Adam Torres and Ross McDaniel discuss Fencepost.
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Show Notes:
What does it take to thrive in your local market? In this episode, Adam Torres and Ross McDaniel, Founder of Fencepost, explore Fencepost and their “Local Growth Formula.”
About Fencepost
Fencepost helps businesses connect with the right customers online, driving predictable profit and sustainable growth.
With over a decade of experience running digital campaigns for businesses of all sizes and managing millions in ad spend, the Fencepost team is dedicated to supporting home service businesses. Roofers, plumbers, HVAC specialists, pressure washers, and lawn care providers play a vital role in local economies, and Fencepost specializes in delivering more high-quality leads through a proven Local Growth Formula.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Ross McDaniel, and he is the founder over at Fencepost.
Ross, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Adam. I’m excited to be here, excited to get in some good stuff. Yeah, Ross. So I am as well. I can’t wait to get into what we’re going to be talking about today. I want to get in defense post and understand, which is the digital marketing agency that helps businesses grow and increase their revenue.
So, I want to talk about how you’re going to do that and also some of your background just in the digital marketing area in general, but just get us started. We’ll start with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So, Ross, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives.
That’s what we do. Ross, what mission matters to you? You know, mission in general matters to me because I think without being on mission we’re, we’re aimless. Off by a degree, off by a mile but if you don’t know, What you’re all from it’s really hard to go anywhere. So for us, our mission is to see local communities thrive and we want to see local communities thrive through relationships.
We’ve got family relationships. We’ve got friend relationships. You’ve got business relationships, and then you’ve got businesses that are relating to the people they serve as well. And so our mission is, let’s see. Flourishing of communities through helping home service businesses specifically grow and provide awesome, excellent service to people in these communities.
If you look at like the blueprint or the, chemistry of a thriving community in middle America, it’s probably one of the leading indicators, probably just a flourishing group of service businesses that are there to serve people that, Have means and resources and already great community relationships.
They’re amazing. Ross, when did you kind of cut your teeth on this idea of wanting to help the community specifically through marketing or like did one come first versus the other? Like, when did that whole idea come to you? Yeah, I think a lot of times ideas like this come together out of need for us.
It was personal need to provide for a family, right? Like we, we, we needed to make some money. We cut our teeth or cut my teeth on Google ads that are part of 15 years ago. And, one freelance gig leads to another 15 years ago. So that’s the early days. Kind of. Yeah, that’s awesome.
Early, early days. Yeah. Early days for sure. Yeah. And yeah, like when, as time goes on, I realized the people that I enjoyed serving the most and the people that were more than happy to pay my invoice were these local mom and pop, roofing companies, plumbing companies, HVAC companies that just for trying to Make a dollar, keep people employed and do great work for the homeowners in their, local community. And that was really life giving to me and my wife. We are born and raised here in Augusta, Georgia, both of us. And coming from that, we’ve been able to use our talents in the digital marketing space to even impact our own local community.
We launched a local coffee shop out of that, desire and are really getting to see all the things we do come together. that’s really cool. And I think some, one of the things, at least when I was looking at your background, that I, found interesting was this concept of staying local.
I don’t think we hear that, often enough, and the concept of, and I’m, I’m originally from the Midwest. I mean, I’ve been in L. A. now for probably too long, going on a decade, but I’m from Michigan, and I’m from the Midwest, and exactly what you’re saying. When I think about my dad, he owned an auto body shop.
When I think about, like, His friends who had, you know, other local small businesses, you know, the roofers that like, these were all our people. And so, for those guys and gals to have a shot, right? And to continue to build and to compete in this digital world that maybe sometimes they don’t quite always understand.
Some are not, not generalizing. Some are pretty dang sophisticated. So like anything, right? But some maybe don’t, They need a little bit of help. And so I want you to get into maybe some of the concept around your local growth formula and really what that entails and why it’s so special. Yeah, so the local growth formula was, brought out of the same thing that we’ve just been talking about the last few minutes, but applying a formulaic strategic lens through which we would actually see that growth happen.
I think a lot of times the problem with mission is it gets fluffy. It gets real fluffy, and so without teeth to it, without tactics to that to that greater mission and vision, you really just have something aspirational, not actionable. And so the local growth formula is our attempt to be actionable with our mission, and we’ve, working with really large companies that serve, Econ, B2B, FinTech, SAS, and then all the way down here to this local level, we see some of these growth principles being pretty similar across the board.
The way those growth principles are executed are obviously different, but we get to see the core concepts of visibility, competency, social proof, referral, all 4 of those ingredients really being necessary. At whatever level of business you are to grow and all the more. So we would lobby and argue at the local level.
Let’s go through those a little bit more. Like, you said, I’m pretty fast. I want people to really get that. So what are those? I’m using the word pillars. You didn’t use that those different ingredients that go into that. Yeah, and maybe break it down a little bit, like, whether it’s the search, whether it’s the online, like, I want to go a little bit deeper in that, especially for those people that are listening that are local, and they’re like, come across, because what I think is so interesting is just the cohesiveness of it and the focus on local.
So go a little bit further than that for me, please. Sure, let’s take a local roofing company, for example, walk through the ingredients that way. So this local roofing company is probably one of, you know, if you’re a mid market deal, at least a dozen other roofing companies serving your 60 mile radius service area.
