Is it possible to reinvent yourself…even after 20 years?

When I started chatting with Andrew Aebersold, I realized he's a rare breed of entrepreneur. After two decades running his digital marketing agency Mediaura, he's still adapting to new technologies and focusing on where he can best help people.

In our wide-ranging discussion on The Hero Show, Andrew shared how he got his start in the early Internet days accidentally…and ended up finding meaningful work improving behavioral healthcare marketing. I enjoyed exploring his unique skills for "translating" complex tech into plain language so clients fully understand solutions.

We also touched on why integrity guides so many of his business decisions, even when it means walking away from revenue. I think you'll be inspired by his lifelong commitment to mastery and ethics.

If you want to hear how a nimble mindset keeps this digital hero at the top of his game, don't miss my revealing interview with Andrew Aebersold!

has their superpowers

whether that's their

fancy flying suit

made by their

genius intellect

or the ability to call

down thunder from the sky

in the real world

heroes have what

I call a zone of genius

which is either

a skill or a

set of skills

that you were

born with

or you developed

over the course of

your career

that really sets you apart

it allows you to slay the villains

for your clients that kind of stuff

come on top of their own journeys

and the way I like to frame it

for my guests is if you look

at all the skills that you've developed

over the course

of running Mediaura

for the last

20 years

you probably have

a common thread

that sort of ties

all those skills together

and that's probably where you find

your superpower

so with that framing

what do you think your superpower

is as the founder of your company

Andrew Aebersold: before I started this company

I was doing

freelancing and consulting

and what I

visualized as the kind

of perfect role

for me at that time

was a liaison between the

customers who have their

problems and the technology

that can solve those problems

and being able to interpret

the issues that they're having

in the language that they're

to something that means something

to a person that speaks technology

that can then allow these ideas

to surface of solutions

for it and having the wherewithal

to sometimes correct a person

on either side of maybe you're approaching

this the wrong way or maybe there's

a better way to do this with grace

and tact so that at the end of it

you get this beautiful product

that fixes the issue they had

that's potentially better than

what they started with

in terms of what their idea

of for an ideal solution was

and everybody really feels good about it

at no point does anybody feel like

they didn't get their way

because they're all happier with

what occurred as a result of that

when you can do that for the most

complex of things

like a custom a piece of custom software

it becomes a little bit easier

to do it for a marketing campaign

or a lead generation campaign

because it's generally less technical

​

Andrew Aebersold: I'm here. Hello.

Richard Matthews: Glad to have you here. I know before we get too far into this, I always like to give a brief introduction.

So you are the CEO at Mediaura. Is that right?

Andrew Aebersold: Yeah, that's right. I started Mediaura 20 years ago and founder and CEO.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. 20 years is a long time to run a company. Most people say most businesses don't make it past like the first of five years. So 20 years is a long time to be running a company.

Andrew Aebersold: It feels like a long time, but it's a great success. And I will tell you, I feel like I've reinvented it probably four times in those 20

Richard Matthews: That's awesome. So, what I want to get into first is what is it that you guys are known for? And you know, this question sets up who you are now, what's your business like who do you serve, what do you do for them?

Andrew Aebersold: That's a good question. I think it's very valid that I just said it's reinvented itself four times over the past 20 years, because when we started out, we were building web applications, a lot of back end software partnered with advertising agencies, building things to make their jobs easier and more efficient with their clients, and that evolved because once somebody knows you're the digital guy or whatever, they'll come to you.

And that's why we realized our area of expertise is primarily behavioral healthcare. In terms of which industry or which vertical and lead generation. We're great at marketing digital marketing for a variety of industries, and we've got a lot of experience doing those, but that's probably the one where we go the deepest, if you will.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. And so you guys have started to shift focus to narrow down to just that industry recently?

And those were probably some of the heavier hit businesses that year, so we're continuing to maintain that diversity and explore other opportunities, but putting the effort in new business acquisition in behavioral health care.

Richard Matthews: Nice. Yeah. And COVID definitely hit a lot of industries really hard. So, the fact that you guys not only survived that, but are continuing to grow afterwards is you know, it says something about the type of company you guys are running and the results you get for clients. So,

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So what I want to get into then is your origin story, right? Every good comic book hero has an origin story. It's the thing that made them into the hero they are today. And so we want to hear that story. Were you born a hero? Were you know, bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get a digital marketing and app building and what not?

Or did you start in a job and eventually move to become an entrepreneur? Basically, where did you come from? And how did you get Mediaura started?

Andrew Aebersold: Yeah definitely wasn't born a hero. At least I don't think so. Maybe they'll change that story 50 years from now when I'm gone, who knows? But the crazy thing is that when I was coming out of high school, even I was already running businesses. So I knew there was an entrepreneurial spirit.

Well rounded when it comes to having conversations or reading the room or understanding, you know, what the real driving factor is in this business deal. Like, what are they trying to accomplish. I was a little naive to those things. And so together we were able to use our powers to take this little pipe dream, if you will, and grow it into something that's, you know, impacted a lot of lives, both on the client side. Their clients are going team members, et cetera. So definitely not bitten by a spider, unfortunately.

