Robert Brill, CEO of Brill Media, explains how businesses can implant a complete growth engine that attracts ideal customers, converts more leads, and scales sustainable growth through a proven marketing framework. Under his leadership, Brill Media has been recognized 11 times by the Inc. 5000 and the Financial Times 500 for helping businesses grow through precision advertising, strategic messaging, and performance marketing.
In this conversation, Robert introduces The Growth Engine Framework—Setup, Awareness, Conversion, Closing, and KPIs. He explains why businesses must first define their Super Consumer, build a compelling proprietary system, and deliver messaging that differentiates them in crowded markets. Robert also shares how overcoming the “81% Gap” through nurture marketing, leveraging AI-powered tools, and documenting repeatable systems enable organizations to scale more efficiently while helping founders transition from operator to owner.
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Implant a Complete Growth Engine with Robert Brill
Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest is Robert Brill, the CEO of Brill Media, a leading media buying agency specializing in precision advertising for business growth. Under his leadership, Brill Media has been recognized 11 times by the Inc. 5000 and the Financial Times 500. Robert, welcome back to the show.
Steve, thanks for having me. It’s great to be back. Good to see you again.
Yeah, good to see you after two and a half years. Lots of things happened. So we’re going to dive into all of those things, but let’s start with your personal ‘Why’ and how you’re manifesting it in your business, Brill Media?
I mean, my personal 'Why' is I'm focusing on becoming an owner, not an operator. Spend more time with family, less stress, more happiness. Share on X Because if I think about the last five years, the most cherished times that I think about are the times that I’ve spent on vacation, going to Disneyland, or going to baseball games with my family—all the fun stuff. And it’s not about the fun stuff necessarily. It’s about the fun stuff with family. So, more of that.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Those times with the kids don’t come back. The business is going to be around for a while longer, much, much longer. So prioritizing this is a really good idea. So tell me what happened over the last two and a half years since we talked together. What has changed in your business?
You know, we’ve really focused on evolving our solutions. For many years, we’ve been focused on agencies, and we continue to be focused on agencies. If you search for white-label media buying on Google, we’re one of the top one or two results. That’s because we’ve carved out a really strong position helping agencies do media buying, earn revenue, create stickier client relationships as a result of the work we do, and complement their work.
What we've learned over the years is that no amount of good media buying can overcome the wrong messaging. Share on X Even if you look at search engine optimization or social media, at the end of the day, it’s just an amplification of an existing message. If you’re spending lots of time, energy, and, notably, money delivering the wrong message, worst-case scenario, you’re confusing the marketplace. Best-case scenario, you’re only losing money. But obviously, neither of those is the desired outcome.
So before we help clients buy advertising space, post on social media, do SEO, or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), we really want to dial in the types of messages that are most interesting to them. The next part is this: even if you have the right message and you have the best media buying in the world through Brill Media, none of that matters if you have a leaky bucket. The leaky bucket is when you pay a lot of money to run a Google Search ad, someone clicks, and then they never hear from you again.
At the end of the day, it takes more than one touch—or even a few touches—to get someone to buy from you. So our responsibility has evolved into building this growth engine of understanding the motivation behind why people buy from your company, then delivering the message, then getting people to convert, overcoming what we’re calling the 81% Gap—we can talk about that—and then getting people to see you everywhere so that you become the inevitable choice. The fifth step is understanding the KPIs—the success metrics—for every step of the process. So it’s not just media buying anymore.
Yeah. No, I definitely noticed that it’s not just media buying. It’s not just precision advertising. It sounds like you help them strategize what the right message should be and then convert those leads into customers. So essentially, it’s the whole growth engine that you’re building for companies. Is that right?
That is exactly right. It’s the growth engine.
So what is the framework? Because, remember, this is a framework podcast. So describe to me. You actually mentioned step four and step five. I don’t know what the first three steps are. So can you go through the five steps and share with the listeners what that looks like?
