IndustrialSage

Alright, so let’s jump into today’s Executive Series. I am joined by Mark Meersman, who is the managing partner at IPC Global. Mark, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

For sure, thanks for having me.

Alright, so for those who aren’t familiar about IPC global, can you tell us a little bit about who you guys are and what you do?

For sure. So we’re an enterprise systems integrator, so that we bring multiple systems together, make them talk, integrate, communicate. In particular, our specialty is getting the data back out of those systems so that we can use it to inform the stakeholders of that. In particular, in manufacturing, where we’ve been proud to do, whether it’s the human resources systems, the manufacturing, they call them MRP systems, or ERP systems, we pull data out of all of those systems and make new sense out of it for leadership, as well as, ultimately, people on the ground.

Well, data’s definitely a big deal, and it’s increasingly to be, continuing to be an even bigger deal as we go, and we’ll kind of jump into that a little bit later here. But before we get into all that, I want to know a little bit more about you. Tell me, how did you get into, how did you get into data?

So, I was classically trained at Price Waterhouse, in their consulting division, and we were putting in big, large enterprise systems around the globe. Fortunately, I got to live in a number of countries along the way, and learned the interoperability of those systems, and what they were ultimately doing for the enterprise. And then, to get, when I started this business, IPC Global, 20 years ago, we had to specialize even further down. So the data is the new gold, and so we’re able then to say, “Listen, let’s just focus on the data that’s being created from these organizations, and making it much more valuable to them.”

Exactly. You know, that’s exciting. So, alright. So you said you started IPC Global about 20 years ago. What was that journey that made you say, “Hey, you know, I’m going to jump from PWC, and I’m going to start my own thing,” what was that?

So I had a brief stint with a product company. So I was with a software company called Markham, and they make enterprise software, and I was responsible for one of the product lines. And they were closing the Atlanta office, so my options at the time were: move to Boston or move to Tokyo, where they had a joint venture with NEC. And those two options were put on the table. And my wife and I had some roots here in Atlanta, and I said, we talked about it at the time, and I said, “Why don’t I step out and do some consulting?” My wife and I had roots here, and she says, “Well, why don’t you go back and do consulting?” And so I stepped out and started doing consulting. But what honestly was the kicker– because I was fearful, I’ve always had work, and firms to work for– is, my father asked me, “What are you afraid of?” I said, “Well, I’ve got kids. “I’ve got to provide for my family.” He says, “You’ll do great, I’ve got your back.” And so I said, “Alright.” And so I stepped out, reached out to a few prospective customers, and got those going. And then now, 20 years later, we’re nearly 50 colleagues strong. We’ve honed our expertise, in particular into data and analytics. We picked some industries that we’re great at, that being healthcare, education, and manufacturing. And thus, provide that value in a unique way, now.

Yeah, so, alright. What was that? I’m always curious, with individuals and these entrepreneurs who go out and make that step. And you mentioned you had that conversation with your dad, and he said, “What are you afraid about?” And you were like, “Oh, well, you know.” Go out there, go do it. I’ve got your back.” What was the, is there a specific moment that you remember, when you made it up in your mind, and said, “Okay, you know what? I’m going to do this. I’m just going to do it.” What was that moment, and what did that feel like?

I think the moment was with my wife, who– she at that time had already stopped working and was raising our boys, at the time. We had two at home, and… Her confidence in me to do that. There was enough other data points in the speaking with prospective customers that they would want my help in certain ways. And so it’s probably primarily her confidence that I could pull it off.

That’s awesome. Well, I, being from a data, a data guy, you had things lined up. It wasn’t just like, “Hey, we’re just going to do this!”

Yeah, no, no.

That’s good. So moving forward a little bit, let’s talk about some of the challenges in the manufacturing industry space. Obviously, right now, COVID is kind of a big deal. It’s caused some, well, we don’t need to go into what it’s caused, because I think everyone’s familiar, and if they’re not, well then, yeah, whatever. But you guys have an interesting sort of view at it, and you also have a very interesting tool that you’re helping companies to be able to kind of navigate some of these waters. Can you maybe explain a little bit about what you guys have, and what you guys are doing?

So maybe just a concept that maybe your audience would be interested in is, our data is never in the same place. I’ve got some here, some there, some in the other place, right? And one of the unique things that we are able to do rapidly is to integrate data from multiple data sources and then produce it in a logical way. And so just a story leading up to this question is, there was a customer of ours that makes MREs for our military. In their multiple plants, all of a sudden there was a suspected Al-Qaeda member in one of their plants. What did we need to do? Well, wait a minute, we just distributed N number of pallets to N number of locations based on N number of production lines, and those three systems did not talk together. However, with rapid near real-time integration, we could identify what, where, and when that was there, we put holds and recalls on that. Fortunately, there was proven not to be an issue, but the fact that we were able to rapidly respond to it.

That’s awesome.

Yeah. And so we’ve taken that, that knowledge and capability to rapidly integrate, and find, and then publish, into a number of places. If you remember, the first Ebola case that came here to the US was in Dallas, and the nieces of that man were in the school district. Well, the school districts are overwhelmingly Hispanic, and Hispanics overwhelmingly have this incredible fear of the fever. It’s just, when you talk to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, or other ones that we work with, they’re like, “Oh man, our phone rings off the hook in flu seasons, over-weighted to that particular community.” Well, these schools cleared out. Well, that was a problem.

And so the superintendent of the time, Mike Miles, needed to get on the phone and communicate, in the news, near real-time, what was happening. And we had already, was able to pull data out of their time and attendance system to say, “The number of custodians that clocked in and clocked out in those locations were this, the number of Clorox bottles and wipes that we used on campus was this, the number of lockers and desks that we cleaned were this.” That’s all data that was pulled together, made available so that he could use it and present, and respond rapidly, and thus give confidence to the community that they can come back to school. So that was another experience. Now we’re in the COVID crisis. And what we’re doing in a similar way is enabling our school campuses, or now even our manufacturing plants to identify, A, where it shows up, and then B, who is in that area to isolate it and then communicate and take action. There’s several protocols that the different sites can take. But we learned from that experience. We enable them with data analytics in order to make really rapid decisions.

Yeah, absolutely. That sounds, those were some great stories, and some great stuff there. On your first point talking about really just consolidation of data, and having that visibility into all these different disparate systems, that’s obviously a huge challenge. Even if companies do have some sort of ERP, there’s a lot of, there’s a million different systems going on, and it’s very hard to have an understanding of what’s going on from place to place. That can obviously be very challenging. We’re seeing a big shift into, a big digital transformation happening right now. How are… maybe you can tell me a little bit about how, kind of expanding on a little bit more with the school use case on what you’re doing, or how you’re able to help manufacturers be able to get some more visibility into really how to navigate this whole situation with their workforce.

Yeah, for sure. Well, there are a finite number of systems, fortunately, that are in play here, and those would be the time systems, the time tracking systems that they have. Whether it be FTEs or temporary labor, we’re still getting that information in overwhelmingly electronically. We’re able to then look at the production schedule. Often, it’ll be in a different system where they have now decided to run this, that, and whatnot. And then, whether it’s electronic or paper, those folks are put out on the production floor. So we’re bringing in that data, albeit electronic, or having people pull that, quickly pull that paper data for it and make it electronic, at the point of need, so that we can then identify, track, and then communicate out to anybody that would be involved in that– what we’re calling little fires. If we can identify the little fires, contain it, and then let everybody else do their thing, we believe that we can manage that. And we expect all medium, large locations, certainly, to have cases. And thus, we know it’s going to happen, so could we define the three or five protocols that we’re going to do when that happens? And that’s what we’re assisting with.

Well that’s awesome because, to your point, stuff is going to happen, especially as we continue to open. And we need to be able to do that, especially, you’re hearing a lot of stories of these manufacturers that were deemed essential and critical, and so they needed to continue to operate. However, you’d have issues where, maybe, to your one point, where you’d have a workforce who was scared to be able to, so having to access data, but be able to say, “Hey, this is what’s going on, this is what we’re doing. This is how we’re mitigating. This is how we’re, this is our response to,” actually having a response plan and data to be able to back up on that, I think, is critical, because you were hearing all these stories before where facilities would come in, somebody would get it, and then it would spread, and then you’d have to shut down a line, or multiple lines, or a facility And then, 14 days, from an operational standpoint, it’s an absolute nightmare. Oh, not to mention, if this is critical, they’re manufacturing some critical resources, like Clorox wipes, or paper towels, or gloves, or what have you, and you were hearing these stories. And so… In a finite way, what, is this like a dashboarding type tool, with things you can pull in, you can see all these different reports? Walk me through, what does that look like?

Yeah, for sure. So in part, it’s a dashboard, certainly, that would be able to communicate some summary level information, but it also shows the network of the number of rings. One degree, two degrees, three degrees of separation from folks such that we can implement one, two, and three different protocols, depending on how close or involved you are with that situation. But I would take it, one other thing that’s really key is to simplify the communication, and have a finite number of protocols on there. I think it’s very relevant to your audience that on a lot of our plant sites, we’ll see, “Number of days to last injury.” Okay? So great.

Yeah, absolutely. Safety’s huge.

Safety’s huge. So this is a different type of safety concern, right? A number, communicating very clearly, “We have this many of suspected cases and this many of active, confirmed cases right now in our facility.” Be open about that. And the fact that it’s a number allows people to respond. And as you have seen with our kids, maybe on the soccer field or whatever they do, they respond to numbers.

Gamify it a little bit.

And everybody was like, “How many days can I go until the next whatever?” And, “Gosh, we’ve gone up to 20 days.” I don’t know, the county I live in up here in Forsyth County, you know, we got up to 21 days, and then we finally had another death. And so the longest number of days we’ve had in a window was 21. And I was counting it every day, and like, “Ah, 21! Alright, we’re starting over.” And now we’re up to 16 again. So I’d love to think that numbers drive behavior, but local numbers, not these big national drama numbers that everybody gets wrapped up in, but rather, on our campuses, on our industrial campuses, we should know.

That sounds super fascinating and very helpful. You know, a lot of… Earlier on, we were talking with a lot of different manufacturers, and kind of saying, “What are your procedures? What are your policies, what are you guys doing?” A lot of them were initially saying, “Hey, we’re going to have different break times.” So instead of having, “We’re going to shut this line down, or whatever, 15 minutes on,” they would do it in stages, and lunches would be staggered, and all that stuff. So I’d imagine by doing some things like this, you’re able to kind of recapture some efficiency, because certainly, that wasn’t very efficient, and so your production capacities were dramatically reduced. By doing something like this, you might be able to actually, with a lot more confidence, be able to go in and actually implement some more efficient production operations, but then also have the tools to be able to, to your point, to be able to identify, and to be able to implement those protocols when and if needed.

And I think people need to ask, “Mark, will this really work?” And I actually have, right here in Atlanta, a whole county is the largest poultry manufacturing–

Huge.

