Charting Creative Entrepreneurship and Small Business Marketing with Drew Donaldson

Have you ever found yourself at a career crossroads, yearning for creative liberation and the thrill of entrepreneurship? Drew Donaldson, founder of GroHaus, joins Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society to share his transformation from a film and television graduate to a marketing maven. Donaldson transports us through inspirations drawn from his parents' business savvy, and how a mix of resilience, strategic thinking, and a dash of serendipity allowed him to cultivate a flourishing marketing agency amidst the chaos of a global pandemic.

Donaldson provides an insider's look at the delicate dance between maintaining creative gusto and the practicalities of delivering standout marketing services. He dissects the nuances of small business marketing, from the allocation of budgets to embracing technological advancements, all while keeping the human touch at the forefront—think Ace Hardware's neighborly charm versus the big-box detachment.

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Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by MediaClip, Advertek Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Drew Donaldson, a serial entrepreneur, world strategist and founder of GroHaus, a marketing strategy and execution firm serving small businesses all around this great country of ours. Drew comes to us from Richland, Pennsylvania. Hey, Drew, how are you today? I'm doing great, Gary. How are you Good? That was the most enthusiastic introduction I've done in a while, because I'm very excited to talk to you. Unfortunately, the listeners didn't hear the 45 minutes of us yacking about technology before we started recording, so we've really used up all of our time and thank you for listening. Actually, Drew, what we didn't get into actually was your background of how you started to get into this business, where you started and how you got to GroHaus found , which you did during the pandemic. So I really want to hear that story.

Drew Donaldson: 1:18

So my obsession with small business ownership started when I was a kid. Both my parents were entrepreneurs. They both owned their own businesses, and so I really experienced small business ownership firsthand. I did filing in my mom's office at her insurance agency, I helped my dad plant flowers at his greenhouse and the most important thing is I saw them interacting with the general public and I saw how they sold things and how they treated customers and how much pride they took in the work they did.

Drew Donaldson: 1:48

One of memory that stands out to me still to this day was I was probably like six years old and I was riding my dad's pickup truck and he was an ag banker, so he lends money to farmers that need to buy equipment and cattle and all of that kind. It's a very specialized kind of form of banking that, unless you live in rural America, you probably don't even know really exists. But out where I live, if you go to a bank, they're going to have an ag banker that just works with farmers, and so that was what my dad did and we were driving down the road one day and he points to a manure spreader ahead of us and I gave that guy the money to buy that and I said how do you know that's the one? And he said because there's only one in the county and I helped him get it and like the pride he had that he helped this small cattle farmer go get this manure spreader and I've all things of manure spreader I'm trying not to go with the poop joke here.

Drew Donaldson: 2:40

But yeah, it was important to him that he helped. One was important to that guy too, right?

Gary Pageau: 2:45

I mean, that was the thing, of course, and he did your father gain a sense of accomplishment and achievement for doing that. But he helped somebody else achieve their dream by spreading manure.

Drew Donaldson: 2:59

And that's the whole thing is that it was the impact, the immediate impact that small business owners have on their community and the people they serve. It's not like a big corporation where, if you work for Walmart, you're so separated from the end user at the end of the day, if you're in Walmart corporate or a director or vice president Walmart you're not really seeing the impact and so that. But when you're on the front lines and you run the business and you're directly responsible for that person, it's just, it's a profound sense of place in this world. So I really fell in love with that. My whole family might come from a family of farmers, so I saw it all throughout. Everybody we associated with was in the small business arena practically, and so that's where it really started.

Drew Donaldson: 3:45

When I got out of college, I really was. I knew in my heart that I was not meant to work for other people, that I was meant to do my own thing and, much to my mom's chagrin, she did not like the fact that I did not want to 401k and a steady job and a nine to five and a paycheck. I was like, no, I want to do this thing.

Gary Pageau: 4:03

What did you go to school for? What was your degree in?

Drew Donaldson: 4:06

Well, film and television.

Gary Pageau: 4:07

Okay.

