EPISODE 117 INTERVIEW WITH TIM FITZPATRICK: MARKETING – IT’S HARD TO MAKE THINGS SIMPLE

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EPISODE 117 INTERVIEW WITH TIM FITZPATRICK: MARKETING – IT’S HARD TO MAKE THINGS SIMPLE

marketing - it's hard to make things simple

Do you ever meet someone and know right away that you two are going to click?  My awesome guest today, Tim Fitzpatrick, is a self-proclaimed marketing nerd just like me! But where I like to focus on messaging, Tim focuses on the numbers side of it.  Tune in to hear our conversation about marketing do’s and don’ts, mistakes we’ve made along the way, and how to lay the groundwork for building a successful marketing plan for your business.

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Transcript

Erin Marcus:

Hi! I’m Erin Marcus, former corporate executive turned entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Conquer Your Business. Welcome to the Ready Yet Podcast. We’re excited to bring you more than a hundred episodes of interviews and insights designed to help entrepreneurs get the financial and emotional freedom they need in order to build a business and a life they’re proud of.

Welcome. Welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet?! Podcast. And today, I am going to do my best to remember that many of you didn’t hear the conversation that my guest and I had yesterday. So, we’re trading podcast platforms, we’re sharing our audience, we’re sharing our insights. So, I’m very excited to continue this conversation. Hopefully, it won’t be repetitive for us. This one’s about you instead about me. I think we’ll be good. But Tim Fitzpatrick and I met through podcast site, right? And I don’t know about you, but I’m having a blast because I love meeting random people and we’ve had several conversations since then. So, I can’t wait. Our thoughts on marketing, our thoughts on business are just so in alignment. I can’t wait to share your take on all of it with people as well as your journey. So, before we dive in all that, why don’t you give people a little more formal introduction of who you are and what you do?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Sure. thanks for having me here. It’s nice to switch sides of the mic, as you said. Like you said, my name’s Tim Fitzpatrick. My company is Rialto Marketing. What we do is we work primarily with B2B professional service firms that want to accelerate revenue growth and attract more ideal clients. Here’s the thing. If you want to accelerate revenue growth, you got to remove any of your revenue roadblocks. So, what we do is we take them through our system, which helps them remove the nine revenue roadblocks that exist within marketing. And as you start to knock those roadblocks down, your path becomes much clearer and you can get to where you want to go faster. 

 

Erin Marcus:

And I think my favorite thing about that is it’s not about making it more complicated, it’s about making it more simple.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yes. One of my favorite quotes is from Leonardo DaVinci, and he talks about simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. I think it is. So, it’s so easy to overcomplicate things. I have done this plenty of times. We all do it, but when we can break things down into their simplest form, it becomes much, much easier to get results. Right?

 

Erin Marcus:

And you ever, have you ever noticed that things get complicated by accident and automatically, but they don’t ever seem to get simpler by accident and automatically?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

No, they do not. Right. It’s hard to make things simple. Right? Especially when we start to dig into marketing, it’s like, what I find with marketing is so many people are battling information overload. There’s just so many channels, so many tactics within those channels. It’s like, “Oh my god, where do I even start?” You jump in and email marketing, right? I can set up this complex funnel and have, you know, well, if people take this action, then they go down this path, and if they do this, then they go down this path. All of that adds complexity and it becomes so difficult to determine where things break down. And it’s just, we got to keep things simple.

 

Erin Marcus:

And the other reason I think things get real complex, and I’m curious if you see this with your clients, is so many times the reason for the complexity is people are trying to create systems where someone just shows up and says, “Take my money.” And they never have to have a sales conversation. They never have to have a human interaction. All the things that make us nervous about being visible. And so, if we create this complex system that predicts everything that everybody might do, then I never have to say to somebody, “Hey, you want to work with me? What do you think?”

