[Fully Managed] Andrew Maff Ep. 54 – Podcast Highlights and Transcript

Shannon (Host): Alrighty. Hello, everyone and welcome to the Fully Managed by Penji podcast, the podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you in your business journey. I’m your host, Shannon, Penji’s partnership coordinator, and I’m joined here today with Andrew Maff, founder of Blue Tuskr, marketing agency focused around e-commerce and online brands. Thanks so much for coming on with me today.

Andrew Maff: Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

The Snapping Debate

Shannon: Of course. My first question for you today is, can you snap?

Andrew: Can I snap? Yes. Like that? Yes.

Shannon: Tell me, okay. This is something that’s been on my mind. I know it has nothing to do… Can you snap? Also, you already showed me. Okay. So you can. What does the sound come from? Does it come from both of the fingers, like slipping against each other?

Andrew: It comes from hitting your palm. I think it’s hitting your palm.

Shannon: Okay. I’ve been debating this with many people today.

Andrew: Yeah, no, it’s a palm. It’s a palm, right? Because there’s no, your fingers aren’t like, because like there’s no friction there. So it’s gotta hit something to make the noise.

Shannon: Isn’t this the friction, though? That’s the only thing I’m like, I kind of understand what they’re saying, but at the same time, because if you put your finger here and block it, you can feel that it’s like hitting your finger.

Andrew: You’re right. But I feel, so I swear the sound happens beforehand, and it dulls it. If the sound was the same and coming from your fingers, you would still hear it.

Shannon: Interesting. Okay. Okay. Thank you for settling this. That’s an argument. I agree.

Business Background

Shannon: Alright. Now that I’ve gotten you out of your game. Please actually tell us about your business. You know, kind of how it started and how you kind of got up to this point.

Andrew: So, my name’s Andrew Maff, am a professional snapper, and that’s why I’m on this show. No. So, I am the founder and CEO of Blue Tuskr. We’re a full-service marketing company for e-commerce sellers. I have been in the e-commerce digital marketing space for a little over 15 years this summer. So it is basically more or less all I’ve ever done. A little bit of in and out towards the beginning of my career there, but pretty much all I’ve ever done.

Shannon: Congrats for 15 years.

Andrew: Yeah. Thank you. Not a lot of people make it that far.

Shannon: You know, that’s a good point. A lot of people don’t even know that e-commerce has been around that long.

Andrew: Yeah. I guess. What do you think about it? We’ve had, you know, you buy something online and it delivers like 15 years is definitely, I remember…

Shannon: Well, I think, well, I guess a lot of people think about it, like, how long has the internet been around? Obviously longer than that. So I mean, like online shopping has been…

Andrew: Well that’s, yes, that is true. But I mean, like, it was, it’s definitely pre-Amazon. So, like when I started, I think Amazon might have been, or no, it definitely was a thing. ‘Cause I think Bezos started in like 99 or something, but they were definitely still selling books when I started. They weren’t selling anything else. But yeah, I’ve been, I’m kind of an old fart when it comes to e-commerce now at this point.

COVID Impact on Business

Shannon: Something that I was wondering is, I know a lot of people, a lot of marketing agencies specifically get involved in e-commerce because of the COVID epidemic. And I noticed that you started in 2020. Did that have anything to do with it? ‘Cause I know a lot people gotten involved in e-commerce because it, you know, it’s COVID proof. There’s always gonna be online shopping.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, it was actually just dumb luck. So before COVID, I was actually a partner at an agency before that, that was also just e-commerce focused, but we exited that in late 2019. I stayed on with the company that had acquired us for a little bit and then started Blue Tuskr, and actually, it was January of 2020. And then, of course, by March, April, it was just dumb luck that we started around that time.

Shannon: All right. Well, that makes sense. I mean, that’s a perfect time. Like, I mean, that’s someone worked on your side?

Andrew: Worked. I’m still here, so not mad at it.

The Name Origin

Shannon: Fantastic. Where did the name come from?

Andrew: So I completely made it up. It was a common question that we get. So I was at, as I mentioned, I was at an agency before this. I owned my own agency even before that. I’ve worked with hundreds of agencies at this point, and I got so tired of like the growth digital or like, which I’m sure is someone’s name, so I apologize, but like, it’s just the same, it’s the same ridiculous names over and over again.

