140: Drive Sales Through Conference Speaking With Mark Bealin

06/11/23 • 27 min

https://youtu.be/OjV2vV9BtPE

Mark Bealin is the Founder and Principal of SearchLab, a rapidly growing internet marketing agency that helps local businesses grow through search engine optimization, paid search marketing, and website design. We discuss the evolution of SEO, how to drive sales through conference speaking, and ways to get more conference speaking opportunities.

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Drive Sales Through Conference Speaking With Mark Bealin

My guest is Mark Bealin, the Founder and Principal of SearchLab. They offer local SEO and paid media services to small and medium-sized businesses , combining large agency capabilities with the enhanced attention of a boutique firm. Mark, welcome to the show.

It’s good to be on with you, Steve. I’m looking forward to this.

It’s good to have you, as well. I’m all into exploring what’s new in the SEO and the paid-media world, but let’s start with your journey. How did you end up founding a digital agency? What journey brought you to this point?

It starts around the Great Recession. I was interested in this thing as a kid. I used to trade baseball cards. I’ve always gravitated toward this thing. I had a normal job. I was working at a company called LocalLaunch! I did well there. During the Great Recession, we all were going to lose our jobs. This was in 2009.

At that point, I started my first agency, which was called Evolving Interactive. I worked there for eight years. For about five of those years, it was good. I then started to have a little bit more complications in my personal life. I got married. I started to have children and wanted to do different things than the other founders of that company.

It’s a funny story. I went and gave notice on January 10th of 2017. When I went home that day, my wife went into labor with my son. I had given notice and had a baby within 24 hours. It was a momentous day in my life. At that point, I stuck around for a little while. On March 1st, 2017, I started SearchLab. A lot of that had to do with wanting to provide for my kids. I’m the only owner of it. It has been a great experience ever since. There are a lot of things I’m leaving out there, but that’s the gist of it.

With any enterprise, there are ups and downs . Even when you’re growing, you don’t grow like this but you grow like this. That’s the nature of the beast. You figured out some things in this company based on what we discussed in our earlier precall. One of the things that grabbed my attention was the sales framework that you developed at SearchLab. Can you explain what that looks like and how you work it?

One of the things in my industry is there are a lot of conferences, trade shows, and that sort of thing. There are niches within those trade shows like conferences specifically for automobile dealerships or medical practices. I recognized pretty early on that being on those stages and connecting with our audience would be a key to our growth.

I was okay with getting on those stages, but I wasn’t great. I started to hire people who were good at it. The first person we hired was Greg Gifford, who is well-known. He speaks all over the world about SEO. It worked as I thought. As soon as he got on the stage, it was fine, but it was a problem because we were getting leads but we needed to clean up our sales process. At that point, we began hiring salespeople.

The components are these. You have a speaker who presents at the conference. You’re going to have a salesperson who’s going to take leads from that conference and bring them through an orderly sales process. Oftentimes, if not always, we will exhibit at those conferences. We’ll have a booth and we’ll have an exhibit where salespeople will look for people. They’ll cultivate relationships and bring them through an early process.

What’s interesting about us is our sales demonstrations are done by the product expert. The people who are on the stage do that. I don’t think Greg has ever put a name into our CRM once. The salesperson does all the hard work of negotiating a deal and getting it across the finish line. The product expert does a lot of the sales demonstration and the client-facing stuff.

What we’ve evolved into now is we’re going to be at something in the neighborhood of 30 conferences. We’ll have a sales presence there. We’ll have speakers at as many of those shows as we possibly can. We’re going to have three people on my team who a big part of their day-to-day life is to travel around, speak, and present at confere...

https://youtu.be/OjV2vV9BtPE

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Drive Sales Through Conference Speaking With Mark Bealin

It’s good to be on with you, Steve. I’m looking forward to this.

Previous Episode

139: Leverage Your Bitcoin Savings With Aki Balogh

https://youtu.be/R6rWz5uvn8k

Aki Balogh is the Co-founder and President of MarketMuse and the CEO of DLC.link, a platform that lets users lock their Bitcoin in escrow, supply Bitcoin as collateral, and earn a yield while maintaining full ownership. We discuss ways to leverage your Bitcoin to earn a yield, what a wider crypto adoption means for other currencies, and the basics of Bitcoin smart contracts.

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Leverage Your Bitcoin Savings With Aki Balogh

My guest is Aki Balogh, the Cofounder and President of MarketMuse, an AI-powered content intelligence and strategy platform and DLC Link, a tech company allowing Bitcoin hoarders to earn a yield on their Bitcoin while maintaining full ownership. Aki, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

It’s great to have you here. You’re the first one who’s going to talk about Bitcoin on this show, even though we are 140 episodes in. I’m super excited to get my feet and the show wet into the crypto world. How did you become an entrepreneur and why did you choose marketing content and crypto as your fields? What attracted you to these fields?

I might have even inherited a gene from my grandfather to be an entrepreneur. My first “business” was I was selling jokes when I was seven years old for a quarter. It started off as a joke. At 14, I started a Hungarian film club with my mom, then at 15, I started a small business, 16 or 18. I started a conference series at the University of Michigan. I started another couple of clubs, a technology club for BBAs, etc. I’ve always been doing side projects and hustles.

