Colin, tell me about your vision. Yeah, you know, my vision is really shared by myself and my two
co-founders, Zach and Josh. So we have a company called Monkey Island Ventures. We've all known
each other since we were about five years old and Monkey Island is the name of a park we used to
play at together when we were kids. And we started Monkey Island Ventures back in 2007 and our goal
has always been to make the world a better place through entrepreneurship. So not only does that
include, you know, building businesses that are benefiting ourselves, our employees, and our clients
and customers, but also we love to educate, we love to share our knowledge, and we want to promote
entrepreneurship as a path to bettering lives across the world. Can you tell me more about that?
Yeah, you know, I think at the base layer it's the work that the three of us are doing. So
we have a few different businesses that are kind of in the tech space, definitely around
digital marketing, software development. We've launched a number of software products over the
years. And I think we're fulfilling a lot of our vision through those businesses. I think,
you know, at the heart of kind of the founder aspect of really helping founders succeed,
the newest venture that I'm kicking out of Monkey Island Ventures is called Rainmaker,
which is really helping founders leverage LinkedIn to grow their LinkedIn network,
leads, and sales. And I think a big component of that that is so fulfilling is that the
educational standpoint of what I get to share, these founders can go and begin implementing
that immediately upon hearing the different strategies and the things that I'm recommending.
So for me, seeing founders come back to me and really appreciative of what I'm sharing and them
applying it to grow their businesses is incredibly gratifying. And I know that we're making a
difference. And so I think not only having a vision, but taking the steps to see that
become a reality, even if it's not the full vision, just starting to see the aspects of
that vision are coming to fruition. Thank you for sharing that comment. To reiterate,
can you define for me what exactly is your vision? I think we want to help create as
many successful entrepreneurs as we can during our lifetime. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that.
Yeah. You kind of went into what it started, but do you have some story behind where did this
exactly come from of helping entrepreneurs, educating them? Yeah, I think part of it comes
from our own experience as being entrepreneurs. So as we have built our own software products and
had issues with marketing and growing those, I think we started doing digital marketing over
a decade ago. And then Josh, Zach and I aren't software developers. And so we felt the pain of
getting our own software developed. And I think that led to Cloudburst and doing software development
for ourselves and for other founders and entrepreneurs. With Rainmaker, I've been
doing LinkedIn automation for over five years, but Rainmaker is a company, is only six months old.
And so I think the vision of helping other entrepreneurs through our businesses, really,
a lot of times came out of our own frustration and trying to figure things out for ourselves,
which allowed us to start applying that to businesses where we could help other entrepreneurs.
So I think then twofold is the actual acts, which is one, providing services, which is great. And
it allows us to build businesses and to generate revenue. But I think the other part of it is very
much around the education component, because now that we've mastered these different industries and
areas of expertise, we can really share that and help other entrepreneurs. So I think there's
that aspect to it as well. Thank you for sharing that. Can you tell me more about that education
component? What exactly do you do in that scenario? Yeah. So for me, specifically with Rainmaker,
clients are hiring me for my strategy and for my automations. But about 95% of what I am doing on
any client's LinkedIn account are really automating the manual actions that they would be taking.
And through that automation, they're able to achieve more scale. But what that allows me to
do from an educational standpoint is to say, this is how you should be using LinkedIn. This is how
I've used it the last five years. This is where I have seen success. And they can literally take
those strategies, those campaign types, and begin applying it to their LinkedIn accounts manually,
and just start improving their performance on LinkedIn. They don't even need me or Rainmaker.
It's only if they want to apply some level of automation and scale that they would want to
use me. So it's very freeing to be able to share these very specific strategies that,
if a business does it right, I don't see how they would fail on LinkedIn. And knowing that
they could do all of this without me if they want it. And so I just love sharing that education.
And usually you get invited to people to speak about these things. Do you have a program that
you give people online? Or do you have a course that people can take? What is it exactly?
Yeah, that's a great question. Right now it's just me speaking and talking. Going on to podcasts,
I was one earlier today. I met with a founder earlier today and spent almost an hour talking
with him about how they should be using LinkedIn. And they want to use me. Great. If they don't,
I'm fine with that too. So I think that there isn't a program other than hiring me for the
automation. I don't have anything else. But I do want to turn rainmakergrows.com into more of a
learning resource. So one of the pages already on that site is a campaigns page. And there's like
12 different campaign types that everyone should be considering for their LinkedIn accounts.
And only one of them requires a unique way that Rainmaker can get at data and export data out of
LinkedIn. The other 11 campaign types, anybody else can use. Oh yeah, there it is. So 11 out of
those 12, anybody can go do manually. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you
tuned into Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue
to move forward. This is going to 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. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.