#169: Inside Exit Five | Behind the Scenes of Our Content Strategy and How We’re Building the Team

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One, two, three, four. Exit, exit, exit. All right, three, two, one. We're live. This is Inside Exit 5 with my new friend Danielle. Hi Danielle.

Oh, hello Dave.

How you doing? Busy time in your life right now. You got new job, wedding coming up, drive coming up. It's a busy time to be you right now, but you're doing an awesome job and we thought it would be fun to come hang out on Inside Exit 5 and we haven't done one in a while, so here we are.

I know exactly. Give me a chance to use my fancy Covid microphone I got with everyone else on the planet.

So you being the well prepared person you are, you send a couple notes about things that we should talk about today. But so bunch of people that are listening now probably get you in their inbox every week. So Danielle joined us as head of content about two months ago and Maybe just give some people a quick background on your career story, how you got here, how you got into marketing, and what you're doing at exit 5.

Very long story short, I actually started my career in finance. I was a municipal bond analyst. And I'll pause to let you Google what that is because it's not common knowledge, but I loved it. I was great at Excel, but I was a little creatively bored. So I actually started an Instagram on the side about brunch in Boston and got like super into it and like learning photography and like how to grow it and ended up leveraging that kind of experience into my first content role, which was with a woman named Mel Robbins. She's an author and a motivational speaker and growing her Instagram and then kind of just talked my way into SaaS from there. I got a job at ProfitWell and was like, I don't even know what B2B is, but I'm going to fake it till I make it. And Patrick Campbell let me do that. And then, yeah, just a couple of roles in the software industry and then saw the job listing pop up for Exit five. And I was like, holy shit, that looks absolutely perfect. I want to work with this bald guy.

My daughter says she's seven and she has this little watch that she can send us voice messages from. So she'll never have social media, but she has this watch right now and she always sends me messages and she goes, hi, bald guy, what are you doing? She. That's literally what she calls me.

And she has red hair, so I like her.

They all. They all do. They all sure do. It's actually unbelievable. Do people stop you all the time and ask you about your hair? Did they do that when you were a kid?

Yeah, still. I mean, still. It still happens.

It's like borderline inappropriate. I feel like some especially old women, they make. Oh my God. And I'm just standing there with my two kids and my bald head, like in the grocery store or something.

Yeah, I get like very weird comments sometimes, usually from old men, though not the old women.

It is old men. Old men's are like, ah, ginger. Huh? And I'm like, jesus, leave me alone.

Yeah, like, please go away. This is my 7 year old.

So anyway, and then how would you describe your purview of thin things at. At exit 5? What is it today? And. And what do you think it will evolve to be?

Well, I was super excited when I saw the listing pop up and I honestly like didn't even pay attention to the title and then we decided it would be Head of Content, which was super exciting. So obviously we are like, Exit 5 is a content community business. So I would say that I am responsible for leading the content side of that, which is this podcast that you're listening to right now. It's our newsletter that you're hopefully getting in your inbox. And if you' you're not, you can just go to exit5.com newsletter shameless plug for that right there. Our webinars, or no, don't call them webinars. They are our monthly Exit 5 live sessions. So that's kind of the purview right now. And where I think it's going, it'll still always be that realm. And I'd like to think of that as like, how do we expand our content impact at exit 5? Is it another podcast? Is it another newsletter brand? And we'll think of that throughout the end of the year. But for right now, just kind of delving into all Things content at exit 5.

It's super interesting. So I have your notes. So why do we hire a Head of content for Exit 5? And then you can interview me about how we feeling as a team of five. And then we can talk about. But what's interesting about this content role. And there's kind of a lesson in like a hiring mistake that I've made in the past a bunch. And I think this will relate to a lot of people that listen to this that are in marketing roles or managing people. Any hiring mistake that I've made, it almost always comes down to because we didn't do the role ourselves first. At some point, we're a SaaS company and we think we should be doing partner marketing. Let's go hire a partner marketing person. Like, that's almost always like instant failure because you gotta spend a bunch of money out the gate. You don't know what success looks like. And I feel like anytime we've had success with hiring at any company or Even now with Exit 5, it's because we've done a little bit of that role first. And so your role as Head of Content actually was. This is essentially what I did for two years when I started the company, right? It was. I was writing the newsletter, I was doing the podcast, I was working with Hatch. I was figuring out what topics to talk about as webinar, as sponsors came in for webinars, for speaking opportunities for all this stuff, I was doing it.

