Data Analysis Strategies And Tips To Grow Your Small Business

Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of E Coffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser. And on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about data analysis strategies and tips to grow your small business with Yader Gil. Yader is the founder of Progeektech, a web flow development, and marketing agency based in Temecula, California. He holds years of experience working in the corporate world, managing stores and overseeing sales. And the idea for Progeektech came to Gil when he was in the midst of a devastating depression after being laid off from his corporate job of 13 years. Once he rose, he could express his creativity and build new skills in online marketing business growth, setting his foot forward to his exciting entrepreneurial journey. He is the single father of two amazing boys who keep him young at heart, and he demonstrates a deep-rooted passion for simplicity and creativity. Thank you so much for coming to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you here.

My pleasure. Thank you for connecting as well. Matt

So for ten years, you worked as a store manager? Well, for more than ten years you worked for RadioShack. What was your experience working there and how has it helped you in your current profession in running your business today?

Yeah. It’s pretty interesting. You know, so I was never interested in sales or managing or any of that stuff. So before that, I actually used to work in a restaurant as a waiter. So this manager used to come from RadioShack store to the restaurant and he’s like, “Hey, why don’t you work for us? I’m like, I’m not into sales or any of that stuff.” I’m into serving, he said will you still can serve people in RadioShack. And I’m like, okay, What can I do there? Well, you got to serve them and sell them. Whatever. Anyways, make a long story short. The guy recruited me and I started working for RadioShack, and six months later I became a manager. They move to a bigger store. And then 13 years later, I was there as a senior manager, managing over 300 employees. I trained them in development and obviously, we grew the companies and we still went to Graham normally like the last store we had. It went from $600,000 to $1.2 million a year, making an impact. Now, things that I learned from that, number one were managing people, and delegating when it comes to like performance. So of course, all these companies they care about performing. And our performance was critical on a daily basis. So I think honestly, although the thing to more than anything, anything was built building relationships either with clients and also your employees. Because I think when you’ve been genuine with people at the end of the day, obviously they’re going to buy your products. But when they see that you care about them more than the product that you trying to sell them, people really become so loyal. And honestly, I think that was our number one recipe.

Yeah, People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Exactly.

If you treat your clients like that and your employees like it definitely help. So what was the event that led you to start your own? I mean, in the intro, we start to touch a little bit about something that happened. What was the event that happened that made you start Progeektech?

Several things. So number one, of course, I was laid off from a corporate job that I have had for a long time at RadioShack. Number two, honestly, the hardest thing was when you were working as a manager, so normally you are a slave of hours, right? You work 80, 90, 100 hours a week and so most of the time I was absent from being at home with my kids or my Ex and things like that. So that led to what happened, obviously separating and divorce. And, unfortunately, you know, my wife left and the hardest thing was, how can I take care of my son or my kids at this time and provide for them at the same time and not be away for so many hours? At that time, they were very little. And so that led me to me like, honestly, I wasn’t able to pay a babysitter, pay my rent, pay my bills, my food, and at the same time, be with my kids. It was more difficult as a man, because as a man, to be honest to me, I had a neighbor, the husband thought that I was trying to hit on her but obviously I was just trying to ask you for help. A lot of the time people have these misconceptions. And so yeah, the best part of all this, a friend of mine asked me saying, “hey, why don’t you build us a website”, and I had never done that, and I said, let me check it out. And honestly, when I start learning about it, I start learning, downloading so many courses, and learning from all the best gurus at that time. And so and from the amnesty, he referred me to one client, another client, and for me to another one, and I started building pretty much the relationships from that. And so today, of course, 10 years later, going strong.

So that was ten years ago?

Yep.

Wow so, 23 years ago that you started your journey at RadioShack, and then it’s been ten years since you’ve been going strong.

Yes.

That’s interesting. So you were able to like you basically trained yourself, self-taught how to do websites?

