Columbus marketing playbook: The Only SAAS Tools Marketers Should be Using (Worth the $)

Kind: captions Language: en Hey, my name is Andy. I own a business that generated $28,000 last month as a solo marketer here in Columbus, Ohio. And this is my channel where I teach you everything I'm doing to get the results that I am along with the things that aren't working as well because there's plenty embarrassing examples of that as well. Lifetime revenue to date, not counting last month, is a little over 350K. If you guys are new to the channel, I run three different businesses actually. I have a design studio called MMG design which is a web and SEO studio for healthcare. I have three remote team members, SEO strategist, EA designer and a developer. So I guess that would be four. Uh my other business is my podcast called Marketing by Design which serves as my bisdev and lead genen method for my personal brand and grows both my businesses. And the third one is Columbus Marketing Organization, which is a job board mastermind and events business here in Columbus, Ohio, which is my newest one and one of my favorites because we just had our first Inerson event last week and it is growing well. So, if you guys are new to the format of this channel, basically what we're going to do in this is where we start basically by doing three things. Start with a little bit of marketer Q&A. I answer questions that you guys have asked across all of my channels, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. Then we're going to build and strategize in public. I'll talk about some of the things that I'm doing that are working that aren't working. Little about what I'm doing to build the businesses that you can learn from. And the third are updates and growth stats across all of my public facing channels, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. So, I have all of our questions to go over here. Uh, I recorded a video yesterday going over these half right here we left out on the burnout tab, but I'm going to start cranking away by hopefully answering the rest of these questions here on burnout, scheduling, time, hiring, team hiring, client relationships, content and LinkedIn networking and money and pricing. So, let's get right into it. Burnout. I love that word. Burnout. Andy, I've been posting on LinkedIn every day for like eight months trying to build something and some weeks it feels like it's nothing is moving and I want to quit posting. Is that normal or is that a sign that I'm doing something wrong? It is not a sign that you're doing something wrong. It could be a sign that you're doing something wrong. But I would say yes, that is very normal. When I first started, I posted I've been posting every day on LinkedIn and I've only missed a handful of days since February 1st of 2024. And I actually did a full presentation about this. Um, check out the very first video on this channel on YouTube. Uh, my first posts were getting absolutely zero traction. If I go to my profile here, you guys can even see maybe three to five engagements, meaning someone that reacted to them or commented on them. And that was on a good day. I was just posting I made the classic mistakes of posting the content that I thought was cool and not that my target customer or someone who would hire me would want to see or get value from. And the northstar of your content should always be to display expertise and to be helpful. And there's no incentive behind that. You know, with free content, organic content, you always are helpful. And then on paid content, then you can be pitchy. So if you pay for ads or things like that. So the gist of it is with organic content, you always aim to only be helpful. If we go to all of my posts here, show all. Um, I want to scroll back some of these earlier ones. If this could have loaded a little bit faster, that would be fantastic. But usually, uh, the lack of performance is usually a symptom of a much larger problem when it comes to posting on LinkedIn. And I would recommend talking to a strategist like this. Shout out to Allison Dmer, who is my trusted LinkedIn figure uh, in my network. But I just want to do a brief scroll back here to level set on what your expectations can be like before you've gotten traction. And even right now I have 7,600 followers, which is not a crazy amount. But on LinkedIn, especially a B2B platform, you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of followers. You can build a very good business on singledigit thousands. And you know, hopefully soon I cross the 10,000 threshold because I'm sending 20 to 30 connects every single day to ICPS in my network and growing that slowly every single week, which you should be prioritizing as well. Um, yeah, just kind of scrolling back here, you can see [sighs] not a lot of consistency in the formatting in the earlier days. You know, a lot of people on LinkedIn, especially when you're posting, they will post a selfie of themselves and that'll get a ton of engagement and they're like, "Oh man, I've cracked the code. All I need to do is start posting selfies." Uh, when in actuality, that is not that is not the method. Uh, people just engage with that and that's very surface level skim engagement. It is a good thing to kind of break the feed with that every once in a while and include, you know, personal personalized content as long as it's valuable and, you know, it's it's part of your strategy, but don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that just posting pictures with your dog or posting photos of yourself with family members or something like that is a good idea. So, yeah, if we go to some of these first LinkedIn