EXPERIENCE 24 | The Business of Politics with Jacob Leis of Wintermind Group

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. This is Kurt Bear, your host, and I'm back today with Jacob Lease. And Jacob is the founder of a weird marketing organization of sorts called the Winter Mind Group. Yes, that's right. And Jacob, why don't you just start by laying the groundwork of what is Winter Mind Group? Who do you serve? What's your team look like, stuff like that? Yeah, Winter Mind was started by my partner, Brian and I, and it's just basically a digital marketing firm is how it goes, except for it's a little bit different where most folks are doing digital marketing for a specific client like I know you had somebody on recently who was doing it for doctors or a small business consulting firm kind of like that. Instead, we are providing community and selling that digital ad space and our core, our core group is all political clients, which makes this kind of a nod duck. There's not a huge pool of folks like if you were selling, you know, women's shoes or something like that, there's at least half the world as interested in that. Or like if you're trying to do a political donations, you're talking about a tiny group of people. Yes, I do not want to know about my opportunity to do a political donations. I tease a little bit, but so like, so talk about like the organizations that that would hire you. Yeah, it's normally the campaigns will be hiring like a fundraising consultancy group for their digital stuff and then those folks are going out to find people who are obviously interested in their candidate and they start pitching stuff to them and they'll come to people like us looking for ad space to run their ads. And so when candidate starts up, but politics is funny because if there's, you know, three or four people running for an office at the end of election day, they all shut down. It's not just the losers that stop all the campaign shut down. Right. And so it's this constant starting over from scratch where you're saying, do I have a built-in customer base when I go to lunch, you know, my Senate campaign or something? I thought you're like, nope, you're starting over from scratch. So everybody is they go, there's always looking for like, who are the people that would be interested in, you know, somebody running for a Senate or something like that. How do I find who's interested and activated now wants to do that? You know, who's interested in the presidential race this year that, you know, has a different level of enthusiasm than they did four years ago? All that kind of stuff. So I mentioned you were like super busy prior to the election, but yeah, it's like you're used twiddling your thumbs now or who's engaging with you now that we're a couple years away from a major. There's still plenty of organizations that want to do it that don't go away. So those are like we call them C4 organizations or even some C3 think tanks. And then there's other folks that are just doing policy work that continue going. But then even the folks that want to like the big committees or somebody like that, the, you know, the Senate committees aren't shutting down talking about what's going on they have played to talk about with border prices is all that kind of stuff. And then other folks are just looking for sort of alternative audiences or have that same sort of audience. It's not a shocker that even online political donations tend to skew a little older. It's just what or the demographic tends to skew a little older. It's the people with disposable income are concerned about that stuff. And it's also how they want to engage in the process when somebody's young. They're like, yeah, let's go to a rally and let's go marching to the neighborhood. Whatever. Let's do all that. And then when you're living on Social Security with a bad hip or something, but you still want to take action on something that's bugging you on the news. You know, like the rallies and that kind of stuff may be in an option. Sure. Or if you're a wealthy person that wants to try to make sure that they don't raise the estate taxes so your kids don't get stuff or whatever you can take an active role in trying to support candidates in your region or whatever that do that. Yeah. And a lot of folks don't sometimes have misconceptions about who the average political donor is or why somebody's making a donation. And it's really people are just looking to take action on a problem that they don't get have an easy way to be involved. Like if I have a flat tire, I know how to change it, at least call someone to change it and fix it. But if you've got a problem with something on the news or on a policy level, you only get a vote once every couple of years, you know. And so what can you do in the meantime? You're like, well, I can make a contribution or sign a petition. I can take action on something. And that's the basic thing or the basic need that's being met there from the consumer's perspective. Is there like, I'm frustrated about something and I want to take action. I want to have done something rather than just worry about it. So I want to make a donation sign a petition, make a phone call, something I thought I want to take action on what's bothering me. So tell me about is it winter mind? Yeah. Tell me about that. Like is it kind of like winter is coming. And so we had to stock up and build the foundation for the next election. My partner when we got ready, he's like, you know, Jake, whatever you want to name it, that sounds great to me. And then it's like, we're going to call it winter mind. And he was like, I don't understand why and now we're going to explain it for the rest of our lives. And I was like, it's going to be great to trust me. But it's from Wallace Stevens poem called The Snowman. And it's him talking about wintery landscapes or sometimes lost on people that are always thinking about spring. They look at wintery landscapes and all I can think about how spring isn't there. And he says it takes a mind of winter to look at a snowy landscape and see the nothing that is there and not miss not anything that's not there. And so really it was about seeing opportunities where other people didn't see it. When we started, there was a lot of people that would talk about this business concept and how we would do it. And they didn't believe it and a lot of our source for finding folks and putting our things together. And we're back. Small interruption from a transient person entering the building. So seeing the snowman that is there. Well, just as far as seeing the opportunity that was there, because in the world of data and sometimes political donations, people don't naturally see, oh, there's an opportunity for disruption there for a couple of farm kids from Eastern Colorado to have a big impact and all of a sudden be doing politics or fundraising on the biggest political stage there is in the world. Most people would have looked at what we were looking at. But like, there's nothing there. You're crazy. No one's going to find interesting. And you've been growing like wildfire. We have. We had a great year. And like it was when you found just at the start of 2019. Okay. Brian and I were working together at a different company. And they did not like our product. And they're like, we just don't see this going anywhere. It's a big commercial database company. Like we just don't see the revenue there. And we're wanting to move in a different direction. They're hiring some other folks. And so you guys are out and we're cutting the whole project. And we were like, well, we still think this has a good shot. It was like, we could we could do what we wanted. You guys were so dumb and slow. We'd actually move and go. And so like we said, we'll launch it together. We're going to we're going to do digital fundraising and politics. I and I did somebody asked when they were like, oh, this is a crazy opportunity. If you had to have like a job change, like, what are you going to do now? You're going to like write a book or maybe become a plumber. And I'm like, they only paid me to do one thing. I've been doing direct marketing for 20 years. And so like it's probably just going to be that. And so yeah, we launched that two years ago. And I have launched a lot of stuff over my life and had some pretty epic failures and that kind of stuff. In this time, it was just one of the things where there were a lot of things that lined up right. Like we were in a position to starve for a while, which you know, we got to have when you're starting something brand new, especially something like this that takes time to get off the. Yeah. Even building the technology and putting the clients in place takes months. It's not quick. You're not going to get paid on day one. So even to starve for a little while, the business know how and even the business contacts and experience and all that kind of thing had come together to make this a good fit. And it was a good time in the cycle too. We got to spend most of 2019 really getting up and running into scale. And then we're just able to knock it out of the park in 2020. So awesome. Awesome. So yeah, I know. So tell me about that staffing journey. Like what do your people do then? Yeah. We're a team of eight folks right now. And one thing about winter mind, we're eight folks in last year was about six million in revenue, which is a pretty big revenue number for a team that tiny. But that was something we did on purpose right out of the gate where we're like, we are going to find any time we could build a tool to do something that person has to do repetitively. We're going to do it. We're going to sit down. We're going to do time studies. We're going to ask our folks. We're going to ask ourselves, what do we do it over and over again? And how can we automate that? And so when we were a team of six, a fully half of us were tech guys writing software or building custom tools, custom platforms. And we were a group that was focused on automating first. And then also bending our tools to fit our processes rather than bending processes to fit tools. I think in some industries, there are such proven ways of doing things that you can find off the shelf solutions and softwares and things like that in systems that are already designed for the perfect process for I don't know, baking a loaf or bread or making a croissant or something. But if you're trying to do something that people have not done before, we really felt strongly that you're like, that's going to require custom tools that we're going to make ourselves and they're going to work exactly the way we want to. There's an inefficiency in the tool that we're using. We're getting rid of it and we're going to write something new. And so not to like six million in revenue in your second year, like what are your costs then paying it for advertising in a lot of places and things like that? Yeah, and paying for access to data and stuff like that. A lot of our core data assets are typically managed by somebody else that doesn't have the desire to monetize and actually sell them. And so we will operate their data and their their property for them that they that they own. And then we're interfacing with the purchasers. We're actually doing all of the deployments, including the then the invoicing and collections and negotiating of rates and stuff like that. And they're doing nothing but sitting back and caching a fat check. And we're both really happy because we're thrilled that your cash access to their assets. Yeah, and they're happy because they don't have to be doing any of it. So you're really leveraging their assets to to make impact for your clients. Right, right. So and the clients like to because they get, you know, great access to good assets. So it was part of what was able to grow help us grow so fast was just that to be able, we were able to walk into some folks that were big day to players and even smaller ones too that were like we don't we want to we know our assets our data assets have value, but we don't want to actually be running the process wouldn't want to start a business or our data asset isn't big enough to justify an entire business right into itself. And you're not going to be able we wouldn't be able to get the attention of all the clients that you're needing to. And so by being able to group those guys together, we were able to have a pretty big offering. And so, you know, folks right on up to the president was using our stuff and that kind of thing. So all of that enabled pretty big growth and there's just been so much time in the industry between Brian and I that the people we needed to call were definitely going to take our call, especially Brian. Our my partners and I are very different folks that view the world in pretty different ways. Okay, so Brian and with friends. Brian Oaks. Okay. And he's your business partner in this. It also sounds like an operating person within the business as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure. We're but he was like, what do we do for titles? And I was like, let's call ourselves a founder. And he's like, right, but wouldn't it be like co-founders since there's two of us. And I was like, I don't feel like it limits us. We can have as many founders. So I have a one founder doesn't apply to having another founder. This is about those founders. So and he's he's great because he the things he likes doing are the things that I just hate doing. And the my inability to sit down and make the sales phone calls and develop those relationships and spend that good time networking and all that kind of stuff that he thrives at. I just hate. So he's more like me, the glad handy guy that doesn't have that many skills, but has a lot of relationships. Yeah, he has a lot of skills too, but he just has like an endless amount of relationships. He's likable. I was arguing with one of our clients about something off topic in like a good, natured way, but I was arguing with a client. And Brian leaned in. He's like, this is why we don't let Jake talk to clients. Jake wants to argue about everything all the time. But I enjoyed the conversation with you. Yeah. So Brian is great at that kind of stuff. People trust him and know when he says, you know, we can get this done. We can do it. So that combination is something that adventures in the past had been missing, you know, because you camp out with your one set of skills and other half of the