Well, I learned a lot of things. Of course, we know because the design is one thing. But of course, my interest before that was marketing . I want to know when it comes to things other than SEO, how can I outrank our competitors with research, and learn how to do PPC. That’s one thing I was doing with Google advertising especially, so you know, all those, all those things of course. But then, within that as well. Web design at the same time.

Did you fall in love with it instantly? Like, did you like it like the word design part of it? Or was it or are you just doing it just to make money?

No, no. To be honest, I always liked the design. So, when I was a RadioShack. I used to design these fliers that were not allowed, but I was designing them and posturing them for business. and I never got approval, but I was doing it behind the doors for us to bring more leads.

To get more leads in.

Yeah, and bring the fliers to the parking lot, believe me and that’s the reason that we see we’re successful. So I always like design. I did like the design. Of course, I didn’t know much about design. Of course, you know, as you said, I started learning about UI UX design, about marketing, about all the different things, and I think that really helped be what we do today. But yeah, definitely it was a really amazing experience.

What did you start off with obviously? Did you start off using WordPress?

I started using it the first two weeks.

Oh, that’s okay.

Yeah. And because that was the easiest thing that I could learn or anything. And then from there, I went to WordPress and during that time, that’s when we used a new platform, which today is honestly one of the strongest ones. It’s called Webflow. And so I said, Hey, somebody in a chat. I was in a chat because I was frustrated with a project that I was doing and there were so many issues that I was having. And then this guy’s like, Have you tried webflow? I think workflow can do this for you. And I say, Oh, let me check it out. So when I sign up, I try it out. And of course, ten years ago, you know, maybe nine years ago back then wasn’t as intuitive. And that is right now. But honestly, I’ve been learning so much from it since then that that’s what we use 100% today.

So how many years have you been using webflow then?

About seven years now.

Oh, seven years now. Wow.

Yeah.

Right on. What do you love about it the most?

To be honest, the flexibility of how much I can customize any designs without limitations. That’s number one. Number two, I like that. In my case, when it comes to the clients, I think that from an agency perspective, that’s one of the hardest things. One, you build and develop a website, you hand it off to the clients and they don’t know what they’re going to do. With webflow that’s what makes it so much easier because they can definitely use it, it’s for a two-year-old or a second grader, so they can actually make changes without affecting the design, without knowing any code simply. And you build obviously for that perspective, how can I make sure the client has access to these and make changes without the need of any designers or developers? And so that makes it so much easier for us.

Yeah. What’s one thing about it that you would improve if you could?

From webflow?

Yeah. The sky was the limit. There’s one thing that you could change about it, if you could talk to the developers at Webflow

Integration. Because the integrations that we have in there are obviously what it’s limited to, whatever you have. So in some cases, for example, people want to create functionalities that don’t exist. Like simple e-commerce, you want to add likes or you want to add a favorite. So you want to add, you know, some little different things. Definitely, you can do none of those things or create comments on a blog. You can create those things unless you use third-party applications.

Okay. So you have to use a subdomain for a WordPress blog if you want to.

If you want to do that. Otherwise, you still can do blogs through webflow, I think it’s really powerful.

Well, you know, some people like Darren Shaw of White Spark. He turned off comments on his blog because he’s like that comments are dead. You know, people are just using it as spam. Those links don’t even have any value.

I agree.

So to me, we’ve got integration with marketing automation platforms like ActiveCampaign or MailChimp or things like that. Just want to integrate with those.

Sure. Definitely, you can.

All right. I noticed that in recent news, Progeektech has announced the launch of a new service called Convert Smart Framework to support struggling small businesses and help them realize their true potential. What’s that about?

