Episode Introduction
Shannon Donnelly (SD): Alrighty, hello everyone, and welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast, the podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you on your business journey. I’m your host, Shannon, Penji’s partnership coordinator, and I’m joined here today with a very special guest, Jake Hunley from Evergrow Marketing. Thank you so much for joining me today. Jake Hunley (JH): Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Getting to Know Jake Hunley
SD: So could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, if you would introduce yourself differently than I would, and anything in your professional career that you think is relevant to date? JH: Yeah. So I’ve been kind of in the marketing world for the better part of 10 years now. I started a digital marketing agency with my business partner, Cody, who we both met at a marketing agency 10 years ago. And we specialize in the landscaping and lawn care industry specifically, bringing PPC, SEO, and web development to the industry and kind of had made a name for ourselves carving that out as kind of one of the top lawn care, landscaping marketing agencies in that niche. And then two and a half years ago, we started a podcast on agency growth and we’ve been having fun with that. SD: I’m happy that you’re having fun with it. It’s very similar to ours, so I’m happy that we’re on base with the same kind of topic. So the lawn care industry is something that I think is super interesting, a very specific niche. I love to get into that when I see that people have specific ones. Is it something that you’re very interested in or passionate about, or is it just something that you saw, didn’t have, wasn’t focused on lately at that time, and you just thought it would be a good niche to tap into? JH: Yeah, I think the catalyst for it was just that there was a gap in the market. It just seemed like all of the landscaping and lawn care companies that I found on Google were like 10 years in the past in terms of just their website and their marketing and their presence on Google. And lawn care in general was something that I always talked to my dad about doing and just starting like a family lawn care business. But then I went the white-collar route and never thought about it again until I got into marketing and then saw that gap when I was just Googling some lawn care companies near me. And it started as just kind of like a venture to pay some bills, just pay some credit card debt down. And I wanted to operate under an alias or a DBA, which was Evergrow Marketing at the time, and was doing that for like two years, just solo, really wasn’t getting any traction, but I was building the brand and just kind of being a resource in that niche. And then my partner joined up with me and then we just exploded from there. But the whole point of the niche to just focus on lawn care and just be in that industry was, if I knew that SEO was a primary service I wanted to offer, I felt weird about getting SEO clients by not doing SEO. So like everybody out there who has, you know, just starts a marketing agency or freelancer work with digital marketing, it’s always weird to me when the first reaction on how to get clients is by doing something that’s not the marketing service that you’re providing. So it’s like if you do social media marketing and they’re like, yeah, to get social media clients, I cold call. It’s like, well, that doesn’t make any sense. Why don’t you just do your own marketing? There’s an excuse for people who specialize in paid media, and that excuse is, I don’t have capital, I can’t run paid ads. With SEO, there really isn’t an excuse, just do SEO. And so the challenge with that became, well, I’m not going to rank for “SEO company.” That’s just not going to happen, just the sky in Kansas City. That’s too much. So there is an opportunity to rank for “SEO” or “marketing for lawn care.” You really bring in that industry and that niche tailored to that. Now, I didn’t think that people were going to search that as much, but I was definitely pleasantly wrong.
