Nurturing Your Audience For Growth

Nurturing Your Audience For Growth

Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience.

Join?Tim Fitzpatrick ?and?Ryan Kreger ?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!

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Nurturing Your Audience For Growth

Tim Fitzpatrick

Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth, and marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Ryan Kreger with me today from ASG Information Technologies. Ryan, welcome and thanks for joining me.


Ryan Kreger

Thanks for having me, Tim.


Tim Fitzpatrick

I'm excited to dig into this and learn from your experience. I learn every time I do these episodes, so I can't wait to dig into it. But before we do, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions if you're ready to jump in.


Ryan Kreger

Yeah, absolutely.


Tim Fitzpatrick

So very quickly, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?


Ryan Kreger

So my company has been around 25 years. I've been in the field myself for about 15 or so. We're a small to medium sized business managed service provider. So we tend to focus on cybersecurity, compliance, but we're a one stop shop for our clients. Average client size is somewhere between 30 employees and 200 employees normally.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Awesome. And in the 15 years that you've been in the business, what's the most important lesson you've learned?


Ryan Kreger

That it doesn't really matter how well you service if you can't sell it.


Tim Fitzpatrick

I love it. Man, you're going right up my alley. So I always talk about marketing and sales. If you don't have marketing bringing in leads and sales converting those leads, nothing else matters. You're like the best kept secret out there. So we got to nail those first things on the front end if we're going to be successful long term. So thank you for serving me that softball, Ryan.


Ryan Kreger

Yeah, absolutely.


Tim Fitzpatrick

So growing a business hard, we all know this, there's ups, there's downs. Do you have any mantra or something that you... Motivational that you say to yourself, your team that helps you push through those times where you need that boost?


Ryan Kreger

I really like the idea of just being better, 1 % better every single day. It's that iterative improvement throughout the year. But besides that, just being diehard about your customers and your client base at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if you're bringing new business in if you don't hold on to the business. So not being quick to let others own problems, even if it's another vendor that you can maybe involve, being willing to steer the ship for your clients, all of that adds such tremendous value. And I feel like that's probably why we have very low churn rate for our clients. Most of my type of business, I should be churning somewhere between 1 % to 3 % annually. I haven't churned a single client now in two, three years. So yeah, that's huge.


Tim Fitzpatrick

That is huge. And congrats on that because one of the things we look at when we look at marketing planning is you have lead generation, lead conversion, and retention and referrals. So many people overlook the retention and referral side of it. And frankly, a lot of businesses simply focus on the lead gen side. And in reality, sometimes you don't need more leads or new clients. You need to not lose the existing clients you have.


Ryan Kreger

Especially in business to business. I mean, it's crazy to me. The dollar spend to acquire a singular client in our market is pretty huge. So if you're just churning and rotating clients in and out, you're never going to be a profitable business. But beyond that, nobody's going to give you referrals. I mean, we're growing, I'd say 40 % of my new business is probably a referral basis.

The Benefits of a Proactive Sales Outreach Approach

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. It's crazy how many people overlooked that. So one of the things we talked about in the pre interview, you were talking about your sales efforts, and it sounds like things are working pretty well for you on the sales side of things. Can you just share with us how your sales team is set up and how your sales process works?


Ryan Kreger

Sure. So in our market, I really like owner led sales. I'm an owner here at ASG. I still do the outside sales aspect of it. And I find the conversational aspect yields the best results, delivering as much value as possible while asking for nothing. That always seems to work. If I'm at the end of a meeting consulting for folks, they're being steered in my direction the correct way. So just giving gets you in this business. But my sales team is I have two individuals. So I have Anthony and Gérald. They're part of my inside sales efforts. And then I have Bridget on our marketing side. And what Gérald and Anthony do is that they're responsible for regularly touching our database of most right fit clients here. I'm in a small state, right? Because I'm in Connecticut. So we're just regularly touching on those business owners and those executives, most of the leadership teams of these companies. I just want to stay in front of them because nobody swaps IT providers except for those two weeks, every three years where there's a true real reason to make a change. And whether that's good or bad. There's a lot of risk, a lot of worry that most business owners have when they're looking around. And we have such access into our clients that I feel like some folks, they don't understand IT. So that alone really prohibits them from making changes. But if they feel like they don't understand it and they feel like something's wrong, they really should be chatting with other companies.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. So your two inside people are actively doing cold outreach to potential ideal clients.


