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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and I'll tell you what.
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There are so many cool businesses in the world, and a lot of us think about the bigger businesses, the ones that have already succeeded in getting market penetration, the ones that we see every time we're out and about in the real world, and that's why today we've taken a company that I love as a consumer.
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It's in so many Walmarts and so many locations around the world and we've asked ourselves who's the strategic minds, who are those visionaries behind the scenes that are propelling these companies into becoming a regular part of our everyday lives?
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And that's where we found an amazing entrepreneur who not only has helped big businesses succeed, but someone who is bringing all of those marketing services, the strategic planning, the visionary stuff.
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He's bringing all of that to small businesses and startups all across the United States.
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I'm so excited about today's guest and entrepreneur.
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His name is John Steele.
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John is a veteran of digital marketing with over a decade of experience as an in-house marketer at some of the hottest startups in tech.
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He helped build the SEO and digital marketing strategy that bought Kimi, which is that company I was alluding to over $115 million in investment and helped Polefish build a content strategy that helped get them to exit.
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After leading marketing at Philadelphia-based edtech startup Suitable through the pandemic, he founded John Steele Consulting last year to bring fractional marketing services to the startup world.
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Now, the way that John thinks you're going to hear yes, marketing principles and strategies here today, but I really want you to get into his mindset of growth and strategy and the intention behind the decisions that he makes and that he helps other companies make.
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We're all going to learn a lot from him today, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with John Steele.
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All right, john, I'm so excited that you're here with us.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Hey Brian how you doing.
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I am so good man.
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You've got a lot to live up to today.
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I so respect the work that you do.
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You're incredibly accomplished, both in your professional career and then also as one of us, as a fellow entrepreneur.
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So give us that backstory.
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Who's John?
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How'd you get here?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So when I came out of college, you know, I started out as a journalist here in the Philadelphia area.
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I worked for Philadelphia Weekly, which is like our version of the Village Voice down here, and I was a sort of a music journalist and covered politics in the city.
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And after you know, the 2008 recession, a lot of journalists you know sought placement elsewhere and I did some communications work and sort of learned how to blog, taught myself how to code a little bit and started working with marketing agencies, sort of as a content strategist.
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So I would work on helping them devise SEO strategy for different companies, writing articles and blogs, sort of launching content, products and things for them so that they could present themselves in sort of a new way outside of the traditional media landscape.
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So these are not companies that are buying ads on television, they're not companies that are doing billboards or things like that.
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These are companies that really want to present themselves not only, as you know, forward thinking, but also sort of flexible new products, new businesses, or they want to rebrand themselves to a new audience, something along those lines.
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So I worked for larger companies doing that and smaller companies within the agency world when I moved to New York in 2014,.
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My wife had gotten into a grad school program there and we moved up there in 2014.
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I started working with startups in-house, so I went from the agency world to bringing all of those concepts in-house to a small business.
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This is a company that operated out of a single room.
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I watched them go from this tiny little office, where everything was falling apart, to a glossy, much nicer office.
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They signed a couple of new clients and they were able to move up there.
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I was able to help them build content and sort of tell their story in a new way.
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They wanted to go to trade shows.
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They wanted to write more blog posts and focus on search and SEO and find these new business opportunities.
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And I really caught this bug for working with startups, where it's never really gone away for me.
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You know the impact that you can have working in a small company.
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You can walk in one morning and sort of say, you know, this thing that we do isn't working and you were able to just just fix it.
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We can just say you know we're gonna just not do that anymore or we're gonna have a new way of doing it, or whatever.
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Your ability to impact change using technology, you know, using strategy was much bigger, and so I found that to be very exciting and that was how I sort of operated there until I made the move over to Kimi a few years after that, and Kimi was a really exciting robotics company, you know again small office, sort of getting their things together.
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When I went to interview there, they had robotics parts and locks, door locks just sort of the guts of them all over tables.
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They were trying to, you know, engineer a robot cutting arm for keys that could cut a key for you in person.
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And so when I went to interview there, I was like what is going on in here?
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They've got parts and things laid out all over the tables and stuff and people were running around, sort of like people were sitting at different tables trying to pick locks.
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They were teaching themselves how to pick locks and how the sort of bulbs of locks worked so they could write code to train a robot to do similar things.
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And so, you know, all different ideas were flowing around and it was just infectious.
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It was just absolutely infectious to be in that kind of an environment where every day you could come in and you could innovate, you could build something entirely new and I watched that company grow from they had a few kiosks in the New York area to going completely national and I helped build the SEO strategy for that.
