Arnie Kuenn - CEO of Vertical Measures

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today we are talking to Arnie Kuenn, the CEO of Vertical Measures. We brought Arnie in to bring marketing value to our CTOs, and we discuss his hub and spoke model to drive customers where you want them, the importance of looking active, and execution of a content strategy. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:00:25) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Before the eye of the tiger, I was watching your video on content marketing.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:00:42) Which one would that be?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) It was short. It was like six minutes, and you were giving some advice about different types, six types of content that someone needs to be making.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:00:52) Gotcha.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) That's good stuff.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:00:55) Okay, good. Appreciate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) Do you find yourself giving advice a lot about what type of content to make?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:01:00) Oh, all the time. Yes. For years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) Is that the core of your business?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:01:07) Yes. Do you know anything about us, or...

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) Yeah, I know the...

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:01:11) Background? Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) Yeah, go ahead. Give me the background for everyone else's benefit.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:01:15) Yeah. So our business, we're a digital marketing agency, and we are sort of rebranding ourselves. We originally came about twelve years ago as an SEO agency. Five, six years ago, really focused on content marketing. And now we're a much more holistic agency, about 50 full-time employees, and we do it all. So, I suppose the quick descriptor is a full-service digital marketing agency. But we've been teaching content marketing, have written a couple books, we teach a lot of workshops, and so that goes all the way back to answer your question of, you know, do we have to explain this a lot? And so that's why the answer is yes, and for quite a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) I always like having people on that know what they're talking about. And so I always research who the people are and I consume some of their content because, you know, it's important that we bring on quality people that give quality advice. For example, we had someone on the show last week, and we asked them, we said, you're a startup co-founder and you've got $10,000. It's you and another co-founder. You made this cool little app and now you need to go market it. How would you spend that $10,000? She goes, oh, that budget's way too small. You'd spend like, you know, 5 or 5.5, maybe 10. I don't know. 5 is even really small to make one video and then the rest of it to push out, but you really couldn't do much with $10,000. And I was like, alright, we're not airing that piece of advice because that is horrible advice. Because I have made apps and I have subsequently had to market my own apps. I flip open my iPhone, make 10 small videos varying different types of content, run $100 at each video, see which one performs the best cost per install. There's inevitably one that's cheaper than all of them, and then broadcast that one to the market. And like, that cost my time and some money to test which ones work, and then I just use the rest of the $9,100 to push the video that works.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:03:21) Great. Well, you know, and everybody has their perspective. Right? I don't know who this person is or what organization they were with, and so they might be used to way, way, way bigger budgets and not really understand the concept of bootstrapping a business. And if $10,000 is your budget, then $10,000 is your budget, and you've got to make it work. So, but I would tend to agree. I would not have spent it all on a video without any further plan. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:50) I think it's reasonable to say that regardless of what your background is, if you own and operate a company that's a marketing company, you got 40 people, you made it that far, suggesting to a co-founder to spend half of their $10,000 budget to make a video is bad advice.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:04:07) Probably. That's true. Yeah. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:10) And you need a lot more with that. But we'll move on. So, yeah, I liked your content. The one, you went over different types of written content. You have one of those videos to talk about different types of video content?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:04:23) No, I don't think I do. And I will tell you that also because video, at the moment, is still, you know, being totally honest as an agency, it's still probably the thing I wish we would improve on the most. And then it's kind of interesting what you just said. There's a little bit of an internal debate even happening here. Your comparison of the iPhone videos, quick iPhone videos, and a $5,000 or $10,000 production video. And we have, we have everything from a client perspective, and we're pretty good at producing the iPhone, small green room interview style projects. But the $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 video shoot out in another location for two full days is not necessarily what we do at all. Yet there's still this debate, you know, of, we've got to raise the bar. We've got to get to that point. You know, our clients are asking for that. So, and that's kind of why I said what I said, you know, how I responded to you about, you know, everybody has a different perspective. But, anyway, I don't think I have a video on that particular topic now. Not that I know of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:32) Yeah. Well, we just took the science approach because, you know, that allowed us to put rockets into space. And we took the approach of, let's just try a few things...

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:05:40) I'm a big...

