Winning on Google: How To Get More Leads To Grow Your Small Business | John Horn

Mastering Google Ads: Lead generation strategies to grow your small business with John Horn of StubGroup

Navigating the complexities of Google Ads can be daunting for small business owners, but in this episode of Small Business Pivots, John Horn, CEO of Stub Group, breaks it all down. From avoiding wasted ad spend to leveraging smart targeting strategies, Horn shares proven tactics that help businesses maximize their digital advertising ROI.

Many small businesses dive into Google Ads without a clear strategy—leading to expensive clicks and poor results. Horn explains why this happens and outlines a step-by-step framework for success, starting with setting clear campaign goals and understanding what each lead or sale is worth to your business.

💡 Key Takeaways from This Episode:
✔️ How Google's pay-per-click system works and why quality scoring matters
✔️ The minimum ad budget needed to make data-driven optimizations
✔️ How to avoid common Google Ads mistakes that drain marketing budgets
✔️ Retargeting strategies to convert website visitors into paying customers
✔️ Best practices for hiring the right digital marketing talent for long-term success
✔️ The importance of website quality, customer reviews, and lead nurturing before launching paid ads

John Horn also shares expert insights on navigating Google’s complex advertising policies, avoiding account suspensions, and ensuring your campaigns stay profitable—even in highly competitive industries.

Whether you're running Google Ads for the first time or looking to improve your results, this episode is packed with actionable strategies to help small businesses generate more leads and grow online.

🔊 Listen now and start running Google Ads the smart way!

John Horn:  StubGroup, CEO 

Website: https://stubgroup.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjhorn1/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/stubgroup

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StubGroup

Blog: https://stubgroup.com/blog/

Podcast: https://stubgroup.com/podcasts/

 #GoogleAds #DigitalMarketing #SmallBusinessGrowth #OnlineAdvertising #PPCMarketing #GoogleAdsTips #MarketingStrategy #PaidSearch #LeadGeneration #SmallBusinessMarketing #AdvertisingStrategy #GoogleMarketing #MarketingForSmallBusiness #GrowYourBusiness #MarketingTips #Entrepreneurship #MarketingExpert #BusinessSuccess #GoogleAdWords #AdStrategy #JohnHorn #StubGroup #SmallBusinessPivots #MichaelDMorrison #BOSS #BusinessCoach #BusinessLoans #OklahomaCity #BusinessPodcast #SmallBusinessOwner #MarketingForEntrepreneurs #ScaleYourBusiness #BusinessGrowth #MarketingExperts #GoogleAdsSuccess 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Digital Marketing Expert
• 5:40 Understanding Google Ads Fundamentals
• 12:50 Finding & Managing Quality Team Members
• 22:15 Google Ad Campaign Management Process
• 30:12 Google Account Suspensions Explained
• 35:21 Retargeting and Digital Tracking
• 38:50 Growing a Digital Marketing Agency
• 47:22 Final Advice and Key Takeaways

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, welcome to another Small Business Pivots, where, again this week, we have another special guest from around the world, and this time they're just one state away from our great state of Oklahoma, in San Antonio, texas. We are proud to have this guest today because digital marketing is a big, big thing for a lot of small business owners these days, especially on Google, but I know no one can say their name or their business like the business owner, so I'm going to let you introduce yourself and tell us just a little bit about yourself.

Speaker 2: 0:32

Michael, thanks so much for having me on.

Speaker 1: 0:33

My pleasure.

Speaker 2: 0:34

My name is John Horn, I am the CEO of Stub Group and Stub Group is a digital advertising agency. So, like you mentioned Google ads and other platforms, meta Ads and so forth Ultimately, we help small medium-sized businesses to find new customers online, where people are searching for solutions, and acquire those new customers profitably and grow and scale their businesses.

Speaker 1: 0:59

Wow, wow. Yeah, sales is a big thing these days, so how do you think we're going to help our listeners today best?

Speaker 2: 1:08

So there's a lot of directions we can go. I would love to talk through, maybe, some of the frameworks of thinking about Google ads. I'd love to focus on Google ads because it is a really relevant channel for many small businesses, whether they're local or national, and there's a lot of, I think, common misunderstandings, pitfalls, ways to easily waste money as a business using Google Ads. So I'd love to hopefully share from some of our experience of helping many, many businesses over the years to run profitable campaigns.

