Overcoming Fear and Finding Your Strategic Focus The Fastest Path to Mastery and Growth

All right, so this should be live now. I always have those moments where when I pull it up, and sometimes it'll kill the connection for a second. But we are. I just did. We're in there. So we are live. Back again with James Robert ley, CEO at Digital Growth Institute. James Robert, how are you doing, man?

Morning. I am tremendous. What about you, Gray?

I'm also tremendous. Hey, so how exactly do you phrase it? I was telling somebody about it after the last time we talked. I said, oh, you know, I was just talking. I was talking to Dimmer, to my business partner, Andrew, and I said, dude, James Robert, I got to take this from him every single time I talked to him. And I couldn't remember exactly what you said, but it's always like, tell me one thing good or tell me something. What do you. Is there a consistent way you phrase it?

Yeah, just tell me something that you're feeling good, that you're positive about. I call it we go big or we go home, and big is we begin in gratitude. So every day, every meeting, I do this with my clients. And it really sets a positive tone for the conversation, and it literally just lifts the room, even if it's virtual, like you and I are having. So just tell me something good. Tell me something positive, whether it be personal or professional.

Right. I love that. My good thing today, I got up at 5am I'm coaching high school baseball. So, yeah, this wasn't sometimes. Often that's by choice. But this morning was not by choice. We run our off season pitching and catching. We do that in the mornings before school. So for me, it's not a big deal. I'm a morning person. But we get some of these high schoolers out of bed and get them there by 6am so they can throw before school. Everyone loves it. At the end of the day, they're like, I hear that every year there will be a couple kids who are like, coach, this was incredible. I hated coming in. And then by the end of the spring, I loved getting a workout in before school. And then I just felt like my whole day went better, but it went really well. This morning. I had very good attendance. This is their first week back with school, so that was great. And what I was saying to Andrew was, normally, I'm by nature a pretty optimistic person. When I look at situations and stuff, I feel like I'm not. I'm more of a real, I think, realist. Most pessimists think that they're just realists, but I see a lot of the downsides and trying to navigate through that. But as far as personal interactions, normally pretty positive. But I think maybe why it stood out was last time. I don't even remember why. Maybe it was just a busy. But I was like, I had to think for a second. I was like, why is it taking me a while to think of what's good? So anyways, I love that question. I love that's like, that's part of what I, you know, how we all have certain things that we associate with other people. That's part of my association with you. Now. Is this what's good with you?

Good with me? My. You talk about kids getting back to school. My kids went back to school today and we're coming off of a long holiday, Christmas and New Year's. And I want to say out of the last I actually went back to the office on Monday. So was it two days ago. And over the entire period I was offline, disconnected, I think except for four days. I just kind of popped on, checked email, but there's nothing. And that was a big thing for me because I was like, my kids were off, they had an extended vacation. I think we counted the days. It was like 18 days including weekends. So it's almost, almost three weeks. And we had a lot of good time together. But now it's what's that song? It's beginning to look like Christmas. Whenever they talk about the mom and dad are ready for the kids to go back to school. You know, we have four. And while we had a lot of fun with them, I'm excited just to get back onto a quote unquote normal routine and get back into the swing of things. I'm really excited about 2019 for myself, for my family, for my clients. I think it's just going to be a good year. It's going to be bigger and better than last year for sure.

Well, let's as we kind of kick into gear here, let's give everyone. Because obviously I've got this background, but most people do not. So why don't you introduce one what you're up to with Digital Growth Institute. You can give a little bit of the history, but kind of just where things are today, what you focus on all that good stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm the CEO of the Digital Growth Institute and we are on a mission to simplify digital marketing strategies for banks and credit unions, really with an end goal to help them maximize their loan growth, maximize their and now with the market, really their deposit growth as rates deploy. Deposit rates are going up and we've been doing this now I think we're starting our 2002, 2019. This is our 17th year that we've been in business and it is not the same business today as it was 17 years ago when I quit my punk rock band and waiting tables to start this company to impressed this girl who later became my wife. And now we have four kids together. We've seen the ups, we've seen the downs, and it's been a roller coaster ride. Obviously more ups than downs. But I think It's. I'm finally 17 years into this, just settling down, kind of getting into the groove of things not relaxing, but being a lot more intentional with my thinking, with the choices that I make. Being less reactionary, being more proactive and really looking at this is a lot bigger than just me Digital growth Institute. It's impacting lives for the banks and the credit unions that we serve. Because money is stressful. People are looking for someone to guide them beyond that financial stress to a bigger and better future. The banking space is changing with all of this digital disruption. And I think there's still a place for banks and credit unions to get people to better future. People are looking for hope, someone that they can trust. And so we're helping these banks, these credit unions with strategies to transform their marketing and do exactly that.

