Narrator: Welcome to the Marketing on the Move podcast, hosted by The Breezy Company, your go-to resource to master your marketing while juggling all of the demands of being a business owner. We understand that your time is a limited resource and marketing might be the last thing on your priority list right now. Our mission is to provide you with tangible insights and actionable tactics into the latest marketing trends, best practices, and strategies that you can implement no matter how busy you are. Each episode is designed to offer practical advice on leveraging your unique business strengths and efficiently managing your marketing strategy. Whether you’re tuning in during your morning commute, between meetings, or while on the run, Marketing on the Move is here to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need to excel in marketing, even when your schedule is packed. Join us for a journey into making the most of your marketing efforts, no matter how busy you are.
Welcome to the Marketing on the Move podcast, hosted by The Breezy Company, your go-to resource to master your marketing while juggling all of the demands of being a business owner. We understand that your time is a limited resource and marketing might be the last thing on your priority list right now. Our mission is to provide you with tangible insights and actionable tactics into the latest marketing trends, best practices, and strategies that you can implement no matter how busy you are. Each episode is designed to offer practical advice on leveraging your unique business strengths and efficiently managing your marketing strategy. Whether you’re tuning in during your morning commute, between meetings, or while on the run, Marketing on the Move is here to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need to excel in marketing, even when your schedule is packed.
Join us for a journey into making the most of your marketing efforts, no matter how busy you are. Hey, welcome to the Marketing on the Move podcast by The Breezy Company. It’s your go-to podcast for all you business people out there that want to be doing marketing, that are busy doing the actual work of your business. And so we want to show you a little bit of how other people are currently running businesses, but also finding time to do really smart marketing tactics. And then give you a little bit of our own recommendations.
So with us, as usual, is our CTO, Steve Soto. Good to be here. Thanks. And I’m Josh Webb. I’m a co-founder and chief marketing officer.
And then today, we have a friend to both me and Steve, but we made the mistake of giving this guy our personal numbers. And now, so we chat at like two in the morning or something when we have ideas. And some of them have been ridiculous. But this is Robert McMillan. And I’ll introduce you a little bit before I hand it over to you.
He’s a seasoned technology innovator with 25 plus years of experience building enterprise business systems. He has extensive track record across state agencies and the Department of Defense and Fortune 100 companies. He’s a three-time startup entrepreneur, a 20-year owner of a successful management IT consulting firm, guided businesses through complex technical challenges and organizational growth. And then he’s currently working on something that I’ve also worked with him as well. I believe Steve is as well, Camping Tools, which is really a hobby-based social platform with online trip journaling and trip planning and social features.
It’s something that me and my wife love. And so I’ll hand it over to you, Robert. How are you doing? I’m doing great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I’ve done a couple of things.
Mostly made other people successful, but yeah. You tried hard. You did good. Give it a hundred percent. Now it’s your turn.
Well, that’s the plan, but you know, everybody has a plan until you get hit in the mouth. So yeah, I’m giving it a shot. I heard that one before. Yeah. So tell us a little bit.
I know this is a lot about you professionally, but just tell us a little bit about you personally and what’s going on. Yeah. I mean, I love the outside, love the outdoors. I would much rather be there than behind a desk. And when COVID hit, it was like everybody had to get out.
We were on the front edge of that wave when we evacuated because we didn’t want to be locked in. So I threw the kids in the RV. I said, Hey, we’re going out West. It’s going to be a great trip. And it was on that trip where I really made the decision to start camping tools.
And the main reason was because A, I like being outside. B, I have made a lot of other people successful and now I wanted it to be my turn. And just throwing all of that with all of my years of knowledge and experience and you know, lessons learned through blood, sweat and tears and trying to make a go of it. And it is never easy. Always tell people it’s like a roller coaster, you know, it’s, it’s exciting highs and terrifying lows.
And if you don’t have a strong stomach, don’t do it. You know, what’s funny is that it doesn’t seem to matter exactly how much experience you have either. It always throws a problem that you’ve never quite faced before. And then you’re like, Oh, I don’t know anything anymore. Yeah.
And I’ve got young guys. I try to mentor, you know, anybody that’ll listen to me, but I’ve got young guys that I’m mentoring and they’re talking about imposter syndrome, you know, and they’re like, I got a promotion. I don’t know what to do. You know, it’s like, you know, I don’t, I don’t, I’m not qualified for this. Let me tell you what, when you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to create something and there’s no guide, everybody has, you know, a guidebook or, you know, I can tell you exactly how to do it.