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:40) ...see what works, and then let's just do more of what works.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:05:44) Yeah. We try to emphasize two things. One is fail fast, and the other thing is, yeah, don't wait for it to become perfect. Because if you do, you'll never publish anything, which is another frustration with content marketing, depending, you know, it's one of the reasons we see people fail, or at least not succeeding to the level they had hoped they would. It's in the execution, and part of execution is actually publishing the stuff and not just waiting till you have something you think is the dream piece of content or a perfect piece of content, whether it's video or written or whatever it might be, or audio, just like this one started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:22) Are you guys doing any audio marketing?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:06:24) Not too much. We don't run our own podcast. I'm a guest on quite a few podcasts. But what, where we're probably one of our actual strongest marketing things, is we still do, and the reason I say still is we've been doing it for now maybe eight or nine years in a row, but we do a monthly webinar. So that is recorded and then republished, and they can follow a PowerPoint with it, but it's primarily audio. And it still does really well for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:56) And what do you touch on in there?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:06:58) Everything. We have about, well, maybe half of the webinars we do throughout the year. So we do 12 in a year. Yeah. Probably six of them will have guests, and then the other six would be put on by internal folks. It's all digital marketing related. So we'll cover everything from, you know, content to SEO to paid media, conversion rate optimization, and so on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:22) So you're the CEO, right?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:07:25) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:26) And grew this company from nothing to where it is today.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:07:30) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:31) We usually talk with CTOs. We're having you on specifically to bring value to some CTOs. We're going to ask you some questions later.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:07:35) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:35) But right now, I'm just really curious about you as a human. What were some of the struggles that you faced when growing your company?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:07:44) All of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:46) All of them.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:07:48) Yeah. Well, and this actually is, technically, my fourth startup, fourth business. The first one, actually, I was pretty young and it failed in about a year, and I learned a lot of lessons there. This is, so this is the third in a row that actually have worked. So, yeah, we literally started. I'd sold a previous business, wasn't sure what I was going to do next, moved back home, home office with my wife. I was doing internet marketing for some friends and some business associates, and you know, had to set up an LLC. So I did, called it Vertical Measures because we wanted to help people grow their business vertically and measure everything we do, and just started getting more and more and more business. So I've had the advantage of at least going through this a couple times. But, you know, the difficult thing I think in our particular industry, and maybe you hear this from others that you talk to and certainly CTOs, is that things are moving really fast. You know, the way we marketed 20 years ago compared to 10 years ago, compared to today, it's just, every day there's something new to read and track from, you know, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, the display market, you know, and on and on. And I'm talking about daily. So it's a daily education process. There's still sitting and resting under laurels. So that's probably the biggest challenge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:26) So what does it look like as far as, like, if I were to look at a pie chart of the content you distribute? Or you, you write articles, make videos, and then you run ads, and then you're going through some funnels to convert for your customers? Is that what you've got? Is that what you guys do?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:09:40) Yep, pretty much. You know, in a perfect world, we would start off with creating a strategy for a client. And generally we'll have the customer journey, the client, you know, our client's customer journey as a focus of that strategy and lay out a strategy based on that journey. And then we have, you know, several different areas that we really focus on from a digital marketing perspective. So many of the things you just said create, you know, but it generally always starts with content. You know, without content, you have nothing to advertise, you have nothing to optimize, and so on. So we do a content audit. We'll do a site audit. We'll do a lot of brainstorming, make recommendations, and then we'll really focus on, you know, of course, getting the content there and then figuring out the best way and the best odds of optimizing it to get it to show up on page one of Google, and then how to amplify or, you know, usually spend paid media to get the right content in front of the right audience. And, you know, it's a long-term strategy. None of this is, you know, try it out for 90 days. This is, you know, minimum of a one-year commitment generally, if you're just getting started or you're not being successful at the moment. It usually takes that long. And we have all kinds of data to show, we will share our average client stats, so not individual success stories, but our stats for all of our clients bundled. And we can pretty much prove it's six months. It takes about six months before we start seeing a nice upward tick. Twelve months later, the traffic's generally growing. And I'm talking now, of course, about organic. And then in two years, we can almost always more than double a client's traffic to their site and conversions. But you've got to stick with the plan.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:29) Yeah. Well, that's the hardest thing to get a client to do.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:11:32) Yeah. Execution is everything. You know, I'm asked a lot of times, you know, what, oh, what's the silver bullet or what's the shortcut? Surely, you must know how to skip all this hard work. You know? And I tell them all, there's no shortcut. But if I had to say there's, you know, one magic bullet, it is execution. Because, again, we study every, we've got about 50, 60 clients, and we can compare the ones where this is working against the ones where it's not. And it always boils down to prioritizing commitment and execution of the strategy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:04) Yeah, like the business. That's what business is like. You're like, oh, you know, it's real cool. Oh, you must be so awesome. You're the CEO of your own company, Arnie. Or they're like, Joel, you have a podcast. You have like 70,000 listeners. That must be so crazy. Look at all the cool people you have on the podcast. And I'm like, yeah, dude. I mean, I wake up at 6:30. We rock. We plan. We record. We do multiple shows a day. Like, if you came and paired with me for a day, the first thing you would say is, oh my God, I didn't know you could work this, I didn't know a person could work this much. The second thing you'd say is, whoa, you have like the most fantastic team, right? And then the third thing, they'd be like, this is not sexy. This is repetitive, consistent. Yeah. Yeah. But it's fun. I love it. I love it.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:12:50) I love it too, and I really love seeing the clients succeed, especially the, our what I would call our mid-market clients. And we've got, you know, worked on Fortune 500 clients where we, you know, we work on a piece of, you know, Microsoft or Home Depot or whatever. We're not really having, you know, obviously we hope we're having an impact on the business, but it's nothing that's going to change their stock price tomorrow. But if we can work with a, you know, 500 employee or 1,000 employees or whatever, less than that, and literally see it changing lives and allowing them to open more stores, add more employees, that, I just, that's the reason to get up every day, you know? So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:28) Oh, yeah. I got to work on a really cool project. I did an app for the largest law firm on Earth.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:13:33) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:34) And then they got hired to handle the Equifax lawsuit. So I was like, that was the, they were using my software for the first time on that lawsuit. And I was like, that's really cool. I mean, that was like a seven-month build and like, it was crazy, like, project. But it's really cool to sit back and like hear that that's the first thing it's getting used on. So...

