Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (00:00.674)
So yeah, I've just started the beginning of the PDF because I'm waiting for the, of course, the lovely Harvey, but no, I'm very, I was hoping I had time to get a couple of chapters deep before this, but I didn't. So my apologies. We've been really busy here.
Corey Quinn (00:00.832)
Have you had a chance to take a look at the book yet?
Corey Quinn (00:05.927)
Okay. Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (00:13.707)
Oh, don't worry. Now, please, this is this is about you. So we're good. We're we're recording and I have an editing team who can edit out the lab. I see this out, but they can edit anything else out. So if you want to touch anything up, feel free to let me know.
Beautiful. All right, so I'll go ahead and introduce you and then I'll ask you to share a little bit about yourself and about the agency and we'll kind of go from there.
Corey Quinn (00:45.435)
I'll go ahead. OK. Good. And the intro is prerecorded.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (00:45.8)
Sounds great.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (00:50.601)
I didn't bring I was gonna have a Scotch you can keep this in. I was gonna have a Scotch. It's three in the afternoon where I am and it's you know, I'm
Corey Quinn (00:54.419)
Yeah!
Corey Quinn (00:58.855)
Okay, that's a little bit that's a little bit better. I've got two more interviews if I did a scotch right now I'd be in trouble Beautiful okay, let's jump in Today I'm joined by the today. I'm joined by the president and chief business development officer also known as sales of Giant creative Marnie Menard that I messed up your name Marty. I forgot to ask Marty Menard Is that how I pronounce your last name?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (01:03.878)
Oh, you're right!
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (01:27.146)
Perfect. You didn't miss pronounce it at all.
Corey Quinn (01:29.067)
Okay, I'm going to start over. Today, I'm joined by the president and chief business development officer, also known as sales of giant creative Marty Menard. Welcome, Marty.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (01:42.55)
Thanks Corey for having me. I'm excited to be here, my friend.
Corey Quinn (01:45.383)
Likewise, can't wait to jump into this conversation to kick things off. Would you mind sharing just a little bit about yourself and what giant creative is?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (01:55.722)
Absolutely. I mean, as you said, I'm an old school sales guy. I'm an entrepreneur. I've been in the marketing field in one form or another for the last 20 years, sales and marketing primarily. This is my first agency that I'm an owner in, and that was a big passion.
Corey Quinn (02:00.875)
Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (02:13.042)
I had worked for a number of larger Canadian agencies and of course on many a sales floor over my time. But I really gravitate towards the excitement of what marketing can be for clients and it's really great to work one-on-one. So it takes that sort of old school sales network building relationship at next level and that's what I really love about marketing. So I fell into it about 12 years ago and then when I got the opportunity to partner with somebody who was a vendor.
Corey Quinn (02:36.049)
Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (02:43.096)
of mine in another agency, it just made sense. And so we joined Creative was born really not even five years ago. It's still a pretty young agency at our team has grown considerably, but the agency itself is still it's still brand new.
Corey Quinn (02:50.921)
Wonderful
Corey Quinn (02:59.551)
Beautiful just a baby and we'll talk more about the origin story here in a second But in the meantime, could you share with us, you know the work that giant creative does specifically what type of services? Who do you who do you service? Who do you work with?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (03:13.01)
Absolutely. So I mean, we are, we call ourselves a data driven performance marketing agency, which I know is a tongue, a long one, but we want to, we're really, we're slaves to the data. We really believe in what the data tells us from first party data all the way down. And, and though we are, this is, this is a really, it's funny court because you and I chatted offline about this. And I think this is where
We're at a really interesting point now, because when we started, we had a very sort of, as we talk about a generalist agency, you know, you do whatever you need to do to keep the lights on. So we started with, you know, we were a content marketing agency in the beginning, and then we, all of a sudden we had clients asking about web development. So of course we can do that job. And then you go and you hire someone to help you facilitate that, or you hire a contractor. And then you start realizing, hey, someone's asking about more branding elements, and all of a sudden you need more
graphic designer, you need at least an art director or creative director. And, you know, month after month, year after year, you start to build this, this team and then, but all of a sudden you're doing everything and not the same way for everybody. So, so that being said, we've tried to really hone in the last couple of years and realize what are we, what's the most important thing for getting success for our clients? Cause without success for them, we can't have success, obviously. And so we were certainly.
Corey Quinn (04:21.259)
Hehehe
Corey Quinn (04:33.747)
Yeah, there's no business. Yep.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (04:36.194)
There's no business, right? So we started realizing that we couldn't, you know, you make those mistakes in the early days. And again, as you so accurately pointed out in the beginning, I'm a sales guy. I'm an old school sales guy. So I might, you know, in the beginning, you know, something that looks beautiful, that's a beautiful design brand guide or an ad or what have you, might have some incredible curb appeal.
Corey Quinn (04:49.076)
Yeah, yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (05:01.43)
but it doesn't get the engagement level you're looking for because you realize you haven't done that homework and made sure that everything from the messaging to the imagery, to the style, to the platform it's being on should be informed by the customer that you're trying to engage with. And that's what I mean by becoming slaves to that data. So we're performance marketers. We're really, our number one thing that we do is lead conversion and we drive leads for franchise organizations as well as standalone businesses, whether it be in the, mostly in the,
Then the other vertical that we double down on is renovations, builders, roofers. We have found a great deal of success there in that vertical and honing in there. But everything we do from the creative, from the brand development to the advocacy, it's all informed by those buyer personas we build from the first party data and the ongoing data. So we're performance creative, but slaves to the data. If that's not too long of an answer.
