. You know, realistically when it comes to our roles, you know, I’m more, you know, face to the franchise kind of in front of customers working on strategy. You know, really just developing campaigns, developing creative messaging, identifying different platforms, what’s going to work best. And then when it comes to the technical side of building out conversions, tracking data, getting campaigns up and running, writing language, you know, that all kind of fell on John. And so it was really just getting John that support.
And so the one thing that we tell everybody here is we don’t want a job just to be a job. We want you to find the things you like to do. And then we can certainly find ways to evolve the job to include things. So you’re not just writing content for Facebook. You have other opportunities, whether it’s email automation or videography or reels or, you know, on the ad buying side, you want to learn about data. There’s lots of different, really good opportunities to evolve that role based on the interest and, you know, branding, creative design. They’ve got lots of different skill sets. And for us to just put them into one spot doesn’t necessarily make sense.
And so we took that same approach when we hired Matthew. And really it was just that we’ve got a lot to do and we need help. So it kind of happened organically that way. But over the years he’s really found his voice within the company and and really found a way to to be a key component, somebody who we honestly couldn’t live without, you know.
Jeremy Weisz 22:44
Dave, you mentioned operations. You know, you put someone in place. A key hire was operations. You mentioned project management, other things. Talk about just some of the software you use to run the business.
Dave Taylor 22:59
Yeah. I mean, we really simplify everything. You know, for the most part, you know, we use an internal communication system called ClickUp. ClickUp I think a lot of people use but don’t necessarily use it to its true ability. And that’s something that we’re always talking about internally about the best way to use it, because it is a great communication and project management tool.
Jeremy Weisz 23:21
We use ClickUp also. So you kind of use it also not just for project management, but also kind of what people use Slack for as well?
Dave Taylor 23:29
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, depending on the client, right. We use Slack. We use lots of different, you know, Teams comes into play all the time. You kind of have to just work with what they’re working with. But when it comes to internally, you know, ClickUp is certainly our thing. And then we use HubSpot.
But depending on the client, we might use MailChimp or Activecampaign or Klaviyo or HubSpot. And there’s just so many. And sometimes it comes down to budget, you know, if they’ve got the budget for a HubSpot and they’ve got the ability to actually use it properly, we’ll make that recommendation. If they want a more simplified communication tool, we’ll do that.
And again, I think that’s the key for us is, yeah, we’re a HubSpot partner. But at the same time, you know, we have the ability to look at each customer and go, you know, financially what makes the most sense resource wise, what makes the most sense? We’re not just grabbing boxes off the shelf and putting them in a shopping cart. We’re really looking at the business to determine what tools are going to be the best.
And, you know, like I said, ten years in, we’ve got the ability to do that because we’ve been introduced to so many different platforms and you can see the value. And then also you can see where people are just wasting money. Some people will have, you know, way too many plugins on their website that they’re paying for. They’ll have way too many communications tools that they’re not using. So we can streamline some of that stuff.
Jeremy Weisz 25:00
Let’s talk about the client side so I can see really, you start in a spare bedroom. You go to a coworking space, you go to a 300 square foot office, then 2000, then 3500. When you go back to the spare bedroom days, what was the first memorable milestone a client that you got that you considered a milestone for you?
Dave Taylor 25:27
I would say that, you know, because I have experience in, you know, working with clients for years and years and years before this, it wasn’t necessarily finding a client, it was just getting somebody to trust us that we could do it without the corporation behind us. So, you know, the one thing I was really proud of was that, you know, I built a couple of really key relationships with, like, you know, some some fun tourism type events and just being able to work with them, like there’s a company that used to be called Skyline Luge. And it turned into being called Downhill Karting. And they basically have like a kart track that goes down a ski hill and winds down the hill and is actually super fun for not just kids, but for all different age groups. And I just remember having some really difficult conversations with them.
They’re from New Zealand, headquartered in New Zealand, doing a lot of things on their own and kind of going like, yeah, I mean, we bought some media from you previously and now, you know, you’re telling us you can do this in a better way. And really we have to trust that that’s accurate because they’ve got a very short season. All based on when can we get the snow off of the mountain, and when is the snow going to come back on onto the mountain? And in Calgary, that’s not a long period of time. So I just remember, you know, kicking off their campaigns and seeing some success right away and just kind of starting to believe that we were making the right decisions.
So, you know. Yes, I was doing a lot of cold calling. But, you know, the one thing that I did when I left the Calgary Sun was I went to every single one of my clients and I said, hey, you know, thanks for the business. I’ll be back. And I went to an agency and I started calling all these businesses.
And then I left the agency and I went, man, what the heck am I going to do now? Like, I’ve just torched every relationship that I have because I can’t go to them and go, oh, I’m here now. I’m here now. I’m here now. I’m here now.
Like, what’s that going to do to my reputation? And that was a really key moment where I said, I got to start my own business, because if I go, I’ve done really well in the corporate job. I’ve gone to an agency, recognized challenges, and now I can go back to my clients and I can say, based on this, I’ve decided to elevate myself into, you know, founding an agency. And I believed that that would improve my reputation, improve my relationships. And it did.