person. Because that part of like running the craftsman side of the technical part of the business can be so different than the sales side that isn't so critical. And just really I could have built the neatest things in the world and none of them would have ever been purchased. Cause I just wasn't ever going to be able to sell it. And Brian has. So it's a it's been a great partnership. And he understands that enough sounds like to know what they can deliver for hundreds and whatever, where to get that data, whatever. Yeah. And we've yeah, we've both been in the business for decades doing the same stuff. So it's it's not like he have to explain it to him. Well, let's let's start about that. Let's start talking about that journey a little bit. And like, who who is this farm kid from Eastern Colorado? Is that like, like, you knew Brian, when you were in third grade together in sterling or hot kiss or almost that way? He's that he's from the south. I'm from out north of brush. Colorado. But we both got involved in conservative politics. About we started we started working together on our first job together 15 years ago. So it's been quite a while. But my first job I was working on the ranch and bumped into somebody at church that was going there. And he's like, Hey, if you ever want to get involved in politics, you can stuff some envelopes, which isn't exactly the glossy political job. And think of where you like, what's that? I bet you're good. Yeah. Yeah. I got really good at stuff and things that blow up. So I like to say that I fell in with a bad crowd and never was able to break out of politics after that just because the politics was fun. But it was a fun job because it, and after only a few months of working with him, he said, Hey, there's a congressional campaign. They're looking for a staffer. I've told them you'd be great and I'm firing you to go have an opportunity on a congressional campaign after having been in politics for, you know, doing clerical stuff for less than a year. Oh, yeah. It was Marilyn Musgrave. Oh, sure. It was the Congresswoman that we were running that race in 2002. Wouldn't that one? Yeah, we sure did. Okay. I like to say that it was because of me. Yeah, I'm sure it was. The one campaign I wasn't on was the one that they lost. But yeah, it took off and did a campaign. And the, both those jobs were great just because I was a kid that, and you're like 23 year old, you have college degrees. I was 20 and supposed to be going to college and just kept on having more fun at work. And so I wouldn't show up to class and do all that kind of stuff. Okay. And then they were like, do you want to come to DC and work in the DC office? And I was like, yeah, screw college. I'm dropping out your college dropout college dropout for sure. So we ran off to DC. But those first jobs were good for they just expanded my mind for what opportunities there were in the world because I loved the way I grew up and the opportunities I had. You're from a pretty rural place too. Yeah, North Dakota and Bear Farms. But like the concept of being like, you could be working at the Capitol was just not a concept that this kid had ever thought about until those jobs. And so they were, they were fun for opening up those, I are opening up those opportunities to my eyes. And then, yeah, then spent a few years there working in DC. And it was just really cool. It's a wild opportunity. It's not one that pays good. I don't think it makes it a long term career. I guess it's just it's just a well, it's got to be like from the literally from the back of the beat truck to like Washington DC and mean streets and seeing how it really gets. So how what were some of those big eye opening things? You're like, oh, this is the way it works in Washington DC. I think a part of it was just some of the credentials people had and you'd bump into so and so and the like, oh yeah, my uncle's this big famous person or my granddad's this or what does your dad do? And they were all folks who'd gone to very fancy schools instead of dropping out a CSU. Folks, they had very connected families instead of some noble pioneers on the eastern plains of Colorado. It's just a good point where I was like credentials and family connections are never going to be my edge. I'm just going to have to find something that's a more scrappy way to differentiate myself in the world because like the levels of fanciness that some of these people had, they were nice folks or whatever, but just they're it was just a different world. There was much more aristocratic world in a lot of ways. They had never built fence. Yeah, yeah, no. So all that kind of stuff. There was like a little bit of a refuge on the ag committee, which I was the legislative person for legislative contact. We were on the ag committee and you'd talk to the ag staffers and stuff. And one of them was like, they were talking about procedural rules and the parliamentary rules for how the thing works now. It doesn't work that way in ag committee. It's more like shop class. Everybody just like, let's just back up and do that part over because we missed stuff. They were nice folks, but very fancy. And I just realized I was like, long term, this world is just not for me. I like the fights of the campaigns and those kind of things and the fun, clear winners and losers of election day and that kind of things. And I just like the more concrete stuff, even direct marketing that we'd done on the campaign that I was working with in the data that I was doing there as a young staffer. There was just something fun and the math of knowing a marketing project. And you're like, how do we do? Did we win? Did we lose? So hard number that tells you exactly what percentage of your return was, what you won, what you lost and they count votes on election day and somebody won and somebody lost. And that's it. And then when you get into the legislative stuff, you're like, I don't know. We got a letter signed. We talked about recommendation about something. This is the worst. It was very fun experience, but I knew right away it wasn't going to be like a lifetime job from anything like that. So I'm curious about, were you in college for political science? No. I was going to do computer science. I was going to make video games. Right. Well, you make video games out of elections. Yeah. So there was parts of that where there are times when I dismissed my college education just for how badly I had approached it. And that's something that I said, if you look back and you talked to folks, what'd you get out of college? And I met all these nice people. I spent all these relationships and all this other stuff. And I was just there. I was like, well, I didn't put it in the effort and I certainly didn't get out when I was getting in. So I just looked at the end of the day. I was like, I'm spending all this money. I don't see what the big deal is. I already got the job I want and I'm out. Were you already like, so where did the conservative element? Was it just that politics was an interesting game? And your family was from Eastern Colorado. And so does your conservative? Was your dad politically active or did he reinforce those values in you? No one in the family was politically active. And like a lot of the, certainly the grandparents' generations were all sort of Roosevelt Democrats and that kind of stuff. And there are certainly some conservative bents to call to rural areas, but they're not sharp libertarians. There's plenty of farmers that are all too happy for corn subsidies and that kind of stuff. So that stuff, it's a blend of a lot of different influences. And some of it was my folks, I grew up shooting and doing that kind of stuff. But I think there's parts of, parts of being a very rural group where you just don't have a lot of use or need for the government in general. And they're more of a pain than anything else. There's, because you're, you're just not affiliated with them. There's a co-op of your parents and their neighbors that own the phone company. The water comes out of the hole in your backyard. All that kind of stuff, you just don't use it like a deeply urban people do and you don't understand why somebody would want to, right? Largian and heavily involved government. So there's definitely some cultural stuff there too, but I think, yeah, yeah. No, I'm thinking about my dad had to build some big containment dams around his fuel storage facility, which is an above ground fuel storage. Like if it springs leak, he's going to know pretty quickly and fix it. It's never going to spring a leak, but he had to pay like $1,250 to the local engineer in town that used the same freaking plan a thousand times. But you had to use this guy because he was the only guy on the federal list in the county to get the engineered plans to build this $4,000 diesel fuel containment thing around his. Yeah, I think there's, and there's certainly a lot of one size fits all stuff that trickles down onto rural folks, too, where they've designed even like a nationwide minimum wage as a wild concept, because you're like, oh, I'm not saying that people in Manhattan don't need more than 15 an hour, but people in brush, Colorado don't need the same amount of money as it takes to live in Manhattan and having one size fits all just feels frustrating to totally folks. Well, it's different economies and I think that's what that, so you mentioned the term sharp libertarian earlier. Is that what you consider yourself? You know, like I think a bumped into that we can get real spicy, but in broad terms, libertarians tend to sometimes be libertarians so they can be libertines and it's really more, they would be called themselves for conservatives, except for the, you know, drugs and sex stuff that they want to have instead. I'm like, I'm just not that way. I'm a crusty old pro-life conservative guy, so I would call myself a libertarian in most aspects, but certainly known social stuff. Fair, fair. Okay. Well, yeah, we better save some of that for later. So your NDC, you're like, eh, not sure about this legislative assembly stuff, and what brings you back. I know that I broke up with my fiance, and that was the push to like, to get out. Okay. Like it was one of those things where you're like, I know I'd want to leave, but there's not job offers flooding into work in politics from a Western state in Colorado, how are you going to ever leave? And then you break up with your fiance and you're like, well, this is a great opportunity to leave town, go home and start it all over again. And so there was sort of a forceful kick that I think anybody who's like, broke up with the fiance and looked back at it years later was like, well, thank goodness. But at the time, yeah, yeah, that's a big deal to you. She thinks she thinks the same thing, or she kick it herself. She's got to be kicking herself. I don't think so. I realized one of podcasts, but if you'd look at me, I mean, she's got to be kicking herself. Amazing. And actually, that's, I imagine that's what brings you like, eventually circling to why we would have met, because you're, do you know this even? Leslie, your wife Leslie was my wife Jill's next-door neighbor when I first started at Jill. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I had came back and came to Fort Collins, and I think you might know Marco telling a little bit. Yeah. And he was like, you got to come check out my church, and I think that's where I've been. You guys, for the first time through Leslie. That's a crossing. No, no, no, yeah. At that time. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. So I came back, and I was like, my friend was like, I don't have a job for you, but I've got an office space for you. And you can set up an office and set a consultancy shop, it makes some calls, and you can become a campaign consultant. You'll be great at it. And that's all I needed to be like, yeah, that sounds like a perfect idea. No doubt, I will be a wild success at it. And then I went to the library to check out a book on how to file an LLC, because I just had no idea about how any of it worked. Or like, I mean, like, my parents are ranchers and ran antique shops. So there's a little bit of small businessy stuff in there. But as far as like, the paperwork and all that kind of thing, you're like, this is just me brand new starting out and not even thinking about it. And like, I was glad I did it when I was young, but learned a lot and ended up just failing real hard, just never making enough money. Yeah. Well, because you didn't really have that sales outreach kind of desire, you could consult all you could. You could add a lot of value. Yeah. And I think especially at that time, trying to start, you're just hungry for like an opportunity to get somebody to buy what you're selling. You don't sit down and just be like, I need this much. And it's not going to sound like a lot. And I think you've probably talked to a lot of people that have started small businesses. And once you go over their plans and their pricing, especially that any sort of consultant or design work kind of person, you're like, you aren't charging enough. You've got to spend half your time selling and half your time working, which means that working time needs to be billed at a rate to pay for the whole week. I just wasn't doing that. I was billing that to be like, I don't know if I can get 15 bucks an hour or something. That's highly technical that no one else was around doing it. I could have definitely charged more and my people would have happily paid more. Maybe it would have been more of a success, but like at the time, I just wasn't, it was new, not standing up for myself, all that kind of stuff. And I do a bunch of volunteering at the small business development center. And you know, I'll meet with these business people and some of them even started a business kind of, but it's all going through their personal checking. They don't have an LLC and things like that. And you're like, here, let me show you something. Here's how you file an LLC paperwork. Here's how you get an EIN number. And I've done these things now, like, for myself and for other people like 25, 30 times, you know, it's, it's a cake. But for them, it's like I'm dripping magic out of my fingers. You know, who would LLC all for my own cell here? And you just look back at those times and you're like, it just, you're just broke. It's a joke. And like, it's a struggle. And like, you're, you're