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a really good point. And we could probably go down a path. We could go down this path if you want, but LinkedIn is a perfect example of this, right? Where so many of us, we all see this, you connect with somebody, they make assumptions, they immediately start to just pitch you before they even take the opportunity to get to know you. And yes, you can automate all this stuff, but you know what, it’s really difficult to automate, truly automate relationship building because you build relationships with people by having conversations. 

 

Erin Marcus:

And when I get those, every now and then, if I get one that’s aggressive enough, the one that I think I hate them, I feel bad for those people because someone is teaching them that that’s a thing. Someone is actively teaching them that this is how you get clients. And so, I have empathy for them because they’re trying something and they’ve just been misled. Where I lose my empathy, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, I’ve had a couple where I didn’t reply to the automated pitch, you know, by my fit. And then I get a series of follow up automated ones that say, “I’m still waiting for your reply.” I’m still like, “Seriously? Isn’t that a little aggressive?” Like by the fourth one I wrote back and I said, “Honest question, I’m in marketing, I’m in business growth. Does this actually work because am I missing something? Does this actually work?” And they never reply.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

You know what’s funny is I’ve had people, I’ve never actually done this, I just don’t reply. 

 

Erin Marcus

Right. Most of the time. 

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

But I had some people go like, “Hey, your messaging wasn’t worth the reply. So, I didn’t reply.” I’ll connect with almost anybody as long as it looks like it’s a legit profile, I will connect. Because I just like to see what people do. So, sometimes I have no plans of ever responding. I just want to see what they’re doing and met a lot of LinkedIn lead gen, it’s notorious. Like they’re LinkedIn lead gen experts and I’m like, okay. This is going to be interesting. So, I accepted. And the vast majority of them are doing the exact same thing.

 

Erin Marcus:

One of the things that, again, we both have this background in marketing. One of the things that was so freeing to me when I figured it out, because I have a bachelor’s in journalism and I have an MBA in marketing, which had me erroneously thinking that if I just came up with the perfect thing to say, I could make somebody buy from me. When the truth is people buy from you because of the questions you ask them, not because of the things you say to them. And so, there was so much pressure to come up with that perfect thing to say. What you’re basically saying is you can’t be perfect enough to say the right thing to a stranger to get them to buy a multiple thousand dollars product without talking to you.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. That I think is the key. And you took the words right out of my mouth. As you were saying this, I’m thinking, there’s a difference between selling a $10 widget and selling high ticket professional services. If somebody is spending 5, 10, 20, hundreds of thousands of dollars with you, they’re not going to buy that from a single ad. Maybe that ad or some of the initial marketing that you’re doing on the frontend to help people get to know you is going to start to grab their attention and their interest, but they’re never going to make that buying decision without actually having a conversation with a human when you’re selling high ticket. 

 

Erin Marcus:

And people think they’re shortcutting the process by doing all this automation, but you’re not getting the results. So, that’s not really a shortcut.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

No. And one, it’s a numbers game, right? They’re playing a numbers game. If I automate, then I’m going to do this. Because guess what? When it’s not something that you can scale, it takes a human to actually do it, it takes work. Right? There’s trial and error there. And most people don’t want to take the time to do that work. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Do the work, right. I call it the work you have to do before you go to work. 

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

That’s a good way to put it. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Well, you know, a lot of us get into our business to do what it is that our business does for a living. This is work to grow the business, not what we got in a business to do. So, it feels uncomfortable and icky and we’re not sure how to do it and so, we come up with an automated robot.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

To do it, yeah.

 

Erin Marcus:

So, I want to back up and learn more about you. How did you get here, you know, existentially or just technically? How did you land doing what it is that you’re doing? The things I knew about you is you were always in entrepreneur world as opposed to corporate to entrepreneur world but how did you get into the marketing side of it?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. So, I’ll make a long story short, and then if you want to dig into any part of it, we certainly can. So I was a math major in college. I had no idea what the hell I wanted to do. 

 

Erin Marcus:

You’re the opposite of me. I had a journalism. 

