Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted small business podcast host. I'm here with Rich M. Smith and his studio.
Rich, tell us a little bit about your experience and what you're doing right now in marketing.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hey Jeremy, thanks for having me on today.
So I've spent really most of my career in marketing. I've been the chief marketing officer of seven different companies over the last 25 years, ranging from Fortune 500 financial services to large regional health care to data and technology. So pretty wide ranging set of businesses. Also a management consulting company.
And you know, over that time period, I've obviously seen a lot of change in terms of the technology that we use, you know, in marketing and business. I mean, when I started my career, the Internet wasn't even really a thing.
So, you know, things have changed a lot. But there are some things that are just kind of universal that I don't think change, and that's really what's driven me to stay in the field for so long, is I'm just fascinated with how people make decisions.
And as the advent of behavioral science came along, that also spoke heavily to me because behavioral science kind of explains why people make decisions in a scientific way.
So studying that and combining that with marketing kind of leads me to what I do now.
I run what I call a growth studio. I work with founder led businesses of all sizes and I help them to scale, but scale in a predictable, systematic way.
I find that a lot of, a lot of founders, you know, they have a great idea for a product or a service, they bring it to market, they get some traction with it, they may even get to be, you know, cash flow positive, but then they get stuck.
And one of the primary reasons, a lot of potential reasons, one of the primary reasons they get stuck is they've never really, they're kind of doing it all themselves and they've never really put systems in place or architecture in place to help them grow their business. And usually what got them to the point where they are now, those are not the same tactics that they need to get to the next level. So that's what we help them with,
[00:02:44] Speaker A: with that behavioral side. Is it nature? Is it nurture or is it nurturing nature?
[00:02:51] Speaker B: I think it's both.
That's a debate that's kind of raged for a very long time. And it's undeniable that our environment plays a role on how we think and act.
You know, I was just speaking with, I had someone on my podcast yesterday who happens to have worked in Russia and the United States And Asia. And we got to talking about how business leaders in different cultures express their emotions and fears. And, you know, it's interesting that what she said. In the United States, grief is not an acceptable emotion. In a business setting, pride is.
But in Russia, grief is an accepted emotion to display. In a business setting, pride is not.
So even though we're human beings and we all experience the same emotions, we have the same needs, desires, and I think a lot of that is universal. How we express that sometimes does change based on our environment.
But just looking at the behavioral science out there, researchers have documented something like 188 different cognitive biases that we're all susceptible to.
And those biases actually drive a lot of our decision making. One way to think of them is shortcuts.
We're bombarded with lots of information every day, ads and news, and you name it, the email just never stops coming in.
And as a result of that, and even from evolutionary times, we've developed these kind of cognitive shortcuts in order to help us make decisions and reduce the cognitive load of each of those decisions.
So we tend to make decisions based on emotion and rationalize them later.
And that's really contrary. I was trained in classical economics. My undergrad degree is an economics degree. And in classical economics, you have this rational actor theory. Theory, right? Like everybody is a rational actor, and you assume that people are making rational decisions. Well, the problem with that is that's not true. We don't make rational decisions. We make emotional decisions, and then we rationalize them later and we tell ourselves that those are rational decisions.
And that's really where the field of behavioral science and behavioral economics kind of stepped in. And it's a. Believe it. It's a relatively new field. I mean, it's only maybe less than 20 years old. You know, kind of started with the publication of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and slow in 2007. And it's. It's kind of exploded since then.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: So then is marketing just providing rational excuses for people to make rash decisions that benefit your business?
[00:05:57] Speaker B: No, I don't think that way. I think that, you know, marketing is not good marketing, and effective marketing is not manipulative.
I think it's more of how are we crafting what we do, how are we talking about what we do and presenting it to consumers in a way that they can actually absorb it and understand it.
It's not about trying to trick people or manipulate people into doing things that are not good for them. Because ultimately nobody wins when you do that, yeah, okay, you might get a short term gain if you can fool some people into buying something from you, but that's not sustainable. And particularly in today's world where there's just so much transparency and so many ways to check on people like you, damage your reputation that way, you probably are out of business, perhaps even permanently.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: So what is the founding mindset across those CMO positions that you've inherited, that you've inhabited over time, that you still inhabit now?
