Value-Driven Strategies for Success | Todd Wallis

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this conversation, Todd Wallis discusses the significance of setting clear goals and understanding the value proposition in marketing and branding. He uses the metaphor of Alice in Wonderland to illustrate the importance of knowing one's destination before choosing a path. The discussion emphasizes the need for businesses to focus on the value they provide to their target audience to achieve success.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• The importance of having a clear goal in mind.
• Understanding your audience is key to effective marketing.
• Value proposition should drive your branding strategies.
• Without a goal, any path will do, but it may not lead to success.
• Businesses need to focus on the value they provide.
• Setting goals helps in making informed decisions.
• Marketing strategies should align with audience needs.
• Branding should reflect the value offered to customers.
• Engaging with your audience is essential for growth.
• Clarity in goals leads to better outcomes.

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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.495)
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. Special shout out to our one listener in Milan, Italy. Yes, we are international here on the Profitable Creative. Arriba D'Urci, as Brad Pitt would say. Thank you for listening. Joining me today, Todd Willis. Wallace, sorry. Todd, let's start that over.

Todd Wallis (00:27.256)
Wallace.

Christian Brim (00:31.479)
Joining me today, Todd Wallace of Inbound Blend. Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Wallis (00:35.598)
All right. Thank you for having me.

Christian Brim (00:38.317)
Yeah, I sat there and I'm looking at it. You know what the problem is, is the branding in Riverside, my font is purple and it sometimes when it goes against light colors, I can't read it. Anyway.

Todd Wallis (00:54.594)
All good.

Christian Brim (00:56.245)
Yeah, inbound blend. What is it you guys do there?

Todd Wallis (01:01.678)
We're a full service digital marketing agency. Started back in 2017 and our initial mission and still, you know, big part of what we do was to help small businesses. Then we started off mainly around the St. Louis area, but through referrals and growth, now in 20 states and we've actually grown beyond just small businesses.

clients over 100 million now and still the same things we do for the solopreneur we're also doing for bigger enterprises.

Christian Brim (01:44.631)
I love that. So what did you do before 2017?

Todd Wallis (01:49.358)
I've had two other businesses. One, I invented a product with a buddy of mine. It was a picture frame with a bendable tail called Pigtails. It was designed for hospitals and nursing homes to bring pictures of loved ones nearby, keeping them nearby while they were in the hospital bed or nursing homes. it went well.

Until it didn't, know, we were manufacturing over in China. was the only way we could do it. And we grew pretty quickly, but it eventually didn't work out. We had some manufacturing problems that were just too costly to recover from. And as far as next business I had was a video marketing company.

And it went well. We grew pretty quickly and just, I think every state and translating videos in 16 different languages. you know, lot of companies you'd never heard of, but we made videos for launch videos for Xerox to training videos for the US Marines and like seven different styles. was a wonderful business, but you know, kind of

to the point, know, have a book over your shoulder that will profit first. The thing that I learned through that experience was our business was a project, all of our revenue was project based. So we did a video project and then, you know, we have to get more and over time that just became very challenging to where the model that we have today, we're upfront with our clients about that.

Christian Brim (03:28.323)
Mmm.

Todd Wallis (03:41.486)
is a MRR, monthly reoccurring model. And kind of a good thing for us as a business, because it makes revenue more predictable. But it also holds us accountable because our services are month to month. don't lock people in long term. They could leave us at any time. But they don't. Clients that stay with us more than a year, we have a 90 plus percent retention rate.

as a result of just doing good work for people, doing what we say we're gonna do.

Christian Brim (04:17.079)
So let me clarify what you said after they've been there with you for a year. In other words, they've got the foundation set. They stick with you 90 % of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Which is exceptional, especially for digital agencies. I want to go back and then we'll come back to this. I want to go back to lessons learned from two businesses.

Todd Wallis (04:28.652)
Over 90 % of the time, yeah.

Christian Brim (04:46.883)
How did that influence the current iteration, it inbound blend, and anything that you didn't want to replicate? I'm definitely not going to do that again.

Todd Wallis (05:04.221)
there's definitely those along the way. The biggest overarching message is problems are a good thing. And actually was a contributing author in a book called 6 Entrepreneurs with Grit that came out this year. And my chapter, and there are kind of talks about this, that the...

The title of the chapter was Problems are a Good Thing. It starts off me talking about being a kid and being a curious kid, following my dad around for week and repair jobs. And I remember one time in particular, kind of a core memory that stuck with me was him working on our Ford F-150. And he went down, he decided the timing he had to adjust it. So he went down and got this thing from the basement and connected it. It was an engine timing light, something I'd never seen before as a kid.

