When our clients hire us, they're hiring an expert, so they don't have to worry about the website anymore. Why can't we do that? Why can't we hire expert sales and marketing support? Not full-time, you need to make sure it's a priority that you pay attention to, but you don't have to be good at it.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the website 101 podcast, the podcast for people who want to learn more about building and managing websites. I'm Sean Smith, your co-host and with me as always are Amanda. Hello, Sean. How are you? Good, good. And Mike. Hi, guys. Good to be here.

And today we have a special guest. One of the people who helped me start my journey as a freelance web developer way back in October, 2013. Mitchell Kimbro. Welcome to the show. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? Yeah, thank you, Sean. Thank you, Amanda.

Mike, you guys have this system when you start your podcast or everybody claps on the count of three. And I got two dogs and I clapped because you told me to, now my dogs are losing it. So they're shaking the table and rattling the camera.

And I'm like, I'm trying to record here. But you clapped, you told me to come. That's what I'm supposed to do. Hey, if you want to give us a little bit of that dog tax, throw it up on the YouTubes and everybody will be happy.

Yeah, never thought of that. Yeah. So I'm Mitchell Kimbro. I founded SoulSpace 23 years ago back when the internets where everybody was just trying to build the thing as fast as we could. And the pace is not slowed down.

SoulSpace is a web development company. We really specialize these days in the industrial manufacturing space, and I'll get into the details of that. It'll definitely come up in this podcast. But we're a team of just under 20 people.

We sell a couple of plugins, free form for CraftCMS and expression engine is really what we're known for at the product level. But most of our activity is client services. Nice. Yeah. We all came from

the expression engine world years ago, and that's sort of how we know your company. Sean, I'd like to hear more about how he brought you into the web development world. If there's more to that story, you want to get into that briefly?

Sure. Well, it's not so much web development. I was already involved in that. But in October 2013, I went to an expression engine conference. I believe this one was in Portland, Oregon. And I was at one of the workshops and Mitchell was in attendee as were several other people.

It was being run by Leslie Camacho. And during this workshop, I got advice from Mitchell and Leslie and a couple of... attendees who I don't recall off the top of my head right now and it really just

pushed me to quit my job the next month and go on and be freelance and that's where I am now I mean I've been doing it for 10 years or 10 in a bit now and yeah it was one of the best decisions I ever made and grateful to Leslie and Mitchell

for giving me the push and the confidence to do it. Nice that's awesome. So my point of view on that is it's sort of a reckless thing to do to tell someone to forget the stability of a day job and go off on your own and try to survive out there.

Try to live a life where you only eat what you kill. So I've always felt like, man, I should stop doing that to people because this is a really tough, tough way to go. All three of you guys know what I'm talking about.

But my memory of that, Sean, was, yeah, I think we must have been standing around in a small group, maybe three or four people, Leslie was there. And we were chatting it up. And you would. expressed an interest in, sometimes I wish I could just go out on my own and try to run

my own business. And anytime I hear someone say that, I encourage them to do that. And probably one of the things I must have said to you was, while you're broke doing it while you're struggling trying to get the business going, part of your salary is the

exhilaration of just the adventure of trying it, just the rush of the courage that you have to summon, the sort of personal development you have to do to survive. running a business. It compels you to become a better person and I was trying

to tell you that that's part of the salary and you will get paid that no matter what you do fail or succeed. So that's one of the things I said and I'm really just really happy to see that it's 10 years later Sean and you're still

at it you know you're still doing it. So I'm really proud of you had hardly anything to do with Leslie or myself or anything. You're the one who did the work. Well much appreciated. So I have a quick question though. Hold on about

that Mitchell. Would you get that same advice to like a new developer or do you generally try to save that to like an experienced developer who's already got like the code down and has worked on some projects,

got some experience under their belt and it's like yeah cool go do this like awesome adventure being your own business. Yeah. Yeah. Good question Amanda. That's a good one and you go straight to a point that really needs to be made. You never ready. 100% agree with that.

