Darren Jamieson [04:43]
I was put in touch with you by one of my former guests, Al Pepper. Al, who is a legend over here in BNI. I’ve seen Al speak live, he’s just a phenomenal guy. Got some amazing stories to tell. Massive NFL fan as well, if you knew that.
Chris O’Shea [05:02]
So, funny story. I had the briefest of football careers, American football careers, Canadian football careers, and that’s where Al and I met. We were at the same university.
Darren Jamieson [05:10]
Wow.
Chris O’Shea [05:11]
I was not a football player in high school, but I always loved the game, wanted to try it. I was like, this is a thing that I have to do. I had chosen my university, I literally harassed the head football coach to give me a chance. He’s like, fine, stop bothering me. Come try out.
So I spent two solid weeks trying to play football with large men who were trying to hurt me very badly. I actually wound up hurting my hamstring very badly, and I kind of just hung it up. But that’s where Al and I connected. He was on that same squad of guys trying to be on the football team.
So I bailed early because I knew that was a bad idea. And then I had the smart idea of playing rugby. So that was phase two for me.
Darren Jamieson [06:04]
A smart idea, you think, playing rugby after football?
Chris O’Shea [06:07]
No, not at all. And I have the wounds to account for it. But that’s where I met Al. Al’s a fantastic guy. He’s always been a fantastic guy. I’m very pleased to hear, through you and through others, that he has the following and the street credibility in the BNI community and beyond that he deserves, because he’s a very good dude, as we like to say.
Darren Jamieson [06:29]
He is a fantastic guy. And when you were playing rugby, how long did that last?
Chris O’Shea [06:36]
That lasted longer, but equally tragic. Our university had a football programme and then a rugby programme. My rugby coach was a Scottish guy, his name is Ed Carti. He is still coaching rugby well into his 80s. He was my philosophy professor. Fantastic human.
So I picked up the oval ball to start playing rugby and again knew nothing of the game other than what I had seen on some match somewhere. We wound up having a hell of a career. I never lost a match in my university career. Now, to be fair, I’m division two at best.
But then I decided I wanted to continue on and I played senior men’s rugby here in Nova Scotia in Canada with a team called Cole Harbour. Cole Harbour actually produced some pretty stellar standout Canadian talent.
My scrum half, one of the scrum halves on the team, was Morgan Williams, whose father’s obviously from Wales. He played four Rugby World Cup tournaments as scrum half for Canada.
I made the tragic error of calling it a beer sport. So I would practise, play the game, then go drink beer. Morgan would practise, play the game, then go get physio, then go to the gym. Two different paths through the game.
I wound up injuring my knee pretty heavily and I wasn’t getting paid. So I was like, you know what, I think I’m good. I hung my boots up probably 97, 98, with a couple of concussions, a couple of shoulder separations, a few fractures. It is what it is. It’s how you go.
Darren Jamieson [08:33]
Yeah. Sorry, I was just distracted a second then. There was an alert sound popped up and I don’t know whether it was you or me. It shouldn’t have been me because I do deactivate everything.
Chris O’Shea [08:44]
If I’m pinging, let me close all of this stuff. I know Microsoft does have a habit of un-deactivating deactivation sounds.
Darren Jamieson [08:56]
Exactly. But why would you possibly want to not have this pinging throughout your day? This very important random email. Somebody gave me a thumbs up on a WhatsApp message you sent five weeks ago. You need to know about this, 100%.
Chris O’Shea [09:08]
Damn sons of it. Story of our lives.
Darren Jamieson [09:16]
I’ve completely lost my train of thought now.
Chris O’Shea [09:18]
That’s quite all right. We’ve been all over the place already.
Darren Jamieson [09:21]
We have. So, while you were at university trying to start an NFL career, which didn’t last very long, and a rugby career which did last a long time, what were you actually in university for? Presumably a rugby scholarship.
Chris O’Shea [09:34]
There was no rugby scholarship in my future. I took a bit of a winding road, but I wound up getting into the business programme at my university, and Al’s university, St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Beautiful spot, great campus.
As most people who go through university say, best four years of my life, kind of a scenario of just enjoying life, learning some things. It was a management programme, a taste for business, and that got me into the business world.
My graduating year was probably one of the worst years of the 20th century to actually graduate and try to find a job. It was a struggle. It was a slog.
So I started with sales jobs. I tried a few different things, nothing really stuck. A good friend of mine, one of my roommates in university, went back to school and went into tech. There was a programme here in Canada that was a nine-month immersive tech programme where they can get you into programming and things along those lines.
