We're trying to build a bond with our customer, or are we

trying to activate a sale? We need to do both,

and we need to do both in protection of the brand's reputation.

And when we do that, holistically as a single

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What if you can eliminate just one obstacle to unlock exponential

growth in your business? Meet Ryan Shute, a strategic marketing

expert at Wizard of Ads who specializes in transforming

small businesses into major brands by removing the

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frictionless, encapsulates his journey from a high friction retail

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agency. Join us as Ryan shares how cutting through common

setbacks can pave the way for smoother,

more profitable business operations. Ryan,

welcome to SeatGo Create. Hey. Thank you so much. I appreciate

it. Glad that you're here, Ryan. We're gonna have a fun conversation. Let's

go big. Let's start off big here. Gonna give you the choice.

Which question do you wanna answer? What do you

do, or who are you? Just go ahead and choose

and start answering. I I rarely get the

chance of, answering the question who I am, so I'll, I'll I'll take the path,

less trodden. And who I am is a is a man of

principle, a person who grew up in a high friction environment.

Mhmm. There's there's past traumas. There's past

challenges that have shaped the person that I am today, and

and in more recent years, have have come to realize that I need

to work on myself, and I need to work on the inner

leadership and the inner leader, for me to be the the

leader, the the tribe leader, and the individual leader, not

only as a boss, as a person who contributes to a

large organization, but as a dad, and as a

husband, and as a person in my communities,

that that I also associate and and appreciate deeply.

You know, when I when I think about what I'm trying to achieve, I'm trying

to achieve something bigger than myself that is going to

give back significantly to this universe. And I've chosen a

tribe of people that I really, really appreciate in the in the services

space. People who are often underappreciated in

what some feel is an ugly duckling business, and,

it's not a sexy thing to sell or or market for.

And I and I really love the challenge of that, and and and I've

gotten very good at cracking that code.

To be able to serve people really well from the top of the funnel

straight down to to the things that matter in our lives that

aren't associated to business. So one of the words you led off

with is the word principles, and I'm

always intrigued. That's one of these big words. I I believe in

the world we're in today, and I know you're we'll we'll be talking about

some techniques, tactics, and things like that in in the area of

ads and marketing that you specialize in as we move along.

But I I think a lot of people I don't wanna say they're lacking

principles. That's not I don't think the thing I want to say,

but I think it takes a certain person to add that into the

their vocabulary. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Have you always had that in your vocabulary of who you

are, or did that arrive at some point along the way?

And if so, when? I've always been

a person of high principle. You know, I see what's just and

unjust in this world and pick a side. So, ultimately,

I have hills that I die on, and usually to my detriment,

because I'm operating off of a fairly high level of

of honesty and integrity. I'm I'm trying

hard not just to serve myself, and it's not that people, lack

principles. It's that they lack conviction of those principles, and

that comes down to a fundamental understanding that I have. Let's

get deep real quick here and and talk about values and

beliefs. You know, Niels Bohr, the the Nobel

Prize winning, physicist, once said that the

opposite of a profound truth can very often be an equally profound truth. And,

Wizard Academy, where I learned the the the

the principles of communication, branding, and and

doing marketing in a different way than I had been used to, which

was deeply transactional. Right?

Effective, profitable, willing to work,

transactional. Ever changing, ever having to adjust and

adapt to the situation. Circling back down to

this last year, the year before last, Roy and

Manley and I, Manley is another partner of ours. He's a pastor at a church

in in New Orleans. And he he said, Ryan,

it's, it's interesting. You know, your your beliefs are

worthless. And I said, Manley, that's a great way to start a conversation. Where are

we going with this? And, you know,

justice and mercy are both profoundly

true truths, But they can't live in the same space.

It depends on which side of the table you're sitting on. The accused

murderer wants to get mercy, and the victim's

family wants to get justice. But what happens when the

victim's family murders the murderer? Now what?

Right? A belief is easily

interchangeable. It's convenient to

change based on the situation. And it's the world that we

live in today is that we change our beliefs to suit ourselves,

but that's not where value lives. Value lives in a

place where you do something inconvenient

for yourself to convenience another person,

to elevate another person in other situations.

And that value is what people value,

and that's why we call it value. Right?

Because it's valuable. You're doing something that's worth something because it

had an actual cost. Right? And when

we have an actual cost, now we have something that we can

do that's better than. That's the thing that can bring us

above what our competition is doing in whatever

perception of competition you are. Sometimes it's yourself.

Sometimes it's it's, you know, that guy who's who's hitting on your wife, and

sometimes it's that that other thing that's pulling your child's

attention or affecting your business in some way, or your

customer base as as to whether they choose to buy from you or not.

The employee who decides to work for you or go work for somebody else. All

of these things fall into the same bucket. What are

you doing that is actually valuable, and

what are you doing that is just serving you conveniently?

And that's why principles and value matters so much in

this world, because we're missing that part of our

life of actually putting ourselves into a position of struggle

or sacrifice. And until we do, are we

really serving at the highest level? Yeah. And I think there's so much

I don't know. Conflict is the right word, but maybe it is

that there's the tension. We're gonna talk about friction in a little while, but there's

that tension between the 2. To me, kind of from

the seat that I'm in, it seems like

people are picking their sides more and more. And and there's still some people that

are waffling between the 2, and I believe it probably

really comes into play when you begin working with some

leaders and owners of businesses and companies because you probably know really

quickly if there are people of principle, value,

what their culture is, all that type stuff. I wanna get into that in just

a little while because what I'd love to do first, you

mentioned a time frame of 2,000 15 seems to be a significant

time for you. And I know from doing a little bit of research, you grew

up. There was family business. You're up in Canada. There's some things

with the way you grew up. And then I'm gonna go back to

the introduction that you had. You said that you are currently

working on becoming the leader, the person,

and things like that. I'm maybe not wording it exactly the way you

did, but maybe just working on yourself. I I guess

I wanted to backtrack a little bit and and give a little bit of

background and maybe find out from

you what did some of the early experiences in your life, how

did it how did it play into what you're doing now? You know, growing up

around a family business, it was a furniture company, different things like that.