And really like I said, you know, coming down to that first couple of clients and recognizing that we could actually achieve the success that we believed we could. We never turned back from that.
Jeremy Weisz 28:20
Dave, the evolution of your services, we take the Skyline Luge example where you’re offering paid media to start? What were the initial services you started off for the agency?
Dave Taylor 28:36
Yeah, I mean, the big one was programmatic. And programmatic really simply means, you know, display banners and, and banner ads that essentially just follow you around the internet based on your behavior or your interest, the things that you’re looking at, the websites you’re on, your demographic, etc. because we knew that we could connect those ad campaigns directly to a conversion and we could provide insight in in data. So that was the one thing that we knew that we could give to clients that they weren’t getting.
And we also knew we could buy it cheaper and we could sell it cheaper. So you know, you have a major corporation selling it for twenty bucks for every thousand times an ad is seen, we’re able to sell it for ten. You know, we’re able to buy it for three, for example. You know, we got margins. We got competitive pricing. We’ve got data. That was all we needed to get into the market.
And then quickly, because we were showing success, we started to recognize that our clients were asking for more. And we were at a position of we either offer these services, we partner with somebody for these services, or we allow our clients to go to other agencies and get the services from them, which means that we could very easily lose them. And so option number three was never an option.
And we started to find those key partners and build those relationships. And then we started finding ways to offer, you know, Google ad campaigns, you know, social media ad buying and then the content creation side, which took a couple of years to really figure out, you know. Yeah, we can design ads on our own, but doing at a higher level and, and doing, you know, the consistent, you know, daily posting on social media, that took a couple of years to really figure out how to do it without the partnerships. And get to that point where we could hire somebody to do it full time was challenging, but we eventually got there.
Those are the positions that don’t come with revenue. I mean, they do, but in a different way. You’re essentially hiring somebody to create another revenue stream and then trying to figure out where that revenue is going to come from. And again, chicken and the egg, what comes first.
But, you know, eventually we got there and they’re all pretty much all of the positions outside of operations have revenue attached directly to them. So yeah, it took a while to get through all of those services. And then, you know, it probably took five years to get to the point where it wasn’t about the services anymore. It was about just getting access to the client, identifying the gaps that they have in their business, and then plugging the holes with the services that we had to offer.
And we really didn’t have anything that we couldn’t necessarily do with them. We have resources both internally and lots of great partnerships. And now, like I said, at this point in the business, we don’t like to use the full service agency language because everybody says, I do everything. We just try to help people understand that it comes down to finding the right strategy and then evolving that strategy into service agreement.
Jeremy Weisz 31:57
Yeah. No, I could definitely see how in the beginning, programmatic ads really worked well. And you had a client, and then they kept asking you for more stuff. Hey, Google ads. Hey, we need social ads. Hey, we need more. And it kind of built from there. And, you know, I do want to talk a little bit more about what you do. And we talked about Calgary Flames. I know you’re a big hockey fan. You have some jerseys on the wall. I could see the little figurine behind you there. How did you first start working with Calgary Sports and Entertainment?
Dave Taylor 32:37
Again, previous relationship, you know, and it took a lot honestly, it took a lot of work to turn that relationship into a working relationship. But the thing about Calgary is it’s the biggest small town in Canada. And you know, we’re the third largest city here. But when it comes down to it, everybody knows everybody.
You want to burn your relationships with people, all it takes is one and that word gets out real fast here in Calgary. But you want to build your relationships, you want to build your name up, it’s very similar in a way that you find the right people and those relationships really start to come.
So we had a relationship with someone who had taken a marketing role in In the Flames organization, who is doing an agency review. We put our name in the hat. We competed strongly against others, and the key message for us was just the exact same way we started the business was that we knew that they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars without having any clear metric for return on their ad spend or their true ROI. And we knew we could give them that number.
And so for us, it was really about just leveraging that data point of if you want to know what your ads are doing, and you want to see revenue, and you want to figure out, you know, truly what dollar for dollar you’re doing. And we were the partner and we’re probably 6 or 7 years that we’ve now been working with them, if not longer. They were very early in our business and easily our biggest client for a while at the beginning. And that evolved into all teams, the Calgary Flames, the lacrosse team, the Roughnecks, you know, the minor hockey team, the Hitmen, the football team, the Stampeders. We’re able to give a clear picture for all of the teams as well as inside the teams. We’re able to help them understand how our ads are performing game by game. How’s creative performing our games affecting other games in terms of campaign performance?
So really it was that and over the years they’ve gone to bat for us. We’ve been challenged a number of times in terms of are we still the right partner? And they’ve gone to bat, you know, stating that you know, they believe that we’re doing the right things. So that’s a big point of pride for us.
And you’re right. I mean, the jersey behind me, this is probably the only team signed. It’s an Every Child Matters jersey that was created for the Calgary Hitmen. I was at that game. And we’re very fortunate to be able to hand over a jersey at times and ask for it to be signed. And just a couple of different relationships got me down to getting that team to sign the jersey. And this is a big point of pride for me as a, you know personally that that hangs on the wall. And then we’ve got lots of Flames jerseys in the office here. We’ve got the lacrosse jersey, we’ve got the football jersey.
