The Ross Simmonds Show

think about listening to this podcast right now you might be multitasking catching seventy maybe eighty percent of it now flip that and imagine that you are only catching twenty percent of it it'd be crazy right yet most businesses only use twenty percent of the data all the important details in call logs emails chats they're just left floating in digital space hubspot gives you access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture today ai can crank content at lightning speed ai can assist you with social posts with creating content for your blog a webinar a white paper a script even a podcast but the question is will it sound robotic i don't think it has to the biggest fear right now across many marketers many creators is whether or not ai means trainee trading your quality for quantity that if you wanna scale if you use ai you're going to lose your voice but here's the truth here's the reality you can create ten times your content output with ai without losing credibility without losing your voice without losing your tone but you have to do it right in today's episode i'm breaking down how smart creators and marketers are using ai as a augmentation tool not as a replacement for themselves but as something that allows them to do more with less you see that initial asset that you create that story that you tell that message that you put out there to the world that people resonate with for the very first time from your own brain to your fingertips to your keyboard and then to the internet that is where the magic happens that humans need to continue with but ai can augment you whether it's research for drafts or distribution my goal today is simple i wanna share with you some ideas on how you can create more stay authentic free up time for the strategic work for the creative work for the valuable work so you can move the needle if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show we all know the fear if you use ai it's gonna sound like everybody else they're gonna throw in an m dash and it's gonna sound like trash but that fear is valid it is absolutely valid to think if you just use ai you copy and paste everything that you put into the platform as it is without providing it any ideas without providing it the the the creative direction without providing the brand guidelines that you will very likely create things that everybody else has your blog posts your threads your landing page copy might feel hollow but when you incorporate a human into it that's when i think you win you see ai is a creative c copilot and if you treat it that way you're going to unlock new opportunities to be faster mission more effective and do more with less i wanna talk about today how you can use ai without sacrificing the quality or the voice and there are five key areas that it thrive in one research two first draft three repurposing four optimization and five refinement and let's dive in to the first one when it comes to research i love the process of getting lost in the data i love the process of discovering new ideas new stories new strategies new businesses new opportunities gaps and markets i love re reading the transcripts from investor calls i love diving into data from third parties and cross referencing it from one brand to the next i love running a good en grammar analysis i love the research i love it because the research can oftentimes give you an edge and thanks to ai l you can now constantly be doing research at scale you can set up in something like chat they've recently rolled out this thing called pulse where you can have automated automatic prompts run every single day where you can ask it to do research every single day and to deliver your a report and then from that report cross reference past data to give you an insight into the future you can use these tools like c copilot rep etcetera to literally go out and create things based off of the research that you've done if you wanna use an l tool to create an outline for you to help you understand your own ideas where you can literally open up an ll hit the voice button and just brain up and say take what i've just described turn it into something a little bit more meaningful for this audience and turn it into something that i think would be worth that you think would be worth consuming these types of stories these types of ideas these types of messages can help start the research process on the way to creativity but it doesn't end there let me give you a practical example one of the things that i love to do is go from one webpage page to the next i recently wanted to buy some electrolytes lights the powder that goes in your drink it tastes good it gives you electrolytes lights kinda like gatorade but that's a whole different discussion in a whole different podcast either way i wanted some electrolytes lights powder so they said t i want you to go to research on the top twenty electrolyte powder today i want you to go to their home homepage and i want you to study and analyze their brand positioning and what makes them different then i want you to go to their pricing page and i want you to identify the cost for each of them compare them then i want you to look at the ingredients that are listed on their website and see which ones have things that might be considered good for you versus not good for you and lay it all out for me i hit research i hit send and in the matter of about five minutes it did all of that that would have taken me probably two to three days full straight right like not two to three days one hour here one hour here like straight that's a lot of research now apply this to business apply this to your own personal growth and development and you're writing your creation your your efforts as a marketer the elements in the assets that you can create now can be so much better and that takes me to the second thing that ai does really well it's really good at creating that ugly brutal not worth publishing for draft you're staring at a blank page you use ai to break the ice you start to delete paragraphs you start to shake them up a bit or maybe you start with your title your headline you start with your your intro and it's great and then you don't know where you should go from there ai i can help you a i can help you with the conclusion it can help you with the middle it can help you with the start it can do all of that and then you edit it like a pro and that is the key folks the key is that the human comes in and they edit it like a pro you incorporate your nuance you incorporate your tone your brand your flavor your stories your expertise you let ai guide you with the structure but you take it the rest of the way and then after that piece goes live after you've decided that you're going to press publish on this piece you've created a killer blog post a great asset you embrace the methodologies of things like the loop framework from hubspot you start to think to yourself how can i repurpose this asset how can i turn it into a linkedin post turning into a thread turning into a newsletter how can i extract key takeaways for a podcast or for a youtube video you could use a tool like distribution dot ai to finally create months in distribute forever if you have checked distribution dot ai you need to check it out it's a great resource helps you take a blog post that you've produced it will read it and it will write the linkedin updates for you the tweets for you it will create at scale the social post that you need to promote your work this is where ai thrive ai doesn't replace the actual process for creating it gives you the ability to create great things and then let those great things be distributed and then after you've distributed your content you want to make sure that you optimize it you might not be an seo but ai can guide you on the way tell ai that this is intended to rank in google this blog post that you just created with with your own hands or the youtube video that you created that then turn into a blog post that you embedded directly into that blog post you wanted to rank so what do you do you say chat what am i missing i wanna rank for this keyword how can i optimize this what can i do here what should be my h ones and h h2 what do i need to rewrite and it will help you it will coach you right and what i would always recommend is that you tap that web search you tap that deep research and you say before you give me these recommendations i want you to look out and study the best practices on seo that are being published right now and use that to inform your recommendation to me this is what you can do and then as that piece gets created as you have an asset let's say you wanted to rep repurchase it let's say you had five different audiences but you want and you want this piece to reach all five of them well now with ai you can do that at scale ai i want you to take this white paper that i created that is tailored towards cmos and make it for cios make one for ceos one for cto the o's it oz and c's and sees all of the people right you can do that this is the power of ai and you might be thinking already ross that's too much ai ai is all over this how do i scale this without diluting the quality let me replay it back to you million dollar moves is hosted by my friend sarah chan spellings and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals joint venture capitalists and strategist sarah chen spellings as she asked the hard questions learns through the triumphs that failures and the hard lessons of the creme creme so youtube can make billion dollar move adventure in business and in life we had an episode many moons back where we talked about the unicorns the brands like warren buffett with berkshire hathaway and how they were able to use marketing in compelling narratives and how shareholder letters double as a powerful lead magnet we talked about how brands need to adapt to the rise of ai and lessons from some of the billion dollar content engines that have scaled in shaped marketing listen to billion dollar moves wherever you get your humans edited you need to augment the ai with you the human touch becomes the key you inject personality tone voice stories case studies examples all of those things graphs and charts you incorporate these things into your piece the l can't replicate your lived experience your founder story your point of view so add that every single time these are the things that make it memorable right these are the things that will really resonate with folks for years to come i wrote a blog post a few months back and in that blog post i was talking about how i actually got my start by having a fantasy football blog and even though the essay sa in the blog that i wrote was about seo i have four people reach out to me saying man it was so cool to hear about your background in fantasy sports now me just saying this sharing with you in your ears that this is what happened to me makes this experience a little bit more memorable and i want you to replicate that in your own content how meta is this i use a story about me telling a story to tell you about the importance of injecting your stories in your stories that's the key now what i also want you to do is to remember that content is an asset it's a living asset that should constantly be improved elevated and changed it's an asset that needs to pay dividends because you poured energy and time into this thing so it is now valuable take the amount of time that you put into this asset multiply that by the hourly rate in which you believe you are worth and that is how much that asset was worth now ask yourself how quickly you can get that roi back if it's going to take one day great but is it going to take years how can you make that timeline of getting the roi faster you can make it faster by promoting by tweeting by sharing by rep repurposing by rep and if you don't want to sync more time into that asset distribution dot ai and tools like that can help you scale it folks let me give you a real example we had a client and they wanted to go from publishing to blog posts a month to twelve but they were worried they were worried to put the voice the quality in the tone so what we did was simple we studied our format we studied the way in which we structured assets for this client we did decided that we were going to create a series of different prompts that were based off of their top performing post we made sure that chat had their brand islands we use it to kinda generate first drafts and then we gave that to people who were experts our teammates our colleagues writers to develop beautiful great assets increase in output no loss and brand consistency more time for them to focus on moving the needle that's the magic of ai you don't just get more content when you start to embrace these tools folks you get more time so here's what i want you to take away ai is not the enemy of great content lazy workflows lazy marketers mediocre marketers are if you trade ai like a shortcut that's just gonna give you the fast path to success you're gonna control c control v every first draft that the l give you then sure do it if you're my competition do it every single day i want you to because that's where i will find my edge that's where i will differentiate right i want you who i know is listening to this because you wanna be great you wanna do good things you wanna achieve excellence with your work to ask yourself what content are you and your team not creating because they don't have time what ideas are you sitting on because you don't have time and how can ai assist that build the engine on the back of ai so you can scale your impact folks if you're trying to play the long game ai needs to be a part of your workflow if this concept if the ideas i shared with you today help shift the way that you see ai help shift the way that you think about marketing storytelling or creating how then i am glad that you caught this episode and i hope that you share it with a founder a creator or a friend thank you so much for listening to the ross show and i'll see you on the gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

how do you lead when there's so many distractions how many how do you lead when there's so many opportunities how do you lead a group of people to achieve great things big things things that to others might even seem impossible how do you lead in a boring industry or in one of the fastest growing industries these are the things that a lot of leaders are trying to grapple with i was lucky enough to have a chance to chat with my friend dusty hong from the arc group dusty has led some of the largest brands that have impacted industries like logistics and more he's been a leader for over two decades i got to know dusty closely over the last few years and he's somebody that has a leadership trait and quality that i truly aspire emulate in many ways he's one of those people who when you're talking to them you're guaranteed to learn something new and i'm excited because today i'm going to plug you into the conversation that i recently had with my friend dusty from arc group where he shares some of the pain points that so many leaders whether you're a manager a people leader or an entrepreneur go through on a day to day basis and some solutions that might be helpful for getting over the challenges folks if you're like me you're in it for the long game and if you're here to play the long game you're here in the right place join me and listening to this episode the ross simmons show dusty super excited to have you on the ross show thank you for making the time really appreciate it oh man i have been looking forward to this conversation it's always such a dynamic conversation with you so i'm looking forward to seeing where this goes likewise it's gonna be a lot of fun i've known you for a few years now so i'm excited for us to have this conversation i was on your podcast had a blast with that and now we're gonna switch the rolls up let's dive in and go a little bit back in a time to when we first met it was back when you were leading red stag and now you're over arc kiss you started your own thing what itch were you trying to scratch by deciding that you were going to build something new i'm so glad you asked that because you know i had to think about this when i was starting right and i realized that up i think i've always been an entrepreneur i've just been able to scratch that itch as an entrepreneur entrepreneur in businesses for for so many years and when i reflect back on this like my first venture to try and make money for my own resources was as a you know creating a newspaper in a very small town and at eight years old and standing outside the post office to sell this four page newsletter that we created now we lived in a population town of two hundred and fifty so i didn't write understood audience dynamics and right my customer base wasn't gonna be scalable and then my mom introduced me to this idea of cogs and made me charge charged me for the paper and it also charged me for the toner cartridge love so i think for me it was really embracing this opportunity to build something in fact i had some of my four mates in my w po forum who who really called me out about nine months ago because i was frustrated i'm navigating entrepreneurship and they go dust you're a builder right what are you building and i had it's just mental shift right that's that was the i was trying to scratch this i wanna build something that matters i love that we were talking you even prior to us like hitting the record button a bit about y p e those types of groups have you always had those types of organizations involved in your career as you kinda built yourself up like if you were like tell me a little bit of your story with those like forum groups is that always been a part of like your own professional development you know i i stepped into it by accident but the answer is for over twenty years now i have belonged to some type of forum you know mastermind or small group and it started with vest and then joined y po and i've had other mastermind my groups along the way but you know for over twenty years i've had and understood the power of being in a room where others help you see what you can't see and franco will call you on your own bs right you can't read your the label from inside the jar and you need people who care about you who have skills that are different than you and who are willing and able to challenge you to make yourself better so for me it's been over twenty years and it it is in irr replaceable part of who i am at this point is part of c mentors and c experts i mean you're the product that the people you spend the most time with so being intentional about how you curate that is a really big deal to me did you have any mental blocks you had to go through to like make the decision to join or were you always someone who is like comfortable with sharing the ron and the the transparent look beyond the scenes of entrepreneurship like is that just who you are i think i was comfortable with surface level transparency and vulnerability and it took me a year couple of years where her frankly to really get comfortable and not feel like i needed to put on the show not feel like i needed to be like this all put together person but be able to walk in there and go i don't know what i'm doing i got i don't have all this figured out so i honestly it took me a few years and it took other people modeling that behavior for me to be able to learn it and and it was a learned behavior and you know i have this i have this full core philosophy that you know you know people talk about leaders being born and i think it's horse who right born with characteristics of leadership or they are raised with characteristics leadership but leadership is not a learned behavior leadership is a learning behavior it's an active tense verb and so for me being able to go into rooms like that and learn and and be better on the other side of it but it took other people showing me the way i love it that's awesome so like for me i know i personally was hesitant to go into these because i didn't wanna let the the the armor of the the night down and be so vulnerable for everybody to kinda hear the stories and know that ross wasn't just like this this brilliant guru kinda thing there's a lot of people who i think don't join because of that like what's your what do you say to someone who's kind of nervous to have to share this type of stuff into like even disclose that like especially with entrepreneurs because as much as it's not ideal there is always a little bit of ego a little bit of pride in being an entrepreneur like what do you say to even like some of your clients and your coat like when you're coaching around vulnerability and opening up to do that stuff like is it something that shows up often am i a solo person who felt that way or is it something you see before no i see it all the time and you're not alone i wasn't alone in feeling that way stepping into it and i think it comes and what i tell people and i think it comes from two things it comes from experience and being able to build relationships and with depth right right you have to be able to trust people you have to trust first and then means you have to invest in those relationships mh but you you get that over time you can't walk in in one day and you know follow over the world and you know maybe you can when you're you know super comfortable right right but it takes a little time so always coach people give it tom embrace the opportunity but skate on the edge of discomfort if you're if you're comfortable you're not pushing hard enough you're not going deep enough you should be uncomfortable because it is within discomfort that growth happens and you can just look at that through the weight lifting or training or running or anything else right metaphor you're not getting faster if you're running comfortable you know only get faster you only get stronger when you are breaking down the cells and building up the second thing that i advise folks around is as you think about this and as you lean into this room and you you you give it the time that it needs to unlock share something you don't want to find a way to learn find a way to learn and so you have to then like the principle here and i go to first principles is kind of my mental model for almost everything like what is it this still down to mh first principle here is why are you here right you here to be better and if you're here to be better you must take the opportunity to be challenged and if you're not here to be better or if you wanna check a box and say your you know surface level doing this then you need to call you know you need to check yourself at the door because you're really not here to get better yeah so go back to that anchored first principal why are you here i love that that's awesome you get that's how you navigate that is it gonna be easy no but it probably shouldn't be exactly no i love that so talking about things being easy you've worked in some high stakes industries you've worked up against giants you've held shoulder to shoulder against some big brands what's one story from those early days that kinda gives a a bit of a glimpse into what it takes to really lead amongst some chaos and to lead in high stakes environments and things like that is there any stories that you can share around like what you've seen and how you've been able to kinda go through a bit of the messi ness in those types of environments and really show up as a leader yeah i think there's there's lots of stories but i one that comes to mind as you asked that question is again go back to the first principle being anchored on what you do and that really comes down to being anchored on the value that you create i mean because that's why we're here right that's why business exist it is to create value it is not to extract value extracting value is something you get as a result of first having created value and i think that's a leadership principle too like we're here to serve others and we're here to create value and when we do that then there can be benefit but not before so like navigating chaos and navigating change and you know competition and all those things anchoring on what you do that creates value so i'll give you an example during my time at red sag know we had a a prospect that came into our funnel and i would work with some of the highest value or largest potential prospects and i loved it like i love working with customers right yeah really understanding what they want and i had to tell this guys they was john and john just like i want to do business with red sag and he showed me his selection list and the criteria he'd done a massive amount of homework right right and you know i was honored by that this right and the easy thing to do would have been to say yes right easy thing would to do would have been to say we would love to have you as a customer because we would have from a marquee perspective and we would have from a business value for us perspective mh but the challenge was is that we were not set up to enable his success our value proposition for him would have been failed and that's what i had to tell and we had several calls in this and i had to say john i would love to do business with you you were exactly the type of person and the type of company that we want to do business with you were purpose driven you were value centric you bet it but if we do business for you i will fail our brand promise to you because we are not set up to do business for you right and to create success for you so navigating chaos is really a place in a space for you to anchor in on what it is that you create and never lose sight of that and i think that's where when chaos becomes more chaotic is where try to do everything right we try to go oh we can do that too and yep yeah it becomes dangerous so that that's one example i've got millions more but it really is like dis the dis destination yeah of the value you create and they're like lock in on that is there a first principle that guides you to be able to say no in the face of massive opportunity even though it might be hired like what is there something that allowed you to kinda face that pretty easily and like yeah this doesn't work yeah the fur the first principle is it for me anyway is are the people value aligned and good people like it's just like that's first principle second principle is when we think about mission and i tend to think about mission not through the lens of mission statements that are marketing statements i think about them as our mission to create value it's all huge red stack for example right our mission was to empower and enable entrepreneurs to focus on their business we did the heavy lifting see they could do it they did best we in most cases was merchandising and marketing and those and therefore in order for us to enable that brand promise we had to be exceptionally good at what we did and so if we have a clear understanding of our value proposition to our customer maybe this is that second principle here then we can say no when we are going to violate because we will not that has to be in invaluable and so yes there's can be these temptation and all these things but will i be able to manifest outward with pride and conviction that this thing that we say we do better than anybody else in the world will actually be done and if it's not then that's a third rail and either have to solve the problem of how or you have to say no mh i love that that's awesome what's the mission for arc group like to have you established that yeah our our mission is to unlock potential in leaders and so what we mean by that and what i mean that i and like i'll be honest with you this is my personal mission statement so in some ways i i created this and said this has gotta be a manifestation of what i believe right and my personal mission statement for over twenty five years has been to empower and enable the success of others and so with arc group i want to empower and unlock the potential within people for leadership and so like that's what it means it means unlocking what they didn't know was there but they haven't inside them one of the coolest things is you've talked to and seen and helped a lot of leaders the world today is a bit different i'm gonna say like then it was twenty years ago yeah but a lot of things are the same but there's a lot of change too what are some of the toughest challenges for leaders today that you're seeing show up and how are you helping those leaders like navigate the the the messi ness of it today yeah it's it's a great question and i'm i'm pausing to think because i wanted dis instill this a bit in my head i think we have more demands on our time and attention than we've ever had and so therefore as leaders and as organizations we have more opportunities let's take the age of ai right we can get solve any problem by asking any questions to any ai bot right yeah there are infinite choices and i think that the because of that today even more than twenty years ago we have to be and i and i don't use this word lightly we had to be ruthless mh in our focus on what's most important so what we say no too i think we have more opportunities to do good work that means we have to be even better at doing and saying yes to only the things that are gonna be great work that are truly unique now am i saying you need to put your head in the sand and ignore great opportunities no right but we have to we have to really embrace the opportunity to focus and i think i think that's a challenge i deal with it all the time right with working with leadership teams and if anything if you were if i can think of half a dozen of clients if they were on the talking with this right now they'd say one thing dusty always says which is dis steal it to three if you can't instill the the most important things to three and then one right you don't have any priorities right right how do you coach folks on the fact that there's lots of new things that show up on a regular basis as a leader where it's like oh that could help me get to this future goal i don't know for sure if it's going to do that but it might so i'm gonna say yes and then they start to compound and it's yesterday's to this yes to this to this yes to this and they're getting they're making progress but they can't even see that by saying yes to all of those things the actual path is longer than it would have if they said no how do you is there any methods any frameworks any ways that you help folks think about this because you're a hundred percent spot on there's never been more opportunities than ever before to do things like no entrepreneur can be bored right now there's tons of things to do so how do are you coaching folks to like figure that all of yeah this is a great question because this is a case where i know i have to eat my own dog foods so to speak i have absolutely practice okay i have the same challenges right you know i can do all these things but i have to say no to many many good things to say great one of the first things i like to ask leadership teams in about and i coach leaders on is are you clearly cod in your purpose your reason for existence beyond making money mh i see that as a first principle understanding and then do you have a clearly cod and articulated vision now you the execution of that vision can be amended based on environmental changes and things that are going on but you've gotta have a really crystal clear vision of what it is you wanna create right then you can make dis decisions you know whether it's you know a year from now wanna be doing this or whatever but it always comes back to is this initiative or this thing going to absolutely enable and empower that vision to come true and if you if you were to cut away everything else it would this be the one thing and and so i like to use and i'd like to recommend almost like a a binary decision making process where you do as a forcing function right how committed are you to one this one thing andy dukes wrote the wonderful book thinking in bets and i'd love to think about this through that lens is is this a small bet that's gonna take some amount of resources that has a potential high return but low drag you know it's not gonna put you at risk you're gonna run something else from playing the game or is this a bet the you know bet the boat you going all going on it right yeah yeah and if you think of it through the lens of a forcing function would you go all in on this right the answer is no then we get to go why and i think the biggest challenge that i see leaders making in this regard is they don't take the thumb to think and i think the fallacy is that people believe that you have to go have a three day off site right and you don't you just need to employ a framework and you know i have a a number ones that i love the one of the most simple ones is sitting down and going what is the situation what is the potential return what is the cost of doing this what am i not saying yes to if i say yes to this what is the absolute trade off and you can do that exercise yeah in thirty minutes i love that i haven't done it in a while but that exercise i have done on planes mh mh when i have no wifi f and no electricity and they won't allow like there's no plugs from my laptop or they force me to check my bag yes and it is so refreshing to do but like getting in the habit of doing it is important how do you think of habits like is have like do you guys do habits with your like through the coaching like how do you think of creating habits with leaders is that a thing like do you have habits that you embrace on a regular basis as a leader that like help you ensure that you're moving in the right direction how do you do that or do you not do it you just i i'm i absolutely do it and i would say i do it as a self preservation or a a protection mechanism because i'm naturally at this you know high energy for person and so the only way that i can like really focus that energy is to install habits that make me better because cool that that i love it like being you know atomic habits james car there's some many things so i absolutely recommend in fact one of our modules and our leadership accelerators an entire week is on what are the rhythms and of life those core rhythms that you want to install right you will hold yourself accountable to doing and one of the things that i like about forum or i like about the groups we put together is i've found with leaders that we will often let ourselves down right or we'll let down another human being but as soon as i have committed to another person or made public my commitment that i'm going to do something i'll honor it right if i you know if i'm just letting myself down and go i'll do it tomorrow i figured out i have more morning routines i love that you're asking me this as we record it because this the first day of the quarter and i certainly regularly this morning just sat down and rode out here's my q four morning routine and need new routine i'm tweaking a few things yeah so not only do i have habits and not i only when do i teach habits i'm always tweak tweaking and learning and right maybe the the most important thing about this is i'm always