Don't call it a webinar.

That's a webinar. I gotta do A hundred burpees after. No problem. I'm a savage. And then last year, worked with someone awesome called Chantal Barley, and she was doing some of this, like, on a contract basis, part time time. And that was super helpful. And that kind of gave me a better sense of, like, okay, I basically spent a year and a half, two years doing this myself, then brought someone in on a contract basis, and. And that was helpful. Then I wasn't ready to hire people full time yet. And so we kind of just decided to, like, pause on doing that, and then waited about three to six months, and then I decided to hire Dan. And that was when the trajectory of the business changed for me, because I was just going to initially have Dan run this business. This is a God's honest truth. I was burnt out on doing this, and I hired Dan because I wanted Dan to, like, manage this asset. It was like a rental property that I own. You and Ross own some beautiful property down in the lake. You don't want to deal with it, but it's a nice money machine for you. Like, let's hire someone to keep it going. And that was literally what I would hire Dan to do. I was like, I'm gonna do some other stuff. You come in, you run this thing, Send me regular updates. I'll pay you this salary. Here's what I'll take. I'll take this cut for myself. And then about three days into Dan, like, digging into the business, he's like, dude, this is amazing. I'm pretty like, am I? I am. Okay.

You're like, tell me more.

Tell me more. That got me super fired up. And I think it's like, you're working alone or even with contractors. It's just not the same level of chemistry and camaraderie and relationship. And so him getting in and being excited about the business, it got me excited. Now we're texting every day. We're getting excited about the business. Then. Then we decide to hire Matt. And then we decide like, okay, we need somebody to do this content stuff. Then we hire you.

And.

But we'd already done a bunch of that stuff, so it's bound to be successful. Obviously, you can get the person fit. Wrong, but we haven't so far. And so you've been able to basically take that in. Dan loves this line. I don't know. Has he used this line? He's like, we're. We're not a business doing content now. We're a content business. You know what I'm talking? Has he ever used that line to you. It's probably wrong.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure that was on my 30, 60, 90.

Yeah. Whatever he means by that is what we're doing now. But it's been super cool because for a while, the newsletter was like, I would write something on LinkedIn. We'd kind of take that, jazz it up a little bit for the newsletter. And to see you come in, not only did we nail this higher, which magically just came to us. It's not like we did anything special. We didn't do anything special. So shout out to you, but you've elevated everything. And so the newsletter, now it's a product, right? Like you said, we're a content business. We want the newsletter to feel like a product, not Dave's LinkedIn thoughts that we're trying to, like, grow an email list off.

I mean, to be fair, they're great thoughts.

Thank you. Some might say they're thought leadership thoughts. And it was also really important for me to diversify the business off of myself. I've been talking about B2B marketing and doing this for a long time, and I wanted to diversify off myself, kind of bring other voices into the spotlight. And so, like, having someone like you take over the newsletter, put your own voice on it now you have such a great process. And, like, I'm just blown away by when I get the draft of the newsletter, it's like, man, this is so good. There's a story like, everything has leveled up and we're leveling up every week. The podcast has gotten better. All of our systems and processes have gotten better. And so I think that's just a lesson in whether you're hiring a head of content or not. The more you can do some of this role first, can someone on your team carve out. Carve out 20% of their time to do that? Like, hey, we want to hire a partner marketing person. Great. Could the product marketing manager do this in 20% of their time to get started? I think you just set everybody else up for success.

