[00:00:00] Speaker A: In the past two weeks I started being much more aggressive with my content and I already got like four meetings booked for inbound leads. Probably the biggest thing that I would implement is delegating much faster in areas that aren't my core competence. When you're a founder of the company, like what's your zone of genius? If I would have delegated them sooner, then we would have scaled much faster. Because my strength is sales and marketing, we're able to find leads that actually are showing intent for the client's product or service before we engage with them, which lifts the conversion rate.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Welcome to the Entrepreneurs Lockbook podcast. I'm your host Zach Bernard. You can find me on social at Zack B. In each episode, I bring on experts from various industries to learn about their strategies and insights driving extreme business growth. The Entrepreneurs Logbook is sponsored by we feature PR where we're dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build their thought, leadership and business by booking them on podcasts and launching your own podcasts. Today we're joined by Patrick Burns, founder of Patrick Burns Company, a B2B brand building and revenue generating agency that helps businesses accelerate their go to market efforts through strategic digital marketing. Patrick discovered his talent for digital marketing while working at two tech startups. After graduating from Indiana University in 2014 and since founding his company in 2016, he's accumulated over 100,000 followers online, generated millions of content views and helped nearly a hundred companies achieve their revenue goals by securing six figure deals with major corporation like PwC, CVS Center, Honeywell and State Street. Patrick, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Zachary. I'm excited to be here.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: I love it. Cool. So Patrick, the way like I always like to take these kicking things off is I'd love to hear if you had to like rebuild your company from scratch from like everything that you knew from back in like 2016. Now what is the one thing that you would implement from day one that a lot of entrepreneurs founders go wrong about?
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Probably the biggest thing that I would implement is delegating much faster in areas that aren't my core competence. Okay.
Because you gotta know, you know, when you're a founder of the company, like what, what's your zone of genius? Like what are you really naturally good at? And then delegate the rest.
So you know, I've had my hands filled with operations, finance, like all those different things, but if I would have delegated them sooner then we would have scaled much faster. Because my strength is sales and marketing. If I'm just doing that all day I'm going to drive the most value and the most growth the company. But delegating the operations and the delivery side, day one would be huge.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: That's interesting because like the previous guest I had on the show, the episode is not published yet. They mentioned somewhat something similar like hiring a project manager, like directly. And I feel like that's like a common theme where like once you're like a new founder startup, you're doing everything at once. I mean that's kind of normal when you start, but you get to a point where you somewhat have to like phase out of that and start hiring people, delegating. And again as you mentioned, focus on like your drone of genius focus for you, which is like obviously the, the marketing and sales component here. I love that. And for like your company, I, I'd love to hear so much and understand your approach because you've obviously grown to like a pretty big following, generated like millions of like content views. But I'd love to understand how you help the comp. The companies and clients to work with like really succeed. So when companies like come to you like they're, they're looking to accelerate their go to market strategy, build it. What does that process like typically look like and how do you actually approach generating results for them?
[00:03:44] Speaker A: So I mean, when we work with the client, we'll send an onboarding form where they'll fill out a lot of details and it's a good exercise for them on details of their ideal customer Persona, all their marketing, brand collateral, their value proposition, everything that we need to intake that and then we can develop a strategy with it. I think the biggest thing is we leverage a lot of different technologies. We have a very sophisticated technology stack to run these campaigns. Okay, sure. So and with that technology stack, we're able to find leads that actually are showing intent for the client's product or service before we engage with them. Okay. There's different ways that we're able to track their social activity as well as their search activity on websites and then engage them. So that makes it. So it's not just a purely cold outreach because there's actually intent there before we engage with them, we. Which lifts the conversion rate. And I think a big thing too is when a client has an idea of what their ideal customer Persona is. Compared to our years of experience on going after these different markets, we know what markets are easier to penetrate than others.
