Nov. 9, 2021

How Dave Ramsey Consolidated Over a Dozen Brands & Websites

In this episode, Dan Sanchez talks with Kacy Maxwell who is an Executive Director of Marketing at Ramsey Solutions about a recent migration of all their websites into a single mega site.

This is an episode that covers branding, SEO, domains, urls, and all the marketing tactics that come with them. Taking 18 websites and brands down to one required a serious effort from the team. Find out about the steps they took to accomplish it.

Transcript
WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.040 --> 00:00:00.250 Mhm 2 00:00:04.940 --> 00:00:08.400 Welcome back to BBB Growth. I'm dan Sanchez with Sweet fish Media and I'm 3 00:00:08.400 --> 00:00:12.930 here with Casey Maxwell who is the executive director of marketing at 4 00:00:12.930 --> 00:00:17.520 Ramsey Solutions or one of a few executive directors. Right, so we've 5 00:00:17.520 --> 00:00:22.210 got a number of them there. Casey, Welcome to the show. Thanks thanks for 6 00:00:22.210 --> 00:00:26.460 having me. I know in the past few years team that Ramsey team has really been 7 00:00:26.460 --> 00:00:32.600 scaling from a few 100 team members to just over 1000 now and with plans to go 8 00:00:32.610 --> 00:00:35.620 like to the moon probably to 2000. I know you guys are building a whole new 9 00:00:35.620 --> 00:00:41.290 building things are going up for team Ramsey and that means change. So I was 10 00:00:41.290 --> 00:00:44.960 excited to talk to her Casey today as I know there's had a lot of changes 11 00:00:44.960 --> 00:00:49.690 within the last two years. I know the pandemic has accelerated some changes 12 00:00:49.690 --> 00:00:55.080 going on recently, especially with your essentially a proliferation of brands 13 00:00:55.080 --> 00:00:59.200 that you've had before and websites that you guys have had. So before we 14 00:00:59.200 --> 00:01:02.760 jump into like what's going on now and where you guys are going in the future. 15 00:01:03.040 --> 00:01:06.930 I wanted to learn more about what you guys have done or where you guys were 16 00:01:06.930 --> 00:01:10.350 with the amount of brands and websites you were managing and kind of what 17 00:01:10.350 --> 00:01:13.700 you've done recently with them. Yeah, the interesting thing, so I've been, 18 00:01:13.710 --> 00:01:17.940 I've been at Ramsey for about five years and I can say the most consistent 19 00:01:17.940 --> 00:01:24.650 thing at Ramsey has been changed. So if if you look at at what Ramsey solutions 20 00:01:24.650 --> 00:01:31.560 was 25 years ago. Dave it was Dave with a small team, they had a radio show, 21 00:01:31.570 --> 00:01:36.160 they had a book and they had a class and they expanded some of the services 22 00:01:36.160 --> 00:01:40.990 over time, over those next 10 to 15 years. But it's really been in these 23 00:01:40.990 --> 00:01:46.420 last 5 to 7 years that it really has exploded. So when I, when I joined it 24 00:01:46.420 --> 00:01:50.370 was, it was a little under 500 team members. Like I said, we're now over 25 00:01:50.490 --> 00:01:55.620 1000. We have the number of brands and services that we've begun to offer. 26 00:01:55.620 --> 00:02:02.890 Just over that time Has been, it's almost been 150% increase. Uh, and it's 27 00:02:02.890 --> 00:02:06.150 funny because when you look at it, a lot of people will know us for one 28 00:02:06.150 --> 00:02:11.080 specific thing, maybe it is the book or the class or the radio show, but the 29 00:02:11.080 --> 00:02:16.160 number of services that we provide across money and across things like 30 00:02:16.160 --> 00:02:20.830 marriage and mental health and career were just, were just exploding. And 31 00:02:20.830 --> 00:02:25.080 it's, it's a really fun time to be part of that sort of growth. That's really, 32 00:02:25.080 --> 00:02:30.040 really accelerated how many, just to give people a sense of what, like how 33 00:02:30.040 --> 00:02:34.260 many things you guys got going on? How many like profit centers does Ramsay 34 00:02:34.260 --> 00:02:38.140 currently have going on? Well, we've been consolidating those for a while, 35 00:02:38.140 --> 00:02:42.370 but if you, if you look back, there was 10 to 15 profit centers across the 36 00:02:42.370 --> 00:02:47.530 company and we've consolidated a good number of those over the past the past, 37 00:02:47.540 --> 00:02:51.950 actually a few months and few years, but it's, it's amazing, it's amazing 38 00:02:51.950 --> 00:02:57.200 how many different pieces the company itself, it's always had this sort of 39 00:02:57.200 --> 00:03:01.570 entrepreneurial bent. So uh teams within, we would have these little 40 00:03:01.570 --> 00:03:06.050 startups that just happened within the organization and it's a small team that 41 00:03:06.050 --> 00:03:11.770 that come around an idea and begin pushing it to get A P. N. L. And to be 42 00:03:11.770 --> 00:03:16.350 able to grow this. And so we had those things springing up all over the place 43 00:03:16.440 --> 00:03:20.930 Over the past, you know, 7, 8 years and we've started to consolidate those and 44 00:03:20.930 --> 00:03:24.450 saying, Okay, these are hitting, but what would it look like for all of 45 00:03:24.450 --> 00:03:28.860 these to be together? What what could we push with with a consolidated effort? 46 00:03:29.740 --> 00:03:33.130 It makes a lot of sense. I mean with the, I know you guys launched entre 47 00:03:33.130 --> 00:03:36.250 leadership like a while ago, I remember first reading that when I got 48 00:03:36.250 --> 00:03:39.850 introduced to Ramsey is kind of about that time and so you were like, yes, we 49 00:03:39.850 --> 00:03:43.060 want to have people that are equally entrepreneurial but also leaders 50 00:03:43.060 --> 00:03:46.290 because we don't need them to go like crazy all over the place. We need them 51 00:03:46.290 --> 00:03:50.710 to kind of set goals and milestones and shoot for those goals at the same time, 52 00:03:50.710 --> 00:03:53.260 but we want them to invent new stuff. So it makes sense that you kind of 53 00:03:53.260 --> 00:03:58.070 created a environment of entrepreneurship and created all these 54 00:03:58.070 --> 00:04:02.010 new skews to sell, right, and you had a lot of attention, you had a radio show 55 00:04:02.010 --> 00:04:05.720 that's being syndicated lots of places that probably lots of eyes and 56 00:04:05.720 --> 00:04:11.300 attention to sell new stuff, but now you have a lot of brands to deal with. 57 00:04:11.310 --> 00:04:15.040 And I know working with companies that can become kind of confusing, right? 58 00:04:15.050 --> 00:04:19.300 Like who's responsible for this product? Who is this brand? How do we type? 59 00:04:19.310 --> 00:04:22.100 People don't even realize this is a Ramsey brand. How do you, how do you 60 00:04:22.100 --> 00:04:26.110 deal with that? I've worked at some big enough companies to know that it can 61 00:04:26.110 --> 00:04:30.690 become confusing to have all these this proliferation of different identities 62 00:04:30.690 --> 00:04:34.320 and brands and different, sometimes they're in the home website. Sometimes 63 00:04:34.320 --> 00:04:37.590 they all have their separate websites, you launch a blog, you're like, okay 64 00:04:37.600 --> 00:04:40.840 crowd, where does that go? Does that does that sit on the home brand? Or 65 00:04:40.850 --> 00:04:44.760 does it, does this new brand need a twitter account? Right. You just have 66 00:04:44.940 --> 00:04:48.880 all these pieces everywhere. So what did you guys do to start cleaning that 67 00:04:48.880 --> 00:04:53.660 up recently? Well, when, when you look at our company, our company, the 68 00:04:53.660 --> 00:04:57.410 products that we offer, the services that we offer, the shows that we put 69 00:04:57.410 --> 00:05:02.790 out? We are a trust brand, you you're not gonna buy any of our books, you're 70 00:05:02.790 --> 00:05:05.940 not going to listen to any of the advice that we have or you're not gonna 71 00:05:05.940 --> 00:05:10.980 take any of the recommendations that we offer. If