Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Adrian Tobey. Adrian, welcome.
Hi, well, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
It’s a pleasure to have you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Absolutely. So, hi everyone. My name is Adrian. I am the CEO and founder of a WordPress plugin organisation called Groundhog. We build CRM and marketing automation tools to help small businesses launched the front of the list and scale their business. Wasn’t always in that industry, though. And it was a little bit of a roundabout way to get to where I am today. I just turned 24. So got started relatively early in university, not exactly a unique story, but it’s always a fun one, right? You’re hopefully covering your story today with the intention that other Gen Zs will listen to it and see that it’s possible for them also to go into business because I don’t meet that many people in your age range that are business owners and the anecdotal evidence that I have is that there is a mindset of a younger person and that mindset is that it’s too early for them to do essentially.
And you’ve proved that it’s the case that it’s not too early to do providing you have the skills. So I’m hoping to go through your story so that you can basically say how you did it. So where does your story start? So my story starts when I was very, very, very young. So my family has always been entrepreneur. I grew up in an entrepreneur family. My father was a jazz musician who got something called tinnitus. 10% of the United States population actually suffers from varying degrees of tinnitus. It’s kind of like a lesser known affliction. What it is, is it’s ringing in the ears, but it’s inside your brain behind your inner ear, and it’s always there and if you’ve ever heard like a loud bang go off, like a firecracker or maybe a firework going off really close to you, you’ll know exactly what tonight is, sufferers live with their for their entire lives essentially.
So for a jazz musician that was quite crippling. And my dad turned to essentially digital marketing as a way to provide for the family. so you went and did a lot of courses and learned about what marketing was and this is like way back and kind of 2008, where, you know, Google was still in its infancy compared to what it is today. So all of the marketing strategies at this point, we’re new search engine optimisation was relatively easy. You know, it’s just like a couple back legs, you know, keyword stuffing on pages and stuff like that. So my dad was really, really getting into this whole digital marketing thing while I was growing up and I was obviously still in school and I’m 24 right now. So, you know, back then I would have been around 10, 12 years old. Um, but I was just observing and I watched and what my dad did eventually was he took this on the road.
So what he would do is, you know, he went out and learned all of this stuff about digital marketing and he was selling his sheet music essentially online at one in time, if you were anywhere in the world and you googled sheet music or something of that nature paultobey.com, which is the domain he used to share and sell. His sheet music was number one in the results. Obviously, that is no longer the case for a variety of reasons. But yeah, so he took this knowledge of how to rank on Google on the road and he went to basically airport hotels and people would fly in when we fill a room with 30-60 people. And from the stage, he said we would set up stage. He would train these people while they were there. They bring their laptops would give them a workbook and they would do the steps that it took to get them to rank on google. And a lot of times, you know, in the early days of search engine optimisation and search marketing optimisation, all that stuff, you know, you could see results relatively quickly.
So that was a really, really good business model because it was like, if you did the work, it was basically results guaranteed to all intents and purposes. And I was always there, I was in the back of the room. I was handing out workbooks. I was running microphones to people to ask questions. And when he sent everyone to the back of the room to fill out in order for him, that’s something that we don’t really do any more. I’m not sure if anyone on the skull if, I mean if people listening on this colour Gen Zs, they’ve never went to the back of the room to fill out in order for him, but for, for anyone who’s a little bit older, uh, and they’ve gone to kind of like these, these seminars that will be familiar with that exercise where I would essentially be in the back of the room and be like that two-piece paper, the carbon copy, and they give us a credit card and I would write down the credit card number on this to process it later. Um, not something that we’re very familiar with anymore. That pretty much gone out the window, but that’s the environment that I grew up. So I was always of the mentality that being an entrepreneur and kind of being a self-starter and being a, being a provider was the only way really did you, was that something that you minded doing?
So it sort of sounds like work to me. So I mean, if you enjoyed it, that is one way of looking at it, but presumably you enjoyed being in that environment. I don’t look back on it with any sort of like resentment. I’m sure, I’m sure there were times where it’s like, all right, Adrian, you know, we got to go set up the booth at X, Y, Z Hotel and I’d be like, I really don’t feel like doing that today. but I never look back on it and think about like, oh my god, I really hated being there. I always liked being part of, you know, I met tons of cool people, like even though I was relatively young at that point in time, I always liked meeting business owners and sometimes, you know, people would come to two or three seminars and I get to see like the progress of their own business as we help them. And I always liked collecting credit cards. That is something that I enjoy doing, I like getting the order form and like filling it out and people like always got a kick out of that, right? Because they’d be like this 14-year-old kid at the back of the room, like they’re giving this credit card to them and basically charging this person anywhere between three and $15,000 at the time, so they always got a kick out of that.
