Trial and Error and Investing in Success

Tom Nixon 0:06
Welcome everyone to the bull’s eyes and bullhorns podcast I am your co host Tom Dixon joined as always by by partner in podcasting, Curtis Hays Curtis, welcome.

Curtis Hays 0:18
Thank you, Tom decided to get this started.

Tom Nixon 0:21
Yeah, absolutely. So, in terms of getting started, I’m gonna let you introduce our guest today, Mario de Aquila. Because he’s somebody that you introduced to me in real life. So why don’t you welcome on Mario?

Curtis Hays 0:34
Yeah, welcome, Mario. So I’ve know Mario since 2017. And Mario is the Chief Operating Officer at assisted living services, and Connecticut. And yeah, welcome, Mario.

Mario D’Aquila 0:50
Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah,

Tom Nixon 0:53
thanks for being here. So we’re gonna dive into a little bit of your chapter and verse and how you’ve helped grow the company, but give us just a quick history of the company from its inception.

Mario D’Aquila 1:06
Sure. So our company was founded in 1996, actually, from a need really near and dear to my family’s heart, my great grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And my mother is sort of being in the sandwich generation, you know, having young children and having, you know, an older relative that needed care, she really took it upon herself to kind of be the shepherd of his care. And, you know, she learned, you know, throughout the years of, of assisting with his care that there was some great folks out there that that could help care for him. She actually hired a company, one of our biggest competitors, nowadays, you know, back then, and they just didn’t offer the type of care that my great grandfather needed. So, you know, he sustained a fall, and you know, he was injured. And when he went to the rehab to get rehabilitated, my mother ran into some some great personal care assistants that were working at the nursing home at the time. And she said, you know, he goes home, he’s going to need somebody full time. Do you guys know anybody? Or do you want to come work for me? You know, they said, No, however, we have cousins, and friends that do this type of work, they’d love to help out. And here’s, here’s a few numbers to call. And she heard these people privately, right to help care for him. He was able to age in place, really till the day he died in his in his 90s. And what happened was, friends of our mothers and fathers said, Hey, how did you? How did you, you know, get this type of care. That was That was great. My mom and dad needed are my grandpa and grandma, I need it. And she was able to actually kind of pair those caregivers with those folks. And it turned into a business. And I always say 9096, we care for one grandfather, and today were cared for over 600. Wow.

Tom Nixon 3:23
Wow. And then Curtis said that you met about five years ago? I think it was Curtis that right?

Curtis Hays 3:30
Yeah, whatever. 2017 shakes out to be six. We’re working on six now. Yeah, almost six. Yeah.

Tom Nixon 3:37
So where are you? My understanding is you sort of took over the business from your father, is that right? And at the time that you and Curtis crossed paths, you were trying to build the business, maybe update some systems bring us back to that point in time?

Mario D’Aquila 3:52
Sure, sure. And I don’t want to take total credit take over completely, of course, I am the Chief Operating Officer. It still is a family business. I always say that my parents are semi retired, the CFO and the CEO, my brother even works here. He’s the chief information officer. So he has everything to do with it. And sort of the information systems. But yeah, so when I was brought aboard, you know, I had this you know, sort of a fresh perspective on, you know, marketing, right, I said, What are we doing in marketing to get more clients and to get, get ourselves more known, and at the time, it was really just a referral based business. It was, Hey, you did good care for my mom or dad, and I’m going to refer to you or, you know, we got a referral from an assisted living community or a doctor or an attorney. And they would continuously refer to us just through that relationship type referral network. And I said, That’s great. Well, What if we opened up another marketing channel? To include website? You know, leads and things like that, you know, how are we doing on the web? Gee, and at the time, you know, we were getting about maybe, you know, between one and five customers a year that we can attribute to seeing us online. Right. So really not a not a good marketing channel for us, you know, and we had a web designer, sort of a web, you know, manager at the time, we outsource it, of course. And he, he was good at it. But, you know, one time, you know, he said, you know, if you really want to take this to the next level, you have to start, you know, getting into, really, SEO, search engine optimization, right? And he said that that’s not, that’s not what I do, right? He’s like, I built your website, I could change pictures on it. And, you know, I can kind of help you out here and there, but by no means, am I an expert in this, you know? So he actually said, I have a friend or I have a connection. It was it’s Curtis. Curtis, forgive me. I don’t even think the company was Kaleidoscope back then. I think it was just Curtis Hays consulting. Yeah, yeah. And he said, give it a shot, you know, reach out to Curtis. And what Curtis had to say, just blew me away. First and foremost, I didn’t know that. First of all, I didn’t know that there was such thing called Google ads. Google AdWords, I think at the time, and I didn’t know how to get our company in front of customers online. It just wasn’t part of what we what we did. And it just goes to show you because we only got between one and five customers a year ever. I mean, I think five was our best year. I mean, in 365 days, we only got five customers, you know, online. So that’s when, you know, I was introduced to Curtis right. And he showed me everything that was actually out there and what was possible.

