The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™

AI-First Marketing For A Legacy Industry With Renaud Delaquis

• MatthewBertram.com

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We explore how an AI-first approach transforms a legacy driving school’s marketing, operations, and hiring while keeping focus on real-world outcomes. The big shift: recruiting becomes the growth engine, and local presence beats AI search for demand.

• AI scheduling reduces travel time and increases daily lessons
• Local marketing at scale through AI-powered research and print assets
• Measuring lift via brand queries, CTR, utilization, and 10th-grade share
• Nine test markets to validate and replicate winning tactics
• Recruiting treated as marketing, led by clear personas
• Retired educators deliver better training and higher lesson counts
• Partnerships with online course leaders instead of head-to-head SEO
• Focus on physical-service moat and first-principles metrics
• Practical AI use: small daily wins over big-bang changes

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: coastlineacademy.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/renaud-delaquis

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With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.

Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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SPEAKER_02:

Howdy, so I wanted to just give you a quick preview to this interview that I'm about to do. It's with an AI first company. Um, and we don't talk as much about digital marketing, but we talk about how AI impacts all the different parts of a business. Uh, we went into uh marketing, but local marketing, um, how to measure it. Uh, we talked about HR, how that's impacted by it, and what you can do with these models from a data analysis standpoint. Um, one of the things, even that we've done recently, is the unknown secrets of internet marketing, no one's really listening to our back catalog, right? Because things are changing with SEO, even though there's some really good foundational information there. So we took AI and we turned the last 12 years into a book. And you can actually get this on Amazon. Um, we're we're gonna have all kinds of like giveaways and stuff like that. But it's a really cool use where we took um 710, I think, podcasts and we put it together uh in a book called The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing that you can get, we can pass out, and then it also links you to the new podcasts. And that's just one of the use cases. And I think AI first companies are gonna win in this new economy a lot of the certifications that I'm getting and where my learning is going is to learning uh LLMs, uh, how machine learning works, how it can be applied. And then the possibility gets opened up. And so this is one of first, one of the first, hopefully, of many uh interviews that I do with AI First Companies. I'm trying to get people on both sides of the desk, if you will, from agency owners to uh online businesses to physical businesses, legacy businesses, how marketing is impacting them, and how business leaders are dealing with uh the rise of AI. So hopefully you enjoyed the podcast. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00:

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02:

Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. Today I have a special episode for you. Uh, as we continue to explore LLM visibility and we're moving into everything AI, uh, I have been trying to bring on other agencies and also other companies, and we're trying to go beyond what's uh happening in search. Um, there's a lot of fun stuff to talk about LLM visibility, but it's on the tail end of the curve. And what I'm seeing is businesses that are starting to build that AI layer and try to transform into an AI first company are revolutionizing how they do business and how they acquire customers. And so I wanted to bring on uh Renault from Canada, but works with a US-based company called uh Coastline Academy, which is a driving school, which is kind of an old school business. So I'm I'm seeing a lot of venture capital buddies of mine that are like, hey, we're gonna go into legacy businesses and we're gonna transform them with AI. And I feel like you're at the cutting wave of that. You have a uh a strong e-commerce background, you know a lot about digital marketing, a lot about SEO. And we're seeing marketing and sales start to uh tap into all these other things in the operations of the business to help it run more efficiently. So um I'm excited to have you on and talk a little bit more about this. Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, why don't we just start with like what's most topical for you as far as how you're seeing the world as a digital market or as an SEO? But a lot of things that are changing for you aren't necessarily SEO um or paid ads or what have you. It's really how AI is affecting the operations and the workflow in the business, from what I understand.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, it's a super interesting time because obviously, as with any industry, AI is changing everything, at least if you allow it to. Uh, and very often it'll change things that you don't expect. Uh, so to give a little bit of background about the company, so we're the largest driving school in the in the US. We started right before COVID and uh we managed to grow quickly. Now we're in 500 locations, we're in nine states. Um, and the way that we approached this was through technology. And so we had our own AI system before ChatGPT was launched. Like we we had a very smart CTO who just put together this uh this system that would pair a driver or an instructor with a student and optimize when someone where someone will be in the future and optimize their scheduling so that we could fit more lessons in a day while minimizing the travel time between between lessons. So that's kind of where the company is coming from. So really we approached the driving education, like the this old school company, like this old school industry with a kind of a new lens. And so you would think that when AI, like all those AI tools are coming, like just came up, that we would be using them and just leveraging the crap out of them. And and we tried, and then we kind of realized that okay, we were kind of it doesn't really work the way we thought it would. So if I start with um, you know, our traffic, organic traffic, uh, or at least organic and paid search, these are like about 50-50, how about half half of our revenue uh generating channels. And I thought that AI search would be this kind of growing channel that I would bank on and that would make a ton of revenue. And turns out that's not the case. Uh, I think the problem with driving it, driving schools is that we're kind of we're this legacy type business uh that is very slow to adapt just as an industry, but people's perception of it is also slow to adapt. Um so I think we'll be like on the second or third wave of of those search terms uh or those AI search terms that we'll finally will like we're still investing in it, but I don't think this is what I think it'll be a few years before we reap the benefits.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, well, I mean, also if you think about who is using AI, um, it's the younger generation, like they're already using it all throughout school, like, but are their parents are the ones selecting their driving school, right?

