Marcus Sheridan's SHOCKING Decision to Merge His Companies

 Summary

In this conversation, Jon Stoddard interviews Marcus Sheridan, a renowned speaker and author, who shares his journey from near bankruptcy to building a successful business through content marketing. They discuss the importance of understanding buyer behavior, the power of addressing customer questions, and the significance of trust in business. Marcus emphasizes the need for authenticity and imperfection in marketing, as well as the value of strong partnerships in entrepreneurship. The conversation also touches on the evolution of River Pools and insights from their recent acquisition. In this conversation, Marcus discusses the intricacies of business partnerships, emphasizing the importance of integrity and self-awareness. He shares insights on testing compatibility with potential partners through stressful situations and highlights the significance of understanding personal strengths and weaknesses. The discussion also covers the challenges of manufacturing, the decision to franchise based on market demand, and the commitment involved in a franchise model. Marcus reflects on the role of mentorship, the importance of embracing one's strengths, and how to overcome imposter syndrome. The conversation concludes with a mention of innovative marketing collaborations.

Takeaways

Marcus Sheridan turned his business around by focusing on content marketing.
Understanding buyer behavior is crucial for business success.
Content marketing can lead to significant sales growth.
Authenticity and imperfection resonate more with consumers today.
Building trust is the foundation of any successful business.
Partnerships should complement each other's skill sets.
Being transparent about pricing can attract the right customers.
A strong online presence can equalize competition between small and large businesses.
Embracing failure and learning from it is essential for growth.
The principles of success apply across all industries. Partnerships require careful consideration of integrity and values.
Testing compatibility in stressful situations is crucial.
Understanding strengths and weaknesses can enhance teamwork.
Leadership dynamics can be complex with multiple strong personalities.
Self-awareness is essential for effective business operations.
Manufacturing challenges can arise without the right expertise.
Franchising can be a response to clear market demand.
A franchise model requires a strong commitment to the brand.
Mentorship and observation are key to personal growth.
Embracing strengths can lead to greater satisfaction and success.

Watch the Interview 

Transcript 

Jon Stoddard (00:00.492)
Welcome to the top &A entrepreneurs. want to welcome guest today is Marcus Sheridan. Marcus is somebody I met at a distance about five, six years ago when I was running my own business, e-commerce business. But he's, let me tell you a little bit about Marcus. He's a speakers you don't want to miss according to Forbes, a web marketing guru says the New York Times. He's been featured in global, the globe and mail Forbes.

Marcus gives over 70 global keynotes annually. He's author of this book right here. They ask, you answer. It's the number one marketing book to read in 2017. He's listed as the 11 marketing books every CMO should read. He's the number one ranked LinkedIn Voices for Entrepreneurship. He's also a partner in River Pools. And I'll tell you a little history about this because I got this from this book.

2007, he was doing about 4 million and he spent 250,000 a year doing that. 2009, of course, 2008 happened, which was the crash. 2009, he was ready to lose his business. PPC's not working, nothing else working because they haven't any cashflow to work on anything. That was his toughest year financially. By 2000, well, he implemented, they ask you answer. By 2014, he had

350,000 visitors to a site, 2015, 500,000, 2018, 600K, and by 2018, he was doing $8 million in business. Welcome to my show, How are you? It's great to see you, buddy. I'm glad we can have this chat. Yeah. Let me just I know I'm talking a lot here, but I'll just tell you my experience with your work.

I ran an e-commerce business in like five, six, seven years ago. And I was mistakenly, naively, relying on pay-per-click traffic. About 90 % of my business was pay-per-click using Google Ads. And it was just, I had a streamline. I I knew what the cost-per-click is. I knew how many visitors were coming in.

Jon Stoddard (02:20.526)
and everything was smooth. You know what? I'd have it in 13 to 11, 12 or 13 position on desktop. And then I didn't take notice, but Google moved over from desktop to mobile, which means there was only four positions left to bid for. And my cost per click went from it went up 4x. So I could no longer run my business profitably.

And I found your information and this is right before the book. was just your, your work, your coursework. bought that. Then I implemented it. I created a hundred videos of how to videos, how to read an audiogram, how to change a hearing aid battery, everything. I turned my business around in six months and then I was able to sell it for, you know, four or five times. would, I bought it for, so I wanted to thank you for that. That's so cool, John. And that's the thing about.

paid is sure it's fine sure it can be profitable but ultimately it's a short-term solution to what is a long-term problem slash need right which is how do I always attract people to me instead of having to pay so much just to get in front of eyeballs that may or may not want to have anything to do with me whatsoever right that's the challenge that we're in that's the world of digital that's why they ask you answer is such an evergreen

framework for digital marketing. It's going to work just as well in 10 years as it does today. I think even more because what's the YouTube is the number one search engine now? Yeah, it's number two next to Google and eventually it's probably number one for teenagers is number one. It's pretty amazing. I got to ask you about what you were thinking in 2009. Were you?

What about ready to declare bankruptcy go out of business? mean, yeah, I was. The problem was, you know, we if you're a small business owner, you recognize that we have to put so much on the line to even have a business. This is the world doesn't understand about business. You know, and, you know, partially I blame the media on this. People hear the word corporation and they don't understand in businesses and taxes and all these things, but they don't understand.