So, step one: Setup. Who are you talking to? What’s unique about your audience? What’s unique about your business, and how do you help them achieve transformation? When we talk about setup, there are a few subsections. There’s the Super Consumer. We talk about the Super Consumer as someone who will evangelize for your company. They will pay you what you’re asking, and, in my opinion, most importantly, you like working with them.
So basically, you want to find the Super Consumer, you want to articulate who the Super Consumer is, and then target your growth engine to the Super Consumer?
The first step of the Growth Engine is simply defining who your Super Consumer actually is. So step one is Setup. Inside Setup, there is your Super Consumer, your Unique Advantage Point, and your Proprietary System. The reason we talk about the Super Consumer is that a lot of companies, especially big corporations, talk about the Total Addressable Market—everyone who can possibly buy from you. It’s too broad.
They also talk about small and mid-sized businesses, and commonly people talk about the Ideal Customer Profile, which is anyone who can extract value from your company. In our opinion, that’s too broad as well because if you dial in to the Super Consumer—if you understand the people you want to work with, who will evangelize for you, and who will pay you what you’re asking—you have a subset of people.
When you define them, there's a clear, describable transformation that you can provide that helps you become the inevitable solution for that group of people. Share on X When you know what those people want, what their desires are, what keeps them up at night, what they’re experiencing on a day-to-day basis, what they’re saying to themselves, what they’re saying to other people, and what they’re searching for—when you understand the psychology behind the person—you can actually carve out a position that is highly valuable.
The key part for us is that this is about commoditization and decommoditization. When you talk about lawyers, doctors, dentists, accounting firms, or any retail location, most of these businesses are commoditized. What commoditization means for us is that if you’re an accountant or CPA, your website says something that every other CPA in the area says. If you’re a dentist doing Invisalign, you’re saying something that every other dentist in the area says. That means you can swap out the logo and swap out the photos of the people, and it’s exactly the same.
The consumer can’t tell the difference between one dentist and another, or one accountant and another, because they’re all saying the same things. So the way you decommoditize is by talking about your Super Consumer—who you actually want to serve—and then carving out a unique position for those people. Share on X An example would be an accounting firm we spoke with that really focuses on the trucking industry because they happen to have a large degree of experience in that space. So don’t say you’re a generic accountant who does bookkeeping, taxes, and everything else. Say, “We’re the number one accounting firm for truckers in America.”
Love it.
That’s unique.
Yeah. Love it. Okay, so step one is Setup. Who you’re serving, who your Super Consumer is, what your Unique Advantage is, your Proprietary System, and decommoditization. What’s step two?
Step two is Awareness—driving awareness with your message. Our idea is that now you know exactly who you’re talking to and how they can achieve transformation with you. When you have the ability to really define how they’ll engage with you and what they’ll get from you that’s different from anyone else in the area or the country, that’s when you deliver the message. That’s when you run ads, post on social media, and say things that are going to attract people.
There’s a whole subset of activity behind that related to levels of awareness. The number one mistake businesses make on social media is posting content that’s irrelevant to the audience. That irrelevance comes from how aware the audience is. When people are unaware they have a problem, it doesn’t mean they don’t have a problem. It just means they don’t realize they have one. Your responsibility, when speaking to people who are unaware, is simply to help them understand that they have a problem.
You’re not trying to get them to start now, book a call, or get your free diagnostic. You want to trigger something in their head so they say, “Oh, I’m dealing with this type of experience. I’m a trucking company, and I really don’t have good accounting. I didn’t realize I had a problem.” The success of your marketing is simply when that person says, “Oh, I actually have a problem now.” You’re not going to see that in HubSpot.
You’re not going to see that in any meaningful metric. But when you consistently post content on social media that highlights the problem you solve, three, four, or six months from now, you’ll start to see that wave of marketing activity result in activity inside your HubSpot or CRM. So step two is Awareness—simply delivering the message.
Okay.
Step three is Conversion. Conversion is simply, “Hey, click on this ad or see my post and download the guide, take the diagnostic, take the interactive quiz, watch a video,” whatever it is, in exchange for an email address, name, phone number—that type of thing. Now, here’s a key insight. People are not ready to buy after they submit their contact information. That’s another meaningful point that businesses overlook.
