How To Market Anything (Michael Pederson & Dominate Your Market)

Want to know how to market a new product? Coming up with a new product or service is a lot of work, which unfortunately does not stop once it's ready. Launching and promoting it is the other half of the equation. You could be offering the best new product or service, but if you don't promote it properly, you're likely to miss out on opportunities or even lose money. Listen, as Scott DeClaire shares how businesses should market their products and services. Discover what business owners should look out for and the importance of marketing yourself to build customer trust. Welcome to the dominant your market podcast where we interview business leaders, CEOs and founders to get their insights on how you can grow your business efficiently, build an amazing company and still have a life. Today's guest is Scott Clarey, who is the CEO of On Me Patch, a vitamin patch company in the host of the success story podcast and the founder of a weekly business newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers. Holy crap. Welcome to the show, Scott. How's it going, man? I appreciate you bringing me on. Hello, Canadian. Yes, sir. Hello, Canadian. Let's go. Let's go. No, I'll tell you what. I was reading your about section on your personal website and that's about four podcast episodes just reading that thing. So I want you to give a backstory, but we cannot obviously speak. I won't listen. So what you're talking about, I wrote on my website, which is like the life story and it goes through like everything from where my where my parents came from to, you know, how I got into tech to all the different things I've done. So that's a long story. But long story short, right now, I'm CEO of a of a CPG company. It's a transformer, vitamin patch company. So Neutraceuticals, vitamin supplements, that's what I'm in right now. My past has always been in tech. So CPG is a little bit of a pivot for me. So I've worked in a variety of different tech companies as sales marketing, individual contributor all the way through to leading sales and marketing. My last company was a SaaS company, software as a service. We serviced broadcast customers and I helped grow that company as CRO and that was acquired. And right now, I guess mostly focused on the startup that I'm trying to build from scratch. So joined as CEO co founder, built a big business podcast. So doing the same thing you're doing right now. And that really was not so focused on selling a product of service day one, but it was building a community around the things that I love, which is sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, business, startup, all these things that you probably love to. And that's where the podcast came from, that's where the newsletter came from. So my life is sort of compartmentalized into two main parts. There's the personal brand building and the podcast and the community building, and then actually being an operator and building a startup. And that's where I'm at right now. You know what's interesting is I came across you on LinkedIn several months ago and I'm like, okay, shit, this guy's doing pretty good on LinkedIn. So that caught my attention and I saw your background, which is similar to mine, but of course much more accomplished than I bowed down to you. But very impressive, right? And I mean, your background with the companies you work with, but I thought I got to get this guy on the side. I'm really appreciative that you're on the show for sure. But I want to pick your brain even like this startup. I want you to talk about the start of your company, because number one, what made you even get involved with this thing? Yeah, that's a really good question, because after my last company was acquired, I didn't necessarily have to jump into anything right away. So it wasn't the kind of exit where you can never work again, but it's the kind of exit where you can be picky for a period of time before you jump into something new. And like I mentioned before, my background was in tech. So going into CPG consumer package goods, which is a complete pivot, right? There's a whole bunch of other issues. So when you're building out a tech company, and I built out tech companies from very early on, so it's not just the sales and marketing component that I've been part of. I mean, yes, technically the mandate was grow revenue, figure out how to build a brand, but you see all the different pieces. So you see all the product-focused pieces of the startup, you see the hiring, finance, you see all the tech side of it, all the troubleshooting, all the Q8. Like you're involved in everything very intimately when you're working in a small tech startup. So the problems that you run into in a tech startup are very different than the problems that you run into in a CPG startup. So when you ship a product in tech, you have bugs, and those are things you have to fix, and then you have maybe server bandwidth issues, and you have to light up another server to accommodate X,000 more clients using your products. But with a CPG company, you have to worry about supply chain logistics. And yeah, I mean, you have cash flow issues because you have to physically purchase product. You have lead time on the products that you're ordering. There's a lot of different components that I've actually never been exposed to. So to answer your question, why did I jump into this company right now? I think the reason why is because it sort of checked all the personal boxes that I had in my mind as to where I wanted to put my time. So it wasn't just an early stage company where obviously if you do that right and you apply your skills and your knowledge in an early stage company, there is an option for a large upside. But you shouldn't count on that because it's obviously very hard to get that upside. But there is an option for that. So if you are going to go balls to the wall into something and you have that kind of mindset towards your career, it is okay at an earlier stage to take risks working and start up, especially when you're on the cap table. I mean, I'm CEO co-founder, so I'm definitely on the cap table. But the point is that was sort of a calculated decision on my part. There was good investors, good co-founder. They needed a great operating partner. So I was really filling a gap that the original investors and founder needed. And that worked for me, but on