Firing The Man
THANK YOU TO OUR 25,000+ LISTENERS! We are so thankful to be one of the TOP E-Commerce Podcasts delivering high-quality authentic content to you! Serial Entrepreneur’s David Schomer and Ken Wilson share tips, advice, and insider knowledge about all things Amazon FBA, Walmart WFS, and E-Commerce. Discover how you can create multiple income streams by selling physical products online so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love - whether that is spending more time with family or traveling the world. Ken and David have successfully created several six and seven figure online business ventures. During the journey, they have had major wins, losses, and lessons learned. This podcast will teach you about selling physical products online through platforms such as Fulfillment by Amazon, building a team, outsourcing, listing optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, driving traffic to your listings, and productivity tips / life hacks that will provide a path to be successful in building your online business. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts and solo shows from Ken and David you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe, and get ready to change your life.
Firing The Man
Redefining SEO as a Revenue Engine with Dale Bertrand
What if everything you know about SEO is becoming obsolete? Dale Bertrand, founder of Fire and Spark, brings a refreshingly technical yet human-centered perspective to digital growth strategy—a perspective forged through his journey from building government supercomputers to revolutionizing how businesses approach organic traffic.
"Rankings and traffic that don't convert are worthless," Dale asserts, challenging the vanity metrics that have dominated digital marketing for years. His "SEO for Revenue" methodology cuts through the clutter, focusing on customer acquisition rather than keyword rankings. This approach has yielded remarkable results, including helping GrabCAD achieve 30x growth in organic traffic that ultimately led to a successful acquisition.
As artificial intelligence reshapes search, Dale identifies three critical shifts: the tools marketers use, the algorithms powering results, and how customers seek information. This trifecta demands new strategies where content must be "semantically dense" and "snackable" for AI training. The counterintuitive outcome? Less traffic but more revenue—a concept many marketers struggle to embrace.
Perhaps most surprising is Dale's deceptively simple advice for understanding customer behavior: just ask them. "We've gotten used to hiding behind analytics," he notes, advocating instead for direct conversations that yield insights no dashboard can provide. This human connection extends to his recommendations for product selection, where he encourages entrepreneurs to find the sweet spot between passion for a customer community, viable sales channels, and healthy unit economics.
For those building online businesses in 2023 and beyond, Dale offers a roadmap for navigating the transition from traditional SEO to what he calls "Generative Engine Optimization" (GEO). Early adopters who master these dynamics stand to benefit significantly, just as early SEO practitioners did years ago.
Connect with Dale at fireandspark.com or reach him directly at dale@fireandspark.com to learn how your business can thrive in the age of AI-powered search.
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Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Firing the man, the podcast for entrepreneurs and business builders ready to scale beyond the grind and into smart, sustainable ownership. I'm your host, David Shomer, and today's guest is someone who designs growth strategies using cutting-edge tech and data-driven precision. Meet Dale Bertrand, the founder and CEO of Fire Spark, a growth agency built on a foundation of supercomputing, artificial intelligence and a ruthless focus on real business outcomes. Dale cut his teeth building a 5,832 processor supercomputer for the US government before pivoting to digital growth, bringing that same power and precision to SEO and revenue strategy. Under Dale's leadership, fire and Spark built the SEO for Revenue methodology.
Speaker 2:Where traffic isn't the goal, it's the vehicle for generating measurable ROI. His team helped GrabCAD achieve a 30x growth in organic traffic, ultimately leading to a successful acquisition. Dale's blend of AI-powered automation, proprietary predictive models and irresistibly creative strategy helps businesses not just show up while leaving competitors in the dust. Today, we'll cut through the clutter of SEO tips and dig into how he's engineering scalable growth systems that turn human grit into exponential revenue. If you're building an online business and wondering how to scale smart, this episode will change your game. Dale, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about firing the man.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. So, to start things off, can you share with our audience a little bit about your background and path in the entrepreneurial world?
Speaker 3:Yes, I have a technical background, so I studied engineering undergrad and I studied engineering and AI in graduate school. So I ended up right after school working at a number of tech startups, so they were really in the hardware space. But I was a software guy, so I was writing software for simulators, for semiconductor devices and computer chips. So I did that for a decade after I finished school and I loved it while I was doing it. But I knew that I wanted to do something different.
