Zoom Meeting with Will – November 17, 2025

Josh Ramsey

Make it better layout and remove any detail for bear iron from the text and write it down some of the FAQ based on the text :

Will Sheils

But hey, November on the East Coast.

Josh Ramsey

November on the East Coast. You’re in Maryland, right?

Will Sheils

Yes, we’re in Annapolis, about 30 minutes from Baltimore, about 35 from D.C.

Josh Ramsey

Man, it has been so long since I’ve been in Baltimore, but I really enjoyed that city. I don’t really know why it’s been that long, but man, just, there was something about Baltimore that I just, I thought it was good. But I don’t think I’ve spent any time in Annapolis. Don’t you have like a large sailing community up there?

Will Sheils

Yeah, it’s a self-proclaimed capital of sailing, sailing capital of the country, which is highly debated with debatable. Newport also claims the same honors, but we have the Naval Academy as well, which is a huge draw, makes us, you know, makes property value valuable and makes people want to come here. So we’ll take it. How about you? Where are you calling from?

Josh Ramsey

I am in just north of Dallas, Texas. So I’m in a city called McKinney. So, but yeah, I have lived here most of my life and have three kids and a wife. And we live in a little area called McKinney. It’s a nice little area. We are not the sailing capital of anywhere.

Will Sheils

I’ve been to Texas. One of my college roommates lived in Abilene. And yeah, it went to, what is it? Billy Bob’s? World’s biggest honky tonk bar? Yeah.

Josh Ramsey

Went to down, drove down to Mexico to Los Rios, I think it was the name of it. Yeah. Cidadacuna. Yeah.

Will Sheils

Picked up some chicks and some pharmaceuticals and drove back.

Josh Ramsey

But that was many moons ago. But thank you.

Will Sheils

Thank you very much for making time to talk to me. Obviously found your name through not just Google, but also AI, the AI search. So obviously if someone. If can market themselves, can market everybody else.

2:03 – Joshua Ramsey (strategicpointmarketing.com)

That’s the plan, man. So, yeah. Tell me what’s happening, Will.

Will Sheils

Big picture. have Blue Star Chesapeake. Blue Star Chesapeake is a merged company from Blue Star Paint and Chesapeake Painting. Both companies have been around about 19 years. We were constantly competing with each other. Steve, the owner of that company, and myself just started talking. We knew each other, and we have a shared accountant, and kind of came up with this crazy idea. What if we merged and made a large painting company? Yeah. That was summer of 2024. So we’ve been in business together for about a year and a half, a little under. In that process, we also started adopting EOS as a framework for what we’re doing. On that team, it’s myself, my partner Steve, both co-workers. Visionaries. We’ve got somebody, Josh, who’s our sort of president, GM. He’s operations. We have a fractional COO who is our integrator. Obviously, we have an implementer who’s part of our team, but not in the office or on our dailies, or excuse me, our weeklies. But we started looking about what is the biggest bottleneck in our business, and it’s lead gen. It’s consistent lead gen. Most people, as you know, sort of half- it. They throw money towards a couple different pet projects and then claim that they’re not getting any business out of it. We’re just looking to open up the pipeline. We’re in a great area geographically and economically to do more business, and we’ve got the capacity to. One thing keeping us back from our potential is just telling people who we are, what we do, and getting in front of them.

Josh Ramsey

It’s interesting that you use the word bottleneck when it comes to lead gen, because you walk me through your nomenclature or thought process or more detail of what that means, because I typically hear the word bottleneck when it gets to, we have a lead gen, but we don’t have the systems to follow up. We don’t have the systems to maybe generate more. There’s typically something more, because to me, you have lead gen, which is driving in, then you have the closing ability, communication, the marketing of communication, then you move into the sales, and that can be a bottleneck, and then you move into maybe design, depending on how you structure or frame, and then you move into execution, and then you move into, you know, the whatever, however you close out projects, right? So can you walk me through just so I can understand how your brain is working around that?

Will Sheils

Yeah. I look at it as sort of like a bottleneck is like a sort of Sigma Six. So we already have a captive audience in our existing clients. We have a brand name in our area. People know who we are, and they know what we do. Okay. When I say bottleneck, I’m looking at the whole company. It’s not our operations. It’s not our financials. It’s not ability to put people on the trucks. It’s not anything but making sure that our lead generation is pumping around the clock, around the calendar. We have an issue with seasonality, right? As a service company in the Mid-Atlantic, around right about now, just before Thanksgiving, our call volume goes straight down. It’s not top of mind. They don’t want people in their houses in between Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s, and also the weather. It becomes prohibitive towards exterior painting, which is usually a high revenue number for us or a high revenue offering for us. So Steve in the past has been doing all of the SEO, the background, the once again optimization on websites and getting in front of people that way, doing mass mailers, emailers, newsletters. And Bluestar, we’ve been more boots on the ground doing trade shows, networking events. And we’ve plateaued both in revenue, just exhausting those two branches. And he and I are both exhausted as being, we have a company of close to 50 people, and the two owners are the people that are driving all the sales. On the back end, we can see the metrics of all of our sales cycle. know we have traditionally a 50% close ratio. We can see a lot of the… Backend of what we’re doing, and we just need to be in front of more potential clients. Okay.

Josh Ramsey

Did that answer it, or did that just provide more questions for you?

Will Sheils

A little bit of both, but that’s part of the nature of this conversation, right?

Josh Ramsey

I mean, part of the nature of this conversation for me is to get a feel for where you have been, where you are, and where you’re trying to get to. So painting the picture takes a little bit of time. I take a philosophy you’ve probably heard of before. Seek first to understand. Before being understood. Because the narrative, when I teach a lot of conferences, we talk about the narrative of the business and the narrative of the ownership and leadership of the business. And the narrative comes from what I have worked with called the trauma egg, which is when you dissect your life from the first moment of memory all the way to current, there are traumatic events, both positive and negative, that have impacted you into the decisions you make now. So for me to continue the… Maturation of knowledge of what you do and why you do it. It takes me down the journey of how you make those decisions. I spoke with a business owner, IT company, and he doesn’t trust anybody. So I looked at his narrative and spoke to him and I understood why he didn’t trust anybody. So I had the conversation with him about trust. And some people are very open to having those intense conversations. And some people are like, whoa, I don’t really think we’re too deep. But when I understand that, I’m able to help clearly communicate not only the message in the USP, unique selling position of the company, but also understand the questions as to, and I’ll ask it now, why are the two owners driving sales and we’re not using, and or are we using, other lead gen where you’re just closing it versus the lead gen coming in?

Will Sheils

I think that’s, first of all, this is why we’re having the conversation because Steve and I are like, why are the owners selling? We have estimators who make, who are on, this is kind of sidebar, who are on these commission structures that worked well five years ago, but doesn’t work well for the business now.

Josh Ramsey

So they’re already making great money.

Will Sheils

So they’re like, well, I’m a sales guy. It’s like, no, you get the lead from the office. And then you go to the estimate and you’re able to close the estimate, but you’re not generating new leads. You’re just order takers. Um, so when we approach our sales guys, or excuse me, our estimators to sell more, they’re kind of like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t want to, I don’t want to , excuse me. I don’t want to mess up what I have going on by trying to sell. can say whatever words they want to offend me.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah.

Will Sheils

I get all nervous now that we’re getting AIs recording. It’s going to have me pinned down to send out automated emails, dropping F-bombs.

Josh Ramsey

Well, you know, they say that, you know, we’re, we’re all worried about Siri and Google and AI. Bye-bye. We everything we say, but what people oftentimes forget is that our vacuum cleaners have been gathering dirt for years.

Will Sheils

That’s right. So we got to be careful.

Josh Ramsey

I like that.

Will Sheils

So, yeah, so not that he and I are directly driving it, but we’re pulling the levers in order to drive lead generation. And it’s, you know, if we do have a double book festival weekend where there’s a trade show and a festival, I’ll come in and help out. And I’m not talking about those little one-offs, but we want to create, for lack of a better marketing word, a pipeline, several pipelines where we know we can pull levers and we have somebody else who says, somebody else who’s a fractional CMO on our team saying, okay, it’s September. This is traditionally, we have about a two-month ramp up to get up for interior paint and interior services. So this is when historically we know we can do X, Y, and Z. And it’s not Steve or I having to be like, hey, did anybody remind, you know, did anybody remember to do this? Do we have to do that? We have a unique ability of being able to provide an amazing service, not just in what we do, but in customer service and backend support. And we have that ability to scale it into other markets. The one thing that’s preventing us from doing so is making sure that we have consistent business coming in the door. Okay.

Josh Ramsey

So let’s talk Legion for a second. I heard you mentioned two, and we stopped there, SEO and trade show. But when you said SEO, it sounds like Steve is the partner, correct? Yes.

Will Sheils

So Steve is not, and by the way, I probably should have said this in the beginning, you probably already picked up on it.

