The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – George Kocher, CEO of Brand North on Building Brands SEO and Complex Internet Structures of Sales Funnels

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

George Kocher, CEO of Brand North on Building Brands SEO and Complex Internet Structures of Sales Funnels Brandnorth.com Brand North Brand North is an award-winning, data-driven digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO, content creation, web development, and more. The company’s website states that Brand North is committed to driving conversions that lead to increased revenue for our clients, focusing on technical solutions that create demand for products or services. Our services include SEO, Google Maps, PR & Growth Hacking, CRM & Data Analytics, and Reputation Management. At Brand North, we take the time to understand our clients’ needs and strategically grow their businesses using evidence-based tools. We value integrity, mastery, and innovation, and we take pride in developing businesses to their full potential. About George Kocher is a data-driven leader with experience building and managing high-performance sales and marketing teams. After graduating from Cornell University, George worked as an Analyst at Barclays Capital and VP of Business Development at Sunspire Health where he helped to grow the organization to 16 locations and an eventual sale to Kohlberg Private Equity. After Sunspire Health, George took over as VP of Business Development for Lakeview Health, a portfolio company of The Riverside Company where he also helped within their healthcare fund. He currently serves as the Founder and CEO of Brand North, a digital marketing growth agency that focuses on applying sophisticated marketing strategies and technical solutions to local businesses and national businesses within behavioral healthcare. In addition, George is also very active in crypto, web3, and NFTs as the Founder and CEO of 3zy Labs. An exemplary athlete and an academic standout, George epitomizes the essence of leadership both in the field and boardroom. Drawing from his diverse experiences, George has established himself as a significant figure in the business realm.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. 15 years two to three

shows a week day what is it 10 to 15 shows a week uh we've been bringing you the most brilliant minds on the planet we literally that we just searched the brilliance minds on the planet bring them on the show and that's actually a google search term you can use brilliance minds on the planet we haven't tried other planets. Maybe we should try other planets. I don't know. There's always that. So how are you folks doing today?

Wait, I'm not talking to you guys. You guys are here to listen to our guest. I hope you're doing well wherever you are, in the car, in the house. We have an amazing gentleman on the show. We're going to be talking to him about his amazing brand and what he does. And George Coker joins us on the show today. His brand is called Brand North. It's a digital marketing and growth consulting company.

And we're going to be talking about his company and what he does. George is a data-driven leader with experience in building and managing high-performance sales and marketing teams. After graduating Cornell University, George worked as an analyst at Barclays Capital and VP of Business Development at Sunspire Health, where he helped to grow the organization to 16 locations with an eventual sale to Kohlberg Private Equity. After Sunspire Health, he took over as the VP of Business Development for Lakeview Health,

a portfolio company of the Riverside Company, where he also helped with their healthcare fund. He currently serves as the founder and CEO of Brand North, a digital marketing growth company that focuses on applying sophisticated marketing strategies and technical solutions to local businesses and national businesses within behavioral health care. In addition, he's very active in crypto, Web3, NFTs, as the founder and CEO of 3ZY Labs. Welcome to the show, George. How are you? I'm doing great. That was a heck of an introduction. I'm psyched up. There you go. There you go. Well, we're having fun.

You know, we tell the jokes here on the show, so all that good stuff. But yeah, so give us a.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, it's brandnorth.com, B-R-A-N-D-N-O-R-T-H.com. That's the main website for everything that we do. I have a personal website, georgecoker.com as well. But yeah, Brand North is where all the business gets done. There you go. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of the company and how you do it and all

that good stuff. Yeah. So focus on behavioral healthcare. I did not used to do that, but really have just honed in on that. It's actually a huge industry with a lot of different complex, different types of healthcare in it from telehealth, mental health, substance abuse, adolescent mental health, and autism treatment, all sorts of different things that have to do with mental health and wellness. So we really focus on that. And we drive traffic to websites and then try to do everything after that that actually results in kpis so within this industry specifically it can definitely get complex because you've got everything has to be encrypted it has to be HIPAA compliant you have to integrate with

phone systems you have to integrate with electronic medical record system, all that different stuff. So we do all the basic SEO and ad stuff, but really what we like to pride ourselves on is being industry experts and really being able to track the entire sales process after they leave the website as well. There you go. So you mostly target that market of wellness and stuff? Yeah. There you go. So you mostly target that market of wellness and stuff? Yeah. There you go. So what sort of companies are a fit for you to work with? Is there a certain size or spend?