So this work that I enjoyed doing, we also did a lot of trade shows. That’s something that again is not, is not so prevalent anymore small business expositions and trade shows and we’ve set up a booth and that’s how we would fill our rooms a lot of time is we fill the room from a trade show, like a franchise show or whatever small businesses bow. They see kind of like what opportunities there are. We always get the corner booth by the entrance with the most foot traffic and everybody would flow through like digital marketing. What’s that? That’s new. That’s exciting. And then my parents and I and a couple other people would be there and I would always be explaining kind of like the technical aspects because that’s always the thing that I was the most interested in was sort of the technology that surrounded it and explaining to people the technology. And obviously, that went over just like a bunch of people’s heads. Some people were, you know, clicked with, but most people needed exact step-by-step instructions are also completely beyond them. But that was the purpose of the course, right? So that, that’s, that’s how or was our selling tactics like, hey, listen, you know, doing this by yourself is a nonstarter.
Like come to the course and you can just follow as we do it live and you’ll get results like within the week. So fast forward from that, right? So I go to high school and then I go to university. I’m not going to the University of Toronto for computer science again, really just still interested in technology and everyone’s building apps, right? Like that’s just in 2000 and 15 when I started university, everyone everyone’s building apps and I’m like, oh, that’s cool, right? Like that’s probably something that, you know, I should, I should be and fall on the bandwagon and figure out how people are creating like these billion dollar companies overnight by seemingly providing absolutely zero value in return. So I go to university and then at that point in time my parents are running their own digital marketing agency and They’re doing essentially done for you services at this point in time.
Digital marketing in 2015, it’s way too complicated. The game has changed like Google’s algorithm has been heavily updated in order to essentially make the lives of digital marketers more difficult. So a transition from a training company and providing education to business owners to be able to do it themselves to just doing it for them because we’re the ones with the knowledge, the expertise and honestly there’s just way too many tools and way too much expensive. Way too many things that someone would have to know in order to be able to do it themselves successfully. I did university full time for the first year and then in second year I was switched part time doing school at nights and then working with my family in the digital marketing agency, essentially full time from 9 to 5. working with literally thousands of small businesses, well hundreds of small businesses, but building thousands of strategies campaigns, landing pages, websites, you name it, we did it PPC campaigns. and I really built up like my knowledge of modern digital marketing and specifically serum and email marketing, which is what I do now throughout the two years, the two additional years that I worked full time within the agency, I also built my first actual software product during that period of time was called form lift in the digital marketing agency, we used a CRM and marketing innovation tool called Infusion Soft for the majority of the businesses that we worked with essentially if you’re not familiar as a business owner or as someone who is looking to become a business owner if you’re not familiar with marketing automation on Instagram, you know, having, having a product and selling it, uh, is one thing, being able to do that efficiently effectively and with minimal overhead and being able to get people to re buy that product over and over and over again is another thing, right? So you can’t, you like, you can have an absolutely fantastic product. But no one will buy it unless you have like the marketing piece and the customer relations and, you know, your audience and all of that. If you don’t have that piece, then no amount of a great product will be able to actually move or generate sales. So businesses would come to our agency with great products and they’re like, well I have this great product. How do I get people to give me money in exchange for it? And that’s what we did. We help them identify their target audience and their ideal customer. It’s amazing how many people build a product and they have no idea who it’s for, Right? That’s probably the most interesting thing that I’ve encountered and probably one of the most disastrous steps that a business can, can skip over.
It is essential to know who you’re building a product for. So you would help them actually identify who that person was if they didn’t already know, then we developed the messaging on how to communicate the benefits of said product to set audience and then we’d actually set up the engine to make that audience aware of this products existence. That’s what I did for two years with that agency. I used it for myself to build that first product form lift. I mentioned a few yourself by the way that was in integration between WordPress, which is our content management system of choice. If you’re building a website, WordPress is like the de facto most popular option. It’s like 30% 35% of the entire internet at this point. Something ridiculous like that. So it was an integration between infusion soft in WordPress. And it’s a very niche product does around I think that’s headed up around 60K US in a year. So do you set up a company for that product? No, we just sold that under the agency. So we didn’t we didn’t set up a whole separate legal entity for that. We just set it up as a product provided by the agency created recurring revenue for the agency, which was great because obviously, we use it for all of our clients and all of the agency clients. So obviously that was a good kind of retainer model. We have them by four left and you know, symmetric cash and like who’s for moves? Well technically, it’s us. So do you feel like you have a job within the agency or are you part of the running? It was both. I was certainly responsible for, you know, producing results on behalf of clients, but I mean any person within an agency is responsible for that. I did take direction, but I also gave a lot of direction. So if I if I had to equate it, it would be like sea level.