It looked like something out of a Buck Rogers show or something. And I remember I asked him, a guy always seemed to just have whatever he needed. It's like, dad, why do you have so many tools? And he laughed and said, because I've had so many things break on me. And as a time as a kid, I just laughed. But it's kind of a memory that stuck with me. And over time, whether it was in the pigtails that

Christian Brim (06:17.485)
Yeah.

Todd Wallis (06:28.558)
video business or our current business as we continue to do things. I've started to recognize that when something goes not the way you expected, there's always a lesson to be learned there too. Either you come out of it or a challenge comes up that you end up finding a way to tell them, this is in a digital marketing agency. That's pretty much every day for us. Something comes up that...

You know, it's like, don't just know off the top of your head what people hire us for as, of course, our knowledge, but also our resourcefulness, our ability to find that answer. And I think that confidence that has come along the way through going through enough of those challenges and problems kind of puts us in a strong position, not just myself, but my team moving forward.

Christian Brim (07:28.897)
Yeah, the founder of Boston Market spoke at an education event that I was at and he was an Italian immigrant from Boston. And so like you could barely understand him between those two accents. But he said, you know, more business, more problems, no business, no problems. And I think

that speaks to, I don't know if you ever felt this way as a younger entrepreneur, trying to figure it out that like, at some point you were gonna get this level where the problems were all solved, right? Like you'd figure this out. But that is absolute fallacy. You don't. Correct.

Todd Wallis (08:16.011)
bait and

Christian Brim (08:21.251)
And I'd agree with you that like you don't learn anything when you don't have problems or it depends on how you can define it as a problem or as a failure or you know the expectation wasn't met like it didn't work out the way you thought it would. You don't learn anything by success and that may sound counterintuitive but it is reality.

Like you, you can have a successful business in spite of what you do wrong. And, and until you reach the point that those problems, challenges, failures, whatever are exposed, you, you don't learn from them. and, and, and I've seen businesses, my, my, my own business included where

You know, things are going along, you're making money and you don't understand what's going wrong under the surface.

Todd Wallis (09:23.982)
No, absolutely. And there's times where you try to do things a certain way because I would say early on, you try to do things a certain way because you think it's the right thing to do because, you know, sometimes there's sound bites from influencers or books we read or whatever. And you think, oh, I don't want to be that entrepreneur or the bad one that they paint.

want to be the good one. And so you try to do some of those things. And sometimes it's not always necessarily maybe it's not the right advice, but maybe it's not the right advice at that time, or that you're maybe too soon to do that thing that you're doing. And I think that definitely, you know, was a part for us. I remember a mentor of mine, you know, advised me early on, excuse me for a second.

Christian Brim (10:00.631)
Mm-hmm.

Todd Wallis (10:20.11)
to that one of the big mistakes that he had made was not delegating soon enough. He held on to things too long and didn't delegate. So this is somebody I respected. So that was in the back of my mind. And I think early on, even into in-bound planning, I probably did that more aggressively. I wanted to groom people and need to delegate to them. Well, I think some of that was too soon.

Christian Brim (10:25.549)
Mmm.

Todd Wallis (10:48.308)
And you don't realize that at the time that sometimes as we get older, I just celebrated my 50th birthday this year. And you forget how much you've learned along the way. doesn't, you think certain things, just take as common knowledge or everybody knows this. it's like, and it's quite frankly, it's a compliment to the people that you're working with that you believe, you got this, yeah, you can do it. But you forget how many meetings you sat in as a second or

Christian Brim (10:48.568)
Hmm.

Todd Wallis (11:18.418)
secondary or tertiary person in the room while somebody else was leading and you know when you were younger or things where somebody helped guide you or the books that you've read along the way to gain that knowledge or the seminars or you know trade shows that you attended you know you just forget how much you've learned accumulated knowledge along the way and I think that you know that's a that was a big one for us is that yes you should delegate you know whenever

possible, but if doing it too soon in your business, it's not a good thing either.

Christian Brim (11:56.035)
Yeah, I here's I talk about this in my book, Profit First for Creatives, and I've talked about it a lot on this show that the key to success, I believe, for an entrepreneur is to figure out initially and afterwards, I'd say initially and perpetually is to know what it is that you do.

that creates the most value, both personally and as a company, right? And figure out what that 20 % of your efforts that you personally do that create 80 % of the results or the value that you provide and focus on that. And the 80 % that you're, the rest of the work, work diligently to eliminate,

automate or delegate, right? But to your point, you can't just throw things at people and it get done the same way. And that's where I think processes are so important and processes allow you to take some of that knowledge that you have and institutionalize it and formalize it.