None of that works in reality for your specific situation. You really have to navigate. And there’s a term called muddling through. You learn a lot about what you know, what you don’t know. And you learn about your, your perseverance level.
And, you know, it’s, it is such an adventure. And I’m, like I said, a roller coaster, you know, and it’s, it’s, it’s super exciting highs and terrifying lows. I know that you definitely have gotten out with your family because every single time I text you or I call you, you’ll be like, I’m in Montana. I can barely hear you. You’re, you’re like, I’m in Canada.
I’m at, like, there’s, it’s, it’s always a different spot. So, so, yeah, so that I think kind of segueing into that part of the, the conversation. One thing I was curious about, especially because it’s, it’s kind of the same similar journey that I’ve on is that, okay, you’ve had all these years as a, as a services consultant, right? Where you’re essentially trading time for money and for expertise and things like that. But now you’re building a product that really depends on, on you having to fund something that then users are going to use. It doesn’t really require any specific time, you know, during it’s not trading time for dollars.
How have you navigated the difference there? Like, how, how do you make both successful? And I know you’re still working on the product, right? So it’s like, that’s probably a never ending, never ending story there. But yeah, you know, your roadmap is probably two years long and you have enough cash to pay people for about two weeks. And so, I’ll roll it back for a second, give you another peek under the covers for, you know, who I am. Like I’ve done some volunteer stuff over my years. I helped a guy set up a bike ride, you know, for 600 bicyclists on a century ride.
And I was the, you know, the co-leader of that. And we had a group, they were volunteers and you have to try to get everybody to perform as if they were, you know, total A players, top tier and deliver without paying them anything and somehow find some level of motivation for them along the way. And so that bike experience taught me a lot about leadership and creating the vision that people will buy into. And when you’re in, when you’re creating a new product, you know, you’re establishing a vision. It’s like, we’re so far off from, you know, what we think this thing can be.
And so the real hard part is motivating the people, getting everybody to row in the same direction. And, you know, scouting was another experience. They’re all volunteer leaders in there and getting people to in many hands, make light work. And when I was building the software for customers, you know, those are paid gigs, you know, it’s, you have the resources and supposedly you have all the resources that you need and, you know, you can build the product to spec and everybody’s happy. Building a product, especially as an entrepreneur and trying to fund it yourself is extremely difficult because you have to make decisions every day and, and the VCs love to call, you know, what’s your pivot? No, no.
What’s your revenue pivot? What’s your, you know, market focus pivot? You know, it’s like, you’re always pivoting, you know, you feel like a problem load trotter or something, but yeah, it’s, it is constantly shifting sands, getting everybody to row in the same direction for most of the time equity. And, you know, everybody knows that maybe one day we’ll get a payday. Maybe, maybe we will, maybe we won’t, we don’t know, but. So it has to do a lot with you casting the vision to those people so that they want to stay around as, as much, maybe not as much as you do, but better than if they just have a job. Totally.
Yeah. Yeah. Especially when they do have a job, you know, it’s like, and they’re giving you extra time, the time that they don’t want to give up. And at least when they don’t have a job, they’re hungry for something. But yeah, it’s, there’s, it takes a great deal of leadership.
I always look at, you know, John Maxwell leadership books because he’s, there’s so much good stuff out there. And it’s all true. Like there’s 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. If you don’t exercise every single one of those, when you’re creating a startup, I don’t know how you’d be successful. Yeah.
It seems like the muscle to exercise has less to do with skill and has more to do with like working on your gut so that, you know, so you’re making things like a decision with integrity, or you’re making things like, you know, sticking to the tenants of your brand, like those become second nature. So that, you know, like it’s, I talked to a lot of people that they, when they’re working on startup, they can’t afford to necessarily hire somebody to make their website or hire somebody to their social. And so they’re like learning, okay, I’m going to learn everything that has to do with SEO, or I’m going to learn everything that has to do. And I’m just like, that’s not a good use of your time. Like, say you do build all those things, you still got to build a company.
And that’s the hardest part. Yeah, that’s a great point. Because, you know, like I said, there are terrifying lows. Well, what’s terrifying is you get out there on the edge of these things. And all right, I got 25 years of experience.
