1:40 - Intro chat
4:25 - How Jace got into entrepreneurship
7:20 - How to be happy/content with what you have
16:20 - Moving onto the next project after building a successful business
18:08 - How Jace’s agency started to grow
19:05 - Stop confusing your audience
25:30 - Getting solid marketing data from Facebook
46:41 - The flaw with the agency model

Marketing By Red
https://reddmg.com/
Email: Jace@marketingbyred.com

Ydraw
https://ydraw.com/

Peter (00:00):
You're listening to the PK experience podcast where I tap into the minds of today's impact players extracting their wisdom and sharing it with you to inspire you to make a greater impact in the world. My name is Peter King. I'm the host of the show and my guest today is Jason Vernon. Jason is the founder and owner of red digital marketing group, which is a 100% done for you marketing agency. They do a done for you campaigns to help grow your business. They provide things like workshops, training courses, marketing audits, again, all to help you, the entrepreneur grow your business. One of the things that I loved about this conversation was Jason's ability to create very, very clear simple plans. It's uh, something that a lot of business owners needs, need. And when you talk to other marketing agencies, it's just very convoluted often. And Jason's team has developed a very clear strategy that that again, I, the simplicity of the approach, but the depth and expertise of his team is invaluable for business owners that are looking to make a greater impact online. So it's a real pleasure to have him on the program. Here I am with Jace Vernon

Peter (01:09):
right here with Jace Vernon. How are you doing, Jace?

Peter (01:12):
Hey, what's up?

Peter (01:14):
I a I, there's a lot that I want to talk to you about today, uh, in the realm of business and marketing and investing and, uh, and to some extent, I think lifestyle design to you, uh, are living a dream in a lot of ways. I think from the outside looking in anyway, I know it's never that perfect, uh, uh, on the ground level. But, um, you have a, I think first and foremost, we got to get this out of the way. Six, six beautiful kids. Is it?

Jace (01:43):
Yeah. Six kids. Two boys and four girls. 13 age is, I can never get it. I leave that up to the mom, but I got 13, 12, eight, seven. Mmm. Eight, seven and three and two.

Peter (02:00):
Oh man, that's great. I, I was one of five and you know how it is. I know how it is. It's, it's like the best of times in the worst of times it's, there's always something going on. It's always crazy and hectic, but that there's some, it was fun. Like, you know, something was going on all the time. Um, how do you, how do you manage that? I mean obviously you have a wife to help. Um,

Jace (02:22):
yeah, yeah. My wife, I mean she stayed at home. That's the thing. It works really good as far as business because she has no idea what I do. In reality, you're like, Hey, what does your husband do? I dunno cause she's taking care of the kids. She's taking care of the house. That's her focus. So it works really well. That's what she loves to do. Like I always ask her, Hey, do you want to go do something or, and she's like, no way. Right. This is what I wanted to be. And so she's a great mom.

Peter (02:51):
Oh that's cool. I, you know, it's, it's, I've always been interested in talking to entrepreneurs who seem to have a well balanced, uh, home life as well. Cause that's not easy. And you know, the entrepreneurial mindset can be very stressful, uh, in and of itself, let alone with other children and other mouths to feed. How have you managed that? How, how have you guys as a team, uh, work together on that?

Jace (03:17):
Um, I mean, we're not perfect, but just the best thing about owning my own business and all that. I work a lot of hours, but I get it determine which hours I work and so, and I've made good money that that is always helped when you're have a big family, it helps when the cost of a family, like when I go on a trip, what costs most families 6,000 cost me 15,000. That's just the way it is when you get into that. But we balance, I mean, we do the best we can now is my wife always happy with me as an entrepreneur? No. It would be funny to have a podcast with entrepreneur's wife and just have them talk about the dumb things we do and what we get caught up at. You know, we balance it fine and, and she works great with it.

Peter (04:06):
Yeah. Well, um, tell me and the listeners a little bit of your background, how you got into business in the first place. Did you, was that always a thing? Did you know from a young age that you wanted to get into it or,

Jace (04:19):
Oh yeah, definitely. So I started back in high school. Um, I started working, I grew up in a farm community and we start working fourth grade. And so I started my first job that, about that age. And then during high school, during college, um, I worked construction, my uncle has gravel pits, does roads, and so I would drive truck from, I'd watched the sun come up, I'd watch it go down and I would still be sitting in that truck driving. And they were the big rock trucks. And it was kind of, at that time I made a lot of money, but I was like, I can't work for people. Um, I was always looking for ways to not have to dry. Like in my mind I'm like, how can I do this better? How can I not be the person in this truck? And then when I got, I served an LDS mission, so at age 19, I left for two years, went down to El Salvador and then came back. And that's when I started my first company. I was like, okay, I'm going to do window washing. It's my own thing. So I started that company and ever since then I've, I've been unemployable.

Peter (05:25):
Um, I love that term. Unemployable in a, in a healthy way. Yeah. Uh, if you don't mind me asking I, and not to make this a religious thing, but I, I, I've always been curious to, to know what kind of impact, like just as a general rule, I think it's such a healthy education to get the perspective of travel and to see things from another, uh, just, you know, see other parts of the world or whatever. So just in and of itself, I think that's great. But, but in the context of doing a, a mission, like how, what kind of impact did that have on your life?

