This week, we interview entrepreneur, Tim Fitzpatrick, about how he built his marketing agency and the life journey he took to get into marketing. Tim gives us a ton of great ideas for how to maximize your time, outsource, and treat subcontractors.
Bekkah: He has a lot of business experience he has so many different things that he’s done in his life, but what he’s doing now is what he’s going to tell us about and how he got there. What do you do, Tim?
Tim: First off, Bekkah, Ruthie, thanks so much for having me! Super excited to be here! What do I do? I own a marketing agency, at this point, and we help service businesses, primarily. Simplifying marketing so that they can grow with less stress. We do that by creating and implementing a plan to communicate the right message to the right people. We get involved with a mix of what I call “done for you” where they just want us to do it for them or “done with you” where we coach them in marketing. We get involved in digital marketing, marketing consulting and strategy work, and then marketing coaching.
How Do You Get Started in Marketing?
Ruthie: Wow! That’s awesome! Okay! There’s a lot there, but why did you start with what you’re doing now?
Tim: How did I start with marketing in general?
Ruthie: More like your heart behind it or what was your “why”?
Tim: Yeah, our vision really is just to have a positive lasting impact on the businesses that we touch. Some of those are going to be businesses that we don’t even work with, right? We’re putting out content. We want to impact and help people get to where they want to go. You know, with marketing so many businesses are just battling information overload.
There are just so many different marketing channels now than there used to be and every week we’re being bombarded with you know a new tactic from some new guru and it just makes people feel overwhelmed. When you’re overwhelmed you just can’t do anything.
Ruthie: Yeah.
Tim: But I believe that marketing shouldn’t be difficult. It is for a lot of business owners but we just want to make it simple, take out the complexity so that you can actually market and grow your business. Because if you don’t have marketing bringing in leads and customers you can have the best product or service in the world and none of it matters. Marketing is so, so important.
What Made You Decide to Get Into Marketing as a Business?
Ruthie: What brought you to that point? Were you in marketing your whole life or you just kind of stumbled upon it?
Tim: No. So my entrepreneurial journey, like most, has not been a straight path. It’s been kind of a winding road. The first business I was a partner in was a wholesale distribution company. I got involved in that right after college. We were selling consumer electronics into what we called “the custom installation market.”
We were selling to contractors that were installing home theater systems, distributed audio in homes. Either custom homes or they were working with production home builders. I grew that business for it was close to 10 years. We grew about 60% a year on average.
Ruthie: Wow!
Tim: And then we sold that business in 2005 and I worked for the company that bought us for another three years. Then I got out and I got in residential real estate after that. I had always been interested in real estate. I was like, “Hey, it’s time to do something different!”So I got into real estate.
That was in the 2010 time frame and most people would say, “god, that’s a horrible time to get into real estate, Tim!” But I’ve always been the type of person that felt there’s opportunity in every market and in that market there was opportunity to help people get out of foreclosure. I started doing a lot of short sale business.
Rather than foreclosing, we list the house, we sell it for less than it was worth, the bank gives the homeowner approval to do that, and that’s how I grew that business. But, man! I hated it. I just didn’t like what I was doing every day and I finally reached a point where like you know I’d wake up in the morning and go, Oh my god. I have to do this all over again.” That was such a stark contrast to when I was in the distribution business because I felt like I never worked. I just loved it and when I reached that point I said man, “I have to do something different.”
That’s when I started looking at what else I could do. At the time, mobile apps were becoming really, really popular and so when I initially started Rialto, we were solely focused on mobile applications, but about three years in Apple made some pretty drastic changes in their app publishing guidelines that made me realize that I was very vulnerable to the policies of Apple and Google and that was not a good place to be. So we shifted and pivoted and that’s when we got into offering much more comprehensive marketing services where we could really be an outsourced marketing partner for a business and that’s where we are today. As you can see, that was not a very straight path, was it?
Ruthie: No! *laughs*
What Was Your Goal in Starting a Businesses in Technology?
Bekkah: When you started getting into technology and looking at “oh, I want to be in marketing” what was the first thing you set out to accomplish? Was it to build apps or what was your goal that you thought “this is what I’m going after”?
