Supply Chain Marketing

Adam Vazquez 00:23
I like to over schedule myself too. But right now Adam Robinson here. Content is for closers. We’ve got this conversation scheduled. And Adam, we had to press record because you and I just went down some deep rabbit holes already, when it comes to content and supply chain. So excited to have you here and to finally get to hang out a little bit.

Adam Robinson 00:41
Yeah, man, Adam squared here on the podcast today. So I hope you all enjoy the exponential power of Adams. We’re pretty big deals around here in the world. But, you know, we’ve been trying to get on a podcast like this or hanging out for years, you know, we first met on social media, I think we have a shared connection with Dynamo. And I always appreciate it and love yalls work, particularly with their podcasts. So the work that you guys do at Heard is amazing. And I think you’re really touching on something that matters. Like, you know, anybody can start a podcast, I’ve started a podcast. But I think when you really put some branding and thought behind how it looks, it feels how the audience consumes it. And I think that’s what you guys have done really well with dynamo, you’re able to really focus on the guests. And the marketing of that podcast becomes infinitely easier because you have a brand or a style guide like you would for any, you know, branding mechanisms. So kudos to that great work there, for sure.

Adam Vazquez 01:41
Thank you. And yeah, I mean, a lot of that goes to Santosh, that experiment, you know, six years ago now, really was that it was an experiment. And he leaned into it and jumped into it fully. The thing that clicked for me, that sort of launched off the past six years, was when people started pitching us or Santosh to come on to his show, because it’s so made so long it was, yeah, for so long, it was the opposite, right? We’re just trying to scrap and get attention. And so when people started legitimate people from UPS or FedEx or whoever started pitching, we’re like, oh, we stumbled on something. I’d be curious with you in your background, that you’ve been all over the place in this industry. What was the initial hook like that got you really enthralled with both the supply chain and media side? So I would say, you

