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#08 Scott V From Brand Creators On Taking Action
488 Plays4 years ago
Things have been turned upside down lately. A lot of us suddenly a lot of extra time on our hands. Do you also have a dream job/career/business that you have been thinking of getting into? Not sure if you should take that next step? Now maybe the time to take the leap and start taking action! If you do, chances are you are going to need an understanding of how marketing can work for your company/project as well.
Scott is in the middle of rebranding. But you can find some of his stuff at: brandcreators.com
Get more from Jesse and Chase The Craft: www.chasethecraft.com
Support The Podcast: www.chasethecraft.com/support
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's podcast is brought to you by Gladfield Malt, creating kickass craft malted products right here in New Zealand. At the moment, my favorite product to play with is the New Zealand Peated Malt. Very, very fun stuff. I need to look into it some more. If you're interested on a commercial level, get in touch at gladfield.co.nz for the home distiller and the home brewer. Check out any good home brew store here in New Zealand and Australia. They should be able to hook you up.
00:00:25
Speaker
This podcast is also brought to you by the people that make this stuff possible. The Patreons, the people that directly support Still It and Chase The Craft on a monthly basis. I cannot thank you enough guys, thank you so much. If you're finding value in these podcasts or perhaps the Still It videos and you'd like to help ensure they keep on coming, you can visit chasethecraft.com slash support for all the different ways that you can help
Guest Introduction: Scott from Brand Creators
00:00:49
Speaker
out.
00:00:49
Speaker
My guest today has absolutely nothing to do with distilling. In fact I don't even know if he particularly likes distilled products but if you're potentially thinking about getting into the game, if you're thinking about getting into the industry in any way shape or form as a distiller owning your own distillery perhaps you want to photograph distilled products that's what you want your specialty to be or perhaps you want to create events that are focused on distilled products
00:01:16
Speaker
Then this is the episode for you. We talk about taking that first leap and just getting out there and trying something. That failure isn't really failure and it's going to teach you something. You got to get on the board somehow and get started. We also give you a brief overview of some different marketing ideas that can be used in the distilling or the craft beverage space. Without further ado, Scott from brandcreators.com
The Journey of Career Transition
00:01:47
Speaker
Scott, we're live. It is really good to have you here, man. For those of you that don't know, I've been listening to Scott for longer than I've had the Still It channel over on The Amazing Cellar. And I know we're going to get into this. We're going to talk about this. Your content's evolved. But dude, honestly, I probably wouldn't be here. I probably wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for you. You were one of the guys that gave me hope and a dream that creating
00:02:16
Speaker
this platform, well, I didn't know what it was going to be when I started, but that it could eventually end up, you know, supporting the family. And when, you know, we'll get into this too, but now that the day job's gone away, what will be very soon, and I am going to be doing this full time, I felt like I had to reach out to you and we had to record this podcast. I thought it would be a cool time to get you on the channel then. So thank you.
00:02:39
Speaker
Yeah, no problem. And let me just say, like, I remember the email, I should have pulled it up before I got on here. I remember you sent me an email. And it was about that you had been doing this kind of behind the scenes, and you hadn't reached out before this, and it was happening for like 12 or 18 months. And you're like, you know, I just decided to give it a shot and, you know, start posting stuff. And, and you were hoping for like 500 subscribers your first year and
00:03:07
Speaker
15,000 and then you became now an inspiration for a lot of people that I teach and I use your example a lot because you stuck with it, you were consistent and you showed up. So I want to congratulate you, number one, and also say, dude, man, you got to be proud of yourself because you come a long way.
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's a nice feeling to commit to something and to see growth for sure. You've got to get a warm fuzzy from that at some point in time. I mean, we were talking backstage too. It's a bit of a roller coaster ride where I'm sure anyone that started their own business or started their own platform or whatever project that they're hoping to grow.
00:03:47
Speaker
It's a weird roller coaster of you hit a milestone or something and you feel good about it for about six hours and then suddenly you're stressing about how you haven't hit the next milestone. It's a weird roller coaster trying to run something for yourself for sure. I know you feel the same. We've talked about that before as well.
00:04:08
Speaker
It doesn't matter what level you're at, man. You're always going to have another level. When anyone says, oh, when I get to that point, I'll be happy, you will be for about, like you said, six hours. And then all of a sudden, it's like, OK, that was fun. What's next? And I think Tony Robbins said this a long time ago. It's like, if you're not growing, you're dying. It's like, we're always going to be growing. We're always going to be learning. At least you should be. So I'm a big believer in that, man.
