[EO Austin] Accelerating Automotive Growth Through Digital Advertising With Andrew Street

Andrew Street is the CEO and Founder of Dealer OMG, an innovative social media marketing agency specializing in data-driven strategies and personalized support for the automotive industry. Andrew, an automotive advertising technologist, started his career focused on mastering cost-effective advertising platforms. His extensive experience includes working as a Local Business Consultant for Facebook, where he gained valuable insights into the platform’s advertising rollouts.

Building on this experience, Andrew created Dealer OMG with a vision to revolutionize the automotive industry by eliminating cookie-cutter ads. Dealer OMG is recognized for blending custom creative with the precise targeting of its proprietary adtech, vinAMP. Under Andrew’s leadership, the firm has grown rapidly, earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in the US.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Andrew Street talks about Dealer OMG and how they help their clients stand out
The importance of asking the right questions
How Dealer OMG’s services evolved throughout the years
Why Andrew prefers building software instead of buying it off the shelf
What are the challenges and pitfalls of creating internal software?
How Andrew attracts and retains talent
What Andrew does to create an upward trajectory for his employees
Andrew’s favorite and highly recommended resources

In this episode…

In the dynamic world of digital advertising, the difference between success and failure often hinges on nuanced strategies and deep market insights. It’s a sphere where data-driven decision-making reigns supreme, and those who leverage data experience substantial business growth.

Andrew Street is no stranger to this concept. Andrew has a rich history of helping automotive dealerships supercharge their growth through powerful digital advertising tactics. His experience spans from understanding the nuances of Google’s ad platform to effectively hiring and nurturing talent for his remote agency, making him a wellspring of valuable insights for any entrepreneur navigating the digital landscape.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Andrew Street, CEO and Founder of Dealer OMG, to discuss the art and science of digital advertising in the automotive industry. They delve into how Andrew’s agency has transformed dealerships’ growth trajectories, effective hiring practices for remote teams, why it’s essential to maintain a robust company culture in a fully remote environment, and how to nurture customer relationships in the digital age.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Jeremy Weisz 0:13

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I’ve Andrew Street of dealeromg.com. And Andrew before I formally introduce you, I would like to point out other episodes, people should check out of the podcast. We are talking about Neil Maier, Mike Edge, David Christopher at Tread Partners, they serve tire shops, right. And we’re going to talk about niching because Andrew has really niche down to dealerships. And we’re gonna go deep on that but they have a great podcast over there Neil and Mike and David so check them out Tread Partners Gain Traction Podcast. Also a great guest since this is part of the Top Agency Series, Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey has a Second Bite podcast and Todd helps pair agencies with private equity. And he funny we talked about valuation and and everything around what he’s found in the in the agency industry, but he’s found that some agencies made more on the second bite and then did on the first so they sold in the private equity sold again, and some of these agency owners made more on the Second Bite. So his Second Bite podcast is amazing. I think I’ve listened to every episode at this point, as well. So check all those out on inspiredinsider.com. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We actually help you run your podcast we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution and production. So that it makes it easy for them. You know, we call ourselves Andrew kind of the magic elves that work in the background to make sure everything happens. So the host could sit back relax, build the relationship and run their business. So you know for me the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships I’m I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you have questions go to rise25.com and we’re you know, we’ve been doing it for over a decade, so feel free if you have anything podcast related. I’m excited to introduce Andrew Street, CEO of Dealer OMG. He bootstrapped it from an idea to an Inc 5000 fastest growing company in the US and his digital marketing firm is best known for lead generation and digital advertising innovation for car dealerships. And he actually started out working as a local business consultant for Facebook. And he witnessed their ad platform rollout and got a front row education on how to unlock its power. Now he does that for dealerships. So Andrew, thanks for joining me.

Andrew Street 3:00

Jeremy, I’m honored to be here. And that was a really impressive introduction with the the elevator pitch for you and the sponsors and all in one take. I’m happy to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:13

Even if I mess it up, I still keep it. So it doesn’t matter. Yeah, it’s a one take regardless. But talk about Dealer OMG. And what you do. I mentioned briefly, but tell us a little bit more.

