In the Guest Seat with Jeremy Rivera

I had a chance to switch places an sit in the guest chair or a conversation with Jeremy Rivera, host  of the SEO Unscripted Podcast. 

We talked about my journey from corporate to agency owner, to podcaster, the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned along the way.

We also talked about SEO, social media and standing out in the crowd.

Check out the summary below or read the episode summary.

The Agency Journey: From Traditional to Digital

Jeremy Rivera: Wow, that’s awesome. So what kind of agency was it? Who were you working with? And what did you learn from that experience?

Lorraine Ball: I started the company in 2002 and we started as a traditional marketing company because if you know the history of social media, none of the platforms existed back then. My world was small business. I worked very heavily in what I would call home services. I come out of the heating and air conditioning business. So roofers, HVAC contractors, plumbers — I understood that market. I understood what it took to generate opportunities for that market.

That was really my starting point and I did a lot of restaurants, neighborhood businesses. Mostly again around service — that really was the common thread that ran through everything.

Then along came email marketing and I went, “Oh, this is really good. This could be really good” because I was sending out 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 postcards. And you know, for my clients, that’s what you did. We were doing inserts in those neighborhood mails and we were designing really cute ones that would stand out. I’m like, “You know, email…”

So I did that and then we started seeing rumbles with social media and as soon as businesses were invited to play, we put our toe in the water, built some expertise and turned around one day and realized I had a digital agency. And I did that for 19 years, stayed pretty consistent with the kind of companies that we worked for, built a lot of websites, did a lot of content, and sold the business in ’21.

The Conscious Choice to Stay Small

Jeremy Rivera: How many people did you have eventually in your agency? How large did you scale it up?

Lorraine Ball: We got to 10 people and I actually made a conscious decision. This was a business decision. When we started looking at “Do we grow?” I recognized having come out of a manufacturing environment, you understand capacity. And as long as your sales are right below your capacity line, that’s great. But if you invest in more capacity, now if you have one more sale above that line, you kind of figure out how to get it in. But now you’ve got to sell a lot more to support that new capacity.

So instead of increasing our size, I raised our prices every time we got to that capacity line. What I made sure of as I added people to the company — did I have our skill sets covered? So I had a long form content person, I had a short form content person, I had a graphic designer, I had a project manager. I had my bases covered, didn’t have a lot of duplication. Then I started cross-training my people.

And then I made the second decision that locked us into that size. I owned the building that I ran the business out of. It was a small house and I could either A) renovate it or B) sell it and move into a bigger facility and I chose to renovate and created a little bit more room, but basically locked us into a footprint. And so that was a very deliberate choice. I was not gonna get to a hundred people, did not want to, but I could make more money with the same number of headaches if I just kept raising my prices.

Learning from Corporate Failure

Jeremy Rivera: No, I think that’s smart because I’ve worked in different environments. I’ve worked at several different size agencies working with commercial real estate companies and these agencies with different mindsets as far as, you know, “hey, we’re growing the team” and “we’re adding these salespeople and we’ve got these new [people].” And you’re right, there is a heartbeat to the company. And if you want to increase that, you know, you increase that capacity, you’re also raising your stakes that you have to raise your sales levels to that goal.

But you also, you know, there is a trade off of like, you step away from being a lifestyle company when you’re in that level of pursuit. And I’ve also seen like the big fish syndrome of like a salesperson will hook a huge lead that’s, you know, 2X, 3X, 5X, 10X beyond the existing capacity of your agency and you know I was with one agency and literally a notorious job posting site who won’t be named due to NDA but they’re very well known and they wanted like a million dollars worth of content every month and they took it on and had to hire a whole fleet of people and third party and set up internal structures, things change. AI starts to look pretty good to somebody that’s spending that much. And suddenly, “hey, we’re going to scale back 5%. We’re going to scale back 10%. This month we’re going to drop the European section.” And then we’re going…

The agency is left with all of this extra capacity and nobody left to fulfill it. If you get a ride with a whale instead of a fleet of fish, then if the whale goes down, you’re going down.

Lorraine Ball: Well, and I came out of corporate and I came out of a company — the company I came out of was at the time the fourth largest bankruptcy in America. And in that process, one of the things that I saw happen was we had a really great advertising agency, very talented, two offices, but we were 90% of their business. And so when we pulled back, they were gone.