Richard Matthews: No, but I love the story to just especially, you know, the talk of just wanting to help people. It's one of the reasons we run this podcast is to show that, you know, entrepreneurs really are out to add their value to the world and to make the world a better place with with your unique skill sets.

So we have a nice separation there, but it's nice that you can do that with your wife. So, but yeah, same kind of thing. I have to hire people on my team that help support the areas that I'm weak. You know, so for me, it's like project management and that kind of stuff and making sure that deadlines are hit.

Cause I'm more of a here's the vision. There's what we're going to do kind of person and, you know, systems development. But when it comes down to actually like implementing, I need implementers. So.

And one of those was. You know, I'm maybe not the most reliable person on our team to consistently do the same things over and over every day, but if you need something solved and there's a complicated issue around it, I'm the one to come in there and use my technical abilities and creativity to figure it out. And, you know, that's kind of my superpower, I guess, if you're sticking with the hero.

Kind of concept, right?

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that's one of the things that cracks me up because like we do, we provide a very consistent service for our clients, right? With the podcast agency. And so there's a lot of like, we do the same thing over and over again on deadlines and that kind of stuff, which is the opposite of my superpower.

And so like, I'm good at that part. And then like, actually running the system, not good at that part at all. So I have to have people who are good at that. And so, yeah I feel you there.

Andrew Aebersold: Well, I think that the other part of this that is worth pointing out, well, besides the fact that I keep thinking of the old vanilla, I song, when we say, if there's a problem, like check out the hook, my DJ fixes it or whatever it is. I keep thinking this song in my head, like, but the other part of it is acknowledging where you are weak and then doing what you can to either grow or learn from that or staffing around it.

So I've spent a lot of time in the past, you know, five years, just. Absorbing book after book, podcast after podcast, you know, anything I can YouTube videos on growing as a leader, growing as somebody that can communicate well, because I realized, okay, well, I'm not maybe always saying the right things or doing the right things with interpersonal communication. How can I get better at that?

And I think that's incredibly important, especially in a field of technology where it's always evolving right

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. So what I want to dive into then is you mentioned a second ago is your superpowers and you know, every iconic hero has their superpowers, whether that's their fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect or the ability to call down thunder from the sky in the real world. Heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you developed over the course of your career.

And that's probably where you find your superpower. So with that framing, what do you think your superpower is as the founder of your company?

Andrew Aebersold: You know, I tried to, before I started this company, I was doing freelancing and consulting. And what I visualized as the kind of perfect role for me at that time was a liaison between the customers who have their problems and the technology that can solve those problems and being able to interpret the issues that they're having in the language that they're comfortable speaking and translating it to something that means something to a person that speaks technology.

In terms of what their idea of for an ideal solution was, and everybody really feels good about it. At no point does anybody feel like they didn't get their way because they're all happier with what occurred as a result of that. When you can do that for the most complex of things, like a custom, a piece of custom software, it becomes a little bit easier to do it for a marketing campaign or a lead generation campaign because it's generally less technical.

Even though there are some heavy technical aspects to it that we do, especially with the evolution of machine learning and AI, but it takes the confusion out of it and it gives everybody this sense of clarity. And I realized that not everybody has the ability to kind of see all of that stuff.

When I'm able to get in and do that, the results are tremendous for the client, for my team, everybody. It's an amazing thing. I wish I could clone myself. To do more of that, which has always been an issue with scaling this company. But I think that is one of my superpowers and I can do it for our business, but I can also do it when, you know, setting up a business, right? Had to be able to see this for our company as well. So I would say that's, really what comes to mind.

And so like one of the examples that comes to mind for me is my dad was an engineer and a scientist. And so I learned a lot of, like, being able to speak that world. And, you know, my brother ended up becoming a mechanic and, like, they're both really good in that area. And then I got into marketing, which was, you know, that's the, you know, the psychology and everything and all those kind of things.

And I ended up, a couple of years ago, working for a solar company. A regional solar company in Southern California. And they were developing a their engineers were developing a product for manufacturers that allowed manufacturers to learn exactly how much energy a particular out, you know, item came from their came out of their their manufacturing plants.

And I remember I spent probably. Six weeks with their engineers. Cause they were like, we need to figure out how to sell this to the marketplace because it's super powerful. It has all sorts of cool things. And like, and you know, I, six weeks of like the engineer is telling me all the cool things that it did.

Because a manufacturer knows what their cost of goods sold is, but what they don't know generally, and they can't, couldn't tell until this, until they developed this set of software and stuff, was that they could tell the energy cost of goods sold like all the way down to like each loaf of bread here, much how much energy it costs to make this loaf of bread.

And so they could include that on a spreadsheet and track it. And it was like, it was, you know, a COG it was one word. And it took me like six weeks, but, it's like a superpower to be able to understand all these things that they're telling you and then turn it into something that another human being would understand.

And it's a skill of translation. And so like, when you see it, when you have it, like, it can make all the difference in the world. And that went on to become a multimillion dollar product, but they couldn't figure out how to sell it and tell someone who know how to translate to come in and be like, okay, here's all the things that you're saying. And here's what the market actually cares about.

