Company: Morether Creative Agency
Owners: Daniel Palmer
Year Started: 2017
Employees: 1 – 10
In the latest captivating episode of “An Agency Story,” titled “Passage,” listeners are treated to an intimate exploration of the entrepreneurial journey through the lens of Daniel Palmer, the visionary behind Morether Creative Agency. This episode serves as a profound testament to the series’ dedication to sharing the raw, unfiltered narratives of marketing agency owners, illuminating the path from nascent beginnings to triumphant success.
Daniel Palmer’s story unfolds as a compelling narrative of evolution, from his humble origins as a passionate artist to the founder of a boutique agency specializing in premium B2C companies. His transition from a one-man marketing band for a church to an agency owner encapsulates the essence of determination and the courage to embrace the unknown. This episode delves into the intricacies of finding one’s niche, the challenges of entrepreneurship, and the profound impact of building meaningful relationships.
Listeners will find humor and inspiration in anecdotes such as Daniel’s early entrepreneurial venture into watercolor painting of football players, showcasing his ingenuity from a young age. Moreover, the episode sheds light on the significance of adaptability in business, with Daniel’s pivot from a generalist agency to a focused fractional CMO style service, emphasizing the value of specialization and the power of storytelling through the StoryBrand framework.
What sets this episode apart are the candid reflections on the emotional and financial hurdles encountered on the path to success, supported by the touching narrative of familial support and the community’s role in an entrepreneur’s journey. Daniel’s insights into the potential future of his agency, marrying marketing with operational and sales support, offer a glimpse into the forward-thinking mindset that defines successful entrepreneurs.
This episode of “An Agency Story” is more than just a story of business growth; it’s a testament to the human spirit, resilience, and the pursuit of passion. It leaves listeners pondering the essence of entrepreneurship and the infinite possibilities that unfold when one dares to dream and act. For anyone seeking inspiration, practical advice, or simply a compelling story, “Passage” is an episode that resonates with aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals alike, encouraging us to explore our own paths to success.
You can listen to this episode of An Agency Story on your favorite podcast app:
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0:01
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel: 0:37
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast. I’m your host Russel. On this episode, we have Daniel Palmer, founder of Moerther creative agency, a fractional CMO style agency based on premium and luxury B2C manufacturing companies based out of Temple, Texas. Daniel founded himself drawn to the creative world during his college years through his artistic passions. Eventually finding his calling in the early days of his career, Daniel cut his teeth by becoming a one man marketing band for a church in Maryland. After 14 years, Daniel found himself at a fork in the road and chose the entrepreneurial path, braving the uncertainty and many difficulties on his journey to eventual success. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today everyone, I have Daniel Palmer with Morether Creative Agency here with us today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Daniel.
Daniel: 1:22
Thank you Russel. Appreciate the invite. Good to be here.
Russel: 1:25
Start us off, if you don’t mind. Tell us what Morether does and who do you do it for?
Daniel: 1:28
We are a fractional CMO smaller boutique agency in Temple, Texas. We work with premium B2C companies like hot tub dealers, direct to consumer manufacturers and we love it. It’s the niche that we’ve locked into and that’s who we work with.
Russel: 1:43
The only thing I know about Temple is that it has a Bucee’s on the way to Austin. Is there anything else Temple Texas is known for?
Daniel: 1:50
Bucky’s is pretty big. It’s pretty amazing. It’s actually about five minutes from where I grew up. We have the Temple Wildcats, which are our football team. I think the last time that I remember winning state was1992. That’s a pretty big claim to fame if you know Texas football, to win state.
Russel: 2:03
Isn’t that the truth? I’m sure there’s a big sign somewhere on a highway letting everybody know to remember that moment. Let’s go back to the time machine real quick. What was young Daniel wanting to be when he grew up? Did it have anything to do with being an entrepreneur?
