Use And Embrace Change To Drive Growth
Tim Fitzpatrick
MSP & B2B Professional Service Firm Marketing Consultant/Advisor | Fractional CMO | Build and manage your marketing engine to get where you want to go faster. | Remove Your Revenue Roadblocks
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?Luis Alvarez?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!
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Use And Embrace Change To Drive 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, we talk about the bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult and you must remove your revenue roadblock to accelerate revenue growth. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am really excited to have with me Luis Alvarez from Alvarez Technology Group. Luis, thanks for taking the time and I'm excited to do this today.
Luis Alvarez
Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm always keen to share any good experiences or bad experiences that I can help make our community better.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, if you've been in business for any length of time, we all have plenty of those to share. So I appreciate you doing that because if we can help shorten the path for people, I'd love to be able to do that. So to get things started, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions. You ready to jump in with both feet?
Luis Alvarez
Sure.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. Very quickly, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?
Luis Alvarez
Well, we are a managed security services provider. That piece of it, we've been doing for about four years. We've been an MSP for close to 13 years. We were an early adopter of the flat fee for service model, and it's paid off well for us over the last 13, 14 years.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. And for those that don't know, MSP Managed Service Provider, yes?
Luis Alvarez
Correct. Yeah. Cool.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So in those 13 years, what's the most important lesson you've learned?
Luis Alvarez
The most important lesson is don't rest on your laurels. I mean, the world, especially in technology, that we're in, changes pretty much on a daily basis. You wake up to new things. Who knew that before December of 2022, ChatGPT existed, but yet now it's all over the place and all of us are scrambling to figure out how can we use it, how we can talk to our clients about it, how can make us better and what to worry about. That's the world we live in. And I've learned that you just got to always be ready for the next opportunity or the next challenge and turn it into an opportunity.
Tim Fitzpatrick
That is a great piece of advice. I actually interviewed somebody and I can't remember his name. It was a while back. It was probably a year or two ago on the podcast talking about how complacency is the biggest killer of success. Fantastic piece of advice. We all know growing a business can be very difficult at times. Do you have any mantra or motivational saying that you say to yourself or you share with your team to help push through those times?
Luis Alvarez
Yeah, it's something that's core to our business and it's been this way for a long time. We call it progress, not perfection. All of us in business sometimes get caught up in analysis paralysis where you just feel like you need to get everything perfectly right before you can move forward. And my team is no different. And I've taught them over the years that, hey, as long as we're pushing forward, we might take two steps back, one step forward, whatever the case may be, as long as we're moving forward, that's what we need to do. Progress, not perfection is something that we use internally all the time. Whenever we get caught up on, we need to do this, we need to do that, somebody will call me out and say, Hey, remember, progress, not perfection. You know it's working when they're giving it to you instead of you giving it to them.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I've mentioned this multiple times in different interviews. There was a group that I was a part of, and they talked about implement now, perfect as you go. Very similar. As a recovering perfectionist, I always have to keep that top of mind. Thank you for sharing that.
Marketing is an Investment Not an Expense
Tim Fitzpatrick
One of the things we talked about in the pre interview was obviously about marketing. You had said to me, Hey, we started investing in marketing about 12 years ago and it's had a huge impact on your business. What prompted this for you? Can you just give us a quick sketch of what prompted it and where you've been with your marketing as your company's evolved?