In the US, for sure, maybe the world. It’s incredibly big. And it was on the news such that, “Well, we’ve got a breakout in our poultry manufacturing plants,” which is true. Fortunately, one of our customers is Northeast Georgia Health System, and they managed that in collaboration with those plants to get them back online. But guess what? They came back online in a short amount of time. They dealt with it, they snuffed it out, they put new protocols in place, or continued to enhance the protocols that they had, and they’re back online, and doing well. And that tells me that, A, with a methodical process, with information, and with the natural business will to do that, it’s very possible. These are intimate situations that these folks are working in when, if you’ve ever been in a plant, it’s fascinating, a poultry plant. And so, but they got it to work, and they’re up and running, and we’re enjoying chicken today.

Awesome! So if I were to, in layman’s terms, I’ll break it down, for our audience too, it’s just looking at, the ability of having, got to have the access to the data. So you’re taking temperatures, you’re doing, you have, “Okay, here’s, who’s coming in, when they’re coming in, here’s the line that they’re working on.” So to be able to have that, then, if something happens, be able to identify those, that individual or individuals, implement that protocol. And then instead of saying, “Okay, wait, we’ve got to do this on a whole company-wide thing,” we can isolate and say, “Hey, we know that this person was just on this, line A,” or something, “around this area.” So the impact will be a lot smaller to operations, but yet you feel like you’ll be able to still mitigate that.

For sure. And I know our industrial engineers have been rethinking that pod-like or group-like setting to keep the shifts, the teams, and all that stuff. I think it’s important, the ability to, a lot of times, “Oh, the line’s down. Move people over there,” that may be done, or they may say, “You know what? We’re going to go ahead and hold off until that line comes back up.” So I think a people concern as it relates to this, I think, obviously, is the biggest. But interesting enough, we also are shipping our product out. Some of our product’s being shipped in real time, coming off the line, and going out. And some of that product may in fact carry the disease for a day or two. And thus, understanding inventory control, going ahead and maybe even leaving it on the truck, or leaving it in the warehouse, and shipping a day later, understanding those that are delivering near real time product have an additional maybe concern to this disease, because it is moving.

Absolutely. Well, it sounds like that’s a fantastic solution you have there. For those who might want to learn more, what’s the best way to kind of go check this out?

Yeah, so IPC global, the website’s ipc-global.com. And all my information is there, happy to speak and engage. Whilst we have a lot of standardized stuff, ultimately, each business would get adapted. It’s quite unique in what they’re trying to solve for, maybe what they’ve already solved for, that we can leverage that and leverage their expertise. Ours certainly is in data and analytics.

Excellent. Well, Mark, I really appreciate the time, and just kind of walking us through what you guys have, and these great solutions. I think it’s, I think a lot of our audience will really enjoy this episode, and you may be getting some phone calls, we’ll see.

Maybe so. Thank you for the time.

Hey, thanks so much for coming.

Alright, very good. Thank you.

Alright, well that wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with Mark Meersman from IPC Global. Hey, they’ve got a really interesting tool. Go check it out if it’s something that you think that your organization might need. We’ll put the web address under the show notes. If you are listening on any podcast, we’ll have that in there as well. So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for listening or watching. Hey, listen, if you’re not subscribed on our email list, you need to do it, and you do it today, because you’re missing out on a lot of other great episodes, just like this that you heard with Mark. We’re talking to other executives, leaders, talking about what’s going on in the industry, what they’re doing, decisions they’re making, challenges they’re facing, opportunities that are out there. So go ahead and subscribe, industrialsage.com, and you’ll get this great content sent to you every week. I’m Danny Gonzales. Thanks for watching or listening. I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Alright. Welcome back. This is a two part series of PPC. This is part two. In part one we went over a little bit of that framework, that 30,000 foot view of what is going on in PPC. Hopefully we gave it justice in the 20 minutes that we went over. Because there’s quite a few things going on. In this episode, we’re going to really go over a couple of little, best practices, a couple of different considerations you might want to have if you’re going to implement a PPC campaign. We have our guest, Lillie is here again to kind of walk us through her process on what she does with her PPC campaigns and share some tips and tricks and a little bit of strategy on what you might want to consider. I’m Danny Gonzales.

And I’m Judson Voss.

And this is IndustrialSage. Alright, let’s jump into more of that tactical approach on a PPC. So a big question.

Uh oh.

I know you’ve got a good answer for it, right?

Uh oh.

A company wants to jump into PPC, what should they do? What are the first steps?

Oh, it’s my answer again. It depends. It really depends. So depending on what you want to accomplish, there are a lot of different ways you could go. So I think I mentioned in the last session that we did that an approach you would take from a retail perspective is going to be a lot different than something to just brand aware or to get people to go to certain pages or to mirror a traditional campaign. There are so many different ways you can go. So what I really start with is identifying what you want. I’ve worked with clients, I’ve worked with my own… I’ve worked with people more on the manufacturing side of things. And so many times I’ve had meetings with people where they just don’t have realistic expectations, and it really works best if you segment everything out and understand what you’re going after. That’s why so much of pay-per-click, depending on which medium you’re using, is set up at a campaign level. So you can do different campaigns. So first of all, figure out what’s important to you. Figure out what’s important to your brand, what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you trying to get more, just clicks to the website? Are you trying to get more people to sign up for your newsletter or podcast? Which you should subscribe.

Oh I like that too.

I got your plug, there we go. Or, really what it is you’re trying to do. I’m in a B2B situation, like the industry I’m currently working in, it’s really about nurturing people and getting them to respond to you and engage with you and understand how your products fit them, right? So figure out what that is first. And then there are a lot of different tools you can use to get to that answer. So keep that in the back of your mind, but be open to what the rest of the market has to say. So you’d mentioned again earlier that this changes every single day, this literally changes every single day, every single day. I mean, pay-per-click, for the most part, depending on which platform you’re using, is bid based. It’s an auction, right? So much like the stock market, much like even something like eBay, it’s subject to what else is going on in the market. So that also changes. It’s human nature. And there’s a lot of different analytics and research and predictive programs you can use to help you get your hands around that. So you may see people coming from an avenue you wouldn’t have previously considered. So keep an open mind. And then after that, there are a couple of different areas you can use depending on your needs. Google is the metric. They’re the metric system really of digital marketing. They’re a great place to start. They have so many free predictive tools. If you’re in AdWords, they have Keyword Planner. They actually, they used to have within YouTube Keyword Planner too. But I think they’ve moved that more over to display of vertical planning, but there’s so much within there that you can start to use. And then use common sense too. So Google does have a lot of neural network work. It is a neural network work. Yeah, that was, that was great.

Easy word.

Right? Yeah. Neural network capabilities that they’re using, but it’s still a computer. What it may suggest might not make sense to you necessarily, but look through what they’re suggesting and kind of preen from there. And make sure you have somebody who knows what they’re doing with YouTube, because it’s really easy to waste a lot of money and time and anger your clients. And none of those are good things.

In general. Do you have a URL for that one tool? Common sense?

For common sense? I wish. I wish.

That’s too bad.

Unfortunately, you can’t purchase it these days.

Speaking of tools actually, and we don’t want to go into everything. The beta machine only records for eight hours, and we wouldn’t have time.

Gotcha.

Can you throw out a couple ideas? You mentioned the free stuff on a Google, maybe another place to start that sort of that SEO keyword type of thing.

So Moz is a really great SEO. So that’s not actually, pay-per-click, that’s sort of paper clicks, more nuanced sister these days. Since again, Google is trying to force people over to pay-per-click, and Facebook’s trying to force people, and YouTube is trying to force people to pay for it. Moz, I love though, because a lot of that kind of all plays together. This is a paid subscription, but they’re fabulous if you have access to it. Conductor Searchlight rules. Again, I don’t know if I’m allowed to plug pay services.

Sure. We’ll hit back up for…

You can just send my check to us later. I love them. Optmyzer is also a really good platform too. They, I find, are a little bit more accessible, price-wise than Conductor is. But Conductor, I think if you’re looking for something that really compares what’s going on specifically on other people’s websites, it’s money for that, yeah.

Gotcha.

Like competitors.

Yes.

I see where this is going. Okay, great.

I mean, but you have to, you really do have to consider your competitors in this sphere because a lot of it’s auction-based, and that’s, I mean, it’s not just, “oh, do I Pepsi, do I Coke?” It’s, “I need to know what Pepsi’s bidding on so that I can make sure that I’m in that space and protecting my backyard and protecting a marketplace that I want to dominate,” right?

Sure.

Sorry, we’re in Atlanta, so we had to go after Pepsi a little bit.

And I think in the B2B space too, you find knowing what your competitors doing it is important or just as importantly not doing.

Absolutely.

They may not be there at all.

That’s a great point. And a lot of times with B2B, especially in the industrial space… What’s a good way to put this? There’s a lot of work still to be done. But if you are cognizant of these things, you still kind of have a first, market advantage to it. So I think you make a great point, absolutely know what they’re not doing. So you can be there first or leverage perhaps what you are doing instead.

Sure. And I think you get pigeonholed to it and say, maybe they’re not on AdWords for a reason. That maybe it doesn’t work there, but other places more targeted do…

Sure.

…Or whatever it is that should mixes that up.

And again, everyone is sort of their own little chemistry set, when it comes to digital marketing, so what might not be working for them, might work great for you. And it’s a matter of being open to that process. So really good digital marketing is semi-scientific. It’s kind of a mixture of a science and an art. It’s really like hard statistical analysis if you’re doing it right. And keeping that into consideration and having strong numbers to back up what you’re doing. So plan well, do a very good educated sort of a hypothesis as to what you think is happening, but be willing to change your experiment as time goes on. And the market always does change. So again, maybe what works for Judson Industries, doesn’t work for Lillie Industries, even though we’re in the same marketplace.

Gotcha.

So be open to that.

Okay, cool. So we talked a little bit about tools and how you go about researching things. Not every marketing department is going to be able to, or want to do that.

Some of it’s quite expensive too, yeah.

So now I guess your next option is agency.

Oh man.

How do you pick, you know, do it in house, take it to an agency?

So, my thought on doing it in house is this, if you’re the kind of person who can read a book and then properly wire an entire house up to the electrical code, do it in house. And those people do exist, they do. In one of my previous tenures, I worked for General Motors, and I went to thousands of dealerships I dealt with all over the US and Canada. And I met one person who I was like, “You know what? You could handle this.” And he had like two master’s degrees, and one of them was in statistics. So that’s why I was like, “You know what? I think, I think you’ve got this, you probably don’t have to hire out.” But it’s that level of sophistication. So you can internally hire for that. There are some really good PPC gurus out there. The nice thing about it being an internet-based platform is it’s easy to keep in contact with people and keep apprised of new stuff. However, if you’re going the agency route, which is also a perfectly valid and healthy way to go, work with somebody who’s collaborative. And if they make stuff sound really easy, I’d be extremely leery. Because as we mentioned, the level of granularity and sophistication you can get into with this is it’s astronomical. I mean, you could really teach a whole graduate level course on this. It’s that much detail. So I would say work with somebody who doesn’t give you the, “Oh yeah, we’ve got this, it’s fine.” Because that’s, that’s concerning. But instead is very collaborative in their approach. Hears you out, hears what your goals are. And also calls you on some of your BS too. You do want someone who does that because a good pay-per-click manager or someone who is implementing that is the person who says, “Hey, I know you said this was really important to you, we’ve wasted thousands of dollars trying to follow this. It’s not working. It’s not converting. Can we try it maybe on this campaign that is working?” So you want that level of conversation because they’re really the ones interpreting and changing, molding this data.

