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In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with Andrew Ishimaru from RyTech about building and growing companies.
Science Highlight: When the nose knows: ontogenetic changes in detection dogs’ (Canis familiaris) responsiveness to social and olfactory cues
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Transcript (AI-Generated)
Kayla Fratt
Hello and welcome to the K9Conservationists podcast where we’re positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs join us every week to discuss detection, training, animal welfare, conservation, biology and everything in between. I’m Kayla Fratt, a co-founder of K9Conservationists, where we train dogs to detect data for land managers, researchers, agencies and NGOs.
Kayla Fratt
Today I have the joy of talking to Andrew Ishimaru from RyTech about building and growing companies. Andrew is a serial entrepreneur and longtime world traveler, having led and advised well over 100 executive teams on marketing strategy, from day one startups to global brands. Andrew is currently chief growth officer at RyTech LLC, following an acquisition of automotive which is an agency that he co founded and grew to a team of about 10. I’ve known Andrew for about a decade now and he has so much knowledge and so much passion to share. I know this sounds like a little bit of an odd episode for us in the conservation detection dog world, but for better or for worse, if you’re going to be in this world, you’re probably going to end up doing some amount of marketing, outreach, building, growing – most of us are not lucky enough to just get hired by someone else and just do the conservation dog stuff for our jobs. So we’re gonna get into it.
Kayla Fratt
But first, we’ve got a review, highlight. Yay! This review says “This is one of my favorite podcasts. The host is very thoughtful, and it interviews a variety of interesting guests. But the thing I like most is that the topics are quite varied, from training, to ecology, to safety issues to how to grow the field of conservation, dog work and more.” Thank you so much for the review. If you are interested in helping support this podcast, and or just helping support the field of conservation detection dogs as a whole. One of the best things you can do to help raise awareness and bring more people into the fold is to go ahead and review this episode. Share it like it all that good stuff, you know the drill, you listen to podcasts.
Kayla Fratt
So before we get into it with Andrew, we’re gonna dive into our science highlight. Today’s highlight was prepared by our volunteer Matty Stephens and it is titled When the Nose Knows: Ontogenic Changes in Detection Dogs’ responsiveness to Social and Olfactory Cues. It was published in 2019 in Animal Behavior by Lucia Lazarowski, Bart Rogers, L. Paul Wagner, and Jeffrey S Katz. Their question was how age affects a dog’s ability to remain locked into odor and ignore misleading human cute cues. So Maddie reviews for us. As many dog handlers and trainers listening to the podcast will know how we subconsciously cue dogs can have a drastic effect on their behavior. And this trial conducted at Auburn University’s canine performance science department of their vet school, it was explored how dogs at different ages respond to misleading cues from their handler regarding where their toy reward was located. The puppies 77 of them were all Labrador Retrievers, and were bred for the canine performance science breeding program for detection dogs. These dogs were tested three months old, six months old and 11 months old, so puppies, juveniles and adolescents in a setup where their preferred toy was placed in a plastic jar with holes for sent to escape, while an empty jar was placed opposite the jar with opposite the jar with the toy, so one jar with joy in one jar without before the trial, the dogs led to sniff each jar for a short period. Once the dog had finished the sniffing the jars the trial began, a human was station between the jars give misleading cues to the dog, which involved pointing at the jar that did not have the toy. The dogs were given 15 seconds to choose a container defined as the head coming within 10 centimeters of the container, and the results were recorded and analyzed. The trials were scored primarily by the experimenter, as well as an independent observer to notate statistical data and a third observer to break ties. It was found that the accuracy and ability to ignore him in queues was significantly higher in the adolescent 11 month old dogs compared to the three month old puppies and the six month old juveniles. It was also discovered that the puppies in the stage at three and six months did not differ from chance and their selection of jobs with human justice. Basically, at three and six months, all these puppies were not doing any better than then than chance. Finally, it was looked at from a statistical lens how the choice or lack of choice of containers as a puppy affected the outcome and suitability as a detection dog in the future who that’s cool. The examiner found that the three month old puppies who made no choice in containers had a much lower chance of becoming successful detection dogs, possibly due to lack of intrinsic motivation. While the six month old juveniles who made no choice had a higher probability of performance success. That’s interesting. With all the data considered and complied, compiled, it was found that the dogs who show cute bias generally have a lower rate of success in the detection field. So basically, those dogs that were more influenced by their misleading human did not do as well long term in the field. Obviously, a major limitation of the study is that the dogs utilized in the trials were raised and trained and reared in the kennels, with most most of their human contact coming from specialized detection, training and general housekeeping. They also were Labrador Retrievers from a highly specific population, due to the fact that these dogs were not socialized with human gestures and mannerisms, the way that our pet dogs may be, it could be argued that the study could not be as indicative of, of all detection dogs are predictors of detection success, an improvement or an expansion for future studies might involve utilizing detection dogs who are raised by their handlers in a home environment. So something like the Penn vet program where these dogs are raised in a foster home, as well as exploring this trend, with detection dogs being raised from shelters, rehome situations, or dogs who are also trained in dog sports, for example, you would imagine that a border collie who competes in agility will be much more in tune with the handler than the dogs utilized in this study. Yeah, gosh, I would be super interested to see this study done with a variety of breeds and from a variety of different backgrounds. But again, I think it makes sense to the dogs that, at a young age were motivated enough to get their toy that they toy that they made a choice. And the dogs that were better at ignoring, you know, handlers of dummy sort of errors. Are we going to be more successful in this field? That makes sense? I’m curious what their thinking was, for the dogs, the six months old, who made no choice being a higher probability of success. That’s really interesting to me. I also would be curious to see what this looked like, if you kind of expanded out past 11 months of age, you know, testing dogs at two or four years old, you know, the, the title of this is based on autogenic changes and detection dogs. So again, you’re supposed to be looking at age, but you only looked at three to 11 months old. But, you know, it always gets hard to do these really longitudinal studies, especially once those dogs are going out into homes, or into jobs and into more specialized training. So you know, as always, there’s things that we would love to see this is where science goes, it just is a starting place.
Kayla Fratt
So without further ado, let’s get to the interview with Andrew Ishimaru of writing about building and growing organizations. All right, well, welcome to the podcast. Andrew, it’s good to have you here.
Andrew Ishimaru
Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah. So you are a specialist and kind of helping companies grow through marketing, especially in that like Uber fast paced startup world. And as I’ve started canine conservationists and been running my own nonprofit, I’ve been seeing a ton of crossover between early stage startups and early stage nonprofits. And the first thing I have to ask you is, what are some of the things that you see setting those apart that survive those first couple of years? versus those that don’t?