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So we essentially were able to take those kiosks, list them online as individual businesses in a way that had not been done up to that point where basically the challenge is you're listing a business inside of a business and you're listing a business that is completely automated.
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There's no person there cutting keys for you.
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So that was sort of a new frontier for Google that they were just sort of getting into and the other Maps platforms as well, of a new frontier for Google that they were just sort of getting into, and the other Maps platforms as well.
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And me and my team figured out a way to get those kiosks listed.
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And then we figured out a way to scale and by the time I left we were doing, you know, hundreds of these kiosks a day, getting them live and online.
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So they went from a few hundred impressions on Google to over 3 million and they were able to roll out, you know, really exciting new marketing opportunities within those kiosks.
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So you know, it was really such an exciting time to be there.
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And then, you know, they made the pivot to try and become a much larger business and the head of my department left at that point to go join a new startup.
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And I went and joined him because, again, I just get so excited about newer companies, smaller companies.
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And that's how I met Polefish and we were able to do a similar thing there where, you know, we were able to do more with less.
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So, you know, smaller marketing budget, smaller team, smaller offices and you know we wanted to.
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We were going up against SurveyMonkey, which is a pretty big competitor, a household name, and we were able to build a content marketing strategy that actually challenged them directly and was able to, you know, get into searches, get into building some ads and things like that, to directly compare ourselves to them in this way.
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And we did that with a number of the competitors in the space to be able to generate awareness for this, this insurgent technology.
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To be able to generate awareness for this insurgent technology.
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And that was a really exciting thing too, where I went from a product that was brand new to a product area that had already existed, but they were approaching it in a new way.
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They were more of an insurgent brand and that was really a transformative experience for me, because I got to see the way that content marketing and SEO can be used to not only build awareness but also, you know, sort of challenge the status quo and, you know, build people's interest in a new type of product.
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And I brought that to suitable, who was facing similar challenges where, when I became the VP of marketing there, their biggest competitors were merging and sort of building up against them and they had to become really an insurgent brand to say, you know, these, these bigger, larger companies, they're building these massive tech infrastructures and you know, you may not need all of that, you may need a more simple solution.
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And so, yeah, we were really a David going up against the Goliath there, and, you know, I felt like we were able to hold our own.
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So, you know, so it's really why I wanted to start JSC, because I used a number of vendors along the way that really didn't understand the challenges that startups face, the specific challenges that startups face, and so that's really where I sit today is.
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I wanted to focus on those tough challenges specific to startups and help them, whether they're insurgent brands, whether they're brand new technology, they're sort of established brands that have just struggled to gain footing as they scale and grow.
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Yeah, I love that overview, John, especially because it really reveals, obviously, where your background comes from.
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I always think I talk to a lot of marketers, obviously as host of this show, and I could have 500 different marketers on and I'm going to get 500 different stories and vantage points and experiences.
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You brought us all the way back to starting in journalism and that's why it's no surprise to me that one word popped up quite a few times in your career arc, and that is, of course, content.
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And, john, I'm going to publicly call this out because what I really admire about your journey is that it's not a mistake.
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You have this proven track record of going to multiple different places.
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How often do we see, on both a macro and micro level?
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On a macro level, we see executives or thinkers go somewhere and they're not able to replicate those same results that they got.
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I mean, if we want to apply it to basketball terms and I'll add a little salt in the wound is Doc Rivers?
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I mean, yeah, he won a championship in Boston.
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He can't go anywhere else and win, and so the question is, is it him or is it the system?
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And then, on a micro level, we see it in our businesses.
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We do something, it works.
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We can't replicate it over the long term.
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So, john, that's what I really admire and that's why I want to use that analogy to pivot into the age old cliche of content is king.
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A lot of people, we've all heard that term, but I would argue and I hear from a lot of listeners around the world that it's kind of a lost art these days because people are impatient.
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People want to just hop on social media and go viral.
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But when you talk about the Kimi story, it's crazy because any geographic region I've ever lived in, if you search for locksmiths, kimi pops up before local locksmiths.
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Now it you said it it's like their, their own independent businesses.
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So let's talk about content.
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What's your take on that age-old cliche of content is king?
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Is it still relevant?
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Is it the longer but more fruitful path?
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How should we be thinking about that these days?
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Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
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So I think content has sort of gone through an interesting trajectory to where you know it was super important for a time and then it's sort of it receded from people's minds as being one of the top choices.
