John Corcoran: 15:08
You said that you had trouble selling it. So what point did you figure out that you needed to pull the plug? And how did you make that decision? Because that’s a hard one.
David Meyer: 15:17
So I had a great meeting. There was a I ended up getting a mortgage company as a client out of it, as a long term client.
John Corcoran: 15:26
So it a client for agency services or for marketing services. Okay. Okay.
David Meyer: 15:32
I did that, I did stuff for them and got it.
John Corcoran: 15:35
So it indirectly led to other work that you got. Yeah. Okay. It wasn’t.
David Meyer: 15:40
Total loss but the big for me was there was a real estate shop in Saint Louis. That is the biggest by far. I don’t know if it still is, but this is 20 years ago. I think they sold. I want to say 20,000 homes a year.
Wow. So I got a meeting with the head of the marketing department there, which took me a while to get, like, I was calling and calling and. Yeah, I finally got to the meeting. Pitched it to him, and he said, this is great. This is a great idea. I love it. It’s like there’s one problem. It’s like. And so. And I switched my business model. I was going to give them to them for free and sell ads in them for electricians.
John Corcoran: 16:31
Okay. Yeah. All right.
David Meyer: 16:33
So instead of selling the books, they were going to get them free. He’s like, I love it. Here’s the problem. If you give me 20,000 books on January 1st, I’m going to have 19,999. On December 31st. I can’t get my realtors to do one more thing. I can’t get them to follow a process or do anything. He’s like, it won’t work. That’s when I punted. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 17:01
So, so I want to get into. I know you had a couple of different kinds of side businesses. You also during, you know, over the last 20 years or so have worked at various different agencies and various different roles. So you end up starting to speak, which was in 2008, actually October 2008, which I think was right around the time of the Bear Stearns collapse and everything. Okay. So what motivated that? I have an idea what might have motivated it, but I’ll let you tell the story.
David Meyer: 17:34
I’ve worked at agencies previously, and I was really good at my job, but not a great employee. I don’t think I didn’t because some of the owners of the firms that I worked at were not the most honest people. I’m sorry. My dog’s barking.
John Corcoran: 17:58
Okay.
David Meyer: 17:59
Weren’t the most honest folks. And I just didn’t. I didn’t feel good working for them. So I was out on my own working with a couple other people. Because I can only do what I can do, and I need other people to do what they do. So there were a few of us working together, and we had a couple clients that one of them is still around. Any lab tests now? It’s a retail walk in. It’s a franchise selling lab testing.
John Corcoran: 18:32
And is that a client that you’ve had for now, 16 years? Okay. Okay.
David Meyer: 18:38
We’re still friends with them.
John Corcoran: 18:39
Okay.
David Meyer: 18:39
Okay. They brought things in-house, and they. They’re doing great. They’re. They’re great. The other one was called Roadside Medical. And the idea there was to put, like, a minuteclinic kind of doc in a box, those, you know, whatever. Not urgent care, but more of, like, what you see at Walgreens or CVS inside truck stops because over the road, truckers are not the it’s hard for them to take care of themselves. It could be something managing diabetes or if they have a sinus infection or if they get sick, it’s when they’re out on the road. It’s hard for them to pull an 18 Wheeler into. Go see a doctor, right? And we did a couple locations with pilot truck stops, and they were going well. And then the collapse really took the funding out from under them and that just died.
John Corcoran: 19:44
So it sounds like it kind of started organically. And you looked for opportunities.
David Meyer: 19:52
Yeah. And we got married before we dated before we got married. So. Okay. Working on projects together. There were a handful of us.
John Corcoran: 19:59
And these were your two eventual partners.
David Meyer: 20:03
There were four of us at that time.
John Corcoran: 20:04
Okay.
David Meyer: 20:06
And one of them made it through until I bought two of them out. Another one joined at one point.
John Corcoran: 20:13
Okay.
David Meyer: 20:15
So, yeah, they. There were four of us when we started.
John Corcoran: 20:21
So this is October 2008. What was it like in those early years or so with the economy in shambles?
