to my solo consulting journey.
So before that, I was in the startup world
as a marketing leader.
And so it's been great.
So I've just continually refined my processes
over the last 10 months,
working mostly with early stage B2B startups,
helping them to find their go-to-market strategy.
So there's a couple of things that are included with that,
but it's been super, super fun.
Dude, I love it.
It's so fun to look at your history.
I don't know if you realize how unique it is,
but going from marketing at Target
and marketing with Lucid,
Lucidchart's like not many people
get to work with brands like that
and then have the audacity and the tenacious ambition
to go after this the way you are.
And it just, I can't imagine
that the treasure trove of experience you have
while you're doing what Reid Hoffman said,
pushing a plane off of a cliff
and repairing it while it's going down,
that's startup life right there.
So what's been the most eye-opening
or shocking thing that you've experienced so far?
I think one of the biggest things is just seeing-
All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Calame, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there.
Hey, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Calame,
founder and CEO of First Class Business.
And I'm excited to have Garrett Jestice on today.
Garrett is a fellow marketer.
I still kind of consider myself such,
even as an entrepreneur.
Like I have some background there,
but he's been at levels I never was at,
working at companies like Target
and working for a company like Lucidcharts.
And the realm of what you do
and the types of people that you work with
and companies that are that massive
or that are on that fast of a trajectory,
it's just different.
We just have very different experiences.
So I can't wait to pick his brain
and help you guys learn from his experience
on how to efficiently grow B2B companies,
specifically, but I can tell you what,
as a business owner who's been in the B2B
and the B2C space and different companies,
the principles, when you find people who have principles,
they apply to both markets.
So if you're looking for growth strategies
and for streamlining success with team alignment,
proper team alignment,
we're gonna be talking about all of that
as we open his vision.
Before I bring Garrett on stage though,
I wanna give a shout out to some sponsors
that I love and appreciate.
ColdClick is what we use for our LinkedIn automation.
And it gets us in touch with hundreds of people
without us having to really do anything at this point,
because we've got the message out there
helping people know what it is that we do.
And the reason why that's so important
is because distribution at the top of the funnel
is something that most entrepreneurs aren't very good at.
And it's not only that we're not good at it,
I see a lot of entrepreneurs that avoid it altogether
because they don't wanna make people upset
or they feel like it's inauthentic.
There's nothing inauthentic about getting your brand
in front of people that you don't know
and giving them the opportunity to say,
hey, I kinda like that person, I should talk to them.
Hey, that person does what I need,
I should reach out to them.
It's just a great way to get in front of great people
and then you can pick up the relationship
more organically from there,
especially if you're not using messages
that manipulate the audience.
That would be my last secret I'll give today on that,
which would be if you have an automation that says,
hey, we have mutual friends, we should connect,
super inauthentic, not cool.
If you have an automation that says,
hey, I'm really impressed with your profile.
Again, you didn't look at it, it's an automation.
It's one thing to say, the system helped me find you
because it says you're a great leader.
Well, the system did.
But anyway, I'm gonna get off my teaching skills here
and go right into Simply Fast websites.
Simply Fast websites is built by Shane Michael
and I love that he built a platform
where you can get a website for as little as $179.
I don't need this.
I would have needed this 10, 15 years ago,
even three years ago when we started first class business,
it would have been somebody that I would have considered
in our lineup of web developers and web designers
because of his ability to offer that.
Now you can build a free website on Wix,
on Squarespace, on WordPress,
with different theme builders and all that.
But I really like that he's got an offer
that's much more generous than most web developers,
web designers have seen out there.
So I'm rooting for him to win.
And I figured if there's anybody out there
who's getting started and they need some guidance
and they really wanna understand the ins and outs
of a great website foundation,
then Shane's got a passion that I just don't see too often.
And the web designers that come across
and I've talked to a few thousand
over the last couple of years.
So I'm happy to support Shane on his venture.
I hope that goes well.
By all means, if you ever work with anything
that we're using and you don't have a good experience,
don't hesitate to throw that back at us and say,
hey, Jax, I didn't have the experience that I thought,
hey, Jax, and here's what I did experience.
We're always looking to optimize.
We have no ego associated with this.
We simply want to help you win.
Now moving into the water project,
we also want this cause to win.