Leveraging Online Forums
SD: We’re looking at people who had questions. They would message me and say, “Hey, like, I have more questions on this.” And then they would ask me, “Do you do this for a living?” Because I would never explicitly say that. And then I found forums online for lawn care businesses, and where they were just kind of engaged. And those are the forums where I would register with my name as Evergrow Marketing, but I’d have my own picture. So people can associate a person behind that brand. And then I would do the same thing, except I wouldn’t need to solicit the brand or do anything. Like people see the account name and they see Evergrow Marketing and they’re like, “Oh, well, they probably know what they’re talking about.” JH: That’s what Penji does on Reddit as we were talking. SD: Yeah, no, it’s exactly, when people are looking for information and you help them, I think that’s a good foot in the door kind of thing or, yeah, no, foot in the door is when, you know, you’re already helping them and now, you know, if they have a need for more things or more services in which you provide, then it’s much more likely to, for them to want to use your service based off of you already adding value to their lives. JH: I just had somebody to reach out to me on Reddit that I haven’t talked to in like a year. And they were like, “Hey, it’s, you know, long time no talk.” He goes, “I’m trying your method of being involved in Facebook groups and in my niche. And I’m just, I’m not getting anything.” And he’s like, “I’ve sent tons of DMs.” And I go, “Hold on a second. Let’s back up. I’ve never said send DMs.” Yeah, that’s cold outreach. There’s a difference between being helpful and soliciting. And I don’t know whose advice that is, but it’s not mine. SD: I definitely understand because you can add value to people’s lives without soliciting to them. I mean, I think that if someone is investigating the company that you work for or what you do based off of the knowledge that you provide for them, I think that’s a testament to your capabilities in that field and what you do. Because I think that if people are seeking you out, then that kind of shows more. I don’t know why the word “prestige” is coming into my head. That’s not really what I mean. JH: Cloud. SD: Yeah, that might be worse than… I think it definitely it shows something about a person to be able to grab someone’s attention through that method rather than some kind of gimmick. JH: Yeah. And it’s, I think it’s hard. Like there’s, there’s a word I hate and it’s called “authentic” or “authenticity” because it’s like, it’s so overused and nobody knows what it means anymore. And so whenever I hate telling people to be authentic because then they just think of somebody they know of who is authentic and they’re like, I’ll emulate that. But it’s like, well, that’s the opposite of being authentic.
The Concept of Authenticity
SD: I definitely agree with that. I think that authenticity gets kind of messy when people talk about it at this point. I think that it’s definitely misconstrued as a concept, especially with the rise of LinkedIn, so to speak. I think that that is one of the biggest players in maybe getting that misconstrued because a lot of people see these top voices or not even a top voice, but like a big voice on LinkedIn and they’ll feel like they have to emulate that in order to provide value. But I am on LinkedIn constantly. And I see the same thing said multiple times in different ways and they’re still getting traction. It’s just the way in which you say it has to be authentic to you. JH: There’s a service out there that literally, I mean, there’s probably multiple ones, but there’s a bigger, well-known one that is that they provide, they basically make you an influencer. They make the CEO an influencer on LinkedIn. And basically the whole goal is to fill your pipeline for your B2B business. And they reached out to be on our podcast, which I’m going to say yes, because I want to know more about it. I couldn’t care less to pay for that service. But the idea that being a LinkedIn influencer is this prestige, we’ll use that word again, and but every time I go on there, I just see like the cringiest posts and I just, I can’t be a part of it. But then every time I post on LinkedIn, I just feel like I’m being super unprofessional because I just like, I’ll say two sentences and like my last posts, I called everybody. I said, “Grow up, babies.” Because I keep hearing the whole trope about how SEO is dead, the rise of AI search engines. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s AI or search engines or algorithmic, it’s all search. And so we don’t need a new acronym. We don’t need AEO. We don’t need… it’s just SEO. And like I posted a screenshot because we got a lead on our marketing website from somebody who found us through ChatGPT. So I posted the screenshot and I was like, “SEO is dead,” you know, quote-unquote, “and I said, grow up, babies.” And like, that’s all I said. But like, I don’t know. I feel like if that got in front of a bunch of people, I feel like more people would actually like it. SD: I definitely agree. And I think that that’s authentic because it’s funny and you’re not afraid to be, I don’t know, crude, criticized. I think there’s a delineation between like, you know, like crude and like vulgarity, you know, I think like, I think the rise of influencers like Gary Vee and Grant Cardone and things like that, there’s like very, they kind of push the limits on vulgarity and I don’t like to push the limits, but I do like, I think there is a, there’s a definitely a line there. JH: I think it’s funny. SD: I do definitely get, I do have a lot of double takes on LinkedIn when looking at certain posts. And I think it’s actually, it’s surprisingly very, I really didn’t like it at first because I was like, “Oh, social media for professionals, that sounds awful and really, really boring.” But it’s so funny for someone who can find the humor in it.
