Marty McDonald 11:57
Yeah, so doing it for so long. It’s just like anything else, like I still love it. But at the same time, you get, you know, bored of doing the, the boring clients, which is just almost paint by numbers at certain times, like not knocking any of our clients just for discounting anything that we do, but occasionally you get in this right, right? Okay, he needs a little more adspend we create a new piece of content, we need to hit this email list. And let’s see what it goes. It’s like, okay, that’s working again, okay, then tweak this, tweak that. And it gets, you know, can get monotonous times, right. I always say digital marketing isn’t easy. But it’s a lot of tasks that add up. And if you’re doing them, right, they’ll produce a return for you. But you have to look at it constantly. And that’s normally what bad writers doing for their clients and started off with a couple conversations around craft beer was one of the first ones that we actually got, you know, clients for when we dabbled in the golf world and how we went about it was how can you go into an industry that you might have a passion for in some way, shape or form? For golf, that’s something that if I could go golf right now I’d go play golf. If I could go golf right after that, I would probably go play golf. If I could then go practice I would then practice and then tomorrow I would get up and then I
John Corcoran 13:15
would play again as you like golfing a little bit. Yeah. So like,
Marty McDonald 13:18
I that’s where I feel just relaxed. I like to hang out there. I like to talk about it I like to play and the challenge of the game. So it’s like how do you combine that without, you know, screwing up your love of the game, because once again in the industry is a lot of different things. So putting together pieces that were fun, and that we can prove out that we could take all the digital marketing knowledge dumping into the golf industry, and then show them something and we created golfing fanatics, and we also created golf cheapskate. Well, we purchased that. And then we just tested things on there. You know, we built list off there we have 100,000 plus on each one, and emails. And we then would say okay, well, you can take this and leverage this list, we can test things off of it. That’s not your brand. And that was our intro into it. And then we wind up walking, working with golf courses, mostly on a concentrated basis on courses that I went to working with PGA section of a Philadelphia. So that was fun. We still do work with them and brought in to speak and talk to people while worked with a couple of golf teaching professionals not on the PGA tour.
John Corcoran 14:24
And then at the end of it individual businesses teaching businesses, yeah.
Marty McDonald 14:29
Or they work at a country club. And they’re looking at how they communicate with students. How do they bring new people to the game? And then over time, you know, it’s just evolved, where it’s like a rotating list of people, some existing people and then mostly referrals that have come in. And it’s been great because from there, you’re just talking about things that you love. And I try and tell that to my staff. I ask everybody that we hire whether they’re an intern or full time, like if you could pick the types of clients that you could have, what would you do and we have One young young guy right now that he’s, he loves fishing. And he passed all the tests and now are saying I always create a fishing brand. And let’s see what we can go. And we’ve already done things in the outdoors. So is this a combo, but what I found was getting burned out on doing digital marketing. For doing it for so long, I had to combine something that I really enjoyed, which was golf, and then I’ll get to the beer in a minute. But the golfing was like I could just talk about golf, right? It’s easy. Like, we have one client and somebody that we work with through the other brands, squares, and they’re all over the place. And I’m going down to Orlando to meet with them at the PGA Show and go to their lawn party with all their partners. And it’s just fun and easy to talk to you like I want to talk to Bob for hours, sometimes to my detriment, but I get a lot of things out. And I say that I go, Oh, wait a minute, that’d be good for XYZ client, or you know what, so and so can use that. So it comes out naturally, because I’ve been doing it so long. Then the second part is you talk about something you’re passionate about. And then golf or beer, turning the same thing was just a little bit in reverse. I was actually speaking, we’ve done when we started back, right, and we did a lot and we still do in restaurants, and food service and specific