Ask Me Anything Session: Social Media, Building a Brand Series

Morning, David. Hey, Ben. Morning, Ben, good morning. Can you get siri? Yes, you're a little echoey, but I can hear you. OK, How's this? This is better. Oh, much better. OK, great. It takes a minute to get the audio settings right. Got you. Hey, man, Brian, what time is it where you are? It's 11 o'clock, 11 o'clock and smoking a cigar. Always, buddy. Hey, How's your I would answer? We can document this for the future. If you're new, if this is your first call, I'd love for you to just kind of pop on real quick and introduce yourself. Can be really short. 10 seconds first. Oh, all right. My name is Adam from Mongolia, and I'm really excited to be here. Actually, I haven't got into the future. Calls are not teachable. It's a lot. But I'm going to get started right now and I'm really happy to be here. That's that's fantastic. OK, I'm going to try and pronounce your name. Is it basil? Yes full name is Patrick. It's Patrick. OK yes, it's actually acrylic name. That's something very cool. What time is it in mongolia? It's 11:00 PM here. Oh, that's not too bad. Not too bad. It's great. OK, who's next? What's his name? OK, Jeff, I see. I see you talking. I don't hear you talking. There you go. Can you hear me now? Yes, perfect. Hi, I'm Jeff. I was here last week, but I got in late, so I wasn't able to introduce myself. Oh, right on. Welcome where are you from? I'm from. I'm from Canada, but I've been living in Mexico for the past five years. All right. We got some Canadians in the group. Yeah you son of a bitch. That's awesome. It's always like, well, in salsa. It's always around like 30 degrees. So very nice. Yeah, that does not compute. There's like, let's say, around 75 to 80 ish, right? That's why I'm so envious. We've had we had snow in May. Yeah well, I've been there. I'm from I'm from the second coldest city in Canada. Oh, well, welcome to the group, which is like a first time. Nobody else. OK well, I would like to just sorry, I didn't hear you calling out. So my name is David, I'm from Hungary and I'm a medical student. But I decided to start a page about space exploration. And it blew up on Instagram. So right now I'm doing kind of work for SpaceX startup and I decided to join the euro group. So to get some business tips and how to handle client work. And I'm really excited about how this is going to turn out because I don't have anybody who has done anything similar to me. I don't know if I finished medical school. I still have two years, but I'm really not interested in, you know, like studying from textbooks. The future courses are much more, you know, much better. But I'm looking forward to it. Oh, very cool. Well, welcome. And I agree. I don't think that there's anybody else doing what you're doing. Medical student making a website about space and blowing up on Instagram. My God. Drop your incessant, crazy. Thank you. You're offering a link in the chat would look OK. Sure this is it's called masternodes. I'm going to if I have to include HTTPS, but. So I just want to shout out the drinks in the room, we got Tyler making some fancy coffee. That's awesome. Then we got demi, who's drinking vodka straight out of the bottle. What I told you, it's water. That's awesome, guys. OK, so just for a couple of more minutes, I'd love to share some wins for the week. This is something that we do just for the new guys. I love to start these calls off with a happy note. So anybody have any small wins, big wins since the last call that they want to share? Oh, somebody raised their hand fireplug. I don't know your name, though. sorry. It comes in. I keep changing. It's Phillip. Oh, OK, good. Anyway, the actual I had a huge win. I brought on my first client and now that I've done a relaunch or actually semi pre launch of the business after huge success I brought my first client happens to be someone that's related to me, that happens to be related to the conversation that we post. I posted there in the call. But furthermore, I also just put the money out on my electric bike, which we'll be showing up next Friday. It is a cafe racer style for oh, 40 eight, 48 volt 1,000 what? In fact, I flip a switch and I can actually blow past the legal limit of 32 kilometers an hour. It will do give or take 55 kilometers an hour, so basically somewhere around 40 miles an hour. Wow and it looks sexy as shit. And basically, I am going to be ripping around town and for someone who has no wheels of his own living in the city for so long. I never had my license. So now I've got I've got wheels, so I got wheels and got quiet and I got some that, hey, I'm here and I got the set going on. So that was, yeah, that's fantastic. Well, congratulations. OK next up, we got geeked. Hey, Hi, guys. I'm geek and I am from India, from Jaipur. It is 8:30 PM here. I actually own an ad agency which is in Dubai and in jaipur, which is a part of India. Oh yeah, I'm looking forward for you guys to give us amazing content and hope to learn a lot of things from the. Killer welcome to the group. All right. We got typekit has one more win. If I won. Hey, guys, can you hear me? Yeah, Yeah. Perfect you know, I wanted to share a win. It's personal for me, and another one is that just right now, I received 20,000 followers. So Wow. Yeah, Yeah. Thank you. Good job. And one more today I'm turning. So a big one for me. OK, say that one again, sorry, my connection was breaking up. I'm sorry today, I'm 30. It's my birthday today as well. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Thank you. I'm surprised. Andrew with George Burnett has not posted a happy here. If the guy, if you had a birthday and you've been his friend, I guarantee you've got it. All right. Well, happy birthday. Welcome to your 30s. That's awesome. Well, cool. So we did this, you know, hopefully every call and I know Matthew posts every Friday about wins, but it's important to focus on that stuff because entrepreneurship is a journey, right? There's highs and lows. Sometimes it feels like there's more lows than highs, so we really need to celebrate among this group when we do have those wins because too often entrepreneurs are too hard on themselves, so. Good job, guys. Fantastic OK, so Phillip's got the first question of the day. Oh hell, yeah, OK. I've heard things about accountants now. I had in the past had a tax accountant just to file my taxes for me, manage things like that. I barely broke the limits where I needed to charge, you know, provincial and federal taxes. But at the point where you reach a certain amount of revenue and a certain amount of income and money becomes a little bit more unmanageable for individuals. So when you're doing $2.1 million in revenue and you take it home basically somewhere around about two, 2 and 1/2 and you've got expenditures for your personal life in your business life are intermingled, right? How do when is it time to get an accountant? And what can the accountant do for me? Like a day to day like, like a monthly accountant on retainer kind of thing, like a lawyer, for example, when you have a lawyer, this sort of pseudo handling your legal stuff that I'm sure the future, and I'm sure as an accountant that manages those sorts of things, your finances of some sort of finance, of course. At what point do you go from at this level? I definitely need someone to help me with this. This is too much for me to manage. And what can they do for me? Because I've heard that, you know, when you've got 20 grand in a month with income net, you know, it's like all of a sudden you need someone to tell you what you should be doing with that shit. Mm-hmm So shoot. Awesome I'm the worst person to give advice about this. I never hired an accountant. My income has been up there for a while, but I pretty much do everything myself. But then again, you know, I'm opening up solo 401(k)s right now and all this kind of stuff, too. So I don't know if that's like a normal thing, but I do know that Matthew has hired an accountant. Matthew? yeah, but it's mostly like CPA for taxes, just like how you had mentioned before, because I don't like dealing with money myself. Like I I, I'm aware of it. I know it comes in, but I don't really like dealing with that, and I've been stopped for a long time. So it's different now for me. And maybe once somebody wants to chime in, but I can share a little bit of what we did at blind. So for the longest time, I think internally, Jesse, Chris's wife, was doing a lot of finance very early on. Then they also hired a CPA. As they grew, they hired a financial advisor. So that they would meet with me quarterly or even maybe bi yearly, just to give them advice just to see where they come, where they're going. And then he would give them advice in terms of how they should be investing their money. And then eventually, as we started getting staff up blind, these were the early days they would just hire a freelance accountant who would do the books. They would come into the office or do it remotely, and spend a couple of days looking at everything inside. And I would imagine at this point they're already doing at least a million in revenue. This is before my time. Now we have an in-house accountant who really works with the day to day books. Who's monica? So she's in-house, and she's been with us for at least 10 years, if not more. Oh, Wow. Yeah so once we've crested and have been doing several million now, I think I'm sure Kris hired her more on full time, like once we were doing in excess of three million and these are just my best guess. Chris can answer directly and this is why our situation, that's when we started having somebody full time because there were just more and more money in and out that needed to be tracked and just kept up to date. And and, you know, as we, our team has grown, we've had executive producers, head of production. Everybody is very responsible with money. And I think that's the culture at blind there, where people look at a job and they're very aware of what we have spent to date on a project, so everyone that's in leadership knows where the money is at and where it's going, at least on a micro level there when we're looking at a particular project. So I don't know if that helps answer your question. I can only speak on what I know and my personal experience. And so that's my recollection of the history of blind. Yeah, OK. I'll give you an example of one where I was able to kind of provide some insight that I know that an accountant would was, for example, this basically does frequent road trips. I say maybe two or three times a month. They go out for a day trip to the seated clients, which they sell the fire department's fire equipment to fire departments. I hear it in Central Ontario, and I helped them basically realize that he spends an entire day doing this OK round trip and he drives about for like 300 or 400 kilometers and helps them calculate basically based on the amount he spends on his vehicle each year and then realize that basically costs him between gas about $250 in gas that cost him about $360 in actual mileage that he puts on the vehicle because he spent $17,000 which lasts about two years based on the amount of travel he does on the vehicle before he has to change it in. Combined with eating out all that sort of thing and realizing that essentially that day trip costs him around $800. So in other words, he has to justify that, that he's going to make that much revenue by doing that right. And so providing that insight where the money is going and whether or not an expenditure or whether or not a a, whether it's like he's making the effort to see his clients and visited clients under the impression that if I'm in front of them, they will order for me, right? And showing him that basically, if you go up there and you're only making three or four small sales and one story, you're actually taking a loss. By doing this, it's not effective or it's a very costly method of doing the same thing. If you invest that $800 in some other way, we could get way more effective ways of getting your client right. The awareness aspect and more efficient are able to do these sorts of things. I mean, oh, go ahead, Ben. I then say normally, you know, I've interviewed accountants several, several, several times, and usually it's just been about taxes. Yeah, I mean, that seems to be where they're focused. A lot of times now, I do have a buddy who's worked for, like some of the bigger consulting shops, and that's the kind of stuff that he actually did. But he's more of like a financial advisor than anything instead of like an accountant. So maybe it's just the terminology. It's almost like a forensic accountant, like because recognizing whether or not this is, this is a good use of your money. I mean, maybe it's us as business consultants, as creative consultants that bridge that gap between the two recognizing, hey, is this a good method that's cost effective for reaching your clients by traveling to them? Is there somewhere other way we could do the exact same thing or a more cost effective method that has better results in the sales? Right, so right. But is that traditional thinking that he has that? Hey, if I'm not there, if they don't see me, then they're not going to order for me. And I'm like, well, that's where we start things with YouTube channels and we start, you know, other promotions, whatnot. Right? yeah, definitely sounds more like an advisor role where if they're getting granular, once you get to that position where you're like, look, I'm doing all this work, but I'm making zero money, I'm taking 0 home. Yeah, help me figure that out. That's when a good financial advisor would come in and they could get very granular or even a good consultant or even a good coach. Somebody like here can come in and it's like, well, what are we doing, guys? What are we doing? So it doesn't. I wouldn't say that it has to necessarily be an accountant, right? Because that's a very broad term, as mentioned. But it really depends on what you need. How responsible you are with money, because I know Ben is very responsible with money. Is like a QuickBooks guy. And he has he knows all our finances and he knows his own finances and they're now very clean. So he has like a lot of visibility on that. For me, it's like I just like to pay people to do that. And as long as I'm not struggling, I know I'm living a decent life and I don't really want to care about money, and it just gets tucked away on its own. What I'm not looking. So it just really, really depends. But I would say that it sounds like there's a lot of titles for this and and it could be different roles that could help fulfill this advisement. Part of your business? OK all right. It is actually on behalf of the client. And just to not tap dance around this, basically my father has decided to take me on to do some work for him. He's also reached an age where he can't hustle as much anymore. 