Drew Donaldson: 4:08

That's actually where I started. So my first businesses were production studios and creative service businesses, and the reason I actually closed those down and stopped working in those was because I had such a hard time in marketing, because I was doing really, really well. I had award-winning films out there I was working for. Like every once in a while I'd work for a really big client I'd have really, you know, I'd be really proud of the work it would look better than anything else anyone was doing. That was at my level Like obviously I'm not Warner Brothers, right, like I can't compete at that level.

Drew Donaldson: 4:37

But for the small little production companies that were doing the work I was doing, I was outperforming and yet I could not get consistent work to save my life. And I knew that the only difference between what I was doing and what these other guys were doing that were doing less work or less quality work, but more of it was marketing. They had to be doing something different in how they're marketing, and so that's where my marketing obsession really was born, was that I just so I'm just curious when you went to photography and film school, did they teach any of this?

Gary Pageau: 5:06

Did they have like a business crack or anything on that? There was nothing on that.

Drew Donaldson: 5:12

No, in fact, when I first got out, I tried to be the good little student and do the internship thing and I did it. I took an internship at a studio in New York and I worked there for like six weeks and I called the guidance counselor at the college and I said they have me getting coffee Like I'm not doing anything. I haven't even gone into a studio yet. Like all they do is they send me out in the morning to get a bowl of fruit and they send me out at lunch to get lunch, and then they send me to get coffee before everybody leaves for the day. That's all I do. And then the rest of the time I'm just sitting at my desk with my laptop, like tinkering around in Ableton, like I'm not not doing anything related to sound in this business. And he said, well, that's just the industry, you just that, you just have to suffer through it. And I was like what if I don't want to suffer? Like what if I, like I went through, I spent all this money getting all this education? I already have like film credits, like feature film credits at this point, I already have album credits on different music projects. Like I have all these credits. I should be able to just get a job. Like I wasn't a slouching college, I worked my butt off. I worked in radio in college, like I was already out there. And then I come and, oh no, you have to be, you know, an errand boy for the next five years. And so that really was frustrating to me because they didn't give any support.

Drew Donaldson: 6:25

I went back to the guidance counselor again and I said, well, what else can you get me? And he's like there's nothing else to get. You. Just got to get coffee for a couple of years until someone decides to give you a shot. And I was like I'm not putting my faith or my future in the hands of some like 20 something, hoping they like me. That's not a future I want to invest in. That was the time we were really solidified that I just have to do something for myself, right. And so I stopped looking for internships and I started really going out there and trying to build a freelance business. And even with that, I called them and I was like, okay, I have a freelance business now what do I do? It was absolutely hopeless. Oh, I even went back and got a master's degree in business because I thought that would be the solution and it wasn't. It didn't. It just left me with more questions and less answers.

Drew Donaldson: 7:12

The way I overcame it was just doing the work, like I just went out and I did as much work as I could. I built. It was big enough of a portfolio as possible. I had a woman named Lucy Jurassic, at St John's University, take a shot at me and brought me in to lead their video production department, and that's where I really like, really, I was like okay, now I have I have this gig, I have a goal in mind, I'm going to build this their, their internal video department, and I'm just going to learn everything I can about marketing so that I never have to feel that way again about chasing, chasing my tail, trying to get clients Right. So that was really it Once. Once I had that experience on my belt. Then it was consulting and then running my own shop.

Gary Pageau: 7:55

Because I find that that sort of the thing in the creative business education complex whatever you want to call that, you know there is not really a connection to how you're actually going to sell what you're doing. I've talked to a few photographers on the podcast who basically, like they're like, they were like you, yeah, I mean they could. They learned the process of setting up studio, putting up lights and what an f stop is and all that stuff, and they did some student work to build a portfolio, but there really wasn't anything about. You know, hey, how do you network? What are some basic marketing things you can do? You know, all that stuff is just kind of lacking in that world and it's shocking actually.

Drew Donaldson: 9:01

I mean, I honestly feel like I was the last and probably probably not even the last I was probably one class after where it was really necessary to go to college for any kind of creative arts.