Adam Robinson 02:33
know, it’s interesting, my background, you know, my first job out of college, I actually got it, working at Smoothie King, and this real estate agent would come in, and he was a regular, I was managing the smoothie kings, and, you know, I didn’t make a lot of money, right? You’re a manager, but it’s, you know, 2003, the minimum minimum wage is like five bucks or something. And, you know, so I’m making like 11 bucks an hour, which is a lot max. And so this guy who had worked as a farmer would come in every day. And you know, I was all about customer service. Like I always had work ethic, I always worked in service oriented things at grocery stores, and, you know, different fast food joints used to be an expediter at the KFC frontline. So, you know, I think when you bring that service mentality to every aspect of what you do, you know, a guy like Edward farmer, who was a top Austin, Texas Real Estate Agent back in 2003. He saw the hustle and the grit in me, and he kind of said, hey, you know, I think you’d be perfect as a contractor close person in real estate. And so, you know, I got really interested in it at that point, just watching Edward do his thing, be an entrepreneur, and to have a mentor that is really doing it out there, you know, and to Ed’s credit, Austin caught up to Ed. And now Ed’s making a lot of money having been in that Austin real estate scene, really early on. But I think what I learned there was really invaluable. But that same thing happened, I was working for Ed, I went to this conference about health insurance, and in the 2003 or 2004 timeframe, there was no Affordable Health Care Act, you’d have independent real estate agents who had ulcerative colitis, stuff they were born with. And they couldn’t help it. But they were making a million dollars in revenue, or even after the Commission. They make a million dollars. And they were spending something like 12 grand a month, just to have health insurance and deal with their issues. And at the time, you know, there were companies like admitted staff, a PEO or professional employment organization, where they were willing to take on small companies of about 50 or larger, because again, everybody was rated on their individual health history. And so what HR trust was able to do was say, hey, look, let’s take the risk of and this was the company that I found out about working with Edward. Let’s take the risk of the PEO and go ahead and see if we can create critical mass by cobbling all of these real estate agents together. But here’s their model Adam. And it was very interesting. And this is where my digital journey really accelerated and brought me to where I am today. But we had about 80 sales reps who would go across the country to put newspaper ads in newspapers and major markets have a seminar. If you will, we call them webinars today, to get a big audience there. So they could learn about it. And you could get a bunch of leads. While it was very expensive. And frankly, the challenge that we had was to find enough people at scale to get a big enough group to kind of support the health insurance, and the safety net of that, well, they brought me in as just this sales guy, because they really respected what I did with Edward. So again, my work ethic is what made me stand out. And I think what’s interesting is that when I went in there, I was just an idiot kid out of college, I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew how to say was, I’ll work hard, and I’ll smile a lot. And I’ll figure it out. Because I had no clue. But I had a fraternity brother, who was messing around with email servers and things like that. I said, Hey, Jason, if I were to get all of the real estate agents and Americans email addresses, could we just send them an email with a link to find out more about it on HR trust.com. And he’s like, I’ll try it out. So he set up servers, and we started what would be technically spamming today, a bunch of real estate agents 24/7, right, preset spam free. This is pre spam act. But you know, what, it’s the Wild West, you know, you do what you can to maybe figure it out, but it was very effective. It reached a lot of people. Obviously, people were paying a lot for health insurance, we ice we isolated that problem of it, no matter how much money you make, you still don’t want to spend more than you have to things like health insurance. And so we got a crazy amount of responses. So we no longer needed all of those salespeople. One of my first jobs was letting go of a lot of those salespeople, and I became the Director of Sales and Marketing at 24. The next problem, so we digitized awareness and outreach. Right, we replaced the analog newspaper and people’s problems were very expensive, didn’t work at scale. Number two, we created so much interest that our problem was no longer generating leads, was actually getting them to fill out and fax that 19 page application to get it all done. I said Jason, can you create like online forms like banks do or they’re starting to do and he’s like, probably, so the guy coded an online application, and bam, the lead to sign up was darn near instantaneous, we were able to create so much traction that it went from zero to about 85 million in revenue. We went from having to use Blue Cross Blue Shield to being big enough to self fund and pay out any claims and taking any premiums. At 25 I brokered a white label deal with GM AC, which brought in every single one of their car dealerships as independent agents and real estate agents. And unfortunately, the two owners started spending the premium money personally and the Texas Department of Insurance ultimately shut the company down. But it left me without a job, a three month old and living in Austin, Texas. And I never really had a big salary despite what I achieved there because I didn’t again know what a good salary was. And so we were at a job I went and moved to Pensacola with my wife’s father moved in with my father in law, which is a little bit crazy, went out and found a job at the Pensacola News Journal selling job ads at six lines each in the newspaper with an upsell to careerbuilder.com. Oh, and at the start of a recession in Florida, in 2006, and seven and eight. And the first thing that goes into recession is classified job ads. So I was cold calling people not because they had jobs to post. I wanted them to think about me whenever they did have jobs to post. Well, long story short, I did pretty well, I would meet my quota and a recession. I got promoted to sell the picture ads in the actual newspaper. And the challenge there again, I saw a very big hole. I said, Wait, it seems like we’re all kind of competing against each other. In this geographic small town known as Pensacola. What if you took the most seasoned reps and made them the outside reps all play the appointment setter. And then anybody who needs to fulfill our orders that we sell because you have to do insertion orders for ads in the newspaper. If you’ve ever done that. We’ll have somebody weirdly

Adam Vazquez 09:38
I have this whole side conversation but we have more in common than not. It’s continuous. That’s excellent.