You never ready to do this. That's true. That's a good point. I've been doing this for 23 years and I'm still no good. I'm still terrible at running a business now better than a lot of people and better than I used to be

But I'm still not ready. How long are you gonna wait? How are you gonna how long you gonna wait procrastinate Sam? I think I'll be ready next year This the other thing that I try to tell people is I don't want Sean to go in and be seven years old and look back and think man

I wonder if I could have started my own business. I always wish I would have tried that I didn't have the courage to try and nobody ever encouraged me like that's the other That's the other part of this that needs to be consumed

What regret are you willing to live with? When I did this, I did it because I was like, I don't want to go through my life wondering if I could be an entrepreneur. Because it was a bug in me as a part of my genetics

from elementary school. Like I was making and selling stuff from a really young age. So I had that sort of inclination and I had to find out what was there. So I couldn't procrastinate, I couldn't wait.

So are you ready? Do you have the skills? Forget it. Don't worry about that. The skill you need to develop is sales and marketing. You need to develop the ability to go find someone who has a pain that you can find the solution for.

I built the business by saying to people early on they come to me with a problem that was a web development shape problem. Can you do this? Can you build like the very first web development thing I did was for a professor who said,

I think I need a website for one of my classes in college. Do you know how to build websites? I have no clue. I said yes. Sure, I can figure that out. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. And I still do that to this day.

Hey, can you integrate these two systems? Sure, probably. We'll take a look. We'll do a discovery. We'll charge you for it. We'll come back with a proposal. We'll see if it can be done. This is, I think, how you build businesses.

So Amanda, maybe that's, hopefully, not too forceful of an answer to your question, but I feel pretty strongly about this weight, procrastinate. I'm not ready yet. F all that. Get to work. Yeah.

No, it sounds good. Speaking of you, so that what you just described about you say yes and... figured out later kind of thing. Has that ever bitten you? Have you ever promised anything? Oh yeah.

Over promised and then ended up disappointing at once on now. Absolutely. Yeah, that's why the first thing you do, I touched on it just a second ago, maybe I should emphasize it better. So we broke a website yesterday.

We did a dumb thing, like I put too much faith in an old expression engine installs, like, oh, it always warns you before this bad thing happens. We don't have to worry about it. We don't need a backup.

Whoops, we nuked it, right? Well, the lesson I learned so many years ago is the technical part is important, but the customer part is far more important. So the lesson I knew to apply at that moment was high touch.

So we were constantly in touch with the customer saying, we knew your website, we know what we did wrong. We're working on restoring the backup. It's going to take a little bit of time. We're going to let you know.

We're going to be in touch with you every five minutes or 10 minutes to let you know what's going on. And at the end of that ordeal, which was stupid, it was a self-inflicted wound, that was our fault because we

we forgot a detail of an old bug in this old install. The end result was a client was super happy. It like just beside himself, pleased. We nuked his website, but because we were high touch and really solid on the customer service part of things,

taking care of the client, understanding what worries them, what concerns them, it came out as a win. Well, and I think that has a lot to do with saw skills. that everybody needs to learn, but I think especially developers need to learn that a little bit more interacting with the client and other team members.

And like you said, staying ahead of the ball, yeah, I screwed up. Yeah, this project's taking longer than I thought. Yeah, the budget's completely blown out of the water. Like get ahead of that as soon as you can get ahead of it.

High touch, high touch. Yeah. Tell the truth early and often. Yeah. Coincidentally, yesterday I also nuked a client's site and email them and they're happy because. I actually solved it five minutes after I emailed them. So I kind of feel like I

emailed too soon, but I mean I emailed them back and said yeah I fixed it. Yeah yeah it makes a lot of sense that just make them feel like they're in good hands and someone's on top of it. I mean it's sort of self-evident I guess when you

think about it rather than the problem itself. The bar shouldn't be this low. Yeah. After all these years the bar shouldn't be this low in our industry that you're good at your job if you just talk to the client regularly. That's

ridiculous. Like how are we still getting away with this? You know, but this is a differentiator that I that still put soul space ahead of other agencies is we will be high touch And we will stay connected with you. There'll be a slack channel. We're gonna get you on the phone every week

