Cameron Heffernan: 09:26
I think it was we’ve had the phrase accidental entrepreneur. I think that’s me and it just was. It’s really more circumstantial. I was in Europe, I was there, I was sent over there on a US, a US job from a US company. Zero eight happened and I was let go.
If I was a European person, I’d have more protections, but I didn’t have those. So I needed to kind of fend for myself and figure something out. I connected with a person, an American person actually in, in Belgium. And I just decided we could keep doing what we were doing. It was a media marketing agency, but I would come back to the US and start the US office branch operation.
So I was still back in Europe every twice a year. And I’m just like, well, this is something to try. Why not give it a shot? And it just kept growing and going from there. I grew it, you know, over seven figures adding new people to the team.
And it was I loved what I was doing. I loved the feel, the autonomy that the every day is different kind of aspect. The there is no one right solution. Just got to go and figure it out. And I love that part of it.
And then Covid happened. So you know a lot changed again.
John Corcoran: 10:38
You know looking back on it. Were your clients too concentrated or too vulnerable to the global pandemic?
Cameron Heffernan: 10:47
Yeah yeah, a lot in manufacturing. And they were marked. Most of my client mix is mid-market you know say 5 to 50 million revenue companies. And so they can’t just, you know, sit back and wait it out for a few years. And manufacturing in particular, like full lines shut down for, for months.
So that made it harder. And then the with the, with that company, they gave them the option to kind of build it back, take a cut and build it back. I’m like, well I could also just do that all on my own. So why would I not do that? I think that’s that was a leap that I took.
Unfortunately I could take some clients and some work with me, and that’s how I kind of got started, truly on my own.
John Corcoran: 11:26
So you had been the founder of Mac Media USA then?
Cameron Heffernan: 11:30
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 11:31
So in.
Cameron Heffernan: 11:32
This country.
John Corcoran: 11:33
In this. Oh, okay. So it was a larger international country and you founded the USA branch of it?
Cameron Heffernan: 11:39
Yeah. And that was also really good experience for me. Now, understanding a mid-market company that wants to come into the US and get started from the from the get go, you know, I did all the entity set up from an overseas perspective. That’s not very tactical, but it’s also important. You know, it’s foundational and you got to get it right.
You know, tax considerations, all those kinds of things that I now work with, clients that are having to think of those considerations too.
John Corcoran: 12:06
Yeah. Actually I skipped over a period of your career. So you actually went and worked abroad before you started Mock Media USA. Correct. So you’ve worked in a couple of different countries.
So how did that come about? How did you end up doing that?
Cameron Heffernan: 12:19
Well let’s see. After college, I had a couple of years in DC, and I was doing different editorial things and writing and managing managing content. And I had just I had the bug, you know, in college, I did a semester abroad. And when I was a kid, I’d always gone to Anglo countries. Just so I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s a weakness of I don’t speak another language at the time.
And it’s like, well, where can I go and continue this, this journey? So I went to South Africa. I was in or enrolled at college program there, but I didn’t didn’t last very long. And I really just want to be in a foreign country and work and travel. So I got a job at a magazine and he was also an entrepreneur too.
He started up his own magazine, a technology magazine, and he was a brilliant guy. His philosophy was, if a provider can’t do it as well as I could, I’m going to do it myself. So he even made his own film. He even thought about doing his own printing, like offset printing for a big publication. So that gave me that.
You can do it yourself. You don’t have to just turn to someone else to do it. And that was a nice development for me. You know, my, you know, my learning.
John Corcoran: 13:26
And then I think you also worked in Europe and in Brussels. Is that right? Or is that just. Yeah, that was headquartered out of there.
Cameron Heffernan: 13:33
No, I was I was for four years in Belgium, in Brussels. Then I was living in the Flemish-speaking part, a university town called Leuven, and was in Belgium for about, you know, four, four and a half years. That was another fabulous experience.
John Corcoran: 13:49
Yeah. And so the job brought you there, I guess. Or did you want to move first?
Cameron Heffernan: 13:54
Yeah. well, I was open to it. I was I was working in a Fortune 500 staffing company, and it was weird. My boss came in one day. She says there’s opportunities in Australia and Belgium.
You’re interested. And I go, sure, let’s see which one plays out. And. And then fortunately, I’d taken some French in high school and that turned out to be very advantageous when I was living in Brussels.
