INBOUND 2016: George Thomas - "How to be World-Class at HubSpot in 60 Days"

How's everybody doing today?

Good.

Good, good, good, good. So we're going to talk about how to be world class HubSpot in 60 days. How many of you want to be world class HubSpot by show of hands? Yeah, you're in the right space. So here's the thing. My name is George B. Thomas. I am a HubSpot accredited trainer. I'm one of about 40 people on the planet that have that title. Also by this deck you can see that I have a disease. It's called orangitis bornsritis. You might be wondering what the heck is that? Well, it's his addiction to get these little orange certifications that you see on the screen.

I'll be okay. We don't need to call ems.

If I say anything educational or entertaining, make sure you hit it up on the Twitters. George B. Thomas. If you want to connect with me.

On a deeper level, you can see.

Me on Facebook, Mr. GeorgeB Thomas, or on Snapchat. Yes, I am in old court and rock Snapchat.

George B. Thomas.

Okay, so how would you define being world class? Or a better way to ask this might be, what words would you associate when you think of world class?

Go. Champion.

Champion. What else? Master.

Leader.

Yeah, all of these. I would agree. And let me ask you what those words that we're thinking about and with the idea of being world class, why show hands? Complimenting what you say that it's hard to be a champion, that it's hard to be world class by show hands. Interesting. Now, of course we're marketers, we're sales folks and we'd love to get data points. So we have to ask the entire audience, since there wasn't 100% hands raised in the air, how many think world class is easy? Go ahead and raise your hand, Dennis, if you can either raise your hand or thought about raising your hand, you are overachievers. You probably know all of what I'm going to say in this deck, but we still love you. Now we're going to talk about five keys to success on being world class with this thing that is HubSpot. The first thing we're going to talk about is that you should train your brain with a plan so you can't go on the Internet all willy nilly.

And think that you're going to be.

Able to learn what you need to learn to make your business successful. And one of the questions that I get most often is, George, where should I start? Like, what's the beginning point? And as you can see, by the slide. It's not like brain surgery, but you have to start with your education. You see, until you know what you.

Don'T know, you can't learn the things that you don't know.

And if that didn't make any sense, it might later. But you can get the deck by emailing me like I said earlier. So HubSpot Academy, which by the way, how many people check out HubSpot Academy by show of hands, it's very interesting. HubSpot Academy, their tagline is show the whole world that you mean business. By a show of hands, how many of you showed the world that you need business? So that's interesting and slightly disappointing, but I think that you guys already maybe know where I'm going with this. Because if we are trying to show the world that we need business and we open up a random set of nine protos, we see that not everybody has orangitis, There's a huge lack of certifications and what that equals is there's a huge lack of education to the tactics and strategies and methodologies that we should be using to make our businesses to make ourselves successful. Correct? No, no, no. Correct.

Thank you.

All right, so to be world class, you need to have a roadmap. And maybe that's where the issue is. Maybe we just didn't have a map that we could journey down to become a world class HubSpot. So today what we want to do is we want to fix that. We want you to be able to see this is exactly what I should do.

So the.

So if you're a marketer in the room, raise your hands.

Awesome. Awesome.

Good. This is your roadmap. These are the five certifications that after you get done with inbound that you should go back to your office and you should get. You should be focused on being inbound. Certified marketing certified email certified, contextual certified. Because smart marketing is the future. But we'll talk about that later today and the newly released content marketing. Look folks, 21 hours education and you're well on your way to being world class at this thing we call HubSpot. Now, how many people by a show of hands are sales professionals in this room? And that is disappointing as well. You see, we always want to moan and groan about how there's these silos and sales don't know what marketing is doing. Marketing doesn't know what sales are doing. Until we get sales into marketing conferences and marketers into sales conferences, we'll still have the same conversation. But since you're a marketer and you probably have a sales team, by the way, I. How many of you have a sales team?

Thank you.

See, you already have this coming out of my mouth.

Thank you.

19.5 hours. You should take this back to your sales team. These are the certifications. Two of the certifications are actually marketing certifications because your sales team shouldn't be banned from the HubSpot platform. They should be able to see the lead intelligence and all the workloads and everything that could actually dramatically change their lives by being a HubSpot superstar, even.