Leaving there and opening up the agency, I made a decision. No client would ever represent more than 30% of my business. Ever. If somebody came along and they were that big, I had to make a decision. Was it worth it? Was it worth the risk? And it really wasn’t because they would require me to change everything about the business.

And that was one of the things — when I walked away from corporate and could have done lots of things, I decided I was going to do this. I was gonna do it my way. Could I have made more money if I had stayed in corporate? Yeah. Would I have a lot less hair? Or would it be a lot grayer than it is right now? Yeah, you know?

Building a Service-First Culture

Lorraine Ball: The beautiful thing was that when you start growing like that, you have to change your systems, you have to change your processes. There were things that we were known for that endeared us to our customers, that built a reputation in the marketplace.

For example, in our building, phones rang once. Every phone call was answered on the first ring. And for new employees that was the challenge — could they get to the phone before one of the senior people? And the idea was whoever answered the phone, me included, didn’t just take a message, would try to address the issue and mostly could because we were small enough.

Even if you weren’t on the Joe’s butcher shop account, you knew enough about it when Joe called and said “Hey I’ve got a new ad” and they could be like “Okay, Sam normally handles your account, he’s not here right now, tell me what the ad’s got to be about, I’ll get Lee on the phone, we’ll figure it out” and it would stun people.

When the phone would ring and I would answer it because I have this voice that I guess sounds like voicemail. “Hi, this is Lorraine. Can I help you?” And they would pause for a minute or “Thanks for calling Round Peg. This is Lorraine. Can I help you?” And they would be like… and I’d be like “Hello?” And they’re like “Oh my God, you’re a real person.” Yes, yes I am.

Not only did we win sales that way and hold on to customers — customers come and go, that’s the nature of that business — but I had long-term clients. I had a flooring company that was with me 11 years. I had Randall Beans, they were with me for about 10. That was fairly typical because we had those personal connections.

The other thing that we had was if you’ve ever tried to build relationships with local media, they’re always working against a deadline on Friday afternoon. And we were the only agency that would answer a phone on Friday afternoon. Normally it was just me, the team was gone. I did bookkeeping Friday afternoon because I really figured that most people only needed to work until noon on Fridays.

The Acquisition That Missed the Point

Jeremy Rivera: I’ve seen companies get bought up and they start chipping away pieces… I was just talking with Michael Mcdougald of Right Thing Agency about when this happened at his previous company. They just ended up losing the market share because their customer service sucked. Their entire mentality just sucked the joy out of being there, sucked the joy out of helping people and just drove customers away again and again.

Lorraine Ball: Yeah, a lot of times in acquisitions companies do not look at what really makes the company that they’re buying special. I mentioned I sold my agency and it’s really unfortunate, but the guys that bought us — it’s not that they had a bad business. They really didn’t understand our model.

They just assumed we were selling web services, they were selling web services, that our clients would happily move into their system. We were doing content, they were doing content. And they really didn’t understand the personal touch that was what made our relationships and our long-term relationships with those companies last. So they ended up losing most of the clients, which is really a shame because had they let our entity run the way it had always run, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have gone that way.

The Southwest Airlines Approach to Hiring

Lorraine Ball: I have always believed in the Southwest Airlines model: hire for attitude, train for skill. Yes, you need to know something about web design, but my lead web guy who stayed with me seven years had never designed a website when he came to work for me.

You can — now fortunately the tools changed. If we were still doing coding that would never have happened, but we were at this moment where with WordPress, I saw that I could teach anybody who was technically savvy, who was interested in learning, who had an eye for design how to do that.

Embracing AI as a Creative Assistant

Jeremy Rivera: The opposite value is what we should be looking at is what can a skilled person potentially do with these new tools and capabilities? Where have you gone in that world as far as new capabilities?

Lorraine Ball: I love AI for the basics. Smart people need to create original content. Let me start there. But I love that I can take my original content, send it over to AI and say “Turn this 10 minute video into five shorts. Take the transcript and give me a summary. But when you write the summary, here’s what my voice sounds like” — and I’ve already done that work — “Make sure it sounds like me.”

I love that I can give it… I just did this, I was on five podcasts last month and I pulled snippets from each of the five podcasts. I wrote the first paragraph, gave it to AI and said “Turn this into an article.”

I didn’t say go out and make shit up because it’s not really good at that. But here was good original content and I was using the tools to reformat, to recombine, to present in a structure that I could use.