61 now, so he can't do the traveling as much. He can't do the Hawking and the jerk it in the trade shows as much. And so as a result, he needs more effective methods of reaching his clients. And he's got that same kind of camera confidence I have. Of runs in the family. They have the ability we make really good Toastmasters and kind of the guide, the podium to be the host. We we really enjoy that and we do shine. What I think is hold UPS are that he can't foresee he look at the expenditure and go, oh, I have to go, I have to recoup that money. I'm like, no, it's better to invest it there. Like pay a guy 40 bucks to mow your lawn once every week and a half because it takes you four hours. To do that, you make $120 an hour because basically based on your income and once you figure that shit out, you're worth $125 an hour. So pay somebody 40 bucks to do the lawn for you and then free up four hours of your time because time is the most finite, valuable resource you have. And he just can't wrap his head around that kind of concept where spending the $40 is actually better than him mowing himself, right? And it's and it's also at the age where he can't keep doing that anymore. And he's kind of reached this precipice where I think he's starting to realize, you know, I'm old, like, I'm slowing down. But he still has the ambition, but not quite the he doesn't know how to go about it, right? So I'm trying to advise him based on the things that I've learned and I know, and that the group here has taught me and working with interacting with you guys. I had the fortunate opportunity to go back to basically YouTube University this past year after after, after a year of what was absolute insanity that is beyond exasperation at this venue. It will be launching in September, by the way. So that said, OK, I've been a little bit of clarity, so I'm not necessarily looking for an accountant per say, perhaps a financial advisor that can help comb through his actual practice and straighten them all out and then maybe meet with them once a year kind of thing or once every half a year. Yeah, or quarterly. Just whatever planning needs, like how much touchpoints he needs like or how much hand-holding he needs will determine how much, how many meetings that they need, how frequent. I think you can get somebody to just look at the books as well, right? That's somebody who needs to hear it from someone other than me, particularly as well. There's that father-son dynamic that plays a bit of a conflict of interest in a certain situation. But yeah, I think it's a matter of I'm looking for someone to kind of tell him the same things that I see that I know for certain that's more qualified to do so. And although I can, I can identify these, these deficiencies or within the finances because I've got access to the records. Someone else is going to be more and more proficient at it and has the ability to convey that message in a more succinct and authoritative manner, right? Yeah Philip, there's people that I've met, some people in transportation business call, they do logistics, and I think this sort of professional you you might be looking for. So they're basically responsible for optimizing financial systems, just not transportation. I just had a client about this. So you can look at this field, the logistics that sounds about right. You know, that's exactly what I'm looking for because I think he once said to me, I don't know if I'm actually making money by running the business or whether or not. Basically, the business is just basically breaking, even whether or not I'm like, because he still he still has his fire department pension and his government pension and whatnot. So he makes it clear six after taxes without getting out of bed. The remainder is like, well, do I really need to be doing all this? Is it paying for itself? And just I'm just doing it for the sake of doing it? Or is it actually getting me ahead, right? So, all right. Well, hopefully that helps fill up. OK, great. Let's roll on. Awesome So we're going to move on to Abby lemon. I'm going to I'm going to let her get her mic and camera ready. She's got a question about finding clients. Yes, I have. Hey, guys. Hey so I mean, that weird transition phase where I've kind of fired a couple of my low paying clients? Yes I know that you did something similar back in the day, and I know that to get kind of to position myself more as an expert, it's going to be long term things like writing content like, you know, doing more video, getting kind of out there with so that I get inbound leads. But what can I kind of do now in that interim period to, I guess, talk to more clients? I'm kind of aware that I will get more, you know, the more people I speak to, I will have more knockbacks, but I will also have a chance to kind of practice my negotiation skills. I have a chance to, you know, there's more chance of a win if I speak to more people, but it's just getting to speak to more people right now. That is a difficult bet. Yep what would you sort of what would you say or what do you like at that point where you kind of said, right? See you later to some of these clients today, I'm doing this to speak to some new ones. Yeah, Yeah. So back in the day when I did this, after I fired all my clients, I had all this time, right and I wasn't like, I was used to working 18 hour days. So I was literally working 18 20 hour days. And then all of a sudden I found myself with hours and hours that I could work on the business. And I was just like, what do I do now? That's exactly it. Yeah, what do I do? What do I do? And so I think that the first question that I had to tackle is who are my customers? So I want to ask you that, you know, this happens when everybody asks me, like, how do I find clients? My first question to them is, oh, well, who are your clients? OK, so I've gone back to a need that I did a lot of work in a few years ago. So it's, I guess, marketing directors and marketing departments of broadcast and creative technology companies. So people that I used to work in the industry on a different side, dealing with people like Adobe, avid blackmagic design, loads of these technical companies that sit within that kind of post-production broadcast space. So the smaller end of that spectrum is really where I'm aiming myself at. Obviously, I need to kind of re-establish myself as an expert in that field around the design and brand space. Because before I was actually working as more of a consultant. But that's kind of where I'm aiming towards, oh, that's where I have contacts and knowledge of the industry. So, OK, so in the past, what have you done for these people? I used to be a headhunter, so I worked for five years placing senior ceos, marketing sales directors in those industries. Yeah so you get to know, you get to know a lot of people. You get to go do a lot of trade shows, you do a lot of networking and all that kind of stuff. Mm-hmm So, OK, so what is it that they looking for these marketing directors? I guess the same as anybody. They're looking. You know, they want to be seen as better in their field. They want to be positioned. But it's at the moment that's part of my research and what I'm doing from a brand perspective. Previously, it would be about, you know, what gaps they had to fill. It would be about of, I guess they would if you had there were certain client can't I start getting certain people in the industry that had quite rare skill sets. So if you were kind of friends with one that person or you made a connection, you could then place that person at another company or so. That's what I was doing now. What their pain points are from a branding perspective is kind of where I'm heading towards and what I'm looking to kind of try and find out more. And solve. So this is where I'm in this kind of weird interim bit where I haven't done enough branding work in that space to know. And so it's what do I do at this point in time that can get me talking to some clients before I've got this like experience and skill sets and expertise. Background, if you like, I do that. Yeah, that makes sense. It does make sense. So you have a group of people that you're used to working with, right? You're used to working in the space. I think that the niche is really tight. So that's good. The group is defined. The problem is, is that you have the solution to a problem that they may or may not have. Yes and so really, what I would start doing is reaching out and talking to these people to see if they actually need the medicine that you have to offer, because right now you're trying to do this right? Yeah and they might not need it. I don't know. It seems to me like, you know, those kind of people, if they're Adobe, their brand is pretty much, oh, god, yeah, yeah, 100% So this is why the smaller companies that sit within that field, some of the smaller manufacturers and that kind of thing is kind of where I was looking rather than heading straight for Adobe. Yeah OK, so this is the secret card that I'm playing with all the people that like, call me and do some consulting with me. Here's here's a little tactic when you're testing this kind of product market fit, right? You've got the medicine. You don't know if it's going to solve the ailment that they have, and it's really difficult to get on the phone with these people because number one, they're busy and number two, everybody hates being sold to, right? And so reaching out to them on LinkedIn sucks cold calling, cold emailing. That's and it's just it's just how do you meaningfully get in touch with somebody? What I would suggest is conducting an interview. OK, do a podcast. Set somebody up and ask them if they want to be a guest on your podcast and you want to interview them about the blah blah blah blah blah ecosystem or the environment in today's world. Now the goal there is not to get that person as a client. The goal there is to figure out what they're struggling with. And you're interviewing them based on, you know, hey, you're a designer in the space and you feel like they have a lot to offer designers or marketers or whatever, and you'd love to hear their experience. Now you're going to appeal to their ego number one, and it's going to be really easy for you to get them on the phone because it's an interview. It's not a sales call. So try that genius. OK I will really in those questionings, you know, from a selfish perspective, right? You're there to figure out if this group actually needs what you can sell, what you can sell or if they need something else. Like, can you transition? Can you pivot a little bit to meet that need. And you sell a different medicine? Does that make sense? Absolutely Yeah. You know, it's a little difficult to like, specialize in something that niche if you don't actually know that they're going to buy. And that's the kind of bit where it's a bit at the moment. It's like, now I know, you know, everyone talks about meeting down and it's just that kind of period where you're trying to discover what the problems are that you kind of maybe need to solve or want to, you know, want to work with or can help with. But without being some kind of spammy Dick that just goes into somebody's mailbox with a really, I mean, how all of us get those messages and that's not what I do. It's also are your ads converting? My name's Ben burns and I run a marketing agency. Yeah, I wanted to share to Abby something that we shared a few weeks ago in the last business boot camp because this had come up to it's like, well, how do you drum up new business? And one thing in terms of the face to face stuff, if you do have a particular niche where they have conventions, there are trades, there are anything that relates to your particular niche. You can just go out and freak and meet them on the floor. So you might just talk to them because anyone who has a booth or a sizable booth, you know, somebody from marketing is there. So we