Hey super fans.

Superstar Freddie D. Here in this episode 145, we're joined by Shawn Garner, an entrepreneur, marketing strategist and a founder of Shawn Garner Consulting.

Shawn has spent over a decade helping service based businesses from health and wellness companies to law firms and home service providers simplify their marketing and grow with clarity and confidence.

A former gym owner, firefighter and faith driven family man, he brings real world perspective due to challenges entrepreneurs face while balancing life's priorities.

With his knack for turning confusion marketing for his knack for turning confusion marketing tactics into clear, actionable steps, Sean has empowered countless business owners to become the trusted go to choice in our markets.

Get ready for an insightful conversation with Sean.

Welcome Sean, to the Business Superfans podcast.

Excited to have you on the show.

You and I had a good conversation before you started recording.

So welcome to the show, Sean.

Mr. Freddie D. I am excited to be here, sir.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to connect and to come here and hopefully we serve and add a lot of value to your audience.

Yeah, definitely.

Sean, let's go back to the beginning.

You've got a great digital marketing agency.

You do a lot of things for small businesses, but how did it all begin?

How did you get there?

Great question, long story.

We'll try to give you the short version of it, but my wife and I, we've owned multiple different businesses in a lot of different industries for a long time.

And how the marketing agency came to be is unfortunately because of me getting burned by several other marketing agencies.

I was realizing that I, I was paying them for things that I really didn't know or understand and because they would make it so complicated.

It was tech speak and I didn't really understand what I was paying for.

I wasn't really getting any results for it.

As we started owning other companies and I started to get more into the online space, I did a lot of stuff, we owned gyms for a long time and I transitioned into the online fitness space.

And so as I was doing that I thought, well, it can't be that difficult.

I can figure this stuff out.

And so I'm pretty tech savvy.

Started to figure out basics with digital marketing, building websites, search engine, optim, funnels, automations, email marketing, text, all of the things.

And then I started having friends asking me that were also in the fitness industry.

Hey, are you doing all this stuff, selling these online fitness products, your online training and stuff?

I was like, oh yeah, it's super simple.

And I started explaining it to them.

It would just Be like all over their head.

And I'd be like, how about I just do it for you?

And then me just be trying to be helping my friends out.

They would eventually like, shouldn't I pay you for this?

Like, oh yeah, that's actually a good idea.

And so it started out as just trying to help some of my colleagues and other friends that were in the fitness industry to create their own online fitness products and everything like that.

And then 2020 happens.

Covid hit and now all businesses need to go online.

I had my attorney actually reach out to me.

He's like, hey, all of this website and digital marketing stuff that you're doing for like these personal trainers and gym owners, do you think it would work for me?

I was like, well, yeah, I mean it's all the same.

But we were talking right before the show.

It's all the same basic fundamentals.

Of course it could.

So I built all of his stuff out.

And then my wife was launching another business is actually her, my wife's medical provider.

And so she was launching her functional medicine practice and she was like, hey, you already know how to do this marketing stuff.

Let's just have you do that.

So did all that stuff and the clinic exploded and it slowly just started transitioning since about 2021, where it was just all health and fitness to where that's only about 5 to 10% of our client base.

Now it's shifted and grown to where we are a full service marketing agency.

We do story brand messaging, website design, sales funnel, search engine optimization, automations, all of the things and that we work with local service based businesses, businesses that are looking to book calls, schedule appointments.

You think like attorneys, med spas, plumbers, home service companies, things like that.

And it's just evolved because of me being frustrated with what I saw from other marketing agencies, deciding to learn it on my own and then using that skill and ability to honestly just start serving friends and colleagues.

And that just led me to keep continuing to grow and serve other people.

Oh, what a great backstory.

What was the biggest thing that you ran into with the other agencies that you used in the past that weren't delivering what they said they were going to be delivering?

Yeah, I think it all comes down to poor communication and unclear expectations.

So a lot of times now the analogy I use sometimes is like, if you like watch a magic trick and you're like blown away, you're like, wow, how'd they do that?

But then if you ever learn how the magic trick is really done, you're like, oh, that's it.

And it kind of like loses its specialty and everything, right?

As I've grown my agency and I've learned my skills, I kind of honestly get even more upset and frustrated because I was like, wait, you're charging people for that?

And so for me, the thing that now looking back and knowing what I know now, I got so frustrated and still continue to do that.

The amount of marketing agencies that are in essence holding their clients work hostage and, and the business owners not even realizing it.

