Thinking Outside The Box to Build Your Company Culture

Thinking Outside The Box to Build Your Company Culture

Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Acceleration Series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-focused executives who 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 marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have with me Dave Carlson from Summit Technology. Dave, welcome and thanks for taking the time.

Dave Carlson
Hey, thank you, Tim. Good morning.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I'm excited to dig in this with you today. I know you got some great things that we're going to we're going to talk about and then you're going to share with us. Before we dig into that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions to kick things off. Are you ready to jump in with both feet?

Dave Carlson
Absolutely.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, man. So very quickly, what do you do? How long have you been doing it?

Dave Carlson
Technically, Summit has been around since 2008. I joined in 2016. We like to call it a curated technology partner. I think MSP is really boring because we do a lot more than just that. We focus on small business and it's a very niche market, but innovative small businesses and particularly startups. We function really well with startups. Being in Utah with Silicon Slopes, there's no shortage of those.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's awesome. Now, how did you get involved with the company in 2016? How did that come about?

Dave Carlson
That's a complex story, but essentially, the company that I was working for had sold a large amount of software to a customer, and it landed on my quota. I loved it. I wanted to learn more about them and then realized that what they bought would never work for them and started a conversation with them like, Oh, well, you know that we own this IT company as well? Would you like to work there? I was like, No, I'm going to buy my own one day. Well, what we might be able to work a deal. That really accelerated it at the time. It was an opportunity that I've been targeting for a long time, but the opportunity showed up, but just took the chance and cashed in and joined the team.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You bought the business at that point?

Dave Carlson
Yeah, I bought a stake in it. Part of that is I get to serve as the CIO of the larger $10 billion conglomerate that was the owner prior.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay.

Dave Carlson
Still a partner in this.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, very cool. What's the most important lesson you've learned along the way?

Dave Carlson
I could write a book on it, but I would say it's the people, having the right people and looking for the skills and talents that you need. Dan Sullivan wrote a great book a couple of years ago called Who Not how. I would highly recommend that, but finding the Who's.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's hard without the right people because we can't do everything ourselves.

Dave Carlson
Yeah, and the right ones are such an accelerator as well. When you find the right one in that role, we can even see that in our PnL when we have made certain hires.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's fascinating. Look, man, we know running a business, it can be challenging. If it was easy, everybody'd be doing it. Do you have any mantra or something motivational that you say to yourself, share with your team to push through those times when you're running into roadblocks?

Dave Carlson
Yeah, there's a handful of them, but I I would go back to the Avengers. I've got a big sign on my office door that says whatever it takes with the little Avengers symbol in there. Because sometimes we're going to run into those, and then you be sure to celebrate it afterwards. If you don't win, you still celebrate those tthings and you sit around and talk about it.

Using a Psychologist to Drive Growth and Shape Culture

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love that, man. I know one of the things that you shared that I want to dig into first because I thought it was fascinating, is you had mentioned that you've got a narrow focus on your customers and the inclusion of a psychologist on your team to help set your company apart. Can you elaborate on this a little bit? Because I've never talked to anybody that does this. I think it's a fantastic idea. But elaborate on how these elements have helped drive growth and shape your culture.

Dave Carlson
Yeah, absolutely. It almost, I think, happened by accident. When I joined the team, a little bit of background, I'm there. The company had served a very captive set of customers. They'd been formed as a separate entity to serve some very specific customers. It was more like internal IT. I thought, Well, the system's already there, that'd be great. But if you've ever worked in, say, internal IT, there's no concept of customer service. It's no customer experience even. This is the way it is no matter what, and that's not going to work in the open market. Then the culture was very, very toxic. There were a few very toxic when I got here. I wasn't equipped to change any of that, but I happen to know a guy named Dr. Paul Jenkins out of... He's about 60 miles south of here, that I talked to over the years, even used him as a coach and mentor, because if you want to close a big deal, a psychologist can really help you understand those dynamics. We had a good relationship. So I called him. I said, Look, this is the challenge I've got. I'm not sure how to solve these things. It's complex. And so we started talking, and then within about the first 90 days, we had an all-hands meeting. Okay, here's the things I found out. Here's what we're going to do. And by the way, here is Dr. Paul Jenkins, who's going to explain some of these concepts to you about customer service and empathy and compassion, because you could teach people technology pretty easy. It's pretty defined science and even following processes. But things like compassion, empathy, positivity, those are much, much harder. Walk through a corporate IT department and see how positive it feels. That engagement started and it was so good. We just kept doing it. We have a long term standing contract in place with Dr. Paul, and we have bi weekly company calls him every other Friday. Everybody jumps on teams and he presents something there. He'll even bring famous authors on that he interviews on his podcast and talk to us about different concepts. Then every time we do an all hands meeting, he'll come and he'll do hands on activities that can really re solidify certain core principles for the whole team.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, interesting. Do people... If they're running into roadblocks that they think he can help with, do those come up during those meetings?