Speaker 1: 1:39

I think all of our listeners have heard of Google, so let's introduce the show. We'll be right back. Welcome to Small Business Pivots, a podcast produced for small business owners. I'm your host, michael Morrison, founder and CEO of BOSS, where we make business ownership simplified for success. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. All right, welcome back to Small Business Pivots, my friend, before we really get started into Google, I know a lot of our listeners have had trials and tribulations growing up as I talk about each week. Many of us had a hard time, if we haven't even gotten over those, so we might have some self-doubt, self-worth issues, mindset, things like that. So tell us a little bit about yourself so we can catch up to how you grew this business successfully.

Speaker 2: 2:51

Yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 2: 2:53

Been doing this as a subgroup, as a business has been around for a little over a decade at this point, and prior to subgroup but I was doing personally was kind of other started blue collar, did some blue collar work, some other marketing marketing type jobs as well, and then had the privilege of having a brother and close friend who started Stub Group and he said, hey, john, come on, essentially be employee number one and we're going to grow this business.

Speaker 2: 3:17

And so, um, I've gotten to be a part of that process, essentially from day one, as we figured out what it is that we were doing, figured out how to, how to run campaigns, how to figure things out and then how to get our own clients, how to scale them, how to scale our team, keep bringing the right talent on board to help our growing clients and eventually build the business over time to where we are right now. So I've gotten to experience a lot of the the ups and downs of that entrepreneurial journey and also see that entrepreneurial journey for so many other businesses that we've been able to partner with over years and see kind of the, the good, the bad and the ugly of the business world, so to speak.

Speaker 1: 3:57

What would you say has probably been one of the biggest challenges at owning and growing this business.

Speaker 2: 4:05

Biggest challenges generally revolve around people. So in our business, you know, people is our primary product that we're selling. It is our team members time, experience and skillset that they're bringing to the table on behalf of our clients, and so my job as CEO is to find the best possible people and to put them in the right roles and to give them the resources that they need to be successful for our clients. And you know, given how people are, there's not always going to be a 100% success rate with that, and so you know, a lot of the problems and challenges have always been around finding the right people. When you make a mistake and hire someone who's not the right fit, learning to identify that quickly and take action on that quickly so that it doesn't impact clients negatively, impact the rest of the team negatively, and also finding those all-stars and making sure that we're rewarding them properly and making sure that they're a part of the long-term success of the company, of the long-term success of the company.

Speaker 1: 5:05

It's interesting that you mentioned people, because many of us think of Google as digital and so we never think of that. There's people behind these processes or these companies or this software, whatever it is. People still are a part of it, and so that's very important to know. How would you say you have found best, because everybody wants key players, everybody wants those A players, and how have you found those? What tips do you have for our business owners?

Speaker 2: 5:35

So a lot of it comes down to the hiring process, and no hiring process is perfect. It's never going to filter out every single potential bad apple or, you know, be exactly what you want it to be. But there's a lot of things you can do to really hone in on the type of person that you want to hire, and this is something that's developed over time and continues to develop. But a couple of key things I would say first of all is when we are, for example, putting out a job posting, looking for the right people, we put a lot of information into that and we have very specific next steps for people to follow and that's a very specific email address that they need to send an email to answering specific questions. And that first step gets rid of a ton of people who just aren't detail oriented and who are just clicking a million buttons and don't really care. And you know, in and of itself that probably weeds out 95% of candidates just by doing that. And so now you've got the 5% of people or whatever percentage is who actually read it to the bottom and who actually follow those next steps. So that's a very, very easy first qualifying step. Then you know we like to ask a couple of questions in that, or give a couple of questions for people to answer in their kind of application to us, and that allows us to get a little bit of a sense for just how do they describe things using written words it's not just their resume, but how do they answer a question? And again, you know so many people terrible spelling, terrible grammar, just obvious things where it's like I don't want that person communicating with our clients. So that's a very clear no. And so we're looking for, hey, who can communicate really well and I'm like, oh, I read that email, oh, that's cool, that's awesome. I want to learn more about this person. Then I like to ask them to create a video so I can see, you know short video answering a question for me and I can see how do they present on video, because I can see, ok, how do they articulate things, how do they present? Is it professional, are they easy to understand? Things like that. And again, that weeds out a lot of people where you say, you know what, I don't want that person representing my brand because clients aren't going to be able to understand them or it doesn't make sense what they're trying to communicate, and so those are just things that you can do to kind of weed out and find potential good players before you even spend the time interviewing them.