Okay, tell us what you need to build and we'll build it. But not a lot of developers can look at the problem and then understand all the tools in the universe that they have at their disposal to fix that problem. And that's been one of the things that I've been blessed with is that since I have a development background myself, I was able to pick those tools out and say, Okay, what if we use this to do that?

But there are tools available there that your average person doesn't know about. And your Google rep doesn't know about that if you understand how to tap into and leverage on behalf of your client, you can get results that are significantly better than the average. And it's not that you had to necessarily create something new. You just had to know how to match the right things up. And that becomes part of that translation as well.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And that translation bit is just, you know, I've experienced it a couple of times and I've gotten pretty good at it in a couple of areas that I'm, that I work in. Right? And so like the biggest thing now is, you know, we've narrowed our focus down to just like the podcasting agency.

And so, you know, where I used to have to like try and learn. All the things that you can learn about, you know, the different areas that we worked in. I would read as many books and learn as much of the language as I can so I could try and translate back and forth. Now we do just the one thing.

You know, even though we're all speaking English, so to speak, you know, the way that you talk about development or the way that you talk about campaigns or the way that you talk about, you know, if you're a doctor or a lawyer, or, you know, you run a behavioral, what is it you said? Behavioral.

Andrew Aebersold: Behavioral health care.

Richard Matthews: Health care, like they have a specific world and a language and everything that they think about and they talk about. And he's like, even in the world of marketing, like you go from a doctor's office to a pest control person, they don't talk about their leads the same way, right?

And so you have to know how to communicate to them, like, you know, cause they're talking about, you know, patients and a pest control person is talking about backyards and stuff like that and those are like simple things, but you have to be able to speak multiple languages.

And that's all from a 20 year history of culminating to it. So it's hard to pick one, right? When you say, oh, I'm gonna lean into my behavioral health care side. But you're absolutely right that each of those speaks their own language. And if you show up to the table. And you don't understand, you know, ADC or VOB or, you know, how they're getting, you know, their leads patient acquisition, those types of things you feel alienated, you feel like you're at a disadvantage because marketing is not the same for everyone.

Richard Matthews: So I think.

Andrew Aebersold: The evolution of our company. I

Richard Matthews: A good place to ask you about the flip side of your superpower, which is always, of course, your fatal flaw. I, you know, just like every Superman has his kryptonite or Wonder Woman has her bracelets of victory. She can't remove without going mad. You've probably had a flaw that's held back in your company, something you've struggled with.

For me, it was things like perfectionism kept me from shipping product. Cause I was like, we got to speak a little bit more before we ship something. And then you never ship anything. So you've not done anything. Or for me, one of the other ones was not having a good relationship with boundaries, so like not good boundaries with my clients, not good boundaries with my time and things like that.

Andrew Aebersold: Think that some of them that you referenced are relevant to me too, you know, boundaries and things like that were probably more of an issue in the past. They still crop up every now and then. I think the common denominator is, you know, since I have this desire to help people, it's hard for me to ever say no because I do want to help people. And so that's the thing that would catch me out the most is that somebody has an issue they want help. I would say let's do it. My team would look at me and say, is that client too small for us? Or, you know, don't we have other things that we're already committed to in this timeline? How can we stop that and help this person too? And then I would end up, you know, burning the candle at both ends, so to speak, to try and really help them out.

So I realized, okay, well, not everyone is gonna see the benefit of this, it's maybe not worth it to burn myself out and try to do it in this particular case, but I couldn't, still couldn't say no. Right. I still, I would just I would know going into it, I'm probably gonna get burned on this one. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna help 'em. But, you know, I can't say no.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that's an interesting thing to learn how to do. And I know, you know, like my business grew because I said yes to everything. And like, that's a bad lesson to learn as a business owner.

Yeah. And I know for probably the first decade of growth, it was like, if I just learn all the things and like, I was saying yes to things that were like in the world of marketing, but still like, that's a humongous world. And so you build, you know.

Andrew Aebersold: Oh, It's huge.

And so when we narrowed our focus down from doing lots of things in marketing to just doing the podcast agency. That, it really helped with the whole what to say yes and no to and, or what to say no to, more specifically. I was like, okay, if it's not in this world, it's just a no. And so that was the easier of the two things to learn.

And then, the harder part of what to learn was, for me, was how to what then do you say yes to. So what was interesting to me, I have a good friend of mine. He's on this podcast probably a couple of years ago now. His name is Lucas Root and he works, for the Pokemon company and he's added several billion dollars to their bottom line.

And so, what came, what for me, what I had to learn was, like, what does it mean to say yes till it hurts and then fix the pain? And what it came down to for me was saying yes to opportunities inside of our market. So things like, you know, speaking events and lead gen opportunities and other things that are like, you know, when you get to a certain size in business, you get hit up all the time with, you know, cold outreach from people that are like, Hey, we can do this for you. We do this for you.

And what I started doing was just like, if it was even anywhere in our world, I would just say yes to it. And then figure out what would you know, what happened on the other side. So things like, you know, I spoke at like on eight different stages last year and spoke at a few different conferences on virtual conferences and spent way more money than I ever thought I would on marketing things from different you know, cold outreach staff and all of that sort of culminated in like we had that eight and a half X revenue growth I was telling you about before we got on the call.