Yeah, I'm a big believer in that, too. When I start something, I want to get into the weeds and figure out the mechanics before handing it off. Even now with like, the podcast and some of the newsletter stuff, like loading it up into HubSpot, I need to understand how that works before I hand it off to someone like Anna.

I think that's what's cool about this job, and I think your role is going to continue to evolve. And so it's only been two months, right? If we stretch this out a year and 90% of your job is writing the newsletter and doing the podcast, like, I think then we haven't evolved and we haven't been successful versus, like, no, you need to come in, you need to do the basics, you need to do that stuff. But a year from now, the role of content is going to continue to change. Then we have other people on the team that you can like, delegate some of that stuff to and train others on it. And so I think it's a really good. It's also a lesson. And like, I do think the fundamentals and the basics matter. You got to nail the pull ups, pushups, squats before you do the crazy complex lifts. And I think that's. That's where we're at right now. What's your reaction to Exit 5 from the inside as a company? So you saw it from the outside. What do we have going on on the inside that you think people might not know?

Yeah, it was really cool to come in because I was an og. Dg, mg. I always mess up that acronym.

Yeah, don't troll me. Don't troll me. On my own podcast on the Patreon.

But that was. So I started at ProfitWell. I didn't have any idea what B2B was. I remember like going or like SaaS. I mean, obviously I did my research before the interview, but like, Googling only tells you so much. And that's where I turned to was like, okay, I just need to binge this and like, learn some of the lingo. So seeing it evolve along the way and then like keeping up with it. I think I was in the Facebook group, but like, I honestly hate Facebook, so that's where I fell off. And then I saw actually Matt popping up on my LinkedIn. I don't know, maybe a couple months before I like, connected with him, started following him and then I saw that you guys were gonna be hiring and I was like, I just have a feeling. I just have a gut feeling. I'm just gonna follow along. And then I saw the posting. I was like, yes, but seeing it from the outside to the inside is. I think I kind of had the same reaction as Dan where it's like, it looks awesome from the outside, but then you get in the inside and you're like, holy shit, we have so much we can do. And like, there's so much just raw gold here. Like even we were talking about, like the newsletter of like, a lot of that is really listening to these podcast episodes and like digging out the Takeaways, which I haven't even had to do anything new really, if I'm being honest. Like I'm not out there like researching all these topics. I'm like, hey, I'm listening to this podcast episode. Cause it got a ton of downloads. Someone likes this. So I think it's really the same reaction as Dan at first of getting in and being like, oh my God, there's so much we can do, which is awesome. But also it can be overwhelming. Cause you're like, I'm like, oh my God, I want to go do like 20,000 things.

Especially when you're working with me. And I'm like, and we could do this thing. And we could do this thing. And here's another new day. Here's another new day. And what about this? And why aren't we doing this yet? It's a lot.

Bring on the YouTube shorts.

I could go for hours. Yeah, that's why you got to use that founder. Now that I'm a big time founder myself, CEO, you got to use that matrix of, of like when the founder sends an idea. Is it a good idea? Yes. Can you actually do it? No. Okay, so just, just smile and nod. Put it away for now.

My litmus has always been like, have they mentioned it three times? Have they followed up three times? That means it's actually important.

Oh my God. I had one in the past where it was, I need a Wikipedia page. Okay, let it go. Where's my Wikipedia page? I don't know how to do this. Third time. Where's my Wikipedia page? Why isn't it up yet? Okay, shit, I gotta go do this. Literally. That's one of those projects, like, if you've ever done that, it takes like six months. You gotta hire some like black ops hacker somewhere to like create the wiki page. But yeah, I feel you.

Wikipedia, I think is like one of the hardest things to do because I don't know what like kind of black ops they have going on in the background, but like, they always know if you're related to the person that you're trying to make a Wikipedia page for.