Jon Stoddard (04:44.278)
is there's lot of small businesses who pay a lot each year. sacrifice. In my case, my house was on the note, if you would, for the business. My two business partners, their houses were on the note. And so this is one of those things where we were going to lose essentially three homes out of the deal. Our 16 employees, we would have to let go.

So was a really, really brutal time. And every consultant I talked to just said, you know, I just don't see, I don't see a path for you to get out of this. And so the Hail Mary in this case was, they ask you answer. And it started by just reading about the internet online because I had this, I had this prompting for a while that, you know, the internet has changed me as a consumer, has changed the world. know.

It's happening for our buyers in Swinpool space. Nobody's taking advantage of it. And the more I read about inbound marketing or content marketing or digital or social or blogging, any of that stuff, I just kept coming back to, know, Marcus, if you just obsess over their questions, you're willing to address them on your website through text, through video, and you're willing to address all of them. I'm not talking about just the just the good ones, but the good, the bad and the ugly. You might save your business. And of course, that's what happened. That's how we became the most trafficked Swinpool website in the world.

That's what saved fundamentally. That's what saves the company. Right. I just did a stat. This is freaking wild. Saturday morning, I was looking at my stats and over the last five years, we've gotten, I think it was seven hundred and eight customers from organic search to our website. Seven hundred and eight. Now, that doesn't mean anything until you know what it equates to from a sales perspective.

which is $45 million in sales in the last five years from essentially the blog content on the website. Yeah. And that's written content. Just that. written content. It's probably some video too, but know, video is a little bit, it's a little bit tougher because if they go to YouTube, they're going to come to you maybe from a link on YouTube maybe, or they're going to do a direct search for you afterwards. That's pretty common to do.

Jon Stoddard (07:06.391)
Which is why, you know, if you're doing videos on this stuff, not only are going to have your YouTube channel, you're going be doing your thing on YouTube, but you're also going to have ideally a video library on your site. And you're going to embed those same videos in text-based content slash posts that are found within, let's call it the learning center of your website. And everybody that's listening to this should have a learning center on your website. Don't just see it as a blog, see it as an actual learning center.

where I can go, there's a place where I know I can go as the buyer, as consumer and say, this is where I get all my questions answered. And ideally, I wouldn't even call it necessarily a blog per se, even though like Riverpools, we still have a blog in our navigation bar because some of the people kind of Riverpools looking for the blog. If the Riverpool blog is famous, right?

But generally with clients that we have with my agency, we have a learning center. The learning center has articles. That would be your traditional blog. Then you've got your video library. This is where you house all your videos. Then you might have another section of your learning center, which could be case studies. Another section, if you have a podcast or any type of audio. Another section, if you have like digital brochures. Another section, if you have buying guides, right? Like meaty, know, meaty lead capture style content. So that's what a learning center should look like.

And the idea is somebody goes there and just says, wow, I can learn however I want to learn in whatever style I want to learn. It's all here. And I get all my questions answered and they don't have to leave. That's the big key. And I got to leave. I remember this part and I don't remember it was in the book that you had this conversation with the customer about, hey, we've answered all your questions. And then why would you go anywhere else at this point? Because we've answered, we've become the celebrity authority for you. Yeah.

You know, people say it's funny how almost like scarce, like the scarcity mentality, a lot of companies have with this because they say things like, well, if you answer all of the questions, then what value do you bring when they actually talk to you? Which goes against all buyer based psychology today, because all the studies show that buyers are at least 70 to 80 % through the buying journey before they even reach out to your company. And that's a study that's by Google and

Jon Stoddard (09:24.313)
forced to research group. I'm like, so we're not, this is not anything surprising. Buyers, consumers are vetting us more than we've ever been vetted in the history of the world. They know more than they've ever known. They're not dumb. They might start off as uninformed. Eventually they're going to be informed. So the choice is we can either be the ones answering their questions or we can say, you know what, I'm not going to go there. Get that answer somewhere else. mean, imagine, imagine if you call the company up.

and you ask them a question like, can you give me a sense for how much your stuff costs? And that person on the phone said, I can't tell you that. But if you come into the store, I'll tell you. You are going to spend 0.01 seconds with that company and now you're gone. You are donezo with that company.

And so we have to have the same mindset in terms of the way people approach our website. We can't hedge, we can't hold back. If they're asking it, we need to be willing to talk about it, which is why, like, you know, when they ask you to answer, we talk about the big five, which are the five most fundamental subject areas that fires research. And still to this day,

lot of companies can't get their arms around, man, how do I do that? These five are, buyers want to know how much is it? In other words, cost pricing questions. They want to know what are the problems or negatives with it? In words, how could this go wrong? How could this blow up in my face? If I buy this thing, what are the issues that the marketplace is talking about? Number three, buyers love to compare stuff. So comparisons. Number four, we love to research reviews, pros, cons, but unbiased reviews, pros and cons.