Luis Alvarez
I'm happy to. As I said, about 13 years ago, we started our journey as a managed services provider, and that meant leaving behind our traditional break fix time and materials, project based business, and actually investing in tools and applications that could help our clients manage their systems more efficiently and help us do it more efficiently so that we weren't losing money. And we were growing organically, word of mouth. But we had made this investment in people and in products and in services, and we knew that we needed to get a return on that. And that just waiting for somebody to call us because they got referred to us wasn't going to cut it. And so we started making investments in marketing, which is something that we hadn't done actively. We'd use a lot of free marketing resources like a lot of business people do. You send a press release to the chamber newsletter or the local paper and you hope they put it in there. But now we were actually paying for not only marketing, but marketing advice, hiring people to help us put together the right combination of marketing services and approaches to help get the word out about who we were, what we did, and why we would be the right choice for them to make, which is generally what I think any business, no matter what your industry is, you try to get some messaging that you want to send. And back then, social media wasn't a thing. I mean, I think Facebook existed, but not from a business perspective is where we all went in to check in and show people all the food that we were eating and places we were going. Why do we do that? I don't know, but that was the thing, right? So, hey, I'm at this restaurant eating this food. But as social media matured and as things like Google AdWords started to become much more of a vehicle to communicate to the very targeted set of prospects that you wanted to go after, we incorporated that into our marketing. And we started, over the years, we've digitized our marketing. We've rebranded several times because you have to look at what's going on in the world and say, Is our brand stale? Do we look old? And in technology, in particular, you really can't look old. And that's why you see a lot of technology companies constantly reinvent themselves. There's a reason that Facebook became Meta. Apple's always going to be Apple, so they don't count. They got some secret sauce the rest of us don't have. But as a business, you constantly have to make those investments because you really can't count on the same business showing up every day. And in technology, in particular, the landscape changes. The people that you work with change. We've gone through, over the last 12 years, a generational change. The people that we were talking to, the CEOs and the business leaders that were our targets, they've retired and their kids have taken over or younger versions of themselves. And those kids aren't as... They aren't Luddites like their parents were and their grandparents were. They get technology. They were born with a computer at their fingertips. So you really can't approach them the same way as you approach their parents about, Hey, don't worry, we'll take care of you and we'll take care of your computer so you don't have to. These guys don't care about that. Today, the modern business wants to know, what am I going to do? What can my company do to make them more successful? So the pitch is different. What we say to them is different. And that's evolved over that 12 year period of time. And so for us, the investment in marketing is the only way that we've, over that 12 year period, we've almost tripled in size. It's because we've been able to bring in new clients and expand our reach to the point where we have a really strong brand and brand awareness in geographically where we're located. But even as far away as other nearby states, we get a lot of interest from people not just down the street, but all over the country.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Luis, you shared so much value in there. I want to pull a couple of things out that I think are easy to miss. First off, what really started this for you was, you were growing but you realized that to really scale, you had to move beyond just referrals.?Referrals are great, but they're not predictable, they're not scalable. And you knew that you were going to hit a ceiling at that and said, I've got to invest in this. You also said invest. I think it is so critical to view marketing as an investment rather than an expense because the people that view it as an expense think it's like a light switch. You can just turn on and off. And that's never going to work well with marketing. You've done it consistently month in, month out, year in, year out. And that is one of the reasons why you've been able to triple your business because you see it as an investment. The other thing that you mentioned that I think a lot of people get hung up on is your ideal clients have shifted. So many times people think about strategy as like, I got to put it in place and then it's done. It's not. As your business evolves, as the market evolves, your strategy and the marketing tactics that you use evolve with it. And having the foresight to know, Hey, gosh, our ideal clients are starting to shift. These business owners are shifting and we need to update that. Our messaging needs to shift because what was important to the people we were dealing with is not anymore. And that's another thing that I think has helped you grow like you have as well. You got to shift and you have to have the awareness to see that it's shifting. So many times when people do strategy, they're like, Gosh, I don't want to narrow my focus. I'm going to lose business because of that. No, it's just man, just focus for now. Focus for now, do this, and you can always shift later, but you got to focus because if you don't, it's too broad and things become far too complex.
Luis Alvarez
It's very easy for us to try to be all things to all people. And somebody comes in the door and says, Hey, can you do this? And you're like, Well, yeah, we can do that. The question we have to ask ourselves is, do we want to do that? And is that going to be good for us? And so we made the decision, for example, that we don't do any projects for anybody that's not an existing client. That is, we don't have visibility into their environment. We don't want to be that company that somebody comes to and says, Hey, can you upgrade my PCs and not have any idea of what that means. And going through that discovery process can be lengthy and most people don't want to pay for it. They don't feel like it's... Why should I pay you to figure out what I have? I just want you to tell me what it's going to cost to get to the next level, but we can't tell them that. And so we said, look, if somebody walks in the door and asks for that, the answer is no. You can become a client first. We can put you on some agreement. We can learn your environment, learn your business. Then we can talk about what the right upgrades are for you. Or even if upgrades are the path you need to go on. We've converted people, for example, who've come to us and said, we have a server or two servers and we want to upgrade them. And then as we bring them on as a client and learn about their business, we say, You don't need any servers. You really need to move to digitize your environment. Use SharePoint, use Office 365, use all these other hosted environments to do the exact same thing that you're doing now with a lot more flexibility, a lot more reliability, and in most cases, at a much lower cost.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Our approaches are very similar. It's so interesting because you made that conscious decision, Hey, we're not going to do this, frankly, because it's not really serving the client and it's not serving you. The same thing goes for our business. As a marketing consultant, a fractional CMO, we don't want to come in and just do a single project because we have no idea, do you have a good strategy? Do you know who your ideal clients are? Do you have a good message? Because coming in and working on a project that doesn't have the fuel that it needs isn't going to serve anybody. And in fact, it ends up coming back on you. It's like you didn't do a good job. Well, you inherited somebody else's mess. So I love the fact that you made that conscious decision and just said, hey, no, if it's not a good fit for us, it's not a good fit, and that's okay. It's okay to say no. A lot of times when we say no, we don't realize how much we're helping ourselves and the client. The managed service provider space, like a number of spaces, super competitive.