But the organisation was pretty flat for them for the most part in terms of like who was in charge of who lay. So was it a job? I mean I collected the salary but I also I was families. I did it because I enjoyed it and I did it because I like helping people. I mean the reason I wake up every day and do what I do, it’s just because I like I like helping people and I like helping small businesses get better results than they’re currently getting. I like seeing the transition from struggling to creating an abundance of wealth. And seeing how what well I produced and what my team produced had an impact on that. So that’s the reason I do what I do. So I certainly enjoyed working within the framework of an agency but during that time is where I also ran into a few issues.
So those issues being that agency work is hard. As I’m sure you’re familiar running an agency H. R. Is incredibly difficult because one of the biggest problems that agencies have is that it’s really hard to hire smart people because smart people who know digital marketing are doing what running their own agency right? So it’s super hard to like higher like incredibly talented people because anybody who’s incredibly talented is probably doing it for themselves are collecting a high six-figure salary from you know some sort of massive venture capital funded start-ups or whatever. So HR was always hard. Number two clients can be incredibly demanding and the hours are hard, right? Because yes, it’s like 9-5.
But really it’s eight to however early in the morning you want to work because you know when you have deadlines, stuff got done, it’s not done well then that’s that looks bad on you and you gotta you gotta make the results happen that you promised questions I was actually going to ask you was why is it that you didn’t go into your own agency? But is that what you’re explaining to me now? That is what I’m explaining. So client clients can be incredibly demanding if you don’t train them right and they don’t know exactly how to work with you. And if you let a bad client in, it can ruin the whole experience and just make your life miserable. And you know, it’s feast or famine with agencies. That’s always how it’s been. It’s either like you’re doing really well and you have like 16 clients and then the economy takes a nosedive like Covid did. And then all of your clients are all of a sudden battening down the hatches and you know, stoking their bank accounts with all extra cash flow that they have to create that rainy day fund. And then all of a sudden digital marketing agencies there, they’re like, okay, well now we have to lay off a bunch of people.
This happened to a bunch of agencies that are my customers right now for my software and they’re like, hey, listen, you know, we’re struggling right now because all of our ate all of our customers are getting spooked by the fact that there’s a lot less money going around or you know, we do work with brick and mortar stores and guess what? Brick and mortar stores aren’t doing right now. They’re certainly not working. So that was, you know, so it’s feaster family with agency and I didn’t like having sort of that looming over me that uncertainty of revenue and cash flow and knowing that it, you know, having little to no control over someone’s willingness to invest, right? When your salary is directly correlated to the strength of the economy because like when, when the economy is good, business is booming and everyone’s making money, businesses are a lot more willing to reinvest that money into making more money with digital marketing agencies. But when, you know, all of a sudden the drops, right, It’s like, all right, well, we need to reinvest this money into rent at this point because we have less customers coming in and we need to cover rent.
So all of a sudden, we’re not giving that money to a digital marketing agency anymore. So that was problem number two problem number three is that there were significant efficiency problems in being able to deliver projects fast and this is kind of where I was and this is the reason where I am, where I am now. It’s working with tools like active campaign, infusion soft and HubSpot. I identified a number of efficiency problems that prevented me a digital marketing agency from being able to deliver a client project a week versus like a month, which is what it usually took. Like I knew if certain tools and suffering software existed and they operated in certain ways, I would be able deliver client projects, you know, multiple times faster than what we were currently doing. so at the end of 2018 I drew well, so in the first half of 2018 I dropped out of university. I was doing a part time. I failed, of course wasn’t a great moment.
And then I did the math on how long would actually take or how much time would actually take to complete my degree. And in 2018 I calculated up to something like 20, and I was like, there’s no way I’m spending another seven years in university. It’s just, I’m not like I, I know how to produce wealth, right? I I did that through the agency, I’m doing that through form left at this point. Like I know that how to create things and how to create results that people will be willing to pay for. So at this point university was like well, I got my three years in, it was a good time. I did the university experience and I dropped out And then in the latter half of 2018 I was doing the agency things still but as I mentioned I was running and all these things like a speedster famine and like clients and all the stuff and I’m like well I don’t want to do the agency thing forever. Right? That’s not who I want to like that’s not the legacy that I want to create.
