Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We were just doing everything all at once, it seemed like. Right. I think a lot of times what I see is there's not enough things being tested early on within a paid strategy. So it's like they'll set up one campaign, put everything in there and then let it run and then yeah, you're generating results when you're factoring in. That's off of 20 years of compounding traffic. It's actually an enormous shift. I found you on ChatGPT. It's already answered a lot of their buying questions.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Welcome to the Entrepreneurs Talk about podcast. I'm your host Zach Bernard. You can find me on Socialite. It's Zack B. In each episodes I bring on experts from various industries for you to learn about their strategies and insights driving extreme business growth. Today we're joined by Rob Varian, co founder and CEO of Flying V Group, a full service digital marketing agency headquartered in Newport Beach, California. Rob co founded Flying V Group in 2016 alongside his brother and best friend Brennan. Bootstrapped the entire thing just with 15 grand. And then a decade later the agency has grown into a 34% global operation, generating $4.6 million in annual recurring revenue, having served 450 plus clients across basically any industry you could think of. Healthcare, finance, real estate, renewable energy and automotive. And They've generated over $150 million in revenue for their clients, all without taking a snow dollar from outside investors. And then beyond the agency, Rob is also an active angel investor through his own company, Ferion Group Investment and has been featured in the LA Times Yield Finance.
Just name a couple here. But Rob, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Yeah, Zach, Zach, thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be on and to everybody listening, thanks for, for listening and watching us as well. So really excited about this.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: I love it. Well, one of like the first things I always like to ask anyone that comes on the podcast as it is a business entrepreneurship podcast and you've been around the block, I mean I mentioned myself like you've been doing this for like a decade with like your current company. If you had to like restart from scratch, like knowing everything that you know today, what's, what's kind of like maybe the one thing that you would do differently that a lot of other entrepreneurs get like totally wrong.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know if they, everyone gets it totally wrong, but we probably did and looking back there were signs and people telling us not to do what we ended up doing, probably more so because of ignorance or just Thinking we could figure it out as entrepreneurs tend to do. But it was the concept around getting more defined from a niche standpoint, especially early in business. So when we started, yeah, we started very generalized and we still are generalized now today.
You mentioned the different industries verticals that we focus on. We're full funnel in terms of service and what we offer.
But as a new business looking back that, that did create lots of different challenges. Right. And so I think if we really would have, even if it was one or two core verticals that we already had, the case studies on that we already had familiarity or enjoyed working in, probably could have scaled things a bit faster and just really honing in on that messaging and providing a specific message to those specific customers versus broad.
And we did that for a couple. I'll tell you why we didn't go that route because one, we thought it would be kind of boring.
We didn't want to get caught into just doing the same thing over and over and over again.
We felt a lot of our value was hearing different problems, different challenges in different channels and different verticals.
And also, you know, we didn't want to pigeonhole ourselves either. Right. We, we saw that there were marketing agencies and the one I always laugh about is like garage door SEO.com. right. And, and so it, it, it always kind of turned us off in that regard. But I think looking back, you, there's still a blend, right. You can still go to the market and help and provide a lot of different services to a lot of different people. But I think when it comes to like your marketing material, your email outreach campaigns, right. I think just getting very, very, very granular and specific, specific with that niche and then just sticking with it too. Right. We found ourselves a lot of times bouncing from one thing to the other to the other and we eventually figured out what those repeatable patterns and problems were that clients were having. But also think it was a lot tougher because we were always talking to different people. So double edged sword. I'd say there's definitely pros to it as well, but I think looking back would have made our lives a little bit easier had we been more refined with our target and our messaging. And I, and I think that goes for any business. Right? Yeah, you can attract organic growth and variety of different people when it, but when it does come to how you want to grow and the intent behind it, I think that focus would, would have gone a lot further and helped us accelerate growth a little bit quicker in those early days.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: Yeah, but, but I think to to your point, in a way, you do have to like, because you've worked like various industries and then you can understand like, okay, these industries are working with, some are not worth working with. I mean, I remember when I started the company, we started trying to like work with like real estate agents. We realized very fast that they could not afford marketing oftentimes. And I spent like six months on that.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Yes. We learned that real estate agents, I'm sorry, if any real estate agents that you guys are, you're tough to work. Tougher than doctors, man. Yeah, doctors are tough to work.