00:04:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I've, I've discovered recently, well, over the process of the last sort of three years, funnily enough, the life of the channel, that, that I'm not happy without that strife. If I don't have something to be stressing about or worrying about or,
00:04:50
Speaker
You know, something that I care enough about and that I'm invested enough in to be stressing about it. Yeah. You know, oh, yeah. It's a weird thing. I often my wife will find me at one of my hobbies cursing and stomping around and acting all grumpy. She's like, why do you do this? I'm happy. I'm happy. Is this fun? Yeah. I think Frustrated is a blast.
00:05:15
Speaker
But strangely enough, it is, you know, like, it's all smooth sailing and easy. Then whatever you get at the end of that process is not fulfilling at all. You know, so it's for me anyway. Well, you know, I was I don't know if you're watching if you're into basketball at all, but Matt are not managing Johnson. Michael Jordan. He's got his he's got a new series on Netflix and ESPN and we're watching it.
00:05:39
Speaker
my daughter, my son, and my wife. And it just, I mean, he was always striving and so hard on himself and like not happy that he got 50 points the game before. You know, it's like, I should have got 55. You know what I mean? Like, so
00:05:55
Speaker
I think it just goes to show you if you want something bad enough in life It's not going to be like laughing and joking all the time. You're you're you're working hard and there's something about that I think we need focus we need Uh those those milestones like you said to hit to feel as though we're growing and we're accomplishing something for whatever reason Um, but I know myself like i'm always looking for that even though at times i'm complaining about it, right? It's like come on, man Get it just work and then you're like, but no if it worked then it wouldn't be fun
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah. And if it just works, then everyone would be, it's like a same old thing of if it was easy, everyone would be doing it right. And then you wouldn't feel you've accomplished anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I would have recorded a, well, I will record a little intro to go at the beginning of this, but let's, let's jump into your, like who you are and what you do just a little bit because this is, this is a bit of a bit of an oddball for my podcast in there. You've got nothing to do with distilling whatsoever. I do like beer though.
00:06:56
Speaker
You can bond over beer. Listeners, trust me, there's something to be gained for this, especially for those that are sitting on the fence about making a leap or not. And we'll get into that later on. But yeah, let us know who you are and what you do, Scott, because that background will be helpful later on.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I'll try to keep it short. So basically, I'm 47 years old. And I've been married for 25 years, going on 26 years. And in May, it'll be 26. I'm glad I got that right. My wife's in the other room. So I've got to be careful here. Extra points. So we've got three kids. But basically, just to kind of give you guys a backstory, I started right out of high school, never went to college.
00:07:46
Speaker
Um, and uh, didn't have the opportunity to go to college. My father never really instilled that into us. He was raised as a farmer. So basically it was like some of his brothers and sisters, he was, uh, he had nine brothers and sisters. So they were farmers, some of his brothers and sisters went to the eighth grade and then they were, you know, working on the farm. So that's what we're talking about. So it wasn't in his DNA to preach to me to go to college. And so I was always raised, you know, you go out there and you know,
00:08:12
Speaker
earn an honest living and you'll do well. And so long story short is I started working for his company after I got out of high school, about two years after I got out of high school. I had a couple other jobs, worked for a cable company, worked for a printing company, and then I ended up working for him. And I learned to trade.
00:08:27
Speaker
right and i thought i was going to own that business one day so the reason why i'm painting this picture for anyone listening is because just because you think where you are right now or the ten years you spent at a job and you feel disappointed cuz that isn't your career path or whatever things change you need to understand like probably a sign of why that's happening i call these take action moments actually wrote a book about it called the take action effect and it's like when you have these moments.
00:08:53
Speaker
It allows you to kind of reach outside of your comfort zone. And for me, I thought I was going to own that company. I thought I was going to own a business. At the time, we're going back years. We're talking almost 20 years ago now. We were a $2 million a year business locally in construction. Nowadays, it would be like 8 to 10 million. And so it was a pretty good sized company. We built it from just him and his partner, some guys. And then I was running like 18 guys at one point.
00:09:20
Speaker
Um, and so I was the, you know, the foreman. And so, uh, basically I learned a lot about business. I learned a lot about partnerships. My father and his partner were like a bad marriage and I just seen the writing on the wall. So then I had to make another, another decision. What am I going to do? Sky has no education, right? As far as like education, where I can get a job with a degree, right? So what am I going to do? Well, I know construction. I can do that. Well, my wife said to me, cause I was burnt out at the time we had kids.
00:09:45
Speaker
I was working 60 plus hours a week plus I built my own house in 11 months so you know people that say they don't have time to build their business I think it's a bunch of crap because I built the house in work 60 plus hours a week and I raised a family but I see I I seen like the writing on the wall and my wife just kept saying to me she's like listen she goes if
00:10:05
Speaker
If you're going to go, you know, do something different, you can't do something like you're doing right now. You got to be able to do something that we can do together or that we can create our own schedule, all that stuff. So we built a photography business, had no idea about photography, by the way, either. And so we ended up, you know, going into that, my wife was like, she had an interest in it. She watched an Oprah episode and she goes, chase your passion. And I'm like, OK, great. We don't know anything about photography. We, you know, we don't have YouTube. YouTube wasn't even really a thing. There wasn't digital cameras.
