Title: BizMarketing – The Origin Story & Lessons Learned After 10 Years In Business
Guest: Emily Caddell
Emily: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast. My name is Emily Cadell, and I’m the marketing director at bizmarketing.com. Today, I’m talking to Peter Wilson, the president and founder of Biz Marketing, to talk about ten years of biz marketing and the lessons he’s learned along the way as a small business.
Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.
Emily: Peter, I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.
Peter: Thanks, Emily. Me too. So lessons learned along the way. There’s been a lot of them, probably some I’ve forgotten. So I don’t think we’ll get all of them, we’ll try to touch on a few of the lessons learned.
Thanks for, yeah. Thanks for, joining me today and being the, the host today.
Emily: So appreciate it. So, yeah, I would love to hear the origin story of biz marketing and really how you got started and where you are today, ten years later?
Peter: Paul Well, a lot of ground to cover here. It all started more than ten years ago. So the business was actually formed in January 2012. I embarked on that journey in about the 2011, when I was in a job commuting each week to San Francisco from Seattle. I had a job in the automotive space.
I was not really happy. I was doing that job because that’s really where the jobs were at the time. Just coming out of the recession, there really weren’t automotive related jobs, which was my background for internet. And I had a conversation with Molly, my wife. She said, Hey, you have a daughter going into middle school.
You have
Emily: a son going into high school, kind of need you around here now more than
Peter: at the time I was commuting every Monday morning, catching the first Alaska flight down to San Francisco and then spending, Monday through Thursday there and then flying back and trying to be, you know, somewhat of a dad when I got back. It wasn’t working out very well. I just needed a change. Patched this plan, worked on it while I was still in that job. Then in December 2011, starting what became bizmarketing.com.
That was really how I got started. That was really the impetus was I just couldn’t continue to do what I was doing. That was really the core origin was not me seeing some massive economic opportunity. It was me seeing a need to be closer to my family and wanting to try something different as well. So at the time, I decided to do online marketing.
That was my background anyway, digital marketing. I had one customer. My first customer was my brother-in-law and his dental practice, North Creek Dental Care. And we’ve talked a lot about, North Creek Dental Care and their success. The interesting thing about that was Don had recently built a new building and he really needed to fill it up because he had big payments to make on the building and needed to transform his dental practice.
Before he built the new building, he was getting like two or three new patients a month, and that just wasn’t going to pay
Emily: the bills going forward. So we had talked a
Peter: lot about digital marketing along the way, and I said, well, here’s an opportunity to apply what I’d learned to help this guy, applying the technologies and skills that we had used at scale when I was in my other jobs, and then boil that down to a small scale to help a small business. So, you know, some of the things that we were doing in the other businesses that I’d worked in, I mean, you know, we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Google Ads, you know, doing all kinds of things, a lot of zeros after the amount of money we were spending. The good news was, is that a lot of the tools that we had used had actually been scaled down so you could apply it to small business. That was really an opportunity and I saw that opportunity. So one of the first things we did for Dawn was we set up Google ads and it immediately started generating results.
It went to 20 new patients, 30 new patients, 40 new patients. One of the lessons we learned along the way was you got to make sure that your staff is ready to grow with you because at the time Doctor. Kunz had somebody in the practice that was not really on board with the amount of growth that he was seeing in the practice. That became a challenge. And that person eventually left, and then the practice continued to grow.
Fast forward to today, we’ve had as many as 90 new patients a month now for many, many years. Doctor. Kuntz, within the last year and a half bought a building across the parking lot from that other new building, completely revamped it and moved his practice into that new building where they have 10 operatories. So they actually doubled their capacity and they continue to grow. Now he has two associates.
It’s just a thriving dental practice. Now I’m not going to say that it was all the marketing that we were doing. He’s in a perfect location. He does a great job. He’s got great reviews.
So from a marketer standpoint, it’s a great business to market. But that was really our first client that we worked with. And then we went along and looked to apply those lessons learned and the success that we had with North Creek Dental Care to other clients. One of the things that I learned along the way was that word-of-mouth is really the way that we got a lot of our clients, which is sort of funny to hear a digital marketer say.
