S2E62 S.A Grant.mp3 – powered by Happy Scribe

Boss Uncaged is a weekly podcast that releases the origin stories of business owners and entrepreneurs as they become uncaged trailblazers. In each episode, our host S.A. Grant and guests construct narrative accounts of their collective business journeys and growth strategies, learn key success habits, and how to stay motivated through failure, all while developing a Boss Uncaged mindset. Break out of your cage and welcome our host, S.A. Grant.

Welcome back to boss Uncaged Podcast. This is another bonus episode. So today’s topic at hand is it’s been around for a period of time, but things are not necessarily mainstream as of yet, but they’re building up to it. And being that I’m a digital marketer, I’m plugged into these spaces and I hear about the great vine, about things that are coming up. And then I studied them and I research them before I even bring them to you. So today we’re going to be talking about NFT’s. Some of you may have heard of NFT, some of you may not have heard of MPs. Some of you may think NFT’s are a fad. But hopefully after this particular episode, I’ll be able to kind of clarify some user cases and the definition of entities and kind of breakdown, like how you can creatively use entities, right? So today’s topic is how can I use NFT’s to increase the value of my digital real estate portfolio. So what we’re going to cover in this episode, we’re going to cover what’s an NFT? We’re going to cover what is a digital real estate, right? We’re going to also cover who could gain to use NFT’s in building digital real estate.

And we’re also going to close out with user cases of NFT’s in building digital real estate portfolios, right? So what we’re not going to cover in this episode, which I’ll probably cover in future episodes, is how to create an NFT, what is the NFT collection? Understanding the BlockchEthereumain , what is a gas fee, how to market an NFT, and how to do NFT’s effectively in the environment, right? Or how do NFPs affect the environment. So those are things that we’re not going to cover. So I’m just going to dive into this and you guys know if I’m talking about this, I’m excited about it. And I think that you need to know about it. If you don’t know about it already, or at least I can kind of help you clarify some things about it. So first off the bat, what is an NFT? Now, you probably heard the non fungible token is a unique and non transferable unit of data stored on a digital ledger, right? And then they go into blockchain. They go into all the stuff. So I’m going to summarize it and I’m going to tell it to you in a story format.

So the first summarization of what entity really is, it is a ledger of ownership of digital content tracked on blockchain. That’s the base level definition of it. So you’re probably still like, what does that mean for me as an individual? Right? Well, think of it from an example of, let’s say you went to an art show in the 80s or the 90s or early 2000s, right? And in this art show, there was a piece of art that you purchased. Now, you may not have been the first owner of this art. It could have been a piece of art that maybe was owned by Shaquille O’Neill, or it could have been a piece of art that was maybe owned by a famous musician. And that’s what they’re telling you as far as the marketing for this piece. So you want to own this piece. This piece has been in multiple different people’s hands. It’s a legacy piece. It’s been in this hands. It’s been in the 18 hundreds. But you’re going off of their work like there’s no proof of that central record, right? Maybe back then they may have been some kind of ledger. But ledgers back then, it could have been falsified, right?

It could have been written signatures, kind of like who had it, who didn’t have it. Kind of like a log file for your car when you go to get all changed with more premium cars, right? But now with NFT’s, it allows you to have something that cannot be disputed. It’s locked into what’s called the blockchain, which is essentially just nothing more than technology behind the scenes. And the way this technology works is that every single time someone purchases or becomes the owner of that product, in this case, we’re talking about art. This ledger is digitally created, and also it’s locked in based upon multiple different computers that are verifying it at the same time. So there’s no way for you to really falsify it, right? So if you just say you have 10,000 computers, all 10,000 computers are going to have to verify that John just sold this painting to Susan. And once that happens, and then that’s considered to be minting. Once that’s minted, then you have a blockchain record of from owner one to owner two, right? So now when you purchase something like that, you could literally go into the record and see who has owned this piece of art, or anything digital for that matter.

That’s what the real value behind NFC is coming. Now, obviously, there are multiple other strategies that go into that. But if you’re into the collecting space, which most people, they collect something, right? Whether you’re collecting equipment as a podcaster or whether you’re an art collector or you’re collecting baseball cards, the problem is always the verification of who owned it, what’s the value of it. Why is this same products, two of the same identical products? Why is one worth more than the other? Well, if you have two pieces of the same similar artwork, and one was owned by JayZ and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk versus another one that wasn’t owned by anyone. Which one do you think will be worth more? The one that’s owned by all the billionaires with proof of ownership that’s like the meat and potatoes of NFT. So, number two, going into what is digital real estate? Well, digital real estate, NFT go hand in hand because NFT are essentially creating ownership ledgers of digital assets, right? So digital assets can be podcasts. It can be videos. It could be courses. It could be images. I mean, the owner of Twitter sold his NFT of his first tweet of Twitter, right?

And I know you’re probably thinking like, well, I could just take a picture of it. That’s always the rebuttal. Why do I want to have ownership of something digital where I could just take a screenshot of it, right? Well, guess what? If you ever seen some influencers, they may go to this big ass mansion, big house. They will take pictures in this house, but they don’t own the house. They’re renting the house. Or maybe their friend may own the house, or maybe they’re on vacation at the house, but they don’t own the house. So part of it, yes, is bragging rights, but also, it’s also the credibility of having ownership of something that has value. And value then can turn into monetization. So if I’m taking pictures in front of a jet, well, do I own that jet or am I renting that jet? There’s this fake reality, and then there’s real reality, right? There’s fake ownership, and then there’s real ownership. So NFD kind of clears that up. So when you get into digital real estate, you have to look at it as assets, much like regular real estate. I could be renting a house, right?

Spending 3000, $10,000 to rent a house. But I don’t own the house. So it’s kind of like, I can’t sell that house. I can’t make money off that house. I can’t take that house and put it on the market. I can’t sub lease that. I can’t do anything with the house to make any monetary gains from that house because I’m renting it for somebody else. Somebody else has ownership of the house, and they’re making that money off of me. So the same thing with digital assets. Boston Cage podcast. I own Boston Cage podcast. I own the audio that we’re creating. I own this episode, right? But imagine, for example, this is something that I’m working on. Let’s say if I create an NFT of images from the podcast, or maybe I create a new brand, sub brand of Boston Cage called Boston Cage Beast. And what I’m doing is selling artwork of uncaged animals, like a lion or beer or tiger. Oh my. And they’re representing quality artwork, but at the same time, it gives the listener ownership of this artwork. So 20 years down the road, 100 years down the road, much like you’ve seen Picasso pieces or bosquia pieces, usually the value of those pieces kind of go through the roof after someone dies, right?

And I’m not trying to say that that’s what’s going to happen with the Boston Cage pieces. But the reality is. If you have ownership of something now over a period of time as Boston Cage grows. Or as your brand continues to grow. Or as your legacy continues to grow. Or if you have kids and your kids have kids. Well. Now you could have a product that can have ownership that people cannot dispute. And you could pass it down legacy to legacy to legacy. Right? So that’s another good thing about digital real estate. In addition to digital real estate, as far as owning it, you can monetize it, right? So prime example, a podcast. You can monetize a podcast, you can monetize YouTube channels, you could monetize audio files, you could monetize images. Getty Images is the big monetization, right? Think about it. They’ve been monetizing images, like forever. They’ve been kind of using the NFT format without NFT even being in creations, right? They’ll create one image and they’ll sell the royalties of that image. So you can use that image, but they still own that image, right? So you want to look at it from that standpoint.

What do you have that’s currently digital real estate? And I want you to think about it. Your website is digital real estate, right? Now, your Instagram accounts, your Facebook accounts, your YouTube accounts are not necessarily digital real estate that you own, but the content that’s on those platforms could definitely go into your digital portfolio. So if you have 600 hours of videos on YouTube, well, as long as those videos are off YouTube as well, and let’s say YouTube decides to go under tomorrow, which that’s highly unlikely, then you have access to this content which has value, which becomes part of your digital real estate, digital assets. Okay? So hopefully that dives into what digital real estate is. So now you kind of understand NFCs. You have like a point of reference to what digital real estate is. Let’s go into number four. Who could gain from using NFCs and building digital real estate? And I’m going to read this list, and this is just like off the top of my head, and I’m kind of give you some variations of it and some case studies as well. So digital marketers, that goes without saying, right?

Digital marketers create digital content. So essentially, if you’re a digital marketer like myself as a grant, and I’m creating books, podcasts, courses, images and so forth, then it totally makes sense for me to then create some content in that space. That’s a unique value proposition for my listener or other people that are investors or collectors to say, well, Boston Cage has a great following. It has multiple listeners. I like what they have to say. I want to go ahead and invest and make a purchase for this NFT. And then from there, they’ll have ownership of this piece of artwork that’s associated to Boston Cage brand, right? Graphic designers, same thing. Graphic designers, that’s all they do is digital, right? They create digital things all day, all night. And those things then become physical podcasters, YouTubers, videographers, photographers, authors, coaches. And I know you’re probably thinking, like, what does coaches have to do with NFTs and digital real estate? Well, if you’re a coach, you’re creating content. And that content is usually in the form of a course, right? Or a Mastermind or Webinar. These are all videos that are all digital. That falls on the digital real estate, that can then become an NFT.

You could then give ownership, right? You can give not ownership of your course, but you can give ownership of different things. You can give ownership of audio clips. You can give ownership of video clips. You can give ownership of images, right? So you have to kind of think out the box of a user case, and we’ll get into that shortly. But to understand that there’s value in what you have, but it’s also value in your listening community to give them ownership of some of these elements as well. Influencers software companies. I think software companies are golden, right? So you can kind of give, hey, if you buy this NFT, we’ll give you access to a lifetime deal to our platform, or we’ll give you access to a discounted rate to our platform. So now you started to see, like, the bridging of the gap between the marketing and the product and services by using Nappies. So look at it. Hey, buy the steel shot of Boston Cage podcast. And if you buy this still shot for whatever the value is at that point in time of purchase, you’ll own that still. But with that still, you’ll also get access to more digital assets, which is access to a year’s subscription to the Boston Cage Academy, or you’ll get access to one of the Boston Cage courses.

So it’s a two for one kind of thing, but then they also have a value add of owning that. So once they go through the course, they’ll get value there. They may take action on what you’re teaching them, but they’ll always have the ownership of this piece of art that later on they can sell at a higher value, right? They could make money off that piece of art. So, again, buying that art, not only do they get access to a course, but they also get access to art that has value that they can resell down the road. It’s a no brainer when you look at it that way. Dive it into more variations. So software companies, marketing agencies, art students, find artists, content creators, consultants, publishers, I think publishers and trademark owners. Those are big, right? Because publishers essentially, they literally, for the most part, own digital content. And they’ll take that digital content and they’ll convert into physical content, much like the music industry, right? Music industry, they’ll record the recording artists, they’ll do all the marketing. The contract would say the music company may own 75% of the ownership of that particular label, and they’ll probably give 25% of royalties.

And these are just numbers that I’m throwing out there. But think about that. What would that look like? If artists and companies would share the ownership of the NFL, and the NFL is then the music, right? And then you can obviously see who owns it. There’s no question behind it. And it goes 100% of the trademarks, right? So trademarks or copyrights, you have to go to the United States, right? For example, you have to go to the trademark office. You have to wait six months to sometimes, like right now, I’m working on a trademark, and it’s been active for about nine months. We’ve been waiting for the trademark to come back. But what would it look like if I took that trademark, right, that image or that logo or that brand and I made it into an NFT? And then the trademark company would then start the trademark office would then look at that NFT validated to say, okay, well, essay has owned the ownership of this particular artwork or this particular logo or this particular brand from 2001, for example. By the time the office gets through all their documentation and verifications and they want to see proof of use and all this other stuff that comes along with trademarks, well, I have an NFC of it, so you can’t debate it.

There’s not anyone else that comes down the pipeline and says, hey, I had that logo before he did. Well, you can’t say that because I have an NFT and it’s a ledger, that’s indisputable ledger that said, I had it since 2001. So it makes the trademark work so much easier because you can’t deny it, it’s undisputable. So that’s another way of looking at another variation of that, right? Let’s dive into like, brand specialists, service based companies. And you’re thinking about service based, what aspect of services? Well, there’s different, like, could a plumber have NFT? Could a roofer have? NFTs. My answer is, why not? Why would you not want to create maybe some valued art piece on roofing? Hear me, it sounds asinine, sounds crazy, but here the philosophy behind it. Imagine creating 150 for a roofer, and these roof images are like beautiful illustrations of roof art per se. It sounds crazy, but what comes with that roof art, NFT is also a lifetime quarterly check on your roof for leaks. So no brainer, right? So you could look at it as a service that someone could then pay to say, 179 per month, or you could essentially sell the NFT.

And as the NFT becomes, the owner has NFT. As that value grows, they’re still getting the access to checking the roof, but then they can sell an NFT and make money off of it. And this is the beautiful part. With NFT’s, you can do multiple different royalties. So with an NFT, I can sell you an NFT, let’s say at $5, right? Because I’m not even going to get into the ethereum conversions. Let’s say I sell you the NFT for $5. And then I say every time that you sell the NFT, after I sold it to you, I’ll get 10% of those royalties. So you may get it for $5, and then you may sell it for 50. Then I’ll get $5 back, right? Then after you sell it for 50, the next person may sell up to 500. Well, guess what? I’m going to get another 10% out of that 500. So again, all of that’s all in the blockchain. The blockchain is keeping that ledger active. And it’s saying that, hey, every single time this piece of art is sold and the value increases, the original owner of that piece then gets 10%. So you start to see like, well, damn, if I’m selling a piece of artwork and I’m giving them value, and I’m also giving them an opportunity with my services as an add on bonus for purchasing it.

