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Telling The Story of Your Business with Duane Carey

Special Guests

Duane Carey

Duane Carey is the founder and lead strategist at IMPACT Marketing, a 20-year-old digital marketing firm specializing in pet care. With a science background and an MBA in finance, Duane brings a decidedly no-nonsense, bottom-line, and data-driven perspective to marketing for his 70+ pet-care clients throughout the U.S.

Nothing makes him happier than seeing a small business thrive! To that end, he has built a company with no conflicts of interest (which are rampant in marketing) and a culture that prioritizes long-term client relationships over making a quick buck.

Outside of work, he loves football (Ohio State Buckeyes and Baltimore Ravens), cooking, and spending time hiking and exploring the outdoors with his family and Australian Labradoodle, Olaf. He can be reached at DCarey@ImpactMarketing.net.

In this episode of the Hey Joe Podcast, Joe sits down with a friend and industry partner, Duane Carey of IMPACT Marketing & Public Relations, a marketing agency that helps brands and businesses grow and thrive using best practices and lead generation. IMPACT is a full-service marketing department for hire with a wide breadth of services, but most notably, they specialize in pet care and health care businesses.

Join Duane and Joe as they discuss why investing in your marketing is not a “next step” or upgrade you can make, but a necessary and crucial piece of your business plan from day one. They dig into the various pieces that make up a successful marketing plan and share their experiences in this episode you won’t want to miss!

Be sure to visit their website while listening along!

More About IMPACT Marketing & Public Relations

IMPACT Marketing is a digital marketing agency, strategic consultancy, and outsourced marketing department with specializations in the pet care industry. They handle clients’ marketing with the goal of revenue growth, greater profitability, improved recruitment, or a successful exit.

IMPACT Marketing pairs clients with strategic thinkers who take client success as personally as their own – applying C-level strategic advice. You do what you do best. IMPACT will handle the marketing.

Transcript

Joe Zuccarello (00:03):
Hey everyone, this is Joe Zuccarello, your host of the Hey Joe Pet Pro Podcast. And as typical with the podcast, my job really is to go out and find subject matter experts in areas in and outside of the pet industry and bring those people to you so that you don’t have to go find those people. So trying to make your job easier, but even bigger than that, to make your job and the effects that happen at your business have even better quality results and impact. And I say impact because I’m joined today by a gentleman that I’ve come to get to know recently, and I think he has a lot of information you want to hear. So I am joined today by Dwayne Carey with Impact Marketing. And Dwayne, thanks for being part of the Hey, Joe Pet Pro podcast.

Duane Carey (00:58):
Hey Joe, thanks for having me.

Joe Zuccarello (01:00):
I am excited to introduce you to our audience, and I know that our companies at Paragon and Impact have started to work even more closely together and we’re going to conquer the world together. But in the earliest days of that, I just felt it was really necessary to get you introduced to our audience. So Dwayne, if you don’t mind, tell the audience a little bit more about yourself and then what inspired you to, I think I remember you telling me that you changed courses in your career and started Impact, so I found it enough, an intriguing enough story. Tell the audience a little bit more about yourself.

Duane Carey (01:38):
Yeah, it’s a little bit of a ridiculous career change because I was a hydrogeologist for the first 10 years of my professional career. So I had an undergrad degree in geology with a focus in groundwater. So I worked in the environmental field. I did a lot of things with cleaning up groundwater that was contaminated and helping supply municipalities with clean groundwater, et cetera, and always thought that I was a scientist. And lo and behold, I was an entrepreneur and I didn’t really know it. I honestly didn’t know it back in those days. But I ended up just kind of changing on my own, what I was doing for the company that I worked for. And I found that I was more interested in growing businesses than I was in doing the other stuff. And what’s been really interesting, and it’s so cool for me, is that in digital marketing, it’s not all that different from the science because we’re looking at data, and that’s probably the most surprising thing I think when people talk to us because they’re thinking, well, as a marketing company, they’re all about creative. They get together at a big whiteboard and they come up with these great ideas and we’re like, no, man, we’re nerds. We’re doing spreadsheets and computer models and analysis, and it’s all about the bottom line. What are we doing to grow a business? So it’s a crazy background. I still love geology. My whole family does. When we take big trips, we always go to national parks and places of really interesting cool things. But yeah, it’s been 20 years since I started Impact and just, boy, it’s been a wild ride.