And then when did you become aware? Was it 2015?

Was it earlier that you needed to start working on yourself? We've got a lot

of leaders listening in. And these leaders, if they're listening to this

podcast, they're probably already they've crossed over that threshold

of I need to go deeper. I need to think in a different way,

values, and all that. However, I love to hear people's stories in their journey.

So give me some of the high points and low points of, you know, Ryan,

the early years. Yeah. The early

years growing up, we didn't have a lot of money. We were certainly

were low middle lower middle class. My

grandfather was upper middle class in his family, so

we knew that there was kind of this this,

better world that we should be aspiring to and and lived in an

environment, a really, entrepreneurial space. My grandfather,

my grandmother, my both my parents, all entrepreneurs. I

I became an entrepreneur early on. I started in sales, which is an

entrepreneurial journey into itself, and really wanted to go out there and

and help consult people. So I started off as some low level training, and then

evolved from there as I went to university and all those things.

I dropped out of high school, found out this

August of 2024 that I have ADHD, and and

that that's really been something that's affected my life and often affects the

life of entrepreneurs who are typically on a, you

know, a pursuit of the dopamine dragon. And

ultimately, I'd I'd come to

this loggerhead, you know, from 2013 to 15

that I wasn't accelerating and being

where I wanted to be in my life. I was doing things that I wanted

to do. I felt like I was on this path, but it was such a

struggle. It was such a grind. It was such,

a a frustrating part

of my life where I knew that I had more in me that I wasn't

putting out there. So I I went to the Wizard Academy. I had been reading

the Monday morning memo at Monday morning memo.com for the last 15

years thereabout. What I'd read in the rabbit

hole as you click through the pictures, you start to get these other little bits

of information from Roy. And he says, I'm thinking about stepping back and doing a

thing. I said, well, I gotta see this guy in action. He's been kind of

a, a figure in my life for for 15 years. I'd bought his

books, the the New York Times best selling trilogy, Wizard of Ads.

And they formed beliefs that I

resonated with. But I always thought it was almost aspirational, not real.

And there was elements that were pulled from it throughout my life, but

never locked in the big play. So I go to a class.

Magical worlds of the wizard aca of the wizard of ads, and it's it's

it's at the wizard academy, and and in Austin, Texas.

And and we we get transformed over 3 days where

you're you're just buzzing with information and and ideas,

and the laws of the universe, and the impact of

fine art, and third gravitating bodies, and all of these magical

ideas that have you thinking about business in a different way. And I'm

thinking as I'm sitting there as a as a well paid, highly

paid, sales and and, marketing

consultant that I was all I was traveling all around the world doing these things.

And and realized, wow, there is a this is the universe that I've

been aspiring to and then thinking about. So I keep on

taking classes and classes and classes. Roy starts to get to know me,

quite well, and and in 2017, I become a partner after many, many

conversations on the phone and and whatnot. That's the pass into The Wizard

of Oz. There is no resume processed. And?

Ultimately what it boiled down to was there had

to be a better way, and the better way was putting more effort into the

right things than to put all of your eggs into the transactional

bucket of cooks and cajoling people into a business

proposition rather than, inspiring

them. And as that hit me,

I came to realize that's been my whole life. Right? I've been in sales.

I've been in this transactional grind, this retail gulag, this

this this automotive space where I was good. Really,

really good. Operationally good. Sales good. I I knew

how to crush this. But only

on the transactional side. So I had to see this change.

I had to see this change about myself because I knew that there was

more that I was not I was gonna have to do something different than I

was doing right now. And it it all spurred from that

moment where I was feeling like I hadn't made it where I thought I could

make it. And I knew that there was more in me. So these were the

signals that I picked up. As I as I started getting deeper and deeper and

deeper, I realized that all this advertising stuff was all the same information that you'd

say in training stuff. And all this training stuff is really what we'd say in

culture stuff. And my goodness, all of this stuff was the same stuff that you'd

apply to your wife and kids in your house, or or at your church, or

or any of these other places where you're interacting

with, lo and behold, people. Right? That salespeople are

people, and bosses are people, and your wife is a person. Holy cow. Who

would have thought, but it all ends up being the same same

core group of things, and that put me on a path. In 2019,

I really started thinking about this from perspective

that Ray Sager, another one of our partners, had had come up with. I thought

it was one of the most brilliant things. It was really the linchpin of what

we had going down the rabbit hole of I could be a part of Wizard

Vast. And that's that your brand, your culture,

and the experience that you deliver are all intermingled

For all the the the 3 culminating

self referential parts that build a business

and grow a business. Well, I believe today

that your business is your culture. That your

culture is the culmination of communication in

your business that communicates with your employees how you

intend to do business and serve people. And they're picking up the

subconscious and subtle cues, the the things that you're not saying, but are

showing, straight through to the things that you that you do. And that

all reflects in the buying experience. And your employee and buying experience

are what make up the stories that we tell in the advertising of your brand.

