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The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
AI-First Marketing For A Legacy Industry With Renaud Delaquis
00:48:57
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- [00:00]
A
Howdy. So I wanted to just give you a quick preview to this interview that I'm about to do. It's with a AI first company and we don't talk as much about digital marketing, but we talk about how AI impacts all the different parts of a business. We went into marketing, but local marketing, how to measure it. We talked about hr, how that's impacted by it, and what you can do with these models from a data analysis standpoint, one of the things even that we've done recently is the Unknown secrets of Internet marketing. No one's really listening to our back catalog, right? Because things are changing with SEO, even though there's some really good foundational information there. So we took AI and we turned the last 12 years into a book and you can actually get this on Amazon. We're going to have all kinds of, like, giveaways and stuff like that. But it's a really cool use where we took 710, I think, podcasts and we put it together in a book called the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing that you can get, we can pass out. And then it also links you to the new podcasts. And that's just one of the use cases. And I think AI first companies are going to win. And in this new economy, a lot of the certifications that I'm getting and where my learning's going is to learning LLMs, how machine learning works, how it can be applied, and then the possibility gets opened up. And so this is one of first, one of the first, hopefully of many interviews that I do with AI first companies. I'm trying to get people on both sides of the desk, if you will, from agency owners to online businesses to physical businesses, legacy businesses, how marketing is impacting them and how business leaders are dealing with the rise of AI. So hopefully you enjoyed the podcast. Thanks so much. This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. Today I have a special episode for you as we continue to explore LLM visibility and we're moving into everything AI. I have been trying to bring on other agencies and also other companies and we're trying to go beyond what's happening in search. There's a lot of fun stuff to talk about LLM visibility, but it's on the tail end of the curve. And what I'm seeing is businesses that are Starting to build that AI layer and try to transform into a AI first company are revolutionizing how they do business and how they acquire customers. And so I wanted to bring on Renaud from Canada, but works with a US based company called Coastline Academy, which is a driving school, which is kind of a old school business. So I'm seeing a lot of venture capital buddies of mine that are like, hey, we're going to go into legacy businesses and we're going to transform them with AI. And I feel like you're at the cutting wave of that. You have a strong E commerce background, you know a lot about digital marketing, a lot about SEO. And we're seeing marketing and sales start to tap into all these other things in the operations of the business to help it run more efficiently. So I'm excited to have you on and talk a little bit more about this.
- [03:46]
B
Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
- [03:49]
A
Well, why don't we just start with like what's most topical for you as far as how you're seeing the world as a digital marketer, as an SEO. But a lot of things that are changing for you aren't necessarily SEO or paid ads or what have you. It's really how AI is affecting the operations and the workflow in the business, from what I understand.
- [04:13]
B
Yeah, it's a super interesting time because obviously, as with any industry, AI is changing everything, at least if you allow it to. And very often it'll change things that you don't expect. So to give a little bit of background about the company. So we're the largest driving school in the, in the US we started right before COVID and we managed to grow quickly. Now we're in 500 locations, we're in nine states. And the way that we approached this was through technology. And so we had our own AI system before ChatGPT was launched. Like we, we had a very smart CTO who just put together this, the system that would pair a driver or an instructor with a student and optimize when someone, where someone will be in the future and optimize their scheduling so that we could fit more lessons in a day while minimizing the travel time between between lessons. So that's kind of where the company is coming from. So really we approach the driving education like this old school company, like this old school industry with a kind of a new lens. And so you would think that when AI like all those AI tools are coming, like just came up, that we would be using them and just leveraging the crap out of them. And we tried and then we kind of realized that okay, we're kind of, it doesn't really work the way we thought it would. So if I start with you know, our traffic, organic traffic or at least organic and paid search, these are like about 50, 50, how about half, half of, of our revenue generating channels. And I thought that AI search would be this kind of growing channel that I would bank on and that would make a ton of revenue and turns out that's not the case. I think the problem with driving it, driving schools is that we're kind of, we're this legacy type business that is very slow to adapt just as an industry but people's perception of it is also slow to adapt. So I think we'll be like on the second or third wave of those search terms or those AI search terms that will finally. We're still investing in it, but I don't think this is what I think it'll be a few years before we reap the benefits.
- [06:48]
A
Yeah, well, I mean also if you think about who is using AI, it's the younger generation. Like they're already using it all throughout school. Like, but are their parents are the ones selecting their driving school? Right.
- [07:05]
B
So, so that's, so that's the problem. So there's this business is, it's a weird business to market to and that's primarily what got me excited about joining a driving school. Because I mean when someone approaches you and say, hey, you want to work for a driving school? Like yeah, no, I'm good. But then they start thinking, you start thinking about it and like wait a second, I'll be marketing to teenagers but they're not the ones making the purchase. Their parents will be making the purchase. And no one thinks about a driving school except for that small period of time when you need it. And then you never think about it ever again until you have other kids or, and chances are you're going to go to the same driving school as your parents or that as your siblings because nothing changes in this field.
