Steve Brown is the founder of ROI Online, an internet marketing agency, and author of Amazon Bestselling book The Golden Toilet. Steve grew up as a "chicken fried steak guy" in Amarillo, Texas and had his eyes opened while travelling the world. Through a long-winding journey, he returned to Amarillo and launched a marketing agency with an international footprint. Steve is a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. His agency ROI Online was recently recognized by Fortune Magazine and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC.org) as one of 100 Fastest-Growing Inner City Businesses of 2019. His agency is a HubSpot Platinum Agency Partner and the original StoryBrand Certified Agency.
Steve believes the true heroes of the American economy are the invisible entrepreneurs and business leaders of small to medium-sized businesses. As the marketing world shifts, these leaders find themselves chasing shiny marketing tactics that don't move the needle. They're left frustrated with nothing to show for their hard work. Steve wrote The Golden Toilet to help these entrepreneurs successfully navigate the modern world of marketing so they can get an ROI from their strategies. In the book, Steve Brown teaches you how to reframe your perspective on marketing so you can focus your resources and attention on the real live humans who need your solutions.
What is the story of how you came to start your agency?
Working for a previous agency, my job was to grow the accounts that came into a web design firm. From that vantage point, I could see what happened after those easy closes—and it wasn’t pretty.
Many of the accounts that came through would crash and burn.
People would come to us for a website or a redo, we’d close the deal and get their site in production, but then
it’d be handed off to the “web designer” (usually a Photoshop guy or someone with basic web creation proficiency).
The thing is, the designer’s job was to design. That’s all they cared about. They didn’t have a stake in the business of the client they were designing for—creation happens
at its own pace. The clients would look to me to pick up the pace, but I wasn’t in charge of the designers or their process. Frustration all around.
That’s when I made the jump into my own agency. I thought
if I could manage the whole process—educate the customer, walk them through every step, align everyone’s
expectations including the designers—we could avoid the frustrated, fiery end that those accounts had all come to.
Not so much.
I started my own agency to solve the problem of designers
designing for design’s sake because they lacked a foundational appreciation for what the business owners were
building. That makes sense enough. What surprised me was that the business owners were often also missing that same piece. When I realized a key piece was missing, my mindset shifted from “let me sell you a website” to “you don’t need a website.”
When it came to a website, business owners were stepping out of their entrepreneur shoes and letting the need
for a website—any website—take over. Instead of thinking about why they started their business and what they could accomplish with this opportunity. They needed to
understand that websites are just another component of a business process. They didn’t need just the one part—they needed a system to help them grow their business.
What I really wanted to do for my clients had little to do with websites. I wanted to help entrepreneurs thrive. I wanted to help them focus on the problem they set out to solve rather than spinning their wheels and wasting more money on marketing. If I can help you align your strategy and overall goals with a better system instead of just the website you think you need, I can help you win.
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