Dave Carlson
Sometimes. Everybody has challenges. People in their personal life have a lot of challenges now. We use an outsourced HR service. They keep us legal, but as far as personal coaching, it's not there. When somebody's going through, say, a personal crisis, we've even had some team ones here with a death on the team, but we direct them to him, and he'll do a team's meeting with them. He'll meet them for lunch, and we cover the bill for his time for that. But it's a whole lot different experience when they're trying to struggle through some of their personal challenges to be able to have access to an actual expert in those things rather than just a generic employee assistance number that you can call when you're struggling. It's two different ways that we engage him, generally with the whole team. But if somebody has personal needs, they can engage him as well that way.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. A lot of it is focused really on how psychology impacting business in its various platforms.

Dave Carlson
Exactly. You know that there's some other things that we've done with him, like different insights of working with some of the leadership here early on, looking at just customer service and customer experience. He's able to point out things that I would never see, and most people don't. One of the ones that's pointed out, and we keep this in front of our people all the time, is when somebody calls us for help, they've already exhausted all their other options. If they've got to maybe wait on hold or spend the time on the phone, they all have work to do. We're the contact of last resort in those cases. Keeping that in mind whenever the phone rings, it really changes the outcomes you can create.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It changes your perspective, right?

Dave Carlson
Right. It's not transactional, then it's an opportunity to serve.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I would imagine that he brings visibility to things that most people aren't thinking about within the company because he's got a different viewpoint that he applies to business.

Dave Carlson
Right. One of the things he'll remind us of a lot, it's his job to illuminate the obvious, the things that we don't see that other people do, and that different perspective. Then other things like the words and language that we use. One quick example is you'll see this a lot. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Or if you take that same statement and say, what we can measure, we can improve. You're essentially saying the same thing, but one, you're already predetermining a negative outcome. The other one, you're inviting people to create a positive outcome. Just changing the language makes a difference. That shows up with our customers as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick
How long have you been doing that with Paul?

Dave Carlson
Well, since I've been here, and I'm coming up on nine years, so about nine years. Every year, when we do budget reviews, people look at that line item number. That one's protected. That one's holy. People will fight for that. The whole company will.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Interesting. So your team as a whole really does enjoy that, and it sounds like they're getting a lot out of it.

Dave Carlson
Yeah, they do. Like I said, the hands-on activities really solidify things. We have quotes from and lessons he's taught on the wall and big vinyl lettering, just to remind people.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you think that the hands-on activities help bring together people in the company?

Dave Carlson
Definitely, especially some of the team-buildings type ones. It's different than the things they normally do, it's not clicking through some online training. They get to help each other and create an outcome, usually something physical. I remember one of the ones recently was Jenga blocks. He brought a bunch of the sets the Jenga blocks to divide us up into teams. But instead of just building them up, you had to guide somebody with their hands closed and guide their hand to place the block. How to rely on each other for that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
These meetings, are they all in person?

Dave Carlson
The every other Friday ones? No, those are on teams, but quarterly, yeah, we'll do an all-hands meeting, and they'll generally be in person.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. It's a mix. How many people do you have in the company?

Dave Carlson
Right now, there's 23.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay.

Dave Carlson
We keep the team small.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Interesting. Thank you for sharing that. I have never talked to anybody that is doing that, and I think it's a fantastic idea. So I appreciate you sharing that, and Hopefully, at least one person takes that away and is like, Man, that's a great idea.