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

So, yeah. So, look, I’m good with the numbers, right? Like, I just never really thought about that other people weren’t good with numbers. It just came natural to me. So, since I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I was like, gosh, math is probably a good–I mean, it’s used, applied all over the place. This is something good to do. So, that’s what I did. Well, once I graduated, you know, my dad had been a manufacturers rep for a long time. So, manufacturers rep, he’s a middle man, right? He’s representing factories or manufacturers. And then he is going out and selling to the retailers that were buying the product from the factory. And shortly before I graduated, he started a distribution company that was related to his rep company. There were some shifts in the market and there was a segment of the market that was much better served through distribution rather than buying direct from the manufacturer. So, when I got out, he had no full-time employees in the company. He had started it with a partner. And I said, “Look, I know you need some help. Let me help you for the summer while I figure out what the hell I want to do.”

 

Erin Marcus:

Yeah, famous last words, right?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. That was it. That’s how it started. After three months, I was like, “Oh my God, I love this. This is so cool.” I was soaking up information like a sponge. I was shipping, I was receiving, I was doing accounts payable. I was selling, I do accounts receivable. I was doing it all. We were selling home theater equipment. So, I mean, I like I loved the gear that we were selling. And so, at the end of the summer, I was like, “Look, I’m loving this. If you’ll have me, I would love to just keep doing it.” And thankfully, he said yes. And so, I basically, from that day forward, I was the one that was running the distribution company day-to-day. I eventually became a partner in the company. We had multiple partners. It worked because my dad gave me a ton of autonomy. He trusted me. He let me make my own mistakes and learn from those mistakes, but he guided me when I needed it. And so it worked really well. 

 

Erin Marcus:

I have to tell you that’s impressive because most family, and I’ve talked to a lot of family business people, the parent can’t remove themself from the parent role, which basically just kills the child’s ability, the now adult child’s ability to be the adult. And it’s not impossible, but it’s not really the norm.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

No, it’s not. I feel very fortunate. It worked out really well for everyone that was involved. I got to see a different side of my dad than I did with him as a parent, which honestly made me respect him and love him even more. But it was an amazing ride. I mean, we grew 60% a year for over nine years, and then we sold. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Wow. That’s amazing. 

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

So, I obviously learned a ton doing it. When you’re growing at 60% a year, it’s really hard to anticipate everything that you need to anticipate. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Every year changes drastically at those numbers.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Very fast. You can anticipate certain things, but there’s things that you just, they’re too far in the horizon but the horizon comes so fast that you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t see it.’ 

 

Erin Marcus:

So, how do you keep out of reaction mode? Things are moving that fast.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Things are very tough. It’s tough to get out of reaction mode on certain things. But I think for us, what helped us, what one, what helped me, like, man, I’m a planner. I’m a systems type person, so putting systems and plans in place helped us. As business took off, we had some of the systems in place to at least help us manage some of that. So, it wasn’t as painful when some of the things that we couldn’t anticipate showed up.

 

Erin Marcus:

Sure. You had almost as much of a safety net as you could create for the business.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, but if you don’t have systems and processes and plans in place when you’re growing that fast, the wheels are going to come off really fast.

 

Erin Marcus:

And the other thing that I do a lot, we look at how we’re doing things and I always ask, ‘Okay. What works with 10 clients, but if we have 20 clients, it’ll break? Right? 

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yes. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Because there’s a certain amount of manual even if it sucks in the moment, you could pull off what you need to pull off. But then there reaches a point where you can’t do that.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

No. I think the other thing too is knowing, ‘hey, I’m putting this process in place, but I know this may not be perfect. So, this is not a set and forget it thing.’ 

 

Erin Marcus:

Well, it’s not set it and forget it. And the other big mistake I see people make is they think every decision they make is a forever decision.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yes. That’s such a good point. I see this all the time with marketing. When you’re starting to do, I know you talk to your audience a lot about target market and messaging and that’s a huge roadblock with target market and messaging because they’re like, ‘Oh my god, if I make this decision, like my feet are in the concrete.” 