Ryan Kreger

Yeah. And then what we do is we rotate them into a warm process once we've set a meeting. So they're just responsible for setting up meetings for me. I prefer to be on site in front of folks. I think that adds a ton of value. Ultimately, it's about partnering. And for what we do, we're going on site to clients regularly. So I'm sitting down, I'm sitting with business owners, I'm going through what they're currently doing and what the results are that they're getting. I talk a little bit about our clients, but the best results I get are just not talking much about us at all. It's all about them at the end of the day. And when I feel like I have a good picture of what they have going on, I'll usually pivot into what we do and talk about some of my client success stories. But yeah, they're just setting up two to three meetings a week. I'm sitting those meetings and I'm taking them through a process. Based on the result of those meetings, 90 % of those are never even going to get a quote. They're going to rotate into something I call my warm 250 where I'm just regularly touching them, keeping them warm, dripping to them. And when they have a need, I've already met with them. I've already delivered value. I regularly reach out to try and make sure I am delivering value and that my company is staying top of mind. Hopefully, they think of us and I get a chance at the business.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Ryan, you drop so much cool stuff here. I want to pull this out. So they're doing proactive outreach, trying to set up two to three meetings a week. It sounds like they're really setting up meetings, not necessarily like this is a straight up sales call. Sure. It's like, are they setting up more like, get to know you? We want to learn more about your business?


Ryan Kreger

Yeah, a little bit. Mostly around technology and what do they think technology success actually looks like? Most executives have no idea in the small and medium sized business, like, what well running technology looks like. Most IT companies don't even really interface with the actual business systems. They're more about trying to do help desk and things like that. I'm big on efficiency and wanting to leverage process and technology should be a part of that, right? But technology is a huge part of any business these days. So when they're just working with someone who they call every so often because my printer won't print, that's great. But they're never really... They're just ignoring all of that growth that they could be going through, all of that efficiency.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Your warm 250, once you've met with them, they go into your warm 250. Are your touches with the warm 250 more automated or are they are they pretty custom outreach touches in some way, shape or form?


Ryan Kreger

I would love for them to be automated, but every single business, depending on the type of business, is it manufacturing, is it a bank or credit union? Really, depending on what it is, they all have such different needs. I don't do enough automation. I think there's room for improvement there. But really, my touch is in those warm 250s, they're regularly getting email marketing. I do do some direct mail marketing. And then I'm just reaching out to them myself as I'm finding things out there or I'm doing fun things for clients in their vertical, I'm dropping those tidbits to them and letting them know, hey, is this something that you have going on in your business as well? Like with manufacturers, a few years ago, there was a very large state grant for updating technology. It's one of those why wouldn't you know about it? But it wasn't advertised anywhere. The amount of manufacturers I chatted with, I mean, we had people's full ERP systems get paid for, or like 70 % of software implementation. Yeah, crazy to me. So just me reaching out to deliver that. Nonprofits, that happens a lot. I do that in the nonprofit sector, too. But it's all about giving. If I can give enough, I usually get something in return. I get referrals from folks who don't even do business with us sometimes.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. So would you say you're touching your warm 250 once, twice a month?