Daniel: 2:14
It morphed a few times. The first adventure in the entrepreneur world was, speaking of the Wildcats, I started painting watercolors of football players. I was in middle school. These guys were my heroes. They were high school football players. They were awesome. I’m an artist. Started art a long time ago when I was a kiddo and started painting pictures. My dad, who’s got the entrepreneurial bug as well. He put me in touch with the booster club and they started purchasing paintings from me. The booster club parents all saw that I could paint and so they started commissioning things. I think I was 12 or 13 or something like that at the time. That was kinda my early bug for entrepreneurial stuff and connected me with a lot of local folks from there. Started to get into music. My career changed a little bit as I got into college. Originally I was gonna be a part of an agency. Shifted a little bit after college, but early days, it was painting, it was gonna be an artist. Eventually I got into graphic design and started working with some companies and doing some side work with local folks. Very early, it wasn’t like to start my own business. It was just, hey, this is spending money for whatever piece of equipment from musical equipment or a car or whatever I was looking for in high school. It was the means to the end.
Russel: 3:15
Very cool. Commissioned artist at the age of 12 or 13. A similar conversation on a previous podcast, the guest was had a similar story and I actually did the same thing, although I was a terrible artist, I think it was more entrepreneurial for me when I was younger. Just to figure out what could I sell, but probably got more donations for my paintings than quality. That’s a cool little gig to have at a young age. As I understand it too, as you graduated and your first big career role wasn’t in fact in the agency space, what were you doing back then and how did that eventually evolve into your current path?
Daniel: 3:42
I graduated UMHB, Mary Harden Bether down here in Belton, and graduated with an art degree, which, I love art and I love the degree. It was a fairly useless degree though in general.
Russel: 3:51
I feel the same way about my history degree.
Daniel: 3:53
Yeah, there you go. I had a great time and got to know some people, so it wasn’t total throwaway, but it definitely didn’t propel me into the next career. I got involved in music, so I had a career choice by calling to move into the church world of music. Did that for a number of years through college. After college I started a little design agency for about a year just to pay bills and it was my own business and essentially was enough just to cover food and an apartment. Then I got a call from a church in Maryland who reached out and they knew that I did music. They had used a head hunter to find me, and I made the move in 2003 to Maryland and started working with a church. Also did a bunch of their marketing, web development, graphic design. Built in that muscle while doing music on the weekends as well for the church, building teams and things like that. It’s just a good prep to change careers later, but did that for about 14 years. Met my wife out there. We had our two kids and learned a lot about marketing, about building teams, about working with volunteers, and a lot of things you wouldn’t think would transfer over to your own business, but it helped out in the long.
Russel: 4:53
What was your favorite thing about living in Maryland?
Daniel: 4:55
Actually having seasons. We have two in Texas, as we have a couple of cold days that happened in like January, February, and then it’s just muggy and hot for the rest of the year. We had amazing falls out there, pretty springs as well. Winters were a little bit of a challenge, but it was still enjoyable to have some snow every now and then. We do miss that. We lived close to the water. We lived near the Chesapeake Bay. Beautiful location out there, so we miss a lot of that. DC is also a very cool city. A lot of history there, obviously. A fun place to hang out and be.
Russel: 5:19
A very long career there. I imagine, you say 14 years, you probably were enjoying that, but what set off the path that originally got you to start your own agency and make that decision?
Daniel: 5:29
You probably need another podcast for that story. I’m not gonna get into all of it. Needless to say, we made an overnight transition out of there. Some things changed and we were clearly given signs it was time to get out, so we did. My wife and I, late 2016, early 17, decided to make the transition. My family still was in Texas and still is in Texas, so we decided, hey, we’re gonna come back. To have support from mom and dad who are still here in Temple helped me make that transition. I was 37 at the time and gosh, it was a challenge to, as a sole provider for the family to make that transition out of a stable job, stable set of friends. We’d bought a house that we loved and everything flipped overnight and we decided it was time to go. Came back in 2017 to Texas, bought a house without a job, which I don’t recommend to a whole lot of folks.
Russel: 6:11
I did that as well when I moved to Texas. Maybe it’s a Texas thing.
