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Guest Podcast: The CEO's Playbook Building a Personal Brand That Attracts Millions (CEO DNA) · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  Today you're going to hear me on C-E-O-D-N-A with Dr. Michael Kloep.
• 0:04
  Make sure you subscribe on YouTube or go listen wherever you get your podcasts.
• 0:20
  And if you're executing properly, you're talking to customers,
• 0:22
  you're jumping on Zoom calls, you're trying to speak with people and they're telling you
• 0:26
  why or why not they buy this and you're going to use all that data to find a new idea.
• 0:30
  The advice that I give them if they haven't figured out product market fit
• 0:33
  is going to be difficult advice because the best way to start a business is to
• 0:37
  is to live in an industry for long enough and see a pain point in the industry and understand
• 0:41
  the product market fit already exists.
• 0:43
  Welcome to the C-E-O-D-N-A podcast.
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  This podcast is all about getting better entrepreneurs, better CEOs and creating better founders.
• 0:59
  And today I have one guy who can really help us here to get people better because he has
• 1:04
  so much experience. He built a huge podcast, he has over 22 million downloads,
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  1.5 million followers on Instagram, and a lot more.
• 1:14
  And how he got that and what we can learn from his journey will tell us. Welcome Scott.
• 1:18
  Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited. I like podcasting with podcasters because
• 1:22
  we get each other, right? And there's no shortage of things we can talk about. That's the issue.
• 1:26
  You can talk nonstop. Absolutely. So you know this podcast is all about
• 1:30
  creating better CEOs and entrepreneurs and founders. So what is a good CEO for you? What's a good
• 1:35
  DNA of a CEO? A good CEO. There's a lot of different obviously
• 1:41
  things that comprise of a good CEO. But I think the most important CEO trait is ownership.
• 1:47
  I think that's by far like and like you can talk about CEO pre-revenue or CEO 5 to 10 million
• 1:54
  or CEO post IPO. But at the end of the day the sort of like the universal throughline is ownership.
• 2:00
  And I think that when somebody under I think they probably wouldn't get into a CEO position
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  without understanding that particular that particular trait. So ownership and then more tactically
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  like if I'm going to hire an operator or a CEO, has that person owned a PNL before? Has that person
• 2:17
  has that person been responsible for hiring and firing decisions like ownership across the
• 2:22
  organization? I think that when that person embodies every decision that's made is sort of a result
• 2:30
  of their competency or their strategy. I think that ultimately that makes a good CEO because the
• 2:38
  inverse is somebody that shirks responsibility and places blame. And I think that that's probably
• 2:44
  the most toxic version of a CEO. And I think that more and more you are not going to have those CEOs
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  thriving in businesses. I think that CEOs that do take ownership and lead by example,
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  those are the ones that will attract the right people, which is a whole other conversation
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  because now there's so many options as to where you want to work. And having a CEO that does take
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  ownership, I think inspires great people to work for them, a players to work for them,
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  which ultimately lead to the success of the organization. Yeah, absolutely. That's so true.
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  What kind of a CEO are you when you would and what is your leadership style?
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  I would like to think that I embody that. I think that most of my CEO operational founder
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  experience has been an earlier stage. So when I talk about extreme ownership in earlier stage,
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  at least how I have done it is I do all the things to some degree of efficiency and competency
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  before I hire somebody to do it. So let's take a podcast as an example. So I'm the CEO of my
• 3:45
  podcast and the founder of my podcast. So before I hire anybody to do a task, could be audio,
• 3:51
  video editing, copywriting, it could be anything really. I do it myself. So when I started my show,
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  what that meant was I was doing all the audio, all the video, I was coding my own website,
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  I was doing graphic design, I was writing show notes, I was writing great copy, I was doing outreach,
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  I was setting up the tools that would actually get I was setting up the tools that would do outreach
• 4:13
  that would get guests to come onto the show. So like I did the gamut of sales and marketing and
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  operational activities and then I codified it, built SOPs around it and then I hired people out.
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  But the point was I didn't just hire out for things that I didn't know to some degree how to do
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  myself. I started to learn a little bit. I'm very much like a self-taught individual. And I think
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  what that does is even though you're never going to be the best at everything and you shouldn't be,
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  you should find other people who are much better at it than you are, having a little bit of
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  hands-on experience especially at an early stage as a CEO, I think is incredibly important. I think
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  that if I was going to transplant an MBA into an early stage startup environment where they've
• 4:52
  never done anything, they've only ever done the theoretical, I think that's a recipe for failure.
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  I think that's never going to work out well because when you do the things, not only do you have
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  a degree, a little bit of insight as to how it should work, you can also have a little bit
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  of a BS meter when you're hiring people as to whether or not they can do the job they say they can do,
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  which will allow you to make better hires, which ultimately people make the organization.
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  So that's assumed now the company is already a bit mid or later stage. How is the CEO then?
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  Because when he, can you really still be hands-on when everything?
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  So that's where ownership shifts, right? So now you still are responsible for the company and you
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  have to be responsible for the good and the bad decisions. But the decisions now shift from
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  figuring out the basic mechanics to hiring the best people to do the job.
