The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unveiling Secrets of Marketing Mastery with Chris Campbell

Episode Date: May 24, 2025

Unveiling Secrets of Marketing Mastery with Chris Campbell Modernmarketingsolutions.com About the Guest(s): Chris Campbell is an experienced entrepreneur and the founder of Modern Marketing Solutions, a company focused on empowering small business owners with effective marketing strategies. With a background in construction and a history of dealing with ineffective marketers, Chris is passionate about helping business owners avoid common pitfalls in marketing. In addition to managing a construction company in Austin, Texas, Chris is a soon-to-be-published author with a book titled "The Delusion of Marketing for Small Business Owners." Episode Summary: In this compelling episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss engages with marketing expert Chris Campbell to explore the intricacies of modern marketing strategies for small business owners. Chris Campbell shares his journey from the construction industry to founding Modern Marketing Solutions, driven by a desire to unveil the truth behind ineffective marketing practices and provide genuine support to entrepreneurs. The episode delves into strategies for overcoming common marketing challenges, insights into crafting effective content, and the importance of scaling and sustaining business growth. Listeners are introduced to Campbell's forthcoming book, "The Delusion of Marketing for Small Business Owners," which seeks to address the widespread pitfalls business owners encounter when navigating the marketing landscape. By pulling back the veil on industry secrets and presenting real-world solutions, Chris Campbell positions himself as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs aiming to optimize their marketing efforts. Additionally, the episode sheds light on the significance of leveraging the right digital platforms, the role of AI in content creation, and the necessity of maintaining robust marketing strategies even during economic downturns. Topics such as ad spend allocation, the impact of meta ads, and ethical considerations in ad placement are closely discussed, revealing actionable insights for small business success. Key Takeaways: Overcoming Marketing Challenges: Chris Campbell emphasizes the importance of understanding marketing pitfalls and sharing secrets often overlooked by marketers, highlighting lessons from his own experiences. Book Insight: "The Delusion of Marketing for Small Business Owners" aims to arm entrepreneurs with the knowledge needed to navigate and overcome common marketing obstacles effectively. Scaling and Sustainability: The conversation explores strategies for scaling businesses responsibly, ensuring a sustainable growth pattern that avoids common entrepreneurial traps. AI in Marketing: Insights into AI’s evolving role in content creation were discussed, examining both its capabilities and limitations in delivering authentic audience engagement. Importance of Continued Marketing: Chris Campbell underscores the need to sustain marketing efforts even during recessions, outlining proactive steps to prevent adverse impacts on business performance. Notable Quotes: "You are a marketing company that also happens to do whatever that you do." – Chris Campbell "We're putting you in jail, you're not gonna rank anymore." – Chris Campbell on bad marketing practices and Google's response. "By the time they defined it as a recession, it's towards the end of Q3, and most of the time you're already out of it." – Chris Campbell on economic trends. "If you're an entrepreneur that's looking for just quick, easy content to put out there, that's easy, but it's typically not convertible." – Chris Campbell regarding the quality of AI-generated content. "When you're all in, you're all in. And that's what we wanna know." – Chris Campbell on working with motivated clients. Resources: Modern Marketing Solutions: modernmarketingsolutions.com Chris Campbell's Upcoming Book: "The Delusion of Marketing for Small Business Owne...

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. Cause you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster

with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hello, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, for 16 years and 24 episodes, we bring you The Chris Voss Show because we were like, damn it, we know there's a whole bunch of people out there who want to... Did the screen shake go off there a second?

I slammed the table with my fist for accent, but we heard there was a whole lot of people out there who want to be motivated, want to learn new stuff, hear people's stories, learn from some of the greatest minds on earth, how they did things, how they survived, how they survived cathartic things, and that's what we do on The Chris Foss Show. So we're going to guilt trip you for five seconds and say, go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss, refer your family, friends, and relatives, go to Goodreads.com, or I did that one, Facebook.com, Fortress Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Foss, Chris Foss One on the TikTokity, and you know, just Google it.

We're all over the internet. We've done a couple of episodes. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Anyway, we have an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking to him about his insights,

his experience, and some of his journey, which is kind of interesting. He also has a book that's coming out in a few weeks called The Delusion of Marketing for Small Business Owners. Chris Campbell joins us on the show. We're gonna talk to him about his business, how he does it, what he does, and why he does it. I just made that up, it's pretty good.

He helps people dominate local search and outrank their competition. I asked him if he could help me with that on the Tinder. He said he might be able to do that, but I don't know. I don't know if I can outrank those chats. I don't have that 20 year old body, but I'm working on at 57. So welcome to the show, Chris. How are you? I'm doing good, bud. Thank you you for having me appreciate it and look forward to Spending this next little bit talking and getting to know each other a little bit more. It sounds like we're on a date You said you needed help with tinder. That's what I'm doing. Yeah, it's got the whole callback going now Call back joe they run through the show

So anyway, you're not you're not quite my type. You seem like a nice fellow though. Did I reject you first? That's not right. I think you smacked left. I'm not sure. So Chris, give us your dot coms, where can people find you on the internet and give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your new book. Yeah, absolutely. So Chris Campbell, Modern Marketing Solutions. You can find it at www.modernmarketingsolutions.com. So I am a current business owner. I own a construction company out here in Austin, Texas. I got frustrated by dealing with just what I call shithead marketers. We probably have spent well over $100,000 in wasted ad spend and marketing companies who just took our money.

