angishields, Author at Business RadioX ® Page

BRX Pro Tip: Values are Verbs

February 5, 2024 by angishields

BRX Pro Tips

BRX Pro Tip: Values are Verbs

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BRX Pro Tip: Values are Verbs

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, you have suggested that values are verbs.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:12] Yeah. I think this is a common misconception that people have about foundational values like love, trust, respect. These things, you can’t just say, I love someone or I trust someone or I respect someone, and you can’t use it as a noun. In order to really have those foundational values, you have to look at them as verbs. They are not nouns. These values are not passive things that happen by themselves. They require action on your part all the time. These are not virtues that you do one time and then you’re done. They require daily effort every single day.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:49] People won’t love you, respect you or trust you just because you ask them to. You have to earn those things by behaving in a manner that demonstrates your trust, love and respect. You have to build those virtues through daily action. And remember, it’s fragile. It takes a long time to earn those attributes, but it doesn’t take nearly the amount of time to lose them.

Richard Culberson with Moneypenny

February 5, 2024 by angishields

Atlanta Business Radio

Richard Culberson with Moneypenny

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Richard Culberson is a communications, retail, media, and technology executive (twenty years’ experience) with deep expertise in identifying, implementing, and scaling business opportunities.

He is currently the CEO of Moneypenny North America and VoiceNation. Moneypenny and VoiceNation are America’s best virtual receptionist & phone answering providers.

For more than 20 years, VoiceNation has specialized in custom-scripted call answering, with bilingual receptionists available to take calls 24 hours a day. VoiceNation is part of Moneypenny, a leading 24/7 provider of personalized answering services, live chat and customer contact solutions.

Collectively, the Moneypenny Group employs over 1,200 people handling over 20 million calls and chats for thousands of businesses of all shapes and sizes – from sole traders right up to multinational corporations – across the UK and the US.

Connect with Richard on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Scaling a business for growth
Tech and new services
Changing firm’s needs
The rise of outsourcing

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Brought to you by OnPay. Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Richard Culberson. He is the CEO of North America at Moneypenny. Welcome.

Richard Culberson: [00:00:45] Hey Lee, thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:47] I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Moneypenny. How are you serving folks?

Richard Culberson: [00:00:52] Sure. Moneypenny has been in the marketplace for over 20 years. We serve answering services, live receptionists, live chat, or small businesses all the way up to enterprises. We’re in the market under both the Moneypenny brand as well as you might see us under Voice Nation as well. We grew via acquisition, but are very proud to serve under both brands and have been doing so for quite a while in the United States.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:16] So now when the business started, was it primarily kind of the voice part of this, or was it always a vision for more than that? Like, can you tell us about the genesis of the concept?

Richard Culberson: [00:01:28] Sure. It’s interesting in both sides of the businesses, as we before we pulled them together, we’re caused a common need of entrepreneurs, came together and found an opportunity for our UK side, really from a brother and sister combination saying they had a small business, they didn’t have the infrastructure, they needed the support. They needed to have a receptionist to have an answering service, to have someone represent their business as the clients are calling in and talking with their customers. So there is a need to serve this opportunity. And it really did start from that as an answering service or a front door to their business. And since this, we’ve really been expanding to really just be a business services company. What are the needs of our clients? And we do serve multiple verticals, whether it’s legal home services, franchise businesses and health care, you can really name it. And we tailor those capabilities to that, whether that’s inbound phone calls, making outbound phone calls, live chat to make sure you’re represented well and engaging on your website as well as other services. We continue to stand up included dedicated services. So if you need 5 or 10 person call center to be outsourced, we continue to grow and it’s based on what we’ve seen to be our client needs, which we’re very proud to be representing over 4000 businesses. So we’re constantly working with them to see what else we could do for them so they can focus on their core business.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:46] Now, is this a situation where a lot of small businesses and I run across this? I’m dealing with it right now with somebody who’s doing work in my house. They’re a small business, and they’re the business and they do the work, but they also have to kind of have that customer success and the prospecting and the, you know, the answering the just general questions. And it’s hard for them to get kind of stretched thin with this. And they miss a lot of opportunities because they don’t have kind of that back office that can watch their back, that can answer a call, answer a question, you know, send out even a proposal or a just some sort of follow up. Is that really an opportunity or a place where you’re you can really help somebody?

Richard Culberson: [00:03:29] It really is. I think it’s and starting and kind of looking especially from a small business perspective, we’ve really seen that change in the past decade. Historically, they tried to do everything instead of focusing on their core business, how they’re adding value to their customers and what they can do. They would take all of that on, but increasingly, they’re seeing the benefit of outsourcing to a trusted partner who can be seen as, again, I use this analogy of a front door to their business, someone who’s trusted to represent them well so they can focus on delivering the core value. So then we can answer those phones, or we can make the outbound calls, or be that live chat person to be able to to respond to business opportunities. So historically, outsourced was seen as, oh, I can have operational efficiencies or I can save costs. But increasingly we’re partnering with businesses now because they see us helping make sure they’re they don’t miss a single opportunity. So, for example, we work with a lot of home services firms. Uh, if they miss that one phone call, that could be a $10,000 deal, which previously they thought of is just missing a phone call. So making sure we’re either building that out for them or supplementing their in-house people because if they have receptionists, they can only answer one phone call. So what happens to that other phone call or after hours? Uh, there’s lots of different models that we work with, but it’s been really satisfying to see how we can help businesses grow. And that’s applicable to small businesses, but also medium and larger businesses as well, because ultimately everybody is incredibly busy serving their customers kind of how can we lean in with them now?

Lee Kantor: [00:05:00] How do you kind of draw the lines in terms of where that service to that business, um, begins and ends like like the answering the call part? Okay. That’s clear. How do you kind of protect yourself from kind of maybe overextending in terms of deliverables, or is this something that you like, try lots of different things and see where you know, it falls off, or if it doesn’t, because, you know, okay, now I’m answering the phones. Now I’m answering a question, at what point are they, you know, becoming kind of a virtual assistant and not, uh, you know, my call center.

Richard Culberson: [00:05:36] Um, what we try to do, um, I think we’re a little bit unique in our space about this. Um, we really focus our time on what we call an onboarding session to understand what are their primary business needs and understanding where their gaps are right now, and how can we help them first. And then what we found is, once we’ve established that trust and we’ve proven that we can help serve that need, there’s so many different opportunities that can be distractions to them that we build on that. So we do try to take and kind of start with what their biggest business challenges or the business need and build off of that versus trying to come in and say, we can do everything for you. Um, we found it’s a better way to establish trust and to build up our understanding of their business so we can represent it the best.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:20] So are some of your services, you know, lean into this virtual assistant where they’re kind of the admin for the organization or or at some level, a virtual admin.

Richard Culberson: [00:06:33] Oh, absolutely. And we’ve kind of started off we’ve got great success stories of working with clients where we might start to just take a message, but then we develop deeper relationships where we will then input information into their CRM. Uh, we will do lead qualification for their sales. We do complex routing, um, overnight of for for think of on call doctors helping them route that through. Um we’re very pleased that we hire and develop our people to have that strength and flexibility. And then we’re very proud of our internal technology platform that allows to enable that very fluidly. Um, so we can handle multiple different call types. We can handle complex routing or different business needs, as well as tie in with integrations into other CRM systems, um, or other technology platforms that like us to work with on their side. So very pleased to be able to do that. And it’s a little bit different as we look at how we enable businesses, whether it’s tying back into their technicians on the back or taking payments, scheduling appointments, that’s what we see as a success. It’s a much deeper relationship. Um, and I think that’s when we’re doing on our best day. Those are the ones we continue to build into.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:45] Now, um, as the technology has shifted and expanded, really, um, is it evolving in that you’re not answering as many calls and now you’re kind of doing some virtual, like, chat and things like that? Or do you help with chat bots where there’s leaning on AI to gather a lot of intelligence, and then having that just show up when a person’s online or are your is your business primarily still uh, with phone answering?

Richard Culberson: [00:08:15] It’s constantly changing, I think. But what is not changed and what we don’t see moving away from is the need for interactions. We have not seen call volumes drop. Actually, it’s that human interaction. We still see that. Now the nature of that call might change. Um, but what we found is that’s still one of the best touchpoints with customers because they want that human interaction. But increasingly, not only we’re doing that over a telephone. We’re very proud to offer live chat. So there are bots out there and there’s peace. But we found once you establish a true human interaction that can be done digitally as well via live chat, it doesn’t necessarily have to be over a phone. So I think we’re increasing mediums and channels to talk to customers, but we have not seen any really decline in desire to have that interaction with business. And when people do try to move away from that, I’m a big believer in AI as an enhancement, but we have not seen it drive away from the interactions with our clients. Um, it’s still one of the best ways to get and maintain business.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:17] So are you. Um, so, like, how is AI playing into this? Do you help? Like, if a company says, look, we have a lot of questions we’ve answered. Um, you know, for dozens and dozens of years, we have a lot of this documented. Can you help us with an AI solution that creates a chat bot that, um, kind of is the first line of communication when somebody goes and finds us online or on their phone, and they can just answer some of the basic questions before it is rerouted to a human being, or if it needs to be escalated to a human being.

Richard Culberson: [00:09:51] Absolutely. And we think that’s you know, it’s one of those ways that everyone’s learning about AI together. But what we’ve built into our technology platforms and the on that onboarding session I spoke about earlier, we collect as much information as possible, and then we develop what we call an in-house scripting, so we can take whatever information is preexisting and make sure that’s fed in, because a big piece is if it doesn’t need to be distraction for the business, we want to be able to divert that away, meet the need of their customer, make sure they’re addressed. But it saves more time for the core part of the business that they need to address. Um, so we see it as a great enabler right now. It enables us to be more efficient on the back end. It allows us to address more questions before it needs to get to a human. Um, that’s something we’re constantly playing with and tweaking with. Um, but what we’re trying to avoid is lose that personal touch and that interaction, because I think that’s how we differentiate and that’s how our clients differentiate ultimately.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:49] Now, you mentioned one of the areas you serve are franchisors. Can you talk about maybe for franchisors who haven’t explored this solution, what are some of the benefits? By having a company like yours be that first line for anybody interested in the brand. So then you can filter that to the appropriate place.

Richard Culberson: [00:11:10] Sure. And that’s it just makes for a more robust offering, a more consistent brand experience from a franchisor of any time they launch a new branch or a new franchise. Really, they’re looking for that partnership. How do they get up to speed quickly? How do they be consistent with their brand? How can you enable them? And then how do you get that commonality and that learning that can be fed both to the franchise owner as well as the franchisor up? So they know and they have that data, that visibility, and they have the consistency that really is important as they represent from franchise to franchise. Um, what we’ve seen is it’s really welcome. A lot of them, we might be a preferred vendor or it might be the vendor of choice, even if it’s just a preferred vendor. We’ve seen that all all the franchise owners value a jump start in getting in and a trusted partner versus trying to have to vet somebody themselves. Um, so we’ve seen tremendous success and it’s happened multiple ways. We might work with the franchisor themselves. And then that kind of works down to the owners. But I think some of the best examples are where we do a very good job for a single franchise owner, and then they recommend us to a couple of others, and it starts to kind of snowball and work its way up. Um, we have several examples of that, uh, in the home services space, uh, where we’ve proven ourselves with 1 or 2 and then the word of mouth goes up. And that usually means that we’ve done something right.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:32] Now, is there a, um, an opportunity for franchisors to have you be instead of going from kind of the bottom up, but to go from the top down, is there a benefit from the franchisor standpoint to have you be the first line of of conversation and then you, um, share that lead with the franchisee? Uh, rather than going the other way where you’re handling multiple people’s, um, kind of answering and then it’s not helping, like the National. But I’m just trying to say if there’s a benefit from a national perspective, if there’s one place where all the calls go and there’s one consistent messaging, and then it just shared amongst the franchisees, wherever they are in the country is there, you know, can you share maybe some of the trade offs of going from top down versus from bottom up?

Richard Culberson: [00:13:29] Sure. Uh, the reason why Bottoms Up has been successful is it means we’re doing right. We are representing the business well and you can see it feed up. But what we have found is that there’s there’s such a span and different approach in running franchises. We respect both ways. Um, we love tops down relationship where someone says, hey, this is an opportunity. Uh, we recognize that the benefits of having a single provider, or even if it’s a couple, is a preferred vendor. Um, that gives that consistency. And and also it’s seen as a stronger partnership and another opportunity to be kind of a franchise in a box model versus simply applying a brand and a couple of other elements. It enriches that franchise relationship. Um, so they know that they can, again, get up to speed a little bit faster, but know how that works. And that does pay dividends to the owners, uh, to the franchise owners themselves. But really, we can provide reporting and data. What do calls look like? What are people complaining about? Uh, it gets visibility into how those businesses are running that we we operate in a lot of different models. Um, we’re very open to both. Um, but we love it. And we’ve got that parent relationship, and we’ll come to national sales meetings. Uh, we will come up to, to headquarters and start working with them to say, how do we have a deeper relationship? So rather than just taking a message like we were talking about earlier, if we can say that we can do a single integration with their CRM, that can then be passed down quicker and easier to all the franchise owners themselves.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:01] So now what is, um, kind of like, what’s the problem these people are having where they’re like, we should call these Moneypenny folks because they they’re going to solve this. Like, what is the pain they’re having? Is this something that just sneaks up on them that they don’t know they have a pain, and then all of a sudden they some some something happens, they have to triage and they have to find a problem solver like yourselves. Or is this something that they’re moving from one solution to you?

Richard Culberson: [00:15:30] It’s, uh, we see a little bit of both, um, because, you know, there are a lot of providers out there, and we’re very proud of how we differentiate what we represent. Um, for having a consistent call quality, for being 24 over seven, offering bilingual, um, offering all different forms of transfers and what we call dispatch on the back end of being able to on call management, sophisticated capabilities not all providers have. But can you look at what the need is? There is a range. Uh, one of the saddest pieces, I think, is really when they find that they’ve lost business. So you hear something like, well, we have one receptionist that doesn’t work after hours. So we missed a we missed a large opportunity that we would have received if we just answered that phone call and could represent ourselves. So unfortunately, we see that more than we would like to. But I’d say increasingly, um, across sectors, across size of business more and more what kind of seemed like a certain connotations of outsourcing, more and more people see that value and the opportunity, and it doesn’t have to replace people. It can be supplementing them. So where you have additional resources, we can supplement that during the day or after hours and be an additional team member. So I think we’ve seen a lot more traction. What used to be a way to reduce cost, which it does, or remove some of the operational complexity, which we do. But I think what we’re very proud is to create growth opportunities and revenue generators for businesses. And I think that’s seeing a little bit more in the marketplace now.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:03] And can you share a story of maybe the most rewarding success story you had where you’re like, hey, this business was struggling and maybe they were on the ropes, and then this really helped them get, you know, over the hump or to a new level. Obviously don’t name the name of the company, but maybe the challenge that they were having and how you were able to help them.

Richard Culberson: [00:17:24] Sir, um, when you get down to the businesses represent, we realize just how.

Richard Culberson: [00:17:29] Personal it is to be the person who is manning that front door, to be the person that when their customers call in, we have to represent that business. We have to empathize with what they’re going through. Um, we serve a good deal of health care clients across the sector. Um, both health care payers, health care providers, uh, single doctor shops. People really need help in this. So we have to have that empathy. So we’ve seen in those circumstances, very sensitive situations, we need to be able to give those customers answers and get it to the right place at the right time. Um, we have very sensitive calls where I was just listening to one of our receptionists talk. Um, one of the customers of our clients was calling in, um, and had her child. Um, we were they handled it excellently. They spoke with them, had great if you kind of from the health care side bedside manner empathized with them and the very expediently we work through the right channel to find the right person. And what we do is we stay on that line or we will maintain in that to make sure that we follow up. What we call dispatcher on call management means we don’t just drop that call, it’s just not just a mantra. Manage and send over a message. We stick with it and make sure we go to the next person and next person.

Richard Culberson: [00:18:49] We have that level of customization with our clients to fit their business. And this is one example where there was an urgent need with the child that needed health care. Um, you know, something that we could have. It basically comes down to saving a life at the end of the day, and that shows just how important it is that we answer the phone. We do it right. We represent our clients correctly because, um, whether it’s kind of a, well, a health care or life and death situation or it could be a business changing opportunity. I mentioned, uh, we use a lot in the home services. Um, if there’s a critical, uh, so, like, water damage comes up quite often and someone’s having a flooding home, they will go to the next provider if we miss their call. So it’s critical that we answer that phone, answer it quickly. And that can represent a quite often a ten, $50,000 job. So what someone thought of before of as a $2, $3 phone call actually is a massive upside opportunity. And those stories, the personal stories when we change a business, those are the ones that make me really proud to see what we do. And as we keep growing as a business and support more clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:55] Yeah. Um, like I said earlier about my home service issue at these, the people that are doing this without people like you helping them are missing, uh, tremendous opportunities that can really affect their whole life and their whole business growth. Because, like you said, it might cost them a couple of dollars, but one one extra client probably pays for you for years. So it just it’s silly not to invest in something like this if you’re in that kind of business.

Richard Culberson: [00:20:26] Absolutely. I get excited. It’s we were pleased.

Richard Culberson: [00:20:29] To have people come into the office and start understanding their business. But all I love listening to our onboarding calls. And it’s what generally happens is they call with one specific need in mind. But as soon as they start to think about ways that we can help their business, it’s fascinating to watch how we can build out that technology, how we can serve different needs. Um, it’s a great thing to see as we continue to have deeper relationships. I think that’s how we’re evolving as a business, where we used to be more of a kind of a message taking service. There’s we have the tools and the people now to meet a lot of these business service needs of our clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:03] Yeah. And especially like you mentioned, it’s a new client. It’s not easy to have conversations with prospective clients. So if you’re just being cavalier that you’re like, oh, well I’m working now, so I’ll get him when I get him that that’s not going to cut it. Um, there’s going to be somebody else that’s going to take that person and it’ll be their client. And you missed out.

Richard Culberson: [00:21:26] Absolutely. And it does. It’s a range we might sort of best as an answering service, as live chat. Um, increasingly we’re getting a lot of traction for for call center outsourcing as a premium contact center that needs to work in their dedicated tools and software, we can be even closer to a business. Um, partnering with them in that capacity as well. So we’re seeing a lot more traction in that side as well. Um, representing business and dedicating receptionists to their business specifically so they can work on their own tools in addition to representing and passing those through or more of an integration type model.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:58] Right. It sounds like you have solutions for businesses of all sizes.

Richard Culberson: [00:22:04] Really, the way I’ve always.

Richard Culberson: [00:22:06] Said it is we.

Richard Culberson: [00:22:07] Help.

Richard Culberson: [00:22:07] Small businesses look large, so they have that infrastructure and all the all the strengths that large typically was limited to larger customers. And we also help very large clients look small. So you keep that personalization, you keep that touch. We’re very proud to be able to span up. We’re not the massive call center that’s 100, 200, 300 people. Um, but there’s a niche in there that’s really underserved that it could be you need, uh, five FTE, five people, 50 people. That’s a market that typically and I’ve been on the other side of that as having running businesses that needed contact centers of that size. That’s just really underserved. And it’s hard to find where you need quality answering for that scale of business or line of business. Um, I’ve always found it’s hard to find that because there’s people that want very, very large kind of what you would call BPO. Uh, in the past, those 100, 200 seats. Um, I think we’re really fitting a need that hasn’t been served historically. Um, and we’re seeing that pretty consistently as more and more people are coming to us for that type of need.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:12] Well, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the coordinates? What’s the website?

Richard Culberson: [00:23:21] Um, so.

Richard Culberson: [00:23:22] You can find us on moneypenny.com, as well as voice nation.com. Uh, we’re proud to be in the market with both brands I mentioned. Uh, please. You can also contact directly our phone numbers on the website. We have 24, seven sales, uh, people ready to talk about what the opportunities are, as well as as I am sitting in on our contact center right now with a pool of receptionists ready to serve your business. So always eager to learn about more verticals, more clients we can serve. Uh, I think we’re pretty differentiated and bring a different approach, um, to really investing in our people and the technology behind them. Um, and love talking with people, running businesses, looking to help get more support. So eager to do that at any point. So please hit up our website, give us a call. Um, you can also see our live chat is on our own website so you can see how we live our own values.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:09] Good stuff. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work. We appreciate you.

Richard Culberson: [00:24:15] Thanks, Lee. I enjoyed your.

Richard Culberson: [00:24:16] Conversation.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:16] All right, this is Lee canter. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

BRX Pro Tip: 3 Ways to Add More Listeners to Your Podcast

February 2, 2024 by angishields

BRX Pro Tips

BRX Pro Tip: 3 Ways to Add More Listeners to Your Podcast

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BRX Pro Tip: 3 Ways to Add More Listeners to Your Podcast

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, what is your recommendation to someone who would like to add more listeners to their podcast?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:12] Yeah. I think it’s so important, if you care about listeners, you have to be proactive when it comes to this. This is not a build it and they will come kind of platform. There are millions of podcasts out there. The odds of yours being found by anybody is slim. So, if you want someone to know that you’re doing a podcast and that it’s something that you want more people to listen to, then you better be proactive and you better be going out there and evangelizing your podcast, and you better put all your team members behind this initiative.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:43] It is not going to happen by itself. It is not something that you just put it out there and it’s going to be found. I don’t care how well you’ve optimized it. It’s just the odds of that happening are slim. So, I think it’s so important that you put out an episode, you better be sharing that episode. You better be posting snippets. You better be posting quotes. You better be repurposing that content and putting it across multiple platforms and driving people back to your podcast. And not only you should be doing this. Everybody on your team, everybody on your team has to be working together to get this information out there if you want any chance of building more listeners to your podcast.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:19] Secondly, you got to engage with anybody who is in the audience currently. So, you better be responding to comments and messages. You better be hosting Q&A sessions. You better be actively participating in all the relevant communities where your podcast kind of fits into. You have to be actively engaging. This is not a passive thing. You cannot just do a podcast and then go home, and all of a sudden you’re going to get a bunch of listeners. There is a lot of work and energy you have to do to get the word out about this thing because you don’t want to be a best kept secret.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:57] Thirdly, reach out to potential collaborators, connect with other podcasters in your niche or in complementary sectors for guest appearances, for cross promotional opportunities. You go on their podcast, they go on your podcast. Do things every day to help kind of the world know that this podcast exists.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:18] Remember, consistency is key. Sticking to a regular release schedule and daily engagement efforts, that’s going to help you grow new listeners. It is not something that can be done passively. It is not something that if you do the thing, you publish the thing and you’re done. It is not that. It will not work. You will not grow your listeners if that’s important to you. So, you have to take proactive action in order to build any type of listenership.

Jeffrey Rohrs with ActiveCampaign

February 1, 2024 by angishields

Chicago Business Radio

Jeffrey Rohrs with ActiveCampaign

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The ActiveCampaign Leap Day Extravaganza! is a free, global, virtual event for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to leverage technology, strategy, and process improvements to #MakeMoreTime in 2024. Attendees will hear from some of the brightest minds in AI, content creation, customer experience, ecommerce, email, entrepreneurship, intelligent marketing automation, podcasting, sales, and time management—all from the comfort of your home or office. You can register here.

Jeffrey Rohrs, VP of Brand Marketing at intelligent automation provider ActiveCampaign, is a creative, strategic, and experienced marketing leader with a passion for collaboration, innovation, and building dynamic brands in today’s fragmented media landscape.

Jeffrey is an author, recovering attorney, bacon-lover, and Clevelander-at-heart. He has served as Chief Marketing Officer at Tendo, Filo, Jobvite, and Yext as well as VP of Marketing for Salesforce and ExactTarget.

Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Chicago, Illinois, it’s time for Chicago Business Radio, brought to you by Firm Space, Your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to firm space.com. Now here’s your host.

Max Kantor: [00:00:21] Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Kantor. And before we get started, as always, today’s show is sponsored by FirmSpace. And thanks to FirmSpace because without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. And we got a good one for you today. On today’s episode, we have the VP of Brand Marketing of ActiveCampaign, Mr. Jeff Rohrs. Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:00:44] Thanks, Max. Happy to be here.

Max Kantor: [00:00:46] Uh, so let’s jump right in. Tell me a little bit about who you are, what your role is, and a little bit about active campaign.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:00:53] Sure. So active campaign helps small teams power big businesses with intelligent marketing automation. So most people are familiar with email marketing. And really, what’s happened over the last ten years or so is that the technologies and tools have been democratized. They’re available for anybody, whether you are a one person company or you are tens of thousands. And we help companies of all sizes, of all industries use intelligent marketing automation to save time to grow their companies, increase profitability, to increase their reach and build audiences. And and so my role at as the VP of Brand Marketing is to increase awareness of what we do, connect with those audiences of customers and partners and prospects around the globe and and ultimately try and help folks, you know, power their businesses in better and more efficient ways.

