Why Your Agency Will Be AI-Only Sooner Than You Think: Ben Kalkman

Jordan:0:02
Welcome back to the [High Ticket AI Systems] Podcast. Everyone please welcome the one and only Ben Kauchman. Ben, how you doing? Good, good my friend, we're happy to have you on.

Ben Kalkman:0:08
Hey, hey, how's it going?

Ben Kalkman:0:13
Indeed. I'm excited to be here. Hope to have lots of conversations with you today.

Jordan:0:17
Let's go. Let's dive in. First and foremost, what is your offer and who is it for?

Ben Kalkman:0:18
All right.

Ben Kalkman:0:22
So we're a marketing agency and we're offering basically online gold mines. That's what I like to call them. But really we generate a lot of opportunities for our home service customers. And so that's HVAC Plumbing Electrical Solar and Security, our five core. And we say we're 80 % that and 20 % things that make sense. Cause we help a lot of other people too, but we really position ourselves and market ourselves with those.

Jordan:0:44
Gotcha. What do you guys do for them exactly? Like, Legion or?

Ben Kalkman:0:48
Yeah. So we're full service agencies. So we build the marketing assets they need. So websites, landing pages, calculators, you name it, that kind of stuff. And then once we've got the right platforms, then we go and market them through all the different tactics and channels that you can imagine. So through paid ads, organic content, socials, you know, even video these days now too. So we do a lot of that as well. So it's kind of full circle and we really get, because we're so focused and so niche, we get to go deep with these customers, right? And kind of really understand the makeup of what their businesses are all about, which is fun.

Jordan:1:18
Yeah, I love going, I guess, working really, really intensely with a client because it does allow me to go deeper into like the mindset of that business, actually, applicant consultant opposed to an outsourced agency, if that kind of makes sense. When you are working with your clients, do they pay you like a flat retainer fee and they get everything included or is it like itemized, one might say?

Ben Kalkman:1:30
Exactly. Yes, yes.

Ben Kalkman:1:41
Yeah, we're more retainer based is how we operate. so, you know, there's two, kind of three, actually three channels to that. So if you're doing like a website project with us, often that'll be scoped and quoted as a one-time project kind of thing. there are instances though, where we have people that are more on subscription models where needed, you know, let's just say they're using a lower, product of like a website tools. Let's just say like a Squarespace or something like that, right? Where there's a model there, but more often than not, we've used not those kinds of systems. We use more custom solutions for that.

So that's one model. And then the second would be the retainer, which is kind of encompassing of the effort. And so when I present opportunities, it's never a one size fits all for our customers because of what I'm asking is what success looks like. And so when we get that clarity with our customer and we understand what success looks like, and often it's this much lead volume or this much revenue or whatever those numbers are that's important to that customer. Well, then I can use good old math to figure out the formulas for how I can do that. And then we can put the tactics or the strategies in play. to support those different levels, because it's never just one thing. So that's the second piece. And that will become the retainer and that's based on velocity. So how much do you need? You know, I always ask my clients if it's like, let's just say they need a hundred leads a month. Okay. Of that hundred, how many do you expect to get from rocket media? Meaning the services we're going to provide. And in this day and age for the clients we serve, that's anywhere between, I would say 65 to 85 % of their overall leads are in the digital advertising space. So that kind of helps me understand.

And then I ask you, how quickly do you want those? Cause that's the velocity mechanism, right? So in other words, how much effort do you want to put into this? Because most retainers are based on hours of time put into the account, whether that be SEO hours or number of pieces of content we create that type of thing. And so that's where the makeup of the retainer comes. And then the third piece of that is of course, the paid side of things. We charge a percent management of the overall spend for those types of things. And so those three buckets kind of figure out what your cost is going to be. And it changes.

Jordan:3:33
No, it definitely does. Depending on market, industry, niche, vertical, et cetera. I love how you brought up reverse engineering the math. I don't think many business owners or people in general actually do that. Like if you have an end goal, right, you can literally, if you know every metric within that funnel, you can essentially pinpoint to the exact dollar, how long it's going to take you and how much it's going cost to acquire a customer, you know, which I think is super fascinating.

Ben Kalkman:3:54
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan:4:00
Which, which would you say, which avenue for your marketing? said 60 to 70 % are paid media, but between Google and Metta, which one do you feel like dominates for home service?

Ben Kalkman:4:14
Well, for home service, it's always been the Google space. We've really got about a dozen channels within that that we would look at. Google tends to be where we want to start. within Google, there's several mechanisms with that that we look at too. So you've got your Google traditional ads, which a lot of people know, right? Tried and true. Those are becoming the most expensive for most people these days, just because Google spends are out of control, especially for home services. Google then has what they call local service ads, LSAs. And that's kind of a subdivision of Google, which is more of a direct

Jordan:4:39
Yes.

Ben Kalkman:4:43
kind of solution. Those are the best cost per leads you can find, but they are there. It's kind of like, it's kind of the stock market. You'll have good days and bad days where you get what you get and you could put a thousand dollars into your budget and, know, only get a few leads. It's just really, it's hard to control that, but that's the gold mine. If you can really kind of get LSA to work these days. Um, and then you've got display, you've got, you know, P max and other forms like that, that you kind of get into that are all parts of that, that we work with.

So, you know, Google definitely is that we also find that Bing, believe it or not, is a good source too. And here's why, lot of homeowners at a certain age bracket don't know the difference between the different browsers that come installed on their new machine. And so you might find yourself using Bing because you bought a PC and that's all that's installed naturally. And so there's still a market for that. And people that have that type of situation are still looking for services. And so Bing has this place and they tend to be a lower cost because not as many people advertise there. but there's not as many, right? So you got that. And then you've got things like Yelp and Angie's List and all the different channels that are on there. In addition to socials that you just mentioned, if you're a commercial client of ours, you're going to be looking at things like LinkedIn ads and things like that also, because there's more of a commercial connection there than there is some of the other channels. So wide variety, but that hopefully gives you kind of the hierarchy.

