Is Anybody Listening to Me?
Introduction:
This week, Shawn Busse, Paul Downs, and Jennifer Kerhin talk about the challenges of communicating with employees, especially in the post-pandemic world. It’s hard enough to get aligned on mission and vision, but how do you connect with an employee you’ve never actually met in person? Is that even possible? We also discuss Jennifer’s realization that she has over-performed on sales but under-performed on marketing, which is part of the reason she’s re-doing her website. “I need a higher level of prestige,” she tells us, “so, better copy, better photographs, an all-around more sophisticated look. What we had was mom and pop. You know, Wix.” Plus: the panel tackles a question posted on the small business subreddit: “How large can my margins become before I’m ripping off my clients?”
— Loren Feldman
Guests:
Shawn Busse is CEO of Kinesis.
Paul Downs is CEO of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers.
Jennifer Kerhin is CEO of SB Expos and Events.
Producer:
Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.
Full Episode Transcript:
Loren Feldman:
Welcome Shawn, Paul, Jennifer. It’s great to have you here. I want to start today with a topic that Jennifer raised in our emails before taping the show today, which is how business owners communicate with their employees. I think this topic is especially relevant to both Jennifer and Shawn because they’ve both gone fully remote since COVID hit. But Jennifer, what prompted you to raise the issue?
Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, communication from a CEO is supposed to be both visionary but then establishing a connection. And with remote employees, and ones who maybe you’ve hired a year ago and you still haven’t met in person, the visionary part has made sense to me. I’ve worked through how to align our mission and our vision and our values to showcase to employees. But how do I establish a connection? Or is that possible? And do I have to just wait until we go face-to-face? Because we do events. I meet the employees, often in person, sometime throughout the year. How [is it] best to communicate, to establish connection? I’m just trying to figure it out.
Loren Feldman:
You’ve spoken here before about the fact that you guys do get together, even though you’re working remotely. You have these events, and people gather there. So you do get to spend time, and you have meals together, and all that. But you just mentioned you have an employee you hired a year ago who you’ve never met in person. That’s kind of an amazing situation.
Jennifer Kerhin:
I was at a show site at a convention, and there were three staff members, and I went out to dinner [with them]. Two of them, I had not met. They were hired in the fall of last year. So I had not met them personally. Obviously, I hired them through Zoom. It all worked out. They’re doing a great job. But having dinner with someone, there’s a connection there that you just… I mean, I’m in the business of face-to-face events. I don’t know why this surprises me. But this just doesn’t come across in Zoom, right?
I can, and I do, often talk about the culture and the values of the company. But that connection, I’m trying to figure out how to manage that through Zoom. We do “Lunch and Learns” where the company buys lunch, and we do training. Once a month, we do a virtual happy hour where one of the departments plays a game. We all bring drinks, and we learn either trivia or learn about ourselves. I’m just looking for more of those ideas of communication, but more so connection with employees.
Paul Downs:
My question is, why would you expect a fully-remote relationship to work at all? When I think about organizations where the actual leadership is sort of up on the mountain somewhere and giving pronouncements, often that is by video or whatever, but you’re not in actual touch with them. Most organizations that have been around for a while that do that always have somebody in person who’s actually dealing with the line-level people.
You know, think of the military or any large corporation. There are layers. And you’re trying to run a company where there aren’t any layers but you. And you’re not making a physical connection, but you’re trying to be both the scary leader or the removed leader, but also the empathetic, inspiring leader. And I’m not sure that that’s possible without just showing up and being in the same room with people.
Loren Feldman:
Shawn, what do you think?
Shawn Busse:
I don’t have a silver bullet, but I have a couple of ideas and also some things I’ve seen with some clients that have worked well. So one is, I would encourage Jennifer: You might consider the phone over Zoom. It’s interesting. When you get rid of the element of video, you just have a different relationship. And that might be something worth trying with some of your employees. There have been some studies on this, that when we see ourselves, we’re so fixated on how we look and how we appear that it kind of freezes our brain in other areas.
I also think, especially for fully-remote companies, that they need to take that money that they were going to spend on office space, if they’re committed to fully remote, and they need to spend it on flying people to be together. And I think they need to do that probably two to four times a year.
The clients that I’ve had that are pretty successful in terms of culture and being remote—I mean, talking all over the country—they’ll gather in different places around the country four times a year. And these are not related to client work, like you’re doing. These are just purely to shape and cultivate the culture. Those have been really, really successful, from what I’ve seen. I’m trying to do that with us, too.
Jennifer Kerhin:
Shawn, that’s good to hear. We are starting that. It’s taking a big hit in my budget from professional development, but we’re doing department meetings with each department coming together for a day and a half in person. The first one’s coming up, and we’re going to try that. Each department over the next four months is doing a day and a half meeting in person. That’s a good-to-hear recommendation, because we’re going to see how this works.
Paul Downs:
Yeah, for what it’s worth, my son managed a team of software engineers that was scattered all over the world. He had like 20 people in—I can’t remember—a dozen countries. And they made a point of getting together physically three or four times a year, just exactly like Shawn said. And I think that that’s pretty well-accepted in the software world where distributed workforces have been around for a while. You just have to get together. There’s no substitute for it.
Loren Feldman:
Paul, obviously, you’re not taking your factory remote anytime soon. Do you have any employees who are working remotely?
