IAM506- Entrepreneur Enables Smaller Businesses Compete Through Marketing

Bill Bice has always been an entrepreneur, starting his first company at age 14, and putting on road races with corporate sponsors. At 18, he started ProLaw Software, which was so successful that it was later sold to Thomson Reuters.

Having built or invested in over 25 companies, he got so frustrated in trying to get great marketing for his companies that he decided to take on the problem himself. A programmer at heart, Bill founded Boomtime, tackling marketing as a technology problem.

Bill can easily identify common business and marketing pitfalls, so his aim is to enable smaller businesses to more effectively compete with their larger competitors through effective marketing, primarily word of mouth.

• CEO Hack: Working on the business instead of in the business
• CEO Nugget: Mentorship from someone who've done it before
• CEO Defined: Being an infinite leader

Website: https://boomtime.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billbice/
Twitter: @billbice
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boomtimeonline/

Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, this is Gresh from I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Bill Bice of Boomtime.

Bill, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Bill Bice 0:39

Hey, it's great to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

No problem super excited to have you on. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Bill so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Bill has always been an entrepreneur, starting his first company at age 14, and putting on road races with corporate sponsors.

At age 18, he started ProLaw Software, which was having so much success that it was later sold to Thomson Reuters. Having built or invested in over 25 companies, he got so frustrated in trying to get great marketing for his companies that he decided to take on the problem himself.

A programmer at heart, Bill founded Boomtime, tackling marketing as a technology problem. Bill can easily identify common business and marketing pitfalls, so he aims to enable smaller businesses to more effectively compete with their larger competitors through effective marketing, primarily word of mouth.

Bill, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Bill Bice 1:31

I am ready, let's do it.

Gresham Harkless 1:33

Let's make it happen. I wanted to start everything off with what I call your CEO story to hear a little bit more about what led you to get started with your business.

Bill Bice 1:41

Well, I've never really other than one I sold that first company and then went to work at Thomson for a while. I've never worked for anybody else. Even in that first company, when I was 14, I was running my own thing. That was such a great experience. It was working with a local sports store and getting to see this family-run business and someone controlling their destiny because they're running their own business. I just got that small business passion very early in life. I feel like I was born an entrepreneur because of that and it's just what I've always done.

Gresham Harkless 2:21

Yeah, it's always great to kind of hear when people have that DNA, so to speak, where you start ventures at a very young age, and then you're still kind of doing it. You've had as I read in the bio over 25 companies that you've invested in or worked with, so definitely you fit the bill of somebody who has that entrepreneurial DNA.

Bill Bice 2:41

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. It's just amazing. What you learn getting to work on so many different companies and with so many different entrepreneurs, I just love it.

Gresham Harkless 2:51

Yeah, absolutely. I touched on a little bit in the bio, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about boomtime. Can you take us through exactly what you're doing? How you're helping support the clients you're working with?

Bill Bice 3:02

Yeah, so where this came out was not shockingly, the company where we have done the best and go to market is, of course, where we have the most success. You do all this really hard work and create a great product or service, but how good you are at marketing determines do you get the payoff that you deserve from that? In the end, it always comes down to marketing. Yet, this is an area where I mean, if you've got a startup, you've got a small business, there are 1000s of options to help you with your marketing, which is another way of saying that actually, nobody has figured out how to do it well.

That's the problem I saw came out of my frustration doing exactly that I built internal teams, I hired agencies that did all these different routes. Eventually, I just decided to go after it myself. As you mentioned, because I'm a programmer, to me, going at it from the data just made the most sense. It was taken that sort of lean startup iterative approach to market, of just constantly testing and iterating and learning what works. Then and then how do you do the thing? That's, I mean, so many did my joke about marketing, like the reason you go into marketing is because you don't want anybody to understand what you do.

That's the thing that needs to change. It's just a discipline that unlike every other area of our business has avoided attempts at is good at avoiding scale and efficiency. We don't allow that in any other area of our business. Why should that be the case in marketing? That's the thing that I set out to change.

Gresham Harkless 4:35

Yeah, that makes so much sense. Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if you found this because you have built so many different types of businesses and worked with so many different types of businesses, but especially for digital marketing. To me, that's one of the big advantages of it is that you don't have to kind of be blind and just kind of do things you have those analytics and that data to kind of pull from to see if something's working or not, and make pivots or changes just based off of that.

