Small Business Big World
New episodes every Tuesday discussing the challenges, adventures and fun of being a small business owner. Each week we'll delve into various small business topics, from real-world DEI considerations to selling your business, using video to market your business, unique benefit offerings for your employees and so much more. Curated by the crew at Paper Trails.
Small Business Big World
The Remarkability Formula
Unlock the secrets to standing out in today's crowded digital marketplace with insights from Rich Brooks of Flyte New Media. Rich introduces us to his "Remarkability Formula," a powerful tool comprising four key lenses: Find, Focus, Forge, and Frame. Discover how these elements can help you pinpoint what makes your business unique, zone in on your niche, create offerings aligned with your mission, and reposition your brand to attract your ideal customers.
This episode is packed with actionable strategies for branding, customer targeting, and effective marketing, all essential for small businesses aiming for growth and success.
Rich Brooks also hosts a podcast called 'The Agents of Change'. Further, he hosts a digital marketing conference called the 'The Agents of Change Conference' each October. This conference brings in many marketing experts from across the country to cover things like local SEO, AI in marketing, creating successful LinkedIn ads, and much more! 'Listeners of Small Business Big World' can receive $25 off tickets by using the promo code "bigworld" when purchasing.
This is Small Business Big World, our weekly podcast prepared by the team at Paper Trails. Owning and running a small business is hard. Each week, we'll dive into the challenges, headaches, trends, fun and excitement of running a small business. After all, small businesses are the heartbeat of America and our team is here to keep them beating. Welcome to Small Business Big World, our weekly podcast, where we talk about all things small business. This week, my guest is Rich Brooks of Flight New Media. Welcome, Rich. Thanks for joining me, Chris, I'm so glad to be here.
Speaker 2:Thanks for the invite.
Speaker 1:Before we hop into it. We're going to talk about Rich's thoughts on his remarkability formula Before we hop on. That don't forget. Please like follow share rate review Everywhere you get your podcasts. We are there Apple Podcasts, spotify, iheart Podcasts. We are there for you. So please take a minute, go ahead, like, follow share rate review. Certainly, any reviews you can give us are always helpful to help with our growth and we appreciate that. All right, rich, so Flight into Media. Talk to me about you. Guys are digital marketing experts.
Speaker 2:You're riding the wave of the craziness we have going on in this world today digital marketing and so forth. Right yeah, I've been doing digital marketing since 1997, or been in business for 27 years, starting with just me building websites out of my apartment, and up to the point now where we for many years had a nice office in the old port of Portland, Maine. And there's 10 of us.
Speaker 1:We're still a small company, 10 of us working on a wide variety of digital marketing campaigns, which is really cool, and certainly we all need that, as well as ours, because life is crazy and I certainly know our team spends a lot of time trying to figure that all out, and we've been the beneficiary of some of your great information through your conference too, so that's wonderful cool so talk to me about.
Speaker 1:You know, you've kind of put together this remarkability formula, um, really to help distinguish yourself from your competition, right? What's? What's it all about?
Speaker 2:well and I would say it was more came out of me trying to help my clients. Uh, because a lot of people would come to me and they just didn't have a sense of who they were. They didn't have a sense of how to differentiate themselves from any of their competitors and, over time, as I started asking them questions to better understand their business, that's when we started to figure out. Oh, you know, it's like let's figure out what makes you different. And because I'm a marketer and marketers love formulas and frameworks and everything like that, it ended up developing into something that I could explain to other people and that became the Remarkability Formula. And the whole goal of the Remarkability Formula is to figure out what makes you different or what makes you remarkable in the marketplace, something that your potential customers can latch on to, that you can hang your hat on and that will just make your marketing much more easy and much more successful, because the days are gone where you could put up a Facebook ad and it would work.