Max Kantor: [00:01:46] So I understand that active campaign can can help small teams power big businesses. So how are you doing that, exactly? For anyone listening who’s like, what is active campaign like, how can it help me? How can active campaign help these small teams?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:02:02] Sure. So when you’re a business, there are a lot of marketing needs that you have. And obviously digital marketing is is really what is ruling the roost these days connecting with consumers electronically, moving them through a customer journey, customer life cycle, and being on top of things so that you’re communicate with communicating with them. Whether you’ve got a new product, a service, you’re trying to be responsive in customer service or other touchpoints along that journey. And what we effectively do is have a platform for email and other type of communication. We integrate with over 950 different types of technologies. And even more than that, through great partners like Zapier. And what it allows you to do is draw data from different systems that you might have already in place, whether it’s a CRM through us or, say, Salesforce could be information that you have about customers in an e-commerce system. It could be Google Sheets, it could be ads that you’re running. But the bottom line is you’re trying to gather the information that you have about customers so that you can be very responsive in the moment. So let’s let’s use the example of somebody comes to your website and they’re looking for information, and maybe they fill out a form because they want to hear from you in terms of an email newsletter. Well, in the old days you used to have that they’d sign up and maybe you’d send them one email just thanking them for subscription.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:03:24] Well, with intelligent marketing automation, what we can do is set up a series and that can be entirely automated and based on how they behave if they, you know, sign up for that first newsletter and they convert right away, you might change the behavior of the the communications that you have with them, shift into a different type of cadence of of conversation. And if they don’t, you may want to keep them on a drip campaign so that you’re giving them more and more information until they become very comfortable with purchasing. So that’s one example. And another is if you’re an e-commerce company, an e-commerce merchant, if you have folks shopping on the site and they abandon their cart, you know, it’s great to try and recover that lost opportunity. So having an automation that sends out an abandoned shopping cart, reminding them that they have items in their in their cart to purchase is a great way to ultimately boost revenue and and keep that customer engaged. So it’s really this kind of dimensional thinking about your business, using technology to automate those things. So you don’t have to be the one doing it over and over and over again. And that’s really where the power of the platform comes in to help grow company, help you get more profitable and help you save a lot of time.

Max Kantor: [00:04:36] Yeah. So it sounds like to me you’re just really helping businesses talk to their customers and to adjust with how a business talks to a customer depending on the situation.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:04:49] Absolutely. And that’s and again, that is the power of of automation. When you integrate the different systems that you have and you have the different signals coming from those systems in the form of data. What? You’re really doing is getting the value of the data that those business systems produce, and you’re using it to power personalized, timely, relevant communications. At the moment, they matter most.

Max Kantor: [00:05:11] And if I was a small business owner listening to the episode right now, do I need a certain customer size to use active campaign, or can I use you guys from really day one?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:05:22] You can use this from day one. That’s the power of the platform because we are we’re simple but not simplistic. And what I mean by that is if you just need an email marketing solution, we can be there. However, email marketing isn’t where it should end. It should graduate up. As you get more familiar with how you want to run the business into automations. Those are the things that run while you sleep, and they make your business much more responsive to a customer or a prospect’s needs. So we see a lot of customers start with us as solopreneurs, and then as they grow and as they add team members, they get a greater level of complexity to their program. And that’s really the the place that our our platform, that active campaign really shines, because we have that level of sophistication that you can get to over the time of your business maturing. You don’t have to necessarily use it from day one, but knowing that it’s there gives you the comfort that you’re going to be able to have a partner that grows with you. And then you put on top of that the community of of of customers and partners we have helping each other, the resources we have, the training. We really work hard to make sure that our customers not only succeed, but they get value on day one and day two and every day after.

Max Kantor: [00:06:40] Now, something that I think is cool that you guys do is every so often active campaign will host events. And I know because I was fortunate enough to attend one of the events and you got a really cool one coming up because as we all know, it’s 2024 and we have a bonus day. It’s it’s a leap year. We do. It’s it’s it’s a free day for us to do whatever we want. Uh, and so you guys are partnering with Calendly, Gold Coast, Gold Coast and the juice um, on active campaigns, leap Day extravaganza. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:07:13] Yes. So this was born of the idea that, hey, isn’t it crazy that every four years we’re just given magically 24 hours to do with as we please? Um, and when you really take a step back, that is kind of a nutty thing that we just have to rebalance our calendars, and it goes all the way back to Julius Caesar. Uh, when he established that, uh, in like 350 something BCE. So we were pondering this and said, well, wait a second, what if we what if we really owned Leap Day? Because the idea of giving you time is very much in line with the idea of intelligent marketing automation. In fact, when you automate things, it’s giving you back time that you would have otherwise spent on these arduous manual tasks. And so the theme of the event is make more time. And what we have done is we have pulled together, uh, you know, over 25 sponsors, over 100 speakers on topics ranging from AI to marketing to email to careers to leadership, uh, to sales. And every single speaker is going to be talking about how you can use technology strategy or process improvements to make more time in 2024. So it’s a free event. It is completely virtual. And, uh, folks are able to register right now. In fact, uh, launched it today and uh, excited that folks can go register at leap day.activecampaign.com and they can dip in or out for all of the 29 hours. You don’t have to sit through all of it like I will be doing. Um, but it will also be available on demand. So people who register are not only going to get to to attend the days that it runs, uh, but also throughout March.

Max Kantor: [00:08:56] And tell us who can attend. Who is this open to?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:09:00] So this is targeted towards marketers and entrepreneurs who are looking to, uh, automate and find efficiencies and productivity gains in their business. And just as we serve folks from solopreneurs on up to large companies, so to our sponsors are bringing those kind of audiences to the table, uh, but where it will probably resonate, most are going to be those folks who are, you know, dealing with, um, you know, perhaps they’re in a marketing team that has fewer people than it had last year, or they’re being asked to do more with less, uh, or their budgets are limited. This is a scrappy event on our side, and it is meant to give folks a lot of ideas on how they can again, reclaim time, make more time, and then be able to deploy it for the things that they want to. Right? If you don’t have to do all the manual, arduous tasks around marketing communications, um, you know, uh, customer service, etc., you’ve got more automations in place. That’s giving you time that then you can go focus. Let’s say you want to focus it on your business strategy. Maybe you want to focus on coaching your employees up so that they are better able to serve your customers. Or maybe you want time back because you want to spend more time with your family or your friends, or on your hobbies. I mean, we have a great customer, um, uh, body yoga and surf. And he actually had said something to us that kind of triggered the idea for this event and said that, you know, active campaign gives me back time so I can spend more time surfing, which is what I love to do. So that’s what the best technologies should do for us in our business, is give us time back so that we can be even more productive and even more present in our lives.

Max Kantor: [00:10:41] Um hum. Um, Jeff, I just have one more question for you. This is how I like to wrap up every episode of Chicago Business Radio. Um, you’re hearing you talk about the event and what active campaign is. Uh, you’re very passionate about what you do, and that’s how it comes across. Uh, can you tell me what’s the most rewarding part of what you do for Active Campaign?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:11:03] What a wonderful question. And it comes at right in a perfect moment. Uh, I have so enjoyed being a connector in building this event collaboratively, not only with my team, but each of the sponsors and the speakers. And I think each of them is dealing with that notion of having to do more with less in their own way this year. Um, you know, as the markets changed from, uh, really rewarding growth at all costs and, you know, uh, burning cash was not a problem for a lot of tech companies. The flip in the last two years has been to be profitable and grow based out of those profits. And active campaign did that successfully, as did many of the other partners. But they are now in a position where they have big dreams and they’ve got big goals. They’ve got to hit, but they don’t have necessarily the same budget and the same staff. And so to lock arms with these folks in a very collaborative way that is driven by partnership and relationship is where I get my energy. And this has been so enjoyable.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:12:07] And, you know, I am so excited to get folks in the door for this event because I think it is very different than a user conference or a traditional marketing event. It is going to have, uh, bite sized content from 5 minute to 10 minute to 15 to 20 minute presentations. And again, because it’s running continuously 29 hours on the 29th, as we’re saying. And that’s simply because of the magic of time zones, right? So in Australia, we’re starting at 8 a.m. on leap Day, whereas in the Central Time zone we’re starting at 3 p.m. on the 28th. But people can join at their own leisure over those hours. And even if they miss it, they don’t have to feel stressed because it’s going to be available on demand. Thanks to our great, uh, platform partner, uh, Gold Cast. And that partnership is is really shown in the fact that Calendly gold cast and the Jews came to the table and said, yeah, we want to do this. And that really put momentum in it and got everybody else on board.

Max Kantor: [00:13:02] So, Jeff, remind us, uh, for people who want to learn more about Active campaign or learn more, slash participate in the active campaign, Leap Day extravaganza. Uh, do you have a website? Do you have social media people can go to?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:13:16] Absolutely. So two websites for you. First of all, uh, active campaign. Com if you’re interested in doing a free trial, a two week free trial that’s available on our site, completely self-serve, and you can get, uh, your, your hands around the product, uh, get some training and, uh, introduction to how it works. And then with regard to the event, you do not need to be an active campaign customer or partner. It’s completely free. And you just go and register at Leap day. Dot active campaign.com.

Max Kantor: [00:13:48] Awesome. Well, Jeff, thanks so much for being on the show today. Uh, exciting to talk about how you’re going to spend your leap day. And it sounds like you got an exciting event ahead of you.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:13:57] We sure do. And, Max, I really do appreciate the time and appreciate your listeners time.

Max Kantor: [00:14:01] Not a problem at all. And thank you for listening to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Cantor, and we’ll see you next time.

Speaker1: [00:14:11] This episode of Chicago Business Radio has been brought to you by Firm Space, your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to firm Space.com.

BRX Pro Tip: 5 Ways to Get Started with Servant Leadership

February 1, 2024 by angishields

BRX Pro Tips

BRX Pro Tip: 5 Ways to Get Started with Servant Leadership

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BRX Pro Tip: 5 Ways to Get Started with Servant Leadership

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] And we are back with Business RadioX Pro Tips. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, today’s topic, servant leadership.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:09] Yeah. A lot of people aspire to be servant leaders. A lot of people heard the term, maybe aren’t familiar with it. But here are some ways that you can get started with servant leadership that I think are pretty easy to incorporate if you’re so inclined to do so.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:22] Number one, I would reflect on your own leadership style and identify areas where you can embody some of the servant leadership principles. I think that’s so important to really kind of assess where you’re at and, really, if you can pull this off or not.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:37] Another thing you could be doing is to just lead by example. Demonstrate some of the qualities of a servant leader, like humility or empathy or authenticity. Is there ways to incorporate that into your daily interactions with your team so that you are demonstrating that you are a servant leader by example?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:56] Last – not lastly, but number three is, empower your team members, because that is one of the kind of tenets of servant leadership is to empower your team members. So, what can you be delegating to them? What resources can you be providing to them? And most importantly, showing them that you trust them to make decisions. That’s so important in terms of being a servant leader, you know, trust, giving them autonomy, delegating, giving them resources to grow. That’s so important.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:26] Number four, and this kind of ties into that, focus on growth and development. What can you be doing in terms of coaching and mentoring for your team to help them grow and help them develop? And really focusing in on what they’re trying to accomplish in their career and their life, and what can you be doing to help them achieve that?

Lee Kantor: [00:01:45] And number five is create this culture of open communication and feedback. You want to be encouraging honest dialog and you want to be receptive to suggestions.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:56] Servant leadership is a journey. It’s not a destination. It takes time. It takes effort. And it takes a commitment to really lean into this and embrace this kind of an approach. But I think that it’s super important if you are aspiring to be a servant leader, to take the time, because wards can be significant for not only the leader, but also the organization as a whole.

BRX Pro Tip: How 100 is Better than 1 Million

January 31, 2024 by angishields

Unlocking Opportunities: Insider Tips for WBENC National Conference Success

January 30, 2024 by angishields

Women in Motion

Unlocking Opportunities: Insider Tips for WBENC National Conference Success

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In this episode of Women in Motion, Lee Kantor and Dr. Pamela Williamson host Marianne Ellis and DeDe Van Quill, both of whom have been national host committee representatives for the WBENC National Conference. Marianne, CEO of CEO Success Community, shares her past experiences and the strategic advantages of the conference for businesses looking to connect with Fortune 500 companies.

DeDe, owner of Image Projections West, discusses her current role and the positive impact the conference has had on her business. The conversation covers the importance of preparation, effective networking, and follow-up strategies for conference attendees. The speakers also touch on the value of workshops, the balance of business and enjoyment, and the support of women in business.

DeDe Van Quill purchased a controlling interest in IPW in 2021. The company was struggling to recover from the huge blow delivered by the global pandemic.

When the country began to work from home, the toner cartridge industry was hit especially hard. Yet, even in a shrinking industry there is always room for growth.

With a combined 30 years of experience in the paper, packaging and toner industries, DeDe identified avenues for untapped potential within the industry.

In addition to running a small, International non-profit organization, she has been working on the development and implementation of a 10-year business plan, hatched collaboratively with her husband, to regrow and reinvigorate the U.S. toner remanufacturing industry via acquisitions and inter-industry collaborations.

IPW was a fantastic fit as part of this plan. Since purchasing the remaining shares of IPW in early 2022, from the last remaining founder, DeDe has been able to gain traction within the industry. As a result, IPW has been able to retain all of our employees as well as our beautiful, Denver, manufacturing facility and are now poised for dramatic growth!

Marianne Ellis is a renowned leader in advertising, marketing, business coaching, RFPs and business development for over 25 years, averaging over $100 million in new billing growth in less than 2 years for two different national advertising agencies, DDB Worldwide and Quigley-Simpson.

Marianne held EVP, SVP, COO level positions at network and independent national advertising agencies. Her award winning, successful advertising campaigns gained her acceptance to The Television Academy and she enjoys attending The Emmy’s.

Marianne has both sell side and buy side experience as a Senior Partner at External View Consulting where she ran RFP reviews for Fortune 500 companies.

Currently, Marianne is CEO of VEO Group, working for Fortune 500 companies, Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) and WBENC Business Owners helping them grow their brand and their business. She is the author of WBENC 5 Secrets to Meeting Success, a Platinum Supplier Program Developer & Trainer as well as a past mentor Ambassador. VEO Group is a Certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBENC).

To advocate for small diversity business owners, Marianne started CEO Success Community, a division of VEO Group, to grow companies from under $1million to $20million+Value in a membership based model.

With 95.8% of small diversity firms not breaking the $1 million-dollar mark, there is a tremendous need to provide coaching to help these firms reach the next level. Marianne is using her proven experience as a current business coach at SCE EDGE Program to help rising suppliers.

CEO Success Community offers two products: Sales Accelerator and Entrepreneurial Flight to $20million+ Value (vetted by Harvard, WPO-Women’s President Organization and co-creating with vNacelle) on our new tech innovation “The Everything Platform”.

Marianne is a graduate of UCLA Anderson MDE program and Startup School 2018-Silicon Valley run by Y Combinator (the Harvard of Startups) who has invested in Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, DoorDash, Weebly and more with a combined valuation of companies over $80B.

Proud to be the CEO Emeritus on UCLA Alpha Chi Housing Corporation, Member of Santa Clara Women100 Foundation, Saratoga Foothill Club, past Executive Board Member of YWCA GLA. A two-time graduate of UCLA, UCLA Anderson and UCLA BA.

Connect with Marianne on LinkedIn.

About our Co-Host

Dr. Pamela Williamson, President & CEO of WBEC-West, is an exemplary, dedicated individual, and has extensive experience as a senior leader for over twenty years.

She has served as the CEO of SABA 7 a consulting firm, overseen quality control at a Psychiatric urgent care facility of a National Behavioral Health Care Organization where she served as Vice President and Deputy Director,and has served as the CEO of WBEC-West, since 2008.

Her extensive experience in developing and implementing innovative alliances with key stakeholders has enabled the organizations to reach new levels of growth and stability. Her ability to lead and empower staff members creates a strong team environment which filters throughout the entire organization.

She takes an active role in facilitating connections between corporations and women business enterprises and sees a promising future for WBENC Certified women-owned businesses.

Dr. Williamson holds a Doctorate in Healthcare Administration, a Master’s degrees in Business Administration, and bachelor degrees in both Psychology and Sociology.

Connect with Dr. Williamson on LinkedIn.

Music Provided by M PATH MUSIC

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios. It’s time for Women in Motion. Brought to you by WBEC West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:26] Lee Kantor here with Dr. Pamela Williamson. Another episode of Women in Motion, and this is going to be a good one. It’s brought to you, as always, by WBEC West. And today’s topic is the current and past National Host committees of the WBENC National Conference are here to discuss what brought them to that role and what their businesses are. Dr. Pamela, you got quite a crowd today. Can you talk a little bit about them?

Dr. Pamela Williamson: [00:00:54] I can, Lee. Thank you for teeing it up. So last week we talked about the national conference and there were so many things to unpack. I thought I would bring two amazing women on the show today, both who have, one who was the past WBENC National Conference host committee rep for WBEC West. And the other is the current WBENC host committee rep for WBEC West. Try saying those two things.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:24] I know that’s a lot.

Dr. Pamela Williamson: [00:01:25] So I am so excited to have Marianne Ellis. She was last year’s rep for WBEC West. And we also have DeDe Van Quill, who is this year’s National Host Committee rep for WBEC West. So ladies, I’m going to ask each of you to start off by introducing yourselves and telling us a little bit about why you you chose to be a host committee representative for WBENC. And Marianne, let’s start with you as our past one.

Marianne Ellis: [00:01:55] Sure. Well, actually, I’m kind of sad going into, uh, Denver, the the WBENC West national trade show. I have to give up my crown and turn it over to DeDe. So I’m going to miss not being on the National Host Committee. It was an amazing experience. Uh, my introduction Marianne Ellis, CEO and co-founder of CEO Success Community. And this conference is perfect for us because our business is all about being the source for women and diversity business owners seeking contracts with fortune 500. So those are the buyers. Those are the individuals coming to conference to look for new suppliers that they can meet with, potentially invite to RFPs, potentially give them purchase orders. So this is a perfect trade show for our business and part of why it was created as background. I’m an expert in advertising, marketing and business coaching and RFPs. I’ve helped multiple business owners, so if you like to make money, close over $100 million in new billing growth in less than 18 months. So if you like money and you like it fast, I enjoy helping you. I also have a unique perspective. I’ve both been on the sell side where I was trying to win corporate contracts, as well as on the buy side, working with companies like Porsche 23, Andme, Panda Express, Brown-Forman, the liquor company in a $16 billion spend pool. I really this is my world and I love it. So that’s a little bit about the company. We do work for clients like we back west, so I’m very pleased to have them as a client as well as we bank uh C, PG and E, CDW and more. My last thing I would share with you or the listeners is I am thrilled to have been an Amazon number one best selling coauthor in a book, Women in Business Leading the Way, and a two time winner for WBE advocate of the year.

Marianne Ellis: [00:03:43] And WBENC back Westworld and also, um, went to the Emmys a week ago. So you can ask me who I met, and I can tell you about my green dress that malfunctioned, but that’s another time. Um, so going on to National Host Committee, it was a huge honor to do that. It was in Nashville. It was March of 2023, and I did it for three reasons. One, because I was thrilled to represent we back west. So there are 14 members on the host committee, and they represent the 14 regions of the United States. And together, this was the first time that we bank ever did this. They had one representative per region. And so I was thrilled to represent my region. We are the best in case anyone’s listening. Um, and then the second reason why I did it is visibility for the company. I think when you put your company out there in leadership positions like that, that is, it says a lot about your company, your willingness to volunteer, your willingness to help run a conference of this magnitude and size. I also did it because I wanted to create relationships across the country. I have clients from New York and Boston and Chicago. I do business consulting and coaching coast to coast now internationally. Um, but so I did that also to expand my geographic. And most of all, I did it because I just I just love WBEC West and I enjoy being a woman business owner in this group. So I will turn it over to Dede. Take my crown. Dede, you get it? Now it’s your turn. Enjoy Denver, but I’m here for you.

DeDe Van Quill: [00:05:21] Oh thank you so much. Oh my gosh, those are huge shoes to fill. Um, I don’t, uh I, I don’t even know where to start with that, but, uh, I will say I am, I am, I am, um, the owner and president of Image Projections West. We go by I w we are the largest remaining manufacturer. Remanufacturer of toner cartridges. Uh, left on US soil. Uh, everybody probably aware that manufacturing in the US, across all industries is being decimated, has been decimated and is going away. And our industry is no different. There used to be thousands of manufacturers in the US, and we are down to less than a dozen, and we are the largest remaining there is. There are others outside of the US, but I’m I’m proud to own the largest. I’m, um, really proud to be in manufacturing. There’s precious few women business owners in manufacturing or seem to be appearing, you know, out of the woodwork more and more, which I’m loving and I’m totally in support of that. Um, we attended for the first time in Nashville and it was such an amazing experience for us. The WBENC conference, uh, really opened our eyes to so many things. It, uh. I think we fed off the energy, the positive energy of everybody. There was really I I’ve been to a lot of conferences, you know, a lot of trade shows and really had never seen quite or felt quite so much positive energy on all fronts across the entire conference.

DeDe Van Quill: [00:07:00] It was really amazing for us as a group. Um, we had a great group with us, uh, just just for that alone. But we also were able to meet some clients that we, we hadn’t thought of as clients. We are business to business. We’re not retail. So it’s a little different for us. Um, but we really made some fabulous connections with with businesses we didn’t know existed. They didn’t know we existed. And I don’t think you can find that in a lot of other places, even other trade shows, because they’re usually so industry specific. So, um, that is really great for us. And I, when asked to serve on the host committee, was very excited to do so for the same reasons that Maryann did. It was it was, um, so great just to be a part and attend it, to be part of the planning committee and and hosting, especially in our own backyard. Our our facility is in Denver. This, uh, this coming conference will offer us the opportunity to give tours to some of our large customers that will be in attendance and some potential customers. We’ve never had that opportunity before, especially coming off of Covid. And lots of people still weren’t traveling. So. I just, um, though it’s just been really amazing to be involved with this group. I’ve been inspired by all the women serving on the conference panel.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:21] So now, DeDe, can you share a little bit about, um, like, what are some of the things that you’re doing in this role?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:08:31] So, um, other than, you know, um, PR and marketing, we are, um, helping to. Uh, get the word out about attending about the, the, um, the benefits that each business owner themselves can gain from just just simply attending, not even exhibiting. But, um, we are, um, offering mentorship to, to women who are just coming into the, the conference and, um.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:04] What are some of the things that you’re like hearing from the the people you’re talking to? Is this something that they aspire to go to at some point, and they just haven’t gotten around to it yet? Like, what are some of the things that they’re asking you?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:09:20] Uh, yes. So I’ve spoken to several women business owners, um, over the past couple months that, uh, hadn’t really even thought about attending because they didn’t know how they would go about, you know, setting up a booth and doing a trade show or what, what what it could accomplish for them, and just being able to share our experience from last year, being just an attendee and exhibitor, um, to now serve, serving on the host committee and getting all of the more detailed insight, information about really how much opportunity on so many different levels there is. It’s just, um, it’s been amazing to be able to share that. And I know that three of the women that I’ve spoken to have are, are now attending. When they had asked me about it, they hadn’t planned on attending.

Marianne Ellis: [00:10:06] One thing I can share with everyone that’s listening is having gone through being on National Host Committee and realizing this now. Um, it really begins. First you need to listen to your RPO leaders. So I began by listening to what doctor Pamela Williamson, what sort of her hopes and dreams, what her expectations were for the conference, because you are a representative of your region. So that’s sort of step one. If you’re on National Host Committee, step two is then you get to engage weekly with meetings with Webbank, which is the national organization. Pam Prince Isom, the CEO of the organization, is on these calls. You get a chance to meet her leadership team. And so you are there week after week. And so Deedee is going to feel this the build up. As the conference gets closer and closer, you’re hearing the decisions that are being made. You’re sharing information back because Pamela is also in with all the CEOs having their meetings. But this is now at the business owner, the WBE level. We’re sharing with all the regionals, um, reps and talking with Webbank leadership. Um, you’re also excited because you get to hear about the Webbank stars. So these are the featured business owners. So there’s a relationship between the stars and the host committee. I also learned a lot about leadership, just sitting on these calls and watching how these different National Host Committee members, you know, whether they were in DC or, you know, coming out of the South, you know, just their leadership style, how they were running things and what they were doing. Um, and then, of course, when you’re on site, you feel like the information booth. So, DeDe, prepare yourself. Someone’s going to say, yeah, we’re wondering why is it taking a while to get to lunch? And then they’re going to go, oh, well, ask DeDe. She’s on National Host Committee. So there were a lot of people that were pointing to me. That might be one part of the crown I might not miss. Um, but you really are a a concierge a bit when you’re there because you know a lot, and you can help a lot.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:10] Now, when you got into this, it sounds like Marianne, you were very strategic. Like you weren’t looking at this as, okay, I have this role. I’m going to obviously that’s table stakes to execute the role as defined. But to really wring out as much value as you can for WebEx West and yourself and your firm, you you seem to have looked at it very strategically. Can you share some of those strategic tips to really wring out the most value?

Marianne Ellis: [00:12:37] Let’s see. Do I really want to give away my secrets? Lee? I mean really? Okay, I’ll give it to you. Just to the listeners. Um. One. I made sure that we back west shined on every single one of the national calls. And I think it was really important because this Pamela, her leadership and Jamie Lomax and all the great team at we back west, you know, I was saying, and this is what we’re doing here, and I saw some of the other RPOs go, hmm, what a good idea. So I think one strategic thing that I felt was important was, you know, be a good senator, be a good Congress person, you know? So I felt like that was one sort of strategic move. And then for the company, I also wanted to make sure that the again, so I welcome everyone for going into Denver CEO Success community where booth number 1615. So write that down and come by and say hello. Um, I felt that I needed to do a good job articulating the company, what we did, how we could be of service to other business owners and other corporations. So both for who I was representing and then also having a secondary role for the company. So I felt like there was sort of two hats I was wearing.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:53] Is this helpful, DeDe?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:13:55] Oh. Tremendously helpful. Yes. And? And I’m taking notes.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:01] Now, obviously, um, protecting the brand of WBEC WEst and protecting your own brand is important. Um, what are maybe some of the benefits that, from the business owners perspective, that they may not it might not be obvious. Um, like, like you mentioned earlier, some people felt like, oh, if I have to have a booth in order to really get as much value as possible. But, um, I heard you say that just attending you can get a lot of value. So for the people who are just attending, um, any advice for them to wring out as much value as possible?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:14:37] And from my perspective, um, if if you’re attending, go with a plan. Um, but don’t be married to the plan. So go with a plan of who? Who are you looking to see and get, you know, really get in front of what is your goal when you get in front of them and be open to getting in front of people you hadn’t, or businesses you hadn’t thought of as maybe even in your demographic and and sharing with them. Because the more you share, the more connections you make, even organically, you can be connected through two other people that you spoke to, to your potentially next biggest client.

