A $5 Million Sandwich: A True Story About Business
A $5 Million Sandwich: A True Story About Business
I scored one of my biggest-ever wins in business the old-fashioned way: breaking bread with a friend.
Internet marketing is a complex, time-consuming business where the rules are constantly evolving.
You always have to stay on your toes, keeping up with the nonstop changes in your social network reach, the latest search engine algorithm updates, and finding new tactics in order to be heard above the noise on over-saturated platforms that reward one kind of content today and another kind tomorrow.
It moves so quickly, it seems, that you have to spend most of your time just reading the latest newsletters and watching videos to keep you up to date so you don’t get left behind.
Or is it?
One thing I’ve found over the 16-plus years I’ve worked in internet marketing is that while a lot of that is true, at a very basic level, internet marketing is actually very simple.
The internet is quite complicated, yes. But marketing is simple.
I often tell my marketing clients: “Simple does not mean easy. It means simple.”
At a basic level, my job as an internet marketer is to:
Get a client that has a product or service.
Figure out who their clients are.
Find out how to share the right message with the right person at the right time.
If I do that well, their clients will buy their products or hire them for their services.
It’s just that simple, but that’s easy to overlook or overcomplicate.
When I worked as a marketing manager at a venture-backed software company, I felt like this happened all the time. In my experience, working at a “tech” company often means that most of your time is focused on holding meetings and discussions about esoteric minutiae that may or may not even be helpful and that you may or may not even understand.
Just looking at my iPad-scrawled notes from the staff meetings I attended during that brief, weird season of life, it’s hard not to roll my eyes at the unbelievable (and punitive) number of acronyms we were concerned with: SaaS, CPM, CPC, PPC, CRO, CTR, MRR, LTV, CAC, mDAU, SOA, ERP, DKIM, SPF, UI/UX, SME, NPS, and a lot more.
That’s not to mention terminology that didn’t include acronyms but still had questionable origins and sounded ridiculous to say out loud: freemium, scalability, bandwidth, bottlenecks, metadata, bounce rates, breadcrumbs, salted hashing, tokenization, DevOps, lead nurturing, nonces, alpha channels, chroma keys, dongles, churn rate, agile, AJAX, microservices, and… who cares!
These are the kinds of things I talked about with my coworkers on a regular basis. Have I bored you to death yet?
When you work in the tech industry, it all makes sense, but there were definitely some times when I’d be standing in our Wednesday morning “standing meetings” (yes, we literally had to stand) and listen to our conversations, and nearly winced at the inanity of it all.
I remember one discussion with my manager right after getting hired:
Him: So, the CEO didn’t like the email campaign you suggested. He made his own and sent that instead.
Me: Okay, that’s weird, but whatever. What do you need from me now?
Him: Well, it had a pitifully low open rate, our CTR was poor, and our bounce rate was really high.
Me: Can you show me what he sent?
Him: (shows me).
Me: Oh, wow. That’s awful. That’s much worse than what I sent him.
Him: I know, but he’s the boss.
Me: Right, so how can I help?
Him: Well, he’s thinking maybe we could spend a few thousand on PPC to drive some immediate conversions.
Me: Well, we could, but we don’t have anything like that on our current website. I’d have to create a standalone landing page for that.
Him: Okay, good idea. Can we add in the leads we got from the latest conference?
Me: Maybe, but we have to abide by CAN-SPAM. We can’t just do a database dump and import them all; we have to prove that people opted in.
Him: Okay. Do we have any digital assets for a lead magnet to put on a squeeze page?
Me: Not yet. We’ve been talking about creating some case studies, but I’m still waiting on the final results so I can verify the data before we go live.
Him: Can you just write a quick whitepaper to use as some gated content we can stick behind a paywall?
Me: For what? What’s our actual CTA?
Him: Well, we could give them a 30-day free trial.
Me: Uhh, we could… do we really have the bandwidth for the services team to onboard a whole slew of new leads if they sign up all at the same time?
On and on these conversations droned… sometimes it felt like we were using so very many words to talk about… nothing.
Why are we even here? I wondered. What do we actually do here? What is the point of all of this?
