Episode 41: Start with the Fundamentals with Tim Fitzpatrick – Transcript
Rennie Gabriel 00:09
Hi, folks, welcome to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast. This is where we talk about money, tips, techniques, attitudes, information, and provide inspiration. In past episodes, we spoke about how to build an income and expense report, how to measure the level of pleasure, based on where you spend your money, how to track your money in five to ten seconds, what to look for in a net worth statement to see how close you are to Complete Financial Choice®. Today, we have as our guest, Tim Fitzpatrick. Tim is an entrepreneur/business owner, with expertise in marketing and business growth. He has over 20 years of entrepreneurial experience with a passion for developing and growing businesses. That passion served him well in operating and managing a wholesale distribution company he co-owned for nine years. The company grew an average of 60% a year before being acquired in 2005. Since then, he's had failures, and successes, that have been valuable learning experiences. He started Rialto Marketing in 2013 and has been helping service-based businesses simplify marketing, so they can grow with less stress. Now, most people overcomplicate marketing, and it doesn't have to be that way. Tim, welcome to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast. Let's get right to it with some questions.
Tim Fitzpatrick 01:42
Awesome.
Rennie Gabriel 01:44
Tell me what you do and why.
Tim Fitzpatrick 01:48
So we, as you described, we help primarily service-based businesses simplify marketing, so they can grow with less stress. And we do that by helping them create and implement a plan to communicate the right message to the right people. Why we do that? There's multiple facets to that one. I enjoy it. I love marketing. And it just keeps me, keeps me going. But two, there's just such a need out there, just see so many people struggling with marketing. And it doesn't need to be that way. And marketing is so important to any business. If you don't have marketing, you can have the best product or service in the world, and it doesn't matter. Because you're not bringing in leads and you're not bringing in new customers. So it all starts with that.
Rennie Gabriel 02:35
I agree. I agree with you completely. Now because I talk about supporting people to create Complete Financial Choice®, so they can be philanthropic, is there any particular charity that you support?
Tim Fitzpatrick 02:49
You know, not any, in particular, kind of depends on what's going on in my life and where I'm at. So I flip-flop.
Rennie Gabriel 02:59
Okay, I get it and that works fine. Because, you know, the point being is, when we're doing well, I believe it creates the obligation to support other people so they can rise up as well.
Tim Fitzpatrick 03:13
Yeah.
Rennie Gabriel 03:14
Well tell me, I understand your target market or service businesses. What do you mean by that?
Tim Fitzpatrick 03:21
Yeah, so our ideal clients fall into three different camps: coaches, and consultants, professional service providers - so you know, CPAs, attorneys, those types of folks - and then home service businesses, so contractors. Those are our three ideal client types.
Rennie Gabriel 03:40
Perfect. So we've all had failures in business. Tell me what your biggest failure might have been.
Tim Fitzpatrick 03:48
Gosh, there's, there's, there's plenty of them. So let me first start off by just telling you, here's how I define failure. I think sometimes it means different things to different people. For me, I look at failure as an opportunity to begin again with more experience and wisdom. So I have tried all kinds of different things throughout my career, throughout my professional career. One of them was getting into residential real estate. I got into residential real estate in early 2010. And I would consider that one of my larger failures. I did it for about three years, was having some success, but for me, I just considered it a failure because I could, I didn't want to keep doing it. I did not enjoy it. I felt like I just woke up each morning going, "Oh my God, I got to do this all over again." And to me, that is just, why own a business if you're going to feel that way every day?
Rennie Gabriel 04:45
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So I take it you were a real estate agent selling residential homes. Is that it?
Tim Fitzpatrick 04:53
Yeah.
Rennie Gabriel 04:54
Got it. Okay.
Tim Fitzpatrick 04:54
Yeah, exactly. And I, at that time, my business was focused primarily on helping people that were about to go into foreclosure or were in foreclosure. Oh, so I was doing a lot of short-sale business where we were working with the bank to get them to approve the sale of the property for less than what it was worth.
Rennie Gabriel 05:15
Yeah, that does not sound like that would have been fun.
Tim Fitzpatrick 05:18
Oh, man, it was . . . Here's the one silver-lining from it. I was putting myself outside of my comfort zone virtually every single day. And so I got used to putting myself outside of my comfort zone, being uncomfortable, and the more I did that, the larger my comfort zone became.
