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SMP vs Fractional CMO vs Coach - What Does Each Do?​ [E167] - The Auto Repair Marketing Podcast

SMP vs Fractional CMO vs Coach - What Does Each Do?​ [E167] - The Auto Repair Marketing Podcast

Remarkable Results Radio Podcast Aug 27, 2025 50 min
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About this episode

A deep dive into the roles of shop marketing pros, fractional CMOs, and business coaches in the automotive repair industry. The hosts discuss how each contributes to marketing strategies, the importance of collaboration, and the nuances of their responsibilities. They share insights from an internal meeting, emphasizing the need for clear communication and trust among shop owners, marketers, and coaches. The conversation also touches on the value of hands-on involvement from shop owners and how to effectively navigate challenges in marketing and operations.

Topics: shop marketing pros fractional CMO business coaching marketing strategy client communication content creation operational challenges trust in partnerships hands-on involvement AI in marketing
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Auto Repair Marketing Podcast.
I'm your host, Brian Walker, and today is going to be a very different kind of episode.
We're essentially talking about the difference between shop marketing pros or companies like
shop marketing pros, a CMO, so chief marketing officer or specifically a fractional chief marketing
officer.
There are a couple of companies in our industry who do that type of work, or your coaching
company and what their roles are when it comes to marketing.
The way that this podcast came about is it wasn't a podcast.
We recorded this.
It was never intended to be a podcast, so you're going to essentially get to
be a fly on the wall during an internal meeting.
Let me give you a little rundown on what it is that we were doing.
We've gone all in on the whole they-ask-you-answer thing that we talk about all the time.
We realized recently that there were some strategic pieces of content that we never
created, and that came from reading Marcus Sheridan's new book, Endless Customers.
If you know me and Kim, we are completely bought in on the idea of they-ask-you-answer.
We're doing a big push to create some of that type of content that will live on our website
and in some other places.
The way that we do that, we do use AI when we're creating our content, but we want
that AI to be completely based off of our thought leadership.
This is something that we used to handwrite all of our content.
We don't believe in just letting AI go write willy-nilly content for us.
That's based on all of the stuff that it has learned online.
We want it to create content that's unique to us based on our thought leadership.
One of the ways that we are able to do that is we can get together, we can have
a discussion, we can really hash something out.
You're going to see, we spend almost an hour in this episode talking about this with four
of us that are bringing all of these thoughts to the table.
We then transcribe that.
We give it to AI and we tell it exactly what we're looking for in an article.
It creates an article and then we will do editing both through AI prompting and
manual editing.
What you are listening to is the meeting where we get together and talk through the ideas
that are going to create the article.
It will actually be really great too if you want to use this methodology for creating
your own content.
Then you'll get to see at least part of what it is that we do and later on, once that
article is written, we'll come back and we'll add a link to the article into the
show notes so that you can go after you listen to the podcast and read the article and kind
of see how it is that it came out.
Very broad discussion.
We might say some things in here.
I mean, I know the full discussion.
There's some things in here where, like, man, do we want to just put that out
to the world?
There might be a couple of things that we do, snip out of the recording, just going
to be real with you, but it is a very honest and real discussion and in the end, we were
talking about it and it was like, man, there would be a lot of value for somebody to listen
to that.
We should turn that into a podcast episode.
Like I said, it's very unlike our normal podcast episodes.
We're going to thank our sponsors and then we're going to get right into the
recording.
Let me know what you think about this one because this isn't the only time that we do
this and there's other content that we create like this where you kind of get to see the
raw, mostly unfiltered discussion, so I hope you all enjoy it.
This episode is sponsored by Shot Boss.
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repair businesses.
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First question has to do with the scope of work in regards to a shop marketing pros
or a marketing agency, a auto repair business coach, and a CMO or a fractional CMO.
First question is, what does each provider actually do for the client?
What marketing tasks do they execute or who's responsible for implementing that work?
When we say CMO, are we talking about someone that the shop hires that is on staff or are
we talking about a fractional CMO like turnkey or overdrive?
