Scaling From Local Direct Mailing Business -> Full Service Marketing Agency: The Execution Diary

[Putt]

It's time for an execution thread.

Background:
I'm British but wanted to move to the US. While waiting for the paperwork for my green card to be prepared, I decided to enter on an E-2 (Investor/Business Owner Visa). This meant I needed to buy a business or start a new one.

I took $400k-ish in cash and bought a long-established direct mailing company in South Florida. $650k revenue, $325k profit. Easy deal.

My first day 'with the keys' was March 3rd. I had a week of normal trading and then coronavirus hit. Revenue is hugely down. Hasn't really recovered yet at all.

To labor the issue further, the seller of the business had an unpaid/defaulted loan secured on the assets of the business that was undeclared. Luckily it was only an asset sale, but there's still the question of whether I might need to pay out. It also turns out there's about 400k in annual expenses that were undeclared. In theory this makes the business non-profitable from day one. Attorneys, accountants, nobody picked up on this. It's almost impossible to tell though, as Coronavirus has skewed all of my figures. That's now in the hands of lawyers who are waiting for the courts to reopen for jury trials.

Now:

Either way, it's time to scale the business. I'd already made a lot of changes that are looking good for the business. Months of the stress of this had destroyed my energy a bit. I'd lost motivation and ideas. On Saturday, I was at @Kung Fu Steve's session and got a lot of good ideas. This thread is about committing myself to those and committing myself to doubling my top line.

At the moment 75% of our business comes from commercial printers who subcontract mailing out to us.
I've managed to increase the amount of 'direct' customers we have and offer to do more printing for them. We now print and mail for a huge department of the FL government which represents a lot of our top line currently.

The plan:
-Expand and begin to offer a '360' marketing concept. Offer digital, print, and traditional. Having a facility with printers and a team will hopefully make us seem a bit trustworthy than a lot of these 'digital' agencies. There's so much you can do in the crossover between print and digital and it's impossible to take advantage of that if you work with two separate companies.
-Establish partnerships with other business in the purchasing chain to secure more business.

In real terms:
-I'm undecided on how much I'm going to post here. It will be at least once a week but I might update more regularly.
- Finish all the services pages on the newly designed website (I seem to be able to rank no.1 within a few days of creating a new page so this will be a good way for increased lead gen)
- Reach out to other service businesses that may be able to refer work to us for a kickback. I'm going to start with app developers. We'll offer 'app launch marketing' services and get app developers to recommend us to their clients.
- Build a few introductory packages. No businesses in this industry list their prices on their websites and that might scare off some smaller customers. A 1000 postcards designed, printed, mailed package might resonate well.
- Build a package combining different strands of marketing for a monthly fee. Think FB ads, 1000 postcards, and a radio ad for a single monthly fee or something similar.
- Convince some of our close partners that white-label our services to push our new offerings to their clients.

Hold me accountable.

 

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[Kung Fu Steve]

It's time for an execution thread.

Background:
I'm British but wanted to move to the US. While waiting for the paperwork for my green card to be prepared, I decided to enter on an E-2 (Investor/Business Owner Visa). This meant I needed to buy a business or start a new one.

I took $400k-ish in cash and bought a long-established direct mailing company in South Florida. $650k revenue, $325k profit. Easy deal.

My first day 'with the keys' was March 3rd. I had a week of normal trading and then coronavirus hit. Revenue is hugely down. Hasn't really recovered yet at all.

To labor the issue further, the seller of the business had an unpaid/defaulted loan secured on the assets of the business that was undeclared. Luckily it was only an asset sale, but there's still the question of whether I might need to pay out. It also turns out there's about 400k in annual expenses that were undeclared. In theory this makes the business non-profitable from day one. Attorneys, accountants, nobody picked up on this. It's almost impossible to tell though, as Coronavirus has skewed all of my figures. That's now in the hands of lawyers who are waiting for the courts to reopen for jury trials.

Now:

Either way, it's time to scale the business. I'd already made a lot of changes that are looking good for the business. Months of the stress of this had destroyed my energy a bit. I'd lost motivation and ideas. On Saturday, I was at @Kung Fu Steve's session and got a lot of good ideas. This thread is about committing myself to those and committing myself to doubling my top line.