Jordan:5:58
I appreciate that. know this much about LSA ads. you don't, if you're a roofing company, you don't want to run ads 24 seven on that LSA ad because if you get a call like midnight or someone's seen that ad at one in the morning, it's probably a bogus lead opposed to only having those LSA ads around, I don't know, operation hours, if that makes sense. With that said, would you recommend a roofing company or

Ben Kalkman:6:20
Yeah.

Jordan:6:25
any home improvement company, having an AI receptionist. So the good answer calls 24 seven hour or 24 seven and still run ads all hours today.

Ben Kalkman:6:29
Hmm.

Ben Kalkman:6:35
So the appetite for that changes. I think when it first came out, like this is probably we're close to a year of adoption now for AI answering services. I myself use one, know, so if you call my cell phone, you're going to get Jessica, which I found out is the new Karen, by the way. So I need to change the name. Anyway, we've got different, different feelings for how that has happening. I think in the home services space, it's, it's probably not that unaccepted because people are calling to schedule appointment. Now, you used roofing as an example. And you're right, roofing is probably not so much of an emergency, right? Like if you got a roof leak, yes, you want to get a fix, but it's not the same as like, let's say you live in Phoenix, Arizona, where I am, and it's the middle of summer, 120 degrees outside in your air conditioning stops. Now that becomes a high, high quality, like you need that now, right? You can only sit in your pool for so long before you start turning into a prune. So you need air conditioning, you know what mean? And so that's going to be one where you're not going to wait. And so if you call and you get an AI, receptionist and you say I need service now and they're like, great, let me book you for our next available appointment. You're like, no, no, no, let me talk to somebody. I need help now. Right. So you see the emergency need of that. So I think it really depends on what and who you're talking to and how you want to get that to go through. But I do see that that's definitely an area where we have opportunities.

Jordan:7:48
Gotcha. Talk to me about Bing ads for a second, because I was actually talking to Claude, my good friend Claude, and they were saying that if you want to increase the awareness with AISCO and GEO, then you should actually utilize Bing. Yes, it's not as popular as Google, but LLM still look at that and cite that pretty heavily. The question I want to propose to you is from the interface with running Google ads and Bing ads, are they similar or is Bing just significantly easier to manufacture or go through?

Ben Kalkman:8:17
So the sophistication level is not the same. Microsoft has its own right, right? And then so you've got a very Microsoft is kind of feeling and operating system there. Google on the other hand is a lot more adventurous in how they've created things. And so they've got a more sophisticated system in my opinion. They've also of course got a lot more revenue sources there and they're the most mostly adopted version. So it's really not even an apples to apples kind of moderation of controls.

They both work in the way they do and they both have, you know, decent amount of attribution, which is the most important. But the reach is really what it's about, right? And so if I know I can get, you know, this much reach with Google and only that much with Bing, well, you know where you're going to spend your money. You're going to want to optimize your higher performing opportunities first before you get into some of those secondaries. And that's really what it works with most of our customers is like, hey, if you've maxed out what you can do in Google, which there is that right? Because here's one of the things I always talk to people about is for any paid advertising mechanism, there's only so much search volume for the market you serve, for the things you do that people are looking for. Therefore, there's a capacity gap, right? And once you're hitting that ceiling, now you got to start looking at some other systems that we'll call fringe and Bing would probably one of those for most customers, as well as other things like Yelp and yada, yada, yada, right? So I don't know that I would necessarily say that they're even comparable, but if I had to pick, of course, Google's the side that I would hit just because of their sophistication levels, just out of the, out of the roof.

Jordan:9:39
Absolutely. The way that someone framed Google in meta on for home and server home improvement projects or home improvement companies was kind of like this. Google's like defense, right? So I'm a homeowner. I need something.

Right, so I look it up on Google and then bam, roofing company or HBAC company, et cetera. With Meta, it's more so like playing offense. It's like, hey, we have this new offer that we want to present to the marketplace, whether it's, you know, $500 offer, buy one get one free as an example. And the homeowner wasn't necessarily looking for that, but because it's a compelling offer, Meta ads could also perform well there. Thoughts on that?

Ben Kalkman:10:14
Yeah. Well, yeah. So the definitely the messaging for the ad is super important. Like that's going to be the biggest positioning differentiation. So in your spot on when you talk about that, because I think a lot of people lose track that they still throw generic ads, bland ads that are not specifically going toward the targets are after that kind of gets into positioning, right. And so, and actually not just positioning, but probably personas for that matter. I often will use the analogy of fishing, right? So when you go fishing, you can throw a huge net into the ocean. and just catch whatever falls into the net. And you will probably throw a lot of it back. But if you use a line with a very specific bait, you're likely going to catch what you're looking for. And that's exactly how you have to think about these ads, right? So I think there's a lot of net throwing in these types of platforms. And so you get what you get and you don't see a lot of clear attribution, strong attribution, lead performance. But if you're really targeted with your messaging and your positioning and you are fixated on specific personas, you're likely to have a much better success with that effort.

Jordan:11:12
No, absolutely. feel like with the new updates that Meta has, basically the messaging is the targeting. Like I know a lot of people that just front open AI or I think it's open AI for targeting. And as long as they have a dialed in message, like you're saying, it will go in front of the right audience, which I think is important.

Ben Kalkman:11:28
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or, know, good example, again, back to my point of the whole different personas and messaging, like you often see the same creative for all these different types of personas, utilizing those same ads, you know, I mean, it's not hard to create different creative these days, you can pretty much adjust that fairly quickly, you know. And so I think that that's the other thing you see too, is it's not a win, you can call it laziness. But I think it's just that you've really trying to get strategic in this stuff. That's where you get to the next level. And I think that's where you see the good from the great.

Jordan:11:56
Exactly. If you look at all the top dogs, they are performing at a very high level, yes, but they're thinking at a high level. They're not lazy. They really go in depth with their strategy. When it comes to your own client acquisition, what are some avenues that you have?

Ben Kalkman:12:06
For sure.