So what can I do instead? Well, I have identified all these like efficiency problems as working within the confines of an agency trying to create results for clients and like well if this was you know if doing this specific process was different, would I be able to create results for clients faster? Yes if this process existed in a different format. If this system was a little bit easier if this feature was built in this specific way. And then from designing my first product form left I inevitably ended up creating a minimum viable product and M. V. P. Of what my company today is which is groundhog is a WordPress plugin, it’s a marketing automation tool just plugs right into your WordPress website and it makes building marketing automation and email marketing campaigns and managing contacts and sales pipelines and payments and all this stuff just infinitely easier. And now what I do is I go to other agencies and I say, hey, listen, you know, this is something that you can use to avoid all of the issues and the pain, the frustration that I experience as an agency from your own agency, and that’s how I got to worry.
I’m today, and we’re at present day, are we now? And we’re at present day about three years later from 2018. Obviously, a lot has happened in that period of time, but to the point from where, you know, I learned about being an entrepreneur which was, which was many, many, many years ago to sort of, when I started my own business, something where I am on the incorporation papers as it were, that’s registered and we pay taxes and Accountants and all of these things in order to run an actual business that started in 2018. So it’s a little bit of a journey to get there, but we got there eventually. Well, I can have my, I don’t know preconceptions about why it was that you decided to go into entrepreneurship based on the story that you’ve told, but why is it that you think that you’re well suited and you were prepared to go in and start your own business essentially. I mean to me it was there was there was really no other option, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of like a nature versus nurture thing.
My nurture was certainly that entrepreneurship is acceptable. Risk is acceptable. Risk has never been an issue for me, like, I know, I know, I know people who were like incredibly risk averse me. I thrive on being outside of my comfort zone, that’s where I operate best with new experiences and solving problems and overcoming obstacles. Like that’s just always been where, where I’ve just been the most comfortable, oddly enough, like, way early days of work though, is that because you’ve got experience in doing that? Yeah, I mean, it’s certainly like in, in school, growing up, always incredibly competitive and always kind of going the extra mile to create something interesting to do something interesting, never, never sat in the back of the classroom, like, I’m like one of those, one of those people, right? Always, always at the front and always asking questions, always kind of go and going the extra mile and but that’s just kind of the way that’s kind of just the way that I was, I was all like, always just incredibly competitive and where that came from, I don’t really really know where that came from, like, even as early as like grade one, like I was like seven, I remember playing chess. There was a chess club in my grade school. I remember losing a lot, and I just hated it, like, I just like eight inside of me.
And I remember I remember that feeling and to this day, like I like on chess dot com, like I’ll play for hours until like I just have like one of those losing streaks because your brain’s fried and say, okay, that’s enough, that you know that this is too painful. Competition and creation are certainly helpful as entrepreneurs, but I do think there are plenty of competitive people as employees within companies, and I certainly think you probably had a skill set to go and be a successful employee. But in terms of why you chose entrepreneurship, I was thinking maybe peer group, so you’re around people, first of all, you were around your parents who proved it was possible, and you’ve got a lot of that experience as a business owners. I think I think one of the one of the things that are, one of the questions that I always ask myself, right, was so at working within the digital marketing agency, so this is the most recent, this is the most recent experience, right?
Working within the digital marketing agency, we I’ll tell you a story, we had a raw dog food company as a client and Ontario raw dog food company, they just opened a brand new factory. They were doing they were they were already doing gangbusters. but they came to us because they wanted to have a digital launch event of their new website, which they got done by another development agency. So they created this brand new like online store experience and it was really cool and they wanted on launch day, they wanted to have this this big launch and tell their entire list and they had a deal which was that, which was their idea, which I think was really, really good. They were going to give a free dog food bowl, like this place like stainless steel bowl is really high quality was branded two orders over $250, like this expensive doctor, it’s small, it’s like small, small containers, right?