you don't trust us and trust 72 00:05:10.990 --> 00:05:16.150 is not an easy thing to, to have or to get in the market place, you've got to 73 00:05:16.150 --> 00:05:21.640 really earn that and Dave earned a lot of trust with people, one, he was 74 00:05:21.640 --> 00:05:26.690 consistent, two people were not disproving this baby steps to seven 75 00:05:26.690 --> 00:05:30.810 baby steps that we that we've put out there and so he's got all of this time 76 00:05:30.810 --> 00:05:35.670 and trust built and all of these new brands that were continually being spun 77 00:05:35.670 --> 00:05:40.360 up didn't have that trust, a lot of them were starting from zero, we would, 78 00:05:40.360 --> 00:05:45.230 we had every dollar budget and unless you knew Dave and knew that we said you 79 00:05:45.230 --> 00:05:49.500 know you need to give every dollar a job, every dollar a name, you're not 80 00:05:49.500 --> 00:05:55.660 going to connect those those two brands. And so we were going back to zero every 81 00:05:55.660 --> 00:05:59.380 time we would launch a new brand and we said that you know that's that's not 82 00:05:59.380 --> 00:06:03.190 scalable for the long term, you know you bring up, do we need a twitter 83 00:06:03.190 --> 00:06:06.970 account, do we need all of this stuff? We started going down that path which 84 00:06:06.970 --> 00:06:13.560 led to 23 different websites across the organization and a bunch of Twitter 85 00:06:13.560 --> 00:06:18.260 accounts and a bunch of instagram accounts and and we said this is not a 86 00:06:18.260 --> 00:06:26.510 scalable future. Just looking at our e commerce platform, having Five, stores, 87 00:06:26.520 --> 00:06:30.740 if you think of all the skews that are in those, think each of that every time 88 00:06:30.740 --> 00:06:34.800 you had a skew your doing it eight times and managing across eight 89 00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:39.430 different properties and it just, it just wasn't scalable. And so we said 90 00:06:39.430 --> 00:06:45.270 that we have to figure out that, but even even before we got into that um 91 00:06:45.280 --> 00:06:51.710 this, this conversation falls into what we call succession planning. So as you 92 00:06:51.710 --> 00:06:56.810 know, Dave, Davis is kind of the heart of the company. He started it and he's 93 00:06:56.810 --> 00:07:01.210 a personality, he's written books, he did live events, but he's not gonna be 94 00:07:01.210 --> 00:07:06.430 here forever, right? He's not going to leave the company unless he's forced to 95 00:07:06.430 --> 00:07:09.860 like in the future, right? He said he's going to stay on the radio show until 96 00:07:09.860 --> 00:07:13.200 he stops making sense and we're gonna have to like yank him off. So he's not 97 00:07:13.210 --> 00:07:17.280 planning to go anywhere but in the future, he wants the company to outlast 98 00:07:17.280 --> 00:07:22.530 him. He knows there's a lot of families, a lot of people that rely on Ramsey for 99 00:07:22.530 --> 00:07:25.870 their livelihood and that the stuff that we're doing the way that we're 100 00:07:25.870 --> 00:07:30.460 helping people that needs to continue beyond him. And so if that's going to 101 00:07:30.460 --> 00:07:35.220 happen, we've got to figure out a way where Dave is not the connective trust 102 00:07:35.220 --> 00:07:39.460 that runs through all of our brands. We need a brand that's going to connect 103 00:07:39.460 --> 00:07:42.630 all of this stuff together and we needed to figure out how to get these 104 00:07:42.630 --> 00:07:47.940 experiences and these brands all to, to sound the same and worked together. I 105 00:07:47.940 --> 00:07:51.460 mean it makes a lot of sense. Whereas a lot of legacy brands, it felt, I felt 106 00:07:51.460 --> 00:07:55.660 like personal brands were like a big thing when people just often like maybe 107 00:07:55.660 --> 00:07:59.110 like 100 and 250 years ago? People often named the company's after 108 00:07:59.110 --> 00:08:03.360 themselves, right? And then that kind of went away in the Mad Men era when we 109 00:08:03.360 --> 00:08:06.610 were coming up with different names for things. But I almost feel like there's 110 00:08:06.610 --> 00:08:09.360 a swing back to this personal brand thing because again, there's a 111 00:08:09.360 --> 00:08:13.470 proliferation of brand. So people that the pendulum tends to swing. Ramsey is 112 00:08:13.470 --> 00:08:16.890 definitely one of those early adopters of leading with the personal branding 113 00:08:16.890 --> 00:08:20.880 with a radio personality like his and like a thought leadership that he has. 114 00:08:20.880 --> 00:08:25.490 It just makes sense. It works. It's easier to build trust that way. So it 115 00:08:25.490 --> 00:08:29.340 makes sense that you're trying to consolidate brands a little bit around 116 00:08:29.350 --> 00:08:35.220 that Trust. It's interesting. You made a point about like a trust brand and 117 00:08:35.220 --> 00:08:39.179 I'm like, wait a second. Like aren't all brands equated with trust, right? 118 00:08:39.179 --> 00:08:43.419 You could say like there's might be check like a, like a new thing of candy 119 00:08:43.419 --> 00:08:48.390 or gum at the checkout aisle, which may not have any trust has zero brand. It's 120 00:08:48.400 --> 00:08:53.530 some, it just has a small value proposition. It promises. Uh, I don't 121 00:08:53.530 --> 00:08:57.380 know, it's like a five hour energy knockoff, but it's cheaper than five 122 00:08:57.380 --> 00:09:01.790 hour energy. You pick it up, you go, you get the caffeine rush, whatever. So 123 00:09:01.790 --> 00:09:06.060 not a lot of trust there, but you would also say that that doesn't have a brand, 124 00:09:06.440 --> 00:09:10.980 right? So are all brands, trust brands, how do you differentiate between a good 125 00:09:10.980 --> 00:09:16.210 brand and a trust brand? It's a it's a really good question. Trust, when it 126 00:09:16.210 --> 00:09:20.810 comes to brand, I agree that in any brand, any time you're going to buy a 127 00:09:20.810 --> 00:09:26.530 product, you have a level of trust and there's a level of commitment and 128 00:09:26.540 --> 00:09:32.540 expectation with that. So when I go to a fast food place, I don't necessarily 129 00:09:32.540 --> 00:09:37.700 have to have a lot of trust there. Right? So I can go in and say it's 130 00:09:37.700 --> 00:09:41.320 going to be a burger, it's going to be fries. I don't have, I don't have to 131 00:09:41.320 --> 00:09:45.120 trust that this is going to be the best burger I've ever had or that this thing 132 00:09:45.120 --> 00:09:49.330 is going to change my life, so I'm not going to pay that much and I'm not 133 00:09:49.330 --> 00:09:53.850 going to expect that much. But when you look at the things that we do, we have 134 00:09:53.850 --> 00:09:58.100 a process to say, we're not gonna put anything out there that's not going to 135 00:09:58.100 --> 00:10:02.060 help people. And if if you're going to do something that is going to change 136 00:10:02.060 --> 00:10:07.010 your life, you have to have a lot of trust in the person offering that to 137 00:10:07.010 --> 00:10:11.520 you before, you're going to do it. So maybe like if we if we didn't have a 138 00:10:11.520 --> 00:10:15.430 lot of trust, we could probably sell a lot of books. We could probably have 139 00:10:15.430 --> 00:10:20.890 people sign up for a lot of stuff, but for people to actually do it and it to 140 00:10:20.890 --> 00:10:24.160 be successful because once you start getting in there, that stuff is hard, 141 00:10:24.840 --> 00:10:28.770 right? I want to go spend a bunch, I want to spend money on whatever I want. 142 00:10:28.780 --> 00:10:31.650 You know, you need to budget this way, I want to put a bunch of stuff on 143 00:10:31.650 --> 00:10:35.480 credit cards. No, you need to actually not have credit cards. Well that sounds 144 00:10:35.480 --> 00:10:41.470 weird if I don't trust you enough to believe that even though that sounds 145 00:10:41.470 --> 00:10:46.690 wrong, but I'm gonna trust you and actually