CEO Of Fangled Group: Andrew Deutsch AKA The Fangled Boss – S3E22 (#118)

S3E22 Andrew Deutsch.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Three, two, one .Welcome welcome back to Boss Uncaged podcast. Today’s show is going to be a very interesting show, and I can tell you that because it’s like I’m talking to myself on the other spectrum of the world. Right. This guy is not only a marketer, but he’s also a Brander. And I could just tell you by the branding of his name alone, we’re going to have some fun. So without further Ado, I’m going to introduce everyone into who I’m deeming the fangled boss. Andrew, once you give our audience a little bit more about who you are.

You promised me just yes or no questions. You don’t have to interact.

Yeah, you got to do a little seesaw, right? I got a little back and forth.

I’m going to double my fee. What’s, two times zero?

You go add another number in front of that, right?

Yeah. 0.0. There we go.

There we go.

Yeah. I’m Andrew Deutsch. Our company is fangle group. We’re a global strategy first marketing and sales consultancy. Our business is helping companies turn off all of that crazy tactical stuff that they’re spending tons of money on until they actually have a core strategy to build those tactics off of. We save companies all over the world millions of dollars in unnecessary spending trying to promote something that there’s no strategy behind.

Nice. Let’s talk about the naming. Right. So before I even dive into you just got to dive into the name. How did you come up with the fangled group?

All right, so originally the name of the company was the Deutsche crew. I had my offices, I moved overseas and worked for many years. When I came back, we had a competitor who I would have to say doesn’t have the same moral and ethics that you and I do. And because we beat him on a project, he discovered that I had never trademarked Deutsche group in the US. So he registered my name and then asked us to cease and desist using our own name. So we went the short of it is we went back and said, well, who do we really want to be? And a buddy of mine who grew up on a hog farm in the middle of nowhere jokingly said, well, you guys are doing that newfangled marketing, aren’t you? And I said, well, newfangled no, we’re in the moment and we’re using the most modern psychological profiling and all of the qualitative study work and all of it. We’re not new fangled, you’re old fangled. I said, no, we’re just fangled right in the moment. Looking forward. Kidding. It was a joke. Well, the next day someone asked me, what are you going to name your company? And I jokingly said, well, we’re thinking about calling ourselves the fangled group. And the guy said, it’s genius. I love it. And we started using it, and before long, it stuck and we trademarked it. And it’s been a huge advantage to us in terms of name recognition. I mean, so many companies get so literal in their naming or I am the AB Mechanical Group or whatever. There’s no name recognition there. Well, people years after meeting me, remember the Fangled guy? And it really does say who we are. We’re not old fangle. We’re not newfangled. We’re really in the moment doing what needs to be done to help our clients build that core strategy and grow their business.

I think in that story, it seems like you got introduced to the art of war through real world tactics, right? I mean, someone giving you just say shit and then they go behind the scenes and they get a trademark and kind of like knock you off your seat. I think that was definitely a lesson learned. Just talk about that a little bit. How did he go about doing something like that? How did you guys not get the trademark?

Well, it’s my name and it truly was dumb on my part. That when I moved the business back to the States that I didn’t immediately trademark and name the company. We were doing business as Deutsche Crew, but it was a lesson learned in me not doing my due diligence and really following up. I’ll tell you, we don’t do much naming for our clients that doesn’t start in the trademark list because of what we learned. I’m all for making mistakes if you can learn something from it and grow and do better later. But it was really, I mean, it was stupidity on my part that we didn’t do it when we came back to the States. But basically what had happened, the guy was vindictive. He was a jerk and thought that he could do some damage. And the funny part of it was we requested all of this because he set a decent assist. You can’t do business with this. And we said we were going to fight it and we made his lawyers do tons of discovery for us. And then the moment it arrived, we said, okay, well, we’re not going to pursue the lawsuit. Sorry. At least we made them spend a little bit of money in the process.

Got you and some insight from it as well.

Yeah, it was an expensive lesson, but it was well learned. And the benefit from it has benefited lots of our clients that recognize the importance of if you’re going to do a naming of a product, naming of a company to really do your due diligence, is it available? Can you trade market? Can you register it? Is there a website available that makes sense with that name and all the other pieces of that? Yeah.

Nice. So going into you a little bit, if you could define yourself in three to five words, what three to five words would you use?

Three to five? Yeah, three to five opportunities found where no one saw them. That’s who we are as an organization. And me in particular. It’s finding that uniqueness that others don’t see, seeing opportunities where others don’t recognize opportunities exist. That’s really who we are as an organization.