I’ve done a lot of stuff. I’ve been a lot of different places. It terrifies me every day when I get to the boundary of something and I don’t know the answer. And you have to rely on people that are, and maybe it was John Maxwell, I don’t know, but he said, if I can find anybody that’s going to do an 80% as good as I can, I’m going to allocate that task. And I’m not going to complain about 20%.
I’m going to hand it off and we’re going to move forward. And you’ve, man, you’ve got to do that as an entrepreneur. Matter of fact, VCs in the conversations today out in San Francisco, if you don’t have co-founders, you’re not getting funded because they know you can’t do it by yourself. And the sooner you come to that realization, the better. So you better get on LinkedIn and start finding some good resources.
I mean, we’ve definitely seen that from our standpoint. I mean, I’ve had a business where I was a hundred percent owner and they do, it is less complicated when you do that sometimes, but everything is riding on you. And you self-cap yourself. Yes, you do. We’re all good with certain things and we’re better at certain things than others, but sometimes you need those healthy tensions that it’s like, this person doesn’t think like me and they’re challenging something that I thought I knew.
And, you know, and not just, I should consider it. It’s just, it’s like, I need to put enough people around me. So I don’t start believing my, my own crap all the time and then build something for myself. Yeah. And Robert, you’ve built a team, you’ve got technical people, you’ve got marketing people, salespeople.
So, and you, of course, you’re still the biggest salesperson out there for it. What, what, you know, what are the challenges of getting people to listen to you? Really understanding where they are, understanding what their needs are, what they want to achieve. When you go to RV shows, everybody’s there. They’re either have an RV, a fairly new, or they’re about to buy an RV and they’re thinking about retirement, retirement, leisure, you know, it’s like they have a specific vision. So you had better fit squarely in their vision of where they didn’t want to go and solve their problems or you’re going to have a hard time finding a market.
And why do, why do the end users come to you? What draws them to camping tools? Well, I, I like to think that we give an alternative to some of the social out there. We’re very, very focused with our message and our purpose. So while the camping industry is a really big industry, this, we’ve got it broken down into like 20 different verticals. The common thread is camping and outdoors. And probably anybody that likes overlanding, you know, would have fun reading an article about primitive camping and vice versa.
And, you know, there’s, there are things to be learned and boundaries to be explored in those communities. And, but that the common thread of the camping thing is, is what kind of makes us unique. Another big thing is that we’re not algorithm-based. People are a little bit frustrated or I don’t want to say disgruntled, but when you go to trade shows and you talk to a thousand people and you bring up the name of certain social sites, they’re like, Oh, I hate that. And it’s like, okay, well, why do you use it? It’s like, well, there’s nothing else.
So, you know, those are, those are a couple of things that we do and do it differently. So if you say you’re not algorithm-based, that means you’re connection-based. You have to, you build your own network of people and subjects and you get to choose what you see and you kind of get, would you say you get the open faucet of all the content or everything? Because with algorithms, they’re protecting you all the time, right? That, Oh, you don’t want to see this, or, you know, this person isn’t important. And you, you’re more what? Egalitarian? Yeah. Yeah.
And, and that’s a good way to look is that we don’t hide anything from anyone. If they want to discover and find it and people have made it available or open to the community. First of all, when a user creates an account on our platform, everything is private by definition. Nothing is shared, nothing is available. Whatever’s in your account is yours and yours alone.
You can choose to open it up if you want to, you might set up a group for your family and, and let some stuff out. Anything that someone has made open to the group or the community, then that’s searchable. So, you know, we’re not hiding anything in that regard. And this may be a good, good segue to the next question I had, but I know that in our case, that, you know, we weren’t necessarily looking for a big community to share all of our camping stuff with. What it really is is that, you know, we have my wife’s mother and we have, you know, aunts and uncles and stuff like that that we do want to share that with.
And we don’t want to have to post that on Instagram or Facebook or something like that, just to let people know, you know, we don’t want them to know that we’re in these certain mountains camping or that we’re not at our house or something. And so it is nice to be able to have a private community like that. And then also know that if there happens to be a group or something like that, that I connect with, you know, like I like motorcycles or whatever it is that I do, it’s nice to be able to know that I have those features. So, you know, I’ve really, I’ve really liked the app for things like that and like for planning and my wife loves to make lists and we would constantly be using, she uses like Microsoft and I use like Todoist and we have all these different things and we don’t like to share, you know, and it’s nice to be able to say, hey, this is the one thing that’s meant for our camping trip. It’s all there.