top of that, the exciting part about the company on me in itself is that it's not just a commodity, which is a good and a bad thing. So Trans-Zermal Vitamin Patch. Literally you think nicotine patch, but then you take that nicotine patch and you can put any sort of active ingredient in it. So you could take all the ingredients in a five-hour energy drink and put it into a patch. You can take all the things that liquid IV does with like hangover relief and you can put that into a patch. And that's what we're doing. So we're taking all of these different consumer products. You put it into a patch, you stick it on your skin. And basically the skin is the largest organ in the body. So the active ingredients can go through your skin, go through your dermis into your bloodstream at roughly a 90% efficacy rate if the active ingredients are below a certain molecular weight as compared to about a 30% efficacy rate if you take a pill or a powder or gummy orally. So a lot of science behind it, yes, with the right molecular weight. So I'm hyping up all these different benefits to patches because this leads to the reason why I joined. It's disruptive, it's technically blue ocean and it's something that really hasn't been done properly before, but if done properly, then you are the incumbent creating the market, which is incredible but also incredibly hard. So it's not like I use example a lot, like liquid death, the water. They took a commodity and they actually applied the Richard Branson Virgin mobile strategy where he went into legacy industries with boring products and he just found a better way to market them. But there was already a huge tam. There was already a huge total addressable market with liquid death in particular. Everybody knows what water is. It's not confusing to people. So you just have to do it better or do it cheaper or do it slightly differently than somebody else is doing it to be effective. With us, nobody knows what a vitamin patch is. Really nobody knows. So I'm a lifelong fitness guy, a 45 years. 45 years, I've never heard of it. Because it's new and it's not popular. So it's a blue ocean product, right? It's the, there's a book behind me called Play Bigger and it's a book I reference a lot because it's about creating categories. It's about what Benny off did with Salesforce because there was no cloud computing SaaS CRM before Mark Benny off. So the point is very exciting opportunity. Very hard to execute well because when you do have a product that nobody's ever heard of before and not just a product or a brand like truly the product itself, nobody knows about outside of literally nicotine patches. We have competitors, but the total addressable market is very small. When you have that, you really have to focus on education and it is significantly expensive to bring a product to market because it takes a lot of money to educate people and to change their habits. So I got to change somebody's habit of taking a coffee in the morning or drinking a red bull or something like that. I got to change habits, but if you do that well, then you're untouchable because you're the first person to do it. So it's cool product. I know my strengths, which is sales and marketing drawing attention. I know my weaknesses, which is pretty much a lot of this up has to do with traditional CPG and supply chain. So I did hire people that are excellent at, for example, negotiating with retailers. I have a VT sales that has about 15 years CPG experience. You have to hire for what you're not good at, know what you are good at, and then hopefully, if you do everything right, in a market that is being created as you grow, you can have a really big moat around you because you're the first people to build a company in that market successfully. So that's it. So being a fitness guy, I'm super intrigued. So I'm just gonna ask this question. So you put the patch on where, like anywhere, like your arm? Because it's all skin. So it's all transdermals. So you put the patch on your skin. It's slightly time released. So any active ingredient is gonna, about eight to 10 hours. So you put on an energy patch, eight to 10 hours of active ingredients, I'm going into your body. So think of it as like an IV drip of that particular active ingredient. But yeah, it goes through your skin. As long as the active ingredients are below a certain molecular weight, they pass through your dermis, add a greater effectiveness and efficiency than if you're gonna take a pill, powder, gummy supplement. You've taken all these things before from like a vitamin shop, a GNC. And you go tell me if you take a multivitamin, your P is gonna be like neon because your body doesn't actually absorb a lot of the stuff that goes in. And on top of that, all those products, I don't like, okay, so we should focus on higher level strategies. Cause right now I'm just sort of like shilling my company, but. No, I appreciate that. And I did ask you the question by the way. So I do appreciate that. I don't like talking just product, but it is interesting how I look at going into an opportunity because I'm not gonna say that it was easy, but the other thing is, you know, with, and I'm a fitness guy too. So I played competitive hockey. My first job ever was coaching tennis. I played soccer and I played every sport and I've tried every supplement from the GNC's and the vitamin shops. And there's a lot of additives, a lot of filler. And if you actually start to look into going down a fitness route, we could have a whole fitness podcast too, but if you're going on a fitness route, you can take a look at all the additives in anything from like a way protein to a multivitamin, like a Jameson office shelves at Walmart. And there's so many additives and fillers. And if you look at the PubMed studies, if you take a sample size of people to take a very basic vitamin off the shelf at a Walmart, whatever, and you look at all those different additives and you take those additives for a period of time, like say 10 years every single day, a significant portion of that sample population will have some sort of carcinogenic cancerous effect. So this is why repeat exposure to things that shouldn't be in our body like the additives they put in sort of pills, powders, gummies, vitamins. It's not great. Now most people don't notice this because they don't really have a strict supplement regime. But people that do, it's shown that it's not that