Blythe Brumleve:
0:05
Welcome into another episode of Everything is Logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI Logistics and I'm your host, Blythe Brumleve. We've got a solo show for you today no guests, because I feel like I owe lots of people an explanation on why I decided to split this podcast from Digital Dispatch, and in this episode I'm going to be going over what those needed changes were and how I have navigated them. So if you are interested in starting a podcast, if you are interested in starting sort of a founder-driven marketing strategy that promotes your business, this is probably going to be a good episode for you, because I'm going to talk through some of the needed changes that I needed to make on my end of things, and hopefully it will provide some value to you. Or maybe you're just interested in some of the more behind the scenes style stuff, and so that is what this episode is going to provide as well, because I like to know the behind the scenes info of some of my favorite shows. So hopefully this will be of help to you. And so, with all of that said, let me give a little bit of a primer on how we got here, how we got to today.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:17
So I started a company called Digital Dispatch in 2019. It is a web design and management company. Strong emphasis on the management aspect, because for a long time well, actually, the entire history of the digital dispatch empire I guess I don't know if you can call it an empire, anyways so digital dispatch, what I would do is I will revamp, rework, create, design a new website for a freight company in this space Because, unlike a lot of marketing agencies out there, I speak the language. I know the language, I know who folks brokers, carriers, freight tech I know who you're all trying to reach and I know how to say it in a language that makes the most sense. Plus, I own my own sites too. I have about a half a dozen of my own sites that are personal, private, also public places where I like to tinker. I like to tinker on different websites and play around with different content, initiatives and strategies and then bring that insight to my clients.
Blythe Brumleve:
2:18
Okay, so, now that we got that out of the way, I started a podcast for it. I started the Digital Dispatch Podcast out of the way. I started a podcast for it. I started the Digital Dispatch Podcast same company, same podcast name, which you're not supposed to do. I don't know if anybody else knows that out there, but technically, from a legal perspective or a legality perspective, you should have a separation between your podcast name and your business name. And that is not that I'm ever going to sell either of them, but just from a tax purposes, from accounting purposes, and if you were to ever sell it in the future, it makes it much easier to sell that one entity versus the other. If I were to ever and not saying that I am interested in doing this but if I were to ever sell Digital Dispatch, if I had the podcast name associated with it, the podcast would have to be involved in that deal as well. And so, from a strategic standpoint, I started the podcast as a way to talk to my customers, be able to get those insights, talk to leads, make connections with people, figure out what was going on in the freight market, specifically when it comes to marketing and sales, and so I was using these conversations as a way to really gain market insight, to have a stronger connection with my customers, with my leads and with my audience. And so from that, the podcast got started Very shortly after that I'm talking like a couple of months after the podcast got started is when I got picked up by Freightwaves and so they said we love what you're doing with your show, we want you to create that same show over here for us, and with the mindset that I would be able to take that content and still be able to upload it to the Digital Dispatch podcast.
Blythe Brumleve:
4:05
So that's how the show Cyberly was born, and that was a B2B freight marketing and sales show that was on Freightways for about two years, and when that contract was coming to an end, I knew I wanted to take my podcast. I knew I wanted to take it independent. I had already been given or shown support from potential sponsors that they would be willing to sponsor the show, and so I thought I've been a podcaster since 2014. I started off in sports and entertainment, pivoted to logistics when I was an executive assistant at a 3PL. I also had a sports and entertainment blog on the side. Sorry if you've heard this story a million times, but I'm going to tell it again just for folks who may not have heard or who are new to the show. I was an executive assistant at an asset-based 3PL. I worked there for about five years and I had a sports and entertainment blog on the side.
Blythe Brumleve:
5:01
When that company unfortunately closed down, I chose to leave logistics and go into the media path. So I was editor-in-chief of a local magazine for a period of time. I also got a gig at radio broadcasting. So I was covering sports on a show called Helmets and Heels and also on the kickoff show here, covering the Jacksonville Jaguars where I am based, and also, if you can't tell Jaguars fan, I covering the Jacksonville Jaguars where I am based, and also, if you can't tell Jaguars fan, I got all kinds of Jaguars stuff in my display in the back I'm wearing teal. As we speak I've got a Jaguars flag right next to me. So right next to we should probably hide that that's a convoy bracelet. So RIP, convoy Anyways. So back when, I think I'm at the correct spot in this conversation or in this story. So I did some radio broadcasting.
