Elevate Your Business: O’Brien Porter

Good afternoon, welcome back. Kent Bain with Nine Business Group and Elevate Your Business Spotlight Interview. We have O’Brien Porter with us today.

O’Brien, please introduce yourself. Most importantly, introduce your company, what you do and what sets you apart from your competition. O’Brien, welcome.

Well, thank you, appreciate that. My name is O’Brien Porter and I am the owner and managing partner of Porter John Digital. We are a tailored digital media agency where we do things a little bit differently because rather than just offering a bunch of services to these business owners, we typically take them on and see where their gaps are within their services and then make sure that we accommodate to that and also enable them to drive their results and hit whatever their goals or KPIs may be.

In addition to that, we do have a smaller division that is solely focused on small businesses and with that, it is just to also help all those smaller guys that may not be aware of what is available to them and try to develop cost-effective solutions to enable that growth.

Excellent, thank you. Is there a certain niche you work with or is it just any business that wants a better online or more effective online presence?

Well, when it comes to the smaller guys, we try to keep it broad just because you know it’s smaller to begin with and the budgets are not always the exact, not the largest, so it’s okay for us to kind of diversify whoever is in need of that but when it comes to larger guys, we do have our core six and that core six is primarily within the professional services.

We also have telehealth and medicine. We also have the construction and real estate. Then we have the institutions, educational institutions.

Then finally or actually we also have the professional, I guess you could say like the accountants and like the law, so law services. Then just to finish it off, I would say that we kind of have a division that’s more on the restaurant side like franchising specifically, so helping restaurants that have more than one location create that franchising opportunity.

That’s a pretty healthy breadth of clients you serve, so I’m assuming you didn’t cook it up overnight. How long have you been at this and how have you gone from where you started to being able to broaden out into as many sectors and in a strong way?

Great question, so it started back in 2018, so I had recently come upon graduating from university for business and I was able to get a job at Meta. Meta is the current company for Facebook and Instagram.

This was in Toronto actually and what I did was I initially started working in the client solutions department where I was focused on small business to begin with.

During that time period, for starters, I had no idea what marketing was about. I didn’t even understand how Facebook let alone made money from advertising because I was just used to going on my feeds and just kind of seeing what I would see.

I didn’t know that there was a whole other element to it, but after getting into there I started working with some of these smaller businesses and I realized how much of an impact it made for them to understand the relevance and the importance of advertising, especially across these platforms.

Eventually, I was segued to work with larger corporations and that was great as well too, but I always remembered my experiences working with small businesses. So in 2019, still working at Metta, I decided to start my own business. I solely started focusing on the small guys just because of how much I enjoyed working with that and the experiences that I was able to build and in 2020, I was able to join forces with a few other marketers and we kind of created what you’d call a bit of a partnership and we started working with significantly larger amounts of businesses, so much to a point where we I think we had touch base with almost 350 plus businesses just in the years of 2019 to 2021.

At this point, we started to kind of really build reoccurring and retention within these clients and started segwaying to larger markets. So from that time period, there was so many growing pains and just learning from just the experiences of you know wins and losses when it comes to client experiences that it kind of helped shape the way of where I wanted to take things.

Fast forward to 2023 or just towards the end of 2022, I decided that I wanted to expand things out west, but the individuals that I was working with kind of really wanted to focus on the East. So at that point, I decided that I was going to just start something new and that’s where Porter John Digital was born and as of 2023, I launched that and decided to migrate over to Calgary, that’s the western side of Canada and I’ve been looking to just grow the business along with the other subsidiaries since then and just been steady at working towards it.

So it’s really been roughly around seven or eight years of just working in the marketing and seeing all the ups and downs, the nuances, the growing pains that has allowed me to shape the kind of the idea of where I want this agency to go and where I want to be able to focus on and make an impact.

Okay, let’s let’s take some of this knowledge you’ve accumulated and share it with the world. What are the top three things that you’ve learned that you often have to solve for your new clients that if they knew they would do, not that I want to replace you, but that would improve their chances of success? So what are the top three things that you always find helping a new client do that they probably could do on their own before they find you but it would just help their marketing?

Yeah, great question. So number one would be planning. A lot of business owners, they plan everything but having a marketing strategy and in my opinion, that can be one of the most important aspects of the business in terms of growth.

So I’ll often ask and inquire about, you know, what the plan is and a lot of it is just kind of sporadic. The thing is with these digital platforms, a lot of them have rules that we don’t consciously think about.

So for example, something as simple as a reel, if the aspect ratios are off, if the color contrast is off, if the captions are not to whatever the standard is on that platform, it will reduce your reach. Like you’re not going to reach a lot of people because it doesn’t really see that video as, you know, a fit categorically to what their expectations are.

So even things as simple as that and just understanding which platforms you typically want to go on, it’s not all of them, sometimes you’re better off just streamlining on two or three and just having the right kind of message, I think that is one of the more important aspects.