Dr. Pamela Williamson: [00:15:17] My question is, there are so many women business owners who are hesitant to go to the conference for their first time. You mentioned earlier that last year was your first conference. I’m curious if you have any advice for those people who are kind of on the fence about going or not going?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:15:38] Um, I would say I can’t imagine it not being a huge benefit to your business to attend and and to to go and exhibit or at least attend a I it again, just just feeding off the energy and and being around other women business owners gives you ideas and sparks creativity that you didn’t even know you had. But on top of that, um. It really is such a great. Um. I don’t even know how to put this cohesive. Function every. Event that I attended, it was everybody was there for the same reasons. And even if even if you were speaking to somebody who was like completely, you know, not. Within your realm of business knowledge. There was something to be gained just from those conversations and being around the energy and and picking other people’s brains for ideas, you just you can’t predict the connections you’re going to make and what that’s going to spark for your business.

Marianne Ellis: [00:16:46] I would say I was going to say going to this conference, I think is a game changer for your business. And I think you can go at multiple levels and I would say start slow, so attend, don’t Booth, then go to the next level. And Booth, you know there’s different levels of attending unless you’re ready to booth right out of the gate. Um, but I would say that what’s so important is this is a real opportunity to have conversations in a safe space. And what I mean by that is, I have a phrase in coaching that I use that’s called suspect versus prospect. Suspect is somebody that I think will do business with me. Prospect is somebody who will do business. Maybe not today. Maybe the buy cycle is two years out. But I think it’s important to have conversations about, you know, is this the right prospect for me? What are your minimum qualifications? Who’s your current incumbent? This is a chance for you to learn a lot and listen. There’s workshops. There’s other ways you can learn from. And I also think that this is a chance when you go to the different trade show booths, they’re going to tell you really quickly, are they going to grant you a capability meeting, move your company forward or not? So, you know, don’t worry about the yes and no. It’s sort of like the Harry Potter Sorting Hat. We need. You all fit into some house. We just need to figure out what the right house is, and we need to connect you so you’re not wasting your time and your money. The other thing I would say is, um, we back west and I’m not paid by Pamela does a great job, so nobody feels alone. They have a great group me app so that if someone wants to say, hey, I’m going to the Starbucks for coffee, join us, or hey, who wants to join me for dinner? Um, really? This group goes out of their way so that no one feels alone at this conference.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:39] DeDe, are you finding that is that, uh, maybe a fear that some people have that they’re going to be by themselves? They don’t know a lot of people, and they’re going to be overwhelmed because there are so many people that if you walk into that room, you feel like everybody knows everybody, and you may not know anybody. So is there an effort to, you know, help a person network and to meet some folks if they feel a little uncomfortable?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:19:03] Uh, definitely. And I will tell you, I was one of those people. I took a group of four with me to Nashville, and, um, I kind of always feel like that was always a wallflower, but, um. So I’m definitely. And, you know, I didn’t even know about the GroupMe app, so I’m, again, taking notes on that. That’s fabulous. Um, but we literally we were constantly having conversations. That’s how well-attended this conference is. We were constantly having conversations with people. You you were, um, making contacts. We we didn’t know any of the people in the booths or the attendees coming by our booth for the first two days. And we had lunch with with almost everybody in our section by the by the end of the conference, I people won’t let you feel alone. So don’t be worried about that because you won’t. You won’t get to be alone if you want to be so.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:57] Is there? Um, is there any, uh, tips, Marianne, maybe you can share on kind of maximizing your time with those enterprise level organizations to get the most out of that?

Marianne Ellis: [00:20:08] Well, the first thing I would say is, as a business owner going to conference, the whole conference organizes itself by industry group. So let me quickly for the listeners, say what those industry groups are, and then you can say, ah, that’s my those are my people. So they organize by automotive, chemical, energy, financial services, food and beverage, health care, insurance, manufacturing. Ding ding ding. There you go. DeDe manufacturing and construction, professional and technical services, retail and a few more. Travel, arts and entertainment is one group and utilities. So those are the groupings that they have for the workshops. That’s how they group all the booths together for the trade show. So all the utilities are together, all the automotives are together. So the first thing I would say is take a look and see. Where are most of your clients coming from right now? Who seems to gravitate towards your company? Who are the clients that you have? What industry are you servicing the most? And then the other tip I would give everyone is, if you’re listening, I don’t know when this airs, but we Back West does a great job, led by Jamie Lomax of a boot camp. And it’s not too late. There’s another boot boot camp session on the 1st of February. It’s all on the way Back West event website. And then I think there’s one more session, but it’s really important that you get some training before you go and that you create this plan that DeDe said. And the plan could be as simple as, what are the six companies you like to meet during the meet and greet session? There is a session on Thursday where there are round tables, and you get to pick six different corporations that you’d like to sit at their table.

Marianne Ellis: [00:21:55] There’ll be a couple of corporates and eight other WBS, and then they have 25 minute sessions where you get three minutes to introduce your company to that corporate. So at the very least, think about the six possible tables you’d like to sit at. And because like musical chairs they can fill up quickly. I always say have some extras, but pick those companies, pick those prospects, do your homework, know your company, how can you best serve, and then go and have some fun. Prepare materials. Prepare your capability statement. They may not want it, but it will give you an anchor point to speak from. Some people bring iPads you know, and speak to an iPad or others. Bring postcards that are smaller with their conference offer on it. So there’s all kinds of tips and tricks on how to do this. But I would just say, come be yourself and be open and take lots of notes and be sure to follow up. That would be the number one thing. Lee. Um, according to the National Sales Association, about 50% will go to this conference and do nothing when they get home. Don’t be that 50%. Please have a game plan for when you get back to follow up.

Dr. Pamela Williamson: [00:23:06] And Marianne, what I what I’d add is that when you talk or debrief with the corporation, or at least when I do, one of the top things that they say is people don’t follow up. They met someone great at the trade show floor. They gave them their card. They told them to give them a call and they never called them back, which is such a missed opportunity.

Marianne Ellis: [00:23:25] Yeah, it’s it at 50% is a big number. So you know what that says. Be the 50% that do.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:32] Now, how do you recommend following up. Because I know a lot of people, they go through these things. They meet a lot of people. And in their head they’re like, oh, well, I didn’t follow up right away. So now it’s weird. And they start, you know, kind of coming up with reasons not to follow up. And then days are going by. What’s an elegant way that you found to follow up if it, you know, you didn’t do it right away.

Marianne Ellis: [00:23:53] It’s never too late to follow up. One if you have a very strong product or service. Number two, I think that at the end of every conversation, discipline yourself and start practicing with your staff members before you go. Like, pretend like they’re a corporate that you want to meet with or a WBE you want to meet with in practice. But before you say goodbye, um, say I just want to confirm. Would you like me to follow up in a week, a month, six months? You know, what’s the cadence here for what you need and how? And I’ve been surprised about the how. Some have said Marianne, here’s my email address. Don’t use the info at da da da. Here’s my personal email address. You know, meaning personal company email address. Thank you. Others have said, you know what? My inbox, my email inbox is flooded. Let’s talk on LinkedIn messenger. I’ve closed contracts on LinkedIn messenger, as crazy as that sounds. And um, so I you need to listen and ask is my recommendation. Um, and really just it’s sort of. Like when you first meet a friend, you know, when do you want to get together for coffee again? And how do you want me to connect with you? So there’s multiple channels of what people want. Um, some people will actually give you their personal cell and say, text me when you send your email. I mean, that even sounds crazy, but it’s a it’s a range. And I think first and foremost ask.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:16] So you ask and you ask how? And then.

Marianne Ellis: [00:25:20] Yeah, ask and ask how did.

DeDe Van Quill: [00:25:24] Oh yeah, I totally agree. I, um, I also agree that, um, maybe even make the plan for follow up before you go to conference. So who’s going to be handling, um, what what segments or who’s going to be emailing, who’s going to be calling and divide the tasks up amongst your staff if you if you have that capability. Um, that worked really well for us last year. Um, we will do the same thing again this year. And, uh, I yeah, I can’t impress upon you enough to have a plan and be prepared, but just exactly like Marianne said.

Marianne Ellis: [00:25:58] Another way to look at it too is so some companies, they have their top ten or their top 20, depending on how many people they’re bringing to conference. That really impacts how many you can reach. But one business owner and CEO successfully said in Nashville, she made she had 38 meaningful conversations. And I thought, wow, now that’s that. That’s probably a pacesetter. But, um, there are a lot of people that say, if I have five conversations that will get me business 3 to 5, I’m thrilled. So you’re going to get a range of expectations and responses. But I would say talk to a lot, but really look for those key quality opportunities that are going to create relationships, that are going to create revenue.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:43] And it sounds like both of you agree that you just can’t go in there and think you’re going to wing this and just kind of wander around and hope you find the person with the golden ticket. You have to be strategic. You have to go in with a plan and have almost a list of people. These are the people that I would like to meet. These are the people that I must meet and then have some plan to follow up after you’ve met them.

Marianne Ellis: [00:27:07] I think that’s how you guys.

DeDe Van Quill: [00:27:10] Yeah, I totally concur. I do say though, if you’re one of those people who, like, cannot make a plan, I know one of those people and that it is also okay, especially if it’s your first time. Just go and wing it but go.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:25] Now, uh, DeDe, you mentioned going um recently for the first time. Was there something that struck you as wow, how did I not know about this or wow, I wish I would have done this before. Were there some moments that you were like, kind of just in awe of what the event is?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:27:44] Uh, absolutely. Um, one it is it is truly a major show. It is, it is a major. I I’ve attended some really big manufacturing, has some really big conferences, um, across the US, Canada and Mexico. And, and this would be considered a major show and, um, it they, they know what they’re doing. Um, I’ll say we but I again, first timer this year on the, on the host committee. They know what they’re doing. They they have planned it out super well for your success as an attendee, as an exhibitor, they they are setting this up so that everybody who comes will be successful. Um.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:23] Now, what about the just being in a room filled with women that are making things happen? Like, was that kind of inspiring for you?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:28:33] I personally totally fed off the energy in in each and every room and every event that I attended. I cannot tell you or name any other conference or trade show that I’ve ever been to that felt that way across the board and where I felt inspired and um, and sparked and incented to do more for my company and for others to help make connections for others that I met.

Marianne Ellis: [00:29:07] I loved listening how other business owners introduce their company, and that brought me a lot of joy. And it was really fun because there’s such a range of the way introductions happen. Um, some were very serious, some were with a smile, some were with a twist. And I think that there is a big part of this conference where you can be inspired, but if you open your ears, you can really listen and learn. And then there are some that are really experienced at trade shows and you can watch them. I call them the Barracudas. They hit that floor and they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re going for it. And then there are others that we’re still getting our sea legs or we’re still getting the train. We got to take the training wheels off a little more. But, um, you know, it’s very I think Deedee has the right word. It’s inspiring, you know, no matter what level you are in this. And then everyone is so kind. Especially when someone says, this is my first trade show. Everyone’s like, hug you. Okay, how can we help you? Who are you looking for? I mean, yeah, there’s some of us are competing against each other, but it really seems like that’s left at the door. There seems to be a real I don’t want to say sisterhood, but there seems to be a real spirit of. I guess it’s the webbank West Coast hook a sister up. I think that Jamie Lomax coined that phrase. It came from way back West. But there is a real spirit at the national trade show and I and it will be there in full force. I know it will in Denver.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:36] Now, we talked a lot about the networking and the business opportunities there. Um, and you mentioned kind of informal learning. What about the formal learning and the workshops and things like that? Did you find a lot of value in that?

Marianne Ellis: [00:30:51] I did, I take I always go to the workshops of the prospects I’m looking to do business with. So, um, I’ve done that’s.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:59] One of those pro tips that you just snuck in there.

Marianne Ellis: [00:31:02] And not only do you have a chance to, um, not only do you have a chance to learn more about the industry, but it’s timed nicely. So the workshops happen before the first round of trade show and before the second round of trade show, so that the first step is a workshop. So listen in and hear what your corporate prospects are saying are their pain points. What’s going on? I mean, obviously you’ve done your homework. You’ve looked at their websites, you’ve read their news, recent news before you go, but this is kind of your last check in. And then you can also quote what you just heard when you get to the trade show booth and talk about how you are part of the solution.

Lee Kantor: [00:31:42] Did you get that, DeDe? That was good stuff.

DeDe Van Quill: [00:31:45] Again. Writing notes. Oh, my gosh, I’m such a novice here, I just. I should have been picking Marianne’s brains for all these months now.

Marianne Ellis: [00:31:54] Oh, happy to help. Happy to help. I really love what I do, and so much of it comes from. And I’ve shared this story before. I would not have CEO success community had I not been working for another woman business owner. I was at the Baltimore conference. I was about to go into a matchmaker meeting with Pfizer. We wanted pharma business, and there was a woman crying on the couch, and I had a choice take the meeting with Pfizer or see what the crying woman wanted that went over to the crying woman. Her, um, her father had passed away, her mother was sick and she did not know how to do a trade show, and she certainly didn’t know how to do a matchmaker. And she had bombed hers, and she was ready to go home. And I said, no, no, no, don’t go home. Tell me about your company. So I’ll keep her information private. And a little cocktail napkin. I said, give me. We’re going to have three bullet points of what you could say about your company. And so I said three bullets and two cues, two questions. And we cleaned up her makeup. She went. And the next meeting she had with the corporate, she then had the corporate asked for a capability statement, which went on to a contract. And that’s how I pivoted into this business. So yay! Hahaha.

DeDe Van Quill: [00:33:02] Oh that’s tremendous.

Lee Kantor: [00:33:04] Now we talk a lot about the, um, the business part of this, but there’s still fun to, um, how do you kind of, um, make the fun business y or do you or do you separate and say, this is fun time and I’m not, you know, I’m not wearing my business leader hat.

Marianne Ellis: [00:33:21] Someone will throw a shoe at you. And I’m sure Pamela will agree and may want to speak to this. Um, you have got to know when to let it go. And at night, when everyone is tired and you know it’s going to be a roaring 20s night, and then there’s going to be ski lodge night, you’ve got to drop it. You know, that is not a selling opportunity. You’ve got to have fun and get to know people on a personal level. And if they ask you about your company, fine. But that’s social time and that’s fun time. And we’ve got plenty of hours on the trade show floor, plenty of hours at the meet and greet. I, you know, I’ve seen WBZ make mistakes chasing corporates in the bathrooms and, you know, stalking them. Just please, if you’re listening to this radio, please don’t do that. They’re human beings too.

Lee Kantor: [00:34:08] DeDe, is that your philosophy as well?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:34:11] Uh, yes. And I did notice that, um, in Nashville, the the functions, the after hours functions, they felt they felt they were filled with fun and had something for everyone. And it did not feel like a, you know, a corporate Christmas party even. It felt like, okay, this is time to let your hair down and and really relax and just talk to people, to talk to people.

Lee Kantor: [00:34:39] It’s all about the relationships. Right. And these are a variety of ways to build relationships with people. And there’s an appropriate way at certain times and, and not so appropriate way. So when you’re in that environment, you know, behave accordingly.

DeDe Van Quill: [00:34:54] Precisely.

Lee Kantor: [00:34:56] So, um, now, DeDe, uh, what could we all be doing to help you get more, uh, folks at this conference? What kind of help do you need from us?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:35:07] Well, I think, you know, I think just raising the awareness that it’s there, that it is it is a fabulous conference that really benefits everybody who goes attends exhibits. However they however they plan to be there. Um, but that it it. It will be, um, at least outlook changing for them. At the very least, it will change their outlook and their prospects to attend.

Lee Kantor: [00:35:33] And then, um, for your business IPP, what is that ideal client look like for you? And, um, how can we help you, um, meet more of them?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:35:43] Um, well, our ideal clients are, uh, redistributors of our product. And so we we actually have made connections through, uh, we bank at Nashville to some of them, but, um, just raising the awareness that there is a difference. And there is, uh, products like ours being remanufactured within the US and that they are more environmentally friendly because they’re not being shipped out of the country and rebrand being brought in and, and all of those great things. But that also, um, to look to support us manufacturers, um, across all industries.

Lee Kantor: [00:36:22] And Marianne, what can we help, uh, do to be helping you with CEO success community.

Marianne Ellis: [00:36:28] Mm. Okay. So there’s a corporate ask and then there is a CEO individual business owner ask. So for the CEO individual ask, I would say that, um, we are at CEO Success Community. We are on a mission. According to American Express, only 3%. The last time they did this study, um, only 3% of all women business owners get over a million. And that’s pretty small. And I think women business owners are pretty phenomenal. So part of what our coaching is, is about growth and accelerating to 20 million plus. And so I think any business owner that’s interested in growing or interested in talking to you and for the corporations, we have a lot of workshops and programs. We are absolutely thrilled that we were featured. Ceo Success Community was featured this year in the Billion dollar Roundtable Economic Global Report. For our RFP to the Win program, we are trying to help more diverse business owners, um, win and do better with RFPs. And we were sponsored by PG and E and featured by PG and E. So, um, if corporations would be willing to sponsor more business owners in our programs or business owners were interested, that’s a win win. But and and I would say at minimum come by booth 1615. If I can give you one piece of advice to help you at the conference, no charge, just to help. I’m there.

Lee Kantor: [00:37:52] And then, uh, the website.

Marianne Ellis: [00:37:55] Oh, um, CEO success community.com

Lee Kantor: [00:37:57] And your website?

DeDe Van Quill: [00:38:01] Uh, YP Usa.com good stuff.

Lee Kantor: [00:38:06] Pamela. Man, this was, uh, a lot of tips today.

Dr. Pamela Williamson: [00:38:12] It was a lot of tips.

Dr. Pamela Williamson: [00:38:13] I took a lot of notes. I hope everybody who’s listening also took some notes. But I think the one key thing for those people who haven’t attended a conference, just do it. Just go. Just experience it. Um, I loved what Marianne said around, you know, just start with a plan. And the plan doesn’t have to be complicated. It could just be as simple as, I’m going to meet three new people or three new corporations, or talk to five people. It doesn’t have to be a big, elaborate plan. But, you know, DeDe, I think you said it best when you said that if you attend, it will definitely change your outlook. So thank you guys both for joining us today.

Lee Kantor: [00:38:53] Yeah. And then so much for having us. And then the event is um, do we have the date and all that for the event somebody. Yes.

Dr. Pamela Williamson: [00:39:01] Uh, the conference this year for the Webbank National Conference, the theme is amplify. It is going to be at the Gaylord Rocky Resort and Convention Center in Denver, Colorado. It kicks off on March 19th and will end on March 20th 22nd. Just as a reminder, if you are part of the WebEx West family, we are having a pre event on March 18th, so I hope to see everyone there.

Lee Kantor: [00:39:26] Good stuff. Well, thank you all for sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we all appreciate you.

Marianne Ellis: [00:39:34] Thanks for having us.

DeDe Van Quill: [00:39:36] Thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:39:37] Alright, this is Lee Kantor for Doctor Pamela Pamela Williamson. We’ll see you all next time on Women in Motion.

Madge Lovingood and Tim Rogers with Byrd Insurance Agency and Neal Murphy with GrassRoots Turf Care

January 30, 2024 by angishields

Charitable Georgia

Madge Lovingood and Tim Rogers with Byrd Insurance Agency and Neal Murphy with GrassRoots Turf Care

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In this episode of Charitable Georgia, host Brian Pruett is joined by Madge Lovingood and Tim Rogers from The Byrd Insurance Agency, and Neal Murphy from GrassRoots Turf Care. They delve into a variety of insurance topics, such as homeowners, renters, pet, and flood insurance, while also touching on the intricacies of insuring personal property and collectibles. Tim and Neal share their individual journeys in their respective industries, emphasizing the importance of fostering community connections.

Madge Lovingood flew into the Insurance Industry in 1989. She has been an Agent, an Adjuster, and an Underwriter. The majority of Madges’ time has been in the agency which is where her passion is.

She likes to say the Byrd Insurance Agency soars above the rest to give you our very best! She joined The Byrd Insurance Agency in 2000 and became a partner in 2004 and has been the sole owner since 2014.

Madge has been married to Brian Lovingood for 20 years. They’re empty nesters except for two furry kids; Ruger, a Redbone Coonhound who is 9, and a 3 year old Anatolian Shepherd who weighs 120lbs.

She has two granddaughters who still love to come to Nana and Papa’s . She loves her family, being a grandparent and a dog mom. Madge also enjoys Golf, NASCAR and Corney Jokes!

Tim Rogers resides in Canton, Ga with his wife and 2 boys. He is an avid outdoorsmen and sportsman. He has been in the insurance industry since 2019 and truly has a passion for developing relationships with his clients and peers.

In the ever-changing landscape of the insurance world, Tim understands the importance of gaining and maintaining trust. “For me at the start of every transaction and ANY business opportunity, Trust, Transparency, Professionalism and Industry Insight will always be the driving factor behind my every day-to-day routine”

When the going gets tough and the challenge ahead gets hard, Tim pushes himself to go higher, work harder and maximize every opportunity. He’s super excited to be a part of the Byrd Agency and looks forward to many years of continued service in the wonderful communities he serves.

Neal Murphy grew up in Boston, MA, but eventually relocated down to Charlotte, NC, in 1998 and then Canton, GA, in 2004.

The majority of his professional career has been in a technology role for a variety of industries including banking, consulting, education and legal. However, with his son and daughter then in college, at the end of 2019 Neal decided to exit his 30-plus years in the corporate environment to pursue the opportunity to be a new franchise owner for GrassRoots Turf Care, a lawn spray company located in Acworth, GA.

Since January 2020 Neal has been the owner of two GrassRoots Turf franchise territories in north Georgia, with his base of operations in Cartersville. Neal moved from Canton to Cartersville in early 2021 to be closer to his business as well as the Cartersville community.

He has been an active member of the Cartersville Chamber of Commerce as well as the Cartersville Business Club, and regularly looks for opportunities to promote other local small businesses and owners just like so many have graciously done for him.

He and his GrassRoots Turf franchise also look for ways to give back to the community in more charitable ways including monetary donations and sponsorships. They have been so happy to support numerous charitable organizations this past year including Advocates for Children, Red Door Food Pantry, Good Neighbor Homeless Shelter, Footprints on the Heart, and Backpack Buddies.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta. It’s time for Charitable Georgia. Brought to you by B’s Charitable Pursuits and resources. We put the fun in fundraising. For more information, go to B’s Charitable Pursuits dot com. That’s B’s Charitable Pursuits dot com. Now here’s your host, Brian Pruett.

Brian Pruett: [00:00:45] Good fabulous Friday. It’s another fabulous Friday morning and I don’t know why people can’t stay healthy in Georgia, but obviously we go from negative something to 60 something, so it’s just crazy. Anyway, welcome to Charitable Georgia. This is your first time listening, this is all about positive things happening in the community. And I’ve got three fabulous guests this morning. And, uh, we are going to start with Madge Lovingood from the Byrd Insurance Agency. So, Madge, thanks for coming this morning.

Madge Lovingood: [00:01:11] Thanks for having us.

Brian Pruett: [00:01:12] So as I say, the bird is the word right? That’s right. All right. We’ll talk about the Byrd Insurance Agency here in just a few minutes. But if you don’t mind, share a little bit about your background.

Madge Lovingood: [00:01:20] Okay. Um, I’m originally from Georgia. I was born and raised in Atlanta, then moved to Cobb County, spent most of my life in Cobb County, and started in the insurance industry 35 years ago. And now I own the Byrd Insurance Agency in Hiram, Georgia, and we have a second location in Villa Rica. Um, I’m married to my husband, Brian, and we have a.

Brian Pruett: [00:01:41] Good name, by the way.

Madge Lovingood: [00:01:41] Yes, I know, great name. I have two daughters and two granddaughters and two big furry beast at my house. Nice. Yes. Two. Two big dogs.

Brian Pruett: [00:01:51] What kind of dogs are they?

Madge Lovingood: [00:01:53] Uh, Ruger is a Redbone Coonhound, and, uh, Sadie is an Anatolian Shepherd, and I think she weighs about 120 pounds now.

Brian Pruett: [00:02:00] Awesome.

Madge Lovingood: [00:02:01] So she’s huge.

Brian Pruett: [00:02:01] So do you say Ruger? Ruger? That’s an awesome name. So if you like dogs, you like big dogs. Uh, that’s a shameless plug for March 21st, I’m doing a Hometown Heroes Expo, and, uh, it’s an organization that we’re helping called, uh, The Outer Circle out there in Dallas. And they’re helping veterans and first responders on PTSD and suicide prevention. And they are bringing one of their friends that runs paws for life. We’re going to have, instead of a kissing booth, a hugging booth. Oh, and you can get a hug from Rufus.

Madge Lovingood: [00:02:29] Oh.

Brian Pruett: [00:02:30] Rufus, I’ll show you a picture when we get off the air. But Rufus is a massive dog. He likes to stand up, and he actually hugs you.

Madge Lovingood: [00:02:36] Oh, nice.

Brian Pruett: [00:02:36] So come get a hug from Rufus.

Madge Lovingood: [00:02:38] Yes. Remind me. I want to put that on my schedule.

Brian Pruett: [00:02:40] I’ll do it. Do it. So. All right, so you are very active in the community. Not only just networking, but you’re very, um, you love supporting the community. Yes. So, um, first of all, share a little bit why it’s important for you to be involved in the community and do what you do.