Ryan Kreger

Not so much. I mean, these are business owners and they don't really want to be nagged. They're getting my newsletter. They're getting at least a monthly automated touch. And then I'm touching quarterly myself, ideally.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Okay, got it. So monthly automated and then quarterly. So here's the thing that I love about this. Depends on what you're reading, but I've seen statistics anywhere from 1 % to 10 % of your market is ready to buy at any given point in time. And so many people have conversations with prospects, it's not right, and then they just drop it rather than taking the time to nurture that relationship and stay in front of those people so that when the need does arise, they think of you. And that's exactly what you're doing with your warm 250. There's a very high likelihood that you're in the top one or two people that they're going to think of when that need arises. So I love the fact that you're doing that. The other thing that you also touched on, too, is in these sales conversations, you're just learning more about their business and figuring out what you can do to help them. One of the things that always stuck with me, too, in the sales process, we need to identify what their current state is and how that's impacting their business. Then we also need to understand what future state they want and how that is going to impact their business. When we know those two things, it's much easier for us to hone in on exactly how we can help them and how big of an impact it's going to have. So thank you for sharing that.

Why You Should Re-evaluate your Marketing Strategy

Tim Fitzpatrick

Now, I want to shift gears and go into marketing a little bit. One of the things that you shared with me when we initially connected was, man, I don't like marketing, and you're not alone. There are a lot of people that are in that boat. Tell me a little more about that. Why is marketing just a...


Ryan Kreger

We used to have an internal resource. I don't think we really understood. We were presenting much like the small company at the time. We were a small company. But if we had continued presenting in that way, we would still be a small company. You have to represent the same level of service that you deliver out there, whether that's reviews and testimonials on your website or having your clients leave you good Google reviews. I mean, if you don't ask, you don't get in this business. They don't go volunteer. I'm not a restaurant at the end of the day. So I feel like all of that culminates in some boost for us or some web hit. But we've been through a couple of outside firms, and the real problem we have with all of it is they just do not get what we do or are vertical. I feel like our best results are reinforcing our sales team, whether that's through marketing materials or props or proactive outreach with email marketing or newsletters. But at the end of the day, what we do is just so niche for each individual client that we serve that it's very hard to paint in broad strokes. Broad strokes don't tend to generate the results that you want. I mean, I have to represent in broad strokes. But an accounting firm has very different need, typically, than a manufacturing firm. Some manufacturers continue to make money as long as they can ship product. Their technology can be fully down. And then some of them will have their entire machine floor not manufacturing anything. So it's wild. I really look for 20 % of the market, and marketing really helps me figure out what that market actually is.


Tim Fitzpatrick

The firms that you used, what types of things were they doing for you?


Ryan Kreger

Everything from We spent years doing SEO and SEO optimization and us not getting web hits except once every two months. It should have been a key indicator that we weren't presenting at the same caliber that our service was heading at. They weren't helping us go out and reach out for referrals or host events or any of it. We've evolved. A few years ago, we fully rebranded. I think that was needed. The old ASG, it just did not represent the same. We weren't the same company we had been for the last 10 years. We had transitioned from this break fix service model to this all in full service offering. I'm not even going after the same clients and we never adjusted our marketing. So we had to redo ourselves and how we presented. Our current marketing is a lot more about the team. Our newsletters are a lot more about what we have going on or what we're doing for clients or what's going on in our world and how we're impacting our community. It's more about giving. It's that thought process that if you just keep giving, eventually you will get something in return. Activity does generate results.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. You touched on something there that I think is... It's very easy to overlook. As we have shifts in our business, we need to go back to our marketing strategy and reevaluate, is this still where it needs to be or does it need to shift? Marketing strategy doesn't have to... This is not something that needs to be looked at every month, but at the very least, every 9 to 12 months, or as there are significant shifts in the business, we need to go back and make sure that those things are in alignment. You get Because you had this shift in service, it's like, Well, we got to... Is our message, is our brand now representative of this shift?