And then you have to work on immediately fixing that pain. So that systems are people that you can put in place to mitigate all the things that you've just said yes to. So anyways, that's sort of my thought on that.

Andrew Aebersold: That's a good way to look at it. I mean, it's definitely flipping the perspective a little bit. I'm glad that you were able to put some qualifiers on the saying yes, because somebody that maybe hasn't gone through those struggles that we have on, you know, saying yes to too many things might not have realized how to say no yet.

Right? And I think that's the part. So we were chatting ahead of this and you mentioned the eight X growth, which that's amazing. I'd love to see that this year. Last year for us was that stabilizing year. And part of that was me learning to say no. And us learning to pass on opportunities that weren't kind of in the trajectory of this company.

And I'd say that it's not a hundred percent there yet. It's still in that transitional piece, but it's definitely becoming easier when I'm in networking groups or just randomly chatting somebody up. What do you guys do, that I can get more specific and it's, making sense. And they're immediately saying, I need to introduce you to so and so because they need your help. Whereas before it was like, cool. And I'm like, I guess they don't know what we do.

Do everything for everyone, I guess is what it was.

And then it gives you more opportunities to say yes, right? Cause more things will come down that pipeline. And man, it was a huge lesson for me that I couldn't have articulated that a year ago because I was still in the phase of like learning how to say no and like learning what to say no to and one of the things that helped me, and maybe this will help you or anyone else who's struggling with this, is I took a lot of the things because I've I've got 20 years of experience in the marketing space.

So we've got lots of tools and lots of resources and lots of templates and lots of like, these things work if you apply them in this way in the marketplace. I turned all those into like PDFs and mind maps and just like resources that I can hand out to people. And now when I get on the phone with someone who's like, clearly, you know, from like what we're doing, we're like, I have things that I can send you and I just send them stuff.

And then people are like, you build reciprocity, I get referrals from that kind of stuff, I've been invited onto stages for things like that, because they're like, they know exactly what you do, who you stand for, and you know, they also know you have expertise in all these other areas. That's been really helpful for me is I actually took the time to take a lot of my knowledge and turn them and just like into the simple resources that I could send to people when I needed to say no to them.

And I still wanted to feel good about it.

Andrew Aebersold: You said something in there that I think is worth pulling out just briefly because how many times have we heard somebody come along and say, you could make a lot of money. You could make money doing this. You could make money. We should do this. We could make money doing this, et cetera.

So I think being able to spot those, we could make money if we did this little distractions and kind of fend them off is something everybody should. You know, be an expert at, and if they're not become one.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And it's hard too, because like you could make money. And then it's always, it's that whole grass is greener kind of thing. You think the grass is greener, of course you could make money doing this, you could make money doing that, but every single one of those things has a whole set of systems and processes and people and like, languages that you have to learn, and there's just so much to it that like, it absolutely will distract from whatever it is that your main products and service offerings are in the marketplace.

And then you develop a unique solution to help them solve that problem. And the important part is that unique solution for the marketplace. And so, any of those things that don't fit into that unique solution, are things that you probably could make money with, but you know, you have to develop all of the things that go around that unique solution in order to move it to the marketplace.

And man, that was a hard learned lesson for a long time. And it was one of those things that like in my business, you can look at over the last 15 years the flatline flow trajectory until we were like, nope. We're going to do nothing but this, and then you see a humongous spike in growth. Right, and it's definitely an important lesson to learn.

Andrew Aebersold: And I think the inverse of it is finding something you're passionate about. That's not driven by the money, right?

Richard Matthews: One of my favorite phrases is mastery begets passion. And, those can go, they can go both ways, but a lot of people are like, I need to find what I'm passionate about, and I generally would tell people, like, passion is a fleeting thing. But if you master something, you can create passion and so, anyways I like that as a, for me it's storytelling.

That's why we're in the podcasting world. Because I think storytelling is one of the, like, foundational, like, skills of humanity. It's one of the reasons that makes us, uncompetable on the. You know, Earth's universe, right? Nothing can compete with us because we tell stories. And so anyways, like, I'm really passionate about that, but a lot of it is because I've spent years mastering it.

Andrew Aebersold: Right? That's absolutely right spot on.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So I want to switch gears a little bit then and talk about your common enemy. Right? So every superhero has an arch nemesis. It's the things that they constantly have to fight against in their world, in the world of business. I like to put it in the context of your clients and it's a mindset or a flaw that you're constantly have to fight against or fight to overcome.

So you can actually get your people the results that they come to you for in the 1st place. So in your world at Mediaura, what is the common enemy that you regularly have to fight against?

Andrew Aebersold: So there's probably three layers to this. Is that acceptable?

Richard Matthews: It is.

The second piece of it is going to be the fact that we can't control everything on behalf of the client. So when you're doing lead generation, the problem that we often run into is we're driving qualified, good leads to them, but maybe they don't have the processes or the personnel in place to appropriately field those and convert them into customers, patients, what have you.