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  And by the way, I also don't believe that a CEO or a founder, because it's kind of like
• 5:46
  founder when they first start, then they can try and transition into a CEO, but not all founders
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  are good CEOs. Good plan. Not all founders slash CEOs, whatever you want to call yourself on LinkedIn,
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  when you're making no money. Not all founders are good for taking a company from a founder has to
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  be good. Sorry, they've come from zero to five million, for example, or even zero to 10 million,
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  but around the 10 million 50 employee mark is when maybe the traditional founder needs like a
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  COO or some sort of operating partner. And even that infrastructure is going to be different at
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  the 50 million and the 100 million and the pre IPO and the post IPO. And I think understanding the
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  different personality and listen, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert at hiring a 50 million
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  or 100 million dollar or IPO, publicly traded company CEO, because I haven't done it. But I do see
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  that there are people that are better at that than they're better at guiding a company at that
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  stage than earlier stage. And I think that understanding your strength and your weaknesses as a CEO
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  or a founder and knowing when to remove yourself from the company and put someone different in is
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  ultimately going to get you to the next level. And maybe that could be the sort of like the
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  linchpin in the potential growth for the company or the potential death of a company. If a founder
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  wants to stay on too long versus pass on the reins to someone else. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't
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  agree more. I think it's very important. But now let's talk a little bit about your story and what
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  we can learn from it. So basically you're from Canada. And now, yes, you have over 22 million
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  downloads. You have over 1.5 million followers on Instagram. But of course, such things are not
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  overnight success. So how did it start? 2010, you started at as a business development position
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  in Canada. Yeah, 2010. 2010. So how did it start? And what can we learn from from this now?
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  SEOs and founders today. Yeah. So I think that I think that my journey, a lot of people, if founders
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  and CEOs listen to this podcast, my journey's going to resonate with a lot of them because I didn't
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  actually come from an entrepreneurial family. Right. But I understood very quickly that in my opinion,
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  a traditional 9 to 5, which a lot of people feel is safe is actually not a safe career path at all.
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  I feel you can be replaced immediately. And I also saw how like past generations looked at
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  job and career and safety and retirement. And if you think about how career works now, you don't
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  have the pensions, you don't have the security that parents and definitely grandparents had. So if
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  you want to retire at a certain age, you have to have a boatload of money in an account somewhere
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  that you can actually live off that money. So in my mind, I'm like, well, I don't have an
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  opportunity to get a job that's going to give me a pension that's going to give me the 70% of my
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  five or 10 best years till the day I die if I retire at 65. So what's the best way to make a ton of
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  money? And in my mind, it was finding ways to work in higher risk environments. So I started off
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  with Bel Canada, which is like a massive telecom company. I moved into a smaller company that was
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  also a telecom company. Well, sales or first business development in sales and marketing.
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  Yeah, business development in sales is kind of the same thing, depending on what the company calls
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  you, right? But yeah, yeah. So at Bel Canada, it was sales. But how important is it to learn sales
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  on the street from the beginning? I think very important because it teaches you how to, it teaches you,
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  I think it teaches you a lot of different things. It teaches you how to be a problem solver.
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  It teaches you how to build relationships. Some people becomes more naturally than others.
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  I think it teaches you how to, I mean, sales is everything because when you're a founder,
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  you have to sell to your shareholders, to your investors, to your employees, to your customers.
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  So learning sales and learning the art of telling a story around a certain product or service,
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  I think is the most invaluable skill you're ever going to get. Anyway, started my career there,
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  moved over to another telco that was much smaller where I led sales and marketing. That was acquired
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  by private equity. That's where I understood the power of ownership because I saw that transaction
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  take place and I'm like, okay, so this makes a lot of sense. This could be obviously super high risk
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  to go into an environment and hope that you're going to get some sort of exit event. But ultimately,
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  that's how you get that massive exit. You've won through this yourself and I understood that was
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  sort of like a shift in my perspective because not coming from an entrepreneurial family. I didn't know,
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  I didn't know anything about exit. I didn't know anything about private equity. I didn't know
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  anything about any of this. So that was sort of like an eye-opening experience for me. So I kept
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  taking bets on early stage startups and that really sort of pivoted me from working for
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  working for companies, trying to get equity and ownership in smaller companies and finding a way
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  to actually help them scale, help them grow and eventually exit. Maybe also a good point for
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  people who might know at the beginning of the path and thinking what should I do. So for sure,
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  sales or business development, as you guys call it in Canada, on in America. And that would be
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  important, but also taking sometimes the risk to work for a smaller company. So I put a lot of
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  thought into this sort of like, you know, hindsight's always 2020. I think that yes, if you want to go
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  work for startups, I think that it can be fun. You can learn a lot because you get sort of exposure
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  to every single business unit. I mean, sales, marketing, HR, finance, like you get access to
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  everything really. What about the bigger companies like Google or Germany Siemens or Deutsche Bank?
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  Yeah, you can work for those too, but it's less risk, right? So I think that a lot of nuance
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  to this. You have to figure out where you are in your career journey. You have to figure out,
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  okay, do I have a family to take care of? Do I have to pay rent, pay a mortgage, whatever,
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  and my responsible for other people. But early stage, I can't remember. I saw a post on LinkedIn and
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  it made a ton of sense and I can't remember who posted it. But the perfect balance of risk and
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  opportunity is something like a director at a series A funded company or something along those
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  lines. So there's funding, there's product market fit. You are you're moving into a management
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  position. So which is going to be a little bit easier for somebody who's just starting their
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  career because they have a little bit of career experience, but they're not going to get a VP or
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  C suite out of series A funded company. But then they'll also get a little bit of equity. So you
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  have the perfect amount of risk plus security sort of packaged into one into one job position or
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  job title. I think that's probably the best setup for most people because if you go on either end
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  of that, if you go for a later stage company or if you go for earlier stage company later stage,
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  there's not going to be as much payout if if the company wins. An earlier stage, there's a high
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  chance the company is going to fail. So I think that that particular sweet spot is best for most
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  people balancing those without knowing their personal circumstance. Absolutely. Good point.