Speaker 2: 7:56

Then, during the interview process, you know there's obviously a lot of standard things to ask, but something that we like to do with our team members or during our hiring process is to give what we call vetting projects to them and we'll pay them some money, regardless of whether we hire them. We're not looking for free work from them, but we'll give them very specific tasks that are relevant to the types of work they would do if they're working with us, and that's incredibly valuable, because people can talk a great game and it can sound like they know exactly what they're talking about. But when you actually make them do some work and then you have a screen share with them and they have to walk you through it, the rubber meets the road and you see they have no idea what they're talking about, or they can't write an ad, or you know what they think about. The platform is five years old, and so those are some of the ways that we try and identify really good A players to bring on board the team.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Yeah, it's communication and having the right people as I say in the good to great book, having the right people in the right seat, going the right direction, et cetera is critical and if you spend that, do your due diligence up front, you kind of come out better on the other side. So those are very helpful tips. Well, let's go back for some of those that may not kind of have evolved with Google, maybe don't understand what it actually is. I know that sounds like a silly question. Everybody's like well, I just go in there and search. Well, it's a lot more than that. So let's kind of start there so then we can get into the ads and how those actually work.

Speaker 2: 9:32

Yeah, so kind of thinking of Google. Foundationally, obviously, it's a search engines where people go for information, but you can really think of it as two unique products in terms of, on the backend end, what brings the information that you see when you do a search on Google, you have what they would call Google organic, which is the quote, unquote, free things that show up. So that's the normal, you know, 10 blue links, like they like to talk about it. Now there's a lot more than the 10 blue links. Now you've got YouTube videos that can come up. You've got Google business profiles if you're looking for something locally, things like that. Those are all things that you're not paying money to Google for, but that, generally speaking, does take a lot of resource investment on the back end to try and actually get into the top rankings there.

Speaker 2: 10:20

And then the paid side of things which is more of where our focus is although we are doing more on the SEO side nowadays as well is where you see sponsored listings that appear generally at the top of the page, and then, if you're scrolling through pages, you'll see them throughout the page as well. Pay Google to get in front and specifically to get clicks from people who you think are relevant to the product or service that you're selling, based upon what they're searching for. So if you're a plumber, you might target things like hey, emergency plumber near me, great, well, that's someone that sounds very relevant to me, I'm going to pay to have my ad appear. If someone clicks on that ad, I pay Google money for that and hopefully I have a great experience for them when they get to my website saying I'm an emergency plumber near you, call me right now, I'll fix your problem. And then you can just kind of extrapolate that across all the different service industries and types of businesses that are out there.

Speaker 1: 11:19

Well, I know one of the important parts of your services are generating leads. So how do you, or how does your business, help do that?

Speaker 2: 11:29

So the way you got to think about it is what are people searching for? That tells me they are a prospective lead. So you know, using that plumber as an example, if I provide emergency plumbing services, I provide them. Let's say, in San Antonio and I provide them. I can take calls from. Maybe I don't work 24-7, but I can take calls from 9 to 5. Just making up some examples here. Great, well, if someone is searching in San Antonio for an emergency plumber near me between 9 and 5, that is someone who is self-identifying as needing the service that I provide. And so, by serving an ad to them, I can say in my ad hey, I'm an emergency plumber in San Antonio near you. And again, hopefully, you know, if they see that ad, they click on the ad, they come to the website.

Speaker 2: 12:19

Now, the journey is not done yet, it's just begun, because now they're on your website and now you have the opportunity to convince them that they should reach out to you and take the action you want them to take. So in that plumber example, you want to think through what are the pain points of your customer. Well, they have a problem. It's obviously plumbing related. They want it solved. Right now. They probably are not interested in reading a long blog post about you know types of sinks that they should have in their house.

Speaker 2: 12:48

What they're looking for is a phone number to someone who's available right now and can come out. And so we want to have a very clear you know journey on the landing page saying hey, call, call this number. Uh, fred will pick up the phone and answer and we're going to get somebody out and fix your plumbing solution, your plumbing need, rather, and so that's, you know, that's how the journey might work for that type of business. Other businesses are going to have a much longer sales cycle. It's not hey, my toilet's broken right now. I need to fix it. It's hey, I'm looking for this software to help me with my email marketing or my you know CRM or whatever, and so you're going to have a different journey there. But again, if someone goes and searches email marketing software for a plumbing business, for example, and that's what you sell, well great, they've self-identified as a lead that's relevant to you, and now you want to get them to your website, pay for that traffic and convert that into a lead through your website.

Speaker 1: 13:42

Yeah, Well, I've noticed on Google searches used to almost just recently, it seems like there were sponsored ads at the top and now, after you search, there's a bunch of AI information. So can you tell us how it's transitioning using AI and how sponsored ads can stand out and still get leads?

