What's your why? Yeah, so my why
has, I have two whys and I think each of them operate really powerfully inside of me.
My first why is something that came from my mother and it's to be a champion of the underdog.
So for my entire life I have always rooted for the underdog. In many cases I have been in some ways
an underdog and I've always felt an incredible draw to the underdog, the voiceless, the folks
that are on the wrong side of the tracks. And so for 20 years I was a journalist and I was always
drawn to the poor communities, to the communities where people were struggling and to understand
their stories and to try to faithfully represent those stories and try to bring greater awareness
to what they were struggling with. So that was my draw as a journalist and the reason I came to
realize, oh and then when I started my business and I was serving small businesses I tended to
drift towards the small business, the underserved business, the business that I could make the
biggest impact in the fastest way on. And the reason I do this is because of my mother. My mother
was an inner city school teacher in Philadelphia teaching art, an underdog subject for underdog
students. And so my why has been to be a champion of the underdog. But then the other why that I've
come to realize more recently is there's been like a very common thread through my entire life,
my entire professional life, which is I love to learn and then I love to share what I learn with
others. I don't like hoarding knowledge. I like giving it away freely and generously. And so
being a journalist, that's what you do. You go in the world and you learn about the world and then
you share it. And being a teacher, an instructor, a coach, a trainer, same idea. I take really tough
topics, in this case, marketing, AI powered marketing, and I simplify it and then I share it.
And I just have this very strong instinct to learn and share. And so that really is about
my grandfather's. One of my grandfathers was a professional soccer coach in La Liga in Spain
and the other one was also a school teacher. He taught physics in central high school in
Philadelphia, the second oldest public high school in the country. And so this long line of coaching
and teaching has manifested in me as someone who loves to learn and wants to share what I
learn with others. Yeah. And you know, it's a statement that I say very often, this life
isn't really about me. It's not about us. We don't have these experiences and the challenges
and the successes in order to keep them to ourselves. They are to be shared and you're
doing exactly just that. Serving an underserved community, helping small businesses that are often
left behind. And as you mentioned, not so many of those small businesses have websites and
that's time consuming within itself. You know, it's just trying to get up a website and just
having that, you know, big audacious idea and not really knowing what to do with it, Dan, has probably
been the least challenging of it all than getting a business off ground. So it's imperative and it's
a need for someone like you to actually help those individuals to move forward and find success in a
small business because there is success. So I definitely appreciate that and thank you for
sharing your why. How did you get started? Yeah. Well, there's two answers to that question. I'm
going to start with how I got started as a business owner and it started with me being fired.
You know, like so many visionary entrepreneurs, there's really only one person who would ever
hire you and it's ourselves. We're driven, but we also drive people crazy. And so, you know, I was
a very high level journalist working at NPR in the public radio station in Miami and lost my job and
had to kind of start over and reinvent. Journalism is a really challenged industry and there just was
no job in Miami where I was living at the time that was a fit. And so first I said, you know, I was
mid-career, I was in my late 30s and I said, you know, I'm really good at storytelling,
journalistic storytelling. I want to start doing business storytelling. So I want to tell the
stories of businesses. And so I started asking people, hey, I want to tell the story of businesses.
And they're like, yeah, that's called marketing. I'm like, okay, marketing. And I like wrote
marketing down on my pad. And then I said, but you know, the future is digital, right? So I want to
do marketing, but online. You're like, yeah, that's called digital marketing. I'm like, okay,
digital marketing. So literally I was that clueless. And so I started telling people, yeah,
I want to learn digital marketing. This will take me a few weeks, right? I'm a smart guy. Anyway,
I realized pretty quickly after I went down the YouTube rabbit hole that digital marketing is a
pretty complex field. So I said, you know what, I could really use like a bootcamp, kind of like
coding bootcamp, but for digital marketing. And I couldn't find it. This was back in 2013. And so I
had to learn the hard way. And so the initial inspiration for starting my business was the
terrible pain that I experienced trying to learn this thing myself. And this goes back to that idea
of my why, which is I want to share, I want to learn and share what I learned with others. Like
seven years later, I started to figure this all out and it felt, you know, like at first I was
able to get a job in PR and then I took on a marketing role while in that job. And then
I joined a startup as a head of growth. And so that was like a marketing role. And I kind of
like tripped my way forward and, you know, and then I started teaching because I like to teach
what I want to learn and kind of figured it out. And over the course of like seven years, got to
like really understand marketing, but not only marketing in the way it's taught at the MBA
programs, I've never actually taken a formal marketing class, but marketing is the way it's
done at the small business level. And I began to build my own methodology that is, borrows from a
lot of what I just learned from the ground and some of the ideas that I've later been exposed to in
marketing. And we call it the lead building system and it's a simplified approach to marketing.
