103 | From Local to Legendary: Marketing Secrets with Wizard of Ads’ Ryan Chute

Welcome back to another episode of freedom blueprint podcast, where we're helping you as the business owner, really move your business and level up to the next spot. And today we're going to do that by having Ryan Chute from wizard of ads coming and hanging out with us. listen, Ryan and his team help companies go from local to legendary, not by shouting louder.

But by telling the stories that actually stick. So Ryan, appreciate you coming and hanging out with us today,

Hey, thank you so much

for having me. I really appreciate it.

I'm excited to hear a little bit about your journey and a little bit about, Wizard of ads and how you guys help businesses But, let's start out the journey with how did you even get into the marketing space? I'm sure you didn't grow up going, I'm to be a marketer. So walk us through that journey a little bit.

Yeah, listen, I've not always been blessed to run an eight-figure agency. In the early days, I was sitting there and ⁓ selling. I was in the family business, and it was ⁓ the gulags of retail, you know, as you fight it out with the wheeling and the dealing, the toxic workplaces, the bad bosses, the ⁓ questionable behaviors, and the weaponized fear, shame, and guilt.

So I'm like, I gotta go see this guy, he's a legend, having written the books that inspired me to kind of follow him since then. Well, I get there and the first day I'm like, buzzing. I'm just absolutely knocked back by how astoundingly different and how profoundly impactful the message was. Tapping into the laws of nature and physics and ⁓ the fine art and photography, things that

demonstrated a way to communicate that didn't require the grind, the friction, the wheeling and dealing and all of the stuff that I'd worked so hard to do my whole life. And that was a transformational moment for me. By the end of that three days, didn't not sure which Mack truck had hit me, but it was ⁓ definitely a Mack truck. And I kept on going back to...

that class into a number of other classes like Portals in the Twelve Languages and Da Vinci in the Forty Answers and these were the cornerstone of a new education that sat on top of what I thought I knew and ⁓ it's profoundly different than what we get taught and the lives we often lead because we're just trying to survive, we're trying to make sure we cover payroll, we're trying to make sure we pay the bills, we're

We're doing all the things that we need to in our business to be successful. Well, since then, nine years, 10 years, I guess later, going on 11 years later, and I've been a student of Roy's and ⁓ chased after what it was that I was missing, not just in marketing, but in how I led culture and... ⁓

how I address the buying experience because it's both the employee experience and the buying experience that really do lead to those astounding ads that have Wizard of Ads write differently and stand you out against the crowd.

So that's interesting that you brought up two points. One, education, which I think is a great point because I think a lot of people go, ⁓ once I hit this milestone, graduate high school, college, whatever. And for most entrepreneurs, that's when learning starts. ⁓ There's not a whole lot besides the, I don't know, consumer math class that I had when I was in high school, which was the.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

the goof off class that all the seniors took is probably the thing I use the most. But anyway, so about self education and going out and going and finding answers is great. And then the other thing you mentioned that I do not hear a lot of people in the digital marketing space talk about was leadership.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, no, absolutely. digital marketing is certainly an important piece of it. ⁓ But a lot of the time, digital marketers aren't marketers, they're digital salespeople. They're selling the channel they sell, ⁓ which makes them really, really good at either selling it or both selling it and delivering it. Ultimately, there's value in that. It is absolutely critically important. But there ends up being this disconnect, this gap between what matters ⁓

for the business to be successful in how it communicates internally and externally and how that connects to all the bits and pieces. It's very often because they're bogged down with metrics and measures to justify their existence when their truest, most valuable, most powerful contributions are to figure out ways to spend the least amount of money to get the most amount of return, which means that it has to work.

in teams, right? There has to be that holistic approach to marketing that a digital marketer by themselves cannot do. It's scientifically impossible to deliver a marketing solution ⁓ addressing only one of the three things that matter in marketing.

So I'll say this, and I talk to lot of business owners, ⁓ you guys don't get the best. When something's going wrong, a lot of times they end up falling on their digital marketing provider. And the question I always ask them is, what is your booking rate? And it's so amazing.

how they don't know the answer to that. And so to your point of you can't make a solution that matches everybody, it is teamwork. your job is to get it to ring, but then the business has got to take the ball from there and run with it. And I think business owners know that, but I think sometimes ⁓ it's easier to point the finger.