That's awesome. You were on. And coming up right after you, we've got Pete Caputa from Databox.

Oh, nice.

Who's following you? And you were recently talking with Pete on the Databox, the ground up podcast.

Yep.

So it was you, Joe, Jerome and Pete and you guys dug into in that conversation. You spent a decent amount of time talking about the specific niche that you're in or vertical, whatever phrase you like to use to describe that. How do you do you care about the semantics?

Niche, niche, vertical, focus, target market. I think it's important to have one though. For sure.

Yeah. So that has come up a lot in our agency accelerator program. Helping agencies are holding goal is can we take agencies from a state of chaos to a state of confidence. A lot of that revolves around mastery. When you were talking about not relaxing now, but you kind of understand more of what's going on. Those are commonly. That type of mindset is commonly associated with mastery. We start to understand this is my sweet spot and our goals increase substantially, but our stress level diminishes because we know like I'm in my sweet spot now. I'm doing what I'm put here to do.

Yeah.

And that. But selecting a Focus is the. There's so many fears that hold us back. What if I picked the wrong one? What if that whole industry that I picked. Thanks. What if nobody wants what I have? What if I can't deliver for them? Talk real quickly here through. It doesn't have to be real quick. I don't mean to rush you through that, but I know that you already. We have a whole podcast we can point people to as well. Kind of highlights, how did you get there? Or how do you. When you're talking to people who struggle with that, what advice do you have for them?

I mean, you know, when I first got started back in 2002, it was a web design shop and we were doing like flash websites with skip intro pages. That's how long. I mean, it's crazy to think back of the evolution of the Internet. We move past that, the business begins to grow. Clients start to ask, hey, can you do this? Hey, can you do that? And being really young and naive, and I hate to use the word, but it is what it is, greedy. I mean, it was really financially driven. You don't say no, you say yes. And so you start taking on all of this work that really is outside of your area of focus or expertise. So you have to bring in these people to do a job, fill a seat, and they get thrown into the mix. There's no training, there's no onboarding for them. And so, you know, for me personally, 10 years into it was 2012, I had this cluster of a business. And from the outside, I mean, we were doing very, very well, like, you know, getting all the awards, the press, the accolades. But inside, personally, I was a mess. My marriage was a wreck. I mean, you talk about Pete. I talked about how I was really on the verge of my wife leaving me. We had a conversation. She said, it's either the business or it's the family. We had one child at the time. And I'm like, you step back and you realize what's important. And I think as an entrepreneur, we have such a unique opportunity to build our life around work, not our work, around our life. And so I made some tough decisions at the time. And, you know, you start to learn a lot about yourself. And I think that's really a key, is self awareness. The more you can become self aware, the more that you can kind of dig into your past and what. Why you are the way you are, why you think the way you think. One of the biggest insights for me was taking an assessment called Colby, which measures four different parts of the brain, it's the conative part of the brain and it's really looking at these four different elements of like, how fast are you to start something, how likely are you to follow through? What about working with your hands? And what I found in this assessment is I'm a nine quick start and a two follow through. And it's pretty common trait for an entrepreneur. So what I would find is I'd frustrate people on my team, I'd be starting all of this stuff and then leaving them. And I have an assistant. And when I hired, I was like, look, your job is to make sure that I don't get myself in trouble, slow me down a little bit. And so when focusing on a niche, it was okay, what are we good at? Looking at the past, doing business with the past, where do I personally find the greatest value? And then saying this is what we're going to focus on. And it does, it takes courage. Because at that time you're like, I'm giving up all of this other opportunity. It's not opportunity, it's really frustration at that point.

Yeah, it's so hard to see making that decision. And I know and you know, because we both lived through it with the non focused. The fear is, I don't know yet what I'm absolutely the best at. I don't know yet who I'd love to serve. There's all the unknowns. Anytime we make a commitment, there's unknowns. Anytime you choose to, you know, to commit to one sport, what if there's a competing sport or anything else.