Yeah. So one of the issues or problems that we commonly see with small businesses is that they either get overwhelmed with so much information out there. In every business normally, if we know what is the process of our business, every business needs traffic, right? They need conversion, then they need sales. Those are the three main things that make any business. Right. So in this case, the question is, we’re going to get this traffic either online or offline. Where does that come from? And the next thing is, okay, now, how are we going to convert it right there and then use a website CRM or form? Social media? What are the things where all these different things are going to convert? And the last thing is, how are you going to make your sales? So with that in mind, because we normally see it as an example, people coming to us are like, Oh, help me with the website, right? We help them with the website. But that was only one part of the equation because now they need to get their traffic. They need to figure out how to do a conversion, and how to make sales. So then, end of the day, the website didn’t do its job, and then if you do the SEO, but then your website is not ready for converting, and then the content and the design are not really well. So in this case, it doesn’t do that job either. So we come up with the idea to say, what about if we build something that will help businesses from beginning to end? And in this case, we came up with Convert Smart, which at the end of the day is the end-to-end solution to help their marketing needs and their online presence.

So in this case, we help them with traffic, in this case, what do we do with traffic? We do our technical SEO. So that’s number one. When it comes to the website, we rebuild the website for them, and then after that, we actually create an automation system that will connect with all those things at the same time.

That’s very interesting. What part has data played in your journey in regards to becoming a marker and using data?

To be honest, like most of the time, data for us is incredible because, of course, there are so many ways you can go for data, right? But in this case, if we’re thinking about it from every based business perspective, data is everything. In this case, how do you know who’s your target audience? What do they do? When do they do it? Any of that information obviously, they are vital. In our case, we think is like, the role that it plays, in this case, is I don’t know, it also depends on what are we going to do with this client. But let’s pretend from the SEO perspective, right, it’s important for you to have very good research when it comes to your keywords, your competitors, all the different things, your links and, all these different stuff that is going to help you to actually use this data to, of course, make good decisions for your business. So I think definitely plays a big part in our day-to-day basis when it comes to Google Analytics, to either website all these different things.

What point in your career did you realize they could either come to a point in one’s career where they need to realize that analytics is something that you need to know about, besides just installing Google Analytics on the website, that being able to read the data and interpret the data and know what the data is saying. What was your journey like into that? Like, was there a specific campaign that you worked on, what was it?

Yeah. Yeah. We had several different projects and especially this one, we were working with dental offices during that time and one of the problems was these clients always say that we didn’t have any results. It’s like we paid it, we pay, we didn’t have any results. And so that’s why we came up with the automation stuff. And so we said, okay, well we need to figure out a way that we can track this data and educate in this case, the client for them to understand what is it? Is it working or not working? And so definitely Google Analytics is a very good thing to do or helps but of course in our case we use our CRM systems that not only give us what could be but actually what it is 100%. It’s like, hey, you got these many leads and of these many leads, you didn’t call all of them. You actually didn’t respond. You didn’t reply. If you don’t, you’re not going to get the sense.

That’s so true.

So definitely.

Yeah, I hear what you’re saying because, I told you, I was the marketing director at a dealership and I never forget the general manager was the owner son who’s part owner of Main in the office and told me what I was doing wasn’t working. And he said, Well, how do you know? Like, I mean, I had to play dumb. And he’s like, Well, because we’re not selling any cars, I said, okay, let me go see what’s going on and come back to you. So that’s when I knew about analytics. That’s when I hit the hyperfocus button on analytics, like the supernova. So I went in and connected. I created all the goals, even more goals, and proper goals, and I implemented phone tracking and connected the phone tracking to the CRM and the call tracking and registering events and Google Analytics. I even went so far as to create goals that were like, time on site goals for certain pages and like the views of certain pages, specific pages that were specific KPIs that registered the quality of the traffic, and so on and so forth. And I was able to show that, hey, look at these numbers, look what I’m doing. You know, I increase the website traffic by average. I sent you off camera or 200% lead volume went up 139. And I would show a year over year, month over month showing the increases continuously, even bringing it down into channel by channel and the sales up by. I was even uploading the CRM data at the end of the month and uploading it to Facebook. So I could say this is how many people we sold cars to based on this campaign. I didn’t go into the DMS, the dealer management system. That was the inventory accounting system to show them the return on investment. And they were kind of what’s that I’m looking for. They didn’t want me to know how much money I was making them, because then they would have to pay me more money year-round about what they downplayed. It’s funny because and then at that point they could no longer downplay the success that I was doing, like because they were kind of like, you’re doing an okay job. And it’s like at that point I knew the job that I was doing. And so it’s so important for us as marketers to have that data and to learn the data. And eventually, I shot them up like there was nothing they could say, although they did start to bitch about the leads not being qualified. So that’s where they could then go, “Oh, you’re getting us lots of leads and they’re not qualified.” Here are the parameters, someone has filled out a lead, they have a real email address, and real phone number and they are obviously interested in a car. What more do you want? It’s you want it on a silver platter that they just walk in and make it $20,000, 30,000, $60,000 purchase with just,” here’s my credit card, give me the car”. Like, come on, like that thing, I get frustrated at. I mean, differentiating between a marketing-qualified lead and a sales-qualified lead. I know that there are parameters there but many times I’ve done both, I’ve sold cars and I’ve done marketing, and I know how to do both. Yeah. So I know what it takes to do both. And like you said many times, these people, they don’t even answer the damn phone and you need to answer the phone. And what would you say would be if they’re not answering the phone? Like, Dan Kennedy, he’s like, you need to record every single phone call. Have your people listened to every single phone call, you better have phone scripts written for them that they follow, you better audit them to make sure they’re saying, because every phone call that’s a marketing channel, they’re costing you money.

