[Fully Managed] – Brody Rotzoll from Tegrity Marketing Ep.74 – Transcript

Daniela: Hello everybody. Welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast. This is a podcast where we discuss marketing tips, business tips to help assist you guys in your business journeys. I’m your host, Daniela, and I’m Penji’s partnership coordinator. I’m joined here with a very special guest today, Brody Rotzoll from Tegrity. Hi Brody, how are you?

Brody: I’m great. Thank you so much for having me on today.

Daniela: Thank you so much for being on the podcast. I’m so excited for our episode and to break the ice a little bit, get us warmed up. Can you kind of give us a rundown of who you are, what you’re all about, everything that we need to know about you, for everybody watching that is not familiar with you?

Brody’s Background

Brody: First of all, I’m, again, like I said, I’m excited to be here. My name is Brody Rotzoll. My background was a lot of marketing, so I went to school and got my business administration degree with a major in marketing. After that, went very heavily into finance for a little bit of time, which kind of gave me a good, well-rounded balance of the atmosphere which helped when we went out on our own for our agency.

While I was doing the finance, I was focused on the bank for quite some time, then ended up doing the marketing there and then it kind of transitioned to where we had quite a few clients that needed websites built. So we ended up creating Integrity Marketing to kind of service those clients.

Daniela: I think the finance background is so interesting from sort of transitioning to something like that to marketing. It’s obviously still kind of one of the branches of owning a business, but I wonder what made you wanna sort of do that change at the beginning.

From Finance to Marketing

Brody: It was cool. So honestly, what happened was when I was at the bank, I was doing a lot of business loans and working with business customers and stuff like that. There was unfortunately a scrupulous marketing agency in the area that actually stole 15 websites and just left with all these clients. So a lot of these clients came up to me and were like, “Hey, can you help us out?” because I’d been working with them on that side.

So I decided to just make that pivot. I was in the marketing realm. We had actually just built the bank website, so I had kind of moved over to there. But with the finance side, it really kind of helped to understand the business side of things because marketing is extremely focused around business and lead generation and things like that, but you can get all the sales in the world, but if you don’t have a good solid expense strategy or kind of managing your income versus output, then it really can’t go anywhere. So the finance side helped tremendously to kind of get into those business owner’s shoes while we’re doing marketing strategy plans and stuff like that.

Daniela: I totally get that. I think it’s sort of a way where all of these things kind of feed each other and being able to understand one is really gonna help you do another in a much better way. I used to work at another job where it was a pretty big company, so a lot of the departments were already very established. And I think a lot of the issues that the staff and the managers were always facing was kind of understanding each other in terms of the goals, like the finance team would always be struggling with the sales team, and then the sales team would have issues with the design team. It was like a whole thing of just being like, “Well, our goals are different.”

Breaking Down Silos Between Departments

Brody: And I see that everywhere. Especially so it’s interesting, I first started seeing it at the bank, but the different departments, and they called them siloed departments. So the sales department was over here, marketing was way over here. Everything was that. So that is one of the things that I’ve been so blessed to be able to help organizations with because I understand that things can’t be siloed.

So like for instance, just to kind of give you an example, in marketing, so many people think like, “Okay, for a good marketing strategy you have to absolutely bombard the company with all these leads.” I think that’s a great strategy, but you actually have to work with the business owner to understand if they can service those leads.

We have a plumbing company slash HVAC company that we work with. It’s really funny, but I literally have to call them weekly to understand how their technicians are doing and how scheduled out they are and stuff like that. Because if we continue just to pile drive them with leads, their customer service is gonna go down because they’re gonna have to schedule out weeks at a time.

So it’s really important to understand that marketing, sales, operations, accounting, all these things have to be together and not individually siloed out. So that’s something we really like to focus on with our clients.