I think that one of the best exercises that I ever did when it came to this, and I literally had this conversation with my wife last night, is what's the worst that could happen?

Fear setting is what Tim Ferriss calls us.

Fear setting. Okay. I call it like worst case scenario. Best case scenario. Worst case scenario. If we focused and we went down this path and it just didn't work out, I could go drive trucks or go wait tables. There's always something you can fall back back on. And that's where you almost have to have some type of detachment that your, your personal value is not wrapped up in what you're doing. It, it complements it. But okay, worst case scenario, that's it. It's like if you write that down and that's your worst case, okay, well what are the odds of that happening now? On the flip side, the alternative best case scenario, what does that future look like? And when we did this exercise, the best case, far outweighed the worst case. And so you have to weigh and measure the two side by side. And it made that decision to focus, to not only focus on the industry which you already had expertise at the time, but it was really kind of saying goodbye and saying no to all these other services. You know, we were a full service firm at the time, doing everything, not for everyone, but it was what's the worst that could happen? And when you, when you make peace with that, it makes it so much easier just to go forward.

Right. That's awesome. I want to ask you one more question before we move into some of the key takeaways that you had from last year in business here as we're moving into the new year and that this is a question from Dan, which is what exactly do you do for your clients? Marketing wise or business wise? And this kind of tees you up for the way that your business has pivoted. But tell us a little bit about the service offering and how you've kind of reframed from being like we're full services to we solve this specific pain for you. You've really transitioned from being kind of thinking about the services that you offer to, to like we solve these problems really effectively for this specific type of people.

So if you look at our operating model, there's really four different areas. There's digital marketing training that informs digital marketing strategy, the thinking that informs the doing, the implementation that then we pause to review and reflect on progress. So analytics, where our area of focus continues to shift and even hone in more, it is around the training and it is around the strategy piece of our clients business. And so with our clients, they typically have a marketing team who does not have the level of digital marketing expertise required to generate more leads, more loans, more deposits, more business if you will. And so it's no harm, no foul. Digital has changed so fast that we come in and we assess the situation, we provide them with recommendations and a path forward the strategy and then we support them through the implementation of that strategy in one of three ways really the optimal, the ideal way is to have their team educate their team, empower their team, elevate their team to implement that strategy with ongoing guidance, coaching, advisory. If they have a capability or capacity gap, we can then pull external resources from people that we've worked with, either with a team that we have here or with other third party providers that, that we know will do a good job and we oversight that or we take everything on internally for the short term and we're very, very clear about that. We'll set the foundation and then transfer that over to them, almost like a jump start so that they're not losing time and momentum. So implementing the strategy on their behalf with the knowledge that we're going to move this back over and empower their team. And it's really about what I call three or four different areas. It's education through training and strategy, empowerment through the strategy, elevating them through the implementation and then really expanding the opportunity through the reflection and the review of the progress that they're making.

Right. That's awesome. We might circle back to the third party relationships that you have at some point because that's a really powerful concept that most agencies, really, most business types overlook completely is we understand that mastery comes from being focused. We're going to be much faster to master something if we focus on a smaller set of stuff to master. But we also understand that clients have real needs and so the temptation, because we don't have people we trust is I don't have a better solution, so I'll just take it on myself. Or we're scrambling for marginal dollars to be made on services that we really shouldn't be providing.

And I think that's kind of the crux of where I see things going. I might be jumping ahead. So feel free to pause me.

Yeah, let's go there now.

So you look at the training of the education, the strategy, the doing and the review and the reflection is four distinct elements of this model. It's the doing part that I see both agencies getting stuck in. All of the doing in the deliverables, that's what they sell. But that's the same exact thing that I see clients getting stuck in is the doing. And so where we're getting brought in, it's to help stop, pause, think, reflect, and then, and then this is where we can go next. And to me, that creates so much more value than the doing it for one reason and one reason only. It's commoditization. You know, we're continuously looking at different technology platforms and I don't care if you're in the web or video or SEO ads, ppc. Five years ago I would have said you're crazy. Web is always, you're always going to need someone to design and implement websites. Yes and no. We're seeing that changing continuously. The same thing with ads. It's where the value is created. It is really through the thinking of how to apply these insights. And I think for an agency in the future, it has to be insight driven. It has to be rooted in research, whether it's with your clients or with the market. And then give those insights away. And then when a client comes to you and says, I have a problem, it looks like you can help me. That's where you apply the insights to their unique situation.

