We worked the gate before
we ever went online.

Parker Scherer

Co-founder

I spent a lot of days on a farm. You learn things out there you can't learn from a dashboard.

You learn that a family will drive forty minutes for a place their neighbour mentioned, and drive straight past three places they've never heard of to get there. You learn what a parking lot looks like at eleven in the morning when the week went well, and what it looks like when it didn't. You learn that Wednesday's forecast decides more about your Saturday than any campaign will.

Most of the agencies I've watched work with farms have never stood in one during a rush. They send a report with impressions on it. Impressions don't clear a parking lot. So the first thing we changed was what we report: tickets. If tickets went up, we did our job. If they didn't, we didn't, and we'll say that out loud on the call.

The second thing was the contract. There isn't one. Your season has an on and an off switch, and your marketing should have the same. Nobody should be paying a retainer in January to hold a spot for September.

Jack Colby

Co-founder

Everybody wants to talk about ads. I'd rather talk about the part nobody's bidding on.

Organic is the most underused channel in this business, and it isn't close. A farm will spend four thousand dollars in September renting attention that vanishes on November 1st, then never spend an afternoon on the Google profile that would bring people in for free every season after this one. Ads stop the day you stop paying them. Rankings don't.

And it's shifting again. People aren't only typing into Google now — they're asking ChatGPT where to take the kids on Saturday. Those answers get pulled from the same places the map pack pulls from: your profile, your reviews, pages that actually say what you do and when you're open. The farms that sort that out this year get to be the answer for years. The ones that don't are going to wonder where everyone went.

That's the part I find genuinely fun. Everybody's crowded into the ad auction, and meanwhile the top of the page is just sitting there.