Paul: 0:29

Hello and welcome back for another episode of MarketPulse podcast. Did I sound really Mackem when I said that? I feel like my posh video voice has, I've been on half term this week, we've been off with the kids, and I feel like my posh voice has disappeared, which is good I prefer my Mackem voice, but it yeah, it's also not good for transcription. I tend to transcribe things and it, the words just, I've had some interesting words transcribed. With me this week, ladies and gentlemen, I've got the fantastic Ryan McCarroll. Ryan, thanks for joining us on the show. Hello.

Ryan: 1:02

Yeah, thank you for bringing me on.

Paul: 1:06

on. LinkedIn probably about three, four, five, Maybe 6 months ago. It's been a while, right? And I was fascinated by Ryan's journal. Journal, Journey. Much the same as I was when I bumped into Devrim. I I just, hands on heart, I think it's brilliant. That you guys like without trying to sound patronizing, right? This is not meant in a patronizing way but for young people to be out there being an entrepreneur and not just trying to be an entrepreneur whilst, working at university or whatever to go all in and to set up your own business and not only that, Ryan, but let's be honest, like we were chatting before the show, but you're doing a tremendous job with building that business out, which I'm sure we'll hear about in a second. I just, I wish I'd had that. opportunity when I was at that age, because when I was at that age, everybody went to university, then you went into corporate world, then you came out, started your own business, if that's what you wanted to do. It wasn't something that many young people were doing at that point. And I, I want to dig into this a little bit more. I'll digress a little bit there, but I want to dig into that a little bit more before we get going. But so Ryan is the founder of DeepPoint Lab and also co founder of AnswerThis, which is a digital marketing consultancy and research tool aimed at empowering small businesses and academics. With a background that began in sales and marketing at just, 14, 1 4, people at home, 14. Ryan's built a 10k 10k dollars. I don't know, I always go 10k pounds. 10, 000 business from scratch, driven by passion for helping small businesses grow through effective digital strategies. Ryan is now based out in the US and he has unique experiences that help businesses streamline operations, improve market performance and not just that, but thrive in the digital age. That is some write up, Ryan. That is some write up. And I know you can back it up. What a fantastic journey. Sales and marketing at 14. How did that happen?

Ryan: 3:00

so I was really fortunate. When I was 14, I was playing around with Instagram. So I used to just really enjoy watching clips and watching motivational posts where it just lay out books a certain Instagram group liked. And so I want to do a bit of that myself as I was reading. Books of entrepreneurs books on how money works. And I wanted to share what little wisdom I had at that time, which wasn't really too much. And so I was growing my own personal brand on Instagram. And this guy reached out to me called Alex Cameron. He's a seven figure entrepreneur from the Netherlands. And he wanted me to help him out with managing. Instagram accounts for clients who had about a hundred, two hundred, three hundred K followers on Instagram. His whole thing was essentially at the time, a lot of Instagram managers tended to be Indian or from Asian regions. I have these big personal accounts, wanted more western managers. And that's very unique selling point. And so I came on and was helping him out with these different personal brand businesses and. He was like a mentor and I was partially working for free at that point as well as mainly just doing it for the experience. And I thought it was super cool to be able to help out and work with these brands. And I learned so much about sales and social media marketing through that. And so I really just stuck with that for about a year. And then from there I use what I learned from all that social media marketing to then grow. My own personal business, which I made with my brother called Kraken Coffee. I think 16 when I started that. We grew that to, I think, 100 plus sales to 13 plus countries. It was a subscription based business. It was during the time where COVID was going about, so a lot of coffee distilleries and, not distilleries, but coffee makers were finding it hard to sell during that time. And so we had a subscription. Business where we essentially just promoted local Northern Irish coffee brewers and we posted out their roasted coffee and yeah we stuck at that until eventually my brother moved over to the States and that went the way, but yeah it's been an amazing journey just being able to have those opportunities and to be able to learn at such a young age. So yeah, immensely grateful for that.

