Discover Your Agency Niche and Build Culture

Michael Redman is the CEO of Half a Bubble Out, a full-service advertising and marketing firm in Chico, California, which he started with his wife in 2002 and moved onto HubSpot about two and a half years before this recording. Andrew Dymski hosted the interview, and Gray MacKenzie joined him for the recap. The conversation covers how the agency backed into a medical niche, how Michael hires, a client he fired and won back, and the weekly rhythms that keep his team motivated.

Discover your niche instead of picking one

Andrew asked whether one industry kept showing up as a good fit. Michael said medical, and that he never went looking for it.

I’m wondering if the discussion should be more about discover your niche… If you don’t have anything that’s showing up, it’s easier to go look, what are my experiences and what are my opportunities?

(Listen at 04:12)

The niche arrived as a 2007 logo project for a Northern California device company whose laser treated toenail fungus. The two doctors using it hired the agency directly, then a practice in the Midwest called after hearing about them.

We got this reputation of being good at marketing and advertising these podiatrists who had these lasers that killed toenail fungus. And none of it was insured or it couldn’t be paid for by insurance. And so it was all cash. We found ourselves accidentally working in this niche of medical, and actually even further niching in devices or procedures that insurance doesn’t pay for.

(Listen at 05:27)

People make fun of the toenail fungus guy. Michael’s fine with that, because it pays the bills.

Hire for character, not niche experience

The medical focus changed nothing about hiring. Michael never hires for experience in a particular niche, because culture matters more to him than domain knowledge.

I’d rather hire the right people for who they are in their character. And then the type of competence issues I evaluate are, can you write? Do you communicate well? Can you edit? Are you comfortable with technology? Are you curious? Are you a learner?

(Listen at 08:01)

The team moves between medical and five or six other markets, so the real test is whether someone can work with people and write well.

He fired a client for insulting his staff, and they came back

Michael’s best current win is a podiatrist in Manhattan. The first year of inbound was slow, the keywords were hard, and the client kept saying they were in a hurry. Then they got rude with the staff member running the account.

I said, we’re done. I draw a line at making sure that people are honoring to one another. And if a client isn’t going to be honoring, I don’t care what’s going on… That was two and a half years ago. I fired them. They came back a week later and said, we’re sorry, give us another chance. And they’ve been one of our top three clients for the last two and a half years since then.

(Listen at 18:44)

Michael figures he explained what keywords are to that client 50 times, one monthly meeting at a time. Around month 11 or 12 the numbers turned: the best December the practice had seen, triple the January surgeries in a record winter, and since then triple the floor space a few blocks from Times Square. His rule now is clear expectations in the contract, and a prospect who won’t get on the phone and talk is a red flag.

Score 75 keywords every week so the team sees progress

Michael co-owns a side business that ships boxed hay to pet rabbit owners, and its search traffic went from 12 visits in a month to almost 600 a year later. The method: build a list of 50 to 75 keywords, load them into a HubSpot campaign, freeze the list, and export the rankings into a spreadsheet every week with a total at the bottom.

We moved up in the last three months, I think it’s 2,400 plus points, points being a ranking mark. So if I go from position nine to position eight on page one, that’s a point… The other thing it allows us to do is keep the morale up of the team.

(Listen at 42:51)

Five competitive keywords can sit still for months; 75 with a combined score move every week. The score also changed tactics: one keyword per post instead of two or three, and a pass back through old content.

We took the last three months and actually stopped writing blogs because we had so many blogs with the same keyword in it that we started going in and re-SEOing them for different keywords… We got a good 40, 50% jump in our organic traffic just by going back and re-SEOing those blogs.

(Listen at 45:46)

A Monday anchor meeting and Friday at four with the computers off

Michael gets in around 8:30 after an audiobook or a sermon on the ten-minute drive. Monday’s staff meeting runs 9:30 to 11:30 and anchors the week: 15 or 20 minutes on life, then everyone’s list and what they need from each other. Tuesday through Thursday start with one-on-ones, and Friday morning goes to his oldest client, eight years in. Then the week closes.

Every Friday afternoon at four o’clock, we stop working, turn all the computers off… We call it RAP. And every Friday at four o’clock, we pay everybody, keep them on the clock, and we have an hour of just, we wrap the week. We talk about useless things. We don’t even necessarily talk about work… It has done an amazing amount for the morale.

(Listen at 54:36)

An hour of paid hanging out tells the staff this is how we care and this is the quality of life we expect, and Michael says the amount of work the team gets done during the week backs it up.