A Reed in the Wind: Data, Decisions, and Leadership Clarity with Scott Schnaars

You're listening to One Sharp Sword, cutting through to what matters most with Outfluencer, Dr. Wayne Pernell.

Welcome to One Sharp Sword, cutting through to what matters most. I'm Dr. P, Dr. Wayne Pernell, your host, guide, and coach on this journey. My guest today is Scott Schnarz, a seasoned SaaS revenue leader who spent over two decades scaling companies from zero to $100 million, closing seven and eight-figure deals along the way. After years of watching marketing teams struggle to understand what's driving results, he co-founded Yirla to bring clarity to one of the most frustrating problems in growth, where your ad dollars are really working. Scott blends deep technical roots with frontline sales experience, giving him a rare perspective that we're going to count on to dive into both data and decision-making. Today, he's building a company designed to help leaders move faster and spend smarter. Scott Schnarz, thank you and welcome to One Sharp Sword.

Love it, it's great to be here, Wayne. Thank you so much for having me, this is awesome.

This is really great. So I have questions for you about, uh, not only what you're doing— YRLA is spelled Y-I-R-L-A, just to make sure that people have that at the beginning so that when they hear it they're not thinking Yerla, but Y-I-R-L-A.

Y-O-U-R-L-A, some crazy derivative thereof. Yeah, Y-I-R-L-A.

Great. So, so before you got there, like, you were doing a bunch of different things in tech. You've seen companies go from zero to $100 million. Um, over the years, something gave you— something bugged you enough where you were like, you know what, marketing decisions are being made the absolute wrong way. What did you see and what, like, talk a little bit about what saw you that got you so focused in a very particular direction?

You know, it's like a lot of things, Wayne, the evolution of a company oftentimes, you know, what you start off with isn't what you end up with. And we're very early in this journey. And I suspect that, and I'll tell a little bit about like what we started with, but the original thesis that we had coming from a sales background, I always felt that ABM and marketing professionals, like for them to be able to get an understanding of what their competitors are doing is a really difficult thing to do. You know, and having to stay on top of your competitors, it's really important. And it's really hard to do because your competitors are gonna keep everything pretty close at hand. And what the original thesis on Urala was that we would provide customer, or sorry, competitive intelligence for ABM marketers, account-based marketing.

Yeah, I was just gonna pause you and say ABM is account-based marketing. So good.

And do that. I'll try when I throw out these TLAs, 3-letter acronyms, I'll try to say like what they are.

You're the only other person I know who says TLA for a 3-letter acronym. That's so funny. I used to show up at organizations and I go, we're getting rid of all the TLAs. And people are like, what's a TLA? And I'm like, TLAs are a 3-letter acronym and we hate them. And it's like, we use a TLA for 3-letter acronym. Awesome.

Anyway, ABM. My mother worked in the government for a long time. So it must have occurred in the government. Lots of TLAs. Every time we'd have dinner, it'd be like, oh, this department and that department. All right.

So account-based marketing, ABM.

Yeah. So we were looking at account-based marketing and we, our thesis was let's give a competitive lens to people who are doing ABM for these large organizations. And we built some basic functionality there and we took that out to the market and we showed a bunch of people. And they all went, wow, this is really cool, it's interesting. And when we said, okay, well, would you pay for it? And they said, yes, we would. We said, okay, well, that's a good sign. They said, how much would you pay for it? And they said, ah, maybe $50 to $100 a month. And we went, uh, okay, like that's not a super sexy business. Like it wasn't the business that we wanted to build, Wayne. We wanted to build like a real enterprise company. Yeah. So when somebody says, oh, it's $50 a month or something like that, it kind of deflates the kind of let some air out of the tires or wind out of the sails, whatever analogy you want to use. When we started talking—

the other thing is it takes multiple, multiple accounts like that at $50 a month to make any money.

