Episode 318: Keep Learning How to Think Strategically with Justin Croxton, Founder of Propellant ...

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm here talking with Justin Croxton, CEO and founder of Propellant Media, one of the fastest growing companies in the country, based out of Atlanta, Georgia. And Justin, thanks for sharing. And would you explain to me what you said, your advice your father gave you about keep learning about how to think strategically. What does that mean to you?

You know, what it means to me is that when any situation that you're in, whether you're trying to figure out a problem, come up with a solution, thinking about a new idea or a new venture, there is strategy in pretty much everything that you do as a human being, all your decision making, everything, and the way that you develop strategy is both through experience as well as education. And for me, what that means to me is I need to continuously put myself in these uncomfortable situations while leveraging the experience that I've had thus far to figure out those new problems and come up with new solutions. One of the things a lot of folks will tell me is like, you know, we'll talk to some folks that might be a little older, you know, someone might be in their 50s or 60s and say, oh, I don't get technology. I don't know how to turn on this iPhone, or I don't know how to send this text message or, you know, and I tell folks, you know, it's an excuse. It's an absolute excuse. You know, we all have the capacity to take on more complex situation, more complex problems by just putting ourselves out there, by just, you know, even if it's just like, man, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to ask this person how to do it or I'm going to figure this out. And then once I have that skillset, I can keep building on top of that. And you know, that that's, that's kind of my mantra. That's what I've learned from what my, what my dad told me and even sort of the tools that my mother gives me. And so, and I say that to say, I know technology can be a little daunting for a lot of folks, but it can't be excuse to paralyze you into not being able to move forward with certain opportunities. It's more of a microcosm of the bigger point that I wanted to make there.

But when you think strategically, it's got to be beyond just learning new things.

I would say so. I mean, it can't just be learning new things. It's. How do I say this? Putting yourself into those uncomfortable positions and being willing to. To also do new things as well as. I don't say perfect some of the older things that you're doing, but, you know, just kind of put yourself out there as well with some new experiences, whether it be starting a new business or anything of that nature.

Well, another thing, what it suggests to me is as you go through life and problems come up, don't just think about solving the problem, the situation in front of you. Learn how to think past that so you can do things to make sure that problem never comes up again or is highly unlikely to come up again. Basically like, I'm not going to let this happen to me again. So you're solving one problem and. But you're solving the. You're dealing with it and steering around and making it hard for it to come up and be something you have to deal with down the road. Right.

And you can deal with it faster now, too. Wow.

That's right. Yeah. You can recognize the problem of the situation. And it might not appear to other people that it's the same thing, but it is the same thing. You know, you kind of thought it through. And when you're building a company, talk about how your growth has compounded and what that has meant for you in terms of adding new people, adding, you know, your, you know, expanding office space.

Yeah, we're. I mean, what's. What's really been fortunate for us is, you know, there's so many digital ad agencies out there. So many. And we try to differentiate ourselves as a geofencing marketing expert, if you will. You know, OTT advertising. For those who don't know, geofencing is a form of digital advertising. It gives you the ability to serve ads to people in very precise areas. And so the greatest example I can give is if a car dealership, car dealership doesn't want to advertise to everyone that's in Atlanta. They want to target people that they know are in market looking to buy a car. And so their best targets would actually be their competitors. So we can build a virtual fence around other car dealerships and serve ads to the customers that are walking inside of those other dealerships effectively. And so for us, we were able to differentiate ourselves as that Market leader, and really, the rest has been history. That's really been our lane. But we've also done a lot of omnichannel advertising, so we do adwords, Facebook advertising, those kinds of things. And that sort of unique selling proposition, you know, has really afforded us the opportunity to grow the way that we have. I mean, we're, you know, literally right now in the process of hiring about five people. We got some more hirings that's coming down the pipe over the next three months as well. And it's been. It's. It's been good. It's. We've. I'll just say we've been fortunate. And you. We try. We just try not to take that growth for granted. And, you know, like we've always said, think strategically of what could be coming down the pipe, of things that we have to look out for.

So how do you differentiate yourself, and how do you stay on the attack with your prospecting and your marketing?