Andrew Street 3:26

We were formed by my business partner myself, branched out from Facebook. And started working in e-commerce like was a big focus of mine is because I really liked outdoor apparel. That was mountain hardware in North Face, Columbia, Arcteryx and all these cool outdoor sporty kind of gears that I like to see myself in. And we were doing kind of complicated Co Op programs between the manufacturers and retailers, helping the manufacturers sell through the retailers. And what we found it was a lot of labor. And there was constantly reinventing things coming up with creative campaigns that were giveaways and things like that. And we picked up one car dealership in town. And it was a Toyota dealership that I didn’t have a lot of understanding of how they worked. But a lot of the same approaches that we were doing with E commerce were working really well with our car dealership. And over the course of like a year we were under a different name at the time or call for kicks marketing. We watched their sales go from 200 cars a month to about 1000 cars in a month. And it was new management and it was new inventory and whatever they were doing. They were getting a ton of success. But a lot of what they were doing, they’re pointing the finger at us and they grew their spend tenfold over the course of that year and so it started catching My attention like Okay, let’s start figuring out more about these dealerships. And they introduced us to another dealership, where we started doing the same, the same processes with Facebook and Instagram, just Facebook advertising at the time. And saw them grow from 200 to 700 cars a month. Like okay, so I ended up on a plane going to a dealership conference. And, and sat down next to somebody that worked at the dealership, who’s in their marketing department, and I just bought them a Bloody Mary or two, and ask them all the questions about how does the dealership work? People are talking about fixed ops department. What is that? Exactly? And you guys can sell new cars but lose money. When you lose $200 per car on average? How do you guys stay in business? And just explain it, ask them all the stupid questions of…

Jeremy Weisz 5:56

That doesn’t seem like a stupid question to me.

[Continue to Page 2]

Andrew Street 6:00

At the beginning, it was working with score and working with consultants and coaches along the way. Like, I feel like we’ve had a lot of resources that we would use, what limited budgets, we had to hire consultants, coaches based on what we need, whether it was operational, or positioning. And then we hired Jason Swenk, who you might have come across for a little while. Shout out to Jason Swenk. But he gave us a little bit of advice that went a long way. And one thing was just like quickly to pick a niche and be the big fish in a smaller pond instead of a small fish and a gigantic pond if we do digital advertising too. And it put us in a position where I put together a chart where we looked at the current accounts that we were working with. And it was elective medical. So plastic surgeries, skincare, stuff like that. It was multilocation retail, or it was car dealerships, because we had all three, and we had a pretty good recipe for each one, kind of stemming out of a background with E commerce. And so I made a chart that was upsell opportunities network. You know, value that we’re able to drive for that industry, networking opportunities for conferences, way to establish authority through publications, things like that, an automotive one. And I kind of like cars. And I’ve gotten way more into cars since we started doing this. And we were working with one Toyota dealership at the time, which was mon Toyota. And they went from, like 250 cars sold a month to about 1000 over the course of a year and a half. And they began pointing the finger at us as like a big reason for their success. So another Chevrolet store called capital Chevrolet in Austin, where we live pick this up. And they went from 300 to 600 cars a month in sales. So we were looking really good and they were spending a lot more money it was much more consistent than some of the E commerce and retail things that we were doing. And so I got on an airplane and flew out to an industry event called Digital dealer. I didn’t know it existed, but I bought a ticket for like $1,500 or something and flew out there with one of my dealers with the marketing director of a dealership. And he was sitting next to me his name’s Dale Duke. I bought Dale some bloody marys and like look, I just want to ask you questions and I had a I had a moleskin notebook. And I just went through like, Okay, you guys sell cars, and you lose money per car, you say you sell? How are you still in business? How do you cover payroll? Okay, the manufacturer gives you kickbacks for selling a certain volume. And you get him with finance, you get them with fixed stops. Okay, I’m glad you brought that up. What exactly is fixed ops? Okay, its services and its parts and everything is not selling cars. What CRM do you use? What language does that speak? What resonates like what is your boss? Look at you. How do they gauge your success as the marketing director, who manages the general manager? And who was the GSM, the General Sales Manager? What kind of discretion do they have? And how is their performance measured, in a sense to be able to speak their language and then to be able to translate between digital advertising into English and then from English into automotive and back and forth. And it’s, you know, in time, it’s put us in a great position to become a much bigger fish in that smaller pond and speak to paid social advertising for car dealerships. And so if and it’s helped us with it’s helped me personally Just with going out to dinners where it’s not like, Oh, you say you own a chiropractic clinic, okay? How’s that doing? Okay? It’s could be better. But instead it’s like if you’re not looking to grow your sales services or trades for your dealership, through Facebook and Instagram, then we can just talk and talk about business a little bit, but we can just be friends.