Blythe Brumleve:
5:51
I went back and worked for my old boss who had formed a new company or started working for a new company, and a lot of that same crew that I had worked with, because I mean, I'll be honest, the media world, especially in sports and entertainment, doesn't pay all that much. And logistics is anybody who's worked in logistics. You kind of know it's almost like restaurants you try to leave, you're going to come back, you're going to get sucked, and the majority of people are going to get sucked back in. So I was sucked back in. I went and worked for my boss and very or my old boss at the time, who was still very much a mentor to me former truck driver, worked his way up, bought the company, owned the company, you know, owned a couple of different transportation companies and so he very much knows, still works in the industry, still love him to death. And so after I went back and worked for him, he knew how much I had grown in my career.
Blythe Brumleve:
6:49
From the time as editor in chief I was no longer, I guess, an executive assistant type. He told me I had become a CEO type and he said there isn't going to be a CEO role for you here or a CMO role for you here. So it's time for me to push you out of the nest and for you to start your own business. And that's how Brumleve Brands was born. And the reason I chose Brumleve Brands is it's neither here nor there, but it's one of those business decisions where I was like, well, I'm never going to change that name and I'm always going to be tinkering with different things. So let's create an umbrella company of Brumleve Brands and Digital Dispatch, which was already a thing at the time, at the time of the business formation. That's when it really wasn't at the business formation. It was months later when I figured out I needed to focus on a niche with Brumleve Brands, and that's how Digital Dispatch was born. But I say all that to say that my boss became my first customer and it was the biggest reason why I started my company, started Digital Dispatch, and I am in the position I am today is because of that man. So shout out, al Steele. He is still one of the greats, one of the legends in my eyes, and so full support since day one for me and my company, and so I would not be here without his expertise, his investment in me. All that to say Fast forward to, I would say probably 2022, would say probably 2022, late 2022,.
Blythe Brumleve:
8:25
My contract is coming to an end with Freightwaves. They say you can still do the show, but we don't have the budget to pay you. And I said, well, I think I can get paid for this. I think I can finally get paid quality, a full-time income from this podcast. I've been a podcaster since 2014. And so, with that experience in mind, I was like I think I can do this.
Blythe Brumleve:
8:50
And so, in January 2023, the Everything Is Logistics brand was born. It was the podcast which I had taken all of my logistics related content that I'd produced independently, that I'd been on other shows or the side release show. I brought all of that content together and I put it on everything is logistics as sort of a catalog backlog of sorts. But starting in January 2023 is when the new content flow started, very similar to what you're experiencing in this episode All of the sort of bells and whistles of intro music and sponsor ads and sort of the flow of the show. So January 2023 was when that was born, but I also.
Blythe Brumleve:
9:34
Digital dispatch is absolutely still a thing as well, but I wasn't sure from the podcast perspective. I was scared. I didn't know if it was going to actually work or not, and so what I had in place was just a very simple like we're going to publish the show, we're going to publish it to YouTube and then we're going to have a very short website. Here's a link to our content, almost like a if you've ever experienced or used a link tree or a bitly link or a link in bio type stuff. I built the originally built the everything is logistic site as just a pretty much a copy of that. I just wanted to be able to get people to where they want to go as quick as possible, find my content as quick as possible.
Blythe Brumleve:
10:19
Are you in freight sales with a book of business looking for a new home, or perhaps you're a freight agent in need of a better partnership? These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called the Freight Agent Trenches, sponsored by SPI Logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America, who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance, IT and sales. But I would much rather you hear it directly from SPI's freight agents themselves. And what better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI? Hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations or, if you're ready to make the jump, visit spi3plcom.
Blythe Brumleve:
11:09
That was the nature of the relationship between everything is logistics and digital dispatch. However, there was starting to creep up a lot of brand confusion. I started experiencing this last year. People weren't exactly sure if I still had digital dispatch, what it was doing. Some of my clients were like you're still going to be around, right, you can still work on our site and manage our site for us. Yes, absolutely. But those kinds of questions were the first sort of inkling to me that huh, I probably need to do a better job of marketing myself. I had only ever marketed myself at Digital Dispatch.