Ben Kalkman:12:12
Yeah, so in this particular space, it's very much still a good old boy network. And I say that loosely, you know, in the sense that most people in these industries know each other from somewhere in some form or life. I've been lucky to be around in this for about 23 years now. So I'm nearing that good old boy age, I guess you could say, right? Where I've been around block. But that's truly how it works. And so in the very beginning, when I first started out again, there was just me out of my house, kind of single entrepreneur trying to figure this out.

I was lucky enough to have a very first client who was in this home services space, which is kind of what tractor being me into it. and as I started working with that particular client, exactly what I'm suggesting happened. That client was happy, satisfied, and started talking about me to his buddies at his different conferences. And next thing you know, I've got knocks on my door saying, Hey, can you do what you did for them for me? And so that naturally grew. That is still true for a lot of what's going on in the home services space. and I think that's true for a lot of companies and a lot of people. use that whole network of who, you know, asking somebody across your fence for a recommendation, you your neighbor across the yard. Hey, who do you use for this? That kind of thing. Similarly for this kind of situation. And I think commercial businesses in general, I like that. Now we do a fair amount of different advertising. I do a lot of public speaking and talking at different conferences that we're associated with. And that helps too, because you can, I'm a huge believer in knowledge sharing. think that's the other way of like, really, I don't sell, I share knowledge, I educate people. And I think what happens is they understand it enough then from my education to trust.

And trust is really what you're after when it comes to sales. It's not so much the dollars and the signature. It's, know what, Jordan, I trust you enough that I'm going to give you the opportunity to earn my business and to show me that you can do what you say you're going to do. And then that is the judgment right there, doing what you say you're going to do. and that trust is really, really hard to build and even harder to earn back if you, if you let it fall.

Jordan:14:00
No, absolutely. No great, great insights there. But you are a lot of trust to education. And I think for me, whenever I'm like, you know, doing demos, I really try to educate them through the process. And I feel like towards the end, they're like, damn, or actually knows what he's talking about, which is pretty cool. I feel like public speaking is definitely a pretty good way to sell one to many. Like you're on stage educating everyone who's listening. So that's a pretty good avenue. I have yet to explore that definitely on the agenda, but we're getting started.

Ben Kalkman:14:27
Yeah. It's not for everybody. And you know, it takes a little bit of a what's the word gumption and then be able to be able to get the courage to get up there. I'm lucky enough to have done a lot of that in my time. So it's pretty natural to me. You know, I'm actually one those kind of guys where I don't like to come up with a slide deck. I prefer no deck at all perfectly. Just maybe a note card with like three bullet points so I can just talk because I'm much better off just like sharing what's in my heart and what's going on in my head on these certain topics matters.

And I very much do that when I talk about different things. Of course, the slides help kind of give me more visual interest because if you're looking at this mug all day, you might kind of get bored. But, you know, that conversation can be fun. And if you're talking about something you're excited about, boy, that really changes the game too. Because I think people can sense the passion that we have with what we do when it comes across and how we express it and talk about it and explore it with people. And that education transfer is really not even that difficult then at that point, because All you're doing is relating and telling stories that intertwine so that others can relate to it as well, right? So you'd probably be good at that.

Jordan:15:28
I appreciate that. When it comes to like your sales process from referrals, would you say it's not an easier sale, but or do you see like conduct them like conduct the whole process as you would if they were a stranger?

Ben Kalkman:15:42
Every process is pretty much run the same way for lots of reasons. Now, my agent is unique. What's unique about my agency is we never ever want to subscribe to more than about 100 customers period, which sounds crazy, but that's the model that we've chosen. And so we try to subscribe to the fact that we want to say yes to the right customers that make the most sense to fit with what we can provide them versus everybody that comes to our door. There's lots of reasons behind that. So

Jordan:15:46
Good.

Ben Kalkman:16:06
But for us, we've got a very specific process and we've stolen that process from the playbook of our customers. So when you hire a technician to come out, the first thing they're going to do is diagnose your situation. Well, that's what we do when you come to us. We're going to do a diagnostic with you and run through where you are, what you've done, where you sit and what we see. Yeah. And so before that, we're also going to ask you to give us some basic information through a little online form that lets us know things like revenue and goals. That's the most important thing for me.

Jordan:16:24
What's the problem?

Ben Kalkman:16:34
You know goals and then just different metrics that are related to what you do So we can do the math to figure that out then once we get that figured out We'll sit down and we'll present to you now Here's what's unique to our team doesn't just have me as a talking head present to you I actually bring in the lead technicians for the service lines that we're discussing So if you're looking for paid if you're looking for organic Sometimes even if you're looking for web we'll bring that team in as well So they can speak directly to what they found and that speaks volume because now you're not just hearing a sales guy Tell you everything that he knows you're hearing a technician that just did that research on your particular company, telling you what they found and what they see in their opinion. And that that's valuable, man. We don't charge for diagnostics. And I don't charge because I need to make sure it's a fit just like you as a customer trying to make sure it's a fit. And so that changes the script slightly. Suddenly you realize, hey, these guys are interviewing me just as much as I'm interviewing them. That's interesting, isn't it? And so it's less of a sales, it's more of a personality kind of connection to and if that passes, Then, you know, then we are providing you with a couple options that you can then pick from. then we'll go in through the kind of the courting process to figure out, you know, when and how and the numbers and things like that. But then thereafter you're right into our onboarding and it goes from there. So that's kind of a whole process, but it, know, it takes in this space, I would say it's very rare that it's like night and day kind of transactions. There's usually a week or more for the courtship. we require at least a couple of days to do our own diagnostics. So that's important to us.

Jordan:17:59
Gotcha. So many insights there. Yeah, you definitely take a consultative approach. It's very, very good. say bringing in an outside source like the technician who's actually going to run the account is a interesting way to go about that. I have yet to do that, but I definitely think I can incorporate that in one way or another. So thank you.

Ben Kalkman:18:03
Mm-hmm.