Tim: Initially, we were just going to build apps for businesses and organizations. A lot of our business, initially, was actually in the K-12 education space. We were working with elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and they were using their apps as a communication tool with their community.
If you have kids, you’re trying to figure out what’s on the lunch menu. You go to most school websites and they’re a disaster. Especially, if you try to access it on your phone! So they’re using their app as a way to communicate with their stakeholders and make it easy for them that’s how we initially grew that business.
What Kind of Risks Did You Identify in Starting a Business?
Ruthie: You had mentioned how you were kind of at the mercy of Apple and Google. When you started out with this business what were the potential risk factors either from a financial perspective or even with your family? As you’re diving into this what were those risks that you were able to identify right away?
Tim: Well, I mean, I think the biggest risk, which is the risk that most of us run into when we start a business is “is this going to work?” Right! And “if this doesn’t work, what’s going to happen? Am I going to be successful or am I going to fails?” For me, that was the biggest risk. I mean, my wife knew that I was an entrepreneur when we met. I’ve always been that way so she’s always been super supportive. So that aspect of it has made it a lot easier for me.
I think, as an entrepreneur, if your family’s not on board you’re going to have a lot of problems. I’ve never had that problem so I feel very fortunate. When I started, the biggest risk was “can I make this work?” and as I started getting into it, again, since I was focused really strictly on mobile apps and I was focused on a very niche market, the K-12 education space, I knew exactly what I needed to do. that made it a whole lot easier.
Unfortunately, as I got into that market I realized, one, that it was that I was vulnerable because I was in that app space. And two, it got to the point, after I have some experience, I was like, “Man, I know we can help these schools, but this is really difficult. I don’t know if I want to be in this space long term.” That’s when we started to shift gears pretty dramatically.
What Has Been The Biggest Obstacle in Running a Business?
Bekkah: What would you say has been the biggest obstacle you’ve had to overcome in that. Either through the process of transition or just in your business in general where you’re like “yeah, we did this and I’ve been so proud of it.”
Tim: Yeah, the biggest obstacle for me was that transition from solely offering mobile apps and really being in a very niche market to “okay we’re going to offer much more comprehensive services and start working with more small businesses.” And for us, specifically, it was more service-based businesses. How the heck am I going to do all this? Because you start to look at digital marketing I mean, website design, content marketing, SEO, social media! There are all these things! You can’t possibly do every single one of those things well. So how was I going to be able to offer those things and do it well and help customers get results? That was a big obstacle and it took some time to work through that.
What Did You Need To Get Started in App Development?
Bekkah: When you first started, did you start with a team, or was it just you, and what did you need to basically start off in technology to do app development, and then you transitioned what were the pieces in place?
Tim: With app development, initially, it was just me. I did have a partner at the time who was helping with some of the stuff. He had some design skills and more of the technical side of it than I did so he helped with that. I was spending most of my time going out and finding new business. That worked out pretty well as we transitioned he got out. It wasn’t a good fit for him.
I started doing a lot of the stuff myself and then I had to bring people on or find partners that I could rely on to help me. Because, again, I couldn’t do it all. What I’m good at is the fundamental part of it. The strategy work, you know, your target market, your messaging, putting a plan together. I’m good at that and then what we now do is we put the rest of those back-end pieces together and manage that for the client so that they have one point of contact.
Most small business owners I think struggle with marketing because, one, they’re trying to manage it themselves and they don’t really understand exactly what needs to happen, and, two, oftentimes they’re working with two or three different marketing providers and there’s a huge communication breakdown. You really need somebody that’s a single point of contact that’s championing that overall plan.
Ruthie: Yeah, to really have that cohesive message,
Tim: Yes, to have some cohesiveness and some direction as to actually what we’re trying to accomplish.
How Did You Choose What Type of Marketing Services You Wanted to Offer in Your Business?
Ruthie: When you first started out you mentioned you had SEO which is “search engine optimization” for those who don’t know and then social media. How did you spearhead that? You’re like, “Right now we’re just gonna go for social.” And then you kind of got good at that and then said “SEO” or you just went for it all at once with those services?