Madge Lovingood: [00:02:58] Well, I mean, that’s how we make our living is off the community. You know, our our customers are our community. And so I think it’s important to give back to the community. We do, um, one of the longest projects that I’ve done is we give back, um, dictionaries to all the third graders in Paulding County. It was started by our rotary group, excuse me. And we’ve done that for about 15 years. And you wouldn’t think that kids nowadays would want a book, but they still do. We’ve asked the teachers and they’re like, yeah, it’s still a viable thing. And it’s so cute to see the kids get their first book, you know, and still flip through it, which is nice. And we had a story about one kid, actually, that went through college and he still had his dictionary.

Brian Pruett: [00:03:33] Awesome.

Madge Lovingood: [00:03:34] Yeah, yeah. And still used it. So that was good. Um, another thing we do is, uh, Next Step Ministries, they have A5K. And so we’ve done that for a couple of years I think. Tim, this is the first year you were involved with that, right. Yeah. Yes, I believe so. Um, in Cherokee we do the. Women’s Service League. They have A5K run and then they do a golf tournament. And we’ve been involved with both of those things as well. Uh, this year we did a suicide walk in, uh, Paulding County, uh, for suicide awareness. And that was really touching to hear some of the stories in the people and, uh, things that they have overcome. It’s it’s amazing. It’s amazing.

Brian Pruett: [00:04:09] Yeah. Well, in the last two years, last year and this year, you’ve been a sponsor of mine that I do in Bartow County with the trivia for, uh, Giving Back charity different, uh, you know, nonprofits. So I appreciate you doing that. Um, so, um, as I mentioned, you also do a lot of networking. I see you different function as well. So we talk about networking on here as well. Can you you got a positive, uh, testimony about networking you can share.

Madge Lovingood: [00:04:33] Yes. So far it’s been positive. Um, Tim Rogers, who’s with me today? Actually, I met him at the Marietta Business Association.

Tim Rogers: [00:04:41] This is true.

Madge Lovingood: [00:04:44] So that’s been a positive, um, story that half out of that Marietta Business Association is another group, too. That’s really, really good about giving back to the community their golf tournament. And they have two other fundraisers that gives back to a different charity each year. Um, similar to you except for you give a lot of charities, right. But they usually pick 1 or 2 and give back to you. So which is good. And then um, Kennesaw Business Association I believe also gives back. And now they give back a lot of scholarships to local kids in Cobb County. Um, so that’s a good, positive thing. Um, you know, it’s just getting out in the networking and in the community and talking to people and just making those connections. I mean, like the other day, we got a call in the office from a lady that I met through a networking group ten years ago, and she called me for a quote.

Brian Pruett: [00:05:27] Well, that’s what we talk about too, is, uh, first of all, people I still run across people go to networking events for the wrong reason. They’re trying to always get that sale, you know, and and it’s more about this relationship building. It is. And it’s not going to be an immediate thing. I mean, you just said ten years ago and they called you so and they remembered that. So, um, all right, let’s talk a little bit about the bird insurance agent. You said you’re in Hiram and you have a Villa Rica. Uh, do you guys what all insurance do you guys do?

Madge Lovingood: [00:05:54] Okay, so bird insurance is actually the oldest independent insurance agency in Paulding County. We were found in 1910. So we are the wise old owl of insurance. Nice. Yes, yes. Um, we are, uh, right next to Clark Funeral Home, if you know the area. And we’ve been there. Well, they just been there since 1910, but we moved the office about five years ago. Um, right next to Clark Funeral Home. And then I last year I purchased another agency out in Villarrica. It’s a smaller agency, but it’s right off Bankhead Highway, so. Okay. Yeah. And we do, um, homeowner’s auto. Excuse me. Business insurance, umbrellas, worker’s comp, things like that. Um, we we also do life insurance. We don’t do health insurance. That’s about the only thing we don’t do.

Brian Pruett: [00:06:36] Right, right. Um. All right, so give a little bit some, uh, some tidbits, if you don’t mind, for insurance, because I know that’s kind of a crazy industry. Uh, you got some tidbits you want to share?

Tim Rogers: [00:06:45] This is my time to shine. Uh.

Madge Lovingood: [00:06:48] I’ll let him take that.

Tim Rogers: [00:06:50] So in the crazy world of insurance, right, we’re always doing our best to. To save money. And, you know, make sure that we protect ourselves. You know, one of the things that a lot of the conversations that we’re having with our friends and our clients, um, is, hey, why is my bill going up? Why are our rates are up, right? Because they’re up across many different lines personal home insurance, home, auto business. Um, and there’s many factors that contribute to that. One way that we kind of combat that is taking a look at their individual policy, looking at their coverages, suggesting recommending changes. Um, we’ve got several providers that we contract with. So the great thing about being in the independent model is even if one company goes up pretty significant on their premiums, you know, we can shop that around with other companies that haven’t. And then we can also look into additional discounting opportunities for our our clients, for those that are willing to take advantage of it. Um, and trust me when I say we’ve had to be very, very intentional and creative with the ways that we’ve helped people save money. Uh, because sometimes it can seem like everything that we’re doing is, is just for nothing, but we’re helping people out, and that’s that’s what we do it for. So we’re excited about that.

Brian Pruett: [00:07:58] So, um, what kind of things do people need to look at and think about when they’re going after insurance? I mean, there’s I know there’s different things you can get under, like the umbrella policy and stuff like that, but there are certain things that people don’t think about that you, uh, can maybe talk about, that people should look at.

Tim Rogers: [00:08:15] Yeah, all the time. So here’s, here’s a big one that I tend to have a conversation about every single week. A lot of people think if they don’t have a vehicle that’s in their name or registered to them, that they shouldn’t be on an insurance policy. It’s kind of the the big misconception with with regular people in society, what they don’t realize is that really puts them at a at a detriment when it comes to their insurance, because so much of how you’re rated as an individual really comes from your prior history with insurance. You know, how recently have you had it, in addition to several other important factors like what are your limits of coverage and liability? You know, in the state of Georgia, the state minimum requirements are very, very low. Most people think that because of that, they’re going to save the most money on their insurance if they select that, when in reality it’s the complete opposite, they’re actually going to be rated much higher. And even when they shop their rate with no activity, no claims, things of that nature, they they’re they’re they feel like they can never get something that’s more affordable. Um, so that’s, that’s one thing that we tell everyone, if you’re selling a car, getting rid of a car, um, stay on a policy, even if it’s not your own policy, stay as a driver or listed operator on a family member’s policy because it will keep that history going. And when the time does come for you to get another vehicle in relation to auto insurance, you’re now getting rated at a better category or tier, if you will, than someone that has no history or no insurance at all.

Brian Pruett: [00:09:42] So there’s a few things. I got lots of questions, so be ready for the ride. Uh let’s go Neil. Okay, so, um, so I know I’ve heard some people talk about pet insurance. Yes. Um, you guys do that as well? We do? Yeah. Um, why is that important?

Madge Lovingood: [00:09:58] Because vet bills are going up, right? Just like any other. Outrageous. I know, I just took my dog in the other day. Ruger. He’s a senior, and I took him in the other day to get some blood work because he’s been taking some medicine. And it was $285. Wow. I mean, that’s more expensive than my blood work, right, with health insurance.

Brian Pruett: [00:10:14] Right? So what does I mean? What does that look like when somebody says, I want to do pet insurance? What all does that what would cover when you take out your your your fur baby to the doctor?

Madge Lovingood: [00:10:23] My fur baby.

Madge Lovingood: [00:10:24] Uh, most of the policies, we’ve got three different carriers that do it. Um, they cover, like, uh, two wellness visits, and then they’ll cover the vaccinations, um, like the rabies and the, uh. What is it when you go shots?

Madge Lovingood: [00:10:36] Yeah, the shots, the de-worming and stuff like that.

Madge Lovingood: [00:10:38] All that kind of stuff. And then, um, you get a discount if there’s an emergency visit.

Brian Pruett: [00:10:43] Okay. Or is it all kinds of pets or are there certain pets that won’t cover?

Madge Lovingood: [00:10:48] I have not had a pet that I couldn’t cover yet.

Brian Pruett: [00:10:50] Even a fish.

Madge Lovingood: [00:10:51] I haven’t had anybody ask me about a fish. I’m going to say that’s probably a hard no.

Brian Pruett: [00:10:58] Darn, I was going to ask you, I know. All right. So now let’s talk about, uh, I guess, flood insurance. I mean, there are some, uh, it’s happened here. Um, and most people probably don’t think about that. Um. A little bit about flood insurance. You want me.

Tim Rogers: [00:11:12] To do that? Sure. Okay. Yeah. Flood. Flood insurance is important. I think first and foremost when we talk about that is, you know, agents in the industry, um, you’ve got to be in what’s known as a flood zone. So a lot of people think, well, I’ve got to get flood insurance. Right? So there’s two there’s two requirements that that generally happen in the marketplace. So there’s you’re in an area where you have to have flood insurance. Right. And then if you’re not in an area that’s zoned as a flooding area, you can still get flood insurance. Um, so we have to understand the difference between the two when it comes to homeowners. Um, also understanding that within traditional policies for your home, generally flood is excluded unless you have a flood policy. Okay. So that’s the biggest thing that we really have to make sure that our clients and customers are educated on. Just because you have home insurance doesn’t mean that if there’s a flood, it’s going to cover it because it’s not, you know, that’s a big exclusion for homeowner policy. So, um, if there’s been a history of those type of events happening on your property or on your home, in my opinion, we need to make sure we secure that for you as an individual.

Brian Pruett: [00:12:15] So are there other, I guess, acts of God in kind of insurance? If a tornado or a lightning strike or anything like that, are there other insurances for those things?

Madge Lovingood: [00:12:24] Now, if lightning strikes or there’s a storm that is covered under your homeowner’s insurance. Okay. Um, earthquake is about the only other thing I can think of that’s not covered. Um, but we do have and we do have a fault line in Georgia. Um, so there are earthquake policies that you can get as well. We’ve got two carriers that have endorsements on their policy.

Brian Pruett: [00:12:40] Okay. Um, all right, so I got a scenario for you. Uh, you you live on a property, and behind you is another property. And a tree from that property falls on your fence. Who’s the one responsible and who’s insurance takes care of it?

Tim Rogers: [00:12:57] Now we have the right answer for that question. But just out of curiosity, who do you think would be responsible for that?

Brian Pruett: [00:13:03] The persons that the property fell off of?

Tim Rogers: [00:13:05] Correct? That’s absolutely correct. So and look, this happens a lot more than people think. But you’re absolutely right. If you have a tree in your yard or in your on your property that falls on someone’s home, their vehicle, their driveway, you’re responsible for making sure that if you have the proper coverage, that they remove that tree and also cover any, you know, repairs or damages that are caused to the property.

Brian Pruett: [00:13:29] So I’ve had some people that told me it was the other way around and I never believed them. But so what our safeguards for that, because I’m sure there are people out there who says it’s the other way around.

Madge Lovingood: [00:13:39] Well, it depends on the situation. If, um, if you have it noted or you have an arborist come out there and say that that tree is dead and you’ve notified your neighbor that that tree is dead and that tree falls on your house, then they knew. So they’re responsible for it. If in a storm situation, it depends. Excuse me. Um, the insurance company, your insurance company is going to pay for your house and your damages and the removal of that tree. But the part of the tree that’s on the neighbor’s property, that is their responsibility.

Brian Pruett: [00:14:07] Okay. And so and if it damages your, like the fence, then they will take care of it. Or were your insurance then then go after the other insurance company.

Madge Lovingood: [00:14:15] Your insurance could take care of it.

Brian Pruett: [00:14:17] Yeah. All right. And does that stuff help. That will then make your rates go up. Then if that’s the case.

Madge Lovingood: [00:14:22] Homeowner’s insurance claims do not make your homeowner’s policies go up.

Brian Pruett: [00:14:25] Okay.

Madge Lovingood: [00:14:26] They just have increases okay.

Brian Pruett: [00:14:28] All right.

Madge Lovingood: [00:14:29] But you’re not surcharged. Now auto is different but the homeowner’s is not okay.

Brian Pruett: [00:14:32] Um all right let’s talk a little bit about renters insurance. Why is that important?

Tim Rogers: [00:14:37] Well, renter’s insurance is very important because when you’re renting, I mean, you’ve got valuables and things that are important to you that stay with you, right? Whether it be, um, you know, personal property. And people say, well, what is personal property? It’s it’s your stuff, okay. It’s everything from clothes to electronics to appliances to furniture, uh, anything of value that you keep in your apartment or your home or wherever that you rent. You want to have coverage for those things. God forbid there is an accidental fire. God forbid you accidentally have a mistake. And, you know, with wherever you’re renting, where those things are destroyed, if you don’t have the proper coverage, that’s a big loss that you’re taking, and you’ve got to be the individual that comes out of pocket to replace all those things. So renters insurance, you know, one aspect is for the personal property. And then of course, the other important aspect is for the liability, uh, anything that can occur, um, on that property or in that home or in that apartment that you could be responsible for and that someone could try to sue you for as well.

Brian Pruett: [00:15:37] So what about folks? I’m assuming we’re talking about people living that rent homes and apartments, correct? Correct. What about storage? If people have storage units? I know some storage units, like we have a storage unit and they make you purchase insurance through them.

Madge Lovingood: [00:15:51] So that depends on which carrier you have. We have several carriers that will cover up to 10% of your personal property on your home or your renters policy and a storage location. So if you own a home and you’re, let’s just say your personal property coverage on there is 200,000. So 10% of that will go to your storage location. Does that make sense. So you’d have $20,000 worth of coverage.

Tim Rogers: [00:16:12] Okay. But it’s also important to remember it’s for a period in time. Right. So so here’s here’s here’s the thing that I’ll say about kind of what agents will tell people. You know, first and foremost, for anyone that’s listening, you have to remember that not all insurance agents are created equal. Uh, this is a huge policies and policies and policies and companies. So there’s a lot of moving parts to what happens in the insurance industry. We have to really know what’s going on, and we have to really know the rules and regulations. The things that are covered aren’t covered within the providers that we have. You know, that we that we place for our individuals and also how that applies to real world situations and scenarios. Um, generally, if someone is moving their personal property to a storage unit permanently, right? Yes. For a period in time, their renter’s policy will cover that, but it’s for a period of time if it’s going to be there permanently there, nine times out of ten, we’re going to suggest or recommend, unless I’m wrong with that.

Madge Lovingood: [00:17:11] I’m going to correct you.

Tim Rogers: [00:17:12] Actually let my boss correct me. See this? See this? This. This is a prime learning experience, a learning experience.

Madge Lovingood: [00:17:17] But he’s right. Not all policies are the same, but we do have two carriers that will cover the stuff in storage permanently.

Tim Rogers: [00:17:24] Yes, but it has to be an endorsement. Yes, typically.

Brian Pruett: [00:17:28] Do you? Obviously. I guess there are. Sorry. Like I said, they they made us. Get that insurance through them. Do you recommend having both? Through and through an agent, as well as what they let you.

Tim Rogers: [00:17:39] Answer that one, because my answer would be no.

Madge Lovingood: [00:17:41] My answer would be no as well.

Brian Pruett: [00:17:42] Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No. All right.

Madge Lovingood: [00:17:44] You can’t collect from two different policies for the same incident okay.

Brian Pruett: [00:17:49] Alright. Good to know. All right. Let’s talk a little bit for somebody who’s listening and still confused a little bit about the insurance world because it’s very confusing. Explain what an umbrella policy is.

Tim Rogers: [00:18:00] I mean, I can do that, but you can do that. Okay.

Tim Rogers: [00:18:03] My boss wants to put me on the spot.

Brian Pruett: [00:18:06] That’s the reason she brought you.

Tim Rogers: [00:18:07] She wants to put me on the spot to make sure I’m up to game, but.

Madge Lovingood: [00:18:10] He turns his back. The best talking.

Tim Rogers: [00:18:11] The best way that I explain an umbrella, a policy. It’s excess. It’s extra coverage, right? Uh, that’s for you, the individual. Uh, when something major, a claim, an incident, a loss occurs that can provide protection for not just your auto insurance, but also your property insurance. Right? Um, this also translates in the business world, you can get umbrellas for for commercial policies for businesses, but they are separate. So you have, you know, umbrella policies for your personal insurance needs, your home, your auto. That’s also any additional items you may keep in your home that have insurance, things like, um, like boats, things like, uh, RVs, things like campers, things like, uh, you know, the fun toys that certain people have, like four wheelers and things like that. Right? If there’s a potential that, you know, these toys or these things can, can injure someone or create a loss or be stolen or what have you. Uh, you want to have a certain amount of coverage to protect against all of that, for one thing, but then also to make sure that if something happens that you’re responsible for, you don’t have someone hiring a lawyer or trying to come after you and sue you for your assets. Right? So that’s the other big aspect of of what an umbrella policy is for its excess coverage. And it you know, we call it in the insurance world. We call it an umbrella policy because it kind of sits above, you know, the limits of your home and your auto. Right, right. So that’s why it’s called an umbrella policy.

Brian Pruett: [00:19:36] Okay. Uh, and then the last thing I want to ask about is, uh, collectible insurance. I have a big collection of sports cards and sports memorabilia, and other people do antiques, things of that nature. Um, first of all, do you guys do anything with that? And second of all, why is that important?

Madge Lovingood: [00:19:52] That’s important because on your homeowner’s policy, they specifically put a limit on, uh, collectibles, jewelry, guns, silver, gold, things like that. Um, there are specialty companies out there that will insure collection and. I’m trying to think of one that we had, uh, lady collected. Um. This little figurines called humbles.

Madge Lovingood: [00:20:15] She collect a bunch of those and she had like $20,000 worth of those things, so she had him scheduled. You do need to get them appraised. And then there’s a specialty company that can insure that kind of stuff.

Brian Pruett: [00:20:25] Okay. Yeah. All right, all right. So imagine coming back to you for a second. Why did you choose to get into the insurance world?

Madge Lovingood: [00:20:31] Wow, that was 35 years ago. I actually answered an ad in the newspaper for just a service rep and went in there and, uh, the lady that I worked for, um, Linda Adrian, was a great mentor, actually, and she encouraged me to get my license. And so I did. And she said, well, when you get your license, you can get more money. And I said, oh, I can get commissions. Okay. Sure. So I just sort of fell into it, to be honest with you. But I like it because you get to deal with the people, uh, good, bad or indifferent. Most of them are good, and it’s a learning experience. I mean, it changes every day now, right? It’s a different experience.

Brian Pruett: [00:21:08] Right. Well it goes to your to your service heart as well because you’re, you know, the helping helping folks. Yeah. So so that brings me to another question too. You said it. Not only insurance agents are created equal when somebody is looking for an agent. What should they look for?

Tim Rogers: [00:21:25] Oh man, I get asked this all the time. And I think my answer changes every every other week. But, um, to keep it consistent with what I believe to be true, I think I think the most, you know, important things that someone should consider when they’re looking for an agent or an agency. Obviously, services is a big part of it. Right? Um, professionalism, being kind, uh, being informative, um, relating with that individual. So, so the service aspect of, of, you know, you want to make sure that whoever you come to or whoever you seek out, they’re going to be responsive, they’re going to know what they’re talking about. They’re going to be able to help you. Um, obviously cost to value when it comes to the numbers. Right? Because at the end of the day, you know, we can talk about insurance all day long, but how does this really affect us? Well, it affects our hard earned money for everybody. Right. And we all have to have it in certain ways. So, um, that’s generally a motivating factor for most people. Um, service is another motivating factor for most people. Uh, and then claims help and then making sure that when there is a potential claim or when they have questions about that claim or when they think they may need to file a claim, you know, we’re not just being their agents, but we’re really acting as advocates and advisors, even if you will.

Tim Rogers: [00:22:33] And I know that’s a word that people may kind of laugh or smile at, but in all reality, a lot of our clients look at us as their insurance advisors, more so than just their insurance agents. Right? Because we have to understand how to navigate the world of insurance. And most insurance agents, if not all, were all middlemen, right? You know, you have the insurance company on one side, and then you have the consumer on the other side, and we’re right in the middle. So we have, in my opinion, an obligation just as important to the consumer as we do the company. Uh, and kind of bridging that in the middle and making sure that there’s fluid converse, you know, fluid, a fluid relationship and fluid conversation on both sides to where when there is an issue or there is a problem, we’re mitigating that pretty quickly. We’re getting in front of that pretty quickly. And then we’re also making sure that we can be there for the individual.

Brian Pruett: [00:23:21] Uh, you talked a little bit about this earlier, but being an independent, you guys like brokers, right? So you can work with all different agencies. Um, what kind of an advantage, other than the fact that you’ve got the multiple agencies to look at? What other advantages that working with a broker like yourself, whereas, you know, you still might be going with a named right big named agency. And so then, well, then why would I work with you if I could just go to them?

Tim Rogers: [00:23:45] I think there’s pros and cons to both. Um, and I’ll be real brief with my answer. But, you know, how I got into the industry was was working for a direct all state agency. So I was, you know, agents call that the captive or direct side of the insurance world where you just represent one provider and you’re, you know, you’re bound to the rules of that one company. Uh, the benefit of being independent is you get options in consideration for multiple providers, right? So and you pass that on to the individual. So when you only represent one company, you can only represent one company. Right. So if that one company is astronomically high on their rates and their guidelines are strict and tight, and you know, you can only quote X amount of people that kind of fit the box, right? That’s a disservice to someone that may not fit in that category. Right. When you’re independent, you learn and you develop what kind of works best for certain individuals, and you’re giving them options, and it puts more of the experience on them in terms of the buying power, if you will. Uh, but also understanding that they’ve got choices. Right. And then it’s our responsibility as the agent to to articulate and be competent on what we’re providing to them and making sure that they can make the best informed decision. And that’s really what it’s all about for us. We want to give you the best. We want to give you the best knowledge, the best information, so you can make the best decision for yourself on where you’re going to place your coverage.

Madge Lovingood: [00:25:06] Okay. Can I ask a question? Because Tim came from a captive and he’s new to us. Would you ever go back?

Tim Rogers: [00:25:12] Absolutely not. Uh, nothing against the captive world of insurance and direct companies. Uh, again, there’s pros and cons to both. I think the pros and the positive things that come out of being in the independent market far outweigh any of the negative things that can come from this. I’ll never go back. Uh, I love the fact that we have the ability to offer so many different solutions. Um, and it just, it makes it makes the day to day better. Also, I feel like there’s, there’s, you know, like, like was mentioned before. I mean, with what we’re seeing now in the industry over the last 3 or 4 years, I mean, every day is different, right? Um, and, and sometimes you do feel like you’re hearing something bad or good every single day that’s going on in the industry. Right? Uh, and how it affects people. So, um, independents better, in my opinion. I think most people in the independent side would say the same thing. Uh, but then again, if you spoke with ten agents that were captive, they’d probably tell you that captive is better. So you’re going to hear it’s going to vary. Right. But I like giving options to our people.

Brian Pruett: [00:26:13] So talk about some of those. Uh, I’m actually with a with a broker myself, and I’ve been with him for quite a while. And he’s very proactive to like, you guys are, you know, customers and clients and matter of fact, I mean, uh, he, uh, my insurance was going up. And before I could get the phone in my hand, he called me to let me know we’re switching. So we.

Madge Lovingood: [00:26:32] Tried to do that.

Brian Pruett: [00:26:33] Too. Right. So. And that’s awesome. That’s what I appreciate about, you know, folks like that for you and other, uh, brokers. But what about these insurance agents that, uh, agencies that that you guys have as options that people may not have heard of? What kind of things are hurdles with that trying to see, you know, well, I don’t want to go with them because I’ve never heard of them.

Madge Lovingood: [00:26:50] That’s probably the biggest hurdle that we have as independent agents, because some of our carriers don’t advertise like we do represent progressive. They advertise on the TV. Everybody knows flow, right? And, um, we also represent Safeco. Some people have heard of that. Some people haven’t. Um, people have heard of travelers again, they advertise on TV, but Main Street America, um, we have uh, Grange, Donegal, Southern Trust. These are more regional carriers and they don’t advertise. Um, that also helps control their cost too.

Brian Pruett: [00:27:19] Because some point I never thought of that. Yeah.

Madge Lovingood: [00:27:21] Some of these regional carriers are very inexpensive because they are regional. So they price their products for the region that they’re in and they don’t advertise. They advertise to us the independent agents and their A-rated carriers. So not nonstandard companies, but these companies just don’t advertise as much as some of the bigger names.

Brian Pruett: [00:27:37] Okay.

Tim Rogers: [00:27:38] And I like to add something real quick, real quick to that. So Matt is absolutely correct. And for any of you guys that are listening, most people know who the big companies are. All state farmers, state farm, uh, you know, Liberty Mutual, uh, nationwide.

Madge Lovingood: [00:27:52] Stop giving them advertising.

Tim Rogers: [00:27:54] Sorry, we’re not giving them. But the point that I’m trying to make is there’s some really cool insurance companies out there that, like, no one’s ever even heard of. I mean, really, there’s some really cool companies out there that do some really neat things and that really pride themselves in the way that they take care of their people.

Brian Pruett: [00:28:10] Can you give an example?

Tim Rogers: [00:28:12] Uh, absolutely.

Madge Lovingood: [00:28:14] Donegal.

Tim Rogers: [00:28:14] Donegal is a great company.

Madge Lovingood: [00:28:16] Donegal is a great company and they give back to the community as well. Um, they have given us money for advertising and for some of the charitable events that we’ve done as well. Awesome. Yeah. So they do give back. Southern trust does something every year and it’s with their staff. I think their staff goes out and volunteers in the community there in Macon, Georgia. And Grange also gives back to certain charities. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but these local carers, and they don’t get a lot of, um.

Tim Rogers: [00:28:42] Uh, press if you press notoriety. Yeah.