SPEAKER_04:

So so that's so that's the problem. So there's the this business is it's a weird business to market to, and that's primarily what got me excited about joining a driving school. Because I mean, when someone approaches you and says, Hey, you want to work for a driving school, you're like, Yeah, no, I'm good. Uh, but then they start thinking, you start thinking about it, and like, wait a second, I'll be marketing to teenagers, but they're not the ones making the purchase, their parents will be making the purchase. And no one thinks about a driving school except for that small period of time when you need it, and then you never think about it ever again until you have other kids, or and chances are you're gonna go to the same driving school as your parents or that as your siblings, because nothing changes in this field.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I can see that.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, so like no one is is going on Chad GPT searching for the best driving school in their town, like that's just not what's happening.

SPEAKER_02:

Um I keep hearing, I keep hearing like my kids are not gonna drive, right? Like uh Teslas and right, like so there, there's there's an expiration date on this, but you're utilizing it like Uber matching, essentially, um to be able to scale. And and I've seen that business happen with photograph uh photographers as well. Like um, I think it's a newer model, like it's certainly an AI first model. And uh I I do the marketing for the Boy Scouts of America now. Uh they've changed their name and there's a there's a lot of PR uh associated with what's what's going on there. Uh Eagle Scout, I'm proud of it. Um uh had a great experience. And uh but it's the same thing. You're you're marketing to like the moms, potentially, or the decision maker of the household uh for the kids, but then the kids gotta want to do it, right? And so um you you have a dichotomy in the marketing you're you're going after, and then there's like certain decision points uh throughout the year that people get enrolled. So I can't say I totally understand what you're going through, but I got a glimpse of kind of what what you're what you're dealing with. Um and and certainly uh all the AI has to make all the connections and the coordination and build the schedules. So I would love to hear more about how you're utilizing it internally, and and we can go as deep as you want. I I think I can probably hang.

SPEAKER_04:

So yeah, okay. So let me so that now that I just uh kind of poo-pooed all over the the whole AI thing from the industry.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, invisibility, like uh let's I'll take a flyer and I'll come back in a year and like we'll talk about it, right?

SPEAKER_04:

Let me talk about where it actually had a massive impact for us and where we see this going for us, because I think there's a lot that we have learned that other companies might want to learn from. Uh, because when when your first idea doesn't work, you go to the second, the third idea, and then you start expanding. And what where we ended up with was a very exciting place. We started looking at other channels, other organic channels that are not Google or not search, that are still that could benefit from from AI. Because what AI does, at least for us, is it it can it allows us to scale whatever tactic we do to it scales it almost infinitely. I say almost because you still want to look at it, you still want to monitor what's going on. Human in the loop, yeah, exactly. But so all those other channels that we started looking at, it's like, well, let's how can this affect local marketing, right? We still have a physical presence. So we're not we're an online first business, as in everything happens online, but we offer a service that is very real, right? It's a behind-the-wheel driving lesson. So a car needs to show up at your door, an instructor needs to be there. Uh, we need to have a physical presence, and also we're competing against a thousand driving schools. Okay. Yeah. Like it's there's no one national driving school. We will become that one national driving school, but now we're fighting against an ex like a thousand little wars against a bunch of different smaller driving schools that that's that have been in business for the most part since the 90s.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, no, you got to dislodge them from the legacy, right? The pass down, like we talked about. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. Um, so what has worked for us is on the local marketing side because we have anything we do in one market, we want to replicate in all the others. And the problem with that is it's creating real material, like marketing assets. We can imagine like flyers, posters, banners, things like that, or also reaching out for potential partnerships. Like we want to partner with the local high schools, we want to partner with the Boy Scouts or the Boys and Girls Club, like anyone who caters to an audience of teenagers, like if they're 15, we need to be there because we're we need to be there at the moment where they are eligible to start to learn how to drive.

SPEAKER_02:

And are you selling? Um, I like I haven't dug into this enough, but like convenience is it basically you don't have to go to the physical location, the car comes to your door. So parents that are busy or whatever, you have a vetted person that just comes to your door, picks up your kid, drives them, drops them back off, or something like that.

