Show Notes

In this episode of The Localist podcast, host Carrie Rollwagen sits down with Bryan Stanfield of ZaZa to talk about how a fast-casual Italian restaurant became one of the most beloved lunch and brunch spots in the city, and how Bryan went from server to owner along the way.

Bryan started at ZaZa in 2010 as a UAB student, working under original owners Brian Somershield and Geoff Lockert (who also co-own Paramount and El Barrio). In 2015, Bryan and his former business partner bought the restaurant. In 2019, they closed for eight months for a full renovation with Creature during the redevelopment of the Frank Nelson Building. When they reopened, the space had grown from 20 seats to 60, dinner service was added, and the name officially went back to Trattoria ZaZa (which is what customers had been calling it for years anyway).

Bryan and Carrie get into the food and the operation. Why the pizza is a hybrid of Roman pizza al taglio and focaccia. Why the daily menu is rebuilt in the moment, sometimes at 3 p.m. for a 5 p.m. dinner service. Why brunch became such a phenomenon in downtown Birmingham that a line forms every weekend. Why Bryan describes his cooking as second-generation Italian with Alabama ingredients.

They also talk about the business side: Why ZaZa built tips into the menu price after the pandemic, and why 99 percent of the reaction was positive. Why staff routinely stay for five years or more, and why Bryan credits taking care of employees first. Why the downtown Birmingham restaurant community genuinely helps each other out, and why running to Paramount or Brick & Tin for eggs is a real thing. If you love ZaZa, run a restaurant, or care about what has been happening in the downtown Birmingham food scene for the last 15 years, this is a great conversation.

Downtown Birmingham Restaurant Topics Covered in This Episode

The three names of Trattoria ZaZa and how the original one came back
How Bryan went from server to owner over five years
Why the downtown Birmingham restaurant community shares eggs and ingredients
The core ethos: high execution, casual, everyone welcome
Why ZaZa built tips into the menu price after the pandemic
How customers actually reacted to the tipping change
Why staff routinely stay five years or more
How the 2019 renovation with Orchestra Partners and Creature happened
What it was like to close for eight months and where the staff went
Working with designer Andrew Thomson on the new space
Why brunch became a downtown Birmingham phenomenon
How the daily menu actually gets built
Why the pizza is a hybrid of Roman pizza al taglio and focaccia
Second-generation Italian cooking with Alabama ingredients
The Olive Garden and Waffle House pop-ups
Why Yotam Ottolenghi is a major inspiration
Why coffee has always been a priority (and RIP Richard the espresso machine)
How Bryan actually bought the restaurant instead of opening a ramen shop
Advice for people who want to open a restaurant

Mentioned in This Episode

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Connect with Trattoria ZaZa

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Below is the full Below is the full transcript of this episode of The Localist with Bryan Stanfield of Trattoria ZaZa.

Carrie (00:12): Welcome to The Localist, a podcast for small business owners where we talk about the highs and lows of building community through entrepreneurship. I’m your host, author of The Localist book, and small business consultant Carrie Rollwagen. The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. Infomedia is a digital strategy company where I work as Senior Vice President. At Infomedia, we help small businesses get big results online.

Carrie: Today we’re talking about Trattoria ZaZa. This is a very popular pizza, pasta and brunch spot in downtown Birmingham, and we have the owner Bryan Stanfield on to talk about it. If you don’t know anything about downtown Birmingham, you probably already know about this spot. It was so fun to talk to Bryan about all their history: opening in 2009, how he started as a staff member and bought the restaurant, the renovation, including tips in the price on the menu, and the way they approach food and hospitality.

Carrie: If you’re interested in restaurants, or any business where you have hospitality and you’re working with staff, this is a great episode. And if you’re a fan of ZaZa, or a fan of what’s been going on in downtown Birmingham in the last 15 years, this is a fun one. Welcome to the podcast.

Bryan (01:58): Thank you for having me on.

Carrie: I’m used to seeing you during my lunch break, on the other side of the counter. Your place is one of my favorites.

Bryan: I love seeing you in there. You’ve been coming in for so many years. I was excited to come on with you.

Carrie: I’m excited to dig into ZaZa through the years. We can even start with the name, because some people call it one thing and some call it another. Can you talk about that?

Bryan (02:28): Absolutely. I started at ZaZa in 2010. It opened in 2009 with Brian Somershield and Geoff Lockert, kind of my mentors.

Carrie: They also own Paramount and El Barrio.

Bryan: That’s correct. In 2009 when they opened up, they were ZaZa Trattoria. Very quickly there were some legal issues with the name, and they had to change. They pivoted to Trattoria Centrale. From 2010 until much later, it was Trattoria Centrale, but colloquially everyone was still calling it ZaZa.

Carrie (03:04): You were the cool person if you knew it used to be called ZaZa.

Bryan: Everyone was calling it ZaZa. So when we renovated the restaurant, we said, let’s embrace the name. We just went back to it.

Carrie: It makes you feel like an insider. But now you can call it either one.

Bryan: Sometimes now we get people that come in and call it Centrale or Central. You can never get it right.

Carrie (03:33): You’ve been a real staple of downtown’s growth. You, Paramount and El Barrio, for a long time, were some of the only places downtown. And definitely destinations. It used to be a smaller spot. At the time, did it feel like you were part of something, or was it just a job?

Bryan (04:07): Very early on, one of the great things about ZaZa is we’re very community focused. We have a lot of regulars, a lot of repeat customers that come in four or five times a week. We’re open for lunch, we’re affordable, we’re quick. It always felt like we were part of the community. We opened very early on with Mauricio at Brick & Tin, Chris Dupont at Dupont originally. Then Brian and Geoff opened El Barrio and Paramount later. Now there’s so many restaurants downtown. We have a really robust community.

Carrie (04:45): Do you have people who have been there the whole time?

Bryan (04:51): We definitely have some customers that have come in the whole time. Over what’s now almost 17 years, some people have moved on. Their offices changed. Just like with the staff, we have seasons of ZaZa. We’ll have people on for three to five years, then they move on. We have the same thing with regulars. Seasons of regulars. They’ll be here for a while, then move on, and life keeps going. We’re trying to be consistent through it.