Jeremy Weisz 10:21

Andrew, what’s interesting is a beginner’s mindset. And some of the best direct response marketers, copywriters on the planet, I feel like have this beginner’s mindset where they, there’s no dumb question. They just want to really keep digging deeper to find out more. At a time, did you have a set questions that you want to go through? How did you know what to ask? Just to dig deeper, because, you know, even people I have found, they’ve been in industry for 20 years, and they’re writing copy or they’re doing ads, they kind of still come at it from beginner’s mindset,. Like, let’s assume I don’t know everything. And it allows them to learn more, and dig deeper. So when you were having a conversation, did you have set questions or now today, you have set questions that you go through just to understand, really the deep needs, and then the client itself?

Andrew Street 11:20

Yeah, I mean, that’s a big quote. Yeah, that’s a great question. Um, you know, for that specific conversation, it was just sort of a few, quite a few questions to get me prompted. And then all sudden, it just spiraled into a lot more questions about how dealerships actually operate, and make money, and manage lead volume and things like that, that I wasn’t really considering asking. And the industry that we’re serving with, with auto it’s, there’s a big tendency for vendors and advertisers to really want to package things up and make it really shiny. And sell products that already exist as a different product, not necessarily white labeling it but spinning it and adding a lot more. Just making it murky on what they’re actually selling, but it’s really shiny on the outside. But on the inside, it’s just carousel ads on Facebook, that drive really cheap traffic to landing pages. But on the outside, it’s, you know, a proprietary machine with database, AI, machine learning. And so we’ve had salespeople on our staff before who’ve wanted to package us and sell us that way. And it sort of works to get in the door. But then it’s a little misconception on what we actually do that’s much bigger than this one little component. And so the questions now that are prompting really good relationships and long term customers, we’re not looking at customers for months, like a lot of the automotive industry with vendors. It’s over the years that we’ve been with a lot of dealers, and it is going through questions about their new car sales, they’re used car sales, they’re used car acquisition, how do they get their used cars? How do they price them going into their operations of? Do they have an internal call center, which they call it a BDC? Like a Business Development Center, their service department? Do they have a lot of open bays? Can they take more services are having trouble with retention? And then you know, are there things that we can do to help with recruiting to where by the end of a five minute conversation, we can be really clear on on the things that we can do from our desk to help with their dealership. And then we pick them off quickly. And then it’s a it’s out of sales hands and into the account management, which we call dealer consultants, for them to be able to continually ensure that what we’re doing from our desks is aligned with what that dealership needs. You know, if they’re, if used cars are just flying off the shelf, and they’re making a ton of money, let’s move out of trying to sell used cars and move more into use car acquisition and go after people driving specific vehicles and call them out by their vehicle and say we’re paying a premium this month for those types of vehicles. Come in for the five minute appraisal. And just Yeah, keep the white glove service on while we still have the advertising machine behind it.

Jeremy Weisz 14:36

Yeah, it seems like you just have that deeper relationship and deeper understanding of the client especially, you know, when you go into a specific niche and, you know, so that’s that’s a big decision, right to go, okay, we’re going to not work in all these other you know, with these other businesses, right, we’re going to focus on dealers and and stuck in? Can we talk about the evolution of the services that you offer you just mentioned right now, if someone’s watching the video, we could see we’re on dealeromg.com. And, you know, right now, you can see the solutions page right there sales was fixed AFS, acquisition, branding, recruiting. Talk about the evolution, what do you start off with when you started working with dealers? And then what did you expand according to as you got to know them? And probably, you built your team?

