Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

Interviews with CEOs and Entrepreneurs about the frameworks they are using to build and scale their businesses.

Management Blueprint | Steve Preda is a business podcast hosted by Steve Preda, with 300 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Steve Preda hosts Management Blueprint | Steve Preda, a business show with 300 episodes published.

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  Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

  367: Implement the Law Firm Success Formula with Jay Berkowitz

  Oct 1, 202629 min

  Jay Berkowitz , Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules , helps law firms implement the Law Firm Success Formula to attract qualified prospects, convert more opportunities, and build five-star operations. Driven by a strong desire to win, Jay applies his competitive nature to helping clients rank higher, sign more cases, earn stronger reviews, and generate valuable referrals. In this conversation, Jay introduces The AI Visibility Optimization Framework—Collect Prospect FAQs, Publish Answers Regularly, Become an Expert on Reddit & Quora, and Blog on Customer-Generated Topics. He explains how businesses can identify real customer questions from sales calls, intake conversations, and AI-generated transcripts, then answer them through videos, blogs, FAQs, and social content. Jay also discusses optimizing websites and Google Business Profiles, responding quickly and empathetically to inquiries, and delivering five-star service that generates reviews and referrals. He shares how referrals, conference speaking, webinars, podcasts, and high-value content drive agency growth and how EOS helped him develop leaders as the company expanded. — Implement the Law Firm Success Formula with Jay Berkowitz Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Jay Berkowitz , the Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules , a two-time Inc. 5000 digital marketing agency that helps law firms generate more qualified leads and clients. Jay, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Great to be here, Steve. So we already talked a little bit about it, but I was really curious about why you focus on law firms. There are so many marketing agencies out there, but I’ve never seen anyone that focused on such a narrow niche. And then I’m going to link it to my favorite question. So what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Ten Golden Rules agency? And maybe there’s a connection to law firms as well? Well, I’ll start with my personal Why, and my personal Why is I really like to win. And I’ve done the StrengthsFinder and different psychology tests, and I’m in the top—whatever—one or five percentile of people who are competitive. And so I was competitive in sports, but I really want to do well in business, and I want my clients to do well. Like, I really, really hate it if my client’s not right at the top of Google and if my client’s not growing in more new cases signed every month. So that seems to be a really great fit for the business I’m in, which is helping clients with growth strategies, part of which is the marketing piece, getting new traffic to their website. Part of it is conversion, so we do a lot of work with our clients on getting a higher percentage of the folks who do show up to call, to click, to fill out a form. And then we work with their intake teams on converting those opportunities. And the final piece we work with them is really running a five-star operation—meaning that they’re getting more five-star Google reviews and getting more referrals from past clients and referral partners. So we do a lot of work in those three pieces of the business to help law firms grow, and I really want them to win because when they win, I win. Selfishly.  No, I love it. I love it. So are you like an outsourced marketing department and marketing-sales department for these law firms? How do you see yourselves? What is the role that you fulfill? Yeah, I mean, we are a consulting agency. So first and foremost, we’re going to help them strategically figure out where to focus. And we have a fully functioning digital marketing agency, so we do websites and SEO and Local Services Ads and pay-per-click and social media and video and lots of AI. And then as a part of our consulting practice, we help with intake consulting that I mentioned before and five-star operations. And a big part of that is just finding the right partners because we’ll do high-level intake coaching and point out if they’re not answering the phone, if they’re not putting the right people on the phone, and then we’ll connect them with one of the top intake coaches in the legal industry. If their back end is a little rough and needs some help, there’s a number of partners. Like, for example, there’s a really great software called Case Status we recommend to all of our clients. And imagine Case Status is an app. So, like, when we all order an Uber or order food, we get updates. “Hey, your driver’s been selected. Your driver will be here in 10 minutes. Your driver’s waiting outside. Do you want to have a conversation with your driver? What temperature do you want?”  And so there’s a great app called Case Status, which can manage the case in an app format that consumers are really used to. “Hey, we got your MRI booked, and here’s the location, and here’s the time. Don’t forget your MRI is tomorrow at 8:00 A.M. Here’s the location. If you can’t make the MRI, click here. Hey, we got your MRI. We forwarded it to the next surgeon,” in a case of a car accident. So using that software helps our firms get five-star Google ratings and lots more referrals, and that’s just one small piece of the pie.  So within the niche of law firms, is this even a narrower niche of injury law firms that you work with? Yeah, it’s funny because when, as a business person, you go from working on 200 SIC codes and you pick one, “I’m only going to work with lawyers,” everybody always asks, like, “Which niche within the niche are you?” But by the nature of our business, 50% or 60% is personal injury, just because those guys are really invested in marketing. They spend a lot of time and money on it, and we’ve built a little reputation. But we also have estate firms and family lawyers, criminal attorneys, sex abuse lawyers, securities attorneys. So I always say 50% is personal injury and 50% is everybody else who deals with consumers. Because for the most part, the B2B lawyers, they’re not going to spend a lot on marketing. But we have done some beautiful websites for them.  Very interesting. I have kind of a tangential question, but you may be able to help me answer it because I’m obviously wondering about it. I always see these billboards with the injury law firms promoting themselves, and I get if someone gets in a car accident and there’s a billboard above them, then it’s going to be an obvious thing for them to call, but it probably doesn’t happen that often. So how are these billboards so good for lawyers, or is it just a myth and they’re just wasting their money on it? No. I think the math is pretty compelling, and the average personal injury firm will make between $10,000 and $20,000 on average on cases. Then there will be one or two or three, what they call whales, every year. So a terrible incident where, like, a FedEx truck or a commercial vehicle hits a family and there’s serious injuries or death involved, and it’s a multimillion-dollar case. So the lawyers make a third of all the revenue that comes in on those cases, and they do a lot of work and they have a lot of expenses too. But when there’s millions of dollars at stake for just one case, these guys can afford the TV advertising, the billboard advertising, and the digital marketing that they do with us.  So it’s not just a billboard. Yeah. Billboard is just a visible one. It’s basically the general idea that they do a lot of advertising because being top of mind is important. Yeah, for sure. And if, God forbid, someone you knew had an accident, you’d start noticing that every second ad on TV is also personal injury. Yeah. Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. So let’s talk about frameworks because that’s what this podcast is about. Business blueprints or concepts that you have developed, you observed, something that helps you make sense or streamline the ideas that you deal with in your business. Anything that comes to mind, something that can be explained in three to five steps? Yes. Well, I touched on it a little bit a minute ago, and we call it our Law Firm Success Formula. And the first part is attract, the second part is convert, and the third part is five-star operations. But I’ll spend a couple more minutes on it. So the attract piece is, first and foremost, you’ve got to have your website dialed in. You have to have a contemporary website. If your website’s more than five years old, it just sends a subtle, even subconscious message to folks that you’re not current, and the design times change over time. And also, Google’s functionality is going to change, or the functionality of your website, as it’s friendly to Google, particularly your mobile website, if it’s five years old, is not going to be the current best practice. And Google’s going to come and test your mobile website, and they’re going to send negative ratings back to the algorithm, and you’re going to show up less in the searches. Equally important is your Google Business Profile. And that’s your Google Maps address. And that has to be up-to-date and optimized and constantly updated with new content and blogs and videos and information and photos from your location because I always say that you don’t own your Google Maps, you lease it from Google, but it’s a second and very powerful web presence that a firm can have.  