You don't necessarily have to explain yourself why you came up with this process or how you came up with this process, but like do it this way because this is the way you're going to get consistent results. But I see so many creative entrepreneurs starting out where they resist that process word. don't want, they feel like processes are limiting, but

the reality is is those processes give you capacity to do creativity and to grow the business.

Todd Wallis (13:52.654)
I was a big believer in that particularly, but I feel like that's changing a little bit over time. And to the extent where we invested heavily in our own LMS, we were using processes. There's a wonderful company, I'll give them a shout out, because I think it's a wonderful platform called System Hub that...

I think they're based in Australia or something. We were spending a good amount of money to have all these different processes for the different things that we did. sometimes you do things on a regular basis, or once you do it a couple times, you've got it. But there are certain things, maybe it's every six months or whatever, that it even comes up, right? And so they even teach you how to make your processes, do a screen recording video, and then the next person to make a checklist.

that if it changes, you can update, you can see who knows that it's there and all that kind of stuff. there's all wonderful things. AI has changed that. AI has changed that tremendously and that the world is changing so fast now that those...

things that we were building become so dated so quickly now that my opinion that building good processes that you leverage the right AI technology goes way faster and better before.

Christian Brim (15:30.325)
Yeah, I think, I think whereas before you had to, when you looked at processes, you, were oftentimes granular and it was, it was more like a recipe with a video instruction along with it. So like you can recreate this souffle. but the, the thing that you're talking about is more of a principle driven, right?

And that's what I find interesting with the technology shift is yes, the tactics, the methods have changed and will continue to change. But that's what makes the fundamentals more important. like understanding, like the basics of marketing, like do you understand your target customer?

Do you understand the messaging? Do you understand the channels where they hang out? Right? Those are foundational things that are completely lost. If like from and it's not just from a business owner standpoint, like your customers. I think it's lost with a lot of marketers like they're caught up in the latest iteration of the algorithm, whether that's that's that was Google or Facebook and now is LLMs.

And it's like, wait a second. Let's talk foundations here. Like, what are you trying to accomplish?

Todd Wallis (17:03.352)
Yep. I actually with most new client, potential new client meetings, we talk about this. Usually the first thing that like, well, well, tell me what you guys do or what you would do for us. And like, we'll cover that. I promise you. But before we get into any of that, we kind of talk about, know, kind of began with the end in mind. And I'll use this story a lot, the Alice in Wonderland story of, you know, Alice in Wonderland walking up and there's a fork in the road.

And there's the Cheshire Cats up in the tree and she goes, well, which path should I take? And he says, well, where are you trying to go? And she goes, I don't know. And he goes, well, then it doesn't really matter, right? And so these are conversations that come up a lot where people are like, tell me what you would do different with my web center. Tell me what you would do different for our marketing, our branding, et cetera, our messaging. And the reality is that if we can get people to focus on

Christian Brim (17:43.797)
It doesn't? Yeah.

Todd Wallis (18:02.094)
planting that flag of the goal, but understanding what that flag, that goal should be driven around, it's then around value. What value are you providing to that target audience? And we literally then talk about what's something we call the value curve. Whereas there's three main levels where somebody says, I'm not interested, I don't have a need for what you're talking about. Or somebody in the middle, this is the area I call the death of a salesperson.

Oh, I love it. Give me a call back in three months. Give me a call back in the beginning of the year. And in other words, they saw some value, but not enough to be disruptive, not enough to stop what they were doing and to move forward. And then the top of it, they usually are saying pretty much to all of us, this is great. What's the next step? Right? Literally say, what's the next step? And then we'll have it on this little illustration that we have. And the only thing you can do wrong there is not close them or

If there truly is a situation they're locked in a contract ironclad they can't get out or there's a fiscal year and blah blah blah blah That's fine But you need to understand that if there's a period time between there. It's not locked in yet they're gonna as time goes on their Excitement for that is going to diminish and so you have to make sure to continue to bring them back to that level of excitement when you reengage or alone

Christian Brim (19:25.111)
Yes, because fun, this is the thing that I, I, I think a lot of business owners get wrong is they, they think that sales and by proxy marketing is about what you do, your features and benefits, you know, the, the, the excellence that you provide, cetera.