Corey Quinn (05:54.185)
Beautiful.
Sure. Yeah, no, no. So just to feed that back, I mean, you said it, your performance marketing, but you build the performance based on the data. You build the personas and the messaging and the creative based on the data first is what I'm hearing.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (06:12.206)
We want to leverage that with analytics to make really informed decisions, right? Those consumer insights, that's going to help drive business growth. And we've seen it again and again. And interestingly enough, that's what's really turned us back around to having to get much more focused on one or two key verticals and starting to fade away from the generous approach.
Corey Quinn (06:14.859)
Mm. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (06:35.52)
What is your role there as the Chief Business Development Officer? What is your day-to-day like?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (06:40.134)
Oh my God, what is my day to day? So, because I'm also quote unquote president, which is really just a title because I'm one of the owners of the agency. But it's interesting because in a marketing agency, and I'm not sure if your background was similar, Cor, I know that you and I are definitely generationally aligned, but you know.
When I set when I you know meet a client or network with a client or a client referred to me and we start down that journey together Which is what I love to do is find out what they what their needs are Bring my team into support to analyze what's going on out there and seeing how they're neat how we can support those needs and if their thoughts and ideas align with what the data is telling us and Getting that over the finish line to selling the client. That's a sales guy's job close that business and hand it off, but
We're a small boutique firm. Like, we're about 30 people. So it's a really, we're all wearing a lot of hats. So I'm very engaged with clients and then with the team that's supporting those clients on a daily basis. So today, just as an example, I'll have two or three, I'm preparing two or three quotes based on some meetings I had last week. I'm building up my briefs for the team that I'm meeting with my team to make sure they're executing on those briefs. And I'm circling back with a couple of meetings with the client to ensure.
that everybody's hearing the same thing. And I'm just, it's like I'm the center of that, that center of truth. And so the days can be busy sometimes. And that's why I wish I had my scotch and ice beside me at this point in the day that it's, you're wearing a lot of hats if that answers your question.
Corey Quinn (08:10.514)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (08:17.995)
Sure, sure, yeah. And as most developing businesses, especially agencies at the 30 person mark, that's definitely what's happening. I'd love to dig in a little bit around this concept that you shared with me, that you started off more as a journalist, you were doing content marketing and then that expanded into brand elements and pretty much everything, design and all these things. And now you're in the process of honing in on a couple of different
vertical markets, you mentioned franchise QSR and then sort of renovations slash, you know, home services type businesses. Generally speaking, did I get that correct?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (09:00.158)
You did. And the reason why, and those are two really unique verticals in the sense that they don't have a lot in common on the surface, but I mean, to kind of go back to Janarus, I think one of the things that I know that there's lots of content written on this and you are absolutely someone out there in the market speaking about this, about the
Corey Quinn (09:07.245)
Okay.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (09:23.198)
pitfalls of being a generalist agency. And one of the things that we learned, we've got a really strong team. I've got people here that have been with me from the very beginning. And we've even won, like in Canada, we have the CMAs, the Canadian Marketing Awards, which are the golden standard. And we've even won some marketing awards for verticals that I know we have just abandoned because what we discover is that it's an unscalable practice, unless you want to be,
You're collateralized to the point where you can build a 150, 200-person agency. But from a scalability standpoint, no matter what we can charge from the research and the planning and the brand development and the content strategy, and that could be in the low six digits to the high six digits or higher per year, that money gets eaten up so fast. And because it's like we're reinventing the wheel for every client. So one of our clients is McDonald's Canada.
Now, we support them on the franchise side, but we also do some content development. And it's just one of those things that you can do one thing well, and then they hire you for something else. And you say, yes, good. But you realize that the franchise lead generation, month after month, we have the equation worked out to the point that we know exactly what we're making every month. We've got that margin tight now, month after month.
Corey Quinn (10:32.523)
Sure. Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (10:50.314)
We go out and shoot another content project and we can do a little margin on it, but you're eating up most of that money for what you can actually charge. So what happens is we saw like 25, 30% of our annual revenue.
within content creation, but it wasn't scalable. All we would do is if we took on, if we wanted to grow that to 40% or 50%, it cost us more to do it. We couldn't find any economies of scale. So the economy of scale on the lead gen side and the performance marketing conversion campaigns, that became something we could just double down on. So now that we're at that point, now we can start to say, listen, this is not the right customer for us. We can say no. We've been able to start to transition back
Corey Quinn (11:16.939)
Yeah. Sure.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (11:35.315)
the two versions we talked about.
Corey Quinn (11:37.1)
Yeah. Let me ask just a detailed question on that. So with regard to the lead gen piece of that business with McDonald's in Canada, or whomever this applies to, are you doing lead gen for franchise development, meaning trying to sell more locations, or is it that you are trying to drive more traffic to the local McDonald's restaurants?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (12:02.334)
the former. So in this particular instance, and we do a lot of this, the one of the things that I brought with me when I came to this agency.
The other agency I was at was very franchise specific. So I personally just happened to have a very large network. And we have a franchise association here. And I'm on some committees. And we're having a big convention in Montreal in April. And I'm on running some roundtables and panels. And so it's a really rich opportunity. Lots of opportunities there for me. And I have a good reputation. So we do a lot of franchise leads. So we are developing leads. But it's really interesting.
