In the inaugural episode of the Servant Leader’s Library podcast, host Nicholas Paulukow interviews Miles Veth, the dynamic leader of The Veth Group, a thriving marketing agency.
Miles also dives into his innovative use of LinkedIn for business growth and discusses how his faith in Jesus Christ shapes his business practices.
By blending personal values with professional strategies, Miles offers valuable insights for new entrepreneurs looking to balance profitability with purpose.
Watch the episode above or listen over at Spotify. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next great servant leader’s story!
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Episode Transcription
Nicholas Paulukow
Alrighty, welcome back to Servant Leader’s Library. I’m Nick Paulukow and I have a guest here today, Miles Veth with the Veth Group. Miles, welcome. Super excited to have you here. Can you tell us a little about yourself and the organization that you lead today?
Miles Veth
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. I know we both connect a lot on this topic, so it’s my pleasure to join the show. I have a marketing business, about 15 employees. We help 100 or so customers basically fill their sales calendar and then nurture those leads that they talk to to try to get them to buy. So it’s a fun challenge every day.
Nicholas Paulukow
Heck yeah, that is one heck of a thing to do, right? Everybody loves you when it’s working and is frustrated when it’s not, right? Tell me a little bit about the challenges of growing a business such as yours.
Miles Veth
Yeah, you’re exactly right. I think we’re in the unique case of everyone always has our pain. You never can have enough meetings.
You never can have a low enough cost per meeting. Most businesses bottleneck at some point by their inability to either pulse what the demand is in their market or capture that demand. So it’s interesting because a lot of businesses are pitching cost savings or security or risk reduction like in IT, where I came from.
We’re really pitching revenue growth. But the challenge is as you scale, there are so many reasons you could lose. So we do 24-hour cancellation.
You could lose a customer because they get bought. They get too many meetings. They don’t get enough meetings.
The meetings don’t buy. The sales rep leaves. The owner has a change of heart of wanting to grow.
So we have a hard time keeping customers even if we’re getting meetings at the level of someone like an IT MSP. So we always have to have a constant funnel, which as you scale to $4 million plus in revenue, it becomes a lot of new business needed. So the good of that is we’re constantly inventing new products that help our customers.
The bad of it is I get some gray hair.
Nicholas Paulukow
Yeah, absolutely. Man, you’re always doing something. I always hear you talking about LinkedIn, right?
And you’re always on there and use that as a powerful tool. Tell us how you’ve used kind of the LinkedIn platform to build and scale as part of the services that you provide your customers.
Miles Veth
LinkedIn to me is a really fascinating thing. It’s about 600 million members. I’m sure it’s still growing.
And we all go on it every day, willingly to look at each other’s content. And I saw a stat a couple of years ago, it was only 1% of users were posting on a regular basis. Yeah, I don’t remember the exact specifics, but I don’t know if it was daily or even a couple times a week, but it was something crazy.
So right now there’s this huge void of they’re trying to show individual user content to each other to keep us on the platform so they can then run ads that we’re not paying attention to and don’t care about that they monetize. So I think it’s just, we’re recruiting for sales, for insights. It’s such a hub that I definitely have benefited from it in our business enough that we’ve created service lines around it.
And for me, as someone like you shares, whether faith in Jesus or just a belief in doing the right thing in business, I think being able to put out what I believe has actually led to finding a lot of like-minded people, which has been cool.
Nicholas Paulukow
Yeah, that’s great. I appreciate that. You kind of said something a minute ago, I saw on your LinkedIn, right when we originally connected that you said the first thing it says is I follow Jesus Christ.
And so like, wow, what a powerful statement that is. Kudos for kind of living kind of your belief in faith. Tell us a little bit more of how you kind of follow Jesus Christ, but deal with this fun thing called business that has a lot of different pieces to it that aren’t always ethical or there isn’t always ethical behaviors done.
Can you kind of give us an understanding of how you marry those two together?
Miles Veth
Yeah. So I think for me following Jesus, you have to decide lots of people believe that Jesus existed, walked on this earth, died. Maybe some people even believe that he was God in some sense, but don’t really want him to be the Lord of their life.
And I think the distinction when you understand what it actually means to believe is not a head logical understanding that Jesus existed, but it’s an alignment of our life that we’re not going to have another Lord, whether that’s money or romance or status or comfort or any other thing. So for me, I think fundamentally, if Jesus is the Lord of my life, that should permeate the way I do everything else, obviously imperfectly, but I think in a business sense, to your point, I look back to God’s word, the Bible to say, you know, where are the guidelines that we’re given? And I think one is we’re supposed to count others more significant than ourselves.