healthy. So with that in mind, how do you supplement differently? That's what we're trying to solve for. That is incredible. I mean, okay, well, so I'm going to check it out. Like seriously, check it out because- Do you check it out? Check out the product, but check out the science behind it. Because as a fitness person, as somebody who loves fitness and working out and tries to understand the body works and understands the different diets and supplements affect your body, it is actually a very important thing that we're trying to solve for. I hope we can do it. But ultimately, the takeaway is there's better ways to supplement so that you can operate at peak levels that maybe don't come from the fanciest packaging at GNC right now. So that's sort of the main takeaway for anybody who's actually like a fitness nut. And most people that are into fitness, they realize that a lot of stuff they take is junk. But they try and go for like the least, it's funny. Because like- Yeah, that's true. But you try and be healthy and you try and supplement. You try and take like way protein powder, but then you look at all the garbage in it and you're like, okay, so I'm working out, I'm getting more protein, but what's the side effect of taking in all these sort of processed, refined supplements? And you don't really feel it, the second you take it, then you start to worry, okay? So if I'm religious about working out and I do this for the next like 30 years in my life, what's the impact that all these added is are gonna have on my body? And then people start to worry about organic and all these other types of things, right? But that's really where it comes from. Because there's so much artificial stuff. Yeah. Well, thank you for all that because as a fitness guy, I was a private fitness trainer for 25 years. So you know, you know what's up. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've done all that. I've done it all. So that's very, very interesting. But you said something a couple of minutes ago that was super important for the listeners to hear. You hired people in the company that were, that were specialists at those other things that you weren't. It's pretty common, you know, most leaders have heard it before, but the CEOs I talked to are feeling at doing that. Many of them are not hiring the right hires to really transform the company. Well, what would you say to that? I mean, what do you think even in the mindset of a CEO is where why wouldn't you do that? That's like almost common sense. It should be common sense, but I think a lot of CEOs have ego. And I think a lot of CEOs don't want to admit that they don't, they don't know something. But I think the one, the most important thing that I've learned in business is the second you have an ego and the second you can be okay with being wrong, that's when you start to succeed. It's, it's like 100%, 110% of the time. There's never been a time, and also you have to start to think to yourself, why would you want to hire somebody that doesn't know as much as me? The whole goal should be to hire people that know more than you. So if you hire somebody that knows more than you, that's step one. But then the second problem that CEOs run into is they hire somebody properly, but then they don't actually let them do their job and execute because then there's an ego component in place. So you hire somebody that knows more than you. And usually if you can break it down and if you really want to hire the right person, it's really not that hard. If the person has done the thing that you're hiring them to do, they can describe an intricate detail like every single step that they took and passed rules to achieve and all the different problems that they encountered and all the different things and nuances. When somebody actually describes something that they know, it's very easy to tell versus somebody that just glosses over the details. And also somebody that has done it themselves and understands that their success, this is sort of an ethical thing for me, but somebody who's done it before and understands that they played a piece in a larger puzzle, they don't claim 100% of the success for themselves. So if I walk through, for example, a marketing strategy that I deployed at my last company, I'm not gonna, obviously it's silly because I was managing marketing teams, but even if I was a member of that team, I would still speak to the other components that made it successful because that's the truth. So if somebody says I deployed the strategy or I hire these people or we got this CPG product into this company, I wanna know that they understood all the different pieces that made them successful and then how they executed with all the different resources or lack of resources that they had. So that's one thing that I've really found to be helpful. So yeah, so make sure they can describe the thing that you're trying to hire them for in extreme detail so that they know it better than you. Make sure that they don't take 100% ownership for the work of others. And then you can also, when hiring people, especially in the startup environment, you can ask them how they'd execute the strategy with different types of budgets. So you can say, how would you do the strategy? How would you get into retail if you had no budget? Okay, now you have $100,000, what would you do? Now you have $5 million, what would you do? Now you have $50 million, what would you do? And if they can speak to each level, then that means that they've actually done it. And not everybody has to have had done it at every single level, but make sure the person you're hiring can have a good enough answer for the level that you're at right now. And that means that they're good for the specific role that you're looking for because you also don't want to hire somebody who's done it at $100 million per year company level and then gets put into a startup and doesn't understand how to operate. That's another big problem. So to your point, yeah, CEOs got to get their ego out of the way. And then once you sort of solve for hiring that right person, you just let them go. And then they're gonna run with it and they're gonna do what they do best, as long as you qualify them properly, there shouldn't be an issue. Yeah, that all was gold right there. Thank you, that was literally, that was awesome. Two things I wanna say about that. You can't refer into ego and we all know, boy, even