Why Most Marketing Agencies Get It Wrong: Austin Rohleder on Building a Founder-First Agency

Austin Rohleder: I'm getting very involved in like local chamber of commerce. I'm leveraging those relationships and just being genuinely helpful everywhere I can.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: when you're starting out you put enough good back into the world and it'll come back to you.

Carmen: Hi everyone, this is Carmen Dervet and I will be hosting today's episode of Behind the Founders. Joining me here today is Austin Rolleder. Austin, welcome. Can you please introduce yourself?

Austin Rohleder: Yeah. I'm Austin Roller, I'm the founder of Capstone Marketing. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Carmen: Great. Yeah, happy for you to be here too. So to get us started, can you share with the listeners out there, what exactly does Capstone Marketing Group do?

Austin Rohleder: Yeah, we are a fractional CMO agency. I can run we really we can run everything from somebody's marketing from end to end for agency vendor management, for SEO, for somebody's ads that they're running, or as simple as running just a small fractional item of what somebody needs, like their content management.

Carmen: So Austin, could you walk us through to the listeners and audience out there who have never heard or came across Capstone Marketing Group? What is it exactly that you do and what is your goal?

Austin Rohleder: Yeah, so the reason why I founded Campstone Marketing is because I've been a director for a home services company for about seven, eight years now. And there are so many marketing agencies that frankly they were just hired as an account manager and they really don't know the back end of the business. And so they're just managing numbers from I mean, just what they've been taught. They know about three different metrics. And the rest of the business is a total black box to them. They frank like until they get a decade into the business, they have no idea what they're doing. And sadly they're playing with our money, trying to learn it. So we run everything from a founder first perspective for somebody's marketing. so whether it's again a fractional CMO running everything end to end, or it's somebody's content management SEO, I'm looking at it like a marketing director. Because I am. And so if someone's getting really a valuable first person perspective that just most marketing agencies aren't gonna carry. Or maybe the person

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: who founded it carried it, but now the business has been around for 20 years. So you've got ten different account managers later. It's just

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: not the same quality it used to be. So we hold a much tighter grip.

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Okay. I just wanted to go back on what you mentioned earlier. You mentioned something about that most of those agencies, they are only familiar with three different metrics. What are those metrics

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: that you're referring to?

Austin Rohleder: Sure, if you're talking about somebody who's managing Google Ads, which isn't a service that I focus on that is an ever changing world that we're not dipping our toes into, but they're focusing on, hey, what's your impressions, what's your clicks, and necessarily what was the conversion rate and your top of page rate, but they're not looking at what's actually happening in your CRM. So I mean, I've had meetings where someone's coming to me and they're like, Hey, your cost per lead is a hundred and eighty bucks. We're doing fantastic. And I'm like No, we're not because my return on ad spend is two hundred percent. Like it wasn't delivering any actual sales. The things that

Carmen: Of course. Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: actually put people in trucks and out to homes and deliver jobs at the end of the day, like wasn't what the ad agency was measuring and wasn't even how they were properly setting up the campaigns. So the campaigns actually get worse over time, not better, because they're

Carmen: Okay.

Austin Rohleder: focused on hitting the wrong metrics because they just have bad data.

Carmen: Hmm, definitely for sure. What would you say, like are the wrong metrics that they're hitting, or what is it the gaps that they're missing out?

Austin Rohleder: So it's just looking at the full funnel. if somebody's only like if you have a social media manager who's just looking at how many pressions do we hit, and they're not looking at how many visits you get to the website and how many of those

Carmen: Yes.

Austin Rohleder: are actually local visits from people around where you are. Because I mean we might have say YouTube videos that get 35,000, 50,000 views in a month or so, but If they're all from states away from where that contractor is, I mean, it it's all good signals for Google and search, but i in the short to medium term, who cares? Right? Like I could be the most famous roofing contractor in Zimbabwe that has zero net dollars going towards my business, right?

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: So at the end of the day, it's focusing it's being aware of the top end metrics that drive the bottom end results and using

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: those bottom end results. To still be the ultimate governor of the daily actions that my team is taking.