Though they're a salesperson. Now, what I want you to also.

Realize here is that we talked about a marketing roadmap, and we've talked about a sales roadmap, and this session is how to be world class at HubSpot, not how to be a marketer in HubSpot, not how to be sales at HubSpot. And so this right here is really the roadmap that you're looking for. These are the nine certifications that if you take the 42.5 hours to get, you will be world class at this.

Thing we call HubSpot.

And the reason that you want to be world class at HubSpot is not just to simply go to the party and say, hey, I'm here at HubSpot, it's because it will dramatically change the way that you'll be able to do business.

Now, how many of you are ready to get certified? How many of you are ready to get certified in either of These certifications? These 9 certifications by show of hands? And that's what should happen. And you can Tweet out to Arkkillins. George B. Thomas told me to get certified at Inbound 16 because that would be awesome. Now the next thing we need to do is we need to be able to actually build a better mousetrap. And what do I mean by building a better mousetrap? It's because we need to save time, we need to be organized, and we also need to build a better process. Build a better process. This is going to be huge for some of the people in the room. But the first thing that I'll talk about is how HubSpot, when they designed the software, did not put folder icons in there because the designers and developers actually liked the look of folder icons. You have folder icons inside of your landing pages, your emails and your lists because they want you to stay organized. Because when you need to clone or delete or adjust something that you're doing with your marketing, it shouldn't take you 7, 5, or 20 minutes to do that. So what you need to do is start to save time by creating these folder structures inside of HubSpot. See, HubSpot, they give you a default program and it's up to you to actually customize it so that you can save time and be the best inside the software. The other thing is that you need to be organized by a show of hands and I really need you to be honest on this. How many of you have file managers that look like the top one where images and documents and everything is scattered? Yes, thank you for being honest. There are like three honest people in the room and now the rest raised their hand. It should be the bottom. You should have a folder structure where you can find CTA images, email images, downloadable documents. You see, because when you need to find that little photo for your member of the email that you're sending out, it shouldn't take you 15 minutes to find that photo. You've got better things to do. For me, it's probably called Golf. Alright, so a world class process. Call to actions. Landing pages. Thank you Pages, Forms by a show of hands.

How many people would agree?