Andrew Street 15:32

Yeah, they continually changes. And it changes based on what type of technologies available, the capabilities that we’re building out in house, because we’ve got developers building out our own internal software. And then also what you know that with the needs of the dealership, as chip shortages and global viruses and everything that’s happening, that that’s kind of dictated what a dealership needs, if anything, and I like to think that we’re still small and nimble enough to where we’re going to be one of the last things that they would ever cancel, because, you know, through the iteration of what was possible, so dealerships love leads, they want really good leads, but their leads, and Facebook, maybe 2015 2015 16, somewhere in there came out with lead forms. And you tap on an ad. And it brings up a pre populated form with all of your contact information, first name, last name, cell phone, personal email address. And I was like, okay, we can generate leads, dealers can take leads, we can route them directly into their CRM, this is the holy grail, let’s unlock this. And so every single customer we had, we were going aggressive with lead forms. And then what you find is, it’s too easy to fill out that lead form. And it would be a lot of people who aren’t intentionally filling it out. Or people who couldn’t qualify for getting this type of car. And it would just fill the dealership up with bad leads, which they could convert at maybe 2%. At the beginning, from just like this high volume of leads to sales, but they weren’t, nobody’s equipped to really handle that many bad leads to trying to set appointments. So we quickly had to scrape back and be like, Okay, we’re going to reserve those types of ads that are asking for people’s contact information. For people who already know about the dealership, how do we do that? Okay, they’ve come by the website, they’ve looked at a particular vehicle on the website, now we get back in front of them with that vehicle and similar vehicles. Now let’s ask them to start the conversation because they haven’t filled out a form on the website. And so it’s a lot of trial and error and a B testing. And then if not, like I had mentioned, you know, and right after everything went into lockdown during COVID, they were so many dealers, and I’m in Texas, and it was pretty, pretty capable of selling cars, buying cars, servicing cars. But a lot of the country was limited to, you know, people delivering cars, they were still essential. So they could do services and figuring out what that state allowed. And then just taking all of our budgets or reducing our budgets and doing that. At the same time, we were applying for loans and, or grants from Facebook for car dealers and everything that we could possibly do from our desks to help. And we don’t do graphic design or website updates, but we were doing it and we were offering it and it’s like, okay, this is a unique situation, let’s do whatever we can to help. But then, you know, when you’re asking about getting outside of just car sales and services, it’s as we’ve developed technology to be able to, to harvest their data and to ingest their CRM data and just the DMV records to be really prescriptive with who we’re targeting. So if somebody is is within a 10 mile radius of our dealership, they live in that radius, and they drive a rav4 but they didn’t buy it from us and we’re a Toyota dealership. I want them to come into our dealership for services or for trading opportunities or for getting my vehicle appraised or for a warranty issue. Or you know There’s a number of things that we could trigger to try to conquest people off the streets. And the same token says, we’re targeting people in their CRM, it’s if you’ve purchased from us, but you’re not doing routine services, and you live in the city, let’s give you service opportunities, or let’s simply just as soon as you purchase, let’s have a message that says thank you, for 30 days, or 90 days that just says thank you. And this is where a big part of the community, everybody that works here is part of the community. This is how we grow by referrals from your neighbors and your family. So it’s coming up with a lot of different solutions using the same platform where it’s common for advertisers just to look at it as a one trick machine that drives, you know, cheap website traffic, or cheap leads.

Jeremy Weisz 20:50

I want to talk, you mentioned software. And I’d love to talk about software development as an agency, right. Because you can build it, or you can just use another software. So I’m wondering your thought process on the type of software and why build it as opposed to use something else, I guess, off the shelf.