in ego and sports, I was an athlete all my life, right? You know, I'll wait till training it for Canada. So you gotta have a high level of confidence but you can't have that ego overtake yourself even, right? Your own being to where it affects other people. And that's kind of what you're saying. So you said ego, which is critical. And the second thing, when you talk about hiring, you talk about if they take kind of sole ownership and something where it's really, it's a team thing. I would almost think that when you're hiring somebody, you almost wanna hear them say, we and not I. Yeah, you do, actually that's a great indicator that they're thinking in the right headspace because somebody that's taking accountability for things that they didn't do, it's so easy to suss out and it's very obvious because again, when you ask somebody to speak through all the different components that were part of that project, they're gonna stumble over things that they didn't do themselves. But it's silly because that person for some reason then thinks that they're expected to do. It's like there's an expectation that they did all these things themselves and they're not gonna be able to speak to them. Even though any good business leader knows that it always requires a team to be able to complete the thing. So when I speak to, if you ask me how to scale out a sales strategy, it's gonna involve the tech, it's gonna involve the marketing, it's gonna involve, it's gonna involve the inside sales rep, the outside sales rep, it's gonna involve the HR team that hired the right person, it's gonna involve the finance team that helped me come together with the right compensation plan to motivate them like there's never one person that's involved in literally anything in a business. So it's silly to think that you are, that's what people expect of you. But to have the awareness that it is a team effort and just in the way that you structure and answer to that kind of question means that you're thinking about all the other pieces and you're not, and you're not egotistical yourself. So I think that that's a great, a great way to qualify how that person thinks through their contribution to the team but also the importance of all the people that support and surround them. Okay, so let me ask you this question. How many, how many employees are in the company right now, roughly, for you? 10, 10, so four full time and then six part time. Or contractors, not really part time, but they're not W2s. Are they all remote? There's everybody remote? Yeah. Because I wanted to talk to you about that even in your previous companies, although I don't know if you were in any previous companies, COVID, dealing with COVID, but I think a lot of CEOs still are hesitant to do this work from home or even the hybrid model where I think employees now minimum for most of them hybrid, worst case scenario would be like, no, hybrid, that's it. I'm not going back in unless it's medical or it's a restaurant or something. Come on. Were you physically have to be or construction or something where you're like physically required? Yeah. So I haven't, so my last company was 100% remote. I love it. And that was actually, that company I joined, that was a company I have CRO at, that company I joined pre-COVID. So I don't know why the founder chose to build a remote team. I think, I think he just, at the beginning, he was a scrappy founder. He bootstrapped the majority of the company when I joined the company, it was about seven and a half, eight years old. And he didn't take on money. So when you don't take on money, day one, you start to become scrappy and that means you're using things like upwork and fiber and top tile to try and figure stuff out. And then I think that when you get good at hiring remote, then you realize how much of an asset that can be to a company and then you just double down on it. So even when you do have W2s or you have full time employees, if you know how to hire a remote, which is not easy, it's actually quite difficult to hire a remote, but if you can start to get into the cadence of finding good people, maybe spending a little bit of time with them in person when you're first getting to know them, but then ultimately you can let them live wherever they want to live. And we don't have a physical office and you can scale a company without an actual physical place, which we did, the last company didn't have a physical office. Awesome. Yeah, it just becomes a lot less of a headache and you can communicate asynchronously and you have all the tools to support that, as opposed to always jumping on calls or always being in a meeting room together and the team and you hire people that don't need, nobody should ever need micromanaging, but definitely are people that know what they have to do and they get it done and they're comfortable working on their own without much supervision. Once you kind of nail that, it's pretty hard to want to go back into an office or to make people go into an office when you know they dread it and you know they hate it and it just is sort of an added expense. So it's kind of the only company that I've known for a while. When I first started working in my professional career, I was always in office, but the second I started working in tech because I was like, okay, so I was in office for when I was living in originally in Ottawa and then in Toronto's in office in office and when I started doing consulting work where I pivoted from working for somebody to doing consulting work, I was trying to build my own consulting firm, I was obviously all remote, I was working with a ton of startups and then I doubled down on one of the startups, joined a CRO, that was fully remote, that was built, acquired, fully remote. And in this company, it's kind of just what I've gotten comfortable with. So we're still all remote. I still like to do in person like when I'm hiring and or events, but outside of that day to day, wherever we want to be. What do you think of Elon Musk with Twitter? As far as, I mean, here's the deal. I'm fortunate to say I have a Tesla. So I'm an Elon fan. I'm an Elon fan too. I'm an Elon fan. He's a very smart person. He's a very good business leader as much as people don't think he is, but I really do believe that he's an exceptional business leader. You look at his resume. So he asked everybody who could to come back into office. So I think that the difference