Adam Robinson 09:44
But you know, I obviously strategically took the best two sales outside reps Lewis and Donna and they are amazing. But what we were able to do is work as a team to where I set them up and they knocked them down because I could Stay in the office instead of driving around Gold Beach or Pensacola Beach or downtown Pensacola and do more emails and more phone calls and set them up. Nobody was distracted then about catching and cleaning the kill, right where you have to sell it and then fulfill the order, which is hyper inefficient. And I also came across a tool that helped me organize a seat back at HR trust. I had to use massive Excel spreadsheets that I made a CRM. If you will, there was this new media CRM called relational. So this is pre Salesforce did not exist yet. And so we use that to track our sales to track our revenue and track our success. And Gwinnett, who owned the Pensacola News Journal, which is a ginormous media company, got wind of that and said, What are y’all doing over there, the Pensacola News Journal hitting your numbers in a recession. And they told me, you know, they got to learn about me. And so then they rolled that out to the whole company. And then they rolled it out to all of Gwinnett. And at that time, pnj.com started taking off. Well, I was the young kid who could figure out anything. And so we were able to sell digital ads on pnj.com. And a new thing, I ended up getting addicted really quickly, called Search Engine Optimization through a vendor called REACH local, maybe they may still be around, but get partnered with them. And I’ll tell you what you want to figure out how to do SEO, try to explain it to a 72 year old woman who owns a Wicker Park furniture store on the beach. And if you can explain to her the value of search engines and you continue to stay at a high level, even to this day, you know, I still rely on those principles. It’s as simple as this, you Google things, right? Yeah. Well, if you’re number one in the world for that thing, you Google, do you think you’d get more business? Oh, yeah. Well, that’s what we do. We make sure you’re ranking for those things. And so you know, the News Journal ended up not working out because of the recession. Guenette started furloughing us. And eventually, because I was one of the managers at that point. Between me and a 60 year old woman who had two kids in college, my boss, Bobby Rice said to me, this will be the most painful day, because you’re gonna lose your job. But it’s also going to be the best day of your life. And what that did is it got me out of Florida and back to Texas. So my wife and I moved to Dallas without a job. I went about going well, what the hell am I going to do. And I got a job working for a director who makes commercials, as a rep. And a rep, essentially, reaches out to ad agencies around town to get to know the creative director and just like the job, the six liner job ads, I had to call people who didn’t know me, I had to reach them and say, Hey, I know you don’t know me. But if you ever have a commercial, we’d love to have Brian over here, my director, produce it and direct it. And we would get a certain amount of that budget, I’d make 15% of that. Well, none of them would answer my calls or my emails at all. So I started getting on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. And at first I went to Facebook and personally messaged these people. But it worked, because I could see if they read it or not. And using social media and all of that I was able to get more jobs for them for my director. Well, a company called Splash media was starting up around that time in Dallas in 2010. And I got, I started becoming a part of that network and that community in Dallas, Texas that was just starting out. And they headhunted me to recruit for this startup, I was a force employee. And eventually, we kind of really invented b2b, social media marketing from nothing. There were no, LinkedIn was only three years old, Facebook had zero advertising platform by that point, no business pages at all. And we just went about figuring it out with SEO as our backbone because I knew that, yes, we’re doing social media. But if we can put a content component here, and deliver that at scale, that’s our low hanging fruit to start getting the results while the social media bears out. And eventually, I left the company. I wanted to go out on my own a little bit. But then I got headhunted by a company, a three PL out of Minnesota called ceressus. And like most clients at that time, I approached the job, not as a job, but as a pitch. And I said, Well, here’s what’s possible. ceressus. And the moment I did research on the supply chain, and this was in 2012, so 11 years ago, my eyes got super big. I said Holy freaking cram. There is not a single one of these big players. I see. FedEx, UPS, cya. You name the big names, none of them, none of them doing content marketing, none of them doing SEO except for one company. Two companies actually frequent.com ended up being purchased by ch Robinson for 400 million. And Joe Lynch at the logistics of logistics, that was it. And so I said, Wow. So I presented this to Steve and to their credit, one of the things They told me is one, you’re the youngest person here. I was 30 at the time by about 20 years, and everything you’ve told to us, no one else who talked to us said anything about this, we think you’re crazy. But we believe in you. And they hired me. And my goal at that time, I didn’t know what LTL stood for. But I faked it till I made it. And I figured it out. And we did a blog a day, and we just out content the world, we were able to rank for things like LTL number one in the world. I remember getting publications and academics or colleges, and even the VP of FedEx reaching out to me, either asking to use our information, or asking how the hell are you number one, and we’re not. And I would just laugh, and I said, you know, my goal, at first was just a blog, per day, optimize it and build from there. And that base and just continually thinking about the content, looking at the returns, and saying, Okay, we’ve got blogs covered. We’ve got SEO covered. Let’s do white papers for lead generation. Hey, let’s add on one of the first industry podcasts, which we did with the free project podcast, let’s do YouTube, and we did a YouTube series we did the fast freight five and talking freight. So talking freight was just a video blog. Fast freight five was the top five stories of the week. We were doing Coronavirus in January of 2020. Before, you know it actually hit really big time. And so I think that just allowed us to have our base covered. And we were able to do some of those extra things that kept moving the needle. And of course ceressus ended up selling about eight years after I started to global trends. I went and worked for a company called turbo for a little while which I really enjoyed. My friend Sam Foley, who I’d worked with as a side client, she was an inner energy management space ended up coming to turbo. So that’s how we connected. And then one day correct the folder just in my DMs. He said, Hey, man, or I think I reached out to him. And I said, Hey, what are you up to? I see what you’re doing with sonar. And I really think I can make an impact here. And then by the weekend, he had a job offer and I was going to work at freightwaves. And I really enjoyed working there. And it really brought my profile to another level I think. And just like a lot of SEO companies or marketing agencies are those in freight, the pandemic accelerated demand for what we did and what I know how to do. And so I launched absolutely, you know, the Robinson agency, mainly, I had a great salary, a great package of freight waves. I was the Director of Marketing there. But I had too many people knocking on my door. And I felt like I’d put in so much work over my career. It’s like everything had built up too. And I had just too many people saying I’d love to work with you. I’d love to work with you. So in April 2021, I put on LinkedIn that I started the Robinson agency, the post was seen 120,000 times and I ended up with almost 30 clients three months later, it was the client. Unbelievable. Now, two years later, we have 15 employees, we’re reaching almost 70 clients, and we have some of the most marquee clients in the industry. And now it’s a lot of fun to figure out how we can scale? How can we grow? How can we continue to get our clients’ results? And I know that was a long winded story to get to where we’re at today. But that’s the Adam Robinson story and the Robinson agency origin story, and I’m really proud of it.