We have the great fortune of having access
to clean drinking water every day, you and I.
We don't have to go look for it.
If you're listening to this, I highly doubt
you had to find a clean source of water today.
There's millions of people
who don't have that privilege and luxury.
We have an opportunity to give back.
What I love about this is they show you
what the community is like before you invest
and in donating your money to the experience
or to helping them.
You also get to see the result on the flip side
and see how many people were affected by it
and see how the community maintains that experience.
So your money is being put to good use in my humble opinion.
It's what I love about it.
And I just, I can't live with myself each day
if I don't take the opportunity to help with these causes
for people all over the world
who have far greater challenges and adversities
than I'll probably ever have to face.
So if you're in a position to give, please do.
If you're not, please share.
And if you feel like there's a better program
that we should be supporting, a better cause,
something of greater need, please drop in in the comments
and give the people who are listening a chance
to help out with those causes.
We've got 8 billion people to help
and I never wanna forget that.
Without further ado, I'm bringing Garrett Justice on stage
after diving into his LinkedIn profile.
Let me pull that up.
Where are you at?
Oh, there it is.
All right, I'm not very good at the screen managing thing,
but here we go.
His experience, as I mentioned,
Garrett has worked with Target.
He's worked with a company called Lucid.
And again, this is the company of Lucid Charts.
He was there for three years,
head of marketing with Lucid Press,
podcast host and community organizer in 2021.
He also has some secrets probably for me
and how I can be a better host of the show.
I'm looking forward to that.
And then these are some of the other startups
that he's also worked with.
And as I got to know him personally,
just impressed with his leadership skills
and the way he held himself.
So Garrett, dude, thank you so much for joining me
on Vision Pros Live.
It's an honor to have you.
Well, it's great to be here.
Thanks, Jackson, excited.
Yeah, man, absolutely.
So I talked about your audience a little bit earlier,
let's give a refresher for anybody who's joining live.
Who should be listening today?
And beyond my rambling, why should they listen to you?
Yeah, it's a great question.
So, I have a background experience in marketing,
launched my solo consulting company earlier this year.
And so I mostly work with early stage B2B companies,
either the founders or those solo marketers,
early marketers, just to help them lock in
their go-to-market strategy.
A lot of companies, when they start doing marketing
for the first time, it's a lot of throwing spaghetti
at the wall to see what sticks, right?
And I've been there, I've done that,
I've made some of those mistakes.
And so I just wanna help early stage companies
have a higher chance of success
and avoid some of those mistakes
that I made earlier in my career.
Because I think that there is a way to go about it.
There are core principles that every company needs to adopt
in order to do it well.
And that's really what I focus on.
Did I see 90% of companies throwing uncooked spaghetti
at the wall to see what sticks?
So, it's challenging.
Marketing is a lot harder than people realize.
So, let's talk about that vision of yours.
Obviously, you wanna help them find what sticks.
But what do you envision for these early stage startups?
What's that path to marketing look like
when they do this right?
Yeah, so let me first explain what I see most often, right?
And then I-
And so, what I often see is,
companies start to get some momentum.
They have some customers, they have some sales,
and they want to put fuel on the fire, right?
And so what do they do?
Often they jump straight into marketing channels.
So, they probably don't have anyone in house,
or maybe they do, maybe they hire someone in house,
but they'll jump to hiring an SEO agency
or someone to help them with paid ads
or some other things like that.
And usually, they haven't solidified
what I call your go-to-market foundations.
And by not solidifying that and aligning the team on that,
you're basically setting up whoever you hire for failure,
right?
Any marketing execution, any channel,
needs to flow out of a strategy
and an understanding of those foundations.
So, what are those foundations?
Kind of going back to your original question,
what does good look like, right?
Any company, before you start marketing,
you have to have a deep understanding
of who are you marketing to, right?
Who are your best fit customers?
And all of this sounds super simple, right?
It's like marketing 101, business 101,
but the truth is most companies don't do this.
And what I see often is,
companies that get some momentum,
they have different segments, different types of customers,
and they haven't picked which one they want to focus on
finding more of.
Let me pause you real quick,
because you said most companies aren't doing this.
And don't get me wrong,
LeBron James has done a layup before.
But it's the basketball players who stop doing the layups,
they can't play the game the right way.
So, this is incredibly important.
