Your Team Is Holding You Back, But Not In The Way You Think, with Brandon Pflieger

What's really holding your business back from reaching its full potential? The answer might surprise you. In this eye-opening conversation with Brandon Pflieger of Capital Growth Partners, we uncover the often-overlooked foundations of business growth and the uncomfortable truth that many entrepreneurs need to hear.

Pflieger brings a refreshing perspective shaped by his diverse background spanning retail, marketing, fitness entrepreneurship, and business consulting. His "Turnaround Blueprint" cuts through the noise to focus on what truly matters: people, systems, offers, and strategic marketing.

The most startling revelation? In 70-80% of struggling businesses, the owner themselves is the primary obstacle to growth. Through compelling real-world examples, Pflieger illustrates how well-intentioned micromanagement suffocates potential and how stepping back can paradoxically accelerate success. "You're going to care about your business more than everyone else," he acknowledges, before offering practical strategies for building team investment through customized incentive structures.

For businesses wrestling with pricing pressures, Pflieger delivers invaluable insights on maintaining margins without joining the "race to the bottom." His approach to crafting compelling offers centers on customer outcomes rather than overwhelming options—"Nobody cares how they're going to lose 30 pounds. They care THAT they lose 30 pounds."

Digital presence gets equal attention, with Pflieger dismantling common misconceptions about websites and marketing budgets. His rule of thumb?

A Case Study In Corporate Fear

"A Case Study in Corporate Fear" deconstructs how fear transforms successful...

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Brandon Flieger
• 5:10 The Turnaround Blueprint
• 9:40 People Problems: Often The Owner
• 12:18 [Ad] A Case Study In Corporate Fear
• 13:06 (Cont.) People Problems: Often The Owner
• 17:09 Creating Value Beyond Price
• 23:19 Marketing That Matters
• 28:50 Smart Marketing Budgets For Growth

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 Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:17

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Brandon Pflieger, who's with Capital Growth Partners, and Brandon's coming to us from Alexandria, Virginia, and he's going to talk to us today about growth management and how to run your business more effectively. Hi Brandon, how are you today?

Brandon Pflieger: 0:38

I'm good, Gary. Thanks for having me on.

Gary Pageau: 0:40

Well, I think you're the first kickboxing coach I've ever had on the show. Can you tell me about your journey into business? To start, please.

Brandon Pflieger: 0:50

COVID hit. I got a little bit rundown in the retail space, as I'm sure people can imagine. So I actually went into the marketing world and ran a marketing firm for a couple years and then I just didn't love that. I kept waking up Gary and just going man, I'm not very happy. And so I transitioned back into fitness. We actually got into the franchise space, so we've got a couple kickboxing studios. As you pointed out, I do teach classes every once in a while so I enjoy a little bit of the workout myself. And now we've got Capital Growth Partners, which is my consulting firm. But I've done a little bit of everything.

Gary Pageau: 1:33

So what drew you to fitness and that sort of thing? Were you always? That way, or was it sort of a business opportunity? You see the business side of it. Were you trying to marry your passion with a business? Is that where that came from?

Brandon Pflieger: 1:47

Yeah, certainly later in life I mean, generally speaking, when I first got into the fitness industry, I just get a little deeper my dad passed away when I was about 18. And that kind of pushed me into fitness. You know, there was a lot of heart problems, there was a lot of, you know, not working out a lot of fast food in my house and I just wanted to do something a little differently. So I think initially it was out of fear. Frankly I didn't want that to happen to me, and so I got into fitness, enjoyed it, and then when I got out of it, you know, you just start to realize, like I was in political marketing for a while, I was in corporate marketing and I just wasn't happy and I knew that if I married, you know, my fitness passion with my business passion, which I already had some pretty good insight into.

Gary Pageau: 2:32

I could make some money and have fun doing it. So that's ultimately where I went. So now you do Capital Growth Partners, which is consulting for business. Consulting when you're talking to someone who says you know, brandon, I've got issues right, my business isn't growing the way I want it to. Can you come in and take a look? What's the first thing you look at?

