Inside the World of Modern Recruiting
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In this episode, I sit down with Adrian Gould, Practice Director at Robert Half, for a conversation about career pivots, productivity, and the evolving world of accounting and finance consulting. Adrian shares how he went from managing rental car branches to overseeing more than 60 active projects at once, and we dive into trends shaping the labor market today—from AI’s growing influence to why companies are running leaner than ever.
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Takeaways
- Career trajectories don’t need to be linear
- Project-based staffing is on the rise
- Time-blocking is Adrian’s productivity superpower
- AI is reshaping accounting & finance teams
- Companies are running leaner
- Hiring is increasingly filtered by AI tools
- LinkedIn remains Adrian's top networking tool
- The labor market is cyclical
- ERP and accounting system upgrades are everywhere
- Don’t fear change
Chapters
00:00 Welcome to the podcast; Jonathan introduces guest Adrian Gould.01:20 From business school to Enterprise Rent-A-Car and into recruiting at Robert Half.
06:45 Overview of the company’s structure, specializations, and consulting partnership with Protiviti.
10:20 Explaining the Loan Staff Program, consulting projects, and client engagement.
13:40 Stories from the field: acquisitions, ERP implementations, fires, surprises, and project chaos.
20:00 NetSuite, Dynamics, Intacct, Workday—what companies choose and why.24:30 Success factors and unexpected challenges that derail initiatives.
28:50 Why companies bring in outside help.30:20 Adrian’s workflow, Salesforce notes, and time-blocking system.
36:45 How he builds flexibility into his schedule without losing focus.
39:50 How much is inbound vs. self-generated, cold calling tactics, and LinkedIn strategy.
46:00 AI’s impact, layoffs, efficiency, and role elevation in finance teams.
51:40 Resume tailoring, ATS screening, mistakes to avoid.
57:00 Observations from San Francisco and beyond.
1:01:30 Books, dad jokes, and wisdom for a billboard: don’t fear change. -
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Jonathan Mahrt (A):
This is on the Flywheel, a podcast where each week we talk to entrepreneurs and professionals about the practical things they do to build and keep momentum in their personal and professional lives. Hello and welcome to on the Flywheel. My name is Jonathan Martin with Flywheel Consulting, and today my guest is John Rushworth with sparkplug Marketing. Thanks for coming on today.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Jonathan, I'm excited to talk to you. Your first kind of marketing person. Well, actually I think second marketing person, but different digital marketing person. So that's. I'm excited to chat with you and hear a little bit about what you do. And where I always like to start is just, you know, tell me about yourself. Tell. Tell me how you ended up today starting Spark Plug, owning your own digital marketing agency and just. Yeah, sure. Introduce yourself.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, John Rushworth with Spark Plug Marketing. So I started in digital marketing, really back when I was still in College. In 2009, I threw AdSense, Google AdSense onto a website I had started. At the time. That site was called campus tracks.com. it was a mood music website using a group shark embed playlist. And so someone could say, rip shark. Yeah, yeah, right.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
It's the deep cut at this point.
John Rushworth (B):
I know I actually DM'd a few years ago, the founder of Spotify, he's like, oh, yeah, I remember you guys. But the idea there was, right, you're in a mood, chill mood, study mood, party, party mood, whatever it is. And instantly a playlist that was curated by me or a couple buddies around me at the time. Yeah, they could get the music they wanted, which was pretty novel then. Now we probably take it for granted with Spotify and other services.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, well, and there's services that their whole business. Their whole business is that. So I'm interested. Okay, so that's a cool thing to start with. So. So what happened to that business?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So ran it again with adsense, made a couple bucks monetizing the traffic pretty quickly. Within like 30 days, we were at 100,000 uniques a month. And that kept going. So I was like, wow, the power of the Internet is great. That stuck with me. I was entrepreneurial mindset through college and out of college, moved back to San Francisco and actually started driving Lyft while Lyft was still just.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
That's early.