Yes, these are the recipe items for a lead conversion process and I want you to stick your hand up and keep it up. If this is the way that you actually build them, you will go into Photoshop. Yes. You will build a call to Action. Some of you might even use PowerPoint. I'm not going to judge. It's all good. And then you go to your process of making things. Unfortunately, what happens is that you get into your call to action and HubSpot immediately yells @ you and says, hey, homeboy or homegirl, where do you want me to actually link to? And you're like, oh my gosh, I forgot, I need a landing page. And so you leave the Call to Action tool and you go over to the landing page tool and you start building this super awesome landing page, only to get yelled at by HubSpot again, saying, hey, it's awesome and everything that you're building this landing page, but what form do you want to associate with it? And you're like, oh crap, I forgot to build a form. And so you jump out of the landing page tool and you go build your form. And then you said, I got this HubSpot, I'm in it to win it now. And you go back only for HubSpot to yell @ you again and say, that's awesome, dude, you got your form, but where's your thank you page? And you're like, oh. Only to eventually after going in and out of tons of HubSpot tools, do you realize that you're back at the call to action tool with everything that you need? And so, folks, folks, if you do nothing else after this talk, when you go back to your offices, build the form first, then the thank you page, then the landing page, and then the call to action. You see, that's the better process because you don't jump in and out of tools. You don't waste time. You're more streamlined inside of HubSpot. Don't feel bad because I know a lot of you raised your hand that this is what you do. I did this for a year and a half before I had the eureka moment of like, wow, I'm done. Let's figure out a better way. Number three, create content that drives revenue. So we have a little bit of an issue at the sales line, because usually when we bring on a new client, we get things like this. Anybody know what this is? What is this? Just say the word. It's on the label. Fluff. Yes. It's very simple. It's just fluff. And it's the sugary stuff that doesn't work. And it really doesn't work in your content marketing or your inbound strategy as well. See, my grandpa taught me a saying a long time ago. And we're going to play a little game with the audience. I'm going to put this next slide up and you're going to tell me, have you ever played that game where, like, you see pictures and you got to see what it says? You're going to tell me what this next slide says. Everybody ready? And you just yell it out together now. Say it together. That's right. And if you put fluff into your HubSpot portal, you're not going to drive any revenue at the other end because people just don't care. Look, I have a buddy here. He's actually part of the sales line team, so don't make too much fun of him. But before he engaged the team and before we started training him on how to write content that drives revenue, we had articles like this, which is Worst foods for sleep. Now that's keyword rich people. Not really. Not really at all. But when he did this article and he didn't really get the results that he wanted to get, he went back to the drawing board and came up with this article, best foods for sleep. Right. Which is way better. And he actually kind of went with micro content, but not on purpose for the second article. And then he thought. And he Said, you know, this just isn't working. I think I've got an idea. And he wrote an article like this, Celebrities that have sleep issues. Now, I don't really care if celebrities have sleep issues, but the fact that Shaquille o' Neal looks like Porky Pig in this picture is awesome. Absolutely awesome. So we give two thumbs down to content that is considered to be fluff. And so with that, we actually came up with a system that we help people generate content that drives revenue and called the content Matrix. And we can't talk about all of it today, but today we are going to talk about the big five. These are the five things that you should be talking about on your website yesterday or last month or, I don't know, maybe two years ago, because Marcus Sheridan has been preaching this around the world for years now to do something. I don't just want to stand up here and say, this is what you should do. I want to tell you why you should do it. It's because you, the consumer, are searching this way and you're trying to sell to people just like yourself, even though you might not have realized that yet. So the first thing that we need to talk about is cost, okay? And everybody wants to say that they can't talk about cost. And I'm not saying that we talk about specifics, but I'm talking about that we talk in generalities, okay? And if people. You are willing to actually address this thing, that is the cost conversation, that then you will have great rewards. There's a company that I want to show you. This is prolessons. They do online guitar lessons. And because they were able to address this conversation and write an article, how much do guitar lessons cost? And because they use a software called HubSpot, we're able to see that they rank for 36 plus keywords. Things like, how much do guitar lessons cost? Cost of guitar lessons, guitars, all sorts of keywords. And. And those keywords actually equal visitors. Which visitors equal what? Leads, man, you're jumping the gate. Leads, Leads. Enter customers. And customers equal revenue, right? And so if you are willing to take the time to address this thing that is cost, you will see the rewards where you'll generate revenue. The second thing of the big five is