getting an education and you're learning lots of stuff that doesn't stop it from being hard. I had a quote remembered to me the other day, you're just yesterday that an education always costs something. Yeah. And you know, whether it's a school of hard knocks or the school of CSU or whatever it looks like, it always costs. So you're, did you shut the doors then? It's still banging around red phone consulting. Okay. So every now and then, there's some little fun side project. It's been a while since I've got to use it for something. But sometimes some side project will show up. I still get to use it for some things. So it, but you made your money in other ways pretty quickly. Yeah. Like, it, there was some other fun things, some fun ventures that got started. We, my brother-in-law called me when the Nintendo Wii was first coming out. Okay. And you remember it had like the stick thing hanging around and he'd got like an early, he worked in video games and got an early like test copies of it kind of thing. And he called me and he's like, Jake, is like something wild's happening. People's hands are getting sweaty, swinging this remote, the straps breaking and they're breaking stuff as they throw these remote around the room. And he's like, and so I've started a website and called, we have a problem spelled cute silly as we, we have a problem. And we're posting up stories and it's gaining a lot of traction. And it got huge right away. And he called me, he was like, you need to be, I need you to be my content guy. You're going to create content and do this side out. And I was like, great, this is it. Another like, I knew if I just kept out it long enough, it'd get a big break. And also I've got to do is write some stories. And they practically write themselves. They're so funny. He's like, we need 10, 10 new fresh pieces of content a day spaced out throughout the day. Oh, my God. And so it's international. One of our guys, it was a little team of three. One of us was on Good Morning America. It was huge. At the time, our online traffic was bigger than the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post combined. And it was international, which was fun. People wear newspapers. The sun times. People would better like, okay, you have a problem. Yeah. So like the, even the UK was stealing photos off our website and that kind of stuff. And it was awesome. And after like a first month, I was like, this is great. And we're getting paid some cash for it. It's all going well. But then after that, it was just all ad revenue generated stuff. All right. We had traffic to this. And people are like, here, bio, we wrapper thing. Right. So we were doing that. And I was like, it was in video games to always loved. And I'm running a news site. But that 10 post a day thing just kept, kept catching up to me where we got like three, four months into it. And I'm like, somebody's hands got sweaty. And then they hit their TV. And I've already told this story 10 times a day for 120 days. I don't know how to make it any more funny. I don't know. We know what to say anymore. And like that level of like production writing and that sort of production throughput. I think everybody's like, someone's got a novel rolling around the back their head. But being like, could you just sit down and bang that out every day? And I was like, this isn't going to be it. I'm never going to be, I'm not going to write fundraising copy. I'm not going to be that guy. I've just learned to hate writing. And like, it's been some years since I've been had to do it. But I could still do it occasionally a couple of times to hate or something like that. But the constant levels of what those production designers and production writers do is like, I just can't handle that. That's not going to be me. I've got to find a different niche to do things. Yeah. No, I, I write up once a month. I write between 500 and 1000 words, typically for the local blog. And it's like, it tumbles around in my little brain for a couple of three weeks. And then I finally spill it out. I got to spill it out the rest of the way this weekend. I've started. But I've two days of the day that the newsletter's got to go out. So I got to finish it up this weekend. But like, if you said you got to write one of these every day or 500 words a day, yeah, I know way. It's just work. And it was another learning thing where I was like, that's a way to make money. And some people are great at it. And that's not going to be my niche. So I need to find the people like that want to advertise on the side of your site that's got all these sweaty hand TV broken stores. Yeah. There's the ad purchasing world is really pretty neat. Like, obviously, the big player is Google acts as like a clearinghouse for that. Those folks come to Google and they're like, I have an ad and Google says, I will find you spaces for it. And I will find you places to put it. But and even though they're the big one that every, you know, small business owners use them for paperwork and that kind of stuff, they're not the only ones by far. And there's lots of other stuff. So even like the guys like power inbox and web content and I forget what's at live intent. That's the one that's on every website. If you go to that website and there's those box of images at the bottom, those guys are a clearinghouse for somebody that's a purchaser and they represent purchasers on the hunt for inventory all the time. Interesting. And my world is this side that's creating that inventory by building an audience that says, you know, these people are all coming. They're clicking. They're engaging. They're like, no one opens and clicks on things if they're not engaged in it. And so you're like, I'm telling you, we post this content and people are coming every day. You know, so are you building sites or more like email things or combinations? We do both in a few different things and it's not all just politics. It's largely email. But we've got a little bit of everything in there. The main thing is if you wanted to find for politics, anybody who's ever got a copy of the phone book has a copy of every political donor in four Collins. And that's a lot how the data landscape works is people like, I've got a thing, a list of data and all of this stuff, but they don't have any context for it. And they certainly don't have any sort of like recent engagement to say like, are they interested now? Because that concept of a direct mail offer going to somebody, it's funny to watch some people talk about it where they like they will send out a piece and it does well. And then you say, great, you should send it out again. And they're like, no, no, people have already seen it. I'm going to change up and send out something different because the whole world's already seen it. It was a piece of mail. Somebody's mailbox. They throw it away all the time. And I was like, the notion that they got your letter, they opened it up, they sat down and prayerfully considered whether or not they should respond to your offer. Just not so. There's so many factors that go into it from who picked up the mail that day, what sort of mood they were in, even if they liked it, did they have a checkbook handy? Did they have excess cash at that time of the month to cut you a check to buy whatever or sell whatever? There's all those things that go into it. And the biggest predictor for that kind of stuff on direct things is like, are they engaging on something right now? Like the world, the people that are trying to sell baby related gear is huge on that. They're always looking for like, has somebody bought a pregnancy test because I have stuff to sell them. And they only come into like season where they want to buy that kind of thing really briefly. And then they spend wild amounts on it. And then they don't. And you can know some things. But it just doesn't pay to just like, Carp, bomb the whole world of trying to bury people because you're on our money way before you sell enough stuff. Right. Yeah. You're looking. So you're looking for somebody to have some sort of contact of being like, what are you interested in? What do you want right now? Because the concept of, you know, direct mailers or direct marketers wanting to talk to somebody who doesn't want their stuff is wrong. That's it. That's what ruins their campaigns. They're wanting to shave and make their lists as small and tight as possible. And that thing that they're looking for is like, are they engaging in it? Are they doing something with it right now? And so digital is a fun world for that because you're like, they're clicking on the article right now. They just clicked on something about whatever political issue you're doing. So if I can show you your ad to somebody who just clicked on something that is about that, do you want to see that? Yeah. Yeah. So that's what that part comes down to. I have a feeling. It's always so much more fun than compared to the other kind of marketing that's just talking about the shape and shade of a logo or something where you're like, I'm sure there's a way to measure the monetary effectiveness of that. But it's really hard like to saying like, what did that bill board turn into in real sales? Right. There's kind of ways to measure it, but it's really kind of blondes. Absolutely. And mainly people are talking about Twitter engagement likes or followers or something that doesn't actually translate to revenue. But with direct response marketing, you're like, it does. And so that's the part that's always fascinating to me about obviously. There's all the old banker quote that says, half of all marketing dollars are wasted. It's just impossible to know which half. Yeah. Yeah. And with digital marketing, that really started to change. And what you're saying is with digital marketing, you can actually, you've mentioned to me, you know, I'll trade quarters for dollars all day long. Yeah. You know, I'll throw a bunch of quarters into the ocean as long as enough dollars washed ashore that I know it works. Then boom. Yeah. And it's beautiful because it gets to come back with a thing was like this, the time you press this button is exactly what this transactions related to. Yeah. That kind of stuff is fun. And mail is that way too. That's I started doing direct mail. There was some, you do a mailer and if it was in a week, somebody that you said that mailer to sends a check back. Yeah. You know, yeah. And even online donation or whatever. And even with the free envelope that you put in there with him, that's got that code on it to say like this was the exact thing. They like this piece of mailing specifically, that kind of stuff. And building those pictures of who your people are, what they're concerned about, what they like to give to, what they don't like to give to, that kind of thing is fun. And like, well, it's fun to me. Fund it would not be any fun. Yeah. I feel like I'm not going to do this topic just because I'm not as aware of it as as a lot of things. But I feel like frankly, give me give me your feedback. You know enough about what local thing thing is and does like if we could get tighter lists of which the people that we should try to market to, we would really increase our chances of growing at a rapid, more rapid pace, right? Yeah. Yeah. But it's hard. You got to, you got to take the time to find it. And like, it's, that's why data is the right data or the context about data is a whole industry just because it is the difference between winning and losing on those sort of marketing campaigns. And so interesting. So let's get back into the, how did you get so smart on this really nerdy topic? So you're, you shut down your first consulting firm, kind of, and took a job with somebody, you met your wife probably circled right around this time. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I got a couple of guys that took me on on, they're called C4 Issue Advocate Groups. So groups like the National Rite work committee I worked for them as a fundraiser. And I got to work as a fundraiser with the National Association for Gun Rights and some other folks. And these guys that did it, they were just, they were like old school masters at the Trade of Direct Mail. They were a really good data. I don't, I've worked in it for a long time since and I still don't think that there's anybody better at Direct Mail than those guys that I got to learn from. And the, they, as you have like the building teams to start a business now, how you, how you treat and train new employees, as always, I, or at least in my case, I shouldn't say I always, people probably do it differently. But I'm such a reflection of the bosses that I had in like the things I'm trying to avoid, where some of their bad habits and the things I'm trying to emulate were some of their good habits. And while they were as plenty of bad habits with that, that season of a few years, where I was working for those guys, one of the best ones was just their obsessive focus on the number because I, you'd have a copyrighter that put their heart and soul into the art of whatever they did. And then when it would just not do well as it came back, they'd say, well, I just think that it was still thing, but it just probably wasn't a good enough thing. I bet you'd still work if we ran it again. And these guys were always sharp enough to be like, no, it just, the math came out wrong. Your number didn't work and that's what we're here for is just the number. We don't want to talk about anybody's feelings or what you think you know. We're going to talk about the number. We don't even need to know why they wanted it, why they preferred one font over a different one or how long it was. Well, we know as 76 people responded to this one and 84 people responded. They're going to tell us exactly what they want. And if you are, want to be good at direct response, and you listen to your customers, and they're going to talk to you through their donations, not through any survey feedbacks or anything like that where they say they don't like, it was an amazing piece that you wrote, but I just didn't feel let down. They're going to talk to you if you have their actions. And you got to listen, you got to focus on that number. And so they taught me a lot about that kind of stuff. And also in a GR when I signed on there, I was employing number three. When I ended up leaving, we were employing number 60. It had. So it just had tremendous growth. And we'd started in like