Yeah, we're usually working with companies that are either pre-private equity or trying to grow and be acquired. Anybody that's looking at expansion and growth and probably multiple locations is where we really excel. There you go. There you go. And so basically healthcare marketing, what does it take to market in the healthcare field as a general thing? I mean, what goes into that sort of thing? What are you targeting and stuff? It's difficult because it's one of those things where something might happen. There might be an event that triggers somebody needing that sort of help. So it is not always easy to do outbound marketing.

A lot of it is kind of demand generation where when somebody is looking for a service like that, we want to be top of mind. So we do that through ads, through SEO, we can be there and help with the website to make an emotional connection and also really just explain complex problems in a simple way. Like when somebody is especially in that sort of state where they need the sort of services that our clients provide, a lot of times they might not be thinking clearly. They might be in a crisis sort of situation. To actually get that sort of help is not easy. Usually you need insurance. You might need to travel. You need to meet clinical criteria. So there's all of these different things. And we really pride ourselves on trying to make the complex very simple. There you go. Making the complex simple. That's the great way to go.

So give us a little bit of origin story. What got you down this road? How did you grow up? What motivated you to want to become in the business you're in? Yeah. Well, it's been a long, twisted, wild ride. But like anybody, I started out in finance. I got a degree in economics and actually went and worked on Wall Street right after college. I did that in New York City for a

few years, enjoyed it a lot, a lot of fun, but wanted to really be able to understand how to grow and manage companies. So I started working for a startup, got into the whole private equity world and got a ton of experience doing that. It was awesome. Ultimately, I was traveling all the time, not really having a feeling like I was the owner of my own destiny and could kind of shape the future that I wanted. So I decided to start my own company and that was about three and a half years ago. Awesome sauce. Awesome sauce. So when you start your own company, what was the journey like to build that? And was that your first company? I'd done other things before, but this was really the first time that I jumped all the way in. I'm an entrepreneur. I've always had five or six different side hustles that I've been doing. But it was actually starting this company was a little bit different because I, what do they say, like, light the boats on fire. That was pretty much what I did. I just, I quit my job and I decided that I needed to go all in on this. And I was actually employee number one. I probably would not do it like that again.

I'd consider getting a partner or buying a company or doing something that had infrastructure. That wasn't what I did. I just, I left my job and I started the company and that was where we went. So I was the salesperson, I was the CEO, I was the billing, account management, the whole deal. And a lot of it doesn't change.

I mean, I've been with all my companies. I've been the CEO and the janitor at the same time. It still seems that I am. No one cleans the toilets around here except me. I hear you, brother. I used to walk around my big company with 100 plus employees. And I'd just be like, why is your shit on the floor? You pick stuff up and you're just like, I'm really just the janitor still.

I, nothing has changed. It's definitely an adjustment. I'll be honest with you. When I was at my job before I left, I had over a hundred people that reported to me. It was, you know, like it was much easier to shape something, I found, that's already a thing. If you have to really go from zero to one where there is no infrastructure that's there, it's a very different skill set. It's just as much about being gritty and just having perseverance and determination as it is kind of being strategic and smart about what you're actually doing. It's probably more about just having the grit when you're starting out,

no matter what your experience is. There you go. I used to liken it whenever I started a new company for us. I used to liken it just getting dropped into the jungle in Vietnam like Rambo. Let's go. Basically, I got to cut a swath of jungle and, and clear it. And then, you know,

start laying the foundation for some sort of community there and, you know, fighting off, I don't know, all the, all the, all the natives and whatever, fighting off all the,

you know, diseases and bugs and everything that's coming my way and somehow hopefully do it. But yeah, just, just throw me out of the plane and I'll make some out of it. The journey of an entrepreneur, if you will. I did that with my wife and say, I'm like a carp.

I could just live in oil. You can't kill me. I'm going to get through it no matter what. And that's it. I'm going to have to think of myself as a carp now. I got that image stuck in my head. I can survive on garbage, which probably explains all the food I was eating back when I started my companies. I mean, I was living on the thing.