best. Look, I know you guys really well. When you were on the plane or before the plane ride to Boston, you were searching best place to get coffee, Boston, because you already knew the hangover that you would have the second day of inbound. You were also probably searching best hotels in Boston, best places to Eat. Which by the way, Yankee lobster, Lobster, Mac and cheese. I need a moment, but we'll continue on. You gotta search for best. And when you address this conversation that is about best. You see here a company called Moxie, Best ways to get rid of mice. Because by show of hand, who wants to get rid of mice? Pretty much the whole room. You don't even have to raise your hand. But if you do that, you see that we have over 3,000 visitors. And visitors turn into what? And leads turn into what? And customers drive. Nice. The third thing of the big five that you want to talk about is versus you see, because we all like a battle. Ford versus Chevy, iPhone versus Android, Mac versus PC, always Mac and iPhone, just so you guys know. But anyway, if you're willing to address that question that the searchers that us are actually asking, like river pools here. Did you see solid vinyl versus mesh in ground winter pool covers? Which is better? Heck, I'm not even the pay grade to own a pool, but when I do own a pool, I'm going to know which cover I should get for my pool. Because they've addressed this question. Because they've addressed this, you can see that they have over 88,000 visits. Visits lead into what? Leads lead into what? And customers equal. And can I ask you real quick, what are we all in this room to do? Thank you, but you didn't sound too convincing. So we also need to talk about problems. See the problem with the thing that we sell or the service that we provide because and right when we're to that point that we think we're ready to buy something, we always go into this thing and say, hmm, I might be screwing up. So let me just see the flip side of what's happening here. And so we'll search the problems of things. And so this company, Smarter Finance usa, they were willing to address the problems with. What you see here is equipment leasing rates. This is what they do, equipment leasing rates. And because they addressed that conversation on the website, they. You can see that they get over 2,000 visits. You see the green organic growth that we all want and leads into customers, customers into beautiful. Fourth thing that we need to do to be successful or world class in HubSpot is that the tools that we use really matter. They really, really matter. So the first tool that we're going to talk about and you're going to hear a lot about is the productivity tools and more importantly is the projects tool. So now inside of HubSpot you can actually associate tasks, due dates, descriptions right inside Your portal of all of your marketing actions. What does that mean? It means that when HubSpot used to say they're all in one marketing software, now they truly are an all in one marketing software. You don't need to jump out into Basecamp. You don't need to go over to teamworks. You can manage all of your blog or any editorial calendar right inside of the projects tool. I would tell you as a user for a long time now of the projects tool. You must check it out, you must try it. And if you're wondering, can I do this thing like webinars or trade shows, they already have baked in predefined projects that you can just push a button and all the steps to your success are right in there. The second tool that we need to. Oh, hang on. There is also, if you go to this website here, which is thesalesline.com world class, you can fill out a little form and we'll actually send a how to be world class project right inside your portal for you so you can follow the steps of what you're learning in this keynote. That's how much we love you. The next tool that we should use is social media. One of the things that I find very interesting when we get new clients is the, the hardness, the effort that we have to put forth to pry the fingers off of tools like hootsuite and buffer that social that people love to use for social media. You should be using the HubSpot tool for your social media efforts because at the end of the day you can do this, which is report on the ROI of the time spent inside of those tools, knowing is Facebook giving me more than Twitter? Is Twitter truly dying for my business or is it still effective or, or Google? I love the shaking of the head of Twitter's dying. That's awesome. Don't say that. The next thing that we're going to talk about is workflows by a show of hands because I'm super curious how many of you are in workflows on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis. Hate the thought of ever going into workflows. And stay away from a plague. Yes. Okay, that's. Yes, that's what I thought. So you have to get into workflows. HubSpot is making it really easy to use workflows. They're, they're doing some neat things with workflows. But what everybody needs to understand that this can do a lot of the heavy lifting for your marketing automation, for your lead nurturing for anything that you're going to do with your contacts inside of HubSpot. So embrace it. Usually clients say, I'm afraid that I'm going to break something, which is weird because it's like you just a piece of software. And the other one is, I'm afraid I'm going to email somebody 500 times the same message, which hopefully you don't do that, but usually that can happen. So just dive in there and get into it. Now, last but not least, how many of you right now, by a show of hands, are using smart content on your website? Okay, so there was this thing a while ago called mobilegeddon where people didn't want to actually have their websites