Joe Zuccarello (03:32):
Well, and you are the epitome of what we call a career reset at Paragon. We talk to people that are career resets all the time. We talk to people that pull up in front of their corporate job and say, I really hate my job. I want to work with dogs more than I want to work with people in some cases.

Duane Carey (03:55):
So we have several clients that are, I think five of our clients are lawyers that have gotten out of law to run dog boarding facilities.

Joe Zuccarello (04:06):
Wow. Wow. Yeah. There is something that’s there. And if you think about the emotional transaction that happens when somebody makes, like you went from science to marketing and the lawyers that go from law to a pet lodge, I mean it, it’s pretty remarkable. But that emotional transaction and that’s, I know one of the things that impact focuses on is maximizing that emotional transaction and connecting the businesses who are your clients to their clients. So to be able to step into that story. So that’s what I’d like to unpack a little bit today. And really our listeners range from, they could be listening to us right now in their mobile grooming unit and they’re in a driveway somewhere grooming a dog, Betty, pet owner’s dog and a driveway somewhere. But we also have listeners who operate hundreds of facilities. So when we have listeners of all different, their businesses are all different shapes and sizes and different offerings. It could be standalone grooming all the way to a full service pet care facility or very large pet supply retailers that have grooming. So when we talk about your company impact a little bit more specifically, one of the things that I always like to do with my listeners is to say, why does Dwayne need to be talking to us? And the very first thing is why does IMPACT get so passionate? Why does impact marketing get so passionate about pet care?

Duane Carey (05:54):
I talk about it all the time with my team because one of the biggest things is, and look, there are probably plenty of industries where you could feel the same thing I’m about to describe, but we’ve literally changed lives every week, sometimes every day, literally. And we have very low turnover of our team, and I’m convinced that a huge part of it is who our clients are. The clients in the pet industry, they’re the best people out there really. It sounds like I’m blowing smoke here, but my gosh, they’re the nicest people. They’re all in it fundamentally as a love for dogs. And I have a huge love for a dog. My wife’s a veterinarian. It’s one of the really truly, dogs and science are two of our first loves together, and that’s something that we’ve always had. And so working with small businesses owners who are out there trying to make lives better for animals and for the pet parents of those animals, it’s super fulfilling.

Duane Carey (07:20):
And I’m sure we’ll talk more about this, but we’re really all about generating leads to grow a business. And so we have a few other little niches. We do a lot of work with trade contractors, plumbers, electricians, HVAC, et cetera, also professional services. But the pet industry is about 70% of our client base and our revenue, and it’s the only thing that we actually actively try to grow. Everything else just comes in by referral and we will evaluate whether we want to take it on or not. But pet, it’s just supreme. It’s where we want to be. It’s the only thing we spend money on from going to Barkley and Oddball and I-B-P-S-A, and we’re very happy to go participate in those different organizations and the trade shows and see all of our friends and clients. It’s just a great group of people.

Joe Zuccarello (08:25):
And you said a couple things earlier, you talked about it’s a profession of passion. So I mean a lot of pet services businesses, pet retailers, they’re doing it because they’re passionate about it.

Joe Zuccarello (08:43):
But you said something also about you also work with other trades organizations, and I’ve often said, especially as it relates to professional grooming. Professional grooming is a trade, it’s a trade skill like mechanic or carpenter or welder or electrician. I mean, it is very much a trade and where you can learn from no skill and make it a very positive, incredible career and along the way build your business. Now obviously sometimes our business owners are not always the best business growers. Of course. And that’s where we have to have people like you in our corner to help us. And this week you introduced me to your team. I was on a Zoom call of probably, I don’t know, I think I was one of 16 people. You were two of 16. So what is that, 14 people on your team that I had the opportunity to meet. And you said a word during that time together, you talked to your team and said, working with Paragon, this is why I’m so convicted about this partnership, this collaboration with Paragon is because we’re both saying the same thing. We’re both marching in the same direction. We both appreciate the potential and the people in our industry, again, back to people that are very passionate and might own a business but might not be really great at growing the business. Or maybe they’re good but they’re not great. Maybe they’re average, but they’re not above average.