We're gonna stop and listen like this simple soft skill stuff is really powerful And it's not a contrivance like this is how my team really feels about living their lives They really want to connect people with people

They want to find out what hurts and there's a certain set of things that we can do to solve a certain set of problems to make At least that part of their life better. So they're we're engaged on this. It's it's real for us

Well, speaking of clients and making them happy, let's talk a little bit about acquiring clients. We don't have a client. Yeah, like what happens when you've got this business and for some reason the work dries

up a little bit and you have a slow period? What kind of tips do you have about? I guess let's start with like what's the day one thing you do? What's the most important thing you do first when you suddenly realize, oh shit, I don't

have enough work. coming in for the next two months, what am I going to do? Yeah. I'm just going to correct questions. Well, this is in this a deep question. There's not a quick answer. So I'll be careful to try to be brief.

But the first thing I want to say is that I've been grappling with this question for years, and I'll probably continue to do so. And I think any business that doesn't grapple with this, doesn't struggle with this question,

it's not a real business. Like you're not really doing the work. If you go way back to my early podcast episodes, the whole thing started. I was like, I need some answer. to the marketing and sales question. I need the answer to this question when things slow down.

What do you do? So those first episodes were all about this topic. And I was asking the question you asked, which was sort of formulated like, hey, it's all of a sudden slow. Is there something I can all of a sudden do to bring in some clients? And the uniform answer that I got from all kinds

of people I asked was, you're a fool, you're asking the wrong question. There's no button you push on your computer to bring in a client. There's not a quick fix to this. The fact that you don't have

that you haven't been cultivating a garden, that you haven't been building up a brand and positioning and you're serving a vertical market that you understand and that you're known in, that you don't have events that you go to on a regular basis,

you don't have a steady cadence of the word out type of activity, the fact that you don't have any of that going, that's your problem. So there's the structural issue that has to be resolved. It's not a, is there a lever on the dashboard I can move

to bring in some clients and then turn the spigot off. I like that cultivating a garden idea. I'm really feeling Mitchell's talking directly at me because I am in an extended slump and it is all my fault.

I haven't been doing writing blog posts or like reaching out to old clients, present clients. Like I dropped the ball and I need to get back on it. So yeah, I'm feeling the whip on my back there. Yeah, so let's get into that.

And Mike, your question was, what's the first thing you do? And I put some notes, we kind of put some notes back and forth yesterday and get prepared to have a sort of a structured podcast today.

The very first thing you do is self-care. The very first thing you do is make sure that you keep your mind clear and you keep your health in order. One of the things I wrote to you guys yesterday was make this a 9 to 5 job.

Our jobs aren't 9 to 5, but you should make worry and anxiety 9 to 5. Do you instantly do that or is it a skill you develop over years? It takes a long time to build that ability up. So get to a point where at 5 o'clock you turn off the worry and anxiety and you go and be

a family person or you go and take care of your dog. So what are you going to do? 9 a.m. you get to turn it back on. So that's the first thing is take care of your health. exercise, eat, sleep, be compassionate towards yourself, right?

I used to just dial up the worry and not actually do anything. That was ridiculous. I had to learn that lesson. I didn't do anything, you know? Yeah. Um, do you, uh, I can hear people listening and saying, okay, that sounds great,

but I am so busy with my current work. How am I supposed to devote time to making sure I continue to have work? Like that salesy stuff. Exactly. I've got to work on my current clients. How do I fit that in?

All right. So. In my case, I run an agency for you guys, your freelancers. So I don't have time, I don't have money, I don't have the time or money to market, but yes, there's not true. It's 2024, there's fractional everything.

There's fractional CFOs, there's fractional CMOs, there's all kinds of help. The first thing you do after making sure that you've cared for your own health and your own mental wellbeing is to say,

I can't do this by myself. This is too big of a problem. Marketing and sales is too big of a challenge for you, Sean, solo to handle yourself. Go get a. 100% agreed. Yeah. Go get help. Oh, I can't afford it. So you can afford to go out of business?

