SHORTS 12 | Candyce Edelen, Owner of Propel Growth: Growing revenue through marketing and sales

Welcome to the Loco Shorts Podcast from Loco Think Tank. In this podcast series, Loco Business Developer Rory Shah will help unfold bite-sized business learnings through the crazy experiences the business owners face along their small business journey. Listen in and listen up because these short business stories may just have the secret ingredient to taking your business to its next level of success. Okay, so welcome to this new episode of the Loco Shorts Podcast. So I'm Rory Shah. I am with Team Loco, so I'll be your host today, and I am really excited to talk to you all because we have an awesome guest today, Candace Evelyn. She is here today. It's the president and CEO at Propel Growth, or which is just about to turn 14 years old, so congratulations for a long time in business. So Candace has a long history in creating and growing businesses and marketing and sales and she really likes to focus around growing revenue. So this is going to be a podcast that a lot of our listeners will want to know more about because no doubt as our business owners want to grow their business, they also want to grow their revenue. Candace, welcome, and I'm excited. Feel free to introduce yourself and give us a little bit grounding on what you do and who you serve. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. So my background is in growing businesses. Propel Growth is my fifth. And actually the eldest of all of them now because the other student lasts quite a long, but so I guess we are no longer a startup. You know, you're out of that. Yeah. But I had like co-founded a couple of technology companies before I started Propel Growth and that kind of propelled me into being able to grow this company too, which was helpful. Mm-hmm. So I'm curious, no, where did you start and how did you know that really what you were good at, what you wanted to do and even get into business on your own? Hmm, interesting. So I won't go all the way back, but I had kind of wanted to start a business even in college and didn't really have the right impetus or confidence to do it. And then in 96, I got laid off from a job. And after a teary goodbye, I walked out of that office and that company was about two blocks from I-25. And by the time I was on the entrance ramp to I-25, I had decided to start my own business. So I started a business called Communicate with an exclamation point, don't put an exclamation point or any kind of punctuation in your business name. Sure. It's really challenging, yeah. And I didn't really, I didn't really have a very good sense of how to run a business then. So one of the things that I learned the hard way was my rates were way too low and it took me a couple of years to figure that out. And I didn't figure it out until I finally shut down that business and took a job with my competitor. I had been outselling this key competitor in Denver and he couldn't figure out what I was doing. And honestly, I can't say I knew either, but he had 25 people and I was one person and I was winning deals from him. And as it turned out, I was charging like less than half per hour what he was charging. And plus, I wasn't really charging money for the creative process of the thinking. I felt like if I was going to write for a company, the only time I could bill for was the time when my hands were on the keyboard. Not when I was diagramming out ideas and thinking about what should be written. And so the end result was that for a piece of content that I put together versus a piece of content, his company put together, like my price would be 25%. Wow. And so I went to work selling for him and that was when I learned like, oh, I guess I'm actually more valuable than I realized. Julie, now, yeah, but then I took a sales class when I was working for him and that got me really interested in the concept of solution selling. And honestly, I didn't land last very long at that company. I really wanted to drive more recurring revenue and the company wasn't excited about that. They liked the people that worked. They're like to do new things every week. And so they didn't want me to go land a company that at the time, the main phone company in Colorado was Quest. And I wanted to land a big deal doing technical writing for Quest and they thought that would be boring. And so even though I looked at it as this would be a really steady stream of revenue to cover payroll every month so then we can go get some creative jobs on top of that. They didn't want that. And so I left and it was not a very friendly parting, but I then got into business with this guy that I had done sales training with and actually really learned solution selling and how to teach people how to sell and how to sell myself. And my billable rate went from $30 an hour to $185 an hour and so I learned more about value and understanding what I could bring to the table and what people were willing to pay for that. And I think that's a really important lesson that a lot of companies struggle with is figuring out pricing and figuring out what's it worth, what's the value to the customer and learning value-based pricing, it's hard. So then I transitioned, sorry, I interrupted you. No, no, I will. I'm holding back a little bit because briefly I'll share that a lot of our business owners that are in think tank groups, that's probably one of their first things they ask us or at least like in the builders