Beyond the Hype: James A. Weiss on Strategic Brand Building in the Age of AI

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Now the goal is to just be served in the results. You don't need to be number one if you're part, if you know, you're one of 5 results that are being searched based on, you know, whatever prompt was, was offered. So understanding that not just the physical way in which search happens, but the way in which search happens from an LLM perspective is we're shooting for different goals than we were before. I think when it comes to the engines that are out there now.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Annika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. I am thrilled to have James A. Weiss, the only time I'll use your full name, James, on the show today on the podcast. James, you are the managing director of Big Drop Inc. So, before we get into Big Drop and what you do, I just feel that your background is really fascinating. You're a former competitive fencer, you're an accomplished musician. So, how did somebody with a creative and athletic background end up leading a top digital agency?

Yeah, happened by magic. No, no, it's, it's, it's really interesting. I think there's a lot of parallel there are a lot of parallel lines to be drawn between things that happen obviously in a creative and competitive space. And then, you know, obviously stepping into the role of managing director where I've sat for the last couple years. But I think a lot of it has to come from, you know, the elements of discipline, wanting to make sure that, you know, you are doing the best you possibly can at the highest level. And then having that translate into areas for growth. I mean, certainly as an athlete, you know, you are always looking for to achieve the next milestone, whatever that may be. And I think A lot of that, I kind of over the last couple years have seen how much that's played into it. And like I said before, the discipline element is huge. Yeah.

Well, I think that's such an interesting perspective. I mean, obviously if you're owning a business, you have to be very disciplined, but so many people don't go into that with that perspective necessarily, especially if you're creative. Sometimes you start a new business because it's something you know that you're good at, it's something that you enjoy doing, but you may not have all of the different pieces and components dialed in, whereas With being an athlete, you have to be very regimented.

Yeah, I guess it's a nice lesson in trying to make sure both sides of your brain are working and functioning in the right way. I guess it's, it's so interesting. We're in a creative space, but because you are a service provider, there's a discipline element that has to go along with providing the strategy, the deliverable, the final product. And that discipline is arguably what gets you clients, what helps you grow those accounts, what helps you, you know, develop new strategies, keep those relationships. It's like you always want to strive for being that well-oiled machine. And I think the better you are at aiming for perfection, you sort of stop short at excellence, which is still good. And that's, I think, I think as a team, that's what we certainly aim for. But I know as an agency and certainly operating in such a competitive environment, we're, I like to think that we're only as good as the last strategy that we know works. And that has been replicated over and over again through different types of companies, different types of clients, different sizes that we've worked with. I mean, We've, we've pretty much seen and touched everything, tech, different tech stacks, different industries. So, if we're constantly trying to push our own envelope and for consistently trying to outperform ourselves, you know, that, that does lend itself to just organic growth.

Yeah. Well, and fencing is not a sport people talk about a lot. It's such an interesting sport, but it's also an interesting sport to think about when it comes to personal and professional growth because in fencing it is a place where you have to be very strategic. You have to have in-the-moment decision-making. So, can you walk us through how that development of those skills shows up in your day-to-day leadership?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you think about highly individualized sports, fencing, obviously top of mind for me, but tennis, boxing, things like that, and, and even to some degree, you know, golf, I think what they all share is the element of self-reliance and having to be, everything is, is dependent on you. And that's not to say that those who engage in those sports are, can't exist in a team environment well. It really is how they drive themselves forward. And I think one of the elements that I think fencing has offered is fencing is often called the physical chess, right? There is that highly strategic component, but it has to be put into practice and has to be executed physically. A lot of times, you know, good fencers are kind of seen as those where you want to show that you are thinking, but you want to show the thoughts that you've had to get you from the difference between Moving forward, moving backward, making a touch, winning a bout, things like that. And I think one of the strongest elements that, that fencing offers in this context is that I'm constantly combating different strategies. I'm constantly thinking through different scenarios, different ways in which the outcomes could effectively materialize and taking and synthesizing all that information in a moment is really helpful when you're trying to figure out the best pathway forward on behalf of someone else who's either paying you for a service or who is leaning on you to drive their strategy. And I even see this on the business development front as well. You know, that's, that's negotiation. You're negotiating with, you know, a weapon, so to speak, in, in fencing and kind of trying to anticipate what someone may need, what someone may want, what someone may feel and think. That all comes from, at least in my experience, it comes from my, my competitive background.