Many years after that, I was at a venture fund, OpenView Venture Partners in Boston, looking at $5 million to $20 million investments for tech companies. The founder of the fund pulled me aside and said, “I like you but you shouldn’t be here. You should be building a company. You can do venture and invest later. Learn how to build a company.” The next thing I knew, I was starting market news where I was looking to bring AI to marketing. I did that for eight years and then passed that on to CEO Charles, who succeeded me and then started this new project where we’re enabling utility for Bitcoin. I would say it’s a little bit of always being entrepreneurial and then always trying to follow the technology that can make, I would think, the biggest impact on the world.

Charles Frydenborg was a guest on this show. He was a very interesting guest. We talked about market news and how you create and use AI to par content, but this is not a topic. We are going to talk about your second business or at least your follow-up business, probably not the second, maybe the 12th, I don’t know. Why did you get interested in crypto and what did you see in it that was promising for you?

I heard of Bitcoin in 2011 when I was in San Francisco, but I didn’t do anything about it. A lot of people have my early crypto sob story of I had some amount of money and I could have put it in Bitcoin, but instead, I put it into myself, which in hindsight might not have netted the return otherwise. I didn’t get into it because of the tremendous sob swings we saw.

This is another Hungarian connection. Steve was born in Hungary. I am from Hungary also. Not everybody in crypto is from Hungary, but one of the people who’s rumored to be Satoshi is Hungarian Nick Szabo, but that’s not what it was. I was leaving market news and looking at new projects. I got interested in the crypto Web 3. I made an introduction for my friend Lazo who has a software development agency where they built crypto stuff and they ended up winning the project to build the Chivo Wallet for El Salvador, which is El Salvador’s Bitcoin wallet.

Their president, Bukele, made Bitcoin like legal tender in El Salvador and they needed a wallet technology to hold the Bitcoin. These Hungarian guys went and built it. There was a first wallet that didn’t work and then they built the second wallet and it worked great. What I saw is when they launched the wallet it had 250,000 daily active users right from launch and over a couple of 1 or 2 months, it got up to 4 million registrants, which is also astonishing. I think you have to have an El Salvador citizen number and ID number to get the wallet.

A lar...

Next Episode

141: Attract Top Clients And Top Talent With Dave Beeler

https://youtu.be/fR8_crwqX4A

Dave Beeler is the President of Beeler Construction, a third generation, family-owned commercial general contractor which runs projects across all industries from medical to retail to manufacturing. We discuss characteristics of successful family-owned businesses, how to grow your business using management blueprints, and ways to attract top talent and top clients.

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Attract Top Clients And Top Talent With Dave Beeler

My guest for this episode is Dave Beeler, the President of Beeler Construction, a third-generation commercial general contractor, experienced in constructing healthcare, retail, hospitality, commercial industrial, manufacturing, and senior living spaces. The company does construction but considers itself to be in the relationship business. Welcome to the show, Dave.

Thank you for having me, Steve. It’s a pleasure.

I don’t often have family business entrepreneurs on the show. I’m very curious about how that is working out. It’s doing very well because you’re third-generation already. There is a single-digit percentage of companies that make it to the third generation. You are already doing great. What does it take to take over the family business and be in the footsteps of two successful prior leaders? The pressure can be immense.

It has been a journey. As you can imagine from 1959 to 2022, a lot of things change from the first generation to the second generation, and now to the third generation. There is a lot of discipline and open-mindedness. The biggest thing is having a clear vision that is understood by all. With the rapid growth we’ve had in the last few years, a $30 million company can turn into a $100-plus million company very quickly, as you can imagine, a lot of things changed.

Having all the owners aligned on where we’re going has been very good. It’s realizing the big picture of things. As long as you can strengthen that relationship with the family members, that’s number one. It’s having that understanding as we broke through the ceiling. The first generation gets it up off the ground and built a lot of good relationships throughout the industry in our area. The second generation expands off of that.

As we’re breaking through that ceiling, there are a lot of changes. You go from that small family tight-knit company to that larger scale. The big thing is to maintain what has started and focus on the core values that got us here. We’ve all heard the saying, “What got you here won’t get you there.” We’re trying to focus on keeping those core value-type items of what got us here. However, we’re redirecting and reorganizing some of these things to get us to the next steps.

In a family, there are multiple children and maybe multiple of them are in the business, which was the case for you as well. How does it turn out who will be the next leader? How does the family manage this transition so that everyone comes out happy?

What’s making this work well is we don’t encourage our children or from other generations like, “This is the path you will be taking. This is what’s going to happen. I strongly suggest you be part of the business.” That individual needs to have the drive and want to have an opportunity at the business. Most of the kids had the opportunity for summers, maybe some shop help, or whatever the case may be, but that individual has to have that want. We encourage having them work at other companies and not start their career here to give them more of an idea of whatever else is out there in the industry.

We are fairly small, at this point, so it hasn’t been too hard to decide. As our families grow and as you start to get into a bigger company, there are a lot more layers that come with that. As we grow, fine-tune, buy and sell agreements, and come up with opportunities, it will get a little bit more complex. I’m very optimistic there won’t be any problems as long as those expectations are clear upfront. As I said, we don’t push our kids into it. It’s more of the want. There have been some that have worked here for a summer and decided to take another path, which is fine. It has worked out well thus far.

If it doesn’t create family conflicts, that’s great. Let’s talk about the framework that you’ve been using to grow Beeler Construction. What is it that you use and what has been your experience?

In 2019, we started the reorganization of the company. There are many different coaching opportunities and man...