The Power of Personal Branding and Authenticity in Digital Marketing

Hey, hi, everyone. Now, welcome to your show, E-coffee with Experts. Today, we have none other than Charlie Harper, the founder of the Whoosh Agency with us. Hey, Charlie.

Hey, what’s going on, man?

Good, Charlie. Back from vacation, right?

Yeah. As I was saying, in the pre-shoot, we were in Nashville, Tennessee, and joined a lot of bands and the good food and all the good times and drinks and all the good. If you’ve never been to Nashville, Tennessee, I highly recommend it. For me, it’s only an hour’s flight from where I live, which makes it even better. You don’t have a long flight to get back from a destination, a long weekend of fun with friends. Lovely.

Charlie, let’s get to know more about Talk us through your journey. I would not do justice in terms of if I go and elaborate in terms of what you have been able to achieve from starting your agency, creating jobs, and helping other agencies. Give us more about what Charlie Harper’s all about.

All right. Thank you for asking and having me on here, too, by the way. I’m really about Like you just mentioned, creating jobs and giving people. For anyone who’s ever seen the movie Shawshank Redemption, I usually make a joke that I Shalshank the Cubicle. I had a long-term high-tech career with IBM and Unix and Linux, systems administration, and things like that. I had a sales background and stuff, but I was unhappy. I’m a social guy, a social sprinter, I guess you will. I was always a side hustler. I’d been building websites commercially since 2001, even before WordPress even existed. I had my unlicensed copies of Macromedia software, like Fireworks and Dreamweaver, and all that before Adobe got a hold of them and all. I had always been building websites on the side while I was in my IT career and in sales and stuff like that. As the internet blossomed, over time, I’m an old dude, I’m a Gen Xer, and I’m 46. As the internet grew, I was and everything, my clients that I was doing websites for were, Hey, this Facebook thing, this email thing, this social media stuff, and all this. All of us are essential, we’re almost like a conglomerate of the things you pick up like a snowball rolling down a hill.

I was doing my tech job, I was doing marketing on the side. Then an inflection point in my life hit when I had my first son. I had my son Brody. I have four boys in 2010. I realized the same thing I was doing for IBM was redundancy and having multiple points of failure so systems could stay up. I had a single point of failure in my life, which was IBM and a salary and a job. I had this kid now, and I started thinking, and it sounds crazy and it’s cliché in a way. I have a signed copy at home, but I read the book Crush It in 2011, I believe, by Gary Vaynerchuk. It wasn’t I was doing or did what he said to do in it, it was just the idea that it brought to my mind about owning it, of owning my success and things like that. It kicked me into gears to say, Hey, I’m going to start building something for real. I incorporated it officially in 2011. After I read that book, I got the LLC going and all that stuff. I started to make it more serious.

Then fast forward to 2015, on October 9, at noon on a Friday, I walked out the door of IBM and handed them my badge. It got to the point where the work for the agency I was building and the job were starting to meet a point. I was that guy who would go to work all day, come home, play with the kids, eat dinner, whatever, wife, go to bed. Then I’d work till one or 2:00 in the morning, and then I’d get up and do it all over again. I take client calls at lunch right afterward. My clients knew I was working at IBM. They knew I was working there and that I couldn’t work with them while I was working at IBM. But I told them that during my breaks and the things I was entitled to, I would address things. I didn’t steal time from IBM, but I was very like, I protected my time outside of IBM with everything I had. Anyway, the biggest change for me, too, man, was when I switched my business model from project-based to recurring revenue. That’s actually what dug me. That was around 2014, and I did that for about a year of growing clients into recurring revenue packages.

Then that’s what allowed me to not completely replace my salary. I got to a certain point where I could. Then when I got to that point, I and my wife downsized our house, cut expenses, do all the shit that nobody else is willing to do. Not chase the Joneses and all that We were like, Okay, we see liberation outside of the rat race than everybody else. We downsize and we do all these different things, and I can leave IBM. My wife was already at home full-time at the time. By that time, we wanted to have more children. Long-winded answer, but essentially, that’s where I am now, full-time since 2015. I hope that answers the question.

Absolutely. I’m glad you elaborated it in a way where we can understand your thought process and can relate to it, man. Great.

Yeah.

Great, Shal. How did you start Whoosh Agency and how has been the journey so far? Having your agency, being an agency owner, is challenging, day-to-day ops, but you have treated an automated system. Talk us through it. Also, how did the initial days look like? There would have been challenges. How come from starting to now making it automated? Talk us through that journey.