So for me, for example, what happened for the first bad experience I had is we were wanting to update and change our website.

And then whenever I was going to do that, I found out that I didn't actually own the domain.

I didn't own the website, I didn't own the Google Analytics account, I didn't own the Google search console, all of those things because it was set up by the agency and they were the admins and the owners and they were just giving me a delegate user access.

So I owned the business, the physical brick and mortar location of our gym, but I didn't actually own our digital storefront, which is your website.

Your domain agency owned all that stuff.

So whenever I wanted to go, leave and separate from the agency, they're oh yeah, absolutely, we can do that.

We just have to fill out this cancellation form request.

And I had to pay money to get them to transfer it to another business when it was my stuff, I should have owned it in the beginning to actually build it out.

Then we had another agency build our website.

We looked amazing, looked beautiful, it worked great for about six months and the agency built it on a.

It's a popular platform, it's called WordPress.

But with WordPress, how it's actually set up is there's tons of plugins and stuff to make it work.

Well, I didn't know this, but if you didn't keep up with updating those platforms, the whole website can break and things can start looking up and showing goofy.

And so then when I go back to the web developer that oh absolutely, we can fix that for you.

All you have to do is just pay us each month and we'll update the plugins and everything for you.

And honestly, Freddie, it was just instances of this over and over and over to where I found out that I was paying people to let me in the front door of my own business that I own.

Describe to clients all the time.

Your website is your digital storefront.

You would not pay a general contractor monthly to come to your business every day.

And unlock the front door for you and let you in your physical location that you own.

But so many small business owners do that with their digital storefront.

They expect, oh, I've got a website guy, he takes care of that for me.

But they don't really realize what they own and what they don't own.

And honestly it's so frustrating for me now because a big part of whenever we're building websites for clients, because honestly we are a lot of clients, second or third agency, because they've gotten burned in the past how much work we have to do working with their existing agency just to get ownership access to the actual business owner.

And if you don't know, if you're ignorant on the tech side of things, of how hosting domains, websites and those account setups work, it's really easy for small businesses to get taken advantage of because honestly, most time they're like, I know, I just need a website.

This guy said he's going to do it, my cousin Bob's going to do it for me.

And he doesn't realize that Bob really doesn't know what he's doing or Bob not maybe the best choice for them.

And they're keeping ownership access and the business owners don't actually own the, the things that they should be owning.

Absolutely correct.

Because my now wife and I, we started a digital marketing agency back in 2014 and we were focusing on directory listing when that was really kind of big.

And so we were competing with YEX when they first came out.

And we never lost to them because we were the first agency that actually focused on verticals.

So we would get people listed in automotive directories, legal directories, medical directories, whatever it was where YE was at the time, just doing all the general stuff.

We went vertical and that was our differentiator.

And we ran into what exactly what you're saying.

There was a restaurant back in Michigan, actually two of them that were.

Both of them were restaurants and they didn't own any of their stuff.

And one restaurant got locked out of everything.

We ended up redoing everything for them and making sure that they had a full ownership because they did not own their domain.

They did not have exactly what you just said.

So we redid everything for them because we got them to list the directories.

But then we found out that they didn't have access to anything, so we had to redo everything for them.

And it was another restaurant where this guy, total schmuck, basically shut down their website because they were using it as hostage and because again they wanted to transfer away from them, wanted $3,000 if I remember correctly, to get that moved over and give him access to it.

And he flat out shut it down and was absolutely insane.

I completely understand where you're coming from because I've seen it and you're right, sometimes people just don't know what they don't know and they really need to be paying attention.

I want to make sure that our listeners understand that you need to own all that digital stuff because it's yours, it's your intellectual property at the end of the day.

Yeah.

And here's more behind the scenes on the magic trick.

Because a lot of agency owners that do these things that I don't like or agree with, they'll always have some verbiage to say things of why they do it this way.

This is kind of some pro tips for people out there.

If you have an existing agency that you're working with, maybe you hear this, oh my God, I got to find out if I actually own it.

This is what you need to ask that second level question.

Because at first they're going to say, oh, 100%, yeah, you do own it.

I've got a client that we're working with right now that is in the financial space and same exact thing, we are kind of working with them.

We're not doing the website build out, but we're doing the search engine optimization and some other things because they're building their platform in this like fintech platform.

And I asked them, I said, do they actually own this website?

100% they do.