- [07:47]
A
Yeah, I can see that. Yeah.
- [07:49]
B
So like no one is, is going on chat. GPT is searching for the best driving school in their town. Like that's just not what's happening.
- [07:56]
A
I keep hearing, I keep hearing like my kids are not going to drive. Right. Like Tesla. Right. Like so there's an expiration date on this. But you're utilizing it like uber matching essentially to be able to scale. And, and I've seen that business happen with photographers as well. Like I think it's A newer model. Like, it's certainly a AI first model. And I, I do the marketing for the Boy Scouts of America now. They've changed their name and there's, there's a lot of PR associated with what's, what's going on there. Eagle Scout. I'm proud of it, had a great experience and, but it's the same thing. You're, you're marketing to like the moms potentially or the decision maker of the household for the kids, but then the kids got to want to do it. Right. And so you have a dichotomy in the marketing you're going after. And then there's like certain decision points throughout the year that people get enrolled. So I can't say I totally understand what you're going through, but I got a glimpse of kind of what, what you're, what you're dealing with. And, and certainly all the AI has to make all the connections and the coordination and build the schedules. So I would love to hear more about how you're utilizing it internally. And, and we can go as deep as you want. I think I can probably hang out. So.
- [09:29]
B
Yeah. Okay, so let me. So now that I just kind of poo pooed all over the whole AI.
- [09:36]
A
Thing for my industry visibility, like let's, I'll take a flyer and I'll come back in a year and like we'll talk about it. Right?
- [09:44]
B
Let me talk about where it actually had a massive impact for us and where we see this going for us. Because I think there's a lot that we have learned that other companies might want to learn from. Because when, when your first idea doesn't work, you go to the second, the third idea and then you start expanding. And what, where we ended up with was a very exciting place. We started looking at other channels, other organic channels that are not Google or not search, that are still. That could benefit from, from AI because what AI does, at least for us, it can, it allows us to scale whatever tactic we do to it scales it almost infinitely. I say almost because you still want to look at it. We still want to monitor what's going on.
- [10:33]
A
Human in the loop.
- [10:34]
B
Yeah, exactly. But so all those other channels that we started looking at. Well, let's. How can this affect local marketing?
- [10:43]
A
Right.
- [10:43]
B
We still have a physical presence. So we're not, we're an online first business, as in everything happens online. But we offer a service that is very real. Right. It's a behind the wheel driving lesson. So a car needs to show up at your door, an instructor needs to be there, we need to have a physical presence. And also we're competing against a thousand driving schools.
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A
Okay. Yeah.
- [11:05]
B
Like it's, there's no one national driving school. We will become that one rational driving school. But now we're fighting against an ex like a thousand little wars against a bunch of different, smaller driving school that's. That have been in business for the most part since the 90s.
- [11:20]
A
Yeah. Right. No, you got to dislodge them from the, the legacy. Right, the pass down like we talked about. Absolutely. Yeah.
- [11:29]
B
So what has worked for us is on the local marketing side because we have anything we do in one market, we want to replicate in all the others. And the problem with that is it's creating real material, like marketing assets you can imagine, like flyers, posters, banners, face things like that. Or also reaching out for potential partnerships. Like we want to partner with the local high schools. We want to partner with the Boy Scouts or the boys and Girls Club. Like anyone who caters to an audience of teenagers, like if they're 15, we need to be there because we're, we need to be there at the moment where they are eligible to start to learn how to drive.
- [12:06]
A
And are you selling? I, like, I haven't dug into this enough. But like convenience is it basically you don't have to go to the physical location. The car comes to your door. So parents that are busy or whatever, you have a vetted person that just comes to your door, picks up your kid, drives, drops it back off or something like that. I mean that. Yeah, yeah.
- [12:27]
B
Convenience is a big part of it. I think convenience goes even beyond that because a lot of those places still, you have to pay them by check. Like I, I kid you.
- [12:35]
A
Oh my gosh.
- [12:36]
B
It's like when I say it's like a traditional legacy business type, like, I mean, it's, you know, everything. We send a report by email. We have dash cams, both sides. We have GPS tracking for the parents. Like all the things that you need.
- [12:48]
A
Yeah.
- [12:49]
B
Just so we're competing on convenience and quality because the reason why we started this in the first place, because we started off as a retrofitting company for cars and we were implementing car safety equipment in older cars. We essentially wanted to create the autopilot, but for cars that did not have autopilot to eradicate car crashes. And we realized, oh yeah, self driving is right around the corner, but it's been around the corner for 10 years. In the meantime, what will happen is we will drive less and less, but we'll be only asked to drive in the worst possible scenarios, like when the AI, when the camera can't, like when.
