The Boss of Brand Engagement w/ Bill Harper | Ep. 128

In this episode David and Gary are enamored with guest Bill Harper, the CEO and Founder of BrandBossHQ, a branding, sales and marketing one stop shop for all mid size startups. The nuggets of wisdom are boundless.

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brandbosshq.com

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

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Bill: [00:00:00] You're going to take a white tissue.

The yellow tissue means cheeseburger. You're going to put the bun upside down in the tissue. That's upside down. Two pickles, not one, not three. One scoop onion, one squirt ketchup, one squirt mustard. Put the burger on, put the bottom bun on, fold it like this, turn it over so that it doesn't undo itself. Now you do it. The reason that it became so obvious was his next comment was when you can make 60 of them perfectly in an hour, come find me and I'll teach you something else.



David: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the biz dev podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I am David Baxter, your host, and I'm joined per usual by Gary Voigt. Hello, Gary. I won't make fun of you today. Cause I'm feeling nice

Gary: Thank you. Yeah, I have anxiety about that every week. So

David: every week. You know what I have anxiety about coming up with a new way to make fun of you. That's what causes me anxiety.

Gary: I just like to watch you try and stumble and try and

David: when I use the same joke, cause I forgot I've done, [00:01:00] we've done a hundred and what, 30 of these now. That's a lot of different ways to make fun of a person, a single person.

Gary: but you usually go for the hair and I'm out of hair rebuttals like so

David: yeah, that's just jealousy talking. I'll be honest. More importantly yeah, you're covering the hair now. I'm telling you, man, he's hiding his plugs. 

Anywho, more importantly, we are joined by Bill Harper, who is the founder and CEO. I got him pretty good on that one. Of Brand Boss HQ. Welcome, Bill. How are you,

I'm actually feeling bad. I don't have any hair plugs or anything to add to the equation. It sounds like you guys have got a good thing going.

Gary: He's

David: I have known

Gary: because I have lovely locks.

Bill: I'm

David: He has not shown them.

Bill: I'm Midwestern. So if you're not giving somebody grief, one of two things is true. Either you don't like them or the jury is still out. That's just the way it

David: fair. I like that. I like that. I find depending on where you are in the country the grief you give, like North Easterners generally, man, it gets mean, like it's not poking fun anymore. It's just. [00:02:00] Rough, and I just, I don't roll quite that hard. But yeah, it's what my favorite thing is. This is totally inside baseball.

When we bring a new team member in and my favorite thing, and I've said it a million times on our Slack, it, I'll just, for no reason, I will ping the entire team and I'll just say, Gary, stop sucking. It's, I do it all the time.

Gary: Judging the reactions is how we can tell if they're

David: when it is a new teammate who has no idea what's happening, like he just got hired.

Oh, that is just lovely. They're like, what is, what did I join? It's just, and everybody's it's okay. They've been doing

Bill: It never gets old. That's the thing. It just never gets old. Yeah. As a Midwesterner, we've taken a passive aggressive sarcasm to an art form. So it's Oh, I see you keyed your initials in the side of my car. So you're upset about something or what? It's

David: Do we need to talk?

Bill: yeah, I guess we need to talk then. I

David: it's funny. You say that I just watched the new roadhouse movie with Jake Gyllenhaal last

Gary: saw that this

Bill: don't know [00:03:00] about that, man. I just, I'm making a judge's ruling from the parking lot, but I, that can't go well, right? 

David: Was actually, it's, if you know what you're, this isn't

Gary: you turn off your brain. And you're just like, Ooh, look at the fast paced action. Then yeah, you'll get

David: you enjoy the original one? Did you ever see the Patrick Swayze

Bill: Enjoy it. I'm from the 80s. I grew up with it. What are you talking

David: short? What

Gary: how many people I've dreamed of pulling the.