Brandon Pflieger: 2:49

Yeah. So we have what's called our turnaround blueprint and the first thing that we do is we initially come in, we look at your people. Almost every situation comes back to the team members that you have surrounding you. So whether you're one or two employees or whether you're 50, you got to make sure that the people on your team one they're in the right seats and are they performing for you.

Brandon Pflieger: 3:10

A lot of times, I think, small business owners if you're an empathetic person and you get really involved with your team and their lives which is probably a good leadership trait to have we hold on to people sometimes that just aren't doing the things that we need them to do for us, and so we immediately look at people and then we move into your systems and processes, your offer. Do people like your product? That's the thing that I run into a lot is. I find that business owners, or the founder, right. They get really excited about their product and they're not listening to what the actual market wants, and so they're kind of ignoring everybody else because they think whatever their shiny product is is great.

Brandon Pflieger: 3:46

And then, ultimately, marketing. We were talking a little bit about marketing earlier, but I did run a marketing firm for a couple of years, and I'm sure you see this. But people don't know what they're doing on digital marketing. And that's not to say that there's anything wrong with that, but you've got to understand digital marketing. I've actually run into plenty of business owners that go. I don't need that. I've got to understand digital marketing. I've actually run into plenty of business owners that go. I don't need that. I've got word of mouth, I've got referrals, which are all great things, but if you're not on social nowadays and using meta for lead generation, you're going to have a hard time.

Gary Pageau: 4:14

Right. So let's start with the people thing. You know, obviously you've probably talked to different types of business that require different types of people. How different types of business that require different types of people. How long does it take you to assess a staff? Let's say, for example, let's use a typical photo retail, you know, like a one hour lab, photo lab, print shop kind of thing. Maybe you have six to eight employees. You've got a very active owner.

Gary Pageau: 4:36

Usually, you know, usually they're not usually, and you know, a lot of times they hire from their customer base, right, they have a customer who comes in and they are, you know, excited about photography and they maybe they're a weekend photographer, maybe they're a wedding photographer and they want to be in the output side, because then they're always involved in the industry. They'd rather be, you know, working their day job at a photo lab rather than at Starbucks and shooting weddings on the weekend, right, you know. But maybe that person isn't great at production, right, or something like that, because even though it's the industry, it's not the same thing. So what are some of the things you look at when you go into a business and you're reaching someone that size who maybe is a kind of a niche business?

Brandon Pflieger: 5:16

Yeah, I mean at that size I think we can get through things in usually a week, week and a half. It definitely depends on how involved that owner is. But if they are very involved, gary, you get to see how they interact with their staff pretty quickly, right? A big thing that I like to look at is I like to look at body language. So I try to jump into those weekly meetings that hopefully you're having with your staff right, where you're kind of setting expectations. That's another problem if you're not right, but we can get to that later. But you know, I like to look at the interactions that the owner has with their staff. Is the staff kind of clammed up? Are they not talking a lot or are they open and is there a lot of ideas flowing Right?

Brandon Pflieger: 5:54

I think tone matters a lot. I used to tell all my clients this, but it's not always what you say, it's how you say it Right. People will forgive you for giving them bad news and having hard conversations If you say in a way that makes the person across from you feel respected. And I find that is usually not the case, and not always, but usually when you find particularly a business that's failing, there's a culture issue somewhere, and a lot of times and I'm not faulting the business owner for this, because I've made the same mistake too it's all your money on the line.

Brandon Pflieger: 6:29

You're stressed, maybe you're breaking even or you're not making money. Worst case you're losing money, and so I think that's a very stressful situation and sometimes we project that onto our staff, and I think the thing I have to remind business owners all the time is that you are going to care about your business more than everyone else, and that's not a bad thing. That makes sense, and so we initially kind of look at the interactions there. I do have one-offs a lot of times with the staff too, just to get the owner away from them and see what's really going on. Particularly, I find the most talkative folks are usually the second in command right In larger companies, usually like a COO, and smaller operations. Maybe it's your assistant manager or your operations manager. They'll tell you what's wrong usually with the business and if they're pretty sharp, a lot of times they'll tell you some really good stuff that you can then go in and out with the owner.

Gary Pageau: 7:15

So have you come across a place where the owner's the problem?