- [13:29]
A
There'S low visibility, when it's raining, when it's raining, but that then people are getting trained, are driving less and less, like from a mileage standpoint. So then it hands them over to them and they're not prepared to drive.
- [13:43]
B
So that's my point. So you have, so you see the problem here, right? And insurance companies are, there's no way Tesla is going to pay out for all the accidents. You're still liable for it for insurance. So I think we're gonna, it'll get worse before it gets better. So like this, this hump, I don't know what the solution is, but all I know is until we figure it out, the driver is going to be at the center of this and we need to create better drivers. And so that's where we, that's where we came to be. But anyways, all this to say, so then we need to start creating all these marketing material at scale.
- [14:15]
A
Yeah.
- [14:16]
B
And I'm like, oh cool, that's a perfect use case for AI because then we can suddenly do this, right? We can do the research for all the outreach for part for partnerships. I can find out the phone number, I can scrape. I have amazing tools now to find out who all the football coaches are everywhere in America and just contact them directly and be like, hey, I want to give you 500 bucks for a banner on your field. So this whole partnership system was enabled.
- [14:43]
A
By AI and then you could print, print whatever you need to print at scale and then just drop ship it or whatever. And I mean you can, you can really go off online to offline pretty quickly with AI. And that's, that's a use case that I don't hear people talking about a lot. Like I'm, I mean my LinkedIn is noisy right now with everything with LLM visibility and, and you know, it's a very small percentage of the market. And you know, I, I, I brought someone on previously that did billboards, digital billboards and you know, getting physical eyeballs and like, you know, physically being there, involved, near that absolutely has impact. And they're seeing it week over week and there's a lot of kids there. Like, I think that that's brilliant.
- [15:36]
B
Yeah. And I think it's, there's also something really cool about seeing the impact of AI in the real world, you know, very too often, especially in digital marketing. Like I like to tell people that none of what I do is real. You know, I Spent. I mean I spend my life in this like little. I spend my life in this room, I'm on my computer, I work for a company in another country. I'm scaling a national brand that I'll never like, I'll never experience it. I go there once a year and then I go back home and I spend time with my kid and my dog and I'm like, cool. None of what I did is real in my life. Like it's not something empirically, it's not real. But then you start seeing flyers and you see, you see photos of banners and then you start to see like bands, school bands with their logo on their van and you're like, oh cool, this is like this is happening, right? And right now we're sponsoring a, a university car. They're building an electric car for competition, a national competition and we have our own car. It's like all these, as we started expanding all these local marketing tactics, it's starting to have a very real effect on, in communities but also like in communities, right? I'm not now suddenly I'm investing all those dollars and I'm not giving them to Google, I'm giving them to kids to like play sport and play music.
- [16:57]
A
So I'm like thinking about like AI recognition, like facial recognition, right? Like, and there's a bunch of, you know, real ID and all this stuff that's kind of double edged sword coming. You know, if you have a logo that's out there, you can, I'm sure I, I would love to hear more about the tools and kind of some of the workflows and, and what you're doing. But I'm like to get share a voice right there. The tools out there right now just are horrible in my opinion. Most of the tools are bloated and not super useful and horrible. They certainly have a place. But there's going to be a new generation of tools that come out. I'm thinking like, okay, if you're doing heavy local marketing and you're trying to get share of voice, like how do you measure share of voice? Well, you need a tool to scrape social media, to find your logos, to find your brand name and to aggregate it all together to, and then, and then you're running it through some kind of weighted metric or whatever you come with, with to say what is our share of voice in this community? Like how are you measuring that stuff? I mean, I guess analytics is, I mean you can take data and you can use AI to get all kinds of insights, but try to measure what you're actively doing in the community. I'm interested to hear more about that.
- [18:15]
B
Yeah, so we ultimately measure this in terms of utilization rate. Right. So we put this, we attach this to a revenue target.
- [18:25]
A
And so based on, based on how many kids, like you're taking census data or something like that, and you're trying.
- [18:32]
B
To figure out, we can calculate market share. We do this by calculating how many 10th grader there are in an area. And it's not a perfect measure because obviously it's not like adults will also take driving lessons, but for us, like what market share of 10th grader, what you want. Yeah, exactly. And so. And that's available data. We can figure this out. And so that's something that we're tracking year over year, how many students we have in an area. Compare that to how many 10th grader there are in that area, and that'll give us an idea of the market share that we have.
- [19:01]
A
And you can label, you can also label out the adults based on age, based on all the data that. Yeah, exactly. And taken. Right. Like, so you can, you can start to cut your own data up and see what, what's happening.