Everything has to be like factual in some way. I like what you're saying about the content machine piece of this because I think what we're doing is actually a cool marketing lesson for a lot of the businesses and people that listen to us. By the time you joined, we had already done 150 episodes of this podcast. Right. And the business that we're creating is not. We're shifting from like Dave's hot marketing takes business to just knowledge about B2B marketing sourced from our community and the crowd. And we have a community with 4,000 members. We've done 150 podcast episodes. We have this amazing network of experts and guests. Well, the opportunity there is to be curators, right? We don't have to be original creators. And so you're doing something like listening to this podcast we did on product marketing with Jeff Hardison, the head of product marketing at Calendly.

Oh, that was such a cool episode, too.

And you're listening to that and you're turning that into a newsletter episode for a newsletter content. But the newsletter is not like, in this episode, Jeff covered three things. You're doing a good job of storytelling within that context. You're like, okay, so you always have a setup. You're like, so my fiance, soon to be husband, and I were on a walk the other day and we saw this billboard and that made me think blank. And then, like, you have a story, you have like a great story, you have a great hook, and then you lead into that episode. And then here's Jeff's, you know, seven step framework for X. And what's amazing is, like, that content is already there. No one is going to respond to that email and be like, lame. I already listened to this podcast episode. There's just so much overlap. It's almost like with LinkedIn, right? If I have a. I have 170,000 followers on LinkedIn, I write a LinkedIn post, less than 5% of my audience ever sees what I write. And so it's the same thing. We're like, I could take that post. If I have a post that performs well, I take it, I save it, and I post it again, maybe with a little bit of a different hook in like three to six months. And so we can do some really cool stuff with repurposing even now, we're launching a new thing here, this marketing accelerator. And we're doing this in this fall after our event, we're doing this B2B marketing roast. And we've crowdsourced like a hundred speakers. You say yes to all of them, but we've crowds, like people have raised their hand to say, I want to participate in your content. And so I think the role of you being head of content here is not necessarily original content creator. It's more like managing editor, marketer, head of this program that we're running. And then, like, over time, there's going to be contractors and freelancers and agencies and guest posts. And I think that's what's cool about this content job at this type of business.

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Yeah, and that's a really good point. And it's two things you said that I want to touch on. One is just a little personal. It's so funny. When I was a kid, I, like, always dreamed I was like, what is my, like, ideal job? And for some reason, I was always like, I want to be, like, a magazine editor or, like, editor in chief or something like that. And that's very similar to what we're doing now. Right? Like, you're working with the experts.

Oh, yeah. Editor in chief is a good way to frame that, too.

Yeah, yeah. You're curating, really, the insights, the experts. It doesn't need to be me. Like, I am not the fashion expert if we're going to get all, like, devil rose, Prada on it. But, like, we're finding our. Our marketing designers. But the other thing I think is really interesting in that we fall into as marketers a lot is being afraid to repeat ourselves when it's probably the most important thing we can do. And it feels really boring. And I ran into this when I was working with Mel because a lot of the content, 5% of my audience is probably going to see this at a given time. It's okay to, like, reshare and repeat yourself. And my partner Mandy there, at the time we called it, because she would get really bored. Mel would. She was like, ugh. We talked about this topic last week. I'm like, yeah, but people want to hear more about it. And we called it same song syndrome. You get a musician that's like, playing the same set every week. And that's definitely something I've fallen into as, like, a new marketer. Is, like, feeling like I always need to go out and be impressive and make all these new things and have this new hot angle. And it's. It's a lot of work and it's really taxing. And it's like, I'm not saying, you know, phone it in and just, like, repost things, but finding new ways to say the same thing, I think is a big part of the job.

And you gotta play the hits. Like, if you know something works, you gotta go back to that. So, okay, why don't you ask me the number one bullet on your list?

Oh, yeah. I wanted to ask you this because you have, in a very short time, basically not even a year yet, right. Gone from solo Dave doing this maybe with some freelancers, to Dave and friend Dave and Dan, and then oh, we're not friends. I know.

We're colleagues.

Dave, Dan and Matt. And then now all of a sudden we were this team of five. And I remember on my and Anna's first day you said basically like, we're a whole new company from this day forward. So how has that been for you moving through in a very short time period? Like you to just you and someone else to you and three people to now like a whole ass company.