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:13:53) Yeah. Nice. So it's been a while since I've really been in the legal business. I did that years and years ago. Is the largest firm still based out of Chicago?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:01) The largest firm by revenue, by revenue, right? Because they all have, they all picture. It's like a, it's $3,000,000,000, like 2.9 or $3,000,000,000. It's called Latham & Watkins or Latham Watkins.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:14:14) That's Washington, DC, maybe, right? Or...

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:17) I don't know where. They're all over the globe. Their CTO is in California. I know that much. So you guys, where are your clients sitting? Like, do you have a specific area where they tend to gather? Like in legal or some specific category?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:14:32) We do a lot in the higher education space, not necessarily intentional, but pretty much right out of the chute when we formed Vertical Measures 12 years ago. Actually, well, theoretically we launched it as Vertical Measures 10 years ago in 2008. And education was one of the clients we had then, a pretty large company that had a lot of different schools around the country, and it's just kind of rolled from there. We've probably worked on 50, 60 different schools, most of them public universities, some smaller for-profit schools, but that'd be our probably our largest vertical. It makes up, but even so, it makes up maybe today 30% of our business. And then the rest is pretty mixed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) All sorts of companies?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:15:26) Yeah. Yeah. And most what I would call, what I keep calling mid-market anyway. A lot of companies, most people have never heard of, but some of them are doing hundreds of millions in revenue a year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:37) So what's getting you excited these days? Like, with your business and, like, what's happening? Like, what type of projects? What's the thing that catches your eye or business that's really exciting for you?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:15:49) Well, the passion and excitement for the agency at the moment is this is finally the year we're going to really do a lot with video. So we're just interviewing people right now. We're making an investment into all the technology we need so we can do a good job, getting a producer on staff and all of that. So we're pretty serious about it, so I'm excited because I've been saying that this is the year of video for about four or five years now. But this year, we're putting our money behind it.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:16:21) And also, I would say as a general thing that I'm trying to get one of our clients and our staff, I suppose, excited about. And even though we've been more or less doing this since our inception, just kind of changing our terminology a little bit. And our focus is with all of our clients, we want to help them grow their own audience. Right? So, much like you, you're building an audience.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:16:50) Right? And I'm assuming somehow you probably own the audience as opposed to iTunes or, you know, where your podcasts are being distributed. But that's, like, our big emphasis. We've been really, really good at helping increase traffic and increase leads for clients, but we haven't really turned the conversation to say, and by the way, along the way, we need to really have you own as much of this audience for yourselves as you can, which pretty much boils down to we need to capture at least a name and an email address. It could get thinned out as much as saying, well, we just need them to get to your site so we can pixel them.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:17:29) So, you know, cookieing them so we can follow them around the web. But to really own it means basically, you know, what you've heard for decades, which is the money's in the list, so building your own list. And just kind of changing that mindset, we've already seen really good engagement from our clients. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I want to own my audience instead of just saying, well, we're gonna help increase, you know, traffic or leads.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:51) Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the more palatable way to say is you want a relationship with your customer.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:17:58) Yeah. Or your prospect. Or your prospective customer. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:02) You want to be friends with them.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:18:03) Yeah. You want to engage. You want them to engage with you. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:07) I'm just softening it a little bit.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:18:09) That's what I do. Yeah. Well, and like I say, it's just really changing how we're referring to it. It's not changing what we've done all along. It's just, and people and our clients just seem to be able to picture it better. Oh, yeah. I want to own that audience. You know? Yeah. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:26) You mean to tell me that marketing and branding companies use new terminology to compete in business?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:18:32) Well, they try. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:35) Yeah. We have it with our show. What we've done, and right now, this is a fun project for us. But what we've done is we went around and talked to everybody, asked what they want to hear about the content they want to consume. We started making it. And then every time someone reaches out, we're very accessible and engaged them. And we're always seeking to provide them value, answer their questions. I'm basically undercutting everyone who charges for advice by giving it for free and giving it out to people. And I have the credentials to do so, right? And then I bring the smart people on and we ask questions, do things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:12) But what we found is, recently this weekend, I was thinking, you know what? Okay. Everyone's telling each other about the show and that's how we're getting a lot of traffic and that's how we got so many listens. And that was great. And then people, we do these clips, we clip really interesting parts and we give them to people and then they share them. And then we pick up on their audience because, you know, they're popular technologists or marketers or whoever. And we get a lot of traffic like that. A lot of new listeners like that. We don't have anything that we sell, just so you know. And what I noticed this weekend is I was looking through my analytics, which I hadn't been looking at at all on my website.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) And I saw that everyone's coming in. Or we're getting a lot of people come in from asking these questions, which I'll just mention in one of my writings. And they're, it's crazy. So now I have this whole list of like 40 things that I need to make content for that I can tell people are looking for and they're coming to my site, but they really aren't getting super answers. It's just also mentioned in my content. So now I have some really intentional content to create that people are looking for.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:20:18) Right. Well, so let me see if I understand. So you're saying you have content on your site that has that question embedded in it somewhere and people are going to Google or some search engine and they're searching that question and they're winding up on that page. Is that. That's beautiful. Yes. Then you're right. You're right. That'd be my recommendation is create content probably with that as the title. The question is the title.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:42) Well, see, everybody was linking to us because we were having big people on the show, so it gave our site a lot of weight.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:20:47) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:47) And then I took my whole book and I just made each chapter an article on the site so that people, so I could. What I did was to make my book, you're gonna like this, Arnie. I wrote all the chapters. I took each one, made it a blog post, ran social ads at people with the job role that would have something to say about it. And then they all got to comment and, you know, went crazy, thousands of shares, comments, everything like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:14) And then I got to see what part of the content needed more attention or people were more interested in. Then I went back into final editing, patched up my book, and now I know I have a solid book before it's even released. Right.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:21:26) No, that's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we would call that, if we want to sound cool, we would call that ideation, but it's basically just good research. Yeah. Good brainstorming and research, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:40) So, that's what we did. And then in those writings in the book, you know, I ask questions and like there's little, there's keywords that are matching for questions that it's just really interesting. I just never, I hadn't looked. And so when I went and looked, I was like, oh, this is really cool. Now I can go make this unique content.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:21:56) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:57) Yep. So I'm gonna ask you the question. Sure. Cofounder, bootstrapped. You've done it before, multiple times. You have $10,000. You have an app. What are you gonna do?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:22:10) I can't remember how you answered it, but your question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:17) You can make up the business, by the way, just so you know. You can change the business. It doesn't have to be an app.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:22:21) Oh, yeah. Well, it almost doesn't matter, I think. Like, product, service, app, whatever it is that you have that you think is the best thing on earth right now. And actually when I talk to entrepreneurs, one of the things I will tell them is, you know, lots of people have started companies and lots of them have failed, you know, reasonably quickly. I think all the stats support that and I think the biggest reason that this happens is they really do forget about the marketing piece, the sales and marketing piece. They just think, well, this is a great product I invented or created or whatever, and why wouldn't they beat a path to my door and buy it? So, of course, I would be clever about or hopefully, clever and a bit frugal about that $10,000, but I would always start by creating content.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:23:08) So I can't actually put numbers behind this, but I would create as much of it as I could for as inexpensively as I can and make sure what you just talked about, the questions that are being asked in my industry, I'm answering on my website. And I would take whatever, I would take 90% of that budget maybe and spend it on creating as much content as possible, as many different pieces of content as possible, not one video. And most likely, that's gonna wind up being a lot of written content with graphics, you know, images and graphics and so on throughout the content to make it nice and readable. But just publish as much as I can to become an authority wrapped around that app or that product or, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to launch, so that people will find you, hopefully naturally in search engines like you just described. And then maybe look for one of those pieces of content that seems to really be resonating and really getting some traffic and maybe skim off, you know, a thousand dollars, you know, 10% of that, 20 if maybe I can afford it, 20% of that and run, you know, again, I have no idea what this product or or whatever it is that we're describing, but probably spend that money on probably Facebook ads because right now that's the lowest cost place and you can really target people there.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:24:36) And so if you know you've got a piece of content that's working and it's resonating and now you want to amplify it a little bit on another channel other than your site, odds are I'd probably choose Facebook and target those people, and that's probably how I'd try to get this kicked off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:52) Love it. That's a great answer.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:24:54) Thanks. I knew that was a big test so I'm glad I passed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:58) No. I just, it's really something that people can't fake. The reason why so many people listen to the podcast is not because it's a gotcha or anything like that. It's because when you're an expert you love to share. And so I'm always prepared. Like I can go into any room ever and talk about any of the things I do. I'm fine. I just, it's who I am. So when I find people on the show that can bring value. But like when you're an expert like you are, Arnie, people pay you. Like your company exists because you licensed your expertise and then scaled it. Right? So when you have a platform like you have, you have a business, like you can afford to come on a show and talk to us and then the people listening, they're instantly validating you as an expert. Like all right, this guy's smart. And then that just, you know, increases your reputation.