Ep. 164: Gordon Van Wechel - Growth Strategies for Professional Practices

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam Larson. And this is episode 164 of our series. Today's featured guest is Gordon Van Wechel. Gordon is president of the Alchemy Consulting Group. He is a business marketing strategist and he helps firms recognize the true business value, grow their business, and provide strategic support to professionals in business. In this episode, he talks with Mitch about the value of working with an agency and the benefits that come from proper advertising. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation now.
Mitch: (00:49)
So Gordon, thank you again for joining us. And, you know, I just want to start off our conversation by asking, in your opinion, your experiences does a professional practice need to have an agency working for them?
Gordon: (01:02)
Well, at the risk of sounding a little bit, self-serving Mitchell, because I do run an agency. I'll answer the question with a yes. But let me give you some reasons why I say that. There's such a multitude of marketing channels available today. If you think back just 15 years ago, you know, a practice had, you know, the yellow pages, they worked off of referrals. Google was in its infancy, YouTube hadn't been invented, social media, wasn't a factor, you know, they could do radio and TV, but there just wasn't that much to choose from. So it was relatively easy to get the word out. That's changed today. I mean, it would be easy for you and I in two or three minutes to come up with 50 different effective marketing channels that a professional practice can use and, and be effective. Now a lot of times when I speak with professional practice owners, they'll say, well, you know, my business is referral based, so I don't really need to do any advertising.
Gordon: (01:57)
What they don't realize is that there are multiple surveys out there that say that between 85 and 90% of the people who are referred to a business will first go online and they're looking for two things. They're looking for the company's website, because that kind of proves that they're legitimate and, and they want to look at that about us page and see who they might be dealing with so they select that company. But the other thing they're looking at is the reviews. That social proof has become critically important in the mind of a prospect because they want to know that the vendor they're considering is doing an excellent job with their current client and is likely to do an excellent job with them. Well, putting all of that together, managing `that diversity of channels and keeping up with the testing, knowing where their prospects are going for information updating of campaigns, you can't legitimately run a practice plus do all of that. So for those reasons, I think that having an agency is important even for a smaller, professional practice. But the caveat to that is to find an agency that understands your business and that's willing to work with you where you're at with the budget that you have available at this time and grow with you.
Mitch: (03:13)
So I think you've probably already addressed two of the answers or possible answers to my next question. But you mentioned, relying on referrals and then potentially budget concerns, my next question is what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see professional practices make for those that do pursue some form of marketing? You know, what are some of the obstacles or challenges that you find to be most familiar?
Gordon: (03:41)
Sure. I think one is not having a really clearly stated value proposition in their advertising. You know, the value proposition is why should I choose you versus the multitude of other firms that are available to me in the local marketplace? Something that we enjoy doing with a new client or even a prospect is we'll have them open up their website and take a screenshot of the homepage, the portion that's above the fold, that a prospect can see when they open up the website, take a picture of that and print it out and then do the same thing with four or five or six of their competitors. And what they'll be surprised to see is how similar all of those websites are. You know, they all promise the same things. They all use the same platitudes and generalities. Many times the only difference between those pages is the phone number.
Gordon: (04:31)
And if that's the case, then what your prospect is left with is the impression that everybody is the same. And if everybody's the same, all that prospect's going to be concerned about is who is going to give me the service for the cheapest price. And, that's a war that I don't want to get into. And I don't think many business owners do. Nobody wants to be in the race to the bottom. So not having that clearly stated value proposition and in today's marketplace, the absolutely most effective way to state that is in a little short, 60 to 75 second video of the business owner looking right into the camera and saying, here's who I am. Here's who my firm is. Here's what we do. And here's why you should consider using us. And just 1, 2, 3 bullet points, you know, whatever that value proposition is and state it as clearly and succinctly as possible and literally in 60 to 75 seconds. Any longer than that and people aren't going to listen.
Mitch: (05:29)
So taking that a step further, what is the most overlooked marketing channel professional practices could be using more effectively based on what you just shared, it feels like potentially a lot of practices are very interested in the social media, maybe? Maybe their website is their go-to, you know, from your experience, what kind of gets overlooked and really should be focused on better?
Gordon: (05:51)
Well, let's assume that a firm has a decent, basic website in place and it doesn't have to be a 10 or $12,000 major investment. It's got to be something that, as I just said, states their value proposition clearly and gives a person some insight into what the firm stands for and who some of the people are. Assuming that's in place and they have a Google business page that's in place and optimized that's the foundation. The next most overlooked step is retargeting. Now retargeting is a form of paid advertising. If you're not familiar with that term, you've certainly experienced retargeting. If you've ever shopped on eBay or Amazon or, really most any of the major retail...