From Graphic Designer to Agency Owner: Chris Peer's Journey Unveiled

Thanks, Vaibhav. Appreciate it.

It was a lot of ignorance and arrogance, I think. I worked for American Greetings, designing greeting cards. What I learned in American Greetings as a side note is every greeting card has multiple people touch it. There are painters and artisans and hand letterers and lettering artists and finishing artists. I was not designing them from scratch. I was putting all of the artists’ work together so that they could be printed and adding some design components along the way. But as I was doing that, I always wanted to own my agency. I always really loved doing freelance work, and I just never had the wherewithal or the time to do it. And after my stint with American Greetings, I went on to work with Ernest and Young, and they owned an education and training division called Intellinex. And while there, I was a graphic designer there, building out adult training and learning programs. I became a project manager. And at the time, they had fallen on some hard times and I didn’t like the way the company was going and I didn’t like what they were asking of me and I just felt like I could do it better.

My wife had a great job and we had some infertility issues and we couldn’t have a baby. I’m like, All right, let’s start the company.

I got one $6,000 client. This was 21 years ago. I quit my job and I said, if we don’t pay taxes by the end of the year, we can survive. I just started going crazy after that and putting my head down and working hard. Then ironically, three weeks after I quit my job, we found out we were pregnant with our first daughter. Oh, wow.

She’s going to college in two weeks.

Yeah. Awesome.

No.

I think I was nerdy. I was always very young for my age. I always looked younger. I never played sports in high school and middle school. I didn’t play sports. I always liked creativity and being alone with myself and my thoughts. It wasn’t until college that I started to break out of my shell and joined a fraternity and became the house manager. Then I finally got some opportunities for some leadership, and I realized I enjoyed it.

I think it was an accumulation of things. After college, all the jobs I had, I felt were my training to be able to start a company. I was thinking, I worked for a marketing agency. I was learning the business side of the world. I think if the experience at Ernst & Young had been positive and I had more growth opportunities, I may or may not have left. But when it wasn’t good, I wanted to pursue my passion.

The transition to your original question, it was tough.

Ironically, the name was started by my business partner, my original business partner. We’re no longer partners now, but he came up with the name SyncShow, and it was the synchronization of the display of information. Back when he created it, it was a lot more like Flash animations and integrated video.

And we just didn’t want to change it after all these years because we got some name recognition now.

Those years were tough.

When you start a business, I didn’t go to business school. When I started a business, no handbook says this is how you do it. At least there wasn’t back then. We did work for anybody that would pay us, any type of business, any size business, and any marketing project, whether it was branding or website development or you name it, we would take it, we’d figure it out, we’d do our best to do a good job. And over those 10 years, we didn’t make much money because we were making a lot of mistakes and hiring the wrong people and things like that. And I think it was at that 10-year mark, my business partner and I, had been investing in our technology and our content management system software.

I think a lot of agencies were doing that back then, but we thought ours was the best. Anyway, we had a client situation that happened, and they were on our software and we built their website on that software, and they moved off of it and went to a tool called HubSpot. And in 2011 or 12 when this happened, I had never heard of HubSpot. Yeah. Early days of HubSpot. We were arrogant and we’re like, Oh, they’ll come back. Six months later, they called us and they said, Hey, we want to talk to you about the website. I’m like, We laughed and we said, Oh, they’re going to come back. They don’t like HubSpot. I went and met with them and they never mentioned anything about coming back to our platform. They had another project. I said, How’s that HubSpot thing going? And they’re like, It’s amazing. It’s awesome. We love it. I drove back to the office that day and told my business partner we were no longer doing our software, we were going to become HubSpot partners. And he had a different dream and a different vision so we ended up parting ways. And now we’ve been our HubSpot Platinum partner, and we’ve been doing it for all these years.

When you’re doing business for everybody, and we had to do some personal introspection and say, What are we really good at? And who do we like working with? And I think that was the big piece of it. We worked with a lot of different personalities, some of them were great, and some of them were horrible. And I just feel like life is too short and we have a right to be happy. So we adopted a no-asshole policy where we don’t let assholes on our team as employees or work with vendors that are our clients.

We’ve fired some clients if they weren’t treating our team well. What we realized was the business-to-business companies that we worked with, especially in the industrial markets like transportation, logistics, manufacturing, distribution, and warehousing, were great people to work with. They’re just the salt of the Earth, really good people. And we had a lot of experience in those verticals, so we decided let’s just niche and focus on them.

No, I think it’s some of that. I think certain types of businesses they’ve got different pressures and stresses in their lives, which can change the dynamic. Certain industries are very steeped and knowledgeable in marketing, and they have very high expectations of marketing, and there’s a lot of pressure on their internal marketing teams to perform. So they’re always in a rush. They’re always very hyper-attentive to things. And with the industrial space, many of them haven’t done marketing and they haven’t invested in marketing and they trust you and they want to see you as a valued partner, not a vendor. And that was important to us. We didn’t want to be a vendor because we weren’t a take-orders group. We thrive when we can go in and help a company to grow by helping them craft better value propositions and putting together a whole ecosystem for their growth. Right. So that’s how it happened.