Tim: What I actually did was I started looking at the different services that we were going to provide. I said, “Look. I can start reaching out to people and try and make connections,” because it’s very common in the marketing agency or marketing consulting world for most businesses don’t do everything in-house. They work with other companies to fulfill some of their services so I might reach out to an SEO company and say, “Hey, I’ve got a marketing consulting business and we’re looking for an SEO partner. Do you guys do that type of stuff? How would that relationship look like? How would we work together?”
That’s very common and so I said, “Look. I could do this work and it may take me six to 12 months to work some of these relationships or maybe I can find somebody else, some other company that already has some of these things in place.” So what I actually came across and I had been getting this information for a while but I had been getting information from a guy by the name of John Jance who’s with Duct Tape Marketing. He had a consultant network already in place and so I actually became a certified Duct Tape Marketing consultant within his network.
One, they have a lot of systems and documentation in place about how to run a marketing agency, how to run your business. They had a lot of tools in place so they allowed me to hit the ground running much faster than if I would have done it myself. So I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. And they already had a lot of relationships in place that I could take advantage of. I also had a network of other consultants like myself. We all have strengths and weaknesses and it’s not uncommon for people to partner within the network when they need help so it gave me a team of people that I could rely on when I needed it and I didn’t have to figure out all this stuff myself.
How to Decide What to Invest Your Time into for R&D as a Business Owner
Ruthie: Speaking of figuring out all that stuff by yourself one thing – Bekkah and I both have a background in digital marketing and it seems like because there are things that are always changing all the time you could really spend all of your time in research and development. In how you have progressed as a company from start to now and even moving forward how do you prioritize what things to research and develop and what things are a waste of time?
Tim: That’s where the network comes into play and that’s also where – honestly I don’t spend a lot of my time on that. I rely more on the network that I’m a part of and following people that I think have a really good pulse on the market where it’s going what’s happening. I don’t need to spend a lot of my time on that.
I’ll rely on other people that I think have a really good pulse on that and then I just stay in front of it. What are they talking about? Where are they seeing things going and then I’ll take that information and figure out are there shifts or new additions or things that we need to change within our business and what we’re doing based on what they’re seeing.
Ruthie: Wow, I think that’s really good because it just shows that you’re still paying attention to what’s going on in the industry but you’re really tapping into those resources and the expertise of those people who are already putting in all the effort for that. I think that’s really cool.
Tim: You know, it’s like we talked about before, there’s too much going on in marketing and it’s changing all the time! That’s one of the things I love about it! It’s very dynamic but you can’t possibly – you know, now we’re talking there are all kinds of things popping up about you know AI and voice search. Man, I could spend hours looking at all those things and still not really have a pulse on it! There are so many! There are other people that know those specific spaces much better than I do. I might as well take advantage of their knowledge and their expertise and then figure out how we need to incorporate what they see coming into our business.
Bekkah: Leveraging other people’s knowledge.
Tim: Yes.
Bekkah: I love doing that! When you were growing your business how has having employees allowed you to diversify but I have two questions there. When did you decide, “Yeah. I need more employees,” or how do you go about making that decision when you’re like “this is when we need more capacity”?
How Did You Know When You Had Reached Capacity and Needed More People?
Tim: A couple of things there, one, right now, I don’t have any employees other than myself but I have full-time contractors that work remotely. I have right now I have a client support and project manager that lives in Croatia. I have a website designer and just a general design guy that lives in the Philippines and then I have another guy in the Philippines that does a lot of content stuff for us. He’s doing a lot of our social media stuff. He wears a number of different hats. They’re not employees, but they work for me full-time and I pay them for full-time work.
For me, I’ve always realized you can never scale a business and do everything so if you wanna build a business that gives you freedom of time and that you can scale you have to figure out how you can start to take yourself out of processes so the business can run without you. Because if it requires you to be there all the time all you’ve really done is create yourself a job. That’s easier said than done it takes time to do that but you have to start hiring people.
Personally, it was always just a matter of trying to hire people for things that either was not the highest and best use of my time, things that I wasn’t good at, and when I hire people it allows me to spend my time on the things that are higher dollar, that I love doing, that I’m good at. So by hiring our team members, it frees up my time to do the things that I really need to do that are going to drive the business forward.
How Did You Find Quality People to Work With?