Speaker 2: 14:06

Yeah, google is very much prioritizing um, the ai generated information. They call these ai overviews, which, like you're like you're mentioning many searches you do nowadays on google. The very first thing that's going to come up is these ai generated results that are trying to answer your question or give you more information based upon the information that Google is pulling from the web. And this appears above organic results. It appears above ads. Now, eventually, google has said they're going to incorporate ads into those AI overviews. So that's coming. We don't know exactly when, don't know exactly what that will look like. That hasn't happened yet.

Speaker 2: 14:43

But what we're seeing right now, I would say, is not as significant of a decrease in traffic on the ad side of things as you might think, because when you think about what types of businesses, generally speaking, are running ads, they're the types of businesses where people aren't going to get their answer just from an AI overview.

Speaker 2: 15:03

They need to engage in some way. So, for example, let's, if you're a website that has a bunch of recipes on your website, well, you're already probably not running ads because there's going to be very little value of people coming to read those recipes, and so AI overview may put the recipe right there, someone might not have to click through to your website, and so if you're a type of business that's trying to monetize traffic to your website by showing ads to them, you could have big problems because Google is essentially replacing you. But again, if you're the plumber, the eye overview is not going to come out and fix your toilet, and so there's still that opportunity. Even if it gives some information about you know, whatever how to pick the best plumber or something, there's still that need that people have to take that next step to go to the solution for their problem, and so you know, ads still provide that solution and get that traffic.

Speaker 1: 15:52

So you do Google Ads management. So let's talk about if a client were to use your services. What does that process kind of look like? And do you do it all and they pay you for that. And then kind of, what is the average cost for a small business owner? I know that depends on a lot of things, but I know there's pay-per-clicks. We hear a lot of these acronyms. How does that all work?

Speaker 2: 16:14

Yeah, great questions. Let me kind of break it down. So, first of all, what does it look like to work with a company like Stub Group to run Google Ads? So we are going to handle the whole process of creating the ads, creating the campaigns, the targeting, the tracking, all that stuff. What we're going to work on with the client is understanding what are their goals, what does success look like? Because a lot of businesses they don't know what success looks like. They're like, hey, let's throw some money at the wall and see what happens, and that's a recipe for disaster, generally speaking.

Speaker 2: 16:46

So we got to figure out hey, what are we trying to accomplish with these ads? Are we trying to get people on the phone? Great, why, what's going to happen next? Is it a free demo? Is it a free quote estimate, things like that? Is it? Hey, we're selling products through the website? Great, what are your best selling products? What are people most interested in? Because that's things like that. And, of course, understanding things like what's you know, what cost per lead can you afford? What's your return on ad spend goals, for you know selling products, things like that. And so we try to figure out what success looks like and then from there we kind of work our way back into okay. Well, what types of campaigns can we run? What are people searching for on Google that is relevant to the product or service we're trying to sell, and how expensive is that traffic?

Speaker 2: 17:30

Because, like you mentioned, google is what we call a pay-per-click model, so you pay Google when someone clicks on your ad, and the amount that you pay Google is going to depend upon many, many different things. The biggest thing is going to be competition. So if you're in, let's say, you're a personal injury attorney, you're going to have very, very expensive cost per click, because all of your competitors are like hey, if I can get somebody who's a million dollar court case for me, I don't mind spending $300 for a click because it's going to work out in the long run, and so they're willing to do it, and so you got to be willing to do it and that kind of thing. Whereas you know, if you're selling a $10 umbrella to your website, well, obviously you can't pay $300 per click, neither can any of your competitors, and so there's essentially an auction where you're competing with your competitors around price, but also you're competing around the quality of your ads. So this is why, when you go and search for, you know, buy an umbrella, you're not going to see an ad for Geico, because Geico could throw as much money as they want at it, but Google knows that's not a relevant ad, it's not going to have a good click through rate, it's a bad experience for someone.

Speaker 2: 18:36

And so if you you know Geico could be like I'll pay you a thousand dollars per click and I could be like I'll pay 50 cents per click, but if my ad is about an umbrella and Geico's ad is about car insurance, I'm going to win that auction because I'm actually what the user is looking for and Google wants to give a good user experience. And so, quality of ad you know what words are in it, what it looks like. Things like that are super important. And so, in terms of how that payment kind of how money changes hands, generally advertisers pay the platform directly. So you might have your credit card in your Google ads account or bank account or whatever, and so you're paying the ad spend directly to Google and then Stub Group, as an agency, is managing the campaigns on your behalf to try and accomplish your goals and you would pay Stub Group for the work that we're doing to manage your campaigns and in terms of cost and budget, like you said, it varies widely, but generally, the benchmark I'll give for most businesses is that you want to be in a position where you can invest at least $2,000 per month into ad spend before getting into the platform.