looking for the ones i need to cut away because pruning is it's the easiest thing in the world to add a habit it it's t the ones that may be good but no longer serve mh that's most important i love that what i'm hearing is definitely around leadership but leading for yourself and like making sure that you take care of you before you take care of others could you dive in a little bit more around like how you think of leading yourself first versus the team and like the the role that that plays i'd love to dive into that a little bit more yeah i think this is certainly one of my first principal beliefs and that in order to lead teams in order to lead organizations the first principle is you have to lead yourself and you know it took me a long time to realize that self leadership isn't selfish and i think that that's a a paradigm that many people buy into they go well you know i don't have to do this you're always i'm being selfish if i take care of myself and it's not that at all it's what enables you to lead with conviction and honor and integrity because here's why all leadership is is behavioral exe exemplified what we say we believe mh so self leadership is the of those things that we say we hold true and that we say we hold dear and then we enable ourselves we hold ourselves accountable to doing it behavioral so if i tell people hey you need to you know take time for a reflection well then i need to be doing that and i need to be learning that right and like to your example a second ago about airplane tom right like like my i was speaking at two events last week on my flight home i took the time know wifi on the plane yeah and pulled out my journal and said okay right what did i learn what do i need to do better what's gonna wanna do differently the next time but you know self leadership is really it's the first principle of how to lead better because we're we're better today you and not both than we were ten years ago hundred percent and we're gonna be light years better ten years from now we take the time to study to learn and to improve and and that's my fundamental belief in type that's what you know i teach all of our cohorts and all our leaders like you must learn to lead yourself first now right nobody comes in to a program and saying i wanna lead myself first that's what i wanna do no what we're chasing is a transformation or an outcome mh the method of achieving that is to establish commitments that you hold yourself to and then behavioral demonstrate them with rigor and discipline right and and that's what self leadership is and you've gotta give yourself time for that space for that thinking or reflection on that and learning guys like it all goes back to the ability to learn when when you're talking i hear a lot around kind of establishing for yourself like this is who i wanna be this is my goals these are the things that i care about this is my mission my vision i'm pursuing it i'm ruthless and relentless around taking care of like the vision that i have so to speak some folks don't have that yet or at least they haven't done the work to find it how do you is there a method that you help folks get there do you like i think of a lot of folks who i know especially in tech and they see the the money they see the cash they see the ai buzz and they're like i need to have an exit i need to go mh how do you help them be be able to even see what you're describing which feels to me as kind of like this this different let like it's the it's the monetary side and then there's like the human side how do you help them see that part of it do you do that exercises is there a framework is their a method is there a book is there a retreat i go on like where do you take those folks to see it yeah there's there's there's multiple ways it can be done and and what we do is pull folks together in a that are like minded and walk them through a twelve week program that allows them to iterative build on foundational frameworks and the first and most important one is a reflection exercise like where have you been over the last ninety days right and where do you wanna be now we also layer in you know personality behavioral profiling or genius assessment so we take a lot of data and then we say okay based on this information this is who you are and this is what you want in the next ninety days now let's talk about purpose and it doesn't have to take long and i think that's where a lot of people get sideways as they think well i need to go you know spend six weeks in the woods with guru and it that'd be fun right but it's not necessary yeah but it is hard work until we take purpose and then draw design and draw your vision and then design and draw the mission your mission is a leader what is the value you create and walk through this process and do it with other like minded leaders who you get to hear their perspective like if you an hour in a group like this together i would love to know like how is ross thinking about this but because that's gonna flavor how i think about it i'm gonna learn from that so what we do is we take these impact accelerators and we walk leaders through this so that they can install the transformation frame frameworks for themselves right the best part about it is these tools are eminent scalable and they're repeatable and they only get better the more and more times you use them right i also like to remind folks that slow smooth smooth as fast right and right and you when you take the tom i guess we can chase that big exit or that big thing yeah but what we often end up doing is spending calories that weren't focused on the important things i'm i'm reminded if someone i talked a few months ago talk with a few months ago and and he's he's the president of a technology startup up in the logistics space and he's he's doing a lot of amazing things and we were talking about macy's i just don't have two hours a week to work on myself and i said well when will you have two hours a week it one that made this exit how long is that gonna take i don't know because i don't have time to work on anything but that and it says if you work on yourself right then that thing becomes an automatic right not guaranteed or we not you know cards have to fall the right away all that stuff yeah but the time's gonna pass anyway what's more important than working on how you show up because it is the ultimate compound effect yep if i show up better next week by one percent that compounds again and again and again and i i i know i'm preaching to choir with you but it's walking through an iterative framework process and and doing it with other people who are also wanting to be challenged right that i have found to be so transformational for myself right and for the leaders that we work with how do you so a lot of leaders listen to the podcast and i think some of them are thinking to themselves like again it goes back to some of our earlier points it's around like okay so i have to talk to all of these people and share like my that i don't know what's going on like what how how do you talk to them and show them like this still works and that these folks you can trust in this group etcetera like how do you break that that challenge does it take time or is it like immediate for some folks like what do you say to those people were are listening and they're like i'd be interested but i'm kinda nervous about the fact that i have to share that i don't have it together with these other leaders yeah i think that well it it's it's a wonderful question because what i have found is there's almost always in a group of twelve someone who will is willing to wait in right away right say i don't have all this figured out and that's the reason i'm here is because i wanna be a better version of myself right inviting all of you into that journey and you know i'll i'll share some stories about me but man it it is almost without fail within the first session someone will say i've seen my personality profiles i've seen these things this is what i want a lot of our questions are curated to make it easier to admit what what it is you want to work on who you wanna become right and so but somebody will open up and go look i don't have all this figured out i i show up every day at work with an incredible amount of impostor syndrome mh and my goal for this transformation is to show up knowing that not only do i belong here but that i'm earning my next level and that that the safety that happens when one person in the room makes that shift and yeah we choose content and other materials to help enable this really but i'll i'll give you an example just yesterday we are having a cohort card call with one of our vision to victory cohorts and somebody showed up one of our leaders showed up and say hey guys i just gotta say like the last week has been brutal i i am in a fog i don't know what's going on i'm i'm i'm absolutely struggling today i i have a little clarity right last week one of my dear friends passed away and i have i'm i'm not who i wanna be right and i'm i'm simply telling you that so that you understand that i'm not i know that i'm not showing up the way i want and i'm asking for your grace and forgiveness and great support and man yeah you could hear pin drop i bet bet that's awesome i love that in that level of transparency when like you do that with the group and you know that it's with people who actually care about your best interest it just like changes changes everything have you had those moments on your end like where you've had to show up in a group and be the transparent vulnerable person and had to share yeah i have and do you remember the first time i i i don't remember the first time i remember the most powerful time okay maybe i'll remember the first one by the end time of his story but in twenty twenty yeah it's right towards the end of the year december of twenty twenty my younger brother passed away mh sorry to hear that thank you he was forty years old so way too young yeah and you know passed away on a thursday and i about two weeks before christmas right and you know we my sister and all hadn't go tell the kids and all these things and it was an uncontrollable heart event and my group i i walked into the room the way that we actually coincidentally had a session the next week meeting the next week and people how are you and i was putting on the brave faced i'm good you right i'm struggling a little bit but i'm good and one of my dear friends looked at me and said dusty i love you in your full crap right i know that you're dying inside because i know how close you and your brother are it's okay and like not only is it okay i want you to know that this is the safest place you'll ever have mh to share the degree of emotion that you feel and you don't have to put on a front for us right i knew this i had been in a group with her for eleven years and she love me enough to call me out on and then i broke down i like i broke down and i said here's the things i'm wrestling with i'm wrestling with mortality i'm wrestling with regret i'm wrestling with future decisions that i'm gonna be making yeah it's and i don't have the answers right so that that was probably the most profound yeah i the the first one was i i've remembered it while we were think talking was me having to walk in and go guys i i think i worked with an absolute raging narcissistic at home right and i don't know how to handle this right and and i just had to be willing to go there and then they had then they had to flip it around and go well maybe it's you and i went wait a minute that's not we're here talk about this surprise surprise so yeah sure that's when come to mind yeah no that's fair i i love curious yeah i think it was when we had i was set on my path full speed ahead girl dad let's go entrepreneurship my kids are done and then we had a surprise reggie my my son who i love to death so if he finds this when he's older reggie you were not a mistake but you were not exactly plants and that blessing was a shock and i was like oh boy so i got like nine months to figure out what i'm gonna do and yeah that was that was a nice surprise i thought we were done we i bought books with just dad in these two kids it was girl dad everything everywhere but then i got a surprise with another one and it's been awesome but i was definitely mentally not yet in the mindset at the time i was ready to go back on the tour i was like my kids are now in pre primary everything's good and here we go again diaper stage which has been absolutely amazing reggie if you listen to this someday but d i'd love to dive back into your world as a ceo before if you could go back and talk to early stage dusty just jumping in what some of that advice that you would give yourself when you were first getting involved in leadership oh man there's three things that come to mind number one trust your gut there are there are times and places that you will not be able to explain why you feel what you feel what it is you're picking up on you need to trust but verify your gut but learn to trust your gut earlier and i mean i can think of hiring decisions i can think of firing decisions i can think of business strategy decisions yeah where it took me taking some lumps along the way to learn that the gut you know i don't need to lead by the gut i don't need to you know lead everything to chance right you'll need to learn to trust it as a an element of direction that says valuable as data because that's the intuition that comes from experience and learning and all those things so that would be number one trust your gut number two you're in the seat for a reason and you know i struggled with for many many years and many roles mainly because i was young but i've had some really significant leadership opportunities of with impostor syndrome you know i was twenty three the first time i had a significant leadership role where i was moving a call center from charlotte north carolina to a small town i was the only person hired twenty a degree twenty three i didn't go hire three hundred and fifty people so my job was to move to this small town hire everybody train everybody stand this whole thing up and you know i was twenty three years old there's no way right that i belonged in that job like you're hiring people that are older than new like yeah yeah i i had you know culture all of it right and so i think that while that was an incredible blessing and it was an incredible gift and i loved every minutes probably the best roles i've ever had you know i was also twenty three so i'd like appreciating and just that that wisdom of your in the seat for a reason would be the second thing and the third thing it took me a few years to figure out and and i'm still learning this i think i'm relearn learning this lesson through a different lens every day is that you need to surround yourself with good mentors you do not have to have all the answers and i think that earlier in life you know in you know that because of that need to prove that i've belonged in the room and that was you know in the seat you know i probably had way too much i have all the answers and right it took me a few years to figure out and and out now it's it's a default state curate rate smart people to be in the room with you to that you can serve and that they can serve you so that you can surround yourself with great mentors advisors you know virtual board of directors all the forum stuff we product about right you don't have to have all the answers surround yourself with smart people i wanna dive into each of those so trusting your gut verifying how do you build that muscle like i think for a lot of folks it's hard to know when the gut is right and when they might be just kinda feeling a certain way that everyone else might not agree like the the data's is not clear it's not obvious your gut saying that this won't work out how do you do you just leap but do you have to like what's your thoughts on how you get better at trusting the gut yeah my the my thoughts here are embracing a disciplined practice so like the the trust your gut is by its very nature or something that's ether and you only know what's going on so alright so what can i do that would allow me to apply thinking models that would help me understand this so practice number one step away it's write down the question what is it i am thinking or feeling right right i i'm cod i don't think this person a good fit in the role why is it that i it's really you know a version of the fob wise why is it that i don't think that what is it i am seeing what are the behaviors that are you know that are are at risk or that i'm being you know bang being scene so then once i can cod that right then i go well the what is it that will happen if i make an alternative decision what's the best case what's the worst case right and that's probably one of my favorite questions anybody who's ever worked with me is has heard this a million times from me which is what is the worst thing it can happen mh because once you can articulate that right then you can start to articulate the business risk and then you can go okay well the worst thing that can happen is you know i get fired well okay that's not the worst possible risk why is it is driving that so i think that for the first one that gut process is really being able to lead yourself and step back and just answer the question why am i feeling this way right and sometimes you can't put words on it true but there's always something that you've you can dis fill it out into it behavioral or observational etcetera it's it's one of those things that i've seen so many times in my career like dating back to my earliest earliest days of business and entrepreneurship it's like the gut telling me no but i'm gonna go with yes because i probably don't know something i'm probably missing something and i think it's like so important to finally get to a point where you can just say my gut says it i have to stick with it and it goes nicely to your next piece around being in the seat for a reason breaking that impostor syndrome just expecting and knowing that you are there because you have the credentials you have the capabilities you have been selected on purpose or you have essentially pursued it and you've achieved it so go do it how do you get comfortable in that seat and like is there a methodology to that or is it kind of just like something that you have to do some of that inner work what's your thoughts on that yeah i i think you have to do the inner work but i i wanna first say it isn't and and you don't answer that question through a place of ego you don't answer that place saying well i'm belong here because you know right of all these great things mh you sit there on and you go okay i i have this impostor syndrome which is one of the most common things you know you and i both belong to organizations where e and lap that is the most common challenge and that people bring up in surveys was like yep impostor syndrome hundred percent and so being able to sit down and then for me and what i coach leaders on which is okay how can we create a system of measure that will be validating information to you that you do belong what is it that you will see and measure and measures don't have to be quantitative through the sense of a kpi it can be something that's observed it can be something that's measured like a kpi or it can be something that's tracked right so what is it that you can look around the room or around the situation behavioral as a point of validation that will say yeah okay i am in the right seat i like that was a good decision and so looking for those successes is what allows us to build that you know that gain mindset i'm a huge fan of dan sullivan and you know doctor benjamin and hardy wrote book out the gap in the game yep like you or getting into that seat oftentimes means we're in a gap mentality right all these other people who are on the mountain are doing all of these amazing things right and we have to establish how are we measuring our gain right how are we validating that we belong in the seat and not in an ego sense no in in an absolute i create value for others by being here i love it the last one surrounding yourself with good mentors so many people have no idea how to get a mentor mh those send dms to people and wonder why no one's reaching out no one's saying no one's writing my emails i've sent twenty linkedin messages to people who run billion dollar companies bill gates didn't get back to me i wanted to bill gates to be my mentor why is isn't any even responding to right like what do you say to the folks who are reaching out to the zuckerberg the elon of the world trying to make them be their mentors how do you get mentors like what would be your advice to them yeah i think you have you can think about mentors through a couple of lenses you can think of mentors as people you don't know but have thought leadership for you you say that again that's that's that's powerful say it again yeah so mentors as people that you don't know but have thought leadership that's meaningful for you right so read their book listen to their podcast read their articles study how they think right and learn from that like i believe that life is a a an opportunity for lessons of learning and we should always be looking around going oh ross has some really good tools in his tool belt i want one of those how does he do it how do i learn from it i do that like with you like create once and distribute forever like i'm thinking about that all the time yeah because of you so that that'd be the first levels like who are the people i wanna learn from and you know harry has truman said hey not all readers or leaders but all leaders are readers like right who do you wanna study the second would be within my caesar like maybe if zuckerberg reaches back out to you amazing but right who who are the people that are around you brett have behaviors that you admire mh and you could just take them to coffee like just like it can be as simple as you know your your grand ad or your grandma like our influence people of influence are those who have behaviors that we wanna emulate and so how do we learn from them just reach out to coffee yep and then the third thing is be very very very intentional about who you choose not to spend time with and i think that that is it goes back to the pruning for habits i think being thoughtful and mindful of the pruning of relationships that are no longer acc for you or for them right and like i we all know people who are like energy vampires are the ones when they we see them on their phone like thank god for call waiting we don't to take the call right right mentors are the in ent of that they're the people that will get poor into us and give to us but we're not gonna we're not allowed nor should we ever be an energy vampire to them how are we creating value for them how are we and some people just give right and that's wonderful but also we allow them to think we allow them to grow we allow them to teach it's gotta be a two way straight that's cool some people are hearing this and they're like how do i have value to a mentor someone has already made it they're successful their ceo they're retired they're living in the hampton they've got grandkids that come and see them on thanksgiving like what do i have to offer these people what's your response to them yeah one of my my closest mentors to this day is a person who achieved a level of a success that it's just imaginable to me like it's just an amazing human being and every time chuck and i get together and every time and and we haven't known each other like all that long a couple years now right but every time we get together the value creation through conversation is bidirectional and the mentor gets value from the quality of the question this asked and sometimes what i have found is a person who who will mentor younger leaders or people who are emerging is it allows me to go back to some first principle foundational leadership elements that i take for granted mh and haven't it thought about and there is so much value in having a beginner mindset and so like thinking about this value through the lens of it's good to go back and revisit these important things because there's things that you and i take for granted because we've done them for so long right and like going back and going oh wow like that really is a fundamental thing and i need to go reinforce that in some other places in my world yeah right so i think i think the the quality of the questions the ability to teach you know one of my mentors once told me so dusty we most often teach what we most desperately need to learn mh and so giving it someone an opportunity to teach yeah it can be value creative for them as it is for you i love that like the idea that the mentor wishes they had this advice when they were in your shoes they'll give it to you now so you don't have to learn it down the road like they did yeah that's that's special one of the things we talked about earlier was like the pain points that a lot of liquor leaders go through and there's three things that i want you to speak to around the pain points that you see most frequently when leaders are reaching out and they're looking to kinda scale grow become the best version of themselves what are the three biggest pain points that you've noticed over the last few years yeah the biggest pain points that i see tom in and in a day in day out time and time again are are these things number one is frustration like i have a vision but the results the team is putting on the playbook on the score board isn't working i have this but there's just frustration for between vision and results there's a million reasons for these but that's pain point number one pain point number two is i am being crushed like everything is ending up on my desk why like everything's coming through me i i can't get to the next level because everything has to go through me so that's pain point number two and pain point number three we've danced around a little bit but this it's this the mindset of loneliness like isolation and leadership is lonely for a reason there are times and places it needs to be lonely there's a great scene and save private saving private ryan where they talk about you you know you grip how you grip up not down yes and i love that i use that scene all the time in our in our work but isolation and leadership is willing leader is does not have to be a perpetuated state if you curate mentors if you curate opportunities if you give yourself the freedom and the space and the people to say i don't have all the answers what do you think right so those are the three that i see all the time there's a lot of reasons for them but those are big three what do you think are the biggest around the frustration versus like achieving the vision like what's the biggest challenges that a lot of folks would be typically not able to even see as the true root of the problem you know oftentimes that frustration is rooted in an execution orientation like we we we're frustrated because we're not executing oftentimes the issue isn't in execution i'm i'm gonna say hey assuming we have the right people in the team and we have all that it's almost always an issue with alignment or an issue with clarity and so the issue with execution almost always happens upstream alright we crystal clear on what's most important and where we're going and how we're gonna measure success who's accountable and responsible for these things like that clarity is like the great leadership unlock for second second component that is is alignment do people know how they fit into do they know how their work matters do they know what it is they are accountable and responsible for delivering and had they met and made and met their commitment of of accountability so those are the places we that we see and we we kinda start flipping from okay the execution is the outcomes that's the symptom now let's talk about root cause how clear are we where we're going and who's accountable and responsible and what we're gonna do and then are the people aligned and so when we start solving upstream issues the execution takes care of itself when you we're in the ceo seat how often were you spending time coaching versus like execution directing people like i'm very curious to get a sense from you where do you see a leader showing up in a in front of the team like is a leader intended to be the organization's coach director and talk through some of the things that we've even discussed today or should they be in the weeds discussing this bolt this bolt this widget like yeah i think well there aren't gonna be any like unilateral answers here i think number one is you have to know when you need to show up in what role so i'm gonna speak in a in a very broad sense i think given the ability to understand and articulate in this season i need to be in this role of the leadership you know in a crisis i need to be doing this and right another situation i need to be doing that but the way i have you the you know the pent leaders you've gotten the right people in the right seats who are focused on what needs to be done and leaders like the ceo of the organization they are laser focused on the vision and the connection bit of that vision to the outcomes and so for example you know in every organization i've run and and been part of in leadership i would do skip level meetings i would do town hall meetings i would do manager means we we have lots and lots of conversations and people knew that there were always gonna be three things that i was talked about in fact people would say here comes dusty we know what we're don't talk about we're we're gonna talk about our purpose we're gonna talk about our vision and we're gonna talk about our plan and then my job was to make sure that they understood why we were here where we were going and how we were gonna get there and then we would spend the majority of our conversation working on connecting the dots now that is the most important part and so depending on the agent stage of the organization depending on the season of the work you know you may have to be down in the weeds and down in the bolts but right you can't be most effective at the ceo level if you know all of the details that's going on you need to be connecting the dots but you know given different roles like you may need to be in those things but you've always gotta be teaching you must always be making sure that people understand the outcomes for which they are responsible and accountable for delivering that's awesome cool i wanna take this one back to you for a second so how do you personally say sharp you talked about readers or leader like leaders or readers what do you do are you a big book person like give me a bit of a rundown and if so i think it's obvious to read books maybe throw us a few that have been influential your leadership journey that you would highly recommend listeners listen to yeah what's read yep absolutely so i'm i'm a huge junkie for reading and it it comes from being homeschool school as a kid cool and not not going to primary education right and and basically being told it you know age ten you can learn anything you want if you're gonna go if you wanna go get it out of a book and so i'd love to read and i love to read history and all these things i think like for for me personally whether it's reading it's an audio it's a podcast it is an intense curiosity to see how others think and how they solve problems and how they how how we can use learnings of others even outside and may especially outside of our own industry or paradigm to solve the challenges that we're dealing with thinking is not relegated to a disciplined or an industry good thinking is agnostic to all those things so i'm i'm just fascinated now like one of my favorite books and i'll mention this one is the goal and i cannot pronounce the author's there's last name but it'll find it will include in the show notes it's an amazing book on the power of a manufacturing environment and understanding bottlenecks understanding systems theory in manufacturing but when you think about it almost all of business is manufacturing where manufacturing a value proposition for the customer how do we do that how do we ensure that the parts arrive at just the right time and don't perish and blah blah blah blah blah so the goal is one of my favorites and i read that every couple years anytime i'm getting stuck and thinking you know thinking through the system's thinking right i i read the goal a first a book i read every single year is man's search for meeting by victor f i read that every single year because every year i read it i read a different book right based on you know where i am in life and just the power between stimulus and the environment to choose your response i think it's one of the most impactful things a leader can embrace is they have the ability to choose so i love that book i it's a it's a classic now but simon sent start with why right i think that's a first principle book for anyone leading google because you've got to understand that people really need to connect the dots right with that for years and years one of my favorites was and it still is a favorite but the leadership secret to colin powell like that book is a chrome haven't oh that's to the list it is such a it's just a trove of of wisdom eric recently and and i'm i'm contemplating whether the book is now replaced leadership secrets so colin powell is my all time favorite book for retired military officer is sick a wisdom of the bull by admiral bill mc cool it it once for my list i love it oh good it's it's it's just encapsulated wisdom and i love his tag on and its leadership is simple but not easy and so i think that's a that's a phenomenal one but i'm i'm constantly learning reading adjusting just some good way trying to find trying to find things that disagree i think we need to find things that we disagree with so we can get a out of our own echo chambers hundred percent i think one of the things that i did probably was four years ago i intentionally set out to read books that i strongly disagreed with mh that were like against my core principles just because i wanted to like push myself to read them and it was a very valuable exercise that i went through because it opens your mind to a world that you might think doesn't exist but does or it challenges some of your thoughts and you're like okay yeah i get that that's fair that's legit i love that you do that i think that's so important to surround yourself with people who think differently yeah oh the that last book i'll mention because i can could just go forever yeah doris current good i think it's is the author and and now the name of the book just blow my head a team of rivals okay about lincoln's cabinet cool the power of he had people who hated each other into his cabinet right so like i love that c that intentional yeah disrupted thinking i love it alright we talked to earlier around how we are going to try to be better ten years from now than who we are today and that through reading through developing by doing the hard things by doing all of the stuff that we've discussed surrounding ourselves with good mentors all of those things we're hopefully going to be better ten years from now than we are today if you were to fast forward ten years who do you hope dusty becomes and what is the legacy that you want to leave as a leader let's say ten years from now such a great question i think as as i reflect and have a ten year vision the the thing that i want so maybe i'll go to legacy first and then in in order to do that i'll have to become someone better is that and this linked to my be hack you know i i'm a big believer in having a big carry audacious goal that scares you terri you don't know how to get right and mine is to impact the lives of a hundred million liters right no idea how i'm gonna do that saying it out loud makes money it's lots that's a lot of people that's a lot of and it's a ten x so i can could first i said a million so i can do ten times that and then what's ten first ten millions to ten percent of the hundred eighty eight so i think the legacy i wanna live and and build is through conversations through interactions through engagements people are able to with for themselves not for me further dis still what's most important feel empowered to take action on it and then go do it and therefore have created a ripple effect of impact based on a conversation based on an engagement based on in an interaction and so one of the things that i love doing is helping people unlock and and decode that which is already inside them and connect the dots for them so that they can be empowered to go do it and so ten years from now if we've done that and and impacted the lives of many through those efforts and you know in order for me to do that i gotta get better at what i do every day i have to learn more i have to connect more i have to read more i have to make sure above all else i practice what i preach and i think that that is one of the most important things so in order for me to to do that for others i need to be better at that for myself and so that's the work i'm doing on myself with the goal to impact the lives of others and i'll never know the ripple effect and i don't need to right it's enough for me i love it well i'm sure some of the folks listening to this are gonna feel that ripple and they're gonna be inspired by this conversation in and be a better version of themselves because of it so dusty thank you so much for jumping on the show if folks wanted to connect learn a little bit more about you your organization your group what you folks do where should they go first place connect with me on linkedin i'm out there all the time in dusty h them and then you could find our work at arc group dot com a r c q u s group dot com tons of resources tons of giveaways like you know i have a i have same belief you do i gotta create value for others and give it all the away i love you did a lot of value freely today we greatly appreciate it dusty thanks so much for joining and i'll see you soon thanks for you soon thanks ross gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