As you’re on the topic of organizations, let’s just talk about, like, if you’re on boarding, let’s say I’m a new client. What are you looking for? Who is your ideal customer?

If you’d ask me about ten years ago, it was always the industrial manufacturing space, but we’ve expanded quite a bit over the years into other areas. We began bringing disruptive technology to manufacturing space. The original name of the organization actually was Tangled Tech. And then we morphed into the Fangle Group later as we started to provide much more than marketing in the industrial technology space. But I would say 80% of our business is a manufacturer or distributor in the industrial space who is stuck or has spent a fortunate marketing agencies and hasn’t gotten anywhere with it. They’ve been burned, and they’re looking for someone who can be fair and intelligent in how we help them grow their business. And then the other ideal client for us is someone in the consumer space that’s got something unique and interesting that they want to bring to market. We don’t typically do work in professional services. I don’t do much marketing and sales consulting, and, for example, insurance, banks, doctors, lawyers, those kind of organizations.

So, I mean, going to the next question, obviously, I think you already told a very crazy tale about potentially not being trademarked and someone kind of pushing you out because of a trademark, which led you to where you are right now, which is essentially a better branded name. Is there any other worst case scenarios that you’ve been encountered with on your journey?

Well, we began in the global space. We weren’t here in the US growing business, so we were given lots of challenges in terms of being able to translate the value proposition of American manufacturers into, for example, Latin America. So you would show up in meetings to talk about a specific tech that never existed in this other country, and you had to deal with these responses of, oh, no, that would never work here to a product that they didn’t even understand. Or you would be talking about a product where in the United States, all of the marketing materials were based on companies who knew the tech and were going to the next level, as opposed to a place where it’s not going to the next level. It’s not an upgrade, it’s an initial purchase. So I’ll give you an example. Machines that do painting on home. So you pressurize house paint and you spray it rather than roll it. In the US, every quality house painter has this airless equipment, and they do the work with it and the sale and all the marketing materials that exist in the US, manufacturers of those products is how to get to the next level, how to get to a more powerful machine.How to get to a machine where one machine can have three guys spring instead of one and upgrades. In South America, it was a Virgin market. They were almost unheard of. So if you go with the materials out there and you start talking about how you can get up to the next, I don’t even know what the machine does. So you had to sort of go back in time and create marketing strategies as they were when it was an emerging technology in this market. So there’s a lot of mistakes that were made along the line by our clients who are trying to sell based on what an American would be doing or North American would be doing, when in fact, it was completely off base for what was needed in that market.

Wow. With that, let’s just time travel back a little bit. What were you like as a kid? Because obviously, I think that you’re very profound as far as technology goes. And then you’re bridging the gap between technology and marketing and branding in a space where usually things are kind of that level of deep diving is kind of mundane in that space. So, like, when did that start as a kid? As a teenager? In College?

Yeah. I was always industrious as a kid. I had some great role models. My grandfather was a guy who, during the Depression, was sweeping floors at a printing factory for a nickel a day or something like that and ended up owning from Zero, a major printing company of his own, before he retired. So I was always around folks that had this idea of how to make businesses run. It always fascinated me. And then I would do stuff around the neighborhood to make money. I never had the paper route, but I would just do projects, helpful things for people to make money. At one point in time when I started really getting into the music scene, I found out who the distributors were of all the T shirts that were sold at concerts. And I would buy all of the leftovers and then put them in classifieds and sell them to make money. So I always had something going on. When I was in College, my freshman year, I happened upon a list of all of the students, their birthdays, and their home addresses. And this is before the Internet existed. So once a month, I would send a letter to every parent on that list whose kids birthday was going to be the next month that I could deliver a custom birthday cake and paid my tuition for most of my freshman year by delivering birthday cakes to people whose parents decided they wanted a birthday cake delivered to their kid.They’re just little, small, clever businesses that kept me sustained as a kid. That sort of built out of the drive that I had for running little businesses and continued from there.

Yeah, definitely. It’s interesting when you said, not only did you not have the insight to realize the wealth in that list, but you see the opportunity and then you convert it. In reality, in today’s world, someone may get that list and they just kind of like they pull their pockets out and they have no. So for you to kind of be more of a tech person and then you say, okay, what can I do if I could make cakes, which has nothing to do with where you’re going, but you saw that opportunity and sees it.

The bigger opportunity was a local grocery store that I negotiated. If I buy X number of cakes a month, what kind of discount can I get? All I would have to do is pick up the phone and call them and say, I need a cake for Tuesday, and this is what it needs to say on it. I didn’t make anything.

