Dan Norris ON: Compound Marketing & Scaling Fast

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Enjoy the show.

I'm super excited, excited to welcome in today's guest. He is none other than CEO of Black Hops Brewing. He's a serial entrepreneur, he's an international.

Speaker and also here's the most amazing part.

He is a multiple times best selling author.

Right.

He's done so much.

Serial entrepreneur, runs the Black Hops Brewing company, international speaker also he's just released.

His sixth book, Compound Marketing.

So please welcome Dan Norris coming in from Australia.

Thank you so much for joining me, mate.

Thanks for having me.

Absolute pleasure. I mean, I've heard nothing but great things I've started over the last few months. I've just seen you everywhere, seen what you do. Your most recent book, Compound Marketing was brought to me actually from my coach who is over in Australia and she.

Was like, James, you got to check this guy out, you got to check.

Out the new book. So I'm just delighted that we get a chance to connect with you and understand what drives you and also learn about this new book. So I really do appreciate you making the time.

No worries. Who's your coach?

Kat Abiannock.

Oh yeah, Nice, cool. She's been really great.

She's been amazing. She's really amazing on the social media side of things, you know. So I've been getting coach with her on that side of things for quite a while now. So big ups to Kat. Thanks for connecting us.

Yeah, no worries.

So tell me this, like I want to talk about the book but I want to know what's the story? Like where did this serial entrepreneurial mindset come from? Was there something at childhood where you're like, you just started getting into this whole aspect of creating and selling?

Yeah, I was neglected as A child. And I just wanted.

So I. Yeah, no, yeah, I actually don't know. I don't really know where it came from. I think I was just bored working in jobs and I kind of tried like when I've only had a job for like four years out of university, but in the jobs I kind of just kept changing the job. And I was in, in an organization where like they just let me do whatever I wanted. So I would just pretty much like they employed me in hr and then I was like, actually I prefer, I would prefer to like do programming. And they were like, all right, well you can do that. And I just kind of just started doing it and then they let me do it. So I just kept changing my job and changing it and changing it until I realized like, I just actually just don't want to work for someone else. So I started thinking about what else I could do. Started reading books about starting businesses and then just quit. I got quit like I got a promotion and then we had like our Christmas party and then I quit like a week later when I was like 25, I think 26.

That's excellent. You've always had a hunger then to drive and succeed and grow.

Not always. Probably just towards the end of university I kind of got my shit together. But before then it was all bad.

I love it.

Hey, I can totally relate. I can absolutely 100% relate, man. I love it. And so you're running Black Hops Brewing, doing a fricking amazing job there. It's an amazing brand. And you're also an international speaker and you have pumped out books. And I don't mean like just a book that, you know, a few people have bought. These are best selling books on Amazon. So your most recent one is Compound Marketing. So please tell me a bit more about the book.

Well, yeah, I have written quite a few books. I think it's. These days it's kind of more of a hobby because like black ops has turned into like, that's like my job now. It's pretty much all I do, but outside of that, I've still kind of got this. I still think about shit. And I'm like, I might as well write it down. And then once I write it down, I'm like, okay, I could write a blog post, but then if I've got like 10 of them, that's like a quarter of a book. And then I'm like, well, if it's quarter of a book, I could probably just write a book and just do it as like a bit of a hobby. There was a while there where I was writing them and kind of I had a membership and I was kind of doing the whole online influencer thing and stuff, But I shut all that down when black ops kind of took off. I didn't really enjoy it, to be honest. I didn't really enjoy it as a job. I like it as a hobby.

Yeah. The latest book is like, I've written. All my books are basically about.

Online marketing, content marketing, and startups. And I kind of brought it all together with this one because.

I just figured, like, early on, I kind of had this approach to marketing, which was like, create shitloads of content, and that was it. And so I wrote books about that. And then.

