"Hello and welcome back to the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Austin McCurdy from the Sharper Process team. Austin is a systems and process consultant and works with a ton of different real estate investors. He has an awesome business background and a ton of value to add talking about how do you keep that handoff from marketing to sales efficient so that you can grow revenue without becoming overly dependent on a very large marketing spend. So I'm excited to get into the conversation and we'll jump right into that now. How you doing today, Austin?"
"I'm doing good, Brandon. Thanks."
"Awesome. See you got your brand new podcast recording studio. Plan on doing quite a few of these?"
"Yeah, we just opened it up. I think last week, I think it opened. So you may be first. Jacob, is this the first podcast we've ran from here actually? So we've been recording some video content, but you're the first one. So yeah, we'll have to remember this. Mark that down: first time with Sharper Studios podcast."
"So yeah, that's right. Honored to have it on the Collective Clicks podcast. I'm super excited to learn from some of the insights that you have today. Would you care to do a brief introduction to yourself and what you do for those listening that don't know you? I think most should know you. If you don't, you definitely should. So here's a chance."
"No problem. So yeah, I'm Austin Court of Sharper Business Solutions. Been here, man, four and a half years I think, maybe a little more than that, almost five with Sharper. Came on, I owned a business before as a Papa John's Pizza franchisee. So I had eight stores in the Chicago market and the University of Michigan, so throughout the Midwest here. A couple hundred employees through those eight locations, so heavy operations-based. And prior to that, I have a degree in education, so taught for a long time. When I sold my business in 2018, I was talking to Gary Harper, who's been a friend of mine for a very, very long time, and Gary said, 'Why don't you come over and we're helping me with Sharper?' At the time, it was just him and Susan, and they had a part-time assistant."
"And I, it became like the perfect marriage of my education background and it just, I really loved - I know it sounds weird - I love teaching high school and I love teaching math, but then I also like, love business and I loved owning my own business and being an entrepreneur. And I've owned my own business of some sort since I was 18. And so this was like the perfect marriage of that education and business background kind of coming together. Was new to the real estate space when I came in. Now I've been involved with almost, I think, a thousand real estate investors over the last four and a half years. Meet every - yesterday I had six hours of phone calls with real estate investors really digging into their business and talking about what's going on. I do that on Mondays and Fridays, and then during the week I travel and go on site with clients."
"So actually, after your meeting, I'm headed to Toronto, Canada. Sharper's first international client, so I'm working up there tomorrow and then headed down to Indianapolis to work down there on Thursday, and then back back home to Chicago here where I'm at. So spend a lot of time talking real estate, talking what's going on and probably talk about marketing more than I really thought I would ever talk about marketing. And it's interesting as a business owner, you have to sit in every seat in the business at some point in time or another, and you have to know what's going on and spend a lot of time talking about marketing, talking about sales, talking about operations, and then finance - kind of all the pillars of a business and what it takes to grow one."
"Yeah, absolutely. That's fantastic. I have to know, how many airline miles do you have under your belt at this point?"
"Wow, you know, I have an app that like tracks it all, like how many miles I actually do. I know right now in Southwest I have a hundred and three thousand miles, and I just used like 75,000 of them. So I think I had like almost 200,000 miles last year, something like that."
"So yeah, I know two new people that travel as much as you do."
"So well, that's kind of - yeah, I'm always on Southwest. If you understand it, it works. I'm always like A16, which is the first person to board, which means that I fly more than anybody else on that flight is what it means. So usually, unless I'm with Gary and Susan, then they're usually ahead of me, but they're about the only ones."
"So I know that because I, I think I travel way too much and every time I get where I'm going, you're there. And I know you travel outside of that too."
"Yeah, I know you do whatever I do."
"Yeah, every week meeting with somebody and so yeah."
"Well, that's awesome. I am, yes, like I said, super grateful to have you here on the podcast. I'm excited to pick your brain about a few things. So as we discussed before the show, we talk a lot about marketing and the operations behind marketing to help monetize it here, just because that's kind of what we're trying to accomplish. You know, those are a lot of the drivers to grow a business, as you know. Most everything else only becomes important if you can figure out this first part, and that's kind of the name of the game."
"So anyways, I'm really curious to hear, because you're spending so much time with investors, you know, both in person and on these calls that you're talking about, what are some common things that you're seeing that in your opinion they're not doing right when it comes to their marketing?"
"I, with when it comes to them with marketing, what I find is that, okay, there's not that many marketing channels out there. Everybody is looking for like the silver bullet of what's the newest, shiniest thing out there. I had a guy call me the other day, he's like, 'Can I just have a call with you once a month just to find out what's going on in the market? Like what are you seeing, what new things are out there?' Right? And when we talk about marketing channels, I mean really for everybody we've got, you know, TV, radio, PPC, you know, and mail. And I mean, that's kind of about it. Like there's, you know, there's not really much. And I mean, PPC I'd say is like social media. Okay, like those are really your channels. There's nothing else out there. I mean, I've got billboards, things like that, but you know, there's not a whole lot of options."
"And so I come in and they're looking for that silver bullet in marketing, and really the problem usually isn't their marketing, right? Or they don't like their vendor or something like that. That's usually not the problem. Not saying it's not sometimes. It's usually the next step in the process, which is how that marketing is getting handled, how it's handed off to sales, and what sales is doing with it."
"Often, especially right now in the market, we saw back in July, as a whole, as a country, we saw leads dip. Things went down, right? We had a little bit of a like a hesitation in the market for several months, probably the second half of the year into January. Okay, and then it kind of started to pick back up when we got into January again. And also now, as I'm looking at stoplight reports - we call them at Sharper - right, people's KPIs, the lead flow really isn't the problem, but we're seeing a problem with conversion at the end of it."
"And what's funny is that, and Brandon, you working in marketing, you probably always hear this: they always say, 'Well, if you could give me a qualified lead, I could close it.' Right? 'If I had better leads, I could close it.' I find that I work with a lot of people with hiring, and they're always like, 'Well, if I had the right employee, I can make this work.' And I look at it, I'm like, if I brought you the Michael Jordan of sales, you still couldn't make this work, right?"
"Like Michael Jordan - we use this analogy, I'm in, I live in Chicago and grew up in the 90s with Jordan - Jordan was with the Bulls for six years before he made a championship, won a championship. He was Michael Jordan for six years, one of the best players in the NBA, and couldn't win the championship. And you can look at like why, there's a bunch of reasons why, but the fact is the Bulls were a dysfunctional organization, and it didn't matter that when you brought them the greatest player on earth, it didn't change anything for them, right? Jordan went on to play for the Washington Wizards, didn't change anything, right? You go on and on for there."
"So really what to say that what I find is that when the organization has, like, it's dysfunctional, it doesn't really matter like how good the marketing is, it doesn't really matter like how good that salesperson is. It all has to work together in one team effort, right? All those things have to be firing right into a system to make it work."
"So I think a lot of people, you look at your marketing now, it's constantly something that you're adjusting, you're making changes, you're trying to improve, better, you're trying to get a better ROI on it. But you also have to look at the next step and say, 'Okay, when these leads come in, how are we handling those leads? What are we doing with them? Are we handling them in the right way?' And we can kind of dig into that a little deeper if you want."
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