You nailed it. We have it so backwards. So many of us do. You get. What do you get valued for? You get valued for what you get paid for. And if you sell off of like you give away all the strategy and you charge for the deliverables, like you've got it completely wrong. And I understand it's hard. We need to flip our mindset.

Yep. I think we have to elevate the level and the role of marketing. Whether you're at an agency or you're on the client side, marketing has been devalued for far too long. I hear my clients complain all the time that they're viewed as kids that literally play with paint and crayons. They're a cost center. CEOs we know don't trust marketing and makes perfect sense because up to this point of digital, it was very hard to quantify activity and result. But now we can tie activity to result. And so everything that we do has to be tied back to some level of growth beyond vanity metrics.

Yeah, for sure. So let's look at. You just finished off a good year. You're gearing up for a bigger year. What are the. What are a couple of the big takeaways and actually I'm going to pause here because you sent me. I sent you like, hey, here's a couple things that were things thinking about framework wise for these conversations that we're having. And you sent me back this email that's like 1400 pages long worth of here's all the things that you learned. And I loved it. I was like, we are not going to get through all this stuff. And this is amazing.

It's a stream of consciousness.

Do you mind? I'm scrolling through it right now to see if there's anything that you might mind. But I'm going to just ask you go for it. If we take a screenshot of that and put it in the group.

No, go for it.

Yeah. That's awesome. This is really good. And we'll do that after because I want people to hear you explain it first. Obviously that's your stream of consciousness. I like when you. I do this all the time. You put something down and if someone was to look at it without any context, I really have no clue what Gray's talking about. So to hear it explain is more helpful. But walk us through. Let's start with that, with a couple of your main takeaways from last year. What did you learn in 2018?

We've already kind of hit on a few of them. And just to quickly recap, I mean, a lot of it is like, we have the ability to create our own future. And it's like, either we're going to be intentional about that and plan our day, plan our week, plan our month, plan our business, or our day, our week, our month. Our business is going to own us. I read a really good book. I've actually sent it out to some of my clients. So one of the things I've got away from is sending out, like, Christmas gifts and Christmas cards to clients. It gets lost in the shuffle. What I wait for is, after the new year is I send my clients one of my favorite books from the previous year, saying, hey, Happy New Year. Looking forward to making 2019 bigger and better together. By the way, this is one of my favorite reads of 2018. Hope it finds and creates a lot of value for it like it did for me. And one of those books was about the idea that we can control our environment. We must control our environment, even all the way down to, like, the use of our cell phone. So there's been a lot of intentionality around the environment, around, like, even mindset, because I really believe that when it comes to our future growth, mindset's about 80% of it. It's not about talent. It's not about capability. It's about, like, do we see something bigger for ourselves? Do we see something bigger for our clients? And so that's where I feel like we, as agency owners, consultants, advisors, however you want to frame us, we have to take care of our mental health. We have to take care of our physical health. Those two are very, very connected. And that is really what is going to propel us forward, I think, even beyond kind of just the doing of what we're doing, because I think you mentioned it, what we do is hard. And some of the things that you're encouraging your clients to do, it's scary. So take care of your physical health. Take care of your mental health.

It is, I think anything you had. One of the things that you put down there was you said something about simplify before you scale.

Yes. If you look at the business and this is something like, it's almost like a yearly exercise, because I feel like, think, and it's about intentionality. Naturally, we Add complexity to our lives. The faster we live, the more kids we have, the more employees that we bring on, the more service offerings that we bring into our business. But it's that 80, 20 rule. Like, how much are these new things really creating value for our organizations? And if it's not, let's take them out. Because why would we want to multiply or scale our business, grow our business with all of this complexity? It's just going to multiply the problems and the frustrations. So that's where I think, you know, every year now, since I've kind of gone through this transition, was it five, six years ago? I come back and I look what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. And so work on the business, not in the business. And you hear that a lot, but you have to make that a habit.

It's hard to do. We are so good as entrepreneurs at adding stuff on, and we are horrible at saying no or removing things after the fact. And usually it's not a conscious decision of, I'm intentionally going to drop this. Yes, it's a good thing, but I'm going to drop it because there's a better thing I'm going to do. It's usually just a. It just gets dropped. It never really gets. We never. We fail to make the decision to say, I'm gonna. We just avoid it.