Andrew Street 21:20

Yeah, it’s, I feel like there’s a common thing that that agency owners get to once they hit and, and they’re like one and a half $2 million in EBITDA, that they want to start investing back into the company, and either they can’t find the right places to put it, or else they think that you know that, hey, we’ve got an idea. Let’s, let’s put some time behind this. Totally different skill set, then. So might, you know, my background is design and marketing and sales, then to switch into overseeing product development. They came with, you know, the the crux was common where we built, we built out a platform that ingests the inventory and CRM information. And then we scrapped it and started over with a different developer. And we had we got a Platform Manager, a project manager, like people on staff who no product, which I thought we could figure out quickly. But I was wrong. And we couldn’t give it the amount of tension that it needed. So we got nearshore developers, developers in the US, because when we were looking at licensing other people’s platforms, it was prohibitively expensive. It would have made more sense if we were an ad agency who used every single platform from media buying to OTT and display networks and paid search and paid social. So we could, you know, be a much bigger part of the pie for a dealerships advertising budget, but we were a sliver, we were this assassin that comes in and maintains that business and keeps that business and is you know, the best in class, not the cheapest, but the you know, the best for this one category. And so a lot of the software’s were really expensive. And we found it, You’re irreplaceable, valuable for us to be able to pull in our customers information, their data, their website, visitors, their past customers or current customers, that customers that start to fill out their lead forms that abandon them, you know, and then pull in data from consumer warehouses, like Polk and Experian and TransUnion to be able to identify people so instead of us targeting the 6 million people in Houston that are on social media every day, around the dealership, and just carpet bombing everybody, we could be much more prescriptive to people who have maybe a low net wealth, low household income, credit score challenges don’t have a great credit score things that could help identify them as somebody who we could help get the right appropriate ad and the right appropriate vehicle to helping people qualify, you know, instead of the message being you know, here’s this 90 $90,000 Silverado it’s here’s a vehicle that we can get you qualified for low downpayment low monthly payment. And so with the platform that we built called Vinvinea. It gives us an opportunity to make much faster advertising decisions, and be much more prescriptive with with who we’re targeting and what we’re saying to them.

Jeremy Weisz 24:49

When you were when you created this started creating it. Obviously you’re scratching your own itch. Right? Was there a thought of Yeah, we’re gonna use intern Only to be more efficient, we’re gonna be better for our clients. Was there a thought of releasing it as an external product as well?

Andrew Street 25:09

There is, I mean, yeah, there, there has been some interest in being client facing and having it be more of a SAS, which I’m not interested in doing right now, that could be a play in the next couple of years. But that’s a different company, that’s, I’m going to have I want to do if we’re going to do it’s gonna be done right, where we have people whose job is to onboard that customer. And to ensure that they’re using it that they’re getting value out of it, that they’re upfront when we first started doing it. Like, we used to use Infusionsoft who did a really good job of onboarding us and had a coach that we had to pay for that would meet us twice a week and require us to go through and do different things and launch different campaigns on that. Because right now, I mean, we’re, we’re dealing with dealerships who don’t have an internal marketing team that’s really has the bandwidth. They have cable, they have capable people, for sure. But they don’t have the bandwidth to take all these different audiences and be like, Okay, here’s what the dealership needs, we need to do better retention with our service department, from sales, people purchasing to people coming back and doing services. And we want to go from 25% retention to 40%. Here’s all the people who purchase who aren’t doing services, here’s all these DMV records of people who drive our cars. Now what you know, is because so we’re set up to do all of that deployed, and show the dealer that we’re doing it, but until and when and if they get those capabilities, or it could be other ad agencies is to start doing it with, but I’m not focused on that right now. I just want our team to use the hell out of it. And then we can talk about that once, you know, once we’re further down the road.

Jeremy Weisz 27:06

Yeah, no, it’s seems, you know, focusing on what you’re doing, because like you said, it’s a whole separate business, I’d love to hear you, because a lot of agencies specifically have ideas and ways that they could probably make their workflow better, easier for their team. I’d love to hear some of the challenges and pitfalls while you were going through this process of creating the kind of the software internal software. I mean, if you look at some big companies out there, it kind of was birthed out of an agency, I think MailChimp, was actually birthed out of an agency. And I think MailChimp, in the past few years was acquired for $12 billion. I mean, that’s obviously a unicorn situation, but it came out of how they were serving clients and serving their own needs and their client’s needs. So it’s always interesting. Agencies are kind of uniquely see a unique viewpoint because they see it across, you know, a bunch of companies, what were some of the challenges that pitfalls you had when you were creating this yourself?

Andrew Street 28:11

Yeah, hold on. I’m taking notes now. $12 billion. You’re like our external facing now.

Jeremy Weisz 28:17

Exactly.