[00:07:19] Speaker B: You know, I think that one of the most important lessons that I learned as a marketer and took into my CMO roles and one of the reasons why I've been successful as a Chief Marketing Officer is having the ability to translate marketing speak into CEO speak.
Right.
If you're a marketer. And I think you mentioned in our little intro when we were chatting that you've got some agencies that go into SEO, right? You do a lot of SEO work. So I'll use that as an example. Right?
So if you go into a meeting with your CEO and you say web traffic is. Or organic web Traffic is up 20%, web traffic overall is up 15% or whatever, your CEO is actually sitting there thinking, well, that sounds kind of nice, but I don't really know if I'm making any money.
CEOs think in different terms. They think in terms of business outcomes, you know, revenue generation, ARR. Churn rates. Right. Cost of acquisition, you know, lifetime value. Right. Npv, lifetime value. They think in very different terms than the way marketers think. Now, we know that web traffic is important, we know that brand awareness is important, all of those things.
Social media engagement, right? But if you go in and you start talking to your CEO about social media engagement, their eyes are going to roll back into the back of their head and you're going to lose credibility with them.
So I think being effective at a senior level in a marketing role really takes translating marketing results and objectives into business outcomes that your CEO and CFO and board of directors and investors, if you're a private business, all understand.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: So is it really just as simple as, you know, we're inhabiting different nations and we have to trip. We're playing interpreter slash translator Pretty much, yeah.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: I mean, I actually describe it that way a lot. It's kind of like, you know, we're speaking one language, they're speaking another language and somebody has to translate the two. And you know, who ends up translating if they're effective, it's at the senior level, it's the CMO or marketing leadership that needs to be able to do
[00:09:50] Speaker A: that translation or interpretation?
[00:09:54] Speaker B: Well, you know, I think that's kind of two sides of the same coin.
It is translation, but it is also interpreting what the business outcome is for that particular marketing KPI.
So, you know, as an example, let's say we were talking about web traffic a minute ago. Well, instead of saying, okay, our web traffic is up 15%, you might say, instead, we've increased potential demand by 15% this month over last month.
Because what is web traffic? It's iBots, people who are coming to basically your digital storefront.
It's just as if you had a physical store. Foot traffic, people walking in the door. That's all potential demand.
And that is something that a CEO will get. And then their very next question will be like, great, what did our conversion rate on that potential demand hold up? Right. Or did it go up or down? Or, you know, so. So then you're getting into a business outcome conversation that really speaks to what they care about every day. And I think that's another really important thing, not just in, you know, how marketers talk to their CEOs, but also, you know, just when you think about how we speak to any audience, comprehension doesn't occur unless the audience receives it and absorbs it. And that's, again, a lot of what behavioral science is designed to do, is to help the audience receive and absorb what you're saying in a way that their brain actually works.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: One challenge that I find in our moment is the.
The methods of attribution.
That seemed very solid. I'd say 2015, I would have very confidently represented to you. Yeah, I think I can give you a rough sketch of what, you know, this campaign. It'll take time, and I'd give you caveats of like, hey, you need time for this, and. And it'll grow organically to this outcome because of this input, and this will happen. And that means, you know, you build links, you build content, and here's the keywords, and here's their rough volume. Here's our competitors we could track, you know, and here's our trajectory of change in rankings. I could confidently go in and say, okay, I think based off of these, here's a reasonable projection, you know, plus 5, plus 10, minus 10 of a path where we could go.
But it feels to me that a couple of our eyes have been.
Eye has been gouged out. One of our ears is clogged. We got hit in the snout by, you know, Claude coming up. And, you know, every other moment or turn we've you know, attribution, there's another scale to it. You know, there's another facet, there's yet another, you know, we can't track mobile, that crosses over to tablet, that crosses, that gets prompted.
So I feel pretty beat up and pretty banged up is it's still even plausible to, you know, come at the attribution model of digital marketing right now with those hard numbers that a CEO would be happy with? Or do you have to be a little more woo woo, be a little bit more PR and a lot more loose in how you're talking about things versus, you know, this is, you know, this keyword ranking for this keyword has this much volume, is this much ctr, is this much revenue. When we get this many leads at this conversion rate, it's not that clean anymore.
Do we still have the wherewithal to go through it? We're just a bit punch drunk. Or do we need to rethink how we communicate those metrics?
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really, really great question.
