So the question is, how did I get where I am? How did I get where I am today? It's a funny question, right? Given we're all at, um, you know, when I was when I was a kid, I was I was a musician. I played the, uh I played the piano and the keyboard and few of the other instruments and wasn't bands I liked. I like the the pressure of putting on a show of performing, getting in front of oven audience. Um, you know, I kind of hope I hoped I'd be a rock star by the time I was 18. But you know that that period came and went, and I was I was not a rock star. Uh, but, you know, I what? I I love the I love the creativity of it. I loved getting lost and creative, really in ideas. You know, that's what I really loved. And I wrote a short story when I was 12 or 13. It was simple, and it was short. But, you know, it could impress my teacher. You know, I wrote a poem. My mom cried. My dad laughed. I felt like this is power um And so I thought, You know, if I don't become a rock star and write songs, I'm gonna become a writer. Um, now, when I was a college, I went to at the end of college, I went to career development. I was very, very interested in the girl that I was dating at the time and didn't have a short road to money. Uh uh, as a writer. So I went to career development, and, um and it was really helpful, you know, that we looked at my strengths and what I'd succeeded in. And they said, You know, you should consider either going into advertising or or into political communications. They said, You know, if you follow your your values, you'll probably go into political communications. But if you loosen up a little bit, you should try advertising. So that was really I was really the beginning for May. I had never even thought about a career in advertising. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Start my own business. Um, frankly, back then, being an entrepreneur, uh, a t least to me, it meant something very different than it does today. There there was folks didn't dream of, you know, starting a unicorn company with a billion dollar evaluation and retiring by the age of 28. The dream really was toe have your own small business. You know, that was that was really it, Toby, Your own Boston Thio. You know, for me, the idea of creating a business is a creative project. Was it was exciting for me because I could pull all the levers and use the right side of my brain and the left side of my brain also, so it was very exciting.

you know, I I had had a couple of of, you know, first off, just a sort of place, you know, places I was I was in my mid twenties, uh, when I when I first worked as a consultant or freelancer I've had in my first agency job was really hard to get in. It was a crazy place where people had ulcers and we're drinking a lot at the office. And we had a crazy CEO who would would, you know, have everyone follow him around the office and then just yell at people in front of you on If you dare to defend the person, it would be a terrible thing. So excuse me. It was a difficult place, and I really only lasted six months. They were laying people off in droves, but I had gotten in and so on, you know, is making $19,000 a year in this job. I got laid off on Friday, Sunday they called me a new assignment, had come in from Black and Decker, and they needed a freelancer for $40 an hour. So I mean $40 an hour, compared to $19,000 a year I was like, I'm rich. Eso I didn't even know that was possible. So I went back in and I started freelancing for them. Um, I had I had I had a few sales skills. I did a little telemarketing while I was in college. And so I thought, You know, I'll use that. I'm not afraid of rejection. If you talk to 100 people, you're gonna make one sale. That was that was a thing. So I started to try to get clients for myself as a freelancer. And I did. I did a little research. I did a little copyrighting. I did a little marketing thinking. I had very little experience. I didn't know what I was doing. Um, but and I was frankly, I was often very anxious because I didn't know what I was doing. I would sell myself into situations and and, you know, so I felt a lot of anxiety. I got some good therapy. Uh, I'm a very, very calm type A CEO today, but But I learned through that, and I'll just say what I realized was that I was competing with people who had experienced and were positioned by the jobs that they had in a way that I wasn't. As somebody just tried to be a consultant right off, I said, I'm gonna go back and get those credentials. So when I started my agency, um, it was five years later, so I was 33 years old, and, um, I realized that I had learned from the people I've worked with before that my first money should be spent on PR on a PR agent. Because in the advertising business, you want your people hire you because you're famous. Um, that was that was what I believe back then. So So I needed So I needed clients. I could do famous work for I actually, um, took on the account of my car service driver, uh, who who had run a Russian with his wife, had run a Russian Soviet chocolate factory, and they wanted to start a little chocolate business here in the US And their names were Alexandra Nikolai, which happened to be the names of the last Czars. So we called it Alexandra Nikolai. And it was, and it was all about the It was look very royal. And, you know, we did these sort of sexy, luxurious ads with the Serena. It was just a sort of empowered royal woman who could do whatever she wanted. And, um So So? So there was that one. Um, I found the sort of semi freelance freelance assignment working on Pepsi stuff, which was a, you know, sort of promotional campaign. And so that started to pay for things. And I told myself, Just keep your cost low, don't live in expensive lifestyle, and you could always consult if the agency doesn't work out. That was a good choice. About a month in one of my clients and my previous agency left to go to SunTrust, the biggest bank in the South, And I had taken her toe lunch, and I said, I'm not taking any of that agency's clients because I love them. I don't want to burn any bridges and all