chapters, maybe in the thinkers chapters, so the businesses that are about to get sort of growing, they're trying to figure out how do they adapt their pricing and that's the first thing that a lot of people help them with is like crank it up. Yeah, seriously, I mean, one of the things that we learned and taught in the sales training program was if you don't get pushed back on the pricing, then your price is too low. Wow. You push it all the way to that end of the spectrum, you're not getting too low. Otherwise, you're leaving money on the table. Now, I think it's hard for people to articulate the value, like they know what they can do. So that's actually a question I have for you, like how were you able to, it sounds like show up to these jobs, but were you able to bring in your inherent skill set and then pair it with these outside trainings, and then that kind of made this perfect blend of skills for Candace to be epic in her job, or how did you find all of these programs? Well, so with that program, that was solution selling, and I actually got connected with one of the key, what did they call them? I'm struggling to remember the language that they used, but solution selling was essentially kind of a franchise, and so I was working with actually three of the top, if you want to call them franchisees, and they weren't, I don't know if they were officially franchises, but it was like some of the top people that were driving these courses, and I was working with them and doing more coaching and creating sales playbooks and things like that with them. And then I started working with another organization where I actually became one of the lead instructors and traveled all over the world instructing for that, and it was really fun, but that's where, you know, it's like the going rate for what I was doing was significantly higher than what I would have charged, because I didn't really have the confidence to do that. So it was like kind of external validation of what my rate was based on what everybody else was charging, and so I did a lot of competitive analysis. And I've learned that sense when I was trying to price for two technology companies that I co-founded, there's a combination of things that I had to do for pricing, definitely looking at the competitors and figuring out how they're pricing, and, you know, you kind of have to go undercover to figure that out. Like it's not always, you know, prices that are published on a website, and certainly that wasn't the case back then. We were also doing something really, really new at the time. So we were kind of feeling out the pricing as we went, and just bumping it up a little bit at a time as we, when we didn't get pushback, you know, and so at the end, I mean, we were selling licenses for half a million to a million dollars, and what I really wanted to do was build a SaaS business. That was, it was so early, SaaS wasn't even a name when we were doing this. So we didn't have a business model to follow. So we were just looking at monthly prices that added a multiple on what it was that it was costing us to offer the services, and, you know, three to four X multiple is kind of what I was looking at as what would be a reasonable amount of money to get started, but knowing that we would ultimately raise that rate as we went on. What was your experience in helping you identify those opportunities? So it sounds like you had at this very high level and maybe early understanding of like strategy and tactics to perform business development. Where did that come from? So where I really got good at it was when we niched because so let me go back in time. All right. In 2000, I had been doing the sales training, and I was introduced to this guy that was getting a business started that I was really interested in. So I was trying to help him kind of get a sales strategy off the ground for that company and decided to join as a co-founder and put some sweat equity, and I worked for about 18 months for no salary in order to earn my stake in the company and built it. I mean, we didn't really have much of a pipeline at all when I got started. And so about six months in, I had a really great mentor in Denver. James Vick Ahmed, and he's still out there in the Denver area. But he had sold a couple of successful dot com companies. And at the time, my pipeline consisted of Gates rubber company, which is a tire manufacturer in Denver, tires and other rubber stuff and public storage, Nike, and a couple of financial services companies that you would have never heard of. But they were really big in the financial industry. And we were selling enterprise application and integration technology. So you really need to know the business in order to figure out what kinds of applications can be integrated and let them talk to each other. And that's a really hard thing to accomplish with an eight person firm in all of those different kinds of markets, because none of them, I was Gates rubber and public storage have to do with each other, right, you know, is like. And so Vick sat down with us and he looked at our pipeline and he said, this is kind of a funny story. He says, did you ever try setting ants on fire with a magnifying glass when you were a kid? And I'm like, crunching going, no, and so you know, he moves on from the violence of that act to you. How did you get the heat to focus, right? And you have to like, angle that magnifying glass so that you've got the tightest beam of light you possibly can. And