do it and get the results that 146 00:10:46.690 --> 00:10:51.430 that comes from it. Like if we don't have a lot of trust people aren't gonna 147 00:10:51.430 --> 00:10:55.120 take the leap to do the weird stuff and if they don't take that leap, they're 148 00:10:55.120 --> 00:10:58.240 not going to have the awesome results that are going to come from, from doing 149 00:10:58.240 --> 00:11:02.440 that weird stuff. I mean that makes makes a lot of sense. You're asking 150 00:11:02.440 --> 00:11:05.740 people to go counter culture, you know, you're fighting against, but that's 151 00:11:05.740 --> 00:11:09.480 also kind of what makes a strong brand right, is to have, is I find that 152 00:11:09.480 --> 00:11:13.970 strong brands actually pick a fight with something, right? Brand can almost 153 00:11:13.970 --> 00:11:17.820 be established by its villain, right? Where is a hero without a villain? If 154 00:11:17.820 --> 00:11:20.350 you don't have a villain, you probably don't have a hero, there's gotta be a 155 00:11:20.350 --> 00:11:24.930 bad guy somewhere. So I actually think that it's probably often missed in a 156 00:11:24.930 --> 00:11:28.820 lot of branding conversations. I think Ramsey's is essentially the debt 157 00:11:28.830 --> 00:11:33.240 industry, right? Is that, is that the main villain? We, we have a lot of 158 00:11:33.240 --> 00:11:37.620 villains out there. We just released a documentary about the student loan 159 00:11:37.620 --> 00:11:42.700 industry and the way that that has basically become this darling that 160 00:11:42.710 --> 00:11:46.700 everybody thinks, oh this is good debt, but that's actually a villain for what 161 00:11:46.700 --> 00:11:53.030 it's doing to your future. And so I 100% agree that a brand is really 162 00:11:53.030 --> 00:11:56.970 solidified when it knows its villain. That was one of the best when when 163 00:11:56.970 --> 00:12:01.200 story brand first came out, it didn't have that villain component to it and 164 00:12:01.200 --> 00:12:04.440 and Donald Miller went in and added, you know, you've got to figure out who 165 00:12:04.440 --> 00:12:10.130 the villain is that is, is attacking your hero so that you can be the guy to 166 00:12:10.140 --> 00:12:15.420 guide them out of that. So being very clear on what you're going against is 167 00:12:15.420 --> 00:12:19.540 important, how you tell people about that. That's that's a nuance of of the 168 00:12:19.540 --> 00:12:23.060 marketing. But yeah, being very clear is really important. 169 00:12:24.140 --> 00:12:28.800 So what does, what does the brand strategy look like now for Ramsey? Are 170 00:12:28.800 --> 00:12:31.020 you throwing Ramsey on the front of everything? Like how are you 171 00:12:31.020 --> 00:12:36.430 consolidating how you explain all your different products and properties? Yeah, 172 00:12:36.430 --> 00:12:42.370 we're slowly walking into that a lot of it. There is a is a good deal of, we 173 00:12:42.370 --> 00:12:48.500 need to add Ramsey to that. So Ramsey every dollar Ramsey financial peace. If 174 00:12:48.500 --> 00:12:53.460 you look at our subscription now is Ramsey plus we've consolidated 175 00:12:53.460 --> 00:12:57.670 something's under what we're calling Ramsay trusted, which was our endorsed 176 00:12:57.670 --> 00:13:02.500 local providers and smart vester. So we are adding Ramsey, there's there's 177 00:13:02.500 --> 00:13:06.990 things that we're doing. So all of our videos online start with our block. R R 178 00:13:06.990 --> 00:13:13.080 Ramsey are it's not as as simple as that, but that's that's one of the 179 00:13:13.090 --> 00:13:18.250 visual things. You need to start hearing Ramsey over and over and over. 180 00:13:18.260 --> 00:13:22.190 Because when you think of consumers, just in general, when when you think of 181 00:13:22.190 --> 00:13:28.350 a brand, How many pieces of information of a brand are you you going to keep in 182 00:13:28.350 --> 00:13:33.940 your mind if you have 37 brands, are you expecting people to understand all 183 00:13:33.940 --> 00:13:37.960 of those brands? Remember all of those brands categorize all those brands or 184 00:13:37.960 --> 00:13:42.120 do you want them to remember one thing so that when they hear it attached to 185 00:13:42.120 --> 00:13:48.350 other things, that trust is going to go to those other things. So if you heard 186 00:13:48.360 --> 00:13:53.840 Ramsey and you build trust around that and then you heard endorsed local 187 00:13:53.840 --> 00:13:58.330 providers, your question is, well, what has endorsed local providers? Who's 188 00:13:58.330 --> 00:14:03.690 endorsing them? What why do I care about that? But if you hear Ramsey, 189 00:14:03.690 --> 00:14:07.780 you've attached some trust to that and then you hear Ramsey trusted local 190 00:14:07.780 --> 00:14:12.420 providers, you're like, oh, oh, okay, these, these are trusted by Ramsey and 191 00:14:12.420 --> 00:14:17.130 I trust Ramsey. So I'm going to trust them. So a lot of our strategy is how 192 00:14:17.140 --> 00:14:21.830 how do we connect that and there's, yes, adding Ramsey. But then the way that we 193 00:14:21.830 --> 00:14:26.200 talk about things, we, we want to be consistent about how we talk about 194 00:14:26.200 --> 00:14:30.080 things across our property. When we look at our websites, we want to make 195 00:14:30.080 --> 00:14:33.620 sure we will talk about this in a minute. But we consolidate them all 196 00:14:33.620 --> 00:14:40.170 under one U. R. L. But that you could take a bunch of colors of plato and 197 00:14:40.170 --> 00:14:44.460 smash them together and they're still going to be a bunch of different plato 198 00:14:44.460 --> 00:14:49.440 pieces together just in one ball. But we needed to figure out how how does it 199 00:14:49.450 --> 00:14:55.360 actually become one brand? And so when you go to the home page and you go to 200 00:14:55.370 --> 00:14:59.090 um one of our brands and then you go to another brand, you don't feel like 201 00:14:59.090 --> 00:15:02.940 you're on a completely separate website. So there's a there's an audio, there's 202 00:15:02.940 --> 00:15:08.150 a written portion of it. There's a colors that we do. You know, even down 203 00:15:08.150 --> 00:15:12.490 to button colors as they go throughout our website. Every website had 204 00:15:12.490 --> 00:15:16.660 different buttons, right? Different shapes, different colors. That simple 205 00:15:16.660 --> 00:15:21.750 thing of making this connected tissue that goes throughout is extremely 206 00:15:21.750 --> 00:15:26.680 important for making that consistent brand experience for customers. And 207 00:15:26.680 --> 00:15:30.500 it's not an easy decision, right? I mean it takes weeks, weeks sometimes of 208 00:15:30.500 --> 00:15:33.510 all these all day meetings of debating back and forth what we're gonna do, 209 00:15:33.510 --> 00:15:36.430 even from the top level of, I don't know you guys probably had this 210 00:15:36.430 --> 00:15:41.830 conversation of uh that's usually the three part like branded house or house 211 00:15:41.830 --> 00:15:45.380 of brands, right? I think every brand, every market has had this branding 212 00:15:45.380 --> 00:15:48.820 conversation like which one do we want to go to or do we want to do the one in 213 00:15:48.820 --> 00:15:52.240 between? That's the endorsed brand? And it kind of sounds like you've landed 214 00:15:52.240 --> 00:15:57.090 essentially in that middle ground of endorsed brand, kind of like a Mario, 215 00:15:57.090 --> 00:16:00.210 it's a good example where they'll have courtyard by Marriott, right? It's 216 00:16:00.210 --> 00:16:04.230 almost like you have these sub brands, but then it's always endorsed by Ramsey. 