The 5 Ways We Built the Foremost Brand in Our Industry Without Ever Advertising
And How Entrepreneurs, Colleges, Grad Schools & Leaders Can Do the Same
Roughly 12 years ago, I took the entrepreneurial leap of faith—the one that I suspect many people reading this blog might be considering, have considered, or have similarly jumped squarely into that frightfully exhilarating abyss—and founded our firm, The Spivey Consulting Group. Of course, it wasn’t a “group” in year one; it was just me. Our revenue (not profit, just the total money brought in before expenses) was about $38,000. We, or I as it were, had no brand. Which made things feel all the more precarious, as I come from higher education, where everything starts with brand. It would be incredibly hard to tank Princeton College or the University of Virginia even if, as an individual, you set out to try. I’m not sure one person could do it in their tenure as a leader. Harvard, with its name and first-mover effect (Harvard was the first college in the United States, William & Mary the second) seems to be doing just fine. But Spivey? Just an unrecognizable name—one that at first I was almost embarrassed to use in the firm’s title, but that I ultimately landed on simply because my friend helping me make the website thought it was catchy and unusual enough to use versus something like “Higher Ed Experts, Inc.” And so our first lesson was learned—differentiation matters.
Many things indeed matter, and for many reasons—the largest of which is that most business fail. Technically, all businesses will fail, and on day one of almost any MBA program, they lead with, “The goal of any business is to simply stay in business.” For small businesses, only about 25% last long enough to be measured as stable and a success. That’s likely also a forgiving statistic because within the arena you inhabit, things like overhead, barriers to entry/exit, volatile supply and demand, etc., you often see specific industries above a 95% failure rate. Another lesson: starting a business is fraught with peril, and simply knowing that fact is helpful. More on that soon.
Despite that peril, Spivey Consulting has not failed, and notably, we didn’t use paid advertising. Not once in our 12-year history. Nor have we ever borrowed money. In fact, despite that slow start I alluded to, we now have a substantial rainy-day capital reserve, a team that now numbers in the thirties, multiple revenue streams, a book, a podcast with nearly a million listens, and a website with visits in the tens of millions. Not a week goes by that a college president or law school dean doesn’t reach out to us for advice or consulting services, and with our services for applicants and students, had we wanted to grow during the boom a few years ago, we could have doubled our number of consultants or easily sold to a VC firm for a return thousands of times over our start-up investment. I say all of very much trying to say it as a business example and not to sound like I am bragging (although I do mean to brag about my colleagues who have made much of this happen), as again, we are acutely aware that everything in business is precarious—our triumphs today could easily be failures tomorrow if we do not stay dedicated, nimble, and aware of our weaknesses. Perhaps the one piece of advice missing below is how important it is to stay humble in running a business, because of how quickly things can change on you. But, for this article, I do want to point out that despite challenges and weaknesses (and all businesses have them), you can be successful with the right strategy. And I’ll be the first to admit that luck could have almost all to do with it, and I am sure it has some. But strategically, this is what I believe not just worked, but what is replicable to many others, and hopefully you.
We started with content marketing and expertise—we earned our brand by giving away an incredible amount of free advice.
If I were to open a restaurant, or accounting firm, or just about any other business, I think I’d fail within a year. It’s one reason I have never invested in a business other than ours—this is about the only industry I am an expert in. Ever watch the TV show Shark Tank? The most common groups that do not get investment deals are the ones that come in with a huge amount of motivation for their product or idea. They start off with a bang because they scream of passion and inspirational talk. But what happens when the questions from the “sharks” start coming? They know nothing about their products, and the spiral to walking out empty-handed is rapid. That same spiral, starting a business with passion alone without tremendous knowledge of your industry, would likely lead to the same result; you see it all the time. A few boom months, then a few months later the windows are shuttered.
In the arena we work in, law school admissions, we are the foremost experts. This has always been our starting point and foundation (see #2). We have over 250 years of experience in admissions, legal education, and higher education. Which is why we do content marketing. We give free advice whenever and whenever we can. Our blog has thousands of pages of content; our podcast, as mentioned, approaches 1 million listens. We are on message boards, a number of social media platforms, and the overwhelming percentage of our posts are simply answering questions and offering advice, on everything from the macro global level (such as how the COVID-19 pandemic would impact higher education) to the incredibly nuanced (such as reverse engineering data pools to determine which school that do not ask for certain essays still give their applicants a bump for submitting them, and which penalize for doing so). Not a day goes by that we do not share information and flesh out questions internally as a team, and more often than not we take what we learn from each other and share for free online. This serves two functions, both of which are core to who we are as a firm. First, it promotes and spreads sound advice and good resources for applicants who are going through the admissions process without our help—increased accessibility to good information. Second, it establishes us as experts in applicants’ minds. Thus, we have never had a need to advertise.
We hired the very best in our industry and embraced a culture that we are all in this together.
The most important thing you can ever do as a business or school is to hire talented and committed people. Not just experts, but professionals who do not need to be managed. Who are intrinsically motivated to add value and do well for the collective team. We’ve hired roughly 50 people since founding the firm, and the vast majority have been exceptional. To date, we have only had one full-time hire voluntarily leave us. This, I believe, is a great place to be because we have hired great people. Because we want to work for each other and not just ourselves. Because we have embraced the simple truth that what is best for us all is also best for ourselves. Imagine if every business or college was run like this. How could they fail?
