– Welcome everybody to today’s “Building My Legacy” podcast. I have with me today, Adrian Tobey. Adrian is CEO of an organization called the Groundhogg. And it is an agency or organization, a software that helps people generate sales funnels, manage and grow their email lists and scale their businesses. So he has also at his very young age, created two other companies. And one is… They’re both in software, FormLift, and what was the other one Adrian?

– MailHawk.

– MailHawk, okay. So both in the area of the digital marketing scene. But Adrian you have… It’s interesting to me how you’ve come into this, because I think your journey into what you’re doing speaks to the challenges of what people experience in the digital marketing space. So if you could just share a little bit about that it would be helpful.

– Absolutely, I’d be glad to. Before I get started, I just wanna say thank you, Lois, for having me on the show and taking the time. And hopefully what I have to share today is beneficial to your audience.

– Welcome, it’s great to have you.

– So for me, it started almost five years ago, almost six years ago now, since we’re nearing the end of 2020. I got my start right while I was in university, I went to the UFT, University of Toronto for Computer Science. And while I was doing that, I did school part-time and I was working with my parents’ digital marketing agency here in Toronto, Canada, full-time. I would do UFT at night and then nine to five I’d be in the office, building websites, web design, copywriting, implementing sales funnels and all of that fun digital marketing stuff. Typically, what we would do is we’d go to a lot of trade shows, we’d go to a lot of business conferences in our local area. My dad usually got the keynote for a lot of these different places. And the strategy is we would go up on stage or he would go up on stage rather, and he would essentially show all of the tools and strategies that a small business needed to implement in order to develop their digital lead generation channel. Like, so Google PPC or Facebook PPC, pay-per-click advertising, the Google business listing, the website, the lead generation form, the follow-up, the review follow up, all of these different things that essentially are needed by small businesses in order to generate consistent growth through their digital channel. And by the end of the presentation, which usually lasted 45 minutes to an hour, all of the business owners would be in a form of information overload, and unaware of the next steps. The only next step that we gave them was go to the back of the room, because guess what? All of this thing is totally doable by us for you as a done for you service. And that’s what we do, because a lot of this stuff was just outside of the realm of the typical small business owner. So after they go to the bathroom to collect the order form, and we’d start working on their project, I would generally be in charge of doing a lot of the website design building websites mostly with WordPress. And then we would build marketing automation and CRM systems based on Infusionsoft, which is kind of like the OG marketing automation tool for small businesses. Maybe it’s not the most popular anymore, but at the time when we were, or the agency that I worked with was the largest certified partner agency in Canada at the time, it was kind of like the defacto choice. So then we have more like HubSpot and ActiveCampaign and all of these new players as well. So where am I going with this? I’m going… Some of the problems that we experienced with this kind of typical way of doing things was once we completed this small business project, right? We built the website, we built the funnels, we built the campaigns, we built all these things, we essentially did a handoff where we’d get on a call and we’d communicate and be like here are all the things that we did, it’s all the latest shiny, and it works, right? And then we’d hit it off and then they’d go off on their merry way. And then one, two, three months later, they come back and be like, “Nothing’s working.” “You know, it’s like my business isn’t going up, I have all these bills, so, you know, what’s the deal?” And, you know, the fact of the matter is, is, you know, a small business owner needs to be involved, because like these things that we set up, these digital channels that we develop are…. Or need to be constantly evolving in order to meet shifts in customer relationships, in order to meet shifts in technology, in compliance, in terms and conditions, and all of these things and all of these different areas are constantly changing. Like things that were made yesterday are obsolescence by tomorrow. So they come to us months later and they’re like, “well, nothing’s working anymore.” Well, it’s because you didn’t keep up with it, because you didn’t know, because they didn’t have the proper training, they don’t have the skills they don’t have the knowledge, they don’t have the education. And the software and the tools that we use to install and build all these services certainly aren’t providing the education that they need in order to make it. And our agency certainly wasn’t the most inexpensive one, the average cost of a project if you worked with us was mid five figures. So it was a hefty expense for them to continue to pay us. And that’s really, when I started my journey into what kind of software could we build in order to alleviate the pain for small businesses investing a significant amount of money to have all of these things built, and then all of a sudden not be able to use them anymore because they’re obsolescence by time and all of these different changes. What software what solutions could we build in order to make it so that the small business owner has the access and most importantly, the wherewithal to actually be able to maintain view reports, view stats, make optimizations, change copy and all of these different things? And that’s really when it started… That process, that thinking process is when my software building career started.