Carmen: Yeah. Yeah, it is right something that I have been recently learning a lot about, right? When it comes into the world of the whole sales funnels that it's really is really easy to gain visibility, get a lot

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: of leads, but the challenge is getting the qualified leads in, right? To be able to go from

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: visibility from them to actually, let's say, booking the service or booking the product, you know, a lot of the times it's like, you would see an ad on YouTube. You would see you know, a a posting on social media, but if people would actually engage in it, there's a huge difference as well.

Austin Rohleder: Yeah, I know a contractor that we actually know pretty well. That and they did a fantastic job posting content, and being able to like things that their content was actually so popular. Contra other contractors were learning about how to execute the trade from their content. And

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: yet they're only a five to seven million dollar business and like they frankly can't figure out how to monetize any of the traffic.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: not that I have any perfect answers for them either.

Carmen: Course.

Austin Rohleder: But it just goes to show like all the traffic in the world doesn't necessarily equal being famous locally or growth in the business.

Carmen: Yeah, that's for sure. so Austin, I'm just going through your LinkedIn profile, right? So you

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: were you do have a background in working in like in marketing. You were a marketing director for over ten years with a mix of sales experience. So what made you decide to shift into an entrepreneur journey?

Austin Rohleder: Sure. So part of it was being in the business long enough and knowing that we could do it. Like you see the agencies and the people who are doing their best but frankly not doing good enough. Like and I've seen the people who are making a living on the marketing side, or you guys have seen it on the recruiting side,

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: and you frank like you can't believe it. And so part of my job is sometimes to do a good enough job to put those people out of business or make them better. And what they're doing

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: and raise the standard and raise the level of competition.

Carmen: Course. Scaling the businesses. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Austin Rohleder: Yeah, and so the short answer is because we can do it. And if you have the choice to work for yourself or work for somebody else, I mean who wants to work for somebody else?

Carmen: Hmm, yeah. You mentioned just now, because we can do it. So I would assume that, you know, you have a team of people, right, supporting you,

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: serving different roles and functions. Could you share with the listeners a little bit about your your team setup, where they all base, who does what?

Austin Rohleder: Yep. So we have a remote team that I work with. outside of me, there's nobody in the States. so we have a full-time SEO manager. I'm bringing on actually another person for digital visibility right now. And then we have a full-time social media manager. they're all based out of the Philippines. for integrity. they have a half the call center is remote. So they have some people based out of South Africa, some people based out of the Philippines. And then they're looking at expanding some additional roles beyond that.

Carmen: Okay, great. So you mentioned that, you know, you have people working in the SEO engine, social media marketing, call center. So what exactly what the the purposes of those call center roles for your business?

Austin Rohleder: Sure. So for a trades business, they're handling all the inbound phone calls. that's a roofing company, so they are handling all of the appointment confirmations. when customers have questions about their jobs, they're handling all of those inquiries. I mean, they're plugged in just like a regular employee would be. I mean, there really is no difference.

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: As long as some like as long as an agent knows the business, knows the customer how to help them appropriately. there really is no business or or no difference between those two people. as

Carmen: Absolutely.

Austin Rohleder: far as the customer is concerned. As long as the there's no accent that's an issue and they're easily understandable. even in the

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Austin Rohleder: Midwest it's not a problem.

Carmen: Yeah. So where do you usually find those remote talent?

Austin Rohleder: So we originally started with an agency that was with Shepherd, which turned into somewhere dot com. Now we source them ourselves on online jobs.ph.

Carmen: Okay, okay. Yeah, I've heard about online jobs.ph. It is a specifically website where you could there's like a lot of roles, remote roles for the market in the Philippines

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: as well. Okay, and throughout that process, what would you say have been some of the experiences you've had, whether it's like lessons learned or challenges and so on?

Austin Rohleder: Yeah. One of the big positives is obviously people are looking at remote work, not only to to be able to access more talent, but also for the significantly lower pay. And we've been able to I mean, I consistently hire at the top end of the pay rate for whatever we're doing, which might only be ten to twenty bucks an hour depending upon the role. but I mean we can access such a higher level of individual than I can

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: here in the States. and frankly, they're more grateful for the position. Like they come to work excited every day, especially on the call center side.