 

Erin Marcus:

They call it each for now. It’s for now.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yes, exactly! You’re making this decision now based on the information that you have, and you believe this is the best course of action moving forward. So, we’re going to do this work and we’re going to get out there and test it and see what happens. But you’re always making course corrections.

 

Erin Marcus:

Well, and what I love about your background, and it’s probably why your business does so well, is you can bring naturally to marketing the part that most people avoid doing, which is the systems, the processes, and the measuring because that’s how your brain just naturally works as a math and numbers and planning person. A marketing person, a person who’s into the visibility and the excitement and that side of the marketing, me or shall we name it me, right? A lot of us don’t do as good a job on the backend to collect the data, which helps you make the next good decision.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. You know, t’s funny, when you start to look at marketing metrics, it can be really difficult for people because there’s so many metrics. And there’s so many vanity metrics that just don’t really mean anything. Oh, my gosh, oh, how many followers do I have on Facebook? And how many people are on my email list? When you really boil it down, it’s like, who cares? Are you generating leads from those channels? And are those leads converting to clients? If you don’t know that, then like, who cares?

 

Erin Marcus:

I don’t care what you’re doing. My favorite version of that is now, I’ve been a speaker even in corporate, but when I started doing it in the entrepreneurial world, I started working with a speaking coach to help me put, you know, how do you do different things. And one of the things he said to me, and he was always brutal, because I would just laugh at myself. I entertain myself to no end. Right? And I would tell him, “Okay. I did this thing and there was a hundred people in the audience, and oh my god, I got a standing ovation. Everybody told me how much they loved it.” And he went, “So what? Did anybody hire you?” Right? And that is the perfect analogy for vanity metrics. So what? Did anybody hire you?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

I can’t remember who I heard this from, but there’s probably multiple people that have said this, but there’s plenty of broke influencers. Like they have all these people that follow them and you look at it and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, they’ve got it all figured out.” We just have to remember, like, man, we’re all just people. We all got problems. We’re all working through things. 

 

Erin Marcus:

They’re just better at Photoshop, right? They’re just better at photography and Photoshop. 

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

I mean, there’s certain things that they’ve done really well to get where they are, but at the end of the day, like if you have all these people following you and it’s not doing anything to further your cause or help you get to where you want to go, then–

 

Erin Marcus:

What’s the point of the platform?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. Does it really matter?

 

Erin Marcus:

Loving what you’re learning here and interested in more? Check out our free Facebook group and join us at Conquer Your Business Community to find even more tips and tools designed to help you get out of reaction mode and into conquering your own business.

So, random questions for you. One of my favorite things to do is lessen someone’s learning curve, right? You’ve been an entrepreneur for quite some time. What is some of the biggest mistakes? And you can stick to marketing, but I know you have more experience than that. What do you see are some of the biggest mistakes people make that you’re like, “Look, just don’t as the way I do it. Don’t do what I did and you’ll probably be fine.” Right? What failures can you share that would lessen somebody’s learning curve?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Oh man. I have so many. The first one that comes to mind, and I have made this mistake early on. I’m getting much better at it, but I still struggle with it sometimes, is asking for help. Like, you’ve got to ask for help. Like, when we get stuck, we can’t figure all these things out on our own. So, early on, I saw asking for help as a sign a weakness, it’s really the exact opposite. It shows strength, confidence, self-awareness, and there’s plenty of people out there that want to help. So, don’t be afraid to ask for help. The other thing too is if you know where you want to go, finding people that are already there.

 

Erin Marcus:

Right?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

And look, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to find people that are already there that are going to help you for free. Okay? But there are people that are where you want to be. And if you can find those people and take advantage of what they have to offer, learning from their mistakes and taking their systems will help you get to where you want to go faster. Because then you’re not throwing stuff up against a wall, going through all the same mistakes that they’ve already made.