Madge Lovingood: [00:28:44] They don’t get a lot of notoriety for it, but they do give back.

Brian Pruett: [00:28:47] That’s awesome. All right, so we’ve heard you talk to him, but we’re going to get to know you just a little bit. So Tim Rogers right. Byrd Insurance agency welcome this morning. Welcome.

Tim Rogers: [00:28:56] Good morning.

Brian Pruett: [00:28:56] Happy Friday. Mr. Rogers is in the neighborhood.

Tim Rogers: [00:29:00] That’s right. He’s in the neighborhood.

Brian Pruett: [00:29:01] But you don’t have your sweater on. I’m disappointed.

Tim Rogers: [00:29:03] No. Not today. No. Uh, yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.

Brian Pruett: [00:29:06] So just a little bit of background, if you don’t mind. Yeah.

Tim Rogers: [00:29:10] Here’s here’s my background. I’m, uh, Tim Rogers full name is Timothy Rogers. I actually grew up here in Georgia, but I’m originally from Texas, so I am a Texas guy. Was, uh, born in Dallas, Texas. Uh, but I’ve spent the majority of my life here in Georgia. I grew up in Paulding County, uh, Hiram, Georgia, back when Hiram used to be considered, you know, rural and country. And now it’s completely suburban and almost metro.

Brian Pruett: [00:29:32] But, um, and everybody knew Travis Tritt.

Tim Rogers: [00:29:34] That’s right. Everybody knew Travis Tripp out there. Yeah. I think he actually still has.

Brian Pruett: [00:29:38] Yeah, he’s still there.

Tim Rogers: [00:29:38] Yeah, he still has a mansion out there.

Madge Lovingood: [00:29:40] He does. I live down the street from him. I used to live right down the.

Madge Lovingood: [00:29:42] Street from him. Yeah.

Tim Rogers: [00:29:43] Nice. Very, very nice. But, uh. Yeah, I grew up there, went to, you know, high school, middle school, elementary out there. Didn’t go to college. Coming out of high school, I thought I wanted, uh, I was 18 coming out of high school thinking that, uh, I had different aspirations to do different things. So I kind of went into the workforce. Um, but I love people. I’m very energetic. People always told me growing up I should get into sales, uh, some form of sales. Some part of sales. Took me a while to kind of finally believe that within myself. But I got into the insurance industry, uh, back in 2019. Um, I am married. I’ve got two kids, I’ve got a two year old, uh, two years and four months. And man, that’s a wild and fun time keeping you.

Brian Pruett: [00:30:25] Busy, running around.

Tim Rogers: [00:30:26] Always keeping me busy. And I’m also a step dad to an 11 year old. And he’s such a great kid. And I’ve been married to my wife for close to two years. And, you know, we we live here in canton. We love the community. Canton has changed so much over the years, just like Woodstock. And, uh, we love to see all the positive growth. Um, I’m very much an outdoorsman and a sportsman kind of guy. I love, love being active, love being out in nature, exercising, working out. Uh, sometimes you’ll see me on the court playing basketball, you know, things. Things of that nature. Uh, do do my, do my best to to be active and find ways to do that within the family. But yeah, that’s a little bit about me.

Brian Pruett: [00:31:02] So, uh, again, you’re very active in networking. I met you at the NBA a few years ago. You just talked about the Canton Business Club a while ago. So share some positive, uh, experiences you’ve had with networking.

Tim Rogers: [00:31:12] I think networking is great. And I’m a big believer in having and creating and finding balance, right, with whatever you do when it comes to your business. So for me, networking is a big part of that. Uh, I do believe you can network too much. Oh, yes. And I do believe you can network too little, right? If you network too much, how are you focusing on yourself and making money and and doing what’s important to you, but also with your network? Too little. How are you getting yourself out there? Creating relationships? Uh, meeting people? Um, matches match was absolutely correct. I mean, we serve the community, right? We benefit off of that. So it’s only right that we continue to pour our time and our effort and our and our dollars back into the community, uh, the wonderful communities that we serve. Um, what I love about different networking groups, uh, they’re not all the same. You get different personalities, different people that come from different walks of life. Uh, and then there’s different industries that are represented in different groups. So I do my best not to, um, be biased towards certain groups and to always be open to meeting new people, learning about people. But most important, making it personal, making it personal with that individual. I think if we can do that better, we’ll see such a positive increase in, in relationships, growing with, with others. Right.

Brian Pruett: [00:32:29] So you talked a little bit just about it being part of the community. But why is it important for you personally to be a part of the community.

Tim Rogers: [00:32:35] Important for me to be a part of the community? I’m passionate about that. I, you know, and I’ve I’m a faithful kind of man. I’m a spiritual kind of man. So I think that speaks to what I believe spiritually and faithfully as well. Um, so, yeah, it’s important to me. It’s important to my family. Plus, I love I love making people smile and I love, I love providing good energy to people as well.

Brian Pruett: [00:32:56] Awesome, awesome. Well, imagine Tim, thanks for sharing a little bit of your stories. Don’t go anywhere because we’re not done with you yet, but we’re going to move over to Mr. Neal Murphy. GrassRoots Turf. Neal, thanks for being here this morning.

Neal Murphy: [00:33:08] I appreciate you having me.

Brian Pruett: [00:33:09] So, uh, Neal is another one that gives back to the community you jumped aboard this year and, uh, as well as one of my sponsors for trivia, so I appreciate that. So you’re welcome. And, uh, you do a lot within the Bartow County area. Um, you have taken over a role for, uh, co-host as the Cartersville Business Club. Um, so if you don’t mind, just share a little bit about your background and we’ll talk about grass roots.

Neal Murphy: [00:33:32] All right. So I’m, uh, born and bred in New England, actually in Boston. So my first 30 years there almost in, I think the same house the whole time, um, you know, grade school I went to. A Boston College high school in Dorchester. And then I went to college. Stonehill College in Northeastern, myself and all my my sister and all my brothers, we all went there. Um, and then I got married at 98. Sorry. I got married in 96. And then we moved down to Charlotte in 98 for a bed. The weather. Boston’s a great place to grow up as a kid, but when you get as an adult, the snow can really get on you. It gets a little more difficult. So we moved down to Charlotte and, uh, 98, and then I worked for a law firm down there. But I’m a technology guy by trade. I’m not a lawyer. Um, and then I in 2004, we kept coming down to Atlanta because the, the law firm that I worked for is based down here and actually had one of my brothers actually lives in Woodstock and has been down here since 93. Okay. Um, so I have two kids. Both were born in Charlotte, so I have a 24 year old son, um, who graduated from UGA just a few years ago and now works for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Atlanta. And then I have a 22 year old daughter who went to Kennesaw. I know you’re an owl. Yes. And, um, and she’s now the manager of the Palmetto Moon here in canton. But she’s like a also an entrepreneur as well. She’s run a few of our own kind of small businesses, which is pretty fun, um, and exciting. I am divorced, I got divorced a few years ago, but my ex-wife and I get along great. She lives down in Dallas with her parents, and I’m obviously now over in, um, Cartersville, and, um, and everything’s going pretty great.

Brian Pruett: [00:34:57] Well, you talked about the Boston, and it was funny because, you know, last week was extremely cold. Very. And you and I got there early. I always get there early, set up chairs for the CBC. And you said, this is why I got away from Boston. Exactly. I thought you brought it with you, but I came down.

Neal Murphy: [00:35:11] Here to get away from it. So.

Brian Pruett: [00:35:13] So we talked about it because like I said, you’re very active. You you’re also, uh, now a chamber ambassador. I am for the actually this.

Neal Murphy: [00:35:20] Year, especially this.

Brian Pruett: [00:35:21] Year. Yeah. Um, and you do a lot of things. I said, like I said, the co-host for the CBC. So why is it important for you to be part of the community?

Neal Murphy: [00:35:28] So my new like a franchise owner the last four years with grass roots. Right. And so it’s the first time I’ve actually been a business owner before. And so many people helped me out, especially those first couple of years, to kind of get going because everything was so new to me. I was in a, you know, new type of business environment. I was in a new, you know, city working with different people. And, you know, I just needed a lot of help in, you know, the chamber was great. Cartersville Business Club was great. And so, you know, I get to the point where, you know, I kind of built up the business big enough that I could then afford the time to do so. That first year or so, I was out in the field spraying lawns, you know, with my technician, you know, every day, all day and then trying to kind of work at night to kind of keep the business going. This past year, 2023 was probably the first year that I actually had time to kind of get back out there and give back, because now I had two technicians, and then I have a part time administrative assistant, so she could do a lot of the office stuff for me.

Neal Murphy: [00:36:17] And so I was able to, you know, participate a lot more in the business club. Right. You saw me there almost every week. Um, I go to a lot of, uh, like, chamber events. I go to a lot of different events around town when I can, even though I’m a chamber ambassador. This year, officially, I went to a lot of ribbon cuttings last year, as many as I could. I tried to, um, in Facebook this past year, just, you know, post about a lot of that, you know, not just about, you know, my business. Obviously, I’m trying to, you know, you know, sell my services as well, but I’m trying to, you know, help others who have helped me. So I try to post about their businesses, maybe people who are providing me services, you know, want to give them a shout out because I want their business to be successful as well. And I really enjoy doing that. Right.

Brian Pruett: [00:36:54] Well, that’s the thing when we don’t talk about that, but being very getting active when you’re networking, don’t just come, you got to get active. Right. And so I think we’ve all done that. But you’ve really done that this year too. So um, so you also do jujitsu.

Neal Murphy: [00:37:08] I do. I do.

Brian Pruett: [00:37:10] Do that keep you in shape or.

Neal Murphy: [00:37:11] I do.

Neal Murphy: [00:37:12] So I did taekwondo over ten years ago in my ex-wife. And I did that because our daughter was doing it. And so instead of watching the class, I said, hey, why don’t you guys do it too? So we did that. That was a lot of fun. So my wife and I, my ex-wife and I and our daughter are both black belts, all black belts in taekwondo. That’s cool. But that was over ten years ago. And so as I came to, uh, working with grassroots, I probably lost 30 pounds in my first year or so because I was spraying lawns. It’s a lot of physical activity, which felt great. It was awesome eating a lot better. Um, but then as I had a few people working with me, I was in the office more and I was like, uh oh, you know what I mean? Like the weight was starting to come back on. I wasn’t feeling as good, so I tried to look for, I’m not going to go to a gym. I’ll sign up for a gym, but I won’t go. I know I won’t, right, but I love we did a little bit of jujitsu when I was doing taekwondo, and so I said, oh, I wonder if there is some facilities around here? And I did find one.

Neal Murphy: [00:37:57] There were several in the Cartersville area, but I found one up on Main Street that I joined, uh, last year, a year ago February. Um, great bunch of people, you know, was there kind of several times a week. They unfortunately had to close in December of this year. Um, I think the, you know, the lease got raised, but they opened up a new facility in Acworth, which is probably twice the size. And it’s great down there. I just couldn’t afford the time to kind of drive down there, just, you know, too far several times a week. Um, so I found, uh, another place, Team Octopus, which I just joined last week. Right. So I’m going to go and kind of 2 to 3 times a week, and I’m, I’m kind of feeling good again. I’m a little I’m actually sore right now because of it. But uh, after a few weeks, I’ll be I’ll be back in it again.

Brian Pruett: [00:38:34] Can you explain the difference between that and taekwondo?

Neal Murphy: [00:38:36] So taekwondo is more like striking kind of on your feet, whereas jujitsu, you go into the ground and you’re kind of wrestling. And so I like jujitsu better. One is it really is a better workout, um, you know, physically. But two, if you ever get in any type of, you know, altercation, hopefully you don’t. At some point you go into the ground and once you’re on the ground, you’re not getting back up again. So you got to know how to, you know, defend yourself and kind of deal with things. So. Right. And I love it. That’s a lot of fun. And I met some great people.

Brian Pruett: [00:39:02] There you go. Yeah. Well we we talked about it. So share I know you’ve got several stories, but share a positive story of the networking you’ve done. All right.

Neal Murphy: [00:39:09] So I’ll give you it really surprised me. So Brian and I know Ann say she’s a brand photographer. And so, you know these networking groups are great. But we you know, people try to have one on ones outside of that. So Ann and I had a one on one because I was interested in doing some brand photography. So she and I met at a coffee shop and I’m coming. You know, I’ve got notes and I’ve got all these questions. And I know she had a tight schedule that day. You know, we were meeting at ten. She had a meeting at 11. I said, okay, and I’m ready to dive right in. We probably spent the first half an hour just talking about like personally each other, and I wasn’t ready for that. But Ann started that way and I’m like, I’m looking at my watch like, are we ever going to talk about like, you know, you know, the business? And I was and then I realized she had done that on purpose to kind of like build our relationship together, which, you know, made our business relationship that much better. And then I, you know, realized and I had never done that, like in in Boston, we kind of didn’t one on one that way. It was just, yeah, you’re friends, but you kind of talk about business here. It was like totally different. It was really weird. And so ever since then, every one on one I’ve had, you know, I’ve, I’ve approached it that way and others have as well. And I’ve just established some really great relationships with some awesome people. And that’s turned into, you know, not only business relationships, but really great friendships.

Brian Pruett: [00:40:16] Well, and we, uh, we do a thing with the Cardinal Business Club, uh, every so often, the reciprocity ring. The first time we did it, you asked for some stuff and you walked away with, well, how many referrals?

Neal Murphy: [00:40:26] Like like three, like I. Um, I was using an accountant out of Houston, and I’m trying to bring things more local. Right. So it’s looking for a local accountant. So our friend Jay recommended someone right away. And so now I’ve since hired that person. It’s working great. I mean, you know, my accountant, I’m trying to work with more local social media people, local SEO people, you know, all the digital kind of marketing things I’ve been doing. And it’s been great. It’s been awesome. Really much better relationships.

Brian Pruett: [00:40:50] And I think that’s cool because, you know, a lot of people, again, they come in and they want to think about themselves and sell, sell, sell. Whereas, you know, if you’re there to help from other people and somebody asks for something, I mean, I, you know, when you ask for I sent you a ton of people, right? Right. So it’s Bryan.

Neal Murphy: [00:41:04] Knows a lot of people.

Brian Pruett: [00:41:06] Um, so I again, we talked about you being involved in our community, but why is it important to be part of the community?

Neal Murphy: [00:41:12] I just I mean, we talk a lot about, like, giving back. But again, you know, so many people helped me. You know, when I first started out a few years ago as a business owner, you know, I was just extremely grateful because you could not do it on your own. You just can’t. You think you can. You can’t. And, you know, as I got to the point where I now had time to do that for others, I started doing more of that, either hiring people to provide services for me or just, you know, kind of like what you do, Bryan, you know, providing people referrals or recommendations or directing people over to someone, you know, for service. Um, it’s just, you know, we talk about kind of collaboration right over competition. Right? We’re trying to like, collaborate with each other, help each other both personally and professionally. So it just just it’s a great feeling doing so.

Brian Pruett: [00:41:54] And I love the collaboration over competition because there’s multiple insurance agencies, there’s multiple mortgage people, real estate. But not everybody does the same thing. Right. And there’s plenty of business out there for everybody. Um, and of course there’s people that, you know, like and trust and people that you don’t know, like and trust. So, yeah, uh, uh, you want to share a little bit about the CBC when we meet and all that good stuff.

Neal Murphy: [00:42:15] So the Cartersville Business Club, as far as I know, has been in place about two, two and a half years, almost three years. There’s some history kind of prior to that. And I think, um, so we meet every Wednesday at 8:00 at the Unity Grounds coffee shop, um, in right outside of downtown, uh, Cartersville. Um, so we network from like 8 to 830 and then from 830 to 930, we have a more quote unquote, kind of formal meeting, you know, going around the room, people can kind of share, um, information about the businesses. We do a lot of shout outs. We have some special education, um, sessions, uh, we have some kind of member profiles. People will talk more about their business in more detail or maybe something, you know, personal about them, which has also been helpful. And we get a good crowd about, you know, 30 to 40 people, even when, you know, that day it was ten degrees. 12 degrees. I was surprised I was too. We got a full crowd there.

Brian Pruett: [00:43:01] And ever so often you’ll have three people give dad jokes.

Speaker5: [00:43:04] So I need to go there.

Brian Pruett: [00:43:07] Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Do you?

Neal Murphy: [00:43:08] Should come. Everybody is welcome. Doesn’t cost you anything.

Brian Pruett: [00:43:10] That’s right. Um. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about grassroots. All right. Uh, as you mentioned, it’s a franchise. It is. So first of all, how did you decide to go from working in a law firm, being in tech world and then getting into the grassroots? So, I mean.

Neal Murphy: [00:43:25] You know, a little over 30 years of, you know, going into an office every day, you know, the, you know, the the commute, the, you know, office politics, that you’ve just seen the same people every day. I just I’m just good. And you and you put on the weight a little bit, right? I call it The Office, but you definitely do. And it’s time consuming. Like I’d be leaving, you know, my house six in the morning. I might not get back until seven at night because of, uh, you know, the commute and traffic and stuff like that. Um, and so, and I always wanted to, you know, at some point kind of kind of own and run my own business, you know, but as you know, I was up towards 50. I’m like, well, am I going to start something from scratch? What can I do? And someone said, oh, why don’t you, um, why don’t you consider franchising? I’m like, oh, franchising. What do you think about you think about food, right? You know, I don’t want to on a subway. That’s not what I want to do. They’re like, no, no, no. So I went to a, um, uh, a franchise expo. Um, here in Atlanta, I met Josh wise from grassroots, who I kind of knew, but not on.

Neal Murphy: [00:44:15] I wasn’t friends with him, but I knew about him. He had just started to franchise. He was at the end of 2019. Um, so long story short, I’m franchisee number four, and there are now 12 of us over the last, you know, 4 or 5 years. And we’re adding a few more kind of every year. So our corporate office or that main office is located down in Acworth, which is only about 11, 12 miles from my kind of base of operations in Cartersville. Um, but again, we have so 12 different franchise owners. Most are in Georgia, but we cover three other. They’re in three other states, uh, North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and they’ll soon be one in, uh, Alabama. And a lot of us own multiple territories. So I own two, which is, I call it Grassroots North Georgia. But it’s that whole kind of Cartersville, Rome, Calhoun area and then all the way over, kind of this way towards ball ground Jasper, all the way over to Dawsonville and Dahlonega. So, okay, a good physical right territory. But I’m, you know, I’m only going about, you know, 20, 30 miles right now. But the idea is to scale over.

Brian Pruett: [00:45:10] Time, so. Sure, sure. Exactly what you guys do.

Neal Murphy: [00:45:12] So we it’s tough. So we don’t cut grass and we don’t install it. Right. So I’m not a landscaper. I’m not a grass cutter. So we’re the ones who spray the lawns for, you know, he likes the weeds. You know, green green grass and no weeds. That’s kind of what I say. Right? So we’re the ones that kind of like a true green. That’s kind of. A big company that everybody knows about, but we’re more kind of local and I think we provide better quality. Um, but the idea is, you know, keep their grass green, kind of keep the weeds out. You know, if there are issues like insects, fungus, things like that. You know, those are, you know, special circumstances and we’ll address those as well.

Brian Pruett: [00:45:43] So I’ve got a few questions on that. So you shared something not too long ago at CBC that I even thought about, about when the leaves were falling. Right. Talk about about that because I just assumed you just leave and go, or do you rake them up or whatever? But why is it important?

Neal Murphy: [00:45:57] What a lot of people will do is they’ll let all the leaves fall and then they’ll rake them. They might not even rake them. Once they finish falling, they wait until the end of the season, then rake them. And that’s a really bad right? So even though especially warm season grasses will go dormant, right? They’ll start to turn brown and people are like, oh well, I don’t need to worry about it. That’s not true, right? Grass still needs sunlight and it still needs water. And if you have all those leaves or like pine needles, things like that, that doesn’t allow the sunlight to get in there, and it doesn’t allow water to kind of permeate and distribute kind of properly. So it really is. And you know, you want your grass to look good, but so you want to get that all off the grass that sticks the branches. Um, get as much of that off the lawn as you can, and your grass will be a lot healthier come spring time.

Brian Pruett: [00:46:36] When you guys spray. Are you is there certain kinds of spray that you use? Things of that nature.

Neal Murphy: [00:46:42] So lots of different types of chemicals, right. So certain chemicals you can use on certain grasses and not others, certain you can only use in certain amounts, either in a given year or in a given application. Um, in certain products you can combine together, certain ones you can’t. So you got to be kind of kind of knowledgeable about all those things. So we’re mixing chemicals in the trucks every day depending on what our applications are. Kind of like that day and that week, all that’s um, you know, recorded, you know, I track all that, um, you know, we spray so many gallons a minute per kind of 1000ft. And it kind of gives us an idea as to how much chemicals we need to cover a particular property based on the size. And so, yeah, there’s just there’s a lot of math, a lot of math that goes on.

Brian Pruett: [00:47:23] In a day. Not all grass is the same either, right? Correct. Correct. So how do you figure out what to use for what grass.

Neal Murphy: [00:47:28] So most of the grass that people are aware of, the stuff that turns brown in the wintertime. That’s considered the warm season grass around here it’s mostly either Bermuda or Zoysia. There is some centipede here though. We don’t like to see it around here. It really belongs more, you know, middle Georgia down in Louisiana where it’s more kind of moist. It thrives a lot better down here. So, um, so we do our best with, with centipede and that Saint Augustine up here. Fescue is the other one. So fescue is the grass that’s quote unquote green all year long. The problem is the temperatures in North Georgia are really not conducive for it. So you really struggle, especially during the summertime, to keep your fescue grass green and even alive, um, just because of the sun and the heat. So tends to do better as you get more towards the Carolinas, or if you have an area that’s very shaded, you know, wooded areas, shaded backyard, things like that, the fescue will do a lot better. The fescue grass is also well, people talk about overseeing. So you don’t oversee the warm season grass. It grows in addition to vertically. It grows horizontally so it can fill itself in. And there are ways to promote that. Fescue grass doesn’t work that way, right? Every seed creates a clump. Bunch of clumps together. Create a lawn. Once you lose a clump of fescue, it’s gone. And not not to be, you know, recovered unless you reseed in that something you do every fall. So when people talk about overseeding, they’re really talking about fescue, or they should be talking about fescue. And then that’s it’s, you know, so it’s growing seasons like fall through spring and then you’re trying to maintain it in the summer. Warm season grasses are the opposite growing season spring through fall. And then it goes dormant in the winter. So it’s fairly easy to maintain as long as you keep the the leaves and the sticks off.

Brian Pruett: [00:48:57] What about because I know some of our neighbors, they put like turf down. You know, I’ve seen come in with just the squares of grass and they put them. Oh some sod. There you go.

Neal Murphy: [00:49:06] Yeah. So even though like, you know, warm season grasses can fill in, but if you have like a, you know, a mass, it’s I mean it’ll fill in over time, right. Small areas, you know, four feet or less kind of in diameter. You could probably fill that in over a season. But when you have like a whole front yard, you need to redo, then obviously you bring in, you know, pallets of sod that you get at a sod farm, which is grass that’s already been grown, cut up in squares or, you know, rectangles. And then you kind of lay that all down. Eventually that kind of grows together and then you have a nice lawn. So that’s just a quick way to do it. But it also is expensive, man.

Brian Pruett: [00:49:38] You just maintain that the same way. Like you’re like you’re talking about with the spraying. Yeah.

Neal Murphy: [00:49:41] Yeah. I mean once it’s, you know, once it’s fully rooted. So once it’s established then you would treat it just like any other lawn.

Brian Pruett: [00:49:46] Okay. Yep. Um, what about I know, like, my mom’s backyard is pretty much just, um. It’s not really. It’s not mold. What am I what’s the word I’m looking for? Moss. Moss? Yep. Uh, mold. Moss is all the same thing, right? Tomato, tomato. Uh, do you guys have anything for moss? So.

Neal Murphy: [00:50:01] Yes, but moss is environmental, and I try to explain that to people. So Moss is there for a reason. It’s usually too much water, not enough sun or just the soil is not great, probably too compacted. So even though they make products that can kind of get rid of moss, it’s only temporary. The moss is always going to come back unless something in the environment is changed. Unless you bring in some more sunlight, you redirect some water away. Or perhaps you can, you know, soil amendments or bring in some some better soil to allow. The grass to grow better. So we get that question a lot. And I you know, we have products like mosques. There are some products that can kind of quote unquote, get rid of the mosques, rid of the mosque. But it’s only temporary. It’s coming back because of the environment. So, right. I just say my my terms is embrace it. Right. If because people some people like love their trees, you can I mean there is some amazing things people can do with moss to make it look really, you know, you know, pretty they, um, you put some kind of benches around it. Some people have built little like, um, kind of like put a dry creek bed between it, put a little bridge over it. I mean, some amazing. I’ve got some pictures of some of the things our customers have done with their kind of moss areas that look beautiful.

Brian Pruett: [00:51:03] Well, um, so I just had a question and it went on my head. Hang on. Um, well, uh, this is what I was going to ask. Kind of the same thing when you’re looking for agent, when you’re looking for a service like yours, there’s again, multiple services out there. What’s the best way to go about choosing the right one?

Neal Murphy: [00:51:21] I mean, it depends on what’s important to you. Obviously, you know, price is important. You know what you want your grass to look like, what type of communication you do or don’t want with a service provider. You know, I mean, I’m not the I always say I’m not the cheapest out there, but I want to be the best, right? So I want to provide a good, you know, quality service. I want to be able to communicate with customers. I want to do it at a reasonable price. Um, if there are issues come up. I want to be able to work with the homeowner to kind of work through some of those. So a lot of homeowners that maybe switch from some of the larger companies, it’s always the same thing, right? You know, different technician every time. They don’t come when they say they were going to, they’re not really communicating with me. They charge me for something I didn’t ask for. Um, I’ve been, you know, I’m waiting for a supervisor to come out and they still haven’t come, you know, things like that. And so, you know, I’m very aware of that. And I’m again, we’re small enough and local enough that we can address those. And I kind of want to stay that way, you know what I mean? Like. Right. I think when you get too big, it, you know, those things start to come into play. So you’ve got to be you got to be careful.

