Zoho Franchise Software Sponsor

Tom DuFore 0:00

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Personal Brand Meets Business Growth

Tom DuFore 1:14

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I'm wondering if you integrate your personal brand and personal branding with your business. Do those two worlds collide or come together? And do you think that's a good idea? Well, our guest today is Adam McChesney, and he shares with us insights about how building your personal brand will support your business growth as well. Now, Adam is the founder and CEO of Builders of Authority, a digital marketing agency built specifically for owner-led construction and home services businesses. With a background rooted in the trades and years of hands-on experience scaling contractor brands, Adam is known for cutting through marketing noise and focusing on what actually drives profitable growth. You're going to love this interview. So let's go ahead and jump right into it.

Adam’s Journey To Building Authority

Tom DuFore 2:22

Excellent. Well, Builders of Authority is exactly where I want to jump into this, your business name and what you do. But I really love this emphasis on building authority specifically in a local market. And I say that from two perspectives. One is just for the entrepreneur, that successful owner that tunes in and listens to this podcast, but also for that entrepreneur that we've helped franchise. And now they have franchisees in new markets that maybe the founder, they've been in their market for five, 10, 20 years, and they've built a lot of local notoriety. And certainly they're always looking to be better, but now they have to provide a solution for their franchisees and how they can start doing that. So that's a lot to fill in there, but I'd love to at least start with talking through these big ideas.

Adam McChesney 3:17

Great questions. And it'll help with some context. So I spent five years in medical device sales before I became a serial entrepreneur and started doing it full-time in 2020. But I got my start in 2018 and I built 200 websites on the side while I was in medical device sales, getting my feet wet into entrepreneurship, really just with like a side hustle because I wasn't making much money with it. But I was building up case studies, I was kind of getting my reps in, et cetera. And so in doing that, right, I went from medical device sales and I was selling CPAP equipment where we have really two competitors on masks and about one competitor on devices. I was having to grow my business, take care of my clients, do all of that. But from an insurance perspective here in the United States, our clients pretty much had to go with me or two other options at the most part. So there was no confusion on what you were gonna buy. It was, I had a 33% chance pretty much every single time. And we had in my market in St. Louis, uh in most of the state of Missouri, about a 70% market share on devices and then a little bit over a 50% share on mass. So I went from that to digital marketing full-time in 2020. And there are hundreds of thousands of options when it comes to hiring a digital marketing agency. There's also the ability for people to do it themselves: freelancers, small agencies, medium-sized agencies, large agencies, in-house, et cetera. So I quickly realized I am in this ocean, and it's very easy to get lost in that ocean. So about a month into that journey, I invested in a mastermind that taught me how to build a personal brand. And this is kind of where the building of authority essentially started. And so for about nine months, I built my digital marketing agency through my personal brand, and I did that on my own. Then I became a franchisee of a digital marketing agency, and then I became a partner in that agency as a whole. And at every step of the way, the main lead generator for the most part was things that I was doing organically through my personal brand. Yes, we had some SEO leads coming in and some paid ad stuff, but it was my podcast, it was my YouTube channel, it was my Facebook personally, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, all the different places, me being a guest on podcasts, speaking at events. So it really opened up my eyes that it doesn't matter what industry you're in, you can build authority with a combined strategy between your personal brand and then that of all the different digital marketing strategies that you're doing inside the business. And so where builders of authority started is for years I started to speak on stage. And with that, I was teaching other marketers, I was teaching people the simple concept of creating content. And I was sharing, hey, I grew my first agency from zero to a million in 15 months, and people were like, this is not rocket science. You just gave us the blueprint. Do you have coaching? Do you have a group coaching or a mastermind? And I just kept telling people, no, no, no, no. And then in November of 2023, I launched Builders of Authority and then I ended up exiting the agency that I was at in early 2024. And I kind of just went into one-to-one coaching and the mastermind aspect of personal branding, some CMO type stuff and consulting. And then from there, after the exit finalized through some legal stuff and some back and forth in October of 2024, we had the ability to relaunch our digital marketing agency. And so today, the mastermind and the coaching, I'm out of that business and back full time in doing digital marketing, mainly in the contracting and home service business space. We do work in the real estate investment space and some other local businesses with website design and development, SEO and the Google Business Profile, and then paid ads on Google and Facebook.

