Hi Erin,
It was great talking with you on Friday. I hope everything went okay with the first day of kindergarten today! Here’s some information about our company and our possible relationship for you to review:
Bullet Points and Stuff
As requested and promised, here’s a proposal outlining our services and costs. Click me to download it. There’s no rush, although as you’ll see, if you are interested sooner than later, we can reduce our upfront fees if we can tie our initial visit to you with our other new client in Nashville.
Book
In October of 2012, it was the #1 Business book on Amazon. We’re finishing the second book, The First Order of Business, now.
Essays
Here are additional thoughts on the various aspects of marketing:
- Goals & Values
- Strategic Planning
- Customer Experience
- Messaging
- Media
- We tie it all together in something we call The First Order Of Business.
FAQs
Why do people usually come to you? What issue (pain) are they wanting you to help them solve?
1. Sales have been dropping.
2. New competitors have come into the market.
3. Or they’ve grown beyond their own shadow – meaning they want to continue to grow, but they no longer feel like they can do it all themselves.
We tend to have the most success with that third group.
What do you feel differentiates you from ad agencies/other consultants?
1. We have a twenty year record of growing good companies. Since 2008, the year the economy crapped in America, none of our clients have lost money – they’ve grown every year. Most of our home services companies have grown year-over-year by double digits… a couple have grown by multiples since 2008.
2. While our ideas are unusual, we’re almost boring in our predictability of executing them. We believe in margin – working proactively to not only establish marketing at-a-glance calendars for our clients, but working ahead so we have breathing room to both develop better ideas and to act quickly when an emergency arises because we have the bandwidth.
3. Our clients tell us we’re the least full-of-crap people they’ve ever met in marketing. We’re neither dazzled by nor interested in the typical ad agency trappings of pretense and awards. We can clearly tell you why we make the choices we make.
4. Our compensation is tied directly to our clients’ growth. The only way for us to make more money is to help our clients grow their companies first.
Why do your clients stay with you?
Not only do they stay with us, but they’re delighted. We know because we measure client delight using the same system (Net Promoter Score) used by Apple, Trader Joe’s, Southwest Airlines, Amazon and pretty much every other company that cherishes their customers. For the last year, our scores have remained perfect 100s.
Why have clients not stayed with you?
1. When our values don’t match. We usually do a good job of vetting this before any money changes hands.
2. When clients want us to be more than their marketing department. We’re not interested in running other people’s companies.
3. We used to struggle with scope creep in projects… we would allow “more” instead of necessarily “better,” but we’ve hired a couple people in the last few years who’ve really helped us stay focused. Steve Jobs famously said innovation and growth come not just from saying “yes,” but from saying “no” to a thousand things… a lot of which are really good ideas. After twenty years of this, we’ve gotten really good at knowing to which things we should say “no” and to which “yes.”
What red flags do you look for when taking on a new client?
1. Short time-horizon. People who only think in 30-day windows or less. We believe in the power of long-term branding… it’s the diet and exercise of marketing. A lot of people just want to find a quick-fix or the next magic pill. We don’t do magic pills. We are marketing personal trainers.
2. Unhappy employees or lots of poor customer-service stories/reviews. Those are systemic signs of poor training and rewarding of a company’s most important customers – their employees. This company shouldn’t advertise until they fix their employee training and rewarding programs.
3. They don’t match—or at least respect—at least four of our five core values… clarity, wisdom, generosity, playfulness, and family.
4. Untruthful… the Internet will generally tell us if you’re not practicing what you’re preaching.
A Little Bit About You
Finally, a little bit about what we need from you… do you share the characteristics of our most successful clients?
- You are looking for a long-term growth solution … not a band-aid approach or a quick fix.
- You are very good at what you do.
- You are open to innovation.
- You are willing to invest resources into the growth of your business.
- You are passionate about your business, its goals, products, and history.
- You are committed to your business goals.
- You accept responsibility for your successes and failures.
If you can answer ‘yes’ to all those questions, and it seems like you can, we’re ready to get to work if you are!
Homework For You
If you’re interested in continuing this discussion, I’d like you to write a letter to someone from your past for whom you have the utmost respect. It could be a grandparent, minister, or teacher. I want you to tell her or him about the company today, and about why you get out of bed each day to run this company, and why you think it’s successful, and why you think you can help make this world – at least the Nashville world – a better place.
Thanks, Erin!
Tim