John Corcoran: 14:15
So okay, so coming back to Covid times. So you have mock media. It goes down because of the client concentration in manufacturing. You decide I’m going to go start this on my own. What was it like striking out on your own.
And you know, having to do everything not as part of a larger entity?
Cameron Heffernan: 14:35
Yeah, it was a leap of faith. I did have a small partnership in between that did not work out. And that was another learning, you know, heavy, heavy cost learning experience. But the lesson.
John Corcoran: 14:47
What’s the lesson from that?
Cameron Heffernan: 14:48
You know, don’t take things on faith. You know, be careful who you trust and when you trust them. And the reason you need to do all those due diligence steps are there for a reason. And don’t just blow them off. And I kept I kept losing sight of that.
So that was the key learning painful lesson. But now I’m glad that I had it.
John Corcoran: 15:06
Yeah, yeah. So then you ultimately go, so you kind of like working. You’re stepping your way down from like the start in the US division of a larger company that’s outside the US to a partnership to solely, solely solo on your own. Completely on your own. Yeah.
Cameron Heffernan: 15:20
That was that was a full on my own. I remember I knew it wasn’t going to work out, but I started to set up the steps, you know, I had to do. And it was a good call. I had an EO, was a mentor I was working with, and we were just talking back and forth. And he goes, well, why don’t you just go do it on your own?
And I’m like, why the hell didn’t I think of that? And he’s like, take a few months to set it up. And I’m like, of course, of course, that’s what I should do. And that is how it played out. And yeah, it was a painful lesson in separation.
But when you do that, you feel like, man, I wish I had three years earlier. But of course, that’s not how life works. So?
John Corcoran: 15:56
So tell me what decisions you made around the structure or the clientele or the services you provided with Beyond Borders marketing that were deliberately different from what you’d done with Mog media?
Cameron Heffernan: 16:09
Sure. So when I first left that partnership, we had a different brand name, and it was called your B2B marketing and put it together kind of quickly and thought, that’s descriptive. That is what we do. We do B2B marketing. And I could, you know, get the domain and put it together.
But as time went by, I realized marketing is becoming ever more commoditized every month, every week. This is pre AI mind you. So that even got worse right. So like what I meant by that was companies, agencies who compete with us can do what we do from Latin America, from South Africa, from other parts of the world, a fraction of the cost. The SaaS tools and the different stack they need to work with is becoming much more affordable and accessible.
So I’m in this very, very commoditized space. I’ve really got to niche down into something different and unique so I can stand out. That’s how I came up with this angle beyond Borders marketing. It fit with my past experiences and my personality. When I would show the new brand and the site to people, that’s like, it’s a great idea and it’s really it’s you.
That’s what your, your life has been about. And I think I really identified with the problems that we’re trying to solve. Right. So one common use case is the owner of a let’s just take a €20 million Italian manufacturer that maybe they have some US customers and they have an aspiration to be here, but they don’t know how to do it. And they think, well, let’s go set up an entity.
I’ll you know, my nephew did a semester abroad at Bu. Let’s send him over there. He’ll run the run. The subsidiary. How could he fail?
It’s America, you know. And it doesn’t work out because they don’t have the support. They don’t have the experience here. They don’t have the network. They really don’t are not equipped to make it a success.
So that’s a use case where we can help them. Another is they hire the head of a US subsidiary, the American person, to run it, but they don’t give them the priority, the budget, the support that they need. You know, the the spotlight is still on Europe or wherever, India or China, the Home Office. And that’s just a subsidiary out there. Let them do their own thing.
Again, America is a big market. What could go wrong. And both of those are recipes for failure.
John Corcoran: 18:18
Yeah. So I thought that the challenge was setting up a company like this would be that you’re American, you’re not Spanish or you’re not Flemish or you’re not Aussie, you’re not South African. And so speaking to those potential clients would be challenging as they would maybe prefer to hire someone who’s from their own home country, speaks their language or knows their culture. But it sounds like that is not the same barrier, especially if you’re working with someone who’s already the head of a US subsidiary. So maybe that’s even another American who just happens to be setting up the US subsidiary, kind of like you did for, you know, a European company or something like that.
Cameron Heffernan: 19:01
Yeah. I mean, I think the case of one of our clients is this to a T as an American guy, he’s up in Chicago. His company is headquartered in Austria. And they didn’t have they had kind of flat, stagnant growth for for a few years. And one of the problems was that they didn’t have the right person in that seat before him.