You’re doing the affiliate affiliate kind of rotation going.

Yeah.Before affiliate marketing was called affiliate marketing, I was selling the local grocery store cakes.

Nice. So to jump back into your business a little bit, obviously you’ve had pain points. You’ve overcome a lot. You’re international, you’ve helped different sectors, and your focus is essentially industrial. What is your business structure? Is it an LLC, an S Corp or a C Corp or a combination of all three?

We’re an LLC.

Is there a reason why?

It makes financial sense for the way we do business? I think it’s odd for a consulting company to not be there’s tax advantages in the way that we have it set up. There’s a lot of little detail stuff that my financial advisory and my accountant and others who I work with recommended it, and I’ll stick with it.

Nice. So in addition to that, obviously, I think you’re a big system guys. What systems do you guys have in place to kind of maintain what you have?

What do you mean by systems or accounting system?

Not necessarily accounting. I mean, prime example, if you’re onboarding, you may have onboarding system, you may have a sales system, you may have a customer service system. So, I mean, obviously, it’s probably one system that you need to more than another. Which one is that? And then how are you using it?

Yeah. The way that we build our client base, most of the intake is with our core business. There’s four of us in the organization total, but we have 95 vetted freelancers of all different abilities and skill sets. And once the initial discovery is done with a client, we build the team from those so that we have the right team for the right project. We talk about the marketing agencies all the time. And one of the things that we’ve discovered is it’s very rare that an agency with all in house staff ever has the right staff for that next client. It’s more common that they’ve been doing work in professional services space forever. Lawyers, doctors, and otherwise. And a company that makes fasteners in the industrial space comes on board and they go, yeah, we’re experts in that. And the next day they’re bringing everybody around the table. You guys better learn about the industrial space because we just got a client. We don’t have to do that because we’ve got the right people. And if we don’t have the right people during discovery, we will let the client know that there’s going to be a bit of discovery on our side to make sure that we can put the right team together.We won’t take the client.

Got you. So you’re organic in nature as far as finding the right people to fit in the right void for that particular client, it definitely makes sense. Like you said before, head guys. But then obviously you have 100 people that you have access to the kind of mix and match to get the right chemistry going.

Yeah, we have affiliates in about 120 countries, too. So if the project is something that needs to happen, we can do that viability study to see whether or not there are foreign markets for our clients product or service and get them to the right trading partners much more rapidly than most companies can do. I think among the 90 something people here in the US that we can work with, I think we can speak 14 languages or something like that. And through the 120 countries that we know, it expands beyond that.

Nice. So let’s just talk about the perception of being an overnight success, like someone that’s outside of your core industry may hear this and be like, okay, this guy sounds great. He knows exactly what he’s talking about. But this is maybe the first time they’re hearing about you. But in your journey, how long did it take you to get from where you were to where you are currently?

30 years? There is no overnight. The challenge for me at the beginning was I went to school, studied international trade, because that was what I wanted to do. Got my bachelor’s was excited. There were no roles in the market at that time for anyone with a bachelor’s degree in the area. And I went to work for a nonprofit to have a job and figure out what I was going to do next. It was probably the worst and the best thing I ever could have done because I really didn’t enjoy the work. I didn’t enjoy the people I was working with. But what I did learn was how to sell nothing for a lot of money because I was in the business of raising money. So how do you sell an intangible where the only thing the person gets for their investment is a handshake of certificate and pride? So I really started to understand that sales process in a way that I never understood before. But then I decided I needed to go back to school, but at the same time, all the MBAs that I knew were unemployed. So I went back and studied psychology and actually worked for a couple of years as a therapist while I was building my business practice.So we were incorporating these multicultural ideas and the psychological concepts of the actual purchasing journey into how we were building marketing strategies and sales strategies for customers. And in that process was fortunate to do some volunteer work for an organization that I was an exchange student with years before and through that started making very powerful contacts in Central and South America. So I spent probably three years making almost nothing, trying to learn my trade, and was able, fortunately, to sustain myself by doing other work. I was working in psychiatric hospitals as an orderly and things like that while I was trying to get this off the ground. And then once, I guess it was 1993, I had a 90 day project that was supposed to take place in Brazil. And I went to handle and it was completely over my head. And I had said to the people, I think it’s over my head, but if you really want me on board, I’ll go do it. Well, the market had just opened for import. There had been a dictatorship, and then the import market was closed. It was very complicated. Well, the moment I was there, the currency was stabilizing.The market was opening even more. And I went from being a guy who kind of knew stuff to an expert in a place where people had never done trade in the US. So I was able to build a business in Brazil. I was there for ten years operating Deutsche Group. So there’s so many hurdles and projects and challenges and things along the way. It certainly was not an overnight success. There were times that there wasn’t any money. There were times that there was. But fortunately, I was able to really learn from all of the crazy projects and experiences and things that we worked on which built what I have now.