217 00:16:04.230 --> 00:16:10.020 Now, I'm sure you have some purely Ramsey brands too, right? But then you 218 00:16:10.020 --> 00:16:13.150 have a lot of separate brands and they might just be products, but essentially 219 00:16:13.150 --> 00:16:17.150 like entre leadership is more than just a product. So it's a massive property 220 00:16:17.160 --> 00:16:21.220 in between, Right? Um so you guys have stayed clear from the P and G. Model, 221 00:16:21.220 --> 00:16:24.560 which is kind of where you were before, you had a bunch of different sub brands 222 00:16:24.560 --> 00:16:29.550 and they were Brandon dealt with differently, correct, correct. You hit 223 00:16:29.550 --> 00:16:34.160 the nail on the head. We made the decision, we're not going to be google, 224 00:16:34.540 --> 00:16:39.420 right? So we're not gonna be google maps, google sheets, google docs. So 225 00:16:39.420 --> 00:16:43.870 we're not gonna be Ramsey debit card, Ramsey debt class, right? We're not 226 00:16:43.870 --> 00:16:48.730 going there, but we're not going the PNG route where you don't really know 227 00:16:48.730 --> 00:16:53.990 what PNG is and you only know the sub brands, we do fall somewhere in the 228 00:16:53.990 --> 00:16:58.990 middle and a lot of that is we've kind of got tier one level brands and then 229 00:16:58.990 --> 00:17:02.570 we've got sub brands that fall underneath that. So when you think of 230 00:17:02.580 --> 00:17:08.800 uh entree leadership, you'll see Ramsey Entree leadership, when you think of a 231 00:17:08.810 --> 00:17:12.760 product, like I said every dollar, you'll see Ramsey every dollar, but a 232 00:17:12.760 --> 00:17:18.020 lot of that is dependent on kind of the space. So sometimes that means we got 233 00:17:18.020 --> 00:17:21.950 some big words, you want to throw another word on top of that, like 234 00:17:21.950 --> 00:17:24.690 that's that's not gonna work, you're not gonna see that in the app store 235 00:17:24.690 --> 00:17:28.790 where it's like Ramsey, every dollar budgeting to like We've got to, we've 236 00:17:28.790 --> 00:17:32.080 got to consolidate that some way. So some of that is based on is based on 237 00:17:32.080 --> 00:17:38.100 space and availability. But yeah, we we've spent the architecture of putting 238 00:17:38.100 --> 00:17:41.830 all of this stuff together. It's been going on for a while. I mean this 239 00:17:41.830 --> 00:17:47.560 conversation started at least 24 months ago from a, how do we consolidate all 240 00:17:47.560 --> 00:17:51.120 of these brands and it's an ongoing, we have a what we call a branding 241 00:17:51.120 --> 00:17:56.230 committee that meets every week and we not only review those things, discuss 242 00:17:56.230 --> 00:17:59.620 those things, but we also look at what are the new products and services that 243 00:17:59.620 --> 00:18:02.700 we have coming out, how does that, where does it fit into the brand 244 00:18:02.700 --> 00:18:08.020 architecture overall, does this need a logo, does this need to fall under this 245 00:18:08.020 --> 00:18:12.710 logo, how do how do all of these things fit together? So it's something that 246 00:18:12.720 --> 00:18:17.160 wasn't necessarily actively managed from a global perspective? We were 247 00:18:17.160 --> 00:18:20.350 always having those conversations from an individual product or even 248 00:18:20.360 --> 00:18:26.330 individual brand line? But looking at it from the global perspective, we've 249 00:18:26.340 --> 00:18:31.540 we've been so pleased about the way Work that's been done over the past 24 250 00:18:31.540 --> 00:18:37.200 months where it all starts to feel together and that that handoff from one 251 00:18:37.200 --> 00:18:41.630 brand to another to another, uh it's getting better, it's definitely not 252 00:18:41.630 --> 00:18:46.050 there, but it's definitely headed in the right direction. So how do you 253 00:18:46.050 --> 00:18:50.130 decide if you want to start a new initiative to sell a product? Maybe 254 00:18:50.130 --> 00:18:55.440 like your your B two B product that you sell, you sell your your software 255 00:18:55.440 --> 00:19:00.190 package and content to HR directors, right? Who kind of package it as a 256 00:19:00.190 --> 00:19:05.200 benefit? Yeah. Smart dollar, smart dollar. I know Sweet Fish is probably 257 00:19:05.200 --> 00:19:09.280 gonna be looking at signing up for that for that sometime, right? Yeah, I can 258 00:19:09.280 --> 00:19:12.310 connect you with someone, just let me know. I think we're already in 259 00:19:12.310 --> 00:19:15.170 conversations, I can't remember, I'm not in nature, so I'm not I'm not the 260 00:19:15.170 --> 00:19:17.890 guy in direct conversation but I'm like I know that we've talked about this 261 00:19:17.890 --> 00:19:21.200 before, the leadership team like this thing but let's say like you want to 262 00:19:21.200 --> 00:19:27.390 start a property around HR but Ramsey is not known for HR. Ramsey is known as 263 00:19:27.390 --> 00:19:32.530 a finance? Maybe essentially personal finance is kind of the main category if 264 00:19:32.530 --> 00:19:36.640 you think of when you think of Ramsey, how do you then that idea? Do you try 265 00:19:36.640 --> 00:19:41.750 to figure out how it fits into the overall brand or is then that or if it 266 00:19:41.750 --> 00:19:44.830 doesn't fit into the overall brand, does it become a conversation of like, 267 00:19:44.830 --> 00:19:48.490 okay then we kill it or do you consider making new property for building a 268 00:19:48.490 --> 00:19:52.830 separate brand? How would you approach something like that? Yeah, we have, we 269 00:19:52.830 --> 00:19:57.150 have what we call the Wheel of Life. So when we started, we were uh, we were 270 00:19:57.150 --> 00:20:00.680 just a money company. And when you look at the Wheel of Life, there's a lot of 271 00:20:00.680 --> 00:20:04.450 different areas when people are thinking about, how do I, how do I 272 00:20:04.450 --> 00:20:11.100 better myself? So that's marriage, parenting career business, which is 273 00:20:11.100 --> 00:20:15.650 kind of outside of career, you've got money. Exactly like all of these, all 274 00:20:15.650 --> 00:20:21.220 of these different areas kind of fall in, in the wheel of Life and we have 275 00:20:21.220 --> 00:20:27.370 been a money company for the past 20 years. We've slowly started moving into 276 00:20:27.370 --> 00:20:31.650 some of these other spaces now, almost unintentionally at first, like you 277 00:20:31.650 --> 00:20:37.000 mentioned entree leadership, that book came out in 2008 and really that book 278 00:20:37.010 --> 00:20:42.060 was just how Ramsey did business. If you read that book, it's like, well we 279 00:20:42.060 --> 00:20:46.560 do it this way and we did this and we did that. It wasn't necessarily, hey, 280 00:20:46.560 --> 00:20:50.730 we're going to redefine the business landscape. It was kind of like this is 281 00:20:50.740 --> 00:20:55.070 this is how we do it. But as we've moved forward, we've been very, very 282 00:20:55.070 --> 00:21:01.210 intentional about the different, what we call spokes uh, that we go into one. 283 00:21:01.210 --> 00:21:05.270 If we don't feel like there is something that needs to be disrupted or 284 00:21:05.270 --> 00:21:10.810 there's something that needs to be um a light shined on it. We're not going to 285 00:21:10.810 --> 00:21:16.110 go down there just because somebody has an idea, some of it is, we've all, 286 00:21:16.120 --> 00:21:20.860 we've, we've always had this champion mindset, we call it where somebody has 287 00:21:20.870 --> 00:21:25.560 an idea and then it goes through a pretty significant vetting process. It 288 00:21:25.560 --> 00:21:30.500 doesn't make sense with Ramsey and before, if it wasn't money to, to your 289 00:21:30.500 --> 00:21:30.960 point, 290 00:21:32.040 --> 00:21:35.870 it was kind of like, well no, we probably won't do that. Like if you 291 00:21:35.870 --> 00:21:39.110 looked at our events, a lot of our events, anytime we would have someone 292 00:21:39.110 --> 00:21:43.300 come and speak, that was outside of money, it wouldn't be one of our in 293 00:21:43.300 --> 00:21:47.310 house personalities, it would be somebody from the outside. But as we 294 00:21:47.310 --> 00:21:51.760 begin having conversations of what does the future look for our company, we do 295 00:21:51.760 --> 00:21:56.520 say we're going to need to move outside of money in some of