Daniela: Yeah, and like internal operations are just as important as output of service and product. I think that’s not talked about enough. I’ve talked to a lot of business owners, especially when they’re getting started, where their focus and their drive is always towards if it’s product, it’s product. If it’s a service, it’s a service. And that’s great, right? You wanna be able to deliver the best kind of service or product to your clients. But I always say like, well, you also have to make sure that what’s going on inside is going well. Because if it’s not doing well, it’s gonna end up reflecting on what you are putting out there.

Scaling a Business Thoughtfully

Brody: And I think too, and this is something that we are actually working with right now as we scale our agency myself. So Tegrity Marketing’s been around. We’re coming up on our fourth year officially. I have myself been doing it for the last three and a half. And I’ve just onboarded the most amazing six team members now, but the thing is I could get all these leads all day long, but if I can’t service them to the expectations that I have for Integrity to be able to help our customers, we are not doing our job as an agency.

So it’s really just as a business owner, kind of scaling, getting things ready, operationally, okay, scale, okay, operations, processes, things to ready to go, and then scale and then optimize. And then scale and then optimize. So it’s just so much fun to work with our clients through that.

The amount of times that we get that call, that’s like, “You’re right. Like, yeah, okay, we did need to set up a Google My Business. We did need to do the local listing management. Let’s do an SEO strategy or put together some different ad campaigns.” So it’s just so much fun to really kind of understand that aspect of the customers. And that is what I just have so much fun with because it’s basically a giant puzzle.

We’ve got a lot of people that’ll come to us and be like, “I need SEO.” And then, you know what? I say “Why?” And I don’t get me wrong, I love SEO, I think that it’s a great strategy. But what’s your why behind this? Are you trying to get leads through your website? Are you trying to get phone calls? Just by understanding that and understanding the organization operationally and their mission, we can really align ourselves to bring them towards that ultimate goal.

Advice for Scaling a Business

Daniela: We actually get, I think you brought up such an interesting point because we get so many business owners listening to this that are in that scaling sort of roadblock. What is your best advice for people to kind of grow? I’ve talked to so many business owners who always tell me that the experience is, it was going great until it wasn’t, because they had finally figured out how to sort of get that up and coming thing off the ground. But once it’s off the ground, you have to change everything again, because the strategy that you were using to sort of grow is now not gonna work because you are already grown, right?

Now it’s sort of making that growth manageable. And I think that that’s such a common mistake that any business owner encounters, which is what do I do? How do I scale? How do you not get overwhelmed with clientele, get way too many leads that you can’t handle, everything that comes with it, hiring personnel, streamlining work. What’s your best advice for that?

Focus on Expenses and Recurring Income

Brody: I would say I don’t think there is any best advice, because there’s so many different things that you can do. Going to the finance side and kind of going back to the beginning, there was a book that really changed the game for me when I first started. It’s called Profit First.

A lot of business owners do this thing where our expenses rise and instead of taking a second to audit our expenses and possibly squeeze that a little bit, a lot of times we’re like, “Okay, well I gotta get more sales.” Well, if you continue to do that funnel, then you’re going to constantly get revenue, try to increase revenue, but then it might increase expenses.

So one of the things that I am extremely vigilant on and something that we focus on is on a monthly basis, I go through every single one of my expenses and figure out how I can cut it. I make some sort of game out of it to where it’s like, “Okay, maybe I don’t need this tech stack for right now. This isn’t showing me a direct ROI,” so let’s go ahead and cut it.

So I think the biggest thing for business owners and as you continue to scale is you need to be extremely specific on your expenses that you have on a monthly basis, and you need to see what that is. And if you’re not constantly auditing it – for instance, last month I caught 250 bucks that was just sitting there that I was paying every month that was just coming out of my pocket. It’s a lot easier to cut your current expenses versus go grab new business. So cut the expenses and understanding that changes the game.

Another thing which goes hand in hand with that is reoccurring income is key. So however you can do that as a business owner, it’s gonna help you sleep at night. Because having that, because you know those months when June, July, August, especially in the marketing industry, my clients are on vacation, they are vacationing. They are not talking to me about a website or doing anything like that. So I’ve gotta get these things set up so that I know during the downtime I can cover these expenses that I’ve been auditing each month. So those are the two biggest things that I would really focus on.

