James: James Schramko here, SuperFastBusiness.com, chatting with Will Wang from Growth Labz. How are you, mate?
Will: Good. Thanks, James. Awesome to be back on.
James: I’m curious about something. I know that you’re a fairly small agency. However, some of your clients are very big. You know, like massive companies, B2B-marketing-type things.And I would have thought, because I came from big companies like that, I’ve worked for General Motors, Vodafone, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz. So I have a pretty strong, sort of corporate background.
Often those people would hire super massive agencies that had huge costs and lots of international pedigree, blah, blah, blah. And they’d get stitched up. I remember, they sat at a board meeting once. And they’d showed us their latest thing. I’m not joking, this would have been about 2007. They showed us a full-page ad in the newspaper that this agency had come up with, and the only thing the ad did was tell people that there was a sale, and it listed the dealer names and addresses. And I’m like, Guys, you are insane. Like, oh, and it went to one page. The corresponding webpage was a page that just listed the dealers. That’s it. So why don’t you give away a Mercedes-Benz and collect everyone’s email address? Like do something with this. And I found out how much they’d paid for that website page. And I think it was about $17,000. I’m talking of one page with the dealer thing. I couldn’t believe it, because at the time I was building my own business online.
Why? How do some of these big B2B companies end up finding someone good, like you? And I imagine they keep you a secret?
Will: Yeah, it’s funny, because the client that we’re working with we sort of get a lot of good referrals within their internal networks. It’s always a bit of a risk factor, right? Because some of these big companies, the risk isn’t that they’re losing money on the work, the risk is that there’s brand damage, the risk that, you know, they can invest a lot of time into it, and it doesn’t work. And if you think about the people hiring us, as an employee, as a CMO or head of growth, they can lose their jobs if they hired the wrong agency.
So there’s always a bit of a risk factor. If they go too small, the agency doesn’t deliver the value and the results they were after, then they just wasted a whole bunch of time and money. And time, for these people, are the biggest thing. Because they’ve got time pressure to deliver projects and results. There’s a sales team that are breathing down their backs, the CEO is breathing down their backs saying, Hey, where’s our sales, where’s our leads? It’s all coming back to them, so I can kind of see why they’d be willing to go for bigger agency.
But in this day and age, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better. And you know, we’ve taken on clients from some of the biggest agencies around the world, and they just don’t have the speed of execution. They don’t have that hands-on experience of really working with the client, understanding them, understanding their message and how they go to market. And a lot of the bigger agencies too, they’re more based around this branding idea, right? Like you said, the full pager with the ad, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Whereas the big agencies aren’t really great or as great as direct response marketing.
So that’s where someone like us comes in, right? We’ve got a team behind us, you know, we’ve got a great team – designers, tech people. And I’m a copywriter, so I write all the copy. And we can really hone in and say, we can actually measure what result you’re getting with us for every dollar that you spent. And obviously, you know, they’ve got to be careful too, because they don’t want to go with someone who’s too small, and they don’t have the resources. And at the same time, there’s a power to being fast and testing. Maybe you fail some of the tests, but you’re always gonna get a lot further along than just putting something out there, we don’t know what’s going to happen or what the results are.
James: Yeah, so true. You know, I used to benchmark our dealer website against the one that the manufacturer provided and we slayed them. We got like 38,000 visits to their 300 visits, it wasn’t even close. Like David and Goliath. They’re just so slow-moving. They wanted to charge me $1,500 to put a Google tracking pixel on the website. It was outrageous! So yeah, I get it, I can see why a big firm with an international footprint is going to lift the trust level of the you know, the sack-ability index, I suppose you’d call it. But as my grandfather said, you know, like, don’t buy from a place with chandeliers. Like, you’re paying for that. You’re paying for their fancy offices and their little bar fridge with all the cool snacks in it and their Foosball machines and whatever, their corporate-provided crèche…
So I like the small, nimble business approach if you can find a good one. Will, you’re a good one. I love that about your business, GrowthLabz.com. Thank you for explaining that. And it’s been an interesting discussion.
Will: Thank you, James.
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