Tyler Kelley: 09:53
It was pretty painful. So if I think about 2008, I was still in my 20s. Yeah, I’m still in my 20s. And the way I got there was my, you know, I bought my first house in 2004. And as a result made friends with the loan officer.
And he was like, you know, we’re making a killing in this business right now. You should do this. At the time, I was doing website development and deejaying part-time, and I was like a remote worker. So like for me, it just didn’t work. Now I love being remote, but back then, it was brutal not being able to see people all day.
So I was like, cool, I’m going to get to the office, I’m going to do this. And I made a really good killing as an originator, made some friends with some people there, and just the natural entrepreneur in me was like, I can’t work for anybody. I’m always thinking about, I can turn this into something. And so that’s what we did, the three of us. We left, we started our own thing, and about a year later, everything crashed, including my wife and I had lots of real estate investments and we just got over it.
I described this period in my life as it wasn’t instant, and we didn’t know what to do to stop the bleeding. And so it was a slow bleed over about two and a half years, like with the property and everything. And so when COVID hit, I knew exactly what to do. I knew exactly how to protect myself and our assets. And so.
John Corcoran: 11:16
Such as.
Tyler Kelley: 11:16
Different lesson. Who knows, right.
John Corcoran: 11:18
There’s so many. I saw so many people that react very differently when COVID happened. And many of them, it was because of what they had experienced with the mortgage meltdown. I was an attorney practicing law in 2007 for a real estate firm, and a lot of the clients owned a lot of big portfolios, and they were just calling us up. And what do I do?
I’ve got ten properties that are all underwater. I can barely keep up with the mortgage payments. The mortgage payments are going up because they were adjustable rate mortgages. And it was just as you said, it was a slow burn for many of them trying to figure out what to do. Many of them actually; the saddest part was that they felt like the mortgage company should help them because they were loyal to the mortgage companies.
They’re like, I’ve you know, I didn’t put food on the table. We stopped going out to eat. My kids don’t have new shoes. And I paid my mortgage all this time. And the truth was that the mortgage companies didn’t value that at all. They felt like that showed an ability to pay. And so they weren’t given help. And they were, you know, a lot of them like, went under because of that for sure.
Tyler Kelley: 12:18
For sure. Just thinking about it now, the whole game back then, I don’t know if it’s the same now, but it was 100% commission. Right. So, if you wanted to make money as an originator, you had to go out there and pound the pavement. And that’s what we do as entrepreneurs. So like just that experience in and of itself, which 100% commission I think is pretty rare now. But that experience really taught me how to really get out there and earn, if you will.
John Corcoran: 12:47
So, that kind of slowly unwinds, I guess. So what were those years afterwards like 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, did you go back to what point did you transition into the new world of doing marketing and building websites and things like that? Or was it basically like going back to something you’d done before?
Tyler Kelley: 13:10
Yeah. And I had always liked that as my differentiator as, as an owner in the brokerage, I could bring the marketing perspective and, and chops. Right. So I had always brought that with me and I couldn’t return to it right away because no one was hiring at that time either. Right.
So yeah, I think at one point, for at least six months, I was bartending, right, just to try to make ends meet. Fortunately, my wife has. She always had a stable job, and later when we launched SLAM!, it was a big moment for our family when she was able to stay home with the kids, you know, and not have to work. That was a big thing. But for the first ten years of our marriage, like it was all her for the most part, while I was trying different things. Right? Yeah. But yeah, it was. I forgot your question, but.
John Corcoran: 13:58
Yeah, I think it was just about how you transitioned from the failing mortgage brokerage and your real estate investments into what eventually becomes SLAM!, what you do during that period, like how you get back on your feet after you have this major setback. Yeah. And you said you, you, you bartender and things like that.
Tyler Kelley: 14:18
Yeah. So, you know, because no one was hiring, right? So I wasn’t able to go get a job. After a while, the market seemed to pick back up. I was able to work with a company that ended up selling for, I think, $364 million.
Very big success story here in Saint Louis. And then after that, I was in digital marketing. And then after that I was able to go work with an affiliate marketing company, still really good friends with this guy to this day, but he was an early eBay seller here in Saint Louis. And then he moved on to doing affiliate marketing back when you could still do pay-per-click to a landing page, sell some products or some sign ups, and get a cut off of that. So at one point with that company, I was managing about $1 million a month in pay-per-click.