Needless to say, that job never felt fulfilling because we never had a product I could see, smell, hold, or touch. I never got to meet our customers in real life. Worse, we didn’t actually have “customers” in real life — due to their reliance on what they thought was unlimited investment capital, they could live a very long time on VC funding rather than actual revenue from real sales.
When it all came crashing down, and they fired 35% of the staff after losing a round of funding, and I lost my job (with lots of other people), I wasn’t very sad. The timing was awful, but I had ALWAYS seen it coming since we didn’t really sell anything to any real customers.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I was now a marketing director for a construction company that built custom homes. My job was, in essence, to take a relatively “offline” company online and make their website their number one sales channel.
This was a daunting task since most of the companies they were competing with had much larger budgets, had far more staff members, and had been in business for many more years than we had.
I did a lot of work on the website: I started by deleting the old one and building a new one from scratch. I hired a photographer and spent many, many thousands of dollars on top-quality, high-resolution photography.
I created a lot of content myself: I wrote blog posts, sent out email newsletters, ran social media campaigns, used pay-per-click digital ads, and mostly did all of the same things I did at the software company but with real-life customers, all while using plain English.
During this process, I had an epiphany.
What if, instead of all that mind-numbing jargony, techno-babble nonsense we talked about at my previous job, I just made the whole thing stupidly simple? What if we forgot all about free trials, squeeze pages, gated content, and playing games by giving people just enough information to force them to contact us to get the simple answer to the questions they really had about our product, like pricing?
I gave it a try. Instead of reading stupid “psychographic profiles” creating fictitious customer journey maps for hypothetical people that only exist in a vacuum, and relying on “best practices” from theoretical user surveys, I just sat down with the boss and asked him some questions.
“So, who are the last ten people you built homes for?” I asked.
I wanted real names, with real ages, and real photos: an actual survey of real clients who had shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house — a real product that I could actually drive to, and walk inside of, and touch, and feel, and smell.
I wrote out the real steps in the real user journey of real people. In doing so, I discovered a few things. One of the biggest was that everybody who contacted the company had a lot of questions. Almost everybody who had ever become a customer was in “research mode.”
Not a single person ever just walked in the door with a set of plans and said:
“Hello, good sir, I have $700,000 cash in my pocket and I’d like you to build me a house that looks like this, please. Can you do it?”
No. Everybody — EVERYBODY — had a thousand questions. Sometimes they were super complicated, but sometimes they were really simple. After a while, I started to notice that a lot of the questions were the same.
They loosely followed this structure in this order:
What’s the difference between building a new home and buying an existing home?
How much does building a new home cost?
Do I need to own land before I build a new home, or do you do that for me?
Do I need a real estate agent?
What kind of insurance do I need while building the house?
What if I want to build in the forest, near a stream, or on a mountain? Does that make the process different or harder?
What kinds of architectural styles can I choose from?
How do I get a construction loan to build a home, and is that different from a mortgage?
There were about 10-12 total questions I noticed just about everyone asked, but it was that very last one that was the most important of all.
“How do I get a construction loan to build a house?” was a very good question, and, as I learned, one the company couldn’t answer very well. Until I had gotten hired, their answer was:
“That’s a great question. We don’t know. Call our friend Terry at the bank, and he’ll explain it to you. Hopefully, he can get you approved for a construction loan. Call us back when you get approved.”
What a huge, MASSIVE wasted opportunity this was. I saw a GAPING hole in their marketing efforts that I could use to our advantage immediately.
My strategy for the next few months was to write as many informational articles on our website as I possibly could with the answers to these questions. Since I wasn’t a subject matter expert (an “SME” — one of those awful acronyms from before, remember?) I could just contact the people we knew who were experts, and they’d help me come up with the answers.
But when it came down to that most important question—the question of getting a loan—the one that helped people understand whether they could even afford to build a new home or not, I wanted to get the white-glove service.
So, instead of just doing my own research, I called Terry down at the bank.
“Hey, Terry, I hear you are our company’s preferred lending expert when it comes to construction loans. I hear you’ve actually loaned out over 90% of all our construction loans for the past few years. You’re like a world-class expert on construction loans, at least according to what I hear.”