You know, I think, honestly, I think attribution continues to get better as we're able to gather more data.
But there's always a, it will only go so far.
There's always an unknown factor. There's always something that's you're not able to connect. You gave some great examples of places where you're not able to connect the dots.
But I think part of how I have dealt with that challenge in the past is to look at designing controlled tests that change those dynamics.
Great example. Okay, you're an SEO expert.
CFOs love organic traffic. Let me just tell you, they love it.
They think that's the best thing, right? And if you're not careful, when you go in to a meeting with a CFO and you're showing results by channel, right? By inbound channel. Well, organic looks amazing because it appears to be free.
We all know that it's not free.
And you know, as an SEO professional, I'm sure many of your audience knows that what happens to SEO traffic when you cut paid marketing?
[00:15:30] Speaker A: It goes down too.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: It goes down, Right.
So these things are all interrelated.
And so it does take some time to figure out what those relationships are. And sometimes you have to create some controlled tests that are never going to be perfect. Right?
You might pick, let's say you're a national company, you might pick a particular region of the country to change your mix and see what the impact is if you change your mix in that region. Okay, now that's not statistically absolutely translatable. To the rest of the country, but it still gives you a pretty good idea of what those relationships are. And you can see that over time. So there is certainly an art and a science to attribution. But in many of the businesses that I've been involved in, over time, we built up enough data and enough understanding of those relationships that we could build attribution models that would approximate reality.
They were never perfect. They were never going to be perfect, but they would approximate reality. So they would give some. So taking that organic traffic versus paid traffic example just at a very high level, you'd give some credit to paid for the organic that's being generated and understanding.
And you have some data and some testing behind it to prove why you're choosing that and putting it into your model. But it's very important to do that. Display advertising is another classic one.
Display advertising often looks terrible if you look at it just on its own metrics.
But display advertising drives organic and direct and other kinds of traffic, right? People see a display ad, they don't click the ad, they type in the URL and they go directly to your website.
So understanding those relationships and then presenting the data in a way to your CEO and CFO, that shows how. Here's the raw numbers. When we apply our multichannel attribution model, here's how that shakes out. Here's why we're using those assumptions, because we've tested them in certain markets and we understand that there are assumptions. And, you know, they're not perfect, but they're better than not having a tool like that to help us make those decisions.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Tell me about an aha moment that you've had in your career, Something that clicked when you were looking at your work.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Hmm, that's a really good question. I probably had a lot of aha moments. I feel like I'm constantly learning as I go through my career, an aha moment. Well, you know, I'll go back and tell a story. So I happen to be, fortunately or unfortunately, the chief marketing officer of AIG Bank. During the financial crisis, AIG was the epicenter of that whole situation. And the bank, the unit that I was a part of, wasn't really.
We weren't the cause of AIG's problems. I mean, we were highly regulated, very, very clean balance sheet. But we were the legal entity that gave the federal government the ability to come in and do the bailout within aig. So we were, you know, ground central to the whole thing.
And I think several aha moments came out of that experience. For me, first and foremost was that much of what is said in the media is really not true. Now I know that's not going to come as a surprise to people in today's day and age, but this was 2008 and we might have been a little bit more, you know, forgiving. But you know, people were saying things on the news. I mean, AIG was now on the news all the time. And the things that people were saying were just so far from reality, it was really kind of shocking.
So that was a learning experience for me in understanding how you have to deal with a crisis from a public relations perspective and what's effective and what's not effective.
The other real aha moment that came out of that for me was we.
So just a little context.
AIG was being broken up and pieces of the business were being sold off, some at the bank. We really depended on other AIG business units for our customers. We just were mainly a cross sell entity.
We sold mortgages and deposit products to life insurance customers and auto insurance customers and customers of the various investment broker dealers at AIG owned. Well, when that's now being broken up, all of a sudden we're losing our entire distribution, just blew up overnight. So we had to reinvent ourselves.
And as part of that reinvention, one of the considerations was, well, should we rebrand?
Some AIG units did rebrand to something else and then eventually rebranded back. And I'll get to that part of the story.
And the task kind of felt to me to answer that question.
And when I was thinking through, okay, what's the best path forward for us?
Was it to change our name to something else, to run away from the fact that we tainted brand and run away from it to something else? Or do we stick with it?
And I made the recommendation that we stick with it.