I would say a fractional CMO to say if they're looking to outsource something and they're
trying to decide should I hire SMP, Elite, or Overdrive, why they might need all
of them or why they might need two out of three and what the differences are.
It's not a rating of the business, it's just what we know that they do.
We know what SMP does, so it's easiest to start with us.
What do we handle for clients?
All right.
So shop marketing pros or a company like us is going to do the actual marketing work.
So we're going to do things like design and build a website.
We're going to do the search engine optimization and all of the little tasks that come
along with that like building citations and creating backlinks and optimizing the
words that are on the pages of the website and making sure the website speed is where
it needs to be and all of these things that would be done for SEO.
Same thing like with Google ads, we're going to actually go set up the ads
and run them for the client and optimize them and check in on them weekly and do all
the things to make sure that the ads are running and they're performing as well as they can.
We do social media management.
So we're going to communicate with the client, find out what's happening in their shop.
Hopefully they're going to do things like send us pictures and videos if they want us to do
like a really great job for them.
They're going to communicate and send us those kind of assets so that we can share
on their social media to get people to know, like and trust them.
What else? I mean, that's ads, SEO, social media, website.
Those are the primary functions that we do at Shop Marketing Pros.
There could be some of our competitors that might do some other little things as well.
But as the marketers, we are actually doing that work.
Now, if we bring the fractional CMO, if we talk about what they do,
in theory, what a fractional CMO is going to do is they are going to drive the overall
marketing strategy for your company.
They're going to create a marketing plan and then they are going to hold other
people accountable to executing that plan.
So a fractional CMO is going to work with a company like us in most cases.
They are going to make sure that the work that we are doing is aligning with the shop's strategy.
They're going to make sure that the work that we are doing is performing by looking at the
reports and doing analysis of that and seeing the phone calls that are coming in and
listening to those phone calls and like that.
These are the things that they should be doing.
It is my opinion that it is a conflict of interest for the fractional CMO to be doing that type of work.
However, the fractional CMOs that are in our industry, they do like social media management.
They will do some programmatic advertising, which we will do also at Shop Marketing
Pros. I didn't talk about that because it's not one of our major services.
But my point is the fractional CMOs will do some of this type of work.
The two companies that are in our industry that I know of, they have to hold themselves accountable.
I do believe that there is a definite conflict of interest in those companies
doing that type of work.
Now you bring in the coaching companies.
And the coaching companies are going to be a little bit different.
Usually they don't get too involved in the marketing aspect.
They might give some ideas.
They will very often recommend working with certain marketing agencies or marketing companies.
They will definitely do some aspect of looking at the overall marketing to help you
as a shop owner determine is it working.
But most of the coaching companies do not get into marketing.
I know that there were a couple of them that dabbled in trying to sell marketing services,
but I don't think that any of them really succeeded in that space.
And I think most of them have decided to stay in their lane
coach on overall business practices.
And then like I said, I do believe that it is the job of the coach to look at
a shops of marketing and the results that they're getting with their client
and help them to make smart decisions as to whether or not
the company that they're working with is providing them a good return.
Where else would you say, I feel like Danny, you'll be able to answer this, that
marketing, whether it's a fractional CMO or a marketing agency and coaching
kind of overlap because I know sitting in client meetings, you have to show the
line sometimes of being or having to be like a consultation maybe about the business
rather than about their marketing.
So what is that like?
It does get blurry sometimes where clients are asking specifically CSMs or their
marketing agency more coach-like questions.
I think the clearest line there is we implement the marketing services,
we watch the marketing services and we send the leads to the shop.
But whenever it gets into the operations of the shop, that's where more of your
business coach steps in.
They're like Brian said, looking at your business operations, your business practices,
your marketing agency sends you the leads for your team to take it from there
into their daily operations and convert them.
It's very much a supplement to the overall plan.
It's not the only plan for a shop.
In Sudden Figure Agency, they talk to us about how so many of our clients, I'm going
to say our, I'm talking about in that whole room of the agencies that are there,
that our clients are depending on us more and more and especially the CSMs that
they're working with to actually work with them in that consultative matter,
not at all to try to replace the coach.