Okay.

That’s a great point. Yeah. You don’t want the yes man.

No, no. And if you badger somebody into being an order taker, you’re harming yourself. Because again, you are hiring somebody to be an expert in an extremely nuanced field. And again, you’re hiring them theoretically because they know more than you. So, encourage them too, but hold people accountable as well. One of the things I highly advocate, if you do work with an agency that will see if they’ll give you read access to the platforms that they’re using. So you can take a look. So much of this stuff is, at least from like a certification perspective, is free. So it’s free to get AdWords certified. It’s free to get, I think it’s Facebook Blueprint is the name of it now. You can do that no matter who you are, and then you can slap it on your LinkedIn and be fancy. But really it’s, you don’t necessarily have to be like, the script writing god to do this, but gain some literacy with it and make sure that you do get some insight into what’s going on and indicate PIs in case, you know, you just want to look or, you retain that level of literacy.

Makes sense.

That’s great. I mean, great. Some really great points. I, you know, a couple of things. So what I’m hearing is it’s a plan. So go back to strategy, plan segmentation in there was a really good piece of breaking it down to a campaign level. So it’s not like, we’re just going to send everything to everybody and all that. But another great area was using some of the tools to be able to, you know, research, but then really just making sure that you’re looking at it, right?

Yes.

And you’re constantly…

Yes, yes, yes.

…Maybe doing some AB testing, looking at what’s working and what’s not, I think was, is kind of important to us.

And again, remember it does change daily. It literally changes daily. So that’s not to say that, you know, your campaign’s completely crushed within one day, unless you’re a very high volume person like Amazon or a business like that… person. Wow. That’s scary. That was a bad Freudian Slip, ooh! But, in any case, yeah, you should keep an eye on it and be cognizant of internet trends too. I mean, again, I come from automotive, oftentimes holiday weekends were huge, huge amounts of traffic, and you want to make sure you’re protected for that. And you want to analyze that because maybe you have not the greatest sale weekend, you can kind of go through and say, okay, well what models did I really fall on my face for? Like what can I put together to figure out what I can do better next time? Not just on a digital marketing perspective, but an in house perspective too, because data is really a symptom. It’s not a cause of anything, necessarily. And you need to think about it that way. So if you see a big drop off, if you see something weird happening, that’s, you know, it’s like a runny nose, essentially. You’ve got to figure out what’s causing it. So be cognizant of those things.

Don’t treat the symptom, go for the root. Ha ha. Alright, excellent. That was good. So anything else that you might want to add? I know there’s a million things we can go over, but you know, I know any, any other little.

So kind of a double edged sword of the internet is that you have so much information, and that’s great. I mean, I think it’s connected us in meaningful and sometimes creepy ways, but ultimately I think it’s a neutral tool, right? So as I mentioned before, there’s just so much misinformation about this. Remain literate, but be open to listening to experts. There were so many free webinars you can attend. A lot of very big agencies will run webinars too. One of the best resources I’ve ever encountered is thinkwithgoogle.com. So it’s a Google property, and they have so much information that they have these amazing case studies in there. They’re usually broken out by vertical. They really do apply nicely. So if you’re looking into information, that’s a really great place to start, and just be leery of some of the things you’ve been told too, and investigate them a bit more.

Great.

Wow, this is great. Well, we’ll make sure we have a lot, you threw out a lot of different resources.

Yeah.

We’ll make sure we put those in the show notes and have it so, you know, our viewers can access that later, But, you know, thanks again so much for coming…

Thanks for having me, this was fun.

…on this two part series. This has been very educational, and hopefully I think our viewers find it very, very valuable. So, you know, thanks again for watching this. If you have any questions on PPC or if you have any other additional digital marketing questions, feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to address them in an episode. You can reach out to industrialsage.com/questions, and we’d be happy to look at them and answer them on a episode. So again, thanks for watching, be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you next week. Thanks.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Well, thank you for joining me today on today’s Executive Series. I am joined by David Peacock who is the President of Hytrol Conveyor Company from Jonesboro, Arkansas. David, thank you so much for joining me today.

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.

Absolutely, well, I’m excited to kind of jump in and just talk to learn more about you and about Hytrol. But, before we jump into everything, can you just tell me and the audience a little bit about Hytrol, who you guys are, and what you guys do?

Okay, we’re a family-owned private company making conveyors. We were founded in 1947, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and relocated to Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1962. We make high-speed sortation equipment controls, the full breadth of conveyor products that you expect from a company in our industry. And, we’ve got about 1,300 employees. We’ve really grown over the last three or four years in terms of the number of employees and the volume of business that we’ve been doing. So, it’s been a very exciting time for us.

Excellent, well, there’s a lot going on, obviously, in the industry, a tremendous amount of growth and we’ll get into that a little bit here later in the episode. But, before that, I want to know a little bit more about you, David. Tell me your background. How did you get involved in the industry?

I grew up in North Carolina. I have moved around quite a bit. I’ve actually lived in 13 states and so I’ve got–

Oh, wow.

I have moved quite a bit. Coming out of high school, my best friend talked me into going to the Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. And then, he decided that he didn’t want to go, so I went down there by myself. Fantastic opportunity. I recognized that that was the start of the journey that opened a significant number of doors and so I’m very appreciative of the experience that I got there. The Marine Corps actually paid for me to go to college and so I went there. I earned a scholarship from those folks and went into the Marine Corps and served as a First Lieutenant, then got promoted to Captain for about a little over 10 years and got out in the mid 90s, then joined corporate America. I went to Rubbermaid to begin with in an operations role. Had a really great time there. Got an opportunity to move into material handling, but it was on the vehicle side in 2001 up in Wisconsin. I worked for a company called OmniQuip. We got purchased two years later. I moved to Pennsylvania with JLG Industries. Again, material handling, but again vehicles. And, in 2007, got recruited to move to Texas to stand up a facility for a European company in an operations role and was there until 2014 when I got the opportunity to come here. Most of my experiences, you see, is primarily in operations. But, coming here was a huge opportunity. I’m the third president in the 73 year history of Hytrol.

Wow.

Was founded the company, was president until the early 90s, and then Gregg Goodner was the president until I took over in 2015. So it’s been a really… It’s the American dream story. I mean, it’s where I started and the path that I took to get here. I’m very fortunate to be in this role. Mr. Loberg created an incredible company and love being at Hytrol.

That’s awesome. No, I love the hearing about the American dream. And just hearing your sense of gratitude on that. So, tell me a little bit, like, in your career, where were some… where were some big moments that, some big learning lessons that you’ve taken away? Maybe, you mentioned that when you were at the Citadel, you were in the Marine Corps, there was a lot that you got from that. Can you maybe share a few things?

Yeah, the Citadel opened my eyes to the world. I mean, I hadn’t traveled a great deal. The first time I got on a plane was when I flew down to Charleston my freshman year. And so, it really exposed me and I became friends with young men all over the country at the Citadel and developed some great relationships to this day. We talk very regularly and are there to support each other. So, it’s understanding the importance of the friendships that I developed and just the breadth of exposure to people from all over the country. And even internationally, we had several students, classmates that were from Panama and other places around the world. So, that was a great experience just to get me started in terms of thinking more of a national global level. Marine Corps, the two lessons I tell people that I took from the Marine Corps, the first one is how to be a good leader. Now, we all drop the ball on and we mess up on occasion, but that gave me the skills that, to understand that treat people the way you want to be treated and don’t ask folks to do things you’re not willing to do yourself and just be out there, engage with people and having those conversations. Huge leadership opportunities and a great learning opportunity for me.

The other one is a little less obvious and that is the value of making a decision. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I was often surprised at how slow some folks would be to make decisions. You get paralyzed by not having adequate information and, at some point, no decision is a worse decision than a bad decision. And so, I learned the value of collecting information and making the decision based upon what you know at the moment and moving forward. And so, that was, I think, a very valuable lesson that I’ve lived with for the last 25 years and probably one of the things I’m most grateful from the Marine Corps for. Then, and the other item, I think, is just the willingness to take an opportunity. That’s when JLG bought OmniQuip, they offered over 100 people opportunities to move from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, and only four of us actually took ’em up on that opportunity. And, if an opportunity is presented to yourself, be open to those opportunities because you don’t know where they’re going to lead and that led, it was a chain of events that have led me to have Hytrol. And so it’s, I think, just being aware of opportunities and then being, having the willingness to step through the door and take that challenge.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s awesome. So, first of all, thank you for your service. Not to be cliche, but seriously, thank you because I… you mentioned you were in the Marine Corps for 10 years. So, I imagine that was a… there’s a lot of sacrifice involved. There’s a lot of things that you probably necessarily didn’t want to do that you kind of had to do, and you kind of had to have some grit. So, thank you. And I love those lessons, those takeaways, so certainly the leadership aspect. The decision making thing is fascinating to me, especially right now where you want to talk about people being fraught with having to make decisions with very limited or constantly changing information scenarios. Analysis paralysis is a real thing. Or, maybe what I’ve heard a lot- just decision making fatigue is definitely been a big challenge. Then, obviously, there’s this third piece of really being aware of opportunities, but not just aware, but really just jumping, taking advantage of them, and actually taking action on them. That’s awesome. That’s great.

And I, it exists both on a personal level, but also on a company level. I mean, we have to be, as a company, as Hytrol, we have to be aware. This is a tough year. We all know it’s a tough year, but there’s huge opportunities that are being presented to us as a result of that as well. And so, being willing to exercise that same philosophy at the corporate level as you do on a personal level, I think is important.

Absolutely. Well, okay, so let’s pivot a little bit and talk about Hytrol with those things. And, actually, maybe we can run with those themes of what you’ve talked about, which I would love to expand on a little bit more from a leadership standpoint. How is that influencing you right now at Hytrol?

I think the– First of is taking care of our people, right? The way we have, we’ve spent a good deal of money this year that was unbudgeted, unplanned, to put safeguards in place, so we can take care of our folks. The last thing that we want is to have a bunch of folks come down with COVID. And, both from a personal perspective, doing the right thing for them and also, for the company’s and our customers’ perspective, making sure that we can deliver product. And so, whether it’s the temperatures, all the different protocols that the CDC suggests that you do, if we have someone who is exposed, we send them home, that Congress passed the, and I don’t recall the name of the bill, but it’s for companies smaller than us, so it doesn’t apply for us, but the right thing for us to do for our folks was to mirror that program.

And so, when we send folks home, we provide COVID leave pay for them, so that they can stay home and take care of their families and not be hurt any more than, and they can really focus on getting well and not have to worry about the financial impact of staying at home. Doing those types of things, making sure that we’re creating opportunities for our folks to grow. So, whether it’s through tuition reimbursement and helping our folks get an education, so that they can move from their current role into a higher role in the organization, doing all of those types of things to make sure that we retain the very best people that we can, that it doesn’t do any good to have a great product if the folks that we have here can’t go out and we can’t keep, maintain the folks that we need and that we want to have in the organization. So, really, the focus is on the people. And, we do that, everything else takes care of itself.