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Austin Rohleder: to pay somebody, say, fifteen to eighteen bucks an hour after commissions,

Carmen: Mm.

Austin Rohleder: and they are just beyond all excited and grateful for the job, versus in

Carmen: Mm.

Austin Rohleder: the states where you have to practically beg somebody to do it. it's

Carmen: Okay.

Austin Rohleder: a from a management perspective, a night and day difference.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: from the Lessons learned side, there's a handful, but one of them I you get a lot more people who are frankly just blind on the resumes, like blatantly lying. So the quality of the vetting process

Carmen: Mm.

Austin Rohleder: has to be there, which even if someone just has stateside employees, like they i it causes you to just tighten up operations all around, which isn't a bad thing. You just you gotta know it's coming. So we had a better interview process. We've started paying for people to do the work before they're hired. So I'll overpay for say ten, twenty hours worth of work

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: to see can they back up what they're saying. Not

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: something that can be AI generated, but hey, you're in the role, what are you gonna execute? So that we can much

Carmen: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely for sure.

Austin Rohleder: much more hire with confidence.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: The football equivalent is when they hire they draft that first round quarterback, and then within

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: like day three of training camp, they're like, that's not the guy. And

Carmen: Yeah, yeah.

Austin Rohleder: contractors and agencies, I mean, we've had that happen how many times? Where you're

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: excited about a new hire, they walk in the front door,

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: and your front office person is like, they're not a fit. And

Carmen: Mm

Austin Rohleder: they're absolutely right. So

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: it just causes us to be more qualified, be more patient. and ask much more of candidates, but pay while we do it. And we found

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: that that system works well.

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's all about like the learnings and the takeaways and seeing what you could do best to be able to vet and find the right talent as well. So you mentioned that

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: you're now in the process of growing your team, you know, you're getting another, was it like a a digital marketing manager on board, or what was the role that you mentioned earlier on?

Austin Rohleder: Yeah, digital awareness is the high level summary. I mean, 'cause you're covering

Carmen: Okay. Okay.

Austin Rohleder: SEO, AI, insert your acronym here, all that stuff.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, all that stuff. Okay. And so in terms of when we look at it from a like very operational scale, would you say, is there still some aspects of your business where you're like, okay, if I'm able to delegate these specific tasks to that person, what would it be?

Austin Rohleder: So right now the I mean AI has accelerated what our remote agents can do. So somebody who I had originally hired for SEO, frankly he's been able to take on a world more of on the development side and our own learning has accelerated. So what we've had to do is I'm hiring somebody to replace all of those SEO execution tasks that used to be his to do and we got fantastic results with, but now there's just so much opportunity to go after, so much more capabilities that we have. I can't just have him on the necessary but low leverage, very transactional tasks anymore. So it's hiring somebody to do all of the very nerdy SEO things that have to be done to keep contractors healthy and their their online digit visibility growing.

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. also like just wanted to point out something that you mentioned earlier about AI, right? that's obviously playing quite a significant role now in our a to day-to-day lives, in their

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: business. It's like surrounding us. I do have a couple of questions around that, but I guess the first question would be which aspects of your business are you integrating with the help of AI?

Austin Rohleder: Sure. So for integrity you mentioned, where I'm the marketing director as well. we, for example, rebuilt our entire website through HubSpot. Without

Carmen: Okay.

Austin Rohleder: AI, that would not have been possible. We originally had an agency helping us with them, with that build out. And then towards the end, frankly, we fired them, rewrote all the code ourselves. and our online visibility and rankings have skyrocketed. not one of those situations where somebody writes the website themselves and then the back

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: end is all shattered into pieces and it's a nightmare. Like no, it can actually properly be done. And then an SEO task, for example, building out service area pages. So

Carmen: Yeah, yeah.

Austin Rohleder: it's still it's not the same levels when everyone was just looking at looking for the 10 blue links on a web page. But it's still very important to have service area pages for your local business. And I can in about 30 seconds of a workflow that we created once Fable came out for Claude can publish an entire set of service area pages that automatically are genuinely like locally researched, genuinely unique and helpful content for the user. And what would have taken me a day, probably, to do manually or one of my guys a day, takes literally 30 seconds, and then we're just proofreading all the answers.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: So the genuinely helpful content generation is sped up so much faster. And

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: obviously there's a lot of people who don't take the extra steps and what they end up creating is just a lot of slot that isn't helpful to anybody. But

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: if they have the know-how and have a little bit of the background and the desire to learn, we can still create a lot of very good useful content with

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: AI. And then outside of some of that generation, analysis is really where it shines.