Jace (05:57):
Oh yeah. I mean it changed my whole perspective. I still look back at those years. So whenever you serve an LDS mission, I mean, you go live there and back then you didn't have email, you didn't have all that stuff. So you kind of got cut off and you live with them. So my first house down there, it was a 10 by 10 cinderblock home. Um, and that's it. You're sleeping on a mattress on the ground and then all day long you're knocking doors. But uh, the thing I took away from it, one was if you're poor, like people down there are still happy, they have nothing but they're happy and way happy. I mean way happier than Americans are. And so that was one of the things that I learned was, Hey, our priorities are a little messed up here. But when I got back, I realized there's happy people out there and you can be poor. But at the same time you realize, okay, there's, there's poverty and we have it pretty good and we ought to take advantage of what we do have and be happy, be happy with what we got.

Peter (07:04):
W what do you think it is that Americans miss? Oh, how are we not happy with all this abundance?

Jace (07:09):
It's consumerism. Consumerism. Things don't make people happy. They never have, even though like me, myself, I, I buy a lot of stuff. Um, does it ever make you happy? No. One, if you're always wanting, thinking you need this new car, this new car, it's exhausting. And especially with social media, with everything out there, it gets exhausting always wanting things. And when you're poor you can't, you're, you have to be content with what you have.

Peter (07:38):
Yeah. That's interesting. Almost. Um, limits the distractions. Uh, yeah. And just culturally, I, I had a friend that went over, excuse me to Europe a few months ago and he came back and he's like, man, I just was so, and he had never been over there. Uh, and he's like, it just hit me so hard. How go go, go. The American mentality is, and he's like, you know, their economy over there is not doing great. Um, but you wouldn't know it. Looking around. People are happy, people are spending time with their family, they're enjoying a nice meal, but you come here and everybody's running around trying to get to this place to the next. And it's like there's a culture to it as well that we seem to miss out on.

Jace (08:18):
Well, and I always look at, I teach college, um, I teach a course in college and I look at what the younger generation is doing and they are adopting more of a free, like, I don't want to work 80 hours a week. I don't want the big home. Now they deep down they do. Um, but they're not willing to do what it takes to get there. So there's going to be a big shift. And us older people are like, Oh, these lazy kids, they're not pushing hard enough. They're not. And it's just like, it's a culture shift from, they're looking at us going, these guys aren't that happy. Maybe I need to take a different direction. Um, but I think there's a happy medium there. Um, and we'll figure it out. But yeah. What do you teach? Um, it's business. Yeah.

Peter (09:04):
So, uh, you went on a mission, came back, um, had a new perspective and then figured out you were unemployable, what, pick us up.

Jace (09:14):
So, so I, well mainly started with washing windows. I was like, well, I'd go knock doors during right after college. Um, so I didn't class as like a two or three. I drive out to rich neighborhoods, knocked the doors, get my day appointments, set up for the next day, and then I'd go out the next day and wash windows. While doing that, I was realized I was making about 50 bucks an hour and no one was going to pay a college student 50 bucks. And what I loved about it was the harder I work, the more I made. So I just realized right then, Hey, that's me business doing my own thing is me. [inaudible]

Peter (09:55):
um, and then w what, how old were you when you started your official first business?

Jace (09:58):
So then I graduated college. Um, I was 20, just got married, I was 24, just turned 24. And I started a lending company, and this was back before in 2004 and there was, we were making a killing. So I started that lending company and I would knock doors, make phone calls, and I had no idea how to do lending. It's just you figure it out. Um, so I, I moved down to a place called st George and I had my best friend there and I was like, Hey, what are you doing? And he's like, I don't know. And he looked at me and he's like, what are you going to do? And I'm like, I dunno. And I'm like, what do you know how to do? And he's like, well, lending. I worked at this lending company and we made a lot. And I was like, I like money.

Jace (10:40):
So we just started it. Um, and it took me four months I to learn the business and to get clients, um, and to get licensed. It took me four months, but I worked my butt off for four months. And finally on that fifth month, I made 18 grand that month. And I was like, okay, I scaled that business. And then I think I went to a net worth of probably about six to 7 million. I was pretty young and the money was rolling in and then all of a sudden 2008 hit and bam, I went to a negative 3 million. It was almost like overnight I had to give up the houses. I turned, I mean it was a disaster, but I've never, I, it worked, but it was crazy.

Peter (11:26):
Well, so did you have, did you, did you lose the company? What happened?

Jace (11:29):
Yeah, yeah. So I shut everything. So it was good. Um, I wanted to restart anyway. Um, I had like real estate on Las Vegas strip. I mean, it was just crazy. So I just stopped. And plus at that time I had, um, banks were after me, uh, because they were all collapsing and they were trying to find money. It was a mess. And so I just kind of went into a waiting period to say, Hey, let me reset for the next year.

Peter (11:59):
Yeah, let the dust settle. [inaudible] um, I was in real estate at the time as well, and it was virtually overnight. I mean, it was, I mean, it just yet the bubble burst. Um, so much fraud going on. Uh, one of the, one of the few people that made it through, um, was a friend of mine who recently passed, but he started a lending business. He was one of the top lenders in the state here. And, uh, his whole thing was always lending a level, uh, ALA, what is it, a level loan.

Jace (12:33):
Yeah. You could look eight a plus credit, a paper AAA rated.