Ben Kalkman:18:20
Yeah. I mean, you look at it from, if you look at it from the revenue, like cost perspective, right? Well, I'm basically spending at least three or four full-time FTEs on a sales call for potential opportunity. But then if you look at the return, because most of the time you have to look at it from a lifetime value of a customer. Now we're very blessed here at Rocket. We have a very low, high client retention rate. We're about 12 years for most of our customers or so in that space. So that's unheard of in the agency world.

Jordan:18:46
as

Ben Kalkman:18:46
And especially in the home services space. But how do you do that? Well, I kind of mentioned it earlier. You do what you say you're going to do. You fall through with things. You keep that trust. You educate, right? We spent a lot of effort on making sure that we build those relationships with our customers. It's because it's not always just about the results. It is important, right? That's the number one indicator they're measuring on is the results. secondarily, it's how you treat them, how you support them, how do you respond to them, and most importantly, how you care about them.

And so we spend a lot of that. call that Rocket Love here at Rocket Media. That's how we take care of our customers and our team. And so we do a lot of efforts with Rocket Love to ensure that we have those kinds of relationships. So that's unique, I think.

Jordan:19:22
That is, that is yes, it's cool to get results, but if a, you know, a client or an outsource agency really cares about me when I'm doing that kind of gets personal with me. It goes a long way as I'm 12 years, your average, your average client retention is 12 years. That's very impressive. Like you said.

Ben Kalkman:19:34
It does.

Ben Kalkman:19:39
Yeah, we're proud of that for sure. know, there's a lot of in our space, there's a lot of private equity transactions happening and there have been for quite a bit. And really that's one of the biggest distractors for us when it comes to losing an account is that they'll get acquired, which is congratulations to them because that's probably part of their dream is to be acquired. But the first thing it goes typically is things that are ancillary like marketing. And so, you know, that tends to be our short straw. And so we pull that more often than we'd like to say. But you know, it's OK because The good Lord's taking care of us and we're always seeing new opportunities come our way that we just never knew that we needed. Then we get new partnerships that we get to grow. So that's pretty awesome too.

Jordan:20:15
On the topic of keeping your average client for 12 years, what are some things you do besides showing love, taking care of them, letting them that, getting them results? Do you have a proper cadence that you follow in regards to one-on-ones, whether it's bi-weekly, weekly, anything else in that realm?

Ben Kalkman:20:32
Yeah. Yes, we do in fact. So the very minimum we require and this is part of our own, when we do our diagnostics, we ask them on the spot, the very minimum we need at least one monthly call with you at the same time, same place every, every month. You know, so we have like a zoom call or what like that. And in that call, we're going to do about a third of that's going to be report dashboard time. We're going to go through and look at the metrics together. The other two thirds is to be looking at what's coming around the corner. You know, what's coming up with your business and industry. We're always looking about three months out because for us, Our customers are very seasonal, weather-based. And so if you could think about that, that's about every quarter, there's a seasonal change. And so we're always planning a quarter out. So that's the first thing is the monthly, monthly meetings. And those can be, honestly, we can do those weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, as long as we get at least one a month, that's our minimum requirement with our customer. So that's important because we want to have communications and connections to make sure that we are still rowing in the same direction and that we still agree on what success looks like. I will always say that if you can agree on success together, you and your customer, and then you know what that number is or that metric is, then all you have to do is perform to that and you will always be successful. It's just, but what happens is I think a lot of times the communications drop, success changes for someone and we didn't know. And suddenly you're not doing what they think is successful anymore because you guys just didn't talk about it. So we're very keen on that. Now that's kind of a normal cadence. Here's what's unique. I think though, as we do QBRs with most of our clients, quarterly business reviews, which is basically a half day session where we go through and do a deeper dive in their account together with them. We'll do a formal presentation on all the different things.

And then the best one of all this is what we do in our annual business reviews. So this is where I'm a big break bread together kind of guy. And so we will fly to you or we'll fly you to us and we'll spend a day together with you and your team. And we're going to go through that whole day together, looking at all the things we've done for the past year. So can we're moralizing that right? Good, bad, and it are different, but then also spend the rest of the day planning what we're doing for the next year together. And that includes budgeting that comes to clue strategy and different type of campaigns we're to look at. We're going to look at the whole calendar together. We're going to walk away. You're going to walk away. with an entire marketing plan for your business in that day that our team helped you do together. And we prepare heavily for that. We have a lot of fun with that. We do a lot of fun campaigns around that. those are kind of some of the things we do that are meeting-based cadence type things. In addition to that, then of course, we're constantly celebrating the seasons with our customers. So we like to do seasonal campaigns. Like for example, every summer, because we have a lot of HVAC clients, we'll do a lot of like summer boxes, which is basically a, hello, kind of gift box, you know.

Ben Kalkman:22:58
different random things that you might need this summer. You're talking like sunscreen and sunglasses and fun little swaggy things like that. Just to have fun for that season. We do the same kind of thing for the holidays. And then there's different things we do out throughout the year that we try to surprise people with. I'm a big believer in the giftology kind of methodology. And so I'm a fan of that. And I like to surprise and delight people with things. I got a whole theory on the mint, which you may have heard of, which is, you know, if you go to a restaurant and the, uh, the hostess gives you a mint at your table when they give you the check.

You see that more often than not, right? Well, the reason behind that is not so much just to give you a mint because you have bad breath from eating their food. It's because they're trying to delight you just slightly to hopefully entice you to say, you know what, this is a great experience and perhaps you'll give them a higher tip because of that, right? It's not that you have to, but they're slightly giving you a gift that they don't expect a reciprocal response from. So that mint theory is what I use. And so I'll give clients surprises with the intention of making sure that it's never something that's so great that they feel obligated to return the gift of some sort, you know, return the favor. but that they see the delight in what we're trying to do. And so we're a big fan of that mint giftology kind of process.

Jordan:24:02
No, I love it, Ben. You're adding so much value in way more ways than just monetarily. And I think it's really respected, love you for that. So keep that in mind. Absolutely. I did have a quick question on that note though. How many account managers do you have?