They think, “Whoa, a lead just came into HubSpot. Well, clearly they’re ready to spend $50,000 with me.” But think about the experience. Maybe I spend two and a half seconds on an ad. I spend 20 seconds on a landing page. No one’s going to spend any meaningful amount of money after 22 and a half seconds of engagement.
Yeah.
All they’re saying is, “Hey, for a moment in time, what you said to me was relevant.” And that’s it. This is where a lot of companies stop. They say, “Well, I’m getting bad leads. They’re not converting into business.” Or they say, “I got a click, and they visited my website.” It’s not turning into business because you’re not warming people up. And then the solution to that is you’ve got to overcome this 81% Gap, right?
So after someone converts—and for e-commerce it’s slightly different. People maybe visit your site, or they add something to the cart and they don’t purchase yet. But going back to B2B and professional services, you’ve got to overcome this 81% Gap. There’s a study by 6sense, the account-based marketing firm, that says 81% of buyers will only talk to a vendor after they’ve decided to work with the vendor. The implication of that is staggering. The number is going to increase by 2030 to, like, 95% or 98%.
What that means is companies are not going to get a chance to sell people anything. There’s no sales conversation. There’s no credibility. There’s no case studies. There’s no testimonials. There’s no, “Hey, here’s why you should work with us.” Which means all the information that would’ve been supplied by the salesperson now needs to be supplied by marketing. All the case studies, the testimonials, the credibility markers, you’re a member of the Chamber of Commerce—all of that needs to be delivered in marketing. It’s no longer going to be delivered in a sales conversation.
Interesting. Yeah.
So step four is Close.
After conversion, don’t we have a nurture step?
Well, we’re calling Close the nurture. Close is effectively the nurture step.
Okay. Got it.
So it’s the activity to achieve the close, which is the nurture. What we’re saying is: retargeting ads. Again, here’s another common mistake businesses make. Many businesses will pummel people with the same ads that got them into the funnel. That’s worthless because you’ve already delivered that message.
The user’s beyond that. What the user needs to see are the case studies, the testimonials, the credibility markers—all the reasons why your company should be the company they choose. The user needs to see the email marketing—up to 45 emails over the course of 100 days, somewhere around there.
Forty-five emails?
Yeah. Twenty-five to 45, but we recommend 45. The reason is, first of all, the user’s not going to read all of them. Secondly, the user’s only going to pay attention to the things they’re actually interested in. So: retargeting ads, email marketing, and professional services. The last component is LinkedIn Social Preheating. LinkedIn Social Preheating is the simplest thing that anyone listening to this can take action on this today.
Go to Sales Navigator. Create a list of all the people who are in your CRM. Find them on LinkedIn. When they post something, like their post. That’s it. Spend 20 minutes a day in the morning liking posts from people who’ve expressed interest in your business. Or, alternatively, do the same thing for people you want to work with who don’t know you yet. The reason that’s valuable is because, number one, they get notifications and sometimes emails saying, “Steve Preda liked your post.” Steve Preda. Steve Preda. Steve Preda. Over the course of two weeks: “I’ve got to pay attention to Steve Preda. That name sounds familiar.”
Yeah.
Oh, and here’s the ad from Steve Preda, and here’s the email about the transformation he provides. So by the time you or your people call them: “Steve Preda… I’ve been meaning to talk to you.” Or they call you and say, “Steve, I see you everywhere.” The LinkedIn activity, combined with the email marketing and the retargeting ads, makes you the inevitable choice. To a small group of people.
Because you’re not trying to get millions of customers unless you’re in retail or e-commerce. You’re trying to get 20 customers who are going to pay you $10,000 to $50,000. To those 20 people—and the hundred people who maybe don’t convert—you’re everywhere. You’re the inevitable choice. The fifth step in this process is setting KPIs at the beginning. How many sales-qualified calls do you need? How much revenue per month do you need? There are clients who are members of ProVisors.