mobile optimized. And we're sort of in a playground where smart content is getting to that level, folks, One of the things you'll hear over and over again is that we need to have the right conversation with the right people at the right time. And the best way to do that is actually serve up content that is for that person's needs. So if you want to actually have a call to action or a form or a piece of content on your website that is targeted to dairy farmers in Nebraska that like orange shoes, you should be able to serve that content up. And if you use smart content, you can do that again. One of the certifications in the earlier bit was that we should have contextual certification. If you're a marketer, get that and start using smart content. Fifth one, embrace the culture. The orange culture. Now, you might be wondering why and how. And we're going to talk about that, but. And I'm going to turn around for a little bit of this because this person right here, who I don't believe is in the room is Stephanie Kit Stevens. And she is super awesome. She's a hubcast listener. And I want to show you why she's awesome. So if you go into Stephanie's Twitter stream, you will see that she has things like, my HubSpot bike is assembled and ready to ride. HubPartner HubSpot Partner Day 2006 Teen HubCast HubStars HubSpot first of all, that's a lot of hash. But the obvious point is, by show of hands, how many other people in the room have a HubSpot bike? So obviously she's a fan, right? She's embraced the culture. Also, when HubSpot updates workflows so you no longer have to switch back and forth between branches, she thinks that Jimmy Kimmel and Elmo should do a dance. So she's obviously excited about this and Then Arkhillns. But I've got inbound HubSpot partner sales, email, contextual and have passed the design cert, the test, the certifications. You see she's embracing that education that we talked about that is so important to your success for your business. And probably my favorite is ha ha ha. Which it probably didn't sound like that. She probably meant like ha ha ha or something weird, I don't know. But at HubSpot is my favorite words inbound 15, marketing, nerd, Instagram. So you might be like I don't even understand what this tweet is about. I figured that would be what you would think. And so we go to her Instagram and her favorite words are HubSpot people and inbound 15, right? So she has definitely embraced the culture that is HubSpot. So got a little quote from Stephanie and you can read along with me. This is what she said. I would argue that the culture is as much the reason I use and love HubSpot as the actual software is. The best software wouldn't survive without the culture and the best culture wouldn't survive without amazing software. But man, the HubSpot community is really incredible. The micro communities within that are also super cool. Agency partners, Hubcast listeners, hub stars, local hubs, designer developers, sales, content, etc. In addition to just users, the HubSpot team does a seriously kick butt job. By the way, I changed the words because she did not say kick butt in there but kick butt job. With training, certifications, events and support and social listening responding, I feel like at least 50% of the company probably knows who I am and that's seriously awesome feeling. They really care about people being useful with the platform and not just selling people on this. At first I don't think they had quite nailed the had this quite nailed down. But lately I think they're doing a really great job. And here's the thing, Stephanie Kit Steven isn't the only person who is embracing the culture. Another example is Holly Tate and I love the fact that there her Twitter cover is we staff the church. But if you look at the long relationship that she's had with HubSpot as well as we see thanks at HubSpot and Victoria Beantown for the fun swag. By the way, I need one of those water bottles. Those things are awesome. If there's a HubSpot employee in here, I'll be waiting at the door when I'm done. But past that we see that she says hey Halligan and Dharmesh by the way, who Knows who Brian Halligan and Dharmesh are. Okay, so she's tweeting the, you know, the people, the real people. Check out our epic HubSpot Jack o'. Lantern. Aren't you proud? Again, by show of hands, how many people have created a jack o' lantern of a sprocket? Like, not many of us. So there, there's a way that you can go beyond just, this is a piece of software and I'm going to use it because my boss told me to use it, or I'm going to use it because they told me to at some conference called Inbound. Like, you can go a different level in 2012. She even said HubSpot does it again. This ebook, mind blowing Twitter social roi. Oh, my gosh. Can it be possible any of these people on this screen, you could follow people like Bob Ruffalo, Darren Bernstein, Amelia Wilcox, which, by the way, is in the room and is awesome and a superstar. There's just a ton of folks that you can go on Twitter and look for things like InboundLearning, Hubspotting, Hubcast and follow these folks and know how to embrace the culture. But you might be wondering, George, okay, I'm down. I want a Jack O lantern and a HubSpot bike as well. How do I get there? And so I'm going to show you some ways that you can actually embrace this culture. The first one is that you can read the blogs. And this might start to sound a little bit like an infomercial here in a minute. I don't mean it to be, but it just. It's so good. It just keeps giving. HubSpot. They just keep giving to us. And so we obviously know that HubSpot has a marketing blog, correct? Show of hands, how many of you are reading the marketing blog? And that's super interesting because there's a lot more hands in this room. They