So we do a lot of work on the websites, on the Google Maps, and there’s a whole SEO protocol around local SEO that surrounds the Google Maps listing and how you’re listed on your website and how you’re linked to by local businesses and the Chamber of Commerce and business associations and bar associations. And then the next piece is getting your message out there and optimizing for the AI. And so the AI today that’s important in my part of the business is the SEO AI, or a lot of us are calling it AEO, answer engine optimization. So a lot of the work we’re doing with our clients is answering questions on video, and those videos go on YouTube, and then we also use the video on a blog on the website.  And you can use those videos throughout the internet, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Very importantly, add a video to your Google Maps every week. So we generally shoot a series of at least a dozen videos with the client every quarter and have them answer questions. Because again, when you’re asking questions of Google or ChatGPT or Claude, “Who’s the best car accident attorney if I was hit in an Uber?” So we literally answer that question, and the attorney will say, “One of the things I’m getting asked all the time now is, who’s the best car accident attorney if I’m hit in an Uber? Do I need a car accident attorney?” And they’ll go on to answer that question, but literally, we put the question in the video.  The question goes on their blog, goes on their website, goes on their Facebook, their Twitter. So it’s a very effective strategy to target the AEO, or the answer engine optimization. And by the way, there’s a couple other pieces that are very important to come up in the AI. So number one is answering questions. Number two is becoming an expert, so getting written up in journals and your bar association, your Chamber of Commerce, whatever industry you’re in, getting on Wikipedias and things like that, and answering questions on Reddit and Quora, which are the answer engine websites. And then the final piece is some technical stuff you can do on your website, as simple as adding frequently asked questions. Most people only have five FAQs on their website. You should have 50 or 100 today in this world of answer engine optimization.  So the first piece in our formula is attracting traffic to the website and getting the brand right. And then the second piece is conversion. And I mentioned things like answering the phone. Super critical today that you answer the phone. And I know that sounds obvious, but Google’s actually tracking how long it takes you to answer the phone when someone clicks off a Google ad or a Google Maps listing. And if it takes more than 15 seconds and three rings, Google’s going to, again, downgrade you for future listings. And it’s not nefarious. There’s nothing negative. It’s just like when people use Google, Google wants them to have a successful experience.  Yeah. So if they’re looking for a car accident lawyer or a shoe repair or a pizza, if you don’t answer the phone quickly, the next time, they’re going to put you down a little bit lower in the listings. So conversion is a multifaceted program that we help our clients with: answering the phone, answering the phone with empathy, answering the phone with a professional who can handle the call, not somebody who’s a busy trial attorney or a busy paralegal, and they don’t even want to take calls. So you really need a professional who’s trained to convert those opportunities. And then we’ve also built some software to optimize any missed calls, and we even have a software when people fill out a form on the website, it immediately sends a text to the intake team so you can call them back. Because we’ve all had that experience where you fill out the form on the website, and you wait five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, a day. Well, by then, you forgot whose form you filled out, and you filled out a couple other forms on other law firms’ websites or other marketing agencies’ or consultants’ websites, right? So very important that we have the software that immediately texts the form information to the intake team.  They can call the person right back. And then the final piece, I talked about five-star operations, and we have several programs to help our clients get more Google reviews and get more referrals from their existing clients and their referral partners. And one of the subtle things that a lot of people don’t do, and this is the easiest, most cost-effective marketing piece, is just sending out a monthly newsletter.  I mean, every business and every law firm and every marketing agency has to have a monthly newsletter. It’s very inexpensive. You can use Mailchimp or Constant Contact and send out some valuable information, some of your community activities, if you’re speaking at the Chamber of Commerce or your bar association, or I’m speaking at an industry conference. And every time I send out a newsletter, I get two or three calls. “Oh, Jay, I was meaning to call you. We want to redo our website.” Or, “Jay, would you be on my podcast?” Thank you for that, Steve. And just being top of mind increases your business opportunities, those referrals. So there’s a number of those programs that we do to help our clients get more five-star Google reviews and more high-value referrals.  That’s fantastic. You’re really very systematic about it. I mean, this is a huge framework, so I don’t know if we can promote it. It’s not going to be easy to promote all parts of it. But I really like the AEO optimization element: answering questions, becoming an expert on Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, and the FAQs. Is there anything else there in this AEO optimization that may be important? Well, the first part about answering questions, I can give you a couple clues there. One of the areas to get questions is to monitor the questions you take on a regular basis. And we use an AI called Fathom that records all my phone calls. And it creates a transcript, and I asked another AI, like a Claude or one of the AIs, to read all 200 most recent sales calls and transcribe all of the questions that I answered more than once. And there were several questions that I answered 20, 30 times and several that I answered two, three, four times. It came up with 269 questions that I get asked on a regular basis on my sales calls, and now we’re systematically answering those questions on videos and blogs and content on our website because we know those are the questions that we get asked on a frequent basis by people who are interested in our products and services. So if you can find the true questions that you’re asked, I often joke that Margaret, the receptionist, you should give her a little clipboard beside her desk, and every question that comes in through the intake department, you want her to write it down and then hand that off to your marketing department and write a blog post.  Because literally, the questions that people are asking about car accidents or divorces or consulting services or marketing blueprints, those are the questions that people are asking Google, ChatGPT, and Claude. So if you proactively collect and answer the questions, that’s very powerful. And then in the expertise area, things you can do like getting in Wikipedia’s, which is hard to get. You really have to be a known public figure today to get approved for a Wikipedia. But Grok has its own Grokipedia, and there’s several other pedias out there. Just making sure that you’re properly listed in all of your industry association listings and your local business associations.  When you just take a look at who’s linking to your competitors, you’re going to find a list of 200 websites that link to and list your competitors, and you can get listed in all those places, in most of those places, because there’s multiple chambers of commerce and business associations and bar associations in every region. And that’s true for every business, not just for lawyers. And then the final piece about the five-star operations, the simplest insight there is if you want lots of five-star reviews, you have to run a five-star business. You have to think of yourself like a five-star hotel.  And when you show up at The Ritz or The Four Seasons, which I’m lucky enough to do a couple times a year because I go to lawyer conferences, and those guys don’t fool around. Even as you pull up, they’re like, “Oh, welcome, Mr. Berkowitz.” I’m like, “How do they know that?” Probably because I told them what type of car I was coming in. Or they’ll ask you, “Are you staying here?” And your name is Mr. Berkowitz. And then as soon as the person hands your bags off and they take you to reception, you’re Mr. Berkowitz for the rest of your stay. They know who you are.  They recognize the staff are trained to give you that high level of service. And then when you go over to the concierge, there’s someone whose whole job is to make your visit great and get you fantastic dinner reservations and nurture your whole relationship, get you theater tickets or concert tickets. So if you think of your business as a five-star operation from the first time they call to every conversation, they should know Mr. Berkowitz. They should be able to pull up your file. They should know what the status of your business relationship is or your legal case.  And in fact, we recommend the software I talked about earlier, so they’re proactively sending you updates on your case. You don’t even have to call in. And the number one bar complaint is, “My lawyer doesn’t answer the phone and doesn’t give me updates on the status of my case.” And I think that’s true for every business. So if you’re proactively sending out updates and information to your clients, they’re proacti