00:10:33
Speaker
we went to the photography of the lab and we just picked up some books and learned it in old fashioned you know test you know try things test things so long story short i built that business in eighteen months i left my job after eighteen months of thinking about starting a photography business.
00:10:49
Speaker
Left my job, and scary as hell, but we did it, and never looked back. Never swung a hammer again. That was my safety net though, and you and I were talking about safety nets. That was my safety net. I could go back and be a contractor, but I never had to swing a hammer again. From there, we built that business into a pretty well-established business locally. We were well-known in our area, but then I started to feel like I was having a job again. I was like, I had to report to customers and clients and
00:11:16
Speaker
And the only way to make money was to have them come to our studio. It's like, there's got to be a better way. And then so I started to hear about selling stuff online. And we actually, our first online thing was eBay. We sold a wooden bridge that we bought for a prop inside of our studio. And we were looking for the prop
00:11:34
Speaker
to buy ourselves and we seen one on eBay. So we bought it for like 130 bucks. My wife was at a local store and she's seen that they had the same bridge there. And she's like, oh my gosh, it's only 30 bucks.
Success in Podcasting and Community Building
00:11:45
Speaker
Maybe we should try to sell these on eBay. I'm like, great idea. So we loaded the minivan up with like 20 bridges and we ended up selling them and they ended up putting our kids through private school. But
00:11:56
Speaker
The big the big takeaway there was i discovered online selling and that opened my eyes to e-commerce but also then online digital sales started a online photography teaching business teaching people how to use photoshop and marketing for photographers and then built that into a sizable enough company that we left the photography studio behind.
00:12:16
Speaker
and moved into that. And that taught me a lot about marketing, a lot about business online. And then I got introduced to Amazon and I was like, holy cow, like I can sell stuff on Amazon and they'll do all the heavy lifting for me. And then I started a podcast after I started that and that turned into a pretty good, that's kind of where you, you found me, but that turned into some pretty good success where over 16 million downloads to date people. Yeah.
00:12:41
Speaker
thousands of people all over the world. I've spoken at some pretty awesome events, met some really cool people, helped a lot of people, and just became friends with a lot of people through that. That's kind of how I arrived at where I am today. And it's been a crazy roller coaster, like you said, but it's taught me a lot. And everything that I've done through that process, Jesse, and you know this, everything that we do is a lesson and is a skill that we're building that we can stack on top of each other.
00:13:08
Speaker
So I had skills now that I didn't have when I was, you know, you know, just outside of the, you know, the construction world. Now I have marketing chops. I have online business skills. I have, you know, copywriting skills. I have all kinds of skills, but I learned them by doing it, testing things, trying things, things work, things didn't work. And and then here we are. So that's it in a nutshell, Jesse.
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty cool, man. So just to interpret that for the person sitting at home that's into distilling. Number one, guys, Scott is not in any way, shape, or form one of these magic bullets, get rich quick marketing guys online. That's like the antithesis of what he's into. No Lamborghinis here. Yeah. I'm not sure your wife would be that into that.
00:13:58
Speaker
My wife would not approve of the girl in the bikini on the Lamborghini. Yeah. So please don't go over to his channel looking for that. And please don't be put off if you've seen that horrible trope over and over again in the online digital marketing world.
00:14:17
Speaker
So don't be put off by it, don't go looking for it. He is about hard work, about taking action, that is literally the core of what Scott does. And he's transitioned very much into solid fundamentals and action points on how to create a brand or how to market a brand that you already have. So for us as distillers, and especially if you're thinking of getting into this thing commercially, or you're already there,
00:14:46
Speaker
That is a huge skill that often we as craftsmen don't focus on a whole lot. So guys, please go check out his podcast. There's so much to learn there. But what we wanted to talk about today sort of comes from that.
00:15:03
Speaker
in terms of taking that next step in terms of doing something that is out of your out of your comfort zone, potentially taking a leap that you haven't taken yet. And I mean, I'm in this position right now, right? I I've been forced to go full time on this chase the craft thing, whatever the heck that's going to turn into. Because of the COVID-19 situation, my company had to let me go. And it was it was the best decision for them. I held no grudges whatsoever. In fact, I agree with the decision.
00:15:33
Speaker
And it's a weird thing, Scott, like we talked about this backstage a little bit, I think. You get yourself into situations where you feel like you should take the next step, you should do the next thing, but there's something holding you back. There's always just that one little thing.