Brandon Pflieger: 7:19

A hundred percent, and I smile because I would say usually 70 to 80% of the time it's actually the owner getting in their own way. You know, a good story is that you know, we've I was consulting a small franchisee and actually in the network of franchisees that I run, rockbox Fitness, and he was so involved in the business I mean we're talking 40, 50 hours but then he had a general manager, an assistant manager. He had a ton of great trainers but he was smothering them. He was there all the time. He had empowered this general manager and this assistant manager who, by the way, he's paying a salary to to make decisions and create connections with members and create connections with other staff. But every time they piped up he would correct them or he would say you know, I would actually do it this way instead.

Gary Pageau: 8:08

Now, would he do that in public or private?

Brandon Pflieger: 8:11

Both.

Gary Pageau: 8:12

You know a lot of the private, the public thing's a problem.

Brandon Pflieger: 8:15

Yeah, and a lot of times it would happen in these team meetings, right? Or even I mean, sometimes it would happen in front of members and so kind of the worst case scenario, right in front of your customers. And so what really what we did with him is I gave him a rule. I said, look, I mean it's not going to hurt you because you're already paying these people. You can only be in the business 20 hours a week. And he was in the business probably 50 to 60 hours a week.

Brandon Pflieger: 8:50

And ultimately he told me, when we first connected and we kind of went through outcomes, what he wanted from us. He wanted to be in the business 20, 15 hours a week because he wanted to go do other stuff. And so a lot of times it's just it's giving your team enough rope to see how they perform and letting them make decisions maybe that you wouldn't make and frankly, seeing how they go, it's not always. You know, there's a couple different ways to attack a problem and I think a lot of times as a entrepreneur, we think that we're the only one that has the answers, right, but you've hired somebody, you are paying them you know, a healthy salary, hopefully to make decisions on your behalf and to build relationships, and you got to let them do that. You got to get out of the way.

Gary Pageau: 9:23

You know, one of the things I think is kind of a some people would push back on that concept is you earlier said you're going to care about the business the most, but on the other hand, you also want your other people to care about that. Now, you know, I think that goes hand in hand with having your team involved in all the metrics right, profit and loss and all those other things, because I think that helps get the buy-in. What do you think?

Brandon Pflieger: 9:50

A hundred percent. I think if you don't have a good incentive plan for your team members, it's a lot more challenging. So, to your point. I like to see what motivates people. I have a general manager, for example, that runs one of my studios, that he doesn't necessarily get motivated by money. He gets motivated by the time spent with me. So I actually will spend a lot of time with him. I'll take him out to lunch, we'll do a nice dinner when we have a really successful month, and that's how I motivate him. Now, other people are motivated by money, right? So I think you need to make sure that there's an incentive plan and it 100% should be based on, you know, the success of your business. I've seen some pretty funky incentive plans out there, but you know, for example, if you know your business makes X this month, then you're going to give Y to that general manager.

Brandon Pflieger: 10:39

And everybody kind of shares in the success right. So that's another way to get past that initial ah. They just don't care as much as I do, because I think you know eventually and usually to be clear, this probably is later on in business what we kind of run into and what I see usually is that startup that first six to 12 months. I'm a big believer personally and actually being very hands on in your business, I think that if you're leaving it to somebody else and hoping it goes well, you're in for a rude awakening. So I'm a big believer of having a lot of control in that first to six to 12 months. But then once you hit that, that revenue mark and you start to really progress and move forward in your business and hopefully you're trying to expand it.

Gary Pageau: 11:25

You got to let people do their jobs and you got to step away a little bit. So let's talk a little bit about the offer, right? I mean because I imagine in the fitness world there's all kinds of different metrics you can use, right, you can have, you know, obese people who just want to get more fit. You may have athletes who are training for competition. You may have people who are, you know, recovering from an injury, who are trying to rehabilitate. You know there's all kinds of different motivation. Now, in the photography industry, there's also a variety of offers. Right, in terms of it may be, you know, you're trying to help people express themselves, decorate their home, or something like that. How do you crystallize a message like that? Because I know in the photography industry there's almost too many choices. It's too many things to pick, and you know what is your insight on when you have a vast array of offers like that. How do you crystallize that offering?