that's where it generates enough heat to start a fire. And he said, business is like that too. You have to focus. And the more focused you are on the tighter niche, the more effective you're going to be. And so he encouraged us because my partner had a lot of really good experience in the financial services industry. And so he encouraged us to drop all of those other deals that we were pretty deep into. And just go after the financial industry and really, really focus on what we were doing. That was a really scary piece of advice to take. But we sat down and talked about it and decided to give it a shot. So I walked away from those other deals. And we went focused 100% not just on financial services, but on a really, really tight niche around electronic trading in the financial services industry. And that turned our business around within, I mean, we had no clients, we had one client that was doing more, we were doing services stuff for in the financial industry. And nothing else was closing. And after we really focused on that within a year and a half, we had 47 clients. And we were named one of the fast 50 in Colorado for the fastest growing technology. So it really worked, but it's so counterintuitive. And we found that the more narrow we nudged, it allowed us to do a better job of hiring because we could really focus on the type of talent that we needed to deliver a very specific solution. It made it easier for marketing, my marketing messaging was so much simpler, made it easier for the pricing because I could go and have conversations with people about what the problem was and what it was costing them to do it without our technology. And that helped me kind of create a foundation for pricing it. And it was easier for creating the marketing messaging. It was easier for training a sales team. Everything got easier when we nudged. Well, that created a lot more velocity for our business. I can imagine that would be pretty scary. And I mean, you've got these big companies, probably nice robust contracts on the table. And for you to turn them down as a starting business, I think a lot of people would have a really hard time doing that. Well, let's clarify, they were not at the contract stage yet. We were still working on the deals, but we were certainly deep and we had good connections there. We had done multiple presentations, but no, we weren't. I didn't walk away from signed deals, but I walked away from trying to get those deals closed. So from that company, what experience led you to propel growth? So we built that company up and raised venture capital for it in 2004. And unfortunately, we had a little bit of challenges with the investors in our company. We didn't have the same vision for the company. So my partner and I made the decision to kind of sell out our interest and go start another business. And we did that. That one we brought in a strategic investor, again, very, very focused on our target market and what we were selling. We were too early to market with that. And so we did not succeed with that business and folded about a year and a half after we started it. And I decided that I didn't want to be in the technology business anymore because it's hard. And so I started propel growth thinking, you know, the problems that a lot of these companies are dealing with are not unusual. And so I wanted to try to help them solve the same problems that I had been solving. I started propel growth with the objective of helping companies like the companies that I had co-founded accomplish what we had accomplished with that first company in terms of building a marketing engine and a sales engine that would allow them to grow. And I actually ended up my first three clients were my key competitors from the old company. I got to, because everybody was kind of competing for the same deals. And I actually was able to work with all of them and kind of get them to swim into different. If you're familiar with Blue Ocean strategy, it's like everybody was literally competing for the same deal. And he's like, oh yeah, I just had a conversation with these three other companies. And I'm like, oh my gosh, are you kidding? We're so early stage in this type of technology that we were building. It was brand new in the marketplace, not just ours, all of us were brand new. So it was way too early for the pricing to get commoditized on this type of technology. And by all of us competing for the same deal, we're commoditizing it because we're all like, you know, fawning over city group to try to get that name in our portfolio and reducing our pricing in order to compete for that deal. And that effectively sets a threshold for your pricing that's going to be hard to get back over and raise the prices again later. And so I looked at all these companies and I'm like, we had to stop this. And so I actually kind of executed a blue ocean strategy for them, helping them all kind of swim into different areas where they weren't competing head to head. And that was really fun and exciting to get to do that. That is really cool. An experience like bringing the people you're bidding against into the same room and helping them out. I think that's kind of like what we should all strive for in business that everyone has their place, everyone has their customer, everyone has their unique service. So trying to get on the same page with your competitors at the same time I think would be a fun thing to do. Yeah. And companies aren't fungible. A fungibility