With the Covid-19 pandemic having had changed the world forever, we’re witnessing an ever-increasing number of businesses adopting digital transformation to put themselves in front of their audience.
Marketing has tried and true core principles and trending strategies that change over time.
At one point in time, using third-party cookies was one of the hottest trends in the advertising industry. But fast forward a few years, with companies like Google, Apple, and many more rolling out their privacy-focused features, advertisers have no other option to ditch the use of third-party data.
We connected with the marketing agency owner, Wesley Mathews, to get some insights about what he sees working today and what’s not.
More about Wesley:
Wesley is the founder and CEO of High-Level Marketing, a marketing agency focused on optimizing websites for B2C companies.
Numbers-wise, they have been featured on the Inc. 5000 list 3 different times (2016, 2018, and 2019) and in 2021, are planning to reach $21M in revenue. They currently have 100+ employees as well.
Throughout Their Conversation, Adam & Wesley Discussed:
- Wesley shares his backstory and how they stepped into the realm of marketing.
- What kind of companies Wesley & team prefer working with?
- Wesley shares his insights on SEO and how they plan to approach it strategically to deliver instant results.
- Wesley shares his valuable insights on how businesses can leverage Local SEO to achieve great results.
- Wesley and Adam talk about how to approach lead generation. How does team at High-Level Marketing help businesses generate high-quality leads in a strategic manner?
- How does Wesley & team approach PPC? What platforms do they hold expertise in?
- Redirecting traffic to homepage vs landing page – what has worked for Wesley & team?
- How much do small businesses need to spend to set up their remarketing processes and actually get results?
- The importance of tracking the right metrics
- How important it is to focus on Google reviews?
- Do Wesley & team like to work with service-based businesses or eCommerce ones?
- How tricky is it to market eCommerce businesses when compared with service-based ones?
- Wesley’s plan for the next two years.
- What are some of the key things that create quality customer attraction and loyalty that people can be thinking about for their businesses?
- How can people reach out to Wesley & team?
Conclusion
The marketing world is ever-changing. And it’s really important to make sure that you are applying the right set of tactics and hacks to put yourself in front of your audience at the right time in the right manner.
And as important as focusing on your marketing efforts is, you can level them up by building a rock-solid brand from the ground up.
Adam and team have rolled out a really insightful article revolving around branding – which you can check out HERE.
Learn How to Strategically Build a Rock-Solid Brand:
Schedule a strategy call with us today.
Subscribe HERE:
Powerful Recommendations for Awesome Readers Just Like You:
- Jake Orak: Skyrocketing Your eCommerce Brand From Zero to 7-Figures
- Rita Sever: Building a Winning Culture in Today’s Virtual World
- The Biggest Reason Entrepreneurs Get Stuck
- The Truth About Why 88% Of People Buy From Brands Today
- Uyi Abraham : From $100 in Pocket to a 8-Figure Company
Episode Transcript (unedited, will likely have typos):
Adam G. Force 0:00
How do social entrepreneurs and small businesses create an authentic brand people love so they can get the edge they need to stand out, create Predictable Revenue and compete against the big guys. That’s what we’re here to discuss. I’m Adam forest, the founder of change creator and this is the authentic brand mastery podcast.