Andrew Ishimaru
Yeah, so I guess, let me start by saying a little bit about about my background that brings me here. And so I so I have been for the past five years running a marketing agency called automotive that I co founded with a partner of mine, my partner, Ben, and before that, I worked at another marketing agency as well. And so and I’ve also started a handful of startups myself, too. So I’ve worked on marketing, and specifically growth marketing for more than 100 companies of all different sizes, like startups from day one, where, you know, either it’s my startup, or I’m working with a founder that has just launched and nothing exists all the way up to large international multibillion dollar enterprises that have, you know, wholesales teams, whole marketing teams, and working with them to grow. So I’ve seen the whole grid stack and the marketing journey of what it takes from a small scale all the way up to big scale and sort of everything in between. So with that perspective, I think for smaller companies, small businesses, startups, nonprofits, and organizations that are basically trying to grow, get established, connect with, you know, an audience or connect with potential customers, buyers, users, donors, whatever whoever you’re trying to reach. That is definitely a specific set of challenges that that you face. And I would really put that in the category of what you’d probably see in the startup world is finding Product Market Fit initially. And thing until you have product market fit, which is basically you know exactly who you’re talking to, you knew exactly who you’re going after, and you know exactly how to reach them. And you’re just building off of that core to your marketing engine, until you have that that that is your focus is getting to that point. And that that can take a lot of different flavors and different permutations of what that looks like, depending on the business business model, the type of organization, but essentially, it’s the same thing. So this may sound familiar, I think, as we break this down a little bit, maybe notice by another name, if you’re listening to this, besides product market fit, but it’s the same concept. It’s basically how do you reach the people that you’ve had reach? And who are they? Because you know, especially if you’re starting out with a new startup or a new business, and maybe we should take dog training for as an example, if you’re a dog trainer and you are trying to get your first initial customers, you know, unless you have a really good idea of who your customers are. It might be a very easy designation. It’s somebody that has a dog that’s nearby you physically and is interested in dog training is pretty straightforward. or you may be a little bit more specialized in a particular type of dog training or animal training, or maybe, you know, what you focus on is like, this is taking me back to days talking to you about this, like one particular behavior, or, you know, maybe you’re maybe you’re training dogs for competitions, and not just sort of an engine, you know, there’s different ways in which you can, quote unquote, have a different product and that type of business. And so you’re going to want to be reaching different kinds of people. So someone who is interested in training their dog to compete in competitions is going to be very different than somebody who has a dog that poops all over the kitchen, all the time. So, you know, first of all, you have to understand what you’re really selling. This is just the basics, what you’re really selling, and who’s going to benefit from your service, or who needs your service, or who you need to convince to buy your service. And once you have those two things established, you can figure out how to actually do marketing, how to actually do sales, as well as an extension of that marketing. But that’s the first step is basically figuring that out and saying, Yes, I know exactly who my buyers are, and exactly who my customers are. And I just need to go out and find them and get more of them. And this is where we want to reach.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, no, and I’m so glad you brought it back there right away. And that’s something it’s been really interesting to kind of pivot from the dog behavior world into this conservation dog world. Because I think two of the things that I’ve really noticed as huge differences from you know, my starting up with journey dog training, well, there’s I mean, there’s a bunch of different things, but you know, you hit the nail on the head with dogs. With dog training, it’s kind of like, okay, you need to find someone who’s in your geographic area, who has a dog that they want to change something about whether that’s potty training a puppy or getting the dog to start, you know, getting the two dogs in the household to stop fighting, or, you know, working on a sport. But then with conservation, it’s a little bit less clear, you know, I might be working with land managers, or researchers or other NGOs, I could be subcontracting. There’s a lot more kind of variety in what that customer actually looks like. And then the other big thing that I’ve really noticed is just a huge difference in that funnel, and how long it is, and how many decision makers are involved. It’s much more to use some of the language I learned from you to be instead of b2c, so I’m working much more like I am one company interfacing with another company trying to convince them and again, probably convincing a variety of people in a room to spend a much larger amount of money versus as a dog trainer, at most, you’re probably going to be dealing with two decision makers, maybe to romantic partners, or to kind of CO owners of a dog. And you’re generally working with numbers that are, you know, probably $100 an hour, maybe $600 for a package like it’s much, much smaller numbers, and then that funnel is much shorter, because most people when they come in to want to talk to you about dog training, they’re like, yeah, when can you see me, you know, when’s the soonest I can get in? Versus with conservation dogs, I’m often talking to people about projects that are two or three years out, and it’s more of a bidding process. It’s much more complicated.
Andrew Ishimaru
Yeah. And there’s a bunch of concepts, that everything you just said, there’s a there’s a bunch of concepts that come out to me, you know, if I’m approaching this from the perspective of, you know, someone who doesn’t know much about about marketing or about sales, or you know about this, essentially my world, there’s a few things that you mentioned, which is one a b2b business to business versus b2c, which would be business to consumer, which is a pretty key distinction, you know, are you selling to businesses or you’re selling to, you know, your average person, that’s a pretty important difference in terms of how you’re going to market and sell to people. And you can, you can slice the framework for how you approach your marketing a lot of different ways. So that’s just one way to look at it. And if you’re selling, you know, say dog collars to, to dog owners, you’re selling B to C, if you’re selling, you know, conservation services to police at the border of an African nation, that’s b2b or b2c government or via whatever, that’s b2b. But you can also look at this from some other perspective, which is, you know, are you selling a service? Are you selling a product as well, which is a pretty important distinction in terms of how you’re going to market something because a service would be like dog training product would be like a dog collar and so you know, there’s there’s a lot of similarities when you’re selling to similar people, but it’s a different approach to market yields, different channels. There’s different ways you want to run ads, and ultimately, there’s a different need or creation of desire in your customer. So if you’re selling, kind of keep running with these examples, if you’re selling a dog collar as a product, you may have someone that already has a dark color, but you so really, really cool, dark color is the glow in the dark. That customized names written
Kayla Fratt
like rhinestones are always good.