That's right.

It's much easier to point the finger and look, if anyone's going to be good at it, it's going to be sales being the guy who's from sales. say that. Ultimately, it's real easy to blame marketing as the anti-sales department. I did for years and it's God bless them. What salespeople don't recognize or sales leaders don't recognize is that sales is a part of marketing, not the other way around.

Again, it's not silos. Advertising is a part of marketing. It is not marketing, right? ⁓ Truck wraps and logos, the visual style guide of marketing is not brand. It is a tiny little segment of brand that matters, ⁓ but is not marketing ⁓ or branding, frankly. There's so much ⁓ loose words being thrown around to overemphasize

the value of the thing that the people are trying to sell, that it ends up becoming a distraction to what it actually is and how it serves as the whole, not as the individual.

Yeah, that's fantastic. So walk us through like wizard of ads. Where did that? It's a very, it's a, it's a great name. It's clever. what's, what's the idea or what was the idea behind naming it? What it is.

Yeah.

Well, Wizard is derived from ⁓ the term wise-ard ⁓ or wise man. These are the people that would have been recognized in the three wise men in the Bible, or specifically who Roy chose to ⁓ frame that behind. And it's about bringing the gifts that we have to people who need what we have. ⁓ And there's a

big difference in our estimation between a wise man and a smart man. And I say man holistically as in mankind, humankind. ⁓ Ultimately, the intention behind wizard is one that goes against the conventions of what everyone else thinks about when they talk about gurus and ⁓ all the other nonsense that is distracting and diminishing, really because people have oversold themselves.

as to what they bring to the table. ⁓ I'm a student, Roy's a student, we're all students in life, we all have recognized certain things and have paid attention to things that other people haven't paid attention to. That allows us to deliver on something that isn't being delivered on because they're not looking at it from the same perspective. ⁓ So the wisdom that you bring a smart man is the thing that helps them. ⁓

bypass the pitfalls, the blind spots, the roadblocks, the bottlenecks that they would otherwise have because we've walked that road before. We're the old man in the woods helping them through being their guide. ⁓ Which is why you don't see us promote ourselves a whole lot and spend a lot more time celebrating our clients and recognizing what they've done because frankly they're doing 99 % of the work. We're just delivering the message and the words in a way that's more powerful than

than others can because they haven't spent the decade doing it the way that we have.

So give us kind of an overview of different services. Like how do you guys help home service businesses get to that next level? What does that look like with you guys?

Yeah, you know, three things really. Four, if you count the ongoing implementation, the first three things that need to be done are to ⁓ figure out what the authentic leveraged and unleveraged assets are that we can ⁓ showcase, frankly, to bring out the best of that brand. Every brand is different. There's ⁓ certain universal truths and commonalities.

But in that, the problem that lies in that is that pretty much everyone's saying the same standard table stakes nonsense that no one cares about. Right? No one cares about your hours. No one cares about your educated staff. No one cares that you do better, you try more, you care more. Everyone says that. If you can say that and put anyone's name there, and most people will, whether they're honest about it or not, is it means it's invisible.

because they've heard that nonsense before. So what a lot of people ⁓ figure that turns into is ⁓ how am going to tell my origin story and how am going to tell customers about the things that we do good and smarter and better than everyone else? And again, nobody cares, right? We've got to stop talking about that stuff. If you're buying some sort of

Boxed TV commercial that they sell to everyone with the truck parked outside and the booties at the door the smiling handshakes the chat chat at the thermostat they'll work on the equipment and then the then the talk over the kitchen counter and everyone being happy and resolved at the end You are invisible and you've just literally wasted every last penny of those marketing dollars. It is absolutely tragic that that thing exists as a ⁓

presumed solution. You've got to say something that's different, that stands 600 feet above the competition, that is a story that nobody has ever told before and would never be able to tell about themselves. A great example of that, H.L. Bowman. Biggest problem with H.L. Bowman was that there's a G.F. Bowman in the same town two miles away. Right? They both sell the same thing, so...

