Empowering Small Businesses with Marketing Tools | Robert Downey

PROFITABLE TALKS

In this episode of the Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim speaks with Robert Downey, co-founder of Simply Be Found, about the evolution of marketing for small businesses. They discuss the challenges faced by business owners in navigating the marketing landscape, the disconnect between marketers and business owners, and the importance of clarity in messaging. Robert shares insights from his extensive experience in the marketing industry, including the need for businesses to adapt to changing search engine dynamics and the significance of content, authority, and trust in effective marketing strategies. The conversation also touches on the lessons learned from past business ventures and the reality of achieving marketing results.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS

• Simply Be Found was created to empower small business owners.
• Marketing often resembles a drug that businesses chase.
• The disconnect between marketers and business owners is significant.
• Search engines are evolving, and businesses must adapt.
• Content, authority, and trust are the pillars of effective marketing.
• Clarity in messaging is crucial for business success.
• Perfectionism in business can lead to costly delays.
• Marketing results take time and effort to achieve.
• Business owners must understand their own value propositions.
• The importance of pivoting when marketing strategies don't work.

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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.198)
Welcome to another episode of the Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. A special shout out to our one listener in Lawton, Oklahoma. Unfortunately, I've been to Lawton many times. There's no reason to go to Comanche County unless you are in the army or hiding from someone. There is a reason why they put Geronimo at Fort Sill.

no need to go to London. Anyway, joining me today, Robert Downey of SimplyBeFound.com Robert, welcome to the show.

Robert Downey (00:41.951)
Hey, thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

Christian Brim (00:44.022)
Have you been to a in Oklahoma?

Robert Downey (00:46.013)
No, but I know some people that were served inside of there.

Christian Brim (00:49.015)
Yes, it is a fascinating place. The first time I was down there, I'm sitting in this office building and I just hear these big... I didn't know what the sound was, but the glass was rattling. And I'm like looking around and no one else is reacting. And I'm like, what is that? And they're, they're shooting artillery. And I'm like, okay. All right. So those are big bombs that are blowing up. All right. Fine. Yes.

Yes, lots of people been through Fort Sill, but I don't think people choose to stay there. Anyway, Robert and I.

Robert Downey (01:25.249)
I heard it's an interesting place and I heard that it's a lot of fun if you're going there to play. And if you're in the armed services and allowed to play with all the big stuff that's there.

Christian Brim (01:34.275)
So there's a funny story about that. When we were down there, we were talking to this retired army sergeant and he said, you know, I had been deployed two times to Iraq and the only time I came under fire was in Lawton, Oklahoma. And I'm like, how is that? And he goes, well, I was at the bar at curfew at midnight throwing privates in the back of cabs and some guy

rolled up and started shooting and I'm like, yeah, okay.

Christian Brim (02:11.8)
Who knows? Alright Robert, tell us enough about enough about lot in America. Tell us about Robert Downey and simply be found.

Robert Downey (02:20.353)
Well, I've been in marketing since 1995. grew up in the small business world and I've had the opportunity to sell businesses over to venture capital. I've done a lot of different things in my personal career. But simply we found we did is we wanted to create a piece of software, a set of tools for business owners to use, to be able to do their own marketing without having to hire big agencies. And we went out to solve that problem of the small business owner not having access to tools that were simple.

And Dean Kailor, my other co-founder, he started off as a client of mine and we ended up creating this after off of a set of needs and necessity, I guess would be the right word to put into there. But simply found all started because of that. I I've walked into his business. He was with my agency and I said, Hey, how are things going? This would have been January of 2020. He goes, things are going great.

I mean, things are absolutely awesome. And I said, how's voice search working for you? And he goes, what the hell's voice search? And he picked up his phone and we did the whole thing. He searched Siri for his business. Sitting in his office, he didn't even come up. And he goes, you're thinking about creating a set of tools or a platform for that, aren't you? And I said, I am. I'm thinking about doing that again. And everything else is kind of history. We created an entire platform originally that was very Google-based, ended up

seeing changes in the market ended up redesigning our whole entire tool and released it out as, not a Google first platform, but as an actual platform to go out to other networks besides just Google and being able to explore all their pieces to help businesses be found and to do it simply from one spot, one dashboard. we have social media tools. have a ISEO pixel to get into more complicated stuff. Our main bread and butter is going to be.