a little garage and the three of us ended up building something huge that has grown on to be dozens of people operating in, you know, dozens of states and getting to grow and play with really big budgets that were fun that you just wouldn't get a chance to do that anywhere else. And like because we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on Facebook alone for a while. And being able to run a program and manage that and say like, how sophisticated can we make this? What can we change? What can we tweak? What's the new thing to do? And especially that time on Facebook, it's still that way. Yeah, but they would change their algorithm so fast. This was work in last month. And now it's not working. And you're like, well, doesn't matter. Kill it. It doesn't work anymore. Just because it used to work. Right. You need to run 10 of the tests now. Switch it up to video. Switch it up to this kind of ads. Switched up to this differently. Try and give away. And since the National Association of Gun Rights is who NGR was, since we had the word gun in our name, we were frequently banned as some sort of bad group. Right. Right. Right. So there were sometimes we weren't allowed to say our name. Things related to guns. We weren't allowed to show or talk about in some instances on some platforms. And happened to work through that kind of stuff. Right. It was funny. So, and it was just, it was a cool opportunity. And I learned a ton doing it. So I could see the fellow, the founder of NGR in my mind's eye, but I can't remember his name. Yeah. It's my, one of my oldest friends in the world, Dudley Brown. Dudley. He's actually the guy that, my very first job, that he said asked me at church to phone to stuff some envelopes 20 years ago. Oh, is that right? He was like, come do this. And the part of the fun was it was he was sent me down and he was like, he's like, you want to work in politics? And I was like, do we put on suits and buy people dinners and things like that? And he's like, not none of it works the way anybody thinks it does. And I'm going to show you how it does. And it's a ton of fun. And that was part of the fun that pulled me into politics because I was like, interesting. The way people think things work isn't how they work at all. And it was the third party that was the third one. That's a Luke O'Dell. He's now running five tools, strategies, a consulting firm of his own. Okay. But yeah, those guys in Luke is another one that I worked with 15 years ago. The first time he actually did some work on that Musgrave campaign too. Yeah. So things come right around. Yeah. And like they were they're just good guys to spend a lot of time with and learn a lot from. So what was that journey? Like three employees up to 60. Yeah. We're like 55 of those people like just digital marketing people trying to our direct marketing kind of just like making because you guys, I in my little mindset, I think of of NAGR is kind of like the National Rifle Association, but not so politically correct. Yeah. Or more. Yeah. It's a right, not a privileged guy thing or whatever. And and to a some extent, I think for a lot of good owners, you took the place of National Rifle Association in terms of actually yeah, like depending the line. It's a it would there was a lot of really talented people involved. So like it wouldn't it's not my doing a lot. I was just involved in part of it. But like the NRA actually got quite a bit more conservative over the ascendancy of any GR just because they couldn't say dumb things or defend gun control the way they used to be just because any GR was there to light them up. And there was an alternative all the sudden. So in there, the NRA is such a terrible organization just to the core like it's awful. Do you want to declare your elaborate? If anybody wants to not give to a bunch of crux and just outright liars, you shouldn't said give to NGR. But there you go. Okay. There. Dudley, you're welcome. Yeah. And you can be on the podcast sometimes you want your crazy bastard. Yeah. But you're listening. Growing that fast was fun because it gave it. It was a fun training ground for one training new people, hiring process, how to find people, all that kind of stuff. And those are for me, I still think that's the biggest challenge for like if I want to hire somebody who's like who's a really great person? I can hire that we'll get what we want to do and be excited about what we want to do. That kind of thing. That's such a hard challenge. And like so many people do it so poorly. Yeah. So it was fun to get a training ground there and also just to say how can I keep people engaged, give them good feedback they need. So they feel like they know what they're doing and how well they're doing at it. That I think some of the worst times in my career working have been where I was like I don't know 100% what the top priority is right now for me to be doing is a junior employee. I don't know if my boss likes me or if it's going well or going poorly, I don't hear about it. I don't know if he knows what the number one problem is. Yeah, exactly. And so some of those things to be like you need to actually give your folks really clear direction and then really clear and immediate feedback about saying and it doesn't have to be like the concept of employee reviews at a corporate place can be nightmare. It takes it only happens once into Blue Moon takes two days and then you're like I don't know I guess I got a 10% salary change but I would have been helpful to know this months ago. Right. And so it was there. The next week over is salary change time again. It was there Luke and I I had read the E-Meth which was pretty good good book and his his method of saying you should describe exactly what that job position is supposed to be doing and so that was our path would say this is what we think your job is doing why don't you take this description have it at your desk for a week and if you find yourself doing things that aren't on that list write them down and if there's things on this list that you say I'm not really didn't spend the entire time doing that this week let's cross that off and come back and get on the same page about that and then once a month we're just going to go through each of these bullet points it doesn't need to be more than like a page or two of stuff but then we're just going to go through and we're going to say green yellow and red and like you know green means everything's going great and perfect yellow means we need to spend more time on it and red means you need to fix it you're going to get fired and we're going to do that every month and like in the the every month it can be a little aspirational because you want to do it every month but like but sometimes stuff gets busy but that at least with that way it doesn't stretch into years of non-communication about how well you're doing or what you're supposed to be doing and it doesn't need to take a long time you can sit down do that in 15 30 minutes and say this is going good this is going bad you know what else do I need to add clarity or if somebody's like you don't understand all the work I'm doing I'm doing all this stuff and in your mind on a broader scale you're saying I don't want you to be doing that it's a great chance to give some clarity or sometimes wow yeah yeah or yeah I didn't know that you were doing I didn't even know we had that fire burning and like we could have been establishing better resources or changed tools on a different team right right so that hiring process we ended up breaking it down into sort of two pyramids or two trees in the company where there was the marketing and design side where that's where we had all of our designers most of our email experts are data people working some of our fundraising copywriters and then we had a policy side that still had to do a lot of that stuff they're still writing copy for a non fundraising piece and that kind of stuff but they're also working with like we need to do a research project on a vote county and the state legislature of Alabama or something right right the marketing guys wouldn't have to be doing that but then the the political guys anytime they like great we're gonna set up a Facebook ads on these you know state legislative races or something like that to talk about yeah uh things on this vote coming up from this research here we're close enough to make a difference let's go ahead and put some firepower in their column or whatever their column the designer guys to put stuff together for yeah yeah kind of stuff interesting um was there like an overarching hierarchy where the project team is probably where there's a yeah we sort of split it um like the little guys changed a couple times it was Luke and another guy named Zach Lautenschlager who I've worked with for years and liked working with that was running that um and then I was running that uh marketing side of it yeah uh and then within there there's a breaks down into sort of action teams of being like you guys of the digital folks you're the design folks you're the whoever else folks so really political numbers was a small team but they had to know all the stuff and then there's just a lot of activators of sorts yeah yeah and then uh there was even fun stuff like we were running uh our own product fulfillment warehouse so the concept of saying like we need um we need to hire photographers and models for t-shirts and then we have a warehouse of t-shirts and they're trying to run fulfillment out of there and that kind of stuff and there was uh there was just a lot of chances to learn that kind of stuff like I would have never like I know now that I don't ever want to be doing that again because it was just a giant hit but that kind of concept we got the t-shirts out there somehow yeah and then and the folks that were handling the caging mail and some the inventory people they were hourly people and so then you're like great we need to come up with a system for tracking time and handling all that and then even as you grow from three scrappy political consultant people like who are like I don't care about health insurance I just want to be a part of the party right and that's all we started that and then you start hiring people like well I need health insurance because I'm a normal person right you're like well I got to figure that out and so how do you handle benefits on a company that's growing from three people to six you and that kind of stuff yeah and like having a chance to tackle those problems is just uh an opportunity not everybody gets and it was a cool learning opportunity yeah for sure especially young in your career and and all that um and then I remember you you transitioned out of the is Nager still big is it still they're still really big deal they're still uh right down there in love with Conorano there they're a cool group and a big deal yeah yeah Godspeed Dudley I hope you keep good fun um so you transition out of Nager after some years though in that journey and and like it was just a quest for new things or new opportunities uh any child was a ton of fun um in my estimation at the time they didn't pay me quite as much as I wanted to make it and so my all these skills yeah so my own friends uh Brian Oaks called me and he was like hey we're doing cool stuff at a database company called Wyland uh and they would love somebody who knows the uh political industry landscape and how direct mail works and how data works and that kind of stuff do you want to come uh sell cooperative database uh lists with me and I said yeah that sounds great and so I went there to Wyland which was um it's funny for it's not the hugeest companies it's it's a it's a couple hundred people okay um but they are the most corporate of corporate companies it should be so uh mean to that poor company the bit like it was a place where it was like I was constantly fussing with a lawyer about something or contracts would just disappear for months at a time that you were trying to get through uh and then the HR department had something I remember filling out some paperwork and it was this huge stack of HR onboarding paperwork in every form at the top of the list asked me to write down my name and then start filling out stuff and I was like but you have my name you already know my name when you print it off these forms you just keep this giant stack together and you leave and you're like why do I have to continually and every form had my name and then my whole address and all that stuff for information that they already had and it like it it was the beginning of the deep frustration with doing some or a group of people collectively doing something that we all knew was dumb yeah where you're like this is stupid that we have to write a name a hundred times right we all agree now yeah but it's just the way it is it's their little feet and it's their silo it's like I just can't take that anymore and that was like another guiding factor later for when we went to uh start winter mind to do other things I was like we're not going to knowingly do something dumb because I we're gonna like you see something dumb that gets repeated let's stop it after the second time yeah there's a bad process it just stop and fix this like there's no need to just be like well that's the way it goes and so there was parts of it that were just so bureaucratic that just it just drove me nuts and it was eye-opening um to see why land in the industry was considered it is considered now uh the one of the best there is their agile and smart moving and they adapting to products compared to everybody else and I was like I find wild and very slow and then you would deal with these other companies and I it's just a wasteland of how bad and how slow a giant corporation can move and I think or anybody's thinking about a business where they can disrupt something or something like that there's already a big business there I don't know that I could have a niche I would say like it's worth a second look if you have an idea that's fighting against something like that because they if they're anything like other companies that have grown through mergers and acquisitions they are so full of silos and inefficiencies that if you are focusing on execution and having an adaptable team that's getting stuff done and changing as you go you're going to just going to be faster you're going to beat them um I like the your podcast with Ben and uh then Cameron from MG fighting against