- [19:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, the most important data point that we're, that I'm pushing towards, like everything I'm doing here is to increase utilization rate in an area. Right. We have X amount of instructors serving, let's say Sacramento in California. And I need their schedules for the next X amount of weeks to be 80% full. Right. And if, if I reach that point. Good. I'll move on. If there's a place where we're at 30%. Okay. I need to really go hard there. All those local marketing tactics, they're not like, it's, it's pretty slow, right?
- [19:43]
A
It's not.
- [19:44]
B
This will be more on a quarter basis. So this is how we plan growth in areas. So because it's a slow moving tactic, it allows us to predict how many people we need to hire in any area. So the tools. So to answer your question, how we measure things is still very low tech. It really is just like, okay, well how many people did we convert in that area and do we need to invest more of it? We do have tools who track our brand across everything.
- [20:12]
A
Yeah. What are, what are, I'm just curious, what are you using for some of that, that kind of stuff? Share voice.
- [20:17]
B
Yeah, so we had some, I think it was called Athena. Or is it Athena? It's like some Greek God. It's not. If it's not Athena, it's some other Greek God. Let me just double check my daughter's name. Outermiss. So, like, I have.
- [20:37]
A
You know. You know what? This podcast doesn't have enough typing sounds in it, actually. Like, I, it was. That was a solid type sound that everybody could hear.
- [20:46]
B
I'm sorry, that's my Cherry MX Blue.
- [20:48]
A
No, no, it's. It's actually something that I'm, I'm thinking about now is like, you know, we talk about. Yeah. Everything that happens on a. A laptop. Right. Like, and so typing sounds need to be part of, like, the, the general cadence of what's going on. And those were, those were solid sounds right there.
- [21:06]
B
That's the loudest keyboard I could possibly buy. Again, to make things real. Okay. I needed something real in my life here. I can't just have like the, My.
- [21:15]
A
The.
- [21:16]
B
My worst fear is to have a touchscreen keyboard. Like, at that point, I'm just. Why even work?
- [21:22]
A
Right? It's like, well, it's going to be a brain chip that's just going to, like, know what you're thinking. Just going to do it. Right.
- [21:27]
B
So I think it's called Apollo.
- [21:30]
A
Apollo. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You're. You're using Apollo to. Well, Apollo. I, I use Apollo. Maybe I'm using a different Apollo. If you're doing, like, cold outreach, like. No.
- [21:40]
B
So, yeah, so there's an out. There's two Apollo. There's an Apollo for cold outreach, which I have used for. Specifically for, for partnerships. The one I've been using. There's another Apollo for AI, I think.
- [21:50]
A
Oh, this is going to be an issue with entity SEO. I was just talking to another company that if we land them, which I feel very good about, everybody will know. Very big crypto company. But there's entity issues with people with the same names and other businesses out there. That's becoming certainly an issue. Ewr. We got mixed up with the airport in New York. I feel like I need to get office in New York because, you know, everybody's like, are you out in New York because you're ewr?
- [22:22]
B
Okay, I have the tool.
- [22:24]
A
Yeah. What is it? Yeah.
- [22:25]
B
AthenaHQ AI.
- [22:28]
A
I'm gonna have to check this out. Yeah.
- [22:30]
B
Athena HQ AI. There is another Apollo that I have used that is not the lead searching tool, but I. The one that I've been using now for share of Voice is Athena HQ AI. The reason why I don't know it by heart is because I don't really rely on it. Like, it's something that I'm like, okay, it'll get better. With time. But it's like I said, it's not really a metric that I care a whole lot about. Like we have, I have other tools that allow me to see how things work. Right. We have our PR firm that just sends me a report. I'm like, okay, that's good enough for me. Or I'll just look. If there's a lift analysis in any given market, I can do that too.
- [23:04]
A
How are you, how are you measuring that? Like tell me, tell me how. What are the things that are important to you that you've kind gone in house now when you're measuring share of voice or lift, like PR stuff, like what are the things that you're looking at that have real value?
- [23:21]
B
Yeah. So brand queries are the main ones on search terms. We still go back to Google because Google is as much as I don't want it to be, it's still such an inter group. Like it's a huge part of our business. Also because other driving skills were not really investing in Google. So like that was the one place we could definitely steal market share was on SEO. We could, we could dominate them very quickly just by being like the Starbucks that shows up next to a coffee shop and kind of like that sort of business model.
- [23:52]
A
Well, I mean your business model like this is like marketing for AI First Company. That's, that's really what I am probably going to call this podcast and this Harvard course that I went through. The transformation that you need to go through and, and really the intersection between, on the charts between like a traditional business with a moat and AI company and, and just the, they just smash right through it. Like AI companies are just steamrolling other companies. So I think some of the claims that you made Renault about we're going to be the biggest company and you're competing against like you know, businesses that were started in whatever 1970s or in that range or run that way. I find that in the recruiting business too. Everything's done this very old school way and I haven't seen yet an AI first company. I need to go start to seek out AI first companies and interview them. I would love that to know what they're doing differently and how they're building the workflows internally. Because it really clicked for me as soon as we started talking about why you're going to win. Right. And I'm very much interested in how that translates to marketing more like tell me more about the workflows or where were we going with the conversation that you still wanted to touch on. I Want to make sure I didn't cut you off?