If you're listening in, gather the nuggets,
out of what Garrett says.
Don't listen just for the overall general topic.
Go ahead, hit it, hit it hard.
So, who?
Yeah, so, and one of the key principles there
is for most companies who are just starting marketing
for the first time,
you don't have the resources to focus
usually on more than one or two distinct market segments.
And you probably are serving more than that right now.
You probably have different types of companies
that you're serving.
So, a big first question is, who do you focus on?
And who do you ignore for the time being, right?
The goal in doing good marketing and sales
is to find more companies or people to buy your product
or service that looks like your best fit customers
that you already have, right?
And so, that's really what it comes down to
in that first step is like,
who should you be marketing to?
And then once you identify those people,
then it's about talking with them,
setting up time to do actual interviews
and understand how they think about the challenges
that you can help solve and where they look for solutions.
So, that should help inform your messaging
and positioning and what you say on your website
and in a sales call or anything like that
and which channels you pick, right?
Again, so often companies jump straight into those channels
where they see and hear, oh, we gotta be on TikTok.
We gotta be doing this, we gotta be doing that.
There's a million channels out there,
but the truth is you don't.
And you probably don't have the bandwidth
to be able to do all of those things.
And so, you gotta focus on those one or two market segments,
understand exactly what they say
so you can speak really clearly to that need
and then focus on testing systematically those channels
and motions where they have told you they are, right?
So, you can find-
How many foundations are there?
So, really just those three is what I focus on.
Three was the who, the channels.
Messaging and positioning, right?
So, what do you say?
Yep.
And then channels is third and that's where do you say it?
Right?
So, who, what and where, right?
Are the key components before you jump in
to really launching and scaling marketing efforts.
Nice.
Okay.
Good stuff, man.
Thank you for that.
I wanted to take, I'm taking a lot of notes.
And what about you, Garrett?
So, for your life, what's your personal vision?
What do you, where do you see yourself moving towards?
And you can say where you're at now,
but I think we established that one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no worries.
So, the interesting thing about where I'm at now is
you would ask me a year ago,
I would have never thought I would be consulting right now.
Right?
I'm just under a year into this.
And so, I kind of went through,
you know, I spent the last 10 years or so
working in a lot of early stage startups as a marketing leader
and it was a fun ride and I learned a ton.
I needed kind of a change of pace, you know,
when I left my last gig and I'm to a place now
personally in my life where I have four kids
between the ages of two and 10.
Woo, go us.
It's awesome, but it's busy too.
And so, I want to be, you know,
to a place where I can coach my son's soccer team.
I want that flexibility that comes with it.
And that's one of the things I think a lot of people learn
as you get a little bit older.
So, that's part of what led me into, you know,
consulting and starting my own business.
And it's been an awesome adventure.
I've learned a ton so far, but, you know,
that's the thing that's highest priority for me right now
is being able to be available, be flexible
while still making a good living and focusing on, you know,
the type of work that I love doing.
So.
I love that.
And you never get it back for all those who are listening.
You don't get to reset the video game.
It's it, you know, and I've been,
I was so blessed to be a stay at home dad
since I was 22 years old, right?
My first daughter was born.
I was working from home.
I ran a crazy hectic life for startups
for those first three years,
but that was also purpose driven.
I said, well, my daughters, and I was there.
I got to see the first steps.
I get to be there for the first war.
She had first, first, first war was with me.
We'd play with a light switch, light on, light off,
light on, and eventually she goes, light.
And I was like, well, that's a strange first word,
but she's also a strangely amazing child.
Anybody who's listening again,
my goal is to inspire you to not only crush it in business,
but to realize that you can crush it with your family
or with your friends and with your personal priorities too.
Those are, those are important.
You don't have to sacrifice those
just because you're an entrepreneur.
Some of us just justify and do so.
Yeah, you know, to that point,
my wife and I were just talking the other day.
So my youngest is almost two.
And one of the things we were commenting on is,
you know, I've worked from home for the last two years,
you know, even before I started the consulting thing,
the pandemic and everything else.
And it's interesting seeing how much closer he is to me
than my other kids were.
You know, I have great relationships with all of my kids,
but at that age, because I've been able to go down
and eat lunch with them every day, you know,
he sees me multiple times a day,
so much more than my other kids did.