do this all the time when we go to a show like Nab or Adobe MAX or the AIG conference. Like our goal as the future is to look for sponsors, look for people to collaborate with or potentially get guests. So that's the perfect place to do it because we know that that's the creative community. So I see Ben is better at this than I am, but we all kind of go out like Ben. We'll tackle a few people on one side of the room. I'll tackle some people on the other side of the room and then Chris will do the same. So what we'll do is we'll just go to the booth. We'll talk to them a little bit and figure out what they're all about. We'll just ask some deep questions, really about their marketing efforts like, oh, what are you guys trying to do here? What's your goal? Is it paying it out? Is it paying out? How is the how is the crowd here? Is that receptive? What would you like them to do instead? And then by asking these types of questions, you're starting to dig up if they have any particular challenges. Once you discover that, then you might. That might be an easy way in. You might say that, you know, all I'm a brand strategist that works in the space. You know, I work with clients like you in the past. Maybe this is something I could help you out with. You know, we can follow up after this. No pressure right now. I just I'm just curious about your business because I'm in this space myself. So you can just have these open conversations because they're there to talk to you anyway, right? Like, that's why they have a booth and the little pro tip, the bigger the booth, the bigger they are as a company, right? So it depends on what scale you might be going for. Sometimes the smaller, intimate booths, you might actually get a deeper connection there because they have time to kill or, you know, like they're still growing right or they're in that transition phase. So there's definitely there's room there. So I would say a trade show floor is underutilized right now in terms of how I see designers or creatives use it. I actually enjoy going to doing all that, and I look, I've been to anybody and done done exactly that there. And like you say, the smaller breeds you actually get to talk to actually some of the decision makers on those because that's who's there rather than they've put a couple of young temps or something on there. The bigger ones. So time for my ticket at IVC. And then, yeah, people, the best way. So as you're doing these long term things, one thing that you know, looking for those short term wins, it's all about networking. It's all about who you know? And if you network a little bit differently where you're not networking with or you're not trying to network with the actual end clients, you can find jobs through companies that are doing what you want to do at a larger scale. So their business development? Folks there salespeople. They know the game, and they turned down a lot of leads because it's not a good fit. So getting in tight with another agency's business development crew and being that kind of like referral resource is a fantastic way to get jobs. That's how I got probably the bulk of my jobs in Richmond is I went to I had a whole list, an Excel spreadsheet of all of the business development folks in my area, and I would take them out to lunch. And that's how I got that first like 40,000 logo job was like network. So you're a smaller fish and that's OK and you charge a lot. But in the meantime, you can have these short wins by networking. That's brilliant. That's really, really helpful, right? Cool cool. Would it be the other way to do it is to find fringe service providers? I said this a whole bunch, but like if you find a piece, if you find a website or a marketing effort that you really admire, look up who actually did that. Like what team actually created whatever you want to work in and find those people and connect with them. So obviously, you know, there's a photographer that worked with them. There's a web developer, there's a copywriter. And if you can locate those other people that offer similar that offer services to similar clients, you can be that person that they refer to when the photographer gets brought in for a job. And oh, by the way, we need a logo. Do you know anybody? Oh yeah, no, Abby, she's awesome. So there's those. Those are the two quickest way to onboarding new clients that I've experienced. That's good. Yeah, because it's about the long term with the short term wins. And I think it's the short term bit that I'm struggling with now. I've got this kind of gap and I need to get on with it, but that's great. I'm going to do all of that. Thank you. Nice awesome. Angela asks a business development folks, who are they? They are the salespeople who work in the agency, so their titles are usually like New business or business development, or sometimes they're called account executives, but usually it has something to do with new business or business development. All right. So next up, Abby, is that good? OK, cool. All right. Next up, we have Francine, Francine, and you're on the call. Hey, there. Hey, Francine. I was not on Jesse. No yeah, just hold on. I'm going to change that if I succeed. Yeah all right. Hi, welcome, thank you. Nice to see you. Yeah, good to see you. OK, so what's going on? Yes so I'm a makeup artist. I'm located in Paris, in France, right? And having an issue with my social media. OK. I've been working with social media for two months and I've seen growth. It's like I can double my number of followers in a few months, which I think is good. Nice right? But I'm still stuck under the 1,000 four, and I've been stuck for like weeks. I don't know why. It's like I get it again. 10 hours use eight in 2018. So it's like, I don't know what to do. I've been working on creating some makeup classes, you know, milestone tutorials, things like that. I think I have a good engagement with my followers, right? But I don't know why I'm stuck. I don't know what to do now. It's like, OK, should I work as a pr? Should I work with influencers? I don't know. No idea. OK, I'm sure that there's tons of questions that I should be asking here. But Matthew has all of the answers in this case. Well, what are we waiting for you? So good? What a jerk. Well, to kick things off, what platform are you using? On Instagram. Instagram OK. Yes all right, Yes. And have you done any collaborations with anybody? Yes but I worked with a woman who works in fashion, right? I worked with her several times and I gained like maybe 10 points from her. I've collaborated with the French team, which gave me like 80 followers, right? But that's all. Yeah OK. OK, sorry, guys. Can I just jump in a little? Please do so. I'm on Instagram. I have 49,000 followers and I've been growing a few pages now. And what at masternodes? It's a space exploration page. But what I found out is that the easiest way to grow when you are very small is that you find a fan page in your field who is like at around at least 50,000 followers or more, and just damned if they could repost some of your things for some money in return. OK Wow. Because they have a huge reach and you will be surprised how cheap they are, like in the space exploration niche. You can get like a post for like a 40 or 80,000 page for like 10 to 20 bucks, which is like which is like, really cheap. And I've been doing this, and if you find some posts that work very well, then you can just ask for bulk discounts. So you can get like five bots and like every second day or so, and it works massively well. OK, OK, that's good. It's really interesting. Hey, Francine, what's your handle? It's Francine. If r and C And EO underscore. Proposal row now you have 877 followers. OK, cool. So I'm going to I'm going to look through this, Matthew, you got any advice for yeah, what would you say your engagement level is right now? Percentage wise, it was like 8% a few days ago. 8% OK. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's fantastic. And I haven't gone through the audit yet, but how social are you on social media? Meaning, like, how many questions like, are you? Do you have a lot of prompts. When you post stuff and do you go out to other pages and socialize with them? In fact, I would say a more of the Instagram story, ladies. So I like to see there a lot. I try to engage with people, to maybe I don't do doing enough. I don't know. Maybe there might be a point here to check. Yeah, Yeah. Because I wanted to piggyback on when David was saying in terms of the communities that do exist out there, if you're very active on popular hashtags or other accounts that are bigger than yours, then you might find people like for me, I find a lot of growth in a couple of hashtags that I'm following that are big in the motion design community. So I will just even, you know, whatever Instagram serves me, I'll just kind of respond to there. I'll try to find something nice to say something quite genuine just because I end up making relationships with people and I don't even know how many followers they have. I'm not even looking at any of that stuff. It's just like, oh, that's something cool, or you posted something interesting, so I'm going to try and respond to that. So I try and carve out a little bit of time every week just to be very, very social on there and to be very genuine so that I might have conversations with people and drum up conversations. Alternatively, one little tip that I learned from Bonnie saying who we've had on the channel many times she gave a little tip is when you post, your post should encourage engagement. Don't post just to post post, but that it encourages engagement. So when she said that I think of every single thing that I post, there is an entryway for somebody to engage with it. So either I'll ask a question, either I'll use one of the features, like the voting features or the slider features something where it's going to signal the algorithm, signal the platform and say, you know what? This is highly engaged content. So therefore we should promote it to a wider audience because that's how all algorithms work on pretty much every single platform. What they do is when you post it will take that post and distribute it to a very small, very small percentage of your follower base, your user base and see how that goes. And if it engages over a certain percentage, then it will bump it out to a wider amount and then wider and wider. And it's all based off of your engagement from what I know, and this seems to be very universal and a lot of platforms, they have different ways that they measure data and things like that. But it seems like the more engagement that gets, the wider reach it will have. That's why if and I see this and you have to sometimes if you want to game the system like, I'm not necessarily a huge fan of this, but I try and do it in my own ways. If you look at somebody like logo inspirations, for instance, if you follow them, they have a huge following hundreds of thousands of followers and usually they post just beautiful logo design work. Occasionally, they like probably every 10 post. They will have one post that's a designer meme, one meme about a bad client or something like that, just to get a laugh, get a joke. And usually it's a posed with the question like how many of you have had a client like this? Respond Yes or no, and it's so silly. It seems weird when I started seeing those at first, but then the amount of comments and engagement is ridiculous, like through the roof, like more than 10% And then later, when you scroll back to their feet a few days later, that post is completely gone. It's hidden, so they go back and re curate their feed. So it's only the beautiful stuff again. But the only reason why they do that is so that they can get bumped up in the algorithm because it has a little bit of an afterglow effect where your account will be kind of flagged. like, oh, this account promotes highly engaging content, so we're going to promote it to a wider audience next time there is a fresh post, ok? So those are things that I understand with, with engagement and what I've seen from experience. But I think between all of us, it seems like there's been a couple of interesting tips, especially from David. That's a fantastic way. Easy money to spend. Easy way to grow. OK, well, thank you much, you and I would like to just ask you, Francine, because right now I'm going through your Instagram page and I see that you are posting in, I guess, French and English as well. Yeah, I would. I would highly recommend you to think about this and try to separate maybe into two accounts to have a French account and an English account. I was struggling with this for a long time because I'm Hungarian, I'm not a native English speaker. And it was easy for me because there are hundreds times more people who speak English than those who speak Hungarian in French. It could be a bit more different to this side because there are a lot of people who speak French, but then you could build a much deeper relationship with those you engage with. OK, but since I already have, like, a small account, if I start a new one, how long is it going to take me to be like? Well, you could send your French followers from this account to the other accounts. You know, and I cross promoting and just keep this as an English one or I don't know your demographics. But I would think about that because I was pondering on this for like a year and then I