John Rushworth (B):
Early San Francisco to la. And I did it for two reasons. To make a little money. But also I realized there were a lot of angel investors and VCs taking Lyft at the time. And I Had the pink mustache and everything on my car. And actually Marin IJ wrote a little article on it because they thought it was a novel because I was pitching people my ideas. Hey, what profession are you in? Oh, I'm in this or that. And I would pitch them and landed on an idea that I kind of was developing in college and thought I could get a little funding for it. And I did and it was called Bottles Tonight. So it's essentially the open table for nightclubs. And again, taking my knowledge of kind of digital marketing at the time and put it, put it to work because I had to, you know, drive Downloads of the iOS app, Android app and traffic to the website. So we had some good funnels going for that. And this was back in like 2015, 16. The cost for, you know, per download of our app was, was really small.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
I'm sure the customer acquisition cost was, yeah, tiny.
John Rushworth (B):
But what came of that is this group of angel investors said, wow, look at these. You know, the cost per download he's achieving. Can you do that for other companies we're working with and actually people in the founder dojo space that I was in in San Francisco and Soma also noticed this and were like tapping my shoulders. So I was getting tapped by these, this angel syndicate and, and my buddies that were working in the founders dojo with me. And so what I started doing there is while I was growing Bottles Tonight, I was marketing my company, but all theirs as well. And it was powerful. And I was like, okay, this is what I love doing. I love helping other people succeed in essence. And my company fizzled out with COVID But we had a nice ride, right? We worked in Vegas, Miami, big hubs of nightlife. And also we were able to go through 500 Startups program which was fun. But really what stuck out to me through that those eight to 10 years where I'm helping other people with digital marketing. And now for the last five years under Sparkblow Marketing, we've been doing it just for small businesses. So for that family legacy business and to me that's the most rewarding because you see startup founders, one or two person teams become big teams and get subsequent rounds of funding and exit. You great investors are getting some money, the founders are having success. But the family legacy companies, they've been around for 20, 30 years. That's where I feel like we're making a real lasting impact and making a difference.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
I mean I love that. That's where I'm passionate too in terms of, I mean those are the clients I want to help as well. That's my background is coming from a family business and so having the opportunity to help other people that are also in local family businesses is super rewarding. And I'm also like very passionate about it. And ultimately like those are the, I've talked about this before, but those are the businesses that are like really truly supporting the community.
John Rushworth (B):
Absolutely.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
They're the ones that are sponsoring little league games and you know, their names are on T shirts and doing all the things. They're the ones giving back and, and still I think they're the number one driver creator of Jobs in America as well.
John Rushworth (B):
I think you're right. Yeah. There's something like 30 million small businesses. Yeah, we like helping us bomb stick around generation after generation.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah. So okay, so you try a couple, I mean effectively startups, right. And then, well technically then you go and start your own business but I assume you bootstrapped it as opposed to taking investing because there's probably not a crazy amount of overhead to spin up a digital marketing agency. So are you still helping startups now or you're pretty much pivoted to local business?
John Rushworth (B):
All small local businesses, service based retailer selling products, pure e commerce companies or retailers with e comm and their own brick and mortar, whether it's one location or multiple. But yeah, service companies as well as I said. And so we pretty much work with any company within the service vertical and the E comm retail vertical.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Okay, so let's dig into that a little bit. So what is when you see when you're coming in to help folks like what is the primary mistake you see them making when they're trying to do it on their own?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, I mean underutilized assets. Right. So an email list that hasn't seen an email in two years or longer. Social media accounts that were created that are actually ranking really high on search engines as a result for when you type in that business but they haven't been posted on 6 months, not no good automations or process for collecting reviews from happy customers on say Google My business or Favorites on Nextdoor. So you know, the small business owner starts the business because they're passionate about something or they're good at one thing, but then they realize they have to hire a CPA and they forget about the marketing piece. And so we have really, you know, small business friendly pricing that you hire us, our team gets injected into your business and we're doing all the elements of digital marketing to make sure you rank high, to make sure you're getting if you want more leads and have a real online presence that's professional.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
How quickly are, how quickly are clients making back their money when they're working with you? I mean like when are they starting to see an roi? How long do they need to be working with you to see, start really seeing?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, I always say three months. So you know, onboard, give us three months and you'll start seeing returns. Sometimes it's within a few weeks even depending on the type of business. Sometimes it's right at that three month mark. But that's where we see if the relationship is going to keep going beyond. And if it goes beyond three months, it's really sticky for us. It's something like over 85% retention of five years from that point on.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Oh wow.