Corey Quinn (12:16.599)
Hmm. Nice.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (12:41.872)
our approach isn't, and we still make this very profitable for ourselves, our approach isn't the wide net, it's really the fishing with a spear. So we look at really developing buyer person. We don't wanna just go put a general franchise lead ads and start collecting 200, 300 leads a month and sifting through. We wanna really hone that down depending on the budgets to where the marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead is more like 60% as opposed to like 5 or 10%.
which I know a lot of clickbait agencies can do. So that's also really fun because we can get that good, but still stay scalable and profitable.
Corey Quinn (13:19.159)
That's beautiful. So you're able to drive quality for your clients and do it at a level that's profitable for your agency. Sounds pretty great to me. How big is the QSR? So my familiarity is at Scorpion, we targeted franchise as well. And we mostly stayed out of QSR because it was not necessarily in our wheelhouse. We didn't have the product for it. That said, we did have a couple of clients. And so.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (13:25.959)
Exactly.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (13:36.523)
Right.
Corey Quinn (13:47.351)
Very, very generally familiar with this space. However, my familiarity is also reminding me that there is like, you look at all of the different types of businesses within franchise, QSR represents I think a majority of the types of business, the count of businesses in franchise. So based on that, it seems like there's a lot of opportunity. Are you focused primarily on Canadian based franchises or are you across all North America? How do you approach that?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (14:17.898)
It's a great question. And it's something that's a big part of our play right now is because we've had some great success in Canada, we continue to build that. Clearly we started here. There are fundamental differences despite all the similarities in Canada, the US, plus proximity just allows us to, you know.
get meetings a lot quicker, especially with some of the stuff I talked about earlier. So, but we're starting to, now that we've built up some really strong case studies, we're starting to look at other regions. In McDonald's, as a perfect example, because of the success we've had for them, the people who are the franchise development team, they've gone and given sort of, you know,
keynote speakers to McDonald's Australia, McDonald's Sweden, McDonald's UK, and now we're starting to get inquiries into working with them. So we're in the middle, just beginning conversations with McDonald's Australia about doing the same thing for them. So we're just getting that opportunity through our success. So it's really exciting for us, but we wanna enter the US. That's, it's a bigger fish.
Corey Quinn (15:10.988)
Beautiful.
Corey Quinn (15:16.215)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a big market for sure. But what you're describing, I think, is really indicative of what it what the benefit, I would say, of getting into a vertical, like specializing in a vertical is that I've always called a vertical market, especially like franchise. They're like they're like a village. Right. Everyone kind of knows everyone else and everyone kind of talks. And when one agency is doing extremely well for one.
well-known brand like a McDonald's, word gets out and the phone starts to ring. Otherwise, if you don't have that, if you don't have that concentration of clients in franchise, you don't get the benefit. Is that your experience?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (15:59.658)
Absolutely. And think about it from this perspective. Like Canada's population on whole is the same as the state of California. So it's one giant small country, right? Where there are over 1200 unique franchise brands in Canada. That's the entire franchise brand network in Canada. The majority of those are restaurants.
Corey Quinn (16:08.446)
Yeah
Corey Quinn (16:13.265)
Yeah, right.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (16:28.606)
And I don't have an exact number for you, I'm sure I could find it, but I'm guessing you're looking at, you know, 60% is somewhere in food and beverage QSR. So now that you're looking at maybe six, 700 franchise brands, and that's the end of it.
And we have one association, the Caring for Anxiety Association. And again, when I go to Montreal and do my roundtables, as you would know, no different than the IFAs and the conferences you guys have there, I'm going to know most people. And we're going to get to get in and we're going to do it. It's a really small community, which is a good thing for us. We don't need that many customers to be profitable.
Right? We can, 30 people, if we're doing our job right, I don't want to take on too many at once because I want to be able to make sure I can manage the whole process. And once they're up and running, then I'll bring somebody else on and so forth. Managing that growth is important.
Corey Quinn (17:21.731)
So a lot of people look at the franchise vertical and say, gosh, there's a lot of businesses here. If you close the brand, then you get all the franchisees. There's a lot of sort of inherent, like the appearance of a lot of scale. Obviously dealing with franchises is a unique experience. How would you, so let's say you were speaking to an agency that has no real franchise experience. How would they get involved?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (17:34.273)
Bye.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (17:40.042)
Yeah, very.
Corey Quinn (17:49.823)
Like how would you advise them on getting involved in the franchise world in such a way that sets them up for success? Like what should they do? What should they expect?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (17:57.61)
Well, you know, I think that's a really good question. And I think it speaks to, and I was going to ask you this because I know that you've got a franchise vertical in your experience, but here, the difference between franchise lead development.
and getting those clients, that's a lot of low-hanging fruit and there's a lot of organizations that need the help. But the way a lot of the organizations run here to go and translate to the B2C and to carry that side of it where you're working to drive more traffic online or in person to any of their stores, it's really hard for a lot of...
you know, franchise organizations, they don't make that transition that easily. They tend to do a lot of that work in house. It's a harder transition. So the first thing I would say is, is if you're looking at franchise, you know, QSR or, you know, home services or, because there's no, whatever it might be, franchise lead development is your low hanging fruit because they're all looking for support and help there. And there's lots of small, and I always say, start with where we did.
Corey Quinn (18:48.655)
services. Yep.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (19:00.946)
is the small emerging, find your sweet spot. Someone who's got like five, seven franchises, doesn't know how to get to 20 units, 30 units. They've got some money, they got not tons of money, but they got some budget and they need to make that move. Don't look at somebody who's like just starting with one or two, unless you're a two or three person operation, because they don't have any money yet. But that, and the bigger ones.
like, you know, the 20, the next 50 to 100 locations, they're working with somebody, so work, go after them, but it's a longer sales cycle. Might take you 12 months, 24 months to close that deal, but I love those like 10 to 15 units. That's my sweet spot because they all need help and there's so many of them and they're coming all the time. There's new franchise brands being born. I say this like, you know, I get on a newsletter list of all the new ones that come out. There's, you know, there's half a dozen every quarter.