– Got it. So, boy, I just… That resonates with me because I remember when I first started in this digital world, I remember going to a conference learning what needed to be done and I go around and I’d go, you mean, I have to do that too? And then I go that too? And it was… It is overwhelming at first until you understand the secret fits and develop a rhythm. And the problem, I think, many small businesses have is that they have so many things on their plate, that to take on the digital marketing without knowing the process or understanding it is-

– I have a friend, Chris Badgett, who is the CEO of another WordPress plugin called LifterLMS. And he always says that the entrepreneur is a wearer of many hats. And I think that’s a various synonymous with what you just described is we wear our HR hat, and we wear our CMO hat, and our CEO hat, and our CPA hat, and all of these different hats that, you know, adding an additional hat of all of a sudden I need to be able to build a marketing channel online, is almost too much to ask.

– Yeah, so describe a little bit about your Groundhogg tool and what it really does for people because people are looking for solutions and ways to be able to put their arms around this whole process of digital marketing so they can do it effectively.

– Absolutely, so the main qualifications, when we were conceptualizing a solution that we could build and provide to small business owners in order to… You know, they still have to wear the marketing, the CMO, the chief marketing officer hat. No business is or no entrepreneur is going to be able to effectively remove that hat, it’s just not possible. And I’m certainly not promising, you know, you’re gonna install it and it’s just gonna work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Some companies promise those kinds of results. You know, I’m a realist, that’s just not… It’s just doesn’t work like that. If it worked like that, we’d always get you rich and happy, right. But we can at least alleviate or minimize the weight that that hat has on you and your business. And the way that we do that is we had to consolidate as many sort of surfaces that you had to have access to in order to get a result. As an example of that in sort of like entrepreneurial terms would be, how many places or how many things do I need to purchase log in and connect in order to actually retrieve some sort of measurable results? The old way you had to have a WordPress website or a Shopify site, for example, then you had to go purchase your marketing automation tool, like ActiveCampaign, and then CRM like HubSpot, and then you had to go get your e-commerce tools and you had to get Stripe and PayPal, and you have to connect all of these things and in a lot of cases you still have to connect a lot of those things. One of the most complicated things to connect typically was the CRM and marketing automation component. How do I get someone who subscribes on my website into funnels and stuff where I can email them and communicate with them, and how do I make that information easily accessible? And how do I track, you know, who was in this email, who received this email, and then purchase something, et cetera, right? That’s a difficult process, difficult integration process. So concept number one, remove that integration process altogether. Our software does that by just being a WordPress plugin. I think someone estimated by 2025, half of the internet, half of all of the top 10 million websites ranked by Alexa or whoever, are going to be built with WordPress. That’s the current based on growth, currently it’s around 35% by 2025, it should be around 50. So just make it part of WordPress. You install it like you would any other sort of WordPress plugin, and all of a sudden your website, your CRM and your marketing automation, your email, your list, your reports is all just automatically integrated together. So you don’t even have to worry about it. You just install it and it’s done. So that was point number one, point number two is a lot of the businesses… Or sorry, concept number two, a lot of the business owners didn’t know the strategies that they had to implement in order to achieve measurable results that increased revenue or increased customer satisfaction or your net promoter score or anything like that. You don’t know what you don’t know, if you didn’t go to, you know, if you didn’t go to school for stuff, you didn’t take personal development training, you haven’t read books, you don’t know, you don’t know. So part of the solution, in addition to just removing that entire integration process was let’s provide the training and templates, email templates, and funnel templates, and reporting templates and all of these different templates that businesses can pick and choose that correspond to their niche, and, you know, generally across all niches, there are a certain number of strategies, recovery, retention and reviews that typically apply across the board. So those are kind of like given, so we just automatically install those or have our customers install them. They’ve changed out the lowest change out their content and they turn them on. And great, now you have something done really quickly that can show you based on the reporting which is automatically generated as well. We have standardized reporting for all the businesses across the board that generally works and gives a fairly good idea of how exactly your marketing is performing. And we have measurable results immediately right there and then. And then we back that up, concept number three, we backed that up with stellar support. You as an organization, also own all of your data so you’re automatically compliant in all of the areas that matter Canada, the GDPR laws and the new California legislation so you don’t have no privacy concerns because you own all of the data. No worries there. You can choose your sending service, you can choose how much you wanna spend in all of these different things. You can choose your own hosting, you choose all these different things. You have now have the… Or we have now or provided the ability for you to choose exactly how it is that you want to build this thing, you’re not forced to use any particular providers. And then concept number four is we had to just make it more affordable. And we do that by alleviating what I’ve started to call, and what I totally stole from somebody else so that his name escapes me at the moment, is the success tax. Our competitors, the people in our industry, the CRM and marketing automation providers of the world, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Marketo, Salesforce, et cetera, they charge their clients based on success, which is generally measured in the number of contacts that a business has on their list. So if you go to the Mailchimp’s pricing page and you have 500 contacts or under 500 contents, it’s free. As soon as you go over… As soon as you get 501 you expect to pay a minimum of $14 a month U.S. And then as soon as you get to a thousand, that doubles, and as soon as you get to 2000, it doubles, and as soon as you get to 3000, it doubles again, and this is exponential. This is a typical pricing model for pretty much everyone in this industry. However, because our product is at the end of the day, a WordPress plugin and it’s self hosted and my organization’s really only expense is the cost of our developers, and the cost of providing top rated five-star rated support, and the cost of developing updates and new features and all these different things, right? We don’t have any hosting costs, we don’t have any like massive servers anywhere, we don’t have any of that stuff. We are able to provide our product and our software and our service at a flat rate no matter how big your list is. So it’s equitable, and no matter how “successful” your businesses, whether you have 500 contacts or you have 50,000 contacts or even 500,000, you’re going to pay the same price as everybody else, which I think is a really, really great way to do business. Basecamp, for example, does this kind of business model where it’s like $99 flat, that’s it, no matter how big your team is, or how many projects you have going on or anything like that. And people are able to do more and they’re able to accomplish more when they aren’t constantly thinking about that upcoming $500 per month bill in the back of their mind, because, you know, they increased their list size by double. But you know, the reason why the success tasks I feel is not the best way to do pricing in this industry is because, you know, there are businesses out there who aren’t making any money that have 50,000 people on their list. So, and it’s not really a true measure of how much you’re actually able to afford. Those were the concepts that were important to me when designing a product that was going to allow small businesses to take this on. It was ease of integration and consolidating all of your various different features that you need in one place, so you just log into one place and have access to all. It was templatizing the process and making it much more easy for you to access the education and the resources that you need in order to implement strategies that would actually get measurable results. Number three, it was being able to provide you with a platform that you had complete control over and the choices that you could make in order to extend it and implement it however you want. And number four was to alleviate the burden of that monthly bill that you expected to come in as your businesses growing. We just removed that with our flat rate pricing.