00:15:51
Speaker
There's definitely always that little something that's saying, maybe you should wait. That's not the right time. And then someone, something like that happened to you. It kind of forces you to kind of do that. You know, I wasn't forced.
00:16:05
Speaker
I was forced, but I wasn't forced by my father's partner. I just knew the writing on the wall. So I needed to make decision what was best for me. And now that I look back at it and I actually teach this now is you really need to know your why. Like you need to know what the heck are you doing right here? Because if you're just reporting to work, to go to work, because you have to provide,
00:16:26
Speaker
You know, that's honorable and that's great, but if you're not doing what you actually enjoy at all, like you need to make a change because you don't get a second round here. Like this isn't a dress rehearsal, right? You know what I mean? Like this, we got one shot here, right? So, and I'm not saying one shot that you, if you don't make it, you don't make it. I'm saying you got one shot to continually chase your dreams.
00:16:48
Speaker
right and i believe that we can do that right we can chase our dreams we can chase the craft right we can do whatever we want to do it's up to us our limiting beliefs are all up here they're all up in our head their stories that we tell it's from stories that we've been told um so it's totally normal and you know for anyone listening right now that does have a business
00:17:10
Speaker
That is local and there's people right now in my local area breweries that we've you know We've supported and and we've you know, we've visited now. No one can really visit at this time You know, but what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to go support them by hey, can you do curbside? Can I pick up? you know a growler can I pick up that you know, and I'm doing that to support them plus I like their beer but I
00:17:32
Speaker
for businesses, you just got to think outside the box sometimes. And there's some things that we could talk about to marketing, if we want to turn this into a little bit of a marketing strategy for people that are in that space or in or on the online or in the online space. There's ways to bring attention to your brand right now and really capitalize on this time. Not in a negative way, by the way. This is like, yeah, not on the cash in on it.
00:17:53
Speaker
No, no, this is the time to gain exposure for yourself. This is a time for you to show up like me. I'm doing a morning show, uh, 10 a.m. every single day. And there's no money I'm making from that other than I'm building relationships. You know what I mean? Like it's an investment, you know, like relationships are an investment period. Yeah.
00:18:14
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, I mean, obviously, there's going to be situations where you have to, you have to go to the grind to get what you want. But there's a very different feeling and a very different set of rewards that you get from knowing that you're doing some hard yakker now.
00:18:33
Speaker
whatever it happens to be. I need to keep swinging that hammer for another three months because I can put this amount of money away every week to be able to then use that as a launch pad to do this. That's one thing. It's an entirely other thing to be like, I'm just going to keep swinging that hammer because I don't know.
00:18:52
Speaker
how to take the next step or I'm scared to take the next step, right? Like there's, yeah. So we're not by any means saying that, you know, you should just quit everything you're doing right away with no specific plan and, you know, take the leap. But what we are saying, guys, is that
00:19:09
Speaker
to quote Game of Thrones, chaos is a ladder, I think is kind of the topic that we're throwing out here, is if there is something that you've been thinking of doing, if there is something that is on your mind, if you are thinking about reaching, and it doesn't have to be starting your own business, right?
Embracing Failures and Growth Opportunities
00:19:26
Speaker
The first rung of the ladder could be, I want to get an internship at the local distillery. I want to go and help out somewhere to learn something.
00:19:35
Speaker
that if you're finding yourself with a whole lot more time on your hands because you've been forced into a crappy situation, now's a great time to do that. So get motivated, guys. There's got to be a silver lining to pretty much every cloud. And it can hurt like hell right now if you're in a crappy situation, but figure out a way to use it. Yeah, no, I agree. I think it sucks when you're in it. Let's face it. It sucks so hard. Yeah, it does. But on the same breath,
00:20:05
Speaker
I mean, for the most part, I would say every single time I've ever felt like that, there's always something positive that comes on the other side of it. And it doesn't matter where you are in your journey or in your career or, you know, I think the biggest thing for a lot of people is though is they feel stuck because they're either at a certain age and they feel like they should have everything figured out. Yeah, I'm 47, man. I'm I still don't have it figured out.
00:20:30
Speaker
You know what I mean? I was telling you like I had someone ask me the other day, they're like a way to figure out where you're where you want to be in the next five years is to ask yourself this simple question. When you go in or when if you walked into a coffee shop or a brewery and you you went in there and two guys seen you and one guy knew you and one guy didn't, what would the other one say about you?
