Matt Coffy: CustomerBloom

Matt Coffy founded CustomerBloom in 2010, an international digital marketing agency specializing in profit engines, which is a proprietary sales funnel marketing platform. Coffy recently built and launched PracticeBloom, a marketing agency for medical practices and the healthcare community. He’s appeared on CNN, speaks at numerous industry events yearly, and has a podcast and news articles that reach thousands monthly. He’s also a seasoned guitarist and a lead singer and songwriter in his rock group, the Matt Coffy Band. He shares the stage today with national acts at major music festivals.

In This Episode

Before starting his full service marketing agency, Matt Coffy began as a consultant. Today, his company has reached seven figures working with clients on executing their marketing strategies. Now looking forward, Matt’s goal is to combine his two passions of music and entrepreneurship. In this episode, he shares why taking chances pays off, how delegation leads to growth, and how great work and reviews will lead to more customers.

Topic Timeline:

1:00 The Three Key Components

Matt started a full service marketing agency that helps his clients get to the next level with a turbocharged profit engine using these three components: the offer, landing pages and conversions.

3:05 Documenting What Works

With journal and video entries dating back to the beginning of his business, Matt now uses his documented journey to offer advice to other entrepreneurs  — “Stay the course and take a chance.”

4:19 A Bottleneck

Once you realize you’re the one keeping the team from growing, you can begin to refocus to systemize and delegate tasks to your team. That’s when things start getting solved and growth happens.

5:12 Taking a Chance

A music festival approached Matt to help them bootstrap their marketing efforts with only six weeks to go. His team went above and beyond, which led to Matt’s band opening for  George Thorogood.

7:16 An Entertainer and Storyteller

The trick to having people engage with you is telling a good story — make the information entertaining and connect on an emotional level.

8:03 Do Good Work and You’ll Catch the Falling Gold

When you have enough reviews and testimonials that speak to the good work you do, your potential clients are more likely to trust you and turn into customers.

10:23 Follow Up With Leads

Matt’s current focus is to find a way to support his clients in closing the gap between capturing leads and closing deals.

12:16 Combining Passions

With a talent for music and entrepreneurship, Matt hopes to bring together these two passions and create high-level, fun and educational events.

14:04 Find Your Message and Build Your Brand

Now is the time to create your personal brand. Figure out what your message is and how you can build something that is important to you.

– Matt Coffy

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. Today, we have Matt Coffy, who founded CustomerBloom in 2010. Seems like an eon ago. It is an international digital marketing agency specializing in profit engines, which is a proprietary sales funnel marketing platform. Coffy recently built and launched PracticeBloom, a marketing agency for medical practices and the healthcare community. He’s appeared on CNN, speaks at numerous industry events yearly, has a podcast, and news articles that reach thousands monthly. He’s also a seasoned guitarist and a lead singer and songwriter in his rock group, the Matt Coffy Band. He shares the stage today with national acts at major music festivals. Cool. Thank you so much for being here.

MC: Yeah. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah. Thank you for having me. We had a great event this morning with great talks, so lots of participation. Your crowd is super engaged.

LR: Yeah. They’re good people. Well, tell me this. First of all, tell me more about what this profit engines platform is all about.

MC: Yeah. Super easy. You know this business. It’s full-circle marketing. You talked about it this morning, which is that it’s the journey of the clients’ clients, typically, in our case with an agency. We’ve designed a profit engine which is a really articulated sales funnel. It just has all the components, builds in all the automations, super turbo-charged with all the little things that bring people from here to here to here, which is offer, landing page, conversion.

If you can get those three things figured out, put them into a sort of hyper bull mode, which… for our profit engines, and what we try to do for our clients is we get them to the next level, which is to get them into a very sustained, kind of over-the-top strategy of sales funnel, like all the articulations that they don’t necessarily want to know about or need to know about. But we build all that infrastructure in, and then they just make profit. So it’s perpetually building profit for their clients and for their journey of their patients, in the case of the medical, or regular customers in our CustomerBloom pile, which would be our CustomerBloom business.