Oh man. And I'm old. I don't have the patience or the bandwidth or the time left on the planet to be able to go make some money on a bunch of $50 accounts. Yeah. The, the other thing that they said was like, you know, while it's interesting, we probably wouldn't use it much more than once a month. So like, it's interesting, but it wasn't addictive. And the thing that my partner and I, my co-founder and I were trying to figure out, okay, is what is the thing that you do that would make you log into this on a daily or multi-time-a-day basis? And we talked to a lot of demand gen marketers and what we found was that the person who actually does the work, like that guy who's doing the creative, like writing ad copy and posting that in LinkedIn, that guy's spending between 15 and 20 hours a week on reporting. And it drives them bonkers because they're spending half of their time doing reporting, which takes away from why they got into marketing in the first place. And that is to do cool creative projects and run cool creative campaigns that drive revenue. So we listened to that and we said, okay, like that's a really interesting idea. And the second piece of it was, well, it would be really good if we had something that would actually tell us what's working and what's not, right? We see this campaign that's running and it's getting, you know, significantly less conversion than this other campaign that we're running. Well, why is that? So we took all of that feedback and we came back and now we have a platform that does really 3 things. One, it does that competitive intelligence. That ABM marketers need, but we'll only use once every 2 weeks, once a month, whatever.

What is it? As you, you're gonna walk through 3 things and I wanna know with each step, what does it actually do? So it, yeah, in step 1, you've got this lump of data and what is it sorting through? Like, because our audience, our audience ranges from retail to healthcare to finance to logistics, and they're at all levels. Many of them are at the senior executive level. And so, as you're describing this, I would love for you to go, you know what, so here's the chunk of data most people are familiar with needing to do sort of some sort. What is it you're looking for? And in what you found, how might this actually pertain to other people that aren't in your world?

Yeah, so the competitive intelligence, what we've built there is we've gone and got access to the ad libraries from LinkedIn, Google, and Meta. So you can type in, oh, my competitor is X company, and we will show you every ad that that company is running. So for example, let's just say I'll use my old company, Sovos. Let's say Thomson Reuters was a customer of Yurla's and they wanted to see what Sovos was doing or vice versa. They can subscribe to our platform or our product. They can type in the name of their competitor and we will give them, here is the high-level overview of the messaging that they're using. Here is every piece of creative that they're running right now across all 3 of those different channels. Here are the types of companies and the people that they're targeting. And here is how much interaction those people have with those ads. So you can see the effectiveness of that messaging as well. So that's thing number 1 is that competitive intelligence. We're still running with that and it's still, again, people like it. They, it's just not addictive. The second piece is the reports, the reporting that we do for a demand gen marketer, what they need to do on a day-to-day basis is go to LinkedIn, download a big report, fudge with it a little bit in order to get it in the format that their company needs. Then they go to Google and they download a big report and then they fudge with that and then they go to Meta and they download the report and they fudge with that and all of that like manipulation and moving around just to be able to go like, oh, okay, like this LinkedIn campaign drove this type of impressions or this type of conversion, this type of download. Oh, this Google campaign did this, this, and this. In order to get that, and we present that data in a single snapshot. We just, you know, there's a button that says, you know, you can click on any of the channels, you can click on a compare, and you can see how each of the channels is performing against one over the other. So that's kind of the second thing. And what we're seeing is that that's saving our marketing partners anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week. It's a huge savings, huge time savings for them. Again, letting them go back and do what it is that they signed up to be a marketer in the first place for.

Yeah, when you're saving, when you're saving 25 to 50% of a full-time person, that's pretty good. Just to define it, DemandGen is about the top end of a funnel. What gets people into a funnel, right?

Yeah, and not even necessarily just the top end these days. Right now, it's, if you think about the campaigns that you see when you're going through the buying process, yeah, you absolutely have that top end of the, the top of funnel campaign. But if you're buying enterprise software, that might take 90 days to 9 months to 12 months or longer in some cases. Well, marketers need to stay in touch and they need to be visible to the people along that journey there. So they come in and it's like, okay, I'm Scott and I've downloaded this white paper from say Workday. Okay, well, am I a Workday customer? Maybe, maybe I'm just trying to learn something, but somebody at Workday knows that in order to make a decision on Workday, there's gonna be 25+ people involved. But now I have this signal that shows Okay, somebody at this company is interested in Workday. Let's go see if the other 24 people are interested in it. Once you have that, then as they're going through that journey, then they start evaluating other pieces of technology. How do we start to shape their evaluation process and how do we start to influence that? That's that middle of the funnel. And then when they get down to the decision process, if you've ever looked at like one of the buying curves there, like you want to get, you've made your decision, what you're looking for now is validation. That my decision is a good one. So that bottom of the funnel is really kind of going in and reiterating the fact that, yeah, you're making a great decision, keep going down this path, here's some case studies, here's other people, I'm gonna connect you to people who have used this in the past and so on in order to be able to get the maximum kind of experience for that customer.