Number five, we love to research the best. I all the times you've researched best plus something online. Those are the big five. The book extensively, they asked you to talk about how to address those five things. And what's wild is now that I've had an agency for 10 years and I've helped so many companies embrace the philosophies that they ask you answer, we see these big five coming up again and again and again and again and again. Over and over. And so.

Jon Stoddard (11:35.201)
that's where companies should start. And that's the content that's going to help your sales team the most. Yeah, it's a great book. I mean, I didn't know what those big five are. don't I didn't read the book back then. But like you suggested in your first material, so just go to the Internet, find out what people are asking and answer those questions. And that's exactly what I did. I created a video was how to read an audiogram because it was the most requested question by people with hearing loss.

I created a five minute video from Fiverr, cost me a couple hundred bucks, and it's been viewed almost a million times. Yeah. What's the ROI of that? You it was incredible because you spent five bucks at Fiverr and now you've gotten almost a million views of that video. That's what it's all about. That's why the Internet is the great equalizer. It's where digital Davids can crush Goliath because Goliath generally tends to be too slow, too clunky.

and they try to do things by the rules by which they've always been done. And the ones that are crushing it online, they are willing to be imperfect. They're willing to fill in the circle outside of the circle, not just inside the circle. They are willing to do it differently. They're willing to fail forward. And they embrace imperfection, actually, in this process. Again, because it is pretty clunky.

Learning to do video is clunky. Learning to be good online is clunky. Audio right, everything. Yeah. But this is why you see like rich teenagers left and right, because they just don't really care. They're just like riffing stuff online and they're not sitting there saying, well, I'm not sure if this matches our brand voice. It's like that company that's sitting there talking about doing a hyper analysis of their brand.

voice or whatever you want to call it and therefore Still hasn't launched their first video or the only video they launch is the one that cost them You know $50,000 per video from that, you video production company That's way expensive that they're outsourcing everything to you get nowhere I mean you get nowhere with this and so too many companies think they're BMW They're not and if BMW had had the wits about them. They wouldn't they would

Jon Stoddard (13:58.477)
hold that brand standard against themselves. like oftentimes brands literally because of brand they hold their brand hostage because they think it has to meet a certain caliber of let's call it quality. Whereas so much of what buyers want today is the feeling of authenticity of slightly imperfect. They're just like me. They get me.

That's what induces trust. Yeah, I used to give free Harry Nate batteries for people that would give a testimonial. And it's very odd because the videos that did the best were the worst that you would qualify. I had a Canadian couple, they set it up there and they go, I thank you for the batteries. The Harry Nate is great. And that video did the best out of people that were trying to.

Right? You never know. This doesn't mean that you don't have the intention to get better with your content and your quality and all these things, but it's progress over perfection. That's the key to online progress over perfection. But too many companies start with perfection over all else. And that is a recipe for disaster.

Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people that are uncomfortable getting video, video cameras is I got to make this perfect. You know, I'm going to go out and buy the best camera. I'm going to go about buy best lighting, the best audio and micing, and then just try to create something. And it doesn't turn out that a lot. goes, this is not going to work. So they just stop. Yeah. That's right. That's right. So what is going on now with the river, park river pools? Tell me about.

What's happening there? mean sales 2018 rate million dollars you guys up over that. Are you still managing that? Well, okay, so The original River Pools is out of Warsaw, Virginia. Little town Warsaw, Virginia. That's the company I found in 2001 2017 we started dabble with manufacturing because we saw Hey, we're starting to leads from all over the country. If we want to scale these leads

Jon Stoddard (16:23.809)
We're scale the business so we can reach its potential. Why don't we start manufacturing our own pools? We can do it better anyway. We can certainly market it better. And so that's what we did. And in conjunction with that, by 2019, we had started the first franchise for fiberglass pool companies in the U.S. River Pools became a franchise. So now we have franchisees all over the country. And we had like last year,

manufactured well over a thousand fiberglass pool shells for our franchisees and dealers around the country. And we also got acquired last year, the manufacturing and the franchise side of the business. And so that was pretty cool because it was essentially like the capstone on the story arc, right? Company is about to lose everything and company gets bought for a really great

number and what's still fun too is I still own the original River Pools franchise. So I'm like a franchisee today and that business does over 15 million dollars a year in swimming pools and so it's not a small shop. It's still doing a hefty business and I'm essentially on the board if you would for the manufacturing company.

and still helping oversee some of that marketing vision that we have. And we have a big vision for the company. So it's still a fun ride to be on, still a part of it, still watching it happen. But it's come full circle. it's just crazy if you think about it, John, right? Because 10 years ago, shoot, man, 10 years ago,

think it was like for me as an entrepreneur, small business owner, I don't think I ever made more than $100,000 a year until like 2013 or 14. Yeah. And that's when like financially, we could we actually could turn it around. Remember, I started the business 2001. Yeah. So, you know, we went from a place of near bankruptcy 2009.

Jon Stoddard (18:43.905)
They spend the next five years building and paying off those debts and starting to become just profitable, if you will. And then finally, it start to get paid. And then it starts to take off. And then we have an acquisition that's like that's hockey stick place of, look at that. Look what happened. All this simply because I said, let's answer our customers' questions on our website.