[00:05:36] Speaker B: So like, yeah, like it's, it's a learning experience. Like you try all these, you're like, okay, we don't want to work these guys, these guys are amazing. So I mean, I'm not sure if I would call it a mistake, but I feel like it's a good learning experience and then you can really narrow down like who you want to work with. So I wouldn't say it's, that's a bad thing. But yes, maybe if you adjusted the targeting a little bit, you narrow down the messaging, you would have gone success breaker.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: I think for us too, we were, we saw so much opportunity is what it was as well. And so while opportunity is great and yeah, there's especially for marketers, right. It's like everybody needs marketing, everybody needs that support. But I think sometimes, you know, seeing all of that opportunity can also kind of paralyze you and you just don't move as fast because you're not, you know, you're not sure where to actually double down, where to put more time, energy and resources because you're trying so many different things. So yeah, I think you're right and I wouldn't necessarily, it's not a black and white change I would make. Right. But definitely would have had more systems in place that you know, okay, we're going to test this for this long and then move to this and then to this and then to this versus we were just doing everything all at once it seemed like. Right. Which became overwhelmed, overwhelming and then sometimes confusing. Right. Like, okay, yeah, that, that is a place we should double down. But then it ended up like, ah, no, it wasn't. That was just kind of a one off because we didn't have enough of those experiences.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
So just like shifting gears like a little bit because I know you've obviously been in the marketing space for like a while and everyone has like different processes approach like how they do things to get results for clients. I know I talked about like some results, you've gone for clients. But I'd be like, a bit curious to hear someone like, how you guys work with clients. Like, when, when someone comes to you, like, what does that process look like to help them? Obviously, everyone has a different process, but I'm assuming you've probably built a pretty good engine, saying you worked for 50 clients.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Yeah, good question.
A lot of them, myself, Brennan and Tyler. Tyler was ex deloitte. I worked for some consulting shops. Brennan as well, just B2B Consulting. And so our lens really does come from a consultant's angle. Right.
And a lot of times when talk about consulting, consultant comes in, gets the information, goes back, figures it out, comes back with a plan, gives you that plan. Great, thank you. Off to the races. So we do that exact same thing in our discovery process. So someone's interested in working with us or we're interested in working with them.
We really want to uncover all the different challenges, pain points, things they've tried in the past to varying degrees of success or lack of success, and really coming with that consultant lens. But then we're also crafting that plan and that strategy and then saying, okay, we're not just leaving it on your desk, we go out and do it. So we do what consultants do and we don't charge for it. For lack, for better or worse. I've been saying it a lot lately. Right.
But that's what allows us to have the strong foundation and understanding of the business. To then when we do sign on the dotted line and it is time to go, just able to move so much faster. Right. And so our process is really. And this is why too, we've, we've going back to the niche piece we were a little worried about. Just like, oh, if we have a niche, we can do the same thing for everybody. Because we were seeing that even if you are the same vertical, you know, are you a new business, are you a mature business? Are you focused on this versus that? Right. So there was still a lot of variability even with the same types of clients we were talking to.
But yeah, then it's, hey, we drop off that strategy, we audit, we come with research and information for why we're recommending the changes and the adjustments or the plan of attack. And then, yeah, we sign on the dotted line and then go. And then from there we put a huge emphasis in those first 90 days. Yeah. So really educating the client, hey, here's what to expect. 0 to 30. We're building out the foundation, we're setting up attribution Measurement, we're making sure we're aligned on those things in terms of how we're going to determine what's successful, what's not day 30 to 60, okay, we now have some of that information but we're ramping up and accelerating the activities and we're starting to get real customer feedback. Hey, how the ads are working, how the content's playing out in the market, etc. Capturing that information. 30 to 60 and then 60 to 90. Right. That's where we're really making either big tweaks and adjustments to initial plan based on real world feedback or we're seeing, hey, we're getting positive initial indicators to where we might need to diversify or adjust the strategy a little bit here. But let's keep down the straight and narrow. And then it becomes that communication and feedback loop. Right.