And that requires. It's really courage. Courage to say no, Courage to walk away. You talked about, as entrepreneurs, it's really about being mindful. You know, there's that old saying, your thoughts become your beliefs. Your beliefs become the words that you speak, the words that you speak become your actions. But I think where I add an extra step in there, your actions become your habits, and your habits become your predictable future. And the only way that you're going to break free from that cycle is to just stop review and think about where you've been, where you're at today, and where you want to go next. And that is the essence, in my opinion. I know everyone has a different definition of strategy, but that's the essence of strategy. Strategy is really about figuring out what we're not going to do, as opposed to, this is what we are going to do. Because that's the harder decision. It's what we're not going to do.

That's a great point. Switching kind of just from. You talked about that whole transition from our thoughts into actions and habits and future performance. So switching from what you learned last year to the changes that you actually implemented last year, what were some of the most successful changes you made.

So the first one that I shared with you might actually be a little bit morbid, but it's kind of become my new motto in life. And I've even talked to my wife about getting a tattoo of it. But it's an old Latin phrase. It's really from the Stoics. It's memento mori. And essentially that means remember your death. And I think that puts so much of what we're doing into perspective. We're all going to die. And it's like, if you kind of keep that at the front of your mind, I think it forces you to make better decisions, whether that be personal or whether that be professional. And it comes down to what value are we creating for the people around us? And that, first and foremost, starts with yourself, then your team, family, then that expands into your clients, and then ultimately the greater world. So that, to me, was kind of a key insight or a key win of just once again figuring out direction, rudder. So memento mori, another one is, and this was a bit tougher, but it was having the courage to let go and part ways with a key employee, someone that I had been working with for about 10 years. And it was good. It was a good departure, but it was something that probably needed to happen. I hate to say it a couple years before, and that's where I think complacency sets in. You have a problem, you don't want to address that problem because you're scared of stuff. But a lot of it was disagreeing with future growth plans, with where things were going to go. And once we broke free from that, that really, in my opinion, freed up a lot of just mental capacity because it was. There's two types of people in life. You got your batteries included people. Those are the people that I want to be around. Because you give each other energy to transfer of energy. Then you get your batteries not included people. And so I think looking at just personality types and who you're associating with is really, really critical. I think really kind of the third one is just hiring an assistant. It's something that I had been putting off for a long time. My assistant has freed up so much space, so much time on all the little, like, administrative, tactical stuff that I hate. I abhor. I let things fall through the cracks. But she loves, like, that's what gives her purpose. And a lot of that has been really kind of, I would say, two things. Giving up my calendar. So, you know, a lot of, like, client stuff, prospect stuff now goes through her so she's taking care of that travel, etc. But then also, this was the biggest one, is giving up my email. And so what I did is I still have access to my email, but it's a very limited set. So I think my email volume went down about 90%, 95%. So she's filtering through all of the other stuff. I don't even look at her folder because we have Gmail for business. So everything gets filtered into her folder. And then if there's something that she feels is applicable to me, she just drags into my folder. My concern was I was going to start peeking into these other folders. Yeah, that never happened. So I'd say those are kind of the biggest things. It was just looking for efficiencies, looking for others to help take stuff off my plate.

Yeah, that's awesome. I have looked at multiple times the idea of bringing someone in to take over email. It's on my list for this year to do. And I'm intimidated by how do I set up. I get all these different things. How do I set this up? And it's just the same thing as picking a vertical. It's like, it's just fear of what if they write back into different tone? Who cares? Like, everyone who I care about is going to get that and, you know, might say something wrong and they'll have the grace to do it. It's all going to be fine. But until you go there, do it.

I mean, it's, you know, having been where you've been, and if you're. If you're watching this and you're kind of considering an assistant, it's been the biggest, probably one of the biggest investments that I've made within the last 12 months, just for me personally, because it's just freed up my. It comes back to headspace.