Blythe Brumleve:
11:50
I didn't know, frankly, how to navigate the waters of marketing myself as a founder of several companies and at this point now between me and my fiance, we have several companies under our belt that serve specific audiences and so I always had that inkling in the back of my head. But there were initial catalysts that really forced me into this change of okay, I have to fully, legally, business-wise, separate these two entities. And so those two catalysts was one of my customers left me, canceled his contract, and when he told me that he was canceling his contract, he said I just didn't think that you had time for me anymore. I see you doing all this podcast stuff and it just looked like you were focusing more on that than anything, and that broke my heart. Well, it broke my heart and also pissed me off because it felt like something that was completely avoidable on my part, and so I'll have more insight on that in just a bit. But that was a big catalyst of I really let that one go and he was a very good client of mine for years and I just felt really gutted after that experience and, even though there's no hard feelings or anything like that, because I get why he made that decision, this is a problem. We do have to address the differences between the podcast and digital dispatch and the level of expectation that my customers within digital dispatch should be getting, and I, frankly, was missing the boat in that regard. So I'm going to have more insight on that in just a second, which is really specific to what that client was experiencing, why he left and the solutions that we've come up with to hopefully prevent that from happening again.
Blythe Brumleve:
13:51
Now the other catalyst is something slightly more annoying, because it was a call that I had gotten on in December of 2023. So that big client had left in the fall of that year and then in 2023, december. Then it was a situation where and I have to be careful here with how I talk about this because I was on a call with a lead Now keep in mind I had already had a call with their CEO. Ceo was familiar with me, familiar with my content, familiar with how we work and how we sort of think about the methodology behind how we make websites, why we create them, the insight to how we create them, our process, things like that Thought he was very much on board. It was a matter of just sending over the contract and sending over the invoice and getting it signed, but first he wanted me to talk to I believe it was his business partner or some kind of like a VP underneath him.
Blythe Brumleve:
14:49
I get on a call with this man and it was one of the rudest calls I've ever been on in my life. It felt like he wanted me to tap dance for him and I'm just not that kind of. I'm not going to tap dance for you. Typically, when I have sales conversations and when I have lead conversations, they already are familiar with my content, they already have a level of trust or they've gotten a referral from someone else that said, oh, she did great work. Here's her information Go book a call with her, so they're already. I'm used to.
Blythe Brumleve:
15:24
My main marketing focus has always been on inbound marketing, and so I'm very used to dealing with people that kind of already know about the philosophy of how I build sites. Now there was, I guess, another catalyst, which I will get to in a second, but during this call he pretty much wanted me to tap dance for him. He insinuated that my price was too low, that there must be a catch, and so I just thought that I had priced my products fairly. I have negotiated rates, I have premium licenses that I've already invested in, and so from my perspective, I'm giving you an entire package that typically a marketing agency would charge thousands and thousands of dollars. I'm talking like 20 grand plus 30 grand. There are agencies who do charge that much for their sites. I do not, because I would personally never pay for that. The only reason I even know how to build sites to this day is because I couldn't originally afford a website designer or developer, so I had to learn it myself, and so I came up with a price that I thought was really fair for the market I was going after, and the market I was going after was smaller trucking companies, small to midsize trucking companies, small to midsize brokers, and so that was who I had worked with for years in my previous gigs, and so that's the market that I knew and that's the market I was going to sell into. Now I haven't factored in how, when business grows, you should really think about how you're going to approach that growth. Is your market segment going to change? Has it changed all that much? If we're being honest, I do more freight tech websites now too, but I guess that's the only real catalyst that has changed in the last handful, since I've been doing this, since professionally been doing this for the last handful of years and so.
Blythe Brumleve:
17:22
On this call, I felt like my reputation was being questioned. I felt as if my work was being questioned. He even went so far as to tell me to bring up a website that he had somebody else do. And hey, can you replicate that? And I kind of pissed him off. When I looked at the site and I was I was kind of taken aback because I thought he was going to show me a beautiful site that looked like it had been built in the last five years. I was wrong. Uh, he showed me a site that looked like it was built in the early two thousands. And when somebody like that, with an attitude like that, that's you feel like you're trying to make you tap dance. You feel like you got to prove yourself. And I'm sitting here like bro, I'm charging you $1,500 for a site when I know it's worth five times more than that. I don't have to sit here on this conversation and tap dance for you, so I'm not going to do it. But I entertained him. I went on this website that he talked about that was so beautiful that someone else had built for him. It was not. It was a very old website. It was something that would probably cost $200 and it's probably $200 poorly spent. Just being completely frank and being completely honest, I don't think he appreciated that honesty and, honestly, completely honest, I don't think he appreciated that honesty. And honestly, between the two of us, it was for the best, because clients that act like that on an intro call, that is just a little bit of a preview of how they're going to be as a customer.
