building the brand | taking our talents to phx for two at capacity meetups

If we can get back to building communities, meeting people, getting in front of people again, I mean, we're definitely going to separate ourselves from the competition.

There have been moments over the last 2 years we've kind of hit a new level, and I feel like we're hitting a new level right now. All right, what up Phoenix? We are here for a fun little 48 hours. I'm gonna get into more why we're here, but we're throwing 2 activations that are at capacity, over 90 folks for each night. First night's tonight in Downtown Phoenix, gonna love it. Our community, the feedback's been tremendous for us throwing these events. I got a lot to talk about on this vlog. A lot of things have been happening, really kind of adding new things to our tool belt with the community. Obviously you can see I got a new haircut. I'm really interested if people like it or not. Makes my head look really big, but it's probably just the angle. Anyways, let's get our bags. Just for the record, you can only check 100 pounds at Southwest. My bag was 120 pounds, so— but a lot of people are gonna get shirts. So let's get the bags, let's get to the hotel, get some coffee. We're actually 2 hours behind Nashville, so that's a little weird. And, uh, yeah, let's do this. All right, in all my time traveling, I don't know if there's any better feeling than like getting to your hotel. It's, it's 10:42 local time. And the hotel room's ready. And look, there's like a Whole Foods. Maybe we'll get some snacks. See if we can zoom in here. Can't really zoom in. Need a better zoom in. See, Whole Foods right there. Your boy, I need to go get some breakfast. I'm hungry. Get some work in. It's gonna be a good time. Nice hotel room. Vibes are immaculate. Vibes are immaculate. Tonight's gonna be great. And we're gonna meet up with Brianna in a bit. So it'll be fun. Let's go.

Can't get lost with sheep, but I will get spun and not by me. After all, I'm all on my own. I'm my brother's keeper.

Take a bit more time to see. Alrighty, it is 4:46 Mountain Standard. I don't think Arizona does time zones or no daylight savings. I don't think they do because it is two hours difference than what it is in Nashville. We are heading to our first night of Phoenix activations. Hundred people at capacity now. Will all hundred people show up? I don't know. Who knows? The fact of the matter is, is that 100 people cared enough to go on and register is a great sign with what we're doing. So super pumped about that. Had a great hour and a half lunch with some Ronstadt Digital leaders that are actually here because Phoenix is a big market. We have a lot of jobs we're hiring for in town around Java, DevOps, SRE, cloud. I know those are all kind of the same. Basically, if you are in tech in somewhat some shape or form, you need to be on the platform in Phoenix. We're hiring a ton. So tonight we're going to meet people, love on them. It's gonna be a great time. And, and again, tomorrow night at capacity, 100 people as well. So just again, there are moments, there have been moments over the last almost 2 years where I feel like we kind of hit a new level. And I feel like we're hitting a new level right now. There's some things I'll go over tomorrow about what we're doing internally. But you know, we're scaling our emails, we're scaling our social, things are clicking, and the numbers are showing for in the platform, right? The cities we're targeting, the numbers are going up. So Super exciting. So let's have a good time tonight. Your boy's gonna be Patrick tonight. We'll be doing video, doing photos for social. It's gonna be a great time. So yeah, let's have a good one. Let's go. We're out. The the shirts are out.

We're here. Look at that.

Look at that, man.

That's right.

Now many people have them. Hey, you want to introduce yourself to the vlog, Brian?

Brian and East.

Don't sound so corporate.

Oh, come on.

Just be yourself. Be be Jersey.

Brian, can't wait for this Arizona event. Been waiting to do this with Taylor for how long now? Few weeks?

Two months.

Two months. Whatever it's been. So now super excited.

I love it.

Glad to be in Arizona.

I love it. Hey, introduce yourself.

I'm Elliot. Yeah, yeah. I work with Brian on BFSI and happy to hear be here. Can't wait to meet a whole bunch of people tonight.

I've been waiting on this my whole life. All right, Brian, so how do you think tonight went? Like, like, what were your thoughts?

Tonight was awesome. I mean, to be able to meet 50, 60 people and just start building this community in Arizona, I think it was a great night. I I think a lot of people just got a lot out of it. The networking, it was great. It was something that we really need to do more often.

Why do you think we need to continue doing stuff like this?

Because everyone was talking about this has gone away. Nobody does networking events anymore. These people were all thirsting for more events. They're like, wow, we haven't done this since before COVID We, we really enjoyed coming out, no pressure, meeting people, talking to you guys, and just connecting again.