posts here, I'm literally posting old logo designs. Check out this logo design I did back in college for a dunking on depression event. That's five engagements, no comments. Nice. Redesign schedules for my old high school as a graphic design project. Three likes, no comments. Fantastic there. Uh let's go one more just for the sake of dragging myself even further through the mud here. 16. Now that's not bad. It is it is not great but um check one more here. 12 sort of picking up a little bit but even so guys not not great work. Um so we all start somewhere. This is just the images. That's not even including the videos or the podcast engagement. But I would encourage you in the early days of posting on LinkedIn, putting yourself out there, you reset your metric of what success looks like. In the beginning, success should look like posting on your agreed upon cadence. Because when you start any new channel, that should be your metric of success is just showing up. Precommit to a period of time where you don't change your strategy. You don't change anything. You are just posting to collect data. That's what early any early content strategy should be is just data collection. And look at those insights. Look at the three to five people who engaged on your posts. And if you post for one month, you have right there three times a week. Uh you have a sample of 12 posts that you can now aggregate upon. So you're basically just collecting data over and over. One week, boom. Week one, you have three posts. Week two, you'll have three posts. Week three, you'll have three posts. And week four, you'll have three posts. All of a sudden, you'll realize one post right here has 10 engagements rather than your normal two or three. What you'll do is you'll take this post, you'll see who engaged on this post content, and you'll start to identify, hey, why did I like this? What was the thing about this post that I think did well, and then you will double down on that? And also just kind of having a barbell strategy in terms of best practices, saying, okay, does this post is this post valuable to my audience? Is this the bottom of funnel questions? Say, when someone gets on a sales call for me, how can I answer the question that they have immediately before that? That is the very bottom funnel of content. It's the type of stuff that you should be creating and prioritizing first and eventually once you've reached escape velocity, escape velocity, escape velocity, sorry. You kind of work your way further up the funnel with more widely applicable, more viral style content after you've afforded yourself that freedom. Um, having put in the reps here. So yeah, anyone with LinkedIn content, just continue to stick with it. I know it can be a grind in the beginning, but if it was easy, everyone would do it. So hope that helps. Question two, Andy, I run I run point on basically everything at my company. Strategy, execution, reporting back to leadership, and on some weeks I genuinely don't know who I'd even talk to about the stuff that's stressing me out. Is that just a job now? So I'm guessing sounds like someone who's in a leadership role at their company. They're not really enjoying their work. They're stressed between strategy, execution, reporting to leadership. In some weeks, I don't even know who I'd even talk to about the stuff that's stressing me out. So, yeah, that's probably not something that you can talk to to anyone internally at your company. Sounds like you're dealing with a little bit of burnout. Maybe the reason that you started is you feel far away and detached from that now. And I can completely resonate with that. I think I I I say this from on the entrepreneurship side. You start doing the thing I started in web because you think that's what you'll be doing all day. You are addicted to the craft. You're just in it for the love of the game. And you very quickly realize that that is a very small portion of the work that you actually would be doing. And on the job, if you're good at your job and you are promoted and you are in a company for a longer time and you move into higher leverage roles, that becomes usually the thing that you started doing becomes a much smaller portion of the role. So what I would encourage you to do is to find things that help me are finding community, engaging with other marketers in your local area has been very helpful for me. even not even in a curated group, like looking up other people at other companies in Columbus that have a similar job title as you or talking to other more senior marketers who have probably been through the career transition that you've been through and also just spending some time to reflect not working for a day, taking a week off your PTO and deeply connecting with yourself and saying why did I get started on this and the I just did this exercise with the consultant. Basically looking at all of our clients from the past 2 years and ranking them on a scale of 1 to 10 based on client fit, enjoyability, profitability, and um best fit, you know, so across all these different criteria. And I would encourage you to really approach this scientifically and as a barbell strategy, take some time to just think of it holistically. Why am I feeling burnout? Is it because I'm working too much? Like treat yourself like a zoo animal almost and say if this zoo animal obviously and just kind of to remove the the judgment from it. Say if this creature was doing this excessive amount of work, if they were working 9-hour days and I'm not wor used to working 9hour days. if they didn't get to work on creator projects like the earlier versions of myself did, well, it would seem