So there's lots of new opportunities, it's pretty exciting. So that would be my advice. Begin looking at emerging franchises with, you know, five, six, seven, 10 units, and then look at what they're doing.
Go out there, see what they're doing. You know, find out how are they right now marketing their services? Go, you start with Google search, see what you can find and look at what they're doing. A lot of them aren't doing very much. It'll blow your mind. A lot of, I go to these conferences and I give panels and I'm amazed about how many people who are running large organizations, 20, 30, 40 units, and they have, and their franchise lead development is almost nil. Even McDonald's Canada, if I told you the budget, it would blow your mind.
Corey Quinn (20:31.959)
Amazing.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (20:34.038)
blow your mind. It's like an apple for so many of them.
Corey Quinn (20:35.515)
Yeah So real quick what Marty I'm gonna I'm gonna change wireless networks because I think about got some internet stuff We'll edit this piece out, but give me one sec. I may freeze for a second Did it do this is great, by the way
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (20:45.496)
Sure.
No worries, brother. No worries.
Corey Quinn (20:59.783)
Okay. Should be back now. All right. This is awesome by the way, Marty.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (21:04.618)
Awesome. Hopefully. Okay, good. I'm glad.
Corey Quinn (21:07.515)
Yeah, that's awesome. So let's jump back in. So all of that makes sense. How does tell me help me understand the focus on businesses that do renovations? You mentioned a couple others related home services. Why is that a target for you?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (21:25.418)
Well, this is, that's a really good question. And it's not gonna be as, it's not gonna make me look like I'm some amazing strategist. So along the way, we again, like we're centered, and I'm not sure how familiar you are with where we are, which is a couple hours down the road from Toronto, which is our major center, one of our three or four major centers in our large country. And,
Corey Quinn (21:37.053)
Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (21:51.89)
you know, our reputation is really strong. So a lot of companies reach out to us. So we got an opportunity about a year ago to take on what was a five, they had five units all within Southern Ontario, and they did roofing, windows and doors, siding, east route, that kind of work. But they were a fairly, you know, 25, 20 to 30 million dollar a year company. They were a decent size. And for Canada, for an independent, that's a pretty good size of annual revenue. It's not, you know, we're not the US.
But we started, we learned so much by the opportunity that we realized that these guys have no idea how to do lead. That they're all doing, what was really interesting as we're discovering, because we've now brought on three or four, and there's a further story here, but none of them understand, they're all doing that old school approach of, hey, our busy season is summer, so let's start advertising in the spring. They had no concept of building a funnel. They had no concept.
of everything. They're just spending and they're pouring all of their budget into Google search for
you know, five territories, but they're doing a 50 mile radius for all. So this, this decent size ad budget of five digits was just getting eaten up by a thousand territories. And so having no impact. So we had to do a deep dive and all of this stuff, but we discovered so many, we built so many great case studies for them. And we've had such great success. And that led to, you know, this next company that was a roofing and siding company, and then, and then to another roofing company, and then the windows and doors, and, and then people that are in related.
industry. And it was all the same picture. Then we partnered with, not partnered with, but we were able to be able to use as a strategic partner, this great company and organization of the US called Owen Corning. And if you don't know who Owen Corning is, they're the ones that they invented the pink insulation. They invented it, it's them. And they certify Windows and Doors and insulation companies. And they had this huge email list.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (23:53.49)
of people that they wanted to provide us to say, go out and help support them. And so now we're doing, I know. So we just discovered, this vertical fell into our lap because we got some great success, but just by chance. And it was a discovery. And now we've got a list of, you know, a quite an extensive list that we're starting to now communicate with and have initial conversations with. And we know what to do now. We're duplicating that work. It's remarkable, going back to the vertical. It's remarkably scalable. We've done all the heavy lifting.
Corey Quinn (23:58.016)
Beautiful.
Corey Quinn (24:18.547)
Mm. Yeah, yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (24:23.07)
Now we just do and do and do and we can charge us still a really good amount of money and our margin just increases a little by every single client.
And they have really unique needs because they're run by, most of them are run by people who were roofers or were windows and doors people. And then they start, then they became the boss and they don't have an understanding. So it's a huge opportunity. And some of these companies that we're talking to now, they're 200 million a year. And you wouldn't believe the joy, what their marketing looks like. It was an incredible eye opening. And it was amazing.
Corey Quinn (24:38.007)
Correct. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (24:43.615)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (24:47.167)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (24:52.663)
Amazing.
Yeah, so as you're beginning to take this vertical focus, you know, you have the franchise that's developing you have this Let's call it renovations you know roofing whatnot and You're what it sounds like is this you're going through this transformation real-time What what let's focus in on the roofing siding the renovation piece in what ways are you able? operationally to sort of
scale. Where are you seeing the economies of scale? You mentioned a little bit, but I'd love to dig in. Any specifics you can share?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (25:29.246)
Sure, no, absolutely. I mean, there was a lot of discovery our first six months, there's no doubt. So I mean, a lot of what we were, we're sort of building our book now with this first company, this first client that I talked about that really was a really decent budget.
we were able to build the books. What we're doing now is just take, you know, we've learned how, and my marketing team would do a better job at getting to the minutiae, but we've learned how to leverage the local service ad. They have way more uptake on local service ads than a lot of other verticals. So because, you know, and they do a lot of trade shows, the local service campaigns have been, we do less effort on building the ads in local service, and we get more response and drive more conversion.