The Importance of Having Systems in Place as Value Proposition
Tim Fitzpatrick
There are a lot of players in the space. There's also not a lot of differentiation in the space. What do you think sets your company apart?
Luis Alvarez
That's a great question and one that we struggled with for a long time because, like you said, nobody's going to say, Hey, I offer mediocre services. I'm like, I'm not great. Our customer service is okay. Nobody's going to say that. We're always the best. We're always best of breed, etc. So that just becomes white noise to people when you talk to them, whether it's a prospect or an existing client that's looking to validate the services that they hired you to do. And we thought, we got into a room and we thought about it and we realized that the biggest comment, most complimentary comments that we got from our clients had to do with the fact that we were reliable because we had systems in place to deliver on our promises. That didn't depend on having a great engineer or having a great account manager. We've gone through account managers, we've gone through engineers, and our clients have learned. It doesn't really matter because we have a great system in place to make sure that everything they need is taken care of. From the moment they submit a ticket to the moment that ticket is closed and they can provide us some feedback in terms of a customer service survey, we want to understand their business well enough that we can plug anybody within our organization into it. And so that meant that we in the back end had to invest in tools that let us do that. So documentation, standardized toolsets, standardized stack of technology so that our folks didn't have to say, oh, that's client X, Y, Z. They use this and client this because that becomes confusing to everybody and it dilutes your ability to deliver services. So having a very systematic approach to the way that you do your business pays dividends because it means that you're not reliant on hitting it out of the park every now and then. You know you're going to hit doubles and triples all day long and get home runs that way rather than trying to swing for the fences. And it works for us. And it's something that we sell as a value proposition to our clients. It resonates with them because more often than not, they're coming from a very chaotic provider, somebody who didn't answer the phone reliably or somebody that promised to be there at a certain time and never showed up and never called to say why they didn't show up. We've had prospects come to us and say, Hey, I called my guy two weeks ago and I'm still waiting for him and I need this taken care of. Can you handle it for me? And we say, Yes, but you have to make that switch. You can't just ask us to come in and fix that one problem. We need to take in your entire environment and manage it from top to bottom. And having systems in place has really been for us what has sold us as a company to many of the prospects that we talk to.
Tim Fitzpatrick
When you understand your differentiators, what makes you unique, what your?competitive advantage?is, the marketing and the sales process becomes a lot easier. When you've seen that. And you said, Hey, one of the things you said was we asked our clients, right? We started listening to them because it is so hard for us to think objectively about our businesses. When we talk to clients, ideal ones, and hear it in their own words, it becomes super obvious. They're like, Oh, my God. How did I not see that? But identifying that unique of, Hey, we've got reliable systems to deliver on our promises, great. That becomes one of your uniques and one of your differentiators. One of the things that I always recommend people do when they're having a difficult time figuring this out, or if we're doing it for clients, is it starts with ideal client interviews, really honing in on that, gathering that information, and then you can start to identify what makes you unique. The other thing that I've also found helpful, too, is looking at... There's four pieces of low hanging fruit for differentiators. How are you helping people save money or make money? How are you helping save them time? How are you eliminating hassles? And how are you reducing risk? Those are other great places to start. The other thing that I've seen... In professional service, this is not always... I would say in professional services, I've seen probably half the people do this. But if you feel comfortable enough offering a guarantee, guarantees can be huge risk reversals. But in some professional services realms, they're really challenging. But if you can do it, it's a huge differentiator. But you guys have found those differentiators. And then as you started having sales conversations, marketing conversations started opening up doors. It makes you look different. So here's another question. As you started doing that, did you see any differences in the sales process? For example, did you start to not get quite as many price objections as you started going through the process?