is, the only difference I can think of, it's just sort of off the cuff, is that when you build a company virtual, there's a certain culture that's created of communication and interaction and collaboration and everybody finds ways to optimize their work without being in the same office. When a company was built with people in office and even the way that you hire or the people you look for or the tech you deploy across your organization has not been optimized for people to work remotely. It's a lot of lifts to get people to be able to operate at the same efficiency as they were. Think about you built something optimized one way then all of a sudden it all of a sudden had to be done another way. So I don't think that it could run as efficiently as when they had that legacy infrastructure in place. Do I think they should try and migrate towards that? Yes, I do, but I think that it's not an overnight thing. So I do believe that the culture and the nuance and the tech stack of a company has to be built with remote in mind. And that's how you build a successful remote company. But if it's not like that from the ground up and it's a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company that never had that built into its ethos, I think that's a tough thing to switch. So I understand why he's doing it too, but that's how he's also built all of his companies. So it just shows that he's never focused on optimizing for remote first. He's always found that he built companies in a very legacy way. There's also, I'm not going to be able to think off top of my head the names of companies because I don't know which companies stayed fully remote and some companies, some big companies are definitely fully remote. There's structures in place that they've put to allow them to do that that I don't think he's focused on yet. Interesting. That's it. That's interesting. Because I wanted to ask that question because it just came to be remote. It's a great question. And then Elon was like, oh man, because what I read was he almost demanded everybody come back. Well, he demanded everyone come back as every people that couldn't. I think the optimal structure, I do believe optimal structure is probably some version of hybrid. I think that the things that you miss when you're doing, so right now we're fully virtual, but technically for team get together is once a quarter, we still come to a location to meet in person. I think that the toughest part about virtual, outside of the culture and the bonds that you create with people that you work with, that you miss when you're virtual is that quick question, clarification where you would go by somebody's cubicle or office and say, hey, just need to help me understand this one thing. And it's like a 10 second interaction because you're physically in the same location. That gets missed with virtual. So if you don't figure out how to quickly exchange information in the same manner that you would, if you're physically in the same office, then you get bogged down with Zoom calls that take an hour for really what could have been like a five second interaction and that some people get burnt out because it's like Zoom fatigue. So again, this sort of goes back to you, how do you build an organization so that you can emulate all the things that happen in an office virtually? It's not easy, but there's ways to do it. But if you just take the standard tech stack that we have, which is jump on a Zoom call to discuss a problem, which is the only way that you really know how to speak with someone else right now, if you have only just gone virtual, then that Zoom call will you jump on and now you're on with the person and then you run through this whole list of things that really have no business being discussed in that Zoom call. And that's where you end up sort of failing in the virtual organization setup. That's very well said. Okay, here's a question for you. So this, all this economic stuff, right? Which economic stuff? Well, we're sit showing a lot of weight. Well, see, and you came down from Canada. There you go. It is a lot of it. Well, I didn't move down from Canada for economic reasons. I moved down for weather reasons, but yeah. Purely, I love what I moved to from Oregon to Arizona, purely weather. Purely weather. Oregon is cold as hell. Yeah. Rainy, rainy. It rains nine months of the fricking year. So it's like BC. It's like BC. Yeah, it's identical to BC. But anyways, okay. So with the economic, what would you say to like a small business owner start up? You know, kind of, you know, and you're, let's say a 10 to 50 employee company. Yeah. And that's typically who I work with. My consulting clients are kind of five to 20 million dollars smaller companies, right? But what would you say to them with this economic thing? I mean, do they batten down the hatches? Do they come back? I mean, you're a founder, you're a CEO. What would you say to them as far as mindset for the, what we're heading into into and we're saying it might be 12 months, 16 months, I don't know. So I think a few, a few things that I would try and do that are pretty easy. And I think the main thing that you should focus on is keeping everybody. That's obviously the hardest thing to do. That's the main thing you should focus on. And it's not just to sound nice. It's like there's a ton of costs involved in hiring and firing and and the not like it's. So speaking to Elon, a lot of people, I've issued with how Elon let a whole bunch of people go. I would say that that's not a smart move if you're planning on rehiring all those people. If you're trying to run a legal organization for the long run, that's a different story. But say you are happy with the output of everybody in your organization, then you try and maintain them and you try and keep them on. You double down obviously on the projects that work and you sideline the things that are questionable. So the things that aren't your biggest ticket items, it's not just a matter of, oh, they make some money. So why would we kill it? It's like, how can we just focus? How do I get my sales team or my marketing team to just focus on the things that give us back the most revenue that have the highest row as the highest ROI? Because even if it's not not profitable, which actually a lot of businesses do things that are unprofitable and they sell products that are lost leaders and whatnot, that's first of all an economic downturn. I