H A C. No, an H A W A W A wac. A whole ass company. Yeah, like that. There's this guy we used to work with at Drift and his name was Sean Lane and for some reason one of the sales guys nicknamed him Sean Ass Lane so everybody called him Sal. Like that literally became like the CEO of the company said, where's Sal? Sean ass Lane. Whole ass company. That's their title for this. Take this. How did we become a whole ass company?

All right, I'm writing that down. Inside exit 5, whole ass company.

Okay. There's a bunch of things inside Exit 5. How we created a whole ass company. Okay. So there's a couple things to say. First of all, feels amazing. It feels so good because I've been a little bit busier with non work stuff than normal this week between children and we're moving houses.

Oh, I didn't know that. That's exciting.

Yeah. Surprise. I'll show you details later. And the weather was nice and so I got a little golf. But basically I have so much to catch up on. Today I opened my slack and like the business is happening without me. That is the ultimate dream, that is the ultimate goal. And number one was to get me out of the day to day machine. And so like the golden handcuffs of the solo business was the business went as I went. And so if I wasn't working that day, the business was not growing that day. Now I have taken resources, which is money, traded that for hiring people. We're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more than we spent last year on Exit 5, but the business is on pace to more than double this year. And that was exactly what I wanted. And so basically I wanted to take home the amount of money from exit 5, but do it with a real team. Because now I feel like we have a real company and it's a real asset and it's a real business. And so that part has been amazing. For so long I was on social media being like solopreneurship is the way. This is the only way I can work. And it's just not True. And so a couple things that I think of is, number one, like I mentioned, the business can run without me. Number two, it's actually given me so much more energy than I ever expected. Back to the example of, like, Dan, like nets now multiplied times five. I love what my role has become now, which is like, we have grown ups working here. We have mature individuals who are smart and perfectly capable. You and I have had plenty of conversations now, like, I might micromanage, like a detail. You had some shit going on last week and I was like, do your thing. And you're like, seriously? And I'm like, yes, you're here because we trust you completely. And so I think you build trust with the team that way. But having four or five other people work on the business is so fun to see other people working on this and to build chemistry as a team. And I used to go through this narrative like, oh, we're not saving the world. We're just doing B2B marketing. But we're building each other's careers, we're helping each other. We're building careers. We are doing meaningful work. People care about what their work is. You go to an event or something, or you meet a new neighbor. What's the second question out of their mouth? They're like, oh, Danielle. And so what do you do for work? Like, we put a lot of stock in what we do as individuals at work. And so having us work on something together, having that shared victory, like, just how in, like our general channel and Slack, we have like these little jokes about, like, that's where all the new trials pop in. And just seeing Matt be like, yesterday, 7, 8, 9, how you'll send a screenshot of something cool that happened and like, do like, hashtag funnel or something. Like, just, we're building a chemistry and a culture. And I think that is something that I underrated. I thought of it was just going to be much more transactional. Like, I'm just going to hire a team and. But it's super fun building relationships and doing this together as a team. That part has been really, really fun. I also think we're five times better because we have five brains working on this business besides mine. And there's other ideas, there's other opinions. Me booking speakers for an event and having you be like, hey, man, a lot of dudes here. Oh, shit. Okay. Yeah, you're right. Okay. That was a natural bias of mine. Like, okay, cool. All right. Boom. That's better. Now, hey, here's this design for this shirt. Actually, no Anna had a different idea, and we're going to do it this way. Getting four or five different opinions and brains in has been awesome. And just feels really good to have built something myself, not on my own, but we started this company out of thin air, and now we're real. Like, we pay people salaries. We do good work together. That part is really fun. And I also think we're. We're not working in an office. We have a light. Like, I want you to have a life, and I'm big on family and, like, life outside of work and just taking care of yourself and everything. And I think I want to set an example for everybody inside the company to be able to do that. And it seems like we're on that pace, and so it's been awesome. It's definitely changed a lot of my beliefs about work and about working solo. And I was like, I'm never going to work on a team again. And now I'm like, no, I can't. I can only see doing it this way.

