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Sept. 17, 2021

Changes To Your Business That Can Move the Needle And Result In Exponential Growth With Dan McGaw

Changes To Your Business That Can Move the Needle And Result In Exponential Growth With Dan McGaw

This episode features guest Dan McGaw. Dan is an award-winning entrepreneur and speaker. He is the Founder and CEO of McGaw.io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy. Coined as one of the original growth hackers, Dan has led the teams at Kissmetrics.com, CodeSchool.com and UTM.io. His skills include the ability to build and oversee new marketing programs that can create sustainable growth.

Discover the levers that you can pull that will help your company achieve expodential growth and why automation is the key to growth.

Ever wonder what UTM tags are and why they are important? Listen as Dan describes the origin of UTM tags and why they are important in properly tracking your website data.

Sending cart abandonment emails? Did you know you can also send emails for journey abandonment emails? Don't leave your retargeting just to the display network, use email. In this episode, you will find out how that is possible.

Episode Action Items:

You can find more information regarding Dan McGaw by visiting his agency, McGaw.io. Also, stay tuned to the end of the episode to discover how you can receive a free copy of Dan's book, Build Cool Sh#t

ABOUT THE HOST:

Andy Splichal, who was recently named to the Best of Los Angeles Awards’ Fascinating 100 List, is the founder and managing partner of True Online Presence, author of the Make Each Click Count book series and Founder of Make Each Click Count University found at https://www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com.

He is a certified online marketing strategist with twenty plus years of experience and counting helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. To find more information on Andy Splichal visit https://www.trueonlinepresence.com, read the full story on his blog at blog.trueonlinepresence.com or shop his books on Amazon or at https://www.makeeachclickcount.com.


New episodes of the Make Each Click Count Podcast, are released each Friday and can be found on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast and on Make Each Click Count at https://podcast.makeeachclickcount.com.

ABOUT THE HOST:

Andy Splichal is the World's Foremost Expert on Ecommerce Growth Strategies. He is the acclaimed author of the Make Each Click Count Book Series, the Founder & Managing Partner of True Online Presence and the Founder of Make Each Click Count University. Andy was named to The Best of Los Angeles Award's Most Fascinating 100 List in both 2020 and 2021.

New episodes of the Make Each Click Count Podcast, are released each Friday and can be found on Apple Podcast, iHeart Radio, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts and www.makeeachclickcount.com.

Transcript

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is changes to your business that can move the needle and result in exponential growth. Today's guest is an award winning entrepreneur and speaker. He is the founder and CEO of McGaw.io and analytics and marketing, technology consultancy, coined is one of the original growth hackers. This guest has led the teams at Kissmetrics.com, CodeSchool.com and UTM.io . His skills include the ability to build and oversee new marketing programs that can create sustainable growth. A big welcome to Dan McGaw. Hi, Dan.

Dan McGaw 1:31

Hey, how are you today?

Andy Splichal 1:33

Doing great. Well, thanks for joining us.

Dan McGaw 1:37

Here looking forward to it. Yeah, you know, the

Andy Splichal 1:39

Yeah, you know, the title of this episode is Changes tochanges to your business that can move the needle and result in exponential growth. So first, how do you define exponential growth? Yeah, right.

Dan McGaw 1:51

Yeah, right. I mean, well, exponential, right, you've got to you've got to have 100% more growth, you've got to be doubling, tripling quadrupling. You've got to exponentially be growing the business and you know, growth for every company can be different. So whether you want to exponentially grow your revenue, you want to exponentially grow your leads want to exponentially grow your cart, whatever. But you've got to be able to increase by over 100% or it's not exponential.

Andy Splichal 2:13

Okay, great. So we're talking about different levers that you can pull that are going to cause 100% growth minimum?

Dan McGaw 2:21

Yeah, that's, it's the only way you can do it. I mean, if you want to grow in the New World, I mean, don't get me wrong. If you're Nike, you're not exponentially going to grow your top line revenue anymore, but they can grow other revenue or other metrics exponentially.