And that we can really elevate those brands that do a

wonderful job at serving their people at both the employee and

customer level. Those have the the

the ingredients of a great brand, and those are the people that we

look for when we look to to, partner with a with a client

because we're in it for the long term. And and ultimately, this game

only works when you're playing the long term game. Otherwise, just keep doing

the transactional stuff, but more of it, and you you'll be just

fine. You'll be exhausted, but

you you'll get it done. Right? So I I think

the thing that's really good, I've come to terms with, it seems

to be exhausting is when you're

attempting to do things that

do not appear to fit with who you really are. That's

one of the reasons why I like that question we talked about at the beginning,

and it sounds like that's where you were in your role before

you discovered maybe this, air quotes here, different way of doing

business because and I'll say this, and I'll let

you respond to this. I actually think some of the tactics

will work in a lot of different situations. It's just

a matter of getting cohesive or congruent, whatever the right

word is, with who you really are, that brand, that culture, and

things like that. And I think culture spills out. I I work with leadership

teams, so I see this quite a bit. I go in, and I spend time

with companies' leadership teams. And I could

talk about us building a culture within a

company, but, truthfully, the culture becomes the

leaders and the leadership of the people that are there. I

could come up with all types of things, but really what I

wanna do is I wanna identify kind of that first question I asked. I wanna

identify who Ryan really is so that

I could then we could work that culture. We could we could make sure that

we're in alignment with what we're doing, and it kinda

we can kinda make all that match up. To me, I'll say

it this way, and then I'll pose it as a question. To me, it seems

like what most of us need to do as leaders, people that are running companies

or organizations, we need to identify who we are

so that we could then project that when we spread the nets of our advertising

and marketing and all out into the world.

Question mark. Right. Well, look. You know?

So a lot to unpack there. A a leader, a culture

is is what a leader will tolerate and what a leader

stands for, and those two things

are inextricably intertwined. You can't, disconnect

those those things. But your leader doesn't get to

control the culture. Right? At the end of the day, the leader gets

to, direct and and lead the culture and point people in

the right direction. Think of it this way. We have we have

4 people on the ocean of life. We have surfers. We

have navigators. We have drifters, and we have drowners. The

surfers are are taking the the waves of, of

opportunity as they come. When the waves, isn't as as

delightful as it could have been, they blame the wave. The the drifters are

just bobbing around hoping for somebody to show up and and

do it for them, while the drowners have a problem for every solution.

Now, I'm not talking about the occasional drowning that we've all done,

in our faith, medically, chemically, financially. I'm

talking about the professionals, the ones who are really good at at just

like, oh, you saved me. Oh, I'm dying again. Right? There's always

this ongoing pressure of of failure. Right?

Then there's the navigators, and navigators know one thing

that no one else knows. They know that the north star doesn't move in the

sky. And that north star, because it doesn't move, allows

them to pitch the sails

towards where they want to go. They can follow the winds and

waves of life. That are thrashing at

your hull, but they allow you to continue moving forward.

Let's face it. No. Nobody follows somebody who isn't going anywhere.

So until you have a north star, there is nowhere for

you to go. And that's why having principle

matters so much, because there's no way you can be a leader

without it. It's impossible. And you can't have

followers if you're not a leader, and you can't be a leader if you have

no north star, because you can't navigate. Right? You

have nothing to navigate with. All the other constellations and everything

else, all the distractions that are in our businesses and lives

are these wonderful things that tell us things about the sky and have

us understand things about the universe,

but they don't actually get you anywhere.

And the interesting thing, I mean, we're getting quite

existential here, which I love. We're we're about to we're about to head towards the

practical. It's where we're about to go. The interesting thing is that

self awareness is something that I'm just becoming more and more

aware of that just to to give a

double, nod to the word awareness there.

And I believe that everyone has principles and values.

I just think some people are more aware of what theirs are

versus other people. And

and in just a little while, I'm gonna ask you kind of a process of

what you do when you step into a business and how you begin identifying

that and see if it's a match and then how you start leading and guiding

towards how to do some marketing advertising and all that. But

I've got one I think it's just one. Let's go macro

question in the industry that you're in because I think you've got the expertise to

answer this. This episode, sometimes I don't like putting time stamps, but

this is gonna be releasing in early 2025. We're recording right at the

tail end of 24. And what I would love for you to do, I'd love

your insight on this. What I would love, Ryan, is

give some things that you're observing that are trends,

things that are moving in your industry and what we're

seeing. And I'm gonna go ahead and give you my second part of the question

so you could just go. And then I also want you to share

timeless principles that aren't going anywhere

because I have a there are many people, they wanna just ride trends

and ignore timeless principles. Some people wanna stay with tradition

and never look at trends. And so I think with this question, I

would love for you to hit a little bit of both. Is that okay? What

are some trends you're seeing here in 2025, and then what are some timeless

principles that we do not need to ignore? I think starting off with

with what we should recognize

aren't going to change. The psychology and biology,

particularly the biology and neuroscience of people, is not going to

change. Right now, we understand, that in a

foundational way, but there is a world of of understanding that

we do not have as human beings.

What we do know is that they're often directly

associated with the laws of nature. Right? So we can draw a deep

and real correlation to those laws of natures. Those truths that be

so profoundly true, they could not be not true. And I'm

I'm thinking about this scientifically in the sense of, we should

always be questioning science. That is the point of science. But

equally as much, we can we can, trust

that certain things are going to be a certain way.

For example, in business, customers are going to continue to

want, the best price for their money. Right? And it

their their money, the customer's money has to be worse less than

the value that you delivered. Right? Whatever that is. The the second thing

they want is choice. They want the autonomy of choice. Right?

The the the third thing that they're gonna want, is is convenience.

They're going to absolutely want to be convenience,

regardless of how that looks in your in your business. And there's there's a number

of very, very specific modeling ways to do that.

But those are things that are true that are not going to change.

There's there's communication elements that are not going to change. The

the 10 things that I talk about in in my book coming up in

frictionless is around motivation are not going to

change. There's way more nonsense that you can learn about motivation, but

these first ten things are the 10 things that are going to get you

80% of the way there. Right? And if we can

just get the basics right, we're going to have an awful lot

more success in growing from there after

we've got a good solid foundation. Right?

So those aren't gonna change. That's the psychology. Right? Which

is driven by the biology, like dopamine, like oxytocin,

the things that have us do the things that we do.

Now, the trends that are going to affect us are going to be

things like social media, which has already affected us and will

continue to affect us. The trends are

AI, and the,

ability to either allow AI to replace

our novel thoughts, right, because AI cannot

produce a novel thought, it can only produce a reductionary thought,

or we can use it to augment our iterative

and innovative thoughts as human beings.

