[EO Southwest Ontario] Finding Your Niche and Building a Purpose-Driven Business With Rob Murray

Rob Murray is the CEO and Co-founder of Intrigue Media, a Certified B Corp marketing agency that services landscaping companies across the US and Canada. Intrigue helps companies build a strong digital presence, generate consistent leads, and promote long-term growth. Under Rob’s leadership, Intrigue has serviced over 1,000 clients since its inception in 2006. Rob has a background in marketing from the University of Guelph and is also passionate about empowering leaders to impact and strengthen their communities. He hosts the IM Landscape Growth Podcast, where he shares insights from industry experts and discusses practical marketing tips.

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

[03:00] Rob Murray talks about what they do at Intrigue Media
[04:03] Why Rob and his team decided to pick a niche and focus on landscaping
[16:26] The hiring process at Intrigue
[21:31] Rob shares how he maintains a solid dynamic with his co-founder
[23:42] Core values at Intrigue that foster a strong team culture
[26:18] Five common marketing mistakes and how to avoid them
[33:06] How focusing on customer solutions fuels business growth
[40:59] Rob’s book recommendations for entrepreneurs

In this episode…

Finding your niche can feel like discovering the missing piece of a puzzle. For many entrepreneurs, refining their focus is the key to unlocking business growth, but the process can be overwhelming. How do you determine where to direct your energy to maximize impact and create a purpose-driven business?

According to Rob Murray, a seasoned entrepreneur and marketing expert, the key lies in aligning your values, expertise, and the needs of your most successful clients. He highlights that focusing on a specific niche not only improves customer satisfaction but also allows you to stand out in a crowded marketplace. This intentional approach helped him transform a small marketing project into a thriving business by narrowing his focus to the landscaping industry, an area that yielded the highest level of engagement and growth. Rob emphasizes that niching down creates opportunities to build trust, deepen industry expertise, and deliver unparalleled value.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Rob Murray, CEO and Co-founder of Intrigue Media, to discuss finding your niche and building a purpose-driven business. Rob shares how his company evolved from local advertising to a specialized digital marketing agency, the importance of aligning values with strategy, and actionable advice for overcoming common marketing mistakes.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Related Episodes

Quotable Moments

“A rising tide raises all ships, and everybody’s kind of in it together, which is cool.”
“You do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it.”
“We believe that you have to get involved, not give back.”
“We’re best friends. It’s been 17 years. It’s kind of unbelievable.”
“Our purpose is empowering leaders to strengthen communities.”

Action Steps

Embrace a strong work ethic and resilience: This mindset ensures that as a leader, you’re attracting people with the right skills and those who are ready to face and overcome adversities, as you discussed during the hiring process.
Cultivate a growth-oriented team culture: Encourage a culture where team members are expected to constantly improve themselves through leadership and personal development.
Focus on community involvement, not just giving back: By getting involved in community activities, leaders can build stronger ties and positively impact their surroundings.
Incorporate purpose-driven communication: Develop a clear understanding of your organization’s purpose and communicate it effectively to engage both clients and team members emotionally.
Benchmark performance against industry standards: Understanding where you stand compared to peers helps set realistic goals and adopt best practices, enhancing leadership decision-making and strategic planning.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 00:02

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

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:12

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of inspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Rob Murray intriguemedia.com you can check them out before I formally introduce you. Rob I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top agency series. A really good one was Jason Swenk. Jason Swenk talks about how he built his agency up to eight figures and sold it, and then he started buying up agencies and then started an agency group to help agency owners. The group kind of he wish he had when he had an agency. That was a really good one. Todd Taskey was a good one. He’s got Rob. The Second Bite Podcast is he basically helps pair agencies to private equity, help sell agencies second bite because sometimes when the private equity sells again, those founders make more in the second byte than they do on the first. So that was an interesting one. Kevin Hourigan as well, Spinutech. He had an agency since 1995, so it was cool to hear the landscape of the internet, business and agency life through some of the decades. So that was a cool one as well. Check out more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping 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. So, Rob, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the host and the company so they can create create amazing content, relationships, and most importantly, run their business. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. 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’ve thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at. support@rise25. com. Rob also has a podcast which we’ll which we’ll talk about. And I’m excited to introduce Rob Murray. He’s the Co-founder and CEO of Intrigue Media. Intrigue Media is a digital marketing company that has been helping, you know, businesses grow in the home improvement space for over a decade right now. In this point in time, the last 14 years. Rob actually directs the vision and works with clients to grow their businesses there. They are a very results driven agency, which you’ll find from this conversation, and they have a proven track record after servicing over a thousand clients since 2006. So, Rob, thanks for joining me.