of that, but she couldn't hire them because she was. Her company was competing with her old company, and she said, You're the one I trust. I want to hire you. I said her. Would you Leslie? Her name was I said, Leslie, do you want me thinking about your business or do you want me thinking about how I'm going to buy computers, she said. I want you thinking about my business. I said, If I send you a bill for the first six months of which do you think you could, you could pay it She said, I'll get it done. And so it was an enormous amount of money that really funded the beginning of the business. So she was a tough New York woman, and this was a Southern. This was a business run by by Southern gentlemen who didn't like being interrupted at the golf course about important business matters. So she didn't last very long there, even though she was amazingly successful there. Eso There was lots of terms. I was. We were either making $70,000 a month or losing $70,000 a month, and our runway was never more than two months for the first couple of years. But I always had the confidence that I could sell again, and if I didn't, I could be a freelancer and then start from there again. And, you know, miraculously, it worked out

one is sort of the mental software with which you run a business and the other is is actual technology tools. I'll kind of start from the bottom up and just talk about technology tools. Um, one of the great things about being a you know, a consultancy meets agency, and we truly are that in the sense that we dio, we do Growth, marketing, behavior change, marketing, um, brand consulting, building brands, advertising and design. So it's a it's sort of broad. We tend to focus on behavior change marketers, um, as a as a consultant or or agency. You can't force your clients on C on the plants of the platforms that you favor, you know, at least not for at least not for things that air that air that maybe quarter their business where you seem incidental. So, for example, we worked with Salesforce. They had to deal with Google, were in Google, hang out to Google, meets that's it. You're not using zoom or blue jeans or whatever Samsung. There are blue jeans. You're on blue jeans. Okay, so, um, you know when you're working with Salesforce, you'd better be using salesforce you so clients have their preferences. Well, I've the the advantage that I see in in being engaged on multiple platforms is that it keeps you savvy about the differences in the advantages of each. So, for example, we use slack. Um, but we also use Microsoft teams, and there will be people to say we get all of this through Microsoft. Why would you slack to why pay that extra money one. It's not that much extra money to there. There are advantages. And seeing that and seeing and living in the different worlds and very few disadvantages of using both that I could that I could see. Um, we use way switched from salesforce, actually twos, Ojo, Uh, for, you know, for our crm. Um, Salesforce is the best, but SoHo, let's sort of the right level for us. We're not a large, You know, three, 300,000 person company SoHo was made the design easy for our crm. It made it easy for our people to work with. It didn't require as much customization and development on our sides, but we went in that direction. We're huge fans of self worse, but But that's what we chose there. Um, where you know where ah Mac shop as creative firms tend to be. But there are some things that you can't you can't do is well on Max, you know? So, you know, analytics and that sort of stuff runs runs on. You know, the scene is, um So So there's that as well, but were largely in the in the apple apple ecosystem. Um, I personally love Google. Uh, you know, Google for, you know, the docks and the sheets and the share ability, ubiquity and all of that. So, you know, that's ah, uh, you know, if you think about it, it's like filing cabinet. Um, that's for me. That's Evernote. Um, you know, share a ble, you know, documents and all of that. Um, Google's the center for me on that, you know, you know, now allows you to have to share, you know, share your documents and work with them. So I'm doing that, too. And then, you know, the the the sort of chat project feature. I prefer slack. Although teams is good too. Zoom me, My my preference for for this sort of thing. Although we do really well with teams and all. Um, did I miss any tech areas thereWP engine, which I think are the same people that Amazon uses for security and on all of that in the background, it's very affordable. We've talked about maybe going over the square face. And we're thinking we're, you know, comparing pluses and minuses right now, Squarespace makes it easier for us being an agency. We're very aesthetically driven. And we we want to avoid, uh, even simple development challenges. Uh, eso I have tow kind of, uh, I have to fight for the for the difficult things that are worth it on by Think progress might be a difficult thing that's worth it, but I don't. I love so at the intellectual level, I love objectives and key results. I would say Learn about that. You know, if you don't know about that two students, um, you know, there's a lot of formality and bureaucracy and time wasting that slips into meetings. Ah, lot of tactical focus when folks should be talking strategically. So I think thinking about what's the objective we're trying to achieve here. I mean, you've come to come into it like, for example, the way you've managed this. I know exactly what the objective is. And I know what the results you want. You want answers to these questions, and and I know what they're used for. Uh, to me, a lot of agendas don't Don't Don't have those basic elements of What are we doing this for? What's the objective? What are the key results? So So I find that really useful for cutting through the complexity. I think if you think that way, you know, coming out of school, you if you you know, if you think that way, you will stand out. If you just ask basic questions, you know, on keeping why are we here? What are we trying to achieve and how will we know when we achieved it?