Speaker 2: 19:41

Now, there are always exceptions to that. We have clients who spend less than that and who do it profitably, but generally speaking, that's a benchmark, and the reason that we have that as a benchmark is because you need to be spending enough money with Google to be generating enough data for us to see what's working and what's not working. Now, if you spend $100 with Google, maybe you get a great lead, maybe you don't, but there's just not data points for us to say, okay, well, hey, let's, let's spend more money here, less money there, because we have no idea what's working, whereas when you spend more money, we collect enough data. We're like okay, these keywords, they're driving some leads. Great, let's double down on that. These keywords over here not working, let's not spend money on that. And then that's where your campaigns improve over time and get more efficient.

Speaker 1: 20:32

Well efficient, well said. You also do Google suspension. You fixed that. So how would one get suspended? And what does that mean? You're listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is produced by my company, boss. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom.

Speaker 1: 20:55

If you're enjoying this podcast. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. Now let's get back to our special guest, as you also do Google Suspension. You fixed that, so how would one get suspended and what does that mean?

Speaker 2: 21:11

Yes. So Google Suspensions is something that most people know nothing about, which is great, but then when it happens, it's something that becomes a little bit all-consuming and is a significant, significant problem. So let's kind of talk through what this means. Google has a large number of policies that you need to abide by when you are running advertising on Google. It's from kind of you know, really obvious things like you know you can't have all caps in your ads, to much more nuanced things like there's, you know, various policy pages they like to see on your website. And there's things like don't know how not having a redirect in your, in your URLs and all sorts of different things that go into Google's policies. And and there's both the written policies and the unwritten policies. So there's the written policies where you, okay, you know I can't do this, can't do this, and then there's kind of the back end of Google, where they are looking at all kinds of different signals, trying to make sure that the advertisers that are using their platform are legitimate, they're not scamming people, they're not installing malware when you click through ads, things like that, and so, unfortunately, a lot of businesses can either accidentally violate policies that they had no idea existed and weren't trying to violate, or sometimes they don't actually do anything wrong, but something about what they're doing or the industry they're in looks suspicious to Google or trips Google's automated flags, and so they suspend the ad account. And what that means is, if you have a suspended ad account, you can no longer run ads on Google, and it's not as simple as oh, it's just going to create a new ad account, because Google will suspend that as well. And it's a situation where this can literally shut businesses down.

Speaker 2: 22:52

And I've seen this happen where they rely upon Google ads for their business, for a large percentage of their ads, and they get suspended and they're not able to fix it and they're dead in the water.

Speaker 2: 23:03

And so what we do as an agency is really, over the last decade, we've built up a ton of knowledge about Google, about their policies, about what Google likes and doesn't like, about how to work through their appeal process, and so we can kind of come along as a guide to bring that knowledge to bear, because Google really doesn't help you. You'd think that they would want your money, but it's more. Like you know, once you get that flag, you're guilty until proven innocent, and so we're going to have to be your your lawyer, for lack of a better word and go to Google on your behalf and try to get your situation where it needs to be, to make Google happy, even though Google won't tell you exactly what you did wrong. So that's kind of a unique specialty that we build up over over time and that we've helped many, many businesses. We've helped thousands of businesses on suspended accounts and stay compliant with Google's policies.

Speaker 1: 23:55

So they're just about like every other platform out there. They don't tell you why you're suspended, they just say you're suspended, exactly. Well, let's talk about real quick retargeting and how that works and what that means. I know when we mentioned that to business owners as business coaches, they're like what? So can you explain that and how it works?

Speaker 2: 24:16

Yeah, yeah. So retargeting is this idea of when someone comes to your website, a large percentage of people who come to your website are not going to take action right away, they're not going to pick up the phone, they're not going to fill out a form. They're in the journey of thinking through. Maybe they're checking multiple competitors out, maybe they haven't decided to pull the trigger on this service or just doing research, whatever. And so with the targeting, um, conceptually it's pretty straightforward. You put some, some code onto your website and then, when that person leaves your website, that code follows them around and you get to serve ads for your business as they browse other websites online. It could be go watch a YouTube video, it could be on weathercom, and you see an image ad on the right. There's many, many different places that those ads can appear. And Google there are different platforms that run retargeting ads.

