Martinka Consulting's Getting the Deal Done Podcast
Martinka Consulting's Getting the Deal Done Podcast
Discussion with Dave Burnett on Unlocking Business Growth Faster
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Dave Burnett is a serial entrepreneur who has started many companies, operates more than one, and also helps other business owners grow their top and bottom lines. Some of Dave's practical marketing tips include:
- "Forgive AI for being bad at the start - it's not the tool that's the problem, it's your prompting"
- "Fly the machine before you scale it; there's no point spending more on marketing if your delivery is broker."
- “Scale smarter, not harder: fix bottlenecks and harness AU for your business”
John Martinka
Jessica Martinka
Contact us via either website or give us a call and be sure to check out our blog pages with new posts weekly.
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425-515-4903
Nothing will grow your business faster or nothing will drive your business into the ground faster if you make lots of people aware of your business and then deliver a mediocre or crappy experience.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to the Getting the Deal Done podcast. This is John Martinka. My special guest today is Dave Burnett. Dave is with AOK Marketing, is a Bloom growth coach and a lot of other things. So welcome, Dave.
SPEAKER_00Thanks so much for having me on, John. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Why don't we start by uh telling us how you got to where you are in this, you know, helping businesses and owning businesses and all of that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's a story that goes back to my third year university, believe it or not. And to completely date myself, we're talking the late 90s. And so I was working for somebody else, and uh they were doing a mediocre job in my in my wisdom of being a 20-year-old. So I thought, you know what? I can I can do this better. So I went out, and what we were doing at the time was point of purchase sampling. So, you know, with people you see in Costco, that kind of thing, that's what we were doing. Except here, I'm based out of Toronto. We can actually do that in liquor store and beer stores with wine and beer. So I was doing that for people, decided, you know what, I can do this better. I went out and got Picardi and Labats as clients and started doing that myself. So I had 50 employees working for me back in uh university, and then uh sold that business to my partner at the time and got into promotional products. So t-shirts, hats, pens, all that kind of good stuff. And so with the promotional products business, I started that, grew it, and what happened was a great recession, 2007, 2008, and my business went to zero. In fact, it went to below zero because I was losing $70,000 a month. So when I was losing $70,000 a month, that's not real sustainable. And as a result, I decided I had to start marketing in different ways, start promoting in different ways. So I got, you know, wanted to get good at digital marketing. So I went out and bought 3,000 URLs. I put up 500 websites and got good at SEO. And that took me through the 2010s, then I became uh open AI beta tester 2017, 2018. Then of course we had COVID, and then uh digital marketing kind of went up, down, sideways, and now we've got AI. So that's that's kind of the shortest version possible to how I got to where I am today.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So let's talk about uh AOK marketing, the digital side.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, digital marketing's been great for the last you know 15 years or so. And then come November of 2022, OpenAI releases Chat GPT. And so with ChatGPT coming out, uh, one of the things we did for our digital marketing clients was uh content. And as part of that content, so it was released November of 2022. By the end of January of 2023, so two, three months later, we had lost all of our content clients, which was really, you know, not ideal, of course. So we had to continue on. So we do SEO, we do GEO, which is generative engine optimization, and we do paid search, paid social, all those good things. So we were helping clients and companies optimize their spend, make as much money as possible online. And so that that's what we continue to do while everybody explored this brand new tool to them, which was Chat GPT. So that's that's kind of the evolution of AOK marketing, at least in the last, I don't know, three, four or five years. So it's been a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_01What are some of the uh top tips you would offer people on on digital marketing these days, especially if they're not all that familiar with it?
SPEAKER_00Well, the first thing you need to do is understand what you're tracking. So all these tools that you've got out there, I'm sure everybody's heard of, you know, Google Ads, Meta ads, or Facebook ads or Instagram ads or any of those kinds of things. They're all algorithm-based. And what you have to do is have the right tracking in place so that you can get those ads to track the right things. If you want somebody to buy from you, you want to have your what's called a primary conversion, the most important conversion to be a purchase. You don't want it to be signing up for your newsletter. You don't want it to be viewing a particular page. You want it to be a purchase. But people have it all set up wrong. And so my recommendation is have somebody look at your setup before you start spending, you know, $100, $300, $500, $10,000 a day, whatever your budget is, before you start doing that, you got to make sure that you're tracking the right things to train the model to then help you achieve your goals. Okay.