Secondly, establishing a strong proposition value. I noticed that businesses sometimes they will do a lot of things except for actually sell themselves and show people why they are different and show people why, you know, their standards may be different from another individual. So having a strong proposition value to kind of really sway the audiences has also been another thing.

And then finally, I would say just execution. Often they, if they do have a plan, they typically don’t follow it. So they will just kind of, again, with the freestyling, just kind of let it be and just put something out there rather than nothing.

And sometimes I’ll have to really recircle with them and be like, hey, I know we just want to put something out there. But sometimes, even if it takes a little longer, you want to put the right thing out there so that when people do see it or when your typical target audience sees it, they perceive it in the right ways and it’s able to be something that’s measurable and potentially a conversion for you as well.

I’m going off script here, but I want to ask, you’ve been in the space for seven, eight years, you’ve spent the last two years growing and scaling your own business. Can you speak to time management? I just got off the phone with a prospect of ours who is just in over his head. You know, he’s turned down good marketing time because he’s too busy. How do you or how have you managed time? And what does it look like for you to have an effective week? And how do you say no? You know, talk to us about things you do to improve your decision making around time and being more efficient.

Well, yeah, it’s been a process through these years. But what I’ve learned to do is to number one, trust automation, trust the resources and tools that help make your life easier, especially with organizing and then having a schedule. So automation is really effective for me because now, like, for example, someone were to reach out to me. It’s not just me manually sending that sequence of conversations leading up to us meeting. I have that automated as the same thing goes for when someone is decided to onboard. Our entire onboarding process is also automated at that as well. So it really allows us to cut time and a lot of additional work by just putting those those processes in place.

And, you know, as we segue on to just kind of having a schedule prior to I would just often freestyle things. So I would try to build a schedule, but then I would just not follow it. I just do whatever. And I found that I was falling behind on a lot of tasks and a lot of important things that would keep the business, you know, effectively growing. So now I have a very firm schedule. I even schedule things as simple as the time I wake up just so that I can keep that routine because that routine builds repetition and that repetition builds you getting closer to where you want to be. A lot of it is self discipline. So to have that in place is is really effective.

And then just be embracing the innovation. Like there’s a lot of new AI tools that come out there. I used to be a little bit skeptical on that, but now I’m very open to trying it at least once just because, you know, this innovation is something you can’t run from. The same thing is digital marketing. It’s just taking over and you have to be able to embrace these tools to have them at your fingertips when that time comes, because soon you might be left behind the I assume it might be gone.

OK, I got to know if there was a pirate, a thief in your business, what would they be stealing from you?

That’s a great question. Probably the solutions. The thing is, with marketing, it’s not just a cookie cutter approach. I know sometimes people like to use the same approach each time, but each business is different. And what we do is we evaluate exactly where you are so that we can find solutions to help you at exactly where you are. Whereas, you steal that from us, that would be extremely valuable because a lot of other individuals in the space seem to kind of think they have it all figured out and just kind of try to implement a strategy that has worked in the past. But we understand that that is just because it worked on Wednesday. I’m sure you’re aware how often these digital tools update to come Friday. It could be a different game. So we try our best to ensure that these businesses are getting those tailored solutions and they’re really seeing the value from what we provide.

I love it. I love it. I love that comment around time too. Thank you for that. When you look ahead five years from now, 25 years from now, what do you want to be doing? What does success for you look like in your business and your personal life?

Yeah. So for success for me, it’s all about legacy. So the reason I got into this is I worked at Metta for five years and it was a great, great time. I learned so much from it and I saw where my potential was for the highest position I could possibly hold. And I thought to myself, what type of legacy am I really leaving behind? It’s great to be able to spend my entire career at a company like this, but at the same time, how is that going to really build that generational wealth, that motivation for the generations that are coming up, not only my children, but also other children that are often inspired by seeing other people taking risks. So for me, it’s all about the legacy, being able to make that impact on my community, make that impact just on the world, and then also to motivate those around me that taking the risk is not always easy, but sometimes it definitely does pay off. And if you really want to make that impact over the masses, it’s the best way. And yeah, it’s just about legacy building and just making an impact on my community.

Love it. Now the last, most important question is, any business owner out there, larger small, sounds like you would love to have a conversation with, you want to help them improve their impact, their reach, where can they find you?

Well, we are virtually everywhere. So we’re on all platforms. You can search us up. It’s Porter J Digital, or if you’d want to work on a smaller scale, it’s O’Brien P Consulting. But we have, you can contact us by email. We have a chat on our website, a chat box for both websites. We have all platforms, as mentioned, give us a call. So yeah, we’re virtually everywhere. You just got to search us up and you’ll find us there. We also have some great Google reviews too, if that’s, if you’re looking to just kind of see how much, what kind of impact we’ve made. But yeah, we’re everywhere.

Sounds great O’Brien. Thank you for your time. Have a great weekend.

Look forward to hearing the rest of the story in the days and weeks to come. All right. Thank you.

And I appreciated the opportunity as well.

You’re welcome.

Cheers.