decided to. OK, let's go full English. This is when it started to brew up. OK OK. OK, I want to open it up to the group, anybody else got any tips, any social media, by the way? You're welcome. Oh yeah, I wanted to share one other thing we've been observing a recent guest of ours Michael janda, who was on the channel. He writes books. He's an author. And so he has a lot of knowledge products, right? He is. He sells several books. But the way that he uses Instagram and we're making some assumptions here about how because he's grown several thousand very recently and the way that he's using Instagram and I see other people doing it this way is they're using Instagram like SlideShare. So if you're familiar with slideshare, you see Ben is holding it up there. If you're familiar with how SlideShare works, basically people have knowledge like either it's a bit of their book or something like some piece of knowledge, and they do a little slide presentation because they're using the swipe feature on there. So, for instance, for you, like one way you might use that slide feature is like, you know, five ways to do your makeup using this natural nude lipstick, for instance, right? And you're showing five different ways to do that, or five different ways that you can make money as a makeup artist, right? You've got to figure out what kind who your community is and what kind of value you might provide. So in the case for Michael janda, what he does is like he takes his entire book and he takes little micro ideas from there and turns them into slides. He takes those slides and then he distributes on there because what happens? People will save that. People will like that. And eventually, if they see enough of these, they're going to just buy his book. Yeah so he has a very smart way of doing that, so and I'm seeing more and more people distribute knowledge this way where they just look at the Instagram feed as a way to distribute knowledge via slides. So I'm starting to do that. I don't know if Ben is going to start doing that, but Oh yeah, I'm going to start. I'm definitely going to start experiment. Yep, it's getting too close, Matthew. I'm going to start it, too. So so there you go. Big time. This shouldn't be here. Yeah, I think it's deeper than just having slides, though, because what you're doing is you're hooking them in the beginning. With that first slide, it's almost like a clickbait title on YouTube. And so if I go to Michael Janice thing, the first thing is how to ask a client for their budget. Right? I mean, OK, everybody's going to swipe on that. And as soon as you get a swipe, I'm going to guess that Instagram sees that as an interaction. And so if you're going to do that, swipe, it's going to say, hey, this is interesting, let me go ahead and promote this. So I think that this is a massive opportunity here. Yeah, that's great. That's really cute. Yeah obviously, everybody in the group start posting slides. OK, last we got 2 minutes before we got to move on. But anybody else have any tips for instagram? I'll just have one question regarding the number of followers, because I think that right now I feel like I'm getting a good amount of clients with the followers I have. But my husband is like, OK, you should have way more followers to be more visible, even if they are not in your niche, just to be visible. You think it's best to be seen like by a lot of people, and it's potential clients or say my mission with my small following. Well, I think that boils down to what are you using social for, right? Follower count can be a vanity metric if you're not selling sponsorships or sponsored posts or something like that, you know, so if you're using if you're using social successfully to pull in the kind of clients that you want, then continue doing what you're doing. That number means nothing. You know, it's all about the purpose behind it. Now it's easy to get caught up in that race. And, you know, I'm sure Matthew does just the same as I do. It's like that. See that little red icon. It's like, whoa to show me. But you know, it's one of those things where it's like, it needs to be for a reason. So, you know, my wife tells me all the time, she's like, sit down, I got this. You probably tell that to your husband, OK, I'm going to do that. OK, OK. All right. But I know that we do have some other Instagram experts. So last chance, guys, any other kind of pro tips? Go live, guys. Yeah, yeah, go, right, Yeah. That's a very good way to build relationship that with your community and get instant feedback on what you're doing. And even if you don't have any idea, actually, this is how I got my 10K client. I just went on Instagram Live today and I just answered a few questions from the community. They were just commenting from the company account that, hey, that's a good thought about going to Mars. And I just jumped in their DMS, you know, like, hey, Thanks for Thanks for just commenting on the life. And then I figured out that it was the CEO doing the Instagram page of a million startup. And then I decided that, hey, I think I can help you out here. And then started to go. So yeah, going live is one of the most neglected things, I think. Oh, OK. Yeah, I wanted to. Yeah, I wanted to say that to you. Live is very interesting. We've done a couple of live streams on our Instagram and we bring on other people to have conversations. So it helps us do the cross promotion very, very easily because both pages are visible at the same time. Also, the other thing I wanted to call out Tina from high light studios, she's been definitely working on this. She's been, I think, weekly every Thursday. They do a live stream where they're either reviewing portfolios or they're talking about a particular subject. And I know her Instagram has following has grown pretty significantly over the past few months. It's probably a result of that where she's just being open and transparent and trying to share information there. So it definitely it's AI feel like it's an underutilized tool feature in there and something that I'm still trying to figure out what might be the best way to use that. But David has great results from that, and I see some people in the comments. They're complaining about Instagram. They don't like it. It's all about beauty or whatever. Like, I get it like you don't have to do. You don't have to use any platform. Like Ben said, this all boils down to your goals. So if your work is not about the beauty of it or it has nothing to do with image or things like that, then don't use it. Use a better platform for it. Use the appropriate platform because there are tons and tons of platforms where you should be focusing your time. But if you're trying to do all of them and having no result, like why focus on all of them? Just focus on the one that's driving results and best suited for your services? OK, so I just got a few things, so it's like Instagram is like the video has a big title, like it's a big like. Same as the foreign images and on a discovery that I think it works really well. So when you put up the video and even it has slides, and then that's a double engagement, right? It has a slide, even its video so. Mm-hmm And also on a hashtag, it's the first one is a video like, you know, that means that it's a lot more potential and working on the video and then just posting some kind of images, I think. And also, when I grew on Instagram, I have like K followers now. It bring a lot of freeloaders people asking for free stuff and, you know, like low quality stuff. And that's the down part. Maybe because I really didn't choose the audience, right? I was just posting my process like illustration processes. So like most of them were hobbyists designers. So I think it could be good. But in my case, I think it didn't do really well. Even I have K followers. It's like, you know, it's not really the best thing in the world. OK, good to know. Ooh, Ben, I think we can move on, I think this is meaty. That was plenty. I feel like I have a lot of like New little pro tips there, so I'm not going to be applying some stuff. Yeah, it was muted. I was going to say, Francine, did you get value out of that? Yeah, great question. Thanks a lot to all of you. Thank you. Awesome All right. So next up, we have William Hardaway Yuan William. SHH, SHH, SHH, SHH, OK no worries. We'll go with Claire. Claire O'Connor, Sarah O'Connor again. Hey, hey, hey. OK, I got a wicked echo. Really? all right, that's better. OK Yeah. OK, Claire, so what's your question? Something about building a brand? Yeah so this you guys are killing it. Matthew and ben? Oh my gosh. I'm sure I speak for everyone on this call that we want to know the whole back story. So spill. Well, the show is the back story. No, I know. But I'm interested in how it came to be. Like, how did you decide to do it? How did you strategize it? Did you do a casting call? You know? Did you storyboard it? Like, how did like kind of the nitty gritty of it? And I know Matthew said that it was a big risk because it was a big investment of time and resources and you didn't pay off and massive various like how much time, how many resources know, said, whatever you want, whatever you're willing to share about the back, the behind. Yeah, but the backstage behind the scenes behind the brand? OK, cool. I would love to do that. So I will take it up until the point where Matthew took over production. And then Matthew, he'd take it from there. But basically, you know, Chris had Chris like an idea generating machine, right? This guy is like he'll walk in like, you know what, guys, we should be a talent agency. And it's like, whoa, what? He's constantly coming up with these new ideas. And he said, you know, we need to do this behind the scenes. Kind of, look, we should bring in a project, we should bring in a client and do a project and film everything. I think that that'd be really great. And so I've been kind of looking for the opportunity, and we actually fielded one opportunity before Josh kind of appeared. That was a barbershop and we had contracts signed and then all the guys funding fell through and the location fell through and it just. Just disappeared on us. So a couple of weeks later, and this was like, you know, after I had let go of this idea pretty much entirely. A couple of weeks later, we get this new lead in and it's Josh. And initially, the budget wasn't anywhere near what we could work with. But then I was like, you know, I wonder if we can reduce our rates, but also get them to sign things that we would be able to like, get into their house and film them in their home and get into the business and film every nook and cranny of the project. And they were wide open for it. So that's when things really kicked off. But that was almost a year and a half ago. This is when this project started. It was a long game. Yeah, Yeah. So you can see the beard like get longer through the episodes as it goes. But the actual product, the project was pretty smooth. As you'll see, we progress through the things. There's bumps in the roads, but it was pretty smooth and we basically documented we shot. What is it like? Almost two terabytes of footage, matthew? No, the whole thing is at least six terabytes right now. It's a lot. It's a lot. Six terabytes, 6,000 gigabytes. It's a lot of footage. Yeah, so it keeps going. And I wanted to point out one thing about Josh the way that Josh found us is because he was watching our channel. So he's a DIY guy and he's actually been watching the channel, so he's looking because he's DIY. Like he literally built almost all of the fixtures. Inside is his beer brewery. He built the refrigerator, this walk in refrigerator, in his beer brewery. It's like he's an insane DIY guy. And so when it came to his logo and his graphics, it was the same thing for him. It was diy, so he was looking on YouTube. He found our channel and he showed us. When we got to his office, he did a bunch of sketches. He's like, oh, I watch this video from Chris. So this is how I designed my logo. And he had some great concepts. I was like, Oh my gosh, like, Chris would be so proud if he saw all of this work. And he's just like a design student or an art student because he had a portfolio full of all these sketches and ideas for all of the can artwork that is done and just everything. And it's all so proud to see that. And that's how he found out at a certain point. His business grew so much that he's like, I can't do this all myself. It doesn't make sense for me to work on every facet of the business. So now I think I'm going to just reach out to the guys who I've been following for a long time, and that's how he reached out and got in touch with Ben. Yep Yeah. So basically, the key to this project was because we were doing this documentary thing and because we were basically working for all of our other clients. At the same time, this Hamilton kind of kept getting kicked down the road. So you'll see those kind of delays in the picture. But I think looking back on it, the one thing that I would do more often is have more interviews through the process with the actual team. We did a good deal of them, but you know, I probably would have liked to have Matthew and I sit down in front of the camera a little bit more just so that we can kind of get those initial reactions after each thing because right now we're having to kind of remind ourselves whenever we sit down and shoot the video or whatever