Bill: Hunt for Red October, and you just don't, you don't pass it. You're like, oh, and now I'm here for the next two hours. Nah, I

David: if you liked the original, you will like this. It's the same kind of, he's a super nice guy. It's he's not Patrick Swayze. Let's not be honest. It is. He's not Patrick, but he is fun. And what's his name? Conor McGregor is the main

Gary: I, 

David: nuts. And he was. No, he's just a nut, but

Gary: over

Bill: couldn't buy it. You couldn't buy the bad guy.

Gary: well, the thing is, let's just say Conor McGregor is not the greatest actor. So he was just playing himself and I don't really like him as himself. [00:04:00] So yeah.

David: he just

Gary: After about five minutes of Conor McGregor, 

Bill: I don't know if this has anything

Gary: to beat the crap out

Bill: building business, but it's a hell of a fun conversation

David: What the reason I

Gary: some of this out, but

David: It's all good. The reason I brought it up is he's Midwestern and it's the same kind of thing. He's like super chill all the way until he's not super chill. But but it was, that's what made me think of it was that you, he's super polite. And then, but There's a moment anyway.

All right. Let's talk about something real. Tell me about brand boss HQ. Tell me the story.

Bill: So this is the weirdest thing ever. I've owned four advertising agencies before Brand Boss and all of them were traditional Center line kind of businesses, 25 million to half a billion dollar client base. That was the bread and butter and we chased them and it was very traditional in that respect.

And as COVID finally caught our company [00:05:00] and we were feeling some of the burn from that A gentleman who's about 10 years, my senior and retired after selling his business is basically doing the consulting. Cause I don't want to golf all day thing came to me and said, you should go on Tik TOK. And I literally laughed him out of the room.

I was like, I won't even let my kids on Tik TOK, get away from me. I don't want to be

David: It's true. I won't

Bill: stupid things. I don't know. I don't have anything to do with Tik TOK. No hard. No. And he kept after me about it. And it was like, one of those things where finally I turned to him and I was like, Why won't you give this up?

It's just I don't want to be on Tik TOK. So he comes to me and he said, seriously, like I, I was crying laughing when he said that he came to me, he goes, I'm flying a Tik TOK star out from Los Angeles. And I literally put my hands on my knees and started crying. I was like, what the hell is a Tik TOK star?

I was like, why would I want to go to this? So he says no. I'm like, I'm doing this whole day seminar. I'm bringing in these companies. And I said, who's coming? And then he listed off companies that were 70, [00:06:00] 80, 120 million top line revenue. And I was like, how many people are coming from these companies is like full tables, like eight, 10 people, a company.

I was like, really? So I went to this stupid lunch and I'm watching this guy talk and he was trying to explain how this all worked. And what I got out of it was that underneath all the like ass shaking, dumb stuff that we all see when we first get on the platform, there was something else, some kind of an educational entertainment thing that was underneath it.

And when I went to leave, they broke for lunch and I was sneaking out the door and he comes up and he goes, I want you to look at this room and there's all these corporations here and there's all this stuff is packed room. He goes, none of them is going to do anything. Be the one guy prove to me that it doesn't work.

And he just, he picked the right guy. So I sat on it and it like bothered me that I wasn't doing anything. And then I got online and [00:07:00] all of a sudden it blew up. It was like three thousand views. thirty thousand views, three hundred thousand views, two and a half million views. And people started calling me and saying, will you be on my thing?

Will you work with my company? Will you do whatever. But the vast majority of these were businesses that were under about thirty million. dollars So suddenly we had to pivot and make a brand that would work with these smaller organizations that were trying to find a way to scale. By leveraging some of the same tools that the larger groups did.

So we couldn't come out and put together quarter million, half million dollar packages for them. We had to figure out something that they could do. That would be much more bite size, much more manageable. So we had to re imagine the entire thing and thus brand boss was born. So sorry for the long diatribe story, but it was like this sort of weird thing that.

Someone stopped me in the hall to do this and, two plus million dollars net new business later since April of last year, like it's [00:08:00] a real thing, it's a super real thing. So I got to say, I'm a fan of the platform in terms of what it can do to scale a business. And we're not even known yet. Like we're just barely scratching the surface at a hundred thousand followers.