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:25:47) Great. Well, you know, people have asked me, you know, when I started Vertical Measures, how did it start and all that. I already told you I started it out of a, you know, the office in our home. But, you know, and like you said at the beginning of our conversation about how, you know, if someone followed you every day to see how much work actually goes into this. Right? Well, in the beginning, it just, for anybody who's listening, thinking about, well, if I only had $10,000 or whatever, I had more than $10,000 if I wanted to spend it. But how I launched Vertical Measures was every night, I was writing blog posts for our blog. And in the beginning, you know, nobody but, in my case, my wife or maybe my mom was reading my blog post.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:26:25) Right? I mean, it had zero traction, you know, for the first month or two or whatever. But I would work all day long doing client work and trying to sell and close deals or whatever, but, you know, mostly the deliverables. And then at night, I would create content and not taking money out of my pocket, I would write my own content.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:26:45) And I'm sure if I saw some of what I wrote twelve years ago, it'd be embarrassing today, but, you know, that's how we got going. We knew what keywords we were gonna target. We knew what questions we needed to answer. We knew the niches we wanted to go after, and that's what I focused writing content around until I could afford to hire someone else to help me write content, and we have never stopped. I mean, we're an agency that has thousands of pages and hundreds of educational pieces of content on our website, and we still publish three every week, and we've been doing it for ten years.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:27:22) And we get a ton of site traffic and a ton of leads every month as an agency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:29) Speaking of twelve year old content that you might be embarrassed about, our producer has dug up. No, messing with you. I would never do that, man. I love you. I'm sorry. Yeah.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:27:40) Video is probably still out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:43) Yeah. Do you guys do white papers? Do you generate white paper content?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:27:47) Not, I mean, something very, very similar. We do and we actually created this thing called the hub and spoke model. And that's, like, when you asked me earlier, you know, to, click that, or the even the answer to the $10,000 or whatever, but, you know, companies are really still struggling with this whole content marketing and all that. We recommend they follow this hub and spoke model. So the concept very quickly is you create a hub piece of content.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:28:13) So that could be a white paper, it could be an ebook, it could be a video training series, whatever it is, something of value that you can gate or, you know, ask someone for their name and their email address behind that. And then that's a hub. And, typically, we launch one as an agency, for ourselves, we launch one of those every ninety days. And then for the three months following that launch, a lot of the content we create is all focused on pushing people back to this hub. So whether it's blog posts, the webinar I mentioned earlier, our newsletter, any ads, you know, whatever we're doing, we'll really try to push that hub out.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:28:53) And then meanwhile, we're creating the next one. And we just do, and, again, we've been doing it for years, which is why we have multiple hubs that people discover online. So, again, long answer, but we don't necessarily create white papers, probably more ebooks than anything else and probably video training series, and those are what we create as a hub. For our clients, it's, you know, whatever is gonna work best for them. Some of our clients do a great job with a whole white paper series and some are better at video so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:25) So you actually, this is what you do to market your own business?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:29:28) Yeah, all of the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29) Mhmm. Can you give me an example of a hub? I'm just trying to wrap my head around.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:29:33) Right. I think the last one we did, and actually this is the cool part, is I've gone from having to write all of my own blog posts to I don't even know what we're publishing anymore. So and that's the goal. Right? So I've got, you know, there's two other people leading the charge of that today and, never run out of it. But I think the last one we did was something like the SEO strategy and tactics for 2018. So it is probably a ten, fifteen page guide that would tell you the very latest that we knew at the time of publishing as far as what would influence rankings and getting found on Google.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:09) And then you guys are just bringing people value. You create the spokes, drive it back at your free value, and then what's happening from there? Are they entering contact information to get this guide?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:30:21) Yeah. I mean, eventually, the way this whole thing works is, you know. But, yeah, hopefully, somebody raises their hand somehow. They fill out a form or maybe, you know, we've got people that have, it's amazing. We'll go back and look at the data to see, you know, what kind of a profile becomes our client, and we see that, you know, they'll hit thirty, forty, 50 pages of our site. They'll download three or four things. You know, we'll see these patterns. But, yeah, that's the whole idea is they're hitting our site. They're starting to trust us. They think we know what we're talking about.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:30:52) They've actually learned from us, but they're in a situation where they just can't either they don't have the manpower or, you know, whatever the reason is, they can't do this themselves. So hopefully they raise their hand and say, "You know, we think you're an agency we want to learn more about and talk to and get a proposal from," and that's ultimately how you end up with the client.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) So I'm like, this is Joel, me asking. You can even clip this part of the call if you don't want to. We can clip this part of the call, but I want to know. So they enter the information, they download those ten, fifteen page guides, you're educating, you're constantly providing them free advice, just value, value, value, value. And then they reach out to you, which is like the best way to do it, right? Because then they're coming. It's always easier in business when someone comes to your door knowing that you're an expert rather than you having to convince or sell someone on who you are and everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:41) Yeah. So they're just easier clients. I get that. That's how I run my app business. People just come to me. I don't market it. People come to me through relationships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:49) The relationships I have market it and that's just how it goes. Yeah. But are you having any success, like, reaching out to those people? Do you ever have, like, sales teams, like, reach out to those people that are entering their information on the guide, or do you just keep staying in front of them by emailing them more value, more value, more value?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:32:07) Oh yeah. You don't have to clip this part. I'm happy to answer it. We do have three salespeople, and both of those things happen. We consistently nurture those leads through email.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:32:22) But if we do happen to spot that, let's just say somebody was in one of our workshops that we taught, and then over the next two months, they've hit our site a bunch of times and downloaded a couple of things. We will do one of maybe three different things, but the sales team will identify that potential client, and they'll maybe even just go back to our video conversation. We might even do a very, very personalized thirty or sixty second video to that person from that salesperson. We might send a custom email, or we might literally pick up the phone and just say, "Yeah, we noticed you were in our workshop. We noticed you've downloaded this guide, this guide, and this guide. Is there anything we can help you with?" So we will do that kind of outreach as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:12) Oh, man. Jake, we got a real expert here. I'm so, Arnie. No. I mean, I like it. That's how I roll, man. Like, that's just what I do. I'll do 20 calls, due diligence calls, you know, just helping people out, give them information, you know, what I invest, what I not, and the code reviews. I just constantly do stuff, provide people value, and then the business happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:33) You know?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:33:34) Yeah. We, you know, it's kind of weird too because we do a lot of paid media for clients, you know, pay per click, social ads, programmatic, and all that. And we do it for ourselves because we need to. We practice what we preach. But that is by far the smallest piece of our marketing budget. Everything, you know, 90% of our, whatever it is—I'm not sure if it's 90, but the majority of our marketing budget is all going into content and optimizing it and having people find us. And it works a lot. You know, we've gone from zero to fifty, so it seems to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) It's working.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:34:14) Yeah. It works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) And are you located in Texas?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:34:18) No. We're in Phoenix. No. Yeah, Phoenix. Phoenix. Sorry. Arizona. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:22) Oh, I actually have multiple friends out there. I have Dan Jaffe who does Lawlytics, and they are a legal software company that's doing really well. They have probably about the same amount of people as you guys do.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:34:33) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34) And then Pat Sullivan.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:34:38) Oh, Pat. Sure. I've known Pat for decades. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:40) Oh, you know Pat?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:34:40) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:43) He's got the Slack competitor, which I'm drawing a blank. So I'm sorry, Pat.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:34:49) And actually, I have another friend who has a Slack competitor here in town too that I will not mention publicly, but he's, I'm sure he's competing with Pat, but yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) Oh, there's two Slack... Arizona. I've been noticing a lot of stuff coming out of Arizona.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:35:04) So there's a lot of smaller software companies here. And actually quite a few digital agencies too. You know, I, you probably heard of iCrossing and some of the others. They all started here in the Phoenix area, whether it was, you know, Scottsdale or Tempe or whatever. But, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:20) I gotta know. Here's a tough one for you.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:35:22) Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:23) Are you a fan of Elon Musk?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:35:25) I don't know him that well. I mean, obviously, everybody—well, anybody in business probably knows of him. And I would say I'm a fan. Yeah. I've got some friends who aren't necessarily the biggest fans, but I give the guy a lot of credit for just swinging for the fences.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) Who do you geek out over? Like, who's, like, really cool to you?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:35:46) Well, is my profile picture going to be on this podcast somewhere? They can figure out my age.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:55) Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:35:56) Well, you're going to date me right now, but the first person who came to my mind is Bill Gates.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:01) Bill Gates? Yeah. That's not, dude, Bill Gates is super cool, man.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:36:04) Well, I've actually managed, you know, one of my previous businesses. I actually got to spend a little time with him, and so that was cool. And I, so got to know him just a little bit, and this is twenty years ago. But I just think what, you know, what he did, you know, business wise for the world is fantastic, and now what he's doing with what he's earned is also just really cool. And I will read his articles and...