also have a sales blog. And so we can see. Here's how you would subscribe to the sales blog. My question is, how many marketers in the room are actually reading the sales blog? And. And how many sales folks. Awesome. How many sales folks are reading the marketing blog? You see, again, it comes down to breaking down those silos and paying attention to both sides of the room. Because eventually it won't be sales and marketing. It'll just be revenue teams. But. But for a limited time only, folks. Just kidding. That's the infomercial jargon. You can also read the customer blog of HubSpot. How many people, by show of hands actually read the customer blog. Very disappointing. So we pay for software huge amounts of money. We want to know how to use it. We're not getting certifications and 95% of the room, when asked if they read the customer blog, don't raise their hand. We have fundamental breakdown in what's supposed to be happening to be world class at HubSpot. But we continue on and we realize if we're a designer or developer, are there any other nerdy creatives in the room with me? Yes, you are my brethren. Do we read the design and development blog for HubSpot? Yes. No. Maybe so. But it's out there, folks. Love yes. Raise the hand, keep it raised high. And then if you are a marketing agency, there's a marketing agency blog. You see, the idea is there is tons of information that we could be getting about this tool that we're supposed to be using to make ourselves successful. Are we doing it? Question really is, you ask yourself, are you doing it? And here's a whole new level of nerdiness and that is the product blog. Like you want to know what the developers are doing as they're doing it, then read about it and stay totally up to date on what your software is about to do or thinking about doing in the future. Be proactive, okay? The other way that you can embrace the culture is by doing events. And there are a bunch of different ways that you can actually do events. You could do events through going to again, academy.HubSpot.com and they have monthly webinars. There is a bank, a bank of pre recorded webinars that you can watch and learn from. But really a lot of us like to go to regular events. So for instance, we have training that you can get from HubSpot and you can go pay money and they will train you for a day. But maybe HubSpot isn't your flavor. You could reach out to some agency owners who do workshops. This actually happens to be Chris Handy, who is super duper awesome guy, thinkhandy.com and you can go and learn in two days how to do a complete funnel with your marketing. Or you could actually contact the sales line and go to thesaleslion.com hit, which stands for HubSpot Intensive Trainings where we would come out to your location for one, one and a half or two days intensive workshop where we talk about the inbound marketing strategy, the tactics, the user experience that you're portraying on your website and then give you anywhere from 7 to 14 pages of notes of things that you could do to make your business run better in the future. Okay, so there's tons of training. There's also events where we say we want to go to inbound and it's a one time a year thing, but what about a local event? So for instance, in Indianapolis there's inbound marketing Bar camp that you go to or you might even want to try something like Marketing Success, Sales and Success, Brew Masters, Impact Brand and Design. Put this event on earlier this year. You got to look for micro ways to get your education and events. HubSpot user group events. You could also go to those on a monthly or quarterly basis. Now, one of the ways that I really leveraged the inbound and HubSpot culture is I took it with me everywhere. Anytime I had downtime where I was driving somewhere, mountain climbing, which guys, I really don't do that much mountain climbing, but it sounded good. I take it with me. And there's six real ways that you can take HubSpot culture with you everywhere. These podcasts are pretty much inbound and and HubSpot specific podcasts. The first one up here is Inbound Agency Journey. That's if you're a marketing agency and you want to learn the tactics and things that will help you as an agency owner or employee, really rock it out with the clients. We've got Inbound Buzz, which is Moby Siddiq who happens to be in the room and is kick butt on his podcast with everything inbound. We also have HubSpot to go again. That's Chris Handy. These are 7 to 12 minute actionable tips that that you can take inside of HubSpot with all the tools Hub and Spoke, which is Adam and Zahn from Australia, which are in the back of the room. They are also awesome. Craig Bailey, Ian Jacobs, Hubshot and then Michael Reynolds and Abby Stearns, Spin Radio. So you see there's not a lack of being able to educate on the go. And guys, I will have to do this. I do have a favorite podcast, although all of these are my favorites and I listen to them all the time. There's also the Hubcast which you can actually take Marcus Sheridan and myself mountain climbing or boating or whatever you want to do. And we talk about inbound marketing strategies, methodologies, wish list items. We really are the voice of any hubspotters that just want to kind of moan and groan or celebrate the fact of what they've done inside of HubSpot. So that folks, is five ways that you can be successful. This thing called HubSpot. And I said I would share five with you. But I'm curious how many of you would actually like a super secret bonus tip by show of hands? So guys, I don't want to stand up here and you say, hey, that was a great talk and he's a speaker and it must be easy, right? Because as we defined at the beginning of this talk, being world class is difficult. And so we all have a journey. We're