Bootstrapping From Zero to $3.8M ARR in Just 4.5 Years

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Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. Hello, everybody. We've got an exciting hour in front of us here talking to the the main man at fame and fame changed our changed my life on the podcasting side. And they're the ones that produce it and organize and take all the pain out of podcasting for Larry Wydell. And so, Tom, I'm having you back on as a return guest because we're going to dig in deeper. So welcome Tom Hunt.

It's an honor to be invited back. Am I have you had guests on twice before?

I have early on a couple of my closer friend, you know, closest friends and where I knew there was tons of things we just didn't get into with them. But, you know, I've been listening to your podcast and I would encourage everybody who's running a business or interested in running a business to to dial into your podcast. Confessions of a B2B marketer, I guess is how you came up with that name. I don't know, but it's easy to remember. And so the B2B business to business. And pretty clever, I might say, Tom, because as you're starting your business, you pick the brains of other people that have done it well and implement the ideas that fit you. Which is how I built my business, Tom, by the way. You know, it's just like, you know, I somehow early on in my career, Tom, people I read in a book or someone told me, you know, it's like you, you beat 50% of the people by working hard. You beat another 40% by having a method to your madness, you know, a management philosophy, a structure, a rhythm. And you do that by watching the top people. You know, how do the top people do it? Picking up trends from them. So I was always interviewing on every Monday morning pretty much my entire career for decades, I've interviewed the top people in our financial services business about because I also had the heard the thing that ideas don't care who use them and ideas are a dime a dozen and the people who use them are priceless. And so if you someone's beating me, I had the audacity to think that it wasn't because they were better than me. I took the approach. It was they knew something I didn't know, you know, because I didn't mind working, but I hated to work on something that wasn't going to pay off. And so maybe they knew how to phrase something, explain something, visualize something, communicate something, structure something in a way that I didn't. And because nobody could know everything and nobody can figure everything out the best way at the same time, you know, and so you, if people surge ahead of you, they're, you know, they're doing something you're not doing. You know, they've got a different thought in their head. And so I, I applaud you doing that and the results are showing up and, and that's just not me and you chit chatting here. This is something for everybody to pick up and think about adding to their business because what it's done, I mean your hard work has. I, I know a little bit about your story, but as you were interviewing recently, recent podcasts with Alan Pence, I heard, you know, I was hearing your story in there with his story. You know, as you start as just doing it all your, you know, one man, paper hanger, doing it all yourself and you work your way up. But this has paid off for you. I mean things have paid off. You are fast growing, you're running a fast growing operation. Why don't you tell people some of those that growth.

Yeah. So the company started on $0 revenue. This was in December 2019, so four and a half years ago. So as of May, our monthly recurring revenue is $314,000. So we've gone from zero to 340,000 and then just to times that by 12. So coming up on 3.8 million in annual recurring revenue in his four and a half years. Fully bootstrapped. And I'm a solo founder.

Solo founder. And so how much. What is that multiple when you say four and a half years, what is that? That multiple from Basically from nothing, you know, so that's.

Yeah, from nothing.

Yeah.

I would say the growth percentage wise was much bigger in the early years because the numbers are much lower. But I would say that there was two big jumps and I'm going to get the graph out so I can remind myself exactly when they were. There are two big jumps. One was in the last quarter and we can talk about why I think that was. And then the other one was in. So the, the big jump was Q3 of 2024 this year. So for us that was basically March to April, March to make our quarters are messed up. And then Q1 of 2023. So that would have been September of 2023. So they were the big up levels in terms of growth.

Now as you, let's dial it back. When you started this thing, what gave you the audacity to think, I can bootstrap this thing? You know, I've got an idea. Why did you think this would be a good idea?

I think so the company started, I was working as the head of marketing at a soccer company and we started a podcast. And I think we got a bit lucky in that the. The eleventh guest on the show turned out like, basically we got chatting with our CEO and then bought our software for the whole sales team. It's like a 50,000 pound deal and we probably spent about £5,000 on the podcast. And so that's like a 9.10x ROI. And so that big delta in like profitability on that campaign for me was like, that set off alarm bells, like there could be potential profit here.

Yeah.

And so that gave me the initial belief and then so very fortunately they agreed to be the first client of Fame. I left and then they became a client. And then I think the reinforcing belief probably came from like the first five clients where we're maybe not able to replicate the full 90, 10x ROI, but we were definitely getting close. And so it was really the fact that we were able to bring on clients and then make them happy that gave me the belief.

Now, were you in your previous business career? Were you primarily sales? Were you management? Had you run teams? What was your experience level?

First four years of my career, I was project management, learning about management probably a bit and then learning about how to write emails and stuff. So being organized basically, then the following. So that takes up 2014 and 2014 to basically 2018. When I started Fame, I was more marketing. So it's no surprise that Fame is really a marketing platform. People, service business. Right. Because I have that thumb understanding of managing people, then I have some understanding of marketing.