Hiring and Employee Management
SD: So we have to, we usually go with the rebuilds and those take 30 to 45 days and it’s about 20 to 30 labor hours. So if it’s just me and we’re onboarding four of them, I that’s 100% of like a 9 to 5 job in one month plus the maintenance. So it was kind of like, we, we called it the position, Sam, super account manager. And it was basically like you, your job is everything, like everything we don’t do or that we can’t do. And so she was doing SEO, she was being, she’s doing the PPC campaigns and then she was also building the websites. Now, of course, all under our supervision, we train her to do all of these. She’s able to like, eventually she didn’t like the remote work. So she went on to work in person somewhere, but set her up on a great career path. JH: Yeah, that’s an amazing thing. She came in as a college student, a single mother college student. I think she was in communications. And now she’s like a digital strategist. So like, yeah, in her exit interview, we asked her like, what were, what are the parts of the jobs you liked or the part of the job, parts of the jobs you didn’t like? And she said that it’s not the amount of hours because our full time at Evergrow is 32 hours a week. And it’s just, yeah. So it’s basically 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, but you only have to log a 32 hours. So I don’t care if you’re watching Netflix all of Friday. That’s totally fine. As long as you get more hours. Yeah. However, between 9 to 5, we need you responsive. So like even if you’re at 32 and we send you an email at noon on Friday, like we expect a response. Now you can respond to that and then go back to Netflix. That’s totally fine. But she was saying like, it’s not the amount of hours, what it is is it’s the, it’s the mental load of all the different tasks, A B C, and switching. I mean, we run on a very productized service, so we have one person can handle 50 accounts because it’s, it’s lawn care and it’s all the same. It’s like just templated basically. And you spend five minutes on an account per day and that’s a lot of mental load and people don’t really account for that. And so not only that, but she’s doing it between SEO and PPC and then also like onboarding new clients. And she’s like, it was just a lot. So what we did after she left is we actually hired two part timers. So we split our hours up, split the people up and split the mind, like the capacity up. But then we also hired two very different thinking people. So for SEO, we hired someone who both knew hires were in college. One was an editor for multiple magazines. She was going to school for writing and journalism, SEO, obviously. The next person was going to school for business marketing, but we were looking for somebody who was very, very particular and did not make mistakes. And so we found our second person to do PPC. And then we trained both of them to be apps. I think Eva, she’s our SEO person. She’s been with us since we split that roll up. I think she knows more than me in SEO now. SD: That’s amazing too. JH: We always say that we don’t hire marketers. We make them. SD: I think that that’s a really great way to recruit, honestly. I think that, and maybe this might sound manipulative, I don’t know, but I think that bringing in a person that’s maybe going to school for something but is mildly unfamiliar with the workforce and how to do very specific tasks, I think that and I hope that this improves and people will bring in more young people because I think that the job requirements for one to three years of experience is sometimes insane because young people will never get a job. Young minds are so moldable and trainable to be very good at the specific task or job that you give them, especially for longevity. There are a lot of people that want to move because they want a different kind of setting or they want to make more money or whatever it may be. But when someone is happy in their position and good at it, they’re more likely to stay with you. And I think that training someone from right out of college to be really good at something if they’re happy in that place, they’re probably just going to continue to be there. JH: There’s a lot to say about that because I think my partner, Cody, he said, you know, he when we filled out the filled out the job listing, it said like required and it said like college degree and I was absolutely adamant against that because I don’t have a college degree. So like I dropped out and like part of my, my excuse all the time for entrepreneurship is like, well, yeah, I had to start a business. No one would hire me. You have to be the leader because you’re not going to be, you can’t be a follower. And I’m like, and if you think I’m an S-tier player, then like, why can’t somebody who doesn’t have that degree be that S-tier player? And I don’t want to bring some, and also like bringing somebody in who has previous SEO or previous PPC experience to, in my brain, they’re brainwashed. So like, okay, we have to like scrub all the bad habits out of you and like retrain you. And sometimes that’s just harder than just teaching somebody who doesn’t know anything. So when we hire, we really go for like the younger college students because our processes are so documented out. SD: That’s amazing too. JH: So we call it like a process should be so easy a monkey can do it or like your grandma or someone. And since those are so documented out, we can hire anybody, do the process, ask questions later. And then when you ask questions, we’ll teach you and we’ll train you why things are done the way they are. But so when we hire people, we don’t, or like college students or younger people, we don’t look for any experience. We just look for things the role might need. So like if you’re an SEO, we want to make sure that you have critical thinking skills and that you can form a functional sentence. For PPC, the difference between spending $100 and a $10,000 is a decimal. So like we need people who are very, very particular. And so sometimes for people like PPC hires, we might give them a process on like how to document something to see if they followed it to a T. But even applying to us, there was there was you had to follow rules.