Peter (12:37):
Yeah. And didn't get seduced by, you know, the opportunity to try to go after all this other, and so he was able to survive, which I thought was really interesting. Sticking to those. Uh, he was, uh, I mean he passed recently. He was in his mid to late forties, so he would've been, you know, thirties

Jace (12:57):
a lot wiser than I was. Like, I had no idea. Like I didn't know what a recession happened. I didn't know. I didn't know winter comes after summer, but,

Peter (13:09):
right. Um, so after that business went away, what did you do next?

Jace (13:12):
So I just took year and just let everything go, cleaned out everything. Um, basically claimed poverty. Um, while these lawyers were coming after me and just said, Oh, you're, you're not getting anything. And I mean, it was crazy the amount that they settled for a lot of them. Like I had one, I had one bank that got, I got taken over by the FTC, their lawyers came and just said, we're tired of this file. What will you settle for? And it was like a $3 million loan that settled for 8,000. Um, so I took me a while, I cleaned all that stuff out. And then one day I was watching a YouTube video and a whiteboard animation video came up and it was created by some company in the UK and whiteboard animation is that, you can go Google it, but it's where people are telling a story and drawing on a whiteboard ups commercial was a famous one.

Jace (14:08):
And so I saw that and I started, I was like, okay, this is cool. Well, I wanted one for to tell kind of my story and I couldn't find anyone in the U S that did them. And I've got ahold of the people over in the UK and they said, Hey, this is $100,000 to do these. And I was like, that's crazy. Um, and I called my best friend, he was doing some men at the time, but he had really good art skills. He always wanted to be a Disney animator. And I just said, Hey, come down here. Let's figure out how to create one of these videos. And I mean, we bought cameras, trip back and forth trips to best buy. And it was pretty funny how it started, but it took about two weeks to get our first video and it hit. And that day our phone started to ring. Yeah. People were searching for these and just confined it. So I mean, we are profitable from day one. I think our first video we sold for 7,000, well we were into the company $1,000 in equipment by then and boom, it, it took off. And so that went, I mean, we'd probably did 1 million bucks that first year. And when there was only three people

Peter (15:16):
did you, did you have an instinct that there was, I mean, obviously you were searching for it before the solution and couldn't find it, but

Jace (15:23):
it was, it was right timing. I knew it was going to be good. It was perfect timing because videos was just coming out. Um, explainer videos were kind of, uh, just starting you to all of that. So it was perfect timing. Did you do it again now? No, you can't, but the timing was perfect.

Peter (15:42):
Yeah. There's probably something else that's about to pop that somebody could see and maybe, I don't know. Yeah, we're always searching for that. Right. Uh, so the, the company takes off, does very well. Uh, you still have the company, right?

Jace (15:59):
Yeah. Yeah. So why draw? And that's called wide draw. Right? Um, and yeah, I mean it still goes, it's, it still cranks out videos, but I kinda got bored with that three, four years in. Uh, yeah. And I started to realize we were doing all these videos and nobody, nobody was using them and they had no idea how to use them. And so I started consulting kind of on the side, just helping people out saying, okay, you need to be running YouTube ads, you need to take this video and you need to get conversions. Don't just buy a video and then sit there. So I started doing that and then people are like, okay, just take over. And that's kinda how the whole agency side started was we just started to take over people's marketing campaigns. And I, and I had done it with wide draw. We grew wide draw. We never did one outbound call, we never went out to conferences, nothing like that. It was always, it was all inbound, um, where they just picked up the phone and call cause we were ranking so well, well everywhere. So I just kinda did the same thing with other companies and that's how the agency started.

Peter (17:04):
Um, just for those who are not as familiar, uh, outbound versus inbound. You know, in the last probably 15 years, you have this thing. I think HubSpot really was the one that coined the term of inbound marketing where the intention is to put content out there and allow people to find you and have them contact you inbound as opposed to you reaching out and uh, advertising or, or calling other people outbound. Um, that's a, that's a pretty remarkable business. A success story right there. It had just, uh, profitable from day one and in the first year and got the golden touch. Wow.

Jace (17:42):
I, I, yeah. And we'll know in the next recession if I have it

Peter (17:47):
spoken like a true entrepreneur. Um, and so you got burnout with that. Yeah. You started the agency. How, tell me a little bit about the agency. This is actually really what I wanted to dive into with you. Yeah.

Jace (18:00):
So still the agency kind of just came about. I mean, companies have problems getting customers. That's the biggest issue. They, they're always wanting more customers. Sells, drives revenue, drives employees. And I see so many business owners that if you looked at their books, you'd be like, why are you even running this? Why don't you go work at McDonald's? And most of the time it's, they have no idea how to get customers. They have no idea how to say their message. And so I became a pretty good student of copywriting, of running ads, of getting people to give me their information. Um, and that's what we started to do for our clients. And we've been doing it seven years, eight years.

Peter (18:43):
So for the entrepreneur who's listening to this right now, can you give them some guidance and tips on how you actually do that? What are they missing and what are they needing to do?