So they’re going to live the way this this free dog food bowl, two orders over 100 and two orders over $250. And their account was assigned to me. So I follow Russell Bronson, I follow dan Kennedy, I follow like all kind of the big digital marketing leaders and thought leaders and I buy into like a lot of their stuff. Like I went to click funnels and Russell Bronson’s funnel hacker conference and that was a whole big rock and I was like super inspired for like a week and then come down. so here’s what we did. We, I wrote a nine day email sequence and a list of around 9000 people I believe, or 19 ended with the nine and They set up a series of nine emails. The first email, read something a little bit of late, hey, listen, we have this new thing coming out.
It’s not quite ready yet, but we’re getting ready to show you. I’m just gonna let you know that you’re gonna wanna watch out for my email tomorrow to learn more about what it is, right? Like, super, like cheeky marketing, whatever it is, it is what it is. Like as marketers. You know, we see that stuff in our in boxes are like, okay, like here we go, right. But when you’re doing like a business to consumer, like this was a consumer product, you can get a little bit, there’s a little bit more leeway to play with it and get a little bit cheeky as a marketer. And then the next day the emails, like, all right, here’s a little bit more information about what it is. We can let you know that there’s gonna be a new online experience. Be happy to show you more tomorrow. The next day, another email the next day, another email and what the and the owners, the business owners were actually getting emails back to these emails, feedback from their customers from the previous customers and people just on the list being like, I don’t want to wait, just like, what, what is it? And we were, and we were able to build out like this massive amount of curiosity. and then on the last day we was basically tell all emails, like Go to the website, orders over $250, you know, for the first, you know, while supplies last adding that urgency, adding that scarcity, right?
There’s not an infinite number of dog bulls, right? So while supplies last, get your free dog bull and we sent so much traffic on day nine on a Saturday to that website that because the email went out at midnight on the Saturday. So like 12:01 a.m. and it crap. It’s totally just total meltdown. Like server meltdown. We sent so much traffic to that to that website and they were paying through the nose for hosting. So they’re agency the agency who actually built the website set up the hosting and everything were like online at like 1:00 a.m. to like, I think 6:00 a.m. trying to get this website back online. It was just a total meltdown. Despite that. You know, once they finally figured out, you know how to find their ass in the dark with a flashlight map. We did over $150,000 worth of dog food sales in that weekend.
And that was kind of when the penny dropped me and I was like, well if we can do this for other people, Like why can’t we do this for us? Like we didn’t make $150,000 this weekend. Like that’s something that I would personally like to be able to create for myself, and it’s not possible to do that when you work for somebody else, if you’re working for somebody else and you do that, it’s going into, well not necessarily their bank account, but the businesses bank account, but guess what? You don’t have access to that. So that’s why I think at the end of the day, entrepreneurship was really the only option for me because I was able to consistently create these results for other businesses. and it’s kind of like shoemaker’s son syndrome, where, you know, you are unable to focus on your creating value and wealth for yourself, because you’re focused on creating it for other people, and the end of 2018, I’m like, you know what, I’m going to go create it for myself, and we’re gonna we’re gonna build this organisation, it’s gonna help people, it’s going to create a lot of value for people, but it’s also going to create value for us that’s going to be sustainable, that’s gonna grow, that’s going to be predictable and create a legacy, moving forward.
Do you think that it’s possible that it’s something as simple as you can see that it’s possible, and you have the competence to do it, whereas maybe other people may not know that it’s possible and they don’t have the skills, maybe I, you know what it’s possible that it’s that simple thinking that you don’t have the skills though, I mean, I certainly have skills in development. Like that’s where my, that’s where my roots are, was just in writing coach. Like I’m really good at that. but I also learned kind of how to be a marketer and an entrepreneur like my entire life and I was very fortunate to be able to grow up in that kind of surroundings to enable me to think that this was anything but possible, right? Like, like, like when I started, when I started groundhog, I didn’t have like the, the typical anxiety of like this isn’t gonna work right.
I never, I don’t, I don’t really suffer from, from that. In my mind. There was never any doubt that is going to work. We knew our audience was, we knew we had a good product, we knew we could help people. And those are kind of like the three things that you need to have in order to be able to run a successful business. Obviously, there’s a few logistical things that you might need to know. But then again, those people can be paid for, right? Like I’ve something like the course that I failed in university was a math course, Math has never really been my strong food, but guess what, you need to know a lot of business is you need to be able to know how to do addition and subtraction and because you know, you got to do a loss or profit piano right at the end of every month profit loss. But guess what? Those people exist to be able to do that. You just give them, read only access to your account and guess what? The log in and they’ll do the numbers, right? Our guys, Gabriel, Gabriel is our bookkeeper, and he’s just absolutely fantastic. And so there’s, there’s people who exist out there who are relatively inexpensive that are there to support you as an entrepreneur as a business under someone with vision, someone with gumption, someone with grit who wants to go out and change the universe.
