Isaac Rudansky: Founder and CEO of Adventure Media | The Business Blast Podcast #409

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All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have Isaac Rudansky with us. He's the founder and CEO of Adventure Media, which is a New York-based digital advertising agency. So welcome to the show, Isaac.

Thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here.

Of course, man, we're excited to have you. Uh, we'll dive into the first one. The first question I have for you, Isaac, is what is the best story for from your life that has an underlying valuable message?

It's a good question. I don't know if this is the best story overall in my life, but it's definitely something related to business. A few months ago, I had a client call me at, I think it was 11 or 12 o'clock at night. This was a client that I had never been involved with, I never spoke to. She had come to our company and requested some consulting services, and the consulting was done. And she actually had originally at some point given some positive feedback. And after the engagement was over, different things in her business went askew and she got really upset because, you know, her accounts that we had originally set up that were originally performing well weren't performing so well anymore. And she called me and I, as a side note, I also teach online courses about digital advertising and she went and found my course, started taking some of the lessons and she was just really frustrated because she was sort of doing this on her own and she called me at 11 o'clock and I had to pick up the phone and I don't usually answer the phone at night and she says, Hi, is this Isaac? And I'm like, yeah, how you doing? She's like, whatever, she said her name. And she's like, listen, I was a client of your company's a little while ago, and I'm really frustrated now. And I want to— and I'm watching your course now, and I'm looking at your face, and I felt like I just had to call you to tell you how disgusted I am every time I see your face on the screen. So I was like, so my, you know, original— my first reaction was a little surprised, you know, it's quite infrequent that I get a call like that. So I said, I said, listen, I tried to play it, play it down. I said, listen, you know, Jennifer, that wasn't her name. I say, Jennifer, you know, you're already up, you're already ahead of the game, because most people are disgusted with my face without having a bad experience in my company. So you're doing better than most people. And it was like, you know, sort of meant as a joke. And it sort of diffused the situation. And she's like, you know, well, I want to just describe to you how frustrated I am. And I'm trying to, I'm struggling in my business. And it went on to be like a long conversation. And I said, listen, tomorrow, I'm not going to charge you, I'll go into account. I'll fix things up for you, even though that's something that we had done already. And sure enough, the next day I did that, and she was really appreciative. So I think the lesson that I sort of took away from there is you see people who are overly sensitive to personal insults, overly sensitive to being respected. I think that's like a number one obstacle to being successful in business. I don't think that most— I think most people who are overly sensitive to whether— and I think this is also very relevant to the political culture we live in. If you want to be in business and you want to be an entrepreneur and you want to be successful and you want to hustle, If you're hypersensitive to insults or to offensive things, I think it's 99% likely that you're going to fail. So that was the lesson I took away from that story. And I think that, you know, just not being offended by like a really harsh insult was a very positive thing for me in my own experience. And typically it takes a bit, takes quite a bit to offend me anyway. So that's that.

Yeah, no, I think that's a great point, man. Thank you for sharing that. The next one I have for you is, what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?

So I help clients get traffic to their websites and convert that traffic profitably. The most important thing that I could sort of broadcast or start try to transmit is that not any one traffic source is going to be enough to grow your business online. Consumers typically interact with a brand almost on average 7 times before they decide to make a purchase. There's a long buyer's funnel for many products. So, if you're setting up a website or you have a website and you think that you're just gonna run some Google advertising, you're gonna run a few Facebook ads and you're gonna get a couple clicks and you're gonna convert into sales, you're making a big, big mistake. You need a lot of different moving pieces to work in tandem with each other to get a person to submit a form on your website or to request a consultation or to buy a product. It's a real thing. It reminds me of a famous David Ogilvy Lyne, who was, you know, sort of considered the father of modern advertising by many, and he says, "The consumer is not an idiot, she is your wife." And what he's trying to say is that don't think that you could have a subpar website experience, don't think you could just have one ad, don't think you could present your product one time to a consumer and not give them a lot of information and offer them follow-up and additional supporting information and resources and they're gonna buy from you. That's not how it works. Like, people want a lot of information, they comparison shop, they decide whether or not they want it, it's a financial decision. So you need to be doing well with traffic acquisition, you need to be doing remarketing, You need to be doing social media outreach. You need to be doing content production. You need to have a really good website. You need to have a good sales team. You also have to have a good product. You have to have a good management team. So, like, I operate in one of those cogs in the overall machine primarily, which is traffic acquisition and conversion. I don't do sales training. I don't do, you know, financial consulting for businesses or product development or product design, but all those things have to be firing on all cylinders in order for any of these little pieces to be valuable. People have this perspective about online advertising that says it's really easy and it's really quick and I could just throw up some ads and have my ads on. I guess I could put some money and have some ads on Google in 10 minutes. Yeah, that's true. You could have ads on Google in 10 minutes, but you're not going to sell by doing or just putting effort into one area of the overall machine that needs to work.

And what's your best piece of overall business advice, not necessarily industry-specific?