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  Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

  366: Get Closer to Revenue with Saul Marquez

  Sep 24, 202636 min

  https://youtu.be/lrnG7ydEErk Saul Marquez , Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket , helps medtech and healthtech companies get closer to revenue through healthcare-focused marketing strategy and execution. Driven by a desire to be a source of love and inspiration, Saul supports healthcare innovators whose work helps people live healthier, longer lives. He believes companies improving healthcare deserve to succeed and should not have to navigate growth alone. In this conversation, Saul shares his Leverage the 3 Forms of Marketing Framework—Owned (podcast, books, content), Earned (Stages, Testimonials), and Paid (Drive Traffic to What Converts). He explains why companies need a clear strategy and strong owned assets before pursuing earned exposure, and why paid marketing should amplify a funnel that already converts. Saul also discusses growing through primary research, thought leadership, podcasting, and conferences rather than relying on cold outreach. He shares why marketing metrics must connect to pipeline and revenue, and how sales blockers, opportunities, and needs can guide the creation of campaigns and sales enablement assets. —   Get Closer to Revenue with Saul Marquez Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Saul Marquez , the Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket , a healthcare-exclusive marketing strategy and full-service marketing execution firm that helps medtech and healthtech companies accelerate their growth. Saul, welcome to the show.  Steve, such a pleasure to be here with you and your listeners. Thank you for the opportunity.  Well, I really have to get my A-game today because I rarely find a podcaster who’s recorded more episodes than I have. You beat that by a multiple of five or six. So definitely, I have to be on my best performance. But my first question is always the same, at least recently. What is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it in your business?  My personal Why. I did some thinking. This was probably about 20 years ago. I did this program. I’ve always been very reflective, and I’m a big journaler. I love to write my thoughts. And I had the chance to, about 20 years ago, do a program called Date With Destiny. It’s a Tony Robbins program. It was a game changer for me. Five days with people that want to just crush it in life—personal, professional, financial, right? Like, they just want to do the best.  And so I had these five days to myself to really look inside, journal, question. And during that session, he has what he calls your primary question. You sort of look inside and you ask and you think about, like, what are those words, the stories that you tell yourself? And the primary question is that question that drives your life. And I was able to uncover that my primary question is, “I want to be a source of love and inspiration to myself and others.” And so I’m driven by love. I’m driven by inspiration. And so that’s my primary question and my primary Why. And then, when you think about it professionally, Steve, I’m very driven by mission. So because of that, I started my career in medical devices around the same time that I actually did the seminar. And I’m driven by being able to help people live better lives and increase health span, not just lifespan. And that’s why the work that we do focuses around leaders innovating in the healthcare space. So very driven by those things.  But these are very noble ideas. And I mean, who wouldn’t want to live better, live longer? That’s an obvious need from everyone, really. And it’s a great thing if you can create an impact in that realm, that then you are creating something very valuable.  You are, Steve. And the data point here that I’ll share to pair the purposefulness, the data point, because we’re very data-driven as a business, and I’m a data geek, is that healthcare is essentially 18% of U.S. GDP, which represents $4.8 trillion annually. It’s larger than the German economy, and that’s just the U.S. alone. So whenever anybody says, “Oh, your niche is healthcare,” I say, “Well, I mean, my economy that I’m focused on is healthcare.” It’s huge.  Of course. Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah. And probably, I mean, we can get into whether that’s not an overinflated number. Is it really that proportionate value? But if you think about it, the biggest resource is humans, then spending 18% of GDP on the biggest resource is not much.  It definitely isn’t. And then if you sort of zoom out and you take a look at globally, GDP focused on healthcare, it’s definitely higher than most first-world countries. And the outcomes aren’t commensurate to the investment. So the opportunity to improve access, affordability, better outcomes is a huge opportunity. And I'm in awe, and I have major respect for all the entrepreneurs and business leaders in this space that are looking to improve those metrics for us in healthcare, and that's why we love to stand behind them. Share on X   The stats are real. 50% of businesses fail within five years, and something above 80% fail within 10 years. And we believe at Outcomes Rocket that if you’re in the business of helping people live healthier, longer lives, you deserve to succeed, and we want to be behind you. And so that’s why we do what we do. The people doing the work, it’s hard, and they can’t do it alone.  Yeah. Love it. Just as an aside, whatever happened to this initiative of Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos that they announced some years ago that they would reform the—  Yeah.  Healthcare?  Haven?  Yeah. I don’t know what it was called.  Yeah, Haven. So yeah, it was Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and JPMorgan. And it didn’t work. And it shows you that, like, even when the best of the best try to go do something about it, it doesn’t work. It’s hard. It’s hard work. Yeah. It’s hard work.  I bet it’s very hard. So hopefully AI will fix it. Let’s hope. What do you think about that?  That’s a great one, man. Like, AI definitely is not fixing it. However, properly deployed AI in solutions such as ambient scribing that helps physicians spend time with patients and no longer have to do what they call pajama time. Pajama time is the time that they spend at home after hours logging things into the medical record. Like, if you’re able to give a physician time back from not having to do that, and actually time back to look at you in the eyes when you’re in the waiting room, that’s awesome use of AI.  The use of AI in the elimination of waste is also beautiful. So I think as a tool, for sure, there’s huge promise in the use of AI for healthcare. Hell, in robotics, man. Like, I was just at a conference, Steve. I was in Miami. Where do you live, by the way?  I’m in Virginia.  Oh, you’re in Virginia? Cool. I’m in San Diego, where I’m literally at the SRS, so that’s the Society of Robotic Surgery. And I’m in the room, and there was a surgeon in Virginia, actually, and a surgeon in California, and the robots were operating on. It wasn’t a person. It was actually just like a simulation, but it was like a cadaver type of thing. And with AI, spatial AI, and the use of technology, these surgeons are operating in two different states on one person.  Remotely?  Yeah, remotely, and it’s working great through robotics. So all of this stuff, man, is coming together. Yesterday, I had a conversation with an entrepreneur in the materials and 3D printing space. She’s been in it for years, and just chatting with her was inspiring because what they could do now as far as custom-built plates for craniomaxillofacial or foot and ankle, they could literally print this stuff overnight on sheets, whereas it used to take months.  Like, we’re moving fast, and the innovations that are available. She called it patient matching, like the N of one. I mean, what’s possible today for a fraction of the cost than it used to be back then is just inspiring. And it’s happening right before us. So it’s a really great, great time to be alive.  And to stay alive.  And to stay alive. Exactly. Well said, my friend. Well said. Hey, you have to tell me about Summit OS and Fable, man. Like, I love what you have back there.  Well, I’ll tell you all about Summit OS on your podcast, but on this podcast, we talk about you. That’s fair. That’s fair.  I like that. I like that.  So let’s talk about frameworks because this podcast is a podcast of frameworks.  I love frameworks.  And I saw that you have the Discover, Define, Deliver, or something like that. But I’m looking for something more unique. Yeah. So something that maybe that’s more insightful or more unique or more you that you could share with the audience, which still can be explained in four to five steps or elements maximum to which give people an insight as to how to do things better.  Absolutely. So I think you and I are brothers from another mother, Steve, because I just love frameworks as well. So the 3D approach is easy, as you mentioned, right? But it is our approach and how we reproducibly bring about a program from start to finish for a client: Discover, Define, Deliver.  