That makes a lot of sense. And I, I particularly like the fact I mean, everything you said is really engaging, but you said specifically that, you know, going from a sport that's thought of as a solo sport versus a team sport, but you were still able to translate that into your day-to-day and into being a leader of a major digital agency. At Big Drop, account management, strategy, UI/UX development, SEO, so many different aspects to your business. Can you talk a little bit about that? Talk a little bit more about Big Drop, you know, what was the thesis for this agency and then how have you continued developing your role and the roles of others?

Yeah, I really think the value proposition for our team was we cut our teeth in the website design development space that still remains our core competency, but over time, you know, that's since grown really through our clients. They've been asking for, you know, different elements of marketing that we have brought into play. I mean, we built out an entire digital marketing team. A lot of that work happens not in a silo, but with, through the lens of what we do with our normal engagements of website design development. I think a lot of times when someone comes to an agency, they're coming to an agency because they need that objective. And here's an interesting term. They need that foil for a fencing term to be able to challenge their own assumptions about what it is that they do in their marketing machine, how their marketing machine is structured, and then, you know, working to help perfect that marketing machine over time. And so it takes a team to be able to understand how all of those pieces need to fit together. And it takes a leader or anyone who is in charge of what success looks like to really drive that forward. So as much as fencing is seen as a highly individualized sport, there is always that element of the time that's gone into training, the coaching that's been, that's been put into an athlete, the time there, that effort. And there is a team behind an athlete. There always is. It's never a solo endeavor entirely, but I think being able to understand how that piece fits as a component in the overall team machine that, you know, an agency environment offers, that to me is a very clear, a clear line.

But yeah, does that answer your question? Yeah, absolutely. And you also though have so many different core competencies and as you said, they grew out of initial work in development and web design, as your clients asked for them, how did you scale that? Was it learning more as a team yourselves, getting those competencies, hiring the right strategic people? Because I know I've had a PR firm before and grew to different competencies based on what my team's skill sets were that I didn't— hidden talents, if you will, but also things that we saw as holes for our clients.. And I do a different type of work now, but a lot of the same things remain the same, right? I'm building this team around, we need this person to really focus on analytics. This person's really good at the social media strategy. This person's good at this part. They also understand the whole breadth and depth of what we do, but I'm always intrigued to see how other people built it successfully because I know that can be really difficult.

Yeah, there are a couple times in Big Drop's trajectory where we've had to modify our process or really lean on subject matter experts externally of our team to be able to not just provide a service, but to understand the best pathway forward. I think in our earlier years, those growth objectives were completely client-led and, and organic conversations. You know, it was, it was very similar to, we, we came up against the conversation of, you know, we built this great website, it functions well, performs great, but how do we drive traffic to it? It's a very easy conversation to take into the next stage of, well, let's figure out what's going to make, what's going to make traffic happen. And how do we not only make sure traffic is happening, but qualified traffic volume that is going to be actionable. That's not just volume for volume's sake. And I think in any agency environment, and you may have experienced this yourself too, it's important to surround yourself with team members internally or externally who have an intellectual curiosity about wanting to push something forward and really wanting to make momentum happen in a way that you're able to sustainably grow from. And that I think is true for us. You know, when we invested in building out the team, we invested, I think, in the right people and the people that were subject matter experts or like really wanting to push their own, their own skill sets forward. And that kind of, you know, the agency grew by extension of that. The better we were able to provide, the more we were able to provide value and the better the value was, the more business came to us. And, you know, we had clients that were, that have been around for 6 and 7 years. And, you know, to this day, we remain. So it's, it's been an interesting ride, but it's also been one that I think has been pretty calculated. And here's, you may find this too, you know, marketing is one of those interesting phenomenons where the concept of marketing doesn't change, but the ways in which marketing happens absolutely change as things evolve over time. And so obviously the big thing right now is AI. Everyone's kind of wondering exactly how that's going to be incorporated. I mean, certainly it has started to be incorporated, but what does a long-term plan look like for this in a marketing capacity? And so it's just the next iteration of incorporating that into an overall marketing machine that we are either driving or helping clients build for themselves.