00:20:51
Speaker
who is that guy, right, or girl. And so that really, to me, it made me say, you know, who do I want to be, right? Like, just because I am who I am now doesn't mean I can't become who I want to be in five years. Like, five years ago, I wouldn't have said where I wanted to be five years from now, right? I had other ideas, or I had other directions, or other opportunities. Because opportunity
00:21:15
Speaker
To me, it stacks on each other. So me starting a podcast, right? I started a podcast. I started two other ones, by the way, two other ones that did not amount to anything. I think it's important that we talk about that too, right? Because this can easily turn into a discussion about, just give it a go and look, it all works out.
00:21:33
Speaker
No, that's not the case. And so and I know how you feel about quote unquote failure. So unleash yourself. Give us a failure rate. Well, yeah, you're gonna fail a lot, you know, and it's okay. I don't look at it as failure. I look at it as learning lessons, like everything you do turns into a lesson.
00:21:51
Speaker
right like you know if i'm if i started those two like i did start those other two podcast and and one of them one of them that was on fitness right which i love i love fitness i at the age of forty i decided to get serious about my fitness and i bought the program insanity and shaun t kicked my butt
00:22:11
Speaker
And I lost like 18 pounds. At the time I was like 190 pounds. I lost 18 pounds. I was in the best shape of my life. That got me energized to be in shape. So then I started doing Tony Horton's P90X and all this stuff, right? It just got me going down that road. But I was like, you know what? Maybe I should help other people that are my age get in shape. So I started a podcast with a buddy of mine. We did like six episodes and it was just kind of like a grind. It just didn't feel right. I didn't feel like I was in my element.
00:22:40
Speaker
I'm he wasn't really in the element some like let's just kill it so we did and i sat there with nothing and then not started another podcast on business but it was too broad. Who's just too broad it was all over the place and so that i was like when the amazon thing came along i'm like maybe i just.
00:22:57
Speaker
share my journey with people and we'll see what happens. And I did five years later, 820 some episodes and 16 million downloads. Here we are. And now that's taught me so much taught me what I like, what I don't like, what kind of interviews I like, what kind I don't, what kind of guests I like, what kind I don't, like all of that stuff taught me a ton. Um, but there was a lot of failures along the way. There's a lot of doubts along the way. Last year I had a doubt. I was putting on my first ever live event with 250 people.
00:23:23
Speaker
And I was nervous. I wasn't going to be able to sell enough tickets. We ended up selling all our tickets that we needed to do to cover cost and to make a little bit. And it turned out to be great, but I was stressed as heck, but I'm so glad I did. Cause I learned about live events. Yeah. But on the flip side, even if you didn't sell enough tickets, it would have sucked at the time, but you would have learned a lot about how to sell more tickets, you know, or potentially how to heed your bets a little bit. Well, yeah. And, and though, Jesse, it taught me, I love the energy of people.
00:23:53
Speaker
Like I love the energy of being in person with people. And I know right now that's going to put a strain on things, but even if you're not in person, you're in person, like on a zoom or you're in person, like virtually, I still think we can get some energy. I love it. I love that atmosphere. I love being with people that get it like, okay, so you're listening to this and you're into this distilling. What if you're in a room of a hundred people that are all into distilling? It's like everybody's Jack.
00:24:20
Speaker
They're like, oh my gosh, this is awesome. We get to talk about it. And they know the lingo and they know everything. It just feels like you're at home. That's what we're talking about. Yeah, we've talked about that. And it sucks because you know that it's legal in here in New Zealand, but it's not legal in a lot of other places. And there's a lot of people that just want to learn about it, even from a point of view of they love whiskey and they want to know what goes into that bottle they love.
00:24:46
Speaker
but they can't even openly talk about that necessarily if they're worried about people listening and watching them. We have talked about
00:24:53
Speaker
We have talked about, and it was definitely one of my dreams to get a live yearly event sort of happening here in New Zealand, where people can come and hang out from wherever they happen, you know, wherever they can come from. They can come and hang out. We can talk about it openly. We can, we can chill out. We can swap stories. We can get people to come in and, you know, bring experts in to come in and give us hints and tips. And that would be amazing. I totally get what you mean about that live. There's, there's nothing more,
00:25:19
Speaker
empowering and, yeah, energy is just the right word. There's no more energy than you can find when you get a whole bunch of people that love something so much that they're happy to put any other expectations or differences or, you know, politics, religion, all that bollocks, all that goes evaporate, you know, and you can just be it be with people that, you know, care about the same thing every year. Yeah, it's a special. It's pretty it's pretty magical, man. It's and and that's what I learned.
00:25:47
Speaker
from that. I learned that I, I truly love that. And that's what lights me up. It's like when I was a kid and I was 18 years old, had the long hair, I wanted to be a rock star, right? My goal one day was to be a rock star because I love the energy of the crowd. I love the energy of the people and I loved entertaining and I loved just, just being there. Yes. I loved being in the spotlight, but also putting smiles on people's faces and making people be like in a new element. Right. And so when the podcast thing kind of came, I'm like, I'm kind of getting that now.