Tom Nixon 7:21
So and then Curtis, so it was Curtis Hays Consulting at the time now. kaleidoscope, just for people who aren’t familiar, just give us a little background on what Kaleidoscope is and does.

Curtis Hays 7:33
Yeah, so Kaleidoscope is just a deep bench of marketing experts in a lot of different fields. So when I started out consulting, I had clients that had needs that I couldn’t solve, I wasn’t an expert in. And I’m not an expert in design or web development. And having been in the industry for a number of years and lived in a couple of major cities, the Detroit area in Chicago area, I had a lot of really good connections. And so really Kaleidoscope was this, just this idea of bringing together the best people to fractionally work with clients. So if we need to do some design work, we don’t have that big agency overhead. We don’t have to charge the major fees. It’s I can I can bring in the right person for that project and solve that problem. But, but yeah, Mario came into us and, you know, really just understanding what his needs were, what he asked for, wasn’t necessarily what we delivered. Initially, it was it was actually much more comprehensive. And, and that’s what we want to do understand not necessarily deliver a service of what you’re asking for, but understand the business goals. And then and then deliver on those business goals so you can get to where you’re trying to get to.

Tom Nixon 8:59
So the introduction was sort of, hey, talk to Curtis. He’s the SEO expert. But did it start with SEO? Or when you got under the hood? And you started consulting with Mario, what did you see is maybe a different need? Or what did you start with SEO?

Curtis Hays 9:14
Yeah, no. So in almost any engagement, you know, we do want to get under the hood, as you said, and kind of just get an idea of the landscape. So the website is sort of a tool and then entire marketing mix. And if that tool isn’t set up properly, to actually, you know, achieve the goals your organization wants to achieve. And that’s really the first thing to do is just to make sure that that’s set up and configured properly. You know, what’s happening with our forms where we send into user after they fill out a form, do we have the right calls to actions in place, you know, some of those simple things but in addition from an SEO perspective, it’s it’s there a lot of really good designers and Abell flippers out there who know how to, you know, make a great functional, you know, beautiful website. But it doesn’t, if it doesn’t serve search engines as well, it might not be found. And that’s like, you know, throwing up a billboard on a country road, and nobody’s gonna see it, because nobody’s driving down that highway. So we’ve got to figure out and work with a client on, you know, what are the right keywords? What could your audience be searching? What types of problems does your audience have that they might be searching for? And do we have the content on the website that solves those problems? So it starts with an assessment. And in the case of assisted living services, you know, as SEO is typically a long game, and so what we proposed to Mario was, well, you know, you could also do some Google advertising, and some of these keywords that your competitors are bidding on, or are ranking for, we can get you on to the top of the page just simply by, you know, bidding on some of those keywords. And so would there be a budget available in marketing, to serve up ads and bring people to the website? We are with some of the search queries.

Tom Nixon 11:10
I’m guessing barrio that. Like most business owners, you say, Well, if it works, there’s always a budget, right? So where did you guys start? As you collaborated? Just now you’re dipping your toes into uncharted waters? Right? This is something you didn’t even know existed? And now it’s probably commonplace to your overall campaign. But where did you guys start? Did you dip a toe? Or did you try some things test?