Blythe Brumleve:
18:57
I personally like to work with customers that I would have dinner with, that I regularly like helping and make helping them grow. This person was not it, but I did take a lesson from that that, because of my pricing at the time, he was immediately skeptical of the quality of the service that I could give him. Now I had to figure out how to strike that balance of what is an affordable price for the companies that I'm going after. Are my still going after those same level of customers or do I want to go for a little bit of a higher tier? Not really. I think that there's still this same baseline services that I should be offering, and then I wanted to tweak it based on the customer's budget, based on their content goals. That's typically how I like to price out my sites. But the fact that he looked at my pricing and said what's the catch? And thought that I would deliver subpar services and a subpar product because of my price, that is what I took away from the conversation. So, while it was a situation where I definitely was not going to work with this man, it did turn into a situation where I took a lesson from it and I said, okay, we need to look at a lot of things. And so over the holiday break, over December, over really the last six months. As I said earlier, it has been a process of looking through all of our pricing, our processes and figuring out where we need to make those tweaks and make those adjustments. So I spent the first 20 minutes giving a backstory of the why, and now I'm going to tell you about the how, and so here are the three tips areas that I identified that I needed to address in order to separate the two brands effectively and, honestly, efficiently.
Blythe Brumleve:
21:01
To give a little bit of context, we are a small team. I have a dedicated team of a tech team that I work with, and then I have what's called a content remixer. So she helps take my podcast or take the video portion of this show, and then she will turn that into social media clips. She'll add it to our email marketing newsletter that goes out regularly. She handles that side of things. Then I have a podcast editor, youtube editor, and so he takes the file, he does his work on the editing side of things. Shout out to Josh and then Lindsay, who handles all of our content remixing, and so that is essentially the team that I have, and I knew that previously, especially when I was editor-in-chief of a magazine, I had a large team.
Blythe Brumleve:
21:50
I had an editorial staff, I had a sales team and I loved working with them. I loved having a team I you know working with Freightways. I loved having a production team Shout out to the Boiler Room Boys in case they're listening I doubt they are because they have plenty of work to do but I loved having a community of that workforce around me and I loved it because it was help. I'm so used to being a business owner that works solo that I really appreciate when I can have the help. But in order to have help, you have to be able to pay them, and so in order to keep my business especially in the age of AI, in the age of all of these different software products that can help you with automation, that can help you with different processes and optimizing both of those things, I knew that the team still had to stay agile and be able to do a lot of things with a little bit of time, and so that is how I choose to build out my team, because I don't want to over-invest in employees and then I'm stuck managing them all of the time, and then I'm also responsible from a payroll perspective.
Blythe Brumleve:
23:10
I don't have to tell anybody out there that hiring is really tough, and then also keeping the income at a regular pace in order to justify hiring those people is also really tough as well. So I had to look at it from a bunch of different angles and figure out what is the best pathway forward, because the last thing I want to do is to make a bad decision that is going to impact the current people that I have and impact their contracts and their monthly income that I send their way for the jobs that they do for me. So that is an extra added pressure that a lot of business owners have to think about, and in the age of AI, in the age of where a lot of businesses are going, I firmly believe that the world is going to be dominated by these smaller companies, by these small teams anywhere from two to five people, and having several businesses now and in the future is not going to be seen as crazy as it was. Five years ago, I had people look at me crazy because I had the company Brumleve Brands with a couple different content sites underneath it. They're like well, if you have many businesses, then you have no business because you're not actually focusing on one of them.
Blythe Brumleve:
24:33
Now the tides have turned a little bit, where my initial thought process is now starting to pay off, but it has its own unique set of challenges. So the three needs that I needed to address need number one better communications. I talked earlier about how that client left me and I could have been avoided had I had better communications. So we have done in the last six months this is why this episode has taken so damn long to record is because I had to identify the gaps in my communications. I'm ashamed to say that when a customer would come on board, we would get their site launched. Everything is great, awesome, perfect. I'm going to move on to the next site and I used to say I'm like the CIA If you never hear from me, it's a good thing. Everything is running smoothly. If you hear from me, things are a little shaky. The problem is is that my tech team does a really great job. So the clients never heard from me and that was a gap in our communications.
Blythe Brumleve:
25:36
And what we have completely revamped is the offboarding process setting proper expectations, how to check your leads, how to check your website analytics, how to add new content, how to you know if you have an issue, if you want to add something new, here's how to do that. Something new, here's how to do that. Little things like that, because typically that process, the way it worked, is that someone would just shoot me an email and tell me what they need to get done and that's what we got done. But now setting up those formal processes of what the off-boarding experience looks like for our clients and developing communications around that. Now couple that with the podcast. We also create a tremendous amount of content with a very small team, and so what can we do from a content perspective? What nuggets of information can we take from those conversations that will help keep me in front of these clients and also help them with certain goals and certain initiatives?