Jace (18:51):
Um, so very first thing that I see, which is common is the messaging. Um, most entrepreneurs are confusing the heck out of their audience. There's a lot of good material out there. StoryBrand is a good book. He has also workshops that are amazing. Um, but he, he says it best is you confuse, you lose. And so what business owners always do, let's say you have a carpet cleaning business. Well, they go have some market or try to create something amazing and some tagline, some vision, some story. And at the end of the day, why don't they just come out and say, we clean carpets. And so the messaging of most entrepreneurs, they confuse peg, especially tech. Um, you read people in, they'll, their headline above the fold on their website is forward thinking. That's what they say. We're forward thinking. And it's like, what does that mean? Um, what do you actually do? And so very first thing we look at is the messaging and say, are you confusing your audience? Are you being clear? And are you talking to their benefits? Don't tell us what you do. Tell us why you're doing it and tell us how it's going to benefit us, not you. And that's kind of our first step.

Peter (20:02):
Mmm. Mmm. Okay. I've seen that a lot as well. The confusion you lose. Um, I w Melinda curious as to why that actually is. It seems that people over-complicate or they're too smart for their own good or they quite honestly, possibly even psychologically aren't, you know, don't want to be so clear, like fear of success or, you know, I see that with, um, with solopreneurs often, you know, it's like they're not, they're not ready for the limelight or they're not ready for the success that the business could potentially bring in. Yeah. Okay. Um, all right. So clarifying the message, getting very clear, not over-complicating. It'd be very clear and direct upfront than what Kate and then that once you have your

Jace (20:48):
messaging, um, obviously it needs to be put everywhere. You put it on your social media, you put it on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and you need to have all this, you need to have a website. It's clean, simple, get a YouTube channel, get a Facebook, get you Instagram, get your LinkedIn, do all those simple things. And then after you have your message on all those avenues, you run ads. Um, I used to say, do SEO and all that, but you won't win. It's too competitive. So get out there, run Google ads, start there. Um, and then turn around and start doing video, create Facebook ads, create YouTube ads and cool, like YouTube ads. Take that, for example. They're getting really, really good this year. And when I go speak at conferences, I ask who's running YouTube ads? Nobody's doing them. Um, but there's a way, I mean, it's second biggest search engine. So let's say once again that you, uh, give me some of the businesses of your clients. You know, what some of the,

Peter (21:49):
um, well, right now, so I've been, I used to be in the service industry and I had, uh, more clients. One of them was a construction company. Um, one was a, one's a journalist. Um, so I used to do marketing and web development

Jace (22:03):
on it. Okay. So, so let's take a construction company. So once their website and everything's good and clear, um, all they have to do is go find videos that are about construction. So if you live in a local area, go run your ad in front of every single video that talks about construction. Very easy to do. Uh, and then after that, you only pay per view. You don't even pay per click. If they watch past 30 seconds, then you get charged. If they skip that ad, it's free branding. So that that's like a little thing businesses can do. And if they pick 10 or 11 really good videos that are getting some good views about construction, well that's a way to get right in front of your target audience. So you just be strategic about YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, um, and then local pack. If you're a local business, you need a dominate there. And that's it.

Peter (22:54):
Um, I'm sorry, as far as the YouTube video ads go though. So you're looking for videos in your specific,

Jace (23:01):
well, so you're looking for videos your consumer will watch. So in construction, let's say you're looking for a mother or not a mother, you're looking for a woman who is in the middle of building a house or looking at plans to build a house. Okay? So then all you do is find a bunch of videos that talk about plans for building houses. Um, how's plans, best color of paints, like stuff that they would be looking for. You just grab those videos and tell YouTube, I want to run an ad on that specific video and that's it. You pick the exact videos you want to run on.

Peter (23:37):
Yeah. I was trying to think of how and when I've been influenced by a video ad in the first one that came to my mind was literally just a few weeks ago, I, there was a little video ad that said, Hey, have you, uh, are you a fan of Joe Rogan? Uh, remember when he said this about his blah, blah, blah. And then it had a little clip of Joe Rogan saying, uh, doing one of those floats, you know, there's zero, uh, sensory floats has changed my life. It's the radical thing that helped me, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, and I was like, come on down, you know, the st Louis Flint, I'm like, I'm in and right to my interest and piqued my curiosity and I was like, take my money.

Jace (24:15):
Yeah. And that's the thing. Everyone's like, well, YouTube ads don't work. And it's like, well, it's because one, you're not talking to your audience. Right, right. Um, and you're just not targeting. If they have the problem, trust me, your video, if it pops up and it asks them a question that they're thinking in their mind, boom, you got them.

Peter (24:33):
Okay. But that, that is a big, that's a fairly big caveat. Or maybe, maybe that's easy for you, but I did, I found that a lot of people struggle with like how do you figure out what's the question? And in the market,

Jace (24:43):
in the mines, I have a lot of techniques that we use, but you need to spend a lot of hours on theirs. It's called an empathy, empathy strategy where you have to think how, what keeps your person up at night, how do they feel? What magazines are they reading? And so you need to build an avatar and everyone, no one ever really does this, but it matters. You need to know exactly who you're going after, what videos they watch, what TV shows they want to, that they're watching on Netflix. Like all of those types of things you need to know.

Peter (25:17):
The problem that I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs run into is that they, they perhaps even attempt to do that, but it's all from their own perception for your own brand. So how do you, what recommendations do you have to get actual data from the real market?