And those are things, like you said,
you just can't get back that are some of the valuable things
that some of the perks, I guess,
that I feel like I've been blessed with
in my current career.
Have you gotten to be coach yet?
Yeah, so I just, I'm in the process of coaching
my son's soccer team.
And that's super fun.
So loving that and-
I wish I had a photo of that.
This is mine.
This is my little girl's soccer team.
We were coaching that.
And then this is my son's soccer team
when I was coaching him as well.
Man, just soak that up.
Whatever, if there's anything that tries to derail you
on that, don't let it happen.
And those of you who are listening in again,
like it's your opportunity to seize that and say,
hey, I'm gonna be there for this.
I'm having some fun with it.
You know, my kids will never forget
that I got to be their coach.
And they still wish, and we still try to figure it out,
even though we live in different cities now.
It's like, man, how do we make more of those types
of experiences happen?
I mean, that's the essence of life, my friend.
So thank you for sharing that.
Do you wanna continue on the vision path?
Anything else you wanna add to that
before we move on to the worst business experience ever?
You know, the only thing else I was gonna say is,
I think your vision evolves, right,
throughout your career and throughout your life.
And so I really see it as stages or seasons of life.
And you know, for me, I just kind of embarked
on this kind of new phase where, again, like I said,
I was the last eight or 10 years as a marketing leader
in early stage startups to now, you know,
as an entrepreneur and as a solo consultant.
And that's just a new phase of life for me.
So, you know, what does the future bring?
I don't know, but I'm sure that there's gonna be
other seasons and phases later on in life.
They're gonna be different.
I think that that's okay.
So I think it's important to understand
that that vision will evolve.
And the most important thing is to understand
what's most important right now.
And, you know, that's really what should guide
what that vision is.
And it might change a little bit later.
It might change down the road as you learn more,
as you grow, as you evolve, as your life changes, right?
I love it.
My saying is begin with a vision in mind
because most people say begin with the end in mind.
And I think it's good too, but the vision,
you know, you don't know the end.
You get to the hilltop and you see a new vision
and of what's available out there.
So that's 100% something that I believe in.
We're gonna dive a little bit into that personal side again,
just because I know how important this is.
And we have an opportunity to shape really a future society
in a way that I don't think enough people are talking about.
When you work from home, you know,
and your wife as well, or your spouse as well
happens to be there and that lovey, wonderful,
all sunshine and roses opportunity exists.
One thing that we don't, I don't hear talked about
in society a whole lot is the fact that now you have
two opinions in the household more often.
And that is challenging.
I'm twice divorced, not by choice, nobody's fault.
One on, you know, lots of accountability opportunities,
you know, and those realities and that the pain
of going through that with a family is very difficult.
The reason why I mention this though,
is because so many people are going into this opportunity
of working from home.
And while there's a million pros to working from home,
there, I don't call them pros and cons anyways,
there's challenges that exist with that.
You don't have to reveal anything personal,
Garrett, about this, but what would your counsel be
or, you know, what would you share with somebody
who's going into that dynamic that can help foster
and cultivate great relationships for family's sakes?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And it's actually, it's something I think is top of mind
for anyone who works from home.
So I'll say before the pandemic,
before I started working from home, I was, you know,
all of my jobs up to then was in an office.
And I actually thought at that point, you know,
that I thought I preferred working in an office.
I think there's pros and cons to working in an office,
being around people, the camaraderie and everything else
versus, you know, working from home.
I didn't think I'd be able to successfully work from home,
just with, you know, craziness of life
and everything that's going on here at my house
throughout the day.
My mindset has shifted 100%.
I now 100% would prefer to work from home.
Again, there's pros and cons to both,
like also love things about working in an office.
And the thing that's really worked for me
and for my family is, you know, my wife and I,
when we first started, when I first started working from home
is we sat down together and we made some rules, right?
Some rules and some guidance.
And we've talked about them over time, right?
Like as our kids have gotten a little bit older too.
So for example-
They evolve as the vision evolves.
They evolve, right?
Yeah, you know, so for example,
one of the things we talked about is like,
when I go into my office and I shut the door,
like I'm at work just like I drove to work, right?
And text me, call me like you would,
but we tell my kids the same thing.
You can't just come into dad's office at any given time
because he's talking.
He might be on a call with Jackson.
