We Need to Go Back to Marketing for Humans

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Podcast Transcript

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Paul, Jay, and Jaci. It’s great to have you here. Paul, I believe the last time you joined us, you told us you were preparing for a big event organized by the marketing firm you hired, where you would be sitting down with a bunch of potential customers. Do I have that right? And did that happen?

Paul Downs:
You are correct. And it did happen, yes.

Loren Feldman:
How did it go?

Paul Downs:
I would say it went really, really well. This was an event that put us in direct contact with a target audience that is very difficult to reach by other means.

Loren Feldman:
Give us a quick update. This is part of your marketing campaign where you are trying to reach a different audience.

Paul Downs:
We’re trying to get beyond Google searches driving our business and make inroads into a different way of selling our product that we have not had a ton of success with, and that’s through high-end architects specifying custom tables for their clients. And so we had 27 half-hour meetings over two days. And I have been working on four solid projects.

Loren Feldman:
It sounds like speed dating. Is that kind of the idea?

Paul Downs:
It is like speed dating. And it was actually a really well-managed event down in San Antonio at a fancy resort. And they delivered what they promised, which was a chance for us to meet, explain what we do, and have an actual personal connection with a target audience, which is pretty well insulated from outsiders by any other means.

Loren Feldman:
How did you get them to come?

Paul Downs:
I didn’t get them to come. Event organizers get the architects to show up. And we asked most of the ones who we talked to, “Do you do this often?” And most of them had either been multiple years, or their firm had been multiple years, and this was their first year attending. So the firms see value in this kind of relationship with a vendor where they get a chance to see what someone does without the usual email and blah, blah, blah.

Jay Goltz:
So wait, first of all, it’s not like speed dating at all, in that you want to get everybody. In speed dating, you’re looking for one person. So correct me if I’m wrong, is this not like basically a virtual trade show, where they don’t have to get on a plane to go to a trade show, they get to talk to vendors?

Paul Downs:
It’s not virtual. You do have to get on a plane and go talk to people. The difference between having a meeting with someone across a table and over Zoom is, to my mind, just incredibly different—which makes sense. That’s what our product is all about, which is getting people in the same room.

We had requested something like 18 meetings, and then we found that quite a few of the people were requesting to meet with us, because we do have a unique product that they were interested in. And so we’ve already got four active projects out of this with a value probably in the range of half a million bucks, which to me is an enormous success. And we haven’t even even started our follow-up so much.

Jay Goltz:
So was it like a one-person trade show?

Paul Downs:
No, there were somewhere between a dozen and 20 different vendors. And I think there was something on the order of 60 architects and interior designers.

Loren Feldman:
Did they come knowing what you do and with a certain amount of interest to begin with, or were you starting from scratch?

Paul Downs:
So one of the things that was also good about this is that you have a lot of information going both directions. So we filled out a description of who we are and what we do that was available for all the attendees to take a look at. And then we had detailed information of every single person, and we could make a choice out of everybody who was attending who we prioritized as wanting to meet.

And so I prepared with my marketing manager. We sat down and went through the resume, the LinkedIn, the website, for every single person and prepared a briefing document: had their picture on it, had their LinkedIn, had what they do, had where their office was, projects they were working on, which we were provided with, and then also projects that were similar that we had worked on so that we had a pretty tailored response to each person. And I feel that that made the meetings much more productive. We really prepared for it.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, was this your event?

Paul Downs:
It’s put on by an English company called Bond organization, and they do a variety of different shows that are of this type where they put vendors and buyers together. They’re really focused on the architecture and interior design industries. And they have managed to get pretty much the top firms in the world onto their train. And so it was a great chance for us to go and meet some of the people who we really are dying to do business with, but it’s hard to break your way through just by going and banging on the door and sending an email and making a phone call. You just don’t get the access that we got on this show.

Jay Goltz:
So, I’m a little confused. Neocon is in Chicago. It’s the big show. Why wouldn’t they just go to Neocon? What’s the difference? This is a very small thing. Is it a niche Neocon where there’s a difference between the vendors that were, here versus going to Neocon, which is the big design show in Chicago once a year?

Paul Downs:
Have you been to Neocon, Jay?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, years ago. I haven’t gone lately.