David Meyer: 20:29
It was really tough. And so we started with a couple clients that were spending a fair amount of money with us every month. They were growing. There was big potential. One of them cut their budget a lot and another one went away entirely. We just didn’t make money for a while. It was, you know, we were just. We found some work. We found some clients, we did some work. We were doing good work, but people weren’t spending. It was tough.
John Corcoran: 20:57
How did you stick through it?
David Meyer: 21:01
I think perseverance is just what we believed in. We believed in our model. We believed that we were good at what we did, and we knew that companies were like, if we can make it through this, we can make it through anything. And knowing that companies who are going to market during a downturn are going to grow market share very cost effectively. And finding those clients with that kind of big picture, long term thinking. Was helpful.
John Corcoran: 21:42
Yeah. How did you figure out with 3 or 4 different partners? How did you figure out who did what? How did you divide up the labor?
David Meyer: 21:50
It was pretty natural. One of them was a designer. I was a writer and account executive. One was our technology partner. So building websites, etcetera. And one of them was more business management and sales.
John Corcoran: 22:09
Yeah.
David Meyer: 22:09
It was a very complementary skill set.
John Corcoran: 22:13
Yeah. As you look back over, you know, it’s 16 or so years later and how much marketing has evolved and changed since then. You know, talk reflects a little bit back on what that’s like, you know, what the marketing landscape is like today with eyes on the horizon and all these different things compared to 2008.
David Meyer: 22:37
Put it in perspective. My first job in an agency was in the Yellow Pages. So that’s how much change I’ve seen. Yeah. Massive. It was, you know, working on Allstate getting them to all their agents to combine eighth page and quarter page ads into a full page ad. And you’re going to save money and get better positioning. And you know and it was like wow. And you know, where is that now? So. Right. The change that I’ve seen has just been incredible. Yeah. It’s been a lot of fun.
John Corcoran: 23:16
How how have you managed to stay up to speed with those types of changes, evolutionary changes over time.
David Meyer: 23:23
I think you just embrace it. It’s. You just I mean, I’m constantly reading, looking to see what other people are doing, looking at leaders, you know, and something as simple as, you know, years ago I would look at the App Store and see what the top selling apps were, and you can figure out the way things are heading. It’s like, what is this, Instagram? What is this? So it’s like you can see there are ways to monitor and measure what’s going on that you just have to look for and just really embrace it.
John Corcoran: 24:05
Yeah. What was so there? I’m sure there were highs and lows during that time period. Covid was one of them. So 2020 I believe you still had two partners at that point.
What was that experience like for you when Covid hit and the world was shutting down? You know, was that petrifying? You know, many agencies will say that it slowed down, but that immediately sped up.
David Meyer: 24:28
Yeah, that was what it was, an instant slowdown. But then once people got stimulus money and people realized that digital was going to, you know, there was a lot of digital transformation. I think a lot of companies that do that really thrived. People were understanding that sales methods changed that in-person meetings and trade shows, trade shows, you know, just recently, I think came back to where they were. So finding ways people still needed to sell and and buy people still had problems they needed to solve through products and services.
John Corcoran: 25:10
Yeah. And and with whom spoke, were you already providing all those services or did Covid require you to change the way that you operated or changed the services that you provided?
David Meyer: 25:25
We adjusted some of the services. We certainly didn’t do trade shows. But we dabbled like virtual trade shows. Those we went as a guest, as, you know, visitors. We attended some virtual trade shows before we put clients in it, and we didn’t really end up putting clients in. One client wanted to be in a virtual trade show, and we helped with that, but we didn’t strongly recommend it.
John Corcoran: 25:55
Yeah, I remember how weird that was. These like, you know, rooms and networking and all this kind of different stuff, and they’d sell digital ad banners or whatever, like, yeah, it wasn’t it didn’t work that well.
David Meyer: 26:08
It wasn’t, it wasn’t the same.
John Corcoran: 26:10
Yeah.