Underneath that, that is the hood to another framework, which when you start to deliver, the framework is essentially a four-part framework that starts with strategy, then it’s owned, earned, and paid, okay? And so those are the types of marketing that you could do. And you mentioned at the beginning we’re a marketing strategy and full-service execution agency, which essentially means we’re a revenue partner, we’re a commercialization partner.  So when you go to market with your value and your value proposition, it all starts with strategy. Strategy is so key. And one of the key quotes that we always share, Steve, is that, “Tactics are the noise you hear before the war is lost.” And I have to say, Steve, and everybody with us, in marketing, there are so many tactics. Too many. And guess what?  Today, with AI, there are so many tactics. I was just on a podcast a couple days ago where I made this connection. I hadn’t made the connection yet, but you have to have an AI strategy. If you don’t have an AI strategy, you become part of somebody else’s plan, and even worse, you become so fragmented, and it’s reflecting in your P&L. Like, you not having an AI strategy is showing up in your P&L in a big way. But anyway, back to the marketing thing and the framework. So start with the strategy.  Inside of your strategy are some very basic things, such as your personas, your ideal client personas, which is like firmographic, kind of number of employees, revenue, et cetera. Share on X Your core messaging. Your brand house essentially is your vision, your differentiation, and then your performance promise. It’s essentially like three pillars. That’s your strategy and your positioning, right? Then when you go to owned, earned, paid—and by the way, they’re in this order for a reason. It’s like algorithmic.  I liken it to the Rubik’s Cube. I was watching a YouTube video with my nine-year-old, and he was like, “Hey, Dad, figure out how to solve this.” I brought him a Rubik’s Cube from a conference. I watched this four-part video. The guy’s name is Cubastic. Have you ever watched it, Steve?  No.  No? Okay. Cubastic, literally, he’s a genius. Like, in four 10-minute videos, walks you through how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. And I can solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes and 30 seconds reproducibly now. It’s actually one of my conference tricks now, like whenever I go to a booth. And so I’m sitting there thinking, like, yes, no matter what, wherever the pieces are on the cube, if you use this algorithm, it's a four-part framework it gets you to the same end. Share on X   So I’m thinking, that’s exactly what we do. So the strategy, then owned, earned, paid, in that order. So owned is everything that’s on your website, what you put out on social. If you have a podcast like yours, Steve, this is owned. You own this. It’s the narrative that you own. Newsletters. Then you have earned. Why does this order matter? Well, if you try to do earned media, like if you hire a PR agency to do earned media, get you media attention, and you don’t have your strategy or your story straight, you’re going to confuse the market even more.  So that’s why earned is after owned. And with earned, it’s everything that you get. There’s a gentleman that put it really great. I have to get his name, but I got this from him. OPS, he calls it Other People’s Stages. And there’s digital and there’s physical stages. I’m on your digital stage. You’ve built this thing, and you’ve invited me, and I’m grateful for it. And by the way, I’m going to have you on mine. I want to learn about Summit OS, and I want to learn about your frameworks, and I want our audience to also learn about those.  So there’s an asset here, and we’re doing an exchange, which is beautiful, and we’re spreading ideas that make a difference. So in earned, you’re getting opportunities like on OPS, and those could also be written. So you get a byline article on a publication, right? Or you get invited to speak at a conference. That’s earned. And then there’s paid. And people ask me the question, like, “Hey, I’ve got these paid campaigns going on.” And I’m like, “Dude, you have nothing on your website that supports a narrative. Nobody is talking about you. Why would you even pay for anything?” I don’t care what it is.  Unless you got all those other things right, paid is there, like paid conferences, to get more people that’ll read the brochures that are owned, that’ll see the testimonials that are earned, that’ll convert to opportunities to check out your demo or sit with you to consider what you’re doing as a business to solve problems. And so the paid is essentially a way to increase traffic to an existing funnel that converts.  So essentially, this framework of strategy, owned, earned, paid is the framework of marketing that, if done right algorithmically, you will get results. Share on X And the result is the acceleration of someone, a business or a person, that goes from the awareness to consideration to decision funnel, which is essentially the business funnel for anyone, right? You accelerate the speed at which somebody learns about you and the problems you solve, considers you as a solution, and then makes a decision to work with you. So you’re not really selling a quick fix here, are you?  It’s not a quick fix. There are no quick fixes. You have to commit to the process and get it done.  Yeah, I like it. I mean, that makes complete sense. You have to have some assets that you start with that you own. I like the podcast. Okay, books can be like that. Yeah. Website, of course. Your frameworks are your asset, basically. And then you have to earn the right to actually share what you know. I love it. People validate, go through the stages, and get the testimonials, so you have to deliver. You have to prove that those assets are actually working, right?  Yes.  And then when you have a funnel, you already have a product that has proven itself, then it’s all about increasing the throughput. So paid is what? That’s right.  There is an amplifier.  That’s it. That’s it. Yeah. Yep. Yep.  It makes complete sense. It’s a very good framework. I’ve never thought about it this way, but it makes complete sense to me.  And it’s algorithmic. No matter where the pieces in the cube are, if you run it, you’re always going to end up with the same color on each side. It just works.  Yeah. So if you don’t have your assets, you haven’t earned your right, then you are just wasting your money on paid. Yeah.  Yeah. You’re wasting it. You are. Now, there’s a use case for paid to accelerate learnings. If you’re working on copy that you just need feedback on, there’s a use case to get mass targeted, like your ideal client looking at and interacting with it to understand how to better convert. That’s a use case, right? You’re after conversion optimization data. That’s fine, right? That’s fine. You could use paid to fine-tune conclusions as well.  Can you use paid for market research? Oh, yeah, for sure.  What you should be selling?  Yeah. You could definitely use paid for market research, for sure, if you have an end in mind. If your end in mind is to get more target, and then you just have to decide, right? Like, what payment model should you deploy? Should you put an ad out, or should you work with a partner that has access to a pool of qualified survey respondents? Would it be more efficient to just go through them, right? So it’s just a matter of what the end goal is.  That makes sense. So let me ask you a question, Saul. What drives growth in your business?  So a couple things. We do thought leadership, and so the thought leadership that we do is on healthcare marketing. Share on X And by the way, even though we focus on healthcare marketing, there’s fundamentals there that can apply to any business. So if you’re listening to this podcast and thinking, “I’m not healthcare,” there’s still fundamentals in the research that we do and the data that we mine that can help you.  So thought leadership based off primary research. So every quarter, we do two new reports. We conduct surveys focused on marketing strategies and tactics. Some of the latest ones we’ve done—we did one on podcasting, which is very interesting. We released this one about three weeks ago. This one’s gotten crazy media hits. Like, we’ve gotten over 30 media hits on this one.  PPC covered us, because it’s sexy still. Podcasts are sexy. But we had a lot of findings, and I’ll share the link with you. We don’t charge for our research. It’s free. We offer it to people so that they could do better marketing. Now, the thing that was most intriguing about that report for me, out of a lot of things, was that people are measuring the wrong thing as it relates to podcast marketing. You’ll see the results, but I remember these numbers. 57% are measuring engagement and downloads.  And that’s the wrong thing to measure. I’m going to segue to that later. The right thing to measure if you're a business is pipeline and revenue, not engagements and downloads. Share on X And the quote that I did on an article that I did recently is, “Downloads are vanity. Contacts and contracts are sanity.” Okay? You have to measure the right things. If you’re not a media company selling ads, who cares about downloads? So anyway, podcasts. We did a GTM report. We did one on public relations.  The other one that got a lot of really good traction earlier this year was one on chatbots. We analyzed over 5,700 citations to figure out what exactly are