Jace (25:32):
Okay, so I don't really go, what, how I get a lot of my data and stuff with that I want to put in headlines is I use what's called Facebook's ad library. So I don't know, do you know much about that? Okay. So if I, if I see a bunch of ads that really resonate with me, I will then kind of dig in and find funnels that are working for my audience. And then with Facebook ads library, you can go in there and see the exact ads that are working for other people and you can just pull some of that information and say, okay, these headlines are working. We know they're working because these guys are converting for them. Um, and so you use the ads library to get some information. And then on top of that you can go out and do surveys. But most of the time I just use the tried and true methods of, I know these headlines work and they almost work in every industry.

Peter (26:26):
Yeah. I mean, I do think that you get to a point with some level of expertise and mastery where it becomes sort of second nature, but I know, I know a lot of, I know a lot of entrepreneurs who are trying to break through that glass ceiling and, and it's, it's, they can't see what they can't see. And so sometimes it's hard to,

Jace (26:42):
yeah, exactly.

Peter (26:44):
Like I to me, I've read so many of it where everyone's like, Hey, write down a headline. And I'm like, Oh, here's my formula. Boom, boom, boom. And to them, they're like, how did you even come up with that? And you don't realize I've had 10 years at doing this. It's hard to explain to people, but yeah. Tell me a little bit about the success of marketing. My read and, and maybe a case study.

Jace (27:06):
Oh yeah. So I mean, very good. Biggest, we've had clients, some of our clients been with us for six, seven years. Um, but yeah, it's as far as a business, amazing. It was one of those ones too, from month one, it was very profitable and it's continued to grow the hardest. I'll tell you the problem with it. Um, the whole agency model cause it, it's changing. Um, let's say you run a really good agency. If you're running a good agency like us getting customers is not that hard to do. It's finding the talent to be able to run people's campaigns. That's extremely hard. So you're bottlenecked by the talent. And then also companies, sometimes companies come to us and their product's just not that good. They don't have good customer service, they get bad reviews. And so when all of that starts to happen, you might only have a client for six months before their business tanks.

Jace (28:04):
Um, and so an agency model, it's tough. It really is. And so a lot of these businesses hire these companies like Yext DExT where they have thousands and thousands of customers and they have one project manager that manages a hundred customers and they don't know this. But it's a terrible formula because marketing takes money, time and expertise. Okay, so a lot of these guys don't have money. So they'll hire a $500 agency a month. That's [inaudible]. You're not going to be successful time. They're not getting the time necessary to be successful on their campaign and expertise. Those people who are running those campaigns are usually interns or they're people that it kind of got thrown into the job. And so what happens is a business owner just jumps from agency to agency to agency and it's like restarting every time. And then they don't, business owners seriously don't know enough about marketing.

Jace (29:06):
This is kind of why I do this book and wrote this book and do this. They have to know enough so that they don't get ripped off. 80% of agencies are going to rip you off. That's the way it is. They just don't have the time. They might have a huge amount of clients. Um, you could have an intern working on your account. And I, even as an agency, I struggle because when I get new talent, I have to put them on a business. And that business has one or two months of, it's like let this project manager get good. Yeah. So it's a weird model, but is it challenging? Yes. Um, do I treat those businesses like my own yet? It devastates me when we lose clients or businesses go under. Uh, but that's why I'm in this.

Peter (29:51):
Yeah. Um, what do you guys offer and do brand development and brand strategy?

Jace (29:58):
So branding are more thing is we offer getting new clients. Um, when I go to a business I'll say, are you needing more leads? Great. First step is let's get you more leads. And that's what we do. And branding, you should have branding in place, but don't worry about your brand until you're making money. And then start to wing branding stuff. But I always tell people, Hey, you need leads. You need cells and don't stress so much about your logo. Don't stress so much about TV's all that, like TV ads, all that. You don't have the budget to do it.

Peter (30:32):
So you're talking about branding and I'm curious to know about brand itself. So that the, you're talking about the message before and I'm talking about the entity that's communicating that message. Uh, first and foremost, like do they know who they are and how developing that strategy of, of the brand itself, the brand positioning. Yeah.

Jace (30:53):
Yeah, we do. We do that. They have to have that. So we first sit down and start with the message, then we get everything. Then we'll make sure their websites in place, all trackings in place, then make sure their Facebook ad, like everything we do that the only manage, like when when a client comes on board with us, we want to manage it all because we have found where if one person's running your Facebook ads and one person's running Google ads and one person's running YouTube, there's a total disconnect between your messaging. And if you use all three of those, you can really create a really good campaign. If they're all disconnected, you're missing out big time.

Peter (31:30):
Hmm. Um, who's your ideal customer?

Jace (31:33):
Oh, ideal customer are companies that usually have good budgets. So, and when I say a good budget, they need to be able to spend about five to 10,000. That that's a good one. They can, yeah. So we'll take on clients are re average retainer's fee is between 25 and $5,000.

Peter (31:52):
And is it how much of that is going to actual ad spend? Right.

Jace (31:56):
See when, if we're running their full marketing campaign, none of it because they are getting an, they're getting an employee that's running their campaign for like 40 hours. So it's like hiring a full time in house person. I see a chief marketing officer.

Peter (32:12):
Gotcha. Yeah. Gotcha. So, but then you have the team to also develop graphics and everything. Okay. Video, audio editing, all that too. Yup. Um, okay. Do, do you have a, a couple of examples of, uh, like a case study that you could share?