hubspot helped tumblr solve a huge problem they needed to move faster to produce training content but their marketing team was stuck we're waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in a matter of seconds they impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com no one should press publish on content just for the sake of it unless you're writing in a journal unless you're writing in your diary you probably want people to see the thing that you've created but right now as you listen to these words there's a lot of brands a lot of businesses and a lot of marketing teams a lot of creators president publish on things that have spent hours maybe days maybe weeks maybe months to produce and those things will reach no one besides their internal team and it's a shame it's a shame because energy was allocated to this work budget was allocated to this work and i recently sat down with the folks over at the agents of change and we did a great dive deep dive into the power of content we dove deep into why many organizations have broken content strategies we talked about how organizations should learn from disney we talked about what i like to call the three hours repurposing remix and res sharing folks we had an absolute blast having this conversation i'm super excited to introduce you to my episode with rich from agents of change where we dive deep into the power of smart distribution the work happens after you press publish when you press publish yes you've done something good you've created content but the real job is to ensure that that content reaches your audience and the mindset shift that needs to happen really starts there with recognizing that pressing publish is not the end goal it is not what you should even measure welcome to the agents of change the podcast experience you've been waiting for your entire marketing career search social mobile ai blockchain and neuro marketing these are the agents of chain and so are you digital marketing success awaits into your transformation begins now welcome to another episode of the agents of change podcast my name is rich brooks i'm your host this is episode five hundred and ninety three powered by flight and media you know flight new media that's the digital agency i started all the way back in nineteen ninety seven when the internet still came on cds that were shipped to in the mail ever since then we've been the plug and play marketing team for all sorts of businesses whether you need help with branding web design or digital marketing we can extend your team's capabilities with deep expertise and an extra set of hands or ten reach out to us at take flight dot com or the ages of change dot com and i'll get back to you personally just tell me i sent you creating good content is hard work unfortunately so much of it goes unseen that's because we often put our blood to sweat and tears into a valuable piece of content hit publish and then what across our fingers hope we get business hope our content gets seen there's so much more to content marketing than just creation and today we're gonna look at how you can get more qualified eyes on your content through repurposing let's get into it my next guest is the founder of foundation a b content marketing agency and the founder of distribution dot ai an innovative software helping brands and create spread their stories with ease he's an amazon best bestselling author of the book create wants distribute forever and has worked with organizations all over the world ranging from some of the fastest growing startups well known higher education institutions and global fortune five hundred brands he's been named one of the most influential marketers in the world by multiple marketing publications and firms like buzz sum sc sem ra mas and moore he received harry jerome young entrepreneur award and has been named one of the top fifty ceos in atlantic canada today we're gonna be talking about how you can get your content in front of the people that matter with ross simmons ross welcome to the podcast thanks for having me i'm excited to be here excited to chat today it's gonna be fun absolutely so how did you find yourself focusing on content marketing and distribution yeah i fell in love with content marketing at a young age agent and i didn't even realize at the moment that it was content marketing so when i was in university i had a blog and on that blog i was creating content although both fantasy football and fantasy sports i was producing pieces pretty much every single day talking about whether or not people should start this player or the next and it just kind of continued to kind of be a thing that i enjoyed doing the moment in which i started to share that content though with other communities online forums etcetera i started to see the traffic in the impression levels just like skyrocket and i was like wait this distribution thing like the actual act of taking the content in spreading it is where the roi comes from and that's when the light bulbs went off however with that fantasy football blog the traffic started to tank i mean the traffic continued to rise but my marks in school because i did this when was in university really started to like go off and i was like oh this isn't going so well and my mom was like you should just write about what you're learning in school so i turned my blog into a website called ross dot com where i started der write about what i was learning which was marketing at the time and after that i kept writing kept writing kept promoting and people started to listen and you fast forward and i had a career built on the back of that that block thanks to mom and her excellent advice that's it that's it jerk said strangely this weekend i was in a vintage shop and they had richard scary book i don't know if you guys read the richard scary books when i was when you were kids but it is a book about what people do all day it's a book written for kids and it talks about all these different jobs i don't think they content distribution was one of the jobs that richard gary covered in is like nineteen forty or fifties classic so when you're talking to people about what you do for work how do you describe what content distribution is yeah so oftentimes people have no idea what i'm talking about i don't know if a lot of people in my family know what i do but essentially we focus on the creation of good content for the internet there's millions of people every single day who log in to their mobile devices log in to their browsers and they're looking for information and the question becomes how do you make sure that that information that you're publishing is actually found so we like to ensure that the brands that are producing great content actually can get that content in front of the people so i would say like over the last few years there's been a major shift that has happened where for years there was a deficiency of content and brands needed to create content period like a lot of brands weren't blogging they weren't engaging in youtube they didn't have videos they didn't have newsletters they didn't have podcasts they weren't thinking about it in that way but then a ship tap in when people started to say that mantra content is can create more content etcetera the world listen but as a result of that there was more noise and more chaos and more stories being told every single day and the question becomes for many how do you stand out amongst that noise so what we do is we help brands not only create the content but also distribute it how to get that content out there to the world on the channels where your audience is spending time in the formats that they want with the stories that are gonna resonate so it's part of what you're offering it's not just about building a higher platform building a bigger mega phone it's actually about identifying where the audience is is that part of the overall equation one hundred percent yeah like we start every engagement with research and in that research process we're trying to understand what channels are the audience spending time on what type of content do they want on that channel what stories do they care about what messages resonate with them and then we use that to inform the way in which we show up on that channel for the client so if a client is has their target audience on linkedin then we develop for them a strategy around how they should repurpose their content into carousel cells how to repurpose their content into linkedin articles how to manage your sales team's content so they can constantly be producing stories so they can use tools like distribution dot ai to repurpose their stories for their clients help to attract leads or if a clients audiences on instagram then maybe we need to develop an instagram specific strategy around how they should be thinking about real instagram stories etcetera so it's very channel specific based on where the audience is i think a lot of business owners and marketers and and creators stop after they hit the publish button right what is the mind shift mindset shift that we need to do to truly capitalize on the content we've created you know you're so right that most people stop at hitting the publish and we celebrate we all get excited we press publish and we feel good pop the bubbly like like this is good you feel great you just did something but in reality the work happens after you press publish when you press publish yes you've done something good you've created content but the real job is to ensure that that content reaches your audience and the mindset shift that needs to happen really starts there with recognizing that pressing publish is not the end goal it is not what you should even measure like yes it's great that you're pressing publish but the o pressing publish is how many people you reach how many people you influence how many people see it how many people engage how many people act because they heard it or consumed it so making sure that that is clear and happening is very key alright no ross i know you're a fan of frameworks can you walk us through a simple distribution playbook that a business with maybe limited time limited resources could realistically implement yeah so every business probably has an evergreen asset when you have an evergreen asset there's a few things that you wanna do one you need to think about a remix a repurposing effort and a res share so on the remix side you're thinking about how can this asset that we've created let's pretend for example that it's a webinar how can we repurpose this webinar you can repurpose that webinar by turning it into a blog post you can take that webinar and you could probably repurpose it into a newsletter in which you're taking the transcription from that webinar you're writing it up you could also probably repurpose it into an ebook if you really wanted to you could turn it into a pdf do a little bit of additional research and you've repurposed that asset you could also probably remix it so the second part is the remix the remix is when you take the audio file from this webinar and you're going to upload it to spotify so now on spotify you can get us to the webinar so you've remix it you took it from an original source which was a webinar and now you can consume it in an audio format or maybe you're going to cut it up different points where at one moment of the person you are interviewing or the person doing the presentation had five minutes where they went on a rant and they talked about something they were passionate about and something that your audience would care about you're gonna cut that and you're gonna share it as an individual asset on linkedin or an individual asset on instagram or one of the channels that you're on that is again a part of the remix now the final piece is the res share and this is one that seems low touch low impact but it's actually something that most brands sleep on every single day and not just brands even creators i'm very confident that some of your listeners already this year have probably produced things that were good so good that when they went live with them they got a bunch of traction and engagement more engagement than they had in the entire quarter but you fast forward four months three months later and they haven't res shared that same post again and that to me is a massive mistake you don't create something that is good that is relevant forever and just promote it once you need to bring that back to your audience because the first time that you shared it you actually only reached a fraction of the people that you want to connect with if you have a hundred followers on linkedin the people who saw that was probably the fourteen percent twenty people thirty maybe if you're lucky so those the rest of the audience didn't see it so if one or two people do see it again the next day they're not going to unfold you because of it they're gonna say oh thanks for the reminder this piece is valuable to me so repurpose remix and res share is a simple framework that i believe every brand should be taking when they invest in creating something that is worth sharing yeah that makes a lot of sense and also if if you've got that piece of evergreen content you're gonna have a different audience six months or a year later people who were not introduced to that content the first time around it whether it needs a a little bit of a re touch or whether it's good to go i can see that you're now supporting and and serving a a brand new audience with that content exactly that's the hundred percent it that's the same reason why so many movies come out ten years later with the exact same concept except they modernize it like you look at the disney playbook of lion king and all of these movies the original lion king is a spin off of hamlet old story just comes to life with animals and then you fast forward another fit ten to fifteen years they roll out a new version with beyonce and childish game be you know all of these characters playing the voice overs and it's action like real life action motion it's like come on like it's the same playbook but for some reason in the internet age as marketers and businesses we don't think that we can repurpose our things and remix our things and re sharing things and it's a broken philosophy for sure well i think after this interview i'm gonna reach out to beyonce and see if she's be willing to remix and review some my content for the podcast that might work yeah i appreciate that i'm guarantee you that would work if those i digress hosted by tony sandra is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals with shows under thirty minutes i digress helps eliminate complexity complications and confusion in business with frameworks and strategies that will help you unlock scalable and sustainable growth i have listened to some of the episodes that troy has published over the last few years and i've gotta tell you they have some hits they have some bang most recently i was listening to an episode where they talked about the new season of newness and how you can unlock new growth in this new year yes i know what some of you are thinking it's already march it's already april whenever you are listening to it but it is never too late to make twenty twenty four the best year yet listen to i digress wherever you get your podcast so how do we decide if we're content creators and that can meet a lot of things if we should lead with video blog posts or audio content do you have a go to recommendation or does it really depend so this is such a it's a complex question because if you were to ask me probably four years ago i would tell people lean into your strength in o and i still believe that to be true however i will throw out a caveat that didn't exist before the caveat is the internet actually wants more video video is where i believe the bet is to be made because it is the most purposeful asset and the most personal asset that can be produced i built my entire career on the back of written word i love written word i think more people should read i think reading is a great way of consuming content in information i think it's good for your brain i love reading i love books i'm a massive fan i didn't launch my book with an audio version because i love books so much however i've been hearing from the internet that they want me to do an audio version because i know that that's what they want so what do i believe you should do i believe for best practices you should embrace video i know it's not easy i know it's difficult to do but video is a very powerful channel best in class however if you can't turn on the video at least record your audio the voice is the second most impactful way it's a very intimate experience when i'm driving around and i can hear someone's words in my ears that is very powerful it creates what they call a para social relationship where they feel like they know you they feel connected to you very powerful on the third tier which again is something that i love is the written word and the written word is personal is connected but it's not as engaging as those other formats and if you ever questioned like is that true there's a simple test that you can run if you ask a hundred people in the last year have you watched tv or read a full book i can guarantee you more people have watched tv than the amount of people who have read books whether we like it or not agree with it or not think it's good for cider or not is a whole different dialogue but the vast majority of people consume television in tv video oriented media thus we should give people what they want ross absolutely hate that answer i know i know i see on books in background and it gives me how it look so i know and i've been talking about video for too many years to count but as i think back on it and as i look at video it always feels to me like every social channel tells you how much they want video and then you start doing video and then they immediately start to d the value of that video in most recently linkedin i mean yes linkedin has this whole thing where they want your shorts and your short wheels whatever i just wonder i'm not saying that you can't take video and slice it up in more ways and repurpose it in more ways than you could of the written word yeah but i i am concerned that people aren't really watching videos except when they're like viral tiktok video is that may not be like the right type of content for database i guess yeah i hadn't really thought this question through until you started talking which is why i'm going wrong about it do you think here's the real question do you think that the video is still the right answer if you're in b2b b yeah i do and the reason why i think it's still the right answers because in b you're still typically selling from a human human and the other thing about this that i think is the elephant in the room that not everyone wants to talk about is it's still very difficult to fake a video it is very easy to fake written word i can put up twenty posts in the next twenty days and not actually write a single one of them but everyone on my linkedin demo will interact and engage and think that it was human while some people will look at it and say a ross you're using lots of m dashes ross is this one here started with in the ever evolving world of content marketing they'll pick up on some of the nuances that maybe attaching pt or claude complexity wrote this piece and that on its own is something that i believe in b2b is creating friction however you can't yet today very well fake the nuances of a video and a human talking and a human taking you on a journey in a story and the manner and things like that is ai close yes i've seen all of the demos i've seen all of the tools i've played with them i've leveraged them they still have some quirks that need to be worked out and we might get there eventually but today i believe the final frontier of authenticity still exists with video alright fair enough although by the time we published this episode who knows knows maybe it will be yes backwards with off so you you launched distribution dot ai to help automate and scale distribution for companies you see ai b most helpful in this content marketing piece and where does it fall short currently yeah i think the best asset in the best value that you get rid of ai that you can just do things faster i think if you're a creator you should be able to if you're let me break it down this way if you are a great creator you can create great content faster if you're a good creator you can create good content faster but if you're a bad creator you can create bad content faster so the end of the day it's an acc it's an acc for all different types of marketers great marketers can be great more good can be good more and bad will be bad more like i think there's a fundamentals that you need to have first and foremost that you need to practice and then you tap into a tool like distribution dot ai and if you are a great at understanding how to create a good video how to create a great blog post you can use distribution dot ai to ensure that that content is being spread effectively if you understand your brand's voice you can upload that to distribution dot ai and all of the content will reflect that brand voice that you've uploaded so when it's promoting your blog content it's promoting your youtube video it's doing it in the style that you want and it's aligned with your voice now where do i see the gap i still today think that the human should review before they hit published i think the human should look at it and analyze and see like does this actually fit my voice before i schedule and share this piece but it's very close i think i'm also looking at this from a expert lens someone who's has been in this industry a long time and can see what good and great looks like if i was to compare an ai to someone who's fresh to school who has never read a single copywriting book and doesn't understand the principles of ai etcetera then they probably will lose to the ai the ai will probably beat the in terms of creating that great content so i think it's a great acc it's a tool that everyone should embrace i think ai is going to completely change the way in which we do marketing and for many no one's willing to say it but if you aren't willing to change your approach and grow and improve yourself and learn these tools i do think gay is gonna take a lot of jobs for those who aren't willing to adopt and change there if if someone is just starting off with using ai either their content marketing what's one task you would say they should hand off today yeah i think the the one i would ask them to start with would be a little bit of an audit like i would actually use ai like a high paid consultant and the prompt might be as simple as hey hey chat whatever tool you're using i want you to review this document which outlines our brand voice i want you to review our ic which is a document that i'm going to upload and i want you to give me insight into some gaps that i might not see do some research on who we're actually targeting here and be brutally honest with your response don't hold back let me know what i am missing as it relates to the approach that we're taking to connect with these people and then it's gonna give you a response then i'd start to go into a bit of a chained command prompt where i would say okay thank you so much for that really appreciate it i've uploaded here maybe my marketing plan or my content calendar please review it in again be ruthless be relentless and give me harsh feedback on what i should be considering and how i could improve and it's going to give you that too that is a simple thing that every business can do and i think they can find some great opportunities from just running that analysis alone that they might not get try to treat the ai as like a partner in your marketing engine as someone who you can bounce ideas off of drove reports out for second set of eyes visibility c gaps one thing i've also been using it for is after i have a call with a customer using ai to summarize and transcribe and identify key things from it that one i can use to inform a product in future decisions but also what could i have done on that call better to prepare to present and into share should i have said certain things did i talk too much all of those things i'll probably do that with this podcast i'll probably upload the podcast to an ai and be like hey listen to this podcast and give me feedback how could i have been better so using it for that is a great way i believe for humans to stay indispensable because if you're able to constantly be improving and you're using the ai to improve you're gonna be unstoppable long term alright this show called the agents of change and very often there's just this parody or echo chamber that happens in all circles but certainly marketing circles is there something that people talk about when they talk about content in air content distribution that just makes you roll your eyes and you're just like that's not actually my experience right yeah one of them i would say that drives me insane is very recent but it's someone here someone listening is going to hear probably in the next two hours seo is dead google i mode killed seo reddit killed seo seo is gone there's no more search engine optimization none of this stuff matters anymore complete bo baloney people need to understand that yes things change but it's called search engine optimization it's not called google engine optimization it's not just google we're not just talking about blue links we're talking about the process of discovery of information that you didn't have before the internet has not evolved beyond it becoming being a place for discovery people's place of search might vary but it doesn't mean the end of search engine optimization i go to x to find out what to read i might go to facebook to find out what events to go to nearby i go to reddit to find out where i should eat i'll go to linkedin to find out who i should hire and i'm searching on all of these different platforms so the way that we think about search engine optimization needs to change where we're not just thinking about google we're not just thinking about what google's doing all the time folks there is search happening in marketplaces on facebook there is search happening on instagram right now if i'm trying to learn how to improve a golf swing i'm going to instagram i'm going to youtube i'm not even going to google anymore so when people are thinking about search the thing that drives me insane is that they're thinking so singular instead of recognizing that search happens on a lot of different platforms in a lot of different ways absolutely great great point and of course you didn't even really touch on ai chat or smart speakers or or any of these sort of tools that we have these days i mean for me it's usually reddit anytime i need to fix something around the house or work on some hot sauce recipes that the first place i go to so it's the wild world wild world yes but search will search will never die because we are always going to be looking for information exactly to help us leave let a leave a better life alright so if people wanna learn more about you ross if they wanna learn more about distribution dot a or your company where can we send them online yeah so folks can find me at ross dot com distribution dot ai is our software that helps brands repurpose red distribute promote a lot of the things we've been talking about with their content and i also run a content marketing agency called foundation foundation inc dot c but the easiest place for anyone to get connected would linkedin hit the connection let them know that you found me through this podcast and yeah they can find me on all of their favorite channels i'm all over the internet well distributed exactly thanks so much for your time today i really appreciate it thanks for having me rich gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