Speaker 3:I saw the engineers that were a couple decades ahead of me and I didn't want to be doing the same engineering for my entire career. I didn't want to be an engineer for my entire career. So I pretty much quit that job and I ended up just spending six months trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I decided I wanted to start a business. So I started a business, but I didn't know exactly what that business was going to do at the time that I started it and I ended up doing some freelancing and eventually that turned into Fire and Spark, the agency that I run now. But there have been many iterations over the last 15 years of Fire and Spark and we were a publisher at one point Like things have changed over the years.
Speaker 2:Okay, and as I was preparing for this interview, I came upon the fact and I mentioned this in the intro that you built a 5832 processor supercomputer for the US government, and I just have to know more about that.
Speaker 3:Well, that was how long ago was that? Maybe 20 years ago? I can't believe that. I'm that old, but yeah, that project was from about 2005 to 2008 that we worked on that. It was a startup that I joined. The founder of the startup was a PhD chip designer out of Intel and he had an idea for a novel chip architecture that we could use to build a supercomputer, and he sold the idea to the US government. So they were happy to buy the machine. If only we could build it. So it took three years to build it, from the chip through the operating system and applications on top of it. But the crazy thing is we didn't know what the government was going to be using it for at the time that we were building it. It turns out that it's been declassified, so we know that they were sifting through phone records. So it's interesting that it was a spy machine at the end of the day, but we didn't know that when we were building it. It was just like a computer architecture exercise to us.
Speaker 2:That's wild, that's right, and that was 20 years ago.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah because I think we started trying to get the timeframe right, like that was 2005, 2000. Yeah, around that timeframe.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay Now. How did those experiences shape your perspective on technology and SEO?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm an engineer by training and I worked for a decade as an engineer, so I love the process of problem finding, debugging technical issues, of problem finding, debugging technical issues, building standard operating procedures for the marketing work that we do at our agency. I'm very much a process-driven person and I enjoy thinking in systems, especially with the business that we're building at Fire and Spark. I think the systems thinking really helps. There are many different people that decide to go independent and take the entrepreneurial route, and everybody who decides to take the entrepreneurial route is going to have a different skill set, a different background. Mine happened to be quite technical and that was an asset for me, but everybody's got something in terms of their skill set that they're bringing to the table.
Speaker 2:Okay, Okay Now Fire and Spark's SEO for revenue methodology shifts focus from rankings to tangible ROI. Why is that mindset so vital for scaling a business today?
Speaker 3:Well, let me talk about this a little bit differently. Like I run an agency, most of what we do is SEO and content marketing, and if you are selling SEO services, people assume that you're like a snake oil salesman as soon as you open your mouth. Right, it's really hard to find an agency or consultant that can help you with SEO, that actually knows what they're doing and they're not trying to sell you services on an annual retainer and then just let you turn at the end of it when you don't get the results. So I have been frustrated for a long time that agencies were selling rankings basically a service design to get you rankings. Oftentimes they're vanity rankings for keywords that don't have much volume. Instead of targeting traffic. You're targeting real customer acquisition and real revenue, which seems like it should have been a no-brainer right.
Speaker 3:Like it feels old to me because I've had this argument, you know, for the last 10 years and it's got to be resolved at this point. Rankings and traffic that doesn't convert are worthless when it comes to SEO and agencies and consultants that are out there bragging about rankings that they're able to achieve. It's not always valuable. Like it depends on whether it's really delivering an actual business result, like whether, at the end of the day, when you're doing SEO, it's for customer acquisition, not rankings acquisition. And that's what I always, that's what I get excited about, and at Fire and Spark I mean we're we're totally focused on actual conversion and customer acquisition at the end of the day, not just bragging about some traffic that's coming to your site that had no intention whatsoever of purchasing anything.
Speaker 2:You know I think I've hired some of those SEO agencies before who I, as a retired accountant, am always looking at ROI and oftentimes they would move the conversation from revenue or net income or conversion rate to keyword ranking and it didn't seem to translate to real results. And so you know, on the topic of and we're recording this in August of 2025, on the topic of SEO, how is AI changing the game?
Speaker 3:AI is changing everything, as we all know, right, because we've all heard the doomsday scenarios where all of our organic traffic goes away. And yeah, I mean AI is definitely going to affect organic traffic. But I think the way I would think about it is there's three ways that AI is affecting SEO Like. One is the tools that we're all using now, like marketers are using AI tools for helping with content and optimizing meta titles and even debugging technical issues on websites, so AI is affecting the way that we work. That's huge.