- [25:23]
B
No, no, I'll just talk about the lift analysis real quick. But then you talk about recruiting and that is not to force like that is the one thing that's the biggest thing that happened to us. And let's talk about this.
- [25:33]
A
Yeah, I mean AI, that's the next area that AI is going to move into. Okay. Yeah.
- [25:39]
B
So just to find, just to close the loop on lift analysis because it's a pretty boring answer but still I want people to know. It's just we, the main two things I'm looking at is are people searching for the name more than before and also is our click through rate increasing in that area? Because people recognize the name and so we can very easily see this in any given area. Okay, does that work?
- [26:00]
A
Well? Okay, so let me, let me go a little deeper for. Okay. Yeah, like that, that's like I need to like SEO, AI, A, E, O, whatever you want to call it these days. Geo 50 of the traffic because of AI overviews let's say, right. AIO reviews, etc, like enriched snippets and stuff like that. What is it? 58.5% on average across all pubs. Traffic tanked. All that informational traffic, I don't know how much you know, what is it directional traffic that, that, that you have. I'm assuming your people are coming to you. So there's not like a physical location but all that informational traffic. Now the educational traffic is just across the Internet, right. And you're, you're skipping all those different areas where it's spread out to and said let's just go straight to where the kids and the, the parents are and go to the football fields and, and sporting events and boy scouts, whatever, wherever they're at and the schools because like we want a physical flyer there and we want a brand recognized and a QR code and a you know, know, whatever, a domain link that they can go check out and image of the logo, whatever and, and you can measure that. I'm also seeing across all accounts Google's not really telling us very much about where that traffic's coming from. It's just branded searches now are the highest category of searches across all areas. And you know, how are you parsing that out or how are you looking at that or does it not matter? And it's just like more people know about the brand however they got there. We're good with that.
- [27:49]
B
Yeah. So for us it's kind of the second part. We're not too focused because there's our reporting has all the reporting tools have drastically changed and ever since the whole J4 thing, like since then I have, I have much lower trust in my reporting than I have the lowest amount of trust in my reporting than ever before. And so I rely, yeah, so I rely a lot on am I the things that I'm doing, am I doing the right things for what I'm trying to achieve? And, and conceptually is it what all those tools want?
- [28:27]
A
Right.
- [28:27]
B
And so I'm like first, first principles.
- [28:30]
A
I mean you're just.
- [28:30]
B
Exactly.
- [28:31]
A
So I have good marketing. Yeah, yeah.
- [28:32]
B
I've been doing this for, for a long time. Like, okay, even if right now there's a Google update that is not working in my favor, am I the type of business that Google wants to promote? Yes, I am. I'm a real business. I have real like a physical business that has a real impact. People will leave real reviews and all of that. Like I'm not an affiliate business that is trying to be a middleman and just like hack my way through the first, the first page. Like I'm Google will always try to please the businesses that like mine, like Coastline. Also we spend a ton of money on Google Ads and so they're like, yeah, we want to keep that business. So I'm like, okay, so this is the first principle is what I'm going by and then are things directionally going in the direction that I want? And so if I have a bunch of local marketing in some area, is business increasing or my. Because I also. We also have paid brand campaigns and so these have much more granular reporting attached to them. So those I get to see like is my cost, like am I going from 0.1 penny to 0.05 penny per click? Great, that's like, I'll take that. Right? Is, is that. Or is my click through rate for all the other campaigns in that area going up on average? Yeah. Okay, cool. I'm okay with this. I'm not going to be too attached to it because this is part of my marketing budget that is not paid. Like it's not paid search. It's not performance marketing. Right. So I'm not going to have like a direct dollar attribution. We're getting into brand marketing and that's always more difficult to gauge. So I have kind of flexibility in my marketing budget where, okay, I have like this percentage that I get to spend on things that I think are right that will help. And if directionally things are moving, then everybody's happy with it and that seems to be working so far.
- [30:25]
A
Those are important conversations to have, but they are.
- [30:28]
B
Because they're difficult.
- [30:29]
A
But. But it's true.
- [30:30]
B
Because it is difficult. Like, you can't. It's. It's hard to convince anyone that a brand campaign has worked unless you. Unless you spend tens of millions of dollars where everyone knows your brand. But that's not what we want to do because we don't need people to. We don't need everybody to know our brand.