Adam Vazquez 18:30
Some threads, I feel like resonates so much with me. I mean, you know, continually betting on yourself, obviously. And I think it’s interesting to see where you ended up. And some of the early situations you found yourself in whether it be the losing this job or the owners misspending which is out of your control. I had some similar things. And it’s interesting how those at some point, some of us tend to be like, Alright, that’s enough. I’m just going to trust the people that I can trust being ourselves, right. And then using those skills that you’ve developed over that time. The other thing I think is interesting is when you talk about beating all these companies with an SEO or being referenced by universities or whatever, with your work, I think that’s huge. So many people come into what we do with the highest levels of impostor syndrome, myself included ever, you know, I think that’s pretty common. But I love hearing stories like that because it’s not that we overcomplicate a lot and try to find, give ourselves reasons for why it can’t be done or listen to people who tell us we have to do X, Y and Z experience or degree or whatever. And what you did is exactly why I love this. It’s purely based on the work and the output of it. If you can create it and you can demonstrate that value. There’s just no gatekeeping anymore.

Adam Robinson 19:57
That’s right. I still tell clients today I cannot believe we can plan out this content plan. Look at these keywords, write stuff around it, put it on the internet, and all of a sudden you have commercial value. Because of this magical thing. It still feels like vaporware, it still feels like magic. And it is but it’s like a game right? Like, I loved sports growing up, I was a catcher, I was a field general. And I absolutely love seeing my teammates when I love playing the role of a field general or just a psychological coach. Because I think one of the things that I have as a part of who I am, is that I can figure anything out, I have zero fear of my ability to achieve X, Y, or Z. And I know that it’s not a straight line, I’m gonna wake up on day three and get punched right in the face. On day four, I’m gonna get punched in the face on day five, I’m gonna get punched on the face. And day six, you’re gonna have your next great podcast guest reach out to you and change your world with who that is. And I think, you know, I don’t know if Confucius said it. But the journey of 1000 Miles always starts with the first step. And it continues with the second step. And the third step, and when you’re going about this content marketing journey, or any business journey, you know, I still think it’s wild that I can put out this content and it ranks in search engines. But it’s because we don’t give up. We look at the data returns. And we go, how can we continue to push through? How can we continue to elevate, you know, and I think the way it’s changed to today versus the back in the day at ceressus. Those days, there weren’t as many analytical tools, a lot of us were just kind of guessing. And that could work. But today, now you have so many tools that can bring you awareness. And so you can start looking at SEO and playing offense, defense, and even special teams, right. And if you look at it like that, you’re no longer this passive victim of whatever search engines give you, you have an active role in making sure your website’s healthy, and making sure that you’re not cannibalizing yourself by just repeating things over and over again. And then today, more than ever, is the conversation around content creation and chat GPT for free. And I think that’s the biggest wildcard where I have to understand how that works. As an agency owner, I have to understand because I know, and I’ve seen it time and time again with new technologies, that my clients are going to reach out and go. What do you think about this chat? GPT? Four? And it’s already happening? And you have to have an answer? And the answer is, well, I’ve played around with it quite a bit. It’s a fantastic blank page syndrome resolver, you can help it to get you thinking. But the irony of a large language model is that it operates in word vectors and relevance, right. And Google for a long time has had this term called LSI, which is, gosh, I can’t think of latent semantic indexing. And so word vectors, which language learning models are built off of, at best, they’re auto complete machines. And LSI terms or latent semantic indexing are highly related. So when you understand how those technologies are made, and maybe how they intersect, you start to clearly see, can a language learning model intimately know my audience and create word vector relevance, while also making sure that the algorithms are happy and appeased, because you’re not over engineering things, and relevance and expertise, and those who understand that you cannot over engineer SEO, that you cannot