SPEAKER_04:

I mean, that yeah, yeah, convenience is a big part of it. Uh, I think convenience goes even beyond that because a lot of those places still you have to pay them by check. Like, I kid you. Oh my gosh, it's I when I say it's like a traditional legacy business type. I mean it. Um, you know, everything we send a report by email, we have dash cams both sides, we have GPS tracking for the parents, like all the things that you need. Yeah, just like it. So we're we're competing on convenience and quality. Um, because then the reason why we started this in the first place, uh because we started off as a retrofitting company for uh for cars. So we were implementing car safety equipment in older cars. We essentially wanted to create the uh the autopilot, but for cars that did not have autopilot uh to eradicate car crashes, and we realized, oh yeah, self-driving is uh right around the corner, but it's been around the corner for 10 years. Uh, in the meantime, what will happen is we will drive less and less, but we'll be only asked to drive in the worst possible scenarios, like when the AI, when the the camera can't like when there's low visibility when it's raining, like when it's raining, but that then people are getting trained like are driving less and less, like from a mileage standpoint.

SPEAKER_02:

So then it hands them over to them and they're not prepared to drive.

SPEAKER_04:

So that's my point. So you have so see see the problem here, right? And insurance companies are there's no way Tesla is gonna pay out for all the accidents, you're still liable for it for insurance. So I think we're gonna it'll get worse before it gets better. Uh so like this this hump, I don't know what the solution is, but all I know is until we figure it out, the driver is gonna be at the center of this, and we need to create better drivers, and so that's where we that's where we came to be. But anyways, all this to say, so then we need to start creating all this marketing material at scale. Yeah, and I'm like, oh, cool, that's a perfect use case for AI, because then we can we can suddenly do this, right? We can do the research for all the outreach for part for market uh partnerships. I can find out the phone number, I can scrape. I have amazing tools now to find out who all the football coaches are uh everywhere in America and just contact them directly and be like, hey, I want to give you 500 bucks for a banner on your field. Um, so this whole partnership system was enabled by AI.

SPEAKER_02:

And then you could print print whatever you need to print at scale, and then you just drop ship it or whatever. And I mean, you can you can really go off online to offline pretty quickly with AI, and that's that's a use case that I don't hear people talking about a lot. Like, I'm I mean, my LinkedIn is noisy right now with everything with LM visibility and and you know, it's a very small percentage of the market. And you know, I I I brought someone on previously that did billboards, digital billboards, and um, you know, getting physical eyeballs and like you know, physically being there and involved near that um absolutely has impact and they're seeing it um week over week, and there's a lot of kids there. Like, I think that that's brilliant.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, and I think it's there's also something really cool about seeing the impact of AI in the real world. You know, very too often, especially in digital marketing, like I like to tell people that none of what I do is real. Um, you know, I spent I mean, I spend my life in this like little, I spend my life in this room. I'm on my computer, I work for a company in another country. Uh, I'm scaling a national brand that I'll never like I'll never experience it. Um, I go there once a year, you know, and then I go back home and I spend time with my kid and my dog. And I'm like, cool, none of what I did is real in my life. Like, it's not something empirically, it's not real. Um, but then you start seeing flyers and you see you see photos of banners, and then you start to see like bands, school bands with your their logo on their van. And you're like, oh, cool, this is like this is happening, right? And right now we're sponsoring a um a university car. Uh, they're building an electric car for a competition, a national competition, and we have our own car. So, like all these as we started expanding all these local marketing tactics, it's starting to have a very real effect on in communities, but also like in communities, right? I'm not now suddenly I'm investing all those dollars and I'm not giving them to Google, I'm giving them to kids to like play sport and play music.

SPEAKER_02:

So I'm like thinking about like AI recognition, like facial recognition, right? Like, and there's a bunch of you know, real ID and all this stuff that's kind of double-edged sword coming. Um, you know, if you have a logo that's out there, you can, I'm sure I I would love to hear more about the tools and kind of some of the workflows and and what you're doing, but I'm like, to get uh share a voice, right? There, the tools out there right now just are horrible. In my in my opinion, most of the tools are bloated and not super useful and horrible. They certainly have a place, but there's gonna be a new generation of tools that come out. I'm thinking, like, okay, if you're doing heavy local marketing and you're trying to get share a voice, like, how do you measure share a voice? Well, you need a tool to scrape social media, to find your logos, to find your brand name, and uh to aggregate it all together to and then and then you're running it through some kind of weighted metric or whatever you come with with to say, what is our share of voice in this community? Like, how are you measuring that stuff? I mean, I guess analytics is I I mean, you can take data and you can use AI to get all kinds of insights, but try to measure what you're actively doing in the community. Um, I'm interested to hear more about that.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, so we ultimately measure this in terms of utilization rate, right? So we we put this, we attach this to a revenue target.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, and so it's based on based on how many kids, like you're taking census data or something like that, and you're trying to figure out so we we can calculate market share.