Ben Kalkman:24:07
For sure. Yay, thanks.

Ben Kalkman:24:17
Yeah, sure. You would think a ton, right? So again, we only subscribe to about 100 accounts. And so we currently have five account managers. And so, you know, they each have roughly around 20 accounts that they manage or so, we really try to keep that controlled. I know that in my industry, a lot of our competitors will, and I know this, because I've looked at hiring some people that come from competitors, they tell me these things, you know, most of them will have anywhere between 50 to 100 accounts that they're managing. And I'm just like, wow, that first of all, that's freaking amazing, but how do you manage that? And they're like, you know, it's really the squeaky wheel gets the oil kind of thing. I have to like jump from call to call to call. And I really never get to actually spend the quality time I want to want at my accounts. And I know I could do that if I was like ever really like pushing to sell rocket media and I wanted some big revenue number that I could be like, my even is great because of all these, I could go that route, but that's not how I operate. And that's not my, that's not what I want for this business.

Jordan:25:06
You lose points that way.

Ben Kalkman:25:08
Well, you certainly can. I think some what happens, I think, in a lot of those larger groups that I just referred to is they have a higher churn, right? They're constantly bringing in a ton because they have a really strong sales team. But they also have a good off boarding team because they lose a client threat. So it's like this constant flow, you know, and I bet there I don't know for sure. But I would assume that their retention rates probably not the highest. But that's you know, that's a model that some prefer. And you know, you certainly can make a lot of money doing that. Some do.

Jordan:25:33
I, but it's in my opinion, and I'm sure you could agree, it is so much easier to just keep a client that you already have and just make them happy, opposed to finding new clients, you know?

Ben Kalkman:25:41
For sure. And it's so much more fun. You know, the relationships you can have and the stories you get to build over time. I mean, I walk into any one of my client accounts that have been with me for over a year or two, even for that matter. And we already have stories. We already have connections. We remember last year's ABR. You know, when we do our ABRs, it's not all business. We do fun things too. We'll go on a hike if you're around here or we'll go do an adventure with you because it's, you know, we definitely go to dinner for sure. Right. That breaking bread thing is my rule. And so you just have memories that you create, you know, and that's, that's important.

Jordan:25:44
You can open.

Jordan:25:59
have to.

Ben Kalkman:26:11
I think those experiences probably speak more than the results sometimes.

Jordan:26:15
Absolutely, Memories are invaluable. can't put monetary value on it. Getting back to LTV, you can only reduce your cost of acquisition so low. Industry average or whatever industry you're in, typically people have around the same cap. But LTV is infinite. can have as many, that number can go up as high as you want it to. Obviously strategies, but...

Ben Kalkman:26:17
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ben Kalkman:26:24
Mm-hmm.

Ben Kalkman:26:36
For sure.

Jordan:26:38
Yeah, I think people should focus on increasing LTV in way more ways than one, opposed to worrying about decreasing their CAC. That's just my thoughts on that.

Ben Kalkman:26:45
Yep. No, I'm with you on that for sure. think there's some really strong knowledges that could be accomplished by having that philosophy.

Jordan:26:54
Do you on that note? Do you have any upsells besides just keeping clients happy and like increasing LTV? Do you have any like backend offers?

Ben Kalkman:27:01
Well, yes, yes and no. So again, what happens often is I love, this is me personally, right? So we have some clients in our service world. We measure our clients by the number of trucks that they operate. Right? So if you're, let's just say HVAC, plumbing, electrical, solar, whatever you have so many trucks that can service your customers. Each truck for most of these industries is about a half million in revenue that it could produce. And so if you've got, let's say 10 trucks, you kind of have an idea of what the revenue would be for that type of company. 10 is actually the sweet spot in my mind because 10, you actually are now at the point where you have enough revenue to advertise correctly or start to advertise correctly. Below that, you're really struggling because you're constantly fighting that operating costs, marketing costs, survival mode, right? You don't have enough reserves quite yet to be able to do that. Where 10 trucks kind of gets you there. Now I will tell you, a lot of our clients are on the higher end where they have 100, 200, 300, even 400 trucks, right? So they're much larger operations and those are fun to work with. Don't get me wrong. They're a lot of fun to work with. but their growth is harder to obtain because they're already hitting a lot of ceilings in some respect, right? So I went back to that like capacity for paid search, for example. Well, when you're needing to support that many trucks jobs, right? Cause a truck, you know, the average truck can do anywhere between six and eight calls a day. So you could do the math real quick and understand what your capacity could be. that ceiling becomes hard because not every market has that much opportunity, right? And so you're kind of hitting those thresholds. That's a good problem to have, but it's also a challenge from a marketer's perspective. Now.

Jordan:28:17
Here you go, I'm Matt.

Ben Kalkman:28:27
go back down to that 10 truck or in that range, you've got nothing but growth usually in those models and they're hungry, their appetite's great, they're very much still owner operated for the large degree. And so you're less red tape in bureaucracy that comes with larger companies. Again, not a bad thing, it's just a different model. So you can make decisions quicker, you can have a little bit more experimentation. Now the upsells you were asking about really does come with that growth. So yes, there's a lot of different strategies or tactics we could add into anybody's campaign.

You might start with some pretty generic normalized campaign strategies. But then later on you might say, okay, what can we do to move the needle? You know, we've got some clients, for example, actually that first client I was talking about way back then, we were able to do some really fun creative things with them that they're in Phoenix. And so they're a plumbing HVAC company. And so to differentiate them, we came up with the idea of advertising in the major league baseball stadium. So what we did is we put signage.

Jordan:29:21
Hell yeah.

Ben Kalkman:29:24
above all the urinals and in all the women's stalls to advertise as their plumbing services, right? So, you know, when you're relieving yourself, you got nothing due to the stare at the wall. There's a great ad about a plumbing company and we made it fun. It was kind of fun jokes and, things like that. So that you're like, ha ha funny. You remember that brand potentially, you know, and then you're back to the game, whatever that might be. And so small things like that, that kind of create differentiations that tend to be more strategy upsells, right? Now we're also living in an age of AI.