Drew Donaldson: 9:10

Honestly, if you're a student out there right now and you're considering going to college for creative arts, save your money. If I could have gone back and really looked at what I should have been doing, what I should have been doing is spending the time trying to get an internship right out of high school, because then I wouldn't have felt the pressure of oh my gosh, I have this huge student loan that I need to pay and these people want me to go get coffee and aren't even willing to pay me. When you're 18, you can live at home with your parents for a couple more years. You can cut your teeth, you can get the five years in, you can learn all this stuff Plus. I hate to break it to you, but everything you learn in college is online now, like you can take free photography classes you can take, you know, from really good people like really talented photographers.

Gary Pageau: 9:52

No, I think the education industrial complex, if you will, is going to be in for a wake up call in the next few years, definitely because of this. Speaking of online, you do a lot of online stuff with Grow House. So talk how you kind of started Grow House in the depths of a pandemic, which probably said, oh my gosh, we got to do some online stuff.

Drew Donaldson: 10:13

So I was. I was like five years into this long term consulting engagement with a media publisher in New York and I had started building this career as kind of a fixer. I would come into companies that needed help with their video departments and then I would fix the video department and then I would leave.

Gary Pageau: 10:30

You were like a video MacGyver.

Drew Donaldson: 10:33

Yeah, but like for but for production process and automation, and through that I had started learning more about marketing and implementing more of that. And so now it wasn't just video but it was webinars and it was email marketing and it was all this other stuff. And so I was running this department with like a two or three million dollar pipeline, working with all the major like financial players, so your, your Merrill Lynch's and your voyas and your Franklin Templeton's and all of the big like investment banks in New York as clients. So very demanding clients, a lot of you know not particularly interesting work, but a lot of it right.

Drew Donaldson: 11:09

It wasn't like you know I was working on the next Terminator movie.

Gary Pageau: 11:11

Yeah, and it's a very regulated market, right. So there's all kinds. You know, there's what they can't say, a whole lot outside of a boundary of of certain phrases and things.

Drew Donaldson: 11:22

Yeah, you can't really. You know you're not going on video shoots with like sports cars or anything like you know, you know, here's a chart that shows bond average. This is like great. This is. This is excellent.

Gary Pageau: 11:33

This is compelling TV.

Drew Donaldson: 11:35

Yeah, but it was. It was interesting work because I was able to solve a lot of a lot of challenges. I was able to really grow as a marketer, but I knew the time for my exit was coming at the beginning of 2020. This is pre-pandemic. So this is, you know, january. So I start putting feelers in the water and I have this idea I want to take all of this stuff I've learned and I want to bring it back to small business community and help them. So I start having pitches and I start doing and everything's kind of normal, normal, normal, normal.

Drew Donaldson: 12:03

Then March hits, everything shuts down and I realize, well, for the rest of the year I'm not selling anything. So instead of going and trying to sell people on, hey, buy my consulting services for small business. I just start talking to small business owners and seeing, like, what do you like about working with a marketing agent? What don't you like? What do you wish marketing agencies would do that they don't do? So I went through this whole process of really like understanding what small businesses actually needed from a marketer and what they weren't getting, and I was shocked at how many small businesses you know. I've never been asked these questions before. I was like all right, I'm on to something here. There's an untapped pain in this market and I just need to put the right pieces together to solve it. And so end of the year comes around, I end that consulting gig.

Drew Donaldson: 12:45

I'm still kind of like we're nine months into a pandemic at this point. I'm like, do I really want to go and try to start a business now? Like I have all this information start, I go and interview, I get a couple offers for CMO and head of marketing positions from some companies, couple remote companies, couple local companies. And I'm sitting down with my wife and I have them all spread out in front of me and I'm walking her through as we're eating you know Jersey Mike subs and talking about like what my next move is going to be, and I go through, I'm like this one's this, this one's this, this one's this.

Drew Donaldson: 13:17

And the dark horse of all of them were two guys from Philly that had reached out because I had submitted a job application like two years prior, and they were like hey, that job's no longer available, obviously, but we're starting this agency. Would you be interested in running it? And I was like, oh, that's kind of an interesting thing. So I'm going through and I'm telling my wife all these and she's like you don't sound excited for any of these. I'm like, I'm not like, I don't, I don't really like. None of these make me get out, get out of bed in the morning.