Paul Downs:
I mean, it’s just a gigantic scrum. And I think that it’s not actually conducive to conversations in the way that this was. And also, I would never exhibit at Neocon. It just doesn’t make sense for me. But this venue gets me to the subset of people who might possibly go to Neocon who I’m actually interested in. So instead of having to wade through 25,000 people, I’ve got 24 or 27 who I really want to meet.

Jay Goltz:
No, I totally get your side. I’m trying to understand: What was the sales pitch to these companies to come to this very mini-trade show? What was the sales pitch to them?

Paul Downs:
I don’t know. Probably: You’re going to meet some vendors who are going to be useful to you. And it’s not Neocon.

Jay Goltz:
Of the people that were there, were you all custom-made? There must be a common denominator to everybody who was there.

Paul Downs:
The common denominator? It’s a good question. There wasn’t an apparent common denominator. We weren’t all furniture makers. And I had first been approached by this outfit in 2018 and was about to actually do the show in 2020, when COVID screwed that all up. So it just took a while to get me around to it. I’m not sure how Bond finds the people who they try to talk into doing this. But that’s clearly a curated bunch of vendors, because otherwise the architects would be like, “I don’t want to meet these clowns.”

Jay Goltz:
Well, no, it would have turned into another Neocon. Were they mostly custom?

Paul Downs:
No, there were a couple that were sort of custom. At this end of the architectural practice, a lot of stuff is just custom, like your glass, your building envelopes. But there were a couple of guys —I think there was one that was selling the air hand-dry things you have in the washroom. You know, everybody needs a pile of those. So that made sense for them, and they had a pretty big showing there. And I think different people just made a decision that, “Yeah, this is how I want to do it.” The total cost to me was, at the end of the day, about $35,000: $22,000 for the show and the rest for all the other stuff we’re doing around it.

Loren Feldman:
Which is part of the overall marketing campaign that you’re spending a lot more on.

Paul Downs:
Well, I’m kind of done with the spending parts of that campaign, in that we have built a new website, developed content for it, completed all of the filming and photography and market research that the marketing guys did. That’s all done, but those two things that were between them—about 100 grand—that’s all completed. So next year, I don’t have to do that.

Loren Feldman:
And the new website is aimed at the same audience: designers and architects, right?

Paul Downs:
Yeah, it’s aimed at the designers and architects audience.

Loren Feldman:
Have you released that?

Paul Downs:
Oh, yeah, it’s been up. And we’re starting to even get some organic traffic through it, which I’m surprised at, because we’re not particularly pitching it to Google. We’re not keyword stuffing or doing any of that stuff. This is really meant to be read by human beings for their own pleasure, as opposed to just written for robots.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, you’re in the marketing business. Have you ever done anything like the event Paul’s talking about?

Jaci Russo:
I have. I’m just stuck on “written for robots.” That’s gonna be, I think, the title of my next book, because it just feels like that’s what everybody’s doing right now: “I’m gonna use A.I. I’m gonna try to stack the deck.” And it’s painful. We need to go back to marketing for humans.

I love this for you, Paul, and for everybody else who participated, because this is what trade shows used to be. It used to be about quality over quantity, making real connections with actual decision makers. This is awesome.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, I mean, I’m quite satisfied so far. As I said, we met with 27 people, we sent them all an email afterwards saying, “Hey, thanks. You know, you mentioned this project. So we’re here to help.” And a little time went by, but now we’ve got four active ones where people came back and said, “Okay, here’s the thing. Here’s the drawing. Here’s the project.” And one of them we should close within, I would say, mid-January at the latest.

Jay Goltz:
Would you say these were mostly niche businesses? I mean, there was no Steelcase there? There was no Herman Miller there? Was it all niche-y, smaller businesses?

Paul Downs:
Yeah, it was niche. Niche is a good way to put it. But I think that a lot of what the architects were looking for was, in my case, anyway, a way to get a product that didn’t involve working through 15 layers of a Steelcase bureaucracy, and the dealers, and all that stuff.