So we don’t do contract lock-in. We don’t mark up our out-of-pocket expenses. We don’t make promises on the numbers we can generate.
We are careful about overlaps in markets. If it’s a small market to make sure that we’re not accidentally sharing insights between competitors or we don’t violate end-user policies, end-user policies can be gray, but it, like if we say, for example, you know, we’re not going to automate the LinkedIn interface. If we’re on this platform, we’re not going to automate the LinkedIn interface.
Like I’m all for a little bit of creativity and how you define some of these things, but if there are things that are just dishonest, and for me, that’s been the baseline is, you know, Google says you can’t have multiple inboxes for the purpose of beating spam filters. We don’t get to have multiple inboxes for the purpose of beating spam filters. And I think it’s less gray than people act like it is, but I think the uncomfortable part is early on, we had a situation with LinkedIn where they didn’t want you logging into other people’s accounts and DMing on their behalf.
So we had maybe a $40,000 month business and $20,000 a month was coming from DMing on other people’s behalf, not automated. We weren’t doing that. We walked away from half the business, like a couple of years in, cut it from 40 to 20, just because of that one honesty thing.
And for me, it’s just, I think integrity is a muscle. The more you squeeze yourself, the more you’re going to stick to it. Yeah.
Nicholas Paulukow
Yeah, absolutely. That is amazing. And I mean, you know, we’re talking about here about like serving leadership.
This is perfect, right? You know, from a commitment to service leadership that it sounds like we have, you know, how do you manage like your goals and profit and to, you know, staying within kind of your values? Can you kind of help us understand if somebody is new in business and they’re trying to grow like, and they have a faith-based background, how do you, how do you, you know, balance both of those?
Miles Veth
Yeah, it’s a great question. So I, I, I look at it like I want to make a modest profit in our business. I don’t want to make a outsized profit relative to our customers.
So this is very contrarian because a lot of people would say charge what the market will bear. And, but I believe in making about a 33% profit margin as a business should be the goal and always be there right away. But I think for, you know, my customers, if they knew at the end of the day, if we pay that group 3000 bucks a month and they make about a thousand dollars a month, I don’t think anyone’s going to complain about that.
If they knew that I was making $2,800 a month off 3000, I think it’d be a little heavy for me. So I think the first thing is with customer profit, not that we can always hit that. We’re always chasing that, but I think a good goal is a third.
In terms of if you make that third and you scale a business, some amount of the business is reinvesting, taking care of people and distributing that. And, and I think that’s really great. I think once you get down to owner profit, how much do you keep yourself?
I think the key question is a hard issue of really, if this is all God’s money, I think we should be able to justify why I live in the house. I do, why I have, you know, the Apple products I have, why I go to Titans games, like the shirt deck relative to the other uses of our money. And I don’t think it’s like we can’t enjoy ourselves.
I know you and I share a love of hot tubbing or, you know, my dad, I grew up around race cars. Like I think it’s okay to have hobbies and enjoy ourselves and deals with other people. But I do think we’ve got to be really accountable to every penny.
I do believe we have to answer for it. So I think it’s more about making, it’s not wrong, keeping too much of it’s wrong.
Nicholas Paulukow
Yeah, that’s absolutely, that’s a great sentiment, right? Like it’s not, we’ve been given the talent to be able to earn it.
It’s what we do with it. It’s really what counts, right?
Miles Veth
Yeah. That’s excellent.
Nicholas Paulukow
You, could you kind of give me your perspective as someone who’s taken the, you know, an entrepreneur from something ground zero, there’s not as many of us that have gone from ground zero to where you’re at now. And maybe just explain to everyone kind of the challenges, you know, we see you now, right? Successful, able to be able to be nimble in your business, but only ever people see kind of our success, right?
They don’t see all of our, you know, fumbles or frustrations or, you know, crying in the corner, who knows, right? But it is a tough road. Could you kind of give a little tips and tricks for those entrepreneurs trying to get started?
Miles Veth
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned is you just have to have a why that isn’t making money. I think the three reasons people start businesses normally are they want to make more money, they want freedom of their time, or they want revenge. Someone told them they couldn’t do it and they want to prove that.
And I think those are all terrible reasons to start a business. Because money, if you share my belief in Jesus, that the love of money is the root of all evil. And we just we also have to remember our hearts are incredibly deceitful, the Bible tells us.