Duane Carey (10:22):
That’s what I’m talking about with the whole changing people’s lives thing. It’s one of the biggest things we talk about because it happens all the time because of course they’re not, they don’t have, I have an MBA in finance from Johns Hopkins University. That was part of my whole thing when I was going to change my career, I was like, well, I need to understand this better. And I was actually going to do it in marketing. And I got there and I was like, you know what? I don’t know the numbers side of business as well as I know the numbers side of science. And I said, I need to understand that. I need to understand the numbers side of business. And oh my God, most people, they’d rather have a root canal. And clearly, if you’re passionate about dogs, you’re much more along the artsy mentality. Most of those folks are not interested in that side of things.

Joe Zuccarello (11:18):
It’s not their superpower.

Duane Carey (11:20):
Exactly. And that is our superpower, and that’s what makes it so fulfilling is because we can take, if they’re already doing the right thing, they’re taking good care of their pets, they’re taking good care of their pet parents, they’re doing a decent job with their staffing, and we start infusing that with a lot more leads. And man, is it a big deal these days because there’s so much competition now out there for each of these facilities, if we can really start bringing in more people, more leads, it literally changes their lives. And there’s an old line in business that revenue fixes everything and it kind of fixes everything. Then they start getting to that point where they can go, oh my God, I can breathe. I can actually take a breath and maybe I don’t have to work seven or eight days a week.

Joe Zuccarello (12:15):
Right? Yeah, no, you’re right. And that breath, and I can think clearly, I can handle situations. That’s right. I can handle situations that pop up and deserve my extra attention. So let’s get into a little bit of the nitty gritty about the pet industry and from your perspective, when you talk about digital marketing, when you talk about digital marketing, what is working and not working in digital marketing these days for pet care? I mean, I hear things where now we can almost mask or hide where we come from to do shopping online, where then it makes maybe these businesses, it’s hard for them to follow the breadcrumbs back to know, did I land at their business because of an ad I saw or a search I did or a banner ad I clicked on somewhere or an email list I landed on. So what’s working in digital marketing now, man? I mean, that’s got to be a moving target for you and your team, what’s working and what’s not.

Duane Carey (13:25):
It is, but that’s why we’re so nerdy about keeping score. We measure everything and track everything and then look, then it becomes easy because we let the results tell us what to do.

Duane Carey (13:38):
And so we have about 70, I think it’s over 70 clients in the pet space all around the country. And so we have this massive database of what works and what doesn’t. So we know in a rural setting, it’s this in an urban setting, it’s that if we’re talking about a multi-state, multi-location brand versus a mom and pop one location. So all of what we do is very informed by the numbers, and I can tell you very clearly, it’s actually, I can distill it quickly. What really works is Google, and it still does, even though we’re in an age of ai, a burgeoning initiative, a lot of people think, well, it’s all about social media. And I can tell your listeners is a very important point. They really shouldn’t be spending much money on social media, if any. So we tell clients constantly, do not pay us to run your social media. You should be able to do that yourself. You have all these amazing cute pets. You have so much fodder for social media content. If you don’t want to do it yourself, find somebody on your staff. I promise you, they would love to have a title of social media manager in addition to kennel staff,

Duane Carey (15:02):
Turn ’em loose, keep track of them, but let ’em do it. It’s easy peasy piece of cake. Occasionally it makes some sense to pay for ads on social media, but typically those are one-offs. You want to put something out for engagement about this great event that you’re having for Turkey day or something. But what we don’t want to see with clients, because it tends to be a waste of money, is we don’t want them using social media ads for lead generation. It’s simply not how the consumer works. And again, we have plenty of clients where we’re doing both and it’s like 10 to one Google Trumps social media. So it really comes down to the two sides of Google are the organic natural listings. You come up naturally, but there’s a lot of work behind that. And then there’s the page side and the paid ads for Google, because you got to remember, they game the system. They put the ads up at the top of the page on a Google results search page or any of the search engines, excuse me. Then the map and then the organic stuff below that. And you have to scroll down. Pardon me, let’s take a quick drink of water. So what we have seen dramatically across all of our clients across the country is Google Ads is the main source for lead generation.