00:26:16
Speaker
I'm kind of getting that same sensation and that same feeling. So I'm going to lean into that. So, you know, I had to grow up, right? I couldn't be living in the back of a van, right? That just wasn't going to cut it for me. So I had to grow up, but I can still kind of have that.
00:26:33
Speaker
I'm really excited about, you know, like us, we're going to be pivoting a little bit. You and I talked about it, but I'm actually able to really, truly be me. And it's not that I haven't been able to be me, but like that's a side of me. Like I I just love music and I love I just love the stages and the people and the energy when when you're around the right people, the people that get you only the right only only the people that are into it. If someone's coming to a rock show and they're in the Celine Dion, maybe.
00:27:03
Speaker
That ain't gonna work. I mean, I like Celine Dion, but not as much as I like Metallica, let's say, right? So it's different, right? And it's just cool when you get people that are all on the same page with like a hobby or music or whatever.
00:27:20
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I mean, let's translate all of this that we're talking about back to something that's a little bit more specific for someone. Because let's be honest, if you're stuck in the middle of this, it can be pretty hard to find comfort. I'm just going to swim around a little bit. My light's got all messed up in here.
00:27:39
Speaker
It can be when you're stuck in the in the quagmire of feeling like you're going nowhere, it can really feel like you're not learning anything. It can really feel like the failure or the I mean, not like you said, not failure, but the harsh lessons that life is teaching you, it can feel like that's all for nothing. But
00:27:57
Speaker
Dude, for anything out of just about any profession, distilling is something where anything you know, anything you learn is gold later on. So if you're a tradesman right now, any trade, I don't care what it is you're doing, you have gold in terms of experience if you're going to be setting up a distillery.
00:28:16
Speaker
or working for someone else. You're a Sparky? Awesome. Guess what? They're going to need that. You're a plumber. Oh, hell yes. They definitely need that. Carpenter, they're going to need that. It doesn't matter what you're doing. Any skill that you bring to any small business is something that that small business is going to need, whether or not you're setting it up or someone else is setting it up.
00:28:38
Speaker
So trust me, guys, whatever it is that you're doing now, it doesn't matter what you're doing now. That is going to be helpful in the future and anything else you do. So, I mean, let's, let's do me. Yeah,
Jesse's Career Journey
00:28:50
Speaker
yeah. I, I learned, I learned, I went to high school. I came out of high school thinking I've got no idea what I want to do. Screw getting a giant student loan for something I don't know that I want to do and I never did it.
00:29:04
Speaker
And then six months later, I was still sitting around doing not a lot of anything. And my parents actually kicked me in the ass and said, you've got to go and just do something, anything. Like don't commit to sitting big. Yeah, do something that you care about. I was like, cool. I want to do an outdoor education course. So I learned to be a scuba instructor, high ropes, whitewater raft guide, all that sort of stuff.
00:29:26
Speaker
And then I ended up going off to work on the mountain for a couple of years. And then I pissed off backpacking for about 12 years. I lived out of a suitcase and went all over the world. Well, not really, but a few different places. And somewhere along the way, I found myself in Ken's in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef with a diving
00:29:46
Speaker
certificate with an instructor's certificate. And I really wanted the job being out on the boats. And there was none. All the instructor spots were full, funnily enough, in Ken's, which was an impossibility. Once again, I was kind of pissed off about that, because that's why we that's why we went to Ken's. We'd used our last cent to get there. We needed some money. And then I found an ad in the paper saying underwater photographer needed. And I never touched the camera in my life.
00:30:13
Speaker
Seriously. That's crazy. But I went and applied anyway. And I was honest about it. And the guy was like, Yeah, sorry, man, we just we need a photographer, not just a dude that knows how to dive. Week in a late week and a half later, he called me up and said, we can't find anyone. How would you feel about coming in and learning for a week on, you know, for free? And then that was it. That that's, that's literally how I turned into a photographer. So yeah, he's just and that's what you know, that's what led me to I went and ended up going back to school and learning about it. And then
00:30:42
Speaker
got my first crappy job, which was awesome for a year, which turned into a horrible job. And then the horrible job forced me to get into to YouTube. You know, that's how I am here. So let's let, I'm going to call a timeout here. Uh, so let's, let's unpack that a little bit for the audience. Cause I think this is important and this is actually what I want to start doing on my podcast. I want to have like these segments for these take action moments. That's what I classify as a take action moment. There's like, if you never applied.
00:31:10
Speaker
Imagine this, you never applied for that job. You never went in and said, you know what, I don't have the credentials, but I'm just going to say I'm a diver. And if they say yes, great. If they don't, they don't. And they said no. Right. Then they called you back and then you ended up doing it and that changed everything. Everything. Yeah. So what would have happened now? We don't know. We can't rewrite. I mean, we can't rewrite like what would have happened. But think about that. What happened after that because of that moment?