Andy Splichal 2:33

All right, great. Well, this is gonna be a fun episode. Now, in your bio, it says that you are one of the original growth hackers. How did you get? How did you get or I guess, rather earn that title? I should probably say, and exactly what does an original growth hacker mean?

Dan McGaw 2:50

Yeah, good question. We'll start out first with like, what does the original growth hacker mean? Well, growth hacking in general, is the ability to create automated processes and systems that are going to help you grow your business, right. So whether this is a referral campaign, or a nurture sequence, or the way that you invite people to your product, you create these growth hacks, which really, really help you grow your business. And growth hackers are typically kind of growth people in general, are not held back by Oh, I'm in marketing, or oh, I'm in sales, or oh, I'm in this department, growth hackers at most companies, growth people in general, they're allowed to kind of cross the border and go wherever they want, in the company to achieve any type of growth metric they have. And you have to have a growth mindset in general, which means that you're willing to solve problems you're not willing to hear no. Like, you're, you're gonna always kind of push a little bit farther. But you know, when you're a growth hacker in the traditional sense, you're typically building something into a product or process that's going to help you grow the business, right. Some people obviously know of these things is flywheels, nowaday and stuff like that. But how did I get the tagline of one of the original growth hackers, you know, I'm very lucky that somebody coined me that many, many years ago. But I guess I got started with growth hacking before the term really came out. If you're not familiar with the term growth hacking, it's from Sean Ellis. He was one of the lead growth people at Eventbrite many years ago. But you know, back in the hay days of the early 2000s, I was already working on these types of programs. And then coming into 2010 to 2015. I had already built multiple, very successful growth hacks to help grow businesses. So that's kind of where I got coined as one of the originals, just because I've been doing it for such a long time.

Andy Splichal 4:35

Now, speaking of growth, and exponentially at that, what are some of those important levers that you have found as a growth hacker that you're going to want to pull if you if you want your company to grow exponentially?

Dan McGaw 4:48

Yeah, you know, if you're really trying to create growth, you know, there's this concept known as a flywheel, right. And what you want to do is basically build a flywheel in your company and that flywheel is going to help you grow And what a flywheel flywheel really means is that as a user signs up, they can do one or multiple actions. However, every time they do that action, it's going to deliver more value for themselves, and hopefully for somebody else. So a really stereotypical example of a flywheel or as well as a growth hack would be kind of a referral program that has a multi incentive in it. So an easy example, when I was the head of growth, at codeschool.com. When you would sign up to the product, we would say, Hey, listen, thanks for signing up, here's two days for free of the product, here's your free trial, they would get all excited, they'd want to take our online education because they'd have two days for free. However, we would also tell them, hey, if you use this little promo code, you can give one of your friends two days for free as well. And if they accept that promo code, and they take advantage of this, this two day free trial, we will give you two additional days as well. So they invite a friend, they get more free time and their friend gets free time. This creates a flywheel because naturally a user is now incentivized to refer the product to somebody else. But in turn, they get more value, right? So that's your stereotypical flywheel very similar to your stereotypical growth hack is creating this automated process, which is going to grow on its own and be able to grow the business itself. And with Code School, we saw a massive growth. I mean, we got acquired about a year later after that program launched out, we got acquired for 36 million by Pluralsight. Because we were able to grow the business like crazy 20% month over month growth every single month. That's that's your stereotypical growth hacker your stereotypical flywheel.

Andy Splichal 6:37

Now, flywheel I heard that term before. But I heard it in context, I believe from Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and built to Last is, is that the same kind of reference or is it referring to a fly well, differently?

Dan McGaw 6:58

No, you know, actually, I don't know the exact fly will reference from Jim Collins, but you know, I'm going to assume is relatively similar, because it's all about creating value that generates more value. But you know, I'm not really sure I don't know the exact context where Jim had said that.

Andy Splichal 7:15

Now speaking of Jim Collins, and And speaking of exponential growth, one of the companies that probably comes to mind is Amazon, who had had brought Jim Collins had to do a bunch of creating their game plan as they were growing. What is a way that companies could automate some of the processes like Amazon has, if they wanted to, to leverage their growth potential?