Speaker 2:The days are gone where it was just search engine optimization, menu or guaranteed business. Every business knows that they need to do SEO and Facebook ads or Google ads or LinkedIn ads and email marketing. We all understand the things we should be doing. The problem is, because everybody's gotten to that level of sophistication at this point, it means that those are table stakes. So I think that what we need to do is kind of go back to some of the classic marketing ideas about, like, how do we position ourselves and what's going to make us stand out. So with that in mind, I started to develop this idea where there are four lenses that you can use on yourself, if you're a personal brand, or on your company, if it's more of a corporate brand or a small business brand, and those are find, focus, forge and frame, and I'm happy to go through each one in a little bit more detail.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. Certainly, you know, we tell our clients keep it simple, stupid in their, you know, payroll and HR world, and I think this kind of puts it back to that in the marketing world. Right, start back at the beginning. We all remember our marketing 101 class back in college or whenever, and it's you know, find your target audience, figure out who you are. So what is that? Fine, what's the first one? What's find? What's that go?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'll give you the tagline almost for each one, and then we can dive a little bit deeper. So find is there's already something remarkable about your business, and your job is to identify what that is and then give it a name. Focus is all about niching down. Forge is a little tricky, and I have examples for all of these. But Forge is a little tricky in which you create something that's outside of your offerings but is in alignment with your mission and values. And then Frame is about positioning yourself in a new way that shows your ideal customers the value of what you have to offer. So actually, the bookends of find and frame are similar in the fact that you've already got what you need. It's just a matter of maybe repositioning things a little bit. So find is a great place to start, and that's where I usually start when I'm talking to clients, because it already exists. There's nothing extra that you need to do here. It's just about identifying something, and an example that I often talk about is when I first bought a house and when I moved in, the house was in serious need of a paint job.
Speaker 2:I'd never been a homeowner, I didn't know anything about it, but all the stories my friends told me were horror stories about. You know, these companies would come and they wouldn't show up on time and then they would drag the project out for multiple, multiple days, sometimes weeks on end. They turn your house into basically construction zone and it just it feels like it never ends. So when we were talking to a bunch of local painters, one of the guys said I can get it done in two days. And we're like that sounds fantastic, let's do that. So we went with him and the way that he was able to accomplish this is they show up in five vans, 20 guys come spilling out of the vans, they throw up the ladders, they paint the entire house from top to bottom in just one day. I think they were singing sea shanties the entire time, but maybe I'm just misremembering that. You know, come back a day or two later, after the paint dries, do the whole thing again.
Speaker 2:As you can imagine that all of my neighbors took notice of this because they've never seen so many people painting the same house at one time. That is remarkable. Like if you're a painter and you just have lower prices or better ratings on Yelp, that's not remarkable. So this was something that really also is very hard to compete on. And that's another interesting factor of the remarkability factor of a formula the more difficult it is for your competitors to compete with you on that front, the more secure your position is.
Speaker 2:And you know, in Maine the painting season is very short, like there's only so much time during the year you can do this. So to have 20 guys on payroll around the whole year, that's a very difficult thing to compete against. So that's a great example of remarkability and something to find. But it could also be you know your pricing, it could be your positioning, it could be your location. There's already something remarkable about you or your business and there's a reason why your current clients chose you. And what you need to do is just identify what that is, because often people choose you for reasons you didn't intend and then give that a name and then you can go out and market.
Speaker 1:So how are you finding clients or small businesses are really identifying that? Is it throwing the sticky notes on the wall? Is it really talking with you guys? I know my wheels are turning as we're talking about this. I know what I would say, but how are you pulling this?
Speaker 2:information out of folks. I think the best thing to do is actually to talk to your clients or your customers, depending on how you see them. But I think the most important thing is and this is something all businesses should be constantly doing is when a project is done, when a job is done, or if it's an ongoing client, to be checking in. I mean, you should be checking with them all the time, but maybe every six months how are things going? And asking very specific questions like what were you going through? What was your pain point when you called us? What caused you to choose us rather than anybody else? When the project was over, what were some of the things that you were taking away? And if you interview three to five people customers, clients, whatever, um on this, I think you're going to start to find these recurring themes, some of which may be very self-evident and you knew them all along, and this is just confirmation. And other time it's something like oh, I never thought that that was going to be what it was that got people to choose me.