So I was like, hell yeah, let’s do that. I’m not going anywhere with what I’ve got. I went into tech, and the next thing you know, graduated from that programme, and at that time it was Y2K. If you were in a tech role of any kind, there was a job for you somewhere.
My fiancée at the time, who’s now my wife, and I were like, okay, what do we want to do? We decided to go across the border. I could have gotten a job in San Diego, Houston, Boston, and we wound up, I worked with a little SAP web development company in Boca Raton, Florida.
So, packed up from the cold Arctic of Canada and moved to the sunny climes of South Florida in the United States.
Darren Jamieson [11:21]
Quite a difference in climate.
Chris O’Shea [11:23]
Quite a difference. We spent six years down there and it was awesome. It was a very unique time of tech. We went through the dot-com bust, the whole nine yards. I learned, I don’t know, half a dozen programming languages that nobody wants me to programme in anymore, which I completely understand.
Darren Jamieson [11:45]
What languages were websites being built in by your company?
Chris O’Shea [11:49]
We were coding HTML 4 straight up. Then we would use ASP if you’re doing something on the Microsoft side, or you could use Java as a middleware, like whatever we were building.
We were doing a lot of taxer integrations, so SAP and taxer integrations. ABAP programming, and again, nobody wants me to do that anymore, and that’s a very good idea. It’s a lot of dead languages.
But it actually set me up quite significantly for future success. I came back and worked in tech consulting here once we moved back from South Florida back to home here in Nova Scotia and Canada.
I worked in tech consulting, then I transitioned into marketing. I was at a marketing agency for a couple of years. My current role is with the Business Development Bank of Canada, which is a stellar organisation, to be very frank.
We’re a functional financial institution, bank, term lending, the whole nine yards. Then we have this little arm of it, which is advisory services, which is where I live, supporting clients with whatever they need to do.
I work in the growth side of things. Somebody says they want to grow their small business, I’m in. Let’s go. That could be sales, marketing, some sort of digital technology conversation. All that backstory kind of fed into where I’m at today.
We work with every type of industry you could possibly think of as part of being in this ecosystem of Canadian business. It’s been working phenomenally. Everybody who works with this organisation is in for the mandate, which is to help small business succeed.
Not too dissimilar to what you guys are doing with the BNI world, because we have a chapter here in Halifax. I’m well familiar with what that does, so it’s understanding a little bit more about that ecosystem. It’s near and dear to my heart.
It’s a very forward-thinking organisation, trying to get companies to be living in the world that we live in right now and not 10 years ago. Many of them still want to live in the 10 year world, so it’s trying to help them do that.
Darren Jamieson [14:17]
There are a lot of businesses that keep trying to market like it was 1990s or early 2000 and think that kind of stuff works. A lot of older style businesses like golf clubs, for example, keep trying the same thing and wondering why their membership is dwindling.
When you were working in web design helping small businesses in the early 2000s in Boca Raton, is that how you pronounce it, Boca Raton?
Chris O’Shea [14:40]
Boca. Right on the east coast of Florida, just between Miami and West Palm Beach.
Darren Jamieson [14:46]
Oh, nice.
Chris O’Shea [14:47]
It is nice. Not going to lie, there were lots of tears shed when we decided to come back to the tundra.
Darren Jamieson [14:57]
I’ve been to Miami, but I’ve not been to Boca Raton.
Chris O’Shea [14:59]
Yeah, about an hour and a half up the coast basically.
Segment 2 [15:05–24:59]
Darren Jamieson [15:05]
Could you have foreseen how the digital world would have changed in the 20 odd years since then?
Chris O’Shea [15:13]
Oh my god, no. Not even. We were in it at the time. One of the big benefits of me specifically being in code was there was no WordPresses or Shopifies or anything out there. That was a revelation for me as a web developer, to be like, I don’t have to code from line one, this is fantastic, where do I sign up?
To see it mature and become this enterprise level tool set. Back in those days everything was so hands-on and manual. You’re building compilers.
For me, I am a C++ programmer at best. Being in an ecosystem with A+ talent, they just know it. They just know what to do. That was extremely eye opening for me. I learned enough to be competent. Let’s call it competent.
But when you get in it and it’s part of your DNA, seeing that talent do that work at that level is magic to me. I’ve seen the same thing in the financing world with finance people who algorithmically think in that way. I can’t even step up to the plate, to use a baseball analogy.