create that relevance without content being crafted by experts. That’s the next phase of companies who are going to beat out generic vanilla bullcrap. And what you’re going to see search engines care a lot about is not a content plan that just only talks about one topic, but that actually puts your audience at the center, your customer at the center of everything you write, and you have to start thinking of it in a core concentric circle, right? If I’m a load board, I’m going to create some pages that are optimized for load boards, right, but I’m not gonna just keep talking about load boards over time. What I’m going to do after my core concentric is go okay, who is that person that uses a load board we have a BA A and a demand side, who are those people? A shipper? What are their job titles, a carrier, what are their job titles or whatever. And you start creating content for those individuals that brings them value that also points back to that load board. And so those who just are creating content for content sake are going to struggle, they’re going to struggle because they’ve not really put a plan together. And they’ve not thought about their message, and their audience who receives that message. So as AI takes over, as it should, in some respects, for certain mundane tasks, we’re going to start to see companies like we’ve done at tra, where our clients are in the supply chain and logistics space. We need to have writers and strategists who also are experts in supply chain, and logistics. And you talked about impostor syndrome, I think, maybe before we started recording or early on in the call here. And I think what you know, ends up happening is that I have really understood that expertise and relevance are what is going to make content marketing from some companies stand out from the others. I myself became an expert, I forced myself to understand it. As an example, I’m on a freight waves webinar on Thursday, with two of my clients, CEOs who have built amazing supply chain technology companies. I’ve never moved freight in my life. I’ve never built supply chain technology. The only thing I know about it is writing about it and listening to about 100 CEOs every week about this space. But I think it’s because of that work ethic and getting to know your niche, and really doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on it personally has made the Robinson agency a differentiator. But our writers and who we hire, I’m not just writing writers, I’m writing writers who worked at coyote logistics, who worked at freight mango, who has actually worked in some of these companies, because they’re gonna be the experts we need. And there’s a ton of great English majors and writers in this space Sure, ended up with brokerages that don’t really want to be there. They’d rather be writing. And so I really enjoy poaching those individuals. But that’s what’s going to make the difference for folks, right? Relevance and specificity. So I did talk about how we built the Robinson agency. But if you’re looking for an agency, or you’re building your own in-house team, put experts at the forefront of your content creation. And if you don’t have people in marketing, who are experts, make sure they’re interviewing those people, have them, talk to the customers, because the more you intimately know your own customers, they’re going to tell you how to market, they’re going to tell you what content you need to create. So I think that’s the biggest evolution that I’ve seen in this space in my journey.

Adam Vazquez 28:03
I totally agree. And I think we kind of close the loop on the imposter syndrome thing. I think that’s exactly the same point, right, it’s like, you’d never move freight, fine, you never build it. But there’s work that can be done that can add value, despite the fact that you didn’t free I think sometimes people get it twisted, and think that you have to have dug the ditch or you have to have built the tower or whatever. And we don’t put that we don’t put that responsibility really on any other industry. You know, if you’re advertising for Snickers, that doesn’t mean you’ve been in the factory making snickers, you’ve been in the brewery, you know, turning up the Budweiser or whatever. But for some reason, sometimes in the supply chain, I think in some other kind of industrial b2b space we put that ourselves. So anyway, I definitely commend you on that and, and love everything that you’ve built. You’ve touched a couple times on this idea of working in a downturn. You did it back in your newspaper days. You’ve done it as you are building this company. I’m curious, like how obviously the space is a little different, but it looks like now the supply chain is starting to feel the effects of some of those last couple of years, economically. How does that change anything? How does that change anything in terms of the strategy that you’re prescribing for your clients? Yeah, I