And the reason being is that we didn't need everybody to do business with us.
We just needed a certain type of customer to do business with us. And my calculation was that certain type of customer would understand that AIG was being, you know, backed by the federal government and as a bank, like all of our deposits were FDIC insured, right? There were good reasons that a sophisticated customer who understood financial markets and understood what was happening would not, you know, as long as we put out a good product, good service, good pricing, they wouldn't shy away from doing business with us.
And if we were to rebrand now, all of a sudden we have to spend lots of like we become a brand that nobody had ever heard of, right? So you could either stick with a somewhat tarnished brand that everybody knows, right. Or you could go do a new brand that nobody's ever heard of and have to invest in building that brand awareness and getting traction for that brand in the market.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Right?
[00:22:30] Speaker B: So we stuck with the AIG brand and you know, the strategy worked, we had a lot of success and in fact within 18 months we were back to profitability within the banking unit.
And you know, ultimately the AIG brand rehabilitated those units that were still part of the company that had rebranded away branded back to the AIG brand because, you know, it had, you know, we went from being a, you know, trillion dollar company that nobody had ever heard of to a company that everybody on the planet had heard of pret much overnight.
And that kind like you can't, no amount of money can buy that level of brand awareness, right? So even though, you know, maybe 80% of the population would never do business with us, well now the 20% that would actually knows who we are and will do business with us. So that was a real aha moment for me as well. Like, like, hey, you know, there are silver linings to these things. There are silver linings to, to a crisis, you know, every company of any size, you know, is eventually going to run into some kind of negative press moment.
It's how you deal with that moment
[00:23:52] Speaker A: that matters and that, that ties to, you know, concepts of leadership and identity. Right. And authenticity. You know, if the, the leadership of your organization, you know, has clarity and has, you know, has successfully. Because I run into, you know, I've asked this a few times to a couple of different guests to kind of connect for me or, or rebalance what I see as broken. Because you know, on the one hand, if you do know behavioral science and attitudes and processes, then you can know what levers or influences people. Right? And so there's an act inherent in the marketing of something that you're, you're kind of pushing on those things.
But there's a challenge of doing that authentically because, because you have a mission and a belief in it versus pushing those levers because monkey get food, you know, pushing on the behavioral buttons because you know, it will get the behavior that you want out of the consumer. And so that's kind of the tension that I see of the more knowledge that we get, you know, the better that we are at behavioral science.
The maybe I would say it as how do you avoid the temptation of structuring things that, you know, get the outcome that you want out of the Market. But come don't come from an authentic place. They come from a manipulative place.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: Yeah, great, great question and I'll answer a couple ways. So first and foremost, you know, authenticity. I think authenticity equals credibility.
And if you're in any kind of public role, one thing you should never ever do is say something that's not true.
You're much better off if you don't know the answer. You're much better off saying, I'll get an answer for you. Like if you're talking to the press. Right. I'll get an answer for you. Don't ever make something up because it will come back to haunt you a million times over. And in the AIG case example, credit to, we had a kind of succession of CEOs after that financial crisis, but the one who really, I think, led the turnaround was Bob Benmoche. So credit to him is he was very clear to the public about what our plan was to pay the government back and what the milestones were along that path. And, you know, we had a lot of brand tracking research. I mean, I would get a deck like that thick of paper, believe it or not, on my desk once a month to flip through. And, you know, as we hit those miles milestones, we saw our brand sentiment improve over time. So, you know, it's an old saying, but, you know, do what you say, say what you're going to do, and do what you say. And if you do that, it tends to, even if it's recovery from a terrible situation, if you're doing that, then that tends to add to your credibility and build trust back in your business.
Now to get to the manipulative question. Okay, so, Jeremy, I have two different kinds of ground beef to sell you.
Okay.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:27:28] Speaker B: One is 10% fat and the other is 90% fat free. Which would you like?
[00:27:37] Speaker A: I see what you did.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: Like, they're the same product.
They're the exact same product.
Did I manipulate you?
No, I told you the truth. I didn't manipulate you. But I was thoughtful about how I framed that to you when I pitched it to you.
And so the framing of what you're doing is often extremely important.
And that's behavioral science, just plain and simple.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: I love that.