Blythe Brumleve:
26:36
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Blythe Brumleve:
27:23
So that was a big thing is developing an off-boarding campaign and then also developing an ongoing communications plan. Now, I wish this stuff could be a little bit more automated than what it is, but it's something that should have been invested in a long time ago. It was one of those things that was a back burner item, and it just took me a long time. Okay, we got to be able to burn some shit down and be able to start fresh, and so the last six months have been essentially looking at all of my processes and figuring out what to burn down and what to keep and what to tweak. That was a big thing that we did. So we implemented the offboarding campaign. We set up the email automation for a lot of regular communications, and so when I say email automation, what I mainly refer to and I would highly advise anyone to do this is to make a shell of an email template. So we have a shell of an email template.
Blythe Brumleve:
28:24
I still use MailChimp. It's still an incredibly powerful system to use. I know there's a lot of other things out there, like ConvertKit and not Klaviyo, that's more e-commerce, but ConvertKit or Beehive, beehive, whatever they call it. I see Beehive and I think of Beyonce. So that email company is that I know is also out there and I've heard very good things about them. However, all of my data is in MailChimp. I like using MailChimp. It's extremely flexible and it's also a great price. Try to move everything to HubSpot. Hubspot is too damn pricey way too damn pricey for the services that they offer from an email perspective. So everything will stay in MailChimp for the foreseeable future. Hubspot just catches strays out here. I should probably do an episode on how we use HubSpot. Very powerful CRM. The starter plan is what most people need. The rest of the stuff is I'll save that for another show.
Blythe Brumleve:
29:22
So anyway, so we set up that different processes inside of MailChimp. We built all that out, so we have the shell of the email template, and then MailChimp also has a really cool tool called Journeys, and so basically as soon as a customer is their website is launched, we put them into the off-boarding campaign. They go through a series of different content initiatives, basically answering the questions of I have a website, now what? Who's doing the updates? How do I make updates to my site? Where do I check my website analytics? Where do I check my lead reports? You know all of the most important things that you should know about your site after it's launched, and then also the expectations of what we do versus what you do. So all of that was not being clearly communicated before, but it is now. And also room to tweak, because we have soft launched it to our current customers getting feedback on that process, and then it's just designed to be extremely flexible so that we can continue to get feedback from our clients and then be able to adjust that campaign as we see fit.
Blythe Brumleve:
30:29
After they go through that series of emails introducing them to the front end and the back end of their site, then they get put into different communications, whether it's regular podcast communications when we drop new episodes. Everything is. Logistics has a weekly email that goes out on Thursdays, and so when it goes out on Thursdays, there's additional communications throughout the month that specifically go to clients. That's more like freight marketing, sales, even like website enhancements, things like that that we're giving them customized tips based on the services that they've already purchased from us, the productized services that they've already purchased from us, and then information that is specific to them. So if it's a broker, then I'm going to send him freight broker marketing and sales tips or brokerage, marketing and sales tips. If they are a carrier, I'm going to send them that kind of content. I didn't want to add to the noise of an inbox and so, with journeys and MailChimp, it's really, really cool how they let you build that journey and then, as you tag those people within your list, you can send them and you can add them to different funnels that make the most sense for them. So it's really about personalizing the experience, but doing it in a way that I'm not manually writing every single email. So that was one of the big ones is better communications, because we also have a lot of content on the everything is logistics side of things and we're going to be doing something very similar on the everything is logistics site.
Blythe Brumleve:
32:08
Next, because I did have to actually build out a website for and everything is logistics. I love this site is um. Of course I love it I mean it's mine, um, but I everything is logistics. I love this site. Of course I love it. It's mine, but I love the design, I love the look of it. I feel like it is one of the few content sites in freight that isn't overly busy, that you can find what you need pretty quickly. At least I hope that is the experience, because that's the mindset of how I design, how our team designed to look in the feel of it and how it displays content. So we're going to be making some more improvements on that front.
Blythe Brumleve:
32:42
One thing I'm really pumped about is being able to send you know, some of the targeted campaigns that we're sending to digital dispatch clients. We can do the same thing on everything as logistics, and so I just want to be conscious of adding to the inbox noise and trying to be respectful of adding value there, so that when you see an email that comes from us, you want to open it, and I think for a lot of emails right now it doesn't feel that way. It just feels like somebody is spraying and praying and it's leading to inbox overload in a lot of instances where you just immediately delete the email and you don't develop sort of a brand affinity. So those are the communications plans that we've implemented and the communications plans that we're working on in the future, which I'm super pumped about because it's a lot of different customization, but also without the added, I guess, overload of trying to manage several different email newsletters that are going out in several different audiences and without having to manually write each and every one of those. So that was a big one, all right.