obvious and then you would be more much more likely to give yourself grace because you just acknowledge that. So hopefully that helps. That's what I run through. Also, going on a lot of walks, taking care of your body, getting a sweat on, using doing going on a run, doing the stair master, getting a lot of steps, that all really helped me a lot. Also reading too. So few ideas there. I hope that helps. on to tool stack. [sighs] Andy, what's actually in your tech stack right now? Like the boring day-to-day stuff, not the flashy AI tools everyone's talking about, but the stuff that you'd be annoyed to lose. So, even in my last monthly retro, there was a lot of expenses that I was paying for that honestly I didn't need. But I will say I'll just give you the high level. So, um, a project management tool is ClickUp. I I love ClickUp. I was overwhelmed using it in the beginning because it was quite a it's a very flexible software. There's a million different custom fields and things that you can add. And to a beginner, a tool that robust can be slightly overwhelming. But what we've done is we've built in workspaces for the four aspects of our business. And shout out to Sam Staren at then um for helping me get this set up. But essentially um what you can do within ClickUp is you can build different spaces. I have one for client delivery, growth, operations and a process library which is basically all of our templates and everything in client delivery. Every client gets a folder within growth. Those are all of our lead genen channels and those have playbooks, templates, spreadsheets that I put into there. Operations. So these are things like internal work, tasks to be done like on our own website and like small project based work. So it doesn't really get its own workspace. And then process library is all of our web templates and all of our SEO templates. And whenever we onboard a new client, we just duplicate all of these and um add that to that client folder. And then I honestly I use the codeex MCP to make the task creation side of this much easier. And we also have all of our team members and contractors on boarded here and they do time tracking on each of the tasks that they're assigned to. So project management wise, I love ClickUp. Uh website build stack, obviously we use web flow. Other tools that I love, I love Stripe. Um invoicing, Stripe for invoicing and payment processing. Uh I also use Folk, which is our CRM. I I love folk honestly and I pay for it just for the accountability of checking into this every day. Have different groups for the different statuses of outreach that I'm doing. [sighs] Other tools, Figma for design, obviously I love Excal which is kind of my presentation tool that you guys see me using a lot here. Gmail obviously as well. Um Notion obviously too. That's the software I'm using to record here. I just I have I I use notion. I'm on the free plane of it, but I use it as kind of a glue for small things in between agency side because it's not as rigid as I would like an agency tool or an official project management tool to be, but it's great for like spinning up quick lists and my history in here is just so deep that I really like using it. And I'm big on UI. So, I love the user interface of notion as well. and I just I I navigate through this incredibly quickly and I love the tool. Um otherwise use Slack for client communications. Um each of our clients gets a separate workspace when they're onboarded during the project phase. Uh workflow is a uh website feedback tool. So it's like a visual drag and drop editor to where clients can see the website and up they can make comments and they those get pushed to our Slack channel where our developers can hear can see it. Creative wise uh uh TA obviously is one that I love as well. als what I'm using to record this video and uh I'll probably cut it there because there's a lot of a lot of tools that you guys have noticed but um I would say high lever ones uh the ones that are closest to the revenue. So folk you know as simple and you know default as it may seem um is close to the revenue because it helps us keep a direct track on client statuses and it keeps me accountable towards closing pipeline. Uh, Tela is just a great creative tool because it allows me it reduces the friction of me recording videos. Um, yeah. So, I would say folk is probably my highest leverage one and you know, ClickUp as well because it's it's client facing. So, any tools that are client facing or directly tied to revenue are high value tools. Next question on tool stack. I feel like I'm paying for six different tools that all kind of do the same thing. I don't know what to cut. How do you decide when something's actually earning its spot versus just something that you were got talked into trying? Like I said, run that audit and do an audit of the tools that are closest to the revenue for you. And also that reinforce the habits that you want to continue with. So if the video if the video recording tool like Loom or TA allows you to be consistent with doing video outreach, then keep it. If you have a cold email software, if you pay for LinkedIn premium and it encourages you to post more and or you use a tool like Authored Up, which is a LinkedIn native scheduler that allows you and makes content easier and it reinforces that behavior of you putting yourself out there, posting content, and gets you closer to getting leads. That would be the highest value tool. So, run all your tools through that filter and trim the fat accordingly. Next up, schedule and time. You run an agency, host a podcast, and I think you said you post daily. How does that all actually fit into a