Yeah. Well, and SEO is obviously a big area of change. What the LLMs come up with in results versus what Google might and how effective are, you know, Google Analytics and advertising dollars going now. I was just having this conversation with a colleague at the university I work at this morning, and we were talking about the fact that there's organic or even growth that you're seeing or reviews. People who are genuinely giving you earned media is such a big, important part of the LLM search. But what if you have trolls who are saying negative things, who may or may not have even gone to an institution, who are trolling a whole bunch of programs. So, you know, that they didn't go to every single one of these programs, but they have a chip on their shoulder for some reason.

And you don't know if it's a bot or a real person, but, right?

But those are results that are coming up in search. So, there's so many things that we have to, I don't want to say whack-a-mole, but like all of these new things are coming up and then we're like, oh, now we have to solve for this issue, which was not an issue before.

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Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. It's inundating. I mean, I, I'm candidly, I'm inundated by the amount that I'm seeing coming out of the AI space. Every day it seems like there's a new tool or platform that, you know, does something that their competitors don't do or does something differently that you should totally lean on them for that versus the tool that you're currently using. And and it's a lot to sift through. I think it puts a lot of responsibility on the general public to, you know, become experts in this area so they can leverage the tools that are out there. And I just think that that's kind of maybe a branding issue that AI is kind of combating right now. But when we think about anything that we've done from a search perspective, it's always been optimizing for the best, the highest possible organic rank on the typical more traditional search engines, the Googles and the Bings of the world. But as the ChatGPTs and the Claudes and, you know, all as those start to come into play more, you know, really understanding how a site can perform on those engines has been a really interesting challenge, but also one that we're starting to find a lot of success with. And it's what's fun about that too, is that we've also gotten business from ChatGPT on a couple of different occasions, partly because our site has been indexed quite a bit for a longer period of time, which obviously helps if you're leveraging an index as large as Google's. But I think the things that we're finding are the same principles that are just now being applied into a different behavior for search. You're still going to want to have the right relevant type of content that exists on the site. You're still going to want to make sure that it's structured properly so that it can be parsed and served in the right format. And I think what's interesting is that everyone years ago was vying for the number one spot, or even as position zero came into being. Now the goal is to just be served in the results. You don't need to be number one if you're part, if you know, you're one of five results that are being searched based on, you know, whatever prompt was, was offered. So understanding that not just the physical way in which search happens, but the way in which search happens from an LLM perspective is we're shooting for different goals. Than we were before, I think, when it comes to the engines that are out there now. And I think the brands that are going to get ahead, the companies that are going to get ahead, are the ones that are going to, one, adopt it early, two, make changes quickly, and three, continue to refine and optimize over time so that they will always be kind of omnipresent within any sort of answer engine result.

For anybody who's listening who wants to be found and get clients through LLM searches like yourselves, What advice would you give them? Where should they concentrate their focus?

Yeah, that's a good question. It comes down to the three kind of things that I, that I mentioned. Obviously the structured data of a digital property is going to be huge. If it's not optimized in a way that an engine can easily sift through and digest, it's going to likely not want to recommend the site as a result. But I think that as important as that is, the other two pieces that I'm about to mention are almost more important. One is really the kind of approach to content, which is making sure that there's relevance within the, the copy and the content that exists on the site. You obviously want to show up for the things that you want to show up for, that you want users to find you for, and making sure that content is being produced on a consistent basis at a high level and with as much relevance as possible is going to set the property up for success when it comes to being parsed and then served. And then the other component is really making sure that the format of that content, which is different from the structured data that I mentioned before, but the format of that content exists in such a way that it's easy to be combed by any sort of, by any sort of engine. Of course, everyone should still continue to want to rank as highly as possible on more traditional search engines. So keep that up, but it's the other pieces now that you'll have to have in mind. But again, it's not anything. New from the sense of, you know, changing the overall perspective on what you're trying to accomplish at the end of the day. It's just a new way of doing it. So it's important to, I think, evaluate what you, what options you have and what opportunities, you know, exist in front of you.