Ryan Kreger

There was no story. Tim, we used to go in there with a quote and a handshake, and that worked. That worked 15 years ago, but it just doesn't work now. We're much more expensive of a firm with much different results than we used to deliver. We're way more in the business, in the systems. It's so much more of a partnered approach versus the old vendor style that we were. We go in now and it's just light and it's just night and day. We don't try to quote it if it doesn't make sense. If it doesn't make sense, I tell them it doesn't make sense. Most of my prospects I meet with are on a journey. If they're at the beginning of their technology journey, they're working with a single guy, single guy outfit. I'm at the other end. I'm full all in. They're probably going to go to a block labor firm or someone who's way more reactive. I'm very proactive in comparison. So during that first meeting, I bring branded folders with material in it talking about our client success stories, what we do, a little more detail, why you shouldn't be afraid to outsource some of your technology needs. Having that around, I mean, I've gotten calls two years later and that folder is sitting on their desk somewhere because they thought, Hey, let me reach out to them. And this is not like chintzy material. I mean, this costs money to be able to go out and leave behind. There's 20 bucks of material that I'm leaving there with them. Along with it, it's branded proposals, bound proposals. It's such a different approach than what it used to be. It's about representing us as the professional company that we are with the results that we deliver. In the past, it was all, you just got to trust what we're saying, man. Yeah, sign here. Trust what we're saying. I can have you talk to some clients if you need, but you got to get it all in writing. You got to be really clear about what you do and the results you're going to deliver. And you need to make it easy for them to accept. In our business, it's not easy to accept. They're firing a vendor that they've been working with for 10 years that gives them mediocre, but I think it's okay results.


Tim Fitzpatrick

So you mentioned Bridget on your marketing team, is that right? Tell me more about what she does. Is she a full time employee? Is she freelance? What does she do?


Ryan Kreger

She's part time. She also assists us with some administrative work and some finance work. But she's very good at graphic editing and things like that. She's a little junior, but I do feel having a point person, you can run some marketing through internally. One of our big reasons I think we failed with all those outside firms is it was my business partner, Rob, mostly doing the talking, the figuring out how we need to present. Once I started to get involved, we saw an improvement because it was just very different. You don't know what you don't know. So having multiple people at your company involved allows you to have just so many different good ideas. And you need a filter point, which is that marketing company. Bridget does a lot of the putting the newsletters together. Taking pictures, making sure that we're getting video every so often. I'm sure she's going to be snipping apart this podcast at some point so that we can be reposting snippets out there. A lot of that. But she needs that direction. She has the capability still.


Tim Fitzpatrick

So she needs the guidance and the coaching, but she can take care of a lot of the tasks.


Ryan Kreger

Yeah, absolutely. So spending thousands of dollars on content writing from a vendor who doesn't even understand what you do is probably not something that makes sense for us unless we want to look like every other IT company out there. But being able to have someone internal who has at least an inkling about what we do and when it's important to be talking about what we do out there allows us to really write that content. I've been working pretty closely with her these last few months and making sure that we have that. Outside firms, there was a lot of just, Give me access to your partner portals. Let's pull prefilled out marketing. It's plagiarized, but it's okay to be plagiarized because that vendor is fine with it. Let's repost it. None of that's actually targeted toward what your consumers want. They want to work with someone who they feel like is an extension of their team at the end of the day. So how do you get there?


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up because I was just going to mention this because I know in the IT and MSP space, sales and marketing enablement tools are available through all kinds of different vendors. Which there's nothing wrong with those materials, but you have to go into it with eyes wide open and understand what your goals are. If your goals are to create a following and differentiate your business, you really don't want to take syndicated blog posts that are being posted on who knows however many websites.


Ryan Kreger

And we've made those mistakes, Tim. I mean, we're redoing our SEO and our blog, and we're specifically rewriting content up there because I'm getting dinged on SEO for plagiarization scores. When it was okay to do that, it's okay to do it. We're also getting the results that you would get from doing it, which are done. So it's tweaking that. It's rebuilding it. All of that material is built around, let's have you sell more of my product. And MSP, what we do, it's great. There's a lot of providers out there that are about selling product. I'm about selling service. I have tools and everything that we do, but my clients, they don't care about the tools. They just want to know that they're secure, that everything's working well, that they've got a partner that they trust and who is regularly there with them and who can hop on a call immediately when they have an issue. They really don't care about a disaster recovery one pager. That might be a pain point, but they're never going to swap just because of one pain point. There's a million tools out there that sends them in the wrong direction when they're searching for tools.