Adam Robinson 29:28
I think marketing dollars most likely need to be spent. You need to grow your company, even in a down market. Or you need to maintain your company. And if the fundamentals of your business are broken, no matter what the economy is doing, you’re going to struggle and particularly in a down market, and I would say one of the core offerings that we provide and this is really more out of me needing to keep customers successful because If I sell them content marketing, and we go about writing stuff, and we’re not getting the results we want to see, most likely our messaging is off. Most likely Our website is not oriented towards a good call to action. Maybe we don’t struggle finding people and getting their attention. But golly, we struggled getting them closed. And so you can look at every facet of your business and say, one, how do I apply a marketing budget? And what do I apply it towards? And so that’s why it becomes super important to understand the purpose and set the right expectations for what one thing does over another. Here’s a perfect example, marketing. Okay, well, marketing is the department. Most likely those companies where marketing and sales are biz dev work hand in hand, are probably more effective at closing deals. That’s always been true. In every place I’ve ever worked, it continues to be true with my client base. But let’s say you take a three PL, where your goal is to help the biz dev team get more at bats, more inbound leads, and to drive meaningful appointments. Most bizdev folks these days are just like what I was at the newspaper, their appointment setters, who set up their hired guns to close the deal. And that works really well. Well, there’s biz dev, folks just like I did back in the newspaper days, they need to be very smart about how they reach out. And then you reach out at scale. And then you reach out with very high powered fundamental messaging. And so email marketing becomes intimately valuable. So let’s think about this as a, you know, a flywheel for biz dev in a down market, and I have a three PL at the center. Let’s say that three PL specializes in producing shipping, or food and beverage, in that segment. All right. So I can go to zoominfo today or other places and get a list of all the food and beverage people who work at these companies with certain job titles, boom, let’s say I have 10,000 on that list, I can get eight biz dev reps, I can get them an email program that warms up a burner email to a certain score, which increases the deliverability. The marketing team is going to take our messaging exercise and we’re going to, you know, defuse that into an email sequence. As a part of that email sequence, we have the high level value in the one liner, an elevator pitch, that first response is direct response. Three days later, four days later, whatever some time period, they don’t reply or nothing happens, hey, here’s a company just like yours. And here’s how we got their results. You can read more here. Okay, day three, hey, we just put together this guide on how to hire, produce, focus through PL just want to make sure you saw it. And then maybe the next step is a LinkedIn visit. The next step is a last email. Alright, so email marketing is going, I’m also creating content, let’s say I’m doing product shipping best practices, or the best way to evaluate a product focus three PL, so you have a bit of content that’s ranking in search engines. So you have email content. And then finally, we have these amazing tools on LinkedIn at just $10 minimum per day. I can upload the exact same list, I can send those individual ads, LinkedIn finds them, and serves up those ads. And then the layer on top of that is the analytics, right. And so now LinkedIn shows me which companies saw and clicked on my ad, my emails are telling me which ones are clicking and seeing my ad, I know which words I rank in. And I’m using Google Analytics, the new GA for tracking those conversions by that specific keyword. And so you’re starting to see, these three PL are always reaching out with their biz dev team, they’re getting inbound leads, you know, through the SEO growth, they’re able to reach people and stay on top of their radar, the exact same people were emailing. And then of course, the team is going to do calls in between that. And so you can kind of see just like, you go, how did you know the movie? 300? How did those 300 soldiers beat the entire, you know, is it Phoenician or Trojan army was a bigger army? Well, what they did is they choked them into a point where the army was stuck and they served all 300 were able to choke them into this point. Well, that’s what we call bizdev air cover, right marketing and sales working together to smartly go about reaching these 10,000 contacts. That’s how companies are going to stop surviving the down market, but that’s how they’ll survive and thrive in any market. It is but

Adam Vazquez 34:47
I mean, I think you’re hot , it’s crazy. And I’m already thinking in my head. This is totally selfish. I’m clipping this and sending it to one of our clients because we just went through this messaging Workshop in order to feed this to salespeople. And I think the emphasis is like, we always should do it. But if you have to have guaranteed leads, and I think people who are listening to this right now are probably in that space marketing managers VPS, whatever, who they’re not sure where to spend, if you have to have guaranteed leads, what Adam is describing is the playbook, because it’s the only it’s the lowest risk roadmap to go from clarity of vision and offering service offering to informed leads. Without any extra fluff, there’s going to be fluff in any you know, there’s gonna be missed opportunities, etc. But what you just described I think, is the playbook for working through a downturn. 100%.