Joe Zuccarello (16:52):
I’ve often said I’m sort of a social media moron, self-proclaimed social media moron, because I just don’t spend a lot of time there. And I would say that that’s probably because it doesn’t geek me. I think I’m in that little lull between generations of “Facebook is for old people.” Well, I pop in just to check on our own fodder for Paragon, and then I’m out. I’m in and I’m out real quick. But social media, I mean even social media anymore, the amount of just noise and traffic and I mean you’re literally a drop in a monsoon and trying to get attention there unless you do something dramatic. Unless it’s, it’s something just so out there that goes viral. Everybody sees that viral thing and they think, oh, I’m going to hit that viral lottery. Right. Well, no. Or you might for the wrong reason, but if you want to stack the deck in your favor, you’re saying obviously having a calculated very specific plan how to use Google.

Duane Carey (18:03):
Yes, that’s right. Now, I will say though on the social media front, video is an amazing tool. And again, we’ve got these cute dogs, so they’re a built in asset with TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, any of those. The beauty of that, and again, this is why I keep using the word engagement, it’s not about lead generation, but it’s engagement with people love to be at the office and see that you just posted a picture on Facebook or Instagram or something and their dog is in there or some of the people that have doggy cams at the facility. But then when they share a cool video, a 32nd video of dogs, simple things like just sitting on command and they’re all doing it and they put it to a little bit of music, people eat that stuff up. So I’m not in any way negative from a marketing standpoint on social media.

Duane Carey (19:11):
I want to be clear that it’s about lead generation. I am because it’s so good for engagement. And then you talk about Facebook for the old people. So you have, let’s say a middle-aged woman in a neighborhood that shares the video of her dog at daycare. Well, that’s going to be seen by a lot more middle-aged women in neighborhoods. That’s true. That can absolutely lead to more business, but it’s not a lead generation strategy that can be relied on to say, I want to get from X level to Y level and this is how much I’m going to put it into it, and am I going to get an ROI from that? That’s all stuff we can calculate and estimate, but you really can’t when it’s just a ephemeral, well, let’s just put it out there and let’s see what happens.

Joe Zuccarello (20:00):
Yeah, it’s more of a phenomenon than a plan, right?

Duane Carey (20:04):
That’s right. That’s well put. Yeah,

Joe Zuccarello (20:06):
And I like that. I mean, you can drive engagement and to your point, oh my gosh. I mean look at the cameras that are an eagle’s nest when you’re, I mean, we’re all fixated watching an cool stuff, and the egg is on my other screen, not me, but on our other screen, and it’s just sitting there hanging out. We’re waiting for the darn thing to hatch. But to your point, it’s about engagement there. But lead generation is something completely different When you’re looking at our industry specifically, because obviously I am very confident that our industry, you have 70 clients, you’re a self-proclaimed nerd in our industry with data and making database decisions. What challenges and opportunities do you see for pet care service businesses in our industry? So those challenges, what are we up against and then what’s some of that blue sky kind of optimism?

Duane Carey (21:02):
You’re going to love this answer. I’m going to bring Paragon into this, but I love this question because to me, it’s the biggest issue facing the industry right now is without question I have the data demand for these services has declined since 2021. It all peaked right after Covid, and it’s right now on average, it’s like 77% of what it was in July of 2021. And that’s across the board for the services. It’s for daycare, it’s for boarding, it’s for training, grooming is a slightly different animal. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But the biggest problem, the biggest opportunity, the grace guys that you’re talking about is that at the same time that this demand has fallen a bit, competition has ballooned, all the franchisors are still selling franchises. And a lot of the people that are the consolidators that are out there with the private equity money buying up some of the existing facilities, a lot of that has slowed down a bit. And I’ve even seen a couple of examples lately where consolidators who bought places just two years ago are divesting them. So they’re selling them again.

Duane Carey (22:33):
But the bottom line is we can look again at the data, we could see inside our Google platforms that let’s say a client last year, I’ll give you a specific example actually, client last year had four competitors in Google ads this year, nine competitors in Google Ads. So that’s more than double the amount of people and fighting for that somewhat diminished demand. So that’s a big problem.

Joe Zuccarello (23:11):
The opportunity two times more competitors fighting for the attention of 25% less market share.

