Hello everyone,

This is the first podcast post on this blog. I have recorded a conversation with the Chief Marketing Officer, Matt Biskup about what the blog means to Franchise Opportunities Network and it’s clients. Click on “Read More” for a link to the actual audio, a link to the pdf of the transcription and text of the transcription.

Thank you, and please enjoy.

Garth Snider
President, Franchise Opportunities Network

Podcast audio here (23 minutes, 23mb .mp3)
Interview transcription PDF

Matt: Good morning. This is Matt Biskup, Director of Communications at Ad-Engine. And this morning, we’re interviewing Garth Snider, President of Ad-Engine. And the objective of this call is we’re going to introduce you to Ad-Engine, to Garth personally and we’re even going to talk about the blog that Garth has started on Ad-Engine. Good morning, Garth.

Garth: Good morning. How are you, Matt?

Matt: Great. Thanks for taking the time.

Garth: Thanks for setting this up.

Matt: You bet. Let’s start out at the top. Tell us a little bit about for the people who may just be coming to learn of Ad-Engine. What is Ad-Engine? What is its purpose?

Garth: Ad-Engine is through the media-buying, holding company for a lot of other more well-known entities in the franchise and small business advertising space. Ad-Engine owns, and has owned for some time, such leading portals as www.FranchiseOpportunities.com, www.FranchiseForSale.com, www.FoodFranchise.com, www.SmallBusinessOpportunity.com. So you can tell we’ve sort of blanketed the lead generation space in franchising and in small business opportunities.

Matt: Very good. Collectively, you’re helping franchise systems attract new clients for their business – to grow their concepts.

Garth: Exactly. Our advertisers are those well-known concepts that everyone’s heard of: The Subway, the Arby’s of the world. Down to the not so well-known concepts: The “Mom and Pops” who are just starting out. And our job is to get people interested in these concepts. Get them interested in franchising corporately, but in particular, these different franchises. We’re not here to direct them to any particular franchise concept, because we have over almost 600 different advertisers. But we are here to give the end-user the perspective franchisee, if you will, a full panoply of choices and then they can determine which franchise or small business opportunity best fits their objectives and their lifestyle.

Matt: Okay, that’s understandable. And that’s a very interesting function where you are able to bring in people from all over and varying demographics or behavioral backgrounds, financial backgrounds, bring them in and kind of help let them filter themselves.

Garth: Yeah they filter themselves. But we also have some proprietary techniques in our system to help determine which person would be better suited for which franchise. Once we get a little bit of information from them, we’re able to steer them to the concepts that are best suited for the interest that they’ve shown. And once they submit what we call a “lead”, when they submit their information, we then do follow-on advertising, paying particular information to the interest they’ve showed in the past and their demographic information. We try to make it a very complete, all-encompassing experience so that both parties win – the franchisor gets the most qualified candidate and the franchisee actually gets to the perspective franchisee that he thinks or she thinks they would be most suited for.

Matt: Excellent. Yeah, that’s the basis for all business transactions. Is a win-win like that.

Matt: Wonderful. How about a little bit of history on Ad-Engine?

Garth: Okay. As I said before, we are a collection of industry-leading web sites. The first web site we started was back in 2000, and that was www.FranchiseOpportunities.com. And that still is, by accounts, one of the top one or two sites in the industry. And then we just continued to roll out more and more sites over the past five to six years. Some of them are very specific, say www.FoodFranchise.com. Some are much broader like our www.FranchiseForSale.com. But we’ve tried to pick and choose particular niches in which we’ve got into. But also making certain that we want to continue the blanket the industry, if you will. Blanket the prospective searches on the internet. So that we can continue to give the top type of white-glove service that we’ve been known for.

Matt: And so Ad-Engine itself has been around for a while is what you’re saying? For an online company that’s almost a genesis.

Garth: Exactly. Yeah, we’ve been around for quite some time. We have, at this point, I believe the largest staff in the industry. And that would include sales, marketing and graphics, search engine marketing, search engine optimization. We really offer things that no other competitor can offer. And that’s not only good for the franchisors as I said before, that’s good for the franchisee. We think we have the best system that will make the end-user experience the most productive. We know that people don’t have a whole lot of time to continue to search and search on the internet. We understand that once they get to one of our web sites, they want to make a decision, and they want to have the information presented to them in a clear and concise way. And our experience in the industry, in understanding the methods by which people motor through a site, have enabled us to make that experience much more enjoyable, much more efficient, and much more profitable, quite frankly.

Matt: I like that focus. I like the fact that the president of the company has the primary focus of getting that end-user to find what he or she is looking for. And then, as you say, it winds up being profitable for everybody. That tells you a lot, I think, about a company when that’s the primary focus of the leader. Tell us this, Garth: You started a blog. Tell us why.