But for us, when we see something that can be improved in their business to actually
talk to them about it and to be able to talk business numbers and strategy and all of that.
For the marketing agency and the CSMs, we're so involved as an ongoing
point of contact and we're having these proactive conversations.
So we, as a marketing agency, can be with the shop as their strategies evolve
and as they grow and as they shift with some of their own planning there.
So for instance, the other day, a shop asked me a question on,
are we keeping track of his returning customers?
Right. And I had a conversation with him where that's more of a business coach type conversation
because we're sending them the leads, we're keeping track of the leads that we are sending,
but it's really up to his team to take the leads and then track their own customer
retention. We're very much acquisition based in what we do and then his team
and his operations is the retention side.
I feel like what I see with what clients experience sometimes is they come to us or their marketing
agency or their coach or their fractional CMO about something and everybody ends up pointing
to the other person. It's kind of like that Spider-Man meme where there's like two or three
of them and everybody is like, no, it's that person. So how can we break down maybe
on some specific examples like who is the best person to talk to in that scenario?
Your marketing team is telling you that your ads are working, your results look great.
They're following the strategy that was set in place from your fractional CMO,
but the customers aren't coming in the door.
So we had a client and his regular Google search ads weren't hitting the
mark anymore for him and he wasn't doing SEO and he's a general shop so he was eligible
for LSA ads. We took all of this into consideration with the shifts that he wanted to do
and the goals that he wanted to achieve and we consulted him to swap services to SEO
and local service ads and now he's much more happier with those services.
In the day-to-day with working with these different types of companies,
what is the time investment from a shop owner look like?
The time investment, I don't know how to answer that as far as the amount of time that it actually
would take, but I do know that the shop owners that we work with that spend more time and get
more involved in their marketing tend to have much better results and at any time that we talk
about this, the first person I think of is Chris Laoma at Jerry's Automotive who has a videographer
who is coming in once a month and shooting video and Chris is there working with him
and who is analyzing those LSA calls that he gets to determine are these things performing
the way that we need them to who is looking at their service advisor and the performance
of that service advisor and then we have the shop owners that we're not trying to turn them
into marketers by any means, but when we can train them, especially if we're handling
their social media, when we can train them to recognize moments that are happening in
their business and to see that is something that I need to share with my marketing company.
They just quickly pull out their phone and share with their CSM what's going on.
Cumulatively, I would imagine that that is something where a shop owner is going to spend
eight hours a month if that, where they are doing things like listening to some of their
own phone calls, which I really think that every shop owner should be doing, going around
a couple of times throughout the month and take some pictures of what's happening in the shop
and send it to the marketing company and then spending that one hour once a month talking
with their CSM, like having the meeting, going through the report, understanding what's happening
in their marketing. They have a responsibility in their own marketing and we see both sides of it.
So we see the shop owners that they don't want anything to do with their marketing and they
just hire us and they never talk to us and they let us do our thing and we get results for
them. But when we have the ones who actually do invest that time and they meet with us and they
send us information, Power My Services advisors perform on the phone and all of these things,
they are going to get much better results from their marketing than the client who wants to just be
completely hands off. And then to go back to your other question Caroline, because
you had asked a question about when you have a shop owner that's working with a coach or working
with a fractional CMO and they are working with a marketing company, which one I think
essentially what you were asking is, who do you believe? Because you got three people that are
often pointing fingers at each other. I don't think that there is a standard answer for that.
I think that as a shop owner, you have to hire people that you trust. And when you do that and
you have three different people that are pointing fingers at each other, at some point you just
have to decide which one of these people do I trust and do I believe the most. Because it
would be really easy for me as the marketer to say, well, you should trust your marketer
because they're the ones that are actually doing the work. They're the closest to it and they do
more of this stuff than anyone else. Logically, it should be the fractional CMO because that's
what you hired them to do. You hired them to set the strategy and then hold the people who are
doing the work accountable to getting good results and aligning with the strategy. But
unfortunately, we have had multiple cases where somebody was working with a fractional CMO
and when they worked with us and worked with the fractional CMO, they were like,
why am I paying this CMO? And they ended up firing the CMO company and working just with us.