foods, like we have an Italian food brand. That’s just Italian food. And they do a lot of great stuff in Philadelphia called soludos. And doing that work like Rich and I decided my you know, my other partner here at Bad Rhino, decided we should probably branch into some other restaurants. So he joined the restaurant networking group, and I’m upfront in getting, I was asked to speak and then I’m getting drilled by somebody in the back. And it turns out to be one of the founders of one of the largest breweries. That’s one of the larger breweries in the country, and they happen to be in our backyard. And then a week and a half later, I’m sitting in the brewery, and then I signed, you know, a sign a contract there. And next thing, you know, we had a brewery client there really wasn’t going after it was interested but wasn’t going after craft beer specifically. And then after that experience for 18 months, I wrote a book about it, which is Great Beer Is Not Enough, which a couple years old, it’s going to be updated probably later this year. But with everything that’s been going on the past couple of years, you know, craft brewing took a hit and everybody that owned a restaurant took a hit. But they turned into the book, it turned into the podcast, and then it turned into us working with I’ve been down in North Carolina and Florida and a handful of other places talking to the beer guilds, about helping these startups in the craft brewery world just get started. But not forget about the marketing. It’s easy to post a picture of beer and people having fun. But do you have any thought behind it. And we got involved with that. And we did it through reverse instead of creating the brands that we did to get into the golf industry, from our beer knowledge, we created the hop nation that does the same thing. And we built lists and a following there, we took a pause during the whole pandemic, just because it didn’t make sense to really have a lot of fun with craft beer and promote it that way. Because that’s how it was. We always wanted to have fun with it. It was tough when so many people were hurting financially because they they couldn’t have their tap rooms open and things like that. So that’s how we got into craft beer and golf.
John Corcoran 18:15
And I want to ask you out, that’s interesting, because you have, in a sense built your own assets or your own, almost like separate businesses. There are times businesses struggle with what amount of focus to put on that, you know, if they put too much energy into it, and sometimes it becomes a revenue source, a profit source, how have you determined that how much energy you should put into these other kind of side projects or side initiatives?
Marty McDonald 18:44
Yeah, great question. And it definitely has reared its head that way a couple of times. But what we’ve done is, we know what the difference is. So we use golf, and beer, that one as well. We’ve used it as training. So we’ve taken that and say, Alright, for our social media managers, or digital marketers, they’re running paid campaigns, we were saying, go ahead and run with this, you have freedom to do whatever. But here’s, here’s the parameters. So we could do that. And they can learn and not feel the pressure of making a mistake in front of a quote unquote, real client, right. But they will also learn the industry. So then, when we get a golf client, it was like, hey, you know, so and so’s already done so much great stuff with the golf brands that we have. Go ahead and do that. So we had to rethink some things because the exact same thing that you just asked me is like, where does that turn out? And where’s the attention going? Right, where you have things. They were never there to be full blown in terms of bad, right? Oh, anyway, full blown revenue generators. What they were there to do was to use as a lead gen and a tool that we could tell the client like, hey, we can also run everything through this giant email. In a giant Facebook group that we already run paid traffic to. So we can give away your products and or talk about your products. And we can test it anonymously, anonymously, like, hey, XYZ just gave us two pairs of shoes, we’re going to give them away, but you have to give us some feedback on it. And they loved it, because it was a quick testimonial of what we could do. Also, they could also generate sales. And at the same time, we can show them the power of a highly fine tuned golf community, on social media and an email list.
John Corcoran 20:31
The brilliant idea more companies ought to do something like that just to create those types of resources. I’m sure it’s super attractive for the clients like Wow, 100,000 person email list. That sounds amazing.