hubspot helped tumblr solve a huge problem they needed to move faster to produce training content but their marketing team was stuck we're waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in a matter of seconds they impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com i've seen million dollar deals one or lost based on a simple reddit thread imagine that first thing a single discussion on reddit one post from somebody walking down the street decided that they were going to put up in nasty post on social put this up specifically on reddit about a brand it could be a crm tool it could be a software company it could be a multi billion dollar company and this single thread gets the people going it gets lots of comments people are talking executives are hud in a boardroom to discuss a screenshot of something in our s ys admin right they're in an r ms p subreddit and people are making a decision not to buy because of a single thread crazy maybe but this is the reality of marketing in twenty twenty five reddit isn't just memes it's not just hobby obvious it's not just a bunch of weird people in their basement talking about cats and what they did on the weekend or what they dream of doing someday it is a king maker for brands it is a brand slam for some it is a treasure trove of seo and a training ground for ai today my goal is simple i'm going to unpack all of it just like i tried to do back in two thousand and eighteen when i wrote my first book called cracking the reddit code and trust me if you're a marketer or creator you don't wanna miss this boat reddit is skyrocketing not only in the ser a aka the search and results page it is influencing the ll m's left right and center it is influencing your buyers right now folks if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show welcome back folks let's start with a very bold but truly my opinions bold clean reddit is the most important organic marketing platform right now yes i said it and here's why in the past couple of years reddit went from an underdog to an organic traffic powerhouse host as of early twenty twenty five reddit was the second most visited website via google search in the us second only to wikipedia it surpassed youtube and search visibility right i have gone on many stages over the last few months talking about the rise of reddit how red took all of the bottom of funnel traffic from sites like ka and g two and trust radius and more how reddit is starting to influence every decision that we make ranging from but not limited to coffee decisions and tourism decisions and software decisions these aren't just numbers they represent millions of people going to reddit threads from google every single day and for good reason folks over the last few years marketers have ruined it ruin what ross ruin what ruined the internet we as marketers press publish on a bunch of blog posts that were list talking about the best mattresses that you should buy and unfortunately the best mattresses that you should buy were all the ones that we were representing they were all the ones that we had affiliate link partnerships with they were good they weren't actually quality they weren't even helpful but we knew that if we wrote these pieces and we had the right h ones the write h h2 two's and we got a few backlinks from people who had a similar site that we would rank and we made money lots of businesses made money now reddit is drawing six hundred million search visits per month from google think about that six hundred million visits driven by organic search their search visibility is up by thirteen x one thousand three hundred and twenty eight percent in a single year this is no accident this is truly what the people wanted seo didn't want and we can complain all we want seo and marketers can complain reddit is trash right it shouldn't be on the ser pal blah blah blah but guess what you wanna know what people were typing into google all the time they would type in their problem and they would type in reddit next to that word why because people trust people and they wanted to read content from other people that they could trust so what's changed why is reddit suddenly dominating the ser well part of the story is google's own evolution google's algorithms wanting fresh authentic content it goes back to google's licensing deal with reddit back in two thousand and twenty four worth a reported sixty million dollars per year for access directly to the fire hose right google pays for reddit data and almost immediately google started to send a massive amount of traffic to read its way right search results came back with tons of threads seo and their content no longer showing up in comparison to reddit a new tab was introduced called forums filled with reddit threads right but folks this isn't just google this isn't just google i go from platform to platform mail and identifying how often are domains being cited in the l from per complexity to chat t to google ai overview guess what shows up every single time reddit when people started to go to google and they typed in best laptop twenty twenty six reddit best coffee pot twenty twenty six reddit when people started to type in best computer chair reddit they were indicating to google that this is what they wanted and google noticed they shifted because they recognize that not only did users search it they clicked they aid and that's google's ultimate signal so the algorithm adapted the algorithm changed and now we see queries that get forty nine thousand searches every single day earn a ton of traffic directly to reddit right where multiple reddit threads are now ranking in the serve whether you talk about mattresses as you talk about coffee machines you talk about b2b b software and niche products reddit is influencing so many of them today right now reddit ranks for over five point seven million keywords with transactional or commercial intent best crm software top project management tools you name it it's stealing the spotlight and clicks from traditional review sites that built their entire business model on the back of this idea those product review sections on new york times they have lost a lot of traction to reddit in fact i did this analysis of new york times wire cutter and reddit dot com they have five point one million overlapping keywords five point one folks if reddit can challenge the new york times in seo what does it mean for the rest of us it means something very simple reddit is no longer optional it's a must have in your marketing mix if you care about organic growth and you're sleeping on reddit cool cool that's you that's that's on you i wouldn't do it as a marketer ignoring reddit is like ignoring google search a decade ago you're missing out on a significant growth opportunity both on the organic side but the paid side right reddit power comes from authenticity it comes from real talk and it comes from the ability to create content that answers questions that align well with search intent when you realize this it should become clear that google chat ep gemini they all love reddit they do reddit has become foundational to how ai models learn about human conversations and knowledge right but don't take ross word for it i'm just just the person i'm just marketer right how about we take this reddit its own coo gen wong what she had to say about it reddit is now foundational to the training of large language models that's that's a quote directly from business insider google and open ai literally signed deals with reddit to use its content for training its ai right millions of dollars and you can continue to pretend that reddit doesn't matter to your buyers but i promise you your audience is being influenced by reddit content whether they know it or not because when they're asking google a question google might not be telling them obviously that this information is coming from reddit but it's very likely based off the data that reddit is a citation in which that is being influenced right i digress hosted by tony sandra is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professional which shows under thirty minutes i digress helps eliminate complexity complications and confusion in business with frameworks and strategies that will help you unlock scalable and sustainable growth i have listened to some of the episodes that troy has published over the last few years and i've gotta tell you they have some hits they have some bang most recently i was listening to an episode where they talked about the new season of newness and how you can unlock new growth in this new year yes i know what some of you are thinking it's already march it's already april whenever you are listening to it but it is never too late to make twenty twenty four the best year yet listen to i digress wherever you get your podcast podcasts folks here's here's let me put this on a bumper sticker for you the opinions and experiences shared by reddit are directly shaping the responses that ai is giving millions of users and this has huge implications if your brand or product is being discussed on reddit and ai might surface those discussions when they're asked about you or when they're asked about your category for better or worse imagine someone asking chat is product x reliable if there's a reddit thread filled with complaints about products x the ai might reflect that sentiment in its answer conversely if reddit are praising you the ai could carry that positive by forward folks reddit as kind of like an open source knowledge base for ai and unlike a static wikipedia page it's filled with diverse real world perspectives that are being published every single day right it's creating content all the time it's a living breathing thing that yes there's mods but there's a lot of people producing a lot of stories creating a lot of content all the time right and perhaps the most important factor here is that the rise of ai overview the rise of google ai mode there's less clicks i don't know if you've noticed it but there's less complex folks people are getting their answers directly in the search i've been saying for years that google's is becoming a destination well guess what the destination has arrived and in that destination there are answers that you are being red fed that are built directly up of threads that are on reddit what does this mean for you it means you should probably embrace ross what is ross not me not me it's an acronym r o s s the reddit operating system of scale and conveniently i use my name so i had to use it it's built on a few simple pillars research you need to find subreddit where your audience you need to study them you need to understand them you need to tap into tools and technologies that give you a clear insight into how your community is showing up in different subreddit there's four point seven member million members of our entrepreneur there's millions of members of different subreddit all over the world like i think cyber cybersecurity one point two million subscribers right if you are in these niches you want to be in these spaces you go to tools like reddit list gummy search spark toro brand watch etcetera and you try to find where your audience is then you're gonna lurk you're gonna study you're gonna learn about their space their attitude towards marketing their attitude towards you their pain points their complaints who the power users are you wanna understand all of that one of my favorite things is to go into these different subreddit reddit and sort top post by all time because this gives you an insight into the types of content that really resonated with them historically right maybe the top post is a heartfelt personal story or super detailed how to content asset you use this to inform the strategy you deploy in the future step two keyword in content research via a reddit you're gonna go and actually understand what reddit threads are ranking in the search what reddit threads are actually influencing the l you start to dive deep and do an intersection around what your audience wants and where they hang up you start to study the list of common questions topics pain points you get inspiration around the formats of content that they care about and you look at that up upload metric to see what actually has content market fit because that's what you're going to use to go into the second pillar content in this pillar we're creating content that is educational engaging entertaining or empowering and we're doing this in a few different ways it could be text it could be link post it could be images great it could be in your subreddit or it could be in someone else's subreddit but you're creating these pieces and the reason why you do that reverse engineering exercises is because i have validated time and time again that if you take inspiration from one subreddit if you take validation from one community and you understand what content they care about and you give it back to them with a unique spin but additional value additional localization personalization and you make it right for them they resonate i took a post that took off in new york but the top pizza shops and i was like a bet i can take this and put it in my own city with local pizza shops and it will work and it did and you could do that same thing in a different city you could do it in san francisco you can do it in san diego you can do it in a room you can do it in paris you can do it in tim two the same philosophy will work because people are the same the marketers that were on reddit two years ago are the same as the marketers today in the sense that if you created and seen that on reddit they really wanted in debt breakdowns i bet you they still want those in debt breakdowns this is the way that it works folks create content that is genuinely valuable highly tactical and formatted for reddit repurpose it with storytelling make sure that you're not like being too promotional and if you are then you might get ready to be blocked so here's my biggest tip to always go into it with indirect mentions or share it be x completely articulate who you are right so they don't try to say oh you're just trying to sell to us right then it's distribution spread to your story people sleep on reddit ads massive opportunity people sleep on the idea of uploading their own content to their own subreddit massive massive mistake don't do it find ways to engage and distribute your stories if your content is already going viral and reddit then do it more on the paid side that fourth pillar you wanna use retargeting i believe retargeting is a massive underrated opportunity the reddit pixel is a gold man i get really excited about this it's a huge opportunity we're seeing some amazing cost leads on reddit with this you if you can invest in lead gen on reddit especially for people who are on high priority pages on your site i think you'll see some massive wins and the last thing is community folks should you create your own subreddit check if it already exists for some foremost right and then use other subreddit for inspiration around what best practices are like you need to one make sure that it's branded you have to set up rules and guidelines you wanna identify your team whether it's flare for employees or moderators right transparency is key you wanna moderate it actively but fairly you wanna encourage people who follow you to subscribe and engage you wanna encourage your email list to be engaged you wanna encourage people to leave you feedback instead of asking for feedback on one of those review sites ask for feedback on reddit right more likely to rank in syrup anyway host ama promoting externally promoted on your website including in your newsletter are included on your on your email signature right and remember the reddit can provide you with an own channel a distribution channel and an seo amplifier folks i encourage you to start now i encourage you to dive in with some of the strategies that we've talked about today in a couple years when others are finally catching on to the fact that while ready is crucial for marketing you'll be smiling because you didn't just play catch up you were there you were building relationships and content all along reaping the rewards to influence the l of the future and the robot will influence the buyers folks i hope you found value you in this episode share it with one of your friends share it with your team thank you so much for checking out the ross and show and if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe stay hungry and keep playing the long game gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

hubspot helped tumblr solve a huge problem they needed to move faster to produce training content but their marketing team was stuck we're waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in a matter of seconds they impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com ai has quickly become the middle man between your business and your buyers not the salesperson not the homepage not even that top ranking blog post that you wrote back in two thousand twenty four now if i that email campaign that you run not the status update not the people on marketplace folks now more than ever before people are relying on ai whether they know it or not to help them make buying decisions when they go to google and they type in a query they're being met with google ai overview they're being met with ai mode and the answer to their questions is showing up directly in the search engines result page they don't need to go anywhere they land on a search page which is telling them answers giving them information that is specific to the query that they put up this is a entire new way of discovery you used to click on a link scroll through a blog post read the first one okay let's consider it click on an affiliate link go to that website consume that content go back to that other page hit command on your keyboard and then start clicking a bunch of links so you have a bunch of different tabs that you can personally go to and review all of them later on you don't have to do it anymore you can now go to chat gp and have it give you product comparisons in the matter of seconds you can go to claude or gemini and tell it to go and pull the information from forms and reviews you can use reddit ai platform built directly into reddit to get answers you can use tiktok to get ai summaries of the best things to do when you go to a certain thing ai is influencing all of us and many businesses have yet to realize that this shift is massive when it comes to tiktok not a channel that i talk about often i need folks to understand that if you are going to new york and you type in to tiktok the best pizza shops in new york it's scanning and analyzing hundreds of videos from creators on tiktok who talk about the best places to eat in new york and they're listening to their voice they're listening take the transcript and doing account of how often certain places are mentioned and then it's giving you a rec on that but it's not just on tiktok folks we've been recently studying the way in which chat per complexity gemini all these tools are scraping the internet to identify answers for humans and what we are finding is my blowing review sites are showing up list are showing up youtube videos on gemini on ai overview are showing up ready to showing up across multiple platforms ai is scraping and using all of this information to give recommendations that people are actually using to be informed and by whether that information is true or not every single time is not the point the point the point is that ai is shaping attention and attention shapes trust so if you're not showing up in these channels or being represented accurately by ai tools by i hate to say it but you're invisible but that that's kinda real right the same way that if i when i google you if you don't show up you don't exist that philosophy that idea that mantra now carries over into the l now you folks know that on the ross show we don't just talk about things that make everybody feel down and like what was me the internet is bad no no no what we wanna talk about here your solutions so what i wanna share with you are ways in which ai is changing behavior but i also want to give you insights into how you connect let's start by diving into the shifts that are happening in human behavior today first discovery as a concept is no longer centralized it is decentralized for years buyers started every internet experience with google they now are starting with chat they're now starting with tiktok they're starting with reddit it they're starting with all of these different channels i go to chat and i'll take a picture of something and say how do i fix this i no longer need to end up on youtube i go to tiktok and i say what is the best restaurants over here why because i know that people who have taste or using tiktok or instagram i use reddit summaries to better understand what equipment should i buy for my home studio right these are the things that not a lot of people a lot of businesses are realizing about the fragmentation of discovery that is happening around the internet ai is scraping content reviews and mentions across the internet and returning answers back to us that bypass some of the traditional seo and i know i know you're gonna have a guru or somebody on linkedin talk about how ge is just seo how ai optimization is just seo and all of these things but it is not it is not when you realize that every search in discovery doesn't start and end with google someone who is using g is expecting and going to get a very different result in query like response back from the l than somebody is using gemini and this is what a lot of people don't realize right so if you're not present in the ecosystems where some of these ais are actually built upon good luck here's the kicker sometimes sometimes the buyer is going to trust those ai generated results more than your website and i know that's harsh to hear but if i see an the ll response that includes a little reddit icon then i'm more likely to say this probably came from a redditor who i can trust versus your own website that's fishy that's fishy right folks evaluation happens before you even speak to your audience this is the other shift by the time someone fills out a demo and actually jumps on a sales call today they've already asked chat gp they've already asked per complexity in claude to compare you with your competitors they've watched videos breaking down your product they've asked in up questions about problems that your business might have they're asking all of these things they're asking the l to go out and read red g to a random twitter threads figure out is this a business i should do work with they're not asking what do you do they're asking can you do this better than the other people that i've seen the l summarized in three seconds folks buyers are coming in more armed than ever before and i love it i love it because i know that my team does great work so when they show up at my door they're like oh we heard about you through reddit we heard about you through chat heard about you through complexity i'm laughing because i know that they've done their research i know that this is an informed buyer and when that buyer comes knocking i'm ready our team is ready because we know that we can deliver great work which takes me to the final shift the decision criteria is being influenced by ai interpretation of trust what does that mean it means what we traditionally thought of as kind of not necessary an okay thing to do a not required thing to do ai systems are now looking at the number of citations the credibility of an author they're looking at whether or not your content is showing up and being your brand is being mentioned with a solution how consistent is it right how recognizable is this entity on different platforms folks it is no longer just about influencing people it's about influencing machines so ross what do we do with all of this how do you show up how do you stand out how do you earn trust when the buyer is being guided by ai here's how you respond folks the first one is a mental shift a shift from traditional thinking to modern thinking we have to get away from optimizing exclusively for search and thinking that google is the only way in which people search for things and start to recognize that search happens in other places thus we need to be on other places it means we need to have content that is showing up on reddit on youtube on guest blogs on forums a medium on linkedin on all of these different platforms it also should make you think that when you are creating content and producing stories that you should write with authority and always have clarity that you should have real human authors names and bios behind the assets being produced and that when you really start to think about the l m's and you start to think about how you can optimize for the future you might start to think about building a moat around comparison content alternative content content that speaks to the bottom of funnel and then to further elevate your stories includes citation stats and external sources but here's another thing that you should do you should realize that with the shift of buying behavior happening not just through blog posts then maybe you should be creating video content that is rooted in high intent queries that your customers are caring about i digress hosted by tony sandra is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals which shows under thirty minutes i digress helps eliminate complexity complications and confusion in business with frameworks and ideas that will help you unlock scalable and sustainable growth i have listened to some of the episodes that troy has published over the last few years and i've gotta tell you they have some hits they have some bang most recently i was listening to an episode where they talked about the new season of newness and how you can unlock new growth in this new year yes i know what some of you are thinking it's already march it's already april whenever you are listening to it but it is never too late to make twenty twenty four the best year yet listen to i digress wherever you get your podcast maybe instead of trying to rank in google for the top crm with a blog post you create a video asset on youtube talks about the top crm maybe that's the play you also want to ensure that this content that you are producing is repurposed ai doesn't just read text it looks at transcripts it's going through threads it's going through metadata it's looking out pdfs folks repurpose rep package your ideas create once distribute forever the more you're content can live in different ways the bigger your mode as it relates to your story and then the third piece is to align your messaging for the pre sales journey everyone is thinking not everyone a lot more organizations are realizing the importance of the bottom of the funnel content but a lot of people really built to their careers on tofu content creating hundreds of pages of gloss pages look at how much traffic we're getting we're great at our jobs all of this stuff and i'm not here to say it's not valuable i think having information on your website is valuable gives you credibility gives you authority and if it's valuable content to the market then the market tell you that and it will respond positively to it but your product pages your feature explain your your bottom of funnel content those stories u from customers those things you want to be compelling clear and a aligned case studies all of it right and then from there you have to remember that even amidst the rise of ai even amidst ai becoming so at the forefront of work we do as marketers day after day people still want to connect with people your edge is still in being a human ai can't ask the sharp follow up questions ai can't follow up in the dms with a with a nice voice note they can't share a real success story that is directly exactly what this person is talking with problem that they had they can't offer the emotional reassurance they can't adapt to the nuance of tone or timing they can't do these things that's where you win that's your human advantage to double down on empathy clarity and listening folks this isn't just advice for marketers i need to really go deep on this for a second because i think it's it's advice that i need everyone to hear and even if it's just this moment tell someone who you know tell a client a friend appear a colleague an employee or a teammate a business partner your spouse to hear these words amidst the rise of ai getting really really good to a point where ai can do things better than most can do where it can write better than many it can create scripts better than many it can optimize things better than many it can do a lot of things pretty good your key advantage is actually in being human in listening in knowing the nuances of human communication and understanding the psychology of humans and understanding how to build a relationship with the human and being able to articulate yourself clearly to a human and being able to hear feedback and not react in a way that isn't is a human trait but to be able to manage it in a way of excellence in grace let's be honest folks ai has changed how humans behave and it's going to continue the question is how have you changed based off of the shifts what worked two years ago might not work today you're not just marketing the buyers you're not just working with peers and colleagues who have the same tools that they used to you're not selling to people who had the same tools that they used to you're marketing to the system and the tools that shaped what these buyers see the game is no longer about ranking the game is about showing up in the data so built trust show up where the machines are listening and create confident content because at the end of the day your authority and your story is what's going to influence both people and platforms folks if you want to play the long game you need to shift your approach to not playing the games of two thousand and twenty you need to play the game that is going to set you your organization and your team up to really influence the next wave of buyers by doing things today thank you so much for listening to the ross simmons show if this episode helped you see the new buyer journey a little bit more clearly send it to a teammate a sales lead your coo ceo whoever because in today's day and age we all need to recognize that ai has influenced the way that buyers are buying and if we don't ship the way in which we're showing up and we stay invisible hustle with hustle with business

hubspot helped tumblr solve a huge problem they needed to move fast to produce training content but their marketing team was stuck we're waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in a matter of seconds they impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com craig thrilled to have you on i wanna start with the simple question and that is what to led you down the path of leadership like how did you make the decision that leadership was going to be something that you wanted to eventually jump into and even launch grants ass hr solutions yeah so thanks for having me ross i'm excited to to chat with you today i i think it's a combination of a couple things i've got a background of psychology i've always been interested in sort of how people tick from an education point of view and also at work and that combined with sort of my my career in hr i've just always been i was fascinated with what makes strong teams what makes good leaders like you know if had some personal experiences along the way they wanted me to you know have an impact in this in this area and ultimately you know your question about grand saas so looking for something looking to build something to fill a gap that wasn't there market in terms of in terms of you know how leaders are developed in you know in really practical and relevant ways when you think of leaders like talk me through a bit of the the framework that you would have or the mental that you have when you're thinking about like what goes into a great leader like what does that what is what does that look like inside of an organization yeah i i think that it's a good question i i i love letting the error out of this discussion so you know leadership is you know for the leadership has the change and it is changing but you know there's these traditional traditional models the leadership is about command and control about being smartest person the room about having all the answers and you know the the the the best leaders i've had and the best leaders i see out there today are relatable they create followers because they can connect with people because you know they aren't afraid to say they don't know something or ask for help and i think that's the that that's the key right there is is is you know creating trust through vulnerability if people can't relate to you they're not gonna follow you so one of the one of the early things i say to people is you know i i know it's counterintuitive but you have to let go of these ideas that your role is to be perfect or have all the answers or you know to be the smartest person in the room as said tell me more about that like when you say be vulnerable and you say like you don't have to be perfect to a lot of folks who are in a leadership position kind of go into the day to day having an expectation that i need to be the person everyone looks up to how do you approach those folks who for the last decade have been taught very differently yeah i i think he answer your own question there somewhere like i think that the the person that people look up to you know people look up to and follow people that they relate to that they see themselves in that they want to emulate that they wanna be like people don't follow people that they can't connect with right so it's it's just sort of a it's the way it's always been and it's it's very it's very counterintuitive that you know the way to effective leadership is letting that stuff go you have to check your ego you have to you have to you have to be okay making mistakes and telling people shortcomings are that way they can you know people people love to help people so if you tell your team you know these are my limitations gonna need your help in this area rather rather than trying to be everything to everyone people will line up to help you out to be that person that has that skill set that that helps you personally so you know it's it's the more you give it away the more you get back when you first became a leader so to speak like what were some of the things that stood at stand out looking back as things you wish you knew now that you didn't know when you first got started yeah so you know when i first got into you know corporate life as a leader probably almost twenty five years ago i think the idea then was you need to be good at everything you know you you you know like i'm saying you know you need to have no holes in your in your game you need to be inspirational but you also need to be data driven you need to be highly relationship skilled but you also need to be credible with details and spreadsheets and these are often skill sets you see in different types of people so i think you know when i started out i i spent a lot of energy trying to be good at things that i'm just naturally not good at right instead of instead of really digging into what my gifts are and really running with that and and you know i if i would've have if i would've have known that lesson earlier about you know the the key is really surrounding myself with people to complement my gaps yep then you know would have been an easier rope perhaps a lot of the folks who listened to the ross show are folks who are founding their own company they've started to generate traction they're starting to build out their first senior leadership team they've got customers they may have made a few hires before but they need to hire people who can manage other people yeah how would you approach those types of founders who have no experience actually managing people they've been builders their whole lives they've been developers their whole life building tech companies etcetera what's what advice would you give them how would you approach them and support them in getting their leadership teams kinda of developed into and thought through yeah interesting so i see this a lot when i'm coaching or working with entrepreneurs entrepreneurs tend to be and i don't wanna over generalize but you know there's certain attributes you think of when you think of entrepreneurs you think of you know very comfortable with risk you think of fast moving you think of you know gen generating ideas you think of you know old and confident and these are all great qualities that lend themselves to building organizations and and you know moving things quickly but you need to surround yourself with all different types of people to be successful you surround yourself with you know clones of yourself with that with those attributes you're gonna have problems you also need to surround yourself with people that that you know are the are the brakes to your gas mh that that can you know tell you when they disagree with you that can look at things more critically than you are because you're moving so quickly and and taking risk so quickly and you not only need to surround yourself with these complimentary perspectives and skill sets you need to be you need to create the environment where people are comfortable bringing you to you to give you their their ideas right i i often see in entrepreneurs the the the classic thing i see in entrepreneurs is a frustration with people that just don't get it they're just like they're just like you know how how did it not occur to you that that needs to be done right and and and the reality is that's why you have the position that you do that's why you owe own the company that's why you're driving the company if everyone everyone's like you there would be no one actually do the work so sometimes it's a matter of you know surround yourself with the right people with complimentary skill sets not just the people that remind you of yourself mh and and then understand that that you know these people you need to slow down sometimes and get on their level and really over communicate expectations right do you have any frameworks or ideas that you think like someone listening to this if they're about to start bringing in those first few managers that they should be thinking about or methods that they should be considering yeah so i so you know there's some biases isn't in hiring right so we we we are naturally you know as a human species we naturally like what reminds us of ourselves right so if i see someone that acts like me looks like me talks like me has the same values i'm going to assume they're they're they're great if i see if i see someone that does not i don't see myself in them i'm gonna assume they're deficient so someone who someone who's a fast moving risk taking entrepreneur might get easily frustrated with someone who is cautious slower moving more pessimistic you know detailed focus and thorough they're gonna view those people as holding them back but the reality is the they you need that person at the table yeah to keep the training for coming off the track so my you know i use a tool called disc i use this with a lot of organizations and this is a a behavioral assessment that really helps leaders understand how they are wired and how they are perceived and how they