Daniel: 6:13
It was a good time to buy, so it’s turned out okay. Had a phenomenal amount of support from my father particularly. He obviously was wanting to make me as successful as possible and help me make the transition. I always say we used to meet monthly at Chick-fil-A and he would buy me lunch, $5 Chick-fil-A sandwich and he would slide over an envelope full of cash to help us make the transition. I always say he was my first business investor. Cause it was a struggle, it was a emotional, financial, spiritual, everything struggle to try to make that transition. He was super instrumental in doing that.
Russel: 6:43
Support is needed. As I understand then, as soon as you came to Texas, that was your foray into Morether and no looking back from there?
Daniel: 6:50
Yeah. The first few months had no idea what I was gonna do. We had started a little business in Maryland, a moon mining gig with a buddy of mine up there. He was doing websites, I was doing a few websites just to pay for vacations and stuff like that. We had a decent amount of little clients that we were working with on websites, and the timing couldn’t have been better. It helped us make that transition and have some cash for groceries and things like that. He’s still with me too. He’s been a friend for a while and he’s part of our web development team. We had a handful of clients and I said, you know what, I’ve applied a few jobs. Nothing interests me. It’s not enough income. We wanted to be a sole income family. I said, look, I can do it. Let’s launch it. We pulled the trigger in June of 2017. Morether is the name. It’s not a Latin word. There’s nothing fancy. It’s a word that my daughter, at the time, she was three, if she got something and her brother got something and his was more, she wanted more there. Okay. That’ll fly.
Russel: 7:37
I like that. Three year olds might be a lot better at naming than adults anyway.
Daniel: 7:41
Yeah, it’s just unique words. It’s words that no one else knows, but it has some context to it.
Russel: 7:45
Everybody should have Morether. So you had a little book of clients. How’d you get the rest of your clients in the early days? What did that look like?
Daniel: 7:50
It was a lot of hustle. You hear overnight stories of folks that start businesses and they go from 40,000 to 500,000 in a year. That wasn’t us. We worked with a lot of local clients, attending networking meetings. I sent emails out. It was bootstrapped from the beginning. I didn’t have a whole lot of cash to invest in any marketing for myself, so it became who do I know? How can I leverage those relationships in a positive way? I think the key is, I started developing and deepening good relationships. The church career, I think that world helped me quickly understand how to build meaningful relationships quickly. Not leveraging them to manipulate them or to use them, but actually build into people, provide them value in their business, whatever it is. Then over time, I’ve seen a majority of my clients come in through those people, it’s a high quality referral network and eventually I’m going to exhaust that. We’re getting to the end of that now, but early days it was very powerful to be kind to people, to be empathetic, to help them in their journey. It’s benefited the way we run our business and the way that we built that first few clients.
Russel: 8:50
Sounds like a great recipe for success to me.One of the things that seems like may have evolved over the time,or you tell me,is the services you were offering when you got started and then where you’ve evolved to where you’re at today.What does that look like?
Daniel: 9:02
If there’s any folks that are listening that are aspirational agency owners, or you’ve got a world of marketing you wanna jump into, I would say early on, if you can, get as good at one thing as possible. We called ourselves an agency. We hired a bunch of people that didn’t work out. You learn your lessons. But we tried to do everything. We did branding, we did websites, we did copywriting. We did video, we said, hey, we can do it all. We would use vendors and stuff and it wasn’t awful, but it certainly didn’t allow me to get good at something. Over time we’ve moved away from the all encompassing agency that does everything and competes with everybody, kinda the bottom of the barrel competition into more niched services and more direct verticals that we’re working with instead of everybody. We’ve gotten to where we’re turning down clients, we’re turning down gigs, we’re turning down jobs that we don’t think we can perform well. The cool thing and the side benefit is that we’ve developed strong relationships with local creatives. Whether it’s branding people, video people, because they don’t see us as competitors. They see us as associates essentially, as people that we can work together with. We get good results quicker, better than I can do by myself by removing some of the things that we are just not good at, that we can’t do.
Russel: 10:07
Fascinating. A lot of agencies go through that transition. We did it ourselves of if you were willing to write us a check for it, we’ll probably try to figure it out as a service. I think we were troubleshooting people’s internet back in the day. In your specific case, how did you realize that was probably a good and natural transition to make?