And as they decide to sell and move that through the market, then I also get a trail of royalties as well. Where’s this shit been for the past 30 damn years? The fact that it’s in existence right now and I’m trying to get you guys to understand you got to take advantage of this or at least comprehend it because the technology is going to be more intrusive in our current day world. Like I’m talking about trademarks. Like, what would that look like if NFT is our trademarks? What would it look like if you’re going to the DMV to get your driver’s license and your driver’s license is the NFT, like, this shit is going to infiltrate essentially everything once it becomes mainstream. So understanding the principles behind it is going to be very valuable going back to the list, right? So service based companies, event planners and event owners. And I think this is a gold mine, right? So for event planners and event owners, this is where I want to get into the case analysis of this. It’s going to be beautiful, right? Just think if I’m selling tickets, a lot of times tickets are like design tickets.

What if I look like selling a digital ticket and that digital ticket becomes NFT and that ticket has value? So imagine going to the first Kiss concert, right? Going to the first Wutang concert and you still have that digital ticket. What would that be worth right now for someone to say, oh my God, I’m a WuTang collector. I’m a Kiss collector and you have the first ticket for the first concert and you’re the original owner. Think of it like cars. If you are buying used cars, the first thing people usually look at is like, how many owners did the car have, right? And it’s kind of easy to figure that out. You can kind of look it up, right? You can kind of go into the history of the car. It’s the same exact philosophy. So it’s two folds, right? If I wanted a car that only has one original owner, and it’s not 20 owners, that’s great. With NFT, if it had 20 owners, what that means that every time it’s been sold, hopefully the goal would be that the value would increase and there’s a high demand and it becomes more of a commodity, right?

So going back to the list, you have collectors, large corporations, families, and promoters. Promoters go hand in hand with the event planners and event owners. Families will think about it. You could have images of your family, you could have family portraits, you could have videos of your family gathering all the different information that can be locked in to essential ownership, to where you can pass it down from generation to generation to generation. Right? Now, today, you may have instagram accounts for that. You may have Facebook account, but keep mine. If instagram decides to shut down, facebook decides to shut down, all those images are essentially gone. If your hard drive crashes, those images are definitely gone. But if you put that sucker in the blockchain, it’s being verified by thousands of machines. So it’s a global platform that can keep your images in the clouds essentially forever, right? So that’s just one way of looking at it. Going into number five, the case studies, and this is something that I really want you to like. I’m going to break these down to a certain extent, some of them. I just want you to kind of think of it again outside the box.

So we’re talking about NFT’s, we’re talking about digital real estate portfolios, music and video, right? And I think I mentioned it earlier about the ownership and royalties. So imagine a music label that has NFT’S for all their artists. And remember I was telling you about, if I sell NFT, then the artist or the original person, the original owner would get a percentage of shares. So think about that, right? And another part of ms that we haven’t talked about yet is smart contracts. So essentially a smart contract is taking all the variables of contracts. If someone does this, if that happens, if this happens, then do this, do that, right? So all of that goes into this NFT, it’s a digital asset. It’s digitally created, it’s associated to a digital product, which essentially in this case is music. It’s a contract which is binding agreement, and then it automatically then executes that agreement, right? So every time that song essentially is then played, then a royalty share can be paid out, and that royalty share can be paid out based upon the percentages of the ownership. That itself makes NFT a gold mine. Because right now in the music and the other industries is not really orchestrated that way, right?

I mean, obviously accountants that go in and is verifying this and doing all that. But imagine a system that does that for you before. And I’m not saying people won’t necessarily lose their jobs, but it will open up opportunity for people to do more constructive stuff than tracking and analyzing where you’re going to be at a particular show this week. And what you’re going to make on this show is that just put all that into the smart contract, into the NFC agreement of that particular song and then base it upon how many songs you’re going to sing on the stage. It’s a no brainer. But again, it’s not mainstream as of yet going into content creation and social media case studies. Well, it’s a no brainer just to monetize, right? Because a lot of times you create content and your problem is trying to monetize it. How do I monetize the podcast? Do I get people to do advertising? Do I get to market my own products? Do I get to sell all these different opportunities to monetize the podcast? But what would it look like if you’re monetizing part of the podcast through NFTs, right?

And when I say part of the podcast, NFT’s, again, you’re going to give added value. You’re going to give bonuses. So imagine, for example, listeners are boss on Cage. This week I’m going to release NFCs, just hypothetical. And if you purchase the first 100 people to purchase NFT, not only going to get lifetime access to Boston Cage Academy or a year subscription to Boston Cage Academy, but you’re also going to get access to the first Boston Cage Summit. And that summit is also going to include an NFT as well, right? And then you can say, hey, maybe you can get 20% off or you can get it for free or whatever it is. But now you’re building a community of people that are all going to be interconnected to these entities. So when you see someone that’s associated to the Boston Cage Facebook group, for example, and then on their profile picture, you’ll see a boss of Cage NFT, then you know that they bought into it. And it’s social awareness, right? So if one person buys it, hey, that’s pretty cool. How did you get it? And then becomes referrals as well. Because recommendations, word of mouth, there’s so many different variables of strategy to these NFTs that you can utilize as an influencer or podcast or YouTuber, but you just need to understand to think outside the box on how to utilize it, right?

So think about it as a branded micro economy. Imagine if Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, decided to sell his first audio recording of Kermit the Frog, right? Imagine that there’s people that love the Muppets, but imagine not only loving the Muppets, but owning the creator of the Muppet’s. First audio recording of Kermit defrog. Now obviously, they’ll still have the rights to use Kermit the Frog’s voice. But for you as the owner of that one little nugget, that one little five minute 32nd clip or whatever, there’s probably going to be a hell of a lot of value for that. Because now you have bragging rights on one hand, but on the other, right, if you’re a collector, you have ownership of it. And by having ownership of it, then you can sell it and monetize it, right? So imagine being the first person if Jim Henson had NFT when he originally created Kermit, and let’s say he sold it for $10,000 back then. How much do you think that would be worth today? Right? So that’s the beauty of that. And imagine if he was still getting royalty shares, 5%, 10%, 20% on the original NFT that he created when he created the current voice.

It’s a no brainer. All right. Think of it from the standpoint of Superball. Imagine being the owner of one of the original Superball one tickets with the Green Bay Packers. And if you purchase that ticket, then maybe you’ll get access to behind the scenes content in the locker room, never before to see interviews of the team on the day of the damn original Super Bowl. Now, obviously, it goes into bragging rights, but it’s so exclusive that not anyone and everyone is going to be able to have access to that content. But if they put that together and they created that, people love football. People love football. So I guarantee you, especially with the Green Bay Packers following, if that was a created NFT, people will be flocking to that sucker. And then the first person they’ll buy, maybe they’ll buy it at a higher premium and never sell it and then leave it for their family and leave it as a legacy. So that way, as it grows and grows and grows and grows and grows and grows, much like owning a Bosquiat piece or much like owning a Jackson Pollock piece, then it becomes a family heirloom to where maybe 100 years down the road, someone sells it, but they’ll sell it for a few million or a few billion dollars, give or take inflation.

All right, going into intellectual property and patents, right? So we talked a little bit about trademarks, but what would NFT look like in patents? That’s another thing as well, too, right? I can say I created the first patent for the iPad, and then Apple will say, well, we created the first patent for iPad, or we already submitted our patent for review, and all this stuff that goes back and forth with the legal jargon behind creating the ownership of patents and trademarks and copyrights. And again, the NFT was created on the day of thought, the day of execution, right? It doesn’t have to be a completely finished model per se, but just to say you have access to the NFT and that ledger. Is then going to back it, because once you mint it, then it goes into the blockchain, and again it’s going to be kind of you can’t dispute it, right? So think of it from that standpoint. What would that look like as a user case analysis to then infiltrate NFT’s into patents, goods, and supply chains, right? Tracking, that’s a big thing. The US. Post office completely sucks ass, and I’ll be very frank about it.

You may send out something from 20 miles distance in Atlanta, and it may not even end up in Atlanta, right? I ordered something from Facebook marketplace that was in California. It disappeared. It never showed up. All the tracking information was all over the damn place. And they come to find out when they finally did find it, it went from California to Alabama back to another location, another city in California. I’m like, what the how is that even possible? How do you go from Cali to Alabama? Back to Cali and I’m in Atlanta. So imagine applying the blockchain NFTs into that formula, right? You’ll be able to then see where it goes, wherever it goes, however it goes. But the beautiful part of it is that it will be a public available transcription of every single stop. Now, right now you may put in a tracking number, and the tracking number should work, but sometimes the tracking is usually paused, right, until that driver essentially inputs that data in is kind of your waiting and pending. Okay. Like Amazon does it all the time. It’ll be there in two days, and on day two they’ll say, oh, it’s not out for shipping yet.

Day three is not out for shipping yet. Then day four like, hey, it’s not here in two days, then go ahead and cancel the deal because it hasn’t even left the factory. It hasn’t even left the warehouse as of yet, even though it’s two day shipping. So imagine infusing NFT’s into a tracking model for the blockchain. Well, sorry, that the blockchain for the supply chain, right? I think that’ll be a hell of a value, right. Another user case analysis would be like the metaverse and everybody that’s like a new keyword that everyone’s hearing metadata metaverse, and it’s not necessarily something new. It’s always been in existence, but Facebook is kind of pulling them all into one new brand, right? So metavers, let’s say, including virtual reality, augmented reality, right. Think about games like Fortnite, Skylander, Pokemon Go, which are all handheld games that could be played on mobile devices except for like, Skyland. Skyland was more so like a product, right? You actually had a figurine of a character, and you would use that figurine of a character to then infuse and play in the game, and you switch it out and it would switch out your characters, right?

Sounds like NFT art to me. Right. So that’s the other thing about NFT art right now is that people are then creating NFT art for marketing for their upcoming games. So they’re releasing the art of their characters for their games. And if you buy the NFT art, then you’ll be able to use the NFT art as that character inside of the game. It’s kind of like Pokemon, right? If I have multiple different Pokemon characters, I could use my Pokemon characters. As I see Pokemon Go is essentially you’re finding Pokemon hidden, right? So imagine you’re searching for NFTs, right? And these NFT’s are associated with Pokemon. And as you find NFT’s, if you’re the first one to find it, then essentially you have ownership of it. There’s so many different possibilities with this thing that it just blows my mind that if you don’t know about it, hopefully this episode is going to kind of help you to kind of make the wheels on the bus start turning, right? They make you sit down and be like, oh damn essay. I wish I would have thought about this before. Right? So again, this episode is essentially just to open up your mind to realize to plug into these damn NFT’s.

I’m not saying to go out there and create them. I’m not saying to go out there and buy them, but I’m saying at the bottom line, minimum, at least comprehend and understand that these things are here and they’re probably going to be here to stay. If they don’t stay, then they’re going to morph into something else based upon the technology. So if nothing else, please understand these principles. Collectibles. So collectible art, memorabilia, memories, digital fashion, all these things essentially falls underneath a great use analysis for NFT’s, right? Art. Well, the NFT art came to existence because of the whole art collection craze, right? So people always want to collect art. They’ve always been collecting art forever. And now they’ve merged technology with art, which is the gold mine for all artists, all creators, right? Memorabilia, baseball cards, basketball cards, football cards, basketball video clips of the whole company that has created a whole NFT craze just on the basketball highlight reels, right? So imagine football highlight reels. Imagine all the different variables of all the different sports all being created into entities to have ownership, right? It’s like you’re creating money out of nothing, essentially, right?

But again, the value is based upon the beholder. If you’re a really big basketball fan and you love the Chicago Bulls and you love Michael Jordan, well, imagine owning the original Schematic drawings for the Jordan ones in a digital PDF or a digital image. And that also came with a signed digital autograph from Michael Jordan himself. People that collect sneakerheads sneakerheads would lose their damn mind and probably spend millions of dollars on that one damn NFT, especially if it’s one of a kind. Please don’t lose their damn mind and they’ll be flocking to get access to that one NFT. Last but not least is like the tracking of ownership. And I said this keyword several different times. And I want you guys to think, I think it was like maybe in the late nineties, early 2000s, it was a website called where’s George and you was able to track money, right? Oh, I had a $20 bill and my $20 bill was in Alabama, it was in Tennessee, it was in Washington, it was in New York, and now I own that $20 bill. So it’s kind of like playing with money in a sense, tracking the history of the money, kind of figure out where did that money come from?

Well, if you like that platform, if you were into that craze about tracking dollar bills and running serial numbers. And again, I may not be talking to everyone, but I’m sure I’m talking to at least a person at the other end of this digital signal that you remember this craze about tracking money, right? It’s the same exact principle as NFCs. So again, I’m just trying to get you to comprehend the value add in the preposition of how to utilize these NFT’s. So imagine this whole where’s George.com and you’re tracking this $20 bills. Well, imagine scanning the $20 bills and converting them into NFPs. Well then it will be no problem to track them wherever they go, right? And then that doesn’t have to be money. It could be anything. It could be anything that’s digital. And that’s what’s crazy about it. If it has a digital signature, a digital pulse, if they take a picture on your cell phone, it can be a tweet, it could be a text message, it could be an image. And again, it goes back to the statement I said earlier. Yes, you could take a screenshot of it, but you’re not going to own it and be able to sell it for a value add.

And the beauty of having a tracking ledger to say that you are the physical owner and you can sell it because you own it, then by default, you’re transferring the value of that ownership to someone else, makes NFT’s hell of valuable versus just a simple ass screenshot. Much like if I just run in front of the White House and take a selfie, it does not mean I own the damn White House. It does not mean that I can’t do anything with the White House besides take a selfie in the front lawn behind the damn gate. All right, so just to recap, we covered what is NFT, essentially NFT, it’s just a digital ledger, right? Just keep that shit simple. You don’t have to get it too complex. When we get into the next version of details of entity, then we can dive that deep. But for right now, I just want you to think about having a digital ledger of ownership. That’s the basis of entities. And that ledger is then supported by verification by the blockchain, right? And the blockchain is just a series of computers that are computing the ownership, right? It’s verifying that a transaction was happening.