Jay Goltz:
Which I totally get, because even when I’ve gone to the show, “Oh, I want to buy some chairs.” It’s just not an easy thing. They send you to a dealer, and then maybe the dealer couldn’t care less about a company my size. So I’m gonna guess that it wasn’t just niche-y, but they’re trying to curate this that goes direct from the seller to the buyer, versus what you just said. A lot of that industry is now going through dealers, which just makes it all much more difficult.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, everybody hates dealers. They suck.

Jay Goltz:
All right, that was Paul who said that.

Paul Downs:
And don’t ask me why. But the architects are not buying for themselves. They’re specifying for their clients. They do have to often go through furniture dealers, and that can be an ordeal for everybody involved. Because… this is a controversial thing. Let’s just say that, in general, the industry is not focused on service and understanding the needs of the client. What they are focused on is meeting their quota of what’s in the catalog and just trying to push that.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, can you describe what those half-hour conversations were like? Did you just start with a pitch? How did that go?

Paul Downs:
Well, I told them my story, because it’s a great story, which I believe we’ve told it here, but the very quick version is: I was just a little nobody, made one conference table, and then Google decided that that one on my website was going to be the top search result for boardroom tables back in 2003. Lightning strike! And ever since then, we’ve done that business. And now we work at the very, very highest levels.

But we don’t interact with the selling path that these architects and interior designers are on, so they didn’t know that we existed. And then you walk in, you say, “Oh, yeah, we just did this project. We did that project. We worked for these guys. We did this stuff.” And often, it was projects that these firms had been involved with. They just didn’t know we existed. That’s a very easy story to tell.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, I think one of your clear goals with this was to develop customers who will be repeat customers. Is that something that came up? And do you have a sense that you’re headed in that direction?

Paul Downs:
Yeah. Again, when people heard the story, they were like, “Oh, yeah, you can do what we need to do. We just didn’t know you existed.” So that, to me, is the start of a good relationship. And now we’re starting working on actual projects. And the nature of the market is that the designers are involved with a project a couple of years before the furniture needs to show up. So this is very long-term. But I’m presuming that if our initial response looks credible, then we’ll continue to get more opportunities. So far, it looks like that’s happening.

Jaci Russo:
And that’s how marketing should be. It should be direct and personal. It should be targeted and specific. And when we focus on quality over quantity, we’re gonna win every time.

Paul Downs:
And how do you make sure that happens for your clients, Jaci?

Jaci Russo:
Well, I think it’s finding opportunities like that. That’s always important. And then creating those opportunities when they don’t. I was on a call this morning with a prospective client. And I said, “So tell me about your target audience.” And he said, “Oh, well, we work with everybody from A to Z. I mean, it’s startups and billion-dollar companies.” And I was like, “Okay, we can’t work together.”

Because you can’t be successful thinking like that. Those two things don’t match. The language is different. The needs are different. The problems are different.

Jay Goltz:
The buyer is different. One’s using their own money, and the other one is some corporate employee who just doesn’t want to get in trouble.

Jaci Russo:
One hundred percent.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, you talked about how your second website is aimed specifically at a niche audience and you’re not stuffing it with keywords. You’re not trying to reach everybody. But you have your main website, which still is SEO-driven and is still trying to find the customers you’ve always been looking for. Have you learned anything through this process that’s going to change the way you approach your original website?

Paul Downs:
The more I look at my original website, the more I hate it, because of the way we structured it in order to be SEO strong. And you never know exactly whether the decisions you make to make Google robots happy are detrimental to how human beings experience the site. But my suspicion is they are.

Because what we did was basically we took a page. Let’s say you had three sub-points about tables, like: How big should it be? How much should it cost? And you broke that out into three separate pages with backlinks into an initial page. And it all just made the whole thing more complicated to navigate, and to my mind, not as pleasurable to interact with. On the other hand, the traffic keeps going up. So you know, what do you do? I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t like what Google is asking us to do, but I can’t piss them off. That would be a bad move.

Loren Feldman:
All right, I want to give Paul and Jaci a chance to pick apart some of Jay’s decisions. Let’s start with insurance. Jay, we talked recently, and I think you had a big insurance surprise.