LR: Yeah. Gotcha. Is this a software platform?

MC: No. Tech stack.

LR: Tech stack.

MC: Yeah. We’ll stack whatever needs to be stacked together for the clients.

LR: Got it. So you’re working on the content, primarily.

MC: Sure.

LR: And getting it all wired up.

MC: Content, ads, copyrighting

LR: You’re doing the ads as well?

MC: Yeah. We do all the mechanics.

LR: Full-service agency.

MC: Full service from cradle to grave to actually now getting inside the clients and helping them with processing their own orders and processing their own clientele because we found out, which you mentioned this morning, if you take the task and the things that you can do, which are secret little hidden gems within some of these platforms, you can actually help a client move from not only getting them the lead but helping them follow up the lead and get them through the process of building the infrastructure to help them be a better client.

LR: Yeah. Got it. So you’ve been at this for a while now. We’re in 2018, towards the latter bit, and you started in 2010. So you’ve certainly had your experiences along the way. If you could go back and give yourself a piece of advice as you were starting out that would have made the road smoother or less painful, what would it have been?

MC: It’s interesting. I’ve documented my history.

LR: No kidding?

MC: We started in 2010, but I was just doing consulting. Around 2012 or ’13, so really about five years ago, is when we really started to get the agency going. But I’ve documented it, not only video, but I’ve documented it on paper. I’ve written almost every other couple of days a journal post. So I’m actually taking that out, and we’ve got a great little community of people who are interested in us because we just passed our seven figure mark as an agency. So we’re sort of now becoming that next level. We can go back and tell other people, just like you’re saying, “What would I tell them?” I would tell myself in 2010 when I first started, “It’s going to be a long journey. However, stay in the game, and don’t be afraid to take chances.” That’s where everything’s come for me … when we took the next-level chance and figured it out.

LR: Yeah. So there were times when you felt like it was too hard? You were going to quit? You drug your feet? Or it looked too scary? Or what was the problem?

MC: I don’t think I ever got scared. I don’t think I ever wanted to quit. But I think I got frustrated to a point where I started to point the fingers at my team. And I learned pretty quickly that it’s not the team. It was me who’s been the bottleneck, and I still am the bottleneck. It’s, how much can I remove from what I’m doing and then systematize it and get the team to do it? That’s when things get solved because I’m literally the problem in the company, which is that I’m taking on always too much responsibility: emails, Slack conversations, writing, all the things that I keep doing that I’ve got to release to the team and let them do it and let me do stuff like we’re doing today, which is to share some of the experiences and give better insight to other people looking to build their own businesses.

LR: Yeah. So stay the course. Take chances. Tell me about a chance that you took that you were concerned about that worked out.

MC: Well, this is one of the stories I told this morning which was, I think, appropriate. I think a lot of people liked it. When we started doing these profit engines, we were looking for good candidates to run these … I guess you could call them mechanical automation profit centers for clients that necessarily don’t have them started today but need them. We were approached by a very large festival, music festival, to help them with six weeks to go before a festival for 175,000 people.

LR: Whoa.

MC: Right? They were way behind. They said, “Look. We know you. We’ve learned about you. We need you to help us bootstrap and get a bunch of stuff done really quickly.” They gave us six weeks to build campaigns and funnels and systems, and that’s really … I mean, talk about short. That’s six weeks before a concert festival. We were able to sell about $83,000 of tickets in that six weeks on a $3,000 budget. We basically crushed it for them and showed them that it was possible in a short amount of time to provide them with what they needed. And that chance for us to actually step up and change our resource allocation to say, “Hey, guys, we need to help these guys out because it would be really cool,” and we have it as a case study now. And what ended up happening, that festival had my band play there as well. I warmed up for George Thorogood at that festival because they were so happy with what our results were. They’re like, “Look. What can we do? You’ve done way and beyond what you can do.” I said, “Put me in.” So we ended up playing there at the festival.