And I said, my God, if I had had this, when I started my career transition, it would have taken
what took seven years and compressed it into seven weeks. And so that's now what I share with
business owners. So they say like, look, you need to understand marketing if you want to grow your
company, if you want to scale, if you want to take this from, you know, a business that you run and
it takes all your time to one where you have enough revenue to hire people and grow, you need to
learn marketing. Now, how are you going to learn marketing? You can learn it the hard way, or you
can learn it with us. Right. And so that's sort of become the story that we tell about why we do
what we do and how it helps others. And what's interesting is as I went deeper into the field of
marketing, I came to realize that what I really love is entrepreneurship. I love being a business
owner dedicated to helping other business owners grow through marketing. And it became, for me,
the learning became much more about how to grow a business and marketing became secondary to that or
supplemental to that. So, so that's really become my second professional love. My first professional
love, my first love was journalism. And then my second professional love has been entrepreneurship,
how to build a business. And I'm dedicated to helping small businesses build theirs.
You know, and that's, that's, it's, it's a, it's a goal that I know that you've reached 20,000 times.
And looking forward to that million, but you spoke about learning experiences. And I'd like to know,
what was your most significant learning experience? Yeah. Well, the school of hard knocks.
You know, I'm a huge believer, one of the core values, the number one core value of
this hack is learn by doing. Yes. And there is no replacement for lived experience.
There's another saying that I love, which is action creates information. So if you have an idea,
act on it and learn and be prepared to fail or even fail gloriously, because in that failure
is the learning. And, you know, I went to Princeton and a lot of what Princeton teaches is theoretical.
And I have dedicated myself to practical learning in the core, in the courses that we teach, it's
all practical, it's all application because the research shows in my experience confirms that the
learning is in the doing. Yeah. And so that's the learning experience. And I'm going to add to that,
which is you have to give yourself grace if you're going to take this approach, because you're going
to make mistakes and you have to accept that you're going to make mistakes and give yourself grace.
And this is honestly, this is the mindset component of learn by doing is you need to test and learn.
And you need to fail gloriously and you need to make those failures productive by learning from
them. And you need to give yourself permission to fail and you need to be patient with yourself and
with others when they fail, because it's in the failing that we are learning. And the only true
failure is a failure where you don't learn from it. Absolutely. And so that is like the corollary to
that. It's not easy. It's easier to have someone just tell you the roadmap and to follow those steps.
But the world has become so complex and nuanced that I don't really think that that's a viable
path forward for most people. You just have to kind of take your knocks and learn along the way.
Now, the one other caveat I'll say is there's, I call it like productive failure and unproductive
failure. Yeah. Random acts of marketing where you throw spaghetti against the wall and hope some of
it will stick is not constructive. Having a strategic approach to your marketing and failing,
as you will often in your campaigns, despite that strategic approach, that's constructive. So same
thing with growing a business. You want to have a strategy. You want to have a vision. You want to
have a game plan. And then, you know, you want to recognize that the plan is probably not going to
work and you're going to have to adapt and evolve. But, but the key is learning as a business
owner. Learning enough to have a structured framework, having guidance and mentors and frame
and coaching to help you have productive failure. And then when you fail to learn from it and build
on it.