What’s up everybody. Welcome back to the authentic brand mastery podcast. This is your host, Adam fourths. So listen, guys, if you missed the last episode, I talked about the enhance and then advance strategy. This is such a powerful strategy to I mean, you could to extract your revenues pretty quick, with these types of steps. And I want to talk about the principles behind it what it means and kind of get your perspective in that place. So if you missed that episode, definitely go back and check it out. Today, we’re gonna be talking with Wesley Matthews, who he’s the founder and CEO of a company called the high level marketing. They had a really great year, and I wanted to kind of chat with him about some things because he works. His company is a marketing agency that’s focused on optimizing websites and things like that. And so numbers wise, they’ve been featured, you know, in the inc 5000, list three different times. And in 2021, they are looking to reach about 21 million in revenue. And so they’re doing really great stuff and lots of good insights we’ll, we’re gonna uncover with Wesley, as we kind of dig into it. And these are all part of just kind of building out your brand and some good marketing strategies that I think will help you guys along your journey. If you’re enjoying the show, and you want to show us a little support, just stop by iTunes and leave us a five star review. That always goes a long way. And we appreciate it. Last but not least, if you’re looking to kind of step up your branding, get your website developed or you are an E commerce brand, you want your sales system to actually be profitable when you’re running ads, right? We run ads, and we struggle to convert that traffic profitably. That is where we come in for E commerce sales systems. And if that’s you, you know, give us a book a call, we’ll talk with you and see if you’re a good fit. We got to make sure we can get you those results. But we’re working with a number of clients and we’re just having incredible results. And I think we could do the same for you this this system definitely can 2x 3x and in some cases 5x your monthly revenues, and definitely increase your average order value. So just stop by book a call. We’ll chat. Alright guys, that’s it. We’re gonna jump into this conversation. Okay, show me the heat. On No, you go. Hey, Wesley, welcome to the authentic brand mastery podcast. How’re you doing today, man?
Wesley Mathews 2:45
Good, Adam. Thanks for having me.
Adam G. Force 2:47
Yeah, thanks. Appreciate you taking the time. Looks like you guys have been doing some really great stuff. And just from what you’re telling me, it looks like you had a pretty good year. So why don’t you just give everybody the rundown? I like to know, kind of like, what’s exciting right now and what’s going on? That’s kind of cool and top of mind, and then then just give us a little bit of that backstory of how you got there.
Wesley Mathews 3:09
Yeah, for sure. So started high level marketing in 2009. And really, the idea was, at the time, there wasn’t a lot of like web companies that were effective or really providing value. And the one thing about me is I love meeting other like minded entrepreneurs and business owners and I saw this big challenge of like a really good web company that delivers on what they say they’re going to do in terms of SEO, SEO just kind of started to come up. So we really spent the time building a transparent digital marketing company. So I want to really show the customer like you’re paying this, this is what you’re getting. And we built a model off of that, that was really successful. So if I if I can reflect back on that time, I didn’t think we’d have a five year run with that I thought the market was gonna get flooded, it was gonna change. But honestly, you know, 2022, looking back, that fundamental foundation is still effective today. I mean, the idea around that, you know, local businesses need a good digital marketing company that can provide value. Every customer we pick up. They’ve had a bad experience with a digital marketing, whether they were lied to expectation. So really, it’s it’s been a great ride, because there’s 1000s and 1000s of these types of customers that are still out there today. So we stay very current in terms of, you know, making sure that we’re relevant, making sure our local customers are being ranked on Google and getting leads so we tailor fit our product and services to each customer we work with. For example, if you’re a local plumber in Wichita, Kansas versus Detroit, Michigan, you might have 10 trucks on the road, you might have one truck on the road. We just tried to understand the customers challenges and problems and then come back with a customized solution around that. It’s very, very effective. So we have over 2000 customers that we deal with on an ongoing basis once a month now.
Adam G. Force 5:02
Okay, wow, that’s exciting. And I mean, are you it sounds like you work with a range of different kinds of companies. So any is there? I guess Can you describe the types of customers that you typically? Yeah, so
Wesley Mathews 5:16
like our sweetspot, b2c home services and healthcare. Again, just because Home Services, plumbers, roofers, electricians. I mean, b2c is heavily searched on Google, b2b business to business, like IT services or you know, that’s a different animal when it comes to digital marketing and how people search, but b2c, right? I mean, if you have water damage, or you have a, you know, shingles coming off your roof, what are you doing your roofing companies in my area, you know, we know how important that is for like a 10 mile coverage area for a business to make sure that they have relevancy and rank, not to mention when somebody finds that customer, when they go to the website, what how, you know, what do we what do we do with that customer when they went on the website? So that’s a whole nother journey that we take with that customer?