that is, like what actually happened? Do you remember, you know, it's kind of like we get to watch what we do or watch the film and kind of respond to it. But that's Yeah. I mean, it was a fairly smooth project which doesn't make for great TV, but it was a wonderful experience. And then at a certain point, it was like, OK, let's widen this thing down. A lot of our other clients, the projects were wrapping up and it was like, all right, we got to finish this thing. So that's when Matthew came on board and basically took over all of the production side of things for the show. So Matthew, I don't know if you want to take it from there, but that's my version of the behind the scenes. Yeah, basically now for the past few weeks or the past, I'd say three months, we've been crafting the content. So looking at all the hundreds of hours that we recorded chopping them down into at least eight episodes and figuring out what are the big chunks in the process that we might show, what can we teach about each part of the process? And then what is the challenge in each episode? Because the only way that this is going to be interesting is if there's a challenge at the beginning that is kind of displayed and then it somehow resolves at the end of the episode. So it's really new for me because we don't really work on serialized content this way. It helps me think about story in a more impactful way or in a different way than I have before, because before I'd work on TV commercials, those things were super short. A lot of our content online is just mostly educational through the future. So this was a whole other beast that we had to try and understand and craft a much larger story and a micro story with each episode. So it's been really a fantastic learning experience for me. Just seeing how this might all come together. Yeah, and it's really interesting because the process that we have for branding and pretty much any of our projects, it's smooth and I'm not bragging here, but it is smooth and the clients, there's rarely any conflict through this. And like I said, that doesn't make for fantastic TV like you watch kitchen nightmares, Gordon Ramsay, he comes in and fixes a business and it's full of conflict and he's yelling and he's like, he's due it his way or the highway. And it's this beautiful thing to watch because the story is in the conflict. And so trying to figure that out was a challenge. It was a challenge. I remember listening to you say, oh, Matthew, I don't know if we can do this. And I'm thinking, you're so full of shit. You do know what you're going to do. This is like what I know. I mean, did you really feel like, Oh my gosh, how are we going to pull this off? There were certain elements that were like dramatic sighs, like, usually I'm not that emotional. Like, I'm pretty stoic guy. But there was some moments where it was like, you know, Joshua, come through with a revision request or something like that, and we'd have to kind of play it up a little bit for camera because the camera, you know, it seems like and Philip, you're really good at this. But it seems like even though I'm emoting to the camera like I'm trying to demonstrate emotions, it doesn't translate or it mutes that stuff. So you kind of have to like, amp it up and go overboard. And for me, that feels silly. Yeah, but sometimes you have to do that in order to convey the emotions that you're actually feeling. Yeah, you really do. You really do have to do that, but you really have to do let yourself kind of be free. And and it's a matter of I kind of became that way through the most unfortunate circumstances like, you know, that kid in high school and in elementary school that was picked on by everyone, even the uncool kids picked on. That was me. I was curious. They took me to a shrink say, well, what's wrong with our kid? And then she said, you're going to have you're going to have big problems with him. He's he's exceptionally intelligent and he has a rapport with his teacher. He told me he has a rapport with his teacher. He's in the fourth grade. Fourth graders don't use the word rapport. And I was a walking target, right? And I just I truly felt like I was just being. I couldn't understand why the hell they were picking on me. So I had to learn how to just be me and accept that, hey, you know what? Fuck it. I don't care really whether or not I'm not going to let anyone really, truly dictate who I am, and I kind of let all of the emotions out at all the time. Now I'm trying to dial that back. Right now, I'm trying to kind of rein that in and a bit more of a professional manner because it has had negative impacts where I find myself struggling. Is that being being true to myself? And actually, I found that telling the truth sometimes is actually not so good. You know the idea that truth will set you free? No, no. Sometimes truth will send you to jail, ok? And even when you really didn't do anything wrong, you know, the fact of the matter is, is truth can can eating a lot of shit. I told a friend some information that and this was a romantic friend. The truth of what I was talking about and it's kind of upset, and I'm really now very, very hurt that she's upset that I couldn't continue on morally and ethically continue on down that road without being clear about my intentions, right? So now she's kind of hurt, and I don't know how to resolve that. And so it's caused me a lot of pain right now, and it's caused her a lot of pain just by being truthful. So and I did in a very tactful manner in a very really, you know, tasteful manner, but the fact is is that you've got you've got to just let yourself out, you know, and and my dad used to say I had this picture up on on on Facebook of the after Christmas party because they used to host an annual gong show for all my friends at Christmas time. And there was a hookah there in the aftermath. And it's like, oh, take that down noise. You never want to do business because there's all drugs like dad. It's shisha, for starters. And only here in north America do we think look at it at a hookah as something that is associated with drugs, and it's not everywhere else in the world. Basically, it's just it's it's a commonplace thing. And I'm like, and they're so close minded as to see that picture and not want to do with business with me. Fuck them. I don't want to do business with them, either. They're going to bring you back around to bring you back around to Claire's question. Claire, one one last kind of tip if you're going to do something similar that I've found. Handy, just just from being in front of the camera document first and then tell the story later, because what I've found is that like doing it Casey neistat style where you're carrying the camera around and doing the thing and trying to tell the story while you're doing the thing, it is so hard to do it that way, and I've tried it right. I've tried it a lot and failed. I've got terabytes of footage of logs that the world has never seen. But documenting being just doing what you need to do and setting up a camera so that you can just record it and then constructing the narrative later seems to be the most efficient way to do it, because then you have that clarity of hindsight and you can actually tell the story. So if you're thinking about doing something similar, I would start by just documenting and getting permission to the material. Yeah, what I am thinking about doing it, I've been thinking about it for a couple of months. That's why when when you when you put that out there, it was like, oh my god, this is perfect, because now I have this model to friendly cannibalised. And Diane Gibbs was actually the one who tossed that out to me and said, you know, you really should do a little web series where you're following these makeovers from beginning to end and. But one thing I was curious about like, how did you actually structure the business relationship with josh? I mean, was did you you said you discounted your fee? And so like, what was he paying for? What were you? So how did how did that work? So we worked with basically a stretched version of his budget, which was much lower than we're used to working with like typically logo engagements on our site or anywhere. Usually there are around 250,000. And he couldn't come anywhere near that. So in exchange for working at a reduced rate, we'd had him sign talent ingredient agreements with the future and anything that we created in conjunction with the actual project we own the rights to. So that was the kind of give and take. And, you know, normally we would never discount anything. And if you can do this without discounting, I think it's a benefit. And I've actually had conversations with clients since then where I'm like, hey, as an added benefit to us, we can actually document this process and broadcast your new brand to our 500000 bill. Like there's there's an advantage there, so I'm not recommending discounting it in any way, but that's what we did. The interesting thing was that there was there's two companies involved here, right? So there's blind and there's the future. The work was done under contract with blind. The talent agreement was for the future. And so anything the future touched anything the future made we owned. So that's the way that the legal kind of deal structure was. Ben, sorry, Ben. I would like to just ask a question about the narrative part because, for example, if I'm doing just a daily vlog, you recommend me to when I'm post producing to just tell the story like at home. What's the question, so so how do I, you know, then I will be at a different location than when I was recording the stuff. So, oh, I see, I see. For example, let's say I go, let's say I go on a summer vacation. Mm-hmm And then it would be very cool to tell the story on top of the, for example, the mountain. Mm-hmm But then you said that that's very difficult to do if you are inexperienced. So then I tell the story at night in the hotel room. Yeah, so I think that it's probably worth taking a look at some documentaries because this is the way that all documentaries work. You know, the show vice was a really early inspiration for us. No, not vice. What was it called matthew? Hustle hustle from viceland. Yeah, hustle where you have interviews and you're supplementing these interviews with b-roll of what actually happened. And you even you can even not even show up on on screen if you look at Matthew's office. Video he narrates the entire thing. As a vote like you never remember. Right? so it's an easier way to construct a narrative so that you're not like having to think, what am I doing right now? How can I translate this into something that's entertaining for the audience and still do this other thing well? Yeah you know, like, it's so difficult. If you can do it, go for it. But yeah, for me, it's that's crazy hard. Mm-hmm OK thank you so much. I just wanted to say one thing and it's free because I'm thrifty. But and I put it in the chat, but you can do Amazon prime. You can put your web series on Amazon prime for free. I think there's a few like hoops to jump through, but you can jump through those hoops, so you guys should do it. My friend Kathryn did it for her web series and. I mean, it's right there. Well, I'm going to look that up right after this call, so that's fantastic. Thank you, Diane. It's cool. OK I think that about wraps it up for building a brand. And right now I'm looking at avril is is next. So give avril a second to bring herself online. Avril nope. OK all right, so next up, we have nihalani. Are your mind? Nobody's online. No problem, we'll just go to the next one. Amirah OK. OK somebody is typing a comment right now. They're like, let me get in it, Shane. Shane Moran. Oh, my god. Everybody's gone. Well, if we get change there, he just needs to unmute himself. How the embarrassing. Can we get here? Appreciate he's in a red sweater and he has earphones on. Oh yeah, I see him. Shane, I don't see a mic icon. You might have to go to your preferences and then look at audio settings and just make sure that there's that mic enabled. Have you tried restarting? I used to do tech support for bell sympatico, so I know it was impractical high speed tech support. My name is Philip Hopkins. That's wonderful. Can I get your B1 number to start, please? OK, thank you. Oh my gosh. All right. Let's go over to Mo while Shane figures out his audio. Yeah what's up, mo? Yo, what up is there, hear me? Yeah, can be safe driving. Yes, yes, I'm being safe. Hey, I have a question on behalf of the titans. It happened weeks ago. We we did a thorough job answering it, but I'd like to hear from you guys. This is for Mario. I don't know if he's on or not, but for someone who's like transitioning into like, I'm talking, just starting building their own business, what would you say? You have to allocate your time and effort to, especially while you have like, a full time job? Oh, OK. So if you have, let me just rephrase the question if you have a full time job, what do you spend your time on the little time that you actually have to work on your business, right? Yes OK. I have. I have an opinion on this, and then I really want to hear Matthew's opinion on this, too. But to be honest? For me, it's all about sales, because if there's no money, there's no business, if there's no clients, there's no business. And so if he doesn't have any clients yet, he needs to do anything, everything in his