Duane Carey (23:19):
That’s exactly right. Wow. So what does that bring to us? And this actually gets me excited and my whole team is on board with this thinking is, I promise you there will be attrition, there will be businesses going out of business. And we’ve seen it recently, and mostly we see it on the daycare side because daycare not a necessity. It’s a want in most cases. So one of our clients in the Midwest, they had a franchise daycare facility go out of business nearby and they were going to buy it just to have the second facility. The facility was in a great place. They ended up not another client in Texas, one of their daycare competitors completely went out of business and another competitor stopped offering daycare services at their boarding facility. So we’re seeing it, but the opportunity is, and what we are so passionate about speaking with our clients about is by God, let’s not be the ones that go away.

Duane Carey (24:29):
Let’s make sure we understand what to do here. And without question, what to do is to stay the course and not retrench and say, oh my God, I’ve got a hoard my money. Because you’ve got to fight. You have to go out there and fight right now to get revenue, and if there’s only a certain amount of available business, you got to fight for your portion. And that’s one of the reasons I was excited to bring you in to talk to my whole team because again, we’re in the business. Yeah, we’re a marketing company, but we’re business consultants at the end of the day and we’re going to do anything we can to increase our client’s revenue. And we think there’s a huge untapped potential in grooming because there’s no question that it can be difficult to deal with the service providers. There’s a lot of trouble keeping a grooming staff busy. There’s a lot of trouble keeping the staff intact. And so a lot of times people just say, you know what? I’m so overwhelmed with everything else. Screw it. I’m not going to worry much about grooming. But that is the one thing. So what proliferated after covid doodles? There’s doodles everywhere. You look at any of our clients and 40% of the dogs, there are doodles.

Duane Carey (26:01):
So they all need a haircut. And how many of them need a bath and nails trimmed and ears done, and anal sax express and all kinds of stuff. And my God, if we can provide that service, and I love what you guys are doing because it is again, from an ROI standpoint, something that we care about. You can get in there, train somebody, get out, you’ve paid your small fee and you’ve got somebody that’s now a revenue generator That I think is a really key part as we, we’ve got tariffs and all this other stuff going on, but the economy has been really ready for a correction for quite a long time, years of inflation. And so now we’ve just got this double whammy with all the tariff stuff. There’s no question there’s going to be, whether it’s an official recession or not, there’s going to be some hard times in 2025. And I think the time is now to really prepare to be aggressively getting in new business

Joe Zuccarello (27:12):
And that new business with frequency. And that’s what grooming delivers. And that’s why I’m so, I’m so happy to see that your team is excited about that. And to your point, most of our clients that I talk to, they have clients begging to do business with them. I mean, what industry is specifically about grooming? What industry do you talk to anybody right now where they say they have clients begging to do business with ’em? What I mean by that, that’s the evidence of not having enough grooming staff, not having enough staff that’s properly trained in grooming, not legitimizing your grooming business, not continuing to overcome the staffing challenges. We’ve got to get past ourselves in this industry. And that’s really great about what you are seeing is that you’re seeing, to your point, I don’t know that we have the luxury to be able to say, oh, grooming is just too much of a headache and because it’s just that inherent headache, I’m not going to do it or I’m going to do less of it. Or in some cases, there are full service pet care facilities out there right now that are just saying, I’m not going to do haircuts at all. I’m going to do that percent.

Duane Carey (28:35):
A big chunk of our clientele doesn’t do grooming right now. I mean, it might be as high as like 15, 20%.

Joe Zuccarello (28:44):
So with that in mind, they’re, and here you are helping them advertise and market and get new business through the door, but they’re inviting some of their customers to go to somebody else. So it’s almost like having a bucket that your group is pouring leads into the top and a certain amount of them are just washing out of the bottom because we’re either, I don’t want to say we’re not paying attention because I think in some cases there’s a deliberate choice not to service that part of the industry. And that’s where Paragon and I think Impact can really partner together to help change that perspective, change those mindsets, and really show how it can be made a whole lot easier than maybe the hangover maybe that they’re feeling from previous experiences. So that’s gray sky, blue sky. I agree with you there. I think grooming is, I mean, heck, grooming saved pet related businesses coming out of Covid.

Duane Carey (29:42):
Boy, those early days. Absolutely.

Joe Zuccarello (29:45):
So I think 2025 will be second only to the waking hours after Covid specifically for professional grooming. Let’s talk about, you’ve mentioned earlier ai, how is AI affecting marketing these days? Maybe a loaded question, I don’t know, but…

Duane Carey (30:07):
Yeah, I think I’m doing a talk on this in Hershey in November. There’s no question we’re in the age of ai, but one of the things we’ve been looking at is are people choosing Chat, GPT and other AI tools to ask questions about finding dog boarding facilities over Google? And they’re not. The data clearly show that that’s the case. People are using AI tools to answer questions.