That's such a measured approach because you're not necessarily jumping to the next shiny object that everybody's saying is the next marketing tool that we all need to be using or, you know, Yeah. Yeah. You're taking a really good solid look at continuing a baseline strategy and then adding in where it makes sense.

Yeah.

And I mean, you run the risk of, if you operate with kind of that more short-term thinking, you run the risk of having an immediate result that really isn't sustainable beyond that time. So that point in time for you, I think anyone who's trying to build a brand, establish longevity with that brand is going to want to make sure that they set themselves up for success well into the future. And who knows what search is going to look like in 5 or 10 10 years from now. But I think there's something to be said for, yes, capitalize on the moment, but also make sure that you're doing it in a responsible way to where you can steward your brand through the many twists and turns that search may take.

Yeah. And we know, I mean, as you mentioned, there are new tools and new things coming out every day. We have to figure out if that's something we want to chase and become part of, or if we want to wait and see if that platform, that tool still exists and if the way that things are being shown in that are still going to be helpful or not. When a new client comes to Big Drop, are there some common uh-oh moments that you encounter in those first discovery conversations where you see, mm, they may be a really great fit or maybe we're not the right agency for them?

Yeah, certainly. I think one of the things that we try to avoid is understanding, well, we, we always want to understand what the line of decision-making is. A lot of times as an agency, if there are too many cooks in the kitchen, this may be true for everything as well. If there are too many cooks in the kitchen and we can't get a consensus and we can't reach, you know, an agreement on where we are planning to go and how we should get there, it derails the potential for success. Something we never want to combat. If there's anything that, one thing that I think any agency will tell you, this may be even true for professional services in general, you're not in the business of producing the deliverables that you produce. Your output is not what you are in business for. You're, you're really in, in the business of managing expectations. And you, you'll need to know whether or not the expectations that you're trying to manage, one, are worth managing, and two, are even manageable to begin with. And I think over time you kind of develop a sense of knowing whether or not something is realistic and whether or not you have a shot to be successful with it.. And that usually helps dictate whether or not an engagement is the right fit for us.

Yeah. And you, and you work with a variety of businesses, right? Enterprise brands, nonprofits, growth stage companies, which is somewhat unusual sometimes in this space. So, what is the through line that you see between the different kinds of companies that you like to work with? So, that's part one, and then part two is what do you see companies— is there a through line between behind what they get wrong about their brands or digital presences, no matter what industry?

Yeah, I think being able to be a one-stop shop because we are a full-service agency, a lot of clients will come to us for one thing and then stick around for all the other services that we have. That was by design. The idea is that we want to establish long-term partnerships, long-term growth opportunities with the clients that we work with.. And for that reason, we developed different departments that are able to service them in the best way possible and make sure that they can find what they need in working with a team like ours. So it's been really interesting to work with a startup that is decently funded, that is really trying to just make a splash or disrupt an entire industry. At the same time, we're working with, you know, large, heavily regulated financial institutions that, need us to do things by the book. I think any agency that, and it's not a knock on any agency that is more niche or has a very specific type of company that they work with from the client perspective, but I think what one of our superpowers as an agency is having to have been nimble in the past so much so that we can say, yes, we've done that and this is how, and you may know this too from agency life is no day is the same as the next. And I think that's kind of what keeps it interesting, both for, you know, the team members on our side who may be transitioning from, from project and project engagement to engagement, who may have to like put on their financial services hat and then take that off and go towards CPG. And that's, that just makes them better all-around account directors. But it means that they can also pull insight and institutional history from other engagements they've worked on where they know things have worked and they can pitch that as a strategy if they need to, or you know, help a client really figure out if that's the right approach for them.

I am also more of a, I mean, there are certain people who I think are my core type of client, but I also found that I like having a more generalist approach of knowing, like you said, a lot about a few different things and being able to pull in strategies from other types of clients I've worked with that may, maybe would be new to that industry or, you know, somewhat revolutionary to that industry because they're used to doing— I mean, obviously thinking about things like finance, they're used to doing things the same way, but you can bring these other perspectives and create an entirely different strategy in the market for them.