Like we're not. We're not big by any stretch of the imagination yet. And we just continue to get momentum.

Gary: now what type of content did you launch with? Was it educational? Was it advertising

Bill: Yeah, it was I refer to it as edutainment, right? The whole thing is I'm a character anyway, so we've got that to work with, but the whole thing was little Scooby snacks about how marketing and branding work because people just don't understand it and there are. They are so tactically driven and they'll run out and they'll just throw spaghetti at the wall and hope it sticks and they don't understand why they're not getting the response that they want.

And so I literally just started speaking to that Hey, when you go out, this is what you should be looking for. And this is how to structure it. And this is a good thing. And that's a bad thing. And here's the difference. And here's why. [00:09:00] And. As I caught a little rhythm to how to keep it under three minutes or how to keep it in a minute and a half or whatever, the response rate started to go up.

And before I knew it, I had a steady stream of people. We made one video that announced brand boss. And I went on and I said, Hey, I'm starting this new company to help groups that are at this stage. And I had two months of calendar invites happen in two weeks. Like they just filled my calendar three days a week, 12 meetings a day. And it just filled and it took our breath away. Like we had absolutely no idea that it was going to be that way. We had no, we, we were not prepared for it. We didn't, we were literally like, okay, stop everything, pivot, figure out how this model is going to work. Spent four weeks, like figuring it all out, getting all the templates, running it through the process, getting the bugs out of it.

And then it was time to go and take it to market. And it, we haven't [00:10:00] looked back since.

David: man I'm blown away. One, I hate Tik TOK, but this is fascinating.

Bill: I treat it like it's a cocktail party. I treat it exactly like I would if I was standing in front of somebody at a cocktail party. I try to say something brief and interesting that's educational that gives them something to be able to see in their own universe. If it's not helpful or useful to them, they're not going to engage.

David: find this so fascinating because I could, I can learn I don't like being the face of big pixel, my company, but it's often my role. And so now maybe you really enjoy being the face and maybe that's a difference, but I get the feeling that you're just doing this because this is where. You find you're finding success rather than I want to be a big name, right?

Which is what most people want when they start doing the social media stuff. Yeah, Alex is a guy, he's got 2 million followers on Instagram and he does a lot of, it's not necessarily marketing, but he does little books and things like that, and he's, he runs a company called acquisition. com, which is ultimately what he makes money off of.

He buys little companies and then blows them up using his [00:11:00] techniques. But it's really interesting to hear someone who's finding success. Cause most people. They're using as part of their, like us, like we're not using tech docs specifically, I don't think Gary does and Christie do all of our marketing, but we do tons of LinkedIn and we're doing, we're about to start a little snippets here and there.

And I'm curious if we're just doing it wrong in the fact that social media on LinkedIn is great. We've done pretty well with that, but we haven't ventured out into any other. Gary stopped me where I'm wrong here, but.

Gary: I think the Tik Tok thing is a different beast. We're just using it as another ancillary channel for the social media content that we already put out. But I think the. The way that Bill is describing it, if you use the Tik TOK, I guess your presence there for a specific reason that seems to resonate a lot better than just using it as another channel to post other social media stuff that you would put anywhere else.

So

Bill: I find

Gary: we should try to leverage that a little bit more,

Bill: Yeah, I [00:12:00] find TikTok and LinkedIn to be separated at birth a little bit. So LinkedIn is the non video version of the same edutainment window. So I've got about 20, 000 followers on LinkedIn and it's cerebral there, right? Like the idea is Here's six pages on how to do this.

Here's an article about this. Here's a video that's specific to something that you could then use as a tool in your toolbox. And I really liked that because I don't like wasting time. Just, watching stuff bounce. That's not doing anything to me. I've got businesses to run. I got things I'm going to try to achieve.