And then we’ve got a new team. Well, I mean over the years we’ve helped launch two teams. We helped launch the Cavalry, which is the soccer team. They’re not involved with Calgary Sports Entertainment. And then most recently, we’ve just completed the second year of the basketball team, which is the Calgary Surge.
And we helped them launch initially last year. And again really give a clear picture on their return on investment, where it relates to advertising. They’re looking at us as a key partner for all aspects of their marketing. We’re having better conversations with them about, you know, creative performance. How are people identifying with the creative messaging, what do you need to see in an ad to really connect with the team?
And they’re a challenging one. Their team turns over almost every year. They’ve got new players. There aren’t long term contracts. These are guys that could go to the G League. They could go to Europe. they could potentially go to the NBA. They could go wherever and they have opportunity year over year to do that. So building a relationship between the fans and the team is not easy. So we build a relationship between the fans and the sport and we showcase, you know, people at the games having a good time and really help people.
And I take this approach to tourism. You want to talk about traveling somewhere. You want to take a family, put that picture in your campaigns. You want to show people actually being there because at the end of the day, yeah, we get memories, but we get that picture of us at the game, right? That’s what we get as people who go to games, who travel, who do things with our families, we hang that picture on the wall. That’s what’s impactful for us.
And you’d be shocked at how impactful it is when it comes to messaging for an ad and creative design. And so, you know, we’ve learned a lot over the years, and we can bring that expertise not just to them. I’d love to bring it to sports teams across North America. You know, that’s a message that we can get out, that, you know, we would be wide open for business in that space.
It’s a hard space to break into without relationships. But we love sports. But it’s one of, you know, hundreds of clients that we’ve worked with over the years, lots of different industries. We’re just really, you know, at a point in the, in the company where it doesn’t we’re not we’re not looking for doctors, dentists, lawyers, chiropractors. We’re kind of open for business for sure.
Jeremy Weisz 38:14
No, I like how you describe your thought process behind it, because, you know, being in Chicagoland, you know, the, you know, you go to Bulls games, Chicago Bulls games and pay a ton of money for tickets and drinks and whatever. But we’ve also gone to the G League, Windy City Bulls, and it’s kind of a really cool experience. It’s actually like a fraction of the cost. They let the kids go out on the court and get autographs afterwards. So the experience is almost sometimes more impactful. And my kids don’t even know who the Bulls players are anyway, like the professional players. So seeing, you know, the G League players, which some of them actually go up to the Bulls is interesting.
So I love how you kind of think what the family actually want and may not be a connection to the players because they’re kind of transient. But, you know, another organization you worked with is the epilepsy foundation and you specifically help with Purple Day by Night. Can you talk a bit about that?
Dave Taylor 39:18
Yeah, this was a passion project for John, for my business partner, but something that really kind of helped us identify where we can help non-for-profits and and and the Purple Day by Night is a major fundraiser for them. And, you know, they need to run a silent auction and a lot of these organizations don’t have the resources or don’t have really the understanding of how to create websites, how to run online auctions, what type of messaging to put out. A lot of their websites are kind of janky. They don’t work very well, they don’t have updated messaging on events. And so we were able to help them really put their best foot forward.
And we were in a really good position to do this without really taking a fee. You know, we’re able to exchange sponsorship and we’re able to exchange partnership and, and give back. And, and so it was really important for us just to support them and help them do this. So this is now turning into a longer relationship. And then we’re going to continue to help them.
But again, you can see our logo there, which is actually we’ve just updated our logo and just did a little bit of a rebranding for ourselves. So that logo is changing. But last year when we worked with them, that would have been the current logo. But yeah, you know, this is something that we like to do. We like to look within the community, find opportunities to help.
And I think that’s one thing that, you know, I said this all through Covid, but I still say it that as marketers, we have skills, we have experience, we have ability to offer our services a lot of the time without a fee. Because really, what does it take for us to step in and help with strategy or help with direction? Yes, the company has to make money. Yes, we have to value our time. But when you can get involved in something that becomes a passion, we have all the ability to help people.
And so when I talk to people about what did it take us to survive Covid, it was that very mantra of just reaching out and helping people. We stopped asking people for money. We started asking them, how’s your family and how are you doing and what’s going on in your life? And then, you know, it evolves to how’s the business and what’s going on and how can we help you? And then, you know, eventually it evolves to a conversation of, of revenue and, and fees and all that kind of stuff.
And you know, we lost a large portion of our revenue, right, in the first three months of Covid because of the full stop, you know, all the sports stopped, the doors closed. There’s nothing. You can’t go anywhere. We’re working with restaurants. They’re shutting down.
But by the end of 2020, we had doubled our revenue from 2019, right in the very first year of Covid. And simply, it was just that we stopped thinking about growing the business, and we started thinking about helping people. And it turned into growth for us. And ten years in the business. That’s been the approach.
Jeremy Weisz 42:57
Dave, I love it. Thank you so much. I want to encourage people to check out InFrontMarketing.ca and more episodes of the podcast. And Dave, thanks so much.
Dave Taylor 43:09
Yeah thank you sir. I appreciate the time today and the conversation. This was great.