Josh Ramsey

I write notes in front of me, and then I’ve got like four screens in front of me and my camera’s right here. So I bobble around here. So Steve’s been doing SEO himself. Is he proficient? Like, does he have background on that or what?

Will Sheils

Oh, he’s. he’s. he’s. He’s very proficient. He built and sold a company for study abroad and travel placement, and he’s very well-versed in how to do all background technology, website SEO. We also have a woman named Britta. That’s her full-time job, but with us, she’s just a consultant, meaning she does it as needed, when needed. To make sure that everything is always tweaked. between the two of them, it covers the bases. Okay.

Josh Ramsey

I want to come back to SEO in just a minute. Trade show. You’re running trade shows just like home shows?

Will Sheils

Yeah, home shows. We talk about festivals, Oktoberfests, stuff in our targeted areas where we can get a lot of merch out, get some names, boat shows. We used to do the United States boat show here in October. And of course, in a past life, we would just do it. And call the people and not really track it too much. But the past couple of years, everything we’ve been doing, we’ve been ensuring that we’ve tracked how many people visited, how many people converted into estimates. And out of those estimates, how many were jobs? And were the jobs enough to- How do you track that?

Josh Ramsey

Manually.

Will Sheils

You don’t have a CRM?

Josh Ramsey

We have a CRM, excuse me.

Will Sheils

We track the festivals manually. put them into Jobber. So we’ve started using Jobber a lot more to track incoming sales calls. Any leads we get.

Josh Ramsey

And you do have how long of data? Have you tracked it down to your cost per lead, cost per sale? Yes. Well, we do cost per lead, cost per acquisition.

Will Sheils

Okay.

Josh Ramsey

Acquisition meaning sale though? Yes. Because some people will say acquisition and they mean, I got someone’s name. And then other people will go, I got acquisition. And they’re like, we’ve sold the job, right? So we’re tracking different. So your word is acquisition. Acquisition meaning Meaning you sold the job. So you have it tracked down to that and you have it tracked through Jobber. So it’s not really manual. I would erase my word manual because you’re loading it in manually, but is your website loading it straight into Jobber as well? Yes, everything works to Jobber.

Will Sheils

We also have a little bit of redundancy where if a phone call comes in, we have our front desk staff make sure that we can, they’ll write as it comes in into a separate spreadsheet, just so we make sure that Jobber is correct to what’s actually happening. And every month I can look at the numbers and say, yeah, we’re one off or two off. Also with something that happens with Jobber is we will have with the cost per lead, cost per acquisition, it throws us off a little bit because if I come to your house and give you an estimate for painting and while I’m there, your wife shows up and says, ooh, I also want to get this done, that done. It shows up as one client becomes three estimates. Then we have to go back and kind of cull it. We decided it’s not mission critical to be that precise, but we have to cull it to make sure that Joshua Ramsey was actually one client, not three clients, because it produced three estimates. So as we look at our EOS scorecard, I manually input it from Jobber to ensure that all the numbers are somewhat accurate, and there’s always more estimates than there are leads.

Josh Ramsey

Okay. And then on Jobber, how long have you used Jobber?

Will Sheils

Chesapeake Painting has been using Jobber for the past couple years. When I was at Blue Star, used QuickBooks. So when we started about, when Blue Star merged with Chesapeake, we picked it up about a year and a half ago, two years ago. Okay.

Josh Ramsey

Have you set your budget? Do you set your budget a year ahead and then track it quarterly, or how do you handle budgets, or do you set budgets, or do you just kind of free-form it?

Will Sheils

kind of free-form it. Okay. Merging last summer of 2014, we don’t have that much historic data as one company, and we’ve been able to, if we looked at our P&Ls from 2023 from each company and merged them together, there’s some cost savings by being under one roof, but we’re still working on creating historic data since we’ve only been operating as one for a year and a half.

Josh Ramsey

And then back to lead gen marketing, SEO, trade show, what else are you running right now?

Will Sheils

Ooh, monthly newsletter mailers and then monthly promo newsletter, email newsletter through MailChimp. We’ve also segmented our jobber lead list and then sending out targeted emails to smaller segmented lists. So if you’re ever, are you tracking that?

Josh Ramsey

if you are, is it resulting in any sales?

Will Sheils

We are tracking. We just kicked it up. I’d have to look to see what the results are. But we automatically see an uptick in a large amount of opening in comparison to the newsletters.

Josh Ramsey

But opening and viewing and it landing in the box is one thing. But engagement, as I would think you would understand, is totally different, right?

Will Sheils

Yes.

Josh Ramsey

So you haven’t really, the engagement, meaning they’ve clicked through, they’ve gone to the site, but then they’ve converted. And you said that you don’t have that offhand or knowledge in hand.

Will Sheils

No, because we’ve kind of stopped with how both Steve and I, not only are we both handling marketing, I sit in the marketing seat. He helps me on the SEO side and the email segmented side. We’re also hardcore messy with switching over banks, employee problems, client problems. So before we got too far afield, we identified the need for a CMO in order to take it off our hands. It’s why build it if we want to hire somebody who’s going to help us with it anyway.

Josh Ramsey

Thank Okay. Let me do one thing real quick. Hang on. And then is there any other? I didn’t see you in AdWords. I didn’t see Meta. I ran a quick report. didn’t see either one.

Will Sheils

Did I miss it? Yeah, we do. We do AdWords and Meta through Chesapeake Painting Services.

Josh Ramsey

Okay. So maybe that’s why I pulled it from BlueStarPaint.com. I ran AdWords and nothing came up. You’re saying it’s under another domain? Yeah, ChesapeakePainting.net.

Will Sheils

We are BlueStarChesapeakePainting as the merge names. There’s two parts to that. So now we have BlueStarPaint and Chesapeake… BlueStarPaint. Chesapeakepainting.net are our old websites, but we’re still utilizing those until we merge names and rebrand in 2026. So part of this is not only are we trying to keep business as Blue Star Chesapeake, we are also going to rebrand and we’re going to put everything into a new website and have all these, every marketing thing we do is going to be directed to a new website. Has Steve worked on the SEO for bluestarpaint.com? No. Feel better.

Josh Ramsey

Feel better.

Will Sheils

We sort of, I shouldn’t say abandoned that, but we started using Chesapeakepainting.net because we needed one website that filtered into Jobber and Chesapeake was already set up.

Josh Ramsey

Give me just a second, I’m going to pull up something I want to see. Some ads that makes more and more. Again, we’re painting a picture here, but. Interesting. Chesapeakepainting.net. .net.

Will Sheils

Very interesting.

Josh Ramsey

I’ll show you what I’m looking at here in a second. I’m just trying to pull some of it up because I’m – and some of this I may circle back with Steve on if we want to move into that direction. At some point in time. How many leads a month are you trying to generate and what are you at right now, knowing that we always want more, right? But – Yeah.

Will Sheils

Hold on. Once again, we are seasonal, so we’ve got about – let me do the quick math because I’m looking at one of the scorecards right now. We’ll usually do 90 to 100. instant. B Leads per month.

Josh Ramsey

Is that what keeps you busy and comfortable? Sorry, that’s… Sorry, thank you.

Will Sheils

Let me clarify that. We’re looking at… That number is about how many estimates in the nice and good weather in the warmer season that we do. Leads add about 10 more to that. We have a pretty… So we’re trying to benchmark per week about 40 leads per week.

Josh Ramsey

But if I told you, hey, we’re going to do 100 a month consistently, forget season for just a second, is that a benchmark that you say, okay, we held level, or is that we’re growing each year? Because you don’t… I’m assuming that you’re probably either a zero renewal, like you don’t have an ongoing, right? Pest control, we’re going to sign somebody up and we’re going to keep them for, you know, however long, and we’re going to get monthly or quarterly. For you, you’re obviously not doing that. So have you cycled through and seen that people are repainting or doing more jobs within a certain period of time? And is your retention high with that? Or is it not really applicable?

Will Sheils

Good question. If we segment it, we say every house is five to seven years, around five years, everybody needs their house repainted. So we’re in the process of documenting who five years ago, and then reaching out to them on a monthly basis. Or, you know, who got repainted every, you know, who was painted, what is five years ago, in 2020. So reaching out to those as a market initiative saying, oh, we’ll give you discounts. But we have a pretty high retention with existing clients. And there’s always additional services to provide. So yeah, it kind of sucks. have yet to find that reoccurring monthly revenue where we can hit somebody’s credit card and give them a service. But because we have interior, exterior painting cabinet. We have the ability to keep hitting up the same clients for different services. Our main painting estimator does, his happy space is around five estimates per day. So when we look at 25 painting estimates per week, I would even push him to do six a day, so 30 estimates per week. That’s where we would have to onboard a new estimator, which obviously wouldn’t be an issue and we’d be happy to do. On the renovation side, because the renovation side of bathroom kitchens and custom carpentry is a little bit more high-low based on capacity, if they could do two estimates a day, I think that would be sufficient. So 214, 30, so 45, we’ll say 45 or 50 estimates per week.