Garth: I want to sort of do what we’re doing right now. I want people to come directly to me if they have a question about my site – come directly to me. If they have a question about the industry in general – come to us. We’ve been in this thing for eight years. We understand online lead generation. We understand specifically franchise online lead generation. We understand what works. We know from experience how franchises are sold from our leads. A lot of times people just takes our leads and don’t really ask us a whole lot about, “Well what’s been your experience about how to do this.” I guess this is sort of a genesis from a conversation I had a couple weeks ago from a gentleman who runs a private equity firm up in Boston. And he is investing the fund in a couple of franchises. And he had no advertising. But he knew of us. And also we had a mutual contact. So he called me up and sort of just started picking my brain about how he should go about maximizing this large fund to invest it. And it occurred to me after talking to him for a while that he had been sort of led down the wrong path in a couple of different ways. He was getting ready to spend a lot of money on what I call middle-men: People who aren’t adding, in my opinion, any value. And also I told him quite frankly, that he had twice the amount of money that I thought he needed to spend currently. So, instead of saying, “Give me all of you money,” I said, “You don’t need to spend all of that because I don’t think you will be able to work all of the leads that we’re going to give you in first six to twelve months.” I said hold some of that money back. Let’s see how this works. Let your people, these new people you have selling your franchises, let them get used to the concept of selling franchises. The worst thing a new franchisor can do is to take an ad budget, spend all of it immediately and just flood its franchise development team with leads. Because, quite frankly, they’re not going to be able to call all of the leads that we’re probably going to be able to provide to them. And at some point, it’s going to look like the return on investment isn’t what it should be. And quite frankly it isn’t, and it’s not because we’re not giving them all of the leads. It’s because they’re not able to work with all of the leads. So we’ve been in this business for years, as I’ve said. We’ve been here for a while. We’re going to be here for a long time to come. So we want to see that businesses that we work with succeed and do well because every time they sell another franchise, they come back to us for more advertising. It doesn’t do me any good if they spend all of their ad budget in a month and they go out of business. I would rather them spend a fifth of their budget with me and they’re around for three years. That is a client with long-term value. And a part of this blog is trying to get out that message.

Matt: That’s a big message. There’s a complicated set of things that occur in the marketplace or within their own environment like you said; if you get too many leads, that you can’t follow them up. That makes sense. That doesn’t do them any good to get that many, to get that heavy on them. It seems like everybody’s dream like “wow I’ll get a million leads.” I see what you’re saying. You’ve got this blog. How do you expect or how do you think that a franchise executive that is interested in learning more from someone at your level of this industry. How do you expect them to interface with you via this blog?

Garth: The short answer is they can always post a comment on the blog. But quite frankly, I would rather them pick up the phone and give me a call. Or shoot me an email if they would prefer that. Just like I have a policy in my office that my door is always open – my phone is always on. My email is always on. If somebody wants to call and either learn more about the franchise industry, learn more about franchise lead generation…even if they just have a problem with anyone of my websites, pick up the phone and give me a call. Send me an email. I’m here to solve the problems.

Matt: Excellent. So what I’m seeing here and hearing here is that you’re really wanting to kick the door open for a direct channel at the executive level between franchise and business opportunity operations and yourself to supplement what you already have going in terms of communication channels already established. So if somebody has a question at a higher level, you’re making yourself available at this blog.

Garth: Exactly. Too many times in the past, and quite frankly still currently, I think franchisors see franchise web portals like mine, as nothing but lead vending machines. Where as they’re not really taking advantage of the repository of information that we have. And I will say that’s sort of our fault, we haven’t gone out to woo them, if you will. But that’s what this blog is doing. I want a sort of partnership relationship with the franchise and the small business opportunities. Because I’ve said before, if they do well, I do well. I can’t do well if they don’t do well. So I want to help them with their lead generation. I don’t want to help them with their business. I don’t know their business. That’s their business. What I do know is lead generation. What we do know is how leads are properly worked. So, let’s give them more of a partnership relationship – a trusted relationship – so that we can all make more money in the future.

Matt: I think the blog is an excellent channel for that. Let’s do this. Can you give me a sort of top-level view from your point of view on the franchise environment, the business climate right now? What do you see? Do you have any recommendations for people that are in the franchise or business opportunity business?

Garth: Small business opportunities and franchising is still a growing market. It is a portion of the economy that will only continue to grow. It’s grown over the past ten years and it’s going to continue to grow. Now with that said, these special economic times in which we find ourselves is having some affect on franchising as well as small business opportunities. With that said, people still need to eat, people still need to have their car worked on, people still need to have their house cleaned, have their lawn mowed. It’s not as if the core product that all our clients are providing are suddenly going to become worthless. They’re not. What I would advise my clients to do is look soberly, if you will, at your advertising budget. Look soberly at your projected income for this year, but don’t look at it in an overly pessimistic or scared fashion. So be judicial with the amount of money that you spend. With that said, I do have some clients who look at it a little bit differently. They look at it as a opportunity to drive their competitors out of business. I have at least one client who said he’s basically doubling down. I can’t say whether that’s a good call or a bad call. I treat all of our clients equally, so some of the clients that he’s going to drive out of business are actually my clients too. So, I’m just telling you. There are different perspectives from an advertiser’s point of view. The one I don’t think is a good choice is to basically pull in all the fishing gear, all your lines, all your finishing nets, and don’t do anything. I think you could pretty much guarantee yourself problems long-term if you decide just to batten down the hatches and ride this thing out. I think you have to have leads coming in if you want your franchise or if you want your small business opportunity to grow. You may not have to have as many as I’ve said before. Maybe you should be judicial with the amount of money to spend. But to simply say “I don’t know what’s around the corner. Therefore I’m not going to do any advertising.” I think that’s the losing strategy. Because like I said before, there are people for right now who are taking the exact opposite strategy, and they’re licking their chops at those people who are sort of scared of what tomorrow will bring.