Marketing is a little bit more my speed. But when I’m in it and I’m doing the work, knowing that I’m out of my element but learning, drinking through a fire hose every day, it is wondrous to see how those things get.
To answer your question, the progress to where we are with Gen AI tools and all the things happening now, there was no crystal ball for me on that at all. I’m sure somebody I worked with could say, oh, this is where I can see the train going. Nope, not me. This has been me trying to play on the front foot and really keep up with what’s going on around me.
That’s what I learned being in the tech space, understanding the rules of engagement, waterfall development, whatever we want to call it. Now we’re in this gen AI, Kubernetes, C++ tied to something, data lakes, all of that stuff. That background serves me well.
Do I have full 100% comprehension of it? No. Can I talk the talk to a point where I understand what’s going on? Absolutely.
That was the real benefit of me being in that space, in that community, in that workforce. Now here I am 20 years later trying to help small businesses wrap their minds around it, and they are very much not in that space at all. This has been the best of both worlds from my side.
Darren Jamieson [18:04]
As you specialise with helping small businesses, and we work with a lot of small businesses as well, one thing I’ve found to be a bit of a problem as technologies got easier to use, and as you mentioned WordPress has come out and Wix has come out, it means that anybody with no experience whatsoever can say, “I’m a web designer.”
They can charge people to build a website, charge people to build a Wix website that they could do themselves with three clicks of a button, but other people will charge them for it. Do you think that’s damaging small businesses, that the barrier to entry is non-existent now?
Chris O’Shea [18:44]
As you posted something about the car situation on LinkedIn, I posted about it last week, literally last week or the week before.
How many times have I seen entrepreneurs, company owners come in and be sold a bill of goods? Maybe that was a good bill of goods, maybe it wasn’t, but they have no yardstick to measure. Is this good? Is this not good? He says it’s $10,000 or £10,000. What is it? What does that mean?
My broad statement was, if you own a business, you need to know how the stuff works. Do you need to be able to code a website? Absolutely not. But you need to understand the mechanisms, the things that make this work. Otherwise, somebody who hangs their shingle out and says they’re a web designer, and they’re using a templatized Wix site, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, that’s a problem.
Has the industry done itself a disservice by allowing that to happen a little bit? Some of that is not necessarily anything nefarious. That is just people saying, hey, there’s an opportunity here. I’m going to make my own small business. I’m going to do what I can. I’m not an expert, but I’ll learn.
Some of that works out and some of that doesn’t work out. My job is to come behind all that and point out the elephants in the room and the red herrings and the that’s not good and why did you do that.
And I am the worst designer in the history of designers, so I have no commentary about that.
Darren Jamieson [20:15]
I bet you’re not. Really. I bet you’re not. I would challenge your statement, but hey, I’ll take it.
Chris O’Shea [20:27]
For me, that’s not the goal. The goal is, this tool, if you’re going to build a website, what do you want this thing to do? What is the outcome for you? And when it doesn’t do what you want it to do, why?
Is it the designer developer’s fault? Is it you don’t know what to do with it? Do you even know what to do with SEO and meta tags? Do you even know what that means? What’s an alt tag? Do you know what an alt tag is?
When they don’t and they expect some level of outcome or success, I’m like, time out. Not how this works. You can’t expect an outcome from something that you don’t understand.
If you’re an expert and it still fails, there’s a different problem. Something else is going sideways. But for most companies, they don’t have the expertise. They’re expecting somebody, that third party, to bring that expertise. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.
At the end of the game, if it’s my website and I’m taking responsibility for it and it’s not doing what I want it to do, that’s a learning opportunity for me.
Best case scenario, if it isn’t working, ask ChatGPT what’s going on, what happened. Suddenly you have a story. Maybe it’s the right story or not, but it’s something you can sink your teeth into.
This is the responsibility I want business owners to take advantage of. If you expect something to happen, you need to have ownership of that. They don’t even own the domain. Not even their domain.
Darren Jamieson [22:07]
We had a conversation with somebody about that just today.
Chris O’Shea [22:13]
There you go. Their web designer owned the domain, not them. In that world, shame on them, but at the same time you don’t know what you don’t know.
Part of my role is to educate a little bit about that. Not expecting an entrepreneur to be a web developer coming out of a conversation with me, but certainly be aware these are the things they need access to.
It’s a tough space for a lot of practitioners. If I’m a chiropractor, I’m good at chiropracticing. I have no idea what that is. Totally fair.
But if you’re looking to scale and grow a business, this becomes part of your job, as challenging as that might be.