Badger yeah and Badger slow and their people don't show up and there's space for a scrappy dog to get in there and beat them well I won't say but it starts with the beat and it rhymes with adjure yeah anyway I digress um so so that was basically the year to departure from um the wildland yeah was when there was some fun bouncing forth between there and NHG are as I hung out there for a few years actually uh bounce back and forth a couple times so there was stints at each other overlapping yeah um but yeah and uh we left out completely in part because Dudley and Luke are at NHG are and Brian and probably some other people are at wildland yeah if you get a chance to work with your best friends doing something that you care about I just can't recommend that enough that will give you a workaholic and a heartbeat just because you're like I'm having a great time doing something I care about that I think it's fun and it can't let these guys show me up yeah as I can I've got my friends with me I had somebody asked me at one point I was grumbling about something but I had been thinking about what I wanted out of a job and they were like uh like well check your your fussing about some of the name thing because you're a grumbler he didn't phrase it like that but he's like do you know what you actually want out of a job and I was like yeah I want to work with a group of reasonably talented people that are making decisions based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve and he's like that's a really specific answer for it off the cuff question but that's what like that's the thing I was chasing and that would the the part that would end up making me frustrated at wild and while I stayed there because I was like we know we could do this let's just do that uh let's just make the change and there was always some you know legal reason or something like that I'm not an actual legal reason just a problem with the legal department the slow maybe yeah like the four-month decision that there was talks about like what sort of headcount do you need with quarter two of next year now can eat a person now and they're like well it's just not in the books and if you did hire him it's actually going to be hired by the HR department so the person that you actually know that you needed you couldn't hire him right all just endless stuff don't understand that turn it into a yeah we don't yeah we want we want to allow that give me another beer and then we'll come back to that let's let's actually take a quick bastard break and refill our beers and then we'll be right back hey we're back um Jake I want to talk about like team building in light of kind of this corporate experience that you just had and and you mentioned you're already up to eight with you and Brian and six presumably employees is that right or subcontractors yeah no uh we had some contractors uh over the first couple of years but like it's been fun to bring those roles on default time not that you don't like your contractors and we still have some contractor relationships yeah well and hit me at that um you talked about how you really had to build the infrastructure in the foundation before you really had a lot to sell yeah like talk to me about that journey of both adding team members and services and and client acquisitions because it it has been a pretty rapid journey for you yeah when we started um for the for what we want to do for building uh sites and newsletters and getting data on board and negotiating through big contracts all that kind of stuff that just takes time um and every start of a business I think is chancey but like if we had to do over again Brian and I sometimes want to like if we did it over again would it work the same way the second time or would we make a different mistake like what side of the coin did this come down on and was it 50 50 or was it always a sure thing yeah or that kind of thing you think about that kind of stuff and I think part of it was just that we were in such a position having done so much in the past and failed frequently in the past uh there was at least two or three uh ventures that I also tried where I just didn't learn uh didn't learn the lessons fast enough or adapt fast enough that kind of thing uh yeah like uh there was one where I started something with my uh with my best friend of the time uh an old roommate where we started a group called the American tradition partnership and it was gonna be a c4 that we were gonna launch and we thought we had all the the right tools and everything and I was just getting married to to Leslie my contract with uh somebody else had dropped off so I was like great we're gonna launch and do this and it's gonna be lean times but we're ready for it and it just wasn't taken hold we weren't seeing the response rates that we knew we needed and I started forgetting some of the lessons that I should have learned uh just being like you didn't see the you didn't see the number and the number is bad and you need to quit trying and so I just kept digging in at it and that first year that I was uh married the I made a total of $10,000 for here and we were getting life insurance or something because we were just brand new married and the insurance agents uh he was like asking the information about stuff and he's like what'd you make and I was like it's made $10,000 and he was trying to make a joke and he looked at me and he's like Jake I just don't understand what you're bringing to this relationship and it just like I was like Leslie looks like I'm not sure either I'm not sure what I'm doing here and it was just one of the things where I'm like you should have just recognized as a failure had moved on faster or just or even some of the things that have concentrating on being like you need that revenue coming in the door it doesn't matter how pretty you made some non-essential part of things you've prioritized some things wrong and didn't fail fast enough and those kind of things and like you said the you pay for your educations and like that year I certainly paid for that one and just my wife she's also a small business owner uh she's a former member actually yeah terribly successful realtor here in town with the NOCO home team and like uh that was still kind of in the early years of her business so she at least got what it was like she wasn't somebody who was like I don't understand why I can't just go get a corporate job and just make a dollar like a normal person instead of being obsessed with running your own thing um so she was so supportive and so understanding even as I was flaming out terribly yeah uh so when we went to start winter mind Brian and I like I had all of that experience on my side and those other things it in that beginning sprint where Brian's like can be something to sell I'm like I don't have anything for you to sell yeah I got to finish building stuff there's things that need to be done it's gonna take some time being able to like prioritize to being like we need to hit that minimum viable product stage we need to be able to hit something that we can sell and if we're working on something other than getting something that we can sell and then selling it we need to change our attitudes and not do that and so like we didn't have any offices right thing like that and so we were going to we were meeting in the in the libraries uh because they have like a meeting room and so like great I'll meet you in the long font study room of the public library right and uh like I said we think differently where I've got like sticky notes and notebooks I've got a notebook here now I always have one with me when I'm doing something and he would just roll in and sit and I'd like uh stream of consciousness y'all about things that needed to be done writing all over the whiteboard and sticky notes are going up and I'm re stacking priorities and he's saying that looks good man if you want to do it that sounds great well be on board he was uh on board he's doing in the meantime so he's working on selling and getting uh he doesn't have any partners yet though oh as far as I getting the stuff to sell right so like while I'm building the the operation platform for us to be able to monetize those data partners uh assets he's out there getting those things for us first and then sell their stuff to somebody else yeah and then even the buy side like when you're running something like this in politics or whatever if somebody says you know I've got a city council race can you help me out I just have to say I'm sorry there's just no way I need you to have something that would have national attention for a national list to work at it so being able to knock on the door of somebody who has the nation's attention and say I need you to buy my thing that's really hard in the number of buyers in that space are down to a a few dozen uh a kind of thing so and he's working on those relationships so give our lists a shot give our give our ad space a shot and uh rent directly from my second and see what happens so and so as we're scaling up on size trying to get to that size where we can actually have their attention he's calling and uh working out those relationships yeah but that takes months of doing it and if your priorities are on the right priorities yeah and it wasn't touch and go whether or not we would actually break through and have the money to keep on scrounging until probably like July August that year Brian got married in July of that first year and it was on his honeymoon and thinking about it's like I don't know maybe we just go back and grab a different corporate job because like he's a popular and talented dude who's got lots of other offers in the industry and uh so for him to to keep the faith and put the time to say like we're gonna launch something this even though I'm gonna not get paid a whole lot of anything for the first six months was uh yeah it's just it's why we worked out so was that first six months yeah the first six months was just the two you hoping it out yeah and then uh we'd brought on some uh consultants I kind of know if you know chef us balloon sure from artifact artifact that cool that tools if you guys want a nice designer uh he was on board doing some work with us uh and uh obviously this was a fun lesson that I had also taken with me is like you need to work on the thing that you're doing not the thing that uh you're you know your vendors should be doing so don't waste a bunch of time uh keeping your own books if you can afford a book keep your head the book keep your do that don't you guys do that don't pretend to be a graphic designer when you're not a graphic designer uh you're supposed to be uh building this platform not playing around with the logo for a whole day because you're bad at it uh and I one time uh I was doing some of the backyard and I was building a fire pit and so I I had laid I had these bricks left over from a garage or something somewhere so I was building this brick fireplace and I got all of the mortar mixed up in these bricks in my hands and I had the trowel full and I went to set the brick down and then I was like I don't know why I thought I would know how to do this and I was just surrounded by what cement being like Jake you don't have any skills in this area you're just you're just lunged in here and I eventually got it laid down after a whole bunch of time and I talked to a friend of mine who was a brick layer uh like a couple months later and I was like hey I just did a thing with bricks you would be proud of me I built a brick wall and it's level and it looks good and he's like yeah he's like it's not hard to lay bricks it's hard to be fast and you get paid by the brick and that's the difference and so like I feel like there's a lot of things out there especially for like entrepreneur folks with like I could build a logo and you can you build it fast and is it great or do you need to be doing something else because the people that get paid for it yeah you could have had that and then spread you spent the whole day trying to download an install Photoshop or whatever and I'm only laughing out because that's the mistake I made a bunch trying to think I'll do everything and so that was one thing that we didn't do this time where I was we were all too happy to be like even though there's not a lot of revenue coming in the door it's going towards people that are going to get us well as part of like I've often said you know nothing really great in terms of business was created without at least some capital yeah some money some social capital like usually it takes some of both like obviously your Brian has a lot of social capital in his circles and things and you've got both intellectual capital for how this stuff works and then you guys could go six months without really having any money that's a big thing like I don't think and that was something I didn't have in the beginning when I was trying to do at the start if you how many people could you sit down and say do you have six months of runway when you're ready to start this thing and we mean people create special situations like I think the episode with the Rocky Mountain West east was like I was living in my van it was like it's cheap to live in a van I was able I was able to do a lot of stuff because I cut my expenses to the bone and lived lived in a weird way so if you don't pay yourself for a long time then you can hire somebody sooner yeah yeah so like who was that first person for you guys our first consultant was just my brother-in-law from well you talked about your service as well yeah how about how about first like first person we we cut our operations consultant and we're like we're like we're bringing on a first person full-time his name is Colesstrallo he's worked at great for us oh he was your first he was first he's employee number one we've talked about how we're working with some consultants and other people before that and he's like it doesn't matter they're consultants I was employee number one and I want that badge so yeah and he's just been he's been awesome he's been one of those talk about lessons that you pull from your previous bosses when you're starting something and some are good and some are bad or you try to avoid their bad things and I try to avoid some of the bad things like yelling or swashing folks is a junior staff's initiative that kind of stuff like that were things that happened in some of those other jobs not by anybody I've mentioned but