Hey, can I chase it? I want to. I want to chase a thread here, just real quickly and encourage people in this way. You are one of the people in the agency space who I think of, when I think of people who've invested in themselves, like, not just time and, you know, that's like, common. We all read books, we all consume podcasts or whatever, but has put down like a good chunk of money to invest in yourself. I know you've gone through Dan Sullivan's strategic coach. We've talked about some of the other stuff. Give us just kind of a quick. Like, how? Well, I guess, first of all, at what point did you make the decision that you're the kind of person. Because so Much Tony Robbins talks about this like that our identity is really what drives like who we tell. The story that we tell ourselves about ourselves is what drives a lot of our action. We can certainly use actions to try and shape our idea. All this stuff is manipulatable. That's definitely not the right word that I'm looking for. Able to be manipulated. When did you decide you're the type of person who spends money on yourself, on self improvement?

I think there's that saying the desire to change has to be greater than the desire to remain the same. And when you're confronted with your wife leaving with your, you know, at the time, your baby, that was the time that I started to bring in some outside help and perspective, and that was back in 2012. So I made a commitment from that point forward that every year I would be working with someone in some shape, form or capacity. I think a lot of times we get lost in our own heads and our own thoughts. You know, you got your water bottle, I see we're inside the bottle. And if we had a label on this, we could not see the label from the outside. So that's where the coach, the advisor, the guide, if you will, comes into play. But it's through those experiences of working with someone that has actually helped me to become a better coach, guide, advisor for my clients. And so I reap the benefits twofold. It helps me as an individual, as an entrepreneur, as a leader, but then I'm also able to transfer some of those insights to my clients to help them help their teams. And so this is this constant giving of knowledge and we all win, all ships rise. So if it's hard to do it by yourself, and this is what I've told so many people starting businesses that I talked to over the last years. Get a coach, get an advisor, get a guide, get some type of accountability. Early on I should have done it probably because I was 10 years into the business at that point. I mean, I probably should have been doing that maybe year three or four or five when things really started to grow. So that's my recommendation on it. It's invaluable because yeah, I've spent, I mean, probably close to six figures now on like personal development training and programs, but I've. I've gotten at least 10 times out of it. So it's an investment. It's either put money in the stock market or invest in myself. And that's how I look at it, right? I'm come invest in myself because I know that I'm Gonna get so much more out of it. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. And that's a challenge to like. My personality type is very diy. I want to figure it out, I want to do it my way. And that's a significant mindset shift, especially in 20. That was a big part for me of 2018. And we spent way more money on getting outside help than we've ever spent before for stuff that. There's a difference between spending on stuff that you know that you can't do yourself and spending on stuff that you think you probably could figure out. And you just want a better way and you want the outside perspective and you want the wisdom of someone who's been there before.

So I've been there and I used to be like that. But my thinking today is if I can shortcut it and what I could learn on my own or finally come to the conclusion, the realization, I don't know, let's say it takes me 12, 24 months. Well, well, if I can take that 12, 24 months and compress it into three months, I'm so much further ahead. And so it's something. There's value there because I read a lot, I intake a lot of information, but it's how much of that is relevant. And that's where working with an outside coach, advisor, a guide, they shortcut a lot of this.

Right? Right. Yeah, that's definitely. There's a big difference between even the word shortcut. I get nervous every time I use that, talking with someone. I'm not encouraging you to be the shortcuts type of person who's just looking for the tactics to get there. I'm looking for you to be the shortcut type of person in like, I want to learn this and develop the principles. I don't want the low level tactics. I want to get the principles right as quickly as possible. And I'm going to invest in the people who are going to help me get those building blocks in the right place and shortcut that journey.

Yeah, it's a great point. It's like it's not shortcutting in and it's going to, it's going to end up being a cost. It's. I use this analogy, I could build a fence, right? I could go to Home Depot, I could go get all the supplies, the materials. I could watch some YouTube videos. My fence is not gonna look good. Or I could bring someone who's built fences thousands of times and they're gonna knock it out, they're gonna shortcut it compared to me. But it's gonna be 10 times better than what I could ever do, because they've been there, they've done that, they have that expertise, and. And I probably could learn a lot more from them by watching than I could even by watching a YouTube video, for sure.

All right, so you've given me all these takeaways, things to learn, all the ways that you've been developing and having success. I'm going to flip this now and go to the other side, which is either we win or we learn, is a common phrase in the Hickory baseball program, that a loss is only a loss if we don't take anything out of it. That's for the future. What are some of the things that you've tried and failed at?