I have to point this out before I ask about the acquisition. Warsaw, Virginia, is this correct? You've got a population about 1500. Yeah, it's still a 15 million dollars and a 1500. Yeah, population. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, this is one of those businesses where everybody in town knows about it because it supplies so many jobs for the local community. Yeah, and you're still the.

You got two other partners still and then you still have a third owner of that of that Warsaw location. I've got my agency and I've got new ventures that I'm working on man because it's like it's the beauty behind this stuff is it can be applied to everything. Right. And so.

Once you understand the principles of success, then it doesn't really matter what industry you're working in. And that's how some people just miss the mark with this. like, that might work for you, pool guy at Virginia market, but that's not going to work for me and my company. And that's like saying your humans are different than my humans. That's silly. It's dumb talk right there. It doesn't make any sense. Fundamentally, every business is built on one singular building block, which is trust. That's what allows someone to give you

money in exchange for a good or service. And if you embrace that, then you recognize at our core, we're all the same. We're in a battle to see who can generate the most trust in our space. So that's what that's what dictates the decisions I make as a business owner, as a marketer, what's going to lead to more trust. Yeah. Trust, they got to like you, trust you before they do business with you and that transparency. 100%. That questions does that. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (20:58.629)
That's why when companies, you know, talk about, you know, we're getting crushed because of our pricing, I always just love to say, so is it possible that you'd be more expensive could be an advantage and not a disadvantage in the eye of the buyer? Like what? Yes. The fact that you're more expensive be advantageous. Could it be a part of your unique differentiator? Of course the answer is yes. mean, you talk about how...

For example, fiberglass pools are more expensive at first and how we tend to be more expensive and here's why we chose to go that route. What that means for you and because of the fact that we're at least 10 % more than everybody, here's the things that we're allowed to do that you're not going to see from the competition and from the rest of the marketplace. Now you can decide which one aligns with your value set more, but here's what we decided to do and we believe in this. People are like, sign me up, sign me up, sign me up. Does this mean that we get everybody? No.

But anybody that tries to everybody does not have a sound business model. You're in trouble. And so this is why I'm a big advocate of every single website talking clearly who they are, but also who they're not a good fit for. Almost nobody has a section of their website, their messaging, talks about who they're not a good fit for. That's a mistake. That's a mistake.

Because the moment you talk about what you're not is the moment you become dramatically more attractive to who you are a good fit for. Remember that. So be willing to talk about what you're not and those that are really, you know, more part of your tribe, the ones that are truly attracted to you. that. Kennedy and Frank Curran talk about that a lot. Say, not only do you talk about your superpower, but who you're not good for. Yeah. Yeah. And you just don't, you don't see that very much.

but it's so freaking empowering to do that. Well, I got to tell you about many of my listeners on Top &A, we buy profitable businesses and that means a business that's probably more expensive, their products are more expensive because they're fans of Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett. You've just got to have that cashflow and that gap in there to be able to have a good business.

Jon Stoddard (23:16.013)
which is, you know, it's like if your goal is to be the Walmart of your space, then you need to stay an employee for someone else. But if your goal is to be long-term and to be profitable, then you need a very different business model, which we've got to, you know, it goes back to the classic value proposition. And our value proposition is we're going to tell you and teach you more than anybody else. Our online user experience is just through the roof.

And I'm working to create a post sale user experience that matches our online one. Because rarely does anybody have both. And so I'm trying to become the Chick-fil-A. So what we're trying to do is make my co-founder, Jason Hughes, he has met with Chick-fil-A multiple times now. And we're going to try to Chick-fil-A the swimming pool industry.

Chick-fil-A is really expensive. They ain't open on Sundays and they're making money hand over fist. Yeah. He sits there and says, how can you do that? Store. They, they, they beat everybody else by. It's like different decimal points, man. It's just crazy. Yeah. That's amazing. Now let's talk about that. You were involved in the acquisition. Was this a private equity fund that acquired your company or.

No, it's another manufacturer. Yeah. And they in their case, they had a they're called Thursday Pools. And so they're one of the leading manufacturers in the fiberglass space. And they have a super plant in Indiana. So they have the ability to make way more pools than they were making. And so they saw a clear

They were very attracted to us because of the website, because of the brand, because of our influence in the space. And what they were world class at is manufacturing, but they weren't very good at marketing. They were just very average, I would say. We were world class at marketing, but probably very average at manufacturing because we were really just getting going, right? And so they've got a state of the art facility. It was a perfect match.