And then it hit me, I should be doing this for myself. It’s like that. It’s like the recurring entrepreneurial drive, right? And so eventually I started to pick up some digital marketing clients, and until I had enough that I could overtake the income that I was making there. Like I said, we’re still friends today.
And so I left that position and started my own thing. At the time it was called a conversion coach. So SLAM!s 11 years old. But that business conversion coach was focused strictly on I always could say like, you know, you could bring a million people to your website tomorrow, but if no one converted, what’s the point? And that’s what was happening in SEO and pay per click at the time. And so it was a good place to be in this conversion rate optimization about 14 years ago.
John Corcoran: 15:50
And what point did you realize I need to broaden beyond that? This is too much of a narrow niche for me.
Tyler Kelley: 15:57
Well, so I met I still had the wedding websites, so those were still bringing in revenue. And I met a videographer and he had some. He just had a really good eye for video. And this is early, this was 11 years ago. And it is just in getting to be friends with him it just hit us that the future of marketing is video. And so, unlike a traditional agency where it’s like a big production, it’s like you have to get in and get out.
Digital video is something that happens quickly. And so that’s what we kind of came together and as a result rebranded into SLAM!. And one of our first offerings was digital video. And so it took off. But we hired graphic designers as well because on the conversion coach side, it was just more like copy positioning. UX, you know.
John Corcoran: 16:46
So how was it going from not having partners to now having a partner?
Tyler Kelley: 16:54
The way I saw it is that it allowed me to do more than I could have done on my own. And so it made sense for me, you know. And. Yeah. And so it allowed me to divide and conquer, right.
So I could focus on what I was good at. He could focus on what he was good at. At the same time, I also brought my brother, who was an employee at a conversion coach. I brought him in as a partner as well, and he Runs still to this day. Operations and production for the company.
John Corcoran: 17:29
So you must have different types of personalities. If he’s running. Operation.
Tyler Kelley: 17:33
He’s a true integrator. I’m a true visionary.
John Corcoran: 17:35
So I can.
Tyler Kelley: 17:37
Tell. Naturally.
John Corcoran: 17:38
You said at one point your goal was to become the biggest agency in town. You had 25 employees, and at one point you walked in and you looked around and you said to yourself, what?
Tyler Kelley: 17:49
We had 25 employees, 3500ft² in a Saint Louis office. And I walked in and I just had this gut feeling that it wasn’t needed. Like it was just money going out the door because people were just sitting around. There wasn’t enough work to support the 25 employees. There was enough revenue, but there wasn’t enough work.
So it took about two and a half years to unwind that decision to to be the biggest and the best, you know, to get on all the lists to, you know, show that somehow you like to provide this story for your ego, right? Yeah, but once you realize it and become aware of whatever that is, then you have the choice to change it. And that’s what we did.
John Corcoran: 18:37
And you have to convince yourself to have partners at this point. And you need to convince them of this.
Tyler Kelley: 18:42
No, I don’t think so. I don’t I don’t think there was any. It was pretty obvious once, once, once it was noticed, it was pretty obvious.
John Corcoran: 18:49
So then they really agreed.
Tyler Kelley: 18:51
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 18:52
Yeah. Because that’s a pretty fairly significant shift in strategy and approach. If you want to be the biggest agency town versus we’re okay with being smaller because you end up having ten employees now and you end up kind of downsizing deliberately.
Tyler Kelley: 19:06
Yeah. And not overnight. Like we didn’t, you know, 15 people overnight. This was over about two and a half years ago. And since that point, I mean, I think my youngest employee at this point has been with us five years, right?
Wow. Yeah. We. I don’t like the word family. I would prefer to think of a company more like a baseball or basketball team, you know? But we really do have those family dynamics. Even though at this point we’re all remote. Which is a whole nother, you know, moment and.
John Corcoran: 19:41
Good. Did that happen after Covid or did you go remote before then?
Tyler Kelley: 19:45
It happened after Covid. Of course, as a digital agency like we’re on slack asana, you know, we have all the tools. You could have walked into our office at that moment and it would have been completely silent because everyone’s just communicating on slack.
John Corcoran: 19:58
Yeah. But you were all in an office because that’s what people did before COVID. Yeah. Thought it had to be.
Tyler Kelley: 20:05
Exactly. So it took me a while. I, you know, I’m, I’m old school in this regard. I thought that we needed to be in person, I really did. And now, if you look at my LinkedIn like I’m, I’m out there saying, no, you don’t.