Brian Pruett: [00:52:19] I’ll throw this into when you talked about the price, uh, you know, even if it may not be the most expensive or the least expensive, it all comes to your relationship too, right? If you can’t trust them. So I have a question. Uh, you mentioned the certain areas that you service. You can’t really go to other areas if there’s already somebody in those areas. Right. But what if what if the person wants you specifically? How do you handle that?

Neal Murphy: [00:52:44] So, you know, I’m you know, I am bound by contract so I can our territories are by zip code. And I’ve been asked this many times. One is you, Brian. Right. So and I’m kind of Cartersville is kind of like the a southern side of where my territory is. I do go into Emerson, but then that’s as far as I go. In fact, I have to cut through Canton on Highway 20 to get over to battleground. And there are two neighborhoods I passed by all the time, but I can’t service those because those are technically a canton address. Those are canton zip code. Um, so yeah, I don’t want to be, you know, I don’t want to be. I don’t want to say I want to be caught in those zip codes. I would never do that. But the same reason if I saw a grassroots truck that wasn’t mine in one of my zip codes areas, I’d. I’d kind of have an issue with that, right? I mean, right, why would they be doing that and vice versa. And it comes up all the time. So, um, you know, I try to work with whatever franchise owner or the corporate office kind of owns that area to say, hey, this is a good customer of mine. It’s their son who has a place down here, you know, make sure you take good care of him. I want you to know these two guys are kind of related, and, you know, they’d like me to go down there, I can’t, so. Do the best you can to to do what I do.

Brian Pruett: [00:53:47] And is that typical with with basically like kind of all franchises I’m guessing.

Neal Murphy: [00:53:51] Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, here in this area, a lot of our franchisees butt up against each other, right? So 4 or 5 of us, maybe six of us brought up against each other. But, you know, the guy in Charlotte, North Carolina, it’s just him. So he doesn’t have to, you know, any other grassroots franchise there yet? Um, the guys in Louisiana by Baton Rouge, they’re the only ones, the guy in Jackson, Mississippi, the only one. But his you know, as we have more franchisees in those areas, you know, that that issue will come up. And the idea is, again, we’re collaboration too. We’re franchise. We’re trying to help each other. We’re not trying to compete against each other, you know, because if you know, if if they go and do a great job, that helps out me, and if I do a great job that helps out them, especially if we’re geographically close together.

Brian Pruett: [00:54:31] Right. Um, all right. So you’ve already given the tidbit about the leaves. Is there any other tidbits people for their lawns? Because I know when I was growing up, I never we never I never saw trucks like yours going around spraying and stuff like that. So I’m guessing it might be a fairly new type of industry, but what kind of, uh, other tidbits can you share?

Neal Murphy: [00:54:48] So aside from keeping things off the lawn keep, especially during the growing season, keep the grass cut on a regular basis. Right. So one of the reasons, you know, weeds, even if you’re having sprayed it, you know, even the weeds will pop is if you give them time to do so. So if you’re cutting your grass on a regular basis in warm season grasses once a week, I would say minimum. I do my my office property. I’m doing it every four days. I’m not suggesting a homeowner do that, but at least every week. But some of my customers are like, oh, I do it every two weeks, or I do it every week and a half. It really is too long because Bermuda grows really quick. And so you give the ability for especially weeds that you might not see yet to kind of pop up. Um, and by the time a week and a half, two weeks comes along, then we’re, you know, now we’re chasing it, you know what I mean? And now it looks kind of worse than it probably would have otherwise. So on a regular basis.

Brian Pruett: [00:55:34] Is is there a certain like, how do you determine how low or how high you cut your.

Neal Murphy: [00:55:37] Grass. So Bermuda grass, ideal inch to an inch and a half. Some people like to go higher. Some people go lower with like a real mower. Get it like carpet. You can do that too. Um, a lot of it depends on just the contour of the property. Right. So if you don’t want to run a mower and you have like a little rut and all of a sudden it just like grinds everything, you got to kind of factor that in. So you don’t want to be, you don’t want, you know, bare dirt anywhere, right? As long as you have grass, that’s good. But inch to an inch and a half for Bermuda, a little bit higher for zoysia, maybe close to an inch and a half to two and then fescue a little bit higher. 3 to 3 to four inches. Okay.

Brian Pruett: [00:56:09] Yep. Two other questions on this. So one uh, I know my mom’s yard has the little seedlings and the little pine trees that come up, right. Yep. Do you guys have stuff that takes care of that as well.

Neal Murphy: [00:56:19] So no. And there actually isn’t a product. So those, uh, the seedlings from like a pine tree in the area. So the best thing for those is cut them because once that’s one, if you actually cut it, you’re going to damage it. And within, um, a few weeks they’ll actually all die. So just mow them, okay. And if you could mow them up, like mow them and bag them. Right. Um, that would be better. But yeah, there isn’t really a it’s a, it’s a tree is what it is. Right. So just like any other, you know, sapling that might be growing if you just if you just kind of cut that, um, you’ll damage it and then eventually it’ll die.

Brian Pruett: [00:56:46] Okay. And then what about those weeds that always look so cute and pretty? Like they’re very like flowers, but they’re really weeds, right? Like dandelions, things like that.

Neal Murphy: [00:56:54] I mean, you should. I mean, if you’re getting your lawn treated, you should never see a dandelion. Those are the easiest ones. So the the weeds that are most difficult to eliminate are some of the grass weeds. Right. Dallas grass a lot of people know about that. That’s, you know, just very aggressive. Usually takes seasons to get rid of. You can actually go in and hit it with a roundup to really kind of nuke it and get it out of there. But then you’ll you’ll nuke everything around it for a while. Um, Dallas grass, not such a big one that pops up. Um, these are things that don’t have pre-emergent, right? So it’s always you have to see it first before you address it. So those are kind of looks like fescue but little kind of thin blades of grass. Um, we do have products for that. And um oh brooms. Broom sedge is the other one. And it does. It looks like a broom. And that’s also, you know, can be pretty aggressive and aggressive weed. That’s tough to address. But there are products for that. You just got to hit it hard and hit it off. Right.

Brian Pruett: [00:57:43] Yeah. So I’m just curious because I you know like I said, dandelions, they look very pretty and cute. How do they damage the yard. I mean, do they are they doing any damage for your grass or something? You just.

Neal Murphy: [00:57:53] I mean, so when weed starts to grow, what they do is they, you know, they take the area that the grass should be. So it actually kind of like, you know, it can damage like turf roots and kind of like kind of quote unquote, move the grass out of the way. So once you get rid of the weed, now you have a little kind of bare spot again. And if you have and I someone mentioned crabgrass, I heard you guys whispering crabgrass. It’s true. If, you know, crabgrass is very aggressive. And if that you know, I’ve had lawns crabgrass has taken over to most of the lawn. Well, once you get rid of it what do you have left? I mean it’s, it’s dirt. So the quicker you can stay on top of that, um, those types of weeds, the better because some of them can grow quite quickly.

Brian Pruett: [00:58:27] So how about the dreaded kudzu?

Neal Murphy: [00:58:29] So, um, we don’t really. I mean, you see that on the side of the road? I can’t say I’ve ever seen that on a customer’s property. Unless their property was right up to, um. You know, like, uh, the highway or something like that. We have had that. But, um, you know, we don’t have products for that, but we’ll call the, you know, the local city or state and, um, and they’ll come over and treat it.

Brian Pruett: [00:58:48] Okay.

Tim Rogers: [00:58:49] It’s an invasion.

Brian Pruett: [00:58:50] What’s that?

Tim Rogers: [00:58:50] It’s an invasion.

Neal Murphy: [00:58:52] Exactly. And that’s I mean, that’s true. It’s it’s bad. It’s right.

Brian Pruett: [00:58:55] Yep. All right, so these next couple questions are going to be for both Madge and Neil. So um, Madge first of all give somebody some advice for who might be thinking about starting their own business.

Madge Lovingood: [00:59:08] That’s a good question.

Madge Lovingood: [00:59:09] Don’t do it. No, I’m just kidding. Um, do your research. Honestly, um, I when I first started, I didn’t know enough about accounting. Um, so I had to hire a CPA, which is the best thing. So that would be one thing that I would say is definitely get people that are experts in their area. Um, hire a CPA that can help you out with your taxes and just balancing your books and things like that, especially if you do as an independent agency. We have several different companies, so I have several different people that are paying me. So you have to keep up with all that. You know, it’s not just one company. Um, definitely hire a CPA. Make sure that you are prepared to hire people and train them. Um, I believe in a servant leadership, you know, so you’ve got to be able to give to other people and make sure that they’re learning from you. And I have some money.

Brian Pruett: [01:00:01] Right?

Madge Lovingood: [01:00:01] Because it does take money in time, right?

Brian Pruett: [01:00:04] And then I think people to forget about the marketing aspect of it.

Madge Lovingood: [01:00:07] Yeah. You got to have marketing.

Madge Lovingood: [01:00:08] You have good marketing ideas. Um, and I think we’ve done a real good job with that. Uh, it’s very rewarding. I mean, if anybody has an entrepreneurial. You know, tendency. Definitely start your own business. But it is hard work. Oh, yeah. You know, but once you get in there and you get it done and you hire the right people like Mr. Rogers.

Speaker5: [01:00:26] You can have successfully entrepreneurial.

Brian Pruett: [01:00:30] So let me ask you a little about a little bit about the marketing, because I know, like we said, you do a lot of networking, you do a lot of giving back. So I know we got a banner for you at Saint Angelo’s that stays up all year long. Things of that nature. What are our marketing avenues that you that you do.

Madge Lovingood: [01:00:45] Well locally in Paulding County? I actually give to the local high schools. So we’re on their football team. The big scoreboard and Family Alliance of Paulding has been one of my, uh, charities that I give to every year. Excuse me. They help families that have been displaced or separated for some reason, and they have visitation centers so they can get them together. Um, as far as marketing. We do? Oh yeah, we do money pages. They do our online marketing. So we have, um, ads that are like, if you’re scrolling through Facebook, you’ll see our ad. Actually, a couple of weeks ago, I was scrolling through it and I saw my own ad. I was like, hey, and then we’re in the local Woodstock Money Pages magazine.

Brian Pruett: [01:01:25] Okay.

Brian Pruett: [01:01:25] I know a lot of people in business. The first thing they cut is marketing when things are bad, and that’s the last thing you should cut.

Madge Lovingood: [01:01:30] That is the last thing you should cut. You’re right, you’re right. You got to keep your name out there.

Brian Pruett: [01:01:33] Yep, yep. Neil, uh, so you went the other way and did it, like you said, a franchise. But, uh, so this is kind of a two fold question. Somebody’s starting their own business, and then maybe somebody is thinking about the franchise way. What kind of advice would you give them?

Neal Murphy: [01:01:47] So I think the franchise is a great option for people who are talking about, like me, who are thinking about, you know, starting their own business later in life. Right? Because I think, you know, Matt would probably say, if, you know, if you’re starting truly from scratch, you know, if you’re in your 20s or 30s, that’s a lot easier because you a lot, a lot more years to kind of work through things. And it’s probably going to take a bit longer, right? When you’re older, you don’t I don’t have that type of time. I have like, you know, 15, 20 years maybe. It’s like, all right. So when you come into a franchise, a lot of the basics have been done. Now we’re just trying to make things better. Right. So I didn’t have to figure out what type of truck I needed to buy. I was I was told, you know, and the vendor, everything was all set. And then I could kind of like tweak it a little bit to, to to what I thought I needed. Um, it just saved me a ton of time. Probably saved me a ton of money, you know, without having to learn a lot of those things. But, you know, like Matt said, there’s, you know, you still have to kind of work at it. You’ve got to get the accountant, you know, you you’ve got to surround yourself with people who can help you because you cannot do it yourself. I mean, I’ve always said it’s it’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done the last couple of years, but it’s also been the most rewarding. I mean, I’m so, you know, proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish, but I did not do it by myself by any stretch, you know, um, and I’m and I’m still, you know, pulling in people all the time to kind of help me out, to help me get me to the, to the next step. And, and it’s been a lot of fun. Right.

Brian Pruett: [01:03:06] Same thing on the marketing side for you. I know again, your networking. I’ve got a poster up for you, uh, at the at Saint Angelo’s. I know you do some other things. Um, on the franchise side of marketing, I know some franchises, they have their. They have to use a certain, you know, uh, agency or things of that nature. But what all can you guys do for marketing?

Neal Murphy: [01:03:23] So the nice thing, at least, you know, we’re kind of new grassroots is new in terms of franchise in the last couple of years is there’s a lot of flexibility. Some of the companies that have been doing for years, you kind of basically told what to do, which is fine because they know it works. We’re kind of learning what works and what doesn’t. So the first couple years, you know, new franchise owners, we just have them do a lot of the basics, kind of direct mail, um, maybe things in like a money page, you know, certain magazines and things like that. But a lot of us the last couple of years have been exploring, um, you know, a lot of the digital marketing, right? You know, a lot of SEO stuff. We did a lot of sting with Facebook this year, all of our franchise owners. This was the 2020 was the first year we had our own Facebook pages and we really started pushing those, which was super helpful. I do a lot of stuff on my own personal page to kind of like kind of push the business at the at the same time, I’ve, you know, I’ve wrote the expert article for the first Cartersville Living magazine that came out like last month.

Neal Murphy: [01:04:14] I’m trying to sponsor different events, you know, I mean, your organization. Brian, I’ve done several things for the chamber, you know, just trying to get the name out there because I was, you know, my first couple of years, I was surprised how many people in Cartersville said, oh, grassroots. I’ve never heard of it. And I’m like, oh, why? Like why not? So it’s like, what does it take to do that? And I’m obviously a big networker, right? So I’m probably one of the only franchise owners in grassroots that’s really big on networking as kind of a marketing tool. It’s not the only reason. In fact, it’s probably not the primary reason I do it. I just enjoy doing it. But it’s turned out to really help my business because it’s introduced me to a lot of people, and it’s introduced a lot of people to me in my business. And that in and of itself is turned into, um, additional customers for me, which has been great. So.

Brian Pruett: [01:04:55] So I’m curious, have you ever sat down and had a martial arts conversation with Caitlin? You know, she’s got a martial arts background. Yeah.

Neal Murphy: [01:05:00] And her her martial arts is something very unique, and I. And I couldn’t tell you what it is right now.

Brian Pruett: [01:05:05] If go back and listen to an old show she was on. It’s quite interesting.

Neal Murphy: [01:05:08] Yeah. And you’d be surprised at how many. I mean, people just have such good. This is what you learn, right? People have such good, interesting backgrounds. Now that people know I do jujitsu, but I’ve heard. I didn’t know there were so many martial arts out there, and Caitlin’s one of them. I still don’t understand what it is. She’s explained it to me, but.

Brian Pruett: [01:05:23] Yeah, I couldn’t either. But it’s definitely impressive. Yep. So, Tim, I have a question for you. This goes along to kind of an employee question. So people out there who don’t want to do a business, but they’re looking for jobs, they’re not happy at their job. Um, what’s the best way to go about looking, finding the right place to work?

Tim Rogers: [01:05:41] Oh, that’s a very good question. And a challenging one at that. Right. Because there’s there’s everybody’s going to have different factors that they think are super important. Um, from personal experience, what I look for, if I’m wanting to work under someone or for someone, um. Number one is. Uh, I’m always looking for personal relationship, right? How relatable can this owner or boss be? How personal are they? You know.

Madge Lovingood: [01:06:12] This is tough because his boss is, you.

Tim Rogers: [01:06:14] Know, well, it’s.

Tim Rogers: [01:06:14] Tough because she’s right next to me. But I mean, it’s.

Brian Pruett: [01:06:17] But it’s a good way to learn.

Tim Rogers: [01:06:18] But but it’s but it’s not really because I, I’ve told her all these things. You know, when me and Madge met, I was pretty impressed with with with Madge just as an individual. Great presence, great personality. Um, but you can kind of tell the genuineness and the authenticity that’s there just from a conversation. So that’s first and foremost something that I think people should, should really lean into and pay attention to, you know, whoever you’re interviewing or getting in front of or being asked to to, to speak with for employment opportunity, you know, how well can you read that person? Right? Because with the with the interview process, I think it’s less about your background and experience, and it’s really more about the, um, about the experience, the experience of meeting that person and how you, you know, how you represent yourself, how they represent yourself. You know, in an interview, both of you are doing the same thing. You know nothing about each other, but you’re interested in the position. You know, the boss or the owner is interested in hiring you as an employee. You, the potential employee is interested in the business, right? So you’re both learning about each other. I think that’s the first thing.

Tim Rogers: [01:07:19] Obviously benefits all the extra perks and things that can come with working for an employer. That’s another thing that is important. But I also try to be forward thinking and look past just this year, six months, you know, do I believe this can be a place that I can grow and still want to be a part of, you know, five years down the line, ten years down the line even longer. And that’s the most challenging, right? Because it’s hard to figure that out when there isn’t already an existing relationship. But you like the personality of the person you’re meeting with and you think it’s a good opportunity. So some of that you do have to figure out on your own as you get hired. Uh, but like Madge said, do your research right. Look around, look, look reviews for the, you know, whatever industry you’re a part of or whatever you’re looking for, get as much recon, if you will, on the company how long they’ve been in business. What are people saying about them? Right. And then you also make your own decision on what you think about that, right, about that business owner in their business.

Brian Pruett: [01:08:15] So you just thought about I’ve never asked this for other for other people. So I’m going to ask you this. And then I got two more questions for managing Neil. But uh, on as an interviewee. What? How do you prepare for an interview?

Tim Rogers: [01:08:28] Oh, this is great because I had a there was a former position in sales that I had where I actually had to do this. Um, quite often I think the best way to prepare. So you’re asking me how to prepare for an interview, correct. Right. Okay. Being interviewed though. Right. Not give. Okay. Correct. Um. Dressed to impress. Always. Mom and dad were real big on that in my upbringing. Dressed to impress. Um, first impressions are the best impressions. I truly believe that if you can give off and provide a really good impression of who you are and who you say you are and who you want to be, I think that speaks volumes and will go a long way. Um, I do think when it comes to the interview process, interviewers, headhunters, recruiters, business owners, they hire people that they like, right? Uh, whether it be the personality or a combination of all those different things, but presence, personality, uh, background, you know, you find different things that you can relate on. So as someone wanting to go through an interview, always think about those things, giving good eye contact. But you don’t want to be that person that’s only looking at the eyes the entire time. And that’s where I grew up here, right? That’s way too intimidating. So, you know, we laugh at these things, but there’s a method, right? There’s what’s that phrase? There’s a method to the madness. It’s true. There’s a method to how you want to go through an interview process. Um, but I really do think it comes back to what’s important to you. You want to look? Well, you want to. You want to speak well, you don’t want to lie, though. You want to be honest. You know, you want to be transparent. Um, and you’re also looking for that in a business owner, right? Yeah. Or at least I think you should.

Brian Pruett: [01:10:02] Right? Right. So I got two funny stories on the end being interviewed, uh, 1997. You guys remember us? Play now. Bolero. They’re on Bear Parkway. So right after it opened, I had lost a job, so I was kind of looking, and I went in. I was in my suit tie, you know, and everything, and I cut myself shaving. So I had a bandage going all the way down my lip and went in and, and they hired me and the manager of the day that my first day on the job came to me. He said, I’m going to tell you, the only reason I hired you is because you came in with that bandage on your face. Sweet, right? But then, on the other hand, I had, uh, an ingrown toenail thing and went into a job interview wearing sandals because that’s the only thing I could wear. And the guy fussed at me, so. But it’s true. I mean, you know. Right. Dressed to impress. So. All right, Madge O’Neill, this is both for you. I’ll start with Madge as an interviewer. How do you how would you suggest somebody preparing for an interview and how do you also, this is a two parter. How do you also handle somebody who’s extremely nervous and maybe not have ever done an interview before?

Madge Lovingood: [01:11:08] That’s a good question. Um, actually, I’m gonna use Stacey as an example of a great interviewee. Stacey. Um, Stacey, who is our newest agent in Hiram. She had not been in the insurance industry before, but she definitely did her homework. She googled us, you know, on her website, and she looked us up on Facebook and she did a little research about the insurance industry itself. So she was a great interview. Uh, interviewee. Ashes. Um, she came in, she had a list of questions that she wanted to find out about the insurance industry and the agency specifically. She answered all my questions. And again, she wasn’t new to the insurance industry. So one, 1 or 2 of the questions I ask are about the industry, about specific policy information. And she was able to answer those. So I knew that she was interested, you know, that impressed me. She was interested. She was knowledgeable. She already did some for research. So you want to see people that do that? Um, Tim was a different interviewee.

Tim Rogers: [01:12:01] I was experienced, yes. Yes.

Madge Lovingood: [01:12:04] He was experienced. But we also met talking about networking and giving back. We met at Marietta Business Association when he was working with Allstate, and I was working well, obviously at bird. So we were competitors, but not really. You know, we were friends and I think we had exchanged some business before anyway. So I already knew Tim. I knew his personality. I knew the people that he knew, uh, I knew his impression was good when he was with people. So it was a much more relaxed interview. It was more of a conversation. And he had some questions as well. So I like it when they have questions for me, you know, because it’s not all about me. Um, I mean, I want to tell them that what I expect of them, but I like them to ask questions of me, too, to find out where their head is. That makes sense, right?

Madge Lovingood: [01:12:45] So does that answer your question? Yeah.

Brian Pruett: [01:12:48] Neal. Same question, same question.

Neal Murphy: [01:12:51] I always go out and I try to make a interviewee as comfortable as I can. I kind of do it for two reasons. I want them to feel comfortable. You know what I mean? I don’t want them to be nervous. I don’t, um, but I also want them to try to, like, I want to see if I can get their guard to come down because I want to see what they’re really like. You know what I mean? Because sometimes you don’t find out until they’re actually working with you, and then you’re like, man, I wish I would have known that in the interview. I’m all for what Tim said, you know, dressed to impress. I’d prefer you overdress for an interview than than under. Um, yes. I mean, I’m okay with that, you know what I mean? Um, but it just I want to know that people are taking the job seriously, and I know they might be interviewing lots of different places, I get it. But, you know, I want to know that they’re serious about this. So I want to make sure they’re, you know, dressed appropriately. I want to make sure that they’ve done a little research, that they know what the job’s about. Um, I like that they come in with certain questions or just any question, you know? Right. I mean, I mean, a lot of interviews where I said, oh, you know, do you have any questions? Nope. And I’m like, really? Not like like not one like, you know, you know, what time do you come in every day? Like, you know, you can.

Madge Lovingood: [01:13:46] Pay every two weeks.

Speaker5: [01:13:47] Exactly.

Neal Murphy: [01:13:47] I mean, there’s a lot of basics you could ask if it wasn’t covered. Right. But I think the biggest thing for me is really just trying to get people as comfortable as they can. So the conversation will just flow a lot nicer. And I think you can learn a lot more about someone that way.

Brian Pruett: [01:13:59] I think the young, the younger generation doesn’t have that concept because, I mean, my stepson would interviews and he just sits there, you know, they’re asking questions. So and some of it too, some of the ones that come straight out of college, there’s no, uh, you know, experience things of that nature. So but again, they need to take the initiative to do the, the research, you know, and just ask questions to folks.

Tim Rogers: [01:14:19] And there’s so much education.

Madge Lovingood: [01:14:22] I was gonna say go ahead. If you interview him over text, they’ll tell you more information.

Brian Pruett: [01:14:26] Oh, there you go.

Tim Rogers: [01:14:28] Anyone that’s listening, I mean, I cannot stress this enough. There’s so much free information out there for how you can prepare yourself for interviews. Okay. Regardless of the industry, uh, everything that’s been said, I agree with 100%. Most important, be yourself. Right? Be who you are. Don’t try to be someone you’re not because eventually when that comes out that can make or break your experience working for someone, right? Or being kept on.

Neal Murphy: [01:14:56] That’s probably one of the reasons you got that job, Brian, with the band Aid, because that, I mean, I would have if someone did that to me, I would have like, you know, they have enough confidence in themselves to say, hey, it happened. This is who I am. Where else am I going to do? But I’m here for the interview and I’m ready to go, you know? Right. Yeah.

Brian Pruett: [01:15:10] Uh, so I’m curious, did you have to go through an interview process for a franchise?

Neal Murphy: [01:15:15] Uh, yes. Yep. So it’s actually, it’s something quite formal. I think it’s even legally required. So, um, it’s called the Discovery Day. So I went to the grassroots corporate office. I basically spent the whole day there talking primarily with the CEO, but a lot of other people. And and we went it was pretty rigorous. I mean, you know, we went through my background. We talked a lot about grassroots, you know, what ideas I had, what I was looking for, what I wasn’t looking for because you don’t want to bring on anybody. And there is a lot of franchisees. I know grassroots is turned away because, you know, you want to bring on, you know, the right type of person or a group of people that are going to, um, you know, kind of promote and sell the product the way, you know, you want it to be sold. Does that make sense? Yep, yep. So and you want everybody to kind of get along together. And we have, you know, our 12 franchise owners. We just had our we meet uh, yearly uh that first week of January after the holidays. And um, it’s like. The best time of the year and we have so much fun together. Awesome.

Brian Pruett: [01:16:10] Yeah. All right. Matt, so somebody listening wants to get a hold of you to learn about your services, talk to you about needing help, things of that nature. How can they do that?