Business stuff was like, create shitloads of businesses and then just fail a million times until one of them works. And so I wrote a book about that. But I kind of feel like I'm bringing it together now with a company that, you know, it's a bigger, more sustainable, more solid business than I've ever had. I've worked in it, you know, for a few years straight, and I feel like continuing to work in it. It's not something I kind of want to get rid of and start another one. And the marketing stuff has all come together because it's. It's not now. It's not, like, about creating lots of content. It's more about.

Really engaging with groups of people to make them care about the brand. And there is still a lot of content because we do a lot of social media. We do blog posts, we have a podcast. We do all that stuff. But I feel like it's no longer kind of throwing shit at the wall and hoping something will stick. It's more. More organized, more strategic. And not just content. It's also about really focusing on the brand, really telling your story or like, every time you release a product, telling a story about the product. So those. Those kind of elements were coming together. I was kind of writing some ideas down around content, storytelling, branding, and community and community. I mean, like your customers and community and fans, as opposed to, like, you know, serving the community. And they just. They're basically the four things I spend all my time on now, other than kind of staff stuff. But they're basically from a marketing and business point of view, the things I spend all of my time on. And we've been able to grow the business to way bigger than any business I've ever had. And we still don't have, like, really hard marketing people. Like, we've got people that help out with social media and stuff. But that kind of strategy of focusing on those things has helped us build this company without spending any money on advertising, without doing really.

That's mind blowing.

Well done.

And so for people that are watching this on replay, so if they're running a business, whether it's a small business, maybe, you know, working towards six figures or seven, or maybe they're pushing up into the big, going into the eights. So if marketing is chewing up a ton of their revenue, what you're saying is like, actually there is a formula. I've got four key pillars. If you can actually invest in these four key pillars, you can see some massive growth without paying top dollars to some marketing agency.

Yeah, I mean, I don't like the word form because I kind of feel like I'm going back to my online influencer ways by like giving people, you know, like a list of things they have to do and then saying, if you buy my book and join my membership, then everything will be fine. And I've gone so far the other direction from that. So, yeah, I don't like the idea of formula, but I do think there's lots of different ways to market a business. And.

You know, I've never been good at the paid advertising stuff. I've tried over the years of being an entrepreneur, I've tried so many different options of paid traffic, paid advertising, just like billboards, like, you know, paid banner ads on websites, all of that kind of stuff. I've never really understood it, I've never been good at it. And I've constantly been searching for another way to do it. And it kind of turns out that if you can get good at doing the other way, which is like the more organic kind of storytelling way, then you end up in a position where you've got a really, really strong advantage.

Because.

Like our. It's not just kind of saving money each month on marketing, it's more that you kind of build up a level of brand love that is really hard to replicate with paid advertising. Like our brand, I think is very strong. I think that's the bigger part of it. You know, like at the moment we, our business is quite healthy. If we wanted to spend 10 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand a month on marketing, we definitely could afford to do that or more, we could spend more. But the fact that we don't have to and the fact that we build up a level of kind of brand love that other people can't really get with paid ads, I think is a really enormous advantage. And like, the point I make in the book is it's not like it's not. It's moving away from this kind of transactional model where you're paying for something to get an immediate return as opposed to investing in something.

And getting payment over the long term. And that's why, that's why the word compound marketing. Because I was sort of starting to reflect on all the different things I do in a business for marketing. And I'm just. The whole time I've been thinking, okay, this is a long game. Like, it's going to be, you know, I'm not going to write one blog post and it's going to go viral. Like, I've written hundreds if probably thousands of blog posts. And you know, you're not going to start a Facebook group and have like immediately thousands of people in there super engaged and loving it. Like, that's not how it works. Like, I started my first group with 10 people when I did my first book and I built it up from there and it took a very long time to. For that to happen, but eventually it ends up paying back. And that, that kind of approach to marketing is not like, you hear people talk about that in business, the long game and everything, but you don't really hear talking about as a marketing strategy. And I did marketing at university and this never came up. Like, this was not. Marketing was always something that was like a transactional thing. And.