And I was like, from an SEO perspective, that’s a nightmare. Like it’s really difficult to find that. And so I was like, I’m just gonna make something up. I’m just gonna pull it out of my head. And then, just like any other brand, like no one really knows what most brands mean. Like when you hear Apple, you now think, you know, high-end like premium electronics. You don’t really think fruit. So, like you can force the audience to kind of eventually consider what it is you’re, you’ve got, right?

So I was like, screw it, we’re just gonna make something up. So around November-ish of 2019, when I knew I was gonna start the agency, it was around like the year, maybe two year anniversary of when I had lost my grandmother. Loved her. She was awesome, but she was obsessed with elephants, and I also liked elephants. I thought it was cool. So I was like, let’s go with like a tusk, Tuskr, kind of like it felt right, right.

And then, my wife and I met in high school and our colors were blue and gray. And so it’s like, all right, we’re going blue Tuskr. And then I’m not gonna say their name ’cause I don’t wanna do them with any justice, but the company that acquired us, right when I left, they rebranded and dropped the E from their name. And I just, horrible experience there. So outta spite, I did the same thing and took the e out of Tuskr and then I merged the two and now it’s there.

Shannon: I love a spite story. I will say like nothing, nothing gets you motivated, like hate. We actually, we, this is so silly and short, but we have a Rolling Stones guitar at my parents’ home, signed by all of the members. And it’s not because my parents really care that much about them, you know, like everyone who doesn’t like them. But it’s because they were at an auction with this guy that really wanted it and they just did not…

Andrew: That’s the way to do that.

Shannon: I just think that’s like spending, like, I don’t even know how much money was. I gonna be honest. Probably not. You know, a pretty penny to just, just because you didn’t like this guy. I love that. Fantastic.

Andrew: Yeah, no, hate makes friends. Hate gives you cool things. It’s great.

Shannon: Bring back hate. Bring back hate. Yeah, bring back bullying, bring back hate. It’s important. Just kidding. Don’t get me. It’s gonna go well for the podcast. Alright.

Growth Strategy

Shannon: Right. So, back to the nitty gritty. Okay. So how have since, okay, it’s only been now four years, which is pretty awesome. How have you been able to grow your agency from when you started it and what’s your strength kind of?

Andrew: You know, it’s funny. It, wow. Is it, it’s 2024?

Shannon: Yeah.

Andrew: So it’ll, it’ll be, it’ll, I look at it as this is our fourth year, which I guess technically it would kind of be our fifth. Because in 2020, in 2020, I did start Blue Tuskr, but I was under an NDA and a non-comp, or a non-compete, more or less, for the agency that had acquired us. And so, I really couldn’t touch e-commerce for the first year.

So, I grabbed a handful of clients just to kind of keep my fingers wet, but they were all like, they were all like SaaS, so technically not really e-commerce. But what I did was right out the gate, I started a podcast, I launched the website. It was just an ad hoc website, but I started creating content. I knew that I couldn’t take on e-commerce clients without being sued. So I was like, okay, I’m just gonna do like a little bit of like a small media outlet thing and start to build up my asset and my content so that when I can hit the ground running, I’ve already got stuff to work with. And it was the pandemic, so I had all the time in the world.

So, I more or less started from that. And then once, we kind of lucked out in the fact of once my non-compete was up, which was almost exactly a year, and in some cases 18 months after I had left. They had announced the, the previous company that acquired us, that they were shutting down the agency that they purchased from us because they just burned it into the ground. And so all of the, a bunch of my old clients found out that I was basically back at it and that they were shutting down. So a bunch of them came over to me. Even a handful of like contractors and a couple employees and stuff came over.

So, in a weird way, it’s kind of a spinoff of that prior agency and we just kind of went silent for a year and a half-ish. But then to like really hit the ground running, you know, this was completely bootstrapped. Like, I think I put like, I think I paid like three grand for like a really fancy laptop because I just wanted to, and then that was like it. Everything else has just been, slowly churning away.

And in the beginning, I mean, you’d get software companies that would be like, Hey, for like a hundred bucks, can I pick your brain for an hour on this feature? And I’d be like, sure. I need, let’s just incomes income. And then, you know, we would kind of go through Upwork and reach out to people and get some stuff through there in the beginning. And really anything to kind of bring in the business and, and just bring in the revenue. ‘Cause obviously the big problem you have in the beginning, I had a ton of experience. I’d been doing it forever, but I didn’t have any testimonials or any case studies under our agency.