Carmen: Okay.

Austin Rohleder: All of the data for a contractor. Contractor CRMs are famously pretty terrible. They often aren't set up very much. People don't execute the SOPs. So a lot of the data's all there, but

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: it might be inaccurate or just goes uncapitalized on because people don't know how to pull the reports, the CRM doesn't pull them correctly, or they just don't have time to look at it. So being

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: able to extract all the raw data out of a CRM and look at the trends that just nobody has the time to look at is where I mean you find hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Carmen: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: sometimes very easily, and that make changes. For

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: example, one of the things that we know for any service business is that speed is key. The quicker we can get

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: to a customer, the better. And that that's true everywhere all the time. We want everything faster. So

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: th but what what causes us to be able to make changes internally or to like really push to someone like hey this change needs to be made is when we have the data behind it. It's not just based on first principles of us saying speed's key. And you're like, okay, great, well I have other things to do. Well we were able to plug all of the data from a CRM into Claude, have it look at our sales data, and see that every appointment that we had that was booked more than three or four days out, it was only, it was half as likely past that four day mark that we would be able to actually get into a customer's home. They would cancel twice as often. Which anecdotally, when we say that, sounds like, hey, no duh, that's rocket science. It's a whole different ballgame when it's your CRM, you pull the data and go, crap, I'm

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: worth a million dollars on fire this year.

Carmen: Yeah, especially when it directly affects you as well. Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's not somebody selling you something. It's your own data telling you the story.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah.

Austin Rohleder: And so th there's a hundred different versions of that analysis and that story that can get told once we have an engine like Claude or any of the large AIs now that can just run the processing so much more effectively than we can.

Carmen: Yeah, for sure. I think there's like what you mentioned, there is so much power when it comes to data and to be able to be in this day and age and era where we have all these useful CRM tools like right, like you mentioned, we have like Go High Level, we have HubSpot, we have

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: yeah, just to name a few Salesforce and so on, that really saves up a lot of time, but it can provide us with a lot of answers on okay, what are the bottlenecks, what are the pain points that we need to identify to be able to improve or generate better revenue. And I think that's definitely very helpful as well. do you see any I would say do you have any reservations when it comes to the use of AI or Are you more of like a pro-AI person? Because people have different opinions, right, when it comes to their thoughts on AI day-to-day life.

Austin Rohleder: Sure. So anybody who is a founder type mindset is almost always the type of person who's gonna be looking to do something bigger, better, faster, stronger. So

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: by default my personality is gonna lean pro. but as an example, with that SAP publishing workflow that we had that condensed a day's worth of work down to thirty seconds. One of the bugs that happened with it was that the header HTML and all the pages, which I won't bore you with the details on it, but long story short, it was wrong. It didn't change with all the details of the rest of the page and all the local research that happened. It carried it from that same original page. So then when an AI goes to look and read that page, it's going to read RON City, RON Product, and then it's going to dean it in the rankings. And so There was a not very many, but there was a handful of batches that went out that had that wrong header HTML. Everything was right, but that one thing. So the

Carmen: Mm.

Austin Rohleder: importance of doing due diligence and checking, and once we fig found it, it's an easy fix. but it has to be proportional with the generation that the back end systems have to be set up to both automatically and manually spot check the quality itself. So without guardrails it's an absolute disaster. with the

Carmen: Yeah, of course.

Austin Rohleder: proper guardrails it's a superpower.

Carmen: Yeah, absolutely for sure. It's it's kind of in a way that, you know, it is a tool that you have to learn how to use. it's a skill to learn how to navigate it in the in the in the best way possible so that you can really take advantage of all of these CRM or AR tools as well. just wanted to go back a little bit about your, you know, your founder journey, right? what would you

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: say have been some of the challenges that you faced along the way?