The Profit First Model

And just to kind of talk about the Profit First model, they explain it like this, more times than not, for instance, we just got a new toothpaste container or something, right? You squeeze it and you fill up your toothpaste and you just overindulge with it. Well, once you get to the end of that toothpaste pile, you still have a little bit and you’ll always figure out how to make your way through that.

So by squeezing your own expenses and getting them down to it, you don’t have that additional income to just throw random places so you can keep your expenses tight so you don’t have to increase revenue as gradually.

Daniela: I’ve literally used scissors to cut up toothpaste and put that when I’ve been on my lowest amount of money. And it works. I mean, you actually get a bunch of toothpaste when you do.

Brody: I think that’s huge because what you do is you take your accounts and you move it into like five different accounts. So I’ve got an operating account, a tax account, a profit account, a revenue account, and a reserve account. And it’s all percentage based.

So for instance, if I have a really good month, my operating account still stays where it should be and I still am able to pay my other things, but if I have a tough month, I can only use my operating account, which is basically cutting my toothpaste open and using that. And that has changed the game because now I have, let’s say, revenue does increase, it increases all of my buckets, not just operating. So therefore I have more in reserve, I have more in profit, I have more in owner’s income and stuff like that.

So really just understanding your flow and your expenses upfront is huge. So therefore you can try your best to get as close to – my goal is to get as close to a hundred percent for our reoccurring income. We’re about at 85% of our monthly expenses through reoccurring services and then the additional for websites and stuff like that.

Daniela: That’s pretty good. That’s really good actually. You’re steadily getting there, right?

Brody: And it definitely helps me sleep at night. Because as you know, with the business owner, it’s funny because we’ve always been taught growing up W2 job, that is the most secure job that you could ever have. But after reading and kind of understanding a lot of these books, it’s interesting because, and don’t get me wrong, I think W2 job is definitely the way to go with a lot of these. But as a business owner, you can actually build your security. So instead of getting paid by one W2 job, you can get paid by 25 clients and mitigate your risk, kind of like a stock portfolio.

Wearing Multiple Hats as a Business Owner

Daniela: I wanted to ask, I guess this is a little bit of a shift, but I’m curious – business owners have to wear many hats. I think that is very surprising for a lot of businesses when they’re getting started because you kind of have to sort of dip your toes in a lot of different areas of business development, right? Like you need HR departments, you need finance. You also need sales, marketing, product, all of these things that usually if you’re a normal employee, you’re getting hired to do one thing and you’re focusing on that one thing.

I’m curious for you, when you’ve been doing all of this with assisting clients with balancing this, how are you able to also educate a client who doesn’t understand certain aspects of their business as well as others? I’ve spoken to people who are so good at product, right? They’ll have really good products and that’s what they wanna focus on, and that’s why they started the business. But the rest is just like, “I don’t wanna do the marketing, I don’t wanna do the sales, I just wanna build my product and sell it and have people buy it.” And even though you can hire people to do that for you, you as the owner, you still need to understand it to a degree. So I’m curious, how have you managed that and sort of coached people in that?

Building a Roadmap for Business Success

Brody: Well, it’s funny that you say Coach, to be honest, and I’ll get to that in a second. But I do wanna say this really cool quote that I’ve heard about business owners and entrepreneurs, but “entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off a cliff and puts their parachute on halfway down.”

So you’re figuring it out. A lot of it is trial and error and stuff like that. So for all the business owners out there and small business owners and starting out and stuff like that, one of the biggest things I can tell you is take a knee. A lot of times we get a lot of stuff, you know, you get those emails that are like “Oh my gosh, I gotta do this.” Or you know, you’ve got a big bill coming up, or you’ve got these different things, you’ve got options. So take a knee, take a knee, go meditate, go take a walk, go do something to get your mind off of that instant reaction. Because I guarantee that that first instinct that you have is not gonna be the winner.