When the reality is, you know, like Donald Miller, you know, and Storybrand, it's their story. It's not your story. You're not the hero. And it's, it's how they feel. It's not how, how you describe what you do. And, and it is, sales is all emotion driven. People, people come to an emotional purchasing decision.

Todd Wallis (20:01.358)
All right.

Christian Brim (20:21.791)
And then they rationalize it with their, their, their neocortex, right? Like it's like, I want to do business with Todd cause I like Todd. I trust Todd and, and he, he makes me feel good about whatever problem I have. Right. I don't know whether Todd can do what he says he's can do. Right. Like I, I'm, but, but the decision is made in, in the hindbrained. It is not made up here.

But you know, I had this argument with my brother who still to this day claims that he doesn't make decisions based upon emotion. I said, you're full of shit. Everybody does. Like that is just not you are diluting yourself. But his his thought is is that I make rational choices. Yes, you do based upon what you feel. You you you bring those rational thoughts in line with how you feel, not not the other way around.

Todd Wallis (21:18.734)
Well, that's an interesting thing just about along those lines that there's a belief that you don't have control over your actions. You only have control over your decisions. It's something that takes place mentally. In other words, you decide to do something or not before it happens to a degree. And I think that there's a little bit to that. But it's like, be careful what you.

what your self talk or what you're focused on. Is it gonna work out or is it not? Whether you think you can, you think you can't, you're right to a degree. And I think that plays a part in that.

Christian Brim (22:05.485)
Well, yeah, and I think you see it. I think it's more obvious when you're making a choice you know you shouldn't. So like, you know, let's say it is something that you objectively consider immoral. Like, okay, I'm gonna cheat on my wife. Well, you you have that feeling and you start to make rationalizations. You're like, hold on a second. I'm rationalizing something I know I shouldn't do.

But it's something when it's something that you want to do and there's no moral quandary with it. You don't see that rationalization come over the top and start filling in the gaps for you. But it exists and not not I guess what I'm saying is is you don't try to change that human behavior. You just go with it and to your point is you know if they're not ready to close and can't close.

then you've got to find some way to maintain that emotion because that's what's going to drive the purchase. I just finished rereading Extreme Revenue Growth by Victor Cheng and it's a fascinating book, but he starts with, know, so like, how do you have a company that grows rapidly? And he starts with this very pedantic statement, which you're like, well, duh, but

It is you have a customer that has a need and they know they have a need and they have the ability and willingness to pay for it. I see which all of those things sound real simple, real basic, right? But you've got to get them all perfectly right. And the problem I see a lot of entrepreneurs and we struggle with this still in our business all the time. I'm sure you do too.

Is you see the need right? You're like man, they're doing their marketing wrong like this is not the messaging scrap. The websites crap the copies crap like and you're like I can fix them right? I can I can make this better and you could. But they don't see it. So it's a non starter right and and that's where we get into this. Game.

Christian Brim (24:29.943)
where we've got to sell them twice. We got to sell them that they have a need because they don't see it. And then we have to sell them the solution, right? Which is a real hard slog. So the key, I think, to having a successful growing business is to find out what they perceive their need to be and find a solution for that. Because what I find, I find it's not so.

this hypothetical company we're talking about that has crappy marketing, right? They may not perceive that their branding and messaging and collateral is the problem, right? But they do perceive a problem if they're not growing, yeah? Or their sales are going down or whatever. There's something, there's some symptom there that they are aware of. And so to me, it's like not trying to convince them

that your solution fits their problem is to figure out what their problem is and design the solution in a way that they understand it.

Todd Wallis (25:39.374)
and that they want to do. Like that's the thing too, right? Like, you know, my wife works in healthcare and there's a term that you use, you know, they left AMA against medical advice, basically. And I was like, oh, pretty much had that same thing in our world. Like, you know, it's still AMA against marketing advice. Like there's things that you see like, ah, this would, you know, you know, it seems obvious to us, but you know, you also sometimes have visitors that project their own personality into

Christian Brim (25:41.314)
Yes.