Andrew Ishimaru
So like, maybe you don’t need this, but you can create desire in terms of this product and just say the same thing in terms of services, necessarily, maybe you need to train your dog to do backflips. But if that’s super cool, so you can, you can train your dog to do that. But I think most cases, services also are generally solving a pain point, which is another important concept for sales and marketing, which is when you have a potential customer that is like, yeah, buy my dog, you know, is potentially going to bite people. Okay? Yeah, well, they need a solution to that problem. And your services are a solution to that problem. So the challenge there becomes basically connecting with people who have that, that pain point, you have that problem. And so there’s, there’s a lot of ways in sort of modern marketing, modern digital marketing that you can do this. For, for example, using Google as as a marketing channel. So SEO, Google advertising, Google ads are things that may sound a little bit familiar. That’s a very, very easy marketing channel, when you have a very specific problem. So if people have a dog that is biting people, or is like jumping on people at the door, or something like that, they’re gonna Google that. So it’s a very, very obvious marketing channel, because someone’s sitting there Googling, you know, how do I stop my dog from jumping on people and 1000 people a month do that. And if you’re in, you know, Chicago, and you’re in one neighborhood in Chicago, probably like 500 people a month nearby, you are Googling the same thing. So if you use that, as an advertising chamber, you know that your audience is there, they have that problem actively looking for it, you can pay to put yourself in front of those people. That’s like a very direct, easy, obvious example of like, how you might market something like that.
Kayla Fratt
Ya know, and I love that example. And it is, again, it’s just funny kind of coming back to so much of this stuff makes so much sense with dog training. And then one of the things I’ve really run to in the conservation nagaworld Is I’m like, gosh, we’re not as geographically limited. And part of the problem that we have in this industry is a lot of times, people don’t know that we even exist as a solution, which my understanding is not dissimilar to dog training was maybe 30 or 40 years ago, where people just didn’t necessarily know that you could do anything to train your dog. And if you had a problem with your dog, you, you know, took it out back either on a train or something worse. And, yeah, so it’s been interesting to try to figure out like, as someone who is relatively comfortable with particularly like inbound search engine optimization, like content marketing, that’s something that I’ve been very good at and focused on for a long time. I don’t feel like I’ve been as successful because I’m not 100% Sure. You know, like, I don’t really know, maybe they do. But I don’t know if like a PhD students sits down and Google’s like, what to do when camera traps don’t get enough information on your study species.
Andrew Ishimaru
Right, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s, that’s an interesting is it also an interesting point, because, you know, we’re talking about solutions, not necessarily. And there’s some, there’s some pain, some pain points behind us some some of these challenges that you might have conservation dogs to solve. But if you’re not aware of the problem, and you’re not, you’re not aware of this solution, you may just have this this thing like, oh, you know, we’ve been doing things the way we’ve been doing them. But actually, conservation animals would be a perfect fit for solving this thing that’s in front of you, then then you face the challenges and organization of in terms of marketing and sales of both educating the potential buyer about the problem itself. Because if you don’t know that there’s a problem, you’re not going to look for solutions for it, and then educating them about the solution for this thing as well. And so then, like, in your particular case, that ultimately becomes having a good sense of, you know, going back to sort of product market fit, like who a good buyer of conservation services would be. And you know, even if they don’t know that they need to solution, even if they don’t know that any problem, but if you know that you can go to like, what’s what’s one of your like, I could category one of your customers like, what’s, what would that be?
Kayla Fratt
Let’s stick with the PhD student example.
Andrew Ishimaru
Okay, yeah. So if you know that PhD students in like one particular field, like could use your services will, okay, go out and find all the PhD students, and then that’s your marketing focus. So then and you put on your marketing brand, you say, Okay, well, where do all these PhD students live? And if you’re going to, especially at a more cost effective, sort of approach to marketing, you don’t have let’s say, you don’t have 10,000 or 100,000 a month to spend on advertising and branding campaign, this and that, like, well, where those students live, you know, you can go online, you can go to different like Facebook groups, you can go to different like, I’ll steal a bunch of stuff out there, Instagram meme pages, you can go to the schools themselves, you can show up on person campus, you can message professors and set something up potentially with, you know, with the students. You can run sort of partnerships with different schools. I’m sure there’s like education sources around that category. And so you know, maybe There’s advertising that you can do on their, like websites where you’re specifically learning about some super niche. Do you think like, you can take this to a lot of different areas, but that’s because you know exactly what your virus it’s PhD student in this particular field. So then you just go and find out where do they live. And, you know, if you have more time and money, you can just reach out directly. And that’s going to be almost always the most cost effective way of getting things started in terms of sales and marketing is get go find a PST, decent common in other talk to them, like find them in person. And then if you want to do that at a higher level of scale, you know, you can buy ads and, and you can do partnerships with like schools, programs, and things like that, that will take more time and money and effort. But you’re doing the same thing, you’re just reaching those PhD students.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, no, i and i love that you’re mentioning this kind of like in person one on one sort of thing. Because in talking to conservation dogs of Hawaii and Rogue detection teams, both of whom who have been guests on the show in the past, what both of them do a really good job of is, you know, going to these conferences, going to these meetups, and even like one of the brilliant things that conservation dogs Hawaii does Kyoko does is she’ll do free workshops. For biologists where they can come and spend, I don’t know if it’s an hour or an afternoon, I’m kind of learning to work with their own dogs on this on a very basic level. And then also, I assume she takes some time to show off her dogs, to really a kind of do that awareness raising of like, Hey, did you know that dogs could help with your study, and also let me demonstrate how much more skill my dogs have and how much knowledge I bring to the table. And you know, bringing people in with a free workshop or food or whatever, has seemed to be a really, really intelligent way to go about doing this. And it’s much seems like so far most people are kind of going that route more so than, like advertising, although maybe that means that that’s an underutilized mark. Avenue
Andrew Ishimaru
so far. Yeah, that’s great. I love that it makes a lot of sense. And like, I mean, advertising is great. Like, I run a lot of ads, and I’ve managed a lot of advertising dollars, you know, hundreds of 1000s millions of dollars, I think at this point, actually, to be honest, maybe 10s of millions, if I think about all the campaigns you run for clients, but yeah, it doesn’t always make sense. I mean, it’s one of those things to where like if your focus as a small business is on all aspects of the business, and you need to worry about dogs and into worry about your finances and need to worry about the material you’re teaching and your own education, all this stuff, like spending money in all these places, like it doesn’t make sense to spend money on ads, when for, you know, a smaller time investment relative to that money, you can reach the people you want to reach. Great, and it might not make sense to reach a ton of people either if you’re going to be limited in terms of how many people you can service or work with, they’ll have a backlog at that point need to significantly grow and hire people in order to and if you want to do that great. But the this, I think is getting to a very important point, which is that the marketing and sales you do should match the scale of your business because you do different things at different levels of scale. And so if you’re much larger organization, F 100 500,000 employees, then you can’t just go in person in the same way anymore, run these workshops, if you do, you need to have a much bigger impact in order to have that’d be a significant driver of your business. So you can’t just do a will do workshops, you know, every Saturday, now it becomes we need to do workshops every day in every major city in the entire country. And so now you need a sales team, you need to hire people in every city, and you need to have facilities and locations and all of this and you need to have enough dogs, like the scale of your operation becomes much, much greater. And then you look at that and you say okay, well, maybe we can run ads instead and have like 10 major cities where we do in person things and people might fly in and we make it a bigger event like that changes the focus of how you use these different tactics. It’s your level of scale, and the small scale. Yeah, I a friend of mine, who runs a software company out of Australia that does like inventory management for, like industrial companies. He got started with this business like, like eight years ago, he picked up the phone and he called 100. Like industrial companies in Australia and said, Hey, I’m thinking of building this thing. Would you would you be interested in this? And they say, oh, yeah, that’d be cool. And he went to be built it. And then he went back to them. And he said, Hey, we built it, would you pay for this? And like 20 of them said yes. And that’s how we got started. And like that is some version of that is I think what for small businesses and startups, pretty much everybody should do at some point.