Corey Quinn (26:12.335)
Yeah. It's magical. Those ads.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (26:14.754)
Like we literally, it's unbelievable, but we won't get that franchise lead gen. We don't get the same uptick, right? Because the buyer, we saw the target very unique, very different, different languaging and messaging and so forth. And that has been a huge one for especially around trade shows because they all do it. So we literally and then so we literally just take those concepts and then supply them to client A, client B, client C and do the same thing over and over again, rinse and repeat.
Corey Quinn (26:21.523)
Yeah, it's different. It's different. Yeah.
Hmm.
Corey Quinn (26:43.179)
Yeah, yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (26:44.194)
but we get to charge the same amount of money and that's where the margin, that's one area I know, because that's been really recent over the last four or five months, where we've really been able to leverage what we learned there into four other clients and it's been profitable.
Corey Quinn (26:58.655)
As you're going down this road, how are you thinking about transitioning sort of the positioning and the branding of the agency from a generalist to a vertical specialist?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (27:08.618)
My God, that's such a good question. It's been on our mind a lot lately. We just brought on it because that's the hardest part. We're trying to build up, we still have, like I would say right now about 30 to 40%, probably only 35, 30 area of our clients would still fall under the generous, where we're doing brand strategy, where we're doing.
Corey Quinn (27:30.961)
Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (27:31.954)
a big content production, whatever it might be. And we have teams that can fulfill it, and we're still saying yes, but we have to figure out when do we start saying no? And if you look at our branding now, and if you look at our website now, we're very designed for, even though we've got some verticals in there, it's clear that we do it all.
Right? And by next year, it can't look that way. And it won't look that way. But what we're trying, it's a real obstacle, Corey. I'd actually love your insight. We're trying to look right now at, cause there's a couple of approaches we're talking about. So we're laying out sort of a game plan for, as we bring on, we have our targets for, I'm gonna bring on two or three more roofing clients, two more franchise clients by end of Q2. So that means...
Corey Quinn (27:52.191)
Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (28:17.502)
Not only what business can we say no to, but what clients are we going to support on their way out? Because if you're doing well for a client, they're not gonna wanna go. And I love.
And I love my clients. Like I've got people that have been with me from other agencies and we go out and we drink and I love my relationship. And these people are really important to me. I'm not gonna just give them 60 days and say good luck. So I want, that transition strategy is the hardest one. So how do I, okay, we're gonna stop doing this. So we're gonna set up a date, client A, that by the end of Q3 or Q4, we're gonna need to move you to somewhere else. We're gonna help. We're gonna do, we'll work with you on the agency
we'll work on that transition and get that over and wish you all the best because we can't keep fulfilling you while we're going in this direction because it no longer fits into our business model. So we're mapping all of that out, literally there's a whiteboard behind you that has some of that information already mapped out because it's been on our mind a lot over the last few weeks that we're trying to figure that out. So next year we won't look the same in some way. It's not easy. Like what did you do? Like,
Corey Quinn (29:10.782)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (29:19.893)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (29:23.179)
Yeah. I understand that.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (29:28.946)
I know you have a great reputation. You came into Scorpion when it was at a certain level, you were one of the key players in getting it, like growing it by 500%. What did you guys do? And what Scorpion already, were they more generalist then or were they already targeted? Were they verticalized?
Corey Quinn (29:36.414)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (29:46.711)
So I would say 60 to 70% of the business was from personal injury attorneys. And that's really where when I came in, we sort of formalized that and then we went forward in that and then we added on another vertical and then another vertical. So I'll share with you how we did that because it was important to for the thing that was most on our mind is how do we communicate to the people we're selling to first off attorneys and then home services.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (29:54.807)
Oh, my God.
Corey Quinn (30:16.683)
How do we communicate to these audiences that we are truly experts and specialists in their world? We're not just a journalist who knows how to do a little bit of legal marketing. Like we are true and true experts in this field. And so the way that we approached it is we did a couple of things. Number one, we had separate segments of the website that were
basically think about them as mini websites where as if they were their own domain, and by the way, we set up separate domains, I'll talk about that in a second. But if you are a plumber, and we were doing sort of very overt specific marketing to plumbers, we would only reveal the plumbing part of the website. So the way we would do that, I'll go to the URLs, we would do scor
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (30:46.93)
Very cool.
Corey Quinn (31:08.331)
would be on all of our collateral, be on all of our marketing campaigns. We actually had a separate Facebook businesses set up. We had a whole really focused on creating that experience that we were true sort of experts. And so you would go to scor that would redirect to the scorpion.co slash homeservices. And that was a fully contained website that had, everything from a vertical homepage to
our vertical services page, our case studies and success stories and all the assets, the blog posts, everything was built within that silo. And if you were to go there, and you can go there today, everything we write on that part of the website is all written for home services, only home service business owner pictures and case studies and all the language, all the inside stuff, so that...
Ideally, someone sees an ad, they come to that part of the website and they don't really care that we work with attorneys or they don't care that we work with franchises. That doesn't that doesn't relate to them. What they care about is, you know, how well do you understand solving my specific problems and who have you done that for? So that's how we approached it. We did it a vertical by vertical. We actually had, believe it or not, this was a logistical gymnastics where each of our verticals had different colors. So legal was blue. Franchise was purple.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (32:10.112)
Right.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (32:30.346)
Right. Your brand team. Oh my.