So every single month making sure everything's one stable and growing or if it's not, communicating transparently with the client of what adjustments and changes are made. So yeah, we've seen just that, that zero to 90, if we get it locked in and dialed in and tons of intent, more communication than we normally would have with weekly check ins and weekly touch bases.
Anything after that kind of first quarter of work just becomes so much better because we have that strong foundation to then grow and build off of a lot of times as well. Because as we get more information in accounts optimize, perform better the further you get out from that T minus 0 point.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Interesting. And what I love that you mentioned though is like the consultative approach, like I feel a lot of people forgot what it's called. I think it's the doctor approach or something like that. That's more like a sales fashion. But it sounds like the way you're approaching it, you're actually doing the consultation before you even start working with the console. They get an understanding like before you even start working with them, like hey, this is the exact plan that we will put into action and this is why it will work. And then as we get more data, more feedback, we're going to be able to get more tweaks and then you're going to get better results. And I feel a lot of people will give you a quick high level like yeah, that's like what we'll do and they'll, they'll keep it pretty basic and then like we'll figure out the rest once we get to the strategy and everything. But it sounds like you guys like pre dress that strategy and that's not something that I hear too often.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: Yeah, we've had. We've had a lot of conversations about are we giving away too much? Right. The entire playbook, or is that even the first step? Hey, we charge for that, you know, and then that rolls you into the.
But I think for us, and especially in the marketing space, right, like, trust and authenticity is. Is absolutely critical. Right. There are a lot of other agencies that do what we do. They build websites, they generate organic traffic, they do content, they buy paid media.
But that first step is the time when we can show why we're different.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: And a lot of times why we're different is because the way we research, right. Taking that data and then applying the strategy unique to the customer on top of that, so they see how we think and how we would work through problems. Yeah. We want to show them our communication and response time. All right, Set up discovery call, got our information, next meeting, and boom, we're actually. That's our first deliverable. Right. It's our first opportunity to show them we deliver stuff on time. It's thorough. You see the quality of the delivered work versus it just being a template proposal. Right? Yeah, you swap the name in or out. But I mean, at the end of the day, there's nothing actually unique.
And I mean, we have a duty going back to that trust standpoint. Sometimes, you know, we might go and then we do the research and we realize actually we're not going to recommend this or we think you really need to. I know you came to us and said you wanted to do SEO, but, like, the competition is insane. You're telling us you need quick lead flow. We've actually brought this to the table, and let's put this in phase B for this reason. Right. And so that builds a lot of trust in that you're not just selling them something to sell them something, and you're coming to the table is something that we truly believe. And I'm going to write my name on it and sign my name on it, and it's my name on the business as well that we're going to be successful with. So, yeah, it's just a critical process that we use. Not that there's not other processes that would work too, but we just find that to work the best for our business. I love it.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: And just like, shifting gears, like, a little bit, because there's a lot of talk about in, like, the digital marketing space specifically around AI search, ChatGPT, perplexity, like, all these different platforms that are changing how people are, like, finding businesses. How are you thinking about that shift. And like, what would you say business owners should be doing now to make sure that they're not like, left behind in a couple months? To put it simply.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: Great. Yeah. We just redone our website. One of our slides, the fourth one's about AI automation and the.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: I didn't see it.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's great. It's. Don't get left behind.
We're thinking about it all day, every day, to be quite honest. Right.