like in some of those other ones where you're like man I really hated that and that job chafed at me because there would be the conference call where some massive guy up the chain is yelling at the intern and you're like that's just terrible I hate this job because of that thing so yeah you're trying to avoid those things but one thing that did take away was I just take a fire on people who are smart hard work and good people that have the right attitude and so much effort is put on like in the beginning I said like when I was in DC all these people had these wild credentials in these connections and these kind of things that's how they were getting the jobs they were like well I went to fancy university actually I see and I'm not trying to knock that kind of thing but there is a lot of great people out there where you're like I can explain it to you yeah like I'm going to teach you what to do if but more importantly I have more people flame out or I've had to fire more people when I've had folks that have bad attitudes or does something else like that I've rarely had to fire I'm trying to think so it's called do which is role these are operations manager so like all of the day to day and there's a lot of throughput like we send into the billions of emails per year and it's a complicated lot of setup and it's all that same day thing where politics is very news cycle driven so the industry has very short planning times right they almost refuse to have decent planning time so even through the weekend you won't know what you're sending on Saturday until Friday afternoon Eastern time kind of thing when they're finally talking to you yeah so it can be a very seven days a week sort of job with a lot of moving pieces that you need to stay on top of and he's running that show he's got a little team of four right now well let's manage in that kind of thing yeah well and Cole is the the worship leader of our church yeah yeah I remember I met with Cole over two years ago before a year before he started with you guys and I he was doing little different jobs in this and that kind of getting through but he was such a gifted writer and just smart guy and I was like man I have no idea where this guy should find his traction in the world but I hope it's yeah something you find I hope we find something you really love soon and that seems like he's really and that's why I was like I wanted to do we you're looking for our first person it's kind of a big deal when you just barely got to paying yourself literally a matter of months ago and then say let's start paying somebody else too you're like the natural inclination is like no let's keep it off I don't want to give away the money we just I need four more raises before I really want to I know how to be given away our cash but like I was like whatever we do I want to find somebody who's got he was like it's just a thinker and a sharp person has got a good attitude that was cool so we went after him but Cole did not have a background in digital marketing or anything like that yeah and that said that lesson that I took from those other bosses because like when they originally when he met a farm kid at HR would have never hired Cole right no or me either at any juncture at any my jobs it was always somebody was like no he's this smart guy and he'll figure it out and like we're gonna bring him on and we're gonna teach us we get and that finding people to have the right attitude and heart to learn I feel like it's such a bigger deal than the experience I've had to like breakways with people at any jar when we were getting that huge growth cycle from three to 60 in such a short time a number of like bad fits got hired over time sure and so like that's the thing um even getting even getting laid off from the corporate job is they're like we don't like your guy's product and you're out of here that process of getting laid off and then also having to tell people like you've got to go you're not working out here is such a it's a wild thing to go through and like I'm thankful for the experience nobody likes sides like people go but it's a it's the worst thing though when you do it usually for both people right and but like I think that's a make a break point in a startup or any sort of business yeah if you get a bad person because a bad attitude can just grow like cancer in an organization or drag the whole thing down and everybody knows it and watches and you like that person got a bad attitude they're not doing their job they're not pulling their weight they're ruining the function of this team and providing fiction friction and our leadership is doing nothing about it and it just ruins everybody's day to go on and no one wants to do it because there's it's awful and there's a bunch of reasons why you're trying to take care of the person and make excuses or you just don't want to have the conflict and then you got to start over and hire somebody else all the things are awful but it's so necessary for an organization to say like you're a bad fit and you gotta go sorry yeah yeah and so uh that's again a lesson we have to take with us we haven't had to fire anybody at which wine thankfully that's uh I I won't share this whole story because I've shared it before but like the first act that I really did as the manager of the bank when my boss got let go is the president I was the vice president acting president was let another person go that just wasn't a good fit and and she went on to be start her own business and and thank me for being the best boss she ever had for one day to let her go to her next right thing you know and because you do release people to the right thing when you do you have to fire so yeah know that when you do have to do that thing and it'll happen at winter mind too yeah I know I know I know it will and then the group will be better for it but like so what's the rest of the team you said Cole's got a four person operation he's got four person operations there they do all the stuff that's all the creation of content the websites the email sendouts things like that you're drafting some things or you're maybe reviewing some plans or whatever we've hired a couple of super bright people they're like dedicated developers and data people for they're doing data modeling and that kind of stuff like that and they've skipped that operations team but for the most part we've tried to keep our folks uh to going through that process even if you go on to the stuff to be uh focus largely on data or sales or other things like that in the future I don't want folks coming in and not understanding with the day-to-day operations so like no silos right um we're winter mind team right and also it provides the flex because that's a job that doesn't quit and so like if we did try to restrict it to two people that were doing just the day-to-day operations then one had a day off for a wedding and what was it and then like now what's happened because the other people aren't trained up and how to do it so I think there will be a long-term amount of people that are at least endabbling in the day-to-day so tell me about your like your hopes for further growth I mean are you trying to like make this a 20% team or do you really want to be a boutique we do this not many people do and we got it you know there's there's different parts of it with there's a couple of larger companies that are in the all-encompassing digital marketing space that approached and said we've been trying to build a political product for years and we want your your thing we were interested in buying you or that kind of thing uh and as we've talked about that I've always like thought it was like one it would be straight back to that mess where I was like the reason you want to buy this is because you guys can't build it and you can't build it because you're not flexible enough you're yeah you're you're a credit system dinosaur thing that cannot and six months after you buy me most buying plays will have quit and you won't really have anything and I'll be annoyed and they'll all have new job searches and right in that concept of like what I said what do you want to do is I want to work the reasonably talented people who care about what they're doing and I was like I've got that right now so I don't ever see like a way to want to change that like the even the I think it'd be fun to see if we could grow it to be way bigger and we're reaching into other industries like charitable which is actually very different than politics or even doing some of the other commercial stuff or you need to meet Mel Uli yeah who is a non conservative political consultant but she's a philanthropy expert she's one of our other podcasts you're like yeah because it is that activation of people to do things right and that concept of saying like I built a community of folks are engaging with something that they're excited to to get and we're selling some ads to them what we do it that kind of thing like that sounds great and that can be really broad and there's parts of what we do where people like do I've had some people like you think you'll be doing this for the rest of your life and I was like this didn't really exist 10 years ago I don't have a really strong confidence that it'll exist in the same for 10 years from now like communication is going to change but the concept yeah but the concept of trying to find people who need something and then connecting them with somebody who has it to give them while very broad and philosophical sounding way for the term advertising that's not going to change and so I think we will just stay in advertising and try to grow and adapt as the industry changes and adapts a lot because stuff's changing all the time even like the mainstays of stuff like web cookies and that kind of stuff those are going away in browsers that's going to be a huge shift it's mainly a really I wanted to click that I couldn't accept the cookies anymore they just won't give them to you but Google still know all your stuff they're basically finding ways for the big guys only to do it rather than little cookie co-ops and that kind of other stuff but the concept of saying like of finding ways or clues to say this person wants this and then connecting to somebody who has it that's not going to change and that's what I want wintermind to really grow into rather as we start out as a niche that was built on some really specific experiences and specific relationships yeah success for me in the next couple years would be like did we diversify into something more well-rounded and more fluid and saying like we're building communities of folks that are enjoying good content and then connecting to folks that have something that they are interested in yeah yeah and that folks they have there's like some clue you're finding you feel like you're sure like homes of sorts that you're finding clues that people are interested in being more active than they have been in this fear yeah whether that's politics or quilting or whatever and like it's a fun time just because of the diversification of media like the biggest scam in political advertising in my mind granted this is a couple of beers in is TV advertising it's it's it's hot garbage the consultants that sell that take such a fat cut and then they advertise just on these huge markets to people that aren't even necessarily in your district certainly not a peat lot of people that are registered to vote or going to vote or even wearing a position to be a swing vote it is just a it is just a nasty drain of scatter shot marketing and that concept was like that's the exact opposite of what I want to be doing of just saying like how can we find something that's super targeted to be like that's what I wanted this the thing I needed and and how do you move people though right like you have to actually change people's minds in this space I don't feel like we do like I don't want to find I'm not out to change anybody's mind I'm just out to give them the thing that they wanted when they wanted it because like the the concept of political donation is like not to say hey I'm going to all the sudden change you from a Democrat to a Republican with fancy mail you or something like that no but I am going to find somebody who wants something done about an issue and then say here's a great way to do that whether that's a charitable thing that they're concerned about of saying like gosh I'm concerned about this event that's just happened and I want to know a way to help that finding those people not trying to there are supernatural viral trends of saying like I will that people got changed from and I don't care to I do care kind of situation but you know I come not interested in taking people that don't care and then turning them into people that do care all of a sudden I'm just wanting to give the people that do care what they wanted to take action on which I think some people just show that you really care give me some money right to do this thing it'll be good yeah so if people are looking for a solution like that's the kind of thing like you're not trying to like talk somebody into buying a new chair you you're trying to give somebody an opportunity to buy a chair who needs a chair so I dig it I dig it that's actually so much easier yeah exactly that's it and really I think that people that think that like through the power of my magical words and design I will transform a person's priorities in life you're like well I think you're fooling yourself a little bit right it's much more natural just to say like totally if I'd have this thing that you've been looking for yeah yeah right the coffee salesman who's trying to turn tea drinkers in a coffee salesman you like or a coffee drinker you're like don't do that just right give people who like coffee a better cup of coffee yeah fair enough well let's uh we're getting coming up on our time let's say let's talk about one consistency in terms of you're hiring and people's selection because we talked about cold just a little bit but you've got six five other team members now how is there common denominators how do you select you do you do the red yellow green thing with everybody yeah it's an easy way to do it I think into it way to express express what's expected out of the job and also to help morph it as they do it um I think the the concept of quick feedback even like those management things like uh scrum or agile management that kind of stuff it's a cliche where everybody