And so I've tried to turn those things around from this skepticism or this, you know, I'm not, I'm still not growing, even though you say you're generating the leads and oh, why don't I just replace you with an internal thing into a chance to help them grow, to educate them and to show them that we can grow with you until the point you get so big that maybe you don't need us. And we're okay with that because that means we've succeeded in our job and we're being open and honest with each other about that journey. I think starting that at the beginning and echoing those you know, conversations throughout the course of the relationship.

Like those things can happen depending on the The type of business. So I think just acknowledging them, getting in front of them and trying to do our best to educate the client has helped overcome those more than anything else.

Richard Matthews: I really like the description of the aura of doom around marketing because.

Andrew Aebersold: It gets bad rap.

Richard Matthews: It does, well it's an interesting sort of world because marketing is required, but not a lot of people actually understand it. And so you have to, you know, put on your translator cap, so to speak, and be able to actually communicate about what's happening and why it's important and what you're actually doing in the marketplace.

And, yeah it's an interesting sort of skill to have, and I like the way that you've approached, like, all three sort of layers of that, because I see that in my own agency. Where you have like the people at the beginning of like, I don't understand why I would do this. Where does this fit into the marketing world?

And we drive the same kind of things for them. And one of them would double their business with the leads that we're doing because they would bring people come in and know how to close them and sell them. The other person would get nothing. And they were like, you know, your leads are clap. I'm like, but your competitor in the city next to you is killing it with the exact same leads.

And it's like, so what's your sales process look like? And you have to know how to educate them on that and teach them how to build a sales team and what a sales process looks like. Cause come to find out not every business knows how to have a sales process. And so you can generate leads for them all day.

Yeah.

Oh, it's just word of mouth referrals, things like that. Closing those is easy. I mean, I maybe once out of a hundred, I don't close. And it's just because there was a price, you know, mismatch or there weren't ready for it or something like that. But referrals are easy. Getting leads from allegiance service are a little bit more tricky and you have to have a process and you have to know how to do it.

A lot of them don't understand that. So educating them before you go into that, I think is key. And, you know, just being able

Richard Matthews: So.

Andrew Aebersold: those conversations.

Richard Matthews: The way that I do it now is I talk about the four B's, and so it's buy, borrow, build, and blitz. And so buy is buying ads, buying leads, and putting your stuff in front of people that way. That's what you guys do probably a lot of is the lead generation. Borrow is things like getting on someone's stage, or getting on someone's podcast, or building a JV relationship with another business.

You're borrowing someone else's audience to generate leads, build. That's what we do at PushButton Podcast where you're building your own audience so you can put offers in front of them. You know, there's lots of different ways to do that. We focus on podcasting and then Blitz, which is cold outreach, right?

So like a your borrow audience, which is a lot of times where the referrals will come in right where you're, you know, someone else is going to make a referral to you. That's their audience that they're giving to you. And it comes with a lot of weight. And so whether it's a one on one referral or someone has, you know, trusted you enough to put them on their stage and to talk to their audience, it's very, it's still a similar like referral type relationship.

And I'll have people from those type of relationships. It'll come and be like, here's my credit card. Charge me I will talk later when we get back kind of thing, right? Like the sales process is just like shut up and take my money. Whereas like you go all the way to the super cold sides like the cold outreach and the sales process on that side averages three months from initial contact to close, right?

Like there's a whole process that goes into being able to convert cold leads versus converting warm leads or advertising leads or, you know, anything else. So I totally understand that.

Andrew Aebersold: Yeah, the timeline is crucial and they may not understand that. And heck, half the people we talked to don't even understand the lifetime value of a customer. They're trying to run ROI calculations, which we encourage. We want to make sure there's value there that they can understand how they could scale or grow their marketing investment. But they're running calculations on the patient or whatever and doing one engagement. But like speaking to behavioral health often you'll see some place that might have inpatient, but they also have intensive outpatient. And then they may have some type of aftercare beyond that.

Oh, they might come twice a month. Okay, well, are you calculating that out over six months to see what it's worth getting that new customer to come see you? Oh no, I didn't think about it like that. So those are the types of things that if people haven't really. Been taking care of the right way in marketing. They may not know because a lot of agencies that don't hold themselves to the high standard of accountability that we do of actually proving our value. They don't want to get into those numbers and they don't want to speak to an ROI calculation. And so the customer has never been exposed to it.

It's like $150,000 of revenue. You know, I mean, of course, that's over a long period of time, but still, like, that's what a new customer is actually worth when you get them for life.

Andrew Aebersold: And not to think it was just the wacky wave arm flailing tube man that got you in the restaurant the first time all those years ago.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.

Andrew Aebersold: 20 rental on the side of the road.

Richard Matthews: Oh, man. So it's the last thing that I wanted to point out was the thing that you talked about the third layer, which was being able to know when to have a customer sort of outgrow you and having those conversations early in the what do you call early in the relationship?

And I've only just started to realize this with ourselves, but I started to realize that, like, hey, there's going to be a point in time where it makes more sense for someone to bring these processes in house. And then started thinking about how do I do a couple of things?

One is develop the process so that we know what it looks like when someone wants to do that. And then also turn that into a revenue and educational opportunity for clients. And so, like, we'll actually talk to them now all the way back at the initial sales call, where it's like, Hey, here's what we do for people.