That is 100% true.

True. So, I mean, what are your thoughts on how they’re having problems answering the phone? What if it is a plumber? He’s working in his business, he’s under the darn sink, fixing a sink or a furnace or whatever. Like he can’t go like, Should I answer the phone? I don’t know, what if you can’t afford a secretary? Because that’s expensive. What do you think? What are some automation systems or clients or services?

Yes, that’s going back to the same thing though, like you said, the virtual assistants, any of those things, of course, I think it will help and unfortunately, not everybody is going to have the budget for that. So in this case, you don’t have the budget for that, you have a CRM that can automate these things for you, normally one of the things we were doing for several of our clients, actually, I would do that today. If somebody missed a call, like a call isn’t answered, automatically the system will send them a text message to them saying, “Hey, I’m sorry I missed your call, how can I help you?” And I’ll send them a text message. And the person, 90% of the time responds and says, “Oh, I was looking for this or that.” And so that conversation, two stars there, you know, so by simply creating little things like that, I know that thing we did for this was for a commercial cleaning company. And what we did was he was having a hard time converting people into the website, filling up the form, the only thing we did is implement a chat widget that he connects to our CRM, and that conversion went to 300% people. I simply want to ask that one quick question.

Obviously, the data was telling you that people weren’t filling out the form, analytics data. So just so you made an adjustment and implemented it.

Yeah. Well, one thing we see right was obviously we sell traffic. So going back to the problem, right, you got to see you’re three different things, right? If you have traffic, you have to have conversion. Does that mean you’re traffic got the problem, right? So what’s the problem here? Your conversion is a problem right now. If you have traffic having a conversion, but you’re not having sales, in that case, your problem is not the first two but the last one right here. So in this case is like, well, how can I fix whatever your bottleneck is? That’s why you get to tackle it until you get it done. In their case, we identify, and we see they’re getting to traffic, right? Because obviously, they were going like 1,000% traffic, and then after they’re not having any conversion. So it’s like, you know, we simply say, hey, let’s try that chart. We put it in and then boom, though, the problem with the challenge is, Clients, have some time or excuses, right? They might say, “hey, I don’t have time to be answering the phone or chatting with people” because that’s very common and it’s a legitimate question.

I don’t understand that because you can’t make money without answering the phone and why are you in business then?

I cannot agree more with you.

What are you talking about? You don’t have time to answer the phone and interact with people. What business are you in then? Because if you can’t connect with people, you should be jumping up and down for joy that your phone’s ringing that much I don’t know what it is you’re doing but that just blows my mind away. That type of thinking, just I don’t mean to be rude or anything but I think you really need to reexamine your business thinking in your business mindset.