And we have some of those clients that years later are still with us.
It's a hard thing to answer and I'm not saying by any means that these CMO companies
are bad because I think that it can depend very much on who the person's CSM is with that CMO
company. We've got a lot of acronyms going on here. Even here, whereas I truly believe that
we're the best and I believe that everyone on our team is amazing, you're going to have
a different experience if you are a shop working with Danny versus a shop working with Kendra versus
a shop working with Katie versus a shop working with Michael. You're going to have a different
experience and it could be the same thing with the fractional CMO companies. When I think of
the big fractional CMO company, Turnkey Marketing in our industry, they are obviously
having great success right now. I mean, the office that they just moved into is amazing.
They're having lots of growth and you don't do that by accident. You don't do that by providing a
bad service. So the experiences that we've had where somebody left, it could have literally
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complimentary app vision session at appfueled.com forward slash Jeremy. That's A-P-P-F-U-E-L-E-D
dot com forward slash Jeremy. What would you say are some of the characteristics of a shop owner
that would work well with a fractional CMO and then one that wouldn't? What's a good fit for
whether or not you need that third party to drive strategy and hold people accountable?
We've seen a few different companies. I would say the one that works best with a fractional CMO
is the one who does not want to sit on a call or doesn't have someone to assign to be on that
call. He wants to fully say, I don't want to touch my marketing, which is not typically our
ideal type of client because we, to be successful performing the marketing, do need some things
to clients. We need feedback. We need the photos and things like that for some aspects,
but also just to communicate, understand what's going on in their shop or that center back and
forth that comes with the fulfillment of the marketing. In the case where someone says, look,
I have other priorities as an owner, I do not have a general manager to assign you to sit on
these monthly calls or to be sending you pictures or whatever, that's where the CMO
steps in. They're basically a GM or a fractional CMO, but this role is oftentimes we see
hired out in the shop to be a marketing person who's handling it or the GM of the shop with a
person we speak to if the shop owner just doesn't want anything to do with it. That's a good position
for a fractional CMO to take. I agree with everything that JR just said, but I think there's
also another type of shop owner. In addition, that is the polar opposite of what he's talking
about. That is your shop owner that they're opening multiple locations. They're building a
bigger business. It's not a case of I don't want to do this. It is a case of they're running a big
organization and they don't have the time to do it. They're probably choosing between do I hire a
fractional CMO company or do I hire an actual CMO to be in our C-suite here in the organization
that is overseeing all of our marketing? I don't think that the fractional CMO is for
the shop that's in between there. If they're wanting to build something big and they're wanting to have
a solid marketing strategy that people are held accountable to and they don't have someone within
their organization to be able to dedicate that time to it, I think that that's a perfect situation
for them also. In meeting with CMOs like from first-hand experience, I've experienced both
kind of shop owners. The shop owner who's acquiring multiple locations and needs someone to help them
stay on track, that avatar of a shop owner who will hire a fractional CMO, and then also the
one who may want to be more hands-off. At the end of the day, the CMO ends up usually
meeting with your marketing team. They sit in for you. They're listening to the marketing
reports and the marketing performance. You really have to think who understands the vision the best.
If you have a CMO that understands your business vision and can be on board with that and be a
true voice for you, if they're sitting and looking at the actual marketing performance,
then that's good. But if they're not as involved and if they're focused on only coming
up with monthly direct mail coupon specials for you and they're not giving your marketing team
what they're asking for, that also happens too. I know one question we get a lot is,
can I fire my CMO? Do I need them if I'm working with you? We've kind of answered
it a little bit, but not so directly. How would you answer that question of,
do I need a CMO if I'm working with a marketing company?
We are speaking right now for marketing fulfillment. The people who are doing the work,
not all marketing fulfillment is created equal. We, as Shop Marketing Pros,
happen to have a high level of strategy that we bring to the table. With us,
when we experience, the answer to that question is, they are not bringing way more than we are.