That leads me to another intriguing question.Right.So you had all these sea sources up and down, riding the waves and then climbing back up the ladder and riding the wave and climbing back up the ladder. If you could time travel back and whisper in your ear at any time in the last 30 years, what would you say to yourself to make some kind of change, to be where you are maybe a little bit faster?

Probably. I would have had more focus at the beginning on the types of clients, the things that I wanted to do, rather than taking it as it came, the opportunities. I wasn’t chasing shiny objects, but there were opportunities and projects and things that were offered to me that really didn’t pass the smell test. But I went ahead and did it anyhow. So I would have trusted my gut a lot more with projects. There were some times where I began working on projects with people that turned out not to be the best people to be working with and had to walk away from profit and projects until I really learned how to pick and choose properly to what works.

Interesting. So while we’re still on the time traveling journey, and I think you brought up some people that had some insight into your life earlier on, but we haven’t really talked about your family yet. So my next question is how do you currently juggle everything you’re doing? You’re enjoying the hustle, but how are you juggling the hustle with your work life?

Well, during the years that I was doing intensive travel after moving back to the States in 2003, I continued the business of the market crash. I took a position where I left my consulting business aside and became an employee of one of my clients and I ran the international division. Back in those days, I was traveling 220 days a year out of house, 300,000 air miles, 45 typically on average countries in sales and really lost that connection that I should have had. So most of the communication I had with my family was international phone calls, being able to video conference before Skype existed actually, and doing a lot of that kind of stuff. So it was difficult. Now my daughters are all adults and out of the home. I’m on the grandkids and I don’t travel nearly as much. So I pick and choose my hours and spend time doing the things that I want to do with my family and all the hobbies that I have.

Nice. So I mean, with that you’re talking about your picking and choosing your time and you’re managing your time as you see fit. It would behold me to kind of believe that you’re a pretty structured guy. And my next question is, what are your morning routines? What are your morning habits?

I get up around 4:30, sometimes 4:00, catch up on news and things like that that I don’t normally pay attention to during the day, go through my to do’s, have my breakfast around, I don’t know, 6:30 ish. I take one of my dogs for a 30 minutes walk just to get my energy going, shower, get in front of the computer, do my social media postings and things that I work on that I don’t want to be interrupted when I’m doing until the phone starts ringing around eight, and then I work straight through. I usually take about an hour, hour and a half midday. My wife works at home also. She’s a professor since she’s doing online teaching, do the lunch thing and then back to I’m usually done with my daily stuff around 4,4:30 because it’s time to relax and enjoy cooking a meal or working on one of my projects, one of my hobbies, my studio nice. And on the weekends I try to I turn off the social media and focus on this time of year, I’m usually out my kayak on at least one day on the weekend barbecuing doing stuff that way, working on the house.

Nice.You brought up hobbies, a couple of different tabs. What’s the laundry list of hobbies that you’re actively pursuing right now?

Avid woodworker. I build all the built in and furniture in my house. I have a glass studio. I work with glass. I Cook. I knit in the wintertime, make my own sweaters, scarves stuff for my wife or my kids.

Nice. You’re a tinkerer, pretty much, right?

Yes.

That’s nice. With that level of hobbies and tinkering and just who you are and the business that you have, the next question is the three part question. Right. What books did you read on your journey? Right. What books helped you become who you are? Part two to that is what books are you reading right now? And part three to that is have you had an opportunity to write any books yet?

Yeah, I’ve got a couple of books that are in the work that I’m writing. One of them is “How We Learn from Horrible Bosses”, “How to be better bosses”, and also my strategy first concept and how to convert all touches into voracious advocates for your brand, which is one of the core of Angle. Books I read over the years. I didn’t read that many what most people would call the business books. Probably the most influential book I ever read was “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” by Goldman, which really looks into the psychology behind how somebody who’s the Hunter killer salesman needs to completely retrain because the skill set that got them where they were as the successful salesperson makes them probably the worst sales manager in the history of mankind if they can’t retrain and learn that skill set. So it was kind of a lot of the books that I read in the early days were more the psychology of sales, motivation and otherwise. The Richard Bandler and Grinder books on neurolinguistics, Milton Erickson, odd things that aren’t typically talked about in the business world. And then I’ve read the old standards, the good to great, and those books right now at the moment, I’m reading a couple of biographies that have nothing to do with business because it’s just stuff that I’m interested in.