SPEAKER_04:

We do this by calculating how many uh 10th grader there are in an area. And it's not a perfect measure because obviously it's not like adults will also take driving lessons, but for us, like what market share of 10th grade is what you want. Yeah, exactly. And so, and that's available data. We can figure this out, and so that's something that we're tracking year over year. Uh, how many students we have in an area, compare that to how many 10th graders there are in that area, and that'll give us an idea of the market share that we have.

SPEAKER_02:

And you can label you can also label out um the adults based on age, based on all the data that's being taken, right? Like so you can you can start to cut your own data up and see what what's happening.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, I mean, the the most important data point that we're that I'm pushing towards, like everything I'm doing here uh is to increase utilization rate in an area, right? We have X amount of instructors serving, let's say Sacramento uh in California, and I need their schedules for the next X amount of weeks to be 80% full, right? And if I reach that point, good, I'll move on. If there's a place where we're at 30%, okay, I need to really go hard there. All those local marketing tactics, they're not like it's it's it's pretty slow, right? It's not this will be more on a quarter basis. So this is how we plan growth in in areas. So because it's a slow moving tactic, it allows us to predict how many people we need to hire in any area. So the tools, so to answer your question, how we measure things is still very low tech. It really is just like, okay, well, how many people did we convert in that area? And do we need to invest more of it? We do have tools to track our brand across every single, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

What are what are I'm just curious, what are you using for some of that that kind of stuff? Share a voice.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, so we had some, I think it was called Athena. Um or is it Athena? It's like some Greek god. It's not if it's not Athena, it's some other Greek god. Let me just double check. Uh my daughter is named Artemis, so like I have uh you know, you know what?

SPEAKER_02:

This podcast doesn't have enough typing sounds in it, actually. Like I it was that that was a solid type sound that everybody could hear.

SPEAKER_04:

I'm sorry, that's my cherry MX blue.

SPEAKER_02:

No, no, no, it's it's actually something that I'm I'm thinking about now. Is like, you know, we talk about everything that happens on a a laptop, right? Like, and so typing sounds need to be part of like the the general cadence of what's going on, and those were those were solid sounds right there.

SPEAKER_04:

That's the loudest keyboard I could possibly buy. Um, again, to make things real. Okay, I needed something real in my life here. I can't just have like the my the my worst fear is to have a touch screen keyboard. Like at that point, I'm just why even work, right?

SPEAKER_02:

It's like well, it's gonna be a brain chip that's just gonna like know what you're thinking, just gonna do it right.

SPEAKER_04:

So um, I think it's called Apollo.

SPEAKER_02:

Apollo, okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. You're you're using Apollo to well, Apollo. I I use Apollo. Maybe I'm using a different Apollo if you're doing like cold outreach, like no, so yeah, so there's an out there's two apology.

SPEAKER_04:

There's an Apollo for cold outreach, which I have used for specifically for um for partnerships. That's the one I've been using. Um there's another Apollo for uh AI, I think.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, this is gonna be an issue with Entity SEO. I I was just talking to another company that uh if we land them, which I feel very good about, everybody will know. Uh very big crypto company. Um, but there's entity issues with people with the same names and other businesses out there. Um, that's becoming certainly an issue. EWR, uh, we got mixed up with the airport in New York. I feel like I need to get an office in New York because you know everybody's like, Are you out in New York? Because you're EWR. Um yeah, what is it? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Athena HQ.ai.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm gonna have to check this out.

SPEAKER_04:

It's like right. Athena HQ.ai. There is another Apollo that I have used that is not the lead searching tool, but I the one that I've been using now for share of voice is Athena HQ.ai. Um the reason why I don't know it by heart is because I don't really rely on it. Like it's something that I'm like, okay, it'll get better with time. Um, but it's like I said, it's not really a metric that I care a whole lot about. Like we have I have other tools that allow me to see how things work, right? We have our PR firm that just sends me a report. I'm like, okay, that's good enough for me, or I'll just look if there's a lift analysis and editing the given market, I can do that too.