That was actually what I was going to say. I can't afford to go out of business. I can afford to run up a credit card debt or something to get a marketing cadence going, to get the word out to start driving some activity. And I can afford to run up some debt if I have to,

or go into some savings to go get an expert marketer or salesperson to offload some of that work. Mind you, sum up what you're offloading is the worry. When our clients hire us, they're hiring an expert,

so they don't have to worry about the website anymore. Well, why can't we do that? Why can't we hire expert sales and marketing support, not full time? You don't have to do that anymore. You can hire it fractionally,

what you can afford, whatever you can afford. But you don't have to do it yourself. Remember, this isn't your job, like you're not good at this. You need to make sure it's a priority that you pay attention to,

but you don't have to be good at it. This is the same type of advice that we've been giving for a long time to small business owners who also have questions. about creating and running and maintaining their website.

It's like, yes, you can do it all yourself if you want to, but you have enough other stuff on your plate. Get, sometimes you need to delegate some of those tasks out. And so yeah, I guess we all need to learn that.

We need to take our own advice. Wix might be cheap, but there's a cost involved, and it's your time and mental. Yeah. Also, Wix is not cheap. Yeah. I don't know. I was just picking one of the.

those free, well-known builders, do-it-yourself stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a problem with mindset. And this is like I was talking about a minute ago with going into business, like the very fact

that you're going to go into business for yourself. You are choosing to position yourself such that you have to personally improve. And one of the things you have to fix when you're running a business is you have to fix

your own psychology, you have to sort out your own mindset. The scarcity mindset says, I can't afford to do marketing in sales. I have to. to do it all by myself. And I'm really busy as taking care of clients. And we had one

blow up and I didn't get to do the marketing thing I was supposed to do to scarcity mindset. There's a finite amount of resources and there's only so much money out there and only just a few clients. It's nonsense. You need to change your mindset to acknowledge that there's

an abundance of all the things you need or want out there. And if you maintain an abundance mindset, it unlocks your psychology so that then your brain works and you can say, well, what sort of creative thing can I do on my budget and my timeline to find someone to

help me with sales and marketing ongoing forever, not just two weeks so I can get another client, but forever. in perpetuity. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine that's especially important for someone like you who's running a

business that employs what you said 20 people you have on staff, right? So you have to kind of look out for not just your livelihood, but everyone else's, right? That's another thing I learned a few years ago was it became ridiculous. Like I used to worry about

everybody who works for me and their children and their animals as like, oh, if we don't get if we don't get more business or if we don't sign this contractor get this proposal approved, we're all going to go. Like it was ridiculous. No, I can't worry that big.

The problem is too large for my amount of worry. to do anything about. It's so ridiculous. You can't touch it. So once you're face to face with something that ridiculous, you're compelled to change and become better person.

["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Hey, Mike here. If you like the website 101 podcast, you should know that we do a live show on YouTube. It's every first and third Wednesday of the month. It's at 11.30 AM Eastern time,

and it's called Lunch Bites. Check it out. I wonder, because we've all had the downtime, and we've all had a You start thinking about maybe personal projects that I could work on, maybe blog posts or whatever.

Do you think it would be, did it makes more sense to continue focusing maybe on the tech stack that you're already familiar with, becoming more advanced, more experienced at it? Or maybe picking up something new,

like trying to go in a completely different direction to more broaden your skill set? Yeah, and Amanda beats me to my question. Yeah, so the question's more complicated than it actually appears upfront.

First of all, as web developers, we're the technology. space and the technology space moves so fast in its in 23 years it's done nothing but accelerate. When I have neglected to experiment and try new

stuff, learn new technologies, in short order the bottom is falling out of my company. I'm always punished for doing that. And you know SoulSpace has been a platform oriented company for so long. I'm shifting us in the last year 12 months

16 months or so to go into a vertical market so that we we own the technology choice. the challenge for us is to find a certain type of client in a certain place at the right time. What exactly does vertical market mean?