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I can't tell you you know how many times I had conversations about you know how you have to build a multi-channel strategy.
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You have to build both content and sort of spend your ad dollars wisely, be strategic about SEO and things like that.
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But you know, all of these channels really do feed into one another and I think one of the things that people need to understand is how search engines sort of view their content right.
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So it used to be.
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You would write a blog post and Google would show you the best result for a customer search, and so what people would do is they would go.
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I know my customers are searching these terms to find me.
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So I'm going to write blog posts that have these terms in them and I'm going to be an expert on these topics and I'm going to keep writing blog content and, you know, just keep churning out content that can answer questions for people, and for a while that really worked.
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I mean people that were providing actual value and were writing content to appease search terms that people were trying to find, were able to differentiate themselves in the market.
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A few things happened.
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So first, google had a very pivotal earnings call I believe it was about 2010 or 2011, where they were told in no uncertain terms that you have a sort of existential crisis.
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Google is too good as a product.
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Essentially, people come to Google, they find what they need immediately and they leave.
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They click off and go to that, and the problem with that is that Google wanted to sell ads.
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They wanted you to look at their ads, they wanted you to click on the results for the businesses that they bring, and they found that click throughs on ads.
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You know, people were really interested in the awareness numbers as well.
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They were really interested in the number of active users that were seeing those ads.
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And so Google sort of reorganized the way that the SERPs work and they sort of said that it was a user experience thing and in some ways it is that you know you can get a search that comes straight to the top.
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But basically, google can go into your blog post now and if you ask it a question, it can find the answer to your question and it can stick it right at the top of the SERP and you never have to click off of Google and you can get a number of answers this way.
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They also they also put in little questions that you might also have right below it.
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So they'll use AI and they'll use their mass network, their massive data bank of searches that other people have done, and they basically say well, if you search for this, you might want to also search for this, and they'll build this massive list right below it, so you never need to leave Google to get a full accounting, a full answer to whatever question you have.
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And so that really puts content marketers at a disadvantage.
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The way people need to compete with that is they need to find ways to cut and slice their data and cut and slice their content into more and more channels, and they need to figure out how to put themselves in front of the eyeballs of the people that they are interested in serving.
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So first you have to find out who you want to serve, then you have to find out what they want to hear, what they need to hear in order to work with you.
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Then you need to figure out how you're going to get as many eyeballs on that message as you possibly can.
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It's much less important to have 20 messages, all of which are perfect, and you're providing this deep well of knowledge.
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A lot of search does come from that, but if you can drill down on a couple of core topics that people are really, really interested in and you can distill your message down to a few core topic areas and you can go depth on those topics, that is going to be much more valuable to you, especially if you can put that content into more and more channels over time.
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So the way that you do that is you know Google has a number of rich snippets Now you get into.
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You know code and tech stuff where you have to sort of structure your content to be pulled into the different menus and the different tools that Google now provides on its SERPs.
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You also need to be on other platforms where people's eyeballs are.
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So YouTube is a Google product, but it's also the second largest search engine after Google, so people do a ton of searching there and if you're interested in doing video, that is a huge plus for your business.
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What would be even better is if you could turn a blog post or a guide into videos, into infographics, into infographics, into.
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So you're basically building content to be in multiple channels, deepening your authority within Google on a couple of core topics that are central to your business and telling that story.
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And so I think content is still king.
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But you have to be strategic, especially as a small business owner or startup, as to how you use your resources, because what a lot of people do is they will spend a ton of time on building content and then they don't have any time left.
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They haven't been strategic as to how they're going to get people to see it, so they just stick it on their website and think they're done and try and share it with their networks and they try and build a following on LinkedIn or something like that, and then they just call it a day.
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And the ones that do try and scale it, if they don't have a content strategy in place to do that, they will be chasing their tail for months on a single blog post, when they really want to get all of this stuff out much more quickly and at much less cost to what they had to do, so that they can save that cost for to what they had to do so that they could save that cost for, you know, ads and promotional to that content, because that stuff is expensive and it's hard for smaller businesses to compete.
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So if they're spending all their money on production then they can't really compete against the bigger guys that they're going up against.
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Yeah, john, you see, this is why I love talking to great marketers, because you always bring it back to the business fundamentals, and I feel like when we talk about content, most people want to skip straight to the channels, which, yes, of course, we can't ignore the channels but you first went straight to those foundational questions of who is it that we want to serve, where are they, what are they searching, what are they thinking about, what are those pain points?
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And so I love those fundamentals.