Brandon Pflieger: 12:57

I think the first step in, Gary, and what I like to look at with offers cause I see what you were just talking about all the time I've got hey, this is my binder full of all these different things that you can purchase from me, right or in the fitness world it's a hey, you can buy this one, this one, this one, this one or this one. Which one do you want to do? And it's a lot of decision-making that person then has to go make. So my recommendation is to first figure out what is the outcome that the person sitting across the desk or across the Zoom call wants from you. If they need to, we'll put it back to fitness, because if there's somebody in front of me that needs to lose 60 pounds over the next three months because they've got a wedding coming up, and I tell them, hey, you can do that for one time a week, I'm lying to them, right, I'm not giving them the best offer. So for someone like that, I maybe give them one offer, maybe two, right, they're not going to get the whole gambit of choices. They're going to get the choices that are ultimately going to help them succeed and get the outcome that they need. So I think that's a strong way to, from a sales perspective, get your message in front of somebody and keep it simple, because the simpler, in my experience, the better. If you've got too many options, you get the old hey, you know? Look, I need to think about this, I need to look at all of this and get back to you, whereas if you say, hey, it's, it's option A or B, Gary, which one do you want to go with? It's a much easier conversation and then you know. I think the offer has to be cohesive to the company too.

Brandon Pflieger: 14:21

I think a good story I have is when my marketing days, I was pitching NASCAR, and a couple of days before I pitched NASCAR, I asked one of my partners hey, can you just walk through this pitch with me? It was our first big client that we were hopefully going to land and I was pitching the same old stuff we would pitch to two, three $4 million revenue companies. And my partner just said Brandon, I think that they're going to laugh you out of the room. You got to come up with some other offerings that are going to hit what they need from you. They don't need a small $2 million marketing budget. They need a $50 million marketing budget. So sometimes you have to make sure that the offer you put in front of somebody actually resonates with their business too, and people sometimes associate value with price. I think a lot of times, because we want that revenue, we get in kind of a race to the bottom.

Gary Pageau: 15:13

Oh, exactly.

Brandon Pflieger: 15:14

And you have to price yourself properly.

Gary Pageau: 15:15

Yeah, well, I know you're exactly right, because that is one of the challenges in the photography industry, specifically because there are people who are offering free prints, there's people offering cheap prints and, to be honest, there used to be a time back in the film days where, you know, because of the way the process technology worked, there was a discernible difference between the cheap, you know 10 cent prints and the really nice 49 cent prints. Right, there were there. You could see the quality differential. I think today, with digital, with printing, there's less differential between the quality. Ascribing that value is a challenge almost to every business to, like you said, everyone wants to change revenue and they think, well, if I just drop my price 10 cents, I'm gonna get X more. So what are some of the ways people can evaluate when that makes sense?

Brandon Pflieger: 16:04

Yeah, I think the first thing and this is something we recommend to any business, no matter what business we're working with, Gary is you've got to know your margins, and that means you've got to know your P&Ls and you've got to know all that other fancy stuff that I find sometimes business owners don't pay too much attention to. They look at their bank account. Is money coming in? Is more money coming in than is going out? I'm in good shape, but you really want to know the margins on your business. So you know, I imagine in like a print shop, for example, there's different margins on different types of printing, Right?

Gary Pageau: 16:34

And different paper right, I mean different paper Right.

Brandon Pflieger: 16:36

A hundred percent. You know we see it a lot when I used to do some direct mail campaigns when I was in the traditional marketing world and we did more of that. And you know, sometimes what we would see is, hey, we can drop our price here, but we're going to cut into our margin and we're going to break even on this deal. And does that make sense? Now, sometimes it might right, sometimes it might get you in with that client and you do a great service. They really enjoy what you provide to them and they put in a deal later that's 10x that right. And then we can talk about why that might make sense.

Brandon Pflieger: 17:07

But I think a lot of times, to use the phrase I just used, we're in a race to the bottom, we're trying to get the lowest price to that customer possible. And then you look back a month later when you're looking at how you perform that month and you go, wow, I made $3 on that whole situation. Or I made a couple hundred bucks, right. And if I just stuck to my guns and maybe focused more on my sales process and talked a little bit more about the quality of going with me versus, you know, sally Sue's print shop over there. Actually, they would have still bought from you and you would have made three X the amount of money, right? So it's not the first place I like to go. I like to talk about you know what is our value, what is our sales process, and how can we provide that value to the client without dropping our price?