Paul Downs:
Not exclusively. Yeah, I would say that, “No,” is the answer. There are some who spend a day or two working from home when that’s the right solution to the day. But for the most part, I see all my people at least several times a week, physically. Like, we’re just in the same room. And I think that that makes it much, much easier to be the kind of leader I want to be. I think I would have a hard time projecting empathy over video or the phone.
Loren Feldman:
So leaving the remote issue aside, Paul, I know you’ve given a lot of thought to how you communicate with your employees. Do you have an overall philosophy of what you’re trying to accomplish in the way you communicate with them?
Paul Downs:
Yeah, my goal is for people to feel like they’re part of an organization that values their participation. One of the things that I learned in my Vistage group—I think, five or six years ago—we had a great speaker, and the guy was an actor. He was one of these local theater types, and he came in. He said, “Hey, if you want to be the leader, it’s a role. It’s something you put on every day.” You change your demeanor, the speed at which you speak, the consideration you give people. Everything is an act, because all your people are going to be looking at you. They’re the audience, and they’re looking for, I believe, certain things from leadership.
And those things are: One, leadership has a plan, that there’s some considered way that we’re going to move into the future. Number two, leadership is honest about the situation the company is in. And I give regular briefings every Monday updating my employees as to the financial health of the company, and the sales we made, and sort of what I see on the horizon.
But I think that the other thing is that it’s also important that a leader, these days, demonstrates a personal connection to the people who work for them, and shows some empathy and knows when the dog needs to be put down, or the kids are sick, or whatever is happening. You have some recognition that your people have their lives and that you’re there. You’re listening. You can be a resource.
I just had an employee who got on a plane to go to Ethiopia last week, because his family has been there. He’s from there. And the family was caught in the civil war situation, and he had not been able to communicate with them for three years. And during this time, there was a lot of trouble in the area he was in, and he didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. And just recently, he was able to reestablish communications, and he said, “Hey, I want to go back.” I was like, “Sure. Do you need some money?” But I just loaned him some money so that he could go and do what he needed to do.
And it’s being ready to respond to how people are. I think it goes a long way to building a culture, the kind of culture that I want, where everybody cares for each other. But it has to come from the top, too. The leadership has to care about the other people. So I think those are my goals.
Shawn Busse:
I love all that stuff you’re saying, especially the acting part, because I think there is something to projecting when you’re in a position of leadership. And I found that in times when I’m just not motivated, and I’m not fired up, the results I get are just so poor. And when I am engaged, and when I am participating, it’s exponentially better. Man, that’s really, really cool.
Loren Feldman:
The acting thing is kind of interesting to me. You need to perform, but you need to perform and act genuine. That almost seems contradictory.
Paul Downs:
You need to perform. But there are techniques involved in performance that make your inner feelings communicate better to the people who you want to understand what you’re thinking. A lot of that is about diction, honestly. It’s about making sure you speak slowly, clearly. You don’t contradict yourself two minutes later. You listen.
But all those things are, to my mind, a skill-set. And when I encountered this guy, I’d already been a boss for more than 25 years. But thinking back to all the situations when I was much younger—particularly, when I was younger and I was trying to communicate to people who were older and more experienced than me—it would have been damn helpful to have some of these techniques in hand, just to give myself a little bit of a tailwind when you’re fighting to establish your own authority and expertise in certain subjects.
Shawn Busse:
I’m right in the middle of promoting somebody internally to the role of president. And it’s just part of my succession plan. And it’s so interesting watching her present to the team. She’s really beloved by the company, everybody there. She does the third thing you talked about, which is create personal connection, Paul.
But it’s interesting, because the thing she’s actually not that good at—and she’s working on it—is clarity and succinct communication. And so when she does a presentation, she’s got way too many slides and way too many bullets. I’m really trying to coach her on a single message, very clear. Metaphors make it simple for people to understand, because they can only handle so much information at once. And in the one-on-ones, you can get a little deeper, but in a group, that clarity of information and succinctness is just so important. And I think that’s part of the skill-set and acting you’re talking about, too.
Loren Feldman:
And is that translating in a remote environment, Shawn?
Shawn Busse:
It’s not as easy. You know, it’s a lot, lot harder, because you can’t read the room. It’s really easy to be passive, if you’re a participant. Those little things that when you’re in a meeting that help the meeting, like somebody throws out a little joke here and there to lighten the room, those are harder to do. Knowing the vibe of the room is really difficult on Zoom. So yeah, I think it’s an uphill battle, all the way.
Jennifer Kerhin:
I would agree with that, Shawn. So I, every Monday morning, send out a weekly email from the CEO. Just sort of an update of things. I sort of have different categories I focus on, and there’s usually a call-out of an employee who did something great. But then on Wednesday morning, we have a half hour, full-staff meeting. And I asked them, I was like, “What do you think of these emails? Do you even read them? And what do you think of the Zoom meeting?” And they told me some really great positive feedback. And they’re like, “Don’t you know this?” I said, “How do I know it?”
It’s impossible to read the room, Shawn. Right? It’s impossible. You’re trying to be succinct. I’m not very clear sometimes either, so I try to do repetitive words, repetitive categories each week, just so that the message stays on point. And they remember it. It was great getting that feedback, because I wasn’t sure how it was being received.