Luis Alvarez
Yeah. We learned early on that it used to be that we were taught don't show them the price until you get to the end. It's the car dealer analogy. How much is it going to take for you? What's it going to take for you to drive this car off the lot? That's not the approach that you want to take in our business. We'll go in and we're very direct. We have a pricing model that's available for clients, and we'll say, based on this initial... We have a process where we have a couple of meetings before we get to this point, but we tell them before we even start doing a paperwork and starting doing a proposal, we've already given them the capabilities brief. They know who we are. They've gotten references. And we say, based on our conversation, we think this is going to be about somewhere between $5,000 and $6,000 a month for us to provide services. Is that in your budget? And if they say, Gosh, no, we were hoping we'd come in at two or three, and we say, Well, sorry, we can't do it for that. There's a hard cost to what we do. We can't compromise it. You don't want us to fail because we can't afford to keep our business running and we're just not a good fit for you. But it just makes it less awkward. So when you do give them that formal proposal and they're looking at the number and it comes in at $50,25 or something, they know it's coming. It's not something where they're going to call you in and say, Well, I didn't know it was going to cost this much. You have to be willing to talk about price upfront. But by the time you get to price, you've already got them to the point where they want to hear about your price because they're like, Okay, we really are excited about working with you. We love what you said about what you can do for us, how you can help us get better, and how you can protect us and make us safer and more secure. We know that's going to cost some money because we've already told them we're not the cheapest people in town. So what's that look like? Here you go. We're going to tell you. And we have a formula that explains why that is. And it's not something that we just pluck out of thin air. Well, you have this number of people, there's many locations. This is what that looks like.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. The when you go to proposal, price should never be a surprise at that point.
领英推荐
Luis Alvarez
Absolutely.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I've always viewed proposals as this is an opportunity to just review what we've already discussed. Do you have any other additional questions I can answer for you? There should not be surprises there. I love that. Thank you for sharing that.
The Importance of Having a Marketing and Sales Plan
Tim Fitzpatrick
One of the other things that we talked about in the pre interview and Luis, you were talking right up my alley here was planning with sales and marketing. You've got to have a plan. You got to stick to a plan. God, if you don't... I can't remember who said it, but I think it was Ben Franklin. I can't remember. But if you fail the plan, you're planning to fail, right? Yeah. You've got to have a plan. Can you share just what's your planning process? How do you view planning?
Luis Alvarez
So for us, it starts with what do we want to achieve? What's the goal for the year? We do annual and quarterly goals that are built around the annual goal. So we say at the beginning of 2023, for example, we had a retreat where the leadership team got together and spent a couple of days going through, reviewing the previous year, where did we succeed, where did we fail, and then how do we leverage the successes to grow even more this year? And what does that growth look like? And where do we want to grow into? What are the opportunities that we see? What are the changes in the environment that we need to look at? Are there any economic factors that we need to take into consideration? So you look at all that and say, Okay, so now we've decided we want to grow 15 % year over year this year. And these are the areas that we want to grow in. So how do we market to grow? What do we need to do on the marketing side to target those specific industries, if that's where we're going, whether it's vertical or whether it's just a more broadly based approach. So, for example, when we started doing got very aggressively into cybersecurity as our leading element to our sales process. Well, we had to revamp everything that we did because prior to that, it was all about managed services and making sure you sleep better at night. Well, now it's, yes, we want you to sleep better at night, but for different reasons because we want to protect you. And so the pitch changed, the target market changed. We started going after things like co managed IT where there's a lot of organizations that have a very small IT department, but they have no cybersecurity skills in that department. So maybe we can come in and help them. So it wasn't about getting rid of the IT people, but it was about partnering with them. And that's a whole different approach to marketing. So once you figure out what it is you want to do, then you have to plan what's the best way to target that particular market segment and those people that we want to target. Is it via email? Is it cold calling? Because cold calling is still a thing. Is it digital marketing? Is it physical marketing? Is it webinars? Is it seminars? So you take all those things and you say, All right, now that we have that, let's put the plan in place. What are we doing in Q1? What are we doing in Q2, Q3, Q4? So that when you get to the end of the year, you can say, Hey, we executed on the plan that we had in place, or we had to pivot because we had a severe recession or we had unexpected, but some outside influence that we couldn't have anticipated made us have to change. ChatGPT is one of those things. That's something that we are now looking into our second quarter, we go into our second quarter retreat at the beginning of next week, and we're going to take a look at that and say, What's the impact of this generative AI technology to our clients and our ability to deliver services to them? Are there opportunities within our client base that we could take advantage of? Maybe there's something that we can add to the products and services that we already provide them. And are there other target markets that we didn't identify at the beginning of the year because this wasn't a thing back then that now we can go after. So you have to reevaluate and recalibrate every quarter, but it's still part of the plan, that recalibration.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Man, again, you're just talking right up my alley. I love planning in?90 day sprints?because it keeps things simple. It's long enough to start seeing traction, but it's also short enough where you get the data, you make course corrections, and you just wash, rinse, repeat. I love that. Thank you for sharing that.