perceive others and it also helps their team understand okay this is where my leaders coming from it really helps to remove misconceptions around you know some of these biases that we have around other personality types and how they show up at the table it really helps you bring in those complimentary skill sets rather you know like right when you think about hr you think about leadership it's oftentimes seen in many organizations it's kind of like a support it's like there but it doesn't really drive real meaningful business performance how do you think about that where leaders need to think more strategically about hr and leadership development how do you go per that yeah i i it's that's an that's you you you you hit on a on an age old problem there hr is still in a lot of cases fighting for a seat at the table mh but you know i think the the research and the data is out there that you know the the most successful companies are the companies with the most strategic hr that are treating their their their their their people as you know not a not a commodity but you know as as valuable pieces of their success so right you know i i think the data is out there for any company that wants to to to to look at that like you know the the degree in which your people are inspired yeah and motivated is the degree to which your customers are inspired and motivate right right you've led some big teams over the course of like your career in terms of like growing teams and overseeing a lot of human like people how do you think about the the org and the people who are working in some of those larger organizations like if somebody listening to this and they're in a larger organization and they're trying to kind of have that people transformation where it goes from being a supporting function to a business performance oriented function what would be your suggestions to them around how they approach it bring the data so you know it's like if you need to bring the roi so if you're if you're if you're speaking about you know an hr function is trying to repurpose itself is more strategic unless you know administrative or reactive and that's where the that's where the effectiveness is that's where you know that's where the value in hr is is a strategic business partner then you need to show up with you know the the the data and you need to show you know how by investing in your people and your people programs you can impact things like absentee and local productivity and you know sick rates and and so on and so forth the the you know the the numbers are really clear about engaged workplaces and productivity so if the company willing to invest in that they'll see the results are there tools that organizations should be investing in to track these that you're familiar with like do you know anything in particular that stands out as the this is the way to get that data from your work yeah i don't think there's any silver bullet but i think you can you know there there's certain patterns in any organization like i said absentee your sick date you know like sick days or just as much about not wanting to go into work as they are about being actually sick quite often right right or it's the work environment is actually making them sick so mh enjoy so you can you you can look at you know two different even can even look at different you can look at different business units within their organization will have completely different sick rates depending on you know leadership and and the health of the culture so right you can look at things like that but you know really the the the best info is out of anonymous surveys like employee engagement surveys where you can you know ask questions that really get to the root of how the employees are feeling right and then that's all all other process but you know you can take that data yeah and then you know work with a representative sample within the company to really dis instill that down in meaningful next steps and and chip away a year over year right when you're working with an order like how what does the first phase look like to quickly like if they're bringing in grand sas and they're like we need to elevate the way that we're thinking about leadership within our organization what's that starting point look like yeah good question but i think that depends on the org so you know i'm working with i'm working with a firm now which is a an engineering firm and as you might expect in an engineering firm you have a lot of critical thinkers that are you know detailed focused and doers and maybe lower on the relationship side than mh some other organizations that might have you know you know people that are more you know less technical and more relationship base so for them the starting point is why is this where's is the value in this right so so you know they're you know to some extent their board is dragging them kicking and screaming into kind of investing in their leadership right and the first step for them is understanding what's at stake and what the opportunity is for for other organizations that understand the transformative power of of you know really quality leadership that is aligned on values and aligned on what good leadership good leadership looks like it's it's easy well you know just go in and calibrate them get them to share their own stories and to give them some real key fundamental habits of effective leadership in twenty twenty five right that makes sense and when it comes to those habits like what does that what are some of the best habits that you're seeing resonate with the workforce today as far as leadership goes i think you know today leadership is very different than it was twenty years ago you know even seven years ago before the pandemic right so i think leaders today are managing you know five generations in the workplace for the first time right and so there's a lot of possible ways that can come off the rails when we're mis str the behaviors of of other generations and labeling them you know labeling them taking a lazy way out instead of really understanding what's you know what's behind their behaviors and needs right so you know so managing multiple generations under one roof you know the impact of mental health and wellness and you know the role of a leader to know where those resources are to support to get people you know pointing in the right direction you know that's something that is relatively new and it's that scary for a lot of people coming into leadership because they think they have to be a counselor but you really don't just have to know how to how deploy people in the right direction and then you know i would say the third thing top of mind would be just sort of adaptability like you know you you're you know you need to have high self awareness today right need to understand the needs of your of your people you need to be able to you need to be able to inspire them to follow you because you know gone are the days where people are loyal to the company now the company has to be loyal the employed so right need to find you need to find a way to to be flexible adaptable and relatable to your to your people when it comes to building that one to one connection in that deeper relationship where your people are inspired by you yeah what are some things that a leader should know like a lot of people are gonna hear you say that and say okay do i have to give a inspirational talk every week like but how i'm not a maybe they're an introvert but they're a leader like what would you advise that person when they hear you say you need to be inspiring yeah they're not like i can't do a public topic like i can't do that like what would be your yeah some of my some of the best leaders i know are introverts no no question like good leadership is not about inter version extra it's not about being allowed its voice it's not being sound about your delivery to grab a great speech it's about how you connect with people and that's not an version version thing that's a that's an that's a that's a matter of authenticity right and vulnerability you know an appreciation for the power of relationships mh you know at the end of the day business relationships for ross us you know that yep is well as anybody and if not better though so you know how you connect with people is doesn't have to do with version ex version has to do with your vulnerability then this is where trust comes from you know how do you form trust you don't you're not vulnerable after you trust someone you're vulnerable in order to create trust with them so you're if you want to create followers if you want to inspire your team you just need to be real with them they need to see themselves reflected in you they need to know that you have their interest at hard they need to know that you know you're you're going to go to the map for them when when they need an advocate you know that you know they need to feel that you have their their their their career in mind and that you're willing to stretch them and that you know they that they can trust you at the end of the day craig one of the things you shared with me during a a lunch and learn session with a bunch of other entrepreneurs was a few scripts like you mentioned a few things that you can say as a leader to your team and make them kind of under make them feel appreciated but also like get out of them that you remove that what's the phrase the the shining arm mirror kind of thing as a leader where you're able to say a few things and make them feel like okay i could open up this individual do you happen to remember what i'm talking about like i remember writing down some notes i i think you're talking about what i called the magic phrase okay yes tell many more about the magic phrase i got that from greg pop of it she was a former coach of the san antonio for big basketball fan and yeah basketball they shaped a lot of my leadership journey and i still draw i still make a lot of parallels between you know highly effective sports teams and highly effective business teams but the magic phrase you know that the pop which was para phrase as is you know when when when giving feedback to someone when trying to course correct someone you often lose them and we often get lost when we're being corrected or or coach because you know the first thing that goes to your mind is oh i've let this person down or gotta find a way to convince some that they're wrong or i've got you get defensive you get you know you get put on your heels and you don't really hear the message and and and the magic phrase go something like this i'm giving you this feedback because around here we have high standards and i believe you can reach them and and and what that phrase does is satisfies some needs that the person has in the moment they need to feel connected to their leader right right they need to know they're not getting this feedback because the leader is enjoying being punitive so the leader says you know i'm giving you this feedback because i believe in you right right and around here we have high standards so that that part tells them that this is no ordinary team we do things differently we're you know we're not just pho it in around here we right we hold ourselves to a higher standard mh and you know that's gonna be that's hard to attain but i believe you can get there right and this is part of how we get you there is this tough conversation so so you know as long as a person feels at the end of the day that the feedback they've been given is direct like encrypt specific but also that you know there's a sense of and i believe you can get there and i've got your back and i'm behind you on this right and so you know you're it's a difference between coming alongside of someone right and and standing in front of someone so you can get you get get around get beside your your your employee when giving that advice i love it what's your thoughts on the ways to give feedback like what do you believe in the analogy that you should only give feedback in private never in public like what's your thoughts on the delivery of the feedback itself yeah i i think that i think that that old praise criticized privately and praise publicly i like that yeah although you know different people are have different comfort levels with with public praise some people prefer you know some some people prefer you know really a really sincere handshake and right and specifically what they did right that's being praise and some people want the take or tape parade in front of the whole group brandy we we we know who these people are right so i think there's some truth in that like the the but when you take someone aside and and criticize them you know date like i said it starts with it starts with that person's perception of why am i here am i here because my my leader kinda delight and pointing of the things that i do wrong or am here because i've got you know i've a trusting relationship with this person they see my potential they want me to become the best version myself and this is one more area where they're helping me improve right so it starts it starts with the relationship yep that's fair talk about that relationship piece a it further like how does a leader like do you act there's a lot of conversation happening around vulnerability they're building trust with your your team how do how does a leader open up to their team like do you think that lines are blurring between private personal life and work life and you should talk about what you're doing on the weekend you should share that stuff or is it really a business oriented to only conversations with your team like what ships are you seeing there yeah so it's you know what came to mind and you mentioned that is this sort of pushback against talking about work as a family right and and i used to i used to kind of protect that and say no i believe in i believe in the work family i believe that you know we can all relate his family i believe that you have you know really want the best to reach each other like a family but then i you know i read something that kinda turned my thinking around with about it's like you know you don't fire your family members and right this is right true true so so the analogy that i like better is work is a sports team right right and sports teams can share in incredible success with each other and they can have incredible highs they're also gonna have lowe's you're you know you you can win a championship but you can also you know get your butt beaten and really badly on the court and but you know what makes a good team you know is is clear expectations and everyone you know moving towards a common goal and and i think this i think in sports these things working in in in business as well to use another basketball comparison like i grew up in the nineties so as a big chicago bulls fan the dennis rodman scott pip michael jordan show all of those guys you look at that team and you see dennis and dennis is like that outlier he's a a wild child if you will yeah in some organizations you have a rodman how would you advise a leader be a team of high performers but there's a robin on the team who's doing things a little bit off they're a little bit entrepreneurial they're doing things that the aren't supposed to they're breaking policies but they're winning and they're doing a good job how would you advise a modern leader to approach that so in in that particular instance let me speak to that specifically and then we yeah then let me generalize that but and that specific you you must have seen the last dance which i did to yeah was and you get to see in the mind of phil jackson a little bit and you get to see that dennis rodman was not you know not this flamboyant rebellious character so much in detroit as as when he left and and get into spur and then get into the bulls and this goes back to what i'm saying earlier about you know coming alongside your employee mh i'm like rather than rather than opposing him right bill jackson you know like i there's a there's was a part where said look i just need to go to vegas for a couple days don't ask any questions yes i yes that was disruptive right yes that was problematic but you know they had a discussion about it at the end of the day phil jackson recognize recognized that this guy has got a very unique skill set that no one else has right but it's gonna it's gonna come with some distraction mh so you know it wasn't until rodman felt part of the team like he felt appreciated he felt he felt that the other guys you know saw him for who he truly was that he led his guard down and he felt that he could be himself in chicago and that's you know part of their part of their championship run and so you know i think it goes back to what i said earlier about you know if if you're the type of leader who is command and control and trying to make a bunch of you know if if you have a hard time del and you you know and you're and you're trying to make a bunch of many use out there right right you're gonna have really hard go you have to understand the unique attributes of your employees even if you don't look like you or sound like you or or are good at things that you're not gonna at you need to find a way and this is where you know leadership today is is more complex mh but you need to find a way to assemble your team right with various gifts because if you have you know eight of the same go back to i'm going back to basketball yeah you have eight point cards you're you're going nowhere if you have eight centers you're going nowhere you need you need a group of people you need one guy that just or girl that just skins their knees diving for loose balls so you need one person who loves the rebound and one person that likes to pass you don't need eight people that score thirty points tonight i like michael jordan you need need supporting supporting cast that all know their roles and feel valued and seen for their roles i love it when you're advising organizations and executives that might be a little bit more on the rational side and less on the e q side like their iq oriented that kind of the an audience so to speak what is the biggest mindset shift that you typically see that you need to help shift to help them be successful in leading leadership culture and beyond yeah i think in general you know i think in general people think that the way they want to be treated and the things that they value are the things that or people want and the way they want to be treated mh so and so this goes back to the golden rule treat others as you wanna be treated you know well maybe there's maybe there's an asterisk beside that right treat treat people the way they want to be treated right right so if going into an organization that is and and the and the and the whole and and so i've already spoken to the technical organization let me let me let me flip that for a second and go to a a sales based organization right and and and the executive the executive table is filled with inspirational greg areas confident outspoken right people that move a mile a minute yep and they are frustrating their technical people because they need more detail more struck sure they need to know the specifics about what success looks like they're not good with just your inspiration so you you you you need you know for for any team for any executive that is sort of homogeneous you need to you need to understand and value the the the different perspectives different needs different psychological and motivational needs of your your team how do you find that is that the disc piece that well yeah i use i use disc so you know disc disc is sort of a a simpler much stickier version of myers briggs and and what what it does is break people into a few quadrant and yes it over generalize it but it it it for sure it always results of people seeing people in different light and explain the behaviors that frustrate through the lens of psychological needs and natural behaviors not that's you know it's not a a a a will thing right that makes complete sense what are some of the most common patterns that you would see in like a high performance team versus ones that are struggling like is there anything that stands out that you see across the board and the high performance folks versus those who are struggling to get by yeah it like so in high performance teams you see lots of trust you see a high collaboration you see vulnerability you see language ross like matt i really screwed that one up right you hey ross can you give me a handle something i'm i you know you're better at this than i am mh i need your help here ross you know not really good at this right so you know you you see language that puts each other first and you know puts a team first and people love to help each other like you know when when i you know when when you say hey can you can you do me a favor people generally like yeah i'd love to help you out if you're if you're stuck right so yeah people you know on high performing teams you see high trash you see collaboration you see you see what what i call belong in cues so you see like lots of eye contact you see high fives you see laughter right you see you see close proximity when it's an environment where people are working shoulder shoulder and you see creative and this isn't an all fluff can also see yeah creative ab as a friend of mine calls it which is like you know constructive constructive conflict right so mh and if i trust you i can disagree with you and we're gonna get to the we're gonna get to the right solution yeah when we when we take our egos out of it right it's not about be trying to manipulate you into my side or vice versa so you know you you see healthy conflict right that's on the on the on the low performing teams you know there's a i i coach basketball and there's a there's an expression that a quiet gym is a losing gym so if your practice has no you know if the players aren't and there's another one is saying you know this applies a basketball in business i hate to draw too many parallels but you know they say on on on on average teams the coach leads mh on good teams you know the coach and the players lead right on extraordinary teams the players lead right so if if your gym is quiet if your workplace is quiet people are afraid to bring their ideas forward for fear of criticism being wrong in public you're gonna have problems you're because you're s innovation because you're not trusting your people to bring forward their ideas right so yeah poor poorer cultures look like low trust command and control they have cultures of of fear and blame yeah and ironically ross it might look it might not look negative might be very polite on the on the surface you have to dig at it because right people learn how to adapt and and hide that dysfunction yeah but you know great teams have high trust and and low blame right more and better you know individual accountability right how does the matter who might be listening to this and say i want all of that like what's their first step to get there like is there anything that they should be considering besides just reaching out to grand ass and getting started in addition to that like what's something that they should be thinking about immediately as ways to fix what might be broken yeah so you know great great leadership starts with knowledge of self right so you you you know you have to you have to know yourself before you can be a great leader in terms of knowing only what your strengths are about what your patients are so you know and you have to you have you have the courage to call bullshit on yourself you have to be real with yourself and you have you know you know you have to be able to tell yourself a thing you've been avoiding in and right working on the thing that you don't want want to hear but after that you know it's about you know understanding i think the the the habits of highly effective teams and and yeah you know creating those good relationships and connecting me with each individual to you know start start building a culture where people feel part of something where they're connected where they have a a shared and common vision that they're working towards but i would say to any eater who's starting out you know and and the other thing i would say is that when you talk about organizations and employee experience you you're talking about the individual leader you're not talking about the company right you know employ employee experience made or broken at the individual leader and i've worked for companies with a hundred and thirty operations and in a hundred and thirty stores in a retail environment and in one store they would say this is the worst place to work i've ever been i wouldn't recommend this to my worst me right in another store they would say this is fantastic you know i'm telling all my friends that come here the difference is in the company the difference in the individual leader right so you know the your power is a leader to shave culture is enormous yeah no that's great the remote side of things like some of the folks listen to this they run a remote organization so they don't have the the close proximity where they can be shoulder to shoulder with their colleagues do you have advice for how folks can manage their teams effectively in a remote world hey i'm just i'm having some connection issues maybe we should turn the video off alright let's do it you still wearing okay i am can you hear me it's just lagging a bit on me ross sorry yeah i can hear you yeah okay let's there we go okay is it audio good audio is good could you hear my question or want me to go at it again try it again okay so one of the big shifts that has happened recently is the rise of remote work a lot of the folks who listening to this might be leaders in a remote work what advice would you give to them around building trust when they can't have that proximity shoulder to shoulder working with their colleagues and peers yeah you know you know this is a a a a very relevant and controversial subject and it's still on unfolding each you know i think you know if you're building trust with people remotely it starts with managing to deliverables and not to screen time right so i think i think i think you have to make the most of the time that you're in person if you have the ability and luxury to get together you have to be intentional about how you bring your your teams together and when you're in person how you make the most of that so that you're charging the batteries of that connective tissue you know so that when people go back and they're separated you've built up some of that that that trust and you know relationship goodwill they can only be a built in person it's it's extremely hard to build you know over a screen but you know what when you're managing remote team like i said you need to manage the outcomes and not make people feel because people you know people are going to feel it's very easier for people to feel the lack of trust if you're let if you're letting on in any way that you know if you're of this mindset that if i can't see you i can't trust you people are very sensitive to that so make them feel you trust them manage the outcomes not to screen time and just you know over communicate your purpose and your expectations i think these are some some some good keys you know give give the give the peep give the people you the the the watch but not the how but them figure it out and you know just stay connected as much as you can i love that is there any situation that you have come across that you would say like this approach completely elevated transformed a company's culture of performance and took it to the next level was there is there any examples that you could share around an org that you worked with or that you are a part of that you really seen a massive shift with a simple or complex solution yeah i worked for a a a billion dollar retailer i was the head of hr and came into that you you know my my career has been built on being a bit of a disrupt coming into organizations and and rebooting hr and and culture and so i came in there in the culture was was you know very stale and you know corporate or head office or whatever you wanna call it had a terrible reputation a terrible you know just was not seen in any way to be helpful or partnering or supportive and was seen if anything as you know as a stumbling block for the operations to get their stuff done right and so the relationship was broken and then you know because of that the operations you know some two thousand people you know felt that management was out of touch with them and they didn't feel supported and they didn't feel they had the tools that they needed it and so my my first thing was to reboot and re brand hr to a strategic business partner put in a business partner model rather than you know that kind of stale you know reactive transact you know policy administrator that you see and in in know companies that are are doing it poorly and so the first thing i did was send my team of thirty out into the operations into the field into these hundred and twenty stores or so a hundred thirty stores to just get out there and start making relationships and understanding the reality of a day in the life of and you know asking questions and finding out how hr could better partner with them to solve their their day to day problems and you know starting to build back the the the the bridge of of corporate and so and then other corporate functions followed suit it and marketing all started of doing the same thing and then you know eventually corporate was re rebranded as you know an operational support and and you know they and the operations were the customers of of corporate not the other way around and i think in the end of the day you know along with some really good empowerment of of branch leadership and kind of re tooling how what the expectations were of them and moving from management to leadership i've you know at the of the day we saw a huge uptick in employee engagement we saw turnover rates and absentee isn't diminished so we you know we we definitely saw some really good fruit out of that initiative of flipping the the corporate model upside down i love it that's that's awesome if you were to give advice around all of your years of experience into leadership to a leader who is new into the world of leading people what would be that advice i would you know great question i wish someone would have asked me someone told given me this advice i i would said you know be trust yourself be yourself mh you know you resist the urge to try to be everything to everyone right you know i think the most powerful thing a new leader can say to their team is i don't know what what do you think what's your recommendation and you know that shows the team a few really key things one that they're comfortable admitting if they don't know something but also that the leader's looking for input and looking for their engagement and their ideas so you know i would say as i said the beginning of this podcast you know leadership is about in twenty twenty five letting the era out of the idea that you have to be you know perfect and loud and you know this this big bold strong visionary doesn't have to be that way you just have to understand how to how to relate to your teams how to build trust through vulnerability and how to you know how to point the way forward so for for a new leader i would say you know trust yourself don't be afraid to be vulnerable make mistakes create the environment with your team where they can make mistakes because that's where you learn to move things forward and be real and be approachable i love it craig i'm gonna end it with that that was a great wrap up if folks wanna learn more about you grand sas etcetera where should they go to find you i you can find me at grand sas h hr dot com or email would be c samsung at grand ass h hr yeah awesome thanks so much greg really appreciate it enjoy the rest of your day and we'll be talking for us yeah great talking with you my friend thank you gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers and here's the perfect example mo college need to reach new students with fresh and engaging content but with a massive nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took like thirty minutes to actually publish breeze hubspot collection of ai tools helped them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty site than percent more time on their site ready for the impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com so you want big results you wanna hit your targets you wanna hit your goals as you wanna blow your revenue out of the water you wanna close that first climb you wanna get straight ace you want to finally beat your personal best at a marathon at lifting whatever it might be you wanna do something that you've never done before well i gotta i gotta break it down for you you gotta stop expecting these things these big ambitions to come from balance a perfect calendar perfect conditions growth it's rarely peaceful progress especially when you're striving to do something that has never been done before by you or even anyone you know or it's rarely achieved by people you know you wanna do something in the one percent like one percent of people do this it's less likely that that's gonna be comfortable sometimes it looks like late nights sometimes it's getting on a flight sometimes it's missing a bedtime story sometimes it's being back to back with calls with meetings with deals with decisions with cities with stages that's the price that's the path and as much as the guru wanna tell you that you should always strive for balance you have to realize or at least i realize i've come to terms with it that balance is not what we should strive for in this episode i wanna take you behind the scenes not just into my schedule but how i'm navigating it how i'm managing two companies parenting speaking around the world and still staying grounded amidst at all you see it's not about having it all it's about knowing what matters in designing your life to reflect that and having the the grace to say to yourself you know i might have to say no to this so i can say yes to that i might have to take a step back on this so i can do that if you're building something meaningful if you have a goal and ambition then i hope this episode resonates with you because like you right now i'm navigating a bit of chaos and i have to choose to show up and if you're trying to go through a process where you're thinking about how you can scale your impact without really losing yourself in the process then i hope that this episode is something that you benefit from if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show i wanna take you inside the next few months of my life first off school is back kids are gonna go back to school and i've made a promise to myself that i don't miss the first day of school so i had an opportunity an opportunity showed up in my inbox and it said we're ross we'd love for you to come to this event we'd love for you to do all of these fun things in addition to the event we want you to be there and it was an awesome offer so i was down i was ready to go but then i looked at the time i looked at the fact that it was a long flight like pretty