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  But then at one point, you had such a high pain point or learning that you said, I want to be
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  self-employed. So what happened? What was the shift also for everyone who's listening who maybe
• 13:00
  is still employed? What what happened there? Well, the pain point was understanding that the future
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  was going to be super bleak unless I found a way to work for myself. So just to sort of walk people
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  down the sort of my path. So I was never founder. I was always like going into a company as chief
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  revenue officer and helping them scale and helping them go through an exit. So this happened. So the
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  last company I did that with was a software, a broadcast software company. I joined them. They were
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  about 10 years old. They weren't moving as quick as they should. I joined them. Help them go up
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  market, help them build a sales force. Then we were sold to Grass Valley. So that was that was great.
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  But that was not me being a founder. So the founder and sort of taking extreme ownership and
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  responsibility from ground zero from scratch was really the podcast, the personal brand building
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  that out from scratch. I tried to build out a consulting company with two other peers. It didn't
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  work. I tried to build a lot of stuff that didn't work by the way. But this is the podcast is sort of
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  like the first business that I've been the founder of completely that's worked out really. Is
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  everybody a good founder? I think it can be a learned skill. I think that there's so many
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  different opinions on this. I want to answer your other question first about the pain point.
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  So the pain point was worked in big company, figured out that I wouldn't have a great retirement
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  or life if I kept working there, moved into a smaller company, understood the power of equity
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  and ownership and exit. And then still got equity and still is working in the start of space.
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  But I also realized that if you successfully build a company and it's not FU money exit,
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  you have to go work again. So the pain point to start the podcast was I don't want to have to work
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  at building an audience for a new company in the future. I want to start building an audience now.
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  So anything I do in the future, it's going to be less friction to start. And that's where the
• 14:57
  podcast comes in. That's where that's where the personal brand comes in. I mean, this is what
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  Gary Vaynerchuk does. And he started his own personal brand. Then he launches Vayner Media,
• 15:04
  Vayner Sports, Empathy, Wines and all. And I'm like, that's a great model. I started the podcast
• 15:09
  while I was building that last broadcast fast company. And I was like, okay, this is going to be
• 15:13
  acquired. It's going to be an okay payout, but it's not going to be FU money for the rest of my life.
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  So that means I got to go find another job or start something new. So what if I sort of,
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  I start to build my own brand out now. And then in the future, when I want to launch something new,
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  or even if I want to go BCRO at another early stage startup, I come with an audience,
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  or I can launch a product against the audience. So that was that it wasn't like a one pain point.
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  It was like a gradual realization of I just want to make life easier for myself. And this seems
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  to be a great way to do it. So I missed I left out a piece of it. So Gina's sitting in the corner.
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  I think part of the reasons why I started building out my thing was because she built out my therapist
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  says with her two sisters and a childhood best friend. And I saw the business that they built
• 16:01
  purely based on content and the amount of views and impressions and revenue that they got just
• 16:06
  from content. And that to me was like the mixing of, okay, what I'm building has a finite life.
• 16:13
  And it's going to die eventually mixed with the realization that I'm a marketer. I know how to create
• 16:18
  good content. Let me find a way to create good content that I care about. They do humor, fun,
• 16:22
  lifestyle content, culturally relevant content. I want to do something different. But if I can create
• 16:27
  even a fraction of what they've made, then I can use that to launch new products and whatnot.
• 16:32
  So it was like the perfect mix of like I know business, I know startups, I want to make my life
• 16:36
  less stressful in the future. I see an example of somebody who's doing it who is like a prolific
• 16:40
  greater. They have like 8.2 million followers. They're killing it. They've been doing it for like 11
• 16:44
  years. So it was like it was like a perfect storm of all my experience, plus like my reality at
• 16:50
  the time pointing me in the direction of start the podcast, build out a personal brand, turn it
• 16:54
  into a business. I just want to highlight one point what I think is very important. And I just had
• 17:00
  an interview with a self-made billionaire. A self-made, you sell it with $300. And I said, look,
• 17:06
  what's your single best advice? And he pointed out how important it is to work for somebody else,
• 17:13
  even the only way to have your own company. And I think you did it similar.
• 17:16
  I did it, but I didn't do it purposefully, but I think I'm grateful for the experience.
• 17:19
  Yeah, I actually had a different, as I told you, my first company I sold when I was quite young.
• 17:25
  And then I decided to still work for three for the top 500 companies worldwide. And this is where I
• 17:31
  really understood standard operation procedures, you mean as a PN, other things. How essential
• 17:37
  they are also when you when you want to scale businesses. I think that that's I think that is
• 17:41
  important. I think that's very, very important. I think that it's interesting because you know, we're
• 17:46
  at greater fest right now. And one thing that I think has made me very successful very quickly
• 17:53
  is I was a business person first and a creator second. And most people are not everyone, but most
• 17:59
  people are I mean, we're kind of very similar, but a lot of creators are creators first and
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  business people second because they're creative. It's like a left brain, right brain dichotomy.
• 18:09
  And they have to figure out, okay, I like creating content. And now I have to figure out how to
• 18:14
  build a business around it. And then what happens is they get screwed by brands or like all this
• 18:18
  stuff happens, right? And or they don't know how to hire great talent or whatever. So I think that
• 18:23
  having the business experience, first of all, in large corporate and large and small companies,
• 18:30
  first, it sets you up for success because you understand how to operate at an enterprise level.