SPEAKER_01And it what about non-paid digital marketing, which would get into SEO and all of that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, SEO is is great and highly recommend it because it's the you know, once you turn that tap on, it just keeps running that water being your income keeps flowing until Google changes the rules and then they do, you know, what we call the Google slap. So the most important thing to bear in mind right now is traditional SEO search engine optimization is all about page authority. So, say for example, you are Starbucks.com. And so if you go and you search for Starbucks, you'll see Starbucks.com and all of the kind of information about the company on the right hand side. And then if you put in Starbucks near me, it'll show you three or four different locations plus a map. Or if you put in Starbucks Frappuccino, it'll show you the Frappuccino page. The reason for this is because Google is smart enough to know that you have, you know, that Starbucks has relevant content for that particular search. So the question is if you're trying to get found on search, do you have relevant content that Google can surface for you? If you do, that's great. That's that's an excellent thing in traditional SEO. For SEO for AI or GEO, uh generative engine optimization, basically what you need is you need to have entity authority. So you need to have really strong signals out there in the internet that your entity is a real thing. And your entity could be a person, place, could be your brand, it could be your website, it could be your company. Whatever your entity is, is a real life thing. It has real authority, and it's actually notable. And so this is one of the things. So the new SEO is much more based around what your notability is, what your expertise is, what your authority is, and how trustworthy you are. So things like a good Reddit thread, things like uh Wikipedia page that talks about your entity or your company or your brand. Uh, those are really important things to be able to show up in the large language models like Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or any of those things. Okay.
SPEAKER_01All right. So let's flip it around a bit. And you are also a uh Bloom growth coach. Yes. What's that? Tell us about it.
SPEAKER_00So Bloom Growth is similar to EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. It's an operating system for your business. And the basic thing about your business, assuming that you've got one and you're listening to this podcast, is it's important to bear in mind all of the different things and parts of your business. There's a couple of different ways to think about it, but I like to think about it in different buckets, right? You've got your three main buckets of each business. First bucket is acquisition. How are you acquiring clients and customers? So that's usually sales and marketing. That's part of your acquisition bucket. The second bucket is your delivery or operations bucket. So that's how are you actually delivering these products and services to your clients? And then the third bucket is your admin bucket. So that's legal, finance, HR, all those different things to make sure that you, you know, deliver products, stay out of jail, get paid, you know, all those important things. So with Bloom Growth or any coaching system that you're going to use, you got to make sure that you are doing all three of those main buckets well. And how detailed you get into those things is kind of too much for a short podcast. But basically, what I've found is delivery. Now I'm a marketing guy, and so I'm an acquisition guy, but delivery is the most important thing. You need to be able to deliver a really good experience, a really great, you know, customer, customer experience to be able to then market because nothing will grow your business faster or nothing will drive your business into the ground faster if you make lots of people aware of your business and then deliver a mediocre or crappy experience.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So I'm I'm taking some notes here, but if you if you have delivered great customer experience, you leverage that in your marketing.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So think about it like you build a fire, which is your delivery, you're starting to get referrals. People are starting to talk about you, they're telling their friends, you're starting to get busy, but it's kind of, you know, usually with referrals, unless you have a very specific referral program, that's kind of spotty. People come and go and that kind of stuff. But if you really are delivering a great product, you can just add fuel to that fire through great marketing. And whether that's digital marketing, traditional marketing, whatever it might be, you can do a lot of great things with it.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Yeah, and I'll tell you that uh people we use to help us put together, they call it a blueprint for social media, so that's you know, put as many testimonials out there.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Well, then that's part of the trust and authority, right? Like the way I look at it is you can nobody else can talk about what you've done, right? You might offer a similar service, say you're an accountant, you might offer bookkeeping services, you might offer year-end services, you might offer tax services, those types of things. But nobody else can say, hey, I did the tax for XYZ company and save them a million dollars. You know, my fee was 50 grand, but I saved them a million dollars and they paid it happily. And they bought me lunch and whatever else might be, right? So yeah, this is these are the types of things. So testimonials about what you've done is a great way to build authority, build trust, not only for users, but also for the machines. Because the large language models like ChatGPT are crawling those independently verified sources to help build authority and to understand who to recommend if you're asking them in Chat GPT, who should I do for this, you know, get for this service.