Content is going to explode on the

Internet. Most of it is going to be absolute

garbage. Not because it's

generally bad content, but it's reductionary

content. It is content that does not propel us forward.

It only keeps us and satisfies our cognitive biases,

our our not confirms our existing

beliefs, because we can we can literally get

anything to confirm our existing beliefs. When

you start to realize that for every proverb,

there was an equal and opposite proverb, you start to

realize this is not new. The former

babes. Anything that you want to believe, you can believe, and now

you can believe it with the force of AI to

reinforce everything that you want. Right? The

reality is, you have to start thinking for yourself, and you will

have to start standing for something, which is going to come

with compromise. It's going to come with sacrifice. It's going to come

with some level of struggle, and that's where your real

worth lies as a human being. I'm I'm glad you brought up

AI because that's obviously a a hot topic.

And I agree with you that the quantity

of stuff I'm gonna send, the quantity of stuff,

post ads, things like that. I mean, I'm seeing on my feeds

now, You know, I turned my advertising over to AI,

and, you know, I'm just sitting here in Arizona doing

nothing and all of are are you excited about

AI? Concerned? Cautious? What

is your personal, take on what we're seeing

with this technology? I am absolutely

so excited. I am so excited for 2 very

weird reasons. I'm excited because it allows us

to spark a creative

constraint. Right? There's going to

be so many people that are going to use it, and

feel like they're done once they've got it done, that they don't

even have to get involved, that they're going to put out

such pedestrian content that it's going

to be so easy to stand out amongst that crowd.

So easy. They're going to be absolutely tragically

bad that we're going to win the game

by just being distinctive in a different

world. Right? The the second thing is is that

it does spark this this this idea. The content for

those people who take that foundation and then put their

spin, their truths, their values, and their principles,

their beliefs, their true consequence on

it are going to be so much more

potent than the people who are

phoning it in with AI. AI is not gonna take anyone's job,

but somebody using AI is absolutely going to take

your job. So so good.

I'm I'm glad to hear that. I mean, I'm very excited about it too. I

mean, I think it's a valuable tool

and emphasize the word tool because

that's what it's been for me and us. Even with some things that we're doing

with this podcast and things like that, it doesn't replace what we're doing right

here. It doesn't replace it's fascinating what

you said that conviction because I have noticed. I'm actually

preparing to do something kinda weird. It'll be right around our 300th

episode. I'm actually going to interview

chat GPT. I'm I'm gonna do a full on interview. One of the things

I've noticed is that it doesn't have any conviction.

I can sway it with my question to be

agreeable or disagreeable. If I ask it to disagree with me, I can do that

if I ask it to agree. So that conviction is so

important. So here's my question, Ryan. How

can we tell when people have convictions

or not? Because there's a lot of people that are just going with the flow

of whatever this technology, this tool is doing.

So and this is kinda starting to get into how do you know who to

work with. So how can we tell who has

convictions and who does not? We're

going to we're gonna know who has conviction and who doesn't by the

feedback loop that comes from it. And that's the

Google reviews, the Yelp reviews where the people specifically

say, they said they would do this, and they did

it. Right. They said that they were going to inflict this

self imposed pain on themselves, and they did. Right?

It's not about that nobody cares about a 5 star

review in 2025. Everyone cares about

a one star review, and how that company responded to

the the problem when a problem arose, because there's

no infallibility in humans, just like there's no

infallibility in chat g p t. Right?

There's there's flaw in existence. It's how

you handle that and how you respect that that person. How

do you keep it human, and how do you serve at the

highest level? And that's going to come back from

other people because you can't toot your own horn. You can just

you can just do the right things and then a little bit

more. So I believe you work quite a bit in

the home services industry. Tell

tell me and the listener, define that industry,

and then and then tell us kinda what you can learn in

that industry that is applicable to

someone that might be outside of it because I think that's gonna frame the remainder

of our conversation as we talk about some techniques and tactics and strategies.

So Yeah. Home services industry, tell us more about that.

Well and I'll I'll put a little qualifier out there in so much as I

love home services. That's typically where I hang my hat, but I I

serve the services industry that are typically higher

average ticket sales, longer purchase cycles. That's my sweet

spot from a from a a place where I want to work.

The Wizard of Ads now services basically higher ticket

items, longer purchase cycles in any industry, be it b to

b, b to c, direct to consumer, online, offline, all that jazz.

So we have solutions across the board. I love home services,

and I love it because of their fantastic attitudes, their

really, shelter mentalities that they

have, these these servant,

mindsets that that have a desire to do something more

complicated than, the the

basics. Right? It's when you're solving a little bit harder problem,

you very quickly get in the weeds of trying to overeducate

the client, which is a space that I struggled in in the retail world

of of how much do you need to sell here, and how much do

you just need to communicate? There's there's

different paths. So to that end, what does that look

like? The reason why home services is interesting is

because it's it's 2 things. 1, it's externally

triggered. Right? Something outside of the person has happened for

you them to have to call you. Right? Something broke.

Mhmm. The second thing is that it's a grudge purchase. No one's

doing it to fulfill their identity as a human being,

right, for not taking the people out back and saying, hey, come check out my

new air compressor. This thing is amazing. Look at my hot water tank. This

this thing is the, you know, the Bath Splasher 6,000. Everyone's

gotta have one of these things. It doesn't happen. Now I'm trying really hard to

make it happen, but, we I have an idea around a

Toto toilet, the G400. We're gonna rename it to the

Marriage Saver 6,000 for a variety of reasons that we can go on to

another episode. But at the end of the day,

what we're talking about here is finding a space where we

can tell an ugly duckling business story

in a way that has people go, they're my boys. I want those

people in my house. Boys, girls, I'm being, gender neutral

here. What matters is is that they're identified as

their guy in the business. And that's not easy to

do because one, something has to break, 2, no one wants to think about their,

home service stuff, plumbing electric, or

HVAC, or or doors. They don't wanna think about that stuff. They want them to

just exist invisibly, and do the things.