Nice. Obviously, I think you’re a tinkerer on both sides of the coin.Right.I mean, obviously, with your expansion of knowledge, you’re dipping down with multiple different things. And I think a reoccurring thing that’s come up on this podcast is psychology. And I don’t think majority of marketers or sales reps don’t really understand the power of psychology to convert a sale or to market to the right audience. So I want to dive into that a little bit more. Like, how useful has your studies of psychology been for where you are right now?

It is the differentiator that makes Fangled unique. And we see it all the time where people don’t understand who their customer is at that core level, what matters to them, what moves the needle for them, what’s their actual internal process in the buyer’s journey? And how do you meet them at their model of the world and bring them towards yours, rather than what most companies do is just beat them over the head with what they think is important and hope it is. If you’re a manufacturer, there are certain things about your manufacturing that you’re extremely proud of and that you think are very important to your customer. In most cases, it turns out the customer couldn’t care less. That isn’t what’s in it for them. You’re not buying a brand new car because it has a different temper of steel and because it has some odd feature that doesn’t matter. People buy cars because maybe they have a safety need. I want this because it’s the safest thing for my family. They might buy it for utility. I know if I have it, I won’t have any problems. The family will be fine. They buy it because it makes them think they look cool.They buy it because they can attract the opposite gender or the same gender depending on who they are. There’s all of those psychological motivations, the benefit of owning that product. And most people are out there selling the features. You went to marketing school. You learned all about features and benefits in school, didn’t you?

I mean, I went to more so design school. But to your point, definitely it’s always going to be feature versus benefit.

Yeah, but the reality is it’s inverted. Psychology tells you that you sell the benefits and you use the features to prove you’re not lying about the benefits. If you show up with this particular brand, you’re going to have this effect on your psyche. How do we know that? Because these are the features that make that happen. So it’s always the inversion. We’ve seen companies that everything that they’re out promoting about their business is like table stakes in a poker game. In other words, we make it out of steel. We can paint it any color. We test in house. We have quality. All those things that people may or may not believe. When the reality is people do business with them because they have flexible manufacturing. They can get it to me quicker. They have zero failure rate, all the things that matter to you as a manufacturer. So if you’re buying components from a company just based on the fact that they test and they have quality or that they’ll never let me down, they’ll always be on time. I’m never going to have a warranty recall because they stand behind and can do so,those are benefits of doing business with somebody. The features are just to make sure that the benefit can be real.

Yeah. And I think that’s collective. I mean, even something as simple as a T shirt, a lot of times you’ll see a T shirt and you may see the size, the cotton blend and all these other essentially features of that product. But the real benefits of that product is essentially not the features. It’s more so the emotional reaction of that product is that product going to make you feel good? If it doesn’t make you feel good, does it make someone else around you else feel good? Does it give you bragging rights? So it’s 100% psychological aspect. So I’m happy that you brought that up. It’s the real hidden meat and potatoes behind sales and marketing that unfortunately gets lost by feature creep ups.

Yeah, I’m going to steal this from my friend Allison Ericsson, who has an industrial marketing company called Felt Marketing. But she always talks about how do you market products so that people feel as opposed to think. And it’s so important in the industrial space. When I first got involved in industrial marketing, industrial marketing was basically sell sheets and a box of Donuts and that was how you went to market. You’d show up at the buyer, you give them a box of Donuts, and you might want to bribe the guy on the Loading dock to make sure when they unload your stuff, they give you priority. He gets another box of Donuts or maybe a couple of subs from some sandwich shop. And that was marketing back in those days. Well, now how do you deal with the pains of that buyer? For example, my product is not the cheapest product on the market, but I have zero failure rate, so you’ll never have downtime. Nobody from production is going to come in here and yell at you because you bought crap. Number two is we will manage the inventory. So all you have to do is pay the bills.All you got to do is give me your production schedule. It’s all going to be there when it’s supposed to be there, accessible to your employees. You can go on to more complicated things while you’re a hero because you’ve never shut the plant down. I mean, those are the things, the psychological aspects of what’s in it for the buyer. Then you’re talking to the manufacturing team. What benefit are they looking for again? You’re never going to have that moment where you’re screaming at all your employees because they didn’t tell you you were running out of inventory and now you can’t produce and you got to shut the plant down. So all of those aspects are far more important than the actual product in terms of the manufacturing process when you’re selling, distributing components.