Shawn Busse:
Yeah. I mean, Paul, you’re so fortunate, in some ways, that for your business, it’s not an option. It’s just clear that you lose so much over the remote. And you’re starting to see some of the studies. There was a study out in Bloomberg about productivity and remote work and some of the problems with those early studies that were showing greater levels of productivity.
So that’s just one element, the productivity side. But I think the morale of the team and the sense of connection, those things are, boy… We’re humans. I mean, we’ve been together in real space for hundreds of thousands of years.
Jennifer Kerhin:
But I’ll never go back, Shawn. Will you?
Shawn Busse:
We’re looking at office right now.
Jennifer Kerhin:
Okay, I’ll never do it. [Laughter]
Loren Feldman:
Why never, Jennifer?
Jennifer Kerhin:
With what we do, the ability to find labor across the country makes it so much easier to scale up. It’s really hard in the geographic region I’m in to find the labor needed. It’s difficult. And so now, I’m not constrained by geography. I am constrained by other issues, but not that.
Shawn Busse:
Where are you at?
Jennifer Kerhin:
In Baltimore.
Shawn Busse:
Oh, is it just that it’s really expensive labor?
Jennifer Kerhin:
It’s very niche, very niche labor.
Shawn Busse:
I mean, that’s a huge market. That’s interesting.
Paul Downs:
Well, I think that what we’re gonna end up with is replicating what used to be back in prehistoric days, where people lived in very small family bands. And most of the time, they were in groups of just a couple of people. And then they would get together with the rest of the tribe several times a year to sort of make the culture work, and get their kids married, and do whatever they did. But it was a splitting apart and coming together, splitting apart, coming together.
And we’ve just done this big experiment of what happens when everybody splits apart. And we haven’t figured out what the coming together needs to look like. Although I think that certain industries are ahead of it, like my son’s software experience. But that wasn’t cheap. They would put everybody on a plane and fly them to Portugal or whatever.
Loren Feldman:
It helps to be in the software business.
Paul Downs:
Yeah, the VCs could do that. I don’t know whether Jennifer could afford to do that. But I think there’s no free lunch, in terms of, “Oh, I don’t need to rent an office, and I can just sit at my desk all day and run a multinational corporation.” I don’t think that that’s actually going to work. We’re gonna see that pretty clearly.
Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I agree. One hundred percent.
Loren Feldman:
Jennifer, it sounds like you’re doing well with a lot of these things. Did this issue come up in your mind because there were problems that you feel need to be addressed? Or is it more just as a vague sense that you’re not sure you have the connection you’d like to have, or that you once had when you were all working in the same place?
Jennifer Kerhin:
It’s more just a vague sense of: Am I talking, and no one’s listening? [Laughter] And should I be doing something differently? I think that it. To Shawn’s point of reading the room, if you talk, and no one’s paying attention, you find out pretty easily what you’re saying is worthless. When you’re sending an email or doing a Zoom call, it’s more difficult.
And I absolutely believe, to Paul’s point earlier, the way I inspire is to tell my employees: What they do matters. The important work that they do, they may not notice it, but it helps fund the mission of an association. And we work with some amazing associations that are doing really important, impactful work out there. And what my staff does is help them fund that mission, and I want to make sure that comes across. I want to inspire them. But I also want to know that they’re listening or that it matters and that they’re not just ignoring it. I don’t know. I think it’s a more vague sense, Loren.
Shawn Busse:
Did you used to have an office, Jennifer?
Jennifer Kerhin:
We did, we did.
Shawn Busse:
What was the lease payment on that office and the headcount of people you had there?
Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, I owned the office. I still do, and so I never really paid myself. I should have.
Shawn Busse:
Ah, so artificially.
Jennifer Kerhin:
Artificially, right. And then, I would have been the person—in 2019, my staff came to me and wanted to work one time per month at home. And I was like, “No. No, I don’t see it.” And then COVID forces us—and I was two weeks away from buying a 3,500-square-foot building to house our office in right before COVID—to fully embrace the virtual work.
And I love it now. I absolutely adore it. I think my employees love it. It works really well for all of us. Are there challenges? Yes, we discussed it before: training new people—recent college graduates—is challenging. Connection is challenging. And I think, I’m hoping, Shawn, that these meetings, these in-person meetings, do solve some of that. I wish I would have thought of that last year.
Shawn Busse:
I mean, I think folks are kind of just now figuring this out. And they saw the positive aspects of remote, which are many, especially when you have kids, or elderly parents—
Loren Feldman:
Or commutes.
Shawn Busse:
I don’t miss the commute at all. And now, I think we’re starting to see the downside. I love your idea of getting people together. Companies that I’ve seen, that are doing that, seem to be doing well.
To get back to why I asked Jennifer what you were paying for your lease, I was doing the math on pre-pandemic Kinesis, and we were spending—I don’t know—nine grand a month, somewhere in that range, for a team of 14-ish people. It was probably more space than we needed, but it was a wonderful space. If I take that number, multiply it times 12, throw in some extra money for all the lunches and other stuff we would do, it’s probably $120,000 a year. That’s what, like $8,000-$9,000 per person? I could budget that to fly them places, put them up, have them have great experiences.