He might be on a call with someone else, right?
And so feel free to text me, call me.
I often, I don't know if you can see
over my back shoulder right here.
I have this basket full of pictures and notes
that my kids throughout the day slide under the door.
Oh, cool.
So that's something that they do, right?
And then if I have a break, I'll go down and say hi
when they get home from school.
But, you know, setting some of those baseline rules
has been super important
to just get everyone on the same page.
Dude, entrepreneurs would benefit so much
from understanding this because they were the originals
of the work from homes, you know?
Like there weren't a lot of work from home opportunities now.
Almost everybody's getting into it,
but phenomenal set of rules and systems.
For me, the most heartbreaking moment
that you wouldn't expect was my six month old daughter
knocking on that door, wanting to play with daddy
and me having to not ignore it.
Be like, I had the first time,
but then I was like, oh my goodness.
Like I'm gonna have to flex here
and help her understand that I'm not ignoring my child.
What a trauma that would be for her to think.
Whereas if you're working not in the home,
they're not even thinking about you, you know?
You're just not around.
But here you are ignoring them in a room they know you're in.
Like, oh, it was such a sad experience to figure out.
Like, man, there are challenges here too.
My kids have a knock rule.
They knock on my door and they're not allowed to enter
until I let them know like it's okay to enter.
And if they do, man, no, I'm just kidding.
If they do, then I remind them, you know, I bring them in.
But I've also done some polite trainings with them,
you know, on etiquette of like, hey, if you come in,
I'm on a Zoom call, make sure to say hi to whoever it is.
Make sure to wait for the right opportunity to talk,
you know, and don't just interrupt the adults.
You know, same things we teach our kids
in normal societal circumstances.
But there's unique challenges about the process.
And sometimes it's not easy even as the adults, you know,
to get on the same page about those realities.
So teach their own.
Yeah, we have similar rules here too.
But I'll say too, like, amazing perks that come with it too.
You know, in addition to that, I carve out time every day.
I block it off on my calendar that I can go down
and eat lunch with my wife or my kids who are home, right?
Exactly.
Like a couple days a week, my wife and I
get to eat lunch together and then, you know,
play a card game.
We've been in a Monopoly deal recently.
If you've played that game.
Love that game.
Right?
I miss that.
I use it all the time.
So we'll play a couple rounds of Monopoly deal
while eating lunch.
And like, those are things, again, like, you just
can't give back, you know, that are just amazing.
So it's awesome.
Oh, I forgot about that game.
I got to go buy it.
Like, seriously, I'm going to go buy it this weekend.
And my kids and I are going to play next week.
So that's good stuff.
All right.
So the other thought that came up is,
and then we'll end this, guys.
This is life hacks for those who work from home.
But I love, I needed a car ride home.
That was the hardest part for me, for our relationship,
was I was stuck in entrepreneur mode.
And I'd come out as an entrepreneur, not as a dad
or as a husband.
And so I realized, like, man, when you go into an office
and you go home, you have time to listen to music
or listen to sports or listen to news or whatever you
need to decompress.
And then you arrive home as like a human being.
But without that separation, I'm jolting out of my office
from entrepreneurship and back into reality.
Like, if I didn't have something to recondition my mind
and get myself set.
And I was like, well, that sucks because now I'm
losing 10 more minutes of my family.
I'm resetting.
My mode and what mode I'm supposed to be in to show up.
So yeah, anyway, let's dive into that worst business
experience ever.
I know people benefit tremendously
from understanding the challenges that exist.
This can be yours as a business owner.
This can be a company you were at.
It's your call, Garrett.
Man, there's so many.
I don't even know which one to pick.
I was actually just writing down today
some of the failures in my career so far,
as well as some of the successes.
It's all about just perception on this.
So why don't we do this?
I'm going to read through some of these failures
that I wrote down in my list.
You tell me which one makes sense.
We're going to rank them.
Dive into it.
Every list you make, you can rank these two.
That'll be fine.
There you go.
So here's a couple of failures that I wrote down.
It took me five years to graduate from college
with a four-year degree.
I launched a startup in college that
failed before making a dollar.
I studied for the GMAT for months,
thinking I was going to go get an MBA, but never took it,
and partially because my scores were never good enough.
I've received feedback from managers
that my skills weren't good enough.