And not only to have a positive

anchor associated to a negative

trigger, but then to be the first people that they call

and trust to do the work when they show up because we have already

established a relationship before the customer showed up at Google.

Mhmm. You heard it here, foe at first, folks, that

Ryan could be disrupting the toilet industry in the not too dis toilets industry. So

we'll be looking forward to that. That'll be exciting. That's probably an industry that

needs addressing, but one of the things I love about home services is that

it is very clear that they solve a problem.

Mhmm. And one of the things I even struggle with with what I

do I mean, I work with leaders and leadership teams. I help

them with strategy. I work with them to, be more

proactive instead of reactive, etcetera, etcetera. But you know what?

I can't help the temperature go from 85 degrees in the

house down to 68 in the middle of summer in

Arizona or or whatever. How important is

it in your industry for a problem to

be solved? Well, this is why I

focus predominantly in the essential services

space. There's more plumbers that have saved lives than

doctors. HVAC, heating,

ventilation, and air conditioning, is no longer a

luxury service. It is absolutely a life

saving service when you're sitting in Arizona in a 109

degrees heat. That's a dry heat, but it's a heat nonetheless.

Right? And then you have electricians. Now if

you don't have electricity to your HVAC system, it's the life support system of your

life support system. Right? There there's electronics

on heat heat pumps nowadays and and water, tanks

and all of these things that service us at the highest level.

Our communication devices need electricity. These are the essential

services of the, of the, certainly of the planet.

Ultimately, what it boils down to is it is absolutely crucial

that these that these companies thrive. I have

strong feelings about how this industry is right now, and industry is right

now, and and I'm concerned about it in a in a lot of ways. But

I'm also serving it where I can at the highest

levels and intend to serve it at the highest levels as well.

My job is to get that particular company that I've chosen to

align myself with or that I have brought in for other

partners to align themselves with as a wizard of ads,

partner, and serve at the highest level so that

they get noticed and stand out above the crowd so that they can run a

profitable, healthy company. When you said

that customers are are looking for, you know, how do I sell this stuff?

Well, they're not just looking for you to solve a problem. They're looking for you

to solve the problem first, empathetically,

second, competently, and third, conveniently.

Those are the 3 building blocks of any service industry,

but fundamentally of the essential services industries. Let's

go ahead and dive in a little bit. Let's just say that

Super Cool Joe's HVAC gives you a call,

and they and they want you to step in. What are some of the

first things that you wanna know about, super cool Joe, which I

just came up with that name, so that might be a clue for you. But,

you got super cool Joe HVAC that's somewhere in

Arizona, which is where I'm parked right now here for the winter, and he

gives you a call. You know, we've talked about principle. We've talked about how

important conviction is, things like that. What are you

wanting to know when you first start interacting

with Joe? Yeah. I I wanna know Joe, you know,

or the the epitome of Joe, you know, who is representing the the,

alter ego of Joe. I I wanna know first what their vision is.

Where are they going with this company? Is this a 3 year play, a 10

year play? Is this a pass to my kids play? Is this what is that

situation? Because that's going to inform how we deliver the creative. The

the second thing I wanna know is is where their purpose

and mission is in life. And I'm not talking about the

pedestrian, knowledge that so many people have have brought

forth about, you know, purpose and and missions these days. I

have a very specific terminology based off of a

lot of research that I believe to be true based off of historical information

and data that we we share. Ultimately, that is

going to tell me what their beliefs are, what their what they believe to

be true, and they're both, you know,

profoundly true things, good and bad, both

dualistic. Right. But what are their values? What are the thing that they're willing to

do? What hills will they die on? What things will they do to

punish themselves? And then what can we do to symbolize

that into what the customer cares about most

in air conditioning in in Phoenix? Mhmm. Right?

When we get the symbolic concept of that right,

then we can put that to market in a much bunch of different ways. Now,

some some ideas are cute and clever. Other ideas

are campaignable. They can last 5, 10, 15 years.

And we're looking for campaignable ideas. We need something with legs.

Otherwise, it just becomes cute and clever, which ultimately turns

into unmemorable. Right? It it it can't hold

their interest. Getting anyone's attention is easy. Keeping it

is really hard. Right. And then embedding it

is the secret sauce. Right. One of the things that I run

across with a lot of business owners is

they're way in deep with tactics, and they're very

short on strategy. That's one of the things I attempt to work with them

on. How did tactics versus strategy relate

to when you step in the door? I think you just addressed some

of that, but let's say someone picks up the phone. Let's say, super

cool Joe calls you and says, listen. I really want

you to come in and run a bunch of Facebook ads for me so we

could get some more revenue coming in. How do you respond

to super cool Joe when he says a

tactical something tactical versus

what you know needs to be more of a campaignable or

strategic is the way I would word it approach?

With with compassion and empathy, Jim, you know, at

the end of the day, they all come to us like that. Without saying, Joe,

you're wrong. Right. Well, and it's because they are

wrong, and it's factually wrong, not opinion wrong.

And that matters, and it's not because I don't

care. It's because I do. Right? Ultimately, when you have a

situation where a person's coming in based on a channel, that is

super normal because people are equating the outcomes

to have results when what they didn't catch was the whole

set up for the magic trick. Right. What did we have to do

to get that elephant to appear on stage and astonish everyone?

Well, David Copperfield has an answer for that. I wish I knew the answer.

I'm sure somebody has ruined that, magic trick for somebody, and I'm not gonna go

looking for it because I wanna be astonished next time.

What it boils down to is we're trying to figure

out the magic trick, and that requires

infinitely more setup strategy, right, than

the ta da moment of the Facebook ads showing up. Great.