Duane Carey (30:47):
And so one of the biggest ways that it affects us and our clients is on the SEO side, the search engine optimization. So I mentioned earlier there’s the natural organic way of showing up in a search page, and then there’s the paid way. The paid way is the better from an ROI standpoint and just a pure volume of leads. But there’s a definite place for organic rankings. And when we intentionally work on those organic rankings, that’s called SEO or search engine optimization, and with the way these AI tools are all stealing everyone’s intellectual property from their websites and compiling it in different ways, we have to take that into account. And we have to be thinking now that we’re not only optimizing for Google search engine and Yahoo and Bing and others, but we also have to be thinking, what kind of information do we want to feed to these AI bots?

Joe Zuccarello (31:48):
Oh, I never thought about that.

Duane Carey (31:51):
And then the other way that it affects marketing is, and I think this is the really positive way, is small business owners these days don’t need to become an AI expert because what’s happening is AI technology is being infused into every tool that they use. So for example, with Google Ads, there are some ad types where the AI in the back, Google’s ai, the machine learning is really getting better and really getting smarter, and it’s helping people like us do a better job of making those ad campaigns more efficient. Then there’s things like Canva or in Photoshop where you can just have a subscription to that software. And now perhaps instead of having to hire a graphic designer, you can do a lot of that stuff yourself. If you’re just a little bit savvy with computers, if you’re not, go hire the designer.

Duane Carey (32:53):
But if you feel like you can get in there with those tools and play a little bit, you can put together some pretty nice stuff and you don’t have to hire us to do it. So that’s cool.

Duane Carey (33:05):
And you can multiply that across a lot of different things. And then even from, there’s tools like perplexity where you can do competitive analysis. There’s all kinds of stuff that you can do, but you have to kind of nerd out on that and really get into it. We’re investing a lot of time and money into really trying to understand it as well as we can. We go to conferences on AI and marketing and so forth. But so far I think it’s been a net positive, but it hasn’t been the earth shattering initiative that has been so much at the hype.

Joe Zuccarello (33:52):
And I think to your point, AI is scraping all of these sites and to serve you an answer to a question, it’s pulling from what you said, what are you and your clients putting out there that it’s going to scrape from your site almost, I don’t want to say claim it as its own, but it’s building a salad from all of those different ingredients. I got the tomatoes from this pet care facility site, it got the lettuce from over here.

Duane Carey (34:23):
That’s right.

Joe Zuccarello (34:24):
Or various different lettuce leaves. I mean, it’s building a recipe and it’s serving you up a meal, but you don’t know where it necessarily came from. And again, may or may not be accurate,

Duane Carey (34:35):
May or may not be accurate, and it might just be junk, frankly. So we have a full-time professional writer on staff who sits and writes all day every day for our clients. And that might be website content, but a lot of times it’s white papers and it’s blog posts,

Duane Carey (34:54):
And the way he’ll use chat GPT and the others is he’ll use it maybe to generate some ideas or maybe to come up with a more clever headline if he’s not coming up with a great one. But what’s really been interesting for us to watch, because we will do that for clients to help their SEO, and you could do that yourself in 10 minutes with chat GP or five minutes with chat GPT, but what the output you’re going to get is going to be completely indistinguishable from anything else on the internet. And Google sees that as indistinguishable. They can tell that it’s just stuff compiled together and it’s just not of any use. It doesn’t help your SEO. So what he’ll do a lot of times is particularly if it’s we have veterinarian clients in addition to dog boarding facilities and with them, there’s more technical things to talk about. So we’ll do interviews and he’ll interview them, he’ll write it all up, and then he might run it through chat GPT or other maybe to take it to reduce it another 200 words or something. So to use it as a tool, it’s really helpful, but it’s really not, at least not yet a replacement for actual work.