“Aww shucks,” Terry said, blushing over the phone. “I suppose some of that is true…”
“Well, then,” I continued. “I have a huge favor to ask of you.”
“Okay…” he replied, intrigued.
“I want to know everything there is to know about construction loans. Can I meet you for lunch sometime in the next few weeks? I’ll buy you anything you want, and we can eat, and I’ll just fire a bunch of questions your way about how construction loans work?”
He laughed a good, hearty laugh. “Oh, is that all? Of course, Ron! Any time.”
I told him to pick his favorite lunch joint anywhere in town. We set a date, and he picked a sandwich shop a few blocks from his office and ours.
When the day came, I walked over with a mini audio recorder in hand and some printed pages with dozens of questions in bullet-list format.
We went up to the counter and put in our orders. Terry is a simple guy, so he ordered a fountain drink and a sandwich that was so boring, I can’t even remember what it was. I ordered a fountain drink and a Reuben Sandwich.
We sat down for about an hour and a half and just… ate lunch. That’s it.
We were just two dudes shooting the breeze and hanging out. I asked him probably 70 or 80 questions about how construction loans worked, how they were different than mortgages, whether you need both a construction loan and a mortgage, whether a mortgage pays off your construction loan, how rates are different on construction loans versus mortgages, whether you need to sell your existing house in order to qualify for a loan to build a house, etc., etc.
I asked so many questions about construction loans and mortgages that the words lost all meaning and it sounded like I was warbling out weird tongue twisters each time I said them.
But we did it: we had lunch, and I got all the answers I needed to my questions. Then I shook his hand and went home. It took me about ten hours to digest everything I’d learned, process all my notes, and distill everything into one article.
I published the article and shared it on social media. And then… that’s it. Not much happened. It never went viral or anything. Nobody interviewed me on CNN or anything like that. Life went on as normal.
But over the next few months, we started getting leads. Solid leads. Real, live human beings with faces and names who would literally contact us, saying:
“We want to build a new home in Colorado, and we’ve been doing lots of research. We’re finally ready to build our dream home. We found your article online about construction loans and it’s the best resource we’ve ever found on the topic.”
They couldn’t wait to come into our office and hire us to build their homes. Over, and over, and over again, I’d watch as our inbox would have a slow trickle of people contacting us saying they wanted us to build their homes.
Anybody who could take such a complicated topic, like construction loans and mortgages, and make it that simple to understand must be really good at building homes, they told us.
“You sound like the kind of people we want to work with,” they’d say.
In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t an earth-shattering article. I’m not the world’s greatest writer, and that small company I used to work for barely even builds homes anymore. You’ve never heard of them.
But that’s not the point. To me, the point was that I found a way to cut through all the bullshit and stop wondering about hypothetical “users” in a fake world that doesn’t exist anywhere outside of VC-funded tech companies that go bankrupt and marketing textbooks.
I just listened to real people, in real life, about their real problems and gave them real answers to their real questions. When they contacted us, we built them a real house that I really walked through and took pictures of when it was all said and done.
Handing over the keys to the new homeowners when the construction process was all said and done never got old to me. I loved attending our “key ceremonies” at the very end, where we’d share desserts, pop a bottle of real champagne, and take photos of the happy new homeowners as we gave them the keys to their dream homes.
I would smell the “new house smell” and look at them smiling for the camera, knowing, “I helped make this happen. This family built a home with our company because they found us on the internet… because of me.”
That was a really good feeling.
In all, the articles I wrote for the company brought in new customers that probably generated about $15 million in revenue. But that one, single article I wrote about construction loans: that one by itself brought in $5 million. I know, because “track everything” is one of my mottos in business, and I know my numbers well.
I have pictures of actual homes that are built on the ground in Colorado, that will be there for many, many decades, that I can prove came directly from that one, lone article I wrote on construction loans and mortgages.
Isn’t that nuts? Who knew that such a boring topic—mortgage lending—could be so interesting?
And that’s the true story of how I made $5 million for my employer with one sandwich.
Well, if you take out the $38.50 or so that I spent on the company credit card for the actual food itself, I suppose I should be more accurate:
That’s the true story of how I made $4,999,961.50 for my employer with one sandwich.
That was the best sandwich I ever ate.