these other areas 296 00:21:56.530 --> 00:22:01.820 because honestly, when you look at money, everything of life interacts 297 00:22:01.820 --> 00:22:06.400 with money in some way, I'm not saying that money is the most important thing, 298 00:22:06.410 --> 00:22:11.600 but if you look about any area of life, money is a part of it. So just think 299 00:22:11.600 --> 00:22:18.200 about parenting, how do I pay for a kid, how do I teach my kid money values? I 300 00:22:18.200 --> 00:22:22.150 need to send my kid to school, how am I going to pay for that? How do I set 301 00:22:22.150 --> 00:22:25.560 them up for the future? Right, What are the things that I should teach them? Oh, 302 00:22:26.140 --> 00:22:30.450 what about marriage and marriage and money? Like we have a conference called 303 00:22:30.450 --> 00:22:34.720 Money and Marriage and when you think about that, there is a lot around money 304 00:22:34.720 --> 00:22:38.400 when it comes, should I, should we have a joint bank account? How do we have a 305 00:22:38.400 --> 00:22:41.800 budget conversation? How do we get even on the same page about how we're trying 306 00:22:41.800 --> 00:22:46.500 to move forward? So when we look at, when we look at things that we're going 307 00:22:46.500 --> 00:22:52.350 to move forward, there's a very uh specific process around how we do that 308 00:22:52.360 --> 00:22:57.360 and a lot of it comes down to do we feel like we can enter this market and 309 00:22:57.360 --> 00:23:02.490 provide value and help people because you know, that's, that's what our 310 00:23:02.490 --> 00:23:07.460 mission is to bring hope and education to everyone in every walk of life. It 311 00:23:07.460 --> 00:23:12.490 doesn't just say money and so it's, it's not an easy, it's not an easy 312 00:23:12.490 --> 00:23:17.070 thing to just jump over into a space that we're not known for, but part of 313 00:23:17.070 --> 00:23:22.200 the global branding effort is so that we can transfer that trust into that 314 00:23:22.200 --> 00:23:25.620 space so that we're not going to just do something that is a completely 315 00:23:25.620 --> 00:23:29.530 separate brand. Um it may be something different than we've ever done. We just 316 00:23:29.530 --> 00:23:34.140 had john Deloney join, join our team and we've been moving into the mental 317 00:23:34.140 --> 00:23:39.180 health space and he's amazing, but we're connecting that back to the brand 318 00:23:39.190 --> 00:23:43.590 and we're connecting that within he, you know, he hosts are Ramsey show, he 319 00:23:43.590 --> 00:23:47.930 is in Ramsey Plus, which is our our subscription, he is throughout our 320 00:23:47.930 --> 00:23:53.040 different areas so that we can tie all of this together moving forward. So 321 00:23:53.040 --> 00:23:55.570 what I hear you saying is that you would take an initiative like that 322 00:23:55.570 --> 00:23:59.020 would be like how do we connect this back to the home base? In what ways is 323 00:23:59.020 --> 00:24:03.590 this tied to our core thing of of money? So if you're reaching out to HR 324 00:24:03.590 --> 00:24:06.490 directors and you're kind of reaching out with the value proposition, like 325 00:24:06.500 --> 00:24:12.450 people struggle with money and the more your employees struggle, the more 326 00:24:12.460 --> 00:24:16.260 they're not going to be focused on great work, help your employees thrive, 327 00:24:17.340 --> 00:24:20.710 build it into your benefits to get smart dollar and help teach them how to 328 00:24:20.710 --> 00:24:24.350 use their money, teach them how to utilize your company benefits, become a 329 00:24:24.350 --> 00:24:28.210 better HR director. And we essentially, we want to help you can become a better 330 00:24:28.210 --> 00:24:31.760 HR director and that could be a property that you then build and still 331 00:24:31.760 --> 00:24:37.040 tie back to the core thing of, we help people take care of their money so that 332 00:24:37.040 --> 00:24:42.790 they can live a better life or whatever the slogan is, right? Yeah, yeah. I 333 00:24:42.790 --> 00:24:47.110 mean you look at, you look at a lot of the ways that our products and services, 334 00:24:47.120 --> 00:24:52.760 they all grew out of an initial class. So financial peace is a class that 335 00:24:52.770 --> 00:24:58.230 teaches you how to do money. We said, okay, there's a lot of people that come 336 00:24:58.230 --> 00:25:03.400 in are doing that on their own. But what are the other areas that people 337 00:25:03.410 --> 00:25:08.690 need this help? Well, what about to your point? What about employees? We 338 00:25:08.690 --> 00:25:12.950 found that employees that don't have that are able to pay and get out of 339 00:25:12.950 --> 00:25:17.500 debt and start saving for their future. They're actually better employees. 340 00:25:17.510 --> 00:25:22.380 Because the stress that comes with mismanaging your money actually makes 341 00:25:22.380 --> 00:25:25.750 you a worse employee because you're focused on that. I'm gonna need to 342 00:25:25.750 --> 00:25:28.380 constantly leave to get a better job because I need to make more money 343 00:25:28.380 --> 00:25:32.000 because I don't know how to spend correctly. Um I've got stress. I'm not 344 00:25:32.000 --> 00:25:34.890 going to come into work. I can't focus because I got all that we've got the 345 00:25:34.890 --> 00:25:38.260 research and we found that companies love that. They're like, yes, please, 346 00:25:38.270 --> 00:25:42.950 how do we offer a benefit that's gonna actually make a better worker, right? 347 00:25:42.960 --> 00:25:47.670 And it's not just we need to to make better workers, but the way that we're 348 00:25:47.670 --> 00:25:52.510 helping people at the same time that then produces a result that a business 349 00:25:52.510 --> 00:25:56.090 is going to like, it made complete sense for us to do that. And we also 350 00:25:56.090 --> 00:26:01.920 did that in schools. Nobody was teaching financial literacy in schools. 351 00:26:01.930 --> 00:26:06.140 I mean, the reason financial peace was so successful is because nobody taught 352 00:26:06.140 --> 00:26:10.540 in schools and people time and time again, we're like, man, I wish, I wish 353 00:26:10.540 --> 00:26:15.360 I learned this when I was in school. And so we said, well what if we found a 354 00:26:15.360 --> 00:26:19.350 way to start getting this into schools? So we started working, we got Ramsey 355 00:26:19.350 --> 00:26:23.690 education, which is a, is a sub brand of ours, but it's teaching that 356 00:26:23.690 --> 00:26:28.400 curriculum in schools and some may say, well that's stupid because if that's 357 00:26:28.400 --> 00:26:32.490 really successful, then this whole other part of your business, you're not 358 00:26:32.490 --> 00:26:36.730 gonna need anymore because everybody is going to be doing it right. And and yes, 359 00:26:36.730 --> 00:26:40.670 that's true. And if you look at our our we want to bring hope to everybody, 360 00:26:41.040 --> 00:26:45.910 That would be a great world. We would be 100% okay if everybody took this 361 00:26:45.910 --> 00:26:50.820 curriculum in high school and didn't need us for that part of of us in the 362 00:26:50.820 --> 00:26:54.650 future, that would be, that would be okay. And there's different areas like 363 00:26:54.650 --> 00:26:58.930 that. How do we take things that are in one area and move them into these, 364 00:26:58.930 --> 00:27:03.860 these other areas? That just makes sense, man makes a ton of sense to me. 365 00:27:03.870 --> 00:27:07.510 I before sweet fish, I was working for a university called Bethany Global 366 00:27:07.510 --> 00:27:11.660 University and it was a required class budgeting and they just walked through 367 00:27:11.660 --> 00:27:14.460 Financial Peace University and I know that students were very thankful for 368 00:27:14.460 --> 00:27:18.840 that. So I know colleges are doing even better to get it at the high school 369 00:27:18.840 --> 00:27:22.410 level, but if not then at least at the college level, as you're starting to 370 00:27:22.410 --> 00:27:25.000 prepare for those things and hopefully you didn't take talk, you'll probably 371 00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:27.850 learn. I mean, a lot of colleges probably wouldn't want to do it because 372 00:27:27.850 --> 00:27:34.130 you'd be like anti large college debt and they'd be like, well, so hence the 373 00:27:34.130 --> 00:27:38.270 high school level would be better. Yeah. Well, and the thing is like, if you 374 00:27:38.270 --> 00:27:42.820 take the curriculum, I think there could be a future and maybe if there's 375 00:27:42.820 --> 00:27:48.020 anybody at college is listening, if they said, hey, we want to sponsor this 376 00:27:48.030 --> 00:27:53.440 to get into all of these schools because we're not anti college. That's, 377 00:27:53.440 --> 00:27:57.540 that's the thing. We're anti student loan debt because it robs your future. 