Darren Jamieson [23:01]
The most frustrating thing for me is we speak to a lot of people who have websites already or are looking to get a website, and they don’t actually know what they want it to do. They think, I need to have a website because that’s what somebody’s told me, that’s what a business advisor told me, or that’s what my competitors got. What do you actually want it to do? I don’t know. I get that all the time.
Chris O’Shea [23:26]
I’ll take that because there’s a learning path there. What do you want it to do? Let’s talk through it. Are you looking to book appointments? Sell product? Get contacts? What are you trying to do? Then you can reverse engineer that process.
It’s the ones that have an expectation with no basis of understanding. That’s where it gets hairy.
We’ll see companies trying to do wholesale integrated e-commerce to an ERP system and have no idea what that means. They have an ERP system, they have a website, they want the two to talk for inventory and sales and customer data and all that. Sounds amazing, except that’s really hard.
When they’re like, we’ll just make it happen, nope, that’s not how this works.
It gives them an opportunity to understand why this is challenging. Is it going to get easy over time? AI, Zapier, whatever, sure. But if you build it, they will not come. This is the world we live in, and they have to wrap their minds around that.
Darren Jamieson [24:34]
The worst thing I found, and this happened when I used to work at a digital marketing agency in Manchester back in the late 2000s, and I still see it now. We’re doing a lot of audits for businesses coming to us for SEO audits. They want us to look at SEO for them.
But the big problem is, and I learned this right at the start of the millennium, if your website is, there is no amount of SEO, no amount of sending traffic to that website that is going to make it work.
People have a website they built themselves as a hobby project, or they got their son-in-law to do it, or they got somebody to do it on Wix, and it is a crap website. But they are paying for Facebook ads, Google ads, or paying somebody to do SEO. They want us to look at it and say, why am I not getting enough traffic.
Traffic is not your problem. No one is going to go to this website and put their trust in you. Some are really high value services like financial advisers or estate planners. They expect to look after people’s hundreds of thousands, millions, in their estate after they die. They’re not going to trust you because your site looks like it was built by a four-year-old. That’s what really pisses me.
Chris O’Shea [24:59]
I completely agree with you.
Segment 3 [25:00–34:59]
Chris O’Shea [25:00]
I’ll double down on what you’re saying. Companies without trusted support and advice will carry on thinking, we’ll just throw more traffic at it, more ads, more this, more that, and something’s going to work. Keep doing it. Something’s going to work. None of that is true.
Even worse is the world we live in where there’s so much data available to them that they never look at. Google Analytics, never looked at it, don’t even know what that is. Heat mapping on a site, don’t know what that is.
Stuff that would give them a story. Move your form up to the top of the page, maybe let’s do that. Number of times I’ve had to say that.
Darren Jamieson [26:41]
You land on their website and there’s a massive photograph. You’ve got to scroll down three times just to get to the bottom of what am I looking at?
Chris O’Shea [26:51]
I literally had a client, lovely guy, same thing. He had a responsive, well-built website as far as he was concerned. If you pushed it and shook it, it was solidly built.
Then I asked them to do this. Your customer, find the contact us button. Thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb. Oh, there it is. I’m like, does that seem like a good idea?
It’s little silly things that we recognise right out of the gate. They’re like, oh my god, that’s why nobody’s contacting me. Oops.
That’s the value folks like us bring to the table. We’ve been punched in the face enough to know how it’s supposed to work. You thought you were getting something amazing, you got something terrible.
It doesn’t mean you throw the whole thing in the ditch. Or maybe you do, but you have to look at it through the lens of the customer. Once you do that, the light bulbs start to come early and often.
SEO is such a long play, such a dog’s breakfast of competitors and keywords and meta tags, and now we throw AEO and GEO on top of that. There’s all kinds of stuff these folks have to navigate.
I always say, take it back to the customer and work forward from there. If the customer has something they’re asking for all the time, why don’t we create a page for that? That sounds like a good idea.
It’s trying to help folks, again, it’s not their day job. I empathise. Their day job is to be a chiropractor or whatever. This is another wrinkle, but it is the responsibility of the business owner to take ownership of this.
If the website is their conversion path, you got to own it. It’s your conversion path. It’s not the web developer. The web developer is going to do or not do whatever they are or not going to do. You got to be able.
You get the Google Analytics report, three-page PDF slid across the desk, and they’re like, look at everything that we’re doing. What am I supposed to do with that? And they’re like, well, it’s all green lights. Everything’s up and to the right. It’s got to be good. Nope.