Rob Murray 02:45

Having me on the podcast, Dr.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 02:48

Yeah. So let’s start off with and by the way, if someone’s listening, there will be a video component. So as Rob is talking, I’m going to pull up their website. Just tell people about Intrigue Media a bit more and what you do.

Rob Murray 03:00

Yeah for sure. So Intrigue Media, we started helping customers make more money in 2007. And right now we are focused on the landscape industry, specifically with landscape entrepreneurs, residential design, build maintenance between, say, two and 7 million that want to grow over ten. We’ve got a lot of niche services and products to help people do that all the way from, you know, CRM tracking, accountability, attribution models so you can understand where your money’s going and what’s working and what’s not to full service, you know, website opportunities. So you can get a world class website from 599 a month to customer acquisition strategies and, and maybe even a little bit of sales coaching so you can help close more deals.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:52

I mean, you know, you know, maybe what I’m going to ask next is why landscaping?

Rob Murray 03:57

Yeah, okay.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:58

That’s cool. Niche is an interesting topic too. So talk about that.

Rob Murray 04:03

Landscaping. Why landscaping? So we started off as a local organization in a digital out-of-home advertising model. We put up flat screens in local restaurants, retail environments, gyms, you know, medical centers. And we built that up to whatever, maybe 8 or 9 cities. And we had about 250 TVs playing local ads as an alternative ad medium to, say, the local newspaper radio station. But as we were doing that and the internet became ever more prevalent, we got dragged into online marketing and digital marketing because our clients kept asking us when we’d start building websites. They, you know, their cousin left or their nephew got a full time job and wasn’t in school anymore, so they didn’t have anybody to help them with their website. And then the social media mountain of energy came in. They’re like, how do I leverage Facebook? How do I get to the top of Google? And so with this customer base, using this digital ad medium that we had before, they were really looking for a lot of help with digital. So anyway, long story short, that’s, you know, 2009 ten. And then in 20 1516 we have all these online marketing customers, but we’re essentially a, you know, jack of all trades, master of none. We’re local. We’re working with all different types of businesses. And we said, okay, well, you know, we we need to work on our position in the market because right now we’re just a full service marketing company like everybody else. So we started focusing in on home improvement and construction because we could we were we had a track record of success. We were doing well for customers. They were happy. We were making the money. Our team knew how to do the projects well. And then as Covid hit, we realized that everybody got introduced to what we’re on now zoom and video calls, and there was an opportunity for us to do a bit more of a North American play instead of just a standard, you know, local marketing company. And so we started looking internally more and said, you know, where are we actually the most successful? Where are we making people the most amount of money, and who are actually the most fun to work with? And we went through a couple of niches, but landscape was by far the place that we were doing the best for people, and the clients were the happiest. And as we started to get involved in the industry and joined the associations across Canada and the US, we actually found that there were a lot of fun. And as much as it’s a bit of a pun, they are down to earth, you know, work hard, play hard kind of folks. And the industry itself is actually super open and cooperative. We were actually working with a lot of HVAC folks to start with, and we get them. I had an HVAC podcast for a hot minute and people would come on, they’re like, I’m not sharing my secrets. I’m not sharing what’s success, how I got successful. Like, well, why did you agree to this podcast? Whereas landscapers are quite the opposite, they’re all willing to share. And there’s a there’s this weird underlying philosophy that’s beautiful around, you know, a rising tide raises all ships and everybody’s kind of in it together, which is cool.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 06:49

Why do you think the landscaping community has that mentality?