much a day out of my my life completely just for travel time both ways and then i realized i was going to be on the ground at this event for like a day and a half maybe not a lot of time grind if you will to be able to get back for school the next day and i said no i said i can't do this i wanted to do it i really wanted to do it but i didn't wanna break my own personal values is that i'm always going to be there for the first day of school all that said you passed fast forward the next few months i'm gonna be in amsterdam i'm gonna be in san santiago diego new york nashville ontario a couple times i got two companies a few speaking gigs a nomination for an award so maybe some definite some deals some prospects a whole bunch of stuff right i've got a few weekends away with the fam but the wife it's exciting and it's a lot and arguably it's overwhelming it's not just my calendar though this is a commitment this is what i signed up for and in this episode i wanna talk about how if you sign up for playing the game the long game then you might have to make a few sacrifices along the way to achieve your goals here's how i've learned not to balance anything because that's not what i strive for i strive to integrate everything together and make that my ultimate delta so let's dive in to the cost of saying yes every yes is a no to something else if i say yes to a keynote i say yes to a webinar i'm saying no to something else if i say yes to an event and no to having the ability and capacity to coach them in a sport then that's the decision that i've made if i say yes to a panel and i say no to being able to show up for the first day of school then that again is the decision that i have made but similarly if i say yes to showing up for drop off to showing up for pickup whatever it might be then on the flip side of that i have to say no to meetings i have to reject a meeting one of the things that i have said no to is hey ross can we jump on a quick call this week hey ross can we jump on a quick call i wish i could say yes to every call i wish i could talk to everybody who wants to talk to me but the reality is i have to constantly be doing an assessment of the real price of my time and the cost to go into a conversation that i don't even know what the agenda is if i don't know what your agenda is how am i going to have my energy right to to show up for you i need to have some context on why we're having this discussion right this is the price this is the price and i want to be honest about it but i have to always be cognizant of how i'm spending my time i have to be cognizant about saying alright i need to block time in my calendar for anniversaries i need to block off time in my calendar for date nights i have to block off time my calendar to make time for golfing with my friends i need to make time in my calendar to do things that are aligned with where i wanna go but i also wanna tell you like this is a part of the game but i also think it's absolutely worth it i think all of us should be okay and encouraged and field empowered to choose our yes with intention and own the consequences that come to them come with them right i said yes at a very young age to working after hours while i had my nine to five because i wanted to be great in my job because i wanted to excel i wanted to be the best i wanted to be be one person within that organization not foundation this is when i was just getting started at another agency that i used to work at i wanted to be the best social media strategist that walked in and out of those doors so i was willing to learn after hours i was willing to study after hours i was willing to spend my money my time to invest in myself to become great i was willing to say no to go into the club so i could instead spend more time watching videos and learning and understanding the art in science of marketing i think you have to own that you need to own it and embrace it because i do feel like this can still lead to peace this can still lead to fulfillment i'm a very happy person i love my life right but i've built a framework in a mental model in my mind that allows me to not spiral like i see so many marketers do so many marketers so many entrepreneurs so many builders are are spiraling with guilt and burnout because they don't feel like the trade offs are appropriate and for me i embrace a simple mindset of yes there's a cost to everything but you have to understand whether or not that cost is worth what you were trying to get out of it and i shifted my mindset from one around scarcity where i don't have time i don't don't have the ability or this is too much to a place of gratitude you see i can remember when i was just getting started of a foundation and someone would might mean to an event and in my heart i felt like this is amazing the industry wants me to speak but in my brain i was thinking how in the world am i going to spend four hundred dollars for a hotel night am i gonna spend two hundred dollars for a hotel night i have to pay for my own flight how is this going to work i'm on i have to pay that extra day to be at this event oh the pressure was real i had to close deals because it felt risky i remember eating i still kinda do this i still do this but i remember eating at the cheapest restaurant i could the cheapest pizza shops that i could just so i could stay on the road long enough and like you know what they say old habits old habits diet this is one of those habits like i i still eat i try to eat healthy but i try to eat healthy cheaply right like i'm like alright if i see a burrito spot if i see a subway or some that i can get a cheap sub i'm going for it right those are real things but i also can remember and i think back to my early days and i think of some of my some of my friends some of the people who i grew up with who literally haven't even had the chance the privilege to even reach this age in life because they were killed through gun violence they were in bad circumstances they never had the opportunities that i did they didn't have the upbringing the parents to to guide them and and mold them as i did or they just got into a a bad situation right and there's a lot of them and i think about them all the time and that gives me the ability to always have gratitude and perspective on like this is an opportunity that none of them ever had they never will have i've got kids they never had them i've been able to see my kids grow up they'll never have that opportunity i'm so grateful for the opportunity to try to be a great dad to try to have a global impact to try to be a great entrepreneur to try to build my health my wealth my my perspective is forever influenced by seeing so many lives cut short and it gives me urgency every day oftentimes i i was on a call just this week when with this person who is advising one of the companies that i'm invested in and she was like you're always on linkedin you're always creating content like how do you how do you always show up like what are you doing that allows you to always do that and i'm like i'm not where i wanna be like it's a it's such a difficult question for me to answer because i have never operated in this world where i looked at linkedin and thought oh this is such a hard thing to create content and press publish like no it's just like i'm not where i wanna be and i have to do these things to get there so i'm gonna do them alright so many people would wish that they had the ability to create content that people cared about what are we talking about how is this a a difficult thing let's just do it because we have the ability to do it right the fact that i get to do this is amazing the chaos that i get to overcome is amazing the fact that i can feel tired after working after thinking after strat that's exciting right it's cool that i have the ability to do these things this life this pace it's not a burden is a gift and for me that perspective gives me the ability to easily keep going now i i talked about integration not balanced and some people are already triggered because i said that so let me talk to you about why i believe that is true i think tactically tactically a striving for balance is a broken concept it's a one way street to burnout because you are burning your yourself phone trying to find this perfect balance and that's what makes us feel like we're falling short we're like oh i don't have balance in my life i need to be off as much as i'm working no you need to integrate things better you need to integrate your life better that's where sustainability lives in this world that we we operate in and there's a few things that that looks like for me first is calendar design i don't just fit in rest i have a garmin watch i used to have a whoop i'm now on the garmin train i love garmin i'm a big fan and this is not an ad for them but it tracks everything from my heart rate how many steps i'm getting in it tracks my pulse it tracks my body battery it does my hr status it gives me a branch benchmark on like how my sleep is all of those things and i love it for that right and i use it to make sure that i am treating my body well so i can operate at a high level hustle daily show hosted by juliet bennett r robert litter ben berkeley and martin is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of e aaron off beaten informative takes on business and tech news most recently it broke down the news ahead everybody talking that is meta complete blitz on recruitment and hiring all across many industries poaching people left right and center from every big ai company you can think of and how their acquisition of scale ai might have been one of the best chess places chess pieces to move in recent history folks if you haven't listened to recent hustle daily episodes you definitely wanna check it out listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast i always book travel with margins if i have to be somewhere i'm not going to be running i'm not sprint through an airport i'm not sprint to a meeting i need to know where i have to be in advance and i'm gonna have a a nice buffer between so i get their own time i try to schedule my calendar wired in and wired o time so i i can really wire in and that means like get into the zone execute high pressure task to tackle the biggest problems immediately and then why out where it's like i'm doing some of the things that i need to ensure that are done so my team who's coming online after me are set up for success or i'm doing things that i know future me will be grateful for a aka a making sure that i have something set up in my inbox or set up in my slack dms so i'm ready to do something tomorrow right i plan for recovery before a burnout happens so if i know that i'm gonna be on the road grinding grinding grinding i will block time the next day when i land i'm not taking a meeting i need that time for recovery and i think this comes from a former passion still a passion i love football but i i used to really ob assess over sports and thinking about how athletes trained they have recovery and we need recovery as professionals too if you're operating at a high level you need to make sure that your time is protected you need to make sure you make time for recovery you need to make time for rest rest is a strategy it is not something to kinda push to the wayside right and everybody's rest looks differently for me it's actually a rest experience it's not a intense experience for me to jump on a podcast interview with someone i'm just having a conversation that's not a high stress for me high stress for me is when i'm in the work in the zone fixing problems solving problems presenting problems building things launching things those are high stress scenarios for me coaching working closely with people and developing them and and supporting them is higher stress for me mainly because mainly because i have a different learning style than many where i like to learn in isolation and coaching and building people up while it is absolutely my passion it takes all of my energy it takes all of my energy to coach into support and i love it but it is one of the higher intensity moments for me so i have to manage my calendar around that then we have our our family anchors this is something that i think every when you're at twenty two twenty one this might not matter to you but for me as somebody who's in their thirties and has a family kids etcetera our dinner is always at the table i have no issues with how anybody raises their families do your thing but we do dinner at the table we sit down we eat we enjoy a meal together all as a family we have a conversation we have a discussion we talk about what the hardest things are that we did that day we talk about new things that we've learned problems we've overcome we call it rose bud thorn something that you liked something that you did new and something that you disliked we have those combos on saturdays i'm dropping pancakes i'm a pink i can throw down in the the kitchen as i think i've talked about before but i make pancakes for the fam i like to surprise my little ones with lunchbox notes so i enjoy being the person who puts together their lunch lunchbox in the morning and walking them to school when school starts these aren't just nice to have for me these are things that i do right just like a board meeting just like a keynote just like a podcast interview i need to be present for these on a regular basis me and wife we have our date nights this is a regular recurring thing right because if my family doesn't feel me present then i don't care if i'm getting a pause when i go on stage and event this is why i said no to an event that i think probably would have generated i would assume at a minimum fifty k if i would have made that trip and some of you might be thinking pro fifty k you gave up fifty k to show up for the first day of school one hundred percent one hundred percent i only get twelve first days of school with my each of my kids right i'm only gonna get twelve of them i think i can get fifty k in a few months i think i will be able to get that back it might be through a different thing it might be saying it might miss a couple days i might have to be on the road another day but i can get that back but i'm gonna miss it this time i'm okay with that that's my trade off right that's the trade off i am willing to make because i am not going to miss the first day of school the third thing is delegation replace your ego with trust here's a lie that i believed way too long and my team changed that one of my early hires the first three people that i brought on all broke this mentality for me and i owe them so much gratitude and grateful for them joining me when i was fresh to school building this business foundation i think was still early on and it's naming like i don't even know if people knew what foundation was i don't think they did it was still like people were doing business with ross simmons and i had a team behind me but they made a bet on me and i made a bet on them they were all relatively fresher to school and i realized in probably a week or two of each of them jumping on then i don't have to do everything myself that if i can give great talent the training the documentation the sop is the path that i don't need to be the one in the way so at foundation today we have a world class team we have a world class team because i have tried my best to always get out of the way because yes i believe i am great at what i do but i also know that there are people on my team that are better than me at different elements so i document i create a plan i create my hypothesis my theory i pass it to the team i delegate and then i trust that they will run the ship and execute and they do i don't need to answer every slack message on from a client i don't need to present on every call i need to build leaders so those folks can lead to others and they can lead themselves on their path to greatness and guess what the more i get out of the way the faster this business grows the more i get out of the way train coach develop again these are this is a lot of work for me i enjoy it i love seeing it happen but it's like one of my highest energy effort the more i coach the more i i document the more i train the faster we grow the faster our scores as it relates to what we we track how happy our clients are goes up these things move right so this is a process that i embrace replace the ego with trust in delegate alright the fourth thing is portable rituals i love to run especially in new cities i've ran in italy i've ran in brazil i've ran through the us i will run anywhere because it is a ritual of mine to run and use that run to center me no matter the time zone the hotel or the chaos i love to do a quick yoga session before i go on stage an event alright right before i hit the stage i love to do a quick flow and then i hit the stage i love to listen to the same song same soundtrack before i hit the stage i love to do a quick face facetime with my kids and make jokes before i come home these are little rituals that go in the bag with the mics with the chargers for me they center me all the time you don't need a perfect setting folks you just need to have a couple rituals that allow you to feel good and stay feeling good alright here's the last one it's new for me and it's still a challenge for me but it's new i have intentionally started to embrace quiet time my dad used to always say go have some quiet time go have some quiet time it's time for you to have some quiet time all the time he would say this and i hated it and i still have a hard time with it because my brain doesn't stop i'm always thinking i'm always going and i i get anxious if i don't have things to think about i used to go to sleep with headphone on because i wanted to hear things as i went to sleep i wanted words i wanted i wanted to always feel like i was getting better but now i've blocked time to just think meetings no emails no slack no scrolling just thinking just being just writing just thinking and i found some great ideas in this process integration is not about trying to have some mythical balance folks you're not always gonna get it right i don't i know that there's things that i wish i wouldn't have said yes to i know i've gone to coffee with people i wish i wouldn't have said yes to i know there's things in my calendar probably today that when it hits i'm gonna say why in the world did i say yes to this but the reason is simple i believe in the work i believe in my team i believe in my kids i believe in you i believe in the industry i believe in the market i believe in business and i believe that everything that we do in this world should have some type of intention that is bigger than ourselves so i say yes because i'm not finished because i still have time i'm not slowing down i'm saying yes because nothing i can go through is harder than those who came before me right in deep down i absolutely love the game so when i look ahead and i see my calendar and i'm like yeah this is gonna be intense this is gonna be a challenge i know where i wanna be in five years i know where i wanna be in ten years so i'm going to make this short short bit of intensity two months versus sixty is not that much two months of intensity amid sixty months to then have certain note come certain desires etcetera be achieved i'm here for it i'm here for the i'm here for the impact i'm not here for the balance i'm here to be present where it matters most to give energy where it matters most and i hope that this episode gives you the clarity to maybe even do the same so whether you're deep in the work you're wrestling with the weight of your yes is or trying to figure out how to keep going i hope i hope that in today's episode you learned something that will help you play the long game for a very long time gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers and here's the perfect example mo college need to reach new students with fresh and engaging content but with a massive nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took like thirty minutes to actually publish breeze hubspot collection of ai tools helped them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty site than percent more time on their site ready for the impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com so you've built a decent following your post get likes your content gets shared your name shows up in comment threats people tag you you might have even gotten a few awards but here's the question how do you go from being popular online having people who care about what you say to actually being a respected authority in your industry how do you go from creating content producing stories telling putting your ideas out there to actually shaping the conversation in the narrative within your industry today's episode is about scaling your influence taking the momentum that you've built as a creator and turning it into long term authority respect and opportunities i'm going to take you back in into time and talk you through how i went from a kid living in my parents basement drink in instant coffee that was probably a little bit expired to someone who ultimately jumped on the internet with one simple goal i need to get a job i need to break into this industry i had no uncle no aunt who could give me my first internship i had no path ahead to break into marketing i had no connections on the global scale who could show me the way to do marketing i had to create stories online and use that to essentially build my career to build influence i'm gonna break down the steps that i've taken i've seen others take to evolve from just showing up on timelines to being someone who gets paid for one hour on stage fifteen k to talk to talk about my ideas to talk about theories to talk about stories that i believe are representative representative of the future what's coming and what's changing you because some people want to go from just being a creator to actually being an industry leader and my hope today is to help you understand how to do it if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show let's get one thing straight this is very important there is a very big difference between being a content creator and being a leader creators get attention there's a ton of the mode there creators have followers creators can put up a story on instagram a post on facebook at like skip comments get shares but they might not actually be able to have anyone do anything because they have said for them to do it leaders get invited leaders make movements leaders drive action leaders create change creators get likes leaders get calls from cmos boards publishers and conference organizers asking them to support them in solving a problem to speak to do something leaders get called from journalists from reporters asking for quotes leaders have the ability to influence and shape culture if you're trying to build real leverage from your platform your ideas your audience and your expertise then you need to shift from being a creator who can get likes to being a leader who can make impact you see you don't wanna just be known it's not a game of trying to be the most popular person on the internet it's not a game of trying to have the most followers give them the most like or even having the most engagement those things are indicators of success but true success is when you are trusted you want your name to carry weight in rooms that you are not in you want your name to be a associated with the values and the value that you can bring to a room so the question becomes how do you go from having visibility building a following building connection to really having influence there's one first step that we all need to make and that is building depth you see most creators focus on how many people are seeing their content how many views do they get how much impressions do they get they get excited when they go viral and they share it on linkedin and they're all excited but look how many people i've reached and while that is cool while that is important it is not a true measure of influence you see leaders don't just share information that they have found or that they brought to life they have a perspective they share a lens they have a a point of view that might be unique to them so i ask you this what are things that you believe that others don't what do you believe is true about your niche your space your world that others don't what is something that you believe is fundamentally broken with your industry what is something that you disagree with in your industry what is something that you think is outdated misunderstood that perspective that point of view becomes your brand becomes your narrative and becomes your story and if you don't know what that narrative is run a few tests share a couple videos share a couple tweets put up a couple posts on linkedin and see how the market responds to the stories and the post that you share and what you might find is that certain posts take off and when you see that it's a signal from the market that this might be something that you can double down on and once you see a few of them you might realize that there's three or four that you can own you see the generalist the generalist will talk about everything in anything but the specialists the leaders they go deep in one area to truly establish that one percent situation a percent one percent is that person who is in the top one percent of people who understand a topic better than anybody else where you can look at that person and hear them speak for hours about a subject because they have gone deep into this idea a few months ago i was listened to a video where i listened to phil mick one of the the best golfers of all time talk about using a nine iron and he talked about how if a ball lands on the grass and it's pointing one way versus the next if it's wet how it changes the dynamics of the ball if you are on a slope he was talking about all of these small details and how they could influence five yards one year two yards three yards depending on the degree of the club all of these things like a scientist because he's in the one percent he can talk about that and know what he's describing when you meet somebody who has depth they can talk about things at a level that most cannot so stop trying to cover everything stop trying to be great in every area of your business your niche your industry or your space and tried to dominate one area educate lead and challenge you see i didn't become the content distribution guy overnight it happened because i've been obsessed with distribution for over a decade i've been obsessed with the idea that distribution is the ultimate ultimate differentiator in the market i've been obsessed with the idea that distribution is truly a emo right and when you can find something that you are obsessed with go deep on it right and it doesn't matter the niche it doesn't matter the space that you're in if i'm in the world of fitness i'm going deep into a certain niche if i wanna be the knees over toes guy right there's a a a guy who runs an account in an entire business which is dedicated to doing squats with your knees over your toes and he's built an entire business around that one simple concept to both flexibility and in that then there's other folks who create an entire brand around how you can get in shape eating whole foods whole thirty right they go deep into one lane then there's others who swear by fasting some who go deep into cold plunge and that becomes their thing what can you go deep immerse yourself in and ob over so other people look at you and they think this person is in the one percent of people when it comes to this idea now you can't just talk you can't just talk you can't just go out and talk about this thing over and over again folks you have to do you have to do and teach influence grows when people feel smarter after interacting with you when people watch you apply the methodologies and the ideas that you are talking about and they see you do it this is one of the most fascinating things that i've seen over over recent time when you look at so many people talking about things that they believe is true but they have no record no history no background to support that they have even applied their own methodology their own theories right hustle daily show hosted by juliet bennett r robert litter ben berkeley and martin is brought to you by the hubspot podcast the audio destination for business professionals the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of air aaron off beaten informative takes on business and tech moves most recently it broke down the news ahead everybody talking that is meta complete blitz on recruitment and hiring all across many industries poaching people left right and center from every big ai company you can think of and how their acquisition of scale ai might have been one of the best chess places chess pieces to move in recent history folks if you haven't listened to recent hustle daily episodes you definitely wanna check it out listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast anyone can take a post and copy and paste it anyone can share an idea online but it takes someone who is actually trustworthy to do the things that they are describing right and you want to be able to show that you can talk the talk otherwise who would listen to you right don't just talk teach and do folks the next step after you have established your foundation which is essentially this you've identified your point of view you've gone deep on a few topics and you have committed yourself to doing and teaching and not just talking the next step is to elevate your brand story beyond the platform creators live on content leaders they build brands that don't live the content that they put up last week and here's how you do that the first thing is to really establish and create a signature asset an evergreen asset that people know is yours if you wanna be known beyond the scroll create long form content it's still without question in my opinion the best thing than any creator can do it could be a podcast like this one it could be a book like create one's distribute forever it could be an in ongoing blog or youtube series or keynote decks all of these things that are worth sharing forwarding citing linking promoting and staying connected to are those signature assets that people can hold on to i created the ross simon show because i wanted to go deeper with my audience i know that there are people who read my words who see my tweets and they feel like they're connected but i know that by hearing my voice it's a deeper type of connection right some of you might be running some of you might be driving some of you might be walking some of you might be working but the fact that you are hearing my voice is a deeper connection than if you just scrolled through a post with my face on it then the second step after having that signature asset is to go in real life build a reputation off of social folks you need to build a presence that doesn't rely on the algorithm whether it's getting media coverage whether it's long form interviews with the news whether it's podcast guest appearances being referenced in third party content speaking engagements going on stage and sharing your voice being invited to panels or reaching out to make these things happen you need to distribute you your story and your message in ways that happen in real life once that's been completed you then want to build trust through consistency this is one of the hardest parts of the game the hardest part is showing up every single day just like showing up to the gym is hard creating his hard leadership isn't built in a week people need to see you show up over and over and over again consistency builds predictability which leads to trust don't just create when you're inspired don't just create because you feel like you're in the mood i believe that the greatest creators are those who are able to create even when they are not in the mood and the best way to do that is to create a schedule use a calendar block off time in your calendar to create i have this thing called wired and wednesdays where on wednesdays i wire and put in my headphones and i execute that's how leaders are made that's how you establish leadership by committing to your audience into the industry that you are going to build for them one of my friends she runs a instagram account over two hundred thousand followers she actually has an agent who will let her know and remind her to put up content because they know that through consistency they build that connection through a para social relationship with her following alright then we go to the next stage the third stage is really coming down to connecting with other leaders you see influences magnified through association if you wanna grow your accounts faster if you wanna grow your influence faster connecting and associating yourself with other people who are trusted who are valued in your industry and in your niche who are cited is a game changer especially when those respected sources start to trust you they re you they comment on your work they they collaborate with you they cite you they start to take screenshots from your work in putting them in their slides when that type of thing happens it changes the game for you and here's how you make that happen for you the first thing that you have to do the number one thing that i recommend to everybody is to literally don't be an a hole i know it seems basic but that's one of the things that i see slow most people down is when they get in person they think that they are the b's needs they're too good to talk to people they're they're so great that they don't wanna see other speakers they don't wanna talk to other speakers they don't wanna collaborate with other speakers they wanna take photos with other speakers or when they're when they're creating content they're too good to reference other people they're too good to actually quote the source and they steal your work right don't be an a hole that's the first step the second one is adding value to those ahead of you right if you want the respective industry leaders then you'd need to show up with no value you have to show up let me start that one again if you want the respective industry leaders you gotta show up with value right you can't being needy you can't be begging for attention you wanna comment with insights on their post and don't use chat gp we can all tell you wanna share their content with a perspective you wanna let them know when you're referencing them you wanna mention them and tag them you wanna help them you wanna give them a shot you wanna do things that add value to their life so they'll say who's this person i wanna give value back to them don't go out reaching out and say can i pick your brain take a step back and say how can i contribute how can i be so valuable to this person that they will have no choice but to reach out to me one of the things that i did early on i would promote people's content that they created on x and i tag them i would tag them so they seen that i was sharing their work and people would click people would comment in conversations would start to happen and that allows you to build relationships with people who are ahead of you the next thing that you wanna do is host the conversations don't just don't just join them right don't be afraid to give the mic to someone else when you're on a panel for example don't hold the mic ask someone their perspective ask someone for them to share what they believe or give someone their flowers and say you know what someone so was a brilliant mind on this i think you should hear what they have to say when you create space for other people to shine they remember you and they will bring you with them as they rise in their own career the next thing that you wanna do is contribute to the conversations that matter i intentionally for many years reached out to newsletters to publications and journalists and said if you ever need somebody who can talk about social media seo distribution i'm your guy and when news broke they've reach out to me right you should be doing this regularly when news breaks in your industry you might not have the context today but you could talk about it online you could post a reaction thread you could write about what you've seen you can publish an analysis thought leaders don't stay quiet amongst noise they are vocal and this is something that a foundation we've done ridiculously well over the last three years when there was news breaking in the saas industry we created content that outlined what we saw what we found why an acquisition would make sense for this brand or that brand what it meant for their search traffic what it meant for their backlink profile we created this insight and we shared it free when you do this it helps you stand out from the crowd and it helps you build trust now let me give you the last snapshot of what you need to do to drive influence you see at the end of the day it's not about being followed folks it's about being felt people need to know who you are how you operate and how you can help them and if your content kind of stops if you go quiet on all platforms and no one noticed you gotta ask yourself where was i actually influential so here's what you can do create resources that help people templates playbook deep dives tools make content that is worth consuming twenty four seven while you're away that's leverage right take people behind the scenes into your journey it doesn't mean pretending that you've got it all figured out i know that i have never in my life built a fifty million dollar business but i'm trying right showing your journey your path and what you want to do is relatable by many people and i'm able to use this podcast to take you beyond the scenes into the journey that i'm pursuing which is to create one of the biggest most successful agencies of all time in collaboration with one of the most successful software of all time distribution dot in collaboration with being the best debt of all time right people trust that people want that and while not everybody's always open doing it those who do are able to win the hearts and minds of others measure your influence by outcomes instead of impressions ask yourself how many rooms am i getting invited into our customers referring us am i getting call from the journalists our competitors copying us our customers referencing our ideas our media publications referencing our our visuals our graphics our slides our data that's real influence that's leadership so here's my challenge for all of you don't just create con strive to create a conversation don't just try to post consistently build trust relentlessly don't just go deep go deeper than the competition the difference between a creator and an industry leader isn't just fame it's the ability to focus on that story distribute it relentlessly and follow through time and time again you don't really want to care so much about how many people you reach what you wanna care about is how many people you've impact you're not here just for likes and clicks you're here to make an impact if this episode sparked something with you share it with another builder trying to make that leap from being a timeline star to being a trusted authority folks lead with intention and thank you for checking out the ross simmons shell gotta hustle with the business hi saw with the business i

hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers and here's the perfect example mo college need to reach new students with fresh and engaging content but with a massive nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took like thirty minutes to actually publish breeze hubspot collection of ai tools helped them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty site than percent more time on their site ready for the impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com in b2b sales and marketing most companies are shooting louder chasing more channels and burning through budgets just to get their prospects attention brad young however has decided to flip the script for the second time around as the c founder and ceo of slash expert and the original cofounder of s he's built a model on connecting prospects directly with your happiest customers so they can hear real stories ask real questions and make confident in buying decisions faster directly through slash exports he's spent nearly a decade c founding and scaling one of the companies that redefine the way the corporate gifting and direct mail is done and through launched six three nine ventures he's backed some of the most creative and unconventional brands in the market today we're talking about how to get through the noise how to design gt strategies that work in twenty twenty five of course the rise of ai and the impact that that has not only on business but also society and we dive deep into one of the most important things that you can have in your life to do it well if you're playing the long game you're in the right place this is the ross simmons show and this is my interview with brady brandon thank you so much for making the time i've gotta start with a question that i didn't plan to ask you and that is one surrounding something that we just stood talked about we talked about going to restaurants we talked about dad life and i wanna start by asking a question around how you juggle it all with the the ambition the ongoing launch of new businesses being a dad still making time to go to dinners with other dads like all of that stuff how do you manage it all today yeah ross it's it's good to be here thanks for the invite i so i think as as you get older i think you got better perspective which is one of those things where when i started s ten years ago i think my balance was off like i was in my days and it was like just everything but worked all the time and as you get older there that you're like wow like it's cool like to have successes but like that's not the end all be all like you right it's good and i i think was successful so i think that grain should need the opportunity to make a little more time for things is that our more personal like hanging out with my four year old and do centers and stuff like that and yeah i think but one thing we always did like my my buddy who's my founder at sand who's the ceo now is we always made time for like the things that are important like what are you working towards like like like what do you like and right there's always experiences a family and activities and so we all work to be able to afford to do those things lot i think most of us were work do most of those things some don't some just love the idea of just working time not not me so i think like as as you put the time at the front and then the gains you the advantage or the time to be able to just spend more time with your family would have balanced it yeah but even if you don't like if your mental head is in a good space and i think your work is better and true as i've gotten older work smarter too like i don't need to work until eleven pm like that means i'm not working smart because i did something dumb right so i to to be able to yeah like yeah no i just think that like that's crazy sometimes and there's a lot of tools that can help you work faster now too so you love i love this week if you could go back in time and to talk to you twenty year old you who's in it going hard sometimes working those fifteen to sixteen hour would you still say keep going do what you're doing it's going to work out or would you told you not yeah yeah no yeah i feel like yeah there's there's like there's there's part me that says like think anyone that says like hey like i'm all about like balance is cool but i think it gives like it it also like you worked at some point so be able to be able to say that and so i think like that's like i'm i'm almost forty and like as was most things were like i've been working for you know ever since college and have saved and like i think that in order to be able to go for a hike sometimes in the middle of the day it's because i've worked to be able to have that advantage and i think that if i went back in time i'd tell myself to keep working because i love it like yeah i think that anyone that says the work balanced thing is is i think it's important but also like you to put yourself in the position for that for sure i agree so you're clearly are somebody who's passionate about the game you love business you've been in it for a long time you've c founded two companies send do and now slash experts when you think of both of those like what is the scratch the itch that you were trying to scratch with those that made you really think like once send mendoza at that time like why did you pursue that and then now like why are you pursuing the slash expert side and and didn't take the hat off and say i'm done with this entrepreneurship thing like you can't go through again love i'm starting from sierra over again the so like forced and like we saw a big issue in the market because it we so we built that company like twenty fifteen right and that was when like every single like sales automation tool was coming out and so like everyone had so many emails and phone calls and like it just wasn't work people were like and i think maybe response rates were better back than for emails but still like was one of those things where it's just it wasn't and like the resurgence of account based marketing was happening everyone was like you gotta be you know very unique and you're all your outreach and we were like okay i get that but like how can i do that at scale and i remember like the startup i was with like we would write like handwritten notes and it was great so they'd always get a response right really there's no way to do this scale and so we launched it and we started with coffee gift cards like starbucks books coffee gift cards like that was and it wasn't originally even called s coffee like coffee centers the original name right and it was a way to send coffee gift cards out and it was great so we we pushed that thing out to all our sales friends and like it took off people would send emails were like hey like have a coffee on us and yeah or on me and like let's connect so it was different it yeah made it personal it used the power of reciprocity and it grew pretty quickly to have more than just coffee and we renamed it and mendoza and we grew that business we had product market fit very early on because that world of gifting has always been in business but no one had ever scaled it right nor tracked it so pushing that into your crm was massive so right and then we hit the market at the right time i mean some those things were like i think any newer like it kinda it's a lot of it is about hard work sure but it's also like we were growing at a pretty good rate with power market fit from like twenty fifteen to twenty twenty right covid happened and covid was phenomenal for price because like no one was your people in the person yeah yeah and like we just exploded during the schools you know two or three years and because everyone was trying to send impacted and just not only prospects but employees and to customers and true we happen to have the network for it cool well that was there what we saw it was like a lot of the traditional what twenty year old process of like hey come take a demo right was just broken people were like they go reviews they talk to their peers they back channel you and i was like that's not like i don't i think that dies eventually like they go and talk to a sales rep and he walks through a deck and yep you're like oh like do you wanna buy it and then you're like more talk about but like that pro i i still think it's like it's being adapted and changed but mh we saw that we're like people wanna talk to existing users right people don't wanna case studies and i think they're great i think it's cool with a case study but people will wanna be able to know their the right tool true so like we're like let's connect our prospects with our customers who love us mh and i mean like it's the same playbook that like salesforce does with their trail blades community right you go in there and you can read about all the people that have used their tool for amazing things awesome so why can't we allow that exact exact same motion with smaller companies and make it easy for a prospect to connect with the customer so build that out just launched it i had five months ago now so that's cool that's gone quick cool so now it's like alright and it's working i mean people like that's converting faster than the book of down lot of dealers that's so very cool that's for the two stories i think it's been funded but the the second time around of you know not making the same errors the first time because you've very that's the first that hundred percent no that makes complete sense with slash experts as you like look ahead what's kind of the the priority driver for scratching this stitch again like are you like what's making you say alright right now wanna jump back in jump back into the saddle start from zero to one all over again i love zero to like five zero like in like that was really the most fun as is like chaos it's like you're you're setting up tools you're talking to customers that like get to buy you and then this isn't a fit me and you're liking it's not fit for you right and so like like you try figure out what you who what your best is you're trying to figure out like how your financials work i like all that stuff that i enjoy yeah i like that much much more than working strategy at a company i think there's amazing people who could take a company from ten to a hundred million mila work first those so they're great they're very good at it the zero to ten the chaos the is testing that's where i enjoy so i wanted to do it again yeah is i wanted to scratch that itch i think that like really times are my absolute favorite that's awesome you you learn like it's a lot of i would say is kind of ed game too because like no one's checking in to make sure you're working at true just like you're solo low so you had a bunch of engineers and like maybe a cofounder and you're like alright like right but you don't have to show up to your writing like you're the one who's scheduling those like give your investors to answer to yes but they made a bet on you too right and so i like that that's cool chaos that building i think if you don't enjoy that part of it then yeah she's about company yeah a hundred percent i love the chaos too it's definitely where i i thrive when you're going through it i always have like a handful of different mantra and stuff that i use to stay grounded and be able to kinda persist through the chaos how do you keep yourself going through it like as much as i love the chaos there's gotta be moments where you're like this is a lot do you have do you have a way to get through like what's your mechanisms do you have a mechanism do you have a mental model do you have like a go to thing that you do to to break through that struggle when it hits or do you just push through all the time to say no i i have to have a balance there i think an easy one is like when i'm overloaded with stuff i'll i mean it's simple like i'll go for a walk i think that like there's my my wife so we have this for each other we have these two like speeches like like like cool if i ask for feedback from like i'm my wife like struggling with something she's like do you want me to play the card of like suck it up and like make it happen core join through the card of like hey like you're right like you should take time you should go for hike or go exercise and come back so like you you i tell her which one i want yeah but usually it's the hey suck it up like you're you're you're getting to build a company like that's amazing so freaking suck it up and like go sit down and make it happen so like i i usually ask for that one that's the so like i think like your partner your friend whoever is is that becomes like your your yeah i would say rock to something that's so it's it's i i hike i i think it's good to keep exercise going right you don't keep that going and i think you're gonna follow apart yeah i hear that you know when i'm not moving it's you can feel it like it's just like i need to go i need to go do a five k run i gotta do something right i think that like then i mean i work out in the morning which helps i think yeah and then like have having having a kid also helps you because that they he's can keep you moving yeah what your playground aaron and let's play tech i like it very cool when it comes to like the actual expertise around direct mail and communication like over your this time you've learned a lot and there's a lot of marketers who listen to this who are constantly thinking about using zen so using these tools how do you think of differentiation when you're trying to make a message that actually resonates with people what does that have to look like like how do you make stories and messages or a message or a gift stand out from everything else that people are getting like you get hundreds of emails these days yeah i i mean so i think usually the is and insanely important i think they're like there's there's even through ten years of growing some those so i can probably count on a couple hands like how many actual gifts i've gotten when you say mailbox you're not talking about digital you're talking about physical mail like using like like send like a physical like message to somebody whether it's an office or home you can confirm addresses and get there so like i think i'll give you two examples the first one is using the is immensely important i only think it's gonna become more important as digital gets even more overloaded with the volume of ai addresses out there like and personalized emails and linkedin messages and phone calls i'm like i think i don't know how many cool calls you get i got a ton and i'm like like i'm gonna answer don't even answer my phone anymore great yeah right it's crazy like text me so like i think that so i the mailbox is important i think the the and what do you wanna stand out i don't think it's the gift as much as it is the timing so a good example is if you do a demo with somebody and they decide like hey like i'm not gonna move forward i'm gonna you know i'm gonna maybe talk to in a couple months right it's a good trigger for a handwritten note it's send a handwritten note or even if like someone's hey i'm take the time send a handwritten note with some information handwritten knows are the most powerful thing ever that people rarely use because still think do i great down people handling when was the last time you got handwritten it note from somebody been long term right too but i think that i think that's one of those things we're like if you lose a deal if someone say hey i we're going with the competitor or hey we're something like versus on the back picture like why not send like a case study in a handwritten note that's hey like i thought you might like this like right if you want include like a a physical gift card to starbucks or something like that's one of those things were like i think that that makes you stand out so strongly about the timing when you wanna send it mh i think if you're working like more top of funnel like demand i think that there's lots of things marketing can send for air cover whether it is simple things like the yeti mug been done but the way you can do all i i think people still use them hats or what i send because cool never throw a hat and they had somewhere and we'll wear at some point so the next simple air cover from marketing is important to get your brain name out there and the salesperson doing things like handwritten notes and things like that are important before you do a demo or a phone call sending an e gift for starbucks is great cool i think you get that same reciprocity right as you would have physical more expensive mailer that's interesting a hot take which is one that i can say that because i'm i don't work do anymore yeah is i think that gifts i don't think a gift needs to be three hundred dollars i think that i guess something simple still works very well okay i think a pair of socks is still a very cool scent if it's sent in the winter not the summer right i think i think an umbrella is a cool scent if it's sent there's a storm on the way yeah i think that like you have to know what the right timing is like i don't send an e gift for starbucks at four o'clock in the afternoon sure people do that i don't so yeah makes sense i i think that's my example if i was testing gifting i would yeah try to figure out timing that's cool how are you thinking about gifting in your world now with slash experts we do a ton of go market essence did you share some of the ways that you're thinking about it for for you all or yeah yeah so like we do hats again so like if i do a demo i i i typically was like i thanks so much for the time and like they get like a hat sent to them after a demo it's like thing to do if i lose a deal i sent handwritten notes saying hey like and i do usually a week later saying hey i'm sorry that you didn't go my direction like would love to chat down the road handwritten note if someone's approaching a renewal there's an automated gift there too of like hey like looking forward to working together again in for another year it could be fine it could be pay could be sweatshirt so think like and like the nice person is you can automate most of this yeah i do i do sense for things that people have celebrations like for example you're getting be married they're having kid cool they're switching jobs those are all very good trigger moments almost to send something just take care of ask like there's have to be an ask in every gift it can be very simple like hey it's just your top of mind yeah i love that that's cool when you send these handwritten notes like i don't wanna get to personal with it but like what are you saying to these people in the handwritten note like it's such a personal thing with your yeah i know it's just it's old fashioned right but it's so intimate because it's like this person's brain transferred to their hand which transferred to this paper it was in their physical presence and then now it's with me well i kinda kind of i know yeah feel that way it isn't really but we all but we believe supposed to right supposed to the robot my make errors exactly yeah exactly yeah so where are you what the message in the so like tip it's it's the first one is like i can send one after a call just saying thanks for the time cool look forward working together if you wanna attach something there you can right if i try to lose a deal let's hey i'm sorry to in my direction whether a shot down the road that typically that can that can save deals too because someone might be with the middle of onboarding yeah and they might be like i'm man with the wrong company like this person sent me a classroom no true true you can send it with a book yeah yeah like at this relevant into the space right and i thought you might like you know this book that's you know the marketing space i think that's an important one too so like those three that's cool anchor and like people like i i think that there's what's written in the note is important right but i don't know if i could like the last hand and note i got was like probably for like my grandma like i don't know what i said yeah but i but i remember got it yeah i know i got it and so i think that's what you're aiming for as we company too that's cool i like it what's one of the mistakes that you think most marketers go to market leaders etcetera are making today when it comes to driving roi i think there's very cool ai tools and there's a lot of them and i know every marketer that's out there has like probably lost folks on their team and so bandwidth is very low and i know that they're getting pushed by their ceos to look at all these ai tools but like we should hire more ai stuff and i i think that that that's a hard spot to be in right but i also so like i would say one of the errors is spending too much time looking at all those i ai tools i would say better your time is spending time talking to your peers right maybe people that are at bigger companies who have added a lot of this stuff yeah i think being in a in a in a community is really important right now with there's a new tool every day true and so like the goal is like if someone finds when that's working well cool yeah like kinda have that discussion as to why it's working well i think that's very important i would say enough end enough marketers are living in a silo right now which is tough i think that's because they're being asked internally look all these tools to help solve marketing so kind they're being asked to like their team needs to be smaller right at the same time they're like hey also like can you not stop building pipeline right well i need to do all three and i i think that's tough for marketer to live in those three four spots and so i i would say they like the that your community becomes of sure that was interesting so community your peers your network yep what does that look like in reality like what's that look like for you even for me it's a lot of linkedin if people would have i've talked through through the years that i know have the same title is me people are typically pretty responsive still on linkedin if you reach out the right way like hey like here's you know here's why i'm reaching out i think that there's groups that are great like pavilion of great for marketers yeah that's good to be in i think and in your career have you been in these types of groups in the past absolutely cool the pavilion the marketing groups of the world the sales groups of the world cool i have enough like there's a lot of founders groups to you that are important it's it's important to be able to i have a call yeah like like once a month with a couple founders where all we do is kind of just like it's not like a i knew is like kind of a like a like a crap talk an hour it's like hey like here here's what i'm going gone through this on yeah yeah no but not it's not always problem it's more just like it's like no one like like this more complaining but you're you're complaining to complain and you're like why am i this so i of you're like okay not a alone i think it's like like like kinda helpful yeah and is that formally set up or informally set up like is it informal yeah it's there's some i there's some form ones too i all the other day someone was building another one there's cool i think sometimes they get too big so sometimes it's just to have like a handful of founders or that you trust that you can share whatever yeah yeah right and it doesn't need to be public stuff there's so many public linkedin channels that advertisers are cool but i don't know i think they like yeah the transparency always happens behind closed doors like the real conversations come when no one's looking and it's you and a whatsapp group with a few friends who are similar sized growing struggling trying to figure it all out and talk talking through the things yeah and that makes complete sense did you always have like take me back before sand mendoza like did you have were you in tech right away like did you jump right to the first first job was insurance actually we for that left college and like two thousand eight thousand nine great time to graduate no and everything was everything was in a recession perfect time yeah yeah and so like it went to work for an insurance company which was awesome learned sales i could've spent my career there because you was like a carrier rep build the book of business but it was like we didn't have it was a big company we didn't have a salesforce we were a crm we i spent all my time on the road i learned how sales those was when banks were shutting down and like yeah but sure it was booming it was through higher salespeople people was great and so like yeah done a couple years there like learned sales and then i just didn't feel that we were innovating and like i was in the bay area which was like i saw like all these companies spinning up at of nowhere and like right i remember i left and i had two offers to leave at a at a offer at this that it's gonna go demand for us which was when took i learned how to do transactional sales there were so small start at the time and the second one was a company called z ride that i said no to and z right changed their name to lyft and they were zero five tests later sorry of those guys so missed that one yeah but like it was i think those are the fun stories of the bay area and tech startups ups but right went there a couple of years learned how to do transactional sales other than relationship sales ad insurance companies loved it then jump to another tech company like two or three tech companies from there and then finally it was like i could do i can this and like yeah my parents own their own like they're my my dad owns like a landscaping business almost like a flu shops and so i knew entrepreneurship in the dna on yeah like i i knew at some point i had to take my shop at it to see if it was possible and that's cool my wife was at facebook at the time so that i gave me an opportunity to be like alright i'm gonna go on your benefits that's just got married yeah and so that helped that for sure helps yeah that's huge so now i wanna go another path because that's fascinating same wife as back then all that so partners seem like it also plays a role in like to growth in massive like i had doctor julie garner on a few months back and she was talking about how important she would tell people who were in their twenties spend more time thinking about who you're going to be partnered with than who what business and job you're gonna take when you look back like how instrumental was that partnership in you guys relationship and now four year olds and all that like mask you guys got yeah yeah i'm intrigued to like it wouldn't have happened without her being like you should go that's because like you've always talked about it should go and see like yes we can afford you know but there the difference was there was a clock so she's like you've six months and if you're not making money at six months then you have to go to work you right at salesforce i love something now like i think partners on the other side so i so my c cofounder who's last so chris was i think that's this so i have three people that i call the most my wife my mother and chris that's cool like like like those like my three relationships that important because your c cofounder founder i knew in college and so i was health i i knew like him and i had you know done stupid college things together so you kinda see everybody like all the lights be like okay like i know right you're like and that helped yeah i would say with building a company and i trusted him true and he trusted me and so those are of those things where you sort and that trust was really important yeah because i wasn't worried if he was working or not right or if he was like hey i'm gonna go take thursday off because i'm gonna go do x cool go like i was there's some question that so i think that need to have that and then dos became successful mh and there's he was focused on things because i was focused on other things so i think that really important to have that like he's a big adviser now this new so i think that without that he also he's an extra neighbor so i like i like like it's like good to right full life immersion yeah yeah now we have kids the same age or wives or friends so love you i i guess it's important to have that to too it's like life optimization everyone's always talking about seo search optimization you're optimizing the whole life factors like if you've got your c founder best friend advisor and live in next doors and your kids are the same age you're doing it right that's awesome i think it helps it helps like and i i think that there's there's a weird distinction when it comes to founders where if you can hang out and not only talk about work like that's a good thing but i would say a lot of vendors don't get to that point that's fair which was important because yeah you're always talking about work then like you know the star a work friend that's fair hundred percent hustle daily show hosted by juliet bennett r robert litter ben berkeley and martin is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of air aaron off beaten and informative takes on business and tech moves most recently it broke down the news ahead everybody talking that is meta complete blitz on recruitment and hiring all across many industry poaching people left right and center from every big ai company you can think of and how their acquisition of scale ai might have been one of the best chess places chess pieces to move in recent history folks if you haven't listened to recent hustle daily episodes you definitely wanna check it out listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast when you're looking at slash experts in your in this new age like when send first launch ai wasn't what it is today yeah but you're doing it again you're launching a new company but ai is here it's automations everywhere how are you thinking about what should be automated leveraging ai versus which be done by the finger on keyboards so the the the the company as a whole looks like a company where we help people prospects and customers connected to chat to talk about why they use a tool but on the back end we also all those phone calls are also recorded so and like though that's first party data from like a customer talking about a product they're using which is gold for marketers and so we give our customers all of that recording data and we can we or we can plug it into an and be like hey here's some insights from that phone call like this person is calling a product that you call x on your website something totally different right and so like like that's information there that's insanely valuable so we've spent a lot of time on the ai side cool trying to make it really easy for these insights as first party call data to be able to be used by marketers and so right that piece that's where i start to compete against companies like gl g and alpha site and all these like big companies that do this for for vc for or for right in investment banks and yeah we're basically just making