That's great. That's great.

So, so that's two. So that's kind of a hot Yeah, that's, that's two. And then the third piece is really looking at the campaigns that people are running and being able to ascertain what's working and what's not. So for example, like a really easy example is if you are advertising on both Google and LinkedIn, they are both going to tell you like, oh, you know, our ads are performing fantastically and don't change anything. And in fact, like you should take all of your money out of this one and put it into our bucket. And the other ones are saying the exact same thing. And what we're trying to do at Yurla is come in and really tell an unbiased story to say, hey, look, like you should move 10% of your budget from Google over to LinkedIn, or, oh, you should take this campaign and you should trim these two offerings out of them because they're not getting the, the type of performance that you want. So we're giving really clear guidelines and recommendations on what an advertiser could do in order to improve their return on ad spend.

I love that. You are, uh, I, I don't know if you've said it on your LinkedIn profile or if you said it to me, but one of the things you said was marketers don't lack data, they lack clarity. And you know, that's a big thing that you are, that you're giving them, which is, which is pretty darn great.

Yeah, I think that there, there's so much data in the world right now. Um, you know, we, we sort of suffer from this analysis paralysis a little bit and kind of go, I, I don't really know what to do. One of the, the examples that we talk about a lot on our website and when I give other talks like this, um, you know, if you come out of your weekly staff meeting and you're like, yeah, you know what, maybe we should just let that thing run. That's not a positive experience. Like, nobody should be happy about that. Like, there should be some real clear decisions that get made.

Like, let's just see what happens.

Yeah, let's let it run another week or so. It's only money. Let's let it go.

That's good.

Somebody will click on it.

It's like a— it's like a dentist saying, it's just a little crack. It's like, yeah, it doesn't get better on its own if you just let it go.

Yeah. By the way, like, last time I talked to you, I was at the dentist because I let that little crack kind of go. And now here we are a year later, I'm still getting my tooth worked on.

Crazy.

Yeah, it's a nightmare.

Great. So along these lines, like, what's harder when you work with leaders? Like, this is my area, so I'm sort of, I'm curious about it because you're, you're capturing all this great data and going, okay, this is what we're seeing and this is how you can use it. In my area, when I come in, I'm like, okay, leaders, you've got good information. But they don't always act. So from your perspective, what's harder? You know, what happens when a— I don't know if it's what's harder, but really what happens when a leader knows something and doesn't act or doesn't know something and either acts in the wrong direction or doesn't know that they should act?

Well, that, that second example that you just gave, they, they don't know something and they've acted anyway. Yeah, that's, that's the worst of all the scenarios. That's, that's like, you know, hey, why don't I go to the grocery store and buy dinner, but I don't know how many people am I serving, you know, what do they want to eat, what's my budget for it. They're just like, just go to the store, just ready, fire, come back with— yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nice.

Um, I think that secondly, then you have a lot of people who have the data, but they— and we've all fallen into this trap, and I'm one of those people, Wayne, that is— I have very strong beliefs that are loosely held. And I think that you have a lot, and I think that it's one of my superpowers is I'm very good at changing my mind because there's very few things that I care about that much to be adamant about something. But I do think that there's a lot of—

Non-attachment is a great leadership skill. And it's—

yeah, thank you.

It is not, uh, like you're like, yeah, it's a superpower. I want to underscore that because, you know, along the way, one of the things I like to do on the podcast is to point out, um, what are the key leadership skills, what are the decision-making processes that happen along the way, because nothing's a straight line to success ever. Um, you know, right? And then success is redefined as you go. So, um, being non-attached is like— there's a, there's like a Zen saying about your mind like a mountain. It can be immovable. It's there, it's present, but it's not swayed by— here's, here's this stuff, aren't you afraid of it? It's like solid, right?