– So what I’m hearing you say is you’ve worked to remove some of the obstacles that small business often worries about costs and expenses, what can they keep affording, right? They know they have to grow, but there is a disincentive with a lot of the channels in terms of growth, because your profit has to grow in the same direction for you to be able to take on additional expenses, right? So that’s brilliant that you’ve been able to do that for your clients. So tell me, Adrian, when people come to you, what’s the number one, two, three things that they’re looking for from you that comes to you rather than to somebody else, why you?

– People generally find us when they need to have more control over their information and over their business. The thing… I mean, if you look at Mailchimp as a recent example, what’s been happening is as people continue to spread disinformation in the world about politics, about COVID, about people of influence, and there’s this rise of misinformation, and about cannabis, for example, in the United States, that’s a very hot topic, it’s legal now in Canada, but in parts of the United States, it’s still very taboo. You see providers like Mailchimp updating their terms of service to essentially say, “If we don’t like the email that you’re sending for any arbitrary reason that we deem fit, we will cancel your account. You’ll you won’t be able to log in, you’re not gonna be able to get any of your emails out, you’re not gonna be able to get any of your lists out, you’re not gonna be able to get anything out, we’re just gonna close it and that’s that. And that’s scary for a lot of people and a lot of businesses that, you know operate sometimes on the fridge, and they operate in these kind of like new budding industries about things that are still fairly controversial. And I’m not saying that I endorse any of those beliefs in any way, shape or form, but even for reputable businesses that have been around for a very long time that may share certain belief systems, that is scary. And they’re looking for an area and they’re looking for a place where they can say, “I control my data and I know that it’s safe and that I’m gonna have full control no matter what, and nobody’s gonna be able to take that away from me.” And that is the kind of promise that we can offer because it’s completely self hosted, I’m not looking over your shoulder, my organization isn’t looking over anybody’s shoulder, you can use and implement our platform and our product i the way that you see fit. And we’re not going to prevent you from doing that. And there’s an increasing number of organizations around the world that are saying that the moderation and the censorship has kind of got too far. So that would be one of the first ways that people are starting to find this, is because they just want more control over their data. With Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign in HubSpot and the rest, you are essentially just renting space and when the landlord doesn’t like you, they’re going to evict you. We’re very popular with cannabis operations at the moment, I see a lot of cannabis operations continuing to come in. And I don’t imagine that’ll remain a taboo subject in the United States for much longer, as in Canada, it’s already very legal so I don’t imagine it’s gonna be that way much longer, but there’s one example. Number two, the second reason why people find us often more and more is they’re just looking to cut costs. You mentioned that profit needs to scale in order to increase demand as the list grows and all of these things. And a lot of the time, you know, businesses, we’re a frugal bunch, you know, we wanna pay the least amount that we humanly can and we offer what I believe to be fantastic service and fantastic product that is equivalent to the largest and most heavily funded of marketing automation and CRM products out there, at a much more affordable price for the small business. You can typically expect to pay a maximum of $480 a year for our product where you may for similar service be expecting to pay $480 a month to ActiveCampaign Infusionsoft or HubSpot. Well actually it’s $2,000 a month usually for an equivalent service with HubSpot so that speaks in and of itself. Those would be the two main reasons, I think.