That'S not how I've ever thought about marketing. And now I think the timing is good because I've actually got some evidence that we've got a solid business that we've built. It's one of the fastest growing companies in Australia. I think we're doubling every year for five straight years. We've got like 50 staff now. It's 10 times the size of my last business. And we started that out of a garage and haven't spent money on marketing. And so there's, I've got some good kind of evidence that, you know, that approach can work.

That's amazing. And that goes for large corporations as well. This is not just say someone that's starting off that you're providing evidence that, hey, if you're running a massive international business, you can actually use these strategies too.

Yeah, there are some examples in the book that I talk about. There's definitely some companies that are doing this well, like big corporations. I don't know how many of them are doing it well, but they're definitely like the kind of the more modern startups. Like you look at Brands like Tesla, you know the, what Elon does, the way he approaches things, brands like Peloton. And I don't know that I, I haven't like sat there and done research on, on, you know, how much these companies are spending on advertising. I'm sure someone, someone at university can do that work. But I, I can see these companies like even if you just take kind of the Tesla thing.

Like they like I constantly see in Australia, I constantly see ads for car companies. Like I think car companies are basically holding up these media companies. They're just, and they're articles and ads. Every time you get on news.com there's like the best car has just been launched in Australia and it's just some shitty Toyota that they're paying all this money to advertise on. And like, like Tesla don't do any paid advertising at all. And that's the only car I want to buy. I don't want to buy any new Toyota suv. I want to buy a Tesla because I know the brand, I think the product's great and I love the story and all of that stuff. And I've been following them for a while and I'm on board. I'm part of that kind of community of people who want to be part of it. And that's so I think it's possible at any scale.

But I don't know if you're an old school corporation, if you go and shut down all your paid traffic and then just do this, I think that's probably not the best idea. But at least from my own personal experience, you know, I always did kind of think okay, it's fine. And that's often the argument you get with content marketing. It's sort of like, okay, it's fine to do, it's free as long as the founder's doing it and you're not paying for their time. But it's only going to get you so far. But you know, I just don't, I don't really believe that anymore. And I know from list with our company we've gotten this far without it and I feel like that's going to keep going as long as we do a good job at engaging the community and keeping the brand strong and telling the story and keeping up with the content and the kind of approach we take to things. And as long as that, you know, if everyone did this, it wouldn't be that interesting. And so for us it's kind of a good point of difference for us, but for someone else to go and shut down everything they're doing and double down on this. It's quite difficult. It takes a bit of a leap of faith.

And so for that reason, it ends up being, you know, it ends up being a good point of difference. It's really hard for all your competitors to kind of copy what you're doing. And even if they take a bit of inspiration from what you're doing, to me, it only kind of helps. To me, it only helps. And it's a really hard thing to replicate. It's hard. It's easy enough to replicate paid strategies, I think, but it's really hard to replicate, you know, like, you know, the love that people have for a brand or, you know, a genuine, unique story.

A group of people who are really passionate about the brand, like, that kind of stuff is really hard to replicate. And I think sometimes even the paid strategies actually do more harm than good. Like, I see, I see, you know, our competitors doing a lot of paid traffic for things, and then you see the results come out and we've done just as well, if not better, without that. So, like, what are people thinking? Like these, these companies are trying to buy people's love when you know there's other companies that are just having a crack, being genuine and getting that. Getting that love. So I think, I think some of the paid strategies can. Can kind of work against that 100%.

I totally resonate with what you're saying about Tesla and Apple. Kind of sticks out there for me a little bit as well, where they've got evangelists who love the product because of the story that it tells and how they connect themselves with that. So for a business, small, medium or large, the whole storytelling aspect, how should we present a story about our business or our brand so that it can connect with more people?