And so how do you think Ronstadt Digital is separating themselves by doing this?

I, I think we just We've held ourselves, uh, massive separation. If we can get back to building communities, meeting people, getting in front of people again, I mean, we're definitely going to separate ourselves from the competition.

Love it. Good morning, Phoenix! Day 2. Uh, got another packed out event tonight. Your boy woke up with I got a cold. I got a cold. I hate traveling when I'm sick, but the kids just haven't been able to get over it, getting healthy. So I think I got what the kids got, a little congested this morning, but that's okay. Not going to let it hold me down. Let's get to work. There's so much work we have to do. We have to do follow-up from the event last night. The event last night was awesome. It was probably for not us ever having thrown an event in the Phoenix area ever. We had about 60 people show up and like the talent level was like super high, right? Like a lot of A lot of times meetups, like the junior and mid folks come out, which is totally fine. But at the end of the day, like the way the market is, let's just be honest, it's more senior oriented. Like last night it was very geared towards senior talent. So it was incredibly impressive, the amount, the caliber of talent and people we met last night. So we're gonna get some coffee, gonna get some work in, gonna talk today just about kind of, just ramble a little bit about some of the things we've been doing. But otherwise, let's go. It's gonna be a great day and I hate being congested. You know, and I just, hey, you know, and I just, hey. Alrighty, so we're getting some work done. This is gonna be a little bit of a yap session here. So I wanna kinda give folks kind of a quick rundown of kind of what's going on. A lot's been happening in the community world and I kinda wanna go over kind of what we've been doing, but then also really kind of describe kind of what the community team is doing. So let's get into it. So I presented, um, actually at my team's all-hands recently, and I kind of wanted to go over the slide. Basically, the, the one thing with the community is there's multiple different levels of community. I think there is community from like a brand awareness perspective, right? How many people show up at your events? How many people follow you on social media? How many people have tattoos on their bodies, which is nine by the way. You know how many people you know rep the t-shirts. You know how how many ambassadors are posting, which by the way our ambassador team I did some kind of back of the napkin math. Our ambassador team has amassed 500,000 impressions collectively from all of their postings. So you know you know I would say that could be titles community. So that you know how many referrals people are sending that could be community. But when it relates to the actual Torque platform and kind of Replicating, duplicating what we're doing. We're creating a framework right now. And so I kind of wanted to share this with you all on really kind of how we're laying the groundwork in regards to community. Because one thing I have been tasked with is like, we need to make what we do like replicated, duplicated, and scalable in every market, right? So the big thing that we're focusing on is really diving into the numbers and getting people to sign up on the platform. That's one of the levers, but also the lever too, one thing we have that no other company has is the scale, right? We have 3 million people on our talent platform, but we are trying to engage them, right? So what does that look like? Through virtual events, through online events, through workshops, through meetups like we just did last night in Phoenix. So we're trying to figure out all these ways to get people to log into their platform, not only check out the jobs they're matched for, but also to, to check all this information. Right. And so, so basically the playbook right now that we have is kind of 3 main pillars. It's reach, gather, and connect. Right. So reach, what does that look like? We send out email activation campaigns. These are in-market members on the platform for specific cities to be like, hey, just general awareness. Hey, you have this profile available to you. This profile allows you to get matched to jobs. This profile, this platform, your profile works in the background and sends you jobs that are fit for the Ronstadt Digital ecosystem. The next thing we're doing is, well, also with email activation campaigns, we're also leading with events. I think one of the things that the community team really helps with is that at the end of the day, staffing companies have a very bad rap, right? And so what we're doing is instead of trying to sell you on something, we're just trying to get you out to events, both virtual and in person. So whenever we come into a city, we send emails out for our Phoenix Like one of the things I heard last night, I was like, how did you hear about this event? How'd you hear about this event? The number one answer was, you sent me an email. You sent me an email and I'm here. So again, we want to continue to pull that email trigger to get people out. The next thing is regional landing pages, right? We have a lot of blogs. We have, you know, events in the area. You know, we're doing partnerships in the area. So we're developing landing pages as it relates to specific cities that we're focused in. Also targeted social media strategy, both organic and paid ads. That we're focusing on. So again, reach, mass email. When I say mass email, I just meant like emailing the people on the platform at scale, regional landing pages to get SEO traffic and AGO or whatever we're calling the AI side of things. And then targeted social media strategy, right? So that's kind of like the reach column. The second column is the gather column, right? We want to bring people together. These are in-person events. You know, we did an At Capacity meetup last night in Phoenix. We were in At Capacity tonight in Chandler. We're about to kick off a huge partnership. We're partnering with Todd Lewis and All Things Open. So we're going to be on their email newsletter. We're going to be throwing in-person meetups with All Things Open in Raleigh. So we got that. We do a Charlotte meetup. So getting people together, local partnerships, we want to do more of this stuff, right? So like doing this partnership with All Things Open, we're going to look at doing a partnership with somebody in Phoenix and then also Charlotte as well. I mean, at the end of the day, I always equate it back to like rap albums or just, just albums, music in general. Like people bring in guest artists. To come on their album to get exposure and to gain rapport. That's what I want to do with us, right? So let's do an event with a tech company, right? That's, that's really well known in the tech community in Charlotte and Phoenix. So we email all the people we've placed as well. Final thing is connect. So we want to connect people not only virtually, but not only in person, but virtual, right? So we're doing city-specific Discord channels. So if you're in Raleigh and Phoenix and Charlotte, we have Discord channels where you connect with people, but we do post-event follow-ups to get people connected.