Speaker 2:And I was just talking to a woman on my podcast the other day. She had an app for getting free drinks at local bars and when they started to interview people, it turns out that they were not as interested. I mean, everybody's interested in free drinks, right, but that was not the reason they did it. They were often using it on nights where there were no free drinks to be had. They were using it to find new places and to connect with their friends. Once the app developers knew that, they rethought the entire app and how it displayed on the phone and they got much more buy-in from people and they also built in tools to get them to tell their friends, which all of a sudden really started to build up the user base. So I think it's critical to talk to your clients first.
Speaker 1:That's the easiest piece of business, which is something so many of us well business owners are afraid to do. We're all afraid, especially in certain industries. We're all afraid of those Yelp reviews or the Google reviews, but I certainly think we have done a really good job. We do a once a year kind of client satisfaction survey and it's been good because, you're right, 95% of the reactions are wonderful. But there are times where someone will come to us with things gosh, we didn't know that happened. Or, especially as we've grown and my team's getting bigger and so forth. Of course I want to know when things are going wrong, because I don't want things to go wrong. So I think we all have to be ready for that feedback good, bad or indifferent. But I think you're right, finding why people are coming to look for you is certainly really cool. So once you found that, what are you focusing on?
Speaker 2:What's the focus piece of it, right? So what I would say is all of these lenses I don't know that you're going to check off every single box, but even if you find something in find, I recommend going to all four lenses, because it's really by stacking these uh, remarkability factors up where you really start to create this unique place. So keep on going and then, after find, you move to focus, and focus is really just about niching down where you are going to serve fewer people, where you are going to offer less things, where you are going to offer less things, where you're going to be open for fewer hours, whatever it is, that you keep on niching down until you are the only business that is serving your ideal customer with your particular solution. And that may be an absolute. That's difficult to get to, especially for certain types of businesses, but that's really the goal here. And so I remember years ago when I asked a guy who owned a restaurant who's your ideal customer and he said people who need to eat to survive. And I'm like, okay, that's funny, clever I'm, but that's not really accurate. You have a Mexican restaurant near the mall in South Portland. It's like there is a very specific audience that you should be paying attention to and ignoring everybody else. And one example I think about is since we're on a podcast, I'll share this my friend John Lee Dumas.
Speaker 2:I met him before he started his podcast Famously he's behind Entrepreneurs on Fire and when he started there were no daily podcasts and he decided that his differentiator was going to be putting out a daily business podcast for entrepreneurs and everybody who was in his mastermind, everybody who was ahead of him in the race, told him he was crazy. Nobody wants that much content, nobody's going to listen, they'll get frustrated, they'll unsubscribe. But he knew that, even though they were probably right for the majority of listeners, there was a subsection of listeners who wanted that daily inspiration when they were driving to and from work that he could speak to, because he understood their pain points and that helped him become a rising voice in podcasting and really blew up his entire business by doing the daily podcast. He became known for it and so when journalists started writing about and talking about podcasts, very often his name would rise to the top. They would interview him.
Speaker 2:He suddenly was attracting a lot higher quality guests, a lot more sponsors, a lot more listeners, and it became this very virtuous cycle, all by niching down and I know it sounds weird that he's doing seven times the work that anybody else is doing. How is that niching down? But it really was, because he was creating content for a very specific subset of that listening audience. Now, of course, other people might join in Not everybody's going to listen every day, but that was very powerful.
Speaker 2:And the other thing about niching down is when you become an expert in something, people will pay you more. And as I was researching the whole idea behind the remarkability formula, one stat that I thought was really interesting was I think it was back in 2017, the average American PCP doctor general doctor was making a very healthy I think it was $247,000 a year on average, but the average specialist was making $399,000 in that same year $150,000 more for literally being able to help fewer people and potentially knowing less. But because when it comes to something important like healthcare, like a knee replacement or or, you know, like heart surgery, we're willing to pay more for that expertise, and so you can become the go-to person because of that increased expertise, just like John 7X'd his podcasting journey by doing it every single day where the rest of them were just doing it.