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:33) I love his letter.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:36:34) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so I still follow him, you know, from a maybe more youthful thing. That's a good one. That's a really good one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:44) Bill Gates is fine.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:36:45) Alright. I'll stick with that. Alright. You're giving me credit for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:48) Dude, and Bill Gates isn't old, man. Bill Gates isn't old at all.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:36:52) Now I'm profiling you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:56) I'm 30, so I mean.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:36:57) Oh, well, okay. That's cool. But...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:00) I grew up with my dad who's a programmer. Yeah. And so, I mean, I've been writing code since eight years old. I've been just, like, really into the technology. So, man, Gates. I remember I remember the day I got to see, on a recording, I got Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on the same stage. I had, like, popcorn. I was like, "Oh, they're going to fight?" They were very nice. Sadly, they were very nice. There was a little jabbing, a little jabbing. I'm sure you could find it on YouTube. But it was, if you read their stories and go back, have you read like Bill Gates' life story or anything like that?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:37:35) I don't, are you talking about even an autobiography? I don't know. I don't recall reading a book on his life story, but I know his life story because of all the years. I mean, I've literally got to spend a full day with just him here in Phoenix.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:52) Oh, nice.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:37:52) And another company I worked for way back when, he came to visit a little software shop actually in Tucson. And, you know, so I've, I mean, I followed him for years. So I do kind of know his story. His dad, you know, lawyer out of Seattle and all that stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:09) Oh, I know where it was. I was reading Malcolm Gladwell.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:38:13) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:13) He, Malcolm Gladwell, in one of his books about great people doing great things or something, he goes into the, it's basically a, the book is just a series of back stories of like different like life stories about, from athletes. Like he found that based on the time of year that they were born determined how well they were because of what size and age they were when they went into the pro sports and the different...