Jon Stoddard (25:34.013)
And so it's been overall, it's been great. I know a lot of people go into a depression when they sell their business. I'm not one of those people. plus I had other goals that I had set up. And I've gone through this a couple of times now. I started a consulting company.

called the sales line in 2009 when we were doing this with River Pools and I started blogging about what we were doing and that turned into a consulting company. Today that merged a couple years ago with another marketing agency. We've got 70 employees over there. It's a decent sized business too and I'm a partner there as well. For me, my preferred model is find really great partners that

I'm aligned with but have very different skill sets than I do that can fill in the gaps. I don't really have an interest in having business partners like me. I want business partners that are quite different than me. So for example, I need implementers because I'm not very interested in being an implementer. That's really not my thing. So I think a big part of acquisitions and of entrepreneurship is that keen, keen self-awareness of what you do well.

and what's not your thing, and then finding someone that can fill those gaps, whether they be a partner in the business or whether they be an employee. The one thing about partnerships is I don't I don't really enjoy business as much without a partner. I enjoy doing things with partners. And so like I'm on my like fifth business now with a partner or partners. And I think ultimately the that there's two keys to great business partnerships.

The first one, well, let me say, yeah. So the first one is, I mentioned this, that you have a different set of skills that fill the void, right, that fill the void. And you don't look for a match, you look for a mismatch. The second one though, is that you have to have a match with your value set.

Jon Stoddard (27:50.157)
And what I mean by that is what can quickly destroy a partnership is, let me give you an example, is if something bad happens, let's say with a customer, and you're sitting there saying, man, in order to fix this problem, it's going to cost us 50 or $100,000. One of the partners says, screw it, let's just have them, let's just put it back on them. Let's, we can legally get out of this somehow, I'm sure. Let's put it back on them. And you're saying, yeah, but we screwed up. Let's eat the $100,000.

Okay, in that conversation, from that point on, the partnership is going to start to dissolve. Yeah. Right. It's done. It's done. It has not happened to me. I've watched it happen before. So I'm ultra, ultra careful about who I get in business with, even though I've had now multiple partnerships, because they have to be willing to do the right thing and match my integrity set while being

an unmatch or a mismatch for my skill set. That's the thing that I think a lot of people that get into business don't understand. And that's where they get off track a little bit. And it's kind of hard sometimes to test to what somebody's integrity set looks like until you're thrown into the fire together. And you're under that stress and you're like, I don't have $100,000. How can we eat $100,000? But the right thing is the right thing.

And so that's harder to test for when you're formulating partnerships. Yeah. If you say, hey, you know, the first meeting, second, third meeting, like we get along really great. It seems like a mismatch. Sign something, you're in it and go, my God, I have to unwind this because we're not the same value set. That's correct. That's correct. That's when it becomes problematic.

I have to ask you about, it's very easy to say Marcus is the face of the business because he likes getting in front of crowds. He just creates this buzz and maybe he's not the implementer and that's a mismatch. check those boxes right here. But how do you know it's like this other merger that bought or merged with your company is the match? I checked those boxes here.

Jon Stoddard (30:10.125)
How do you know that? Either one, either with the agency that acquired it? Yeah, so one good way to test this is to put yourself in a stressful situation, if at all possible, with the potential business partner. So I'll give an example. Before I merged with Impact, which is my agency today, we did two events together. Now, events are difficult.

They're stressful. They require a lot of planning. You lose sleep. And so you get to see the person in a stressful environment when they're being hit from all sides. And it allows you to say in the end, wow, I'm really glad we're not business partners because I had no idea they would react this way. Or it allows you to say, wow, that was a lot coming out.

and we feel closer today than we did beforehand. And so that was an absolute key. was, merging with Impact did come as a little bit more of a challenge because I've got a couple partners there, but my main partner, his name's Bob Ruffalo. And so Bob and I did these events together and it was a very good match, but

We had a few issues making our partnership work. One of the biggest issues we had making our partnership work to the point where we are today where it's very successful is we ended up finding out that we both, I don't know if you've heard of Strengths Finder, John, but that's one of those tests that you take to find those core strengths that you have.

And there's like, think there's like 32 main strengths that people have. Well, it turns out that your top five strengths are what you should lean into the most. And your bottom strengths are actually major weaknesses that you should have somebody else doing for you. Okay. So there's like, like said, I think it's like 32 of them. Well, the thing about is what we found out with my business partner and I is we both had a top two strength of what's called command.

Jon Stoddard (32:33.453)
And command is the person that, like if I wasn't in, if I wasn't doing what I was doing, I'd be a football coach. That's what I would be, right? That's like, and the reason is because my number one strength is strategy. My number two strength is command. I'm a very strategically thinking person. And so that's how they ask your answer came to pass is.

I saw this thing that we were calling digital and inbound and odd stuff. I saw it from a strategic standpoint and formulated a pattern in my mind of this is how you can make this work. Call it, ask you answer. There's these things called the big five and boom, it takes off. That's the strategy, right? Now command is when you can get a group of people behind you to run with you, right? To run through that wall with you, right? And you're leading the way.

Well, sometimes it's not very good to have two that have that core strength that are leading a company if you're not going in the exact same direction. Also, it can cause confusion to your leadership team and or your employees. Who is the person that's really in charge if you've got two major figureheads at the front? And so like, how did Bob and I resolve this issue?

So what I ended up doing is I recognized I had to be very careful about saying my vision to the entire team before I say it to Bob. I need to make sure that I give Bob my vision first and that he and I therefore on the same page of a direction always.

because I'm the type of person, the way that I communicate is such that if I'm just riffing on a particular, hey, you know, maybe we should do this, suddenly, everybody's thinking, that's a great idea, Marcus. And that can be problematic to a company because of the fact that Bob also has a vision.

