All in on one industry: Pete Lynagh, HAUL Agency

Connor: Welcome to the Exit Ready podcast, the podcast for agency owners who want to build a business worth selling. So if somebody puts their hand up one day and says they are ready to buy, you will get the value that you deserve and the company will be ready to sell. My name is Connor McAuley and today I am talking to Pete Lynagh from HAUL. Without giving too much away, HAUL focuses entirely on one industry, and today the conversation will undoubtedly get into the power of niching down and having the conviction to go all in. So with that said, Pete, welcome to the show.

Pete: Cheers, Connor. Thanks for having me.

Connor: First and foremost, tell me where you are in the world today.

Pete: Melbourne, Australia. Don’t let the accent fool you though. I am from a little village near Ballycastle called Armoy, County Antrim. But yeah, been in Melbourne probably 20 years now. Cannot shake the accent.

Connor: I have to ask, and I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this, but did you marry an Australian or did you find love out there?

Pete: I did. I came out here with an Irish girl actually. We parted ways pretty soon. I remember a guy telling me at the time, “Why would you bring an apple to the orchard?” I thought that was quite funny. Yeah, that didn’t end well. But I married an Australian girl, so I am staying put now.

Connor: Very good. Congratulations. Look, today I would love you to tell me a little bit about HAUL, what you guys do, and who you do it for.

Pete: Cool. So HAUL Agency is a marketing agency and personal branding agency for the transport and logistics industry. I niched down probably two years ago after seeing an opportunity.

I had been doing general digital marketing since 2015. In 2019 I started working with one of Australia’s biggest transport carriers, Border Express. That was my first introduction to the transport and logistics industry, which was very archaic. The whole marketing mindset was sales-driven. Nobody really put any effort into marketing, websites, or social media.

I started doing my thing with them and they were getting great results. I enjoyed the industry, even though it is quite boring and mundane. I just saw a lot of value and a lot of opportunity that could be added. So I rebranded from Stage Fright Management, which was my general digital marketing agency, to HAUL Agency, and went all in. It has taken off.

Connor: What led you to that? Was it that singular client, seeing what work you could do, seeing the returns, the output, and falling in love with the industry?

Pete: Yeah, because no one else was doing it. I think there are maybe one or two in the whole world dedicated to transport and logistics. That was the first opportunity. The industry is starting from the bottom, and the only way is up. You get rungs on the ladder very quickly with these guys. And they do great work, they are just underexposed. It is a very technical, ruthless industry with great people who all fly under the radar. That is actually how they want to operate.

I remember speaking to one client who just wanted to fly under the radar, but they wanted to grow their business. I said it does not work like that any more. So there is a lot of education that goes on in the industry, and then showing results.

Connor: What type of services do you offer for these transport and logistics companies? I know we are going to chat a fair bit about personal branding, and that is a new string to the bow, but you have been doing that alongside the other work for years. It is just bringing that front and centre. But the primary service of HAUL, what does it provide?

Pete: I have just repositioned to offer, whenever I come into a company, the first thing I check is their website. The website is usually something made in 2001. Brochure-style, not really a lead generator. Not built for the AI architecture and the AI flows it needs in this day and age. So the first thing I do is upgrade their website. Then we keep it maintained with SEO, AEO, GEO, blogs, all the things to keep it current.

That is the company-side marketing, plus social media. The other side is personal branding. That is where the conversations start online, specifically on LinkedIn. I have put together a package for logistics leaders, executives, founders, and CEOs. We manage their LinkedIn profiles and ghost-write for them, and that is paying off big time, because not a lot of people are doing that in this industry.

Connor: And do you find, because with the marketing side, it was the cake, and the personal branding is the icing. There are certain industries where one or two people start investing in marketing, they do great work, and other people just see that and want some of it. Have you seen the same with personal branding, especially given a lot of directors don’t want to be all “look at me”?

Pete: Yeah, exactly so. They are all cringe. They all don’t want to. Myself included. When I started doing my own personal posts on LinkedIn, I was cringing. But once people start coming to you looking for your business, that changes. People drop the “this is cringe” once it is paying the bills. So you soon get over it once you start seeing the results.

It is a big thing for people, especially these founders who are well respected in the industry, who have been under the radar and done well. Once they start doing their own personal branding, they cannot believe the meetings and the commercial value that come from just a LinkedIn post. They are blown away.