So you can develop those things internally. And so they're seeing that they're like, Oh, these guys actually like. They care about our revenue and our bottom line. And they know, like, we've thought that through and there is a segment of business that we can build a really huge company with, that it makes more sense for them to hire it externally than it does internally.

And then it gets to a point eventually where, like, it makes more sense to go the other direction. And so we've turned that into a service, which no one's taken us up on yet. But, you know, hopefully we'll get to that point where it's like, hey, we have a transition service where we can help you hire and train and build the SOPs and take the systems that we're using internally and help you train your team on it.

It was like, when it makes sense is when you want to pay for these things. Cause like to the thing that we were talking about earlier, the grass is always greener kind of thing, but that involves an investment in systems and people and other things to take it all internally that we've built all of those systems.

So like you're getting to benefit from our economies of scale. And so if we educate them ahead of time on like what that looks like and the kind of investments we're talking about and what it would look like to invest in their company, to build the same things. Now they can have that discussion with their finance person or whoever's making those up and like have an intelligent conversation about it.

And because there is a point where it makes sense, but it's a lot later than a lot of people think it is. And because of all the investments in the systems and whatnot. And then when they can't have that discussion clearly. That's really helpful, I think.

And then try to break that down financially with the time involved in the different skill sets. And then you start talking about, well, then you have to manage that employee. You have their benefits, et cetera. And I realized that was becoming a little bit too, I don't know, it was, it just felt kind of cheap the way it was being teed up as like a dollar for dollar employee type of a thing that I found a better way to kind of package it so that I get the same message across, but more proactively instead of reactively.

So knowing that you have somebody that can help you generate the business and then simultaneously over time, train you on how to grow a department that can replicate that and kind of hand it off and then transition to the point where maybe we're just dipping in from a consulting standpoint to help, you know, keep your marketing fresh or give you guys like a third party audit every quarter to make sure you're hitting your numbers, et cetera. That part of it I think is appealing to them because everyone has the aspiration to grow.

So every client I talk to more or less is going to say, Oh, that sounds like us. Now, the reality is not everyone's going to grow at that rate. So we may be with this client for five years, or maybe with this one for six months, it just, you never know.

But the common denominator is they all envision themselves expanding and having this internal team. So why not start the conversation?

Whether or not we like them for that is a different discussion. But what is it that you fight for in your company? What's your mission, so to speak?

Andrew Aebersold: Yeah. So it's something that's been tinkered with a little bit more recently. And so we kind of settled on the concept of impacting lives by helping the right businesses find the right customers. It's a little wordy. I'm still kind of workshopping it, if you will, but since we like to help people and we like to improve lives or impact lives we have found that if we can identify the right businesses.

And so that could be true, whether it's food and beverage it could be true if it's behavioral health care, behavioral health care is one that it seems to be the most obvious when you think about it, because not all treatment facilities are created equal, some are in it purely for profit, and I often view those as kind of a revolving door where they're happy to write the, you know, prescription for medically assisted treatment and just keep somebody coming in and collecting that check from them or from insurance reimbursement. And I feel like they've never really gotten to the core of helping that person.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it's very similar to what we talk about. A lot of times when, you know, every time we do our company meetings, I go over our core values and one of our core values is that the work we do has a ripple impact. It's got a ripple effect on the world because we're not just helping our clients every time we help our clients because we're what we're doing is we're helping people get their story into the world or helping businesses get their story out is it impacts all of their clients.

And it impacts the referrals that they get impacts a lot of their business. And so, you know, we might have 30 or 50 or 60 clients in any given time, but the number of people that our work impacts is in the untold thousands, if not tens of thousands. Right? It's huge. And like, that's one of the things I love about business in general is that it's not an, you can't see all the impact of a good business.

Their work has an impact on that. And so like, there's just such a huge impact of running a good profitable business. That helps people and it helps anyways, I love that, I guess is my point. the same way.

Andrew Aebersold: It's touching. Well, we just got out of the holiday season and my favorite holiday movie is "It's a Wonderful Life", and I think that's one of the underlying tones that you don't realize often how many people you impact that they just may not be telling you on a daily basis, but that you've changed their lives for the better.

And it could be clients, employees, people you bump into randomly. And so I think your ripple concept really speaks to that.

And I remember thinking that at 17 and being like, wow, and it's true, right? And I got four kids now. And there's a lot of, one of the reasons why I got into entrepreneurship and business at as early as I did was that concept of like, I want to be doing something that has a positive, like a big positive impact on the world because I wanted to have, I wanted to be worthy of whatever, you know, I wanted to be worthy of my kids looking up to me, if that made sense and that was before I was even a dad.

Andrew Aebersold: That's good. It's a big yet simple easy to grasp goal. That is harder than I think a lot of people realize.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it is definitely harder. And, you know, it's been a lifelong sort of goal of mine is to just be, to be worthy of the influence that you don't know you have.

Andrew Aebersold: That's cool.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, which is.

Andrew Aebersold: I shameless plug want to give you a shameless plug.

Richard Matthews: What's the shameless plug?

Richard Matthews: for shameless plug.