Andrew Street 28:21

You know, it is that like that was there’s been several challenges. One is the funding of it was pretty, everything’s been bootstrapped. And I’ve looked at taking money in the past. And I at the time, I didn’t exactly know what I would do with it. Now I know exactly what I would have done with it. It would have been get amazing people and start building products earlier. Like a lot of the challenges too, are just internal and excess or, or, you know, an identity crisis of as we’re building it. Our leadership team internally is like, Okay, this is a SAS, let’s build it as a SAS. Let’s market it, our sales team is going to put this forward. This is the first thing that makes us different. This is what makes us special is the software. And like, yes, it’s what we do with the software, though, is what we’re doing it what it’s what enables our team, our graphic designers or performance managers or dealer consultants to be really good and really fast. And then well valuations on SAS companies and, you know, the, the ability for us to sell and to larger entities and larger dealer groups and publicly traded dealer groups then after marketplaces, no, you know, it’s like, it did create a bit of a riff internally for us to really land on our feet. with what we’re doing with it. And a lot of it just stems on my background is not a SAS person I want to do I want to deliver, like I want our team to be able to deliver. And with the customer base that we have, they’re not, they’re not a customer that’s going to be able to take a bunch of this information and do something with it. We can like we are built to do it. And an industry where I think a lot of companies are built the opposite way, where we’re a data mining platform or a consumer data platform as CDP or you know, we do this component that’s creating a lot of information for targeting or for creative. And then the customer doesn’t know what to do with it and and neither cancels or just doesn’t use it. And then they become an ad agency X accidentally. i There’s a lot of people out there that own an ad agency, but grudgingly and they didn’t mean it to be an ad agency. They meant to be a software or a data mining platform. Where we were an ad, we’re still an ad agency. At the core. We’re a facebook, instagram specific ad agency that’s testing out interest in Amazon Display Network, but our core, we are an ad agency, we are a designer, we make things bespoke custom that stand out from other dealerships in the market. And we just now happen to have a software component that helps to fuel a lot of our decisions. And a lot of our measurement and a lot of our our targeting capabilities.

Jeremy Weisz 31:39

And I want to talk about hiring and culture. Right. Internal hiring, also you help – one of the things you do for dealerships is you help recruiting and hiring too, right. So what are some of the things that have worked for you from a hiring perspective with your agency?

Andrew Street 32:05

There’s been a few ways. I mean, obviously, we’ve done we’ve done, you know, the the marketplaces for recruiting people for getting applications. And I think it’s, it’s really grown over the years from, we’re like, I don’t know if this analogy still is obvious. But we used to be like the Jon Stewart for people’s careers, where you get out of college, and you work for us, and we’re gonna train you so hard and get you really refined into a machine that understands this platform understands how to have the conversations, and then you’re worth more money to somebody else, because we couldn’t pay you that much. And then the double your salary and go somewhere else. And we did that for five years, four years, until we gotten to a, you know, a profitability position to be able to pay people with chops. And to retain them, and to invest in them. And to come up with benefits around it that include education bonuses for them to go learn anything, ceramics or, you know, really drill down on their specific niche. And invest in people and we’re going to industry conferences to to bring people from our team there to expose them to, you know, the the conversations that are happening the other providers at the risk of people getting poached, and we’ve had people poached from these events, and it’s just the price that we are going to pay for keeping that culture and that value alive as people are going to get poached. And it’s gonna suck. And I’ll tell the other, you know, competitors that like, look, this one’s free. Next one will cost you like, you know, don’t start gouging our staff.

Jeremy Weisz 34:09

Yet, they’re gonna wake up with a horse’s head.

Andrew Street 34:11

Yes, yeah, something. Yeah, I’ll leave the mystery open. But I’ll just figure it out if they do the second time. And, yeah, I mean, the alternative of not investing in the staff not ringing them is, you know, keeping your best talent under lock and key and they stopped developing anyone that you know, you don’t get a chance to sit with them and hang out with them and get to really know them because we’re in a complete remote work environment. And so And yet another thing with hiring too, it’s like, we either need to fill a position and we need to start taking a lot of applications for it and vetting and getting referrals. Or we have a position that would be nice to fill. And we’re going to serendipitously find that part Listen, and it’s not urgent. We’ve had a couple of people that have been great hires that or it was just the timing was right with their career. And we’ve seen eye to eye with them over the years, and they work with other providers and competitors or clients of ours. And then they’re available and we get in touch. And it’s like, okay, we don’t have a specific role right now. But let’s make one. Let’s make one, let’s bring you on. Let’s get started. Let’s roll our sleeves up. It’s not a an unsurmountable risk for us to take. And let’s make it make sense in the next 60 days like this. Yeah, let’s just start working with this person.