I’m a member of ProVisors. How does your marketing impact your ProVisors relationships? The core idea is that we see a lot of companies going into the marketplace with point solutions. “Hey, I’m going to try Facebook ads.” “Ah, it didn’t work.” “I’m going to try Google Ads.” “Ah.” “I’m posting on LinkedIn.” “Ah.” They try all these different things and wonder, “They should work. Why don’t they work for my business?” The answer is because you don’t have a unifying strategy. They all serve different roles in the marketing process.
When you know the difference between an unaware consumer and what they need to hear versus a solution-aware consumer who’s on Google, you know you need different metrics and KPIs. We want to prevent companies from going from one point solution to another for years, spending lots of money and getting very frustrated. Instead, have one unifying strategy and then deploy activities that are actually going to benefit the growth… Share on X
Love it. So the five-step framework is: Setup—Super Consumer, Unique Advantage, Proprietary System. Number two, Awareness—ads and social. Then Conversion, which is basically email capture, a diagnostic, a video, a white paper, whatever. Then Close, which is the nurture: retargeting, email sequence, LinkedIn Social Preheating. Interesting. And then KPIs. How do you measure? What are your targets? And how do you get there? That’s
Yeah. That’s the Growth Engine.
So one thing that you mentioned: Proprietary System. What do you mean by that?
The only truly unique things that exist in the world are technological innovations. The iPhone—when Apple created the iPhone—that was unique. When Ozempic came out, that was unique. I’m not talking about that. What I’m talking about is this. I’ll give you an example. If you’re a lawyer, a dentist, or an accountant— If you’re a lawyer, you cannot deviate. You’re literally dealing with the law.
What you have to do as a lawyer has been dictated in legal documents for a long time, depending on the field of law that you study. You cannot deviate from that. You have a process that you have to follow. But what is unique is the way you think about it, the processes inside your organization that ensure you’re successful, and the way you steward clients. Look at marketing. We’re a highly commoditized industry. There are a million people on Upwork who do some sort of marketing work.
There are 40,000 or 50,000 agencies in the United States that all do some type of marketing work. If I go to the marketplace and say, “Hey, I do Facebook ads,” guess what? There are 10,000 people who also do Facebook ads. That’s not unique. What is unique is the systems and processes we’ve developed around how we do Facebook ads and how we think about marketing. The first step we take with our clients is developing a Proprietary System—the thing that's unique about the way they approach the world. Share on X
I was just doing some thinking about roofing. I have some notes here. The Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System. What is that? I don’t know. But you know what? A roofing company needs to have something called the Seven-Point Storm Shield Inspection or the Precision Roof Blueprint. The idea is that you have something no one else has, such as this Precision Roof Blueprint, that you can point to and say, “Look, you can get roofing from anyone, but only we have the Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System.”
Yeah. Yeah, got it. So it’s not a marketing system. It’s more about productizing and branding your services.
Exactly. You need a three-, five-, or seven-step system that you can point to. When we have sales conversations, we have a visual for the Growth Engine. The reason that’s important is because you need to be able to hook into the buyer’s mind. One of the ways you hook into the buyer’s mind is by the buyer saying, “Look, they have this thing called the Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System. I don’t know—that sounds real.
Here are the seven things you get when you get the Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System.” It’s a way for people to not just get excited about your business, because that lasts a very short period of time. They need to go to their husband or wife, or they need to remember a very pithy, short summary of what the conversation was about. “Oh yeah, they have the Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System. Here’s what it is. Here’s a visual of it.”
Okay. That makes sense. So, switching gears here a little bit. Things are changing very fast in this business, and you want to make sure you put your family first. What is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in this business going forward?
I mean, the most fascinating and exciting thing I’m doing right now is something I’ve always wanted to do but never had the skills for—and now I suddenly do—which is building actual software that’s valuable for us and our clients. For example, we have a framework for LinkedIn. In very simple terms, you like the posts of the people you want to sell to. From the perspective of the LinkedIn algorithm, that’s very low value.