– I think in today’s world both of those are hugely important. I think from what I see in terms of discussion with that control of data that people are really searching for, and we’ve all had the experience on Facebook for example, where suddenly your group gets shut down, or this gets shut down, or that ad gets shut down and-

– For seemingly arbitrary reasons that, you know, a group member that you don’t endorse or that you don’t know is all of a sudden sending or saying things that, you know, you don’t necessarily agree with, but to Facebook they’re so big, it doesn’t really matter. So in a sea of people looking for solutions to have more control and to share their message with their audience, tools like ours exist to fill that gap.

– Adrian, our time is almost up, and we have a few minutes left, and I just wanted to leave it with what are the things that we haven’t talked about that you think are important for people to know about in this digital marketing space? And, yeah, how do they… Let’s start there. And then I have another question after that.

– Well, before we started recording you mentioned that there’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of people out there you see, I see I’m bummed by Facebook remarketing gods from, I won’t mention his name, but he rhymes with my Opez and about drop shipping and Shopify and, you know, become a millionaire overnight and all of this stuff. And, you know, sometimes it’s possible. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and all of a sudden your product went viral overnight. And, you know, you get your $10 million VC and then you exit five years later and you’re a billionaire, sometimes that happens, but it is the exception rather than the rule. And I am certainly not one of those exceptions. I have over the last two years, worked 70 hours a week, give or take, to build a profitable organization that is able to help several thousand business owners around the world a daily basis and allow them to achieve the things that I promised here, which is launching their funnel, growing their list and scale their business. And, you know, consistency, values and determination are essentially what made that possible. So for any entrepreneur who’s kind of listening to this and they’re thinking to themselves, “I don’t really see the light at the tunnel right now. You know, we’re burning through money, it’s not happening, it’s not going viral, it’s all of these things. So this must be a debt.” Well, that’s just not true. I probably did… I didn’t make my first dollar until like three months in and then it took another year after that to surpass $10,000 in a month. You know, here we are an entire year later and I’m happy to say that over the black Friday period we posted a fricking record phenomenal, you know, 306% increase over the previous black Friday, so that was awesome. But it takes time and it’s not an overnight thing. And as long as you consistently provide value to other people’s lives, if you help them… You know, the saying goes, if you help enough people get what they want, you will eventually be able to have what you want. So for anyone listening to this, if you’re gonna take any value from this call it would be that stick with it, it’s not overnight, consistent contribution and consistently helping other people is going to get you sort of over that hump and into the black.

– Super, on that note be persistent, be consistent, both of those, and then there are resources available. We will have information about Adrian and his company in the show notes so that for those of you who are listening, who would like more information, or would like to get in contact with Adrian, that will be available for you. So, Adrian, thank you so much. I appreciate your perspective in today’s marketing world because it’s realistic. I think people need to hear what’s truthful and real so they can really plan in a organized systematic way. If you believe that tomorrow morning you’re gonna wake up and be suddenly this incredible wealthy star then-

– It happens, it hasn’t happened to me, I’m still waiting.

– It happens to some, but it tends to be few, right? And it is that persistence and that consistency. So I just really appreciate your comments and your thoughts. And I look forward to getting this information out to people because I think these kinds of resources are really important for people to have. So thank you so much, Adrian, for being with us today.

– It was honestly my pleasure, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to share my perspective. And I mean, the only thing that I hope to get out of this is that someone listening to this has got at least a little bit of shorter value, right?

– Great, I’m sure they did. And for those of you who are listening, thank you for listening to “Building my Legacy” podcast today. Be sure to visit our website at bild2morrow.com and our social media sites also build2morrow.com. Thank you so much for being with us today.