Carrie (05:19): When I was first dating my husband, he worked at Paramount, so we got discounts at all three. Heavy rotation at the beginning. As far as the transition, the story of how you got to owning the restaurant is really interesting because you went from staff member to owning. Can you talk about what that was like? Or how did you come to it? Were you inspired by pizza or food?

Bryan (06:00): My love affair with restaurants and food happened at a young age. My dad was a chef, so I grew up in kitchens. He predominantly worked at a restaurant called Yonko’s Little Zagreb’s in Indianapolis, a legendary 100-year-old steakhouse. Growing up in those kitchens, it was something I was always looking for.

Bryan: I moved down to UAB to go to school. Through friends I heard about ZaZa. Went in to eat a couple times. Talked to Brian Somershield. I was just swept away with the whole process and their ethos. I was lucky enough to get a job there. I worked my way from server to front-of-house manager to begging my way into working dish. I did that for a while and worked my way up through all the restaurants.

Carrie (06:55): What was that ethos, and how much of it is carried forward?

Bryan (07:03): One of the big things for them and for us is that high level of execution while still maintaining it being casual and friendly. Putting forward food that’s the highest quality we can provide through great purveyors and good technique. Doing it at a price that gets people in all the time. Trying to be inventive and fun, and provide something a little different than what you can find anywhere else.

Carrie (07:39): One of the things I wanted to ask about was your tipping. A couple years ago you switched to tips are included. I’ve been so interested in that because it simplifies things, but you don’t see that a ton in Birmingham.

Bryan: Punch Love recently started doing it.

Carrie: That’s true. I didn’t hear that. What was the transition like? Why’d you do it?

Bryan (08:08): I was talking with the staff and with customers. We went through the pandemic. All my servers became delivery drivers. We shut down inside. We did distance outside seating for a while. During that time, people were very thankful we were there. The tips were great. As the economy pulled back and some of the assistance went away, we saw our tip averages drop dramatically.

Bryan: At the end of the day, my employees have to make a certain wage. I started asking myself, why am I asking the consumer here to essentially pay and employ my employees? I needed a solution. How can I guarantee this wage? We decided to build it all in. I saw some restaurants in Seattle that started doing this around 2018. I was like, that’s a great idea. We thought through our process and rolled it out.

Carrie (09:27): During the pandemic, everybody was thank you so much for being here. Then we got back into the world and forgot how to be in the world. We were all a little rude for a while.

Bryan (09:45): I don’t think anyone was necessarily trying to be rude. We’re all operating within what we have the ability to do. Money got a little tighter. Things got a little fuzzier. I still needed to provide that wage, so how can I do this?

Carrie (10:04): Did you get pushback at first? Has that tapered off?

Bryan (10:12): Without a doubt we had a couple very vocal customers, very vocal emails and messages. But overall, even at the very beginning, it was 99 percent positive and 1 percent upset. Now we don’t hear anything about it. Generally the only thing we hear is oh, I like this, this is nice. We pitch it as this is the European model. We build it all in. The servers are always taken care of. You don’t need to worry about it.

Carrie (10:44): From a guest perspective, you seem to have longer tenure with your staff. There’s a lot of turnover in restaurants. I came from coffee shops, same thing. But I see a lot of familiar faces at ZaZa. Is that true?

Bryan (11:06): I would say the core of our staff has been with us for five years. My chef Knowles has been with me for almost nine years. Generally, my ethos is I show care and compassion with my employees, and hopefully they extend that to the customers. I think that encourages people to stay longer.

Carrie (11:38): You guys turn tables over so quickly. I always feel like people are being cared for. That’s tough in a business like yours, where you have to turn the tables over. Efficient but also hospitable.

Bryan (12:04): Our goal is never to turn the table over. We’re not asking how quickly can we get this person in and out. There’s a nice rhythm that happens where we have enough seating that people are in and out in the time, and there’s usually space. Pre-renovation we were much smaller, and it was tougher when we had 20 seats inside. Now we’re 60 seats inside.

Carrie (12:37): How did you make the decision to renovate?

Bryan (12:41): I wouldn’t say we made the decision. I’m thankful we did it because it allowed us to expand quite a bit. Expand staffing, what we offered to the staff, everything. I was resistant at first. Our building was one of many buildings in downtown Birmingham purchased by outside investors that wanted to renovate and increase rent. It was renovate and get larger, or just pay more for what we have. It was thrust upon us, and we stepped into it.

Carrie (13:18): How long were you closed?

Bryan (13:22): We closed for roughly eight months.

Carrie (13:32): How did you and your staff make it through that time?

Bryan (13:35): We had a very small staff at that point because we were 900 square feet. We had 12. Everyone that was interested, I got jobs at other restaurants nearby: Brick & Tin, El Barrio, the restaurant Paramount opened in Five Points. Everyone was able to get something in the meantime. My whole job was focusing on the renovation. It’s a lot to cram into eight months: the design, picking materials, fleshing out all that.

Carrie (14:09): You took it seriously. You didn’t try to DIY it. The first space was a little more DIY, in a good way. Was that process something you knew from the beginning, like I’m bringing in experts?

Bryan (14:33): We worked with Orchestra Partners, the owner of the building. They had a contract with Creature Development, so we were tied through Creature for our build-out. They were really great at facilitating the design and execution. If it was purely up to me, it would have taken a lot longer to find contractors and make decisions. It was streamlined working with an all-in-one.

Carrie (15:11): And Andrew Thomson did some of your design, right? Was he through Creature or separate?

Bryan (15:17): He was a separate entity. He was a regular downtown. He was working with Lewis Communications, I believe. Now he’s doing his own thing.

Carrie: Nice. I love Andrew. I still use him all the time for designs.

Bryan: Me too. Shout out to Andrew.

Carrie: He did the original Localist and the Church Street logo.