means that, you know, a dollar bill that you have that's all crumpled and filthy and dirty. And I've got a nice clean, crisp dollar bill that I just got from the bank. They have exactly the same value, you know, I can buy something with mine. You can buy the same thing with yours. We can trade them. We have the same value. But companies, even if they're selling products in the same space, are not fungible. And the teams are different, the way that they solve problems is different, the way they approach the market is different. And so, you know, it's really important in your messaging to try to understand what is the unique value proposition that your company brings to the table and then getting that message across in such a way so that people don't perceive you as fungible or as a commoditized offering, especially for early stage companies. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder a little bit about the growth and evolution of propel growth with your longest year-oldest company. What has it been like growing that and how has that changed over the years? So we started in that same electronic trading space. And after working with those three companies, we worked with a bunch of other companies that were all in the electronics trading space. And we did that for like 10 years. And it was interesting because of those two companies that I'd co-founded, I had established a bit of a name for myself in that space. And I was able to leverage that brand that I had built. And I had published some thought leadership back then, but then I started doing more thought leadership content as I moved into running my own marketing business. And the trade publications would accept my content. And as often as I would write something for them, they would publish it. And so that allowed me to bring inbound leads, that, and then just the referral network that I had built up because I had these relationships in that space that were like, you know, I'd been in the space for a long time. And so I didn't make an outbound sales call with propel growth for 10 years as all referral traffic and inbound from the content that I was publishing. So I got a little lazy with selling. You were a small company. It's not like we had to do a high volume of deals every year, you know, we were doing like maybe four, five, six deals a year because each deal was big enough that that's all we needed to do. Well, in 2018, I was getting kind of tired of working with these same companies. A lot of them were getting kind of long in the tooth with their technology. And so I felt a little bit as a marketer that I was putting lipstick on pigs and not really in the pig cosmetic business. And so the bovine cut, no, that's not bovine, oh well. But anyway, so I decided that I wanted to make a shift and I'd landed a client that was in the commercial real estate technology space and that was really interesting. It was a tight tangent. It was related enough that we could kind of leverage a lot of our knowledge, but it was all different players. And I didn't have a network, didn't have a list, didn't have any referral sources. So I had to go figure out another way to sell. Yeah, for you, you're starting fresh, like like usually people usually do exactly exactly. So I didn't have an email list, I didn't have a referral network, I didn't have connections. And I'm in Denver, which is not or Denver, excuse me, Fort Collins, which is not a bastion for commercial real estate tech companies. So if I'm going to go meet people, I'm going to have to get on an airplane, book a hotel, and pay for some expensive conference ticket in order to go really make connections in that space. Well, we're a two person firm. We can do one or two of those a year and that that eliminates our budget for that, right? I mean, you just got, you can't like overspend on that kind of stuff. So that wasn't going to work for me. I didn't have the list. I'm really opposed to buying a list. It's not effective anyway. And it's not very ethical to buy a list and start emailing it. And I really, really, really hate cold calling, like like with a passion. So cold calling wasn't going to be an option. At the same time that I was trying to figure that out, I was getting hit up all the time with these LinkedIn lead generation services saying, oh, we'll generate all these leads for you. And a client of mine in the financial services area was interested in kind of exploring it too. And I ended looking into those and I interviewed like, I think 12 of those companies over the course of a couple of months, talking to their founders, talking to the sales people, understanding what their process was. They all, not all of them, but some of them publish a lot of content about their methodology. And so I was like reading like crazy on their methodology. And trialing a little bit of it myself, then my client decided they wanted to hire one. So I picked a one in Denver that I thought was really, really perfect for my client in the way that the methodology they were using seemed like it was really going to work. So I'm watching them and coaching them and helping them with their messaging, because I really wanted them to succeed, plus at the same time I'm trying to do stuff myself, because they were charging like, I think it was two or three thousand dollars a month and I didn't have that money either, you know, so I had to do it myself. And what I found was that the methodology that everybody was pitching is the best