Adam Robinson 35:46
You know, you can extend that. And there’s a funny question I asked clients, ago, let me ask you something. Do you want to be in business in the next three years? Of course, have a five? Absolutely. Okay, so how are you building the wealth model of marketing? And they go, What? What do you mean, equity? Are you building marketing equity, and they go, I don’t even know what you’re saying right now. And I go, Well, what I just described with those three PLs is really like your day job. It’s just table stakes, you have to show up and get a salary, you’re a 22 year old kid coming out of college, you gotta pay the rent, you want a car, maybe you have cash in your pocket, you’re gonna get a job, you’re gonna get a salary. Most people, most people in their lives are gonna go from 22 to 60. And they may have, you know, year to year three to 6% swings in that salary. But largely, it’s not a huge uplift from 22 to 60, in your salary range. And so you can’t build wealth that way, often. So what do they tell you to do? If you’re a smart kid, go to your 401 k max to get a cup of work with a company that matches it. So you can get the legal amount of 54k a year, get an IRA, get a whole life, do all these other things that you can build equity, you know, over time, and by the time you get to 60, you have a very substantial amount of money. Well, marketing is the same way, you know, that advertising, I gotta keep giving it to LinkedIn, I gotta keep giving it to someone else, or Google biz dev, I gotta keep paying bizdev people, I gotta keep reaching out, you don’t want to stop those things. You want that to be sort of a constant, like your day job salary. But if you’re smart SEO, and messaging and branding and identity are investments that at a certain point, will outpace the money you’re making, from your biz dev efforts. And that’s where that, you know, it comes to you inbound leads, you don’t know these people, they found you because you’ve built in this model for people to discover you that don’t know you. And that’s really, even in a down market. You don’t have to invest maybe all the money in the world, but you better be investing in your future.

Adam Vazquez 37:53
I love it. The golden goose out of this has been awesome. We’re over time already, from what we booked. And we’re gonna have to do part two at some point, because I love that we didn’t even really scratch the surface of all the things I feel like we can talk about, but you’ve mentioned it a few times. The Robinson agencies, your company, what? How do people tag along? Do you follow the work that you all are doing? All those things?

Adam Robinson 38:14
Yeah. So I think the best way is probably LinkedIn. Just found Robinson, the Robinson agency on LinkedIn. I’ve had the same website for our website since the company was founded. We are true cobblers. Kids have no shoes, kind of thing. But we’re getting there. We’ve just been too busy with client work, and frankly, love it. We don’t want to bury ourselves. We’d like to grow. But we’d like to grow smart. And we’d like to grow meaningfully. So we’re not in a hurry to grow it and market ourselves yet, but that will change after this summer.

Adam Vazquez 38:50
Hey, listen, we just had a chat or listen on from a VRL recently. And his landing page says, Hey, we pick 16 people to work with each year, you know, apply if you want people who have the I love the 16. Yeah, you could just, you’re basically there. So just you know, a little tweak of the copy, and you’re in the same spot. But this has been great. We will absolutely have to do a continuation. And I just appreciate you coming on and spending your time with us.

Adam Robinson 39:15
Hey, Adam, thanks for having me, man. Great to meet you. And I’m glad we could connect. Looking forward to the next one.

Carlton Riffel 39:20
And that’s a wrap. Thank you for listening to this episode of Content Is for Closers. We hope you find this show really helpful as you grow your business with content. Maybe you know of other people who would find this show helpful as well. How about you send them our way? If you didn’t like this show and you want to tell us that, then you can head over to contentisforclosers.com where you can send us a message, give us some feedback, ask questions, or find detailed notes for every episode. Until next time, keep creating and keep closing.