John Rushworth (B):
Because we. And then longer. But yeah, it's because we really drive value and we are looking at unit economics and making sure it's profitable. Now we get different types of business owners, right? We get the service businesses, whether it's painting company, moving company, they want leads, they want more clients. Great. That's pretty easy to measure. But are they, how are they doing on the service side? Right. Are they taking that lead and following up really quickly and converting them? Because that can be a sticking point. We advise businesses on that. But when it comes to E commerce, right. It's very one to one, you know, oh, we see that. That person checked out from this channel. Great.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Right. That's the beauty of E commerce is really easy to make sure.
John Rushworth (B):
So a little easier than the service leads. But we also get the businesses that are like, you know what, I just want a few posts a week here and there and that's all. And they're not measuring roi. They just know they need to have these profiles that are active and we're here for that too. So whether it's a business owner that really wants to grow or business owner that just wants the discoverability of their businesses to be where it needs to be, which is active profiles, consistency that the small business owner can't achieve without.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Us, at what point is there start to be diminishing returns? Like what's the kind of the sweet spot for most business businesses if like, even if someone can't afford to pay someone else to do it, like what's kind of the, yeah, what's the sweet spot for what they should be doing right now to, to actively promote their business online?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, I mean the baseline would be, you know, one or two posts a week on Facebook and Instagram. If you have those profiles already created, engage Those audiences that you have created personally and professionally over the last, say, decade or so, however long those profiles have been around, a couple of posts a week to keep things active with those audiences, you're not necessarily going to attract a ton of new eyeballs to those pages without, you know, at least one or two posts a week. Google My Business, making sure you're getting consistent reviews. If you're a service provider and then, you know, and reputation management, replying to reviews. And then all these profiles are also looking for activity. So consistently uploading, say a picture on Google. So you have a post or two a week on Facebook and Instagram, picture a month or so on Google, a few reviews per month on Google, that'll really raise your frequency. Now you gotta also make sure your website's indexing on Search Console Bing because Bing and Microsoft and ChatGPT have a good relationship. So if you really want to surface on ChatGPT, you gotta be indexed on Bing. And so this is something we see like nine times out of ten. No business right now, small businesses is indexing on Bing. So that's an easy win. Those things that I just outlined, kind of the social post, Google My business focus and Nextdoor is even, is powerful. So getting favorites on Nextdoor and then yeah, just doing those three kind of three things and indexing on Search Console and Google My Business that's a great starting point and baseline. So usually when we onboard a client, we'll do these things right away and then, you know, keep doing that for months and years.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
So what do you need? What about a website? Like what. Where. How does that like a traditional website fit into there? Should they be posting stuff on a blog or anything like that?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, so we, I look at websites as a living and breathing thing. A lot of people create a website, never touch it.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Right.
John Rushworth (B):
It should if, if it's appropriate for the business. There should be seasonal content change and orientation layout. So like if a, if a painting company, it's in the winter, a lot of rain, well they want to prioritize interiors rather than exteriors. So you know, the content on the site should be oriented in a way that makes sense for the season and talk to speak to the season and those types of customers that might be more attracted in winter versus summer. And you know, that's something that's overlooked in small businesses. But a lot of our relationships do start with building a website for a client and then we maintain the site and all their marketing to push the right type of traffic to the site.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Okay, so you guys are Doing website in addition to kind of social media stuff.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. So, yeah, you know, definitely more than social media. You know, digital marketing is an umbrella, but kind of social media, paid ads, website management, Google, you know, reputation management, email marketing.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
So I also. You touched on something that I wanted to ask you about because obviously, you know, everyone knows. Yeah, we want to rank on Google, but how is AI affecting your business? Because so many people are starting to use AI to do search and to do research and do that kind of stuff.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. I mean, I think maybe a good example would be Instagram with Reels trying to compete with TikTok. Right. The algorithm's looser. You get more organic views on Reels than you do a regular post. Because they're competing with TikTok now with ChatGPT and say Gemini with Google, you know, Gemini, it's, you know, surfacing results above the paid ad section and local business section. And so the Gemini results are starting to surface above the ads and on Google as a result. So Google product is mixed the search and Gemini as a result, which is.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Gemini is the name of their AI kind of chatbot thing. Yeah.
John Rushworth (B):
Competitor at Chat GPT. Yeah. But, yeah, index yourself on your site on Bing if you want to show up as a result on Chat GPT.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
And. And so. And there's some. There's attribution there as well. Right. Because one of the concerns is that, you know, Chat GPT goes and crawls the whole web and sucks all the information in and then doesn't give credit to anyone.