So one thing I want to chat about a little bit more because I feel like it's been an interesting transition. You were saying you were all on LinkedIn, like, Hey, I am all in on this solopreneurship, never building a team again. But you were also getting really burnt out, like you said. And having a team has kind of helped. I mean, from my perspective, has helped you kind of get out of that burnout and have a new energy for the business.

Yeah, absolutely, it has. That's a good observation, because I think it's allowed me to re. I wouldn't say, like, rebrand myself, but it's given me, like, a different set of skills to work on, right? Solo business, focus on B2B marketing. I gotta have the hot takes. I gotta be Mel Robbins, right? Like, I gotta be, like, the solo brand person doing the shtick, right? Hiring people was to get my face, like, out of the spotlight a little bit. Now I host the podcast, I do webinars, but my role has changed, Right. That has now meant, like, it's not just about me. I can shift my role to do, like, let's think about strategy. Where is Exit 5 going? Oh, yeah. I have some time and space to think about those things, and I think people need that stuff. I think people that work with you, they need a vision. And I think I've articulated some of that stuff to you, and I don't think it's perfect, but I think you can have a. Maybe this company might go in three or four different directions. But I think you can start to paint a little bit of picture in your mind about, like, which, okay, I can see where this could go from here. I don't see how we're just going to do this forever. And so it's given me time to, like, write more, think more. I love the problem solving. I'll get a message from Dan and it's like, hey, this sponsor that we're working with, like, they're pissed about this thing or that we want to fix this thing. I love I get to do those challenges more. And so I truly feel like I'm operating a company as opposed to just, like, sharing my hot takes about why B2B marketing is broken. And so I think it's allowed me to change my identity. Right. And kind of similar, like, think about your career story, right? You were working in finance, and you've reinvented yourself. You're building your head of content muscle. Right now. I think I'm in a different phase of life where it's allowed me to build some new muscles. And then I also think I just was being lazy. Like, I was. It was very easy to just do enough to keep things going. And I do think that not to, like, blow myself up, but I do think my. My lazy for is a lot for most people, But I feel like I was not pushing myself. I was just kind of, like, showing up, doing a couple hours of work on Exit 5 with no vision, with no long term. Now I think having a team of five, like, forces me to do that. It forces me to have to, like, use some muscles and don't let those things atrophy. And I love the creativity and trying to figure things out. So ask me a year from now. I'm sure things are going to go wrong at some point. I do kind of wake up sometimes and I'm like, this is going too good.

Oh, my God. Dan and I had that during the interview process because it happened so fast. I submitted my application and literally, like, five minutes later, Dan was, like, connecting with me on LinkedIn. And I was just like, hey, you want to chat today? And he was like, your application was so good. When can we talk? And I was like, I'm free this afternoon.

I don't know if this has ever come up with you, so, sure, let's share it with thousands of people on a podcast. Our biggest red flag with you was, is this happening too fast?

Yeah.

Why are we all in on this right now? It was like after a day and a half, and Dan was like, we're ready. I'm ready to make an offer. I'm like, yeah, I feel good about it too. Hold on, hold on. Like, you know, you have to put some guardrails on yourself sometimes. Like, are we doing this to, like, are we really doing, like, should we really do this? Right? Like, we just bought this house and we had the same thing. Do we really want to do this? Like, this is happening really fast. That was the biggest red flag I know.

And, like, Dan and I literally had, I think, made the offer, like, had a conversation, and I was just almost like, artificially stopping myself because I was like, oh, like, I'm ready to sign this. I'm ready. I'm excited. And then we both were like, are we having, like, a little bit of too good to be true moment? But, like, we were just very, like, honest about it, and he was like, okay, why don't we, like, take a day? And then we did. I already, like, know the decision because I trust my gut and it worked out, but it was really funny. And in that, it.