Andrew Aebersold: Well, I was just gonna say like, we're here on your show. We've talked about maybe doing a show together, which I think is great. I'm all for it. My team used to tease me what I would make videos. I started doing them during covid doing, you know, kind of like little five minute videos or whatever.

And they said, Oh, they're so goofy or whatever, like nobody likes those things. But then we looked at the data and they were just giving me a hard time. But the reality was every time I produced content like this, where I was able to talk about something to tell a story to get in front of people I would usually get two or three referrals the next week.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And you know, just to continue that little bit, one of the things that I talk to clients all the time about, because they're like, you know, they're used to working with a legion agency. Like what you guys do is we spend dollars. People click on links or they click on ads or they do something and then it's very trackable.

And then so like when we start talking about storytelling in the marketplace and how storytelling impacts their marketing, they're like, well, how do we track that? I'm like, it's really difficult to track because you'll have someone who may not even ever interact with your content, right?

They'll just like every single day they see you in their feed and they're like, oh, there's that guy again talking about, you know, talking about real estate in Temecula. He's talking about real estate in Temecula talking about real estate in Temecula and you're not interested in real estate in Temecula because you're not buying or selling a house but someone buys or sells a house every seven years in the United States Right.

Right. And so it's really hard to track how effective that is, because now when he goes to search for real estate agent and he sees the three different agents are all, you know, at the top of Google, one of those faces he recognizes. Right. And it's yours.

Andrew Aebersold: hundred percent.

Richard Matthews: Yeah,

So it's

Richard Matthews: It's gotta

be,

Andrew Aebersold: just about posting

They interview all the school board people. They interview all of the people who run the the doctor's offices and all the chiropractors and all of everyone in town. And so like they're, and they're constantly talking about. Their community because they're like, this is the community that I live in, that I live and breathe and love and they even go to the playgrounds and they're like, he brings his drone out to the playgrounds and he reviews the playgrounds and he reviews the the hiking trails and he reviews, like, there's one that's got a waterfall on him.

He's like, he goes through and he does whole things on it. So like the content is good, but like, as a real estate agent, he wants to be known as the one who knows the community. And so like. He's got the biggest real estate agency in the community because he's creating that content and he's not creating tomorrow's leads or the next day's leads.

He's creating his leads for two years down the line.

Andrew Aebersold: That's

Richard Matthews: yeah it's really interesting. And it's super potent. So anyways, I agree with the shameless plug, but you know, I guess I'd have to.

You know, you would record something and then it would sit on the hard drive forever and you wouldn't edit it and cut it up. I think what you're offering helps people overcome that issue because without it, they probably aren't going to make the content. And if you're not making the content, guess what?

You're not getting in front of people.

Richard Matthews: You're not getting the benefit, which I agree with. That's actually why we built the that's why we built the offer in the first place was cause I had a, my previous business, we had a whole playbook that we'd walk people through. And the last sort of step of that playbook was like how to build your own podcast.

Why, like some people wouldn't some people wouldn't the people who would they had a team of people that they could hand a playbook to that would implement the work that would do the work. And the ones who didn't have that team of people because it's hard to do. So our solution to that was obviously just to build the done for you service.

So those clients who. didn't have the team to do it could, they could get the work done and get the benefit from it.

The hero show will be right back.

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Now back to the Hero show.

For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever puts them in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by. Maybe something you wish you had known when you first started Meteora 20 years ago.

Andrew Aebersold: Oh my God. The first thing that came to mind was actually something that I learned when I was practicing martial arts many years ago. And I was involved with that for 17 plus years. It was a big part of me becoming, I think, an adult in a lot of ways. And it was one of the tenants do the right thing when no one else is looking integrity.

So to speak, they're blindly trusting companies like us with their budgets, with their money. I couldn't tell you how many times I saw other vendors, you know, raking clients over the coals with timelines and, you know, lying about even simple stuff, like, Oh, I think you just need to clear your cash.

So half of them they would redirect to them, half of them they would sell back to them. So it looked like they were getting some from their ads and some from there, but they're double dipping using that. I mean, it's just, it's horrible to see. And so my goal is I'd like to get more of those people that come to me before they get burned by somebody else.

But at the same time, I'm happy to help the people that have been burned or, you know, look under the hood and see if they are getting burned. It's just, I think that's the one thing that, that really drives me.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I love that. And one of the things that you'll probably appreciate is, you know, we're on 250 episodes or so for the hero show. And I ask that question all the time. We never skip the guiding principles one, cause I think it's important. And one of the things that has struck me is probably 90, 95 percent of our, the people that I asked that question to, they respond with some variation of integrity.

And and I love that. And I know that like, particularly in the digital marketing space, it's so easy to not operate with integrity because of, you know, that stuff we were talking about earlier, the whole translation. world is It's a world that a lot of people don't understand. They don't understand the ads, they don't understand you know, the SEO, they don't understand the coding that goes into some of it.

And there's just, there's a lot of technical garbley gook that unless you understand technical garbley gook. It's easy to be hoodwinked. And, you know, even in something simpler, like what we do with the podcasting there's a lot of effort that goes into what we do, right? A lot of labor effort and like we regularly get asked and like I actually had a discussion with with a pretty high profile business owner the other day.