Blythe Brumleve:
33:54
Need number two slightly embarrassing to admit this, but I needed to update, upgrade my financial acumen. Now I have to preface this with I grew up in a very I wouldn't say low income, but a lower middle-class income family. So we were always taught you don't get credit cards. You get maybe one, but you pay it off each and every month, which is still, you know, great advice. But we paid for everything in cash. Um, there was no talk of like 401k investment or, uh, a profit and loss assessment or anything like that. That kind of talk just wasn't had. It was if you can afford it, then you get it. If you can't afford it, you don't get it. You pay your bills on time every month. Just very basic level financial acumen. And, from a business perspective, I knew how much my expenses were each month, how much revenue I needed to earn each month to cover those expenses.
Blythe Brumleve:
35:02
Transportation, marketing and Sales Association. Mark Dirks and Jennifer Karpis-Romain had asked me to join the TMSA financial committee and I was like are you crazy? I don't know anything about finances. I know very base level stuff. Why would y'all want me on this team? And I turned it down. Then they asked me again and they asked me again and they asked me again and I finally just caved. And I caved because I'm just going to put this story out there. But Jen and I are friends outside, I guess inside of the association, we are friends, talk regularly. I love hanging out with her at different conferences. She's a gem of a person. But we had had some wine and she asked me again and I said yes and I will tell you.
Blythe Brumleve:
36:03
As soon as I said yes, she ran to Mark, told him and he was so excited and he said to me something that I will never forget and that when he manages women at Blue Grace because he is the CMO over at Blue Grace Logistics that when and I'm paraphrasing here, so please don't quote me or quote him on this, but he had said something to the effect of with women in particular, we will not apply for a job unless we have been asked several times. Also, there is data this is separately from what Mark said separately. There is data that suggests that if or not, suggests, but tells a story about how women, when they see job notices, job boards, job listings, things like that, that if they don't meet close to 100% of the qualifications of that role, they won't apply. In the reverse, though, with men, they could meet none of the qualifications and they'll still apply because they're going to shoot the shot. And so when he said that to me, I thought of that study and I said, my God, I fell victim to this myself, where I had a lot of self-doubt, I didn't think that I belonged in that group and, frankly, I probably didn't, because I didn't have any kind of financial acumen.
Blythe Brumleve:
37:31
But when I joined the committee I was like a sponge. So I just sat and I learned, and I just learned. There's very simple things such as creating a P&L, profit and loss statement, learning what top line revenue is versus bottom line revenue, and these things might sound so dumb to someone who has been in the industry or maybe has dealt with a lot of these things for a long time, but I just I never went after it, I never. I didn't know what I didn't know. And so within these conversations, within our regular committee meetings, I realized how much I needed to learn. So I just became a sponge and I took a couple of courses and I started replicating a lot of the spreadsheets that we had for TMSA and the way that I learned the best is we had Google Sheets for a lot of our summaries and balance sheets and profit and loss statements. I made a copy and then I started putting my numbers in for my business into that spreadsheet and editing it for myself. That was the biggest, best decision that has ever happened in my business.
Blythe Brumleve:
38:44
I am not confident that I would still be in business if it wasn't for Jen and Mark convincing me to join this committee and pushing me to learn something that I didn't even know that I needed to learn, and I will be forever grateful for them for pushing me in that direction, because when I was starting to my expenses and my pricing, I had never raised my pricing. That should have been signal number one that if all of my other expenses are going up, it's okay to raise your own fees, to raise your own prices. I had a lot of hesitancy and I think I've always had a little hesitancy of what the value of my work is worth. I thought if I was giving a fair price to me 10 years ago me then that was good enough and that should be good enough, but I was creating this perception of myself and of my work and of my business that I was cheap. And because of going through my profit and loss statement and realizing the true cost of building a website, I doubled my prices immediately. So now we start off at $3,000 for a five-page website, which is still extremely affordable relative to all of the other marketing agencies, especially in the logistics space that now exist, that charge a premium for some of these services.