Bryan: I love working with such passionate people. Andrew travels and constantly takes pictures of different logos and gets ideas. Anyone that’s a big nerd about what they do, I love it.

Carrie (15:51): He also did the design for Ohm Jiu Jitsu, my husband’s business. We had all our meetings at ZaZa. He’d have huge sheets of paper on the table. That’s cool about a downtown location. So many ideas are born there.

Bryan (16:15): Andrew did more for our renovation than his original scope. He really wants to focus on marketing and imagery, but I was like, buddy, I don’t know what I’m doing. You need to come in and help me. This sconce versus this sconce. How do you think about this color? I really put it to him.

Carrie (16:39): His original background is in product design, and he switched to graphic design. If you put a product in front of him, it’s virtually impossible for him not to give an opinion.

Bryan (17:16): When we opened back up, we had the benefit of most restaurants they open and say, I wish I could have worked a year here before designing. I had the benefit of seven years before we did the renovation. We brought educated ideas in about the flow. Once we expanded, I was like, I wish I could redesign it again. I had all these ideas that didn’t quite flesh out like that.

Carrie (17:48): When we opened Church Street Coffee & Books, it used to be a Starbucks, and a lot of us worked there as Starbucks. It was weird the sense memory. I hadn’t worked there in six years, but as soon as you get behind the bar, you know exactly where everything is.

Bryan (18:06): Muscle memory. Especially in a kitchen, that becomes so second nature. You’re not thinking anymore. You just flow through the space.

Carrie (18:18): Can we talk about brunch? That’s a huge thing you’re known for. It seems like a lot of logistics. People still line up? People wait for you to open. I know for a while you were selling pastries before.

Bryan (18:53): We used to. A couple of people that live downtown came in, played chess, got scones. It was a great meeting place. But post-renovation, we always have to be conscious because we have such a long line right at the open. We make sure you order before you sit down, so we can flow through people, and no one’s waiting for seats too long.

Carrie (19:19): Was that always a thing? Everybody gear up for brunch, or you’re used to it?

Bryan (19:35): We have it pretty dialed in now. One of the things that makes our brunch unique is our menu changes daily. We do Saturday and Sunday brunch. The skeleton is the same, but we optimize a lot depending on what we have.

Carrie (19:59): How do you figure that out? Is that a you thing, or with your chef?

Bryan (20:06): Whoever is running the kitchen that morning. Sometimes me, sometimes Noel, sometimes Tyler or Augie, our chefs at the restaurant right now. You come in and get a scope of the land. What do I have? You take 30 or 40 minutes, work through it, pick out your scones and put the pieces where they go.

Carrie (20:29): Is that literally done in the morning?

Bryan (20:33): Everything at ZaZa is done almost in the moment. We did a date night series for about two years, kind of as a result of the pandemic. I did a three-course meal with a wine pairing. I did more planning for that because I had to work with my wine rep Patrick to pick wines and develop food. But outside of that, when we did Friday night dinners, I would end Friday lunch service at 3, turn around from 3 to 5, and develop the whole menu, then open at 5. I really enjoy that hump of turning around and being forced into being creative.

Carrie (21:23): How do you order ingredients? Just get what’s fresh?

Bryan (21:34): We have bulk things we always carry: onions, potatoes, shallots, garlic, herbs. Then throughout the seasons, this is May, we’re ordering strawberries. Over the course of the year we’re ordering more specifics when they’re good. Then we develop from there.

Carrie (22:00): How do you get the website updated?

Bryan (22:04): It’s just me and Ashlyn with our laptops. You hop on there right when we decide it and update it.

Carrie (22:11): That’s very up to date. Usually I’ll just show up for pizza, but sometimes I check what you have today. That’s a lot to do. I don’t think most restaurants operate like that.

Bryan (22:38): Sometimes to the chagrin of my staff. They would love it a little more planned out weeks in advance. But it is a lot off the cuff.

Carrie: You’re getting ingredients in, figuring out what you’re doing, updating the boards and the online menus. That’s great.

Bryan: With our pizza program, every day we do cheese and pepperoni. Our meat and veggie change day to day. Those are only written on the board because that’s the only place we can list it. We also post on a couple online forums.

Carrie (23:21): When you took it over, was there anything you changed as far as the food, or added?

Bryan (23:47): I did start cooking under Brian for a while. Brian and Mark Christy at ZaZa were great mentors for me. The way they cooked is the way I learned to cook. That was an easier transition. When we first took over in 2015, I had a big focus on I don’t want it to change too much off the rip because people are already going to be looking for differences. How can we keep it consistent? We changed to fall season when we took over. I put a couple new dishes on. For the most part it was the hits of what we had been doing in prior falls.

Carrie (24:43): You have specials, like Olive Garden night. Do you look at those as pop-ups? You have the core and then those?

Bryan (25:01): That’s exactly it. One thing I’m very conscious of is being consistent. Our core, the thing that drives most people to come in day to day for their quick lunch break, we need to have that dialed in, repeatable, perfected. Then we need to have a little fun ourselves. We do pop-ups. Sometimes we go other places. Sometimes we do them in the restaurant. We know this day is going to be slow, we want to drive a little business, what’s a fun idea? We’ve done Olive Garden nights, Waffle House nights, other pop-ups.

Carrie (25:43): You mentioned Seattle and their tipping. Are there other places you look for inspiration?

Bryan (25:55): I’m always looking for inspiration. I have hundreds of cookbooks at home. That’s my hobby. Hey Bryan, what do you like to do? Cook, read cookbooks, talk about food. I’m always looking at different recipe books. I go on to 20 or 30 restaurants I like or admire the chefs and check out their menus. That sometimes shows through in our food, in that thirst to try something new or something I haven’t been able to do before.

Carrie (26:39): Do you have a favorite cookbook author?

Bryan (26:48): Several. For the past couple years I’ve been really into Mediterranean cooking. A lot of Yotam Ottolenghi’s books have been awesome. I enjoy the unpretentious way of his execution and the clean, clear flavors.

Carrie (27:10): Unpretentious is a really good way to describe your restaurant too. You don’t come in and feel like you don’t belong. It doesn’t feel stuffy. It’s a good entry point for people wanting to try something.