And this is where having data becomes a really valuable thing to our customers is that, you know, we're giving them data. Let's, I'll just keep using that Google LinkedIn analogy. If we show you data that says you should migrate 10% of your ad spend from Google over to LinkedIn, we're pretty confident that that's, if you do that, you're going to see a higher increase in conversions or downloads or impressions or whatever the metric that you're trying to drive for that particular campaign is. We're very confident in that, but a lot of people will look at that and go, oh, you know what, I've spent my whole life like with a 50/50 spend, or I spent my whole life like leaning in hard on Google and it's always worked. And it's hard to get people to deviate from something that's worked for a long time and now they have to shift that. And one of the things that we talk about a lot is the HIPPO, which is another one of my favorite acronyms, the Highest Paid Person's Opinion. And in a lot of cases like that comes into play with, you know, even when somebody has the data, they— that hippo in the room is saying like, nope, I like Google and we're going to stick with Google. And everybody else in the room is going like, the hell, man. Like, I'm showing you all the data that says if we do this, we're going to get more leads, we're going to get more conversions, we're going to get more what have you. That to me is like a really dangerous position when you have the data, people see the data and you're still making a decision to do something that is not necessarily in the best interest. And once in a while, we've always done it this way, right?

Why do we have to change? We've always done it this way. And just to be fair, by the way, um, you could, you, you could recommend that people go from LinkedIn to Google and not the other way. Like, I'm just saying, 100%. Okay, I'm just saying, it's like, you're not, you're not here saying I advocate for people to leave Google. You're saying For example, right? I'm just making it clear.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it could be, hey, like, and it doesn't even necessarily need to be, oh, take money from this bucket and put it into this bucket. One of the case studies we have, which is one of my favorites, is we have a customer that was running a campaign that gave away a, in order to take a meeting, I think it was, you get a $100 gift card to Lululemon, $100 gift card to Apple, or $100 gift card to Amazon. And the Lululemon gift card outperformed Amazon and Apple 4 to 1. And we saw that immediately. We went like, you should just turn off Apple and Amazon. Nobody wants that. Nobody's clicking on it. Nobody wants it. Go all in on Lululemon. And they were able to do that and it drove a ton more leads for them. My theory on it, and I have no data to support this, but I'm gonna pontificate a bit, was that you can't buy anything at Apple for $100. So nobody wants a $100 gift card there and everybody already has everything lined up through Amazon and putting a gift card in Amazon is kind of a pain in the ass. So nobody wanted to sign up for that one either. So they just went like, Lululemon, I can go in, I can get a nice shirt, I can maybe get a little pouch, pair of socks, and I'm good to go.

But that's interesting.

That's my thesis.

I would offer something to that thesis, which is it hits a very specific demographic. Because personally, I've never shopped at Lululemon. I walked—

oh, it's the best, Wayne. You should. Their, their pants are amazing. Their golf shirts are amazing. Their socks, their underwear, everything they make for men is a 10 out of 10. It's a little, it's a little overpriced.

We— well, you know, keep talking. Maybe I'll reach out to them to sponsor One Sharp Sword.

Well, there you go. Free ABC Pants for life or something. I don't have any sponsors here yet, so hey, uh, let's go Lululemon, let's go, come on.

That's awesome. So, uh, it's, it's interesting because you're in the space of I see things, right? It's like you, you get the information, you make the recommendations. How do people trust a system with their budget decisions? Like, where do you feel the most resistance when you're working with your clients? And how— like, they've hired you because they want to save money. My guess is— and I even get this in coaching, um, which, which in my world makes some sense because people do push back when their subconscious says, I don't want to change. And maybe it's the same for you where it's like, I don't want to change. I know what— I know what I like, and I'm unfamiliar with that. Because I'm unfamiliar with it, it makes it unsafe. And that may be the psychological underpinning of, of what's happening. I just wonder, where do you get the most resistance and how does it show up? And, and the flip side of that, yeah, I mean, the more positive side is how do you build the trust that it takes.