So it’s verifying your ledger. That is it. Bottom line, period. Yes, there’s other facets to it, yes, there’s other details that go into it, but at the simplest level, that’s all it is. Digital real estate. Much like regular real estate. If I own the deed to my house, then I can sell my house. If I own the ownership of my content, then I can sell my content. The more content that I have that has value, the larger my portfolio gets and the more monetization that I could possibly make. The same thing. If I own more properties, more turn keys, more apartments, more buildings, more commercial properties, then by default, the more money I would make for people renting it, people leasing it, people wanting to purchase it, right. Same exact principle. Put those two together, you have NFT’s, and you have your digital real estate portfolio. Number four, just who can gain? Essentially, I would say, I hate to say anybody and everyone, because it’s not for everyone. It’s not for anyone, but anyone that’s in the digital space. Anyone that’s in front of a computer. If you touch a computer at any given time of your day, and if you have a cell phone and you touch your cell phone, you take pictures.

And if you’re on social media, you need to dive into NFT’s, at least learn what the hell they are and then how you can use them for yourself. And number five is this is a case studies, and I’m not going to go through all these all over again, but I just want you to understand the cases that I went over, which is to open your mind to kind of think of all the possibilities and use case analysis that you can utilize NFT for running side by side with digital assets as well. So think about that. Good example to recap on was like the super ball. Well, imagine every super ball ticket being an NFT. There’s only a limited amount, right? There’s only been a limited amount of super balls. So let’s say total, and this is arbitrary number. Let’s say total from the first super bowl until the next super bowl. Let’s say there was only 10,000 tickets in creation. Every single ticket was a different year, a different team, a different city. Think about collecting that. Think about what would that look like as far as ownership? And you may think about, well, I got bills to pay, this down third and all that.

But essentially you’re looking at it as more of an investment, right? It’s much like looking at property. If I’m going to buy a property, it comes out of location, location, location, right. So it’s the same thing with the NFTs. What are the location? Not necessarily like the geolocation, but in reality of time frame. When does this ticket digital asset relate to something? It relates to football. It relates to Superball. It relates to a location. So there are three variables that make it very original. So to have ownership of it then gives value and then having the value of that, then you kind of sell it and monetize it and make money back from it. All day, all night. Especially you would want to create the original asset and then you’ll get royalties on that, right? So again, this is Essay Grant. Hopefully this information. Again, I just want your wheels on the bus to go turning comprehend it. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me and let me know. Was this helpful? Did you get a ha moment? And I want you to say, AHA, I got it, I understand it and if you don’t, then let me know.

Again, I’m going to create more videos about this topic and create videos about many other topics. But the goal would be NFT’s is here now and I think they’re definitely here to stay. So before the bandwagon kind of gets too fluctuated, at least comprehended you don’t have to invest in it, but at least understand the world that you live in and where the world’s going. SA Grant. Over and out. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Boss Uncaged. I hope you got some helpful insight and clarity to the diverse approach on your journey to becoming an engaged trailblazer. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review and share the podcast. If this podcast has helped you or you have any additional questions, reach out and let me know. Email me at ask@sagrant.com or drop me your thoughts via call or text at 76223 three boss. That’s 762-233-2677. I would love to hear from you. Remember, to become a Boston Cage, you have to release your inner beast. Essay Grant signing off.

Listeners of Boss Uncaged, you are invited to download a free copy of our host S.A. Grant insightful ebook, Become an Uncage Trailblazer. Learn how to release your primal success in 15 minutes a day. Download now at www.bossuncaged.com free book.

12 Fundamental Business Model Secrets – powered by Happy Scribe

Boston Cage is a weekly podcast that releases the origin stories of business owners and entrepreneurs as they become uncaged trailblazers. In each episode, our host, Essay Grant and guests construct narrative accounts of their collective business journeys and growth strategies, learn key success habits and how to stay motivated through failure. All while developing a Boston Cage mindset. Break out of your Cage and welcome our host, Essay Grant.

Welcome back to Boston Cage. So this is a bonus episode. And as things progress with Boss and Cage, I always want to kind of keep everyone in the loop and kind of post these updates. So moving forward, when I do these individual bonus episodes, they’re going to be more like micro courses. And what I want the listener to do is to listen to this and take notes, take actions on what I’m about to present to you. Because the goal is part of the whole Boston Cage story. And Boston Cage brand is to help entrepreneurs help business owners on their journeys. So this particular one is not the first one that I’ve done. It’s going to be the first one I’m going to do in this particular fashion. And I really want you guys to really take heed to what I’m about to say. So I’m going to kind of just talk about the topic. The topic is The Twelve Fundamental Business Model Secrets to Help with Your Growth Strategy. And so, as the story goes, when I first got introduced to business modeling, becoming a consultant, becoming a strategist, I’ve been doing this thing for about 20 years.

So about maybe ten to twelve years back, a friend of mine by the name of Scott Wise had introduced me to the lead in Canvas. And I’m sitting there and I’m building my business. He was building his business. And he presented to me this book and I looked it over and I looked at the content. I’m like, it makes it very transparent and very simplistic enough so you can kind of really comprehend the components of any business that you need to have to make that business run effectively. So when you start to break down like the Canvas, you have to think about it more. So from a standpoint of a single document versus multi page document, like a standard business plan, obviously both of them could be utilized, both of them have their places in business. But it’s so much more easier to kind of fill in the blanks for a business model and then use that to then jump off of business and use that to then start developing into your business plan. If you do decide to go down that road, if you’re looking for equity or if you’re looking for capital, stuff like that.

So here we go. Twelve, right? So the first one is going to be Value Proposition. And what I want you to understand about Value Proposition is every business that is created, you’re essentially creating that business to apply value to a particular customer segment, right? And that value should be associated with some kind of monetary value or in some shape or form. So value proposition is more so like a promise that you’re going to deliver value or deliver a solution to a client. In the case of Boston Cage, I kind of give you guys a little insight to what our value proposition is like. We’re here to help entrepreneurs and business owners grow their businesses through the storytelling of other entrepreneurs and other businesses, what hurdles they have overcome over the years. And in addition to that, as Boston case has grown, we added the book club. And the book club is essentially a value proposition to help people learn and read and get more insights that other entrepreneurs are reading. In addition to that, we’ve added the Boston Cage Academy, which is probably, I think, the first time I’m really making the announcement of it.

It was kind of like behind the scenes things I was working on. But the Boston Cage Academy is definitely active and is live, and you can definitely check it out at Boston Cage comACADEMY. So the value proposition of that particular platform is what we’re doing right now, taking videos like this and breaking them down to smaller buckets so people can really comprehend exactly what they need to do, how to do it. In this academy, we record videos, we do step by step tutorials, we do Facebook groups, we do Q and A. So that way, if you’re an entrepreneur and you want to leverage marketing strategy, or you want to level funnels, or if you want to leverage email marketing, not only do you have access to what platforms that I’m using, you may have access to what other platforms other people are using, you’ll have access to multiple different platforms, right? So you may have a lifetime deal, you may have a free deal, you may have a pay to play deal, or monthly subscription deal. But the goal is here is to explain these platforms, do live tutorials, explain exactly how to use them, why they use them, what the results should be when you use them.

And that’s what the Boston Cage Academy came to be. So that’s the value proposition for that. So the takeaway from number one that I want you to do is what is your value proposition? And I want you to look at it from the standpoint. You know, if I’m talking about branding, there’s multiple different sectors to branding. There’s an individual brand, right? There’s a business brand, there is a product brand, and there’s a service brand. What I’ve just done is just tell you about maybe one of our services, right? So like one of our products, like, that’s the story behind the Boston Cage Academy or the story behind the Boston Cage podcast and what those value propositions are for each one of those particular sectors. So you want to look at your products and services and figure out what is your value proposition, what is the value that you’re delivering to your customer segments and how are you delivering. So that’s number one. Number two is the unfair advantage. And the unfair advantage is one of the things that people always say that there’s so much competition in the market. No matter what market sector you get into, there’s always going to be competition.

But even with that competition, there’s an individual or individual business that can step up and shine because they have an unfair advantage. A good example of unfair advantage would be trademark, right? Having a trademark allows you to kind of own a particular brand or a particular name that no one else can use. So let’s say your name is a functional name. Let’s say your name is Ladders or Windows and Doors’right. Let’s say that’s your name. Well, if you can get that trademark, which would probably be impossible for Ladders indoors, but if you can get that, then nobody else in that industry could particularly use the ladders indoors, or they can’t use Windows and Doors because you have a trademark on that. And if they infringe on it, then you can legally then say, hey, you need to cease and desist. So that’s an unfair advantage for that sector. In addition to that goes back to the branding. If you look at your four products, right, and I’m seeing you as a product, your company as a product, your product as a product, and your service as a product, if you look at these four different individual brands, each one of them could have their own unfair advantage, right?

So me, as SA Grant, like, I’ve branded myself to where I have an unfair advantage, that there could be another Essay Grant, but there would not be another Essay Grant that’s associated to Boston Cage. So you can see how this compounds together. Like, Boston Cage by itself is a brand, SA Grant by itself as a brand, but the union between the two becomes a fair advantage, becomes a variable. So Essay Grant may not be trademarked, could become Essay Grant, but Boston Cage is going through and becoming trademarked so that I have that leverage to say, okay, you know what? You can’t be Boston Cage. You could be SA Grant, but you can’t be both. That’s part of our unfair advantage. In addition to that, like, my story and what I’ve developed and what I’ve created and who I’ve interviewed also cannot be replicated exactly the same way I have replicated. It cannot be delivered the same way I’m delivering it. Even if someone studies the way I’m doing it and practice it, they’re still going to be uniquely different than I am. So that’s the unfair advantage. That’s just like the tip of the iceberg.

But you want to figure out what is your unfair advantage, because you could be in a market sector with hundreds if not thousands, maybe even millions of competitors. You just have to figure out what your value proposition and association to your unfair advantage works best for you and works best for your customers and makes you stand out more than anyone else. So the takeaway for this is like what do you have that your competitors cannot copy or replicate, right? Again, it could be systems, it could be processes, it could be automation, it could be logos, it could be identity, it could be brand, it can be so many different things. And I think people just kind of like they hear unfair advantage and I don’t have unfair advantage, I’m just like everyone. But no, you’re not like everyone else. Everyone is uniquely different and what you need to do is figure out what’s that unique factor and play to it. Number three is customer segments and relationships. So this is like kind of goes without saying, anyone that’s in sales or any admin level person or any C level person, they understand customer service and customer relationships, right?

So again, this is just top level stuff, but you have to kind of figure out who your customers are. In the beginning of this podcast, I was talking about who my customers are. So I’m talking about small business owners and entrepreneurs that are looking to get a leg up on marketing, business strategies, growth strategies, and brand development, right? So anyone that’s in that sector space, I can talk to them and talk to their pain points and give them solutions because not only have I done it before, but I’ve done it for other people as well. So I’m talking to that customer segment. Now, the type of relationship that I have with those people, it can be variable relationships, right? You can have a B to B relationship, right, which is business to business. So prime example, Cerebral 360 is my marketing agency. That company could then partner with another company to help them create a website or to help them rebrand or create a logo that’s more of a B to B play, right? Or you can have B to C, which is more so like the solopreneur to the business. So I have my corporation and then someone contacts us and they say, hey, I like what you’re doing, I like your podcast, I need you to help me with some growth strategies.

And I had a call like that recently, like the name of Sir Evans. He was actually on the episode, I think it was season one. And he contacted me, he was like, hey, I just want to talk to you about some branding, some brand development, some brand strategy. How could I work with you? Okay, so that’s more of like a B to C, but it could then easily grow into a B to B as we develop that relationship and we develop his brand and get that platform that he’s standing in to grow and prosper in addition to that, there’s like POS point of sale to where you don’t really communicate with your client. They just kind of find your product, they’ll purchase it, and they’ll just kind of keep moving forward. And I’ll look at that more so as like Amazon now, obviously Amazon has customer support, and they probably look at it more as a B to C business to consumer. But in reality, it’s just point of sale. I’m pointing at something on the screen and I’m purchasing it. The customer journey is there, but the reality is there’s no real person to person contact.

There’s no real communication. For me, to them, it’s essentially a bot to a person or algorithm selecting the products for that person based upon what they’ve done before. So just understanding that, okay, if I’m going to create a business, I’m going to create my value proposition, I’m going to establish my unfair advantage, and then I’m going to talk to that customer’s segment and I’m going to build a relationship with them. And I would say, probably more than likely you want more of a B to B or a B to C play, right? So the takeaway for this one is like, who are your customers and what kind of relationship do you have with them? Is it A B to B? Is it a B to C or a POS? And keep in mind, these are just three of them. There’s many others, but these kind of give you like an overall viewpoint to kind of establish the first line to say, okay, you know what, I’m more of a BTB or more of a BDC. And then from there, you can kind of dive in a little bit deeper. And there’s times where we can kind of go into deeper roles and talk about that in more flushed out manner.

Going into number four channels. Now, channels is probably one of my favorite out of the twelve because it’s the way you communicate, it’s the way you contact individuals. It’s where do you develop your content, what platforms are you on? So this one could be everything and nothing at the same time, right? You can be talking to anybody or talking to nobody. And it goes back to figuring out who your customer segments are and what relationships do you have. So for me, obviously, I have a podcast so that’s one of my channels. I’m communicating through my audience, through a podcast of individuals that essentially need this information. They want this information. This information is definitely helpful and useful for them because I’m talking directly to them about problems they may have had or by people that I’m interviewing or telling them stories that they may have had or they’re experiencing right now. And they’re figuring out how to if you could overcome this and you became successful three years after that or five years after that. Well, let me get a little notebook and write down some notes kind of take heed to what that person is saying, because that little nugget, that one word, that one sentence could change the way you’re thinking.