• 18:35
  You know how to operate in a startup environment. But then if you want to become a creator, I mean,
• 18:40
  like I'm an example of that. I can take every business thing that I know. And if I find a way to
• 18:47
  create content, I can build the framework and the infrastructure around it. So again, it just
• 18:50
  grows quicker. It's easier. It's smoother. I can hire a team. I can sort of fire myself from a
• 18:55
  lot of the different tasks as soon as possible. Yeah. Before we talk about your podcast, you had
• 19:00
  one step before 2019. You had advisory roles in different several ventures. I still do. You still
• 19:08
  do. Okay. So what is the, yeah, what can we learn from from from there? Is there like one common
• 19:15
  crowned of learnings we can do? What's the main issue? What's other pain points? And when you advise
• 19:22
  what, how, how is your impact? How, how do you do that? So it's, it's funny because it's, it's,
• 19:30
  some of the things we spoke about are very relevant to the advice that I'd give an entrepreneur,
• 19:34
  like an early stage entrepreneur hands on hands on, figure it out, have ownership of all the
• 19:39
  different things. I would say that I would say that the most important things that I would
• 19:44
  sort of repeatedly, because I work with a couple different incubators. I work with creative
• 19:48
  destruction labs out of University of Toronto. I've worked with futurepreneur. I've worked with a
• 19:53
  couple organizations. What is futurepreneur doing? It's like, it's like they do mentorship. They pair
• 19:58
  entrepreneur with somebody who's a little bit more, but what can a mentor do? Well, that's the
• 20:04
  thing. So I think that every entrepreneur has different problems, but most entrepreneurs have
• 20:08
  product market fit problems, like making money problems, right? So I think that it's about
• 20:12
  finding your first 50 customers, finding your ideal customer profile, finding your buyer persona,
• 20:17
  and figuring out how to create a campaign that targets that person. What is your tip to do that?
• 20:21
  Let's say I have not a product market fit. How do I find this product market fit? What advice
• 20:28
  are you giving to the entrepreneurs? The real advice is the advice that I give them if they
• 20:34
  haven't figured out product market fit is going to be difficult advice, because the best way to
• 20:38
  start a business is to, is to live in an industry for long enough and see a pain point in the
• 20:44
  industry and understand the product market fit already exists and then build a product to solve
• 20:48
  that problem. Very true. Yeah. What most entrepreneurs do is they think they have a great idea and
• 20:53
  they're trying to push it on a customer base that really doesn't care about it. There is no real
• 20:58
  need. So how important is the idea? Anyhow, all the business? I think that reverse engineering
• 21:04
  a pain point is much more important than just coming up with an idea that you think is great.
• 21:09
  I think that's that's way more important. I always say ideas 1% of the entire
• 21:14
  and then execution is everything. But if you just have an idea, I mean, I would give you the
• 21:20
  so again, if you just have an idea and you haven't worked in an industry and you're not sure if
• 21:24
  there's an actual need for this yet, the steps would define see if there's product market fit or
• 21:30
  maybe to decide if you should pivot. So as an entrepreneur, let's say I have a very bad idea and a
• 21:37
  very good execution or I have extremely good idea and a very bad execution. Rich entrepreneur,
• 21:42
  what you bet on execution always always. That's not even a question because if you have a bad idea
• 21:49
  and you execute, you're going to find out if it's a bad idea very quickly and then you're going
• 21:52
  to change your idea because of all the data and the feedback and the learnings that you've gotten
• 21:55
  from executing. Because if you execute enough, you're going to get you're going to get
• 22:00
  you're going to get an idea of why this idea is so bad. And if you're executing properly,
• 22:04
  you're talking to customers, you're jumping on Zoom calls, you're trying to speak with people
• 22:08
  and they're telling you why or why not did buy this and you're going to use all that data to find
• 22:12
  a new idea. So from your experience, the successful factor for entrepreneurs is what's the number one?
• 22:19
  Is it execution? What's the time to market? What about the business plan? What about funding?
• 22:24
  I would say don't don't bother funding. Don't find funding yet. Don't worry about
• 22:30
  don't worry about anything else outside of speaking with people who could be your ideal customer
• 22:35
  and then getting feedback from them. And once you figure that out and once you speak to
• 22:39
  enough people, then you're going to have a semblance of an ideal customer profile. And then you're
• 22:45
  going to, ideal customer profile is which industry, which company size would buy your product. And then
• 22:50
  once you have your ideal customer profile, then you figure out the buyer persona. So literally,
• 22:54
  the person within that company that CMO is a director of marketing, a director of finance,
• 22:58
  figure who that person is. And then that's how you would structure the first sort of take to
• 23:02
  market strategy to target that person. And also you don't want to look for funding yet because you
• 23:06
  have to validate your idea. If you look for funding too soon, investors aren't going to want to
• 23:09
  invest in you. So to validate an idea, I mean, you could do something as simple as put up a website.
• 23:14
  Dollar Shave Club. I think they okay. They had some videos as well. Well, so
• 23:20
  there's a strategy that this one startup and I'm blanking on the name now and I probably should
• 23:24
  have another coffee, but the basically what they did to prove out product market fit before they
• 23:28
  raise investor money before they put a dollar into ad spend is they spun up a landing page.
• 23:34
  And they put, they put a Google type form on that landing page and they push traffic to that
• 23:41
  landing page, maybe like marginal spend to push traffic to that landing page. And the type form was,
• 23:45
  this is what we're building. These are the features we have in theory. This is the price point
• 23:50
  that we would be selling it for. Fill this out. Would you use it? And if so, like leave your email.