And then we do virtual series.

You know, we're doing a Databricks workshop here soon. By the time the vlog gets out, it's gonna be well done with that. Um, and then also we're doing, um, you know, a Java panel. So we wanna bring people, we wanna do a lot of things virtually, right? We're throwing 3 to 5 virtual events a week, but at the end of the day, we're trying to get people, uh, connected virtually and then bring 'em together in person, if that makes sense. So that's just kind of the playbook on what we're looking for, which is already 7 minutes of this video. So that way we can hit Phoenix, do this, you know, the reach, gather, Connect. Raleigh, reach, gather, connect. Charlotte, reach, gather, connect. And then ultimately driving people to the platform to sign up. So that's what we do. Hopefully you're still watching at the end of this YAP session. All right, night 2 of Phoenix events. Today's been a day kind of bouncing around. I tell you what, one thing we've been dealing with is like social media scheduling tools. We've used one, the video wasn't working, like uploading video. Then we switched to another one, Then they're charging us money to post links on X. So literally most of my day has been spent trying to find a social media platform that we can schedule our posts on. So that's been cool. But yeah, so headed to our second night tonight. Team's ready to go. Going to be a great night and bring you along for the ride. It's going to be great. And then home tomorrow.

So let's go.

There we go.

Round 2.

Look at the shirts. Look at the shirts. Looking good.

Look at that.

I don't know about the khakis, but you know, other than that, it looks good. Yeah, you know, if you get you a pair of like— I don't know, just looks a little— this is the stuff that's not the glamorous part of a Fine 2 gentlemen helping me. All right, y'all, we are here at the Social Hall, I think it's called. I don't know, terrible details. That's not the point. The point is, look at this. I mean, this is just— vibes are immaculate. Shout out Fur for planning this. But guess what? We're inside with air conditioning. I'm super excited. So come on, I'm gonna take you— listen, I'm gonna take you along for the ride. Which is basically just some stairs. We got our own patio, so that's pretty neat. Let's go in here. Already got some people here. People in Phoenix like show up early. It's so different than LATAM. Like When we throw parties in LATAM, people are like an hour late. So people are already here networking. We got the swag. So let's have a good night. This is great. This is Fight Club. The easiest way to play is gonna be rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

Yeah.

Okay, whoever wins, raise your hand and you're gonna keep playing. If you miss one, you're gonna sit down. What in the world? How are y'all not? All right, here we go.

Uh oh.

All right. All right.

Here we go.

Here we go.

Uh oh.

Uh oh.

Uh oh.

Okay, game, game 7, game 7. All right, all right, I love it, I love it. Congratulations, there you go, you have won a tour.

Thank you so much.

What'd you think?

I thought tonight was amazing. Yeah, we met a ton of great people. Yeah, with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Yeah, for the the technical market, and they wanted to get out and meet us, and they wanted to learn what we had to offer, and they wanted to share what they had to offer. It was excellent.

That's awesome. Will we be back?

I'd love to come back.

We'd love to come.

You know what I love about tonight though?

What's that?

We took the torque platform and we married it with the human element.

Yep.

And it goes together really well.

There you go. There you go. That was great. All right, we're tired. Thanks, it was great. Time to go home.

Peace.

Daydream, I fell asleep amid the flowers for a couple of hours.