Like it sounds like a buzzword that I would hear in some meeting that I don't like going to. Yeah. All right, so Sean's like, yeah, things are kind of slumped right now. And by the way, Sean, it's that way for everybody.

All the agency owners and freelancers I've talked to the last few months, as soon as the interest rates went up, business dried up. That's right. Free money meant there's less work, right? And now we see that.

There's other reasons. There's sort of a general sentiment that the economy's not in good shape, but all the numbers look pretty good. So I don't, I can't control any of that. I can tell you that there is a slump.

So. So then Sean says, all right, so now what do I do? I would like to go, what if I could just go meet prospective clients who are perfect for my business and just talk to them face to face? How would I do that?

You don't get to do that unless you know what your vertical market is. So the answer, Amanda, to your vertical market question is your favorite perfect client, do they gather at a trade show anywhere in the world at least once a year?

Like do they show up in the same room talking about the same thing? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. buying and selling from one another, that's a vertical market. You know, like plumbers are a vertical market. There's a plumber's convention.

Dentists are a vertical market. There's a dentist convention, a lot of them. In my case, industrial manufacturing and distribution, there's tons of trade shows in every major city, at least every few months, in that vertical market.

I went to Wannanahime on Wednesday. Just flew down and did a day trip. And I'm chatting it up with all sorts of people who were perfect client prospects for me. So if you don't know what trade show to go to to meet people that would be your favorite ideal clients, you don't have a vertical market.

Nice. Yeah. I know I don't have a vertical market. My market is basically other agencies. Whoever will pay you. I... Yeah. You do have a vertical market. You just said it because you answered my question.

Those agencies show up at trade shows. There are places where agency owners gather. Right. There are a lot of places. And frequently they do meetups. So there's small scales. that you could do every week, go have a beer with somebody. And then there's larger stuff.

There's like technology stack providers throw conferences that agency owners show up to. So that's the thing you could do as well. So it's kind of like even more niche would be like going to say the craft conference that they have annually and talking to the various agencies there,

which I didn't go to last year. I wanted to, but I couldn't make it. Can't go to every conference. No, you can't. But it should be a priority. It should be a priority. Yeah, I'm going to take note of that and look

at more conferences and things. I think Mitchell's got some really solid advice for us here. I'm only using trade show and conference to illustrate a point. That's proof that you found a vertical market.

That's not all you do. You don't just go to trade shows. Some of us are shy. We're socially anxious. We don't want to talk to a bunch of people. It's hell to go to a trade show and talk to a bunch of strangers.

What I mean is that those people are group. right? And you can reach them on LinkedIn. They talk to each other and they socialize with each other. There's email blasts, there's industry publications, there's all sorts of stuff that

swarm around that vertical market. That's what I'm talking about. Nice. So a multi-pronged approach, not just focusing on one thing. Exactly. And you'll find the sweet spot. You'll find the marketing

and sales mix that helps you reach that vertical market with your message at a time when they're in their pain that you can solve. So you have to sort that out. That's just just a lot of churn. You got to.

You just go through that month after month with an expert. Don't do it yourself. Get some expert help on that. I will definitely look into that. So one of the things that you put into the notes here, you said, do you have a hedgehog

concept and then you reference Jim Collins? Yeah. I don't know who Jim Collins is and I don't know what a hedgehog concept is. Any micamandy, you guys know what I'm talking about here? I have to say no, I don't.

I haven't heard of it now. Okay. So one of the things that I also recommend when and you hit that brick wall, you're like, oh, I think things are drying up. We're gonna have a slow period. What should I do?

You should do what Amanda suggested or alluded to, which is, hey, what kind of new technologies out there that I can tinker with? What if there's some solutions to problems that my clients have that I didn't know about?

Use the empty time to do that. We'll go read some business books. I do a lot of driving for various reasons. My kids, they have horses and the barn where we keep the horses is really far from the house

from driving all the time. I listen to a lot of business books. and an author that I recommend really highly, that I learned through Leslie Camacho's work with us in EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system.