There's pivotal moments in history and in business life cycles and AI is clearly one of them. And if you look at just the overall analytics, and this is across all of our website, hundreds of different websites traffic, all different sorts of traffic. Right. For the last 18, 19, 20 years, 99.9% when it comes to organic traffic came from more or less one source, Google. Right. Yeah. You had your Bings and your Yahoos and duckduckgo, whatever else out there. Sure. But it such a small percentage. And just over the last year, two years, you've seen that percentage move from 99.9 to 98 and then 97 and it's like, oh, well, okay, two points, nothing major over two years. Not. Well, when you're factoring in, that's off of 20 years of compounding traffic. It's actually an enormous shift in terms of just the overall volume of traffic that's coming from these GPTs or LLMs or we're just seeing overall absolute volume of searches declining as well because people are just staying on ChatGPT versus actually utilizing Google or whatever other search engine they might be using. So yeah, it's something we're taking very seriously.
We're addressing it with our clients immediately. There's still your traditional SEO work that needs to be done. And it's funny, I always joke, you have companies that have never once talked about SEO and have never done anything for it, but like Geo generative Engine Optimization, they just want that immediately. I'm like, well, we could also get some of this core base stuff set up and do that at the same time. It's just funny. Shiny object syndrome in that regard.
But yeah, we're really trying to educate our clients on what's happening, the traffic shift. We're also seeing much higher quality of leads coming off of an LLM search because they've already done a lot of that research and that information. I've even had clients say, I found you on ChatGPT, so you probably know I'm going to work with you because you've already, it's already answered a lot of their buying questions. Right.
And so the biggest change and what we're helping our clients with is it's even though it's AI, AI, AI, it's actually putting more demand on the human element of business because now people are trying to sort through, well, was that just a website that has an AI content article? But they're actually, they don't know how to do it or they're not as good of experts as they say they are.
So we're really pushing and the, the LLMs are pulling video content, short form video content. Right. Podcasts, like we're doing here, you and I actually being able to have a conversation. I don't know what question you're going to ask me next. So then that's giving more validated proof to the potential buyer, which that's what the LLMs are pulling in more and more from a citation standpoint too.
So yeah, really bringing to light your expertise. Case studies. Google's doing the same thing because you saw all this scaled content start pumping out in the form of blogs and white papers, but they were all just being generated by LLM. So now they're requiring either me up there explaining what we did or real proof on the case study of how it worked, what we did, and the results that we generated for the specific client. So yeah, we're helping our clients learn and understand everything that's happening in that particular space all day, every day it seems.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: So one of the things I'd be curious though, so if you're like a business owner, you're like, hey, like I'm hearing about all these things that I can use like AI, like SEO, geo, like what would you recommend them to actually do? Because a lot of people have this like shiny object syndrome where they're like, oh, let's do all these things. While that may not be like the best decision for them.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Right, right. Yeah. And that's, I think a lot of the coaching and the education that we, we try and do. Right. So a lot of times, especially in a complicated space where there is a lot of noise, there's a lot of options like marketing and advertising presents. It's like I need to do everything or they, they lock in on one particular thing and that's what we're going to do and move forward.
So when we're talking to those potential clients initially it is, what, what are your goals? Why are you talking to me about marketing and advertising? And then you can start to pick up, okay, those buying signals or whatever those signals are for. Is it a short Term problem. Is it a long term problem? Right? Like, hey, our business is struggling. We need new sales in the pipeline immediately.
I'm going to post blogs on our website and in 30 days we'll have more leads and traffic. Right now we're going to have to go and consider, okay, paid media strategy. But then also you got to what's your budget? Right.
Can you afford the additional spend to drive that quick paid media to your website and pay us? If it's going to be somebody that's managing, setting that up, distributing.
So you're working in that way or a lot of times it's, it's phasing it. Right? Okay. Our end goal is this. And These are the KPIs, these are the numbers we need to hit, but we need to give them a realistic roadmap and timeline of okay, here's what that's going to look like. Here's what we're going to dial in and knock out in phase A. And then once we have phase A, then yes, we can move to whatever our phase B is or our phase C.
And even just setting up the proper technology for the efforts as well. Like okay, yes, SEO, that is a great channel. If they have the time, three, six months for ramp up and see results, great. But also we want to talk about ways to squeeze more value out of it. Right? Like if we're driving organic traffic, let's make sure we consider a pop up lead magnet to capture emails. And then do you have an email drip sequence, Right. That we can set up and start to get run in. And similarly, you might use some of those catalysts for paid media as well. So yeah, I mean, I think from our side it's just asking questions about the business, not related to marketing. You know, what is your profit margin? Right.