Adam G. Force 6:02
Yeah, yeah. And so I guess I’m curious, let’s talk a little bit. Now, you, you you do SEO, I know you have a lot of different services. And I have a focus on just like SEO, you know, good website performance, you know, sales funnels, things like that lead generation. So I’d like to kind of dive into some of those things. And I’m curious, like, what, when you when you’re working with people, who is the SEO thing more? I guess, prominent, I will say, for the low people who are look doing local businesses that like, big, does that become a priority for them versus some of the other companies that are more global?
Wesley Mathews 6:42
Yeah, in my experience? Yes. Because again, if you take a plumber in your local market, and you look at dollars are like, how are we going to get how are we going to get customers and prospects? You know, for me investing organically with a little bit of paid and having a whole strategy. I mean, that’s the quickest path of least resistance for that customer to see results. And, you know, you you know, as well, as everybody listening knows that, you know, customers don’t, you know, it’s instant gratification they want, they want to spend money, and they want results now, so yeah, I always get a hybrid solution around paid search, with organic, because obviously, organic is more of a ramp up. And output, honestly, I mean, most of the customers we take on, you know, some are good, some not so good. But we have to re you know, kind of rebuild from scratch, it’s like having a home, you know, if you’re if you’re searching for a new home, and on the outside, you’re looking at it, you know, new windows and the house looks great. But then you open the door, and there’s like a big hole on the foundation. That’s a really good analogy in terms of like, who we deal with, it’s like, well, my website looks great. And I spent all this money on it, we have to be the company to come in and say yeah, but here’s like the laundry list of things that that are wrong, and we can’t, you know, we’re not going to like reshingle the roof when the foundation is about to fall apart. So what we’ve been able to accomplish as an organization, because look, I mean, how do you how do we know this as an organization, or if you’re a sales individual, and you’re talking to that plumber, how the hell do you know if it’s gonna work, like, unless you’re a salesperson who’s really educated in SEO, so what we’ve been able to do is develop some technology over the course of 11 years that could take a customer’s URL, scan it against their competition, scan it against Google, literally run a bunch of AI, I’m just doing the short version, we could probably have another several hour conversation about what it really is. But what it does, it gives the customer a comprehensive report of everything that’s wrong, and everything that we can do, and then what that outcome can potentially be, which gives us a guide in terms of delivering that back to the customer to say, Hey, I work with high level marketing, this is exactly what we’re going to do and the timeframe. So it takes all the ambiguity out of it. Because if you talk to people that invest in digital marketing, or paid search or whatever, they’re like, yeah, it didn’t work. Well, what does that mean? What did they do? Why don’t know, do you get reports? Why don’t I don’t know what that means? You actually put documentation and support against that. So when we onboard a customer, we go through the process, you know, we have a dedicated customer service management team, who then also manages to that priority. So as they’re discussing with customers and doing their, you know, the relationship side of it, they have something that everybody’s looking at rowing in the same direction, saying, This is our goal. You know, this is what we’re trying to accomplish together. So it’s not hodgepodge pie in the sky, which I feel a lot of digital marketing companies, that’s how they operate. They just take a fee, and cross our fingers and hope for the best and hope the customer is not going to combine.
Adam G. Force 9:34
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and I’m seeing more and more, you know, it seems like the market is creating more and more big promises these days, you know, we’ll do this or your money back and all these kind of big guarantees and things like that. So it’s interesting to see the evolution of the space and I’m curious. Two things. I guess the first thing is, I’d like to talk about a scenario for a local company and I’ll be honest, like I I do branding and things like that. And I have a, one of my companies that I worked with is a Armenia, this one’s for you, is a local food company, right? And they do things without preservatives. So shipping all around is very tough because you have a shorter lifespan. So local becomes really important. So when you’re starting up local, any just kind of tips for a company people listening who have ecommerce companies do local stuff like that? Like, what are some things that might help them that you guys do? Obviously, they can’t run the full gambit all over the crazy work that you do. But what are some jumpstart tips that might be good for local SEO that they can consider and think about?