People exist who are just happy to support you in your journey and to enable you to go and enact on that vision and I’m very fortunate that I have a network of people both inside organisation and outside as advisors or just people that I can rely on or, or attempts or contractors or whoever who can come in and fix the problem that I don’t necessarily have the knowledge or experience to fix. Uh, and be able to fix that where to find these people. They’re everywhere. You can just go into a Facebook group one day and say, hey listen, I really need help with this one problem. I do that a lot. Like I even go to our own Facebook community, like our Facebook community that we have for our customers. That’s where I found our first support wreck as I went into our Facebook group and like, hey listen, we’re hiring for sport reps. Like is anyone from our existing customer base who is already familiar with our software, who’s already paying for our software, who already knows everything about our organisation, want to come work for me and work for our organisation and help other people who use GMOs and that’s how we found Jesse.
And Jesse has been great and it’s sometimes it’s just it’s just that easy to find the people that are willing to support you on your journey. Not everyone wants to be right. An entrepreneur, some people just want to come from along with the right and those are the people that you need to find and support you on your own dreams? Yeah, I certainly think it’s not, I’m not one of those people who thinks that it’s right for everyone. For sure. But coming back to what you said about marketing, I do think people who have a marketing or even sales background. I have a slight edge over those that don’t when, when people go into business because it’s that is that you mentioned Dan Kennedy, he’s all about this in terms of what business are you in? Are you in the marketing automation business or are you in the customer getting business. He would always say, you know, your job is to get every businesses in the customer is in the customer attraction business, right? Of course, there’s obviously different ways to monetise that.
At which point and there’s a little bit, it’s not that simple, but every business needs customers in order to survive customers. Businesses without customers tend to go away. Unless you’re Uber, in which case you just kind of keep fuelling the fire, just keep making venture as long as you can, as long as you can, unless you have venture capital mountains, the size of Mount Everest to burn, right? But I digress, someone was watching this and there are gen, z to and they’re interested and they’re not too sure whether it’s possible, they don’t really know, let’s say what business they should go into, What kind of advice would you give someone under that general um, circumstance? So that’s really far down the totem pole of what I, what I would call entrepreneurial awareness. So that’s like, well, I, I want to create value and wealth around me for other people as well as for myself, but I, but I don’t want to do that in the context of working for somebody else, right?
If that’s kind of like where your mentality is, number one is, be sure of, why you want to do that. Is it just because you want to get rich, is it just because you want a yacht, is it just because whatever I find that when you have the desire to be an entrepreneur purely for the reason of creating personal wealth tends not to go well for very long, maybe early results, you have to be, there’s, there’s universal laws which, which kind of dictate human behaviour, and the outcome of events, which will determine whether or not you and your business or ultimately successful, like law of attraction. Law of reciprocity love all the things. If you don’t know about kind of sort of like these, these almost spiritual, universal laws and how they recommend that you go and do a little bit of investigation with the research on those. I dictate my entire life by, by them and that’s why I am where I am today.
Well, one of the reasons why I am where I am today, there’s a few others. But if you are getting into it for the purpose of helping other people get what they want and making an impact on the universe for the better and creating positive change in your communities, then ultimately, I think you’ll be able to find success. If that is your ultimate goal, Then people with that goal tend to be able to, to accomplish that one with the other. Sometimes it takes a week, sometimes it takes 10 years, sometimes it takes 50 years, sometimes you’re dead before it happens and someone else you pass on the reins to somebody else and then it happens. But ultimately, the change happens. And if that, if that’s the reason why you’re getting into it, then that is a good reason. The law of reciprocity dictates that if you help enough people get what they want, you can have what you want. So if you still want a yacht in a plane and to live a lavish lifestyle and I’m certainly guilty of that and being able to do things without having the fear of essentially like financial constraints on that, that’s okay too.
It’s just as long as you’re helping enough people get what they want first that ends up coming. So, understanding that is certainly crucial if it’s just, I’m trying to get rich, you know, and you joined an MLM, that’s, that’s a really great way to get poor really quickly. Um, you’re losing your entrance fee anyway, losing a lot of time in the process. Yeah, exactly. So number two, So that’s, that’s, that’s probably most important. And I had an unfair advantage by basically my parents teaching me this at a very young age and it’s very deep rooted. So it’s like a lot of people end up having to remind themselves of this and to me it’s kind of just like a second nature type thing. So a little bit of an unfair advantage, but I would, if you’re not there yet, go to research on the law of attraction, love us upon property and all the other universal laws, number two, you got to have something which actually adds value. Uh, so there has to be some sort of inefficiency, there has to be something missing from the marketplace.