Josh Ramsey

Is what? Is what you want?

Will Sheils

Is where we would need to be in order to see minimal growth. What I would want would be, you know, 100 estimates per week.

Josh Ramsey

So minimal growth would go from 40 a week to, if I heard you, 45 a week?

Will Sheils

Yeah, 45 or 50 would be consistent because then we could start tweaking our prices a little bit more. You know, we play with pricing. When we have a backlog of estimates and our estimators are busy, the price goes up.

Josh Ramsey

So you’re getting about, right now, you’re getting about 180. You’re getting about 160. My numbers are off somewhere because you said somewhere around 40 a week, but you said that you’re getting about 90 to 100 a month.

Will Sheils

Sorry, so we have about 20, I’m looking 25 per.

Josh Ramsey

I’m using growth. We don’t have to hold ourselves to it, right? I’m just trying to, like, get a gauge for where you’re at because I’m about to lead to another question.

Will Sheils

So if we were to take it across 12 months, I would say about 100 a month.

Josh Ramsey

So that would be 25 a week. Yes. So then you’re saying you want to try to double that. Yeah.

Will Sheils

I mean, obviously, we want everything.

Josh Ramsey

It becomes the question of what’s achievable, right? Because we have the thought of, hey, this is what we want. I mean, for me, for instance, this is going to kind of lead down the road of conversation here of some of the things that I’m seeing. And I have a few more questions, and then I can kind of answer questions for you. But when I look at myself, you know, there’s something that I call fact versus feeling. And a quick story on that is I do a lot of podcasts. So I’ve been part of my PR and why you find is my PR is really strong because I’ve been on over 100 podcasts. By doing that, when I first looked at it back at the beginning of 2025, I said, man, I looked at my budget spend for the year and I’m like, this is insane. That’s a lot of money to spend and not being able to track and see that I’m getting leads from it. So I sat back and I was like, okay, I’m going to kill it. And then I stopped myself and I go, what would I tell a client? And what I would tell a client is there’s a difference between fact and feeling. And the answer became that I knew what I was spending. And then I went and looked at, is there anything that I could associate from it? So business owners, we talk about ROI, return on investment. But I’ve actually since then modified how I use ROI. And I look at result of investment because the result of investment isn’t necessarily the return monetarily, but the result could increase my visibility, finding me on chat GPT and so forth. So now I can accredit you finding me on AI to. The spend that I did on the podcast, the time and the money and so forth, right? So too often I think business owners just fall in that trap of return on investment, where’s my money? I did all this, where’s my money? But we have to look at the result and see if we can draw other indicators to that. So there’s a lot to kind of pull in within that concept of what are we willing to spend that we’re going to call traditional high tide marketing of high tide raises all ships and it’s going to help us all over. And then what are we going to count as we have a monetary result of? So these are two different elements that I break apart. One thing about how I do marketing is I simplify it because I just had a conference in Miami last week and I said I had about 100 business owners sitting there and I said, all right, everybody, to start off, I want to just get this out of the way. I’m going to say one word and I want all of you to think about and write down how you feel when I say this word. What are you thinking? How do you feel? Two different things. And I said, ready?

Will Sheils

Marketing.

Josh Ramsey

And you could see all these people’s faces change and uncomfortable and angry and confusion. And some of them were happy, but most of them were like this gut feel was just like, I don’t like it. And I think it’s because people don’t understand the foundations of what it is. So you have strategic message, tactical marketing. You have the principles of how impressions work. You have the flow of you have to do good SEO to get keywords ranked to move all the way down to the sale. And when we start breaking these into funnels and pieces of conversation, almost like chapters in a book, it starts to become more relevant. And then you’re able to pull marketing together and build what is marketing by understanding all the different segments of. So when you say that you’re doing monthly emails, trade shows, and SEO, and you’re generating 25 a week, I’m not seeing anything in action. So let me go to kind of a question, but a statement on my share screens and see if you can add some clarity.

SCREEN SHARING: Joshua started screen sharing – WATCH: https://fathom.video/share/q2C69Bee2ZgnSam-CsosAnWKshskJt7m?timestamp=1750.229361 Sure. So I use a lot of different tools because fact versus feeling is what do we see versus how do we feel about it? So if someone tells me that they’re an expert in SEO, I go, great, you’re an expert in SEO. I want to do what’s called confirmation bias, which is I believe you. Now, what are the supporting evidence that’s going to show me that you’re there? So if I start off by looking at your site, and there’s going to be clarity that I need from you. But when I look at bluestarpaint.com and then I pull up the organics of it, you know, low authority. You have pretty good keywords on page one of Google. Your SERPs are what’s really driving you. You’re at 96. So you’re showing up in position zero. It’s what they used to call it. Now they call it SERPs. So you’re showing up, which is good. But, you know, there’s there’s. Some good things that you have going here on what’s happening. Follow versus non-follows, not too much. It seems like you have a lot of branded traffic. was trying to find where that was. We can dive into that here in a little bit. So I’m like, okay. Then I look at this site, 18. It is ranking more overall, but if we look at page one, you’re only looking at 44. Over here, you were 20, so you’re half. The interesting thing is that when I go to the site and I try to crawl, it gives me errors. So the first way I crawled it was using Screaming Frog, and it blocks. Everything is no-response non-indexable, so I can’t see anything. And then when I went to view page one,

Will Sheils

And this may be, and this is just, last week we had a malware attack on the Chesapeake side email and website. So we’re coming out of that. Obviously, I don’t speak computer internet jargon, but that may be a product of us scrubbing everything on Friday into today to make sure that Chesapeake side. That would make some more clarity, right?

Josh Ramsey

So again, I’m learning, right, where you’re at. The other thing is, is that I’m not seeing anything show up in AdWords. So this is ads transparency by Google, and it tells me if someone’s showing up. So you see how nothing is here. If I type in mine, it shows up. So I select it, and now it shows me all of the ads that I’m running or have been. So I’m not seeing that there. And that should not be affected by the malware and the spam. So is it running? And I didn’t see it under your other, Bluestar. It didn’t run under each, either one. Are you aware of any of that? I am not aware of that.

Will Sheils

I know she was asking for some help with it a couple weeks ago, which we realized we had a malware attack, and that’s why we had to stop everything. So I can reach out to her, or I’ll have Steve reach out to Brynn today and see if that’s why we’re not posting on anything.

Josh Ramsey

Because I’m seeing a little bit of traffic here. You know, and again, this is not going to give us exact, but it gives us an idea of October and November. Did y’all shut off ads in this season, October, November?

Will Sheils

No, we changed it from, we fine-tuned it away from kitchens and bathrooms because it was more expensive and moved it over to just interior painting. on pray. pray. pray. Thank you.

Josh Ramsey

That’s interesting that you’re going after this. You’re not a remodeler, are you?

Will Sheils

We do refreshes, kitchen, bathroom refreshes. So we have one of our core service offerings is we have a custom spray booth to paint cabinets. And so when we’re in for cabinets, we can do countertops, tile. We had a renovation department that we did these $500,000 $700,000 interior renovations as of finished up the last one this summer. And we decided we’re no longer chasing after that. We become the bank for trades and for subs and for our clients. So… We’re a lot better and more proficient at painting and these quick refreshes. So that’s what we’re charging after.

Josh Ramsey

And is this in between Steve and I wrote her name down somewhere, are they effective in getting the site fixed and back live or are they still running out for months?

Will Sheils

Yep. They’re good? Yeah.

Josh Ramsey

Okay. Some of your pages still seem to be broken.

Will Sheils

So we just got our email out of Google jail like this morning. Okay.

Josh Ramsey

Okay. Good.

Will Sheils

Going back to you talking to the group about marketing, some people frown, some people smile. We understand that it’s not, you don’t wave a magic wand. I understand there’s seven to 10 impressions. We talked to our clients who have used this. A couple of times we’ve talked to new clients and we saw your yard sign. I was driving past one of your fleet on Westry. I saw your thing on Instagram. So I always think it’s a six to seven touch points before they actually call us. So we know it’s not, oh, yes, I saw your ad, your promo. I want to go with you. It’s usually three to four reasons why they found us. And, but we want to make sure is that we cast, we have a wide enough umbrella that brings people to us and making sure we’re not foolishly chasing after one and ignoring the other.

Josh Ramsey

That’s the bulk of my questions, I would say. Tell me where your head’s at. What are you thinking? What are you looking for? What could I give you or tell you right now to say, this is X, like this makes a valuable conversation to you? What, what does that look like?

Will Sheils

So. Just basic questions. You do do fractional CMO. Correct.

