What’s Wrong With Small Business Marketing?
Sometimes, before you can figure out how to sell, you have to figure out who you are.
By Loren Feldman
How do we get more customers?
Like most business owners, Shawn Busse, CEO of Kinesis, and David Nichols, CEO of Loupe, have asked themselves that question many times. Early on, they tried to answer it, as most businesses do, by focusing on the basic elements of marketing: logos, positioning, platforms, and the like. Over time, however, they came to a very different understanding—basically that before you can create an awesome message for a video or a website, you have to truly understand what’s awesome about the business. That has led them to take a very different approach to marketing. To hear more about their journeys, you can watch the video above or read the edited transcript below.
Loren Feldman
Shawn, let me let me start with you. Tell us first, what Kinesis does and then tell us how things changed for you around the time that we hit the Great Recession.
Shawn Busse
Sure. As you know, I’m just a huge supporter of small businesses, which really kind of gets to what Kinesis does, which is we help small businesses to really be their most remarkable self. I’d say our journey has been almost the same length as yours. We’ve been around for about 21 years. I’ve worn 21 hats throughout that journey, for sure.
Loren Feldman
Thank you for doing that. I appreciate that, Shawn.
Shawn Busse
In 2009, 2010, we got hit by the Great Recession after having been in business for about a decade, and it really caused us to question everything. The phone pretty much stopped ringing overnight. And the vexing question I had—or the paradox—was that our customers were in-house marketers, mostly at small-to-medium sized businesses, some corporate players as well.
Loren Feldman
And what were you helping them with at that point?
Shawn Busse
We’d do all the tactical stuff: branding, positioning, website development, logo design. We were really the shop you hired if you needed to get marketing done, and we were relying on the internal marketer to set the course for where they wanted to go. And then we’d just essentially follow their lead. It’s an okay model—as far as business models go. There’s a lot of marketers that need a lot of help, and a lot of people want to help them.
But what I found to be really fascinating and a little bit saddening was that when the economic situation went south, a lot of businesses, their first fire was to eliminate their marketers. And then maybe shortly thereafter, their salespeople, which was really strange to me. Because these are the people who are supposed to help bring customers in the door and to help create revenue opportunities. So it was a tough moment, because you sort of take for granted that this is what their job is, and you thought that that’s what they were accomplishing. And yet, owners clearly didn’t have enough confidence in them to invest in them.
And that started me on this journey of asking the question, What’s wrong with marketing for small businesses? And why do so many of them struggle with it over and over and over again, to where they’re scared to invest in it? Or they don’t want to go all in. And I’m really interested in answering that question, or I was, and I figured a few things out along the way.
Loren Feldman
Well, give us a hint. You started asking the question, I think, maybe it’s not just about the marketing? Maybe you need to look more holistically at what the company is doing? What prompted that?
Shawn Busse
Well, first I realized, all these folks were getting fired. And then I just started thinking about, Okay, let’s put myself in the shoes of the small business owner. And I realized that two things were happening. One is that the owner wasn’t doing a very good job of connecting to the marketer to communicate what their vision and purpose of the organization was—where they wanted to take it. And that’s a really hard thing to do. So there is a gap there.
And what was happening was, marketers were just doing stuff: making websites, creating new logos, running social media campaigns, and sometimes that stuff worked. And other times, it really wasn’t producing any kind of tangible results that the owner could see. And more importantly, they weren’t connecting to the owners vision and purpose. So that was problem number one. And then problem number two is that the owners themselves actually had struggled really hard to stand out in a crowded marketplace. And so even though the marketer might be a really great marketer, what they were marketing, the thing that the business did, wasn’t actually that remarkable to a buyer—even though it could have been.
That was the big gap that I saw. And then I was like, Oh, let’s figure out what a company stands for. First, let’s go from the inside of the company and work outwards, as opposed to outside in, which is what most marketing does. That was our big epiphany. That’s why we wrote the book (Marketing from the Inside Out). That’s our whole marketing from the inside out framework. And in that journey, when you realize that purpose starts here and then radiates outward, you realize purpose also needs to touch your employees, and that you need to hire employees that align with your vision and purpose. And then they touch your customers and create a remarkable experience. So then we started getting into things like recruiting and retention and culture and amplifying.
Loren Feldman
So before I turn to David, you’ve basically framed it in terms of the companies that you were working with. But what impact did going on this journey have on you and your business?