And he came in. We worked together to really niche down. Again, people think it’s a big market there. What could go wrong. But if you try to take on everybody.
We have a I have a blog post about this by David, not Goliath. Take on going to niche sectors, going to go into segments that you can own and compete in. And they doubled their sales in two years, and they fivex their EBITDA projection by doing that, by having that strategy of really tight focus, where can we be a big player in this market? And that playbook, you know, let’s let’s just look at what are their other other subsidiary heads? The Managing Director, US, the president Americas, that need that approach and then the whole other crowd is their pre-entry like I’m talking to some companies in the past couple of weeks that have good sales here, 10 to 15 million annual sales.
But it’s they run it remotely. They have customers here. They don’t have an entity. They don’t have staff. It’s not going to grow if you if you don’t, you know, grow.
Put some some thought and some cultivation into it.
John Corcoran: 20:19
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s you mentioned a second ago obviously changing the landscape as you said, we were talking earlier about Marcus Sheridan, who’s a real well respected speaker. And, you know, he’s done some work or talk. He’s talked going out talking, writing books about interactive pricing pages and basically tools that are attracting people, which is important given that the the landscape of SEO, which attracts, has for 20 years now attracted people to find people online is changing.
So can you talk a little bit about that, about the idea of creating tools or an interactive pricing page and the role that that plays for businesses today?
Cameron Heffernan: 21:04
Sure. His main thesis, his first book was They Ask You answer and the thesis. There is basically the questions that your customers and prospects would be asking and are asking. That should be front and center in all of your content, whether it’s a web page, a landing page, a video, whatever. Okay, the problem is, most companies are reluctant or hesitant to do that.
I’m not going to give away my pricing. I’m not going to give away all the information. My competitors will find it. And his his idea flips it on its head. Those are the exact pieces of information your customers, your future customers, your prospects are going to want to know.
So taking it a step further, his his latest book, Endless Customers, looks at again he’s he writes it for marketing agencies and creative agencies and in different digital providers like like us, you’re going to be obsolete in two years if you don’t do something different, if you just keep cranking out blog posts, which anybody can do with a good GPT and an internet connection now, right? If you just keep cranking that out and LinkedIn posts and tweets, you’re going to become obsolete. So you have to look at what’s going to bring people back, what value will they will they come back to and seek video podcasts, interactive calculators? We have our first one that we were launching is called the US Market Growth Potential Calculator. So it’s looking at whether you’re a pre-market entry or a subsidiary, what are the go-to-market gaps that you have?
What are the foundational aspects that you’re missing to have your business succeed here and how can you close those. We use it as a piece to kind of get in the door and get people, you know, to pique their interest, but doing it can apply to almost any business, you know, a roofing company, any company that has any residential home improvement kind of project is perfect for that. And those are the things people are asking. You know, people have consumed 20 to 30 pieces of content by the time they actually reach out to sales. No one’s calling a salesperson in the first.
Yeah, yeah. Inform me. No, they’re going to go to the website. I read six papers. I watched two videos already.
If you don’t have those assets, you got to go in and make them.
John Corcoran: 23:09
Yeah. And you’re even talking. We were talking beforehand about creating AI agents as a marketing tool, which is interesting to me because, you know, I use I would think that that is not a marketing function, that that is a, I mean, requires a tech team to implement. Maybe it’s become so accessible now and so manageable to create something like that, that it can now become your AI agent, can become a marketing tool to draw people in. Talk a little bit about that.
Cameron Heffernan: 23:39
Yeah, I think it can be. There’s this debate going on in entrepreneurial circles. Who’s going to be the first person to launch a unicorn business, $1 billion business with one person. Right. And who’s going to.
John Corcoran: 23:52
Be Sam Altman has said maybe others have said it as well, that it’s going to be possible soon.
Cameron Heffernan: 23:58
Yeah. So I would love to hear how that’s going to play out and how it’s going to work. But I think the concept of I can’t be in all these places at once, you know, I can’t go be doing eight podcasts, interviews and YouTube videos per week. But what if we could make a facsimile of me that has a language library of my information and my knowledge and all the things I’ve been writing and speaking and producing over the years there? I’ve trained it, I’ve taught it, and the quality of the avatars, the visual quality is dramatically improved.