So while I may know what I’m doing, I have no proof that my team does. So I had to just be like, you know what? We’re gonna be doing stuff at cost for a little while. We’re just, it is what it is. And so building up case studies, building up examples, references, reviews, all that kind of stuff. And then slowly just increasing our cost until we got it into a place where like, okay, we’re an agency now, and then we just the normal stuff.

Shannon: Yeah. So, you know, you have to have good work, but you also have to have credibility at some point because that’s gonna bring in more customers, you know?

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. It’s nice to have connections in the beginning, but you need to get to the point where, you know, you can not think about it as much.

Shannon: Exactly. That makes a lot of sense. And I, under the, the picking your brain for a hundred dollars for an hour, I, I, there’s, there’s not many things I wouldn’t do for a hundred dollars an hour.

Andrew: We wanted in a few cases, like I remember we would have like, we’d get someone who just wanted us to show them how to connect their Google Analytics to their Shopify or something. So it would just be like an hour of work and I’d be like, fine, whatever. You know, we’ll get that.

And then in other cases we would get some of these software companies that would just be like, Hey, we just want to you to look at it and then take a survey and we’ll give you like a hundred dollars Amazon gift card. And I’d be like, okay, I can get improved a light for the podcast that I want to like start to ramp up a little bit. So like, it was literally just where can I get dollars from and then just slowly putting it into whatever I can.

Shannon: I mean, that’s also really nice for credibility reasons too, just because, and just personality, like a lot of people won’t dedicate the time to show people like trivial debatably, trivial things like that. Especially agencies, you know, people will go, oh, I have something else to do with my time. But I think a lot of people will appreciate, even if that’s all they ask you for, they’ll be like, this guy helped me with this. And then they, they tell someone else about it, you know, that’s always good.

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, agency space, it’s all about reputation and you can’t, it, it’s almost impossible to scale them like overnight. It’s not a software company. If I have something go viral, I can’t take on 500 clients overnight. I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta ease into it. So no matter what my growth pretty much is stuck remaining con, just consistent. And you know, you deal with that, but you can’t scale it overnight. So because of that, your reputation is everything.

And so, you know, to your point of like you wanted to do a quick consulting call, cool, let’s do it. I know you may not be a fit, but maybe you know someone is. Or if I teach you well enough and you do it right. Maybe a year or two from now, you will be a good fit and you’ll reach out to me. It happens to us all the time. We’ll get people from two, three years ago that we just kind of walked them through how to do stuff. Business is still trucking along. They don’t wanna do it in house anymore. Now they’re a client. So it’s, you never really know where it’s gonna land.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s a lot of times, like I talk to a lot of people on this podcast and separately of for partnerships and things and a lot of people don’t have a need for us. They have an in-house designer or something like that. But then, you know, down the line that person doesn’t work out. They leave the company or whatever, and then they have us in mind. And you know, it’s sometimes, you know, it’s the wrong place, the wrong time, but there might be a right place, right time, near future. And that’s important. You wanna be present in people’s minds.

Andrew: Yeah, I imagine that’s probably why you’re doing this podcast.

Shannon: The podcast. Yep. Secret.

Andrew: Yeah. I knows it’s secret.

Shannon: It’s helpful. Yeah. It, it, it is helpful. But, you know, I’m no salesperson. All, that’s all I’ll say, but it is nice. It’s just nice to get your name out there too. For any, any, any way at all. And I think that’s the strategy that you had kind of discussed of like getting your toes in the water and then doing all of these other things to get your name out there is really, I think, I think a really great way for people to start, especially being under the non-disclosure agreement. You can’t, obviously, you’re stunted in a way.

But that’s a really great way to start out because at least you get some kind of credibility for being knowledgeable. Which is, you know, what people want, but you know, they want good work too. But if you don’t have a lot to of work to show for it, then at least you have the talk.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Client Acquisition and Retention Strategy

Shannon: So, now that you have kind of explained like your process beforehand, what is your strategy for kind of getting clients but also maintaining them, communicating with them, different things like that?

Andrew: So, where do I start with that? Well, to me, the agency space is always very interesting because you get to me, you get two different types of agencies. You get ones that are actually just sales companies, and then you get others that are more marketing agencies, at least from a marketing perspective, right?

And I, the way I see that difference is how strongly are they focused on retention versus how strongly are they focused on getting new clients, right? And in the beginning we were a hundred percent a sales agency. You can’t retain anyone if you don’t have anyone. So like, you gotta get ’em first.