don't think a smart thing. But even if it's not profitable, it's still a time suck and it's still a distraction. So if you have a sales rep selling one product or five products, well, the sales rep selling the one product is going to obviously just focus on that. They're going to be learning the nuances. They're going to be having more objections that they can learn to overcome for that one particular product versus if they split their time over five products and then that information exchange and that upskilling of that five product portfolio, it's all a little bit diluted versus that one product. Now, if those five other products or those four other products have eventually some sort of strategic importance in your company, that's fine. But right now, you're not trying to really focus on strategic five year plan. You're focusing on in the case of your businesses where they don't have a ton of revenue to play with. You're focusing on weathering the storm. So focus on what weather is the storm the best, has the highest profit margins, whatever it is. So I would say yes, focus on keeping your people by focusing on the highest ROI activities and then also negotiate terms. So negotiate terms in your favor because a lot of things are negotiable. Almost literally everything is. So if you have cash flow issues and your payment terms for your enterprise contracts were net 60 or net 90, negotiate net 30. But then also negotiate your contract with vendors. So if you have like a net 15 to pay someone else, negotiate a net 30 or a net 60. Negotiate things so that you don't run to cash flow issues because most of the problems that come of the pandemic in a smaller business are not that the business stops operating. It's that it's cash flow. It's they have they have accounts payable, account receivable and they and those aren't adding up because there's really no extra. So negotiate both ways. And if you start to negotiate both ways, you'll find that if you're selling a product to somebody who can afford it and they like the work that you're doing for them, they will be amicable to to pay you quicker, especially if you're just honest with them because they trust you. They don't want you as a service provider or the coach or the consultant or the tech product that they're buying, they don't want you to go under because they trust the service that you're offering. So if they can, they will pay you quicker. Also the people that you own money to, they also don't want to see you go under. What benefit that you can't take, what is it? You can't take blood out of a stone or whatever that's stupid saying is like. No, correct. You're the real estate, the all the tech products that you're purchasing from people, whatever it is, all the consultant that you're purchasing from people, if they have the ability to know, obviously there's a butterfly effect because everybody is trying to survive this economic downturn. But for the people that can't afford it, they would rather you not have cash flow issues, not go out of business and just pay your bills a month later or two months later, whatever that is. So I think that if you focus on high SROI, keep the people because there's a huge expense in turning people and then also negotiate your terms. I think that's a great first couple of steps to not do so badly. That is phenomenal, brick and phenomenal. I love that. Thank you so much for that. That's awesome. So on your website, I read that you're rewriting a playbook or something. Is that correct? No, so that's, I do my research, bro. It's not a physical playbook. This is how I approach companies. So when I say I'm rewriting the playbook, I'm saying that everything that I put under the world, everything I teach, the stuff that I work on with companies, I try and help people sell better, market better, bring products to market, draw more attention to themselves in a way that maybe hasn't been done before. So that's what I say when I'm rewriting the playbook. It's everything that I experiment with with my own personal brand with my companies, hopefully the way that I build my brand, the way that I build my companies can obviously teach people who have maybe only learned one style of marketing or maybe thought about, never really thought about building a personal brand or maybe the way that we create, I don't know, UGC content and run TikTok ads against it. Like whatever it is, I'm trying to just teach people to stay up to date on different trends that will help them drive revenue for the business. And that's amazing. You know, I'm a constant student. So the stuff that you see me put out on social, on my site, my newsletter with the company, all that stuff is sort of me learning from all these different industry experts and then compiling it and processing it and turning it into some sort of strategy that, you know, we'll test it out. We'll see if it works. And that's really, that's who I am as a person, as a professional. That's what I like to do. Well, okay, so you said something I want to cover before we end the show. Personal branding for founders, CEOs and owners, right? So I have this conversation with clients every day. Every day. And I call it hiding behind your company, right? And when you get, unfortunately, and I'm an older guy, by the way, I hate to admit that, but I am. But when you get the older CEOs, right, that are in, you know, whatever, manufacturing, construction, whatever it may be, right? They're gonna be like, no, why would I do that? Why would I do that? You know, I've had my company 20 years, 30 years. Yeah, I have a LinkedIn, but you know, you go to their LinkedIn and it's horrible. It's horrible. It's nothing. It's a blank, it's a blank picture, right? So what would you say? Because, you know, coming from a guy like you, your LinkedIn's super impressive, super impressive. Yeah, you've done it in your content's top notch. So our listeners need to understand something. And if they don't know you, then we'll make sure they go to your LinkedIn afterwards. But I can vouch. It's phenomenal LinkedIn that you have. So with that credibility, what can you tell a founder, CEO owner that has a profile, let's say? Yeah. No, I don't want to be LinkedIn. I might be okay. So the reason why the reason why they don't is because they think business is going well. That's the main reason. It's like, it's not worth it to me. And you know what? Maybe I'll tell somebody that is gonna