Paul: 5:24

Obviously you're grateful, but you walk through the door, right? That door opens and I'm a big fan of, Talking about this because I've had my own doors that I've walked through to get where I am right now and I see a lot of people who have a victim mentality, right? This is my life. This is all I've ever been given and I often see when people in that frame of mind get offered something that could be game changing. they disbelieve it because why would that ever happen to me? Whereas I see other people like yourself who have that entrepreneurial mindset of what's the worst that could happen here? I give some time of my own free will. It doesn't work out. I don't make any money, but I've learned a ton while I'm doing it. And quite often when you do walk through that door, you then have the opportunity to turn that into revenue, to turn it into a business. And it's skills that at your age, it's in it sets you head and shoulders above pretty much anybody else, and to have a conversation with you about business, I wouldn't guess, if I couldn't see you on screen, I wouldn't guess that you're the age that you are, right? I learned what B2B was at 39, right? I had no idea what B2B was until I was 39. I had to have it explained to me cause I'd lived all my life in B2C world. I'd lived all my life in corporate and I came out and I walked through that door the same as you did at a much later age, but it's a fantastic path to hear somebody join on. So then you now based in the States, I guess you've moved out with a brother, right? Or because of your brother.

Ryan: 6:53

Yeah, so actually when I was I think it would have been the second last year of high school. My brother went for the exact same program and it was called Sudden Trust. It's a Fulbright program where essentially kids from low income backgrounds in the UK can get a chance to go to America for two weeks. And so I was gassed. I really wanted to go see New York I've heard so many good things. In fact, I I was weirdly passionate about the 1 pizzas that they do over there. I just thought it was really cool. So I just wanted to go over there and experience it. Sadly that is when COVID did happen. So I didn't have the opportunity to go on that trip. But I got into the Sudden Trust and yeah, Through that, I was able to work on college applications to the U. S. and have more of a chance of getting a generous scholarship, which I ended up getting for University of Richmond, again. Absolutely. Super, super grateful for that. That's the same process that my brother went through. Yeah no, I'm stuck here in the U S for another two years. I'm in my third year at the minute and yeah, absolutely loving it. Yeah.

Paul: 7:56

It's fantastic to hear. It really is inspirational. And when I think I came away from university. with pretty much a pile of debt in an industry that no, you know I left in 2005 with the dotcom, the first dotcom bubble burst, right? There was no jobs in what I wanted to do anymore and I ended up putting in a retail. So my degree pretty much went to waste for 20 years, 15 years, but it's interesting how, That came back in later life. And I hope you see that too, is not just the skills that you're building on an entrepreneurial side, but your qualifications will become much more relevant further down the line when actually they're what separate you from other people and give you a unique skillset that other people don't have, who haven't been through that educational environment. Talk me through DeepPoint Lab, first of all. So what's DeepPoint Lab and why focus on small businesses?

