Tag: #entrepreneurship

The Basics of Business & Entrepreneurship with Paul Rush

May 14, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 91 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Entrepreneur Paul Rush, about the basics of business and entrepreneurship!

Sections

Introduction
Substantial: Paul Rush’s Product Development Company
Products that Substantial has Worked On
How Old is Substantial?
The Two Philosophies of Entrepreneurship
Other Companies Paul Rush Has Started
The Very Beginning
Learning Playground: Computers in the 90’s
Connecting With People Online: In the Beginning
More Than Just Wires Connecting People
Nurturing Talent at An Early Age
Opportunities For Innovation in Education
You Can Lead a Horse to Innovation but You Can’t Make Him Do It
The Concepts of Work and Leisure
Deciding on A College Based on Interests
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

The Basics of Business & Entrepreneurship with Paul Rush

Introduction To Paul Rush

Paul Parisi: Well today I’d like to welcome Paul Rush from Substantial.

Now Paul, you’re in Seattle today and is one of your offices there or is that where you normally are?

Paul Rush: Yeah, we’re headquartered here but I go back and forth between here and San Francisco.

Substantial: Paul Rush’s Product Development Company

Paul Parisi: And what is Substantial?

Paul Rush: Substantial is a product development company so we help clients get new software products into the market and primarily we provide software development design services. But often we go as far as helping clients figure out what they want to build and what kind of audience they want to address. So, it’s kind of like a startup team in a box.

Paul Parisi: Oh cool! So, do you have specific technologies that you sort of… If I’m looking for a job, a shop? Or is it not really a shop kind of thing? Who is your typical client? What do they look like? Are they entrepreneurs or are they companies already in the market and they just want somebody reliable?

Paul Rush: Yeah, it’s a pretty broad range. So, we work with everybody from Fortune 500 companies – Large companies that are getting a new product or service into market. We actually do a lot of work in the education foundation space. So, helping people build learning platforms and then probably the bulk of our work, about 50 percent or so, is in the startup space and that could be from anything from a very early stage company that doesn’t have a product in market yet. We often help them figure out how to do product development and implement best practices in their organization. So, standing up DEV team and DEV process as well as design.

And then we work sometimes for larger Series B or Series C startups that either have something new that they’re putting into market or need help with an existing product.

Paul Parisi: Do you have a specific technology bend or are you agnostic? How does that work?

Paul Rush: We are fairly agnostic. We have technologies that we like more than others, so we don’t do implementation work against some of the large platforms. We’re not like a sales force company or a WordPress company. We do custom software development and we have technologies that we use more than others, but we really believe that the best developers want to be able to work in different arenas. So, you get a lot from working with different platforms.

People bounce around a lot on our projects and it’s more what fits the client. That said there are things that we try to stay away from. We don’t do that much work in the Microsoft Suite. We’re pretty more on the open source side, and IOS and Android for mobile development.

Products that Substantial has Worked On

Paul Parisi: Cool! Excellent. Are there any products that you can publicly rave about that you’ve been involved with or are those all confidential?

Paul Rush: The larger ones are usually confidential but two that we can talk about that are really fun on the smaller side, are Exploding Kittens which was a friend of mine’s Kickstarter that was the biggest Kickstarter game of all time. It’s a card game.

Paul Parisi: Yeah, oh yeah.

Paul Rush: They’re in the cards against humanity world. We did the mobile application which allows you to play online against people. That was a really fun project.

And the other one is a part of the Trello ecosystem. We did a plugin called Hello Epics. That’s one of our own products and it’s doing quite well. It’ll add Epics functionality to Trello which is their biggest requested feature. And we have more coming in that world of product management and organization

Paul Parisi: Well, that’s cool. So, we have you to thank for our mobile Exploding Kittens.

Paul Rush: Yes.

How Old is Substantial?

Paul Parisi: Excellent. So, how long have you been at Substantial? Where is Substantial in its growth? In its maturity? Is it a teenager? Is it a child? Is it a mature company? Where is it? How old is it?

Paul Rush: Maybe a preteen. We’re getting there. It’s twelve-year-old company and I was the CEO of the company for the first maybe, six, seven, eight years. Then I left to go start a new business and took some time off and have gone through a very interesting process of figuring out how to have someone take over your company. There are lots of entrepreneurs that have been at that position, considering that, and know that it is a very difficult process. It’s not something that is “Oh hey, anyone can just take over a company.” It took a couple tries to get it right.