378 00:27:57.590 --> 00:28:02.170 We, if you look at one of the baby steps, one of the baby steps is saving 379 00:28:02.170 --> 00:28:06.780 for college. So we are very pro education. We're very pro, like, hey, 380 00:28:06.780 --> 00:28:10.640 we want, we want higher ed. The thing is you just got to figure out the best 381 00:28:10.640 --> 00:28:14.250 way to pay for it. And they're like, we teach all that stuff through 382 00:28:14.250 --> 00:28:18.910 scholarships and part time jobs and figure out how to, you know how to do 383 00:28:18.910 --> 00:28:22.150 all of that higher education. If they, if they look at it as like, oh, we 384 00:28:22.150 --> 00:28:25.650 don't want to talk about this. No, no, something's going to happen with 385 00:28:25.650 --> 00:28:29.470 student loans. Like it's, it's reaching the crescendo and something's gonna 386 00:28:29.480 --> 00:28:34.200 disrupt the college industry in a major way they would be good to look and say 387 00:28:34.210 --> 00:28:39.340 how do we figure out how to help people pay for college so that people can 388 00:28:39.340 --> 00:28:42.850 continue to come to college instead of trying to say no, no, no, don't do that, 389 00:28:42.850 --> 00:28:45.060 continue to do the way we're doing now. So 390 00:28:46.140 --> 00:28:51.130 with Ramsey being as big of a brand as it was, you guys had a have a massive 391 00:28:51.140 --> 00:28:55.880 web presence, how did you go about consolidating a lot of those websites 392 00:28:55.880 --> 00:28:58.970 that were out there with all those different U. R. L. S, all those 393 00:28:58.970 --> 00:29:04.340 different style sheets, all those different Back End Systems, Like Why 394 00:29:04.340 --> 00:29:08.910 Did 1? You've already talked a little bit about why you wanted to consolidate 395 00:29:08.910 --> 00:29:13.760 some of these things to provide a more holistic experience for brand reasons. 396 00:29:13.770 --> 00:29:18.130 But what were some of the technological reasons you wanted to do this? And then 397 00:29:18.140 --> 00:29:20.060 how did how did you execute that process? 398 00:29:21.440 --> 00:29:29.140 How do I distill 18 plus months of work into answer? Like that is a really, 399 00:29:29.150 --> 00:29:33.330 it's a great question, but it is a really, really big question. So when 400 00:29:33.340 --> 00:29:38.580 when we made the decision to consolidate this a lot of it, uh 401 00:29:38.590 --> 00:29:45.250 branding was a big part of this, there was also S E O that we thought about it, 402 00:29:45.250 --> 00:29:52.450 It's very similar to Trust Google is a is a trust brand right there there, 403 00:29:52.460 --> 00:29:56.210 they have to trust your website before they're going to give it the right 404 00:29:56.210 --> 00:30:02.280 placements and they call it, you know, different things. But we have a lot of 405 00:30:02.280 --> 00:30:07.060 trust in google. We had it for Dave Ramsey dot com which was our primary 406 00:30:07.060 --> 00:30:11.660 website. But every time we would go launch a new website that wasn't 407 00:30:11.660 --> 00:30:16.860 connected to that, we didn't have that trust. So we were building that trust 408 00:30:16.860 --> 00:30:20.930 from scratch so that every time if we put the same article out on Dave Ramsey 409 00:30:20.930 --> 00:30:25.350 dot com versus one of our other sites, it would always win. It would always go 410 00:30:25.350 --> 00:30:29.180 to the top of that search result and we were struggling on all of these other 411 00:30:29.180 --> 00:30:35.980 sites. So we made the decision, we need to combine all of these into 11 site 412 00:30:35.990 --> 00:30:40.820 and to do that it was it was going to be a massive undertaking. So they were 413 00:30:40.820 --> 00:30:45.850 like, there were three main things that we thought through in this process. One 414 00:30:45.850 --> 00:30:50.660 we had to to think of traffic right? We had to think of, there is a lot of 415 00:30:50.660 --> 00:30:54.630 traffic coming to this site. There's a lot of traffic from S. C. O. Coming to 416 00:30:54.630 --> 00:31:01.270 this site. And so how we plan this and walk this out if we do this wrong, it 417 00:31:01.840 --> 00:31:06.070 the damage that it's going to do to our site that we are going to be digging 418 00:31:06.070 --> 00:31:11.830 out of forever. It's like we did, we looked at all of these migration case 419 00:31:11.830 --> 00:31:17.170 studies and found that, you know, people were losing in 90% of their S. E. 420 00:31:17.170 --> 00:31:20.860 O. Because of the way they did it when it's not doing the redirects correctly 421 00:31:20.860 --> 00:31:24.620 or giving a bunch of four floors and all of these other things. And so a big 422 00:31:24.620 --> 00:31:29.450 focus of our planning was around how do we make sure that we don't destroy 423 00:31:29.450 --> 00:31:32.860 ourselves in S. E. O. For the long term. We knew we were gonna have a hit 424 00:31:33.240 --> 00:31:37.890 regardless. We were going to have an S. E. O. Hit. But how do we minimize that 425 00:31:37.900 --> 00:31:42.790 as much as possible? The second is there was a lot of work that needed to 426 00:31:42.790 --> 00:31:49.230 be done. Not all of these websites that we had were on the same uh systems on 427 00:31:49.230 --> 00:31:53.120 the back end. The CMS is so we had to figure out how do we transfer pages 428 00:31:53.120 --> 00:31:59.770 over into the new section with that came redirects? Our final redirect map 429 00:32:00.140 --> 00:32:07.420 was over 15,000 U. R. L. S. So we had a spreadsheet of €15,000 that said here's 430 00:32:07.420 --> 00:32:11.650 the old one and this is the new one that it goes to. And we had one person 431 00:32:11.660 --> 00:32:15.550 that was responsible for owning that. And the thing is she was really good 432 00:32:15.550 --> 00:32:19.920 with spreadsheets and she loved it but it kind of made my eyes bleed when I 433 00:32:19.920 --> 00:32:24.030 just would look at it just because it was it was so long and so complicated. 434 00:32:24.040 --> 00:32:27.680 And so we had to figure out how do we do that? How do we make sure that we 435 00:32:27.680 --> 00:32:34.310 don't have a ton of 4/4. We had to look at the overall architecture. We went 436 00:32:34.310 --> 00:32:40.410 from a very brand first architecture to a topic first architecture. So instead 437 00:32:40.410 --> 00:32:47.760 of leading with financial peace and an R. U. R. L. Slug. We lead with debt or 438 00:32:47.770 --> 00:32:52.760 money or insurance because that's what people are looking for in in search. 439 00:32:52.840 --> 00:32:57.000 And so when we consolidated all this, we said, what is the, what is the 440 00:32:57.000 --> 00:33:01.610 future of this site need to be? How do we make this site scalable? So that in 441 00:33:01.610 --> 00:33:04.960 the future if we had more products that are gonna help you with dead or more 442 00:33:04.960 --> 00:33:08.280 products that are gonna help you with insurance, they're all going to be 443 00:33:08.280 --> 00:33:12.910 categorized in the right way with with google. And the last one because we 444 00:33:12.910 --> 00:33:17.030 knew we were going to take a hit. And in terms of traffic, we looked at 445 00:33:17.040 --> 00:33:21.500 revenue and seasonality to figure out when we were going to do this because 446 00:33:21.500 --> 00:33:27.410 all the research we did and anytime you research anything on google, the one 447 00:33:27.410 --> 00:33:32.060 thing that you're going to find is that everybody thinks something different. 