How much money do you make on, on each product that you sell or service that you sell? And then we got to make sure, okay, well, what's the cost per acquisition on that? Are we actually profitable utilizing this marketing channel? So yeah, just a lot of times those things aren't considered and it's like, oh, if I do marketing, it will generate results, which yes, it will. But it's if you do the right marketing at the right time with the right tracking in place, then yes, it will generate.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: And I was going to ask you about that because I feel like a lot of people, maybe if they're looking for like, hey, quick results and you're thinking about like SEO's, like, yes. Does SEO work? Yes, it does. Is it something that's going to get you some leads maybe in the next two weeks. If you've never done it before, probably not. And that's where it just falls into like, picking which one makes more sense for like, your goals. And you talked a little bit about like paid ads, like advertising. And one of the things I hear a lot from like business owners, CEOs, et cetera, is that they've tried running ads before and they felt that they've like burned like their entire marketing spend and they have like nothing to show for. Is there like any like, common, common mistakes, things that you see from business owners when they try to run paid ads? And how do you actually, like, measure whether your marketing spend is actually worth, like, spending on?
[00:22:07] Speaker A: Yeah, good question. I think a lot of times what I see is there's not enough things being tested early on within a paid strategy. So it's like they'll set up one campaign, put everything in there and then let it run and then, yeah, you're generating results, but they're kind of random. You're not quite sure what drove those results within the account.
So like a big thing for us is just setting up and we see it even with accounts that we take over. It's a lot of times just reconfiguring the way the structure of the campaign is set so we can more easily identify exactly what you're saying, which specific keyword. And then that specific keyword is also segmented into its own clustered group of keywords in a campaign. And then you have that in four or five different ways where you can start turning things on or off, or you can quickly turn things off if you know they're not working before you go and scale out that budget in that one campaign and burn all that cash. Because Google's just given free rein, right, to really distribute your ad. So I think set up is a big one, having a strategic plan for how those campaigns look, what each campaign's goal is, because there's different goals for different campaigns as well.
But more often than not too, paid ads work and they work really well. And that's why they're expensive and that's why we get paid to run them. So you also need to make sure on the sales side too, you have a plan in place, sales enablement, so we can be the best marketers in the world and hey, we drive a lead and we've seen this. But they don't get called back for 12 hours or the sales rep sends one email and says, ah, these leads are no good. They never Respond it's like, well yeah, there has to be that consistent follow up or you have to have automation in place for, you know, like I said drip sequence of email earlier to help alleviate those, those bandwidth concerns from a sales rep standpoint or just having some process or plan for how you are going to move them down the funnel once they show that initial interest. So marketing's one piece, but sales is a complete other.
And yeah, we're definitely, those are converging for us too in terms of how we're coaching on the sales side to where just generating the lead, that's just the start.
Right. Like that's not the end all, be all, that's the start of that sales process, that chase, that hunt in some regards. Right.