Jon Stoddard (34:43.389)
and it could be misaligned from that and I could be off track but just because the way that I say it sounds convincing or influential now it could be causing discord within the direction of our company and so I act as the figurehead of the company. Bob said you're the figurehead, you're the guy on stage, you're the one giving the vision to the world to get behind.

I'm the one that is able to give that vision to the company and they get behind. Together, it's a great match. But if he tried to be the public figure with the world getting behind him, he would probably fail or we wouldn't reach our potential. And if I tried to implant myself as the core leader in the company that everybody was behind, then

Again, it wouldn't work very well. So now, although we reached a point of 1A and 1B, he's clearly leading the company. And I'm clearly leading, we'll call it, what we think as a company digital marketing should look like and how the public therefore perceives our company. And that's difference. He had to swallow some pride and say, I'm going let Marcus be the public facing figure. I had to swallow some pride and say, I'm

going to dictate all the terms of the company itself. I think a good example is that if you've ever read the history of Steve Jobs and Apple, man, the way he created all those items right there and just nearly destroyed the company. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Well, is this with Bob Ruffalo? Did you have a dating period, engagement period and say, we're, you know, we've been through a number of these

Crucible by fire type events like let's get together and get married or what? We probably didn't we probably didn't date as long as or go on as many dates as people want. It's two events and that was it. We just did two events and I felt like it was time because again my self-awareness just told me Marcus you're never gonna grow your consulting company as big as it could and should be and you probably won't take they ask you answer where it should be because

Jon Stoddard (37:05.515)
you don't always have a visionary scaling of businesses. So, you know, I recognize that. Bob saw a major opportunity. And so therefore we went ahead and we took that leap. And we did have to work out again. On that one, we had to work out a decent amount of kinks because you got two alphas that are two command strengths.

And but we worked it out and that's the main thing. We worked it out and we're better for it. They Asked Me Answers better for it because to give you an example of this, Bob was the one that pushed me to do the revised version of They Asked Me Answers 2019. Is the books crushing? Let's do a revised version. I think there's a lot more that you could say and I'm like, he's like, no, I'm telling you, you can do this. And so I did it and the book's selling more today than it did in 2017. That's crazy. That's crazy. And so.

Books aren't supposed to have that staying power. know, 1 % of the 1 % of the 1 % have that type of staying power. They sell more four years later. They ask you answers one of the books. And that's, I attribute a lot of that to a business partner that pushed me and see I wrecked, but part of that goes back to the self-awareness of me knowing that I wasn't going to scale the business and some of my ideas like they should have been scaled because I'm not a great implementer. Therein, Bob solves the problem.

That's amazing self-awareness to say, hey, look, I'm going to sit back in that role. I can do this well, but I'm going to let somebody else do that. That's great. Let me ask you back about- of people have it, though. Let's be honest. And it's hard to test for that. It's hard to interview for it sometimes. to me- Ego gets in the way so often. It does. It absolutely does. And I love, it's like, I will consistently-

We practice this as a company, embracing our failures, talking about them so that everybody could learn how powerful self-awareness is. Because the problem that I have as a business owner with mistakes is, and this is like most parents, it's like you expect mistakes. The issue is when the person doesn't recognize they've made mistakes or why they made the mistake. That's when you're like, this is not gonna work out.

Jon Stoddard (39:30.509)
But if somebody wets the bed and says, I went to bed. Here's why I went to bed. This like, okay, now I got something here. I got a, I got a team player here. That's going to be great. But they have no concept that the bed's even wet. my goodness. don't, don't, we don't. it just get them to a minute and goes, you know, conflict arises. They misunderstanding. Just say, I'm sorry. It's like, okay, then we'll say it. Move on. Recognize that they don't see it. Then we got a problem.

Self-awareness is like the number one attribute that we look for in employees today. Yeah. It's amazing. Hey, I have to ask you about this, the pools and Thursday pool acquisition. When you were dabbling into building your own pools, what was happening there? You just weren't able to build enough or the quality wasn't there? What was happening? Well, we financially bootstrapped the whole thing. Yeah.

And so to build a manufacturing facility, to put all we put into it, that was hard. And we didn't have a manufacturing background. So it was not just bootstrapping of money, it bootstrapping of ideas, right? And a lot of it was reinvention of wheels that were already out there, but we just weren't smart enough to necessarily know.

I mean, did we pull it off? But the biggest catalyst that was Jason, speaking of self-awareness, my business partner went to Thursday's plant, the company that ended up buying us. He went to Thursday's plant and it was the type of thing he looked at it. He said, could we ever build a plant like this? I don't know. Best case, 10 to 15 years down the road. Best case.