And I just said, you know what? I'm tired of it. We're going to pull the veil back. Let's, let's jump in. Let's identify what's holding back entrepreneurs from actually being able to do their own thing. And it's led down some really cool holes that have opened the opportunity to really get out there and actually help people.

So that's where we are today. Awesome sauce. actually help people. So that's where we are today. Pete Slauson Awesome sauce. And so, the book isn't quite on Amazon as of this moment on 5-20-25. When do you anticipate that it's going to be up there? Chris Foss We're looking for the second week of June. We're looking to release. Pete Slauson And if you're looking for a link for it, there'll be an update on the chrisfossshow.com post. Search for that and you'll get a link to

the book or you can probably Google at that time. In writing the book, I imagine this is your first book you're putting out? It is, yes. Is it going to encapsulate some of the different things you guys do for clients in your business? Absolutely. And so we identify, you know, what are the pitfalls? You know, every entrepreneur that gets in, they just think that I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna be a millionaire next year.

And what they don't understand, or what they don't know is, is that statistically, that's absolutely unlikely. And not only that, they don't have the tools, they don't have the people around them to support them correctly, and more importantly, they get swindled by bad marketing people who promise the world

and will always under deliver. And that's really what we aim to try and identify as the pitfalls, who the hero is going to be, which is ultimately going to be the entrepreneur, and then looking out for ways to get their business out there in a way that's not, oh, I just post on Facebook. And so we really dive into a lot of little bit of different secrets on how to really knock on Google's door and have them rank you correctly. Ah, and so tell us about your journey through life. How did you get into this business? How did you, you know, what were some of the things that maybe prepared you for it or influenced you for entrepreneurism? You kind of had a little journey, didn't you?

for entrepreneurism, but you kind of had a little journey. I did, yeah. So I started out, my parents had split up when I was very young, my dad and stepmom I grew up with in Dallas and stepdad and mom were in Albuquerque and they were entrepreneurs and they bought and flipped apartment complexes and they were very motivated by identifying opportunities that made them money. And so any of those things that it did, that's what they went after. And my stepdad was, he was, let's see, he was master HVAC, master plumber, master electrician, taught in college.

I mean, he was very well known. And so I got to watch them, you know, really take a bigger leap financially. So I got to really kind of keen in on those things. And so I had the opportunity to run the company. take a bigger leap financially. So I got to really kind of keen in on those things. So I had the opportunity to run the company. I said, no, I want to be a chef. So I became an executive chef, went to culinary school, did that for almost nine years, had the opportunity to leave that and join a healthcare group. So I joined a healthcare company called Epic Health Services and was able to grow and become

an executive director within that company. And then I got called back into construction. So I took over a company back here in Austin. And afterwards I helped them sell and I said, you know what, it's time to do my own thing. It's being really at the top at different levels taught me a lot of different opportunities, but it doesn't teach you how to be an entrepreneur. It just teaches you when the company is made, how to run it, not how to get to that point. And I think that was the exciting part of this journey.

And how did you approach that? I mean, how did you look at that? I mean, sometimes it can seem daunting to people. Sometimes it's kind of a thrill, but it's also part of the thrill is the risk of it or the potential for loss. How did you approach it to try and make sure you got it launched? It sounds like you had some entrepreneurism in your DNA from your dad. Yeah, exactly.

And you know what? I think I, and this is the delusion of being an entrepreneur is I thought, okay, I have these big contracts, I have builders that say they're going to follow me, so I launch and they don't follow me. They say, hey, you know what, actually, you know what, we don't fall... You were serious about that? You're brand new. Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm like counting in my bank account, you know what I got this building, that building, and none of them followed me.

Wow. The ironic thing of it all is, and when we started, I'm like, okay, I'm on Google, so people are just going to call me. And that didn't happen. And I said, okay, I've got a website up. And that didn't happen. I put out Yelp ads and that didn't really do anything. So I got a call from a guy who we have a name that's similar to another company

that's kind of farther away. He called said, Hey, is this whatever? And I said, no, you have the other one. He goes, you know what? They suck. I think they're assholes. Anyways, when you just come in and remodel my house, I said, sure. He was two hours away.

I said, you know what? I got time. Nothing's ringing. And you know what? He's been our Nothing's ringing. And you know what? He's been our best client since. We've done five other projects with him. We've done his families. We've done his daughters.

And we've been so happy along the way. But in that journey, you really learn what it takes to be able to take off. And nobody teaches you that. They don't teach that in school. They don't teach that in school, they don't teach that in college, you know, so it's really who you arm yourself around with to get that knowledge of it's all about marketing, all about marketing. Unless, and Alex Ramazi says it right, unless you're doing a million dollars a year in profit, your company is not your company. You are a marketing company that also happens to do whatever that you do.

And so that kind of switches what helped get us off the ground further. Well, then that works out well. You know, sometimes you just never know. And it's kind of wild. I've had that experience where, you know, you're, you're trying to figure out how to make a business work. And all of a sudden you find the segment of it. I remember when I started our courier company back in the day, which was our first big, hugely successful company, we were in the medical staff business, which was on call 24

7, race to a hospital, get it to the blood clinic within at least an hour, which was, you know, just madness, especially in the middle of the night. And it was really low when you looked at the availability of how you couldn't run a schedule off it and you just had to have people on call. And just for the pricing, it just wasn't working. But it was great for initial contract that we had when we started the company that my business partner worked for. But I was like, you know, I knew enough and had my own business practice run ups, starting

little companies that I knew enough that I needed to find a better resource. And so I remember saying to my partner, I go, we've got to reach out. We've got to find something. And so we dumpster dived a company. And this is back in the day when you could dumpster. I used to have a friend who used to have an Apple magazine and Steve Jobs couldn't figure out how his shit was leaking and it's because they were dumbstruck into typing the shit. Hey, once it's in the public atmosphere, it's in public.