00:31:38
Speaker
Look at all of the stuff that happened. And I don't know all of it, but I'm sure there's a ton that came off of that because once you got that job that introduced you to other things or gave you more experience of photography, whatever, and that led you to where you were going to go. But at that moment, never happens. You're in a different place right now, man. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And, and it's hard because when you're in that moment, when, when I'm stuck there, there's no way I'm stuck in Ken's, I'm whatever it was, 23 years old or something.
00:32:08
Speaker
There's no way you can possibly know that that is an important moment in your life. There's no way. No way. But at the same time, I was running around all over town, trying to get any job I could, you know, oh, I can kind of, I'm actually kind of decent in the kitchen, I'll go into play, you know, at every team page and see saying, I'll put me in the kitchen and I'll cook for you. And there was actually, so there was, there was two moments within a month of each other.
00:32:35
Speaker
The other one was that I did, I did go to the team page and see while I was waiting for this other job to show up. And they started sending me out to kitchens and then they sent me out to the swanky ass, like ridiculously swanky resort sort of job and for one of the high end kids places. Okay.
00:32:56
Speaker
I knew nothing about it. All I did is went in and it was just me and the head chef for like two days doing all sorts of, he was like showing me everything. And then on the last day he said, right, so you've got this, right? I was like, wait, what? He's like, yeah, yeah, I'm out of here for two months.
00:33:09
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? He's like, no one's explained this to you. Oh, there's no one actually really here at the moment. We're just, we're just catering for the, you know, the walk-in restaurant, but there's a big group coming in and I'm out of here. So you've got to run the kitchen. I was like, dude, I'm not, this is the only training I've ever had, you know.
00:33:32
Speaker
So my point being is that it was there was kind of like a pivotal moment there, right? I could have gone down that road. I could have turned into.
00:33:40
Speaker
a chef from that, that point. So what did you do? What did you do? I'm curious now. I'm sure the, I'm sure your audience is. So what you, did you end up just quitting or did you actually try to fake it for a little while? What happened there? No. So what, what happened was that the, the team page agency was hiring me out as a, um, what was the word they use for it? Not an executive chef.
00:34:05
Speaker
The, the team page agency were pulling a dirty, they were hiring me out as some like really like, you know, like properly trained chef. Okay. Okay. And paying me as a line cook basically. So there was stern words had between the, uh, the hotel management and the team page.
00:34:24
Speaker
Yeah, I was just straight up with them, dude. I'm not going to sit here and screw your restaurant up, but that wasn't in me at that point in time to just fake it. So I was honest about it, and they ended up finding someone else to come in. And so then you went to the photography under? Yeah, I can't remember exactly how the timing happened. I think I went in there and helped them out for a while. It was literally just a temp job, so it was like day to day, you know, I could do different stuff. That's crazy.
00:34:51
Speaker
yeah it was pretty weird but once again the thing is right if you don't put yourself in those situations if you're not doing random things and trying them it's you just even know what's gonna what's gonna catch and what's not and so once again guys get on the phone and call the local distillery like start looking into things I think yeah let's let's turn this a little bit into
00:35:14
Speaker
a little bit of a marketing 101 for people too, because if you're planning from here on out, guys, is to go and get some experience with someone else. Let's talk about that real quick. How can people get in touch with someone in a way that is going to make them appealing? How do they get in touch with someone to get in the door and get some experience?
00:35:38
Speaker
Well, I guess the first thing right now, if someone is just, so what you're saying is someone just wants to be around it. They just want to go in and be somewhat of a helper.
00:35:47
Speaker
Yeah, they just want to be able to absorb knowledge. And I totally get that, guys. Like, let's face it, especially if you're in a country where this is illegal to do at home, it's pretty hard to make that transition. You've got to have a big old set of steel ones to go from having nothing. And in America, you pretty much have to jump in and get all the equipment, get everything set up, and then apply for your liquor license, which is crazy.
00:36:11
Speaker
It's bonkers. I mean, personally, I think it's pretty simple. If you really are doing this because you just want to learn, then I would reach out to anyone and say that you want to go there and almost be an apprentice,
Offering Skills for Learning in Distilling
00:36:26
Speaker
right? It's like you're going to be there and say, listen, I'll work for you for free for right now, just to learn. If you need me to sweep the floors or whatever, just so I can be around it and watch you actually produce, because I want to learn. I want to be a student.