Dan McGaw 7:43

Yeah, for sure. You know, the easiest one that I always point to when people are trying to automate stuff, I always tell them to go sign up for Zapier, Zapier, which will enable you to connect almost any single tool on the internet together to another tool. That product itself enables me to automate a lot in my business and as well as just in growth in general. So Zapier would be the first one that I would say, if you're not familiar with it, go check it out, really, really good for being able to help you automate really anything. But with that being aside, right, if you're trying to do more Amazon style, automation, or even Amazon style personalization, this is where having a really, really good marketing automation tool is going to come into play, and having one that's able to help you automate, but as well as help you do the personalization, that's going to be the really, really big critical stuff. And you know, for any business out there, I'm a big fan of a product called autopilot. Autopilot is, if you were to Google autopilot marketing automation tool. It's specifically designed for small and medium sized businesses. And they have two products, their journeys product, which is a little hard to get a hold of, we have access to it is one of the most amazing automation tools we've ever used. Really, really powerful. But the new version of autopilot is also powered with artificial intelligence. So what it's able to actually do is write your emails for you write your subject lines for you help you come up with what that automated sequence needs to be. And platforms, like autopilot are really changing the game by bringing that Amazon style automation, that Amazon style personalization, really to anybody and allowing them to be able to use it.

Andy Splichal 9:11

That's a great tip. Thank you. Now I know another one of your specialties is tracking. And one of the issues out there is data. Is your data good? Can you trust it? How can you tell if you can trust your data? And what what can you do to make sure you can?

Dan McGaw 9:32

Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, if you don't trust the data, right, like it just gonna end the whole model right there. So you got to make sure you trust your data. And if the data doesn't feel right, you need to do additional due diligence, to try to really understand what's going wrong. And that's where like a lot of these analytics companies, even our own we'll provide you a diagnostics we'll go through the tool, will help you QA it will help you do real time testing. So that way you can see hey, this user did this action did that actually end up in analytics that process though, and every analytics tool, whether it's Google Analytics or whether it's something else, is not necessarily the easiest thing in the world. But the easiest way to understand is, if it doesn't just doesn't feel right, you need to go QA that again. So quality assurance, make sure that it's actually working. But it's not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to do. So sometimes you have to bring in an expert to really help you dig down. But if you are trying to get organized with tracking in general, right, it's really, really good to make sure that you start out fresh, you have a good UTM taxonomy, you have a good data tracking taxonomy. And you've, you pre plan how you're going to track things on your website. And if you're using Google Analytics, they provide a tremendous amount of robust tracking out of the box. But if you want to make sure that you can have effective marketing attribution, well, you've got to have good UTM campaign tracking. And that's going to be really, really important to get your marketing attribution, I recommend a product called UTM audio, which will help you get your campaign links in order. But you have to remember when you're using Google Analytics, you're hopefully measuring goals on your website, because somebody purchase something. If you get that set up correctly, you can glean so much information around how people are using your site, why they're purchasing, what they're not purchasing all that stuff. But if you set that up wrong, I mean, you're flying blind, and you can't manage what you can't measure. So you really have got to make sure that measurement is set up correctly.

Andy Splichal:

Well, I would think it might even be worse than flying blind, because you you're tracking the wrong thing. You know, for those for those that don't know, what, what is UTM? Tracking? And can you can you describe that a bit more?

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, of course, you know, so before Google Analytics was Google Analytics, it used to be called a product called Urchin, right? You know, there's little things you find at the bottom of the ocean or the sea, and they have these little, little needle sticking out from them. So Urchin was the original analytics product that helped everybody track what was going on on their website and all that stuff. So when you think of a UTM, it stands for urchin tracking module. And that's what they ultimately named it. It's now a part of Google Analytics. But what a UTM is, it's a little query parameter, which will add to the end of the URL. So let's just say that your domain was apple.com. If you add a query parameter to the end, it just be a little question mark. And let's say UTM. Underscore source, which is what the query parameter would be, you might want to put the source of that traffic is Facebook, right? So in the query parameter, you would write the source is Facebook. Now anybody who clicks on that link and then goes to your domain, we know that they came exactly from that source. We know they came from Facebook. But you might be saying, well, I have referred tracking and Google Analytics, well, that's great. And that's really, really helpful. UTM is actually override whatever is inside of that referrer. And the reason why is because with a UTM, you can attach a bunch of different pieces of context to that. So we can know it was Facebook, we can know it was the summer savings campaign, we can know that that was sent through an organic social media post. So their query parameters are a little bit of code, you add to the bend of the URL. So when somebody clicks and comes to your website, we know where they came from all the different information about what was in that campaign. So it really gives you that granular campaign attribution you need.