You might as well just throw it in the street, man. So we got kind of a profile of their top clients and so we sent out, we targeted those industries and we were, we were broke. We were just kids running on $2,000 and to start up and, and top ramen and 18 hour, uh, no sleep days. And the, so we, we had enough money. I had, you know, like some spare money to do like a a-piece mailer by hand. We're typing the letters, we're copying them, and we're sealing and doing all that. This is a mail, kids.

So what I did was I picked, I think I picked 20 of each of the different top industries, and then I tried to target some of the top people in those industries. And I sent out a mailer, and my friends, this is stupid. This is a waste of time. We shouldn't be spending. And I'm like, no, we got to get out of this rut. And he's, you know, some of these companies never work. I'm like, just shut up.

I know what I'm doing. You don't. He never run a business before. And so we sent out the five different industries, 20 different mailers for a hundred mailers. That was the deal. And so we sent it out. And the one segment that we had no idea that was so profitable, because we thought of these other segments like lawyers and different things that needed immediate documents were

a thing, but they never paid their bills and tried to collect from attorneys a bitch. And all the tricks. And we found this vein of the mortgage business business which eventually led to me starting my own business This is this vein of mortgage business that was fucking crazy and we made all this money In fact, we dumped the the we started with eventually and we found this very profitable Line and sometimes you just never know and I remember my business partner was like really discouraging. It's never gonna work This is where the money's at and I'm like, you don't know And yeah, sometimes plumbing sometimes just finding just being open to finding that channel or that that vein that's out there

And sometimes you just got to find it. It almost seems like sometimes it's like a combo to a safe to find it. It almost seems like sometimes it's like a combo to a safe where, you know, I've had companies where, you know, you just can't get anything to fucking work. And somehow you, you hit that right fucking number on the combo and the lights go on and you're just like, fuck shit, we hit it. And you know, hopefully you don't run out of money by then. And I think part of it is right. You're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. So enough throws is going to eventually catch you something when you're in that position. And I mean, surely I thought all these builders were coming this way and they sure didn't. And it actually let us down a different road, which was away from builders almost entirely and in towards restoration which

was definitely not the anticipated route and then it led us to here I mean I would have never guessed we'd make the full switch into marketing but when you tell people your story and you tell people hey we're real we're gonna show you some of the secrets that these guys are pulling over your eyes and we're real, we're going to show you some of the secrets that these guys are pulling over your eyes and we're going to show you actual results. It's amazing how convertible that can be as well. I mean you're more real at that point so that's for sure. Now do you focus on a certain segment of client that you work with?

Do you mostly focus on like those some of those blue collar things that you come from or do you take clients from anywhere? Who's the profile of your client and maybe their spend or where they need to be you know as a Fortune 500 company, Fortune what else about that? Yeah I think again I think the analogy of throwing stuff at the wall kind of still applies here. I mean we have so much experience in construction and roofing and HVAC and plumbing. So you would think naturally that is where you would land, but we didn't. We actually land with jewelry store owners. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, definitely not the way I would have figured that

out. But what we identified with is, you know, they have pain points that a lot of people just simply don't understand or don't want to learn. And that is they have a lot of money out there and they need to flip it quick. But they also have small stuff like watch repairs and battery change outs that you know are 40 to 100 bucks. You do that 20, 30 times, you're going to cover a lot of costs. In the meantime, now we're getting the custom jewelry, now we're getting engagement rings, now we're getting you in front of that high-intent buyer or seller if they're wanting to sell anything and now they have an opportunity to scale up.

So most of our people are seeing 10X to 30X return by getting those ads or getting your videos in the right way to set people up. So our services started at 2,000, they ran up to 5,000. Really just depends on what they're looking for and what they're wanting. Most people don't realize most of their websites are shit. I can't tell you how many times when they say, oh my gosh, Chris, I have a brand new website. But guess what? It's coded totally wrong on the backend, doesn't have a content, doesn't link anywhere.

Google doesn't really recognize it. In a lot of cases, it takes the rankings down. So that's the first thing that we identify is what are they doing wrong? How are they not converting in a way that they expected to? It's because the expectation that was set up by the last guy set it up for the downfall of everybody else. Pete Slauson Oh, wow. Brian McLaughlin So, now, we're overcoming objections that

are just simply untrue. Pete Slauson Wow. So, I noticed on your website, you have a lot of services that you offer. Tell us about some of the breadth of that, if you would. Brian McLaughlin Yeah, absolutely. And I think even kind of leaning into that is, so what we really identified in everything. So what we did is we called the top 30 agencies in Austin.