The Two Philosophies of Entrepreneurship

And I think there’s sort of two philosophies in entrepreneurship. One is build the company, run it, stay with it a long time, or until it has some kind of exit event. And the other is start companies and have other people come in and run them. Richard Branson is famous for doing that. That’s the model that I’m most interested in because I want to get a bunch of companies off the ground and out there. So, learning how to find very senior management and put them in place successfully, is super important for that. I’ve been working on learning that – that ultimate delegation skill.

Paul Parisi: It’s one of many things that are so very important. So, you would characterize yourself as a serial entrepreneur. We’ve got one company, Substantial. What other companies have you started?

Other Companies Paul Rush Has Started

Paul Rush: I started a company before that called Future Tracks that was digital download service which I raised money for. It was before iTunes was out. I’ve been involved in music for a lot of my life, so I’ve been playing around with music on and off since I was a kid. And before that, I was playing music professionally and before that I was doing a consulting company for the music industry.

Paul Parisi: Oh okay.

Paul Rush: That was right out of college. Also, technology.

The Very Beginning

Paul Parisi: We’re going to jump around a little bit, but I think it will make sense. So, let’s sort of rewind. When you were ten what was your dream job? What did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

Paul Rush: That’s a really good question. I wonder if I can even remember that.

Paul Parisi: Or eleven. Within a couple of days.

Paul Rush: Somewhere around there I really got the bug of being involved in computers. And this is a very different time for computing.

Paul Parisi: Do you want to share when that was?

Paul Rush: Yeah, this was the early 90’s. So, computers were just coming out of their phase of being a little bit more home brew and very small technical audiences. So, Commodore 64 just passed and we were in a sort of new era of the beginning of the user interfaces. But they were something that you needed to know quite a lot to get a lot out of. So, being a geeky computer kid was something that I loved. For all the people who were involved then, I’m sure it’s the same now, although computers seem so much easier to use now and it’s harder to see behind the curtain in a lot of cases. Which I find a real shame about IOS.

Paul Parisi: It’s opaque.

Paul Rush: Yeah. And it stays running all the time and it never crashes and you never have to figure out what’s wrong and they don’t provide a great access layer to below the surface of the operating system. But back then you really did have to go that far, and it really was a learning playground.

Learning Playground: Computers in the 90’s

Paul Parisi: So, what was your first computer? You said you were in the close of the Commodore 64 era, so what was the computer you were playing with?

Paul Rush: It was called an Amiga 500.

Paul Parisi: Okay.

Paul Rush: For the people that know that computer, it was an extremely special computer. It had a tiny soul and heart. It made that landscape really really fun and enjoyable. And I don’t think to date there has been a product like that on the market.

Paul Parisi: How did you get that? Who said, “Oh, we need to get Paul a computer because he’s geeky or just because kids need a computer?” What was the impetus to get that computer into your hands?

Paul Rush: Yeah. My parents were soft science and art so it wasn’t from them. I had had some experiences where I actually started doing some programming and stuff below the surface with computers and it struck me like a lighting bolt that this was the thing I really needed. You know you talk to people who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives but for whatever reason, I was very lucky. I don’t know how it was for you, but I was very lucky that I found a few things when I was in that ten to fifteen range, that I really loved, and this was one of them.

Paul Parisi: So, you really enjoyed it. I’m speaking from my own experience. It was sort of all just “This is the coolest thing in the world. I’ve never seen anything like it!”

Paul Rush: Yeah it was completely that. And it’s such a fun time for technology because you could see the potential and if you had any idea about where things might go you could connect the dots and see this as coming.

Connecting With People Online: In the Beginning

Paul Rush: The thing that really put it over the edge for me was connecting to other people online. So, bulletin board systems. And then I got very early access to the internet and seeing how computer networks could shape interaction and human beings’ social activity was just phenomenal.

Paul Parisi: Was that in retrospect or did you actually feel that or detect that or identify that at the time?

Paul Rush: Oh no! I felt it right then!

Paul Parisi: Really? That’s insightful!

Paul Rush: It was pretty easy to say “Okay. There’s this small number of people here now and the interest is growing so eventually there will be a lot more and this is so useful and so universal.” Finding information online was already a thing. The internet as we know it was a project of the 70’s so by the time the 90’s hit there were enough people online and enough information online that you could really see “Wow! This is something that’s going to be massive!” Imagine another ten times the number of people on and then ten times that. It felt big even at the time.

Paul Parisi: Interesting. I will say something that’s very embarrassing. I was at the Mac World when Netscape came out of the closet and honestly, they were in the corner of the Mascarpone Center in San Francisco and they had a huge booth. I was one of the people who walked round the idea and said, “So what’s this going to do for me?” And it was just like “Okay. I can connect to other computers.” There was networking and stuff at the time. But the perception of the content wasn’t there. I was obviously completely wrong and that’s why it’s embarrassing.

