[Top Agency Series] The Power of Niching and Digital Transformation With John Capuano of Lone Beacon

John Capuano is a driving force behind the transformation of marketing in the financial sector. Co-founding Lone Beacon in 2013 alongside Greg Dinetz, John’s leadership has propelled the company to be among the most recognizable names in the industry. With a penchant for questioning conventions and fostering growth, John’s journey underscores the power of curiosity and the rewards of embracing change.

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

• [6:40] The importance of understanding the time it takes to be successful in business
• [12:55] The significance of company culture in employee satisfaction and retention
• [13:07] The importance of having an effective website for your business
• [19:34] The significance of practice management in running a successful business
• [28:18] The power of effective social media presence in business visibility
• [36:05] How letting go of a major client can pave the way for business growth
• [38:27] Learn how to develop a robust digital presence in a competitive industry
• [40:43] How to use data from your website’s analytics to drive consumer behavior
• [41:49] How to turn what you perceive as a disadvantage into a strength
• [42:49] Understand how to leverage technology to offer better services

In this episode…

Join us in this episode as John Capuano, the mastermind behind Lone Beacon, shares some exciting insights. From crafting compelling websites to revolutionizing lead generation, John’s expertise will reshape your understanding of business growth.

John Capuano walks us through the art of building captivating websites and the science of lead generation. With his guidance, you’ll uncover the strategies that transform digital platforms into dynamic lead-generating engines, ensuring your business stands out in today’s market.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, join the host Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Capuano, as they explore the world of captivating websites, effective lead generation, and the power of business integration. With John’s insights, you’ll learn how to craft engaging content, harness data analytics, and cultivate a resilient company culture that propels your business forward.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• John Capuano on LinkedIn
• Dr. Jeremy Weisz on LinkedIn
• Lone Beacon
• Simplicity Group
• Inspired Insider
• Rise25

Special Mention(s):

• Greg Dinetz on LinkedIn
• Kirby Mack
• Ron Popeil on LinkedIn
• John Warrillow on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Build a Business That Can Thrive Without You with John Warrillow of Built to Sell” on Inspired Insider
• [Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech on Inspired Insider

Quotable Moments:

• “We looked at practice management as a way for us to not get fired, and not squander those leads as they were coming in.”
• “Understanding the time it takes to be successful is crucial in business.”
• “When a door closes, another one’s going to open and we need to find a way.”
• “I look at what we do as a form of artistry and creativity.”

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, and today is no different. I have John Capuano. And John is the founder of Lone Beacon. And John, I always like to point out other episodes, people should check out of the podcast, we were just chatting before we hit record about John Warrillow. And his book Built to Sell he was a guest on the podcast, check it out, they have a podcast too. And John has sold his company, John, who I’m talking to, not John Warrillow. And so we’re going to talk about that, and it’s interesting. Tales behind that a little bit. Also, John has been in the agency space for almost a decade now. And I did an episode with Kevin Hourigan. And he’s been at an agency since 1995.

So it’s really interesting to see the evolution. And also we’re talking about digital transformation and what that means, and there has been a lot of digital transformation over the past decade and since 1995 So it’s interesting to hear that that many more on InspiredInsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect their Dream100 partnerships and relationships. And how do we do that we actually help you run your podcast, we’re an easy button for a company launch run a podcast we do the accountability, the strategy and the full production execution behind the podcast we call ourselves John and the magic elves that work in the background to make sure everything you know makes it look easy for the host and the company, they could just have the conversation and run their business. So you know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking for 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 have questions, and you’ve thought about podcasting, go to Rise25.com. And to learn more, I’m excited to introduce John Capuano, like I said he’s the founder of Lone Beacon. Lone Beacon is one of the top sales and marketing companies for high end financial advisories and institutions in America. They work with about 75 financial advisors and institutions, they generate 30,000 leads that equates to a lot of money, John, it’s like more than $20 billion in leads. They deliver 15 million emails per year. They’ve recently been acquired, as I mentioned by the simplicity group, a financial service conglomerate holding company. And we’ll dig into that and Lone Beacon. And John, thanks for joining me.

John Capuano  3:05  

Thank you, Jeremy, super psyched to be here on the show. Thank you.

