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Hey, everybody, this is Jessie Michael Moore, agency and transformation coach and founder of Mission Control. Creator of leverage for growth and I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist Attire, which scaled from 0 to $200,000 a month with my own agency. We are the host of leverage for growth, podcast agency leverage and Episodes. We know that in order to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within the founders mindsets, skill sets, and leadership styles.
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We are on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy and money. In order for you to get your agency to the next level. If you find value in these episodes, watch the case study video to learn more about leverage growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in Control Decomp case study at Niche in Control Accommodation.
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You are now listening to leverage for growth. Hey everybody, this is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche in Control and creator of leverage for growth. Welcome to the agency Leverage Edition. Today I am here with Kyle Berry, founder of Kaizen Marketing, a digital marketing agency built by enterprise level media buyers and operation experts for small to medium sized businesses.
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Thanks for coming to our show today. Thank you. So I’m pumped to be here, man. Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency? Yeah, yeah. So, I actually grew up, at with a family owned business. Right. When I was a little kid, my dad had me working in the kitchen, probably by 11.
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So I was an entrepreneur by 18. I bought the company out from him, and it was upstate New York, and I, I made the venture down here to Florida and eventually got a sales job doing marketing because I loved it so much when I started my dad’s business, for a company called Val back, the direct mail company, I learned a lot about marketing and advertising, but what I really learned is that there’s so many different platforms out there for you to represent your business, and not all of them work.
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Val Pack was a great example. Some clients, it absolutely was amazing. For some clients, it was burning money. So a combination of understanding that this platform doesn’t work for everybody. And this is back in 2014. I started diving into Facebook ads and Instagram advertising YouTube ads. a combination of that, as well as my personal career of becoming a professional paintball player.
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I realized that there was a form for representation in marketing of certain businesses and certain people that could be filled with digital based advertising. So in about 2015, coming in 2016, I try to exploit this and work with a bunch of different businesses as service based companies, restaurants, things that as a CMO to implement them into this business.
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And I started working with other agencies during that time to understand how markets are functioning. I found a bunch of holes in how the agencies were structured and how they worked with these small businesses. So in 2018, I decided to start this company, which back then was called KB Social Media and Online Advertising. I put my name on it.
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I was a young kid. I was like all excited, right? So, eventually grow into what we call it now, Kaizen, which is a Japanese business term for continuous and ultimate growth, a person in business. And that’s what we truly believe is a continuous growth process between the employees of our company, the employees of the clients we work with in the client themselves.
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and our real goal is to give, upper level entrepreneur and, advertising structure to the small to medium sized businesses, these guys that are just trying to figure out how to run the restaurant or how to run their service based business. And, me personally seeing advertising spend between $500 a month to $1 million a month, I can understand the scalability and the practices that get put in place to really find success.
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And a lot of times you find these smaller businesses, they’re kind of getting left to the side by lack of the right implementation of tracking or media development or, actual advertising structure. and they’re getting left in a position where they’re spending all of their money because they’re a small business and not seeing the returns. So coming from a small to medium sized business, that’s where it really all started, with this desire to really put these enterprise level advertising structures into these small to medium sized businesses, to help them grow and develop and nurture.
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And then the whole goal for me personally, in Kaizen itself was to develop a marketing agency where we worked, where we didn’t work with a vertical, we didn’t work with a specific niche, we worked with every different type of company so that we can understand the true common denominator of what makes companies grow, so that hopefully one day I can bring it back into professional paintball and be the Dana White of paintball, like what he did with the UFC.
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So we got big goals for the future. But right now, really our biggest focus is to watch these small to medium size companies flourish and grow through our campaign structure. That’s awesome. I love the kaizen methodology and mindset. that was part of continuous improvement in corporate America. And so we are implementing continuous improvement all the time.
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when, when was you or one when you, you’re actually, like continuous improvement. When was that something that got introduced to you? Was that from your dad? And and when it was eight it when you were 18 and entrepreneurship or talk a little bit about continuous improvement and kind of where that came from. It’s a really good question.