Probably that listings engine or the social media suite.

Christian Brim (04:20.14)
So you, had a general agency before that.

Robert Downey (04:25.461)
So I've owned, I've started, I've been part of over five different marketing agencies. Some of those had some tools and platforms inside of them. My biggest agency, I had 30,000 clients inside of it. Yeah.

Christian Brim (04:37.848)
Holy cow. And that's one that you sold to VC.

Robert Downey (04:42.389)
Yeah. Plus it had some different tools and stuff in it, but yes, we sold that off over to a venture capital group. And then I worked for that venture capital group and that's where we got to the 30,000 afterwards. yeah.

Christian Brim (04:48.354)
Well, that's

Christian Brim (04:53.699)
That, that I would, I would have assumed when you said 30,000 and VC that there were, to have been a technology piece involved. Okay. So you're, you're so, so the agency before was just kind of a stop gap. I'm in between things kind of exploring.

Robert Downey (05:14.737)
I've had my set of clients. I've taken them between different companies and different ventures I've done that I've had for years. mean, I've got, I've got a couple of clients that go all way back to 2008 from my agencies. We still do all their marketing, still have all of that. But really I see a gap where people do in their own marketing or getting better results than coming to us and hiring us in this as an agency. That's why we got out of the agency piece. And plus they can make it to profit a lot faster that way.

Christian Brim (05:42.633)
Right. Yeah. Well, I've discussed this on the show many, many times that there's, there's a lot of, ineffective marketing. and, and I don't, I don't mean to say that the marketers are trying to do a disservice, but it, I think it starts back with the disconnect between

the marketers and the business owners and not really knowing what it is that the business owners need. Exactly. so, but then even if they do have that understanding, I see them still trying to make square pegs fit into round holes. Like, you know, this,

Robert Downey (06:19.69)
or what they do.

Christian Brim (06:38.287)
strategy and these tactics have, have worked in the past. So we're going to make you use them. I ran that into that with, an agency recently. It was like, well, we've tried this before and it doesn't work for us. well, you just haven't done it right. And I'm like, I don't think so. but you know, if that's the Hill you want to die on, go ahead and try it. And.

you know, 60 days later, I'm like, I told you it wasn't going to work. you know, so, so there, there just seems to be this, this disconnect between marketers and business owners. What, do you think that disconnect really is?

Robert Downey (07:24.989)
Not knowing thinking everybody has the same exact playbook. and believing every single so-called expert on the internet of what the latest trends are, what should be happening. I'd say probably the biggest disconnect there is everybody wants to focus on Google and Google's not the biggest dog on the, on the planet anymore for search. There's so much more that's happening out there, but

They're not willing to make that a lot of agencies aren't willing to make those changes. They're not willing to, we've been doing this for years. You know, go spend money on Google ads, go spend money on this go because it used to work. And I always phrase that marketing is almost like a really super good drug. You'll keep going and you'll keep buying it and looking for that very first high every single time. If it's working for you and you'll keep chasing it. If it's not working, if you're not getting that satisfaction, you'll chase it.

Christian Brim (08:16.461)
Right.

Robert Downey (08:18.337)
and Google ads would be a good common denominator for that is they'll spend money on it and they keep spending money because they used to work and they're not willing to pivot. If you talked about some of the big agencies that are out there that aren't the one man shops or one or two people inside of an agency, they are doing the same stuff or they're getting kickbacks from different companies. You can get a kickback from Google, you can get a kickback from Bing for doing certain things and

That's where I was like, I don't agree with it. It's one major reason why we changed off of being Google first is I knew they were going to change the rules of the what's called an API, which is how you connected to say Google business profile. And it's because we weren't going to follow their rules. We weren't going to talk about stuff. I didn't want to become a partner of Google for that reason, because all they're going to do is hold me to be them. And that's just not the way I operate. But when you look at it from a business owner aspect,

They really don't understand it. It's been made to be super confusing. And it really isn't that confusing. You're going to put your message out and that's it. And you know your message better than anybody else.

Christian Brim (09:16.269)
No.

Christian Brim (09:24.226)
Well, I was at a marketing conference a couple of years ago, and it was right after ChatGPT had come out. And there was a lot of discussion around LLMs and this new technology. And one of the vendors there, or one of the participants there, was an old Google guy, had worked for Google.