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It makes me really want to zoom out because I'll confess this to you is that the more I was doing my research about the work that you do and the way that you approach real life business problems, it seems to me like you have a big business pet peeve, and that is a lack of a plan, a lack of a strategy, because you work in the world of startups, which I can't think of many worlds that are faster moving than startups, and I can imagine that most of these startups, especially when they get funding, is they just hire.
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We hear that all the time in media headlines is they hire a marketing team?
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There's all these titles these days in the marketplace I've never even heard of, like growth strategists and all of that, and that's what they rush to.
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Without having that plan, john, what's a real plan look like?
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What do we need to do before we start aggressively pursuing marketing and hiring?
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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So, you know, I really learned this working with a couple of the startups that I've worked with, where you know, and it's an understandable position for them to be in.
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But essentially, you know, if you are a young coder, a young engineer or you are a young entrepreneur and you you know you want to get into marketing, the concern is that you're going to spend a whole lot of money and not get a lot of return as you sort of learn the area, and so you want to bring someone in who can lead that effort for you.
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The problem is is that a lot of companies, a lot of startups, will start.
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They'll believe, when they found the business, that it's their job to sort of do some marketing on their own and sort of, you know, show some amount of foundational build of a marketing department, and that can really set businesses back, unfortunately.
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So what ends up happening is they'll make some unfortunate choices in terms of their technology stack.
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For example, They'll commit to building a website on a platform that is really underutilized in the market, doesn't have a ton of buy-in from engineers, so they don't get new features, they don't get user experience.
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That can really save them a lot of time and energy and instead you're sort of stuck on a stack that is not built to move as quickly as some others.
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You would also get into a position where you may have an agency or a vendor group that's not serving you because they're not specialized in smaller businesses, and so what ends up happening is you sign on to a sort of a services agreement with a big agency.
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They offer you a whole big ton of services that you aren't even really ready as a business to access.
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They don't focus on the things that are really important to you and they don't gotten to start sort of digging into it.
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But you haven't really answered some of the key questions that any marketing strategy really requires.
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I think companies don't start at the beginning.
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They sort of start in the middle, and I think that that's where this planning comes in.
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So what do I mean by that?
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Well, I think companies don't think about positioning or competitive analysis right away.
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They think about their competitors, but they don't think about the long-term plan of their competitors or the type of customer that they want to reach.
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That's different from the type of customer that their competitor wants to reach, different from the type of customer that their competitor wants to reach, or they don't think about things like what if your customers are just good with the status quo, because it's easier and it's hard to convince them that the problem that you solve is worth the headache of replatforming or changing their stack around?
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So that can be a challenge, so you could be spending all kinds of money and time speaking to a problem that isn't as big for your customer as you think it is, and that's a challenge.
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You come into it with some assumptions, because you've written a business plan, You've gotten buy-in from key stakeholders, You've done some hiring, You've sold a few units, and what ends up happening is you have a story that you're telling yourself and then when you go to scale, or you get some new competitors in the market or your competitors you know merge with others, or get a big investment or something like that, the landscape changes and so if you don't have a fundamental view of who your customers are and why they're interested in working with you or a business like you, then you're going to be in a challenging situation and you're going to waste a lot of time and money that you don't have.
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You can't afford to waste.
00:24:02.359 --> 00:24:13.509
I think next then you would go to sort of that marketing operations idea, which is like how can automation and technology be used to make us more competitive?
00:24:13.509 --> 00:24:31.530
So once you know the customers you want to reach and you sort of have your ideas of them built out and the messages you want to send to them, you need to figure out a way to build content at scale and build content that you're not going to need it.
00:24:31.530 --> 00:24:34.006
Resources You're not going to need some.
00:24:34.006 --> 00:24:38.262
You know a flashing agency or something like that to build for you.
00:24:38.262 --> 00:24:39.683
You need a content developer.
00:24:39.683 --> 00:24:52.534
Um, you need a content machine, essentially for lack of a better term that you can sort of build your ideas into and then sort of build content quickly and scale it effectively.
00:24:52.534 --> 00:24:56.636
Um, and there's, there's a lot of great technology out there to be able to do that.
00:24:56.636 --> 00:25:02.661
And for sort of an upfront investment and having a plan for that, you will save yourself so much time.
00:25:02.901 --> 00:25:16.938
I can't tell you how many of my clients have committed to some technologies that are not going to serve them in the long term and they're prolonging an inevitable switch that they're going to have to make eventually.