Josh Ramsey

So I’d like to clarify and make sure. Let me stay on that for just a second. Is that all right? So I do fractional CMO. Let me give you my background and then what you find today. I think the education of it is important because a lot of people get confused as to what the market looks like. So back in the late 90s, I sold media. So I did transit advertising, billboards, radio, all the traditional stuff. Then I got frustrated mainly because I wasn’t able to retain clients because the branding was working. The messaging was working. But I didn’t know at a young age how to translate the conversation of impressions versus leads versus the next level. And web wasn’t really hot then. It was just brand new. So there wasn’t a good way to say, look, we did this and we had this much more traction. So I just got frustrated and said, I need to do something different. So I went to work for a top 100 ad agency. Within two years, became senior VP of sales and marketing. My job was to talk with business owners and then onboard them and set them in the track they needed to go to be able to say, look, this is where you’re at. This is what you need to do. Here’s what are the steps and how to execute it. At that time, I started working with Google and trying to integrate Google, SEO, pay-per-click, and AdWords and so forth into the company system. 2009 hit and the business was struggling. I was straight commissioned. The business owner said, hey, I’m going to lay you off. I’m like, I’m commissioned. Why are you doing it? He’s like, well, I could pay this guy lesser commission and get it done. Then he came back to me three months later. He’s like, biggest mistake of my career. I shouldn’t have done it. He’s like, will you come back? I’m like, no, that bridge is gone. I started my first company called Strategic Point Marketing. That is a full-stack ad agency specializing in digital marketing. We do web builds. We prefer more of you have the build. We can take it, manage it, run AdWords, run meta. Run other things to get it up and going, but then sprinkle in other needs that a company has. From there, in 2018, I had structured the company that I basically stepped away. I call it somewhat fire retire, where I didn’t have to really be involved. Flew to the Philippines, opened a SaaS company that’s now turned into an AI company. So we do a lot of AI integration. That’s one reason why you were able to find me is because with that AI and what we’re doing, we’re on a small business budget, and we are executing at a high rate. So rather than us coming in and being like, hey, $5,000 for this one plug-in, we’re like $5,000 and we’re going to give you five or eight plug-ins. So it’s very different in how we approach it. We focus on brand, we focus on LLMs, and we focus on tracking and communicating more clear in the web. So that company, same thing happened. I have a president of that company. I have a VP and CEO of the agency now. So those two companies operate. I kind of stepped back and said, what do I need to do? This is 2019, 2020. I needed to figure out what else I wanted to do and how I wanted to grow. So I looked at the market. No one was doing fractional CMO work.

Will Sheils

You had the fractional COO, CEO, CFOs.

Josh Ramsey

No one was doing marketing. So I published. I was eight out of 10 positions, page one of Google for like three years. And then all of a sudden, everyone started catching on and saying, oh, so now what you find in the market to just be aware of is some fractional CMOs are only trained by digital marketing, not the traditional. And they’re not trained by, by, you know, what is the whole brand? I’m trained classically and efficiently of just self-work of what are all the pieces? How do we look at everything as a whole? And how do we set it? I think you’re going to, you know, understand what I’m about to say. But I say to people, my job is to work myself out of a job. You grow so much that you hire somebody, and then also my job is to keep my job, and how I keep my job, the company grows. We’re able to see the growth and the metrics and the KPIs that we can all look at as an executive committee and say, hey, we were here, we’re moving here. Here are the problems, here are the issues, and then I come in and say, here are my solutions and my plug-ins, and I talk probably more about issues with my clients than I do success stories, because we can all see the success. We’ll be able to feel that, but what we need to do is continue to figure out the problems and solve those problems. So that’s how I work, and that’s why I am a fractional CMO of stepping in, talking about it, then going and executing. So whether that’s with someone like Brita, we find another agency, or whoever’s doing it, we pull and we allocate to different people, we set our budget, and then we follow that budget, and we look as close as possible for that ROI on each one. And again, ROI meaning both. Result of and return on. So go ahead. You had another thought. Tons of thoughts.

Will Sheils

Yeah. What we’re looking for, you know, and it’s, it’s a discovery process for us because we’re growing as well. You know, if you said last year we would have a fractional COO with who’s, you know, we’d be running EOS, we’d, we’d have X, Y, Z. We’d be like, whoa, that costs too much, but we’re starting to look and not be, you know, not be cheap and realize that we have the potential to make this company. It’s fun and profitable now, but we’ve, we have the ability to really ramp it up and scale this business. And once again, we went back to, to needing somebody in the marketing seat and that person in the marketing seat, we want to have, you know, EOS fluent. We want them to be able to like numbers more than the creative factors of it. I love that you said your job is to work yourself out of a job because that should be the first. The first mission statement of anybody in a fractional position. And somebody who’s accountable for it says, we can have fun what we do, but we need to drive all the numbers to meet scorecard metrics. And we need to make sure that we are not just printing advertising. We’re not just running print campaigns, that it’s hitting on all cylinders. And then we will be able to determine which outlet is working the best for us and where we need to tweak up. And I guess I mentioned it, but you are EOS Fluent. Is that something you’ve been part of? I have been.

Josh Ramsey

We have a client that’s in the middle of it. We looked and got pitched on doing it for my company as well. We did not do it because, excuse me, the structure of my company, it just doesn’t make sense. We’re, it’s probably a poor word to use, but we’re a bit fragmented because the. vision of each company is different, and our goals for each company is different. So, you know, reading the book, Traction, understanding the principles, and plugging it in, we understand how to do it. Different people have different levels of scorecards and what that looks like, and I’m having my assistant pull one so I can share with you what we do internally. The principle of it I like. I believe that when you have a staff of 50 plus that it makes a lot of sense. My staff’s fully loaded, I’m going be honest. I have no clue how many people work for me as a whole. I have no idea. But the principles of what EOS is, yes, we know very well, and we apply it. We apply it a little bit of a different spin with each client.

Will Sheils

And with a 30-day expiration, what’s the word?

Josh Ramsey

A 30-day marketing plan, but it’s a personality conversation as well. For instance, I just showed you that report card, right? And I’m like, hey, here’s the budget sheet. Here’s what we’re tracking. Here’s what we did in the last few years. Here’s where I think he needs to go for next year. So right now, that business owner and I are sitting down in this month and next month, and we’re lining out what needs to happen in 2026. And we’re basing that on what has already happened. So with you, we do a little bit of forensic accounting of marketing spend and lead gen so that you already have stuff in Jobber. We’ve worked with Jobber, so that’s great. That’s easy for us to be able to come in and say, okay, this is what we see. Is this accurate? Do you see it the same way? Okay, this is where we see leads coming in from. This is how we see them working. We look at what you already have. You’re a little bit more ahead of most people that I talk to. So that helps because then we outline for you a marketing plan of what we call a plain English marketing plan where it’s not, we’re not writing the SWAT. We aren’t fresh out of college. You know what mean? We’re like, we’ve done this. So we give you the real world application of, hey, no one’s doing this. Hey, if you want to show up in AI, you need to do this. And then we have meetings about that. And I set you up with different people that I know or myself to talk about. Here’s something called Brandcast. It’s a couple hundred dollars a month. We put you on two podcasts a month and you just talk about this and we get you trained. We get you classical. So you know how to look into the camera and not look at someone’s face, but you’re looking at the camera, the lighting, you know, what’s the background. How does it look? What’s important? The kids, an interesting piece, you know, a flag, metal flag, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? A clock, the proper books. There’s certain things that you want that are easy on the eyes that people can focus on. Then we talk to you about, you know, the lighting. Like I don’t have my professional lighting. I’ve got one overhead right now, but I’ve got one that goes to behind me. So we walk through that and then we talk about how we’re going to take that. So then we would move to something, for instance, and I would train you through it on a couple of things. One of them is, you know, and your guy, Steve, may know this, but we do a lot of blogs and we get rid of them on the navigation. So we talk about your user navigation. We’re going to analyze your user flow, high exit rate pages. Before I keep going, is this what you want to hear? you want me to say? Yeah, no, this is, yeah, this is the good stuff.

Will Sheils

So we’re going to talk about the high exit rate pages.

Josh Ramsey

What are your highest exit rates? Why? AdWords, and then also, you know, SEO. Why are they exiting? How can we keep them on page longer? What are our GA4? What are our analytics and metrics? What’s our reverse funnel visualization? How can we improve it? What are the most visited pages before they actually fill out a form? How can we modify that? How can we grow that? We’re to talk about offers. How do we start getting people in November and December and the beginning of January to book now with what type of strategy so that we have already filled our bucket going into January and February because they got some type of offer discount, but we got some additional cash flow in the bank. So we’re not just sitting here on zeros. We’re sitting here and going, hey, it’s not as much as we want, but it’s a hell of a lot more than zero. So we kind of work on that. Like, what do you see, Will, that you want to grow? How can I help you with that growth? What’s our flow? How fast are we getting back to people? What’s our UI UX? What’s our engagement time on site? You know, then we start looking at meta. What are ads that you like? We talk about your USP. What’s your unique selling position? I don’t see one on either one of the sites. On the site, what I see is, and I’m going to go to Chesapeake and kind of just show you what I mean. And we talk about this and then we outline it and then I give you ideas written out that say, this is what I think.