And I just assume that for the people who also feel that way, they don't want to waste their time just watching stuff bounce up and down either. But when I got onto Tik TOK, what I found was. That the bite sized nugget thing was really great. And as I did some further research in it and found that millennials down are using Tik TOK in place of Google, it makes more sense to me, right?

So all of a sudden now this platform becomes what I refer to as [00:13:00] mini mentorship. If you want to make star Wars, exact replicas of star Wars spaceships, I promise you there's a thousand hours of exactly how to paint space dust. In three minute segments on tick tock to teach you every single thing about how to hold the brush or how to like, like anything you want, there's a guy with a million followers out there who just unboxes like bolt on solutions for turbos for old four trucks. It's nuts. And this guy has got no lighting, no sound, no nothing. He's, he's Jerry from the sticks or what? I don't remember his name, but he's like Jerry from the sticks. Like his camera is bad. The lighting is horrendous. It looks like a mustard blob and a mayonnaise background. There's no color to anything.

And he'll slam a FedEx box down and be like, this is the a 24 B 19 for a 68 Ford, whatever, and he'll rip it open and go. [00:14:00] Hammer this thing in and he'll just stand there and talk about it. This is a turbo and how it works. And that's really when the light bulb went off over my head, because when I looked at that, I was like, okay, now I get where we're going with this from a B2B standpoint or a, how can I make my brand work standpoint, it's suddenly a mini platform for mentorship and it's really well received here.

So It's the it's a small stage to a big audience and it's amazing. So it's, I can't say enough good about it. I've, I have found it to be incredibly beneficial.

David: So if you, I'm thinking larger audience, not just me, cause although I can nerd out with you alone, just like about big pixel and how to use this. But if you are someone who's got a startup or something like that, you just find a niche and start making videos. Or is there, cause there's a billion of those people, right?

And they're not all finding success. Like where, what do you. Think is making your

Gary: what would you recommend to [00:15:00] your clients as how they can utilize Tik TOK to

Bill: So the first thing is most people just get up and are trying to get attention. Screw attention. Attention is the byproduct of having made a good connection. So I think most people are coming at it the wrong way. It's like starting a business for money. Money is just the byproduct of doing the thing well.

So number one, we got to get our priority in line. Number two, how you talk about what you do is incredibly important. The same. Mechanical structure, the same scaffolding that makes a Nike or a Disney work works for startups too. And it's been proven dollar shave club was nothing. Poopery was nothing.

Liquid death was nothing. And people get this weird fairy tale fantasy us and them membrane between. What that company used to be, which in Phil Knight's case was a guy selling shoes out of the trunk of his car to what this 46 billion empire is today. And [00:16:00] they can't see their path to it, but the fundamentals are the same.

If you ask most people, you guys have had people on your show and I'm not going out on a limb too far here to guess this. You've asked some people, what do you do? And they start droning on for five minutes. How long is it going to take for people to lose interest when you can't articulate what it is that you do, but if instead you're able to come back and say, oh, I make brands popular through strategic storytelling.

Oh that's cool. How do you do that? That's exactly it. You're solving a particular pain point. I want my business to be popular. I don't know how to do that. I understand that storytelling is valuable in terms of marketing. How do you put those two things together? Oh, let me tell you about it.

Most people don't do that. Most people come out and go, yeah, the thing is, and then they give an opinion piece. Your opinion is not relevant yet. We don't know you yet. We've got to be on here. If I'm going to bother watching you, I want to get something out of it. What's in it for me is true. I am completely irrelevant.

I tell my clients this all the time. [00:17:00] Gary, you asked the right question. I'm irrelevant. You're irrelevant. You're never going to ask me questions about my business because you don't care. You only care about whether or not I'm a useful tool to you reaching the goal that you have. In other words, I am in service to you.

I only exist because you have a need. If I didn't, I would disappear off your radar completely. Doesn't matter if you sell the world's best hammer, if what you need is a screwdriver. So the whole thing here is, who are you talking to? What are you saying to them? And how will it benefit them right now?