 

Erin Marcus:

I had a business coach, we were talking about whether or not she wanted to work with me, and she was also a business coach. And she literally said to me, “I don’t want to work with another business coach because I don’t want somebody to tell me what to do.” And I looked at her and I thought about it, and it wasn’t a mean statement. We were having a nice conversation and I went, “Really? Because all I want is for someone to just tell me how this works.” Tell me what to do to get from where I am to where I want to be.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

One of my mentors talks about like how he always, when he has something that he wants to do within his business that they don’t know what to do. You know, ‘Hey, I need to build out my LinkedIn platform. Okay, fine. I go find a LinkedIn consultant, I hire him and have them tell me exactly what to do, and then we go do it.’ 

 

Erin Marcus:

Right. And then you make it your own, right? You make it your own. It’s not cookie cutter. You make it your own. You add your voice to it, you add your flavoring.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. And so, there’s so much. We don’t need to have all the answers. We need to know where to go to get the answers that we’re looking for. And early on, I would say, I have definitely made both of those mistakes that I just mentioned. Now, from a marketing standpoint, there are so many mistakes that we all make with marketing, but if it’s okay with you, I’m going to focus on planning mistakes. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Sure., absolutely. 

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

The first mistake with planning is people just don’t have a plan,

 

Erin Marcus:

Don’t do it. Right. They don’t do it.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

They don’t have a plan. And when you don’t have a plan, everything looks like an opportunity. 

 

Erin Marcus:

I would say the same thing, you’re very susceptible to squirrel.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yes. It’s like you’re a squirrel chasing a nut or you’re throwing spaghetti up against a wall hoping something sticks. But you’re just so susceptible to the distraction when you don’t have a plan. When you have a plan, you know what your priorities are, it eliminates those. So, you have clarity. Right? And when you know what your priorities are and you have clarity, your stress goes down. So, it’s super, super important to have a plan. But the other thing people do with planning, like sometimes they make plans to complex, which goes back to the beginning of our conversation. When I look at marketing planning, I look at it in 90-day sprints because man, a year-long marketing plan? Give me a break. Nobody puts a yearlong plan together and at the end of the year, it’s still the same plan. It morphs. 90- days is long enough.

 

Erin Marcus:

We can’t do anything more. So, we’re doing this, it’s September 1st, tomorrow, and I call this the “Oh, crap!” part of the year, because to your point with planning, if you do a big, big complex, longer marketing plan, you know, January and February are all excited about what the new year and what our goals are. And then May and June hit and you decide to take off for the summer. And now, it’s September and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I only have 2, 3 months before I take a break for the holidays. I didn’t do any of my things.” 

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. Whereas if it’s 90 days, the plans are simpler. It’s long enough to start seeing whether you’re getting traction, but it’s short enough where you can make course corrections and you just wash, rinse, repeat. So, I think 90-day planning makes sense in all aspects of your business. But in marketing especially, it’s just the market’s evolving, your business is changing. You need to make–there is no perfect plan so you’re going to maybe making adjustments. It’s those incremental adjustments that we make that lead to exponential returns in our marketing over time.

 

Erin Marcus:

I’m curious, when you do your 90-day plan, how often do you then look at it?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

I actually look at it weekly. I glance at it. It doesn’t mean that we’re changing things weekly, but I’m at least glancing at it just to go, “Hey, are we still where we need to be? Are we still on track? Are there any notes that I need to take?” Because, you know what, sometimes what happens, we all get opportunities that come our way. Right? Or we see something that’s like, ‘Ooh, that’s something I might want to try.’ So, sometimes one of the things I’m doing in my plan is just adding things at the bottom of future–

 

Erin Marcus:

I have a whole section, it’s called Ideas on Hold.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

There you go. You know, whatever you want to call it, it’s not a no forever, it’s just no right now, because this is not a priority for me. I already outlined my priorities, but I don’t want to forget about that. So, that’s where I need the notes.

 

Erin Marcus:

Right. And if you don’t write them down, they take up space in your head.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Correct! Yes, it’s in your subconscious. Right?