And then as I start digging in and getting on these calls with them, I find out like, no, this is built on a proprietary like CMS or content management system that this other company owns.

And so I just straight up asked them on the call, I was like, whoa, I thought you said that they own it.

Yes, they own the content.

And I said, well, what if they ever wanted to move their website to a different platform or company?

Oh well, yeah, so they don't own that part.

And so it's people using different terms and swapping it out.

They own the domain, but they don't actually own the website.

It's like, okay, okay, those are two different things.

And they're just manipulating the terms.

And then honestly, another thing that I think that business owners should be looking out for when it comes to other agencies is I love let's grow big companies and let's scale.

But when it comes to the agency side, what you have to realize is if an agency is able to deal with hundreds or thousands of clients.

Typically it's because things are.

I would love to say that they're overly systematized, but most of the time they're overly templatized.

And so a lot of times, if a lot of agencies, if they specialize in a specific niche to where maybe it's just plumbers, they're using the same website wireframe templates for all of their clients.

So whenever it comes to things like search engine optimization, you're getting a lot of these things that's called duplicate content, because in essence, you're writing the exact same content for every single thing.

And all you're doing is changing out the name and the city location.

We were working with this plumbing, saw that with the chiropractor website.

Yeah.

Where there's a platform and that's it.

They're selling their platform and they just change the logo, change the name, a couple things.

And they're paying a couple hundred dollars a month for basically something that's generic, that's just been minusculely tweaked for that particular agency.

Yeah.

We literally were building out a website a couple of months ago, and in the back end, they didn't even delete a lot of the template code stuff.

It even said, at R, we love serving insert city name here with these insert service list here.

They actually had the template text still in there.

It's like, guys, come on.

If you truly want your business to grow and dominate and stand out online, you have to be unique.

You can't be like everybody else.

And how do you expect to do that if it's just copy paste work from everybody else?

Yeah.

And that's one of my sayings, is to be terrific, you need to be specific.

And if you're specific, you will be terrific.

And that's one of the things that you're doing, is you're really helping people become unique and specific for their market space and the value that they bring.

Because I looked at what you guys are doing, that's really the differentiator, because that's the first impression somebody gets in today's world.

First thing we do is we pick up our phones, we look at what it is, and then the next thing we do is we look at the reviews.

And that's the second thing.

That's a social proof that we're all after.

And so we take a look at what the reviews are.

Because you and your wife, or me and my wife, we go to the restaurant while we're driving, saying, hey, what do we feel like going, I don't know, let's take a look at what's in the area.

And the first thing we're doing is take a look at what other people said.

That's the world we live in.

The reviews is the new word of mouth today.

And so it's important that first impression is powerful and resonates with the audience that you're targeting.

And more importantly, you've got that social proof that validates that, okay, this is a cool place.

Think about it, especially if you're in a big city, you're walking around and you look at and I've seen this, I lived in Chicago for a while.

There's a restaurant, there's two restaurants next to one.

Another one is semi empty, the other one, there's a line to get into and they're next door.

And you're wondering, why is this line?

Well, this one's got the reputation and the food quality is ideally the same because I've done it, I've gone to both of them to test it out and the quality is the same, this one's got the reputation.

And so everybody's going there and that's the one that's got the line because we all want to go where everybody else is going.

So what you're doing is you're helping that business that you're working with develop their unique brand and then validating that everybody's going to this place a hundred percent.

Because like exactly what you just said is the social proof aspect of it matters so much.

What a lot of business owners, maybe they don't fully understand how it works is they think that, oh man, I've been in the industry, I've been doing this job for 20, 30 years.

This is a family business, this is legacy, this is, we're a third generation home builder.

And so they assume that because they've been doing it in the real world and they've got all of this social proof and experience that if they build a website, well, it's just going to be flooded because I've got all this experience, everybody's going to come to me.

What people sometimes struggle to realize is Google, the online space, has no idea what you've actually done.

And if you take a bigger step back and think about why it's set up that way is because it's to help prevent people from, from just spinning up websites and everything being equal.

Because that's how people unfortunately get spammed and taken advantage of.

Because if everything is the same, well then what's that differentiating factor.

And so in the online space, that's why things like Google reviews are so powerful.

Because for one, it's honestly difficult to fake Google reviews.

Like you have to have a Google account and everything.

You just can't like pay somebody to make a testimonial video for you or anything.

It carries a lot of weight to actually be able to get those reviews.

And then on the website side of things, whenever you start talking about things like SEO and search engine optimization, well, how does Google know which home builder business to show up higher on Google?