Jeremy Weisz  3:09  

No, I appreciate that. And that means a lot because you have like over a decade experience in radio, you worked for CBS radio. And I want to start with just talking about loan beacons and what you do.

John Capuano  3:25  

Well, we actually our roots in broadcasting go back to the early 90s. And that’s where I met co-founder, Greg Dinetz, where we were working at W alar radio network in New York. And we did a ton of business within the financial sector. And we learned back then a lot about the industry, particularly how underserved it was for financial reasons. And I’m not sure why maybe because ad agencies don’t find it very sexy, or maybe there’s so much regulation in it. It’s just a very tricky one. And Greg and I way back then thought, gee, they need to be better served. And then finally, in 2012, Greg called me, who owned radio stations at that time and said, Hey, why don’t we quit our jobs?

And what business should we start and we didn’t have to take very long to say, gee, this is a really necessary industry to carve out, particularly because one of the things we learned in talk radio was media consumption with the baby boomer demographic and consumer behavior. And we wanted to just apply that to the financial industry. And so we began our company in 2013 as largely coming from the broadcast space A company to start infomercials and we saw the first iteration of us was in the broadcast business as it relates to financial, but we really wanted to morph into the digital space. And that’s what we have become today.

Jeremy Weisz  5:17  

Do you remember Ron Popeil?

John Capuano 5:21

Yeah, totally.

Jeremy Weisz 5:25

So I had Ron Popeil on the podcast, you mentioned infomercials. So talk about what I want to talk about the evolution of the services for a minute, because, you know, I know you start off, a lot of companies start off with one service, and they grow from there, on what was the kind of the first version for a Lone Beacon?

John Capuano  5:41  

Greg hates when I tell this story. Nobody says we will, we went to a financial convention as radio hosts, or radio consultants, and we decided to and we had no clients, and we had no money. And so our big investment was we rented like this humongous monitor. And I can’t remember how much it was, but it was like, holy cow, they charge a lot for these things at hotels. And we, it’s exorbitant. Yeah. And we built a Photoshop website of what we thought the best financial website should look like. And we had it on a just roll through a PowerPoint. And so it looked like an actual website.

And so people were coming by our booth thinking they’re going to talk about radio, and we’re like, you know, you really need a good website. We had no idea how to build what year this is? 2013. Okay, maybe 2014. And so, but we figured, how hard How hard could it be? And so, anyway, and from an ergonomic standpoint, we believe that it would be like somebody should have this style website. And lo and behold, someone came to us after the convention was like, Guys, I really liked your website. I’ll take one. And so then we had to figure out, Okay, now we have to find somebody to kind of put this thing together. And we did. His name is Kirby Mack, and he’s our Vice President of digital development. And he’s still with us today. We hired him away from where he was.

And we, it was crazy building it, and it took maybe 60 days to build it. And we were like, literally school girls running around the day it launched. And it was such a huge event. Now, it’s like, we’ll launch probably 100 a year. And, then we launched it. And then the next day, we got a call from our client. And he’s like, guys, I gotta tell you, and we were trembling. And he said, I got a lead on my website. On the first day, I’ve been in business for 20 years. And I never got to lead before this. I don’t know how you did it, but you did it. And we talked about school girls, we jumped up and down in one another’s arms. And like, we’ve done it a little bit. We know how much more we had to learn. But anyway, that was our first foray.

Jeremy Weisz  8:36  

So it started off with a website. Right?

John Capuano  8:41  

I was not expecting that. Yeah.

Jeremy Weisz 8:44

What did you expect?

John Capuano 8:48

Well, you know, you have so much experience in radio sales that I thought it was going to be. Maybe brokering deals with radio stations for infomercials,

We did plenty of that. And it’s funny how we tend to gloss over that because it still is a considerable part of our business. I think it’s almost second nature to us. But something very interesting that we learned. It’s also interesting that you mentioned Ron Popeil, because in a very nerdy way, he is a hero to us. And the whole thing about that, as I’m sure you know, the turn and the carnival and all of that stuff. Midway and we applied a lot of that to broadcasting in terms of how do you capture somebody’s attention right away before they flip the channel. And we had become good at that because it was our business and we sold lots of it through the media companies that we worked for.