And because we have our other businesses, there was no way to, I mean, we were able to mask really what we were trying to accomplish. And guess what? They were all almost identical, the same saying, and the and the pricing didn't do anything that necessarily stood out to me but I will say there was a handful that I thought were pretty good I thought the rest of them were shit and so when we say 95% suck and steal your money we really mean that and I think that's probably a very accurate

statistic at that point but the main thing that changed the game for us is we bought a news station And when we bought our own news station, it means we create our own narrative And so our narrative is whatever clients want to be So if you say hey, I'm Chris boss I got nice feet and I really want the world to know about my nice feet and my only fans for the for the fee. If it pays the bills, Chris, let's do it. But how are you going to get that message out there that Chris Voss has the

nicest feet on air? And what we do is we can create several thousand articles and push it in any zip code you want to be in almost as granular as the street address that you're on. Wow. That's that's power. I don't know any marketing company that owns their own news station and has the ability to not only create, but create and scale and rank any client

in any area in any way. And that is a rapid ranker technology, which we have created. So that's special. So Chris, when you're ready to get those, those beautiful pearly white toes out there, everybody I have toes like fingers, like Siri, I'm not even kidding. Yeah. They're 14 inch shoes, fish toes. And I already have, you know, really big hands and fingers, but yeah, I have, I have, I have bite or fucking,

they're rolling a spider. That sounds kind of gross, but they're like really long. Like in my old age, I have to be careful. I don't bend them wrong or they'll bend back. They're just, they're literally like half fingers. I think you're underestimating the market on long toed men. Oh, there's a segment. I see where you're going with this. You do have to niche down though at your age, so you got to be careful.

Yeah. So ladies love it, I'm sure. I don't know. You can grab things, hold things. Well, they love other parts, but no, I've always looked at them and I'm like, if I ever lose my pinky, I've got replacements. So now you mentioned the thing that I'd seen on your website. Was it the Rapid Ranker?

I think it was. That's it. Yeah, yeah. And you guys do all sorts of stuff, content marketing, conversion rate, digital marketing, you just see email marketing. I know it's Austin is named a lot here on some of the offering you have for it is so are you based in Austin or we are? Yeah. So there's two ways to kind of look at things, right? And entrepreneurs don't really realize that it takes two roads to grow. Everybody just assumes you pay ads, of course,

but you have to pay ads. It's part of the business that people don't understand. The question is, where do you pay ads? What content are you putting in an ad? And within that, what is getting the majority of the ad spent? And right now, we're doing an 80-20 split of meta to Google before probably four or five years ago was the opposite it's 80 Google 20% meta but now meta knows more about your pearly white toes than you do and so when you buy big shoes

and you're bitching about your shoe guess what ads you're saying and that's for big shoes right or you know sandals that allow those things to come out. And so what we're understanding now is that that ad spend is critical. Now you have the organics of ranking correctly. So if you don't rank, then your ad spend, although can still be helpful, you're not getting the full view of how to run this business. And so I think in the book, we talk and we dive into the organics and how to rank correctly and the mistakes

even marketing companies make to get you there. And then we talk about how to set up ads properly to get you into a place where you can then put ads in there. Now, most people don't have the time to do both. They might be able to manage one or the other. And that's why having a good marketing team is gonna be great, because you're gonna get better return upfront

that covers that cost and you're gonna scale properly. And you have a family to call home, right? So you're not by yourself anymore. And I think that's the trap. 80% of entrepreneurs are gonna fail within the first two years. But then the next statistic is that 95% of the 20% will fail by year five

So that's a small you're only talking about two or three companies that'll make it to year five. Holy how do you get there? Yeah so how do you get there you get you have to get there by scaling and And understanding the expectation of what it means to scale it and you could scale too fast and then you get there? You have to get there by scaling and understanding the expectation of what it means to scale. And you could scale too fast. And then you get pulled back and then you have to learn the rhythm of understanding a plateau, scaling correct, and then get into that next level. And again, we talked about that in the book as well, which becomes important.

And so that's really wild. You guys have your own studios, TV stations, studios. And so they can- Well, to be fair, it's really wild. You guys have your own studios, TV studios. And so they can... Well, to be fair, it's not TV, but it's everything but TV. Okay. Do you do podcasts or audio or you just basically film in the studio or how does that work? Yeah. So we have our own film editing team, our own content creating team, our own video scripting team. So they'll help write all the scripts out. So if you're a local business, let's say you're in Tampa, right,

and you want, you're a roofer that's out there, right, we can help create all that content on our side to be able to get that message in Tampa, any zip code that you want to get it in, right? So it's not enough just to have the news station, you have to be able to embed it, in other words, put it in the area that you want it to get it in, right? So it's not enough just to have the news station, you have to be able to embed it. In other words, put it in the area that you want it to show up in,

and that's where most marketing companies never get it right. They never get it right. Maybe they have targeting on meta, but how do you get that message into that specific area correctly? And it has to be, what Google wants to know is answer this question.