Because if you meet somebody on the street, I promise you, that walks by and says one thing smart, you're screwed. You'll look forward to seeing that person again on the street the next day and hope you run into him again. Just on a single encounter. Same thing is true in business. We just don't think to treat it that way.

It's just people.

David: feel like I'm talking to Yoda, man. I'm just sitting down and absorbing. This is awesome. Cause you're right when you ask people and it, and that's the same even for me. Hey, what do you do? I [00:18:00] usually, even though I've, Oh, look at that. He's pulling out his Yoda figurine. Very nice. Now I lost my train of thought.

See, Yoda just knocked me over,

Bill: see, one Yoda and it threw the whole thing off.

David: I've just done, I've, I find when I'm in a situation and I'm going to a schmoozer, right? I'm going to a networking event. Someone asking me what I do should be par for the course. And yet I'm almost always surprised by it. I know what I'm going to say, but I never say it.

Like what

Bill: what are you going to say?

David: usually my usually thing is I run a custom software design and development business. And that's usually where it ends. Cause I know I've got 10 seconds, right? I'm not going to flowery, but.

Bill: Okay, so David, why do you do that? Why do you do that business?

David: I love helping people create designs and building, transforming their businesses through technology. 

Bill: Them. How, what's the thing that you give to them? Like, why would they care? Follow the, why would they care thread back? When people ask me that I say to them, I help businesses tell stories so they can grow faster. And they go how does that work? [00:19:00] Because the thing that they don't understand is I want to grow faster.

And I'm curious about this thing called storytelling. You do something similar. And I don't know what that is yet, but if you back it all the way up to. We help these people do this little simple thing. We just help people spread butter on bread. That's all we do. We just help soap dissolve better in water.

That's what we do. Now, the complications of it, we can get into that, but in the long run, if you're a person that needs to spread butter on bread, We might have something to talk about. So you've got to bring it back from the description of what you are to the thing that you solve so that it becomes the beginning of a story.

That's the piece that's missing. So if you want, and it's really fun when you do it the first time, because once you realize how to tell that story that way, You'll never be without a story to tell again. But it always comes back to when businesses hire us, really, they're hiring us to do one thing.

They don't know how to tell a story. They don't know [00:20:00] how to promote themselves. They don't know something like fundamental ABC basic. That's what you help them solve for. Then it's a conversation because it's something that they can wrap their head around. If I said we're a strategic branding agency that helps businesses in the 25 to 50 million or 500 million range, people would be like, okay, but there's nothing there for them to grab hold of.

Cause it's not relevant to them. But if I say we help, grow businesses by teaching them how to tell stories. Oh, that's interesting. I didn't even know that growing a business and storytelling were related. Like, how does that work? Or I've never done that. Or I've seen some good stories on a Superbowl spot.

How do you even do that? That's where we want them.

David: so I get the hook. You've got the hook. You're you've explained that very well. What I am still confused about is how do you turn that into business? You blew up your calendar. You had 25 people and then you're saying, okay, a lot of people blew up your calendar. You still were selling to your traditional early on, right?

You're selling to your [00:21:00] 25 to 500 million customer and

Bill: WMA still is. Yeah. BBHQ is over on one side. So the other business still does. Yeah.

David: but you're just starting out and your calendar blows up, you're like, Crazy Oprah's favorite things moment, right? And you have a proposition that you've been selling for years over here for your main business. And now you have 25 sales people, knocking down your door or meetings. How long did it take you to figure out?

I got a shift. How many business meetings did you drop the ball? And that very air quote, because you didn't know what you were selling, right? You couldn't sell this. You're going to sell this other thing over here and they're

Bill: It was about five and it was less about how to talk about it. That part was not really different. It was just smaller. Like I used to describe an apartment building. Now I'm talking about a a shack it's just size. The place where it fell apart was in understanding how I had to use the language to get them to come with me.[00:22:00] 

So the first time that I did it, it was a person that called that was. In a really unique space to me, never worked on it ever. And it was a relationship, a woman that did basically millionaire matchmaking right out of Los Angeles. And she called and I never even charged her because it was such a train wreck.