At the moment 75% of our business comes from commercial printers who subcontract mailing out to us.
I've managed to increase the amount of 'direct' customers we have and offer to do more printing for them. We now print and mail for a huge department of the FL government which represents a lot of our top line currently.

The plan:
-Expand and begin to offer a '360' marketing concept. Offer digital, print, and traditional. Having a facility with printers and a team will hopefully make us seem a bit trustworthy than a lot of these 'digital' agencies. There's so much you can do in the crossover between print and digital and it's impossible to take advantage of that if you work with two separate companies.
-Establish partnerships with other business in the purchasing chain to secure more business.

In real terms:
-I'm undecided on how much I'm going to post here. It will be at least once a week but I might update more regularly.
- Finish all the services pages on the newly designed website (I seem to be able to rank no.1 within a few days of creating a new page so this will be a good way for increased lead gen)
- Reach out to other service businesses that may be able to refer work to us for a kickback. I'm going to start with app developers. We'll offer 'app launch marketing' services and get app developers to recommend us to their clients.
- Build a few introductory packages. No businesses in this industry list their prices on their websites and that might scare off some smaller customers. A 1000 postcards designed, printed, mailed package might resonate well.
- Build a package combining different strands of marketing for a monthly fee. Think FB ads, 1000 postcards, and a radio ad for a single monthly fee or something similar.
- Convince some of our close partners that white-label our services to push our new offerings to their clients.

Hold me accountable.

Hope you have some momentum from Saturday!

Did you complete the 3 x 3 x 3? The gameplan moving forward?

 

[Bekit]

That's exciting! Rooting for you!

One idea to increase business is to get on the radar of all the copywriters and freelance growth hackers who are out there. Put out content aimed at teaching them how to get better results for their clients by implementing direct mail.

I know I've looked for agencies like this in the past and never got very far because they didn't cater to me as an outside consultant being able to recommend services to a small business.

Let's say I'm doing some copywriting / CMO consulting for a realtor in North Carolina.

And we identify together that they need to be sending monthly postcards to the homes in their target neighborhoods.

Sure, there may be printers in North Carolina. But I'm based in Colorado. So I don't have any relationships with the local printers in my client's area. And the part about getting the mailing addresses feels confusing. But if there was a printer who made it easy for me to plug in these mailers for my client, I would work with them no matter where they were in the county.

Just a thought.

Hope the current post office craziness doesn't affect you too much!

 

[Putt]

Hope you have some momentum from Saturday!

Did you complete the 3 x 3 x 3? The gameplan moving forward?

'Momentum' is an understatement. I've got my gameplan and it's achievable.

I've already sat down and started teaching my team the ideas of a business being a system and all the communication that goes with it. I realized that a lack of communication during fulfillment was responsible for most of our mistakes.

Thanks again, Steve

 

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[Putt]

That's exciting! Rooting for you!

One idea to increase business is to get on the radar of all the copywriters and freelance growth hackers who are out there. Put out content aimed at teaching them how to get better results for their clients by implementing direct mail.

I know I've looked for agencies like this in the past and never got very far because they didn't cater to me as an outside consultant being able to recommend services to a small business.

Let's say I'm doing some copywriting / CMO consulting for a realtor in North Carolina.

And we identify together that they need to be sending monthly postcards to the homes in their target neighborhoods.

Sure, there may be printers in North Carolina. But I'm based in Colorado. So I don't have any relationships with the local printers in my client's area. And the part about getting the mailing addresses feels confusing. But if there was a printer who made it easy for me to plug in these mailers for my client, I would work with them no matter where they were in the county.

Just a thought.

Hope the current post office craziness doesn't affect you too much!

Thanks! A very good idea. I'll throw some thoughts out to some contacts of mine and see how people feel about it.

USPS is as bad as usual and then a bit. A lot of my clients are political candidates and USPS seems uncapable of sending a political mailing without leaking photos, losing mail in a back room for 2 weeks, or not understanding their own mail regulations. All part of the fun of the industry though!

 

[Kung Fu Steve]

'Momentum' is an understatement. I've got my gameplan and it's achievable.

I've already sat down and started teaching my team the ideas of a business being a system and all the communication that goes with it. I realized that a lack of communication during fulfillment was responsible for most of our mistakes.

Thanks again, Steve

I'm sure you can turn around the profit pretty fast if you start doing those machine meetings every time there's a breakdown.