More Than Just Wires Connecting People

Paul Parisi: So, what I’m pointing out is that you really had an insight and wisdom as a fifteen-year-old kid to say, “There’s something more than just the wires connecting this.”

Paul Rush: Well, what’s funny is that I actually had this same reaction to the web. The internet gave me that feeling but the web didn’t.

Paul Parisi: Interesting.

Paul Rush. I was at Columbia Research Facility when Mosaic came out, which is the predecessor of Netscape and I looked at it and was like, “Boring.”

Paul Parisi: Yeah that’s what I said. I was talking about Mosaic actually, yes. So, I said the same things. That’s interesting. So, you identified that there was a connection medium?

Paul Rush: Well, the internet was great because I was on IRC and we were all chatting with each other and I was talking with people all over the world and it felt so connective. I had friends in London when I was fourteen.

Paul Parisi: Interesting.

Nurturing Talent at An Early Age

Paul Parisi: So, you’re fourteen. I know you have an affinity for music. Were you playing an instrument? Or did you just love music?

Paul Rush: No, I grew up playing an instrument since I was old enough to hold one.

Paul Parisi: Was that put upon you or was that something you took to?

Paul Rush: It was discovered as something that I wanted to do pretty early. I don’t remember who was there first when I was five or six. I loved it and was extremely good at it and then the nagging of my parents drove me in the opposite direction. So, for a long time I didn’t practice and didn’t want to play and then back in high school I got back into it. And I really wonder what would have happened if I’d kept playing for those five or six years in between. Because I was really good when I was a kid and then those five or six years, I sort of fell behind. I went from ahead to behind.

I think about this a lot with talent in general. It’s one of the world’s biggest problems. How do we get and nurture people to find a thing that they have aptitude for and desire to do early, and encourage them to do it? Because so many of the people that we know and love who are artists, musicians, creators, technologists, they happened to find it, have the right resources, have the right mentorship early on and you always wonder “What if?” What if I’d practiced those five years? What if I’d have had someone else keep me on the track? Of course, those “What if?” questions continue forever but it’s an interesting thought. Like how do you encourage people to dive into something?

Paul Parisi: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. We have a son who took piano lessons and actually showed some affinity for it but his parents, me and my wife, were a little bit too encouraging of it and he wanted to quit as quickly as he could.

Opportunities For Innovation in Education

Paul Parisi: I agree. That is a key opportunity for innovation – How parents nurture their children in music or in talent and things like that.

Paul Rush: Well, it’s society really. It’s not just parents. I have this same feeling that something is going to change massively for humanity with education. We’re going to figure it out. We’re going to get more cognitive about it and understand how people’s brains work and really be able to tailor education to people. Imagine what would happen if people loved learning and people have their natural aptitudes. I’m a bit of a futurist and a science fiction fan so I think about these things a lot. But imagine if you could go from a couple percent of the population being super engaged in something to seventy or eighty percent. I mean humanity just gets so much more productive.

You Can Lead a Horse to Innovation but You Can’t Make Him Do It

Paul Parisi: Okay, well, let’s explore that. I’m naturally wired to learn. I just love to learn. One of my brothers has a joke that whenever their family was talking about something and they said “Oh, you know, what about this?”

“Oh, well, why don’t you just call your brother, Paul.”

Because I would have some opinion about it. Not that I’m this rocket scientist or anything but I just have this insatiable curiosity about everything. I’m not sure what my parents did. I don’t know if its genetic. I don’t know if it’s learned but I’ve recently just started teaching an innovation course at one of the universities here in Boston, and I am struck by the lack of motivation. So, I’d be interested in your thoughts on that because you can lead a horse to innovation, but you can’t make him do it.

Paul Rush: Yeah, I’m curious as well. I feel like this is a thing I could get to in my career, so to speak, in a few years. But I’d really love to know how to identify talent and then encourage it to grow. I don’t know where it comes from. I’m not a neuro-scientist. I’m not a behavioral psychologist so I haven’t approached this from any real angles yet.

Paul Parisi: But you have experience. Why are you interested?

Paul Rush: It seems like the whole reason that we’re here, I mean there’s nothing. Not to get too philosophical, but if you take life for what it is without curiosity and engagement. I feel like it could be a dull or difficult process.

Paul Parisi: Sure.