Speaker 3:The other thing that AI is affecting is the algorithms that search engines are using to do ranking in a traditional ranking search engine, but also to generate AI results, and we're talking about ChatGPT or Google's AI mode, or even like AI overviews.
Speaker 3:So those algorithms are changing.
Speaker 3:Those are the platforms that are going to give answers instead of traffic, right?
Speaker 3:So because those algorithms are changing, because search engines are moving from ranking engines to generative engines, there's less clicks and less traffic to your website.
Speaker 3:And then the third thing that I want to point out is that AI is changing customer behavior in terms of how your customers search for your products and your services and how they search for information about problems that they might solve with your products and your services, and how they search for information about problems that they might solve with your products and your services. And with all three of those things changing at the same time, it feels like whoa, like there's a lot of change happening here, and marketers that I talk to when I speak at conferences, when I do my workshops, they're really overwhelmed with all this change. Now, if you're new to the space, that's actually an advantage, because you don't have the baggage of the old way that SEO used to work or the old way content marketing or digital marketing used to work. You have the opportunity to really take an AI first mindset if you're just getting started with a new venture, or if you're just getting started with a new venture, or if you're just getting started with your entrepreneurial career or your marketing career.
Speaker 2:Can we talk about what that would look like from a practical sense? And let's use an example. Say, I've got a business that does chainsaw carvings, something kind of unique, sure what you know, what would have been the old way that SEO would have been done? And then how would that change in the AI age?
Speaker 3:So if you are doing chainsaw carvings which I've never done before, so I'm going to make some assumptions about it chainsaw carvings which I've never done before, so I'm going to make some assumptions about it it's a local business, or it's possible that you're selling on Etsy, or maybe you're selling nationally if you're able to ship your chainsaw carvings, I don't know. But if you're selling chainsaw carvings, like any business, you're looking for customers. The old way of doing SEO would be writing blog articles about chainsaw carvings either how to do your own chainsaw carving like maybe 0.001%, but some of them might want to buy a chainsaw carving. So that's how you would get your customers. At the end of the day, what is happening with AI search is that when your customers are searching for that information about chainsaw carvings, they're getting their answers and maybe even a chainsaw carving tutorial directly from AI, so they're not going to need to come to your website at all. So, on the face of it, that changes things, because you'd be writing content to train AI about your business so that it has the right, accurate information about your business and they can answer questions accurately when somebody is actually searching for the service that you offer or a chainsaw carving, if they're looking for products or something like that, because we're no longer aiming for that top of funnel informational traffic that will land on an educational blog article.
Speaker 3:Instead, we want to make sure that when the AI is having a conversation with someone who's a likely customer or a good candidate for my service, it mentions my name or mentions our brand, or it mentions one of our products, and that's really a different way of looking at SEO. Both are search engine optimization. It's just that we've got to get out of this mindset that what SEO is for is driving traffic. It was always for driving customers, not traffic. That's the SEO for revenue mindset. But now that we've got these AI engines, we want them to have the conversations with our customers about our brand, about our products, about our services, and then, after the customers are educated, they'll seek us out. Maybe they'll click directly from ChatGPT or maybe they'll type our brand into Google search. What we've seen is we've seen brands who are pursuing the strategy where their traffic goes down but their revenue goes up, and that's really something that's hard to wrap people's heads around.
Speaker 2:Okay, so what I'm hearing is the classic blog on a website that people used to push articles to is becoming less relevant, and packing your website with more useful information is the move today.
Speaker 3:Is that accurate? Making sure that the content is optimized for AI, for its training. So you want to make sure that your brand is in the right places online based on the conversations that you want to appear in. The easy thing to do there is have some conversations with, let's say, chatgpt and figure out what pages it's citing and figure out if you can get your brand mentioned on those pages for your chainsaw carvings using this example. And then also, you want to make sure that the content that you're creating is semantically dense, it's modular, that it's snackable when it comes to AI training.
Speaker 3:Like, imagine the difference between a long let's call it like a 10-page long blog article something very long for a blog article but it just never really gets to the point.
Speaker 3:It's really fluffy, it talks around the topic and it doesn't really answer questions that people would need answered if they were in the middle of a buying decision.