Absolutely, no, that’s great. Now, obviously, it’s… going to feed into a great culture. And you have to have a great culture if you want to have a great company and so on. That’s fantastic. As far as this decision making piece on here, obviously there’s a lot of companies that are, quite honestly, very struggling. I’ve heard from many who’ve told me, “Hey, Danny, listen, we’re really just, honestly, we’re a little paralyzed. We don’t know what the right course of action is across many things from an operation standpoint, from a sales standpoint, from a marketing standpoint. Like, what do we do? Because things are changing so quickly and we have… we don’t have anywhere remotely near all the information.” How have you guys been able to sort of manage that? Is there, I don’t know, is there a certain process that you go through? Say, hey, we don’t have all the information and this all could do a complete 180 tomorrow. How have you been able to navigate that?

Well, I look at it at two different levels. There’s the tactical level, the day to day execution of the business and then the strategic level. Looking at the tactical level, I got here in ’14, became the president in May of ’15. We’re twice the size that we are today that we were in 2015. And we’re very high-tenured employees. I have a gentleman who works for us. He’s worked for us for 52 years.

Wow.

He’s a manager. Does an awesome job. I can’t imagine him not being part of the company. But, we have 53 people who have been here for 40 years. And so, we have a very high-tenured workforce. But, we also have– 50% of my folks have been here four years or less. And, we’ve, historically, everybody just knew how to do their job and, as we’ve transitioned and grown, there’s less and less of that. And so, encouraging our frontline leaders to make the decisions that they need to make to execute their responsibilities on a daily basis is instrumental in making sure that they’re, they feel safe and comfortable with making the decisions. So, people are going to make mistakes. And, as long as we don’t hurt someone, we can recover from that and move forward. But, it’s much better to encourage our frontline leaders to be making those decisions on a daily basis, particularly in light of… if we have a situation and someone in a key role can’t come to work because they’ve been exposed to COVID or they have COVID themselves, then those decisions can’t come from my desk. They’ve got to come from the people that’s closest to those impact areas and move forward. And so, encouraging people to make decisions at the lowest level on tactical issues is instrumental. On a strategic level, where do we, what do we need to do and we recognize that the business is changing.

Right now, this year, retail distribution has historically been a huge part of the business. But, e-commerce has dwarfed retail distribution this year and being able to pivot from that one focus to another focus at the strategic level is instrumental for us and that’s just a matter of us getting together at the, my direct reports, having conversations, staying engaged. We have, we’ve done a lot of work to make sure that while we protect ourselves from the– If I get sick, we already know who’s going to take my place and making sure that that individual and I spend as little time together face to face as possible, but that we engage, we continue the conversations is critical. And so, we’re doing a lot of those types of things to make sure that we can continue to move forward. But it’s really the two issues. Let’s make sure we take advantage of the opportunities that are available to us today at the tactical level, but let’s make sure that we that we stay plugged in on where business is going to take us over the long term, and then we put the resources in place to be successful over those longer term periods.

Yeah, absolutely. So, kind of transitioning and to kind of pivot a little bit, well, let’s talk about pivoting. Let’s talk about those opportunities. You mentioned that that was a big thing you’ve learned to say, hey, look, to be aware of what those opportunities are and then be able to take action on them. What are those opportunities, and you’ve kind of mentioned a few of them here. What are those opportunities that you see that obviously are in the short term and then, but certainly, in the long term, relative to this whole COVID thing?

Yeah, I think– People have always been the challenge, right? There’s still the challenge. It just has taken a different form this year because in the past, if you go back six months, unemployment in Jonesboro was below 3%. Well, unemployment in Jonesboro is not 3% today. You have, that doesn’t mean that having, getting the right resources, the right people in place is any easier. It’s just a different methodology or different issues that are challenging us to have the right people. And that applies internally and it applies to our customers and recognizing that, what do we need to do to support them? And so, if we understand that it might be difficult for us to provide field service by putting somebody in a plane and flying them to one of our end user sites to do maintenance on a piece of equipment, what technology exists for us to be able to provide that same level of support, protect our employees, but also make sure that our customers are able to have the functionality that, the uptime that they need.

And so, that’s one of the challenges. Internally, how can we continue to increase our productivity, our efficiencies, in this environment? When you think about, we don’t want one area having someone with COVID wandering into a different part of the facility. We have 700,000 square feet, so how do we protect folks? We have a health clinic that does an excellent job for us in terms of medical staff to make sure that we stay on the front edge of any possible issue that we might have and that we’ve been very fortunate. We’ve had a few people that have been diagnosed with COVID. All of them have been minor. We haven’t had anybody hospitalized. And I attribute that to the fact that we recognized the challenge early on. 100% masks in the facility, temperature checks, limiting people’s going to the cafeteria, a lot of those types of things. And so, just staying ahead of it, I think, is the opportunity for us.

So, and pardon me if you’ve already answered this, but you mentioned you have a 700,000 square foot facility that’s in Jonesboro. Do you have other locations, or you’re in, it’s all in Jonesboro?

Well, we’re all in Jonesboro right now. We have our tech center, which is about a half a mile down the road that we bring customers in that has about 90% of our product in demonstration configurations, so that we can run product for them and they can see what our products are. We do R and D down there as well and then the facility we have here. But, everything is located in Jonesboro.

Gotcha, okay. So let’s look at maybe some of the industry challenges and maybe those industry opportunities that are out there right now. What are you- what are you seeing? What do you think, if you could take your crystal ball out and forecast, where do you see things going?

Well, we’ve talked a little bit about people, so that’s going to be ongoing. The other side is technology. Technology is advancing at an incredible pace right now and making sure that we stay relevant by understanding what technology offers us and how do we plug that into our indoor equipment. So, for example, we have a significant R and D program to continue to take noise out of our equipment. Noise is one of the challenges that everybody faces. We’ve partnered with the University of Arkansas and Arkansas State. Both have programs that are underway, working with us to try to figure out is there different materials that we can use, are there, to eliminate noise? Are there other materials that we can use to buffer that noise? And so, that’s just one example of where we’re applying technology. How do we go faster using less energy and more reliability? How do we predict when we have… if we have a motor that starts to draw increased amperage or heats up where it’s vibrating, that we capture that data and make sure that we recognize that we probably have a problem coming up with that particular motor and we’re in a position to change it on our schedule and our customer’s schedule, as opposed to it failing in the middle of a run and them not being able to, they’re loop having downtime.

So, taking advantage of technology as we insert it into our equipment, looking at technology that we can use to make our products better or move into a different area, and then, also, technology inside our facility. I have to be of two minds. I look at, when I think of technology, how do we employ it in our products, but also how do we employ it in our production facility? So we have a huge robotic cell, seven robots that are building products for us that used to take 18 people. It’s very heavy, and so we did it for safety, but we also did it for productivity, not because we want to reduce people. We actually had to hire 200 people more to do other things in the facility that complements what the robots are doing.

Absolutely.

Robots grow our workforce, not reduce our workforce. And, it also created opportunities. Some of our highest paid employees are those that are robot, that are involved in the robot cell to make sure that we’re attracting the best talent possible in that area. But, we have to look at leveraging technology in our production processes as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that technology definitely is a huge thing and that’s going to continue to be the story for years to come. It was a big story before, but now it’s even… it’s even more, so. Well, David, I really appreciate it and enjoyed our conversation, learning a little bit about you and about Hytrol. For those who would like to learn more about you, what’s the best way to learn more about Hytrol?

My marketing team does a great job of putting us out in the public’s eye. Come to our website. We only sell through our distribution network, so, but you can come to the website, you can find an integration partner that we work with that fills, meets your needs. If you need some additional help, reach, give us a call. We love hosting people in Jonesboro to see our facility, but the website will connect you to us and then we will be able to connect you to the right folks from there.

Excellent. Well, David, thank you so much for your time today and thanks for coming on the IndustrialSage Executive Series.

Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation.

All right. I enjoyed it. Well, there you go, wrapping up today’s Executive Series with David Peacock from the Hytrol Conveyor Company. You can go check them out if you have any information, like to learn more about them. And, this is, this wraps today’s episode. Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t. You can go to industrialsage.com and subscribe to get the Executive Series sent to you and other content that we have around sales and marketing. We’ve got news and a lot of other things there, so if you have not subscribed, go ahead and do that today. If you are tuning in or watching us on social media, hey, jump in the conversation, add a comment, ask a question, and we’d love to hear from you. So, that’s it. I’m wrapping up today. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Lead generation is a typical challenge for most, if not all manufacturing marketers. You have to constantly feed the beast. Now, one of the most often used digital tactics to help generate leads is utilizing a pay-per-click or “PPC” campaign. And when it first rolled out, it seemed almost magical. You just set up a list of keywords, and voila. Clicks to your website. Well, things have changed a little bit over the last few years, and it’s not as easy as it was. It’s way more competitive. You can spend a ton of money on it and get nominal results. And it’s not a “Set It and Forget It” type of thing. Things can change every single day among many other variables. So for today’s episode, we’ve got a very special guest. We have Lillie Beiting from Stanley who’s going to share with us her process on PPC and some tips and tricks on how to get the results that you’re after. Now there’s a lot going on in this, so we are going to break this into two different episodes. And today we’ll be focusing on, “What is PPC?” I’m Danny Gonzales.

And I’m Judson Voss.

And this is IndustrialSage. All right, so let’s jump into this two-part series of PPC. On this first episode we’re going to talk about “What is PPC?” What’s going on there? So before we jump into all that, Lillie, I was hoping you can tell us a little about yourself, your history, your background.

All right, so I am Lillie Beiting. I am currently working for Stanley Black & Decker, but I worked for one of their products called CribMaster. We are industrial vending solutions. And previous to that, actually I was in automotive. So I was in a whole bunch of different tiers of automotive, but I gave it up. I’m now on the industrial side. So a lot of background in digital marketing with that.

Cool. Excellent. Very cool. All right, so I kind of want to lay a little bit of a foundation for our viewers who may not be as familiar with PPC. There’s a little bit of misinformation out there.

There’s a ton of misinformation.

So just kind of let’s go basic. What is it?

So pay-per-click is just that. It’s a click you pay for. Now I know people think that it’s just AdWords or just what you see on a search engine. It’s a lot broader than that. And when I discuss it, I kind of use it as a generalized term because so much of pay-per-click is on so many different platforms and mediums now. So just think of it as that, but something like Facebook could be pay-per-click. Display can be pay-per-click. LinkedIn can be pay-per-click. Arguably even boosted content could be that too. So again, just think of it kind of as the medium in which you purchase internet advertising now. Video can be pay-per-click. It all varies.