I want to take you down a different channel and discuss the evolution of what I see of a new marketing channel. You know, my friend Matt Brooks of seoteric says that we have to treat AI visibility as outsourced customer service that we don't directly control but can influence.
And they definitely are directly influencing Buyer behavior.
So I'm curious in a fundamental, like, specific use case, like how are you advising your clients to approach AI as a surfacing channel? We can talk next, if you want to, about its application in the business layer ops on the side, you know, connecting and marketing if you'd like. But I'm curious, as a marketing channel, what are some of the insights you've taken away, some of the best practices, you know, if you're installing pools in Nashville, like, what do you need to know about AI, what's overblown and what you need to take serious?
[00:29:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I really.
It's a great question. I'm glad you asked that one because usually the question you get is about using the tools within your business.
And everyone wants to talk about how they're getting more efficient by using AI and they need less people and they need less vendors.
And it's not that that's not important and valuable and maybe we'll get to that. But the change in customer behavior is dramatic.
And I love the phrase outsourced customer service.
In many ways it's outsourced customers sales as well.
And you know, when these days, you know, when I look for a product and I'm sure many you and many of your listeners do the same thing, we don't really go to Google and just type in a generic Google search anymore.
We go to chatgpt or Perplexity or Claude or, you know, you name the tool Muse and we ask it about the product that we're looking for and it comes back with an answer.
And it comes back with an answer that's framed in a way that, you know, they know me.
It almost sounds like a trusted friend giving you advice, right? So it's kind of like word of mouth marketing on steroids, right? Like it really, you know, when you get that answer from Perplexity and you know, you asked it about the toaster that you want to buy and it come back with three recommend, you know, three possibilities and says, I recommend this one.
What do you do? You go on Amazon and you buy that one, right? You don't go shopping because you just feel like, well, Perplexity has gone out there and they've searched everything and they know me and they picked the right one for me and I just trust them. So I'm going to buy that one.
I think that's something that if any business owners or marketers listening to this show really needs to absorb is that what is being said about you, what you put on your website and what you put in your Advertising is not necessarily what your customers are actually seeing anymore.
So my advice to a lot of the companies that I work with is you have to be cognizant of how you're showing up in AI. And there are some tools now to help you do that.
You also, you have to work towards generating third party media.
Right. Because I can sit here and tell you, Jeremy, I'm great, I'm amazing. I'm the best marketer ever. You should absolutely hire me.
It might be true, but if somebody else says that about me to you, it carries a lot more weight.
That's the same thing. That's exactly the way AI engines work.
I can say all kinds of things about myself on my own website. I can show all my stats and all my social proof and testimonials and all that stuff. Right. And it's not that it's not helpful. It is, and it's important to continue to do those things, but they don't carry as much weight as a news article written about me, as a review article written about me. So, you know, even if you're selling pools in Nashville, you need to be thinking about how am I generating third party mentions and third party media about what I'm doing. And that could be customer reviews, you know, Google reviews. Right. On Google my business. Or it could be, let me get a local newspaper to come out to one of my pool installations and. Right. And do an article on pools that are being built in Nashville. Right. Think about those kinds of things, like how do you get coverage of what you're doing in other places.
I think the same is true for CEOs and entrepreneurs who are trying to grow their companies.
Being invisible as an entrepreneur is not going to work.
You've got to be out there and be visible in places like podcasts is a great place to be visible.
And that creates again, third party credibility.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: I think you'll be happy to know that we actually now have third party party validation.
Ben Wells from OPAlerts, just released this week is a huge study and he goes a lot into the details of vector embeddings. But he took a huge data set and classified what can be correlatively attributed as a ranking factor in AI search results based off your visibility across multiple models.
And it was provable. He had, he said, trying to remember this Perfectly, there are 20,000 verified yeses and zero false positives for this signal. And it was the backlink profile of those sites matched to the industry of the the page categorically. So you were getting links backlinks on anchor text that wasn't your name was the strongest signal out of all. So strong that he dared use the word causative.
Which you know, statistically for somebody that,
[00:35:02] Speaker B: that's a tough one.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: Yeah, it's very tough to, to reach that. But he has the stats for it says the stats say that it is almost provably causative, which is fascinating to me.