Makes all the sense in the world. And he said it, learn by doing and give yourself grace and have
patience with yourself. And I believe as a, as a entrepreneur or a new business owner, that those are
things we don't think about. We just start doing and maybe not even learning from that. As you
stated, there's the productive and unproductive marketing. And I honestly can say for myself, I've
done both. And the productive part was never do the unproductive again. So I definitely understand
that. And there was, you know, there's usually a question that I asked that you beat me to. And
those, those tips that you just gave for any entrepreneur, for all the audience that is, are
listening, if you have to rewind this back, rewind that back, because those are the things that are
going to keep the business and its longevity. Those are also going to be things that don't burn you
out so soon, right? Which is usually focusing on perfection instead of production and trying to get
it right before you actually do it. So definitely, definitely. And I have, it's, it's a random
question off the top of my head, because now I'm thinking about the next decade. What digital
marketing principles do you think will stay essential in the next decade? Yeah. In the next
decade, in the past 2000, 5,000 years, and in the future, as long as we're still a species, which is
business is human to human, marketing is human to human, intermediated by technology, but not
replaced by it. And so with digital marketing, and then especially now with AI-powered marketing,
business owners are completely losing sight of how human an endeavor business is. It's one of our
most intimate human activities is to trade value. And just never forget that. And so as you're
thinking about how do I use AI to automate things? How do I use AI to do things faster, more cheaply,
more efficiently? If you lose sight that there's a human being who is your customer, and that they
value and treasure your personal story, your personal motivation, your why, your vision,
things that no robot or AI chat bot could ever provide, then you're not going to succeed.
And think about the businesses that you know and love best. And you know the owner. You know their
story. You know why they're doing what they're doing, and you support them, even if it's more
expensive or a little takes you a little out of your way. Most of us are small business owners. 99%
of businesses are small businesses. And the core of that activity is this human-to-human interaction.
Now, do you need to suffer? Do you need to work 100 hours a week? Do you need to do things
inefficiently? No. That's where AI can help. That's where just good strategy can help. That's where a
great team can help. But recognizing and remembering that your core activity is building and leading a
team that takes care of other people, your customers, and provides them with something that
they can't get anywhere else, that's where success lies. Not just financially, but just morally,
ethically, and spiritually. And you know, one of the things that I overhear in conferences, networking,
the thought that AI is going to take away the relationship aspect of things and not having that
human-to-human contact as much anymore. Have you been approached with that statement or have heard
that as well? Yeah, it's, there's a lot of financial incentive to promote that stupid idea.
Largely by tech bros, you know, men who don't value human relationships. And it's stupid. It's a stupid
idea. It's manifestly not true. Like, why would anyone think that things that have been true for
time and memorial across every culture? Like, how do we connect as human beings? Through stories.
And that's true across every culture in every time. And the stories that people care about are why do
you do what you do and why does it matter? And so just focus there and then leverage AI to help you
get noisy about it, to help you say that in more channels and in more ways, to be creative in ways
that maybe you wouldn't have thought of. Use it as a partner in getting that out more widely. But if
you're not telling that authentic story digitally mediated, whether it's social media, your website,
email, you're gonna, you're not gonna stand out. You're gonna just be one more me too business. And
by the way, like, if an AI bot can do it, then another, your competitor can build the same bot to
do exactly the same thing. And the chances are they're going to be better at it than you are.
And so I definitely think that there's a strong financial motivation, starting with the largest
tech companies in the history of the world, to de-emphasize the human component of business. And
I think it's a dumb idea. And you should be very skeptical of it. That's not to say to be, to not
leverage the most powerful productive technology, the most powerful technology for increased
productivity in the history of the world. You'd also be completely nuts to not leverage AI. So I'm
not saying it's just understand what AI can and should do, and not have it try to replace you.
Absolutely. I love that.
And then one last thing I'll say is, what I actually love, love about AI is it's actually
helping us define our humanity. Like, what is distinctly human about us? And I'll tell you
what's distinctly human about us. It's our personal history and our personal motivation. Like,
really the core of your podcast around vision, no AI can provide that. No AI has lived the life
you've lived, the experiences you've had, the influences and the people who've shaped you.
That's the human part of marketing. And you have to get really good at telling that part,
and then leveraging AI to help you do it more efficiently and get noisy and maybe tell it in
more creative ways.
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 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.