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, yeah. I know in the in the dog training world. A lot of times what we suggest to like dog trainers who are trying to get established in any area is like, hey, offer some free lunch and learns and show up with food for the local veterinarians, because a lot of times the first response for people who are experiencing a problem with their dog is they talked to their vet or Are they kind of mentioned it at their vet or whatever, because the vets are someone that sees these dogs regularly. And then then you might be able to if you can get your foot in the door and get a lot of good referrals from veterinarians, particularly if you’re in that behavior issue world, or puppy world, that can be super duper helpful because people, you know, they ask their vets, so if you can make friends with the vets use them as a referral source. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I love you know, thinking about a what stage of the business you’re at be what makes sense for your customers, and where are they going to be found? And then see, even you know, what are your strengths? And what are you good at? Maybe you are, you know, maybe you have a lot of social anxiety. And that’s part of the reason you like the idea of spending your time alone in the woods with your dog. Doing conservation dog stuff. Okay. Yeah. So maybe workshops aren’t the venue for you, but what did we figure out for you instead? Or maybe, you know, we need to take you scepticism classes and figure out how to do that. Because maybe workshops are just kind of going to be the thing that you have to figure out how to do. That’s certainly been my experience with grant writing. I do not like grant writing, and I do not think I’m good at it. But I am kind of being forced to learn right now because that’s, that’s where a lot of our money is going to be coming from. So it’s practice and it’s painful, and I don’t like it, but we are doing it.
Kayla Fratt
Listen, you and your dog are already canine conservationists by listening to this show. So go ahead and show it off. Join the club, check out our brand new merch store, which is located at k9conservationists.org/shop. It’s stocked with stickers and magnets and bags and shirts, we’re adding new designs all the time. If you’re an artist wanting to collaborate, just we split profits and are eager to hear from us reach out at [email protected]. We also offer all of our webinars on demand through our store. So you can check out our puppy raising webinar alerts and changes of behavior, introducing a target odor, as well as seeking sourcing and alerting. We’re also planning to add new webinars to this all the time. So if you’ve got a request for a webinar, or you’re a practitioner hoping to contribute a webinar, again, we’re going to split our profits with you and you can reach out to us at [email protected] Let’s keep the learning going.
Kayla Fratt
So okay, I think we’ve hit on actually a lot of my questions already, but I’m gonna start diving into a couple of them in a little bit more detail. So maybe why don’t we circle back a little bit? And is there a good definition that you like, of kind of the difference between growth marketing and like plain old marketing is all marketing growth marketing? Yeah, what? Because I know that’s a category you put yourself into is more of a growth marketer specifically? Yeah,
Andrew Ishimaru
yeah, it is, I think so modern growth marketing has taken a bunch of different turns. There’s, there’s a whole history to this, that goes back to sort of growth hacking, which may sound a little bit familiar to some people. Modern growth marketing is basically performance marketing. And it’s the the modern skills stack that a good I would say, Digital Marketer, but to be honest, it’s just like, digital marketing is a part of marketing now. So it’s just a good marketing skill set to have. Growth marketing is like the modern marketer. That’s all. That’s all it is, I think it at its core, you can take a bunch of different permutations of what it means to be a growth marketer, some growth, marketers focus more on advertising, paid advertising, so like running Google ads, and Facebook ads, and tick tock ads, and snap ads and all this stuff. Or you could have growth marketers that are focused more on like working with data. And again, depending on the business and the industry, and the level of skill, you’re going to get different types of growth, marketers that do different things. But yeah, data is one of those applications. So for example, if you have a retail brands, and you have 10,000 different articles of clothing that you sell on your brand, and you sell digitally, you sell in different stores your partnerships, you have like this massive, massive data set. But if you’re a growth marketer that can work with data, you can do a dangerous amount of stuff with that data, and you can tie it you know, this ties into your communication with customers, the insights you have in terms of new product creation, the emails that you send, what you’re doing in terms of how you design the brand, what you put on your website, what you’re doing with, you know, where do you put a button to purchase a product? Are you talking to people via text message or email, these kinds of things are all possible and you have a massive amount of data. But I should say all of this, besides sort of the performance component really gets down to I think, what is the core of where growth marketing came from, in my opinion, which is growth as a function. It’s not necessarily just saying, I’m going to run ads, or I’m going to post on social media or I’m going to, you know, create a brand growth is all of that. And it’s more than just marketing. So growth marketing, specifically these days tends to be about performance. putting, like a, like I just said, but growth is a function is cross functional, it’s tying in product to your marketing, to your sales to everything from like, r&d to, you know how you’re organizing your your entire company essentially. And so a good example is like software software companies, because I think growth marketing got really popular in last 10 years, mostly through a lot of software companies coming out of Silicon Valley and sort of venture capital funded and marketing. Wherever you might have a software product where because of the data that you haven’t customers, you have a really good idea of a new feature that might be created. So you go to the product team go developers, and you say, hey, you know what, like we have, pick a random thing, like a CRM, like we have the CRM, and based on our data that we can see here, we think that people are willing to pay for more automation features. And so you go to the go the depth, you say, alright, let’s build more automation features, they build that all of a sudden, you then you go back to the people in charge of the website, you say, alright, well, we put this in the website, and we need a pricing strategy, we need to update how we’re bundling the center enterprise level pricing plan, then you go back to you to your performance marketing team, and you say, alright, now I need to advertise this, you go back to your internal communications team, you say I was put this in the latest email going out to everybody, and we should do some kind of a promo. That’s not, that’s not really advertising. That’s not really like a traditional marketing thing. But when you know, 10% of your customers sign up for the new plan, and then you you’re able to convert additional 1000 customers a year because of these new features. But you’ve just unlocked an enormous amount of growth for the overall business. And so that’s like, that’s, that’s the core ethos of what it means to be truly my opinion, a growth marketer is to find insights like that. But I should say, as well, that the history of growth marketing goes back to this growth hacking, and this idea that of combining marketing and, and coding. So like the original growth, marketers were growth hackers, and the original growth hackers came out of the, I guess, the first internet explosion of internet companies back in the day. And so like, the super famous growth hacks that a lot of people have written about, and I’d say most modern marketers