Austin Rohleder: Sure. Well the biggest challenge is always getting started. as a marketing director, when you've got a few million dollars to pump behind a business every year, well you can get the name out there. and it's an entirely different ballgame when you have a lot less than a few million dollars in order to get that done. And that's where it becomes way more old school. where it's who do you know, what are the relationships and what can you leverage to get the ball rolling. Cause those first five or ten clients are by far the hardest hurdle.

Carmen: Mm, okay.

Austin Rohleder: so it's on my side, it's all about the relationships and then I'm still doing the content publishing, the social media, that way like hey, I can be found and I can go after some of the low-hanging fruit digitally. But initially, before I have a ton of dollars put behind it, I'm getting very involved in like local chamber of commerce. I'm leveraging those relationships and just being genuinely helpful everywhere I can.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: 'Cause then if you when you're starting out you put enough good back into the world and it'll come back to you.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. No, that's a very powerful that is a very powerful and also like thoughtful way to think about it as well and in a way very quite meaningful, right? It's like you give back to the world and then you know the universe would find its way to work work its way to like reaping or that you're able to enjoy the fruits that you bear as well. so I'd just be curious to know, you mentioned that when you first started out, the first five to ten clients are the toughest one. What made it so hard? Was

Austin Rohleder: Yeah.

Carmen: it not targeting the right clients? Or what was it that you found that was sort of making this process more difficult?

Austin Rohleder: Sure, so mean, it all depends upon where you're competing, right? So if I'm going ahead and I'm trying to target for a plumbing company and I'm trying to generate Google ad traffic, but I don't have the amount of dollars to buy the clicks, well I can spend half the money, but I will get zero the visibility, because you just don't have enough money to play the game. So if you're coming into a market with established players, you have to come from a different angle. but then even then once you have that different angle, you either have to pay with literal dollars or in sweat equity. Because you can be the very best in the world. Nobody knows you exist.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Austin Rohleder: And if nobody knows you exist, well, I mean obviously nothing can happen. So the entire game is visibility. And so it's very manual, very boots on the ground. There's no way around it.

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah. The visibility piece is definitely key, right? I've heard there's a lot of businesses there great at what they deliver, great at what they do, but the struggle is always getting enough clients in because of the missing piece, which is the sales and the marketing aspect as well. Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: Mm-hmm. I mean you guys have seen it on the recruiting side

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: where the plenty of people have been burned by recruiting agencies before, where

Carmen: Yeah.

Austin Rohleder: hey, they found me people but they weren't qualified or they took way too much time, didn't get back to me, and now all these people left the pipeline. Now I have to be now I have to pay for that. And yeah, you've always gotta come in and probably clean up on the back end. I'm sure it's not too

Carmen: Yeah, yeah.

Austin Rohleder: often where you're working with people who have never worked with a recruiting agency before.

Carmen: Hmm. Yeah, 100% for sure. Okay, well Austin, just like a final question that I like to ask for every one of my guests coming into this podcast. if there was one advice or takeaway that you would like to share to our listeners out there, what would it be?

Austin Rohleder: And is this primarily for founders or where's the the perfect target audience there? 'Cause I would say it goes very wide ranging.

Carmen: Yeah, absolutely for sure. I would say honestly, it's entirely up to you. If you feel like there's something that is relevant for people considering to start a business, you can share that too. Or if you think there's something that's more general, you can also share that. So there's really no right or wrong. Whatever you think speaks out to you the most.

Austin Rohleder: To start a business is gonna take a hundred times the effort you think it will, and it's gonna take ten times as long. But at the end of the day it's worth it. And that's how the universe sorts out who actually wants it. And those are the people who get to have the independence and the lifestyle to run their own business. So you gotta decide, okay, how much do you think what do you think it's gonna take? Multiply that times a hundred and go, okay, am I still willing to put in that effort?

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Definitely involves a lot of projections, calculations, maths, and also how badly do you want it, right? To continue to persevere and everything like that. Okay. Well, Austin, thank you so much for coming on to our podcast. it was lovely to chat with you. And this is behind the founders. Be sure to stay tuned for the next episode. Take care.

Austin Rohleder: Perfect, thank you.