Tom DuFore 7:11

Thank you for sharing that and giving that summary. I think that is going to resonate deeply with a lot of the folks here. You've seen a lot of different angles as you've gone through this. Someone that tunes in or listens to this, they might be thinking, okay, I do find it interesting how you were able to grow your practice so quickly in the 15-month window, and that you found this universal application of essentially building your brand, regardless of whatever service or product you ended up selling. So are you working with clients today, or maybe just some general thoughts on using or building a brand to grow that local presence and maybe what you're doing to help your clients with that?

What A Personal Brand Really Is

Adam McChesney 7:55

So we do a lot of content creation still through my personal brand, whether it's our Facebook group, we got about 4,000 members that are in there that I'll just share tips and strategies about building a personal brand in digital marketing. The reason why I got out of the coaching and mastermind and really the personal brand space, if you will, is it still relies on somebody like you can't replicate, even with AI for the most part, a personal brand. It's what people think about you when you're not in the room. And it's that no like and trust factor. So I kept hitting my head of coaching people one-to-one or group coaching, and then people just aren't willing to go do the work. Whereas on the digital marketing side, it's like you hand over the keys and my team and I, we just go build out everything out for you. So it was easier to do that without their involvement, which is which is why I kind of course corrected there. But I still try to as much as possible share tips about, as an example today, been just hit four years of doing my podcast consistently every single week. You were a guest on it a couple of weeks ago. Just things that, again, may not be outside of the box, and they're typically not, but they're good reminders to anybody that sees my content. Because I don't care if you're a brand new business owner or you're a franchise or you're a franchisee, is you should always be building authority. And if you're waiting, you buy a franchise as a franchisee and you just expect it to blow up, right? There are cases where that happens because the brand is so big already and it doesn't require you to do so. But there are plenty of instances where it's like, hey, it's gonna take off, but if you want quicker results, why aren't you posting about the new franchise you bought? Why aren't you trying to go boots on the ground through your connections and through your experience, try to grow the company as well? So I try to hit it from as many different angles as I can to really build the top of the funnel for builders of authority.

Tom DuFore 9:53

It's not

Free Organic Marketing Before Paid

Tom DuFore 9:54

a uh you just buy the franchise and it turns into a money machine or an ATM. You still have to put some elbow grease in to operate the system in looking at brand building, investing resources, not just time, but money into doing this kind of outreach or expansion or marketing build out? What is it that you see, especially for some target customers that you service? What is it that you found that is there a, I'm sure it's not a one size fits all, but are there instances sometimes where some brands should be spending money on advertising or where they should always be doing what you were talking about here just a moment ago about building that brand in you with your current social channels or, you know, I guess I'm just trying to kind of build on some of those ideas you were sharing.

Adam McChesney 10:38

Yeah, so I don't think it's uh this or the other, but for a lot of people, especially if it's a new business and they don't buy into a franchise as an example, it you don't have some of the resources early on from an investment standpoint to be able to do both. Now, what a lot of people do is then they don't do the the the free and easy stuff, they don't build the brand through their personal brand on social media. You don't even know that they own a business if you go to their Facebook page. They may or may not have a LinkedIn, they may, if they're lucky, have a Google business profile, but there's very little reviews and no content there. So the people that actually really should be building a brand from the get-go are saying, Hey, I can't go pay a company, I can't go pay Facebook, I can't go pay Google for all this stuff, and then they take no action or very little action at all. You should be constantly building on the free and easy, the zero dollar cost activities. And then when you have the ability to invest, hopefully sooner rather than later, in the paid ad side, those things are both kind of taking off. And then ideally forever, you're doing both.

SEO Versus AI Search What Data Shows

Tom DuFore 11:47

You know, with this new changing, I don't want to say changing of a guard, but I mean, with AI coming full force and people going on and searching Google, people asking questions. You know, what's the difference here for you and what you're seeing with SEO versus AI searches and AI marketing? How does that all play in with what you're seeing and some of the things we've been talking about here?