Tim Fitzpatrick

You touched on something there that is so important. We got to understand what's important to our clients.


Ryan Kreger

Absolutely.


Tim Fitzpatrick

In most cases, it's not all the stuff behind what we're doing. It's the result of what we're doing. Most of them don't necessarily care all that much about the tools. It's just, are these tools going to enable you to get this result that I need? If so, cool. Most of them do not want... They're not technical. They don't want to dig into the weeds on it.


Ryan Kreger

Just like your business is complex, ours is too. I mean, technology success for a client, they probably think that they're successful if they feel like they have efficiency in their business and that their technology supports it. They're not successful if they're having cyber security events or if they're not backed up the way that they should be or any of these other 900 reasons that might influence that success. But it's about the end result. It's about the overall delivery. They really don't care about any of the four pieces that go into it. Just like you. I'm sure if you're delivering web hits, if I was your client, for instance, if I got X number of web hits, I wouldn't care about the individual pieces that got me there. I really wouldn't. I would be happy to write the check if I just got the result.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. Well, as a marketing consultant and an outsource for fractional CMO, we really do outline the metrics that are most important. And in most cases, it depends on what your goals are, again, but there's so many vanity metrics with marketing that just don't mean anything. And to me, tracking something like web hits can be an indication of things building at the beginning of the customer journey where people are beginning to know, like, and trust you. But at the end of the day, do those web hits really matter if they're not generating leads that are turning into customers?


Ryan Kreger

Absolutely. Are they qualified or is it just clunk?


Tim Fitzpatrick

You mentioned, Hey, look, we invested in SEO. Sometimes with SEO, it's like, Look, what's their job? Their job is to drive traffic. Sometimes they're driving traffic and it's not converting. Sometimes they're driving traffic and it is converting. When things aren't working, you got to have the ability to identify, why is this... What's off?


Ryan Kreger

Absolutely.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Because a lot of times they may be attracting the wrong types of clients, and they're coming to your website and they're not converting because they're not the right types of clients. Or maybe they're attracted to the right types of clients, but the messaging on the website is poor. There's no good calls to action. There's so many moving pieces that make it really difficult to diagnose when marketing is not what you do day in, day out.

Identifying What Marketing Metrics to Track

Tim Fitzpatrick

I know one of the things that when we spoke before, you had mentioned metrics, marketing metrics being a challenge. I want to dig into this a little bit because I started to touch on this, but what's been challenging for you with marketing metrics?


Ryan Kreger

Recently, it's been watching my website traffic just yo yo all over the place through the holiday season, things like that. I'm not a marketing person at the end of the day. I understand if we're getting results, but really marketing just boosted our sales effort in terms of making sure we represent the way we should be, not necessarily tracking anything specific. So now I'm tracking qualified web hits, I'm tracking SEO scores. Is that going up? Is that going down? Number of Google reviews or referrals that we're regularly getting. I'm noticing that when we're getting good Google reviews from clients, our web hits, they tend to correspond. So if I get one or two good Google reviews in a week, I'll end up getting a web hit that week. And it doesn't feel like it's 100 % of the time because of that, but there's definitely something there. And I know that there's tons of technology to be able to track it down to that specific point. But I don't know if I need that technology. I'm just getting the result that I need. If I can get a qualified web hit every single week, those skip my entire warm 250 process. They're already warm. They're already reaching out to me. They're already going through something enough to have the real conversation that matters, which is, can I help them? That's huge. So there's so much value there.


Tim Fitzpatrick

So those people are already scheduling a discovery or strategy call to say, Hey, we've got a problem. We need some help.