Dave Carlson
I would highly recommend it. It's very unconventional, but it's been one of the differences that makes the difference. A lot of the executives at some of our affiliated companies, we're part of this larger conglomerate. They'll come to us, How have you changed the culture there so much? How can we do that in our work? Usually, we direct them to him. This has been a huge game changer for us, an accelerator.

Using a Referral Rewards Program to Drive Sales and Marketing Success

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's awesome. I know one of the things we also talked about prior to today was that referrals are a big heart of your sales and marketing success, which is not uncommon at all. But you have a referral rewards program, correct?

Dave Carlson
Yeah, generally, it's a little more loose than most of them probably are, but we do.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What are you doing there?

Dave Carlson
Instead of being more formal, it's more like on a customer, a case-by-case basis. We can just offer things, and we've done this across the board. Here's the plan. If you bring us these types of customers, we'll give you these things. But those usually fall on deaf ears. If somebody brings us one, well, what do you need? We can redirect marketing funds in that case because generally the cost of a customer acquisition is much, much higher than that warm introduction. And so we could do things like we'll buy new laptops for their executives, or we've installed teams rooms for some of them in their conference rooms for that, for doing it. And if it's an individual that brokers those, we'll provide whatever we possibly can. We keep suite at the hockey team here, the one with the soccer team, the Major League teams. We'll give those out, those tickets out to reward people just for warm leads. But it's more tailored to the individual. We keep pretty detailed notes on those people that refer us business. Then generally, we ask for them during quarterly reviews and meetings with our key customers.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's just, Hey, thanks for doing that. What can we do for you? We'd love to say thanks.

Dave Carlson
We tried to standardize it across the board, but like I said, everybody's needs were different. When we have the ability to integrate and communicate more, I'd say on an intimate level with those customers, let's tailor it to what they need. Everything became an exception, and so we just handle it that way now.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, interesting. How long have you guys been doing that?

Dave Carlson
Probably since about 2020. We realized that a lot of the money that we spend on marketing and outbound activities wasn't producing value or our cost of customer acquisition was so high with those. What else could we do? Let's ask for referrals.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah.

Dave Carlson
Okay. Well, now we have all this extra marketing money. What do we do with that? Let's reward the people that gave us those referrals.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you find that rewarding them is helping you generate more referrals?

Dave Carlson
It comes and goes and flows, but it generates much better referrals.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Interesting.

Dave Carlson
Coming from people that we already work with, it's a much, much better referral. They're further down that process than they would be, especially from some of the lead gen services and things that we've used before.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's a much higher quality.

Dave Carlson
Definitely. And they've already got a reference there. If the customer is willing to refer you, they're already a reference for you.

Learning from Marketing and Lead Gen Efforts that Didn't Work

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's awesome. You had mentioned that some of your marketing and lead gen efforts, you weren't getting out of them what you wanted to, and you are not alone in that. What type of insights have you experienced as you've gone through this? And how did they help reshape your internal approach to marketing?

Dave Carlson
Whenever we really start to go after more leads, it always comes up, Well, we should reach back out to these people we work with before. We have an internal joke that our CEO Dan brings up. He's like, we need to find a way to measure if we just took a big pile of money, put a video camera up, set it on fire, and put that on YouTube, how much revenue we could generate versus how much we could get by paying some of these companies. And so, again, some of the challenge, I would say, goes back to working with Dr. Paul, that the people that we would hire and contract with, and there's a small handful that really serve the MSP industry, they're never going to care about our mission, our niche, what we really specialize in. For them, it's all a game of numbers. How many appointments can I set? And generally, the ones they do aren't that great. They're not a good fit, but they're not going to be passionate about our message and what we do. And so we would love to be able to outsource more of that and scale it, but we have much, much better success delivering the message ourselves.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So you've shifted. Are a lot of your marketing efforts now done in-house?

Dave Carlson
Yeah, we do use some SEO services to try to continue to bolster that up. But generally, most of it's done in-house. By non-marketers, I would say, none of us are marketers. We read books and we talk to people and build those relationships with the people who seem to be successful. But generally, it's all done in-house.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. How has that worked? You have multiple people on staff that are doing some marketing as It's not part of their work, but it's not their 100% sole job.