Essentially, in the beginning, it was a lot of just me. I think that’s the common story. It’s always been the challenge of where the cobbler’s kids have no shoes. Everything I was doing for everyone else, I was never doing for myself. There are a lot of challenges with convincing clients that what they wanted to do was not the right thing to Then in the beginning, my biggest challenges were pricing my services. I was not pricing myself correctly, and that caused a lot of pain. I couldn’t hire for help. I couldn’t do anything like that. The other thing, too, is that I still had a mentality, the wrong mindset as an owner early on where I still had an employee mindset a little bit, where I would get clients. I knew how to sell and get clients, but then I would start acting like an employee to them, taking orders and doing their stuff or whatever, versus driving the relationship, which is completely what I do now. Because they were looking to me to drive the relationship, but at that young age, I did, or I get not young age, but a young stage of my agency.

It was a lot of growing pains of pricing, the relationship stuff. But through it all, though, I still have clients today that I started with. I think That’s been good, but there have been a couple of missteps where one guy hired my agency for a product that doesn’t even exist anymore. That’s when I realized, too, my split between services versus products and e-commerce. I do not do e-commerce or products or anything because I had a bad experience with someone who was trying to sell a product that had a horrible website. It wasn’t just, Oh, because I want to take care of the website. I was like, No, we got to do the website before I can even send traffic because you can’t even buy anything off of this website. You’re asking me to sell something that they can buy off the website. But what happened is I started working on the website and they were like, Why isn’t the funnel built? I’m like, Because I don’t have any conversion place to send them to. They didn’t understand that and I couldn’t. I had a failure early on, I think around 2018.

That’s been my biggest failure. But a lot of good guys, good people that I was involved with, and we parted ways amicably. But still, it was a lesson of, Hey, I’ve always in my life been a service provider. Every business I’ve worked in for other people and everything like that was services. I worked in a law firm for over a year as an IT person in a services business and all this stuff. It was that next inflection point of, I hate product marketing. I hate e-commerce. I hate all that stuff. That was those kinds of challenges. Then it became the hiring, right? And getting help and ramping people up and going through all the thousands of software. It’s like a shiny object. Man, I tell you what, I don’t know about all l you, but man, software, it’s almost like crack cocaine sometimes. You see this next software out there and it can do all these bills and whistles and you’re like, Oh, this is going to make my life easier. But what happens is you start pilling on all these different software and everything, and there was some complication in that.

I guess I think that the journey is that I figured out what worked, and then I cut the hell out of everything. I have cut out probably 20 software of my life. I cut all that out. I figured out exactly what roles I needed in my agency. I needed a designer. I needed a copywriter. I needed a project coordinator person. I needed to maintain control of advertising and communication with clients and things like that. I think there’s a great book called Clock, something. I can’t remember the name of it or whatever, but there’s something called the Queen B Roll. What is your actual role? I needed to stop doing everything and start handing it off to folks. Those are some big unlocks for me over time. There still is. Now and then, you’ve got a client that’s unhappy with something, and most of the time. But I’ve not had anything relationship-ending anymore. It’s always a messaging problem or something that they’ve pivoted in some way or they’re under a ton of stress in some way, and you just work through those problems with them.

Absolutely. Charlie, you have been in the service-based business for quite some time now, right? In your experience, what have been the biggest challenges faced by service-based businesses when it comes to digital marketing?

I think that they find something that is working and they don’t want to stop it, and they don’t want to adapt to new things. I can’t get a service business owner or a stakeholder of any kind on video at all, hardly. Some of them in their attempts have started wanting to do AI videos or where they use little stick figures. We do some videos with B-roll in them and stuff like that. But there’s a huge avoidance of someone being a personal brand in a company right now, even still today, even though you see it all around there. I think one of it’s impossible Monster syndrome and just fear of the camera. There’s that obvious thing. But I think, too, that the words influencer marketing, don’t want to be an influencer because of the negative connotation, which that whole negative connotation is undeserved and stupid, in my opinion. But basically, I think that one of the bigger problems is getting videos out of clients. The other challenges are their reluctance to spend more in the market as far as advertising is concerned. They don’t realize the ad costs are going up and their ROAS and things like that.

I have some clients who spend the right amount of money and they are constantly busy. But getting some clients over that hub of their daily spend and things like that, they don’t see it. You try and tell them, I’ve got one client that refuses to advertise at all. They are running a massive startup that’s a multinational company with proprietary software, all the different things. They are running completely organically with everything. That leads me to another problem I see with service businesses. What they want and what they are willing to do are two different things to get it. I’m like, I’m doing this at five other companies just like you, and we are seeing success. You want what they have. Let’s do that. No. I’m like, Okay. I don’t know what else to tell you there, buddy. But that’s another big challenge there. That’s the big ones right now. Right.