practice didn't work very well, because they would, they would pitch it's like, okay, send a connection request that says, Hey, Rory, I noticed that we have a couple of connections in common. I'd like to connect with you. And you might connect with me or you might not, because a bot could have sent that, right? Sure. Yeah. That's not really broken my ears in any way. Exactly. You know, like, you know, or, you know, I noticed that you are in the whatever space, you know, and it's like, yeah, right. I am. Goodbye. Yeah. Like, try reading my profile and getting like 30 seconds of investment in my profile and you'll know more about me and you could actually personalize that connection request. So like the connection acceptance rate was like 20%, maybe 15%. And I'm targeting like a really tight market. So was my client, we were both targeting really tight niches. So if you only get 15% of these people to accept your connection request, you burn through your niche in like two months, you know, so that wasn't going to work for me. So I started changing it up and I got a 76% acceptance rate, which now that's doable. And then started sending one-on-one messages with people and, you know, experimented with the way that they do it, which turns out kind of spammy and started landing on this idea that I could just invite people to get a coin in over a meeting like a Zoom call and actually get acquainted with these contacts. So over the course of like six months, I've got 125 people to do calls with me. That's incredible. It was amazing. And so I built up my network that way and had a pipeline and have relationships with people that are now sending me leads and I've got my referral network back. And I did that in six months. That's incredible. So that's what, you know, like, I've actually kind of shifted now and we're teaching this because I'm so sick of the automated robotic approaches on LinkedIn. You know, it's like, there's a better way to do this. So we actually launched a masterclass just to teach that because it's like, stop screwing up this platform. It's working really well if you do it right. That's a good point. Like, are there more and more people using the bots and services now for lead generation? It seems like it. I'm getting a lot. But what would you find a new research? So I tried the bots. Like, I found a couple of them and experimented with them because like their value proposition sounded cool. But the fact is you can really screw it up really fast. And sometimes it's pretty transparent when the bots are coming through. One of my masterclass students actually sent me an example where CPAs were coming after her CPA firms wanted to do the accounting for her company and she's the CEO of her company. And she got approaches from two different CPA firms on the same day with exactly the same connection request. She accepted it. And then they start sending her messages on LinkedIn and it's exactly the same language. Six different messages from each of the firms over the course of a week or two, all the same. So they've basically two CPA firms have outsourced to the same company unknowingly and they're paying this company to create their own competition and make them look fungible. You know, I would be so pissed with one of those companies because they're paying thousands of dollars a month for it. And with my client, my client was finding that they were getting maybe two to three meetings a month from these services. So they think about it. That's a thousand dollars in meeting. Well, yeah, that's not good. And that same person is taking a call with your direct competitor the same day basically? So I've got a few more questions about that masterclass, but backing up before kind of in the decision like that you've had to tell me, let me try to ask this question. So I mean, you're going forward with your business, you're serving clients and then in the meantime, you're like, hey, there's this whole other area that kind of sucks. Someone should do something about it. And what made you want to raise your hand be like, okay, I'll do it. Let me be the shepherd for all you poor people on LinkedIn needing help. I'll be the person. So I'm not the only one. There's actually some other people that are doing a great job. Vivica Von Rosen in Boulder works for a company called Vin Grasso. And they're doing this too, which I really, really respect them. When I first did this, I was kind of wanting to like hold this like tight to my chest like, this is working so well, I don't want to tell anybody what I'm doing because then they might copy me and that might make it not work as well, right? But the more I'm getting confronted with the bots, the more I'm realizing that the people that are following these quote unquote best practices on LinkedIn, they're the ones that are going to break it. And so if I share what I'm doing, we can probably make the platform work better for everybody. And then COVID came along. And so my business slowed down because of COVID, because a lot of my clients were struggling, because their businesses were affected. And that actually created kind of an opportunity for my husband as my business partner. And he and I really kind of sat down and looked at what we could be doing to change that. And an opportunity came up to teach this to a company that was selling into the senior living space. So I created a course for them. And then we're looking at like, you know, this really has some potential. Maybe we should try