Yeah. So again, like I said before, you know, when the books I've read on storytelling were all sort of like, you know, this is the structure you need to follow, and if you follow this structure, your company will have a great story. And that's. I don't subscribe to that. Like, what I've tried to do in my book is say these are the different types of stories that you can tell, and if there is one that is a genuine story that fits into your business, then you should be learning about this and telling it because it's going to be beneficial. But if there's not, there's not. And, you know, I don't think, I don't think you should be making things up. And there's a lot there's a lot of that in our industry, where you've got, you know, products that are kind of themed after, like, fake explorers or convicts or some shit. And it's like, this is the beer they drunk. It's like, it's. That's actually not. It's just. You're just doing that for marketing. It's quite obvious and, yeah, kind of depressing, but. So I think. I think stories have to be genuine. That's. That's what I think. And if you're, like, with the companies I've started, my businesses have always had a genuine sort of founding story and that's helped me a lot. I've used that a lot throughout my marketing and throughout my story.

Just.

Just because it's a good, genuine story of, you know, like, the current business. It's three mates having a crack. We started in my mate's garage, you know, and it just kind of blew up from there. And people have been following along this whole time. And that's just a good, fun story, especially when it comes to beer, because it's kind of like every man's dream to, like, do a homebrew and then build a brewery.

So that. That works for us. It's a great story. But that, like, we don't stop there. So that's like a founding. Typical founding story.

But what we do a lot of as well is like product stories or even customer stories. So we've. We've just brewed out 200 beer in and we've been. That's about five years in the making, but we've done probably 150 of them in the last two years. And so. So we're constantly bringing different beers out and a lot of these beers, you know, come out with some kind of interesting story. Like, one example I've got in the book is one of our Facebook group members suggested a beer for an event and we're like, oh, that's a cool beer. But the event was canceled, so we kind of thought that was over. They thought that was over. But instead of it being over, we brewed the beer anyway and kind of acted like the event was still going and, you know, gave him credit when we released the beer, surprised him by sending it to his house, did a full branding and everything for it, and did release the beer anyway and then did a live call and pretended we were doing, like, you know, the tasting for the event. And, like, that's an example of where, like, that if we didn't choose to do that. Not that we only chose that because it was a good story. But, like, I'm always conscious of, like, you know, if we're going to make 200 beers, might as well make some that have a good story behind them. And when he suggested that, it's like, if we do this, this is going to be a good, fun story for him. It's going to be a good, like, customer success story. It'll be good for that community of ambassadors in the group on Facebook, where we've got almost 3,000 people. And so for all of those reasons, it became a really good story. And we chose to kind of go down that path. One reason being because we knew it would be a good story. And I talk about that in the book, where you, like, if you're an entrepreneur, you got a business, you can choose how you spend your time. And like, I choose to spend zero time on paid strategies and 100% of the time on organic compounding strategies. And I choose to look for stories in what we do and, you know, chase press opportunities and, you know, do beers that will involve our customers, engage our audience, all of that stuff. Because I know that stuff is compounding activity. And, you know, if you, if you're aware of it and you kind of understand what stories can be useful, then you're more likely to kind of go down that path and chase those opportunities.

That's amazing.

A lot.

That's so genius. And I think more companies do want to look at organic marketing because pay, you know, it has its limitations, it has its costs, and I think when you're going organic is so much more authentic. I love that. And let's get out of the book as well.

Like, in my case, you know, I've gone all in on organic strategies and compounding strategies throughout my whole career as an entrepreneur, and it hasn't always worked. Like, you know, I've had a lot of bad years, um, but I've just continued doing it and believe that it was going to work. And it did work in the end. But I do like to think that that's not the only way to do it because not everyone wants to be that ruthless and also just kind of fail for that long before things work. So it makes sense to me that if you are really good at paid ads and it's working really well for you, that you would keep doing that, but maybe you would also kind of dabble in some of this stuff. You know, set up a blog, do some content, set up a, a group for your community members. Really start thinking about the brand and what it means and telling stories and that kind of stuff at the same time and then maybe doing a bit of both. And you know, who knows, maybe eventually you don't need the paid stuff or maybe you come up with a really nice combination of both, that works for your skills and you get the best of both worlds. I love that.

And you talked about starting it in the garage with a couple of your mates and then now you've got a brewery. So for those people who haven't engage with your brand yet, where's the brand at now? Starting in the garage. Where are you at now?