Gotcha. Okay, so it’s removing– Because I know a big thing is with that– You mentioned that you think, at least I know I did for a while, it was like PPC is just Google AdWords that that’s it. So it’s just anything else essentially, that could be–

Correct. And it’s actually important now to think about it in an abstract sense because people don’t really recognize channels as much as they did anymore. For example, YouTube is a search engine. I don’t think people think of YouTube as a search engine, but it is. And when people are, or clients are engaging with a business where they’re engaging in search, there are a whole bunch of different places it could be. So do think of pay-per-click as kind of an abstract concept of how a business can purchase advertising. It’s really the best way to go about it.

Okay. Great. So I guess maybe the next question would be, how, I mean, I think, well, how would you use it? I mean, obviously it’s paid and…

And it’s per click.

And it’s per click, yes.

There you go. There you go. So you’re going to hear this a lot for all the questions you ask, but it really depends. So at a bare minimum for a business, I would say brand protection is the way to go. So anything that has anything to do with your brand. So AdWords, for example, or Facebook, just make sure you’re at least appearing for your brand. “Backyard protection” is what I like to call that. And then as you start getting into campaigns, or different goals, then you can kind of start looking through and figuring out what works out for you or what would be the best avenue for you.

Okay. So on the brand protection side, where do you sort of start up from there?

Always, always, always protect your name. Absolutely. Because if you have competitors they are bidding on your name. That is the way of the world now.

So, how might that, like, you mean like protecting your name, what would you do?

So if you’re buying keywords, so Google would be a place you buy keywords, Bing, Yahoo. Make sure that you’re protecting your name there. So CribMaster, for example, we buy CribMaster that specific word. And then you want to buy your own products too. So it tends to be a pretty cheap click if it’s your own stuff, but you want to make sure that base level, your names, your properties, your intellectual content is protected there. If you do nothing else at the very least protect that because as time is changing, a lot of these platforms are monetizing, right? So Google used to be fairly free from an SEO perspective. They’re trying to push more people into paid search because they make more money that way.

Yeah.

Yes. So absolutely protect your name.

Okay. And then the second tier sort of going after your competitors?

Ah, conquesting, I don’t actually suggest, in most situations because it’s extremely protective. So conquesting, for the audience, conquesting is essentially buying somebody else’s names or products.

Okay.

Be very careful about that because if you don’t do it right, you can just, you might as well just burn your money.

Okay.

Okay.

You can also throw it around there are many things you can do. You’re wasting it essentially if you’re not extremely targeted and careful.

Gotcha. So once we got ahold of PPC and all these different pieces that are there, you talked about autos and the different areas from a B2B perspective. B2B versus B2C how does that differ on a paperclip standard?

So I think B2B marketers especially like to think that we’re very, very different and there certainly are differences between B2C, but you’ve got to remember that everyone is glued to some kind of electronic device now and search engines, whether it’s Google, whether it’s YouTube, whether it’s going through class articles, magazines, what have you online is something that B2B decision makers make like they do that. That’s not unique to, you know, somebody looking up shoes online. That’s the way of the world now. So you do want to make sure that you’re protected for that, but you also want to make sure that you have a very nurturing relationship. Because a lot of B2B decisions take a long time, right? It’s not, again, the impulse of going to Nordstrom, “Here, my shoe’s done.” It’s making sure that you’re touching somebody at a regular point. So we may be getting into this in the next segment. But if you have somebody’s information, which is to say, maybe they went to your website, maybe you have their email address. If you’re super fancy and a physical location that people convert at, you can sometimes get information that way too. You want to make sure you’re nurturing them throughout the entire process. So I would say branding, that’s just a general thing for everybody. But as you’re going to that campaign level, if you’re going to that B2B model, maybe if you’re splitting down to a certain area, make sure you’re nurturing those people, and there are a lot of different ways you can do that that are much deeper and thorough than just brand protection.

Okay. Then I guess one question that’s probably good to bring up now too, is: We’ve gotten the basics, we’ve gotten to understand the difference between B2B and B2C. And this might be really basic. What are some of the terms that people need to get familiar with to understand what the inner workings are going on, what they need to pay attention to?

There are so many letters just crammed together.

Can we just start with the first 50?

Right and actually some of the letters and KPI’s is more letters.

More letters for you.

Some of the KPIs vary depending on the platform. So an impression load in Facebook is a little bit different than an impression load in AdWords than it would be in DoubleClick, for example. So there’s a little bit of difference to it and just be sort of cognizant of that. Some of the most important things I would say, I am an impression share freak really. That’s what I really pay attention to. And that’s a term that’s specific to paid search within a major search engine like Bing or Google or Yahoo or any of those. So impression share essentially is how much of the market you own. There are only x amount of impressions because somebody, you know, they rely on how many searches there are. And impression share will tell you how many of those you’re hitting for. An impression is just how many times you show up, period. It’s not where you rank. It’s none of that. It’s just, if you appear in a search, that’s considered an impression, right? But again, usually there’s more than one person in the market or one entity in the market. So figuring out what percentage of that you own is some really valuable information to understand how people are interacting with your business. So that I really care about a lot. Click-through rate, also very important. That number and kind of the things I’m comfortable with or ranges I’m comfortable seeing also varies quite a bit. So you’ll see a very low click through rate for display. That’s usually like point teens I see that in maybe point twos versus something like pay-per-click. Not pay-per-click. No, ad-words. See, I’m guilty of it too. Versus AdWords where I expect to see it in the single digits or if you’re, if you’re really feeling fancy the teens.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right, so maybe we can break down a little bit to throw out a couple of words. I want to make sure that we’ve got a good understanding of what you– display, the impressions and click-through rate. So like display versus… like, let’s lay a baseline, what is that?

Sure. Okay, so display versus AdWords, actually display can be housed under AdWords depending which channel you’re using. So if you’re using just AdWords for paid search, that’s those little ads that appear at the top of Google. Sometimes you’ll see a whole bunch of stuff underneath them. Sometimes it’s like two or three lines. It kind of varies. Now display are those ads that follow you around. They’re like digital billboards, I guess, would be the best way to describe them. But they’re getting a little more complicated than that. Because it used to just be sort of a static image and it used to be that you have to pay for the sites they’d appear on. Now there’s an extra level of complexity where they can follow you around depending on you going to the site. Or they can say, “Hey, I’ve already collected your information “because you’re a Google user. “I know you’re this demographic and that demographic “I’m going to serve you up a feed with this “that’s not just an image. It’s a bunch of products “my research is telling me you’re likely to engage with.” So it’s those ads. But think of them as visual. Those are what follow you around.

So display being graphically driven. Visual.

Correct. Correct. And then kind of the sister to display would be Pre-roll. Sometimes you see Post-role too, but those are the little video ads that appear before your cat videos on YouTube. But they appear on a lot of different areas. So just think of Pre-roll is like a mini commercial. Sometimes it’s a long commercial actually. I’ve seen companies do like 15 minute, 20 minute Pre-roll but you have to be HBO pretty much to make that work out. If it’s “Game of Thrones” people watch.

So Pre-roll is the thing you sit there and wait to click five seconds from now on?

Correct, correct. And then you have some other iterations of it too. So sometimes you’ll see in Twitter marketing, you’ll see in Facebook marketing and there are a couple of different avenues you can use. So there’s my business, which is when you pay and then you can also boost posts within your own business page. And I know that that’s kind of a hard distinction to make, but those are two very different ways of pay-per-click. And again, I consider boost post– Post boosting pay per click. There’s a little bit of a debate on that, but I think it falls into there.

Yep.

All right, so that was helpful. Thank you. And then, when it comes to impressions, just kind of want to lay the framework. So you mentioned, let’s say we’ve got a display out. Let’s say there’s an image of something we’re trying to drive people to our website about a new product or something that we’ve got going out there. And you mentioned with impressions. So what is, for our audience, just explain what does that mean like in terms of what is an impression relative to impression load, click-through rate, all that stuff, those metrics?

So an impression period is just how many times something appears. So if it’s paid search is just how many times your little text ad appears. If it’s display, it’s how many times your little video appears, or excuse me your image appears. If it’s pre-roll, it’s how many times your video appears. If it’s Facebook, it’s how many times, whatever you’ve decided goes in Facebook appears. So in something like Facebook or display if you’re doing kind of broad audience targeting, it can appear as many times as you want, right. There’s really no cap. It’s not finite. If you’re looking at something like retargeting. So you’ve got a set list of people you can use or a captive group, maybe it’s people coming to your site, that is a finite amount. So you may see more projections of share based on that, because again, fixed share, finite amount. No share, I mean, it’s like a billboard, how many times can you count it being there, right? Yeah. So that’d be kind of the difference that you see there. Were there other ones that you wanted me to describe a bit?

Click-through rate, just in terms of like, okay, the amount of, it’s the percentage of the amount of actual clicks that you get from. Yeah.

Correct. And that’s when you get charged typically. So there are a couple of different ways that you can run pay-per-click. So on the average side, you’re always going to be paying for the exact clicks. Sometimes you may see what’s called a CPM model and that’s cost per thousand is what that stands for. So that may be them charging you for pockets of a thousand of how many thousand impressions they’re serving up. So you may see that too.

Right. And when you’d be using those, just depending on what the objective of the campaign is?

Correct.

So maybe an example is if you really just want to build your brand awareness and get out there, you want people to see your name and maybe your display ads, you might want to be looking more at impressions. And that’d be more of an important thing vs, “I really want to drive people to our website for “whatever, our webinar or for whatever that may be.” And so the click through-rate and all that’s going to be a little bit more important on that.

Correct.

Is that all right?

And again, think about it conceptually, differently, too. So depending on what kind of business you are, if you are someone who’s product based. So again, back to the example of Nordstrom’s, click-through rate’s super-important for you, because you can very clearly trace when somebody engages with your ad and eventually converts to buy something. But at the same time, if you’ve got somebody who is, or a customer has already been to your site, so you cookie them and you’re able to keep serving them up that ad, sometimes it’s important just to see how many times you’ve hit them. Maybe you’ve hit them too much, that can happen. Or what it takes to kind of see that average amount of that kind of impression delivery per client per conversion. So there’s a lot of granularity you can really get into, but make sure you identify what you care about before you take a look at these metrics. Because there’s tons of numbers and they all kind of click together with each other and understanding how they work is very critical to seeing what’s profitable for you.

So pun intended, you said they all click together. Okay, I see what you did there.

Excellent.

Yeah, so one other question there– I guess two other things I want to, again, lay a little bit of the framework and get a little understanding. Cookies, being a big thing, I mean.

Yes.

It’s kind of generally accepted that people kind of get an understanding of that. But relative to, I know we touched on this too as retargeting. Maybe give it a little bit deeper explaining on that. Because that’s very, that’s exciting and that’s something that’s accessible to everybody.

Yes. It absolutely is. And retargeting again, so think of this very broadly. I know people tend to think of retargeting as just display. Again, that’s an avenue for it. Google’s really kind of conditioned us at this point for the market, but–

They’re doing a good job.