Connor: What do you think makes it such a good fit for a niche agency like yours, all honed on logistics?

Pete: I always wondered about the niche thing and I did not really get it until I had done it. Now I really understand it from the perspective that it makes life so much easier. You are talking to the same target market, the same message, they have the same problems, and you can speak their language and pick up the jargon pretty quickly. You become the trusted source. It is like going to a GP versus going to a specialist for brain surgery. Which one are you going to go to?

I did doubt it at the start, obviously. But I gave it a crack and yeah, it has paid off dividends.

Connor: I would say the same in my space, because I only work with creative agency owners. Every single person I work with is trying to solve the same problem, or a version of the same problem. They are just at a different stage on the path. It makes it really easy that you know who you are speaking to, you know who your ICP is right away, you know the challenges they are facing and the opportunities they are yet to discover. If you can talk confidently to them and do that more and more, you become more authoritative in your market. Less objection handling. The guys know what you do and they know what you can do for them. It makes it easier to sell.

Pete: Yeah, 100%.

Connor: Class. Right, so you and I have spoken for many years at this point, and one of the things that always was amazing to me was your content marketing quadrant that you designed way back in the early days. Tell me, and tell everybody watching, what that actually is.

Pete: Yeah, so the content marketing quadrant is something I developed for the transport and logistics industry, but you can put it across any industry. It came from watching other companies, other agencies, and other transport companies just marketing for new prospects. That was all they cared about. New business, new business, new business. I saw that they were leaving three other parts behind.

So the first missing quadrant is keeping current clients happy. Sharing information, new fleet coming in, new depots being opened, ideas like that.

The second missing quadrant is existing staff. No awards during the year, no employee of the month, no events being covered when they were going to Christmas parties or the races. Existing employees would probably feel there is not much culture, or they are not being included, even though it is just social media, but that plays a big part.

The third missing quadrant, and probably the biggest, is attracting new talent. You cannot grow your business without good people. These days, people window shop on LinkedIn. They want to see if the company is a vibe. What do you do, is there events you go to, what is the culture like. You can do all that through social media.

Then of course, prospects. Yes, you want new business, but you cannot have one without the others, in my opinion. There are strategies inside each of those quadrants to meet that need.

Connor: Honestly, it was one of those things that was an eye-opener for me the first time we sat down and you showed me that document. You could literally lift it and implement it in any industry and it would be successful.

Pete: Yeah. And it was Alex Hormozi I stole the concept from to begin with, in one of his old videos. I think it was for gyms when he was talking about it. I said, I can take this concept and put it on to my industry. And as you said, you can put it on to any industry.

Connor: Yeah, honestly, it was brilliant. Now, we have big plans for HAUL and you and I know what they are. But for everybody else, what does HAUL look like three years from now?

Pete: I’ll be sitting here like a robot, you’ll not be speaking to me. I will be at home in my bed. You’ll be speaking to my Tesla robot.

Connor: Is that where you reckon the direction of your industry and your trade will go? Or do you think it is just going to maximise output for you?

Pete: No, it is going to do both, I think. It is going to evolve into an AI agency. Someone understands how to use AI for the benefit of the transport and logistics industry as a whole. It will probably move away from just marketing solely, into efficiencies and improvements in all areas of the business.

Connor: The automations, implementation, things like that. 100%.

Pete: Automation, training, everything.

Connor: I see that in the marketplace and there is such a space for it. Even today, in our industry of being creative, marketing, and digital, there is such opportunity for efficiency or to be more productive with our time and our teams. Never devaluing the people sitting there. But if we can make them more productive, it is better for the business and better for the clients.

Right this second, I think we are in the gold rush of AI and agency. Obviously the gold rush will come to an end at some point, but right this second, there is opportunity, and the efficiencies we have in business are our efficiencies. They are not our clients’ at this moment, because we are at the tip of the spear when it comes to bringing all of this technology to the marketplace. And we are in a fortunate position to understand it. A lot of people watching this will actually have a greater understanding of AI than I will ever have, and they are using it in far greater ways than I could ever consider. The pace at which we are changing in industry is mental.