Marty McDonald 20:42
Yeah, and we do a lot of it. For right, wrong or indifferent. We do it for free. At first, and there’s some parameters, I mean, it’s not entirely free, but it’s pretty close to free, like, Hey, if you want to give us some stuff, if it’s a clothing retailer, or equipment manufacturer be like, hey, you know, if you want to send over some things, we’ll help you out, and we’ll give them away. But we also want to be able to, you know, make sure that it’s real. And then there’s like a flat fee, sometimes based on what they want to do. And it’s worked out wonderfully, complete, cool
John Corcoran 21:15
idea. I want to ask you about working with restaurants and craft breweries, especially during the pandemic, we have a series on one of our podcasts, focusing on restaurant tours, which in many cases are just kind of the bread and butter of this economy and just been hit so hard and had to hit it, you know, that now you have used as kind of like a boxer up against the ropes, you know, just getting hit back and forth? What? Yeah, what has it been like for you with these clients? What is he seeing working? What type of pivots do they have to do? What role has digital marketing played for these businesses over the last few
Marty McDonald 21:51
years? So day one, I was actually like, right before the whole world shutdown, I was flying back from San Diego with a contract to work with brewers that were going into casinos. And I was excited, because it was a lot of work to get to that point. And it was a very lucrative contract. So I’m already thinking like, as I’m flying, as I’m landing, I’m like, Okay, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna have to meet in two weeks, I’m probably going to fly back out here in a month. And then the whole world stopped. But it was impactful for just that. I mean, that kind of bummed me out. Because that was a lot of work. Cumulative of about five years worth of work went into getting that and that just went up. Just like that. But so
John Corcoran 22:30
like, San Diego has an amazing beer scene. I know stone. So many great breweries down there.
Marty McDonald 22:35
So many great ones there. Yeah. Yeah. Tons. And it was interesting. And then it then it quickly shifted to you. Okay, well, we also have quite a few restaurants and breweries that we work with for years. So the ones that we’ve been around for quite a while easy conversations, like they’re like, look, here’s what we need to do, what do you suggest, and that was easy conversation, some of the newer ones that were we’re about to take it on the chin, probably worse than worse than any other industry. That was immediately like, hey, we don’t even know what we’re going to do. We just got to stop everything right now. Because, they had no idea and it would lasted for probably about close to almost three full months, at least in our area, and the areas that we were working in where they had no outlet, like whatsoever to produce revenue. But how digital marketing actually then started working through there was a lot more work than we ever anticipated in there where they had to refit their websites, they had to do online ordering, prepare for take, you know, takeout and other things and became a little a lot of project work, which we did to help them out. And some of them we got paid on some of it. We were just adjusting things that they had paid for before just to help them out. But yeah, I mean, it was brutal for everybody in that industry. Not only the owners, but the workers, the staff. I mean, just the vendors, like I always was taught like if you see restaurants doing well, you know, the economy is doing well. And I always kept that in the back of my mind in all of my professional career. And the few times I used to see like restaurants like it’s interesting like last couple of weeks I walked by here I drove by here I don’t see as many cars and then the first time I remember noticing that then was the financial crash. And it was weird because it is true like that. industry ties a lot of things together from people that have side jobs that people that have their main jobs as their great bartenders and servers and things like that. Then you have the vendors that supply you have the farmers and other people their supply the restaurants locally as well as some of the bigger ones. And you have a lot of trickle down effect with their that affects the economy here in the US for sure. It was a little scary but we had to we got through it with a lot of them and digital marketing played a huge role. And now that we’re you know, knock on wood kind of coming out of it in the past few months, we’ve seen a big uptick in inquiries about, you know, what they want to do next, not only from current clients, but potential new ones. So it’s a wild ride. And I hope anybody that has a restaurant out there that if you can hang on, I think better days are ahead. But I mean, kudos to you if you’ve stayed in business this, this while while all this was going on?
John Corcoran 25:21
Absolutely. I mean, so many courageous restaurant tours, restaurant, owners, operators, it’s amazing what they’ve been through. I want to ask about one thing, you are kind of known by many in the agency world as an expert in client experience. And I watched the training that you did on this involved Rhino pins that played a role in, in nurturing clients and former clients as well, to talk a little bit about some of the things that you’ve learned the last 20 years of managing clients and giving them a great experience.
Marty McDonald 25:55
You know, it’s funny, and I appreciate bringing this up. And also, I really appreciate bringing it because I actually have to order those pins. And it’s been on my to do list. I’m like, oh, yeah, I gave last one away. Go.
