Experience 17 | Exploring Digital Marketing and the Journey of Life with Tyler Brooks of Analytive

Welcome to the LOCO Experience Podcast with LOCO Think Tank Founder Kurt Bear. Listen in as Kurt digs deep into the business and life stories of business owners and thought leaders at different stages of growth from all walks of life. Launching and growing anything can be a crazy experience, so expand your thinking and level up your understanding of what it takes to find success in the world of free enterprise. Welcome back to the LOCO Experience Podcast. My guest today is Tyler Brooks and Tyler is the owner of Annelitive, a digital marketing agency and also a local podcaster here in Fort Collins. And Tyler's also a LOCO Think Tank member. And so Tyler, why don't you just set the stage by describing Annelitive a bit, who your team is, who your clients are, and what you do for them? Yeah, great question. Kurt, thanks for having me, honored to be here. I love huge fan of LOCO Think Tank, been a member for just over a year now. So, Annelitive, so digital marketing agency, as you said, is always a challenge to describe because digital marketing means so many things to so many people. But our big focus is on, I like to call it like digital. We're a kind of digital Sherpas for your customers. So if you have a business, customers find you online. Maybe they find you in search, Google ads, maybe it's Facebook, Instagram, maybe it's social media, email. But what we help do is we help companies build paths from where they are actively searching to basically the front door, or at least the digital doorstep of your business. Okay. Right. So, And then the sales team in some cases would take it from there, or even if it's a digital sale, then they can just become a customer. Totally. Exactly. So if it's e-commerce, you know, the ultimate like conversion, we call it in digital marketing parlance, it's the conversion, where they buy something, they convert into a customer. That conversion, we basically get it to that. So for B2B, right, business to business. So if it's, you know, long, yeah, long sale cycle, where you need to sit down with someone kind of vet them. It's like, how do you get them so that they fill out the form on the website or reach out on LinkedIn or whatever that action step you want them to take. So we try and start with that. Like, what's the action you want someone to take? And then we back out, right? And typically we then build a trail, right? Which is why we call it the kind of digital Sherpas, we, and we want to lead the customer to that digital front door so that then the sales team can close them, they make a purchase. And so we work through that entire process. So typically on the top end, it either involves some kind of advertising, Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, another channel, you know, we work in a lot of different channels. And then it could also involve organic search SEO, right? So if you're searching for, you know, restaurants in Fort Collins as an example, like how do you show up at the top plumbers in Fort Collins, whatever. Sure. Or in B2B, same thing if it's, you know, a niche podcast microphones, right? It would be any commerce example, right? Just stuff come into mind. So we say, okay, how do we, how do we get them there and then, and then move them across the journey and build every single, like stepping stone in that journey? So like starting, if I remember, I had a marketing class one time, like awareness, right? Like they first had to become aware of your existence and stuff and then come to kind of want what you have or whatever is that. Yeah. Simple. Yeah. No, it's, it's an important process, right? Where we tend to focus is we tend to focus a bit more on, on, on the search site, right? So a large part of our focus is on someone's already looking for your product or service. So how do you get in front of them when they're looking for it? Right. Now, on like the Facebook Instagram LinkedIn, some of those channels, it is more interruption based, you know, but so a lot of times on those, the awareness step, but we always, we always try and go for some conversion, right? So we're not just running ads for general awareness, but maybe it's signing up to watch a webinar, right? It's a low commitment, you know, and you start with the lowest commitment, which is them clicking on the ad. And then you move up the commitment cycle where they land on the page and it offers on my webinar and ebook or an info product or, you know, free-play shipping offer or whatever. And then you move them sort of through what we kind of called the value ladder, right? So the first step is to click, you know, the next step is maybe putting in their email and signing up. And so you sort of, you work them up this value ladder as much as possible with, you know, ecommerce has a fairly low conversion, you just want to get in front of them when they're searching, they might buy. Again, with b2b, it's going to be a very long sales cycle. So you say, okay, what's, we've got to get them to click on the ad. That's step one. Then what's the next most logical follow-up for that? Right? And then you start building out all of these steps with the goal of then getting them to obviously pay you money, right? Or if we're working, because we do a little bit of work in like the nonprofit space. So in the nonprofit space, it might be to volunteer, could be to donate, could be to just share something that you're engaging with. And so again, we start with the outcome, try and work backwards and fill in that step. So who are your customers then that you do these journeys? It sounds like you're familiar with all types, but do you have specialties? We do. Yeah. So we work with a lot of like high net worth financial advisors. Okay. So that's been really fun, fairly recent in the past year. We do, we've really in the last year also spun up kind of a small business division, right? So working with local businesses, plumbers, hotels, things like that. Really optimizing Google logo. Not geographic stuff, a sort of yeah. Yeah, like hyper geographic, like where you're looking for something in your region. But we also have a few e-commerce plays. So there's, I mean, there's a lot. But what I love about it is it's always a little different. And so, but it's the same fundamental process of like, what's the next step? What's the next step? Right? What's the next step? How do we get them to move further down that process? Yeah, yeah. And what's that look like for you? Like your customer's journey. Sure. I'm starting to hire you. Yeah. So there's a great question, right? So several, sometimes the cobbler's kids have no shoes. Right. I was going to actually use that analogy. I'm really glad you brought that up. So yeah, but we are largely based on referral. Like we have an active website. We get some leads, you know, referral based stuff. We also have kind of a small business. So my wife is an eye doctor, an optometrist. So we have kind of a hole that I started just on a whim because I saw that so many optometrist were getting really crappy marketing. You know, they are paying 500, 700, 1500, 3 grand a month. And the quality that they were getting was incredibly low. And I said, wait, we've never worked with optometrist, but we've worked with all the other other small businesses. And so we sort of built out our own little division, you know, optometrymarketing.com where we actually help optometrist do that. And so that's all, you know, I guess. Do you just do like one optometrist per like zip code or regions? Yeah, per region with each other. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, exclusivity per region. So yeah, otherwise it would be competing against ourselves. If you pay me more, then I'll send you. Right. Right. Very good. So yeah, so we try and update that marketing, huh? Yeah. So lots to, lots to think about. But, you know, generally, the other thing is we try and keep real long relationships with our clients. And we try and provide very hands-on service, right? Because that journey is going to be different for every type of client. And what a lot of agencies do is they'll try and cookie cutter out something and say, oh, well, you're, you know, this is your business. And so we're going to do SEO. We're going to do ads. And we're going to do all these things. And then they just kind of throw it at the wall. And you're getting the exact same service that everyone else is. Right. We do these three things for everybody. But whereas somebody should have a focus on their Instagram because they can create like all this visual appeal or a focus on their LinkedIn because that's where they get the credibility built up or whatever. Right. And if you want to be competitive, you have to do something that other people aren't doing, right? So you think about it. And if you hire, let's call it a big box agency, you know, the showroom remain nameless, but there's a handful of them around, right? You know, they're working with 50 other plumbers. They're working with 50 other financial advisors. They're working with a bunch of other people. And so it is. It becomes the game of whoever pays more, right? Well, typically get the best service. And even then there's sort of a big question mark. The other thing is in order to scale this. And the reason we've kept our team pretty small is I'm super hands on with it, which is a choice that I've made, right? I can grow the company and hire lots of people. But building out those steps takes time. And it takes effort. And more importantly, it takes a strategy and being able to like empathize with where the customer is, right? And then figuring out what that journey looks like. And that's not something that most junior marketers are able to do. Like, you know, and I say that as I do understand it's like, oh, yeah, you just do SEO. But like what are the important keywords? Like what are the important topics? Like how do you actually go and do something that's going to provide value versus just say like we checked off the box, right? And we try to avoid to check off the box marketing. And instead really focus on like what's going to return revenue to the businesses quickly as possible, right? Kind of that 80 20 like what's the 20% of effort that will return 80% of the results. We're always trying to find that. We don't we're not always able to find it as quickly as we would like. But that's the focus rather than cookie-cuttering and saying here's what we're going to give you for exactly this price. So you mentioned a small team. Yeah. What's that look like for you today? Yeah. So you can feel free to drop names if you want to, but you don't have to. Yeah. Yeah. A team all over the world. Okay. Right. So one of our key project managers is in DC. We do have a team of overseas contractors. We have local writers here in town, some folks in Denver. So we keep a pretty diverse team, which I love. Mostly subcontractor. Yeah. Yeah. One kind of key employee. And then yeah, a lot of subcontractors. Okay. But there are people that we've worked with for a very long time and have really good relationships with. And you might do a third of their revenue creation. They work for you and a couple of other guys. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of ladies. Right. You know, which again, I love because you build a relationship. You know, in life, I think is a like compounding relationships, just like compounding interest, right? So longer you work with someone the easier it gets. And so we've sort of trained them in our methodology and in the way that we approach marketing. And so I can say, hey, I need a piece of content about X and I can give them a very rough outline and they can turn something around. And that's why you probably have writers that are mostly local because it's hard for a local topic to be covered well by a Philippine writer. Totally. Yeah. Anything that requires like a strong command of the English language, we always do US based. You know, I've tried writers from a lot of different regions. And it's always been more hassle than it's been worth. Yeah. Yeah. How do you find these international team members? Well, again, a lot of our team has been with us. I was actually adjusting a team member, one of them in India, their contract today. And they've been with us five years. Okay. Yeah. So we use like Upwork. Upworks the main platform. But you have a kind of open audition almost of sorts. And then when you find somebody that adds a lot of value for the time and whatever, then you're like, Hey, we're gonna have more work. Totally. Well, and that's how I've always hired like whether it's a full-time employee, whether it's a contractor, I always give them a project. And typically the vast majority of the time I pay them for that project. Right. So what I'll do is I'll say, Okay, I need a website build. I need a piece of content. I need an ad. I need whatever. Right. A small project, you know, from a hundred bucks to a thousand bucks somewhere in that range. And then I will usually give it to a handful of people that I'm auditioning. And I'll pay them for their time. I mean, they're doing real work. I don't expect the work for free. And then usually end up taking the best one. Right. And you can even AB test it yourself. Right. Yeah. Exactly. You know, and so we pay people when we AB test them. But that's that's how I do most of my hiring. You know, even if I have someone who killed it in an interview, I say, Hey, like, here's a project. Right. I'll pay you X amount an hour. You know, a fair wage, not crazy. Maybe less than they would make if they were full-time. But you know, I don't want to take advantage of you. Again, I don't expect you to do free work because I wouldn't want to do that. But yeah. And then we go in and see how they do. Yeah. Interesting. So if you were going to just drive a like ideal client, or maybe you've got a couple of different subsets, right? Like, I know you've got optometrists or is one of your sweet spot in and whatever. But if like a normally an ideal client, and if there's e-commerce, business to business, is there things that are better and stronger? Yeah. So the big areas are anything with a fairly high, and that's a relative term, right? But a fairly high ultimate conversion value. A big ticket. Right. A big ticket item. So cars or boats or membership and a more expensive think tank. Right. Well, and some of our, you know, but with loco, you know, you could look at it and say whatever, it's X $100 a month. But really, it's a big ticket sale because ideally that person's going to be there a year, two years, ten years, right? And so yeah, if it's whatever, a hundred bucks a month, you know, that's 1,200 bucks a year, times 10 years, you know, you got 12 grand. Right. So it is a, and again, I'm not saying that's