Jeremy Weisz 35:41

You know, when we look at retaining great staff, Andrew, you mentioned, you know, education, bonuses, stuff they like to do, obviously, you’re from a compensation perspective, just investing in education. What else has worked from a retention standpoint, I actually I’m gonna pull up here, you can check out dealer omg.com. And, you know, one thing is just having a nice actual careers page with all the benefits on it. And you can kind of see on here, what if you’re looking for there’s certain perks, education, 401k, matching health plans, profit sharing, PTO? Is there anything else that we’re missing this that kind of intangibles that?

Andrew Street 36:34

Yeah, I didn’t know, we had that on our website. But yes, I mean, that is big for us to be able to articulate while we’re hiring. But then when we’re onboarding a new employee, we typically fly them to Austin or Columbus, where we have a couple of headquarters, or we have our leadership team lives, then we get a conference room, but to sit down and really try to explain how we do what we do, what makes us special, where their role is, and what kind of like upward trajectory could look like, within our organization, which is small. And we’re typically float around 20 people. And, and have, like, five years ago, if you asked me what culture was, I’m like, Yeah, you know, we’ve got a foosball table, we haven’t put it together yet. We’ve got beer. We do when there’s a new employee, we go to lunch, you know, there’s like small things that that really aren’t kosher, but it is what I thought it was, but now it’s just really caring about people and knowing that their dog is sick, or that their what their boyfriends name is, or their husband’s name is Or their wife’s name is and knowing people, you know, and caring about people. And, you know, being able to help with finding opportunities for them, Hey, you don’t you’re not taking we have unlimited PTO, which is sometimes a little bit of a two edged sword where it’s like, okay, you’re never taking your PTO. It’s been nine months, let’s find an opportunity for you to even if you don’t have to go somewhere. But caring about people, you know, paying them competitively. And then having like, we have to have a beacon internally, we have somebody named Jasmine that works with us who’s allowed introvert who loves to help organize the holiday PowerPoint presentation slideshow the games the happy hours, and there’s ways for like that she’s unlocked. We are seeing Legally Blonde too.

Jeremy Weisz 38:59

I don’t know, I have seen Legally Blonde. I can’t remember I’ve seen the second one. This sequel.

Andrew Street 39:04

I haven’t seen either. Not yet, I should probably see it. But there’s a thing called snap cup, and Legally Blonde 2 to where they’re all there. They’re, I guess they’re arguing at some law firm or at some some office environment. And they go, they sing a song about snap cup, and everybody sends a snap out to somebody. And then we tie it in with our core values. So when somebody does something that’s above and beyond or somebody just needs recognition, there’s a Google form that they can fill out and then a drop down, pick somebody with their with their nickname next to it on what they did. And so during happy hour, we’ll go around. We’ll start out by singing the snap cup song from Legally Blonde to and then like somebody will kick it off on something great that somebody did that somebody can Meanwhile, they were out that covered there is no errors, or you know that a BDR is that do outbound calls that they got their first appointment and their first deal, then they get a shout out. And it’s a cool opportunity for people that are in every single department of the company to be able to see what people are doing. And an opportunity for people that are really delivering to get recognized, and to, you know, have that be seen in front of all the leadership team. And then like little things like that, having happy hours that aren’t just sitting on a zoom and drinking, but having some, some games to it had been fun. As fun as it can be to be, you know, completely separated by time zones and state lines.

Jeremy Weisz 41:02

You mentioned, is your upward trajectory. I love to hear a little bit about that. I know, this comes up a lot in agency conversations about how do I create this upward trajectory? And, you know, compared to if there’s a large corporation where they have account, Junior account manager, account managers, you know, middle account manager, Senior Account Manager, you know, there’s a lot of different layers there that leave room for upward trajectory. How do you tackle that in in your organization?