Adam McChesney 12:11

Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot of different like opinions, I'll call it that, that's out there. That, oh my gosh, like I saw a crazy statistic yesterday that like in the next year or so, over 70% of searches are going to happen on Chat GPT and like the or AI in general, and like the guy is absolutely serious, like trying to back it up, do all these different things is you're seeing a lot of like the marketers that used to market all the different things back in the day, whether it was the courses or the coaching and all this stuff, like those are some of the people that are now seeing this as a cash grab or an intention building thing. And there's very few people that are actually creating data around all this stuff. So, are more people using Chat GPT and some of the other AI platforms to search now than they were this time last year? 1000%. Will that number continue to grow? 1000%. But there's a lot of people, again, with misinformation, that are repackaging this and saying, hey, you need to do AEO or LLMO or whatever the other thing is that they're gonna, you know, explain it as today. What we're seeing is that a lot of the same stuff that is ranking in Google is also ranking in those platforms. There are things that if you haven't been doing good SEO for a while, you weren't ranking in Google, and you definitely won't rank in AI. So there's a lot of bad information that's out there, unfortunately. And I just did a case study across all of our clients, so 100 plus clients over the last 12 months, 81,000 leads, and less than a percent of them came from AI-driven sources. Now, what you do see there is that it's usually a way higher quality customer. They're writing like novels in the contact forms, they're staying on the phone for 10 or 15 minutes because like they've already done their research, regardless if it's your website, chat, wherever, and now they're ready to move. And they're typically converting at a higher clip and usually a higher quality client. So all those things will continue to change and be impacted. But trying to change strategies and say, hey, I need to go do this and invest all this stuff over here, like there's gonna be this bubble that pops of all these people that drank the Kool-Aid and then went in this other direction while forgetting what's actually making them money and can make them money.

Tom DuFore 14:47

You know, thinking about kind of this blend, because it is a transition where we're transitioning, it may not ever fully be 100% AI. Google's gonna be around, right? With telephones still around, you know, cell phones and telephones and fax machines, albeit probably not a whole lot of folks are using those anymore. But these things don't just go away overnight in these instances. So when I think of some of the specific industries that you're serving with contractors and other types of businesses, you have these technological shifts impacting what's going on. There's

Private Equity Pressure Without Panic

Tom DuFore 15:22

also this, I guess, a changing of the face a little bit with private equity coming into this. How do you see this working in with these trades and other organizations and kind of making sense of all of this?

Adam McChesney 15:33

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing is you have to make sure you're utilizing your resources and being efficient, knowing enough to be dangerous as the business owner. So you're not making bad investments, getting into marketing with an agency as an example that's going to own all of your digital assets. We come into that a lot where it's a big national marketing agency. The contract seems great at the beginning, but then people realize they don't own their website, they don't own their ad accounts, and they're essentially renting out their own stuff. And so I kind of just go back to the like I've been through the wave of the last five and a half years, almost six years now, doing this from right out of the pandemic to literally people freaking out and cutting all marketing costs where we're at right now. Is there's nothing, in my opinion, right now, that should be panic-worthy decision making. And so, but that's what you're seeing happen. And and a lot of it comes from misinformation or it comes from feeling like you're missing out on something, but we're not talking about the internet just getting launched. And a lot of people are comparing it to the internet just getting launched. Well, do you remember Google back in the day, or do you remember Facebook back in the day? It was like Facebook was the first of its kind, and Google transformed literally everything else. You're gonna have to yank people away from these different things if you expect it to take up all the market share that all these people are saying. And so I think there's a lot of the misinformation, there's a lot of people saying things without data, which is why I've like, for the most part, with my content and with everything I shared, just say, hey, let's go back to the data. Like, what's the data telling us? And when I see data that says something different, I'm gonna go change our approach and go recommend doing things differently. But that's an aspect of it. The private equity thing has been interesting. They're willing to come in and write basically a blank check to take over market share to see what the opportunity is in that marketplace. And a lot of our clients and even franchisees, they can't keep up with some of that stuff. And so, again, it's about utilizing resources and being efficient, but not panicking. Like I know a handful of people that have sold the private equity over the last couple of years that that business is no longer in business because they went and screwed everything up, overspent in the marketplace, and it all was from a panic, right? And so I think being in that mode of panic or chaos in business in general, is you whether it's marketing or not, is not a great place to live and make important decisions on.

Where To Connect With Adam

Tom DuFore 18:07

How can someone learn more about you, connect with your podcast? You know, where can they go for this?