John Rushworth (B):
Sure.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
And so, but I think they're starting. They include links and stuff now.
John Rushworth (B):
Right.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
To try and push you back to the website.
John Rushworth (B):
Absolutely, they do, yeah. Under the result, there might be multiple links out to another site that opens a new tab or keeps it within ChatGPT.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Are you measuring how much traffic people's sites are getting from AI chatbots?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, yeah. You see it on the dashboards, whether it's wix, Squarespace, Shopify or Google Analytics or something similar. You do see that they're emerging. They're not close necessarily for a small, small local business, a service company, retailer. They're not close to the, you know, Google or bing results. But ChatGPT and Gemini results are on the rise. And I think now is the time to again, get indexed and optimize your site. The content on the blogs, publications that are citing you and your site. That's important metric, you know, to have for these search engines.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Where do you think the. Where do you think the value play is right now in marketing Whether it's, you know, cheap attention or even just in ad spend if people wanted to get bang for their buck.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. So display ads are an arbitrage on you and what you're doing, right. So if I'm scrolling through Instagram looking at friends content, I see an ad I didn't search for a product result or service result. I'm just getting bombarded by an ad. And so that is less, that's gonna have a little looser spend and waste a little more money than a Google search ad. The classic Google search ad. Because you're going to Google with a search intent and you're saying, hey, I want to find this or that and the result pops up, or chatgpt, I want to find this or that result pops up. So that's going to. On a small budget for ads, you're going to get the most bang for your bucket with search because there's that intent there. But those campaigns are more and more pushing you through. If you're structuring a campaign, pushing you to use their audience network and display ads as a part of your search campaign. But you got to know how to filter out the different, you know, settings that they try to thrust onto you.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
And when you say that, you're talking about like Google putting ads like on other people's websites and stuff, not just.
John Rushworth (B):
Strictly that work and also on YouTube. And yeah, strictly Google search search is going to be your best bang for your buck on a small, small business budget. But if, if you're seeding the market, whether it's a small regional market or national, it's important to do both, right? Do a couple different types of campaigns within Google complemented by a meta campaign, Facebook and Instagram to let people know, oh, this company, this is awareness with display marketing. And then maybe some people from there will search and it's, it's complementary. We see that a lot in the data.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Because my impression was, and maybe this is just really, I'm sure it's business and context dependent, is that Google Ads are some of the most expensive ads that you can run.
John Rushworth (B):
You can cost cap, so whether it's conversion or click basis, you can cost cap and that that helps. Depending on the industry, like you said, the cost per click or conversion can be higher. And it really depends. Like there's eight or so ad stacks we use within Google and meta depending on the type of business. So across the country we see what campaigns are performing for what types of businesses document that. And then we roll out similar campaign structure to other businesses that Are similar to them in different non competing regions. And that aggregated learning is key for us and helps our clients more. But it's really. Yeah, like you know, lead capture campaigns on Facebook and Instagram work really well for certain types of businesses with the right type of offer. But.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Okay, no, no, I mean that all, that all makes sense. I mean like, like, I mean that's always the hard part. Right. Is people want to know what the magic bullet is, but there isn't necessarily a magic bullet. You just kind of got to figure out what's right for your, for your business. And it's a lot of trial and.
John Rushworth (B):
Error, I would say. Yeah. And we, we forecast like oh, okay. This is kind of how much ad spend to get the results a business is looking for they would need. And it varies based off how competitive is in a local market.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, yeah. And also probably how specific the search terms are and things that you're targeting against I assume also makes a big.
John Rushworth (B):
Difference being specific helps.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also true if you're in bni. Right?
John Rushworth (B):
That's true. Yeah. They do teach us that, don't they?
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm curious to see. Cause how big, I think we've met before. How big did you have? Around 10, 12 people under you?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, 12 people on the digital marketing side, few more on the sales side.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
So I'm kind of interested from. Cause you're talking about having processes and figuring stuff out. I'm interested what tools you guys are using to manage the business. I'm always interested in what kind of platforms people are using.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, sure. So before I go into that, I'll just speak to the onboarding of a new client.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, I'd love to hear about that.