week? It's like like walk me through what a normal Tuesday looks like for you. Very timely because tomorrow is Tuesday and I was just getting ready to make my schedule. So, I'll talk you through my schedule now. Sometimes I go through and time block this all directly, but um I'll go through it now. This is non this is a non call. So, Roa is my assistant. She always works from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. every morning. Every morning, I try to get up at 6:00 a.m. and either go on a walk or run. First thing, just roll the crusties out of my eyes, get some exercise in, and make movement the first part of my day. First thing I'll do after that, when I'm in front of the laptop, try to be in front of the laptop by 7 when Roa is working. If not, I'll usually start around 8. And that is when I will do my intentional outreach. if I don't have meetings or calls scheduled. Uh like yes, today I did. I went and met Kim Schubc for coffee. Shout out to Kim. Um but this is where I will do my high leverage lead generating activities. And like I said, I run in that hour. Usually it's between an hour and two hours. I won't eat. I will get caffeine and I will lock in on what the highest leverage region activities of that day may be. And I kind of ran everything through this matrix um that I showed you guys earlier. So highest funnel, highest leverage activities, active conversations, follow-ups, and inbound. Start with those. Then after those are finished, you move on to your colder conversation, non-timebound follow-ups, outreach to existing customers. And then after those are finished, if you have more time, go to cold conversations, content, responding to comments, etc. And then communities. Since it's the end of the day here and it's currently about 10:30 in the evening, I will do content because it's the least time bound. It's creative and it's not as close to the sale and that way speed to lead isn't as important there. So that's how I would prioritize your schedule moving forwards. And then after that, I kind of go through the whole gamut here. What I usually do after that is either go on another walk, get breakfast, and then I'll move on to putting out fires. client-f facing work. There will always be updates from Roa, from Ali, from Clark in terms of the work that they're working on. So, I'll head into Slack, check in with them. Then I will open up LinkedIn and start to be drowned by the madness that is the LinkedIn notifications, Slack notifications, email, etc. But within that first hour, like that's uncompromised lead generation activity time, whether it's sending DMs again, starting at the bottom of that salesunnel and working my way up because that is our highest leverage activity right now. And that's something that only I can do. So that's generally how I structure my day. And then afternoons flex. If I will have some content that I want to get done, if it's client facing work, usually the afternoons are filled with client facing work. Um, I do take a lot of meetings with people locally, so I try and reserve those between 2 and 5 in the evening. Sometimes I go to the gym at lunch. Usually I go around 5:00 p.m. in the evening. After my gym session at 5:00 p.m. Then I will come home and I usually work uh get dinner and work from 8 to 10:00 p.m. or so. I'm running a little bit late tonight because I had a lot of caffeine today and I'm feeling good. So, I'm going to record some content. But on aggregate, that's usually how I structure my days. Start with the highest leverage activities. Really control those early times in the day when you don't have the distractions and you don't have people bugging you and really begging for your attention. And you want to create the feeling that after a certain time in the morning, after 10:00 a.m., if you were to get nothing else done, then you would still be set. Um, so yeah, prioritize the hard high leverage stuff early. Team and hiring. Uh, let's make this the last one. It's been about 20 minutes and then I'll get to the last several here afterwards. Team and hiring. You've got a team of four now. How did you know it was time to hire the first person instead of just grinding it out solo longer? And what almost went wrong with that first hire? So, this is a great topic. I did a presentation in 10x solo, which is a community that I'm in, all about hiring remotely and how I used a uh a Oh, there it was. I hired my first team member and I'll go through my whole process here. [snorts] Uh there it is. 10X solo doc. And I'll share this with you guys briefly, but essentially I started working with Ali who was the first hire in it around two years ago. So he actually I put a post out on LinkedIn and he responded via the Web Flow Freelancers forum on LinkedIn which I was a part of. I wasn't really that active in. He sent me a DM on LinkedIn and lord the laptop is freaking slow. It happens all the time when I'm recording on Tela, which is super mega unfortunate. But um yeah, let me just X out some of these tabs and hope that that helps. But basically, I started working with Ali as a full stack developer. He does a lot of different things in the web space. He is a custom coder as well. Um but he really reached out and he started I started him at $10 an hour. So, I had him clock in hourly just using a a time tracking tool called Clockify, which is it's a free online Chrome extension. This is loading so slow, man. Um, a free online Chrome extension he would clock in on. He would do the task and I just remember sweating as I gave him the login to uh our website in Web Flow and ask him to do this task that I had clearly defined. um and getting on a call with him