Yeah. And I think a lot of the clients that we work with are trapped in very competitive market spaces where it's really difficult to cut through the noise and it's not really a matter of throwing enough money at it to see how high you can raise your brand. It's really more how do we compose a narrative that's going to make sure that it reaches the target audience in a way that is meaningful, but also helps to grow the footprint of the brand in a responsible way. I think two things can happen. Those two things can happen at the same time. And I think that's a really interesting challenge to have to take on, especially in highly concentrated markets. Like, I think that's kind of the fun that goes into it.

One of the things that you also champion is accessibility design, which we hope everybody starts with, but often I feel like is still the last thing that's considered as a piece of the puzzle in design elements and also human-centered design. How do you help how your clients understand and, you know, get their leaders bought into the fact that these are the things that you need to be looking at? From the beginning, not just at the end to make sure that you've complied with certain standards.

Yeah, I think that's, that's an important point because you don't just want to do something to check a box. You want to make sure that you're doing it properly. And like I said before, you know, you typically— clients come to agencies when they realize they don't know something and they need help with it, or they know what they want to achieve and they need the right type of expertise to, to execute it. Something like accessibility, I think, is going to continually be something that every agency should be talking about with their clients and certainly everything and anything that a client would do to be responsible with, you know, with the new presence that's being built for them or just their general approach to their marketing engine. For me and for Big Drop, I think, you know, closing the, what we call the digital divide and making a more inclusive, taking a more inclusive approach, inclusivity with the realization that all users are not just all users. Every user is may be different. I think it's a great brand play for our clients in the sense that, and it's, it's also a smart brand play. You, no one wants to have to deal with a claim because they didn't follow through on something. They didn't interpret a regulation properly, but also they're giving themselves every opportunity to win business from someone who is trying to navigate their site, who may just have an inherent inability to do that the way we would normally build a site for, for them rather. So I think when it comes to accessibility, it should be almost seen as a business imperative more so than just a measure of compliance.

I agree with you so much on that. I mean, I've had people on the podcast who I've had people with all kinds of different abilities or spoken to their family members or, you know, other people who have been champions of designing, whether it's new shopping carts or other kinds of new tools because they see a need in their family members. And it's amazing to think 20 to 25% of the global population has something. And so you're creating a lot more brand loyalty if, if you're looking at this intentionally from the beginning. And it's something I definitely try to impart on my students at USC. And I find that a lot of them go, oh, I, I knew about this thing, but I didn't realize this thing when I'm posting on social or creating a website for a client or whatever the case may be, that it is something that should be top of mind.

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Yeah. Amazing. You touched on the fact that you have clients who come in, and I think this is everybody's dream, right? You have clients coming in one area and then they stay on with your organization because they see that they have other needs that you are perfectly suited for. So, I'd love for you to give us, if you can, a couple of those favorite examples.

Yeah, I'm working with, say, they've been a client of ours for 7 years now. They're in the education space, but they're in the education space for stylists, salon stylists, and they really had robust development needs, but it was very clear that the development, a lot of the elements for performance were an afterthought. So it was an easy conversation to have. You know, we can certainly build what you're looking for and we can do it well, but you should really consider what you're doing from a performance aspect so that you can make sure that nothing is going to hinder your ability to grow the way you're, you're asking us to help you grow. And then working with them in a digital marketing capacity is, has been great. Because now we're kind of seeing both sides of the coin for them. They need this helpful partner. They don't have the technical expertise to do what they need to do. So they need us in that way. But they also don't know what they don't know from, you know, maybe a demographic perspective. I mean, certainly they know who they're working with, but what is the data telling you? Who's coming to your site? Where should you be in other markets? You know, things like that. So that's always been, that's always been really fun. And there are others that I think are just unique where We've taken on a project recently that is really— the best way I can describe it is an online museum. It's the best way I can describe it for a very specific product collection, a product that's been certified Guinness World Records, which is incredible. But helping them understand that there really wasn't a brand in place. They had the collection, they had effectively some sort of idea of what they wanted the visual to look like, but not understanding how the identity needs to kind of drive that conversation when it comes to the interface when it comes to the elements of color and, you know, walking them through branding exercises that help them arrive at a visual identity that can now inform our perspective on what the interface is going to look like. So I find that while there's always a business development, you know, opportunity to help a client understand how to take advantage of working with our team, I also think that, you know, and this, this goes back to having an intellectual curiosity about what a client needs, what they may not have, and filling that gap with the service that you provide. And that's been kind of a winning combination, at least in my experience.