A lot of this was kind of the early story that I told about starting this business, getting greedy, growth for growth sakes. I think that is really a big thing that I saw from my past, and a lot of it is rooted just kind of in my upbringing. I came from a conservative family. It's not that we were poor per se, but I just remember as a kid asking my parents for something, we can't afford it. We can't afford it. We can't afford it. We can't afford it. It's like you kind of get this ingrained in your head, and it's like, well, when you start to see have some moderate success and then it becomes this, that's what fuels you. Well, that's going to ultimately lead to a downfall. And I think it's growth for growth sake. It's wrong. This idea of grind and hustle stuff that we see from Gary Vee, great guy, love him to death. And I see some of his message starting to change as well, because I think people have taken it out of context. Look at this. We're in this for the long haul. Like, what if death was the only exit out of your agency? How would you operate then? What decisions would you make then? Like, you can never sell. You can never retire. I was listening to a podcast with Blairens and David Baker the other day. That's kind of what they were talking through. I'm like, that's a great perspective. And that's kind of the way that I look at this now. Is I in this for the long haul? Because this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. And coming back to the idea of just finances and money and, like, money's not a bad thing. I am a capitalist. I am an entrepreneur for that reason. But let's redefine the relationship with money. And now it's not what drives me. Money is just nothing more than the result that comes out of what I do. There's that phrase, you know, if you want to be a millionaire, figure out a way to help a million people. And so that, once again, it gives you time to stop, pause, and think. It's like, how can I help a million people building websites? Or how can I help a million people running PPC ads or social ads? So it's going to require, like, that's the doing. Take time to stop and think about, like, the value creation for that for your clients. So I think those are. Those are some areas I think, you know, looking as well. It's like, what did you learn from failure? I love your perspective. The Hickory program, it's either we win or we learn. I think failure, it's something that we need to work through as a society. I look at failure as the fertile soil for future growth. Failure is not a bad thing. But now with kids in elementary, it's almost like you develop a fear of failure in elementary because before elementary, they haven't been conditioned. There's no context of failure. They're learning. Literally, they're learning. They build something that falls over. Great. Build it again. No harm, no foul. One of the exercises I love doing with my clients around this subject is it's that marshmallow spaghetti stick challenge. I don't know if you've ever done that yourself or seen that performed. It's the kindergartners who have done this challenge that outperform the MBAs and the executives because there's no fear of failing. And so I think that's a big thing, looking back over the past years, that before I would not make decisions because I was scared of failing. I was scared to change. But it's like when you, when you start to lean into that fear, that that's what makes it actually kind of makes it fun because it's like, once again, coming back full circle, what's the worst that could happen?

Right. I'm going to ask you a question that Miriam threw out here. This is going back to your comment about sending, you know, kind of giving up on normal Christmas gifts and sending out a book to people that was impactful for you from the prior year. Was it the same book that you shared this year? Did you customize it to people? And what was the book?

So I customize a couple of different books. So some of them are like more of in the banking space. But the one that I think that I Probably sent the most was a book called Willpower Doesn't Work. And it really gets into. Let me see. I'm actually going to try to Google this real fast.

Yeah.

Benjamin Hardy, I mean, he's the number one author on Medium and a lot of his stuff is rooted in, like, human behavior. And so I think, like, that's what I see a lot with agencies. And I've been there. I'll never forget I had one advisor, basically. He's like, your creative's not all that good. You're really not all that good. And I'm like, yeah, you're actually right. And it's like people aren't necessarily buying the creative, they're buying more of that, once again, that result. But where are the results driven? And he's like, you have no science in your agency. You have no sociology, no psychology, no behavioral economics. And so that really put me on a path forward six years ago to start diving into the sciences. And so that's one of the reasons I look at some of the stuff from like, the works of Benjamin Hardy. Willpower doesn't work. Great book, great read. Highly, highly recommend it.

Yeah. Okay. I'm not going to keep you here for much longer, but I want to ask.

I'm having fun, man. Time's flown by.

It always does.

Yeah.

I want to ask you this because you're pretty tuned in. I mean, you're running your own with Digital Growth Institute, but you're pretty tuned into the agency space. What, what are kind of the fundamental changes or what are the. What are a couple of the big things that you see evolving in the landscape as we look forward 2019 and beyond?