Do I still have to read over the content and look for those phrases and expressions that I’m like “Okay, nobody in America uses that phrase, get rid of that”? Yes, but the more you work with the tools, the more it becomes representative of you.

I’ve also used it for brainstorming. I’m working with a client right now and I wanted to generate a year’s worth of content topics — not the content itself, but I gave the tool: “Here’s my target customer, here’s the business, give me some ideas.” And it gave me some really good ideas. There were some that are just not plausible, but there was a lot that really was. And that saved me hours. Hours.

The New Consulting Model

Jeremy Rivera: So you’ve niched down and you’re doing podcasting. It seems like having conversations comes pretty natural to you. So what is your line of attack? What is your process and who are you fishing out of the pool to consult with? Because obviously, like you get to choose like at this stage. So…

Lorraine Ball: The kind of companies that I like working with are organizations that have been in business for a while that have spent money on marketing and are not happy with the results. What I want to do is go in, audit what they’re doing and give them a plan for where I think they can get better.

I’m no longer interested in doing the execution. I’m happy to audit a website and then help you find a web designer who can take my ideas and turn them into a reality.

One of the things that I found when I was running the agency, because I would do a lot of marketing audits back then, is most marketing agencies will do an audit. But the funny thing is, if their expertise is web design, at the end of the audit, you need a website. If their expertise is SEO, wow, you know, that’s your biggest problem. I don’t have that agenda. I have no skin in any of the games.

You’re paying me for the strategy. You’re paying me to think through the ideas. I do one hour working sessions and I do plan development. It’s really funny right now, I’m working with another digital agency and I get paid to work with their team. Every week we talk about two or three of the clients and I help them develop the strategies for their clients. That’s fun for me.

The Golden Rule: Answer the Questions

Jeremy Rivera: Kind of heading into the homestretch, what is the most actionable thing that you can advise people listening to this podcast to do? Now, most people listening to this either are SEOs or they’re small business owners or they’re at least aware of digital marketing in some way. Like that’s probably why they’re listening. So with that context, what is your most actionable golden rule or piece of advice?

Lorraine Ball: So it’s a little bit long, bear with me just a sec. So the advice is actually answer the questions. That’s the advice.

Jeremy Rivera: Bear away.

Lorraine Ball: Now, how do you do that? If you wanna win SEO, if you wanna win sales, if you wanna get noticed on social media, if you wanna stand out in a crowd at a networking event — all of those things really rely on one thing: your ability to answer the questions that your ideal client has.

Now, if you don’t know who your ideal client is, then that’s where you need to start. You need to get really specific on who is your ideal client and it’s not everybody. And it’s not even all women age 25 to 35.

I just did an exercise with my students — I teach a class at a local university — and I gave them five pictures of five women who were all in that age range. But each photograph was so different. One was a mom, one was a woman working at a Starbucks, one was obviously a student, one was at an office. I said “Each of those women is 25 to 30. Now yeah, there are some products they will all buy, but there are a ton of products that only a small group of those women care about.”

When you define your ideal client, you got to really niche down. Now you know who your customer is. Now you got to start working on what are the questions that they really want the answers to.

When you figure that out, you write content for your website. Hello SEO people. Don’t worry about keywords, worry about answers.

When you do that on social media, you get engagement because that’s what people are looking for. Nobody is looking for “long plus pigeon plus cage,” you know? They’re like “I got pigeons in my roof, how do I get rid of them?” And you gotta have the answers and there’s all sorts of ways you can do that.

But at the end of the day, doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to your website, doesn’t matter how many phone calls you get off your lead generation tools. If you can’t answer the questions, you aren’t gonna make the sale.

Where to Find Lorraine

Jeremy Rivera: That’s super legit. I love that. Just share where you’re at, the name of your podcast. Plug anything you like. This is your stage.

Lorraine Ball: So the podcast is More Than a Few Words. It’s available wherever you listen to podcasts. If you wanna reach out to me, find Lorraine Ball on LinkedIn — that’s where I hang out the most — and go to morethanafewwords.com. There you’ll find in our archive hundreds of conversations, workbooks, white papers, and all sorts of tools for small business owners.

Jeremy Rivera: So smooth. Thank you so much for your time. This was amazing.

Lorraine Ball: This was fun. Thank you for the invite.