SCREEN SHARING: Joshua started screen sharing – WATCH: https://fathom.video/share/q2C69Bee2ZgnSam-CsosAnWKshskJt7m?timestamp=3235.913216 So the first thing is, this looks blurry. Free estimate. You don’t want anything blurry to anyone’s eye when it says free estimate because you’re basically telling someone that you aren’t precise with your design. And when you’re painting, you’re going to not have a nice clean line. You’re going to have some extra crap, right? And we want to get away from that. So those little things matter. Here, when I go, when I look at this myself, and again, we talk about this, but when I look at this, it’s overwhelming. I’m looking for a painter and I see too much stuff. When I go to your other one, this is a little better, but man, no one’s going to read this. So now we talk about the strategy. You have what’s called interrupt or disrupt, engage, and then educate, and then next steps or offer. But your interrupt, they are interrupted if they are inbound marketing because they went, they typed something in and they land on your site. So the interrupt is already there, but the engagement has to be the next level. And when was the last time that you made a good friend and the first thing that you did when you met them goes, hey, Will, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Blah, blah, blah, blah. You’re like, shut up, right? These don’t become friends. So we talk about the content of this, both sides. If I take this one and I put them side by side, this is, again, just a lot of stuff. So it’s like, where do you want me to go? Why use you? What’s your unique selling position? What makes you special? Hey, man, I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to get married. I want to know if I like your ethics, morals, and values. Does what you say and what you do make sense? Are all painters painters? Probably not, because I’ve had some bad ones. So what does that look like? I don’t care about financing because I’m not ready to get married, right? So I don’t want to see that. I want to know, like, where is it? And this is what we talked to you about. Where is it? See, now you’re starting to talk. Now, this kind of looks like everyone else. So I would probably give some recommendations. First of all, I wouldn’t want to say learn more, learn more, learn more, because then that. So then we start talking about SEO. see if we’re aligned. Painting, work, job, Chesapeake. Those are your first four major keywords. I personally don’t like them. Now, Steve may come back and challenge me and say, Josh, I know more about SEO than you. Awesome. I love learning, so teach me. But what I know is if we have someone type in a search for us, they’re probably not going to type in painting work unless they’re looking for a job or work. This is people that are coming to you trying to get a job and calling you and saying, hey, are you hiring? Hey, we’re GC. Are you hiring? And I’m like, we don’t want that. So no one cares about our name until they know they want us. Again, there’s a longer conversation we have with that. Going back to the site now. I look at this and say, hey, what if we change user navigation and we start talking about ideas and designs? What does the design look like? Here’s one that I built a while back. Just kind of threw some stuff together to show an example. But here you have the for navigation. We call this a child map. When you hit planning and architecture, it takes you to the page, but then we have subpages. So then even if you come down here and you change up how it looks, you can keep people on your site to look through items, but still click on it and get the picture or drive to a new page.

Will Sheils

Right.

Josh Ramsey

So now we look at our people getting this far. Studies, not my studies, but other studies, especially with Google, show that people don’t scroll more than a third down the page. So there’s one. There’s two. There’s three. So is it buried? I would say yes. The question would be, can we prove it? Fact and feeling. Okay, Will, let’s move it up to section two, just below the header. Let’s run it for 30 days. And let’s look at our engagement rate of, do we get more click-throughs? Do people stay on the site longer with… Just that one change. Because if you go make five changes and you get a better result or a worse result, the problem is you don’t know what happened. Like, which one worked? Which one didn’t work? And that’s where we’re trying to figure it out. You know, we could track videos. I call this all SEO. But the other thing that a lot of people want to know is process. Right?

Will Sheils

Not many people probably go here.

Josh Ramsey

They probably go to pricing. But now when I look at these dropdowns, you’re giving me an overwhelming and we’re not controlling the user navigation. I built this site. And on this site, what we figured out initially was he had a standard picture and it never moved. And he wasn’t getting an engagement. So we changed it with a little bit of AI flair to it. And we got him to see the virtual realities. Because what we found is step one, if people went to virtual realities, do you need me to stop talking? No.

Will Sheils

Okay. No, please. if they…

Josh Ramsey

If they go to our virtual realities, that was step one. We had a deeper level of engagement where they were like, holy crap, that’s awesome. What we also found was they would go to the pricing guide no matter what, but if they went to these three pages, they would 90% contact us if they were priced into what we want. With the pricing guide, we created a short showing them four steps, four questions, and we’re going to give you a price. So now we can see where people are wanting to go, why they’re wanting to go, and boom, this is your price. This guy came to me and said, Josh, I want to start dequalifying people. I don’t want my phone to ring. I want my phone to ring a little bit, not much at all. So I responded to Eddie, and I said, Eddie, your phone’s now going to ring four times a month, and you better answer all four calls, day or night. Now, Eddie, no one’s going to call you after 10 o’clock at night, you know, like that’s spam, but they’re probably… They’re to call you in the evening when they’re sitting with their spouse and they’re looking at doing a remodeling job because, Eddie, you’re only doing projects really for half a million dollars and up. So he knows if we give him five projects that are somewhere around half a million and up, he’ll pick up some of these $100,000 projects and he’s happy. So that’s what we went and did and we changed. Now, even for painters, what I have seen in your type of industry, they’re wanting to know what are the steps? What does this look like? How are they walking through it? Like, what should I expect? So using plain English words like what to expect helps. Then driving their navigation keeps them on longer. But it’s proven, and I can tell you a study because I’m a nerd like this, but there was a study done of judges. This was done by Harvard. And Harvard studied probationary judges that would go listen to inmates, listen to their story, review their record, and decide, do they get probation, do they get out of jail? And the study showed that with all things as similar as possible, race, age, track record, offense, that in the afternoon, they let less people get probation than they did in the morning. And they did the study as to why, and the decision that they came up with was essentially that the more decisions that you have to make, you get decision fatigue. So the less information, the faster you get it, the more likely you are to get to the end result. So you want to not have to make a lot of decisions. So with clients, when we look at website, we look at traffic, we’re trying to also pick the time of day with as much factual data of when do they really buy? And let’s up our AdWords spend at that time. When do they buy? What’s up our meta at that time? Are we averaging? we Advertising on Insta or Facebook or TikTok, okay, what is the platform so the video matches the platform, right? If it’s Facebook, typically it can be a little more serious. If it’s Instagram, it typically tends to be a little more feminine and it tends to be a little bit more relaxing. TikTok is more of, I’m looking for something, pop, pop, pop, let me go. So we have to adjust our messaging on each platform. So these are all the things that we talk about when we get into that 30-day program. The difference in between that $1,000 is the execution of some of these ideas. So if we go do AdWords and you want me to modify AdWords or you’re going to pay for some meta ads and display ads and things like that and you want to see how they go, that $1,000, we go in and start building accounts or modifying the accounts. If you say, hey, Josh, just give me the plan. We’ll go exit. You review it. Great. It’s $1,900. One time, we build out the plan in between two to four weeks. Since it’s the holiday, we would have it done approximately just before Christmas because next week is a holiday. So we know you’re probably not going to work as much or at least on this type of project. So we just kind of knock those things out. So that’s the difference in between the two plans. If you ran the other, we might even want to go a little bit into January. I don’t like dragging it out. That’s why I call it 30 days. But we might go into January a little bit just to kind of see what type of traffic we get. And we wouldn’t want to run anything over Christmas because we know people are probably not going to sign up. Although we may talk about it and go, hey, let’s spend $150 or $200 on Meta. See if we can get anything to create a baseline for next year. Yeah, of course.

Will Sheils

Yeah. No, I love it.

Josh Ramsey

I like the meat. I like the meat.

Will Sheils

It’s better. I like meat. It’s better than the sizzle. Yeah.

Josh Ramsey

Next steps.

Will Sheils

And let me parse it out. The way my brain works, I’m going to parse it out into three different things.

Josh Ramsey

Okay.

Will Sheils

So when we talk about CMO, we talk about obviously accountability, provided accountability, which happens on Thursdays at our weekly level 10s and then quarterly meetings for EOS. That’s how we’re structured. With that, once again, I talked about an umbrella. Well, there’s a wide umbrella that envelops everything marketing down from handing out chapsticks and trade shows to making sure that everything’s dialed up in the online world. So we tend to go, oh, marketing, I can do that. And you already said there is a difference where people just focus on SEO and that’s their only focus. Bringing the businesses together and creating a new brand, which we have, and a new website, which we know what the layout is going to be, kind of the skeleton of what we want it to look like. Looking at that as something that’s happening in the first quarter of 2026, is that something that would fall under your job as CMO to manage and facilitate, or would you, and how would that, what would that look like? Would you give me like, would you want your ad agency to take it over? Would that be a cost savings if we use you? Or would you want to find somebody who’s, you know, somebody else out in the market for that? Yeah. So I start with what is the project?