Andrew Street 41:36

I think a lot of the staff comes most of our staff with you very few exceptions that have been really successful, that what the recipe is for them to come in and be what is called a performance manager, just doing ad operations. And understanding the philosophy and the intricacies of what we do have where the rubber hits the road. And it is the most vital role that we have. And then just based on people’s I guess, skill sets and desires. There’s other roles from that being more client facing sales facing that they can evolve that people have evolved into. And it’s just based on, you know, them getting a good grasp of what we do, being able to articulating it, being able to articulate it, and then just being able to work with car dealerships, which isn’t, you know, an instinctual thing that a lot of advertisers, younger advertisers really want to do. But it’s, you know, one way to grow. And then we have people that have moved into our internal marketing team, we’ve got people who showed a propensity for like, being very technical and become the technical lead to help customize pixels and all the super detailed digital marketing stuff. And it’s to recognize that and do it pretty quickly, you know, to hire fast and promote faster and fire fast, but keep promote, you know, like, make things move quickly. You know, the rule of hiring slow is not necessarily true, I think in our case, when when we’re growing, we need to fill some roles and we need to push some people up that are that have mastered what they’re doing.

Jeremy Weisz 43:37

Andrew one last question. But before I ask it, I want to point people to check out your website, dealeromg.com. To learn more about what you do. I just I love some of the in the trenches, stories you shared throughout the conversation. So thank you. My last question is some of your favorite resources. Resources can be a book. It could be a podcast, also groups that you love, and I love you know if there’s any takeaways from EO. So you’re in EO. What are some books, podcasts, movies, items, things you learn in certain groups.

Andrew Street 44:25

Man, a lot, dude, like right now like EO or EOS like the the you know, like the entrepreneurs operating system with traction was pretty pivotal for us to be able to move to a remote environment. It came up at the same time for us to be able to have like the level 10 meetings and rate them and who attends them and the or the accountability chart was big and for us to use an EOS implementer was really helpful. It was a great investment. Crucial Conversations. I mean, there’s been a lot of books that have been really helpful for kind of exploring weak areas that I feel like I needed to improve on. But right now, like, what’s been what’s been like the most beneficial are stories of other entrepreneurs, like the Steve Jobs, I just think the last two books I’ve read were the Steve Jobs’ biography. And Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, his autobiography, they’re both great. These are both like huge Titans that just continually get gutted along the way and are walking through fire. And it’s just, it’s, it’s comforting, I find them strangely comforting to read or to listen to. And podcasts like this, like yours. And like the pursuit that you’re doing with the agencies. It’s great, because it’s all so different. And so similar and so relatable at the same time. EO’s has been instrumental, Entrepreneurs Organization, just to, you know, have some educational things to attend, but just to have the format of communicating with people in a network of folks who are kind of going through the same high highs and the same lows, and, you know, finding resource there to be to be have, it’d be helpful to the other people that are in Iover, and have them be helpful that, you know, EO has been great. I’ve been an Agency Management Institute with Drew McClellan was very helpful to like, look under the hood, and look in the books of other agencies and be able to, you know, get some input as well as, you know, get their input with with our positioning and, and things that we’re going through in our aspirations and our hires and things like that. Like, at the, you know, 30 minutes ago, we’re talking about is being resourceful and finding consultants at the right things, but it’s also finding the right, you know, the, I’ve been fortunate find the right books, I mean, the world of podcasts that are coming out at infinite warp speed of new podcasts, and they’re great, you know, they’re well thought out and getting the right types of guests that aren’t going to resonate with everybody, but it’s going to resonate with a population of people. And if you’re talking to agency owners and their story, well, that’s me.

Jeremy Weisz 47:41

Andrew, I want to echo that I love Traction, Crucial Conversations. Shoe Dog. I agree. When people ask me about Shoe Dog. I definitely say it’s kind of like entrepreneurial therapy to see a big icon of big company go through the same, like, yeah, you put it well, the fires that everyone else does.

Andrew Street 48:02

Much of them from your intro song about going through the fire and being better on the other side. Right.

Jeremy Weisz 48:11

Exactly. But so thanks for sharing everyone, check out dealeromg.com and more episodes of the podcast and Andrew, I want to be the first one to thank you so much. Thanks so much.

Andrew Street 48:23

Appreciate it. Thank you, Jeremy.

Outro 48:25

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