to add this to our services offerings. You know, and so we then we got another opportunity to teach it to resellers of this company. And there were 300 resellers that we're all looking for ways to do a better job of generating leads. So this company sponsored it. And we did that in in December. And we basically built the master class for that group, but then realized that we needed to make it more broad, because it's not just this small group of resellers that can make use of this. So then we we literally launched the master class with like a couple of months of effort. And so that's what we've got going now. And it's it's going really well. It's fun. And I really enjoy working with the students in it to help them, you know, really, really ramp up sales without, you know, especially now during COVID when people can't do these in-person networking, you've got to find a way to fill your pipeline. So the timing for this is good, but it's going to be something that will persist after COVID is well, I guess over is a weird way to put it. But you know, once we can go back to in-person networking and conferences, this methodology will still work because it was working for me in 2018. And so I think that, you know, anybody who learns this for one thing, their cost of customer acquisition will go down because they don't have to go to an event in order to get acquainted with people. Yeah, I feel like there will be gosh, the like side effects of all of this and like the shift back to normal will be so long. And so I think there will be a lot of people leaning on digital more than they'd like to. And being a little bit nervous to be back in person. So it seems like this is a perfect time to introduce this to people. And it puts control back in the lap of the sales organization rather than waiting for an event or waiting for something that will generate a bunch of leads for you. You can actually go out as a one person. You know, it's like I'm running a business at the same time that I'm doing this. I couldn't like devote all my days to this. I was putting in about five hours a week to get those 125 calls. You know, so like a business owner or somebody who's wearing multiple hats can do this. It's not just for a business development rep, a BDR that's a full time just, you know, pounding the phones. Like a BDR can definitely do it and should be doing this. But it's not necessarily something that requires full time attention. So would you say that that LinkedIn strategy and some of that coaching that you share in the master class is that helpful for pretty much like any business? Any business where the deal size is large enough to justify hunters. You know, if the deal sizes are the nature of transactional business where you've got to make 125 sales a month, then this methodology is going to be too slow and too low volume. For me, you know, I make five to 10 deals a year and so 125 sales calls is way more than I need to fill my pipeline up. But for, so a company that's doing deal sizes that are 20, 30, 40,000 dollars per, you know, annual contract value, this is going to work for them. And if their deal sizes are significantly bigger than that and you're expecting a salesperson to bring in three or four deals a year, it's perfect for them. But you're looking at, you know, more of a complex sales process, a longer buying cycle and where you need to be more of a trusted advisor rather than just a transactional sale. That's important to note that in somebody to consider. Yeah, yeah. So like, you know, a company that's building a technology platform, I was just talking to somebody yesterday that is building this technology platform for hospitals. You know, the deal sizes are pretty big and so this totally makes sense for them. Okay. Okay. Candice, one thing I've noticed as you're talking, you have this eye to see opportunity. How did you develop that? Well, starvation is a great motivator or starvation of woodens. I like, I laughingly say that I have this some really bad habit that I like to feed. Like I eat like two, three times a day every day and so, you know, so I guess it's just, it's been more of a, I don't really like having a job. I'd rather own my own business and when you own your own business, you've got to kind of keep your eye out on the horizon and look for where the opportunities are. And then I've got my partner Phil who's also really good at that and sometimes he'll see an opportunity and it'll take him like a year to convince me. We've shortened that cycle. It used to be two years. Okay. But he's really good at, he's a creative and so he's really good at seeing things that I sometimes miss. That sounds like a good partnership. It is. You have more people on your team who support your big vision. Do they do the execution? So we work with contractors sometimes, but we're trying to minimize the amount of execution that we're doing and do more, more strategic work so that we don't have to be tied down to as much execution. So from a marketing perspective, we used to do a lot of execution work and had employees and we made the decision. I guess it was in 2015 that we don't really want to build that kind of a business and don't really want to have employees. So we use subs and I've got some contractors working on projects right now, but we tend to not really focus on doing execution and rather outsource that. We'll do execution for our business, but not for other people. Sure. What would you tell business owners who are trying