AL EP 38: Michael DeMos – Using Consumer Data to Drive Client Results

Show Notes

Michael DeMos has a 30-year successful track record of building companies from ideation to profitable ventures and exits. His very exciting career has included a diversity of roles and responsibilities providing him with a unique perspective on problem solving innovation and industry disruption. Victory 360 is a data-driven, full-service direct response agency focused on helping B2C service providers drive higher response rates, better return on advertising spend and lower costs per lead. The company is a trusted resource for understanding consumer buying behaviors and maximizing the impact of every advertising dollar.

Connect with Michael DeMos & The Victory 360 Agency here –
Web: https://www.victory.360.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3627098
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Victory360

Episode Transcript

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Everybody is adjusting to your agency and transformation coach and founder of Mission Control, Greater of Leverage for Growth.

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And I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist, which scaled from 0 to $200000 a month with my own agency.

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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. 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.

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If you find value in these episodes, watch the case, Study video to learn more about leverage for growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in control Icon slash Key Study at Niche in Control Icon slash kingdom. 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.

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Welcome to the agency Leverage Edition. Today I am here with Michael Thomas, the CEO of the Victory 360 Agency, a direct mail marketing agency that creates cost effective, personalized direct mail campaigns that build brand awareness and get your phone ringing off the hook and increasing your revenue. Thanks for coming to our show today.

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Thanks for having us. It’s great. Great to meet you.

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Absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency? Michael?

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Sure. So I started my first business in 1998, which was a printing and mailing company, and we were like at the end of the food chain, right? So the agency came to us and said, Hey, we need this printed and we need this mailed and we need it done by tomorrow and we need it done cheap. Right. That was and then they were the ones that made the big markup to their customers.

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And we were, you know, running around trying to get this stuff done. And I realized along the way that the margins in the direct mail business, the printing and mailing business, were just not enough to support the kind of growth that I was looking for. And so what we started doing was we started going direct to clients and selling full packages.

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And instead of it being like it’s $0.10 for the envelope and $0.10 for the paper and $0.10 to put it together, we would say, Hey, it’s $0.30 in the mail. And the clients loved the fact that it was very simple. And then we started growing that way. And so I left that business in 2011 and sold my share to my partner, and I thought I was going to retire.

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And within a year or so, my clients started calling me and saying, Hey, can you come and consult with us? We have this special project. And so I got sucked completely back into the business as a consultant, and that just took off. And so I started hiring people and ended up owning an agency. And over time, what we did was we started we focused on the home services business.

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So plumbing, heating, air conditioning, roofing windows, siding doors and really got into analyzing consumer behavior and doing direct response marketing for them. And I’ve got case studies I can share, but that’s how the agency evolved. Hmm. Awesome.

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I love how you trying to get away from it? Got pulled back in and then you’re like, Yeah, doing consulting work. And I was like, This is more work than I can handle. And then he created the agency. That’s awesome. Did you did you know what was kind of like your telltale sign of making the switch from consulting to agents?

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Like you had to hire some people? Or was it just based around demand or were you working too many hours and you’re like, Holy crap, I got to do something? Or, Yeah, I got a little bit about that.

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I don’t know what it is. It’s like in my DNA, but I’ve always lived this. My view of the world is continuous improvement. So I always look at like, where I am is even if I’m four feet underground now and then next week I’m three feet underground, it’s still progress. Right. And I just love the idea of expanding the offering and making it better and better for the client.

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So if if I could, you know, if I got 2% response rate this week and 52 weeks later, it was three clients happy, I’m happy. And I felt like the way I was working with the clients, I ended up on their side of the table like I was in their company, kind of representing them. And I just loved that feeling and I saw it as a differentiator from traditional agencies where I was like a partner with the customer with their best interests in mind.

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And I just love that feeling. And people that I started bringing on board, they loved that change, that fresh new view as well. And so it just organically started rolling and I just held on for the ride. Awesome.

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I know you said two terms. That kind of piqued my interest in continuous improvement and partner. Those are really, really key things that a lot of times agencies either overlook or they’re not focused on. Can you talk a little bit you talked about that kind of being ingrained within you. Where did you learn continuous improvements and you know how it if you don’t mind me asking where that originated from?

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Yeah. So my first job out of the Army, I was a sales guy at a chemical company and somewhere along the line got promoted to be a manager and they had to teach you, um, program. And so I went through a bunch of training to be a facilitator. And I have always loved math as well. And so it was very simple, you know, go from the lower left to the upper right, whatever it is that you’re doing.

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And I loved that measurable result. And so that’s it’s always been part of my view of the world. And the other thing is, you know, in those roles, post-military, I hired agencies. Mm hmm. And they drove me bananas because they so many of them had a silver bullet for some one solution that was going to change my world.

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And a lot of big promises, a lot of dollars flying around. And then at the end of the day, I was like, it was cool. But I wasn’t sure that I really got something out of it. And I was like, That’s an opportunity to do something different and say, Hey, what is it going to make your business better and what can we do to help you achieve that, regardless of whether it’s something that my team can sell you or another resource, like what’s going to be best for you?