And I didn't know until then, until two years ago about all of the churn that Google creates on ads. so like essentially when they took out where you could blacklist, sites for your ads, that they took that away from the average user that was producing, you know,

30-40 % erroneous traffic for these small business owners. Coca-Cola, you know, they still got to blacklist. It was fine for the big customers, but for the average Joe, I didn't know that my ads were getting served, you know, one in three times to some server farm in Manila. I'm like, yeah. And it was at that point, I I knew it intuitively that Google was not my friend.

But I didn't know specifically how until that moment two years ago. like, this is some nasty shit. mean, that's...

Robert Downey (11:02.497)
Well, that's some major nasty shit.

Christian Brim (11:04.748)
Yeah. So what you said, Google's no longer the 800 pound gorilla. What's replacing it?

Robert Downey (11:11.531)
combination of things and some of it happens to be Google products. So I mean there's things that are tied in. So you have multiple different pieces when you look at the ecosystem of just local search or how any kind of search happens, everybody's pulling off of data points from each other. So if you look at a map of it, we have it on our website, if you look at the map of it, it's connected all over the place. But you have chat GPT that now has its own search function that can live inside of Chrome.

Christian Brim (11:29.485)
Right?

Robert Downey (11:40.065)
It can live inside of Edge for a browser, so you can have it be your default search engine. It's pulling real-time data and analyzing it for you. And you can have a conversation with it. You have Gemini that's doing the same thing, which is a Google product. Then you have everything else that's there. You have people using DuckDuckGo. You have Yahoo. You have Voice Search, where people are using their voice versus using, you know,

typing it in the traditional way, you have a lot of different searches. So you have to make sure you're found absolutely everywhere. Cause you don't know where that person's going to find you. And everything inside of marketing is about touch points. It's no different than going to the lake and casting that pole out there. You might pass that same fish five times with that lure or that bait, but just that one time is that time that they're going to actually grab it and you know, you're going to catch that fish or hopefully catch that fish.

but it's about those opportunities that are inside it.

Christian Brim (12:35.031)
Yeah. And from what I've read and the other industry experts I've talked to, it's not that there's a foundational change in what works. mean, if you've got a content, whether that's just your website, but if you've got content that has authority, that is usable by the user,

That still is what drives things. Would you agree with that statement?

Robert Downey (13:07.595)
You have three pillars. You've got content, you have authority, and you have trust.

Christian Brim (13:12.856)
Okay? And so that hasn't changed. That hasn't changed.

Robert Downey (13:14.399)
And they all will combine and play with each other.

has not changed whatsoever.

Christian Brim (13:20.366)
And I don't think it could change. mean, like, if you're trying to get people served up the right information, those things can't change.

Robert Downey (13:33.953)
Correct.

Christian Brim (13:35.714)
But then, you know, what's changing is who's making money off of it.

Robert Downey (13:41.387)
who's making money, how they're making money and how it's connected. I mean, it used to be where you produced a lot of content, you got authority and you were number one. Now with AI, that's not the case. Because it has to actually be something someone cares about. It has to be a problem that has to be there. What I see most business owners fail at in their marketing strategy is that they don't tell the algorithms and tell the search engines by blogging, doing social media. This is...

Christian Brim (13:44.929)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (13:54.264)
Right.

Right.

Robert Downey (14:11.905)
what I do. So, and that's where an agency is going to majorly fail in a lot of cases because they have no idea what that person does. A good case in pointing that is I'm going to use a guy in LA that does garage doors and security gates. I had no idea we were doing full-time marketing for him. I had no idea his number one phone call that he received was because mice were eating cables inside of boxes.

Christian Brim (14:13.409)
Right.

Christian Brim (14:22.893)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (14:42.19)
Mmm

Robert Downey (14:43.423)
He does a video on that. We do a blog post. We start doing social media based on it. Guess what? Now we start to rank for a search term that someone's looking for of, hey, I've got mice in my box. What do I do? How do I fix it? It's an amazing concept. But as a marketing person, you would never, it's not going to be a thought that you have unless you've ever experienced it.

Christian Brim (15:05.718)
Right. And, and, and if you don't have that conversation with the business owner and, and sometimes, sometimes, you know, that guy sounds like he, he had some handle on things, but a lot of times I think business owners aren't real sure themselves. Like, you know, they, don't know, like who their ideal client is or what problem they actually solve. Like I'll, I'll take, I'll take accountants and bag on them for a while.