Nice.

Right now, the auto industry in the US is coming to a stand still. Why? Because It can’t get chips, the chips that are used for the computers on the cars. If one of those manufacturing companies out there was able to come in right now and say we just set up, we can make those chips for the future. You’re never going to be out of chips again, but you got to buy them from us. The other guys would be gone, but nobody has that capacity because right now the pain that needs to be solved is supply, not quality.

Very interesting going into obviously, I think you’re building not only a wealth of information and wealth for your clients. Correct me if I am wrong i think inside you’re also building wealth as far as leaving behind a legacy of information for your family. So my next question is where do you see yourself 20 years from now?

Oh, I love what I do. So even at the age where I would want to retire, I’ll still have my toe in the water. I really enjoy the creative process of what’s here, but my kids are all into other things. So probably there’ll be an exit within 20 years where either I’ll take on partners who buy me out or sell to someone else who I think is aligned with what Bengal does. And my hobbies are going to keep me until I build the box they’re going to bury me in. Nice. Yeah. I’ve got two friends that have done that. I always thought it was a little creepy.

But I think it was probably creepy passes. But now you probably could relate to them. Probably a little bit on a different side of the coin now.

Yeah. I actually thought it was pretty funny as a fellow I knew down in down in West Virginia who built his own coffin, but he made it look like a coffee table. So it was in his house for years and no one realized that what it was. There was a book out years ago on how to build it. I don’t know if it still exists as a woodworker’s guide to building your own coffin.

Imagine trying to market that product, right?

Yeah, but just an Apple of it. You probably could sell a lot of it.

Going to my next question, what tools do you use? Obviously, in marketing, there’s marketing software and apps, particularly software and apps. Which ones would you not be able to do what you’re doing without?

I use the core Microsoft package of what’s there the graphic artists that I use. I let them decide what they know best. Same with my video editing team. All of them are brought on because they know what they’re doing and I can trust them to get and they understand the look and feel and the strategy that we’re working from. So I don’t interfere with any of the outside folks. And then we have web development teams that depending on the client, we then choose to which team makes sense for what they’re doing. If you’re just building a website for a branding statement and basic, simple ecommerce, it could be something as simple as a WordPress site onto the other which is much more advanced with our Magento team that can do very complex websites and everything in between. But I have my own sort of system that I’ve developed for project management. That’s proprietary and most of the work that we do after that Discovery call is really managing all of the people and keeping the communication between them. Some of my freelancers love using that program, Slack. I find it annoying, but if it helps them, I’ll go with it.And of course we use like, for example, you see me on here. This is one of my communication tools. The fancy background. I’m actually using a virtual camera for this so that when I’m doing meetings, I can actually remain in the scene while I’m presenting and bring up a program behind me. I can do silly stuff, keep the audience happy, blow somebody’s mind if I need to. So there’s a lot of sort of special tech stuff that we do to be more present in the room during the era of Zoom, when we can’t be in meetings that allow us to connect better with our clients and be more effective in meetings.

Nice. So thinking about like final words of wisdom, and I think for you just to say there’s someone that’s in their mid 30s and they’re essentially one to step into this space and they’re listening to this podcast and they’re hearing your insight and they’re like, okay, I love what this guy is talking about. I would love to be him one day. What words of wisdom would you give to the individuals to grow into becoming you?

The initial years that you’re in marketing is really about learning tactical implementation of stuff. And all of the tactical things are great to get your foot in the door and get involved in projects, but you always have to have a focus on really learning how to develop a core strategy. The actual development, of course, strategy, qualitative study, and really understanding that process is something that you build on throughout your career and you don’t become an executive and a high level marketing guy within an organization on tactics, it’s on strategy. The problem with being a tactical guy is every year the tactics change and you’ve got to relearn everything. If you learned how to code in the 1990s and now it’s the 2020s, all of that knowledge is gone. If you knew how to build a website five years ago, the tech today is different. So the way we build strategy today isn’t that different than what we did all those years ago. We’ve just gotten so much better at it because we’re constantly building onto that core. So the future of being a top level marketer is really focusing on how do I become a strategist, not a tactician.