Ryan Kreger

They understand that there's something wrong in their approach and that they want to get a clear picture. Maybe they're meeting with three or four vendors, which is a terrible process, by the way, in my space, because everything is like comparing apples to bananas to oranges. I think that people make really the most informed decisions when you take them through the entire process and they're able to talk. At the end of the day, talk to your clients. It's that referral step that some people ask for them and they never even call them. Call a business's clients and actually get an understanding about what they do and the difference they've made for you.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. With metrics, I think I want to try and expand upon some of the stuff that you touched on there because metrics is a tough part of marketing for a lot of businesses because there are so many metrics, but if we don't identify the metrics that are going to make the most sense, it's hard for us to make informed decisions about whether things are working or not. So we really need to think about what's our goal with this particular activity. And based on that goal, that's going to help outline?the metrics that we track . But I always like to start with three simple metrics. How many leads are we generating? Where are those leads coming from? If we understand where the leads are coming from, we start to get a picture of what activities we're doing are actually working. You mentioned, Hey, look, 40 % of our new business is coming through referral. You know that because you're asking in the process.


Ryan Kreger

Absolutely.


Tim Fitzpatrick

A lot of people go, Well, geez, because I tell people, just ask. When a lead comes in, how did they find out about you? That's not 100 %. It's not foolproof. But guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than what most people are doing right now, which is not even asking.


Ryan Kreger

And it's the same in sales, by the way. The amount of business that go, I made it to the top three, but I don't get the business. I want to know why. I've sat with them. I've probably spent two, three hours at least with that prospect. Let me know, where did we fall short? Was it price? I mean, sometimes I want to be told no, based on price. That's okay. I don't want to be the cheapest firm. But is it something else? Do they feel like they actually would be getting a better result with someone who isn't going to do that? I've had competitors steal our proposals before. Oh, it looks exactly the same. And I'm like, oh, can I see that? And it's literally a copy paste of our entire proposal. This is way back in the day. I've had folks come back to me. I'm like, do you think you're going to get it for half? You think everything in there... I'm just what, pulling it over your eyes here and just lying to you? I understand the business. I understand the metrics. There's no money in that. They're not going to do what we're doing. They're just not. I've had folks actually come back to us a year or two later. I think that there's so much power in just being honest with everybody.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. One more metric. So we talked about leads, lead source, conversion. How many are converting to clients? If you know those three numbers, you're way ahead of a lot of people. And then from there, you can start to get a lot more sophisticated if you choose to do that, right? But we don't need to overcomplicate this, I think, in a lot of cases.


Ryan Kreger

I track all of those, Tim. On the sales effort, we have a playbook that we regularly keep up to date with my inside folks, all of their activity. We started adding marketing metrics into it as well. And then also at the bottom, when I'm getting a qualified prospect and we're delivering proposals, they're hitting my playbook and I'm putting down, where is this originating? Where is this at? So that's how I know that when I have something come in and it's warm like that through the website, it's way more likely to close than the two years of me having to touch it before I'm going to get them to become my customer.


Tim Fitzpatrick

The?metrics help guide your decisions ?and it helps you make much better decisions. So I love that you're doing that.


Conclusion: Nurturing Your Audience For Growth

Tim Fitzpatrick

What would you say has been the biggest factor in your growth up to this point?


Ryan Kreger

Probably just the sales side and the entire marketing outreach, matching what we do on the service side. We revamped our service delivery some years back, all built on really what we expect for ourselves. Everything just needs to be working. I need to have a partner. I need to have answers when something comes up. And I need to be secure while I do it and have very low risk. Making sure that everything speaks to that really goes a long way. If you're presenting thousands of dollars worth of quotes, you better have a written proposal that talks about you and your company and your culture and some client success stories in it and goes into the actual weeds with what they're getting. That isn't technical, by the way. Business people, they don't care. They don't care about the tech part. They just want to know what you're going to do for them.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah, I love that. What's the next level of success look like for you?