power to find those clients. You know, he needs to start reaching out to people. He needs to take his lunch break and actually. Eat lunch with potential clients. It needs to be reaching out, it needs to be figuring out what his niche is. He needs to be building the infrastructure to pull in clients and into and to generate those leads. Without that, there's no business. You could have the best process in the world. You could have the sexiest design skills ever. But if you don't have clients, there's there's no business there. So that's my vote is spend time on sales, spend time on nurturing leads that that can bring you money. Yeah yeah, I can say plus one to that, I don't have much experience from that because at the time when I was building my own business, I was freelancing, so I had the free time where I could work freelance for a little bit of time, save a little bit of money and then go venture off and do a freelance job that I do a client work. So it was early on that was it was very easy for me because I was in a flexible state with blind in the future. This is what we had done for the past five years, where we're running blind full time, but as a second business that we're building the future. We spent whatever free time we could building content because we know in the long run building the content is the thing that's going to generate us any type of attention, whether that be selling more wares, doing sponsorships or partnerships, or just allowing us to gain more leverage using our name what we've built. So depending on what the ultimate goal of this of Mario is. I would say that, you know, building some kind of audience or building some kind of customer base or building clients that you can actually work with. Those are all very, very important because without that, there's there's nothing. It's a super, super broad question, so the answer is have to be brought in this case. I hope that helps. Yeah, I definitely does. I wish he was here. I have a follow up given the direction of where our conversations have been going in the chat at titans, as well as just on the calls. A lot of people are struggling with, I guess, the management of their time because they're solopreneurs between on the business and in the business. And I know both of you are like managers for blind and the future or creative directors and whatnot. What would you recommend? This is probably also broad. So any any type, you can help me out here. What would you recommend a solopreneur do to kind of. Better allocate their time to building their business. great. This is awesome, I can I can definitely answer this one. Working on the business versus working in the business, if if your goal is to stay solo, to stay a company of one, you deliberately have to set aside a chunk of your week. And I would start by setting aside like a four hour chunk of time, whether, you know, take a morning or an afternoon and dedicate that to working on the business. And this is where you shut off your email. This is where you shut off all communications. You don't work on client work and you reserve that on your calendar for working on your business. Start with that four hour chunk and then work up to like two days a week. If your goal is not to stay so low, the goal should be eventually to work exclusively on the business and not in the business, right? You want to hire people, you want to build an army of freelancers, you want to build the infrastructure below you so that you're dedicating 100 percent of your time to working on the business and bringing in clients and all that kind of stuff, because that's the role of the CEO of a company that has employees. Mr. Hazzard raises his hand, I'm sure he's got some some gold to drop here, actually. Hopefully Matthew in China has some gold. I'm curious about focus sprints. He mentioned that last week. Oh yeah, you do that. Perfect segway oh, this is beautiful. Yeah, I came back from 99 you two weeks ago. I'm making a video on this on our new channel, but I'm happy to share what focus sprints are now because I've been doing them and they've been fantastic in terms of productivity and a few people in the office have adopted it since, and they've also seen productivity jumps. So here are some of the detrimental things right now. What I learned is we put a lot of value on this thing. This is we are the most distracted generation ever. This thing and open office space is all these inventions of the modern workspace, slack. Email all this stuff. We're reachable any time we put so much value on this, and this causes a lot of stress and a lot of distraction. So the key thing is to get away from the distraction as much as possible. So the idea with a focus sprint is you turn off your notifications, close your email, hide your phone, literally hide your phone like you have zero stimulation outside of the task at hand and your watch and your watch. Like anything that's going to stimulate you or pull you away from focus thinking. So that's the first thing hide all distractions, turn off everything. And I've seen other people at the office do this now, and this is great. Next thing, set a goal. So what can you accomplish in 90 minutes? A focused sprint is 90 minutes of working time and 20 minutes of rest. The reason why is this is based off of ultra rhythms, which is just your energy over the day. And that's based off of stress building, doing high value thinking and then your your body having to go to a healing response for 20 minutes to replenish, re-energize and lower your cortisol and stress anything that's going to contribute stress to your body. So 90 minutes on, you're just working on one clear task you could break those down into subtests. So one example would be I have to write a script for a video so that 90 minutes is broken down into 30 minutes of blocking out all the different sections of my script. And I'm going to spend 15 minutes filling in each section section so that by the time I'm done with 90 minutes, I have more or less a first draft of a script for a video, and I got it done in 90 minutes. And it was fantastic because the time keeps you a little bit accountable, but also just breaking it down into subtasks helps make the task a little bit more manageable in real, because one of the biggest objection objections that we have when it comes to tackling a new goal is it's too big, it's too unsurmountable, and I don't know where to begin. So if you set a goal that's way too big, you're never going to complete it like, yeah, I'm going to write that novel someday. Well, if you say I'm going to write the foreword or I'm going to write the outline for chapter one or whatever that is, then it becomes a lot more bit-sized. So that's the key thing. Put away distractions, set a clear goal, break those down into subtests, something that you can do in 90 minutes, set a timer. Hopefully, it's like analogue or something else that's not your phone. Set a timer for the 90 minutes. Once that goes off, stop working, stop working. And even if you're in the flow, just stop working. And the reason why you can you mute francine? Got it! Thank you. So even if you're in the flow, you want to stop. And the reason why is because when you're doing a high value task like really working on something very hard, your cortisol and your stress levels are building up. So you do need to let your brain rest so that you can do more of these sprints throughout the day. You could try and power through it. But what's going to happen? And maybe some of you've experienced this, you can go for hours straight and I've done four hours straight or just highly focused work. But after that, four hours, I can't do anything for the rest of the day. Yep, because my body is so tired. My brain is so tired. So the idea with focus sprints is based on the clarity and rhythm. If you let your body rest, then you'll be able to do more of these sprints throughout the day and squeeze up more productive time out of a full day's worth of work. And you won't be tired at the end of the day. You'll actually be pretty energized. What you do in the 20 minutes of rest is very important. Still, keep your stimulation away. Don't the first thing? Don't hop on your email. Don't hop on to Instagram. Don't look at your notifications. Go for a walk. Go get some vitamin d. Go stare at something green because that also has calming properties. Or the best thing is you could just close your eyes for five minutes and shut out all stimulation. Because what's going to happen is all of that stimulation is going to help or de stimulation is just going to help calm you down and replenish all the energy spent on a high value task. Excuse me, once that 20 minutes. Is over. You could start a new sprint, set a new goal, set new subtasks and go again on Saturday. I had to create this whole video. It's like this 15 minute video. It was being handed off to me in a rough state. I did five sprints in that one day and I finished the video, the entire video from beginning to end, and I was like, how is this possible? This is insane. And by the end of the day, I was still pretty good in terms of energy level and focus, and I was still like, I could go on for another hour or two. That's just like, I have to shut it off. Let me rest for the day like this was. This was great. So that's the idea of the focused sprint. So first, get away from all distractions. Set a timer for 90 minutes. Set a goal, subtasks, rest for 20 minutes and then do it again. So if you break your day up into four focus sprints, then you could get six hours of very solid, productive time out of an eight hour day. Because what I found and this was given by a talk a cognitive neuroscientist who works out of Berkeley, she said the average worker only gets 3 and 1/2 hours of productive time out of an eight hour workday. That's sad. That's because we get distracted every 90 seconds, either from a co-worker or from our valuable phone right here, right or a computer in things. So if you shut all that stuff off, then you can reclaim your productivity and creativity again and focus on the high value tasks. It seriously works, and it seems like pretty like, yeah, focus for 90 minutes. Come on. But if you follow this thing to a tee, it is incredible. It is so incredible that a couple other guys have made signs. Come talk to me and I'm sprinting. And basically just hang this thing on a mic, stand behind them. It's really it works to add to what you were saying, Matthew, about the neuroscience. I don't know who it was, but it was another study that said it takes a minimum of 22 minutes to return back to the focus state that you were in when you're interrupted. And so as such, minimum 22 minutes to return to that. So as a result, when you get a bleep on the phone, even if you don't look at it, that distraction alone or you just go, oh, that's a message that is enough to throw off your mojo. In fact, I don't get any notifications on my phone, except for a very short list of vips who can call me or text me. And they know that basically, like, I mean, it's like parents' best friend, you know, spouse, that kind of thing. Yeah, I've I've actually got all of my notifications on my Mac turned off. So same here. The monitor notion, slack email. All of those little red things. I have those those badges turned off. Yeah and then do not disturb as a great, great way to go to Priscilla. You had your hand up. Hello hey. Hey yes, I mean, it's completely unrelated, I just realized I had a question. OK, hang on 1/2. Let's let's close this loop first, and then I'll come right back to you. OK OK. Matthew, you got any final thoughts on focus sprinting? Yeah, no. Give it a shot and it's good for a high value tasks. So if you have to do critical thinking or strategic work, that's what it's best used for. If you're doing things like email, don't waste your time. Focus on on on emails like that's when you can do. Just like I'm going to block out an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon to check emails and then that's it, right? Just just compartmentalize your life. The more you do that, the more focused and intentional with your time you can be. And I have mentioned this on previous calls like I've seen Ben block out his days. Most of the managers, a lot of the people at the office now are starting to block out their days where one whole day is, I'm not. I'm working from home and I'm completely undistracted like I can't. I'm not taking meetings, I'm not taking calls, I'm not doing anything outside of doing the task that I had set out for this week, my high value task for this week. So the more you can compartmentalize your life and the more you can separate things, the more I feel intentionally. You can be with your time. And I think that's the key, because if you're just it's like, I'm going to work 40 hours this weekend, it's just busy, busy, busy. If you measure your output at the end of the week, well, what did you actually accomplish? What is coming toward your goals? For me, I've been in a productivity slump and I saw that it's like, well, I didn't accomplish a whole lot. I did a lot of managing and client handling. But it's like, did I actually get anything done? No, nothing for me, nothing for the company. So I need it to be more intentional with my time. And these are things that I'm trying to fix and tweak and be more intentional with. Yeah, and it's important to listen to your energy, too to pay attention to that