Speaker 2: 25:07

Google is, I think, probably the largest in terms of across the internet of showing or marketing ads in many, many different places Meta, facebook, they do remarketing as well, and so forth. So basically, it's this idea of very cost-effective marketing because you're only targeting people who've already been to your website, so it's not a large number of people, generally speaking, and it's not particularly expensive, generally speaking, to show ads to them. But they are the warmest audience, people who already know who you are. They've been to your website. They're probably thinking about you right now and it allows you to stay in front of them. You know, keep, keep your brand in mind and sometimes strategically to, you know, give incentives for them to come back. Hey, here's a 10% off coupon, come claim it now, things like that. And so it's a cost-effective way of staying in front of people, keeping your brand in their mind and ultimately trying to bring them back to take the action you want them to take.

Speaker 1: 26:02

You may or may not know the question to this, but I hear this often of business owners. I'll be sitting at a coffee or something. I'll go. You know, I was just thinking about Nike shoes and next thing you know I look, nike shoes are all over my platforms. How does that work in the background?

Speaker 2: 26:18

So this is a very controversial, controversial question. There are many uh there. There are people on different sides of this. I am of the perspective that your phone is not listening to you, so a lot of people have that and I've experienced that as well where it's like I just was talking about these Nike shoes and obviously my phone is listening to me because I'm seeing them.

Speaker 2: 26:40

But there are many, many other ways that advertising platforms can figure out potentially your interest in this without listening to you.

Speaker 2: 26:50

So there are some, I'd say, more obvious ways.

Speaker 2: 26:53

So, for example, if you go and search Nike shoes on Google, google knows that and so Nike is going to target people who are interested in Nike shoes, and so that's kind of an obvious way.

Speaker 2: 27:04

But there's also things like let's take Meta, for example. If you're logged into Facebook on your phone and you're talking with a friend and that friend just recently bought Nike shoes and they're telling you about those Nike shoes, well, meta may not be listening to the conversation, but they know that you're in the vicinity of this friend and they know that this friend recently made this purchase through a Facebook ad and often we'll see you know they'll be like oh well, let me show an ad to something similar to this person because they were in, you know, geographical contact and so stuff like that happens and lots of other things. There's also, like you know, third party data, credit card stuff that can get pulled into some of the platforms. So I don't think that they listen to you. I'm not going to say that with 100% certainty, because I certainly don't know all things, but there are ways to accomplish the same thing without necessarily having the mic turned on, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 28:02

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because I know that's one of those big questions. Well, we've talked a lot about Google and you've been very helpful for our listeners. Let's talk about Stub Group. So our listeners are mostly small business owners, and those that aren't are probably those that want to be a business owner. They just haven't pulled the plug. So let's start back to the early days. What were some of those challenges that you had? Growing, because you've got quite the team here on your website. I see you've got quite a few people on your team, but that's not how every business starts. So let's go back to the early days and kind of tell us things you've learned and maybe some tips and insights that you would share with others.

Speaker 2: 28:44

Yeah, absolutely no, definitely. It definitely did not start out with the size of the team we have right now. You know some of the some of putting money into our own advertising campaigns hoping that we're going to get business out of that that can then pay that off and keep flipping that cycle, things like that. We're very much a part of things. I think, at the end of the day, it really came down to looking at every client relationship as the number one priority and we're going to figure things out for them, even if they're not paying us a lot of money right now. We're going to build our reputation by doing an awesome job for them and by being creative, by bringing some fresh perspectives to the advertising we're doing for them that other people aren't bringing, and build that reputation for excellence and create a foundation that can then help us get new clients and also help us attract the right talent who wants to work at a good place. And so going back to that talent went through so many interviews and conversations and kind of approaches to figuring out how do we structure our team, how do we find the right people, things like do we hire and then train? How do we find the right people. You know, things like do we hire and then train or do we hire people with experience?

Speaker 2: 30:14

Often in the early days we would hire and then train and there's definitely benefits that come from that.

Speaker 2: 30:20

But there's also a lot of downsides, because you don't know for a long time whether or not the person actually has what it takes, and you may train and invest for six months or 12 months and then realize they're just not getting it.

Speaker 2: 30:31

You know, and I just wasted all this time, and so, generally speaking, nowadays we've moved more of the model of hiring people with experience and obviously you can pay a premium for that in terms of, you know, salaries and things like that.