John Rushworth (B):
Usually they approach us and two things happen. They set up calendly, you know, link to my calendar and we do a 30 minute Zoom intake call and from there we generate a proposal. And in the proposal process we're looking at their current online presence and already documenting where they're at.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Talk to me about the discovery process for a second. Do you guys have like a template that you're following every single time? Yeah.
John Rushworth (B):
Oh yeah. So yeah, if they're coming in and setting a meeting up with me first or maybe they're, you know, buy a package first then if they buy a package first then we'll do the 30 minute intake and an intake survey. And if they don't buy a package first and they come in and set a meeting with me after the proposal and our research of their business Currently. Then we go into the. Yeah, they pay their invoice on Intuit or whatever their preference is and from there we do an intake survey. Get their intake survey results, compare them to the 30 minute interview answers that we received and from there we, we set up a content pipeline so the small business can provide us with photos and videos through like you know, shared iphoto album or Google Drive or Dropbox. And then our team gets the work, gets to work on the various elements of the plan. And we're pretty autonomous but we are proactive at the same time and we'll reach out to the business owner or the key stakeholders when we need things.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Right. So when you say survey, is this a in person I'm asking. Well not in person but I'm like face to, you know, zoom or in person asking you questions or do you send them some like a Google form or something?
John Rushworth (B):
It's a type form.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
A type form.
John Rushworth (B):
So Google form would work too, but we prefer type form.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Oh yeah.
John Rushworth (B):
So pretty sexy and fancy.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Pricey though.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, yeah, it's okay. Yeah, no, no, but yeah, to speak to the tools, the full Google suite. Right.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Okay.
John Rushworth (B):
Chad, GPT has, has made every employee and all of us more efficient and expand our skill set faster. So it's, that's nice too.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
But so are all of your like, let's say like in. We'll call it an internal knowledge base. Right. Is that all just like share Google Docs or, or you do, you do use.
John Rushworth (B):
I do well for like a new digital marketer that we onboard. I train them and get them to where they need to be for whatever tasks they're getting assigned. But it's yeah, it's all Google and the knowledge base is within. Yeah, Google Sheets, Google Docs, the Apple Notes on my computer.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Love it, love it. Okay, very cool. So what do you think? What makes what's your guys unique selling point? Like what do you think that you do better than you know, the next digital marketing? Digital agency.
John Rushworth (B):
We're literally priced for the small business. So when we see businesses coming over for larger agencies, they're getting, they're not getting great value from larger agencies because they're just. That agency is not used to working with a small budget and a small local market. They're used to, you know, Fortune 1000 type companies. So that was a few years ago when that, when I saw that we were getting these types of clients coming from a bigger agency, I was like okay, we really do have a strong value. We have comprehensive packages that start at 500 bucks a month. So hire us and we'll do a few social posts a week, email marketing, clean up your online web presence, reputation management, manage your website at 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 3500amonth. And any of those price points come with more and more value and more services at a higher frequency of posting. But all those are also customizable. So you can find those on sparkwebmarketing.com but all those can be customizable, whether it's a constraint of money or services that the business owner is already thinking about that they want to say, oh, let's try this first. So we're flexible in how we create these plans, but there are set plans on our site. You can also just hire us for say, Legion. It's fine. We have an a la carte menu too. But the better value is coming from these more comprehensive packages.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Sure, sure. So other platforms that we haven't talked about that I'm curious about, one's, you know, YouTube shorts are a big, big thing now. YouTube, LinkedIn, even Snapchat, and then obviously TikTok. Give me your thoughts on those.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, sure.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
So throwing a bunch at you?
John Rushworth (B):
No, no, that's great. So we consider like LinkedIn and these other types of platforms, third party platforms and we do manage LinkedIn for small businesses or solopreneurs where we post a blog to LinkedIn essentially or post on their page. Business and professional when it comes to posting on. What else? What else?
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Well, I was just throwing, I mean, well also I didn't mention X, but.