Madge Lovingood: [01:16:18] They can call us at (770) 439-7991. They can look us up on Facebook or they can go to our website which is WW dot b y r d I n s u.com.

Brian Pruett: [01:16:31] Awesome. Neal. If someone’s listening and wants your services even though they may not be in your. Well if they’re in your area. Yeah. And even if they can’t and they want to get a hold of you and you can lead them the right way, how can they get Ahold of you?

Neal Murphy: [01:16:42] Me personally. Yeah.

Brian Pruett: [01:16:43] So your your your yeah. Your business. Yeah.

Neal Murphy: [01:16:46] I mean, so it’s, you know grassroots our main, you know, website is grassroots grassroots turf.com. Hopefully that’s easy to remember. We have a nice 800 number that we got a year or so back. It’s like 83366 grass which is four seven whatever. You know I have to put the number in the letters together. But we try to put grass in it. Um, and you know, my personal cell. 678459 7410 I have that on my business card. People call me all the time and I’m happy to talk to them. Awesome.

Brian Pruett: [01:17:11] So as we wrap this up, I like I always like to do this. I like for my guests to share, uh, a positive quote, nugget word, whatever the case is for my listening for the rest of 2024 and beyond with. So imagine what you got.

Madge Lovingood: [01:17:22] And I tell a joke.

Brian Pruett: [01:17:23] Sure.

Madge Lovingood: [01:17:25] It’s going to be a bird joke.

Speaker5: [01:17:26] All right.

Madge Lovingood: [01:17:26] Why do birds fly south for the winter?

Brian Pruett: [01:17:29] Keep warm.

Madge Lovingood: [01:17:30] It’s too far to walk.

Brian Pruett: [01:17:31] Oh, there you go.

Brian Pruett: [01:17:34] Nice. Tim, how about you?

Tim Rogers: [01:17:38] She’s much better at the jokes than I am. I have to rehearse them and all those kinds of things. Um. Uh, this is something I really have to tell myself, consciously or subconsciously. Uh, each day. Um, always put your best foot forward. Um. I don’t want to be cliché, but we’re our worst enemies, right? Uh, your biggest enemy is the person that’s looking back at you at the mirror every single day. So, um, celebrate the small achievements and the small things that you can. The good things. Right? The positive things learn from the negative and the bad things. Um, and just continue to push yourself each day to to do more and to go farther.

Brian Pruett: [01:18:18] Awesome, Neil.

Neal Murphy: [01:18:19] So I’ve heard it many times before, but someone just posted last week on Facebook, someone local, and they said, um, listen to understand, don’t listen to reply. And I’m like, and I need to be reminded of that so often because, you know, when you’re in a conversation with someone, you’re thinking about, oh, how am I going to reply to it? And then you don’t listen to what they said, and then you kind of miss everything. The more you can really listen to understand what someone’s saying, I think the better relationship you can develop, because you really do learn more about that person and hopefully vice versa. Right.

Brian Pruett: [01:18:47] Awesome. The last thing I do, uh, the thank you, is a lost art these days. So match. Thank you for what you do with the communities that you’re involved in, all the nonprofits that you help. Tim, thanks for what you do for your your clients, your customers, the community. And Neil, thanks for what you do for CBC. The Bartow County area and all the folks in and around that area. Everybody out there listening. Remember, remember, let’s be positive. Let’s be charitable.

George Martin with CorpCare EAP, Kelly Biggs with WSI Biggs, George Coundouriotis with Zambawango and Hannah O’Donoghue with BKS Partners

January 29, 2024 by angishields

Chamber Spotlight

George Martin with CorpCare EAP, Kelly Biggs with WSI Biggs, George Coundouriotis with Zambawango and Hannah O’Donoghue with BKS Partners

00:00 /

Today on Chamber Spotlight, Lola Okunola interviews four industry professionals. George Martin discusses CorpCare’s mental health services for employees, emphasizing personal clinical services. Kelly Biggs, with WSI Biggs, shares her expertise in digital marketing and the significance of adapting to AI and new technologies. George Coundouriotis talks about his gluten-free dessert cafe, Zambawango, focusing on healthier lifestyle choices, and Hannah O’Donoghue, with BKS Partners, delves into high net worth individual insurance, stressing the importance of protecting valuable assets and comprehensive risk management.

CorpCare is proudly family owned. For over 30 years EAP has been a personal mission, and we have expanded our reach globally as a result. Most importantly, we give back to our profession as leaders.

Our Founder, George W. Martin, Jr., M.Div., MA, has conducted EAP services for a variety of corporations, hospitals, legal associations, veterinary associations, manufacturers, and first responders since 1986.

He has served on the Employee Assistance Society of North America (EASNA) as president of the board and is a member of the Employee Assistance Professionals Association (EAPA).

His team is equally involved in continuing to improve the quality of EAP for HR professionals, brokers, healthcare providers, associations and small businesses.

Follow CorpCare on LinkedIn and Facebook.

With over 25 years in the field, Kelly Biggs is a seasoned marketing expert with an MBA from Emory University and a rich history of working with Fortune 100 companies, dynamic startups, and small businesses.

As a Principal Consultant at WSI Digital Marketing, she brings a comprehensive blend of strategic insight and practical marketing acumen.

As the owner of a digital marketing agency, Kelly excels in driving growth for clients. Her approach involves crafting customized marketing strategies that effectively align with clients’ objectives, transforming their online presence.

Kelly’s expertise extends to the realm of artificial intelligence in marketing. She is a certified AI Marketing Consultant from the Marketing Institute, adept at translating complex data into actionable insights for her clients.

Kelly resides in Atlanta Ga where she loves riding her Peloton and cheering for the Falcons.

Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn and follow WSI Biggs on Facebook.

As the President/Founder of Zambawango Desserts & Coffee, George Coundouriotis has been leading the country’s first gourmet bakery that specializes in low carb, sugar-free, and gluten-free desserts, pastries, and coffee drinks since 2018.

With a cohesive company culture, a carefully selected team of passionate professionals, and an outstanding Executive Pastry Chef, George built Zambawango from the ground up with a vision of re-inventing the dessert and coffee space by eliminating the unhealthy and guilt-inducing elements without compromising on taste or appearance.

With over 20 years of experience in strategic sourcing, merchandising, and purchasing across various industries, George has leveraged his skills and knowledge to source the best quality ingredients, negotiate the best prices, and partner with the best suppliers for Zambawango.

He’s also expanded Zambawango’s reach and customer base by launching a nationwide shipping service in 2020, and by creating a strong online presence and engagement through their website and social media platforms.

George’s mission is to share the benefits and joys of low carb living with as many people as possible, and to make Zambawango the go-to destination for delicious and healthy desserts and coffee.

Connect with George on LinkedIn and follow Zambawango on Facebook.

Hannah O’Donoghue joined Baldwin Krystyn Sherman Partners (BKS Partners) in May of 2022 after serving 5 years in the non-profit space, 12 years in the retail industry with her family and 3 years doing public relations and marketing for non-profit and shipping & logistics industry.

Before joining BKS-Partners, O’Donoghue was the Membership Director for the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MJCCA) in Atlanta, Georgia. Before MJCCA, she ran maternity boutiques as well as an e-commerce store in Atlanta. Prior to those positions, she also worked in public relations and marketing for 3 years with companies like UPS, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Catapult Business Ventures.

A native of Atlanta, GA, O’Donoghue was raised by a retail business owner and a non-profit executive, so she naturally worked in both of those business spaces throughout her career. She has her Bachelors in Journalism from the University of Georgia and a Masters in Business Administration from Mercer University. She serves on committees for the MJCCA, fundraises for Chesnut Elementary School and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, as well as, directing a Galloway Half Marathon Training group in Atlanta.

When O’Donoghue is not helping her clients at BKS, she is spending time with her child, Ronan O’Donoghue and her husband, Martin O’Donoghue. She also enjoys anything outdoors, running, CrossFit, reading and discovering the newest restaurants in her city.

Connect with Hannah on LinkedIn and follow BKS Partners on Facebook.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Sandy Springs, Georgia. It’s time for Sandy Springs Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lola Okunola: [00:00:24] Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Chamber Spotlight Podcast, proudly sponsored by Southern Live Oak Wellness. I’m your host, Lola Okunola, and today we have an exciting lineup of guests representing diverse industries. A big thank you to Southern Live Oak Wellness for supporting our community. Now let’s jump into today’s conversation. We have a full house today. Meet my guests George Martin, the founder of CorpCare. Kelly Biggs, the CEO of WSI World Digital. George Coundouriotis, did I say that correctly? George, owner of Zambawango. And last but not least, Hannah O’Donoghue, an advisor with BKS Partners. Now let’s start with George Martin. Welcome to the show George.

George Martin: [00:01:24] Thank you Lola.

Lola Okunola: [00:01:26] So CoreCare offers employee assistance programs to corporations and their employees. Can you tell our listeners about your business, the services you provide, any special offerings, who your target market is? How did you get into this? Who does it benefit?

George Martin: [00:01:46] Well, Lola, we are 33 year old company. We’re a national concern. We provide traditional forms of employee assistance programs, which means that we are emphasized clinical services on a personal basis. We still have some other virtual like telehealth systems that we bring to bear to, to help people in, to conveniently locate counseling services. Primary purpose is to help people get from a bad place to a better place in their lives. And we do so with a network of licensed, credentialed mental health therapists. We also add to that a the telehealth option through BetterHelp, and we have a series of work life related services that provide child care, elder care, financial and legal related consulting services. We I’ve been in the field since the mid, actually the mid 80s and have watched it change throughout the through that time. And when I was a marriage and family practitioner in private practice, I then was introduced as into the EAP world and saw the future of it as a very promising to help corporations and so on to assist their family members and their employees. And and our whole purpose, as I mentioned, is to get somebody to a higher performance level instead of letting their issues create some performance related problems. And a nutshell, that’s basically what we are and who we we work. We work with groups that are under 100 employees to just under 100,000. Wow. And we work with a dozen veterinarian associations, eight bar associations besides, and a number of private corporations here in, in based in Atlanta and elsewhere. So a little bit about us.

Lola Okunola: [00:03:28] All right. Mental health is very crucial in the workplace. And that is probably a benefit that we often overlook. Right. It’s not necessarily health insurance. It’s counseling right for. So bereavement divorce.

George Martin: [00:03:48] Yes.

Lola Okunola: [00:03:49] We have a crisis.

George Martin: [00:03:50] We cover the waterfront of of mental health related needs. It’s a prepaid benefit by the way, that the companies and contract with us. So their services are free to the employees and their family members. It’s not a full treatment model, um, like an insured related service, but we provide a certain number of counseling sessions available to them. And it’s interesting that one year we did a review of our utilization and found that 85% of those who used our service, uh, clinically, justifiably did not go on for further care to tap their medical medical benefit, if you will. They were able to take care of many of their issues within the confines of the number, limited number of sessions, or to, uh, connect to some of our work life services and resolve those problems and, you know, improve family life, improve work life. Mhm.

Lola Okunola: [00:04:42] Are you able to share any of, you know, examples of your clients. And if you don’t want to mention them by name, maybe the industries that they are in.

George Martin: [00:04:50] Oh the clients range everywhere from hospitality, food industry and so on. We, I mentioned the the associations we serve. We serve a private prison corporation for example, was an interesting group of people. And then as you would imagine, then, then we work with all of just a dozen city governments and county governments, for that matter, in Florida and Georgia. So we, um, we also have a, a jewelry company, a jewelry store company in Saint Thomas. And. The islands. Wow. That’s my client.

Lola Okunola: [00:05:25] Okay. Wow. Thank you so much, George. Very interesting. Now we are going to move on to Kelly Biggs, the CEO of WSI World Digital. Welcome Kelly.

Kelly Biggs: [00:05:42] Thanks so much. Great to be here.

Lola Okunola: [00:05:43] So Kelly um WSI is a digital marketing and IT company right. Could you share a little bit more about what you do?

Kelly Biggs: [00:05:53] Absolutely. And I know it’s confusing sometimes for people because when we first decided that that’s where we were going to go into business. And when I say we, I mean my husband and I. Okay. Which is another whole podcast.

Lola Okunola: [00:06:05] I know you have to tell us how how I can’t imagine. I mean, I love my husband, but I don’t know if we can work together. It’s been.

Kelly Biggs: [00:06:13] Fun. It’s been fun.

George Martin: [00:06:14] You need a marriage therapist.

Kelly Biggs: [00:06:16] Exactly. Especially through Covid. So. But we balance each other out, so that’s been wonderful. But to answer your question, WSI and digital marketing is really the way that people market themselves online from soup to nuts. We’re a full service marketing agency in that regard. And my background is actually sales. So I’ve worked for some some companies that you would recognize. And so I have a passion for not just getting leads for customers, but rather helping customers grow through their online presence. So whether it’s all website, all things start with actually I was going to say your website, but that’s not exactly right. It’s your Google business profile. And a lot of small businesses really overlook the power of that. So that’s one of the very first things we work with people on. So I call it like think about that as the the store front. If you have a storefront that would be your website. Mhm. But the window, the display is what people would see on your Google my business. And so then getting from that to getting found and how you navigate that once they find you, then getting them the information they need from your website and for that information to be really valuable so that then you’re selling through your website. So we optimize websites for selling. And really that’s the path simplified.

Lola Okunola: [00:07:47] Okay. Do you do any social media or anything on behalf of your clients?

Kelly Biggs: [00:07:52] We absolutely do. And actually with the advent of AI, social will become way more important than it ever has. And that is because we’re not only I’ll tell you something fascinating. For the last two weeks I have not used Google to search for anything. What are.

Lola Okunola: [00:08:12] You using?

Kelly Biggs: [00:08:14] There’s so many TikTok platforms. No, I use ChatGPT but also perplexity dot I it’s I need to write write that one down. Also there’s Claude Claude ai perplexity AI it looks almost like Google, but the reason I do it is because I want to make sure that as clients are paying me to show up on Google, that that’s what they need to do. I want to make sure that they also show up for perplexity and other searches. Right. And so, so can.

Lola Okunola: [00:08:48] I go and search for the chamber or myself on perplexity?

Kelly Biggs: [00:08:53] I absolutely can, you could say, and when I think about searching, you think about it in the realm of what would people actually say? Right. So put yourself I’m a business in Sandy Springs. What chamber would I need to be a part of? Would be a question. And if your name doesn’t come up to the top, you can. I do this all the time, so it’s a cheat. But I will say, hey, like I have a client, I’ll put myself like I put, what’s the great digital marketer in Sandy Springs? And if there’s somebody above me, I will say, hey, why did you put that person above me? Like, what is my site missing? That, that and it’ll tell you. And so you can start to look at that I see.

Lola Okunola: [00:09:37] It’ll tell you the differences. And so you can work on absolutely the gaps. Wow. I’ve learned something new. Great.

Kelly Biggs: [00:09:46] That’s what I try to do. I learned something new every day. And I want to educate my customers, not just for I want them to be smart about their business and growing their business and think outside of like, what is today and think about what’s coming tomorrow.

Lola Okunola: [00:10:03] Wow, wow. Okay, well thank you Kelly. We will come back to you. Next on is George Coundouriotis, the owner of Zambawango, a cafe that offers delicious gluten free desserts right here in the heart of Sandy Springs. Welcome. him to the show.

George Coundouriotis: [00:10:23] Thank you so much. Lola, thank you for inviting me.

Lola Okunola: [00:10:27] Yeah, thanks for coming. So. Zamboanga is known for its delightful gluten free desserts. Right. And also, you’re really authentic coffees, right. Tell us more about how you decided to start Zamboanga. So what are some key things that you would like for us to know? And I see you brought us some delectable looking treats, which we’re going to all dig into after the show. But yeah, tell us.

George Coundouriotis: [00:10:55] Or during the show. That would be.

Lola Okunola: [00:10:57] Nice. It might be hard to talk while we.

George Coundouriotis: [00:10:59] That’s true. That’s true. Um, so the funny part is the whole business, which we started in, uh, 2017, we opened in 2018 here in Sandy Springs came from a personal need. Um, I, I embraced the low carb. Um, they call it keto, but it’s really minimizing your daily carbs lifestyle. And had, um, back in the day, I was, um, about 65 pounds heavier. Oh, and I lost the weight rapidly and have kept it off for seven years. Increased my exercise. Um, everything became healthier. Um, the brain fog disappeared, all that stuff. And so we I started the business out of a personal need because I realized a lot of other folks, um, were in the same predicament. They were trying to lose weight. Um, they were doing calorie reductions or portion size reductions, and they were just failing. Um, with the low carb lifestyle, you’re just avoiding sugars, high carb, uh, high glycemic, um, foods that wreak havoc in your system in many different ways. And you’re never supposed to be hungry. You eat until you’re full. Um, so that makes it so easy. Um, so by being low carb, we cannot use grain flours, uh, because those are extremely high glycemic, and we use almond flour and coconut flours. And therefore, by default, we realize we’re also gluten free. Now, the low carb segment of the market is much bigger than the gluten free segment. Um, people avoid sugar because they’re pre-diabetic, diabetic, want to lose weight, they’re, um, more weight than they want to be.

George Coundouriotis: [00:12:57] Um, Alzheimer’s prevention cancer patients cannot have sugar because sugar feeds cancer. Um, so that’s 35 to 40% of the US population that cannot have desserts and breads and bagels and dinner rolls or should not be having it. Um, so that’s really our target, uh, niche. And one of the first questions we get from new customers is what sugar replacement are you using? Because there are so many junk, uh, sugar replacements that are actually worse than sugar, um, artificial replacements. And from day one, our criteria was our sugar replacement must be sold at Whole Foods. Number one. That’s the first thing. Okay, so it’s past a very regimented test already. Okay. And after that, it has to be baked and taste, um, like sugar or better, you know, um, so we’re not going to produce goods that have an aftertaste or have a gritty texture. Um, they have to look and taste, um, similar or the same or better than their sugar cousins. So from day one, we used, um, swerve, which is an accepted, widely accepted brand of sugar replacement. It’s considered by the FDA as natural because it’s entirely plant based. And then Allulose came into the market while we were open, um, midway like 2021 or so. And that’s considered also a superior natural sugar alternative. And we use a combination of the two very little because our customers are used to not having sugar.

Lola Okunola: [00:14:49] Right.

George Coundouriotis: [00:14:50] So by default our goods are more European style. They’re not very sweet. Um, and we if we have a chocolate product, we accentuate and bring forward the chocolate element, not the sugar element or the sweetness element. Um, the cranberries that you see here. We take fresh cranberries, we house dry them and sweeten them with a little bit of swerve. So those are very low carb cranberries rather than full of sugar, right.

Lola Okunola: [00:15:22] You tried them, right? Yeah.

George Coundouriotis: [00:15:24] And cranberries are naturally low carb, so they’re berries. That’s another very interesting thing. This is a raspberry mousse with topped with chocolate. Um, raspberry. The berries are a family of very low carb, um, vitamin and nutrition, um, bombs that you can have, you know, I call them bombs because they’re so healthy. Nutrition bombs and, uh, they’re low carb. You would never imagine a raspberry that is naturally sweet to beat low carb. But it is.

Lola Okunola: [00:16:01] I just always assumed that they were high in sugar. Blueberries, blackberries.

George Coundouriotis: [00:16:07] Those are our friends. Strawberries. So that’s a strawberry, uh, cupcake. We start with fresh strawberries and make this, um, the frosting and the cupcake. Everything. We’re obsessed with being. Um. I brought this from the corporate world where I worked for 25 years, always in procurement, which is a general management role. But you set certain parameters that have to be met. And then I was very blessed to find an executive pastry chef, Kathleen McDaniel, who embraced this concept and wanted the challenge. She came from the restaurant industry, some of the best restaurants in the country Boston, New York, Atlanta, uh, pastry chef. And she embraced the challenge to take rich desserts and make them low carb. Without her, we could have not executed the business. You need the executive pastry chef talent that embraces what you want to do. Um, and then she built rebuilt together a team of chefs, um, Amanda Murphy and some others that are here, um, supporting us and doing an amazing job.

George Martin: [00:17:18] You know, you’re aware of the correlation between sugar content and depression. Sugar blues.

Lola Okunola: [00:17:24] That was going to be my next thing I was going to say, you know, your physical and your mental health, right? You’re not just tackling. You are what you eat. You are what you eat physically and mentally. Yeah.

George Coundouriotis: [00:17:36] So this is very interesting. I’m a marathon runner.

Lola Okunola: [00:17:40] Wow.

George Coundouriotis: [00:17:40] And I’ve ran in three marathons since opening the business on low carb. Because you have clean energy, this provides you with clean, long lasting energy. It’s completely the opposite of what the FDA, um, or whatever dietitians have taught people that you need to carbo load. You never need to carbo load. Um, this energy is long lasting. It’s a reserve energy in your system that you can use over a long period of time, such as running a marathon. Um, and I’m not the only one like that. If you do a search about that keto lifestylers and athletes, it’s very prevalent, um, in the low carb keto lifestyle that you are an athlete.

George Coundouriotis: [00:18:28] Some of our top customers are athletes.

Lola Okunola: [00:18:30] I see. So other than pastries, do you do any keto meals as well?

George Coundouriotis: [00:18:37] So what we do, we’re strictly a bakery.

Lola Okunola: [00:18:39] Okay.

George Coundouriotis: [00:18:40] And, uh, what we’ve added since opening our focus when we opened was desserts, because that’s the toughest part of the menu, you know?

Lola Okunola: [00:18:48] Yeah, I’m a low carb because I can’t do dairy or gluten. Yeah. And so I’m always looking for places that and there not too many of them that offer.

George Coundouriotis: [00:18:59] Well that’s another story. Yeah exactly. I can get into that. But um, we expanded into bagels, dinner rolls, breads. Okay. Bread loaves. Um, the bread does have gluten because we add vital wheat gluten which is non carb impact, but it impacts that wonderful texture of the bread. Um, otherwise it’s very flat. This makes it into a real bread loaf with the right texture. Um, but the the fact that are there any other bakeries like us? It’s a tough business. First you have to find the talent. Mhm. Um, second, you have to source the ingredients which are alternative ingredients. So we go straight to swerve and you know, and I used my purchasing background to negotiate some special deals. Um, and straight to the distributors, main distributors of Allulose. Even though we’re a small company, we act like a big company and negotiate some great, uh, deals that we pass on to our customers. But this is a very difficult business, um, in every respect. Right. So when we opened, we were the only ones in the country that were low carb, keto friendly, bakery, period. And then. Several source in and started opening. Um, and I say that with confidence that they saw us and benchmarked us because when we opened in 2018, in 2019, literally the whole year. Um, we were getting completely inundated with phone calls. Do you ship, do you ship, do you ship, do you ship? And we listened to that. And open the commissary kitchen in Alpharetta where we ship from. In the meantime, um, Covid hit. So that was for shipping. That was a relatively positive thing. Um, it was different times. It hurt our retail, um, bakery here in Sandy Springs, but it helped our shipping, so things balanced out somewhat. Um, then, um, other keto bakeries open in 2021 and the shipping started declining a little bit.

Lola Okunola: [00:21:19] I see.

George Coundouriotis: [00:21:20] Now almost all of those have gone out of business. So the shipping is picking up again.

Lola Okunola: [00:21:24] Yeah.

Lola Okunola: [00:21:25] It’s because it’s your passion, right? If it’s not your passion, if you open something that’s difficult to do and you don’t have the passion to do it, exactly, you’re going to shut down.

George Coundouriotis: [00:21:36] It’s not, um, our items are a little bit more expensive than traditional, but actually we haven’t adjusted prices, so they’re now below most traditional bakeries. Oh, wow. Um, however, it’s, um, it is definitely a huge passion. It’s a very challenging space. And in Atlanta, within 25 miles of our bakery, there’s 6.2 million people. So if you take the statistics of 35 to 40% and the fact that we’re the only diabetic friendly, low carb bakery in Atlanta, if not in Georgia, um, we should not have to ship anywhere. You know, we should be able to have 5 or 6 shops here in Atlanta, uh, have wholesale businesses and all those things and penetrate the local market. So as a small business, one of our top, uh, challenges is getting embraced by influencers or people that can actually move the needle for us.

Lola Okunola: [00:22:40] Well, maybe Kelly can speak on that later, that maybe when we start talking about synergies, I think Kelly might have some some things to offer. So now we’re going to move on to Hannah O’Donoghue of BKS Partners. She’s an advisor there I want to hear all about, I think, not just me. Everyone that’s listening wants to hear about what BK’s partners does.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:23:08] Yeah. So BKS Partners is a public company. Um they do everything insurance. So we have a benefits arm, we have a commercial arm and we have a private lines arm. So I work in the they call it the private risk or personal lines sector. So we focus on insurance for the general consumer. So we would work on their home their auto, their umbrella, their collections insurance. Um, one of my personal things that I like to focus on is I have that like nosy piece of me that I love to learn about people’s collections. And, and a lot of our customers don’t realize, like, how much valuable jewelry or fine arts or maybe they’re they have a firearms collection that is possibly worth a lot of money, or a pinball collection that’s sitting in their basement that if their basement floods, that’s a it’ll be a couple thousand dollars gone. So I always like to kind of look for those different gaps in people’s risk portfolio and try to create a good solution for them and do it in a timely, you know, moment. Oh, um, one of the things I was going to touch upon from hearing you guys, I come from an entrepreneurial background also, that I used to run retail stores with my father. So working for your father is definitely not the easiest thing, especially an Israeli father. Oh, wow.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:24:36] I know about family business, but I also know about it’s all about the delivering good customer service. And that was something major that I learned kind of being in that retail spot for so many years. And then I transitioned into nonprofit from there. So even though insurance hasn’t been my life since I graduated, um, undergrad, it’s definitely a little newer for me. But, um, I think at the end of the day, I’m looking for my clients best interest, and I always want to be as responsive as possible. And even if I’m not helping them with their insurance, I can connect them to other helpful things in their lives, whether it’s a private banker, wealth advisor, an estate attorney. Because in the. To the day we get like very into their personal lives because we have to understand like all their assets and lots of times we find little nooks and crannies that they maybe haven’t thought about. Right. So we try to identify those problems and then kind of hook them up with the right people to help them with those solutions.