• 23:57
  And they basically got a list of potential customers. I think it is buffer before they before they
• 24:03
  before they even built out the product. So it was like a no code zero cost MVP that validated their
• 24:10
  idea. Now they have a list of people that are saying, I want this feature at this price point
• 24:14
  and I'd use it for sure. So they can do two things with that. First of all, massively de-risks
• 24:20
  the startup process because now they have this proven out. And if they do want to raise money,
• 24:25
  how much more can you argue a higher valuation? If you literally have a list of customers saying,
• 24:29
  I'm going to use this product or service. What about the companies that are bootstrapped?
• 24:33
  What do they do different? The best bootstrapped companies will be pairing a product,
• 24:39
  marketing or sales founder with a technical co-founder. I think that that's the best way to do.
• 24:44
  I mean, you can also have just a technical co-founder that can sell, but normally a co-founder
• 24:50
  or just a technical founder, sorry, that can sell without a co-founder. But ultimately,
• 24:54
  I would do CTO that has equity in the company. I would not go to a dev shop because I find dev shops
• 25:01
  screw people 11 at a 10 times. So CTO, product and marketing, sales co-founder pairing. And that's
• 25:09
  how they would build up their product. The CTO is going to put a whole bunch of sweat equity
• 25:13
  into this thing. He's going to build that or she's going to build up the first version of it.
• 25:17
  The sales and marketing person is going to find a way to sell it, take it to market. They're
• 25:20
  going to take that money. They're going to take it back and put it back into ads, whatever.
• 25:24
  But I think that that's the best way for a SaaS product, for sure, to do it.
• 25:29
  So we are fully bootstrapped company. I'm running at some own co-op cart.
• 25:34
  And it makes me also sometimes a bit proud that we were able to do that.
• 25:38
  Did you do that strategy or do you do something different?
• 25:39
  No, I wanted not to have investors in, but never say never. We also talking to smart money,
• 25:47
  obviously. But I think it's still an additional risk if you take investors.
• 25:55
  It's risk and pressure. So there's sort of two things about bootstrapped that I just mentioned.
• 25:59
  So one is CTO, which is important because the alternative is to hire somebody at dev shop.
• 26:04
  I think that's going to kill a company. It's going to put a lot of financial pressure on you.
• 26:08
  You get investors. I also think that they're, I think Silicon Valley romanticized VC money
• 26:16
  and angel money. And I think it's actually toxic for most entrepreneurs because, of course,
• 26:21
  VCs do not have bad interests. They're negative and malicious, excuse me. But the interest of the
• 26:31
  founder and the interest of the VC are slightly at odds. So the founder does want to build a successful
• 26:38
  company, especially first time founder that company is going to feel like their baby. VC doesn't
• 26:42
  give a shit. VC has to have a positive ROI, a positive return on investment on that and have to
• 26:47
  have it as quick as possible. So you're a founder trying to build a company. VC just trying to
• 26:52
  realize a return that can create a lot of stress mostly for the founder. And I think that most people
• 26:58
  aren't aware of the stress and the pressure that taking on VC money will put on them.
• 27:04
  And if they don't do it right, their valuation may not be correct. They could be giving away
• 27:10
  too much equity. They could be losing control of their company. They could be giving away too much
• 27:14
  equity upfront, which is going to screw them for future rounds in the future.
• 27:17
  There are for sure lots of risk. I mean, there are also other sides. Even that we are now
• 27:21
  bootstrapped. But some investors also are seeing the long term pictures and having a bigger
• 27:26
  mission behind it, maybe. But you need to know the money. If you're going to bring in an investor,
• 27:31
  I would say that they have to have relationships with customers that you could sell to.
• 27:38
  If you're going to bring in an investor for a SaaS company, maybe have them,
• 27:42
  depends on what you're selling. But maybe have them have a relationship with an enterprise
• 27:46
  customer that you could sell that could radically change your revenue or your CPG company make
• 27:51
  them make an investor have a relationship with a Costco or a Walmart. Be strategic because money
• 27:56
  only takes your company so far. You're not going to build a company based on money. We're not in
• 28:00
  the days of Uber where you're building unprofitably for 10 years or Amazon. I don't think
• 28:07
  sustainable for most companies. So I think that you should find an investor that can
• 28:11
  find, put a little bit of capital in. But I don't even give a shit about your capital. I care
• 28:15
  about your connection to Walmart and Costco. Good point. So what I think we could learn for sure
• 28:21
  from your time or now as an advisory, what you still do to entrepreneurs and businesses for sure
• 28:27
  to have this very strong product market fit. That is very essential and that execution is the
• 28:33
  win-in factor. I agree completely. Then 2021, you started the podcast, the social. No,
• 28:39
  the social app you had later. So podcast was first. So podcast was success story when you started
• 28:46
  like 2020, 2021, just right during COVID. But it wasn't an overnight success. No, actually no,
• 28:51
  so it's what we're 24 now. No, I've been doing it for about five years. Wow. So okay. Yeah,
• 28:56
  so but but how did it start? And why did you do that? Why would you? I alluded to it earlier.
• 29:02
  So starting the podcast was at the same time I was building a business and I got that if when
• 29:08
  if and when this business was acquired. Cool. I'm going to have to start a new business or build
• 29:13
  out a new company or start from scratch again. The podcast was okay. I want to build an audience
• 29:19
  in a community that knows who I am. So in the future, eventually, I don't have to build from scratch.