SPEAKER_02:

Um how are you how are you measuring that? Like, tell me, tell me how what are the things that are important to you that you've kind of gone in-house now, uh, when you're measuring uh share a voice or lift, uh, like PR stuff. Like, what are the things that you're looking at that have real value?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, so brand queries are the main ones uh on search terms. We still go back to Google because Google is as much as I don't want it to be, it's still such an integral, like it's a huge part of our business. Um, also because other driving skills were not really investing in Google. So, like, that's was the one place we could definitely steal market share was on SEO. Uh, we could we could dominate them very quickly just by being like the Starbucks that shows up next to a coffee shop and kind of like that sort of a business model.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I mean, your business model, like this is like marketing for an AI first company. That's that's really what I am probably gonna call this podcast. Okay, and um this Harvard course that I went through, uh, the transformation that you need to go through and and really the uh intersection between uh on the charts between like a traditional business with a moat and uh AI company and and just the they just smash right through it. Like AI companies are just steamrolling other companies. So I think some of the claims that you made, Renault, about um we're gonna be the biggest company and you're competing against like you know businesses that were started in whatever 1970s or uh in that range or or run that way. I I find that in the recruiting business too. Uh everything's done this this very old school way. And uh uh I haven't seen yet an AI first company. I need to go start to seek out AI first companies and interview them. I would love that to know what they're doing differently and how they're they're they're building the workflows internally because it really clicked for me as soon as we started talking about why you're gonna win, right? And and I'm I'm very much interested in how that translates to marketing. Uh more like tell me more about the workflows or where where were we where were we going with the conversation that you still wanted to touch on? I want to make sure I didn't cut you off.

SPEAKER_04:

No, no, no, that's right. I'll just talk about the lift analysis real quick, but then we talk about we talk about recruiting, and that is not to force it like that is the one thing that's the biggest thing that happened to us. And let's talk about this.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, AI, that's the next area that AI is gonna move into. Um okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

So okay, just to find just to close the loop on lift analysis because it's a pretty boring answer, but still I want people to know. Like it's just we we the main two things I'm looking at is are people searching for the name more than before? Um, and also is our click-through rate increasing in that area because people recognize a name, and so we can very easily see this in any given area. Okay, is that work?

SPEAKER_02:

So, well, okay, so let me let me go a little deeper for that. Like that that's like I need to like SEO AI AEO, whatever you want to call it these days, um, G E O. Um 50% of the traffic because of AIO reviews, let's say, right? AI overviews, etc., like enriched uh snippets and stuff like that. Um, what is it, 58.5% on average across all pubs, traffic tanked, all that informational traffic. Um, I I don't know how much uh, you know, uh what is it, uh directional traffic that that that you have. I'm assuming your people are coming to you, so there's not like a physical location, but all that informational traffic now, the educational traffic is just across the internet, right? And you're you're skipping all those different areas where it's spread out to and said, let's just go straight to where the kids and the the parents are and go to the football fields and and sporting events and Boy Scouts, whatever, wherever they're at, and the schools, because like we want a physical flyer there and we want a brand recognized and a QR code and a you know, whatever a domain link that they can go check out and a image of the logo, whatever, and and you can measure that. I'm also seeing across all accounts, um, Google's not really telling us very much about uh where that traffic's coming from. It's just branded searches now are the highest category of searches across all areas. And um, you know, how are you parsing that out or how are you looking at that, or does it not matter? And it's just like more people know about the brand, however, they got there, we're good with that.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, so for us, it's kind of the second part. We're not too focused because there's our reporting has all the reporting tools have drastically changed, and ever since the whole J4 thing, like since then, I I have I have much lower trust in my reporting than I have the lowest amount of trust in my reporting than ever before. And so I rely, yeah. So I rely a lot on am I the things that I'm doing, am I doing the right things for what I'm trying to achieve? And and conceptually, is it what all those tools want? Right.

SPEAKER_02:

And so I'm like first first principles. I mean, you're just exactly so I have good marketing, yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. Like, okay, even if right now there's a Google update that is not working in my favor, am I the type of business that Google wants to promote? Yes, I am. I'm a real business, I have real like a physical business that has a real impact. People will leave real reviews and all of that. Like, I'm not an affiliate business that is trying to be a middleman and just like hack my way through the first the first page. Like, I'm Google will always try to please the businesses that like mine, like Coastline. Also, we spend a ton of money on Google Ads, and so they're like, Yeah, we want to keep that business. Um, so I'm like, okay, so this is the first principle is is what I'm going by. And then are things directionally going in the direction that I want? Uh, and so if I have a bunch of local marketing in some area, is business increasing? Are my because I also we also have paid brand campaigns, and so these have much more granular uh reporting attached to them. Um, so those I get to see. Like, is my cost like am I going from 0.1 penny to 0.05 penny per click? Great, that's like I'll take that, right? Is um is that or is my click through rate for all the other campaigns in that area going up uh um on average? Yeah, okay, cool. I'm I'm okay with this. I'm not gonna be too attached to it because this is part of my marketing budget that is not paid like it's Not paid search, it's not performance marketing, right? So I'm not gonna have like a direct dollar attribution. We're getting into brand marketing, and that's always more difficult to gauge. So I have kind of the flexibility in my marketing budget where okay, I have like this percentage that I get to spend on things that I think are right that will help. And if directionally things are moving, then everybody's happy with it. And that seems to be working so far. Um, those are important conversations to have, but they are because they're difficult, but but it's true, because it is difficult. Like you can't, it's it's hard to convince anyone that a brand campaign has worked unless you unless you spend tens of millions of dollars where everyone knows your brand, but that's not what we want to do because we don't need people to, we don't need everybody to know our brand.