It's not just because you are really good at what you do and you've been doing it for 40 years.

Google has no idea.

So how you get that social proof, how you get that like social proof in the digital world with things like SEO is several factors.

But one of them is something called backlinks.

So other websites linking to yours, that shows Google, hey, this is a trustworthy source because look at all of these other businesses or think about it in the real world, look at all these other people talking about this business.

It must be good and it must be more legitimate.

So we should show them higher than the other one that nobody's really talking to.

Like the restaurant thing that you were example you were sharing earlier and that's how that stuff actually works.

So just because you've been awesome, like the physical world, a brick and mortar location and you're trying to do more on digital and you're frustrated because it's not really working, Google, the Internet world doesn't translate over to what you've been doing in the brick and mortar real world.

Sure.

Another thing that I coach people on is using this as a device to basically, especially if you're in a service based business and you've provided a service to somebody, ask for permission to record a video testimonial on the spot.

Yeah, most people will give it to you if you ask them.

And then now you've got proof from a video and that becomes your salesperson when you're presenting your service to somebody else.

Because they may be looking at getting a kitchen remodeled.

They're going to look at two, three different bidders.

Well, you can come around says, hey, here's Sally, here's Mike, here's Mike and.

Susie, and here's their story of what.

We did with their kitchen remodeling.

They're the people selling.

You don't have to say nothing.

Yeah, exactly.

And I love what you said there too because what we coach our clients to do is if you Ask for reviews.

Most of the time you will get one.

But if you just ask for a review, you're going to get one of two things.

Typically you're going to get something like Freddy D was really nice and that's it.

It's going to be very vague, general, nothing special.

Or you're going to get like a five paragraph essay about how Freddie D. Changed my life and it's gonna be so much stuff that it's going to be exactly.

So what we typically coach our clients to do is let's say you hired our agency to build your website or something like that for you.

This is how I would ask you for review.

Hey, Freddie, Websites live.

So happy to hear that you love it.

Remember how you were telling me that it was really difficult to build a website with your last agency because it took forever.

They really didn't understand your mission.

You didn't feel like it was unique and they didn't help you really tell the story of your brand and really clarify your marketing message.

And we were able to come and do that.

And not only did we clarify your message for you, but we built your website and we were able to launch it in a matter of like three weeks.

Remember that?

Oh yeah.

I love that.

Awesome.

Freddie, can I use that on my website?

And they're like, oh yeah, 100%.

So now I don't have to worry about Freddie writing me this big review.

I'm going to be able to write the review because I got Freddie's permission to do it.

And you can do the exact same thing like you just said.

I love that about the video version is pull out the phone.

Hey, Freddie, we just launched everything.

Do you mind if I record a little story real quick and talk about that?

Yeah, yeah.

Nobody's going to say no, is he?

Just like you just said, you whip out your camera.

Hey, I'm here with Freddy.

We just launched his new website here.

We were able to do this, this and this.

Freddie, tell him one big thing that you love most about working with us.

And he's.

You're going to say one thing and it's going to tell the whole story.

It's going to be easy.

It's going to get you more reviews.

Yeah, I mean, that's how we grew our digital marketing company until we basically ran out of cash.

That story very quickly is we grew.

We were competing.

We were actually applying for a patent on some technology because like I said, we were competing with YEX and we had a really cool idea and we got some investment money and we ended up going in front of VC companies, and the Blackstone Group came up to us and said, hey, we like what you're doing.

We're interested.

And I had a meeting with them up in the Willis Tower in Chicago.

And I was like, oh, my God, I'm talking with the stupid bunny people.

But we weren't asking for enough.

And then we met with.

She knew somebody who knew the guy that created those gas station TVs, and he sold it for about 250 million.

And I'm emailing this guy directly, and I'm like, oh, my God, I'm talking to somebody.

Stupid money level.

And he says, yeah, we're interested.

And we met with his team and presented our stuff, and they said, yeah, we like it.

Finish building the boat and show us that it can leave the dock in its own power and we'll help.

We'll put money in to help you scale.

I was like, well, I need money to finish this thing.

Yeah.

We ended up running out of cash.

But the thing that I wanted to share was that the bottom line is we.

Every customer that we helped with getting their directories listed, and they were showing up on page 1, 2, and 3 of Google, they owned those pages.

We got video testimonials, and that was our sales presentation to everybody else.

We actually put them all together and then just, here's stuff.