Speaker 3:Like that's a lot of the type of blog content that we created when we were told that SEO content had to be 2000 words long, 5000 words long, like it ended up just getting more fluffy as long as it had the right keywords in it. But for AI content, you want it to be more semantically dense, where an AI page or a page that's optimized for AI would be a collection of modular sections that are maybe one, two, three paragraphs each that each answer a specific question succinctly and densely, without the fluff, so that they are snackable when it comes to AI. Ai is going to be looking for those modular passages when they are relevant to a conversation that is having with one of your customers and AI will give them the information that you have in those snackable modular sections of your content and possibly, depending on what AI you're using and what mood it's in, give a source link out to your website, so maybe you will get some traffic out of it.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay. So what is in the AI age? Where's the most valuable real estate? If it's, if it's no longer on the blog section? Uh, where is your valuable real estate, to put these snackable uh bits of information? So?
Speaker 3:it's wherever your customers are searching for information about your type of product or service. That's like the obvious answer, right? So so, david, it it? You really need to start with customer research. So where are your customers hanging out online, do a safari Like? Are they? Are they at the watering hole? Are they hanging by the fruit trees? Um, it might be a. It might be that they're hanging out on Facebook looking for information. It might be that they're Googling or talking to chat GPT. It might be that they're in a private forum that you need to join, but that's really the most important thing.
Speaker 3:And then, when we're creating content let's say the type of content that we used to create as, like, keyword targeted educational blog articles we want to make sure that we're creating the type of content that has value in the places where our customers hang out. So, if we decide that our customers are hanging out in this private forum or this Reddit thread or whatever it is, it could be Facebook and we're using our content for Facebook ads, we want to make sure that we're getting more value out of our content rather than just typical SEO rankings. I mean, seo rankings are fine and they're still very valuable. Most people still search Google the traditional way, especially for those commercial keywords, not just the informational keywords. But when we're creating content, we want to make sure that we understand where our customers are hanging out online. So we're creating a type of dual-purpose content that can be useful in those forums but also in traditional search engines. Also, it's snackable for AI engines.
Speaker 2:Okay, I want to go a little bit deeper on the question of where are customers hanging out? And, dale, I got to compliment you on I threw you a real curve ball with this chainsaw carving. And the reason is last weekend I went to a county fair. There was a guy that took a block of wood, made it into a bald eagle. It was outstanding and so it's top of mind. But you know, say you have a client come to you and they have a business like chainsaw carving that you're unfamiliar with, and you are going through the step of figuring out where customers hang out. What's the best way to do that? Ask the customers. Okay, that is a lot better of an answer than what I was thinking. I was thinking an advanced AI tactic and you're just yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, I will expand. I gave you a short answer because I just wanted to emphasize the point. A lot of us who are marketers today, in 2025, grew up with digital marketing. Like, digital marketing hasn't been around forever, but it has been around for a very long time. For most marketers who are practicing right now and for those of us who've been doing digital marketing or SEO or content marketing online, we've gotten used to hiding behind analytics. So when we ask a question like where do our customers hang out? What information do our customers need to make a buying decision, we start looking at tools and software and analytics dashboards and we forget that we can just ask them Like it's as simple as that. So, like, the most important, most powerful thing is that you figure out, whatever your situation is as a marketer or an entrepreneur, how you're going to have conversations with your customers full stop. You're going to have conversations with your customers Full stop.
Speaker 3:When I advise a startup, there's a lot of advice, right how to raise money, how to build their products, how to do their marketing, how to optimize Facebook channels. But really for an early stage startup, what they care about is having as many conversations as possible with their target audience, and this could be face-to-face, on the phone, whatever video call, but the point is they're talking to as many people as possible and that's how they're going to figure it out. I mean, for you as a marketer, regardless of what type of organization you're at could be established or a new venture that you're starting, you need to be talking, optimizing. You need to be optimizing for talking to your customers. Maybe you're calling them like the first several orders that you get, the first several dozen orders that you get. You're calling everybody. I mean, you should call everybody in that situation until you just can't anymore, because you want to understand how did they find you? What questions did they have? Why did they choose you? What did they think about the competitors? Why did they consider not buying? Find you? What questions do they have? Why did they choose you? What did they think about the competitors? What, what, why were did they consider not buying from you? Like, those are the most important freaking conversations, but those are your customers. You also want to talk to people who didn't choose you and you got to figure out how to do that.