SPEAKER_02:

Are you doing like um A-B tests or pilot programs in different areas and kind of measuring the uplift to see what works? And then, you know, like taking two demographically similar areas and kind of running those and then going, okay, this is working versus this. Okay, maybe we'll we'll we'll spread that one out and and do it, replicate it, right?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, correct. So we have uh nine areas, we have nine test areas. Um, and the reason why we have nine is because we have people physically there, like managers who live there. So the moment I have someone who is physically at a location, I know I'll have a much more, I have a much better chance of whatever tests I'm doing to work because I need someone on the ground to make sure, like, are the banners up? Because we've been scammed before. Like I gave money to a school, uh, and turns out like their agency was just a total scam. And so, like, I don't know who got like they, yeah, they stole money from kids, which is terrible, but like that's the world we live in. Wow. Um, I need to make sure, like, it are the banners actually up, are the flyers up? Are we physically present at the car meets, at the festival, at the whatever? So we have nine test areas and we meet every week, and whatever works in one area, we implement two others. We will often do two areas that are very similar and see if can we replicate those results? If that's the case, then we replicate this in all those other places. That's I think that's kind of the strength. We have we have hundreds of places we can test things. The moment something works somewhere, we can scale it everywhere. And I think that's very cool. Uh yeah, no, this is this is uh great conversation. I enjoyed it. Um, but again, but I do want to talk about the recruiting part because I mean that was the biggest aha moment for us. Um, so I'll just start with some context. We lost our HR manager, uh, our HR uh director um around Christmas. Um, and um, so we all kind of had to come together, all the all the leadership team, we're like, okay, we need to pick up the slack here because like we still need to hire people, like growth needs to happen. And so, what happens when you have a bunch of people who are not in HR, who are not recruiters, who are then looking at HR and recruiting, you have a bunch of ideas, like you have new ideas. Like, wait a second, like I'm looking at this through a marketer or product growth marketer, and like this is a marketing problem. Like, I recruiting is essentially just selling something to someone, like, except instead of instead of them buying, they're buying into the company I'm paying them, fine, but like the all the economics and all the funnel is the same. Yep. And I'm like, I need I need to treat them as I would any client. Like, are these who are we recruiting? And so, like, who are the personas that we're recruiting? We don't know. Uh we kind of know if they pass the interview, okay. Yeah, cool, but like, can we define exactly who it is that we want? And so, what we did is we started doing personality assessment for all our employees, uh, because we wanted to know like, who are we hiring and and who are the best ones? And like, because I just want more of the best, right? I want and who are the best? Well, they're the ones who are the happiest and the most fulfilled about their job, like the ones who treat this as like a career or something that's more purpose-driven. And we found very common themes. Like one of them, one of the personas that we have is retired educator. These people, gold for the company because they love what they do, they're patient, they're calm, they really believe like they they they will in they invest themselves in the education of their students, which is great, because then they create better drivers. And what how do they create better drivers? Turns out they they convince students to take an additional lesson. So in California, for example, you need to take three lessons to meet the state requirements, and the state requirement means whatever you need to pass the road test. The road test is not comprehensive. Okay, you don't go on the highway, you don't parallel park, you don't drive at night in rain, you don't uh do blind intersections, like there's a lot of essential skills that are not tested there. So the incentive for driving schools is to not cover this material because we want because I mean, someone will only complain if they don't pass their test, right? So, and it's next impossible to do everything in three lessons. So we we found a higher average lesson count for all the students who went through those highly motivated, highly motivated employees, and like this is all stuff that I don't have the data analytics background to like pull this data together, but like AI just made this super simple to just figure this out. Um now there's two, so then there's two key learnings here. We know who we want and they generate more money for us, and they create better drivers, right? That's important. Like, so this fits our mission, this fits my goal as a marketer, because I need to create more revenue, and then this is a target for recruiters, so but I can't just leave it there, right? I have like now I need to help them, I need to help them, I need to help them being the recruiters, hire more people like them because they're not necessarily easy to find. So then my so then my priority as a marketer is to hire people, and so in my as a demand generating uh like my job is to demand is to is to generate demand, but now I need to generate some offer, right? I need to generate the offer side, and so then I started looking at my own funnel. Well, okay, do I is there any markets where I generate too much demand? And that I'm bottlenecked by how much offer I can actually fulfill there. Absolutely. The Bay Area is one of those places. I cannot hire enough people in the Bay Area. So then all the incentives they can't like between the two departments started to like merge together. And now we have since hired uh an HR manager and a recruiter, and so now we have the team in place. But what this allowed us to do is we had this like shared mission now, where the way that we will increase revenue, like one of the ways that we increase revenue for the company, one way that we create better drivers so we fit our mission, all that comes from marketing and HR collaborating to make sure that we hire the best people who will be the happiest of the company, who will give the best service possible, who will, as a byproduct of that, sell more lessons. And me as a marketer, I need to unlock this and make this as frictionless as possible by giving them all the marketing material they need because I don't want them to be pushy salesmen. They're not gonna sell anything, but they can totally just share information, have flyers, have everything ready to go. I can create incentives. And yeah, so like that was the biggest, like that was the biggest aha moment for us.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it makes a lot of sense, and you can now tie it together with data of like you're you're going after a two-sided market, right? Like you've got to have enough people to drive if you have enough demand, and those things need to be linked because you don't want to keep you know pumping this air if you don't have the drivers. So those things are associated with each other and are relevant to each other and and need to be part of that conversation. And then you're building brand campaigns, you're you're trying to recruit them. Like the thing you're selling is to join your company and to believe in the the brand mission and be part of it. You have target personas, you have a customer journey, um, you have assets and videos, and like, you know, it it's it's just you're selling something different, right? You're selling for them to uh join your company and you want the top talent of what what you're looking for, and then it ties to your revenue goals because you can sell a bunch of courses, but if they can't get their lessons in a reasonable time frame, they might go with another solution. And so it it all balances on each other, but you can use AI to help you figure that out. I I love that idea of uh like you know, doing um, you know, there's Myers Briggs, there's a bunch of different tests, taking that together to understand what that is, and then feed that in uh to AI to understand what what is the DNA of our company, like who who have we hired and who are those best people? Because what you probably found out from the retired educator, that that might not have been already uncovered, or was it with uh with the uh um you know HR team, that's clearly something that you could get from AI Insights that is finding these patterns, right? And um, it seems like also uh, you know, you went into it a little bit of hey, like we're gonna teach them more, so they're gonna produce more lessons because they're getting you know good quality driving that leads to better reviews, that means to more revenue, um, and and certainly referrals if their kids learn to drive better than the minimum required to meet the test. Because I can only assume that I remember, I actually kind of remember defensive driving was at like a laugh, like a defensive driving and and uh driver training, I think were uh associated with each other. And it it was just a bunch of well, useless videos um that need to be updated from the government. Um and there are some online businesses. So how are you competing? Oh, that's driver, that's driver. Uh, do you do that part of the business too?