Ryan: 8:46

Yeah, so erm, MyMy passion, I guess my passion for small businesses my dad, actually, he does a lot of landscaping work, or I guess in the UK it's like fencing, lawn mowing work. So he did a lot of that on the side. He actually retired. Recently, I was thinking of making his own small business just to do a bit of landscaping on the side. And so I've always grown up with people who own small businesses or like trying to do side hustles and work in that way. And so I resonated with the struggles that small business owners have to face. Having to go through financial struggles during half the season or half the months of the year for landscapers from November to March, it's really rough for them. And to try and help those guys out was something I was really passionate about. And during my summer of my first year here at college, I actually met up with a guy called Ayush Garg. He's really good with technology, he's amazing at websites, he can code. Like no one else can code. I think when he was younger too, he was like he's originally from India and he was like the top 0.1% in math in India, which is immensely impressive. So I was blessed to meet up with him. He also came into that entrepreneurial world during the summer of first year as well. And so we try to combine both our passions. I was more of the marketing sales side. I really enjoyed all of that aspect of business. Whereas he was more product focused built, building up websites, all these technologies streamlining, pretty much anything. And I started out marketing to small businesses originally as a sort of an experiment to see if we could actually help them. I know a lot of these agencies. And honestly, it's quite disgusting. I really don't like a lot of these agencies because they'll come in, they'll promise big results. And we've talked to so many business owners. I think I've talked to a hundred landscaping owners over the first summer here at college and all of them, I'd say all of them who did work with an agency had a horrible experience. For example, a lot of these guys promote SEO and SEO is not something that can just be worked up in a month. But that's what people are promoting SEO as to be. And when you come in and you see the work that these SEO businesses are doing, they essentially just post a blog like once a month and expect that to boost the SEO. They might change some things in the meta tags or H1 tags. And it's like minimal work. Sure, it's going to I'm going to increase SEO by a little bit, but it's not going to really impact business that much. And we came through with a holistic package, which was Instagram marketing, Facebook marketing. We would probably do up their SEO as well as newsletters for them. We'd essentially try and streamline the whole functionality of their business. So that they would get better results. So they'll have more Google reviews, which is generally good for SEO. If they have more five star reviews, they're going to rank higher on that Google Maps, especially local SEO, amazing for that. We go through, we redo their entire website. A lot of these landscaping businesses don't really know how to run a website and don't really know the whole technology aspect of things. So we come in, we'd fix all of that up for them. And then of course I would use the Instagram marketing that I knew as well as the Facebook marketing which is very similar to Instagram marketing as well. We would 10X their following accounts and honestly just grow a community around their brands. We've made lots of Facebook communities for these folks as well as building up their own personal brands. Having them be a thought leadership, but also showing off their work at the same time actually made them more personally satisfied in their work. So it's not just grinding out day by day, trying to get through it, but instead it's something they generally enjoy, especially when you hear feedback from not just customers, but people you haven't even used your business and them saying, Oh, this is really cool. I really enjoy like these clips. They find that really fun to have. Once we found out that what we're doing works, we started monetizing that and we've just been doing that ever since. It has been slower recently as I'm sure we'll start to talk about answer this, but for a first start business, I think it's honestly been an amazing ride to do and I guess I don't want to sound arrogant in saying this, but it's also like a lot easier than I expected, especially in the sales side. We started off by just doing cold emails and from there we'd book a call. And honestly, I hear all these Instagram reels and like YouTubers talk about how they overcomplicate sales in a way, I believe cause they always talk about, oh, you've got to say this, that this like setback, or that someone will say this and you've got to say this, but there's really nothing to memorize if you go in, ask genuine questions in your first call. Which is, it's just a customer discovery call. Just ask questions and see if there's generally a problem that they have. If there is a problem that you can solve, then great. Go for it, ask for a second call, say, Hey, I think that we could potentially solve these problems. I'd love to tell you a bunch of ideas that we have and put it in a format that's easy for you to understand. And if you don't want to work with us after that, Then that's fine, completely fair you can just take the information that we gave you and you can use it on your own. Or if you do want this to work with you after that, then we'd be more than happy to and this is what it would take in order for us to work with you. It's just a two call process, customer discovery call and a proposal call and essentially book from there and yeah, I don't know what your experience with sales is, but or hearing all these gurus out there, but I definitely do think it's a lot simpler than what people make it out to be. And honestly, the first step, the only thing is just doing it.

Paul: 14:39

I love that there's a clear passion behind what you do. And you've unlike a lot of other businesses, you've clearly articulated who your first target market is being that, that lawn care business and the business that you know so well. And I think that's a great example to a lot of other businesses out there. We're scared of niching down into that subset of customers. Cause. Essentially, with doing what you do, you've got a huge target market there's very little in the way of what does or doesn't work. It's more a case of where can you showcase experience, and you've gone there first, which is fantastic. talked about Instagram accounts here. And a lot of followers of this podcast are B2B, right? So small to medium businesses who are B2B as an example obviously this podcast, I run the TikTok channel for this podcast and I don't see it as a key channel for us, right? Like it's a way to raise awareness. I don't expect to see business through it. I don't expect to get a lot of inquiries it. I want to raise awareness. And I think that's having that goal in mind for business owners when you're doing these things is important. I logged back into our TikTok account a couple of days ago and found that we had over 17, 000 likes and 153, 000 views. When you consider that all I'm doing is posting out TikTok reels. Week in and week out. I'm not really putting any effort into it. My wife queues them up, writes the posts into them, sends them off to schedule. That's it. We wash, rinse, repeat. That's been a phenomenal find for me and it's blown my mind. So in your view what's the best advice you can give a small business owner B2B focused? How can they Is Instagram worth it for them? And if so, what's the number one thing that they can do to make a difference there if they're already active?