stuff. I'm sure many of you are introverts. Surprisingly, I'm an introvert as well, and I like the Myers Briggs definition of being an introvert or being an extrovert. If you're an introvert, you expend energy to be around people, and if you're an extrovert, you gain energy from being around people. So being an introvert meetings exhausts me. At the end of the day when I've had a few meetings, I'm just absolutely exhausted. So Matthew kind of mentioned this. I only take meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays. That's it. All the other days I'm actually working. Sometimes there's some management that has to be done in there, but usually Mondays and Wednesdays are the only days that I take meetings and that has significantly ramped up what I've been able to do. So, yeah, isolate different segments of your life. It's huge. Mm-hmm OK, so. Oh, sorry. Go for it. I was going to ask, does this focus Brennan philosophy work when you're in the client service world? I know that the future dynamic of business is a little different. How would you translate focus sprinting when you're, say, solo or you're running an agency and you're trying to and you're almost responsible for every? Mm-hmm I would just I would just block out your time, so for instance, like if you have a team and just like meetings are only on Mondays. Or you could say at times it's like main meetings, our Mondays where we're doing planning and then the rest of the week, I'm just going to come to you every four o'clock every day to go check on your work, just compartmentalize it so you know what you're doing when for client work? Greg, I mean, like, we pride ourselves from being for being pretty responsive to clients, right when we were doing service work with blind. So what you might do is just just block it out. So like every three hours, you might look at your email, I just don't want to make it so that your email is always open and you're looking to respond so quickly because a two hour response is still fantastic. Usually, if my expectation with business is if you get back to me in 24 hours, we're good. Like, that's already. That's that's golden. So I know Greg does this where he'll just check emails at one point early on in the day and then one towards the end. Or sometimes some people just do it once a day, and it still works on the client service side. You just want to block out your time where people know when, when to bug you and when they cannot. And it could be a simple sign of just closing your door if you have office doors. Or you could just say, hey, guys, you know, every Monday, I'm working from home or every Monday. It's a silent day. What book is that ben? Where is it? Rework? yeah, work with that library hours. Yeah, they have library hours where nobody talks. Yep and you know, I did this when I was. When I was, I had a team, but it was like three dudes. It wasn't, you know, a massive, massive team. And so I was doing a lot of the client stuff myself and I was so scared. I had this like white knuckle grip on my mouse to, you know, as soon as an email came in up bam, fire up a response, you know, and the clients loved it. They some of them even had my cell phone number and they were texting me. That's horrible. That's horrible for business because it sends you in so many different directions. And being that accessible for your clients is actually a detriment to the project because you can't be as creative as you need to be if you're always getting interrupted. So I would challenge you guys. Like if you email addicts shut it down all day and check it once. Just try it because the world's not going to end. No one will, you know, fire you for not responding to an email within an hour. Right? so just try it. I mean, this is such a huge concept for for this specific group of people. But if you're one of those people that has your email open and just waiting for that next ding to come in, shut it down. Mm-hmm Yeah, and I just posted a link in the chat where I found somebody medium article that does an overview, it's similar. It's not exactly called the focus print there, but it's the same concept and it's all based off of your ultra rhythms and making many sprints for your day or your week so that you can accomplish really big goals. Actually, you guys have a resource on the future. How about a time awareness sheet that outlines your week I switched from, like two years ago, I still use it, actually. I get some people on friends, clients to actually use the same thing, and when they realize they just start sketching in the blocks and then coloring them in, they are like, holy crap, like that. Many hours of my day is spent on this and it's like, you know, and then I get them to turn on the new stats thing for their iPhone and their iPad and their computer. And just like just monitor it for a week or two and they realize they're spending like an hour and a half on Twitter every day. And they're just just like just flicking up and down reading crap. That awareness alone, Mo will help you do it, and there's a sheet right on the intercom that you can look up. It's free. Yep, do it. Jacob Philips a plant? No yeah. And here's another tip, guys. If you're spending too much time on email, just restrict. There's this great thing called the four sentence rule. If an email cannot be conducted in four sentences, it's probably better to do a phone call, and that is going to be a game changer for a lot of you. I know it was for me because if you're writing really long emails and like explaining concepts or, you know, trying to convince somebody of something, if you're writing these books, stop, just get on the phone. I remember back in the odesk days, the upwork or whatever it's called now. When I was working there, I would jump on the phone with my clients and it would be like, Oh my god, this is amazing. I never expected you to get on the phone, and it's so much better to communicate that way. So if something takes more than four sentences, you just schedule a 15 minute phone call and you can knock it out of the park. OK all right. Priscilla's been patiently, patiently waiting. So sorry. Let's do it. Oh, sorry, I had to switch. It was completely unrelated, but I had a quick question at what stage is a good time when you're wrapping up a project to ask for a testimonial? And how do you ask for testimonial hoping it's going to be a good one? That is fantastic. OK let me formulate my thoughts, Matthew. You anything like right off the top? Yeah usually towards the end and towards the end when everybody's kind of glowing like you would look for the moment where everyone feels the greatest about the project. I honestly like that's a really good moment. Like if it's delivering and everybody celebrating the work, this brand or this product or whatever it is, is launching. And then it's like, you know, hey, I really enjoyed this process with you, you know, and I'd love to do more of this with clients just like you. Would you mind giving me a quick testimonial that I might use to help promote the work that I do. So I can so that I can continue to do business just like this? So that's one way. And that's just spitballing how you might do that for the business bootcamp. Right now, we're marketing and ramping up for a new season of business bootcamp. What I did is I went to all the previous groups and said, hey, if you guys got any value out of this course, I would love to use your testimonial to help US market this course. And the way I'm going to do that, I'm going to make it as painless for you as possible. So what I did is I set up a calendar link. And I just made slots there, so I just jumped on a Zoom call for 15 minutes and ask them questions, ask them three questions so that I might get the response that I'm hoping for. So I might ask, like, who are you and what do you do? How long have you been working right? Just like information, then I ask, like, where were you before we started this process? What were your challenges? And then after I say, like, where are you now? And what is one key takeaway that you would say that was a highlight for this process for you. So three simple questions like that, and you might get all the information that you need. And you might say, do you mind if I cut this up or repurpose this, paraphrase this or that, you know, I could use this somewhere on my site to help promote me? Usually, most people are cool with that, especially if you've serviced them well. And if they feel really good about what it is that you have given them. Sometimes with this process, like if you're working with a client and you're doing discovery, sometimes I feel like the client is most glowing right after the discovery session. Mm-hmm And it just depends where your strengths are, so you might ask them then in there, it's like, hey, you know, I know this is just the beginning parts of the process, but I would love to have your testimonial if you're willing to give it, and this helps me to do more work like this. Yeah, Yeah. Great All right. I want to share one thing. It's from the complete case study. So for those of you who haven't bought it yet, get your screenshots ready. It's the AI file. I made this little worksheet. It's called the job jacket and there's different phases for, you know, your projects. You've got the sales phase, you've got discovery, you've got the creating phase, then you've got testing. And then after the project concludes, and I've got some questions here that are not only just for the client, but they're also for you. And if you're going through a project and documenting as you go, it's a lot easier to write case studies based on your notes. But after the project, there's a couple of like stimulating questions that you can ask your client things like what's the project experience like? How have the users responded? What's the impact of this? Were there any conflicts after we finished? How was how was the rollout? Would you work with us again? You want to. You want to encourage the your client to give you feedback in a meaningful way. And then what you can do is you can take that feedback and kind of summarize it and then send it back to them and say, hey, are you OK to use this as a testimonial for us? This is basically a summary of your response to these questions and that way that you're not putting the weight on them to come up with something creative and fun to say. You're actually just writing it for them, right? And I wanted to say to, you know, whether you post this testimonial on your site or not, you know, because that's helpful for validation there. But I think where I found it actually pretty effective, just doing this short run with the business bootcamp is that when I probe these people, the different people like their stories of where they were before versus where they are now. I learned new stuff about them that I didn't know before. Or especially a lot of the challenges that they were facing early on, like I got some very personal and deep stories now those stories are actually repeatable stories, right? Because Chris says this all the time, it's really good to have repeatable stories. It's good to have parables as our friend from dotcom secrets likes to say it were you. If you have a repeatable story where, you know, I knew this client that I worked with. He was here. These were his challenges and his business wasn't growing after we made these three tweaks. He doubled in size. And now he's making x amount of revenue a year. Those are great, repeatable stories that are so bit-sized and somebody could latch on to you right away. I'll give you another example. We met with an investor recently, and she's trying to throw a lot of money at us or potentially. But we don't know. Like we don't. We don't want anything yet. And the thing is, she had like maybe 10 stories ready to go and to just tell you, it's like, oh, I had a business that I invested in that was just like you. They were making about $4 million a year. And after we made these tweaks x, y and z, now they're making $10 to $15 million a month. You see how repeatable that story was, because she knew what the challenge was, where they were and how they transformed after they work together, so of course, naturally like hearing those things being on the other side of the table like, oh, tell me more, tell me more. So even if you don't end up using this testimonials on your site, you can use these to help develop stories for different personas, for people you might be talking to, because sometimes a person just needs to hear the right story for it to be relevant to them. Not everybody's going to relate with the crystals on the channel or the Mr. Ben burns or me. Some people relate to the rookies or the eren's on the channel because they're more reflective of who they are or their age or their demo or their story. So you just want to have these stories ready and get to go, which is a nice byproduct of doing these types of interviews. OK, so I hope, Priscilla, did that answer your question? Yes, thank you so much. Yes awesome. Cool Shane, let's loopback around to you. Is your audio working? I hope so. Can you hear me now? Yeah awesome work. OK, so you're the last question of the day. Very much so for you. I don't know what the story of there was. That was really annoying. So, yeah, I just put through a question. I'm struggling of just trying to find and that's why I guess and I just like to I'd just like to hear how