• 29:25
  And that was really it. I was looking at the Gary Vies of the world. I think when I started the
• 29:28
  podcast, I don't think Alex Ramosi was really that big yet. And he's done kind of the same things.
• 29:32
  So now his personal brand, he built acquisition.com on it. Now he uses it as a funnel to attract
• 29:37
  companies that he can invest in. But Gary Vies was kind of the OG in doing this and made a ton of
• 29:41
  sense. Like I know how to create content. I enjoy doing it. Let me find a format of content,
• 29:47
  interview style. I enjoy chatting with people that are incredible business people and thought leaders.
• 29:51
  So not only is it fun and sustainable and I can do all the things required to put it out into the
• 29:55
  world. Also, it's going to create an audience that eventually I can use and I can either
• 30:00
  sell. I can sell consulting. I can sell whatever mastermind. I can sell product or service. I can
• 30:05
  do whatever I want with that. Interesting. For me, it's like really to kind of give something
• 30:10
  back to the entrepreneurship community. Because as a founder and you really know sometimes also how
• 30:15
  hard things are. Also, I think I will enjoy the conversations like today, for example. I really
• 30:21
  love it. It's like, you know, like I had a great amount of people I met through this and became
• 30:28
  no friends actually. Yeah. I think that that. Yeah. So I think there is to make me not sound like
• 30:33
  an asshole. There's two answers to your question. So you asked me, why did I do it? There's a very
• 30:37
  tactical reason. Yes. But I think the, I think the altruistic reason and the reason why I didn't
• 30:45
  gate or productize the podcast earlier was because I enjoy unpacking lessons from people that
• 30:52
  have figured it out before. Because I find that when I work with entrepreneurs or when I'm advising
• 31:00
  or mentoring or when I'm having conversations like this, I find the best, the best gift you can
• 31:07
  give somebody is not letting them have to reinvent the wheel, learning from somebody who's done it
• 31:12
  before. So that, that, I guess, I don't know. I think the, the conversations, the, how do I put
• 31:26
  this? I don't want to say like the feeling of, but it does feel good to teach people and to help
• 31:30
  people like no doubt at all. But it's also mastery, right? So when you teach to somebody else,
• 31:35
  it's really the highest form of education, I believe, because you learn more when you teach,
• 31:39
  actually, you actually learn, you learn what you don't know when you do something. Yeah. Exactly.
• 31:42
  Yeah. That's what, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Good, good points. So now, for entrepreneurs,
• 31:47
  how important is it to have a, have a face to be as a CEO of a company or as a founder? How
• 31:54
  important you think is it nowadays to have also a personal branding? What would you do? I mean,
• 32:00
  I'm obviously biased. Yeah. As, as I'm sure you are, I think it's very important. Yes.
• 32:07
  I think that I think that there's a shift in how people want to do business with businesses.
• 32:15
  And I think that people like to do businesses that feel like they just aren't these
• 32:21
  corporate machines. And I think that one way to do that is to put yourself out there. I mean,
• 32:25
  there's other things to people are investing into socially conscious businesses and ethical businesses.
• 32:30
  And this is sort of, I think it all is in one bucket of people don't want to do,
• 32:37
  people don't want to buy from companies that are just these like massive, you know. So true.
• 32:43
  My story is a bit interesting. I actually paid a lot of money at one point to
• 32:50
  be taking off anywhere in social media. Yeah. And then when I joined the company co-op card,
• 32:57
  one of the co-founders told me, Michael, you should start an Instagram profile. I said, no,
• 33:01
  no, I don't like it. And now I'm doing even podcasts. So I think we also need to understand
• 33:06
  that times are shifting. And at one point, it's just important, exactly what you said,
• 33:10
  to know who's actually also behind it or who's running the show. I think that's very important.
• 33:15
  You're right. And I think that CEOs need to not be so worried about saying the wrong thing.
• 33:21
  Absolutely. I think that you have to be real. And authentic. Yeah, you have to be authentic.
• 33:25
  And I know that's kind of an overused word, but it's very true. I mean,
• 33:29
  unless you are, I've said this a few times, like, because people ask me like,
• 33:33
  are you nervous of putting yourself out there? And unless you're actually a bad person,
• 33:38
  you're not going to get canceled by voicing your opinion. And to be honest,
• 33:42
  if you do have a strong opinion on something, what will end up happening is you're going to attract
• 33:45
  more people that are like-minded towards you. So whether it's, it's not, I don't think it's ever
• 33:50
  really going to hurt your business unless you're actually not a good person, which hopefully none of
• 33:56
  right. Hell yeah. I never, I never cost on any podcast. And actually it's not me, but I just
• 34:02
  want to do it today the first time. You're absolutely right. Yeah. So, so good. So now you built
• 34:08
  this person brand. What can we learn from it? How can we also implement it as a CEO of a company
• 34:14
  or even now also maybe for me as a launch in the podcast, international and going crazy?
• 34:20
  I think you have to know, I think you have to know what your your KPI is or your North Star is.
• 34:25
  So my my North Star for the podcast would be very different than than a CEO of a company.