Darren Jamieson [29:25]
That’s why we stopped doing ranking reports years ago. Where you rank in Google for a keyword is completely irrelevant. It’s how many people are searching for it, coming through to the website. Still not that relevant. How many people are actually inquiring with you? Are they the right kind of inquiries? How many people are buying? Are they the right kind of orders? Are they coming back and buying again? That’s what matters. Where you rank for a keyword, not that important.
Chris O’Shea [29:57]
How much money are you making? That’s what’s important. Business results and customers. That’s it. That’s the real meat on the bone.
Not to try to make practitioners become web nerds. But it’s helping see through that fog. Goals, outcomes, that becomes a key piece of the puzzle.
Now with all of this AI stuff, I’m keeping tabs on it, probably like you are. I’m watching the Rand Fishkin videos and things along those lines, what he’s seeing from AI search versus traditional Google.
Google is still 10x, 100x more than ChatGPT search, but it’s going to change. It will flex.
How do we keep people aware of that as well? Full respect to entrepreneurs, they’re dealing with enough already, and now we’re throwing this on top of the pile. It’s a hard ask.
When they have somebody within the business that they can trust, who can be the transition or translator, says, here’s what the web company says, here’s what that actually means, here’s what the action plan is, off you go. Whether that’s an employee or a third party, I’m okay with all of that because at least they’re getting good advice.
When they don’t have any of that and expect an outcome, that’s tough.
Darren Jamieson [31:24]
One of the things you wrote down when we initially started talking about this interview was boring marketing for B2B businesses. I’ve been in SEO a long time. I’ve created a lot of content for clients. There are clients you get where you think this is going to be easy. This is such an exciting client. Then you get those where you think, okay, this is going to be a stretch. What’s your view on boring marketing for B2B clients?
Chris O’Shea [32:09]
I got a lot of opinions. Marketing in 2025 is very difficult for many reasons, but one of the reasons is most brands, most companies are straight up boring. They’re not saying anything that their core customer would recognise as interesting, educational, helpful, funny, cute, whatever.
The clients I work with don’t necessarily understand. Again, I don’t expect a funeral home to be funny. That’s not the goal. But I’ve seen some that are.
They need to understand what is the thing that will get someone interested in what they do. Obviously, I hope I don’t have to deal with a funeral home, but if I do, who do I choose? Where do I go? What do I do?
In our vintage we had the yellow pages. Start the A’s, AAA funeral home. That doesn’t work now.
So in the B2B space specifically, commercial industrial companies, if they take a step back and look at how they’re approaching their market space, serious business, big ticket item sales or contracts, they still have to get a human being to interact with them, who may not be a customer today.
So how do we do that? Reverse engineering customer is always the way we start. Who is that director of procurement that is going to call you?
If they know you through word of mouth, I’ll take word of mouth all day. But short of that, what else you got?
From a marketing perspective, how do we make sure we’re relevant and interesting to that director of procurement or buyer, so they understand who we are, what we do, why we’re different?
Not enough companies spend time on that. They’re good at the whats and the hows. They’re terrible at the whys. What we do, they can talk about all day. How we do it, they can talk about that. Why we do it, they can’t.
This is the stuff that gets people activated.
Segment 4 [35:00–44:59]
Darren Jamieson [35:02]
There are certain brands in the UK you would consider relatively boring, and they inject personality and character. There’s a supermarket chain called Aldi. They start wars with other supermarkets. They post stuff about how their legal team is constantly fighting them to put stuff online.
We don’t know if they’ve really had legal cases going on or whether it’s all just in good nature. How far should a company go if it thinks, right, I want to stand out against my competition, I’m in a relatively boring space? Where’s the fine line between standing out and everybody remembering you, or going too far and people seeing you as they can’t be trusted to be serious in business?
Chris O’Shea [36:05]
That’s a risk. In B2B, risk aversion is everywhere. We have to be serious, professional. Nobody’s showing up in a hoodie, whatever those things are.
To that point, somebody who gets it, everybody’s familiar, is Ryan Reynolds and Maximum Effort in his branding and marketing.
There’s one company, shame on me, the company name escapes me, but they did a commercial for a 3PL company about moving goods. Very boring business. Moving truckloads on ships, containers, stuff like that.
If I can swear, go for it.
Darren Jamieson [37:13]
Swear away.
Chris O’Shea [37:18]
The whole thesis of the Maximum Effort ad was, what’s a ton? We move a ton of stuff. What’s a ton? Awesome. Just awesome.