I leave it to Beaver, a ⁓ television show that's very, very campy back and forth, super funny, and all he's doing, he's always like shooting an arrow into something that he shouldn't, like a fridge or, you know, flirting with the wife or some other silly thing that is so extremely not the technicians or who they are, it's just simply a funny way to entertain people, to get the words H.L. Bowman put into an ad.

on average, six times an ad. Now, to this day, nobody has one single issue remembering H.L. Bowman. Why? Because we are so outrageous in the way that we tell the story, very little of it, by the way, having to do with home services, just enough to let them know that this is the thing we do. ⁓ But people don't need to know the mechanics, the nuts and bolts and all the other silly things.

Right.

that we think they care about in our ads, what they need to know is, know these guys. I like these guys. They feel right to me. I trust them enough to come in my home. They've got a sense of humor and that demonstrates the two things I care about most. One, empathy. Two, competence. And when we have those two things, we have the building blocks of trust. That gets us over the threshold.

It seems to be

that most businesses now, the ones that are doing, I'm going to say pattern interrupt, but really what I mean is entertainment, that they go from it from an entertainment first standpoint, seem to be doing better because, know, with social media, I don't know, I think 20 years ago, I mean, 20 years ago when you were advertising, it was phone book.

Yes.

I mean, there was TV out there as well, but there wasn't a lot of tongue in cheek. There wasn't a lot of, ⁓ a lot of that kind of stuff that was going on. But, ⁓ what do you think the shift has been? do mean, do you think it's the, just the social media generation that we live in now that people would rather be entertained?

Yep.

That's right.

Yeah, it's actually not been a shift. ⁓ This is the wildest thing about this whole thing because it feels like it's been a shift. When I was in furniture industry in Canada 20 years ago, 25 years ago, we had TV commercials where an old man was acting as the coffee table and ⁓

Yeah.

you'd have somebody ringing the doorbell and then looking at the old man like he wasn't there and then it's like the two women having tea on his back and stuff. And all of this stuff, when you entertain the public, you're using a currency that is meant to pay off in the future. You're compounding your investment through retention, right? So the same thing with radio commercials.

When you'd have a radio commercial that's not written by the radio station because they literally have a written mandate that says do not make any commercial better than any other commercial, the expectation will be raised and we can't be having that because we can't keep up with the expectation. Right? So the last company that you need writing your commercials are the ones that'll do it for free and make it sound like a commercial. Right? So

There's a top of a mountain. We've already hit it.

Entertainment is extremely, extremely valuable, particularly the longer your purchase cycle, right? So the longer it is, the longer you have to have them remembering you for when the thing does go wrong and they need to buy the thing that you have to sell. But you can't have entertainment for entertainment sake. When you have entertainment without the ⁓ very strategic scientific anchorings that we're putting in the, the

⁓ echoic retention, the hooks, the audio logos, signatures, the jingles, things that are strategically doing a job, right, then you're going to miss the mark. And a lot of money is going to get invested in a lot of ⁓ flavor is going to be added to something that isn't going to stick. ⁓

There's nothing worse than having a couple of folks standing around the water cooler on Monday saying, hey, did you hear that one about the penguins and the kangaroos and the crocodile? was just such a funny ad. Like, I was like, who was it? I don't even remember. But it was like the kangaroos, though, were like really great. Like, you didn't do the one thing that the ad needed to do, right? Now, when we're done with our clients using

very strategic things in the jingles, in the audio signatures, in the slogans that we say that are something that we call brandable chunks. These are things that a customer will literally sing back to the technician as he's stepping out of his van. And he's like, they see him wearing his thing and they're like, why is this 83 old lady singing to me? Or why are those kids like pointing at the van and like losing their minds?

Why are people coming up to me and literally taking selfies with our our vehicle wraps? Well, it's because we baked all of that in so strategically to make sure that the story sticks enough that they become the preferred choice And it doesn't happen overnight, but it absolutely happens Pretty much without fail in one way or another we're going to see it. There's there's rarely a time it doesn't

the only ones that don't are the ones that don't allow it to work long enough for it to take effect.