Robert Downey (15:10.358)
Great.

Robert Downey (15:22.433)
That's my guess.

Christian Brim (15:36.089)
because I can and I am one and that's okay. Yeah, well actually they party really hard strangely. the problem with accountants is that there is virtually no distinction. And I put this on law firms and architects and engineers and every other profession out there is...

Robert Downey (15:39.315)
Accountants are a fun breed.

Robert Downey (15:44.897)
They do.

Christian Brim (16:04.118)
There's nothing different about them. That's not to say that there isn't, but they don't lead with it. They don't say anything about it. And maybe they don't even know it. Like, you know, who our best customers are or who I want more customers like this. Like, you know, have they even gone through that thought process? But until you have that clarity, you can't properly market.

Robert Downey (16:31.489)
You can't. So inside of our dashboard, the very first thing you do for our listings engine is you're going to fill out your profile. And when you fill out your profile, there's three different descriptions. And in those three different descriptions, have one that's 100, your first descriptions are short, which is 100 characters. Then you have a thousand characters and you have 4,000 characters. It amazes me how many business owners can't talk about their business inside of those descriptions.

Christian Brim (17:00.207)
4,000 words is a lot of words. okay, all right.

Robert Downey (17:02.369)
Well, 4,000 characters. So that's your max. So you can technically use your medium and copy and paste it down into the long and you'd be fine. But they'll put in, I do garage doors. I do electrical services. have an account, since we're picking on accountants, I've got an accountant that I was just reviewing theirs and they said, I'm a CPA. They did that for all three descriptions. I had a guy who

Christian Brim (17:08.13)
Yeah, yeah, just keep adding. Right. Yeah.

Christian Brim (17:21.347)
Let's.

Christian Brim (17:26.19)
That's awesome. Yeah, that's not.

Robert Downey (17:31.027)
writes resumes and does all this content writing, he wrote, I'm a writer.

Christian Brim (17:37.763)
Yeah. And, well, and you know, it's, interesting. I, I've, I've been on this entrepreneur entrepreneurial journey for a while. And I can tell you that one of our biggest problems in getting that level of clarity was it was completely self-imposed. It wasn't, it wasn't that we couldn't figure it out. It's that at the end of the day, we didn't

Robert Downey (17:38.739)
And I'm just like, I'm like...

Christian Brim (18:06.454)
want to figure it out because there was this perception that never really reached the level of conscious thought and speaking was that by limiting our target and saying this is what we do, we're somehow going to miss out. That we're going to have to say that we're leaving all this other potential business on the table, right? But the reality is that you're never going to get to talk to anybody

unless you have some type of specificity and clarity.

Robert Downey (18:40.705)
I call that the death of being everything to everybody. And you can't beat everything to everybody. Now with our descriptions, they can get into the chat, they can talk to a marketing coach and we can go through and we can help them be able to work through this is what you should be talking about. It's one of those things to where you have to be able to say, this is the problem I solved. nobody wants to be, everybody wants to be sold, but nobody wants it to be Spanish.

Christian Brim (18:45.826)
Yes. Yes.

Christian Brim (18:50.211)
Yes.

Robert Downey (19:10.421)
when it comes to anything inside of marketing. You have to be able to tell your story. And I'm a big believer that your customer is the hero and you're the one that's going to help them get to where they want to go in their journey. And if you don't tell them where that you can help them, you're going to left behind. It's kind of like if you confuse, lose.

Christian Brim (19:10.467)
Right.

Christian Brim (19:21.389)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (19:28.014)
a hundred percent. And I think back to your, we'll go back and bag on agencies now. I think there was so much money to be made, you know, back from 2000 on, that it, didn't really require them. mean, they had to, they had to be good at the technical aspect of it, right? but, but what has happened is, is that the technical aspect is pretty much automated anymore.

Like you, you, you, you can't, you can't juice the engine anymore. You've you're and so you're no different than anybody else.

Robert Downey (19:58.229)
It is.

Robert Downey (20:06.101)
You are, you're a commodity. It's what you turn into. I mean, we work with a lot of agencies that use our system to be able to go out, but it's one of those things to where, I mean, I remember back in the day when I could charge 20K for a website, cause it wasn't hard to do. Now we could take the SEO pic, the AI SEO pixel that we developed, we could put it inside of that Wix or that GoDaddy site that they went through, they drag and dropped it and created on their own.