That kind of stuff is a big risk. They’re in a serious business where goods must move across certain geography at a certain time frame. They’re talking about tons and buttloads. Stand up and clap. Good for you. Now you have personality on top of that.
Whether it’s Aldi or this company, that’s what I want B2B companies thinking about. Do they have to do that? No. Do they have to make a mark, take a stand, make a statement, be bolder, be braver? Absolutely.
If they’re in an oversubscribed business, meaning the phone just rings, we don’t got to do anything, I still want them to do that. If the phone ever stops ringing, what are you going to do? You don’t start from zero.
Get that flywheel spinning. Who we are, why we’re here, our version or flavour of that from a marketing perspective. That makes them stand apart. Standing apart is everything in my world.
Darren Jamieson [38:42]
I’ve got two follow-up questions from that. I’m going to ask the second one I thought of because I’ve never asked it of someone before, and it’s perfectly relevant because you mentioned being in an oversubscribed business.
I hear this a lot when I’m trying to help businesses come along to this networking group. Or SEO for a website. The biggest objection I hear is, I don’t need that. I get all my business now from word of mouth. I get all my business from recommendations from customers. Who knows what happens when that stops?
Chris O’Shea [39:19]
Exactly. There’s two problems to that.
Right now, there is a veritable tsunami of entrepreneurs, business owners in Canada with a certain demographic that are like, “I’m out. I’m done. I’ve got to sell this thing. We’re moving to Florida. We’re moving to Barbados. We’re out.”
They look to the market and the market says, “How do you get your business?”
Word of mouth.
Awesome.
“What do you do for marketing?”
Nothing.
“What money do you spend on your sales team?”
Nothing.
“Oh, and you want twenty-six million dollars for that business?”
Don’t think so.
They’re getting hit square between the eyes because they have not built the fundamentals of the business.
I love that conversation when somebody says, “No, I don’t need all that. I’ve got word of mouth coming out of my ears.” Amazing. Except what happens if somebody has a bad experience? You start getting poor reviews. Somebody says you’re a jerk. AI makes up lies about you. Suddenly that word of mouth goes. Now what have you got?
The fundamentals of business do not change. I want business owners, I want entrepreneurs to build the machine. And the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to do is say no. Say no to a customer. “I need you to do this and that.” Can’t do it. They’re allergic to that.
And that, in my headspace, is the best place to be. I want to say no all the time because I’m so busy. I’m so full. The machine is still turning out. The phone is ringing. I couldn’t take another deal or another customer even if I wanted to.
I want that phone ringing off the hook all day, every day. Nope. Nope. Nope. See you in six months. You want to wait? Okay.
This is demand creation.
Demand creation, for me, is the stuff that entrepreneurs take for granted and then they don’t execute on. You take it for granted when the phone rings. When it stops ringing and you haven’t built a demand creation engine, what do you have? Nothing. That’s what you have.
It’s establishing with entrepreneurs what that means. And I’ve got lots of entrepreneurs that want to go on the hockey stick. There we go. We’re a trillion-dollar company. Amazing. How are you going to do that? On the back of what?
And then it’s establishing how that’s going to work in a world where you’ve got to be profitable. You can’t just say yes to everything and then fingers crossed you make money at the end of the year. That’s a bad idea.
So it’s understanding. There’s a lot of moving parts to this. But if you create the machine, the machine runs itself. It’s a flywheel. Once the flywheel starts to spin, I don’t care if anybody talks about me at a backyard barbecue. I don’t care about that.
I’ve got seventy-five people lined up to take me on as a next vendor because I’m really good at what I do. They know exactly when I’m busy. They know I’m good. They know I’m going to solve their problem. They will wait six months or they will go to a competitor, have a bad experience, and then they’ll come back to me anyway.
It’s helping entrepreneurs look at it from a place of adaptation. And then from a place where they think that abundance is happening. It’s not scarcity, it’s abundance.
Everybody who’s my target will come to me if they know I exist and I have a good outcome for them.
And it’s getting them to think like that. Because if the phone’s ringing, great. But if the sun doesn’t come up tomorrow, what do we do? It’s helping them navigate what that means.
And that’s a challenging place for a lot of companies. That is not a small thing. And I’m quite certain that’s the same in the UK as it is here.
Darren Jamieson [43:37]
We bought a couple of businesses a couple of years ago and we’ve been on the lookout for more since. A big problem we found with businesses is pretty much what you’ve just described.
They’ll have word-of-mouth referrals. They’ll have business coming in. But it’s coming in because of that person. A personal recommendation. And then when they leave and sell the business, there is no business.