- [30:47]
A
Are you doing, like, a B tests or pilot programs in different areas and kind of measuring the uplift to see what works? And then, you know, like, taking two demographically similar areas and kind of running those and then going, okay, this is working, versus this. Okay, maybe we'll. We'll. We'll spread that one out and do it. Replicate it. Right? Yeah. Correct.
- [31:07]
B
We have nine area. We have nine test areas. And the reason why we have nine is because we have people physically there, like managers who live there. So at the moment, I have someone who is physically at a location. I know I'll have a much more. I have a much better chance of whatever test I'm doing to work because I need someone on the ground to make sure, like, are the banners up? Because we've been scammed before. Like, I gave money to a school and turns out, like, their agency was just a total scam. And so, like, I don't know who could. Like this. Yeah, they stole money from kids, which is terrible. But, like, that's the world we live in.
- [31:40]
A
Wow.
- [31:40]
B
I need to make sure, like, it. Are the banners actually up? Are the flyers up? Are we physically present at the car meets at the festival, at the whatever.
- [31:49]
A
Yeah.
- [31:49]
B
So we have nine test areas, and we meet every week. And whatever works in one area we implement to others. We will often do two areas that are very similar and see, can we replicate those results. If that's the case, then we replicate this in all those other places. I think that's the strength. We have hundreds of places. We can test things. The moment something works somewhere, we can scale it everywhere. I think that's very cool.
- [32:15]
A
Yeah. No, this is a great conversation. Enjoyed it.
- [32:19]
B
But again, but I do want to talk about the recruiting part because, I mean, that was the biggest aha. Moment for us. So I'll just start with some context. We lost our HR manager, our HR director around Christmas, and so we all kind of had to come together. All the. All the leadership team were like, we need to pick up the slack here because, like, we still need to hire people like Growth needs to happen. And so what happens when you have a bunch of people who are not in hr, who are not recruiters, who are then looking at HR and recruiting? You have a bunch of ideas. Like, you have new ideas. Like, wait a second. Like, I'm looking at this through a marketer or product growth marketer. And like, this is a marketing problem. Like, I. Recruiting is essentially just selling something to someone. Like, except instead of. Instead of them buying, they're buying into the company. I'm paying them. Fine. But like, all the economics and all the funnel is the same.
- [33:13]
A
Yep.
- [33:14]
B
And I'm like, I need. I need to treat them as I would any client. Like, are these. Who are we recruiting? And so, like, who are the Personas that we're recruiting? We don't know. We kind of know if they pass the interview.
- [33:28]
A
Okay, yeah, cool.
- [33:28]
B
But, like, can we define exactly who it is that we want? And so what we did is we started doing personality assessment for all our employees.
- [33:39]
A
Employees.
- [33:40]
B
Because we wanted to know, like, who are we hiring and who are the best ones? Because I just want more of the best. Right. I want. And who are the best? Well, they're the ones who are the happiest and the most fulfilled about their job. Like, the ones who treat this as like a career or something that's more purpose driven. And we found very, very common themes. Like, one of them, One of the Personas that we have is retired educator. These people, gold for the company because they love what they do. They're patient, they're calm.
- [34:06]
A
They.
- [34:07]
B
They really believe. Like, they, they. They will. They invest themselves in the education of their students, which is great because then they create better drivers. And what. How do they create better drivers? Turns out they. They convince students to take an additional lesson. So in California, for example, you need to take three lessons to meet the state requirements. And the state requirement means whatever you need to pass the road test. The road test is not comprehensive. Okay. You don't go on the highway. You don't parallel park. You don't drive at night in rain. You don't do blind intersections. Like, there's a lot of essential skills that are not tested there. So the incentive for driving schools is to not cover this material because we want. Because, I mean, someone will only complain if they don't pass their test. Right.
- [35:00]
A
So.
- [35:01]
B
And it's next impossible to do everything in three lessons. So we found a higher average lesson count for all the students who went through those. Highly motivated, highly motivated employees. And like, this is all stuff that I don't have the data analytics background to like pull this data together. But like AI just made it super simple to just figure this out. So now there's two, so now there's two key learnings here. We know who we want and they generate more money for us and they create better drivers, right?
- [35:34]
A
That's important.