Finding the Right Talent could Be Challenging
Tim Fitzpatrick
What do you see as the biggest challenge to your company's growth at this point?
Luis Alvarez
I think if you'd asked me that at the beginning of the year, we thought the economy was going to be the biggest challenge. We don't think that's much of an issue anymore, at least in our geography, it may be in other places. I don't doubt that economic swings affect different parts of the country differently. But I think our biggest challenge is going to be finding the right talent. That continues to be a challenge. It's always a tradeoff between growth and talent acquisition because you don't want to grow too fast that your existing clients start to feel the pain of your growth, where you they're like, Well, why can't you take... Your service delivery times have gone down. Why can't you take care of me like you did last year? It seems like you guys are stretched thin. Those are phrases and comments you never want to hear from your clients. So sometimes you have to just pause on growth until you're able to add the right talent to deliver on that growth. And that was something that happened to us with our cyber security team, where we brought on so much business that our team had to grow and we had to find the right people. And it took us probably a good six months to find the right two additional folks to add to the team. And now we're moving forward again with adding and looking for more cybersecurity related opportunities. So finding talent, I think, in our industry is always going to be a challenge. That's why many of us embrace automation. I want to see what ChatGPT, and like technologies bring to the party this year. I know that a lot of the vendors that we work with are starting to integrate that into their offering so that maybe we can alleviate a lot of tier 1 technical support queries and move that off to automation and then elevate those folks into tier two and give them higher value work to do so that we can solve our staffing problem by just basically hiring robots to do the low end stuff. But we'll see. We've had this promise of AI solving that tier one support issue for a number of years, and we haven't gotten there, but maybe we finally are going to get there.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how it all unfolds, right? It's still incredibly new. I think it's difficult for us to really see exactly where it's going to take us, but I think there's a lot of opportunity, so it'll be interesting to see.?
The Future of Technology is Exciting
Tim Fitzpatrick
What's been the biggest driver of your growth and success, would you say? I think the biggest driver of our success.
Luis Alvarez
Has been our ability to look into the future and anticipate what that future looks like. So like I said at the beginning, we were early adopters of the managed services provider model, which a lot of my peers shied away from because they really were scared of this concept of how do I price it so that I don't lose money? How do I know my clients are going to overuse my services? I'm going to lose my shirt on this. And we took very deliberate steps to make sure that didn't happen to us. We didn't do it wholesale. But when we got to the point that we had figured out our pricing model and it was working for us, then we made that switch because we realized that that was what customers wanted. They didn't want the unanticipated cost every month of how much did I spend on IT? They wanted to know if I hire people, I know exactly what my budget is. If I hire a company, I need to know what my budget is. And so that's what Managed Services did for us. And it really spurred a lot of growth because that was attractive to the market. Then we moved quickly into cloud when we saw that it was really something that was going to be a game changer. A lot of my peers said, Nope, I'm never going to let go. They were like, My server, stay with me. I'm never going to let go of them. I said, Hey, dude, you got to be ready because Office 365 is for real and it's going to take off. And then same thing with security services. And now I think this AI is something that we are going to really be investing in and learning more about and learning more about how it can help our clients and how we can leverage that to grow our business. But always keeping yourself open to change. One of our core values is embrace and drive change. And we chose those words deliberately because we want everybody in our team to know that it's not just about wanting to embrace change, but it's also pushing change, driving change internally in our company as well as to our clients and being able to explain to them and educate them why that change is important and it's going to make them better. So we think that there's a lot of good opportunities on the horizon, and it's just keeping your eye out there while at the same time running your day to day business, but being strategic about looking toward the future and seeing what's the next big thing. And how can I leverage that?