Andy Splichal:

You know, something I have, I've always wondered, and I don't know if you have any data on this, when somebody clicks up potential customer clicks on one of these URLs that have all of this appendage, UTM data? Do they ever think what the heck is going on here? Why doesn't it just say x, y, and z.com? What What is all this stuff?

Dan McGaw:

You know, I would ask the question back to you, when you've gone to Amazon and looked up a product, have you ever once cared what the URL looks like? I mean, at the end of the day, yes, UTM parameters are something which gets on the end of the URL, but most users just don't even notice them. Very similar to when you go to Amazon, you don't realize that URL is a couple 100 characters long because they have query parameters throughout the entire URL. That being said, I can totally understand trying to remove those 40 parameters. So one, if you can shorten those links, definitely do it right. So if you have a UTM link, use a bitly, or go to UTM, data EO and use their link shortener, you can definitely shorten that link, that doesn't solve the problem that when they get to your website, that the UTM is still going to be exposed, right, because that's still going to load up. That being said, if you were to go check out the people@utm.io, they have what's known as a UTM cleaner. So if you install their JavaScript on your website, you load up your website, and it has UTM, it will load up the full URL with the UTM. And within a matter of a couple of seconds, all of those additional query parameters will actually be removed the link. And this is not only valuable one, because it doesn't give away the UTM that you're using. But two, if somebody copies the link from the URL browser bar and copies those UTM parameters with your link to let's say another site, it's now going to mess up all of your attribution. So really, really important if you can clean off that URL so that way only your final domain exists, but I'd say at the end of the day 99.9% of users out there don't even notice the query parameters, because we just aren't trained to care about them if that makes any sense.

Andy Splichal:

No, it does. I mean, as you say that I think the only URLs that I ever noticed are my own that have. Hey, have you ever had any study, though, on somebody who uses that UTM cleaner is far as results before after? Is there been any discernible difference?

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, really, really good question. You know, you know, there's definitely some blog articles out there, I cannot remember the stats off the top of my head, but I can definitely tell you this, we work with another company. So if you were to visit my company, mcgaw.io website, every time you load a URL, you will notice this little hashtag that gets added to the end of the URL. And the reason for that is we want to know, when you copy a URL from the browser bar, where do you take that? Where do you use that? And then when you come back to the website, what was that viral lift? So we with our site, I mean, we get 25,000 users a month coming to our website, roughly 98% of all of the shares, which are done on our website are from copy and paste, which blew us away the first time, we're like, we've got all these social sharing widgets on our blog, nobody use them, they just copy the URL, and they share it. So that UTM is still on the URL, when they share it out to someone else, all of your attribution is gonna get messed up. And there is a study that was done by Neil Patel a few years ago, saying somewhere around the range of 60% of all of your UTM data is incorrect. And the reason for that is because people are copying and pasting your links, and they're sending them in different channels. So there's a concept known as Dark Social, which would be when I save a link, and I send it to somebody in like Facebook messenger or a text message. And then they click on that link, they go back to my website. The problem is usually when they copy that link, it's not because they came from messenger, right? It's because it was from a Facebook ad or something else or email campaign. And your attribution is now all messed up.

Andy Splichal:

Wow. Well, that's goes right to the garbage in garbage out philosophy of properly tracking data, then.

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, that's why that UTM cleaner is so so so helpful. And we're not the only one who has it. If you were to Google fresh URL, there's a JavaScript you can get from Wistia, which does nearly the exact same thing. Ours is a little bit cooler, but whatever.

Andy Splichal:

I was reading on your website, how one of your strategies for growing ecommerce revenues fast as true journey, abandonment strategies. Can you tell us a bit more about what that is?