Emily: So
Peter: but I’m convinced that they work hand in hand. If you get a word-of-mouth referral to a business, first thing you’re probably gonna do is Google their name and check out their website and, see how they are they legitimate? Read their reviews. So right away, you’ve got, from a digital marketing perspective, you’ve got, the website. You’ve got the reviews.
We have a product to help people get more positive reviews online. What I see is that word-of-mouth and digital kind of work hand in hand. But in our early, early days, the clients that we picked up that we still have today were word-of-mouth referrals, friends, or friends of friends. For example, Beresford Booth law firm in Edmonds, they’re the biggest, law firm in Snohomish County. That was a, a friend who I had met through, kids playing sports.
And and, David Tinkstad, managing partner there, he heard that we were doing some marketing. He says, hey. Maybe we could use some help with our marketing. I went and met with the partners, did a little research, figured out that the website that they had, which was pretty dated at the time, was not really showing up in the search results, was able to help them with a plan and sign them up as a client too. So word-of-mouth referrals has really been key to our success.
And both North Creek Dental Care and Beresford Booth are still clients today. And that was back in 2012 when we were with them. So thanks guys. Appreciate your ongoing support. But one of the things that I then learned was I tried to do just some straight up digital marketing, and I was very unsuccessful, just straight digital marketing.
This is, of course, ten years ago. I think we picked up a couple clients, but it was not really that good. So then I decided, you know what I need to do is I need to go to chamber, Edmonds Chamber of Commerce. So I started going to the breakfast meetings that they have, and I met a couple people there. I met Ryan Brotherton, Bob Wilkie, and I met Lillianne Hendershot.
Lillianne at the time had a graphic design business. She was working at, OfficeMax at the time running their print business, and then she had a design business on the side. So we collaborated on a few little projects here and there. While I was at Edmonds Chamber, I also met, like I mentioned earlier, Bob Wilkie and Ryan Brotherton, and they both invited me to this thing called BNI. And so this is back in the this is back in, 2013.
So this is about a year after I started the business. I’d decided that, you know, I needed to get out. So I went to chamber, and then I discovered this BNI thing. And the first meeting I went to, I walked in to this visitor day, and I see, one of my clients, Brett Hartman, who owns Brett’s Inc, auto repair shop in Linwood sitting there, and I’ve been doing business with him for like fifteen years. So I was like, what are you doing here?
He looks at me and is like, what are you doing here? He goes, I’m a member. You you should sign up. So BNI is business networking international. We have a podcast about that as well where we talk about the value.
But again, BNI is all about word-of-mouth referrals where basically you’re part of a networking group that meets every week. And instead of just selling products to the people in the room, you’re actually using those folks become your Salesforce. So you’ve got twenty, twenty five, 30 people in the room that actually become your Salesforce. It turned out to be the number one source of new business for us over the years. The first customer we picked up from BNI was a guy named Mark Lee, who is American Crawl and Pest Services, still our customer today.
And Brett Hartman turned out he ended up being our customer, and he’s still our customer today. So you kind of see a theme here of just these word-of-mouth referrals and meeting people and just doing a good job. We weren’t always perfect, but if there was any problems, we always figured something out and fixed it and got it working again. I’ve enjoyed working with all those clients we’d mentioned so far. So that was 2013.
Another word-of-mouth referral was meeting Anne McKinney, was our project manager. That was through a friend of mine, Diana White. She introduced me to Anne and said, I think you should meet this person. She’s got a lot of really good computer skills. She’s done some computer work for me, and I think you should really, you know, meet her.
So we met in January 2014, and I must have, I don’t know the exact date, but shortly thereafter, she started working with me. At that time, I didn’t have a space because I just had my house that was working out of my home office at the time. So Lily and I had conversations, Lily Anne Hendershot, about finding space where she was going to start a print shop business and a graphic design business. So we decided we should collaborate on that. We found some space down in Harbor Square, which is in Edmonds.