So we want to make sure that we get them the fastest, win as quick as possible, and then build upon that for their more ideal target market because they might not know what's going to perform the best with these type of campaigns.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Yeah, and I feel that's like a really important, like when you, what you said like, really earlier about like getting like those quick wins, like when you onboard a client, making sure you can secure those really quickly. And I found that interesting, like the intent approach, because I feel like a lot of companies are just focused, like cold outbound. I mean, spraying.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: Pray that doesn't work anymore. That doesn't work. Trust me. I used, I've done it before. I used to do. I mean that I've seen the entire evolution of this whole process. I mean, I used to get by with just uploading a CSV file and sending a blast and getting a bunch of leads or just really generic type messaging and converting them. But you can't do that now. The market's way too noisy. Because I was one of the first people, really, because our primary method of doing this is outbound campaigns, like messaging campaigns through LinkedIn and email. And I was one of the first ones to even do that. So it was super easy to convert people in the early days because they didn't get inundated with it like they do now. So it takes a very sophisticated approach to get the same result.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Or you just like 10x the volume, you get the same results, but that's not really sustainable in like the long.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Yeah. So kind of makes sense. You need to have a smart approach, but you can scale it up too. I mean, if you're doing both, then you're set up to win for sure.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Yeah, you just need to have like, the right infrastructure and like tech stack, as you were saying like earlier, to get like the, the right results for your clients here. And touching back onto like, results, like, you've obviously like generated like millions like, content views on like social. You built a pretty like, big following on social. But I'd love to hear a bit about your, your framework for creating content that doesn't just like, generate views, but content that actually drives, like, results. And it's not just like a vanity metric as far as like, views.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: And.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: And now you go about actually replicating that success for the clients that you work with.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Mm. Well, I mean, a lot of when I was younger, I mean, I actually was just trying to go viral as much as possible and just get as much attention as possible, but. And I would do a lot of curated content where I would find viral type content and post on, you know, my behalf with that. But now I'm Doing a lot more authentic content that's coming directly from me and I'm sharing my exact insights with the audience. And sure, like, I kind of blend it together though, because I'll have like a certain amount of content that's video content or text content where I'm doing thought leadership and I am giving value or I'm breaking down case studies of companies that we work with and success stories. But then I still will layer on some posts that I know are more emotionally driven and it's going to go viral because then when I make those thought leadership posts, it's going to favor those on the algorithm and push those up too. So I kind of blend those all together.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: And I like that mix though, because with like the, the posts that are more like emotional that they go viral, you're like somewhat hooking people that could be potential clients. And then with the algorithms you mentioned, like, it pushes the content that you actually want them to see, not like the vanity, like viral posts, more thought leadership oriented.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: Well, and I think a big mistake for people is to assume that you're going to get a ton of sal sales pipeline from content, like organic content. When I post content, I'm just focused on awareness and building brand. I'm not like, oh, I'm gonna get this many leads from this because having that expectation, you're not going to stay consistent with it for a long period of time. Okay. And that, and that's the thing too. I mean, I used to spend all day doing that because I didn't really, I was a solopreneur. I didn't have a, you know, a team and operations and all that stuff. And then I went to not posting as frequently because I have so much I'm working on in the business. But now I have the infrastructure in place where I can go back into being more aggressive with my content. And it's crazy, but it's because I've built up a strong base because just in the past two weeks I started being much more aggressive with my content. And I already got like four meetings booked for inbound leads. And then also you reached out to me, by the way, like for a podcast. So I was like, wow, this is like another inbound. Instantly. Yeah, instantly working. It's crazy. But I, I spent many years building that base for that outcome to happen.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: That's interesting. And you've like noticed like a major difference when you do like that two week pause that you stop posting content. And then now, like, you're obviously back on the grind, like starting to post.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Again, well, it was just interesting because I'd have people that I knew from the past just reach out to me, like, oh, I was thinking of you. Or like you came with. I'm. Man, this is working real well. Like it's only been two weeks that I've been back on the map, like posting a bunch of content.