Dave Carlson
Yeah, we do not have anybody dedicated to marketing. In fact, I think I probably do more of it right now than most.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay.

Dave Carlson
It's usually when there's opportunity for it. Okay, we need to go acquire these types of customers. What do we need to do? How do we set up a campaign? It almost always comes back to asking our existing customers for more of those referrals and case studies and things we can use, be referenceable. That's a key part of it. But none of us are marketers, and all the ones that we've engaged with, even a fractional CMO. In our industry, it's really hard to find somebody with great marketing talent that understands our value proposition. We've got a lot of campaigns that were designed that we paid money for that completely fell flat.

Tim Fitzpatrick
The other thing that's tough, too, in the MSP space is just the sales cycles can be very long. And so it's from a marketing standpoint, there's got to be a lot of patience, right? But you also need to feel confident that you're headed in the right direction. And I find that there's a lot of people that struggle with that in between where it's like, are we headed in the right direction? Oftentimes, they may wait too long to make course corrections, and they get to I'm nine months down the road or I'm 12 months down the road and nothing's happening. That can be really challenging to manage and navigate.

Dave Carlson
Yeah. For me, I've always come from a technical background, numbers matter. There's no good ROI that you can measure on some of these activities and spend. It's a leap of faith every time.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, there's this balance in marketing where some of the activities you do absolutely can be measured, and you can measure ROI. But there are some that are a lot more difficult to measure.

Dave Carlson
Very tough.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You got to look at both of those things and bring them together to determine what you're willing to accept and what you're not willing to accept. But there certainly are marketers that are like, Hey, everything should be direct response. But with direct response, you can measure it. But I think if you take that approach, there's some things that you're going to miss from a marketing standpoint that can be pretty important.

Dave Carlson
Absolutely. You're in this business. One of the things that we're really starting to realize is social media. It's something we never paid a lot of attention to before, but we've got some really good customers that are great. We do lunch and happy hours with their executives, and learning from some of them, one of the fastest-growing ones, they now have two full-time social media marketers on staff. That's all they do. They focus everything there, and they're generating 1,000 leads a month from that right now.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Social is different for different businesses, but I think it is going to continue to become more and more important, especially as you look at what's going on with AI right now and how that is going to impact search. A lot of these SEO efforts, I think, are going to change dramatically over the next year, two years, three years. And if people aren't going to go to Google search and click on content and be driven to your website, content is still really important, but it's going to be a bit different. And where are they going to be going to get content? They're going to be on social consuming content. They're going to find you through your content on social as well as other areas. Social, I think, is going to continue to be really important.

Dave Carlson
Yeah, but we are focusing more of our efforts there, and we may bring somebody on just to specialize in that. There was something that one of our customers share with us that the target customers, the startups that we're going after right now, these are generally millennial and sometimes even Gen Z. 82% of that demographic forms their opinion of your company based on what they see on social media. And that blew me away. Social media was an annoyance. It's like, well, we'll post things because we're supposed to. And now we're really focusing on content and what we can push out there. One of our internal philosophies that we share, we give away our best information for free. If customers call us with a problem, we'll give that away and let them know. So we're trying to champion more of that into social media, showing how we solve certain problems in quick little bites. But we're getting ready to do another one. We have a Payphone in our office. It was a challenge we did internally. The Payphone is actually connected to Microsoft Teams voice. You can just pull it up in Teams and click the call a Payphone and initiate a phone call and call the Payphone or make a call from the Payphone anywhere in the world. Being able to show that off where customers had a unique need and well, if we can do that, we could do a Payphone, too. That would show off pretty cool. You can find anything on eBay. But showing more of those things that can enlighten customers to what they can do with the technology that they have.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. There's no shortage, especially in the MSP and IT space, of content. I mean, your engineers, your tech people, the people that are solving support tickets, all of that is sources of information that you can create content around. You had mentioned case studies. Case studies is really low hanging fruit for a lot of businesses. That's great content, too, where it's just, Hey, we had a customer that had this problem. Here's the unique way we solved it.