Paul Rush: But if you have that spark then it provides all the purpose and meaning for an interesting life. There are so many things to learn about. So many things to experience. So it seems base level connected to who I am, which makes me think that it might be a genetic disposition to just be so interested in that. But I don’t know. Maybe there were key moments in development where that became important. What do you think?

Paul Parisi: Well, I don’t know. My parents were very… If I showed interest in something, they did everything they could to encourage it. So, if it was electronics, “Oh, let’s get him with one of the local electrical engineers and have him talk to them.”

“Oh, you want to take apart a radio? Oh, here’s a radio to take apart.”

Whatever it was. Coin collecting. “Oh, well, let’s introduce you to the coin collectors.” Stamp collectors. Same thing. Whatever it was that I showed an interest in. I remember I showed an interest in wanting to play football and they dutifully took me to football practice and I just said this is not worth it. So, that was very affirming of me.

The Concepts of Work and Leisure

Paul Parisi: So, I’d be interested to get your feedback on this. I’m actually working on a book that’s talking about the concepts of work and leisure. And what I’ve learned in research is that leisure is a relatively new concept. Traditionally, you had an agrarian economy where people had to work most of the day and didn’t have much time for leisure as we define it. As we’ve moved into the 20th and, 21st century where we have these different levels and scales of economy, you have people that are given time where they have nothing to do.

And now, I fill that up with learning and stuff like that. But a majority of people, it seems like, leave that to do nothing. And it’s almost like everybody’s working for the weekend to quote 38 Special and I think it’s a placebo effect of sort of the… what is it? Sedation of the Masses. Sort of like, “Well, okay. Have your leisure time.” Basically, unplug and shut off or disconnect and shut down. There seems to be a stratification in society of people who don’t do anything that is building one’s self up. They just want “Okay, I’ve gone to work so I can celebrate for the weekend.”

Paul Rush: Yeah. I mean, I am a very amateur student of history. I’ve been reading little bits and pieces. Sapiens was a big eye opener for me. And from that book – did you read that?

Paul Parisi: No, but it’s on my list.

Paul Rush: It’s a fantastic fantastic book. From that perspective, we kind of lost something when we entered agriculture as a society, as a civilization on earth, where we actually had a lot of leisure time and we knew what to do with it prior to agriculture. And it kind of got worse and worse through the industrial revolution and I agree that it may be reversing now and we may end up with more and more time as automation kicks in. We may wind up with people with a lot of time on their hands.

But I think the big difference between when we were very early on the planet as Homo Sapiens and now, is that there’s so much stimulus and a lot of it drives you via capitalism to have an ethic of comparison. And that can drive people a little bit mad psychologically. So, I feel like we need to figure out what leisure time means for us in a way that’s healthier and leads us to more satisfied lives.

And I hope that there’s some kind of movement where we start learning and teaching each other how to be connected to some purpose because that’s, I think, a path through the noise. Imagine people with ten, fifteen, twenty more hours of time on their hands and we can do something. It would be potentially disastrous if we don’t give them something to do that is meaningful for them. And we’re seeing it already. People are magnifying problems way out of hands. We’re having a lot of difficulty having reasonable conversation across different demographic apps.

Paul Parisi: In some ways it’s WALL-E.

Paul Rush: Shhh! No! That’s the dystopian side of this. It goes towards a WALL-E or Idiocracy which is another great movie. You could easily see it going there. So, what’s the anecdote to that? My naïve, unstudied answer would be finding a way to connect people with purpose, so they don’t feel a meaningless void in their lives.

Deciding on A College Based on Interests

Paul Parisi: So, now you’re fifteen years old. You love computers. You’re getting back into music. Did those two things synergize together at all?

Paul Rush: They did a little bit, but they were pretty separate. It wasn’t until much later that they started to come together.

Paul Parisi: So, what instruments did you play?

Paul Rush: I played all woodwinds, but saxophone family was my big instrument group.

Paul Parisi: Cool. So, now you decided, I would imagine, at some point, that you were going to go to school. Did you go to college?

Paul Rush: Yes.

Paul Parisi: What were you going to be?

Paul Rush: Again, like I was saying, it’s hard to identify with people who didn’t know what they wanted to do, because the two things I checked off on interest… I think I put, when I was looking for schools, computer science, computer engineering and music. And I did all of those things at school. So, it was very natural. I think the thing that wasn’t’ captured is that I had already started playing around with entrepreneurship and trying to figure out how to make money. I was a hacker kid, so it was up to nefarious stuff that thankfully I did not get in trouble for but a lot of it was driven by ether meeting people or figuring out how to make money.