Rennie Gabriel 05:39
So now one of the things that you said was, you recognized it wasn't fun and you didn't want to do it anymore. What would you say was your biggest insight from having been in that business?
Tim Fitzpatrick 05:54
A few. One, just, if you're going to be successful . . . I think most people that are successful are constantly putting themselves outside of their comfort zone. You have to constantly be pushing yourself. And that was one of the biggest learning lessons that I took from it. But the other thing, too, was that was the first business that I was involved in that I didn't really enjoy. And so I had never actually thought about it. You know, when I was in the distribution business, it felt like I didn't even work. I loved it. So, I mean, I could spend all kinds of time there. It was just, it was a foreign concept to me when I got into real estate. And after a while, I just felt like it was just a grind, and I was not enjoying it. So that definitely opened my eyes. And I was like, "Why? Why continue to beat my head up against the wall? This doesn't make sense."
Rennie Gabriel 06:45
That makes, yeah, that makes so much sense. And as you said that I reflected back to last week and my doing some things that I really enjoyed around the real estate that we own, and I was actually playing handyman. I was installing some cabinet latches; I was re-grouting a kitchen counter. And its sort of like, I'm having the time of my life. Now granted, this is, I don't have to do this.
Tim Fitzpatrick 07:15
Yeah.
Rennie Gabriel 07:15
I could hire someone else to do this. But I'm having fun, and I make a lot of money at it.
Tim Fitzpatrick 07:21
Yeah.
Rennie Gabriel 07:22
So it's the ideal combination. So, well, let's talk more about, you know, the people that you work with. What would you say are their typical feelings or the typical feelings they experience?
Tim Fitzpatrick 07:35
So when it comes to marketing, I find that most people, most business owners, are, they're just battling information overload. There's so many different marketing channels. Now, there's so many different tactics. There's no shortage of marketing gurus telling you, you need to do this or no, you need to do that. And when people are just facing all that information, what they really feel is overwhelmed. Some of them feel stuck, but it's somewhere in that realm of, "I am overwhelmed. I'm stuck. I have no idea what the hell to do."
Rennie Gabriel 08:12
Yeah. And it's, it's so funny, too, because I just got a text message from someone who was telling me that I should have my own Clubhouse channel. You know what? Since I signed up for Clubhouse in January, I have listened to one broadcast. What - and I'm going to have my own channel? No, I don't think so.
Tim Fitzpatrick 08:35
Yeah, it's, there's . . . Clubhouse, obviously, is obviously the newest, you know, hippest thing from a social media standpoint. There are some people that are doing very well with it. But I think if you're going to jump into anything like that, you've got to, you got to have a plan and an idea of what your, what your endgame is.
Rennie Gabriel 08:54
Absolutely. Well, so what are the common mistakes that your prospects make?
Tim Fitzpatrick 09:00
The biggest one that I see is people skipping the fundamentals. So, I don't care what discipline it is. The fundamentals, they don't change, they're the same. And you, if you skip the fundamentals, you're building a house without a foundation.
Rennie Gabriel 09:18
Yep.
Tim Fitzpatrick 09:18
Right? I can't possibly even conceive of being able to stand up to the plate and hit a major league fastball, until I know how to hold the bat, I know what stance I need to take, I've got my hand eye coordination, dialed in . . . All those other pieces that come into that. If I don't know those, it's never going to happen consistently. And marketing is no different. So people, what people want a lot of times with marketing - people just... I need leads. I want to start seeing results. And because they've got this short-term thinking of, I need this right now. They immediately fall into the trap of, I need to get tactical. Right? I need to do Google ads, or I need to do Facebook ads, or I need to have a YouTube channel, whatever it is. Well, what people don't realize is, if you do that, and you don't have the fundamentals in place, you're putting the cart before the horse. And inevitably, you're going to waste time and money. And you're going to go, "Oh, my God, that didn't work."
Rennie Gabriel 10:17
Yeah, well, yeah, I hear what you're saying. It's sort of like, if you don't have your messaging dialed in to reach the people you want to reach, you could be on any channel you want - from Facebook, to Instagram - and it's not going to work, because the fundamental of knowing your messaging is missing.
Tim Fitzpatrick 10:37
Knowing your messaging, knowing who you're trying to reach, you know, who do you serve?