Funny enough, we just finished the week with Tony at business mastery as well. Keith Cunningham is the guy that teaches accounting and I'm always blown away by how much he knows and how much most accountants and lawyers don't know.

 

[Putt]

It's a Monday and that means an update!
Last week:-
- A lot of complicated logistics for a client took about a day 1/2 of my time
- Most service webpages are now written, built, and live.
- Ranking no.1 for most of our critical keywords
- Developed 3 'intro' packages included self-service checkout on the website (Even if these don't directly generate sales, it's a little way of showing what area our prices are in which avoids a lot of timewasters)
- Created a new infographic and specialist webpage for luxury real estate agents.
- Had a few new inquiries from the website, including a real estate agent specializing in 1M+ that wants us to 'consult' and implement a marketing strategy.
- A few interviews done with publications this week with little mentions of this business.
- Upgraded VPS making my website load much much quicker as I have a feeling that was causing problems.
- Spent 30 seconds installing hotjar to collect user experience data to see if there are any improvement to make.

This week:-
- Friday: Most of the day at the US embassy for my E2 visa interview. They granted me an emergency interview and intend to issue me a presidential exemption from the travel ban.
- I want to build out some more of the pages on the website targeting specific client types. For example, I want to reach out to app developers and see if they can pass on some business to us for the marketing side of their clients' apps. By building a webpage, it helps me refine my pitch and sales 'copy' so a 2in1.
- Contact existing resellers and inform them of our new services. [OVERDUE - Priority task]
- Send out an email blast promoting new services and mentioning our referral scheme. Try to do this at the start of the week to avoid the labor day email spam.
- Have meetings with 2 guys about website integrations for certain products. We offer data/mailing lists to lots of our clients. Often, they are done alongside mail but occasionally standalone. This data broker can beat my existing supplier prices and offers a widget built into the website. Another way to save my team a lot of time and provide a service our competitors don't.
- Start thinking about implementing @Bekit's idea of producing content targeted towards industry. I might also try to put together a 'trade' page on the backend of the website with a form that makes the process as easy as:
Complete form -> Receive Price -> Pay -> Done
- Check hotjar data and implement findings
- Finalize & close deal with realtor. If he's satisfied, there's a lot of potential business he could send.

 

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[Putt]

Mid-week update.
This week has been a great week for business. By the end of the week, we'll have had half a million mailpieces pass through our doors. A lot of our old clients that used to work with us every month stopped during COVID. A lot of those are resuming their regular mailings.

The luxury realtor deal has now closed and we're working on the first direct mail campaign for him at a much more healthy profit margin. Upsells will come later and he's willing to introduce me to the owner of the brokerage to help them as well. That's my first 'proper' job with the new business model. A pretty good proof of concept.

Yesterday, we had a prospect literally walk into our office. We're the only company listed on the official USPS directory within about an hour's drive. They came in wanting to do a small EDDM mailing and walked out having agreed to a 70k person mailer including an automated email follow-up sequence. When I bought the business, the office manager wasn't allowed to do much work and the owner's ego was literally soul-destroying. She has received more responsibility and is thriving. She's signed herself up for a business management degree at the local community college. She still needs to be trained on sales but she's doing a pretty good job already. I've got a follow-up call with those clients today to firm up the details and take the rest of the payment.

I've reviewed the hotjar analytics data from the website. Nearly every visitor looks at the 'packages' page. This was something I had quickly thrown together and not up to the same standard as the rest of the website. Now that I know it's getting eyeballs, I need to improve that page. Having discussed with a few prospects, they like the idea of the transparency of the pricing on the page but wouldn't be willing to hand over $500 to $1500 without speaking to anyone. I'm going to cut out the fully automated checkout and instead take each 'checkout' button to a specific contact form that requests more detailed information that the usual contact form. Productization can come later.

This week has been a pretty motivating week but there's still plenty of road to travel.

Active TODO List:
- Write and send email blast. I'm going to craft a clearly priced first month offer for digital marketing and promote it.
- Send some hand signed letters to long term clients thanking them for their business. I'm going to start doing this for all clients that sign onto monthly contracts as well.
- Redo the packages page in line with findings
- Content targeted towards industry
- Continual progress on new pages on the website
- 'App developer' plan still needs to be implemented
- Finalize discussions with my Google Ads guy to get those restarted.