Christian Brim (20:07.788)
Yes, right.

Robert Downey (20:34.913)
It is nothing more than a business card with a lot of data points on it. And you can take that data and you can turn it into advertising. We can go through, we could tweak out that message and be able to make it to where it's going to rank higher if I do an SEO side. But really it's turned into where it's automated more than it ever has been, which is why we can do it for the price we do it in.

Christian Brim (20:54.979)
Right. Do you know Dennis Yu? You familiar with him? Blitzmetrics. He's the one that codified the dollar a day for social advertising.

Robert Downey (20:58.113)
The name sounds familiar, but I'm not picturing it.

Robert Downey (21:10.561)
think I've seen some stuff, but I really don't, I mean, I don't know it personally.

Christian Brim (21:13.91)
No. Okay. Well, it's, it's, it's exactly that on, on the, on the social platform where it's like, you can guess what's going to work with the algorithm, but why, why bother just put it out there and let the algorithm tell you if it's working. Like you, don't, you don't need to be smarter than the machine. Just let the machine tell you.

Robert Downey (21:37.867)
Well, with our social media suite, meaning you pop it up, can enter in, you can write your message in, you can say correct with AI, it'll go in and it'll look at it from that aspect, look at your profile, what's worked, what hasn't, it'll make a recommendation of this is what you should say on this network, they can go to the next network and do the same thing and schedule them all out because I'm a big believer that the message you do inside of Facebook is different than the message you do on X or Twitter versus LinkedIn versus...

doing YouTube versus doing each of those networks that person even if it's the same person that's going to go to each of them they're in a different mindset when they come to it. Gary Vee probably said that the best out of anybody. They're in a different mode when they go to Facebook than when they're on Twitter. It just is what it is. When they're on Twitter they're looking for news which is kind of a very interesting dynamic that has shifted over the last three or four years.

Christian Brim (22:15.095)
Yes.

Christian Brim (22:30.796)
Yeah, and when they're on LinkedIn, they don't want to see cat videos. You know, they're in business mode. Right.

Robert Downey (22:35.137)
Correct.

And each of these platforms have kind of twisted and changed. If you go back and you look at the history of YouTube, you know what YouTube started as?

Christian Brim (22:41.709)
Yes.

Christian Brim (22:46.912)
I think I knew at one point, but I've forgotten.

Robert Downey (22:49.957)
it started as a dating app and then it started getting majorly used by escorts inside of Nevada and one of them shared a cat video and then YouTube turned into what YouTube is today.

Christian Brim (22:52.864)
okay.

Christian Brim (23:04.802)
There you go. Well, you know, it's kind of like Facebook's origin story was seeing which chicks were hotter. there's you just got to figure out how simply be found connects people for sex and then you'll it'll just rocket. I don't know how.

Robert Downey (23:25.953)
We've been confused as a dating app before. I had someone on chat this weekend that wanted to find out how I can match them to the right person and use their data to be able to find their mate.

Christian Brim (23:35.584)
Robert, you may be missing out on something. I don't know.

So let's go back to some of the previous businesses that you've owned. What are some of the toughest lessons you've learned? Like the ones that cost you the most or hurt the most or you had to keep repeating because you weren't getting the right mess.

Robert Downey (24:03.329)
Trying to be perfect.

Christian Brim (24:04.952)
Hmm.

Robert Downey (24:06.593)
I've done that on multiple businesses. I can even say I've done that inside of Assembly Be Found. Trying to be absolutely have a perfect piece of software or a perfect solution and also not just getting out there. Because whenever you create anything inside of the business world, it's about getting it out there as fast as you can and seeing if you have a market. If you don't have a market, you got to pivot and you got to be able to move on and be able to tweak what you're doing because it's not going to work.

Christian Brim (24:31.352)
So are you there yet with Simply Be Found? Have you proved the, yeah, you've proved it.

Robert Downey (24:33.601)
yeah, we're there. Yeah, we've proven it. Our dynamic of going from not just being Google only or Google first was probably one of the best things we've ever done.

Christian Brim (24:46.414)
So back to that perfection thing, how has that caused problems?

