Four Acquisitions. Three E-Commerce Platforms. One Team to Figure It Out. (with John McMillian from Solve Industrial Motion Group) | Ep. 44

Most manufacturers know what they sell. Solve Industrial Motion Group is in the middle of figuring out how to tell people everything else they can do. VP of Marketing John McMillian joins Kyler Nixon to talk through a pivotal moment: Solve acquired four companies in roughly 60 days in 2025, shifted from a bearings-heavy portfolio to a full drive solution provider, and jumped from about 5% US manufacturing to 25-30%. Now they need their web presence to catch up to the business.

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The conversation covers Solve's decision to separate its brand site from its e-store, a no-AI content strategy backed by an engineer-turned-product-marketer, how to measure brand equity when views don't tell the whole story, and what a distributor's relationship with EDI means for e-commerce traffic. Plus, John closes with a story about a joke of the day that proves customer data beats best practices every time.

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👤 Guest Bio

John McMillian is Vice President of Marketing at Solve Industrial Motion Group, a Charlotte-based manufacturer of engineered bearings and power transmission components backed by Audax Private Equity. He joined Solve in October 2024 after serving as Director of Marketing at MacLean Power Systems and spending more than a decade in marketing leadership at General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems. He holds an MBA from Wake Forest University and a BA from Elon University.

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📌 What We Cover

Why Solve is building a separate brand site alongside its e-store, and what two distinct customer journeys that's designed to serveThe "tripod" content strategy: brand site, vertical campaign systems, and a product marketer with an engineering background — and why all three tent poles have to stand togetherWhy John ruled out AI for Solve's content despite using it personally, and what credibility costs when you slip up once in an industrial audienceHow 15-year-old installation videos are still pulling thousands of monthly views on YouTube — and what that tells John about the demand for educational content in manufacturingThe $250,000 benchmark for a dedicated videographer and edit suite, and how John is building the business case before the budget is thereTwo web metrics John reports monthly to make the case for brand investment: competitive sessions/users benchmarking and traffic inflow/outflow patternsHow EDI is becoming a real force with distributor customers, and why deep EDI integration can quietly cannibalize e-commerce traffic without anyone noticingWhy a joke of the day on a product footer drove inbound calls when it disappeared — and what it says about knowing your customer

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

Solve Industrial Motion GroupB&B Manufacturing — acquired by Solve; source of the Todd Talks video seriesHubSpot — Solve's email and marketing automation platformOptimizely — e-commerce platform for legacy SolveBigCommerce — e-commerce platform for one of the acquired brandsFaith Tank, Zip's AW Direct — referenced by Kyler as a prior guest example of in-house content expertiseAmanda Clark, Barron Equipment Company — referenced as a prior guest doubling down on SEO