So I've talked to business owners that have gone through that process, what you're talking about, where they're singing and there's a local company here that I hear the beginning of the jingle and I know the phone number because they've done such an amazing job at doing that. And now my guess is by being very strategic and working with people that are experts in that sort of thing,

My guess is you're spending less money on marketing on the long term than you are if you don't do that. Is that a fair statement?

You

absolutely are. You're spending as much as you can on marketing until such time as you've hit critical mass, right? So you can spend your 8, 10, 12%. Some folks even spend 15 % because they're looking for critical mass sooner or they're in a different size city that requires that demand for a short period or longer period of time in those bigger cities, right? Because there's just so many people. Well, then you stop.

Spending right there's always going to be a ceiling where you just stop spending right and when you do that You now have the ability to start shrinking that that total marketing budget down and down and down as your revenue is growing ⁓ It is it is Consistently a pattern if people are looking to save money in the first three years of building a holistic marketing strategy They're not going to do it right. There's no point in even starting right if they're looking to

eventually get into a position where they're going to pull an extra 5-10 points to the bottom line, then this is the right strategy to do. And every situation is different. How big is your market? How much competitors do you have? How good are your competitors, both in operational delivery and in their messaging? ⁓ There's a ton of things that are considered. And we know that we can put out our absolute best foot forward and gain market share. ⁓

And every situation is going to be different because every situation is different, frankly. The competitors and the messaging and the we call share a voice, the impact quotient and all of the things that bake into the result you're going to get.

So what are some of the things that you kind of dig into with a home service business before you even get to budget? if I call you and I go, hey, listen, I need some help. What are some things that you kind of start digging into? And really my question, my question is, what do the business owners need to be paying attention to before even thinking budget?

Well, first and foremost, they need to have an operation that delivers. If their operation isn't able to deliver. Now, I'll tell you, somebody who's had a $10 million operation and makes their way to $25 million, they've got a lot of stuff to learn in that period because it's an awful lot more work with different management structures and different systems and different people, frankly, in a lot of cases, that are going to get them to that level.

So they have to have an operation that they are ready and continuously looking to adapt and grow as the business shifts. ⁓ They have to recognize their values, right? And values are deeply, deeply, deeply misunderstood ⁓ function in business today. Values are the things that you won't compromise on when it's hard for you. Now, most people say that they have values, but

The minute it's hard, they flip-flop to the other side. Which is not unreasonable, but that's a belief. And a belief has no consequence, and therefore has no value, because it's just conveniently exchanged for the other thing that is equally worth believing in. And when you have a value that you're willing to take it in the chops for, that's when you're actually delivering value.

Those are your values and that's the thing that the customer values. So that understanding that is huge. 99.9 % of clients that we sign on haven't got a clue how they're going to be valuable to a customer. And that's a big part of this. It's not just about writing ads or TV commercials or radio ads or putting a truck wrap up. All of that stuff is superficial. If we don't have

the thing to back it up, right?

So

I think about the quote from the manhatter about, you know, the Alice's going, going to him and he's like, you know, she's trying to figure out where she's going. And he's like, if you don't know where you're going, any direction will get you there. ⁓ and for me, when you, when you said that, that just popped in my brain of, you know, having core values, having a mission, really knowing your why and having your why. ⁓

That's right.

Yeah, I mean, that seems like it would be pretty valuable for your team to be able to take them where they want to go. They first have to know where they want to go.

That's right. That's right. it's, it's, it's actually when you're on the ocean, you have a sextant and the sextant is, doing the calculation of the North star. Now the North star is over the pole. It's the only one that doesn't move. All the rest of the stars move. So while the other stars are very ⁓ informative of, different things from constellations and, and positioning, it's only the North star that allows you to navigate. Right? So if you don't have a sextant,

If you don't have a North Star, you don't know where you're going. Right? And if you don't know where you're going, if you don't stand for something that does not move when it's hard for you, right? Then no one's going to follow you because you're not going anywhere. How long do followers follow people who aren't going anywhere? Right? This is the exact same thing that leaders have to recognize is that

Yeah.

Until you stand for something on how you care for your people, customers, employees, yourself, frankly, then why in the world would I want to be, you know, associate my personal brand with this business's brand or the brand that you're putting forth Mr. Business Owners.