Someone put in, nicest toes in Las Vegas, and my God, that better be Chris Voss that shows up because his website says he's got the nicest toes. So what we do is we go through and we check to make sure that all those questions that are top-ass get answered correctly. It's so funny. People are going to be Googling this. There's no I don't think anybody wants to see my feet if you want to see my feet. I don't know. I'm not gonna kink shame

Chris was in the kink Show podcast. Welcome. King Shame. The King Show podcast is on another.com folks. I love only fan callback jokes. They're fun. But anybody who's Googling that data to see if I'm on there, you're disgusting. Yeah. King Shame. And you know what's great is when I get you the actual release, I'm going to show you the data of people who have Googled Chris Voss feet or the sexiest feet in Vegas. I think you should go with hashtag the sexiest feet in Vegas. Let's do that. I had a date a couple of weeks ago who she called me and I went spinning out the door because it was last second and I hadn't clipped my toenails. She was not excited about that, but it still worked out. Yeah, I'm not sure that chicks, the problem is I'm not sure the chicks are buying that. It might be some other

folks that aren't in my wheelhouse. Anyway, but it's what everybody can answer thanks so we're not fully kitchen. Anyway, we all have flaws, Chris. I mean, let's be real. I mean, so, I mean, they just are going to be accepting of the sexiest feet in Vegas. I don't know about that. I mean, my feet have like knuckles, like they're like this, like I have a 10 and a half, almost

11 inch span hands. I can do the math on everything else. But yeah, I have these toes that like, they're on their own timeframe. But they can walk off on their own. Now to be fair, Chris, I saw a statistic that anyone over 10 and a half inches of hands, you have to divide by three to find the next part.

You know what I'm saying? So it's not by two, it's by three. You may need to use times with me. Anyway, I'm not normal. I can't, you know how men sit and they can cross their legs like a woman? Yeah, that's not possible physically with me. Like when I see men do that, I about fall over in pain just watching it. I don't know how men can sit that way. So anyway, on your guys' service, do we go over like if someone's listening out there in the audience, they're on LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera, what level do they need to be at to qualify to work with you?

Pete Slauson It's really about them. I mean, we do reject people as well. There's a certain expectation. I think we got to add that as a service page. I think we've discovered a new revenue stream for you all. Only fans, marketers. I mean, I think we could get there. I mean, we have the video team to do it. Trade for print, trade for work. I don't know what that means. TFP? Yeah. Well, just like everybody else, expectations are so critical. Whatever you set for yourself, we're setting for you as well. When we onboard someone, we onboard, when they're ready to go, we onboard within 24

hours and we're asking all these deep dive questions like, tell us about your revenue, tell us about your goals, tell us about what you're doing for you. Because at the end of the day, we can do 98% of the work, but there's still 2% you're gonna have to do. And if you're unwilling to do the 2%, it doesn't matter how hard or how much we do, you're not gonna scale correctly, and you're gonna fall back,

and then you're gonna blame us. And that's not the case. The case is when you're all in, you're all in. And that's what we wanna know. And so if they are, and they're ready to move, we're gonna work with those people to get the specific goals that they want. And if they're listening and their marketing company

isn't talking to them every other week or once a week or sending out info or getting weekly reports or just identifying I'm in this rut and I've been in this rut for more than a month, then that's the wrong company to be with because they're not making the changes that it takes to see them successful. And I think for me as an entrepreneur and owning this wonderful marketing company that

has the best technology that we've ever identified, you have to make moves at the end of the day. You have to move forward. No matter the rut you've been in, you have to move forward. No matter the rut you've been in, you have to move forward. What do you see as the future going forward with concept marketing and platform advertising on Facebook and other places, Google? What do you see the future maybe in the next year or two? Are there changes coming that you see that people need to be ready for? I know we're very likely going to end a recession.

I think that's just a given. I think we're first quarter down and now we're, so we just need one more quarter more officially in a recession. And a lot of people sometimes in a recession don't understand that's one of the most important times to amp up your advertising is to offset those losses. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I totally agree. And even during the Biden eras, Ias, we had two quarters that were down and then they refuted it and said that there wasn't really a recession, that maybe we were already out of it. Most economists and most people will tell you that even if they've defined it a recession, by the time they've defined it, it's towards the end of Q3 anyways most of the time you're already out of it even if it's relatively small a percent of three-quarters of a percent down from year to year that's you can make that up I think what we did find is that April is going to be a relatively bad month in terms of overall numbers because of the quote-unquote tariff

scare so we'll see how that plays out for sure. But here's what I can tell you. In the world of AI, everybody is thinking, you know, right now that AI is gonna take over all content marketing. That if you just subscribe to an AI website, it's gonna write all this great stuff for you. And there is some truth that it's better than you probably at writing content right now, but overall that is not how Google looks at stuff. And what AI can't do is answer the questions that you and I organically are coming up with, right?

Sexy feed in Vegas, right? And so when we talk about creating stuff, it has to be answering those questions. And right now AI just stuff, it has to be answering those questions. And right now, AI just really, it's close, but it just isn't there yet. And even when we're dealing with AI, probably every five or six prompts, we're seeing errors in it.

So it's still not, we still can't justify that it can be everything. And I don't think that it ever will be. But I think it can help a lot of areas get ahead. But if you're an entrepreneur that's looking for just quick, easy content to put out there, that's easy, but it's typically not convertible. We still have to, as humans, get to why do people ask this specific question and how do we answer it?