00:25:16.938 --> 00:25:20.454
I think that creates some issues for them.
00:25:20.454 --> 00:25:57.680
And then, just basically, from there it's having a content strategy and then having a production strategy where you can not only effectively convey those messages that you figured out before from your competitive analysis that you need to convey, but also how to produce that content in a timely way Sorry, my doorbell's going there how to produce that content in a timely way so that you know you can be agile, be effective, respond to changes in the marketplace effectively and capture the attention of potential customers for yourself.
00:25:57.680 --> 00:26:06.740
So I like to say that you know I help companies make their make themselves fast, flexible and findable to their most valuable customers.
00:26:06.740 --> 00:26:08.829
So I think that's really the game.
00:26:09.571 --> 00:26:12.066
Yeah, I love the way you've articulated that, john.
00:26:12.066 --> 00:26:23.212
It's really fun for me because I want to transition a little bit this conversation, because hearing you talk about all of this as a subject matter expert is one thing, but, as I teased at the top of the episode, you're also one of us.
00:26:23.212 --> 00:26:24.596
You're also a fellow entrepreneur.
00:26:24.596 --> 00:26:31.623
So I want to get into that entrepreneurial head of yours because I not only love the what you do, but I love the how you do it.
00:26:31.623 --> 00:26:33.228
Your startup sprints.
00:26:33.228 --> 00:26:35.534
That's something that is so near and dear to my heart.
00:26:35.534 --> 00:26:37.157
I'm a big believer, I love quarters.
00:26:37.157 --> 00:26:43.036
I think we can accomplish a lot of big things in 90-day sprints, and so that's kind of how I internally operate.
00:26:43.036 --> 00:26:47.791
Talk to us about startup sprints and the capacities through which you work with the clients that you help.
00:26:49.134 --> 00:26:57.798
Yeah, so the idea behind the startup sprints was as a framework to sort of view how startups, what startups, need.
00:26:57.798 --> 00:27:04.535
That's different than other types of businesses, so startups and small businesses have different challenges.
00:27:04.535 --> 00:27:11.732
So I am, you know, I'm pitching some work right now around that local SEO.
00:27:11.732 --> 00:27:47.643
That was similar to what I did with Kimi, and it's a similar situation to where you know, if you're a larger business and you're you know, you're a chain you have a hundred locations or whatever you have the infrastructure and the manpower to get a ton of your new locations online as a smaller shop, you really have to make decisions around what you're going to focus on, and so I think what I wanted to do was I wanted to create some areas of service that we offer.
00:27:47.643 --> 00:27:53.865
So these are the services that we offer, and they're really geared towards what stage of your business you're at.
00:27:53.865 --> 00:28:33.691
So I think part of what I like to do with the clients that I serve is figure out what stage they're at and then figure out which of these sort of task areas service areas can help them, and so I think the four stages that I've identified are positioning and competitive analysis, marketing operations, content strategy and content production, and so what you see with a lot of businesses, like I mentioned before, is if you're in this sort of early stages or you're sort of looking at rebranding, you need to maybe launch a new product line.
00:28:33.691 --> 00:28:35.234
That happens sometimes.
00:28:35.234 --> 00:28:54.047
You're really in that stage where you may be doing something that either you've never done before or you never looked into in a more strategic way, and I think that is figuring out what I said before that exact thing that your customers are looking for.
00:28:54.047 --> 00:28:57.199
Why do they come to you versus your competition?
00:28:57.199 --> 00:29:00.228
What is your sort of unique value proposition to them?
00:29:00.228 --> 00:29:03.212
What are you offering them that no one else can?
00:29:03.212 --> 00:29:08.308
And in some cases you know that thing doesn't really exist.
00:29:08.308 --> 00:29:18.998
It's more the way you conceptualize what already exists in a different way, or you package the same service differently, or something like that.
00:29:18.998 --> 00:29:23.012
But it doesn't necessarily need to be a completely unique product.
00:29:23.012 --> 00:29:25.699
You just need to figure out a new way of approaching it.
00:29:26.405 --> 00:29:31.958
And then for sort of the marketing operations piece, this is where you see a lot of businesses.
00:29:31.958 --> 00:29:39.115
They've made some technology decisions.
00:29:39.115 --> 00:29:42.259
They have sort of efficiency issues.
00:29:42.259 --> 00:29:44.890
They have things are taking way too long.
00:29:44.890 --> 00:29:49.589
Their staff can't make sense of the website builder that they have.