So I don’t know that it’s necessarily more expensive to do that. It’s just a different use of the money. And I think a lot of folks went remote, and they were like, “This is sweet. We’re saving all this money.” But they’re missing out on the costs that they’re paying, that they’re going to pay in higher turnover rates of junior employees, folks feeling disconnected, alienated. So they’ve got to counteract that, and that’s gonna take money. It’s gonna take money. That’s all. It’s as simple as that.
Loren Feldman:
All right, next topic. Jennifer, at the end of the last session that you were on, you mentioned that you’ve recently invested heavily in a new website. Could you tell us a little about that? What are you trying to do? And how’s it going?
Jennifer Kerhin:
Sure. It’s not launched yet. It will be launched in a few weeks. So we’re on the final lap. I think we rebranded January of 2022, and we did it very quickly after COVID. Because our company changed dramatically. We added a lot of new services. We’re doing a lot of tech support in the virtual event world. So we rebranded, but there just wasn’t enough time in the day to rebrand and then make a great website. So we just sort of slapped it together. And now, a year into this, a year and a half, it’s not good enough. A year into it, we realize we’re just not making an impression when new associations come to us. It looks bad.
And so our new website, we’re not going in a new direction like Paul is with his website. It’s the same people who we want to see it, and it’s not for lead generation. It’s more to showcase who we are to associations that already may be interested in us. And I need a higher level of prestige—so, better copy, better photographs, an all-around more sophisticated look. What we had was mom and pop. You know, Wix. And now moving to the next level, we’ll have a professional designer, professional copywriter, a brand agency helping us to get to that next level of sophistication. So I would say, overall, pretty great. I look forward to the end result.
Paul Downs:
You’re near the finish line on this?
Jennifer Kerhin:
I am. I would say two more weeks.
Paul Downs:
And what’s the budget been?
Jennifer Kerhin:
It’s been low. We’ve spent about $15,000.
Paul Downs:
On everything?
Jennifer Kerhin:
On everything.
Paul Downs:
That’s low. Low by my lights.
Jennifer Kerhin:
Hopefully the sophistication level is still high. We have a great, great agency that we’ve worked with in the past and partnered with on some other things that I know gave me a family and friends discount. And I’m looking forward to seeing the end result.
Paul Downs:
Do you get a lot of organic traffic to your site?
Jennifer Kerhin:
No.
Paul Downs:
How do people get there then? Why would they find you?
Jennifer Kerhin:
Yeah, they contact us through other means. I speak at a lot of conferences, or they moved from association to association. And so they say, “Oh, I recommend this company,” and then that person goes on the website to hear more about us.
Shawn Busse:
The function it’s performing is affirmation. So your customers, or your potential customers, are evaluating you. They’re finding out about you via word of mouth. And then the website’s job is to affirm that purchase and to not scare them away.
Jennifer Kerhin:
I’m going to use that sophisticated marketing language, Shawn. I like that. [Laughter] Affirming our abilities and our reputation. I like it. I think that’s going in my next weekly CEO email.
Shawn Busse:
That’s cool. I really, really encourage folks to think about good marketing as a series of yeses. Like: Okay, they heard about us via word of mouth. They heard good things. That’s a “Yes.” They went to the website. They saw on the website what they heard via word of mouth. That’s another “Yes.” They read a case study. That’s another “Yes.” They picked up the phone. They had a great experience on the phone. That’s a “Yes.” And so just evaluating that entire journey of purchasing to the point they become a customer and then after, and make that all yeses and look for the nos. And it sounds like your website was kind of a, “Well, maybe.” It wasn’t a, “Yes.” So that’s cool.
Paul Downs:
Yeah, I’m looking at your website right now. The thing that’s missing, that you need, is testimonials from clients front and center. Because anybody can put up a site that says, “Hey, we do stuff.” But it’s the power of other people affirming that you did a great job that you really want to put right there.
Jennifer Kerhin:
Totally agree. That’s phase two. So the website goes up. And in the meantime, we have people working on writing case studies with our clients. So that will be probably in the fall. Totally agree with you.
Paul Downs:
I would extract the pithiest sentence or two from those case studies and just make a scroll on the bottom of the screen that’s just like, “These people are awesome, bup, bup, bup.” We’ve looked into why people buy from us, and a big part of it is they’re suspicious. Like, “Who are these guys who just came from a Google search?”
So we’re always making sure that we’re showing them two kinds of testimonials. One is from people who are just plain impressive, but the other one is from people who might be down the street from our clients—so that we’re saying, “Yeah, we could service anybody, even the most demanding, but we also work with people like you.” And doing those two things at the same time is the best thing you can do with testimonials.
Some kinds of testimonials can chase people away. If they look at the testimonial, and they say, “Oh, well, of course, the president hired you. Of course, you did a great job. But that’s not me.” So you have to figure out who your next client is and make sure that you’re demonstrating that you could do for them the same work you could do for anybody else.
Shawn Busse:
I agree with most of everything Paul just said. I’m curious about what your strategy is for your “About” page. My instinct, when I look at a company, is to go to the “About” page and the “Team” page.
Loren Feldman:
Jennifer, you don’t have one, right? At the moment.
Jennifer Kerhin:
So what happened is—it’s terrible. I have under-performed in the marketing area but over-performed in the sales area.
Shawn Busse:
Right.