If you don’t have to be in person, you shouldn’t be in my opinion. But at the time, I really thought that we needed to be. And again, I think looking back, that’s probably more ego, right? So part of my story is just like shedding the layers of ego, you know, over time through these experiences. But it was 2021. I continued to go into the office during Covid, and it was great because my kids were at home. I don’t know, by the way, I don’t know how people got any work done with kids.
John Corcoran: 20:45
So I was the same way. I have an office that’s about two miles from my house and it’s just me here. I don’t have any other employees here and I would never have gotten anything done. Fortunately, my wife was able to oversee the kids, and the kids did whatever online schooling for a while and stuff like that. But yeah, it wasn’t easy at all. But I would never have gotten anything done if I had tried to work from home.
Tyler Kelley: 21:08
Yeah. So I think it was like January, February of 22 where I finally was like, because even after like, you could go back to the office, It was working out so well that we didn’t require.
John Corcoran: 21:20
Right? How is it better? What specifically can you point to that made it better?
Tyler Kelley: 21:26
I mean, just quite frankly, like work was getting done. It was getting done at a higher, you know, like it was just better work being done. Like part of our Covid experience was that before people knew that we were going to become remote, like they generally like our previous employees, generally expected to have to return to the office at some point. Right. And so because of that, I had two key employees early in 2020 decide that one moved to Austin and the other moved to Denver, Colorado.
John Corcoran: 21:59
Oh, so that’s significant. And these are key employees that moved somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Tyler Kelley: 22:04
And so we had a decision to make. Do we just like to advertise locally?
John Corcoran: 22:09
Part ways with them, or do we decide that we’re going to remain remote so that we can retain this talent?
Tyler Kelley: 22:14
Well, that we didn’t think of then. So they ended up working in agencies in those cities. But when it came time to go ahead and fill those positions, we decided that we were going to put the jobs out nationally as opposed to just locally. Best decision we ever made in terms of talent and just really in addition to the talent. It’s just like this, this like desire to do really well because of how grateful the team is to be able to have freedom of and of movement and freedom.
John Corcoran: 22:50
It’s significant, isn’t it? Right? Yeah, yeah. I found our team is entirely remote, and I found that people have different priorities. It might be kids, it might be spouses.
It might be work-life balance. It might be a passion or hobby or something, or might be taking care of elderly parents or something like that. There’s all these different things that people have that they prize flexibility and because it allows them to, you know, to pursue those adjacent goals beyond their professional goals.
Tyler Kelley: 23:19
Exactly.
John Corcoran: 23:20
Yeah, yeah. Talk a little bit about some of the niches and companies that you work with. One interesting one is you work with the Better Business Bureau, which is an interesting model because you go after one client and then they actually operate with lots of local offices. So you actually have lots of little clients because they’re different local offices. But I imagine there’s efficiencies of scale there because you do similar types of services for different clients. So talk a little bit about that approach.
Tyler Kelley: 23:49
Yeah. So just to give you a little bit of insight into SLAM! as an agency, because when we hear this word agency like it can mean a million different things. And just being an EO I’ve an entrepreneurial organization. I know we haven’t talked about it yet, but being an EO in Saint Louis, we have about 15 agencies. And out of all those agencies, maybe one overlaps, but just a little tiny bit.
So really, an agency world, like everyone does something so unique and different that there’s not really a whole lot of overlap. So for SLAM!, what we do is we provide an outsourced marketing and creative department or function for companies that don’t have that in-house. And so for the Better Business Bureau, each of their offices are so small, but they can’t necessarily hire; they really can’t hire a director level position just for marketing and creative. And so our offering to them is that we will come in and be that marketing or creative department for you, for your office, for a reduced fee because of the economies of scale. And it’s allowed us to do, you know, national commercial campaigns, digital marketing, creative on a very large scale all across the country. So it’s been an amazing experience. We’ve been doing that, I think, for about eight years now.
John Corcoran: 25:08
And the way you operate now with your company is you are kind of the sales, the marketing, and the rest of the team is the production for you. Now, that’s not always the case with owners. Sometimes they’re enmeshed in both. They have to do all the sales. They have to do all the marketing. They also do all the production. Did it take a while for you to get to that point where you could remove yourself from the production?
Tyler Kelley: 25:31
It definitely did. I am a perfectionist.
John Corcoran: 25:36
Guilty as charged right here too. Yeah, yeah.