It.

It clicked so fast.

Do you think it takes a certain level of maturity, comfort, speaking up, ability to own your shit in this type of business? Like, where it's this. We don't have an office. It's run by a person who hates lots of meetings and doesn't want to.

Do lots of process.

And so, like, I'm not gonna be on every meeting every day. We're not gonna meet all the time. We're not gonna do Rah Rah Team Friday. Maybe at some point we'll have to. Right. Would this not work out for everybody? Is there a certain slice of person who maybe this is the right fit for? For.

Yeah, I think any job is like that, right? A certain person who's going to fit in there. And I've definitely been in roles that, like, I didn't fit in. And it wasn't like the. The fault of really me or the company. It was just like. It just wasn't. Truly wasn't a fit. And that sounds like cliche, and I think that that's a similar thing here. But when you feel that it's such a fit, that's pretty rare. I think the reasons it fits for me is I like smaller teams because I like knowing the people I work with really well. I also, like, I don't like, like, bullshit and bureaucracy and all this hierarchy, and, like, I can't say something to this person, and I have to, like, play Game of Thrones a little bit. Like, I've just. I Hate that which we don't have that.

I've always had a hard time that even as like a 20. I would worked at a 1500 person company when I was 23 and I got in a lot of trouble one time with my boss because I just could not believe how much nonsense was happening in this meeting that I should not have spoke. I was supposed to be in the meeting just to like take notes and watch. I just couldn't believe it. I was like, wait, this is really how these people work. Like, this is so insane. There's so much gossip and politics and toxic. If you and me just were in this room and for five minutes, we could figure out this problem. And I think that was something that I look back on now and I'm like, I don't ever want to work that way. If I can dictate how we work, speak up, get shit done. Like if you see some trash on the ground, you live here, pick it up, put it in the trash.

And also there's enough guardrails that it's not chaos, but also enough flexibility that it's. You get to be a little bit of like an entrepreneur within exit 5 to, hey, I have this idea. Or like, hey, I'm going to try this with the newsletter this week and it's not so regimented that it's like, okay, well this needs 8 levels of approval before we let ourselves test it. And by the time you actually get it to publishing, it doesn't even resemble the thing you started with. So like the test has gone out the window in the first place. Some people need that structure and that's totally okay. Like I said, I worked in finance the first part of my career and I also, like, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and I don't regret that experience at all. And there was definitely a point where I was like, I wish I went to school for something different or I wish I was doing this. But like, I actually think that experience was really good for me. I wouldn't change it. Looking back, I liked it. I made a decent amount of money which let me save and also let me be able to like take that leap when I needed to. But it was also just not the environment for me. Because if you want to talk about hierarchy, like work at a like 10,000 person financial, heavily regulated industry.

Woof.

All right, we're going to wrap up. Danielle, thanks for hanging out. We'll talk more, but we'll have Danielle back on. We'll do more of these, but go to LinkedIn right now. Go find Danielle. Danielle Mesler on LinkedIn. Connect with her if you haven't already. We gotta get her more connections. So go send her a connection. Be like, man, I heard you on the Exit 5 podcast with Dave. You're so great. And now I read your newsletter. Now I heard your voice. So we got this. And Danielle has the keys to the podcast kingdom. So let's get this episode out sooner than later. It's fresh. We need this out now. We need this before your wedding. We need the before drive and then we will see that you can actually still snag a ticket to Drive. You can go to exit5.comdrive. There's like maybe five or ten tickets still available if you want to join us. We have drive September 11th and 12th right here in Burlington, Vermont. I'll be there. Danielle's driving up from Boston with her label maker in the back seat. Love that. So go find her on LinkedIn. Connect with her, send her a message, and that will make my day as a. That's the only call to action from this episode. Take back what I said about drive. Don't go to Drive. Don't go to the website. Go to LinkedIn and connect with Danielle and send her a message there. And thank you for the continued support and listenership here on the Exit 5 podcast. Exit Foreign.

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