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I’ve had Kaizen in my personal Instagram bio for probably like six years. the word came to me when I was reading How to Curry. and I was reading some of these, Japanese works of samurais and warriors and the development of them, mainly for people like learning how to be a better, better at a at a war game.
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Right. and I brought it into the business sense, and I found out. And people see this all the time, that their personal life and their personal lives bring back into business. And I’ve seen that through and through with paintball. So, personally, like when I started, when I started in marketing and advertising, I was a cook, right?
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I was in the kitchen with burns on my hands and my, my, and my forearms, and I just really wanted to strive to be better than just a cook. And after that, it was better than just a business owner and striving to be more and more. And that’s really where I got in the marketing career. Same thing happened in paintball the first that the first day I started I was glasses Frosted tips 240 pounds at 13 years old.
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So I was not an athlete in any way, shape or form. So, I had to go through that personal development. But it was it really resonated with me, probably about 6 or 7 years ago. I’ve been trying to enact it myself, but but putting a word and terminology to it, like Kaizen has really flourished the direction that we go.
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The values of the company and myself and kind of how we look at everything. It’s not it’s not winning or losing. It is success and lessons. And as long as we understand the lessons early and understand how we can evolve from those lessons, we are constantly improving is as the word kaizen. Oh, I love it. And since starting the agency you’ve probably gone through a lot of change and continuous improvement.
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where at maybe you’re looking back on times like maybe 2 or 3 years ago and you’re like, oh man, if I only knew this or if I only did it this certain way, that I made of, like, shortcut your way to success. If you were to give advice to somebody that might be, you know, 1 or 2 steps before you.
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Now, what would you. Well, what advice would you give that person? This was huge, because personally, when I developed this agency, it was very cyclical because it was just me. It was a, basically a job that I created. It wasn’t it wasn’t a company. and being young, in my early 20s, I didn’t understand the difference.
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Right. I was like, oh, yeah, I own a business. But as a single employee with some hired contractors, I didn’t own a business. I just was giving a service. And I was the guy that was mainly holding the job position. So the biggest change that I had in my company was five years into the development of my company.
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I hired, Santi Lozano, who’s my CEO now, and I gave him a good portion of my company because simply to fill the holes that I was not good at, I truly believe that there’s four key positions of success for any business owner, and that is diligence, organization, perfectionist and prudence. And I was very diligent. I worked very, very hard.
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I understand I had prudence, I understand what was the right way to run these campaigns and how to advertise this business. But my organization was lacking, and I did not have the checks and balance to have a level of perfectionism in my business, and that’s what I hired for. So bringing in some people was on a really helped organize and perfect my step by step process.
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And he helped me document the system. And that’s the biggest thing I can say to young entrepreneurs. A young agency owners, is that SOPs are everything standard operating procedures and practices within your business that are written down so that you can actually work from them, optimize them, and implement them into your employees is the biggest change from being a single agency owner, with maybe a 15 to 20 client list, to doing multi-million dollars as an agency.
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Those SOPs will give your foundation to your business, will give you a position to optimize what you do, and a clear understanding of how to increase your overall bandwidth. You’re you know, you really got two hands and one mouth, and bandwidth is limited. SOPs expand bandwidth the way that you want them to. So I recommend if you’re a new agency owner, you download Lume today.
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You document everything through lume. Documentation is how I started. And then once you’ve documented Lume You, you transcribe it on to a blog, make sure you read it. You recite it and you go over it quarterly. So you’re always optimizing the procedures in your business, and it’s consistent through you and all your employees. That is a game changer for a lot of agency owners, too.
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And they’re like, I got everything out of my head. And now things can happen a lot faster and easier. You know? that’s that’s awesome. What is so what are you excited about over the next 1 to 3 years? Like, what are you working on? What’s success for you? coming up, I’m pumped right now, honestly, because I talk to a lot of business brokers, I talk to a lot of agency owners and a lot of other people that are in current position like mine.