Jace (32:33):
Oh yeah. Yeah, I got a lot. So we've done a lot in the addiction space, um, back in the day. So we took like a new roads is what they're called, new roads treatment addiction space used to be really, really competitive. It still is. Um,

Peter (32:48):
I'm talking about like drug around,

Jace (32:50):
well, alcohol addiction. Yeah. I mean there's a lot of money in it and it's very competitive as far as marketing goes. And so example, we came on board with them. They were spending 15 grand with one guy before we came on board and a month, 15 grand a month. And I looked at the history of the site. He hadn't touched the thing in three months, so they were losing and they brought us on board. So the first thing we do is we redo the whole website. Um, and once we took over the website, we got the tracking in place. Well then we started to do Google ads and really hone down on their SEO. So back then SEO was good. I mean, now they're full. I mean they, they've been with us five, six years and they're doing, they're doing awesome. [inaudible] okay. Um, but I'll tell you, I'm trying to think of some, well we have a lot, you can go on our website and see our case studies, but let me think of some bad ones.

Jace (33:47):
That's, that's kind of where they want to hear is where the screw ups went. Um, Oh, I'll, I'll, I'll give you one. So this is one who was a carpet cleaner out of Seattle and this is for business owners to know kind of how to treat your art agency. So when we brought him on board, he was all gung ho and he's like, yeah, I want to nail it out of the park. I want SEO, I want this. And we're like, okay, we can handle all that. And month two, we started to kind of go back and we're like, Hey, we're doing this. We need to do conference calls to have a discussion, get on the phone. We couldn't ever get them on the phone. And then all of a sudden, three weeks in to month two, he's like [inaudible] emergency. And then you'd hear from him for one time and then all of a sudden he'd disappear.

Jace (34:34):
And I tell business owners marketing is way important. Well, come around, seven months in we've doubled as SEO. So, even though on our side he's had double SEO, he's had, um, like we fixed a lot of things, but there was always a disconnect because there wasn't communication between the business owner and us until eventually seven months in, it was like we parted ways, not because it wasn't doing good, it's because we could have done a lot better had we communicated better with the owner. Um, and you run into that, so you're, you have to like the agency, you have to be able to jump on the phone with them once every other week because no one knows your company like you do. And we just, we missed the boat and it hurts. But that's how it is.

Peter (35:21):
Yeah. Do you, one of the issues that I've seen in this kind of space too and bringing on an agency is working with an existing marketing company already at the company. Um, what advice do you have or how have you been able to navigate that in a,

Jace (35:37):
so most of the time they're bothered. Okay. Um, so as, Oh, here's a real quick tip. Whatever company you do, hire, make sure you control your ad words, make sure that the ad words, the analytics and all of that. So Google ads is what it's called now is in your name. A lot of agencies will say this is proprietary there, it's BS. What they want to do is kind of handcuff you into keeping it. So our biggest problem is when it's somebody else jumps over to us, we lose that data and the agency's not willing to work with you to give you that data. Well, as a business owner, make sure that's in your name. Um, don't let them and they trust me. When you hire them, they will put it in your name. When they get going. Just make that part of the contract and then the transition is so much easier. It's a basically, Hey, switch the website over. You already have your Facebook, you already have your Instagram, it's all in your name and bam, you switch it. But we've also worked with agencies like their agency and our agency and doesn't work out. Yeah, they have different ideas. We have different ideas. So it's best to make a break.

Peter (36:47):
Yeah, that makes sense. Um, scaling and automation. Yeah. When you, when you find, uh, the right message, well how do you recommend somebody amplifies that?

Jace (37:01):
Okay. So very first thing is you, you spend, and you can do very little, spend a couple hundred dollars on your headlines on Facebook. Okay? Find out, make sure these headlines are going to get clicks and they're going to get a conversion. So with online marketing, I can go on and spend $200 and be like, okay, that got me two customers, great or that didn't give me a customer. Well, what you don't want to do is go scale until you know what headline works, what image ad works. And then you start off slow, spend two or $300 and if you see your conversions happening, well then start to scale. So now spent $500. Like we had a client come to us yesterday. They're at right now they're at $100 cost per lead. And we've been with them for three years as a startup. And yesterday we're like, we can scale big time because we were looking at our Google ads words, our Google ads, and we noticed we were only showing up 50% of the time for some keywords that were giving us really good conversions. And so we immediately were like, take, take our budget from 3000 to 6,000 bam, that should work perfectly and give us that many more leads. It's all numbers based. So when you go to scale, know your numbers,

Peter (38:18):
do you have, um, support for a business who may not be ready quite yet for the additional business?

Jace (38:25):
Mmm. Explain to me what you,

Peter (38:28):
so like if there's somebody hires you and you guys hit it out of the park and all of a sudden they're getting all these leads, but they're bottlenecked in their own to actually fulfill.

Jace (38:36):
Yeah, we're running into that issue right now. Um, it's funny, I meet with a client today that has that issue. We, they got 140 leads, um, last month and they can't follow up with them. They want the business. But if you're not following up with leads, you're not getting customers. And that's another hard part about this. I, I can get a lot of leads and at the end of the day, if you're not closing them, we're not, we're going to get fired. So I have to make sure. So something I'm looking to do right now is hire a call agency that follows up for all our clients in their leads, but I haven't got there and that might be something I don't even want to go down.

Peter (39:17):
Yeah. Um, do, do you have copywriters then on staff? No.

Jace (39:23):
No. I teach my project managers. We got all types of courses that they go through.

Peter (39:28):
So they are getting copywriting training then?