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  Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

  365: Plug All the Holes in Your Marketing with Dan Salganik

  Sep 18, 202628 min

  Dan Salganik , Founder and CEO of VisualFizz , helps established B2B companies plug all the holes in your marketing through integrated, outcome-focused strategies. Driven by a desire for freedom, travel, and creative expression, Dan built a fully remote agency that allows him to explore the world while helping clients create distinctive campaigns, strengthen their marketing capabilities, and generate long-term customer value. In this conversation, Dan introduces The Growth System 4 Tracks Framework—Brand & Digital Foundations, Staff Augmentation, Transformation, Transition & Expansion, and RevOps Growth Inflection. He explains how companies can select and combine these tracks to strengthen their foundations, expand internal capabilities, support acquisitions and geographic growth, and align marketing with sales. Dan also discusses growing through quality rather than speed, building larger client relationships through trust, and shifting VisualFizz from commoditized services toward solutions focused on business outcomes. He shares how identifying small gaps across the customer journey can improve efficiency, strengthen retention, and create sustainable revenue growth. — Plug All the Holes in Your Marketing with Dan Salganik Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Dan Salganik , the Founder and CEO of VisualFizz , a company that empowers industry-leading brands to maximize their potential with effective marketing strategies and custom-tailored campaigns. Dan, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it. It’s great to have you, and I’d like to learn about your personal ‘Why’ and how you’re manifesting it in VisualFizz. Wow, that’s a big question to start with. I’ll start with my kind of goal for a little bit of freedom, which is funny because the more you grow, the less freedom you have. But for many years, I started VisualFizz because of a need to travel and to have freedom to do what I want. I’m a very expressive person, and after working at a number of agencies and finding things they do wrong, and also being a big traveler, I actually decided to launch VisualFizz almost 10 years ago, which is crazy to me. And ultimately, we’ve seen this company grow quite a bit in that time. But I built it out to have the ability to travel, to do the things I want, to build a team, to build also campaigns that are fun and they’re unique and build customer value. So you started with a great question, and there’s so many reasons why—my kind of personal philosophies and why I manage and run and grow VisualFizz—but I think travel, freedom, and the ability to see creative campaigns at scale are just a few of them.  So I saw on your website that one of your goals is to travel at least 100 days a year. So is this business travel? Is this personal? Is this a combination? I’d say almost no business travel counts, right? Because then you’re just doing business. I love business, but that’s totally separate. It’s personal travel. Basically, every single year, yeah, for almost 10 years, I have spent about a little less than a third of the year traveling, and some years a lot more. And so, being a remote company—and pre-COVID we were remote—we’ve built this style and methodology and processes, everything around being a fully remote company or an organization. And so, yeah, I do 30-day trips. I do two-week trips. I do two-, three-month trips. But for me, it's always very important that work doesn't slow down. But you're going to regret working your whole life. Share on X I like the phrase, “You don’t die with your money.” It doesn’t come with you, but what you do have is experiences that you can remember and memories and everything—photos and things like that. And you’re not going to want to cherish your photo when you’re at a nursing home of you working in front of a computer. It’s going to be you with friends and family, enjoying the world and eating well and drinking well and seeing sights and exploring history and things like that. Yeah. My dad, he was a doctor. He worked very hard all his life, and he always told us when we were kids that he was going to retire at 60 and travel around the world with my mom. And then when he was 60 years old, he had this opportunity to run this hospital, and one thing led to another, and he turned 70, and then he no longer wanted to travel. And he literally said, “Oh, I wish we traveled more while we were young because now I don’t want to travel.” So that kind of resonates with me, what you say. It’s great that you have this awareness and you make it happen. So when you travel, do you run your business remotely?  100%. My business runs with my laptop, and if I’m lucky, I have a second monitor with me. Actually, nowadays I travel with a second monitor even on a flight, if I have to take a flight.But I have a second monitor with me. I have my laptop. My business comes with me. That’s number one. So I might switch my hours a little bit. I might change things around, but I’ve got a great team. I delegate. It’s interesting because in the early days, it was hard to travel because we didn’t have a lot of clients, so we didn’t have a lot of money. Still don’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t have nearly as much when I started the company. Nowadays, we’re a growing business, and it’s great. So finally—it’s the whole dilemma. It’s like we’re finally growing. We’ve got a real business. I can pay myself a real wage.  But you can’t leave the business for too long because then you have other issues. But it’s a good balance between the two, and I always do bring my laptop no matter where I go. You never know what happens. But if I’m truly taking time off, which is very, very hard, I give my wife my cellphone. I either don’t take my laptop or I put my laptop away in the safe, and I don’t touch technology. Because honestly, it’s very easy to get distracted.  It is super easy to get distracted. So let’s talk about frameworks because this is what the podcast is about. So tell me a framework that you have developed or you picked up somewhere that allows you to do something better than other people, whether it’s more effective, whether it’s bigger impact, whether it’s more organized, whether it’s generating an insight that can be explained in three to five steps. I love that. Actually, this is really great timing because we just built a brand-new framework, and I just soft-launched it to the world. We had a big event last week, and it’s called the Growth System. And it’s for our soft launch called VF3, VisualFizz 3.0. We’ve scaled up. This is kind of our software reboot. There's four tracks. It's a track system, so it's similar to a framework, and they're driven by the following. Share on X Let me actually backtrack a little bit. It’s developed for mid-market and enterprise B2B companies, especially companies that have been around for a long time, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but have something that’s broken or maybe needs improvement, et cetera. And so they come to us, and instead of saying, “Oh, I think you need SEO. I think you need paid search,” it’s solutions-focused, not services. The services come after. And there’s four tracks that are built off of. Each track can take three months, six months, 12 months, two years, et cetera. It just depends on the business.  The first one being the brand and the digital foundation. Many of my clients come from boring industries, my favorite. They need to rebuild. They came in understanding there’s private equity money, there’s new competition coming up, this, that, and the other. It’s a new brand, rebrand, or brand infrastructure, and then web infrastructure, all focused on sales. So everything here is focused on RevOps, sales, et cetera.  The second one, track, is staff augmentation, capability accelerator. It’s helping brands that are really great at something and really not great at another thing, or have a very expensive team internally where they feel that they can outsource to an agency for a large discounted price, for lack of a better word to put it. An example is we took over the tech arm of one of our clients, saved them about 50% in their budget, doubled their capacity, have a full team, 100% uptime, things like that.  The third, the one that I'm probably most excited about, is transformation, transition, and expansion which is all about mergers and acquisitions, national expansion, franchising, scaling locations, things of that nature Share on X and how to ensure that those are done accordingly, kind of symbiotically, consolidated properly. And the way I put it is, you’re spending $50 million or whatever you’re spending to buy a company, spend half a percent or a percent of that purchase value on the marketing, on the consolidation of brands, on sales materials, HR communication, kind of that side as it pertains to marketing. And the final one is RevOps, growth inflection. We come in, we look through the CRM, we work with the sales teams, we audit the sales teams, we do interviews with the sales teams, and we make sure that marketing and sales are not oil and water. We combine them, we develop everything, we focus on lifetime customer value, post-sales transactions, and really driven towards long-term growth and revenue, basically generation. So a little bit longer than the few sentences you asked me for, so I apologize. But this is the future framework that VisualFizz will be built upon and scale upon for the future. Share on X Like, we’re just launching this as we speak. My website’s in progress right now. Yeah. I love it. So the big picture is that you fix the foundations, then you give them people who can actually execute, then you transition. Does the transition mean that from staff augmentation, you transition to their own team? Or what does— No, not necessarily. They don’t have to go one after the other, and that’s something I’m trying to work around communication-wise. You might start with brand infrastructure and go straight into demand gen, RevOps. Because we need to scale now. Or you might say, “Hey, VisualFizz, why don’t you just take over our SEO department fully?” Or it’s a little bit of both. I’ve talked to a lot of mid-market and larger, a couple quite large billion-dollar-plus companies that said, “You know what? I don’t need a new website, but I really need to understand how we focus on communication with our sales teams,” or, “We do need visual improvements for our brand. We don’t need the new website.” So you can pick and choose a little bit. My goal is to not have to do that, but there’s not a linear step that you have to take between one, two, three, and four. It’s really, “Hey, we need to scale. I do $500 million today.  I want to buy three locations across the United States. This is what I’m looking at. My goal in five years is $750 million. How do I get there, VisualFizz?” And we lay out year one, two, three, four, and five, what we do, and how we plan to scale alongside the company.  Love it. So you basically productized your offering to these four major situations, and they can be implemented piecemeal. You can start anywhere, and you can keep stacking them. That’s super interesting. So let me switch gears here and ask you, what drives growth in your business, in VisualFizz? For a lot of time, it was the very generic hustle and bustle of just trying to do good. Be a—how do I put it? Being there. Being the fastest to answer the phone, being the fastest to email back, getting the best proposals, because that’s what you do as a small agency. But as you grow, you don’t win on speed, you win on quality. It’s different. As a startup or as a startup who’s interested in an agency, you go fast, fast, fast. But I actually tell clients, “I’m not interested in speed.” That’s why these tracks that I told you, they take a year, two years, three years. So now the growth is really driven around my clients’ peace of mind and my prospective clients’ peace of mind, knowing that they’re working with a decade-old agency, with team members who’ve predominantly been on our team for five years or more. Almost everybody is senior on my team. What drives growth is not so much quantity, never really has been, but it’s quality. And so my intent is not to win more customers. It’s to win bigger and better customers that are going to allow us for longevity, growth, and longer sales cycles internally. That’s really what drives growth today, is less stress and better clients.  So what does it take to land those larger, better clients? A lot of work. I think there’s a couple. One is trust. Some clients will start small, and that’s where this whole model came from. I had a lot of clients come to me and say, “Hey, Dan, I need a new website.” And I’m like, “Okay, great, but your brand doesn’t look good.” I respect the brand, and I’m not somebody to say, “Oh, you need to do a $100,000 rebrand,” because some companies really don’t need that. But I say, “Let’s look from the inside out.” And before you go, “Hey, I need a new website,” or, “Oh, I need demand gen. I need paid search ASAP,” I go, “Wait a second. Hold up. I’m not going to spend $50,000, $100,000 on sending traffic to your website when your brand and website can’t accommodate that.” And so we start small with execution around a brand implementation. That moves into web development. That can take some time. We’re not an AI cloud web builder. Like, it’s just not going to happen. We build proper sites for proper companies. And then moving forward after that, it becomes a marketing campaign. That lasts for years.  So for me, it's really driven around that methodology to work with clients and keep growing them and scaling them. Share on X And as such, we grow because we offer more services, but it’s in lieu of hiring full-time people on their end. And so I have an example with a client where they have no marketing department, not even a director, and they’ve actually had VisualFizz become the entire marketing department, agency of record. But beyond that, just—we are the marketing department. And we probably come at a third of the cost or half the cost of what a true marketing department would cost. So it’s a win-win for both parts. So are you going to land large clients, or are you landing small clients that you grow into large clients? So how do you actually execute the strategy? It’s both. Over the years, we’ve really pushed to be B2B-focused, and in doing so, our client size revenue—not for us revenue, but their revenue—has been larger. So maybe back in the day we would land $10, $20 million companies. Now it might be $500 million companies. But the engagement was the same. Same size. And so now it might be the same difference where we land a $300 million company, but we can start small, but there’s more room to scale up over time, kind of what I told you earlier, as we build trust. So it might just be a small engagement. Like I said, “Hey, let’s just do a brand exercise.” And then it moves into, “Oh wow, you guys actually provided value. The ROI was there. Let’s move into something else.” I’d say our close rate is lower, unfortunately, but our average statement of work or proposal is higher. And so again, it’s quality over quantity. I may lose nine out of 10 because I’m competing against larger companies that do technically have more to offer. But there’s those clients that say, “You know what? I really like the small boutique agency.  I don’t want to go with the 100-person shop. I want to go with the 20-, 25-person shop. I’m going to be a big fish in a small pond versus a mid- to small fish in a big pond. I’m going to go with them.” And so those are the customers that I do win right now, the ones that understand they're going to be my big fish. They're really going to be well taken care of. Share on X And then again, the trust and everything else comes with it later. Yeah. So what’s one thing that you’re trying to figure out in your business right now? My pivot. That’s a really tough one. My business has changed a lot in the past year. From a leadership perspective, I’ve become the sole owner of the company, which I wasn’t before. It was a good decision for everyone. I think everyone left happy. And beyond that, it’s really now, how do I build VisualFizz up? One of my biggest challenges that I face, and I think a lot of agencies face, especially when they don’t internalize their problems, is we’ve become very commoditized. All of our offerings that we have get compared to AI, as well as there’s a lot of offshore agencies that their biggest barrier to entry was their language. And now with AI, that’s no longer a problem because we can all do our work fluently. Smart people, but being a U.S. agency, that was our advantage. We charge what we charge because we’re U.S., and the barrier to entry was high. But now there’s all these other folks, as well as AI, as well as software, as well as everything else.  And so I realized that we can’t rest on the laurels of being a 10-year-old agency. That doesn’t matter to people. What matters is results. And so my biggest challenge right now is, how do I pivot my company from being this commoditized service? Even if they’re good, even if you’re the best, it doesn’t matter because it’s a commodity. You could have the best concrete in the city, but if you get an RFQ and the other guys are five cents cheaper, they’re going to go with them a lot of times. Not always, but a lot of times.  And so my intention is what I said earlier: focus on the solutions and focus on the outcomes within our system that I’m building, because I think customers are going to care more to hear, “Hey, I’m not Dan who offers SEO services for you forever. I’m Dan and VisualFizz who take your company from $75 million to $100 million in the next year.” Like, that’s what I think drives their interest. But my challenge is, how do I prove that model out? Because it’s not a standard model that people know yet. It’s not been drilled down like the agency model has been for so many years. It’s new.  And do you feel like you can control the client’s business? You’re so good that you can control their growth, you can make them grow? No. I would be overzealous and confident to say that I can do that. But the thing I can do is I could help work alongside them to do our best to get there, right? And I’ll give you a couple examples because, I mean, it’s all in the case studies. I took one company with my team from $150 million to $350 million with them, with them, to then have a merger of equals, and now they’re probably worth half a billion, $600 million, something like that. And then another company, at a certain

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  Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