Bryan (27:36): That’s fantastic. Part of the core ethos. We want someone to come in and feel like they belong, regardless of whether they’re in a business suit or coming in after a bender on the weekend. Everyone’s welcome. They should have a good experience and feel nurtured, nourished both by the experience with the customer and with the employees and with the food.

Carrie (28:04): I’m usually there for lunch, so I don’t see the bar really active. Is it more of a coffee bar or a service station?

Bryan (28:18): We’re beer and wine only. We’re counter service. We don’t have a lot of people who come in and just have a glass of wine. We have one doctor who comes in every night and has two glasses of wine before he goes home. But for the most part it’s table service for customers eating.

Carrie (28:41): You have really good coffee. Has that been the whole time? I know you had one of the prettiest espresso machines in town, and he just retired.

Bryan (28:59): Richard. Our Victoria Arduino Venus Bar. They got him in 2009. Fantastic machine, but unfortunately it is a machine. It’s finicky. It’s an old Italian machine and nobody makes parts for it anymore. For the last 10 years I’ve been getting custom parts made. A glass sight glass broke, I went to Magic City Signs and got them to blow us a glass piece. At this point we can’t do anything more. We’ve been piecing them together for so long. It’s time for him to move on.

Carrie (29:49): The espresso machine’s name is Richard, for listeners.

Bryan (29:54): Richard is no more.

Bryan (30:06): Anything we do in the restaurant, we want to be intentional. I’m a big process guy. Coffee, even before we took over, was always an emphasis for Brian and Geoff. It’s an emphasis for us to make sure we’re putting out a quality product.

Carrie (30:20): You have a full espresso bar. You do lattes. That’s a little unusual. I always get two slices, a salad, and a nice latte. What are some of the favorites, or anything unique?

Bryan (30:48): The thing that’s most unique, we make our vanilla bean syrup. It’s probably the Nutella lattes. Adding Nutella isn’t necessarily special, but we’re one of the few people in the city doing it. It’s one of the things people come to us for. It was a quick answer to make a mocha.

Carrie (31:11): Talk some more about the food. You’re into food, you read cookbooks. I know what makes the pizza special to me, but I wouldn’t know how to describe it. What is different about the pizza?

Bryan (31:32): Let’s talk pizza right off the rip, because that’s our core. We do pizza al taglio. That’s kind of Roman by the cut pizza. Big square sheets. If you went to it in Rome, it’s the street food. You walk around and they sell it to you and cut it by weight, by the kilo. Here we pre-portion it in slices to make it easier. It’s a higher hydration dough that we proof. At this point we don’t do the most traditional al taglio. We’ve tweaked it. Trying to get that crisp bottom and airy interior. It’s kind of a mesh between pizza al taglio and focaccia at this point.

Carrie (32:19): Talk about the rest of the menu.

Bryan (32:31): Our menu is relatively dialed. We have a good spread of people ordering salads, pastas, specials. In origin, we’re trying to be a Roman trattoria. A quick-service Roman shop restaurant. I’m not Italian, and that’s not necessarily the most authentic thing to me. I like to think of it more as I’m second, third generation Italian. How would I cook here in Alabama with our ingredients?

Carrie (33:11): I feel like that goes with using the freshest ingredients and creating in the moment. I’ve mentioned that you bought from those guys. Why were they selling? Or did you come to them with an offer?

Bryan (33:36): Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: It was doing well. It was becoming a little institution.

Bryan (33:43): Almost six years open at that point.

Carrie (33:45): It’s also convenient to Paramount. I do love that this still happens a little bit, where somebody’s out of something and you see somebody running from Paramount or Brick & Tin bringing eggs back and forth. You guys genuinely are a community.

Bryan (34:11): I started working for Brian and Geoff in 2010. I worked for them up until 2015. I was at El Barrio for two years prior to that. My business partner Erica was the front-of-house manager at ZaZa at the time. We were talking, hey, we’ve been doing this for a while. What’s maybe our next step? We were developing an idea for a ramen restaurant. This is 2014. I was picking Brian’s brain about things. He has a great mind for restaurants and business. Neville down at El Barrio too. I was picking their brains. In that process, Brian got the idea and approached us. He said, why don’t you buy ZaZa?

Carrie (35:10): Yeah.

Bryan (35:11): I said absolutely. I know this place. I know its past customers in the door, which is always a big worry. It’s already a hit. I’ve loved the cuisine and the experience. Let’s make that happen.

Carrie (35:25): That’s really cool. As a manager, I love talking to people about what they’re interested in. Those guys invest in people and ask what are you interested in, what do you want to do. That helps me so much. Even doing a totally different business now, working at a tech company, knowing this person is interested in this or that. A few months later, we have an opening now, I know somebody who can. It works on both sides. I don’t have to onboard somebody, and you’re giving somebody opportunity.

Bryan (36:25): Absolutely. It’s part of getting to know your people around you, your little community, having authentic connections, which leads to great things.

Carrie (36:37): If they hadn’t been open enough for you to be talking about it. Some people are so protective of their business that they’re like, don’t start any other restaurants because we’re the only restaurant. If they had been like that, you wouldn’t have been able to have those conversations. And it worked for them in some way too.

Bryan (36:56): Absolutely. It took one thing off their board. They got a little check. I hope they feel that way too.

Carrie (37:03): You still have a good relationship?

Bryan (37:07): I talk to Brian almost every day. Geoff all the time as well. They’re great.

Carrie (37:11): Does that feel more like a friendship now, or a mentorship, or a mix?

Bryan (37:17): A mix of both. Maybe a little more friendship at this point, but Brian’s been doing it much longer. I’ve been doing it for 11 years. He’s always a great mind to bounce off of. You mentioned running to Brick & Tin, or Helen, or anyone in our little community. There’s great ideas, great passionate people. Bouncing off with any of them is great.