Wesley Mathews 10:45
Yeah, so I think the big, you know, from, from the, my personal opinion, is, if you have local brick and mortar, that’s a lot different than being a plumbing company in an industrial Parkway, that’s going out to service customers. So for me, if I had a retail store, or if I was involved in this business, as one of the owners, you know, your your best asset in brand value, I would be all over social media, you know, friends, family running campaigns on social media. Again, I think from a, you know, from a search standpoint, you know, I would invest in the foundation, like we offer a foundational package, which gets, you know, that local business on every citation, I’m sure you’re familiar with it, just making sure that the directories are sound, I would start at the foundational level. But again, just starting up, I mean, I would be as the owner, just getting out there and doing everything I can for word of mouth referrals, because educating the market on who you are, you know, the digital marketing is a nice supplement to what you’re doing. But I feel like it’s gonna take a couple years for that business to really see the value of that investment. So instead of the owner, like, you know, doing the food or doing that, like they got to get out in the world and start to develop their name before they can start to, you know, meaningfully invest in digital because, you know, again, not knowing too much, or getting into the weeds, I don’t like to see customers throw money at things that aren’t going to provide a return, I’m always going to give you $1 educate me on a clear path of TEDx, even 3x. In this case, it might be too early on to make that big capital investment. Yeah, that’s just like my knee jerk reaction. And I feel as an organization, we’re really good at that across 100 Plus individuals, because our goal is to not take on every client, we want to educate them. And if we can provide the solution, that’s going to be a win win. It makes sense, you know, and that’s why like, we really, you know, b2b is a different animal. And we just try to be as transparent as clear as possible, to make the customer’s life easy. And make sure it aligns with our, you know, vision and strategy, how we do digital marketing.
Adam G. Force 12:47
Yeah, yeah. And are you guys running? So let’s say you’re doing lead generation? What kinds of lead generation are you? Are you doing? Yeah, so
Wesley Mathews 12:57
mainly, I mean, a lot of our customers are, look, they’re small local businesses, we do deal with some large franchises with several 100 franchisees below that. But look, most of them, they don’t have sales process. They don’t have Salesforce, they don’t have HubSpot. So we ultimately, look at the website, you know, we have our own proprietary technology that we call mice that you know, allows a customer to log in, manage their website, pretty much do everything you can think of customer can do that themselves, or they call their account manager and all of our account managers can go under the hood and make any modification. You know, the second thing is sorry, for I kind of lost where I was going with that.
Adam G. Force 13:38
Yeah. So much lead generation, that’s
Wesley Mathews 13:42
what was going through my head. So what happens is, I mean, every customer has an email address, right? Yeah, we look to see if they have Salesforce or any type of sales funnel, running in the background, most of them don’t. So it goes down email address, so like, our system will load and save every lead, and then it sends it to their email address. So the nice thing about that is when the account manager is having discussions with the customer, they can see all the leads that are happening, and that we have technology on the background that shows customers investment, how many leads are coming through. We also offer call tracking, and all these other things that you can manage right from the dashboard. So what we try to do as the evolution of the customer is try to educate them on the technology, and then start to suggest things over the year like hey, how are you following up on the leads that are coming in? Because we run into a lot of customers that might say, you know, last month was terrible. I didn’t get any leads? Yeah, and the manager might say there’s 10 leads in the backend. Like what happened? Well, one of the challenges is some of these entrepreneurs are, you know, let’s say we’re dealing with a tree tree cutting company. This is a real example. You know, the gentleman’s in the tree cutting the tree and like missing the call. Sometimes he answers the calls while he’s up in the tree. And like how do you follow up, you know, you’re working all day leads get missed, you know, we’ll play the call tracking for them. And then also listened to like how the sales team or whomever is answering the phone on their end are working existing leads, which creates like, oh my gosh, like that was scary, I don’t want to listen to another one. So that’s where we try to start with them is, you know, we can document and show all of our efforts and what we’re doing on where everything’s coming in