So, as an example, if I get into a long online dispute with some online troll who slanders or creates distorted truths about us based on actual lies—and this will happen to you if you have competitors or have to turn clients away—what am I really doing? I am putting the need to anesthetize my frustration by punching back above the needs of every single other person at our firm. It’s my ego speaking—so I don’t let it. How does it help a single other person at our firm for me to bicker online when we are attacked? Yet I see this happen every single day from leaders. I see it from Presidents of large corporations, and I see it from college administrators. Or, as a more everyday example, if someone at our firm is struggling with a client issue, how does it help the firm if they keep it to themselves? They don’t. They share, they ask for advice, and we all step in. Together, as a team, to help our colleague. You’ll also see our team members volunteering free time to participate in our substantial pro bono program (up 150% in applicants from last year and up 250% from the year before!), to write blogs, to do podcasts, to share data and newsletters, or to just be a friend to another person at our firm. And since we are all remote except for our annual professional development retreat, this at times means being a friend to someone you have never met in person. We do it because we hire caring, compassionate people who are thought leaders in our industry. Which along with point (1) brings us back an amazing feature of our firm—that we have never had to advertise. If we are constantly giving good advice to the market for free, and if we have a culture of hiring industry leaders who embrace the firm as a group, why would we ever need to? We have stayed relatively small in the boom periods and weathered the down periods in an incredibly cyclical industry, all because we’d rather be stable as this group than churn in more profit as a conglomeration of people who hardly know each other or the industry.
We don’t oversell or spin.
Think of a movie where the grifter salesperson comes into town selling something they claim the townspeople desperately need—water that cures ailments, for example. On a stage, with an audience, they spin and charm and sing and dance, and before too long the entire town has bought the water and said sales expert has moved to the next town to continue to make a fortune.
There’s a lot wrong with the above, even if it makes for an entertaining movie or play. For starters, sincerity is easy to detect. Inauthentic organizations rarely realize this, but when they are insincere or spinning, others in the industry, including their potential clients, tend to pick up on it. Which also brings me to the idiocy of the example above. Word spreads. In fact, word spreads faster today than it has at any time in human history. If we were promising our clients unrealistic outcomes, they would go tell other applicants about it, and our reputation would take a hit. Word spreading has positive impacts too—it’s what allows us to avoid being constant salespeople. If we as a firm were constantly loudly selling ourselves, we would be drowning out all of the people who we have helped who are organically talking about our services because they are kind and grateful people. Our podcast has a 5-star rating on every platform it is on that rates. Our book has a 5-star rating on Amazon. We have well over 100 testimonials online from our clients. Why would we ever feel the need to add spin or even sell above these points? We’d just be drowning out the most sincere form of flattery of all—that from others. Unbiased. Legitimate. Real. Yes, this is a blog about what has worked for us, so I am writing about the good things here. But listen to any of our podcasts or read any of our blogs. We don’t tend to sell ourselves. We just try to give the best advice we can, and the market can find us if they need us.
We listen to dissenting opinions.
In the early days, when the firm was just me, I had to make every decision. And I made a lot of bad ones. Undeniably so. What would be the point of hiring incredibly smart people and not listening to them? One thing I have come to learn in our 12 years is that one of the greatest feelings I have is when a person, or people, change my mind about something. This doesn’t have to be 180 degrees, and most often is not. But it could be taking an idea and going in a different direction with it. Or slowly going forward with it rather than immediately launching (I am notoriously impatient).
Don’t get me wrong. Organizations need a hierarchy. Flat organizations with every vote being equal in every single decision have never worked—the literature behind this is unanimous. So, at times, I have to make an ultimate decision, and at rare times that decision will go against the majority. But here’s a cool phenomenon. As your business becomes more successful, your ego becomes less of a driver. Or it should. You’ve already proven yourself, and what starts to matter is the well-being of everyone you work with. Part of that well-being is listening to their dissenting opinions as carefully as possible, and creating a space and culture where they can dissent without retribution.
We worst-case everything.
I won’t belabor this point, because I already wrote a blog on it, here. I’m an incredibly positive person in my life. But hope, as it were, isn’t a viable business strategy. If you plan for the worst, everything less than the absolute worst becomes easy to deal with.
I love what I do, I care greatly about the people I work with, and the stability our firm adds to their lives. We work from home, and while we take our profession incredibly seriously, we don’t take ourselves that way. We disagree at times. We have had arguments. We have had down months. But our trajectory in 12 of 12 years has been upward. Growth. More importantly, I’d like to think (and there is a lot of reason to believe) we have gotten better in each of those years because of the contributions of those we have added. But what is most important? You absolutely can be passionate about something and make it work for not just yourself, but for all those who join you in the cause such that it becomes bigger than yourself. You just have to have a strategy behind that passion. I sincerely wish you the best with yours and hope that there was something, even the tiniest of ideas or thoughts in this blog, that will help you along the way.
– Mike Spivey