I feel like that's actually a lot easier is building the trust than getting people to, you know, if you go back to, um, oh, I just brain farted on his name, Crossing the Chasm. He was an investor in one of my companies. Uh, go ahead. Not Gordon Moore, but, uh, um, great book, Crossing the Chasm, where he talks about, um, early stage technology and how do you—

Gordon Moore.

Jeffrey Moore, thank you. Not Gordon Moore, Jeffrey Moore. The— what he talks about is that crossing the chasm. And I think that there's still— there's a lot of distrust still for AI. Part of the reason we haven't pushed the button on or put a button into Urala that says, okay, this is your recommendation, let's try it. We haven't put that button in. Like, that's easy to do and to make it go do the purchase and reallocate budgets and all of that. That's a fairly easy thing to do, but it is a massive trust hurdle that we have to get over. And I don't think that people are— you know, if you think about like, who are the people who are using cloud cowork right now? It's predominantly engineers who are doing it for really technical tasks. You've got some marketers now who are using it for— and by the way, this might be a completely biased answer just based on the news sources that I'm looking at and people that I talk to as well. So I'm Again, strong belief, loosely held. The—

For a data guy, that's pretty good.

But I think like that's mostly who is using cloud co-work to go out and actually do real work for them. And I don't think like, you know, it was interesting to see the Oracle announcement. Was it yesterday or the day before where they laid off, you know, 30,000 people? That was a big hit. But is Oracle really going to start running AI to run every aspect of their business? Probably not going to happen for a couple of years. And I think that there's, there's still a sense of, do I trust this to actually go out and do great work for me because I pushed a button and I can just kind of let it go? So you've got a lot of people who are experimenting with little things and leaving the big things still to humans. And, and that will change over time as the little things become more consistent and get better and deliver better results. Yeah, but for now, like, even when I have, you know, coworker go out and listen to every blog post or go find the transcripts to every blog post about X and write me 2 blog posts about Y, like, it still just kind of comes out kind of sucky and it's getting better, but it's like you spend a lot more time trying to clean up the work. And one of our concerns with Urala is We're going to make a recommendation. But like, you know, like they say in Peloton, it's, you know, we make recommendations and you make decisions, right? I don't want to have the person— I don't want to be the decision maker sitting on some— I'm going to make $100,000 ad spend and we screw it all up. And then I'm on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

Right, right. So interesting, because we are at a juncture of where humans use data and where humans use AI to get data, and sometimes, more often than not now, use AI to sort through the data. So your You are on the way to like filtering all that and making it all work really well. There's still a human component to it.

Yes.

If, if Yirla works the way you want it to work, I want you to project out 5 years from now. How does it change the way companies make decisions?

I think that we are making the decisions around creative and we're making the decisions around spend based on the optimal scenario for that campaign. So for example, I could see a world where somebody says, you know, we want a campaign that just drives awareness. Great. We've got a creative engine that drives, that builds all the very customized, personalized creative for Wayne, for Scott, for Joe, for Betty, for Holly, for Julie, whoever it might be. Our engine builds that personalized content and then sends it out to the right channels at the right time for those people to see. And, and often, and possibly like there's no human in the loop. And we, you know, our engine is good enough at that point, 5 years from now, our engine's good enough at that point to be able to make those types of decisions to drive the most optimal impact for each channel and to constantly be changing, right? Because right now somebody goes, oh, you know what, like let's put $25,000 into LinkedIn for this. We'll put $25,000 into Google. And then they look at it 2 weeks later and go, ah, you know what, like let's adjust a little bit here. And then they look at it 2 weeks again and then it's kind of run its course by that point. So I would really love to get us to a point where we basically become your like end-to-end marketing, your point for marketing.

That's amazing. That's because it's sort of like money management right now, right? And so it was all done by let me calculate. We don't back in the old days, right, when there were newspapers, you'd like open the newspaper, follow your top stocks that you were following, you'd look at your graph paper and you'd, you know, make little notes. And then it turned into I'm keeping track of it on a computer, and now it's like the computer is keeping track of all of it for me. Yeah, I'm still making the decisions. And, you know, as of tomorrow, it's like computer's tracking it and making decisions. I check in to make sure that we're on track and actually making money. Same thing for do. It sounds like with how many eyeballs on an ad, how many conversions of the eyeballs on the ad, um, can we get a half a point more doing something different? And based on ad spend, you're— even that half point can be significant dollars.