your price. I don't know off the top of my head, right? But it can be a fairly high ticket item. So rather than, you know, just selling like whatever catsox or, you know, something with like real. That'll sell a lot of catsox. Right. Real low value. We try and really focus on like the high conversion value because the secret is, you know, one of the marketing I'm kind of getting into into the secrets, right? Is is and this takes a little bit to wrap your head around. But the person that can pay the most to acquire the customer will always win. Sure. Okay. Right. So that means that we have to extract the most value from the customer. Yeah. Right. And here's why is because, especially like search ads, but also Facebook, it's, it's a competitive space. Right. Right. So if you can't out compete Walmart, I'm selling catsox. Exactly. So a lot of these folks have very, very, very deep pockets. So you don't want to race to the bottom on price. You actually often want to race toward the top and say, look, yes, my product is $10,000. But that means I can pay whatever, right? $2,000 to acquire this customer. Right. So I can run more ads. I can produce more content. I can reach more people than I would ever before. So it's actually like very counterintuitive. But you want to be able to, not that you want to spend all your money acquiring customers, but you want to be able to pay the most. But you can't really spend more than say 20% at the most, depending on your margins, yeah, on acquiring customers and could be much lower than that. Yeah. And it, again, depends on your business model, right? You know, a restaurant, your margins are tiny, right? So you can't, you know, whereas something, different types of businesses, I mean, there are some businesses that have 20, 30% margins. If it's an info product or a webinar, we reach out, people reach out to us a lot who, you know, want to take a class or something, you know, offer an online class. Like you could spend 50% margins and acquire the customer. Sure. Plus though. But every marginal customer is 100% profit. Yeah. I mean, yes, it scales very well because you can reinvest that into marketing. Plus, you sort of get them into your ecosystem, right? An email list or an ad. And like, if you, you know, if Kurt went and said, I want to come out with, uh, an ultra premium local think tank membership that's whatever 10 grand a month, right? The people who are going to buy that from you are not some random Joe off the street, right? It's already the people who have, you know, extracted the most value have paid you. They trust you. And you put together some amazing package with like Kurt's private phone number and consulting and all of this. Then as soon as you do that, there are the ones that are going to move up the value chain. Right. And so once you have them in your ecosystem, like, uh, you can continue to move them sort of up that value chain. So, um, let's explore a little bit, uh, your journey. Um, like, what led you to become, uh, a marketing ninja? Uh, yeah. Yeah. Where do we start? Um, yeah. Let's just start like, uh, I'll describe you. Just start with young Tyler, like third grade. What was third grade? Like what? Yeah. So I'm from the Midwest. Okay. Born and raised in northern Indiana, out in the country. Okay. I loved my, my parents. We were, I was probably eight or nine. We moved. Roughly third grade. Yes. From small town, right? To another kind of small town, but we were out in the country, log home, uh, 20 acres, woods and creek. I mean, like kind of a boys, yeah, stereotypical boys paradise. So, you know, we rode ATVs. We played paintball in the woods. We built tree houses, you know, whatever, um, you know, whatever we could, we could do. Um, you know, and so my mom is a licensed and registered teacher. And we're kind of getting, I think you asked a family question at the end. So I'm skipping ahead. Yeah. No, I'm trying to understand young Tyler, but we'll talk about family more intentionally too. And so, uh, I was actually, my mom took what 15 years off and homeschooled both my brother and myself, basically K through 12. Older younger? Uh, younger. Okay. Yeah. So I'm the oldest of two. Okay. Um, yeah. And so just gave us sort of every advantage in the world, which I'm super grateful for, um, to them. You feel very positive about that homeschooling experience. I do. Yeah. I mean, by and large, I was given incredible opportunities. Yeah. Right. That I wouldn't have had otherwise. Yeah. Um, and, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that have not appreciated that experience as well. And so, um, yeah, it's interesting to just kind of, I don't know, considerable sites. Yeah. And like anything, like public school, like private school, like Catholic school, I mean, whatever, you know, there are people who it's a good fit for, you know, and had a good experience. Um, so I credit both my mom and my dad, you know, so we were a single income family, my dad always sacrifice, right? Yeah, had a great job. Yeah. But yeah, you know, and, um, and my mom is also a very, very good teacher. Right. Um, you know, so that's an advantage I had that not everyone has. I mean, she went back like just how awesome my mom is, right? She went back after we graduated and kind of moved on with our lives. They were empty nesters. You know, she went back and did PE, she was a PE teacher, physical education. But in the scope of, I don't know how long she was back five, 10 years, I mean, raised literally tens of thousands of dollars of donations and gear. So this little tiny elementary school, right? In the middle of, you know, small town, Indiana, sort of had an archery program. They had like their own little like American Ninja Warrior course that they set up in the gym. My mom is amazing. Activated people. Yes. She's very good at that. Um, when my brother was in high school, he started, um, actually skit and trap shooting. Oh, yeah. So shotgun. Yeah. Yeah. He actually made it to the junior Olympics. He was on the junior Olympic team for a while. Um, so we had a lot of these opportunities. We maybe wouldn't have had otherwise. Sure. Um, so really grateful for that. So anyway, um, but also being, I think at home, it was like, we didn't have a lot of structure, especially as we got into high school, in the sense that like it wasn't like you show up to, to school at 8 a.m. And you sit in this chair for an hour. Right. You know, and it was, here's your work. Get it done, right? You can take 12 hours to get it done. You can take. Yeah, you could take an hour. And so I think I approach my work very much that way now in that, like, I like to make a list of all the things I want to get done, right? Or need to get done for the business and really, um, focus deeply on those things, which is hard in a very distracted world. And not always the best at it. But rather than, you know, and I still keep a fairly normal schedule, eight to five, nine to five, sometimes seven, right? You know, seven to seven, depending on the day and what level of work we have. But it's always, you know, focusing on, on getting what needs to be done, done. Um, and I think then also, uh, my parents really instilled a lot of curiosity. Like I'm just, I'm a very curious person. Well, I'm going to observe. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. But that your mother is like activating people to support these programs and to do these things. Like it's surely you, things don't just happen to you. You can make things happen. Yeah, totally. And I think that a marketer has to have that kind of a mindset because that's what your people are hiring for. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so anyway, sorry for the side. Yeah, no, it, my, both my parents are amazing. Just incredibly, incredibly blessed, you know, with a lot of, uh, opportunities there. And then I, well, so then kind of fast forwarding to like high school, I think when things really started to take off positively for us, is there was a small local Catholic school, um, community college, not like school, but community college. That was like 20, 30 minutes from our house, um, called in Silicon, and my dad was an adjunct professor of computer science there. He worked in systems, uh, IT stuff. And, um, so I think I had just turned 15. Um, I think it was a freshman's right around there. Um, my freshman year, but my dad was teaching the stuff and he said, Hey, I think Tyler could do this. And at the time they never had a 15 year old enrolled at the college, right? And so, uh, so my dad went to the registrar's office and said, you know, and he had a good relationship with them. He said, what would it take to get Tyler in to do this? Um, and they said, well, you know, I don't know. He's 15. Okay. But if you take the entrance exam, like, you know, you can, you can go in. So I took the entrance exam. I did well enough, right? To get in. Um, so that was really fun as well, because I'm sitting there learning with, with college students. And again, community college, so probably not the most academically rigorous program, but it was great. You know, I took, well, I was a lot of individualized attention and stuff, though, because these small classes and whatever. Yeah. You know, and had an amazing, uh, history professor. So got a real solid understanding, you know, of history. Um, when I'm, a couple of my favorite classes were, uh, journalism class that we took, you know, so obviously we've talked about doing the podcast, but being able to go and interview people, right, on campus and be like, hi, I'm with the campus newspaper. And I'm writing an article, right? And so I remember the professor was professor Merle. I think he went on to teach it like Loyola or, you know, some fairly prestigious school little, little French guy, you know, did iron man's in his free time kind of kind of person, but learned a ton about just asking questions, right? Forming media narratives, you know, stuff that marketing effectively is, but like how do you draw a story out of someone? How do you interview? How do you write? Well, how do you write concisely? Um, you know, and there were a handful of other classes that I took there. I don't know, but I, I guess I do. Yeah. I mean, you these podcasts and my writing, I've been complimented along the years and stuff like that, but didn't really have any structured training around it. Yeah. And so, uh, yeah. Anyway, so you're in this, in this community college and really learning a lot of the skills that become the toolkit for being a good marketer. Yeah. Which of course, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Sure. You know, I mean, I, and it changed every other couple of weeks then and, you know, sometimes. What was some of them? Um, really thought about like military or police, you know, always grew up in kind of that world, um, you know, pilot, like I remember, you know, top gun kind of stuff. Um, also, you know, so my grandpa on one side was in the military. Um, my grandpa on the other side was a farmer. So it was like running a large farming operation. I think looking back now, again, through the lens of growing up, I was always the boss, you know, like he used to play with like little tractors and toys. And you're like, this is my farm. I have people working for me like, and again, at the time, you don't even think about that, but looking back, it's like, oh, like I was the boss. Like and here I am today, you know, with the opportunity to run my own company. So very cool, very cool. So I guess finished high school, you already got a bunch of credits in the community college and stuff. So did you continue on your education there? Uh, so transferred. So when I graduated high school, um, transferred all those credits, I think I ended up with about 27 or 30 credit hours. Okay. Um, which was a great start to Indiana Wesleyan University. Okay. Um, which I, uh, I loved, you know, small private school, kind of also in the middle of Indiana. Um, very formative years there, developed some amazing friendships. Obviously, as most people do in college, you know, with people who are, you know, still friends today. Um, so while I was there, um, started out in a business and communications major, excuse me. And um, it was really good. I ended up dropping the communications. So, uh, graduated with a dual major in a business administration and entrepreneurship, um, actually. So, um, and while I was there, I got an opportunity to start doing video production work and production work for a, uh, conference, a Christian high school conference, right? So it's sort of like a summer camp meets a big rock and roll show for Jesus is kind of the best way I can describe it. Well, sounds pretty outrageous. Was it, was it big? Um, events. So they did 20, 30 events per summer. Wow. Yeah. You know, so you traveled around full semi truckload of gear. Like, I mean, you know, small end was like 100 kids big end was like two or three thousand. Wow. You know, I mean, it's a, we're talking, it was a concert series, basically. Yeah. Coming out of a semi truck going across country. Yeah. I mean, it was a rock and, you know, to anyone else, it was a rock and roll show. Right. I mean, video, um, stage equipment, my ex wireless line array subwoofers, bunch of different bands, bunch of different artists at each one of these stops. Yeah. Exactly. You know, we had sort of the, the resident worship band, often we'd travel with them, you know, speakers that would fly in. What was your role in this? So it started out, um, basically, so you imagine an event like that, you have the video up on the screens, right? Um, there's somebody behind the scenes who's selecting which camera goes on the screens, right? Sure. And so that was me at first, but then throughout the four years I did that. So basically every summer, because in high school, I was a bank teller. That was my, my day job. You seem like a banker type. Hey, yeah. Well, it helped with, uh, it helped with my finance knowledge. Right. For sure. So, and then they said, anytime you want a job, come on back. So after my freshman year of college, I called them up and they said, Hey, we love you, but we just hired someone full time. We don't have a spot for you. So I said, shoot, you know, like, what am I going to do? Ended up connecting with an old friend who was a few years older than I was. So he, you know, had was mid 20s, probably got connected up with this conference. So every summer, then I literally traveled with them. And so it, you know, made fairly good money for a college kid, got a lot of neat experiences. I mean, we were everywhere from, you know, Florida, the Carolinas, California, you know, here in Colorado. I think my first time in Colorado, we did a conference down at Durango. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it was my first time that I'd ever been in Colorado at that point. So yeah, so did that for four or five years. I'm going to kind of fast forward a little bit. So graduated college there. Got a job at a church doing the same kind of stuff. I want to hear what you learned about business from that conference before we move on too far. Yeah, about business. I mean, or entrepreneurship or. Yeah. So you learn a lot about people, right? You're crammed together with 20 people and you travel around all summer long and you stay in dormitories. Right. You know, so it's, it's this weird thing where you come together with people, you become sort of best friends. Yeah. And you know, obviously some people rub you the wrong way, whatever. But generally, everyone gets along. You become best friends for eight weeks, nine weeks. And then it's peace out, you know, and then you may or may not keep in touch with them again. You know, so, you know, business-wise, I mean, maybe just life skills more probably. Yeah. Plus you were homeschooled, right? She'd never been crammed in with 20 people and I've bused before. No, well, not that often. So, well, and I was just imagining, I've participated in the Wild West relay. Okay. Last couple years. And it's a relay race from Fort Collins to Steamboat Springs. Right. With 12 runners and two vans. Okay. And, you know, participating in an overnight 33-hour running race with six relative strangers, there's a certain closeness that gets built. Oh, yeah. You know, a different way than that. But that's the closest thing I can compare to that experience with those conferences. No, yeah. You know, and you hear about people who were, you know, in crazy situations, you know, and how they develop or like combat. And obviously what we were doing was very far from combat. I'm not comparing like, you know, a, a bee testing here. But it's a similar sort of like you're just put together. You have to solve problems. You're up late at night. Like, you're, you're just jamming all the time. I think what a couple of things that I learned there generally were one is we were working on technical systems. Right. So if you think about a video system, it goes from, you know, the camera to different conversion boxes to a switcher to then the projector on the screen. And then you have, you know, you make sure audio synch with video. So, you know, to most people. A lot of opportunities for error. Right. And a lot of eyes if you screw it up. Right. And the big thing is your ability to problem solve. Right. Because you have things that happen at a live event that are different. You know, you can't just be like, oh, let's start over. You know, I mean, you know, you have, we got to get the left microphone working now. You have three that does happen. You have two, three thousand kids in a room. The power goes off. You have no audio, no video. You have, yeah, two thousand high school kids in a handful of youth leaders. Like, what do you do? Right. You know, you like, look for the fuse, I guess. Right. That's your problem to solve, you know, and like our team solve that problem. We pulled a 15 passenger van into the loading dock. We put a AC DC inverter in the cigarette lighter, or I guess connected to the battery. We plugged in a couple of portable, you know, Mackey, like, you know, $500 powered speakers and plugged a microphone into the back and said, we're on. Now we have the ability and worship leaders to think they're with them acoustic guitar. You know, and obviously that stuff is kind of rare. Um, but I don't remember that one. I don't remember why the power went out that time. Like 45 minutes or, you know, I think we ended up doing a couple songs and a talk and then we dismissed them. And I think that was the end of the day. We had, uh, we were up in California with a generator run out of gas. Um, the company was supposed to come fill it, you know, because we're using it day after day. Right. They never came, you know, and so same sort of thing. You have kids in a tent and the generator dies. And here you go. You know, so a lot of problem solving, you know, and like thinking on your feet, who knows how to siphon gas. Right. I mean, literally that's, that's, that's where you end up. So, uh, so it was a really neat experience. Yeah. You know, um, but I also realized that, you know, that level of travel and that commitment, you know, you're never home. So it was amazing. And you had grown up in stability. Yeah. Well, and, you know, I knew that I wanted to like put down roots somewhere, you know, and so I said, hey, this is a fun experience now, but I don't want to be 40 years old and be like, you know, and we had a couple guys who, amazing guys, but they like, yeah, I leave my family for three months every summer and travel around, you know, or sometimes even longer. And it's like, mm, that's, that's not what I want. Yeah. Um, so very grateful. Um, so then, you know, fast forward, ended up working for them, you know, several different times, uh, even after I graduated college, as I was kind of between gigs, but how I got into marketing was, um, I said, I don't know what I want to do with my life. And so the logical extension at the time was to go get more education. So, uh, went back and got an MBA. There's a Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana has a one year accelerated MBA program. This design for recent graduates, right? Okay. So it took a year. I worked at a church. And after about a year, I said, yeah, this isn't for me either. You know, weekends like you're making no money. Obviously the nonprofit world. Right. Um, not that that's the most important thing, but it, you know, you see the writing on the wall. If you want to have a family and children, you got to be able to put diapers in the cupboard. Totally. Um, yeah. And, you know, every, every Sunday you're, you're up. I mean, Sunday's a work day, you know, and, um, and we had Saturday night services. We had like one and a half days off a week. And it was just exhausting. Um, so again, grateful for the experiences there, ended up going back getting an MBA. While I was at the MBA, the mutual friend got introduced to a gentleman who owned a web development marketing agency. So this is just right outside of Indianapolis. Okay. Um, connected up with him. And, you know, just kind of talk to him. I know nothing about it. It's like you're kind of smart. Maybe I should hire you. Yeah. Well, I said, I can do video, right? Like I can do video. I do it better than any, you know, anyone else, um, which, you know, maybe I don't know if I said that, but probably wasn't extremely true. But he's like, all right. Well, let's give you a shot. Right. And so I think a video better than some people is what you really meant. Right. Right. Right. Well, and, and at the time, like you have to get what's called like an externship or they encourage you to get an externship, right? So you go to class three days a week and then I think like Tuesday, Thursday, maybe it was inverted, right? You go and you work. Yeah. Cool. Um, and so I said, hey, look, you know, pay me. I think it was like 15 bucks an hour. Like, you know, do that. So ended up doing that. You know, I did okay on the video stuff, but the truth is they just ran out of video work, right? They're like a web design agency. Right. And they're two weeks later. I get all the stuff I need to get done done. And they're like, uh, if you just do video, yeah, like we don't have any work for you. But we have sort of this like division kind of this sub company that does digital marketing. Uh, they need some help. You want to learn this? It said, yeah, I don't want to go look for another job, right? Like so. So, uh, said yes. You know, that company was doing, uh, at the time, SEO, um, was the primary one. So learn SEO, learn analytics, learned a lot of that. It's certainly a little bit like, where is this in the evolution of the internet and, uh, stuff like is it 2012 or 14 years? So I graduated college in 2011. So it would have been 13. Okay. 2013. All right. You know, so I mean, Google's starting to take control pretty good and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Growing grilla. Yeah. It's not that different from the world that we live in now. Yeah. I mean, it kind of matured by that. You know, you didn't have Instagram or TikTok or some of those. Right. Um, but you, you know, you had, you know, ads, Google ad words you had, display ads, you had SEO like as a concept, you know, people have been doing it by that point for like 10 or 15 years. So it was kind of right. You know, I, if you imagine a curve where, you know, I don't know, I guess, maybe that's a bad example. Well, when I, yeah, well, when I got into my career, I had a flip phone. I had an email, but I was an early adopter. Right. You know, and stuff, and nobody, there was no such thing as a smartphone and websites were, you know, a lot of companies who were pretty skeptical if you really needed a website or not. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a different page than there. Definitely. You know, and so there was, there was obviously demand. Like people were really trying to understand this. I mean, the iPhone came out in what O7. So the iPhone's been out six or seven years. And the blood was in the water in the newspaper industry already. Yes. And the digital marketers were smelling it. Yep. Yep. So, you know, and actually the web development side of the company worked with like tech crunch early on. You know, I mean, so they were pretty heavy hitters. You know, um, also worked, you know, with a few different political parties, you know, on, uh, building out websites for senators and representatives. Um, you know, so a lot of security. Yeah. Obviously those are not gov addresses need to be very secure. So they did a lot of that. Um, yeah. So really just kind of right place, right time. You know, huge, huge blessing. And then, um, so graduated MBA and just started applying to marketing jobs. Right. I said, okay, I don't know what else to do, but I did the whole video thing, did the traveling thing, not my jam. I have, you know, eight, nine months of this marketing. That wasn't a role for you at this place. Yeah. Marketing experience. Um, ended up getting, uh, an interview, uh, which you did twice on Skype or zoom. It wasn't zoom at the time, but I think it was on Skype, um, with a small agency here in Fort Collins. Okay. I don't think even exists anymore. Um, who said is it? Can you mention it? I'd rather not. Okay. Um, yeah. So I don't even think they, but you learned about Fort Collins, I guess. Right. And so they flew me out here. We did an interview. You know, they gave me a small moving bonus of a, you know, a couple grand. And I said, okay, well, I don't have anything better, right? It was the first thing that kind of showed up. So I ended up moving, uh, moving out here. And that's, you know, how I got to Colorado. I didn't have any grand plan to relocate to Colorado, but it was a great opportunity. Um, you know, if I didn't target again, necessarily, you just, there was a job up opening here. Sure. You know, and if it would have been the same job in, you know, Podunk Alaska, I probably wouldn't have taken it. You know, so I was excited about the job, but it was kind of the combination of both. You know, that was, I think, you know, with Fort Collins, yeah, it had really just started to get general awareness that like this is a great place to live. You know, I'd never even heard of it right prior to being out here. I got here site unseen. I never heard of it really before. Right. Um, yeah. So yeah, I ended up moving out here, worked for that agency for about a year. Our styles did not match at all. I'm a very, like I talked about earlier, like build the journey, get to ultimately the conversion and revenue. Yeah. Um, they were much, let's just call it like a softer, like community and branding and like, which again is super valuable. I'm not trying to diminish that, but that's just not my style. Well, and that kind of fit into what ultimately became your name and like your very numbers driven approach results driven kind of thing. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, and we do that creatively. And it, we realize that there is, is value there. I never wanted to diminish branding. I think it's super important. Sure. And obviously you buy night shoes or Yeesies or whatever. Um, so, but that's just, that's not what I want to know how many conversions I'm getting for how much money. Right. Because the other thing is we work with small and medium-sized businesses. If you have Apple's budget, you can throw money at anything you want to, right? And you pick some arbitrary metrics of success. And you're going to sort of, you know, just overwhelm your way to brand recognition. Sure. Right. You know, and again, I don't want to diminish what big agencies and those people do. But generally, you can be a bit more lazy, right? And, and get it done. If you're in a small business like you have a set marketing budget, right? You need that to turn around more grill or warfare. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And so you've got to poke in the bushes where your clients are and stuff like that. Yeah. So, you know, and I realized early on, you know, we're pitching all of this like, you know, branding and design and, and, you know, all these different packages that like, you know, we're helpful. I mean, you need to have a great logo. You need to have good professional design. Like that's all. Sure. But you, when you're charging a small business, you know, five figures, six figures for that kind of stuff, it's like, oh, is this really the best way to spend your money? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, you know, to me, it wasn't, and, and frankly, I mean, the other thing is I'll just admit my fault. I'm kind of a terrible employee. Like I'm a really good marketer. I, I, I think we serve our clients very well. You know, I take a lot of pride in that. But as a, like an employee, like, be here at this time, you can leave it this time. You know, again, maybe, it hasn't been how, how you ever were. Right. You know, yeah. How did you do that way? And I can't, like, punch a clock. Yeah. So it was like, you know, give me what I need to do and I'll get it done. And I got it done really well. It was just, yeah, our styles were just very, very different. So, um, less than about a year there, bounced around a few other jobs ended up working actually with downtown Fort Collins for a little bit. Oh, um, doing like a big event stuff was more operations there. Kind of started in marketing ended up more in operations. Like some of the music events and stuff like that. Yeah. So, brilliant. Again, if we're going back to, yeah. So one of the funnest things was, um, talking about some of those other bounced around some other jobs, and, uh, must have been failure at some of them. Well, the big one. So, yeah, there were a couple, right? So left there wasn't sure I wouldn't do. So I actually went back on the road called up the conference and said, hey, free agent again, you know, you want to, you know, ball here. I don't have a job. You've got heavy kids of people for three or four months here. So, um, so, yeah. So went on tour again, you know, did another summer with them. Again, I'm super grateful for. And then, you know, at that point, I'd moved out of my apartment and I'd packed up all of the stuff that I own including single now. Oh, yeah. Very single, including my car, right? Which I, at the time, I still have it's, uh, one of my cars. It's a little Volkswagen Golf, you know, and I rented, including golf. Yeah, a 10 by 20 storage unit and crammed everything I owned into the storage unit, you know, because we went to end their lease. I went to pay, you know, a grand a month or whatever. Right. The storage unit was only 75. Right. Exactly. So it took off, did that, um, and then came back to Fort Collins at the end of that summer. And my former roommate had his own apartment and allowed me very graciously to crash on his floor for like, you know, well, I, yes, air mattress. Yeah. Um, you know, and I was kind of lost. I'm like, like, what do I do, you know, at this point? And it was right at that point where, you know, at this point, you're like 26 or something like that, maybe. Like 24. Not quite that old yet. 24. Okay. Yeah. 24. Sure. You know, and I think there was never any doubt that like, I'd figure out how to make it work. Right. But there was sort of what, until you can kind of have a at what? Right. And that was the big challenges, you know, I, yeah, I still think my parents were very concerned, you know, I mean, they're, they're proud of me. I'd taken the, the LSAT, you know, I thought about going to law school. Right. Um, just never felt right, you know, um, my brother's a lawyer, two of my best friend, one's a lawyer, one's becoming a lawyer. Now he kind of tried a couple career paths and bounced into law. And so deep respect for that field, um, everyone says I would have made a great lawyer, but just I wasn't feeling it, you know. Yeah. Um, so yeah. So anyway, so came back to four columns, you know, crashed on this air mattress. And I'm like, I have to figure out like how I'm going to make this work. Otherwise, I'm going to move back to the Midwest because the only reason I'd originally come out here is for a job, but I'd started to establish connections in the year that I was here. And I, I didn't want to throw in the towel yet. Like I really liked four columns. Um, you know, was enjoying the hiking and and all that. But we're going to take like a restaurant job and hope for the best. And yeah. And so slip out of the professional career kind of. Yeah. And so then kind of I was back three days, I think. Okay. And I get a phone call from at the time, the director of the Downtown Business Association. And I had applied to a job in April. So this is August, right? Okay. So in April, I had applied to a job, um, got turned down. Good. Do you want a for an interview? Did well, they were looking for like a marketing manager. Yeah. Um, is this short when he was there? Yeah. Yeah. Mike Short. I know what. Um, so, uh, so yeah. And he said, hey, you know, uh, at that time, a lot of the staff had just, uh, exited the DBA and said, we were looking for some, you know, web help. We just need to kind of some hands, right? Who can get stuff done? We really liked you. You just weren't quite a fit for the marketing manager position. But do you want to kind of come in and and, you know, work with us? And so kind of came in for a while as a consultant, um, ended up helping, yeah, run events, um, as well as doing marketing, manage the website for a while. Yeah. Um, just sort of, uh, kind of do everything guys before that organization that really needed some help at that time. Right. Cause I, you know, at the time, I was very much, uh, you know, Jack of all trades and expert at none, you know, I had a deep understanding of technology, a working understanding. Maybe that's better. A working understanding of technology, you know, uh, could build websites kind of issue at the time. Like I was learning very quickly, new marketing, new finance, right? Cause I had an MBA in a background. So yeah, just a general, yeah, fix it person, um, ended up running, uh, currency for a lot of the big events. So made sure, you know, everything balanced. And, you know, I think one of my, my favorite moments was leaving, uh, what was it? Was it 2015? New S Fest, you know, so I had a team that I'd hired and a lot of them were just friends and, you know, local bankers and stuff. And so at the time, and I'm not sure what new S Fest does now, but we were managing a lot of cash. Right. Um, and so there was a time where we came out of our, what was the cash headquarters at the time? You know, it's 11 o'clock at night on the Saturday. You know, so it's the big day. It's busy downtown. There's people all over. We had $300,000, you know, all counted wrapped in backpacks. Right. There's a Fort Collins police officer there. And I said, Hey, you know, I introduced myself for a while. My name's Tyler. Um, I have, you know, three employees that are going to come out of here with $300,000 in cash. And we're going to go to the bank and drop it off. You think you could follow us and he was like, we got you. So yeah, we all loaded up in the car. You know, we had the little Durango escorting us. And so, so yeah, a lot of good times. It sounds like a real opportunity, though, to, um, get that breath. It looked like a very, a pressure cooker time almost like there's so many things, so many different opportunities that you could just really grow as a, an awareness of what business is and does and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. Well, and if you've ever done, anybody who's done events knows that it's, you know, I don't know, to borrow the fast fear is kind of like right or die. You know what I mean? Like with, with office work and what we do now with marketing is if you screw something up, you, you know, you try again probably nobody knows. Yeah. Right. But when you have 3,000 kids in a room or, you know, 10,000 people at an event, it better work. Right. Or you better figure out, you know, kind of that, that show must go on. You know, it's a cliche saying, but unless you've been in a show or supported a show, you don't know what that means. But as soon as you are the, the talent or the support person and the show must go on, you got to figure it out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. In the bank, you could, you could always fix something. You know, if something wasn't, you just change the computer, what it says. Right. You call them up. I gave you two little money, two much money. Yeah. Whatever. Exactly. You can't like, ungive a loan. Right. Right. You're underwriting and make sure it was a loan. But other than that, you can kind of fix everything. So totally. So, um, so now we must be approaching. Yeah. Sorry. That's the, we're kind of doing parkour here jumping. No, that's okay. All around. Um, so then yeah, I ended up working with that job, kind of went through the transition of executive director into the new one. And was there as the operations manager for about six months, uh, and then my contract kind of wrapped up. And at that, that was a point where I said, Hey, I'm going to start analytic, you know, and I think I'd form the LLC. Like I sort of had this weird inkling that I was going to do it. But not really, like I should just have an LLC. Like, I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I should have it. You know, start out doing just web building websites, you know, and, and then really sort of found my, uh, my niche in the search, uh, and in marketing. Because what I love about what I get to do is it's the intersection of psychology and technology. Right. Is marketing, digital marketing lives at that intersection. Right. It's using technology to persuade. Right. So people would say manipulate, but we, you know, I people have their free will. Right. But to say, okay, you should, you should buy this and it'll make your life better because of that. I have a think tank. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Um, and so, yeah. So we are also pretty careful with the clients we work with. Right. I only sell products that I believe in. Um, so, you know, that helps me because then I can really buy in and I say, okay. And again, it's, that psychology is empathy. Right. Like why would someone, like what is someone going through who would sign up for local think tank? Right. As an entrepreneur, we all know this a lot of your audiences. It's lonely. It's frustrating. Maybe, um, your spouse doesn't really understand because they, you know, they are nine to five or some other job. Um, you know, maybe you're single. Like you don't have anyone to bounce it off of. You know, you got these things you need to go through and you just need some community and some support as well as some good guidance and advice. Right. So being able to empathize with that. Right. And meet that person where they are and then say, Hey, I have this solution for you. Yeah. Right. Would you like it as really helpful? You know, because you could sell loco two ways. Right. I want to unfold that just a little bit more. Well, you finish first and then I want to ask you don't fold it more. Right. Cause in marketing and what I realized early on is a lot of folks focus on like what the product is. Right. So it's like, you know, with loco. And again, I'm using it as an example because everyone's probably fairly familiar with it. At least who would be listening to this podcast. Maybe. Maybe. So, um, you know, we meet once a month for three hours and you get to talk about your business, right? That and personal stuff. That's what loco is. But the value is not that. Right. The value is its emotional sport, its advice, its advisory. It's the things that will help you be happier. Make more money, right? And live a healthier, both mentally and hopefully physically life. Like that's the value of loco. It's not that we meet, you know, once a month and three hours for four hours. Totally. Yeah. I like to say it's a two parts board meeting one part support group. Yeah. I think that's pretty accurate. Yeah. As a member, I, I, yeah, I think that's fairly accurate. But people come to loco for lots of different reasons as it turns out. Like you're describing one, the, the, you know, I have a home office with a dispersed team and there's a certain amount of loneliness and, you know, but then there's others that that really desire strictly the accountability of having people telling them what they need to get done before next month. And there's other people that are like, I understand everything from the financial side of my business, but I don't know what marketing is or does. And I really need to build some skills or connections there. And so there's all these different reasons. And that's to some extent how we've struggled sometimes at loco because we don't know which of those people we should be talking to or if we try to talk to everybody differently or one mess. I don't know. Yeah. Well, and, you know, in the sales process, you can uncover that. Right. And that's so you got your job as a marketer is to get them to my front door. Right. And then the salesman's going to be like, oh, I'm working with a driver here. I'm working with somebody that just wants a hug or whatever. Yeah. You know, and this is where, again, we could go off, you know, on a lot of rabbit trails. But, you know, in marketing, there's this thing called like persona development, which is useful. I mean, it's a lot of fru fruey. You know, this is your archetypal customer, right? This is Peter and he's 45 or this is Leanne and she's, you know, 32. And this is what they're looking for. But that can be helpful because I imagine, you know, you have your different tiers, right? Solo per newers. There's probably three to four problems, right? That solo per newers. If you were to survey all of them, not enough revenues for most of them, yeah, lonely, totally scared. Right. And so if you were to survey them, they have, you know, those things, whereas you're, what is it, upper level or next level? Yeah. Right. And so those problems are a little different than you have sort of your, your highest revenue groups where those people almost always are managing a team with a lot of employees, you know, they're trying to hire lieutenants and get them into different positions. Right. Yeah, we say the leadership architect is one of their defining characteristics. Totally. And the messages that then you would give to each of those people's very different. Right. Right. And also the way that those people interact with technology is often not always very different. Sure. Right. Like solo per newers tend to spend a lot more time and again, broad stereotypes in my mind, you know, marketing themselves. So they're using Instagram. They're using Facebook, you know, they're doing that. Maybe the people at the top end are like, you know, just give me what I need right now, like the information, like I'm very busy and I need to get back to whatever is the way you reach them, the way you engage with them is a little different. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. I, you tempt me to consider hiring analytical for some marketing support. We've talked about that sometime. Yeah. Well, it's funny because when I reached out to you, so yeah, I found you. Do you remember how I found you? Yeah. Well, I'm LinkedIn, I think. Yeah. So LinkedIn and this guy named Kurt and loco, think tank, local peer advisory. And I think every single friend or connection, I don't know what you call it on LinkedIn, connection, I think that you had in Fort Collins or that I had in Fort Collins, you also had. I mean, it was like hundreds of people and I'm like, how does this guy know everybody? All my people, you know, yeah. And so I reached out and I said, I don't know what you do, but I feel like we should have coffee. And so that as a start of. Well, I was like, who's this marketing guy? He probably just wants to sell me marketing services, but we'll have coffee with him. And by the end of it, you were like, I think I might want to be in a think thing. Yeah. And frankly, I'm not sure. We definitely are getting to the place. You know, that we've had kind of built our internal marketing team because you got to have that first. Sure. You don't even want to work with those companies typically, but we are getting to the place where we're like, you know, where are the places where we can be really strong and where are the places where we can use some support and some operational activity? Sure. Yeah. Whatever. Well, when you ask earlier about ideal client and our ideal client, you know, besides having, you know, some marketing budget, obviously, because you got to whatever buy ads and pay us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But having someone internal is always something we, we like because there's a lot of minutia. There's a lot of things like we're very good at building our pathways. But what we don't want to do as an agency is get distracted by all the like build to spec kind of work. Like, oh, would you like take this presentation and make it fancy for us? We've changed this page on the bottom of page three of the website. Will you make it say this instead of that? Right. And, you know, for us that that's bad in two reasons. One is it takes our time and costs the client more. The other reason is again, we're not focusing on what's really important. You know, and I guess if there's one theme that I guess I've always tried to focus on in the way I approach business is like, what is the most important thing that needs to be done right now? That will have, you know, the biggest impact. Again, 80, 20, 90, 10, you know, 99, 1, whatever that percentage is you want. What's that 20% that's going to be super valuable? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting thing. We've kind of had false starts on a referral program before with local think tank. And we've kind of more formally launched that we have some structure to it. And actually some systems that we can make sure we don't like not pay people if they refer. Right. But that partly came about because we sort of our database when we were like, oh, it was actually a lot. And so like I would imagine like knowing that a lot of business and membership to local think tank comes through a referral program. Well, the smart market would be like, well, let's work on marketing that referral program better. Totally. Right. You know, and referrals for small businesses regardless of size, you know, when a company comes to us and says, you know, we make a lot of money from referrals like, I'm like, great, like I can never, no matter how good your marketing is, I can never compete with that. Right. Right. And any honest source, right. And any honest marketer would say that. So if we could formalize it, that's great. But one, you know, once you've, you know, and if you're happy with the size of your business now, then I guess we don't have to talk. Sure. And once you kind of tap the referral tree, right, and get all the sap out of that tree, then you can go and say, okay, like what are the other channels that we need to build up? And that's where you get, yeah, the digital marketing that we tend to work on. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So let's talk about the evolution of analytics a bit in that five years. And because you were kind of a rookie website builder and did a little bit of this a little bit of that. And I guess departed a DBA after contract was over and whatever. Yeah. So I think I wrapped up there. And I went full time with analytics in October of 2015, I think. Okay. Yeah. And it's been a process of figuring it out. And then about three and a half, four years ago, we hired our first full-time employee. Okay. And really built up the team from there. You know, for me, it was a big, like any business owner, right? It's at the same full-time employee. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. You know, and shout out to your key. Yeah. I'm really grateful for our team. Yeah. You know, and honestly, I try and as much as possible. I know everyone says this, right? But like make it a great company in that we've been entirely remote forever. Like I've never, I had a shared office space for a while, but it was, you know, a communal one. And it was just for me. It wasn't for anyone on our team, you know? But yeah. So one of our key employees is now in the greater DC Virginia area. Again, we have writers all over because that's how I prefer to work. Like I love face-to-face meetings. I like hanging out with people. But I've found that our team is more productive if I'm not bugging them. Yeah. Yeah. You know. And I think that's also the thing I learned about management is, you know, there's a lot of people who manage by walking around and just manage by walking around. Yeah. Yeah. Like how are you doing? You know? My first manager said that. Yeah. But it's typically, especially if you're doing deep worker creative work, right? If you're at a, if you're a flippin' burger or something. Yeah. You know, when I was a teller, like you want the manager there if you have questions. Sure. Right? But if you have a team who's doing deep, either technical or creative work, you want to leave them alone. Yeah. Right? Because they, they need to get into that flow. Yeah. I actually saw an uptick in Rory's productivity when we went to largely remote work, you know, with the COVID thing. Because I wasn't always, hey, by the way, I just, and she didn't, you know, shake in her head or I was just getting into my flow on this creative thing and now I'm janked out. Totally. And I think it's, who's a Paul Graham, I think, has a blog post, you know, venture capitalist about this, you know, managers time versus as a creator's time. But basically the idea is as a manager, you know, you have eight hours in the day, you try and fill that with as many meetings as possible to keep things moving. If you are a maker, right? You need a whole afternoon. And if you have a meeting at two o'clock, that could blow up your whole afternoon, right? Because especially if you're doing programming design, video editing, like those things, you know, it takes you 15, 20 minutes to get in the zone. You really need to get focused. You don't want to be pulled out of that. And, and I as kind of a creative and a technical person, like I spend a lot of time still even in our business doing that kind of work. I don't like it when my team bugs me. Like I'm available to them, but I'm available through Slack or through email, you know, so we do one team meeting a week. We do it on Zoom for an hour and a half, two hours. We run through all the clients, all the tasks need to be done. You know, we use a sauna for our online tracking. But there will be weeks where I don't hear from my team for three or four days, but I see tasks getting done in a sauna. You know, one of the things we do is our team sends me at the end of the day, a three by three. It's like, what were the three big things you work on? I'm trying to remember all of it. Like what three roadblocks did you hit? And what like three questions ends up kind of just being like, I hear what I did today. And here's some questions that I have. Yeah. I love it. You know, I know when they're kind of like wrapping up working, I know if they got stuck, you know, and then I can follow up. And they're like, oh, by the way, I had these four questions. Yeah. Reply question one. Here's your answer. Question two. Here's your answer. You're only a lot three questions. Sorry. They can ask as many. But generally, you know, and our team does that. And it's nice for them. Yeah. Do you steal that from somebody else? I think so. Yeah. There's not that many new ideas in the world. Yeah. So, and I was like, let's just do that. You know, and so if you're one of those managers, it's like, well, I'm not sure that my team will work without me. It's a great way to sort of keep an eye on them without keeping an eye on them. Because if they're not sending it or they're sending the three things they did and the three things are, you know, I updated the date on this website. You know, it's like, okay, you worked eight hours today, but like you only got this one thing done. Yeah. You know, so it's a way to sort of check in, but you're also not hovering over them. Yeah. And I'm not at all about like, oh, let me spy on your computer. Like at the end of the day, I don't care, you know, right. Like as long as you're getting your work done, I'm happy. As long as the clients are happy. That was a the shorts podcast that Rory did with Mel Uli just the other day. Mel said, you know, our team, we have open time for sick leave. We have open time for this and that and whatever. And there's really just three questions you have to ask yourself every day. Are my clients happy? Are my clients happy? Are my clients happy? Yeah. And Mel is in my group. She's she's awesome. Oh, yeah, I forgot that. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I learned to like her even more than I already did, which was quite a bit when I listened to that podcast, and especially that's hard. Yeah. We had coffee with her and my my wife joined us kind of randomly. Because I was like, oh, why don't you come and and meet Mel, you know, but Mel and I were just grabbing coffee and my wife ended up sitting and talking with her the whole time. And I think my wife likes Mel and Mel and my wife better than either of them like me. So, right. No, it's fine. You're gonna have that instant connection with you already know and stuff. So let's talk about that. Like somewhere along that way, young Tyler fell in love. Yeah. So I'm in the midst of forming this business, I gather. Yeah. So we were we were pranking, you know, cooking at the time, right? We were, I met my wife in February of 2017. Okay. We met really since I'd moved to four columns. I'd been involved at Timberline Church. Okay. For primarily they have what they called 9-7-0, you know, it was kind of cool branded thing like NINE 7-0. Oh, yeah. Right. Young adults, you know, 20s and 30s. Yeah. A couple of kids and you kind of had these Christian music circles and they had the best stage and whatnot. Yeah, you know, and I really loved more than anything. I loved Timberline's heart for the community. Yeah. You know, I've always, you know, and we could talk about some of the other stuff I've had just a blessing to work with like, serve 6-8 and some of their, you know, non-profit stuff there. But so yes, I was involved, you know, they met every Thursday and I think they still meet. But I ended up meeting my wife there in like February. So we sort of, you know, like kind of got off to like, are we dating? Are we not dating? Finally, like, I, you know, kind of ask her out and we committed, took her skiing a few times and then she was here because, so I mentioned she's an eye doctor, right? She was doing a rotation. So she was only here three months, you know, and there was a family at Timberline church who had a huge gorgeous house and they said, come stay with us for free. It was a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing. Wonderful people. So she was here, you know, three months for free didn't have to find a lease. So and then they're like, hey, you know, you should go to Timberline. They knew Bob Seal who's one of the pastors over there. And, you know, maybe there'll be some people there and hopefully they're not weird. Well, turns out she met me and said, yeah, there was, there was, she met one weird person, but she kind of fell in love with them. So awesome. Yeah. And so then we started dating and then she actually did her residency at the VA and Cincinnati. Oh, wow. So for a while, I was doing the Jetset Lifestyle, right? Pretty much all through 2017, 2018 and then July of 2018, convinced her to move back out to Colorado. And we got married up in Estus Park. And then we've been, I mean, I was already a Colorado resident, but she's been a Colorado resident since. Awesome. Did you, was there some thought about like going to Cincinnati or someplace else to be where she was going to be? Yeah. I mean, we loved Cincinnati. You know, my business was here. Yeah. So I was the primary breadwinner or would have been, you know, once we got married, you know, the other thing is she can get a job anywhere. So we had a lot of long conversations about it. Turns out people have eyes everywhere. Right. You know, and so yeah, you know, and she liked lifestyle here as well. She's originally a Chicago native Chicago in. Yeah. The window and blow like it does in Chicago here. Sometimes. Yeah, some days. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, you know, and so we've we've planted roots here, you know, and there's always potential to move or go somewhere else, you know, and we miss our families greatly, but we do love our friends and our community we have here. We, you know, have a small group, you know, through Timberline Church. And so there's a lot that we value here. Yeah. Let's talk to some of those. You mentioned a fair bit of nonprofit engagement, both through the church and outside of the church. And I imagine even marketing elements and some pro bono work and stuff like that. Do you want to talk about that? Heart for service. And if that's how that's related to the business core service and things like that. Sure. I mean, I'll do my best, you know, so our big question. Yeah. So obviously the conference itself that I worked for was a nonprofit, you know, and I worked for church for a while. So I'd spend a lot of time in that world. Yeah. Um, you know, and then my faith background is obviously Christian, um, you know, and I'm a, uh, yeah, from birth. Was there a, well, we'll talk about the faith family. Yeah, we can dive in. But yeah, so I, I love Jesus, you know, and I love as much as possible helping people. And so, um, when I, so analytic was kind of cooking at the time and I heard a, you know, these are podcasts or a book at this point. I don't remember. And I think it was Bob Gough. I don't know if you're familiar. Yeah. We went to, uh, he spoke at a resurrection church school fundraiser. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so yeah, a great author, uh, lawyer and he said one thing, um, that he said, if you're, uh, following Jesus and he's not leading you to the poor, you're not following Jesus. And at the time in my life, like things were pretty good, right? You know, and like I was still, you know, I had a couple of roommates, but like the business was, it was growing and, and that really hit me between the eyes. And I said, you know, I look around, I don't really know any poor people. Like I knew people who, you know, maybe made $15, $20 an hour, who we wouldn't consider super affluent, but I'm sure he's already poor. But they're 22 year olds or whatever to you. Exactly. Yeah. Um, and so I, uh, I can. There's difference between poor and poverty. Right. Exactly. Um, they're like broke, yeah, or, you know, like building, building your future versus like, you know, kind of going in the opposite direction. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I reached out, uh, to serve six eight, which at the time was housed in Timberlain Church. So serve six eight for people who don't know as a local nonprofit here that's gone through many iterations, um, but really focused on on the, the community of Fort Collins and generally Northern Colorado. They're now in Windsor and Loveland and a bunch of different areas here. Um, and said, hey, I want to help, um, showed up there, you know, but also kind of realized. And again, I say this in the most humility and not in any arrogance, but like sitting there folding clothes for three hours wasn't my highest and best use of time. Right. Right. That's super important. And I never ever wanted to mention putting a bag of rice in each box for these food packages. Right. And I was, I was willing to do that. But there was, but if you could use three hours of digital marketing time to drive $2,000 for the donations to a cause, right. And so what I ended up helping them with was primarily, uh, I helped launch basically their careers program. Now it's called talents. And I said, well, I've interviewed for a ton of jobs, some of them, I got some of them, I didn't. Um, I've hired people, right? Like, so I've been on both sides of the table. Um, and I know what works and what doesn't, at least to a certain extent. And, you know, I can help people work on their resumes. And so for, you know, several years, I'm not as involved as I, well, any more as I was. And now the program has grown into something awesome. You know, they have a whole team of coaches and people. Right. So if you're, if you're struggling looking for, you know, job help and, and need help with the resume and interview skills and all that, you should definitely reach out. What's the current executive director there? Mike. Uh, yeah, you wouldn't ask me. Mike Walker. Yeah. Mike Walker. Uh, great. He was on the podcast. He was on the analytics podcast. Um, yeah, former police officer, former home builder, former firefighter. Yeah. Not a profit. Amazing background. Super cool. Mike, I'll have you on the local experience podcast if you'd like. Yeah. You should. He's, he's, he's, he's awesome. Um, so yeah. And really just set down. I mean, the first time somebody brought in a resume and I, I'd never done it before, you know, I could build my own resume and just started meeting with people. And so typically, would book out Thursday mornings, um, spend an hour or two, just meet with people, um, coach them through getting a job, right? Getting a job is a tough process. It's not fun, right? It's very discouraging. Um, you know, and most of the advice that you get on, you know, get a job blogs is just total garbage. Right. You know, I'm writing a resume total garbage. You know, and I done all this copywriting, I sold, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars and software deals, you know, so I know how to write great copy. You know, and you get these resumes and I'm like, I just need to take like all this marketing and copywriting skills and instead of applying it to a product. Yeah, make this person. Right. You do it to the person. Yeah. You know, and so I can say, you know, and I still do that from time to time, like, you know, whenever anyone is like, look at for a job, I'm like, you know, just let's have a 20, you had that with, you know, someone the other day of this and, you know, I'm looking to get a job. I said, okay, here's what you need to know about the interview. You know, we just run through in 10 minutes, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Here's what to watch out for. Here's what you need to say. Here's, you know, the care about in this industry. Yeah. The kind of thing, whatever. You know, it's not that complicated. I have to think about, I'm thinking about my like third and fourth grade English teacher now and some other ones along the way that really made sure I got good grammar. And because I was reflecting and I hate to say it, but I've gotten almost every job. I've tried to get all through my, that's awesome. Yeah. Like six different jobs and I've had like 10 interviews or nine right in my whole career. Yeah. And so I didn't, but I think it was because I had pretty good writing ability that high school English and different things like that. Like, that helped me to get those jobs because I always had a resume that really sold me first. And then I'm friendly and, you know, well, and you have natural, you know, natural sales ability, right? Like you're very conversational. You've worked in sales in various forms. Some people don't have that. Right. You know, and so again, it's, it's literally marketing. So on a product, you list the features and not the benefits, right? Or that's what people do this wrong. You say, loco, we meet it, you know, for three hours or whatever, you know, on Thursday mornings, it's like, no, the value is different. And so when you're doing a resume, what value do you bring to the company? Organized, efficient, right? Productive. Nobody cares that you worked at McDonald's, right? But they care that you were problem solving. But then the other thing is like humans, like you and I, we connect with stories, right? And that's the language. I think you had Seth on or we'll have Seth on the podcast story on yesterday. Yeah, super, super cool guy really focuses on stories, probably knows way more about than I do. But instead of like saying like, I'm productive, like you tell a story that says, how are you productive? Or like, I have leadership skills. Well, when did you take leadership? Right. Or if you can show this progression at McDonald's of starting and then growing as a leader, growing as a leader. Right. And then you come up with, and what I tell, sorry, we're going to park our hair or jumping all over, right? No, this is what people do. But you come up with, you know, 12 narratives stories before you even start, right? And you say, okay, if they ask me about leadership, instead of just saying yes, I'm great at leadership. You tell them a story about when you took the lead, right? And again, you don't make up stories. You're honest about your past. If you don't have the job experience, you pull it from whatever, right? Maybe you did four age or boy scouts or girl scouts. Those little coaching, so if they ask you about leadership, you've got at least a story that you can pull out your pocket and be ready. Yeah. Yeah. Like you just have those stories and those also stick with people, right? Because those are the conversational hooks that are like, oh, you were in boy scouts. I was in boy scouts. Right. Right. Oh, you know, that was, and then three weeks later, when they're like, who was, you know, who was Kurt? Oh, he was a kid that was in boy scouts, you know, or whatever. Some. Yeah. Awesome. Well, so actually our church, we're closely with service X-8 this year as well. Awesome. And there was a relief fund. I was a participant. That's where I met Mike last spring and stuff too. So anyway, great organization. And thanks for all the support you've given them. Well, thank them. I mean, I don't do as much anymore. But I love what they do. You know, and the big focus and part of the reason I love them is it's not about providing for people's needs, but it's about providing for their needs and then moving them out of poverty. Totally. Right. And you have to have that motion aspect. Otherwise, you're just getting people. Well, and that's the Matthews house is the organization. I've been really passionate supporter of and actually, somebody from the service X-8 group, Mark Orfen, did a strad up as a gift from the community foundation to the Matthews house when I was the board director. Cool. Yeah. I'm the chairman of the board of wherever. Yeah. And so that's where I got kind of my first exposure to that organization at large. So anyway, shout out to Mark Orfen as well. You're a stud. Yeah. Amazing people over there. It's true. It's true. So let's talk to, I guess you want to just what else do you want to talk about business journey stuff? I think we've kind of touched on. Is there any? Oh, let's talk about before we get into the face family politics element that we close with. Why don't we talk about your local experience just a little bit? Yeah. Don't want this to be a local commercial or anything. But you have been a member now for a couple of years and a year and a half year and a half. Okay. Something like that. Yeah. Um, is there any like, uh, boom, I learned this or I changed this about that? Or is it? Some people have these pivotal moments in their memberships. Others just, I'm just everything about my business is a little bit stronger than it was then or whatever. Is there, what's your experience been in that regard? Yeah. So probably more the second one. Yeah. Um, so local for me has been, um, so I think one of the, the most interesting things about local, right, is that when you see someone else's problem, you almost always have, assuming you have some knowledge and, you know, it's ways to fix other people's problems. Yeah. You have a viable solution. Right. You know, and so you hear other members of the community talk about staffing issues or about, you know, even, you know, we don't do inventories. That's not really my ballgame. But like growth issues, you know, uh, working too much, you know, getting new business like, and I have to stop myself from talking too much because I'm like, oh, I have a solution. But what it's, it's helped me to do is to say, wait, so, you know, almost like be a, a disembodied intellect on my own problems, right? Yeah. So like to step outside of, yeah, because I'm like, oh, so and so, you know, X person had this problem and they had a staffing issue. I have a similar staffing issue. What would I tell them to do? Right. You know, and then you also, I mean, it can be, you know, a cautionary tale too of like people who, you know, maybe have problems that, you know, bounce up here and there and you're like, oh, I'm making that same problem in my business. Right. Right. So that's been part of it. Um, I think just being in a community with other business owners and entrepreneurs is really interesting. Um, obviously I love learning, like I said, I'm naturally curious. So I love learning. We have a variety of industries from, you know, real estate to manufacturing to consumer, you know, goods to, you know, medical to be consulting. Yeah. Exactly. So, um, yeah. And so being able to ask people questions and I've had several of them on my podcast, they're like, what does it like in your job? Right. What is it like in your industry? Um, because I, you know, I'm like, I'm very curious about how people operate and how industries operate and how the world works. Yeah. Right. So what is it like in your job? Um, the, the impression I'm getting is that most every, uh, of your clients has the relationship with Tyler and they know Tyler and his team is going to take care of him. Is that true? Yeah, the vast majority of the main maker of most all accounts. Yep. Absolutely. The vast majority, although, um, like our project management, uh, team is awesome. Right. So, you know, I'm, you know, like any business, I'm the buckstops with me kind of person. Sure. But a lot of our clients are team managers and they do a better job than I am. You're checking in with the project managers, but they're really checking in with the teams. Right. You know, and if they have questions, I'm happy to step in or you catch the fish, you throw it to the project manager as they slice it, dice it, turn it in sushi. Totally. And where I sit, you know, because for me, like my goal in business, right? And I'm working towards this is not to get paid for my work, but to get paid for my judgment, right? And they're not judgment and like, oh, I'm judging you, but judgment in my ability to make good decisions. Yeah. Right. And so that's always my focus. And so if I find that I am doing anything in my personal and professional life, you know, if I'm working too much, if I'm too in the weeds, it's going to cloud my decision making process. And that's going to cause issues because I'm not going to be as clear. So what I like to do is sit down with the team and say, okay, here's a new client. Here's all the things that need to happen. Here's the strategy. Now go execute and let me know if you have a problem. Right. Right. Right. And in doing that, I'm training them in strategy as well. So a lot of times, maybe the next time we, I only have to say it's this type of client, do x, y and z, you know, and give them the main bullet points and they can fill in the gaps. So yeah, but my goal as and why I love my business is, again, it's that 80, 20, it's, it's leverage. Yeah. Right. Like business is all about leverage. And I wish I would have known this earlier. All right. Right. And there's a few different types of leverage. There is capital leverage. Right. So you invest, you get interest or yeah, you know, assets go up whatever capital leverage. Obviously, if you're new, right, you don't have access to capital. That's not really an option. There's people leverage employee leverage, which is good. And that's what impresses, you know, your family. Right. Like I have 25 employees or whatever. But, you know, it's, it's tough to scale. Right. And so you want, you want to use that as much as possible. Then there's technology leverage, which we try and use a lot of. Right. Sure. Sure. Sure. So like and my, well, people leverage every fractional amount costs quite a bit. Total leverage, it doesn't. Right. And so my, you know, the decision making process that I try and use, right. And again, I'm very imperfectly, but is EAD, right. So eliminate anything that can be eliminated. Right. Any tasks that are on my plate that just don't need to happen. Let's not do them. Right. It's like why we don't have an office. Like, because then I have to hire a janitor to clean the office or, you know, pay rent and, you know, all that we could, we, I realize, really, we can eliminate an office for the type of work we do. I'm not sure. It's right for everyone. Yeah. So anything I can't eliminate, right. Anything I can't eliminate the next step is I try and automate it. Yeah. Can I use robots? Can I not let me have a twice weekly podcast recording in our house, though? Right. So. So be software happen instead. Yeah. So we use, you know, tons of software, we even have developers that'll write custom software for things that we need. Because I want to automate as much as possible. I don't want to be the one like, you know, like, I don't want to be paying someone $25 an hour for something that would take a software program 30 seconds or three seconds. Right. Right. So automate. I'll already get it set up to do that. Yeah. So eliminate automate. And then anything that's left, right. So this is sort of the filter is delegate, right? Like what of this can I delegate? And this is where, learning from loco, I have work to do. I'm not as amazing at this as I would like. But