from, I mean, even to the point of dynamically changing the phone number, like if you google search the local, you know, tree cutting company, and you came in through, you know, this avenue, we can say, hey, like, you got 10 leads from here, you got five leads from here, like, it’s very, very specific. And, you know, again, going back 2009, I would have thought every business would have had all its sophistication, and, you know, be ready for business. Companies don’t have any of this setup. So, you know, we try to come in and again, understand where they’re at how savvy they are, do they have a marketing person? Do they have a team to help them? Are they running solo? So, you know, we just try to go in and help them as best we can. And that’s part of our process. It’s not, you know, sign up, and then, you know, set it and forget it, you know, we’re having monthly conversations with all of our customers diving deep quarterly. I mean, I have customers that are still on board that came on board when I started in 2009, you know, guys that had one barely running truck that now have fleets, and we’ve been able to grow with them. So that’s really cool. I mean, we are an entrepreneurial driven company. And, you know, the the Protect, you know, their prospects and customers that we work with, they have to have an entrepreneurial spirit for us to really kind of integrate together. We don’t work with Fortune 500 companies. I mean, if Apple called today and said, We need this, they would it would hurt. But I would have we would have to pass on that opportunity. On the entrepreneurial ran company.
Adam G. Force 16:45
Yeah, yeah. And are you guys running, you know, Google ads, or YouTube ads, Facebook ads, stuff like that?
Wesley Mathews 16:53
Yes, we are. So we’re big in PPC. So sort of like our suite of product offerings. It always starts at the website, I mean, everything goes back to the websites, we have to make sure that that’s sound, organic search, paid search, mainly through Google. And then kind of below that we have like, the geo fencing, we have the YouTube, we have social media, which is more I feel like brand stuff, you know, I’ve kind of been brought up with, like, I’m a big ROI guy, like, you know, like I mentioned a minute ago, like 10, to want, you know, 10 to one. So the YouTube videos and the social media, I think is like good brand awareness. And I might be cooked into a little bit of the budget. But you know, mainly we’re working with the home services, healthcare that want to drive leads and opportunities, and we search for the path of least resistance. And to me those kind of come down the priority order, if that makes sense.
Adam G. Force 17:44
Yeah. And so let’s say you’re working with one of these small service companies, and you said that you’d like to bring everybody back to the website, I guess, as the the primary hub. In what’s your, I guess, where have you found the most success? I mean, people aren’t driving traffic to the homepage. Are you doing dedicated landing pages and setting up those processes for them and things like that?
Wesley Mathews 18:08
Yeah. So from a, from an organic standpoint, you know, it’s the website, the, you know, just the service pages and the great content for PPC, the fastest way to lose and the fastest way to burn through your budget is to send them to the homepage, everything we do is we understand the target audience. And we make specific landing pages around the specific service offerings in the areas we’re going after. So every campaign we do, sometimes it might be five different can’t be like five different services. I mean, we make a unique landing page, you know, again, you can’t you really can’t click around that website going clicking you can do is submitting your information. Yeah, I love remarketing, right? Because if somebody goes to your website, and they don’t buy or they leave, and then that follows them around. I know there’s a lot going on with that right now. But that’s one of my really favorite brand building things. I mean, one of our one of the things we used to do in my office, you know, if we’d have a customer meeting, or even over the phone, and I’d say, Hey, Adam, got a website real quick. Just Just so you type it into your computer, and then we’d have a conversation the next day or whatever you’re like, and ever since we talk like you’re everywhere, like, you know, because if somebody goes to the Wall Street Journal, or they go to Amazon, like they’re seeing high level marketing everywhere they go. And I think like that’s a simple, inexpensive form to market that’s really effective that quite frankly, not a lot of people understand or know even exists. So yeah,
Adam G. Force 19:35
I mean, you’re talking about just remarketing anybody that visits the website in the past, you know, whatever 90 days, 180 days, how much do How much does a small business really need to spend Wesley to to set that up and how much traffic do you need for that to even be possible? Really, because I know on Facebook, sometimes you have too much. We have a really small volume of traffic. It’s just not going to do anything, you know?