  364: Offer LLM-Digestible Messages with Parry Headrick

  Sep 4, 202630 min

  Parry Headrick , Founder of Crackle PR , is helping B2B technology companies offer LLM-digestible messages through earned media, human-centered writing, and strategic communication. Driven by the belief that where people start does not determine where they finish, Parry has built an empathetic, senior-led agency that works exclusively with good companies and empowers its people to share their expertise openly. In this conversation, Parry introduces The LinkedIn Cheat-code Framework: Post every day, Tap into news stories, Weave in audience impact, and No-CTA. He explains how consistently sharing valuable ideas and expecting nothing in return helped him build an audience, generate most of his leads through LinkedIn, and shorten the sales cycle from three months to one week. Parry also discusses how LinkedIn thought leadership creates a virtuous cycle of earned media and LLM citations, why websites and PR content must be readable by both humans and machines, and how a senior-led agency can scale without sacrificing quality. He also shares why human writers will become more valuable as AI-generated content creates a growing sea of sameness. — Offer LLM-Digestible Messages with Parry Headrick Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Parry Headrick , the Founder of Crackle PR , a B2B tech public relations agency that works with good companies only. Crackle PR is a senior-led B2B tech PR agency built for the LLM era, where earned media is no longer just a brand builder, it is the vital infrastructure that feeds foundation models. Parry, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, it’s great to have you, and you are all about LLMs and how to get through the AI filters, which is relevant for all of us. But before we jump in, I’d like to ask you my $64,000 question. What is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in Crackle PR? Yeah, that’s a good question. And I haven’t really been asked that question in that way before, but if I had to nail the answer, it would be this. So I started out with humble beginnings. My family didn’t have any money really to speak of. We wore secondhand clothes. It was the typical scratching and clawing our way up story. And I had a difficult childhood with divorces and everything, and I ended up getting kicked out of high school. Seventh grade was the last grade I actually completed. I was kicked out of two different schools three different times. And the last time I was dismissed, I was told by the principal that I would have a long life working at McDonald’s. It was a real dagger that he put in my heart as he showed me the door. And I just thought at that point that didn’t seem like something that someone in power should say to someone who had none. And that kind of informed everything that I’ve done since, including being a reporter where I covered stories trying to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, all the way into how I’ve tried to create an agency that is predicated on doing it with empathy.  And we have an ironclad no-assh*les policy. I hope you don’t mind the swear there. That means internally and externally. We won’t work for jerks, and we won’t tolerate brilliant jerks that work with us because that tends to be very cancerous for an organization. So that’s the Why, is where you start doesn't really dictate where you finish, and I'm determined to prove that that's the case. Share on X Yeah. I love it. And that’s one of the benefits of being in business for yourself. You can select your own clients. You don’t have to accept the ones that you don’t like. But few people actually put a stake in the ground and actually declare it, right? It’s harder to do it than to just make some compromises. Yeah. So tell me about Crackle PR. I really like the name of Crackle PR. I kind of sense what it might mean, but why don’t you explain how you came up with this? Well, good question. I like these layups you’re giving me here. So I started Crackle during the pandemic, actually, when most of us were staring at the walls of our home thinking, “What the heck is going on?” There were riots in the streets. People couldn’t go anywhere, and it was really this sort of just dark malaise that covered the world. And it was that time that I thought, “What if I were to start a PR agency that is the antithesis of the large ones that I had built?” So prior to Crackle, I had built a couple of the largest privately held tech PR agencies in North America. The models at these large agencies, as you probably know, are very hierarchical, where you trot out the Parrys of the world and the VPs, and then the model demands that you have most of the work done by juniors because that’s how you make the money. And I thought, what if we just, instead of trying to get big at all costs, what if we instead had a very prescriptive model where, instead of paying for offices in Manhattan and San Francisco, what if we just put that money into our talent and had a senior team that did the work, and we didn’t have a whole bunch of overhead? Wouldn’t that be cool?  And what if we also, as I just mentioned, don’t work with any jerks, and we work just with companies that are good people doing good stuff? And that was the true north for the company to start. And so we’ve been very fortunate in the intervening years. We now have 15 full-time employees, another five consultants. We’re hiring prescriptively and slowly. We don’t want to grow for the sake of growth. And we have clients all the way from seed rounds of funding to publicly traded companies. We really run the gamut. It's a B2B tech PR shop primarily. Share on X But I always thought that the bad people need more PR than the good people. Well, they may, but we’re not here to put lipstick on pigs. I had somebody that told me in my life one time that you don’t get into the mud with the pigs because the pig will love it, but you’ll both get dirty. And that’s not a game I’m looking to play. So I didn’t actually answer the question about Crackle itself. So the idea was that during that dark, dark time—COVID, riots, craziness everywhere. We wanted to represent a bit of goodness in the world. So I just pictured the world being this heap of ashes Share on X and under those ashes was a little spark, a little crackle of life, a little ember of goodness that was going to come out of all this. And that was really the impetus for the name, and it’s really guided the true north of the company. Love it. That’s really fun. And your hat looks good, too. You see the little spark, the little crackle right there? I see it. Yeah. It’s like a Christmas cracker. So, okay, this podcast is called Management Blueprint because we are looking for, or I’m looking for, frameworks that people came up with, that they stumbled upon, which other listeners might apply to their business. So what’s a framework that you could share with us which can be explained in three to five steps that helps you get an insight or communicate better or organize better, something that helps you be more effective? Yeah. So this may not be a big surprise. Some of your listeners may follow me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my cheat code. When I first started this business, I went to LinkedIn with my full self. Share on X Determined to tell everyone the good, the bad, the ugly about the industry that I’m in, which is public relations. And a surprising thing happened. At the time, there weren’t a lot of people kind of being truth tellers in their respective industries. But I stuck to that same framework, speaking truth to power, which goes back to my Why. An interesting thing happened, which is I tended to get a bunch of followers really quickly, and they would DM me saying, “Finally, someone’s just saying it like it really is in the industry. Finally, someone is lifting back the curtain. Finally, finally, finally.” And so I just doubled down on that approach. And so fast-forward to today, I have 82,000 followers on LinkedIn. The majority of my business comes in through DMs on LinkedIn from them having read my posts, my thoughts.  And by the time they actually come to me, they already have a good sense for my ethos, how I think, how I operate, that I work with good companies only. They know me. So the vetting process is 75% of the way done by the time they ever reach out. So that’s the cheat code. I’ve shortened the sales cycle from my old world being three months down to a week. If we have a phone call, we put together a quick proposal, and then it’s done because they are already looking to hire me when they reach out. So that’s the framework, that’s the cheat code, that’s the hack, and it’s applicable to just about any industry.  Okay. So I love it. So let’s break it down. So how do you create this effect where people pick up the phone or DM you and within a week sign you up? What is the process? Yeah. So the process is just I post literally every day of my life. Maybe weekends I’ll take a break, it depends. But every work weekday I am posting. It is not a nice-to-have, it is a mission-critical function of Crackle PR. I would say up until recently, about 90% of my leads came in through my commentary and writing and posting on LinkedIn. And it's really me just sharing everything that I know, including commenting on the news of the day tapping into the zeitgeist about issues that are happening from a public relations standpoint, and sharing real-time thought leadership across my… Share on X And so it’s not a simple process of, like, I do A and then B. It’s really more like, what’s happening today? What’s a story that I should tell and comment on today? And then how is that going to positively impact my key audiences? I’m always doing it with the intent to simply share value and expect nothing in return. I almost never ask for anything. Occasionally I’ll say, “Hey, does anybody know a good account manager?” But I’m not out there selling my wares on LinkedIn. I’m very simply ungating my brain and letting everyone have access to it, and the right people find me at the right time.  