Running Facebook ads may be the right solution for

super, cool Joe's HVAC company. But it

also may be a hyper inefficient path

forward that's just going to spend money for the sake of spending money and not

getting any short or long term result. So

to serve Joe at the highest level, I would say, tell me a bit about

what you wanna do. Where do you wanna go with this thing? How long are

you keeping it? What is the game that we're playing?

And what are the rules to that game so that we can play within the

rules and then figure out all the ways that we can step outside to win.

Right. Ethically, morally, legally. You know?

But equally as much in a

distinct way, we're not going to win this game. Can you market your

company and grow your business and make money, doing things that we

don't do? Yep. Will you grow and hit a ceiling

doing it? Yep. That's just pure math. Right? There's only so

many human beings in the population. Only so many of them are going to buy,

and you can either grind them into the into paste to to to buy your

stuff, or you can or you can get more of a

pie. You can also get a bigger pie by going into another market.

But you're still getting your piece of the pie. We're we're

basically taking an extra share of the same pie

because more people want our piece than the other piece, which

gives us the larger piece. Mhmm. That takes time because

people have to have something break in our world. Right?

They have to have had their guy that they already have, the devil they

know, let them down. Right? And then they have to be

willing to know, like, and trust us over the swath of other

2,000 operators in Phoenix, Arizona right

now that would be happy to do it. Half of them that would

be happy to do it for less than any price that you're willing to quote

ever. So we have all of these slogger heads that

we have to figure out to do something that is going to be

valuable to people. This doesn't change whether you're running a church,

or a or an HVAC company, or a restaurant. All

of these things hold true because those principles

don't change. And that's why Facebook

matters at the very end of this conversation. The very first thing

that matters is, what are we trying to achieve?

How are we going to achieve it is the last thing. But why are we

trying to achieve it? And what are we going to do? Right?

Just like Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. It's it's this

why. People buy the why. Mhmm. Let's find the why,

and let's represent symbolically the why in the

in the message that we put out there. And let's leverage things like

entertainment until such time as they need your thing. Right? Because when they

hear your ad, they're not going buy it. Right? If you if you have a

Lululemon ad, sure. They could go, oh, I need to have my ass

look fabulous. Let's put it on. I wanna add and

inspire people to have fabulous keisters, and and and here we

are. We're not doing that. We're we're selling air conditioners.

The air conditioner is like, it's not broke. I'm not fixing something that's not broke.

I want my thing to be invisible, and that's not

that's not going to be a win in this strategy. So, knowing the industry,

understanding the landscape, and then taking the path of least resistance

until such time as they're ready to buy, and then showing up in their

heart for them to make the decision to click on us,

pick up that phone, book that appointment with us over somebody

else. Yeah. One of the things interesting

that I I think I heard it on your advertising in America podcast

episode. I listened to one where y'all were talking about

what has become a little bit more of an old

school advertising, which is radio and TV. And

it was odd when you were just talking. I was thinking about how, you know,

our real estate companies years ago, we used to do door knocking, you know, and

hanging flyers on people's doors and, you know, just put them in their

mailbox, which you're not supposed to do, by the way. And I and it got

me thinking about analog versus digital or or really what it got me

thinking about, Ryan, was all the choices

that Joe has. Right. And which also

means all the choices that you have as someone

who's advising Joe on the best route to take.

And and I I think one of the things I I tell

my wife this all the time. This is probably showing my age. I'm 61 years

old now, and it's like, you know what? I'd like to have 3 choices.

I don't want a 103, but we've got a lot of

choices right now for spreading the nets or getting the word out

about Joe's business. Correct? And just

whatever you wanna respond to with that. I mean, do we have too many choices?

Maybe we have more options. I mean, I guess that's good, but it

also confuses Joe. It it does confuse Joe

because everyone who's selling a channel

is pretending to be a marketer when what they actually are

is a salesperson selling a channel. And it's

it's it's it's excruciating because there is literally

millions of those people to me, and

to my other 80 partners that are that are my equals and peers in this

in this adventure that we're on. And there is certainly other

organizations that stand for the same things that we stand for because

they seem to be these lost fables

of of of marketing, when in fact, they're the first

principles of communication. Right? They are the biology

and psychology, the neuroscience of

communication that we're working from. So

we monitor radio every day of every year.

And at the end of the day, what

we're trying to do we're we're media agnostic for for for starters.

We we love radio because it's efficient, but radio is not

always the solution. Right? We love TV, because

it's it's, provocative, and we can leverage multiple

stimulants of the human brain, at one time.

But it's not always the answer. There's a production cost to that that that

pulls it, the cost. And certainly to a $3,000,000 operation,

we're not selling to Apple here. Apple's not our client.

Ultimately, what it boils down to is

picking the channels like radio, like television, there really is

only a few options. There's written word,

right, where you can read a thing. There is visuals.

Right? Those could be video or static image, or there

could be spoken word. Right? The spoken

word has the most powerful impact from a

retention and recall standpoint. It has a 5 times

longer durability in the brain than a visual

stimulant. A visual and a written, or a spoken together

are going to give you a 6 times, and a written, spoken, and and,

audio combination is going to give you a 7 times combination.

So that's why TV ads can be powerful, because

you now have written words on screen while you're also doing

another thing that you can you can embed, embed, embed.

The trick here is frequency, how

repetitious you show up in the customer's

purview. The impression count matters. And I'm not talking about

the doom scroll impression that you don't actually even get

seen on. I'm talking about the impression from the billboard,

from the truck driving by, from the, from the, radio

ad that you heard, from the television ad that you saw twice that

week. When we get the math right to the neuroscience

that has already been researched for 30 years on how

much it takes to get retention and recall to move from the initial

part of the brain that holds things for about 7 seconds like a ram of

a computer to about 7 days, which is erased

with sleep, like defragging an old PC to clean up that brain a

little bit, Back to the chemical part of the brain

where people sit there and remember your thing 30 years

later. These are the songs that you know 2,000

sets of lyrics to to 2,000 songs that you never wanted to

know the lyrics to. Right? They get in there,

and they stay there. Whether you like it or not, I bet you you know

of cab company's, jingle from 1985

that you can't get rid of, but that cab company is probably not even in

existence anymore. Right? These are the things that we have to

consider when we're actually building

the thing that we're building. That's what's going to inform which channel we

put it on because the channel will dictate what the frequency that they'll see it

at is. It'll dictate how impactful it

needs to be to do the thing. And what duty are we trying to serve?