Speaker 3:Um, if you're in an organization where you have a sales team, you can um, you can listen to recorded sales calls, because maybe you don't have access to your customers. First of all say if you're a marketer, you don't have access to your customers. Don't take that job like find a job where you do have access to your customers, because it is not possible to do marketing hiding behind an analytics dashboard. Like where did we get that idea? I think I think for a a while we were doing like google adwords back in the day, now google ads and we're like oh okay, I see I can just optimize.
Speaker 3:But that type of job where you're doing marketing staring at a dashboard all day, attracts a very different type of marketer than a marketer that needs to talk to their customers, interview their customers, understand the nuance of the answers that they're getting, dig deeper in the right places, take the right notes, understand how to use the customer's words in your marketing as messaging. That's actually. It's a different type of marketer, right, and one type of marketer is declining while another one is advancing. So the type of marketer that's staring at dashboards all day and interpreting the numbers in order to turn a dial, that's going away because AI can do that. The type of marketing that's not going away is somebody who can talk to real humans, understand their buying patterns, understand how to persuade them to choose you, not your competitor, and make the cash register ring. That's the type of marketer that's not going away.
Speaker 2:I really like that answer and it's so simple when do customers hang out? Ask them. I really like that and I can tell you there's probably some listeners right now that are attracted to e-commerce because it is, in some ways, a nameless, faceless transaction in some instances, some ways, a nameless, faceless transaction in some instances, and I think that attracts a certain type of person, and so I'm sure there are probably some listeners right now that that answer makes them uncomfortable picking up the phone and dialing. But I think your points are well received.
Speaker 3:On the two types of marketers. It depends on how much of your margin you want to give away to Amazon, like if anyone listening has ever sold on Amazon like they want all your margin. They want you out of business at the end of the day. But if you build a brand on your own site, you're building a brand. You own the customer relationship, you're having conversations with your customer. That's a real business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that's something that needs to be said and I, as an Amazon seller, I know there's a lot of people listening that sell on Amazon, and I think that's a big difference. What you're talking about is building to where they're not your customers, they're Amazon's customers, and your ability to engage with them and and ask questions are limited by by policy.
Speaker 3:And Jeff Bezos has famously said, like your margin is his opportunity and he means it. So what that means is, if you can pay your rent, that's money that he's trying to figure out how to put in his pocket.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, absolutely Absolutely. So I mentioned in the intro, you led GrabCAD's organic traffic to grow 30X, which led to a successful acquisition. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and what strategic choices made that possible?
Speaker 3:Well, that's really what it's called now is product-led marketing or product-led SEO. We didn't have that name when we were doing it, but what GrabCAD was was a website where people who are working on any 3D design could collaborate and submit designs and comment on each other's designs and there was actually some software that helped them do the design. So, because the product was collaborative and because some people were using it for free, we could generate SEO content from the library of 3D models and it became a really nice virtuous cycle there where the more people that submitted 3D models, the more content we could create. That was just basically generated from the database of 3D models. The more content we created, the more differentiated all of that content was in that library, so that different pages and the library itself would rank for more and different types of searches and the more searches that the content in the library was appearing for, then the more people who were interested in 3D design would find out about GrabCAD and go to the website and get involved.
Speaker 3:So it really just became this virtuous cycle where we had to make sure that we were generating the right content, that we were surfacing the right information about the models that were submitted so that they would show up in Google searches, and then making sure that the registration flow was appropriate so that people understood why they wanted to register. Make sure that we understood that people, because people would usually come because they want to download the model and play with it or use it in their project, and so we need to make sure that they register in order to download something and they get the value that they're looking for, and then they want to come back. There's a whole email marketing campaign on the back end to get people to come back to the site and submit more models and more designs, which is really important, and then we're creating more content based on those models and it just goes. But it's really a product-led marketing approach.
Speaker 2:How could somebody take some of the lessons that you learned or things that you did with that company and apply them to their own physical products brand?
Speaker 3:Well, it's tough because we think of product-led SEO or product-led marketing as working best with, like, a software solution or a software solution that can generate content online or generate some type of marketing asset. So with the products, it really depends on the type of product that you're selling. But if it's a physical product, what I would say the real parallel there is the community that we built around the brand. So anything that you could do to build a real community around your brand and that involves the founder or someone who's leading the brand really being out in front and engaging with the community it helps so much if you've got a purpose-driven brand or, at the very least, you give a damn about your customers. I'm going to give you an example.