Mario D’Aquila 11:33
Absolutely. I mean, it as I recollect on, everything that we did, and how the game has evolved throughout the years, and what we did, I think, in terms of organic traffic, you know, Curtis, and I spoke about creating more blogs and more content, you know, it was like, let’s use more blogs, right? Let’s get let’s let’s, let’s really provide some value add to these customers, right? Let them know, Hey, this is the difference between this type of home care and skilled home care. This is the difference between an assisted living community and an independent living community, and just create content, I think that’s, you know, we actually put a lot of work into creating content. And nowadays, I don’t know if people read blogs at all, you just go on YouTube, and you watch something. Right. And that’s the type of content we’re talking about now. Right. But back then that was it. Right? That was that was, that was excellent, you know, and we were creating lots of content and trying to drive traffic to the site. You know, what with that? But then, you know, we said, let’s, yeah, let’s start paying for some of these ads, let’s see if there’s some ROI on this. Right. And that, that opened up a new world to because, you know, you can put a ton of money into AdWords, right. But if you’re not bidding on the right AdWords, if you’re bidding on things that aren’t what you do, right? If we’re bidding on home health care, and people are coming to us, and we’re like, oh, boy, we don’t that’s not the type of thing we do here. You know, you’re, you’re throwing money away. Right. So we had to think creatively. And if I recollect I think some of the words that are more expensive, so bit Anna are the obvious ones, right homecare, right? But what are some of the things that we can get more value for online? Right, like homemaker, you know, homemaker companion, right, or live in home care, right, or taking care of mom and dad at home, right, like some of the phrases that aren’t there sort of secondary and tertiary to to the word homecare. But there are ways to really use our budget more efficiently and effectively. And we went from dipping our toe in all the way to the the, I mean, a significant part of our marketing budget now goes goes to the web, because it’s proven to be an effective outlet and effective channel. You know, we’d only spend like a couple 100 bucks a month or something back in the day, and now it’s like, a couple $100 a day.

Tom Nixon 14:45
You know, so that obviously, there was some ROI initially, and obviously, they’re still to this day Do either of you remember when you first started noticing that uptick from one to five per year to something a little more significant? If that you said, Well, this is obviously we’re spending more on it, like how quickly were the results? And how quickly was the lift?

Curtis Hays 15:10
Yeah, well, let me add one more thing to Mario what he was saying about the keywords that was, it was actually what their company name was even really tricky, because their company name is assisted living services. And assisted living, typically is a facility, which isn’t what Assisted Living Services is, its its home care. So we could have easily spent 1000s of dollars in Google advertising, accidentally promoting in a facility and getting the wrong people to the website, that will still happen occasionally. But so so the key to figuring out ROI for us is a really good foundational analytics setup. So are we tracking conversions? are we tracking them properly? And, and providing visibility to the customer, you know, about the conversions and what’s happening within the within the campaign’s? So, you know, we can at least tell things like, what is it cost us per form, fill or per phone call to the business and those types of things? And then it’s having regular dialogue with Mario and his team, the sales director and other members of the team to understand, you know, what’s the quality of the phone calls? You know, what’s, what’s the perception of, of the types of leads that are that are coming in? So mario talk a little bit about that, in our early stages of what went out look like?

Mario D’Aquila 16:54
Yeah, absolutely. And actually is a think about it, it was almost comical, and I know, I told you guys, you know, sort of where we were kind of humble beginnings for how to track sort of where the money is spent. Right. And, you know, I just remember, you know, we were implementing all these different marketing channels, right, you know, hey, we’re doing a little more out in the community. Hey, we’re doing a little more public relations type things. Hey, we’re investing in some AdWords and some, some web development.

Curtis Hays 17:28
You were even on TV, right, Mario, didn’t you, you kind of news stations and stuff like that. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t small. It wasn’t, you know, small business kind of stuff. I mean, they were You were definitely doing a good job in the state of Connecticut.