Daniel: 10:22
I was exhausted all the time. I was exhausted trying to learn new stuff constantly. I was fearful of losing a proposal, so I would make concessions. I would either lower the price or I would add something on that I didn’t know how to do, and I said, this isn’t gonna work long term. I can’t sustain this. There’s too many things out there for marketing for me to know that I physically can’t understand and do well. I’m a perfectionist by trade and if I can’t do something well, it drives me crazy. Rather than try to do everything well, let’s narrow things down to what I can do. I think at one time we were doing, you said troubleshooting. We were providing email services and I still have people that we essentially are paying their email, they’re paying us for them, but we’re essentially the pass through and I’m trying to get them off of our QuickBooks cuz I’m tired of 20 email addresses being paid for on Google every month. We’re still extracting ourselves from some of the peripheral things that just don’t make sense for us to deal with.
Russel: 11:12
Our worst one was hosting. We did hosting with our own servers and everything, and that was an utter nightmare for not a lot of money. I mean, I should have cut out 50 other things, but whoo, hosting was a beating. One of the things I understand, you’re a StoryBrand guide, which I love the StoryBrand concept. I think it’s a great framework. How has that been effective or how you weaved that into your business?
Daniel: 11:31
That was a game changer. Frankly, I ran across Donald Miller’s book, Building A StoryBrand in 2019. We were flying for vacation and I just happened to snag it and I said, you know what? I’ll check this out. And it floored me because we had been struggling consistently trying to figure out a framework on how to message people. I love the idea. I knew conceptually that we needed something different. It’s not revolutionary, it’s not rocket science, he just figured out a way to say it well, which is part of the point, right? I ran across that in 2019,started immediately applying it to all of our clients, and it changed the game in terms of how we approached not only their messaging, but every part of their marketing. In 2020, I applied to become a guide. Actually late 19, and then the 2020 class of April was where I jumped in. Ironically that was the first class that was canceled because March 13th happened and all of a sudden everybody’s staying home and freaking out. Kudos to StoryBrand though. They bootstrapped it, pulled it together, and did their best to put together. Everything before then had been all in person. I had a flight booked to Nashville, a Airbnb booked and they flipped it and changed it to a digital only. Our claim fame’s, we are the first digital class. Everything since then, the learning’s been incredible. There’s access to all sorts of resources, not only for StoryBrand but building a business, and of course Donald Miller’s moved into this whole build a business world now beyond just StoryBrand, but the key is the community. It’s the access to phenomenal marketing people. I’ll give you a quick example. We have a client that is one of our biggest clients, love him to death. They had their Facebook hacked about this time last year, and it shut down their entire, not only their leads, but their sales got shut down, which was a big deal. Over time we started building it back, working on their messaging. Finally we hired a top notch digital ads person out of Dallas. He works at Fortune500companies. He’s one of the best and would never work with them directly. Probably wouldn’t work with me directly outside of StoryBrand, but he knows me through StoryBrand. We have a decent friendship and he took on the project as a personal project cuz he wanted to see what he could do. And man, he’s improved our leads, brought our cost per lead down from $250 to $40 over the last couple months. He’s just doing the thing he does. Point being the community at StoryBrand gave me access to someone like that who has the tools and the know-how and the experience to get better results for my clients, improve my knowledge as well. That’s a huge access point for us for StoryBrand.
Russel: 13:40
That’s a good ROI. Is that like a 500% decrease? I don’t know all the math today. It’s a little early this morning. What about on the business development end? Has it helped you in that front? Is it something that attracts people to you or is it still just more of a deliverable framework than it is a business development traction point?
Daniel: 13:56
It’s a little of both. Some folks come to us and they know exactly what it is and they say, you can do this. I would say probably five out of 10 leads have some concept of what StoryBrand is. It may not be the initial push, the initial reason why they’ve reached out. But it certainly can play a part. Ultimately though, I don’t think it’s going to be a high lead generator for us. I think more so it’s just gonna be the gel that holds everything together. It’s the framework we use, not only for our websites and approach to campaigns, but it also helps us when we work with sales and how we help them with sales scripts or with proposals. It flows into even how we built out mission statements for companies as well, because it’s the framework, it’s storytelling. It applies to almost every part of life. It is the glue that holds all of our marketing together for every client. It’s not a huge lead generator and I don’t see it being long term, but it’s a massive tool for us to use with clients.