Speaker 3:Like, I worked with a small e-commerce brand that was selling jewelry and it was a jewelry designer, a woman here in Boston. She loved designing jewelry. She wanted to sell it online. The problem is, there are about a million people, including five in my family, who like to design jewelry and want to sell it online. Like, how do you differentiate that? That's very difficult. So when I was asking her about the different products that she was creating, it turned out that there were a few of them that were selling really well. But there was one that was selling great and I asked her what it was and she said, oh, it's a bracelet paired with a necklace with this autism symbol on it. And I was like, oh really. I said, well, who's buying it? She said, well, families who are touched by autism. And I said, okay, well, how'd you get into that? And she said, well, we, we have a son or a daughter who is autistic, and so I made a couple for some friends. Everybody liked it. So I ended up making dozens more and they've all sold.
Speaker 3:And I said you've got your business idea right there, because not only is a product that you've proven you can sell, but it's a product that taps into a community, it's a purpose behind it, it's targeted enough. It's not just jewelry. It's targeted enough where you know what communities you need to engage with and who you need to activate to get more sales and what influencers you need to engage with and who you need to activate to get more sales and what influencers you need to talk to about this jewelry. So I really like the idea of a purpose-driven approach and for me personally, if I was launching an e-commerce brand, it wouldn't be, you know more, I don't know beach umbrellas or something. It really needs to have a purpose behind it that's linked with a community that would love it, absolutely love it, and promote it for me, and so it's really that community angle that drove GrabCAD. That could also work for a physical product business.
Speaker 2:I like it. I like it and, in terms of building, that community is there and maybe it depends on what you're selling and where your customers hang out, but is there a natural place to start building a community? If you do have a brand, yes, there's a silver bullet. Ask your customers.
Speaker 3:Aha, I love it. I love it. Brands that go viral. They've got a good story behind them and they've got a community that already existed before the brand launched, that was vibrant and around whatever that mission is, whatever that purpose is, and so they just tap into that.
Speaker 2:Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense and, being the customer avatar, in a way, it is really helpful. I've got two brands right now. One of them I would compare to your beach umbrella example. It's products that I can source for X and sell for Y, and I don't have a huge connection to it. My second brand is within the fishing category, which I love to fish and I'm part of a bunch of fishing Facebook groups and and I I know where I hang out, and so I think that's something that's important.
Speaker 3:Well, let's double click on that, Like if you were getting started now, or or maybe you're launching another brand or something like what, how would you do it? Cause you've you've got two great brands there for comparison I'll tell you what I wouldn't do.
Speaker 2:I would not take an, a course that says go find something on alibaba that's under 20, that you can fit in a backpack and go sell it. Um, and you see a lot of me too products there, um, where you type in a particular keyword and you, your first 10 listings all look very, very similar. It's hard to differentiate. And so, um, you know, that was the first brand that I started and, to be honest with you, I kind of got tired of it. Um, you know, you are, uh, very involved with the products that you're selling. You're making infographics, you're writing listing copy, and if you're doing that about something that you're passionate about, everything is easier and it also helps you tap into the mind of your customer. If you know, in the fishing category, I know a bunch of fishermen. I can ask them hey, where do you hang out and go from there, and so, yeah, that would be my advice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think you, we want to make sure that people aren't thinking oh well, whatever I'm passionate about, I love to knit, even though I know someone who does a great business on knitting. Well, whatever I'm passionate about, I love to knit, even though I know someone who does a great business on knitting. But it may not be something that you can sell or you know what channels to sell it on. It might not be something that has a community that you can tap into. It might not be something where the economics work for many different reasons, with various products that are easier to ship than others and just being one example.
Speaker 3:But you really want to find that concentric circles of a product category that you're passionate about, but I wouldn't say passionate about the product. You're passionate about the people that you would be selling to, so you like hanging out with them, you like calling them on the phone, you like talking to them about whatever it is they're excited about that you're helping them to do with your products, like that's huge. And then also you've you have a channel. It could be Facebook ads, but it could also be a private community or any other type of community. There's a channel where you can, you could sell into that that works for you at the volume you need to make the business work. And then also the economics work the economics around your margins and shipping and everything that goes into making the unit economics work.