Gary Pageau: 13:46

Well, because your DNA, going back to your parents, is that of not working for other people.

Drew Donaldson: 13:53

Exactly, and I was like the only one that I'm I'm I'm like genuinely curious about is this offer to go run this agency, Because I was like they're saying I have full creative control, I can take it whatever direction I want. That's that is really. I'm still be working for other people, but it's a heck of a lot more control I'd have than any of these other jobs where I have to, kind of, you know, I have to fit their puzzle. I can't create my own puzzle. And so she's like well, I think you already made your decision, haven't you? I was like, yeah, I guess you did.

Drew Donaldson: 14:22

So I called the four other companies and I said, yeah, no, I'm not interested. And then I called the two guys who ended up being my business partners for the next year and we started this business. And that's that's really how the first version of grow house got started. And one of the reasons I didn't like that deal was that I had to change the name. They had a name already picked out. They had some assets built. They wanted to go by crackle marketing. So part of the negotiation was we keep the name crackle I, you know, I, I shelf grow house. I don't grow grow house while I'm working with crackle and, and we did that for a year and then, about almost a year later, I bought them out of the business and took it back to grow house, and that's where we are today.

Gary Pageau: 15:04

Awesome. So I'm just curious about the name. It's G-R-O, capital, h-a-u-s. The spelling of house is a little European. Is that something that means something to you, or?

Drew Donaldson: 15:20

Yeah, well, the name in its entirety has a couple of different kind of angles to it. So the first thing obviously is the Germanic inflect. We live in Pennsylvania Dutch country. So when I first started this I really wanted to serve that community because those are my neighbors. Like that's why you start a small business, right, this is a servant neighbor's. Turns out I actually don't have any clients in Pennsylvania. I don't think so. That didn't really work out the way I planned. I have clients from all around the country, just not in Pennsylvania. I have had some here and there. I might maybe I'm speaking out of turn I might have a client in Pennsylvania, but it's not proliferation. So when I first started the brand, I was really leaning into like well, this is like if you go down the street, there's a lot of businesses that use that.

Gary Pageau: 15:59

Oh yeah, that's why I asked, cause I'm familiar with that spelling.

Drew Donaldson: 16:04

But the whole concept of a grow house really goes back to my father because his small business was a greenhouse and so you know. The sad part about the story with my dad is that he saw his dream realized and then died a year later. And so he got to the top of the mountain. He saw everything. So the name grow house really is an ode I guess is the best word to his struggle to get his bone business started in the actual growing plants. Just ties back to the whole reason I'm in this business. The first place really was the influence of my dad.

Gary Pageau: 16:40

So what were the type of questions you asked some of those small businesses about their marketing needs? Cause I think you know, and the people that I talked to in the imaging space or maybe you know, run a camera store or run a photo lab. You know all those kinds of things. They just know they need marketing help. Right, you know they need that help, but they don't even know where to begin. What were some of the questions you used to prompt them to get them to think about marketing in their own business?

Drew Donaldson: 17:10

I mean, really that's the whole thing. I wasn't really asking them to try to prompt them into a sale. What I really was just curious about is, like, how much money are you spending on marketing on average, and how do you define?

Gary Pageau: 17:22

marketing, right? I mean, that's the big question. Right, is marketing? You know, your social, is it your print and materials you may hand out? Is it TV ads? Is it radio? Is it all of that? But that's advertising. That's not necessarily. You know, marketing is more than just advertising. So how do you define it for them? Or how did they define it for you?

Drew Donaldson: 17:42

I should say I really say it's any activity that supports sales.

Gary Pageau: 17:47

Okay.

Drew Donaldson: 17:48

Right. So, and sales, obviously for every business is gonna be a little different, right, it could be a guy to counter selling you a product. It could be someone calling you on the phone. It could be a self-service website where you add stuff to your cart and check out. It's whatever activities you're doing that support that activity. The principal activity of making revenue is that's what marketing is. So generating referrals is part of marketing, sending out mailers is part of marketing, doing posts on social media is part of marketing and going to speak at a conference is part of marketing.