John Rushworth (B):
That'S X. Yeah, we post on Twitter as well.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
So are there different, like I mentioned Also Snap, Snapchat, TikTok. Are the strategies similar for these platforms? Like what are some of the kind of, like what are the, some of the differences people should be thinking about if they're trying to.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. So for, for TikTok and Snapchat, usually we educate the younger employees at the business how to use it and we stay out of those for the most part, you know, but we are active within Instagram reels and Facebook. That's just currently our current set of clients. And the clients approaching us, they're not really thinking too much about TikTok or Snapchat, but our content pipelines, if they want to be on those platforms or we advise them to be on those platforms, the content pipeline would just be filled more with videos rather than photos. And then we take the video, edit it, throw it onto Snapchat or TikTok with the right Captions and keep growing that audience. So it's, it's not out of the question. But most of our clients currently aren't participating on those two platforms.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Who, I mean, just, just generally, like, step back for a second. You know, not thinking about current clients, but just, you know, someone listening to this. What would make them want to consider using one of those other platforms as opposed to just sticking with Instagram and Facebook?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, I would say TikTok and Snapchat speak to a younger audience. So if you have products that resonate, if you're more of the type of retailer or e commerce store that looks for the latest trends, throw it on there. I mean, of course, Those platforms, especially TikTok, are becoming older demos, but it's still young, young people. And so I think it really depends on the service you're providing and the product assortment you offer, whether or not you should be on those platforms. Because those, those platforms can be more demanding for a small business and an owner than Instagram and Facebook.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, and that, I guess that, I guess that makes, that makes sense. I mean, people with, most of the people with money probably are still on Facebook and Instagram. So it probably depends on.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Because it's going to be whatever, you know, millennials and older ones with money right now. Right?
John Rushworth (B):
Right now. Yeah, that's right. Yep. And the product price points matter. So if you're selling something at $10 a unit, TikTok and Instagram ads can convert well. But if you're talking a few hundred or more, you know, it's less effective.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
What about, you know, this big. This, this thing is big now with the, like, TikTok shopping, I don't know what it's officially called. Do you have any of your e commerce businesses? Have any of them been able to take advantage of that?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, we've tried it with a few businesses. For first, with the Facebook and Instagram shop, that's pretty much been closed down now by them. But with TikTok, it's similar, you know, and we build a lot of Shopify sites, so it's pretty easy to take those products in Shopify, port them over to TikTok shop. But unless you're posting consistently consistent videos that are really interesting and catchy, you're not gonna get much traffic through the shop by just having a shop. But that's exactly the world of digital marketing. You create a website, no one's going to go to it. You got to push the right type of traffic to it.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Right. What about leveraging influencers?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. That works well. So we do have one service we offer which is like micro influencer sourcing and you can hire us for that. We'll find three to five micro influencers in your area that makes sense to do come into your, your business and do you know a series of Reels or TikTok Snapchat type posts?
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Are people doing that with selling stuff on TikTok too?
John Rushworth (B):
Like, yeah, oh yeah.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Reaching out to a influencer and say, hey, like, here's my product. I want you to, you know, I'll pay you or give you a cut of everything you sell.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's been something that's happened for the last decade or so and it's effective. Right. So micro influencers, if you get a thousand of them and that's going to be really effective because they have small audiences, but in aggregate it's meaningful. Or you could approach one of the bigger influencers. But again, small businesses don't have the budgets for anything typically more than a micro influencer or a few micro influencers. But that is helpful. Again, it's like, yes, those people are followed by their fans. They pretty much are loyal to them and they're more willing to take a product recommendation. But it's also that model because it's been around for a decade, it's getting a little tired. But what's still very effective is talking about a positive experience of the product and also a service provider. If especially like restaurants, you know, oh, I'm eating. Point of view, food content does really well.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, there's still a lot of people that like to go around and eat things, film themselves doing it. That's Instagram. Was, that was a big part of early Instagram just taking pictures of filters.
John Rushworth (B):
After the initial photo.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Does anyone use like those kinds of filters anymore really on Instagram? I feel like maybe for, you know, you know, the beauty ones, but I don't know if I feel like, see stylized filters that much. But maybe they're also just less aggressive now.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, I think there's, yeah. Content overlays. But also I think, you know, Apple and Google have perfected the smartphone around Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Right.
John Rushworth (B):
So they have some of that on the front end where you can create the filters you want before even uploading to Instagram.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
That's true. Yeah, that's true. So what's. Where do you see what kind of like total spend on digital marketing? Do you. What's kind of. Once again, I keep asking about the sweet spot, but like, where do you see People have the most bang for their buck. You know, is it $500? Is it $3,500? Where's. And I'm including not just what they would maybe be spending with someone like you, but also like ad spend on. On top of that for. Yeah, let's say a smaller local business.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. So when you hire us, it doesn't include ad spend if you're going to participate in ads. So we typically recommend 250 to 2000amonth as a starting point based off the again that intake, interview and survey and.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
What the business that's including paying you or that's on ad spend alone.