There has to be something that someone is struggling with that. You have a solution to that problem. Right? That’s certainly an important thing to have when, when, when running a business, it could be your own intelligence, right? Intelligence is valuable, right? That’s why digital marketing agencies exist. Their product is Digital Marketing Intelligence and getting results for their clients based on that intelligence. So that is a product. There are other products like software products like my own where we’re solving very specific problems which enable people to do certain like marketing campaigns and email the customers and manage their customers. So we offer a software solution. There’re tons of other solutions, but you got to have something that solves a problem. Number three, you have to know who you’re selling that solution to. If you don’t know who you’re selling a solution to, then you’re gonna have a really, really hard time selling it. I’m not the first person to say this, but you know, if you sell to everyone, right, A lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs think, well we’re gonna achieve mass adoption in all 7.5 billion people in the world are going to be able to get value from this product.
Nope, unless it’s an iPhone maybe, but you have to know or you have to at least in the early days you have to choose an audience, You have to choose someone who you’re going to sell to because you sell to everyone to sell to nobody because you’ll just there’s so many other companies which use specific targeting on a certain individual to be able to identify them as a better solution than another product. For example, our ceremony, the automation tool is very much geared towards digital marketing agencies because we know that they’re the best who are or they’re going to be able to make use of our software, the best they’re also pay. They also pay the most money which is good for us and they require the least amount of support, so the least amount of overhead. So overall the most profitable customer that we have. So a lot of our, a lot of our message being a lot of our marketing, a lot of our targeting is towards the specific agencies. We spend a lot less time focusing on kind of like the general small business, we still serve them and they’re still they still make up 60% of our overall customer base and we’re happy to work with them but they require more support and they spend less money so the margins on them are lower.
So we spend less time specifically targeting those individuals. So you have to know who your audience is, you have to know your customers, you have to all of your marketing, all of your targeting has to be specifically focused on the small group, a niche group, something that you’ll be able to penetrate easily and if you don’t know who that is, spend the time to figure it out, hiring agency to help you figure it out. There’s lots of agencies that offer that kind of service of being able to help you identify your target audience is. we worked with the car wash in the agency with the car wash once and their audience was, you know, people who own Ferraris, they were like a Ferrari detailer and that’s, that’s what they did of and they also got business from people who want Bugattis and barons and Maseratis and all of the other kind of like high end Italian cars. But all of their marketing was focused on like the Ferrari owner. And that kind of brought in a whole bunch of other like exotic car owners to their car wash detailing service, but they were certainly marketing to people who own Toyota Corollas is snitching, isn’t it?
Yeah, and they certainly were in target of those guys, but because they chose niche of people who own Ferraris, they could charge 3 to $4000 for a detailing service for someone who owns a Toyota Corolla isn’t gonna pay 3000 to $4000 for a detailing service, right? So if you choose an audience who might be a bit more affluent than someone else, You can also guess what charge more for your products, right? So it kind of goes hand in hand. That’s a lot of information. Those are, those are, those are the three things that I would certainly think about first. And then it just becomes a question of doing like, do you have the knowledge to actually build a product or create a product? And sometimes you don’t even have to build or create the product? You can pre-sell the product, that’s what tools like Kickstarter or for example, you don’t even have to build it. You know, you just have to tell people that you will, and then you can get backers or you can get venture capital or you can get all these different things and fund it that way.
And that way you can then use that money to go find the intelligence to actually make the product or, or whatever it is that you’re going to sell. So there’s lots of different ways that you can accomplish this. There’s 1000 different ways across the room. Obviously, if you have the intelligence to build yourself, like I did, that’s going to make it a lot easier if you don’t. Again, there are people who exist in the universe whose sole purpose is to support you in your journey to creating a mark on the universe, right? Not everyone is an entrepreneur, a lot of people out there, the world, there’s like four kind of main categories of people, there’re controllers, there’s analytics, their supporters, uh, and there’s promoters, those kind of like the four categorical types of personalities. A lot of people in the world out there are those supporters and those promoters, the people who are gonna, you know, let you other people know about their products. There’s the supporters, the people who are going to be your accountants, your support reps or sales reps.