Jennifer Kerhin:
And so now I’m going back to be like, “Okay, our marketing presence needs to reflect who we are as a company now.” And so that’s why, a couple months ago, I embarked on this process. Yeah, don’t look at our website. It’s terrible. [Laughter] For the new website, feel free to give me feedback in a few weeks. I’ll come back on and you guys can give me better feedback on that.
But overall, across the board, we tell a much better story in the sales process than we’ve ever done in marketing. And I don’t know where that disconnect happened. It happened years ago. It’s, I think, because I enjoy sales more than I enjoy the marketing part of it. I don’t know.
Shawn Busse:
Well, who’s helping you with the marketing?
Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, up until a year ago, I was totally responsible for business development. So business development marketing was on my shoulders, and I lean toward sales.
Shawn Busse:
And you like sales. I mean, that’s like the age-old pitfall that every owner does, is they hire a VP of business development and hope they’ll do marketing and sales equally well. And they never do. They’re either really good at sales, or they’re really good at marketing. So it’s great you’re recognizing that you’re really good at sales. And that’s usually the fastest path to growth, which you’ve demonstrated. So who’s going to help you with the marketing now?
Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, you know, Shawn, it’s funny you say that, because of the director of business development I had, she’s amazing. But she’s more of a salesperson, too. [Laughter]
Shawn Busse:
You’ve got two of you!
Jennifer Kerhin:
I have a bunch of volunteers from the staff, but they are not marketing people. Oh, you’ve just identified a gap that I have now.
Shawn Busse:
Yeah, and then you’re only spending 15 grand, so I’m like, “Who’s gonna really nail it for you?” I’m hoping your agency’s good.
Jennifer Kerhin:
What’s your suggestion?
Shawn Busse:
Well, wait till your website comes out. Then Paul and I will really hurt your feelings.
Jennifer Kerhin:
Okay.
Paul Downs:
Well, you’re gonna do 4 million bucks this year, right?
Jennifer Kerhin:
No, $3.6 million.
Paul Downs:
Let’s say 5 percent for marketing. That’s about what I’ve spent on it for years—whatever that is—that’s closer to 100 grand. And that’s how you grow your company. You have to make people aware. The fact that you guys are good at sales is awesome, because a lot of people are the flip side. And that’s a much tougher problem.
Shawn Busse:
That’s a worse problem, actually.
Paul Downs:
But I think part of it is thinking of just like, “Hey, we’re making this much money. This much money’s coming in the door. How much should I be spending on whatever?” And you’re not spending it on rent. Okay, you’re gonna maybe spend it on staff development, but you should have a budget for marketing. You should just expect to pay something for it.
Jennifer Kerhin:
I do. But I’ve put the marketing money in thought leadership. So when I speak at conferences, the cost that it takes for me to go there. We’re exhibiting for the first time this year.
Shawn Busse:
That’s totally reasonable.
Paul Downs:
Yeah, I’m agnostic on what you should do with it. But I don’t think you should be surprised to be paying something for it.
Jennifer Kerhin:
No, I’m not surprised by that. What I’m disappointed—I guess, in myself—is that the website just became overlooked as we grew, and we focused on sales. Somehow, this website fell to the side. And I’m looking at it now, and it’s pitiful.
Loren Feldman:
Jennifer, why didn’t you address it when you did the overall rebranding? Why did you leave that behind, at that point?
Jennifer Kerhin:
I rebranded, but I wasn’t sure. At that point, we hadn’t had the sales come in. In retrospect, yes, Loren, I should have at that point said, “Let’s spend $30,000, make some great brochures or a website, do testimonials, put it there.” But I wasn’t quite sure. And then a few months later, we got all the sales. So there was like a small window of opportunity that I just skipped over. And then the sales came in, and I was busy trying to figure out how to scale up operationally.
Shawn Busse:
Well, this is so good, because really, what this illustrates is that Jennifer kicks ass at sales. She’s allocating money to a type of marketing, which is thought leadership, which leads to faster lead generation, because people are seeing her. They’re seeing she’s an expert. They’re going, “We want to talk to you.” And half of them are going to the website and maybe not taking action, because the website’s hurting you, but the rest are going, “I trust this person. I’ll overlook this crappy website.” So it’s actually, dollar for dollar, a great use of your money.
But then the thing you’re not doing is a different type of marketing. You’re really not doing brand strategy, messaging, and communication. And that’s a whole different discipline. And it requires a different level of expertise. And, you know, that’s cool. You’ve identified the challenge, but you’ve also been doing really great things. So I think Paul’s right. I think you’ve under-resourced. You probably under-resource marketing, and you’ve put a lot of it into sales.
Jennifer Kerhin:
I agree, I agree. To scale to the next level, I can’t ignore it anymore. I could get to this level with a hard emphasis on sales and expertise through thought leadership. But to grow to the next level, I can’t.
Paul Downs:
What percentage of your business now is repeat clients?
Jennifer Kerhin:
70 percent.
Paul Downs:
Well, that’s how you’ve been surviving. Because once you get them once, then whether you have a shitty website or not doesn’t matter. But that will limit your growth, because just like what Shawn said. Just picture it. Someone says, “Oh, I saw Jennifer at the conference. She gave a great speech,” and someone says, “Oh, yeah, send me the email,” or whatever. And then they click on the website, and they’re like, “You want to hire this person?” And you lose them there. That’s where you lose them.