So we can think we don’t have a love of money and have a love of money. So we need other people to tell us that. But I think money is a bad motivation, because the more of it you have, the diminishing returns of its value.
I think the second motivation of time building a business, you know, 30 years from now, the idea you could work yourself out of a job is the idea of passive income. So first five years is just not real. Right guys that have tons of rental units, they’re fixing sinks every day.
They’re personally on the hook when the government, you know, wants to call because a renter got something wrong with the way section eight housing works, or e-commerce businesses, Amazon’s algorithm changes or your business or mine. So I think time’s a bad motivation. And I think I think revenge is the worst of the three, because I absolutely I’m sure like you had people that told me I would fail.
And I can’t even remember half of them. And it’s not now it’s like, you’re gonna go back to them be like, Oh, look who was wrong. It’s like, who has the emotional issues if you’re doing that?
They probably forgotten all about me, moved on to critiquing the next person. So I, I think that the right reason to start a business is like you embody and talk about the desire to serve. And for me, the desire to serve God with my life, led me down a path of being a fourth generation entrepreneur.
So I wasn’t totally from scratch in my learning. And I think from there, it’s how do you serve your, you know, really, I think your team, if you serve your team, they’ll serve your clients, if you serve your clients, that will create profit where you can serve your community. But when people ask, you know, how do you do this at one in the morning?
It’s like, well, I see what’s going on in Israel, like our business will seek out opportunities to find those Israeli refugees that can’t pay their hospital bills or anytime there’s a crisis to be able to actually have a front row seat to try to be able to serve like is so motivating when you see what they are going through versus us sitting in our cushy lives here. It’s 1am is light action compared to what those people are going through this week. And that to me, definitely is fuel that keeps you going because that’s the hard part is keeping going.
Nicholas Paulukow
Yeah, and even having the ability to do what we do in the country that we live is a blessing in itself. Yeah, absolutely. You know, from a you had said kind of fourth generation entrepreneur.
So who was who was your greatest mentor? Why?
Miles Veth
Yeah, my dad’s taught me the most in terms of one person. I think he’s, he’s been at it for 30 years, 35 years, just because, yeah, just brought a real integrity to both his for profit and nonprofit pursuits. And I think in terms of just his ability, I most admires his ability not to hold grudges because I’ve seen him get burned so many times and he doesn’t he doesn’t hold it against people.
But I think he’s just taught me frameworks that I would have taken me 20 years to learn. So how to price, how to hire, how to incentivize like and I think I was able to take his 30 years and cram it into about two years of learning. He’s actually underwritten a lot of our technology.
So he has been a mentor, but he’s also a lot of the code of how we’re able to deliver so many emails comes from him. So I wouldn’t be without him. Yeah.
Nicholas Paulukow
Yeah, kudos dad. Yeah.
Miles Veth
So dad’s been a big, big help. So I, he’s clearly the number one, but I think the number two, there’s been a ton of people that have, have really helped me from pastors to fellow business people to professors from college. Like, so yeah, it’s been an army that’s helped me get here.
Nicholas Paulukow
That’s amazing. Kudos to dad. Dads are wonderful people.
It’s neat to see that you’ve been able to have that journey with him too. We all, we all talk about kind of like mentors, but then we also talk about long life learning too. Right?
So I know you’re a fellow reader and love to digest information. So as we wrap things up today, why don’t you tell us a book that all of us should read and why, and how it might’ve impacted you as you kind of went through that journey of additional learning through it.
Miles Veth
Yeah. So I would always first and foremost plug the Bible. I’d say if you’ve not read the Bible, Jordan Peterson is not a Christian, but he was talking about this idea of the Bible has this living quality, like no other book he’s ever read.
And I really think that is true that any amount of wisdom that I have gathered has been from that one book. And the book of Proverbs is really helpful for business and leadership, especially for a non, for a more just average human written business book. I would recommend The Crux is one I’ve been reading recently.
His name is Richard Rumfelt, I want to say. And The Crux is a business strategy book. And what it’s really helping me to understand is you want to look for problems that are both essential to solve and you have the ability to solve.
So he kind of brings a realistic look at business strategy of not every problem can be solved. We don’t always have the resources, but what you need to do is take an inventory of your options and look for the crosshair of where something is both meaningful and possible to be influenced. So if I think about the broader economy, it’d be great if the broader economy are moving in my direction, but I don’t really want to influence that.
Worrying about it or talking about it. And he really is helping me even today, I’ve been listening to it. He’s just, I think the framing, because I’m at the beginning of it.