I was just going to say, too, I’m talking with a lot of them about AI.

I was about to. I was about to ask that in terms of what is your general take on AI and machine learning. And has been more than a year now since we got into all of this. So what do you think? Where are we heading with AI, machine learning, and all?

It’s crazy. We were using Jasper AI for about a year and a half before OpenAI made its massive whatever. I’ve been coaching the clients on it’s great for ideation and for generating ideas and giving you structure and things like that. Man, it’s so obvious when someone’s on LinkedIn and they just literally spit out something from AI and copied and pasted it into their posts and things like that. I think AI is just like, you’re still Batman, but it’s Alfred. I don’t know, who knows? It could probably become Batman at some point in certain things. But my opinion about AI is that personal branding and AI are going to continue in this trend together. Because perhaps authenticity and psychology and things like that, it’s not going to go away. People are going to crave what’s old is new again in a way. All this new AI is eventually the old is new again going to be replaced. Because I do think that AI is going to push harder the community growth aspect of things, how people are growing their communities and outside of social networks and stuff. I think that AI is going to push the growth of community marketing in a bigger direction where, again, but there is an influencer.

There is someone who is respected and has authority and influence there. It’s just that human connection isn’t going away because of AI. Can AI help us with SEO right now? It certainly does. We’ve got AI. AI is being baked I’m listening to every damn thing. But I think people are just sniffing the crack of AI, and most of them don’t even know how to use it correctly. I try and tell people when I go to meetings and they ask me about how they should use it, and I tell them something I think a lot of people don’t know. I say, Tell AI to first ask you questions that you need to answer. Then, I think the use of AI, too, is best. I told one client one time, ” I would rather you pick up your phone and record your sofa for 10 minutes talking about a topic, and then use the transcript of that as the source of the AI output you get, versus using the generative that’s out there. You want to be able to base it on your information to keep it unique. That’s where I’m at with it.

Think about this, man. Google, they’ve got Bard, what is it called? They’ve got their flavor. They’ve got their thing. They’re big-time AI. Google’s got AI for days. Probably we’ve had it for a decade. They’ve got AI for days. But at the same time, their second largest search engine in the world, YouTube, they’re, Well, the point of breaks. We’re going to start labeling everything that we know was generated by AI so that our viewers, in other words, our user experience, don’t decline because of AI. They’re already seeing the cannibalization of, We provide their product. They’re not even sending people to the websites anymore. Ai is another, and you can get me going on this. Everyone with these complicated websites, I tell clients to make a four or five-page website now. All of your everything should be out in places like YouTube and stuff like that where there are aggregators and stuff to get. Then the website is just the final conversion point now. I know that’s against all the SEOs just probably gasped, but I’m thinking now that I remember, that eventually the major websites would pull all the people in and there would only be a few websites on the web that really are where everybody is.

I feel like that is happening. You still need your website. But the actual organic traffic aspect of things and what AI is going to do to AI to organic traffic, and I just feel it’s going to affect a lot of things. But I don’t have the fear That a lot of people have about it, putting a lot of people out of jobs. You just have to adapt. It’s just like everything else. Every time the internet was introduced to the world or the conveyor, Ford’s assembly line was introduced to the We adapted, we changed. I think that’s where AI is taking us. But man, people give too much credence to shit they don’t control. I don’t control AI. I don’t control what other people are doing with AI. The only thing I can control is my actions. And that’s it. That’s all you can control. Act in a direction where there’s success, you can find clues. But, inside of my agency, I still have a full-time copywriter, you all. All these people are talking about, Oh, copywriters are going away and all this shit.

Hell, no. We work with law firms and stuff like that. I need someone who’s going to human verify some stuff and rewrite it. She’s a great writer, and she’s, Yeah, this is just pure crap. It’s repetitive. A lot of people who don’t work in it don’t understand how repetitive it is. Anyway, sorry. That’s a big topic for people in our industry.

Even in the medical space, lawful marketing is one. Even in the medical space, you need an actual human side in the content who is specialized in the particular domain. I could not serve you that content for the medical space for that matter. Yeah. All right. Look, Charlie, finally, you have been on the road for quite some time and quite a This is for a journey, I must say. What advice would you want to give to our listeners today who are trying to make a mark in the digital marketing space?

