Gary Geiman, author of “Dominate Your Market in 90 Days,” on the importance of core values
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
Joining the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur is Gary Geiman who is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the marketing agency, DMN8 Partners. He has 30 years of experience and has been helping companies, especially those 7-figure businesses in the home services category, get noticed. On the podcast, he talked about the impact of core values and how you must have those in place to scale and grow your business.
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The Core Values of DMN8 Partners
Entrepreneurs want to acquire customers in certain ways and entice them to do business with them. However, if you’re a business owner, your customers will find it hard to understand you and your company if they don’t understand what you’re about in the first place.
At DMN8 Partners, they are very specific on their core values and how they want those to be portrayed to their clients quickly. Their company only has four. It’s few because if you have 20 of them, it will be hard for you to plug what those core values are into your audience.
They also don’t talk about integrity and honesty because these are already given. They’re going to do everything with the highest of integrity and they’re going to be nothing but honest. These don’t need to be core values because core values need to be specific to how you interact.
Take a look at the core values of DMN8 Partners:
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“We Make Digital Easy.” Anyone who looks at digital marketing — whether it's social media or search or website management — and doesn’t have a thorough understanding of it can get confused very quickly.
On their part, Gary and his team help make digital easy for clients. They don’t burden them with doing things that they may not be used to doing. For instance, copywriting. If you have a business and are not a big copywriter, creating 2,000 words of copy might take weeks. In contrast, their staff can pump them out in a couple of hours. They will provide you with that copy for you to proofread (which is easier than writing).
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“We Respond Same Day.” For Gary, communication is critical. So responding the same day is a core value that’s important to them. And that value is based solely on the fact that it’s how he wanted to be communicated to when he’s interacting with and spending money for other businesses.
Responding on the same day, however, doesn’t mean that they’re going to give you an answer or solve the problem on the same day. It means that they’re going to recognise the communication. In other cases, they even go further by responding within the same hour. Clients constantly thank them for the fact that they communicate quickly.
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“Production Over Perfection.” Value often gets lost amidst people’s wanting to be perfect. DMN8 does care about being perfect. But to produce something and push it out is more important than worrying about the need for everything to be correct, for every “t” to be crossed and “i” dotted. If you’re focused on just that, then you can fall into analysis paralysis instead of pushing information out and getting that in front of people. This value has led DMN8 Partners to be able to push out marketing programs faster than other companies.
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“We Solve Problems.” If a client presents a problem to them, they will try to figure out who did it or who did it wrong. They take ownership of the problem and solve it. And again, that goes back to Gary’s personal desire when it comes to how he wanted to be dealt with.
They also want to make sure that the problem doesn't happen again. His team will focus on seeing and solving the problem and, during meetings, they discuss with clients how to make sure that the problem won’t be repeated and how to be more streamlined. They put emphasis on improving.
These are the four core values that hold their team in place when they go into the market and consistently take care of their customers. They also implement standard operating procedures based on these values.
The biggest mistake that a lot of business owners make is that they don't understand the very foundation of their business. If you’re communicating value and you give customers consistency in terms of work and performance, then you’re going to get noticed. In fact, even though DMN8 Partners do a lot of different things to get out there in the marketplace, their biggest generator of leads is referrals. Those referrals come from customers who have worked with them and gotten results — customers who have known what the company’s values are and have communicated those values to others.
Sharing Core Values with Your Team
For Gary, it’s a combination of continuous communication and consistency in talking about your core values.
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At DMN8 Partners, when they hold meetings to discuss accounts or have updates on certain things, their core values lead the conversation. The same is true for every communication that they have with their clients.
They see to it that everyone is on the same page: This is how we’re going to treat clients and how we’re going to be consistent in doing it. The whole idea is to focus on the why and not on the what.
Gary also usually asks his employees about a time when they spent money on something and the result irritated them, prompting them to want to get their money back. He asks them to tell him about that process and what’s the biggest problem behind that. If an employee says that an issue they encountered is that the seller didn’t respond to them, then he’d emphasise why they at DMN8 Partners should respond to clients tenuously.
Though Gary is still figuring out how to manage someone working remotely at an optimum level, their office has large metal-printed signs of their values and other action words to help remind employees of those. But, generally, the key is consistency in communication.
He also considered his employees his customers: He has to treat them around the same core values that he talks about.
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For instance, when their company changed payroll providers and he knew that payroll wasn’t going to get delivered on the day they were supposed to get paid, he let everyone know what was happening and what options can the employees avail of. If he hasn’t communicated about it and employees would only learn about it when they don’t have a payroll in their account, then it would have been very bad. This is one example of their production-over-perfection core value.
How About With Customers?
When communicating with customers, they don’t really say what their core values are. After all, core values are something that should be done. It’s not a matter of explicitly saying, “Hey, we focus on production over perfection. That’s why we’re able to get to the finish line faster.”
What they do is when they explain their sales process, they incorporate their core values in the discussion. They will help you understand what production over perfection, for instance, actually means: It doesn’t mean creating sloppy work but getting to the finish line first and fixing things as they see them.
Then, during all their communication and work with their customers, they live those core values. Over the years, Gary hasn’t encountered a client yet who said that they’re not following their values. In fact, they get the opposite — they get responses appreciating their core values.
Getting DMN8 Partners Noticed
For any business, the biggest problem is finding customers. So the first thing that Gary did was to make sure that he was present in places where individuals who might hire him are. He also focuses on video content. He’s a big believer in it because it allows the audience to hear and see the content.
He also does things based on stages. For instance, for the “know” part in “know, like, trust,” he does social media, goes on podcasts, and speaks at events. He offers value in a way that can help audiences in their business growth, operation, or sales and marketing — hoping that, at some point, they may need that and reach out to him.
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Because DMN8 Partners is a digital marketing agency, they also work a lot on being found online. Whether it’s for his business or when working with clients, Gary always focuses on two things: to be present and to be found. If you’re working on being present and being found in areas where your services are being looked for or viewed, then you're going to dominate your market.
Gary defines being present as an awareness type of stage. It means that people aren’t looking for your service yet but you’re letting them know about what you do. Old awareness methods include putting up billboards on the highway. Now, we have social media, podcasts, YouTube, and speaking engagements.
Being found, on the other hand, is when someone is searching for the services that you provide, and the services that you provide do come up as a result of their search.
The Idea Behind “Dominate Your Market in 90 Days”
Gary wrote a book called “Dominate Your Market in 90 Days,” and his purpose is to help business owners have a process and have a daily guide to success.
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Throughout the years, he’s often received queries from business owners on what should be done on a daily basis to find customers. So he created a book that teaches the skills needed for that and itemises what should be done on days 1, 2, and 3, all the way through day 90. The book covers several things, including what should you write about and when and where to post.
He used to have a home service business. And he's using the same plan he implemented in growing that business to help others grow their own business through that book.
To learn more about Gary, the best place to find him is on Facebook. You can also visit LinkedIn and DMN8 Partners at https://salvonow.com.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by 8photo on Freepik