Well, you’ve got to be as good or better than that competition. You’ve got to be competent and good at what you do in order to, earn somebody else’s business. So that’s ingredient number one competency. Second thing is in all things remaining equal, the roofing company with the most reviews, with the most excellent customer experiences that have been broadcast and showcased across Google, across Facebook, across wherever they’re going to win the day because they’ve got social proof and that’s going to be a marker, a core ingredient of a thriving business.
So that’s number two competency and social proof. Number 3 would be visibility. So, if we’ve got that same roofing company, and they’re awesome at what they do, and they’re serving customers. And they’re, good at it, but they’re not visible. Nobody knows they exist. Well, the volume of customers they’re serving is actually pretty small, so we can’t really grow that way.
And then the last piece would be referral. We talk about active referral systems and passive referral systems. Everybody has a passive referral system. If you exist, and you have interactions with people, you are you are. solo referral engine just by existing and having relationships with people. But what we want to do is we want to have active referral systems.
If we’re a local home service business, and we want to make sure that we are incentivizing and encouraging and making it incredibly easy for our customers to refer others to us. And so those four key ingredients, competency, social proof, visibility, referral, if we’ve got all four of those, there is no world where we don’t just grow exponentially, become predictable, profitable, and thriving.
Yeah, let’s take that a step further. And I know we won’t have in the context of one podcast interview time to unpack all of it. but I’ll at the end of this for everybody listening, just so you know, I’ll definitely allow Ross the opportunity to leave a website or other things to follow up with.
But let’s just. Let’s just unpack one of them, maybe I’ll just pick out of a hat. So the social proof component of it, if I’m, let’s take that same roofer and if I’m looking to differentiate myself or the review side of it, the active system, you can actually pick any of those. I’m not, I don’t have a preference, but like, maybe give an example of one of those and what that could look like.
so people can kind of visualize that. Well, I’ll just lead off with social proof. I think this is one of the most underrated and most valuable pillars of this local growth formula and really. The most valuable ingredient of any local business, and it’s your ability to get your customers to shout your praises from the rooftops.
A great example of this is Trellis Coffee Bar, our coffee shop here in Augusta, Georgia. We made it a mission to go to launch day, to grand opening, with at least 100 reviews. Well, if you’re not in business, how do you actually do that? For us, it was. Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m in. I’ll play. How do you do that, man?
Well, how do you give people a taste of your experience of your business without ever having tried the real thing, but you give them glimpses of it? So much so to the extent that they feel like they are equipped to say, Hey, I vouch for this place. And even if it doesn’t exist yet, I’m excited to be there.
And here’s why. And so we actually were able to come, I think we had, like, 115 reviews because we showed up at markets. We gave away stickers. We gave away samples. We gave away just our time investing in the local college here, all that sort of deal. And so anyways, that’s like the pathway to acquiring these reviews.
But what they have done for us, that social proof, is in the crowds and noise of all the other coffee shops here in Augusta, we have been able to earn the business of the college students, of the local business people, of the moms, of the nursing community, and we’ve done that because our reviews are so highly touted.
So if anybody is new, looking for a new coffee experience coming into town, they search us on Google. And. We show up number 1, and I think that extrapolates even further to the roofing company, the HVAC company, the plumbing company, you know, these are all companies that, if somebody is looking around to find out, hey, who’s the most trusted and reliable person to come into my home and, do something that’s relatively intimate for me in exchange for money.
Well, I want somebody that my peers had vouched for that have said, yep, we used him and it was great. That’s why social proof is so important. it’s pretty obvious that the only reason why you show up number one is because you’re the only coffee shop in the entire city, right? Absolutely not. Come on, Ross.
Come on, man. No, but I do say, I say that in jest, but I do say it to like prove a point. You were able to rise in ranking past the competition. It is past. Like it is popular and I’m guessing there’s shops in your local area that nothing against them, but, know, that maybe aren’t using the exact same tactics or whatever, whatever that, you were able to surpass that online.
So, it just shows that it works. That’s right. Yeah. And so if it worked in, if it worked in an industry as competitive as coffee, it can and does work in other industries. 100%. You’re spot on there. Yeah, that’s awesome. Ross, this has been a lot of fun, man. I really enjoyed getting more into your, formula, into your head on marketing and and I know our audience are interested in learning more as well.
what’s the best way for people to follow up to connect and learn more about fence posts and connect with you and your team? Yeah, come check us out at fencepost. co. That’s fencepost. co, not com. And if you’re looking for Help getting more visible and showcasing how awesome you are at what you do and getting more reviews We would love to talk to you fill out a request for a free video assessment and we’ll We’ll get to work.
Fantastic. For everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on the link and head right on over and check out Ross and his team over at Sunspost. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, Be sure to hit that subscribe or follow button and hey, we’ve been talking about reviews all day If you feel so friendly then leave a review too.
I’m not mad at it. Right ross. So feel free to Well, I remembered to ask and appreciate you tuning in and again hit that subscribe or follow button and ross Really man. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing your knowledge and insight with me and the audience. Appreciate you.
Absolutely. Thanks adam