Joe Zuccarello (36:18):
Yeah, it’s not a replacement for the truth, right? I think it’s mistaken as the truth, but it’s not necessarily a replacement for the truth. So that’s a little for all of you out there that are listening, Dwayne just gave you some reassurance that we’re not part of a Terminator movie where AI is going to start building its own robots and taking over the world. So Dwayne, as we’re kind of closing in on the last few minutes of our time together, I met you at a trade show. I met your team at a trade show back in last fall, and here we are, we’re starting to do some work together and such. But for my listener audience out there when let’s say that they’re okay, my interest is peak, this guy Dwayne kind of sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, right? Joe seems to like him, maybe that has a little bit of seasoning in there. What should they do next? I mean, what is it that impact when you’re talking with a new client prospect, what are you drawing for them to say? It could be this. I mean we’re all saying, Hey, imagine yourself in this place as we’re selling our services and our programs and our products. Imagine yourself in this space. How do they engage with you? What does that discovery process look like? And what are you telling them that you can help them

Duane Carey (37:44):
With? Sure, love that. So I’ll kind of couch that in sort of the overall culture of impact. We take tremendous pride in this, and I won’t use the swear word, but our whole approach is no bs. And because there’s a lot of BS in marketing and there’s all kinds of stuff with kickbacks and commissions, and a lot of people, particularly when they are doing Google ads or Facebook ads or whatever, you’ll pay me and I’ll pay Google and I’ll take a piece, or you might not even know how much is actually going to the ad spend. We work from the moment, start talking with somebody to establish trust because it’s hard. Just about every client we ever talked to has unquote been burned by a marketing company in the past.

Duane Carey (38:48):
So I figured that out very early on. And it’s my heritage anyway, to be no bs. And so we talk to people right out of the gates that we charge for our time and our expertise and nothing else. So if we do Google ads, we do all the work, we set it up, but the client’s credit card goes in to the Google interface, the client’s credit card goes into the meta interface for Facebook or Instagram. So we start talking about that literally from the first two minutes of the first call. What typically happens when we engage with somebody is we’ll schedule a video call. It’s almost always me and one or two of my team members, and we just want to hear what’s going on, tell us what’s up. And we take great pride in not selling things to people. We want to hear what’s your situation? And that’s one of the beautiful things about PET is sometimes we’ll talk to people in other industries and we’re like, we don’t think this is going to work.

Duane Carey (39:59):
But with pet, we’ve got so many examples, nothing we haven’t seen, there’s no challenge that we haven’t seen in pet. So we’ll just talk to ’em about it and say, alright, let us go do some analysis. So we will have a first meeting, get to know them. We’ll ask ’em a whole bunch of questions about the business, some of them that they may not be able to answer right away because a lot of it’s numbers stuff, but it’s where do you have capacity? Where don’t you, what are you trying to grow? Who are your competitors? What are the areas that you draw from? And then we’ll go away for a week and we’ll do some analysis and then we’ll come back and say, okay, here’s some of your options. And we try to give people, we try to start people as low and slow as we can.

Duane Carey (40:50):
And again, part of that’s the building trust thing because a lot of times, A, they’ve never done this stuff, or B, they’re doing it with somebody who really doesn’t know what they’re doing, or it’s just some local company. That’s all things to all people. And they’ll be like, well, gosh, I don’t know. This sounds expensive. I don’t know if it’s worth it. We’ll be like, cool, no problem if you don’t want to do it. But we have all of this wealth of background to show that this stuff will work. I’ll give you a quick anecdote. I just was very frustrated, shaking my head this morning. We very often see, so a prospective client came in and I looked at their website and I was like, this looks like one of those subscription type websites where they’re paying X dollars a month, it’s a relatively low cost and they don’t own the damn site.

Duane Carey (41:51):
And sure enough, I asked them, I’m like, find me a copy of your contract and let me look at it. And sure enough, they don’t own anything. Oh boy. And we’ve got another one right now that’s onboarding where their local company is holding them hostage. And the company, the marketing company owns the URL for this client’s website. Oh boy. And they’re holding ’em hostage. They have a contract through the end of December, 2025. It’s like one of the biggest things that I am an evangelist about all the time. I tell people, please own your own stuff. Don’t ever have somebody else own your stuff. You need to have all your logins for all your stuff. You need to own them, not have some marketing company, because what if you want to fire ’em someday? And that includes us. So we don’t buy URLs for people, we don’t, don’t have subscriptions to websites. That’s all BS. And it’s very, very ugly bad business practice.