John Rushworth (B):
Ad spend alone.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Okay.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, like 250 to 2000. $250 to 2000amonth across the board. Service companies, retailers, e comm. And again, 250 is the absolute lowest 2000. It's typically, you know, the best option. But what we do find actually is kind of like 1000 to 1500 is where you're not. If you're playing at 2000, you can waste more money actually. So we like to kind of say, okay, you have a $2,000 budget, we'll start you at, you know, 800amonth and then go up from there. So the campaign learns. And it's not just starting in 2000 where a lot of wasted spend would happen in those early months.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Oh, because you're trying to figure out what works and yeah, double put the.
John Rushworth (B):
Rest of the budget into what's working within those campaigns.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Right, right. So you don't just spray. Less spraying and praying in the beginning.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, exactly. So testing things but on a smaller budget and whatever hits kill the others and you know, put the rest of the budget into the hits.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, I think that's what I think that's also what's cool about digital marketing is that you can test things that's unique compared to like putting an ad in the newspaper. That's a lot harder to test and it's expensive. Right. You're going to spend probably at a minimum like 3 or 400 bucks. Put an ad on a paper for however long and then yeah, maybe they call you about that ad. But then, you know, you don't know how many people saw it. You don't know how many people were interested in it or read it. Like you have no idea what the actual impression.
John Rushworth (B):
It's true. Yeah. And media will say, companies will say, hey, you're one thousand, a hundred thousand households hit. But what's actually happening is more abstract. I always say, hey, put a QR code or a tracked URL link, like a tiny URL link to actually see clicks to your site or whatever the destination is on that physical mailer or magazine or newspaper article.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
So do you have clients also doing paid traditional media advertising as well?
John Rushworth (B):
Yes, absolutely. And if you're doing one, you gotta do the other. Truthfully. And most of the businesses participating in the display ads, the traditional media, are ones with a bigger budget. So some of our companies have revenues of 300,000, some have close to 10 million a year in revenues. And so those companies that have bigger budgets are doing more of that local area or regional reinforcement of their brand and just keeping their brand top of mind. So the awareness piece and then the, the, you know, ads that are converting on digital are the ones that they can scale, but it's good to do both and it's complementary if you have the budget.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, so. So we are getting close to the end of our time. So I want to just talk about like the cart before the. I think we've talked about a little bit, but like, all right, I'm a, I'm a small. I've started my business, right. I'm like, don't I need, I need more business. I need Legion. I need to like grow my business. But I also feel like I don't have the budget to, to spend on a bunch of marketing. But also if I don't spend money on marketing, then how do I grow, grow my business? What would your advice be to someone like that?
John Rushworth (B):
Yes. Figure out a way to get $2,000 and give yourself two months and you know, commit a portion of that, like a small portion to initially Google search ads. Test maybe a PMAX campaign with Google and then test a couple.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
What's a pmax Cam?
John Rushworth (B):
It's performance. So it engages all the different Google Ad structures in one. It's like eight to 10 different types of ad campaigns in one. And it's using AI to auto optimize and stuff. That can really waste spend though. So definitely you can, you know, depending on the service products do really well with that campaign. Not so much service companies unless you have the budget. But so just test a little on meta, Facebook and Instagram and then test a little on Google and see from your web data like what is converting, not just traffic, but like filling out a form on your site, buying a product, and then within a, you know, start these campaigns new. You gotta give them four to six weeks for them to learn and figure things out. But after that four to six week mark the last say you know four to two to four weeks at the end of the first two months and the $2,000, put all the rest of the money into what's working and kill the, kill what isn't and just be, have that, write that down. That's your rule. 2000, two months and you're going to see a campaign that's performing for you. And again, this is advising more generally because I don't know what type of business you're talking about.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Right.