John Corcoran 26:06
My chain. Hopefully, the the ends are not stuck on the ship off of California here.
Marty McDonald 26:11
Who knows? Um, you know, it’s interesting, John’s like, what we always try and do enriches is way better at it than I am is just remembering things, right. So when we just always start off, it’s just thank you cards, like somebody gives you a call. At night at my desk. In my office, I have a stack of them. And it’s just like, here’s the car, you know, and I tell all our people, like, if you ever get stuck, and you’re not sure what to do, or fix a situation, you can’t go wrong by dropping that in the mail, you’ll be surprised. So I started there, like way back when, even when I was recruiting, like, I still have them when I got people jobs, or they got new jobs. Or I took an interview with somebody and they sent me a handwritten thank you note I’ve kept on quite honestly, because not too many people do it. And it’s a memorable thing that you get that in the mail. And it’s just like, Oh, thank you for taking the time. And some of them, I got jobs, some of them I didn’t. And over the years, I kept those. And I took that same philosophy. When we started back Rhino. I was like, take the five minutes at the end of each day. And it’s not even too fancy. It’s like, you know, Hey, John, thanks for having me on your show. Really appreciate it. If you ever need anything, let me know, throw a business card in there, put a stamp on it, fire it out, right. And you know, takes a few minutes. And it’s just a simple thing. And a lot of people have like, they’ll send me I love when I get emails. Hey, thank you for the Thank You card. It’s just the touch point. Right, right. And so when we started bad writing, we’ve done a variety of things over the years. And in that presentation, one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve adopted rhinos, so you get like your own Rhino. And it’s just a cool little thing that you can update. And then like Cindy Lee, or any
John Corcoran 27:53
or nonprofit that helps her rise, which by the way, is not how you came up with the name. It wasn’t like, passion for Rhino, it’s just like to do
Marty McDonald 28:02
that. Right? Yeah, we just love rich came up with a cool name. And we ran with it. And but yeah, so we give away the pins. And then we try and do something around the rhinos there. But it’s hard, you know, it’s like, Hey, you adopted a rhino, right? And we’ll keep your Rhino going. So it’s not like a client leaves, like you’re going to get rid of the rhino. So like, if you have XYZ client and they have a rhino, I’m not going to stop supporting that Rhino. Like that would be cruel. So we keep it and then you know, for x clients, as long as they’re still in business, they get an email, you know, once or twice a year that just says, Hey, you still have your Rhino. Nobody unsubscribes from that list. And it’s awesome. You know, you just build that out.
John Corcoran 28:43
I’m curious. So these former clients, they email you back, or they say thanks for the donation like,
Marty McDonald 28:48
no, well, I’ve had a few I shouldn’t say that. I’ve had a few say no. Hey, great to hear from you guys. Appreciate it. You know, hope all’s well. Happy New Year, whatever. But we’ve never really had you know, anybody like yell or scream like just kind of, like style
John Corcoran 29:04
giving that money to my Yeah, stop Frankie’s a rhino and Africa.
Marty McDonald 29:09
Exactly. And that’s it. And it’s interesting. It’s also sparked a handful of conversations and referrals to and it’s just, I think, sometimes everybody takes it a little too serious, like you lose a client and it’s just like, oh, well, that person, you know, ate that person. I don’t like that person. I don’t want to be reminded that, hey, I want 100% I’m like that too, right? At certain times. But at the same time, like I you know, it’s business, they no change. They weren’t happy, you know, whatever it is, as long as we can stand on what we did. And we always have, and we’ve never had knock on wood issues with that, and 12 years. And we can always report back saying, hey, you know, I understand that you need to change but we also are going to keep the rhinos and, you know, it’s a nice little thing that to remind them that we were there and we help them on their journey in some way, shape or form.
John Corcoran 29:55
That’s cool. And then you know, have you seen others do something similar you advise others have done something similar like that have like a little thing.