Drew Donaldson: 18:19

So I don't try to like pigeonhole people into like, well, this is marketing and this is not marketing, because for every different business it changes. I do live streams twice a week, right, that's part of my marketing, right. But for a business that's for a pizza store, doing live streams twice a week or even once a week is probably not gonna be necessarily effective for them, right? Because they're dealing with a local market. Who's gonna watch it? Even if they are, you know, showing three or four people the making pizza? It's like what's the real net result of that? So for them, live streaming would be something fun to do. It wouldn't necessarily be part of marketing. But say, you had a really high tech local firm that did like custom footwear or something and they wanted to try to grow their client base beyond the local market. Live streaming could be perfect for that. So I think that's the thing is that there's no hard and fast rule of like this is marketing, this is not marketing. It changes for every business.

Drew Donaldson: 19:18

Now is one of the things I found is that a lot of people define marketing differently. A lot of people were spending a lot of different money or didn't really have any accounting of money. They had like, well, I spent this much on this and this much on this and this much on this and this didn't work, and then I got a refund for this. They didn't have a marketing budget whatsoever. Then the other biggest thing that came out of that was that that helped. They really were struggling with the technology. Is that they were really good at whatever they did?

Drew Donaldson: 19:45

If the guy was a psychologist, he was a really great psychologist. People would rave about him and say, oh my God, he's helped me so much. By the end of the day, going on and launching a Facebook ad was like your minds will ask him to design a rocket for NASA. It just wasn't his thing and so that kept becoming a trend. So there was this mix of like I'm wasting money on marketing and I'm not seeing any result and I don't have any direction. And then there's the technology is really hard and I can't figure out how to make the technology work to my end. And then there's general just sense of I don't know what I'm doing. I know that I don't know what I'm doing and that's scary, like that's really scary.

Gary Pageau: 20:22

I don't even know what I don't know.

Drew Donaldson: 20:24

Yeah, oh, I heard that probably 15 times Like it's. And so it was that general sense of I'm stuck, I'm not growing, I'm spinning my tires. And then these three very things, these three very specific things I'm wasting a lot of money on marketing, I don't know how to use the technology and I have no idea what I'm doing. And so I really pinpointed those as like, okay, that's the angle, like it's not just another lead gen strategy, it's not just another social campaign, it's not just content marketing. This is the specific pain I need to solve. And so that's what we've spent the last three years designing a solution for. I'm pretty proud of it. I'm pretty proud of how we solved the problem.

Gary Pageau: 21:06

You know, in the photo space like camera stores a lot of them. You know I hear a lot of them debating the merits of like classes and workshops, right, and so I've had conversations with some of these folks. You know I don't make money off the classes very much, but it's great for marketing. What do you think about that? Like, maybe even running classes is a break even, but you're using the raise awareness of your business as hey, we're the experts in photography, for example.

Drew Donaldson: 21:32

Oh, it's fantastic. I would never. I would never poo poo a workshop strategy, because so here's the thing you gotta think about right, anyone right now can wake up and buy a camera on Amazon. What is Amazon not going to provide? They're not going to provide support for that camera. They're not going to provide training on how to use that camera. They're not going to provide someone to help them compare.

Drew Donaldson: 21:51

I mean, we were just talking about me buying this camera. Right? There's not really any camera stores I know of in the area I actually looked. The closest one was like 40 minutes away. I got a one year old. I can't be driving 40 minutes out and leaving my wife wife alone for an hour on the weekend when I'm working all week, so that's not an option. So I had to buy it from Amazon. But I had to just take a stab in the dark that this was the right camera, that I wasn't going to regret this. It was a big investment. So if you have, if you're in a local market and you have people that know where you are and you're offering these services, you're going to greatly stand out to those buyers who don't really know what they're doing either.

Drew Donaldson: 22:30

They're like well, I really want a camera to take good photos of my kid. Do I really need a $2,400 camera or can the $700 that good enough for me? Yeah, and then just buying one of these cameras? I mean, I can't tell you, for the first week I couldn't figure out how to live stream the camera to the computer. I worked in production. I used to run crews of 20 people and I could not for the life of me figure out how to make the thing talk to my computer.

