Turning Passion into Profit: Navigating the Complexities of Launching and Managing Agencies

Hey, hi everyone. Now, welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. And today we have Andrew, who is the owner of Pesty Marketing Agency and bananas marketing agency. So we have an owner of a couple of agencies there. So welcome, Andrew.

Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

Great. And before we move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey? How were you as a child growing up? And then how you started these agencies and what are your core competencies from an agency standpoint, and then we take it forward from there.

Sure. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and got the entrepreneur bug pretty early. My dad had us set up a lemonade stand every year when we had a local festival on the same street that we lived. So there I learned about revenue, expenses, cost of goods sold, all the things that go into some of the basics of running a business. And Any time I would play with my brothers and sisters, I was always trying to play something like city or car dealership or something where I was the boss and running the show and making money. And when I was in middle school, I used to sell… Actually, when I was in elementary school and middle school, I would sell candy to kids. I would stop by a grocery store on the way to school and pick up some and then sell it to them at an increased price. And then in middle school, I used to sell pooky on cards. I would buy them at the store, repackage them, guarantee a shiny card in every pack, and then resell them in the alleyways of our middle school, in the hallways, because we were not supposed to be selling them.

When then, I picked up a couple of books really early on that continued that entrepreneurial spirit, like How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And both of those were left a really big impression on me, especially Rich Dad, Poor Dad, when pertained to business and building the life I knew I wanted to build. And it spoke to me so much. I think at that point, I knew I figured out I didn’t need to go to college to do what I wanted to do, which meant starting and running a business and building something of my own. And And yeah, in terms of childhood and growing up as it relates to, I think, this podcast, that sums everything up all the way through my teenage years.

Absolutely. I’m quite entrepreneurial from day one, I would say. All right. And what was the first job that you ever had? How challenging was it? How did it help shape your career path?

I got two jobs back to one another. The first job I got was as a janitor at my high school right after I graduated from high school. And this was first legitimate job. I had worked odds and ends throughout. Growing up. Made a little bit money here and there. But the first real part-time job that eventually was a full-time job was… Yeah, I was a janitor for a summer at my high school, waking up at crack of dawn, riding my bike a couple of miles to school, and then working from first thing in the morning into the afternoon. And then pretty quickly after that job, and basically at the same time, I got a job selling Cutco Cutlery, which was essentially a door-to-door knife sales job. So I would go into people’s homes, do demonstrations of the cutlery that we had, and learned how to pitch, learned about sales, learned to grow thick skin, learned to get told no a lot.

This was what age? This was what age?

17, 18. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Those are my first two jobs that I got right at the same time and right out of high school.

Lovely. And how did digital marketing happen? How did it get into the SEO, its digital marketing lamp How did that speed?

Well, eventually, I ended up selling home automation systems and then pest control, door-to-door, literally walking door-to-door in neighborhoods and trying to convince people to purchase this product and service that I was selling for these companies that I worked for. And And after a few years of that, I just thought, how much fuller would it be if people were calling me to buy things rather than me trying to go door to door and sell them? So as I was doing that, I started to teach myself marketing and then learned about SEO and web design. And so that’s how I ended up in the marketing field.

And then talk us through founding Bananas Marketing Agency, which must have been a bold move. I understand that you have been an entrepreneur since your childhood days. Is founding an agency It is a big move, right? Let us admit to that. So what inspired you and what motivated you to do that?

I think when I first did it, I thought it was going to make me rich within six months and thought, if I’m going to do marketing. So no, when I actually happened was I was learning SEO and marketing and trying to build my own sites. And a friend of mine was getting into website design and wanted to do website design for other companies, but he wasn’t getting any leads and didn’t know how to do any marketing didn’t want to learn it. So he said, If you can help me with SEO, if you can help me get leads, I’ll give you a commission on every new customer we close. And eventually we were selling enough customers, enough clients that he said, You’re making too much money on commission. This is unsustainable. We might as well partner together and start an agency together. And so that blossomed into what we called WebSauce Studio, and that was the first agency.

Okay. And then when you start an agency, it has its own challenges, right? The initial day is in terms of getting those first few clients, keeping the lights on. And then how was it like? And how did you guys overcome it?

It was terrible. We were not mature enough to run a business. We were not quite fiscally responsible enough. We were really bad at collecting invoices from clients. We were terrible at saying no to clients who were not a good fit and who wanted us to do everything under the sun. We were trying to do everything for everyone. The class or agency mistake. And it was stressful. It was a few years, I think it was two or three years of just not having much money, not really knowing what we were doing, trying to figure things out along the way. Some clients ended our relationship very happy. Some of those clients, they still have today, actually. And then other clients were not super happy, and reasonably so, because we were learning some things as we were going. So it was stressful. And eventually, my business partner and I part ways because we just realized that neither of us were really a good fit to run the agency together.