Well, I'm glad you brought that up about employees. That was going to be one of my questions is maybe not question, maybe more of a statement, having a brand that stands for something and being out there, people want to be part of that.

That's right.

If you're,

if you're just like, everybody's my customer. do all things for all people. First of all, that's exhausting and not very profitable, but, ⁓ yeah, I mean, the more you lean into this, I, to me, I feel like the easier it is to have that bucket full of team members and people that want to roll in the direction, because now they know what direction they're even going in, which is such an incredible thing in a business when everybody has clarity and direction on what's going on.

Absolutely. mean, you think about a ⁓ ship where half the ship is rowing backwards and half is rowing forward. Where are you going? If only the left side or the right side are rowing, you're just going in circles. This is it. And if one side is stronger than the other, you're always going to be swaying to the side that's stronger. So it is about balance and finding the fit, finding the...

Yep, just spinning around.

the right tension, finding the places of resistance and removing that resistance or friction. That's what truly makes a brand better, which is where I fixate. As a marketer, if you only think about marketing things, if you only think about the ads and the marketing department and the digital stuff, you're only thinking about a fraction of what actually matters at the end of the day.

that the functions of marketing are brand awareness and sales activation and lead capture. But marketing is the sales department, the advertising department. It's the actual delivery of the product, you know, in the various ways that it gets delivered. All of those become exactly why or why not you will grow. If your operation isn't there, it's to put a bunch of... ⁓

⁓ of accelerant on your fire is only going to let more and more people know not to use you the next time. And that's problematic if you don't have a solid operation that you can stand behind and feel proud.

Yeah, that's fantastic. All right, let's shift gears a little bit. We think about a little lightning round action. Let's do it. All right, so what is one book that you would recommend?

Let's do it.

Selfishly, I'm going to say Wizard of Ads. It's actually a trilogy, but a lot of folks haven't read that book, and my goodness, it is a book that I read two, three times a year ⁓ because it just continues to remind me of all of the things. Now, there is three books in the series, but that's the first of three.

Okay, great recommendation. Where would they get the book? that a Audible, Amazon? Okay, fantastic. What's a business lesson that took you too long to learn?

Amazon? Yeah, Amazon.

⁓ that

Transactional living, transactional behaviors in business and in life ⁓ is survival mode thinking. is fixed thinking. is stunting growth. It is not the way of the future. It has a shelf life and a life cycle that make it absolutely exhausting to live life. And that when you can get past transactional thinking, selling, ⁓

and living frankly, ⁓ that your life is going to exponentially improve.

that's a good one. Very good. If you were running a $3 million HVAC business today, what's the first thing you're going to do in your marketing?

Well, I guess there's a lot of variables to that. It depends on how big the city is. It depends on what my competition looks like. But at $3 million in most any city in America, you can get on the radio ⁓ and speak to a customer for two and a half hours a year ⁓ for less than a dollar. So if I want to talk to half a million people fairly quickly, I'm going to

do that ⁓ and then I'm going to get my message real, real, real strong. Now, could I do that on TV and social media? Yep, absolutely. Is it going to be as economical? Not even close. Is it going to be ⁓ more potent? Nope, because I can get frequency rate on radio and that's going to make a difference. Now, in America, in the top 150 cities in America today, we know without a shadow of a doubt that we can reach

in excess of 50 % of that marketplace, with the majority of markets being well in excess of 70 % of the marketplace infrequently. when we measure, we know that even with aggressive, consistent frequency, we can get them 42 % of the time in the biggest cities in America, ⁓ which means that we can convince more people more often, more frequently, with a powerful message.

than any other medium thus far. Because that may change as the world changes, but most people don't appreciate how entrenched TV and radio are in the traditional models.

I'm telling you, I don't know the last time I've heard someone talk about radio with that certainty. That's fantastic.