There’s no business because there’s no sales team. There’s no referral process. There’s no pipeline of sales. It’s them. And once they go, you’ve got to replace them. And that’s going to cost you fifty, sixty, seventy thousand a year to replace the managing director and the sales manager, because it’s one person doing two jobs.
There’s no profit.
Chris O’Shea [44:26]
No business, no profit.
And on the other side of the fence, they want all the money. They absolutely want all the money. Everybody thinks their business is worth a million dollars.
There is a lot of retirement funding built into that model you just described. And that’s a hard place when that message doesn’t come across cleanly.
Technology is the poster child for that. They haven’t invested in technology. The website was built by the nephew seventeen years ago. All of those things stack on top of each other and they still want all the money.
And at least in Canada, it will be a buyer’s market for businesses for the foreseeable future. It’s understanding that as well. You might be talking to me, but you might have seven different businesses on your roster to talk about. What do you want to do about that?
When I say tsunami, I truly mean it. This wave is continuing to build.
Darren Jamieson [45:35]
To go back to something we were talking about earlier, not as far back as Ryan Reynolds, but almost.
When you talked about businesses setting themselves out there and doing something creative to stand out. If I’m a business owner of a boring business right now, let’s say I’m a stationery seller or an accountant, and I think I want to do that. I want to make a name for myself. I want to stand out.
I want to do something that has people going, “Wow, he’s the Aldi of accountants.”
How do I do that?
Chris O’Shea [46:12]
I love this.
There’s two angles to it. Brand strategy has to live with the company you’ve built. A boring company, that makes total sense. A CPA, an accountant, a lawyer. That reflects who you are as a business.
I don’t want somebody trying to be funny who’s not funny. That’s going to fall flat.
But on the flip side, who are you? If you are a serious professional who knows what you do to the nth degree, we need to present that. That’s not you being in a boring business. That’s you being the expert in the field.
Once you build out what that strategy is, funny, cute, smart, experienced, whatever, everything has to be reflective of that. The customer is going to own that brand.
They’re going to be the ones who say, “Oh yeah, he’s super experienced. That guy’s a genius.”
How do we use that to our advantage in everything we do?
We don’t want to be cute one day, funny the next, serious the next. That doesn’t work. It’s confusing.
So it’s establishing with an individual, an organisation, a founder, who are you? What does this turn into? Who’s going to respond to that?
And then it’s the standing apart. You can’t just say the same thing everybody else says and expect a different outcome. You’re just vanilla.
How about we be chocolate?
What does that mean? Messaging, presence, whatever it is. If it’s a serious professional, I want that serious professional on every podcast about that profession that we can get them in front of.
It builds the brand. And it’s serious. We’re talking about law. Fine. Let’s talk about that.
And it has to be in lockstep. If it’s not, it doesn’t work.
And then we expect an outcome and we’re disappointed.
Darren Jamieson [49:01]
One of the other things you mentioned in our correspondence before this interview was about creating demand for your business.
Chris O’Shea [49:19]
Yep.
Darren Jamieson [49:20]
We have a TV show here in the UK. You’ve got it in America. I don’t know if it’s still on in America. The Apprentice.
Chris O’Shea [49:24]
Yep.
Darren Jamieson [49:25]
Used to be. We lost Donald Trump to a very big job, as you might have heard.
Chris O’Shea [49:28]
Yeah. He went and got his own apprentice job.
Darren Jamieson [49:30]
And then Schwarzenegger took over for a bit.
Chris O’Shea [49:32]
He’s doing great on The Apprentice.
Darren Jamieson [49:35]
They always, on the tasks where they have to create a product, they’re set up to fail by the way it’s edited.
They’ll create the product, write, “This is the product we’re going to do. We’ve branded it. We’ve now got this pitch with this company we’re going to sell it to.”
And then the other team will go off and do market research to see if there’s a demand for the product, which is after they’ve already created it.
The market research finds out there’s no demand for the product. And then they’ll either tell the first team, “There’s no demand, it’s a bit rubbish,” or they’ll lie and say, “Everybody loved it.”
Then they go in and try to sell it and the experts say, “No, there’s no demand for that.”
They do it the wrong way round.
Chris O’Shea [50:16]
That’s good TV.
Darren Jamieson [50:17]
It’s great TV. They all look stupid, but it’s great TV.
So how do you create demand for your product when you’re already in a business, without doing it the wrong way round like The Apprentice?
Chris O’Shea [50:28]
One hundred percent.