Gary Pageau: 17:51

One of the challenges I think you know people retail photo has is because a lot of it is online right. There's online ordering where even the you know the independents have websites so they may be challenged to convey that quality and differential Right. So it's kind of eke into the marketing part of the conversation and talk about what are some things you can do to kind of convey that when you, when your product may be difficult to discern, especially in an online environment discern, especially in an online environment.

Brandon Pflieger: 18:24

Sure, I think, first and foremost, you want to look at your SEO. You want to make sure that people can find you, and your offerings are very simple. So I like to go back to what we talked about earlier. From a price sheet standpoint. You want to make sure that people don't have to read too much or go too far into your website to figure out what you're all about.

Brandon Pflieger: 18:40

I think there are some businesses that want to keep the price hidden until they have an in-person conversation, maybe like me and you are right now and then there are some businesses that make sense to just put it all out there and turn, and so I think the biggest recommendation we have and I usually I have partners that help with websites when I see a website that's just struggling a little bit you gotta have a good website.

Brandon Pflieger: 19:03

You've got to make sure that you know your offerings are front and center, that within, I would say, less than 30 seconds, people know what you do, what's your best at and how you can help their business grow. So I like to go back to if if the front page of your website doesn't help people understand what it is that you do and what outcome you can provide for them. You've already lost because people's unfortunately people's attention spans have gone way down, I think, over the last couple of years, with all the social media that's going on and gosh. I think you used to see 2000 ads a day. Now you probably see 10 to 20. I don't even know what the stats are now, but you got to make sure your offering is really simple and easy to understand on your website.

Gary Pageau: 19:46

So how would somebody go through the process Would they look for? You know keyword searches or you know that sort of thing Because you know. I think you know what you run into, especially when you have an independent who is passionate about their business. Right, let's use fitness as an example. You know you're passionate about, you know kickboxing or whatever. But what people are coming to you for may be something else, but you're really passionate about that piece, right? And in photography might be, hey, I'm helping people preserve their family memories and I want to share their stuff, but that may not be actually why people are coming to you for that. So how does an independent business owner kind of struggle with that?

Brandon Pflieger: 20:28

So I would recommend going towards video and optimizing your website for sharing experiences. You know I loved what you just said, gary, about you know like preserving the family memories and with us. You know I always joke about nobody really cares what the workout is and my staff always looks at me and goes what? And nobody cares how they're going to lose the 30 pounds. They're going to care that they lose the 30 pounds, so they don't care if you throw them on a bike or if you have them punch this bag. We just happen to have kickboxing at our gym, but they really came in today not caring about your fancy equipment, not caring about what the way that they're going to lose weight is. They care that how long is it going to take me and when am I going to see results? So I think the same would translate to this business as well is that you got to make sure you're not getting into the weeds about. You know the equipment and how shiny you know the printers are that you use. You got to really focus on what is the outcome for the customer and then how can I convey that? I've done that for other people, so I like to use video.

Brandon Pflieger: 21:29

I see a ton of websites that don't have any form of video on them at all, and I think that's a huge mistake. People consume information through video. Now, I was just reading a stat the other day that folks are starting to in our podcast world. They're starting to watch more podcasts on YouTube and consume more video, and it's not huge yet, but I imagine it'll still continue to move up, particularly as the big showcases and they cancel their shows and then they start going on podcasts. People are going to want to watch them still, right, so video is really a non-starter. It's the thing that I recommend every one of our clients to use.

Gary Pageau: 22:06

You know, you always hear that and the challenge I run into or with that and again, I'm I do video myself, so I'm not you know, it's just the challenge of I think there's you know there's an ROI time issue with that right Everyone says oh yeah just do a quickie TikTok, right. But if it's not well done, what is the point right?