Joe Zuccarello (42:54):
And the problem is you just end up getting used to each other and you become reliant. And then before you know it, you’re dependent. So there’s a difference. There’s a line. You cross from being reliant to being dependent.

Duane Carey (43:11):
And then when you’re dependent and you have golden handcuffs on you and you can’t end that relationship because they’re going to take down your website, good lord, that’s a problem.

Joe Zuccarello (43:22):
Yeah, you’re kicked out of the apartment at that point. You don’t click. So I love the discovery process. I love the no bs. Right? I love that. Just say, I have been part of those conversations in my career where you just get, by the time the conversation’s over, you don’t know any more than what you did going into it, right?

Joe Zuccarello (43:49):
Yeah. You’re left more confused, scratching your head more than anything. I mean, I just want somebody to be that river guide, and that’s what I appreciate and that’s what I try to be for people. Whether it’s my consulting part of my business or the Paragon solutions, we just want to be the river guard. We want to take something hard and help make it easier.

Duane Carey (44:10):
That’s right.

Joe Zuccarello (44:13):
And marketing is exactly that. It is, to your point, it is really a science. And now I see why that engineer kind of science brain owning impact and putting that to work. And you could see it in your team yesterday. I mean, everybody, when they were asking me questions, I could say, okay, tone from the top. I could feel it amongst the team that they want to get to business, but they want to get to good business. So if we’ve peaked the interest of people out there, how do they, and of course we’re going to have, we have impact on the Paragon Pet school.com website as one of our partners. So you can go to paragon pet school.com and you can get sort of a preview on impact. But if you want to go right to Dwayne and his team, Dwayne, how do they do that most effectively?

Duane Carey (45:02):
Yeah. Impact marketing.net, not.com, dot net. And I do best, so we’re a remote company now, ever since Covid, we all work from home, which is just awesome. And frankly, we’re not great about the phone because we do everything by email. So either info@impactmarketing.net that comes to me, plus my whole senior team, or my email is D Carey, C-A-R-E-Y, d as in Dwayne, C-A-R-E-Y, at impact marketing.net. And as a typical business owner, I’m connected to that 25 8, 26, 8, 20 15

Joe Zuccarello (45:47):
All the time. Right? So at t, so Dwayne, I just want to say thank you. I think the clarity, and for all of you who are out there watching or listening to this episode, I hope you got what I was hoping to deliver with Dwayne’s help. And that is Dwayne’s no nonsense, no BS approach to let’s just get down to business, let’s get through all of the muck, let’s get through all of the confusion and let’s talk real speak and words that you can understand. Because again, you’re out there driving businesses because it’s a passion business of yours. You’re really good at what you do with pet care, you’re really good at what you do with client care, but you’re not really great marketers. Dwayne and his team want to be those river guides, and I fully endorse them to be that. So I encourage you, I mean it, reach out, right? Starting a conversation is free. So just reach out and pick their brain and see and let them guide you. If it’s a right fit, it’d probably be the best fit. If it’s not a right fit, okay, no harm, no foul.

Duane Carey (46:54):
Yeah, Joe, I will talk to anybody in this industry anytime for free. And it can be the local TV station is trying to sell me X, y, Z, the radio station. This, the newspaper that I’m happy. I’ve tremendous 20 years of experience with all this stuff. Happy to talk with anybody about that. I really am. I love this industry. I’m very dedicated to it, very seriously considering dropping any of the other 30% of our business and just only doing pet. But anytime, shoot me an email, I’d be happy to try to help.

Joe Zuccarello (47:33):
Well, I think that’s fantastic, and Dwayne, for you and your team, I know that anybody that we would send to you is going to be in the best and most capable of hands. So thank you for being a guest on our podcast. And I think there’s probably some topics we’re going to want to unpack even a little bit deeper. If I can coax you into being, if I didn’t scare you away in the first episode, I’d like to unpack a couple of these other topics. I think they can be additional little nuggets of help. So for all of you out there, again, paragon pet school.com or you can go to Impact’s website directly. And Dwayne, thanks for being a guest.

Duane Carey (48:11):
Thanks so much, Joe.

Joe Zuccarello (48:12):
Take care. Bye.

About Joe

Joe Zuccarello is president of the Paragon School of Pet Grooming, leaders in grooming education on campus and online. He possesses more than three decades of experience in the pet grooming, product development and pet business consulting disciplines.

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