Because if you’re thinking internally again, you need to bounce those ideas off of someone else. And that’s the philosophy behind communicating on channels. So there’s Facebook, there’s LinkedIn, there’s Instagram, Tik, Tok, Twitter, email, YouTube. I can go on and on and on all the different platforms that you can communicate your value proposition through. What you have to figure out is where is your customer segments? Where is your customer avatars? And a lot of you, you may have Facebook, you may have Facebook pages, you may have Instagram, you may have Twitter, but you’re not looking at the analytic data. You’re just creating content with the assumption that you know who your target audience is. But in reality, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, even Pinterest, they’ll tell you exactly who your community of people that are actually on your products or on your page are. They may not give you their name, but they’ll tell you their sex, their age, and their region. That’s more than we’ve ever had access to before where we are in technology today. So think about that. If they’re giving you all this information, then all you need to do is apply this information to your communication channels to talk to that audience, to make it a little bit more transparent, a little bit easier for you to start converting.

Okay? And a good example of this is saying that, okay, let’s say I’m talking about hearing AIDS, right? Let’s just say that’s my general product is hearing AIDS, and I’m communicating on Facebook and Instagram, and I’m making it hip, and I’m making it kind of like more postmodern, and I’m doing a little bit more edgy. Well, the reality is that communication vehicle and that device and those language and those terminology, I just use them more so to like, Gen Xers and YGens. It’s more of like a younger generation up until maybe like late 30s, early forty s. And keep in mind that entire generation, let’s say from 18 to 40, they don’t use hearing AIDS. So then why am I communicating to them on that particular channel in that fashion? And hence why you probably don’t have any conversions because you’re talking to the community, but you’re talking to them in the wrong language. So then you want to kind of figure out, okay, if I’m talking to more so people that were essentially born in the 60s or born in the 50s or essentially born in the 40s, then I need to speak to them.

I need to look at the need to look at the need to think about their psychological aspect of when they grew up. What did they see? You have to think about it. It was more black and white than this color right now. So putting things in perspective to look at old TV shows, right? Listen to old radio spots, look at old ads, so that way you can kind of touch into their psyche and communicate with them on a level to where it’ll bring them back to when they were younger. Because ideally, people as a whole want to live forever, right? That’s part of creating legacies, and you always hear the story. But when I was younger, I used to all of that comes back to them going back to the youth. So you want to pull into that psychological aspect and communicate to them on that channel based upon those principles. The takeaway for this one is, what channels do you use to connect to your customers right now? And I want you to list them out, like, create a list of these channels, because then you can kind of see what’s the value that you’re getting back in return.

If you have ten channels, are you converting on ten of them? Maybe you’re converting on one. Okay, so if you’re dividing up your time between ten channels, then you probably need to figure out which channel is really working for you and put some more time, more bread and butter into that channel. Communicate a little bit more, a little bit more. Focus on that channel, make that channel work, and then step into other channels as well. You can have all the channels up and running, but if you’re not really putting time into them, I think we all know by now the algorithms are not in our favor, right? They’re in the favor of conversions for their ad platforms. Number five customer challenges. So this goes hand in hand with everything we’ve been saying, right? Customer challenges, like your value should deliver a solution for a customer’s challenge. So identifying the customer’s challenge, we’re just talking about hearing AIDS, for example. So if I’m saying that, hey, it’s hard for you to hear, what is that challenge that you’re going through? It’s difficult for you to play with your grandkids. It’s difficult for you to hear somebody on the phone call, what’s this FaceTime thing?

I can’t really hear what’s going on. If you’re talking to that community of people, identify those challenges, make a laundry list of these challenges, and then apply your values to figure out which one of your values to solving that challenge for them. And then you’re connecting those dots. Okay, so what I’m doing is I’m doing a live consultant with you going back to that story with me and Scott. We used to do these literally for dozens of clients. We would set them up and say, okay, where’s your business? That we would do an entire consultant call back then was in person, right? And then they would buy and purchase a lean model canvas from us that we will build out for them and fill in all the blanks and all the components of their particular business and say, okay, this is where your holes are. This is what you’re missing. This is what you need to do more of. And then they would have a game plan to move forward and they could take that game plan and either work on it themselves or they could hire us as an agency to then develop and fill in those voids.

For them, it was a win win for both us and for the client, right? So think about it from that standpoint. What’s the problem? And then we’re going to talk about number six, which is the solution. But before we get to that, what I want you to do for takeaway for number five, for customer challenge is what are your brand and customer challenges? So you’re talking about the customer, what’s their challenge? And for you, for your brand or your company brand, or your product or your service brand, what’s the challenge? Right? And you want to put these on a sheet, like two columns and list out all your challenges for you personally for a brand or you personally for your company. Your problems may be leads. You may not have enough traffic, you may not have enough conversions. So then you want to figure out, okay, how do I fix these? Like, what am I doing actively on a day to day basis to make this work or to make modifications to make changes? Do the same thing for your customers. If you’re a plumber or a roofer, well, you know, by default, part of your problem is to keep people safe, right?

Part of your problems is to keep people dry in their houses. So going that basic and then putting on the obvious on top, obviously there’s roof maintenance, right? There’s plumbing maintenance, there’s all these different things to keep your pipes working, to keep your roof from leaking. Those are essentially challenges that people will be presented with year round. So then you can say, okay, here’s my solution for that. Maybe you can kind of create a video course and say, hey, you want to buy into like active solutions to how to maintain your roof, how to maintain your plumbing. Or maybe there’s a service that you can set up and say, hey, twice a year, three times a year, once a quarter, whatever it is, we can come out to your house and check your pipes or check your roof. That’s solving the problem without having to sell. You’re just identifying the issues that they have been presented with in their life or they may be presented with at some time, or you’re using case studies to say, hey, other people have been presented with the same exact issues in your area because you have the same house, the house was built in the last 2030 years, and this is what happens with a 30 year old house.

Blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s all the problems and here’s the solutions that we have and here’s the price to go with those solutions. And you kind of see how this starts to form together to make your life a lot easier because you’re using growth strategies to create a system to keep your pipelines full. Number six, customer solutions. So we kind of talked about that a little bit with the customer challenges, but with the customer solutions, you have to fine tune them, right? And it just kind of goes into honing into your audience and understanding what their problems are and then applying the right solutions. Okay, we talked about roofers, for example, but imagine a roofer that just focuses on gutters, right? He does not really install roofs, but what he does do is install gutters to roofs. So he is piggybacking on the roof market by fixing the gutters. So he’s applying to a real solution, right? He’s saying, hey, if you do not want to spend ten to $30 to $40,000 on a new roof, one of the things that we do to help save your roof and maintain your roof outside of touching the roof, is making sure you have gutter guards, right?

That’s like a sub niche of that same spectrum. But by having a gutter guard by default, what are you going to have? You’re going to have less rain that’s sitting in the gutter, which could potentially help with less mosquitoes, less leaks, because again, it leaves back up. Then they’ll end up on the roof. So you can kind of see how you can kind of depict this story. You want to be able to tell them the story about what can happen, what has happened, and how you could then prevent that from happening. In addition to that, then you can say, okay, in addition to the service of the gutter guards, what we also do is we do leaf blowing from your roof, right? That could be an additional service in addition to the gutter guards. So you’re protecting the roof by two external services that’s going to maintain the roof. But you’re not even doing anything with roof. All you’re doing is blowing off leaves and you’re maintaining and updating gutters, right? So you can kind of see, like, this solution could definitely plug into that market, but we’re not installing roofs. So you have to get very clear and very precise with your solutions based upon the customer problems.

And you have to think outside the box to figure out what variables can I do that’s cost effective and have enough margins to apply. All right, let’s go down to number seven. This is another one of my favorite ones, right? And I’m doing it right now. So you can look at my clock. It just turns 07:00 A.m.. I think I woke up around 06:00 and I was like, I’m going to do this video. I was amped up. So I was like, I’m going to come out here and I’m going to drop these twelve nuggets, right? So number seven is key activities. So in any business, you have to understand you just can’t set it and forget it. Even with automation, even with systems in place, you’re going to have to kind of have someone touch and maintain the systems. Because the prime example with systems is like a lot of times they’re connected through APIs or they’re connected to plug ins or software talks to software. Things break all the time. Facebook may have an update that may block out your automation, right? Your email campaign may be, oh my god, we’re not getting more leads because your funnel is disconnected from.

So keep in mind you always have to kind of maintain double check and a lot of email reminders will do that for you. If you have those email reminders set up for those systems that you’re using to say, hey, if something’s broken, if something’s not working, at least notify me. So that’s a key activity that I know, that I do pretty regularly and I have my VA’s look at as well. But generally for any business, like whatever your value proposition is and whatever the problems that you’re solving for the customers, each one of those need to have key activities. So if you’re driving a truck, right, let’s say you have a truck company and you’re moving around, you’re doing logistics and you’re delivering well, the key activities for that is maintaining the truck, maintaining the wheels, maintaining the oil. Those are things that you cannot go without not doing. You cannot pay attention to that because if a truck breaks down, then essentially your business breaks down. It’s the same exact principle whether you’re in a physical business or whether you’re in a remote business, whether you’re a solopreneur, there’s maintenance for any business. So you have to maintain whatever it is that you started, whatever it is, is making you money and keep maintaining that for forever, right?

So then you can put people in place to maintain it for you. You can put systems in place to maintain it for you. You can put automation in place to maintain it for you. But you have to understand that the key activities, it’s a key activity for a reason. The key takeaway for this one would be what key activities are you currently doing to expand your value proposition? And I want you to really process that question. What key activities are you doing to expand, not to maintain? What are you doing to expand your value proposition? And I gave you an example of that earlier, talking about the roof, talking about the gutter guards and what’s the key activity that they can use to expand. We talked about leaf blowing off the roof, right? So that’s essentially a new service that they’ve added on. But there’s maintenance that comes with that new service. You’re talking about leaf blowers. With those leaf blowers you’re going to have new employees possibly. You’re going to have to probably have new insurance possibly, right? You’re probably going to have to maintain those machines, whether it’s oil whether it’s gas machines break down, you have to have a cost overhead to buy a new machine.

So those are all key activities that you’re going to have to look at when you’re looking to expand into that new value proposition. So you can kind of see how these compartments can start to connect and start to build a clear puzzle. So number eight, key resources. Key resources is I look at key resources and I’m just trying to figure out the easiest way to explain them. Key resources could be software, right? Going back to your systems, like utilizing software to maintain my value proposition could be associated directly to a software platform. QuickBooks, for example, is a key resource. Like how am I sending out invoices? Well, if I didn’t have QuickBooks, then I would have to create an invoice or somebody on my team to create an invoice or an accountant or CPA would have to create an invoice email or mail. Imagine mailing an invoice. Imagine the debacle that would cause the lag of payment, right? So just think about that. If I had to mail out my invoices, you’re looking at essentially give or take whatever state or whatever country, somewhere between three to ten days for that check, for that invoice to be delivered.

Once it’s in the mail room or at that mail location, someone has to check the mail, which people don’t check the mail every day, right? Then once they get that, then they’re going to have to look at it and then they got to process it. Now you probably heard of net 30, net 60, net 90, even before because again, the further up the food chain, the larger the companies are. They have their own processes in place, so all these things come into factor. So again, you may not get paid for 120 days just because of how long it takes for that invoice to come in, come into the system for someone to open it up, someone to review it, someone to approve it, someone to then release the funds, then someone to submit the funds. It’s a damn nightmare. So think about QuickBooks. QuickBooks kind of solves that problem, right? Or venue, for example, solves that problem. Or obviously there’s PayPal as well too. I wouldn’t recommend using cash out, but obviously there’s all these different new services that are key resources that you process payments a lot faster. Stripe is another good example for like course graders.

So now you don’t have to worry about waiting for someone to get a check or waiting for someone to essentially open up their email, like right then and there they can make a payment and you can process the payment. So think about that at scale. I’m just talking about the money. I’m just talking about cashing out. But if you’re using a key resource, it could be for anything, right? It could be for any aspect of your business. Something that if you do not have access to it. It would probably be a nightmare or take manpower or take time away from you doing something that’s more important, like building your business or making more money doing these steps and procedures. So these key resources help to compound time, make things easier for you and your corporation. And they also plug into your system that you’re creating and developing to make your company run. The takeaway from this one is like, what are your key human resources? What are your key financial resources? And what are your key intellectual resources? And your human resources essentially is your employees, right? And you’re not trafficking people. I’m just saying humans could be a key resource as well.

Like, my VA is a phenomenal VA, right? And it’s a team of VA, essentially like five to ten of them at any given time based on projects we’re working on. That’s a key resource for Boston Cage. So that’s my key resource. My key financial resource, I give you an example of that would be essentially QuickBooks. And the key intellectual resource, we talked about that, right? It’s books and practicing. What I’m doing is creating all these different content. So essentially, I am that intellectual resource behind the boss of Cage brand. And again, my key activity, I want to be able to maintain these. So how am I maintaining my key? Humans will have to make sure that they’re happy, make sure that they’re paid, make sure they have things to do right, and make sure that generally they’re all going the right direction and they’re growing. And my financials, I have to look at my numbers to make sure that my software is working right. Payments are being made. That’s a key thing that I need to do to make sure that key resource is up to par to where it needs to be. And on the intellectual side, I need to continue to keep learning, continue to keep educating myself, continue to keep interviewing new people, hearing new stories, hearing new inspirations.