Are we trying to build a bond with our customer, or are we

trying to activate a sale? We need to do both,

and we need to do both in protection of the brand's reputation.

And when we do that, holistically as a single

solution, we build a business that goes from

name recognition to a household name. Now the difference is

people knowing your name is great. But when they know your

name and care about it, you have a household

name. Is the is the chemistry think of it like

think of it like bricks and mortar. Every impression is a

brick. The emotion is the mortar.

If you want to build a big house, you're going to need mortar.

You know, you you would absolutely have bricks. Right? But

what's more impressive, the pile of bricks sitting on an empty lot or a

McMansion that everyone goes by and looks at, right, and

and and wants to go into.

Right? And when they actually step into that house, the inside of the house

has to be just as nice as the outside of the house because if it's

disappointing on the inside, guess what? They're not coming back.

Doesn't matter how pretty it is on the outside. You have to deliver

on the thing, and even better when you put something that's in that house that

kinda surprises and delights them a little bit and goes, oh, I want a little

bit more of that eyes. Have you seen the thing? That's

delight. Now delight is is a driver of oxytocin, not

dopamine. Dopamine's never going to win this game for you. When you

get people feeling the oxytocin of your brand because they've

been inside of it, now you've got repeat business,

5 star reviews, unsolicited referrals.

You've gotta go see this house. You've gotta go inside and check it out. You've

gotta see what they've got. You're gonna love it. Right?

These are the foundational things that don't

change. The channels are gonna change. AI is gonna mess with

channels, and and YouTubes, and and Chat GbTs,

and search on Chat GbT. All this all this could change.

And that's okay. There's really smart people that we talk to that help change the

change. Right? To get it on and and give you the present. But

there's all this stuff that's not. Door hangers, love them. Right?

Truck grabs, amazing. A a plane that's got

a thing towed behind it, we've done that before. We'll do it again. A guy

in a gorilla suit holding a sign, absolutely in the

right strategy as a whole. So one

of the challenges that most business owners have

is they're fighting for attention. Not their attention,

for getting the attention. There's so much noise, and you said it earlier. AI is

going to add more noise out there. I

may have heard you talk about or may have seen it, but let's let's just

say Joe goes down the gimmick route to cut through the

attention, and he says, I want a

busty woman that's sort of sweating and looking

wet with a low cut shirt on a billboard and

says, hot wife. You know? I've seen that all over. We travel a good bit.

Those are all over, by the way. Mhmm. And

maybe they work. Maybe someone's selling it. Where do gimmicks

fit into this? Because they really kinda bother me,

but is when does something become a gimmick versus

strategy? And then I wanna ask about frictionless before we finish up

here. Right. Well, at the end of the day, you know, there's a

couple questions you gotta ask. Could I take, a a picture of a

beautiful woman and and say, hot wife, keep her cool at

Joe? Could we take Joe's could we take Joe's logo off

of that, put somebody else's on it? So how how

did how did it work? Right? Did Joe get any more business from it, or

did Joe just startle someone? Now the very first time that that was

put out there, it probably got a few phone calls,

and it possibly got a whole bunch of phone calls, and some of

them may have had to do with service and a bunch about,

maybe checking the moral standings of the people making those

decisions. It's hard to say. We don't know.

But what I do know is that gimmicks work until they don't.

Right? Anything that works fast is

certain to not work long. Things that take

longer to work tend to last longer.

This is the difference between a 1 night stand and a marriage. What do

you want from your customer? Well, you know,

that's the question you've gotta ask yourself. And then that's why

we tend to focus on higher ticket, longer average ticket, longer average sale

products, that have a bit of complexity to them because

there is a large buy cycle and a large,

lifetime value of customer there that can justify the endurance

needed to grow this business, and the spend that goes

along with it too in gross stages. So

gimmicks, you know, if we were to pull back from the word gimmick and

just say sales activation as a whole, if sales

activation is all you do, there is a a profoundly important

graph that, exists in the marketing world from Binet and Fields that shows

the sawtooth that hits the natural demand ceiling of any

marketplace, and it's consistent. It'll stay flat

all the way along, and it'll work and then stop, work and stop. And you

just have to keep working. This is the transactional world we're in.

That's the hard part. If we do that in conjunction with

branding, the branding is going to be a set of stairs that eventually

oversteps and supersedes and goes beyond

the sales activation. The sales activation feed the beast.

The branding compounds. This is some cost.

You're not going to get anything more than what you get. The

branding is going to go past that and give you your disproportionate

share of market. It's gonna take 3 to 5 years to do

that. Anybody who tells you that it's gonna happen in 6 months, you're

going to notice it in 6 months of a branding campaign. In the first

6 months, it's going to be torture, and you're gonna spend a bunch of money

and not get anything for it. But though that and that's

why people don't brand very often is because there is this duration that they

have to go through, but the real meat here happens in years 3, 4, and

5. It pays for itself in year 2 and and forward as

a rule depending on, of course, some uncontrollables that nobody

can can can can manage to to effect.

Ultimately, what we're talking about here is what do you want

out of the business? Now, if Joe has a business that he's gonna sell in

3 years, don't bother wasting your money on a brand.