This is what we do.

And I just let the customers do the selling.

And we would close every deal because of that.

Yeah, that's awesome.

That's talking about business superfans.

I think that that's the.

One of the things that this is probably also goes back to the agency red flags.

Things to ask for and things not to ask for or things to avoid.

If they don't do this.

I am 100% okay with giving you the email address and contact information from any client that we've worked with in the past because of the level and value of service that we provided to them.

If you're working with a business, not just an agency, but any business that you're about to work with and you ask for references and like, I.

Well, I don't know, some of the people, we don't want to share their private information.

If you really provide somebody a ton of value, they're going to be okay with helping to become brand ambassadors for you and to let other people know about you if you've truly made an impact and you've delivered on what you've promised them.

I'm always very leery of businesses that are datekeeping referrals and stuff like that.

And they'll use clever language like oh well, we just like to keep our clients information private and stuff like that.

They'll do that to kind of gatekeep it.

But I would be more than happy to let the here's all my clients go.

Call any of them, see what they said.

You must have read my book because that was my power move back in the 90s when I was selling manufacturing software.

I had a CRM that I kind of wrote myself and then I used another one and I had a daytimer and I printed out all my customers in a daytimer and I would go and I was selling manufacturing software and I be saying we'd be doing a presentation on stuff and I would take on my daytimer, put it up there and flip the pages and say.

And then I take my cell phone, I had a brick phone back then, and I turn around and drop that on the table and says, okay Sean, that's list of all my customers.

Here's my phone.

Pick any one of them and call and it shut up.

Talk about a power move.

I do love that because I had.

The cojones because they were all referenceable.

All of my customers were super fans, which is why I've got plaques on the wall being top sales guy in the company.

Because I went above and beyond to make sure that they got not just the technology I was selling, but really where do they wanted to go as a business.

They were all referenceable.

My customers were my super fans, that was my sales team.

I didn't prospect, I got everybody to prospect for me.

And so all I was doing was basically closing deals that they were handing to me, ready to go.

Exciting opportunity for quality business owners.

But also the sad fact of the matter is too is it's a lot easier to be in my opinion, I create superfans now than it was back in the day.

Because honestly, it feels like so many small business owners, they've kind of gotten lazy.

And what I mean by that is I love AI.

We leverage AI and stuff like that all the time with the agency, with helping our clients set up stuff.

But if you rely 100% on AI and automations to run all of your business, how is that unique from all of your competitors if they're able to set up the exact same automations and the exact same AI, chatbots and answering services, do you know what creates super fans and things now is human connection.

People are getting sick of press one for this, press two for this.

They're sick of the auto generated text messages and emails and autoresponders and stuff.

Now listen, I love that stuff and we set that stuff up for our clients.

But what I tell them is the reason why we build out these automations is to help catch this stuff so no lead gets left behind and your bucket isn't leaking leads.

But if you truly want to stand out and grow, grow your business with the marketing and stuff that we're doing for you, don't just let the automations and everything, don't think you're going to sit back and the automations are going to sell everything for you if you truly want to stand out from your competition.

The marketing that we're doing is bringing in real humans that are interested in what you do call them and you will be amazed when you actually call them.

They want to buy your stuff.

You get a 15 minute window to respond to a lead that comes in.

In today's world you have 15 minutes because otherwise you're going to go someplace else.

And the other thing that you need to do is remember old stuff which is called direct mail.

It actually still works and actually it works better than emails all day long every day because you can send somebody a postcard and guess what?

It gets at least 10 seconds of a visual impression email.

You look at it and go, oh, I don't know who that is, goodbye.

Delete.

Yeah, postcard or card or direct mail still works and that was one of the things, I still use it today because it's a huge differentiator.

It's the same thing with recognizing somebody on their birthday is sending them a birthday card through the mail, not an email, not a text message is something how you differentiate yourself from all your.

Competition for the younger generation that may be listening to this, like ah, no, I don't believe that.

Everybody probably knows who Alex Hermosi is.

He's very big with online marketing and everything.

I signed up for his latest book launch that's coming out and today I got a letter from acquisition.com his brand sent me a letter in the mail.

I do think that there's tons of value and still just those real life connections and just something tangible people can get in because yeah, you're probably got thousands of emails a day in your inbox but you might get some junk mail.

But you can definitely differentiate yourself just by standing out in somebody's physical mailbox as well.