But as far as going onto these operations and all these different departments, and you said Coach – I personally have a coach that has helped me tremendously. So one of the things that we’ve done, and we first did when I first started with him was we – my conference room is filled with whiteboards. So I’m a digital marketing agency and we do everything not with paper. My office is filled with those whiteboards with just marker all over it.

We mapped out all operations. So that’s accounting, map it out, sales, map it out, marketing, map it out, and just go through the tasks for each one of these departments. Understanding that is very important because then you can map out the things that you do like and the things that you don’t like to do. I went through there and I just put stars by things that I wanted to do, and then the things that I didn’t wanna do or the things that I felt I could get somebody better at, that’s when I went to Upwork. I went to Contra. I went to some of these systems or places to find somebody that was passionate about these particular things that I didn’t wanna do because anytime you’re doing something that you don’t necessarily aren’t full into, it’s gonna drain your battery.

Daniela: It drains your battery, so it does.

Brody: So those are the things, is really just spell it out. Figure out what you want to do and genuinely want to do, and then take and find people that want to, and or better are than you at those other positions.

Daniela: I feel like you’re never as good as when you’re doing something that you want to do. If you wanna do it, you’re going to put so much more effort than if you’re just trying to get it out of the way so that you don’t have to worry about it.

Brody: Every time.

The Transition to Business Ownership

Daniela: So I was also going to ask you, how scary was it to actually transition into becoming someone who runs a digital marketing agency and a business owner yourself? I think we also see a lot of people who wanna take that step and are worried of leaving the financial stability of a nine to five. There’s responsibilities, there’s children, there’s partners and stuff, and then they’re like, “Well, what if my business fails?” And like that quote you said, you’re kind of just trying to put your parachute in the middle of the sky, like when you’re falling and you have no idea if you’re gonna end up starfish on the floor or you’re gonna land standing. So it can be a scary sort of step to take.

Brody: It’s not super easy because it’s – but the fun part is, there’s a lot of things that you can do. So first of all, keep your expenses low. For the first year, I used Google Analytics, Google Search Console. I used all free tools. My expenses for like the first two and a half years on an annual basis were like $10,000. I kept it so lean as lean as you can get it because that that one is a good way to get it started, but two, it goes back to a good finance plan.

So for instance, I went through and I created a spreadsheet that put together every single one of my expenses and how much money I needed to bring in the door every single month to figure out what that was. And then on top of that, then I even got smaller and I figured out what it needed to make on a weekly basis, and then I figured out what I needed to make on a daily basis.

So when I first started, I figured out that I had to make $210 Monday through Friday, 52 weeks out of the year to be able to do what I needed to do. And just having those metrics of, “Okay, I made 210 bucks today, I can go home. I can go home and I’m good to go.” That and just again, being able to sleep at the end of the night because as business owners, it’s tough sometimes, you get down, you get stressed because things happen.

But the coolest thing is by having those metrics. Let’s say one day you don’t make it, but the next day you make 400 bucks and then double your whole thing. So by the end of the week, you know where you’re at. By the end of the second week, you really know where you’re at. So you’re not coming to the end of the month going “Oh my gosh, I need eight grand to pay all this stuff.” No, I’m looking two, three months ahead to figure out what my finances will look like then. And if something doesn’t, like for instance, if we don’t launch the website, how am I gonna get the other money to replace that? You know, just really because if you’re looking at a week to week basis, you’ve already lost the game, you need to be two, three months out. Just kind of understanding what could possibly be on the horizon.

Daniela: I mean like, I think that that’s a great lesson just for life in general. If you’re just sort of dealing with symptoms instead of trying to figure out long-term solutions, you never really fix anything or progress. If you don’t wanna call it a problem, but you know, grow, I think it needs to be a lot of planning ahead so that you can just sort of follow that plan, right?