Well, the promoter would be the sales rep, but you’re certainly your support reps will be promoters or story supporters, um, your analytics will, will be your CFOs, your money people, your analytics people and then you as the entrepreneur are the ultimate controller, you’re the person who’s kind of setting the vision, steering the ship and guiding everyone in your circle of influence towards an ultimate goal. It’s a great breakdown. I appreciate the sharing their and it highlights something for me, which is, um, I often have people on the podcast who are not marketing based because I already know a lot of that information, but what happens is that the people who view the podcast don’t necessarily get to hear it. So I appreciate the value that you’ve added there. One thing I did want to ask you about is the, you’ve got a long career ahead of you. We’re along business career, What are, what your goals, what have you got on the horizon for you.
So my ultimate professional goal, at least for my organisation for groundhog is to be able to provide agencies and small businesses, the complete suite of tools to be able to sell, market and deliver their products and be the de facto solution for those businesses using WordPress, WordPress is kind of like the campground that we chose to play in. and we’re on a mission to be the de facto solution. Much like if anyone who is familiar with the WordPress industry, like woo commerce operate something ridiculous. Like almost like I think 70% of all e commerce sites, it’s like new commerce and that sounds like a great place to be. So we’re on a trajectory to essentially be the market dominator for our CRM and marketing automation product and be at that level of, of market adoption for small businesses and agencies might take a while to get there, but that’s, that’s our trajectory.
So professional goal there personally. I’m an ambitious guy. and one of the things, I mean, I mean the reason I wake up in the morning and I don’t consider my business work right? I don’t, I don’t get up in the morning and I think that I have to, I have to go to work, right? If I was if my girlfriend let me I would work all the time nonstop. Like I thoroughly enjoy it because I just love helping people and I love helping people get results and I love just being there too support other businesses on their way to creating their own impact on the universe and knowing that I had a part of that and I’d be able to like to do that on a much larger scale than what I’m doing now. So personally, I am on my way to being a leader in the small business and the agency community and being able to provide and share the information like I’m doing now on global stages and being kind of not necessarily up there with Dan Kennedy and maybe Russell Bronson they offer different value than I think that I often about but certainly having that same level of recognition so that what I know and the value that I have to offer can be disseminated on just a much larger level than what I’m currently able to accomplish.
So personally, that’s where I would like to inevitably get to and be able to just help people in a much larger scale professionally for groundhog de facto solution and mass market adoption in the Sierra marketing on a mission category. Interesting. I would say that based on what I’ve heard and also the answers that you’ve given today, I think you’re capable of a lot more so. Yeah. Yeah, well the year is young. Got a lot of time to think about it. Yeah, we got time. That’s something that I’m not too concerned about. Have you ever heard of the big hairy goal or whatever it is? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I think especially with like information givers like Dan Kennedy, for example, I mean highly influential don’t get me wrong, but at the same time, yeah, you got an awful lot of time and I think you’ve got an awful lot of knowledge and skills.
So I think we’re going to be hearing from you Adrian. Well, I appreciate that segment and I hope you’re right. So where is the best place for people to find you? All right. So I’m available in a lot of places. One of the things that has ultimately helped my business a success is the fact that I make myself incredibly accessible to people with questions and people who are facing obstacles not only with our software, but with business in general and me being able to help them along the way. So if you’re in a situation where you need a little bit of guidance and you need a little help, here is the best way to get that in an efficient and timely manner. So you can find me personally adriantobey.com where I have every single one of the shows that I’ve done very similar to shows to this one. Shows that focus more on marketing. Shows that focus more on specific business strategies. All of those recordings are linked on my website. So if you just want to go on and binge and see all of the value that I have to share, you can certainly do that. There also a link just to shoot me an email and it’s my personal email address, and I’d be happy to email you back and see if there’s any way that I can help you on your own business journey. So again, that’s adriantobey.com, T-O-B-E-Y. You can also find me at Groundhogg.io that’s going with two Gs. And that is our software organisation. We got live chat there. So if you’re interested in the actual like software aspect of my professional career, you can find that there. I’m also on Twitter, so if you just want to @ me, it’s @AdrianTobey on Twitter as well.
Thank you for all that. And again, thank you. I reiterate, thank you for all the value today.
It’s been my pleasure. I really I really enjoyed it. I love talking about this stuff in hopes that someone listen to and learn something and that’s able to steer them in the right direction.
I’m sure they will. Adrian Tobey, thank you very much.