Nice. I definitely could cure with every last word that you said. It’s a hell of a philosophy. And it’s not just a philosophy, it’s a way of living. You have to kind of live by it to kind of really understand what he’s saying. They may have heard what you just said, and they want to get in contact with you. How do they get in contact with you? Online, through your website, social media.

Right here behind me, Fangledgroup.com is a great contact point. Our podcast is called The Fangled Cast, and you can find us on YouTube and all those crazy places that people have there. I think I’m on; i don’t know nine or ten different podcast sites. It gets spread out, and I’m not even sure where all it is anymore. But, yeah, I mean, find us. You can fill out contact us through thefanglegroup.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can find me. I’m that guy who looks like this with my name next to it. It’s pretty easy to. You can send me a Fax if you know how to do that. Maybe a telex Telegram smoke signal.

Fax will be pretty interesting for the demographic of today’s world, right?

I remember when the Fax machine first came out and everyone was there’s never going to be anything better than this. This is the most incredible thing. Oh, my goodness. Guess what? I don’t think anyone under the age of 25 ever used one.

I’ll be done. Not unless they work. It like an old sawmill somewhere in the middle.

Medical office is still using. But yeah, it’s funny. The tech. I mean, the old cell phones you carried like a bag around with a zip around it over your shoulder, and you unzip the thing and pull out a phone with a cord.

Going at the bonus round. Right. I think this will be pretty interesting. Right. I got a couple of bonus questions for you. One of them is, outside of your family, what is your most significant achievement to date?

Most significant achievement? Probably the languages that I’ve learned. Being able to communicate almost anywhere in the world.

How many languages do you speak currently?

Currently fluently English, Portuguese, Spanish. I can read and understand Italian, French, little Mandarin, little Swedish.

That’s got to be a hell of attribution to who you are. I mean, do you have, like, a photographic member, or is it just, like trial? By being in those locations and living there and being on site for so long, you just picked it up?

Yeah. I thought I had a photographic memory, but I didn’t know where to buy the film. But no, you pick it up through communication. I never studied foreign languages in school, but it comes out of necessity and practice and listening. You start making weird noises until people start responding to them and you know, you’re speaking. I know that sounds silly, but it’s really true. It’s fascinating. Over time, after you’ve learned a bit, you start recognizing what people are saying. The words aren’t as important as sort of what the underlying communication is happening. And you become even more skilled with it when you’re traveling in places that you don’t speak the language and you’ve got to communicate. So it’s an acquired skill over time. Nice.

Very nice. So going on to the next question, if you could spend 24 hours with anyone, dead or alive, uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be and why?

Well, that’s a good one. I probably would go the opposite of what you would think and pick one of the entertainers who fascinated me throughout life, maybe Ian Anderson, the head of Jethro Tall or dad. Maybe hang out with Frank Zappa for 24 hours and get my mind blown with different political and social ideas that are outside of my scope.

It’s not what I expected, but it’s still what I expected. I expect it to be something outside of the box, by all means.

Yes. I work so much in the business space and have met and spent time with so many people who I admire over the years. It’s kind of a tricky. They always tell you, do you never want to meet your heroes? Well, I have met some of my heroes, and I really enjoyed the experience, so I could think of others that would be interesting to hang out with.

Nice. So going into closing, I mean, you’re a fellow podcaster, and I always give opportunity to where I’m interviewing, an opportunity to interview me and ask me any questions that may have arise during this interview. So the microphone is yours. What questions do you have for me?

Well, I think you’ve got an incredible creative background based on some of the stuff that I was looking on your website. At what point in time or what was the influence that told you that you could be really good at this?

So growing up as a kid, always sketching and drawing. Then in my high school years, once I got introduced to graffiti and then I started drawing more. And then when I moved to Atlanta, my parents threw me an art school. So when I look back, historically, art has always been a part of who I am. And then I had to realize that I’m both 50% creative as I am analytical. So I spent so much time chasing after the creative. And then after in my mid 20s, that’s when I realized, okay, all this creative stuff is great. But there’s another side of me that’s been calling me, the underlying side that’s been calling me. So once I’ve kind of bridged those two together is when I had that Eureka moment to say, okay, I could be really good at art if I answer to my analytical side and bring them into one world at the same time.

Yeah. I find in my history, when I deal with artists, the ones that I connect the most with are the ones who figured out that it is a passion and a business, and it can be both without compromise. The artist I’ve dealt with over the years that the relationships don’t last long are the ones where their personal interest in what they’re doing outweighs what the client’s looking for. It fascinates me when I meet somebody who not only has that creative. I’m curious, though, is there a medium and art that you’ve always wanted to try and you’ve never stuck your toe in the water?