It’s funny because some of these softer skills, these things that you kind of can’t study. Entrepreneurship is something that it’s great that we’re teaching it, but it’s not necessarily taught as a curriculum. It winds up being, in some ways, the most valuable. Then the hard subjects are things that are more bridges to get somewhere.

Closing

Paul Parisi: Well, we’ve been talking with Paul Rush today of Substantial. And he’s been joining us from Seattle. We’ve had a great conversation about both entrepreneurship and innovation and businesses he’s been in.

I’d be interested in feedback from our listeners, other areas you might like us to explore. Whether it be science fiction or people problems or things like that.

Well, thank you for coming on and I’m sure we’re going to invite you back.

Paul Rush: Looking forward to it. Thank You.

More Episodes:

This is Part 1 of 3 our interview with Paul Rush. Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon! We’ll be talking about getting out of your comfort zone and overcoming the first hurdle of starting your own business!

Show Notes:

Business Advice From An SEO Expert

April 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 90 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with SEO expert Jeremiah Smith. He’s Founder & CEO of Simple Tiger and he’s sharing his business and entrepreneurial advice with us!

Sections

How Jeremiah Got Into SEO
Jeremiah Smith: “Living My Dream”
How Jeremiah Started His Own Business
Jeremiah’s Business Lessons Learned
Advice For Starting Your Own Business
Jeremiah’s Business Book Recommendations
What’s With The Name “Simple Tiger?”
Closing Advice
More Episodes
Show Notes

Business Advice From An SEO Expert

How Jeremiah Got Into SEO

Paul: Welcome to another edition of The Edge of Innovation. Today we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith with Simple Tiger. He’s the founder and CEO. So, you’re an SEO company.

Alright, let’s shift gears a little bit here. This is The Edge of Innovation. While we’ve been spending a lot of time talking about – and I think very useful time – talking about how to do this incredible, important aspect of our web presence in SEO. We’d like to talk to people about why did they start a business? What in the world led them to do this? I’ve likened starting and running your own business as one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. So, you told us a little bit about the mom and pop that you were working for and you learned SEO. Did you have an aha moment there and say, “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life?”

Jeremiah: Absolutely! It’s so funny that you asked me that because that’s exactly what happened actually. So, my mother was doing the book keeping for that company and she actually was the one that connected me with the company to begin with. They saw a website that she was showing them that I built, and they loved it. They wanted my web design ability, so I did that for them. Then I did the SEO thing because they asked for it.

And when I kind of got this little hunch that I’d seen the leads coming through the site ever since I built it and then did the SEO for the site and was actively working on it every day and I got really curious. I’m looking at the analytics and I see these big names that have come through. That these are guys that I’ve actually met out in our show room and shook their hands. And I generated them on my effort, playing on this little laptop in my office over there. And I was like holy cow its really cool! Something hit me that this is very, very real. This is, at the gut, at the core of a business and these guys are standing out in the showroom with a semitruck out in the loading bay area getting loaded up with twenty ATVs.

I was like, there’s so much value in what I’m doing here, and I got curious at the end of six months and I went and had my mother pull a report for me out of QuickBooks and I said, “Look. Here are the leads that we’ve generated from the SEO effort so far. I’m able to track those because again, this was about 12 years ago, so this was the early days of SEO. Google Analytics data was so wide open. You could get anything you wanted out of it. And so, I knew all these leads came in, out of all these different keywords and so I said I need to look at the books and see what kind of revenue these kinds of people gave us.

And so, she showed me. She generated a report, handed it over to me, I saw that two million dollar increase in revenue and my jaw hit the floor because I knew what they were paying me, which was peanuts compared to that but it was a good living for me at the time. I didn’t care and there’s no hate there at all. I was totally happy and blessed with it. But I saw the value. The proportion of what they paid me to what I was able to deliver through that effort and that was when I said, “I am on to something. I’m on to something that I think I can help a lot of other businesses with and this is what I want to do.”

So I put it on my resume and I said I do SEO full time and stuck my resume out there on Career Builder and it got picked up a couple weeks later by an agency in Atlanta called 360i and 360i – I didn’t know who they were at the time – but when I went in for my first interview, I walked down this long hallway with all these plaques on the wall that said MBC, MTV, E*TRADE, LG Electronics, Sports Illustrated, and I was like, oh my god, this is the big league. So those were my clients when I went on to work there and I took everything that I knew from helping that small mom and pop shop in to working at that agency and noticed that the difference was not that big between what I was doing before and what I learned there. It was just scaled up dramatically based on the budget that these clients had. So that was really the only difference.

Paul: Wow!

Jeremiah: And after that, I realized not only is this valuable but the playing field is level and it’s based on your pace – What can you do? What resources do you have at your disposal? You could leverage all those for SEO and you can see equal sized results.