Pete: That is what I was saying to a friend yesterday. We are so limited in our thinking that we cannot even fathom the opportunity sitting levels above us. It is scary and exciting at the same time. It is our own limited thinking that holds us back.

Connor: That’s it. I went into a rabbit hole of AI over the last six months and I was building because I could. I kept building and building. I was waking up at three in the morning excited to get on a laptop. That’s really scary. A few weeks ago I cleared the decks, got rid of everything, completed all the projects in my head. I haven’t got back into that AI psychosis, as I called it. It has been quite liberating to see, well, here is all the work that I have done, now it is time to sell it. I had another client yesterday say to me they are struggling to keep up themselves. Nobody can fathom the amount of knowledge you have to grasp for that. Just being in the conversation is good enough today, I think.

Pete: Yeah, definitely. And I think we are probably in the top 5% of the population that are actually dabbling in it.

Connor: Yeah, we are not using it for dinner recipes. Right, so how are you using AI today in the agency?

Pete: I wasn’t using it as much as I could have until we started working together. I am flat out now on Claude. Claude is the number one for me. I still have ChatGPT for, it is more like a personal assistant, because it has known me for the last three years. I could bring it across to Claude, but I just keep them separate, two wives, keep them in different groups.

So Claude. Just getting into Claude Code. Claude Code works, and it is really helping me with efficiencies in my business. From SEO, to social media, to web development, to the personal branding.

Connor: Fantastic. One of the big things for me was implementing the Google Search Console MCP and really making sure I was keeping on top of my own activity, seeing what my own sites were doing. It has been a game changer, speed first and foremost. All the information I would have garnered myself over time is just at my fingertips now, and it produces a really good report every single month for me across all of my sites and anybody I am working with, their sites as well.

Pete: AI has given me time now to work on my own business. Which is something I haven’t been doing. All I had been doing for my own marketing, which is bad, it is typical probably for a marketing agency, is just my own personal branding posts on LinkedIn. But now I have actually redone my website. I have put together a full marketing content plan. Something I just had not had time for, and now I have the time.

Connor: Yeah, and I see that across all agencies. We always put our clients first, but we have to remember that we are our own customer as well. And that’s fantastic. Right, so tell me, if someone was thinking about niching their agency into a single industry, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them? What pitfalls would you steer them away from?

Pete: I would definitely do the research to see what your competition are in that niche. Then make sure you have a point of difference to come in and be a heavy hitter. It was different for me because no one else was doing this. It was always marketing agencies who had a transport logistics client, but the content was very vanilla. So I said, if I go all in here, I can take it to the next level. Definitely checking who else is in that pond swimming with you would be the number one thing.

Connor: And would there be any challenges that you faced that you could steer them away from?

Pete: The clients will probably get a bit antsy about working with their competition.

Connor: I’ll happily tell you because this was a learning moment for me as well. We always said in our agency that we worked with everyone, and we worked with everyone so we could garner the experience across all industries and all clients. So we would have worked with one restaurant and another restaurant, one sporting organisation and their competitors across the road, because we were using that shared learning and that understanding of both sides to make everybody’s experience far better.

From our perspective, that worked incredibly well. Even today, the amount of agencies I work with, I work with 15 at this minute on a one-to-one basis. Every single person I work with and all of their teams know I will never tell a story out of school. They have to trust that what is talked about in their four walls stays within their four walls. But collectively the experience I learn from working with everybody, plus my own past experience, means I can give a better service. That is what we found when we had that conversation way back when, when that client was not ready to come on board. I think eventually they did, on the back of that.

Pete: Yeah, it is the collective. That collective understanding of the industry helps you as the business owner help even more. But some of the clients do not see it like that. There is a lot of fear and anxiety. That is fair. That is their perspective.

Connor: Well, Pete, is there anything you want to share with the audience before we leave? How can we find you? Where can we find you online?

Pete: LinkedIn is probably the best place. Just Pete Lynagh. There are not too many of us with a rare surname like mine. And then haul.agency is the website.

Connor: Thanks again to everyone tuning in to the Exit Ready podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please feel free to subscribe and leave a review wherever you are picking this up. And if you want to build the best version of your agency, check out moveatpace.com where I share a heap of resources, articles, and my own agency valuation assessment. Thank you as always, and I’ll see you in the next show. Pete, thank you so much.

Pete: Cheers, Connor.