Google owns us. It’s their world. We’re just living in it. But think of retargeting as serving up people you already know about. So you may have a captive email list you can use, and you may have somebody who pretty much, if you have a Google property, whether it’s a YouTube account or a Gmail, Google knows everything about you. So if you have access to that level of information, but it’s again, think of it as a captive customer, it might just be somebody who comes to your site that you’re able to cookie. It’s that kind of contained group of people you’re able to reserve in different ways. And then you can get to very specific layers of granularity with retargeting. So you can say, okay, well I’ve got all these people in my pool and usually it’s thousands and thousands of people or IP’s really if they’re not a Google property. That’s again kind of PPC. 201 more so than 101. But if you have that information, you can start breaking it down further and saying, “Okay, well I really only care “about people in this age range who “make this much money who have this many children.” so you can get much, much more granular with it. But think of it, it kind of as audience control and serving up more specific messages based on an audience profile that you already own.

Gotcha. Can I–

So– I’m sorry. Go ahead.

I think that’s really important in B2B where you might even be living in a world where there’s 500 people in the whole world that care about what you have to say online. So that gives you the opportunity to really focus in on that and not sort of shotgun it out there.

You make a great point. You make a great point. And Danny, I think said in his introduction that you can just throw away money at doing this, especially in the B2B world, because like at Stanley, I’m on the industrial side, there are only so many factories, right? There are only so many power plants and what have you, and being very much in control of that, it might be more expensive per acquisition per client, but it’s so much more efficient and really monitoring that journey and appealing to that customer is a great way not only to get them to convert, but to engage with them and not alienate them, and maintain a regular relationship. So retargeting there on– Sometimes you hear it called remarketing, but essentially, you know, think of it as a much higher tech CRM system. It’s monitoring who you’re communicating with and how often and what kind of communications go to them.

Good.

Excellent. I think this has been a great framework just to kind of lay the land of PPC and what it is. So I think that maybe it’s, that’s a good part, the good time, I can’t talk about that. There’s so many things going on here, cause you know, I thought PPC was just really simple, right? You set it and forget it?

No, it’s extremely complicated.

So this is just a little bit of a framework, just a quick little, you know, 30,000 foot view of what it is, maybe a little areas on how you might be able to use it. So our next episode we’re going to jump into is a little bit more tactical on the process, different use cases on how you might want to use this and how to really set up the framework and get some results. So thanks Lillie for this part one. Will join us for part two here, right after this?

All right, thank you for having me.

And thanks again for watching this. If you like what you see here, be sure to like us and we have all of our videos and content all over social media and we have an email list, so you can subscribe to that to get these emails to you sent to you weekly. We also are on iTunes, so you can subscribe there. I can’t talk today. So I’m just going to go ahead and wrap up this episode before I can’t talk anymore. Thanks for watching.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Hey, everyone welcome to another episode of the IndustrialSage Executive Series. I’m Danny Gonzales, your host. No, just kidding, I am David Caron. So, today’s episode is going to be a little bit different because today I’m interviewing the one, the man, the legend, Danny Gonzales! Cue applause!

Yeah, exactly. This feels weird.

Yeah, I know. I’m sitting in your chair.

You are sitting in my chair.

I’m sitting in Danny’s chair. But this is going to be good, okay, because Danny, you’ve interviewed 150 plus people from a variety of different organizations?

Yeah, probably, yeah.

I mean just on IndustrialSage.

Just on IndustrialSage.

That doesn’t include, all the other location interviews and all that that you’ve done.

I’ve interviewed one or two people, yeah.

“Just a handful-” hundreds. Hundreds. I’m telling you, hundreds of people. And it’s great because it’s wonderful content for our audience, for everyone that’s tuning into IndustrialSage and learning and discovering things, gaining some insights, but I thought that it would be important to know a little bit about Danny. So, what makes him tick, who’s inspired him, why this whole IndustrialSage thing came about, or how it came about, maybe who has influenced him in his career… because Danny’s got, he’s got a substantial career, 13 years running a video production company. It’s no small feat. So, enough of me talking. We want to hear from Danny. So, Danny, let’s just start maybe this episode with kind of your journey like where, like maybe from start to where we are today, maybe not everything. Like we don’t need to know like your birth story, kindergarten and grade school and high school all that, but maybe college and after that you can kind of share with us what has really impacted you on your journey.

Yeah, so, interesting story I’d say. I’ll start with… where the whole journey really started was, I’d say right before I graduated high school. I had like a senior English class thing that basically said, “Hey, for this thing you need to do a video.” And I was like, “Okay, whatever. I guess we’ve got to do a video.” So, I talked to some certain people. I don’t know if you remember that. You were involved in that. I had to make this, and I always thought that was like the nerdiest thing ever. And I was like, “The computer nerds can do this, I don’t really care about this. Whatever.” But the seed started… was planted. I was like, “This is kind of interesting.” And so, that year after I graduated, I went and did some missionary work, and I lived in Mexico for a year doing some works on youth mentorship.

Oh, ¿habla Español?

Hablo un poquito de español.

Okay, I don’t know what you just said.

Vamos a continuar en español. Que bueno–

Okay.

Lo que paso es- what? Oh, sorry, yeah.

So, we’ll continue just briefly in Spanish after some of… No, I’m sorry. I digress, okay.

We probably have a very good addressable market we could do in Spanish. But so I was in Mexico for a year, I was super excited about it because despite the last name Gonzales, I actually didn’t learn Spanish from my family. I had to take it in school and so I was like, “It’s kind of cool.” So, while I was down there I had seen over the time, this is 2002. So video and stuff was relatively it wasn’t… nowhere near as exploded as it has now. So, it was a little bit more difficult to come by but some tools were coming out and stuff, and so I met this one guy who had actually made a bunch of these little, we call them these little ‘virtue videos’ because we were working with youth mentorship and youth programs and stuff. And I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. You could put text on them, and so he was like, “Well, listen, you’ve got the program here and this system where you can figure it out,” and so I was like, “Okay, well let me tinker around.” And so I did and it just kept growing- it snowballed. I really enjoyed it. So I came back afterwards, started college and I kept doing this on the side. Meanwhile I was pursuing… I wanted to go into the FBI. I don’t know, I wanted to do that. Makes sense.

Makes sense.

So, in order to go to the FBI, there’s- I wanted to be a special agent. There’s four areas to go. Accounting actually is one of them. I ended up getting a scholarship to go into accounting. So, I was like, “Alright, I’m fully fledged, going into this thing. But at the same time I was doing all these videos on the side, and then I was working with another group doing some more with the same organization but doing more youth mentorship stuff. And so, we would do videos as a way to sort of communicate like good virtues and leadership skills and different attributes, and that was a whole lot of fun. So, I was doing that on the side but still like, “Hey, I want to do the FBI.” And so, my junior year of college I got the opportunity to do one of two internships. Either go intern at a production house in Atlanta, they do some really really cool stuff- It’s called Elevation. They do a lot of what they call broadcast billboard designs, like on- not print, but for TV.

Digital billboards?

Yeah, digital billboards!

Or TV billboards?

I can’t remember the actual name of the-

So, real high-level, higher production value?

Super high level! So, like-

Like you guys.

I think they did like the Piers Morgan show. They did his intro and stuff and they’ve done some really cool stuff, so- you’re welcome, Steven, for me gloating on you. Check out Elevation. Anyways, so, it was either go there or go do an internship with the FBI. That was my junior year, and so I ended up doing the internship there at Elevation. And I was just like, after that summer I was like, “This is amazing!” I got to go travel. I got to go shoot these documentaries, got to do all this stuff and I was like, “This is super cool, I think I really want to do this.” So, alright, but I’m like “You know what? I’m going to finish school, let’s do this accounting thing, and I’m sure that’ll help me, but I don’t know.” And so I kept doing the video stuff, freelance doing all these things. Ended up getting like whole projects. People, some of the parents of the kids I was mentoring had businesses and they’d say, “Hey, can you go do this? I have this product that we’re putting in BJ’s-” which that time, nobody knew what BJ’s was- it was like Costco or Sam’s club I guess. Even… it was the precursor or whatever to Costco. And so, it’s like this little end cap TV thing. I said “Alright, well, I guess we can do that,” and started doing weddings and then I realized, “Oh geez, maybe we should incorporate.” So, I incorporated, and then just kept on going. That was in 2007 and I’ve just kept on going since then. And we’ve just evolved and integrated and that’s a little bit of the journey there.

And so… you’ve done a lot of different types of videos A lot of different clients, from weddings to product videos to obviously a lot of industrial videos. How did you make that decision to say, “You know what? I want to focus on this industrial marketplace. I want to use our video production expertise and capabilities to be able to help the industrial market”?

That’s a great question. So, I think it was, there’s a couple things. I think it was a realization that we as a company had the ability to be able to really implement storytelling in a way, specifically with B2B customers in a way that others weren’t able to do. I think that for a while there was a big focus on other… B2C gets all the love, right. So, alright, so, they do all the really cool stuff and so people think, well, B2B it’s like whatever and I didn’t believe that. And so I remember there was a pretty big, it was a big distributor. It was actually HD Supply. This was years and years and years ago. And they wanted to do an identity video, and we had done a lot of stuff in their space and so they wanted to do sort of the traditional corporate video like, the big music and the voiceover, “Hey, we are the best since whatever.” And I just thought, “Let’s do something different. Let’s do something really cinematic. Let’s do something exciting.”

And so we kind of, I kind of had to push them because they were a little nervous with something new. They were like, “I don’t really know.” The thing was a smashing success and I mean, the president of the company- there were several companies, but the president over all of them was floored by this thing, and said, “This is amazing.” And it just got me really excited because it got all the employees and the customers very excited about what they did and they were getting feedback saying, “I finally know what we do; I feel like I can go home and I can tell my family what I do, and I’m really excited about it,” because it helped them to understand who they are, what they were doing, and it created some more purpose. And that got me really excited because I feel like a lot of companies particularly in the manufacturing in the industrial space, I feel like they think, “Oh, what we do is, it’s dirty and it’s grimy.” There’s a workforce development challenge where a lot of younger Millennials and the next- Generation Z or whatever they’re calling them, are kind of like, “It’s kind of dirty and boring and I don’t want to do that,” and you know what? I think the reality of it is, there’s some amazing engineers, some amazing things that these industrial companies do. And that has been super exciting for me.

We look back and see, we’ve done a lot of work in this space and we’ve done some- some of our best work has been in that space and I think it’s because that, again, they kind of maybe look at themselves as like, “We don’t have a really cool… We just make this.” HD Supply, they’re a distributor for electrical products anywhere from light bulbs to laying out the grid and having transmission distribution lines, and they’re like, “Well, we’re just a distributor or whatever.” It’s like, “No man, you guys actually help to power- to bring power to people’s lives, and what does that empower them to do?” Pun intended, Let’s focus on that instead of saying, “Oh, I just move boxes. I take a box off a truck, put it on a pallet and then I put it on another box.” Say “No, I’m actually, I’m helping in this ecosystem to power people’s lives.” and I think, yeah, you pull that story out and you show that, and then people are like, “Oh, wow, that’s super cool.”

You have more of that emotional connection.

Exactly, exactly. So, that got me excited and we’ve been able to do it over and over and over again and I just think that honestly, B2B in general, it’s changing now, but they didn’t get the love as much from from a video standpoint, and I think the manufacturing industrial space is a subset of that for sure, and I just feel like, man, there’s some amazing things that are going on here and I want to be part of it.