Shawn Busse
I went from having a kind of mediocre business with an offering that lots of people could do—to be totally candid—to having a business that had something that nobody else was really doing. We had what you would call a proprietary way of working. And so that shifted us from being viewed as more of a commodity to being viewed as a strategic partner, which meant you could charge more for your services that were more reflective of the value you were providing. And so that was a massive transformation to go from being a commodity, or thought of as something that lots of people could do, to something that only you could do. That’s a huge, huge pivot. And then in terms of the market, we went from being kind of flat to mediocre growth every year to just taking off. We won fastest growing awards year in and year out.
Loren Feldman
And how did that happen? Was it the result of marketing? Word of mouth? How did you grow so fast?
Shawn Busse
So a lot of it is, don’t ever underestimate when a market wants something. And after the recession, people were deathly afraid to hire another marketer. So we had an outsourced solution. For a scared business owner who realized, I’ve got to do marketing, I’m reluctant, I don’t know what to do, but I’ve got to do it, I would raise my hand and say, I tell you what, we’re outsourced. If we’re not working for you, you can cut the cord anytime. You don’t pay payroll taxes on us. And then I would also say in those early days, it was really easy for us to say, We can make your marketing remarkable, and make it work. And we could optimize on SEO, we could give talks about what marketing from the inside out looks like. So it was a combination of strategies to get out into the market that worked really well.
Loren Feldman
David Nichols, tell us about Loupe. What does Loupe do?
David Nichols
Well, I hope I don’t brutalize the beautiful Kinesis copy of our mission statement. But I mean, they made it really easy for …
Loren Feldman
We should say you have been a client of Kinesis.
David Nichols
I’ve been a client and friend of Shawn, yeah, for a while now and really grateful for their teaching us how to run their playbook on our business. The one word mission for us is revolution. We want to revolutionize robotics and automation. We work in manufacturing, automation, robotics, anything that’s cutting metal or drilling holes in airplane wings, or making kitchen cabinets, or putting things in boxes, stacking up boxes. Any kind of manufacturing automation, where there are robots moving things around.
Loren Feldman
You make the robots and sell them to manufacturers who actually make the things you’re referring to?
David Nichols
How much time do you have? The quick way to think about it is, you can think of us as kind of like a magical R&D workshop for new kinds of machine designs. We have several supplier awards from Boeing, for example, where we’ve consulted with them on designing new equipment for their production facilities. We also work with a lot of equipment builders, just on a consulting basis. We have a lot of different ways of making money from doing that. But basically, it’s a bunch of smart machine-design nerds that work together to do amazing things.
Loren Feldman
So tell us about your trajectory when it comes to marketing. What did you try initially and how did it evolve?
David Nichols
Well, I would say that it started when I went to engineering school, which was sort of—they weren’t dismissive of marketing. They were sort of unaware. Because they didn’t tell you that it existed. Someone should have mentioned that to me. Because when I was like, I’m so excited about this work we’re doing. I love these machines we’re building. The team is great. The work we’re doing is great. And then, occasionally I would have these moments of, well, I want to do this more. I want to have a bigger team. I want to have cooler toys and facilities. So I guess I need to grow sales, because I need more customers.
And so the kind of very basic analysis was like, let me try to do that with salespeople. I was trained to be a salesperson, even though I was really an engineer. And I did that okay, but then I thought, let’s just try to grow sales. I need customers. I need sales like salespeople, it’s right in the name—like of course that’s how you do that. And that turned out to be effective in some ways and now that I know what salespeople do and what they’re great at, we know how to apply that. But we were using a salesperson to do all outbound communication, all relationship development, every aspect of this really complex client-interaction process. And salespeople are great, but they’re not good at every single one of those steps. No one is.
But I’m also very determined and extremely willful, so I tried really hard to do that for a couple years.
Shawn Busse
He is. He tried hard.
David Nichols
I don’t try so hard anymore, because now I recognize that it’s a sign that I’m probably pushing on an immovable object. But anyway, after kind of lying down to die after one of these failed attempts of version five of our sales team, I was like, maybe we should figure out how to communicate what we do. And I couldn’t say this at the time. What I said was, I think we need marketing. And I also need to know what marketing is. That was where the journey began for us.
We had become a company maybe 10 years before. We really started to get serious about this kind of work, because we were great engineers. People would hire us because of that. That was enough to go through a certain beginning phase of our company. But we really wanted to branch off from that. We’d really hit these plateaus. We can’t take it any further doing what we’re doing. And so it’s really out of curiosity and kind of, I almost describe it as a sort of a near-death experience where I’m just like, we have nothing to lose. We might as well try some of this stuff.