Conclusion: Use And Embrace Change To Drive Growth
Tim Fitzpatrick
So knowing what you know now, anything you do differently?
Luis Alvarez
So many things. I recently heard Daniel Pink speak, and he was talking about people, he's asked the question, do you have any regrets? And there's so many people in the world that say, I don't have any regrets. And he said those people will regret saying they don't have any regrets. We all do. I mean, we all make mistakes along the way. I think for me, one of the things that I would have done earlier in my career is really learn the nuts and bolts of finances better. We were fortunate in that I can say for the 22 years that we've been in business, we've been profitable every year and we don't have any debt. We've lucked into it more than I care to think about. But I think we would have been much more successful had I really understood all the drivers of our business and the importance of each element of it, especially I would have invested in marketing a lot earlier and a lot heavier than I did because at the time I was concerned that we were just... I looked at it, even though I said it was an investment in my head, there was a little thing that was saying, This is just an expense. You can't quantify this. And we learned that we could quantify it. And there's a lot of metrics out there that you can use to say, Hey, if I spend X amount of dollars on marketing on this platform or in this media or in this market, this is what I expect to get back. And if you don't get that back, then you know it was a bad investment.Bad investments happen. But understanding those numbers is something that I wish I would have understood at a lot younger age.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. We don't know what we don't know, right? And we need to get the we need to get out there, take action and learn from it to continue to grow. But I love that. I mean, honestly, I think you invested... You say that you wish you would have invested in marketing earlier, knowing what you know now, but compared to a lot of businesses, you did. When you started investing in marketing, do you remember how much top line revenue you were doing at that point?
Luis Alvarez
We were probably about a million four, a million five. Like I said about, we're almost four times that now. So it's helped us grow. And I would say that it wouldn't have happened without putting ourselves in a mindset that said, we have to set aside budget, real dollars every year to do marketing. And we're not just going to do it ad hoc. We're going to put it into the budget and say, this is how much we're going to spend, and we can spend less if the opportunity isn't there to spend it. We can spend more if we think that there's more opportunity there. But we've drawn that line in the sand, and now we know there's no argument that that's what we're targeting.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And you're willing to put it on the line and test and see what happens. I know for most businesses, a lot of the marketing that they do doesn't work, right? But it's that as they're testing, they're learning, and that's helping them find the things that do work. And the things that do work make all the investment worth it. Have you found that to be the case?
Luis Alvarez
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've made plenty of mistakes in sending out everything from marketing pieces that didn't resonate, even though we spent thousands of dollars on them, to hosting webinars that didn't really attract an audience because it was the wrong topic at the wrong time, to lunch and learns that we invited a bunch of the wrong people into the room, and so they ate our food and listened to our food and didn't buy a thing. But that made us do better webinars, and that made us do better Lunch and Learns, and that made us look at marketing and more targeted marketing as a worthwhile investment as opposed to just shotgunning out a bunch of flyers to the to every business owner in town and hoping that one of them calls us.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Luis, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your experience. Where can people learn more about you?
Luis Alvarez
Well, you can come to our website, alvareztg.com, and we're very active on Twitter, so you can follow us?@alvarezTG. We're also on?Facebook. You can find us there by just searching for Alvarez Technology Group. And of course, LinkedIn, we're there, I'm there, and we're always posting on what's going on and the latest and greatest things. Now, a lot of stuff on cybersecurity and ChatGPT, quite frankly, that might change over time.
Tim Fitzpatrick
It will change. No doubt about that. It's just a matter of when, right?
Luis Alvarez
Exactly.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So yeah, please go out, connect with Luis. Go check out alvareztg.com. Find him on social. I really appreciate you taking the time, Luis. I enjoyed the conversation. I know people will get a ton of value from it, so thank you for that. Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you as well. We've been talking about growth. If you want to grow, you got to remove those revenue roadblocks. If you want to know which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can do that over at?revenueroadblockscorecard.com. You can also always connect with us over on our website at rialtomarketing.com. Thank you again. Until next time, take care.
Connect With Luis Alvarez
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About the author,?Tim Fitzpatrick
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