So we were talking, you were talking about security a little bit. We’re talking about privacy. I think, and this is kind of a question for both you guys. I know both of you have worked in government agencies and you’ve done lots of things that require severe privacy. When you’re doing something, not just like camping tools, but maybe even like the clients you have for your consultancy, how do you kind of balance, you know, wanting to take somebody and help them from an innovation standpoint and say, hey, this is what we’re going to go and we’re going to try this feature or we’re going to add this while overcoming their, you know, how scared they are about security and about hacking and about like all those things.
How do you balance that? Steve, you want to go or you want me to go? Yeah, I’ll go first. I mean, from an architectural point of view, the base thing is start with tools that are inherently secure. If that’s your building blocks, if you’re using encrypted databases, if you’re using SSL, if you’re using things that have authentication tokens and things like that, whatever you build on top of it, if you expose something, that would then be because of bad design, not because of the inherent security of the tools you’re using. Now, if you’re using, you know, the AI of the month club and you’re sending stuff to the AI and that AI doesn’t have all of its security locked down, then you’ve got an exposure. So it’s always best to start with secure tools and then worry about what your design exposes.
Yeah, what’s really funny is that when I tend to get resistance about that, and I don’t know necessarily from a technology point of view because that tends to go over my head, but a lot of times I’ll think about it from a user experience point of view and I’ll say like, hey, this is a barrier here or you’re not solving this. This whole thing can be automated and doesn’t need to be something the user has to deal with. What I’ll get a lot of times is that, well, we have to keep internal spreadsheets on everybody’s computer so that people don’t hack. And I was like, do you understand that that is way easier to hack? Yeah, I think the cloud, you know, is a blessing and a curse like most advanced technologies. You know, you can, of course, architecture and security has to be, like Steve said, it has to be designed in from the get-go.
And I’m a big believer in layers of security. So you start in the core as your most secure assets. And then as you identify your data and what level of protection that you need, you put the appropriate level of security around each of those. And when you’re talking about rolling out new features in that context, the cloud makes it easy because you can push a live update and nobody will know. I mean, you can have thousands of users on there and all they know is their screen refreshed and they have the new feature.
So you can just as quickly roll that back. So for people that are looking for new features and new capabilities and they’re fearful of, you know, data breaches and hacks and that kind of stuff, I would say tiptoe. You know, go ahead and lock your core down and get the capabilities that you need for your customers. But then as you want to expand and, you know, to your perspective, maybe like do you want to take a little risk and create this thing that could be exposed, but we’re not quite sure. You design it the best you can.
You implement the security the best that you can for that small piece and then you release that small piece. In other terms, people call that agile, where you’re releasing parts and pieces and testing it and making modifications, enhancements, evolutions over time. But I think when you limit the risk, you recognize the risk and you communicate it to the customer and then you acknowledge the risk and plan for the risk and monitor the risk. Then when you release it, you’re in control. You’re minimally exposed and you can roll it back very quickly.
What’s funny is how many organizations that I’ve worked with that will approach what you just said that, you know, agile methodology like from a to a software standpoint. In our cases, we can build pieces of software, but we primarily are maintaining websites, right, when it comes to the technology side. But we have chosen to look at it from more of an agile point of view as well, where it’s like instead of building, you know, kind of like guessing how much it’s going to cost, we’ll kind of just say, hey, we’re going to keep making it better over time. We’re going to watch the behavior and see how people actually use something and then we’re going to change it over time. And it ends up being a lot more effective than paying for something like it’s a big brochure or something and then just leaving it out there.
So I totally see what you’re saying from an application standpoint. And I think that if people would start looking at that more like then we’re going to build it and wait for people to come or, you know, wait for something wrong to happen, then we’ll fix it. You know, they’ll stop facing those as much as, you know, as they might be scared to. I think, you know, it’s important and an important concept, not only from the software creation side, but from the change management side. Because if you have the conversations with the users and stakeholders along the way and you say, hey, we’re planning this little thing.
We want your feedback. Hey, we’ve already got this thing out there. Go interact with it. Use it. Tell me what you think.