SPEAKER_04:

The uh driver's the online course, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, the online courses. I'm assuming you do that as well, like right, it fits right into what you're offering pretty easily.

SPEAKER_04:

Absolutely. Uh yeah, so we do, and that's actually why. So I was hired primarily for uh for growing that product. Okay. Um, and um the reality of this space, at least in the US, is that there's very few comp there's only a handful of competitors. They own the market because that was like a really good SEO play for the longest time. So you have a company like Aceable who owns all the top, I'd say the top three or top four companies, um, like drivers ed.com, that's them. IDrive Safely, that's also them. Um, so they kind of own that market. Um, then you have other companies like Zatobi, uh, they are on in the practice test realm, uh, which is like an in-between. So you do driver's ed and then you do your practice test in order to take your DMV test. That'll give you your permit. Then you take behind your wheel lessons, and then you take your rope test. Like that's the sequence of events. Um, our approach was to not go head to head against them.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's a that's a big I mean that that's all I saw that like as an SEO play, right? Like you get to the top, you need to just get a certification or get some kind of approval, like driver's ed, and you're just like, Oh, I'll I'll take the top thing, right? Or the top of Google. And that was all that people thought about.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, but what we did uh is partner with all of them. Um, so that was like if we can't be them, let's join them. Because what we told them is like, listen, you guys sell the product that comes before us, and like realistically for us, driver's ed is just a lead magnet, right? It's just like there you go, yeah. Like we just need them, like we will break even or we'll lose money on this product because we rely on a certain percentage to then convert to behind the wheel lessons. Um, so we told them, do you guys want to just make a commission on this and send people our way? And they said, Yep. And so we're partnering. So all our competitors, that was my first year, is like, let's just partner with every competitor out there.