Speaker 1:I think that's, you know, certainly, being the expert at what you do, whether that's in marketing or payroll and HR, or or even being, you know, the expert in hospitality. Right, you want to run a restaurant, you know we, we see the folks that do hospitality really well. I mean, we have some phenomenal hospitality here in Maine, but you go to New York. These are careers, these are what people do, you know. That is why people go there, right, that's why people frequent your business. And certainly you are wonderful at telling the world about your expertise in marketing. And you're on TV once a week, you know, at 107, right? Is it once a week or once a month? You guys are Once a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I see the preview every once in a while and I see on there, you know, just talking about all the things we need to know, and that's we do the same thing through our podcast, you do it through your podcast and the content that you put out we put out. And I think that really, I will tell you, we kind of figured that out during COVID as laws and the situation was changing every single day. We were I was reading more law than I was doing anything else and I was telling my clients what was happening and how to deal with it. And we became the experts in my business group 25% that year because we knew we were just telling people what was out there, right, we were the expert in that thing and I think people don't take a step back and think about that expertise piece.
Speaker 1:Gosh, there's a reason you get into this and it's to be the best, right? Um, certainly, that focus is really, really important. So once you've found it and you've focused on what you want to be doing, you've built your niche, what's the forging part of it?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, forge is a little bit challenging for some people to wrap their heads around, and the whole idea here is that you are going to create something that is outside of your core offering, but still in alignment with what you are doing. So there's a lot of ways to think about this. One example is the Lost Kitchen. You've probably heard about the Lost Kitchen. This is a famous restaurant in Maine, very hard to get reservations to and the only way you can get reservations.
Speaker 1:'ve figured it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they've focused and they've done a great job yes, yeah, and so the only way you can get a reservation there is that you actually send a postcard that arrives between about april 4th and april 11th or whatever the dates are this year. Um, and then they pick and choose from those postcard reservations. You have to hand write these things out and send it to them, which seems so crazy, but it actually happened, because the previous year when they opened up their phone lines for reservations, the phone lines crashed because 10,000 people all tried to call at the same time to get a very limited number of seats at the you know and so. But postcards seem like kind of old school. But if you know about the restaurant, the restaurant everything's very organic. I mean you sit at big, long tables that are made out of, like you know, reclaimed furniture. It's very organic, feeling like the farm. All the food comes from local farms, the farmers are off in the servers that night, like it's just a very different vibe and a handwritten postcard feels like it's in alignment. Now, there's no way that they couldn't have just said let's outsource this all to OpenTable and just let them handle it. The whole idea here is it's very much in alignment with everything else they're doing. They could have just used some sort of reservation app like OpenTable, but the truth is like this just feels better and then it becomes a great story that gets passed along. And, in the same vein, I don't know if you've ever overcooked pasta, but barilla the, the pasta maker, actually has spotify song lists that are timed to the exact amount of cooking time for their pasta be al dente and you can like. You can go to spotify and you'll find boom bat, too silly, which I think comes in at like 11 minutes. And then there's like a spaghetti mixtape that comes in at nine and you know it's got. It's got Italian musicians playing, it's got Italian artists who did the cover art for all this. It's very, very all about their brand. Now, of course, you can also say to your smart speaker hey, set me a nine minute timer and it'll be just the same, but they created something that you don't need to use. But it is keeping in alignment with everything they believe, which is cooking, is art, and that's really what they believe and they do a great job using this tool.
Speaker 2:And one more example my agents of change conference. Like you can hire flight new media to do your digital marketing. Never having attended agents of change, and you can go to agents of change conference and never hire flight new media. This is something that's outside of what we do. But the agents of change conference is all about digital marketing. Flight new media is all about digital marketing, and so it's just something that we offer because we believe it. And very often, as I ask clients hey, how did you hear of us? You know they'll be like oh, I've been attending the agents of change for years and I'm finally ready for a new website or seo or branding, what have you? So again, these are things that you don't need to use to work with us, but it is something that's helped grow in our biz, grow our business and help position us and kind of show off our remarkability.
Speaker 1:It's a really interesting kind of thought about stepping to the side, thinking about how to offer more value. Right, I didn't know about the Spotify playlist, so I feel like I need to make pasta for dinner tonight, so, but that's a really cute thing that you know. Again, it has my wheels turning, so hopefully it's good for some other folks as well. So, once you find it, you focus it, you forge it, you build it. What's the frame piece? How are we?