talks about it but nobody's actually doing it correctly that kind of thing but that sort of stuff we like we're going to adapt in short sprints of saying like here's our goals and then we're going to measure them and then change into something else and we're going to do it quickly um over and over and over again and if it's not working out then you need to go and there's no hard feelings but we're just moving somebody else in and we've had a couple people leave us for either better opportunities that better fit their skills at or we've had some people that show up and work for us and they're like I didn't realize I thought I was signing on for something else and this is too intense or too technical for me or something like that I want out and we're like that's no problem at all just move right along we'll find somebody else that was one of the bad things that I found working with folks in the past is we would have employees or folks that would have other opportunities elsewhere or that would be a better fit and the bosses are managed at the time are scared of losing people and having to go through the pain of rehiring and they would work to like try to shut those opportunities down for folks and it's like that's a terrible thing I was like I don't know how to sleep at night let's just almost morally reprehensible just help your folks find their best fit and if that happens to be with somebody else because you don't want to pay them what they're actually worth then then help them go that way everybody wins everybody's winning just if you were better at hiring you wouldn't try to trap people in a job that wasn't the best fit for them which is just insanity it's one of those things where like where I say like we're all doing something that we agree is done right we don't want shouldn't be doing this so we're breaking the thing so trying to get people trained out prepared them for whatever the job takes them next but then also trying to build the job around them that fits their skills I would rather find somebody that was talented and then needed to change a role to fit their talents then have that perfect box if you love them as an employee and they're they're just not succeeding at their current role but you can move them to this other thing and yeah that's great we just hired somebody who starts a money that I'm very excited about and she had said oh one of the challenges from my previous job was that they were annoyed at me for doing things that were outside of my role that needed be doing needed needed needed done I was doing things outside my role that needed done but they were saying that wasn't my role and I needed to stay further into my box I will never tell you that it's like this is great come on board if you find problems in your fix tonight that's great we'll change your role we're not kind of put you in a box like that so I think finding good folks in trading is better than trying to find the the extra qualified folks and then just focus on people's attitudes and excitement to work not majoring on the major things like we're talking during one of the breaks about obsessions over expense accounts or that kind of thing there was some debate where I worked one time whether or not we would allow people to have the nicer phone case versus the medium level phone case on the company phone that they were buying right and it's like this is a $50,000 year employee that we then pay health benefits on top of that we've already bought a $1000 phone for and the difference in the phone case is $50 or $60 what are you fussing about the percentage of this person's expense we've wasted more money just talking about it for an hour than this would have ever saved us and they just focus on such little things it's sort of that thing where if you give somebody a hammer everything looks like a nail so the cost controller people can get out of control but it's really more about helping people find a talent that they can do and do it and if it fits the best view great if it someplace else is good. Well in every cost for like a company or a business every cost should have a payback right like and so that's yeah if you're investing this person let's make sure they're productive to you yeah for you and that's even then yeah so like just focusing on the thing that actually matters that most and trying to be task oriented rather than saying like to show up at 905 versus 85 or any of that kind of stuff it's just so my mind count of productive and it's easy for us because we're doing something that's internet based rather than like trying to run a manufacturing operation line where you being gone while everybody else is actually be a disaster. So do you guys have anything like a 905 you mentioned already nice job on the hiding the beer in the table like totally because we can hear it we can completely hear it. So like since you've got this seven day a week kind of potential news cycle do people get a lot of flexibility in their schedule and they just know they're gonna have to work an hour and a half on Friday night to get this stuff ready. Yeah they don't they don't have to for sure but a lot of guys do choose to like some of the guys on our team are younger and rather than work laid on a Friday they would rather work part of a Saturday instead or do that instead and we've had other folks who are like I don't want to work weekends that I was like you absolutely don't have to don't feel that you do we just have X number of widgets that we know takes about this much time to get done and you got to get those things done and if you do them all on Friday if you do someone Friday Saturday whatever that sounds fine but using any sort of collaboration tool to track projects getting done throughout the week and taking close measurement of what's getting accomplished in real terms makes it easy to not worry about time or when people were doing what you've got that chunk of done I'm obsessed with Asana yeah it's really yeah I was so annoyed with Asana like things better Trello and Monday are both been better to me exactly a lot a lot of people love it I'm among my team and the people that know me like Jake so weird Asana fanboy that any that's the only thing that I really force people into doing like I would like we use slack and all the other things that I didn't want to use that people like using and they work out great but I cannot get pulled away from Asana that's just my world that I live in and I've used it for too much stuff for too long so it's still it's cool yeah it's one privilege of being the the boss where I'm like I'm sorry you got to use my productivity software so I like Asana for doing all of that although my close second favorite is Notion if you guys ever get into notion that's neat it's like I have a notion to do this thing but I don't know yeah it's Notion.so but it's a half wiki half corporate documentation that you can also turn it into boards and move tasks around and have databases within it so it's sons intriguing yeah it's been nice because hiring people like that's for me I think HR could make the difference in a lot of businesses where like we have a friend the bros that run ABS services that do landscaping and I was like what that really is the real challenge is not how to put in a pipe in the ground but how to manage that wild HR problem of seasonal workers in hourly paid sure and consistent long time employees that know how to do their jobs and all that all of that is just a big HR challenge and whoever if there was 10 businesses that started in the in the area that we're trying to do that I think the person who is best at HR would would be the winner in that and I was like that's a part for when it comes to onboarding new employees tools like notion where you're like it's all written down there how to sign up for here how to get the thing on going on here and when you're a small five-person company and somebody's already signed joining up and you like you need to get this set up and fill up this form and an account set up over here and it's notions made it really easy to document all of our onboarding processes and all that kind of stuff so it's my two-plush things I'm not affiliated with it all yeah yeah well you'll earn no analytics for those guys let's jump into faith family politics which would you prefer yeah I don't have enough time to fold right for sure right so let's talk about your faith you go to my church to crossing I do I got saved as a young kid in vacation Bible school a young age and just like what seven or something yeah around that yeah just like in middle school area it's a different different faith experience because some folks that have that that big change in life from when they are when they're a grown person that went from not being a person of faith or paid too much attention to change it can be a big change and it's an easy marking or differentiation point in their lives but when you're a kid and you make a decision like that is a very young child where you're like you're not old enough to buy a cigarette you don't have a long history of terrible yeah yeah sudden you make a philosophical decisions about your eternal soul at the age of seven and so it makes it sort of like this fuzzy transition but it turns into steps over steps over years of just saying but you've kind of played it a lot since then so talk to me about like why use data as a church go or like yeah a big part of it is sometimes outcomes of other folks are just comparative folks where like I had a grandpa give me advice one time that was like you should take advice from people that have the thing you want to have so don't take financial advice from a broke guy and don't take marriage advice from somebody who's been divorced four times or that kind of thing yeah and I say it's not a it's not a bad starting point and there is part of that where you're like what about the outcomes of folks that are having the life you want to have and you're like it's those believers and times when you're having just faith struggles or just a time where you haven't been focused on it and it comes to a time of choosing where you're like is this something for you or you're just saying you're done with it all looked at folks I knew that were not people of faith and people of the word I was like they're living the life I want to have and even if it I'm not having a big emotional spiritual experience right now in my heart I believe the evidence I believe the data yeah I believe these outcomes I believe the things and I was like I'm choosing I was like I want to be I want to be a Christian I want to I want those outcomes in that life yeah that's the life I want to be living I've actually shared that same notion in a different way of like there's some people in my sphere that are non-Christian a lot of people in my sphere that are on Christians probably two thirds and in some respects and I'm like hey you notice these people that you really love that that yeah have come around and stuff like that all the ones you love the best there's a Christian man in my mind yeah and they're you know I hate to say it but they're kind of you know some of them are doing right and most of us are doing it wrong yeah well that's a thing and whatever and even them plenty of skeletons I'm sure plenty of hypocrites and I'm the I've been the worst among all of them and I've met tons of folks that were not Christians that were wonderful folks to hang around with but yeah in the end of the day that's the thing that's I mean if the easiest way enough ever data point yeah um so family yeah uh we've talked a little bit it's 12 years now which has just been wild um we're we're two crazy people that like when we were dating there was a good chunk of our social circle that said this is a terrible idea do not get married uh but we mostly less these friends because you only made like ten thousand dollars the first year right yeah so uh but we stuck it out and like to be honest the the that people were such fighters that the people's rejection uh of our relationships just sort of put it so you yeah sort of put this back to back and you're like well I got news for you there's a circle here and we're on the inside and everybody else on the outside we're together and we're gonna fight this thing through uh and we are we're too super I don't know if I would describe myself as intense but everybody would describe Leslie as pretty intense and she's just like uh Jesus a high performance high charge an individual he's uh frankly has if I've ever had uh tendencies to just relax or goof off or be a layabout or anything like that she's always like what are we doing we're gonna do something get after it and so half of my if there's any drive in me half of it has just come from being around her because she's just such a she makes me more a man than I would have been without her yeah absolutely I just would have been uh uh yeah a layabout goof so she's just like an intense person and we're on the same team and and fighters about it the whole time which has been which has been fun because I think most people would find us challenging to hang out with for long stretches at a time yeah I like the short stretches but I do like those short stretches a lot yeah so let's talk about the you got three chillins yeah we've got three little kids uh they're they're awesome I like to do one word descriptions of the kids with their name if you don't much sharing it uh Lillian is just Leslie to the tee which is so funny because sometimes uh Leslie is so frustrated with her yeah she gets super frustrated with Chloe that's like Lillian is my favorite person she's like she's just like a little you and I love hanging out there and she's like she's a person who loves characters and stories and digging in is great imagination and is just got so much emotion and feeling and passion about stuff she's really cool to hang out with uh and then George is just a funny charmer of a person he's named George Jake Least the third which is just like a triple like boy is that your name you know that was my grandfather's and my great-grandfather's name oh you can do this I had to look it up just to make sure because I didn't want to do the wrong thing but you can skip a generation oh sweet yeah so I I pulled in the other ones to give him George Jake Least the third and he's just a kid who's kind of uh let me build uh he's just a charmer he's just who he is no one no one dislikes that kid no he makes fun or makes