Russel: 14:43
Storytelling is universal since probably the beginning of communication at least. What aspect of entrepreneurship gets you the most excited or gets you outta bed in the morning?
Daniel: 14:52
Building the business. I love marketing. However, I actually think I love building businesses more. I like graphic design. I like video, I like all the things, but I’m not a creative at heart. It doesn’t drive me to get out of bed. It’s another means to an end. I love small businesses who just get that entrepreneurial spirit. If I can help them cultivate that with marketing, I can help them grow whatever they have. That’s kind of the reason we shifted from the general marketing agency world into more of a fractional CMO world because the fractional CMO allows me to get to know a client from the inside out. I spend a lot of time with them. We have phenomenal retention with clients. We have some that have been with us for almost as long as the agency’s been alive. We’re building deep relationships with these clients and they see us as part of the team. That’s what I love. The entrepreneurial side of growing the business is a joy for me. I don’t like digging into the marketing and saying, okay, bye. You guys can figure out the rest. I like to say, how does this impact sales? Does this impact operations? Kind of feel like a marketing director that’s part of the team. That’s what our flagship is.
Russel: 15:50
You seem like the person that doesn’t mind a good pivot for a good reason. How do you see the agency evolving to the future? Do you feel like you’ve found your place or do you think there’s another step or two in your evolution?
Daniel: 16:00
I don’t know that I have dreams. I have no idea where it’s gonna go. I do believe we’ve locked into the fractional CMO thing we started. It’s been evolving over time, but the main thing happened about a year ago. I just said, look, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna stop doing everything else and this is it, and then we’re gonna find industries that we love to work with. And so we did that. That’s been the big evolving piece that’s happened in the last year. The next thing is it’s hard for marketing to work if operations stinks. I have a personality type that likes to dabble in the operations side too. Setting up processes, systems. I think having a group that performs fractional marketing, coupled with some version of fractional operations and possibly even fractional sales for some of these, there’s small businesses here. They’ll make a million dollars in a couple of years just because they’re great at what they do, and then they hit a ceiling because they can’t scale. There’s just no way. There’s no more hours in the day. They don’t have the know-how to figure out systems and to come in there and say, hey, we’re gonna spend three years with you guys. We’re going to take over your marketing, we’re going to help with some front end sales, and we’re going to sure up your operations for a portion of a 5million company. Something like that. That would be a fun project, a fun dream.
Russel: 16:59
Fractional powerhouse slash incubator? You’re kind of in new territory there. I don’t know if we can expand upon from that but my next question was gonna be, what’s the BHAG or big, hairy, audacious goal for those that aren’t familiar with the term, as it relates to the business? What does the dream world look like for you?
Daniel: 17:14
A10 year goal, I would like to have the space to step away, whether that’s selling it to a protege, selling it to, I don’t particularly wanna sell it to another company. I’d like to, if anything, sell it to somebody that I’ve helped raise up. One of our challenges right now is how to scale my head. I’ve got a great project manager on the team and she’s suring up our back end, the systems and things like that. The thing that we’re going to run into is, strategy, and I can’t, my time’s limited. I need to take a outside perspective at my own business and say, how can I scale me? We’re looking at strategists, whether it’s bringing somebody on full-time or a fractional role or a 1099 or something like that to help run some of these fractional CMO for us as we get more and more companies. At that point,10years from now or so, I’d like to say, hey, I’m done. I wanna step away, either be a minority owner or the whole thing over and go paint more.
Russel: 17:59
Paint pictures of football players in Temple. Go back to your roots.
Daniel: 18:02
Paint pictures of football players. I might sell ’em for a little more than like $150, but we’ll see.
Russel: 18:06
Is that what selling for back then?
Daniel: 18:08
It was something like that. It wasn’t bad for a 12 year old in1992.
