The Hyperlocal Content Gap Franchise Brands Ignore

0:00Andres Figueira:How you came to create the Candid Collective and what it is in your own words as well.

0:05Matthew Cancino:We work a lot in the franchise industry and with multi-location brands to execute hyperlocal strategies.

0:12Andres Figueira:Do your clients belong to a certain type of industry? Have you noticed a certain pattern with the people that you work with?

0:19Matthew Cancino:In today's age, you need to be able to meet your customers where they're at. It really just depends on what you're trying to do, who you're trying to get the word out to, and your business.

0:33Andres Figueira:Hey guys, welcome to the show. This is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, helping fast-growing teams hire exceptional remote talent from Argentina, South Africa, and beyond. We connect companies with world-class professionals who bring skill, reliability, and a global perspective to every role. And just for our listeners today, we're offering an exclusive 10 % discount on your first hire. So all you need to do is visit GlobalTalent.co, click Start Hiring, and mention the podcast listener discount when we reach out. And with me here today, I am speaking with Matthew Cancino, founder of The Candid Collective, a company that's crafting authentic local first video content that connects and then helps its clients distribute it.

1:18Andres Figueira:So, Matthew, it's a pleasure to have you on the show, man. How are you doing?

1:22Matthew Cancino:Pleasure to be here, brother. Thanks so much for the invite and the awesome introduction. It's pretty spot on. Probably better than I could have probably said it myself. So really grateful to be here.

1:34Andres Figueira:Now, we're also very happy that you were able to come on the episode, bro, and really excited to learn about all you have done with the Candid Collective. And with that said, in order to give the audience a bit more context, Matthew, would you be able to tell us maybe how you came to create the Candid Collective and what it is in your own words as well.

1:53Matthew Cancino:First of all, I think it's important to understand that we're still a young brand. So we started about two years ago now, and of which the first year I actually started it while I had a full-time job, which is non-traditional. A lot of entrepreneurs like, oh, quit your job and go all in, which I agree with. But also the first year in business is one of the hardest times for a lot of businesses. so a lot of people will quit or you're in business to make money so your first year in business you're they say you don't make money but you actually do make money but what happens is you take that money and then you use that money on personal stuff and then you're not left with a business anyway so one out of the two years i still had a full-time income i was on the leadership team of a larger marketing agency called bright pink and we were servicing multi-location franchise brands, building WordPress multi-sites for them.

2:50Matthew Cancino:So I was consulting with them and helping these franchise brands really service their local franchisees. And I noticed kind of a gap in the market where we weren't providing local content for our clients. And the reason that we weren't is because it's hard to scale. So imagine you have a business, you have a location in San Francisco, You have a location in Miami and you need a local, just a picture even of the front store somewhere. But your entire team is in is in one of the two cities. So I thought in my head, what if we could create an app that essentially would be almost like an Uber, but for the thousand dollar phone in everybody's pocket.

3:34Matthew Cancino:Right. And we could pay like people$50 an hour to go out, get like UGC content of these local areas. And then we could use that content to better serve our clients. So that was the original idea. And we actually started to invest a bunch of money into developing that when we first started out and we failed. But six, seven months into it, what we had was a team of awesome people all over the globe that were helping us and and helping us become essentially. we looked at what we had and we're like, we're going to stop developing and we're going to focus

4:06Andres Figueira:on solving the problem in a more internal way.

4:10Matthew Cancino:And then we'll go back to the tech thing later on, but let's really serve our clients. Let's get a really good offer going. Let's get a really good company and a really good brand because I'm really big on branding. And then I found out I was having a baby and instead of, so I was at a crossroads then. And instead of taking the safe route, I decided to quit my job and just go all in on Candid. That's a little bit of the origin story there.

4:34Andres Figueira:Oh, my goodness, man. And that was brave of you. And thank goodness it came out right and it was the correct decision. How long since that happened, man?