I've butted heads with coworkers and company leaders.
I've been laid off in two of my four full-time jobs
that I've had post-college.
So those are a couple that I wrote down.
There's plenty of others, right?
But I don't know.
Any of those you want to dive into?
Well, I'll put you on the spot.
Yeah, you'll put me on the spot with that.
Well, I have you beat on the university level
because I didn't make it past the third semester.
So there's a, and I would say, I guess the layoff aspect,
because I'm sure you also have other realities, diversities
that you face in life beyond those.
But the good news is none of them
are like, I lost $5 million to a partner who embezzled.
It'll come, right?
That won't come.
Hopefully not that one.
But yeah, we will all go through adversities
that give us the opportunity to learn valuable lessons in life.
That's how I see every adversity that I go through.
So I appreciate the playful nature of ours
and that you're willing to play with me on it.
But let's talk about those layoffs.
Feel free to dive into the worst one
or take the angle you want.
Yeah, I'll say layoffs are hard.
They're challenging.
And I think there are a lot of people right now
who are experiencing that, especially
if you work in software or tech.
There have been just massive layoffs the last year plus.
And I see posts and I see friends who are struggling.
I saw one yesterday of someone who's
been out of work for 10 months and had countless interviews
and just can't find the right thing.
So honestly, I'm grateful for the experiences
that I've had being laid off multiple times because I get it.
I can empathize with the pain that those people can
go through wanting to take care of their families.
And also, it's helped me be more open to helping those people
out when I can.
I regularly will do calls, how to call this week,
with someone who's looking to move jobs.
And it's just something I do for free on the side
with connections that I have to help how I can.
I love it.
I'll say my first job out of college
was at Target in Minneapolis.
I moved my family halfway across the country to Minneapolis,
a city I hadn't really been to before except for working
there.
Had a job there for a couple of years,
and they went through a massive round of layoffs.
And it wasn't that first time.
It wasn't performance related.
It was really just striking thousands of people
out of work.
And so there I had a young family.
I had my son and my wife.
I'd moved halfway across the country
and had to figure out next steps.
And it took a while to figure out.
And I ended up making a shift into a different season.
I realized through my experience there,
I missed the smaller company feel.
I missed that startup feel.
I missed something else.
So I ended up making a shift into a different company,
different industry.
But I mean, those are challenging.
It's hard.
I worked much more when I was out of work looking for a job,
connecting with people and applying and interviewing
and all that than I did in my full time job.
So I mean, it's a lot of work, and it's a lot of pain.
But fortunately, the few times that I've been laid off,
I've always ended up getting something better.
And that's really hard to hear in the moment.
Like, if you're listening to this and you're looking
for that next job, it's always hard.
But from someone who's been there multiple times,
I can tell you that it's always turned out better for me
in that next step, in that next step, in that next step.
And so it's really about having that long term perspective.
And even though it's challenging in the moment,
it's going to work out.
It's going to work out for the better in the long run.
Right.
And you have to be in a position to do
what you can about the situation.
You also have to do something about the situation
in order for that to happen.
And a lot of people, when they lose their jobs,
if you've got low self-esteem, you've
got a lack of confidence, you've got insecurities,
that can be one of the most debilitating experiences.
You're suffering a depression.
You can feel like nobody cares or nobody values you.
And you've got to get out of your own head
and realize that's not true.
You don't deserve to beat yourself up like that.
I was thinking, like, man, I've never been laid off.
I've been fired a number of times.
I've been kicked out the door a couple of times
because I'm very direct and self-assured.
And I know what I won't.
And I won't mess around with bad ethics.
That's a big thing that I've had to deal
with in certain companies.
But I was laid off.
I was laid off one time.
But I came back to work the next day.
And they said, what are you doing?
We can't pay you.
And I said, I'm going to make my phone calls.
I'm going to make my sales.
And they said, you can't.
Like, we just laid you off.
I said, I don't care.
I'm going to my desk.
I'm going to make my phone calls.
And I will close my deals.
And he said, all right, Jackson's crazy.
He's going to work for free.
And I went and I closed my deals.
And we went from a $537 bank account to a $30,000 bank
account.
Within two weeks, we had $10 million from our investors.
But you can't do that in all situations.
You can't just go back to work.
But there's a resilience and a tenacity.