Carrie (37:48): Restaurants are a business where people have the dream of starting them. Coffee shops are the same. People are always telling you what you should do. First year, I was probably just irritated by it. I finally realized they’re just dreaming. I don’t have to tell them why that’s a bad idea. I can just say, oh cool, sounds like a fantastic dream.

Bryan (38:14): They’ll probably develop as they think more about it. They’ll figure some of those things out. That positive sounding board.

Carrie (38:20): If somebody says, this is what I want to do. Is working in a restaurant the place to start? Where would they develop this?

Bryan (38:32): If working in a restaurant is the way they want to work, if they like food service, if they like hospitality specifically, you’re driven by taking care of guests and welcoming them in. The way to do it is to jump in. I was interested in it from a very young age. I was working at coffee shops before ZaZa. I really wanted to get into food service specifically. I just had to jump in and do it.

Carrie (39:02): I like what you said about caring about people, because you said this throughout. Your guests and your staff. That’s a big part of successful restaurants that people sometimes forget. You have to like hospitality, which is a different thing than just liking food.

Bryan (39:30): I hope you like hospitality. What we’re doing is making food and nourishing people. But at the end of the day, we’re not there unless customers are coming in. We got to provide that experience that feels good to them and helps lift them up throughout their day. I’m hoping that this visit to ZaZa, maybe their day’s a little brighter afterwards.

Carrie (39:57): It always does that for me, so you’re killing it. If people want to experience ZaZa, is it just come and eat? Where should they start? Lunch, dinner, brunch?

Bryan (40:17): Doesn’t matter. Come on down. Anywhere you are. Fancy night out or slumming it by yourself. Seven days a week. You can’t go wrong. Anytime you’re gonna find a unique offering for you.

Carrie (40:29): Thank you so much for coming on.

Bryan (40:32): Thank you.

Carrie: It was fun to actually talk while you’re not making food.

Carrie: The Localist is written and produced by me, Carrie Rollwagen. Our showrunner is Taylor Davis. Our outreach manager is Hannah Craigen. Our engineer in the studio with us today is Paul Bryant. We record right here at Infomedia Studios. Thank you to Infomedia for sponsoring the podcast and making everything we do here possible. Until next time, whether you own a local business or you’re buying from a local business, thank you for everything you do to make our community stronger every day. of this Localist Lab episode with Matt Robinson of Uptick Marketing. This transcript is provided for accessibility and SEO.

Carrie (00:13): Hi, I’m Carrie Rollwagen, host of The Localist. What you’re about to hear is a live recording from one of our Localist Lab events. This is when we bring in experts to talk about practical insights on marketing for small businesses. This session was recorded in front of a live audience, so you may hear some room noise and shuffling during the Q and A, but hopefully that just makes you feel more like you’re actually there. For more background on the speaker, or to view slides from the event, check out our show notes, or grab a ticket there to our next event. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Carrie: Good morning, thank you for being here. My name is Carrie Rollwagen. I am the author of The Localist book and host of The Localist podcast. On The Localist podcast, we bring in small business owners from around Birmingham to talk about how they built their business, what has gone wrong, what’s gone right, and what they want to know about today. If you’re interested in that, either because you want to know more about small businesses in Birmingham, or you run a small business and want to hear what other people are going through, follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. We’re also on YouTube.

Carrie: For example, we just had George on the podcast. He owns Uncle G’s, and he owns a pizza truck. I thought we would talk about pizza, but I said, what do you want to talk about today, and he said, AI. That was a pivot, but not really, because so many small business owners are asking, how do I use AI? Those are the kinds of things we talk about on the podcast, and here at the lab we dig deeper into those things. Questions we hear from you, if you’re a client of Infomedia or Uptick or Tempo, we try to answer in the lab. Or things that come up when I interview business owners, we bring in experts here to talk about.

Carrie: The Localist has been a passion project of mine for more than a decade, probably a weird amount of time. Now I work with Infomedia, which is a digital strategy company, and Uptick Marketing, our sister company, and Tempo, another sister company. I’m meeting every day with experts who are answering the same questions business owners are asking. Some of those business owners are our clients, and some aren’t. We wanted to start this series to bring in those experts and open up that information.

Carrie: Today we are going to have Matt Robinson. Matt is from Uptick Marketing. He is their Director of Advertising and Analytics. He also works with AMA Birmingham and does a lot of other stuff. He has a little sticker pack over there. So stop by his table and get one. But I love talking to Matt about digital ads. He’s done this for a long time. He knows what’s going on in the industry and he explains it really well. I actually go to him when I have questions about my business. So I wanted to bring him on to share those things with you. Matt is here to talk about what’s really going on with your digital ads and how to fix it.

Matt (03:43): Hello everyone. Can you hear me okay? I have trouble speaking into microphones. I hear I might yell in them too often. Let’s get started. First, we have a couple of sponsors that Carrie mentioned. I do think we should talk about just for half a second the Lavoy family of companies of Infomedia, Uptick, Infomedia Studios and Tempo. We do web development, digital marketing, photography, video, quick websites, big websites. If you’re a huge bank and need a great website for a big infrastructure, we can take care of that through Infomedia. Tempo does quick websites for small companies. Uptick handles digital marketing strategy and tactics. Across these companies, we can be your one-stop shop for digital and web strategies. Also thanks to Lady Bird Taco. Everybody loves a Lady Bird Taco.

Matt: Today we’re going to talk about what’s really going on with your digital ads and how to fix it. My name is Matt Robinson. I am uniquely able to describe this because I do it every day. I work in digital advertising during the day, and I work in digital advertising during the night. I’m also President of AMA Birmingham right now, so I do a lot of research with them and talk about this stuff with other professional people across the country. I’m not necessarily an expert, but I have the ability to talk on this because I’m in it all the time. This is real real life stuff.