It's big. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's really big. Um, and you know, you're seeing it right now with, with financial services. I remember when I first started making some money, like I had a Morgan Stanley guy, and then he became a Merrill Lynch guy. And then I was like, ah, you know what, I'll just do it myself. And now you can do it with Wealthfront and you can just say, hey, here's what my goals are. And it just kind of goes and runs. And I guess in a lot of ways that's sort of what the S&P has been forever, is I take all my money and I just put it in the S&P. Somebody else is there balancing everything out to make sure that it always goes up.

It's exactly good. Not lately, but I know, well, everything is up and down and everything has a cycle and a season. So here we are, you know.

Yeah.

All right, so what, uh, you know, I'm kind of watching our time together and, and we had a great talk prior to this and, and that meant that our time on recording got a little shorter. What, uh What were you hoping I'd cover that we didn't cover? Like, what do you want to— what, what main point or points would you like to make sure our audience knows?

I think the one thing that, um, I like this question. I think the one thing is, you know, we talked a little bit about leadership and how, um, strong beliefs loosely held is like a, a really strong superpower. Are there other elements of leadership that you think would be interesting to your audience that we should hit on?

I think, you know, part of what you do is you simplify decision-making, right? You do essentially, you do stochastic probability. So you take a look at all the possible areas. And you go, based on what we know, this area, if we aim this way, we are very likely to see success by heading in this direction. And your job is to make that really fast. My job is to allow a leader to communicate that we don't have all the information. Based on the information we have, this is a powerful direction to head. And a leader could say, when I find information that differs, I'm willing to pivot like that. And I expect you, dear team, to come with me. So I don't know if that's like an answer to the question that I asked you that you bounced back to me, or if it's just kind of an interesting place to play in, because that, that for me is my sandbox. I love that.

And to me, I think it's a great sandbox. And I think that people— I think society got a really healthy dose of that during COVID and couldn't handle it. And that was like, that was like a big surprise to me, right? And I was lucky enough to meet Anthony Fauci back in 2003 or '04 and spend a little bit of time with him and chatted about like what he got to go through during COVID He's like, the thing that was crazy is the data was changing on an almost daily basis. You have all these scientists from all over the world and they're trying to figure out what's going on with this disease. It was the first time we'd ever seen an asymptomatic contagious disease in the history of humankind. And that's why it was like, oh, turn off your air conditioning vents and don't leave your groceries outside for 3 days. And we were coming up with all these crazy theories because like we saw the signs and then every day the signs changed, the data we were getting changed and it broke people's brains. People were like, oh, these guys don't know anything. What? Yesterday you told me I shouldn't go outside and now you can tell me I can be with my friends. And like, it, it, it really, the challenge with that as a leader is it does hurt your credibility if you're not good at explaining what the data is. And we live in this like bite-size informational world where, hey, you know what, we're gonna change, we're gonna move money from this campaign to this campaign. Well, why? Oh, well, the data told me. Well, again, you probably have to put like a little bit more of a sales pitch into it than just this is what the data told me. Otherwise, like people's brains break. And, you know, again, we probably saw the, the biggest social impact of that during COVID when all the scientists, the CDC was getting different, you know, updated data on a daily basis, which changed the recommendations. Again on a weekly basis, and people were like, these people don't know what the hell they're talking about. I'm just gonna go back to hanging out with my friends and going to bars and not wearing a mask and any of that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, it's— that's interesting because without wrangling any of that, trust is blown.

Oh yeah, 100%, right?

Rules are meant to be rules, which are meant to be containers, and when you change the rules. It's like, this is a rule and it's life or death, and it's like, just kidding, this is a rule, it's life or death. Oh, we got new information, what we thought was wrong. And it makes it seem like any new information is going to make you wrong instead of this new information makes us right. And that's where you live right now, which is in the— we have information, we've aggregated all of this information The good news is it's not life or death. It is about your business, and we can make you a ton of money if we divert by going here. Let's go.

Correct.