Because again, much like the listener, I’m actively learning as well. We’re all learning for different reasons. But for me, it’s like I’m plugged in to the data that I die. I want to be able to touch and communicate with as many people as I possibly can until my last breath. So that’s part of my maintenance. I’m going to be doing this so I have no teeth missing the leg and gimping around, just to be straight up and be honest, right? So let’s just go into number nine, key partners. So we talked about the key activities, we talked about key resources. And number nine is key partners. Key partners is a goal. Mine. Because like I said earlier, if I didn’t have that partnership with Scott, would I be having that conversation with you all now about something that I learned 1012 years ago? So that partnership opened up my eyes to new philosophies, new theories, new processes new systems, right? In addition to that, you could have partnerships like affiliates, like Prime Example, like Tycoon. He’s the Kindle cash flow king. That’s his thing. He’s been doing it forever. He’s been doing it before, since Kindle started.

So being able to be an affiliate to his program, well, obviously I can create my own program to talk about Kindle, but why would I recreate something from 100% from scratch when I can kind of give an overview and say, hey, if you want more detail, more insight, here is a partner of mine that has dozens and dozens of courses, from audio courses to not just audio, but like how to create audiobooks, how to create physical books, how to create Kindle books. And he has all the information about that. Then I would then say, hey, after I teach you what I need to teach you, which is the bare basics, then if you want to take it a little bit more advanced and take what I’ve taught you and scale and grow and magnify it even more, then I would recommend you take this course. And here’s why. This is what this course has done for me. I know this guy, and I’m going to tell you the story and I’m going to tell you what has done for me. And then you’ll be able to go over to him. So that’s a key partnership.

And obviously if it’s an affiliate deal, then every time I send someone to him, I would get payment as well too. So it works for me, it works for him, and it’s the best interests of that particular student at the same time. So that’s what you want to have key partners with. Going back to the roofers example, well, if I am a roofer roofer, and I’m doing installations and doing roofs, I may not do drains, I may not do leaf blowing. So now this new sector of this new key activity for this new value proposition for this new company, instead of them being competitors now, they could essentially be partners, right? So you have one company that’s installing the roof, and then you have another company that they’re going to refer you to that’s going to maintain your drains and your gutters and blow the leaves off your roof at the same time. It’s a win win situation. So they give you a brand new roof, and then they have a maintenance package for your roof as well too. So they’ll then give the referral to the maintenance company. They probably get 20%, 30%, maybe 50% of that revenue.

But then that company is getting new leads from the roofer every time the roofer installs a roof. And that’s what that key partnership should look like. There should be push and pull back and forth, much like networking. If you’re going into a networking group, which I’m a part of as well, through Success Champions, I tell everyone, all the members all the time key partnerships goes back to my statement about Triangulation is that you need to figure out where you are in a triangle. If I’m a graphic designer, who would a graphic designer work well with? Graphic designer work really well with a web designer. And who would these two people work really well with? Well, these two people work really well with a videographer or photographer. So once I talk about networking, I want to bring these three sides into my networking group. There could be other triangles going on at the same time, but my core triangle is going to be these three people because I’m a graphic designer, that’s a web designer, and that’s a photographer. And all three of us are sharing equally minded, equally particular clientele’s. But there’s no really overlapping or stepping on feet.

We’re all sharing the same referrals. So then you become an ecosystem. That’s what key partnership is really about. So my takeaway for this one, I want you to think about it like, do you have key partners? And if you do, who are they? And if you don’t, then you need to start thinking about, okay, how can I scale or grow if I had an opportunity to have a key partner in a particular sector of my value? If I can add on additional value without adding on additional cost, that’s where that sweet spot is. So you can take your business from here to here overnight just by plugging in two additional key partnerships. Number ten, cost structure. So call structure kind of goes back to what we talk about with key activities. With the financials cost structure, you have to kind of figure out what’s your overhead. I don’t say you need to go extremely anal, but you have to kind of understand, like, what’s your overhead, right? You have to understand if you’re a work from home person, like, what’s your overhead for your electricity? And you don’t have to do this every single day, every single month.

Just look at, like, an annual review, get an average and figure out, okay, this is what my annual cost is for my general expenses, whether it’s going to ship something out, whether it’s creating something, whether it’s paying for VA, whether it’s buying software, licensing softwares, or subscriptions, add all those numbers up and then you can kind of see, okay, you know what? Per year I’m spending, let’s say $30,000, right? My annual revenue is $35,000. So you’re only really bringing in $5,000 because you’re spending $30,000 to make that 35, right? So you just have to understand, okay, how do I scale that? Like, you want to scale that because you don’t want to be at 5% out of you don’t want to be 5000 out of 35,000. This just makes sense. So you have to figure out, do I bring in new key partners to add on additional services so I can then get referral fees or affiliate deals, right? Or do I add on new offers that essentially I already have access to. It just goes back to a question that we had in a network group. I have all this content. I have all these ebooks that I’ve created, or I’ve had all these written documents or the blog posts.

What do I do with them? But that’s a good thing for you to take all that information and bundle it up and tell a story and put it into a course, or put it into an academy, or put it into a group, a paid group, like something behind a paid wall. That way, all the content that you’ve accumulated over the period of time could then be reused and recycled for a whole new target audience. But now you have all of it in one sitting versus being diversified on all these different platforms. Follow me on YouTube, follow me on Facebook, follow me here, follow me. Take all the best of the best, collage those suckers together and put them in one environment. And that’s one thing that you could definitely do that has a lot of value behind it, because there’s years of content, years of information, and apply a cost to it. So understanding your cost structure is essentially understanding your value. What’s your return, what’s your margin like, what’s your overhead? The first thing I want you to do is for the takeaway is, what are your monthly operational expenses? Just start at the monthly level.

And then you can either go micro, you can go down to the daily level, or you can go up to the annual level. But start at monthly. Look at your monthly reoccurring costs. Look at that. And then say, okay, this is my monthly recurring cost, and this is how much money I make per month. And then the difference in between, like, that’s the money in the bank. So you have to figure out, okay, if my money in my bank is not outweighing the money that I’m spending, how do you fix that? And this model could essentially get your mind to wrap around where you have holes. Next, of course, we’re talking about money. So your revenue streams. So you’re figuring out your cost structure and you’re figuring out your variables of, like, what about my monthly reoccurring costs look like versus what I’m making every month. Then you have to figure out your revenue streams. And I just gave you guys like, a really good one, which is like, take the old content that you have sitting around that has a lot of value, that’s still evergreen content, and collagen together and make a course or make an academy or make it behind a paid wall.

That’s an additional revenue stream, right? So we’re talking about company revenue versus product revenue versus service revenue. Well, that’s why I was talking about multiple brands before, all brands under one umbrella, much like Amazon, right? And then you have just Beto, and then you have prime and then you have the echo dot, let’s just say like that’s one, linear of those three variables of product, service, company, person. So for you, think about your business and see where you are currently. Right? Now if you’re just a company and you’re not a personal brand, my question would be, why not become a personal brand? Especially if you have a storefront. Storefronts are like built and designed for personal branded people. Especially if you’re local, okay? You’re like the local hero. You walk around, you shake hands, kiss babies. It’s almost like you’re running for office, right? So you have to make yourself into a brand to help your business grow. In addition to that, in that business, figure out what your products are and figure out what your services are. You usually have one or the other, but the likelihood of having both is where the real money comes into play.

So you figure out, okay, if I’m selling coffee, coffee is my product. My coffee store is my company brand. I am the owner is the brand of the coffee company. But the part that you’re missing is maybe add a subscription service for the coffee. It didn’t cost you anything to really develop that, right? So now you have all four of these elements. It’s as simple as that. You’re adding on a subscription and say, hey, you guys are local people. You come in here so regular, not only will we give you a discount, not to say punch cards, but you can do a digital at this point in time, right? You can have someone scan a QR code or scan a barcode to get their cup of coffee. Maybe they have unlimited cups. Maybe they have one cup per day, maybe two cups per day. Maybe you could have different price plans. You could have one cup per day versus unlimited cups per day, right? That’s basic versus pro. And there are people out there and companies right now doing these things because they understand the principles behind these four different brands. So just adding on that additional service then now you have all four of them, much like we talked about with the roofers.

And again, if you don’t want to be the additional service, then partner with someone. That’s where your key partners come in. You want to pull those key partners in to say, okay, you know what, I am the company, I am the individual brand and I have a product. But you have that service brand. Let’s pull that service brand in. And now you have all four without having to create it, right? So with revenue, you want to think about the key takeaway for this one is, does your value proposition create a revenue stream? In addition to that, where is your missing of the four components of four brands? Again, company brand, individual brand, product brand, service brand. If you have all four, great. Now only thing you have to do is figure out how to scale and monetize and make sure that that system works. If you don’t, then you need to plug in either a key partner or create that additional brand to get that ecosystem to work, much like the example I did earlier with Amazon. Another example of that would be Apple. You have Apple, Steve Jobs, iPhone, itunes, or any other variables of their many other products.

And you can kind of do this over and over again. It’s like if you did a chart and put the four columns, you can start figuring out multiple different brands that have this thing that I’m talking about with all four brands and then going into number twelve. Last but not least, I’ve titled it Envision Goals. And it’s kind of like goals are one of these things that you kind of set, but goals are always updating, changing and modifying what vision does as well too. So I’ve kind of combined these two to say, okay, the result of achievement toward the effort is directed towards the result. Sounds crazy, but the reality is, if I have a goal, does that goal and stay in alignment with my vision? If my vision shifts, my goal should shift, right? If I’m aiming for 10 million and I have this one envision for my company, but then there’s a fork in the road and I have a dual envision and they’re both working for themselves. Prime example, I’m adding on a new service to my products and my brands. Now I have a dual vision. Well, the goal for this particular vision, which is on the right hand side, that goal could still be met.

But now this new vision, what’s the goal for that one? It could be a similar goal, but again, if I have two separate products and service, there should be an alignment. They should be differently parallel, but the end result should be the same. But again, the goal should be uniquely different for each one of the platforms. That way you can isolate and figure out your problems at hand. And a good example of this would say, okay, my goal for Boston Kate podcast is that I want to get 1 million listeners. That’s my goal, that branch. But my goal for the Academy is I want to get maybe 10% of that 1 million right? Because again, not every listener may need the academy, but the end result of both the Academy and Boston Cage podcast is to essentially help entrepreneurs, help business owners. Some people love just listening to free content and they’ll learn through that. Some people love listening to free content and they need an extra push. They need a community of people. They need step by steps. They need checklists, they need show notes, they need videos. They need to be able to ask someone questions.

Well again, the results could be the same, but the goals and aspirations of both these branches are uniquely different with the same end result in mind. So that’s something that I want you to think about. So the walkway for this one is like, think about what I just said about the envisions and think about the goals and see if your vision and your goals all lined up with your value proposition. So just to recap, the twelve things that we’re talking about today, and the fundamentals are value proposition, unfair advantage, customer segments and relationships, channels of communication, customer challenges, customer solutions, key activities, key resources, key partners, cost structure, revenue stream, and envision goals. So obviously, with everything that kind of throw up, everything I just threw up on you guys, I want you to kind of relisten to this. Take notes, take action, at least on one of these, right? If you’re missing one of these twelve components, figure out which ones you’re missing and then fill it out, start to answer those questions. And obviously, if you need more help with that, I would say this is where I would plug in the Boston Cage Academy.

If you have personal questions, step by step, if you want me to kind of create more content just on a particular section that we talked about, then I would just say go and look at the Bostoncage Academy, which is at Bostoncage comACADEMY. You will be surprised how cheap the cost can be for something as simple as setting up a subscription to help multiple different peoples. But you can definitely sign up for that, take a look at it, see if it will benefit you. If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to me. All my communication devices are always out there in plain and simple, right? Last but not least, in closing, something else that I was talking about recently was reviews. So as I start to do more and more of these videos and more and more of these trainings and these micro courses, as I’m going to call them, and continue to build up the Boston Cage Academy in conjunction with Boston Cage Podcast, I need insight from our listeners. I need insight to is this content helpful for you? Do you want more of this content? Do you want more insight?

And I’ve seen some comments here and there. I’ve seen some reviews that have come up on Apple reviews, but I know we have way more listeners than we have reviews. So my next step is I want to start getting more insight from you, the listener. I want to know what you want, how you want it. If you have any referrals for somebody that you want me to interview, I want to interview them. I want you to hear their stories. I want you to take action on their results that they’ve gotten, that you can do the same once you hear how they’ve done it. If you want more insight on these individual podcast episodes, I want to hear that as well. So in the show notes, on this. I think this is on YouTube live and on the podcast. There’s going to be a link. I’m going to tell you what the link is. It’s called Learnacademy bostoncase. Comreviews. That’s L-E-A-R-N-A-C-A-D-E-M-Y. Bostoncage. Comreviews. Take 30 seconds, 60 seconds. Write a quick review or leave a video review so that I can create more content to effectively help you on your journey to get you to where you want to be, which without doubt, you want to be a boss on Cage.

Again, this is SA Grant. I appreciate you guys. I love this stuff. I love this information. Hopefully you love what I’m delivering as much as I love delivering it to you. Essay Graham, over and out. Thanks for tuning into another episode of Boss on Cage. I hope you got some helpful insight and clarity to the diverse approach on your journey to becoming an engaged trailblazer. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review and share the podcast. If this podcast has helped you or you have any additional questions, reach out and let me know. Email me at ask@sagrant.com or drop me your thoughts via call or text at 762-233-2677. I would love to hear from you. Remember, to become a Boston Cage, you have to release your inner beast. SA Grant signing off.