I think it's just going through the motions. Like, you know, people have the capacity to work extremely hard for short bursts of time, and then it's not uncommon for a feeling of burnout to settle in, or like actual depression, or just feeling incredibly overwhelmed. And just in my own personal life, like this past week, I was like really out of it. And I have a business to run. I have, you know, 15 people on payroll. I have clients that need me, and I just It was very, very difficult for me to even get out of bed. I was like feeling depressed. I was feeling like just down about a lot of different things. And just like dragging yourself through the mud in the darkness and just going through the motions, showing up, sitting at your desk, even if it means just staring blankly at a computer screen for 3 hours because you can't process any information. It's really, really important. And I think that people who have launched successful businesses have all experienced this sort of thing. And just consistency is really key. Going through the motions when you're down, putting in the hours, showing up, and just being present and sort of slogging through those lows in your own cyclical process is what I think is something— I don't know if it's the most important thing, but again, personally, it's been something which I found to be a really crucial element of developing a business.

And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?

Hmm. If I could give my younger self one piece of advice, I think it would be to be more confident, to have a greater self-esteem, to feel like you could offer something valuable to other people. And to have figured that out at a younger age, I think would have been very beneficial for me.

And in your opinion, what's the key to happiness?

Hmm. Ooh. Well, I think it's maybe similar to that previous idea. I think a big key— and again, obviously, as the question implies, this is my opinion, and you'll get a lot of different answers to this question, I'm sure. I think a lot of it is being able to feel a sense of accomplishment internally. A lot of what drives us for success is, you know, like what we call— like what I call other-esteem, you know, getting recognition and validation and appreciation and acceptance from other people. And that's an important thing. I think every human being needs it to some extent. But a lot of people— and myself, I struggle with this also— is an inability to do something for yourself and feel really good about it and to feel that sense of accomplishment and that sense of pride, just like inherently alone for yourself, by yourself, and without necessarily needing enormous amount of external stimuli, developing an ability to feel a positive sense of accomplishment alone for something that you did that you knew was difficult and to be able to feel that sense of pride, I think is very, very important to a person really being happy because if the only way you could feel good is when you're getting recognition from other people. It's a very unstable source of that, and it's ultimately, I think, a little bit of an unhealthy source of that, and it could cause other problems. And when you lose that or you don't have that, it could create a really strong sense of loneliness. So I think, in my opinion, that's one of the keys to happiness is being able to develop that internal sense of pride in your own accomplishments.

And what's the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?

I have a lot of favorite books. I'm currently reading what I think is one of the best books that I've read, which is Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. Fantastic book for anybody who's in business. It happens that it has to do a lot with the advertising world, but it's really cool for anybody who's looking just for overall, you know, personal, positive personal attitudes. And what I learned from him was that he was enormously successful And he had a huge following, and he had a lot of people who looked up to him and his ideas and his concepts. And he knew that, and it comes out in the book. Like, he was very aware of how good he was at what he did. He was an advertising man. He wrote campaigns for some of the biggest brands that we know today for many, many years. But what I learned from the book was that at the same time he had such a sense of confidence in his own ability, it was clear, and he conveyed this over and over again, that everything he got, he got from other people that he admired and that he respected. His whole life was training under other people that were able— that he was able to learn from, and that he had a huge amount of admiration for and a huge amount of respect for. And throughout the whole book, he's just showing examples of how his career was a result of, like, a lot of the expertise that preceded him. And that ability to have, like, a sense of humility and to be able to be receptive to people who are doing things better than you are and to— to take ideas from them and to incorporate those ideas into your own work and to have a healthy respect for the competition and to have a serious respect for the masters of the craft and people who are doing really well is a very, very positive thing. And I think that's something that I learned from that book.

And what is your favorite quote and why?

My favorite quote, I think, is Stephen King quote, who's my favorite author. And he says, the quote goes as follows: loneliness "The most terrible word in the English tongue. Death doesn't hold a candle to it, and hell is only a poor synonym." And that's my favorite quote because I think a lot of what I do in marketing is trying to create a sense of identity and relationship and unity. And a lot of times when people buy into a brand or buy into a product, they're typically doing it to feel connected with something bigger than themselves. And at a much deeper psychological level, a lot of what drives consumer buying behavior and the brands and the products that we're involved with is to not feel alone in the world. Like, there's people strongly— there's a very strong concept in sales and in marketing that people want to buy the products that people like them are buying. I mean, that's a very important thing, which is why when you post testimonials on your website, you should say like, oh, this is a— the chief financial officer of this company is saying this about my product. So then when another chief financial officer sees that, it's like, wow, like someone like me is doing this. I want to get into this club. And I think that the feeling of being alone is a very deep and fundamental fear that people have. And it drives a lot of behavior on a more subconscious level, perhaps. And I think about that a lot. And then how we write advertisements and how we present the positioning of a brand and just how I run our office and culture we have here in the sense of like friendship is, is very, very key to people feeling good about what they do, being able to do good work for our clients. So that's why that's a favorite quote of mine. It just sort of strikes a chord with, with, within my own framework of how I look at the world.

Yes, dude. Thank you so much for coming on. This was an extremely valuable episode. The last question I have for you before we let you go is where is the best place for people to find you online?

Sure, you can go to our website, it's www.adventureppc.com, adventurepeterpetercharlie.com. The name of our company is Adventure Media Group, but our website again is adventureppc.com. And I'm pretty active on Twitter @isaacrudansky, I-S-A-A-C-R-U-D-A-N-S-K-Y. You can find me there, and you can check out some of my courses on Udemy, U-D-E-M-Y. Search for my name and you'll see what I have going on over there.

Perfect, brother. Thank you again for coming on, we appreciate it.

Absolutely, Tyler. Thank you very much.

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