Mario D’Aquila 17:40
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we have a great publicist that really has some great connections, she does a great job. And she gets us gets us, you know, in front of the kinetic people using news outlets or radio outlets. And, you know, it dawned on us, okay, we actually have to see if these things are not just converting into clients, but are they are people actually coming into our business? Right. In other words, you know, is the phone ringing type thing? And, and I imagined, I remember at the time, you know, going, again, my dad was a CEO, and he actually had all of the we call them customer info sheets, right? And I just remember, going to see how we did for the month. And I said, you know, let’s start tracking how we did how did we do this month, right? And he had just a big stack of customer info sheets, you know, on his desk, and I said, Okay, so these are new customers, right? Yep. Okay, their customers that we started this month. How do we get these, you know, well, this is essentially a compilation of all of the other stacks that are on everybody else’s desk. And at the end of the month, the Henry are the stacks and we count them up. And that’s our ROI. You know, that’s how we did, how big is the stack? You know, how big is the stack this month, right? And if the stack was little, we didn’t do well, this month, you know? And, of course, we did our best, you know, how did you hear about us website, TV? I saw your sign a customer referred right? And we’d write this at the bottom of these customer info sheets. But then it dawned on me that, you know, well, that’s great. That’s how many customers we converted into paying customers, but how many people actually called us? You know, how many people call this that? We couldn’t service because we didn’t have staffing for that area? Or, you know, we were too expensive or You know, I mean, you name it, right? You know, why didn’t we start these customers? And, you know, it dawned on me that these marketing channels can be doing their job, right the web can be bringing in clients and the PR in relation relationships can be bringing in clients and the professional referrals. But we weren’t tracking people that we lost, right, for any various reasons as well. So what we decided to do at that time was to say goodbye to good old fashioned paper. And we we, you know, common sense would say, Well, why did you know, maybe you just skipped right to a spreadsheet and kind of listed everything, we just leapt right over that, right, we went, we looked online, you know, a texting the word CRM. And of course, what popped up was Salesforce. And right away, they said, you know, 25%, ROI, you know, for tracking your leads and tracking your customer information. I said, Whoa, 25%, that’s excellent. So we had a consult with one of the Salesforce reps. And we said, let’s just do this, right, let’s not, let’s not mess around. Let’s implement Salesforce. And at the time, it was so new, I mean, implementing a system on that scale, to a company that literally have a paper stack to count their leads and out their, their, their customers from that, you know, just skipping right over the good old fashioned Excel sheet and going right into a CRM was like, whoa, what do you guys do and, and the cool thing about implementing Salesforce is that we were able to build the system. It wasn’t like, we were giving, given a system that, you know, that we had to fit into, we fed what we wanted into Salesforce. So we had a great integration team. And we built that system around it, to help track every lead. And we and implementing it was a challenge route, as you might know, you know, folks that are used to kind of writing everything down or now having to type it in. Having users adopt, it was difficult. But we developed the motto and you know, we say it even today, I mean, years and years later, if it’s not in Salesforce didn’t happen, you know? Oh, did you call this customer back? Oh, yes, I did. That at Salesforce. It didn’t happen.

Tom Nixon 22:44
Right. That’s like the new expression pics, or it didn’t happen. Yeah, that’s what the kids say. Yeah, yeah. Well, real quick, I that because this is I think, as long as I’ve been in the marketing business, I’ve always seen so consistently, this sort of split between the marketing efforts and team and the sales efforts in teams. So the marketing team will say, Hey, I’m sending leads, right? They’re going to the website, and the phone calls are coming in what happens after that? is on the sales team, and then the sales team, if they’re being held accountable, will at times say Well, yeah, the phone calls are coming in and the leads are coming to the website. But they’re, they’re not the right leads, marketing’s not doing the right job. And so then there’s this combative sort of marketing, pointing a finger at sales, sales is pointing a finger at marketing. And then I meet Curtis and Curtis is one of the few people who I think was attempting to in has cracked this code, which is, why would we not connect these two and create this whole this closed loop? So that not only is marketing finding out what happens to the leads, but then is going back to the sales team and saying this great lead that turned to a conversion is a persona type that we should go out and find more of. So why don’t you explain that Curtis and why you almost insist on having these mutual accountability meetings? I think it’s key, it’s important.