 

Erin Marcus:

And it’s making me crazy. So, I do the same thing where I write it down in a category for on hold and we revisit it later. I probably look at some version of my marketing plan almost every day, but I do it to what I call “Set the Stage.” So, not the whole plan, but the overarching things of the plan. So, if I do that first thing in the morning, it helps me make decisions that day because I’m sure you knew this in manufacturing, you have Project Creep. I think there’s marketing creep. Right? So, kind of like the frog in the boiling water, you don’t realize you’re going off track but if you only looked at your plan on day one and day 90, it’s like that game of telephone, you might not be anywhere near the plan.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yes. I totally agree with you. And so, like for me, the plan for my business, actually, parts of it, like you just said, make its way into my daily planning. So, like I have a daily planner that I update. And on that daily planner, I have my task for the day, but I also have my priorities for the week. Well, my priorities for the week are attached to my priorities for the month, which are then attached to my priority for the quarter. 

 

Erin Marcus:

And people don’t like to do this because it’s a lot of work and they just want to go do the thing that the business does. But this is the type of stuff that allows you to go do what–

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

It’s easy to go off track, like you said, if you’re not doing that. And here’s the other thing, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t go off track. I do go off track sometimes. We all do. But what I find is when I’ve got my priorities clearly outlined, and they’re on there, they’re a reminder. But dang, when I make the time for that to, “Hey, this is my priority.” When I make time and I get my priorities done, damn, I feel so much better at the end of the day. Even all the crap that I thought I really needed to do that I put to the side, I was like, “No, this is the priority.” Even though half that stuff didn’t get done because I got my priority done, I was like, “Dude, I accomplished something today. That was good.”

 

Erin Marcus:

And I heard this, I have to figure out who I heard this from because it’s not my original thought and I like to give credit, and I can’t remember who said it, imposter syndrome. The monster that feeds the imposter syndrome problem is the lack of integrity, a lack of doing what you said you were going to do. So, when you don’t get the things done, your priorities done, you feel like a fraud.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. It’s playing into your psyche, right?

 

Erin Marcus:

Yes. It messes with you. So, I’m going to ask you kind of a flip side question. I’m sure planning could be one of these answers, but the difference in all the people that you work with, the difference between the people who succeed and the people who don’t. What’s the glaring difference?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

The first thing that comes to my mind is short-term versus long-term thinking especially from a marketing standpoint. Marketing is a marathon, it’s not a sprint. And we’ve got to think about it from a long-term perspective. There are so many people that give up on marketing activities and tactics because they haven’t given it enough time to actually work. And so, honestly, I think short-term versus long-term thinking is just in general from a business standpoint, is a huge issue for people. When we make short-term decisions, inevitably they negatively impact us in the long run.

 

Erin Marcus:

And it’s so interesting. So, way back in the day, my big fancy title, I was Senior Vice President of business development at a long-term care insurance wholesaler. What that meant was I put relationships together between financial planning groups and warehouses and the insurance companies that produced the product. And I had the most amazing conversation with an actuary from John Hancock Insurance. Now, I love this actuary more than any the other actuaries I knew is, you’re going to love this, the way he learned numbers is because his family ran a booky operation in New Jersey when he was there. So that right there, I’m like, dude, this is fricking amazing. Right? But what he told me is, if you look at the financial services industry, as soon as a private company goes public, like terrible things happen because public companies are judged on quarterly earnings. Right? You’re bringing back memories for me because if you’re only judging on quarterly and what he taught me to do, and I’m not great at it, is hold the vision and act in the present. Can you hold the vision and act in the present? And exactly what you’re talking about, if you’re only thinking about short-term, you’re so subject to reaction mode and you can’t function in reaction mode.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