And your role now has. You've gone through quite a shift in the changing of your role and your daily activity and responsibilities. Talk about that. You know, we, I know on your podcast Alan went through in detail. Now the only thing I can say about Alan is, you know, it's easier to understand if you're in that business, you know, like, you know, level three, level four, level five of this and that and the other. But, you know, if you're not in that world, it's just mumbo jumbo. You select more complicated, you know, people just, you know, you, you know that some of those terms are not easily understood or picked up on by people who are not actually in the game. Because what he was talking about. His thing is that most people, people never got past, you know, a million dollars in revenue. And that's pretty much, you know, a solo practitioner, you know, just doing everything yourself. And like only 4% ever even go beyond that. So it's, it's, you know, when it's important to. A lot of times, remind yourself when you're, you're dealing with these other levels and other systems. It's not many people can relate to that. If you're listening, you need to realize that will make real sense to you when you get there. And it hurt. It does help you to hear that in advance, which they will hear on your podcast and all. It's just don't worry about things you hear on Tom's podcast or even on this one that don't make sense to you at this stage. Just kind of tuck that away because there will be a time when you, you know, your vantage point in terms of growth reaches you say, okay, now I get that. You know, and so the exposure is good. It's good to have it, have it internalized. But as you have gone through these steps and I see that, you know, you've had to make decisions, you know, decisions, projects, effort, you know, expenditures of effort give. Create results. Results don't just come in because, you know, hey, you know, I grew another bumper crop of, you know, oats this year. It's like I didn't even plan anything. You know, look at that field, you know, and you've got, you've got to plant before you can harvest. So talk about how you've gone on the attack with your energy and effort and focus and, you know, how that's turned into results.

So going back to the question you asked just now about how the role has changed, and then I'll come into what I'm actually doing and how that's impacting results is, you know, I mentioned we had the two big jumps of growth. 1 20, 23, 1 20, 3, 24. I think the 1 in 20 came because I was doing less stuff, less stuff inside the company.

Yeah.

And I kind of stood back, had these three people, head of growth operations and account management that were responsible really for 90% of the day to day running the company. Instead of me being responsible for client happiness, me being responsible for growth, me being responsible for ops, it's just I'm not good enough to be good at all three. And so I've stepped out. And then we have these three people who are all just focused on doing that one thing. And I'm just there to coach and be a consultant. And I think that's had a big impact because now they're doing a better job than I was. But then we add on to that the fact that I now can have like 80% of my time to invest in new things that could lead to growth. So I'm happy to share. Probably the biggest lever, I think, has been LinkedIn organic content. I happy to share more about that, like the impact it's had and what I've invested into that.

Yeah, well, let's go ahead and dive into it because I remember that from a earlier podcast that I listened to that because you and I were talking about using social media here several months ago, and there was a debate between Twitter and LinkedIn and it seemed like LinkedIn won the argument. The argument that went on after I got out of the conversation. But it. By the way.

But anyway, yeah, LinkedIn is. I mean, I'm trying to get Twitter to work as well. It's just not working. But LinkedIn is working better. What I've essentially done is probably taken about half my time and have just invested that into seeing into maximizing the amount of impressions I can get organically. So it's not paid by creating content and then engaging with other people's content.

Two things, new content and engaging with other people's content.

Exactly right. And so let's say five months, 50% of my time. So 2.5%, 2.5 months of my time has been invested on this. So like a decent expense for the company. But the output is that we now get anywhere between 10 and I think in June it's going to be 20 million impressions on posts that I from my personal profile. And the output of that is that we are getting more people coming inbound that want to start a podcast. And actually the bigger impact of that is that we've roughly 10x the amount of people that want to come work for us. Really the reason for that is to make LinkedIn organic work, you want to have three things. You want to be talking about something that you are passionate about. You want to be talking about something that you're doing every day, so you're continually learning. But then you also want it to be a topic that aligns with how you make money. Now I actually only have two. I'm talking or. Or the post I get the most impressions are like the workplace culture, remote work posts. So I'm. I'm doing that every day. I'm basically responsible for the culture and leadership of fame. I'm Passionate about it, but it isn't what we sell. We sell podcasts and so that's why it's having a big, big impact on hiring versus getting customers, because it's not aligned with what we sell. But that's fine. I'm trying to work out how to talk about more about what we actually sell in order to generate more leads, but that can come later.

Yeah, I was going to ask you that because as people listen to this, they're going to say they're going to reach the point, well, I'm interested now in LinkedIn, you know, to get my, raise my profile and then, and I'll probably have you speak about that, that you, if you're, you've got a business, you need to raise your profile and you need to. The tendency for us is to hide behind the business is out there and you know, to try and be oz behind the curtain, but not that doesn't seem to win. You got to come out from behind the curtain and expose people to who you, you are as a person where they feel like they get to know you. I'm going to have you speak, go ahead and speak to that and then we'll, I'll ask you the other stuff.

Yeah, I think this, the role of CEO is to promote the business to three people. Well, actually four people. I think customers, employees, potential employees, partners and investor, shareholders. And simply just being known is very valuable. And I think that's the job of the CEO. Everybody has like a group of people they have influence over. And if somebody reads a LinkedIn post and they agree with it, they align with it and they remember you, you are going to be the podcast agency that they refer to when their friend asks them for it. And so I think every CEO should be focused on getting just more exposure to those four groups of people.

When you started running, you had to prove to yourself that your, that LinkedIn was going to work. I mean, you know, when you started this thing, it was a theory. It's just like starting a business. It's a theory. And I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to see if it works, see if there's a demand for it. And then you do that with your marketing. And in this case, we're talking about LinkedIn as a marketing target. And so you launch into LinkedIn and you ran some exp, I assume you ran some experiments about different kinds of posts, frequencies and how to do it. And so did you start with the model that you have now? Because right now it's basically to summarize, it's. It's a photo, not a video. And some texts, you know, some. Something to read it, basically. Right.

Yeah, exactly right. I would go further than that and I would say that every post should be an experiment. The way you, I think you win at LinkedIn is that you. You basically have this relationship with the algorithm. The algorithm is constantly evaluating whether you as a person should get impressions and whether the thing you've just posted should get impressions. And there's no rulebook for the algorithm, and LinkedIn don't publish what you need to do. But if you have awareness and you make every post an experiment, you can learn about what LinkedIn values for both of those things. Whether your profile is authoritative, whether the post is good. And then if you compound a 0.5% learning every time you post and you're posting every day, in three months, you're going to be a lot better at posting.