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, for sure. You know, everybody here is familiar with cart abandonment, right? So Sally comes to our website, Sally adds this purse to her cart, but then she doesn't shop or she doesn't purchase it. So we then send her an email with that purse. And we're like, Hey, you forgot this item in the cart? Well, that's a great tactic. We're all familiar with cart abandonment. But the problem that we really forget about is that in many cases, people never even make it to the cart. In many cases, people are doing much, much more browsing on your website than just in your cart. So what you want to do is, as somebody who's going through your website and viewing different products, you want to save the last product that they viewed into certain fields in your marketing automation tool. If you can save the last five products they viewed in your marketing automation tool, even better. If you don't know how to do that, just contact me, I can help you get it done. But what you want to do is track the recent products that they have viewed, because they might not have ever added it to their cart. Because if you're a busy mom, you get distracted. If you're a busy Dad, you get distracted, right? There's other things going on. But if we save those product views in marketing automation, we can then send you our next email saying, hey, thanks so much for coming to our store. Thanks so much for checking things out. Why don't you pick up where you left off and view the last five products that you ultimately we're looking at. Now, I don't think you need to use the exact copy that I'm saying right now. But if you have them pick up where they left off, and their last five products purchased, they never add an item to their cart. But this is basically retargeting them with the products that they had looked at just via email. And if you can do that really well as they're going through their journey and track that stuff. You can see a dramatic increase in people actually purchasing those products, because you're delivering them the things that they care about most right in front of them. And I think it's a waste for people to only do retargeting over like display networks, you can do it over email to why aren't you doing it?

Andy Splichal:

Interesting. What kind of results have you seen from customers who have implemented that?

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, really, really good question. So one of our companies, Carolina designs, a company that we had worked with, they're an Ecommerce site, but they work in the vacation rental space. And we added this same exact process for people to pick up where their last listing was left off. And we're talking about homes that rent from anywhere from $2,000 a week to $50,000 a week. And by adding this into their email flow and into their nurture sequences, they were able to see a 3% lift in reservations being booked. Now with a company that are doing $40,000 A week a 3% lift is a really, really big deal for them. And it is all about just allowing people to pick up where they left off. It was nothing more than that.

Andy Splichal:

Nice. So what have is you guys have gone through your journey as an agency? What are some of the struggles you've gone through over the years with trying to deliver results for companies that that really want to grow and grow fast?

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, really, really good question. You know, I think the biggest struggle, we see people with his focus, you know, we always have to as an agency, our job is to serve you, right? Like we're a service based business. So our job is to take care of you. And the biggest struggle we've had, I will say, as a company is telling our customers no, right? That doesn't make sense. This isn't something we're doing now. Is it hard for me? No. But I'm the CEO, I've formerly been a CMO. So I have no problem telling another CEO, hey, I don't agree with you. No. But as an agency, our team is always trying to deliver what makes our clients happy. And usually our clients, the number one problem that prevents them from growing their businesses is they're boiling the ocean, they're trying to do too much at once. And they're not staying focused enough on what's actually moving the needle. So that's the biggest thing that we see with companies is they just lacked focus. They lacked discipline, to stay focused on what's working, and doubling down on those areas. They see something working, and they're like, let's try this other shiny object. That's usually the biggest thing blocking you from really growing your business.

Andy Splichal:

Shiny Object Syndrome.

Dan McGaw:

Oh, yeah, lack of focus. Yeah. Lack of focus, for sure. shiny objects, and lack of focus is relatively the same thing. If you can stay focused, you can ignore the shiny object.

Andy Splichal:

Now, personally, have there been any books out there that you can attribute to your success as an entrepreneur?