This is the stuff that very few companies invest enough in, which is product market fit, market research, understanding.
I said it earlier in this conversation, the customer is everything. If you don’t know who your customers are deeply, intimately, not just females thirty-seven to forty, that’s a starting point, great, but you need to know what makes those human beings tick.
You can’t fundamentally change their behaviours or thoughts if you don’t know what influences that conversation. Whether that’s a sales conversation or a marketing conversation doesn’t really matter.
If there’s not enough of them, we’re kind of screwed from the get-go.
So how do we not do that?
Understanding your market space. And the thing I always say, and so many companies say this, “All I need is zero point two percent of the total thirty-billion-dollar market and I’ll be a millionaire.”
What are we even talking about?
Total addressable market matters to IBM, Microsoft, Apple. For ABC Corporation in Yorkshire, it means absolutely nothing.
Yet they’re like, “It’s a two-billion-dollar industry.” What are we talking about?
That confusion is where a lot of companies start running into trouble.
SaaS is a great example. “It’s a two-trillion-dollar industry.” You are this big. You are a pimple, and you’re worried about two trillion dollars.
It’s understanding why that market is even interested in what you have to offer, if it’s interested at all.
And then what are we going to do about that in terms of putting information in front of an audience that gets them thinking about it?
You can create demand. You cannot manufacture it. If it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist.
Darren Jamieson [52:43]
That reminds me of The Simpsons when Marge Simpson went to a franchise fair to decide which franchise she was going to buy.
I think she ended up buying some sort of baking franchise and it turned into a turf war.
But while she was walking around the franchise fair, Disco Stu had his own disco franchise. He was very selective with his figures.
He said something like, “Between nineteen seventy-six and nineteen seventy-seven, disco music went up six hundred percent. If that trend continues.”
Chris O’Shea [53:16]
I recall all of that.
Yes, there’s a lot of that going around. There’s a lot of disco out there.
Darren Jamieson [53:28]
If someone’s listening to this and thinking, “This guy’s absolutely insane. I want to find out more. I want to speak to him. I want to get him into my business. I want to hear him speak.”
What’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you?
Chris O’Shea [53:44]
I’m putting out content on LinkedIn fairly regularly.
Darren Jamieson [53:48]
Spitting out content. I like that. That’s down with the kids.
Chris O’Shea [53:51]
Spitting it out.
My LinkedIn profile is probably the best place to start. And not because I’m trying to get views, but I want people to watch my content because it’s the thesis.
It’s where my thinking lives. I say this to everybody who says, “Oh, you do content on LinkedIn.” Yeah, because I’ve got to get it out of my head.
It’s either coming out through my ears or while I’m walking my dog.
I’ve been in the small business space, including marketing, for almost fifteen years. You see patterns. You stay current on trends.
What I’m trying to impress upon companies is that the way we’ve done things is not the way we’re going to do things in the future.
That future could be next week. It could be twenty-twenty-eight. But it is a shift that a lot of people are not ready for.
So for me, get in touch, be part of my world, start there. LinkedIn, YouTube, it’s all under my name.
It’s important to me that people pay attention, whether it’s me, you, Al, to how things are shifting.
The world has changed. There’s just a lag in the system. The system hasn’t caught up yet.
How do we help companies navigate that?
That’s the thesis. That’s what you hear in my content.
My ideal client is really small businesses in Canada. I don’t do side consulting. I’m working with Canadian entrepreneurs in my current role.
It’s important to me they have access to people like me, whether that’s me or someone else in the ecosystem.
It’s about helping them be better.
It’s a tough time for Canadian companies, especially those connected to the American market. Every day is different right now.
Some days are good. Some days are really not good.
Darren Jamieson [56:38]
That was a long-winded answer and a really upbeat message to end on.
Chris O’Shea [56:46]
All the positivity.
Darren Jamieson [56:48]
We’ll bring in some music. Maybe the Benny Hill theme.
Chris O’Shea [56:53]
Perfect.
Darren Jamieson [56:55]
I’ll put links to your LinkedIn and YouTube in the show notes below the podcast so people can scroll down, click, and follow Chris.
Watch him walk his dog. He’s got to get it out of his head. Think of his poor dog.
Chris O’Shea [57:12]
The dog’s either an expert in marketing by now or he’s looking for a new home.
Darren Jamieson [57:17]
One or the other.
Chris, thank you very much for being a guest on the podcast.
Chris O’Shea [57:23]
My absolute pleasure. This was amazing.