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And we all know recessions knocking on the door, right? We all know there’s a weird position right now. We’re we’re in in March of 2023. And the position that we’re on financially is concerning to everybody. But we continue to grow. we continue to assign 1 to 2 clients per week consistently. And I really think it’s because the values that we hold in our business, and that’s what I’m excited for, is the change that we’re going to see in marketing and advertising coming into 2020, 2023 and beyond.
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Not just AI bringing in faster production of videos and copy and implementation of advertising, but also the ethics that are going to come behind marketing and advertising agencies because of the transparency that is coming into the field. Five, six years ago when nobody knew really what Facebook and Instagram advertising was, anybody could sell the platform just by saying, hey, get you on Facebook and Instagram.
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Now it is much more complex now it’s understanding that everyone’s tried Facebook and Instagram advertising at one point, but 90% of them tell us it doesn’t work well. It’s the same thing. I tell all the people that I have sales meeting with, hey, if you hand me a spatula, I can promise you I can go cook you a five course meal that would blow your mind.
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But if I go hand it to some random person who’s never worked in a kitchen before, he’ll have the spatula. But he won’t produce the success that you’re looking for. It’s the same thing with Facebook, Instagram, and Google advertising or any digital advertising for that matter. It is a tool that, when used correctly, can do incredible things. It can build amazing machines, but when not used correctly, it gives a bad taste in our client’s mouth.
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So what I’m really looking forward to for the future here is the the transgression of of of marketing and advertising using AI, using the speed, using the optimization, the, evolution of business owners, understanding the value of content and understanding how big that is in the 21st century and how it’s leveraged and social media. And then finally, the ethics and the practices behind marketing agencies really taking this drive forward to always set up conversion campaigns, even if the client has a $500 budget, making sure that we are developing good brand stories and understanding hooks, pain points, benefit factors and what the company is really needed.
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Instead of just doing templated campaigns over and over and over again. So I’m excited for the future of marketing that I’m excited for the future of Kaizen. and overall, you know, we built this company with the foundation to hold those ethics, true and truth from the very beginning. And I think that’s why we’re striving today. I can hear it in your voice.
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That’s awesome. Thanks. So what is the the best way for people to get in touch with you or, do you have any offers for them that they could take advantage of? Yeah, yeah. So, kaizen marketing agencies, our Instagram page, we post some funny memes on there. We’re trying to stay engaged as much as we can. That’s the best way to kind of see us engage with us.
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You can check out our website, Kaizen Marketing Agency, and right now we’re offering free audits across the board. So what we like to do with a lot of our clients is give a clear understanding the difference of marketing agency, the difference of campaign structures, and the difference of success from one person using that spatula to somebody else. So right now, if anybody reaches out to us via our website, we are Instagram and they’re looking for a free audit.
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We’ll do a free 15 minute audit, either person or person or through Lume. They’ll give you a breakdown of, CRO campaign on our, website optimization. We give a campaign overview by looking at your ads library. And let’s you can give us access to your ads account. We’ll give you a full overview of that content development, ideologies, positioning of your sales ladder and, your value ladder, your value proposition and how you can increase it.
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Our retention models and really a clear understanding of customer acquisition, retention, and increase of lifetime value throughout your entire business when looking at a digital model. And that’s completely a free audit. We just really want to give people the opportunity to either put in a sweat equity to grow the business yourself or say, hey, this is a huge pain in the butt, Kyle.
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I’ll pay you for it. Right? So that’s we’re really just giving people prudence. We’re looking for give people the opportunity to understand what is right and wrong, to move forward with the growth of the company. That’s awesome. And for anybody that’s listening, I will include those links in the show notes of this episode. And I just want to thank you very much, Kyle, for being a part of the show.
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Thank you. Jesse Pump, thank you so much. Agency owners, if you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement, where you can stop working in the business and switch to working on the business where you can regain control of your time, delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day.
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Go to niche in control.com/case study right now to learn more about leverage for growth, you can book a free strategy session with us to look at your systems, understand what needs to be done in order for you to scale and get a free strategic plan for the next year. To live the life of entrepreneurship that you’ve always dreamed about.
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Go to Niche in control.com/case study that is niche in control.com/kc. Now you.
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Got.
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