Yeah, good question. So the one thing has been with geofencing, that's how we differentiated ourselves initially. But what we've also noticed is that you can't just, like, we were at one point, 100% geofencing, and then we started to transition into, yeah, we lead with geofencing, but we do these other things, being able to sort of tell that story in somewhat of a different way so that we're not losing market position with the geofencing and the programmatic display and the OTT advertising that we do for many of our clients. And so the way that we've been able to, and what I tell a lot of folks, from a growth standpoint, number one, we practice what we preach. We don't tell clients that you should do this form of advertising. This. We do it ourselves. And a lot of folks will say, oh, you know, I'm not ready to spend 1,000 or $5,000 a month in advertising or marketing. And I'm like, you need to build a sustainable business model that is recurring. And I understand that, you know, for some people, 5,000 would be too much. Some people. Other people say, well, 50,000 is too much, and 25 is really not that bad. But you got to have a marketing plan. And we've had a marketing plan for ourselves, and, you know, we've invested in the same strategies that we do for our clients. We do it for ourselves. So that's really been one of the biggest things. We've also built out an inbound. An inbound sales pipeline and also a sales team that handles that inbound and we're still working on an outbound process as well. And so, you know, we're trying to think through all the different ways that we can traditionally as well as non traditionally acquire customers and doing away where we're just trying to add value to those folks and just slowly build those relationships over time.

So what has been the biggest difference maker for the growth of your company other than the product? What has given you the edge so you can stand out?

I mean, I'll say two things. Number one, without a doubt, above anything else has been the team and our people. It sounds wonky, but when you think about strategy, there's like four or four different components. There's strategy, there's execution, there's cash flow, and then there's also your people. People matters more than anything else. Because if you don't get the right people who can think through strategy execute, then you won't be able to get the cash flows that you need to reinvest into the company. And I genuinely believe that the culture, the environment and the people that we've brought on board to the company has really helped us afford us the opportunity to grow the way that we have. That's been sort of, I'll call it the secret sauce. But that's been a big deal for us. I mean, there's a number of other things that we've done. And I know I said this before, but I just got to reiterate this. We practice what we preach. We do our own form of marketing for ourselves, for everyone that's out there. If you, I mean, just to give you a stylized example, if you're listening, if you go to www.propellant.media, you will see it's a website that's not just solely built to say, hey, I'm a digital advertising company. Here are my services. Let me know if you want to have a conversation. It's built. The website itself is built as a tool to educate the market as well as capture your contact information, send emails to you, educate you, provide many different touch points for you to actually engage with. Our internal team, you know, I can't tell you how many clients, let alone other agencies that just have a simple website. And it just makes it very difficult for people to actually want to engage with you. And so that's really been our secret sauce. And we also just try to educate the market as much as we can. And that's also afforded us the opportunity to be a thought leader in the work that we do.

What is the biggest mistake people make in setting up Their company website. You know, you try and make it pretty, you try and make good image and you try and have some things where they build credibility with, you know, your background and things like that. Get the email capture type thing, offer a free handout or a book and stuff like that. Maybe, but how do you. And then some of them will have a blog. You know, you have a blog, you have free information and what for a business, what's important that for them to do?

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to whiteellanwinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

I think a lot of folks try to put up this corporate. It's two things. The first thing I'll just say, because it's top of mind, is don't try not to just build a website that's thin on content. Meaning don't just say, this is my business, these are my services. Here's a light description of my services, here's my contact information. Let me know if you have questions when you go to our site. It does feel big, it feels long. There's a lot of content, it's very easy to get lost. And some people would even go as far as to say that it's so long that it's hurting our conversion rates. I would beg to differ. We probably get about 700 to 1,000 leads a month, give or take. And a lot of it is, you know, you have to think about the complexity of your business. I mean, if it's E commerce, people still want to learn about the product. They need to know, you know, the background of the product, the images, the video of the product. Like people are still doing research, they're looking at their other competitors. So, you know, building a well organized site that has great information and gets a lot of those big questions answers is a big deal. And so for us, like, you know, and I tell a lot of people, you know, don't feel like adding more text and breaking it out so that it still looks compelling is a bad thing. I mean, you don't want like a, you know, a 3,000 page landing page per se. I'm not suggesting that, but having more content is only going to benefit you from an SEO perspective, but is also going to benefit the customers who go to your site too. As long as it's organized in a way that tells a compelling story. That's the first thing. The second, a lot of folks try to be sort of put kind of be behind this corporate veil of their site. So they don't want to put their videos or they don't want to put more things that has video composed. I think it's a huge mistake. Ultimately people do business with people. They don't do business with websites, they don't do business with corporations. And so if you're able to show more video, more individuals who can kind of tell that story of who you are and what you do. Like for us, at first I was nervous. I didn't want to put my own video or video of me on the site. But I said screw it, you got to, you got to be able to, you know, show that sense of personality, be personable with the folks who do go to your website and if you do that, they're going to be way more compelled to do business with you versus someone where they just kind of read their site and you know, got some context on what they provide and you know, that's about it. I tell you, just having video makes the biggest difference in the world. And I would totally suggest that to anyone that's out there and what kind.