Speaker 2:framing. Yeah, so frame is again. You're not going to make any changes to what you offer, but you're just going to position it in a way that it resonates more with who your ideal customer is, and one quick example is Red Bull. Red Bull could have come to market it was actually already on market. It was like this caffeinated beverage that a lot of taxi drivers in India drank, if my research is correct and when it decided to become more of a global brand. If they had just gone head to head with like Coke and Pepsi, we never would have heard of Red Bull. But instead they went with smaller cans and they promoted an ingredient that was very uncommon in other soft drinks, which was Tori, and they basically identified this not as a soda but as an energy drink, and it is now like the biggest energy drink in the world. I think it made like $60 billion last year. I mean, it's just an incredible brand. That's not the only reason it's been successful, but it talked about, it positioned itself in such a way that it's ideal customer whether that would be, you know, guys doing programming late at night or college students or what have you they really identified with it. They saw the benefit of this that you know. Now there's Monster. There's a bunch of knockoffs as well, but at the time that was a real emerging trend that they were able to jump on by promoting it and positioning it in such a way. And another great example I picked up in a book by Matthew Stoddard. He wrote the Introvert's Edge and in it he talks about some of his coaching services.
Speaker 2:And there's a woman Wendy Huang, I believe her name is. She was teaching Mandarin in California very successfully, and then all of a sudden things changed and suddenly a lot of new people entered the market offering the same thing for a fraction of the cost. You could jump onto Fiverr and actually, you know, people living in China would give you lessons. For next, she couldn't compete on price. She saw her profits and even her business eroding. She thought this was the end. She ends up hiring Matthew and as he's looking through her client list, he's like you've got a couple of business people there and it turns out these business people had been relocated to China and they needed to learn Mandarin. They hired her and it turned out not only was she teaching them Mandarin, but she was also teaching them about how they should behave in a business situation while they were in China, and then she also were teaching the spouses and children about the new environment so they could adapt more easily. When they got there, and he's like so really, you're helping people succeed in China. They immediately rebranded her as the China success coach.
Speaker 2:She wasn't doing anything different. It was all the stuff that she had been offering all along, just repositioning. So now she can charge whatever she wants, because it's a business expense. She's not going after the lowest common denominator, she's not competing with almost anybody else out there, and her business, you know, just started to explode again. And this is an important thing, because not only was she using Frame, but she was also using Focus, because all of a sudden, she stopped going after anybody who wanted to learn Mandarin and she only went after business people who are relocating to mainland China, and so also, that makes all of her marketing so much easier as well. That is a key point, because I want people to recognize that these are tags or lenses that we're using to help us, but it doesn't really matter what category something falls under. It's just about continuing to stack these things upon each other until you have this really clear picture of what makes you stand out and what makes?
Speaker 1:you. So you know this is is really cool. I'm I like I said my wheels have been turning our whole conversation. But how do you really roll this out with small businesses? You know we work you and I both work with small businesses. You know, largely, you know in Maine kind of New England, and I think most of our clients have a struggle every day just to get the doors open and get you know people to show up to work and find clients. And you know we're a relatively small market. You know, are you seeing people really go outside their normal market? You know, certainly we're in this world today. You can work anywhere, you can find customers anywhere if you think about it. So you know, how have you had, what success stories have you had kind of, with the small businesses in this?
Speaker 2:area. I would suggest that, yes, you can get customers anywhere, but that also means that those customers can go anywhere, and I think, more than ever before, brand is critically important, and we're seeing this in a lot of different places, like a lot of the conversations in the SEO, digital magazines and such are about the reemergence of brand as really being a differentiator. Especially now, with AI, where there's so many companies just leveraging generative AI to create a whole bunch of content, it's so important to really start to build your brand, and so this is where it becomes important to being able to focus your attention. So, if you have, if you've gone through this exercise and you start to be like, okay, I know I have a really good sense of what makes me remarkable, I'm niching down, so I'm going to go after a more targeted audience All these kinds of things will help with your marketing and getting your message out. It helps clarify your message, it helps you identify who your best customers are and, at the same time, it helps you kind of push away, or you know the customers who are not going to be a good fit, because that doesn't mean that they're bad people, they're just not a good fit. So the more that you can lean into what makes you remarkable, the more that you'll attract the right type of client and push away the wrong type of client.