It is more commensurate with the value that you can get from this. And so I was like, well, the conversation I ended up having with her, cause she was like, she was adamant that I should charge more, even if I was going to charge her more. And I was like, listen, this is what you're paying for the service over here and getting half of what we'll do for you.

And less quality and less consistency. And I was like, but. If you take all of that and we print it, like, here's what we're actually going to charge you. What I'm going to do then is give you coaching and education on how you take that difference in budget and put it into something that's actually going to move the needle, which is, you know, putting advertising dollars behind your content and talking to a legion agency, who's going to be able to really take all this content fodder that we're creating and move the needle in a big way.

But I was like, if I was charging you

And not understand where the ROI is, because they're just you know, either they don't have, you know, they have to charge that because they don't have the systems in place to do it at scale. So that's just what their labor costs are. Or they're just charging significantly more than they should.

And it. It's you know, it goes right back to that integrity things, and, you know, I guess everyone has their own view of it, but it's definitely an interesting world to be in.

Andrew Aebersold: Yeah. I think the, you may give me an idea, like the biggest area that I think most businesses are getting scammed currently that I've seen is search engine optimization. They're paying for it. Many, I'd say half the agencies that we audit. They're literally doing nothing. They may have done some on page work.

And I had to explain to him on a call that was. They were very appreciative of, I said, I don't, think that's your play right now. I'd like to charge you more money. I believe me. I, everyone wants to make a little bit more money, but that's not what's going to help your business. I'd rather see you succeed here.

And why don't we explore that, you know, at a later date when it makes sense. And her response was, I thank you so much because every other agency I talk to is really. Just, yeah, we'll do that. Yeah, we'll do that. Yeah, we'll do. And they just take, they want to get as much money as they can to hear somebody say, they don't think I should do that because it's not a good investment right now was refreshing. So I think the integrity thing, people that do it probably get the benefit benefits of that more often than they realize.

And one of the things I've noticed too, is like, when you're, especially like in our world, we're talking to other business owners you know, where our profit fits in and how it fits into our model and how it fits into our pricing and stuff like that, and show them that like, Hey, this is what we do.

This is what our margins are. This is how we operate. So like, we can afford to put food on our table and that kind of stuff. And it knows like, we're going to be here next year. Right. Cause we have a profit to be here next year. Like businesses really understand and appreciate that kind of stuff. And then realize that like, I'm not just.

Charging you to charge you I'm not just telling you this is what you spend your money on. And you know, anyways, a lot of that goes right back to just operating in integrity. And it's one of the things that I regularly use in our sales calls that I'll tell people is like, we don't have, there's nothing cloak and dagger about what we do.

That's what you're paying us to do is execute. And I was like,

so anyways, and it goes right back to this, just operating and integrity. And so I have one more, one more question for you before we finish this off, and it's called the hero's challenge. And I do this on every one of my interviews and basically it's I call it do this to get access to stories we might not otherwise find on our own.

Cause not everyone is out doing the podcast rounds like you and I might do. Question is this, do you have someone in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come and share their story with us on The Hero Show?

First person that comes to mind for you.

Andrew Aebersold: Okay. So I want to make sure that I get You put me on the spot. It's a gentleman from my vestige group and I want to make sure that I get this. Can you,

Richard Matthews: Yes.

And, you know, there's skin in the game, so to speak, and just seeing that happen. It's not every day. I see those situations. It's usually either I'm in the traditional business world and I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, or I'm going to go and start up and raise money and do whatever to see both of those happening at the same time has been fairly unique to, to see from the outside.

Richard Matthews: That's really awesome. Yeah. And so we'll reach out afterwards and see if we can get an introduction to him. Maybe he'll come on the show and say hi. Not everyone does, but when they do, we get some unique stories that you know, tend to be, end up being fun episodes. So. In comic books, there's always the crowd at the end who's cheering for the acts of heroism.

Andrew Aebersold: Yes, so you can find us on our website at Mediaura.Com. I'm also on LinkedIn. As an individual and as a company, Facebook, you know, any of the social media platforms were accessible on those are probably the best ways to get in touch the people that we would like to speak to are people that are comfortable investing five, 10, 15, 20, 000 a month.

If you are around that 5, 000 range on your lower side, but you're thinking about getting into it or increasing your marketing spend it's just no shame in giving us a call, we'll see if we can figure out a way to kind of get you eased into it. With the aspirations to grow so that if you're growing and the money's there, you'll invest more, et cetera.

But the reality is you should probably have somebody in charge of marketing at your business, but maybe you don't have that full team or you've got a gap. And that's where we can slide in and help augment that team that you have or be the team that you don't have. Until you can establish one.

You know, like we talked about earlier of that cloak and dagger salesmanship that happens. And so it's nice to see companies that are operating the way that you do. So appreciate that. I appreciate getting to hear, you know, your hero's journey a little bit today. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience for hit this stop record button?

Andrew Aebersold: Ah, just keep doing it, man. Some days are easier than others. Some days are hard, but never give up.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you very much for being here today, Andrew.

Andrew Aebersold: Thanks for having me on the show. I really enjoyed it and appreciate it.

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