Wesley Mathews 19:58
Yeah, I’m all about quality. Do you over quantity? I know a lot of digital marketing companies say, Well, you know, we can get you, you know, 10,000 clicks or this, that and the other. It’s like, that’s fantastic. You know, I want quality clicks, you know. So for us, you know, most of our clients are coming in ranging anywhere from like, we have a core basic package at like 350 a month, I would say, on average, over the 2000 Plus customers, we have 15 to $2,000 a month are typically where our customers are landing, from an organic standpoint, from a paid standpoint. And what’s cool about paid is, you know, once you figure out the mathematics around, what is your lead cost? I mean, the question I asked customers that I asked everybody, even employees, wave a magic wand, where do you want to be in one year? If we work together? define success? And I’ll tell you that question is really hard for a small business to answer because nobody asked them that stuff. What they say is, we can get you 10,000 clicks, we can do this, we, we challenge them in a different level. And sometimes it blows up, it doesn’t work. They’re like, this is too hard. I don’t want to work with you. But again, I want this to be a long term relationship, and I want to be effective. If we’re not on the same page. It’s not gonna work. So we’ll talk to some customers and say, well, we want 10% increase on XYZ. Okay, well, how are we going to do that? Because the conversation we just had, you want to go in these five directions. And that has nothing to do with what you just said. And they’re like, oh, so I feel like, you know, having those conversations, flushing that out in the beginning is really, really important. Yeah. And then we come back with that clear deliverable and saying, Hey, here’s how we’re going to get there. So again, at the end of the day, I’ll challenge a customer and say, do you care? If you get 100 clicks versus 10,000? Like, does that really mean anything to you get after and say, you know, if we develop a lead cost for every customer, which I encourage everybody runs an agency, be direct with the customer and understand what that is, because then you can look at the monthly spend, relative to what’s coming in. Yeah, and know if it’s a success, putting a stake in the ground. And that’s where I often feel a lot of agencies missed the mark. And customers, they just don’t, they don’t know where they’re at, they’re spending money. You know, it’s not things are, that’s where we again, like we’re not perfect, you know, but when we strive to all row in that direction, good things,
Adam G. Force 22:18
I mean, you got to have some clarity, it’s hard to, if you don’t know, your KPIs, for anybody listening and key performance indicators, you don’t know those numbers throughout your process, like I use, there’s no way to get there. So for you to come in and give that clarity. And it’s shocking how many people don’t really know their numbers or how all that works. And they’re just like, go, go go. And it’s a churning process. You know, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. So um, yeah, I mean, I had a question. I just lost my thought to what I had to piggyback off of that me a second. What was it? We were just talking what
Wesley Mathews 22:55
while you’re thinking about going back to that, one example, Google reviews, right? I mean, the individual you’re talking about, about the food company probably has a high level of people buying food, you’re developing that process. And I mean, honestly, like, nobody can tell me that they don’t buy a bunch of stuff on Amazon, I won’t buy anything that has less than four stars, I don’t even look at it. So I think the next evolution of where we’re going, and that’s even Google reviews, I mean, I, if I’m going to invest a meaningful amount of money in something, I’m going to do my due diligence, I had my basement finished in my home. And I read every single review, because one of my biggest fears of hiring this company to finish my basement, the crew has to come through my garage, walk through my kitchen to go to my basement. And I’m like, you know, sorry in advance. But I don’t want to see you for four months. I have four young kids, my wife, I don’t want you guys trashing my house. As I and I literally had two objections, I was crystal clear with this organization. And when I read those, of course, when I when I asked them, they’re like, We are the most professional and data that sounded great, right? But who doesn’t say that? Everybody’s great, right? But when I read the reviews of individuals, there was like about 100, I could really understand that these were real people. And they were just they gave some details that like resonated with me. And I was like, they delivered on it, I trusted them. But then the customer review verified that and doing that. And I’ll tell you, I hired them. They were amazing. They delivered on it. And then I wrote a review for them that went even more detail. And they keep calling me back then dude, like, we’ve picked up so many pieces of business, because you basically said what everybody’s feeling. So I feel a lot of customers like, that’s an easy way. I mean, it takes time, right takes time. And you got to figure out a process which we can help we help with those strategies. Because it’s so much more for us than just digital marketing and web and SEO. It’s we want to see entrepreneurs succeed. Yeah. Yeah.