Brandon Pflieger: 22:25

Yep, yeah, I struggle with that too, gary, because I think that sometimes I've had a client before that I've recommended video to and we were on a pretty specific contract. So I talked to them once a month and when I came back and talked to them next month they had gone off and spent three to $5,000 on a big video shoot and they had people coming out and you know that was my mistake. I said you know, hey, look, if you want to go through with it, go through with it. You know these people sound talented, but I'm really looking for something simple, for something that you guys can probably put together on your own. There's a lot of AI, not to use that buzzword, but there is a lot of AI out there that will help you edit your videos and kind of find the strongest points in the video that you record and then pump out something pretty impressive. So to your point.

Brandon Pflieger: 23:15

I think you know, not necessarily filming a TikTok, but something short, something sweet For me and my business. Personally, I'd like to be very transparent about how we we find our clients is. I do a lot of video, but it's a lot of me sitting right here and talking about, you know, the customers that I work with and how I can help people. Um, I try not to, you know, make it fancy and have all the background, and you know I'm not standing next to a Ferrari telling people I'm going to get you one, you know. So it's all about keeping it simple, I think, and you can keep your costs down and do that pretty quickly in most cases.

Gary Pageau: 23:48

Because I think you know, in today's AI world, right to just start heaping on the buzzwords right, Just like let's go buzzword crazy. But I really do think, though, the way people are going to be succeeding is with the authenticity right.

Brandon Pflieger: 24:02

I mean, yeah, the AI generated stuff is fun, but it's eye candy. It's not really substantial. Yep, I definitely agree with you and I use AI quite a bit for my businesses, but I always go over what that thing spits out. I can tell by the way. I follow a lot of people on LinkedIn and a lot of other. You know influencers and you know the just based on what I do. I follow a lot of people on LinkedIn and a lot of other. You know influencers and you know just based on what I do.

Brandon Pflieger: 24:24

I have to kind of build a brand around myself and I can tell my AI, who kind of knows me pretty well at this point. I use it a lot. So they know my businesses, they know what it is that I do. They even know my voice a little bit. But you can still see the difference between a post that my AI would put on LinkedIn and the one that I would put on Right and so, for example, I always recommend hey, ai is a great way to cut down time, it's going to give you a nice base, and then you need to go in there and make it your own and give it your own voice, because it's not that good yet. Maybe it will be one day, I don't know. They're saying two, three years and they'll all take over, but I've heard that before. So it's still a human business at this point and you got to make sure you're doing your own thing as thought leaders are suddenly positing these four or five paragraph dumps on.

Gary Pageau: 25:14

you know some sort of topic and you can just tell it's not their voice.

Brandon Pflieger: 25:30

No, yeah, and you also usually will see, my favorite is when you find somebody doing that and then you end up catching a video of them, maybe talking somewhere, and they can't pump out any of that information that they put on LinkedIn and they're super camera shy and they're not comfortable on a podcast, right, so you can kind of tell when someone's leaning into the AI, and I think that's again I really like to. You know, put videos out. I like to go to conferences and talk to clients, because that's how you know that you're getting into bed with somebody that's not just going to take what you're telling them but through chat, gpt, and then give you that as you're, you know, offering, you know, somebody that is actually knows what they're doing and it's going to help your business grow, right.

Gary Pageau: 26:14

Yeah, because in the photography industry there's actually been kind of a backlash against the AI in a way, because there's this whole move back towards film, right Film is now super popular because it's you know you can screw it up, it's got imperfections, it's got a grain, it has a look and people can always tell.

Gary Pageau: 26:36

Even if it's being presented digitally on a screen, you can pretty much say, yeah, that was shot with film, because you could. It just looks different. In fact, there's a lot of digital technology now to make stuff look like film, right, to kind of copy that look. So I think that is interesting. That's sort of the authenticity piece I think is important. So if you were to sum up what I'm kind of getting through the three points you talked to, you know the people, the offer and the marketing is really understand your core as a business owner. You know and how to make all those things go through.

Brandon Pflieger: 27:11

Yeah, what we like to look at. And again, you've got to make sure. Before marketing anything, I always like to go backwards and really make sure we've checked all those boxes right. So, do you have the right people? Do you have systems in place for those people to be successful? That's a big one.