sitting here in this room, we've got a ton of information we're about to learn, just massive amounts of information the rest of the three or four days of inbound. So we all have a journey that we have to head out onto. And what I want you to realize is that my journey has not been easy. It's not been the golden boy or the Midas touch or any of those things you see, because you folks really weren't around for the journey when at three and a half, my parents got divorced and my mom and stepdad moved 2,400 miles away from the rest of the family. And in that time of my life, I realized, hmm, life can hand you some very interesting things, but what should we do with it? And you guys really weren't paying attention during my journey when I would actually ride my pony to a one room schoolhouse and felt like I was in a really small world. But I had really big dreams and I just wasn't sure how I was going to make it there. And see the part of the journey that really hasn't been had a spotlight on it is when I lived at 42 Merlin Drive in King Arthur Court. Folks, I can't make this stuff up. And my mom would be at work and my dad would be in college and I would come home alone and I would learn to fend for myself at 13 years old and just wonder, is this really what life is supposed to be like? And the journey continues on where at 17 I went to school and I thought it was a normal day like any other day. And I had a math teacher look me square in my face and say, you'll never amount to anything. And within six months I was a high school dropout. You see, nobody really paid attention to the part of the journey where I actually joined the Navy because I didn't know what to do with my life. And after boot camp and I was underway, I started breaking out in these things called hives. And it got so bad, it was around my heart and my lungs and they had me on massive doses of Benadryl and steroids. And one day they couldn't wake Me up and my chief petty officer said, you know what? I want you to go see the doctor because just something isn't right. And the doctor said, george, not that this would ever happen, but if there was a fire on board ship, we wouldn't be able to wake you up. We wouldn't be able to get you out. So we're going to actually have a helicopter come pick you up and take you off ship. And see, folks, nobody was really paying attention to the journey when 13 hours later I walked in to see the TV screen say, USS Cunningham missile got a destroyer, 18 people injured, two people died because the number one boiler exploded, which was directly under my birthing space. You see, folks, nobody was really paying attention to the journey when after that, he said, holy crap, there must be somebody out there and there must be something that I'm supposed to be doing. And I worked at a Christian camp for three years teaching kids about Jesus and how to ride horses. Because remember, Montana, we're all cowboys. We may hide it, but we're all cowboys. And during those three years, I made $100 a month. And I learned a valuable lesson that it's not how much you make, but it's the impact that you make in life. The journey continues on when you actually see me get the first agency job. I had never worked for an agency, and I would go to work and I would come home at night and I would watch lynda.com tutorials so that I could complete the tasks that I had to do the next day because I knew that there was the think Big mentality. I knew there was a way to get away from everything that had happened in the past. And see, this agency job also led me to the first inbound, where in 2012, I listened to Gary Vaynerchuk. By the way, how many people were here last night and heard his keynote? Let's say that was awesome. Give Gary a round of applause. But see, not many people knew that I won tickets, some Fluke world's largest webinar. And I heard Gary Vaynerchuk speak and I was just a web dev guy. And I realized, man, I want to do this thing called inbound marketing. I want to be able to do that. I want to speak on the stage, I want to talk to people, and I want to change their lives. And guys, just so you know, this is a pause for a second. You are part of that journey today because I have made it in 2016. But see, it didn't become easy because in 2014 and I submitted or 13. I submitted and I didn't get to speak, but I came and I learned and I started to connect with people. And the connections that you make at this inbound will dramatically change where you're headed in the future. And then I got back from 2013, and the agency that I worked for, which was wild boy at the time, went out of business. The house that I lived in is actually being sold. I had a son in college. I didn't know how I was going to pay for his tuition. I was literally at the lowest point of my life, life, not knowing what was going to happen next. And I got a phone call from Marcus Sheridan saying, hey, I think you've got some skills that I'd like to use for our company. Are you interested, guys? It took me about two seconds to say yes. And in 2014, we started this thing called the Hubcast. I started working for the sales line. I haven't looked back since. And I submitted again to 2014, to inbound 2015, and then again to 2016. And all of the story, folks, is to let you know that I'm not special. We all have our journeys. I'm not special. Everybody in this room can achieve the level of world class. But the super secret tip, the sixth tip to make the five just absolutely, undeniably achievable is that you've got to take your hurdles and. And turn them into hustle, and you've got to take your pain and turn it into passion. And if there's anything that you do after this session, that would be my wish for you. Look, get connected. Get the deck by emailing me and get certified. Thanks.