Drew Donaldson: 22:56

Right, Now it turns out it was a wire was bad. The wire they shipped with the thing was bad and I plugged in a new wire and popped.

Gary Pageau: 23:03

everything went on, oh, ok.

Drew Donaldson: 23:04

I mean, wouldn't it have been nice if I could have taken that down to a camera shop and they would have just told me like oh, your wire's bad, that's what's wrong. You have all the settings right, but no, I had to go and watch four hours of YouTube videos trying everything under the sun and still failing you know.

Drew Donaldson: 23:19

Another example outside of the photo space is my daughter is one and a half years old. She is obsessed with trains. She loves. We have a in Richland. There's a train that goes through the town and she is obsessed. We bought her. We put a train up for Christmas. She's obsessed, Just sit there and stare at it, Loves watching it. We bought her another train for after Christmas. She loves it. But there's I don't know anything about trains. I'm not in, I'm not a train guy Like. She doesn't get it from me. Apparently, we're talking to my mom. My dad was really into trains. I didn't even know that. So I have no idea what I'm doing. But there's this little shop called Brian's Trains in Myers town. Shout out to Brian's Trains if he ever sees this. But he runs this little shop and he is the most helpful guy you could ever imagine on trains, right? One of the trains I got doesn't smoke, right? Well, what kid doesn't want a non-smoking train? Like you want to give him a little like a little cough of the thing coming through.

Gary Pageau: 24:10

Yeah, exactly.

Drew Donaldson: 24:11

So I bring it in and he helps me fix it. I have these. She, my daughter, really wants these vintage cars but they don't work with my new train, so he helps me sort it out, so it has the right couplers to connect it. Do you think I could have gotten that service from Amazon or Walmart or Target? Not on your life. The whole benefit of being a small business is providing the service that all the big boys won't provide. None of those businesses are focused on training. The only big pox store that does any kind of training is Home Depot, and they do the little kids workshop Saturday mornings, that's it.

Erin Manning: 24:42

That's your only competition.

Drew Donaldson: 24:44

So if you're a small business owner, if you're running a camera store and you're questioning whether to not to do workshops, the writing's on the wall man, yeah, it's your, that's your competitive edge, you know. Now it's just a matter of getting the word out of that. You're doing them Because once you get, once you get the word out, you will attract people for sure.

Gary Pageau: 25:03

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are doing workshops. I mean it's not a really new thing for them. A lot of them are doing. I know, I know I've actually had somebody on the podcast to my friend shout out to Mark Coleman from Paul's photo, who actually is taking it to the next level and he has African safaris. He fly, he goes around the world and he promotes the hell out of it. It's a great thing for him. But I think the challenge a lot of them have is what is the benefit? Right, they may not be seeing it as a promotional benefit. They look at it as hey, you know, I need 10 people to spend 40 bucks to make this worthwhile and then they need to buy equipment afterwards. Right, I need to have, you know, send Tamron lenses to sponsors so I can show some lenses. So and it doesn't have to be that, I guess, is where I'm going is that there's an intangible benefit of being that resource in the community that's going to have a halo effect and everything else they're doing 100%.

Drew Donaldson: 25:54

I mean I have spent. Out of all the small businesses I've gone to, I've spent more money with Brian's trains in the past four weeks than any other small business, and the reason isn't because I'm now all of a sudden a train addict, it's because I needed stuff fixed. I didn't know how to fix stuff. I needed lights changed on the train that burnt out. I needed, like my daughter wanted this little tanker car Like, but I'm not going to go anywhere else because he's my guy now, right.

Drew Donaldson: 26:20

Yeah, like you know, my wife and I when we first moved in, we had an issue when we were buying the house and we had to get a lawyer and it was the first time we ever had like a lawyer. Like we had gotten like legal advice online. You know you pay like $100 and like a lawyer will chat with you. But like we had a physical guy in an office that we could go to and like talk about legal stuff. And we're on our way home and we just had a good conversation with him and she turns to me and she goes. I'm really glad we have people now.

Erin Manning: 26:47

Yeah.