But, you know, you get through it. And it sounds like you found a great way to get through it. What do you love about the SEO ad business, you know, doing all these different things? What is it that turns you on about it? I think it's kind of the ultimate job if you enjoy starting things and being an entrepreneur. Because when I go into these companies, we have to evaluate and figure out all of these startups or even if they're past startups, we're not working with Apple or Sony or a massive company like that. Even if they're large,

there's always a scarce marketing budget and we have to figure out how to be the best steward of that budget and figure out how to do that and really enjoy testing, figuring out what's going to work the best, how to put the puzzle pieces together to make something successful. testing, figuring out what's going to work the best, how to put the puzzle pieces together to make something successful. And that's really what we've been able to do through our process,

through how we do our process. But also, like I said, being more than just an SEO or ads company and figuring out what's actually resulting in more patients and ultimately more revenue so they can treat more patients at the end of the day. And that's a complex thing to figure out when somebody's calling on a phone, they're not checking out on a website. So we're integrating analytics, a phone system, CRM system, EMR system, like I said, all of these different things to really be able to get a full picture. And we've just found that that's why I decided to focus only on this industry because when you do one of those things but not all of those things, you don't ultimately get all of the results.

So we kind of narrowed down on that and figured out what our sweet spot is. So it's not just about trying to get good keywords on the website. You've got it all integrated to where you can do the whole sales process and capture and all that sort of good stuff. Yeah, we're really their data and sales and marketing engine. So even if we're, for instance, we might do SEO and not do ads or we might do ads and not SEO or we might do social and none of the others. But what we're always going to do is their attribution and really understand their entire

sales cycle for all of their different channels. And that's our major differentiator. There you go. Matthew calls in, he says, business ownership is the most challenging and rewarding job ever. The exponential learning curve is what makes you happy. I like the adventure of it. And he says, as an accountant, I love working with SEO marketing companies. Thanks for the love there, Matthew. Yeah, to me, it's the adventure. For a while there, I was almost kind of bored once the companies got set up.

I'm like, I want to go do some fun stuff and play around and tinker. And the creative process, I think, is the thing a lot of people enjoy. Yeah, I agree. And with what I do, I get to kind of do that over and over again. And as we're doing that, we're, I mean, on our side internally, we're working to develop software and develop tech that kind of better supports the entire process that we're implementing so we can just continue to do it better and faster for our clients. Better and faster. That's what everyone wants and sometimes cheaper, but you pay for what you get and when it comes down to it. Some of the other aspects that I noticed in your guys' website that are interesting is you guys

are offering several different services. You've got web design built in here. So people need some of that and development, local business marketing and national business marketing. So you work with national companies and local then. Yeah. The thing about behavioral healthcare is that, I mean, a lot of times it's not just about who's close, but who can provide the most

specialized care. So if we're doing marketing for somebody, a lot of times we actually have to market them nationally because people are flying all over the country and all over the world for these types of services to get the best help. So that is a lot of times even a local business, we're trying to market nationally. And in terms of web development and seo and all that different stuff we've actually found out that it's too difficult to take over somebody else's mess and a legacy sort of platform i mean sometimes we have to

we we have to do that or we're forced to do that because of different circumstances but we actually have just started rebuilding every website that we start out on, because then we have a framework in place that works with the entire thing. And it's just a better, faster, smoother process. Otherwise, you know, we're dealing with websites that were a mess that we took over three years ago, and they're still a mess. So it's better to just take the bandaid, rip it right off when we get started. There you go. Well, it sounds like you have that multifaceted approach, so everything has to work in the sales funnel sort of channel, if it were. Kelly calls in.

Thanks, Kelly. I apologize if I missed this. Did your experience in PE involve healthcare, and that's why you wanted to move into this space at the agency level? Or did you just kind of get in the SEO and you kind of found that this is a good niche for you? Yeah, it was all really pretty random. So I worked in finance on Wall Street and then I got started with a healthcare company. They're basically doing substance abuse and mental health at one location in Florida. I came on there very, very early and got into operations

and kind of found my way into the intake and marketing process. So I was there and helped to lead that as the company grew to, I think it was 17 locations when we ended up selling and we sold to a private equity company, stayed on working with the private but anywhere between 200 million to $500 million. And that was where I kind of, I sat with an organization. So got a ton of amazing experience there. And then yeah, I started my agency. I was, believe it or not, actually completely burnt out on healthcare. So I spent about two years doing everything under the sun. We worked with personal injury attorneys. We worked with roofing contractors. I mean, e-commerce, office furniture, anything you could name. And then I ultimately ended up finding my way back to healthcare and and realized that that not only was a passion of mine, but it connected the mission and the business and it makes everybody, I think, within the organization feel good.