It turns out, when you work with professional communicators, they know how to communicate what’s awesome about your work, why you’re excited about doing what you’re doing. You can talk blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like for hours, and they can say, Did you mean revolution? Like, how did you choose that? And it turns out, Oh, that’s their skill set. Like that’s what they do.
Loren Feldman 21:10
Let me stop you there for a second. Because you’re right about professional communicators when they’re very good at what they do. But they aren’t all great at what they do. And you have to find the right ones.
David Nichols
Okay, same with engineers.
Loren Feldman
So, how did it work for you? How did you connect? I assume you’re referring to Shawn. How did you figure out that this was the right person and the right direction?
David Nichols
It wasn’t like, the first moment I had this notion, I called Shawn, and it was a perfect match. It took us a while to find each other. And at the time, it’s like, we could hire one more engineer, or we could have a marketing budget. And we would always hire another engineer, right? Because we knew how to hire them. We knew the ones that were good. Like we knew.
Loren Feldman
I think that’s a very common route, a very common path you’re describing.
David Nichols
And so at first, we needed to take these tiny bite-sized steps. And even some initial conversation with Shawn was like, he was educating me on how to hire different types of marketing companies, not just his. That was sort of like, here’s your choices, right? And we’re one of them. And so we started off with this project-based kind of thing. I think a lot of agencies probably want to offer that to people to give them this smooth on ramp to be like, If we do great work, we can build from there. And so we did a website, we did some core values work, which again, excellent work, so good. In fact, our core values were from those workshops.
Shawn Busse
And to be clear, that wasn’t with us. David and I met over hamburgers, and I was sort of, here’s the landscape. And here’s all the different things you could hire. And we’re in that. And he went off and hired some people that actually did really great work for him. So I think that’s a testament to your point, Loren. There are people out there that kind of suck. And there are also good people out there and figuring out which is which is really the hard part.
Loren Feldman
How did you wind up hiring someone to help you with core values, David. Were you aware you needed core values? Or were you on this path looking for marketing? And you ran into somebody smart? Who said, you need to figure this out first?
David Nichols
Well, I talked to people, and I said, I need more customers. And they’re saying, Have you ever heard of marketing? You should talk to these people who know how to tell people’s stories. I was like, Oh, yeah, that does sound good. That does sound like what we need. And so we did good project work with them. And they’re a great team, great, awesome team, but the way that our company fit together with their company couldn’t hit that critical mass. We did not have an internal marketer—to Shawn’s explanation earlier, that could guide an external project. We had nothing. We were 10 engineers, period. Maybe one admin, right? And so there wasn’t anybody to direct to that type of organization, to be like, this is the next project. This is the next project. So we didn’t have the appropriate interface between our companies, even though they did amazing work when we were able to get these projects together.
I was the CEO and acting as the internal marketer. I just did not have the bandwidth. So we got to the end of the year, and we hadn’t spent our marketing budget. She was like, how is that possible? That seems impossible. It seems like the easiest money to spend in the world, but it would take too long to figure out what project to do next. Because we don’t know what to do next. We’re not marketers.
Shawn Busse
David puts his finger on like one of the most critical things, which is that the industry in general is designed to interface with a marketer. So you have research which …
Loren Feldman
Which industry in general?
Shawn Busse
Marketing. The marketing industrial complex. Every function is designed to work with an in-house marketer. And so if you don’t have an in house marketer, it’s friction. It’s a lot of friction. And then the problem I described from the Great Recession was even if you do have an in-house marketer, often the marketer and the owner are not peers. Often marketers are elevated up from an administrative role. And so they’re often thought of in this sort of sub-level of professionalism. Or small business owners often underfund the role. So they’ll hire somebody right out of college. They’ll be earnest and work really hard, but they have no mentorship or peer support. And so you’re almost setting them up for failure in that environment. Because now they’re part of the marketing industrial complex, and the marketing industrial complex will basically take advantage of that.
Loren Feldman
So I’m imagining people listening to this conversation, Shawn, saying, Yep, that’s me. I hired that kid out of college. Or I hired my nephew, or whatever it might be. What do you tell someone who knocks on your door in that situation but realizes it’s not working?
Shawn Busse
First of all, I try to empathize with them. I used to get really frustrated with the marketplace, because it was just not working well. And as I got older, I’ve tried to become more empathetic and realize that most owners aren’t themselves marketers. And so they’re trying to get help, which I—that’s awesome. That’s super noble. And they’re also trying to give people opportunities. So that’s really great, too. So first, I try to recognize that the intention was usually good.