Blythe Brumleve:
40:27
Most sites don't need it, but bettering my financial acumen was something that I didn't know that I needed and I think well, I know that it has single-handedly saved my business and now it impacts directly what I make investments in, what I don't make investments in, and it's allowed me sort of the permission to say, even to cut out unnecessary expenses, which is one of the bigger things that, as I was going through this process in December and January or December of last year, january of this year, I'm going through this process and I'm looking at all of the things that I'm spending money on and it's just you don't realize it how many associations you're part of, how many conferences you go to free conferences that you go to that are never really free, you got to pay a lot of extra money on the side in order to get. Even if you get a free ticket to a conference, which I am grateful for, I will say that because of the podcast, I am able to go to, uh, some conferences not all um, some conferences and my ticket is comped. But I had to look at those conferences and say did I deepen any relationships at those conferences? Did I get any leads from that conference? Um, what about that association? Did I? Did it provide value? Yeah, in any way. And for a lot of the associations, no, they haven't. Tmsa, however, has. I will give that caveat. Obviously, this whole section is kind of about them and how they've helped me.
Blythe Brumleve:
42:08
And so from there I became better educated. My accounting firm that I had had for years, my CPA accounting bookkeeping team that I had had for years, started realizing that I had had for years my CPA accounting bookkeeping team that I had had for years, started realizing that I had upped my knowledge and upped my game, because I started having a lot of questions and I started seeing a lot of things that were coded incorrectly on some of my expenses and I wasn't taking full advantage of some of the tax advantages that you get, and also protecting myself from things that I thought were covered, you know, like meals, entertainment, things like that that I thought would be covered tax wise but that you shouldn't actually mess with, because that's just a signal to the IRS that, hey, we need to come audit this person. I don't want no IRS smoke and I want to be able to play the game as fairly as possible, but I also want all of my tax write offs to play the game as fairly as possible. But I also won all of my tax write-offs every single last one of them, and so that was another part of the business that really was strengthened, because I was pushed into an uncomfortable situation that I agreed to over some glasses of wine, but that then turned into creating a profitable business, and so we are completely debt-free. I'm absolutely super pumped to say that that Digital Dispatch is debt-free, everything is logistics is debt-free and we are a profitable company. And so I don't know, I think we would have had a little bit of runway, but I don't know, I don't know if the business would have survived without that. So deepening your financial acumen has been such a game changer, and I'm so thankful for knowing what expenses to cut what the true cost of my services is and then being able to come up with a pricing plan that is still affordable for my customers but is also not going to be a situation where someone looks at my pricing and says, what's the catch? So shout out to that guy for helping me. That lead that did not turn into a customer, which was a good thing, but also helped save my business, helped me raise prices, and now we have record revenue and record profitability. And we're five months into this year, and so I'm very, very thankful that those situations happen, because without those situations happening, I wouldn't have addressed some of the elephants in the room that I needed to address that had been back burner items that needed to be moved to the front burner, and if I did not move them to the front burner, I probably would have burned down my entire house. So highly recommend any business owner to upgrade their financial acumen.
Blythe Brumleve:
44:51
Uh right, final one, and then I'm going to cut this out, because I did not think that this show was going to be four. We're at 44 minutes right now. I did not think that we were going to take it this far, take it this long, but I'm a podcaster, I'm a talker, so let's land the plane here with number three better processes. I don't have to tell you I'm a process nerd. I mean, maybe I do have to tell you I'm a process junkie and I would not be able to figure out my prices. I would not be able to develop a stronger financial acumen if I didn't take all of my processes and just tear them down and start almost from like a zero-based budgeting perspective, but start as zero-based processing perspective. So that is essentially taking everything that's most important in your business and then figuring out the things that you need the most and then developing a budget around those things that you need the most, and then developing a budget around those things that you need the most. And then, if you can't develop a budget around it, then can we automate it? And then asking yourself, what parts of these processes do I need to do? And then what parts of these processes do I want to do? And so once you map out I mean I'm talking like actual literally in one time I'm actually going to use the phrase literally in its correct form is I went through and I wrote down every part of the process for onboarding, offboarding, what happens during lead conversations. What happens when somebody becomes a customer, what happens when they move into an active opportunity, what happens during the podcast process when somebody becomes a sponsor. I ripped it all down and then built it back up from the ashes of those flames from the previous processes.
Blythe Brumleve:
46:32
So if you are interested in mapping out your processes, a channel that really, really helped me. I know she does some paid stuff. She has some paid options as well, but a lot of her content on YouTube Layla at Process Driven YouTube channel is such a godsend and a lot of her content I didn't need to get the upgrade. Maybe in the future I'll pay for something because it is that good, but a lot of just her free content that she puts out into the world was more than enough to push me in the right direction of how we're doing things, why we're doing them, the budget behind them and what does that look like for the future, especially when you factor in where one aspect of the business is everything is logistics and it's very content heavy and AI is kind of taking over as far as all content is concerned.