Ryan Kreger

So we're growing. Fortunate enough, we've been about 30 to 40 % growth these last few years, every year. So it's been about learning how to scale, learning how to pod our approach so that folks are working with the same couple of individuals at my company. I feel like that really delivers a best in class offering. And the clients feel that way because our churn is just gone. It's keeping our CSAT. I mean, we track so many metrics for what we do. I'm basically four different businesses combined for what we offer to clients. I'm compliance, I'm reactive service, I'm proactive service, I'm strategy. So it's having metrics and making sure everything's firing. And we're fortunate enough to be in a spot where all the metrics are just showing extreme health. And that takes a lot of discipline to get there. That took us years to get everything dialed to where it needed to be. So now it's just feeding the machine. It's making sure that clients feel like you're very specialized at what they do, that they really understand. They don't have to understand technology, but they understand the result that they're getting with a proper partner. I think it's just a matter of continuing to iterate on that, continuing to grow. I mean, we're building another space. We've ran out of some room in our current real estate that opens up next month, so that should give us another 10 or so desks that we can then fill out over the next year or two past. Yeah. So it's growing. I'd like to acquire at some point, but I feel like our current growth trajectory makes it actually pretty hard because we're very busy, we're very much disciplined, and there's a lot of regiment and buying someone's MSP business that's not well ran and then flipping it around to be well ran with clients that you wouldn't have taken anyway, that's hard. There's a lot of folks growing by acquisition in our space.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Yes, there are.


Ryan Kreger

I don't like it. I just don't like it because I can go two, three years and just build that business natively in my way of doing things, and the clients are very happy to stay. So I think it's just continuing the track. This year for marketing, though, specifically, it's cleaning up all of our bad habits. It's getting our website to tell our story more. We recently moved from an outside firm to doing it in house with some contract help on the marketing side. So it's more about talking about us and ultimately our clients and the actual concerns we're seeing out there through the sales process, not this junk from these toolkits that they send you, which is what it was previously. It was a little bit about us. It was a little bit about the junk and the tools that nobody actually cares about. They care about the result. At the end of the day, we sell process to technology success process. So it's about painting that process on everything that we have and making sure that they click with something there about how, oh, I would love to have that in my business. That's the call to action that you really need. It's just figuring that out. I'm marketing to most of Connecticut now. We're touching them regularly with my inside sales team. The one thing that we're not doing and there's so much room is advertisement. It's Google AdWords, it's SEO, it's focusing on those marketing, bring them in when they're warm items. That's where we need to continue to improve. Or I need to expand outside of New England.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Right. Yeah. So knowing what you know now, anything you do differently? I don't.


Ryan Kreger

I don't think so. I mean, there's so much learning that's gone through this place in all the years that I've been here. Maybe I would have started my career in technology a little sooner. But besides that, I really have no regrets. I think you learn from every mistake. You always take the professional approach, and you hope to get to a spot where you're able to really focus on what you need to focus on and just grow. And I think we're there. I do. But it's the marketing piece that always can need improvement.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Awesome. Ryan, thank you so much for taking the time in. I really appreciate it. You shared a lot of great stuff today. Where can people learn more about you?


Ryan Kreger

Sure. They can learn about us on our website. It's asgct.com or [email protected]. I'm happy to talk to anyone who wants to chat or if there happened to be a peer, things like that, if I could ever deliver value, that's only worked well for us. So I'm all about it.


Tim Fitzpatrick

Awesome. We will make sure that those show up in the show notes asgct.com and then [email protected]. Again, Ryan, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed connecting with you. Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you. We've been talking all about growth, accelerating growth. If you want to know which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can find that out at?revenueroadblockscorecard.com . It takes less than five minutes. If you want to connect with us, you can also do that over at rialtomarketing.com. Be happy to?set up an initial discovery call ?and help give you some outside eyes. Thank you again. Until next time, take care.


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