If the [in-house marketing] person is still on the team, and they have some strong fundamentals, we can come in and basically be that mentorship and full team to support that person and train and help them elevate that internal marketer. I love doing that. I come from a teaching background, and we’d love to help people grow and become better. If they’ve gotten rid of that person out of frustration, or often that person turns over themselves. The average tenure of a marketer is like two years, industry-wide. And the reason is, marketing personas tend to like new things. and small businesses often have one thing they’re doing. So the turnover is really high.
So let’s say that marketer has selected out. In that case, we say, let’s build a good strategy that supports your vision. Let’s figure out your values, your purpose, your one-word mission statement, let’s do all the hard work that you could never hire a junior person to do. And then we can either help you implement and execute on it, like we did in many cases with David’s firm and still do. Maybe there’s enough volume where you need to bring in somebody, and we can help hire that person. I’m a big fan of hiring folks internally, especially at the beginning to do the administrative activities of marketing and sales of which there are a lot and mostly under estimated.
I almost never recommend for a small business that they hire—well, this isn’t totally true. Occasionally, it is appropriate to hire a very senior person, but I caution them around that because I say it’s not that salary that you need to worry about. It’s going to be high. It’s all the people that that person wants to hire and surround themselves with. So If you’re going to go that path, get ready. Because that person will want to hire junior people to do the work they don’t want to do. And they’re going to want to hire agencies to uplevel their professionalism and to build their empire. So you think it’s a $120,000 marketing budget. That now is going to turn into a $250-to-$500,000 marketing budget—or you lose that person. Both outcomes are terrible.
Loren Feldman
So David, I suspect that a number of the people who are watching this saw the video that I posted in the 21 Hats Morning Report, a video that you created and put on YouTube showing a bunch of robots cutting a tree with chainsaws. Is that a marketing video?
David Nichols
Of course it is.
Loren Feldman
I thought that was gonna be your answer.
Dave Nichols
I think you just answered your own question.
Loren Feldman
How is it a marketing video?
David Nichols
Well, I talked about being a team of great engineers and wanting to do interesting work. Putting a chainsaw on a robot is something that we would have been excited to do at any point in the company history. That’s just obviously extremely fun and cool to attempt. Before I learned some things I know now, I would have thought of it as, this is a guilty pleasure. This is something I’m doing. It’s really fun, and it’s exciting, and it’s connected to what we’re about. But it’s not serious. It’s not real work. I should be dealing with clients or something.
And what was really powerful and fun for us was Shawn and the work that we did with the brand, to really dig into, what are we doing here? Why are we here? What are we about? What is the purpose of this company? We have a really firm handle on that now. And so now when someone says, we want to put a chainsaw on a robot because we want to do all these things that weren’t possible before, it’s an instant match. Yes, that’s what we do.
Loren Feldman
So you put the chainsaws on the robots in response to a request from a client, or you dreamed it up because you thought it would be a good marketing video?
David Nichols
Okay, a client did ask us to do that, but they weren’t a client when they asked us to do it. They said, we’re thinking of putting a chainsaw on a robot. And we said, How about we do that on Thursday? And a lot of organizations would have been, Yeah, well, let’s talk about the project. Let’s work toward some mid-six figure bid of how we’re going to build this thing for you, scope of work. And we were like, We’ll try that. We’ll test that. That’ll take a day or two of our time to test. And by the way, potential client, you need to go talk to your people, because we need the footage clearance. We won’t ask you for any money. We just want permission to share the footage. And they were like, Okay, that’s fine. So again, it’s one of those things where it’s just a priceless thing to do. We just know that it’s the coolest thing ever. And that’s a good thing. And it’s aligned squarely to the purpose of our company.
Shawn Busse
That’s the last piece that a lot of people don’t get. They think, Oh, well, David’s got access to robots. Of course, he’s got cool marketing. What he actually has that I think is more powerful than anything else is, he has the power of decision making, which is informed by his mission of revolution. So if an opportunity comes along, he looks at it. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you look at it through the lens of purpose. Does this align with our mission of revolution and changing how the industry works? If yes, we’ll do it. And I think that’s the biggest problem with most quote-unquote marketing. Most owners don’t actually have a good filter. They don’t have a good way to make decisions as to, Should we do this thing or that thing or nothing? And often, they default to nothing, or predictable and boring. And so by having a really powerful mission, he can make good decisions and know what to drive toward, as opposed to spending energy on everything.