So Sean, share a story with us of how you worked with an organization that had some issues that we've talked about, stepped in, helped them get out of that mess and then transform them to where they've now become a super fan of your business and now your biggest advocate, generating more opportunities for you.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's honestly, I wouldn't want to say, oh, every single one of our clients, but yeah, every single one of our clients, they all have a similar story.

They're either a brand new business and they've been talking to tons of people and they know they need to build a website, they know they need to work on their branding, everything because they're getting ready to launch, but they're so confused around the process or they've been working with an existing agency for a long time and just marketing doesn't seem to be working.

They're wasting a tremendous amount of money and they're just not getting results.

And so I can think of specifically with one of our clients we've been working with, it's coming up on a year, actually this month.

They're a local plumbing company and they were already successful in their local market doing probably around three and a half, $4 million a year as a local plumber in just a small suburb city.

And they'd been with this marketing agency for about three and a half, four years.

And it was honestly the same situation I told you before is this was the agency they were with was a huge national agency that only worked with plumbers.

So it was a lot of templated content and it gets good results initially because most businesses just by doing.

I was in the fitness industry for a long time, so a lot of my analogies I used, I relate to fitness, whatever.

If you've done nothing and you start working out and eating a little bit better, you start seeing amazing results really, really quick.

But then you get to a point where you actually have to start going.

In the fitness industry, we would say you have to go from working out to training.

And that's whenever your body is kind of adapted to the initial shock of I'm getting better food, better sleep, and I'm starting to move to where you actually have to start training and you have to be doing specific things in order to keep seeing those progressions and stuff in your fitness.

The same thing happens with your marketing and a lot of these big agencies, they'll come in, they'll lock you up on some really big contracts and they'll sweep in and they'll get you really great results initially because you've been sitting on the couch eating Doritos from a marketing standpoint.

And so you're not getting any results and so they come in and they just get you off the couch, make you drink a gallon of water a day, and walk you around the block.

You're like, oh, my gosh, we're getting leads again.

After doing that for six months or so, things kind of start slowing down and you start to hit this other plateau.

This has happened with this other agency, and they happen to actually be coming into another business that my wife and I own is a medical spa.

And I met one of the owners, they saw me in there, and we just connected and hit up a conversation.

And what I did for them is the same thing that we do for all of our clients is the first thing that we want to do with our clients is we really want to make sure that we clarify their marketing message.

Because we don't want to, as you said earlier, just create stuff for everyone.

We want to make sure that we're very specific to the type of person that we want to work with and the problem that we solve for them and how we want to make their life better.

Because even just with plumbing, right, there's a lot of different plumbers, there's a lot of different ways to do that.

But what makes them unique and what makes their customers that they are called to serve unique?

Because I believe that everybody in business is called to serve a specific customer.

If you try to be all things to all people, you're going to end up attracting none.

And so we went in there and we saw that they had a lot of differentiating factors about them that could help them to stand out in another market.

But unfortunately, they looked just like every other plumbing company.

So we went in and we helped clarify their message so that when they actually started to sound unique and it was inviting their customers into a story instead of just talking about the plumbing services that they offered, then the next thing that we did is we took that messaging and we plugged it into a website wireframe that just didn't list out their services, but actually engaged their customers and invited them into this story, and it led their customer through the relationship journey.

What we actually always use our clients, too, and maybe I have to start paying Freddy D. Money for this, is we always say that we want to take your business from people not knowing who you are to being super fan customers for life.

And that's why I love the show, because that's what we want to do, is we don't want to just have somebody check a box and think of you as a service provider.

We want them to think of you as the only option that they have to get this service provided because if not, you're going to be lumped in just like anybody else.

And they're just going to go down the list and they're going to call who's the next one is available.

We took all that messaging, we embedded it into their website, we built them a new website that was beautiful, that made them actually stand out online.

Because like you said, in the digital world, the website is the first impression.

It doesn't matter how great of the referral is.

What they hear is about something.

You're going to open your phone now, you go to the website, you can look at their socials and stuff like that.

And we want to make sure that digital presence really makes you stand out and differentiate yourself from the compet.

So we build them a beautiful website.

My dad joke is Fill the dreams was a great movie.

Horrible marketing advice.

Just because you build it doesn't mean they will come.

So then we really took over their search engine optimization strategy because they were already doing really well in their local market.

But what we did is because we are not just trying to be this big mass agency where we're copying, pasting all the techniques.

We were actually to dive in and start training with their marketing and find out the opportunities and the specific things that they needed to do for their business, for their industry, for the markets that they wanted to break into to where the previous agency couldn't get them past.