That’s changed over time now. Now it’s less of like, okay, if they come to us and they wanna work with us, are they a good fit? Can we grow them? If we grow them, are they gonna stay with us? Like there’s a lot of questions around like, it’s interesting now to look at another, I have to project another business’s growth to understand if it’s going to actually help me grow my own business. So it’s kind of a weird like evaluation period.

So, everything we do is we stay focused on retention as much as possible. A lot of our, our efforts go into just consistently improving on what we’re doing, and that becomes more around people. Right. So at a certain point, we actually realized we are almost more of a recruiting firm than we are a marketing firm because I can get someone in here who could be really good at SEO. But I also need ’em to be able to speak and educate a client to understand why they’re doing what we’re doing.

And if I can get the world’s best SEO person, but they’re a hotheaded, horrible person who just yells at clients, guess what? I don’t care how good you are, you’re not gonna be a good fit. So you’ve gotta figure those types of things out. Right. So our model, we’re a full service marketing company for e-commerce sellers. And the reason I did that was because years ago when I was in house, I had specialist agencies, right? I had an SEO guy, a Google Ads guy, a med ads guy, a social person, an influencer, like they were all different because they specialized in it.

The problem was, is when you put together a full marketing strategy, the right hand has to know what the left hand is doing. And these agencies, even if they weren’t competitive, had no desire to work together. And if they, even if they did, their processes were so different, I wouldn’t know, like, am I gonna get this asset in time to be able to launch it on this date when this person needs it? And then are they gonna have enough like, so it was, I was basically account managing my own agencies. I could never actually just do what I needed to do as my own job.

So our strategy and our model – we are basically like five or six-ish agencies in one roof, right? So your account strategist kind of acts as like a fractional CMO and oversees all elements of what’s going on with an account that we’re working on. And then we have specialized departments in house, so we have departments, but in some cases we call them like their own agency because we have like an SEO team that’s basically the size of an SEO agency. And the same thing with paid media. And even under them we have a Google, a Meta and an, and a marketplace department. Then we have like a social team and an SEO team, influencer team. So like they’re all specialized in their areas, but it’s the account strategist that oversees everything.

From a communication standpoint, yeah, you have the standard stuff, right? You get on a call the client like once a week, once every other week, whatever. They can email us fine. We also do a shared Slack channel, so like anyone who’s involved in our client’s accounts are all in one channel so that they can just chat with us whenever they want. And so that’s kind of how we make sure that we stay like a true extension of their team and that they feel like we’re employees, which we find is a lot more beneficial on many different fronts.

Especially because for every agency owner that’s listening to this, they know like, you’re treated like a vendor. You’re not treated like an employee. And that’s sometimes horrible where they’re treating you like, I could just cut the roof, like, cut the, take the rug out from under you whenever I want. And they treat you poorly. And it sucks because it’s just like if you want us to do good work, you wouldn’t treat an employee this way ’cause you’d get sued for like a toxic work environment, but yet you can do it to us.

And so we end up getting, you know, in situations with clients that are just genuinely rude and they’re just not fun to work with, and if their culture starts to affect ours, sometimes we have to drop clients. And so that’s where like the communication comes in because if we act as a true extension of their team, they start to realize that and they treat us like people as opposed to a vendor.

And then, to your question on the lead flow side, I mean, that’s all over the place. I mean, we create more content than I know what to do with. We’ve got our own podcast, the e-comm show. Every Wednesday, we’re interviewing other e-comm sellers or industry people similar to what we’re doing. We’ve got our own weekly newsletter that goes out. That’s just industry updates of what’s going on. It’s like a marketing brew sort of thing, but just for e-commerce, basically.

And then we’ve got blog articles we’re putting out all the time. We’re listed on a few different directories that every now and then we’ll get something. We work very closely with the Amazon Buy with Prime team. So like they send us stuff all the time, whenever they’re implementing things, and we have a little bit of ads of our own that we kind of dabble with of creating like gated content and try to just practice what we preach. But otherwise, most of it’s coming through those.

Shannon: Okay. Well, I mean, I think it’s really great to have a lot of avenues because, you know, there’s a lot of people will really hope for that referral. And that’s kind of like the most ideal of course. And, you know, you can get that with just good work and good communication.