Listeners of Boston Cage are invited to download a free copy of our host SA Grants site e book, Become an Uncage Trailblazer. Learn how to release your primal success in 15 minutes a day. Download now at www dot boss. Uncaged.com forward slash free book.

S2E55 Jonathan Baldock.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Alright. Three, two, one. Welcome. Welcome back to another episode of Bosson Cage podcast. Today. We have Jonathan, and I think this is going to be a very special treat because we’re going to talk about marketing. We’re going to talk about software and kind of just give you guys a little bit in and out some different strategies. So without further Ado, Jonathan, why don’t you tell our people a little bit more about yourself?

Very good. Hey, thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on. So a bit of background. I worked at LinkedIn for almost ten years, and I spent quite a bit of time with their big corporate customers globally. And so first few years was all around social media, recruitment, marketing. So building their recruitment strategies, if they needed to hire 20 or 30,000 people, they would come to us. And we kind of help them figure out how to do that with the LinkedIn network. And then the final four and a half years was all around social advocacy and employee advocacy platforms.

And so we had one for LinkedIn. And so really it was helping companies in four different ways, really around the topics of brand reputation, social selling, marketing and telling acquisition. And so I was with LinkedIn up until the end of June of 2020. And then with the lock down and all the other stuff that happened, I was actually supposed to transfer with them over to Singapore, but international travel was banned and all that kind of stuff. So that opportunity came and went. And then since then, I’ve started doing some consulting work with a software company.

I live in Toronto. So this software company is also based in Toronto. So I’m helping them out. And they’re called Social HP, and I advise them on how to build their business and what not.

So let’s just dive into your history a little bit because, I mean, you gave a lot to our audience to kind of chew on a little bit.

Right.

So as a kid growing up, I mean, when did you know that you were going to go into technology? Was there something in particular that happened during your life that said, hey, I love technology and I’m going down that route.

No, I had a zero plan to do any of this. And I think some hard work kind of got me to where I am. So I just have a high school background. And I had planned to go to University at College, but I took a year off and that ended up turning it into the rest of my life. And so actually, when I took the year off, I got a job and just started working. And that particular company just kept promoting me. I was working super hard.

And the harder I work, the more opportunity they would give me. And then such a good learning experience. And so after a bunch of years of doing that and I was managing a pretty decent sized team and working with a lot of great people. I realized, though, that probably my opportunity long term would be a little bit limited, just only working in retail. So what I ended up doing was I found some of my friends had moved over to recruitment and head hunting, and they were working way less hours and making way more money.

And so I thought, oh, I should probably do that. They’re really killing it. And so I eventually convinced them to hire me. It was 13 interviews and including the owner, because that was the first guy they had ever hired that didn’t have a post secondary education. And then I did. Well, there too. They gave me lots of opportunity. And I stayed there a bunch of years. And then that kind of recruitment was technology recruitment. And so that’s how I sort of first started to get my feet wet.

But to be honest, I’m not a technical person. I know I understand the technical terms. I know what they mean, but I can’t code, I can’t build systems and whatnot I know what they are. And I know how it all kind of works together. But I’m not the guy that’s doing it, so I can talk about it. But that’s kind of the end of it. And then I left that industry. And I was, actually, to be honest, spending my time doing comedy and acting on the side with friends and just really kind of building out that creative side.

And while I was doing that, maybe a couple of years in a friend of mine said, hey, you know what? You should work for LinkedIn. And at the time, LinkedIn was much, much smaller. So they had 80 million members and they had 600 employees. And so I thought, okay, cool. I’ll have a conversation with them. And then very quickly I realized, actually, I should I should probably try and get a job at this place, like it’s going somewhere, and it’s got really cool stuff. And the people were great.

And again eventually convinced them to hire me. Same thing. They kind of put me through the Ringer because I didn’t have that educational background. But I did have some good experience. And so they gave me a shot. And ten years later.

Here I am, definitely definitely an interesting journey. So you alluded to a couple of times about the education side of things, right? It seems like that was kind of a hurdle that you had to overcome, because obviously you could do the job. But the credentials of having the diploma behind you wasn’t there at the time. How did you juggle them? I mean, obviously you could have went back to school, but your experience should outweigh your education to a certain extent. And what’s your viewpoints on that?

Yeah. Well, first off, I have a few one is like I never had an issue with the fact that I didn’t have that education. I was willing to work hard. I was pretty smart car. I figured I could get the job done. It’s just really it’s kind of like, what’s the barrier at that company, what’s their thinking? And I will say earlier in my career, it was a little bit more stringent. Like, you don’t have a degree, you can’t work here like that kind of a thing.

And then which is why they would just always add extra interviews. But I knew that was the deal. Like I knew I didn’t have that education, and that was what they needed on the piece of paper. And so I would just eventually convince them. And to be honest, I just try and win them over. Kind of tried to be engaging, and I was enthusiastic, and I wanted to be there. And fortunately, some people gave me the shot, and I convinced them to give me that opportunity.

But personally, my actual belief on it. And you hear, Elan Must talking about this a lot, which is education isn’t necessarily going to pave your way. I think it’s hard work. And so there are a few companies that still like it’s a mandatory requirement. They will not even consider you if you’re not have certain credentials. And then there are certain organizations that won’t even consider you. If you’re not from a particular school, I will say you can’t teach attitude, and you can’t teach someone to be a good person.

So if you find, like, a fantastic person and they don’t have the skills, if the skills are learnable, then give them a shot. Because I’d rather hire great people that can learn the job than someone that’s amazingly good at the job. And they’re just not a good person to work with. They become painful and they really drag the morale of the team and the company down. So that I would say, is my opinion on that’s been my experience. And I’ve been involved in a lot of hiring decisions.

And I’ve made serious recommendations passing on people that have all the right stuff on paper, but they’re just terrible in person. And then other people that look like they were missing things, but they were just such a fantastic person. I’m like, you definitely need to get that person to shop. They can learn this.

Wow.

Yeah.

That’s definitely inspiring itself to kind of understand behind the scenes because I think a lot of times people they have that struggle with, okay, they’re asking me for these requirements, but I know I can do the job, and I know I have the mindset to move forward, and then that becomes a hurdle to where they won’t even apply because they don’t think they’ll be able to get hired because of that. So I think you kind of open that Pandora’s box up a little bit.

So I would say just a little bit more on that because I’ve spoken to some youth group where they’re coming from homes that they don’t have access to computers. And they’re not at the very best school. Even like local schools, some high schools are better than other high schools and so on. And so they’re coming from an underprivileged area, underserved areas. And some kids they would go through, like a technical training program or whatnot. And then they got to visit LinkedIn. And so I would chat with that whole group.

And so these kids, they don’t have University, and a few of them did. But most of them didn’t. A lot of them, their belief was like, I shouldn’t apply for that. Or I can’t apply for that. Or they’re never going to give me a chance. And I would tell those kids, don’t listen to anybody. If you want to do something, you got to figure out a way to do it. And if they put hurdles in your way and then just get over those hurdles, sometimes those hurdles are pain in the ass, and you got to work hard to get past them.

For example, they might say, hey, okay. I want to work at LinkedIn. Okay. Well, maybe they tell you you need to have two years of this kind of still experience, two year kind of sales. If you want to work there, get two years of experience doing that. You got a whole lifetime to go after your goals. You don’t have to hit your goal tomorrow. So they don’t get that job getting that kind of experience. And they tell you, you need this kind of experience before you can do that, then go get that experience.

Just keep knocking down those hurdles until eventually they just give up and go, you know what I told you? You need two years of experience. And two years later, here you are with exactly what I asked you for. Yeah. Like, you’re a go getter or you’re going to get it done. And it’s that kind of enthusiasm and that kind of commitment that pushes people forward.

Nice. I think you have hell of tenacity, right. You have a lot of energy. It kind of shows, right? Just by in that last five minutes of this conversation. So if you could identify yourself with three to five words, what would your three to five words be?

I mean, over time, that’s probably changed. I’d say right now, outgoing, confident, engaging. And I try and be thoughtful as best I can. We all struggle, right? Sometimes. But as we get older, I think our perspective changes and we realize there’s a lot more people out there that have done just ourselves. And so that’s certainly been a good awakening for me over the last little while, especially over this last year.

Great. So go to the next question. I mean, obviously you’ve been through LinkedIn, which is essentially like Corporation level at this point, right. But you have the entrepreneurial side to you as well in your current business model. Is that business set up as an LLC, an S Corp. C Corp. How is it structured?

And just to give you a caveat, I’m Canadian. So we don’t have LLC here, but we have corporations and probably the same thing. So the place that I’m consulting for their Corporation, they have their company set up and they have employees. And then I have had side hustles. So I’ve owned my own camera rental company, which was a Corporation. And I just launched an app last summer and that’s tied into my Corporation. And that was a whole experience just trying to build an app because I can know what the technology is, but I can’t do any of it.

So I had to get the right people and get a bill. Now, of course, I’m working on trying to monetize it. Yeah, I’d say. So my hands are sort of in both sides. I’ve got some familiarity of running a business. And then certainly I’ve got some familiarity of being an employee at a business got you.

So lets talk about your app a little bit. I mean, what is your app and what does it do?

So it’s called Glimp social. And the first use case. What I released it for was if you’ve ever used ways to be able to drive and get somewhere ways tells you what’s the best way to go. My app is designed crowdsource information, but my app is designed to tell you what it’s like when you get there. So, for example, is there a big line? Is that stuff in stock? Is there room on the patio at that restaurant so you can drop pins on anything around the world and ask questions, and then people at the other end will get a notification and give you the answer.

So that was the first use case. And then second use case was the election in the the presidential election. So what I did was I dropped a pin on every single polling location in the US, and then it allowed people to be able to basically drop a pin on the polling location and say, hey, how long is the line? Because some polling locations, there’s none, but others there could have been 12 hours. So I wanted to help people out. So they knew what they were getting into when they were voting.

And then still, right now, I’m working on trying to help people if they want to get vaccinated. So trying to get all the locations to wear vaccines once it becomes generally available, drop a pin on all the vaccine locations so that you can find out, do they have it in stock? How long is the line? Because it could be a four hour wait. And then if you’ve got five places to choose from and one’s got a 30 hours wait and one’s got a four hour wait.

I think I’ll go to the one that shorter lines. That’s kind of the idea behind it. And then now I’m working into how to monetize it, which would be around sporting events. So for example, if you want to go to a College football game, maybe which entrance the line is fastest. Interviews with the players and coaches. How long is the line to get beer behind the scenes stuff and setting up the field, et cetera. All that would be available through the app. And there would be custom pins depending on if you’ve got a player interview and they’re interviewing the quarterback before the game and it’s not televised, but it’s just for the app.

Then they can interview that and you would get a VIP pin that would show up. That would show you a player interview, et cetera. So that and working on it for shows like music events or even just like conferences and trade shows.

So I would think with that push notification will probably be a serious add on if it’s not there currently right now. I mean, obviously to know when the line is short and when to run to the line. Is that already built into the app currently?

Yeah, you can get alerts, you can decide when and where you get alerts, you can follow different things. So the next version is just about to be released. With the next version, you’ll be able to say like, I’m following this team. I’m following that venue, I’m following this event. And then these are the kinds of notifications I want to get. And then in a perfect world in the future, if you see hypothetically, let’s say we’re both in New York City and we want to go to a restaurant every night.

It’s busy there. And so we want to go to a restaurant. You try and phone and you don’t know how busy it is. You go on the scheduling tool and it’s telling you you got 3 hours to get a table. We could just drop a pin on three different restaurants and then they all fire back answers, saying, oh, yeah, there’s room over here. The patrons are telling you it’s a good scene. There’s tables or no. It’s jammed and people are lined up at the door. Then we know, okay, we probably don’t want to spend 30 minutes standing out in front of the restaurant.

Let’s go to the one that’s not as busy. And then that would also give the other restaurants the opportunity to be able to advertise to you to win your business. So it would be like real time and ten based advertising, which is kind of the goal of where it would head to.

It’s pretty in. Jesus, let me just regurgitate that translation. So you pretty much took the functionality of Way speed trap to say, hey, there is a speed trap ahead, and you converted that into, like, first person user basis. So if they’re going to store, they go into a concert, going to the bank, going to pick up anything. Now they have access to Noel ahead of time. How long is going to take them before they even leave to go to that location.

Exactly. I’m going to Costco. Is there a line to get in? And is that thing I want is that flat screen TV that they had on sales or any left? I want to know that I don’t want to drive all the way down there, get there, going to line up, get in and find out if not even there. It’s like, okay. Well, that kind of sucks. So that’s how it’s designed to work.

Obviously.

Next goal is to try and get as many people on it and get people helping each other. And that’s really how it would work is that when you have the masses on it and they’re sharing information back and forth, it’s everyone’s lifting everybody up. So it’s really about providing information what you need when you need it. Yeah.

I mean, the reason I went down that road is kind of like I think you brought us full circle and let me just kind of pull that together for everyone is obviously you created an app that does what you describe that you do. But you’re also working with another company that’s more socially aware. So the combination between the two, it’s a gold mine. I mean, it’s obviously it gives you an opportunity to kind of figure out the marketing strategy and the branding of the social awareness of what people are looking for and how and then you have an app of support to deliver on the results.

So you’re juggling both points.

Yeah. I’m trying to work it on both ends. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah.

I learned a lot working at LinkedIn, and I’m doing my best to try and provide something that I think could be valuable to a lot of people where also you can kind of turn it into a way to make money. And then I want to be able to donate some of the proceeds to system good. Not for profits.

Nice. You’re definitely Frank. You’re socially aware on all aspects of it, and it kind of goes back to you, like your word choices. Describe yourself. Right. All of these things are shining through in this moment. It also shining through. Or you could have picked any app you want to develop, really and truly. But you picked an app got to fit your personality, which is definitely ingenious. I mean, something that I think that you love to do, and you would continue to love doing it, moving forward as well.