retire any year. Maybe you don't have to worry about it. But let's say you're not retiring any year and business is going okay for now. So the reason why I build this brand is to future-proof myself. So all businesses can be disrupted. But if your business is disrupted and nobody knows who the hell you are, then you got to build from scratch. But if you start to put yourself out there, not only will it double down and help your existing business because people buy from people, not businesses, even if you don't have a public face, the person's buying from their impression of the sales rep. That's who they buy from. So people buy from people, they never buy from businesses. And if you have no customer facing people, you'll see the high-turn rates, you'll see people aren't loyal to you. It's very simple. So to put yourself out there as a founder, people will trust you because you're putting yourself out there. You'll build a personal brand, you'll build a community. You look at the biggest names in the world. It's not Tesla, it's not SpaceX, it's Elon Musk. It's not Virgin, it's Richard Branson. It's even not Amazon, it's Jeff Bezos, right? These are, if you want to look at data points, look at their followings, who has more following? Amazon or Bezos or SpaceX or Elon or Virgin or Branson. Across the board, people trust people. So not only will you do a benefit to your company, you'll make your entire downline, you'll make all your sales ref of easier times, selling your product, all your conversions, all your metrics will go up if you're a reputable figure. People do a lot of the buying before they actually speak to a sales rep. So if they see podcasts from you, if they see you speaking on stage, they're immediately gonna trust you versus anyone else in the industry that's not giving a shit. But then say the worst case scenario happens and somebody does disrupt you or your industry tanks or something or whatever. And businesses isn't going well. We'll look at what Gary Vitas, he spends up brands because he has 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, whatever it is, people that already look at him. So he spun up, you know, empathy wines, VaynerMedia, VaynerSports, his NFT projects. He didn't do that from scratch. He did that from the 10 million people that already follow him. So if something is not going right, you can launch new businesses, you can launch new products, you can go into different markets, you can test new ideas, you can do that at scale without any ad spend when you have a community. So that is the reason why you do it. So that's interesting because in and also with you, you've got this big newsletter now. How long did it take you? So you had a 100,000 roughly? Yeah. That is just obnoxious. That's very, now I will say, I almost matched you. Back in the day, I launched the world's first golf fitness membership site back in 2001. Yeah. Seven figures. And I had 93,000 subscribers back in 2003. So that's pretty damn good, man. Yeah. I was email marketing way before 95% of the market were doing it. So and I see we are ranked number one in the world for like a somebody typed in golf chips. I came up number one and globally for like the word golf chips. So I'm actually that's super badass. That is incredibly impressive. Well, it was all from content marketing, right? Yeah. It not enough of me now goes back to your newsletter. So talk about your newsletter. We'll wind this down. Yeah. Even when I saw the number 100,000 like instant respect right away, I was like, okay, let's talk about that newsletter because how long did it take you to build that? So about three years, about three years of newslettering and posting and it started off with once a week and went to twice a week. And now I actually have two separate newsletters that feed into that. I have a daily newsletter. And then I hired a writer for that. And then I have a biweekly newsletter. So twice a week, not every two weeks, twice a week. I think biweekly is the right term that actually I like to let a lesson that you can pull out from the podcast. So I just, I'm basically, if nothing else, a master at repurposing content. So I, that is my number one marketing strategy. It's the GaryVee style marketing strategy. So my podcast goes into two newsletters, podcast, video, 50 social clips, every single one, every single show. Man, wow. You, like you, if you want to be a marketer, you have to be omnipresent and quality matters, but constantly showing up very much matters. And I don't even think you can really gauge what quality is until you put out several hundred pieces engaged audience feedback. So yeah, I have a massive content repurposing machine that allows me to stay across every single platform all the time. So I have a lot of letters are part of that, but then I also cross pollinate. So on every single YouTube video that goes up on every single newsletter that goes out on every single social post, the call to actions are always to go follow me here or go subscribe here or so I'm always against every audience, always pushing all my assets again and again and again. And if that goes out like 20 times a day, over three years across seven different social channels, right? Like the math is nuts. Yeah, that's crazy. And, and the lift is not significant. It's not as scary as you think. When you take a podcast, you turn an audio video, you take every single question, turn that into a social clip, transcribe it, turn it into a new, like the lift is there, but it's not like you're creating 50 pieces of net new original content. So it's actually not that bad. Well, even if you and I'm going to check out your podcast by the way, but even when your podcast, if you've got a little bit of structure to the podcast, then it's you, I don't want to say template. That's I hate that word templating, but that's how you can scale this stuff, right? When you take your content, and you have the same sort of format, like the same format of your podcast, the same format of your posting, your article, whatever it is, then it's a lot easier to break that up, especially if you get a VA or somebody, because it's like you dive in every time, it's just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So it's a lot more efficient, right? 