David Meyer: 26:11
But we yeah, we I think what we did changed how we did it changed us. Everyone went home and everyone’s been working remotely for our shop since, which.
John Corcoran: 26:24
Yeah. So that was a big change then how did that affect the culture of the company?
David Meyer: 26:32
I was really scared about that. I was scared about the culture of the company, but I was also scared about bringing on new team members, how that would go. How do you get them to buy into the culture? And I think you just learned, I think probably from EO you’ve heard it. It’s like hiring for culture for culture fit and then people you can train anyone to do something, anything if they have the most people have the capacity to do something, but if they’re not a culture fit, it’ll never work.
John Corcoran: 27:13
And did you start hiring people from outside of the Saint Louis area?
David Meyer: 27:18
We didn’t. We could. We do. Some of our contractors are certainly outside, but all of our full time people are still in the Saint Louis area. Unnecessarily. It’s just I think it’s people we know. I’ve been in the agency world in this town for a long time, and some of my peers. So we just know a lot of really good people in town.
John Corcoran: 27:44
Yeah.
David Meyer: 27:45
And we keep our culture strong. We get together about once a month. Doesn’t sound like that much, but we get together once a month for group learning. You know, like we. So we have a virtual office, not a virtual temporary co-working office.
John Corcoran: 28:06
Yeah.
David Meyer: 28:07
So we’ll get there together once a month and then we’ll meet with clients there in between or meet there. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 28:14
And I imagine you’ve noticed that the clients are more accepting of that. A lot of agencies, a lot of companies before Covid felt like they had to have a retail footprint because, you know, reputation, the clients expected it, that sort of thing. And you’ve noticed a change in that.
David Meyer: 28:30
There are still some holdouts. There are still people who. Want you to have a physical space. And we have that in our coworking space that serves that purpose. But for the most part, yeah, yeah. Accepting it. I mean, people are used to having dogs barking.
John Corcoran: 28:52
Yeah. Right. And I teased at the beginning the idea of starting with strategy rather than tactics. And we also talked about how much things have changed in the marketing world over the last 16 years. Has the way that you approach strategy with clients changed, or is it kind of the same series of questions, same kind of inquisition, I guess.
What is it like now, like with the landscape of AI and the horizon and stuff like that? What does a process look like to figure out what is the right strategy for any given company?
David Meyer: 29:31
AI? Well, the internet’s internet’s made doing research a lot easier. So either secondary or primary research is very affordable for a lot of companies.
John Corcoran: 29:47
So yeah, I think back about like writing papers in high school and like having I went I grew up in Los Angeles and having to like drive 45 minutes down to the UCLA library to write a paper in high school, which is just a little mind boggling now that it was so difficult to get, you know, particular books.
David Meyer: 30:04
Right? Yeah. And in college, too.
John Corcoran: 30:06
Yeah.
David Meyer: 30:07
So that type of research, competitive analysis. But again, just primary research like doing studies or. Whatever. It’s just so that’s a lot easier. Yeah.
And we definitely use AI to help us with our work product. And that’s made us more efficient. We can do things faster, but it’s still kind of like that. It’s kind of like how Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or whatever has made design easier, or it’s just another tool.
John Corcoran: 30:47
Yeah.
David Meyer: 30:49
It’s not the strategy, and the thinking still has to happen. And we haven’t found a way to short circuit that. We still voice of the customer interviews, win loss interviews, and then really diving in and talking to clients and their sales teams and getting that information is it’s it’s huge and understanding that humans haven’t changed because of the I mean, sure, we’ve changed because of the internet, but we still make our decisions the same way.
John Corcoran: 31:27
Right?
David Meyer: 31:28
Make our decisions based on emotion and then backfill it with logic. So we, you know, it’s still tapping into that and that human psychology of understanding people and how it’s not what you want to say, it’s what they want to hear that hasn’t changed. And I don’t know that I don’t see that changing. I don’t know what websites will look like 20 years from now. I mean, you know, who knows with virtual reality and AI. What, what? But human psychology is pretty deeply ingrained.