Blythe Brumleve:
47:18
So how do we fit in the robots without making it sound like a robot? That is essentially our content philosophy right now, where we figure out the things I need to do. Obviously, I need to write the scripts. I need to be the one on camera. Do I need to edit the podcast? No, do I need to be manually writing out transcripts something I actually used to do no, I do not need to do that. And so figuring out where I best need to spend my time, but then also helping my team figure out where they need to best fit their time and where they need to prioritize and where some of these other tools can help. Now, because I went through my processes, I also discovered a lot of software subscriptions that I was paying for that were no longer useful, so that was also a big expense cut. And so it all sort of comes together as you rip down all of your processes and have somewhat of an idea of a business goals or business goals in mind and how you can develop content to further those business goals, and that is the. These are the reasons why I had to split everything is logistics from digital dispatch and so, um, I I don't know if, uh, you'll find, I mean, if you're, you're still listening at this point.
Blythe Brumleve:
48:36
I hope that you found value in this conversation. I hope that some of the things that I have talked about will help other founders, other content-focused entrepreneurs, figure out what their path is, because everything is logistics is its own entity now and digital dispatch remains its own entity Both of those I still work full-time for as much as you could say full-time for each one, but the content drives the business. So we still do marketing and sales focused shows, we talk to marketing and sales logistics leaders, and now we just take that content and also put it on digital dispatch. We also send it to our customers. We're in the process of creating some premium content libraries that are commercial free and that is more like cut to the chase type content, where I can take the best insights from these six marketing leaders and package them up for my clients so that they don't have to go and listen to six or seven different podcast episodes and pull out different nuggets, and so that is the future of what we're investing in.
Blythe Brumleve:
49:40
I'm trying to contribute less to the noise and provide more impact, but I'm also trying to do it in a way that is sustainable for my team from a mental perspective, but also a financial perspective. So with better processes, better pricing that sends the right message. And, through all of these things, I hope that this was a good explainer of why I chose to separate these two brands. What's sort of coming down the pipeline in the future for the podcast and for the business I do? Because of these optimizations that we've made in those two sectors, I now feel fully confident that I can launch this other idea that I've been sitting on for about a year and a half, and I really, really want to tinker with this one too. And so now that we have this process and the team really dialed in, with standard operating procedures and processes, you know, go figure, like the boring stuff is the important stuff, um, but dialing those in now, uh, gives me the mental clarity and also a little bit of mental freedom to to feel okay. Adding, uh, another, you know, chain in the armor, um, and so, with that all said, I think I feel like I said this twice already, but I'm going to say it again.
Blythe Brumleve:
51:03
I hope you found value in this. If you're still listening, I imagine you found some kind of value in it, but I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear how you're approaching content marketing, how you are, if there's any areas you're struggling with from a content perspective, especially in the world of logistics, if there's folks out there that we should be talking to. If you need a website, reach out to me. All of my contact information is over on everythingislogisticscom, also on digitaldispatchio, and so you'll hear a lot more about these companies. That's a weird way of saying this. Hopefully you're already hearing about this company.
Blythe Brumleve:
51:40
So, anyways, I've gotten to the point of the show where I am rambling. That's a good place for me to stop, but I appreciate your time, I appreciate your attention and I appreciate you listening to my story. Much, much more to come and I feel much more confident about pursuing these other goals and initiatives in freight. I should note that in freight is not leaving freight whatsoever, but pursuing some of these other initiatives and ideas that I have for the freight world, now that I'm confident in our processes and our pricing and in a lot of the things we discussed in this episode. So thank you again for your time and attention. Feel free to reach out for any needs or support. And yeah, that does it.
Blythe Brumleve:
52:21
We'll see you next time. Go, jags. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Everything is Logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Subscribe to the show, sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everythingislogisticscom. And in addition to the show, sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everythingislogisticscom.
Blythe Brumleve:
52:42
And in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let y'all know about another company I operate, and that's Digital Dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a coworker's child, a neighbor down the street or a stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital Dispatch. We've been building online since 2009, but we're also early adopters of AI, automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as $1,500, along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast.
Blythe Brumleve:
53:42
You can watch a quick explainer video over on digitaldispatchio. Just check out the pricing page once you arrive and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go Jags.