to grow and they're feeling overwhelmed? Focus. You know, it's like you hear all of these marketing pundits talk about how you've got to do all these different things. You know, you got to be on LinkedIn, you got to be on Twitter, you got to be on Facebook, you got to blog, you got to publish, you got to do PR, you got to do webinars, you got to do podcasts and it's exhausting. It's better to do one or two things really well than to try to scatter yourself when you're a small company. And then the other thing is focusing on a niche because it's so much easier to do everything if you have a niche focus because then you can get to know your audience really well and make all of your messaging from your sales messaging to the product offering to your marketing messaging is very customer-centric and customer-driven. And by being in that narrow niche, it also creates this referral network. It's kind of, it becomes a natural way for people to find out about you. So honestly, even though it sounds scary to niche down, everything is easier when you niche down. I like that encouragement because I think it's needed because like you said, it's scary. I don't know what's on the other side of that. Yeah, because you feel like you're walking away from stuff, but remember that for everything you say yes to, you're saying no to something else. So if I say yes to doing stuff on five different platforms and targeting five different target audiences, I'm saying no to focus. I'm saying no to knowing my audience so well that I can really nail my messaging to that audience. And I'm saying no to being able to get really, really good at one platform like LinkedIn versus Twitter. You know, it's like I'm on Twitter, but I don't post to it very often because I'm getting really good at building an audience on LinkedIn. I'm not doing much on Facebook either. You won't find my business on Facebook because I don't have time to get good at all the platforms. Yeah, I mean, honestly, that's relieving for me to hear now too. And I think as growing businesses, you want to cast a white net and you want to reach those people, those people. So it's nice to hear like you don't have to do everything. Sometimes you need that encouragement, that reminder. Well, and if you think about it, you know, it's like how many deals can you get done? So if you think about casting a white net to 10,000 or 30,000 companies, well, that's not going to change the number of deals you need to do this year. And I find it's easier to target 300 companies to get my five or six deals rather than make those deals bigger, rather than targeting 5,000 companies and or 50,000 companies where I'm diluting my messaging. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that. So that's how I do it anyway. Candace, I have a few last questions for you and this has been super interesting and I'd love to pick your brain more on your marketing tactics, but we'll have to do that another time. I know that you've got so much experience there, but getting back to you. So knowing your business owner with a lot of energy vision, motivation, what fills your cup when you're like, I don't know, I don't know if I should do this anymore or do you have those days? You know, that's an interesting question because I was getting kind of frustrated when you try to lead somebody to water and they don't want to drink. And the masterclass in launching this LinkedIn masterclass has like totally lit my energy button so much and I'm having so much fun doing it. Like, I tend to try not not working Fridays and my goal is to have a 16 to 20 hour work week and really focus on, you know, making time available for other things. But since I started doing this, I'm working crazy hours, but it's because it's fun. And I've become really, really passionate about my work again, which has been kind of nice. And that's a really big surprise for me. I didn't expect that consequence of doing this new project. I like that. It's kind of like a unknown, I don't know, renewal of energy, like you said. Yeah, it's like a passion project. And who knew, you know, but I really like to teach I always have and so I think that's part of it too. Yeah, I can tell that from from everything that you've shared. Do you have any last questions for you? What are you most proud of with everything that you've accomplished? I'm most proud of having a really great marriage. Oh, that's probably not what you expected. I think that's the most real though, like how I mean, especially because you're your partners in life and love and business, like you have to make that work. So something more about that. Well, so Phil and I are married eight years now, eight and a half. And we started out working, well, we started out in church serving together. And then I hired him as a freelancer, and then I hired him full time. And then I executed my one time employee retention strategy. And we got married. So we can't quit. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you know, I mean, I'm looking at his picture right now. He he's a creative and one of the things that we've learned and one of the other drivers for our shift in our business model to create more passive income is to free him up because he's really kind of a jack of all trades. He can he can pretty much accomplish anything I ask him to do. But that's not his joy. His joy is in creating music. And so one of our big focuses this year is freeing up a lot of his time so he can go create music. That's fantastic. What does he play? He's a keyboardist and an arranger and producer. And so he's working actually is doing this some class right now that the music district put on for sync licensing and is working on with a team to put together some music. And so sync licensing is when you sell music that companies are like like for TV shows or commercials like there's always the backing music and stuff. So that's what he's working on right now. And he's having a blast with it and it's fun to see his joy. And that makes even more things worthwhile. So yeah, like figuring out how to nurture that in somebody even though that's not my passion, I need to nurture it for him and find ways that we can build a business that allows that. So my mentor is Carlos Hidalgo and he's got a company. He's just started a business called Life Design. And he built he wrote a book recently called The UnAmerican Dream, which I highly recommend reading because it's like this idea. He was like this fast-paced CEO built up a four million dollar marketing agency and then just like left it all behind and got into business with his wife. They're having a blast. They're living in an RV now and running their business from a big fifth wheel and traveling and they're just like their whole focus is helping people to design a design a business that fits a lifestyle instead of trying to go after the quote-unquote American dream of this whole this whole idea of like hustle and hustle exactly exactly I'm really kind of becoming very opposed to using that word in business. Yeah, I think a lot of people think it's honorable to be exhausted. Yeah, and it's not. It's a good way to shorten your lifespan and mess up your marriage and mess up your relationship with your kids. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, last question for you. What's your next milestone in life or business? Oh gosh, so as I say this about hustle, you're going to cross out. So, we're building this masterclass out and so my goal right now is to finish. I mean the course is finished and so now I'm just trying to build a pipeline of people to push into that. And we have developed a prototype for a new product that creates a really cool environment for interactive content. So, you know, when you write a white paper and you put it in a PDF and you send it to somebody and they try to look at it on their phone and you know, it's like you're growing things and expanding and shrinking and moving around. It's just a nightmare to try to do content like that. But also for the marketer, we don't know whether the content is actually working. We know that somebody signed a form to get the content but we don't know whether people actually read the content or got value out of the content. So, we've got a product that we're getting ready to launch that solves some of these major problems and gives sales really good insight about a lead so that when somebody reads the white paper, you don't call them up and say, hey, I noticed you downloaded my white paper. You want to buy something. There's conversation starters based on the activity that the person is doing inside the asset. So, our goal right now is that we want to launch that, which will also be another passive income stream for us. It's a product-enabled service that we're going to be offering and we will hire for that, isn't that hilarious? Like, I mean, we're going to go full circle, but this is something that we want to build up and then sell. And so, we're like super lit about that too, but we're trying to just kind of shift our focus away from consulting services so that we can make that happen. That is awesome. I know. It's like everything I just said, just throw it away, you know. Delete that section of the podcast. But it's all about passive income for us right now. That's kind of my mantra is, how do we create more passive income? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think that's the strategy a lot of people want to try to tackle. Well, Candace, thank you so much for your time. This has been awesome. I'm still curious on a ton of more things, but we'll I will respect your time. So, thank you for joining us. Any last things that you'd like to share with our audience or ways that people can connect with you? Oh, so if you're interested in figuring out what we did with LinkedIn, there's a webinar, like a one hour webinar that's free on our site. You can go to learning.propellgrowth.com to find that webinar and if you register for that, you'll get some tips from me that are free. It's just an email series that each email has a tip on how to use LinkedIn. And then you can also just reply to that email to get a hold of me or you can reach me at Candace with a Y, Candace C-A-N-D-Y-C-E at propelgrowth.com. Awesome. Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Locoh experience podcast. This is Kurt Baer, founder of the Locoh think tank and host of the Locoh experience. And I'm here with Rory Shar, Locoh business developer and host of the Locoh 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 where you listen to podcasts to get new episodes as they are released. Curious about Locoh? You can learn more about us at Locohthinktank.com where you'll find more information about our chapters, business resources, and events for business owners and key leaders. 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 Locoh experience podcast with me, Kurt. And with me, Rory, for Bite Size Business Lessons in the Locoh shorts. Bye!