I was trying to apply. 50 million business practices to, 400, 000 a year or a million dollar a year, whatever it was business. And was like, it just didn't, it didn't make any sense. But I walked away from that experience. And it was one of the last times that happened because what I realized was that I was asking the wrong questions.

I was asking 150 million corporate questions rather than 1. 5 million dollar solopreneur questions. And so I had, I just had to pivot. Where they were. So the conversation very quickly went from what things do you have in place? Where have you been [00:23:00] working? What's working? What's not working to tell me about how you sell your business and tell me about how you're growing and where are you now and what are you trying to reach and what marketing tools have you been using?

Fundamental, fundamental, no assumptions. Okay. You've got a marketing plan. You've got marketing stuff in play because I can't make those assumptions anymore. I'm not working with a company that of course has an entire marketing department and has an AOR and has, these other things.

So once I figured out how to pivot down to that appropriate level of conversation. Which was the thing that was on me to learn how to do. Then all of a sudden those conversations flourished very quickly because it was like, okay, here's what I'm juggling, right? I've got this and this and this and this and this and this.

And I'm like, okay, have you tried this thing, or this thing I have, but I have had limited success or this thing worked really well, but I don't know why I can't replicate it. It's okay, so now I'm starting to get into your universe. Let me help you organize these pieces first. And then from there, we'll [00:24:00] make a plan.

Those larger companies didn't need that same type of organization. They already had it in place. So I was starting too far down the line. Once I got that figured out, then it was like, okay, so we just have to start here instead of there. We got the pieces. How are, what are you calling them? At the larger thing, they're using the same vocabulary down here.

They don't down here. Somebody's calling it a spot and someone's calling it a TV and someone's calling it a creative and somebody's calling it or whatever. And I'm like, okay, let's get vocabulary locked in. Once we had that kind of an understanding, it got real easy to start having a proactive conversation and they were looking for structure first.

And direction second, as opposed to concept first and execution second, which was the big guys. So once you figured out where it was appropriate to engage and how the rest of it became pretty straightforward

David: So now I'm going to ask you I think it's a tough question. So you've been selling big boy packages, probably for a [00:25:00] pretty premium, big bucks, right? If you're a 300 million company, you can spend some money on marketing. So you're used to big boy packages and you sold maybe 10 of those a year on a good year.

If I were to guess, now you've got little baby packages and you've got to sell. 300 of them. Do you find as a business owner that trade, and I'm not saying trade, but that change is worth it. Cause like I could do the same. I, we build big software packages and those are pretty high dollar, generally speaking, I could pivot at any moment and build 5, 000 websites, but I would have to build so many of them.

It'd be a beat down. To make the equivalent of, so are you finding that to be stressful? Now you've got two, 50 clients when you had 10 or, 

Bill: in some ways, yes. And in some ways, no. The most important lesson I ever learned in my life, I learned at my very first job at 15 working as a whopper flopper at Burger King. And that was how to make a Burger King burger, right? And the guy, Vic, that owned it. God, he [00:26:00] hated all of us and brought me in with a spatula in his hand that he was, minutes away from whacking me on the head with, which by the way, I probably deserved.

And he was like, I'm a one, I'm going to teach you how to make a hamburger. And like every other idiot, cocky 15 year old kid, I was like, dude, I made a million hamburgers. I don't make them right. And he says, no, you don't. You don't know how to make a burger King hamburger. You're going to take a white tissue.

The yellow tissue means cheeseburger. You're going to put the bun upside down in the tissue. That's upside down. Two pickles, not one, not three. One scoop onion, one squirt ketchup, one squirt mustard. Put the burger on, put the bottom bun on, fold it like this, turn it over so that it doesn't undo itself. Now you do it.