you came across yours, I guess. I think that might be helpful. Maybe Yeah. OK, so what do you define as the why? So for me, it would be the motivation of why I do what I do and what drives me forward to keep going and keep improving. Thanks sorry, I just had to meet a couple of people. OK, so it's like the motivation. So we're talking about the Simon Sinek. Why? right? Yeah, totally. Yeah OK, so what are some of the ideas that are floating around in your head? So what I've done is I've written down like things that I really love and I'm passionate about and then things in my life and then life goals and trying to merge all those elements together. And yeah, it's just so broad. And I'm trying to figure out along with this the kind of niche to target because I have a few loose ideas going around my brain, and I'd like to get that down a bit focused, if you know what I mean. Yeah so I see this a lot in the people that I consult. There's like two different worlds, right? There's the y, which is more of like a motivation. It's a value system behind things. And then there's the niche. And a lot of people are trying to bring those two things together, and sometimes it really works. I think it's Roxy who started a company that's really focused on vegan companies. I love that because that's both a principle. It's a value. It's her y and it's a specific niche. Sometimes those two don't line up. So can you get specific? Like, what are the niches that you're considering and what are the whys that you're considering? OK, cool. So just for myself, like I've worked many, many different jobs and communication has always been at the core of it. If it's not been design related, then communication and representing brands has been a way. They're where they're really relevant. And then, of course, a need some thinking about design for tourism or kind of environmental issues or a mindset might be an issue as well because they're really important to me and everyone. So they're kind of things I'm thinking at the moment. Yeah, because it's important to be healthy in your mind and be motivated to build a brand around those things, which I think I'd be really be good at. I'm going to tell you this. You don't sound very passionate about any of the above. OK, cool. Really? what do you do when you're not working? Read about design. Get easily distracted by lots of things that are really about design or business. Yeah, just read books about business and become really boring, I just read, but it's really fun as well. I go to Networking events, always chatting, always networking all the time. TV, movies, films, music, gigs, love, music and tunes. Yeah, art, museums, that sort of stuff, I guess. OK, so what kind of things in the world do you hate? Like, what are you against? Like rude people. I guess that would be awful. OK, what else? Like if somebody if you had to take a stand against something, what would that be today? I guess people not listening to other people because there is nothing worse in the world if you have an opinion, but you're not being listened to or not being heard, I guess. OK and what does that say about your value systems that I value honesty and. Yeah value, honesty and transparency, maybe. Yeah, yeah, transparency, definitely. They're being honest and being clear and saying what you may mean and meaning what you say kind of saying, I guess. It sounds like it sounds like a solid motivation to me because you want to cut through the clutter, right, you want to be the honest and transparent person. There's a lot of different ways that you can slice the why, right? And I would encourage you to continue digging here because the value systems that you hold are going to influence the company that you build. And so what else can you say about the values that really kind of ignite that fire in you when you see somebody getting shutting down, getting shut down or not listen to or, you know? The opinions not validated in the world, like why does that drive you, why does that kind of bubble up? I guess from have the background, I'm from maybe various experiences of my own background, people having a lot of cool things to say about not being given the opportunity to do so being held back as underdogs. Yeah, definitely. So you're for the underdogs? Yeah but like, isn't everyone? Well, aren't we all? Because like, yeah, we all like the underdog. Maybe, maybe what? I wish I could remember the agency name because they beat me and I hate that I'm very competitive. I went up for a million project when I was on my own. It was literally a million and it was for a real estate site. And this is years ago. So I can say who it is. It was for homes. And what they wanted was a campaign that promoted their service and they were going up against realtor.com, Zillow and Twilio. So for those of you in the states, you guys know that those are massive real estate companies, and home-school had the direct connection to the MLI, which is our listing. You know, whatever service that is. And so they had a better service than all of the big dogs, but they were the small people in this space. So there was an agency that I went up against. It was me and them in the final, in the final pitch, and I lost to them because they were positioned as. We serve the underdogs. That was literally on their home page. And this company felt like they were going up against Giants because they were smaller. All this kind of stuff. And so. This is kind of positioning this, this why it doesn't have to be some kind of like Tom's by a pair of is, and will donate a pair of shoes because we want to feed, it doesn't have to be that way. It just has to be a statement. It has to be something that potentially somebody's going to disagree with or somebody is not going to align themselves to. The kind of sounds like you want to fight for those who don't have a voice. Yeah, I think it's pretty huge. I'll be done with her. Yeah thanks, Ben. You've give me some good focus there because I've had all these things down, but I think maybe they're definitely on to something. There should be really cool. A lot of times, like if you're like me, you write stuff down and you're like, oh, that's not good enough. That's not good enough. And that's the internal voice that we got to start squashing, right? Value what you put down on the paper. Oh, I like cram this book full of stuff all the time, it's ridiculous, but I think, yeah, because I'm well in favor of like, Yeah. Often in some cases telling people to like F off or whatever, but in a civil and respectful way. If their opinion is absolute nonsense. But I think it's just I mean, I don't mean that in a decade, we I mean, you know, like some people, but. And yeah, and if I can incorporate that somehow in a branding direction, I think that would be amazing. Yeah, it can be huge. Very, very, very powerful. Totally and I think, you know, everybody can take something away from that like, look at your value systems. And if it's hard to identify, look at those things that you would stand up against. Because everybody's got those right, I mean, everybody's got that kind of figure in their head that they'd love to punch in the face. And if you could figure that out, then you start uncovering your beliefs and your values, and it could be massive for your positioning. More so, yeah, I learned something interesting last week that's like, you know, finding the hero and every hero needs a villain and we're all like the main character of our own books are being our life at the end of the day. So that's quite an interesting point. What you've. OK well, I think that's just about wraps this up, guys. Anybody got anything to add on that last little bit. Ben, can I ask a quick follow up? Go for it. Go for it. Shane, thank you. Thank you for your question, bro. Because I always think about my why all the time. My follow up is how do you how do you connect the why to practical things to like, meet your goals? Does that make sense? Because sometimes you get so lost in the fluff the why? So how do you translate the why into something more practical and get that traction, you know? Yeah yeah, it's a great question. I mean, are you struggling with this? Like, what are you coming up against? I wouldn't say I'm struggling. I would say that sometimes I get lost in perfecting the process versus execution. I think it's the student in me, you know, where it's like, I want to make the way in which we deliver things so great so they can, whenever they think about us are why is very clear, you know? So I guess maybe translating the y into sales and client discussions, and this may be way too big for the last 3 minutes of this call. But yeah, probably. But you know, honestly, I think the y is just the differentiator. It's going to be what makes you stand out in a crowd or in my case, it's going to make you lose a pitch for a million. You know, I think that that's the key and really the positioning statement that hero statement on your website is going to go a long, long way. And if that hero statement that we are x and y, if that doesn't turn people off, if it doesn't turn some businesses away, then it's not making a statement. You're not making a clear why. You know, if it doesn't ignite some kind of passion either way, then it's not. It's not there. And then everything else really depends on the why. You know, Tom's charitable, they want to help kids in Africa. So they're given shoes, right? So they make shoes and they can give shoes. And that's just an immediately application. It's an immediate application of their why. But also, I think that you know, a lot of these companies were starting to see through that as more of a marketing gimmick than anything these days. So I don't know. I think it's just a balance, right? You want to align yourself with a niche, you want to align yourself with the customer base. And that's the specializing. And especially if it's value based, that's your why. And then. Use that in a way that doesn't kind of seem like a millennial marketing scam. Oh, that oh, that was my 3 minute version. No, I think you I think you did answer and I think it triggered something in me. It's just really neat down. I love how you said that, especially when you put it in the context of something real, like the hero section of the website. I think the why is what is where you stand and where, like Chris always says, you've got to make people, you've got to stand for something so people either don't like it or they like it, and you're almost the Enigma in that regard. So I think polarizing. Yeah yeah, I think that's it. That's it. Mm-hmm And it could change to I just wanted to add that it could change just because you make a decision on who you are today and what you enjoy today. That doesn't mean three years from now, four years from now, you're a different person. I hope that we're all different people as we evolve, right, we get new stimuli, we meet new people. We have experiences for better or for worse in our life. And we change as people, we grow as people. What we enjoy yesterday is not what we're going to enjoy tomorrow. So variety is the spice of life, and it's OK to change your. It doesn't have to be this deep thing. This philosophy that I'm going to live my life by this and you're never going to change because that's a sad life to live if you never have any variety there. So I would say it's good to do this every so often. So maybe once a year, maybe twice a year, you might even relook at that thing. Like, is this still me or all of my goals still aligned with this thing is my goal is still the thing that I should be focusing on, because things can change very quickly. And does it work and does it work? Exactly does it even work? Right? so you just have to kind of point to this at a point on this. On one of his interviews, he said, basically, you have to be prepared to offend someone if you're going to take a stand for something. If if you're going to express an opinion or speak your mind, you have to be prepared that it may offend someone. And that if you're not prepared to do that, then you're not prepared to take a stand, so you have to kind of draw that line where what comes out of your mouth is going to potentially piss someone off. And by the more people you piss off, the more solid your stance is. Also the same time, the more people will come to defend you because there's as many times as he's been cut down on you on YouTube and the internet and tweets, he's got followers that Jump button to pit bulls. So it's that if you prepared that, you're going to turn people away. Thanks, man. I hope that helps, Shane, with the y stuff, and I would just say for everybody, don't lose sleep over it. You know, this is not something to like, break your neck over. And really, you probably already bring your wide to the table without even knowing it. And sometimes it can just take a client to show it to you, right? And like my. Yeah anyway, I'm going to go ahead. Thanks Thanks for that. A nice one. Yeah OK. So awesome seeing you, everybody next week we've got Matthew Silverman coming online. He's going to be talking about blogging and the way to do it today in today's world. So I'll be I'll be seeing you guys then. Thanks for an awesome call. This was really, really fun one. Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks, man. Ben, Thanks. Thanks, Ben. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. If you don't say. OK, bye, guys.