Love it. Love it. So the four steps I heard were: post every day, tap into the zeitgeist or the story of the day, how to impact your key audience, so essentially the story and how can you turn it into something that helps people, and no CTA at the end. That’s right. Yeah. Love it. That’s a great framework. Yeah. It’s great. And you know what’s interesting is that it’s multifaceted in the sense I’ve told you already that the majority of my business comes from LinkedIn, okay? Because I share what I know. It’s thought leadership in real time, and it’s a captive audience. The byproduct of that is interesting, which is that I am constantly written about in the news by, like, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, you name the publication. Because they’re finding me on that platform and reading what I have to say and reaching out for comment to expand on those ideas. So it's got this virtuous cycle where, as a PR guy myself, it's interesting that I'm putting thoughts out into the world and I'm attracting earned media Share on X which is the coveted thing that all of the LLMs I talk about rest on, because 82% or something of citations across LLMs come from earned media. So it’s a really virtuous cycle that I’ve stumbled upon and that I’m trying to refine and hone over time. So basically, you’re drinking your own Kool-Aid. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder, a lot of marketing agencies, they sell marketing, but they are not able to market themselves well. “The cobbler’s children have no shoes” is the common expression. Exactly. But you are the cobbler’s child who found a pair of shoes, and this is actually doing what you’re preaching others should do. So that’s kind of very, very counterintuitively intuitive. Well, just to add on that quickly. So public relations, we’re about promoting and publicity and all of that. The bizarre irony is that the vast majority of people who are great at writing, great at promoting, like me, don’t post on LinkedIn. They’re not sharing their thoughts out there. They’re not doing what they were born to do, which is a really fascinating thing. And I think part of it is where they work and they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing or maybe lose a client or whatever it may be. But my idea is, and I tell my team this, my staff this, is like, “I want you out there sharing how smart you are every single day. I’m under no illusions that you’ll be with me until the end of your life, okay? But while you’re with me, I want you sharing what you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly about our industry, because that’ll help you gain a brand, and it’ll help me attract an audience.”  It’s a win-win. So I wish more people had that mindset where they weren’t stingy about who has a voice but rather empowered everyone across the organization to use that voice for the better of the organization and for themselves.  Yeah, but it takes discipline to write every day. It’s not easy. It’s not easy at all. It’s easier for others than some. I mean, I was a journalist. I came up writing, so for me, it’s just a natural thing, and most PR people are writers. So you’d think it would be pretty easy for us because we write every day for our clients, but I would say probably 85-plus percent of the people in my profession are either afraid or don’t have time or just don’t want to do it, and I just think it’s a shame. They’re leaving a lot of at-bats on the field. No, absolutely. Absolutely. So you kind of half answered my question that I’m going to ask, but I’m going to ask it anyway because I’m curious about other aspects to it. So what drives growth in your business? Yeah. So if you asked me this six months ago, I would’ve said primarily it’s LinkedIn and referrals. Today, I’m happy to report that it’s referrals and LinkedIn, and also my optimized website, my website that’s optimized for the LLM era. Again, another example of eating my own dog food here, where I’m making my website readable both to humans and the machines that cite, and I’m preemptively going after the earned media pieces that will then fuel citations for my company and for my website. So again, I’m trying to create this flywheel here, and I think I’ve been pretty successful so far. I would argue probably among the most successful in PR agencies, where I’m feeding the beast constantly and prescriptively doing so, so that my website, my LinkedIn work, my earned media hits all effectively get scraped and cited by these LLMs, which is the future of search, obviously.  Yeah. I still use Google occasionally, but even Google is just the AI explanation up top. You’re not even going down, scrolling anymore. You’re just getting the quick explanations. And so everything is headed that way, and I think that being a first mover on that front is particularly important. And I think any marketer that is not looking at the LLM landscape as the next great frontier is missing the boat. Oh, yeah. I love it. So how do these LLMs work? Do you have an insight, a deeper insight as to how to create these quotes or how to show up? Is it just writing every day, making original posts, or is there more to it? There’s a bunch of things, and this could be a topic for a podcast in and of itself, but I’ll just talk in basic terms to not have your audience’s eyes glaze over. It used to be that, for example, we would write in PR a press release that was very narrative in structure. X company today announced, and the CEO is proud, and all of that kind of stuff. And then that was used to then go pitch the media. Well, the LLMs are scraping these press releases now, and what you want to try and do is make it as easy as possible for them to lift the essence of that information Share on X in an attributable way to the author or the company that is in question here. So it’s about making it digestible and ingestible for the LLMs, and there’s a variety of techniques and tricks that you can do this with, and your audience can do a quick search and find those tricks. But there’s a whole playbook now about how to do that, and it’s not even just things like press releases, but it’s how you structure your bylined articles that you place, and it’s how you frame your conversations with reporters so that you’re saying things in such a way that the LLMs will ingest these and then in turn cite these for respective audiences. And by the way, whether it’s Gemini, ChatGPT, all these different models, they all look for different things. So some of them rely heavily on places like Reddit. Some of them rely heavily on places like YouTube. Some of them ingest things more frequently than others. So there’s a whole cornucopia of things that has to be done if you’re really going to dial it in because no two LLMs are alike, and they value different things, and they weight them more heavily. So it really is a science, more so than an art form, which is what I think PR is largely known to be, more of an art form. Share on X Yeah. Yeah. So at the beginning of this conversation, you shared that you have been part of big PR companies, and you wanted to do it differently. You wanted to have a senior people-heavy agency where, I guess, people get straight from the horse’s mouth what they want to have. So is this model scalable? And if so, how? Yeah, it is scalable. And I think there’s a distinction. So when I say senior talent, I’m not talking about only VPs. So we have account directors, we have account managers, we have senior account executives. So they’re a little further down on the scale. But what we don’t have is interns and account coordinators and the very earliest players. So everybody has at least four to five years of experience on the team. And so in that sense, it is scalable, provided that the minimum retainers are sufficient. So we have a $12,000 minimum monthly retainer, and that’s very intentional because we know what we need to do to be able to be profitable and to continue to hire and scale, to your point.  So yeah, it is scalable, but it takes work, and it took a lot of hand-wringing and mistakes along the way to get to a point where we’re able to do it now. But it’s kind of beautiful in the sense that I don’t want to be a huge 250-person agency. I think I’m comfortable in the 20- to 50-employee range, and then I’ll probably, in a few years, ride off into the sunset, having made a very good earning or good living, rather and I’m not trying to become a billionaire here.  So who are your ideal customers that you’ll hire? Yeah. Typically, it’s, first of all, good companies doing good things. We don’t want to work with tobacco companies or people that are negatively contributing to the world. And it’s typically B2B technology companies in A round, B round, C round, D round of funding, or even publicly traded companies. It’s a pretty wide swath, but