Just dump all of your money as aggressively as you can

into Thales activation, gimmick driven, paying as much as you

can for a paid lead, all of this stuff that you like,

because let me qualify that. You're gonna pay as much as you can. You're

gonna pay as much as you can because these are bidding systems, and people

pay top dollar for that lead and position. Right? If

you hope to get the click, you have to pay the most. Right? Our

strategy is a combination of doing that where you have to,

reducing that as we go, and spending more

or as much up until we hit a diminishing returns threshold

on your brand, and then stop spending. The 2 in conjunction

take a business at $9,000,000 at 12% marketing budget

down to 4% marketing budget at $50,000,000

spending all the money they can spend. Now, 4% of $50,000,000 is

still a whole bunch of money, but it's only 4% of your total advertising

cost, right, of your total revenue. The word frictionless,

I keep seeing that in your stuff. So you've got a

project that is talking about friction within business

and becoming a frictionless business. Tell me a little bit

more about that, and what are you working on there?

Hewlett Packard the David Packard of Hewlett Packard said,

there's nothing more dangerous than leaving marketing to the marketing

department. And and I'm a big believer in that, so much so

that I I started investigating what will help our customers,

our clients grow, disproportionately faster

and more profitably. So I started studying the elements that come along

with that, and there's 12 major things that are all oriented towards

how you're communicating things in your business consciously and subconsciously

to your employees and customers that that determine

whether or not you've got a healthy culture, a thriving culture, or a

survival culture, or a toxic culture,

and a fixed culture versus a growth culture, a creative culture

versus a, pedestrian culture. All of the things

that we look at from a thriving and surviving standpoint,

and this the relational and

transactional as well all fit into these worlds. Well, all

of this stuff, when we start to analyze, it goes, hey, if we just make

adjustments along the way in all of these 12 different components

affecting your business, marketing sales, curation of product and

pricing, how you help people empower people in your

in your, business, how you help them master their craft, all of

the things that we're talking around motivation of not only the customer, but the

employee, and frankly, yourself. All of these things are the

things that are affecting mindset,

efficiency, productivity, growth, and profitability.

What if we just talked about those things, and started

giving our clients a pathway forward

to getting out of their own way, and growing

past the length of their shadow so they can be tall enough to ride the

next ride? And and that's where growth comes from. So many

companies get into this $3,000,000, $5,000,000 ceiling, this

$10,000,000 ceiling, and that's it for them. They can't grow because

they haven't realized the the more subliminal,

less obvious things that are actually slowing their growth,

not propelling it forward. And that's been my path for the

last 7 years is if we're going to market well, and if marketing,

and branding is the culture, and the culture is going to drive

the buying experience, well, what if we helped our clients improve their

culture and buying experience so that our branding got better?

Now, we're the secret sauce that everyone needs to be

able to propel themselves forward whether we are able to directly service

their account or not. We can be a beacon of virtue and

value in the industries that we serve. But it just

it doesn't stop there. Because all those same things that I learned

about advertising that were true to sales and sales training are

equally as true to our family relationships and our and our

community relationships. And that kind of

information just needs to be in the universe in a

way. So, I'm trying to distill it down into something where people can

just get the basics right. Go back to the ABCs.

And, and build the foundation from something solid and stable

no matter where you are in your business or or personal journey. So

you're you're obviously putting it in book form. When will the book I

don't know. Do do you have any definitive dates, or are you still

still in the creation process? We're we're on chapter

9. We know that there's about 14 chapters. We've already mapped

everything out, and and the path is is consistently moving

forward. We anticipate the end of q one, is is when we're gonna do

it. As to when we officially launch, the book

is is still in question, of course, because publicists and and,

all those things have have opinions about best times to do

things. So Alright. You we've talked about a lot of cool things.

If someone wants to connect with you,

either be on a wait list or whatever for the book or reach out

to, you know, the wizard or, you know, whatever, Tell

people where they could find you, and then I've got one more question, and we'll

wrap up. You got it. Four places to find me, wizardofads.com,

of course, for the the the main site for Wizard of Ads. The wizard of

ads dot services website is, specifically to

my clients and and how I am handling things within the Wizard of

Ad agency. My personal page is ryan schuett.com.

And finally, on all of my social medias, you can find me

pretty much anywhere at, wizard Ryan Schuett.

Ryan, we're seek, go create. Those three words, seek, go

create. I'm going to allow you to choose one of those words or

force you if that's the way you wanna look at it. Choose 1. You know,

it just means more to you. It's like, oh, I like that word better

than the other 2. Seek, go, or create, and why?

Golly. Well, I can say that I am a

seeker by nature. I I'm an asker by by

nature. I am

highly adaptable. I believe in Darwin's philosophy around it's

not the strongest or smartest that survive, but those most able to

adapt. So I am I am looking for that

innovation and iteration all the time, but I

really have no problem in just, implementation. Right?

I I like to build the plane while I'm I'm, flying

it. And and by

nature, it it is a creative process. It is it is absolutely

not about, accept the

norm. Right? That that idea of authentic

creation. So do I have a

good answer for you? It's like, yes. The answer is yes. All 3.

What's 3 absolutely astoundingly fantastic words,

to tickle the fancy. Well, very good. You know, the thing that I love about

it is that, you know, it's not as if we just talked about the tactic.

Obviously, you're such a great deep thinker. I mean, some of these

responses have been, like, just had such depth to them,

and I appreciate that. I highly recommend if you've been listening in,

go connect with Ryan. Obviously, his personal side, I'm

guessing, is where his book's going to be mentioned as it's

getting close here. Again, this is probably being listened to in

early 2025. Sounds like it's a few months out, but

check that out. He is a wizard of ads. Go check him out

there, and I appreciate I appreciate the

deep and thoughtful answers to what could have

been trivial and tactical type

responses. So go check out Ryan. I appreciate you listening in here at SECO

Create. New episodes on YouTube and all the platforms

every Monday. Keep, making those comments and

sharing and doing all the things you do. Keep actually

man, we keep having people giving us tips over at cco

create.comforward/support. I appreciate all of a sudden

getting a message that someone gave us $50 just because

they love what we're doing. So thank you for those people that keep doing

that. That is awesome. Until next time. Just thanks for

listening in. Until next time, continue being all that you were

created to be.