Jim Collins is one of the highly recommended authors in that program. And there's a book called Good to Great, which is sort of his masterpiece. His work is research driven. So they pick businesses that are publicly listed

in the stock market, and they analyze those businesses over time looking for patterns. Why did this fail? Why did this succeed? And one of Jim Collins' principles that he talks about that can be where you can attribute

a business's success is that they have a hedgehog concept. So the idea is that comes from an old Greek proverb where there's a hedgehog in a fox, and the fox is trying to get the hedgehog who wants to eat it.

And the fox tries all these different things, like the roadrunner and coyote, right? Tries all these different ways to get the hedgehog. All these... different forms of attack, all you know, swims over and jumps on him, all that kind of stuff.

The Hedgehog does one thing, curls up in a ball. That's the one thing the Hedgehog does and it works every time, never fails. Jim Collins' idea of a Hedgehog concept is that in your business, the company that you're

running, even freelancers, you have one set of things or one thing that you do really, really well, that you're really passionate about doing that you'll do for free if you could. You have the potential to be the best in the world at it.

Nobody could be better than you. You might meet that person and maybe two or three a little bit better, but you can strive and you can be the best. In the last pieces, the Hedgehog concept is something

that drives your revenue engine. So you can make money from it. You can serve people and they'll reward you by giving you money to do it. A Hedgehog concept matters because you're gonna serve a vertical market, but you're gonna, like Wednesday

and Anaheim, I was walking up to a trade show booth. and chatting people up and I'd ask what they would do, like what's your business, they would tell me and they would say, so what do you do? And I say, we build advanced industrial manufacturing websites.

We build the complicated websites that integrate with other systems that do a lot of the sales work for you, they handle a lot of the complicated problems that your sales team has to handle. We offload that to the website, we help you build that up.

So our hedgehog concept is building and maintaining these complex websites, handling complicated web problems, making those problems go away and making a website reliable. So our hedgehog concept over 23 years, it actually turned out to be consistently that.

So if you have something that meets those three criteria, it's a Jim Collins hedgehog concept, and you go after a vertical market with that, it's gonna take some time to spin up a flywheel, but you're gonna succeed.

So it almost sounds like a hedgehog concept is kind of the same as like the 32nd elevator pitch, yeah? Yeah, they're very closely related. The hedgehog concept does not have to be that brief and concise.

Some of the hedgehog concepts that Jim Collins did not have to be that brief. talks about from companies he analyzed, you wouldn't want to hear that in an elevator pitch. The way they explain what they do is more complicated than that kind of a pitch, but they are closely

related. And you're not going to get to that pitch unless you have clarity on what your hedgehog concept is. What the core activity is that you do, that you love doing, that you're great at, possibly the best in the world, that brings in the money. Cool. In terms of getting, we mentioned

this earlier about getting a professional to help you with. sales and that kind of thing. Do you have any advice for concrete tactics for how someone should go about reaching out to get help, to get them to have that marketing outreach

support? I mean, I know there's obviously various companies you can hire, do you recommend just kind of scoping the web for that stuff? Or how do you do it? Yeah. And how would you choose somebody that

invite them and vet them in a way that you know that they're going to be able to help you? Yeah. All right. Good. You guys are asking all the right questions. And I want to report six months from now. I want to know the

all three of you executed and all these good questions that you asked. Okay, well, we'll have to schedule a follow-up podcast. Come to Toronto, have a drink with us. That's right. I shall. I've been off the sauce for a month. I took a January off. I'm like, I like this. I'm going to

keep going. Oh, good. We could have tea or kombucha or other beverages. Yes, exactly. Yeah. All right. So you have a two-part question. First part is how do I find a marketing expert to help? I asked the same question a few weeks ago and I was overwhelmed. There's just so many reasons.

