"Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman, and today I'm doing something a little special for you. I went to visit a couple of our clients in Southern California, Aaron and Michaela Gant. We talked about how they took their business from $0 in revenue from PPC to seven figures of PPC revenue in just a year. The first episode is about what kind of decisions were made to make that happen and an overview of the whole situation. In future episodes, we're going to dig pretty deeply into different aspects of their business and how they've been functioning with a national real estate model over the past year."
"Well, thank you both for being so welcoming and allowing me to stop by your office today. I'm really excited to dig into a lot of how your business works and what has been happening over the past year. I know you've had tons and tons of changes. So, if it's not too much to ask, let's just start with an overview of what you're doing now and what some of the biggest changes over the past year have been."
"Thanks for coming by to our office," Aaron said. "And, you know, obviously being a guest in our home, the team was really excited to have you here. Just in our short conversations, we've already been learning a lot and getting to know you a little bit more. One thing we did when we first started our wholesale company—we just ended year four, as you already know—was move along our journey. A lot of that four years was just learning how to do business. I was a blue-collar guy before then: fire department, military. We've just been learning how to do business."
"In 2022, we did a lot of scaling with text messaging, that cheaper form of marketing. We were sending out 30,000 text messages a day," Aaron continued.
"30,000 a day? Did I hear that right?" Brandon asked.
"Yes," Aaron confirmed. "At a $5,000 fine per text message. We had about 20 cold callers, and we didn't just have them; we tried all different types of cold callers. We had cold callers in-house. We built our own team of cold callers. We hired a bunch of VAs and trained them up ourselves. And we've had outside companies, obviously, use their cold callers. So, we've tried and scaled other types of marketing channels that a lot of people come into this space and try."
"Now, obviously, there is a graduation phase where we should be going from outbound marketing to inbound marketing. That's what we're doing now. Other people call it 'big boy marketing.' So, I tell my team, 'Hey, we're doing big boy marketing,' which is PPC and direct mail. This upcoming year, we're going to be really perfecting direct mail. We've always seen a great return on direct mail, but we're going to do it at a high level. But, obviously, what we're here to talk about today is what we did last year, which has been PPC and some Facebook, and we'll get to that as well."
"We went with you because we were very attracted to the idea of hiring a PPC company that had multiple clients. You knew how to scale your campaign because of all the clients you have and all the past experience. Rather than us just jumping in and figuring it out, we knew to pay you handsomely so that we could excel a lot quicker than we would if we were doing it by ourselves. And also, we'd probably crash and burn because I'm trying to scale the team, run a business, and don't need to worry about this one marketing channel. But the cool thing is, this past year, we were only doing pretty much PPC and a little bit of other types of marketing. We can talk about that later. But it was primarily PPC and trying to perfect that."
"I'm trying to lay out what I understood happened, and you tell me if I'm getting this right," Brandon said. "So, in 2022, it was texting, cold calling, everything outbound, every way you can imagine. And it was right at the end of 2022 that we started working together, I think it was like September or November, something like that. And then in 2023, you had a year where you're still operating as a business, maybe a little smarter, a little bigger team, but things are completely different in your marketing. Did you phase the cold calling and texting out slowly or quickly? Tell me about what the business accomplished in 2022 versus 2023."
"I think we talked about this," Aaron replied. "And again, this is just me hypothetically talking. It really comes down to—it almost doesn't matter what type of marketing you do; it really does come down to what you're spending on marketing. But for us, and the way the cash conversion cycle that a lot of people like to talk about definitely changed. When it comes to phasing out cold calling and text messaging, we really phased out cold calling—we almost did a hard stop on it. We were sick of it; we didn’t like the leads. We made a good chunk of money through cold calling, but it wasn't the type of leads I wanted to give my team. Also, I'm not a big fan of lead managers. With inbound marketing, the 'big boy marketing' we're talking about, those leads go directly to your acquisition people. They can get right on it and follow up. It's a different type of sale."
"Yeah, I think I heard a podcast with you," Aaron continued. "You were talking about the type of salesperson. You had a client, and his whole team was based on text messaging and cold calling. They knew how to close those leads with a lot of follow-up. Then they got PPC, and the owner tried to close the deals. He was the only one closing them. He had to fire his whole team and retrain."
"That's what I love about having our team," Aaron said. "When those leads come in, we make it a whole fiasco in our office. When a PPC lead comes in, we ring the bell. We’re shouting from the rooftops, 'New lead, new lead,' and everybody is calling that lead, trying to be the first to contact it. We're about contact rate here. We know we’re spending a good chunk of change on that, and we know it’s a great opportunity because of the type of motivation for somebody to type in 'I need to sell my house' from a Google PPC lead. Whoever answers the call or gets a hold of that person has a higher chance of closing that deal rather than the 50 cold call leads that came in that day."
"Yeah, that makes sense," Brandon said. "I'm curious to hear your perspective, Michaela. What’s different about how the business looks today versus a year ago?"
"I think with changing it from outbound marketing to inbound leads, our team is putting efforts into better channels," Michaela replied. "They’re not spending time calling the 50 leads that came in from text and cold calls and getting beat up. Now they’re spending their time on those inbound leads and having better conversations because these people want to sell. Are they sometimes unrealistic? Sure, but at least now they’re actually having conversations instead of just getting yelled at. We still do text messaging, but we scaled it back dramatically. There were changes with the vendors we were using, so the pricing plan was completely different. We decided to put those funds into PPC instead. You can see a different attitude in our team because they’re not getting beat up all day. They are, but in a different way. We're just making sure our efforts are in the right spot."
"Yeah, that makes sense," Brandon said. "So, team morale is a little bit different. Based on what you told me before, Aaron, it sounds like revenue is in a similar place to where it was the year prior with a similar amount of marketing spend, but you’ve completely changed the way your business is doing it. You have pretty big plans for next year. Do you feel like you’re in a more scalable spot now than you were a year ago?"
"Yeah, when you talk about scalability, one thing we did for 2023, and I'm so proud of it, is that by bringing on your company to help our company grow, we wanted to make sure we took care of these leads. We value these leads. I don’t think a lot of people value the leads like they should. At the beginning of this year, I focused on leadership. Like John Maxwell says, I needed to raise that ceiling. The second focus was culture. With just those two things, we built levers in our company to hire, retain, train, and onboard. Those are vitally important to ensure that as we bring on new people, we can scale. By focusing on that, we also worked on building a solid foundation for processes and procedures, accountability, and scorecards. We call them our stoplight report to keep everybody accountable. The numbers are in front of everyone all the time, and they know what metrics they need to hit. By having more visual aids, it's easier to monitor people. We've seen that as long as you hit those numbers, the results will come. This year, we built such a strong foundation that now we can throw people in those seats because we even have a process for hiring. The people we've brought on with this new recruiting process have stuck. When they come in, it's just hit the ground and go."
"That’s crazy interesting," Brandon said. "I’ve always thought it was interesting how businesses grow. We think it looks like this straight line, but really it's kind of like this—flattening for a minute and then growing a little bit more. It’s not always reflected in the revenue how much you’re growing. I know I've been that way with my own company, growing your capability, growing your people,