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So that's a good segue into uh AI in general. And uh we talked before we started recording this, you know, about AI and how it applies to different aspects of businesses, different types of businesses. Uh and it's to me, it's something that for most people, it's still the very, very tip of the iceberg. A lot of people say, I use AI, uh, I I ask things in Chat GPT, which is is good, but uh you know, you're you're just using a little bit of AI's capabilities.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, I mean what we're finding is there's a lot, there's a bunch of different types of AI. So the most popular and what people think about now is Chat GPT and the chatbots and the large language models. And so basically what that means is this is a model that knows how to speak and knows how to basically regurgitate, if that's a bad word to use in a podcast, knows how to bring up the same information again. So, how they basically work is you you put a lot of information in, it sorts through all that information, and then it comes up with the average next best word. So, this is how it works. If you're like, you know, what color is the sky? And then the answer could be the sky is and it will know logically blue as the next best word. It does that for everything. That's basically how it works. So whenever you ask it something, it's using the average of all its knowledge to come up with the next best word, and then that's how it completes sentences and paragraphs and tells you stories and does all these things, is based on whatever then the probabilities are for the next best word. Because this is all math at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So when people are talking about how to use large language models, the first thing they have to understand is if they're using it themselves versus if they're using it in their company versus, you know, are they using it with their clients and customers? If they're using it for themselves, then they got to get familiar with the tool. And if they're not getting the results that they want, it's not the machine's fault. It's because their inputs aren't good. You know, people uh there was a brief talk about maybe prompt engineer is going to be a career, but basically what that means is you know, you have to get better at instructing the machine. Think of the large language models as a highly educated, you know, university grad who doesn't know anything about you or what you want from it. So if you can give it lots of context, lots of examples, lots of uh demonstrated results, it will come up with a much, much better answer. And all of a sudden you'll think, hey, this thing's brilliant. Because I it's actually just because you prompted it better. It's the instructions you gave it. If you're gonna be using this for your people, your people are gonna be hesitant about it. And this is my experience across lots of organizations. They aren't sure if this is gonna steal their jobs. And then if it doesn't steal their jobs, are you gonna expect 10 times more work out of them? And the answer is yes to both of those, right? But they're gonna go through kind of a multi-stage process. They're gonna be afraid of it at first, and then they're gonna use it a little bit and then get crappy results and they're gonna be skeptical about it. But then something amazing is gonna happen at some point where they're like, wow, this thing, like maybe it comes up with a great answer, or they see a video about something or something maybe, and they'll have this moment, this like, oh my goodness, moment. And so when they have this aha moment, then they're gonna start investigating what's going on, and then they're gonna research that and figure it out, then they're gonna start using it, and then they're gonna start mastering it. So it's everybody kind of has to go through this cycle, whether or not they want to or not, just because of the nature of this technology.
SPEAKER_01Okay. I want to jump back to when you said you know, use it for yourself, which is tied sometimes tied to business. So, and so about a year and a half, two years ago, we were selling helping sell a client's company, and we I used ChatGPT and said, write an ad for selling this kind of business in this size range, etc. And it did an excellent job, other than I had to go through it and take out what I will call all the 1960s used car sales pushy uh sentences and and uh you know, this is like this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and kind of kind of stuff. Could I have or could it have, if I did then, say two years ago, said without being salesy, would it have then it would have changed it, right?
SPEAKER_00100%. You could say uh yeah, not being as salesy, use lots of references to our you know, our testimonials, go online to my website, look at what testimonials we have, do research on the industry, understand what ads others are running, figure out what a good ad is, what differentiates us, and then it could come up with much, much better results. And you could even say, and write the ad for a C level executive, so somebody who's you know very smart, but who has a middle school reading level in order to make the answer more simple. So C level response, mid middle school reading level, and it'll come up, it won't, it won't be you know patronizing or anything, it won't be talking down to any of the users, but it'll be very simple in terms of the messaging that it's got. So you can change the tone, you can change the message, you can give it you know length requirements, you can say make it shorter, make it longer, make it funny, all these kinds of things. It it it really has the ability to be able to do a lot of things.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, 80% of it was great, and uh it and it it worked a lot better than what we had come up with on our own.
SPEAKER_00Uh well, and if you had taken those final ads that you were happy with and put those back into Chat GPT and said, make me 10 more like this, it would have come up with 10 more variations for you.
SPEAKER_01Wow, okay.
SPEAKER_00Because you're giving you feeding them all, you're giving it feedback, you're you're you're training it to answer the way you want it to.
SPEAKER_01Got it. Okay. So moving to you said for using with your people, yourself, people, company.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01What about the company using it? What do they have to watch out for?