almost every other business owner I talked to has the same problem, especially small and medium-sized businesses. Our ability never enough resources to do all the things right to delegate. Yeah. You know, so I try and frame up like every decision and even for the client, right? For all of the client work, which at the end of the day is our product are deliverables. Like what can I eliminate, right? So like we use automated. So I said, let me give you an example. So we do a lot of reporting. Right. Traffic went up by this much, clicks went up by this much. You spent X amount of dollars, Y amount of dollars. And when I worked for the agency, you know, back in 2013, like the first agency, I spent half my day making reports, you know, in PDF, like took a screenshot, pulling up this data. So this is stupid, right? This is a waste of all of our time. So what I do now is I create automated dashboards. Like, or really, I have a team member who does it, right? We create automated dashboards where you they go in there and they say, I want to look at the last 30 days. I want to look at the past 90 days. They click a button, set their dates that they want to look at. It'll show them all of the important information. We don't do reporting. Like we do, like we'll give insights. The seconds are insights. We give insights. Like, okay, based on what we're seeing, here's what we suggest. And this is what this means. But we don't, I don't have anybody sitting there like copying and pasting screenshots. Like maybe once a year, we'll sort of do like a, you know, a foreign thing or whatever. Yeah. Full report. But that was one where we said, this is a waste of time. I didn't pay anyone to do it. And our clients like it. Because then they have, they can look, you know, if it's three in the morning and they're nervous about their business, they can log in and look at the dashboard. Yeah. Yeah. What's my prospect activity been like? Totally. Yeah. I like it. So it's that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that focus on efficiency because what it seems like you recognize is every hour that you spend is kind of like three hours of the employee of your customers time, right? Because you guys, if they had a marketing person, it would be a third as much or half as much per hour than your team. Because I guess you don't get paid by that, but you get paid by results. But you're a high leverage device, right? Right. Well, and my my value of my time, right, is to me is infinite. What is my time worth to me? Like, forget about what it's worth to curve or to like, I want to be doing what I want to be doing, right? And call that selfish, you know, and a lot of times I love what I do. So I want to work, but specifically I want to work and I want to learn, right? So I'm trying to learn like, how do I do better market? Always get a longer lever. Right. Almost. And so I try and minimize the amount of time. And obviously we still do client calls, right? My business is not fully automated. And I don't think a client service is business like ours. If I figure out ever how to do it completely automated, we'll have you back on and I'll reveal the secret to the universe, right? But but I love what I get to do. And so for me, it's like, I prefer to read and to study and to think. Right. And nobody that you could hire wants to go to all these different platforms and capture the statistics for last month's activity and put it into a big spreadsheet. Totally. And then like I said, getting paid for judgment. So in order to have good judgment, I need a base of knowledge, right? Right. So that means that I need knowledge and the best way to do that. I mean, obviously, experience is the most expensive way to do that, which is really helpful. But is to learn from others who have already been there. Yeah. And I think we circled back to the local experience a little bit too, right? Because you've got 10 fellow members in there and they're telling stories about their experiences with this and with that and whatever, and it just kind of increases your lever without the factor of time so much. Totally. You know, and I just, you know, I love listening to, you know, people articulate problems and solutions of what's going on. So yeah, so overall, it's been a positive experience, you know, built a lot of meaningful relationships with members of the group. And I'm just grateful. Yeah. And you came on about the same time that Pat Nicholson came on as a facilitator, I think. I only ever met Pat. So I, you know, I have, you know, I just a month or two before you joined. Okay. Yeah. I mean, and Pat's fantastic, really, really appreciate Pat does a good job. Yeah. Pat is very, very smart. Like he says a lot like, yeah, I wish, you know, I've told him. I'm like, so Pat used to what work for Apple and does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Started in the mail room and ended up in the board room, basically. Yeah. And I'm like, Pat, when are you going to talk about like branding and all these things are like, he's really good. He's like, I don't know. He should do a, he should just do a presentation for you. I'm going to keep telling him that. Yeah. Like Pat, like you have so much knowledge. And like I know, because I see it in your insights, you know, kind of like, he sits a little head out and I'm like, oh, like I want to know what you know. I'll poke him with that. We can actually just have him do. He should start with you guys and he could do a branding presentation. Some of our other chapters too, because it's intellectual capital. We're just wasting if it sits there. Yeah. Totally. So and maybe it's not branding. Maybe or something else he's passionate about. But I'm like, whatever you know, like let's get it on table. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. So feels to me like we could go into our final stage. We've touched on faith a little bit, but faith, family, politics, which one would you like to start with and go as deep as you want to in any? Yeah. Well, I mean, faith and family. So, you know, Christian, I love Jesus, you know, try and love my neighbor. Did you have a, it sounded like you were raising a Christian family? Did you have a conversion point proper for you or whatever? So I didn't have a, um, a, uh, like a crazy, didn't have a rebellious period to overcome or anything like that. No, I mean, I think I got, you know, in our denomination, you weren't baptized when you were born, but you made a choice, right? And I was nine. I think when I made that choice and, you know, I've stuck with that. I mean, obviously at times it's been easier and times it's been harder and I'm super imperfect, right? But for me, that was a, a decision that I made early on and I've, I've stuck to my guns, you know, and God's been very, very gracious and, uh, to me. So I'm, you know, I'm grateful and, and, want to make sure that what I'm doing is, is honoring to him in, in whatever way. Is your why, when you were nine, uh, really the same way as, as, as a 30-ish or whatever you are now? I guess, what do you mean why? The why you just shows to become baptized as a nine-year-old. Is it, is it deeper richer? Is it still childlike and, and that's a hard question. Um, I know. That's why I'm, you know, in some ways, in some ways, you know, you lose that childlike faith. So it's, it's always a struggle to get back to. Um, but in other ways, it is so much deeper and richer, you know, and so it's both end. It's like, you know, I, I don't know. Yeah. No, it's, yeah, I, I could appreciate that. Well, there's a first coat of paint on a wall and then it's, anyway, that's, wait, terrible metaphor. Sure. So family, um, yeah, family, have any little, uh, and what's your wife's name? Christine. Christine. Yeah. Uh, we have one on the way. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so, uh, do June 4th. Okay. So, um, we're very excited. I think, right? I don't know. Yeah. Maybe twins. No, not twins. Yeah. We, we, we seem to understand. I was kind of, I was kind of joking with her and my wife was not, uh, not super keen to have, have twins, not that you can control it. But yeah, she's like, no, no, no. But, uh, yeah, you know, we did our, our ultrasound recently, baby's healthy. So congratulations. I'm excited. I can tell that you're, uh, just going to be a great dad. You're gonna do my best. Do you want to talk about the extended family a little bit? We talked about your mom some already, but we, I don't know if we named her or your dad. Sure. Yeah, mom and dad, um, still based in Indiana. I love them both, uh, a lot, my little brother, um, became a lawyer, super successful, runs his own practice in South Bend, Indiana. Um, we got the train coming through, but that's okay. I know you'll, you'll hear it in the background. So, and then obviously my wife and then, uh, I am very blessed with great in-laws. Uh-huh. Um, so, yeah, just, you know, that, you don't get to pick your in-laws, right? You can pick your family, either. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and, but I'm, I'm really, uh, richly blessed with incredible in-laws. So, you know, extended family, lots of cousins and, and folks that, you know, I was kind of close to growing up in the Midwest, you know, playing out on the farm and out in, in, in the woods. But, but yeah, you know, really focused primarily on the immediate family, both, you know, my parents and brother and then, you know, down, uh, yeah. What would Christine say about why she fell in love with Young Tyler? I have no idea. You do ever ask her? You're not curious? I, and I told her this the other night. I'm, and this is not like some weird, like false humility thing. I'm still shocked when she wants to spend time with me. Like, I'll tell it. I'm like, I just, I don't know, because I think I've always been a bit of a loner, you know, and like, I just, I love that she loves to spend time with me. I'm, I'm so grateful, you know, and I love spending time with her so that the feeling's mutual. But like, I tell, I don't understand why, like, you know, nobody's ever really wanted to spend time with me as much as you. Yeah, you know, and so I'm, I'm very, very grateful, uh, that she does. Awesome. Awesome. So, yeah, so you'd have to ask her, you know, I never want to put, put words in her mouth, so. And what would you say about why you fell in love with her outside of that she wanted to spend time with you? Um, he has a laundry list, right? Like, there's so much. Um, everybody who meets Christine loves her. Like I said, you know, when we had coffee with, uh, with Mel, like, you know, she's like, Christine was great. I'm like, and then Christine's like, Mel was great. You know, like, I mean, they just, you know, Christine is, uh, very well traveled, you know, spent six months in, in Rome. Um, you know, I'm like a study abroad kind of program. Um, just loves life, uh, brings joy into every room that she walks into. Um, you know, you just, you, she doesn't see it, you know, but I tell her like, like, when I see her family, like, there's just, she brings them joy. Right. You know, and it's so proud of the woman that she is. Right. And I tell her, like, you don't understand because you're never not in the room. You know what I mean? But like, when you walk in the room, faces light up, but you can't see that because when you leave, you know, like, oh, so it's beyond just that joy. Like, she's almost the, the physical bringer of a physical manifestation of joy in her family. Yeah. And she's also, yeah. And she's a very tough person, you know, um, very tough and, you know, and because she's like, we've dealt with, you know, a little bit of health stuff here and there. And I don't really want to, you know, dive deep into it. But she's, you know, she's on a very restrictive diet. Like, I would, I would be nuts if I had to, you know, eat the diet and I eat about half of it, you know, that she does. But she just, and she is very, yeah, just a great kind, generous person, you know, very disciplined and a hard worker. And obviously she's a doctor. I mean, she's wicked smart. Right. Right. Awesome. So, do you know, boy girl yet? The girls for some get that deep. Uh, yeah. So it looks like we're having a boy. Awesome. So yeah, any names that you're tossing around. No, you know, we only found out literally this week that it was a boy. And so we've, we've avoided the naming conversation until we sort of get into, you know, some more detail about, well, until we knew the gender, and now we'll start to have that conversation. Right. Right. Start looking up to different pages. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, we're the day after Joe Biden has been elected president. New president. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I don't really prefer to get too deep into politics. It's just kind of a statement against not being able to talk about politics. Okay. And, uh, let's just say can we even talk about this? Well, I, I actually discarded what was going to be my January blog post title in favor of something a little more business. I, I love wordplay. Sure. And I think you probably do too. And so, I had, I had been market testing the title because I always come up with my title first. Okay. And then I write the blog. It's a good way to do it. Yeah. Is it? Oh, I didn't know people did it that way. Otherwise, mostly, but I'd love it. Um, but it was, uh, it was going to be abide in me, Trump's abide in me. And, uh, and it was really going to be all about abiding and not like swimming out of God's plan for you or the universe's flow or whatever, whatever you want to talk about that thing that keeps us kind of in the direction we're supposed to be in most of us know when we're not abiding. Right. Right. Whether, whether you're calling God or Christ or some of the God or whatever. Sure. You can kind of tell when you're not abiding. You're not in right place and whatever. And so I was, it was an encouragement to, to abide and just chill out a little bit on this whole political thing. Totally. And, you know, Biden's great. He's not going to change the world that much one way or the other in my estimation or whatever. So that's what that was. Uh, can. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any thoughts on like what he could do perhaps, especially to, uh, you know, he's promoting himself at least as a, as a unifying president, as there are things that he can do to those 72 million Trump voters or whatever that thought otherwise. And the ones that marched the Capitol especially. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is, it's a complex question because you're a student of history. Yeah. You know, and, and there's so much happening right now that like we can't even begin to scratch the surface because what I like to look for trends, um, and see like where have we come from and where are we going? Yeah. Um, and regardless, and this isn't a political, you know, and again, trying to be like as, you know, as disembodied as possible and like try and look at this objectively, not that there's any real such thing, right? Um, but yeah, I mean, I, I love America. I do have deep concerns about the directions that we're heading, like as a country. Um, and yeah, over like spending over federal government power, let's make a concern is that the federal government is being used to do so much that right different states are going to decide screw it them out or yeah, well, uh, uh, tomorrow, you know, an author, Jack Carr retired Navy seal his quote, you know, we're citizens not subjects and we must be ever vigilant to keep it so. So I think we're living through the fastest rollup of power in human history. Mm-hmm. That COVID has rapidly accelerated. Yeah. Um, you know, and so you have power and wealth primarily consolidating into the hands of very few politicians on both sides. Yeah, medical industry, medical industry tech industry. Yeah. I mean, you know, whether or not like Jack Dorsi is the most powerful man in the world. Right. If you can silence the king, you are the king, right? Like, uh, you know, and again, I'm not giving a value judgment based upon like whether this is right or wrong. I'm just looking at what trying to like look at what's happening. Um, you know, and I think some of the deep concerns are a few things. One is our values as a country have started to fragment. Mm-hmm. My intuition and not that I have some, you know, deep history was that by and large, like, we used to share similar values. Right. Right. Um, some people would search more than others and some people not at all, but they pretty much kind of thought that that God thing was pretty good. And when you would say something like justice, right? Like someone who is in the left or the right would like, if you had them, you know, go into room and like write on a piece of paper and you brought it back together, right? I think that is fragmenting. Yeah. So that's a big concern because when you no longer have similar values, you don't have much that that ties you together. Yeah. And so as, you know, values continue to fragment. Um, and then so you combine that. So fragmentation of values, right, with the ability, and I know this because I work in marketing, the ability of influence. Yeah. Algorithms and combined with journalists, right? Again, both sides. Yeah. To create anxiety, fear, emotion. Mm-hmm. You know, one of the things that I try and do, uh, is like, if I ever read a story, regardless of the topic, that makes me feel an emotion, anger, empathy. I always try and step back and say, whoa, like what's the narrative that's been being? It stands to gain from moving me totally, right? And you see this, like, it's super common, you know, whatever party, you know, and historically it's been like the Republican party, you know, maybe now it'll be the Democrats. I don't know. But like when you start itching for war, right? Like prior to the invade, like if you look back and you say, oh, there were pictures of, you know, dead kids on a beach, like anytime you see pictures of kids in bad situations, like that's a hyper emotional trigger and it should be, right? We should love our kids. Sure. But you also have to look and say, okay, is this an objective piece that's asking hard questions, or is this a, you know, is this designed to solicit a particular type of emotion? Emotion. Yeah, you know, because in marketing we, it's, it's people make emotional decisions and they, they then use logic to, to back that up. The other thing that really concerns me that I think is different than any other time in history is we see things being rewritten in real time. Oh, yeah. Right. And I see this because I can go into an ad and I can change a headline, right? I can go into a blog and I can change a headline in real time. Yeah. Right. I can, we can literally like rewrite and use to be flyers that had to have this many printed or whatever. Right. And you had what you call it letters from back in the day and whatever. Encyclopedia Britannica, right? On a shelf we had growing up, we had a version from 1992, you know, the whole series we bought from the library for like 10 bucks. Right. And no matter when I looked, right? What was in those books was always the same. Right. Wikipedia. Right. I can change your Wikipedia page today. Right. And we're going into a point where like, and I see this because I keep a journal that really in the past three or four months, I started keeping a journal where I just take snippets of news articles and stuff. And you can see history being written and rewritten in real time. Yeah. And you also see things like there's a last updated at the bottom of a lot of articles though, they don't always have that. Right. That's the really creepy part, right? Is that like there's no obligation. Like if you start looking at like way back machine and different things and you start to do some forensics on this, you know, the numbers that were originally released, released on COVID deaths were like post posthumously. 2.2 million were supposed to be like the forecast for right. But then those same articles have some of them have been like rewritten, you know, like the titles. And again, these are like local news sources and different things. And you start to realize that all of this is malleable. Right. And then you have to say, right. And so you have to go back and you have to say like, okay, like, how do I like work through this, right? And how do you keep grounding when your values are changing when you know, you're being like motions are being toyed on, right? And then even like the your memory is being effectively can be rewritten by media narratives. Even the document that you would go reference may or may not be the same document exactly right. So unless you keep a hard copy of it. So I think those are just three big things that I see, you know, so values, you know, the ability to spark up emotions. And our ability to really understand the world, right? And to have an accurate recollection of what happened. Right. Right. Are all being changed by technology. Yeah. Yeah. So stripped away or changed. One thing didn't repeat, but I wrote down a citizen's not subjects. And we just got our level up approval here. We got expected for. So we could right now we can have up to five people in this combined office space. Sure. But because I went through and, you know, have a reporting requirements and different things, I can go up to 10 after certain levels are hit. Nice. Okay. And so actually before you got here, Chad, from the chamber came down to a picture and they're going to have a level up page. And I feel so gross about it, even though it helps me protect my business interests and things like that, because it seems like government granting rights, not protecting my rights. Yeah. I mean, that's a big topic, right? So let me, let me reframe this. And I, you know, I stole all of this from someone else, right? But like the problem, you know, so the problem with COVID is like, what do you do to have them the minimum amount of damage, right? Like regardless of how you, you know, lives, businesses, like, yeah, should we shut, whatever, right? That's the question. And fundamentally, there's a philosophical problem for that, which is called the trolley problem. Are you familiar with the trolley problem? I don't think so. So imagine you're standing, we're here next to a railroad track. You're standing next to a railroad track. There's a trolley coming down. You look down and you see that there are workers and there's some workers. There's five workers on one line, right? And the train's going to hit them. And there's another worker on this other line. And you're standing at a junction box. You can't stop the train. You can't warn the workers, right? Do you pull the lever, right? And make the train go and hit one or do you let the train go and do it staying and hit five, right? Yeah. So what we have done as a society is we've, we've taken the trolley problem and we've pushed it down so that everyone has to make their own decision to this trolley problem, right? And on top of that, you complicate it. So instead of one track, there's 50 tracks, right? And instead of five workers, you see a couple workers and then it's fog, right? You don't know which, I mean, we think we do, right? But I think if we're truly honest, none of us really know, you know, do whatever, right? Like what works? What doesn't? Do lockdowns work? Do they not work? Yeah, our mass effective actually. Right. And so you're standing here, right? As as as a government, as a business owner, like as anybody, and you have, you know, a vote, if you will, in this lever, and you have to decide which track, right? This trolley is going to go down, you know, but you don't you can't see the outcomes. Yeah, but there's whatever an infinite number of various tracks, but you can't do nothing. Well, you could, but then, you know, who there's some workers on that track too, right? And where this gets real sinister, it's like, okay, it is what it is. That's reality where it gets sinister is now as a, a government employee as a business owner, you have to go up and you have to present your solution to the class. So Kurt, what is your solution to the trolley problem? Do you go down track number three or three hundred and seventy five? Yeah, right? And then if I don't entirely agree with you, right? Either you're killing businesses, like, you know, you know, how could, you know, no economics that or you're a super spreader, right? And you're going to kill my ground. And so as a society, like, they're, you know, we've talked a little bit about this before, but I've frankly just backed off a little bit and said, I don't know, and I don't want to participate in this problem because it's a no in problem, right? My opinion, especially as a marketer, you know, I'm not an epidemiologist or anything, right? It's not super helpful. So the best way I can deal with this problem is to step out of it. That said, right, if your business or your health are on one of those tracks, right? Then I think you have a right to stand up and say, look, like if you pull and send it down track number three, forty two, right? You know, my business dies. And so you need to have that vote. And that's sort of where we are as a society. So I don't, I don't have a great solution, but I also try not to participate in that problem, right? Right. Yeah. You know, because it just doesn't, I don't. Well, the economist in me is like also smitten by the fact that most of the, you know, 52% of Letterman County have been over 85 years old so far. Right. And they don't pay taxes anymore. They just suck up taxes. And so the utilitarian in me is like, well, let it go. She's ready, you know, and that sounds terrible and tragic. But it's kind of better than the 27 year old restaurant tour that saved up their life savings and has three little kids and has their whole world ahead of them. Charlie problem. Yeah. I'm not going to comment because I have some opinions, but I, again, there's nothing I can add to this conversation. Yeah. I'm not saying I have the answer. And I kind of like, I'm glad I'm not a insider. Yeah. And so all things considered, is there other things that you would want to make sure that people knew about Tyler Brooks and Adelitive and I do want to put a plug in for your podcasts. Yeah. So the analytic podcast where I get to sit down with wonderful people, many of them local members, but all kinds of people, and just talk to them, interview them. I love, like, you know, if we had zero audience, I still love doing the podcast because I always learned so much. Yeah. What else? I mean, we've covered a lot of it. Just, you know, grateful to be where I am, I think. You know, excited, still, and in light of the political conversation, still very optimistic in America as a whole, you know, optimistic in this community, you know, in Colorado. And, you know, feel very blessed to be here. I don't think there's anywhere else I would want to go in the world. Even though, yeah, you know, we talked about some of those big concerns, but I'm bullish, right? I'm bullish on on America. Well, I think obviously the fact that the economy is not in the crapper with all the downward pressure that's been applied to it, yeah, indicates that the psychology of people is still toward trending toward the optimistic. Yeah. So, and I think we see that, you know, and I think people, and I don't know, you know, I don't know what the future holds. And I always, I just, I like looking at trends, but I mean, those trends could reverse and those trends could change. You know, so we'll see. Yeah, it's hard to get rights back once they've been taken away. And as you observed, we've had a change in our kind of the narrative about what rights are and what they aren't lately. Yeah, you know, and I think maybe the first conversation is to try and, you know, maybe, maybe not, but rather than talk about policies, because I think we like to talk about policy. I think there's fundamental conversations about values, you know, and what, what words mean, you know, because when you start to change, change all those. Yeah. You know, it, things can fall apart real quickly. And then suddenly, you have people who are generally in agreement, you know, but don't, yeah, don't see things the same way. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, yeah, something, anyway, interesting. Well, thank you for sharing freely. Yeah. And for making the time to be here today. Totally. And Tyler Brooks and Lidav and a live podcast and a local think tank member. Thanks, sir. Thank you for listening to today's episode of the local experience podcast. This is Kurt Baer, founder of the local think tank and host of the local experience. And I'm here with Rory Shah, local business developer and host of the local shorts episodes. We hope you heard some new ideas and business perspectives in this episode. Our mission and all that we do, including this podcast, is to share collaborative business ideas and solutions that uplift the business community. Subscribe and follow us for you listening to podcasts to get new episodes as they are released. If you're curious about local, you can learn more about us at localthinktakes.com where you'll find more information about our chapters, business resources, and events for business owners and seniors. If you're looking for perspective, accountability, and encouragement along your business journey, why not apply for a chapter near you today? Why not? Why not? Why not? We'll catch you next time on the in-depth local experience podcast with me, Kurt. And with me, Rory, provide size business lessons in the local shorts. Bye!