Speaker 2:I've heard you mention economics a couple of times and I think you will have a great perspective on this. You've worked with hundreds, probably thousands, of entrepreneurs. At this point, Are there any rules of thumb on unit economics or uh, that people should consider when deciding products to launch?
Speaker 3:It's really tough Cause, like I work with several product businesses with their margins are just astronomical 90%. Think, like the supplements, space or somebody selling like a paper product, like maybe a printed illustration or something like that. It's just insane, like the margins that they're able to get. Those are great businesses, so I would love to be there. But also if it's a recurring purchase, that makes a huge difference. So then what it comes down to is lifetime value, and the lifetime value of a customer might be high in terms of the margin that you're getting. It might be high because your customer acquisition cost is low. It might be high because you have great margins on the product. It might be high because your shipping is zero, because it's a digital product. Or it might be high because you're happy to lose money shipping the very first product because you know they're going to buy every month, every whatever, because it's a recurring purchase. But the rules of thumb are really around the customer lifetime value compared to the acquisition cost on the channels that you're considering.
Speaker 2:Okay, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense to zoom out and look beyond your first sale, repeat purchases, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value. I think those are all really really good metrics and there are a bunch of ways to make it work.
Speaker 3:The way it doesn't work is if shipping kills your margin, or you're going to need to do advertising and there's no margin for that, or there's just no margin. So, in general, the more margin the better, but if you don't have astronomical margins, there's different strategies for making it work. If you're somewhere in the middle, you just can't have zero margin. Remember, that's what Bezos wants.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. Warning to all you Amazon sellers beware, so Dale. Can you tell us more about Fire and Spark? Who do you work with? What's your typical client look like?
Speaker 3:So currently we work with a bunch of e-com and healthcare clients and we do a lot with content. So we've been doing SEO content for a long time and, as I talked about during this conversation, SEO content is changing. It's now generative engine optimization, not search optimization, but the other term I really like is search everywhere optimization. Because, if you think about it, content marketing has been around forever before the internet, before content was digital. Content marketing made a lot of sense and it still does and it always will. But it turns out there was this period of time for the last couple decades where content marketing was really easy. All you had to do was hire some cheap writers and have them put keywords in the right places and you were done right. I made my own money doing that back in the day when we were a publisher. But that is coming to an end. That window is closing. So everyone's asking well, what do we do next? And what we do next is content marketing, which is the same thing we've always done. It's just that we're going to be marketing that content on more channels than just organic, just search engines. We're going to be marketing that content in online forums and social media and email marketing and traditional search engines and chat, GBT and generative engines and AI. So what we do at Fire and Spark is help brands make that transition from what was to what will become. And what's wonderful about what was was a lot of us made a lot of money selling various products. I feel like I've sold pretty much everything through my agency or one of my sites that I was running and made a whole bunch of money, like optimizing for Google. And in the future there will be opportunities, Just like when SEO was new.
Speaker 3:When SEO was new, this was like 15 years ago and I knew some folks who figured it out. They taught me what they knew. That's how I got started. I figured some stuff out on my own because I'm pretty technical. It worked and it put money in your pocket, because those of us who were early to SEO like we figured it out before the big brands threw a lot of money at it.
Speaker 3:And the same thing is true right now with GEO. There are a few people who have it figured out for their brand, but it's not going to work for every brand. But if you're in there early, if you can figure it out, if you've got the right business to really leverage it, then, yeah, you can make a killing, just like we did with SEO. So what I would say to people is, like, if you're curious, like you know, reach out to me. I'm happy to take a look at what you're doing. I will say that, like, getting value out of GEO is pretty different from getting value out of SEO. It's different, but happy to have that conversation with anybody who's trying to figure out what comes next after SEO.
Speaker 2:Outstanding, outstanding, and we'll post links to all of that in the show notes. Dale, this has been an outstanding interview. I feel like we could go for several more hours, but out of respect for your time, I would like to transition into the fire round. This is four questions that we ask every guest at the end of the episode. Are you ready, dale?