SPEAKER_00Well, there's privacy issues. You got to make sure that depending on which model you're using, just bear in mind that if you don't have training data turned off, you don't have your privacy settings set up correctly, you are helping train future models. You are training them with your data. So if you took sensitive client financial information and uploaded it and said, give me the EBITDA for this particular um, you know, earnings before interest, taxes, and appreciation for this particular uh company, and you told it the company and you uploaded its sensitive financial information, then that information is now in the model. So you don't want to do that and you want to prevent your people from doing that. But what you can do is you can actually download models. So OpenAI came out with an open source model called OSS, and they've got two different variations of it. So you can actually download the model, put it on your local computer, put a firewall around it so nobody else can access it, and then you can train it on your own personal data because you have the model, you have the data, and then it can interact with the outside world based on how whatever restrictions you you put on it. So you could you could upload those financial statements and not worry about it if you were using an in-house model that you could download for free, basically.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Yeah, I've been investigating private AI. And I I started, and you know, in our business, uh, we went through a little bit of a slowdown after the tariffs were announced and nobody knew what was going on. And then all of a sudden we got super busy.
SPEAKER_00I was gonna say, wait a minute. Do you do you know what's going on now? Because I'd love to know.
SPEAKER_01I should say what's going on now is people are saying, uh, I gotta live with it. So I'll just do what I was gonna do. Just keep doing what you're doing. Yeah, I agree. That's what I'm hearing out there. Yeah. So it's still on my list. I've got websites up and things like that. And uh uh that's uh that's exactly what you're talking about. Although I at at least a few months ago, OpenEye didn't have that.
SPEAKER_00I don't think that was that's relatively new. I think they released it in August, maybe late July, when they released their own. There were others, there are others. Lama is one that was released by Meta. There's other ones that are on Hugging Face, which is a uh technology platform. So there's a number of different places you can go, but from all of our testing, the best model is OSS 120. Currently, the best open source model is that one. It's trained on the you know, the largest we can we think it's trained on the largest database of information, and therefore its answers are better, and it's just kind of a general, better overall experience. As a private AI. As a private AI, yes. Okay.
SPEAKER_01All right. Well, what about uh you know you you help in a number of ways companies scale. What are the top few tips, not counting digital, that you would you would uh you have worked with your clients on?
SPEAKER_00I mean, there's so many different things, but basically you have to fix your delivery mechanism first, right? You need to really nail down through systems and process what you're delivering. And when you nail that down, then you need to figure out, okay, how are we gonna get paid for this thing? And then, okay, now that we're getting paid for this thing and it's all legal and everything is good, how do we then scale this business? And scaling is usually done through various marketing and sales efforts. But the thing is, you know, outside of digital, you need to fix the machine first, and then you can scale it by applying, you know, fuel to your rocket ship kind of thing. So if there's specifics, you know, it's specifics around your process and how you're executing your process, how many people are using that process, how repeatable it is, how proprietary it is. So is it your process? Do you own it? And beyond that, is it you know, if you've got your finance function, how is it communicating with the rest? Are you actually, you know, there's So many things to it, but business is all one interrelated organism. And what happens is as you start to grow and scale, you'll hit a bottleneck in a particular department or function. I like to think of it as you'll break the business. So this is what happens is you start to break different parts of the business based on different growth curves. So if you're under a million dollars, you know, usually people and revenue, people are usually kind of their sales function is broken, their marketing function is broken, but they may have decent delivery, just decent product. Then once they get over a million dollars, you know, one to three to five, they start to break their processes. Their business can't handle that amount of out of business, and they can't continue to scale because they can't deliver, which you know stops them from scaling because they're delivering a mediocre experience. So then they have to fix the experience they're delivering, but they now have more resources. Then they're starting to scale with the marketing again, they're scaling with their um operations, their delivery side of things, and then something else breaks. They're not getting paid on time, you know, they're getting sued because they're now a noticeable brand name, whatever it may be. And then so you need to kind of at every stage, there's different parts of the business that will break, that will scale and break. And then you'll get to a new constraint, a new bottleneck in your business. So then it's just solving that bottleneck to get you to the next level because it doesn't make sense for you to triple your media spend on whatever you're spending it on, or triple your sales force if you can't deliver a good product or service. So you need to fix the product or service. And if you can't get paid for any of that stuff, then none of that matters, right? So depending on where you break your business, that's what you need to focus on fixing. Okay.