Jeremiah Smith: “Living My Dream”

Paul: Interesting. So, when you were growing up, did you think you’d own your own business? What was your vision for your future?

Jeremiah: Thanks for asking that. So, it’s funny, when I was a little kid I liked to take this little kitchen set thing that I had. It was like a little kids Fisher Price thing. A little plastic stove and refrigerator, sink and everything. And I’d drag it out to the edge of the street where my parents lived, and I’d take some of my toys that I didn’t want anymore and write some prices on them and stand out there all day and wait for someone to stop and buy one of my toys. No one ever bought anything from me except Mom and Dad. They’d come through and give me a quarter for a plastic dinosaur or something. I loved that and so did my brother. He did the exact same thing. We both did that all the time. Didn’t get much for it but we loved doing it.

Traveling around with mom, she was doing bookkeeping for different clients. I’d go to all these different businesses that she worked for and I loved the variety of going into these different businesses as a kid. Just getting to see them, you know. And she would talk to me about how the business worked. I would watch her balance her checkbook and keep her gas receipts and charge those to her clients and things like that. I just learned a lot about business by kind of watching that happen. And then my father being an actor, he was the self-starter and he had to really sell himself for roles. He had to put everything he had into making his roles something that he could win. And so, I was really just kind of a self-starting, business motivated person.

When I was about to graduate high school though, I was deeply interested in robotics and I thought that I was going to go to school for robotic engineering after high school. But my math grades were terrible. All of my grades were terrible. I had a terrible time in school so my prospects looking at Georgia Tech, robotic engineering degree was just shot. They weren’t going to happen. So right after high school, I did a semester of college, maybe a semester and a half, before I discovered SEO. Then I just dropped out of college and did SEO and it wasn’t until a few years later, that I realized, wait a second, I’m doing robotic engineering on the largest robot in the world! And I didn’t even think about it at the time!

And then fairly recently, about three years ago, I got pulled into the University of South Florida to do some honorary guest lecturing on search engine optimization to senior level marketing students in the marketing program there. And so, it really hit me that I came full circle from failing school pretty much and dropping out of college, to actually teaching college at a very high level on robotic engineering and so now I’m living my dream, knowing that I’ve accomplished that.

But I have to say that I don’t look backwards and see a lot of my personal efforts that led up to that. Based on my faith, I kind of see God’s hand at work and so a whole lot of divinity in that case.

How Jeremiah Started His Own Business

Paul: Very cool. So, you made the crazy decision at some point to start your own business. You were sort of doing it as one person, but there’s a big difference when you hire your first employer, your second employer and you actually realize you’ve started a business. Tell me a little bit about that because you were working at this… you made it to the big leagues and you were working for somebody else. But now you own your own business so how did that happen?

Jeremiah: Yeah, so while I was working for the agency that I mentioned earlier. I really loved it. I gained a lot of intelligence working for that agency. A lot of corporate expertise and understanding and got to dive really deep into working with large brands and playing the corporate brand. But after a very short period of time, I knew I did not fit that corporate model. It just wasn’t for me. And this was around the time that the four hour work week came out and I read that and it totally just shattered everything that I was doing at that agency and so I decided to start trying to shift things a little bit. I approached the agency with some ideas for doing allowing remote work and some other stuff. And my ideas kept getting shot down and so I got demotivated.

I was building this consulting practice on the side, and I was helping clients on nights and weekends. And eventually just decided, “I’ve got to grow my consulting practice into my own agency.” I had Simple Tiger then, but it was still just a little consulting business. It wasn’t until I brought on my brother Shawn, and he and I really joined forces and decided to actually start hiring a team and kind of adding more clients and offering a service that included implementation and production of content, links and things like that – Beyond just the consulting that I had been doing so far. So, when we decided to do that, we opened a whole new can of worms which was building a marketing agency and that was really fun. But I never expected to be here, to be honest. I didn’t plan to be here, but I would not want to be anywhere else. I absolutely adore what we’ve been able to create together and what we’ve been handed.

Jeremiah’s Business Lessons Learned

Paul: So, what would be… Well, I’ll ask that in just a moment. But what’s your business lesson learned or unanticipated event or “Oh my gosh! I didn’t realize that part of business!” Or staring your own business?

