Marketing Mix andConsequences

I spent most of my career in corporate environments. From tech startups to water treatment and payment processing, I’ve always had to live by consequences. I had targets, and if I didn’t meet them, I had to explain why I didn’t, and what my plan was to reach them next quarter.

One of the things that shocked me most when I joined automotive restyling is that no one seemed to have expectations tied to their jobs. Sure, if a PPF installer pulled paint repeatedly, he’d get fired. If a sales guy cussed out a customer, he’d be gone. (and even then, not always!) But no one seemed to have direct, monitored targets.

I’m still shocked that Marissa has to tell her clients to put their sales people on a commission based pay. It happens often! And even when they do, they still cringe at the thought of giving them real sales targets. I’m talking like, if you don’t sell this much, you’re fired.

The same thing should happen in the back of the house. If you can’t detail a car, coat it, tint it, do a full front in a certain amount of time, why are we keeping you around? These metrics should be monitored and reviewed on a regular basis with real consequences attached to them.

I’m not expecting this to change overnight, so I’ll start you easy. The simplest concept attached to this is the marketing mix I was talking about in my last post. Most organizations will utilize it as a forecast or a plan of their marketing budget, I like to use it as a report card.

02Marketing Is Like Investing

At its core, a marketing mix is just a list of the marketing channels your business utilizes to promote itself. For most shops, even the really big ones, the “buck” stops with the owner when it comes to marketing.

Even when there is an agency, the owner will always play a huge role in this business function, and realistically that’s never going to change. In almost every other part of a shop, it’s a good thing when the owner can remove themselves from it. In marketing it’s the reverse, and I’ll go as far as to call out every owner, even my clients, for not being involved enough in their marketing.

For some reason, it’s always the last thing on the list. Oh we’ll record a video if we have time at the end of the day. Oh yeah I’ll get you information on this job when I can so you can write good content. Oh sure a promotion is a great idea, I’ll crunch the numbers at the end of the week once we’re over the rush.

Of course, none of this ever happens, and then the owner wonders why his job board is light, why the leads have slowed down. Marketing is like investing, if you don’t do it right when your paycheck hits, there’s no way you’ll get to it once all your bills are paid.

03The Marketing Mix As A Report Card

Once you accept that marketing is a core function, the one that matters most before anything else, you’re ready to set up your marketing mix. Thankfully, for an automotive restyling shop, it’s almost always going to be the same.

One note before we start, if your shop is making under 60k/mo, you should not be spending a single dollar in paid ads. It’s not because you can’t afford it by the way, it’s because at that level, it’ll create a dependency on that channel that you will never be able to shake off.

Before you spend any money to acquire leads, you need to be able to get 60k of revenue “for free”. Otherwise, you’re literally at the mercy of an algorithm change or CPC increase, and you simply won’t be able to pay your bills. But if you have that amount or more locked in anyway, a rough month on ads is just that, and not a disaster that might kill your business.

The mix below is what I would expect to take on if I owned a shop making 80-100k a month.

Now, if you add all of those, you can get up to 17 hours of extra work. Some owners will see this, get a reality check, and realize they need to delegate better in order to have the 17 hours to spend on this without overloading themselves.

Most will decide to hire an agency, or multiple agencies and freelancers to achieve this. There’s no right or wrong way to achieve this, but I will say that even with agencies, there’s something wrong if you’re not spending at least 10 hours a week completely focused on your marketing.

Now the fun part: pick a cadence, every month or every quarter, review your revenue and split it out between each channel. Of course, this only works if you have the correct tracking in place, and that should be your number one priority even before establishing the marketing mix. It’s also one of the main reasons why hiring an agency to set this up is a good idea since this can be a bit technical for most.

Calculate the share of revenue for each channel, and have a meeting with everyone responsible on a video call. Don’t confront people with this data, give them time to review it, analyze it and build a case to explain themselves, because a lot of variables can impact this.

For example, paid search not hitting its target revenue share could be because of poor management of the ads, but it could also be because of a bad close rate from your sales team. Either is fixable, but the issue lies with a different person.