Marty McDonald 30:03
Yeah, I’m big on really nice corporate gifts. And I’ve talked to a lot of people that were like, Well, I’m not sure if I wanted you, you know, the rhino thing kind of saved. The world doesn’t fit with our brand. But I always say, you know, if you’re gonna send me something, and we’ve been doing business for a while, and I’m just making this up, and let’s say I pay you $1,000 A month or even 500 a month, that’s take 500 to six grand a year. And you send me a $5 notebook. Right? Like, come on, like, Yeah, I think yeah, I hate that shit. Like, I was their logo on it.
John Corcoran 30:39
Yeah, no, we’re barely logo. Right. I’m sure you know, John Ruhlin is kind of the thought leader in this area around, you know, gifting and yeah.
Marty McDonald 30:48
So I get it like as a promotional thing, right. But especially at the end of the year, when everybody sends you something, right. And you get like a flimsy notebook or something goofy, and you’re just like, Come on, man. Like, just step it up a touch. It doesn’t have to be a lot. So what we do, and I’ve advised people, and I know that things at work is like, Hey, John, who’s your you know, do you follow sports? Do I? Yeah, yeah. But do you have like a favorite sport or a favorite? Like,
John Corcoran 31:16
we’ll say San Francisco Giants? Sure. Yeah.
Marty McDonald 31:19
So like, I just take a note of that. And maybe, you know, it’s before baseball season. I’m not going to get you tickets or anything. I’m not gonna make you commit to something. What I’m going to do is just find something that’s unique, like, so maybe we’re talking on a second phone call. And you go, yeah, you know, I really didn’t like Barry Bonds, but I loved what’s a catcher? Buster Posey. Buster Posey. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, that’s
John Corcoran 31:42
spot on. I feel exactly right.
Marty McDonald 31:44
So and then I just go and I look for something that Posey signed or something like that. And, you know, it doesn’t have to cost an hour, like, no, um, but I, you know, I send that over to something small. And it’s something that I always try and consider, like, if it doesn’t fit the motif of your office, or you need to get rid of it, I always make it a gift that somebody could like, either read gift or resell. Because nobody likes stuff that’s sitting around that you just like, I’m never gonna use that. But I don’t want to throw it away. Because it’s a nice $100 gift. And it doesn’t really for it doesn’t really fit or my girlfriend or wife back on Lake or whatever. And you just put a little bit more thought into it. And what I find is like, the response is, like, overwhelmingly awesome, like, friend of mine, Tony, I don’t even think we did business together. We actually just traded podcast and some other things. And he had mentioned how good he was the raiders and, and I got him a signed Raiders, little mini helmet, you know, and I’m like, Oh, here you go. And he was like, Dude, this is awesome. He’s like, nobody ever pays attention when I’m talking about these things. And that type of stuff to me is like, cool. And then I’ve done like, this past years, like I had really nice gifts. Me, I’m actually waiting for them. So I actually sent out a couple of notes and have something for you. I just don’t know where it’s at yet. But it’s kind of like custom created with their own logo and their own brand. And just something I know that they’ll at least use or look at and be like, No, that was just a nice thought. And that’s the only thing is just taking that one extra step, rather than just ordering like a cheesy notebook and putting it out there. And it’s just like, with your own logo on it. Now I do send really high end stuff with my own logo out to people that I know, well, one. I don’t send it out to all my clients, because I think that’s kind of odd. But I’ll send out and I just get like really nice stuff. If I’m going to do a T shirt. It’s going to be a very high quality t shirt or very high quality sweatshirt or hat or things like that. But it’s just a connection point. And I think that’s important to do. And you should have a process for anybody on board. Yeah, that’s great.
John Corcoran 33:41
Well, this has been great. Marty, I want to wrap things up with the last question that I was asked. So I’m a big fan of gratitude. And if you look around your peers and contemporaries, however you want to define that, you know, who out there do you respect do you admire? Who would you want to acknowledge publicly and just thank them for being there for you or helping you along the way?