This is going to be a weird one that I think a lot of people, might do, but they don’t realize what they’re We always want to get reviews, but a lot of people don’t realize that a review and a recommendation are two different things. I’m not just talking about a referral either. A referral is a different thing as well. A referral is when my client happens to be talking with another colleague or something like that, and marketing comes up, and then they connect me via email and stuff, and that’s a referral. Then you get a review where you’ve done a good job for a client, and you feel confident they’ll give you your review gate, You want to make sure they’re going to give you a good review, and you get that review. One a lot of people don’t talk about is recommendations. What I mean by that is a lot of your clients are in groups online and communities. They’re either in a circle community out there, they’re in a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group and all that. Those groups are normally contextual to a specific topic or industry. Lawyers are in lawyer groups or lawyer software-type groups like Clio or the other locus and all this stuff.

Occasionally, I’ll just say to my clients, Hey, if someone asks about marketing or asks for a recommendation for an agency, Please bring me up and post me inside of the group. I know for a fact, that nobody ever asks for recommendations inside of groups online. I think that is where a lot of decision-making is happening now. They’re trusting the word of their peers. They know that reviews now are gamified. Reviews are gamified and referrals are just one-to-one things, But if you want a one-to-many, it stays in that group forever. They put you in that group. They can have conversations about the recommendations coming through to a specific response or something like that. I have gotten clients across the entire nation in Facebook groups because a law firm recommended me. And I’ve had calls. We saw you were recommended in blah, blah, blah, the Facebook group, and we’re reaching out to get a quote from you. I think that, and this ties in with what I was saying about community marketing in general. I think that now, obviously, creating a community, managing a community, all that stuff is a large undertaking. But I do think agencies and agency owners could probably benefit from creating a community of their own to generate leads.

Because here’s the other aspect of this, too, and this is a meta thing to say because we’re on a podcast right now. I am telling all of my clients right now, you do paid, you do organic. But the one thing you don’t do is audience. It’s almost like the audience is a whole other channel that a lot of people are afraid to jump on. They’re all about their SEO, which you’ve heard my opinion on that, and where websites are heading. They’re definitely about paid, which is constantly going up in price, especially for the smaller local companies and things like that.

200%?

Yeah. Audience. How are you building an audience for yourself? If you combine that with a community, that right there is a powerful strategy for you going forward that is isolated, right? Especially if you were to use a school. Com or even high-level community thing now that they’ve got. I don’t know what it’s called exactly, but if you can own a community and start building an audience. That’s old news, right? People have been building audiences for years now, but it is not old news to these business owners out there, dude. If you’re beaten, let’s say you’re in the HVAC space, getting one of them old boys to build a community is going to be about damn near impossible. But could you convince them eventually to start just making TikToks or something like that while they’re under the house? Things like that. I think that if you can start doing that, they will help you grow because it’s where it’s all heading. It’s like success leaves clues about things. Let me see if there was another note of something that… Oh, the other thing, too, I did want to mention this, and this is a personal experience of mine.

A lot of people focus on local SEO. That’s from your line of work and everything. But they are missing one thing. They’re missing local involvement. If they want to focus on local, they’re a single location company and their market… A lot of people talk about marketing, but they don’t realize what they’re doing is making a market for themselves. That’s the whole point about the community thing. You got to make your market. Are you involved in your planning board? Are you on civic boards with your art council or local groups with your chamber? Are you on the boards with these places where you’re at all the ribbon cuttings and all the things that are happening in your local community? Where are you being visible For me, I’m very active in Miracle League, which is a special needs baseball program. In sponsoring them, I sponsor all the Little League and the recruit Parks and Recreation Sports. When you’re talking about local marketing for yourself and you want to become an influence or a big deal in the market that you’re making, where you’d have the most success. A lot of people can build a seven-figure business within a rock throw of their business.

They’re trying to go after the big money all over. Yes, I have clients all over the damn place. Yes, 100%. But I’m shifting now to where it’s local. I’m on the planning board. I’m on the board with the chamber of commerce and all that. I think a lot of business owners would benefit because just think about it, who gives a shit to go out on a Thursday night to a drinking chamber event, things like that? A lot of those times, family obligations and stuff get in the way of that. But if you’re involved with the boards and the decision-making and being at the other things that are involved, you can build relationships. There are calls for you to be there, not just to hand out your business card all the time and say, buy my thing. You’re there with actual stakeholders. Anyway, those are my tips get involved in person offline locally in addition to your local strategy, ask for recommendations, and get your blood into building a community and an audience now, because those are the things that are going to shield you from AI over the next 10 years, in my personal opinion.

Lovely. Great, Charlie. It has been brilliant Thank you so much for doing this with us. Appreciate it.