Jace (39:31):
Oh yeah. Yeah. And to me copywriting is pretty simple. You just do the Russell Brunson model and stuff. You find funnels that look good, make it your own, adjust some of the copy and use those ads across the board. You use those same headlines across the board. Hmm.

Peter (39:50):
Um, speaking of Russell Brunson, are you going to be at the, the funnel hacker live?

Jace (39:54):
Uh, no. I went to his stuff his first year, he had it. Okay. I haven't been back since. I like it. He's amazing. Like, okay, that funnel hacker live event, if you watch how that is set up from the very get go to the end, it is nothing but a conversion machine to take. And he's amazing at it. Right. So good. But isn't that the point? Um, yeah. Yeah. I mean that's what he does at four and he's great at it.

Peter (40:23):
Yeah. Did you not feel that the, that there was value once you got there?

Jace (40:27):
Oh no, no. Like, no, I don't, I don't like ClickFunnels. Um, I think it's a great tool for people who just want to set up a quick funnel and do it. But if you're building a brand and want your website to go and SEO and all that stuff, click funnels is not true. It's not fully comprehensive. Yeah. Yeah. It's not. And I'm all about, Hey, build something that in 10 years, it's an asset of driving traffic. You have huge amounts of audiences. You've got amazing content on it. So fun click funnels is not built like that.

Peter (41:03):
Do you, how do you guys build out your platforms? Is it all custom?

Jace (41:07):
Yeah, we use WordPress and then we use a simple thing Divi. Um, and it's very easy. It's like once you have a good funnel, um, I can duplicate that across all the websites. Right. But it's not for business, for a do it yourself thing. Click funnels is awesome. It is awesome for people who are just want to build funnels. Right. We don't use it.

Peter (41:32):
Yup. What about for email marketing?

Jace (41:35):
I love active campaign because the price, um, I use infusion soft, which now is keep those two are the ones, I'm MailChimp a Weber. They're all the same. Yeah. But I like, they need to have texts. It's good to have texting in them now. So I'm testing out a lot of texting. Email is getting worse. It's not dead, but it's getting worse.

Peter (41:58):
Are you familiar with um, direct to voicemail? Um, no person. What does it do? Just put some voice technologies that bypass the, the, the ring and you can drop a, a voicemail on somebody's phone. And um, I had a little

Jace (42:15):
okay on that. I would probably be a little tick. Yeah. Because I would've grabbed a voicemail on my phone. I'm so tired of like cold calling. I'm so against it because I hate it. And everyone's like, you need to cold call. I'm like, nah, I hate when people call me and I'll never buy from them. Yeah. So, and then if somebody who's leaving me voicemails, I'm deleting those and I'm like, what are you doing? Call me.

Peter (42:38):
Well, and the other thing too, I know a few companies that are doing this and uh, and I'm like, what do you think is going to happen if this actually is an effective strategy? And more and more people start doing it, like how, and how quickly is the FCC gonna jump in there and go, yeah, no, this is not going to happen. You're going to get fined. And,

Jace (42:58):
or, or they'll do what marketers do. All of us ruin everything and it'll be one of those things where it gets overcome and next thing you know, no one even listens to voicemail. Always smells, gone.

Peter (43:11):
Ruined it. Yeah. Um, do you have any vegan clients?

Jace (43:16):
Um, no. I've had some vegan people work for me, but we'll be getting clients. I probably have, I just haven't asked them.

Peter (43:23):
Okay. Um, I'm curious from a business perspective, from an entrepreneur, entrepreneurial perspective, why do you do what you do? What is the why behind marketing at red?

Jace (43:37):
Um, I have my goals, but there's, I, I like the challenge now. I'm very active. I play a lot of sports, so I still like I dumped on shack. No one can say that. So I have gone on check before

Peter (43:52):
game over. Like you've won a white boy Dunkin over.

Jace (43:56):
Sure. I know I'm six foot one. That's what I said. There's only one six foot one white boy that has ever dunked on set.

Peter (44:01):
Do you have a, do you have that on video?

Jace (44:03):
It's probably on YouTube. Yeah. We gotta find that he was, he did have his back turned to me. Just know that. But um, but so I'd go play in all types of details. So I do play in camps like that. And then I, I am like, I have my goals of how much I want to have, but at the end of the day, I like being active. I like doing what I'm doing, but I can turn it off anytime and go do something else. I'm kind of a Jack of all trades, master of none. So like I'm just an entrepreneur where I see an opportunity, I will take it. Like I'm involved in, I still do a lot of real estate investing. I do hard money lending. I do, I do plexes like I just turned money. Sorry.

Peter (44:54):
I've, I've noticed, um, Tony Robbins talks about different types of entrepreneurs. Um, and my daughter actually, uh, she and I built out a little membership site and we took, and one of the things that we talk about is like, know what kind of entrepreneur you are. And we, we came up with the names, a game player, an impact player, and like a manager leader, which is something Tony Robins talks about, but you're, you're like that classic game player that just loves the game, loves the game of business, looks at numbers, looks at opportunities, doesn't care so much about what the, what the product is so long as it you can see that you're solving a problem, helping a market, helping a need and obviously making money doing it. Yeah. My father was like that and it's been a little bit difficult for me to be quite honest because I'm more of like an impact player I'm interested in, in, in the people behind. And I'm not saying that you're not, yeah,

Jace (45:44):
yeah, yeah. No, I get what you're saying. Yeah,

Peter (45:45):
yeah. We're, we're talking about like small degrees of difference, but, but you're probably the guy that if I could guess would pull out a calculator and go, okay, well let me see the market and you'd run the numbers real quick and you'd say, Oh, this is, here's an opportunity. My mind doesn't work that way. I'm always looking at like transformation. How is this person? And it's very different and, and that's part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you is because it is harder sometimes for me to get what's probably so stupid simple for you in the messaging and the headlines. Not like I will, I will cause it gets cloudy. And so like I'm trying to get better at and understanding how to do that or whatever. Of course, you know, maybe we just hire you and be done with it.