David: I love how

Bill: I screwed it up,

David: so many years later,

Bill: Yeah. And all these years later, because the reason that it became so obvious was his next comment was when you can make 60 of them perfectly in an hour, come find me and I'll teach you something else. And what I didn't realize at the time, of course, as a kid, I was like, God was stupid.

I can do better than that. But as I grew up and I [00:27:00] realized what he was doing, he taught me operational efficiency. What he taught me was, is that you can't approach. Small projects the same way now, here's a statistic that you might not know in the United States at any given time in, in, in modern day, there are roughly 41, 500 enterprise size businesses.

That is companies that are over 250 employees or 300 employees. However, they define it at the same time. There are 32 and a half million small and bin size businesses that are being completely ignored by everybody. Because all the businesses are trying to chase the 000 projects you refer to as opposed to figuring it out.

If you apply the same logic as the hamburger solution, you can have a single, a double, or a triple. If you want cheese, it's extra. To the way that you manage the smaller pieces of business, they become manageable. Not that they all get the same solution, but they go through the same [00:28:00] process. You can't do that same thing up at that large scale.

There are too many moving pieces, too many parts. You've got department heads, you've got. Outside vendor partners. You have relationships that exist. You have there's too many layers to stack that way. But when you come down to businesses that are under 25 million, it's super easy to be able to walk in and say, this project at 50, 70, 000, whatever will satisfy these things in this period of time.

deliverables and you can have it in this period of time. And that allows you to do it at scale, because now you can hire teams. Those teams learn how to do that. Those deliverables become predictable. You can predict the model and scale. And the next thing you know, because it has a beginning, a middle and an end to that first engagement, you're able to do it and replicate it much more quickly. So it's just different in how you do it. It isn't better and it's not worse. It's just different. 

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I understand that, the operational processes and stuff in order to scale. Now, my question to you was with taking on all these new clients, the smaller clients, are you pivoting some of your current team to work from the larger scale clients to then spend time on the smaller ones?

Gary: Or did you actually have to end up, adding to your team to just surface to smaller clients along

Bill: you add to the team and you repurpose some and not others. There are efficiencies of scale inside that you can take advantage of. A designer that does logos over here can do logos over there. Account service folks that work on these kinds of businesses are suited to work on those kinds of businesses.

So it's just. There are [00:30:00] additions to it in different ways, but the pacing and the way that organization moves is different than the large scale organization. There are different assumptions. There are different expectations. There are different types of deliverables and different types of ways.

It's just, it's a different dance, if that makes sense. It's the same. It's the same story, right? You're taking them through the same process of discovery. We have to figure out what insights we need. We have to figure out which story we have to tell. We have to figure out how to tell it creatively, but we have to tell it on this side, this way, and we have to tell it on that side, that way.

And. So it's just figuring out how best to satisfy that.

David: Do you foresee, and maybe this isn't a fair question, and feel free to tell me, shut up. Do you foresee the TikToki business overtaking your existing business or do you see them always living in concert?

Bill: That I think honestly is more a function of what's happening with the [00:31:00] economy than it is anything else. A few years ago I heard for the very first time, you can't grow my business. It was the very first time I'd ever heard that, even in 08, we didn't hear that, but the logistics issues that have come as a result of what's happening in Ukraine and China and the seas there and being able to get, when you compounded that with COVID's impact on docks.

And being able to process materials and the backlog and backup that had to do with shipping internationally and with so many companies working internationally to produce products at a lower cost and then shipping them in to country. All of that had such traumatic impact that all of a sudden I was hearing from large scale companies.

I can't have you grow me because if you do, I'm going to die. I'm going to tick people off. I'm going to lose my client base. So it was a really weird time. So what I see it more as is a balance, right? There are going to be times and what's happened, right? If you watch what's happened in [00:32:00] corporations where they had to get lean and then they blew up and then they got lean and they blew up and we've had that super accelerated over the last.

Three and a half years as people responded to COVID and then thought COVID was over and then brought everybody back and then realized that logistically they couldn't grow. And then, they did this weird stutter thing. More people left and started to develop their own concepts. They were like, forget that I'm not going to be accordioned in and out of businesses anymore.