Yeah. Oh, I, those are really great examples and it's, it's also fun because you use two different types of clients, but you're able to help them with their goals in unique ways. So, love that. Was there, on the flip side, a project or situation that you realized that, okay, this client was a really good fit for this one part of our business, but they don't really, they're not really understanding the other things that they need to add to truly be successful? Or maybe that helped you say, hmm, maybe we need to change the way that we're talking about this part of our business.

Yeah, I think one of the things that tripped a lot of clients up was really understanding the SEO component of the work that we were doing, mostly because you're obviously not going to build a site that doesn't have an opportunity to perform, but it's not a set and forget kind of endeavor. You need to consistently maintain search over time. And that means it, then it's not just a matter of, you know, modifying what happens on the site from a structural perspective and then wiping your hands of it and moving on to the next thing. There's a strategy that needs to be put into place to make sure that content is consistently flowing, consistently being produced, consistently published, and consistently maintaining the relevance on top of making sure that it is technically sound and configured properly. So I think SEO gets seen as, oh, well, this is, this is the way that you rank higher on search engines as opposed to the actual work that goes into getting those results. And even as an agency at ours, as we, we rank number 1 for some of the most competitive brand terms organically, you know, at Google, which I'm very proud of. But also that takes a lot of effort on our side to do it just for ourselves. I mean, imagine, and we're in a pretty saturated market. So I mean, doing that for literally any other type of industry, you know, there's a lot of work that needs to go into building a proper search strategy. And it touches so many different elements, even going to the social media aspect. So yeah, I think it's been hard for, and I think part of that was also the type of client that we were working with. Was not as marketing savvy. And over time, as we started to win larger accounts and we started to grow, we were talking with more seasoned marketers who really understood our process, who had maybe worked with an agency before and understood what really goes into, you know, working, working with an agency and how an agency can support their initiatives for search. And so eventually that conversation got easier. It was really a matter of tailoring it to objectives. I think when someone doesn't necessarily have a foundation for something like, in our case, SEO, it was a much harder— they couldn't fathom exactly what needed to happen and, and why it was worth the investment. And sometimes those conversations can get highly technical and you don't mean for them to be, but they just end up going that direction.

So, and I also think there are people out there who sell specifically SEO services who make it seem like it's gonna be a quick win. When it's like you said, it has to be very intentional. It's over time. I mean, even to get yourbrandamplified.com, it took a lot of time because somebody else had that as a redirect to their website, even though they were a branding agency in Australia, you know, all the way around the, the world. And it took a lot of time for my podcast to get enough visibility from episodes, but also other people sharing it and then having the blog posts and having all the different components running. Where they finally just gave up the website and I was able to buy it for a lot less than I anticipated having to buy it for. And was, it was like, 'cause that.com is something I wanted to own. I didn't, I, I have the.co, but that was really important to me. And, but it happened over many, you know, it was not, it was not a quick fix at all. And so sometimes I think people confuse that search engine advertising versus search engine optimization and all the things you have to keep fixing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a, there, at least in our experience, there's, there was a huge divide there. And I think people anticipate that once you fix something, it's fixed, you did your job, it's done. But I think any brand, like I said before, that's really working towards longevity is really going to want to make sure that the investment that they're putting in their marketing efforts, their search efforts are going to one yield a return, but yield a return for many years to come. And that starts with laying the proper foundation and then following a dedicated path to making sure that it optimizing and tailoring and over, over time to make sure that you maintain where you're going.