Well Danny that is fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. I want to switch gears just a little bit. Maybe talk about, maybe some of those people, those influencers who’ve maybe inspired you or influenced you throughout your journey, whether it’s making decisions or deciding on what direction you want to go, how you want to do business from a character perspective. Maybe talk about those things. Share those with us.

That’s a loaded question. So, there’s a couple things there. I’d say number one is actually my grandparents. My grandfather, my dad and my family they’ve all had obviously a big impact on me like I think most do. But my grandfather just passed away about a couple weeks ago and he was- both him and my grandmother were immigrants and migrant farm workers. And so they were dirt poor, had nothing to their names. They would tell me stories on how when they grew up in Mexico and, I mean like no electricity, no running water. My grandmother was afraid to sleep inside her house because it was dark at night, and so she would go sleep on the streets outside when she was like eight or nine years old because her mom… their dad died, her mom was working, she was there by herself. I mean we’re talking about a very tough life.

And so I remember hearing stories of how they would go from farm to farm and they would pick cotton or pick vegetables or whatever. They would sleep in the farmhouses and I remember my grandfather telling me one time, because, “I remember hearing the scratching noise all night long underneath me,” and he said, “In the morning I woke up, I ripped up the floorboard and there was a nest of scorpions underneath there!” and it was like… crazy. So, I remember hearing all these stories and to see how my grandparents really sort of, took advantage of the opportunities that we have- we live in this great country- to be able to actually capitalize on the American Dream, and make themselves something. Now they weren’t like super rich and had all these businesses and stuff, but they were able to really make a name for themselves and provide a better future for their children and for their grandchildren and their great grandchildren. They were able to climb out of this poverty, they were able to learn about, “Oh, we need to save money and we need to not spend more than we do,” and then it would start- they bought, they had owned a couple of rental properties and so… that’s been a big influence, big for sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

As a kid, you know? Just… I don’t know… just going out there and you have an opportunity to really to make something of yourself and you can- you get in what you get out. Or what you put… You get in what… I’m totally butchering the phrase.

Good in good out.

Yeah, exactly. Garbage in garbage out, good in good out.

Yeah, that’s something like that.

So, that’s one thing maybe a little long-winded on there but the other thing that has really helped me and it helps me out and there’s many, but the other thing was actually kind of going back to this missionary year that I did after high school. It’s something that I draw on probably almost on a weekly basis. That experience was very interesting because, and there were multiple people that I was working with and I had, was able to draw influence from, but I think the whole experience of going into a completely different culture, Yes, I’m culturally Mexican but also half like French-Canadian or whatever, but going and then bringing in this like American mentality, going into Mexico, trying to do work down there and I’m, “Oh,” the American mentalities: “We’re going to get stuff done. We’ve got to go, we’ve got to go, we’ve got to do this!” Totally different over there and you’re like, “What is wrong with these people? Like, what?” You have a greater understanding and appreciation for the world and for humanity and realizing that people do things differently than you think, and it’s just opening your mind to all of that.

But then also just experiencing all kinds of new things. Big challenges and things that I look back on and say, “Man, I can’t believe I forgot the one time that I got lost!” Taking a bus from Aguascalientes down to Guadalajara, and then I was supposed to meet up with this group of people, and I didn’t have any money, and I talked to the taxi driver and I had no fear and I was just like, “Oh yeah, whatever we’re going to figure it out. We’re going to… I don’t know, I think it’s maybe around over here.” I mean this is before GPS, cell phones… I forgot the phone number to the group that I needed to go to, like I was legit lost for like three hours. And then showing up and finding somehow like, “That house looks like it! That looks like it right there!” Showing up and the group’s like, “Dude, where were you? We were leaving in five minutes!” and having no fear… and that’s something that I, that’s one small little story of drawing on, I feel like in business and everything it’s like you’ve… every time you come up with a challenge or there’s some fear or something, you look at it and you say, “Listen, I’ve been here before. It looked different, but I’ve been here before, and you can do this and let’s keep moving.” Anyways, little things like that have really kind of impacted me.

Those are really fascinating stories and from the family aspect from it being that close to home, so to speak, and having that personal connection with that influencer, it’s really amazing and it’s a great credit to society, how you can really go from just some really crazy stories of challenging lifestyle situation to coming here. There’s the dream being able to… maybe not millionaires and billionaires and things like that, but like you said having a successful lineage for your children, grandchildren, and so forth. I mean, I think that’s a beautiful story. Also, many prayers and blessings to your grandfather passing away.

Oh, thanks.

That’s always challenging. I lost both my grandparents on my mom’s side last year. So, I know.

Sorry to hear that.

But it’s the understanding how they work and like you said, it’s that influence. You can really build and grow from their experiences. And that’s also something, from the executive series, that’s one thing we’re always trying to be able… that’s a great purpose of this show, is that from… whether it’s your experiences or any of the other executives that come on the show is we were able to understand and share and grow from these different experiences. So…

Yeah, absolutely.

That’s another reason for this wonderful executive series. So, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about your journey, who’s influencing you, maybe we can talk a little bit more maybe present day in… okay, we won’t necessarily all go into COVID and all that because it has some very particular challenges…

Sure.

But maybe from a higher level that maybe is going to span a little bit longer than just, say, the COVID period that we’re kind of dealing with… but those challenges you see in the industrial space because you have a different perspective than say the manufacturer or the buyer within it. It’s a little bit third-party, so to speak, involved. Can you share some of those challenges that you’re seeing the industry facing?

Yeah, so, I mean there’s a lot but I think that certainly there was, the challenges that were there pre COVID are the similar challenges that are going to be post COVID if not like times 10. And I think really the biggest thing that we’re seeing is, when you’ve got this whole generational shift right now, you’ve got a whole series of… it’s a big workforce thing. You’ve got the baby boomers who are retiring. They’re leaving, maybe they’ve got a generational business and they’re passing off the keys to the kids and the grandkids, and one of the challenges is being that… When you look at the baby boomer population, the next generation, Gen X, is half the size of the boomers. So what’s happening is, when you’ve got 10,000 plus boomers who are retiring per day, the amount of jobs that are being fulfilled by the Gen X… they can’t completely like fulfill all those, which means that the Millennials which are twice size of Gen X but the same size as baby boomers are moving in and they’re being fast-tracked.

And so, one of the really really big challenges- and again, COVID obviously is exacerbating it and it’s really shining light on it, but it was there before and it’s going to be there even more- is really this understanding your buyer, understanding your supplier, your partner on fundamentally how they buy and how they want to do business. And I think that has been a really really big struggle with the manufacturing industrial space right now because it’s been the traditional means of going to market: “Oh, we’re going to do a trade show, we’re going to do print ads, we’re going to do all this stuff. The digital thing, I don’t know, I don’t understand it. It’s out there, I know we should change, but it’s just hard.” I think that is really one of the biggest things. It’s really understanding if you put the sort of the trifecta of this, you hear a lot about being customer obsessed, customer first.

And I think that there’s really three buckets that’s going to fall under, it’s sales, marketing and operations. We need… those three areas really need to be aligned more than ever. I mean sales and marketing primarily have been, you know, this side of the building and that side of the building. Operations is somewhere in the middle. Those all really need to be aligned and the digital component is a huge piece to all of it. So, it’s really understanding getting into the mind of the customer and understanding how can we not just sell to them, it’s not just about our marketing message and branding and all this but it’s also really getting a deep understanding about what their challenges are, what their pains are and evaluating again, not from even just a sales content and messaging standpoint but also from an ease of doing business. How can we make their lives easier, and that could be pre-sales that’s post sales because let’s be honest, we’re always selling. Even after you’ve sold that deal or whatever, you still have to continue to sell. So, these organizations really need to embrace these digital technologies, and really look at this whole ecosystem on how all these things play together, and then kind of reverse engineer the sales, marketing and operations efforts behind that. That’s what I think is really the key challenge right now.

Yeah, I really couldn’t agree more with your thoughts on that. It’s very evident that’s what’s happening and I kind of, I think that to a certain degree what IndustrialSage is doing, because I want- we always talk about organizations. Maybe how they got started, so I don’t want this to be, “Oh, this is all about IndustrialSage,” per se.

Sure.

So, the spin that I want to have on it is really… so IndustrialSage: you started it and I feel like and I know that it really answers a lot of that challenge that you’re talking about within the industry. So, maybe when you explained us how IndustrialSage got started and kind of that journey, you can also dive in a little bit in that regard.

Yeah, so IndustrialSage first of all started back in 2017, three years ago. And so, the whole reason why I started it was- I called it the great experiment because it… we’ve got Optimum Productions, the video production company, then IndustrialSage is essentially the media arm of it that’s focused on the manufacturing industrial space. So, this set that we’re on right now, we kept, over and often, we kept running into an issue. The challenge where companies need to be able to create content that could be like there’s one banking client we had specifically. They needed, we would go to, you know, like the Ritz-Carlton and try to make this space look nice, like make it look really nice, and we try to do it I think once a quarter because they would have these like panel discussions where they bring in their chief economist and it was, we always we’d run into all these issues all the time of trying to make it look good and not look like a conference room or not look like a… not a hotel room, and we ran into that with several other clients.

So, we thought, “You know what, why don’t we create a space where they can be able to do that and we can help create content at scale because we think that the ability of creating thought leadership content and other type of content is really the way of the future.” So, did it, found this set, built it, said, “Alright, let’s build the set. Let’s do the space.” And then the next thing was like, “Well, listen, I want to be one of those companies that we’re going to drink our own champagne.” I changed that word. Used to say “eat our own dog food,” but I’ve been working on that.

Well, no, I prefer Kool-Aid. I mean, “Drink your own Kool-Aid.”

Okay, sure, that’s a good one. We drink our own Kool-Aid, yeah, exactly. We drink the Kool-Aid and it’s our own and it’s good. So, because I think that’s important. So we said “You know what, it’s really hard to sell something you can’t see, especially in our world in this digital world.” So, we thought, “You know what, let’s show people what you can do. Let’s show what things could be like, how you can do it,” and so we started IndustrialSage for the purposes of demonstrating that. But also with a secondary point saying, “Hey, we kind of want to focus in the manufacturing space,” because it was either going to be, “We’re going to do a show on the manufacturing space,” or “We’re going to do a show featuring, small business within the Atlanta community.” And so, obviously you see what we did, and the whole point was really to share best practices and thought leadership content around sales and marketing for that space.

And then after about two years we said, “You know what, we think we need to make a little bit more of a pivot. We need to open it.” We’re hearing from people that are saying, “Hey, this is awesome. I’d love to hear topics on ERP or Lean manufacturing or more manufacturing news.” And so we said, “Okay, maybe there’s something here,” and after the 100th time of hearing that we said, “Okay, let’s open this up a little bit more and really help companies to essentially, create a platform where companies can be open, where they can share their content.” We really essentially want to kind of create the playground, if you will, where all these manufacturing industrial digital experiences can happen, and that’s sort of the nexus of where we want to go and where we want to take it,” to help companies to be able to shape their content, maybe create their own expert series, their own executive series that can be branded for them and use it as a sales tool, use it as a thought leadership tool to be able to get their knowledge and their expertise out there, not be salesy, and use this as a platform to be able to do that. And so, obviously we’ve created a lot of different programs off that and that’s sort of the idea and the goal. We didn’t see that out in the marketplace and we thought, “Well, you know what, we think there’s a huge opportunity here especially as digital’s growing, is let’s focus on a specific niche channel and expand on it.”