Ryan: 16:22

Yeah, no, that, that's a great question. From my personal experience, like Instagram and TikTok is amazing for what you said spreading awareness, but it's going to be really hard to get sales initially like you. Instagram is going to be a very long term thing you'll have in the background, which will eventually make sales. But my main focus or my main piece of advice would be to really learn either cold emailing or cold calling. Cold calling is a lot harder. And honestly, I've probably spent hundreds of hours just cold calling. And may maybe nowadays it's a lot harder. I'm not quite sure why, but I haven't really had that many good results. Maybe two calls booked with probably I wanna say a thousand people called, whereas cold emailing that, that can just run in the background. If you have a really nice cold called email script. Then you can just burst that out to thousands of landscapers at once. If it comes across as genuine and personal, and if you sound like you're genuinely curious about wanting to learn more about their business and wanting to actually get on a call with them, then you're going to be very likely to be able to book that just one interview, and from there you can really take it. Honestly, like the hardest bit of the whole sales process is booking that initial call. And so My biggest piece of advice would be to practice on refining your script, refining your copy, and just sending yourself out to loads of whoever your target customer base is. For example, a few tools that I've really found useful would be Outscraper to find emails. You can focus on the groups or say you're like me, you can find landscaper owners really easy for there. A lot of people use Apollo as well. I'm not too big of an Apollo fan just because I think it's expensive. And a lot of the emails I give me aren't very valid. So I'd use Outscraper to find emails. I'd use debounce to verify that the emails are actually existent because there's a lot of spam traps, there's a lot of dead emails that you'll find so that sort of washes out all the bad emails and just keeps the good ones. And from there you can use, if you're just starting out you can use, I'm trying to remember the name of it Streaks CRM for Gmail is really good just for starting out and sending out about 50 emails at a time. If you want to get a little bit more advanced with it, I recommend using Smartleads or even Salesforge. Both of them are really good for sending out emails. And then from there, you're just one of the big calls in Refined Copy. I guess you asked me for Instagram advice, but from that side of things, I don't really use it too much myself. In fact, I've only used it for the first time. About two months ago, but I know the meta ads are really good for B2B businesses. If you have a high ticket sale that you're trying to do, so if your products worth more than a thousand pounds or a thousand dollars, I highly recommend using a meta ads just because it's going to be low cost and high returns. But in terms of Instagram and Facebook growth I'd say really it's just for awareness and I would keep that running in the background, but that probably shouldn't be your main focus when you're just starting off or when you're really trying to get customers quickly.

Paul: 19:46

And I think that's the problem that I see a lot of business owners come up against, is they have false expectations of what a channel's going to do for them.

Ryan: 19:53

I get

Paul: 19:53

people come to me and we do a lot of repurposing for people. So I give them content in lots of different formats and their immediate response usually is, oh great, so now I can be across all of the social channels. I'm like, yeah, but Get good at LinkedIn first, because you've now got ammunition for it,

Ryan: 20:09

because

Paul: 20:09

that's B2B, that's where it's at, right? Once you've got that at YouTube, definitely, because that's searchable, you can curate a playlist on there, you can put what videos you think are relevant in front of your target audience, great. Everything else beyond that, you need to test and learn one at a time. And, I'm, I've no doubt that the audiences are there for these things, right? So people say all the time, I hear B2B owners saying my audience isn't on YouTube. For example, that's crap these days. I don't use it that way. I know I don't use it that way. I use it for Blippi and Numberblocks for my son, right? But The numbers that I see back on it, tell me the story that there are people on there who are interested in that sort of content. Not in huge numbers, but they are there. And if that holds true and I can make TikTok sing and dance with just a podcast with no real effort behind it, then I know Instagram's not going to be too far behind that in terms of what it can do and achieve. So each channel has its own content. Way of supporting your business, go into it with your eyes open and test and learn on each one. I guess to come back then, Ryan, to mistakes that people made.

