1347 – Step Into Your Zone of Genius with Carter and Custer’s Jim Carter III

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Hey there, thoughtful listener. What is your number one lead generation blocker? Head to upmyinfluence.com quiz to find out. Right now, that's upmyinfluence.com quiz and I'll share why you aren't getting the intros and sales you deserve. We're also actively seeking guests for this daily commercial free entrepreneur wisdom podcast agency owners, consultants, coaches, and B2B service providers. Head to upmyinfluence.com guest and I'd love to promote your expertise to our amazing audience. Let's get on with the show. With us right now, it's the CEO of Carter & Custer. It's Jim Carter III. Jim, you are found on the web@carterandcuster.com thank you so much for joining us, Tim.

Thanks for being happy here, man.

All right.

Yeah.

Give us an overview of the work that you do with Carter and Custer.

I started in this agency about three years ago and more recently took on a new business partner. That's the Custer portion of Carter and Custer. And we just love helping entrepreneurs thrive to make bigger impact in the world. That's. That's just really the ethos. That's what it all boils down to. My co founder, he. He's just been in consumer. Consumer packaged goods in the CPG industry for quite a while. He. He's grown a lot there. He's seen a lot in terms of that marketing side. For me, I've been a tech guy my entire professional life. I started putting together Frankenstein computers when I was a teenager, and that's just turned into the passion of being. Now, I like to say I'm a recovering software engineer because I spent two decades, you know, building empires and now really taking everything I've learned and turning it into actionable, tactical, really awesome ways to help brands thrive. And we just do that through really ethical based marketing. We love supporting nonprofits, people with missions. Um, I'm a certified B Corp founder going for my second for this one as well. And we just really care. And I've got a great team that absolutely loves to see the impact that can happen when you pour into people and you really, you show up as a partner, not just as a hired gun.

Yeah, well, you've worked with some pretty decent sized companies. Verizon Media looks like Lewis Howes, Ed Millette, which in the podcasting world will certainly know those names.

They definitely ring a bell.

Yeah, yeah. Gusto, Green Goat. So, yeah. Well, listen, congratulations on the success. How do you get. What is it that you're I mean, obviously you're going to focus on, you know, making a bigger impact. But tactically, what is that? What are those services?

Yeah, we show up in primarily to two ways. One is we have our own Mastermind program. It's called Fast Foundations and it's the single quickest way to bring entrepreneurs together to help them thrive with the community, offering in person events and support and coaching and just help them kind of get from that, you know, just getting started a little bit more of a side hustle to actually having a lot of the roots and foundations so they can truly grow and hire and they can kind of get out of their own way. You know, a little bit, a little bit of mindset, a lot of strategy and with that allowing them to continue to build their impact and grow. So we love that Mastermind program. It's a really great way for entry level entrepreneurs to come together, find community and really bond and grow fast. On the other side of it, with the more agency side of kind of the primary for our company, we have repeatable flat rate services that just support entrepreneurs where they're at. So if you just need to go fast with email marketing, we have a whole ready to go sort of email suite or come in, we'll draft your journeys, we'll put it all together, we'll go through the strategy with you and we implement it. And I've got 13, I think maybe not 14 copywriters on the team. We've written well over 2 million words, we've produced thousands and thousands of articles. We know what we're doing and we have the same for an SEO version. So we'll take your content, we'll repurpose it, something as simple as this, a podcast episode, and we'll take the best of it, we'll turn it into content and we'll publish it for you. And then same on social media, we'll work on reels, create TikToks, things like that. We also recently started working with Mighty Networks. We have a really great strategic partnership with them. So we build. Me too. Yeah, I love Mighty Networks. Mighty's fantastic. So we'll also set up the whole community. We'll run it, we will, we'll engage with your people for you. So, you know, there's a lot of ways that we can spend our time as entrepreneurs trying to figure out do we want to do these things ourself, do you want to be a solopreneur or do we truly want to grow a team and do we want to run with it. But a lot of the times, you know, we're jaded by hiring another agency. You know, everybody kind of has an agency story, and that's okay. I got knows I do. But at the end of the day, the question is, if you don't want to hire for it, are you going to do it or are you going to delegate it? And we wanted to come up with simple ways for people to just get that one job done and, and feel really good about it. So they're all done for you. Services, we again, we support the entrepreneurs through the mastermind, helping them get out of their own way, learn the things that they don't know so they can discern and decide. And then we also offer a marketing agency to be able to serve not only those same. Those same entrepreneurs. It's great when they start with us and they get to learn about our team, but it turns into a beautiful funnel for the agency as well. You know, we lift the curtain, we teach the strategies. It works for us. We love serving our customers the best way we can. But it doesn't matter what stage in the business you are, if you need to get these things done, you need to make a decision on it. And we wanted to make those simple, repeatable services for entrepreneurs so they could just thrive.