Well,

it's infallible data as well, and it's because it's measured by measuring the subsonic pulse of every single radio station legally obligated to emit a pulse in America, and then measured with two times the statistical sample size of every single person that they use the sampling with in America. So the data is within 1 % standard deviation of accurate, both in

the stations that are being listened to and the other stations that people listen to, how long, what the frequency is, ⁓ what the likelihood is on a Saturday versus a Tuesday, what time of day. This data is astoundingly accurate. When you compare that to the astoundingly false data that you see on Google and Bing and Facebook with the reporting metrics that they're giving you and how much corruption is going on in those spaces. ⁓

People are being lied to at dramatic levels and not by the digital marketers. They're just doing their job. They're doing the reporting that's been provided to them, but by the people who are providing the data for the digital marketers who are at a criminal level showing data that is without a doubt, beyond a shadow of a doubt, false. Upwards of 64 % wrong. ⁓ That basically means you can't trust

pretty much any bit of data that you see from your digital reports that you get.

heart a little bit. With so many businesses spending so much on Google and making decisions based on Google reporting and I got to be honest with you and this is by no means am I an expert in this space I have you on here because this is your expertise I would have thought the cheapest way to get in front of the most people would have been social media I just and I'm guessing most people would be in that same camp as me just

It's devastating.

Yep, a lot of people do.

Our

most recent research comes from ⁓ work and it shows that it has about a 40 % higher price in socials than it does on radio.

Okay, all right, very cool. So, all right, so here's the next question. If you could challenge our listeners to do one marking related thing this week, what would it be?

Yeah, 40 % higher.

gosh, ⁓ if I was going to do it, I would start at the beginning, and I would start at the beginning with something that I found to be the truth in mission statements. I have a very strong position around mission statements, mainly because for about seven of the 10 years I've been with Wizard of Ads, they made just famously good fun of mission statements being nonsense. And I asked myself, why is it nonsense ⁓ having a military past and recognizing that there's ⁓

a value to it at some level.

My mission statement comes from a lot of research, a lot of data, and it breaks down into three buckets. Helping people win in a trustworthy and grateful manner. These are actions, right? A mission is an action. It's an actionable function. So helping people win, being trustworthy, living gratefully, the action of doing these things. What does that mean for your business? What does helping people win mean to your business?

What does being trustworthy actually mean? Integrity is nonsense. Right? It's just an ideal. No one listens to that, pays attention to it, or lives by it. Because it's not tangible and there's no action to be taken. Right? But being trustworthy is. What does that mean to you? What does that mean to your business? What are the things you will and will not do? What does gratitude have to do with anything? Gratitude frankly surprised me. When I did the research, I did not think it was going to make the list.

It not only made the list, it's only one of three on the list, right? And it's gratitude that we anchor in our humility. We remove our ego, we create our gratitude, we act with abundance, we find happiness in the simplest of things, both for our customers and our employees. Gratitude is astoundingly important. What does it mean to your business?

How do we show gratitude? How do we live gratefully for our people? How do we be trustworthy? How are we acting in a trustworthy manner? How are we worthy of trust? What are the actions and behaviors we're taking to do that? Now the ones that you're not willing to compromise on, no matter what, you will die, literally die on that hill. Those are your core values. Everything else is just a convenient belief that will interchange depending on the situation.

Now you have something to talk about.

That's fantastic. So Ryan, if someone wants to find out more about you, your agency, how you can help them move the needle, how would they connect with you?

People who want to talk with me directly, Wizard Ryan Schute is all my socials, my website, RyanSchute.com, and I also own a niche site for Wizard of Ads called WizardOfAds.Services. ⁓ Those are the places where you can kind of get a more granular look at how I approach essential service marketing. ⁓ Wizard of Ads as a whole is at WizardOfAds.com, and the Wizard Academy is WizardAcademy.org.

Very cool. Well, Ryan, we really appreciate you coming and hanging out today. And you got me thinking about a lot of stuff. And I'm sure the people listening are going, wait a minute, I got to connect with this guy because I have so many more questions. I do appreciate your time. I know you're busy. And thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us today.

It's an absolute treat. really do hope that I got some feeling stirred. That's always my intention with these things. ⁓ I just want people to know that they got this. They can absolutely do it. It's not as overwhelming or as scary as it seems. ⁓ It's brave. ⁓ It's vulnerable. It's courageous. But it is something that will absolutely change the game.

We appreciate it, Ryan. Thank you so much.

Thanks so much, Justin.