Of videos you've talked about. The basically introducing yourself. And I'm sure these are short clips because people have short attention spans, but introducing the people involved, talking about the services are those kind of things.

Yeah, what I tell folks a good exercise is just think about like those frequently asked questions that people have. I'll take, you know, I'll take for example, you know, the top 20 questions that someone may have, like I have an ebook. We haven't actually have an ebook on that, but I'll do a video and actually speak to it. We even have an explainer video on our site that's more graphic but it's still a video. I have, we, we have like an hour long webinar that we did. We have like a ton of webinars, but we have one in particular that we use for a lot of our lead gen and so give people options like you don't really always know what's going to convert but you know, it's a little bit between an art and a science. You know, test a few things out and I think that's the last thing. You also want to test stuff because you just never know. But you got to do something, you got to have some video. And it can be short form, it can be just introducing yourself. It could be FAQs. If you do those things, it's going to break down that corporate veil and make someone, put someone in a position where, you know what? I kind of like what this guy is saying. I don't really know. I don't feel like I built a connection with the other company, but at least I know who's behind this company. Let me reach out to them and see what they're about. You're going to win more times than not if you, if you take that approach.

And what, how, how did you figure this out?

You know, it kind of gets back to what I was saying about testing. You literally just have to keep testing. You know, my mom always says scare money doesn't make money. And that holds true when it comes to taking risks, taking chances and testing new things out. I didn't know that. I didn't. I mean, I had a feeling, I had an idea that, you know, an hour long webinar would still be compelling to certain folks. But once I started getting, you know, emails from people that, hey, I saw your webinar on geofencing. I was trying to learn about it. Didn't find anywhere else, but this webinar was perfect. Now I know about it. I want to implement that for my car dealership. Can you let me know a little bit more about it, that kind of thing. Then, you know, I kind of knew we were onto something. And then we doubled down and tripled down on that approach. We started doing more videos and, you know, doing more ebooks and more videos. But you only know that by testing it. If you don't test it, then you won't know it. It's kind of like the public speaking. You got to put yourself out there. So I didn't know it, but I did know that there was an opportunity. And I also had a sense that, you know, like people do business with people ultimately and you know, that's, that's sort of my mantra. And if you take that approach, you know, hopefully we'll win more times than not.

What excites you about your company and your role and your future right now? What are the things that's got you the most excited?

It's sort of like a matrix, sort of like a puzzle where. When I went to business school, I wasn't sure if I was going to be an entrepreneur per se, or if I was going to work for a digital agency or what the path would be. But what excites me is that I get to leverage the MBA that I did get. And you don't have to have an MBA in order to be successful in any business, let alone digital advertising. But what excites me is I do get a chance to leverage all the skills that I gain on top of the soft skills with getting my mba and be able to think about all the different problems that we're solving at Propellant Media, both for clients as well as internally. Whether it be how do we improve cash flows, turning turnaround times for AR from 65 days to 30 days to 15 days, those kinds of things to how do you develop talent within your team? If one or two people may not have the same capacity for talent that someone else on your team may have, how do you grow and groom those individuals to thinking about the growth that we've had in programmatic and geofencing, but then solving for how to grow quickly in other areas areas and what that could look like and how to develop or build out an outbound sales function. Like, I'm decent at sales, but I don't know the process and the path. So we hired a company, but we're partnering on how to build that out successfully. And so for us, it's really been thinking through, you know, all those, you know, you know, not having the answer for everything, but knowing that the new things that we're testing and that we're doing is actually making a difference. Like we're seeing our revenues grow every single year. We made the Inc. 5000 last year, just made it this year again. And it's material, material impact. And just knowing that I'm never working on the same thing every single day, it's something that's different. I'm constantly learning is very gratifying.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch, go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.