Josh Ramsey

What do we need to do?

Will Sheils

Then we look at who’s going to execute it.

Josh Ramsey

So there’s a level of execution that I’m going to come in and I’m going to teach, I’m going to train, and I’m going to make sure that we’re going the right direction with whoever the execution person is. So everything that you said that you’re mentioning, the answer is yes, that’s what a CMO does. The CMO essentially is fractional, becomes more of what’s the workload? Do you want me in every meeting? I? Am I two meetings a week? Am I in one meeting a week? What does that look like? On our side, we do once a week meetings. And we call them like the 10-minute meeting, but they always turn into one hour, and that’s fine. But we do one hour a week. And the reason we do that is very specific. There are going to be weeks, Will, where you’re like, I’m sick, dude. I can’t do it. Or I had a kid emergency. I can’t do it. Or I’m traveling this week. I’m busy. I can’t do it. Well, that’s great. Do it. Take care of it. We’ll meet that next week. So that way we’re not scrambling of like, hey, let’s reset. We got to get on the phone and emails to try to figure out when the next meeting is. It’s just boom, boom, boom. We know at this time, at this week, like here’s exactly when we’re going to meet. And then we talk about it the week before, like, hey, next week is Thanksgiving. Are we meeting on this Wednesday before Thanksgiving? I go, hey, I can jump on for 30 minutes if we want to cover AdWords. Just take a quick look, and let’s just have a verbal conversation. Great. If not, no. If yes, we need an hour. Let’s jump on and share screens and walk through it. We make those decisions, you know, day in and day out. Being in your executive meetings, it’s not a problem. If you feel like that’s a benefit and that we need to be a part of it, I would say in the beginning, it’s good to know that. And then we can kind of make a decision over time. Some clients come in and they never change their price with me. Some clients come in and they go, we want and need more. Some clients come in and we get them ramped up and going and we move down.

Will Sheils

Everyone’s different.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s why I don’t say here’s a box other than for 30 days. I want a commitment from you financially that you’re going to show up and I’m not wasting my time. So that’s why I do it that way is just to say, get involved, answer my call, do your homework and let’s make that happen.

Will Sheils

Did I answer your question? Yeah, of course. I’ll be completely honest and say we had a market agency that runs on EOS and they were referred to us by our integrator, Kara. As she’s worked with them before. They came on board. We paid $5,000 for the month, not even a trial, but a market assessment. And then we kind of got into the actual structure of what we were doing. And we realized that they were coming up with content, but we were responsible for execution. And we were responsible for making sure we track that execution. So it was like, well, , we could just have ChatGPT. could draw up pictures and download. So we were sending them information and we had a conversation. And Steve and I use this example of it’s a hamburger, right? Like fractional CMO is the top one. The marketing, which we already have fleshed out 80% of SEO website. What do we do with print media, trade shows? It’s kind of here. And then we need a bottom bun, which is somebody… Whether… We hire a part-time or full-time on our staff who’s doing the legwork, the groundwork of taking pictures, doing Instagram reels, providing you content, making sure that we have things that the printers printing correctly and, you know, dare I say a college grad or somebody at the community college who’s looking for it. Yeah. So we started reassessing when we don’t just, we can’t rely on one person to do all that. But what we want to rely on is the top one, the fractional CMO to say, hey, this isn’t working. This is what you need. Because obviously if somebody’s worth their weight, we will see an initial, you know, we’ll see an initial uptick in business and revenue based on efficiency.

Josh Ramsey

I’m going to make an observation and a statement. And I think it’s going to tell both of us if we would be a good fit working together. That bottom bun to me is not what you said. That would be the cheese or the lettuce or the pickles, tomato, something. The bottom bun is what is the outcome? Here’s the idea. That’s your top. Here’s all the execution. All the, we got to do this, we got to figure this out, this stuff has to happen. And then the bottom is, was it done properly? Can we make the whole hamburger the hamburger? Because if you don’t have the bottom part that actually tells you, did it work? Then it’s like, did it work? And how are you going to get back to the top to eat the next one when you couldn’t even hold the bottom on the first one? So to me, in your example, it would be the top and the bottom, which is what I would do. Finding the people to execute and be the legs, be the doers, as a lot of times we call them, the doer, who’s going to get the picture? Great, get them. How many are going to give me a month? How many are going to give me a week? How are you going to create this video a week? You’re going to do the SEO. How are you going to do it each week? What’s geared up? What does this look like? Give that to me. You know, that’s all that middle part. But the top and the bottom, the CMO should hold everything together, confine it, control it, and then be able to report it to the executives on the… A committee that say, this is what I planned. This is the result. Here’s what’s next, right? And why? And answer all of those questions. That’s my opinion.

Will Sheils

Open to your thoughts on my thoughts.

Josh Ramsey

I like it.

Will Sheils

I’m going to retool my explanation of what we need now. Because we did have, obviously, interviewed a couple of people. And they have these little boxes which say, for $3,000 a month, we will do X, Y, Z. And then it’s the big FU. If you want to shop outside the box, oh, that’s another $2,000. And we need somebody to tell us, this is the truth. We’re adults. I mean, our revenue last year was $10 million. We’re going to hit around $8 million. And we can see that just recessional. Yeah. This year sucked.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah.

Will Sheils

First quarter in the trades in the area, everybody was down, whether it was plumbers, painters, concrete. But with a lower revenue, we’re able to eke out a better profit. So we definitely can tell when things. have a system where we can’t. We can tell when things are working, and we can tell when things are not working. So let me throw three things out there, just so I said it, four things real quick.

Josh Ramsey

First of all, I know that I like working with you, at least on the starter plan, because of your response. Some people on my response of taking your analogy and modifying it, of, look, I’m the bottom and the top, right? The output and the input. Some people will push back and be like, no, don’t break my system. And I like your response personally, because I’m like, okay, I could work with Will, because you were open enough to be able to say, hey, my position isn’t always perfect. And that’s how I work.

Will Sheils

I go, is my position perfect?

Josh Ramsey

Not always. But I need to understand cognitively why it’s not perfect. Confirmation bias. Prove to me why it’s not, because I’m open to it. But if it’s not, then I need to know how to modify and why. So that’s one thing. So compliment. Thank you. I like that. The next thing is, I’m an all-inclusive. Meaning, I’m not going to come in a nickel and dime and change and charge. I’m going to come in and say, look, this is what we’re doing. And if something continues to push outside, then I’m going to come back and go, hey, this is kind of outside. I’m going to give you, for instance, we’ve got a client, they’re an attorney, they’re out of Omaha, and they decided, I give people, I’m going to answer this agency side of question, but they decided to work with my agency to rebuild their site because their site is terrible and they knew it and they admitted it. And when we started talking about rebuilding the site, I told Justin, one of the owners, I said, listen, just so you understand, Justin, the agency has gone above and beyond your contract. I’ve asked them to do it, and because I’m the founder and owner, I can have them do it, but I want you to realize they’re producing really fast for you. This is not typical. It’s not typical, meaning don’t expect this level of mass production for six months straight. We’re doing it to get you to where you need to be because it needs to get done. But then we’re going to kind of slow down and things are going to fall into a… And Justin goes, great. Thank you for telling me. I’m good with it. Check the box. Justin’s that type of guy. Check the box and move on to the next thing, right? If he has a problem, he’s going to tell me. And we’ve learned to communicate that way. The other part is on the agency. I don’t know what I don’t know. And what I don’t know right now, Will, is what you really need. Because when you tell me that Steve is fixing the site and that Steve knows SEO, if I look at the site and I plug in a few things, like for instance, I’ll just show you this real quick. This is one of the first things that I’d want to check out and plug into your site. But I created one of the only zero I have been able to find, an AI report.