And I think I almost electrocuted her husband, Tim. He claims.
Emily: You’ve heard the story. Yes, I have many So
Peter: anyway, we opened, I was just looking this up 05/09/2014. So eight years ago, we had a grand opening, the branding iron. And the branding iron is still there. They’re doing well. Anne and I had a little corner there.
I didn’t feel like it was, you know, a good idea to work from my home if I had people coming, you know, here and all that. So yeah. So that’s up through 2014 and Branding Iron. Thanks to BNI and the existing customers that we had already acquired, you know, earlier, the business really started to started to grow.
Emily: Great. Yeah. It sounds like a lot of the way that biz marketing started was through connection, and it sounds like that continued on past being at the Branding Iron. So I’d love to hear about that.
Peter: It did. Yeah. So somewhere along the line away, I met Teresa Whipple, who is the director, founder, owner of, MyAdminsNews, online paper, source of news for Edmunds. Met with her. We did we collaborated a little bit on, some a project I did for best of Edmonds.
She and I collaborated on that project and really fun to work with her. She’s very entrepreneurial and very driven by civic duty for the area, especially for Edmonds and surrounding area. She introduced me to David Coffer, who had a similar, business to mine. So he had a digital marketing. He worked with a different type of client.
He worked in more in the medical field and that area, whereas we worked more with dental and home service contractors and things like that. So we met, hit it off, and we decided that it would be a good idea for us to find a space together to share the space that we had in Branding Iron. It just was a little small. Ann and I were just kind of basically sitting on top of each other. So we found a space at the Edmunds Yacht Club.
I’m not exactly sure. I think Diana White introduced us to Pat Shields. Again, another connection here to Pat who had space available. He had a company at the time called NPI, upstairs at the Edmunds Yacht Club. We were able to secure a nice little room with a couple offices in it and moved in there, March 2015.
So we first got started with Anne and I and then David, and he had another, individual in the office working for him. So it’s a really neat little spot there
Emily: Mhmm.
Peter: Right on the Edmunds Waterfront. And that was March 2015. And then, really kind of the turning point for the business was a referral we got from BNI for, Anna Allison through her franchise that she owns. And so we started working with Anna back in January 2016. And along the way, the corporation decided they liked the services we were providing and offered us an opportunity to kind of take over some of the digital marketing for all the franchisees around The United States.
And of course, if I was going to do that, I need a lot of help. So it was somebody named Emily Caddell that we hired right around then. Think we’d been speaking for a while. The time, Emily was working in another position, working for another startup in a different field. And I think she was looking for maybe a change of pace.
Emily: Definitely. Yes.
Peter: Change of scenery. I think that, you know, what’s funny is all these new clients are pretty much word-of-mouth and all the people we brought on board were word-of-mouth.
Emily: You
Peter: know, it just seems to work. And I also needed a developer, Lily and Hendershot’s husband, Tim, who I’d worked with a little bit previously, was available.
Emily: Mhmm.
Peter: And so, Emily and Tim got brought on board in August 2016 to support the new client that we had picked up. Mhmm. And that really is when things kinda took off. I mean, that you’re looking at 2016, you’re talking about four years, more than four year like, four and a half years after founding where we really kinda hit
Emily: Mhmm.
Peter: And it wasn’t always easy along the way. One of the things that I wanted to do was not focus on one time client representation, but really ongoing client work. And that’s one of the things that I was able to do as we built the business. That was kind of another key to our success was focusing on, you know, not a quick hit. Oh, this client has a bunch of money.
Let’s go let’s go get them to spend it all with us, but look at their needs and look at what’s gonna be best for them and focus on helping them over the long term. And I think that’s been the key to our success is the fact that, you know, we well over a 100 clients now, and the number of clients that we’ve had for a very long time is, you know, it’s just a it’s an amazing list. Mhmm. So I think that’s been really another key to the success is that and then also I think another key to the success has been the flexibility of the team because, you know, at some point Emily had Haddon. So, you know, we had to kind of be a little flexible there and figure out how your work was going to get done while you were away.