Matt: How I became a marketer. I have a communications degree from the University of Alabama. I majored in advertising and public relations. I graduated in 2008. If anybody was around here in 2008, it was a tough time to get a job. Worked in restaurants. I bummed around. Lived in cool places. That’s a train in a cruise ship. I lived in Alaska and worked for a train company. That was cool. I became a graphic designer at a local print shop. I had worked at print shops almost my whole life. I’m not a good graphic designer, but I am a graphic designer. I moved into backend type stuff called advertising operations. I started working with digital publishers like Gatehouse and Gannett, huge newspaper companies. I’ve worked for over 150 newspapers through those two companies. Then I worked for Bassmaster.com doing video and display advertising. I’ve been at Uptick for about five and a half years now, running Google Ads, Meta Ads and handling our analytics stack.

Matt (05:00): Why does it feel so broken? If you do this stuff day to day, if you’re a small business running your own ads, you probably feel it because it is kind of broken. It feels broken because it is. Here’s four things that are really stacking against each other. You’re spending the same as you always have, but getting less in return. The platforms have changed, and because of that, the rules have changed. Tracking is about as crazy as it’s ever been. And you might be getting bad advice.

Matt: When I say you may be spending the same but getting less. Several years ago, Google Ads was kind of a race to the bottom. You were always looking for cheaper cost per clicks, cheaper metrics. You could put together hacks to get those. In 2026, cost per click is more of a quality signal. A more expensive cost per click means the quality of that click means more. Google values that person more to your business than it would a 50 cent click.

Matt (06:00): There’s a difference between minimizing your cost per click from $50 to 50 cents. A $10 click is going to come from somebody who really wants what you sell. A 50 cent click probably came from my child watching something on YouTube. Chasing cheap clicks is just chasing cheap customers, chasing spam. The platforms know quality now. Because of inflation, and because more competition is entering into the same amount of audience, the platforms know quality, and they can raise those prices. They know who’s going to buy from you. That’s what people mean by algorithms. They know who will click on an ad next. So clicks, conversions, costs — those are quality signals.

Matt: The more that click costs, the better that person is to acquire. And everybody’s trying to acquire that customer, not just you. That’s why it costs more. Did I mention it costs more because of inflation? So when I say you’re spending the same amount and not getting the same results, that’s one of the biggest reasons. The cost for people’s attention is more than it was even six months ago.

Matt (09:00): What does this look like in your accounts? You’ll see broad keywords in your accounts, things that don’t necessarily relate to your business. Let’s say you’re selling Montessori toys, wooden toys, and your search terms are showing up for baby jumper. That’s not the same thing. It is a toy. It is adjacent. But a Montessori toy click is going to be $15, and a baby jumper click is going to be $1. Specific expensive keywords like wooden Montessori toy lead to more expensive clicks and fewer clicks. Those are real buyers. Those are the people that know what they want right then.

Matt: You also see specific keywords that aren’t getting clicked on a lot, but are the drivers of your real conversions. The stuff that is actually turning into business. You might see really low cost per clicks with low conversion rates. That’s because you’re just not paying enough. The cost per click isn’t high enough to get into that same competition. If you’re not ready to bid as much as your competitors, you’re stuck in lower auctions with people looking for baby jumpers.

Matt (11:55): In Meta Ads, honestly, you see this all the time now. Your Meta Ads are stuck in learning, learning limited. It gives you all sorts of errors. Add more ads, do this, do that. Your Meta Ads are consistently stuck in learning. That means you’re not getting enough results for those algorithms to optimize toward. It’s a cost problem. It’s not spending enough to get enough data to run properly.

Matt (13:00): You don’t necessarily want to cut your budgets, because everything costs more. Why would you cut your budgets if everything costs more? It’s like me going to the grocery store and saying, last year I was spending $200 on groceries. I’m going to spend $100 this year and expect to get more than I did last year. That’s not going to happen. But maybe I could redirect it to better things I could buy. Maybe I could buy in bulk. Don’t cut your budgets. Redirect them to higher intent audiences.

Matt (14:00): Here’s what that looks like in search. Somebody searches for lawn mower. That’s a really broad search. Let’s say you’re a company that does lawn mower repair in Birmingham, right down the street here in Avondale. You’re running ads. You start getting clicks on people just searching for lawn mower. Lots of clicks. 50 cent click. I’m getting tons of website traffic. Great CTR. Those people are looking for lawn mowers. They could be my kid interested in lawn mowers. You don’t know who those people are. Those are the broad curious searchers.

Matt: Lawn mower repair. A little more specific. Cost per click goes up a little bit. Might get a couple more buyers. But people could be looking up how do I fix my lawn mower. Once you get more specific, that’s when it gets more expensive. Lawn mower repair near me. That person’s ready to buy. They’re in Avondale. They have a broken lawn mower. It’s hot. They want to fix it today so they can finish cutting their grass. Google knows that person wants that thing at that moment. Not just from the way they search. From the fact that they’re involved in that entire Google sphere. Lots of signals associated with them.

Matt (15:47): So you think, duh, I want to target lawn mower repair near me, not lawn mower. But that process actually takes time. That’s the way Google Ads works. Letting it have time to figure out what works and what doesn’t work. Letting it breathe. It’s a phased approach. Higher intent searches turn into more conversions. Less traffic turns into more conversions. Everything in digital advertising takes time. Or money.

Matt (16:30): Here’s part of that rules have changed piece. Your website matters just as much as your ads do. If you’re running hundreds of dollars a day on Facebook ads and your website stinks, that’s a waste of money. Your competition is spending $100 a day and does have a good website. Your website matters because it’s becoming much more of a data source. Not just for ChatGPT and Gemini. Your website is a data source for Google Ads and Facebook Ads too.

Matt: Google is scraping this to know. Is it up to date? Is this good content? Is this content associated with the ad the person clicked on? Google doesn’t want to serve an ad that somebody clicks on and doesn’t convert. Google is in the business of making money. They want to charge as much as they can for that click. You will buy that click if it converts. Google is looking at your website saying, hey, is this website better than the other one? It’s going to deliver the most relevant, best ad and website combination to the person searching.

Matt (18:00): AI Max, Performance Max and Advantage Plus. These are ad types in Google Ads and Facebook Ads. They are starting to decide more and more what your targeting is and what your ad creative looks like. It’s basically just an AI thing. It scans your website and uses your website as the targeting, the ad, your messaging, your click-through. It’s trying to put people like me out of business, but it doesn’t work. I mean, it works great.