Yeah, that’s really wonderful. I mean, that, IndustrialSage in a nutshell, here we go, and so I think- so there’s the practical side of, “Okay, this is what we did. This is why we got started.” Now how do you apply how it’s really kind of answering that challenge so to speak that you talked about with workforce…

Yeah.

Change of the guard and like, how does that all work? It’s one thing to be able to show your expertise, for businesses to be able to talk about their knowledge and resources and information, but is anyone really going to watch it?

That’s great question.

Do people consume it? I think- I know I’m asking a super leading question here, okay, so don’t worry. It’s a leading question on purpose.

I don’t think people are going to watch it. No, I’m just playing. Well, our analytics dictate otherwise, they do. And actually interesting thing is I, some of these episodes stuff we’re doing are more longer forms. So traditionally when you would think “video content,” you’d say, “Oh, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, two minutes, you don’t want to go longer than that online, otherwise people aren’t going to listen.” Well, we’re actually finding that the engagement rates are actually a lot higher than I thought, to be honest with you. When we started on this when our typical content is 20 to 25 minutes long, we’re getting 30% to 40% engagement rate which just blows my mind.

But to answer your question about how we’re really positioning it and helping these companies be able to do it and are people actually going to watch it… I will answer this in a COVID answer, but again this was true before- but especially now, right now, because a lot of these companies in the manufacturing space traditionally would rely on heavily, heavily attending trade shows and other in-person type events. Those are completely off the table, and so you have to pivot to a digital means. And so everyone is scrambling right now trying to figure out, “What do we do? How do we do it? How do we replace that? How do we, what lead gen tactics can we put in?” And so, the answer honestly, really- and this answer was there before, but we’ve now been accelerated by five years- is my firm belief is really in… it’s hard driving into thought leadership content. Why? And the reason is, when you look at the way that people are buying, okay, if you look at the buyer’s journey, typically there’s a big focus in when people are researching a product, or they know they have a need, then they start researching it, then they put it, “Let’s put up the RFPs.” That’s where the big focus of all that content typically happens. Why? Because it’s very transactional and from a sales standpoint, well, we know that we can count on this for pipeline revenue, and we’ve got a quota to make. We have numbers we need to do, so, that makes sense.

The challenge is, not everybody is there and how do we… a lot of these sales cycles can be very very long. How do you shorten that? The golden goose is when a company has a problem and they say, “Oh, we’ve got a problem with… we need more mugs,” or whatever. Okay, immediately off the tip of my tongue I know where I’m going to go at least to start, and it’s XYZ company because I’m familiar with it. That is what the thought leadership piece is really going to be able to help to answer and then some. And so, it’s really about sales is really all about education, and so it’s thinking about,

I mean education, relationships.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

It’s building that, but to your point…

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, if I can listen, if I can assume the teacher role, okay, then I assume some sort of authority, some expertise over that. So, when you have a question you come to me. I’m the… I’m the knowledgeable one. I’m the guru so that when you have a sales question or you have a need and you know it, you’re going to come right to me. So, that’s really what it is. Just short-listing, a great strategy to build a shortlist for your company to be able to be the number one, two or three. On someone’s shortlist say, hey, we have a problem. We didn’t have it before, we didn’t even know we had this problem, but man, I’ve been watching this guy, I’ve been watching this content on LinkedIn for the last year and a half, and by golly this problem came up and I know exactly who I’m going to call, and that sale can go way faster with that. And so it’s kind of putting some of your sales and marketing a little bit on autopilot, and if you think about it that’s kind of what you would do at trade shows.

I mean it’s… there’s a whole… you can… trade shows are like a Swiss Army knife. You can use them for many many different things and you can touch people at many different points of the buyer’s journey, some who have no idea about you, have no idea that they have a problem that you can solve. Some of them they already know about you and they’re evaluating you, and some are existing customers looking for that second sale or whatever. So you can kind of hit them across the board. Again, with that gone, you’ve got to pivot to other things and this is why I think it’s such a big deal to have that thought leadership content because you can take these conversations, and you can have them on demand. And what I mean by that is, people now want to buy on their own terms and on their own time.

When you look at the work-from-home movement that’s happening now because of… out of necessity. The work day is completely obliterated. It’s not a… and it was kind of like that anyways but even more so now. Eight to five is not… that’s not a thing anymore because you have people that are like, “You know what, gosh, I don’t have to report in at eight. I do my best work at 11 o’clock at night. I’m just going to shift my schedule. I’m going to do that.” Well, you think that if I’m a sales guy and I’m calling in-between, eight and five or whatever and I’ll be able to get a hold of that person at 11 o’clock at night? Probably not, and that person may have a need. What are they going to do? They’re going to start searching for that. So, we have to put that content out there, and it can’t be this, “Oh, it’s 45 minute long, they’re probably not going to watch that.” But if we can do it in small little doses, you start feeding that out, that’s really the sort of the whole goal here.

Yeah, I mean that’s a great explanation of really why IndustrialSage came to be. How it came to be, and the purpose behind it is really to be able to facilitate the whole, ‘If you build it they will come.’ To a degree, if you build it and it’s available, people are going to find it.

Yeah.

So, having that content available.

Exactly.

So, we’ve talked a lot about IndustrialSage, the industry challenges, your thoughts on it. All really fantastic topics. Now I want to get super personal, okay? Super personal. Alright, we’re going to… let’s come in a little bit closer. No, just kidding. No, but, yeah, when you think about the life of an executive, all the demands that you’re faced with, there’s a lot of stuff happening. A lot of stuff going on, a lot of people depend on you for decisions, answers, questions all of that, and it’s not for everybody. And so my question is, maybe, what’s your routine? What’s your morning routine, how you kind of prepare yourself for the day to be able to answer all of those different challenges, those questions, those hurdles, the fires, all those kinds of things?

I can answer that in two ways. I can tell you what I try to do, and I can tell you what I actually do, and it’s really a blend. Now, so the daily habit typically is… I can tell you one really big thing that I’ve rooted out and that’s been helpful is waking up and having a purpose of not just grabbing my phone and looking at emails and looking at news and whatever. It’s just kind of just getting up and being focused on, take a shower or whatever, get ready. And one of the big things is, I guess two things. It’s actually, for me, prayer and meditation. And so actually just, and by prayer it’s really almost like emptying my mind of things and almost just like trying to get rid of distractions and almost just being, and being still. It’s an interesting concept and not even just like, “Oh, please help me with this.” I mean, I do a good chunk of that. But it’s just kind of sitting there, emptying your mind, being open and receptive and just being still. So, that’s number one.

And then number two is kind of planning out, looking over the day, planning it and saying, “Hey, here are the key objectives that I need to get done for this day.” And typically I have a tendency to do, “Alright, I’m going to do these 15 things.” Recipe for disaster. Let’s focus on two. What are the two big things that I need to get done today so that they flow into my overarching goals? That could be weekly, monthly, quarterly, what have you. And you can kind of reverse-engineer that. And then just start drinking a ton of coffee, get into the office, and tackle the day. I mean, that’s really it.

Now that’s, it’s good routine. You’ve got to have a routine at a minimum, something to adhere to. It fluctuates. It’s different all the time. I mean you have kids, a couple of them, like four or five, six… What are we at now, four?

I’ve lost count. No, I have four.

Four kids, four beautiful kids, great family life. I know this because Danny is a great friend of mine, and so I think that’s also a major contributor is having that strong family life that enables you to be able to have a strong business life also.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah, my poor wife. She’s awesome. Yeah, you’ve got to have a strong, yeah, I’m very lucky. I’m very blessed.

Blessed, yeah, I would say so. And so, we’re going to wrap up here in just a minute but maybe share with everyone, this isn’t an executive series question. So, I always ask everybody this question. Okay, so, we’ve talked about a bunch of different stuff but there’s certain things that when you meet people when you talk with people you want to leave them with something. Maybe some advice or a story, just something, a little nugget. Maybe you could share with everyone that’s listening today one of those things that you always like to be able to share with people. It could be anything. This is the executive series, you’re allowed to say whatever you want. It’s your show. I’m the stand-in interviewer here, but maybe we can end with that.

That’s a loaded question. I’ve got to think about this. I wasn’t prepared for that. Alright, so here’s what I would share. This may be not conventional but and I think that my mind typically tends to go towards business stuff, but I think for this answer I try to share this, maybe it’s a little morbid but I would say think about the person that you are and the person that you want to be, and hopefully they’re the same. And if not try to make them the same because I think at the end of the day when I think about it, when I’m on my deathbed what’s going to be the most important thing that I’m going to be thinking about? And am I focused on those things right now because at the end of the day I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to die. I’m going to die, we’re all going to die and everything around us there’s a downer, right? No but everything around here is passing, and so I think that if you kind of live that way and think about that, that influences the decisions you make, how you treat people, how you run business, certainly from ethics to character, and I would strongly encourage to think about that because that takes a lot of things away off the table and you’re like, “Oh, this is a petty little thing,” and you’re like, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t be worried about this or that or the other, and maybe I should be focused more on my family versus, ‘Oh, I’m so freaked out about, all this other thing and I’m making, all these sacrifices,’ at what cost?” That would be my advice.

Yes, oh, Danny that’s perfect. I mean that, I don’t think it’s morbid. I think actually it’s a great reset because there’s a lot of challenges that every day people are facing whether it is work related, business related, family related or has nothing to do with any of those topics. It’s just something else, okay, but there’s a lot of challenges. And it’s being able to really… What is that? What’s your polar north, we call it. Okay, and based on what you’re saying, that polar north is who I want to be and if I’m not doing that… I mean I think it’s wonderful, actually really really wonderful advice. That’s why I love asking this question.

So, Danny thanks again so much for being patient with me to interview you today on our executive series. Thrilled to be able to share this with our audience. I think they’ve been hearing you asking the tough questions and now I get to ask some tough questions, maybe a couple loaded questions also. But guys, thank you again for listening for watching. Please make sure you give us a review. We want to hear your feedback. We need reviews on our podcast. We need a thumbs up or a like on any of the content especially this one because I’m going for a raise. No, no just kidding not really. But, yes, seriously, this is important. It’s great content and if you have an executive or you are an executive, and you think you have important stories to tell or insights or anything like that and you’d like to be a guest on our show, drop us a line, industrialsage.com/contact/ or email, anything like that. Send it in a LinkedIn message, whatever it is, we’d love to have you on the show, share some insights we… obviously it’s open, but we want to be able to get your message in front of those that need to hear it. And so, thank you so much for being here. Danny, do you have anything you want to say?

Do what he said.

Do what I said, do that. Okay, beautiful, I’m going to record that and play it back over and over again. Alright, enough of me, have a great day, go conquer the world and this is IndustrialSage.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!