Corey Quinn (32:33.467)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who all reported to me and I was part of that brand team. So we would do that to really distinguish each of these different brands, mini brands. And so that's how we did it. It was a lot of logistical kind of, you know, bending and things, you know, we had to do a lot of things to make that work, and I think that's a good way to do it. But my advice generally is for folks in your position is
to not have to worry about like boiling the ocean, doing a big rebrand and relaunching a website. I would just build out a segment of the website that speaks directly to this buyer and make them feel like, hey, these are true experts based on everything they're saying and they're showing me.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (33:19.222)
Yeah, and that's exactly what we've been talking about. So that's really great insight because we've been talking about, do we and but do we have those domains, in your case, Scorpion Home Services as just a separate domain? They're not going to link to the other sites that have vertical X, Y or Z. It's just an existing site. Is that how you set it up or were they able to go back to Scorpions?
Corey Quinn (33:40.52)
No, they would redirect to scorpion.co, which was our primary domain, slash, you know, home services. So there was no actual web, there's no separate website. You can get to the home services part of the Scorpion website from the homepage of scorpion.co. That's just, that's the way that we did it. You can certainly set up separate domains and websites. There were some reasons why we did it.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (33:47.195)
Right, right.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (33:56.651)
Right.
Corey Quinn (34:06.303)
the way we did it, but you could do it both ways for sure.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (34:10.602)
Well, I think the reason why I would think you would do it that way, and that's the way we're talking about it, but I wanted to get your insight. I mean, from a Google authority perspective as well and all that, we want to have one don't we want to we're obviously not going to, but I'm always interested to know because I have seen other agencies do that, where they buy a landing page URL for a certain service and it's separate from their site. So I'm always interested in going, well, I mean, I guess if you're spending enough money and you can put enough work into that, but you're still losing out if you're neglecting
Corey Quinn (34:20.435)
Yeah. Exactly.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (34:40.956)
or whatever. So that was interesting. That's what we're leading towards as well. And you're right, we just can't make that transition all at once. Boiling the ocean is a perfect way of putting it. We just can't do it. My business partner, Andrew, always says, he has this great line where he always goes, let's just water the grass we're sitting in right now. Let's not worry about over here, over there. That stuff will come. We'll just do it where we're at right now and we'll get there.
Corey Quinn (34:42.16)
Correct.
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (34:54.588)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (35:04.209)
Bye.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (35:08.086)
But we're, so we're just getting that going now, but that is really good insight and that's part of our transition plan.
Corey Quinn (35:12.68)
Yeah. The other thing, and clearly you're doing this with a lot of intention, however, you don't have to fire all your existing clients that fall outside of these verticals, as long as you can continue to provide services and fulfill the promises you've made to them. Like I've interviewed dozens of folks who have done this transition, and of course they still have the...
you know, the ice cream van operator as a client that they started off way back in the early days. And that's fine because they've been able to make that work.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (35:41.781)
Right?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (35:46.914)
As long as I can keep up, it's also about, you know, it's always about managing, how big do we gotta get?
I do, you know, it gets big in one with that. That's a question we don't have an answer to, but that is really good insight. Cause we are just wanting to ensure that we're a nice streamlined team and team utilization is something that we look at all the time to make sure that we're really, just part of being profitable, right? Is ensuring that you've got the right people in the right seats. The department is well positioned for success, but you know, you're not putting a strain on, we have really great people. I don't want to burn them out. And marketing is already built to get burnt out
Corey Quinn (35:51.976)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (36:05.185)
Beautiful.
Corey Quinn (36:20.359)
Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (36:22.632)
I'm trying to advance. I just got off the phone this morning with an American client who's where they're now, they're marketing their franchise that's entering Canada and they've hired us to be their Canadian franchise partner for development, but they're American and they don't really understand Canada, but they literally will, you know, I'm on the phone where all of a sudden a deadline gets pushed and this is indicative of just them, but their deadline got pushed up by 12 weeks. So I have to produce something I thought I had 12 weeks for in four or 16 weeks for in four weeks.
Corey Quinn (36:30.859)
Beautiful.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (36:51.492)
And what are you gonna do? You have to say yes. You negotiate for an extra week or a few days after there. But that's the... So it's already prone to burnout. So I try to make sure that my team isn't overworked. I do want them to have a certain quality of life where I can. Where I can. So that's always part of my play in terms of these kinds of decisions. But again, really good insights around like video production and...
Corey Quinn (36:53.499)
Yeah. You have to fulfill.
Corey Quinn (37:17.771)
What? Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (37:19.538)
It's really a big part of what we do. We have a strong video team. So that's gonna be the one that we stick with the longest for sure, because we can turn it out over and over year after year, and it's not costing us more money. We're not growing it in a way that's gonna make us a ton, but it's not ever costing us money, right?
Corey Quinn (37:25.707)
Yes. Yep.
Corey Quinn (37:35.703)
Sure. Yeah. Well, interestingly, yeah, video is becoming more and more of a mainstay of marketing anyways. So even for franchise development and these other verticals are gonna, potentially there's an opportunity to make a lot of money there.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (37:50.986)
Well, a big part of our McDonald's success was the video content that we created for the campaign. Content was... and I think that goes back to that whole data piece for us where... Like, I'll give you a quick insight if you don't mind.
Corey Quinn (37:54.643)
Yeah. Beautiful.