So it's powerful stuff.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: But, but I love the fact that you mentioned that like people have like these false expectations sometimes you're going to get like thousands of leads out of posting content when that's clearly not the case. It's definitely more like top of funnel awareness, brand building, et cetera. So it serves more as like a, like an amplifier for like any other of your outbound marketing efforts, et cetera. So, yeah, I love that. And I guess going back to more like the outbound side of things, because we were talking about the approach that you used to do like some LinkedIn stuff. I mean, you probably still do and with like email. But you guys take more like this, I would call it sniper approach in a way where it's like, definitely more like precise finding, like intent as opposed like Sprint. Right. But I'd love to hear like a bit of insight as far as how you structure these campaigns and what are like some key elements within those campaigns to actually perform. When everyone's like inbox, they're getting like a hundred emails every single day.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's by using those intent signals to identify it, but it's also hiring the right people to run the outbound campaigns. I mean, everybody on my team, we actually use clay. That's our primary tool that we use to do. And everybody on my team's a clay expert. I'm actually not a clay expert, but I know I've researched it and I have a high level understanding and I know it's a very useful tool, but I've had to be. The biggest thing was for me to recruit the right people to execute this. Okay. Because you know, when you post a marketing job, you can get a bunch of applicants that have various skills in marketing, like, oh, I've done blogs, I've done SEO, I've done. I'm like, if you haven't done outbound specifically, like day and night, then you're not going to succeed in this. Like, you have to be very specialized in this exact skill set to be effective. And that was a shift that I did too. It's like I only hire specialists on each campaign function.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess going back to like, what you were saying, in the beginning, like you said, I think like, first, first thing we touched on, you mentioned like, delegating, like hiring people to handle like parts of the business. But. But I find that interesting because now you've somewhat made the correlation that hiring like the right talent, like people that will crush it for you. Because I feel like in the beginning you might get a VA project manager. You're just looking to have like stable operation. But once you get to that next level, I mean, you're looking for like clay expert, for example. Like, that's very niche down, but you're ensuring you're getting results for clients by doing so.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: And I literally have to recruit them from different communities. I can't even find them on LinkedIn with a job post. I have to like go, you know, the next level to get them. But I, I also have methods that I use. I use Chat GBT for hiring people outside of that role. And it's made me extremely efficient with hiring. I was able to hire somebody within two days, like an A player within two days.
Because I input so much information in chat gbt. It knows everything about my business, my org structure and all that stuff. So I'm like, oh, I need to hire somebody for this role. And it'll give me a description, the qualifying questions. I get people to submit their resume. I upload them all in the chat GBT and I'll have IT do an analysis, a rating of everybody that applied. It's like, who should I interview? Who's the top three people I should interview? And then I do that. I take the transcript and put it in Chat GBT to come with a hiring decision.
It's crazy how efficient it is, you know, leveraging technologies like that.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Look, because you mentioned Chad GPT and I was like, okay, that's interesting. Like, how are you using it higher? Because, Because I'm not sure if you, you know, about like the feature, but there's like a big, like, trend going on with like AI on like SEO where you can find companies. Because I literally had an inbound lead a few weeks ago. I was like, yeah, like, how'd you find us? He's like, I asked Chad GPT is like, you found us on Chat GPT. I thought that was like, really interesting. But it's more so just like using all the criterias that you want for certain, someone specific. And it's just like streamlining, like your entire workflow.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: I mean, that's like the more information you feed it, I mean, the more information if you. I upload my P Ls to do financial analysis. I do a bunch of stuff which I'm in the top 0.1% of users based on my usage of the technology. Like I use it all the time. It's a powerful tool.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I like Claude more. It's. I don't know, it's. I like the language more and everything like that. But OpenAI definitely has a good API, so you can make like some really cool integration, automate some stuff and everything like that. But I love it. So like the big picture that I'm getting is you obviously need to like people that know what they're talking about, experts, but you also need the right tools to do. So we were talking about like Play for example, which is an amazing tool. I've used it before. We've somewhat built it internally in a way to not have to pay for that because we weren't really using it.