So I’m, this is encouraging to read alongside me. I think what I’m just realizing is how much we get distracted by things we cannot control. So a great example is we spend all day writing vision statements.
That’s not really the problem. Like my biggest problem right now is find more customers that are a good fit for what we do. So don’t waste a bunch of time writing my 15-year goals because like the biggest problem is spend time on get more customers.
And I think that that is a refreshing perspective because if you read too much, you know, business literature, it almost is like you need to do 1000 things. Well, I think what the crux is saying is what’s the one thing that if you did, the problem might go away. And that I thought was a cool perspective.
Nicholas Paulukow
That’s cool. That just start by doing one thing. And then start from the next.
Yeah, that’s cool. So, you know, as you talk about kind of growing your business, and we always use this word success, right? And so it’s like, what does success mean to you?
And like, how do you measure it? Like what is considered success?
Miles Veth
Yeah, for me, I think it success is someday standing before God and Him saying, well done, good and faithful servant. I don’t think it looks like the business, perpetuating or wealth or reputation, or I really do feel like I’m living for the next life more than this one. I know a lot of people talk about your best life now, I think I want to be at 80.
Having spent the time looking forward to the life after this, I think tangibly what that would look like in terms of how do you measure that I would want it to be true that there wasn’t a meaningful gap between what I espouse to believe about following Jesus, and how my life actually was lived out. And I’m far from perfect and have as much sin in me as the next person. So that’s not going to look like Jesus’s life looked.
But in trying to follow Jesus, I think my hope is that people would genuinely say there was something about Jesus that influenced this fallen person who was clearly fallen miles to love in a way that was different than the people that didn’t follow Jesus. And I think if that was true of me, I’ll be happy. And if that’s not true of me, I’ll have probably more regret than just about anybody on earth.
So it’s like, yeah, serious.
Nicholas Paulukow
I mean, you’re almost saying how much that you’re, you know, God has given you a talent, and you’ve really found your talent and feel that you’re using that talent to serve other people. And that and at a, you know, an age that you’re at right now, that’s an amazing and impactful thing. Many people take many, many years to figure that out.
So kudos to you. That’s amazing. Very empowering.
Thank you very much.
Miles Veth
You would know. Yeah. Yeah.
All the credit goes upstairs for that. But I, I really, I appreciate your kind words. And yeah, I think, I think it’s a, it’s a high calling.
And yeah, as Christians, I mean, our job is to make it easier for other people to believe in Jesus. And that has a high bar in our society. You know, the church is failing in many ways.
So I know you’re someone that has made it easier for me to believe in Jesus. I think that’s what I want to be back to other people. Right.
Yeah.
Nicholas Paulukow
It’s kind of saying like, get, get with like-minded people. Right. And we, we many times in my faith, right, we leave our church.
And the last thing they say is go and tell others about your faith, be a disciple. And so you’re definitely living that. I think it’s amazing.
It’s wonderful to hear and hear from like-minded people in that regard. So you said a minute ago, as we go to wrap up, that you’re looking for new business. So tell us what your ideal customer is.
Who are they? You know, what, what would be the ideal customer today to continue to add to your wonderful organization and how they contact you?
Miles Veth
Yeah. So for me, it’s, it’s probably a business owner that has likely like one or two salespeople, maybe one marketing person has a relatively large deal size, but probably, you know, an LTV or lifetime value of like over $5,000 and, and wants to, wants to grow in a way that is long-term minded. So I don’t think we’re not in the magic bullet business.
We’re not trying to bring people leads that are going to be foaming at the mouth and buying the next week. We’re really trying to help people build relationships through creative outreach, creative nurturing. So I think someone like you, that’s got a long-term view of serving their market, that’s up for doing things a little bit differently, that has a little bit of budget, but really wants to be budget conscious, I think is a great customer for us.
And we have everyone from the fortune 500 down to one person armies, but I would say, you know, if you’ve got like 10 to 30 employees and, and you fit those criteria, you want a partner that’s willing to not lock you in any kind of contract. I’d love to talk to you.
Nicholas Paulukow
Oh, that’s perfect. Well, I can say from a consumer of Miles’s products and services, he instituted some of his services with us and we were overwhelmed with leads. So great job, really does a great job in serving even at that level too.
So thank you, Miles. I appreciate your time today and look forward to the next time we speak again.
Miles Veth
Thank you very much, Nick.
Nicholas Paulukow
Alright. Thank you, Miles. Have a great day, everybody.
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