Tyler Kelley: 25:38
Yeah. And it’s funny. Like every once in a while I’ll log in to my Facebook, and I’ll see an ad or something that we’ve produced and like one out of maybe like every 250 I catch something really small and I’m like, hey, what? And it’s like, that was the first time in like three months and you just happen to log in. Yeah, but I was a little more nit picky when it comes to design principles and things like that.
So. And where clients aren’t aren’t. And the thing about design and really any they’re subjective, right. So my standards might be different from the client’s standards. And or a better way to say that is we might know the best practice, but the client overrides that opinion in many cases.
Right. So all that to say, I was always a bottleneck for the creative team. And so once I had to really like it, I had to just cut it completely and not look at anything for like six months before I could, in my mind, fully trust the team to do what they do. And once I made that decision in my mind. Right. This is just all internal dialogue then like it was like they were off to the races. The point is, they never needed me at all.
John Corcoran: 26:55
How did you and how did you ensure that with you not keeping your eye on the ball during this period of time, the work would still be of a caliber that you were proud of, and that you didn’t have clients that were finding mistakes and things like that.
Tyler Kelley: 27:11
I mean, the answer is trust. I just had to trust the process. And then eventually like it, it got up to where it needed to be. I think part of that is that when an owner is like hovering or something like, you know, figuratively hovering over an employee, let’s say, like there’s this, this nervousness or that, that, you know, they’re not able to perform their best when they think that you’re looking over their shoulder. And so when I was able to step away, truly step away to where I knew that I was completely detached and so did they. They were able to rise to, you know, their highest potential.
John Corcoran: 27:53
So it’s a bit of a leap of faith, isn’t it? Right. Like you imagine when you did it, it was probably driven by the fact that you were seeing the ill effects of your perfectionism and you overseeing everything. And so you felt like you just had to remove yourself. Like lots of people go cold turkey on different things, right? Vices and things like that. But yeah, I imagine it was a bit of a leap of faith for you.
Tyler Kelley: 28:16
Definitely.
John Corcoran: 28:16
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tyler, this has been so great. I appreciate your time.
I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of practicing gratitude and giving our guests a little bit of space and opportunity to give any shoutouts to anyone who’s been helpful in their career trajectory. Anyone in particular that you know, peers or contemporaries that you’d want to thank?
Tyler Kelley: 28:38
You know, since you warned me that you’d be asking this question, I’ve been giving it some thought. And I have a business mentor. Right. And so naturally, I would be grateful for him. Right.
He’s at this point 86 years old. He had a very successful company. And just hearing things from his perspective is different from what the people that are in my life, you know, it’s it’s very it’s that 86 year old influence is not common. Right. But that’s not how I’m going to answer the question today.
I’m going to answer the question. I had lunch with an old, let’s call it a client when we first started conversion coach, which would later become SLAM!. We supported a local agency here in Saint Louis, and we were up to about 60% of their digital work. And overnight, they cut us out. And that was a huge lesson for me because.
John Corcoran: 29:33
Like a subcontractor, basically.
Tyler Kelley: 29:35
Like a white label subcontractor for them, and they realized that they were just paying too much for that service, that they could bring it in-house, you know, but it cut out like all of, pretty much all of our revenue because we had all our eggs in that basket. Wow. I had lunch with him last year. I had lunch with him just last week. And like, I might have mentioned earlier, like I wouldn’t take anything back, including that experience because and that’s what I’m grateful for is him and that experience. Because had it not been for that, there would be no SLAM!.
John Corcoran: 30:04
You remained on good terms with him despite that.
Tyler Kelley: 30:07
After a few years.
John Corcoran: 30:09
Yeah. A few years later. Yeah. Okay.
Tyler Kelley: 30:12
I get wiser over time.
John Corcoran: 30:14
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s good of you to, you know, to remain on good terms with someone like that. Cuz that sounds like a painful experience.
Tyler Kelley: 30:22
It was.
John Corcoran: 30:22
Yeah. Tyler, where can people go to learn more about you and SLAM!?
Tyler Kelley: 30:27
So me personally, any social network at. I am Tyler Kelly with an e y and SLAM! agency is at. We are SLAM! or SLAM! agency. Com.
John Corcoran: 30:41
Excellent. Thanks so much, Tyler.
Tyler Kelley: 30:43
Thank you, John.
Outro: 30:46
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.