Okay. So now they’re using it. They don’t even know it really, but they’re part of the test group and they’re giving you real time user feedback on your deliverables, kind of like, you know, in a small test market. And when you do go live now, all of a sudden they’re your champions because they were part of the process. Have you all heard that? I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard those, but it’s the thing that Mark Zuckerberg says that their internal philosophy is over at Meta, where it’s just like, you know, break things quickly.
So I guess they give them like a portion that’s like only distributed to the certain users and they give them some freedom to be able to just try things. And if it like horribly underperforms, they get rid of it. Or if it like breaks the whole thing, they don’t freak out. I don’t know if that’s real. I mean, it may be public relations, but.
It’s 100% real. And that’s why sometimes you hear, you know, Google went down for the day because, you know, they have that power and flexibility, but there’s also the baked in discipline in the culture that prevents those bad things from happening. But it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. You know, you just have to plan for it. Yeah.
Well, what’s what’s interesting about all of that, and I’ll kind of like combine this with with something I’ve read a while ago, which is a company that had a really the way Amazon kind of does their return policy, right, or or their customer service policy, where it’s just they have an incredibly large amount of power to return something or give a full refund or send somebody a new thing. And the reason they do that is because it’s cheaper to make the person happy than to sit there and deal with every single thing that comes in. Is this worth it? Yeah. And so it’s kind of what’s similar about that from what you’re talking about with with with producing those pieces is that are putting out any kind of feature is that there’s just a lot of autonomy and in that you surround yourself with really smart people, you lead them in what the right goal is, and then you kind of let them lose. You don’t sit there and hold control over the whole thing.
But if you don’t set up the right format to do that in, then again, it can screw you up. So set up the right format and then it succeeds. You know, it becomes a lot easier to accomplish your vision. Yeah. And you’ve really got to not only coach people, but explain to people that when that type things happen, when that type of thing happens, it’s a good thing.
Like when you fail and you break something, most people are conditioned to thinking that breaking is bad. You know, it’s like be productive is good, you know, and you really have to explain because it’s not a natural thing. I haven’t found. And once you set that in the culture and you tell people, look, I want you to try this thing, I want you to try AI. I want you to.
Yeah, it’s going to be wrong, but get out there and learn it faster and better than anybody else, because it will matter. And and that philosophy, I think, is what moves the ball forward faster and leads to a more positive product over time. Yeah, I think that one thing that that I’ve learned as I mean, as being a creative director for a long time, but then also in only a couple of businesses, is that I have to stop caring if people will think my idea works, because I think there’s something initially in people that it’s like when you tell them, they’re like, not only do I not understand, but I don’t think it’s going to work. And so I always kind of remind myself that I thought YouTube was stupid when it first came out. I was like, who’s going to upload a video to the Internet? You know, it’s like, it’s like, I, so I try to remember, like, when somebody tells me an idea, I go, okay, well, I’ve a lot of things that have worked, I never thought were going to work.
And then I try to remind myself that to, you know, kind of full circle when it comes back to the imposter syndrome. It’s the same kind of things like so when I put out, it keeps me from being scared to share ideas, because I’m not really super concerned what people think about me. And I don’t have to present them a totally polished idea, even though they’re not going to fully understand what it is. It does keep people keep it from that. You know, but I want, I want to have that this, this segue to this, this next conversation, which, you know, you almost did a really good segue before, but I didn’t go with it.
But it’s, it’s, it’s really talking about the change management. So when, you know, when breezy is hired by a company, we’re half the time, we’re talking about their messaging, or we’re talking about how they communicate, you know, what their social avenues are like, how they’re going to do interviews, I mean, there’s stuff that requires something of them. But But we make it as, as, as simple and painless as possible. But it always requires them to change a little bit of the way they do things because because of the way we recommend things. The success on it of it.
I mean, people that we see that do so well with it. It’s because they were able to adapt, and they were able to get the team on board. And they were and the people that we see not succeed as it has more to do with their inability to be able to change that it does with the amount of time they had. How do you approach that in your role and the people that hire you? Yeah, I was afraid you’re going to ask how do I approach that with the customer? Because sometimes customers will not change. And it’s unfortunate.
But again, I look to the leadership skills, the coaching skills, when you see something, say something. If you see somebody having a hard time, you know, embracing that, then you just call it out. And you say, it’s okay. And this is what I see. And, you know, this is how we’re going to move forward and coach them through that situation.