And oftentimes, still, chat GPT is not gonna answer that or Deep Saker, Claude or Crocker, any of those guys, they're not gonna answer it correctly, but they have their own lane that they do help in. Ah, excuse me. And here's what I do think we will see more of. Like for example, lawyers are so expensive, right? They're hundreds of dollars an hour,

they charge you every time they think you're calling them. Like they're, they're going to call you. Yeah. I mean, they're going to charge you for any and everything. I'm going to start doing that with my clients. I think you need help, more help than you're paying for right now. And I'll just bill you for it. Exactly. And what you can do is you can, you can take a lease, you can take a contract of income, and you can upload it into ChatGPT, and it'll tell you everything about this contract, and it's gonna give you pretty sound advice, maybe not the total advice,

but it's gonna give you how to answer any type of questions if one arises, or it could tell you how to get in and out of danger if you're trying to sign into something that you don't have time to read, and you don't wanna pay a lawyer $600 could tell you how to get in and out of danger if you're trying to sign into something that you don't have time to read and you don't want to pay a lawyer $600 to tell you yeah you're fine or no you're not and I think that's kind of the cool part now is it's going to solve a lot of things like that that'll save people money so it's really just identifying what those look like but overall from an SEO standpoint, humans are still going to

win at the end of the day. Why is it important to amp up when times get slow? I mean, one of the problems that a lot of entrepreneurs have is they kind of have their model and their system. One thing I learned years ago buying companies was they usually run that fucking thing in the ground. Like maybe they start the company for a couple of years. You know, you talked about how a lot of companies don't make it to year five. And so what they'll do is they'll start with their model and sometimes it works

or they, maybe they just have the clients lined up and it works for a while. And then sometimes there's changes in the marketplace and competition and business models for that industry. Sometimes there's just the model stops working. I don't know. One of the big things I would see with people is they'd hire their whole family to work for them. They became successful and that creates its own finance drugs.

And it's hard to fire those people because they're like, they're my family. And I've walked into companies to acquire them. And you know, there are steps away from bankruptcy and they just really don't realize it. You'll walk in and you're looking at all the people and you're like, yeah, here's my mom, my sister and my, oh, you have most of your family that works at your company. Oh shit, I'm going to be firing you and all of them. I see what the problem is here. Yeah.

Yeah. If you get, I mean, people have to live with that sort of thing over their head or they perform better. I'm sorry. That's just the way it is. But when you have family, you know, there's all sorts of other things that play into that. Maybe you, I don't know, you punched your brother in the head when you were a kid and he's just, he's sabotaging your business.

I don't know. I'm just running scenarios here, but I would see that. It was crazy when I'd see it. And sometimes I couldn't take over the company because you're going to fire everybody, aren't you? And I'm like, yeah, you don't have your family work for you. That's just it. And there's no guarantees. This isn't a, what is that? Professor tenant, Tennessee or something like that, where you can, you can get, you know, you basically can't be fired as a professor after a while. You know, it's kind of how family feels. But so what do you see if we do intercession,

if things get tight, you know, or ups and downs, you know, I've learned as an entrepreneur that as soon as I see, you know, the model sort of falling off, or I see holes coming in, or, you know, maybe, coming in or maybe there's a couple days where there's no revenue, you're like, hey, what's going on, man? Let's check the, do a checkup from the neck up and see what's going on. Why is it important to do that even in recession?

Yeah, absolutely. In my opinion, you're planning the next month, right? So the month you're in, you should already know the data for that month You're already checking the next month's data So if the data from current month and last month is you're down 20% versus last year down 10% You're starting to see the bigger picture then we know that you've got to tighten up your bootstraps and one way or the other and picture, then we know that you've got to tighten up your bootstraps in one way or the other. And identifying how you're going to get your message out becomes even more critical.

So there's a lot of people that decide, oh, I'm going to put ads in late. I'm going to get caught up because I didn't need ads, I didn't need all this stuff, and now that I need it, I'm depending on it. And that's the wrong time to do it but it's the easy trap to fall into because you say oh I don't need to spend until you're in a need and have to spend. So identifying that ahead of time is really critical. So you see that you're 10, 15, 20 percent down then it's time to develop a plan and talk to people. I think it's not just, hey, we gotta do stuff.

If you've got a mentor, talk to that mentor. If you have a mentor that's at a bank, a bank is a great way to get great data that maybe you don't have access to. Hey, what is going on that you can help me out? My mentor told me the three greatest things you need to be successful as an entrepreneur is to have a great mentor, a great bank, and a great lawyer.

If you have a great lawyer, you're going to be able to really maneuver out of a lot of jams. But more importantly, you're going to have people that are going to give you sound advice. The lawyer thing could be in question, I guess, theoretically. But really, you want that person to give you best advice to protect your assets and your liabilities at the end of the day. But forecasting is critical. And if you're not sure your mentor should be helping you identify that. And I think my first year in business, although we were profitable and we did scale actually pretty quickly, it really wasn't until year three when we had a pullback that I was like, you

know what, I really need to have someone that I can lean in on to for advice and say, hey, I don't have these systems in place. Where do I start? How do I get them? And by forecasting correctly, seeing the trend, you're going to be ahead of it. Your ad spend will be better. Your converting content will be better. You're're gonna be better in line to get through that tougher time. I think a lot of entrepreneurs experience that in 2024 alone. I know from a retail perspective, it was down 40% from the previous year in most industries.

So 40% is a big hit. I don't think that we're gonna see 40% hits in 2025, but I do think 2026 is going to be an excellent year. So I think if we're all smart and we plan appropriately, we're going to be ready for a great 2026. Get ready for it and all that good stuff. And yeah, I mean, marketing is just so important. And I've seen people that in times where the model starts

failing and they're not making as much money, and they're kind of like, hey, we should probably look at just cutting some expenses. The first thing they'll cut is marketing. Like I've seen that for 35 years of business. The first thing they'll do is, yeah, we're going to cut back our marketing. And they're usually working with people like me. Back in the day, I used to do some of the stuff you do, and about 10 years ago or so I think now, God has it been that long that social media's been around? Yeah.