Matt: I’ve seen in the past – I understand what you’re saying there- where you never, ever want to put a crimp in the sales type line. Because you know what’s going to happen to the flow at the other end if you do that. Very good. That certainly makes sense. Let’s talk about what other things that Ad-Engine does in the background to bring people in to the varied Ad-Engine properties like you said like FranchiseOpportunities.com, FranchiseForSale.com. Most people, I think, assume that an organization such as yours is just doing search engine-related work. And even that itself is fairly complex. Can you give us kind of an overview of some of the things going on? It seems to be a fairly fast-moving environment.

Garth: Well it is, Matt. There’s any number of ways in which we get people to our site or drive people to our site, or generate leads. And some of that may or may not be through our site. From a sort of an old world prospective, we still do direct marketing. That works at thumb level for some people, for some clients. As you said before, FranchiseOpportunities.com is maybe the most highly trafficked of the franchise lead generation portals primarily because of its, what we call “organic traffic,” meaning the research results that it gets. It’s just a very highly indexed web site. And we’re always continually trying to figure out how to have more pages indexed highly. Then you get into the search engine marketing, which is code for what most people know as paid advertising; PPC, pay-per-click advertising. And I think that few would argue that we’re not the best at that as well. I mean, we’ve spent a lot of money on getting traffic to our sites. I mean, I don’t just bring an advertiser on and say, “Well, they get what they get because of my organic traffic.” No. I’m making certain that they’re getting the most traffic they can get. If that requires me going out and spending more money, darn it, we go ahead and do it. I think we probably have one of the largest, if not the largest, franchise advertising budgets in the market. And with that amount of money that we’re spending, we have to be very good at what we do. And so we’ve developed tools that help us maximize our paid spending.

Matt: And I imagine taking some of that work and pointing it in different directions because the list of advertisers is so varied. That I imagine the target eyeballs on the other end are always in the same spot.

Garth: It’s quite complicated. And I won’t bore you with all the details right now. But, yeah, we’ve got multiple campaigns going across to hundreds of different search terms on eight to 15 different web sites at any given time.

Matt: Wow.

Garth: It sort of starts to boggle our mind if you think about how many different paid listings we have running on the internet across the world at any one time. But that’s what we do. We bring traffic to our site and that’s just one part of it. We also do a lot of email advertising. And this isn’t the email advertising where people say, “Is that spam I’m going to get in my box?” This isn’t spam. These are directed emails where people have asked for information in the past. So we go out there. We find them. These people want to hear about our product and we want to give them the information about our product. Because our product, as I said before, is quite frankly, I think the best in the industry. And we have to go out there and maximize the eyeballs. Maximize the pool of people who are looking to start a franchise, are looking for a business opportunity. Or, quite frankly, don’t know that they are, but have an inkling that they might want to be their own boss.

Matt: So that’s another level yet out there?

Garth: Yeah, we’ve just started tapping that one. We’ve always sort of been a passive preceptor of leads. What I’m hoping to do with Ad-Engine here in the next three to four years is go out and be a more active participant in the lead generation business. Where we go out and we say, “Hey. You may not have thought about franchising in the past, but look at what we have to offer.” Everybody doesn’t have to own a McDonalds. Everybody doesn’t have to own a Meineke. There are a lot of different franchises that fit many different lifestyles across the spectrum of interest.

Matt: I also understand that you’re doing some podcasts on FranchiseOpportunities.com that probably goes along with your marketing tools as you’re outlining for us here.

Garth: Sure does.

Matt: Super. Well now I totally understand why you needed your own channel to communicate with franchisors directly.

Garth: Good. Well, thanks for taking the time and as I said whoever is listening to this or whoever sees it transcribed, if you have any questions at all, pick up the phone and give me a call or shoot me an email.

Matt: Why don’t you outline your contact information right now while we’re on the line where you want people to get a hold of you at and how? Obviously the blog at www.ad-engine.net/blog. That’s an obvious start right there. But past that how would you like to…

Garth: You can send me an email at gsnider@ad-engine.net. Or just pick up the phone and call me: 770-391-5050.

Matt: Excellent. Thanks for taking the time and we look forward to doing more and more interviews and I look forward to seeing your articles on the blog. Thank you, Garth.

Garth: Thank you. Buh bye.