Guest Podcast: The CEO's Playbook Building a Personal Brand That Attracts Millions (CEO DNA)

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