And so the first thing I always cut is your budget, you've probably gotten those calls where like, ah, we're cutting you. And you're like, you're cutting your market? That's like slitting your own throat. Cutting off your, what is it, cutting off your nose to spite your face. That's probably not the best thing to do.

I mean, just go fire like 50 employees. No, don't do that. I'm just doing jokes. People stop it. Not we're not Silicon Valley over here. No, but you're, but what you're saying is right. Be proactive, but don't cut off the arm that ultimately will save you at the end of the day, you know, but I would say that needs to be the part

that maybe you scrutinize the most is, hey, where's our ad spend going? And then identify what is our conversion and spend in each area. If you see that you're not really doing anything at Google or Yelp, stop spending money there. If you're saying that it's all in Facebook, then that's where you need to plant your money.

And really good marketing companies are going to put out eight, nine ads. They're going to test them all and see which one's firing, and that's where you put your ad spend at. But if your marketing company isn't doing that, then that's a big red flag. Get out, save your money, move on for sure. Get out, save your money, move on for sure. You know, save your money, move on. Now you talked early on too about, this is kind of, I'm really falling back, but you talked about some of the bad ad spending that you've made and mistakes that you've made doing your own where, you know, there's, I mean, there's a lot of, we've had a lot of

people on that have talked about ad fraud, ad click fraud. You know, sometimes your competitors figure out ways to burn your ad money. I can tell you for sure that there are companies out there that specifically make bots that click on your competitors' ads to burn their budget. I do know that. Now that's a black hat tactic. We don't do that. If you believe in God, you believe in karma. That is just an area you stay away from because that will come to bite your ass But people are desperate out there they can they can they can pull some interesting things And I know that's a big deal with them is is all that and so you help you know get your clients avoiding that because Running ads it can be complicated if you don't do right, you can lose your ad account, right? Yes, no question. Yeah. And we, I mean, the guy

that helped us, he was a pre, he was an owner of a construction company himself, a marketing company guru. He knew all my pain points. He knew how to structure things in a way that just sounded so great that you were like, Oh my gosh, take my money. But one of my, my first big red flags was as he said Chris I can help you here is how I get your return on investment and I think it was like 6x or 8x not what we're doing for sure by any stretch but at the time that sounded great and he said hey give me your credit card we'll start today we gave him the card and we didn't get onboarded for a week.

So if I spent $3,000 and I waited a week, I just lost 750 bucks in waiting. So I mean, unless we're prepared to onboard next day, we don't even take the credit card because we value the importance of taking care of people the right way. And what he did is he created all these different landing

pages. He was creating different Google business profiles, that pointing things different ways. So Google just said, hey, we're putting you in jail. You're not going to rank anymore. You slide down. We're not putting you up. This isn't right.

And so next thing you know, we've lost $10,000 in ad spend that didn't go anywhere because Google didn't want us anywhere near high-intent people and so by identifying that we're losing money in this ad spend but having improper pages Google business profiles I mean it just it was a disaster and then the money on top pain yeah and then it's three months to get out of it. And you're calling Google, you're saying, Hey, you've restricted our account, talk to us. What are we doing?

He's not with us anymore. I promise. Like it's a sad story. And as an entrepreneur, you can't afford to be in that position. Were you able to get your account back? Yeah. Oh yeah. There you go.

Yeah. And then now we become- We just hire an idiot that ran around. Yeah. Yeah. It was my bad. Just, just someone who told me exactly what I needed wrong to be fixed. And this is, but this is important to know because people don't realize this. I had a friend of mine who was asking me about getting in the SEO game, the Google ad game. He, he saw somebody who's making a lot of money every month on the internet or something, you know, making a lot of money every month on the internet

or something, doing a lot of what you do. And he's a young gentleman who's trying to find his way through his calling in life. And I was like, number one, go find your purpose. Go find something you'll do that you'll love more for free. Don't go on the internet and just see people that have money and be like, I want to be like them. Go find something you love because it makes a whole big difference when you wake up in the morning. But number two, I said, you're going to have to go apprentice that.

He goes, no, I just saw this guy on the internet doing it and I can do it. I'm like, no, you don't understand. You can lose. I've known lots of gentlemen like yourself. I'm like, even the best ad agencies can trip those trip that, those anonymous wires of the computer algorithm and get their ad accounts suspended. And, and I go, you know, then you have liability insurance. You're gonna have to cover for if you fuck up someone's, their online presence. I mean, you know, you take down a Facebook ad account, you're sometimes taking down the whole Facebook account, which means you're losing everything.

And then your client's going to get pissed and sue you. And you're going to have to go spend years learning this. And he just thought he could walk into it. But there's a lot of risk and you're paying for the knowledge to avoid all the trial and error and the stuff that you guys have done painfully, building a knowledge base for all the years you've been in business, you're jumping right to the front of the line, basically, when you do that. Because if you're trying to master the ad business online and it's the moving target

that it is for, you know, you've got TikTok now and, you know, God knows what's next week and AI, of course, is coming down the road. That's probably, you're welcome to comment on that. It's not really a question. It's just a ramble, but also maybe a question I'll feed you to on top of it is, Oh, no overload. The guess what questions Chris is. Shit.