Jeremiah: Hmmm. That’s a good question. I think that being the somewhat visionary entrepreneur that I am, where I have these little ideas in my mind of what I’d like to create, having those get shot down so many times by the harsh realities of the world, was at times, demotivating. But it has, over time, educated me to realize that the world wants a thing and will pay for it, so you build it and you win money and sometimes that may not be as enjoyable to do because it may not be as enjoyable as the big grand grandiose idea that you originally had. But in doing it and in building it, on the way to delivering it, once you start to see it work and once you start to see people happy with what you’ve created, it suddenly can become much more enjoyable, especially given that the great idea that you had was just getting shot down. It was not getting validated.

So for me, I think you know, I started Simple Tiger as an agency that did everything. It was web design, logos, business cards, it was awful. I was doing way too much. When I narrowed it down to SEO, that helped me a whole ton. Simple Tiger actually started growing. And then we narrowed it down from just SEO to just software companies, Saas companies specifically. It got super narrow and I was able to have basically almost the exact same conversation on every call with clients and deliver better results, deliver a deeper product, a more innovative solution on everything, every time, for each new client to the point now, our customer success is so high and so strong that I am just elated every time I sign on a new client because I know I’m about to have a new best friend or a new happy customer. Whereas before there was a lot of heartbreak in everything because I was kind of managing a mess that I created and not really delivering happiness to my clients as much. So, I think for me, to answer your question, the challenge and the “ah ha” moment was, for me, to develop something the world wanted versus something I wanted to develop. If that makes sense.

Advice For Starting Your Own Business

Paul: Yep. I get it. What would be your best piece of advice for somebody out there saying, “I want to do that?”

Jeremiah: If by “that” they mean start a marketing agency?

Paul: No, I mean more general than that. There are all sorts of specifics in every different vertical and people are probably listening and saying, “No, no, tell us that.” No I mean, really everybody has their own ideas for businesses or those that have them, have them. What would be your advice, warning, caution, whatever it might be?

Jeremiah: So, for me, from my angle, my last name is Smith and I often times think of myself as what you would consider kind of an old-fashioned smith. A trade person who works with their hands to create something. A technician to a degree. And so, I think of myself as a technician often times. And sometimes, if I really want to get into a groove with my agency, I just jump in at the technician level and do some technical work and I’m like, “Ahhh!” I feel like I belong. It just works for me. I think that’s just in my blood, so my recommendation is probably going to come from that angle.

If you find yourself doing some level of technical work, whether you’re with a company or you’re an employee of a company or an organization or you volunteer in some area of your life. Maybe you’re not doing some technical work for your professional trade or anything like that but you’re doing technical work in some volunteer area or you’re consistently helping family or friends or something like that. And it’s something that you actually, when you get into it, you just know that you’re good at it. I recommend crafting something around that.

It’s something like, there’s this Venn diagram but it’s made of three circles, if you can kind of envision this with me for a moment. One circle is something that you’re good at. Another circle is something that you enjoy doing and then the third circle is something that the market itself wants. Alright. Now the market wanting it doesn’t mean there’s no competition there. A lot of people hear that and think, “ohhh, no competition.” No, you want competition, trust me, because if there’s no competition there, you’ve either struck gold which is highly rare or there’s no money there. No body wants it. So that third circle has to be a good market.

In the middle of these three circles – what you’re good at, what you love doing, and what the market wants – is what I think you ought to build a business around. And if that business is just you, doing freelance consulting work for a while, do just that. And don’t build anything else out of that unless, at some point, you feel compelled to move on to the next step and grow up from a consulting company into something else. But for me, actually, I got to be honest, while I love running my agency as it is right now, my second favorite job I ever had was when I just did consulting and Simple Tiger was not producing content, not implementing things. I was just consulting companies. I really, really enjoyed doing that.

Now during those days, I was the technician and I was the only guy so if anything was wrong, it was one hundred percent my fault. Nowadays, I run my agency and I try to remain humble where I can, so if something does go wrong at my agency, I still take responsibility for it. And I’m still to blame for it but in those days there was not a system there was just me. So, it was a little stressful and if I didn’t go out and do sales, I didn’t have sales. And so that was really hard too. But yeah that’s what I would do. I would look at that tri-circle Venn diagram I came up with there and find out what’s in the middle and then build a business around that.

Jeremiah’s Business Book Recommendations

Pual: Now, good business books or books that you would recommend reading, one or two?

Jeremiah: One or two? That’s tough. Well, coming from the marketing angle, one would definitely be, “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek, which if you want to, you could just watch the Ted Talk. Its eighteen minutes. Look up “Simon Sinek Ted Talk Start With Why.” Then the second one is probably, “Tribes” by Seth Godin, where he talks about knowing your tribe and appealing to your tribe. Your audience basically is what he means. So those are my two favorite business books from a marketing perspective.