John Corcoran: 32:02
Yeah, yeah. And says he is the son of a psychologist or psychiatrist. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
David Meyer: 32:10
You know, it’s like we still react like, you know, cavemen a lot of times.
John Corcoran: 32:15
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I forget the name of it. But I think you do have a, I think you call it VTO or something like that. Like there’s a process that you take clients through to figure out their messaging, figure out their strategy. Do you want to talk about what that’s like?
David Meyer: 32:31
So yeah, VTO is an EOS term. So we work with a lot of clients that run on EOS, operating the Entrepreneurial Operating System.
John Corcoran: 32:41
Yeah.
David Meyer: 32:42
And others that work with scaling up or bloom growth is a newer one. I mean, there are a lot of the Rockefeller habits. There are a lot of business frameworks that people use and the process, we call it destination mapping, where we’ll go through and figure out that’s where we do the really deep dive. That’s where we ask. We’ll do client discovery, where it’s a workshop and we’re 2 or 3 hours before and after.
We’ve done a lot of research where we’re asking a lot of questions. We might have done voice of the customer research before then as well And get really getting to the root of what makes the company unique, what the benefit is, what how does that relate to the people that they’re trying to sell to?
John Corcoran: 33:41
And the voice of the customer is calling up their customers and asking them about oh yeah, asking them questions.
David Meyer: 33:46
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s just exactly calling up a customer and finding out why you chose them? Why? Why are you working with them? What’s it like to work with them? What are you and you find out a lot of great information.
John Corcoran: 34:03
Yeah. I was going to say. What’s that like when you present that to the client? Your client? Like, are there times where they’re just like, oh my gosh, I have no idea that we were doing this or that they were having this impression.
David Meyer: 34:15
I don’t think people are generally too surprised. I think it’s validating and it might allow them to speak the unspoken. You know, it’s like, yeah, we knew that was a problem we weren’t addressing or it’s it it puts a lot out on the table.
John Corcoran: 34:37
But it’s probably easier for you. It’s probably easier for you rather than you having to be like, I can hold a mirror up to them and say, like, this is what you’re messing up on. Instead, you can say, look, I’m just reporting what your own clients have told us.
David Meyer: 34:54
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely gives you a little third party cover. Yeah. To say things they need to hear.
John Corcoran: 35:03
So I know you now run the company on your own. You actually bought out your two remaining partners. What motivated that? And how has it been running the company after all these years? Running it yourself now.
David Meyer: 35:19
So the big benefit. So it happened. Nothing. Nothing bad happened. Nothing blew up. One of my former partners went to work for a former client, and he became a client. And the other partner that I’m buying out still works at spoke. He just wanted to; he didn’t want to work full time anymore and pull some chips off the table. So it’s just. Yeah for him and his life cycle where he’s at the thing that I didn’t know going into it that I wish I would have known is owning a third of the company. You still worry about 100% of the stuff. Like it’s not like, you know, it’s like you’re still responsible if if something goes south, it still potentially falls on you.
John Corcoran: 36:16
Yeah.
David Meyer: 36:17
So you got 100% of the downside and 30%, 33% of the upside. So why not just take the 100% of the upside. So that was for me.
John Corcoran: 36:33
Yeah. So there isn’t a part of you that maybe thinks, well, maybe the company wouldn’t be where it is today, or maybe it wouldn’t have grown to the size that it’s at without the business partners. You think you could have done it on your own or is that not? Go into the calculus of your observation.
David Meyer: 36:54
At some point I didn’t. I never took an accounting class or a finance class or that many business classes. So the business. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 37:04
Yeah. Same here, by the way. Yeah. I took one in community college and didn’t finish it. So like an accounting class.
David Meyer: 37:13
So it’s like, that’s the kind of stuff that I really had to learn.
John Corcoran: 37:16
Yeah.
David Meyer: 37:17
The hard way. And make some mistakes. But once we got through that, you know, as, as we would work together, I would by the end, I was taking I was handling most of the business stuff anyway.