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:38:40) That's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:40) And then he did Bill Gates and he's talking like his parents, he happened to be at the one private school that decided to buy a computer and he happened to get time leased on a mainframe over that summer and then he happened to get this. And they did the Linux guy or some other embedded systems guy and it was so interesting that, like, they were at this individual that was so successful was at the only school, like, in the state that had a computer.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:39:04) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:04) It's like, oh, man. Your environment is so, like, tied to your ability to be successful.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:39:10) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:13) Alright. If you could go back, sorry, I got way off track. I've never asked a guest that question before. You go way Elon Musk calls you out or no, I'm sorry. Bill Gates calls you out.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:39:21) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) He texts you. Hopefully you don't have an iPhone. That'd be super offensive. But, so he texts you up and he says, "Come over. Arnie, I gotta show you this." He's got a time machine, but there's something wrong with it. He can only go back ten years ago to talk to your previous self. What advice would you give yourself?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:39:41) No. That's great. We actually ask every employee that when they get here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) Um.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:39:46) And we publish it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:49) That's awesome.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:39:49) Yeah. Internally. But, and most of them have a similar answer to this. And but mine, I know because I wrote it, wrote a internal article about this actually fairly recently. But mine is, look more long term. I've, you know, I think if you go back, you know, twenty years, thirty years, I do think at times, I feel like, "Oh, we gotta get this done." And if we don't hurry up and get this done—not done, but I mean, if we don't capture this or, you know, make this move in the next two years, we'll be behind and blah blah blah. And then the years go by and I realized, you know what? People still aren't here. You know? And it's just having a much more long term view of everything from investments to growing the business to changes in direction, whatever it might be. That's probably the one thing I would do differently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:45) Playing life in the... I play life in decades. And what...