I blew it. Okay. I'll let you respond to that. And then I'll. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people just assume you create an ad, you throw it on Facebook, you say, hey, what is my audience? You don't know what your audience is.

You have an idea of what your audience is. You go to YouTube, you put in how to identify audience and Facebook ads. The problem is you're going to get so many different wrong views. The problem is you're going to get so many different wrong views. And the problem is you're gonna get so many different views. Like the former CMO, Chief Marketing Officer for New Balance, for example, his belief is when you run Facebook, you didn't even put an audience in. You let Facebook figure it out for you.

His idea is that Facebook knows so much more about you and about what your product is, that as it goes through the learning phase, it'll figure it out on its own. However, I've talked to influencers in Europe that swear that that's absolutely the wrong way to do it. I mean, these are top influencers and marketers who say, no, you can niche down to your audience, you pick your cities, you're going to pay more for that ad, but you're going to get better, high-quality ads that are more content or more likely to buy from you, intent, excuse me, as far as

I look for, to buy your product. And so you have two opposing forces. Which one's right? And the answer can be, both can be right to some degree, right? But how do you know when you're an entrepreneur and you only have $1,000 to spend in a month, how do you know which one to go with? How do you know which one's not just gonna burn your account? Yeah, yeah, and there's a lot of people out there

that say they know what they're doing, but they don't have the reputation, or sometimes they're just running scams. Yeah, and funny enough, that same guy that was running these ads for us that promised the world, there was only two sets of people that called in on these ads. One were people who spoke only Spanish and people who were 65 and up. It wasn't the exact opposite.

No, it was the exact opposite of our target market. Over 65 and only speak Spanish? What market is that? I don't know. I don't know. Old people rest homes or something. But what about the Spanish part? It's rest homes in Mexico.

Yeah. So it just was, I mean, it was almost unbelievable that that happened. I'm like, this is what you claim you do best? I mean, it's just, anyways, it's absurd. So for us, for us to, Yeah, go ahead. No, I was gonna say,

that's just the thing to be aware of, is if you're not good at ads, don't pretend to be one. Don't waste your ad account. Don't put up a hundred bucks a day or, you know, $2,000 a month when you have no idea if it's working or not. Stay away from that, save your money, hire someone, hire us, and we're going to lead you towards the right way. So as we go out, give us your dot coms and give people your final pitch.

Tell them how they can reach out to you and get to know you better and find out if you're fit with each other. Yeah, absolutely. So Chris, my email is chris at modernmarketingsolutions.com. Feel free to personally email me. I would love to spend any amount of time with anybody. And then our address is modernmarketingsolutions.com. And then also you'll have up there,

they've got the phone number to be able to reach us direct. We also have a Calendly that could set up a time with me personally or our other founder, Tyler. We do all the onboardings ourselves. We believe that that time for us is important. So we believe that when you're face to face and you're breaking bread with other people and you say, Hey, I'm in this with you. I understand your feelings.

It's not just a cell. It's not just a pain point because I just happen to know it. It's because we genuinely want to see people's lives transformed by the 5% who know what they're doing, not the 95% of still your shit. Yeah. That'd be there. I imagine there's a lot of fraud in the industry. And like I said, I, I kind of example, I cited earlier of, of, of a friend who

was like, this looks easy, I should get into it. I'm like, no, you know, he was like, he's right here. They're making $100,000 a month in revenue. And I'm like, I mean, that sounds like some really big clients they have maybe and they're going to see the shit if you fuck up their camera. Like you're gonna need insurance for, for you know, if you tell somebody the wrong thing and, and you muck their brand, you know, I didn't even told them some stories about how, you know, kind of, I mean, some of the, you know, there's some of the PR faux pas from some of the big marketing thing.

There's a story years ago of the gal who made some racist statements while boarding a plane to go from, I guess, New York to South Africa about AIDS. I don't know if you remember that. She worked for a big agency marketing house. She made a tweet, got on a plane and woke up with the whole internet going viral and she was out of a job by the time she landed. But I'm like, you can do something personally that can, you know, your clients are going to be pissed about and they're going to, you know, they're going to, or, you know, you've

seen the accounts that are corporate accounts and some idiot will put something stupid through that they're not supposed to. And so there's a lot of mistakes you make. And I'm like, you understand, you're working for other people. You muck that up and they're going to come after you. They're not going to be happy at all, especially if it's a big muckup. You know, I've seen them all. I'm sure you have too.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, and you're the face of the business at that point. You know, you're pointing high-end people back to you and this is what they're saying. So yeah, you have to be incredibly, incredibly important about that, but Chris, I appreciate your time, and thank you again so much for that.

Looking forward to the book coming out. And again, more importantly, we're here to help people. I think at the end of the day, this is genuine. If anyone's just curious, hey, do you think this person's taking advantage of me? That's the right call because we want to help them. This is not a sales pitch. This is really just helping other people that didn't have to go through what we had to go through.

And you get to jump right to the front line and sit down and learn the hard way and spend those all the years that whatever. But yeah, the name of the book is the delusion of marketing for small business owners, correct? Yes, sir. And probably by the time you're seeing this video, maybe it'll be out or be close to being out. Watch for it. And then we'll follow up with an updated link on the Chris Foss show. Thank you, Chris, for coming to the show. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss, One, the TikTok, Gideon, all those crazy places. be good to each other Stay safe. We'll see you next time

And that should have us out