Bill Bice 5:00

You're gonna have the opposite problem now. So like, there's, you know, there's that old quote that was that was attributed to John Wanamaker, which is, I know, half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half. Well, now we know how every single dollar we are spending, we know every single engagement that we're creating. We have the opposite problem have too much data. How do we turn that into information? I mean, how often do you sit down with somebody you say, when's the last time you looked at the Google Analytics for your website? It's six months, 12 months.

Gresham Harkless 5:27

You have Google Analytics, you might.

Bill Bice 5:29

Yeah, you have Google Analytics installed. Yet, that's where the critical information is about how we understand how those initial interactions are occurring with our prospects. If we just focus on the really core basics, if we get better at capturing the referrals and leads that we're already generating, and then we do a good job of automatically following up with all of those, and we build that into an audience that you now own, it's the number one undervalued asset in every business is the audience of your clients, past clients, your network, people you get to talk to over and over again, without having to pay a media company to have access to them.

That's an enormously valuable asset. You have to put it on tour to stay top of mind with that. If we do those three things, that's the low-hanging fruit in every business that for a lot of companies, all the growth they need is sitting right there, you just have to execute well, on those things.

Gresham Harkless 6:27

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And it's powerful. I think so many times, and you've probably experienced this with clients, that a lot of times we're looking for the shiny object and the new thing, or we got to do something additional. Especially if you've been in business for longer than probably like a day or so you probably have a sphere of influence or connections or people maybe they have filled out a form on your website, or network or whatever that is, that is around you that if you cultivate those, as you spoke to, you can reach your goals.

Bill Bice 6:56

So much easier to leverage the thing that works well, which is word of mouth. I mean, so many businesses like that. My favorite question when I sit down with a business owner, that marketing director of the CEO, where'd your last couple of new clients come from? What I'm looking for, and what I hear 99% of the time is oh, it was a referral from so and so. Yet, all this activity on the marketing side is, it is shiny object syndrome. That syndrome is what creates the biggest problem in marketing, which is the lack of consistency. You've got to pick a proven long-term strategy and stick with it if you want your marketing to work. It is the reason why we don't get a return on our marketing dollars because we're just, I call it random acts of marketing. That is what a lot of business marketing looks like.

Gresham Harkless 7:47

Yeah, and a lot of times their marketing strategy is probably like cherry-picking from different things, and then moving and trying it for a month and then switching over. As you talked about having that long-term approach, because not only do you want to have that for your marketing, but you also probably want to be in the business long-term as well, too. They have a different approach to your business and your marketing doesn't kind of isn't as consistent as you guys do.

Bill Bice 8:09

Yeah, and that's what I saw in the data, which is that consistency is just absolutely key. The number one mistake is talking about yourself because nobody cares. What they care about is the problem that you can solve for them. The way to do that is to talk about how you're helping their business and career. If that's what the focus of your marketing is, then you're being helpful with all your clients, every prospective client, they're better off because they're getting emails, they're getting LinkedIn posts, they're getting information from you. That's what makes great marketing, you do that consistently. It's amazing how well that pays off.

Gresham Harkless 8:48

That's extremely powerful, correct me if I'm wrong, I want to make sure that I understand this correctly. Because I know there's a really big push, obviously in personal branding, but you're in you're saying that talking about yourself for the sake of talking about yourself is different versus talking about yourself if it is a value or what you do is a value that provides value to kind of like the end user listener or your client.

Bill Bice 9:11

It's just really a thought leadership strategy. The best way to create your brand is to show off your expertise. It is not to talk about how great you are, it is to share insights and perspectives that you uniquely have. This is effective so we specialise a boom time in high value b2b Lots of professional services SAS, things that are higher ticket impactful tend to be a complex sale. Then in an area like that, demonstrating your expertise is the best marketing factor. The best marketing you can do is take whatever is the most valuable advice you have, the thing that you cherish the most, and give that away for free. That is your best marketing because the truth is people aren't going to turn around and just go do it. They're going to come to you and say, Oh, you know how to do this. Now let me apply your product or service to make this happen for me.

Gresham Harkless 10:08

Yeah, that makes so much sense. That's powerful for B2B organizations, but also organizations to understand being a value and understand how the thing you feel like you're most valuable about you give that away for free, and that this further increases your overall value. I appreciate that.