But I think that, you know, especially if you’re, if you’re on the newer side, which I, I guess I consider like the first 10 years of an agency being newer just because it’s rough to get to the 10 year mark. And I think that getting as many leads from as many places as possible is a really important strategy. I think, you know, it’s great to have the reputation that you have and of course you wanna maintain that, but you need to be able to, you know, show your work. And the more people that you work with, the more the work that you can show.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, referrals are great referrals. Nine times outta 10 will close significantly faster than anything else. The only issue with referrals is you don’t really have control over them. So like, we’ve had situations where all of a sudden, for whatever reason, we’re getting 10, 15 referrals in like a month, and we’re like, Hey, we can’t take all of these. And then we might go like a month or two without any, because everyone’s on vacation over the summer.

Something like that. So like, while I love the idea of referrals, there’s no, you can’t like push a button and be like, Hey, okay, now send us referrals. Like you can remind people every now and then, but they may not know anyone, they may, you know, and then hounding clients too often. So we, while we love referrals, we make sure that everyone knows that we have like some, you know, a referral program in place. We also are just like, we’re here if you have anyone. If not, we’re not gonna hound you for more stuff. We’ll stay focused on your brand.

Shannon: I, I think people hate that and they’re very much less likely to give you a referral if you’re annoying.

Andrew: Exactly. No one likes that.

Shannon: Yeah. And I think, it sucks, too, to have to, like turn a referral away. But you know, that is how it is. If you can’t, if you can’t take it in, you can’t take it in.

Andrew: Yeah. But, it does suck when you get a referral, you of a client you really like and you don’t like the referral.

Shannon: That’s a very good point too. That happens also.

Andrew: Everything seems to happen.

Shannon: Yeah. You never, you always think that you’ve seen it all and you haven’t seen anything.

Unique Clients

Shannon: Oh, so that gets to a question that I have. This will be our last question for the day. It’s fun. You don’t have to say names, of course we don’t know wanna expose anyone on this podcast. But is there a unique and or strange business that you have worked with before, like the strangest one?

Andrew: Oh man, I don’t even know where to begin with that. There’s been, you know, we come across brands all the time where they sell stuff that like, I can’t believe this guy’s doing as much as he is selling this. You know what I mean? Like the one thing we always joke about is like, you know, it’s e-commerce and so sometimes you end up working with someone that was theoretically like a first mover, right?

Like they were one of the first people on the internet to start selling X and so they are doing an obscene amount of money and you talk to the owner and you’re like, how? Are you doing like 30, $40 million a year? Like you are insane. And so we get that kind of stuff a lot. We’ve dealt with like random, like small pieces of glass that the guy’s doing millions of dollars a year. How many people are doing like HVAC parts and stuff like that? Is always interesting.

You know, we’ve got, geez, everyone and their mother seems to put CBD into everything now. So, like, we’ve got all of those things.

Shannon: Drinks. Yeah.

Andrew: The, we also have like the weird stuff where it’s just like, all right, let’s all be adults as we talk about this kind of thing. Because we’ve had, like, you know, we’ve done sex toys in the past, we’ve done weapons in the past, we’ve done. You know, wildly right wing stuff, wildly left wing stuff We’ve done LGBTQ stuff like we’ve done all over the map where it’s kind of like we’re a marketing company, we know the drill, we know how to do this. Let’s be adults and just discuss it.

But I, you know, sometimes you come across those. We do a lot of work with what we just referred to as like restricted brands. So, like the sex toys, the weapons, CBD, that kind of thing. I didn’t like put my name out there and go, Hey, if you’ve got, please, that stuff, send it our way like it just happened. We do a lot of content marketing, so I’m guessing that’s kind of the direction, but we call ’em restricted brands ’cause they can’t add, like they can’t do ads, right? You can’t do Google or Meta and anything really. So they’re restricted from what they can do and we get a bunch of those, and those are all really weird.

Shannon: Sometimes, it’s nice to have an office giggle.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. The office sneaker is important. You do the usual, like, all right, we’ve got five minutes of everyone get their best jokes out and then like, let’s move on.

Shannon: That’s great. That’s so bad. I would be making jokes all the time, every day. I have no self-control with that, but that’s fantastic. It’s good that you guys are all adults. Sometimes.

Conclusion

Shannon: Well, that is, unfortunately, all the time that we have today. I know that we both have meetings. Probably shouldn’t put that in there. But thank you so much for joining me today. This was a great conversation. I think I’ve laughed a lot more than I usually do in the podcast, so I appreciate that.

Andrew: Sure. And thank you so much. Good help. Thank you.

Shannon: And everyone watching at home, do not forget to like and subscribe to see more professionals like Andrew on this podcast. And tune in next time. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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