- [35:35]
B
Like, so this fits our mission. This fits my goal as marketer because I need to create more revenue and then this is a target for recruiters. So but I can't just leave it there, right? I have like now I need to help them. I need to help them. I need to help them being the recruiters, hire more people like them because they're not necessarily easy to find. So then my, so then my priority as a marketer is to hire people. And so in my, as a demand generating, like my job is to, is to generate demand. But now I need to generate some offer, right? I need to generate the offer side. And so then I started looking at my own funnel. Well, okay, do I, is there any markets where I generate too much demand and that I'm bottlenecked by how much offer I can actually fulfill there? Absolutely. The Bay Area is one of those places. I cannot hire enough people in the Bay Area. So then all the incentives they start like between the two departments started to merge together. And now we have since hired an HR manager and a recruiter. And so now we have the team in place. But what this allowed us to do is we, we had this like shared mission. Now where the way that we will increase revenue, like one of the ways that we increase revenue for the company, one way that we create better drivers, that we fit our mission. All that comes from marketing and HR collaborating to make sure that we hire the best people who will be the happiest of the company, who will give the best service possible, who will as a byproduct of that, sell more lessons. And me as a marketer, I need to unlock this and make this as frictionless as possible by giving them all the marketing material they need because I don't want them to be pushy salesmen. They're not going to sell anything, but they can totally just share information, have flyers, have everything ready to go. I can create incentives. And yeah, so like that was the biggest, like that was the biggest aha moment for us.
- [37:30]
A
Well, it makes a lot of sense. And you can now tie it together with data of like you're, you're going after a two sided market, right? Like you got to have enough people to drive if you have enough demand and Those things need to be linked because you don't want to keep, you know, pumping this air if you don't have the drivers. So those things are associated with each other and are relevant to each other and need to be part of that conversation. And then you're building brand campaigns. You're, you're trying to recruit them. Like, the thing you're selling is to join your company and to believe in the brand mission and be part of it. You have target Personas, you have a customer journey, you have assets and videos. And like, you know, it's, it's just you're selling something different, right? You're selling for them to join your company and you want the top talent of what, what you're looking for. And then it ties to your revenue goals because you can sell a bunch of courses, but if they can't get their lessons in a reasonable time frame, they might go with another solution. And so it all balances on each other. But you can use Aida help you figure that out. I, I love that idea of like, you know, doing, you know, there's Myers Briggs, there's a bunch of different tests taking that together to understand what that is and then feed that in to, to AI to understand what, what is the DNA of our company. Like who, who have we hired and who are those best people? Because what you probably found out from the retired educator that, that might not have been already uncovered or was it with, with the, you know, HR team? That's clearly something that you could get from AI Insights that is finding these patterns. Right? And it seems like also, you know, you went into it a little bit of, hey, like we're going to teach them more, so they're going to produce more lessons because they're getting, you know, good quality driving that leads to better reviews, that means to more revenue and, and certainly referrals if their kids learn to drive better than the minimum required to meet the test. Because I can only assume that. I remember, I actually kind of remember defensive driving was at like a laugh, like a. Defensive driving and driver training, I think were associated with each other and it was just a bunch of, well, useless videos that need to be updated from the government and there are some online businesses. So how are you competing? Oh, that's driver. That's driver. Do you do that part of the business to the driver?
- [40:18]
B
The online course?
- [40:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, the online courses. I'm assuming you do that as well. Like. Right. It fits right, right into what you're offering pretty easily. Absolutely.
- [40:25]
B
Yeah. So we do. And that's actually why. So I was hired primarily for, for growing that product.
- [40:31]
A
Okay.
- [40:33]
B
And the reality of this space, at least in the US is that there's very few, there's only a handful of competitors. They own the market because that was like a really good SEO play for the longest time. So you have a company like Asable who owns all, all the top, I'd say the top three or top four companies like driverzed.com. that's them. I drive safely. That's also them. So they kind of own that market. Then you have other companies like Zatobi. They are in the practice test realm, which is like an in between. So you do driver's ed and then you do your practice test in order to take your DMV test. That will give you your permit. Then you take behind your real lessons and then you take your road test. Like that's the sequence of events. Our approach was to not go head to head against them.
- [41:26]
A
Yeah, that's a, that's a big, I mean that, that's all I saw that like as an SEO play. Right. Like you get to the top, you need to just get a certification or get some kind of approval like driver's Ed and you're just like, oh, I'll take the top bang. Right. Or top of Google. And that was all the people thought about. Yeah.
- [41:43]
B
But what we did is partner with all of them. So that was like, if we can't beat them, let's join them. Because what we told them is like, listen, you guys sell the product that comes before us and like realistically for us, Driver Z, it's just a lead magnet.
- [41:56]
A
Right? It's just like, there you go. Yeah.
- [41:58]
B
Like we just need them. Like we will break even or we'll lose money on this product because we rely on a certain percentage to then convert to behind the wheel lessons. So we told them, do you guys want to just make a commission on this and send people our way? And they said, yep. And so we're partnering. So all our competitors that was my first year is like, let's just partner with every competitor.