Yeah. I’m pretty passionate about it. I appreciate you saying so.

Yeah. Definitely. So let’s just talk about time frames like somebody may hear this podcast and. Okay, Jonathan seems to be someone that I want to mimic. So I want to get some insight from him, and it seems like he’s overnight success. This app just popped up out of nowhere, and he’s working with these other companies. But the reality is, how long have you been on this journey.

I mean, from a technology standpoint, I think the technological awakening was probably me spending time at LinkedIn because I saw growth from 600 employees to 13,000 employees in ten years. I thought go from 80 million users to 750,000,000 users in the same amount of time. And so when you see that kind of scale and you see what’s involved and obviously there’s a lot of very smart people there and a lot of professional level engagements. And, of course, the companies that I got to work with, I’m working with some amazing Fortune 50 Fortune 500 kind of companies and very senior level folks at these organizations.

So one is great experience. And I learned a ton and I’ve got to see new functionality and new technology being implemented every day at our own company and various other companies. But I will say, I think would also help is that sometimes we put people on a pedestal. Sometimes we put the CEO at this or the senior executive at that. And then we’re afraid to talk to them because they’re this sort of glorified person. They’re all people. They’re all trying to move forward depending on what their goals are and their objectives are in my experience, through all that really help me to understand that not necessarily everyone’s, like reachable and you can call up anybody but nobody that is necessarily better than anybody else.

They’re all just at different stages of their journey. And so it’s being able to connect with the right people and kind of move your story forward. I don’t know if that sort of answers the point, but that would be my take on it.

Definitely. So I’m just thinking about, okay, you have a cool app, the name of his glimpse. Right. So if I say this app had time travel associated to it, right. And you had an opportunity to go back in time and you could get a glimpse into the future of the Forks in the road ahead of you. Right.

Sure.

What’s one thing that you would want to do differently if you can time travel backwards?

That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a great answer for it other than I should probably have had a better understanding of what it takes to actually build the app, because there are a lot of hurdles with that one, the requirements to launch an app on Android versus with Apple very different.

Yeah.

Like apples like, you know, a 40 story climb upstairs and then Android everything’s on the first floor, so way harder to do it. And then I kind of went in with sort of heart and passion. I would say, like the direction of where things head and listen system. I listen to some good podcast. One of them that I listen to is how I built this. And you will hear very regularly when you hear those interviews, like the business started this way, and then it evolved into this, and then it changed into that.

And then now it’s this, and I am definitely experiencing that where I’m like, this is what I want the app to do. But how do I get it to do? How do I get everybody using it? Well, I mean, I don’t have billions of dollars to be able to just run ads indefinitely and tell everybody about us, so they all download it and it does what it does. So how do I get people to use it? Well, maybe I use it through sporting events and shows or concerts or maybe, etc.

Etc. So it’s finding different ways to provide value so that you can still reach your end goal and being creative and trying to come up with that is good. So I would say probably what I would have done is build a strong network of smart people around me to provide advice, because as I meet people that are awesome and provide great advice, I’m like, oh, wow. Can we keep that conversation going? Your feedback so awesome. Like, I really appreciate it next time I come up with something about it.

If you give me your opinion and finding those different experts that can help you through your journey because you there’s no way you know everything and you’ve got to learn so much and you’ve got to accept the fact that you you’ve got a long way to go and you need a lot of help. You know, it’s kind of like if tomorrow I said, I want to be an Olympic sprinter. First of all, you’d laugh. You’d be like, good luck. But but I need a ton of coaching.

Now. First, I have to have some talent, which I don’t in that area, but I need a ton of coaching, and I’d be relying on a lot of people. And yet, for some reason, in business, so many people think like, I just like, I got to do it on my own and I can’t ask any questions and what not. And the answer is, if anything in life, we need coaches, we need support. We need a good network. So that’s my ramble on answer.

Yeah. I think you definitely hit it on the nose. And to your point, about the Apple versus Android, it is a complete because I’m working on an app right now as well. I’m working on two separate apps. One app I’m working on is essentially for the entire Boston Cage network of different tentacles to have one portal to say, just download the app and you have access to everything just makes it ten times easier. And in that journey, obviously, Apple cost more just to buy in. You have to go through all the dim requirements and specifications versus Android.

You kind of just sign up for the account where you upload the app and it’s live and like, 2 hours.

Yeah. Thumbs up. Good luck.

Yeah. Pretty much. So. I definitely appreciate that answer with your tenacity and your entrepreneurial spirit that you currently have did that come from like a family member, any ancestors and your family have that entrepreneurial hustle.

I’m not sure my family doesn’t have a lot of entrepreneurs in it. But I will say when I was a kid, I always had a little bit of hustle. So I was always looking to try to figure out a way to make a bit of money. And my first job, I was delivering Flyers when I was eleven years old. Nice, because I could make I think it was like one or two cent per flyer that I delivered. And so I was like, oh, wow, great, because I want to be able to buy stuff.

And so my motivation was to get stuff. But I was like, I want that whatever. And that pair of shoes or whatever. And so how do I get the money? Well, my parents aren’t going to give it to me. So I had to figure out a way. So most of my household, to be honest, just came from me wanting material things when I was younger. And then now most of my Huckle comes from just wanting to be passionate about something that like finding something I’m passionate about and then really wanting to do it.

And then in that it evolved a lot because as you get older, you also care a lot more about helping others and and providing some value. And so I think that’s a great way to do it.

Nice. So I think it’s safe to assume that you’re a highly passionate individual. And I think once you sink your teeth to something like your laser focused on the end result of getting that thing mission accomplished, correct me if I’m wrong.

Well, you’re mostly right. You’re certainly right on probably what you’re hearing. But I do have a lazy side, which is that can wait till tomorrow. I have some natural built in procrastination, and but I’ve been doing everything I can to try and crush and get rid of that and try and squeeze it out of me. And so to kind of building really good habits around how you live. And so I work on that every single day, trying to just make sure that I’m using my time the best way I can.

So that kind of leads me into my next question. Like, how do you currently juggle your work life with your family life?

Well, I have the good portion of sitting at home so that works. And then my kids are about. But they’re not little. So they’re kind of independent. And so evenings we socialize and spend time together and try to spend time with some friends when and where we’re allowed, depending on the nature of the world as it stands, because I’ve got irons in a few fires. What I do is I just have to have a pretty organized view of what’s the next conversation and make sure my mind is ready that I’m prepared to have that conversation.

So I think that’s helpful planning things out is good and then making sure that I’ve got gap that I use them. So like, I’ve got a dog waiting for me to walk her on my next gap in the day, and it gets me outside, which is great. And then I do all of my working out before I do anything. So I get up at 06:00 a.m. Or 630 every day, and I do all of my working out right away. So that way I get that done.

But I’m pretty, like routine based, so work is just kind of like fits in. And then if I have a 1 hour gap during the day and I need to get groceries, then I use that. I go get the groceries and then I come back home. So to be honest, I think when evenings hit, I actually don’t have a ton of stuff to do other than to try and be social with family and friends.

Nice. So I think you kind of stepped into my next question, which is like, you know, like, since you’re so habit oriented, like, what is your morning ritual? Your morning routines look like right now.

Over the last few months, it’s been wake up at six or 630. I do a yoga class, I lift some weights, then I do a spin class. I’m fortunate enough. I got a peloton bike a couple of years ago, and so it’s in my bedroom, literally, my workout gym is at the end of my bed. I have a yoga mat on the floor. I have kettlebells and freeways, and I have my Pelton bike, and I just do all that stuff. And I’m not a guy that likes to go to the gym.

I like to just work up by myself and even the commute to the gym and back. I’m like, oh, that seems like a total to. Yeah. I mean, first of all, yeah, it’s dead. So just as soon as I wake up, I find yoga is like a great thing to do because it starts getting me moving around, start stretching me out, starts getting me limber, and then I get all the workouts done. I shower, I take the dog for a 45 minutes walk. Then I get home, and then I start making breakfast, which right now is oatmeal and some berries matched into it because my doctor told me I had high cholesterol, so I’m eating more fiber.

And you’re walking more often as well, too.

I get two or 345 minutes dog walks in a day. It was a little bit worse because I’m in Toronto through the winter. It kind of sucked. It’s cold and windy, and so I had to get a really good quote for my dog because she gets a cold in the winter and shakes. So I got her a nice park, which she seems to appreciate interesting.

So coming into the book segments. Right. And I got a live book club that every time I have an opportunity to talk to someone like you, I always ask them what books inspired you on your journey and what books are you currently reading right now that you want to recommend.

So I listen to books rather than read them. And I think that’s just because I like to listen to podcast and and use my time. So like, while I’m walking the dog, I’m listening to a podcast or I’m listening to a book. So recently I finished a book called Lifespan by Davidson. Claire, I’m very try to be as health conscious as possible. I want to eat healthy. I want to put good stuff into my body. And I want to be as active as possible. And so this book is really cool because it talks about the technology, of how its evolving around our health and how technology will help us reverse aging.

So it won’t be like going to the place to get plastic surgery will be more like going to the place to get your certain kind of shot or take a pill. And it’ll kind of help to roll back the clock. So understanding how that all works is very, very cool. And then I’m actually a super huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell. His commentary, social commentary is just amazing. And so the most recent one was Talking to Strangers. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that book, but it’s pretty fantastic.

I really enjoyed it. And then the audio piece was really kind of excellent. And then food and health wise, there’s one on it’s called Breath, which is all about breathing through your nose rather than through your mouth. There’s like a pile of health benefits there. And I could keep going on, like, sort of the food and health side. I’ve got a whole bunch of them that I listen to.

Yeah. It’s always funny to me when I ask that question is always like, I open up Pandora’s box. And at the point, I probably do a whole podcast, just one book at this point.

Sure.

I mean, they fill up a lot of people’s lives, and they give a lot of ingenuity to how to achieve your next goals and your next aspirations. So, like, what do you see yourself? 20 years from now.

I would like to see myself with a boutique hotel on a beach somewhere. I own the hotel, live in it, have it, make some money, but have access to the nice restaurant, have some drinks. And I constantly have friends coming in and out and meeting people on their journey and lives when they’re on vacation. That would be a pretty ideal situation for me.

Sounds like a Casa Blanca kind of situation.

Yeah.

So coming into, like, software, right? I mean, obviously, you’re building apps, you’re working for software companies. You worked for LinkedIn tools or software applications. Do you currently use right now that you do not see you doing what you do without.

Well, from a marketing and communication standpoint, the one that I consult for right now is pretty key. So that basically figuring out how to get your message out at scale and without paying because I don’t want to have to pay make a buck in order to be able to do that. This is designed for business owners that have employees. And so if I give you the example of LinkedIn LinkedIn, you’ve got a company page and then your employees like, I work there. And so you’ll have people that follow the company page, which means if you do an update company page update and it works the same for Facebook and others.

But you do a company page update, it’ll reach all the followers. Well, the reach of your employees is way, way, way bigger than whatever your company page followers are. So to give you a quick example, the average member on LinkedIn has 800 connections. And so if I have 50 employees, a company of that size might have a thousand followers. So if I do a company page update, a thousand people will see that if my 50 employees share that out, it’ll reach 40,000 people. So the reach of my employees is amazing.

And then who are my employees connected to? Well, they’re connected to my customers and they’re connected to my future customers. So if I get my employees to commonly, like, regularly share out stories that help bring value to the company and also help them bring up their professional profile, elevate them, then that’s what that’s what is a good thing to do. And so versus spending a whole bunch of money. Paid campaigns are exceptionally targeted, and they’re very, very valuable. But usually people don’t have deep pockets to be able to keep running those kinds of targeted campaigns.

And so utilizing a channel like employees is a great evergreen strategy. And it’s a great equalizer, because then a company of 50 people can have the same power and reach as a company that has 2000 people.

Let me bite into that a little bit because I mean, obviously marketing is one of the things that makes my heart beat right in that depiction that you just clearly outlined something like that. Let’s say you have a company of 50 people, and let’s say I do a monthly sweepstakes for my employees, and I’m tracking, like their shares how many times they share, how many times they communicate with additional target audiences based upon what we do at the company. Then, like you said, it’s an evergreen situation that I could say I put $100 into gift cards or hardware or whatever I think my employees would tangibly want would be ten times or 100 times cheaper than spending 100,000 or 10,000 an ad spend.

And that’s pretty much what you just outline. Is that correct?

Exactly. It. So to give you a quick example, a small paid campaign on LinkedIn would be ten grand, and that could last a few weeks. If I have 50 employees for under five Grand, I can communicate through my employees for an entire year.

You’re definitely right.

With a pay campaign, I run one ad where I’m like, Please click on this and buy my stuff. If I can communicate through my employees for an entire year, I could tell that story in so, like, such a nice way, a little bit about the company, a little bit about thought leadership, a little bit of how we participate in the industry. Here’s our perspective on this. And instead of just like, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. Now I’m building an awareness of us. I’m building an awareness of our employees.

I’m raising everyone’s profile. Now we’re thought leaders in the industry. All of a sudden, the conversation is different. We’re no longer a company that’s just pitching. Now we’re a company that’s adding value. And then periodically we talk about ourselves and talk about our products and services. But we’re not in any kind of rush because with a pay campaign, you’ve got a stuff in people’s faces, whereas with an evergreen channel like that, I I can tell you this story over the course of months because decisions don’t get made usually don’t get made in the moment.

It’s not like I see an ad and go, oh, gonna go by Bentley. I just saw that commercial and made me want one. If I’m in a position to buy something or even as a company, we’re going to buy some software. We’re going to take a while and a bunch of people are going to be involved. So if you build that awareness with me over the course of eight months and all of a sudden, now we’re in the market for that product immediately. You’re top of mind.