We are helping people. And by focusing on it, we're just able to provide a much better product. There you go. There you go. And you're in a lot of other things too. You've expanded your interest. Tell us about some of the other companies that you're investing in. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm always starting companies. But yeah, definitely very into crypto and blockchain technology. That's something that's been a major focus for me. I just think that

the ability to store and send something in an anonymous, private, and encrypted fashion is going to be something that's more and more integrated into our society as things grow. So I've been developing and building things within that sector for almost two years now and see that as something that could definitely develop into the biggest thing in the future. There you go. Blockchain is always interesting. I know NFTs are really struggling right now. There's a new report on NFTs that they've 96 or 95% are worthless. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, sadly what happens with almost any emerging industry where there's a lot of money to be made

is the scammers come in and there's problems with it and all sorts of things like that. So it's hit a little bit of a rough patch right now, but to me, I don't think that it changes the long-term basis for why it really matters. And at the end of the day, it's the best thing I've ever seen that represents proof of ownership. You can't prove that you own something in a way like you can with NFT technology. And that's extremely valuable.

And it's going to be used in the future in a lot of different ways. Just right now now of course it's you know people are buying them hoping price goes up price doesn't go up they're upset right like that that culture is going to have to change and evolve a little bit but i i definitely believe in the technology there you go i i mean technology just does feature there might be something else that pops in the horizon maybe there'll be something new that comes out of it that whatever. But with blockchain, I mean, there's so many different applications that we see and uses that we see. When you work on your company and with your teams and stuff, what sort of things have you used to train yourself for leadership?

And do you have a leadership style that you use or important aspects of leadership that you think are important in managing people? Yeah, I definitely try to subscribe to serving leadership. And that's the style that I hope to be, where my idea is that I am here in the company to serve and to support everybody else that's in the company. So it's more of a bottom up approach where, and I try to live this every day, but I'm not going to ask somebody to do something that I wouldn't do or that I wouldn't feel comfortable with. And a lot of times I do do those things or I'll do it right alongside of them. So I am really just trying to support the team and make sure that they're taken care of and that they're happy and have all of the resources that they need. There you go. Serving leadership.

People really don't get that. In fact, sometimes I ask people what a lot of times I ask people what their leadership sort of style is. And they're like, I don't know. I just yell at people and tell them to do or else i was really lucky i had a job where a ceo kind of took me under his wing and really was a very prolific ceo and also speaker where he would talk about serving leadership and all those things and i experienced it firsthand i mean it was very coming from working at British Bank and doing things like that. And then going to work for this person who's highly successful and would just call

me as I was driving home and say, Hey, I really appreciate what you did today. And, you know, like, keep it up. And please let me know if there's anything that I can do to help you achieve more. That was kind of a novel thing at the time for me to experience, and it definitely left a mark, so I try to do the same thing. There you go. Well, it's great that you have that sort of experience and insight. Someone gave you that guidance. I noticed on your website you've got several different examples of success programs. Here's one where you guys achieved 400% traffic increase for a company called InheritanceAdvance.com.

That's pretty darn awesome. Yeah, they're an awesome company. We still work with them even though they're not in the healthcare sector, but they're just an awesome company. They have a great mission as well, and that was a really fun one. We were able to just come in and kind of take over that entire industry, to be honest. So that was a really good example, and we still work with them today. There you go. And just getting people new business and everything else.

What advice do you have for future entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs that might be out there struggling? Any thoughts on people who want to start their own business and go down the pathway you did where they kind of hack it away in the jungle and learn it the hard way and get through it yeah i'd say that it's best if you're a practitioner and you actually understand what you're doing and can do it yourself doesn't always have to be the case but if you are starting off with fairly low budget being able to roll up your sleeves and actually get the job done yourself is is definitely helpful um i actually like i i was hiring a lot of developers i wanted to do a lot of different data scraping and um really have a much deeper look at our analytics. And I took a data science course and programming course. I'm not a programmer or developer, but I wanted to understand those things. And I wanted to make sure that I understood that I was hiring the right sort of person with the right skill set. So I've always taken that approach.

Not everybody would agree with that. It's definitely not the way you have to do it, but I think it's good to have a solid understanding of what you're doing. And the other thing that I would say is try to go one to many instead of just going individual to a lot of different people. Try to figure out systems and processes that will let you reuse the resources that you have and serve it to a lot of different people instead of having to remake the product over and over and over again. That was the biggest mistake that I made at the beginning of the business was just doing everything custom over and over and over again and starting from scratch every single time and you know now it's like people think of like templates as a bad word like you're getting a template but you know we have templates

and frameworks and things that we know that we've tested a million different times now that just get better results than anybody else and we're able to do it faster and more cost efficient and all of those things because we have reps of doing that. We've taken a lot of at-bats and we've failed a lot of times and we've made it better and better. So now we can have a development framework where we can build 10 times the amount of websites in a month that we could when we were doing everything custom