It’s good from a sales perspective, but from the algorithm’s perspective, it’s not that interesting. You post content on LinkedIn that has to have a unique perspective—an opinion. A lot of people can write with AI. You don’t write with AI. You say something that’s unique to your perspective. Maybe AI helps you write it more eloquently in little bits and pieces. But even that by itself, it’s hard to get traction. The way you get traction on LinkedIn right now is through comments. I’ll get 80 to 100 views on a post.
I’ll get 400 to 800 views on a comment. The comment is the engine behind more visibility on LinkedIn. This goes back to the question you asked. The key point on LinkedIn is you’re not just saying, “Hey, great job.” “I like that.” “I totally agree with you.” Or posting the raised-hands emoji and saying, “This is amazing.” That’s not the kind of comment I’m talking about because that’s low value. It’s also not AI-written content because that’s low value. It’ll deprioritize your content.
When you comment on LinkedIn, you have three sections: Compliment. Expand. Ask. Compliment: “You’re right. Marketing is highly commoditized. I fully agree with you there.” Expand: “When we work with clients, especially highly commoditized businesses like doctors, lawyers, and accountants, the first thing we do is help them decommoditize their business.” That’s the second section. That’s Expand. The third section is Ask. “What’s the first step you choose when you come across a highly commoditized business?” Compliment. Expand. Ask. Now guess what? We built an app that I’m using. All you need is five to eight posts a day. It’s AI-powered. I put in a link for Opus 4.8. It gives me a perspective on what I could say. I get three options. I copy one, write my own commentary around it so it’s not fully AI-written—because I want it customized to me—and then I post it. After that, I go back to the app and put the content I wrote back into the app.
A few things are happening. Number one, any of our clients can now use this app to write highly engaging commentary on LinkedIn. It starts to learn your voice and how you write so that the AI becomes better at writing in your style. I don’t know what it’s called—a micro app, a business app. This isn’t something I’m going to take to the marketplace and say, “Here, spend $10 a month to buy this service.” It’s simply an added value for our clients.
Love it.
Those types of apps are super powerful. I get on sales conversations. I understand the business problems that businesses have. Share on X I build apps. Like right now, I’m in the process of building a media planning app that actually becomes a replacement for how we develop proposals. One component of that app is going to have a diagnostic section, which means you give me some information, and it’ll spit out information about what you should do for your marketing that, number one, follows our framework, the Growth Engine, and, number two, is based on the historical knowledge we have across all of our clients—but generalized by industry, not specific client names.
It takes the best of what we do and makes it so easy that someone who doesn’t have a great deal of knowledge in digital advertising can get a highly pertinent proposal and diagnostic ready for them with the click of a button after talking to someone for 15 minutes.
Very impressive. So you’re building these apps, and essentially you’re empowering your business with these apps so some of the things you’ve done in the past can be automated. So, Robert, if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be?
I mean, look, just to be completely honest, I understand the difference between an owner and an operator. The short answer to that question is I want to be an owner, not an operator. I’m looking at an operator as someone who’s in the day-to-day. They’re the practitioner. I mean, I’m 23 years into the advertising business. I’m 13 years into my business. I love this business. You’re not going to see me become a real estate agent, and I’m not going to be hawking…
I think I probably said this last time. I’m not going to be hawking crypto or whatever the case is. This is my life, and this is my passion. For so many years of my life, I’ve dedicated my interests, my hobbies, and my professional time to becoming a better practitioner. My goal now is to become an owner, which means the business operates without me. I get to focus on the projects that I want to focus on, which I’m already doing to a degree.
I have a phenomenal Director of Accounts. Her name is Linda Flores. She is k*ller. She scares me sometimes. We’re on calls, and I’m like, “Holy cow, if I was not the owner of the business, I’d be scared. In fact, you’re scaring me, Linda.” You’re getting things going. People should be scared of you. That’s what a good Director of Accounts—an operations person—does. She’s phenomenal. But at the end of the day, if I choose to be on an island for six months out of the year, the business operates fine. We’re not there yet. That’s what I’m focusing on.
So what’s missing? You said you’re already spending some of your time developing these apps—the stuff you love. What would you have to let go of in the next 12 months to get there?