This is just so above and beyond how my brain works and our brain. We don't have really engineering brains. And the head of Thursday is he's got like an MBA in accounting and in engineering. And he's just like, just totally like that. This is how his brain works. And so Jason said, Wayne, I don't want to compete with that. I want to be a part of that. I want to have that type of quality control now for our franchisees. And

Jon Stoddard (41:56.479)
So, you know, I had been pretty much removed from River Pools for the most part for, geez, probably seven, eight years. I've just been five hours a week with River Pools for seven, eight years. So for me, it was, hey, I can go ahead now. I can cash out. I can complete the story, the story arc, which to me is important as a speaker. And at the same time, I can continue, though, with it and offer continual guidance.

So that's nice, right? That works. And I still have the original company, still a third owner of the original install company, Warsaw, Virginia, that is still a pretty good size. Population 1500, that's amazing. right. Exactly. I'm not laughing at that. came from a town in Wilcox. That's cool, right? One stoplight. Yeah. Yeah, I got two stoplights in my county. In doing $15 million, that's amazing.

Yeah. What was the conversation? Why did you decide to franchise the opportunity? How did you figure out like, hey man, we got this package so well? In a lot of ways that goes back to they ask you answer. They ask you answer. At first it was like, hey, let's obsess over our customers questions. Then over time, it becomes a part of who you are to just listen to the marketplace better.

than everybody else listens to the marketplace. And this might be the old strategy strength for me as my number one, it's, I'm seeing around the curve or the turn because I can understand the obvious for what it is and not over complicated, right? And so this really, that's the same thing that happens with our company.

And that's what allowed us, that's why we decided to do what we did. We were getting so many leads from so many areas around the country. To launch a pool company. People were like, I learned everything I ever learned about pools from you. Is there any way you can install them in my area? Like, no, I'm freaking in Virginia and you're in like Idaho. No, I can't do that. I would love to do that, but I can't do that.

Jon Stoddard (44:17.333)
You get enough of those, you're like, OK, I can sell the leads. OK, so you sell the leads to some company you don't know and you could lead to a terrible experience for the homeowner. I'm sure there's some law against that. So it's like it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel right. And it's not very profitable whatsoever. It's like, OK, that's off the table. So if we're going to take advantage of this national brand that we've developed.

What do we need to do? Well, it makes sense that we manufacture because now we can scale as far as we want to scale, just like these other manufacturers had done. And so that's when we said, let's go for it. The marketplace was sending us the clear signal. And what's really interesting, when we franchised, I thought a lot of our franchisees would come from the pool industry. We're getting a ton that don't come from the pool industry.

And we've actually gotten like three of them that have come from researching pools, frustrated with the experience, discover us. This is amazing. Can I get one of your pools? sorry, we don't have a franchise in your area. Hey, how do I become a franchisee? That's crazy, right? That's great. Isn't that wild? about selling too for. my goodness. Yeah. I'm going to talk about an integral part of the family. Of course, everybody in the industry said.

franchise model won't work, Swim Tools just won't work. That's an SEC offering, isn't it? You had to go through the licensing for that? Yeah, I we had to go through all the legalese, but it wasn't like the hoops were not incredible to jump through. And hey, look, we're still figuring it out, but the whole model goes back to people want to do

what they're good at and don't want to have to reinvent the wheel with things they do not thrive with. You got all these people that's like, just want to provide a great customer experience. I've got swimming pool experience or I want to install pools. I don't want to be the marketing person. You know, I don't want to have to come up with the contracts. don't want to do that. So it's like that model is a beautiful model because it eliminates so much of the learning curve. Now the drawback to the model is, man, you marry the freaking brand.

Jon Stoddard (46:37.057)
Right? mean, you become completely married. Your business is now River Pools of Nashville, Tennessee. River Pools of Salt Lake City. Right? And that's a commitment. Now the beauty for us though is it's a commitment. You know, the swimming pool industry is full of wishy washy dealers that are just like...

What manufacturer do I want to work with today? mean, imagine an automotive dealership that sells Ford, Chevy, Toyota, Lexus, Porsche. They sell every single one. mean, it's like, no, that doesn't work for a reason. And they have their SLPs and it's It's a law of diminishing returns at that point, right? And so-

you know, if business is proven time and time again that if you have a singular focus, you tend to do dramatically better than, you know, if you're offering one line of swimming pools versus three lines, the paradox of choice tells us that for the buyer, it's easier to make a decision. For the business, it's much easier to build a brand and to sell and market the product. Yeah.

I had that issue with the hearing aid business. thought, man, if I just kept adding more hearing aids to my website, people would choose. Actually sales went down. That's right. Paradox of choice right there. I went back to just three, good, better, and best. That's it. that's what people want because there is a clear law of diminishing returns that comes with that paradox of choice. Where choice is, that's why, you know, it's like freaking...

You know, your business model is not the Cheesecake Factory's menu. Not a good strategy for your business. Too much stuff. Think Chipotle. Really simple. More simple, the better. Speaking of the arc of the story, it sounds like you read a little Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell. Where are you at right now with, I mean, you've called to a venture, refusal to call and meeting a mentor. Did you have a mentor through this whole process or?

Jon Stoddard (48:41.205)
You books or online or? You know, I wish I had more of a mentor. I don't really feel like I've got a definitive, you know, I've got my. I don't read as much as a lot of people do. I probably only read a couple books a year. I'm much more interested in just really paying attention to the market.