Totally.

Anyway, obviously, you have to solve problems for clients who don’t want to answer the phone and implement solutions that enable them to be able to still get the business.

Yeah, I think also sometimes that’s a challenge too and I don’t know if that happens with other marketers. But, sometimes you put solutions for them and then that solution and still that not happening and then you’re like, “Come on, man, what else can I do. So one thing is to keep going back to the dentist. We actually implemented all these things and guess what it still wasn’t happening.

What was going on then?

The problem was their receptionist, like they’re too busy with this and that. I said Ok, is it because they don’t know how to use the system or they don’t know how to answer or they don’t know how to reply? So we obviously went through some, training back and forth to make sure they get it right. But to be honest, at the end of the day, I will say the problem in this particular case was the kind of ability, not from the receptionist, but from the actual owner. Because she really put their responsibility on other people, but in the end, she didn’t hold them accountable. Do you know what I’m saying? So at the end of the day, as a business owner, you have to make sure people bring more business, that’s what you pay them for. What I think happened with this specific client was that she was busy and overwhelmed with all this stuff that she was doing that she really it was easier for her to ignore or just forget about it.

But she’s losing money.

Definitely.

Did you keep them as a client or did you let them go?

No, unfortunately, no.

These stories that you’re sharing is reasons is the reasons why I don’t do client work anymore. I actually refused to do it. So I tip my hat to you for doing it. But I realize that it takes a certain personality to be able to do what you do. Like from a personality test. And I just don’t have patience for it. I know there are other ways to make money besides doing client work. Not to say to discourage you from what you’re doing. I’m just saying it takes a certain person to be a plumber, a certain person to be a musician, a certain person to be a teacher, and a certain person to be an agency owner. There are people that absolutely love it. They absolutely like you. Like, I know you do. I can tell by your vibe that you absolutely love helping clients. I talked to agency owners, and they get so much joy out of helping small business owners and other types of businesses, Making an incredible impact, and seeing the growth of their business.

Yeah. So believe me, it’s very rewarding when you see those things though. Now, in our case, though, I think today, of course, we’ve been learning from a lot of mistakes like everyone else. Now we are not on the stage where we work with everyone, because we used to be on stage where we would work with whoever knocked on our doors. But now, of course, we pre-qualify them, and we figure it out. They’re a good fit for us. So really we don’t care. Of course, we care about the results we want to bring to them, but also we care about the relationship we can build in the long term. We have clients that have been working with us for, I don’t know 5-7 years. That’s the type of relationship we like to build with every one of our clients.

So what we’re hearing is that in the beginning, you worked with anybody in a heartbeat, and now you that your clients, to filter them out and what are some of those factors that are at hand for is a certain amount of revenue and like if you don’t you have to do a minimum million dollars a year in revenue.

No, to be honest, I have never asked a question about revenue and the reason is that most of the time people feel like, what are you talking about money, is you’re more interested in how much money they’re making, how much money is going to get paid. So most of the time I honestly care about their characters- How patient they are when they collaborate with people, How responsive they are, their attitude, their energy, to be honest. I see all these little things. And when it comes from a business perspective as well, I see like how much they want to grow, what are the goals they have in all these things, so obviously we have some red flags like..

I was just going to ask you that question. What are some of the red flags from your experience?

Totally. Some of those red flags, of course, in this case, I would say it also depends, right? Because the two main things we do is to make things right. Web Design which comes to webflow. And then the other thing we do is search engine optimization. So we used to do before this, we used to do obviously PPC, but we don’t do that anymore. We focus more on these two parts, So we do webflow design, which in this case recently we’ve been working with quite a lot with, SAS companies, start-ups, and things like that, and then the SEO part as well. But some red flags here are like normally how many results they want in such a short time.

That’s a huge red flag.