should know about these days is like Dropbox. And if anybody’s used Dropbox, and especially use Dropbox, 10 years ago, you probably remember that they had the, you know, refer friends and you reach get 250 megabytes of space in your drop. I think that was the promo back in the day, and super compelling, and basically makes the product go viral. Because you’re like, Yeah, okay, I want, I want to throw all my files, yeah, I’ll invite all my friends. And then you invite 10 people, and you get two and a half gigabytes of space in your Dropbox, and they each get some space. And then all of a sudden, they invite 10 of their friends. And that is like a pyramid scheme. Viral Marketing explosion of you know, now Dropbox is massive multibillion dollar company and tons and tons of users. That was a famous growth hack. Hotmail had a famous growth hack, as well, where they put set sent with love from my Hotmail account in the signature by default, on a new accounts, and then, you know, people can email and be like, Oh, what’s this Hotmail thing, they click through, and they’d sign up, those are what I would call growth hacks. It’s good marketing. And I would say, the viral subset of what now we know of as modern growth, marketing. But back in the day, that was growth hacking, that was sort of the origins of what modern growth marketing is, which is like, Let’s do marketing. That’s not just, there’s not just design and ads, and PR, and creating some kind of marketing focused content breaking free of that idea. That’s, that’s what that’s where it really came from. And there’s been other stuff that has fit this sort of description historically, even before that, like before the before the current era back into the back in the 1900s 1990s 1980s 1970s. Would you like go really back to all the marketing agencies of previous generations? But that’s, I would say, We’re modern growth marketing comes from this is that
Kayla Fratt
Gotcha. Yeah. So if people are because I think broadly, in our audience, people are going to be relatively unfamiliar with this. What are some kind of foundational books that you would recommend if someone was like, hey, I want to start a company or an organization or a nonprofit, I am passionate and skilled in the areas of service that we’re going to provide, but I’m not as I’m still very new to this side of it. Other than obviously, bringing in co founders, where where would you point them? To start learning more about this and getting more familiar with some of these, these terms and some of this history and things we can learn from?
Andrew Ishimaru
There’s a few websites and a few books that I think are pretty good. Like growth, growth, I think it’s growth hacker.com or growth. hackers.com has a bunch of like, growth specific stuff. a demand curve runs like a growth education platform. And they have a bunch of really good stuff on their blog. There’s some books that I would say, would make sense to read. There’s a book by Ryan Holiday, wrote trust me online and a couple of books. That is about growth hacking. I can’t remember the name of his book. But that’s a good one to read as well.
Kayla Fratt
And I remember you had me read that one. And that was one that it was funny, because I hated it at the time, and it has also been so useful. Yeah, he wasn’t necessarily the most likable person in my book, but he had some good ideas.
Andrew Ishimaru
Yeah. Oh, it’s called growth hacker marketing. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt
Okay. Yeah, that’s not the one.
Andrew Ishimaru
Yeah, he trust me. I’m lying. I think he’s the one you’re referring to. And basically, it’s about like, creative ways to sort of hack public opinion. But you worked for this guy. Yeah, who was like, it was like, frat frat core books, I guess it was just like, That guy just published a bunch of like, frat party stories. And then Ryan Holiday was responsible for a lot of his marketing. And he did a phenomenal job of getting that guy, a lot of a lot of eyeballs. But you got this other book called growth hacker marketing, which is a good book. But I would actually say I think for anybody who’s trying to, especially with the with the small business mindsets, and with the startup mindset, where you’re not going to take on massive amounts of investments. I think, honestly, the focus that I would say more so is marketing a small business than doing growth hacks, for the reason that growth hacking, you know, those origins are from the sort of software growth era of the last couple of decades doesn’t really apply to a small business, and especially a service based business where, you know, you’re not going to put 253 megabytes in doesn’t make sense, you know, you can take some of those principles and have a referral program within your clients. And you can do like nice things for your clients that lead to more business, but
Kayla Fratt
I can see maybe trying to think through some way to do like, you get a free day of surveys or something. But even that would be would be pretty tricky to figure out. So yeah, I see exactly, I see what you’re saying, it might be a little bit easier for some of like, canine conservationists, we do a lot of like education. So we could do, hey, if you refer someone to this course, you get a free free webinar. Or if you invite someone to this webinar, you get 20% off your next one and those sorts of things. But if for the actual like, Hey, we’re gonna drive cross country with our dogs and show up and do two weeks or two months of surveys. Yeah, it would be a little bit harder to figure out how to apply that. But I think thinking creatively about it, probably is still a good exercise anyway.
Andrew Ishimaru
Oh, yeah, for sure. And the things that I think makes sense for small, small businesses that are service based dog trainers, in particular, is that you basically want to do one of two things, you want to either focus your marketing on being top of mind when a problem or an idea or a desire comes up around around your pets. So when someone’s like, Ah, shit, we need to we need to do something about this, like, we need a dog trainer, then they say, Ah, let me talk to let me talk to Kayla. And or if they’re like, you know, it’s time we’re going to win the Westminster Dog Show, when he talks like that, like, that’s the first place to go, which is just focus your marketing on being the go to person where, when that arises, or the other way, which is, you know, at the core of your service is a lot of knowledge and a lot of practical advice. So I think to your point about doing workshops and things you give that, give that up for free or find some way to position yourself as an expert, where you’re educating people in a way that they look at you as an expert again, another way
Kayla Fratt
you mean like maybe doing a podcast,
Andrew Ishimaru
like maybe doing a podcast Yeah, like a workshop is just one because the thing is a workshop is just a vehicle for delivering information and it helps with pets in particularly richer physical objects. To have them there in the room with you and you know, you’re teaching them but like, yeah, podcasts for example. Or if you’re going to do any kind of like digital training and you say, Okay, well I’m recording video of this training, I can send this to people is the same content might not be necessarily the right delivery vehicle, if it’s better to be hands on in some cases, but other times it might not matter. And you can just record a video of certain training technique, and you can send that to people and they can watch that video. and they can get the same value out of it if they were there with you in a workshop, but it’s a lot easier to send that information to a lot of people. So the point of doing a workshop is to transmit that information, position yourself as an expert. And as somebody that can be trusted, and can solve problems as they happen, or train future champions or whatever, you know, whatever, whatever you’re trying to do with your with your pets. And then when they want to work with you, you’re the person. And so although I will say them the easy way, this is the more difficult but I would say better and more sustainable way of thinking about marketing, the easier way is like, somebody has no idea who they want to hire, they just Google dog trainers near me. And then you have to pay to be at the top of the list or you’ve spent enough on your local SEO that you can be at the top of list, which is a good strategy, local, local SEO specifically. But you’re going to be is going to be a lot more competitive, and you will need to invest in order to get there. So if you’re really bootstrapped, and you don’t have a lot of money to invest in your marketing, probably not a good option. If you have some funds, and you can invest in your local SEO or paying for ads, you can have a return on that investment. It can be a good marketing strategy, but it needs to make sense for the budget you have. And like your business itself, because it may not make sense to do that.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, definitely as someone who, instead of paying I took all the SEO classes, and then just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, as a way to build journey dog training, I can attest it is it is not fast. And it is not easy. But I was able to do it for free. More or less. I’m trying to think if I ever paid for any SEO courses, I don’t think I did. And I’m certainly not an expert in it probably would have been faster if I paid someone. But it is it is a route.