Robert Downey (24:54.241)
to where you don't, it costs you money, especially when you're developing software, it costs you a lot of money to be able to develop and be able to put those systems. The problem is those systems change just as fast as you're developing. So if you don't have a most valuable product or MVP and you're out there, it's gonna cost you a lot of money. And it's just, it's gonna be a cycle that you can never get out of because you're fighting not just yourself.

Christian Brim (24:59.555)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Robert Downey (25:21.737)
I mean, if we look at Simply Be Found, we work with over 800 different networks on our listings engine. Those networks have issues. Those networks have changes on a daily basis. If not an hourly basis, we have a new update that comes through. So you have to be able to stay on top of each of those updates and how things are being used and being done. If you want it to be perfect, it's never going to be perfect. It's kind of like...

you'll get that one person that's one off, it doesn't work inside of mobile, or it doesn't work on desktop, it doesn't, you know, there's little tweaks because they might have a resolution that's different than this person over here. There's not a single perfect algorithm out there for software development. In the marketing world, you have to take some risks. You might say something, it might be totally wrong, it might get you bad publicity, but there is nothing that...

I would say 99 % of the cases, bad publicity is okay publicity, because it's publicity. You got your name out there. It's all in how you handle it. mean, there's certain things that you could do that you'd classify in that 1 % that you're never going to come back from, and you should have done those in the first place. But most of the cases, put yourself out there. Take risks and pivot if it's not working for you. And in the small business world,

being able to believe in yourself and not trusting what these so-called experts are out there and being able to go with your gut. That's probably my biggest advice for any small business owner.

Christian Brim (26:54.049)
Yeah, there's this concept that I don't remember where I learned it, but it wasn't my idea of knowing enough, you know, and I think that's what has cost me a lot of money over the years, specifically around marketing is that, you know, it was like, well, I have this problem. I'm just going to throw it on your plate and you fix it. Right. But not having enough knowledge about what is possible.

Or what is, is potentially going on so that I can monitor or hold accountable the people that are doing that. you know, it's, it, for a long time, a lot of it is what I just referred to as a black box. I don't know what goes on in there. and, that's a dangerous place to be as a business owner because you can be taken advantage of. but even if they're not trying to take advantage of you.

You really don't know whether they're doing their job correctly or not.

Robert Downey (27:57.945)
And guess what? Most of these marketing companies are going to give business owners, you got this many likes, you got this many comments, you have this many people following you. Are they the right people? Who's liking, who's doing that? And I've never had any of my bills ever paid by likes and comments.

Christian Brim (28:08.342)
Right. Right.

Christian Brim (28:13.342)
No, no. And at the end of the day, if you were going to boil it down in some form or fashion, the business owner wants leads calls, you know, right.

Robert Downey (28:24.469)
actionable results that you can put your hand on. And they want money in the bank account. Now, them keeping it their bank account, that's a whole different story that's on them.

Christian Brim (28:32.207)
Right. But I remember one marketing agency client I had that was working with a charter aircraft company and they, uh, the charter company was saying, this, this isn't these marketing efforts aren't working. And they came back and said, well, here's all of these calls that were initiated from this campaign. And they went back and found out that no one was manning that phone line.

And it's like, you know, it's, and that goes back to the whole no enough, just because the marketing agency was doing their job. They were getting results, but internally they didn't have the right follow-up process to, to, to manage the leads. And so it was a waste of money, but whose fault was that?

Robert Downey (29:25.429)
I've seen it happen. I saw a roofing company that canceled one cell phone number and that was the number that all their calls were going to because their assistant wasn't there anymore.

Christian Brim (29:35.724)
Yeah. Yeah.

Robert Downey (29:36.927)
Like it's been really dead the last three months. Like it took you three months to realize you weren't getting phone calls.

Christian Brim (29:42.06)
Yeah, yeah. And how long did it take them to figure out that it was the phone that they turned off?

Robert Downey (29:47.957)
We have, I started going through the marketing campaign and I called the number and it was disconnected. I'm like, this is a problem. Like what happened? They're like, well, don't you check that? how often do I call you?

Christian Brim (29:55.864)
This is bad. This is bad.

Christian Brim (30:04.726)
Yeah, well did they get the phone number back? No, that's that's disappointing.

Robert Downey (30:12.161)
So was one of those things where you had to go through, had to update it and change it. And that's where, I mean, speaking of phone numbers, I hate tracking call numbers. That's probably one of the biggest things that marketing companies push on business owners that cost them probably the most because once they leave that marketing agency, they lose that tracking number and now it's the number that's out there. And once you let anything out of that genie's bottle and it goes out on the internet, it's hard to pull it back in or get it updated to be changed.