- [42:21]
A
Let's. Let's play like it's how what we're talking about. And, and I'm a little bit slower right now because I'm processing this of as a AI first company, you have to think, think differently. Right. And so you're like, we're not going to compete with these guys. Let's actually, let's partner with them to grow this other product that we have some sustainable advantage against other players in. And that's just going to accelerate your growth. Right. And so that's, that's a partnership play that I don't, I don't know if all the other driving schools would think about it that way. Well, you know, if they couldn't even service it, like, y' all could actually service it and, and do it and go head to head. But you decided, hey, like, this is our focus. This is, you know, where we want to specialize in and so what, let's figure out how to turn all these negatives into positives. I love that. Yeah.
- [43:17]
B
And I think this kind of our philosophy for, for just as a business, because we're a bunch of very passionate entrepreneurs. Like as, like, we all have. We did the personality test ourselves. So we all, we are all the same person, at least on the leadership side. Like, there's seven of us at the leadership and like we're. There's two different types. But like, still clear Personas. We can easily be distracted by good ideas because we live in this world. Like, what AI has done for us is. It removed the. It removed the. How do we do something? Because I don't care. Like, I know I can right at this point is I don't need to know how to. I could vibe code something that like, and just. It'll happen.
- [44:02]
A
Right.
- [44:02]
B
Like this morning I was looking at Hank Green's new app. I think it's called. What's it called? The. The Vlog Brothers guy. I think it's a distracting free. Anyways, it became like the number one app today or yesterday in the US like it overtook Google and ChatGPT. And it's, it's just a timer that prevents you from like, just don't touch your phone for however long you can get to. And like you have this bean that'll just start knitting and if you touch your phone, the bean will stop knitting and it'll be sad. And so you don't distract the bean for however long. I mean, that is like the number one app. Okay. There's no account creation, there's no ads. There's nothing like it. This is a perfect use case for like vibe coding. Something like this could have been vibe coded. And it's just one of those ideas. Like you have this idea. I don't care how to do it. I can do. Probably wasn't vibe coded, but it could have. That's my point. And so at Coastline, we. We try to be very mindful of not being distracted by anything that is not our core business. Because yeah, we could do like there's a lot of really cool ideas. We could become an insurance company.
- [45:05]
A
Right.
- [45:05]
B
We could be. Because we train the best drivers, so why not insure the people that we train? We could try to own the online practice test because it's related to our product. Yeah, but, like, that's not our main advantage. Our advantage is to give better driving lessons that are more convenient. And our competitors are the mom and pop driving schools. And so we need to keep focus on that. So anything else, if it's going to be. If it's going to be a problem, we need to either join with them or address it in some way. But, like, joining them is the best scenario because, I mean, the practice test market, the top three companies in the U.S. they're not from the U.S. they're from Eastern Europe or, and, or Sweden. It's just like you're opening the doors to pure SEO or pure organic play. And if you do that, then you're opening the doors to competitors from all across the world. And there's someone out there with a better team that is more. Less expensive to operate, and they have more time and they will crush this game. But what they can't do is create a physical business. And so, like, that's.
- [46:11]
A
Yeah.
- [46:12]
B
So we keep. We keep focusing to.
- [46:13]
A
To.
- [46:13]
B
We keep reminding ourselves to focus on that.
- [46:16]
A
Well, Renaud, like, I. I love this conversation. I don't know if everybody's following what, what we're talking about, but I think that it's gonna age well. I think it's gonna age well as people get more feet under them around AI. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you want to make sure that we highlight? I. I know I took the conversation maybe a couple different directions, so I want to turn it over to you to share with us anything you would like to share as well as, you know, how people can get in touch with you to find out more. I think you're doing some really interesting stuff.
- [46:58]
B
Yeah. I think two things on AI is just use it as you would healthy food. I think that's our approach just a little bit every day. Because you can't just, like, eat a healthy meal, a big healthy meal once a week. No, no, it's like just use. Use it a little bit every day just so you understand the capabilities. And whenever the new model comes out, at least you'll understand how you can use it. Like, don't try to do the big change. Try to do the small changes. Because, I mean, I think that will open the door to a bunch of opportunities that you didn't know existed. And at least in your, in your context and on the driving side. Yeah, drive safe out there. I mean there's a. We're, we're, we're here. Like we're doing this for a reason. Right. We want to create safer roads. I think things are going to be worse before they get better. And I think it's the best thing you can do is to improve your training. So I would encourage people to take driving training if with us or with. Or someone else doesn't matter, but just learn those skills because the consequences can be pretty severe and we see them and it's. Yeah, I may be overly exposed to this, but I do really generally think people should learn defensive driving skills. And so I encourage people to do that. And if you want to check us out. Co and yeah.
- [48:16]
A
Awesome. Well everybody, hopefully you found this conversation helpful. If you did, please like it, please share. Really does help us. We are trying to transfer over to a video first podcast. We've been doing this for 12 years and we have to learn new things and AI is getting involved in every which way. So hopefully you found this podcast helpful. This is the unknown secrets of Internet marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. Until the next time. Bye bye for now.