David Nichols
Years ago, I would have said, I need more leads. I need more customers. And how are we going to build something to deliver that? And, well, if you know what you are, and you know what you’re doing, and you know what you’re about, and you blast that out as loudly as possible to the world, then the people that really relate to that and are gonna appreciate that just get sucked in like a magnet. I mean that in a good way, right? Because we get together and we’re like, we do great work together.
Loren Feldman
No business owner I’ve ever spoken to feels he or she has too much money to spend on marketing. There’s a budget. It’s a problem to be solved. They’re concerned with return on investment. And that’s true, whatever type of marketing they choose to use. It could be print advertising. It could be pay per click. They want to know the results. And sometimes it’s really hard to tell. It seems like it would be especially hard to tell with a robot chainsaw video. How do you know that was effective marketing?
David Nichols
I don’t have a spreadsheet that can prove that, so let me just admit that piece right away. What I know is that people who are the right kind of people to work for this company message me on LinkedIn, and they say, I want to work for your company. The thing about ROI is that communicating the purpose of a company is way more complex than can be captured in that transactional type of analysis. It’s way more complicated. It’s just not possible to put onto a spreadsheet. But there are things where we would start, we would do a little bit, and then we would get this signal back. There’ll be this huge reaction to it, either internally, “That’s amazing!” Or they’ll be excited about it. And that’s also not on your spreadsheet. And yet, it’s the most important thing, right? When people are really feeling it, those are the people your customers see. Those are the people that show up and want to work for you. That’s going to help us make plenty of money, like I’m sure, right? That’s kind of the long answer to your question.
Loren Feldman 39:16
It’s intriguing to me that the most concrete example you gave of the result of that video was not a customer coming to you but of potential employees reaching out to you. And I’m curious, when you created that video, was that a deliberate goal? Were you looking to attract more employees?
David Nichols 39:44
That’s the really fun thing about when it’s aligned on purpose. It’s directly showcasing a product that our company sells. It’s an advertisement for robotic arms. We are the local distributor and dealer rep, which is, like, if someone sees it looks like a good robot arm, “Oh, I’ll buy one of those.” Instant sale, right? It’s a direct client request from a potential new project that we could build a ton of engineering services and consulting around. It’s also something that looks incredibly cool and will be fun to do. So it helped even just as an internal experience—like who’s going to get to do that cool thing that is just some speculative project. And then when you make a video and put it on the world. There’s no telling who would see it and be, That’s really amazing. So there’s six potential lottery-ticket outcomes from one activity. I’m not saying I don’t care which lottery ticket cashes. They could all cash, it’s fine. Or none of them. But those are all things that, intuitively, we would have in mind about why this is a good thing.
Loren Feldman
I want to ask you about that, Shawn. The chainsaw robots are indeed awesome. It’s cool. It’s special. Most of us have never seen anything like that before. But that’s not the situation most businesses find themselves in. And I’m thinking about that typical business owner you described early on, who might be looking at this and thinking, Great. Robot chainsaws. There’s not a lot in that to help me understand how to market my business. Do you see a principle behind this that does translate for people who are in, you know, less awesome fields than David.
Shawn Busse
I just think it’s easy to underestimate the potential. It has been my experience that, in the vast majority of businesses that I meet with, there is something there. It might not always be the thing they do. I’ve got a former client, that was one of our very first experiments. I’m sure they would appreciate being thought of as an experiment, but it was a successful experiment. And we tried the marketing-from-the-inside-out framework on them very early on and transformed their culture and changed who they were.
They do HVAC equipment. They put blowers and ducting and stuff in buildings. And you might say, well, that’s not a robot chainsaw. It’s not that interesting. But if you start digging into things that they’re doing with culture, and they’re doing around environmentalism, and recycling, the things they do are really fascinating. And so I think it’s often a lack of imagination among those professionals that are brought in to help with the problem. They go immediately to some tactic or building a new website, when there’s not actually something awesome to put into the website. But we’ve worked with plumbers. We’ve worked with people who build houses. We’ve worked with very non-sexy, and in fact, I kind of like those industries, because I find them to be often very genuine and earnest. And so helping them uncover what’s awesome about them is really rewarding.
David Nichols
Yeah, if you have a company that doesn’t instantly die, then there’s something about your company that’s worthy of attention. It’s so hard to know what it is sometimes. Often, you’re so close to it, you don’t even know how to describe it because again, you’re not a professional communicator—just a really good engineer. That’s not a job you have experience with.