Yeah, sure. We don’t have specific documented core values.

We have an ethos that we go by. One is just to treat everybody with respect. See it, own it, do it is a phrase we use. Take accountability for your professionalism and your career. We try at Think Show to have more of an entrepreneurial mission. We used to have standard core values, respect, integrity, and dedication, and we just realized everybody says that stuff.

We’ve transitioned more to descriptors of how we expect our team to support others on the team, our clients, and just do the right thing, even if it costs us money on your actions, those kinds of things

Yes, we just separate the company and really the two different halves. One is client services and one is non client services. So on the non-client services, we have operations and finance.

Then we’ve got HR recruiting benefits and education and training for our team. And then on the client services side, I think some of the bigger changes we’ve made as we’ve grown is we used to have one person overseeing all of the client services, all client strategies, and client relationships. Now we’ve got a vice president of client services who oversees all the operational infrastructure. So all our systems and processes, how we do work, efficiency, team utilization or billability, productivity. Then we also have a newer director of client strategy that roles about two years old, two and a half years. And that person is just responsible for the client’s strategic vision, client happiness, and client attention.

Okay. And then we have the account managers that report up to that.

When you saw me in Nashville, I was in a bad place. I was burnt out. I was very stressed out. We were just coming out of COVID. We had major employee retention issues. In 2021, we lost 52 % of our team. They resigned or moved on.

It’s hard to run a business when you’ve lost half your team and you’re replacing them and you’re spending a lot of money with recruiters and spending a lot of extra time training and bringing people on board. So I was in a pretty tough spot. Profits were down, revenues were stagnant, and we were very fortunate they were stagnant. What we did was we got serious and we said, Why are we doing this? What’s the why behind this? We love marketing, we love serving our clients, we love helping them grow, but if there’s no value back to us, it’s very difficult. So we realized that we had been losing profit margin year over year for probably three or four years.

We were bringing in a lot more revenue but making less money than we were three or four years earlier. This is ridiculous. So what we did, and this was last year, late last year, we put together a new strategic plan that said we’re going to focus on profitability, we’re going to focus on retaining our clients, great relationships, and treating this like a real business. And we implemented several things I’m happy to talk about. But yeah, the result is our profit margins have never been higher. This year, we’re doing fantastic above industry averages. And even though we planned for no growth, we’re seeing significant top-line revenue growths too, which weren’t planned, they just happened. So we’re very fortunate. We’re very blessed at this point.

I think there were four. Real quick, I’ll go through them. One way we created an executive scorecard. Every week we meet, we follow the entrepreneurial operating system and that process for those that are familiar with that. So we meet every Monday in our L 10 meeting, and I implement an executive scorecard I did two things on that scorecard one, I made my VP of client services accountable for reducing our cost of goods sold. Those numbers were getting higher and higher every year and way above where they should have been. Number two is I made my directive client strategy accountable for client retention and client growth. And so he’s now seven months into the year and he’s very close to hitting his annual goal for client growth. So the most client growth we’ve ever had with existing clients. Those were two things. The third thing was we implemented utilization and time tracking.

We used to do it and we got away from it over COVID.

Yeah, we switched over to ClickUp as our project management tool, and then we used an extension or a third-party software called Ever Hour to integrate for tracking hours. That’s been amazing. That whole process was a ton of work, but now we have insight as to who’s doing what and when and who has bandwidth. So that was important. And then the fourth thing is we just stuck to our budgets. We just looked at our team and said, I talked to so many other marketing agency owners and they focus on the top-line growth. And I talked to a couple of folks and they were like, Double our revenues but making less money than me. And I’m like, Oh, my gosh. If you just optimize, you can make a ton more money. Yeah, those were the four big things we did.

I’ll share the long story because I outlined it in the book.

I hired a new VP of client services, John Dators, and he started asking some probing questions after he started working here. Are we getting these results for our clients? Are the case studies working?

Yeah. We had one client with a 27 X ROI.

We realized we were good cooks but didn’t have recipes.

We were winging it. We were just customizing every single client. The book was written, it’s not a how-to marketing book. It’s more about how to build your marketing infrastructure so that you can get a return on investment. We just incorporated all of the mistakes we’ve made and all the things that we found that did work and compiled them all into these eight different categories.

Yeah, it’s pillar number two, value proposition, messaging, and branding by a long shot.

Every company I’ve ever talked to if they want marketing or they want marketing help, it all boils down to one reason. They want more sales, either new business sales or growing customer sales. When you start having a sales conversation and how marketing contributes to sales, it changes everything. What we realize, and you mentioned manufacturing, a lot of the companies we serve are very commoditized. And so the only way a lot of them can compete is on price, which that’s a wrong place to be if you’re always competing on price because then you’re not making margins. So how do you charge more for your services or how do you get chosen more often? It’s your value proposition. But most companies, I’d say 95 % of companies, never craft a well-articulated and differentiated value prop. They don’t know how it’s very difficult. They tell a story, but their story isn’t unique. What we found is almost every company has a unique speak story to tell. We just got to figure out what it is. And so we start every engagement with value craft.