You know, so we’ve worked it out so folks were able to work from home. So we’ve kind of evolved to a virtual business. Then, of course, Emily is in Boston. I’ll never forget. She came to me and said, hey, Nathan, her husband, got a job in Boston.
But the next thing she said was, Anne, I want to keep working for you.
Emily: Didn’t wanna let that go. Of course. You’re not gonna get rid of me.
Peter: So I think and one one area where I think, that’s really another area that’s really led to our success is the fact that early on around the 2016 timeframe, Emily was kind of adamant about us being a little more, what do I want to say, a little more diligent on, you know, do our team meetings on purpose, for example. I came from a corporate environment where we had team meetings, but in retrospect, they weren’t very organized. They occasionally had an agenda. Somewhere along the line, we went to a global leadership summit as a team. Mhmm.
We attended that two day event, came out of that, heard a lot of great ideas, including folks like, Patrick Lencioni, who, wrote the ideal team player Mhmm. And five dysfunctions of a team, two of his books.
Emily: Mhmm.
Peter: So I think it was your sort of, you know, intentionality for how we work as a team and function as a team and meet as a team that I think really helps cement that as a core of the way we work. Mhmm. You know? So and, of course, our core values are we help businesses win. We have a great team vibe.
We believe in technology and, you know, the latest and greatest, but it’s gotta be proven. So those are kind of our three core values that we focus on. That was around the 2016. So now we’ve kind of hit stride. It was right around that time where folks started going virtual.
Some folks never did work in the office ever.
Emily: Mhmm. Mhmm.
Peter: In in 2017, we moved to a new space. So we moved just right next to the Edmunds Ferry. I think that was about the last time we were all together as in somewhat of a team was right around the time we moved in there. It wasn’t much Mhmm. After that that, you know, folks started going away.
You had had Mhmm. And all that. And we’ve been virtual probably since at least two thousand eighteen, I would say, right around there.
Emily: Mhmm. I think that’s about when everyone started working mostly from home.
Peter: Yeah. The I think the key to making that work for us has been weekly team meetings
Emily: Mhmm.
Peter: With an agenda, and it’s not me just sitting there blabbing on. We actually rotate the responsibility somewhat.
Emily: Mhmm. Mhmm.
Peter: And we keep it fun.
Emily: Mhmm.
Peter: Try to. We mix it up. Each week is a different theme. So we have first Wednesday, second Wednesday, third Wednesday, fourth Wednesday, and we have different, things that we do in the meeting. I think that’s also been a key to the success.
I think the biggest key to success has been just having a team that is bought into and believes in the vision of helping businesses win. It’s never been about how can we grow as fast as we possibly can, or how can we get the most customers, or how can we get the most money? It’s been more about actually making sure that our customers are helped. I don’t know. What do you think about that?
Emily: Yeah, I definitely think one of the things that sets biz marketing apart is that all of us really do care about our clients. We talk about them in our Wednesday meetings, making sure everyone’s doing well, making sure everyone’s feeling good. We always try to be very responsive to our clients. Like we just want to, we want to help our clients succeed. And like you said, it’s not, we’re not like, how can we get more money out of you?
How can we demand more of you? We’re like, we only offer up things and we only suggest services that actually think will help our clients.
Peter: Brad Right. Yeah. So it’s been a ten year, it’s been a crazy journey. I would say the first four or five years were probably the toughest. It’s certainly the nature of it’s changed over time.
But I do look forward to what’s next. I’m excited for the future and the opportunities that that’s going to bring as well. But it’s been quite a journey and I’ve really enjoyed having the team with me because in the beginning it was just me and it was pretty dang lonely.
Emily: Yes. Definitely. Well, thanks, Pete. I really enjoyed just hearing the story of biz marketing, where we’re going. I’m really excited just for the future of biz marketing, and I appreciate you sharing everything with me.
Peter: Great. Well, I thank the listeners for hanging in there. I know it was a bit of a long story and a lot of names and dates and things like that, but, hopefully, everybody took something away from it. So thanks for listening, guys.
Emily: Thank you.
Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.
