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What does success mean for you and your team? Paul Potratz from PPADV.com shares the unique way he runs his business and sets up his company culture where he encourages his employees to make their own decisions and mistakes (including the interview process for that). He tells us how to build a quality brand, get back to basics, and provide a "Nordstrom" customer service instead of a "Macy's" one. Compete based on your brand, not on price!\n\n \tPotratz Agency\n \tPaul Potratz: Free Strategy Tips\n \tPotratz Floral Shop & Greenhouses\n\nDisplay TranscriptRobert Plank: Paul Potratz is the COO of Potratz, a firm in Schenectady, New York, I hope I said his name and the city right, that works with businesses in the US, Canada and Copenhagen on creating top funnel brand strategies, consumer engagement content on websites and social media, and sales training. Sounds like lots of good stuff. How are things today Paul?\n\nPaul Potratz: Good. Good. How about you Robert?\n\nRobert Plank: Super fantastic. I see you're in upstate New York. I was there about a year ago. I fell and broke my ankle in two places there, so I don't think I'll be going back.\n\nPaul Potratz: That's not the norm here. I mean it's a bunch of Italian food and senior citizens.\n\nRobert Plank: May I just had to go to your exact city, not just the general area maybe.\n\nPaul Potratz: That's probably what it was, yeah.\n\nRobert Plank: In your general area of Schenectady, New York and wherever else the world takes you, what would you say that it is that you do and what makes you different and special?\n\nPaul Potratz: We work with business owners, but we work with business owners establishing a brand and getting new clients. That's kind of it in a nutshell. That's our ad agency portion. In the last few months I've started to expand out of that because the agency does well. What I mean by expanding is working with business owners or future business owners of how to get their business going.\n\nRobert Plank: Okay. Do you have any cool stories ... Do you have any cool, interesting, almost like cutting edge things that you're doing to help these businesses recently?\n\nPaul Potratz: Yeah. Matter of fact I do. I'm asked that question a lot, what's cool, what's new, what's cutting edge? We can definitely talk about dynamic retargeting and gmail ads. We have workshops here at our office a lot and what I've done is I'm like let's go back to the basics, because with all the new technology and everything we forget about the basics of how to answer to phone, how to actually proof our emails, how to send emails, how to build an email data base ... To kind of take all that back, because there's so many things swirling through my head, it's all about brand. I feel like that's what people are missing because of all the online ... The digital marketing pay-per-click, is they don't establish a brand, and if you don't establish a brand all you have is sell by price, die by price.\n\nRobert Plank: What should be people be doing to establish that brand?\n\nPaul Potratz: You've got to decide what is it that you ... What is your product, what is your service and how does it improve one's lives. You've got to decide how does it really help someone. The workshop I was in a few weeks ago ... I was in Virginia and I was trying to get the business owners to understand how does your product or service improve somebody's life. I gave them a little test or a task to do to come up, work together in groups, and they just couldn't get out of the sales pitch. That's what they wanted to do, is pitch their product and not talk about how their product or service was going to help somebody save time, save money, improve their life.\n\nRobert Plank: They were lacking what's in it for me then?\n\nPaul Potratz: Exactly. You've got to think selfish. You've got to turn yourself around and not only in that negative, but you've got think why does someone want to do business with you other than price. Most business owners,