And the situation being groupthink is always better than solo think. And I think as an entrepreneur, again, going back to having to hire outside talent and stuff, you have to be self-aware enough to be comfortable that as smart as I am, or as far as I think I am, there are other people out there with good ideas, and that have a lot better skills than I have. And that goes to the groupthink. So when the group comes up with a set of actions that the group, you know, and the assumption here is they’re all working for your benefit. You know, they’re not trying to sabotage you.
But assuming everyone there on your behalf, you have to assume that whatever they come up with is better than what you would have come up by yourself. So go ahead and try that. And if it’s new to you, you know, have your opinion, but try it and see how it works out. And then do it again and see how it works out and do it again and see how it works out. And the law of averages will show you groupthink always trumps solo think.
Okay, so you told me not to ask you about how you handle that with a customer. But that just reminded me that I should ask you how you handle that with a customer. When you launch a piece of software, if there is no adoption, then the software is a waste of money. And I can tell you, and I can tell you before the project officially starts, whether that’s going to happen or not. It doesn’t mean you won’t take it.
Hey, you can only, you can only warn them, you know, you can fix the transmission, but you can’t change the way they drive. That’s the kind of thing that is unfortunate, but it’s more frequent than you think. You have these conversations, just like I’m having right now, and I’ll go back to change management. So change sidebar for a second. There’s a great book, if you’ve never read it, it’s called The Social Life of Information.
It talks about people, in the plural, their ability to adapt to change. And it takes a certain amount of time to have a revolution, to go from one paradigm to a new paradigm. And you can squeeze that and force it a little bit, but for the most part, it’s going to happen at its natural pace. And so you need to understand what is the natural pace for the organization that you’re consulting to. What is their ability to change? What is their leadership’s ability to change? Have they implemented change in the past? And, you know, how long did that take? Why did it take a long time? Where did it fail? To be able to ask all of those questions, and then you can gauge through experience over time, because you’ve seen it time and again, that, okay, this organization looks kind of like this, and it fits into this box.
It’s going to take them about this long, and I need about this much coaching to make it work. And then if all of that goes right and well, and the product is good, then you may be looking at success. Yeah, I’ve even had cases, or I’ve had a lot of cases, where I’ve had a lot of people where we’ve had to do internal campaigns just to try to mitigate the cynicism that employees have. Right? So they’re already like, well, that’s never worked, and the bosses don’t know anything. And I mean, and there are some people that are like, hey, if they’re like that, we’re going to fire them.
But there are some industries that are like, well, if we fired all of them, that’d be like 80% of our people. But you do have to get past the like, okay, if most people’s first response to this new technology, or this new way of doing things is going to be, well, you know, they always try something new, and it never works, and blah, blah, blah. It’s like, how am I going to encourage them out of that? And it seems like not a big thing, except for when you start to look at the ROI of how much did it cost for us to do this? If this worked, how much money would it save? All this gossip. So it’s worth having my company actually be behind us improving. There’s a story, it’s called the fishbowl effect.
But when you put people in the fishbowl, so that everybody in the organization can see their behavior, then they tend to have a little bit of a different outcome than if they’re able to operate in isolation. Because when that person is the person you’re talking about, oh, they tried that before, it’s never going to work, it’s going to blow up. When that person is in the fishbowl, you get a different outcome. And it may lead, probably you’ve had customers or or know people like this, but it may lead to a situation where that person, the first thing I’m going to do is try to get that person on my team. Okay, he’s the biggest naysayer.
He’s the one that is fearless enough to make that statement in the presence of management. Therefore, he has enough tenure, seniority, a blood relation to the CEO, whatever the situation is, he’s got some kind of leverage that he thinks he has in that organization, and he’s exercising it in front of you to show who’s the boss, right? So I’m going to bring that person on and I’m going to make him my strongest advocate, or I’m going to figure out a way to get rid of him. And if that means fire him, that has happened before. And things change quickly after that. But those are two, you know, kind of extreme cases.
But sometimes you’re winning over individuals, sometimes you’re winning over management. But yeah, the top management’s got to buy into it, support it and champion it or it’s not going to happen. But then there are the individuals that can sabotage you and go subversive and cut you off at your knees. And you just have to be aware and know how to mitigate those kinds of things. Yeah, I have at a certain point, I mean, you have to take personal responsibility if something doesn’t work, but there are so many different factors.