SPEAKER_02:

Let's let's flip like it's how what we're talking about, and and I'm a little bit slower right now because I'm processing this of as an AI first company, you have to think differently, right? And so you're like, we're not gonna compete with these guys. Let's actually let's partner with them to grow this other product that we have some sustainable advantage against other players in. Yeah, um, and that's just gonna accelerate your growth, right? And so that's that's a partnership play that I don't I don't know if all the other driving schools would think about it that way. Well, you know, if they couldn't even service it, like y'all could actually service it and and do it and go head to head, but you decided, hey, like this is our focus, this is you know where we want to specialize in. And so let's figure out how to turn all these negatives into positives. I I love that.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, and I think this kind of our philosophy for for just as a business, uh, because we're the we're a bunch of very passionate entrepreneurs, like as like we all have we did the personality test ourselves, so we all we are all the same person. Um, at least on the leadership side, like there's seven of us uh at the on the leadership, and like we're there's two different types, but like still clear personas. Uh, we can easily be distracted by good ideas because we live in this world, like what AI has done for us is it remove the it remove the how do we do something because I don't care, like I know I can, right? At this point, is I don't need to know how to I could vibe code something that like and just it'll happen, right? Like this morning I was looking at Hank Green's uh new app. I think it's called uh what's it called? The the Vlogbrothers guy. I think it's uh distracting free. Anyway, so it became like the number one app today or yesterday in the US, like it's it overtook Google and Chat GPT, and it's it's just a timer that prevents you from like just don't touch your phone for however long you commit it to, and like you have this bean that'll just start knitting. And if you touch your phone, the bean will stop knitting and it'll be sad, and so you don't distract the bean for however long. Like, and that is like the number one app. Okay, there's no account creation, there's no ads, there's nothing like it. This is a perfect use case for like vibe coding something. Like, this could have been vibe coded, and it's just one of those ideas like you have this idea, I don't care how to do it, I can do it. It probably wasn't vibe coded, but it could have. That's my point. Yeah, and so at Coastline, we we try to be very mindful of not being distracted by anything that is not our core business because yeah, we could do like there's a lot of really cool ideas. We could become an insurance company, right? We could be because we train the best drivers, so why not ensure the people that we train? We could um try to own the online practice test because it's related to our product, yeah. But like that's not our main advantage. Our advantage is to give better driving lessons that are more convenient, and our competitors are the mom and pop driving schools. And so we need to keep focused on that. So anything else, if it's gonna be if it's gonna be a problem, we need to either join with them or address it in some way. But like joining them is the best scenario. Because I mean, the practice test market, the the top three companies in the US, they're not from the US, they're from Eastern Europe or and or Sweden. Um, it's just like you're opening the doors to pure SEO or pure organic play. And if you do that, then you're opening the doors to competitors from all across the world. And there's someone out there with a better team uh that is more less expensive to operate and they have more time and they will crush this game. Um, but what they can't do is create a physical business. So, like, that's yeah. So we keep we keep focusing to we keep reminding ourselves to focus on that.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, Renault, like I I love this conversation. I don't know if everybody's following what what we're talking about, but I think that um it's gonna uh age well. I think it's gonna age well as um uh people get more uh feet under them around AI. Um, is there anything that we haven't covered that you want to make sure that we highlight? Um I uh I know I took the conversation maybe a couple different directions. So I want to turn it over to you to uh share with us anything you would like to share, as well as um, you know, how people can get in touch with you to find out more. I think you're doing some really interesting stuff.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, I think two things on AI is just use it as you would healthy food. I think that's our approach. It's just a little bit every day because you can't just like eat a healthy meal, a big healthy meal once a week. No, no, it's like just use it a little bit every day just so you understand the capabilities. And whenever the new model comes out, at least you'll understand how you can use it. Uh like don't try to do the big change, try to do the small changes because I mean I think that will open the door to a bunch of opportunities that you didn't know existed, and at least in your in your context. Um, and on the driving side, yeah, drive safe out there. I mean, there's a um we're we're we're here like we're doing this for a reason, right? We want to create safer roads. I think things are gonna be worse before they get better. And I think it's the best thing you can do is to improve your training. Uh, so I would encourage people to take driving training if with us or with or someone else doesn't matter, but just learn those skills because the the consequences can be pretty severe. Uh, and we see them, and it's uh yeah, I may I may be overly exposed to this, but I I do really generally think people should learn defensive driving skills. And so I encourage people to do that. And uh if you want to check us out, coolflanacademy.com, and yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Awesome. Well, everybody, hopefully you found this uh conversation helpful. If you did, please like it, please share it. Um, it it really does help us. Um, we are uh trying to transfer over to a video first uh podcast. We've been doing this for 12 years, and uh uh we have to learn new things, and and AI is getting involved in every which way. So hopefully you found this podcast helpful. Um, this is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. Until the next time, bye bye for now.

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Matt Bertram

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