And so oddly, from a broadcast standpoint, they were in financial business, they were kind of slapping it together and they weren’t getting not great advice on it. So that part was kind of easy for us. What we, when we started to morph into more digital, what we learned was those same principles that Ron Popeil had, are they the tenants of the digital space? And so what doesn’t exist, or what hadn’t existed, at least in the financial business? was when people put a digital ad together. They might be good from a technical standpoint, and how do you filter by and how do you put a buy together? But ultimately, the words that you put together, like that’s the essence of like, that’s what Ron Popeil says, right? It’s like, how do you capture their attention like that. And so we applied the same.

And at first, we were almost self conscious about it, because, you know, that was yesterday’s technology. And now digital is different. And a lot of people told us, You need to use it differently. But the reality is, what we learned about capturing the attention of the consumer in the broadcast business is exactly the same that you would in front of somebody having a conversation or in any, in any medium that you would choose. And so we applied a lot of that to our digital business in virtually everything that we do. And I think that sets us apart a little bit, because I think that’s a loss in the modern era of marketing, direct responses, direct response, you know, I totally, I geek out on the top direct response marketers. And that’s why Ron Popeil was one of the top of my list to talk about how do you sell, he’s got some amazing stories of waking up at like four in the morning prepping vegetables, and yeah, doing selling on the street face to face or like the choppa Matic, it was writable.

It’s not good. And at the end of the day, that’s all anyone wants. And that’s what it boils down to. And I think of our leads, and, you know, we’ll have conversations with literally the largest financial institutions in the world. And we’ll ask them, what’s the most important thing that you need?” And they’ll say, we need to lead. And that’s what virtually every business wants, no matter what kind of business you’re in, you need someone walking in your door. And that’s, it always is going to boil down to that. And I think that’s a loss a lot. And people try to get too fancy about it. And it’s just, it’s a very binary act. It’s like, capture somebody’s attention, get them to understand what you want. And now the beauty of digital allows us to look behind the curtain and watch, they’re truly their consumer behavior to find out how they’re in or engaging with all of your content to find out when is the best time to really get them to walk in the door.

Jeremy Weisz  13:07  

I love how you focus, generate results, right? And you’re like, yes, you want leads, we can accomplish them with all these things. But ultimately, it’s about leads. So early on, you would help them create websites, and you still do that, for lead purposes. You’ll help get them on radio, for lead purposes. What other services walk me through, again, other services that you added and started doing over the past decade for this purpose of just getting results and leads?

John Capuano  13:28  

So it’s broken down ultimately in four areas. Number one is building websites and creating the content on websites that people need to engage. And we look at it as your storefront. And you know, many of us look at it like yeah, you need a good website. But I don’t know why. But a lot of people feel like they could skimp out on a website. And the fact of the matter is on your website, you could have 1000s of people a day coming to your website, you would never have that many people coming into your retail establishment. Also, the way you can use data from a website is amazing. And we’ll use this analogy. If you were a sporting goods store, and across the street was another sporting goods store.

How valuable would it be to understand your analytics like where people are coming from to shop at your store when they come into your store? Are they coming to the golf department? Are they coming to the sneaker department? And what are they consuming and all of that kind of stuff? All of that you can learn all that from the analytics on your website, but so few people are really mining that data to learn to get insight on what your consumers want. And so a big part of that you know of what we do. And we need to start with, you need great content on a website, and you need to look at the analytics, a website is number one number two is generating leads at the, at the top of the funnel. And you can’t do that without having a receptacle. And that receptacle is the website. And so we generate leads via broadcast.

By and large, it’s via digital, whether it’s, you know, Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Instagram, or search or banner, all kinds of stuff. And once we capture those leads in the funnel, then it’s on to the third thing that we concentrate on. And that is email marketing and automation and data. And that is where I would say a lot of the magic comes in because a lead is very superficial. And the reality is most leads aren’t going to act. And the way that what we learned, after years of mining leads coming in is learning about the data is if we could get 10% of those leads coming in to act on something we’re so far ahead of the game. And a lot of our clients in the beginning were so myopic that they would look at, you know, 100 leads and be like 90 of these leads absolutely sucked. You guys don’t know what you’re doing. And we’re like, and we at the beginning are like, I guess we suck, until we figure out that 10% is pretty good.