And so I can tell you right now, like our company, we've completely not revamped, but we're adding a bunch of things that we call rocket AI labs. And that AI labs is really our division of interfacing and utilizing AI technologies to our customers advantage. Right. And so it's new service lines that we're able to provide new strategies and kind of research things that we can do that we couldn't do before that can really help elevate them from their competition. As well as new tools that can help mechanize some of the things that were a little bit slower to run that we can now optimize faster.

Um, and so we're evolving. Like I could tell you right now, um, you know, this, this wave of industry that we're in right now for advertising is changing yet again. Like I look back, I'm old enough to remember when it was just traditional advertising or traditional agencies, right? Ad houses that did media and print and things like that only, then introduced the digital agency, right? That kind of disrupted this whole industry in itself. And you either were traditional or you were digital. There was really not a whole lot of both. And then we saw the merging of those and traditional kind of started to lose its luster, right?

Gone with the gone with the yellow pages and other things like that. And digital became the stronghold. And now it's very rarely do you see a full just traditional only agency. Almost always it's an agency that does traditional and digital or just digital only in these days, right? Well, now that's what's happening today. We're seeing this transformation from digital only to AI only. And we're seeing this blend. And it won't be long and you'll see this transformation from digital to AI and potentially just probably only AI.

Right. And so we'll see this transition and history repeats itself and you can kind of see this throughout things, but I predict, I foresee this is where we're headed. Right. And I think everybody that's astute enough to understand where we are heading with things will agree with me there that this AI agency is really the model of what the future looks like.

Jordan:31:36
Absolutely. Yeah. We use AI for all of my clients. For me, course, AI is a really, really key component inside the business. It allows you to increase scale without adding headcount. I I don't have to sell you on AI. I'm sure you already know, but I freaking love it. You said so many things that I want to touch on. One is I rarely, rarely freaking watch TV. When I do, it is a baseball game. But more importantly, the commercials that I actually remember are the ones that make me laugh.

Ben Kalkman:31:50
Right.

Ben Kalkman:31:59
Yeah, there you go.

Jordan:32:05
They're not really selling me anything, you know, cause like, obviously it's a commercial, like their goal is to sell you something. So they kind of flip it on its head. like, let me just make this person laugh. I've become memorable and then I might purchase their product later, you know? So great, great philosophy and ideas there. The second thing I was going to ask, you kind of dove into it, but I want to be more specific. When you use AI on behalf of your clients, can you give us like a quick rundown of like one way you guys utilize it?

Ben Kalkman:32:05
Yeah.

Ben Kalkman:32:29
Yeah, okay, for sure. So it depends on how you want to look at this. There's really three arms to AI today. There's the operational side that makes you as a person more efficient. So what can Jordan do utilizing AI to make your day to day more effective and more efficient, right? That's like the first layer. From there, you're going to go to how can I help my company and my peers become more efficient? So now it's company wide adoption, right? And you got like different things that you're doing that are company wide. And that's kind of when you'll get into things like scripts and maybe some operating gems and things like that that you might create that are more universal that your company can share as a group, right? And then from there, you've got the services and opportunities you provide for your customers. And so when you get to that, you got to look at kind of the layer of how do you better optimize their world for them? That's really where it's at right now. And then are there ways for us to make their services more interesting to their customers? So for us, we're looking at from that lens, right? One of the things though that we've done recently, we call it, we built a kind of an internal product that we use called Content Weaver. content weaver is one of the things that I, you we mentioned is making sure that you have strong voice and tone messaging and positioning. And traditionally, when you try to work through those, you would basically have an interview with the customer, right? And ask them a series of questions to extract that. And then your content person would probably most likely go and create these personas messaging, voice and tone templates. Well, now we have AI. So we've created this online version of this, where we can go and give the client an invite.

And they can go through and either click a button and just talk to answer these questions, right? Cause it's capturing their voice or they could type it in whichever they're comfortable with. The other cool thing is I can give it to, let's just say they have five people that are in charge of their business. They want to get all five of their voice and tones perspectives. Well, I can give it to all five and then utilizing AI, I can collect that and have it average those out to create a unified voice and tone for the company. Right. That's super important because when you're trying to do the advertising for a company, you've got to have very specific. credentials that you use, especially if you're using AI. So what I think people often forget, and I use the analogy of an onion when it comes to AI, because there's just all these layers and so many people are just surface laying on the top layer of the onion, you know, using things and asking just questions without getting to the core. And the core is really that central knowledge base that you need to be able to have really good understanding of the AI, right? And build from there. So you get to the why almost like a Simon Sinek kind of thing. You get to the why of what you're trying to solve.

Ben Kalkman:34:53
And you start building that knowledge from the inside out. And then by the time you get to the outside layer of the onion, you're actually getting great results. You're getting things that actually matter. So this is one of those. We got the core of the onion, which is the voice tone weaver that I just talked about that extract relates all this information from the customer then generates those tools so that when we go to do run ads, everything we do for them is unified and consistently positioned in the way it should be. So it works a lot better. So there's just one example of how you can take AI. benefit from your own internal process, because you're making your content person a lot more effective and faster. You're using AI to benefit the customer's needs. And then when you run those ads, whatever you're doing, you've got some unification there that you can use. I better stop talking. I could talk all day.

Jordan:35:35
No, you should have lot of insights, my friend. I definitely utilize it in a very similar way for content. I don't write blogs for other people just because that's not what our service is for. But we do utilize copy and email, circled email to be exact. Basically, we have a very similar process. They fill out this onboarding form.

That onboarding form gets zapped up in the cloud code. Cloud code says, OK, cool. And then obviously, we start testing the copy. We start testing the emails. But depending on what our client services are, depends on how the output is going to be for the email. That kind of makes sense. So that's just very interesting, man. It's just very interesting.

Ben Kalkman:36:14
Yup. Yup.