out there and it's it's just astonishing how much help out there there is. This is why vertical market matters. It matters that you know who you're trying to reach because the marketing experts that you want to work with

understand the vertical market already. They've been in there a long time and they can teach you a lot about it so that's the first filter to narrow down who you're looking for. You guys are not saying oh I know what my vertical

market is. There's still some skepticism over there but it's superpower. There's a lot more we could talk about to get into that. But one of the benefits you get by focusing and nitching down is that all this stuff

expands and opens up in front of you. For example, marketing and sales professionals. So how do you find them? Well, I got really lucky last week I was in Austin at a conference. It was the first of its kind, as far as I know, is

called the Industrial Marketing Summit. So it was a conference for marketing professionals in the Industrial Management Summit. factoring space like perfect for me. Yeah. What I have gotten that access to that

conference had I not chosen the vertical market I did. If I continued to say what Sean says which I'll build for anybody whatever you guys want I'll do it. If I continue to say that what I have ever found this conference no I wasn't

looking until I nitched down. And now I'm in a room with a bunch of marketing directors not only marketing directors from companies that would be perfect fits for soul space but also a bunch of marketing professionals talking to

each other sharing notes and saying well I do fractional this and I have this kind of program and big agencies take care of giant companies like everybody was there and they're all focused on the industry and they understand it and they've been doing it for years. So

that's one example. You meeting people in person shaking hands, getting to know them. That's my first choice because you have the human connection. The second is LinkedIn is a great resource, but using LinkedIn you can drill into the industry you're interested

in and you can start looking for those professionals. Maybe even before LinkedIn, just keep it within the family. Just start asking around. If you were to say, hey, I'm looking for someone to help me with marketing,

nobody can help you because it's not specific enough. Hey, I'm looking for someone to help me with marketing in a fractional way in this particular market, in this particular region, then you're going to get some answers because people can help you with that.

You're specific enough to ask a good question. Nice. Okay. Yeah. I'm more and more. I'm believing that LinkedIn is a really good resource. Um, I mean, I learned at this conference that this whole everybody in marketing

in this industry is totally obsessed with LinkedIn. They're all over it. Um, so good job LinkedIn. You get. you got your act together and now you're a great resource. But use that. Start to look kind of start to pull the threads apart and you'll find some people that you might find

you're just connected to by three degrees of separation. That's within the family. So somebody knows somebody who knows somebody and you're off to the races. How much stock do you put into social media in general? Do you advise the people beyond

Twitter all the time talking about their industry and that kind of thing too? My happiness ratio is inversely proportional to how much social media I do. I couldn't agree more. So if I haven't been on Twitter for maybe two or three years.

years. And the farther away I get from it, the happier I am. Do I use YouTube at all? I really should. And I'm going to start. Do I use LinkedIn? I'm going to start picking that up. And I'm just going to kind of bite the bullet. I would prefer not to engage in

social media because I don't know. It's just not, it doesn't get me fired up. Well, how do I reach the people I want to reach? Well, it turns out they're all on LinkedIn. So I better get to work on that and kind of reach them with email. I'm finding that going out

to these trade shows like I've been talking about is the least thing I ever would want to do. But something happened along the way. You know, I started to dive into being a good web developer. And it's a very solitary thing. So this, this sort of isolated, solitary,

quiet introspective version of me was really germinated and was nurtured by that, but the social outgoing conversational version of me, which was really active in high school, got shut down somehow.

So for a long time, I didn't wanna go to these trade shows and conferences. I didn't wanna go talk to strangers, but I've sort of by brute force, I've started to overcome that, and I'm realizing how fun it is.

How much I miss just talking to people and meeting new people and being a curious three-year-old asking, how does that work? Why does that, where does that go? What's what? app. So I feel like I've changed and necessarily done that. So yeah, there's social media, but I

believe in human contact. And the pandemic's over and it proved to me how important it was to me to connect with people. And I had given that short shrift for a long time. Yeah, it's everyone is so excited about, you know, getting back to normal and the pandemic being over. But I'm finding that

there are still maybe I don't know if it's just our industry, but you know, it's still it's very difficult to like get people like nobody wants to go back to the office. Students don't want to come into class on.

campus, like everybody still just wants to do everything alone, which is fun. I get it. I never want to be in an office again, but I mean, I need some of my best friends still over my entire life from that first job that I had out of school. So it's hard.