Jace (46:31):
Yeah, I am shifting. I will tell you like my latest endeavor is I've seen such a flaw in the agency model. It's hard. Um, and so I've been creating these things to say, Hey, don't even hire us for market. Like just hire us per lead. So turn around and we will put everything in place and just do a paper lead model where you don't have to worry about anything. We'll take all the risks, we'll spend our money, we'll build all the assets ourself, all the messaging, and then it doesn't muddy the water and then it's just like by my leads. So there's a lot of companies that do this Zillow. Um, but I have been finding like yesterday I watched a campaign last week and because I did my own thing, own messaging, own branding, own Phil, I'm a 50 cents per message and $1 per lead [inaudible] and it was, it was blowing up and I'm just like, okay, there's something here. Yeah. So that's been something that's been my latest endeavor. I'm like this paper lead paper customer model is amazing.

Peter (47:36):
And so when that happens, is the, is the, is the prospect still receiving messaging from the same brand entity or does it, when you sell that lead to another company, how does that work?

Jace (47:48):
So, yeah, I mean it is, it's our brand in a way. Um, so I'll build the brand out and then it goes to that their thing and it's not, there will be a little bit of a disconnect unless there's some companies that have hired us to say, Hey, build our brand out and do the same thing. We'll stay away. We won't [inaudible]

Peter (48:09):
technically that would be your asset that you've built.

Jace (48:12):
Yeah, it's our asset. Cause we put all the money behind it and then there's no risk for the business.

Peter (48:17):
Yeah. You take on all the risk, you're simplifying it. You're, you're, you're creating a turnkey, I'm going to hand them to you on a silver platter. And in exchange for that, you're obviously because you're taking the time and investment and risk building up that asset yourself.

Jace (48:30):
Yeah. And what's a blast is it's scalable. So in my whole goal is to get the lowest cost per qualified lead. That is my goal. The business owner just wants qualified leads and so he has his number of say, I'm going to pay you $50. Great. Well, if I can get those leads qualified at $10, which happens over time. Well, I'm basically four times in my money right now it comes to a game of how fast can I spend $50,000 because if I expend 50,000 I'm making 200,000 out the back end. Right. So that's the whole goal.

Peter (49:04):
Um, can I ask you a couple of questions real quick about hard money lending? Oh yeah. I'm still good on time. Oh yeah. Um, so for those that aren't familiar with it, um, hard money lending is, is you're not going to a bank, you're going to somebody like yourself that has capital who can lend, uh, on property. And typically, cause I've been in this industry a little bit, typically those are being lent towards, uh, properties that are in some level of distress. Correct? Or,

Jace (49:32):
yeah. Um, well mine is more all in to people with money. Like, okay, the guy I lend to this last week, I mean the guy's worth 100 million bucks and he's a big real estate developer that's just like, I have an asset. So I look at it, they have assets but they're cash poor. A lot of real estate guys are like that, right? And so I come in, I'm like, okay, well we can't get traditional lending banks. The banks are too slow. Um, banks are still, they're just hesitant and they take 90 days and it's like, deals need to be done faster, especially in certain phases of real estate development. Now, if, if the land's done, it's developed, then the risk goes and banks will lend on an all day, but it's that first initial phase that all step in now.

Peter (50:19):
Gotcha. Um, do you do single family resident?

Jace (50:24):
Um, no. No, that's, that's regulated. So I don't, I don't mess with it. That's too emotional when you're lending on people with single family residence. Gotcha. Oh, couple our business and next thing you know, I'm like, okay, just live in there or do what you need. And a year later I haven't made a dime.

Peter (50:44):
Right. Um, Oh, that's fascinating. Well, I'd love to talk to you actually a little bit more about that cause I, um, is it primarily on development?

Jace (50:54):
Yeah, it's a lot. I mean, I'm up for anything, but at the end of the day I just want to turn money. Sure.

Peter (51:01):
Yeah, that makes sense. Um, well Jason, I love hearing about what you're doing. I'm very interested to talk to you potentially as a client of yours as well, but I know there's gonna be other people that are gonna hear this and want to do the same. Where can they go to find out more about, uh, red?

Jace (51:17):
Um, so you can always email me jace@marketingbyred.com. You can go to marketing by red.com or Y draw.com. You'll find me. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Facebook, just Jace Vernon, and you'll track me down.

Peter (51:33):
Is the why draws@theletteryorisittheletteryydraw.com. Uh, very good man. Well, I appreciate you taking the time today and sharing some of the wisdom and uh, yeah, I'd love to stay in touch and see if we can maybe work together.

Jace (51:47):
Hey, no problem. We'll be in touch.

Peter (51:48):
All right, brother. Peace.