From a business perspective, I’m just going to leave “The 4-Hour Workweek” and its hall of fameness. That would be one of them, but I don’t want to recommend that one because everyone would probably say that. Something by Peter F. Drucker. “The Effective Executive” most likely would be one of my number one business books. Absolutely incredible and eye opening and some simple things about business.

And then actually some of the writings by Edward Deming as highlighted by Tony Robbins in his book “Awaken the Giant Within.” I recommend that book personally. I think it’s a fantastic book but in that book, he goes into Edward Deming and defining some business principals and Edward Deming’s business principles were just stellar and they’re so awesome and they’re still completely applicable today. I think they’re elegant. I think they’ll probably apply for the next fifty to a hundred years potentially, so I’d highly recommend people study that.

Just a quick highlight and a reason why you should study Edward Deming. He went to the big three auto manufactures in the 60s and said, “Hey, here are some things that you guys should do instead of what you’re doing right now, that are going to make you behemoths in the automotive industry forever.” And this was the 60s. The automotive industry was booming. We just came out of the 50s, where we had this kind of credit thing being created and people were buying cars on credit now and they couldn’t manufacture cars fast enough in the US. So, the three auto manufactures laughed him out of the room. So, he went to Japan, and he talked to Honda, Toyota and Nissan, who nowadays are eating our lunch. They listened to him. They paid him, and they implemented what he said. So, I think you should listen to Edward Deming. He’s incredible. He will teach you things that apply to your tiny small business all the way up to Toyota sized companies.

Paul: Excellent. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of experience with Deming and he definitely has some insight. Some amazing insight.

What’s With The Name “Simple Tiger?”

Paul: Okay, final question. Maybe. We’ll see. What’s with the name Simple Tiger?

Jeremiah: Ah. Good question and I like it. My father always used to call me “Tiger” growing up. And when I was thinking about starting a marketing agency or consultancy, I wanted a name that would stick in someone’s mind. And so, one of the key things or components you could have in marketing is something that’s not conceptual but is concrete. So, think “Apple.” Right? That sticks in your mind. You see it visually. Tiger was that for me. I wanted to carry with it a differentiator that applied to business that wasn’t so esoteric as tiger. How do you apply “tiger” to business? I wanted to take something complex, like search engine optimization, and simplify it and make it simple. And I wanted to apply the 80/20 principle, the Pareto Principle to everything. And I saw that as simplicity. And I saw simplicity as this art form where if I can master simplicity in what we do, then that would make me happy and so Simple Tiger thus was born. “Tiger” kind of carrying the effective component of our brand and “simple” kind of carrying the, I guess, the simplicity element of our brand.

Paul: Cool. Very cool.

Closing Advice

Paul: Well, we’ve been speaking with Jeremiah Smith of Simple Tiger and he’s an SEO expert and they’re an SEO agency and as you can tell there’s a lot of value here, in what he said. So, as you’ve been listening, we’ve been throwing out book names and different things you should go and look at. All of that will be in the shownotes so I encourage you to look there. You’ll find links to Simple Tiger and a way to actually contact Jeremiah. So, Jeremiah, thank you very much! Is there anything you want to close out and say as we sort of wind down here?

Jeremiah: I guess, if I could just leave everybody with one marketing maxim, it’s something I really like. I think the CMO of Ammex said this about branding specifically. So, if you’re dealing with your brand messaging right now and everything right now, this is just a really cool piece of advice. It’s really simple. “Be clear, not clever, be different, not better.”

And I love that because the idea there is that a lot of brands try to come up with some clever name or clever lingo or clever brand messaging and end up confusing people and not actually connecting. So, instead of being clever, just be clear. Be very clear about what it is that you do and who you are. And then, don’t be better, be different because better is completely subjective but different is very objective and you can speak directly to a person’s concerns if you can differentiate yourself into their category. And then, that’s how you can appeal to people. So that my favorite marketing kind of maxim.

Paul: Very cool. Well, I want to thank you. Thank you for spending the time with us. And who knows, maybe we’ll have you back soon.

Jeremiah: That would be awesome. I’d be happy to come back. Thank you so much for everything, Paul. It was an honor to be here.

Paul: Alright, thank you.

More Episodes:

This is the Part 5, the final episode of our podcast with Jeremiah Smith!

If you missed any of the previous episodes from our conversation with him, you can listen to them here:
Part 1: An Introduction to SEO With Jeremiah Smith
Part 2: SEO: Google & Artificial Intelligence
Part 3: SEO: How To Create Content For Your Business
Part 4: Is SEO Always Worth It?

Show Notes:

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