• 34:32
  So if I was a CEO of a company that would have a certain product or service, for example,
• 34:36
  I would want to build a podcast that would do a couple things. So I would want to sit down with
• 34:42
  a potential customer, ideal customer profile. I would ask them questions that were questions that
• 34:49
  my customer base was always asking because I could research what my customers cared about
• 34:52
  and pain points that they wanted to solve. And I would ask that potential guest, those types of
• 34:57
  questions, because then I would know that not only could I use that hour to build a relationship
• 35:03
  with that guest, all the derivative content from that podcast could be used in marketing material
• 35:09
  that would be tailored towards my ideal customer profile, my customer base. So I would structure the
• 35:14
  podcasts maybe a little bit differently, maybe a little bit more structure around it. So I could use
• 35:20
  the interview time, if it's an interview style, for example, to build rapport and potentially
• 35:25
  have a customer right there. But also I would structure the derivative, the questions that all the
• 35:30
  derivative content would also be more usable for my marketing strategy. But that's because I have
• 35:37
  a product or service. When I started my show, I didn't have a product or service. So my goal was
• 35:41
  to build brand. It was almost like I want to build the largest brand possible. And then when I
• 35:47
  figure out what I want to do with this audience, then I can find a way to productize it a little bit
• 35:52
  more specifically, but a CEO who has a company. I mean, you can already write off the bat if you want
• 35:58
  to structure it very specifically so that it accomplishes like a real business objective.
• 36:02
  Yeah. Good point. So looking back now over your podcast time, what was the biggest learning
• 36:09
  that you can give us? Was there anything you can say, okay, if I would have known that now,
• 36:14
  I would do things different differently. To be honest, there's not much that I've changed
• 36:23
  since I've started. I would say that sort of the fundamentals that I believe in for the podcast,
• 36:32
  there's a few, tap into other people's audiences. So that's why I bring big guests on the show
• 36:38
  because they're important right away. Nobody cares who you are. So you have to tap into other
• 36:41
  people's audiences. Eventually, people will care when you're starting nobody cares. I would say
• 36:47
  tap into other people's audiences. I would say find ways to be discovered organically,
• 36:59
  which is why I think that all podcasts have to be a video, in my opinion. I mean, if you're
• 37:05
  scared of the camera, my feedback is you have to get over it. Why is that? Because YouTube is the
• 37:12
  second largest search engine in the world. And if you just put out an audio podcast,
• 37:17
  you put it up on your podcast hosting platform. There's no organics. It's very hard to get
• 37:24
  discovered. So if you tap into other people's audiences, if you optimize for organic reach,
• 37:29
  and then you find ways to create pillar content and then turn that into hundreds of pieces of
• 37:33
  derivative content, meaning pillar video, like we're doing right now. And I turn that into short
• 37:40
  form, TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts. I turn into a newsletter, turn it into a blog, put it up
• 37:47
  on Hacker Nume, put it up on Medium, put it up on my website, turn it into Tweets, turn it into
• 37:51
  still images. So the long form gets turned into every show probably gets turned into like 100 pieces.
• 37:57
  GaryVee kind of approached to say like, really go here because that allows you to show up everywhere.
• 38:06
  And even though it's not optimized for every platform, obviously because if I was going to be a
• 38:10
  TikTok reader, I do things differently. I still show up everywhere. And I'm still accomplishing
• 38:15
  main thought and main objective, which is organic reach. But because you are on so many different
• 38:19
  platforms, you know, you're on TikTok, you're on LinkedIn, Facebook. So you use all this. And how did
• 38:26
  you build up 1.5 million on Instagram? You talked to me earlier, Michael, that was hard work. So
• 38:30
  just important to understand there's no overnight success. But there's no overnight success.
• 38:35
  But it was just by posting a lot. I post a lot. So I posted about three to four times per day.
• 38:40
  And some of those posts are collaborations with other big names and influencers which help drive
• 38:46
  traffic back. But it's really just, and by the way, there's a lot of ways that you can use AI
• 38:53
  to help your content strategy to clip a whole bunch of video. The way that you use AI, by the
• 38:58
  way, because it is important to when somebody thinks like, okay, how can I put out three to four
• 39:02
  pieces of content on every social per day? That's like insane amounts for most people who,
• 39:05
  especially if you don't have a team. It is a lot. But if you use tools like opus.pro or you,
• 39:12
  which is an AI video clipping tool, if you use some of these tools that you can you can use AI
• 39:20
  to do like a first pass at a lot of the content you put out AI. And right now today is not good enough
• 39:26
  for my opinion to be the finished or end result. But it's good enough to create the first version
• 39:30
  of content that you can then edit and massage. And it basically takes away 90% of the admin or the
• 39:37
  grunt work associated with content creation. So even if you don't put out four pieces a day,
• 39:42
  put it like two pieces a day. And you could achieve that with an hour and a half of work.
• 39:47
  And I think it's also important to have things regularly consistency in that super important.
• 39:53
  And I was waiting for one thing that you probably wanted to say anyhow. I think it's also very
• 39:58
  important. Not only the amount of followers, but also the quality of founders as the followers,
• 40:03
  I mean, the engagement basically. Yes. So that sort of brings you back. Yes. Yes. A thousand percent,
• 40:09
  like not even a question. But because one hour platform on corporate, I see also lots of who
• 40:14
  sometimes have only three thousand followers, but make a lot of revenue. More sometimes there's
• 40:19
  somebody with a hundred thousand followers, for example. So yes. I mean, I think that I think that
• 40:26
  followers are vanity metrics. I think that for most people, they don't have to have even a hundred
• 40:33
  thousand followers on Instagram. They have to understand how their content is driving a business
• 40:38
  objective. So that's that's really it. And if the content is driving a business objective,
• 40:42
  if the content is part of a funnel, which it should be, and you have a product or service that
• 40:47
  you're selling, I mean, followers really don't matter. If you like my show, what I'm trying to do
• 40:52
  with my shows, I'm trying to compete, not compete because I believe in abundance. I believe there's
• 40:57
  more than enough room for everyone to play. On a benchmarking against diary of a CEO or my first
• 41:02
  million or Tim Ferris or Tom Billy or Lewis. And I bet CEO DNA. Yeah. Yeah. All these are all
• 41:07
  exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
• 41:09
  Cook Jonas can be funny sometimes. And I just I'm pushing for that level of guests and that
• 41:17
  level of exposure. But that's a very different strategy again. Then somebody who has a business,
• 41:23
  a CEO of a company, and wants to build a podcast to sell more product. Right. Yeah. I understood.