And so, you’ve been able to keep your hooks in people by doing a great job, and that’s fantastic. But it’s going to limit your growth. It’s so easy to just see some little thing these days, and be like, “Ew! That bothered me! I’m gone.” And so our whole marketing and sales process is about making sure that once you’re in our gravity pull, you never get out. We never give you that excuse to leave. Everything gets better and better.
Shawn Busse:
A bunch of yeses. It’s all yeses. What’s the average age of your buyer, and has that changed, Jennifer?
Jennifer Kerhin:
I would say 35 to 55. No, it has not changed.
Shawn Busse:
It’s not gone down?
Jennifer Kerhin:
No.
Shawn Busse:
Really? So this is another factor to consider, is that older buyers place less emphasis on things like visual design and clarity of messaging and professionalism of the website. And to Paul’s point, like for younger buyers, that can be an immediate no. And so that’s the thing I always wonder about with new clients is: What’s your buyer like? And I’m seeing a pretty massive shift because the Boomers are retiring or leaving their businesses.
So now you’re getting either Gen Xers who are at the VP level or the decision-making level, and there’s not enough of us. And so that means Millennials are in those positions. And they really grew up on brand. They grew up on professionalism and clarity of brand. So I think it’s even more important as the age of those—maybe the age isn’t changing, maybe it’s just that that demographic is now in charge. So I think that’s real.
Jennifer Kerhin:
So, after the website, and then case studies, Shawn or Paul, what do you think’s next for me on the marketing side?
Paul Downs:
It depends on how you present the case studies. I would be careful about just having a page full of case studies on your website. You need something that speaks to people being happy, right on the homepage. And we have a rotating—I don’t know what you call it. It’s not a banner. But it’s—
Shawn Busse:
A carousel.
Paul Downs:
A carousel—there you go—that’s just testimonial after testimonial, so that as soon as you’re on the site, you’re seeing, “Oh, there were happy clients.” Now that’s on the new site. On the old site, we have the Google review tab right on the page with 100-some Google reviews, and you click into that. It’s all about establishing that other real people have patronized your company and had a good experience. That’s the key thing these days.
Shawn Busse:
One thing though, Paul, that’s really important here is that, I’m guessing, folks, when they come to your site, they are in a buying state of mode, right? Like, they know, “I need a conference table.” And so they’re in the evaluation phase. And so it makes a ton of sense for you to throw testimonials, because you’re saying, “We already know you need a table. We make tables. Look at what everybody says about how great our tables are.”
It could be that Jennifer’s buyers may need to be educated. They may not actually know they need to hire her to do the thing. That’s a challenge I have, is that folks don’t know what they need to buy when they’re coming to our site, as an example. So I guess that’s a question for you, Jennifer. Are they buying? Do they know what they’re buying? Or do you have to educate them still?
Jennifer Kerhin:
You bring up a really good question. I think before, they were coming to our site because they knew what they were buying. But now that we’ve added these services—you’re making me think here, Shawn. I think I’m realizing that, especially on one side of it, we need to do a significantly better job of educating them—especially two of the new services I’m thinking of. Uh huh.
Shawn Busse:
I mean, that could be, because my understanding—if I remember back to some of the shows I’ve listened to with you on—the landscape has changed so dramatically, because events and association events have gone from all in person to remote and now hybrid. And then that’s opened up a whole Pandora’s box of ways to approach an event. Correct?
Jennifer Kerhin:
You’re exactly correct.
Shawn Busse:
So you’re gonna have buyers who don’t know what those solutions are. So you’ve got to educate them before you can sell them. Sometimes.
Jennifer Kerhin:
That’s exactly the service that I’m thinking of. That’s the service that’s brand new, that and the event tech support. Those two services are new. They’re kind of new to the association/convention world, because they didn’t exist before, or they did but in such a very small way before COVID. No, you are absolutely right. We have not changed our mindset, in that the website—or any of our communications; we have zero other promotional communications, zero—so there is no education on those two services. I’m taking copious notes now.
Shawn Busse:
Paul, how do you handle—because I simplified your business a lot there.
Paul Downs:
No, I think you’re absolutely on target. Yeah, we’ve got a different buyer than she does, although maybe not that different. I would say what’s similar between your buyer and my buyer is they’re shopping for something that is not generally understood by buyers. Like, my people come to us with no preconceived notion of what a table should cost, for instance.
Loren Feldman:
Is that an advantage or a disadvantage for you?
Paul Downs:
Oh, it’s a huge advantage. I mean, I don’t want to be in a price competition with anybody. And as I said, there are a lot of buyers who proceed all the way down the road with us, who you never think would be buying an expensive custom table. The thing is, we just gave them what they wanted. And then at the end of the day, they didn’t even bother to price shop, I imagine, because we answered every question.
So I think that if you’re going to educate a client, the one thing I would watch out for—and we’ve sort of found this out the hard way—is that if you put the answer to every question on your site in a way that people can easily read and understand, they’ll often just read, and understand, and go away, and think, “Oh, I got it. I got it now.” And what you really want is to talk to them. So you have to kind of leave a certain amount of confusion there so that they want to call and figure out what you’re actually doing.