Andrew Ishimaru
I mean, you probably would have had to pay 100,000 200,000 over over multiple years. Oh my god. Yeah. No, I can’t even imagine like that investment paid off in a big way. And you could, you could have paid the money upfront to have that done as a service for you. And it would have gotten into a similar place, probably, but you would have needed to have $100,000 to spend on that. So
Kayla Fratt
which I certainly did not. I mean, and one of the things I tell people, I’ve got a couple friends that I’m like helping build their blogs right now and work on trying to get into more of that the content space. And one of the things that I tell a lot of them is like, hey, this takes a really long time. And honestly, if I had set out with journey dog training, trying to turn it into what it has become, I think I would have quit, because it took so long. And it was so hard. But because I was much more kind of passionate about getting the information out there. And frankly, it was a laziness thing as well, where it was like, Okay, if I have to write a protocol for three clients this week about how to create train their puppies, I’d rather turn it into a blog post and put it up on the internet for free. And kind of unbeknownst to me, that turned into content marketing. Again, I think if I had really been like, yeah, in five years, or I eventually want to be able to just live off of the advertising, typing advertising revenue that comes in from this blog, I would have quit 50 times over because it just took so long.
Andrew Ishimaru
Yeah, well, there’s actually so you just said something that’s really good point, which is, it is a passion component, but also that you’re working with clients. And if you’re going to give the same information in written form, or verbal for record video, for whatever, to the same three clients, you write it down once in one blog post, and then you give it to three clients, you can save a ton of time and ton of effort and doing that because you’re working with clients and you just send them similar information every time. There’s other ways that you can benefit from doing things that are fit within the marketing category, like content marketing, like writing blog posts, like having a website, putting stuff on your website, social media. There’s other ways you can benefit from that, besides just being discovered by the algorithm of Instagram or Tiktok. Or Google where, you know, people search stuff or people are, you know, swiping through stuff on Tik Tok, and they just come across you that’s one discoverability method. But if you have that content that lives out there, and you’re working with clients, and you’re there in the community, and you know, you’re talking to people, you’re having conversations, anytime you just say, Oh yeah, follow me on Instagram. Well, now your audience is a distribution channel for all that content. That’s one way to stay top of mind if you know, they potentially to hire someone with your particular skill set. And so maybe you’re not necessarily posting on Instagram, say that through social channel of choice. Maybe you’re not posting on Instagram, necessarily to you know, attract all these people who have never heard of you. But if you have, you know, 100 500 1000 people in your city who know you that follow you on Instagram and see your stories from time to time and you post interesting stuff and educational stuff, then well when something comes up for them and one of their friends, they’re like, Oh, you need to do you know you need some of the data Wait a second, I follow this dog trainer on Instagram. They’re awesome. They post, go check them out, you know, let me talk to them. Oh, by the way, I think they have I think they have a referral program. And then they go in, oh, yeah, I can get, you know, I can get 20 bucks. If I refer a friend, they refer their friends, they get 20 bucks, you got new client, but that’s not necessarily saying well, I want to be the top of Google. So I get all this, all this traffic and all these people that are just gonna come flooding into my business like that was a game 20 years ago. It’s not really the game today. But if you’re at the top of Google, and people that know you or heard about you, Google your name and your business, you pop up and it looks legit. Like yeah, okay, all right, I trust this person, I should reach out to them. So there’s other benefits besides just reach that you get from these kinds of things. And this is, I would say, very solid, small business tactic. And particularly this scales up to businesses of any size, in different ways, as well. But I think it’s I think it’s an excellent sort of way to look at these different marketing channels, especially if you look at say, social media, and you’re like, Oh, why should I have social media? Why should you know, I don’t know I’m a small business, I’m doing this and I’m doing that really see the value. I don’t have 100,000 followers and all that stuff. It’s like, you don’t need 100,000 followers. You just need a few even dozen followers that are the right people. And if you have that, then it’s a distribution channel to reach those people and build trust and build expertise and put yourself in a position where they need your services to read there.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, exactly. I mean, and that’s how, like when so Bartley just tore his cruciate ligament, his ACL and I have been aware of Dr. Lesley Eid for gosh, probably four or five years now. She’s a sports medicine rehab that. And you know, like, I’ve heard her on the fenzi dog sports academy podcast, I’ve heard her on cocked dog radio, just like as a podcast guest. And, you know, guess who I emailed right away when barley went lamb, and guess who is now getting $1,000 of my money to you know, go through and do his rehab plan, because I know that she gets dogs post surgery back onto the agility World Team. You know, it, she could have done all the advertising she wanted. And I was never going to be a common customer until I really needed her. But because I knew who she was, I was willing to pay a premium and work with someone who’s in Washington State. Because I know and trust her now. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. Okay, so we’ve kind of been hinting at this a little bit. But let’s talk a little bit about remote work. Like you are a world traveler. I don’t even know how many countries you’ve been to now. But you’re, I think, fair to say a bit of an expert in remote work. And particularly like working with teams and clients remotely. It’s not that you’re just a web designer. working remotely, you’re really managing these big teams and doing a lot making a lot of big moves remotely. So what are some of the things that you have found really important to keep in mind for being successful with remote work?