No, I understand. I understand. And life can be challenging at times. But leading to marketing agency, Simon, we’re talking about in the green room, was actually very impressive. So how do you manage your time and responsibilities effectively between bananas and pesty marketing? I understand that the team is the same, but the clients will be different. It’s two brand names. Give us more about it.

Yeah, bananas does all the fulfillment for pesty. That right there is the majority of what would otherwise be a huge headache, right? So in a sense, bananas white labels services for Peste. And so it’s running two agencies, but it isn’t really the main differences and the things that end up taking a bit of extra time to have two different brands are, one is the deliverables need to be branded and yet really just branded in the way that the client is expecting. If you have a pesty client who’s getting a deliverable, it needs to look and feel like it’s from pesty. If you have a bananas client who’s getting a deliverable, it needs to look and feel like it’s from bananas. We recently rebranded bananas or refreshed the bananas brand and also just finished refreshing the brand for the pesty brand. And so there are some things that I’ve done to help with continuity between the two brands, in particular, something as simple as they share fonts. Whenever we have to change a deliverable in the way it looks to make sure it matches the brand. We just have to change the logo and colors out, which makes it a lot easier.

The other thing that is a bit different is with Peste, everything we do is much more scalable, and something that can apply to one client can apply to all the other Pest Control clients, which is why I started the agency in the first place. So we get that advantage. With bananas, we have clients who all ultimately sell a service and we need to do lead generation for But from one client to another, the needs are a little bit different. Most are B2C, some are B2B. There are certainly some inefficiencies in the business that are a result of having two different brands, but ultimately, we’re able to overcome those just fine. And the team does a good job of helping us balance both sets of clients.

Lovely. And then moving on, you guys do both SEO and paid search like we are talking about, So what is your understanding or your opinion or your take on SEO versus PPC?

The way I think about the two is that they can be, and the way we use them is that they are complementary to one another. Ppc is great because you can immediately turn the faucet on or off. It’s not so great because it’s incredibly expensive and it’s only getting more expensive. Whereas with SEO, there’s a lot of upfront front investment required, but there’s a compounding effect to the results, depending on your level of, frankly, commitment and also where you’re starting today and what your market looks like in six months to a year, at least in the industries and markets that we play in, in those first six months, it’s a bit painful because clients are spending all this money. They’re seeing all the work they’re doing. They hopefully are trusting in the process, but it’s not very ROI positive for quite some time, and you’re really playing the long game. But what’s nice about PPC and SEO is when we get to do both for clients, it’s really valuable for us to see what keywords are converting from PPC because then we can optimize our SEO efforts around those keywords, knowing that what we want to rank for will lead to more conversions.

The other thing that’s really nice about doing PPC is that we design, build, manage the landing pages for our clients on PPC. And that’s huge for us because we can take the learnings from what we see works in terms of a conversion rate optimization standpoint. We can apply those things to the website design and the local service area pages, and that has really served us well. So in the context of who we serve and what we do, those are the things that come to mind first.

Lovely, lovely. And then since you have expertise in both SEO and SCM, how do you strategically combine these tactics if you can help us understand what the use case there? For clients to achieve optimal online visibility and conversions there?

So the way I pitch the marrying the two to clients is actually I call it a holistic SEO strategy. And the end goal that I try to help clients envision is that after a few years of working together, what we really want consumers in your market to see when they’re looking for your services is we want them to see an ad show up at the top, whether it’s a search ad or a local services ad. Below that, we want you to show up in the Google Map pack with great reviews. Below that, we want your website to show up with a link in the top three results, ideally number one. And then if there’s any directories available or a list that we can get you on. We want you to show up there because ultimately, before someone calls you, especially the customers who are usually really good, the ones who are going to do a lot of research beforehand, we want them to see you three, four, five, six times before they even pick up the phone so that by the time they get in touch with you, that sale should be a laydown. And so when we paint that vision for our clients, they understand the importance of combining effective PPC work with all the SEO work that we’re going to do.

And it makes sense to them, especially if they have the ambition to be a market leader in their space. In order to be a market leader, it was really helpful to show up. We have clients who have expressed to me that, yeah, what you guys told us a few years ago is what happens now. We’ll get a call sometimes where a client just says, I asked how they found us, and they said, I was looking and you guys kept showing up, so I figured I had to call you. And that’s the exact call that we want our clients to get.

Absolutely. And you also touched upon a very important thing about local search rankings, especially for home services businesses. This is very important. So what strategy do you recommend for service businesses to improve the local search rankings?