And how did we find that out? Well, through a lot of experimentation with how comprehensively we would describe the solution to certain problems. And when we made it crystal clear how to size a table for your room, then people would just be like, “Oh, thank you very much. That was nice information.” Then they would disappear. Whereas if you kind of got them started, but then maybe you didn’t tell them everything, then people would call you to figure out what the rest of the answer was.
So you’ve got to understand what your goal is, too. Like, my goal is to get people to call me. So we’re very carefully tracking the number of people who arrive at the site and the number who call us, from year to year, so that we can see whether we’re on track with at least that part of generating the funnel.
Jennifer Kerhin:
And is that, Paul, with your new site, geared towards the architects?
Paul Downs:
That’s a very different audience. And so it doesn’t need quite the same treatment. With them, we’re really emphasizing that sense of, “Hey, we’ve worked with the most demanding people, and we’ve worked with people like you.” That’s really what that site is supposed to say. And that’s why we put the testimonials up in a way you really can’t avoid them.
And they’re very carefully chosen. We’ve got a couple of thousand different nice things people have said about us over the years. So the ones I chose to feature were very carefully considered. Who is it? What are they saying? What is the message they would give to someone who’s not sure whether we’re a good idea or not? Because with the clients we’re aiming for on that site, the worst thing they could do would be to go all the way to the end of a project with us, and we screw it up. That would be a disaster for that person.
And so we have to be engendering trust right from the get go, which is probably exactly the same thing with you. You’re dealing with the operating director of some association, and that person is either going to come away after the convention feeling like that was a win or that was a loss. And if it’s a loss, then their personal credibility within the organization is now threatened. So part of our messaging is based on understanding who we’re talking to and how different people win or lose within their organization and their day-to-day life. And so making sure that we’re responding to people who need to be able to show that their choice was the best choice to the other people who they have to deal with all the time.
Jennifer Kerhin:
Paul, after your website, do you have a communications plan that’s not just sort of sales calls?
Paul Downs:
Not a really good one, and we’re trying to rectify that. Most of our traffic is just inbound and that’s enough to get me sort of where I’ve gotten. And we’re trying to figure out an outbound sales strategy. I think it’s a really difficult problem these days, because the channels that everybody has access to are mostly digital, and it’s mostly advertising, sort of Google-style advertising, remarketing, ads that chase you around all your devices. And you’re like, “What the hell is this? Why are these people nagging me?” And everybody in the industry swears to God that works. And everybody out of the industry hates it.
So there’s something basically wrong here. And so it’s not clear to me what a strategy would be, other than to put out decent content, keep the website fresh, do the Instagram feed, and hope for the best.
Jennifer Kerhin:
You mean you’re not gonna do TableTok, a new TikTok channel devoted to conference tables?
Paul Downs:
No, I don’t think I will. But I am going to try to talk more… I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re gonna do. As a 61-year-old, this whole world is kind of discouraging. [Laughter] Because if we master TikTok, then five years from now, it’ll be BlipBlop or some other thing that’s all new, and we’ve got to start all over. And that’s not very exciting for me.
Shawn Busse:
Jennifer, are you using LinkedIn as a way to create new connections and then influence?
Jennifer Kerhin:
Yes, so I love LinkedIn. It’s the only social media that I love. And we post when we’re on show site, photographs of what we’re doing. We connect a lot with our potential clients as well as our current clients. That is a medium or social media outlet that our potential clients use.
Shawn Busse:
I think one opportunity that’s pretty big there is not just to be like, “Hey, look, we’re doing this, we’re doing this, we’re doing this,” but actually to use something that’s called the strategic narrative framework. Essentially, what is the old way that was being done? What is the new way? Why do you need to care?
And I think for you to just hammer that out there continually to let people know there’s a new way. I think that’s your opportunity. Because this is a clear case of: The world has changed. People need to know about that change. You are at the forefront of that change. What do you think?
Jennifer Kerhin:
I like it. So is it me writing it? Is it ChatGPT? Is it a content writer?
Shawn Busse:
I mean, I think you’re probably the voice, as opposed to the company. It’s going to be more compelling and believable. Yeah, I mean, you might need some help here. But I would just encourage you to think about what really connected when you were up on stage in the real world that got people leaning forward, and then try those messages out in the space and try storytelling in the space. And if that starts to work, then you can try things like paid media, but I don’t know. I like the authentic connection. That’s what fires me up about LinkedIn as well.
Loren Feldman:
Going back to the website for a second, I’m feeling a little bit guilty that we’re having this conversation right before she puts up her new website. And we may have discussed some things here that she’s now—
Jennifer Kerhin:
I think it’s great, because now I can have their feedback once it’s done. And they can tell me—
Paul Downs:
Okay, wait a minute. We should actually, for the benefit of the audience, just say what the URL is. So they can look at this site right now and go, “Yeah, ugh.” And then when the new one comes out, they can be like, “Holy smokes.” So it’s Discoversb.com. And the name of your company is Sponsorship Boost. And your website is—
Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, that used to be the name. That used to be the name.
Paul Downs:
Well, that’s what you have stamped on the envelope you sent me.
Jennifer Kerhin:
Oh, yeah. [Laughter]
Paul Downs:
What’s it called now?
Jennifer Kerhin:
It’s now SB Expos and Events.
Paul Downs:
All right, SB Expos and Events, but it’s still gonna be Discoversb.com, right?