LR: Cool.

MC: Yeah. Monster event, and stage size … Roller coaster looking down at that … 40-foot stage when you’re in that type of environment is kind of cool.

LR: Yeah. Insane. So tell me what you think your unique skill set … Apart from the guitar, what do you feel like your unique skill set is?

MC: I’ve been told I’m an entertainer. I think that’s my skill set.

LR: How does that translate to business?

MC: Well, just like today up on stage, I think I told a really good story. And I think people engaged. At the end, there was Q&A. A lot of people want to now engage with us, post this conversation. But it’s the information built into that entertainment so that people have got … Not only they are listening, but they’re engaging because I’m getting their senses started. So we’re starting this sort of educational infotainment strategy in our business, as well, to try and get people a little bit beyond the normal logical level and get them into an emotional level where … That’s where I think some of the things that we’ve done have been supportive to that.

LR: Where does most of your business come from? Is it from networking stuff like this, or do you have other strategies for growing your business?

MC: Good question. I think this is a big question for a lot of people, which is why they have problems with their sales is they don’t have enough bandwidth, and they haven’t done enough acumen on getting their reviews done. We have a lot of people come to us because they see that we have 75 reviews on our sites. They’re pegged with five-star reviews. We’ve got video testimonials. We’ve got tons of back-end third-party proof.

In the first indication that someone comes to us, they have a trust factor from a third party level. So that helps from the very beginning, but we also have other parties like yourself and other vendors who continually recommend us. It comes down to doing good work. If you do good work, you never really have to do much more than just be there to catch the falling gold, I guess you can say, right? So we literally haven’t started even our own marketing campaign yet for ourselves because we’re so busy with just inbound leads. But that’s mainly just from good work. The one thing we’ve figured out is that as we’ve now built a new medical side of our business … So we started CustomerBloom in 2000 and, really, 12. PracticeBloom was started last year. We are going to market that as a single entity, and this year will be our first year having a real, “Okay, let’s do profit engines for our company. But let’s niche it down so we can repeat processes and make it easy and have the systems all the same.”

LR: Yeah. That’ll be exciting to see how that goes.

MC: Oh yeah. I’m excited because it’s one of the things that we’ve talked about to market ourselves forever. We didn’t do it with the original brand because it was so wide. We’re like, well, who do we market to? Who’s our avatar? What do we do? Now that we have a medical brand based in some very special medical, let’s just say, verticals, we have targets. We’ve got avatars. We’ve got ideas on how we’re going to now build it so we do it the right way. I think that’s one of the challenges we find with the marketing in general … if you’re not specific, it’s just meaningless. If it’s very specific to somebody’s ears and they know what they’re looking for, your chances of conversion are a lot higher. So we’re going to use our own resources to develop our own marketing plans, to finally do our own profit engines for PracticeBloom.

LR: There you go. You take your own medicine, finally. I hear that. So what do you feel like your cutting edge is right now? What are you learning about? What’s most interesting?

MC: You brought it up this morning, which was that I think it’s the post-process. We can deliver leads to any client, no problem. We’ve done that for years. But what happens to those leads? Do they follow up? Do they close them? Nobody’s going to give us their books to go check their revenue. “Oh, here’s your … Here’s how …” But they are going to allow us to go back in and track and do post-sale. So they came in. They have a lead. They became something in your system. Now what did that person do with that lead? We’ve tried to figure out a way to do that, and just like you said, it’s tasks. It’s minding those tasks. It’s managing the tasks and then having a responsibility from our side and their side to say, “Look, I know this is going to get confrontational. You’re going to need to show up,” meaning that it’s just not us. You’re going to have to come back and show up, and you’re going to have to tell us, why did you not follow up on all these leads that we just sent you? Why is there no task?