John Corcoran: 37:31
Yeah. Yeah. So then it definitely, definitely makes sense. So, you know, this wouldn’t be a podcast interview in 2025 without me asking about AI and the impact on your business. So we’ve talked about it I guess, a little bit already. But any further thoughts on how AI is going to affect the work that you do in the future, or not at all?
David Meyer: 37:55
Right now, I’m just seeing it as a tool that we’re using. We’re able to work more efficiently. I’m able to take transcript notes and feed them into a ChatGPT or a cloud or whatever.
John Corcoran: 38:13
Yeah.
David Meyer: 38:14
And create personas. It’s definitely sped things up. Yeah. But I still have to ask the right question.
John Corcoran: 38:27
Yeah.
David Meyer: 38:30
Will it get to the point where AI is taking the place of people I don’t know? I’m sure I mean, someday, who knows? Right now, it’s just a better hammer.
John Corcoran: 38:45
How are you? You mentioned that you are and were the writer in the partnership. I’ve always identified as a writer. I had, you know, a number of jobs that were professional writing jobs. How does it affect your own personal identity?
David Meyer: 39:03
So I unfortunately haven’t been one of our main copywriters in years. I say unfortunately because I really enjoy it. Yeah. It’s it’s that. I love the creative part of it. I love the problem solving part of it. But I love working with writers now too. So.
John Corcoran: 39:30
And so it’s not that much of a leap then if you weren’t the one creating the copy, writing the copy anyways.
David Meyer: 39:36
And it’s still okay. And I still like it if I’m writing something, I’ll run it past I and say I am this, you are this. You know what? What am I missing? Yeah. What holes are there? What? So it’s like, way better than spell check.
John Corcoran: 39:58
Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I say to people is like, spell check on steroids. Yeah.
David Meyer: 40:02
Yeah. It was like spell check. And then, you know, there’s Grammarly. Help me with, you know, some of my tenses. I’m sure that I was missing or. Yeah, some split. Yeah. The split sentences. So it’s just an extension of that. It’s still I’m not going to. You still need a human in the loop. There’s nothing, maybe that’ll change. But right now, there’s nothing that we would take straight out of an eye and deliver it to a client.
John Corcoran: 40:34
Yeah. Yeah.
David Meyer: 40:36
Near good enough.
John Corcoran: 40:37
I know we’re just about out of time, so, David, this has been great. And I want to wrap up with my last question, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of practicing gratitude and also giving our guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge anyone, especially peers or contemporaries or mentors who’ve helped them in their journey. Is there anyone that you’d want to shout out and acknowledge?
David Meyer: 41:01
I know you’re an EO, my EO forum I’ve had. I’ve been in three different ones and each one has helped me immeasurably. Whether it’s, you know, I remember my first forum, I was complaining about not understanding the finances and it was a few meetings where I’m like, I’m just looking at these things. I just. And Don Sufco was just like, looked at me and went, and this wasn’t very gestalt of him, as you know.
Yeah. He’s like, shut the f up. Like, you’ve been talking about that for the last three meetings. Get your calendar out. We’re going to go to lunch.
We’re going to spend two hours there. You’re going to print out all your stuff, and I’m going to walk you through what these reports mean. And it’s just that it’s and it’s like whether it’s navigating the buyout of my partners. Yeah. That is difficult.
The loss of a client or hiring somebody or firing. Just having that peer group has been invaluable. And I’ve had a couple mentors through EO. Kevin Carley helped me for a couple of years because he was great to go. And somebody who’s been there done that to look at your business through that lens.
And I’ve got one now, Tim Doney, who’s just a powerhouse in Saint Louis. And the fact that he gives me a half an hour once a week, it’s just incredible how generous people are with their time and their wisdom.
John Corcoran: 42:52
That’s great.
David Meyer: 42:53
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 42:54
David, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you, learn more about speaking?
David Meyer: 43:00
Spokemarketing.com or they can reach out to me on LinkedIn.
John Corcoran: 43:04
Excellent, David, thanks so much.
David Meyer: 43:06
Thanks.
Outro: 43:10
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.