Yeah. So or sometimes they’re like they’re very demanding, like, I want this, I want you to do this, I need to buy, let’s say next week. Okay. Well, what happening next week didn’t happen, you know, and you start seeing more of their attitudes and things like that. And that’s what I was telling your attitudes are extremely important, and so other things, too, when it comes to red flags. I think is important for people to compensate, how much work we’re going to do, and a lot of the times we see, we care to help businesses, but we don’t want them to take advantage of us and so and it’s quite often a lot of the times people they’re trying to find, how can I take advantage of these people. And so in these cases, I looked at those little things too. It’s like, are they trying to take advantage of us or are we trying to really grow their business in a way that can be fair for both of us.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, how do you politely decline the work?

I got two strategies for that, one of them is either I give them a price that is way out of their reach. Unfortunately, they’re not going to be able to cover that and I’m being genuine when it comes to like I don’t want to rip them off, but in a way is like a this is what normally we charge. Is this something that can be within your budget? So normally that’s one, number two is simply I say, you know what, Thank you. But I think that I can recommend it to someone because I may not be a good fit for you.

Yeah. We don’t do this type of work and refer them to your competitors.

Yeah.

It’s good. I know you don’t do that, but I had to make a joke.

Okay, let me send you. Let me send you.

Yeah, I would do that. But anyway, it’s a very good one.

Actually, I’m going to use it now.

Is there any question I should ask you that I haven’t asked you already? I mean, is there any question that I haven’t asked that I should have asked?

Yeah. I think, normally I would always say when it comes from I’m sure you’re normally your target audience or listeners are agencies, right?

Yes.

Yes. So I normally say, you know, from an agency perspective, like I think we constantly are dealing with how can we grow? And I constantly am looking for, how can we bring more leads, more revenue, and things like that. And I would say, you know, commonly, you see so many gurus out there, we’re going to bring you 5 to 10 leads every month. I don’t know how many times you see these types of emails. I get these messages every single day. I think one of the questions I probably say is that. When it comes to talking to other agencies and things like that. One of the challenges that we probably commonly have as well, will be talent. Yeah, I’m not sure when it comes to like last week.

It’s a big problem.

Yeah, it’s a common problem. As we had in our case, we do design, right? I was looking for a UI UX designer, and I went to all these groups that exist on Facebook, maybe like 20 or 30 different groups, and I posted all of them. So you would not be able to imagine how many of these freelancers came, applicants came, and most of them, give you all these amazing portfolios, right? Like amazing designs, so what I did is, I was like hiring these people and then the design that they show me, then the design team and giving me, is like not even close, it’s garbage. Yeah, so what I did is like, well, what about if instead of me, out of all the ones, I think they’re the best? I’m going to pay them for all of these ones, but I’m just going to give them a test. Okay. I want to see, can we do a design for this and this and this and I give them the same design to all of them is what kind of design can get bring me. And so we did, I did that for maybe like two or three weeks to find one person out of 90 people and so that was exhausting sometimes. So honestly like it’s incredible to see how much talent is out there but you don’t actually find people that the has the level probably of design that you’re looking for. Like in my case, we’re very picky when it comes to that. So sometimes it’s very difficult to find talent. And I would say one of the things where business owners are, is or their agencies is probably created different ways for them to find these talents obviously has to sometimes can be challenging, but I think it can it can happen. This is obviously in my case, that’s what I did in my career. I pretty much paid them for the test. Hey, I’m going to pay you for the next 10 hours to do that.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I want to thank you so much for being on the show today. If our listeners want to connect with you online, how can they do so?

For sure. Yeah, they can find me on our website, our website is. It’s progeektech.com and of course, they can find me on LinkedIn and find me on LinkedIn/Yadergil

If I’ve been saying your name the wrong the whole time, my apologies.

I think I made people confused because I put it with a J, but it’s spelled with a Y.

Okay. So is it Yader or Jader?

Both.

Okay, So my name is Matthew or Matt. But I go by Matt because that’s the nickname my grade 5 French teacher gave me. But anyway, it’s been a pleasure having you again. I’d love to have you back on. And thank you so much for being here.

My pleasure. Thank you so much as well, Matt.