Keeping it Local | Christopher Marentis at Surefire Local

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Christopher Marentis 0:00
And I think it’s an indication that we really move from being a services company where the perception is you could turn it on and off. You know, people turn on and off advertising to being sort of a system that helps a couple of we operate like almost like QuickBooks for digital marketing.

Alexander Ferguson 0:28
In part one of my conversation with Christopher Marentis, of Surefire Local, he talked about his company’s efforts to bring the online marketing power of a large company into the hands of small businesses. In the second part of our conversation, he discusses how his firsthand experience with his father’s business inspired him to write the book that will eventually serve as the basis for his company. And he takes us deeper into the future of marketing, offering some important insights on what to expect on the road ahead. I’d love to hear the journey now that you’ve been on, you started your company, as a saw as a service company, specifically, and now you’ve transitioned to almost entirely software based as a platform, SAAS. Tell me about what was that journey? Like? How long how long has it been now? And what were some of the hurdles that you had to overcome, that another entrepreneur can learn from?

Christopher Marentis 1:20
Yeah, sure. You know, I started the company, after being CEO to venture backed startups in the web two, oh, actually, a company called ad this were the first, you know, web two companies funded back in 2007, something like that. And, you know, I realized how local marketing was going to change, and I was never really a local marketer per se. But I grew up in a small business household, my dad was an HVAC contractor. And I saw how local business owners were literally getting ripped off by all the big companies, you know, a, the web dot coms and the yellow pages, and all those different folks, because they really just were these cookie cutter, you know, not really doing the work. I mean, what a lot of entrepreneurs don’t even realize is that when they do paid media, doing those companies, 50 cents of every dollar they give them doesn’t even go to them acquiring a customer, they’re putting it in their pocket. And they’re not being transparent about that. So I wrote a book about this new world of marketing, just to educate business owners, like my dad, to say, you know, if I were you guys, here’s, here’s the way I would do the world. And it was really, you know, this world was proliferating lots of new channels, you could win get more than your fair share of new customers in your market, if you just had a coordinated, firm strategy of communication and data across all these channels.

Alexander Ferguson 2:53
What was what has this journey been like now since 2017, launching at full, where you’re more sounds like all of your effort has not gone into this bucket of just this software side? What is it like to now scale software of this style versus a service based?

Christopher Marentis 3:14
Yeah, no, it’s been a journey. That started when we launched our first generation of software in 2017. The first sort of part of that journey was, you know, really, honing in on product market fit, and our customer journey from the sales and what the expectations were of what we were to implementation, and then ongoing, customer stewardship. Getting that aligned properly was was critical and understanding what the right messaging should be. And through that, we also learned what customers liked what they’d like to have in the platform. Example is, you know, we had all this content, you know, sort of management, but there was no where to store and manage, you know, media, like, like, like pictures and videos and content and logos and things like that. So, you know, next generation, we launched a gallery in it, you know, so little, like, there’s a lot of improvements and enhancements that really made this very useful. We learned from that customers, again, that product market fit right, then, once we knew we were launching the next gen product in September, probably the spring of last year, we started completely revamping our entire marketing and sales, operations and leadership, so that we really started marketing as a product company, and creating a flywheel and you know, efficiency of customer data. acquisition is really critical in a SaaS business to make it work. And we just completed that literally, you know, q1 of this year. So now we’re really starting to gear up to, to actually grow in an exponential way over the next year or two, you know, hopefully, as the COVID thing is going to go the other way,

Alexander Ferguson 5:24
on that, on that topic of how do you see this environment that we’re in? How do you think it will affect both of the local businesses that you’re working with, as well as a technology and platform provider?

Christopher Marentis 5:41
What’s interesting, you know, for us, one of the things that we did not have that much in terms of customer pauses or reductions, we had some, but not nearly as much as our scenario planning, when this thing first hit, bought, we might, and I think it’s an indication that we really move from being a services company, where the perception is you could turn it on and off. You know, people turn on and off advertising to being sort of a system that helps a couple of we operate like almost like QuickBooks for digital marketing. And you can see that their numbers year over year and such. So that was really, really interesting. You know, in terms of customer acquisition, I actually think this is a big opportunity for us, as we come out of this to actually take market share from others, because there is a lot of frustration. And you know, in fact, one of the things, you know, on our website, you’d see as a agency antidote, and playing around with this idea of agency and do not that agencies are bad, inherently. But there’s a frustration. And that’s why there’s a lot of churn in this industry, that they don’t feel like they understand what agencies do for them.

Alexander Ferguson 7:03
Looking forward here of the future. What do you what kind of tech innovations do you predict we’ll see, in the near term, like the next year or two and the long, a little bit longer? Like, like, 510 years from now?

Christopher Marentis 7:18
Yeah, well, you know, I think that, you know, it’s sort of talked about a lot, but, you know, I think, you know, AI, that’s going to create more and more automation, you know, automation is that, because, you know, people are time starved, and they want to get more efficient, you know, so, you know, automation through AI is going to be a bigger and bigger part of where things are going in the future. And, you know, the key to doing that is having data, that’s accurate data, because otherwise AI doesn’t work. And that’s where we think, you know, we have a sort of a moat around our business and opportunity, that to deliver value to customers. The other thing I think, is going to be around virtual reality, or augmented reality, I think it’s going to change a lot of different categories and in a lot of different ways, from how you present, you know, your, you know, to your customers, you know, meaning my customers, customers, you know, you know, the benefits of doing work with them, whether it be a dentist or a you know, or, or home remodeler. You know, whatever, you know, I think, you know, I, you know, it’s gonna just change a lot of the way people think about augmented reality from a gaming perspective, but it’s really going to have huge business implications, you know, it’s gonna take a while, but that’s, we’re talking next five years, that’s going to be a big piece of it too.

Alexander Ferguson 8:53
I love that you paint the picture of AR and VR because I’m 100% with you, that it’s it’s the new, more immersive way to learn and connect and understand if anything, today’s environment where we’re have to be a distance, we’re leaning more on technology to close out last question of is there any books that you’ve read over the years or podcasts or audiobooks or, or insights, places that you found good insight as a leader to grow your business and to grow as as a business owner?

Christopher Marentis 9:27
You know, there’s a lot of different places that you know, but you know, I was talking about this with someone else recently. And it was really related to that actually another entrepreneur who wanted advice about growing the business and such. And, you know, you know that if you’re if your business, whatever business you’re in, you know, a lot of people focus on marketing and sales first You know, and it’s really around the product. And there are people out there like Seth Godin, who, you know, if you read his, you know, his, you know, newsletter every day, it’s this sort of really brief little thing. It really is around delighting your customer, you know, whatever that customer is, whatever you’re about, and everything in that customer journey delights it, you know. So, there’s a lot of different you know, content and materials you could get on that. But that’s, that’s sort of what I’ve been obsessive about recently.

Alexander Ferguson 10:37
That concludes the audio version of this episode. To see the original and more visit our UpTech Report, YouTube channel. If you know a tech company, we should interview, you can nominate them at UpTech report.com. Or if you just prefer to listen, make sure you subscribe to this series on Apple podcast, Spotify or your favorite podcasting app.