But no. Interesting. And when it comes to just like yourself, like differentiating yourself, marketing yourself in the industry, I mean obviously you've been in the space for a while. There's so many companies that have a focus on like marketing, branding, etc. But I'd really be curious to hear how you go about differentiating yourself or if there's like a secret sauce. I know you post a lot of content, but I'd love to hear from you.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Yeah, our core differentiators. Well, the biggest thing is how many people I deploy for these campaigns. So like even on our lower tier packages I deploy three people to manage the account. So you have an account manager that helps with the high level go to market strategy and the reporting and they're the main point of contact. Contact. Then I have a marketing specialist that actually writes the copy and runs the tech and then I have an sdr. So when somebody replies back to the campaign, the SDR gets in loop to book the meeting. So that's completely end to end with that and you're having specialists in each area to make sure it's super effective. The other thing is we're really strong with technology in the technology sector. I mean, I've been in the tech space my entire career and that's 80 plus percent of our portfolio is software companies, IT services or software development agencies. So we're very strong in that specific market.
The other thing is we have a different engagement model. So we actually have one that has a revenue share element. So what we'll do is we'll take our monthly retainer, cut it by 50% and then add a revenue share component. So when we generate a lead and the client actually closes it. We, we get commission of that deal.
So that reduces their fixed cost. But there's also big upside potential based on performance.
So we're willing to put skin in the game with.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Yeah, you're like aligning like your interests because if you deliver results and you get paid more money by doing so.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Yeah, Y.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: And another thing, because I know we touched onto like the outbound side of things when it comes to like the go to market strategy. Is there like anything else that you guys incorporate within the mix to perhaps make those effort more like not interesting but more effective apart from the branding? Because I know you guys obviously do that as well.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: I mean we have different systems that we use to send out the messaging but really it comes down to the copywriting. That's the biggest piece. Like how well can we write copy? And you have to make it completely text based. We never like send links to case study because nobody reads that stuff. Nobody.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: I mean it goes to spam if you do that in the first place.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And we know all the, you know, the minefield of getting, you know, going through and getting to the inbox and avoiding, you know, bad ability. That's why I have experts do it because I there for a time, I try to do it myself. I'm like, I can't keep up with this. Like this is just changing so much every single people. Yeah. So that's a big piece of it too. I just have the right people to handle that are better at it than me. That's what you want. You want those people. You know, I, I'm aware of it and I can kind of, I can do it, but it's like they're better at specifically than I am. And that's like the best feeling honestly as a leader that you have people. Because you don't want to be a genius, the only genius in the room. You want to have other geniuses. You want to create geniuses. That's your job as a leader. Like you're not like the end all be all like answers like the oracle for the company. You want them to collaborate and experiment and come up with their own ideas and that are better that than you could come up with. That's when you're being a great leader. And that's taken many years to learn leadership because that's a big thing. I mean it's totally different on how you approach business being a solopreneur as opposed to leading a team and how, you know, you have to motivate them and everything.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: I love that quote they mentioned though. You want to create geniuses and I think that's an interesting part of the puzzle here.
But no, thank you so much for coming on, Patrick. And if like anyone wants to get in touch with you, because I know like, I obviously found you through LinkedIn pretty active on there, posting like a lot of content. You have your website, any other, like, platform things people should check out, lead magnets, anything like that?
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Well, I'm, I'm posting on a bunch of channels I'm posting on. I mean, LinkedIn's always been my main channel, but I'm distributing content on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Threads, X on all of it. See, it's at Patrick Burns co as like my handle on all these channels.
And then I'm also willing, if you have a B2B company that's over a million in annual revenue, I'm willing to do a lead generation audit for you and then I'll give you a 50Amazon gift card once it's completed. But you have to be over a million in annual revenue to qualify for that.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: No, that's totally fair. Cool. Well, really appreciate your time here, Patrick. If anyone wants to get in touch with them, obviously head over to the website, the social. We'll put all that down in the description here and then to our listeners. If you've enjoyed this episode, do not forget to subscribe. Review the podcast. You can also find more
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