Yeah. And so if we're giving a clue for your editors that are looking for a sound bit or a short video clip to take out of this, it would be one heading would be why every post should be an Experiment.

You absolutely nailed that, Larry.

And so how are you experimenting right now?

I am experimenting with the image. So the posts that like, really popped off for me in the past three months have been, as you mentioned, text posts about culture, remote work management and an image of me and sometimes the dog. And it works. But some feedback or criticism I get sometimes is that the picture has nothing to do with the post, which is valid.

Yeah.

Now, one of the things I learned early on is that the algorithm does, like, when there's a person especially quite close up in the picture. And so I did a post on Monday, it's on about 10 million impressions now. And one of the big reasons is that my face is quite big in the post. And so I would say 80% of my posts have this picture of me, sometimes the dog. Because of that reason. Now I was in Italy for two months of this year and so my girlfriend's also a photographer and so we got a loads of great pictures. We were doing loads of stuff. And being in Italy is amazing for pictures. Now we're back in London, we don't really do that much stuff and I'm running out of pictures. So I'm like, what else can I do to. For pictures for these posts? And so then I study other people that get a lot of attention. Here's like the key thing. They're not listening that wants to win on LinkedIn. Just follow like 20 people that have over 20, 50,000 followers and then just look at what they're doing and adapt it. And so what I'm actually going to test hopefully tomorrow is a new type of image where I'm paying someone, a freelancer to hand write, make it look really pretty, like the big message from the post. And I'll write the post and then it'll be like a handwritten, A picture of a handwritten note that's going to be on the post. And so that's the experiment that hopefully is going to happen tomorrow and we'll see if it works.

Handwritten rather than typed or.

Exactly. So she is. So I literally gave her the post and gave her the thing and she's gonna. I'm actually gonna check to see if I've got it back yet and hasn't been delivered, otherwise I could share it with you. But yeah, it's basically handwritten, like the big message handwritten on a piece of paper.

Have you run experiments with picture of you versus you and the dog and then you versus you and the girlfriend and then you versus the girlfriend and the dog.

So the girlfriend has actually only ever been. Oh, you're right, she's been in one with me and she's been. Been on one with the dog. The one with her and the dog actually did perform really well. The one with me didn't perform so well. So. But I don't know if she's that keen on me, like using her to game the algorithm and pick up impressions, you know.

Yeah, it gets into other, other considerations there. But now when, you know, talk about impressions, you know, when you started this, how many months have this, has this been a program, you know, a focus? And then how has, how has your, your followers, your subscribers, your impressions jumped in that period of time?

It became a real focus in January. And in January I had roughly. And I'm going to get the exact data up 25,000 followers as of today, I have 110,000. So we 4x this January and in.

Terms of pressure, January, February, March, April, May, just starting June. So it's a little over four months. Four times 400% increase.

Exactly. And then the number of impressions In January was 115,000. In March we hit 13 million. April and May were nine and a half million. And I think June is going to be more like 20 million.

And have you monitored, do you have other kind of monitoring that you've noticed, like calls for business and you know, clients like that? Because I know that right now that you, you don't have to market. I mean you got people calling you.

Yeah, but I think that's largely down to stuff like this. I mean, yeah, I, I would say that because the, our sales process is people request a proposal, then we jump on a call. We don't actually do any outbound. And so for, for the lifetime of the company, up until a year ago, the percentage of people that would come have and say, because we asked people how they hear about us when they request a proposal, the percentage of people that would say LinkedIn was probably like 5%. And then I actually have been posting on LinkedIn for like two years and so, and it's been very slowly growing and so maybe it went up to 10% but now in these last three months is probably like 30%. So that's on the customer side, on the hiring side, in the past five, six months we have 10x the amount of applications we get.

And so when you say you take half of your time on this is it, you know, like pod, you know, in a podcast situation, you try and bunch them up in, you know, do a couple in a day at least. You know, you know, you, you get your, it's not like every day can be interrupted with a podcast. You know, you try and batch process. In any business you're trying to batch process. And so in terms of batch processing, these, preparing your posts for LinkedIn is that once a week, once a couple of times a month. You know, you have to get your mind into it. You know, it's like you don't have to switch. You know, when you're CEO, you've got a lot of hats that you're wearing and you can't make flip it decisions. You know, whatever the issue at the moment is, you've got to give it your total focus. And so you can't be doing a post and someone comes in with a complicated problem and you, you know, call a shot. It's like, oh, I forgot the most important thing there. So when you dedicate your, you know, you, you slip into posting mindset, how does that work and when and how often is it?

Yeah, you're turning, right? It's once a week. I'll spend most of a day, maybe six hours like researching and writing the posts and I'll get between 7 and 10, like 80% done. And then each morning when I wake up, I'll select the post, do the remaining 20%, select the image and post it.

So you're doing this on a daily.

Basis, then one post seven days a week.

Yeah, and so as opposed to twice a month taking a couple of hours and knocking out 15 posts and say, line them up and here's 15 pictures and 15 posts and turn it over to somebody else to put them out there. You're not doing it that way. You're not doing a batch process.

I would say I'm batch processing it. Well, partially, but on a weekly basis and only to like 80%. So there still is some daily work. Yeah.

Uhhuh. Now, are you actually typing them up and posting them or you got an assistant that you're. You're doing?

I'm doing 100% of the work, yeah.

And why is that?