First and foremost, if you have control over where you’re going to put your Google business profile, I always recommend that clients put it nearest where they want their clients to come from. Because proximity to searcher is the number one ranking factor. If I’m across the street from a pest control business and I type pest control into Google Maps, it’s a very good chance that business across the street is going to show up, even if they don’t have as many reviews and as high as a rating as, say, a company that’s a mile away. Just because I’m close to them. So if you can control where you established your Google business profile, that becomes really important. If you’re in the B2C space, again, going back to pest control, then you want to ideally put your establishment near a residential area, assuming you want to go after residential, that has the potential clientele that you actually want to get in front of and take on. That’s going to make a massive difference. The next thing I get clients to focus on is reviews and their ratings. And I usually recommend using some type of system in order to generate reviews, meaning…

And a lot of CRMs have this built in. So if someone, after a service, after you complete a service, you send them a request to leave a review.Automated, yeah.

Yeah, automated. So that’s really important. In the B2B space, there’s also ways to get reviews. And sometimes incentivizing your team to get reviews can be really helpful, especially if you have field service technicians letting them know, Hey, for the next month, you’re going to get a $5 bonus for every review that mentions your name. And they tend to be extra nice, extra thoughtful, and really push those reviews. So that’s a good way to get a review boost. And then after reviews, it’s making sure your profile is filled out. Google doesn’t give you an incredible amount of things on your profile that have a big effect on your ranking. The name of the profile makes a huge difference. The category of the profile makes a big difference. Beyond that, the services that you list and the products that you list can be helpful, but the impact is definitely a bit lower than your profile name and your category. Having good photos on there makes a difference, I think, largely in terms of the click-through rate and creating trust and credibility with someone who’s looking at your profile. And then the last, but certainly not least, most important thing is to make sure that the profile is linking to the most relevant page on your website.

So if I have branch offices in, let’s say, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio, then I want my San Antonio Google business profile to link to the San Antonio page on my website, Houston to Houston, Austin to Austin, as opposed to linking all those pages to the homepage. And that’s going to help Google understand that the page you’re linking to is relevant to the service that someone’s doing if they’re in Houston looking for pest control. And it’s also going to be really helpful for the conversion rate of your website, because if you send someone to a home page that is generic information, it’s not going to be as useful to them as sending them to the page that is relevant to the city that they’re in with all the information relevant to the things that they’re going to have questions about. Those are all the things that we focus on when it comes to ranking in the Google Map pack.

Lovely, Andrew. Thank you for dealing that out for us. And for our audiences, for the for young listeners, you have been an entrepreneur, like I said, from day one since your childhood days. So for our young listeners who are trying to start out their entrepreneur journey, what is the piece of advice you’d want to give to them?

I think for yourself, there’s a lot of advice out there. There’s a lot of people trying to sell you things, whether it’s selling you their info product and how to get rich quick, or whether it’s friends or family members selling you on the idea that they don’t think you can do what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, or that it’s a bad idea or that you should take the safe route. And I think some of the opinions that we hear come from a good place, and some are even valid. So that’s not to say you should ignore everyone out there. But I think a lot of weight should be given to thinking critically, independently, and for yourself when it comes to things, especially as important as, what am I going to do with my life and what path am I going to pursue? And how am I going to spend my time? Because we only got one shot on Earth. I suppose depending on your beliefs, you might as well do it how you want to do it.

Yeah, lovely. Thank you, Andrew, for those insights and those valuable information there. But before we let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re game for it.

Yeah, let’s do it.

All right. Your last Google search.

Oh, my last Google search. It was what? I cooked potatoes. I baked potatoes yesterday, and they needed to know how hot the oven needed to be.

All right. Your next vacation.

My next vacation is to Miami.

Oh, lovely. When is that?

Next Thursday.

Wow.

Yeah, so it’s coming up.

Yeah, around the corner. Almost there. All right, Andy. And what do you do with your first paycheck? First paycheck of your life, assuming you have come really early. Yeah. So if you remember, what did you do with that?

My first paycheck, honestly, I probably took some cash out and went and bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey with a few friends and went and partied.

All right. On that note, where do we find you on Friday evenings after work?

Friday evenings after work? A lot of Friday evenings after work, I’m going to bed because I just work relatively late. But some evenings turn into a social time with friends. Tonight, I’m going to grab dinner with my girlfriend and a few of our friends, and then we’ll probably jump around downtown for an hour or so afterwards. So yeah, working or hanging out with friends.

Lovely. You have a plan, it seems to not hold you back for long now. Thank you so much, Andrew, for taking out time to discuss with us. This was a brilliant conversation. Cheers, man.

Thanks, Ranmay. I appreciate it.