Hey, James.

Here.

I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

Yeah, so we've got three breweries now. So three breweries, three tap rooms. We just bought one and turned it into black ops Brisbane, which is the city kind of 100km from here. We've got two in our local area, one up there. We're about to release a fourth tap room just for barrel aged beers.

And the brand is. We just got voted the number one craft brewery in the country.

Yeah, the brand's extremely strong.

Where we're doing 2 to 3 million liters of beer a year, which puts us as sort of one of the bigger independent brewers.

And.

Yeah, and that's all. Yeah, and it did. It started in the garage. We built a small brewery. We built a much, much bigger brewery and then we just bought the third one and turned it into Brisbane. And the bigger one is just expanding and expanding. We should get tanks. We've got three lots of tanks in the last three months. We should get more today or tomorrow and we're just feeling those immediately. We're selling a lot of beer at the moment and, and it's also, you know, from this year, it's been a good, solid, consistently profitable business.

And that's, that's quite difficult for, you know, for this kind of business because it's, it's very, it's A very, very difficult business to run. Like, if you're going to run a small brew pub, you're probably going to be always profitable and it'll be fine. But you got to try and distribute a liquid product that you make around a country as big as Australia that's very difficult to do and still make money. So that's, you know, that's probably what I'm most proud of, is now we've gotten through that kind of valley of death where you just have to invest in all this equipment and you don't have the scale to actually not lose money every month. So we've gotten through that hurdle as well.

That's amazing. And for other people that are trying to scale and do what you're doing, and they come up against hurdles, they come up against bureaucracy or pandemics, you know, what's your advice to those people who are coming up against hurdles? What. What have you went to do to overcome your hurdles? Have you had mentors? Have you had strategies?

I haven't. I wouldn't say I have mentors. I'm not. I'm not much of a. I'm much more of a do it myself type person. I'm not. I'm not really that into coaching, mentoring stuff for whatever reason. I don't really know why, but I. But I do. I observe what other companies do, for sure, and I have, you know, other colleagues in the industry that I kind of turn to if I need to. But we've also built up a really good team. So we've been very fortunate, is probably the right word. With the team we've got with, like, I delegate just about every job and I've got a lot of faith in our team.

We were able to move pretty quickly with the pandemic. We were kind of worried it was going to completely squash our business. We went from, I think, the week before it hit here.

We have a business that sells beer to bars and restaurants and sells beer at our own bar and restaurant. And all of those were shut down with about a week's notice. And that was about 40% of our entire business. And this is a business that's just breaking even at this point.

So it was very scary. But we were able to do a couple of things. One, the shutdown here only lasted four to six weeks. Throughout that whole time, we're still doing takeaways, and we also had the retail trade into bottle shops that went through the roof. So we were fine from that point of view. During that one month, we were able to execute really Quickly and get a local delivery app up and running. So we had Adam made them on Jared who does.

It'S called the App Match. He like helps entrepreneurs with apps and he helped me build this thing. I basically built it myself with his help over the weekend of that pandemic. And then we had a live app in the app store two weeks later and we had a web app you know basically on the Monday following.

And we were doing like we went from I think our previous best month of online deliveries was like 160 I think. And then during that month of April we did 1091 online sales. So we literally 10 xed and we were doing for April, I think we did $85,000 in online sales. So we basically effectively built this kind of million dollar run rate online business in a week.

Which, which got us through that kind of four to six week period of shutdowns.

But ultimately once everything went to, went back to normal we didn't need that. That month was, was good because we didn't kind of lose that whole chunk of the business. But once everything went back to normal we just, we were just straight back at it and we've been selling more beer than ever. So it's a bit, it's a bit different here. We were very, very lucky with the pandemic. I think the politicians here seem to seem to get it pretty right. I think they did some pretty aggressive shutdowns before it got out of control and got everything back back slowly and at least Melbourne it took off again and they were shut down for months and months. But where I am, Queensland, it kind of went back to normal and it seems normal now. And we were very lucky. I know it's different over there.