Like, you know, is it a good organization? Are they leading their organization well? You know, and sometimes they’re not. And that’s what you have anything to say on that, Steve? I like Robert’s idea of getting the most negative person on the team and getting it to be like somewhat their idea that you’re promoting. That tends to like, you know, Robert pointed out, they have a little bit of influence. They’re certainly comfortable enough to say negative things about the project. If you can win them over to make the project partially their idea, they become a more positive force than just a negative force.
And I think that’s very powerful. I’m a big fix it before you throw it out person. Yeah. And, you know, we are talking about humans. Yeah.
Especially when it comes to relationships. I’m the same way. Yeah. So I like that idea. And then there’s always chicken biscuits.
What’s that? Oh, well, when you have meetings, you bring chicken biscuits and you start making friends. Yeah, there you go. I’m on a fast right now because I’m trying to lose weight really quickly and I’m constantly hangry. And so. Well, I will tell you, my wife’s my my wife used to make brownies for me to take to the office.
And it got to the point where people would go, it’s been a few weeks since you brought brownies in. And it’s like, you know, you’ve got everyone to get everyone’s attention when they’re like they’re following how long it is. You know, it’s like we’re Steve. We’re Steve. Yeah.
For some reason, around 11 o’clock, I was super hungry. All this all this makes a whole lot of sense. You know, you know, if we could kind of just just end this with, you know, if you were talking to another person who is, you know, thinking about starting something similar to you or maybe has been in the industry for a long time, but they’re thinking about starting something new or approaching opportunity, you know, what would you tell if they’re talking about growing a business? And this is just one slice, one perspective, you know, of the 360 degree prism that you’re going to look for and see a different perspective from every single one of this. So that’s just my way of saying there is so much to know and learn. Don’t listen to this one piece that I’m giving you as the only thing you need to know.
So this is this. But this is an important thing. When you’re when you’re building a company and you’re building a team, I mentioned about being self-aware with your your own personal strengths and weaknesses, capabilities, limitations. List out the different parts of the business, finance, marketing, sales, I.T., security, you know, all the major PR, all of the major things and figure out how you would rate yourself as an individual and think about, would I hire myself to do that job? And you very quickly figure out where you fit on the scale of one to ten. And if you aren’t a nine or a ten in one of those areas, you need to find somebody that’s better than you are at it.
And start with your close circle of friends and your network of professionals and seek advisors and advice to figure out who can be a good fit for both your your product, your culture, your vision, but also their skills. And when they bring those skills to the table, listen to them, let them do their job. If they, you know, to your earlier point, you know, you need that positive tension in there to grow. When you get out and exercise and lift weight, that’s a little beyond your limit. You’re going to have some muscle fatigue and it’s going to be a little sore and it’s going to hurt a little bit.
It’s not going to be pleasant. Same thing’s true when you grow in a team and learning to trust other people. And I think that’s a big part of it is when you have new people coming in and you haven’t really worked with them before, there’s a lot of trust. And what you really want is a high grade product and happy customers. And you hope that everybody that you bring to the table wants it more than you do, which is not always the case.
But, you know, it’s a reality. I mean, it’s you got to have that strong leadership, the vision, but you got to have the right people on the on the bus. Yeah, absolutely. So if somebody wants to look up the things that you’re part of, where should they go? Google Robert McMillan camping dot tools. You’ll see a bunch of articles and stuff.
But our website is www.camping.tools. There is no dot com. And you’ll see the website. You know, you can download the app. It’s a growing community.
We’ve got about 4000 users now. We’re having a big blowout this summer in terms of marketing and advertising to get new users on the platform and expand some capabilities. If you’re interested in me personally, you can find me on LinkedIn, Robert McMillan. And yeah, just do a search on camping tools in there as well. I guess you’ll you’ll probably Awesome.
Thank you so much for being here. And so for everybody listening, I do want to point you to a tool that we have that’s new. If you made it this far, that you can go to reputationpillars.com. It’s a really fantastic way to build a powerful online reputation. And there are a lot of tools that can help you there as well.
And you can also learn more about us and get some more insights at the breezy company.co. Well, thank you so much for listening to the marketing on the move podcast. And subscribe to us if you haven’t before listen to us on your on your favorite podcast app. And we’ll see you next time. Thanks.