Drew Donaldson: 26:47

And I say what do you mean? She's like, well, now that we like have a house and we're like settled, like we have all these people, like we have a lawyer and that's just our lawyer, and like we know the guy that runs the pizza shop, that's like our pizza shop. Like he knows, like when we call him, he already knows our order. He's like I just love the fact that, like everywhere we go, we like know somebody that's going to like tailor the service to us and like take care of us. And I was like, yeah, that is a really huge point that until you have it, you don't realize how much you want it, but once you have it, you never trade it. Like I'd never go back to like not using my lawyer and go back to like Googling legal questions or, like you know, go to a different pizza place just because you know it moved in or something. It's like no, well, anthony knows my order, I'm not going to go anywhere else.

Gary Pageau: 27:39

And as long as you use it. I mean, the challenge there is. You know, there's sort of the place the price elasticity issue, right. How much more are you going to spend for Anthony to have be the sport, the local business, local guy who does a great job, versus, you know, chain store pizza, that is, you know Anthony's got to be competitive, price wise, right? I mean, that's sort of the thing is, you're right, he's got to have, you know, better service and hopefully better pizza, but you know you can't be 12 dollars more for a medium than you know the local dominoes.

Drew Donaldson: 28:11

So I I think the company that has actually figured this out and you can just you know this is gonna be a local, a very local market thing, but this is how I would determine what your thresholds are go into an ace hardware and grab a coil of romax, which is electrical wire. It's three strand copper wire. It'll be labeled something like 10 to or 14 to or something like that. Look at the price and then go to Home Depot and see how much they're charging for the same wire. That's your price differential.

Drew Donaldson: 28:39

Because the reason why ace can charge more is because ace has better customer service Hands down than Home Depot does, right? How many times have you been wandering around at Home Depot and no one's there, right? All the time? Right, you never have that with ace, because part of their whole thing is that someone greets you at the door. Every single time I walk into my local ace, someone goes hey, how you doing? How can I help immediately, right? So I am willing to pay that premium 10 times over. If I have a question, I'm going to ace, right?

Erin Manning: 29:07

if.

Drew Donaldson: 29:07

I need something specific and I don't need to ask questions. I'm gonna go to Home Depot, right, because it's cheaper, right, but if I have any, if there's any Question in my head, am I doing this the right way? Is there a better way to? Is there better tools or better? Whatever it ace has my loyalty, even at the higher price point. So I would look at that as the kind of standard, because they're pricing and Home Depot's pricing.

Gary Pageau: 29:29

It runs very parallel in a lot of these markets, always gonna be, you know, six percent higher or whatnot, and I would say that's where your safe spot is a lot of times you know people in niche businesses like photography or hardware or pizza or whatever right Kind of do product first and then try and market around it. Do you talk to people about how marketing can drive your product selection?

Drew Donaldson: 29:54

Yeah, I would. I would definitely inverse it. I mean, I think, the whole, the whole benefit of running a camera store or Any kind of business where you're having a consultative sale. You're asking the person you know, what are you gonna do with this camera? Oh, you're a food photographer Well, this is the right camera for you. Oh, you're just taking photos of your pets in the backyard Well, this is a better camera for you.

Drew Donaldson: 30:15

That consultative approach is what people want. So I would, instead of going and saying, hey, I have the new cannon, where everybody else is just gonna roll their eyes and goes like, yeah, so does everybody. Right, it's not exclusive, right, you're not the only shop in town to have it. It's not like, oh, shipman arrived today and another one might not arrive for six months, right, not the world we live in, any. So the consultative approach, the fact that you're gonna help them, you're gonna help them get set up, select the right camera Once the can, once you have the camera in your hands, set it up to make the best use of it, that's really what I would spend my marketing.

Drew Donaldson: 30:50

And then I think the other thing is with, especially with photo businesses is you have to go niche because Photography as a hobby has so many these subneashes and like that's where I would really attack. I think, like you look at like a King Arthur, flower Baking is similar to photography in that there's there's the general niche, but then there's these very specific subneashes, and King Arthur does it the same way. They run workshops on these subneashes. So if you want to learn how to make Indian breads, they have a class for that and they have all the ingredients. They're gonna sell you all the ingredients, but it's very, very niche and you're like, well, who would go see that? Enough people for them to run a class every month.