Ryan: 21:17

I just want to, cause you made an excellent point about social media and that you should focus on one channel at a time. I think that's great advice on also. For B2B businesses like you said, I think LinkedIn is definitely the best one to focus in on first. Cause a lot of, I, I mentioned cold emails, but LinkedIn also works just as good, if not better than cold emails. And actually I highly recommend that for B2B businesses as well. And if you have a business account on LinkedIn that has more than a thousand followers, you're going to look really trustworthy when you reach out. And if someone's Someone can just quickly look at you and look at your business and be like, wow, okay, this is actually interesting. These people know what they're talking about. If you're posting about work that you've done or advice for businesses that are related for your sector it can give you a really good validation for those businesses. So I actually highly recommend focusing on LinkedIn first. But then to answer your other question, What mistakes agency owners make when they have the client? What should you avoid? I think cause I have made quite a few mistakes especially for our first clients. And I think one in that proposal call, be crystal clear of what your output's going to be, what they should expect as a return and be specific or make sure your goals are specific. measurable and relevant. Those are the three things and you want them to be something that you can actually achieve. It'll be really attempting to over I guess oversell on that first call and pretend that you can do a lot more than you can actually do. So be as realistic as possible with your goals. And so when you hit them, the business will generally be satisfied because Realistically, what you sell on that proposal is what they expect. And so if you can't meet those expectations, then it's simple as they're just not going to be happy. So that's my first piece of advice. My second would be, and this is all just sort of client relationship. At the end of the day your goal is to make your client happy. And so doing anything possible to make your client happy, is ultimately what you want to do. You can achieve anything you want to achieve, but if your client's not going to be satisfied with that, then what's the point of doing all of that work? So another piece of advice I'd give would be to have standups with your clients. So what I used to do was every two weeks, I'd have all the work that we've done for the client, I'd have some results. So how much is their Instagram growing, for example how much Have we measured that have directly come from us and how many sales have actually increased? So there, it might be hard to get specific I guess measurements on those. But for us, we were able to clearly see how many sales came through Instagram, came through Facebook came through the newsletter and we were able to pronounce we were able to lay all of that out on a standup call. And also we'd have a little Canva presentation with all this information for them. So I'd say those two things are really key. Cause you can get really boiled down and just working on product, working on your service. But client relationship is something that is extremely undervalued and it's ultimately, in my opinion, what matters the most. So that'd be my biggest piece of advice.

Paul: 24:38

Just before we go back to that, so some great points there for me,

Ryan: 24:41

I'd

Paul: 24:41

say if you're a business owner and then you're not feeling that relationship, maybe you're just not getting the communication back. The communication doesn't feel as though it's right for you. I guess trust you've got is what I would say on the side of things. If it doesn't feel right. There's probably somebody better suited out there who is a better fit because right back in the beginning, it's like dating, right? It's like having, going out in a relationship for the first time. It's the best it's ever going to be. If it's feeling off now, in six months time, you betcha that's going to be worse than what it is right now. Second thing being if they just say yes to everything, if you're pushing them for, I want to see this, I want see that, I want to see the other end. And all you're getting back is yes. No is a powerful word for trust. No, I can't do that. No, we don't work that way. No, that's not something we can contribute or measure towards. What we can do is this. In my experience, that's how you build trust with a client by being, to your point, very clear about what you can or can't deliver. And, I don't think any client expects to get everything on their wish list from one agency, right? It is, it's accepted that you're going to get, but I guess there's a lot of business owners out there who just take that agency at their word and then get burned badly. And then all of a sudden we trust no one which isn't great for anyone either. And then lastly, to your point as well, don't trust an agency that's not been transparent about their figures and numbers and dashboards and things. If they can't prove what they're doing for you, how do you know what they're doing is working? And yes, it's technical. It's confusing. There's lots of, you probably won't understand half of the metrics and numbers, especially in your case where you're talking with landscapers, right? What's a conversion rate? What's a click through? What's a call cost per What's a client acquisition cost? All these sorts of there's going to be loads of metrics that you don't understand. But the point being is if your agency aren't willingly coming to you to present the figures and showing, showcasing how proud they are of what they're doing. Then something's probably off somewhere, they're hiding something, or they don't know themselves what they should be measuring, which gives me about results. the other question that I led on to for you was what's the biggest mistake small business owners making right now?