Adam G. Force 24:53
I mean, do you guys mostly work with service businesses and things like that or E commerce as well?
Wesley Mathews 24:59
Not really e commerce First, I mean, we will, if we have to. I know that sounds terrible, but I mean, again, home services and health care, non ecommerce.
Adam G. Force 25:08
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, ecommerce I see, you know, a lot of that you see a lot today oh, we work with coaches, and we work with service companies, because they have high ticket price points. So you can run the marketing and do all that stuff where ecommerce can be a little, a little bit trickier for people when they’re running ads and things like that.
Wesley Mathews 25:25
Yeah, I mean, I feel like, you know, I’m from Detroit, Michigan suburb, you know, so big motor city, right. And I’ve always kind of felt like, you have GM, you have Ford, like, let’s just use Ford, for example, they have the Ford F 150, they have a chassis, they have a platform, they know what works. So again, you can buy a Ford truck, you can get the finest leather in that thing, you can get the most basic cloth seats, you can either spend 300 on that, or 3000. But when we stay within the home services and healthcare, from an engineering perspective, from is this thing gonna, like fall apart at 70 miles? Like we’re not prototyping things. So you know, Shopify has come a long way. All these other entities, it’s so easy to use, where quite frankly, like well help advise and consult clients. But you know, that’s not our sweet spot. We like to stay on that kind of, you know, we speak home services and healthcare, we just know that space. So well. That’s why Ford isn’t selling a Lamborghini. Right?
Adam G. Force 26:26
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, everybody that’s in that’s important, right? As a company, you got to know your sweet spot, or have some kind of focus, not just kind of, do, you know, work with anybody and everything, right? For
Wesley Mathews 26:36
example, like, you know, look, we run across this all the time, customers will call us. And there’s these opportunities where we’re like, Hmm, maybe we should go, maybe we should try this, maybe we should help this customer, December of 2021. But but we did over a million dollars in new business in December. So for us, we’re already at like the capacity for our team, we have about 109 team members. So like, we see the market, it’s there, there’s still so many opportunities within a home services and health care, that were just so bullish, and we want to just be the experts, and continuing to just sharpen our, you know, sharpen our tools and just get better and stay in that lane and just be as effective as we can. Ecommerce has a lot of support. You know, it’s a lot of a lot of stuff can go wrong, a lot of stuff will go wrong. And it’s a completely different animal.
Adam G. Force 27:26
It is a different animal. Yeah, a lot of those companies though, they’re just like, to your point, they throw up Shopify sites, and they like, Oh, here’s the Shop Now button, and they’re like, hey, hopefully people buy stuff. And it’s like, okay, so there’s a, there’s an interesting gap there for people that and that’s kind of where we’ve been focused is I was working with service companies and, and E commerce. And it was a new division this year. And I actually found some really interesting wins in the E commerce space. And I’m like, no one’s really tackling that as much. I mean, people are but not quite the way we work. So that’s why I like to see people Yeah, you focus on those services. And we’re gonna
Wesley Mathews 28:07
It’s scary, right? I mean, it’s just, it. There’s a lot of troubleshooting. So I want to know, when your customer has a problem, it could be a million things going wrong. The customer calls and says, Hey, this is happening. You know, we had it’s like, okay, we know what it is, or that’s, you know, it’s simple.