So I think a lot of people read books like every week, but they're almost blind to what's happening around them left and right. Where I thrive is I don't read a ton of books. And by the way, I think reading books is great. And when I read books, I enjoy it and it helps me. But I just find myself working more on observation and collecting those ideas and then running with them.

Right? I still think the greatest book ever written from a nonfiction standpoint is How to Win Friends and Influence People. I just think that to me,

Probably 90 % of my success goes back to understand communication. Understand what moves people to take action by someone's word or message. And so I get hired today to speak about marketing. I get hired today to speak about sales. I get hired today to speak about leadership. But all I'm talking about in all three of those is principles of transformative communication.

That's all I'm talking about. And so I latch on to these principles and again, goes back to it. And then you can apply it to whatever you want to apply it to. And so there's not a lot of people that are great in terms of there's generally in the world of speaking, you're hired to be a sales speaker. You're hired to be a marketing speaker, but not both.

Jon Stoddard (50:47.927)
I have transcended both very, very well. This is not a brag. This is just me because I'm happy to tell anybody all day long all things I don't do well. By the way, that's a whole other subject. We talk about self-awareness. Society looks down on us saying, hey, I do this thing really, really well. No. If you are granted a gift that you have, then it's very, important that you embrace that talent. You don't bury it.

in that you recognize it for what it is. Same thing as I recognize I'm not good at accounting. I'm not good at algebra. You mix math with letters, I really start to falter. I actually am not good at labor with my hands so much. So I'm not turning on the excavator really to dig the pool. And I'm not turning on the spray gun to build that fiberglass pool shell. It's not my thing. I'm okay with that.

But we have to get very, very comfortable embracing what our strengths are and having an understanding and a relationship with them of, OK, that's my thing. That's what I'm really, really good at. I know what I'm very good at. I communicate better than 99.9 percent of the world. In certain settings and applications, so that allows me to teach it and to expand it out, to to expand upon it to different things. They ask me to answer. Ultimately, it's a communications book, but it's called digital sales and marketing.

The next book I'm writing, it's all about transformative leadership communication. But again, it's just about communication. I did a book on video this last year called The Visual Sale, it's how to use video in the sales process. It's just a book on communication that uses video as the core theme to it. You know your strengths and you embrace them and you run with them. It's just amazing what it can do with your life. It really, really is.

They can give you a comfort level with yourself to where you're never sitting there and dealing with the issues of imposter syndrome that so many people are dealing with. It's like sometimes people say to me, Marcus, how do you overcome imposter syndrome? This might sound like a weird subject matter, like I have honestly, I don't remember the last time I struggled with what people would call imposter syndrome.

Jon Stoddard (53:07.393)
I think one of the biggest reasons for that is if it's not my thing, I just don't swim in the arena. I just don't even go. I don't go play there because I'm totally fine with it. I'm just completely comfortable not doing the thing. That's why we're not talking about ballet right now, right? It's not my thing. I'm totally fine with that. Just talk about my stuff and I'm not going to suffer from imposter syndrome because I've embraced my gifts for what they are. And if it's not my... Like sometimes I get these thought leaders online like, hey Marcus, I want to get your thoughts on such and such.

for this article that we're doing about the biggest keyword automation tools for 2022. I got something I think. I don't have something for you. But Marcus, we want you on the list. Yeah, that's not my thing. So I'm not an imposter. And I'm not going to put myself in a position to be one ever. We're talking about where my strengths lie and know what they are.

maybe this is where the command comes into play. It's like, I am just very interested in staying in my lanes. Sure, I'm discovering more lanes, but they all have the commonalities of my specific strengths. Everybody's listened to this. I think if you get that point in your life, you can so much more comfortable with what you're doing.

who you are, the stuff that you communicate, your message, your personal brand, you're satisfied with that. There's no different, John, than as a speaker, I know that roughly 2 % of the audience is going to hate me and is going to say, I don't like this guy. He yells at me. He invaded my space because I walk into the audience. I mean, they just say these things. 98 % is like, he's one of the best speakers I've ever seen in my life. It's just the way he came into the audience, the way he's so enthusiastic.

I let go of those 2 % before I even get to the room. I accept the fact that they're going to say negative things and they will not dictate the terms of the way that I communicate with the world. I am okay with them not liking me and it's not their fault. I'm not their thing. Remember going back to know who you are, know what you're not, same deal. You got to have that mindset in business. Beautiful. I got one last question to run out of time. How did you do the co-marketing with Grunt Style and River Pools? The shirt.

Jon Stoddard (55:15.661)
I'm a veteran. love grunt spotlights. Yeah. I don't even know how he did this. I know my marketing person set it up and I just, these are new and I love them. Like these are the greatest shorts ever. And so I got to find the answer to that myself. All right. I really appreciate this time, Marcus. I mean, you guys, if you get on Amazon, they ask, you answer. It's a great book.

his content saved my business. I was able to turn around from having my vendors in here saying, we're going to close down to less than six months later, selling the business through Empire Flipper. So thank you very much, Marcus. I really appreciate the time. pleasure, brother. Be well. Take care.