Corey Quinn (38:05.367)
Please.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (38:06.558)
Their request was so unique. Now, I'm not sure how familiar you are. I'm sure you are with the McDonald's model, but in Canada for franchising, it's not like you pick your territory. They're gonna put you in the McDonald's in whatever province and city that they have that opening in. So if you live in Ontario and you wanna become a McDonald's franchisee and you have a million, 1.5 liquid and you can get to start this process, but you're in Ontario, but the openings they have are in Alberta and Saskatchewan
lower population problems, you don't have a choice. You go or you drop out. So it's a really unique model already. And then on top of that, they were seeing, they were getting so many males and white males that they had these new diversity requirement and they wanted more women and more people of, more new Canadians. So think about this, 38 million people in the whole country. Now we're going down to just women.
who have a million dollars or 1.5 million liquid, and who want, and who are willing to relocate. That niche market. So content, it's unbelievable, right? So our audience just shrunk so far and got really narrow, right? So we developed some new audiences during the process, but the content was, it was everything.
Corey Quinn (39:11.979)
Yeah, very specific.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (39:25.322)
Right? And we did, you know, interviewing, you know, some really successful women franchisees, telling their story in a way that we could have six, second, 15 second, 30 second cut. That was how we got real big and gamey. If it wasn't for the content, it wouldn't have happened. Right? Then we wouldn't have had it. Cause that was so niche, right?
Corey Quinn (39:25.652)
Yes.
Corey Quinn (39:33.911)
Beautiful.
Corey Quinn (39:40.627)
That's awesome. Yeah. And that speaks back to your the fact that you're focused on quality at scale, but you're able to generate a, you know, the this meet the specs of the of the outcome that you're trying to create, right, which is very specific. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. You got to over deliver.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (39:56.565)
That's right.
So each man, and it's McDonald's, so you want to feed for them, right? Overdeliver it every time and do it with a smile on your face. So we were...
Corey Quinn (40:09.439)
Exactly.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (40:10.326)
But we had killer reasons. We've been, they're super happy obviously, and that's gone great for us. But I can say that, you know, even a more general campaign that we've had, like we have a set of QSRs under a family of brands called Chairman Brands, and there's some coffee shops, there's some pizza places, and a breakfastman. And we do it, and we have a great success on both the franchise and the B2C, but.
They don't have the McDonald's budgets, but they have no interest in that content, but we can still get great success for them because it's a much wider target. We've got lots of personas where a persona is so niche, content is one of your key, key if not only differentiated outside of, you know, good data management.
Corey Quinn (40:42.78)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (40:49.045)
Yeah.
That's awesome. That's awesome. So you're based on this conversation. It's clear that you're moving into a direction where you want to get more scale. Why is scale important to you and the other sort of founders of the company? Like what's the future of giant?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (41:05.474)
That's a great question. And I think I'm an entrepreneur at heart in the sense that, you know.
I've been building businesses, I've had businesses long before, you know, my marketing business and I love that concept. I think Andrew, my business partner and I, we have, we're at different stages of our lives. Andrew is just approaching 40, where I'm, you know, in my mid-50s. I'm not a young man, as everybody can see. And for me and for Andrew, and we're looking at where do we wanna be in five years? And what we don't wanna be doing in five years is grinding.
Which is what we're doing now. I don't mind grinding. I'm still young and hard and I got a lot of energy and And I'm highly caffeinated. So so
Lots of energy, but at some point we want to get to the point where this either becomes something that we can sit back on or maybe in five, six years we have an EBITDA of X dollars and that's our retirement plan, that's our ticket out. So for us, scalability and profitability is really important because we want something to come in and go, hey, we've got some good IP.
where we brought on a new CTO that an IP is something we're going to look at over the next three years, along with some systems and process and solutions that just work and some, you know, obviously strong acumen and a couple of verticals with the idea that then maybe, you know, that this is going to have a certain evaluation and then we decided that moment if we sell or what the project is. But it's definitely an end game, you know, that's kind of the approach for us.
Corey Quinn (42:33.811)
Yeah. Beautiful. Getting serious. I love that. And the saying I love to reference in this context is, you wanna build a business that everyone wants to buy, but that you don't wanna sell.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (42:49.514)
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's when you're going to get the highest valuation and the best deal every time. I'm going to steal that line. That's a great line. I'm stealing it. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (42:51.168)
Ha ha ha!
Corey Quinn (42:54.931)
Yeah. When you don't need it.
Corey Quinn (43:01.927)
Yeah. So, guys, this has been a great conversation, a lot of value for me, and I'm sure for the audience. What would be your sort of your parting advice for, let's say, a generalist agency owner, maybe a giant a couple years ago that was, you know, focused on a lot of different things, saying yes, a lot and then the struggling with scaling? What advice would you have for them?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (43:23.058)
That's a really good question. And Andrew and I talk all the time about the decisions that we should have made, or we maybe wish we would have made in the first 12, 24 months. And a lot of those just come down to, wisdom is just experience, right? It's not like I'm smarter than somebody else. I'm just older and been through more. And you start to realize that early days,
If you can't scale it, if there is no way to whatever solution or product you're selling, if it's not a scalable, then take a hard look at it and realize that if you need to reinvent the wheel for every new client that comes in and you're selling them a brand new set of services at a different price point based on unique needs, you're going to end up overworked, burnt out and not any more profitable.
Corey Quinn (44:13.011)
Yeah. Yeah, that's wise.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (44:14.814)
So I would really hope, you know, go back and go, this is what, is it scalable? And if you could figure out what to make it scalable, then you're on the right track. If it's not, then maybe that's something you don't want to continue going down the road. That being said, you know what it's like, man, when you're, when we started not even five years ago, there was four of us, right?