They might be bringing the fractional CMO, might be bringing a little bit to the table,
but it's not enough for the shop to see the value. We're like, well, you guys, and this is,
we've heard this many times, well, you guys are bringing just as much strategy in the meetings
as we are, or they're just, if they're coming to a marketing meeting, the fractional CMO
is just sitting there and doesn't have anything to add. That is when a shop will say,
I don't see the value. The expectation is always out of expectations. If I were a shop
hiring a fractional CMO, I would expect them to really be bringing a lot of strategies at
the table to be doing more than the marketing fulfillment would. We just tap into a Shop Marketing
Pros when we see it happens. It's because there's just not anything to add beyond what we're doing,
but we also happen to do more. Not as much as a fractional CMO would, but we also are
doing some of the things that they may be expecting, like suggesting additional services,
changing budgets, changing targeting strategy, asking smart questions like, well,
what's your goals in the shop? Things that you might expect that you might not normally
expect of a fulfillment agency, we do. Then the fractional CMO needs to go beyond that and
be looking at the broader strategy as well. A fractional CMO should be looking at,
what is your community involvement? What are the opportunities for you to get involved with
some local advertising? Should you do the Tube Mailer? Should you be sending out direct mail
and where should you be sending it out to? What is the message that you should have there?
They should be doing all of those things. To my knowledge, I don't know of one company that
does all of these services that we're talking about. I don't know of one company that
does web SEO, digital advertising, direct mail, programmatic media. You're advising you on
local marketing strategies with your Chamber of Commerce and your BNI group and whether or not
you should be sponsoring the Little League team and should you hold an event for National Car Care
Month. That is what your fractional CMO should be doing. Basically, if you hired a person,
if you hired a full-time person to work inside of your shop and their job was just marketing,
community involvement, networking, their entire job was to get more cars in the base through
all means and to come up with the strategy for making that happen and overseeing all of the people.
Because that person's job would not be to actually run the ads and do the SEO and build the website
and all of that. These dreams of these unicorn full-stack marketers that can do all of these
things, even if you find that person, they've only got so much time. For a shop that is looking
to have aggressive growth, there's not enough time in the day for one person to do all of those things.
But if you were going to hire a person to do that, that is exactly what your fractional CMO
should be doing. It's the same stuff that they would be doing if you had that person
in your business. I personally am much more of an advocate of actually having that person
in the business than having an outside services fractional CMO. I have no idea where the article
is going to go with this and we can edit however we need to. I'm not a fan of fractional CMOs
as it's being done now by the people in our industry. I feel like I can give a pretty direct
answer to your question, Caroline, about can I fire my CMO? I have answered that question that
yes, you can. This was a conversation between the shop owner and myself where he's like,
if I move away from the CMO, will my services be intact with you? The answer is yes. We run
independently from the CMO and then touching on what JR was mentioning about the consultation,
the level of strategy that we bring to the table as shop marketing pros. That also ties it to that
answer too. The strategy that we run is on the services that we do. We're going to do
strategy that is about your website, your SEO, your paid ad strategy, and social media.
We don't do strategy outside of those things and there are many other types of marketing that a
shop owner could employ that we're not running strategy on. I think that's exactly where I was
going to where a fractional CMO fits in well is if you want to do other types of marketing,
traditional marketing, print marketing, community involvement, things like that,
to be able to drive that strategy or for those shops that like running specials all of the time
and having somebody else create them for them and keep up with it and run it and integrate it
into their systems and all of that, that's where the CMO fits in as well. But on some of those
levels, not fully, but some of that direction can come from a coach too where if it's
community involvement, I would think your coach can also advise you on how you can get involved
with your community. Maybe not exactly what that marketing strategy looks like for it,
but some basic information to help you do what you need to do. I think the shops that we have
that have either never used a fractional CMO or have moved away from using one have a great
coach. They're involved in their business and they're involved with their marketing and they
understand what they need to own that we don't own because it's not a service we offer.