Curtis Hays 24:04
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I heard the term quite a few times before I actually looked it up. But I heard it being used about 10 years ago, with closed loop marketing. No, you should be doing close with marketing. It’s like, what does that even mean? And so yeah, to us, it’s, you know, really closing that gap, where, on a regular basis, at least monthly sales and marketing connect, to talk about the activities that have happened in the previous period. And then learn from that, and take whatever you’ve learned into the next marketing period. So let’s say you’re doing that monthly. And what I really appreciate about Mario and his team is we’re not just learning about the good leads and and the ones that turn into clients, but as he mentioned, understanding what’s about the one ones that we lost, and really analyzing that. Because there’s really good business decisions that can happen from that, that maybe aren’t even sales and marketing decisions sort of speak, like Mario mentioned, like, maybe we can’t fill that. That case, because we don’t have a caregiver in that area. Okay, it’s an area we’re currently serving, and we’re just short staffed, are we starting to get leads from an area that we haven’t marketed in previously, and now all of a sudden, we’re getting leads there, and we should, you know, move more so into that area. You know, so there’s a number of things potentially, you could learn that you can adjust, you know, business that make business decisions based off of it. That could be cutting costs that could be, you know, again, maybe servicing a new area, which which could help drive new revenue. Or it could be understanding what marketing activities are working, and which ones aren’t. And so, you know, you double down on the activities that are working, and you put more spin, and you put more budget to those and, you know, or, or make sure you continue those, and you and you fine tune or turn off the ones that aren’t working, and, you know, over over a period of time and over a process, then you can get to something that really is working when you share that information with with a sales team.

Tom Nixon 26:28
It’s, you mentioned this, or at least alluded to it, Mario. But the other thing that I’ve noticed is that just getting the CRM is like the first and easiest step. It’s how you implement the CRM and how you ask for and get the count of the accountability that you need. It’s critical. And we’re gonna pause there because we’re gonna come back and you’re gonna share your some of your lessons learned out of the CRM piece of it in a future episode. But before we go there, I just wanted to pause and say that in PS, a future episode, because there was another game changer that happened most recently that sort of tied into this. And without going into a, just give us a quick tease on the tool that you implemented that changed this whole game over again. And that is call rail.

Curtis Hays 27:21
Rail rail. Yeah. Yeah. You want to share that Mario? Or I?

Tom Nixon 27:27
Why don’t we Why don’t we hold it? Okay, that will get people interested, come back, because going back to this whole, it shouldn’t be so mystical and magical, this great divide between marketing and sales. So this is my big takeaway. And I’ll ask for each of yours as well. The big takeaway is that we can close that chasm and get those two teams actually working together and talking together, sales is going to be happier, marketing is going to be happier, there’s going to be more our ROI. So the CEO, CFO, CEO, oh, are all going to be happy. But that’s the thing that we have to solve for as marketing professionals. And we can’t be pointing fingers anymore. So that’s my big takeaway, Mario. I know we’re early on in the timeline here. What was your big takeaway up to this point? If you could say, this was my aha moment that got me from running a small business to running a growing enterprise?

Mario D’Aquila 28:14
Yeah, I? Well, first and foremost, I just want to make a quick comment on for the next episode, we’re kind of integrates marketing and sales, but the word that comes to mind is, well, two words is game changer. It just is. And I’m laughing and smiling at the same time, because it bridges the gap between sales, marketing and operations. But your question, Tom, was, what was my aha moment? And go Ah, ha moment, you know, for me, was that really whatever you think, Is is possible in marketing? You know, the what if we did this? And what if we do that? It’s worth exploring, right. And I think that putting up these mental roadblocks, like, you know, you know, we’ll never going to be able to do that because people aren’t going to adopt it. Or we’re never going to be able to do this because it doesn’t exist. I think those are really important roadblocks, that everyone has to get over. Right? It’s really a mindset thing. Because if you can think it exists, right? And that that’s really that was my aha moment, at least.

Tom Nixon 29:35
Because you could have easily early on said we only get one to five leads a year on the web. Why would we devote any amount of energy or money to the web? It just doesn’t bring in leads. But you didn’t. You said how do we change that one to five and make it something much more exponential in a bigger return on our investment? Yep. Curtis, what was your big takeaway from the first era? of working with Mario.