There's rewards for exercising those virtues.
And then you become, if you're an entrepreneur,
you're constantly looking for new work and opportunities.
And so it becomes a thing of the past, the challenge
of dealing with that.
So thanks for driving that reality home for people.
And what's your best experience in business?
Another great question.
I love when, as a consultant or previously
as a marketing leader, when I can impact people's lives
for the better.
I love being able to help and to coach and to advise.
And that's a lot of what I'm doing right now,
working with founders and entrepreneurs who are,
they don't know what to do.
They want to grow their business,
but they just don't know what.
Or maybe they've had some bad experiences.
And it's so rewarding to be able to coach them and walk them
through a process and help open their eyes a little bit
and get to a point where they say, oh, my goodness,
this has been so impactful.
I was on a call with a client just earlier this week.
And I've been working with their core leadership team
over the past few months, walking them through this process
to understand who's their best fit customers,
what's that messaging and positioning look like,
which channels should they focus on.
And someone just made a comment like,
we would have never gotten to this.
Doesn't matter how long we would have focused on this.
We would have never gotten to this without your help.
And so that's rewarding.
I also think from a personal perspective,
though I'm a company of one today,
one of the things I love the most in the past
is professional development of people on my team.
And so I still get to do that occasionally
as I connect with people and provide advice.
But just being able to help people understand
that careers are long and that I want to, as your manager,
help you find what you want to do long term,
help you discover what your vision is,
and hopefully this is a stepping stone to that.
But the more that I can help understand that,
the more that I can help tailor this role
to be meaningful for you to end up where you want to go.
And so that's always rewarding too,
is being able to work with people like that
and be in a position where you can help tailor their future
so they have more satisfaction in their current role
and they're moving closer to that ideal vision
in the future.
I hope to blow everybody's mind right now
in relation to the fourth level of impact
and influence that exists,
which is your ability to impact people
without even being present any longer, right?
That's Jesus, that's Gandhi, that's Martin Luther King,
all right, they're gone, they've passed on from this world
and yet they still have a tremendous impact
and ripple effect.
And with modern technology,
we've been blessed with the exact same type of thing, Garrett.
You as well have already done that
in tremendous ways for my life
by being part of Lucidcharts, for instance.
Now, I'm an extremely grateful individual
and I own that confidently.
I hope everybody listening to this is working on that
as well because it breeds so much joy and peace
for your life when you are.
But you also begin to see the connections in the world
of how things work.
I have 1% of a company in Toronto,
thanks to in large part, Lucidcharts
and what I was able to utilize that for
and what they were able to utilize that for as well
to help us construct our processes for the company
and the organization.
So you had an impact on that.
You didn't get to see it, you didn't get to be a part of it.
But when I was at Video Power Marketing,
I was looking at 70,000 people a month
coming to this website to learn how to become
video strategists and launch agencies.
And what if somebody in Sri Lanka
who are some obscure place in the planet to me
ends up becoming one of the best video ad agencies
in the world because they learned
what we were doing with these systems.
Like I got a huge kick out of that.
So now that you're coaching entrepreneurs directly,
the indirect mechanism is that all that they're going
and doing the same thing for others now,
thanks to what it is that you are doing for them.
You just don't get to be the brand behind it,
the face behind it in that reality.
But dude, you're absolutely crushing it.
We've got a few minutes left.
I wanna do that for as many people as we can right now
based on B2B growth strategies to streamline success.
We talked about the foundations,
the who, the what and the where.
Excellent principles.
If you're taking notes on that reality,
writing that down, what is your who?
What is your who not?
Like Garrett said.
And what channels and what messaging and positioning?
Awesome.
What can you throw down right now though?
Some secret sauces, maybe some dangerous stuff
that we shouldn't do until we have that established.
What do you wanna gift us?
So I think the biggest thing that I end up coaching
entrepreneurs on is focus, focus and the power of focus.
There are, again, just like life,
there's like times and seasons.
And when you're first starting a company,
you're trying to sell anything and everything that you can
to keep the lights on.
Eventually you're gonna get some momentum
and you're gonna find some patterns
across the different types of customers that you're selling.
And that's gonna be a time where you're gonna wanna scale,
but in order to scale revenue faster,
it's almost counterintuitive,
but the best marketing is as focused as you can be.