Yeah. So I mean, that's— there's a, there's a level of authority. I mean, with— unfortunately, um, you know, I, I keep I keep out of politics on, on the podcast mostly, and I would just say that, that, um, Fauci— love him, hate him— he was in a very difficult position. Oh yeah, terrible spot, because he was getting information and his ability to filter and, uh, and disperse or dispense that information was limited based on how much airtime he would get, right? That is under the control of each CEO in their company. And I think that's really so important that CEOs use that— any leader at any level— that they use, um, the ability to communicate, over-communicate. Here's what we know, here's what we're doing. These are our expectations. If we don't meet these expectations, we'll modify them. We'll modify our behaviors and our actions and potentially seek more input until we get information that drives us in the direction that we said we wanted to go.

Right.

I love that. For you, I love that because that's your world around marketing. That's your world around ad spend. And that's how you get from zero to hundreds of millions. Very quickly. Let's hope so. Yeah, no, it's really, it's great. I mean, you've guided companies in that way. I think it's great.

It's fun. We're having a good time.

That's awesome.

So if people— like we said at the beginning, like, that's the most important part, right? Like, life is too short not to have fun. And, you know, let's, you know, me and my co-founder, we like each other a lot and You know, I think we both philosophically— I think that's another important point is like, if you're going to go into business with somebody, make sure you're philosophically aligned. Yes. Whether that's a co-founder or a customer. Right. Like, I went for years not buying M&M's because I worked with M&M's Mars at Yahoo! and they were such jerks at the time. And it wasn't even them. It was their agency. Their agency sucked so bad to work with that I was like, we're not buying M&M's in this house. We're not.

That was your own boycott, right?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Based on an ad agency. That's awesome.

Right.

But not even the agency.

Just the one person. Yeah.

That's hilarious.

That's awesome. Yeah. So I do think like it's, you know, you have to be strong but be able to change based on that data.

This is good. So, you know, in the martial arts, it's be like a reed in the wind. Right, so yeah, you are anchored and able to bend, which is really good. So, um, cool. If people want to find out—

I think that's the title of this episode, Reed in the Wind.

A Reed in the Wind. I like it. It could well be. Um, we have so named it. If people want to find you, Y-I-R-L-A.com, Yirla.com, right?

Yep, or LinkedIn is good for me.

Okay, let's spell your last name because this is so much fun.

Oh yeah, Schnars, like cars and guitars, but with two A's. S-C-H-N-A-A-R-S.

Right, it's— it— yes, I was gonna make a pirate joke or something, but it's two A's.

Arrgh! Yeah, no, I've heard that one.

So Scott Schnars, S-C-H-N-A-A-R-S. And, uh, he's probably the only Schnars on LinkedIn.

Oh, I think there's a couple of dozen of them, but it's a pretty uncommon name. Yeah, cool.

And, uh, yearla.com, Y-I-R-L-A.com. Good stuff, Scott. This is really fun. I, uh, you know, I talk to people, as I said, I talk to people in verticals from around the world in various verticals across industries, and to kind of dive in a little bit deeper into this. It's, I think it's probably the first time I've gone into, into how do you decision make, what goes into decision making around ad spend. And that's very niche. And it's also, as we've talked about, it's also very leadership-based. It's very, it's about how do you decide and it's about how much data is enough and it's about when you have this data, now what? Do you dare to act? Do you dare to— yeah, do you dare to trust the people bringing you the data? Which is great, right?

So, well, and that's— there's that old adage of, I know 50% of my ad spend works, I'm just not sure which 50% it is. And what we want to do is like help you understand what 50% actually works and how to allocate the other 50%. That's so great. That's—

that is a good rap line. A good end. We want to help you allocate. You know, that's good. Thank you, Scott.

Thanks for being here. This is terrific. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a blast. Thank you.

Yeah, you are welcome. So glad you were here. Scott Schnarz has been my guest. This is One Sharp Sword, cutting through to what matters most. I'm your host, Dr. P, Dr. Wayne Pernell, and we will see you again here next week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening to One Sharp Sword, cutting through to what matters most with Outfluencer Dr.

Wayne Pernell. For more information, please go to onesharpsword.com.