Jay Goltz:
It’s mostly property insurance. It’s not workman’s comp. It’s not car insurance. It’s mostly property insurance. We just pulled up what I was paying for property insurance in 2011. And if you look at what I’m paying today, if you factor in inflation, it used to be three. So I put it in four to compensate for some of the higher years. My insurance has literally doubled. And my building, where I have a factory warehouse, is most of the problem. It’s 85,000 feet. It’s sprinklered, but it was built in 1903. So the insurance company is not counting it as a sprinklered, because the pipes are too small and the blah, blah, blah. And you say, “Oh, well, if the insurance is going up…” $100,000. It’s going up $100,000 a year.

Loren Feldman:
From this year to next year?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah. So you’d say, “Oh, well, you ought to just fix the sprinkler.” Yeah, that’s gonna be about $700,000, $800,000, $900,000. They would have to completely take all the pipes down, bring a whole new pump in. And it gets down to the cost-benefit analysis. The insurance guys tell me this stuff goes back and forth, that the prices could drop dramatically in the next year. So I don’t know that it’s worth spending the 600k or 700k. But it’s up a lot, and it’s not just me. I think anyone who owns a building, the insurance has gone up a lot. In the last three years, between real estate taxes and insurance, my active occupancy costs have gone up pretty dramatically.

Paul Downs:
What would a fire cost you?

Jay Goltz:
Ten million bucks. Which is why, trust me, I thought about, “Well, maybe I should just self-insure.” And I realized that if the place burned down, which is obviously a long shot—we haven’t had a big fire since 1871. If my building burned down…

Loren Feldman:
You’re talking about Chicago.

Jay Goltz:
Chicago. If my building burned down to the ground, okay, the land’s still there. So that’s worth something. But if I had to replace all the inventory and the building? Like, yeah, I’d have a check, but I’d be out of business. So I realized, I’m gonna have to pay the piper and just pay for the insurance, because self-insuring is not really an option. So you literally have to just build it into your business model and say, “Okay, insurance is going to cost more.”

Loren Feldman:
Jay, is your sprinkler issue just a niggling insurance company problem, or is it a safety issue?

Jay Goltz:
Well, first of all, there’s not a safety problem, because it’s not a housing development. If there was a fire in there, people would run out of the building. And I do believe the sprinkler would work. The problem is the insurance company. It’s not up to their standards. But one of the problems I have is, I’m in the framing business. So I’ve got lots of wood there on racks, so that freaks them out. And the insurance company says the pump isn’t up to standard. And I just put a new pump in. I don’t know, that was a six-figure expense.

But yeah, the pipes are literally 120 years old. They’re too small, and they want me to put a whole new sprinkler system in. And if it was $200,000, okay, great, do it, because you’ll make it back in insurance premiums. But it’s going to be far more, and I have to decide: Is it worth the money to go ahead?

And the insurance guy says: It’s a competitive market. Sometimes, the insurance just goes back and forth. They take some bad losses, and all the insurance companies raise prices. Then all of a sudden they say, “Oh, wait, we can get some more business if we lower our prices.” And that’s the way the commercial insurance business goes. It swings back and forth. So maybe next year, it’ll only cost me $40,000 more. So spending that kind of money to put up a brand new sprinkler system in is not necessarily a good investment.

Jaci Russo:
So I’d like to take your sprinkler and wood and compare that to my cinder-block building that is only 50 years old in downtown Lafayette. We have no wood, because the walls that we’ve built are all done with metal studs and Sheetrock and literally cinder block. The exterior of the building the entire way around is cinder block. So I mean, I guess there’s wood in the kitchen cabinets, but we don’t have a stove. We have computers and people and some printers. I mean, we’re not talking anything that feels flammable. And in ‘21, our insurance doubled.

Jay Goltz:
Wait, wait. How big is the building?

Jaci Russo:
8,000 square feet.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, so it’s literally 10 percent of the size of mine. So what, did the insurance go from $10,000 to $20,000?

Jaci Russo:
Uh huh. And it doubled again, and it doubled again. And here’s the crazy thing: We’ve owned the building since ‘05. We’ve had no claims ever. We did have a little flooding problem, and so water came in under and flooded into the conference room. Didn’t make a claim, fixed it myself, the same insurance company all of the 17-18 years. And just all of a sudden: double, double, double, double. So we switched companies, and we were able to at least get it back to our 2022 rates. But it’s crazy.

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