Rob Murray 06:53

I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s a lack of perceived professionalism from years ago. So they kind of need to band together, you know, better together type of philosophy. I think there’s something to be said about the type of person that’s willing to get their hands dirty. You know, like they’re just they literally are down to earth people. And they work their tails off. You know, if you think about people working in 40 degree weather or where you are 100 degree weather outside and lifting heavy shit and pushing stuff around. There’s a certain character to that, and I don’t think they really care. If somebody knows, you know, what their gross margin is in their business, it’s not going to necessarily impact their ability to be successful.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 07:34

It’s interesting, you know, thanks for walking through that. And there’s some things I want to just highlight for a second, which I think are really important. One, the evolution of the business Change. And also you looked at the specific who you loved working with and who you had the best results for. And that kind of went from everyone to home improvement, construction to. And you kept kind of just refining it to now you’re at landscaping. So it was really interesting you found the community was really inviting. I’d love to hear from the the initial piece with the screens, which kind of got you started.

Rob Murray 08:14

Oh, 100%.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:16

What was the business model? How were you charging people?

Rob Murray 08:20

50 bucks a month? No contracts. Handshake. We were skateboarding from door to door with a backpack and a laptop, and we were using point and shoot cameras to make videos on a screen with Windows Movie Maker.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:33

So 50 bucks a month, you you install the TV.

Rob Murray 08:37

You put a TV up at the University of Guelph to start with, and then went to the downtown businesses and said, do you want to advertise at the University of Guelph for 50 bucks a month.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:45

I love it. I mean, it’s a no brainer offer though, right?

Rob Murray 08:48

Well, I mean, you can put a TV.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:51

In my house for 50 bucks and, like, serve me ads.

Rob Murray 08:55

No. Yeah. Well, but so that’s the thing. Like the person that ran the hair salon at the University Center was an awesome person. His name’s Dean. He was a champion unicycle, you know, if that’s a thing. And he was just, like, such a cool dude. So we got to put the TV in there for free. And he was willing to just help out some students trying to do a project on the side. And then we would charge 50 bucks a month for these, you know, local businesses downtown to put their video up on this TV. But then what happened is people started saying, well, why don’t you put a TV in my business and then give me a discount on advertising on the other TV. And so that snowballed pretty quick. But we didn’t have any money we were doing this to we spent 400 bucks on the first TV and we went to a Best Buy, what was then a future shop, and they did a little financing kiosk in the middle of self-serve financing kiosk and said, Apply now for a 90 day no interest, no payment credit card. And so we applied and all of a sudden it said, you’re approved for 2500 bucks. And so 2500 bucks just happened to be at the time, in 2008, the amount of money it took to buy a TV amount, a computer and cables to install a television. And so essentially we would buy a TV. We had 90 days to sell enough advertising to pay it off. Excuse me. And so we did that 13 times over. And we went from our, our forecast of $8,000 in revenue the first year, which was 20, and then to about 100 grand the next year. And it was on the backs of a 90 day, no interest credit card.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 10:18

Love it. Talk about hustle, right? Yeah.

Rob Murray 10:20

Oh, yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 10:21

That would be a great pitch for, like, at least a story on Shark Tank. I feel like the sharks would eat that one up. Talk about your sales pitch. I know you’ve had sales training, but at that point, again, you’re walking in cold. You’re on a skateboard. What’s your sales pitch to some of these these businesses? Well.

Rob Murray 10:39

Back then it was just like it was actually really simple. So we said our our students party. Your people that want you want to come here. Yes they do come here. Okay, great. We have a TV up at the University Center. We’ll make you a video for free. If you like the video, you pay us 50 bucks a month. No contract to put your video up on that TV. Everybody’s like, sure, no problem. So we take a bunch of pictures with an HP point and shoot camera. We skateboard away, come back two hours later and we show them the video and they’d be like, Holy shit, this is great. Here’s my 50 bucks. But you know, what we found out was doing something for free and proving to them that we would do it when we said we would do it, build trust. We asked people three years later what was the number of reasons? Number one reason why you decided to work with us? And the number one feedback, and we still get it to today, is you do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it.

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[EO Southwest Ontario] Finding Your Niche and Building a Purpose-Driven Business With Rob Murray

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

In this episode…

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Related Episodes

Quotable Moments

Action Steps

Sponsor for this episode…

Episode Transcript

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