But the shop owners who want more going on and don't understand it, don't have anybody in the shop
who can understand it or who's dedicated to that and they want to be running direct mail
and running other sorts of ads and always doing things that maybe you're either not part of our
scope at all because it's not a service we offer or beyond our scope that that's where
kind of that you can supplement I guess with the fractional CMO. Going back to the finger pointing,
I want to reframe it a little bit is like everybody blaming each other, but try and give a couple
examples of in this situation, say this is the shop owner's problem with XYZ problem,
who is the actual owner of that solution? So an example is they have all three and
the marketers are executing the marketing strategy. The ads have a great cost per click.
They have awesome phone calls where the customers aren't coming in because they're not converting.
In this situation, the solution would be you and your coach should listen to your phone calls and
assess how your service advisor is doing on the phone. I think we would all consecutively or
whatever agree the issue there is probably operational. So how can we advise in a couple
other situations where the issue is maybe operational or marketing implementation or marketing strategy
to try and give them some ideas of how to identify themselves, who to talk to and who to trust
in that situation? I think the most common and like everything is just an iteration of like
I'm not getting the results. I'm not getting as many cars as I want. So I don't think it's
fingers pointing. I don't feel like we ever say it's your coach's fault or I think every finger
points down to fulfillment is usually what happens. When all three are involved, you gave
an example of like, okay, so let's say the coach, let's say this shop goes to their coach and is
like, look, you advise me to hire a marketing fulfillment company. You advise me to hire
a CMO or whatever. This is what I've got. What do I do? What do I talk to? The coach
should say, talk to your person who's in charge of the CMO because they should know
everything that's going on. They design the strategy. So that was where the coach's finger
should be pointing. The CMO is going to, we're going to continue down the slide. The CMO is
going to either, if they're smart, they're going to look at other strategies like, okay,
if this, they're going to have the data to know if it's working and there's an operational
issue like you just discussed, or if we need to explore other strategies. And these are
the things that the fulfillment shop marketing pros would look, are we doing our job? Are the
ads performing well? We have all those kinds of metrics and everything. If the answer is yes,
then we either can increase budget or explore another avenue to utilize. And that's about it.
And sometimes we will say, we've noticed that there's probably an operational thing here,
the phone calls, et cetera, which would be escalated back up. So I think it's more of
less, less Spider-Man pointing at each other and everybody pointing down the line is how it
more looks like to me. Yeah, I think JR explained it so well there because I don't think of it as
finger pointing. I think of it more as identifying and connecting the dots because we all want to
achieve the same outcome, which is to keep the shop busy. But that exact line of communication
has happened with myself a few times where the coach says, talk to your marketers.
So they either go to the CMO or to the actual marketing agency. And we need to sit down with
the shop owner and dig in and identify. And if the phone calls are coming in through your business,
Google Business Profile, if they're coming in through your ads, if you have a high level
of lead generation from the marketing and the shop owner is still not feeling it,
then you have to look at the conversion of your service advisors. And that's where it does
get identified. And it can go back to the coach where they talk to the shop owner about the
close rates of their teams. Shop marketing pros tends to, we are not a fractional CMO,
I don't want them to come across. However, I do believe that our company does more
strategy that approaches the CMO than any other company does. So in this particular case,
if something's not working, the shop owner says, look, everybody says they're doing stuff,
but my numbers aren't adding up. What do I do here? Shop marketing pros is going to likely
do what a CMO should do. And in some cases, say, we need to explore another option or something
higher thinking. A typical fulfillment would be like, we're doing our job. The numbers add up,
see ya. We are typically our CSMs, we're going to try and dig deeper and just explain, you know,
well, have you done any training with your staff or we noticed this? Maybe we should, you know,
will advise on increasing budget. We're very good at, as Brian said earlier about
the subject we're doing, but we also understand enough that perhaps there's another thing
you can be exploring, even if it's something that we don't provide. You know, so we're
putting all our eggs into digital advertising right now. Have you tried direct mail? Are you
trying other sources? And this should really be what the CMO is doing. If there is only coach
and fulfillment, that leaves a little bit of the gap because a coach isn't all, it depends on the
coach or the coaching group. They're not always an expert or on, it's not in their scope and