Matt (19:52): You need somebody like me to drive it, or it’s just going to completely plummet into the ground. If you have a bad website and you start running an AI Max campaign, you’re going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on baby jumper when you’re trying to sell a baby car. Is your website slow and outdated? Site score speed is one of the biggest things Google and Facebook care about. These things go into the bidding algorithm. If your website stinks and somebody else’s doesn’t, they’re going to win that click. Your website has to seal the deal. I can get people to click on your ad and get to your website, but is your website going to convince them?

Matt: AI Max crawls your page, expands your headlines, and matches beyond just your keywords. If I’m searching for lawn mower, AI Max might match to weed eater. That could be because the person searching for weed eater actually meant they needed a lawn mower. Maybe they’re searching for a weed eater because they want a cheap weed eater because they actually need lawn mower repair. I’m not kidding. That is actually how AI Max in Google Ads is starting to work. That’s why you see weird things show up in your search terms.

Matt: Performance Max is the opposite. There’s no keyword targeting at all. It uses your website as the main signal to drive everything. It uses your website to source a lot of the ad creative and messaging. When people click on my ad, I want to make sure that lines up with the message on the website. That’s going to help bring your costs down. Advantage Plus is a Meta Ads product that’s about the same. Meta calls a lot of things Advantage Plus now. It scans your website and creates audiences. It doesn’t even show you it’s doing this. Weak pages mean weak targeting.

Matt (22:00): A lot of this is an easy fix. It’s easier to do things these days for certain reasons. You can say this is what I want on my website. Sometimes it’s easier to filter that through a ChatGPT or a Gemini to put it into your vendor’s language. I want my website to do this turns into I want my website to have a clear headline.

Matt: Does your website load fast? Does it have a clear headline? And is there an obvious next step? Laine White over here spoke recently. I work with her at Uptick Marketing. She has a three-step process. Run everything through that filter and that’ll fix almost all your marketing problems on your website. Make sure your stuff’s loading fast. A fresh coat of paint can make you look like a market leader overnight. We took on a client last year who had just put out a new website. It was a good-looking website. Over the year they iterated on what was working and what wasn’t. Recently they pushed out a great update of all these great visuals. They found out what products people wanted to see most, what pages people were visiting most, and put those things in strategic places where it was visually appealing. That fresh coat of paint really made them look bigger and like a market leader.

Matt: All these things are good content for the machines. This content is also good for large language models being able to relate back to your website. People say, how do I show up in ChatGPT? Be clear about what you do, how you help people. Reviews help. But just be very clear on your website.

Matt (27:28): Here’s the lawn mower repair site again. If I was using a Performance Max or AI Max, that would automatically create an ad out of this. This is the top of my website. It tells everything that needs to be told. What I do, how I do it, what you can do, reviews, where I do it. Fast loading. Clear headline. Obvious next step. Services. Repairs we handle. That’ll get picked up in Performance Max and AI Max searches because you might search for my lawn mower won’t start. This company has a tab right here. Your lawn mower won’t start. Do you need your carburetor cleaned? So you can actually use these AI Max and Performance Max tools on this website because it’s very well structured. The machines can say, I know what this person does. They offer push mower repair. They also can change your oil. Just be clear. You don’t want an ad that says you do carburetor cleaning for lawn mowers, but it’s not reflected on your website.

Matt (28:00): Here’s another part of the platform change. Previously, we used to talk about Facebook ads with problem, message, answer. You don’t want to put paid media behind why you exist as a company. Guess what? Facebook says otherwise. Facebook wants you to create this whole story of ads for people on their platforms to understand you and trust you more. It actually works. It’s just a mindset change from what you used to do, which was put an ad up, expect clicks. This is why you see a lot of business owners and founders becoming influencers. They’re on camera all the time. That’s what Facebook wants.

Matt (30:00): Here are a bunch of ad types Facebook wants. Us versus them. You don’t have to mention your competitor by name. Just what we do differently than other people. Face to camera. Hey Birmingham. Product demo where somebody shows you what it is. Feature benefit — that’s an old one everybody should have always been using. Testimonials. Meta Ads wants more testimonials. They want your customers telling other customers you’re good to buy from. Web experience. This is an ad that would show what you do next. If you go to my website, here’s what it looks like. Positioning tests. Founder story. Facebook wants a whole host of ads. They want 20 plus a month. They want to tell a story compelling enough for customers to buy from you. Test them. Some won’t work for your business. You can tell very quickly. Facebook just won’t serve the ad.

Matt (32:30): Here’s another big thing and why it feels broken. Tracking is broken and it’s just getting worse. We’re still being tracked. I have a phone in my pocket, it’s tracking me. We’re all location targeted. We all have email addresses. Yeah, we’re being tracked. But not as much by advertising platforms as we used to. And as much as they probably are tracking us, they’re not letting people like me and you in on that black box anymore.

Matt: iOS changed several years back and really killed Meta Ads. There’s cookie deprecation. There’s consent pop-ups. Do you accept cookies? If you click no, I can’t track that click back to your ad. If you go in and buy $10,000 of merchandise from me after clicking no, that is unattributed. So you say my ads don’t work, but really your ads work. Your consent pop-up also works. There are different laws per state and region and country.

Matt (35:30): Tracking is slowly getting worse. In 2016, you used to be able to spend $100 on Facebook ads and make $1,000, and you could look at it and go, boom, I’m targeting these people. It’s not like that anymore. It’s much more advanced. Facebook has caught up too and knows how to make money off of it. They’re asking us to make 50 ads. It’s tough to know which ad caused which sale these days.

Matt: The platforms are reporting numbers. They’re not always real measurements. They’re modeled behavior. Everybody who is used to seeing I spent $1 and made $2, we can still look at that. But it’s important to think directionally. If your sessions and visitors are down over the year, if you dig into it, your sales might actually be up. Start thinking directionally. Your platforms are reporting different numbers because it’s not being tracked, not because you’re getting less of it. You are getting less of it because of Google Gemini and ChatGPT, but it also looks like you’re getting less because of tracking. Think of things like signals. Not exact dollar amounts, not exact people, not exact numbers.