I think to really make a social profile work, there has to be. I don't think it needs to be 100%, but I think there has to be significant input, at least at the start from the person. I think when there's a number of examples of content that's worked, then it can be operationalized and potentially handed over to someone else. So I think that's coming. But it could be like in a month or so, once I've really understood how this thing works, and then we can hopefully drastically reduce the amount of time I spend on it by having someone else manage it.

Yeah. And Tom, can we, you know, take and look at this and as a process and kind of point out to people that that's pretty much how anything new works. If you're a CEO or you're designing a company or designing a new operation, because you're always, you're always designing, there's always new things. If you're a CEO and you're expanding business because you've got to grow or die, and there's only so much growth that will come by expanding what you're already existing in place. You know, you got to have a new system, you got to have some people, a new division, a new beachhead, new product line or something like that. And in the beginning, there's really no other successful way to. And I, I heard this, you know, with this kind of came up in your. Your podcast with Alan Pence is other. The personal involvement. Because in the beginning you have to get your. You have to become an expert to some extent in what works, what doesn't work, before you can design a system to turn it over to somebody else. And then when you do that and you get someone else doing it where you can quickly keep an eye on it and know this is being done right, or this, you know, you got to, you know, if you offload it, someone else You've got to be able to keep an eye on it instinctively. You know, you can't, like, okay, I'm going to go into. Look at all the lines and no, it's you. You got to know it well enough to where you can instinctively look at it and say, no, this is not working. Problem's probably over here or whatever. And you can't. You. You're not going to have that instinct unless you spent time doing it yourself, would you say?

Totally agree. I don't understand how somebody that doesn't have a good grasp of the work can manage anybody that does. Yeah, it's just not like you're just not going to know if they're like, how they're doing or what if what they're saying is true. So I think this worked out really well that I had to do every role in the company, so now I can be a pretty competent CEO because I can probably jump in and do pretty much everything. Now. If we had more money at the start, then maybe I wouldn't have gone through that process and I would have hired people where maybe I wasn't, and I wouldn't, like, missed out on getting that experience. So I think that's a hidden benefit of bootstrapping.

Well, the other thing, Tom, in my experience, when you have the money, whatever. I've been usually disappointed when I brought in someone who's going to be an expert to solve my problem in whatever area. He's like, oh, great, this guy knows this, he knows that, he's done this, he's done that. My problem's over. We finally got this guy, and then he turns into such a whopper of a dude, you know, he said, I don't know what, you know, he sit in there, you could be eating donuts for a month and be more productive than whatever in the world he's been doing, because nothing, you know, And. And when you hire the expert, you tend to leave them alone, like, oh, they're the expert. I don't know what they do, but I'm gonna, you know, I'm not going to micromanage something I don't know. And so you. They go out there and just drive you right into the dirt. That's been my experience. You know, it's, you know, if you can grow your own or if you can have expand as a natural outgrowth of.

Of.

Of what you're doing, it always works out better because, you know what's going on.

The other kind of way we've expressed our fame is that we haven't ever hired anyone for somebody that isn't an entry level role. So there are three people in the leadership team I mentioned all joined as account managers in the past two to three years and then they rose through the ranks and now we only promote internally. So the pro of that is that we kind of like the person is tried and tested, they fit the culture and it's worked very well. Now the downside is that maybe we are missing out on some expertise of someone that's run a sales team or run an ops function, but it seems to be working okay at the moment.

Yeah, if you're growing, you know, and that's the thing about as a CEO, you have to be the one to grade yourself, you know, self edit your performance. And if you're growing, you've got to pretty much say I'm doing enough of the right things. If we're growing, you know, and where you get critical on those things, it's when you stop growing and you don't know why don't you think.

Totally agree, totally agree. And we've had months where we've been flat for two or three months and yeah, you really have to like dig into everything, dig into all the data as the founder, CEO and try to come up with hypothesis on what else could be changed in order to get a different outcome.

Now I'm going to give you some, something I thought about when this is the way I operate and I was going to join your conversation with Alan, but the method that's worked for me, Tom, is when you're growing, you know, you brought those people entry level and you trained them up and you got, you know, they're running things. What we always did, the approach we had was basically whatever you do, that's you take the most important thing and you try, you develop seven people. Seven to ten people. Jesus had 12 disciples, but he was God, he could keep up with more. But if you go, if you get seven to 10 people that you train up to do, a certain account manager, you know, over this, that and the other, what you do, then you're not limited by one or two or three. If you have, if you get seven to 10, then you can get them to compete against each other. And you're now running the competition. Now you grad. The idea was if you get seven to 10 people to do what you do, you have promoted, you earn the right to promote yourself up to managing those seven to 10 people and you can get them, you could keep them on track, beating heads against each other there. And the thing is from that. There's no, you know, you challenge them to develop teams underneath them, and that's where you get. You can go from 7 to 10 to 20 to 30 wide, you know, and you're not really limited because you're, you're 7 to 10. If they're training other people, they're learning, you know, if they're training other people, they're going to be learning. And so. And then they're competing against each other. That keeps them on their toes. And so that's a way to kind of keep things bubbling underneath in terms of growth. And you can pretty much figure out, either you'll figure it out, or they'll go find the answer somewhere else and bring it into the group and you can keep growing internally that way. Anyway, that was going to be my conversation, my additional conversation.

And then would you use the carolist or the stick or combination of both to incentivize performance in that pool of seven to 10 people?