I'm in Christchurch, New Zealand and the same thing, our government shut things down real fast. Yeah, really, really fortunate. And I've got some clients actually in and around Brisbane and one of them is in the medical industry and she ended up doing a lot of COVID testing during that time. She was really impressed that how few cases were showing up across a number of months. So your government have obviously been made some really great calls.

Yeah, I think we're very lucky.

It's good. And in terms of the book, right. So I want people so people can jump onto Amazon, they can grab compound marketing on Amazon when it comes to launching because you're quite amazing. Your track record with launching and getting success and bestseller status is phenomenal. Do you have any advice if there's an author watching this, any advice to that author around how to get your book on the platform or how to position it and then how to launch it.

Yeah, well, to be honest, I haven't done really a proper book launch since my really my first one or two because these days, like, I like even the last book I did, I didn't even do any podcasts or any marketing at all for it. I kind of really treated it like this is like a hobby that I'm doing for fun, this one. I have done a bunch of podcast interviews mainly because I kind of felt like I put a lot of work into the book and you put it up there and a few people downloaded and it's kind of not really doing yourself much of a service if no one buys the book. But the best one, I think the first one I did was just. Just getting a group of people behind the idea, getting a review committee together, giving them free copies of the book in advance, and then lining up a bunch of content and interviews and whatnot. Around that time. I don't know if people still do it, but at that time I did like a free for three days thing on Amazon and that, that was quite good. And then they swapped it over to paid and then it kind of stayed in that bestseller status for quite a while. But yeah, I mean, it's probably like anything, I think, like, like my. My personal brand was at its strongest when I was personally engaging with it with those people. So I had a Facebook group that was really active. You know, I was speaking at events and conferences and I was, you know, I was selling my books themselves and signing them and sending them out and really like trying to build that community around, around the ideas. Like the seven Day startup. The first one, I had a online challenge. I had courses, I had a local group at a free Facebook group. I was presenting at conferences. I was doing like live calls where I'd review people's businesses and give them feedback and review their marketing, all that kind of stuff, all that free stuff just to engage people around that topic of the seven Day Startup.

And I'd be doing the same thing now if that's what I wanted to focus on for this book. But like I said, it's like now it's just Black Ops. And Black Ops has even got its own book that I wrote about Black Ops. So I do focus on that one a bit more and we do sign copies of it and we still do talk at events and things and, you know, just try to engage with people on the topic. And that just kind of builds up this swell of interest that has worked Pretty well for me. The audiobooks have been good too, for some reason. This one is not published yet and I've been trying to contact Audible about why. But the audiobooks have been a big plus as well. There seems to be a lot of people who like listening to audiobooks. I love it.

And did you record that yourself or do you have someone do that for you?

No, I did it myself. It's super painful. I've done all of them. I've done all six of them myself. And it's. It's not fun. It's really not fun. It's probably the, probably the least favorite thing. Like, I like. I like writing the content. I like publishing. I like the feeling of, you know, getting a copy of it, all that kind of stuff.

But I hate recording the audiobooks. It's just so painful. I think if you like reading through your own content, I mean, I do it because I think it's better when the author reads it, but it's a painful thing to read through content you've read through so many times before. And then also every time you make a mistake, you kind of have to clap and then do it again. And it's quite difficult not to make mistakes when you're reading content.

I think you just kind of like you never really, as an adult, you never really read out loud anymore, so you kind of forget. It's actually not that easy. And then you want to get the words exactly the same as the book. Say that whisper sync thing works so they can sort of listen to the book and read the Kindle and it syncs up.

So, yeah, it's frustrating. But yes, I have done them all myself. And if I write another book, I'll do it myself because I think it's worth it. And.

The audiobook sales tend. Tend to go really well too. So it's worth it from that point of view.

That's brilliant. And in terms of the book itself, do you have a paperback or a hardback and an ebook version?