00:29:49.589 --> 00:30:10.175
They're sort of the way that they build content, the way that they deploy content is slow and difficult, and so, therefore, it creates bottlenecks and they're not getting their message out as quickly as they need to, and that's technology related.
00:30:10.175 --> 00:30:21.432
They have ideas, they have customers, they know they want to reach, they have messages they want to get out, and they just can't get out of their own way enough to do it, and you see that pretty constantly.
00:30:22.035 --> 00:30:31.377
Another stage of business that somebody ends up in is they have a ton of content, they've created a ton of content already and it's just sitting there, nobody's looking at it.
00:30:31.377 --> 00:31:17.316
They may have 100, 200, 500 blog posts present it to uh, the market, to search engines, et cetera, um, and sort of make something out of this asset, because, as you know, as an entrepreneur, you can't waste the assets that you have, right, so that that's one of the worst things you could do as a as an entrepreneur is an entrepreneur is waste, an asset that you do have, and, make no mistake, any content that you make that is quality, that speaks to the needs of your customers, is an asset, and you need to get as much value out of that asset as you can.
00:31:17.316 --> 00:31:19.067
And then the last one is production.
00:31:19.067 --> 00:31:28.549
You know if you, if you're in a place where you have messaging, you know it can reach and you know that if you build more content you will get more return.
00:31:28.830 --> 00:31:30.916
There are a lot of companies that are in that place.
00:31:30.916 --> 00:31:33.170
They've basically built an audience.
00:31:33.170 --> 00:31:34.836
They have people that are interested.
00:31:34.836 --> 00:31:41.597
They just don't have the manpower and the capital yet to capitalize on that.
00:31:41.597 --> 00:31:52.315
And so you know, you see a lot of the second half of the sprints, the strategy and production kind of working together, where you know we got content that works.
00:31:52.315 --> 00:31:54.184
Some businesses are in that place where we got content that works, we got an audience.
00:31:54.184 --> 00:31:59.758
They're interested, um, but I need to know, you know, what they're most interested in.
00:31:59.758 --> 00:32:01.067
What can I double down on?
00:32:01.067 --> 00:32:02.971
Where should I put my resources?
00:32:02.971 --> 00:32:07.407
And then, how do I build a scalable strategy to build on that?
00:32:07.407 --> 00:32:19.367
And so maybe you'll start with topic A and you'll ignore topic B for a little while and you'll scale topic A and you'll build a structure for them in which they can build content into that over time.
00:32:19.387 --> 00:32:37.088
So it's really about the stage that the business is in as to which sprint that they would want to go into which service area that would work best for them, and I think that it's helped me to distill for clients.
00:32:37.088 --> 00:32:43.326
When I'm speaking to them, you know sort of what area here feels like the most need.
00:32:43.326 --> 00:32:51.615
Tell me about yourself, tell me about what you've done, what's worked, what hasn't, and we can sort of position them in the market.
00:32:51.615 --> 00:33:10.222
Also, just doing your research and you know, digging into the assets that they do have available there, you can find and you know sort of what they're working with and looking at their competitors and looking at who's beating them, because a lot of entrepreneurs are very competitive.
00:33:10.222 --> 00:33:12.428
They wake up in the morning thinking about who's beating them.
00:33:12.428 --> 00:33:23.651
So I think, knowing those things and then working with them, the sprints give me a really good way to start conversations and start them thinking about not only problems but solutions.
00:33:24.352 --> 00:33:27.590
Yeah, john, I'll tell you what it fits right in, and I knew you'd deliver in this way.
00:33:27.590 --> 00:33:38.218
I tease your approach at the top of today's episode as both strategic and intentional, and it's on full display even in the way you structure your services, and that's why I always say that quote.
00:33:38.218 --> 00:33:39.285
Success leaves clues.
00:33:39.285 --> 00:33:45.939
It's so clear in the way that you operate why you're able to get so many businesses, the results that you operate, why you're able to get so many businesses, the results that you help them with.
00:33:45.939 --> 00:33:46.778
So you've been a wealth of knowledge, john.
00:33:46.778 --> 00:33:55.031
I genuinely think you and I could go on for hours here today, but I'm going to ask you this question at the end of today's conversation and it's super broad, so you could take it in any direction you want.
00:33:55.031 --> 00:34:04.517
And that is what's your best piece of advice, your best takeaway knowing that we're being listened to by entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs all over the world at all different stages of their own growth journeys.
00:34:04.517 --> 00:34:07.101
What's that one thing that you want to impart them with today?