Christian Brim (30:20.109)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (30:41.656)
Yeah, yes, I know that from experience, trying to hunt down numbers. Like where in the hell is this number showing up? Like people are calling this number, but I have no idea where it shows up in the world. I don't know where they're getting it. Yeah.

Robert Downey (30:54.443)
Right. I had people calling my personal cell phone for Simply Be Found a couple weeks ago and I'm like, how'd you get that? Well, it happened to be in one spot, happened to be on my LinkedIn profile, and they started calling it off of that. Of course there are salespeople trying to sell me things, but you know, no. But it's one of those things to where, I mean, they're pulling data from somewhere. It's like the most, probably the biggest miscommunication, probably the biggest...

Christian Brim (31:06.798)
There you go.

Christian Brim (31:10.328)
Did you buy? No, okay.

Robert Downey (31:22.981)
mis-piece from any member that we have that comes on is they look at Simply Be Found as an ad and they think that just because they paid and they put it out there it's going to be an instant process and since it's organic it's not instant.

Christian Brim (31:38.85)
You have to earn it, baby. You gotta earn it.

Robert Downey (31:40.929)
You have to go through it. It takes time and it takes different pieces. My best story on that was a realtor in Dallas, Texas. She thought she was going to show up inside of voice search for best realtor, since she put that keyword in, best realtor in Dallas, Texas every single time.

Christian Brim (32:03.554)
That's not gonna happen.

Robert Downey (32:05.217)
I said if I could guarantee you that spot, for one, you wouldn't probably be able to afford it. For two, I'm sure I probably wouldn't be talking to you because I'm sure I could sell that spot for a lot of money. And for three, that's not the way this works.

Christian Brim (32:14.516)
Exactly. Somebody else. Yes.

Yeah. When that goes back to the know enough, like know what's what's possible. Like, yeah, because otherwise you're going to get sold on a hope and a dream that yeah.

Robert Downey (32:30.451)
And it takes a little bit of work to make business work. It doesn't just happen overnight. It's amazing concept.

Christian Brim (32:34.046)
It's fascinating, it? Yeah. I'm always very skeptical of someone that is pitching pie in the sky. you know, I don't... I guess I'm old and cynical. I don't know.

Robert Downey (32:52.265)
I mean, it works better back in the day if we go back to Yellow Pages.

Christian Brim (32:57.055)
Well, yeah, world was.

Robert Downey (32:58.465)
But then if you missed the salesperson that came in to sell you Yellow Pages or you screwed up and put the wrong phone number in Yellow Pages, which I've seen happen before, you're screwed for a whole year.

Christian Brim (33:09.878)
Yeah, that's true. That's it. That's exactly right. Could you find Yellow Pages anywhere anymore? No. Although it would be handy.

Robert Downey (33:11.079)
you only have one opportunity for the whole year to be able to that print.

Robert Downey (33:19.719)
I tried finding an old yellow page to be to do a YouTube video the other day. Like I wanted one those great big dimmer like big thick where they had multiple different books.

Christian Brim (33:25.452)
Yeah. Yeah.

Robert Downey (33:33.217)
I'm sure somebody has them somewhere. The library's like, we just threw those out like three weeks before and I'm like, of course you did, of course you did!

Christian Brim (33:41.41)
Well, I mean, even a white pages would be helpful. Yeah, anyway, Robert, how do we find out more about Simply Be Found? I mean, I'm assuming it's just simplybefound.com. That's brilliant.

Robert Downey (33:48.128)
I

Robert Downey (33:53.281)
You can go to simplybefound.com. You can also check us on YouTube. We have tons of YouTube videos. Our biggest thing is being able to help as many small businesses, educate them on what's happening in the world of marketing. if they're a good fit for them, then great. We'd love to have them on as a member. They get marketing coaching, everything with that. And we have the tools to be able to make it happen, especially our social media tools as well. That's probably the most popular tool this year.

Christian Brim (34:21.312)
I love it. Listeners, if you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. Robert, thank you for your time and your insights. Listeners, if you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message and I'll replace Robert. Until then, ta ta for now.

Robert Downey (34:43.999)
Awesome, thank you.