friends with adults so easily adults are just like this kid's fun he's always got a story and he just reminds me so much of his namesake my grandfather George Jake Least where it's just like he was uh sort of slender and German from Russia kind of guy uh who's just a farmer and everybody liked him and he was just yeah he's just a easily charmer yeah and then Henry's uh I'm calling him Hank the tank or the H-bomb because he was just like he's just a wrecking ball he's just a brute he's he's all talent and everything like that he's like this he's this little handsome little mussely little kid where you're like everything's gonna come easy for you and it's gonna drive me nuts like you're gonna be the kid is just gonna be huge and physically fit and handsome and okay it was just a charmer yeah yeah so that little asshole yeah yeah for the rest of us we're like we all had to work for it and he's like you're I'm just like you're just gonna coast on all kinds of stuff but he's just uh he's a brute I hope it works out sometimes coasting doesn't make you strong well he's the youngest of them and so he just has to fight for his space too because the elder two are are powerful personalities that are ready to dictate things so he's gonna grow up his whole life having to fight for his space so it's a good conversation inside I think it'll it'll it'll work out well so face family politics so so because we you're deep in politics yeah tell me some politics things that would surprise people or maybe why you're a conservative social libertarian yeah they're saying whatever because you're not really a you're a Republican you're conservative but probably registered Republican I imagine yeah yeah well that's the thing like folks register for a party like you're missing out on half the elections like if you're paying attention there's a primary and then a general and if you're on affiliate it's getting looser all the time where you can just all of a sudden magically change during the primary but like fight in those other elections I get to vote twice as much as you uh an affiliates because I'm voting in a primary and a general where people are like I'm independent which just means they're just skip and half of this I want to screw around with this prank stuff yeah yeah so like the uh I think the thing that people what about those like 40% of people that don't really say I love everything that the democratic party stands for are a six eighty percent of people that can't really sign up for one platform you know the the social liberty people that want guns yeah every every fun satisfying fight I've ever won or had or the most passionate we're always within the Republican Party it's always the primaries that's the most fun and like if you like the weird blood sport of politics this politics is strange uh like that we've received death threats like like we have you Brian are not not me personally but like the office we were working on obviously my congresswoman did uh and like uh those people go through a ton uh and it's a weird thing evacuating from bomb threats and all that kind of stuff in nature this is a weird industry or business to be involved in and I think that um as somebody who who has enjoyed uh the process and mainly fell in love with the people that were involved I was on the road fundraiser for a while and I'd go and sit down with people personally in their homes and explain what we were doing and see if they wanted to be involved in and it was on the road for like three weeks out of the month at a time so it was rough and it was not cool places it was just odd parts of the world which was fun to meet but you got to meet these random people that cared really passionately passionately enough to open up their pocketbooks in big ways to say I want to do something to change the world or whatever yeah and so there are those folks that have taken upon themselves to be like I really want to be super involved in it and those people are cool to meet uh but then I've also been a bunch of people that are like I don't even vote or do whatever and I'm here to tell you somebody who loves politics or whatever not being involved is a perfectly valid choice to be making like the concept that everybody needs to make politics their full-time hobby and needs to be paying attention to the TV and watching the bad news all the time as if they were personally going to affect the presidential election or whatever that is just not the case and they end up taking on so much stress and they're freaking out and they're just like the world is going to end if the thing that's happening in this far place doesn't happen the way I want it to and they get so stressed about it and it's I think a temptation to make political solutions a spiritual and moral solution to your life which just isn't the case like I love America to the to the core and I love the the process we have I think it's great but if you were living some place else that did not have a free and fair democratic election you would still have family and neighbors and people you needed to care for and love and that's the part we're here yeah and that's the part that's going to give you a better life and a more satisfying existence there's not a joyful fulfilling solution at the end of any sort of political expression for yourself and so like I think the most folks that are concerned about politics in general and like this is stressful there's a border crisis so there's a gun crisis or something's going on or whatever and I can't take them it's stressing me out and the news is bothering me I would just say just shut off the TV let's talk about those we've got both a border crisis and a gun crisis but I'm saying hey those folks should all turn around look at your neighbor look at somebody next to you and help them and do something with them that's that's agreed the actual be it all be connected to your local community live locally and don't don't accept politics is a strange identity so let's but let's go let's zoom up we got border crisis and gun crisis like in the last two weeks those are both like super high on the radar yeah you know the tell me tell me about both the spin and the solution are you studying these things yeah like to be honest there's not a lot of like I wish I had like a fun new solution for you and there's not going to be one but like you don't have a fix to the good problem like there's crazy people in there there are crazy people and like when they're saying something like Boulder City itself almost passed a ban on owning a gun or an assault rifle or something like that Boulder City itself and everywhere also already had a ban on killing people right but the law is only applied to the law abiding and so as long as you want to do something wrong I mean you don't have to look any further than like the war on drugs or something like that to say like you're not going to just wish away some sort of behavior by saying law abiding people can't do it that's not gonna fix law breaking people so that's not a fun sporty new solution but it is the actual truth that the situation is that you can you can ban things but if there's no you can't ban violence or you can say don't do that we do do that we try to we always say don't kill people yeah we're gonna chase people down and arrest them for it but that doesn't stop that problem from happening and that's once again goes back to that people looking for some sort of political or legal solution to a moral problem which is which is original sin basically like we're all fraud and broken yeah which is just just not that easy and I think as far as like the the border goes I think I switch a lot with a lot of normal conservatives when I was like immigrants are a pretty cool solution to people when hard work and ambitious people that are going to pick up and say I want to change my life by going someplace else the number of people that sit down look at a bad situation be like well this just sucks and I'm just gonna sit here and stay in it first the number of people that say no I want to buy and large and I want those center people here and like there are the adults it's not like their dependence they're just showed up looking for jobs and so I think illegal immigration in a border crisis in general you like that's absolutely wrong it needs to be stopped as far as new people coming in bring it in there those are sort of folks and like that's what the that's what my grandparents my great-grandfather got put on a ship sure 16-year-old where the whole family saved up enough money to buy one ticket put the kid on the boat at the age of 16 he got shipped from Russia to the middle of Nebraska and then called to go start a farm in eastern Colorado it's so bizarre the rest of it will come whatever he was just the one that got sent it's all the money they had yeah and so they've afforded one ticket and they changed their generations future down the chain and that's so many people's immigration story I mean that's everybody's immigration story at one point yeah depending on how far back you go my dad's grandpa my mom my grandma's dad was an immigrant he they thought it was Greek but he was adopted through Lutheran family services to some little lonely farm in North Dakota as like a ten-year-old boy and orphan and they don't know if he was Greek or whatever necessarily but Dimitri was his name and so that's the thing and yeah he's got a big line now you know well I think there's a phrase that says America is a nation of laws which sounds strange at first but what that's really saying is like what other nations are built around a racial identity to say or culture or shared culture heritage with America is a nation is in a single group of people that's founded on ideas and they're very aspirational if the original founding fathers were like all men are created equal and part of the laws is the all men are created equal yeah and that that kind of things like is everybody equal do women get to vote are how are you just trading black people and you're like well not great and no women don't get to vote but these are aspirational things that we're working towards and then these are the actual things that bind us together these aspirations that all men are created equal in these notions of what our country was founded on what's up like what if we get harry into like so what about like gay marriage for example or can gay people can a gay couple adopt a child huh you know I don't know I think it's weird that the government's involved in that in the first place I told my wife one time and think about it's like why did we pay the government $25 so we could get married I'm like I'm mad about this already we should have never got a marriage license and it will stun you to know that she was not on my side about not getting a marriage license I'm no I'm not shocked I'm not shocked so let's jump into the local experience because we got only a few minutes left here so the craziest experience of your whole lifetime that you're willing to describe to people in a recorded track and it can be short long yeah the this will be a funny one when I was in DC I grew up in a town brush where the high school football team is the beat diggers the sugar beat diggers my grandparents hoed beats with beat so wasn't wrong when I was talking about beats earlier yeah yeah so like yeah we've got towns of Colorado named Sugar City all built around this concept of getting sugar out of beats that was in danger with the Central American Free Trade Agreement sure and it was a big fight when I was there as a young kid of like I think I was old enough to my bear as like 21 but like I'm getting hauled in and there are my congresswoman and I had a meeting with the speaker the house at the time was Denny Hasdard and I was talking with him he was like what's the deal what's your hold up on this free trade to vote it's like well we've got some challenges like we want we're supportive of free trade is we're going to practice super monster but I was like there's the challenges like it's deep cultural ties here and and I found myself like I'm talking about an international trade agreement with the speaker of the house and I am 21 and looking back I was like that was a silly and outrageous situation to be and I was happy for the opportunity to do it but that was probably the craziest since he had no idea what sugar beats were probably yeah yeah yeah no idea and then if you went out if you look up Denny Hasdard that crazy guy I'm like a swear on your podcast but that guy should have been jailed the whole time I think he's in jail now okay well Denny hope you're riding in hell good good okay well so what else do one people know about winter mind group about politics about growing a business like we're in the home stretch here now yeah I just think like there I think there's a funny gene that gets into people that run small businesses or do startup stuff where it's hard for folks to have normal lives want normal jobs why would they want the weirdness and stress of skipping paychecks and all this fretting and worrying if the whole business will blow up next year and you'll be next month yeah out on your ear the whole time and if you are that person who is weird I feel like I would just encourage you yeah just get weird and accept it as a lifestyle and like enjoy the time that is now of saying like I get inside what I'm doing today and I'm doing it for me and that's its own reward even if some of those lean years are terribly lean hopefully you'll hit pay dirt and it'll be a huge job but don't don't skip the part where you're like you can wake up as a business owner and say it's my time and I'm doing it my way and I'm doing the thing I want to do because that's so rare it's it's such a and don't fail too long with that same press fail fast and move fast move on get a job try something different later Jake love you all right appreciate you being here it's been great man and thanks for being on local experience yeah thank you for listening to today's episode of the local experience podcast this is Kurt bear founder of the local think tank and host of the local experience and I'm here with Rory Sharer 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 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 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 we'll catch you next time on the in-depth local experience podcast with me and with me Rory for bite-sized business lessons in the local shorts bye