4:43Matthew Cancino:Yeah, so that was about a year ago. We've been about two years, two years in. A year in, we were developing that tech. We were figuring a lot of stuff out. And I was doing it because I'm always respectful of whatever it is that I'm doing, right? So I was literally doing this like after work, like second job, weekends, that kind of stuff. And then I was burning myself out and the baby was going to be here. So I made the decision to say that my baby is never going to be the reason that I didn't chase my dreams. You know, that dad didn't chase his dreams. So I was like, I'm going to take the I'm going to take a harder road here and I'm going to take a chance on myself and on what we've built so far.

5:22Matthew Cancino:and we've been growing ever since and figuring it out.

5:26Andres Figueira:But I do understand what you mean and that at the beginning you were like juggling your main job and pursuing this as a side hustle because you got to make ends meet at the end of the day. But I do get that when push came to shove, you must also have thought it would be better to create my own empire than live in a relationship of dependency with another company. If I'm going to have a daughter and a family and whatever else comes in the future, it's cool to also have your own thing. And my question is, Matt, I noticed then that the Candid Collective grew from a point of friction that you noticed that wasn't actually being helped or worked on for companies.

6:00Andres Figueira:And do you just work with companies inside the United States or are you able to record local content in other countries?

6:08Matthew Cancino:It's an interesting question. I could probably apply the same fundamentals of how we scale local content in the States to another country. so I do have editors and team members outside the states and we function very well just with them editing and stuff so it would only be like a little bit different mindset to fulfill on the service but I don't know if I would be comfortable doing it so I wouldn't like one of the I wouldn't even know how to invoice out of the states right now and I think that's one thing like I don't for anybody listening when you start a business that's something that you got to figure out how are you going to get paid you know who teaches you that right like how do you know how to send an invoice right and then it's like you you google it and you stumble upon these canva invoices or templates but that's just a picture that doesn't actually run a credit card number maybe for cash it's okay But what's the underlying foundational stuff for your business that's going to keep you like, so when you're thinking about scaling, especially into a new market, you have to understand how are you going to get paid?

7:22Matthew Cancino:Where are you going to get your customers? Assuming you've got a customer and that's why you're trying to solve the problem, how are you going to pay the person shooting the content?

7:29Andres Figueira:So that's another thing.

7:31Matthew Cancino:Yeah, but if the client is large enough, if the deal is right, we'll figure it out 100%. It's the same thing. If it's in South America, se habla espanol.

7:45Andres Figueira:Si hablamos, si hablamos. And Matt, another question I have is, do your clients belong to a certain type of industry? Have you noticed a certain pattern with the people that you work with? or is it just like more of a random people that just clients that come and you serve them as they come?

8:03Matthew Cancino:Yeah. So we work a lot in the franchise industry and with multi-location brands. So we also work very nicely with larger agencies like the Ogilvy's of the world and stuff like that to provide video underneath larger campaigns like that. But because that doesn't really mean anything franchising and multi-location so pretty much everybody knows mcdonald's right mcdonald's is a franchise and they have thousands of locations so everyone a lot of those locations are owned in at an individual level not necessarily by corporate so we work both with the corporate brand and then we also work with the local individual owners to execute hyper local strategies or execute national strategies that have local intent, right?

8:55Matthew Cancino:Or regional intent. So now you can think McDonald's in Super Bowl weekend, right? Probably investing millions of dollars on a national campaign. That's a national need. But let's say they wanted to target, I don't know, a regional ad that they wanted to do. They're going to need regional footage to resonate with that audience specifically or state or city. It just depends on what that is. And then when you get down all the way to like the local, that marketing is ran by that individual owner. So that's what I mean with franchise marketing and how we fit into that world. Multilocation is just the same thing, except maybe it's not owned individually.

9:42Matthew Cancino:Maybe it's owned by a private equity group or maybe it's owned by just an entrepreneur who grew their business to 12 locations. So we work with a window washing brand here in Florida. And they've grown to four locations now. And that would be an example of a multi-location client that we have. So each of those cities that they operate in, we need to create essentially a digital footprint for each of those cities.

10:11Andres Figueira:Based on the customs, the people and what you know is locally accepted and liked. So that way it's a more customized ad style, for example.