Ranked number 18 and now we're ranking in the top one to three positions for all their key terms in all the different suburbs that they're trying to be in just by training with their marketing and making it specific to them, the things and the problems that they solve and the customers that they're trying to reach.

That's what we did.

But I would say what made them become super fans is three things that our company I think does extremely well is.

Number one is communication.

We overly communicate with our clients because I know if you've ever hired an agency or business before that you don't ever want to feel alone on an island.

We want to overly communicate because we want them to know that we're not just taking their money and running from them.

Right?

We're always here to serve them.

That's the verbiage that we use is we're there to serve our clients.

And so in order to serve somebody, that means you have to be readily available for them.

I'm not saying you can't take days off, but to truly serve people, it's going to be Inconvenient sometimes.

That's what being a servant is.

The second thing is we overly communicate.

The second thing is, is we are incredibly fast.

Even though we are not copy paste templates from everything, our speed makes us look like it is not because we have templates but because what I said earlier, systems.

I'm a huge systems guy.

So we have systems and checklists and processes for everything.

So if we start a website for a new nonprofit today, but before we actually start the website build up process, we've already created all the copy, created all the digital, got all the assets, built out the automations and stuff on the backend.

So whenever I give it to my web developer, she can build out a website typically in about one day now because we've done a lot of checklist process to give it to the web developer and she just knocks it out.

And the third thing is, kind of the overall thing is we say go the second mile.

Back in the day, Roman Soldier, whenever they were taking over territories, they could stop anybody and had that for the places that they were occupying and they could make anybody carry their bag one mile.

And so to really stand out, we want to call our people to go the second mile.

So do more than you're expected to do.

I always want to under promise and over deliver for my clients.

If we tell them that we're going to have the website done in four weeks internally, our deadline is two weeks.

Just so we can really try to make sure that we can over deliver for our clients and go that second mile for us.

Yeah, that was one of the things that I did when I was selling the manufacturing software in the manufacturing space.

And that's one of the things that differentiated us is I would talk about the whole implementation aspect of the technology and I would ask the owners, okay, when do you want to be profitable?

And the answer was as fast as possible.

I said, well, let's lay this whole thing out.

And so I would take the marker board and we would lay out, okay, you got to run two systems simultaneously.

You can't shut this all the way off.

Yeah, keep this going while we're coming up with this new technology.

And we got to do the training and set up systems and processes and everything else.

And I had everybody in the room so even the guys that were going to be using the computers that were actually going to be doing the stuff.

What I did is I bought them some road because otherwise it'd be like, how come you're Sean, we bought this stuff.

How come you're not using It.

Yeah.

Why is it up and running yet?

Right.

So I lay this whole thing out.

Basically I call is I reverse closed it because I lay out this whole timeline.

This is what's going to take to be actually profitable.

It's going to be okay nine months back.

Then, based upon the timeline that we just laid out, Sean, I need to have that purchase order today to deliver on the timeline that you and I just put together.

It'd be done because they'd be like, ah, yeah, I just put this together.

So you're doing the same thing is you're helping your customer understand, here's the timeline, here's what's going to happen, here's our process and here's what it's going to take.

And we can't shut this off, but we're going to build this up and then we're going to make this transition and then we're going to keep tweaking it once it's live so that it goes.

So same process, just different times.

But that's how you create those superfans because you set the proper expectations and then you go deliver beyond what you've set the expectations.

And that's transformative.

To truly serve your business, to truly serve your customers, your business has to truly serve.

And serving requires sacrifice.

You have to go the extra mile for them.

You can't be like everybody else.

You can't even be what your job title or industry is.

So I don't even like telling people often that I own a marketing agency because they're going to lump me in with every other marketing agency that they've had an experience with in the past.

And so I want to make sure that how I talk about myself is different so that way they don't lump me in with the bad experience that they've had in the past.

Because how we do things is different.

Yep.

Same thing with the way I was selling and still sell today is really looking at how I can help that business or that individual get to where they want to go.

And that's really what it's all about.

Yeah.

As we kind of get closer to the end here, let's go through a little bit of some of all the services that you guys offer.

Yeah.

Our specialty is building out sales funnels.

And so for me, a sales funnel is not a piece of software.

It's not even a type of landing page.

That kind of stuff's gotten popular with software tools like click funnels and high level and things like that.

And they associate a funnel with that.