Brody: One of my good buddies slash clients, he’s a really good dude. He said something that really helped. He said anything, and he’s in his forties, he said anything meaningful that he has done in his life, it took at least three years to get going. So it’s not, there’s nothing like, just like they say, Rome was not built in a day. The machine, the things you are doing today are what’s gonna affect you three to six months from now to a year from now.

So while you’re doing this business, all you’re doing is you’re getting the engine ready to go. To the point where once you get this thing rolling – for instance, we’ll have weeks where I get calls and it’s like, I didn’t even plan on getting this revenue, but now we’ve got it because of things that we did a year and a half ago. So just really putting forth that effort. And just as a business owner, the biggest thing you can do is give yourself time. The more time you have, the more ability you have then to make that big break. And that was just kind of some of the things that I’ve kind of seen in the industry.

Discussing Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank Example

Daniela: I wanted to bring this sort of situation up because I always find it really interesting. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Dragons Den?

Brody: I have.

Daniela: Are you familiar with Shark Tank?

Brody: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Daniela: Dragons Den is like the international version of Shark Tank. They have like a version in different countries. The one in Canada? I saw like a video that went viral. I don’t really watch the show, but I sometimes get interested in the cases of the people sort of presenting and I think the guy that is like, you know, the scrub daddies, the sponges. He went on that show and he got like investors and now scrub daddies are huge. Right? So there’s like some businesses that have come out of that that are really interesting and I think from marketing perspectives and like sales perspectives, really interesting to see sort of these businesses and their pitches and all of that.

There was this one guy who, I don’t remember what the business was, but he was promoting it. And he kind of talked about how he lived in Toronto and he was doing a nine to five, and then he would essentially leave his job at 5:00 PM and work on his startup, what he was trying to do. And he was trying to get these investors to invest basically so that he could quit his nine to five and kind of fully do this thing.

And the investors were all kind of uncomfortable with him sort of still having a nine to five saying like, “Oh, well you’re not putting all of your eggs in the basket.”

Brody: All of your eggs in the basket.

Daniela: “And I want someone that’s committed, and if you have this other job that’s gonna take priority over your business.” And then this guy was like, “Well, yeah, I know that. That’s why I want you to invest so that I can sustain quitting my job because I have children and I live in Toronto and it’s expensive and I cannot afford right now to quit. And I need to.”

And it was such an interesting sort of situation where the investors were like, “Well, I did, you know, when I started my business I hustled and so you should too.” And then he was like, “Well, it’s not, you know, like inflation. The prices when you started were obviously different,” but like this whole back and forth was happening.

I think what was interesting to me was just kind of how it all just came down to numbers, you know, the financial side and being able to sustain it. And what he was genuinely needing was just to figure out a way to make his business sustainable so that, like you said, you can sleep at the end of the day.

Different Paths to Business Success

Brody: And I think that’s the important thing. No matter what, you know, getting more money and more revenue and all these things, that’s really great, but then when you get a $30,000 expense bill at the end of the month or something like that, it is tough. I mean, it really is.

When I first started this business, I remember freaking out because I didn’t have enough work, but I could go on runs at all time. I was working like 20 hours a week. I was having a blast. Now I’m making a lot more revenue, but I’m working 50 hours a week. So it’s really the trade off of what you want in life. More money is not always, it’s more problems for sure, but it’s not always happier, you know, so if you can manage and have the funds that you need coming in to make sure that you’re good on your bottom line. That’s really the thing I think that is the best.

But going back to the situation in Toronto and that business starting up and stuff like that. So I think there are multiple ways to start up a business. For instance, I know getting investors and stuff is a great option to use what they call, you know, use other people’s money. I know a lot of real estate people that do that for investments and stuff like that, but I think it all goes back to risk and reward. I mean, I think that’s as far as like loans and investing everything. It all goes back to risk and reward, and then what you want for your mission.