I don't want to be the AI fear monger or the, or the digital technology fear monger, but I've seen it slowly creep in. It's like the doing is just going to continue to go away. Technology is going to be able to do it faster, cheaper, easier. I mean, I forget what the platform is, but it's basically to where you can take a blog post and create a short video, pull out the content, the AI pulls out the content, matches the content up to some video, pictures behind, and you have some social content. I mean, how long would that take for a person to do when it takes literally just seconds for the technology to do so? Really being aware of what and how we're positioning ourselves in the marketplace I think is critical. What are the changes that are happening? It's like in five years, how will my role change? And I think it's going to Change drastically. And therefore it's like if you look, you have to continue to push yourself as an individual, your team, your organization, upstream to higher levels of value creation. The thinking being the strategy. But strategy, in my opinion, that still has the potential to be commoditized. And what I mean by that is I'm starting to see people, you know, they put their strategic process and I use it in quotes because it's a copy and paste template on every single agency website. And it's like, what is it, the five or the four Ds? Define, diagnose, develop, deploy, do it again. Okay, great. But what does that mean to you? Like how do you execute against that? Take some time really thinking through that process, that methodology, because that is where value creation comes not only for your clients, but also for yourself. Because it's about systemization, repeatable process, repeatable processes lead to repeatable pattern identification, which then informs strategy. That's where really the high level margins are. And so if you can separate yourself from the doing and the thinking, that's one area. But once again, being aware that strategy has the potential to become commoditized as well. So strategy becomes commoditized, we have to go up higher. And that's where the training is and the education. But you can't do training education if you don't have a strategy model in place. Because otherwise you're once again commoditized with the training. Think like Udemy, right? I mean, you can go and watch YouTube videos and learn yourself. I think the differentiation becomes accountability, applying insights to a person's unique situation, oversight, coaching and guidance. Because I mean, the online course completion rates are abysmal. And if an agency creates an online course and puts it out there and hopes people to take the course, I'm not exactly sold on that. But if you have the course and you tie that course back with some type of coaching, consulting, guidance, etc. There's a lot more value to be created there. So I think strategy is somewhere to look at in the future if you're not looking at it now. But don't get so stuck in the strategy. Keep your eyes out even further on the horizon, which is kind of where we're playing. It's in that training, that education space. Because that is where, once again, even more value can be created at a much higher elevation for clients.

Right. That's awesome, man. We could keep going forever, but let's wrap up here. We'll save the rest for parts two, three, four and five down the road. Talk to people Though about the best places to stay tuned with what you're doing. Obviously, we've got Digital Growth Institute. You've got an awesome URL there. I'll let you give that. And then anywhere else you'd want to point people.

Yeah. So digitalgrowth.com, some changes will be coming end of month. Some stuff that I've shared with you behind the scenes scenes. It gets back to exactly what I've talked about, about process, about systemization. Really. We're publishing like, everything. We're going to be publishing the entire process that we're taking our clients through. And that's a big fear that I had to get over. It's like, well, what if someone takes this? Great. Take it. Apply it to your client set. We're taking 17, 18 years of knowledge and, and packaging it up. And so if it helps you, wonderful. So we have digitalgrowth.com, probably LinkedIn is where I'm most active. Best thing that I recommend people do is just Google me. James Robert Ley and you'll Find me on LinkedIn. Twitter, I'm not nearly as active on, But I'd say LinkedIn is really the place to find me.

That's awesome. This has been so good. I appreciate you coming on and sharing. Thank you.

I'm gonna go. I'm gonna. I'm just gonna go ahead and say this to you and. Because this is where I'm gonna start making stuff public. So, you know, optimized product offering coming out. 2019, big thing for me. That's the year I write the book. So Digital growth blueprint or banking on digital growth. That's gonna, that's. That's the title set right there. I've got the outline. My wife has been bugging me to do this, so now I've just put this out into the universe and now I have to. I got people to hold me accountable. Exactly right, man.

Initial reaction. We'll have to hear from people. And I'm sure you're doing all your own surveying. I love banking on digital growth. That one stuck out to me more.

But that's actually part of a much bigger book series. So there's a lot of ways that we can take that.

Okay.

And I've been working with an advisor on where we can go from here.

Of course you're working with an advisor. That's awesome. Well, good. Well, thank you for coming on. This has been really fun.

Hey, man. Awesome. Any. Any time that I can just help and give back, reach out to me. Because it's like, if I can help someone shortcut where they're at to where they want to go. I'm happy to share the good and the bad, the ugly. Because we're all in this. All in this journey together.

James Robert Lay, ladies and gentlemen.

Thanks. Thanks, man. Cheers.