Matt (37:30): There’s an elephant in the room. I mentioned earlier you might be getting bad advice. You might be listening to ChatGPT, Gemini, any large language model too much. I use Claude every day. I use ChatGPT every day. I use them for all sorts of stuff. But I also vet what it tells me. One of the things I see a lot is it will give you generic best practices. It will give you advice like you’re a billion-dollar company trying to spend a billion dollars. Of course it’s going to pitch you the best SEO plan ever, and make it sound like it’s the best. This is exactly what you should do. This is how it’s going to work. But is it actually going to be good within your margins?

Matt (39:42): Is it going to be good within what you do and your ability to do it? It can give you a giant list of stuff. What on that list is what’s going to actually work? Make sure you’re curating and vetting the advice. It’s going to give you really confident answers. Use your own personal context with those confident answers. I have taken these confident answers as advice and it was bad advice. You have to use that human context layer. As you use more of it, it’s harder to use that human context layer. Keep exercising that muscle. If not, you end up with a lot of yeses and not enough nos. You’re just saying yeah let’s do that, yeah let’s do that. As opposed to, well, this looks good, but my margins on this product aren’t great for me to build out 15 web pages or spend $15,000 a month on this. Use your best judgment. You know your business better.

Matt: Here’s a better way to get advice. Did you tell it your budget and your goals? Did you tell it what’s worked before and what hasn’t worked before? Because it might tell you what to do, and it’s like, well, we tried that for the past four years and it hasn’t worked. Did it push back on anything at all? One thing I always try to prompt on is, if this doesn’t make sense, or if you have a better idea, let’s do that. Ask me questions before we move forward. Why did you do this? Did you push back on anything, or did it push back on anything? Because maybe you’ve just got a yes man. Maybe that’s what you want. Maybe not.

Matt: Here’s a big one. It’s going to give you a really long list of stuff to do. Should you do all of that list? Should you make all those changes at once, or are you going to vet those changes one by one? If you make 10 changes at once, it’s going to be hard to see what change made a difference. Try to solicit better advice from it.

Matt (43:00): The one thing I want everybody to walk away with is to start thinking directionally. Numbers are numbers. Numbers belong in your QuickBooks and CRM. Numbers are in your ads. But let’s think directionally: up, down, uptick, up, down. That’s the way you want to think when you look at your analytics.

Matt (43:31): The main takeaways otherwise. This stuff’s getting expensive. It’s not for the faint of heart. Sometimes you see stuff and you’re like, whew, that’s tough. I spent $50 on that. You can’t think like that. You didn’t spend $50 on that. You were going to spend $1,000 on two customers. You didn’t spend $50 on one keyword. That’s a directional type of thinking. Filtering your AI advice. That’s a no-brainer. It thinks it knows and it’s going to tell you it knows these things. Make sure you’re filtering it. I use several Google Ads Guru type frameworks that are loaded into my ChatGPTs and Claudes to prompt things so it isn’t just Claude or myself. It’s going through a certain framework, checking certain things, as opposed to just what Claude thinks it needs to do.

Matt: Another big thing. Your website is a data source. Treat it as such. Keep it updated. Make sure the stuff is right. If you want to show up for informational terms, that’s okay, but make sure your website is also talking to the person that is your customer, your perfect client.

Matt: You can download some takeaways from that QR code over there. It’s going to ask you for your email address. I promise I won’t email you that much. Over here is Carrie’s Localist Lab. Forgive me, Carrie. This is for an email newsletter subscription. She will also email you. Thank you everyone.

Carrie (45:59): Yeah, I’ll email you once a week. Matt will email you possibly in November. We actually talked before and decided we weren’t going to leave a ton of room for questions because so many ad questions are really specific to your business. But we’ll do a little lightning round. If you have a quick question, now’s the time.

Matt (46:20): I’m also pretty long-winded. We went until right at 11:01 a.m. as well.

Carrie (46:26): Also I know there’s a ton of, we’ve gotten so many questions about this, and this isn’t something I have a ton of experience in. So I really did want Matt to drill down into a lot of the specifics. I think there are some really good takeaways for small businesses. Even tracking. The smaller your business is, especially if you’re a B2C business, you can talk to your customers. A lot of times they’ll mention what they saw. You just have less data coming in. You can see, I started ads and I started selling stuff. To some extent you’re like, okay, it’s probably working. We have a little more data than an Amazon would have in a different way. I mean, they have a lot of data. We have a different kind of data. We have a more one-on-one kind of thing.

Carrie: All right. I think we covered a lot. Thank you, Matt. If you want to get specific information for your business, you can work with Matt and his team at Uptick Marketing. Find Matt after and he’ll help you get connected there. Thank you for coming. This talk is going to be available on The Localist podcast. This is one of our podcasts in the studio. If you’re interested in shooting in the studio, you can talk to me after, and you can shoot at Infomedia Studio.

Carrie: We have a video of this event and any events we did in the past. It’ll run on The Localist in a couple of weeks, and it’ll also be at infomedia.com/events. You can sign up for future events there and see the ones from the past. Next month’s event, I’m going to be speaking. The topic is: if you can write instructions, you can build an AI skill. Here’s how. This is going to be a really practical talk because at Infomedia we are all sick of going to AI talks that are just, this is AI, it might be bad, it might be even worse. We all know that. We actually need to know how to use it. That’s what this is going to be about. It’s going to be about how I think this is less of a tech platform and more like, if you can delegate at work and write instructions, you can build this kind of stuff really easily. And we’re going to walk through how. I hope you’ll come. Third Thursday of the month, right back here. Thank you for coming.

Carrie: Thank you so much for listening to this Localist Lab session. If you’d like tickets to the event, check out the show notes. The tickets are free, and we would love to see you there. And as always, whether you’re buying from a local business or running one, remember that what you do makes our community stronger every day.