Out of all the ones I have tried, the one that I really haven’t really Dove into is probably sculpting.

Sculpting. What medium of sculpting do you think interests you the most?

I think, like, more metal working, like, kind of layering up, like bronze. I remember vividly, I forgot which Zoo it was, but it was a Zoo that I went to, and it was a piece of a gorilla. But the gorilla was essentially all pieces of metal layered on top of itself to create the form. And you can kind of see the negative contours in between. But when you step back and you look at it, it was a marvelous piece, and it was at scale as well. I was just like, how the hell did they weld these many pieces to create this shape.

It takes a lot of vision. That’s an area, too, for me. I’ve always wanted to take a good class in welding. That’s something that I haven’t incorporated much metal in my work. Where do you see when you’re looking for new clients for your work? Are you looking to do things for people’s private art collections and things like that to sell, or do you mostly do your work creating imagery for businesses within a strategic concept?

I would say more to the Lather over the years. I’ve sold some pieces of art here and there, and I’ve done pieces of art for family members, but it’s passion for me, but it’s not like my core passion. My core passion is I want to kind of create more of a legacy branding. So when I have the opportunity to work with someone and I can kind of sculpt their business into something that they didn’t imagine it could be and then support it with the visuals, I step back and look at that more as a visual masterpiece than just looking at a piece of painting on the wall that was created by Basquiat.

Fantastic. That’s interesting. It’s interesting. We have a lot in common in terms of concept and drive. I’m glad to have met you.

Yeah, definitely. I definitely appreciate your time on your schedule. And like I said, right off the bat, when I saw the name of your company, I was, okay, I’m definitely going to be talking to a branding guy, because most people, structurally, they don’t really understand branding. And just like you play on words, and if you look up the definition of what fangled really is designed to represent and kind of how you’re using it, it’s ingenious. Right? So, again, if you haven’t had an opportunity, I want someone to go and Google the definition of that word. And then think about everything that you probably learned from Andrew on this podcast, and you can see that the connections between the two is phenomenal.

And it’s funny because fangled really isn’t a word. There’s sort of a definition for it, but newfangled, old fangled are words, which is kind of why I think it’s interesting. There have been some interesting namings over the years, both in English and in other languages, where it just really stands out. The lack of creativity that people have in going you’re going to open up, I don’t know, a pet grooming place and call it the dog groomer. It works. No company ever failed that I’m aware of because of a bad name. But lots of companies have taken on to the next level because of the impact that they’re naming and their slogan and that have had on people to become inspired, to become advocates for that brand. At the core of Fangled, what we tell our clients is every decision that we make has to pass the test is what you’re doing, what you’re saying, what you’re acting on, is it going to create gracious advocates for your brand? Does it convert everyone you touch or does it not complete that? Because if it doesn’t, you need to really think about why you’re doing it.

Very interesting. I think you bring up a really solid point. Right. I mean, if you think about Walmart, you think about Amazon, you think about Nike, you think about all these huge household brand names and essentially the definition of each one of these words that I just listed off don’t really have anything to do with their product or their service. It’s kind of like Yahoo, for example. It’s kind of like a brand that came out of nowhere. But to your point, they went into more of the psyche of how do I corner the market? Can I get something that nobody else has access to? And then can I self define this new product and make it into whatever I want to create versus using keywords to generate the title of my company? So I definitely appreciate you bringing that up.

Yes, Yahoo is a funny one, because if you think of that word, it gets used in different ways. There’s that sort of numb minded Yahoo who does stuff. And then there’s I’m having a blast Yahoo. There’s different ways, which makes that just a fascinating from a branding conversation. But at the end of the day, everyone we touch with our business, every employee in our organization, everybody who’s related to our brand should be trying to convert everyone they touch into Voracious advocates, not just the people who do business with you.

Nice.

Think about some of these artists, the singers who have their Swift and Spears, and those people go online and say something negative about them and see whether they have Voracious advocates.

You get Mobbed, for sure.

Yeah. And because of that people will line up around the block to buy a new phone that nobody’s ever touched or felt for thousands of dollars because they just know that that brand means something to them and they want to be first. If you take that to any business that you’re in and you can achieve that level, you’re a great marketer.

I think on that note, it would be a great way to close out the podcast and I definitely appreciate everything that you’ve delivered and taking time out of your busy schedule to be on our show today.

It was absolutely my pleasure, man. Thanks so much for having me on.

Great S.A, Grant. Over and out.