I'm just going to start my own thing. And so all of a sudden you have all these smaller businesses that are Desperate to understand how to align sales and marketing efforts into something that's a growth machine. So I see it as a, as a. Teeter totter really of need. One will be high on one side and then one will be high on another.

This is just the first time that we've ever been in a position where we can take advantage of both. And that's really the big lesson that I learned. And once I realized that. I realized that there were other models that we haven't yet taken advantage of that will scale us even [00:33:00] further because there are independence models.

There are education models. There are other things like once I got out of, we're a traditional agency that does things this way and you actually pivot and consider a different model, all of a sudden the realm for possible, expansion into new revenue streams, like your visionary light goes off, like a thousand Watts and you're just like, okay.

I can do it this way, and that way, and this way, and that way, and now I just need time and teams to be able to make that happen. But the opportunity is significant.

David: I love it. 

Gary: We usually wrap up with one question with every guest that we have on and I'm seeing that you work with a lot of startups. You're probably in a good position to answer this. What would you give as your top three pieces of advice for any new startup business or entrepreneur?

Bill: Number one, success through simplicity. I promise you that if you are a startup company, you are thinking way more complicated than you need to be in terms of both your messaging [00:34:00] and your execution. And I see that every day. So businesses are like thinking, I came out of the corporate world and they operated at this level and they delivered at this level and that's not necessary when you're at a smaller level, starting off simple, simplifying that down is going to be helpful.

Number two, understand what the real problem is that you're selling. Lots of businesses go out wanting to explain how the way that they made the greatest hammer in the world makes hammers better. But nobody buys a hammer because the hammer is better. They buy a hammer because they need to hang a picture on the wall and they need something to drive the nail in.

Understanding what problem you're really solving will get you closer to being relevant to that consuming audience. And the third is, be fearless. There are so few companies that are willing to stand up or for anything. And I'm not talking about causes. I'm talking about [00:35:00] saying something different. If you're starting a business and you do nothing else after this, take 15 minutes and bring up the top 10 competitors or players in your categories website and look at them.

Really look at them. What promise are they making in that first message on the page? How articulate are they? How savvy are they? How much of an experience is the website? How many of them look and sound exactly the same? Now, your inclination is gonna be, that's how it's done, cause that's how everybody's doing it.

And you have to fight that, and be brave enough to do and say something different so that you stand out. If you are part of the chorus, you can never be the lead singer. You have to be willing to step forward and be different in order to get noticed. Every major brand has done that in some way, shape, or form, either through their message choice, their behavior set or their creativity and their [00:36:00] marketing campaigns.

I'm a Mac. I'm a PC doesn't talk about how long their cords are or how much faster their chips are, or none of that garbage. Cause it's totally irrelevant. They talk about the thing that Apple stands for, which is we celebrate the contribution of the individual. One person can make a difference. One Amelia Earhart, one Mahatma Gandhi, one author, one playwright, one actor, one anything can make a difference.

And they've been doing that exact same message from 1984 Super Bowl spot with the whole George Orwellian thing through the 1990 campaign of Think Different, where they literally brought out Ghandi's and Amelia Earhart's and the rest and celebrated them to I'm a Mac, I'm a PC. The exact same strategy over a 40 year window. And that's what makes them That's what makes them who they are. So those are the things that, that companies that are in a position now can do to begin making their model more efficient and [00:37:00] more effective.

Gary: Those are three of the probably best pieces of advice I've heard lately. I love

David: Gary

Bill: fourth one is to call us and we'll help you do it.

David: Fourth one.

Gary: if anybody wants to learn more about you, your business, or wants to follow you on Tik TOK, how can they reach out? How can they get in touch?

Bill: The easiest way to find us is brand boss HQ. So Tik TOK is at brand boss HQ and our website is brandbosshq. com.

OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net. The BizDev Podcast is produced and presented by BigPixel. See you next week. Until then, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, and LinkedIn.