Yeah. Okay.

Wow.

Lots that we could talk about here. And so let's start by. Just because you mentioned it, and I'd love to talk about your views on community, but very specifically, you mentioned binding networks. And I'll tell you, a lot of conversations I've had, both publicly and privately are, you know, just be very cautious about where you put all of your eggs. And if you're relying upon a platform, let's say like a Facebook group, just know that forevermore. And you know, as long as you're relying on that, you need to have Facebook in your. If you're doing a SWOT analysis and your tee box, your threat bots, you need to. You cannot remove Facebook from that. From that box because there have been far too many people that have been burned by, you know, these one size fits all huge social media platforms that, you know, you could wake up tomorrow and your access to your community could be gone. Or, I mean, yeah, or it's. So it's. It's definitely a risk. And so what I like about mighty networks and other platforms, whatever. Right. Just something that you can own that, you know, you kind of like email to social media. Right. So email is more of a meritocracy. If you have really great email content, you're gonna have better open Rates. If you're a spammer, you're not gonna have open rates and you're gonna have very poor delivery. So, you know, with, when you own your community, you know, you can, you have just much more control over what it looks like. But I'll let you take the ball and run with it. On the topic of community.

Yeah. And the best way that I like to explain this is it's almost the same as do you own your home or do you rent your home? Right. Do you own your list or do you lease your list? Right. When you're playing in somebody else's fields, you are susceptible to their roles. So good luck opening a support ticket to Facebook and saying, hey, could you guys export an email address and a CSV of all of the people who like my page? You're just not even going to get a response. Good luck doing that on LinkedIn. Good luck doing that on TikTok any anywhere else. God help you. Instagram. So, you know, it's a great channel to do what it's meant for. But you are renting that space, you are renting that real estate, you are leasing it from somebody else. And if they change the rules, what are you going to do? You accepted their terms and conditions, but when you own your list, when you actually do something with your own people, you have their emails. You know, I'm also a big advocate of text message marketing. When you, when you have those phone numbers, there's called data portability. It gives you the ability to have that information and make it portable. You can't just export the people who like your page or part of your group. So yes, there's a little bit of a convenience factor, but if anything, it should be complementary. It shouldn't be everything. And that's the beauty of using something like Mighty Networks. Circle is up and coming. There's a few of these that are, that are getting more, getting more important to pay attention to. But when you truly own that community, you have the ability to thrive with those people that you've curated. And now you don't have to worry about what happens with an algorithm. You're actually just playing all out the people who trust you and want to show up in your energy. Yeah.

So, you know, again, we could talk a lot about repurposing as well, but what do you see working really well in content today?

So the answer really depends on the game that you want to play. Right. The, the reason that we have three kind of key services. We have, we have long form blog articles, we have email marketing and we have social media content is because they're three different games, right? SEO starting there. SEO is a long game. It doesn't have to be if you do it right. But you know this, Josh, you've been doing this for a long time. Unless you start writing content, you're never going to eventually rank for it. Like it's one of those best time to plant a tree seven years ago. So unless you get that content footprint out now and you commit to it, you'll, you'll never realize that channel. Then you have something a little bit more mid form, which is growing a list and doing email marketing. You don't have to have a 500 part email nurture sequence that takes years. You know, maybe a 10 part email sequence is great. It's just, it indoctrinates the person and lets them get to know you, fall in love with you and you know, like, and trust you and, and then you can kind of go in and you can talk about what you have to offer and then you've got something like Instagram for reals and you've got TikTok where you know, we have attention spans of fruit flies. You see something, if you're interested, you swipe, otherwise you don't. And then it kind of falls off into the abyss and nobody looks at a reel from three weeks ago. No. So you, you really have this, this, this lay of land. Right. And that honestly for our agency, that's why we went all in on exactly what we do is what game do you want to play? And we go all in on those. For long form blog writing, few of us have time to just sit down and write a 2,000 plus word article. You know, I've, I've been at SEO for over a decade now. I've, I've built really big companies that way. Josh, with what you've done in the past, you understand the importance of long game there too. You have to get that original content out there. But what's, what's unique about all of the services we offer here is we already start with content you have. So something like this podcast where we can take the video and we can do more with it, our team can transcribe those words, put them into long form blogs, we can do the same and we can do it in email, we can do the same and we can do it for short form. And that doesn't mean you have to hire us. It means anybody can do this. We just do it at a really rapid scale. So you have to ask yourself, what game do you want to play and where are your customers that you want to talk to? And if you believe more of them are searching the web for it, well, then you should really start getting content out into the world and establish your baseline with someone like Google, who likely could be your biggest customer. People don't always think about Google that way. Or if you just have an interest list and you need to be able to get information out to them, you should really think about repurposing towards email. Otherwise, when it comes to video content, I don't have to tell probably this audience this, but you know, TikTok style and reels style video content that are quick, fun, they, they introduce a little bit of something unique about you that, you know, somebody can fall in love with. That's the kind of stuff that works these days. And it just, it feels good to be who you are and to project that outwards so people can find you, fall in love with you. And again, you get that like, know and trust factor. The sooner that they can understand exactly what it is that you're into, then they can find out if they want to resonate with you.