Shawn Busse
I have a client, they’re a steel fabricator. And even though they make really amazing things, they don’t actually hang their hat on the amazing things they make. Lots of other steel fabricators make amazing things, too. Where they hang their hat is on career development, and taking kids out of high school and nurturing their development as apprentices and talking about the opportunity for the skilled trades. So his passion is really around elevating up folks into that career space, and his website is filled with that stuff. And then that attracts other people who care about that stuff, right? And so his website, it’s about steel fabrication but doesn’t list all the equipment he has and what he can weld, and all the beautiful welds. It’s actually about the potential for human development in the skilled trades. And that’s a really exciting story. Like David said, if it’s not dying, it’s interesting.
Loren Feldman
David, let me ask you this: Did you go from figuring out marketing and figuring out videos right to chainsaw robots? Or did you experiment? Were there videos that didn’t work as successfully? What was that process like?
David Nichols
My answer to that question is like—and it has to do with magic. Shawn taught us one of the archetypes in human society and mythology is the magician. And he’s like, you guys are kind of like magicians. And if you study magicians, or you learn about magicians, it’s just a trick. And you just have no idea how many times they shuffle that deck of cards. You would not believe how many hours they sat by themselves in the room shuffling decks of cards to be able to do that under shuffle, or some little trick that you can’t see. They have so much practice, and so like, when you see us put out a video, you would not believe how many videos we’ve done. And the early ones are not good. Like, I can hardly watch them. But they were fun to do. They were interesting.
Shawn Busse
That’s a great point, David. One of the things that I love about our business is that I don’t think of us as prescriptive. We didn’t come in and say, David, you need to make videos, and you need to start today so in three years, you’ll be good enough to do it. It’s more like a journey. Folks will often ask me, Did you do that thing for your client? Well, kinda. Like we actually did it together.
Loren Feldman
Shawn, I have one last question for you. By the way, I finished reading your book last night. It’s a terrific book. I highly recommend it. It’s kind of a guidebook to thinking through what you’re trying to get out of marketing, and it becomes much more about how you build a company with a culture that warrants being marketed. And you have a lot of great case study examples, one of my favorites early on is the one of the doctor who thinks he needs more leads. But the problem really is that he’s got an office that’s mishandling all the leads that come in. And he’s got to find a way to figure that out and understand that. And my last question for you is, what happens when somebody walks in your door—and I imagine it happens occasionally—who has solved those problems? They’ve got the business running pretty well. And they really do just need marketing help. Where do you begin that conversation?
Shawn Busse
What’s really cool about small businesses doing it for 20 years is I’ve actually seen things get better—meaning that I see owners more and more talk about why they care about the culture, why they care about their employees. And that did not used to be the conversation. So in the beautiful scenario you described, where somebody comes in the door is like, our culture is killing it, we have a great offering. Maybe the market doesn’t know about it enough. We need to get it out there.
And I think what is happening is, especially with Covid, is everybody’s gravitating toward the same tired solutions. Everybody’s sending out email spam more and more and more and more, because they can’t go to networking events. Or they’re all paying Google more and more and more money. It’s an arms race. And so my challenge to that type of a business would be to say, What could we do together to build something that’s truly remarkable and different in a way to communicate with our right-fit customers—not with all customers, our right-fit customers. And I find there’s a lot of room to grow that mindset. And then I would say the second piece is, even if they’ve got everything figured out, very few I come across are doing what David is doing, where the activity he does that attracts customers is actually the same activity that attracts job candidates. And he gets unsolicited resumes. Most businesses that are doing really well from a financial standpoint, and even a growth standpoint, are still struggling with hiring and getting great people in the door. And connecting those dots is a real opportunity.
Loren Feldman
Last question for you, David. Where are you on that continuum? Do you feel like you’ve got this all figured out?
David Nichols
One of the unsolicited LinkedIn messages I got today was, “I stumbled across your company. I can’t believe how cool what you’re doing is. I had no idea that you existed, which is really surprising, because I follow this kind of stuff.” And I was like, right? No one’s heard of us. Still. So, no, I don’t think we have it all figured out. I mean, I think we have some really important things figured out that are going to serve us well. And some, lucky break could happen where all of a sudden we have 100 times as many LinkedIn followers or whatever, however, you would measure it. But no, we have a ton more to do.
Loren Feldman
David Nicholls of Loupe and Shawn Busse of Kinesis. Thank you both for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