for every single client. Wow, that's got to be awesome. So Kelly responds here, yay, thanks for the win. One too many for the win. You know, I like how you focused on that narrow aspect. Like you say, you can always just keep fine-tuning it. But some people, they scattershot. They try and go serve 50 different directions, 50 different ways,

and they get stretched really thin and sometimes too thin, and it can end up costing them. So I like how you guys have kind of found that vein of business in the health wellness thing. See what I did there? Vein health wellness. You guys have syringed right into that

and pulled the blood out of it. And so there you go. So what's the vision that you see for the future of your company? You know, one thing self-entrepreneurs have to have is a good vision. So what's your vision for what you see your company doing and maybe some of the other investments that you're doing? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that Brand North is going to become the largest behavioral healthcare, digital marketing and data provider in the industry. I think that we're on our way to being able to do that. So my goal over the next two years is really just to continue expanding the team, making sure that everybody's getting paid,

making sure that everybody's happy, that we're serving our clients well, and building a bigger moat around the business. I think that through having a lot of different repetition of doing the same things with the same types of clients, we've developed a deeper understanding than we would have otherwise been able to develop. And we're looking at a lot of different software solutions that could just make our stack a lot better and a lot more useful to the clients that we serve. So that's really where I'm trying to go is have it be not just a custom service provider, but have it be a software and service-driven company.

There you go. You know, I like how, like I said, you stay in that lane and you just really get good at that one thing. And sometimes that's what people need to delve into. I'm going to pat myself on the back for that because it was not always like that. It was like it became that through having enough pain of learning, like this just doesn't work if I'm going to be in a million different directions. So it's not like I had the foresight to just do that right off the bat. I learned

through stubbing my toe a few times. There you go. Well, that's the beautiful part of trial and error and starting your own company. I remember when we started one of our current companies, we had a certain vein of customer we're going to go after and it worked well. And then we started, we got lucky and there was a few different companies are like hey can you do some stuff for us and we're like what are you guys doing that's not really what we do and turn out that was a more profitable vein of money results roi cost of what it took to do business etc etc and so we delved into that and we have ended up abandoning our original sort of, uh, business model and yeah. And then we just went all in on that and just dominated the market in

that, in that sort of segment. And so that makes sense. Uh, final thoughts as we go out on, uh, your company, how you guys do it and everything else and, and, uh, et cetera, et cetera. Hmm. Um, yeah, I think that without getting way too much into the weeds and talking about all the little different intricate details, I would say that we just try to go broader and deeper

than anybody else. We're trying to really fully understand the scope of the problem and develop holistic solutions to that that really serve the operation. I think that sadly, a lot of digital marketing companies over time, digital marketing is one of the most competitive industries in the world. And a lot of times, sadly, clients just are not super educated on it. It's not really their fault. They're running a business. They don't need to know the intricacies of SEO. And I think a lot of companies are just showing a graph that

goes up into the right and that's awesome, but it's not really actually generating new business and putting money in their pocket. So what I've really tried to do is just be extremely logical about, okay, who is your target client? How do you reach your target client? How does your target client actually enter your clinic or hospital or organization and get very specific about that and then reverse engineer that into what are they actually searching for. I mean, you would be, it's hilarious when we get asked to audit a website or we're going to take over a website. We see these websites, they're ranking for terms that I can't even say on your show because you would probably get, you know, banned or something like that. But it's like they're putting these websites turned into research reports. They're not not even they're not even websites that are targeting the

their target customer their target persona so try to be very logical about what is actually going to result in new business and that's my dog back there there you go i just saw your puppy walk in is that a puppy this is frank frank. Oh, Frank. Oh, Frank's cute. What kind of dog is Frank? He's a Cavapoo, believe it or not. Cavapoo? King Charles Cavalier and a Poodle. Oh, so he's a mixture

of a whole mess of stuff. Dogs make the best people. He is. So it's been wonderful, George, to have you on the show. How do people onboard with you or reach out to you to find out if it's a good fit to work with you and them and they're a good fit for you as well? Yeah, just schedule a discovery call on our website. You can go there, book a call, and I'll hop right on with you. We can get down to business.

There you go. Well, thanks for inspiring people and sharing the data on how you guys do it. And hopefully we've inspired some other entrepreneurs to come around. Thank you very much, George. Thanks so much, Chris. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go check out George's website. You can go to brandnorth.com.

That's brandnorth.com. It's on Chris Foss. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have a.