Right. Because what will keep a company honest is internal competition. Of course, external competition, because that monitors you on the possibilities of what you could be doing because other people are doing it. And that's an inspirational thing to the whole group. But to keep people honest inside the internal competition is a great. You know, it's like Napoleon said, there's. There's no telling how many wars have been won with a few pins and ribbons, you know, and so as you go out and you have, you know, you had to get yourself convinced to put the time into LinkedIn, and you couldn't have done that if you didn't have an idea, a method that you believe would work. Did you. How did you get that method in your mind? Because now we're talking about, you know, you've offloaded some of your responsibilities back in January, freed up your schedule. But, and you. Beyond that, Tom, you got yourself excited about this new venture. You, you had to be excited about doing this in LinkedIn because of something you saw or had had potential, otherwise you wouldn't have done it. And so what did you see? How did you get to the point where you were convinced that, you know, in other words, for you to be the leader into this new marketing thing, this is a key piece I'm excited about leading and not that, you know, hiring someone to do it, you know, because a lot of people say, okay, this is great LinkedIn, I'm going to go hire a social media person, and I promise you there'll be a dud. You know, I hate to say it, but God almighty, every One of these experts, social media experts, most of them, you know, turn into duds. I'll have people that'll have, I, you know, there'll be people I try and get for my podcast and I'll say, this guy is great. He's unbelievable. You know, I'd love to get him on the podcast. And he'll say, well, call like, you know, talk to my social media person. She'll arrange it all. Okay. You know, like two years. And I'll even go back into the office, say, where is the social media part? Oh, we talked to her again. She said, yeah, I hadn't got around to it yet. Jeez. And, but you didn't do that. You said, I'm going to lead the way. And that's, you know, we, we all should learn from that. But somehow, you know, we're not going to lead the way if we not convince. And what I'm wanting to happen from, one of the many things I want to happen from this hour is that people get excited about this as a possibility for them expanding their brand on LinkedIn and could be a fun thing for them. So how did you get to that point?

I think I looked on the platform and I saw a number of people who were getting like, big numbers, like 1, 10, maybe even 100 million impressions organically. And I didn't think that there were that much, like, because you need two things. You need like the ideas and then you need the ability to package those ideas up in the content. And I didn't think that any of these people were like that much better than me on either of those two points. Right. And so then I was like, okay, well, let's try this out. Let's do three months, 50% of my time and see if I get enough feedback that I should invest more.

And of course, you know, you've got a good looking dog and so.

The dog helps. The dog has been a cost center for six years and only in the past six months has she started to repay the investment.

Well, thank goodness your efforts, your investment has paid off there. For those of you who are sick and tired of fooling around and are dead serious about wanting to move up fast, I've got something especially for you. I've combined the best insights from over 40 years in business and making $70 million in income and compressed them into a free webinar. That's right. It's a free resource if you, if you want to find out exactly what the concepts are that I use in coaching million dollar earners Register now@widelonwinning.com you'll discover the five part framework used by so many to reach their financial, personal and professional goals. You can find that link in this episode's show. Not now. Talk about what, as you've gone in there, think not everything has turned out. What, what are problems you, you've run into? You know, you got your staff listening here, so we're not going to talk about problems you've had with your staff, but what problems have you, you know, what are things that have just disappointed the heck out of you or you, you went out there and it would appear like you've had skyrocket growth. We all know that. You know, it's, you can have overall growth, but you could have slumps and derailments during the process. What are some of those derailments? When you're the CEO, you got to take ownership of those.

Yeah, I see my job as making really four groups of people happy. The first group is the owner, the shareholders, which is just me. So that one's relatively stress free. The other group, or the two most important groups are the employees and the clients. And then the kind of ancillary groups are the partners and the freelancers. And so the biggest challenges have always been when we haven't delivered on our mission, which is to make team members or employees and clients happy. And so whenever any one of these groups of people or whenever the individuals within those groups are unhappy, those are the trickiest times. And if that consistently happens, because sometimes people can be happy because of it's been unlucky or something that we couldn't ever plan for. But then if there's consistent unhappiness in either of those groups, then there's something wrong with the system that you have. And so the hardest times have been where there's been systemic issues that have led to unhappiness in those two groups of people.

And I know that you startups create a lot of those things and your overall business has been a startup, but you started BCast. What is BCast?

BCast is a podcast hosting tool. And so what people may know about podcasts is that the audio actually doesn't sit with Apple Podcasts or with any of the other directories. It sits on a, a server that you would typically own. And then Apple Podcast pulls the audio from that server. And so this is called podcast hosting software. And so at a similar time to when we started fame, we saw a gap in the market for podcast hosting software. And then FAME has essentially funded the build of this application that we Obviously give for free for all our clients and then we're able to build stuff into that that helps us with our specific podcasting process. So yeah, currently a separate brand called bcasset Blue and then Famous Pink, but bcass is wholly owned and maintained by Fame.

And so what kind of situations have you gone through with that? Because that's a technical type operation and glitch. As we all know, technical things take a while to become reliably built. And so what are things you've run into there?

But here's a really good point that I recently realized is that there's kind of four types of leverage you can use as an entrepreneur. And I'm like heavily utilizing two and then not utilizing the other two. And that's because I'm skilled in, in the first two and not in the second two. So the first two that I am skilled as people. So the four years in management consulting, all this like leadership culture stuff, it's what I'd love is what I'm good at. Second is media. So here's the impressions on LinkedIn, for example. So those two leverage, pieces of leverage are being used.

Now.

The two that I'm not so good at is capital, eg, we haven't raised any money fully, boost threat. And then the other one is software. Again, like, I'm not technical myself. I have some like product management skills, but not really. And so if, let's say I spent four years not like doing people and organizational stuff, but I spent four years coding, right. Maybe Fame wouldn't actually exist and we would just have a software company because I'll be using that, that leverage more. So yeah, there's definitely been issues and it's definitely not the strength of the organization.