SCREEN SHARING: Joshua started screen sharing – WATCH: https://fathom.video/share/q2C69Bee2ZgnSam-CsosAnWKshskJt7m?timestamp=4476.569816 So this is my website tracking. And I track my leads and I can see the date and the time that people come in. I can see the bounce rate, which is zero, and engagement rate, which is 100%. Because what I’m able to track is when you came to me, if I went back and looked at my records of when you submitted your form, you… We’re one of these little spikes right here, and I’m getting 100% of people that come to me through AI are contacting me. What I want to know from your side is how many people are asking questions, and what are the questions to be able to figure out what AI is? Like, someone came to me at the conference, and they said, hey, you know, we’re thinking about doing AI, and I asked them what they do, and they said, well, I don’t, as a marketing person, I don’t really think AI is going to work for us, but all the board thinks it will. I said, do this. Go back to the board and ask them all separately during a meeting to write down two or three questions that they think are going to be asked of AI that they want to show up for. So she’s doing that. She’s going to come back to me, and I had a conversation with her, and I said, based on your industry, I don’t know what people would ask that you want to show up for in AI. She was like, I agree, but we had the conversation, but this is going to be one of those benchmarks that I plug in to be able to say, what are we getting from AI? What do we want? What do we expect? What would people type in? Then I come up with strategies that I’ve already used, which is something like what’s called indexable but non-navigational. So we create content that is on the site, but it’s only built for LLMs because the human brain wouldn’t really want to read it or understand it, but the LLMs that feed AI will want to. And again, these are strategies like you said at the beginning. If I can do it for myself, I can do it for others, and that is the answer. Now let me go back and circle my last point on the agency. I don’t know if you’d want to use my agency because I don’t know what you need. So until I run the reports, until I run the AI, until I can see what the SEO is, and I can see what you’re doing with AdWords, and what your system is, I would not make any recommendations until I know that. And let me finish that with one story that I find very important for you to understand about me. JCPenney JCPenney was… So JC Penney was trying to hire a new CEO, and he narrowed it down to two CEOs that he liked, and he couldn’t make a decision. So on separate days, he took them to breakfast. The first guy he sat down with, and the guy sat down, ordered eggs, added salt and pepper, and started eating. JC Penney said, hey, I’m just curious, why did you add salt and pepper and eat? He goes, because I know exactly what works, I know how to do it, and how I like my eggs. second one came in, they tried the eggs, then added a little bit of pepper. JC Penney said, hey, why did you eat your egg and then add something? And he said, because I wanted to see what I’m working with. Maybe the chef was heavy-handed with salt or pepper, and I’m not going to be able to know what I’m eating yet. I want to make sure I flavor it to what I want. I’m that guy. I’m the guy that says, Will, what are you doing? What got you here to $10 million? How do we leverage that meaning? Apply a little bit of pressure to certain areas to impact our return.

Will Sheils

That’s what I want to know.

Josh Ramsey

So that first 30 days allows us to learn each other’s personality, for me to learn about the company, and then to come up with a best plan of action to be able to tell you, hey, Will, I think you should do this and this, and here’s why. I think you should avoid doing this, and here’s why. And then here’s how I would apply it. But ultimately, as a CMO, I’m going to come in and lead the charge and say, this is what we need to do and why, and then I’m going to be watching for the result of. The only thing that I’m not going to do, I put an asterisk by this, and I’ll answer the asterisk in a second. The only thing I’m not going to do is run your AdWords day to day. I’m not going to go in and rebuild your website and build webpages day to day. I’m not going to go do the video reels day to day. But I am going to go look at it and tell the people, I don’t like it and here’s why. I want something different and here’s why. You know, I want to plug this in and here’s why. And I work always within the budget. And that’s why monthly and weekly, we look at the budget. I typically don’t do it weekly. Once we get into a little bit of a groove of two or three months, but we look at the budget and say, look, let’s stay in this budget. We allocate it. But if we see something not working, cut it or reduce it or modify it. If it’s not working, you got those three options, right? So that’s where we make those decisions based on fact, not feeling.

Will Sheils

Awesome. Love it. I love it. Well, thank you. I don’t even know what we’re slated to do, go until 12 or 1230, but I appreciate you giving me a thorough explanation of everything we do. I don’t think I have any questions that you haven’t answered. Just one other thing. I know I talked about our level 10s and then we have quarterlies. Quarterlies, obviously it’s once a quarter. It’s an all day via Zoom. We do have annual on-site meetings. We could figure out if you could just kind of noodle over what a cost would be to come out to us. Or obviously, we pay for travel, but what does that look like labor-wise? The answer is zero.

Josh Ramsey

The answer is it fits within the model of if that’s what you want us to do and that’s what we agree to, then we come out there. And honestly, some clients, we don’t even charge them to fly out there. We just kind of package that into this is what we expect for us to do. This is our presentation to you and our option for you. We’ve got a client in San Diego, and I go out there once a year. We’ve got another one in Phoenix. I go out there once a year. We’ve got another one in Panama City. I go out there once a year. So I travel probably two to three times a week. I’m sorry, two to three times a month. So out of four weeks, I’m on the road. Weekends, I’m at home with the wife and kids, active dad and husband trying to do the best I can. So I’m around for those important events on the weekends with everybody. But yeah, travel isn’t that much of an issue. So that part’s there. And then as far as meetings go, Zooms and such, not a problem. We just schedule it in. So whatever those are that you think that we’re meeting. I’m a big advocate, though, of only being in meetings when I’m needed. So if you’re talking operations, and I understand the business, a lot of times I’m like, I don’t need to be in an operation meeting, Will. I’m going to exit. So it’s like, hey, let’s do the CMO first. Cool. I’m in it. Boom. Or we’re going to do it second part. We’re starting at 11. Come in at 11.30. Cool.

Will Sheils

And that’s what we do with our fractional. We have our finance team, accountants, etc. They sit in for an hour, and they present what they have to do. They get the high points, and then they’re out. Because we’re not trying to screw up as many people’s days as possible listening to things that aren’t on their docket. That’s awesome. Next steps. I would love to have Kara and Steve and me meet with you. Is that something you’d be willing to do? And if so, what’s your availability?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, absolutely. What are you wanting to look at? This week, next week?

Will Sheils

What’s your Thursday look like?

Josh Ramsey

Thursday is pretty open. I’ve got meetings in the morning, and we’re an hour difference just so we’re on the same page. I’m central. Um, so I have on Thursday right now, I’m open from your time, 1230 until about, I’m going to say it central first. So 1130 until two. So that would be 1230 to three. I have a full block. Not that you need that much, but I can do, I’m completely open at that time right now on Thursday. Let me do this then.

Will Sheils

I’m going to email Kara and Steve and suggest three o’clock.

Josh Ramsey

So three o’clock, well, that would be two o’clock my time. Yes, three o’clock our time.

Will Sheils

I can’t, I’ve got to end it too.

Josh Ramsey

Oh, you’ve got to end it.

Will Sheils

I’ve to end it too.

Josh Ramsey

that I got to end at three o’clock. So if you could do two to three your time, that would be an hour block earlier.

Will Sheils

That would be one to two my time.

Josh Ramsey

Two to three, yep.

Will Sheils

Two to three your time? Yeah. That’s crazy. Our president GM on the Chesapeake side is named Josh. Joshua. And the person who was at Bluestar, who was our sort of GM, her last name was Ramsey. So we were laughing and she’s no longer with us because of core values. But we were looking at, you know, you type in her to chat GPT, fractional CMOs, and your name was one of the top ones. We were just laughing like this could, this is either divine providence or it’s going to be the most confusing, you know, name we’ve ever had to mess with. No, not this Josh, not that Josh. I don’t know if you’ve ever, I’ll tell you two funny things.

Josh Ramsey

The first one is that I have a client that signed up. Oh, and there was something else I wanted to tell you just so you had this number in your head. But I have a client, his general manager is named Josh. So we were drinking whiskey one day and I like to travel and whenever I’m near someone, I usually stop in. And we went out and had some whiskey and went to eat and everything. And we’re sitting there just laughing and having a good time. And they kept saying, Josh, and we both kept looking at him like, who? So finally, we dubbed my name. J-Rock. J-Rock. So now I’m J-Rock with that guy. But the other thing I was going to tell you was interesting. I don’t know if you’ve ever studied this history, but Lincoln and Kennedy both had, I don’t remember the position in the White House, but Lincoln and Kennedy both had like a certain position. was like secretary, not secretary of state, but it was like some type of admin secretary, right? And their names were reversed, right? So it would have been like Ramsey was the first name and then last name of the other one. And they both said to the president before they were assassinated, hey, I have a bad feeling. Don’t go to that event. And then history happened. It was weird how that happened. I read that a while back.

Will Sheils

I was like, man, that’s crazy. Yeah, it’s like there are certain coincidences that make us feel like we’re living in a simulation. It does.