You might have already touched on this, but I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. It could be for you or your organization, but what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

Bill Bice 10:36

Well, so in our case, we're applying technology in a way in an area that just really hasn't been done before, like most marketing is sort of a third, throw bodies at a kind of problem. If we don't get scale and efficiency in it, it's really hard to make them, to solve those two problems. How do we how do we put out great content consistently? If you're just throwing bodies at it, it's a pretty expensive thing to do. The secret sauce, in this case, is how you apply technology for that, but we don't sell the technology, we sell the result because most companies don't want to buy a huge tech stack of marketing tools. They just want great marketing to occur. So that's the result that I've been focused on.

Gresham Harkless 11:24

Yeah, it makes so much sense what is it, you don't care how the sausage is made, you just want the sausage. A lot of times we get sometimes the end, I think is great, of course for experts, like yourself who understand those aspects. At the end of the day, just as you said, the clients want to know and have great marketing, not to say they don't care.

It's probably not as important as making sure you have those great results is what they're ultimately looking for. I appreciate you for sharing that with us. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be an app or book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Bill Bice 12:01

It took me a long time to learn the most important thing about being a CEO, which is my whole job is to find people who are much better at what they do than me. My job is to help them be effective. Frankly, it's a tough thing to do, it was tough for me starting as a programmer to learn that, really develop that skill. Working on the business instead of in the business is the only way you can create long-term growth around your company.

Gresham Harkless 12:33

I appreciate that. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business?

Bill Bice 12:44

The number one thing I would do when I started my first software company at 18, is I think I knew it all like I had it down. Therefore it took me a long time to build that business because I wasn't open to advice and help from other people. Mentorship is just an amazing thing, whatever it is you want to do, there's somebody else who has already done it.

We have this amazing ability of humans to go learn from them, put ourselves in their place, and learn from all that experience. We apply this in marketing all the time. Like there's a larger competitor out there who's already spent millions of dollars figuring out how to make marketing work in your space. You don't need to relearn all that.

Go figure out what they've done, learn from that figure out how to apply it to your circumstance. I just think we can apply that to everything in business.

Gresham Harkless 13:33

Awesome. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favourite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on this show. So Bill, what does a CEO mean to you?

Bill Bice 13:45

Well, to me it is the best definition and I realize this coming because it's the book I'm reading right now, but it is being an infinite leader. There's so many things that I like about the way that Cynic has brought all of those pieces together. You see over and over again that the the best CEOs, that's exactly what they do, and they're able to engender the culture that you were just talking about a minute ago where everybody's buying in because they want to.

For me, that's the real definition of being just a CEO, but being a great CEO is when you can do that.

Gresham Harkless 14:25

Yeah, and I don't know if you've found this too, but a lot of times when you're able to exhibit that yourself, and also seems to kind of manifest itself and create that energy around everybody on the team. It's not just you being in a leader, you start to find and see it in the people that are on the team as well.

Bill Bice 14:43

Yeah, I mean, it's what energizes everybody, and everybody starts making decisions for what's the long-term benefit of the company and the team. There's so much benefit that comes out of getting out of that short-term mindset.

Gresham Harkless 14:56

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate that definition. Appreciate your time even more Bill. What I want to do is pass you the mic so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and listeners know, then of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you guys are working on.

Bill Bice 15:11

Well, as you probably picked up, I love talking about marketing. You can reach out to me at boomtime.com You can go find me on LinkedIn. If you work in b2b, you can see what we're doing a demonstration of what we have found to be the most successful approach in b2b sales.

I'm way behind you, but I am following in your footsteps. I've started my podcast, The Word of Mouth Marketing Podcast, and having a lot of fun doing it.

Gresham Harkless 15:39

Yeah, I appreciate that. Yes, it's a fun medium to get to use. I think we're always learning so I'm always paying attention to what everybody else is doing. I'm way behind you probably as well too, because you're doing so many awesome things. I appreciate you for being on the show. Appreciate you for starting the podcast and we will have all those links and information in the show notes as well.

Bill Bice 15:59

Thanks. A lot of fun.

Gresham Harkless 16:01

You're welcome. Have a great rest of the day.

Outro 16:03

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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