And so how do you mitigate? How do you, how do you turn that into a strength?

That's a very good question and one that I should probably think more about.

Because, you know, because that chain will break at a weakest length.

You know, I think partnering technology with a great human business can be very valuable. So I think it's still worthwhile having the application. But in terms of how we would turn that into a strength, I think I have to think more about that.

Well, the thing is with, I think you might be onto the right idea there because partnering is something all big companies do. You know, the only reason that like YouTube, Google, remember when Google bought YouTube for like $350 million or something, and people going, what a bunch of idiots. You know, why would they. Who's going to be interested in Cat videos, you know, and, you know, and I think it's turned into a pretty good buy for Google. You know, they didn't have to just go out there and create their own. They partnered up. And so you see this all the time. You know, the. There's a great weather app that used, we all used to love. I even forget the name of it now, but now it's part of Apple, you know, and they just, you know, they just bought it, you know, brought, brought it in. But you see this happening all the time because it's a good model. And especially that's why professionals, when they graduate from school with a medical degree or a, you know, attorney, they pass the bar, they go to work with a existing company for a while. You know, they partner up until they get their legs underneath and their strength, and then they, they, they've learned the ropes and they move out there. So that's, that's a possibility. But as things, how do you get yourself excited about doing things you don't want to do, knowing that you've got, you know, there's a certain amount of investment you're going to have to make in it to solve the problem? How do you get yourself excited about doing things you don't want to do?

One of my highest values as a person is growth. And so what excites me about the whole business thing, it isn't necessarily like looking good or getting money. It's more like the person I would have to become in order to achieve that thing. So the personal growth. And so with the LinkedIn thing, I was like, well, these other people that are doing it, they're not that much better than me, but I am going to have to improve, obviously, because I'm not getting the results at the moment. And that was just quite exciting. Like the innate process, like thinking if now 100,000 followers. And I think to myself, how could I get to 500,000 followers by the end of the year? Like, the person that I would have to be to do that excites me. So I think maybe that's fortunate. I have this innate, like, excitement or passion for trying to do stuff I haven't done before, which may. Which is probably the answer to why I'm an entrepreneur or why I'm building this business.

Now in that, and you referred to this earlier, is interacting with other people, not just coming up with new content, but interacting with other people. Do you target the people that have the biggest followers? And as far as interacting there, because that gives you another excuse to kind of follow them. And pay attention to them. Are you just interacting randomly?

So there's benefit to commenting on other posts that are going to get a lot of exposure because your comment will likely get more exposure. So that's one of the reasons why I would comment on people's posts that are more popular.

Yeah.

But I don't, I only do it if I actually like the person and I like the stuff they post. It's a big creators that post stuff. I think it's complete rubbish. And then what I also do is if I see people consistently commenting on my posts, then I'll go and comment on theirs. Just because if nice, I want to follow their journey. They're being nice to me.

Yeah.

Now the added benefit of commenting on people that have a big following is that that same thing would happen in that they'll start to like you and then in theory they'll come and comment on your posts. And that's a big driver of, is the audience of the people that comment.

Yeah.

Because if someone has a massive audience and they comment on a post and that post will be shown to a percentage of their audience.

Yeah.

And that's how you get more reach.

Yeah. And I think there's a lesson for us in the, an extension of the lesson, like the people they say, you know, your. Who are your five people you spend the most time with, you know, and what are their income and their success levels that's going to influence yours. But it can be the same. It can relate to the same thing on social media. Who are the five or ten that you interact with the most and follow the most? And in your experience, would you say after this four, four or five month exposure, it has a direct impact on, you know, in terms of the transformation process of you becoming someone who would have the 100 million views and follows.

I think I have changed as a person. I think I have evolved since starting doing this in Jan. And maybe that's just like specific knowledge about LinkedIn, but it's also probably a better understanding of humans, I think.

Yeah.

To really get posts that like pop off and get 10 million impressions, there's like a lot going on in the post, even though it might look quite simple. So I think, yeah, I have evolved.

Yeah. And you know what's interesting about this, Thomas? This is journey you've gone on by yourself. It's not like you took your whole company with you and it's like you're in the world of LinkedIn and you're following these people that have bigger exposures, bigger audiences and you're noticing things. You know, it's a lot of this in life has to do with what you put your eyes on and what you follow. That's what, that's how babies develop. You know, they just look at you, you know, and they're just following. And, you know, I remember when my great nephew on the down in Georgia, when he was born, he would just look at you like this. And I said, what kind of monster is he going to turn into? And he actually turned into a fun kid, but as a baby, he was just like, he was taking everything in. He would just not move. But when you're. A lot of this has to do with what you set your eyes on. And I think speaking for myself, you know, looking at social media, which is hard to get myself excited about it, because when you look in there, there's a lot of, a lot of things that are thrown at you by their, their algorithm. And it's like, I'm not interested in this crap. You know, why do they, you know, this feed, feed, feed. But you can, you can tailor your search and just ignore all that stuff right there and just say these, this is who I've got. I'm gonna, I'm going to. If this is a big party, I'm going to gravitate over to this side of the room and keep my attention over here. And it takes a while to learn how to do that, but you can control your experience and learn things from people that it is worth your time and you will look forward. Do you find yourself now looking forward now that you've identified people on LinkedIn that have the big following that you do agree with a lot of their posts, they're not that, you know, it's, it really sucks your soul away to some of the stupidity that people will put out there. And you just like, you know, you want to tear your hair out, you know, because, you know, people are listening this and taking it as a gospel truth and it's just total nonsense. But you can ignore those and you can find people that really have something valid to say and focus on that. And do you find yourself now having some anticipation about going in and seeing what they came up with today or something?