Making sure that we can tell a well-crafted story and then we work on the messaging and the branding to support that. And once you have that, then it’s okay. How do we take this to market? We have to do all your marketing, your website, and social media, which is that transition question you asked about how do we scale this? Well, if you buy a race car but never take it out of the garage, what’s the use of having it? You need to put gas in it. That’s how we scale it. And most of our clients are with us for multiple years, 3, 4, 5 years. We’ve got a client that’s been with us for over 10 years now. It’s an evolving process as well.

Yeah. Number one, I think first it comes down to doing business with the right clients.

We have a saying that we repeat all the time here at SyncShow, and that’s just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. And we can do PR, but we shouldn’t. So we don’t do PR. So I think knowing where you’re really good and where you’re not is the first step. And then finding companies that value what you do and working with those kinds of companies is really important. And I think just being honest and open and if your clients know that you’re working hard to hit their goals, they appreciate that. And eventually, we’ll get there. We have one client right now, they had no ROI in the first year. They were a smaller retainer. It was a smaller engagement, but they also had zero marketing when we started. So we spent the whole year building the case. I think they might have a one-time ROI or whatever. They broke even. But we’re now seven months into the second year and they’ve got an 8 X ROI.

Far. So when you average it out, it ends up being like a 2 X ROI. But it just took some time to kick in.

That’s a big question, Bye Bye. I think every business should be in business to make a fair wage. And if you can charge a premium for your services because you’re really good, then more power to you. So when we do our pricing, first we look at our costs. What are the costs that go into it? And then what’s a fair markup for those costs? And then what’s the ultimate value? So we do something I think that’s very unique. I think our approach to building out a repeatable marketing infrastructure and then servicing and doing the implementation work is very unique. Our client results show it, they prove it. Our focus on niche industries and being niche helps a lot. We price our services based on what we think is a fair price in the market that doesn’t overprice us, but we also test it from time to time too. Sometimes it’s just like when business is really good, maybe we get a new client opportunity and we charge more for a service than we did before just to see, can we charge this much? We have some strategy processes that traditionally have been loss leaders for us.

We lose money on them because we want to get a foot in the door or we want to win the engagement. Now, business is going well, you might be able to charge a little bit more for that and say, What if I doubled that price? Would people still buy? You got to test the market a lot. Sure.

Part of it is the eight-pillar methodology, but nobody’s talking to me in my company unless they’re unhappy with their current situation. They’re either with a current agency and they don’t like that agency for personality reasons, or they don’t like the agency because they’re not delivering an ROI. Things are making sense to them or they’re new to this. When people hire us, it’s going to be more than $100,000 a year, sometimes much more. So it’s a big investment for these companies, so they want to do their due diligence. I think a lot of it is just saying, hey, one, we’ve got the industry niche experience. We know your business and your companies, your prospects, and how they make buying decisions probably better than you do. And I would say the number one thing that we walk them through is the reason that it’s not working is because they don’t have a marketing strategy. We’ve worked with hundreds of companies over 21 years, and not a single one has provided us with an existing, written, documented marketing strategy.

Yeah. And you got to do the strategy right. Just putting it on paper doesn’t mean it’s a strategy.

Absolutely. But having a plan, and that’s what you mentioned, is whack mall-style marketing, otherwise, you’re just implementing marketing tactics, hoping it’s going to work.

It’s critical. In most of our companies, we are their marketing department. They may have one or two or three marketers on staff, but most of them don’t. We do everything on the marketing side, but we think of ourselves as presales. Our job is to help the company to drive more sales revenue, whether from existing or new business. And the salespeople want the commissions and they want to do their job because they want to be heroes. We do an extensive process. I just had a meeting this morning with a manufacturing company that said, we want to move forward with you. What’s the next step? And I said, before we even sign off on a proposal or do a contract, I said, I want to come out, I want to sit with you for two hours. I want to meet with your sales team and want to talk about how we can work together and see if it sounds like a good fit. So we’re going to walk through HubSpot and the CRM capabilities of it and lead generation and show them how the ecosystem works.

That’s a great question. I think in general, I believe everybody has a right to be happy. I pursue happiness at all costs. And so part of that is I want to pursue happiness in life and work. I also think my mantra or how I operate is thinking about my epitaph when I die, what people remember. I just want to be remembered as somebody honest, cared for, was a good friend, somebody that did what they said they were going to do, somebody that was trustworthy. And then I just like working hard and playing hard.

I like to be active and I like to accomplish things. Big dreams and big things happen.

Sure. We’ll try it.

My favorite business book is The Boutique. It’s a professional services book. Fantastic.

Not particularly. I do follow several thought leaders but they’re all over the place.

Hubspot. I think HubSpot.

Fishing. I’m a big bass fisherman.

If I could go back and tell myself 20 years ago, B, don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t stress over all these things you can’t control because I’m good at doing that.

Thanks. I appreciate it. It was great to be here.