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:40:50) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:50) What made me get that perspective was having my daughter, and she's five months old now.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:40:54) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:54) But what happened was I started to realize right at coming up on 30 that I have memories of when my dad was 30, right? Because I was like, I was like eight. And so I'm like, oh my goodness. Like, I've got, I've got twenty years that's going to fly by me right now.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:41:10) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:10) So all I really need to do and I've got, I've been working and writing code and been trying, like, I've been, I work, man.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:41:17) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:17) I work. And I've been doing that for, you know, fifteen, sixteen years now so hard. So all I really need to do is just keep pushing that work in the right direction. Those twenty years will fly by, and I will be where I want to be.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:41:30) Yep. Now what you just said is exactly what I was trying to say is looking at life as decades as opposed to two or three year bites.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:39) So you're pumped for the next decade then?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:41:41) Yes. I am. Right. I couldn't say no to that, but yes. Yeah. Of course I am. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:48) Yeah. Consumer behavior, you're right. Like, we get all excited in technology and in business, but consumer behavior definitely does lag behind.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:41:56) Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And actually, I would say as I reflect on the last couple of businesses I've had, even this one, sometimes it's been a little bit more painful than it needed to be because I, I don't know how, I wouldn't say, like, I'm a super smart visionary or whatever, but I tended to be ahead of the curve. And when you're ahead of the curve, you spend a lot of time educating, right? You have to educate your audience, your clients, and so on and so forth, and that's expensive, and that's costly. Sometimes you just can't, you know, make it in those circumstances. So that's, you know, so anyway. So I think you gotta, you know, figure out right the sweet spot, when to make a change or do whatever, and then stick with it, would be a lesson I have learned. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:46) Yeah. We actually had some interesting education stuff come up today about computer science. There's a big issue right now where, so, like, I hire techno, like, programmers all the time, right, for my businesses or people who want to ask me to hire them or whatever. Well, they'll come out of school, you know, four years of school, $100,000 in debt with a computer science degree, and you can't do anything with them.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:43:09) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:10) Like, they don't have, you have to go put them into an internship for two years so that they learn what actually happens, then you can use them, right? So it's really tough. So we're, I mean, it started out small, like, I would get a message here and a message there from a computer science student that would come across the podcast. Arnie, every day, multiple times a day now.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:43:31) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:31) Every day. "What do I do? What do I do? I need help. I need help. We're not learning what we need to learn. Like, we're doing all these Hello World projects. We're not actually learning stuff and I've got," every day, like, "My loans are, you know, they're in their first year and a half," right? And they, that's kind of when they're realizing it after a year and a half in of a four year program.

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:43:52) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:53) And they're like, "You know, what do we do? What do we do?" And so, I'm kind of just, you know, "Go get an internship now."