You focus on one type of segment, one type of user.
You focus specifically on talking to them and their needs.
And don't worry about the others, who you might sell.
You focus on one or two channels.
And that power of focus is so important
to scaling your impact and your success.
And so many companies just get trapped in that realm
of feeling like they have to do everything.
They have to be on every channel.
They have to talk to all of their different
types of customers, right?
They have to serve lots of different types of customers.
And the truth is you don't.
You can focus and the more you focus,
usually the better it gets.
Absolutely, I'm gonna give two examples of that.
I used to respond to all of my messages in LinkedIn
or all and most of my emails I would respond to.
I got a little bit dismal of those emails.
I read every single one of them.
But I would, even if it was an opportunity
that I knew I was never going to pursue, no thank you.
I'm not interested.
Or when I was younger and a little bit more pretentious,
I would respond with your offer is not great.
Here's why, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm giving them free work and I'm not working
on my business when I do that.
I'm not focused.
I'm losing sight of my vision.
I'm not being a producer, I'm being a consumer.
And that reality, that's an example of focus
that can literally give you back five to 15 minutes per day,
which if you multiply by the 365 days,
you know, that exists or the 200 working days that you have,
it's a lot of lost time to build what you need to build.
Thoughts on that?
Yeah, well said.
Yeah, no, I think there's so many ways
that we can focus and focus better throughout the day.
And as an early stage company, you know,
one of the things you're lacking most often is resources.
It's time, it's budget.
And so the more you can focus, the more it helps you
to do those most important things better, right?
And that's really the key to growing and scaling.
Here's another example of that that we just implemented.
You know, when you get off the show, you and I,
I just triggered an email to you while we were talking
by putting that you showed up for this episode.
And that just triggered an email to you
that sends you all the links so you can reshare this
with your audience, right?
Before, one, we weren't doing it.
You know, so we're losing the opportunity to have,
and why?
Because like you mentioned,
well, I'm not worried about what we're missing out.
We're missing out on millions
and billions of things in the world.
I don't focus on all the things I can't grab right now.
I focus on what I have,
and I focus on what's practical to move me forward, right?
So after a show a few weeks ago, I realized like, okay,
I can write this email to somebody,
or I can have ChatGPT and my team create this, right?
So they did.
And then I edited it to make sure it has my style
and my uniqueness.
And then we got it put into the workflow
so that all I have to do is click a button.
And now after two minute timer, it's going to send that.
And somebody on my team or myself
could have been stuck doing that.
And it's, what does it take?
10 minutes?
You know, per time that that happens.
Now it takes 10 seconds and can be done at the same time
as I'm even live on a show.
And again, those factors exponentially add up.
It's again, it's about learning what to focus on,
when to focus on, you know,
and not getting stuck in the day-to-day monotony
that sometimes we tell ourselves,
we can't do anything about that.
We just have to do things this way.
We don't have to do things anyway.
We get to, we choose to.
Yep, awesome.
Garrett, I appreciate what you've shared,
the big lessons.
If anybody's looking for help consulting
with building your brands and business,
of course, reach out to Garrett in the show links.
LinkedIn is how we connect that I believe.
So I know he's reliable to access there as well.
Is there any other place we should be directing people
towards Garrett?
LinkedIn is, I'm there every day.
My website, which he just showed a minute ago,
preludemarketing.com.
You can reach out to me there.
So either way, would love to chat,
even if it's just to kind of catch up, get to know you,
I'm happy to do, you know, 30 minute intro calls
with, you know, clients and offer some free advice
to see if it would make sense to work together.
If not, no harm, no foul.
Have, you know, someone new you know,
and I'm happy to make an intro to someone else
who might be a better fit, so.
Awesome, and yeah, I would throw down on that too
on Garrett's behalf entrepreneurs,
those of you who are evaluating who to work with,
the interview process is one of the biggest things
that you're missing, is your HR process is in shams,
and you don't have the ability to properly quantify
who you want in your team,
and then you're not going into these interviews
with enough depth to understand the strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
of working with said person.
So make sure to do your due diligence.
That's my final gift to you on this episode.
Vision Pros, we appreciate you being here,
and we look forward to seeing you on our next show.
Garrett, thanks for joining us today.
Thanks, Jackson, it's been fun.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show,
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.