You don't say no to anything. You say yes at all and that's that trap you get into. So it's trying to make those decisions sooner the better as opposed to maybe making them four years in. If you can make those decisions that you're here to, you're gonna be a lot farther ahead than where I am at this point.
Corey Quinn (44:49.463)
Well, I'm going to take that advice, Marty. I'm in the middle of all that as well, just wrestling with my own business and creating scale for myself. So I take that advice. Thank you for that. Yeah, well, I'm a, yeah, well, I'm a consultant and I recently realized that I'm going to be 50 soon and I'm going to be 60 after that. And if I have to hustle for every deal, then this is not the life that I'm building. And so...
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (44:57.622)
Well, tell me more. You don't tell me more.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (45:12.969)
I'm out.
Corey Quinn (45:18.859)
So I need to ask myself, and I'm in the process, part of that is built, you know, I'm gonna plug my book, but part of that is the book, and I'm building out some, some ways for me to be able to provide as much value as I have, but probably more, to a larger audience without requiring 100% of my time. So that's what I'm, that's what I'm building, and I'm about to launch something really soon to help, help with.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (45:19.498)
Totally.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (45:24.107)
You should.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (45:40.81)
Well, that's exciting. Well, I figured the book was the beginning of something exciting. You had the pedigree. You know, it's funny, because just when we first talked, when Jeremy introduced us and...
Corey Quinn (45:42.607)
Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (45:53.002)
I got on a call with one of my sort of affiliate partners in the franchise side and I said, oh, I just had this great conversation with Corey Gwynn and he's like, oh, I just started following that guy. I love that guy. His name's also Corey and he has a franchise lead nurturing business called Cadence Franchising. I'll give him a plus. Awesome human being.
Corey Quinn (46:03.467)
Yeah
Corey Quinn (46:10.503)
Awesome. Yeah, great.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (46:13.546)
I love him, but he's a big fan. But I knew that it seemed like you were on the cusp of that next level. And when I realized the book was coming, because you're commenting on LinkedIn, and then I joined up to be on one of the early readers, which I'm excited about. No, I'm excited for the read. I figured something big was brewing. So I'm excited to keep my eye on where you're headed, my friend.
Corey Quinn (46:20.308)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (46:28.471)
Thank you. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (46:36.759)
Thank you. Well, I appreciate your support along the way. You've been really helpful. Last question for you. What is your motivation?
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (46:46.59)
Ah, that's a really good question. And I was just asked that by a team member. And my motivation, I mean, it's hard to define why I love being an entrepreneur.
Corey Quinn (46:51.916)
Mm-mm.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (47:00.21)
But that is certainly a motivation. Like, I'd rather work 12 hours for me than six hours a day for somebody else every single time. I love and get energized by being in an agency with team and talking and building relationships. I do love that feeds my soul. If it didn't, I couldn't do the job. So being in a setting where I can be creative in my thinking, I can work with really creative people, we can get success, that whole team aspect of it where people are working together to create something wonderful.
Corey Quinn (47:00.458)
Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (47:30.004)
for a client and getting their success as well as our own. That's a really invigorating feeling. Like I leave, like this call right now, I'm going to be high for the rest of the day because this is fun. This is a really engaging convo, right? Like I could do this all day. This is, this is, I make me feel 55. This makes me feel 35, right? But so that's a big one. And then I'm also just on a personal note, I'm a single dad with a 10 year old daughter who I spend a great deal of time
Corey Quinn (47:43.121)
Yeah, yeah.
Corey Quinn (47:47.22)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (47:57.207)
BLEH
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (48:00.224)
And she is absolutely a very, very strong motivator for every decision I make in pertains to how it affects her and our lives together and her future. That that whole, that exit plan, she's clearly directly tied to that. And I'm not sure if you have kids, so if you do, you'd know that feeling. And she's a strong motivator.
Corey Quinn (48:05.78)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (48:17.877)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (48:23.923)
Yeah, I've got a nine-year-old boy here, and yeah, he's amazing, and definitely a motivation for me as well. You know, they're always watching, so I wanna set a good example for what's possible.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (48:27.245)
Nice.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (48:38.21)
Absolutely. And it's absolutely right there. They're right now. Our kids at this age, they love us. They think we're the world and we're they're forming all this information unconsciously about us and about our behavior that they're going to start to, you know, actually start to do that on their own unconsciously when that you know when they hit the teenage years and beyond. We are modeling great stuff for them. But for me, it's too like I'm sure like nine is such a great age. Nine, 10 like they're such a
Corey Quinn (49:04.039)
It is. Yes, the best. Yes. Yeah.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (49:04.93)
They're so fun. They got tons of energy. They want, they're the best, right? Like I'd rather hang out with my daughter than most people, cause she's a blast. And I'm sure your boy is no different.
Corey Quinn (49:16.071)
Yeah, 100%. We're a very tight-knit family, so it's definitely the case. Yeah. Awesome, Marty. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. You've been so generous with where you're at and the process and this journey. And so, but from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the listeners, thank you so much.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (49:20.45)
That's nice. That's nice.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (49:38.086)
Aw, thank you Corey, this was super, super fun man. I do it every week if you let me. But thanks for having me.
Corey Quinn (49:42.579)
Yeah. Okay. We should. Of course. Thanks.
Marty Menard | President, GIANT Creative (49:45.358)
I'm sorry.