Bekkah: You hit on something that I actually didn’t even know! Oh! Hidden nugget! I’m so excited! *Tim laughs* I love this concept. I’ve been looking at it a lot and being like, “Wow! How do people do that even?” Especially when there are so many places in the underdeveloped world or whatever that need jobs and if you’re tapping into places where there are those networks of people that are saying, “I have skills and if you give me a computer, I can do it.” How did you go about forming those relationships? Is that through the marketing program or is there another way you’ve been looking at as well?
Tim: No, I’ll get fairly granular here. With the people that I hired in the Philippines, I actually used an online job board called onlinejobs.ph that specializes in Filipino workers. You can hire people to do all kinds of different things but that’s where I started. I knew that I wanted to hire somebody for this specific job. I went in there. I posted a job. I found the person. I hired them and then once I hired them they [onlinejobs.ph] were out of the process. Initially, I was paying our remote team via Paypal now I actually use a service called Transferwise but I look at, even though they’re not employees for our company, I look at them as team members.
I treat them like employees because that’s where I think most people go wrong with remote contractors! They treat them like crap! They think that they’re dispensable and it’s like these people are just like anybody else. They want to have a good job. They want to feel good about what they’re doing. They want to be treated well and they know that they’re going to get paid well for what they do. I just treat them well and because of that, I think that we have a good relationship.
I mean, my web design guy has been with me for over five years! I’ve got my other guy in the Philippines who has been with me for I think close to three now. Then the client support person that I hired the project manager I hired him from Croatia. In Croatia, I went to a site called jobrack.eu that specializes in Eastern European workers and I will tell you what! There are some highly, highly educated and very well-qualified people in Eastern Europe and there are tons of them. That site, they did a great job. I told them what I needed to do and they actually started outreach for me as part of that job post. I think it was like two it was between two and three hundred dollars for the job post.
Ruthie: Wow!
Tim: The thing that I think you have to be really good at if you’re going to work with people remotely you have to figure out how you’re going to communicate with people. We do that our project management software helps with that I use Loom all the time which is a screen capture software, if you’re not familiar with it. Loom works awesome. I use it all the time. Then I also meet with them consistently.
Ruthie: Meet with your team?
Tim: Yeah, with our team. My project manager I meet with more consistently, but the team members that I have in the Philippines I meet with every couple weeks. You know, then you have to just give clear direction and guidance because you’re not there to sit there and look over their shoulder. You have to tell them exactly what they need to do.
Ruthie: I think they do huge, especially when you run your own business it’s really easy to micromanage. I think that can be something that people are really fearful of when they subcontract because then they are essentially releasing some of that control. When it’s your baby, you don’t want that!
Tim: Yes! But I think you have to hire people that you can trust. People that are responsible that all goes into the hiring process but I also think too if you can give them clear direction and you know exactly what you want them to do, to me, if they’re getting their work done and they’re doing a good job that’s all I care about.
How you did it or when you did it – who cares? If you can give them the freedom to do what they need to do you’re creating a really solid work environment and a place that they’re gonna love being a part of and a place that, long term, hopefully, they can create some meaning from.
Resources For Anyone Who Wants to Start a Marketing Agency
Bekkah: Okay, I have another question for you. This is the final one before we transition into our Gawk portion. What advice or resources would you recommend to someone who’s looking at starting out in marketing? Doing a marketing agency, whatever, what does that look like?
Tim: If I was doing this all over again, I wish that I would have come across you know Duct Tape Marketing sooner rather than later and because, look, I don’t care what kind of business it is, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The systems, the frameworks, the processes that you need to take advantage of to be successful they’re already out there you just need to find them. Duct Tape Marketing was a huge help for me but there are others! Digital Marketer is another really big one. They have all kinds of tools and guidance.
I’m sure there are others but find organizations like that where you can do some initial research to really try and figure out what you want to do in this space because I mean you know look marketing is vast. There are all kinds of different things you can do. Find those organizations that are putting out the information that that resonates with you, that gives you some of those systems, and those frameworks that you can use modify them to work for you and be your own, and then just start.
Ruthie: Yeah that’s all really, really good content. I’m just excited that we got to talk with you and kind of hear about your journey and so thank you for sharing that with us!
Tim: Absolutely! Appreciate it!