beforehand being like, "Hey, understand this is exactly what you do and he understood the assignment." Um, let me know if you guys wanted me to make a full video on this. By the way, I did this presentation for a community. And I got really good feedback on it, but this goes into all of my team members, the task that I have them doing, how I got started, how I approached hiring. And if I can give the the cliffnotes version of that here. Essentially what I would do is I would use online jobs.ph and I've done this for more projectbased contractors. Roa, Ali, and Clark are our longer term team members. Uh Roa is from the Philippines. She's my EA. Ali is from Pakistan and Clark is from uh the Philippines as well. And both are all of these are senior hires. Like these are all all Clark is around 30. Ali is in his mid-40s and Roa is in her mid-30s. So these are senior people with experience and to be honest with you, Ali and Clark are far more technically skilled than I am. And I would not be able to, if you guys hear me talk about lead generation all the time and how I allocate a lot of my time towards that because it is our highest leverage activity. The only reason I am able to do that is because I built this delegation muscle. So this is a very high lever thing as well to build that delegation muscle, offload work and share this and share tasks with your team and grow together. I will also say that my perceived well-being is a lot better uh now that I have there's a feeling of having team members and not being in it alone which is highly enjoyable and it helps my life a lot. Um, but yeah, this kind of a list of the things that I have them doing and some ideas that I have them doing as well. Um, some mistakes that I've made here, being blunt, not being precise, assuming context, leaving room for interpretation rather than being frustrated by it. Um, but to go back to the exact question, I started doing that before I felt like I was ready. I remember being almost burned out. Um, and the thing that I did before hiring or before pursuing this as an option, I was very fortunate that Ali reached out to me and that it kind of ended up being a perfect fit. But I would determine you to go through this exercise defining all the actual roles that are in your business that you're doing. So, for example, there's sales, there's client delivery, there's account management, and uh there's marketing. There's all these different roles that are in your business and you're doing all of them right now as a solo. So, I'd highly encourage you to either take one or two approaches. Hire specifically for a repeatable work. Obviously, AI helps a lot with doing a lot of the repeatable work, but someone who you can trust who can help you free your head space. That's the main goal. Depending on the model of your business, you could also hire around full account management. So, if you have a junior who you can hand off an entire account to, depending on the model of your business, to your consultant or you're an agency and you want to have them run an account end to end, you've just freed them. And then you can basically play a margins game. However much that client or account is paying you, you can do a math problem and say whatever is less than that, I can then afford to delegate to this team member. You can also do you can track between retainer and hourly, which is what I've done. Um, [gasps] Roa is retainer hourly, so she works she technically clocks in, but she works the same number of hours every week. Uh, Ali and Clark are a lot more flexible. So, depending on client needs, they clock in and I pay them every two weeks. But also, make friends with these people. These are real people. So, if you go to online jobs.ph PH or any other job hiring platform. Vet these people. Get on a call with them. Talk to them like they're humans. Share your goals and visions and allow them to create the aspirations of seeing a future with you as their leader as their employer. And this has been a remarkably helpful activity for me and I would love to talk more about this especially if you're a solo. Shout out to Tass Bober and Tim who made a amazing podcast on this um on the marketer's exit. So I highly encourage you guys to go check that out as well. But um [sighs] yeah, so let's do let's wind up with a little bit of growth stats here. I hopefully that answered your question on the delegation and BA side of things. But this is the current channel, Andy the Marketer. My other YouTube channel is the main channel just crossed 400 subscribers, which is nice. The podcast with Lillian did really well. So, looking at some of our more recent content here, I have not been as consistent on content recently for YouTube, which is a bit unfortunate. Christina's podcast did really well. 120 views, 75 views. Uh Tom's podcast did pretty well. Let's check over on the Indie the Marketer channel. 25 subscribers, six in the last 30 days. It's not great. But I will say too, like the the watch time on these videos is very good. And I swear if you're commenting and you're pitching me for thumbnail designs on my channel, then you just stop it right now. That's so annoying. Anyway, um, current subscribers 25 on this channel and then on the main channel. Let's go here. I can't get anything to load. YouTube Studio. Last check in here. [snorts] Lord. Anyway, um I'll wrap the Q&A there. Thank you guys for checking in this week. If you guys want to learn more about anything that I touch base on, feel free to drop a comment in the description and I will answer them. I answer all comments either on LinkedIn or here. And thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.