That’s the hardest part right now that we are trying to solve, which is to have someone who’s going to be on our team who’s going to be responsible for that confrontational discussion. That’s when the owner of the business is going to come to us and say, “If I need to potentially even let people go because they’re not doing their job, I want you guys to let me know this,” because that’s where we’re getting to, which is we’re finding the resources that the other clients that we’re working with who’ve come back to us and said, “We’re just not sure if this is working or not because we can’t really see. We can see that you guys are [inaudible] leads, but we don’t see the revenue.” And we’re like, “Because you’re probably not following up on anything,” and go, “We can build all the automation. We can do all the things that we support. However, a human being has to close deals for clients.” So we’re working on that piece, which you eloquently put out today, which is that’s really the bleeding edge for everybody now, is how deep do you want to get into the business and help your client succeed?

LR: Yeah. Awesome. What do you hope that your legacy will be when you come to the latter stage of your career?

MC: Interesting. Musically-wise, I’ve thought about that as well. So business and music all together. Somehow combine the two. Someone will say, “I remember that guy whose band played in Ontrapalooza. Then he spoke.” [Landon] was like, “Yeah. This is awesome. We finally have a band at Ontrapalooza.” So I think it’s more like putting together the two resources of really good information, really good emotional ties back to an experience, a mutually shared experience. So someone can say, “That was cool. I really learned something, plus I was entertained.” I think that’s when my worlds become together and the legacy would be something I would like to do.

LR: Something new and unique and memorable?

MC: Something that I haven’t seen anybody do yet. I mean, I’ve seen some iterations, but no one’s done it to a point where I think I have the two skill sets to provide. So I hope that that would be things that, as I get more and more involved in these events like this and more higher-level music stuff, that I can bring it together. And we’ve done that at our event. We’ve had an event, as well, for the company that we just had a mastermind. I brought my band down and we had an event. It was a lot of fun, and still we had information as well. So it was kind of like a concert plus a party plus an infotainment. It was like a lot of the things combined together that, hey, it was fun and people talk about it to this day, how much fun it was. And the example of that is sort of where I’d like to be from the legacy standpoint to say

LR: Cool.

MC: “That guy combined all this stuff together. It was really awesome how he figured it out.”

LR: Yeah. Cool. What do you think it means to be a modern entrepreneur? We’ve got this unique moment in history. Things are different than they were in the past. What is unique about today in entrepreneurship?

MC: I think it’s the chance of a lifetime at this point to become a personal brand. To me, I look at this and go, we’ve got this short period of time in history where if you are not now taking advantage of building your own personal brand and building a strategy around building your gravitas, you’re going to be bummed out five years from now when all the platforms are so mutated so that they’re all paid ads and there’s no organic. And it’s like we can just see it coming, like Facebook and Instagram. I mean, you have the scale, these video cameras here today. You can scale yourself and get visibility. The question is, what’s going to be your message? I think that, at the end of the day, that’s the interesting point. So that’s the two-part piece of this, which is that … Don’t miss the opportunity to build your own personal brand and to build something that’s important for your legacy.

And then the second thing is, what’s going to be the message of the brand? What is the point? I think that probably is something that a lot of people are still trying to figure out. It’s like, what do I want to be when I grow up? I think, for me, it’s always been, hey, what’s going to be cool that’s going to make people happy and get them through their day and get them more productive? And what can we do to help solve a lot of the pain, which is, especially entrepreneurs, how do they get through that initial stage of going past the seven-figure ceiling or even the $500,000 ceiling? How do they get out of lift-off, past gravity, go beyond where they’re not going to sink back into challenging, go back to have to go get a job? But the entrepreneurs who can go past that threshold go into orbit. I think that that piece is where I’d like to have some sort of dialogue, entertain, and give people emotional security that they can do it.

LR: Cool.

MC: And it’s not like I am some kind of rocket scientist. I just kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it, and here I am.

LR: Yeah. Awesome. Well, hey, thank you so much for being here.

MC: Thank you.

LR: Really interesting conversation. Would you sign our wall?

MC: Yeah, sure.

LR: Appreciate it. Thank you.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring Digital Strategist and Brand Consultant, Shane Barker.