Andrew Ishimaru
So this is something that has been very much on my mind lately. In particular, with Yes, I so I have been running a marketing agency for the past five years, we were actually recently acquired earlier this year in June by another marketing agency, our run our division under them still operating remotely. But since day one, we’ve been operating as a remote team. And actually, prior to starting, this agency actually was working remotely another company before that, as well. So So I’ve actually been working in remote capacity since about 2016. Back then, we would go into the cooking space a little bit sometimes. And it was basically what we would see as hybrid today. But as before the concept of hybrid is really existed in terms of you know, what came out of the global pandemic. But yeah, I’ve been I’ve been working remotely with, you know, not just my team, but with clients, of course, as well and different complicated situations in terms of well, we have 1020 clients different times, and we have 10 people on our team. And we have different contractors we work with, and we’re all working all around the world, different time zones, different countries, different situations. And this is I think, one of the most important changes in the world in the last decade, have the ability now facilitated by global internet access. And by now I would say the speed of connection that most people have to be able to work anywhere on the planet, through a laptop through Wi Fi connection, any with any kind of working modality that doesn’t necessarily involve your hands or physical goods that obviously there’s some things that don’t apply to this, such as if you’re working in a factory, or if you’re working in a lab, or if you know your job is working actually in like a retail store. You can’t really do that remotely you kind of need to be there for Listen, if you’re a doctor that actually sees patients, yourself surgeon like, yeah, you need to be in prison. But for a lot of jobs, and for a lot of different things that people do, it absolutely can be remote. And one of the bets that I’m willing to make for the next 10 years is that we’re going to see most of the world’s economy shift to a remote first model where it’s no longer Oh, you know, let’s say for startup, you start a startup, and then you grow your company, eventually you get office space, and then you grow up and you raise more money, and you get more customers, and you get a bigger office space. And eventually, that office building downtown, and for existing corporations, where they say, Oh, we have an office space where we you know, we’re expanding, we’re hiring new employees who need to, you know, lease new office space, that’s the world we live in today, I think that’s going to fundamentally change in the next 1020 years, where the model is actually remote first, where you say, Oh, we were growing, we’re expanding, you know, we need to hire another 1000 people, well, let’s hire them remotely, let’s not pay for more, more office space. And it’s for startups. And for smaller companies and fast growth companies, you know, a lot of companies now are just taking a remote model and never getting office space. And, in particular, you know, that’s what we did at Automotive is we ever had an office. In the early days, it was just me and my business partner who worked remotely. We started out with a few in person clients. But all of our clients over time had been remote clients that I’ve never met in person, I’ve had team members that I’ve never met in person. And I’ve hired people without ever meeting them in person. And the thing is, and I think a lot of people now realize you this after the pandemic happened, it’s completely 100% possible to do that. And there’s not an impediment in terms of performance in terms of productivity in terms of creativity, that you lose when you when you go into remote team. And and I think one of the things that I see a lot of people talking about now are oh, you know, people want to be remote. But you know, leadership wants people in the office, let’s go hybrid, it’s a sort of compromise, or people saying, well, I like to work at home or, you know, I want to go travel or I want to spend more time with my family. But creativity happens in the office. And I think that fundamentally, both of those, both of those ideas is absolutely wrong. I think that that’s something that is a false, a false premise, this idea that it’s you know, you need to be physically together in one space. That’s, that’s great. And I love working in person, with my team when we’re in the same place. And I love getting together with, you know, different people I work with and collaborating in person. But I don’t think that we need an actual office in order to do this every day. And when I look at the way that businesses and society as a whole is structured, I don’t think that offices for a lot of use cases have a place to stay. And if you look back into this, actually, and you look back historically, you know, beyond the modern era and past generations, you go back to, you know, actually the 1700s and the 1600s. In the 1500s. The concept of an office is only a relatively recent phenomenon, and before offices as sort of like knowledge work and management work. And you know, these kinds of things happens in an office space before that, the concept of an office really came out of the concept of the factory where you had people coming together into one common location to produce physical goods due to the economies of scale and the efficiencies in terms of organization of human capital, and resources. And you had in like Sheffield, in the UK, you had the steel mills where they could buy massive quantities of raw materials. And then they could have all the super specialized skilled workers and management one location. And it was way more efficient, and way better for the economy overall, to produce steel like that than it was for you know, individual blacksmiths in their houses to produce steel. But before the factory, people worked out of their homes, and you had people that were working in their own home environment, creating, you know, these are different goods. And you would say, you know, people call it like the cottage industry, it was like, literally out of your cottage, you’d have skilled craftsmen, creating like pants, and shirts, and shoes, and candles and all this stuff. And that’s where we came from as a as a society. And so, you know, the concept of of an office and the concept of, you know, people in a concept of a business event and people coming together in one place in order to do work. It’s very, very recent phenomenon. And so I think that what we’re going to see very soon here is that the modern concept of an office is now obsolete in a lot of ways. It’s an unnecessary expense. If you look at it from a p&l perspective, and you say, Well, how much are we paying for its office space? What if we didn’t have to pay for that? And all of a sudden, from a financial perspective, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. And from from a lifestyle perspective from a lot of People, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense either because I’ll say sitting in communities like that is that is the worst like, find me a person that loves community like that. Like it’s absolutely bullshit thing. So I think for a lot of
Kayla Fratt
I liked I liked my bike commute back in Denver. But that was I was very lucky there. And I didn’t like it when it snowed. But until then. Yeah, no, I see. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. And I think like, yeah, I obviously agree. I have not worked out of an office. I knew, I guess, yeah, back when I worked at conservation, Colorado, we had an office. And then when I worked at the animal shelter, obviously, we were reporting to work, but we didn’t really have an office, it was more just like, well, you know, the dogs are in the kennels. So we have to go to them. And yeah, with the conservation dog stuff like I it certainly is helpful to like get together physically and trained together. We, the canine conservationists, crew did that for the first time earlier this year, and we got to handle each other’s dogs. But yeah, it really seems like remote is the way and it was interesting when we launched. So we launched this online conservation detection dog handler course. And we got some pushback from people who were like, You can’t do this online. You can’t teach this online. And you know, my response. First, I was really upset, of course. And then I was on the phone with my mom as one does. And she was like, Kayla, your sister is in med school right now online. Like, we’re in the middle of COVID. Obviously, yes, at some point, my sister is and she is in clinics now. But you know, you can start so much stuff online, even when there is even when you do have to do a hybrid model, and maybe you can’t be fully remote.