Dan McGaw:

Oh, man, there is a lot, but I'll try to do my best to give you the top ones. You know, the book, The hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz is a really, really good book. It really helped me realize that my job as a CEO sucks, and they just need to suck it up. The CEOs out there that we all admire and are famous, the reason why we admire them is because they didn't quit. And that's basically what I took out of that book is that if you don't quit, eventually, you're gonna get lucky. You just have to keep fighting. Which is, which is crazy. I mean, it could take you 10 years could take you 20 years could take you 30 years. Who knows? But people forget how old Amazon is. They were started in the 90s. None of us knew who they were until 2015. And most people didn't know who they were until 2020. Right. And they got started in the middle of the 90s. Right. So sometimes it takes a long time. So the Hard Thing about Hard Things, and probably one of my favorite books. The next one that I would say is that the principles by Ray Dalio is a really fantastic book to to remind you that you can do more. You business is mental, it's physical, it's all of the things. But you've got to have good principles to help lead that ship forward. And the book principles would be another really good one. But you know, I'm a big reader, I read 42 books in 2020. I've read 30 books this year. So it can be sometimes a little hard to point my fingers that my favorite ones. But going back to your comment about good strategy, bad strategy, things like that. I love a good strategy book. So definitely recommend the most of those there.

Andy Splichal:

great. You know, that's one of my favorite questions in these interviews. And it's how I continually fill up my bookshelf. So thank you. Now, let's talk about your agency. What are some of the problems that you consider solving for your clients? And how do you enable your agency to stand out from the competition?

Dan McGaw:

you know, this is a really fascinating question. Because seven years ago, when we started this company, we I never meant to start it, it was a complete accident. So much so that, like, I didn't even name I have yet to name this company, which is so fascinating. No, we started out, we just tried to be a digital marketing firm. And we found out that like, there's digital marketing everywhere. So in 2016, we made the decision, you know, we're going to focus on what nobody else focuses on really well, which is we're going to focus on the tech stack and the MAR tech stack for companies. So that's kind of our niche. And really where we focus our time, we help companies ultimately build the infrastructure for their revenue by putting all these tools together to help them grow their business. So whether that's marketing automation, or CRM, or analytics, we really are most focused on connecting all those tools together, connecting all the pipes so that way, the data can flow freely. So you can do really good personalization, you can have really good metrics. So really, at the end of the day, we provide a lot of technology stack integration work, we do a lot of marketing, sales and revenue operations for companies. So running these tools, building automation sequences and personalization. But that has really been our differentiator is that we are most focused on stack. You don't have other competitors in the stack space. There's only really one other competitor that I point to, I'm not going to say their name, but we only have one real direct head competitor. If you think about if you're an SEO agency, you can literally point out 10 of those within probably a 200 yards if you anywhere in your in a downtown region? So our differentiator was really the services that we offer, which is we build sack we build the architecture and infrastructure for your revenue. So that's our hallmark there. And it's paid off really, really well. I mean, we're experiencing 100%, year over year top line growth. So I can't complain, we're in the right place at the right time.

Andy Splichal:

So let's let's talk specifically about those services. How would a company know that they need your services? And how do they usually come into your door?

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, so you know, typically, companies come to us for one of two problems, either they lack visibility in their customer journey, and they need help with measuring it, they don't know what their customers are doing, they don't have good measurement there. Or they lack the ability to convert them or grow their business at a fast enough rate. And they're being held back by their tools or their technology. So a lot of companies come to us one of those two problems, it's a lot of helping companies choose their tools. So hey, listen, you got a marketing automation tool, what's gonna be best for your business, your team, and as well as your customers, you know, you have Marketo, you have Eloqua, Pardot, you have active campaign, MailChimp, autopilot, not to mention 400, other types of marketing automation and email tools, what's going to be best for your business? So when companies are going through their procurement process, or thinking about acquiring new tools is a very, very common time that people reach out to us, because we help them assess whether that tool is going to be good for their business. But also can their team use it? Is it going to help them achieve their outcomes. And at the end of the day, if you don't know what your objective is, we're not going to help you, right? You've got to have a good objective. We're trying to grow our business, we're trying to increase this, we're trying to do that. So that's really, really important stuff there. A lot of companies also come to us when they need help with analytics, a very busy time of year for us is going to be in at the end of q3 and q4. Because everybody's either I can't see my analytics or my metrics for last year, and I've got to report to the board what's going on. And they can't pull that data. And it's really hard. That's a really, really popular time companies come to us, or when somebody hasn't hit their goals for one year, they hire us because they need to make sure that they keep their job next year. And they help they hire us to help make sure that they can not only see their metrics and have those goals track, but also how do we set them up for success? So they can really actually obtain those metrics as well.