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:43:59) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:59) Outside of your school hours so that when you come out of school, you have a job. But then we were thinking we actually came up with a couple cool ideas of how we could change what the teachers are doing. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go around and we're going to get some people that are running computer science departments at different reputable colleges because I have a lot of local connections at, you know, UCF and University of Texas and University of South Florida. So I'm going to go talk to some of the engineering professors there and kind of get their perspective and then potentially put together a solution for how we could get these kids more experience without having to change the curriculum and just add some value to their classes. So when we do that, I'm going to reach out to you and say, hey, like, this is what we're trying to do. Could you help us with that?

(Arnie Kuenn at 00:44:51) Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a believer in that. Yeah. Yeah. Because...

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:57) We need to solve this problem. It's not fair that these kids, they don't know what they're doing. They're 18. They're told to go do this. They sign the dotted line. They don't understand debt at 18. They don't understand anything. And then they don't have the skills they need to make money. And it's, it's one thing to hear about it in passing, it's another thing to see those kids' faces like ask you every day, "What do you do?"

(Arnie Kinn at 00:45:15) Right. Well, you know, it goes back to how we almost started this show off, where I was saying that my biggest frustration probably every day is how fast everything's changing and how much you have to constantly stay in front of it. And that's the problem with any of our schools, is that they're already behind. I don't even know how to phrase this, but it takes so long for them to produce curriculum and get it approved and get it into the schools. By the time they do, in the technology side, it's too late, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:50) It's too late.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:45:50) Yeah. And I've thought about solutions over the years, and of course I have to stay focused on the business I have, so I haven't ever acted on it. But that is—you're right. All the frustration you expressed, I feel the same.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:04) And then for the marketing, do you guys do any technology companies?

(Arnie Kinn at 00:46:08) Well, we did Microsoft a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:13) As a technologist—yes, right? I have to say, if you could, any help with this would be great in the future. Maybe if you could just give a talk on it or something. All the marketing to me, because I hit all the qualifiers of an engineer and a programmer and whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:29) It is so boring. Like, I just want somebody to do a little something better than a 60-page science white paper. They need to put more—I don't know. This trend has started, Arnie, and we need

(Arnie Kinn at 00:46:45) to find a way to

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:46) end it. If the opportunity ever comes up, just be like, yeah, I would love to learn about an API from a cool video or maybe just something that's not a boring white paper.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:47:01) Right. Well, I have a friend here in town who's managed to help grow quite a few businesses, and his passion right now is to get into the whole STEM thing with schools. And so, not in the higher end, but more in the high school, even junior high level. And he's actually trying to raise some money right now. And if he does, then I'm gonna probably start helping him.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:47:23) But his whole thing is to address your concerns by getting technology and video and, you know, everything into the curriculum, so it just becomes a natural part of what they're doing. You know? And, you know, the simplest example might be getting to actually use PowerPoint, but the other might be setting up their own site and blog and just understanding what is happening in today's world from a digital perspective and, again, trying to just work it right into the curriculum.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:47:56) So that's the approach he's taking to try to solve the problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:01) Yeah. Actually, so I called one of my friends after we were talking about the computer science problem this morning, and he told me that in our town, we have USF, a college, and a couple of the companies were upset that there weren't digital marketing talent in our town. So what they did was they got together, they went to the college, and they actually spent like eight months, made a course. The college got a professor to teach the course, and now they hire out of the kids that attend that course.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:48:29) Right. Yeah. Well, in the Bill Gates years I was talking about, I actually did exactly that with the University of Phoenix. We took Microsoft's curriculum. The business I had in the '90s was a technical training center.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:48:45) So we were teaching people, you know, how to write code, how to do software development, how to support networks. A lot of—actually, all the CTOs that are listening, all the people you're hiring that have Microsoft certifications and all that, you know, Oracle and so on and so forth, that's what we taught. And a guy who I've actually stayed friends with ever since came to me from the University of Phoenix and asked if there was a way we could integrate our curriculum into theirs so that people could get a degree but have these certifications as well and give credit for them. And so we actually, in the '90s, built all that for the University of Phoenix.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:26) Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. So they would actually do real work and then get credit for the real work, and now all of a sudden that piece of paper kinda means something.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:49:36) Exactly. Right. Yeah. Imagine showing up with your computer science degree backed by six certificates of Microsoft's whatever. I don't remember what they're called anymore, but Microsoft Certified something—developer or Microsoft Certified network support person or whatever it was.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:49:53) Yeah. That made all the difference. Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:56) Because if you know they passed the MCSE course, you know exactly what they know.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:50:00) There you go. MCSE. That's what it was, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:50:03) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:03) Dude, I had the MCSE in front of me at age 11, and I was so upset. I was like, why do I need to know whatever the version was? Like, in the MCSE, if '95 was the most recent operating system, they would quiz you about the three OS before that. I'm like, I don't even know about printer drivers three operating systems before that. I don't even have that computer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:23) They would go backwards multiple versions. I was like, oh, this is 11 volumes of these 500-page books. It was crazy. Yep. And that was my childhood.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:50:32) Right. True. There you go. That's why you are where you are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:37) Well, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic call, Arnie. I really appreciate your time.

(Arnie Kinn at 00:50:41) Oh, you bet, Joel. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:48) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this, get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:55) You guys are the absolute best.