448 00:33:32.440 --> 00:33:36.990 No matter if you are an S. E. O. Expert or you are someone who used to work at 449 00:33:36.990 --> 00:33:41.420 google or you're somebody at google that is putting things out that it's 450 00:33:41.420 --> 00:33:47.780 this black box for how you actually do it, quote unquote correct. And so the 451 00:33:47.780 --> 00:33:53.920 decision, the decision that we made, we called the light switch approach. So 452 00:33:53.920 --> 00:34:01.580 instead of slowly migrating all of those sites, one after another, we did 453 00:34:01.580 --> 00:34:10.590 them all at one time. So we did all of the work for about 18 months and then 1 454 00:34:10.600 --> 00:34:18.150 10 hour plus day we got 100 plus people in a room and we migrated all of these 455 00:34:18.150 --> 00:34:22.810 sites at once. So we turned the lights off on all of those sites and the 456 00:34:22.810 --> 00:34:29.389 lights on at Ramsey solutions dot com, It's by far the biggest, the biggest 457 00:34:29.389 --> 00:34:34.250 project that I've ever been a part of. I mean if you look at everybody in our 458 00:34:34.250 --> 00:34:40.630 1000 plus person organization touched that project in some way but we had so 459 00:34:40.630 --> 00:34:45.020 just just from the sheer number of volume we had over um over 1000 460 00:34:45.020 --> 00:34:51.870 marketing pages. We had over 2500 blogs that had to be had to be either 461 00:34:51.870 --> 00:34:55.620 consolidated, migrated. We had even more than that that we killed or 462 00:34:55.620 --> 00:35:01.160 redirected And then like I said over 15,000 you or else not to mention 463 00:35:01.540 --> 00:35:07.650 because google likes hard coded links in web pages. We had to go in and 464 00:35:07.660 --> 00:35:13.550 update all of that in every page we went in and hard coded all of those 465 00:35:13.550 --> 00:35:17.440 links again. Now luckily we were able to get a script, we have some smart 466 00:35:17.440 --> 00:35:22.670 developers that that did that but had we had, we done that manually there was 467 00:35:22.680 --> 00:35:28.490 like over 120,000 in page links throughout the website that we were 468 00:35:28.490 --> 00:35:33.270 going to have to update. So those are kind of the main the main things that 469 00:35:33.270 --> 00:35:38.650 we considered, but a lot of it was a phased process that we did. We had some 470 00:35:38.650 --> 00:35:44.320 key milestones over that time um and then we had times where we called it 471 00:35:44.320 --> 00:35:48.310 the freeze, there were different things that would have to freeze so that 472 00:35:48.320 --> 00:35:52.480 nothing else would change and we could verify it again and again, one of one 473 00:35:52.480 --> 00:35:58.440 of my favorite things that we did, we called it everyone's a Q A and so 474 00:35:58.450 --> 00:36:03.070 everyone in the organization, we had a giant spreadsheet that had all the U. R. 475 00:36:03.070 --> 00:36:06.450 L. S. That we were transitioning and we sent it out to everybody and we said, 476 00:36:06.450 --> 00:36:13.030 hey go in and choose 3 to 4 pages and just go in and q it make sure the links 477 00:36:13.030 --> 00:36:16.300 work, make sure it loads, make sure when you click to something that's 478 00:36:16.300 --> 00:36:20.940 going to the right thing and we involved the entire organization and we 479 00:36:20.940 --> 00:36:26.240 we actually we did that two different times. So we had everyone's a Q a part 480 00:36:26.240 --> 00:36:31.700 two and everybody knows that Sequels are always better than the original. Um 481 00:36:31.700 --> 00:36:34.940 And so we got every, we had to get everybody excited. Again, we're like 482 00:36:34.940 --> 00:36:40.700 we're gonna QA again let's do it. But it was it was such an awesome example 483 00:36:40.700 --> 00:36:45.940 of getting the entire organization behind this, this overall project, but 484 00:36:45.950 --> 00:36:51.510 all let's say is not easy. The decision was not taken lightly and the amount of 485 00:36:51.510 --> 00:36:56.530 time and effort we put in here was significant and I hope to never have to 486 00:36:56.530 --> 00:37:02.270 consolidate that many domains into one again, I found big transitions like 487 00:37:02.280 --> 00:37:05.890 this usually only take place once unless something dramatic and the 488 00:37:05.890 --> 00:37:08.930 company happens way later down the line like you change business models or 489 00:37:08.930 --> 00:37:12.650 something then of course then it's time to reconsider again, I mean this is one 490 00:37:12.650 --> 00:37:15.080 of the bigger ones that I've heard of, the amount of traffic you guys were 491 00:37:15.080 --> 00:37:19.050 dealing with across all these properties page size wise. The only the 492 00:37:19.050 --> 00:37:22.860 only people that are like bigger than this as far as our like maybe dedicated 493 00:37:22.860 --> 00:37:26.960 media properties like you know like Forbes or wired or whatever. Like those 494 00:37:26.960 --> 00:37:30.260 guys that were like social networks are people who do like programmatic sc Oh 495 00:37:30.260 --> 00:37:35.880 so you think of like Zap ear who set up like 100,000 pages automatically just 496 00:37:35.880 --> 00:37:38.910 by coming up with all the different weird tool combinations that people 497 00:37:38.910 --> 00:37:43.550 search. Right? So those can be kind of complicated but you guys have multiple 498 00:37:43.550 --> 00:37:47.190 properties and not only do you have multiple properties but you change the 499 00:37:47.190 --> 00:37:50.530 your all of your core property. It went from Dave Ramsey dot com to Ramsey 500 00:37:50.530 --> 00:37:55.680 solutions dot com which is that in and of itself is a big change over just 501 00:37:55.680 --> 00:37:59.190 changing the core properties don't mean but not you should decided just to go 502 00:37:59.190 --> 00:38:03.520 for it all at once, which is which is crazy what has been the results you've 503 00:38:03.520 --> 00:38:07.430 seen as a result of changing it over. When did it change? And you had the dip 504 00:38:07.430 --> 00:38:12.830 where you guys at now. So we we changed it all over in april and we're still 505 00:38:12.830 --> 00:38:18.110 walking that back. So we we had the dip um immediately and one of the things, 506 00:38:18.110 --> 00:38:21.770 so obviously you're watching your domain authority, so our domain 507 00:38:21.770 --> 00:38:27.890 authority uh dipped and within a week it was back up to exactly where Dave 508 00:38:27.890 --> 00:38:32.870 Ramsey dot com was, which was great. We and we have been watching where we're 509 00:38:32.870 --> 00:38:37.710 kind of falling from. We look at both what we call branded and non branded 510 00:38:37.710 --> 00:38:43.470 search and so are branded rebounded immediately. That was that was never a 511 00:38:43.470 --> 00:38:48.050 major concern for us in terms of us getting back up in those rankings, we 512 00:38:48.050 --> 00:38:52.570 knew that the only way we were going to lose those is if we did something 513 00:38:52.570 --> 00:38:57.250 horribly wrong, like if we didn't if we didn't do the redirects right, or 514 00:38:57.250 --> 00:39:00.880 something broke or they didn't take a site map that we submitted or something 515 00:39:00.880 --> 00:39:06.200 like that. So that stuff came back relatively quickly. The non branded is 516 00:39:06.200 --> 00:39:12.410 what's what's been slowly coming back up and a lot of that is because we have 517 00:39:12.410 --> 00:39:17.140 things that span a lot of different areas, each of those are kind of having 518 00:39:17.140 --> 00:39:22.730 their own path back, right. And there's things that are happening if if nothing 519 00:39:22.730 --> 00:39:26.560 else was happening in google. So if they weren't constantly releasing 520 00:39:26.570 --> 00:39:29.880 algorithm updates and they weren't constantly shifting what they're saying 521 00:39:29.880 --> 00:39:34.460 about core web vitals and page experience and all that, it might be a 522 00:39:34.460 --> 00:39:40.460 more consistent return. But there are so many different factors that are that 523 00:39:40.460 --> 00:39:45.710 are impacting our our trek back up. And so we are we are on the path we're 524 00:39:45.710 --> 00:39:50.640 still down. Um But we we knew that we were going to be down for a good amount 525 00:39:50.640 --> 00:39:54.980 of time in S. E. O. And so we've been looking at what are other ways that we 526 00:39:54.980 --> 00:40:01.490 can continue to drive that um Because S Ceo is not just done in the world of S. 527 00:40:01.490 --> 00:40:06.340 E. O. Right, people don't just search because of work that you've done in 528 00:40:06.340 --> 00:40:10.440 search. So it's things that you're doing outside, whether it's branding, 529 00:40:10.450 --> 00:40:15.860 um whether it's media hits. We we saw some great seo traffic increase through 530 00:40:15.860 --> 00:40:19.840 all of the advertising that we did around the borrowed future documentary 531 00:40:19.840 --> 00:40:24.680 that just came out. So there's a lot of stuff that we're still glad that we did 532 00:40:24.680 --> 00:40:29.270 it. We knew long term and we made the decision that the long term brand of 533 00:40:29.270 --> 00:40:34.180 the company was not going to be Dave Ramsey. And we also knew that as we had 534 00:40:34.180 --> 00:40:37.840 these other products and services that are just going to have Ramsey on it, 535 00:40:37.850 --> 00:40:43.910 that the kind of easier sc oh way to go would be to just consolidate into Dave 536 00:40:43.910 --> 00:40:49.320 Ramsey dot com but that was going to be a big disconnect for our customers. So 537 00:40:49.320 --> 00:40:54.740 if I, if I find Ramsey every dollar and I go and then I'm redirected to Dave 538 00:40:54.740 --> 00:41:00.090 Ramsey dot com. If you don't really know Dave Ramsey, that's going to be a 539 00:41:00.100 --> 00:41:03.040 really big disconnect, you're gonna be like, what does that even, what does 540 00:41:03.040 --> 00:41:07.440 that mean? But even our personalities like Rachel Cruz or john Deloney when 541 00:41:07.440 --> 00:41:11.860 they do media hits, they're called Ramsey personalities so that when they 542 00:41:11.860 --> 00:41:16.740 go to Ramsey Solutions, which is the name of our, our overall parent company 543 00:41:17.210 --> 00:41:20.040 and it's the name of our building. So when you come in and listen to a show, 544 00:41:20.040 --> 00:41:23.610 you're gonna see that that on the outside too, that there's actually a 545 00:41:23.610 --> 00:41:27.780 connect. So again, it all goes back to this overall branding, the connective 546 00:41:27.780 --> 00:41:32.520 tissue that's going to go throughout it. And you know, sometimes you gotta, you 547 00:41:32.520 --> 00:41:38.000 gotta pay a little bit up front for the long term benefit. We talk about that 548 00:41:38.000 --> 00:41:41.170 and investing, right? You gotta put in money now and it's gonna be painful now 549 00:41:41.170 --> 00:41:45.810 so that you can have good stuff in the future. That's a similar situation that 550 00:41:45.810 --> 00:41:49.720 we're experiencing today. Have you seen a big fallout from revenue based on 551 00:41:49.720 --> 00:41:54.970 your, your lost traffic? Yes. And no, we've, we've had issues with with some 552 00:41:54.980 --> 00:41:59.900 areas with revenue, some, some areas aren't dependent on non branded for the 553 00:41:59.900 --> 00:42:04.680 most part. And so we haven't seen that and like I said, we knew a lot of this 554 00:42:04.680 --> 00:42:09.580 was coming. And so we've been focusing on other areas to kind of minimize that, 555 00:42:09.590 --> 00:42:10.720 that gap overall 556 00:42:12.100 --> 00:42:14.810 bummer for the teams that are dedicated, the products that were most dependent 557 00:42:14.810 --> 00:42:16.120 on it, but at the same time 558 00:42:17.500 --> 00:42:21.710 there's so many things going on that I know it would work out, man. We've 559 00:42:21.710 --> 00:42:25.990 covered a lot of different topics. We've talked about branding, we've 560 00:42:25.990 --> 00:42:30.770 talked about house of brands, we've talked about S E. O. Domain names, uh, 561 00:42:30.780 --> 00:42:35.030 this massive project Ramsey over did to consolidate all these anywhere else. 562 00:42:35.030 --> 00:42:38.050 One of the bigger projects that I've heard of, thank you so much for walking 563 00:42:38.050 --> 00:42:41.940 me through all of that. If people want to connect with you, Where's a good 564 00:42:41.940 --> 00:42:45.520 place to connect with you Casey and what's probably the most relevant thing 565 00:42:45.520 --> 00:42:50.640 for B2B marketers to know about Ramsey and where to find it. Yeah, we, so 566 00:42:50.650 --> 00:42:54.290 connecting with me is, is relatively easy. I spend, I spend a good deal of 567 00:42:54.290 --> 00:42:59.510 time. This is where we met on linkedin. Uh, and so that's K. C. It's K C Y. 568 00:42:59.510 --> 00:43:03.580 It's a, it's a weird spelling, but that's, that's how you can find me. And 569 00:43:03.580 --> 00:43:09.820 there's a lot of really smart marketers from Ramsey that are on linkedin, like 570 00:43:09.820 --> 00:43:13.460 if you're listening to this and you want to connect with. I've never worked 571 00:43:13.460 --> 00:43:18.970 at a company around so many people that are extremely intelligent and experts 572 00:43:18.980 --> 00:43:22.110 in their craft and so if you're looking for, if you're looking for that, 573 00:43:22.110 --> 00:43:27.240 there's a lot of people whether it's uh you know, Andy high or tray cinnamon. 574 00:43:27.250 --> 00:43:31.450 You've got Jennings recently. We have a lot of people that are active on 575 00:43:31.450 --> 00:43:35.970 linkedin as well. So connecting with people, there is a great thing to do. 576 00:43:35.980 --> 00:43:40.710 But if, if you're looking for like Ramsey Solutions, what we do. Ramsey 577 00:43:40.710 --> 00:43:46.090 Solutions dot com is where you can go and get all of that. And we are hiring 578 00:43:46.100 --> 00:43:50.060 a lot of people, we're hiring marketers were hiring developers, we've got a lot 579 00:43:50.060 --> 00:43:54.200 of people out like a lot of roles Because we are continuing to grow. I 580 00:43:54.200 --> 00:43:59.920 said we're at 1000, We've just built our second building um that houses 1000 581 00:43:59.920 --> 00:44:05.380 people. So we have 1000 in one building and we just built another one. And so 582 00:44:05.380 --> 00:44:09.960 we are poised for a lot of growth in these next years. And so if you want to 583 00:44:09.960 --> 00:44:13.190 get on that ship, go to Ramsey solutions dot com and and look in the 584 00:44:13.190 --> 00:44:17.600 career section. Fantastic Casey. Thank you again for joining me on GDP growth. 585 00:44:17.610 --> 00:44:19.420 Thanks for having me 586 00:44:21.690 --> 00:44:25.890 and sweet fish. We're on a mission to create the most helpful content on the 587 00:44:25.890 --> 00:44:30.470 internet for every job function and industry on the planet for the B two B 588 00:44:30.470 --> 00:44:34.510 marketing industry. This show is how we're executing on that mission. If you 589 00:44:34.510 --> 00:44:38.010 know a marketing leader that would be an awesome guest for this podcast. 590 00:44:38.090 --> 00:44:41.540 Shoot me a text message, don't call me because I don't answer unknown numbers. 591 00:44:41.550 --> 00:44:47.760 But text me At 407 four and I know three, Just shoot me. Their name may be 592 00:44:47.760 --> 00:44:51.680 a link to their linkedin profile, and I'd love to check them out to see if we 593 00:44:51.680 --> 00:44:54.800 can get them on the show. Thanks a lot. 594 00:44:56.790 --> 00:44:57.300 Live with it. 595 00:44:58.390 --> 00:44:58.720 Mhm.