I love it. I love it. So, you know, so we've been talking a bit about community. So that's one of the services that Carter and Custer provides, what's called a community multiplier, where you're creating that. Similarly, there's traffic, message and content multiplier, each designed to, I'd say, you know, get more value. This was what I perceived to be the commonality here. It's about listening, you know, if you're a thought leader, if you're, you know, producing great content, chances are, and I know a lot of people struggle with this, that stuff is getting way too siloed. And what is the point of you as a successful founder in doing this work? It gets produced and one tenth of your potential audience sees it. When in fact you could again bring in a team, you could bring in some talent and they could help magnify the work that you're already doing. No more work for you. It's just you're much better at being where the people are. And I'm sure that to our friend that's listening right now, we all have those social media channels or outlets and we could acknowledge that. Yeah, we're just, you know, I don't have very good email game right now because I just, you know, I'm doing all this other stuff, producing this podcast, producing these YouTube videos. It's just not getting into those other channels that's solvable it's totally solvable.

Ask yourself how many just zoom recordings you have sitting on, you know, your computer or a hard drive that you're never going to go back and touch. You know, how much great content is there that you've already recorded, that you've gotten out there? Um, think about webinars that you've produced. Think about freebies and courses. It's very likely that if you've started at least stepping into your zone of genius, you have content that can impact more people. So that's why we love doing what we do, and that's why the impact piece is really big to us, is because we care. We know that if we can help our clients get their word out. Josh, for example, like your show here, if we can help more people find you on Google, more people fall in love with you because they were interested and they joined your email list, or one or two more people just see a reel or something that comes up because that's what's trending, then your impact will go further. And put yourself in Josh's shoes. In this case, do you have a podcast? Do you have a show? Are you recording on video? Are you. Are you teaching webinars? Do you get up on stage? Do you do keynotes? And you've never done anything with it? All that content could be gold, and we just help you find that gold and really get it out there so everybody can see it. And that's why we're so fired up about it, and that's why we love what we do. Yeah. Awesome.

All right, so Carterand Custer.com when somebody goes there and they're like, okay, you got my interest? What would you recommend they click on?

What?

What should they do?

We have a services tab that just expands on all these things as well as we have a direct link to our mastermind. Those are the things that we love to do, and we're here to talk about them. You can always reach out to our team directly through some of the interest forms on there. All of our pricing is 100% transparent. There's no surprises. We show up just like this when we get on calls. And if you have any questions directly for me, you can also just DM me directly. I'm at Cause Hacker, if you ever heard that term growth hacker. I was a growth hacker for, God, over a decade. And I just got tired of chasing the money. I wanted to do it for purpose. And here we are. So I kind of renamed myself. I'm now forever known as Cause Hacker. You can find me on all the socials there and I'd love to tell you more about what we do and who we love to serve. And you know, honestly, even if you're thinking about joining a mastermind, if you've ever been curious about that, ours may not be perfect for you, but I do know so many guys and gals who just thrive in them and throw them. So if you're, if you're just curious about that, you want to have that conversation. It's one of my favorite topics to talk about because those kind of programs unlocked me and got me to where I am. So I'd love even just to, just to share, you know, other programs, other, other ideas, things that are out there to help point you in the right direction.

I love it. Okay. Jim Carter III. Thank you again Jim for joining us. Founder, CEO of Carter & Custer, found on the web@carterandcuster.com thank you Jim.

Thanks so much, Josh.

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