For instance, do you want somebody else to have access? So like an investor, you know what I’m saying? We’ve had a lot of people come to us try to, “Hey, we’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars to boost up operations, but we just want this particular interest rate of this,” and this is like, “No, this is my business. I want to do whatever I want to do with this,” you know, so you gotta, it’s a trade off too, because as soon as you start accepting some of those funds, they might have contingencies with it. Where, “Okay, now what your brand used to be, well, these investors are saying you have to do this now.”

So I think that’s really big, but just understanding what you’re willing to put into it, what you want to come out of it, and then the direction that you want. So also, just to give you an example, when I first started, I was working at the bank 40 hours. And then I would come home and I would work five hours a night building websites for Integrity until I could figure it out. But I could have went the investor route or I could build some sweat equity in it to get things rolling the way I wanted, and now I get to keep all my own dollars.

Daniela: It’s a give and take.

Brody: And I don’t think either way is better or worse. I think getting an investor, if you have a really great, solid product, you can just scale it to the moon and that’s great, but do you want to do that?

I’m running into that issue now where it’s like, to get my team to where I want them to be, we’re gonna probably have to double our agency. And what does that look like for me? That looks like more hours and that looks like more expenses. And then on the backend, that is not always the best. It sometimes this is what people want, but I like to go camping on the weekends. I like to go running. I like to go on a bike ride with my wife. I’m not gonna be on a call all the time, so what we’re doing at our agency is really scaling, trying to scale controllably so we don’t wanna rip our hair out and we’re not tired of it. We still get excited when we come in every day.

Daniela: You can only spread yourself so thin too, so much. I mean, you can only spread yourself thin so much until it’s not working. And like you said, I think it’s sort of what I saw with that case is just that it’s also very relatable, you know, it’s true. It’s hard nowadays in 2025, 2024, I don’t know when this came out. It’s getting harder to sort of sustain that type of lifestyle. And it is harder to just up and quit your job to try to grow a business and I honestly, I was not on the investor side because I was like, “Well, you’re a millionaire and it’s really easy for you as a millionaire to sit there and judge this guy.”

And I think it’s actually commendable to see him sort of working two things and still having a goal. But I think for me, it’s like, you know, like you said, if you have what you wanna do is just having a game plan so that you can eventually leave that, whether it’s through the investor route or just kinda like hustling until you get enough money to sustain it. And that’s probably the best thing that I think any business owner can do.

The Power of Vision Boards

Brody: And I think just that vision, you know, especially as a business owner. If you want to quit in a year, you wanna start this business in a year, you need to be looking a year out. Like just start looking through those things.

One of the things my wife and I do, and actually my team and everybody, but we do personal and professional vision boards every single year. I know it’s the smallest thing, but just by focusing on those, that high level thing, I can knock out my tactics to get it done throughout the year. So just by having that goal, it’s the smallest little thing, but just having something that you can wake up to and stare at all day, that changed the game for us.

And it just helps you to realign your focus. We’ve got several businesses and any time that I take my focus off of Integrity Marketing, then I see a decline. It’s literally where your focus is. If I go start playing with these businesses, my main business, which is Tegrity, takes a decline because I’m not putting my time into it. So just really focusing any aspect in life that you really want to focus on.

The Worst Advice You’ve Ever Heard

Daniela: Well now I think this, we’ve just been giving, you’ve been giving so much great advice to business owners to have a business. But I want to have a segment where essentially it’s called “What’s the worst advice you’ve ever heard?” And I think this is a great moment to bring it up, which is the worst piece of advice that you can think of that you have received in your career, to whether it’s growing a business, scaling, what’s the worst thing that someone has told you that you’re like, “Wow, don’t do that.”

Brody: I’ve got it ready to go. Actually, I wrote a paper on it for one of my classes. So when I was at the bank, this is all pertaining to customer experience because I think it’s extremely important, no matter the industry, to listen to your customers.

While I was at the bank, I had a customer that was getting overdraft fees, but they had, long story short, they had like five grand in their savings, but nothing in their checking. So they were getting overdraft fees in their checking account. And so I just taught her how to move it so she wasn’t, she was avoiding the fees.