Todd Wallis (26:08.622)
you know, what they think all of their prospects do, or things that, you know, somebody else has told them, you know, that this that's got their ear. And so it's also a question of what does success look like? You know, you talk about, you know, the, you know, the example a lot of people go to is, you know, you can miss 70 % of the baseballs when you're up to bat in Major League Baseball and still make the Hall of Fame. Like, you know, that

you know, plus baddie average is amazing, you know, and the challenge that I think we deal with is there's a lot of fragmentation in marketing right now that there's, you know, between social media and not just, you know, we had SEO, of course, now there's also AEO where people are wanting to rank on different, you know, chat, TBT and the like. And the,

you know, the challenge you run into is something my experience with a lot of folks is they get caught up in what I, you know, last click attribution. In other words, what's the last thing that they did that then automatically, of course, turns into a sale, right? And it's like, well, almost never, unless you're selling something very, very simplistic.

you're telling the little thing that pops on the back of your phone to hold your phone, okay, a kickstand, sure. We can get into last click attribution to a degree there. Even that can get more complicated. you know, you're sure we can generate an awareness and you can see things working or not, but a lot of times you're forgetting that there's kind of a life cycle to this.

It sometimes goes through a few cycles before it actually kicks out something, a lead or a new client.

Christian Brim (28:08.301)
Yeah, because that last attribution was the first of, it was the last of 12. And you didn't track or see the other 12, right? I mean, it's kind of like this. I wrote this book and I put it out there. I can tell you there were some sales that were attributed to the book. But the reality is I have no way of measuring the impact of that book.

on my marketing and sales efforts because just the book existing, whether anyone buys it or not, makes a difference, right? How much of a difference? I don't know. And that's what we're trying to do in marketing is understand human behavior. And it's complex and oftentimes irrational. And so, you know,

I've been very guilty of this. used to think that there was a marketing machine that you could build and you'd put $1 in it and $2 would come out the back, right? I am now convinced that that does not exist, right? I think that if you have a great product or service and you have got traction in the marketplace, in other words, people are

are buying it. You're going to be able to know if you've got success when people come find you, right? Which is not what a marketer wants to hear and that's not really what a business owner wants to hear because I want more. I don't want to wait for people to come to me, right? But I guess what I'm saying is,

Most business owners need to go back to that fundamental question. Do they have the right product or service offering? That's that people want because marketing is just an amplifier and and and if you don't have a good product or solution Then you're just putting lipstick on a pig

Todd Wallis (30:22.226)
Yeah. No, uh, a hundred percent. And I think, you know, there's also certain businesses where they'll tell you that, you know, they, they know they need a website or maybe social media, et cetera, but that they get most of their business from referrals and their network and what have you. And as an agency, I, we have literally tested this multiple times for ourselves, uh, to see, cause you know, we give referrals, luckily, and

we get, we found very obvious, we get more referrals when we're advertising. In other words, if you, we, we, the brand lift that more people who know us see us. And because the thing people forget is that everybody's got their own stuff going on. Everybody's living their own life. They got their own problems of the day, their family, their kids, their, you know, whatever it is.

Christian Brim (30:59.287)
Yes.

Todd Wallis (31:20.942)
Yes, they may refer business to you occasionally, but you're not at the top of their list. But then you become part of their short-term memory, like they see an ad for you, that's Christian's business, that's great. And then something comes up where they now have an opportunity and they're able to help connect those dots.

Christian Brim (31:26.037)
No. No.

Christian Brim (31:44.737)
Absolutely. No, yeah. And it was not meant to be a, shouldn't market, but more of a kind of like the discussion about processes. Do you have the basics right? Do you have the right product or service that's actually solving the customer or client's problem? I want to pivot back to your business model. it sounds like...

One of the changes you made with this current iteration with inbound blend is that you're focused on a recurring revenue and what I would call without having seen it, a more of a productization of your services where there's a menu of services that you provide for a fee. Is that accurate?

Todd Wallis (32:37.802)
Yes and no. So yes, because that's the way people think of it. So when we're going over our services with somebody, we ask for a full service agency, we offer all these different things. And we'll literally show them a list of the 12 main things that we do. But we then tell them, now, before we go to my room, don't get hung up on this part, because

For us, these are just our tools. These are the things that we have at our disposal to help you. It'd be the same as if your car wasn't running and you took your car into the shop and you say, hey, my car is kind of making this weird noise or it's running rough. Can you fix it? And the mechanic goes, oh yeah, look at all these tools that I have. I don't really care what tools the mechanic has. I care whether or not you have the knowledge or ability to guide us. And that's what we have.

Christian Brim (33:23.201)
Right. No.

Todd Wallis (33:32.462)
It all begins, as Stephen Covey said it best, begin with the end in mind. When somebody says, what will you do for us? It's like, what's happening or not happening right now that you want to change? In other words, where is it you want to go? We're back to Alice in Wonderland. Which path are you trying to take? We can then give you our opinion. We're not yes men. We're going to give you feedback if we think that's the wrong thing to do.