Adam G. Force 28:24
Yeah, that’s your Yeah, exactly. No, it’s it’s interesting, all these processes, and been quite a learning experience. But so what’s the, I guess, plan for the next few years? Anything interesting going on?
Wesley Mathews 28:37
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we had a great year 2021, did about 21 million in revenue, we have about 119 members in the organization. So I feel like high level marketing today. You know, we’re not the the new kid on the block. We’re not a large behemoth agency, but we’re right in the middle. So we have a lot of opportunity to grow. So our focus is again, servicing our customers grow through organic growth and just our natural growth of about 15 20%. But then we’re also going to be growing by acquisition. So we are looking to, you know, look at potential one to two agencies in 2022. Again, I think that, you know, we just went through a transition in March, we took two agencies and put them together, we are now nine months from that time, and we’ve done a great job. If you think about it from an agency perspective, like there’s so many costs, if you’re running a $5 million agency, there’s, there’s all these costs. Well now, you know, we can work with some of these digital agencies and just roll them into our fold. We have leadership, I mean, I think if I can reflect back as I was growing high level marketing in the beginning, you know, it’s, you know, team members are expensive and growth and I mean, we have this infrastructure and model now where if there’s agency owners that look that built a good business, great clientele, but they’re like man, for me to get to the next level, is going to take a ton of cash. I don’t have it in Mi or whatever the case may be. That’s sort of what we’re looking for. And we have some good opportunities in front of us now, because we are just, you know, full steam ahead. We’re looking to grow the organization to 100 million in revenue. And you know, we have no plans on slowing down.
Adam G. Force 30:12
That sounds exciting. Cool. Yeah. And I guess I’d be curious, as just to wrap up here, for people listening, you know, running their marketing and stuff. What what has been some of the keys that you have seen maybe some consistent factors, as you are working with companies, you know, whether it’s, it’s just anything around, you know, having? Because you mentioned quality over quantity? What are some of the key things that create quality customer attraction and loyalty that maybe people can be thinking about for their, their, their businesses? Yeah, I
Wesley Mathews 30:50
think it just goes back to really understanding what the customer wants. And then how, how do you as an organization deliver on that? I remember early on when I was in elementary school, we played this game where we all sat in a circle. And the teacher whispered something in the first person’s ear, and they’re supposed to go through all the individuals. And by the time it got to me, I heard some stuff that I wasn’t prepared as a kid to hear. And I think that’s probably one of the biggest challenges in an agency or growing a business is clearly articulating what the customer wants, and what we’re doing and how we’re going to get there. Because the more specific and intentional you can be, again, that creates the quality because you can just slap plumbing content off and you can just do whatever right and put something out in the web and, you know, develop a little bit of traction. But if you’re intentional, and you get specific, and you find the right team members to help you, you know, really put quality work into that project. You’re going to get quality and I mean, honestly, it sounds kind of basic, but I mean, look, I’ve been in this space now for 15 years and I’ve seen a lot of that oh, that’s that right there has always stood the test of time versus anything else.
Adam G. Force 32:03
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s the core of it right? The foundation and bad foundations. You won’t you won’t get very far. I Wesley Thanks. Where do people find you if they want to learn more?
Wesley Mathews 32:15
You can always go to our website, high level marketing comm HGH, you can find me Wesley Matthews with one T on LinkedIn. I love when entrepreneurs reach out and ask questions and if there’s anything I can help with, you know, for me, I love meeting and speaking with other entrepreneurs, I’m an entrepreneur. Through and Through, there’s been certain things that have really helped me through my journey. You know, just like everybody else. I’ve read a lot of books, I’ve done a lot of things I’ve made investments, bad investment, but there’s about three or four things that have really been transformational for my life. And I love sharing those things. So yeah, reach out I’m happy to
Adam G. Force 32:51
share that man. Thanks for tuning into the authentic brand mastery podcast. Don’t forget to stop by change creator calm for more information, fresh articles, content, and our services if you’re looking to build a brand that people love, and please stop by iTunes, leave us a five star review. We appreciate your support.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai