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Patrick Egan is a senior marketing executive and the Founder and CEO of Spark Interactive. Spark Interactive fuses the power of storytelling with professionally-produced video to help business owners attract a high volume of the right customers. Patrick takes a pragmatic approach to product management, marketing, and team building, focusing on executing the technological vision.
In this episode…
Are you looking for a way to attract more of the right people to your tire and auto repair shop? Does your shop have a great story behind it? Now may be the time to leverage your shop’s story through video. If you’re seeking more loyal customers or great, long-term employees, this episode of Gain Traction is for you!
In this episode of Gain Traction, Patrick Egan tells Mike Edge about the tremendous value that storytelling through video can bring to the owner of a tire and auto repair shop. Patrick explains how he interviews shop owners, employees, and loyal customers, combines their thoughts with compelling footage and edits them into documentary-style videos that serve as marketing tools as nothing else can. Your shop has a story that people want to be a part of. Tune in to learn how to make it happen!
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Patrick describes the service Spark Interactive provides to help tire and auto repair shop owners tell their story
- How Patrick learned to recognize what it takes for a shop owner to be truly successful
- What employees at successful shops say about turning their jobs into careers
- Why reviews from customers on video are more convincing than in print
- Using Spark Interactive’s videos as recruiting tools to attract great employees
- The hidden SEO benefit of video
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to the Gain Traction podcast, where we feature top automotive entrepreneurs and experts and share their inspiring stories. Now, let’s get started with the show.
Mike Edge:
Mike Edge here. I am the host of Gain Traction, where I talk with top automotive business leaders about their journeys in this great industry. This episode is brought to you by Tread Partners. At Tread Partners, we provide digital marketing for multi-location tire dealers and auto repair shops. By using our strategy, branding, and marketing services, we help shops sell more tires and put more cars into bays. So, what are you waiting for? Check us out at treadpartners.com. Today I’ve got a returning guest, Patrick Egan, president, and owner of Spark Interactive.
Mike:
Patrick and I met at a show in Florida last year and hit it off ever since. I believe in his product. I believe in what he does. We actually tried to do a show live in Las Vegas. It is posted out there. But in spite of that, it didn’t quite come off the way we wanted it, both of us, because we had so much background noise, et cetera. But this time, we decided we’d do another one. Patrick, welcome to the program. You’re actually the first returning guest.
Patrick Egan:
Oh, boy. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Mike. Appreciate it.
Mike:
Yeah. Glad to have you again. Let’s tell the audience about Spark Interactive and what you guys do.
Patrick:
Sure.
Mike:
It says here you make videos for the tire and auto repair industry. But tell us what video means to the world today.
Patrick:
Sure. Yeah. It’s a lot more than just video, too. You can get a lot of people out there to just come and shoot a video for you. We’re a little bit about trying to document your unique success story. Every successful shop has got a story. I found that most often, what shops struggle with is sharing that story about what makes them different than the average discount place down the street. We help them by coming out and interviewing the shop owner, their team, and a bunch of their raving fan customers, and put that together in a series of documentary-style videos where they just talk, give their authentic stories from real people about what makes that location different and the audience that they serve and how they give back to their community and really, how they work with the team and the customers to put them first.
Mike:
That’s awesome. Tell us a little bit about the interview process. Because I know you personally go out there and do that. I think you’ve experimented in the past with using freelancers, but you realized, “Man, I’m the guy that knows this industry. I know what to ask. I know how to lead a customer or even an owner of a shop into saying what they need to say or accomplish what they need to accomplish.” Am I making sense there? Is that pretty accurate?
Patrick:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. For sure. That’s true because prior to doing what I do today, I spent the prior ten years working in the automotive industry and visiting shops while I was running marketing for a couple of other companies with [inaudible 00:03:18] and Auto Vitals. Hearing those stories and working with these successful shop owners, I got to recognize their wants and desires and recognize what goes on in a shop and what it takes to really be successful. Like you mentioned, I tried an experiment using freelancers where I’d send them out and ask the questions that I knew that had to be asked, but if you don’t have that background and are able to really carry on the interview as an interview and really be able to lead them through that discussion, you don’t get the real authentic story. You get people answering single-syllable answers to your long-winded questions.
Mike:
Yeah. And you’re trying to get them to expand on something and they’re like, “No.” Yeah.
Patrick:
Yeah. Really, I sit down and I’ll spend the day there interviewing the shop owner. Typically, what I do is I’ll interview all the team and the customers first. Then I’ll go back to the shop owner. After I’ve heard them say all the bad things about the shop owner, I’ll see if he can actually confirm it. But it’s usually the other way around. I find that the team and the customers, team love working there. It’s the reason they get up in the morning. I find that at successful shops, typically, the team are talking about wanting this to be their last job, making a career instead of job. At a successful shop, the customers rave about why they’ve been coming there for years and why they recommend it to their friends. Then when I go back to the shop owner and ask him why that is, they fill it in with their story about how they got started and their focus on their team and their community ethics and ethos are all about and how they use that to drive their profits and not so much trying to siphon money out of people’s wallets.
Mike:
Tell me, I can’t remember but you got… Once you complete the video, let’s say you’re getting a lot of cuts. You’re doing a lot of interviews so you got all this and you got to take it back and you got to edit it. How long does it usually take to put that together? And then what do you typically condense it to?
Patrick:
Sure. Yeah. Typically, the package that a lot of people like to have is a package of three or four videos. It takes us about two weeks to put this together. A lot of it is editing. A lot of it is me on site doing the interviews, but the editing process is later. Car guys out there, you get that. What’s your labor rate? There’s a lot of labor involved. The three types of videos that we put together primarily are of the business story. The story about how the business owner started the place. Because a lot of the times, that’s, “My dad started the place back in the fifties. Me and my brother took it over from him. Working in the garage since we were kids.”
Patrick:
Then we mix that in with some of the team members talking about how they got there in the first place. Guy started out sweeping floors and now he’s a master tech. Mix in a few customers talking about how they came there on a whim and have been there for 25 years. That authentic story is what really grabs people and gets them engaged. Gone are the types of videos that people used to have on their websites, “Hey, come on down. Buy three tires, get one free, hey.” [inaudible 00:06:49].
Mike:
That’s the feel-good, “Here’s who we are, and here’s what we want to be for you.” Does that go on the homepage or the about us page? Or do they utilize it in different ways? Probably have a YouTube channel for it or what?
Patrick:
Sure. Yeah. Primarily, people put that right smack on their homepage, first thing you see so that anymore, people pick up their cellphones and they search for, “I need brakes for my Audi.” Looking on the phone and this shop does brakes. They both work on Audis, and they do tires, too. I don’t know the difference.” If you have that type of story, that’s what makes you stop and look and lean in and listen to see why they’re different. Then the second video is the customers. Everybody loves five-star reviews, right?
Mike:
Yep.
Patrick:
This is like five-star reviews on steroids because it’s a whole bunch of your customers telling that really authentic story about why they got there in the first place. Typically, when you do get a really good five-star review, it’s somewhere like, “Great job. Been coming here for 25 years. My kids bring their cars here now, too. You should, too. Two thumbs up.” That’s it. There’s not a lot of emotion there and there’s not a lot of, there’s no story. The ones that do leave a story are probably the ones you don’t want.
Mike:
Basically, you’re saying… The video, look, I’m hooked on video too, but I think video, as you’re saying, is basically more convincing. Why not have more of it on your site?
Patrick:
Exactly.
Mike:
And utilize it more. I know you got one more to talk about, but what’s the shelf life of video, do you think? If somebody [inaudible 00:08:36] with you.
Patrick:
Yeah. I think a shelf life on a video like that is a couple of years, really. That investment can go a long way. Obviously, customers come and go. You can always add to it. One of the cool things is the way we embed these videos. Once they’re on the site, add another customer, we can add that to the reel and pop it right in and no changes have to be done to your website at all because we can do it all remotely.
Mike:
Nice, man. Real nice.
Patrick:
And yeah, the one that might have a little bit shorter shelf life, hopefully not, is your team video. That’s the third one that we do, which is your team talking about why they get up in the morning and love coming to work. But more importantly, what is it really about that shop that makes it unique from an employee’s point of view? Which is a great trust-building tool so that customers can see the actual people working on their cars. Because they never go back in the shop, never see those guys. They might see the service providers upfront or the shop owner, but they never really hear about what’s going on in the back of the shop. So that’s good. But primarily, it’s a great recruiting tool because everybody is looking for new talent. It’s really hard to find employees these days. Especially techs.
Patrick:
So everyone’s got a job out there, “Techs needed. Apply here,” and it’s a form. You might even have a description about your company values and a couple of bullet items about your benefits. But this has, again, authentic stories from the people working there about what it is they love about the job, how the team interacts. They can actually see them and hear them. Because we do do this documentary style, we’ll always add in a lot of that background video that shows them interacting in the shop, shows their working environment. Depending on the location, different things are important. When I was shooting in Texas, the big benefit of a shop I was working at is they had air conditioning. The guy is standing underneath the blower and his hair is blowing around. He’s like, “What’s the main benefit? Air conditioning. We work inside.” You know? That’s a great thing.
Mike:
And it’s cool because there really aren’t enough videos of testimonials of seeing employees happy working in a spot. So I could see it being a huge recruiting tool that in the process of filling out an application or whatever, you’re going to see this video and click on it. It may win you that good employee versus somebody that doesn’t have that.
Patrick:
Exactly.
Mike:
Yeah.
Patrick:
And the thing too is most shop owners that have a successful team have told me that they’ll hire for attitude and they can train in the technology. You might have the right requirements for the job, but if you don’t meld well with their team, with their family, then you’re probably not a right fit. This way, you start to get to see the fit right away. If you’re looking for a corporate environment, not shop is a little bit more relaxed, maybe that’s not where you want to go. So it attracts the right people. Maybe repels the ones that aren’t right.
Mike:
That’s cool. Go back to the editing. Well, first of all, we have three types of videos. We have the story about the company, their founding, their purpose, et cetera. Then you’ve got the one that deals with the customer testimonials, basically, which is like reviews on steroids. And then you’ve got the employees and their testimonials working there. Obviously I could see why things may evolve if you have older customers being interviewed. They may pass on so you’ve got to update the video just for the sake of their families. So you’re saying that’s easy to do, [inaudible 00:12:38]. Okay. Then same thing goes with the employee side. Sometimes employees can come and go. People advance in their careers and move on or whatever. So you can change those people out as well.
Patrick:
Yeah. Absolutely. And with a lot of our shops, we do go back and come back maybe twice a year and shoot additional videos. People use these videos not only for the things I was mentioning for on their website. They’ll also use clips of all that content for social media postings. If they have specialties, if it’s a make specialty shop, for example, that focuses on German cars, we might have them shoot some specific videos where they’re talking about, “Here at Motorworks, we focus on German vehicles. And one of the German vehicles we work on most often is an Audi.” And they’ll talk about why Audis are special to them. They’ll put that type of video on their Audi specialty page. That again creates a little bit more video content. But there’s something key about that, too. People like video, but from an SEO point of view, it really has a hidden benefit.
Patrick:
First of all, we take all these videos, one of the big things that is important to any online business these days is ADA compliance, as you know. Having the closed captioning down there makes sure that that website, that online business is going to be ADA compliant. And the way we do this is by embedding that transcript of the closed captioning. It gets embedded behind the scenes for ADA compliant readers to see. But it turns out, as a side benefit, that happens to be the exact same thing that Google sees first. So any of that spoken content, all of that text, that entire transcript is embedded as content for the website. First that Google Spider sees is all that spoken word text.
Patrick:
For example, if you’re searching for Audi vehicles in whatever city that particular customer is in, it’ll see all of that original content. Google knows that it’s a video so it knows that that is actual authentic content and not keyword packing. Not marketing text that so many marketing companies are talking about these days.
Mike:
And that is a huge way of growing your content inside by doing your video. Being an SEO guy myself, I think that’s gigantic in regards to what it provides your customers, or let’s say a shop’s capabilities in regards to getting found. Video does a great job of marketing the company, but the transcript does a great job of marketing the company with an SEO effect that is really exponential.
Patrick:
Exactly.
Mike:
There’s so much that’s said. There’s so much… And it’s authentic. Google has gotten so good at determining fake lingo, per se, and they know when it’s real based on the conversation that… It really can score you well.
Patrick:
Mm-hmm.
Mike:
Yeah.
Patrick:
Yeah. Definitely. It’s just the actual page is tagged as a video page. Google knows that that transcript is a video transcript. They do an additional thing, too. If you’ve seen, being an SEO guy you’ve seen that when you search for whatever, widgets, you’ll get your regular search results, but there’s always the video tab. If you click on videos, all the pages that we put a video on will show in the videos tab as well, too. So they get right into the video with a preview of the video in the thumbnail.
Mike:
How long does it take you to typically do a… Let’s do an average shop. Let’s say somebody has eight stores and they’re all within a relatively close region. Would you go to each store? How do you break that down? Is that a week long visit for you? Is that a couple days?
Patrick:
Yeah. Great question. Yeah. I’m actually headed out to do something similar. It’s a six location shop. Going to be doing that next week. It’s a little bit of an “it depends” question because it depends on what you want, what your goals are out of the project. If we’re looking at just collecting the content we need for the videos we’re talking about, so the three or four main videos, maybe a couple of specialty videos, maybe if you’re going to be focusing on your touchless tire mounting system or your road [inaudible 00:17:29] balance or something like that, if those are some other videos you want, we’ll collect additional content from that. But with multiple locations, what we’ll typically do is interview your team. You pick the top team members you want us to interview. If you want us to interview everybody, great.
Patrick:
But keep in mind that’s labor time. It’s time interviewing, it’s time editing. So typically, we’ll interview some top team members and let’s say up to five customers. We’ll shoot the background video in two, three, maybe four of your main sites. Then we’ll shoot outdoor stuff of your other sites if they’re relatively similar looking. Because a lot of that video, you want to be able to showcase your different locations. But the inside and the back of the shop is not something that we’re typically, we have to go in and shoot all day on. And on some locations, when I’ve worked with even larger locations that have 10 to 15 locations, we’ll maybe pick five for the videos.
Mike:
Yeah. Okay. In a sense, [inaudible 00:18:42], per se.
Patrick:
Exactly.
Mike:
Yeah.
Patrick:
Do you want the one that’s in a strip mall? [inaudible 00:18:49].
Mike:
No, I got you. Well, we’re up on our hard time.
Patrick:
Okay.
Mike:
But let me ask you, why don’t you give the audience a good way to reach you in case somebody is listening that would like a quote on getting video done for their stores.
Patrick:
Absolutely. You can find me at sparkinteractive.com. Or just go ahead and give me a call. You can call me direct any time. Call me at 805-403-3462. And again, it’s Patrick Egan.
Mike:
That’s awesome. You want to give them an email address as well?
Patrick:
Yeah. You can reach me at [email protected].
Mike:
Spark is S-P-A-R-K. Patrick, I’m really glad we did this again. It’s always a pleasure talking with you.
Patrick:
Appreciate it. It’s been a great time.
Mike:
Yeah. We’ll do another one sometime. But to all our listeners out there, thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in again. Till next time, we’ll stay safe and we’ll look forward to seeing you again.
Patrick:
Thanks a lot, Mike.
Announcer:
Thanks for listening to the Gain Traction podcast. We’ll see you again next time. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
Transcript
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