Russel: 18:11
That’s good. That’s way better in my artwork. I was selling for like a dollar. I’m envious. Last big question for you, standard question on the show. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Daniel: 18:19
Man this is a tough question. I think they can be made. I do. I’m not gonna get way macro, but I do believe our entire system of capitalism of America, I think it’s built on shoulders of people who think outside the box and want to build a life for themselves and if we do it together, can even do it better. I think that folks can be made. Now, at the same time. Not everybody should be an entrepreneur. I think we have folks that have a great spot being supportive roles. Obviously if we had all entrepreneurs, no one would ever get anything done. We’d be dreaming all the time. No one would make any money. I do believe that they can be made though. I think there are enormous amount of resources out there for folks. Not a great answer, but I guess hopefully it’s encouraging to folks who feel like they’re creatives and maybe they feel like they don’t have what it takes to get into the entrepreneur world. You can, there are plenty of resources. There’s help. I would say just don’t try to do it all. Try to figure out what you’re great at, do it well, and find the people that are gonna pay the price to solve their problem.
Russel: 19:12
That sounds like a great answer to me. If people want to know more about Morether, where can they go?
Daniel: 19:17
The website is morether.com, m o r e t h e r.com. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m fairly active on LinkedIn. That’d be a good spot to personally connect with me and love to meet other creatives, other agency owners. I’m always hungry to learn what other people are doing and how they’re doing it. I never see anybody as competitors. If you do it great, you’re just making the industry better. I love to connect with folks in that space.
Russel: 19:37
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Gosh, thank you so much for being on the show today, Daniel. So many takeaways. Can’t wait to see how your journey progresses in the future. Thank you again so much for your time.
Daniel: 19:47
Thank you Russel. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
19:51
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Daniel: 20:27
A few years ago I had a client. I say client, they actually never paid us for anything, so I wouldn’t even call ’em a client, but we decided we would help them with their messaging and their website. It was a barbershop in Austin. We drove down and we were gonna do their messaging system. With StoryBrand, you do a whole two hour discovery, and this is before Zoom was a big deal, so we drove down to Austin. It’s a two hour drive. We pull in and it’s in the middle of the barber shop. I was like, do you have an office or something we can go to? He goes, no, we’re doing it right here. There’s people coming in, they’re getting haircuts, there’s the TVs going. It’s just a buzzing location. I’m like, okay, we’ll see what we can do. We start diving into the StoryBrand stuff and asking the questions. StoryBrand’s all about positioning your customer as the hero, so I start saying, okay, tell us about your customers and the problem you solve for them. I swear it was like a15, 20, 30 minute monologue of how great he is as a barber and how if customers don’t like him, they can just find somebody else because he’s the best and he doesn’t have time to mess with people who don’t like him. We got into that little monologue. It’s, okay. I think we got what we need. We’re just gonna go ahead and go back. We were there for less than an hour and I realized pretty quickly this isn’t gonna work. We’re not gonna be able to help this guy. Great barber, clearly had some issues with his self appearance. We were driving back and we were just real quiet and I was like, I don’t even know what to say. That was one of the roughest most difficult brand scripts I’ve ever been through. Needless to say we didn’t go any further. That was the end of that one, but it was a little bit of a moment where it was like, is this StoryBrand thing gonna work?
Russel: 21:46
Does it work for everybody, I guess clearly no. It would’ve been one better if you had to have delivered this while he’s giving you like a haircut or whatever.
Daniel: 21:54
At least he could’ve given me a haircut. I should’ve at least asked for something out of the whole deal.
Russel: 21:57
Yeah, you should have said, prove it. I don’t know if you’re the best. Prove it.
Daniel: 22:00
I think the height of it was, at one moment he had a guy come in and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this. It’s awful. They do the nose waxing, this barber.
Russel: 22:07
Oh yeah.
Daniel: 22:08
Oh my gosh. So he had this guy come in, burley guy, they wax him up in his nose and they’re yanking that thing out and he’s screaming and what world are we in right now? Trying to do a brand sketch with guys getting their nose hairs plucked.
Russel: 22:20
The experiences that shape us.