Rennie Gabriel 10:42
Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick 10:43
And how are you going to serve those people? You can't identify where you need to be from a marketing standpoint until you first understand who you're trying to reach. Otherwise, you're just like throwing spaghetti up against the wall, seeing what sticks. And that's just, that's a crapshoot. And it's never going to work consistently.
Rennie Gabriel 11:03
You got it . . . Is there a case study or a story you could use to illustrate, you know, someone moving from one point to another, with the stuff you're talking about?
Rennie Gabriel 11:15
Sure. We have a commercial cleaning client. And when we first got involved with them, the owner had just purchased the business. So he had bought it from the previous owner. You know, they had been in business for a long time. I mean, they were fairly successful. But there was, you know, he obviously bought it because he saw a lot of opportunity there. When we first got involved, their website... in fact if I pulled their logo off of it. It looked . . . I couldn't tell you who it was. They said the same message that everybody else did about commercial cleaning. And so when we got involved with them, we helped them put together some clear, engaging messaging for the markets that they were serving. We helped them implement that. We redesigned their website, helped them implement the messaging on their website, had very clear calls to action about, "Hey, if you're on the site, what are you going to do?" You know, "Am I going to get a free consultation?" Whatever that may be. For them, it was get a free consult. From there, they had already had in place, some offline marketing that they were doing that was working fairly well. So, you know, they were doing some networking. They were doing some cold outreach, and they had a good referral partner base. So to supplement what we had done with the messaging and their website, we also implemented Google ads for them. And the combination of the things that we did for them and the things that they were doing from an offline standpoint, within the first year of us working with them, they're, the average value of a client for them doubled. And their business grew 57% in that first year. So you know, it's, look, I'm not going, I'm not going to tell you that just because we did X, this happened, because there were a lot of moving parts there. But when you have messaging that resonates and makes sense to people, and is clear, and it articulates the difference between working with you and someone else, you're naturally going to generate more leads, better leads, and you're going to convert them better.
Rennie Gabriel 13:18
Yeah, well, a 57% increase in the year is substantial.
Tim Fitzpatrick 13:23
Yeah, it was substantial. It was a lot.
Rennie Gabriel 13:26
What I like to do is to leave listeners with are two things. One of them is, how to get a hold of you, and if there's something that you have to offer, a free resource or something? Let me know. Is there?
Tim Fitzpatrick 13:39
Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate that. If you like some of the stuff we've talked about, you want to dig more into the fundamentals to make sure you've got those in place, go to our website, rialtomarketing.com. That's rialtomarketing.com. I put together a landing page just for your listeners. So if they go to rialtomarketing.com/wealth-on-any-income, and I'll give you that link. So you can put in the show notes.
Rennie Gabriel 14:07
Perfect. Thank you.
Tim Fitzpatrick 14:09
There are free resources for the marketing fundamentals to help them start to get those things in place. And if they start working on it, they hit roadblocks, all they need to do is hit, Get a Free Consultation, on our website. Be happy to chat for a few and help you push through those, so you can get to where you want to be.
Rennie Gabriel 14:28
That's terrific. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. And the last question is. Is there something I should have asked you and didn't? And if that's the case, what's the question and what's the answer?
Tim Fitzpatrick 14:41
Sure. So I would have asked what are the biggest mistakes that businesses are making when selling their products and services? And there's two answers to this question. First is, they don't focus on what's going to help people survive and thrive. Okay, we all make buying decisions based on avoiding pain and gaining pleasure. Right?
Rennie Gabriel 15:06
Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick 15:07
That's what it's all about. And too many people focus their message on themselves. And our customers don't care about us. They care about how we can help them. What's in it for them? How can we help them get from where they are to where they want to be? And a second big mistake people make, is they make it difficult for people to understand what they do and what they offer. And if . . . We're short on attention spans. If I land on your website, and I immediately don't understand what the heck you do from what you say, at the top of the page, I am moving on. We need to be... we can't confuse people, otherwise we're going to lose them. We need to be clear, instead of clever when it comes to our marketing message.
Rennie Gabriel 15:35
I like that. Yeah. Clear instead of clever.
Tim Fitzpatrick 15:53
Yes.
Rennie Gabriel 15:55
Thank you, Tim. Thank you for being on the show. And to my listeners. Thank you for tuning in. You can listen to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast on your favorite platform. And please rate, review and subscribe. And until next week, be prosperous. Bye bye for now.
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