And just slightly below that was unlinked was linked mentions and unlinked mentions were on the scale the next two factors. So like you said, going out there and doing stuff and being mentioned, other places being citable and cited but also linked because that was a question mark on the SEO.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: That's something we've kind of. But even there, I mean if I, if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like his results showed that the top three.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Drivers were all third party. Yes, all third party Validation.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: I think number four was your homepage relevance as far as a factor. But, but it's fourth. Yeah, that's fourth.
[00:35:57] Speaker B: It used to be first, now it's fourth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, going back to outsourced customer service and your, your Nashville pools example, you know, the other.
So we go to these, search these AI engines when we have a problem to solve. Yeah, that's obvious. Right. And sometimes that problem is I'm looking for a product to buy that's going to solve a problem for me.
Sometimes is I already own something and something's wrong with it and I need to figure out how to fix it or do it better. Yeah, right. Like I'm a HubSpot user.
[00:36:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: I have a HubSpot CRM. If I have a question about something to do in HubSpot, I don't go to HubSpot and ask that question. I go to Perplexity or ChatGPT or Claude or one of the other engines and I ask them how to fix my HubSpot problem and they tell me how to fix my HubSpot problem very succinctly so I don't have to go hunting around on HubSpot's website to find that information.
Now, you know, as a pool owner in Nashville, what does that mean to you? Okay, well, that might mean, you know, think about what are the common problems that people have with their pools and let me put information on my website that answers those questions. Maybe I'll do a few videos on how to check the chlorine concentration in your water, whatever that is making that information available.
Then the engines will find it and present it to your Customers and maybe your prospects when they're having a problem.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: I put it as the best way to come off as an authority is to have already spoken about something before you're asked about it.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Love that.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: Because I mean that that's a cornerstone foundation of, you know, content marketing, you know, from the past 10 years. But I think there was a scary moment, I would say, you know, like when ChatGPT hit the roof of everybody's visibility.
It just felt like, oh man, this is all changing. All of this content that we put out there, Chachi PT is just gobbling it up and giving nothing back. And so why even. Let's stop stop all of the money. Like so many campaigns I saw, I worked on with an agency and they saw, you know, big jobs, company and first they lost Europe and then they lost the second world in. Then it was reducing spend for content creation in America.
And a lot of that came from the thinking of, hey, you know, like they're just going to. ChatGPT is just going to answer the question, why are we wasting our money putting all this content out there?
But the, the truth of it is if you're an authority and you've spoken about it, then that makes you more findable when people, because otherwise you flip it on its head and you're gambling that they'll stumble upon you to ask you the question as opposed to asking the question and being directed to the answer you've already given.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Right, right. Great example.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: So to kind of wrap up, give you a chance to kind of shine a flashlight on your core value that you, you give to your clients when they come on board. What is the core marketing message that you're, you're hitting on and as you do that, tell people how they, how they can contact you, work with you if they like the shine on your boots.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: Yeah. The core value that I talk about is that growth is not an accident and growth is not, you know, revenue growth, sales growth, marketing growth, you know, complete the sentence. It's not an accident and it not a black box.
There are ways to create predictable growth systems and implement them within your business.
And those systems, if you're a founder, entrepreneur and most of the companies that I work with are kind of mid sized businesses, so this is pretty relevant to them.
If you're in that category, it will actually free you. Putting systems in place that will drive your growth will also free you as the founder to do the things that you're best at and take you out of doing the things that somebody else can do and you may even be better than them. Let's say you're, you're a sales oriented founder, probably a great salesperson. Most entrepreneurs that I run into are pretty good salespeople.
So maybe you're really good and maybe you know, your head of sales that you hired is not as good as you.
Okay, but that doesn't mean that they're not capable. Right. And it also mean, doesn't mean that you spending time on sales instead of spending time on other things that you are really good at and that you're the only person in the business that can do is slowing your business down.
So that's one of the main things that I help, you know, my clients understand and then begin to implement processes and systems that can allow them to do what they're best at and allow their company to grow.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: Love that. Tell the folks where they can reach you, name of your company, if you're on a particular social media channel where you're easy to access, etc.
[00:41:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm pretty easy to find. The easiest way is through my website. It's just richmsmith.com and I can also be found on LinkedIn. It's probably the best social channel. I'm on all of them, but LinkedIn's probably the best one to reach me.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: Fantastic. Thank you so much for the conversation.
[00:41:52] Speaker B: Thanks, Jeremy. Appreciate having me on.