Dave Carlson
That's how we did it. Yeah. Based on the way we were formed, we cover more things than most MSPs do. We saw some pretty unique things from bouncing internet off of microwave towers on mountaintops to setting off alarms for gates around swimming pools. If the gate stays open, set off the alarm, and then we make a send a team's message. You said one of the things, Tim, that I'd like to touch on just a bit more.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Absolutely.

Dave Carlson
With all the developments and changes in AI, the last two years I've been going to night back at MIT. It just focused on AI and business strategy. I couldn't get in there when I was 20, but I can buy my way in there now. It's been really enlightening, but one of the first things that I thought was SEO. I've been trying to talk to our SEO guy about this. I'm like, this is all going to change. I can see it coming. I use perplexity to search the Internet now more than anything. If I need an answer, I use perplexity. If I just need to find a URL quick, I'll still use Google. But with all that there, and then you see perplexity doing things like they integrate with Reddit right now. They're pulling social media, and they're the ones trying to buy TikTok. They'll be able to collect all that data and answer questions from it. I don't know how they're going to validate it, but I agree. That whole SEO game is going to change quickly. I think it'll happen really fast in the next three years or so.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It is. When you see on the marketing side, I see a lot of SEO people starting to shift. They're now talking about AI-based search, which I'm going to tell you, I'm not convinced on some of these things because they're now talking about, Well, hey, you want your stuff to be what's referenced in AI, and that may help build more brand awareness. But right now, I'm not seeing that. Yes, in perplexity, and even in ChatGPT now, you're starting to see references to the articles where if you want to dig deeper, you can click on it. Most of us aren't clicking on it. We're getting the information we need right there. And even if you go to Google and do a search, you'll see the Gemini summary or synopsis is right there at the top. A lot of us are not going there. But one thing I will say, I talked to somebody, this was a few weeks ago, who said that they got their first lead through AI, where the prospect actually went into ChatGPT and said, can't remember where it was, but they were like, I need a list of the top 10 MSPs in Austin. And ChatGPT created the list, and that's how they got found.

Dave Carlson
Wow.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So are those types of searches going to happen more in perplexity in ChatGPT? And if so, how is that information going to be pulled? I could see that. But that's a very small window of search. Most people are searching for content. In that case, that person was way further down the customer journey. They were ready to find an MSP.

Dave Carlson
That's intriguing.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So I don't know. We'll see. It's evolving quickly. It's just one of those things we need to definitely keep an eye on from a marketing standpoint because it is going to impact what you choose to do.

Dave Carlson
Definitely. It's exciting, though.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It is.

Dave Carlson
We're using AI more and more in our business operations and marketing.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, I use it multiple times every day.

Dave Carlson
Yeah, I was explaining that to one of our customers. I said, right now, if you took away, there's three or four main tools that I use. We're a Microsoft shop, so we always start with copilot. But there's things that's not great at. But if you were to take those away, it would be as devastating to me as taking away a keyboard and mouse.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's funny you say that, Dave, because I was actually thinking about that the other day. I was like, I can't imagine doing my work without it at this point.

Dave Carlson
It's come so fast. Within the last 18 months or so, maybe two years, people really started talking about ChatGPT and what it's capable of now, the way you can train these models to speak in my voice, or what we're doing with some of the marketing stuff there, which has been such a challenge for MSPs before, I think we're going to see more and more success from that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, and if you give it enough information and you've got strong prompts, you can get good output. I mean, I still run into cases. I ran into something the other day where it wasn't working very well. I'd given it some information and I wanted it to... I was bouncing ideas off of it. By the time it was done, I found that it had gotten rid of half the stuff that I actually really wanted. You run into cases like that, but for the most part, it's really strong.

Dave Carlson
It's how well you use it. There's things we've done. You mentioned the instructions you give it. I have one specific use case where I've written an instruction document that's 35 pages long, and it took me a lot of time to create that. Now, that one document being able to be referenced by Copilot or ChatGPT or anything else, that saves me four hours a week now. The 10 hours I spent compiling all of that and it's paying back dividends. The ROI on that was two and a half weeks.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Tell me, within ChatGPT, I'm using Custom GPTs where I'll load in the data there. With Copilot, are you loading in that document within the prompt, or does Copilot have custom GPT type features similar to ChatGPT?