Brandon Pflieger: 27:25

You know, a lot of times I'll find that business owners do not have sales processes. They've got all this stuff in their head and they're just like all right team, go get it done. And then they get frustrated when it's not done how they thought it would be. So, have you put systems and processes in place? And then, yeah, to the point we just talked about, is the offer something that's exciting to customers to either purchase it, whether it's a service offer, or if it's a brick and mortar specific like shoes or pizzas right, does it taste good? So you've got to make sure that all those things are checked off before. And this is where I come in and I say, hey, your marketing budget's too low.

Brandon Pflieger: 28:03

Before you start spending money against marketing, we always make sure all that's taken care of. But, yeah, the biggest thing I see, gary too, is that you've got these companies particularly smaller companies, I would say in the like zero to two million range of revenue and they just don't have the backing of a nice big marketing budget. And to be clear, you know I'm not asking people, I'll just use fitness as an example. I'll have people that are spending $200 a month on marketing and they can't understand why their business isn't growing. And you've got to spend more. In our space you're talking, you know, probably quadruple to, maybe even more than that $2,000 to $3,000 a month for a small boutique fitness operation, and then it scales from there. I used to advise larger companies that we worked with with NASCAR and some other company names that we worked with is that you really should be spending about 5% to 10% of your total revenue on marketing if you're in a growth phase.

Brandon Pflieger: 29:00

If you're not growing and you just want to kind of hang where you are and you're making good money and you're cool with that, great you know, don't spend the money. But if you want to grow, you got to have a healthy budget to go behind.

Gary Pageau: 29:08

Right, that's one of the things I kind of hear from people is like they don't know you know what, because sometimes they confuse marketing with advertising. Right, and advertising is part of marketing. It's not the whole thing, right, and so you know, you always hear three to four percent should be advertising. But you're saying on top of that there should be marketing activities, whether it's promotions, whether it's, you know, buy one, get one free, whether it's, you know, pr or social or TikTok or whatever.

Brandon Pflieger: 29:37

Or social or TikTok or whatever. Yeah, the advertising and that probably depends on your industry, but I'll use some companies that we've worked with on, like the home services front and like the brick and mortar is that your advertising dollars that are going into meta should probably be about 60 to 70% of your entire marketing budget, because you're getting a lot of leads and in this space right now that's where the most leads are coming from. So you know if you're going to spend money. Let's say your budget in total is $10,000 to keep the money simple, that'd be a pretty big fitness studio, by the way, but let's say the budget's $10,000 to keep the numbers simple. You should probably be spending around $6,000 or $7,000 of that on your advertising, your digital advertising footprint, and then you've got some leftover there for, um, yeah, the, the events, or maybe sponsoring the local school, so that every time moms are driving through the kiss and ride, they see your name and they see your giant sign there.

Brandon Pflieger: 30:32

Um, there's also a real um neglect, I think, of traditional marketing. Um, and people have been moving away from that for a while, and I really have had a lot of success utilizing direct mail in almost all of my businesses, and so I think that's something to look at too. It's not always cheap and I think sometimes that we're all trying to save a penny or a nickel there, but you've got to. Especially when you're first opening something that's a brick and mortar, you've got to have some direct mail behind it. So that's usually how I look at it. And then, on top of that, you know, there's your, there's your website and making sure that your SEO is sound. There's PPC campaigns, which is pay per click for Google, which is definitely important. You want people, if they type in boxing, to find your boxing studio. If you're running a photography business, you want people to be able to find you. So having some PPC behind that, I think, is important too.

Gary Pageau: 31:25

So where can people go for more information to learn about Capital Growth Partners and the things you guys do?

Brandon Pflieger: 31:30

Yeah, absolutely Gary. So we have a website set up. It's growsmartercgpcom. So again, it's growsmartercgpcom and all they need to do we've got I think we've got a pretty good website. Better Cause I just talked a lot about it. You know, you'll just go through, you'll kick on, learn more and it'll immediately send me a little form fill and I'll get in contact with you. We like to do a 30 minute discovery call. There's no charge for that. It'll learn a little bit about your business and see if we can help. And if we can, we'll help. If we can't, we'll tell you. We're pretty transparent.

Gary Pageau: 32:06

So that's where to find us Awesome Brandon. Well, listen, it's great talking to you. I learned a few things and I appreciate your time and look forward to catching up with you again soon.

Brandon Pflieger: 32:11

Likewise Thanks, Gary.

Erin Manning: 32:13

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