04The Consequences

If there’s no consequences tied to the marketing mix above, you might as well not do it and continue winging things. The reason why you need to have consequences is because without them, you can’t accurately forecast the revenue your business will have. If you can’t do that, you’re just working your ass off towards a slow, inevitable failure.

Any person that poses an obstacle between you and your ability to accurately forecast the future of your business is a serious liability that must be addressed. And yes, sometimes that person will be you.

If this were software sales, any amount under your target is cause for immediate termination. I’ve had coworkers get fired because they sold 85-90k of their 100k monthly target two months in a row. But 85k is still pretty good right? Not when you have a big sales team and they all miss the target you calculated your growth on by 15k. That’s a lot of money, especially when it compounds.

Now, a sales team in an automotive restyling shop will have a different structure. It doesn’t need to be this intense, and you should modulate targets to the time of the year for obvious reasons. But a salesperson that repeatedly doesn’t meet their target and doesn’t seem keen to improve the situation is absolutely grounds for termination. I don’t see this nearly enough in shops.

Obviously, the same is true for a marketing agency that’s not bringing enough leads, that’s an obvious one. The other aspect I am shocked to never see is the back of the shop. If your technicians aren’t able to accomplish details, coatings, tint and PPF in the allotted time on a regular basis, it’s time to review the process and fire the repeat offenders.

I’m not stupid, I know why this doesn’t happen. The guys in the back have often been there since day one. They were the first people you hired, they represent major milestones in your business. Or worse, they’ve become your friends. A perfect scenario for people to become entitled and complacent.

The speed and efficiency of your service delivery is an even more important metric than revenue when it comes to business forecasting. But the finger is only ever pointed at sales people when the board is light. And I hear salespeople being told to “slow down and let the back catch up” WAY too often.

05Are We Still Talking About Marketing?

Yes, except this in another category, branding. Paid ads, SEO, blog posts, that’s all marketing. I’m not talking about your logo or your website. That’s not what people remember when they think of your brand, no matter how good it is (another very ironic take for me here).

Your customers will remember who spoke to them on the phone, how they presented themselves, how the work was executed and the timeline in which it was delivered. They’ll never go back to a shop with a disinterested front desk person and they surely won’t recommend a shop that can’t book them before 3 weeks from now and need their car 4 days for a full front.

That’s how you fail at the repeat and referral channel, you know, the one that should bring you a third of your revenue. If the people involved in the success of this channel are messing up, they are messing with your money. If you’re going to let that happen, that’s also a path to work your ass off towards an inevitable failure.

Another part of your branding is how you portray yourself. Customers might also remember how a video you posted on Instagram convinced them because it showcased your passion. They might remember a really well written blog post about a project on the same car they own. And they’ll definitely remember a great conversation they had with you at a car meet.

These all lie on you, the owner, and you need to come up with a consequence for you not meeting those targets as well. According to the marketing mix above, you’re responsible for presence, organic, and repeat and referral, that’s up to 50% of the revenue of your business coming from you.

That’s not a bad thing by the way, that’s what being a business owner is, and the popular thought that “leveling up” as an owner is when a smaller slice of revenue depends on you is bullshit. That just means you have to figure out a consequence that works for you if you don’t allocate the appropriate time for each of the channels.

06Someone To Disappoint

Some people will call this accountability, but at the end of the day, what most of us need is someone to disappoint. As an owner, you can’t really hang the same consequence of termination above your head. So find someone that you respect, and go over the marketing mix results with them on the same cadence you do with your staff.

This has to be someone who is allowed to call you out on your bullshit, preferably someone who has already done so in the past. It has to be someone close to you, someone you have an emotional connection to who will be able to ask you hard questions.

If it’s not, you’ll fall into the same pattern that led you here. Oh I only recorded 3 videos that month but I was really swamped. Oh I missed Cars and Coffee and only went to one car meet, but I’ve been so tired. This has to be a person that will shake you up if you say this.

It’s easy to say that missing Cars and Coffee is no big deal if you’re not attaching a dollar value to it. But if you tell yourself you missed 15 grand in revenue because you missed it, all of a sudden you’re being a liability to your business.

Marketing is a big deal. Start acting like it is.