Probably like five people.

I'm going to get you to send me those five, those five names. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and save time. Yeah.

I mean, you were saying at the start of this episode that I was clever for using my podcast for learning, for learning stuff. Right. But this is what we're, I think, is what we're doing here.

Yeah. And see, that's what. But you know, a telltale sign is who you get on your podcast, you know, and so, you know, that's because I'm sure that's not an accident. You know, the, the guest selection I have on my podcast is by design as much as possible and you know, drive you guys nuts with wanting to get, you know, the cream of the crop of high producers. And by the way, I found two more of them today myself.

How did you find them?

Well, I've been stalking, I've been stalking one since she was 17 years old and came out to Trump Golf and started playing. She was like this six foot Amazon young teenage girl out there. And now she's gone on and had a tremendous career in the LPGA world. Lexi Thompson. And you know, you don't want to, you know, she started showing back up. I've only been out there the last two months since I've been back from Aspen and she's been out there three or four times but getting lessons on the driving range and I haven't wanted to interrupt her. So I was waiting for a time and sure enough, this morning I drove out to the driving range. She was coming off, her cart was right next to mine and I said boom, boom, boom. She said, yeah, I remember seeing you around, you know. So she not only agreed to get on the podcast, but gave me her, her manager. And it turned, I looked him up and he's, he's a manage, but he's got a management company where he's got a lot of the men, top, top men golfers. So we're going to see about getting him and then he would be an entree into some of those other golfers. But we see them out at, we see some of those out of Trump anyway. But yeah, it's fun to dial in because when you get someone who has high achievement, you know, that was not an accident, you know, and if you see someone go back to link in and you see that in the business world they've got lots of people following them, that's not probably not going to be an accident. And it's probably going to be even though there's going to be some people that have just get it through personality and nonsense is probably the people that have, the followers have something to say, you know, and they're the ones who kind of earn the right to have you pay attention to them. So as you go, what would you advise people? There's one thing to get all this noise, but how do you now create that, turn that the podcast, the podcast and the LinkedIn and the social media into what suggestions have you found that are ideas to work with and turning this into sales funnels, you know, to get people. Actually you referred to it earlier like that you had lots of followers, but they not necessarily was turning into phone calls about the business. So how do you recommend people that are podcasters with you or you know, what you've learned from how to engage people with your posts that would cause them to have an interest in coming over to your business?

Yeah. So our belief is that we just want to the the ideal buyers. We just want them to start to know like and trust us. And if we can do that, then ideally when they come around to wanting to buy a thing, they're going to come to us. But the way we can speed up that process is by we have 80% of the content. Just get them to know like and trust us. Don't really ask for anything. And then with 20% or maybe just 10%, we are very clear about the thing we sell.

Yeah.

Now if you think about my LinkedIn presence, because I don't have that third part, I have the first two. I have the thing I'm passionate about, I have the thing I'm doing every day, but I don't have the thing that we sell because I'm talking about remote work. But we sell podcasts. So I am getting people to know like and trust me, but I'm not really telling them enough about what we do. And so what I should be doing and what I will be doing soon is maybe one post a week or one post every two weeks is going to be like a case study with how we grew a client's podcast, for example. So that's what I'm going to start doing on LinkedIn for my podcast. What I do is I've just been four years every. Well, with bi weekly. Now it's weekly. I just. The episode is like pure. Like there's no ads or the content is not about fame at all. It's about B2B entrepreneurs, B2B marketers. Then I do mention fame in the intro and outro that I do. And so anybody listening to an episode is going to be aware of what fame does.

Yeah.

So it's just this balance of getting people to know like and trust you by giving them information that helps them. But then for a small portion of that, we have to tell them how we make money and what they can do to work with us.

Yeah, you have to find a Way to get that in there. You don't have to be annoying about it, but you do have to be definite that you're in business, right?

Exactly. And if anybody likes the content, they should also be happy to engage with that or consider that because they must know that the content's only there because someone's paying money somewhere, you know, and so if people truly love your content, then they're going to want to do business with you.

Now I'm going to give you a, a moment to just tell people why they should have a. If they don't have a podcast, they ought to think about a podcast.

I'll tell a story for this. I in, in that four year period of like doing online marketing, I had this business and it was kind of like a tech startup thing. And every day I would release a 10 minute or 5 to 10 minute solo episode of like what I was doing while I was building. I'd actually batch record them at the weekend and then release one every day. And the business didn't end up working that well. But the podcast, it was called Zero to 4 Million Startups Bootstrap Journey to a 7 Figure Exit or something. And so it got a decent amount of traction. Actually I was quite happy with it. And what surprised me was that the people that were listeners how like, bought in to the journey and how much they, they liked me or could be influenced by me. And that was because I was in their ears every morning. And so we actually had people. One guy specifically, I can't remember his name but was like trying to give us money, was trying to invest in the startup, even though it's a rubbish idea. And so that's the power of the intimate connection that can be generated through the audio, video medium. And so in my opinion, every B2B business should take one person. Could be CEO, could be head of sales, could be head of customer success, that we just need everybody in the market to get to know like, and trust them. And it starts with social and then we can add that email bit in the middle that's kind of optional. But the bottom part, the part where you really get people to know like, and trust you is the, the podcast.

And I wonder if you're a, like a New York Stock Exchange company, you know, really, you know, Fortune 500 company, you wonder if putting a human face, you know, you have the CEO turns over every five years usually there you wonder who that face should be. But you, you know, you do feel like if there was a, you know, some personality come out there, it'd be easy for. Easier for people to identify with there, you know, but the question comes like, who should that be?