Ryan: 26:53

Yeah. Oh man. Yeah, no you made some excellent points there. And also I guess to your relationship example too, I'm talking about small business owners when it, when an agency does come to you. And I, it's actually mind boggling cause I've been on so many calls sales calls with business owners and none of them asked me for previous results. None of them asked me for proof. None of them asked me for evidence. These things. I bet, I 100 percent bet, if these agents, or if these small business owners asked these questions of, Oh, can I see your past client results? Can I see, what other clients have followed you? Can I get on a call with a previous client that you've had? I bet you that all these all these small business owners who took on these SEO agencies or these marketing agencies who were then disappointed, wouldn't have put them on in the first place if they'd seen their previous results. From a Google search from some of these landscapers, I can just quickly go on and see the quality of blogs that the agencies have been posting and have a quick audit and see that it's just not up to standard. Asking those questions and not being afraid to, cause I'm sure a lot of these agencies get on calls and just tell them, Oh, click through rate. That's going to be like very high. The sales are going to be increasing. But I think that. These small business owners who are more focused on their day to day job and don't I guess have the time to look into these things to go, Oh, okay. Okay. I think a strong piece of advice for small business owners would be asking how and asking why and educating themselves. On what's going on in the industry and keeping up to date with these new marketing methods. Cause even if you want to keep to word of mouth and word of mouth is working excellently for you, it's still worth to learn about these different streams of marketing such as social media marketing and sending out newsletters. So I guess my one piece of advice would just be to not stop learning. Trying to keep up to date as possible, maybe finding a few newsletters or reputable sources to grow and learn about new things, even if it's not fully relevant to what you're doing. Cause I think like yourself, Paul that this whole thing is just a nonstop learning and once you stop learning, that's when you stop growing. Yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice would be to never stop learning. And also I guess take a bit of a risk as well. But make sure it's an educated risk where you've asked the questions of, Oh, what are the past results been? Or why does something work like this? Or how does this work? And constantly asking questions and trying to grow your mindset.

Paul: 29:34

Fantastic. Ryan I appreciate you've talked extensively about landscaping and I know that's not your only target audience, right? This is a, it's a great example of an area that you know well. If a business owner is listening along to this and thinking, do you know what? Like I can understand exactly what Ryan's saying there. I've been in that boat. I've been burned by those things. And they want to have a chat with you to find out a bit more. How can they best contact you?

Ryan: 30:00

Yeah, 100%. So the best way to get in touch with me would be to email me ryan at answerthis. io. That is Ryan@Answerthis.Io. And then you can also just look me up on LinkedIn, Ryan McCarroll. I'm more than happy to message back anyone on there. I'm currently growing a personal Instagram account. It's actually the same account that I used to post on when I was younger. So it has 2k followers, but I deleted all my posts just because I didn't think they were as quality as I can make them now. Yeah, you'll probably see me post about that on LinkedIn when I do have, clips from this podcast or posts going up there. But yeah, email or LinkedIn is the best way to reach

Paul: 30:45

Fantastic. And we'll stick all those email addresses and websites, et cetera, down in the show notes. So if you want to find out a bit more, you can just through down below. Ryan, you've been a fantastic guest. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge. and Experience with us. And I wish you all the best of success as you grow considerably again this year. It sounds like you've got a fantastic year ahead of you.

Ryan: 31:05

Yeah, no thank you so much for bringing me on and yeah so many great takes on your end too. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Paul: 31:13

No problem. Thank you very much. If you're listening or watching along on YouTube or the usual podcast directories, we'll be back next week with another guest. And if you know someone who might make a good guest, or you would like to be a guest yourself, feel free to reach out. Again, links are below in the show notes. Don't forget to give us a subscribe. Thank you. Bye bye.