Speaker 2: 30:42

But we like to bring on proven entities for lack of a better word who understand the business that we're in, who already have a lot of experience, and then we still do more training to kind of bring them up to our level of excellence and how we do things. But we know that they already get what our industry is like and how to do the job and they have experience of working with clients and, ideally, working in an agency environment and things like that. And so just figuring you know, figuring things like that out over time what those hiring processes are, the the hiring process we talked about earlier. You know vetting, vetting people and and you know coming up with projects for them to work on, and things like that um have been really crucial to maintaining a high level of of service that we provide to our clients, maintaining a good reputation, which then allows us to keep growing as a business, bringing more clients on board and repeating that cycle.

Speaker 1: 31:36

The digital space, would you say it's more kind of self-learned, self-taught, or are there places that people? Because you said you want to hire experienced people. How do you determine if they're experienced? Is that, like I said, is that going to college? And if so, is there a good place to learn this kind of stuff? Or is it? Where do they get this knowledge from?

Speaker 2: 31:59

Yeah, that's a great question stuff, or is it? Where do they get this knowledge from? Yeah, that's a great question because, like you mentioned, the digital space moves so quickly. I I really don't care about education. I honestly don't even look to see if people went to college. You know what they graduated with, et cetera.

Speaker 2: 32:14

What matters to me is that hands-on experience of actually working, you know, in the trenches of running campaigns, of working with clients, of figuring out Google or Facebook or whatever. So we're looking for people, generally speaking, who've already been doing that, ideally for other agencies, and then we're able, through those vetting projects, to get a sense for, okay, how have they been trained and what type of work are they doing? And is that in line with, you know, what we know works best and kind of with the way that we approach things for our clients? And then, um, and then, generally speaking, we give them a lot of new experience they didn't have exposure to, because the types of clients that we get to work with and you know the processes that we put in place, and so we we can help kind of up, upskill them up, level their skills and uh, and get them to where we need we want them to be for for working with our clients.

Speaker 1: 33:06

I know a lot of business owners. You know you've kind of gone through the. This is how we attract, this is how we hire. How do you retain key employees? That's another big thing about how do I keep these people now that I found them?

Speaker 2: 33:20

Yeah, I think a couple important things go into that, you know. One is very much the environment that people are in, and that environment is very much controlled by the other people that they're working with. Now we used to have a physical office where the majority of our team members were physical. Now we're completely remote. So we have people all over the country, all over the world, that we work with, but there's still lots of interaction between those team members working towards a common goal, and so it's really important to bring people on board who other people are excited to work with. Having that bad apple, having that big ego that just wants to take credit for everything and run a rough shot over the other team, it's not worth having those types of people, at least from my perspective and my experience, because they create an environment that other people do not want to participate in, and that's where you see people leave is when they don't like the people that they work with. So, again, going back to hiring and what types of people we bring on board, but that's super, super important and, like I was just having this conversation an hour ago with a candidate we're hiring who was asking about our environment, and usually the first thing I'll say is we don't have a bunch of big egos on board. We're very team oriented. We wanna be successful for our clients and we know that when we are, we're successful as a company and then each of us individually is successful. So that's really important. And then, you know, just from a very basic level, incentivizing people, paying them well, paying them for their work and when they do well, when they excel, when they drive, generate more revenue, more value for the company, rewarding them for that, so that they see that their hard work is valued and they get to, you know, engage in the fruits of that labor. So I think those are the two most important things.

Speaker 2: 35:08

Probably the third thing I would say is in the agency world, we're not afraid to fire clients. It's not, you know, certainly not the ideal, not something we like to do, but there are just some businesses that, frankly, are just not worth working with because they just don't approach things with a partnership mentality. It feels like a fight every day, even though we're trying to help them be successful and our team knowing that you know, I have their back in that way and that if a client's being unreasonable with them or is being unprofessional with them. They can come to me and say, hey, I can't take this, that type of thing and I've proven. Hey, if it's a situation where we need to, we'll sacrifice the revenue for the company, move on from that client, wish them well, refer them to somewhere else, because it's just not worth working with. You know really terrible clients in the long run.

Speaker 1: 36:02

Yeah, we like to refer those to our competition and I love to hear this because just because you're a business and you're paying someone doesn't mean you can't treat them in humanely, like you know badly. So I love, love to hear that. So let's go to a couple of challenges. Anything that you learned along the way growing and scaling this business Like this is an essential that every business owner should know, because this really moved the needle for us. Or maybe this is something we did. Don't do this because it really damaged us. Anything like that happen in the years you've been in business business.