I mean, the bajamas are more comfortable. They're cozy and I like my pajamas. They're warm and I feel safe in them, but you got to get dressed. You know, you got to get dressed. You got to go outside. And once you do, you're like, I don't want to go back to wearing my

pajamas. We just get habituated to stuff. Yeah. You know, like I was saying, I had to dry January and I was habituated to a five o'clock glass of wine while my body got used to it And that's the thing I was doing you can break that habit with a little bit of like Navy Seal Force

But after that, it's easy. Yeah, it's easy to not have a five o'clock trick. It's easy to go to a trade show now and say Hey, what do you do? What's your name? It's not it's not hard anymore We were talking about that on Wednesday. We do the first Wednesday and the third Wednesday of every month

We're doing a YouTube live and so this week we were talking about how you know It's you fall off the wagon and it's hard to get stuff back together And you know that you should because it'll make you feel better

But once you start doing it everything it becomes easier and everything else starts clicking and falling into place too Yeah, exercise is very much like this. I swim almost every day and I've been doing that for years

We my whole family caught the flu in January. So I was out of the pool for almost a month. Yeah. It was really hard to get back in. Once I was back in, the routine kicked in. Right. So the social stuff is the same thing.

Now that I'm in the routine and I'm desensitized from the social anxiety, it's really easy to walk into room full of strangers and start chatting people up. Yeah. I like to call it a little bit of a sexy indifference.

You know, the first couple of times you do it and it's the same with interviews and it's the same with dating. The first couple of times you go and try to do it. It's like it's nerve wracking and you're nervous and everyone's staring and one of my.

doing wrong. But you do it and you get used to it and then you can kind of walk into the room and start to not like fake the attitude but actually feel. It's like you know what I have things that are worth saying that are worth listening to

and so I'm just gonna go and work the room and you don't want to talk to me fine. I'll go find somebody better. Yeah. I've learned that you can you can lead with curiosity. That's the superpower that I've I've discovered and that's why

I love the industry that we serve so much. You ought to see some of the stuff that set these trade shows like there was a there was a whole room dedicated to automation and robotics. This is robotic arms doing all kinds of stuff is invisible to the common person.

You don't know how much activity there is in the supply chain in the industrial space. There's companies, entire divisions that sell coatings for electronics to make them waterproof for handle like adverse conditions.

Did you know that existed? I didn't. There's all sorts of stuff like that. Lead with your curiosity. Follow the three year old version of yourself around. Why does that work? How did you do that?

Where does that go? Then you just get out of your head. You're not worried. about yourself anymore. You're asking questions and they're like, what do you do? I build websites. Oh, really? We have a crappy one. Can you tell me more about what you do? All of a sudden,

now you're marketing yourself. You didn't even know it because the three-year-old curiosity kid led the way. Awesome. Good advice. Wow. Well, maybe we'll wrap it up there. I guess that was a lot of great stuff. We need four more episodes. We got so much to talk about. Yeah, I know. Absolutely.

We'll have you back. Sean's got his work cut out for the show notes because there's a bunch of stuff we can include. Yeah. Including your podcasts, Mitchell is a podcast. Yeah, we'll be link to that. Cool, yeah, thank you. Well, Mitchell, thank you again so much for joining us. We'll

definitely have you back. Really appreciate you being here. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mitchell. Amazing talking to you. Thank you, Amanda. Really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was, it was excellent. Sean, thanks for putting us together. Congratulations. Ten years later, you know, if you can survive

ten years, you can survive another day. Hey, thanks for listening today. This is Mike Mele. You can find me online at belikewater.ca or on socials at Mike Mele. Hosted in part today by me, Sean Smith.

You can find me at my website, caffeinecreations.ca or on LinkedIn at caffeinecreations. One third of the website 101 podcast talent is provided by me, Amanda Lutz. You can find me online at my website, amandolutes.com.

I also hang out on Twitter sometimes, you can find me at Amanda LutzTO.