The tech stack that I’ve heard people talk about is effective is 11 labs for the audio, again, is one of the good options for the video part. And that’s, I think, a good key for AI in general. If you go to your GPT five and ask it to go write War and Peace, for me, it’s going to be a mess. But if you have it right, two sentences at a time and then a chapter or a paragraph and then a couple chapters, it’s got to be it’s got to build on it. Right.
So I think anything you make a project like that, that approach will work. Look at the best in class tool you have to work with and use that to form, you know, help with your storytelling. Poppy AI is a really good sort of whiteboarding tool for building a storyboard. You use it to go out and research. What are the the most compelling speakers and content creators in my niche?
What are people writing? What’s the hook that’s going to pull people in to watch the whole video? What are the components? You can train your gpts in all your favorite authors, you know, and load them up. And it’s going to follow Derral Eves’ YouTube formula.
Alex Ramsay’s $100 million leads Marcus Sheridan’s approaches from his books, and they’re all they’re forming your sort of board of of of content creators.
John Corcoran: 25:48
Yeah. It’s incredible really. All these different capabilities that are at our fingertips now that we can have these ideas and that we can train these agents to act on our behalf, guided by, you know, the the systems or the processes or the thought leaders that we, you know, agree with their approach. And we feel like it’s it’s on point for our brand.
Cameron Heffernan: 26:13
Absolutely. Now, that part’s essential. Like it has to drive what you do. It’s got to relate to your core service core function. Otherwise why are you doing it?
And then two, it does also creates an opportunity. If you flip it around like I’ve seen, more and more of my clients are doing some postcard mailers and revisiting their trade show strategy because they just need some more telemarketing. You know that. Again, don’t forget the humanities. You have to have this mix.
You have to have all those different touch points, because who you’re selling to and who you’re working with, different age mix, different, different life experiences, they’re going to resonate in different ways with different people.
John Corcoran: 26:50
I do wonder if people will start to tune out in, in a sense, some of the things that they used to value more online, because we’re getting to a point where we might not know if something is human or not. Whereas before we see a video from someone and we listen to it because it’s a human sharing some wisdom. But, you know, as this stuff evolves and we’re not sure if that’s really a person or not, if we’ll leave, it’ll alert us, learn, you know, lean us towards distrusting that content in some way, and then we’ll revert to things where we know that there’s humanity into it, like a trade show, like a networking event. You know, something along those lines where we don’t question its humanity because we know the person’s right across from us. We know it’s a human.
Cameron Heffernan: 27:37
Yeah. No. Like, I still love getting together with my team in person, and we all gather around the room and actually spend time together and work on a whiteboard with real paper and markers, and that’s hugely valuable. And you always, you know, have to have that mix. If you’re a client mix and your provider mix is overseas, it makes it hard to do that, of course.
So you really need to have the ability to work all these different components and these different levers into your toolkit.
John Corcoran: 28:03
Yeah, yeah for sure. Cameron, this has been great. And I didn’t warn you beforehand because I forgot to, so I apologize, but I’m going to ask this question anyways. This is my last question. I’m a big fan of gratitude, and I’m a big fan of giving our guests a little bit of space at the end here to thank anyone who’s been with them along the way, especially peers or contemporaries.
Could be someone you know through entrepreneurs organization, which you and I both belong to, could be another agency owner, or someone like that, but especially someone who’s still in your life. And, you know, it goes without saying that we’re grateful to our family and our team. So I’d love to hear if there’s any peers, contemporaries or anyone else out there that you would also add to that list.
Cameron Heffernan: 28:42
Oh wow. Okay, I guess I’ll thank my my current team. We’ve with in one case, we’ve been together from the beginning of this current iteration of the company. And so she stuck with me through thick and thin, which has been good. And we recently hired a young lady whose name is Yetta, and she’s German national now living in the US.
And it’s great to have that international flair and flavor and remember what it’s like into that part of the world. So like to give a shout out to them and a thanks for, for, you know, working hard.
John Corcoran: 29:17
Cool. All right, Cameron, where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you, and follow the work that you do?
Cameron Heffernan: 29:24
Oh yeah. Beyond Borders marketing. And our URL is Marketing Beyond Borders. Com.
John Corcoran: 29:30
Excellent. All right, Cameron, thanks so much.
Cameron Heffernan: 29:32
Thank you, John.
Outro: 29:36
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.