Yeah, exactly. It's. It doesn't have to be this. Yeah, it could be. The founder doesn't have to be someone that has passion for the subject matter and has relatively good communication skills.

Yeah. When you think of yourself as having good people skills, how do you think that manifests itself? You know, how. How would you describe that to someone who is autistic and they. They have no idea what people skills are?

I think it's understanding how someone feels and then tailoring your communication to, I want to say, maximize the good feelings. I think that's the core of my skill that I think is understanding where they are and then communicating to ideally make them feel better. And so there's two things there. A is like, understanding how someone feels, and then B, it's selecting the vibrations or the words you say to ideally change how they feel.

It has to do with what. What I'm hearing you say there is the ability to connect with people in a positive way. Would that. Would that. Would that be safe?

Yeah, I think that's probably a more concise way of saying. Yeah.

Well, I don't know. I had the benefit of following you anyway. So, Tom, you've watched our podcast grow up over the last a few years. What do you. What do you. What kind of advice can you give me?

I think I like your hosting skills. I don't think anything needs to be changed there. Like, conversational, like, not too. Not scripted at all, really. I think you. You have, like, some idea of what you want to talk about, but then you. You roll around it. So I don't think we need to change anything on the hosting scales. And I actually maybe don't think we would change anything with the podcast. Like, we have the guest. You're, like, super clear on who the ideal guest is.

Yeah.

I think the next step is to, like, take one of the social channels and try and blow up organically.

Yeah.

Because it helps. It will help with other objectives. It will help grow the podcast. Yeah. And so then we have to think about which one it would be. And maybe we spoke about this before, but I've selected LinkedIn and Twitter because I don't think I'm that charismatic or that good at on video. So they're like written platforms, basically. I think you're more charismatic and probably better on video, and so that opens up other options. For example, TikTok, Instagram. Have you. Have you thought about if you could only do one platform, which one you would do?

No. And I don't know where my target market audience would be the most in terms of entrepreneurs or leaders, high achievers, I don't know where they would be. But now we have the ex president on TikTok and so I guess everything is fair game.

You're totally right. That's the other very important part. It's like where's the highest density of the ideal customers? Listeners.

Right.

And yeah, I think it's interesting for you. It depends on the age. I think they're like the entrepreneurs on all platforms and maybe in relatively similar densities, but they just split out by age. And maybe the oldest is on Twitter and then LinkedIn and then these video ones will be younger. So it depends kind of which what's.

The ideal age and do you recommend focusing in on one?

You know, 100%? Like the, the benefits of getting it right are so massive that diverting your focus to try and get multiple to work just doesn't. Just makes zero sense. Bearing in mind that they're so different. Like even Twitter and LinkedIn. The post I did on Monday now is on like 10 million impressions. It would get like 1,000 impressions on Twitter now. Admittedly I have a lot less followers over there, but they're so different. And so if you take those two things into account, like the upside of getting one working is incredible and each platform is so different, the output of that is that it just doesn't make any sense to divert efforts and focus to try and get a multiple to work.

How would you give a quick summary? We've got to go. But a quick way for people to understand the difference between other than TikTok younger. But of course we have the YouTube shorts as well. What? You know, rather than taking one video and post it, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and just see which one takes off. I mean, should you run an experiment like that yourself and see which style you like to work in, which platform it works better on or how. What, what's the different uniqueness in these platforms?

There's one easy ev distinction which is the written first platforms versus the video first platforms. So that's Twitter and LinkedIn are written first. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and I don't even count Facebook. I don't think that's worthwhile. They're live video first and so that's easy. That's easy distinction to make.

Yeah.

But then to understand which one you should focus on or the difference between any of those, you just literally have to test it and if you post daily to all the video ones or both daily to LinkedIn and Twitter, within a couple of weeks, you'll have a good understanding.

Yeah, I think one way to go about it is to run your own test and just see number one, what do you enjoy doing the written or the video? And also put it out there and just see where, where the response is, you know, like if you're musical group, you know, you take your act on the road and see where you get the response, you know. So, Tom, thanks so much for all of this. Any. I always like to give my guests the last word. So what would you say? Any last thing thought for people that want to do something big with their life and maybe, maybe they've already started, maybe they're thinking about it. Any last word to pass on to them?

Something that's always worked for me is that try to think less before taking an action. Like the real value of or like the whole thing. Whatever you're planning on doing is going to be a big learning process and you only start learning when you start doing stuff. So I would do less planning and more doing because that just speeds up the learning.

Excellent. Well, thanks so much, Tom. Let's look forward to seeing how your journey unfolds. I know it's going to be, you know, you've already said growth is one of your core values and it needs to be for all of us because if you're not growing, you're dying. And so it's going to be fun to see you grow because you've. You set the pattern in motion. The success pattern in motion is just a matter of staying on track. And I think your dog has got a lot of lives left to go. So I think you're set up for success for a long time, man.

As long as Bear is alive and is being photographed on LinkedIn, then it's going to be fine. Larry, I want to thank you so much for having me on again. It's an honor.

You're very, very welcome. And thank you for all, all you and your staff do to make these programs work. Look forward to the next time. Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Commit to your personal and professional evolution with our free training video. It's designed not just as an educational session, but as a transformative journey for those bold enough to aim for the stars. This isn't just any webinar. It's a roadmap to achieving the extraordinary. It's tailored for those who dare to dream big. And yes, it is completely free. Join us in a network of ambitious professionals ready to take their careers to new heights. Secure your spot now@whitelonwinning.com and let's unlock your potential together. Thanks for being part of this community.