I recently read the book The E-Myth about a year, year and a half ago. One of the most insightful perspectives I got from The E-Myth is this—and people are going to hate this. People who are not entrepreneurs will look at me like I’m the devil. Okay? But this is not my idea. This is from The E-Myth. The idea is that processes, systems, and standard operating procedures are effectively the safety net for the success of a company.
Which means instead of hiring incredibly expensive people inside your business, you can hire, for many roles, people with the minimum level of qualification. The standard operating procedure becomes the safety net that helps them succeed. I was like, “Holy cow, that’s fascinating.” Because as a business owner, I’m looking at myself. I’m hiring highly qualified, very expensive people to do the work. The sign of a good business, in my opinion—or at least from what I understand—is a business that has such phenomenal standard operating procedures that it can hire people with the minimum level of qualification, and they can still be effective.
Frankly, I think we have good standard operating procedures, but we need better ones. And frankly, the AI tools that I'm building help us get there. Share on X The media planning tool that I’m building means I could hire someone with two, three, or five years of experience in marketing and advertising. Through the AI system, they get the benefit of all of our clients’ knowledge and insights that we’ve talked about over the years. They get the benefit of what I know about marketing.
They get the benefit of all the data that’s flowed through the pipelines of our business. All of that information becomes the baseline from which someone with two, three, or four years of experience in marketing develops a phenomenal strategy. Because they’re not relying on two, three, four, or five years of experience. They’re relying on my 23 years of experience delivered through an AI pipeline.
So essentially, what you’ve accumulated over the years—institutional knowledge—maybe it’s in your head, but you can download it. You’ve written things. You’ve produced a bunch of videos. You can put that into an AI database or knowledge base, and that can power some of the systems you’re developing. Other people can come in, run it, and follow your process.
Yeah. And it’s not just ours. I mean, look, it’s any system that I believe is valuable that should be piped into that AI knowledge base. But the value there is me as the curator. That’s when you get to the point where the business is still an authentic reflection or extension of the owner. One of the most important things, especially for professional services businesses, is that the business will be successful if it’s an authentic representation—or extension—of the owner, and you like the people you’re working with.
Love that.
Which goes back to the Super Consumer. The most important part of our whole process is: Who are the people you love working with? Just as an aside, what’s funny is there are two paths. There’s the path of people you love working with who don’t pay you as much, but it really fills your soul. You like them. You’re helping them. They’re very grateful for it.
Then there are the people you like working with less, and they pay you a ton of money. You need both. I think every professional services client we have who starts paying attention to this discovers that same dichotomy of clients.
Well, if you can have them be the same people, that’s the ultimate, isn’t it?
That’s the ultimate.
Yeah. By the way, I really love this E-Myth reference. I had Michael Gerber on this podcast about 10 months ago, and he might actually like to hear how you’re refining his system in The E-Myth. So it’s pretty cool. Robert, if people are hearing this and they want this Growth Engine to be developed in their business, and they want access to the other software components you’re developing that could amplify their business—maybe the LinkedIn warm-up system and things like that—where should they go, and how can they learn more and connect with you?
Yeah. So the site that’s most relevant right now is: strategy.brillmedia.co. Again, that’s strategy.brillmedia.co. That breaks down what we do for businesses and what we do for agencies. You have pricing on there. To get a blueprint for your business—the diagnostic and strategy—we spend an hour on the phone interviewing the business owner. What are the economics? What’s been working? Why is now the time?
Tell me about your best clients and your worst clients. Just tell me stories about your business. It’s $497, and you get a complete blueprint—a complete marketing strategy synthesized through our systems and processes—so you can get off the marketing treadmill. You’re not spending months, years, and lots of money grasping at straws: Facebook. Google. LinkedIn. “Why doesn’t any of it work?” We’ll solve
All right. Definitely check out strategy.brillmedia.co. See for yourself what you can get there and how you can get started with Robert and his team. Definitely connect with Robert on LinkedIn. And if you enjoyed this episode, stay tuned because every week we bring you one or two exciting entrepreneurs who share their frameworks with you. Thanks for coming, Robert, and sharing your experience. And thanks for listening.