Andrew Ishimaru
Yeah, well, and I think this is this is something that, you know, remote work is here to stay. And for mode, operating in a job operating a business operating as an organization, not just business, but like as, as organizations, nonprofits, governments, court systems, a lot of stuff that happens in person can be done remotely, we just did a huge global experiment where we tested it, and it absolutely worked. And maybe there was some kinks. But we also just trained the the world citizens to do this remotely as well. So I think that you know, and the thing is, not only is this something that, you know, is entirely possible, but it unlocks a lot in terms of lifestyle for all of us, individually. So for me, as you know, I’ve been traveling for the last almost five years now, at this point, working remotely living in different companies, I’ve been a digital nomad, the things that working remotely has done for my life. And for me personally, like, I’d like my god, ridiculous, I my life would not be the same without the ability to do this. And so I’ve had immense rewards from this in terms of both the growth of my business and what I’ve been able to do business wise, not necessarily need to be in prison with clients, but also just for all the super cool things that I’ve been able to do. I’ve gone to more than 3035 countries at this point, I’ve lived all around the world. I’ve been in cities, beaches. Um, right now I’m in Thailand, and I’ve been doing more Thai training with more Thai fighters in Thailand. Like, you can get into, you know, more Thai as a sport. Another place, but Thailand is Thailand is where that you know, is is really Yeah. So when you’re here is a different level. And working remotely facilitates my ability to, to do that here, which is just absolutely, absolutely awesome. You can’t buy that with money, you have to actually be here and, and right. Brain with the best. So
Kayla Fratt
yeah, well, and you know, I know one of the things like here at Cana and conservationists, we’re really focused on capacity building. And that means that we don’t just want to be working with the people that we can physically reach. Especially kind of depending on where you’re located. That’s just so, so limited, because this is such a small field. So you know, we’re doing the online education, definitely. And then we are also like, we continue working with the team in Kenya that we worked with earlier this year. And that’s all pretty much over WhatsApp and zoom. And no, it’s not perfect. Yes, they would benefit more if we were able to be physically there and able to, you know, instead of eight hours later, when we wake up and we watch the video, say hey, actually, you know, maybe you could have clicked 10 seconds earlier or whatever. Yeah, it would have been better if we could have been standing there and adjusting them in the moment. But it is so much better than not having anything and particularly when you’re looking at cost and carbon footprint and whatever. It is so much more efficient in many, many senses of the word for us to work with people over WhatsApp or Zoom than it is for them to fly As you know, across the Atlantic,
Andrew Ishimaru
right, right, right, it structures that out. So you basically have a lower cost option from their perspective where they still get the level of level of expertise and training and inputs. But yet, they just wouldn’t have that without the ability to do that new side of planning, which is, which is awesome, which is, like, that’s a technological innovation in Marvel in itself. You can be working with people, so it was
Kayla Fratt
incredible. I could be like sitting on a rock while I was still in Kenya on a whatsapp call with Rachel and Heather, my co founders, as I’m like listening to hyenas in the distance, and watching elephants go by and you can’t see another human being or sign of humans in just about any direction, there technically, were some electrical wires off if you look the right way. But you know, and I could just be on WhatsApp with them. And know, it wasn’t good enough for video there. But we could still troubleshoot. And I could give them updates on what I was doing. And that’s what the team is able to do now, when none of us is there anymore. And it’s not just us, they’re also working with other teams in Europe, but you know, still like, we’re able to have people from Europe and North America, and Africa all coming together and trying to troubleshoot. And that’s just something I’m really, really excited about as far as capacity building and, you know, increasing accessibility to, to this method. Okay, so at risk of going really long here. Is there anything else you wanted to circle back to or bring up or something I forgot to ask you about that you wanted to make sure we covered more?
Andrew Ishimaru
Um, I don’t think so in terms of in terms of substance, and I think we went deep on a couple of marketing things specifically, as it pertains to probably a lot of your audience. I would just say that, I think the only last thing that I would mention with marketing in particular, especially in the context of small business, is that you just have to go and do it and get started. And especially when you’re not working with a large budget, like don’t let that get in the way of going out and making things happen. Because if you say, Okay, I want to do something with marketing or with sales, and I only have, you know, $500 a month, $1,000 a month to spend, okay, you can spend that. But if you’re really, really reaching for that money, like, pick up the phone, go call people go do things, the moment you start to actually experiment, which is I actually forgot to mention this earlier, experimentation. And structure testing is a pretty key part of growth, marketing as well, the moment you start to test things and say, Okay, this is working, this is not working, this is working, that’s when you started building progress in your marketing machine. So yeah, go out, go out and make some things happens, you know, call people you can thinking about updating a website, go do it, you know, it doesn’t need to be big thing, do it over a weekend to get on a Saturday, you know, set aside a couple hours, you want to do something so familiar. All right, go have something together on Canva and put it out there. You know, if your brand is polished and pristine, then you know, you need to put in the extra effort or pay somebody who will. But you know if if the important thing, which I think is the most important thing is getting information out there and connecting with people. And yeah, just go and do it. And you’ll quickly realize what’s working what’s not.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great note to end on. And I’m glad that you meant you brought back up. Yeah, that that, that AV testing that having a hypothesis and actually testing it out and seeing what’s going on. And don’t be afraid to ask like I just saw, gosh, at the beginning of October journey dog training took like a 30 or 40% traffic dive. And I immediately started emailing people being like, what did Google’s algorithm just do? An A, I was able to notice that because I keep an eye on my Google Analytics. And if you don’t know what Google Analytics is yet, or you’re not using it, that’s probably one of the first tools to start keeping an eye on Google Search Console, those two tools, they’re free, incredibly helpful. Canva is something you mentioned. And yeah, just make sure you know what your baseline is, you can ask those questions, and you can start figuring out how to answer them. And there’s so many cool free tools out there, to just play around with and we are not going to go into all of them. Because again, we’re we tried to keep this at or around an hour, and we don’t need to turn this into a masterclass. But, yeah, I think that’s a good note to end on. Andrew, where would you like to be found on the internet? If people have questions or just want to learn more about what it is that you’re up to in the world?
Andrew Ishimaru
Yeah, there’s two places you can go to find me. And if you want to connect with me, you can you can choose what you find more interesting. You can find me on LinkedIn, Andrew Ishimaru, or you can find me on Instagram. Andrew underscore Ichi is H AI. By last My name is pretty unique and I own the SEO for my name and very well so if you Google me, you’ll find me. Yeah, if you want to see some of my travels, my adventures and some business updates and things as well. I post up on Instagram. If you want to keep professional I also post a lot of the business related and marketing related things on LinkedIn as well.
Kayla Fratt
Excellent. Yeah. And we’ll make sure to link all of that in the show notes. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the show and for everyone at home. This episode may have inspired you to get outside less than normal, but I hope that it inspires you to maybe get online and figure out how to improve your your reach and reach your goals as a canine conservationist in whatever way suits your passions and skill set. As always, you can find shownotes, Patreon, merch all that great stuff over at k9conservationists.org, and we will be back in your earbuds next week. Thanks!