SPEAKER_01It's an interesting way of putting it. I haven't heard it said that way before, but it makes sense because we talk about sometimes the businesses, the growth curve is like an S curve. You know, you go up, you go, you plateau, you go up, and you know, then what you're saying is recognize what's causing it to plateau.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, what's broken and fixing it. Sometimes it can be, you know, you bring somebody into your organization to fix a particular function. Say you bring in, like, I don't know, an HR manager, and that person you think is doing a really good job, but they hire C players. And so you got lots of people running around not doing much, and you realize, okay, you know, maybe that initial hire caused some issues. And so figuring out is your hiring process broken. And then if, say, for example, you start to scale and your technology can't keep up, right? Okay, so we need to fix the IT function. And within fixing the IT function, this is something else. And and so, you know, just growing that is it our marketing, is it our delivery, whatever parts of the business that you get to, and then figuring out how to how to break through that. And usually, usually it involves newer, better people who've done this before. Because that's that's a real breakthrough for me was figuring out who can I hire, who's done this before. So if you want to go from 5 million to 25 million, the easiest way to do that is to hire somebody who's done it before. Because this is all they've done all of the learning associated with this issue. So that's that's the the secret, the secret secret sauce is hire somebody who's done it before. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So I've got a couple of wrap-up questions. Any other tips you want to get out before I ask them?
SPEAKER_00No, just I I would say if you're not utilizing AI, play with it. Try it out, overcome your own inhibitions associated with it, forgive it for being crappy at the beginning because it's not crappy. Unfortunately, you are. So you got to at least be familiar with what's happening.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So, Dave, when you're not doing this and you're helping businesses grow in promotional products and mark digital marketing, what do you like to do?
SPEAKER_00So I like to work. I hate to be that guy on this call. But I really enjoy spending my time solving the problems that I find in my own business and in clients' business. I view it as this like unsolvable Rubik's Cube that as soon as you get to a certain point and you think you got it, the rules change, the environment changes, you know, tariffs come in, or COVID happens, or you know, you name it, and nothing is ever the what you thought it was gonna be. For anybody who thinks that the next two, five, 10 years are gonna just be nice smooth sailing after we get over whatever hump that they are facing, just take a look at the last 20, 25. There is like there isn't a smooth time. There isn't going to be a smooth time. So I love that side of things, that it's uh a never-ending challenge. So yeah, there's always something to do. And, you know, I I really enjoy, really enjoy spending the time doing it.
SPEAKER_01Okay. And is there anything you wish I'd asked you about that you'd like to get out? Business, non-business, anything.
SPEAKER_00No, I just in terms of what you're seeing on the exit side of things where people are doing, I'd love to hear your feedback associated with how you're viewing the market these days and what you're seeing.
SPEAKER_01Well, what I'm seeing is it's just like you talked about the last five, ten, twenty years is that there are there are downs when it should be up and ups when it should you think it would be down. And I know a lot of people in my industry, once the in the US, the tariffs were you know hit big in April. There's just a lot of uncertainty, and well, we better pull back because we don't we don't know. And I just saw a presentation from a banks economist last week, and you know, the tariffs uh there's a lot of headline and bluster, but the the the level of tariffs is not all that high compared to what everyone was led to believe. Of course, specific industries and countries, that's a different thing.
SPEAKER_00Oh, of course. Yeah, you dig down, there's some that have been greatly impacted for sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So no, I think it's I think it's an interesting environment. Like I said, this is this is fun, right? I mean, I can't I know a lot of people like Dave, this is not fun. I would rather have it not change. I like the predictability associated with whatever time frame they're thinking of. But really, I mean, this is this is where the opportunities arise are when change happens. So things are changing. So where's your opportunity? Yeah. So how do people get in touch with you? So, easiest way is LinkedIn. I'm at LinkedIn slash in slash Dave B Burnett, because there's lots of Dave Burnett's out there, so make sure you find the right one. Uh, you can find me on X at Dave Burnett underscore at the end, because again, lots of Dave Burnett's. And uh, that's just some thoughts I have over there, but also at promotionalproducts.com. That's where we do gifts, giveaways, incentives. And uh, but yeah, that's the main places where you can find me.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Well, Dave, I appreciate it. Uh it was a fascinating discussion. I took more notes than I usually do when uh when doing this, just so I wouldn't miss it. And uh I think some great insights on both the marketing, but especially on the AI. And I would say your advice on it uh was very practical.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but you gotta you gotta be able to use these tools. I mean, I am now doing literally in an hour what it used to take me eight hours to do. I'm able to, and so when you have that kind of productivity, you're faced with a choice. Am I gonna work for one hour and you know do something else for eight? Or am I gonna go hard for eight and do eight times the productivity? So this is the choice that we're all faced with. Yeah, it's an interesting time.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you, uh, Dave Burnett, Bloom Growth Coach, A-O-K Marketing, uh practical AI is what I would say you are you are good at. And thank you for being on the Getting the Deal Done podcast.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you so much for having me, John. I appreciate it.