it happen for b2b so like that's that that's pretty cool for i'm excited about it i mean so certain them there for hiring we're we'll we have a rule in internally like if there's a problem that we have we'll look and see hey i can do it first if i can't do it then we'll outsource it someone who can for a cheaper price not in the typically right and then if we can't do one of those then we'll hire somebody there's number thing i to do so we we we hired right off bat but even look right outsiders or ai makes sense or when you think about the future of like slash experts is the plan to try to build a massive organization like are you going for the no what's the what's the play the goal is to get this to a point where like we're we're at enough companies placing enough data for them where and then if if we can scale that out and use ai to make one person you wanna to manage more account to make sales being able to manage more deals then i think i i think a really cool stat these days is like revenue per employee it's always been around but i i really like that stat for founders right now especially if ai companies are extremes like if you're like a cursor crushing it awesome crushing so but i i think like adapting that like the b to b right type saas tools too is important because you don't need a sales team of four hundred people sure but if you had a sales team you know five or six who were doing tire revenue and they're using their day properly using ai to make it to to match everything out awesome which think would be is true for sure pretty sweet yeah more profit it's more commission for everybody everybody wins yeah it's it's good commissioned for everybody i think that i think the traditional sales of sdr disco phone call to ae to s to am to cs i think it i don't think it dies anytime soon but i think that it just gets more efficient with tools i think we're rather than hiring you know ten sdr higher too which right is interesting because i think like that has its own lay type of stuff with it but i think i think that's where we're moving towards right when do you think the the culture within b to b saas tech around that is going to change is it next fiscal is it two years out three is it are we in it and is yeah i think i mean yesterday there was a big announcement it like you know cla and lost that one and so like you you you have consolidation happening which is interesting because consolidation happens so now one ae on three products true and so and i think this only i think it's a compound over the next like six months i just think that like it's gonna get while through there and there's there's more ai get built and they can do a lot of the way like they can help people are around roles i think there's gonna be a separation really quickly from your aes that are crushing it right tools like this to ones that aren't right like that's gonna be interesting like over the i say i think we're in i think we're yeah i think what happens to the mediocre what happens to the i think i think they gotta find a different way to they're yeah not maybe a different job it made different structure internally like right but i don't think you need teams of twenty thirty anymore especially if you're a mid market company it's true yeah it's changing you it's definitely changed and i think sdr are too i think that like i even seen like there's i mean there's if you take any role like hr is another one like all like phone screens are done by ai now right i think there's she's like alright so like that's a a ton of jobs sure i think i think what gets hurt in this i think i think experience is important people that have experience are important companies but i think the interesting group of folks that i'm nervous about or entry level if people come about right out of college because i don't know the only path they have to build is you they learn ai and often maybe they get they go to meta make seven hundred billion dollars a year vendor your and look get retire go or they don't go into tech like i it's that's right i that's an interesting one and like i don't have an answer for that that the people right at a college yeah they would typically go into an sdr str training program yeah salesforce like i didn't never be doing that anymore would no it's i was thinking about this a lot recently like even with my own little ones i'm like okay what path will they be able to actually take into the careers like so much is going to be automated so much is going to be able to be done by ai and it's already there so it's like what's gonna be left and if you evaporate all of the entry level skills needs because ai and agents can do arguably even if though it's on record like better than most of the kids fresh to school like ai is better than them what's gonna happen like it's gonna be a very interesting dynamic for the market yeah i i mean there's i think there's jobs that aren't going anywhere like for long term but are like the trades true i think agree hvac if you're in the hvac system world well yeah right i just great hvac here like yeah there's like here you go i have no clue what i'm doing yeah exactly here's my money yeah takes some money oh it's dripping here's more money yeah it's grades are interesting i i don't think the like if you're in tech and like you learn how a lot of these ai tools work i i think ai might be like the final blow to the generation that's still working mh like who's like who's like all the guys that are in like you know like that are like the ceos right now it might be the final blow of those those where they're like okay like right i don't understand this or if you're like a cro and you've been doing it for a long time might be time yeah that you're like i don't like i've you're so reliant on like your rev some marketing ops teams to like put reports together for you like you become like middle management is unnecessary with the volume much worse that are out there which you can be and if you really wanted to be great now is the best time to do it like if i i oftentimes think i would crush it in real estate right now because i know all of these things that people in real estate don't know like you could absolutely crush as a realtor send a message to thousands of people it's it's wild it's absolutely wild yeah we're like the trays just be like be able to true like have like an actual follow through right follow ups in proper he got the phone yeah there was like i was i was saying there day to somebody i was like i think i think it was hvac like be i'll be at your house in the hours of like ten and five and right okay like could you imagine demos like like four like like let's do a demo like i'll call you between ten and five yeah i never would work you never work it's so well so looking back at your time mendoza you're a founder again launching slash experts bringing this to life what are some of the lessons that you learned that you will apply here that are that second founder superpower like everyone always talks about how first time founder you make a bunch of mistakes second time founder you learn from those mistakes and you crush what's the lessons that you're going to apply here that you did you wish you at back then yeah i mean if you look like a simple thing was like finances like i i didn't when the first time around i didn't understand p and l's ls and finances like as properly as i could there's so many tools that are out there that help with that now like knowing exactly what your burn is things like that you don't have to look at your financials like once a month when your account comes over right you can do it in real time so then i think that's a big one knowing exactly how much you're burning exactly if you can make big bets on things so like well how will this impact my numbers for the month isn't brain right secondly is it taking advantage of the people that like offer it up like if you take money from a vc if you have friends that are in your space that people are always yeah let me know i can help ask them right it was to hey let i can help cool hey i'm looking for customers so you the only anyone who wants to use this awesome like send that and follow up i think like people are typically most of the time go end a conversations with hey mean i can help you and like if you push it you're like yeah actually i'd i'll tell you exactly what i need right i think like you learn really quickly like who's legit and who's not yeah and the people that are the legit that are helping awesome give equity right like give them a piece of the company that's good i think like those are pieces that we learned at sand dos and like i think we're doing that right now is like people that are willing to help is you take care of them yeah and do you give them some skin of the game and you grow with them so i think those are the two biggest ones simple back office stuff understand it better and secondly like you know use the people that offer help right sure and then don't build an a silo like what's that mean like don't build something that you think your customers will want but they don't know they want mh like i just don't that works because right right you need to go and talk to your customers and figure out what they need and didn't go build go and build it but but i don't think you need to build the thing go and sell like there's so many amazing product people that build an amazing beautiful product mh once it's done then they go and sell it and right that's not the way to do it the way to do it is like build half of it and have a conversation with a customer be like hey like what do you on something right should i keep going how do i pivot this yeah is this close to you fitting your needs that type of thing or including your contract like if if you're trying to sell somebody and they're like i really need this feature like cool i'll build it for you just sign a contract for me give green until i build it right right that's cool that's smart when it comes to the first point you said you use tools now to get that visibility the listeners love hearing exactly what tools they should use is there anything that in particular that stands out on the finance side that you've been using or thinking about user yeah i mean finance said i mean we use simple things like like i didn't have quickbooks the last company until so like quickbooks sales ton right that like there's there's outsource change yeah there's outsource accounting firms like punch that we use rate cool there's gonna be call get parallel that helps us with like what our burn looks like nice then like from internal like tools that are back office i think that we use click up like crazy people account organize spot shop i think yeah there's there's a lot of really good early on startup up tools that got come out that you can look at and like you can tell if you wanna add or not but right the ones that are like a less expensive burn i i think it's most helpful that's fair i like it so slash experts send so kinda different what would you say is the common link between the two so is one so so sand all involve like you're you're sending gifts to people you're using reciprocity right and with slash experts if we're also connecting people so same sort of thing and if a customer does a phone call they're thanked so there's a glitch there as well right okay thanks so much so for doing the phone call so gifting is intertwined between the two yeah people to people connection i think i still think people buy from people and especially deals like larger than ten k i still think they're there has to be a conversation there unless you're like aws yeah right like awesome but i don't think everyone is so i think that people typically are gonna talk to people for sure are you doing a lot of the sales right now for all of that yeah it's all me so like it's all me and then i we're sales and cx and then mostly engineering were you doing sales at the end or at sand mendoza or the end no no my job like going back like this is a big shift wild like the yeah it's changed a lot you know it's like fighting for bandwidth more than budget which is just right right the yeah so i i did send so i said closest to the sales side there because i enjoyed the sales side so i think that that's that's always from my background i like the community side a lot in the partnership side a lot so i imagine like the first role i'll hire for will be a founding ae cool come and run sales and then i'll go focus on community and cx which is where i have more fun and what's what are you looking for in this age for your first sales it's higher like do they already even have to be using like what are you saying is these are the things that i need for somebody who's gonna be great for founding a yeah found so founding a one who's hungry one who definitely knows like like they want to learn i think it's easy to say you want to learn but the prove to me you wanna learn like maybe you a small company in college awesome cool like like something like that is great yeah someone else wants to come in and be like hey like just because like the way that i manage is probably wish most founders managers way is like hey great they'll spend a couple days going through everything cool you got it awesome luck limited rooms and like and like maybe you jump on the first call or so i can call with like the first time demo but you don't maybe it was too recording later yeah so i think like the if someone who's wants that like there's not a lot of like i don't like you know the job we got hit numbers you know like your deals are becoming andy you gotta do some prospecting so you gotta get hands dirty right and so i think like someone who's willing to do that and that's a hard find because yeah and usually it's somebody who is maybe they've been in a a company they they keep getting in trouble for breaking process that's the person i want right because like like they're like i don't understand why this is the process here cool come here and build the process you build this yeah think like that's that's that's the fun part and that's we had like a really early on aes and mendoza that really made the company and like okay my favorite thing is is he came in and he was like hey whether you guys are building i get it if i had a million in sales in a year i want one percent of the company right and we're like done let's go yeah and like so someone who gets motivated by that yeah like he hit it and he got it that's like which is awesome so i think like that's that that is true that's the kind of person that needs to be like an early that's the hunger somebody who's like setting in their own target and pursuing it yeah yeah can't go away there yeah like that's that's the dream advocate right there that's the dream mapping i mean like it's basically like someone who i know at some point will go build their own company right but like maybe i can you know train them in sales for a while from old trade stuff but they're also throwing skin in the game they're like i'm gonna give you twelve months of my life and i'm gonna hit this number and if i don't hit it you don't have to give me one percent but if i do then i want one percent that's yeah exactly fair that's absolutely i mean apps i think that should be asked for more if like if you're coming out as grounding anything at a startup up like you should pick a pie in this sky number metric and if i hit this then put something attached to it hundred percent i i just and like i think the equity is not as valuable as at once was i think that's i think another play if you're an early start person is like you should try to negotiate hey like when we do around of funding like i want the option of secondary right i think like that's i think those are important a clay who just raise a another crazy around like they they did a great job with that like they offer secondary it's like i think they're first like one hundred and two awesome yeah right and i think that like like celebrate the wins together especially with the founding team and i don't think equities as valuable as it once was so i think it's important to have other exit pass yeah that makes sense that's fair let's go beyond the curtain a bit so what are some of those habits that you use to kinda stay focused i know you talked about staying in shape trying to go to the gym all that kind of stuff like what are the things that you use to stay focused on this path and like commit yourself to to entrepreneurship like and do it again yeah so i i mean like the the getting in shape one and the talking like your partner and i'm having like like having a motivational speech that you know right need yeah i think some of it i mean they it's it's important to know whatever you're building you need have passion behind you like having to experience that problem right is important to have a founder who pushes you is that is a big one and like knows your ins and now knows when you give you feedback we're not to give you feedback right you're gonna have days where like you just pissed off and everything and like you need to know how you how you're gonna click back in like whatever it might be it might be like you just take the day and then you check the next day so i think that it's important to understand and like i didn't have that i would say the first time around like i know now like their days right just some not feeling it right and like you do and you go into the motions it's not helpful point and so that you you need to know when you need to check out and then check that again is really important and then to know your escapes whatever it might be if it's vacation if it's a weekend away if it's shut prime rib you never know right yeah whatever whatever whatever it might be i i think it's important to have that yeah i love that that's awesome when it comes to success in how you define that like what did it look like when you started s and watches does it look like no man so s we started that we were like we should make this a lifestyle business like this is like four kids so you'll like we're like we're like we should build with in bali and this had this thing real on its own right and this like then were like oh we're raise a little money and then we raise a lot of money right out went away quickly and so probably yeah yeah success there i would say was to build a company that was lasting like that made a made a profit and help people like solving problems but i think a lot of it was able as a successful business that helps you know people solve problems and build something that like you know like made it we're like we could pay ourselves like guess sorry to you i think it was important right now i would say it's there's a lot of like the data piece is so important we're building so it's making it easy for companies to just market better and it'd be really cool ways where they can hear our customers have to say yep i think is important right and then i think it's about to business that can scale i think right this one my plan is not to raise as much money this time around i wanna about a business that is easy to use and makes it easier for people to get information they're looking for i think reviews online are great i just don't think that i think they're gonna die i think you wanna have like face face conversations yeah so and hopefully we're at the beginning that make it easier people that's cool i like it it's a big bet this is like would would you say this is entire new category like i'm not familiar with many it is yeah it's which is tough i think they're like trying to figure out i it's a new way of selling because we're you're taking the reference of being at the end of the sales cycle to yeah beginning where the role right right that's about different people aren't used to doing that at all but the thing is people are used to doing it because a back channel true or they buy anything and so it's just taking that and making it more transparent yeah yeah that's fair and is the belief that at the end of the day if you folks can get this right in b to b in this world that brands will kind of be encouraging their customers to use go through slash experts to kind of facilitate that dialogue i think it should be a term in the contract hey i we'll give you a discount on your contract and that's cool you can be an expert for us i think that's that's that's go that's the goal right i think yeah there's so many different ways to use a lot of the tools that are out there and talking to peers that are already doing it i think it's helpful i think it not only helps the deal close but it also helps a customer more successful because no one wants sell shelf for these days so true i think it's important to be able to have that for people fast four ten years everything with slash experts has gone well things that and what's the what's the world look like then we have so much data like most people like i i think at that point like there's when you're thinking about buying a product like you're looking for there's like next to the book of demo button there's also a talk to a customer talk to an expert button on right most b2b sites should be great but i i think that's in the next couple years so my goal is if i look ten years out i would say that there's so much data that we've collected from these companies that you don't have to talk to somebody there's also a chatbot that's just learned that's everything from these phone calls that can just live there and answer any phone any question you might have or right to ten years so they actually just they know you already need this as sprouts starts that's it's as you code to a page it's like hey like you're looking for x because you've x right right i think like that's gonna be that's wild that's the vision of like have that much data in first party data on companies which should be the goal that would be awesome or we all might just be robots and all just working at hr hvac companies hey that's another and that's another possibility anyway that's fair getting served up by the the robots in the the restaurants all of that gets up it's gonna be a wild time when you look back at the last decade plus of your career and you look at the next wave of entrepreneurs i know you've seen a lot of early founders you are in those circles etcetera what's the advice going ahead like you've seen the social media arise you saw the immersion of that if you go way back you've seen the immersion of iphones and what that did for mobile etcetera this is that new thing with ai as somebody who's gone through some transformational moments in business what's the advice that you would give to somebody who's getting started at first time first time founder they're ready to build they want to create the next dos they want to be essentially you but they're just getting started they might not even have money yet mh how do they or how should they think about the next decade for their career to to come out of this thing winning yeah i mean i i think that a lot of us think have done to like how fast you can build and i think that that's because there's so many tools that help you build quickly so something that you used to take a week now takes an hour and so i think it's important to whatever your concept idea is that you're thinking about or think that there's a problem that you wanna sell bounce it off of like every friend league person and i'd be like do you think this is a real problem yeah they start reaching out the people that are in the space already and pitching the concept be careful about end day and all that stuff but i think like i think most most people is like like most founders love talking about new ideas right that aren't built yet and most will help you point in the right direction i like find those people or ask for those intros and like your idea like crazy if you and like i think that most founders will like are pretty cynical and they'll be like oh this is a bad idea right so or like which and if you get enough of those like maybe it's not great but you you get a lot of nose as a founder a lot like this isn't gonna work or his a feature it's not a platform right i think if you are truly believe in it as a founder and like you bounce around if you gotten something like maybe then like then go and build it and then get really good at the basics get really good at wire wire framing you can do easily now but you need to get great that you need to get good at how you track what your engineers are doing and you need to find a team of people and peers that you trust to help to build it with you right i think like that's i don't building a company on your own is cool i just don't think it works i think it's able to have peers to build it with i think it's easier so i think like like have a team that you trust to go and build it with too it makes complete sense brandon i've got one last question and it's a bit fast forwarding as well but as a a dad and you have a little one what's the message that you let's pretend they find this podcast someday let's pretend they are listening and they wanna hear something from debt what's the message that you would want to leave your little ones with for them to hear from you i think this so there was there's always the one that i was told as a kid that was you know follow your dreams so the yep you know the money will follow and all that jazz i don't know right i felt like right like i think that like that works i can you followed by yeah follow i think that would work if you had like success wear it then you wanna go follow your dreams right right i would say like to constantly improve cool would be like my one is like if there's something that you're like whatever form of business you choose mh and like be one of the best at that form of business and constantly improve to make sure that like you know whatever is you're working on you're getting better and better at which i think is important yeah and like you can do that easily there's ai that are out there there's all kinds of tools that you can use and if it's the future matters even more stuff so i think that's important yeah so whatever industry you're in that'd be the best at it or least strive you the best for it and then i think like the other one would like if you're miserable right you're making a lot of money that's cool but like there's a lot more like make a little bit bank little bit and then and they and think do something money you wanna yeah i think you don't have to stand a job because you're making a lot of money yeah say it for a while like right to the point where you're open the bag take care yeah exactly your yeah but like i imagine like loyalty is gonna be a really interesting thing with companies is like as companies like go through this next iteration of ai and yeah i don't know when when my daughter's is old enough to look at like is are we back to spending thirty years of the company any probably not i imagine there's more everyone's probably more like a consultant yeah so just be really good at the industry you choose i that's fair brad thank you so much for the tech really appreciate you jumping on this has been an absolute pleasure where can folks find more about you about slash experts to what you're doing yeah mean you check out slash experts dot com for sure then i'm only brad and young on all linkedin my name is spelled weirdly so your o d n so find me on there and i'll include some links so folks can find it as well again brad thank you so much have a great one and appreciate you jumping on thanks gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

you don't become the world's most valuable woman sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience to make it all in one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just a matter of three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in over two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better let's zoom the launch of chat bt five is not just an upgrade it's a leap we're not just talking about a few tweaks here and there we're talking about a fundamental evolution in how humans and machines collaborate this version holds longer conversation handles much more complex tasks i've been looking into it and i've seen that it's the most advanced ai for health ever it can code design diagnose build you can use it as a tool it can reason there's even a demo that i saw where it builds a fully functioning game from scratch with one prompt no dev no meeting no designers no mock ups one prompt long gay now imagine what this does for a solo founder for a student a small business a marketer for you it shorten your timelines it eliminates bottlenecks and it should multiply productivity folks this is a tool that thinks with you this is a technology that is fundamentally changing the way we should operate as professionals especially in the white collar world today we're gonna talk with something that just happened something game changing folks chat pt five is here and if you are playing the long game you are in the right place let's talk so chat five has just dropped and this is an a marginal upgrade folks it's faster and smarter it's more useful it can hold contacts longer respond more naturally reason better and even build games like let's be very blunt anyone who thinks that ai is a had is absolutely being silly it's ridiculous to think that that is a idea worth holding on two folks we're so far gone whether you love it or haiti it's all secondary at this point right this is where things are getting really interesting i've seen a few case studies over the last little bit that are showing the power of chat five designers are creating full brand kits in the matter of seconds developers are qa their code founders are creating entire landing pages and go to market plans i don't know if they go to market plans they're that good but hey they're decent right i think the power is in the prompt students are using it to prep for interviews right i even seen someone use it for customer support like they are literally using it for everything folks let me say this loud for the people in the back this is the new baseline right this is why i've been getting into debates and arguments on the internet with so many people because i don't think that if you are a mediocre anything you have a foot to stand on mediocrity is no longer going to be allowed if you are mediocre at your job if you are mediocre in your craft you will be replaced and if you want to establish mediocrity the bare minimum is to use ai because ai does everything mediocre right it does it at the average level and kind of with the roll to chat five it might have got a little bit better than that right here's what blows my mind still so many people are skeptical still clinging onto to that idea that chat l le the ai can't write content can't create a good story while i'll tell you this you can put up a post right now today using a tool like distribution dot ai you can use this to take your podcast take your youtube videos and it can write a few linkedin posts for you and they will be written fast in your voice faster and better than most marketers could it's really like a lot of these folks who are nay saying it's just hype are kinda like someone standing on a beach watching a sun tsunami come in and if me has just a big wave folks this is an optional avoiding ai in twenty twenty five is like avoiding the internet back in two thousand and five you don't have to go full doom right you don't have to completely pivot your life i don't want you if you have a successful career if you're two years away from retirement hustle daily show hosted by juliet bennett r robert litter ben berkeley and martin is brought to you by the hubspot podcast the audio destination for business the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of aaron off beaten informative takes on business and tech groups most recently it broke down the news ahead everybody talking that is meta complete blitz on recruitment and hiring all across many industries poaching people left right and center from every big ai company you can think of and how their acquisition of scale ai might have been one of the best chess places chess pieces to move in recent history folks if you haven't listened to recent hustle daily episodes you definitely wanna check it out listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast you don't need to change everything but you should pay attention because this is the biggest shift i think in social media and the people who embrace it they're going to build faster think bigger and execute matter with fewer people fewer resources than ever before profitability should be easier for everyone because you now have tools that can do things they used to take people they used to cost hundreds of dollars now can be done for pennies on pennies with a prompt so here's the move folks here's the move that i'm playing not only am i building ai tools like distribution dot ai i'm encouraging every foundation i'd have foundation to embrace technology like this if you are writing an email ask the ai that we created internally that talks about our best practices for follow ups and communications that is clear that we trained and ask it is this a good email before you send it upload your fathom recording which is one of the ai tools that we use to kinda keep track of our sales calls and then use our l tool to analyze your pitch understand if you made a right proposal get feedback for yourself on how you communicated it all of this creates a a flywheel a feedback through ai and if the ai is trained on best practices on principles that we believe that we think are true then the only thing that can happen is improvement so i encourage all of you to play with it explore it learn it build with it when you see chat five go live don't say i'll try that later try it now this technology is game changing i have seen firsthand people who are willing to take into consideration the fact that they are in control of their own growth and learn things be able to end up with a whole new trajectory of their career in their life and i'm living proof of it i've done a time and time again i geek out about something i go deep something i become excellent at it i learn it well and then it opens up new opportunities and i want you to do the same if you are just getting started you can't get your foot in the door if you are trying to figure out how you're going to thrive in this world don't play the game of woe with me in the world is against me play the game as holy smokes look the technology that's at my fingertips i'm gonna use this to become great folks were at the edge edges something massive and with five i'm telling you i'm telling you i've been using this tool for the last couple hours this is just the beginning and the same way that the internet mobile changed everything ai is changing at all too the folks who win are gonna be the ones who know most the folks who win are gonna be the ones who experiment the most who tinker the most who ship the most folks if you're a marketer a ceo a creator developer just get involved just play with it just try something build something while you can and if you're playing the long game you need to start playing with this now gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business