Andy Splichal:

So who is the perfect client for your agency?

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, fantastic question. You know, so typically, where we are most focused, you know, we work with a lot of CMO, CIOs, VPS of marketing, things like that, typically, a company that's doing between 10 million in revenue and 200 million in revenue is our is our typical sweet spot. You know, I don't discriminate against the billion dollar companies, we definitely worked with a few of them. But they just take a long time to pay their checks, and they like net 90, and you know, I want to pay my team. So we, we prefer those mid market companies. And you know, if you're a small company doing less than $10 million, you're, you know, we can still work with you. But at the same time, we're pretty expensive for some companies, you know, trying to come up with a 30,000 $50,000 budget to be able to roll out your stack. If you're doing $2 million a year, it can be a little hard to come up with that budget.

Andy Splichal:

I think that 90 is the definition of the difference between a million dollar company and a billion dollar company.

Dan McGaw:

Oh my gosh, oh, my gosh. And there's, I'm not going to call this company out by name, but they wanted 120 days. And I was like, You gotta be kidding me. Like, how am I going to feed my team. But you know, when you're the one of the largest company, I mean, they're fortune 10. So when you one of the largest companies in the world, you can kind of throw that weight around and do what you want it going back to the type of companies we target. You know, we we tend to be as agnostic as possible, we treat our client portfolio, like an investment portfolio. So we do work with B2B, we do work with B2C. And we actually monitor what types of businesses we're serving. And we treat it like a diversified portfolio. Because if you remember when COVID hit, you know, I live in Orlando, Florida, we were decimated as a city, right? Like, Disney stopped, right in general, like they just had to shut down. If you were any of my buddies, who owned an agency focused on travel and tourism, I mean, they had to lay off a ton of people. We don't have a niche like that specifically, because when those types of things happen, and the economy crashes because of housing mortgages, that tech bubble crashes, we have our portfolio of clients weighted so that way at any given time, if we lose if something was to happen in the world, we can of course ship it, we can shift, we can pivot, we can do all that stuff. But we may lose two clients, we may gain another two. Going back to your business book, the book, Anti Fragile. I can't remember the gentleman's name but anti fragile by far one of the best books I've ever read, and I use it in my personal life and then as well as in business.

Andy Splichal:

And one more question before I let you go today, how can an interested listener, whether they're perfect or not learn more about working with you?

Dan McGaw:

Yeah, you can definitely go to mcgaw.io. So my last name McGaw.io. But I always tell people, you know, go on LinkedIn, look up, Dan McGaw reach out to me with an email. I accept almost all connections. And we'd love to answer any questions you have always happy to lend a hand and help out.

Andy Splichal:

And you have a book as well, right?

Dan McGaw:

Oh, fascinating. I forgot about my book. Wow, look at that marketer there. Yeah, so I have a book called Build Cool Shit. It's your modern blueprint to designing a tech stack. It's a fantastic book, I'd love to give your listeners a free copy. If you're okay with it

That would be great.

What you can do is pull out your cell phone, and I'll get you a free copy of the book shipped right to your house, what you're gonna want to do is text this number it is 415-915-9011. I'll say that again. 415-915-9011. All you have to do is text the word martech to it. And you'll actually be taken through one of our text bots, which will collect your information, collect all of your information, it will give you a little link you have to confirm online and we'll get you a free copy of the book shipped out to you if you need us. If you're international, we'll send you a copy of the PDF. But our text bot will give you a firsthand look at what it's like to work with the modern tech stack and how to really do that marketing and personal personalization for your customers.

Andy Splichal:

Well that's that's a fantastic offer. And it would be great for anybody interested to see exactly your knowledge and action on doing that.

Dan McGaw:

Yeah

Andy Splichal:

So that is it for today. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Dan or his agency, McGaw.io. You can find it in the link in the show notes. Additionally, you're looking for more information on growing your business using Google paid ads request to join the Make Each Click Count Facebook group. I'll be releasing some brand new free live trainings and more will be happening soon. Meantime, remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.