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And I found that to be like, I can sleep better at night selling that way. Mm hmm.

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Jesse P Gilmore
Yeah. Focusing on the customer results and the value deliver it, even if it means that you’re, you know, doing continuous improvement or free to get there, which is huge.

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Michael DeMos
Yeah. Yeah. And then being honest, you know, you know, we can try these things and they might work, but a lot of times you don’t know. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Awesome.

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And how long? How long as a victory? 360. I’ve been in existence.

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So 2011 is when we first started. We’ve been through a lot of crazy time. So in 2019, I bought a PR firm, a local PR firm, and then the pandemic happened, and that whole idea just fell apart. I mean, the end ended up actually closing. I tried to combine the PR agency and the direct marketing agency together, you know, talk about things you shouldn’t do, like, you know, that that that saying that cash is in the pigeonhole, right?

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Like, if you’re in your niche and you stay in your niche, you can do really well. So the learning for me was essentially I closed the victory 360 and the PR firm and started two companies. So I had the victory 360 agency, which is this direct response marketing agency, and I have the C 360 agency, which is a full service advertising agency, and that allows me to do both.

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But they sell out of their own channels instead of trying to mix it up, which confuses the clients.

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So yeah, especially if especially if it’s different clients and a lot of times they’re one of the lessons I teach in agency owners is you can’t just you rabbits, you catch nine. You know that whole idea with the the ideal clients And so you’ve been on quite a journey over over a decade with this agency, let alone since your first business.

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If you were to kind of look back on your journey and you were to give advice to someone that might be like one or two steps behind you, or like your previous version of yourself, that would save you their time, energy or money. What what advice would you give them?

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I think everybody’s probably heard the same thing, but from for me, it’s been about the people. When I get the right person with the right personality and the right work ethic, it changes my world, right? Like I’ve had the wrong people with the wrong work ethic. And I felt like I was always chasing all the little stuff and it distracted me from working on my companies.

00;09;35;28 – 00;10;08;24
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Yeah, it’s all about having really good people and it’s sometimes like overpaid, but who cares, right? Like, get the right people and then the work gets done well and the customers love them. And and then I think the second thing would be if your gut telling you there are bad clients, they’re probably a bad client run, you know, so we’ve we’ve been really good about like we have real personal relationships with our clients and if we don’t have that, we, we don’t work with them.

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It’s too hard. Mm hmm. Yeah, Those are my two big things.

00;10;13;07 – 00;10;25;02
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Yeah. So they internal people making sure you got good quality people regardless. And then also the people that you’re working with, make sure that there’s a good symbiotic relationship and that’s mutually beneficial.

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Yeah. Yeah. Makes it fun, right? Life is short. Don’t make it too hard on yourself. Yeah. Your clients making you lose sleep at night. And maybe they should be somebody else’s client. Yeah, sure.

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And so, what are you working on right now? What, are you excited about over the next, like, maybe 1 to 3 years or so?

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So the big thing for us is we we have been manually crunching consumer behavior data. So like literally with big Excel spreadsheets and statistical models. And it’s it’s a it takes a lot of manpower. And we finally have invested in automating this thing and then putting machine learning on top. So it’s in development and it’s I’m really excited to have like a live dashboard that helps a client decide.

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You know, a good example would be some people like a deal, some people are more interested in quality. So if you mail the right message to the right person, you can double your response rate and we can figure that out now. But it’s very complex and our goal is to be able to do that in real time. So every week we can draw up a mail piece that’s fits that particular demographic.

00;11;43;13 – 00;12;09;00
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And because the home services companies are getting gobbled up by venture capital, these earnings are turning into bigger and bigger deals. So one venture capital company might own seven or eight brands. Now we’re working with one person, one director of marketing, and doing it across the whole enterprise, and it can be super effective as opposed to having to deal with every single individual client.

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So those are the two things that we’re really fired up about for the next couple of years.

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Sounds exciting. I’m like, How can I get my hands on that database?

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Yeah, you can. Yeah, it’s I mean, Experian is like the big data gorilla and like, I can type your last name, first name and zip code into the database, and I could get 500 plus data attributes about you. You know, where you live, what your household income is, what your home value is. Do you have a mortgage? Are you right wing political left wing?

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You name 500. Oh. Oh, wow. It’s it’s kind of scary.

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Yeah. It’s just got to be used in the right way, right?

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Yeah.

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Well, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you, or do you have any offers that they could take advantage of?

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Yeah. So if you are a home services company and you want to improve your direct response marketing, please reach out to me. Michael at Victory Dash three second and what we’ll do is we’ll do an initial evaluation of your customer database, recency, frequency and monetary value. And I promise you in 30 minutes you’ll learn more about your business that you should have known then you than any CFO has ever given you.

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And it will help direct your marketing efforts in the future. Awesome.

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For anybody that’s listening, I put the link to the Michael and Victor. E360 in the show notes, and I want to thank you very much for being on the show.

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Michael Thanks for having me. I greatly appreciate it.

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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. Go to niche in control dot com slash 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

00;14;22;16 – 00;14;30;15
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dreamed about. Go to niche in control dot com slash case study that is niche in control dot com slash kasumi now.

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