Adam McChesney 18:12

Yeah. So the best place is buildauthority.com. That's our website for the digital marketing agency. You can connect with me on social media, Adam McChesney. We also have a free Facebook group, and that free Facebook group, again, teaches a lot of the digital marketing and personal branding strategies that I talked about here today.

Tom DuFore 18:28

Perfect. Perfect. Adam,

Misses Wins Multipliers And Success

Tom DuFore 18:30

this is a great time in the show. We like to ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is Have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

Adam McChesney 18:40

Yeah, you know, I've been a franchisee, right? I've also had multiple business partners in a variety of different businesses. And in certain instances, I've mistrusted business partners or decisions that I've made because I didn't listen to my own advice. I didn't trust my gut. I also didn't listen to the advice of other people, and I didn't do my due diligence as I kind of just recommended everybody to do for their marketing stuff. So sometimes I had to take a dose of my own medicine, if you will. But yeah, different decisions, partnering with people in business because you don't necessarily trust yourself. Like those are some misses that I've had along the way.

Tom DuFore 19:17

Let's look at the other side. Let's look at a make or a highlight or two.

Adam McChesney 19:22

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is since we relaunched and had the ability to relaunch a digital marketing agency since October of 2024, we hit $2 million. Well, we had a million and two million dollars in 2025. So basically a brand new business. We eclipsed the seven figures and we eclipsed multiple second seven figures. And I grew from basically seven employees to over 40 in a 12-month time period. So those uh those have been some really cool things, kind of like the comeback story, the the rebuild.

Tom DuFore 19:50

How do you support and work through that growth? That sounds like a whole lot of folks coming in.

Adam McChesney 19:55

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing is having great people on your team to lead the rest of the team, the managers, the directors, the chief of staff that that kind of houses everything. But I it also comes down to core values, mission, and vision. A lot of them I've worked with or knew people that worked with them in the past. And so my personal brand has also helped recruit a lot of people as well. And so I think it's a combination of of all of those things.

Tom DuFore 20:19

Well, let's talk about a multiplier that you've used to multiply yourself personally, professionally, or organizations you've run.

Adam McChesney 20:26

Yeah, I think the the biggest thing is being in the rooms with people that are where you want to be. Sometimes that's a business coach, sometimes that's a masterminder community, sometimes that's just mentorship, getting mentored by somebody else, right? And then being willing to put the ego aside and get in those rooms and feel uncomfortable and ask the tough questions and be willing to get information back on how to improve. That's the biggest thing to, and I used to talk about it all the time is how do I condense time to be able to go get what I need to do without having to wait all of the years that it typically takes to do something? It's by getting in the right rooms with the right people.

Tom DuFore 21:04

And the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?

Adam McChesney 21:09

Yeah, so success is freedom, the freedom to work when I want to, where I want to, with who I want to, and how I want to while making what I want to as well.

Tom DuFore 21:18

Yeah, very good. Well, Adam, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you're hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

Adam McChesney 21:25

Double down on building your brand. If you've been shy to do so, or maybe you've done it, or maybe you used to do it, right? Your brand, especially on the personal brand side, and this is why I tell people about it so much, is that will go with you forever. A business venture, a franchise, like something else is potentially infinite or finite, meaning it can come to an end. Your personal brand is not. So double down on that, build it, build the authority, and never stop.

Key Takeaways Win Win And Closing

Tom DuFore 21:57

Adam, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let's go ahead and jump into today's three key takeaways. So, takeaway number one is when he defined the term personal brand. And I loved how he described it. He said, A personal brand is what people think about you when you are not in the room. I thought that was said very well. Takeaway number two is when he talked about the fact that you can build authority between your personal brand and grow your company, that those two things can coexist and not just coexist, work well together. Takeaway number three is when he advised to all of you owners and leaders and founders out there to make sure you're utilizing your resources well when it comes to marketing and to know enough about marketing to make good decisions for your business. I thought that was great that you don't have to know everything, but you've got to know enough so that you can make a sound business decision. And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win came at the end of the episode when Adam talked about doubling down on building your brand, especially your personal brand. And he said that because you can always take that with you no matter what you do. So whether this business you're running, you decide to get into a new business, or maybe that you're running your company and you franchise it, or you're franchising today. Well, this brand is going to help you grow your local business, your franchise business, and support your franchisees as you expand. It's a win-win all over the place. And so that's the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.