Ben Kalkman:36:19
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a growing curve, isn't it? Like it's the synergies that are happening with all this stuff. It's, really, really fun. I'm lucky enough to be on a few AI boards for different technology industries that we're part of. and so I'm learning the insights of what people in these different industries are needing. Right? So for example, one of my boards that I'm on is for the security industry. It's called ARC and, AI readiness councils, what they call it. And that one's a fun one because we're just starting to get into it, but we're kind of trying to build as a group of I guess peers and agency like myself of the foundations for what that industry will use for AI consistency, because they're trying to create policies and things like that that are that are relevant for that industry. And then you go to the different ones like HVAC and plumbing, they have similar kind of sources that they're trying to build for. And I love the spirit of sharing that that has in those kind of models, because, you know, it could very easily be one person that's doing all that themselves, that's really isolated. But then there's also ways for you to share that across the networks, which is pretty cool.

Jordan:37:15
So for sure, which LLM do you use for RAI?

Ben Kalkman:37:19
Well, it varies. Like right now I'm a big fan of Claude. it's one of the leaders in the space right now. And I love that they're so inventive, but even today I just saw the release of chat, GPT's new models that they've just come out with. it's like every day it's like up and down, up and down. They're constantly chasing each other. Now Gemini is one of my favorites as well, but it's not gone at the fastest pace, but don't count Google out, right? Cause we're about to see some major things happening there that, you know, right now.

A lot of people are at Google's live presentation that they're doing, or they just had yesterday, guess. and they're seeing, you know, they're showcasing a lot of these new technologies that are coming up. it's been rumored, I guess, actually probably factual at this point that Apple partnered with Google for Siri. And so the next major release of Apple, most likely, you know, I'm no, I'm not, I don't know anything for sure about this, but I've been told or I've read that that's going to be now the foundation for all things. Now, you know, as well as I do people like Apple. maybe slower to produce the things that they do. But when they do, they almost always do it perfect. There's very few instances that you can look at where Apple really just missed the mark. You know, I'm a huge fan of the Vision Pro, but you would argue that that one didn't hit the mark. It wasn't widely adopted, but I use it every day. Thank you very much. But there's a lot of people that, you know, would argue, but the watch, the phone, the computers, all that thing that they've just been the mainstay for so many things. So you watch out. But Claude is what I use today most and mostly. I have really big fan of the teamwork.

Jordan:38:25
You

Jordan:38:29
All right.

Ben Kalkman:38:42
version of that, right? love that in cloud code as well. And they just came out with last Friday, Claude design. So you can go and check that out. That's going to rival figma and, and Canva and all those in between. Right. So, boy, they just keep pushing that needle. Don't they.

Jordan:38:56
And that's why I like them. They are very creative with their outfits, if that makes sense. They really give us what we need. In regards to Gemini, why do you like Gemini? I had never used it, but some people say they like it.

Ben Kalkman:39:01
Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Kalkman:39:11
Well, first of all, my, agency, we're a Google shop. we have, you know, when you're a Google shop, meaning you're subscribing to the Google properties, you have access to all of their systems and the, Gemini properties, you know, when you look at notebook LM, for example, or any of those different technologies is all built in. And there's a lot of unification within the Google products that they have, um, that are becoming more and more and more sophisticated. Uh, you know, arguably one of the better image based systems out there probably would be considered a Google's banana. Right now that keeps giving.

Jordan:39:15
Makes sense.

Ben Kalkman:39:41
you know, challenged all the time, but majority of people will use banana when they create banners and images these days. I know I do. And I haven't really used Claude's design yet, but when I try that one, I'm sure that'll probably be the next one I go to. but again, because Google has Google and they have the lion's share of the market share rather of where we do our search properties right now. I predict and I know for a fact that they've got some things up their sleeve that they're about to release. That's just going to rock the world.

And then, you know, we're going to be like, well, Claude was the best, you know, for a minute. And now it's gone this way. And then I love competition. You know, I think that's one thing I will say right now is that I'm so thankful that, and don't get me wrong, I love Google, but they're such a dominant player in search that there's not a lot of competition for them. Right. And so for the longest time, it was just like, if you weren't Google this, then you were kind of, you know, not really in the game. You couldn't say that today about AI technologies, because you can go in any one of the four major players right now. and probably be pretty satisfied with the things you're getting and amazed by what's happening there. And they're pushing each other. And so we're seeing a constant elevation of the technologies and eventually one will rise, but the others are always going to keep pushing them. think at this point. So I love that. It's the healthy competition keeps us from being just one band show, right? Yeah.

Jordan:40:55
Yes, yes. And if you are trying to be the alpha, trying to be the king of set industry, it's going to push you because you get competition on your ass. So you're always going to want to create, create, get better, get better. And I do that. Like you said, competition. A few more questions here for you. Overall, what is the biggest goal for the company? Are you looking to sell it or just grow and expand? What's the goal?

Ben Kalkman:41:04
Yeah. Mm hmm.

Ben Kalkman:41:16
Yeah, I'm not really in a sale mode at this point. mean, one could say that that's always an opportunity. And I think you build things to sell eventually. Rocket Media in the very beginning, I'll be honest, was a lifestyle business for me right out of the gate. I mean, that's how most companies start. Like most people when they start their own business, when it's a one person show, it's because they were working for somebody else and they decided they wanted to do it themselves because they thought they could do it better, or they just wanted the independence that came with running a business. And little do they know, they lose all that as soon as they start running their own business. But

Jordan:41:27
Hahaha

Ben Kalkman:41:44
So fairly quickly, you know, it became less of a lifestyle business and more of a business business. know, I'm a graphic designer by trade. That's what I went to college to become. So my background's in that space. I have no rights to being a business operator. only through dumb luck and, you know, failures, a glor that I've been able to learn these things over the last 23 years. I've had some great mentors in my path, which also have been really helpful. So the future of Rocket is really, I love the advent we're in right now. Let me tell you this.