Gary Pageau: 31:25

There's enough people, so that's where I would.

Drew Donaldson: 31:28

I would go is I would say okay, what are the niches that you, as the business owner, really passion? Are you an Anzal Adams landscape guy like me? If you're, if you're really Into food and product, well, let's design workshops around that. Let's really target that sub niche, the people that are really interested in that, and become the source Specifically for that group, right, and then you can build it out from that. Oh, you know, I also want to get into pet portraiture.

Gary Pageau: 31:50

Okay, that's like, with film photography coming back, that's become a thing where you know, a whole new right, new class of customers are discovering film photography, which you know, for some of us who live to the analog to digital transition are looking at them kind of scratching their heads, going why no, digital wasn't an improvement over film, but now it's growing. I mean it's crazy. People are flocking to film because they want that sort of Tacto experience and you know that sort of thing. It's just like your king flower thing. It's not the way it used to be, but there's enough people doing it. Where film photography is a thing, I Still have my Canon a1.

Drew Donaldson: 32:27

It's upstairs, I haven't used in a while but it's still there, it's clean, it can run. I can drop a roll of film in tomorrow and start shooting. Like there are still people out there that that like Vintage stuff. My wife just bought me two jazz albums on vinyl for Christmas. Right, I like listening to jazz on the vine, I just prefer it, right, and you could say, oh, that's very snobby or whatever. I don't care like listen.

Gary Pageau: 32:50

Preferences, right. I mean, that's sort of like in this world. You know you can have preferences, you can prefer something and it's not a knock on the other thing, right?

Drew Donaldson: 33:00

Oh, hundred percent and, like you know, I like the. We were listening to the Footloose soundtrack. We have that. She has that on vinyl too. We put that on and we're listening to it. We're like Sounds terrible, awful. We put on the same album on like the digital, and it sounds crystal clear, high fidelity, beautiful. We're like yeah, it's just some things right. Classical music and jazz sound great on vinyl. I don't want to buy Albums online that are digital. Jet just sounds cold and dead. It sounds so much more rich and earthy. So there's people like that that have those hardcore preferences that you can absolutely tap into and it might not be a lot of people.

Gary Pageau: 33:35

Kenny Loggins does not benefit from the analog process. Is what you're saying?

Drew Donaldson: 33:40

Yes, I would say as good as Kenny Loggins is Not. No, you could buy the first pressing of a Footloose. That would still be really rough on the ears.

Gary Pageau: 33:54

Tell me more about your live streams. Are you streaming any jazz, or is it just the footloose soundtrack? And how people get information for learning more about grow house.

Drew Donaldson: 34:07

So you can visit us online grow house org. That's where you can find more information about our, our agency and the services we provide. When, in terms of the live streams, I do them Tuesday, Thursday I have to check my schedule. It's 2 pm Eastern and really there's there. I'm doing two things.

Drew Donaldson: 34:25

Tuesdays, I'm actually doing a behind-the-scenes breakdown on exactly how I built the agency, how I'm growing it like. Really, it's the behind-the-scenes that I always wanted when I was coming up, and so if you're interested in how to grow whether it's a creative service agency or a marketing agency or any type of agency where you're providing a service to people I would definitely check that out. On Tuesdays and then Thursdays, I do interviews similar to this, where I bring on former clients that are in our Hall of Fame, have had like amazing results and great stories to share, as well as experts in the field. So you can find me on LinkedIn, facebook, twitch, all the, all the usual suspects for that. Twitter let's grow out everywhere. So I'll give you, though, all the tags and everything so you can put them in the show notes. But, yeah, I look forward to seeing more of your listeners over there well.

Gary Pageau: 35:07

Thanks, Drew. Is great to talk to you and Look forward to connecting with you on one of your lives soon.

Drew Donaldson: 35:14

Yeah, ,Gary would love to have you on.

Erin Manning: 35:17

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www. The dead pixels society com.