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  Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

  363: Simplify Your Tech Environment with Denis O’Shea

  Aug 31, 202627 min

  https://youtu.be/1xVHNhjP1AY Denis O’Shea , Founder of Mobile Mentor , helps organizations pursue a clear goal to simplify your tech environment while strengthening security and empowering employees to remain productive. Driven by the joy of learning and intellectual adventure, Denis left a 15-year career at Nokia to build a company that learns about emerging technologies, translates them into business outcomes, and mentors customers through change. In this conversation, Denis introduces The Tech Stack Streamlining Framework: Understand Current Tech Stack, Assess Capacity for Change, Benchmark to Peers, Build the Roadmap, and Deliver Simplified Tech Stack. He explains how immersing his team in a customer’s environment, asking thoughtful questions, and benchmarking the organization against its peers can reveal a clear path toward a simpler technology stack. Denis also discusses Mobile Mentor’s fast-growing mentoring service, how its Microsoft partnership transformed the business, the challenge of finding technology professionals who are natural mentors, and why people must remain responsible for the quality and accuracy of everything they produce with AI. — Simplify Your Tech Environment with Denis O’Shea  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Denis O’Shea , the Founder of Mobile Mentor , a technology service provider helping thousands of clients find and maintain the right balance, securing devices, protecting data, and empowering people to be productive. Mobile Mentor is also a five-time Microsoft award winner. So Denis, welcome back to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me back. And I have to say, you look fantastic. You’re aging gracefully, and I hope I’m doing the same.  Well, unfortunately, my barber is on vacation, so I couldn’t visit him last week. But it’s great to have you back on the show, and we couldn’t agree whether it was two or four years ago that you were here. Anyhow, it’s great to have you back, and I’ve got some questions for you that I’m curious about. And first and foremost, the question is, what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Mobile Mentor business?  My personal Why is probably learning. And I think the reason I went into business in the first place was to learn and grow as an individual. It certainly wasn’t money. I expect money as an outcome from the process, but I didn’t go into it for money. It was really to learn, and the trigger for me was I did an executive education program in Switzerland. I was living there for a few years, and that blew my mind. That just exploded my mind when I started learning all about mergers, acquisitions, turnarounds, management buyouts, all these different ways of growing a business that were nonlinear.  And that motivated me to go on and do an MBA, and that then motivated me to leave my employer, who was a great company. I was working for Nokia for 15 years. They were amazing, but I decided to leave them and go out and embrace all this nonlinear stuff and found a company from scratch. And one day I thought maybe I’ll do a spin-out, or maybe I’ll do an acquisition, and I’ll do all these different things. And it was purely for the joy of learning and the intellectual adventure. So I think that’s my Why. It’s learning.  Yeah. Well, learning is great, and it’s a big driver of businesses when they are able to learn, especially in today’s age. So tell me a little bit about how Mobile Mentor is reflecting this way of learning. Is it a learning organization, and in what way is it?  Oh, that’s an interesting question, Steve. I would hope we are a learning organization. Something I’ve been saying to my kids and my staff for years is, “We’re a learning species. We can learn anything we put our minds to.” And so I would hope we are a learning organization. And the word “mentor” plays a huge part in not just our brand, but how we work. So we’re a technology service company. We’re always unpacking the latest technology and helping customers figure out what to do with it and how to extract value from it.  So I would hope that we’re good at learning what the technology can do and then translating that into outcomes for customers and helping people unlock the full potential of the technology they’ve just purchased. And when we started 22 years ago, we were focused on mobile devices. That’s why the company’s called Mobile Mentor. Nowadays, it’s mainly AI and security and all that. And by the way, we’re going through a rebrand. The company’s just going to be called Mentor going forward. Just Mentor. So that we can work with all technology, so we remove any association with that small device where we started 22 years ago. So I think we are very good at learning, internalizing the new technology, and then translating that into business outcomes for our customers.  Yeah.  That’s what I feel like our core skill is.  Yeah. And I love this concept of mentoring because essentially it’s not about teaching people, it’s about helping people discover how to be great. And if you can do that, that’s amazing. So that brings me to the next question, which is about frameworks. So this, as you know, this podcast is about frameworks, and what I’m curious about is, what’s a framework that has helped you grow this company, build this company, or help your clients or mentor your clients? Maybe it’s a mentoring framework. Maybe it’s a technology framework. So something that comes to mind that can be explained in three to five steps to our listeners.  Sure. We have a really strong framework at the front end of our sales process. It’s an assessment and roadmap we do for customers. And it’s something that’s on our website. It has a price point, so it’s got a value, but we choose to give it away for free when we get a strong, well-qualified opportunity, or when we have a channel partner bring us a strong lead. We will use this assessment and roadmap process to build a vision for the customer. And the way we do it, we’ve got a good framework for this.  We go through an assessment. So we tell the customer, “We’re going to have a look at your environment holistically and get a really good understanding of the technology stack you have today, all the different technologies you’re using, and also get a good understanding of your organization’s capability and capacity for change, and how you embrace change, how you make change happen. “And we’re going to show you how you compare to a whole bunch of other organizations.” I think we’ve done 174, 175 of these in the last maybe three years. And so we show the customer how they compare to others in their industry and also against others roughly their same size. And then, most importantly, we build out a roadmap, and we show them, “Here’s how you can potentially go from where you are today with today’s technology stack,” which is usually very busy, it’s usually a long list of technologies, “to a much simpler technology stack in the future if they’re willing to consolidate on one or two platforms and do all the possible integrations, automations, and simplifications so that they’re extracting much more value from one or two platforms, like Microsoft, than having a whole colorful mix of different technology vendors.”  So we’ll say, “Here’s a journey you could go on,” and then we describe it in vivid detail, showing all the different parts and how they would go passwordless, how they would automate setting up new employees and all the technology they need, how they would automate all their patching and security, how they would embrace AI into their operations, how they would use AI for productivity improvements, and kind of show this technology journey. That process, or that framework, of doing an assessment, and it covers 120 different topics. So we do the assessment, the comparison, the roadmap.  We find that to be extremely powerful because customers will look at that, and they’ll look at the destination and say, “Right. We want to be there. We want to get that outcome,” and then they’re buying off us. We’re not selling to them. They’re basically saying, “Okay. We want to get there. How do we do it? Help us. How can you come in and help us do it?” So the narrative flips from us being a sales organization to then being a mentor and helping the customer figure out how to get there.  And of course, we want to sell services, and we want to sell long-term contracts to say, “Yes, we can take you from here to there, and it’s a three-year engagement to do all those changes.” So that’s what we want. But the customer is buying it off us because they’ve bought into the destination.  Yeah. And that’s the modern buyer’s journey, right? They research you. Before even they come to you, they want to listen to you because you might have something for them. So I love this framework. So what I noted down was step number one, understand the technology stack that they have. Step number two, assess their ability to manage change or to handle change.  Yeah.  Then you benchmark them to others in their industry or in their peer group. Then you build the roadmap, and then you show them the simplified end state, the simplified tech stack.  Correct. Correct. And then we give them options around how we can help them to get there. Usually, there’s three options. And we say, “Well, what style of engagement works best for you? How would you like us to work with you?” And then it becomes a very comfortable, easy sales process from there, and it becomes easy because we’ve done all the listening.  So when we do the assessment and we cover 120 topics, we do 60 questions in 60 minutes. So it’s two one-hour sessions. And we call it our “friendly interrogation.” But what happens during that time is what I call a selfless immersion in the customer’s world. So we don’t talk about us. We never talk about us. Everything is about them, their technology stack, their environment, their processes, their technical dependencies, all the things about their organization.  So we get this really rich understanding of their environment. And at the end, guess what they say, Steve? Or guess what they say at the end of that interrogation or that assessment session?  I don’t know. Give it to us. What do they say?  They say thank you, which is extraordinary, and it surprised me when it started happening. But people love to be heard. We’re not selling. We’re not pitching anything. We are just seeking to understand their environment and asking a whole bunch of really good questions. So we don’t need to tell them who we are and what we’ve done, that we’ve won Microsoft Partner of the Year and blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to do any of that.  They know that we know our stuff because of the questions we’re asking, because those questions have been refined and refined and refined. So we’re able to get right into the heart of their issues, and they tell us all about their environment and their issues and concerns and frustrations. And at the end of the assessment, they say, “Thank you.” And I remind them, I say, “We haven’t delivered anything yet. All we’ve done is asked you a whole bunch of questions.” But they feel like it was almost a cathartic process of unloading and sharing all of it. And then we do the second session, and the rapport gets even better, and they bring in some different people.  So by the time we get to the end of the assessment, we’ve had a really good conversation about 120 different things. There’s now a high degree of trust. And so when we come back in the third session, we say, “Okay, we heard you. Here’s where you are. Here’s how you compare to others. Here’s where you could be, and here’s what the journey would look like to get you there, taking all the complexities into account, all the dependencies, all the legacy, all the technical debt you might have. “Here’s what it would take to get you to where you want to be.” They’re now listening and they’re trusting us because we’ve listened to them.  Yeah. I love that. That is very powerful. And asking good questions is actually not always easy. In the age of AI, answers are omnipresent, but good questions, good prompts, that’s a skill, right? To ask the right question.  It is. And it’s interesting you mention AI because we’re not using any AI in the way we do this. We could choose to send out a form to the customer and say, “Please fill out this form.” Actually, we tried that. We tried that 10 or 12 years ago in our New Zealand operation, and it was a complete disaster. Nobody wants to fill out a long form and answer all those questions. But if you have a conversation face-to-face, on Teams or Zoom, whatever, you can have the conversation. You’ll get all the information.  But now we’re establishing rapport between us while we do that, and that also gives them a flavor of what it’s like to work with us. How we interact and how we follow up the question, how we drill down, how we clarify and confirm, “Did I understand that correctly?” in a way that you don’t get from just filling out a web form. And we also don’t use AI to analyze the transcript and try and fill it out. We actually do it based on us understanding it, because we find we get way more detail and nuance than relying on a transcript.  That’s very interesting. Definitely, when there’s a human on the other end who is interested in what you’re saying and is listening deeply, it’s a highly motivating and even inspiring thing. That’s why it’s hard to make a talk without the audience, because you need the energy of the audience. So you provide the energy for them to come up with the goods and explain where they are, right?  Yeah, yeah. So let me switch gears and ask you this. What drives growth in your business?  What drives growth? Two things. One, that process sets us up to be able to sell something. The fastest-growing thing that we sell is a service called mentoring, which is very closely aligned to our brand and the way we work, and it’s something that’s very unique to us. So what we figured out is that there are some customers who just want to bring in a partner to build something for them let’s say to deploy some new technology, and then they want the vendor to go away and leave them with it. There are other organizations who don’t want to touch the technology. They want somebody to provide a managed service, so you get all the outcomes.  And those two technology service categories have been around forever, right? Microsoft has 400,000 partners doing this kind of work, doing project work, or providing managed services. We found a huge white space in the middle between those two. We found there’s a big white space in the mid-market, in particular mid-market organizations, where they have their own IT team. They don’t want to give the keys away to a managed service provider and let go. They want to learn all about the new technology.  They want to internalize the knowledge, and they want somebody to come in and help them deploy it with them, and be hands-on-keyboard, and do it together with them, and do lots of knowledge transfer, and help them build the documentation and the knowledge base, and get the experience and the skills so that their skills grow, their confidence grows. And we call that service mentoring, where we’re doing that for them. So we’re not just building it and walking away, we’re building it together with them. And it can be a one-year, two-year, five-year engagement where we’re building out this complex technology capability, but we’re doing it together, and they become the experts over time. That is our fastest-growing, top-selling service.  That’s fascinating. So it’s essentially coaching, mentoring, and still you turn it into an ongoing engagement because it’s not simple, right? There are a lot of layers to it. And what’s the timeline of such a relationship?  Typically three years. Typically. It can be as short as one, it can be as long as five. But for most of the technology transformation projects we’re doing, I would say they’re two, three, four years for the organization to change and embed all the changes and turn off all the legacy technology and fully embrace the new way of working. So our typical contract is three years. And then we set up all the cadences so that we’re working together every week through specific things, and there’s a weekly cadence, our engineers doing all that stuff, and then monthly coming up for air to see how we’re doing against the roadmap. Do we need to make any changes? What’s the focus for next month? And that’s a rolling process that keeps going on and on. And so the two teams end up working extremely closely.  Our engineering team, and we’re bringing in different architects, engineers, and there’s obviously a consistent project manager across it. And on the customer side, they’re bringing different engineers or architects depending on the piece of work we’re doing. But it’s generally all modernizing the way they work with Microsoft technology primarily, and changing from legacy stuff to very modern, invisible security, embedded AI, really trying to accelerate their maturity as an organization.  Yeah. Love it.  Does that make sense?  So it makes sense. I’m wondering, I mean, most businesses these days, they want to have recurring revenue, and even though you have a three-year engagement, it’s still not an evergreen engagement. So what do you do to turn these engagements into more of an enduring one, or you’re not trying to do it because it’s not the purpose?  That’s the $64 million question for our business, Steve, is how do we turn a two-year or three-year engagement into something longer? And it actually comes back to where you started with the learning thing. So what we need to be doing, and this is a constant battle for us, is learning about the latest and the newest technologies and staying ahead of the customer. Always staying ahead in terms of our knowledge so that we can keep adding new things to the backlog of work that needs to be done.  So that we might deploy technology A and get that done and do the migration and modernization, but then we need to move on to B and C and D and E. And there’s always new stuff, and actually the rate of change is accelerating now with AI. Everything is changing so fast, it’s unbelievable. But our job is to stay ahead so that we can always have something new and edgy that we can bring to the relationship. That we’re always able to give new knowledge, information, value.  So is it a managed technology business or is it more of a consulting business?  Ah, we are three different things. We do a lot of project work where people will come in and say, &

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