Speaker 2:And as far as implementation goes, I mean, I always say everything starts with your website, so it comes down to, like you know, the messaging and the graphics and the photography.
Speaker 2:As far as understanding and niching down, that's going to help a lot of your targeting when it comes to digital ads, whether they're social ads or paid ads, so you can really start to go all right. Well, you know, I thought everybody was my customer, but really they're in this geographic location, they have this much income coming in. There's this element of them they like this, they like that. Those are the kind of things that help really narrow your targeting. When it comes to something like meta or LinkedIn, that can really help you lower your customer acquisition costs as well. And then it just becomes this virtuous cycle where, as you bring on more clients, you start asking them why did you choose us? What made us the right choice for you? Did we solve your problems and things like that. And I've just seen over time that this really helps people narrow the focus of their marketing so that they can spend less time on their marketing and more time doing everything else that actually generates which is always the argument that everyone has.
Speaker 1:I don't have time to do marketing. I don't have time to do marketing. I'm too busy flipping burgers. I'm too busy doing whatever right, so awesome and it is a challenge, and we all know I'm sure you've gone through the same thing, chris.
Speaker 2:I mean there were. There've been many nights where I've worked way too many hours, but this is what you do when you're an entrepreneur. This is what you do when you're in charge of the business, until you get to a point where you brought on enough people where they're doing a lot of the work and you're just helping them do the best job that they can do Indeed, Indeed.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great place to leave things. So talk to us about Agents of Change. That's coming right up, right, yeah. So this will be our 10th annual in-person digital marketing conference under the Agents of Change banner. This year it's going to be on October 9th and then we have some deep dive workshops on October 10th for people who want to really take their skills to the next level. Whether you want to go yourself or maybe send the head of marketing, this is a great event. They can learn more.
Speaker 2:We've got 15 digital marketing experts from across the US and Canada descending on Portland Maine for that date, with great content around SEO, artificial intelligence and marketing, personal branding just a wide variety of things that are going to help people grow their business. You can check out the information at theagentsofchangecom. We are running some discounts right now, but for any of your listeners, if they use the code word big world all one world, all one word, they'll get an additional $25 off. So I definitely recommend go check out the website, see what we've got in store for you. But this is probably going to be one of the best investments you make in your marketing.
Speaker 1:If you can't make it in person, you've got the digital track as well, right?
Speaker 2:Great point, yeah, so there is a digital pass that will allow you a live feed of the main stage and then every single session on demand after the conference.
Speaker 1:I know. John, who's our marketing director, went last year he did a digitally loved. It was a great session. He's going to be out on paternity leave this year, so I'm going to try to get myself there for sure.
Speaker 2:How do I?
Speaker 1:get in touch with you, Otherwise, what's a good play? How to Instagram LinkedIn? How do we get in?
Speaker 2:touch. Linkedin is really my jam, so that you can always find me on LinkedIn. I am the Rich Brooks on every platform, but I'm most responsive on LinkedIn. And if you want to come and check out our website, we're at takeflight and that's F-L-Y-T-E dot com, but LinkedIn is a great way to just talk to me.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Well, thank you again, rich, for joining us. Reminder please like follow share rate, review us. We are on all the podcast platforms. Those reviews really help us not only improve but certainly grow our following as well. If you have any questions for us or any of our guests, you can always email us at podcast at papertrailscom, and we will get right back to you or get you in touch with whoever you need to. So thanks again, rich, and thanks to all of our listeners and viewers, and we'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Small Business Big World.
Speaker 1:This podcast is a production of Papertrails. We are a payroll and HR company based in Kennebunk, maine, and we serve small and mid-sized businesses across New England and the country. If you found this podcast helpful, don't forget to follow us at at Paper Trails Payroll across all social media platforms and check us out at papertrailscom for more information. As a reminder, the views, opinions and thoughts expressed by the hosts and guests alone. The material presented in this podcast is for general information purposes only and should not be considered legal or financial advice by inviting this guest to our podcast, paper Trails.