Speaker 3:Sure sure.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 3:What is your favorite book? Oh man, I mostly read business books and I'm trying to figure you know what One that's not quite business but it is nonfiction is the Let them Theory, which I founded on a podcast probably a podcast in the manosphere but then I mentioned it to my wife and she said I've known about this book forever. It's been all over social media, but I read it and it was really really good. It's about how you relate to the world. Um it really. It really falls into the bucket of books that are about your mindset. I don't even know how to describe it, but um it it. It's very popular in my wife's circle of social media and podcasts and it's not so popular in my circle of podcasts Cool, I'm going to add that one to my reading list.
Speaker 2:What are your hobbies?
Speaker 3:I recently started tennis again, which I love, so for me I try to do something physical every day and really what unlocked it for me for tennis was working one-on-one with a coach, so I didn't have to wait for a friend of mine to be available and I'm learning a lot faster than if I was in group lessons. So that costs money, but it worked great for me.
Speaker 2:Outstanding. What is one thing you do not miss about working for the man?
Speaker 3:Well, this is such a peculiar question because I think I am the man now because I, like I, have 25 employees right, so what I don't miss is not being the man. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I wish there's a way that I could say that, um, like it goes full circle. Where I worked for the man, the man was an asshole. That's why I gave him the middle finger and quit, and then I started running my own business and it took me 15 years to figure it out. But now things are going great and I couldn't even imagine that.
Speaker 3:I hesitated back when, like the the moment before, I figuratively gave my boss the finger. I can't even believe that. I hesitated Like I should have kicked that guy in the ass. Um, gave him the finger, called his mother names and stomped. I hesitated Like I should have kicked that guy in the ass, gave him the finger, called his mother names and stomped out of there, like because things worked out really well.
Speaker 3:So, but then, like I hire a bunch of people, you know, figure out my business and I'm the man. And being the man sucks because, like all of that bullshit that my boss used to do to me, now I do it to my employees and I'm. I don't do it on purpose, but they've got to deal with my crap. I'm scheduling meetings when they don't feel like attending cause they've got 20 other things to do that I told them to do Like I'm the man now. So you got to ask yourself, like, what problem do you want? Um, but it comes full circle and I'd like to believe that I'm a better manager than most of my managers were. But I really have to be intentional about how I manage so that people have a better experience working for me than I had working for some jerks back in the day.
Speaker 2:I think that's really really good perspective. Final question what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?
Speaker 3:You may have heard this one before, but it's really the why behind your business. If you're starting like a transactional business where you sell like you said, you buy for X, you sell for Y and that's it. You don't care about your customers or the product or the difference your product is making in the world, or something. Maybe you care about your family putting food on the table. There's plenty of people out there who are excited to just offer their family a good standard of living and they'll work their butts off just for that. I'm not one of those people. I have to actually care about the customers that I'm working with in order to show up every day. But any e-commerce business that you're building, you don't believe the people that say it's easy, because it's not easy. The people who succeed are passionate about something and that's why they show up every day. That's why they send the extra email, they put in an extra hour, that's why they work on the weekends, that's why they're doing more social media posting than they need to, but it's that kind of stuff. Or making phone calls making more phone calls than the other guy, but it's that kind of stuff. Or making phone calls, you know, making more phone calls than than the other guy. It's because they're passionate about something and that's really what drives them. So I don't know what that is going to be for everybody, but there needs to be something that you're excited about, Like if you.
Speaker 3:One litmus test for this is like what do you do nights and weekends? And I don't know a single entrepreneur that stops working at five o'clock. Most of them start work at five o'clock before they can fit their. They can finally, you know, quit their full-time job, right. So if you're work building a new business and thinking to yourself all right, this is work. I don't want to do it after five o'clock. I don't want to do it after five o'clock. I don't want to do it on weekends, Like you are simply not going to succeed because you don't enjoy the process enough to to stick with it.
Speaker 2:That's a really, really good answer to that question, and this is my two hundred and eighty ninth interview, and that that is one of the best ones that I've heard. So, dale, thank you so much for your time today. If people are interested in getting in touch with you, or Fire and Spark what's the best way?
Speaker 3:Well, we're at fireandsparkcom, all spelled out. I'm happy to talk to anybody who has questions about what's going on with SEO and how that's transitioning into GEO. Or reach out to me directly, dale at fireandsparkcom, or you can look me up on LinkedIn. I post on LinkedIn at least a few times a week.
Speaker 2:Awesome, Awesome. Well, Dale, thank you so much for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch. Oh well, bye-bye. Thank you for having me.