But at the end of the day, they're the boss, we'll help work for them. But the reality is, is once you plant that flag, I had a situation yesterday where there was a certain thing that they want people to sign up for, for these certain seminars. And immediately, that'd be a good metric and the thing that, goal for it to work towards. And immediately, while we're on the call, started looking, navigating through their site.

and realized several things wrong with just the client experience right now, where I got to tell you, think 95 % of people would have bounced off that wanted to go forward based off how difficult it was to navigate. And so some of that was low-hanging fruit for folks like us that was like, hey, there's a better way to do this to make the experience a little bit easier to navigate and having that goal in mind.

the path to get there starts to show itself.

Christian Brim (35:02.189)
So is yours a true retainer model in the sense that the work is custom scoped and then they're paying for the time or is it more of a you pay us X amount and we're going to solve these problems for you?

Todd Wallis (35:24.238)
Yeah, it's a... Are you familiar with the term stopgap?

Christian Brim (35:30.499)
Yes. Well, in general, I don't know if there's a specific application.

Todd Wallis (35:34.124)
So, hey, well, we've created the, my million dollar idea, if you will, was, and you know, had wonderful feedback on it was creating these marketing service blocks, okay? Because it's something that people can wrap their head around. Early on, this is not always, it wasn't always the case, but it's been the case for a while. Early on, we used to do exactly kind of what you're saying, like,

We meet with somebody, discovery, then tailor a price and everything according to what they have going on. What we've done is standardized that to a degree and created the ability to have these individual blocks that have different stop gaps. Only a couple of them are around time. Most are on certain deliverables. And then the people can stack them if they want a whole lot of a certain thing or...

they can change them out. And so what people kind of get their head wrapped around quickly is that you come to us, you have access to everything we do. We have 12 different marketing service blogs and you can start with just one if you want and kind of get your foot in the door. You have access to everything. In other words, next month you can change it to something else, et cetera. Or more often than not, somebody is on a daily, start with.

kind of four blocks or more. And there are certain things that may be pretty standard and then, you know, maybe one or two that get changed out periodically or seasonally depending on the business.

Christian Brim (37:11.885)
So in other words, your pricing would be dependent upon how many blocks they want at a time. Yeah. And, and I think that's, that's a brilliant solution. I ran into that. hired a vendor earlier this year that does work with accounting firms to help automate processes. And the way they do their pricing is based upon how many projects they work on at a time.

Todd Wallis (37:18.296)
That's right.

Christian Brim (37:41.675)
And the entry level offer is X dollars will work on one project at a time. That doesn't mean that the project is going to be done in a month. It might get done in two weeks. It might take eight weeks, but we're going to work on one problem at a time. And then if the way you can stack that is, okay, well, I need you work on two projects at a time. So it's more of a pace capacity thing than it is a specific outcome and time. If that makes sense.

Todd Wallis (38:10.606)
Yeah, and there are projects that get brought into that, obviously, but a lot of it's ongoing things. Like somebody wants us to take care of their social media, or we're managing their Google Ads, or we're doing SEO work, or managing their website, keeping things updated, and making edits and changes to it. These are all reoccurring things that are on an ongoing basis, and as the vast majority of our clients. I think the reason that 90, you know,

That first year is a little bit different. It goes up and down, up and flows. It's because we do, when we're bringing on to people, some people do just hire us for a project. it's like, whereas that's not our target, like if we're doing market segmentation, that's not the target we're going after. It's a secondary market, right? Like, yeah, somebody who just wants a little bit, the hope is that they get in, see the value and beyond that.

Sometimes you run into things where I could probably tell early on that they're gonna be a temporary one because they're non-believers. There are certain people that are just non-believers and there's nothing you can do about that.

Christian Brim (39:22.313)
Yeah, and that kind of goes back to that. Do they perceive the need like clearly, you know, the and maybe the project will reveal the need to them. They'll realize through that process that, I do in fact have more things that I need fixed. Perfect. How do people, Todd, find inbound blend if they want to learn more about what you do?

Todd Wallis (39:49.804)
Yeah, we're just real simple, and on blend.com. And we also have a YouTube channel called Blender News Zone. You can find us there.

Christian Brim (40:01.699)
Perfect, listeners will have those links in the notes of the show. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message, tell us who you'd like to have on the show and we'll get rid of Todd. Until then, ta ta for now.

Todd Wallis (40:19.01)
Hahaha

Todd Wallis (40:22.542)
Thanks.