John Rushworth (B):
And so if you, if you say I'm a service business product, I'll give you more of a direct diagnosis there. What works because we see what's working across our network of companies. But generally speaking, $2,000 to two months and you'll have a campaign that's giving you more than without that spend and contribution to the ad.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Obviously I'm not trying to encourage people not to hire someone like you. How much success do you think people do people have on their own without hiring a company? If they're really like, I'm super budget constrained, I can't afford, you know, in this situation, like I'd love to hire you, but I, but I just can't. What are like some kind of, do you think people can have reasonable success trying going on their own, at least in the beginning until they can afford to outsource it?
John Rushworth (B):
It's tough, man. I mean over the last 15 or so years, the complexity of Google Ads and Meta ads has grown like crazy and there's so many nuances. And so when you hire us, we know the campaign recommendations that benefit Google or Meta more because they're an ad business, they're ad businesses. Right. And so they often recommend things and say things in ways that are misleading to the small business owner, leading to small business owners not seeing good campaign success. So we know how to read between lines, turn off these features and these functions and these automatic upsells from these platforms and make it more efficient again for the small business budget. So we do see a lot of tainted views when a small business owner says, oh yeah, I've spent 500 on Google, didn't get anything and they're angry about it. Right. And so that's the mindset most people will have if they try it on their own, quite frankly, and don't know how to create an effective campaign. It's tough to have the right product mix and have a good campaign, let alone not knowing if you have the right product mix and try and get a good campaign or service type campaign.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Plus it's probably hard as A small business owner to also just like, find the time to manage it appropriately because.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, it's iterating a lot of the time to find what's working. And yeah, you can't dedicate hours to it every day or every few days or weeks if you're a busy business owner. And that again, creates wasted ad spend and just not efficient. Yeah, learning. Because these algorithms are going to be reinforced by what you're telling it to do in the direction you're pointing in. So it's super important.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah. Yeah, that's good to know. Well, I want to end our conversation with a couple of questions I always ask everyone because I think it's interesting. And the first is, is there, is there a book that you gift or recommend most often to people?
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. So I'll be honest. I'm more of a podcast guy and I know there's tons of books on podcasts, but I would more refer people to what has inspired me because as entrepreneurs, I think often you don't have peers to relate to unless you're part of business owner groups. And so inspirational content can get you through the lows and you can learn. Right. You can take bits and pieces out of someone's interview or podcast series and apply it to yourself if you know how to filter the information coming to you and all that. But. So, yeah, I would say, you know, how I made my first million is my buddy Sam's thing that HubSpot bought, He has a lot of inspirational content where he interviews millionaires and billionaires and they get real granular, which is cool. So that's, I guess the podcast book that you asked for. Yeah, I would say my first million is what it's to going called.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, yeah. What's his last name again?
John Rushworth (B):
Sam Par.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm. I'm familiar. Yeah, That's. There's good content. And then the other thing I always ask of people is what if you could put like one thing on a billboard over the. Over a freeway. Right. That people would see every day that you wanted to tell people? What would you put on there besides just marketing? Spark plug marketing.
John Rushworth (B):
Right. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I would. Yeah. Maybe, you know, start your day off with a cup of coffee and a little physical exercise.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Okay. Start with caffeine and exercise.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. Just 30 minutes of blood flow.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah.
John Rushworth (B):
Can go a long way to make your day great.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm with you on that. I. Right now, that's mostly aspirational on the physical exercise part, but I, you know, I think about doing it a lot.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah. Before I came here. Well, peloton exercise.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
There we go.
John Rushworth (B):
I love it. I have to start my day that way.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, no, no, that's. That's.
John Rushworth (B):
Physical feeds the mental is what I always say.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
There you go. That maybe that's what goes on the billboard.
John Rushworth (B):
Right. There we go. That's the campaign.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Physical feeds the mental. That's great. Well, John, it's been great chatting with you. Thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast and chat and share some of your wisdom and insights and it's been a great conversation. Anything would you like to plug? Anything, I assume, Spark Plug. Where can people find you on the Internet?
John Rushworth (B):
Yes. Sparkpl marketing.com. go to Google, Bing, other search engines.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Chat GBT.
John Rushworth (B):
You'll find us. Chat GPT Gemini. Yep. Yeah. So spark marketing.com.
Jonathan Mahrt (A):
Yeah, perfect. Well, thank you so much again. You can find me at Flywheel Consulting. Co. The podcast is at. On the flywheel.com and that is another episode in the books. Thank you very much.
John Rushworth (B):
Yeah, thanks for having me, Jonathan.