10:22Matthew Cancino:So like these multi-location businesses, right? It could be one brand that services multiple cities. You still need to have that footprint to serve your customers locally, especially service-based businesses. e-commerce, that kind of stuff, where you're shipping stuff out. Maybe it's not as hyperlocal, but in today's age, you need to be able to meet your customers where they're at.

10:49Andres Figueira:I had never thought about hyperlocality in terms of how you are implementing it, man, but I do see the value in what you're bringing to the table and how that really helps out a company that might not have this process as thought out as your agency already has. So it's a lot easier to just delegate and let the people who know how to do it just do it for you. We work with

11:10Matthew Cancino:a mold brand out of California and they probably started out with 12 locations. They've tripled that since then into different cities, into different, they've tripled their footprint. These people get thousands of clicks organically just because each of those cities is serving pages that are local for each of those things. So hyper-local digital marketing is super, super important, both on the video side, because yes, we're video experts. I can scale video, but also just your website in general, right? This is how the largest, like the McDonald's of the world, like the largest companies in the world, they already know this and they're already doing it.

11:51Matthew Cancino:So it's just the way that you have to serve your customers.

11:54Andres Figueira:Okay, okay. And Matt, another question I have is then, you also like you you take care of the creative aspect the creation of the style of the ad the recording of it and then the distribution and do you have to then follow certain guidelines by the companies or do they just give you like free reign to do a campaign that you feel is fit so i think

12:14Matthew Cancino:the short answer to that is it depends that's the honest right it just it depends on the client but in my experience every brand operates just a little bit differently every company operates a little bit differently. Every single business owner has a different way that they run their business and that's okay. So oftentimes we have to meet them where they're at. Some business owners don't have, they don't even like have more than one Google business profile for their business. So if that's not in place to do a lot of these strategies, you need to multiply that. And then we can look at your website and then we can say, okay, where's most of your money coming from?

12:52Matthew Cancino:where should we really get some of that hyper local content. But a lot of it is we treat everything. I like to think of like foundations, like building a house. Right. So you want to build the foundation first really strong. And depending on where you're building, that foundation might look completely different. Your digital footprint needs a solid foundation and that foundation might look a little bit different for your business. Right. Do you have a retail space? Do you have a store where people come in, right? That's a different type of business than let's say our business in the digital space where we can operate anywhere.

13:25Matthew Cancino:So all we need is service areas. There's always distinctions to be had. It really just depends on what you're trying to do, who you're trying to get the word out to and your business.

13:37Andres Figueira:And Matt, with this endeavor that you have, how many people do you have helping you out? Like how big is your team?

13:45Matthew Cancino:Yeah, so right now we have about 12 people on our team.

13:48Andres Figueira:And this is like the main team for the Candid Collective. And it includes also the videographers that help you.

13:55Matthew Cancino:No, so we'll scale videographers up and down as we need. So there are videographers in that team. There's probably like three or four, but they're mostly in Florida. We're happy to fly them out anywhere. It just depends on the project, the size of it, and the length of it and the scope. Like I said a little earlier, we will actively scale the team up or scale it up realistically, depending on the project. So let's say we had a client that we were going to be working with for six months in the Midwest. It's not going to make sense for me to fly out videographers every single month. So in that case, one of the reasons I'm so big on brand and transparency is because it helps to attract other professionals and say, hey, like, this is our clients.

14:44Matthew Cancino:This is who we work with. This is what we're doing. We need help with this. And just very transparently, this is our budget. And then it's a yes or no. We're happy to collab. I don't need to white label your service. I don't need you to pretend that, you know, you're part of the candid collective. unless you're going to do lots of work with us great and you want to do that but i want the people that we work with it the re so we rebranded i would say about a about a year ago from candid socials which was that original app idea to candid collective because we're really more of a collection of creatives that's what we are so like that rebranding served to help push that story forward and help us attract talent as we need it and just help with transparency all the way through which by the way is nothing necessarily new in the agency space right so like some of our biggest clients is because we've worked underneath larger giants like ogilvy so we did a video shoot for dove technically like dove wow hair brand in this day i don't know if they're in that jantina yeah