Marty McDonald 34:02
Sure. No, I mean, I know in the notes and everything. We’re just leaving out friends and family. So I’m not forgetting about you know, they’re great. I love them. Yeah. Friends, family and all that good stuff. But there’s a couple of people. Yeah, so first one, I mean, who I met, and we’ve done a lot of projects were together eight years, kind of like my conscience and we joke around a lot. We play a lot of golf together, and we share agency war stories and, you know, people will start off in the morning and play around a golf and by lunch for we’re kind of relaxed and talking about new things and we just use it as a bitch session has Ben LeDonni, Creative MMS and he’s in Philadelphia, and he’s always been great. I’ll text me call me like different times a year and it’s always been a lot of fun. Another one real quick, Justin Christensen who I’ve been friends with for years, and another person that is great. From that standpoint, he does great work with conversion fanatics, super smart in the E commerce world. One of the smartest guys I’ve worked with For sure. And continue that and value that relationship tremendously. Not only the work that we trade, but then just bouncing ideas and talking to next one Joey Gilkey, who’s been a guy that I’ve gotten to know over the past three years, and we do the same thing, we have a weekly standing call, and he’s always there to listen to me. And vice versa. And it’s great, because, you know, he’s, he’s younger than I am, which I, you know, as I get up there, it feels like everybody’s younger in this game. But I think I provide value to him and vice versa. And it’s always nice to hear that where he has he is on his journey. And finally Ian Garlic, and, you know, the video work that he’s done and stuff for us has been invaluable over the past few years. And we’ve been partnering on a handful of things, and working on those, but he’s done an amazing job of putting tons of things out there for me, and helping me guide me through that process where I know a ton about marketing, I don’t know much about like, where video should be and how it should be shot. And he’s helped me out a ton over the past few years down in golf, but also in our agency and some of our clients as well. So those are the ones that just right there in the inner circle. There’s many, many more, and I just gotta keep on forgetting, and I’m sure I’ll hear about it when we published this podcast.
John Corcoran 36:13
I know why didn’t you mention me? Why didn’t
Marty McDonald 36:15
you mention me? I don’t know, man. I don’t get nervous on these things. But I don’t have a list and we got a time limit here. We don’t want to all day.
John Corcoran 36:22
You know, it’s so funny. We’ve never spoken before, but we kind of overlapped in different communities and things like that. And I know all four of those. And Ben that was talking about him this morning. Ian Garlic is a great friend and a client of ours and he’s done case stories for us on our website. They’re phenomenal. I recommend him all the time. Joey have had on the podcast Justin, I think I have his book over here on my bookshelf here. A small world. Yeah.
Marty McDonald 36:45
Justin on, you should have Justin is by far one of the smartest dudes in this that I’ve ever met. And he can break things down. But he also does it in a way that not only can educate but gets results and he’s just really good.
John Corcoran 37:01
That’s great. Yeah, no, I haven’t interviewed him. So I appreciate that recommendation. I’ll definitely reach out. Yeah, Marty, where can people go to learn about you? It’s not badrhino.com which is a clothing brand. Bad Rhino? I believe it is?
Marty McDonald 37:14
That is badrhinoinc.com. Put that in. We have a brand new website coming out here in the next 10-12 days. But you can still go to our old sites got plenty of information. I offer this on every podcast if you’re listening to this. And you’re hey, I want to talk to Marty about something I’m not going to guarantee is going to be me that’s responding to you immediately but somebody will get back to you really quickly just send an email to [email protected] mentioned this podcast in the subject line and someone will get back to you one way or the other with question answer, set up appointment whatever it is. Well you can find us there if you search Bad Rhino Inc. You’ll find us all over the place Bad Rhino Digital Marketing is actually a better keyword and you know, social media, etc.
John Corcoran 37:58
Excellent Marty thanks so much.
Marty McDonald 38:00
Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Great time.
Outro 38:02
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.