• 41:29
  Let's look a little bit in the future. And what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?
• 41:35
  What's in your goal with your leadership and with your ventures?
• 41:40
  Yeah. So I sort of have two objectives. The first objective is more with the podcast and the
• 41:50
  content and teaching as many entrepreneurs as possible. Because actually, I started a second
• 41:55
  show. If it keeps going, I'm not sure. But it's a daily show where I do like a 10 minute
• 42:00
  educational business idea once per day. That's called the 10 minute MBA. If anyone wants to
• 42:06
  listen to that, but that's less interview style. But the point is, I genuinely enjoy
• 42:11
  making people's lives easier because I feel like entrepreneurship is convoluted and confusing.
• 42:16
  I know other people are creating content like myself. But I mean, like if I can just help one or
• 42:21
  two entrepreneurs up skill and understand how to break out of a situation they don't love and
• 42:27
  they hate their life and they hate their job and they can listen to some of my content and they
• 42:31
  can upscale personally and professionally and they can go and build their own thing or improve
• 42:36
  their situation or circumstances. That to me is a win. So I never want to gate my content and
• 42:40
  I never want to stop helping people basically just remove the stress in their life. That's really
• 42:47
  the goal because I really don't believe life has to be as complicated as we say it is as we think
• 42:52
  it is rather for most people. So I think that that's really the goal of the content creation.
• 42:56
  And I'd like to just do that at a larger and larger scale like the more people listen to this show.
• 43:00
  I genuinely believe the more people that are helped whether or not it's learning from somebody who's
• 43:04
  inspiring or learning from something that I've done and I've taught over that to me like I want
• 43:09
  to do that till the day that I die. There's no like expiry on that. The other thing that I really do
• 43:15
  enjoy is I enjoy building companies. I would like to I would like to create a billion dollars worth
• 43:23
  of value. That's like an arbitrary benchmark for me. But to me it's like if you want to have a
• 43:30
  significant impact on this world from a business perspective, not be a billionaire. It should be great.
• 43:35
  But I mean like the point is create a billion dollars worth of value. So grow companies or create
• 43:40
  a portfolio or invest in a portfolio of companies that have a billion dollars worth of valuation.
• 43:45
  I haven't done it yet. That's a benchmark for me. And I think that that's when you can say that
• 43:48
  like listen, I've sort of figured out this game. I've figured out how it works. I can copy and
• 43:54
  repeat my success. And that's more like a keeping score thing for me. And I'm not I'm not there by
• 44:01
  any means at all. I'm not. No, no, but not a billionaire. A billion dollars worth of value.
• 44:06
  Honestly. So that to me, like if you look at what Alex Ramozi does with acquisition.com,
• 44:14
  I would enjoy building a private equity firm or venture capital firm in the future that can
• 44:19
  invest in startups and put capital towards startups or even put capital towards non startups,
• 44:24
  but find a way to invest. And I don't have the time for it now, but that's sort of my vision
• 44:29
  for the future. Make time. Yeah, yeah. Final question. When you look back to your life and you could
• 44:36
  give one, um, yeah, one recommendation, one, one tip to your kid, um, once they've been entrepreneur,
• 44:47
  why not an entrepreneur or anybody? Yeah. So the one piece of advice,
• 44:56
  the one piece of advice that I would give is actually, um, it's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna butcher
• 45:02
  this quote, but it's a Seth Godin quote and Seth Godin actually has no idea that he did this,
• 45:09
  but Seth Godin is actually the one that got me a little bit into podcasting because I listened to
• 45:13
  an entrepreneur because I listened to one of his podcasts, a Kimbo, and he said this one line,
• 45:17
  which I thought was an incredible line. And it's just about, um, the story of Icarus and flying
• 45:22
  close to the sun and how he spun it was like, don't worry about flying too close to the sun,
• 45:28
  you won't get burned, I promise. That was the general takeaway, but the point is, take more shots,
• 45:34
  take more risks. And there's a really good chance that even if the first one, second one, or tenth
• 45:39
  one, or 50th one doesn't work out. Like, don't stress out, life's gonna be fine. Keep trying,
• 45:44
  keep pushing, keep testing, keep taking those risks, keep taking those shots. Don't worry,
• 45:48
  it's gonna be okay. Eventually, it's gonna work out. And I think that that's probably, um,
• 45:52
  the one lesson that I'd want to leave my kid with just take more chances, take more risks,
• 45:57
  fly close to the sun, don't worry, you're not going to get burned. Like, that, that to me,
• 46:01
  um, I love the way that he phrased it because I think a lot of us, they don't take risks because
• 46:06
  we are afraid of getting burned and we are afraid of screwing up. Scott, this podcast has been
• 46:11
  amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much. Thank you. Don't wait for your future,
• 46:17
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• 46:25
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• 46:34
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• 46:40
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