Josh Ramsey

It does. But the other thing I was just going to tell you is, you know, let me just put this out there. So from everything I’ve heard from you, this is always going to be a question. So we make decisions in the world based on three things, advantages of ownership, objections, and vendor selection. So no matter whether it’s a stick of gum, a water bottle, you know, drinking out of a faucet, a hose or whatever else, buying a car and hiring people, it’s always the advantage. What’s the advantage of me having this? And that’s tied to objections, which then go back to advantage. Price is always a heavy objection because, but if the advantage always outweighs the objection, then you still go back to the advantage. And then you go to vendor selection, which is who, what, right? Like what, who do I hire? What do I buy? Right. Is it a Mazda or Honda, you know, Lexus or Mercedes, right? Like you always make those decisions. So let me start to clarify advantage and objection of price point when it comes to working with me and give you kind of a high number. The highest number that I see you being. Yeah, would be $12,000 a month. But I don’t think you’re going to hit that. I think that you’re probably going to come in somewhere between like six to nine. Part of the reason I say that is that we’re working with a guy, he’s based in Philadelphia, and he works the entire eastern seaboard of doing restoration. And he’s at $8,000 a month. Then I’ve got an HVAC company who does most of the Gulf from basically from like Birmingham, like Mobile, all the way over to Tampa. And they do HVAC. And they’re at nine also. So just to kind of give you a reference of, okay, Josh, is it three or is it 12? Or what is it? Just wanted to kind of put that out there. So that way you’re aware and you can, you know, digest that of, you know, depending on if I’m traveling out there, if you know what I mean, like what we’re doing, how much time you need, how many meetings am I in, how many people am I managing as far as staff, you know, how many projects are we doing? That kind of gives you the range of what that is. That price can always come down if you work with Christian, because Christian is my protege, but extremely efficient. He works with probably 80% of our clients. My pricing is a little bit higher. So a lot of times people, they love my system and what I do, but they just want it involved. And they’re like, hey, we love you, Josh. Let’s hang out. Like, let’s go have a beer or whatever. But they’re like, we’ll work with Christian to save a few grand. And so I’m just putting that out there of those are some of the pricing for you to kind of digest and be aware of. So it’s not, I don’t think it’s a sticker shock. It’s pretty affordable from everything I’ve seen in the market of what I do and how we work and the systems and the principles that we imply. But I like putting it out there just so it’s not like, you know, what does this come from? You said three and now you’re saying nine.

Will Sheils

Oh, boy. Well, let me clarify, though.

Josh Ramsey

The three is if you want to come in and we’re just coaching. If we’re going to come in and you have a team and we’re going to coach you on what it is, we’re going to coach you. Right? That’s coming in at three. If we’re coming in in the first 30 days, we’re test piloting everything and we’re getting to know each other, that’s three. When you start saying, hey, we want you to travel once a quarter or once a year, okay, it’s going to go up a little bit. When you say that we’ve got to oversee an ad agency and make sure that they get it done and you want the top and the bottom, that brings it up a little bit. If you’re saying, hey, you’re running AdWords and we need to be watching AdWords and setting the budget and managing the budget because we’re going to run multiple attributions of lead gen, it goes up a little bit more. So that’s why I wanted to clarify that for you of, yeah, if you look at my pricing, it’s the starter packages are set. But then when we talk about travel, when we talk about how many meetings a week, when we talk about managing budget and the people, that’s where it starts to change. We can still get you in at whatever number. you said, Josh, we want to come in at 4,500, we can do it. It’s just going to limit what you want and how that works. How much do you need? That’s the fractional cycle. No, I’ll tell you what, I’d really appreciate it as any small business owner in America.

Will Sheils

It could be here, it could be here. Because the shittiest thing that can ever happen in life as a consumer is you think it’s going to be X and you show up and it’s X plus Y. And you’re like, wait, what? Is this the bait and switch? And I think obviously we try to never do that as we try to give somebody, well, we’re out giving a painting estimate. Well, if you want all this, it can be 20,000, but I think we can get it at 17. So there’s no mistake that this is the cost is the cost. And this may help you as well.

Josh Ramsey

One of the things when I work with companies that are doing bidding projects is we come in on a bidding project and we give them the base and we’re super competitive with that base. But then we also follow it up with a sheet that says, we also have done enough of these projects that we know that you’re also going to need this, this, this, this. So we amend and give them additions where they can see this is what it is. So I don’t. I know if y’all are bidding projects. We didn’t go through that yet. But if you’re bidding projects, a lot of times we come in and say, hey, this is the base because we just strip it down so we’re competitive and we get through that initial process. And then we come in and go, but you’re probably going to need this, this, this, this. And for me, that’s part of the starter plan. I don’t know what I don’t know. I asked you a ton of questions at the beginning. I got a ton of notes. I understand a whole lot more. But as we dive in, and it’s the same way for me, all of a sudden you peel back a can and you go, yeah, Josh, I forgot to tell you, we also, you know, bid contracts to the government. Okay, Will, who does that? You know, what’s, do we have a webpage for it? You know, is there a system for it? You know, how do you bid it? And you go, hey, Josh, we also do commercial. Okay, like, how are you analyzing commercial? Hey, Josh, we also use Zoom info. Okay, like, you know what mean? You add those three things and all of a it becomes a lot more. So I like learning in the first 30 days to then. Make a proposal for you and say, look, I think that y have enough stuff. Will, if you’re going to keep doing the sales, you just need some modification. And there have been times where I’ve gone back to class and said, hey, I think you need to implement this for the next 30 days. And then let’s talk in 30 days. Like, go do these things. Don’t pay me again. Go do these three things. And let’s talk in, you know, February 1. So there’s not much I haven’t done. I mean, I just had a company that does cybersecurity. They’re out of Macedonia, and they wanted to break into the U.S., and I wrote them a 90-day plan, worked with them for 90 days, got them on track, got them launched, and then now we’re waiting 90 days, and then we’re going to re-pick up, and I’m going to evaluate if they executed on plan or not. So I do these every three months with some of these clients where we work for 90 days, and then we take off 90 days, and then we work for 90 days, and then we take off for 90 days. So everything is in the air. It’s just I wanted to make sure that I tried to touch on everything for you.

Will Sheils

No. What we’re doing is we’re building a base. We’re building a, and all financial systems, marketing systems, tech systems, everything. Obviously, as a small business, you’d love to be like, yeah, I need business next week for our guys. We understand we’re going to put a little bit, this whole year has been putting a pause on instant gratification, revenue, profits to say, we want to make sure that we’re building a foundation on all of the different seats on our leadership board so that in 2026, 2027, things work. And we’re not just reinventing the wheel and going back to, you know, the half-assed web guy and doing X, Y, Z. So it’s very important.

Josh Ramsey

And there are also things that we’ll dive into, you know, if we move forward and we can talk about it in the next meeting or what have you. But, you I worked with a jewelry store company that had eight locations around Miami and I worked with them for about 90 days, maybe 120. And, you know, one of the things that the business owner was frustrated with as I got to know him was he would have… I have one of his offices super, super low on sales and debt. And he was trying to figure out how do I flip a switch and make it pop, make people just show up. And I created top to bottom an entire system, built it, and made it to where all he had to do was make one phone call. If I was on staff and then I found someone to replace me, but he didn’t make one phone call and that person just go to their computer, push a couple of buttons, and boom. And it proved to generate sales for him immediately. So again, it’s some of that learning process as I get it. And the more I get to know the executives of the company, I’m able to say, okay, this is what we can do that’s going to make it better, make it different, that’s going to impact us, you know, and where we want to get to. So, you know, again, that’s the maturation process of getting to know each other. What do you need? What do you want? And why? And I’ll close on this. And then if that, I’ll have my assistant reach out to you and confirm that meeting. And then it. If you need to cancel it, change it. I’m not offended. But one of the things, Will, when I started my company is I didn’t have a mentor. I didn’t have anyone I could go to to say, hey, this is what I’m struggling with. This is how to fix it. I didn’t have anyone to say, hey, here’s how you should run your books or a sounding board that would tell me this or that. So because of that, one of the things and more that I can tell you later about my own narrative is that I’m a very, the ethics, the morals and the values that I carry are extremely high. My mom was a retired pastor before she passed. And I believe that the user experience in my world is extremely important. And the people that work with me love what I do and how I do it because I’m honest and ethical and transparent on this is what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. And I don’t leave people out to drive because I’ve been there and I haven’t had those mentors to give me the direction. So I’m focused in my age now. We might be. I’m same age, but I got more gray hair than you. But I’m focused now on making sure that I give everybody the best advice I can give them so that they can at least walk with that and go, okay, you know, here’s the pitfalls, here’s what to watch out for and why. That kind of goes back to what I was talking about, the types of fractional CMOs are out there.

Will Sheils

Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate the honesty and the information and the time. I’ll let you go. I got to go do some others. No worries, man.

Josh Ramsey

You got to go answer some crazy people.

Will Sheils

But I just texted or emailed Steve and Kara to see if Thursday worked. And as soon as they get back to me, I’ll confirm with you guys. Obviously, we are talking to a couple other people. So the next stage, I meet with them. And then we’ll do a meet with, you know, Steve and Kara, see if it works. And then, you know, make a decision pretty quick. Pretty quick.

Josh Ramsey

Any questions for me?

Will Sheils

I think we’ve covered a lot of ground, you know, so just reach out on anything else.

Josh Ramsey

And let me throw my cell phone number in here just in case you want to reach out direct for anything. If you want to grab that real quick, that’s my cell phone. So feel free to text me if something pops up or you want to just chat with something or another question pops up.

Will Sheils

Feel free to text me anytime. Awesome. I’m going to put it in my notes. Thank you so much. Appreciate the time and we’ll be in touch soon. Thanks, Will. See you later.

Josh Ramsey

Take care. Bye.