Mario D’Aquila 30:03
Yeah, I think

Curtis Hays 30:05
they, the whole team there loves information, loves data is open to share, you know, adaption to new things. I mean, so that dialogue about trying something new as long as we can we can measure it is is there open to that. And then most of our phone calls are really centered around, you know, looking at that data. So whether it’s in Salesforce, whether we’re putting data into spreadsheets, whether we’re looking at dashboards that we’ve built in Data Studio, you know, it’s, it’s now we don’t talk about what we did, or what we’re going to do, you know, we’re talking very specific things, what worked? What didn’t, the data is going to show us that the numbers are and then we say, okay, how do we influence these numbers? What are some things we could try and that ideation and creativity? I think it opens up the door for for that to actually happen. And then we can start exploring possibilities. Well, what if we went after this service here? Or what if we, you know, increased our bids and focused on this service area over here, because it has a has a higher profit margin, you know, those types of things? And then we try it. And then we come back a month later, and we say, hey, what, you know, did this work or not? And? Yeah, go ahead.

Tom Nixon 31:28
I was just gonna say that. That’s another common mistake I see when you don’t do it this way is I see too many companies say, you know, if they can get over that first hurdle that Mario described, it’s like, well, let’s try something. Okay. So they try something for a period of six months or a year, and then they wait till the end, and then they give it a pass or fail grade. Right? It’s like, does that work? And that really, are we tracking it? Wow, that really, right? Well, you just feel like it didn’t work, or did work. And this is blind. To be testing monthly. And iterating. Monthly is important, too, isn’t it?

Curtis Hays 32:03
Yeah. And there was something I learned very on a very early on, when I started consulting on my own, which was, when you have meetings with clients, the meeting should never be focused on feelings. Everything has to be data driven, right? So don’t, from my perspective, being a consultant, I can allow the customer to have a conversation about whether or not they feel good about the activities that are happening or feel bad. You’ve got to really dig into why, you know, and what is it and, you know, get to the heart of what is essentially true. I mean, the numbers, if you have integrity and your data, you know, now you’re speaking truth. And, you know, you can have a conversation around something that that’s really meaningful and can move in the right direction. It’s not that feelings aren’t meaningful. But I don’t know, from a consulting perspective, you know, what am I supposed to do with a feeling or to speak, right? But if you tell me, hey, you know, currently, it’s costing us $1,000. For every marketing, qualified lead, we get, we need to get that to 500. In order for us to be successful. Now, I’m moving my business in the right direction. Now, that’s something we can build a plan around. And that’s what Mario did. He actually did the work to say, here’s the lifetime value of a customer. Here’s what we need to do from a marketing perspective and bringing in qualified leads and what number we need there. Let’s work towards that. And we didn’t get there in the first 30 days, 60 days. Frankly, we didn’t get there in the first year. But we’re there now. And we saw a little pieces of success along the way. So when you start talking like that from a customer’s perspective, and you have a team who knows what to do with that, I think you can move yourself towards success. Yeah.

Tom Nixon 33:59
Cool. Well, Mario, will you come back and tell us the rest of the story? Because I know there’s a lot more to tell.

Mario D’Aquila 34:05
Sure. It sounds like fun. Yeah. We’re just getting started.

Tom Nixon 34:09
Just getting started. So just real quick, it was one last piece. We started with one to five leads per year on the web. Can you just give us some sense of kind of what’s going on fast forward to the future? Oh, my

Mario D’Aquila 34:22
goodness. Now I have to open up Salesforce. thing I have it open.

Tom Nixon 34:27
Does it lie? Sorry, one

Mario D’Aquila 34:28
to five Lee. I mean,

Curtis Hays 34:30
US customers one to five customers. I think Mario a year right?

Tom Nixon 34:34
Coming from the website

Mario D’Aquila 34:41
Well, I can tell you it’s it’s definitely over. 50

Tom Nixon 34:47
So a good month might be double what you had in an entire year.

Mario D’Aquila 34:54
Absolutely. I mean, we’re gonna we’re going on Triple and of course That’s we implemented call rail and I know it’s in another episode. But you have to be careful about where your leads are coming from. And what we’re realizing with the implementation of call rail is that we’re getting more online leads than we thought we were getting. And, and that number is going to be I think this is going to be a record year, to be honest, because of that medium. So I guess stay tuned.

Tom Nixon 35:31
That’s a good place to leave it right there. So all right, yeah. Well, thank you so much, Mario for coming on. bull’s eyes and bull horns. Curtis, thank you as always for your data. nerdery we keep us all on your religious commitment to the numbers and we’ll be back to hear the rest of barrio story on future episodes, multiple of bull’s eyes and bull horns.