Well, we definitely need to talk to those guys. They’re smart. They’re adding value, and they’re in that space. We need to get their opinion on what we should be doing. And I wonder what their product is like. So that’s how you change the conversation through the employees channel. And so tools like who I consult for and what LinkedIn hat before, which was Elevate, which was their social sharing channel, and a product that was designed for that. It was a fantastic platform. They’ve since sunset that platform.

And so now I invest my time with social HP, but Benet of it is, you know, you can really drive a lot of value. The hard part is trying to convince people to do it regularly.

Yeah, that’s why I threw in the sleep steak sticking it. I want everybody to listen to this last ten minutes. I want you to kind of rewind it back and listen to it again, because the Nuggets are definitely falling from the sky right now. Right with that. So pretty much I want people to really understand is that if you have a tribe you could weaponize your tribe with the right Spears to go out and Hunt for your right clientele by just giving your tribe initiatives on a routine basis, which is significantly going to be cheaper than running ad campaigns at a shorter period of time for a higher cost.

And that’s pretty much what he’s saying, which is golden when you really think about it. It’s so simple. But the reality that not everyone’s doing that, not everyone’s doing it well, almost nobody’s doing.

Some big companies are doing it, but they’re on the bandwagon early, and they’re adopting technology at a pretty fast rate. Smaller companies, definitely not midsized companies. There’s a few, but not a ton. And then I will say, I’ll add to this, which is software, especially either consumer based software or software that you would give to employees. It’s hard to get them to do it unless it’s like they’re going to get fired unless they don’t do it. If it’s an opt in kind of thing, most people will say, yeah, but then they forget real quickly and they opt out.

And that software is a service. That’s the number one problem is usage. And so with most tools that curate and bring in all of this amazing content for you to be able to share, to try and convince your employees to regularly go in, you can contest and you can Starbucks cards or whatever, like a gift card. You know, that kind of thing that will definitely make a difference. But it’s not on. Some people aren’t motivated by that. And if they’re not motivated by that and then they’re not motivated by the greater good, then they’re not going to do it.

And so my experience when I was at LinkedIn is that about of your employees will actually regularly go in and share and won’t. And so with the company that I’m supporting now, which is social HP, they build some technology, which is basically where your employees are like, look, you guys, the marketing experts, I individually am not going to be a social media marketing manager, and I don’t want to become one. So why don’t you guys just do it for me? And that’s what we built. We built to do it for me functionality, which is basically like, hey, why don’t you share for me four times a month?

Share good stuff that makes me look great, makes me look smart and helpful for the company. Get up. And then I just give you permission to do that for me. And then now everyone can share and they don’t ever have to log in. They don’t even have to touch it. And then they’re sharing all the smart stuff so that their networks are like, oh, wow. Like, hey, Sarah, that was amazing that you shared that. And they’re like, cool. I didn’t literally have to do anything.

Who’s going to eat the cost of that? I mean, essentially, you’re talking about a software that’s going to have API integrations into individual social media platforms. All of that information is going to be regurgitated to reflect positive on the mothership company that these employees work under.

Correct?

Who’s paying the cost for that?

So the mothership company buys the software access. The employees don’t pay anything, but that software is cheap. That’s the thing. Like one paid campaigns. Ten grand that’s offer for 50 employees is under 5000.

So 5000 monthly or annual or no for the year. Oh, shit.

It’s like it’s cheap. You’re giving it away. Can you share a LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? You can share all the platforms. The employees decide which tools they want to connect, which of their networks they want to connect. And then you can just take care of it for them. So they literally just go, yeah, I’ll connect my stuff. That sounds great. Thanks for making me look smart. I’m happy to promote the company. I’m proud of the place where I work. We’re going to talk about how we do in that charity run or how we’re doing this good community work, too.

Amazing. I want to talk about that. And the employees don’t know where to find those stories. And if you could profile an employee, like, say, hey, like Cassandra is been working here for three years, and we’re just so proud of her. And here’s the great work that she’s doing. The rest of the employees don’t know where that story is posted or located. It’s on their corporate blog. They’re never looking at the corporate blog. Is it on the Internet or is it on our website? Where is it this way?

One administrator just pops it in, delivers it out. And then Cassandra gets a visibility of 40,000 people Super Super fast.

So who is developing and creating the general content? Where is that content being sourced from?

So the tools like this pull in from third party. So you can pull in from, like, any third party publishers, whether it’s like Harvard Business Review or industry stuff. Like, if you’re in the legal field, then it pulls in all the law journals, anything like that. If you guys have a corporate blog, it’ll pull in from the corporate blog. It’ll pull in from your corporate, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn account. It’ll pull in from your marketing tools. It’ll pull in from any source you want. You can even do Google keyword searches if you like, every time we’re mentioned in the news or anytime this topic is mentioned in the news, then it’ll pull in all those stories, and then the administrator just basically select which ones, and when they get shared.

It so human me here for a second. I’m listening to it and we’re diving in the convention, and I’m enjoying this conversation.

Right.

So that particular software is a sexy as hell when it comes down to corporations. But I see an alternative use for it as far as like, if I’m a corporate individual and I want to sell a particular product. Everyone’s familiar with influencer marketing. Could I not then say, I have 15 influencers that are my employees.

Yeah, of course.

We should give the system.

Yeah. You can invite anybody on you want not only that, let’s say you have customers. So let’s say I’m in a retail business, and but my customers are passionate about me. So maybe I have an email list of 2000 people that have all bought for me, and they’re all like, hey, keep you posted when stuff comes up. Normally, what I would have to do is write out an email and whatever. I could literally just take a story, click a button. It creates an email and it’ll send it out to all of them.

One it’ll allow them all to read it to it’ll, allow them all to share.

It nice.

So they can share as a guest so I can invite in my own employees. I can invite in my own influencers, and I could share content to the masses and have them amplify it for me.

Yeah.

Literally. Within 10 seconds, it would take me to do that. Yeah.

Definitely. It’s sexy. And it gives it its kind of manipulating the organic side of things to scale. Like you said, it’s all about scale. So you’re scaling organic. It’s going to, like, final words of wisdom. Let’s say 20 something year old. And I’m listening to this podcast, and I’m hearing all this information, and I’m like, this is great. I love this. Like, what words of insight would you give to me to continue on this path?

Well, I mean, definitely the more you know, the better you are off. Right. If you’re headed in a certain direction, figure out in this case, if it’s social marketing, figure out what kind of platforms are going to be the most valuable to you. And then learn about what technologies that you can use that will help to amplify your messaging. And then from that standpoint, I’d say, there’s so much out there right now that you can do for such a small amount of input, like, small amount of dollars in and you can generate a ton of value out.

So rather than hiring like a company to run your social channels, I had a friend do that recently, and they were paying $500 a month for whatever it was like, six posts, like, good for them for being able to charge that. But it shouldn’t cost that kind of money to do that. And if you don’t have the expertise, I think you just need to invest a bit of time. Doesn’t mean you have to be an expert, but you just need to invest enough time to figure out what you should be doing.

And if you don’t want to have to handle it, then that’s when you have to build out your advisor network. I’ve got an advisor. That’s an expert on marketing. I’ve got an advisor. That’s an expert. And these are like my advisors aren’t trying to sell me something. My advisers are like legitimate experts that they have no incentive to tell me what they’re telling me, because if they have a reason behind it, they’re giving you this information and then you go, oh, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

And then like, okay, cool. So you should buy my service. That’s not really an advisor. That’s the sales person that will give you good advice. But they’re definitely trying to sell somethng. So I would say build a really good network of people. If you’re a young entrepreneur and you want to grow your business, reach out to people that can help you in every area that you touch and every new area that you find. You got to get those right people on board.

I definitely insightful. So how can people get in contact with you? I mean, what’s your online handle? I would think by the fault you have a LinkedIn profile, how people get in contact with you.

Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best way to reach me. So it’s just my name Jonathan Baldock. So that’s the URL as well. So LinkedIn. Com. My name Jonathan Baldock. And you find me. We’re happy to answer any questions.

So going into the bonus route, right. What is your most significant achievement to date outside of your kids, outside of your family? Just as far as business goes?

Good question. To be honest thing I’m most proud of is being able to launch that app because I was like when I went into it, I knew zero about how I would go about getting that done. And I owe it all to the people that help me get there. But I pushed hard and invested the time and got that done. I know it’s recent, but I’m very excited to have done that.

Got you. Well, I definitely commend you on. I’m in that space right now as well. And I’ve been with other people that’s built apps, and I think a lot of people from the outside and looking in, they think it’s kind of like building the website and it’s as simple as that. And in reality, there’s a little bit more that goes in behind the scenes to actually start an app. You got to stay away from the feature free ups and then executing the app. And then once you get the app done, that’s not the end of the journey.

You have to have people use the app to give you insight to let you know what’s wrong with the app so you can fix it and make it better than what it was when you originally came up with it.

So totally you could have the best app in the world. That doesn’t mean anyone’s going to use it.

Yeah, you’re right about that. So if you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive, uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be and why.

Yeah. Okay. Alright. I think I would choose Robin Williams. I think that guy was just such a comedic genius. I had the good fortune of going on set the day after Robin Williams is there. I never met him, but I went on. He was in those night Museum movies, and I was on set the day after he was there. And the director showed me his dailies, which is basically like his takes from the previous day. And they never gave him a script. And every single take was a completely different scene with completely different dialogue from him all made up on the spot.

And every single one was like, the best take I’ve ever seen in my life. Like, I could not believe the director said. He goes, I could literally pick any one of these ten takes, and it would be the best take I’ve ever seen. And they were all unbelievable. And so that’s I would say, like, Robin Williams was just such a such a charismatic. I loved all this movies. He had such range and like, I love movies. I love TV. I love all that stuff. And his storytelling really had an impact on me.

I thought he was just so genuine and then hearing how just wonderful he was, because when I was there the next day, they were like, oh my gosh. She was like, the nicest guy and just so thoughtful and approachable me was a huge star and, you know, had all the money and all that kind of stuff and just was like, the nicest guy a lot. What a great person. I would love to spend some time with him.

Yeah. I could definitely see that to your point. As funny as he was, he was also as dynamic and great as a drama actor as well. I remember, like, 1 hour photo was like one of those movies that was kind of like it creeped me out just enough to be like, Holy shit, he wasn’t funny, but he was jest as organically, dynamic in that role as he wasn’t Morkan windy. So I definitely you get two thumbs up for that.

And. All right. Thanks. I appreciate it.

So going into closing, man, obviously, we had a lot of different ups and downs in this conversation that we jumped around to different ports. Right. So any questions that may have came up on this journey that you may want to ask me, this is the time to go ahead and ask.

Well, you know what you mentioned, the apps. So one you said you’re building for the boss encaged suite of services, but it sounded like there was more than one. Yeah.

So I mean, one essentially to me, it’s using myself as a case study.

Right.

So in the space of entrepreneurs, in the space of podcast and also in the space of just authoring books, because I’m an author as well, I wanted to kind of try out this platform to see. Is it possible for me to make it easy enough to pull all these octopus tentacles into one system to deliver to a target audience, and then taking that and then thinking about the database behind it, I was like, okay, what’s the easiest database that I could think of? An Excel spreadsheet. So how can I create this portal on the front end for Boston Cage and on the back end, turn it into a resource for other podcasters and other authors to simply have an Avenue to plug in information through not necessarily iframes, but through Excel data sheets and pull it all together to create a finished product.

That way they can update it on the fly, deliver to their target audience.

Cool. Cool. That sounds great. How close to finish are you?

So with the first one I’m at about, I could finish it literally, probably next week. But you know how it is when you kind of squeaking. And this one feature didn’t work exactly where I wanted to work. And I’m trying to think about Usability, so that’s where I’m at with that one. And the other one is essentially in still in schematics. Still again, just one app needs to be done in order to get data back to create the other app. I don’t want to create them independently without having some data from one to the other.

So it’s a two part thing. So the first one, I should be able to release it in the next 60 days.

Well, that’s awesome. Well, good for you. I will tell you, I thought my friends were so sick and tired of me telling me, like me telling them when my app was going to launch, because every two weeks I would say, I think I’m about two weeks away, and I did that for six months and eventually at the end. Okay, I can’t say two weeks anymore because you’re all throwing me on the fire. So I eventually had a switch. And I’m like, you know what? I think it’s like a few weeks, but it could be longer.

I really don’t know. And it just took so much longer than I thought. So you’re very, very close, which is very exciting. I’m super happy for you.

Yeah, I appreciate it, man. It is one of those things because this year I had promised I was going to deliver my season one as a book, and it was going to be kind of this episode would have been in the book. And we’ve been talking about software and the great takeaways just kind of like what you said earlier about Guy Roses podcast. And he created a book to complement that podcast similar in that fashion. And then I hit a cross road to where I had some other things came up, and then the app just became more of a necessity.

It was just like, you get on the phone with somebody and you have a conversation like, oh, I didn’t know you had a store? Yeah, I have a store for, like, twelve months. Oh, I didn’t know that you had a book club. Well, the book club just launched. I did all the marketing for it, and you’re in my card. How the hell did you not see it? So I was like, I need to have one thing that I could just market. That one thing and everything else would just come through that one portal.

Yeah, that’s good.

I definitely appreciate your time. I think you definitely like I said earlier, I mean, you made it rain. A lot of Golden Nuggets and a lot of insight, a lot of information, a lot of passion. And I think our audience will definitely if they haven’t. I would say this is an episode you have to listen to more than once to kind of, you know, pull it apart and get the pieces that you need and take action items on what you’ve heard, to get the results that you’re looking forward to.

So again. I mean, John, and thank you very much.

Thank you for having me on.

I really appreciate it as they grant over and out.