Jennifer Kerhin:
Yes, it is.
Loren Feldman:
You might need that marketing person, Jennifer.
Jennifer Kerhin:
I think I do. I think I do. I think I have to figure out next stage.
Paul Downs:
I’ll add one other thing, which is that when I hire a website company, I don’t assume that we’re just gonna do this site, and then shake hands, and then we’re gonna be done. I actually have my first website company on retainer, and we’re still in the bug-fix phase of the second website company, but I’ll put them on retainer too. I always want to make sure that we have a pretty comprehensive back-end to the website, so that I can do a lot of editing myself. We can load new content in, we can update things.
But to me, it’s just like, of course, you’re gonna need to be talking to these people all the time. A website is your store. You don’t just put stuff in it one day and then just forget about it for the next five years. You have to think about it, and have the ability to change it whenever you feel like it. And that should be the expectation of you, whoever on your team is doing content, and the people who are running the website.
Loren Feldman:
I’d like to squeeze one more topic in here real quick. I actually saw this question on the small business subreddit. The owner of a landscaping company asked, “How large can my margins become before I’m ripping off my clients?” And I thought the conversation was pretty interesting. I’m curious how you guys react to that. Is the size of your margins an ethical issue?
Paul Downs:
Well, I would say that based on the businesses in my Vistage group that different industries just have different expectations of margin, and that service industries and professional service industries have much, much higher man margins than manufacturers. The guys I know in the group who have the highest margins are in the 30-to-40-percent range. And that’s just normal for those kinds of businesses.
Loren Feldman:
Do they worry about ripping off their clients?
Paul Downs:
No, that’s just how it goes. Like in manufacturing, if you could get a 40-percent net margin, oh my God. It wouldn’t last long because someone will steal your product. And I think that the question really is answered not by the owner, but by the marketplace and the customers. So if the customers are paying so much, and then they suddenly realize that, down the street, there’s another landscaper that’s half the cost, they’ll go there. And that’ll fix itself. You’ve got to have some faith in the market. But different businesses settle into different patterns, and so there may not be a huge price difference going from one business to the other, if the whole industry works that way.
Jennifer Kerhin:
I agree. A margin is a temporary snapshot of what’s happening to the business and your service or product. And it could change drastically in six months. Competition could come in, the market could change, economic standings could change. So then your margin over the course of the year is much less than what it might be for that one product, that one job, that one client, so I would not worry. It sounds like the question’s based on fear, anxiety. I wouldn’t worry about it. I would worry that if it’s so high, you price yourself up and competition comes and sort of steals your lunch.
Loren Feldman:
Shawn, we’re all familiar with businesses that don’t charge enough. They’re afraid to raise their prices, because they’re not sure people will pay it. Do you ever run into businesses that are reluctant to charge more because they think there’d be something wrong if they actually charged more?
Shawn Busse:
Oh yeah, over the years, many businesses. And I think the Achilles heel here is that our ability to gauge value, as the provider of the thing, is very limited, because what we do maybe comes naturally to us, or we built experience over the years. And so we have a tendency to devalue the thing that we do in relation to what the market sees its value as.
And I think for the landscaper, this is a great example. I couldn’t find somebody to come take care of my yard. Like, I would call and nobody returned my calls. So for me, the value isn’t in the price. It’s actually in reliability and consistency. And so this landscaper may very well be under-estimating the value he provides to his customers, because he doesn’t actually understand their point of view.
You know, it could be that for these customers, their greatest value is time, and so to have somebody who’s consistent and good and does great work, they don’t think about the margin and being ripped off. They see a great value to what he’s doing. And I think that’s usually where owners get caught. They don’t recognize that what they’re doing is so incredibly valuable. And if it’s not, the market will crush you. So, yeah.
Paul Downs:
Well, there’s one other possibility too, and I’ve run into more people who are in this situation probably than those who are able to get away with overcharging, which is: They don’t actually understand their numbers. And so they think, “Oh, if I charge $100 an hour when I used to make 25 bucks an hour working for Joe, that’s terrible. I wouldn’t do that.” And they just don’t have any sense of what the actual costs they need to cover are in order to perform their business successfully.
And so I think that that’s when people ask that question. I’m always like, “Do you actually know what you’re talking about?” I mean, let’s face it. Nobody would ever drive for Uber or any of these delivery companies if they actually understood car depreciation. And there are so many people who just have no idea what they’re trying to accomplish by charging money to some other person, and what they need to get in order to actually have a healthy business. And I’ve talked to multiple small, small struggling business owners who are in that situation. They just never had any notion of what they needed to do with their money. So they were undercharging, and they were constantly in trouble and tearing their hair out. And so, fix that problem first before you worry about overcharging people.
Shawn Busse:
Yeah, amen to that. It’s so easy to under-appreciate the risk you’re taking as an owner. And to some degree, you have to price that into how you charge for things. You know, you get sick and can’t deliver services. An employee sues you. A client sues you. It’s just a very volatile, uncertain environment. And to some degree, margin is your friend in that.
Loren Feldman:
All right, my thanks to Shawn Busse, Paul Downs and Jennifer Kerhin—and to our sponsor the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses use an open-book management system to build healthier companies. You can learn more at Greatgame.com. Thanks, everybody.