Yeah. So it used to be through CreateSpace. I think Amazon owned them. Now I think it's just through ACX or whatever the name of the Amazon author central or whatever Amazon does. But yeah, I've got a guy that helped me with the formatting, so he just. I do the whole book in Google Docs. I get Chris from Jet Launch is the guy who helps me with it. He does the editing and the formatting. It doesn't cost a whole lot, to be honest. It's reasonably easy. He just puts it in a format from the Google Doc into a format that works on paperback and PDF and Kindle and you can just upload those files into Author Central. It's pretty easy to do print on demand, so it doesn't really cost you a center. Like if I, when I make a book, the only thing I really pay for is the design of the COVID and the formatting of the book from Chris. But it's really not a whole lot of money. It's probably, probably like it's under a thousand bucks and yeah, and I would, I would get that back on just audio book sales alone, like reasonably quickly. So it's not. Yeah, it's not a huge money making thing but it's not like I'm pouring money into it. It's quite an easy thing to do.

That's brilliant. Well, you're making such an impact and I think that's one of the most important things in terms of what you do with marketing is showing people, hey, here's how we can do it, here's a pathway. So other than what you're doing with your business, what else in your life are you juggling? Do you have a family that you're looking after as well?

Yeah, I've got two kids. I have them 50 50. So yeah, that can be full on. But yeah.

That seems to work pretty well. They're like 10 and 12 so they're kind of looking after themselves a little bit more now. It was a bit harder when they were younger.

I've got a wee boy who's four, we do 50, 50 as well. So I totally understand that juggle. And so any advice for dads out there who are entrepreneurs, Dads that are busting their gut but want to be there for their kids. Any advice? Just to keep moving in the right direction.

Drink more beer.

Black hot brewing beer. Right.

I love it.

So good.

Hey, that's all we need. That's perfect.

Now Dan, I want to say a massive thank you. And you know, I think the book compound marketing.

I think it's a book that every.

CEO should have, every marketer should have. And you know what you're doing is amazing work. So please keep proliferating your content and creating the amazing work that you do.

Thanks mate, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. And yeah, if I think of like sort of every time I write a book I'm like, oh, that's the last one. I don't have any more ideas and then I kind of have some more ideas and then I write another one. So if I think of more Ideas, I will, I will make another one. But I tend to, I tend to write books about what I'm, what I'm doing at work. So they're not just books written by kind of authors. You know, they're really just like capturing what I'm doing as a business owner. And to me, that's, that's kind of a little, it's a little bit unique and it's good because it kind of takes people inside the business when, you know, might be hard for them to do that otherwise. So if, yeah, if I have enough interesting things to talk about that I'm working on, I'll create another book. But if I don't, I'm not just going to do it for the sake of kind of having a business card. By the time you have six books, you don't really need any more business card books.

Totally. And, hey, where can people come and connect with you and your brand?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, like I said, I don't do a whole lot with my personal brand anymore. You know, I've got the books there. I'm on social media, obviously, on Instagram, Dan Norris, Facebook, Twitter. I don't use Twitter a whole lot, but yeah, if you're interested in looking at what Black Ops are doing, that's, that's what I spend all my time on now. So have a look at Black Ops Beer. Have a look at how we go about our marketing. And if you, if you are anywhere in Australia, you can, you can buy the beer and, and, you know, get behind the story and get behind a bunch of independent people kind of building an exciting business. I love it.

Hey, everyone that's in Australia that's watching this, please do support Black Ops Brewing, Go buy their beer, enjoy, and as Dan says, be a part of the story. That's what it's all about. Engage and interact. Hey, thanks, Amelia, Dan, I really, really appreciate you taking the time. I look forward to connecting with you. Once this bubble opens up between Australia and New Zealand, I'd love to come and check out one of your tap rooms.

Yeah, that sounds good. Well, we've done a collab with Altitude in Queenstown over the COVID period and we're keen to do a couple more over there. New Zealand's got a really good craft beer scene, so once that's opened up, we'll be coming over there for sure.

Come and say hello, please.

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