100%. So that, yes, so I do have, I mean, that's sort of like another like little life hack that we didn't go into, but like processes and systems for everything, always, everything you do, find a way to systematize it, even if you include yourself in that system, and what I mean by that is if you're committing to creating content, have like a date and a time when you record every single week and hold yourself accountable, even if no one else is. So all these different things that we sort of just alluded to, that's how you, that's how you create, I mean, personal brand, but also like marketing strategy for a company. Yes. Not that much of a difference. Well, and you know, for me, I've been content marketing seriously since 2001. Long time ago. You're like an OG in this. You're like. But, but you know, like Joe Pellizzi, I just had him on the, you know, Joe Pellizzi. Yeah, yeah. He was on my podcast last, we recorded last week. He's like OG, like that dude, because he's been around. How long has he been in the game for? Well, same as me, but he's, come on, come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, but, but I think he respected me knowing my background. And when I told him about the golf, that golf business, he was like, whoa, you did what? Yeah, because I, I was creating web pages that were 25 hundred words long, one web page 20. So I was creating many websites with every page. That's so good for SEL. Yeah. That's why I ranked. So what I did was I shot two YouTube videos and embedded five relevant images in a 2500 word web page. And I did it. Yeah, it would still work in 2022. Oh, God, it would crush in 20, especially for in that B2B world. Yeah. But most business owners, they hear content marketing. And I even tell my story and they're like, yeah, no, but I'm like, this gets set you apart. This literally, in the cost of content marketing as opposed to paid ads is. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I know. And like you said, repurposing the content is a beauty. I repurposed all my content. My YouTube channel back in the day had, I won YouTube. So the only thing left of that business, I had to walk away in 2010 because in the market pressure of 08, the plummet, because I was selling golf fitness products. I put golf and fitness together, right? Anyway, so I walked away from the business, but the only thing left is my YouTube channel today. And it's hysterical because the quality of the video and I got more hair now and all this stuff. But I've got one video that's got 1.8 million views. That's wild. One video. So and I've got 25,000 subscribers from a YouTube channel that's 18 years old. So it's crazy, right? So video marketing, content marketing, podcasting, all of that stuff is massive. And so I think if any CEO listening, God, just bring somebody in on your team that can oversee the content marketing, right? I think it's, I think that, you know, I don't know, like if you're a $10 million business, you're probably spending, I would assume more than $50, $60,000 on ads a year. I would assume like way more, unless you are just a pure outbound B2B enterprise player where maybe you don't spend a lot on it. But outside of that, like think about like trade shows because you'd be doing those then. Like you're gonna spend way more than 50, 60, suspend $60,000 on somebody that just knows how to repurpose, like it's not, you can walk them through it too. It's like you could get somebody an intern, 60,000, maybe 70,000, okay, you're starting to get into a decent salary for some people. And then they could just repurpose content. They're not thinking through strategy, they're not doing complex tasks. So just you have your CEO, record a podcast, literally walk through the framework or just sit, you're a CEO, jump on a Zoom, have a podcast with another industry leader. There's a ton of reasons why as a CEO, it's very valuable for you to convince another industry leader to sit down with you for 60 minutes of like intimate chatting. That's a other sales strategy you can leverage. But outside of that, you do that 60 minute, you give it to a marketing intern and you just walk through the tools to be able to repurpose that and their entire job is just content, content, content, content. You build a personal brand, you have content for your business. If you are B2B, my God, B2B content is so bad, like the bar is so low still, which is like still blowing my mind. It's so, so simple. And you could totally stand out in whatever industry you're in, especially if you're in a boring legacy industry. So, right. Scott, thank you so much for your time. I so appreciate this. Thank you. And my pleasure, man. I so appreciate it. But now for anybody who wants to find out about you, that your company is your LinkedIn, your newsletter, working they find out about you. So website is ScottDeclary.com and then all my social across like anything, Instagram, Twitter, whatever is at ScottDeclary. Okay, and you are on Twitter too, because I think I just followed you like. I'm everywhere, man. I'm on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube. I Facebook, even though not much happens there. LinkedIn. Oh, Facebook, oh boy. I can't believe you mentioned Facebook, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I understand when you shit. Yeah, I know. I hate Facebook. I do too. And the only reason is because I have the strategy. So I'm like, actually my Facebook doesn't do much for me at all. But I'm like, listen, if I'm already posting this to LinkedIn, I'm not going to not copy and paste it onto Facebook. Like I can't not. I have this neurotic, I can't not do it. What's a platform? It's a platform. So, you know, and also I think that over time, maybe they'll figure out their shit. I know that it's big in different demos. Like it's not big in North America, but it's big in other countries. So we'll see. Well, thank you so much for your time. We'll also have a webpage with all your show notes and all that stuff. So we'll definitely be promoting it on our social media as well. But thank you so much, brother. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate you bringing me on. You've just listened to the Dominator Market podcast with CEO business consultant and author, Michael Peterson. Growth-minded CEOs hire Michael to explode their revenues, build an amazing company, and create a transformational mindset that encapsulates growth, success, and ultimately happiness. His book, Dominator Market, is creating quite a stir in the marketplace. Go to dominatormarketbook.com and get your first chapter free.