I've said for the last, gosh, at least 10 years when someone asked me like, Ben, what's your dream job? What would you love to do if you could just do anything in the world? I've always said, I would love to sit around and just come up with ideas. I'm a huge idea guy. Come up with ideas and pass it on to a team and have them build it and figure it out and just watch it grow. And then keep coming up with ideas. Like I just would love that. Guess what Jordan, we are living in that era right now, man. I'm in my hay day because I can come up with ideas.

And I can ideate and iterate those through AI technologies faster than I can do the work thoughts. And I can actually see them come to life. Now my team will look at that and say, geez, someone's just given Ben dynamite. Cause this is crazy. Like he's going to blow this whole thing up. I always have to also remind them that these are not production ready things. I'm basically taking this idea I had and making it conceptualized. Right. And then I have to vet it and then pass it onto them to make it great. And that's still where we are today. But I'm living the dream. I'm having a blast doing what I'm doing right now. And I am so excited to be able to share that with people and talk about it. That's why I'm having a blast going on these different talks that I'm doing for different industries. But I'm also excited for where the future is of this agency. The biggest challenge with that though, is bringing my team along. Because I'm so passionate about it, I've used this analogy a couple of times, but I feel like I've been Lewis and Clark out on the expedition, exploring the great America space and then bringing it back to my family. to like share with what I learned. And I'm at that point now where I'm coming back and I'm sharing everything with my family and they may not like that because change is not always the favorite thing for people. Right. And so that's my biggest challenge right now is bringing the team on board and helping them understand it and seeing it through my lens and understanding like, Ben's got a new vision of where this is going. How do I get on board with that? Right. I think there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of miss, you know, miss misunderstanding and probably misinformation to that point.

Ben Kalkman:44:05
about what's happening with the space. know, I, my, my line lately has been that you're not going to lose your job for, to AI specifically. Now some might because of the way technologies, but in our space, at least you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job potentially to someone that knows AI better than you, how to use it better than you, how to manipulate better than you. And so that's now becoming the new knowledge gain that we all are seeking. You know, I do a lot of speaking in different areas and one of them is the education space.

Jordan:44:21
Mmm.

Ben Kalkman:44:34
And if you look at that area, boy, I'm to go on a different tangent for one second. Okay. If you go back and look back, like remember when calculators were first issued way back when I do, cause I was that old. But anyway, when calculators first came out, it was taboo. You're like, teachers did not want you using calculators in school. That was like, you can't use a calculator. You need to know how to do your arithmetic. It got passed by legislation that calculators were allowed in schools, but it still took like 10 to 14 years before them to become adopted within the schools because teachers and schools.

It's not teacher problem, by the way, it's just principles of, didn't want calculators in schools. now fast forward to today's age, calculators are been in there for a long time. In fact, I would say for the last 15 years or so, it's been very widely used that almost any math class. Past basic arithmetic arithmetic, you're going to have a calculator do all these computations and things like that to help you with these things. Well, here we are and we have this AI coming in. And I think a lot of people are on that same fence with AI. For example, like if you're a professor.

Do you allow a student to use AI to write their paper? Probably you would say no out of the gate, right? I would argue yes. And here's why. Yes. Yes. Because there's going to have to do the research and understand it. What I think has to change is how you test on that knowledge. So it's not the paper that you turn in anymore, Jordan. It's the recital that you give me about the paper that shows your knowledge. So it's changing how you measure knowledge rather than the inputs, because guess what? Trying to fight.

Jordan:45:42
Alright, yeah.

Ben Kalkman:46:03
The students from using AI to do the work is a feudal battle. You're going to lose it. But changing the way you score and measure is something you can control. And I think that's where a lot of universities, a lot of colleges, a lot of schools have to go to change their adoption. I totally went off on a tangent. I'm sorry, but that's related to what AI is doing in the industries as well. We're living in this point where we have to learn to adopt and change and be accepting of the what's happening around us because it's not going to go away. Right. So

Jordan:46:07
Good luck.

Jordan:46:32
No, totally fine that you talked about universities and in schools. That's very, very important part in everyone's lives, know, at least the up and comers, right? There was, hold on. that this part out, I was. I did, I did. You, oh, that's what I was gonna say. Staying ahead of the game with AI. Obviously you're doing a fantastic job of being on the board.

Ben Kalkman:46:40
Yes.

Yup.

Ben Kalkman:46:48
I got you off on a tangent. You forgot your thought, didn't you?

Ben Kalkman:46:59
I'm trying man, I'm gonna keep my head above water as best I can, yeah.

Jordan:47:02
For sure. mean, kind of same here. I'm sure you're more advanced than I on this, but like if I do have net downtime, which is typically lunch before I go to sleep gym, I'm just watching YouTube videos about AI. You know, like that's the only thing I consume is trying to just advance my knowledge in that area. Cause what you said is very, very true. We're not going to lose our jobs because of AI or because somebody knows AI better than us. I want to be that guy, you know?

Ben Kalkman:47:22
Yep, yep. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. I think that's the new motivator. Like you want to be that, right? Like you want to be able to lift more weights. You want to be able to be stronger than your competition so that you can outperform, right? So you're going to have to practice harder. Yes.

Jordan:47:35
Absolutely. Ben, where can they find you, my friend?

Ben Kalkman:47:38
Where can you find me? lots of places. My favorite place you can find me is my own personal website. And that is Ben's AI brain.com. So it's a little website I put together that talks about all these different projects that I'm testing, the things that I've failed at, the things that I've been successful at, and even my thoughts and philosophies on how AI works. Of course, you can always go to my agency, rocket media.com. That's where you would find all the great people that work with us here at rocket media. Um, but I love, I love both places so you can figure me out either way.

Jordan:48:05
Ben, thank you so much for the conversation, brother. You're obviously crushing the game right now. We'll have to have you back on like nine to 12 months to see how things are going. Awesome. Well, thanks again, I'll you guys soon. Bye.

Ben Kalkman:48:07
Yeah.

Ben Kalkman:48:11
We'll see what looks like then. Thanks, Gordon. Yep. Bye bye.