Dave Carlson
They do have custom ones now. I think ChatGPT in that case, and I use Claude a lot as well and do the same thing with projects there. I think it's more capable. However, there's things that we can't share with ChatGPT or Claude, particularly internal business information that we would never put there. Copilot can read that. Usually what I'll do is I'll use Claude or Copilot. I'll develop the project the way I want it, get the instructions right, and then move those over to Copilot. Then Copilot can search our internal data, which is what's really starting to change the game for us in, say, marketing messages.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's fascinating, man. I think we could talk about AI for a long time. Hopefully, some people got some something from that because I'm still talking to people that I don't think are using it as much as they should. I think, I don't know, I'm finding that we're probably not using it from an automation standpoint as much as we can. But even if you're not using it to automate things, there is so much value in it.

Dave Carlson
Well, there is, and it helps you learn faster. If you want a freebie, you're in marketing, I'll give you a tip here in this It should work on any platform, but we show customers how to do this in copilot. Generating marketing messages is tough, especially for MSPs. Our customers usually only see, have an experience with this when they contact us for something, And that's really about 15 % of what we do for them. Now, when we're going after a new prospect, one, we record the meeting in teams, and we have copilot in teams that transcribes meeting notes. And so once we have that, now we have all of this marketing information, even some of it like solutions from trouble tickets, and it's very unstructured. In fact, most of us just cut and paste it into Microsoft Loop documents. And so now we can use Copilot and say, hey, based on this meeting where Tim had these pain points, list his pain points, and then create us a PETA or an ADA type marketing message to respond to him with based on all of this data that's there. And it specifically targets specific use cases and writes the message. Copilot messages seem generic. We have to refine those ourselves. But being able to answer those that quick, it's very, very professional, refined-looking, where we've never been able to do that before. Just to get a message out there would take hours upon hours of framework.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I do the same thing in ChatGPT, where I have a GPT I call the Trust-Based Sales Coach, and I loaded data in there about trust-based selling and how I wanted it to communicate. I'll do the same thing where I'll take a discovery call transcript and just pop it in there and I'll get feedback. Hey, what did I do well? What did I not do well? What kinds of things should I be focusing on or looking for in Follow-ups with this particular prospect? Dave, it's invaluable. The data is right there. We just need to use it.

Dave Carlson
Yeah, and you don't have to structure it. We're piloting all sorts of different things internally. In fact, there's a case study of publish on LinkedIn about us about the amount we save internally by using automation AI. Then taking that to our customers and having deeper conversations, it's like, okay, everybody hears AI. It's like the buzzword that you can pull off the first page of CIO magazine now. We want AI. Let's talk about outcomes. What do you need to accomplish? What's some of your low hanging fruit that takes up a lot of administrative time? Let's start there. It's not all Tony Stark's lab yet, but there is a lot of value we had. It gives us another way to engage with our customers. Let's talk about these things, and it deepens that relationship.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it. Dave, this has been great, man. I want to ask you one last question before we wrap things up. Knowing what you know now, anything you would do differently?

Dave Carlson
I'll say it again. I could write a book on that. I would focus on the people issues first. The technical ones, the business ones, the financial ones, When I came here, there was all of those. Solving the people ones, solved all the other ones. Focus on those first. Treat your people better than you want your customers treated. That's a high bar we try to maintain. But how they feel at work is how they show up to our customers.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I love it, man. Dave, I appreciate you taking the time, man. This has been a great conversation. Where can people learn more about you?

Dave Carlson
Our website, it's pretty easy, marketing gimmick we use. It's greatservice.com. It's a lot easier. So check us out there. Find us on LinkedIn, and we are publishing more and more just free small business tech information there that you can take and use with instructions.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Awesome. And we'll make sure your LinkedIn profile is up there, but that's C Dave Carlson.

Dave Carlson
Yeah, Buzz Lightyear was already taken.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's right. Awesome. Well, Dave, I really appreciate you taking the time. It's been a fantastic conversation. And those of you that are watching and listening, I appreciate you. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com. The other resource we've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. When we work with clients and help them build their marketing engine, we help them remove roadblocks in nine key areas. If you want to know which of the nine are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. So take advantage of that. And until next time, take care.