necessarily go down like, okay, in your area, what are the options and stuff to you? And then
you've got your market fulfillment where, to be truthful, we do what we do, we know about
these other things, we might be able to suggest it, but that leaves the shop owner having to kind
of figure it out for themselves in some cases. We can fulfill on what our thing is and we might
be able to advise a little bit, but I think that's where the CMO gap, that's probably their
biggest value is to explore and suggest things that the shop owner that neither won
the fulfillment or the coach can do. The idea of having a partner versus a vendor,
as your vendor is going to come back and say, here where your deliverables,
I did what you paid me to do, that is the extent of my job with you. And a partner is going to
come in and say, oh, yeah, I can see we have some issues here, here are some possible solutions,
have you considered this? I can't even fully solve this for you, but I can give you some
information to further research it or solve it yourself. So there are marketing companies,
fractional CMOs and coaches who fit the bill of being more of a vendor and those who fit the
bill of being more of a partner. So it's determining which level of each you have as a shop owner
and where you need to fill and bridge those gaps or if there are one or two or maybe two out of
the three that you have that they can work together in tandem that cover all of it or if
you need three or if you only need one and somebody may be in the shop. I think the
ultimate test of whether you have a partner or a vendor is whether or not they're willing
to advise you to stop something that makes them money. So if you had a coach that he's doing
his thing and this coach is getting paid, if he saw that the shop would be better fit
with someone else for whatever reason, if that coach is willing to say, you know what,
I think it's going to be better for you in the long run if we don't work together.
Same thing for the fractional CMO, same thing for the marketing company. I know we have many
occasions and I don't know if we want to put this in the article or not, but we have advised
the shop to stop doing the service at our financial detriment because it truly was not,
you know, marketing is not perfect. It has a very high success rate, but occasionally,
for whatever reason, it may not, that particular service may not work for a shop
and we I know will tell advice the shop you need to be putting your money elsewhere,
which is not something a vendor does. That's something someone who truly cares about the shop.
And I think that in all three levels that we're discussing here today,
that is ultimately what the shop needs to think about. Do I trust these people enough
to make a choice that is better for me despite whatever financial game is there for them?
We talked about what the marketers do and what the CMO do. We talked about
the limited role that a coach would play in that, but for the article's sake,
if we're going to be spelling out what it is that each one of these types of companies does,
I think it's important to kind of say what it is that the coaching companies do.
It's going to depend, first of all, on the level that you are at in your business. So if
you're a brand new auto repair shop, you have zero business experience, which is most
technicians that become shop owners have zero business experience, they're great at fixing cars,
not great at running a business. Then the coaching companies are going to
teach you how to be a better business person. They're going to show you how to
read the numbers in your financials, how to read a profit and loss statement,
how to read a balance sheet. They're going to teach you things like what you should be pricing.
How you should be pricing your services, I should say. How much markup you should put on parts
and how to figure that out because it's going to be different for different shops in different
markets working on different types of vehicles. They are going to teach you things like phone
skills and sales skills, and they'll teach your team. If you're at the point in your business
where you have a team, then they can teach your team about those phone skills and customer
service and such. They will very often facilitate like 20 groups or peer groups, whatever you
want to call them, where you will get together with other shop owners a couple of times per year
and get to learn from each other, very often visiting one of the other shops and getting to
see how they do things. Your coach will usually meet with you about once a week
where you're going to have a phone call and you're going to go over what's happening in
the business and go over the numbers, like hiring strategies. If they're a great coaching
company, then they're going to work with you on creating a great company culture. They will advise
you on terminating employees and things like that. The coach is much more about helping you to
become the businessman or woman that you need to be to properly run a business because that's
the most common situation is you have a technician that wants to do their own thing,
they want to go open their own business and they do it and they realize that they've gotten into
a world that they know nothing about. Anything else? Do you think it's worth talking about?
If they only had to hire one, which do we suggest they choose? Yeah, 100%. This might be an
opinion kind of thing. I think first they would have to evaluate what's the biggest need now.