I got pulled into the office of my manager at the time, and she said that I should not help the customer and I should have just let her get the fee. And that’s how we’re all paid. And by me helping the customer out, by avoiding the fee, I am losing my own paycheck. What. That makes no sense.

Daniela: Yep.

Brody: So my thought on it was I get to teach the customer, we get a longstanding customer because I get to help them out and then we can do additional products for her because we helped her out. She was a good customer. We could do other cross sell and stuff like that. So that was hands down the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I literally looked at her and I was really young at this time, so I was having a hard time not going “what?”

But she said that, and it was just, I was sitting there staring at her and it was like – so first of all, I never did what she said. I always, I continue to help customers out, but, so that was hands down the worst piece of advice I’ve ever heard, and it’s honestly something that I tell all of my team members when we bring them on and let them know, I don’t care what it is, you are there to help the customer. That’s why we’re here. That’s how we have the money. That’s how we do everything.

So for instance, we’re building a website right now, right? We didn’t bake in an events page because they didn’t want it at first, but then we went back through, found it was a way better user experience with it. So I’m just gonna add it on because it’s better, it’s better for the customer. So just hands down, just literally doing some manipulative stuff like that was not, they did not have integrity, to be honest.

Here’s the formatted transcript with speaker names and subheadings, keeping all the original text:

Discussion About Customer Experience and Business Culture

Brody: I used to work as a bartender. Mm-hmm. Um, and the owner of the bar, he told us that like, he didn’t like it. We gave out. Too many free shots of like drinks. Mm-hmm. Um, because it was very much part of the bar culture to give people shots at that bar. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it was a speakeasy, so like that meant that like, sort of getting people in and out of the bar meant it was kind of complicated and sometimes they would just wait for a long time.

Mm-hmm. Um. So a lot of times to sort of keep the customers happy because the wait time to get into the bar was long. We would give them, uh, shots as a like, thank you for waiting. Mm-hmm. And they were like complimentary shots. Um, and then the owner one time, he like sits all of us down and he’s like, don’t do that because you’re wasting so much alcohol.

And he was like, this is gonna, like, if you actually sit down and count how many shots. Um, we lose how many, how much like alcohol we lose from like, giving people free shots. Um, that’s like costing me money, like my business, blah, blah, blah. And, um, he said that to us. Then he left. And then, um, like the other waitresses and the other bartenders, they were like, he always says that it doesn’t matter.

Keep giving out the free shots because it’s literally what makes people wanna come back to this bar. Like mm-hmm. He’s making more money than he’s losing by giving out free shots. Like, you know, like you need to give these customers a good experience. And that was kind of our job as the bartenders and the waiters was to sort of make people have fun.

Daniel: Yeah.

Daniela: It’s a

Brody: loss

Brody: Yeah. It is like a sim. It kind of just, when you were talking about that, it reminded me of that experience where like in, in, at that bar, like the bartenders were just like, just ignore him. And then he kept giving out the free shots. And I remember I kept doing that and when the new girl arrived, I told her the same thing.

Mm-hmm. But, um, yeah, like it’s like sort of think big picture, you know, like, and you’re not losing that much money as you think that you actually are. And,

Bad Customer Service Costs More

Daniela: and honestly, so in, in the instance of the banking customer, it was a $30 fee. She ended up, she, so the, the bank, long story short, next time this happened, they didn’t tell her I wasn’t there to do it.

She wrote a bad review and I guarantee that they lost a lot more than $30 because of that bad review. You know, it’s, it’s just. It, it makes common sense, you know, so it’s, I just, I think it all goes back to, and it’s just so funny, out of everything that you watch throughout all of the businesses, good people go far.

People that are trying to get by or like to get one over on you, people know, and, and it, it, it’ll catch up to you. I’ve seen so many the business owners that. Have integrity and are doing, you know, things for their clients, for their customers. Always win. Look at Chick-fil-A, look at Capital One. Look at like these companies that have a good culture, they’re crushing it.