I wanna ask about some of your commitments outside of Big Drop and actually see how they might connect because you're very involved in philanthropic and youth-focused initiatives around education, community impact, two things that I'm also highly involved in and excited to see that you are. How does that work shape the way that you lead and run Big Drop? Are you able to do company-wide initiatives that help with some of the efforts that centered around? And, you know, are there other issues that the company has buy-in to?

Yeah, good question. I think some of the things that I get to experience outside of Big Drop certainly seep their way into how I approach doing the work that we do. I think one of the biggest changes in my life, aside from any sort of endeavor, community endeavor, is, is really parenthood. Parenthood for me really reframed quite a bit. My wife and I have two boys. One is going to turn one year old in a couple days, which is crazy. That time really did fly. But that I think has, it's given me a little bit more patience than I normally would've had. I don't think inherently I'm a necessarily patient person, but I understand the need and the necessity for patience and, you know, helping to reframe certain things for myself that are not catastrophic or not that I may have viewed as catastrophic before, even though they didn't really deserve that name, you know, things that, and just, and, you know, watching their growth has been incredible because it just, it gives you a lot of inspiration for your own growth and where you can take that. So I think that's probably the area that I think has come into my ecosystem a little bit more.

I should have asked you that question at the beginning. We could have a whole talk on parenthood and how it affects everything we do. I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. My daughter is going to graduate from high school this year, but every age is amazing. And yeah, the opportunities for our own personal growth, how we perceive the world, how we care for other people, and what we want to do as good role models. I think that definitely goes into everything that we do, whether it's work, community involvement.

Friendships, other relationships. So, yeah, precisely. Precisely. Yeah. I don't know if I necessarily knew it was gonna impact me the way it has. I certainly, you know, surmised that it was going to be a big impact, but could never have imagined, you know, what it's, what it's done for me. And yeah, I'm, uh, it's, it's funny. I was, I was talking with someone earlier and they were like, oh, you have two boys. And I was like, yeah, it's a little like running a pirate ship. It's, it's, it's kind of the best way I could think to put it.

So, Yeah. Yeah. Daughter on this side. So very different, but I love that. And I love that you see this as something that's really changed your perspectives on what's really important and urgent in life.

Yeah, it's, it's completely reframed for me where I want my time to go, how I want to spend my time and what I choose to put effort and energy into and the way in which I put effort and energy into it.

Absolutely. Wow. I think it bodes well for you personally and professionally because I do, I see the intentionality that you've also put into the growth of your business and the way that you operate with your clients, things that you want to achieve for them and with them. And then being able to also take this time to be really intentional with your family and the growth and care of, you know, everybody in your family. So James, thank you so much for coming in. For bringing some wisdom to the show today. I know we covered a wide range of topics within the digital ecosystem.

Do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto that you'd like to share? I think one that I, I always come back to, and I don't know who to attribute to, but the will to win is nothing without the will to prepare. It's something that I always really like. I don't want to get caught up in the preparation, but I do always want to make sure that you're putting yourself in the best possible position to succeed.

And that rings very true for me. I don't know that I've heard that one, but I'm, I'm going to have to look it up and paste it somewhere on my wall. That's a really good one.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I don't know. It's, it, it resonates with me maybe as former competitive athlete and then certainly as more, you know, finding the good fight on the leadership side.

So yeah. Yeah. Amazing. And what is the best source of truth for people to find out more about you, find out more about Big Drop and how they might wanna work with you?

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, James Alexander Weiss, and Big Drop, uh, you can find us pretty much everywhere. I might lead you to our website, bigdropinc.com, uh, just as it's spelled. And then check out what we're doing on social too, because we're putting a lot of effort there more recently, and I really, really dig in what we're doing there too.

So yeah, Big Drop Inc. Okay, amazing. Thank you so much. And thank you to everybody who's listening to this episode. Hope that you got some good information about what you should be considering with your digital marketing tactics, strategies, everything from your website, but also notably we talked a lot about SEO and LLM search. So think about how you can continue to have a strong foundation, but show up effectively with some of the, the ways that James has taught us today. And I'll be back with another amazing guest to share their story, their journey, and some tips and tricks for you in a couple days. Until then, have a great work week, weekend, time with your family. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified.

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