Where are they in their business? We've got a shop that's completely brand new, doesn't know what to
do at all. We've got the shop that Brian talked about earlier that's got five locations and it's
got a full people to handle that kind of stuff. The newer shop or a more typical shop needs to
prioritize fulfillment before higher level strategy. I think the CMO is probably the last
choice for them. If they don't have any marketing at all, then getting marketing going
is going to be the highest priority. We will often tell people in strategy calls we're listening
to try and establish whether they have their ops under control. Coach may be number one,
fulfillment number two in that scenario. If they feel like they have their ops
under control and they're ready to accept more cars and marketing, definitely. If they are a shop that
has got all their ops under controls, has marketing, what's better marketing, but also
doesn't necessarily have the time or wants a higher level of management and doesn't have an
internal CMO team. That's when the CMO comes into play. I really think that the coach is
the first thing. Unless you just happen to be a natural business person and there are people
out there that just get business. For regular ongoing month-to-month services hiring a coach
is probably the most important thing. That being said, when you open, there are still
things that you have to have. You need your Google business profile to be set up correctly.
You need a website. You might want to invest in something like local service apps from the
very beginning. The way that you approach that in the beginning might be very different
than the way that you do once you're more established. In the beginning, you might just
go on Fiverr or Upwork or something like that and just find someone to build you a four or five-page
website and get something put up there. You might hire someone on one of those websites to
go in and create and optimize your Google business profile. It's just a one-and-done
thing. You're not doing any ongoing marketing work for you, but you have to have those things
in the beginning. It also depends on the situation. I literally just had a phone call
over the weekend from a technician that I used to work with that is open in a shop
and he wants to get started with marketing right away. He has been very wise with his money.
He's got no mortgage. He's got over a million dollars in retirement. He's got $150,000 set
aside to start the shop with. That's a different situation. He can hire the marketing company
and the coach from day one, and that's optimal. But the fractional CMO, that is not something
that I think that anyone should be considering hiring until they are a well-established
shop. You're playing a bigger game at that point. You hire a fractional chief marketing officer
at the point that you would be willing to hire an internal chief marketing officer,
but you just know that one of two things. Either I don't have enough work to keep
someone busy full-time and to pay someone the salary that they would need to be a full-time
CMO in my business, or you want to hire a CMO that has that automotive-specific
experience. That's where the benefit of that fractional CMO comes in, in that they work with
nothing but auto repair shops. If you go with an industry-specific CMO, so they know
already what works for an auto repair shop, whereas someone that you hire to come in,
if they don't have that experience, they have to learn those things. They've got to figure those
things out. One thing that's standing out to me in your questions, I don't know if you all want
to dive into this, but talking about the cost to value of a marketing team, so touching on
the fact that with your marketing team, especially how a shop marketing pros operates,
you get an entire team of marketing specialists. It's our duty to specifically stay on top of the
individualized marketing trends, like what's trending in SEO, how is AI voice search impacting
SEO and digital ads and all these other things. That's the duty of a good marketing team to
stay on top of. A CSM is your liaison between the marketing team and its entire team of specialists
on that end. For the purposes of AI, I'm sure that it knows this, but CSM is going to be your
client success manager. All right, so how was that? What do you think of that? Let us know,
because we do this stuff. We may let you get a little peek behind the scenes every now and then
if you thought that that was good. As we recorded that one, I thought to myself,
man, it would be really good to let our listeners hear that. I'd love to hear your feedback on it.
Thank you again to our sponsors. Remember, we are just one of a handful of podcasts on
the Aftermarket Radio Network. You can find the others at aftermarketradionetwork.com.
I hope that you'll listen in again next week. And until then, remember, in everything you do,
be a pro. You've been listening to the Auto Repair Marketing Podcast with Kim and Brian Walker.
Follow the podcast on your favorite listening app. Find the emails in the show notes and visit
them at shopmarketingpros.com. Let Kim and Brian know what you want discussed,
because they're all about advancing the aftermarket.

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