The ones that don’t have a good culture, and especially in today’s society where you can work wherever you want, you can do whatever you want. So you have to make sure that your employees are happy, your customers are happy. And that’s, that’s the main thing. If, if those two things are not met, then your business will not go far.

I don’t care how well your marketing is. I don’t care any of your stuff. Those two things are extremely important

The Impact of Social Media on Business Reputation

Brody: and like, especially with like social media nowadays, I feel like they’ll, you’ll get exposed, you know? Oh yeah. Yeah, you piss the wrong person off. Um, customer, employee, whatever. And they’re gonna go on and make like a really angry video being like, Ugh, I had a terrible experience at Starbucks.

Yeah. Um, and you know, and then it’s a PR nightmare. So, um. Yeah, definitely just be good. And I mean, going back to that bank, I’m pretty sure they also could afford losing those $30. It’s a bank, you’re gonna be Oh

Daniela: yeah. They, they, they definitely could. And it just, it hurts my stomach to even, like, why would you be so, you know, and it’s like,

Brody: yeah.

Daniela: Agree.

Creating a Better Business Culture

Brody: Yeah. But the cool thing is too, again, just going back to when you start your own business and stuff like that. Think through the things that, you know, you, you went through as an employee and bring it to your office. Like for instance, that bank, which was making all that money, they would freak out if I ever tried to just say, Hey, can we bring shirts for the team members?

Right. They wouldn’t even get them shirts for the team members. Our team, I make the frac the smallest, tiny fraction of what that bank used to make. And I made sure that all of my team members have all the gear that they ever want because it’s just like how you gotta reinvest in your team, your, your culture and things like that.

So just think of the things that, that you don’t like at your previous employer or you do like, um, and bring that into your business because that’s the fun part of starting your business. ’cause you can do kind of whatever you want.

Daniela: Yeah, exactly.

Brody: Yeah.

Daniela: Yeah. You don’t have to follow rules. I think that’s also a great note to end this podcast on.

Brody. It was so great to have you. I think we spoke about so many great things. Um, and before we finish, I do want to give you the space to plug anything that you wanna plug. Um, if anything that we spoke about today resonated with someone and they would like to work with you mm-hmm. The floor is yours.

Closing

Brody: Oh yeah. Well, I just, honestly, integrity marketing, my goal with everything is just to be a thought leader. Um, In these, these spaces, I want to continue to learn. Uh, one of the things at our team, we have weekly continuing education and we just continue to grow in the market. But, um, what we’re able to do right now, and I just kind of wanna shout out, especially, um, we’re about to launch an, a free online assessment.

So, uh. People and businesses can go to our website and just fill out the form. We’ll do a complete audit. So the audit’s gonna do a site audit, backlink audit, heat map, and local services if you are a local service type company. Um, and then also we’re, we’ll be doing an ads audit as well, so we can kind of do the full thing.

This is kind of something that we do because. We don’t like working with people unless we kind of know a direction and things of where we can help out the most. So we’ll make sure to put together a comprehensive outline of recommendations and stuff like that. So if you guys want to head over to Integrity Marketing, um, you can kind of meet our team and sign up for that.

And we’d, we’d love to, uh, do those audits for you guys.

Daniela: Awesome, thank you. I will be adding the links to the description of this video so that people can easily click onto it. And thank you so much for doing this, Brody. It was great having you.

Brody: This is amazing. Thank you so much. Um, and yeah, this is a great opportunity.

I love talking through this stuff, so

Daniela: I love it too. Thank you guys. I will see you on the next episode.

Brody: Alright, thank you.

Outro

You’ve been listening to Fully Managed, brought to you by Penji. Check out the show notes to learn more about today’s guest and to learn more about Penji the Human First creative subscription service. Head over to Penji.co. And by the way, if you’re still listening, it would mean the absolute world to us if you were to share this podcast with a friend, and of course, subscribe.