Lola Okunola: [00:25:43] So it sounds like you, I mean, and you can correct me if I’m wrong. Are your clients like, what is their net worth? Like, is there a limit? Do you work with everybody or are you working with corporations or high net worth individuals? It’s a.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:25:58] Great question. So our focus is a high net worth individual. And what that looks like usually a home that’s like $1 million or more and replacement costs, um, they have a few cars potentially. You know, we can work really well if someone has, like if they’re a car collector, even we have carriers that we can help with on that. Um, they have multiple homes. They’re looking at umbrella policies for maybe 5 million plus. You know, that’s kind of like our bread and butter. We can help in the middle market and in the high net worth space. But our price points with the carriers like Chubb, AIG, Cincinnati pure, that’s kind of their niche. So that’s where we can offer the best value. Um, one of the things I wanted to bring up, and I don’t know if you guys have seen this or felt it, is the nuclear verdict and being in the US and knowing that it is very easy to get sued. Yes.

Lola Okunola: [00:27:01] Very litigious. Yeah. You get in a.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:27:03] Car wreck and the person that you got in that car wreck, they sued you or, you know, you hit someone with a golf ball and now they’re suing you for our friend comes.

Lola Okunola: [00:27:14] To visit you and they fall in front of your house and they can sue you too. Exactly.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:27:19] So those are kind of the things we’re trying to instill into our client’s mind and remind them that an umbrella policy, it’s it is kind of a scary thing to think about, but it’s something to pay for that. It’s very minimal per year, but it’s really that backup plan to if something happens and the likelihood of being in Atlanta of getting in a car wreck, it’s probably going to happen at some point.

Lola Okunola: [00:27:46] Even if it’s with yourself, with the potholes. Right?

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:27:49] Right. So we want to just make sure our clientele know that they’re, you know, whether they’re looking at an umbrella policy and matching that up with their net worth or net assets, or possibly even a little higher, just so that in the event that you possibly get sued, that you have that backup plan and you don’t have to go into your personal pockets and take care of that.

Lola Okunola: [00:28:15] Wow, that’s pretty interesting. You know.

George Martin: [00:28:18] I was, uh, surprised when you mentioned the value of collections. And we had a home that we rented out, and the renter that we had at the time showed me his collection of tennis shoes, and he showed me a.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:28:30] Really up and coming.

George Martin: [00:28:31] Now he showed me a Jordan pair. It was worth $12,000. And I thought, good grief.

Lola Okunola: [00:28:38] Oh yeah, it’s a thing. Now we have.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:28:40] Carriers that literally all they do is they work on collections. But I would say for shoes that would probably be a more difficult one. Like we would really have to find a specialized market because I’ve had them tell me with the couture stuff they knock out, like maybe shoes, maybe bags for sure, but clothing, they try to knock out of the park so that there’s only so many markets that we can go to for those like specialized risks. But a $12,000 pair of shoes, you definitely. I mean, that’s as valuable as the engagement ring, if not more so you definitely want to protect that.

George Martin: [00:29:18] I offered him my old gray box, uh, for at least 500, but he didn’t. He wasn’t interested. No, it didn’t work out.

Lola Okunola: [00:29:25] Wow, this has been super cool just hearing how different you know, all your businesses are. So I mean, just off the top of my head I can see that there’s definitely synergies here, right? We we’re all sort of working in spaces that are related or dependent on each other in some shape or fashion. Um, Kelly, I’m going to go to you first because we all need marketing and exposure. And I want to go back to what you said. You know, you’re using new search engines like, help us talk to George. The George is you.

George Martin: [00:30:08] Know, I want to say I’m glad you brought that up because I, we our company spent the last two years in, uh, rebranding and then also getting an SEO, um, technician to help clean up things and then to, to develop. Are LinkedIn and so on, visibility and whatever else. And it’s still something of a mystery to to us.

Kelly Biggs: [00:30:29] We like to keep it that way.

George Martin: [00:30:33] So mental health is that same way too, by the way.

Kelly Biggs: [00:30:36] How we stay employed. But no. So it’s a couple things. One, I want to give a shout out to Sandy Springs Chamber as it relates to this. And so as Hannah was talking, there was a couple things that that, that you mentioned, which is she speaks to a lot of people. And having a venue like this, an organization where she can be valuable and just meet different people, that she can be of value to her clients is extremely important. Um, and then we talked about something called we didn’t call it this, but I will now domain authority. And so the domain authority of a sandy Springs is very high. And what do I mean by that? It means. So when you have a website, everybody I need to put up a website. And, and generally when I talk to people, sometimes they will say, oh yeah, I got a cousin that can put that up for me for $500. And I’m like, okay, you’ll call me later, but, you know, go do that. And when they do call later, it hasn’t been put up in a way that sound. Conversely. And what do I mean by that? There are things that have to happen on your website and I won’t get too technical, but there on site things like your meta tags, your middle titles, your meta descriptions, um, and a company or an organization like Sandy Springs has spent a lot of time and money doing that. Um, there’s another thing called eat, and it’s now it’s e a t.

Kelly Biggs: [00:32:13] What is your experience? So somebody who’s been in business for 30 years, Google respects more than somebody who’s been in business for one year. That’s not to say that the person in one year can’t make moves, but they can’t overtake this other person if if they’ve set up things right. Right. So it’s your expertise. Um, they also want to know your authority and that’s what we’re talking about. So one thing that helps with authority is your backlinks. So what is a backlink. Just it’s you have your own site and within your own site you’re saying you’re great and Google is like, okay, that’s interesting. Um, who else is saying else is saying you’re great? And every time somebody mentions your website, that’s a vote. That’s a vote, that’s a vote. But there are also things called toxic websites, and these are things that don’t have anything to do with your organization. So Google looks at that too. So there are some companies that will say, oh, we’ll get you a million back. So I’m the new company and I won’t back links because perplexity just told me I don’t have enough backlinks because I’m not ranking in the same way as my competitor. I’m going to go buy them. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. That is a quick way to destroy your website and have to start all over from scratch. So, you know, those are just technical things. I try to put them in layman’s terms that are just basically you have to have a website built by somebody that you trust that is at least having these conversations about, I’m going to build your website, but before we do that, let’s talk about some things like and we’ll go back to the pastry.

Kelly Biggs: [00:33:59] What makes you special. And it’s really clear the things that make you special are you have an award winning pastry chef that understands what’s happening with somebody with celiac disease, for example. You understand that you can’t mix ingredients. And the thing is, what I didn’t hear you were saying, I heard you say, like, I have a shipping place. I have all of these things and these things are happening. What we try to get people to do is to make things happen. Right. So just really understanding what are your goals for your business this year and let’s align those goals. So you talked about things like influencer marketing. That’s really more around PR. And we actually have a PR division in our in our team. They’re the experts I have. I just surrounded by a group of group of experts. This year I was able to hire on a graphic designer. Well, I can do some stuff in Canva. They’re dangerous right now. I can tell them, hey, here’s my idea, go do that same one thing that we’re seeing quite a bit of, and I would like to warn the community about, is people will come back to me and say, hey, Kelly, I don’t need you to write my blogs anymore. I got ChatGPT for that.

Lola Okunola: [00:35:15] But it’s so obvious now. You can tell it is. But it will get better. It will. Fine tune, but for now I think it’s quite obvious that the.

Kelly Biggs: [00:35:26] Wreck so I the the definition I like the most about I is it’s the science of making machines smarter, right? And so actually speaking of offers on my website you can go as W-w-w dot C Biggs digital.com. And you can download a free e-book on ChatGPT. We tell you how to use the prompts, right. Because there is actually a formula to it where it can get pretty good. It really can. And so you can go through that look at prompts that you want to use. We help small businesses get ahead. I think we’re on the cusp of something very remarkable and a change in that. And the more that you can equip yourself to know that, the better. I use AI, but the way I use it is to ideate. So again, I go to perplexity like what’s missing? And typically like your your content is in and so okay, great. What what should I add? A lot of times they’ll say, so here are some keys. If you’re writing a blog, refer back to places within your own website. Even at the end, if you say, hey, contact us, shoot them over to your contact page. So some inner links is like internal votes, but also they are starting to value even more. Where did your source come from? Are you just making opinions, or did you go to Sandy Springs to say this is where, you know, go to a domain authority, a high ranking domain authority and refer back to something that they have said.

Kelly Biggs: [00:37:09] And so I will take I will first research it and say who what competitors are ranking high. What should I write about that might be of interest, and what might an outline look like for me? But then I turn that over to the copywriter, right. And I say, here’s another key trick. This is lovely. This is fun. Um, another site you can go to for AI is Bard. Bard. That’s Google’s competition to open AI. And I like it because it can actually read websites. You can put your own website in and say, what’s my tone? Right. So it’s back to talking about branding. Branding will be on the forefront. So that was smart that you did that work? Okay. Branding will be on the forefront into everything you do. And the more that you know your brand and you’re able to be on brand, the more you’re going to stand out above any competitor that comes in with other gluten free meals to compete with you, because they’re going to appear like the copycat. They’re trying to do what you do well already, right.

Lola Okunola: [00:38:18] Oh, that’s a great one.

George Martin: [00:38:19] So my team is put together these various Facebook messaging, if you will, and it has this one obviously stress management tips and so on and that kind of thing. And I’m actually impressed in how they how they provide these brief informational, um, pieces. And I have no idea how they do this. Um, I get up to them, which is great, but I’m so impressed with what some social media can be able to do to demonstrate, I think, high level messaging. And so we’re we’re believers in this. I may have to talk to you.

Kelly Biggs: [00:38:54] So yeah, let me tell you what I love about this post. And like it’s really good. So I see your brand colors right. Like blue and yellow. And then if I’m scrolling I would stop my scroll here for a couple of reasons. One, people love people’s faces. Yeah, people love like you. Like just human nature. We like to see the faces of other human face on is is typically the best. But this is really good. Like, I want to lean in and know what it is. I know that we’re on podcast. It looks like somebody is whispering and I want to lean in and hear it. And that yellow tells me straight off the bat what it is that you’re doing. And then I see your, you know, your brand colors, you have your logo, and I’m going to stop and pay attention here. So they’re doing a fantastic job. And and you just want to win. This is one thing that I hear from a lot of people is, hey, I’m posting on social media and nothing’s happening. It’s not supposed to. Right. Um, what what what? And actually something is happening. It’s that you’re just creating that brand awareness. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. Um, but now when you want to get leads, you’re going to have to put money in it. Um, so that’s kind of it. But that’s a great job.

George Martin: [00:40:21] Appreciate you saying that. I’m curious about one thing. If I can interject. Of course. So back in the 1991, when I started Corp Care, um, we were looking at promotional efforts and it was either the printed something or other magazines, whatever else. And now obviously social media is the place to go. What’s next?

Kelly Biggs: [00:40:44] Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a fantastic question. It depends on who you ask. It depends on your business. I think social media ads will stay digital. In fact, I was in a, um, in a meeting just the other day and they highlighted digital ads will be like will be on steroids moving forward. Now where do you want to put that depends on your audience. You have to do the work to figure out where is my audience, the people that I’m trying to reach, where do they hang out and and interrupt that? So it will be the I think physical ads are going to be be more popular because now more than ever, people will stop. And even again, it’s what’s your goal? Am I probably going to call somebody based off of a flier? I get 3% of the people who you who see your ad, who see your messaging. Only 3% are in market for you right now. So your goal is to stay in front of the ones so that when they do think about you, that’s when they see you and that’s when they move. So I think it’s still going to be digital. Advertisement. Um, and I think that we’ll figure also out how and I’m sorry. Um, I think we’ll also figure out how, um, we will navigate through that, but something else will come along. And it’s again, how do I stay on top of it will be hard and perplexity and all these other things figure out a way to make money. Absolutely, absolutely. So it’s I think it’s probably going to be something on the AI front, but to be determined, I’m.

George Martin: [00:42:31] Hoping for a return of the Goodyear blimp.

Lola Okunola: [00:42:33] Oh, I think those days are gone. I think I agree with Kelly. I think AI is the next way. Right. So when social media started, you still needed someone to tell you where to put your money, what you needed to do. But now we have AI telling us, right? Ai is telling you, oh, do you want to reward that? I’ll reward it. Reward it for you? Or do you want to use this image? You know, so I kind of think that that’s where we’re going, where suggestions are going to be made for us to optimize our advertising. It’s a good.

Kelly Biggs: [00:43:07] Point, and I actually want to get back to a point that you made. What we’re seeing a lot of success on for products specifically is user generated content. So if you could have relationships with people that you met at the Sandy Springs chamber and, and they say, oh, I tasted this. You know, I have a really good friend who suffers from celiac disease. And so I know how important it is, like if I’m buying something from her for her, even if it’s lunch, like, we have to stop the waiter and say gluten free. Not no, no, no, not just gluten free. Can’t touch anything that has had a wheat product on it and all of these things. Right. But if you had somebody like this and I’m calling them micro influencers, right? And that person is using your product and that you’re able to tap into those networks. Powerful. Yeah.

George Coundouriotis: [00:44:09] We’ve experienced that. Um, especially if they’re not sponsored influencers. So they’re organic. Um, they come in, they taste something, and they just blast the bottles because they’re so excited.

Kelly Biggs: [00:44:24] I’m going to say this if you have somebody to do that, try putting some money behind that. Yeah I mean it’s 100% still work.

George Coundouriotis: [00:44:31] They want. Yeah. The ones that we’ve seen a big impact, um, are the ones that taste are good and um, post the bottom like there was a couple that lived here in Marietta that were called, uh, Keto Connect. And when we opened, we invited them over. Uh, that was back in 2018, and they have almost a million YouTube followers and they’ve got 500,000 Instagram followers. They’re very highly respected. They’ve gotten out of the space. Now they’re doing something else. Um, but they came. We gave them a tasting kind of like this, and they did a story. Then they did a YouTube. Um. They insisted that we don’t pay them anything and that gave them the credibility. That’s why they had that many followers, because they weren’t being paid to say, this is delicious. They could kill your brand, or they could make your brand.

George Coundouriotis: [00:45:34] Their opinion counted. And they absolutely loved everything. So that put us on the map for sure. For all of 2019. Lines out the door in Sandy Springs. Um, um, the shipping calls, shipping, shipping, shipping. Um, we’ve tried to connect with other influencers there, the pay for review type of model for most of them, and they don’t have the kind of following that these guys had. Mhm. Um, but what we’re doing for exposure, it’s a challenge for sure. We have email blasts um from actual customers. So we have about 15,000 uh, folks in our email list that have signed up to be on our email list. Um, that’s very huge. That’s powerful. If you have.

Kelly Biggs: [00:46:25] 15,000, that’s. Yeah, that’s that’s a huge number.

George Coundouriotis: [00:46:30] Um, then we have about 15,000 organic followers, um, that follow truly follow us on Instagram and 18,000 on Facebook. But, you know, at the end of the day, if we could get someone with a reputation, a following, a reputation that they know what they’re talking about, like a doctor, Eric Berg, for example, he’s an authority in this and he’s got 2 million followers. We’re trying to connect with him, uh, because he would be extremely interested, we think, in what we do. Um, but it’s tough to connect because they have 2 million followers, so they’re probably getting 20,000 messages a day at a minimum. And I can post a comment at Zamboanga on one of their posts of his posts that gets seen by his followers. That’s a very big thing, and it helps us. But to get him to say, okay, let me try your products, that would be hugely impactful.

Kelly Biggs: [00:47:33] So when you’re posting to his things, are you also are you linking your website? Yeah. So when you do that that’s called social bookmarking. Nice. And that’s super effective as well. People do that, people do that and they even do that on LinkedIn. I have a couple of people I follow, and the minute I comment something, the next thing I know, you know, I get all these people like, oh, connect with me, connect with me. So that that while you might not see it immediately, those types of strategies are are super important.

George Coundouriotis: [00:48:08] I agree totally. I’ve seen it. Um, in practice, like what you’re saying is actually does work. Yeah.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:48:14] Um, I wanted to mention kind of don’t forget the little guys, because you touched upon a couple of your passions like keto and low carb, and you brought up celiacs or marathon running. So I run a, um, a half marathon training group in Atlanta. So we’re based out of North Atlanta, and we kind of run all over from Roswell to Dunwoody to Sandy Springs. But already kind of I’m thinking about ideas of why wouldn’t we have like a party? Exactly. You know, with you guys, but that’s already accessed to like 30 to 40 people that can then kind of go and blog and put that social media piece about you. Um, another piece you brought up the celiac and the issues, the gastro issues that people might have. Yeah. Um, another thing that I’m heavily involved with is the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. So I feel like kind of getting into that network, not necessarily through, um, your main drivers like the big doctor names, but getting through with the volunteer parents that are putting together, like, we, um, do this big event that this past year we raised like $100,000 for Crohn’s and colitis through a Halloween trick or treating event. Nice. Nice. Um, and so you need.

Lola Okunola: [00:49:33] To be part of that.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:49:34] Yeah. So something like that is like I would say it would be great for you to have a table or have tastings, you know, have your brand all over the different marketing.

Lola Okunola: [00:49:44] Pass out for trick or treating. I can see it already.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:49:47] But I think based on like the conversation, I think kind of putting yourself out there and networking and don’t forget the little guys, because sometimes the little guys may have more influence, yes, than 100% than you realize, because I think sometimes trying to reach out to those, they.

Lola Okunola: [00:50:02] Come and they don’t go right, right. They’re not like the influencer. Once you’re up and you know they.

George Coundouriotis: [00:50:07] Eventually dies out, it dies.

Lola Okunola: [00:50:09] Down. But when you have the real followers, yep. They stay.

George Martin: [00:50:14] And I was thinking of something similar. But the their alliances, the medical health alliances, there’s one called. Earl von Hippel-lindau disease. It’s a rare form of family genetic cancer and their diets because it hits the pancreas. Their diets are all gluten free. I mean, they have to. They follow what you make. Yes. And they so often those who suffer from that are unable to really enjoy what they used to enjoy. And here’s your opportunity.

George Coundouriotis: [00:50:45] Let me ask you guys a question. Um, the whole table. But, you know, if you are in that position and you do and you’re interested in finding a bakery that can fill your needs, um, wouldn’t you do like a search? And on Google Yelp, we ranked number one, always number one, number one, number one in searches.

George Martin: [00:51:12] Um, you know, that’s an interesting question because I was just thinking about just my wife has VL that’s why I was thinking of that. And when we think about where do we go shop the Publix across the street. Convenient, easy. So we deal with whatever they can provide us and that limitation whatever. But, uh, to do something like what you’re suggesting to search on the internet for something like that, I would not even knowing that it even existed. Right.

George Coundouriotis: [00:51:38] Yeah. So that’s an interesting situation, because if I’m interested in a specific type of product or store, my first thing like we were talking about is a Google search. So if I wouldn’t wait to get it, like from the air, I would search for it.

Kelly Biggs: [00:51:55] A lot of a lot. I’ll start right now. Still, 90% of searches start on Google. Yeah, Google search engine. What’s important, though, is thinking about keywords in a different way, what you’re really looking for. So if I’m looking for a search my search might be around. Am I just information gathering? Right. What we try to look for is and that and if it’s just informational gathering, that’s what we call a short short word like you. Just one one word, gluten free, keto, those type of things. But what we what we’ll do is a Google search for we’ll talk to you. You know what? Who is your audience? What kind of things do you do? What makes you special? All of that. And then we go back and do some keyword searches like real generic. But then we move into this thought, and this is where honestly, I has been a tremendous help. And it’s saying because you have all these keywords of these keywords, which ones are the most transactional keywords? High intent. I’m looking to buy this today. Like what is that? Those are the keywords you want and those are the words you then kind of put on your page. Or you write articles about to drive people with high intent to your website. Exactly. That’s what’s important.

George Coundouriotis: [00:53:25] That’s great, great information because it’s like peeling the onion and getting deeper in layers to get. Ultimately, your goal is a transaction. You know, either online with our online shop which is local and shipping or walk into the bakery, you know. Right. So yeah.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:53:44] Transactional. Um, another great idea. And I feel like it could help with any business is having, um, people like implanted in the different moms groups online, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram. But I strangely, having an eight year old and being in the Jewish community in Atlanta, like, I get a lot of my information from the Jewish Moms group of Atlanta. And they’ll often be like, where can I find this cake? I need something kosher, but it can only have this, this, or this. And I feel like that’s a place that like, if you’re introducing a new product or something, you could have kind of plants already in all these different moms group because they’re listening to the people who they trust. Plus they want to support other people in the Jewish community or in the Atlanta community or Sandy Springs. So I feel like those are some other like avenues to keep in mind as well.

George Coundouriotis: [00:54:37] I think that’s huge. Um, and what we’ve done in the past and it’s hit or miss is, um, tag those groups on our posts, you know, like on Facebook or Instagram. And some of those groups are trending and then they, they go away like East Cobb moms was a big, important group for us. Um, and then that kind of like died down a little bit. But we do get a lot of mothers with it’s the cutest thing with little kids that come in and either they’re type one diabetic kids or there’s something else going on gluten free or something, and they just go crazy. The kids go, that’s like, that’s why we’re in. Isn’t this, you know, to be able to service folks that could not have that otherwise?

Kelly Biggs: [00:55:27] Are you asking them how they found you?

George Coundouriotis: [00:55:29] Yes. Always. Always.

Kelly Biggs: [00:55:31] So are they saying.

George Coundouriotis: [00:55:32] They do like they heard about us in the group? That’s common. Um, the other is there were driving around and they saw the big green signs that say keto, low carb, gluten free. And they said, we finally stopped in, um, because the location is is a good central location. But folks, um, have to search for us still because they’re on their way somewhere. It’s right by 400 exit five. So we’re right at the exit or entrance and folks are headed to 400 typically. So we do get a lot of cars in front of us, but they’re on a mission. Um, we need we need them to turn around on that mission. Take a brief stop.

Lola Okunola: [00:56:21] Well, hopefully today you have your, um, your customers that are listening and will know to stop or make a point to to come in. Um, thank you so much, Kelly, Hannah and George and George to George’s today. Um, for sharing information about your businesses. I would like for each of you to tell everyone how they can reach you. Like, what’s the best way, your website, your phone number, your email, whatever it is that you want people to know to be able to contact you, let’s let’s let them know. We’re going to start with you, George Martin.

George Martin: [00:56:58] I George, at, uh. Excuse me, I was about to give you my personal email address is wrong. Um, it’s corp care Corp as in Paul c a r e at corp. At um. Corp. Com Corp care erp com I know it’s sooner or later I will remember my own email on my, on my website corp care ERP. Com. And there you’ll see a listing of services and and the description of each of those services and so on.

Lola Okunola: [00:57:25] Yeah. So if you’re a company that is looking to provide more benefits to your employees, this could help you with retention. It could help you provide better benefits to your employees. Consider corp care their EAP program. Thank you Lila. Now, Kelly.

Kelly Biggs: [00:57:44] Yes. So in order to reach me, you can just go to Wtci Biggs digital.com. Our telephone number is (404) 682-2991. And I’ve really enjoyed speaking with all of you here. It’s been quite a blessing. Thanks.

Lola Okunola: [00:58:04] Yeah it’s definitely been great. I mean, you do not not want to call Kelly. Sounds like everyone needs to call Kelly. I can’t wait to get to my desk and go and look at all these new sites. Um, and next is Hannah O’Donohue.

Hannah O’Donoghue: [00:58:19] So you can find BCS partners online@bcs-partners.com. Um, I’m all over LinkedIn. So if you look up Hannah Vahaba O’Donohue it’s a lot of vowels. And so I’m not gonna spell it for you guys, but I think probably the best way to reach me is by phone or text message. We have like a nice zoom, um, phone setup. So you can reach me at 404 9477128. And that’s my work phone. But I can accept text messages or phone calls from there. And so that would probably be the best way to reach me so I can come and help do an insurance review for you guys.

Lola Okunola: [00:59:03] Yeah, maybe some tennis shoe collections or some artwork or something. And last but not least, George. Yeah.

George Coundouriotis: [00:59:12] So, um, we have two ways that you can reach us. One is the retail bakery and coffee shop on, uh, in Sandy Springs, and we’re located at 901 Abernathy Road in the Serrano, uh, mixed use condominium building. Um, between you might see it, I the eye clinic and the color bar hair salon right before 400 exit five. Um, and we are open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 to 4. And the phone number there is (400) 487-9973 one. Then we also have our commissary kitchen up in, uh, Alpharetta, exit 12. That’s not open to the public. That’s only by appointment. And we ship out of there nationwide. So if you have relatives, friends anywhere in the country, you can order on Zamba wingo.com. And if you’re local, you can, uh, select local pickup at checkout. And, um, set up your appointment the day and time, and we’ll welcome you at the commissary to, uh, give you the goodies.

Lola Okunola: [01:00:18] Awesome. Thank you so much, I can’t. Wait for us to be able to dig into these goodies that you’ve brought us.

George Coundouriotis: [01:00:24] I can’t wait for you guys to try them.

Lola Okunola: [01:00:25] Thank you so much. Well, that concludes another episode of the Chamber Spotlight Podcast, sponsored by Southern Live Oak Wellness. A big thank you to our guest, George Martin, Kelly Biggs, George Koundouriotis, and Hannah O’Donohue for joining us today. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Don’t forget to subscribe for more enlightening conversations with the community’s leaders. Until next time.