That's not to us what a sales funnel is.

A sales funnel is a process.

It is a digital process of taking somebody from not knowing who you are to a super fan, customer for life.

And the things that are included in that process.

If you truly want to grow your business and dominate your industry is you have to build, fill and optimize your sales funnel.

A sales funnel starts with your messaging.

I'm a certified story brand coach and so we leverage the story brand framework by Donald Miller to help businesses clarify their message so they stand out online.

We do brand messaging and copywriting.

The other thing that we do is then once you take those words, that's awesome if you have words.

But we want them to look good and we want to have a place where customers can see them.

So we do websites.

We build custom websites for small business owners so that they stand out online from their competition.

The other thing that we do is we build lead generators for them so people come to your website, they're not always going to be ready to buy.

So we help them put together guides, PDFs, mini courses, eBooks, types of things so customers can leave their information so they can get a little piece of information, piece of value from you and position yourself as a guide.

But that's not the secret.

The secret is in the other thing that we do is then we create the automations and the systems to help follow up and plug them into a CRM pipeline so you and your sales team can keep track of and like you said, follow up with Those people within 15 minutes of their information coming across your pipeline.

And that's what we do to build sales funnels.

But like I said, just because you build it doesn't mean they come.

The other thing that we really specialize in is search engine optimization, SEO for local service business owners.

So making sure that you're ranking up in the number one spot Google for the SERP or the search engine result pages and the Google Maps or the map pack.

And now with these language models, these LLMs and stuff is making sure that you're showing up in AI overviews.

And so we use that with that.

And then the third thing is optimizing after we built it, after we're sending people to it, now we actually have data to make decisions.

We tell our clients all the time is we don't make decisions based upon personal preference or emotion.

We use data.

So there is tons of data points available to us in the marketing world.

And so we leverage those to let us know when we need to change copy, changing email, subject lines.

What we need to do to increase conversion rates and we're always looking and tweaking that to optimizing the funnel.

Because if you think about a funnel, it is your bucket.

You're going to be filling it with leads and potential customers.

If there's holes in the bucket, you're just wasting money with paid ads and things like that and organic content and it's just falling out the bucket.

Our job with optimizing it is to make sure that the bucket has no holes.

So as many of those people that come in, we maximize the conversions or the amount of people that are able to come in and become those super van customers.

Okay, excellent.

And how can people find you?

Yeah, the best would be specifically if they're listening to this show is go to our website.

It's Sean Garner co/business superfans.

So it's S E A N G A R N E R co slash one word Business Superfans.

And we're having a special landing page just for your audience.

We've got some free guides and checklists that we're going to give them with a marketing domination checklist so they know exactly what they need to do in order to grow their business and dominate.

We got a website wireframe.

So if you already have a website or you're about to build a website, we're going to show you exactly how it should be wired and framed out so it maximizes conversions.

We got free Google review scripts on there.

So if you do want to get some of those reviews that we talked about earlier, we've got the whole three message sequence that you should send for text and emails to follow up to make sure that you get more Google reviews.

So you stand online.

All that stuff's on the website just for your people.

Seongarner Co Business Superfans.

Wow.

That's very generous of you.

Thank you so much.

And it's been a pleasure having you on the Business Superfan podcast show.

You and I could probably talk for hours on this stuff and definitely would love to have you back on the show again.

Yes, yes, sir, Absolutely.

Anytime.

It's been an honor.

Thank you, Mr. Freddie D and I appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you, Sean.

What a powerful conversation with Sean.

The Superfans framework Pillar F is all about finance, protecting margins and cash flow, strengthening your financial foundation so you can scale confidently and sustainably.

Sean reminded us how easily business owners can lose control when agencies lock up domains, websites and data.

If you don't own your digital storefront, you're not protecting your margins.

You're putting your cash flow at risk.

Here's my challenge to you.

Do a quick audit this week.

Make sure you, not your vendors, own your website, your domain, your analytics and every digital key to your business.

The result?

You safeguard your profits, avoid costly hostage situations and keep more of your hard earned cash flowing where it belongs back into your growth.

And remember, one action, one stakeholder, one superfan closer.

Until next time, keep building your business Superfans.

Thank you for listening.

And know this, when you do, profits grow and freedom follows.

We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Superfans Podcast.

The path to success relies on taking action.

So go over to businesssuperfans.com and get your hands on the book.

If you haven't already, join the accelerator community and take that first step in generating a team of passionate supporters for your business.

Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.