Speaker 2: 36:38

I would say one one thing that comes to mind. This is not going to be, um, you know, not going to be this, this genius gem of information, but I think a lot of businesses deprioritize it is you have to have that sales funnel constantly being filled and moving forward. So a lot of businesses, especially you know, you've got a business owner who's maybe has wears a bunch of hats, is doing a bunch of different things, really busy actually doing the work on behalf of their clients. They put sales and marketing to kind of the very bottom of their priority list and then they wake up one day like I don't have any jobs the next month and at that point it's too late because it takes time for marketing, time for sales. And so you have to invest the time, the energy, the effort in always having leads coming in, having those conversations, making sure that your pipeline is full so that you can keep yourself and your team busy.

Speaker 2: 37:33

And and you can't, you know, you can't deprioritize that, even though it's so tempting to do that, because it's not calling you, yelling at you like your customers might be. And you got those customers calling like, well, I got to deal with this, and yes, you do, but if you also don't deal with your sales and marketing, you're not going to have any customers calling you next week, and so that's, I think, a really important thing to just always remember you have to focus on as a business owner. Well, you think that's not a gem, I think a really important thing to just always remember you have to focus on as a business owner.

Speaker 1: 38:01

Well, you think that's not a gem. I think this is about our 90th episode we're recording and you're the first one that ever said that. So it is a gem, because many people don't think about that. They get a big sale and they get so wrapped up working in the business as they say, they forget that, hey, next month or six months from now, if I'm don't keep that consistent lead generation going, I'm not going to have business. So I appreciate you sharing that. Well, is there anything that I haven't asked? I know a lot of times if I'm on a podcast I'm like I really wish I would have said this. Anything we haven't covered, that you're. You're just like yeah, let me mention this before we sign off here in a few minutes.

Speaker 2: 38:42

I think we covered some great territory, I think. If I wanted to kind of emphasize or reiterate a point, maybe I would go back to that idea of if you're going to get into any advertising channel, whether it be Google Ads or whatever. It's just so important to think through again. What does success look like? What am I trying to accomplish? How am I going to measure that? And try to set yourself up for success.

Speaker 2: 39:06

You know, if you have a website that looks like it's built in 2009, maybe don't start spending a bunch of money on Google ads, sending people to a website that they're not going to trust because it looks terrible. Put the time and the effort and the investment into having a good web presence, into making sure that if someone Googles your reviews, they're going to see reviews about you because you've asked for your customers, give your reviews and just kind of basic foundational things. Just think like a customer how do you decide who to work with? And then just make sure you've got those things for your business and for a lot of businesses, you know, just a few changes, improvements on your website, getting some more customer reviews can have just a massive impact on your sales and lead volume that are coming in Excellent.

Speaker 1: 39:54

I know a lot of people like to follow our guests, learn more, get in touch with them. What's the best way to do that with you?

Speaker 2: 40:02

I'd say that the place we probably most consistently place content on is our YouTube channel. So search Stub Group on YouTube. Put out a lot of free content on there. And then, of course, if you want to learn just more about Stub Group and other social media channels and things, just go to stubgroupcom and we've got all the information on there.

Speaker 1: 40:18

Any podcast or anything Blogs. We do actually. We do actually.

Speaker 2: 40:22

We do our own podcast called Clicks to Customers. You can find it on Spotify, apple Podcasts and elsewhere. Generally, we talk about various marketing topics. We usually go a little bit broader than advertising. We've talked about, certainly, seo. We've talked about how AI is impacting advertising. We've got a sales episode coming up soon, so, yeah, lots of good content on there.

Speaker 1: 40:45

And then is there a place to follow you if they want to do that Best place for that is probably going to be LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 40:51

Just search my name on LinkedIn and you'll find me on there.

Speaker 1: 40:55

Fantastic. Well, before we sign off here, I always ask one final question, and that is if you were in front of an audience of business owners different sizes of business, different industries what's one applicable insight that you would give them? It could be a quote, a book or just something. Maybe you've already said that you want to reiterate.

Speaker 2: 41:15

I'm going to go back to the people side of things and back to a quote which is hire slowly, fire quickly.

Speaker 1: 41:23

Wow, amen, amen, and that's the hardest to do. Well, john, you've been a blessing to many and a wealth of information. I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much, michael, really enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker 2: 41:36

My pleasure.

Speaker 1: 41:39

Thank you for listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is created and produced by my company, boss. Our business is growing. Yours. Boss, offers flexible business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. If you need help growing your business, email me at michael at michaeldmorrisoncom. We'll see you next time on Small Business Pivots.