The Egg Challenge
SD: This is a great culture. I’m going to share this with our team too, because it’s hilarious. In a whole day? Waking day? So not like 24 hours, but as long as you’d be awake. Yeah. Man, I could probably do two dozen. Yeah. Well, it depends too, because if they’re like have them anyway, you don’t have to have them like hard boiled or whatever. You can cook them any way you want, but you have to eat them. I don’t, I don’t eat a lot. Like I generally like 1,500 calories a day. So like I can probably eat two dozen, which is more than that. But if you’re pushing it. Yeah, right. Hold on. This is what’s, what’s, we’re going to do what’s 24 times 70 calories? Yeah, 1,680. That’s like right, you know. JH: Off the top of your head, how many calories an egg is. I’m like a little concerned about you as my healthy green. SD: I got, I got health as a priority right now in my life. Well, that is incredible. I’m happy you didn’t say like seven. I swear that I think that if I was a hiring manager and someone said less than a dozen, I would be, you know, you’re gone. You’re not pushing yourself enough. JH: I usually do like when I go to a restaurant and I’m like really hungry, like, you know how they have the calories next to like the food. I’ll use the calories as a metric for how full I’ll probably be. So it was like, it’s 1,500 calories, I’m like, I’ll be really full. But if it says like 800 calories and I hadn’t really eaten anything, I’m like, I’m still going to be hungry after this. SD: My question about the calories on menus is, and maybe since you’re a calorie expert, a calorie egg person. Well, because, okay, I think everyone, I think most people have not been trained to actually correctly read a serving label, a calorie label. Obviously, there’s serving sizes, and people will eat more than the serving size, and then it’s more than the calories that it’s provided. Also, apparently, calories are only determined by a specific weight class and not actually including the entire population, so it’s very arbitrary. But on a menu, something I always wondered, is it, is there serving size or is it just that entire dish? If you finished it. JH: So this falls in like advertising guidelines. So it’s the whole dish. SD: It’s the whole dish. Yeah. Because if they can give you like… JH: So because the way the restaurant calculates the calories is they do it by how, like the individual pieces. So if like this has two slices of cheese, they look at like the raw, like the raw. Yeah. And they just add it up. So usually it’s not even like fully accurate because the only way to actually determine calories is like literally by like burning it and water and doing like the whole like measurement we did in chemistry class and junior year, but they’re not doing that. SD: Interesting. Well, that makes me feel so much better, actually, because I never finish anything. And maybe you wouldn’t hire me for that. I haven’t started. Recently, since I took my health series a year ago, I’ve been not finishing my entire plate at restaurants. I never finish my entire plate. I don’t even know how it’s physically possible because the portion sizes at restaurants are usually huge. Unless you’re going to a Michelin star restaurant and they’re giving you this little tiny cake. JH: You look at any restaurant menu, like a burger and fries and whatever, and it’s like 1,500 calories. That’s literally your entire day right there at that one sitting. So I don’t want to think about that. SD: Yeah, but that’s true, because if I do eat something like that, I feel like awful the whole day. And I know that that’s because I wasn’t meant to eat my calorie intake in one meal. JH: No, you got to treat us to meals. It’s $30. That’s $15 a meal. SD: I have breakfast. Yeah. And then you have lunch. That’s what I do. I just split my meals as much. I feel like slightly healthier, even if it’s not good for me. Yeah.
Episode Conclusion
SD: Well, this is a really funny note to end on, but we are out of time. Well, hopefully the audience will not only get some marketing and strange, funny LinkedIn knowledge from this podcast, but also calorie knowledge because no one is taught to read serving sizes in American education systems. Be healthy out there, everyone. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. This was very fun. I’m sorry that maybe we didn’t get to touch on as many marketing topics as you probably hoped. JH: No, totally fine. If you want to know marketing topics, just listen to more of your episodes or check us out on the Agency Growth Podcast. SD: Yeah, we had a shameless promo for another marketing podcast. JH: Yeah, stealing all of your listeners. SD: You can have them. I like sharing. But thank you again so much for joining me. Everyone listening, don’t forget to like and subscribe. You can get more knowledge, more calorie intake knowledge. Maybe we’ll have another guest that knows how many calories an egg is. You guys can be best friends and I’ll send you an email. Thank you. Thank you again so much and have a lovely day. JH: You too.