You don’t. You miss the bigger picture when you’re only thinking short-term and when you’re missing the big picture, it’s inevitable that you’re going to make poor decisions. Some of the decisions you make might not be bad. Right? They might even be really good in the short-term. But like you said, if your public company’s managing to quarterly, when you got to manage to quarterly, you’re naturally going to make decisions that are going to negatively impact. I got a buddy in sales, they’re notorious for it. It’s like, end of the quarter, you got to call all your clients and book the orders. Well, don’t you realize that we’re booking orders that were just going to happen next quarter anyways. So, all we’re doing is shifty to the business. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Right. So, who cares, right? Right. It’s a shell game. It’s not real.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. We’re moving one thing over here and then we lose that. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense. But those things happen all the time. So, yeah. Think long-term with your marketing, I think that’s a huge, huge mistake people make. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Awesome. So, let’s wrap this up with one more brilliant piece of advice. I mean, we’ve already get, right, We’ve already talked a lot about planning and the long-term versus the short-term and how to do the planning so that you’re in small sections so you don’t get one overwhelmed, two distracted, or three completely ignore it. What would you tell somebody who is stuck? Like, “Okay, I’m stuck. I’m doing all the work, it’s not working. I feel like I’m doing it right and yet,” because I think that’s also a common thing. Like it feels like you’re doing a lot of work. It feels like what you’re doing is on the right path, and yet, you’re not getting the results that you would expect.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

To me, if somebody’s in that place, something is out of alignment, right? There’s something that is out of alignment. Typically, with marketing, there’s either there’s a target market issue, there’s a messaging issue, or there’s a channel issue. You’re not in the right place to get that message in front of those people. Marketing can seem really complex, but when you break it down, that’s really what marketing boils down to is target market, the message that’s going to resonate with those people, and how am I going to get it in front of those people?

 

Erin Marcus:

Who are they? What do you do for them and where are they? It really is.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

If you’re getting in front of the right people in the right place and it’s not resonating well, then there’s something going on with the message or the author. 

 

Erin Marcus:

And we’re all too close to our own.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yes. We’re way too close. So, if you want to do one of the most insightful things in your business, the one thing I would tell your audience to do is go out and in the next month, interview 8 to 10 of your current clients. Interview them, ask them questions. Frankly, I didn’t think we were going to talk about this, but you give your audience my email address, I’ll email them a document that has all the questions that you can ask, but your ideal clients will create your messaging for you. They will tell you things that you are like, ‘Oh my God, why didn’t I see that? Or why didn’t I think about it that way?’ It will be one of the most enlightening things you’ve done in your business in a long time.

 

Erin Marcus:

Absolutely. So, what’s the best way for people to continue this conversation with you and get in touch?

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Best way is go to our website, which is @rialtomarketing.com, which is R-I-A-L-T-O, marketing.com. The other thing I will let your audience know, and I am just launching this, but we just put together a Revenue Roadblock Scorecard to help people get visibility to their roadblock. So, if they go to revenueroadblockscorecard.com, the tool there will help them discover and assess which of the nine revenue roadblocks is in their way and slowing their growth.

 

Erin Marcus:

Right. That’s awesome. So, it’s Revenue–

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Roadblockscorecard.com, revenueroadblockscorecard.com. 

 

Erin Marcus:

Fantastic. Well, this was awesome. You and I have a feeling we can just do more of these. We can keep talking. But thank you for sharing your insights, your stories. I know I’ve learned stuff from you. I’m excited to bring it to the audience and can’t wait to do the next round.

 

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Yes. Thank you so much, Erin. It was a pleasure.

 

Erin Marcus:

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Ready Yet?! podcast. I truly enjoy bringing these stories of success and inspiration to you. Please join us in our mission to empower entrepreneurs to be in charge of their businesses and in charge of their lives by sharing this with anyone you know who would benefit from our tactical and motivating advice, leaving us a review and letting us know if there are any particular topics you would really appreciate hearing about. See you next time.



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Erin Marcus is an author, speaker and communications specialist helping organizations to “Conquer the Conversation,” and creating improvement in sales, customer service and team dynamics. To bring Erin to your event or business:

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