To get that buyer to the next stage.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: And I think that's even more present when you're thinking about like local businesses like maybe like home services. Just an example.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: Oh great one.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: They won't even pick up the phone when you're driving like all these leads, like, hey, we're not seeing like any like new customers like come in, like what's going on. It's like you're taking four days to get back to someone. Like they've already picked a different vendor person because you weren't answering your phone.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: That's why you got to be really quick with that.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean even like our discovery phase, part of the discovery is us making sure that the buyer understands those things too or they're actually going to hold their team accountable and know that it's not, it's not easy. None of this is easy. Right. And so because we can't have a situation where okay, we start generating leads and then we're just getting blamed. But in reality there's no follow up process and you know, that CEO or that owner isn't willing to hold their team accountable for us and then yeah, it's a lot easier to cut us than to reprimand an employee a lot of times or to change behavior. So like if we don't have that buy in from the top, that's a red flag for us when we're even considering the situation because we got to make sure we're putting ourselves in a position which we can succeed.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. It's like wrapping things up. Rob, one of the things I always like to ask like anyone because we've obviously covered a lot of grounds. But I always love to hear for any like business owner out there that's like, hey, we want to get more leads, we Want to do our marketing better, more efficiently? Is there maybe two, three bullet points, little like piece of advice that you would leave listeners with, like hey, if you're just trying to like have that like 1% improvement, like do those consistently go ahead and do these things today to make sure that in the next weeks, months, years that actually like compounds and you can show for.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: I think it starts with don't even worry about the marketing, but look at the business itself and like what do you want or what does the business need? Right? Is it your sales guys are telling you that they don't have enough people to call on or the people that they are calling on aren't interested in what they're sell selling? Are you happy with your growth but you just feel like the perception of your business doesn't match the reality online and so you need to focus more on brand awareness and just awareness type stuff to get your name out there.
So I think it's having those hard conversations of what have we done in the past to grow the business, what's worked, what hasn't worked and then truly like what are your needs and want? And they might be just wants too. And are they short term? Like we've talked a lot about short term, are they long term? Do you need a partner or is it just a situation where a lot of this is stuff that could be done on your own, you just haven't done it and consideration for that because that's another piece too, like I said. I mean everything we're doing, big companies do on their own, they do it internally. Right? They have their own teams. That might be the route you want to go and you want to build that because there's pros to doing it that way. Right. Versus as an agency. Sometimes it's tougher for us to you know, know all the ins and outs of the business or what's happening on the day to day. If you need to bring to life personality and you are talking brand. So yeah, yeah, I mean I think it's just going back to the core. How do we want to grow?
What channels will we lean into? Like will the company buy into? We don't want to be running something that you know, hey, we're posting on social media and everyone on the team hates social media or isn't on social. You know, you've seen that too, get that buy in.
So yeah, I mean I think it's just looking at your business, is it a short term, long term need? And then what's our real goal? Is it leads product Sales awareness and people are always thinking, well if it's marketing, it's always growth and revenue, but it's actually not a lot of times like it could just be that brand component that you're missing, which a lot of times isn't going to be a huge paid media intent acquisition type campaign. And it just accentuates everything else that you're already doing, right? And it was that one little missing piece or catalyst that accelerates the business to the next level. So I know a lot there. But yeah, I think it's just going back and looking in the mirror, right. And asking yourself the tough questions about your business and then being honest and transparent with the people you are talking to that here's what we think our problems are because we're here to help, right? There's no need to be discouraged or embarrassed by what you've done or what has or has not worked in the past. That's all valuable information that will help us drive better performance for you.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: I love it. Well Rob, really appreciate coming on the show here. If anyone wants to get some marketing help, reach out to you. I know you're active in a couple places but where should people look for you here?
[00:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, active most everywhere being a marketing guy. But yeah, personally LinkedIn is great. Please connect with me on there, shoot me a dm, I'll trade my email, sell to. I love having conversations with all different types of people, even just introductory. There's always something for me to learn from them and there's opportunity or even just, you know, me helping network connect do a lot of that just personally as well.
So yeah, Rob Farian Instagram X as well. Just Rob Farian handle. And then for our business, flyingvgroup.com, our website, Ton of blog content material, we actually just recently launched an AI marketing playbook.
Just gives 10 steps for executives to consider when it comes to AI and actual practical applications.
So there'll be a pop up there, just enter your email, you'll get that. And then Flying V group on all LinkedIn, Instagram, I don't even know if TikTok probably we got it all over. But yeah, we love chatting with people and just building strong community and strong network as well. So people for us are still in this AI, AI age, more critical than ever. So would love to meet up with anyone. Love that.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: So you heard that everyone head over to flying vgroup.com if you want to learn more. You can obviously connect with RA basically on every social media platform as you mentioned here.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: There we go.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: And then, if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. Like, review, leave a comment, all that fun stuff. And then, until then, keep pushing and, yeah, see you in the next one.