00:36:41
Speaker
I think I don't know who wouldn't be up for that for someone that is like you know what that's pretty awesome it's kind of like an intern you know at a radio station right like they don't pay them usually you're going there for an internship so you can learn the trade
00:36:56
Speaker
but you're actually just going to volunteer and i know some people be like well i should get paid at least something no you are you're getting paid knowledge you're getting paid information that you're downloading in your brain from experience not from a book that you're reading right that's the one thing i have a problem with colleges like you don't really do the job.
00:37:13
Speaker
You don't do the job until it's like your last semester and then you get thrown into a classroom where you get thrown into the hospital to do an internship and you're like, oh damn, I don't really like this. This doesn't look like something I'm gonna wanna do. And you're like, holy crap, I just wasted three and a half years of my life or six years of my life or whatever. I would just, I mean, to get a hold of these people,
00:37:36
Speaker
you can go through a whole bunch of different channels. You can go through email if they have email, then Instagram, if they have an Instagram, if they have a Facebook page, just hit them at all different angles and just be like, listen, I want to come in. I want to work for you for free. And I just want to give you some time. I want to learn more about this. I'm obsessed with distilling and I just want to be around it. And that's it. That's the pitch, right? Yep. 100% agree. If you can offer some value too,
00:38:03
Speaker
Like say, look, I'm happy to come in and I'll sweep the floor. I'll show up on bottling day and help you bottle. Oh, but by the way, I am a plumber too. You know, like if you've got anything there, I'm happy to help out. Exactly. Yeah. Or I am an accountant or I'm into marketing or I'm a photographer or whatever it is.
00:38:21
Speaker
and that's something you said there that was interesting is you know the idea of never doing work for free and this has been a bug bear of mine in the photography world for a long time. The idea of oh you should never ever ever work for free because it screws the industry and it you know screws everyone else. I agree don't work for free never work for free
00:38:42
Speaker
But just because you're getting paid doesn't mean it has to be cash. Do you know what I mean? That's true. Yeah. If going and doing that job gets you access to that location, to that model, to that Lamborghini with the chicken, the bikini sitting on top of it. That's right. You're getting closer to that.
00:39:08
Speaker
If you've had this creative idea for an awesome photo with a chicken and bikini on a Lamborghini, but let's face it. You can get it. You've now got access to that. Offer them something, they offer you something, it doesn't have to be cash. In this situation, yeah, sure. There was one guy that I talked to recently, who was it?
00:39:34
Speaker
Oh, Gabriel from Balconas. He was very good at, that's a, sorry, a craft distillery in Texas for the uninitiated. Very, very good at visualizing data. So his sort of specialty was to be able to take data from a spreadsheet that was just a massive numbers
00:39:54
Speaker
and turn that into something that you could look like, turn it into a graphic sort of interface that you could look at and intuit information from it without having to dig into every little bit of numbers, right? Which sounds like a super niche piece of information. But think about a distillery that has thousands and thousands of barrels sitting there aging in their warehouse and they need to know what each one of those single barrels tastes like.
00:40:19
Speaker
That's a huge advantage. Huge. So what I'm saying is whatever skill it is that you have, you can offer something to a distillery. Maybe they've already got someone that covers that base and you're not that attractive to them. Move on to the next one.
00:40:35
Speaker
It could even be this like, okay, so I'm going to relate this to like marketing. Like if you're, if you're, uh, maybe you know, you're getting into distilling and, uh, you know, that's your hobby right now, but you want to turn it into a profession, but you've got web development background or you've got Facebook experience. You could reach out to that local distillery and go, Hey, you want me to help you get some more people in the door?
00:40:55
Speaker
Like, I'd love to help you if you'll let me come into your place and, and, you know, just shadow, you know, someone making or, uh, or, you know, someone that like, like you said, or maybe someone that is just organizing the things or seeing how everything is put together. Or when you do something on a certain day, I'd love to be there. I'll do that for you. That's what I do. That's my expertise. Like, like you said, or you're a plumber, right? Or you said, is, is, is a sparky, is that electrician? Yeah, sorry. Yeah.
00:41:22
Speaker
That's all right. I just learned something today, guys. If you're a Sparky, and I'm like, wait a minute, I think that's an electrician. New Zealanders have an innate need to shorten words and give them nicknames. I love it.
00:41:40
Speaker
Money story when I was coaching my son's baseball team when he was in little league. He's 22 now He all his all his friends when I was coaching they used to always call me Sparky because I always came there with a lot of energy, right? Yeah, right guys. Let's go. Let's go. We got to get it Let's get on the line. Let's go. Let's move right and they're like, ah Sparky's here. He's ready to go I had the name Sparky. So it was kind of funny that you that you said that but but yeah, I mean
00:42:07
Speaker
how can you add value? But also you don't have to always get paid because you're getting paid with the knowledge. I tell that to so many of my students are like, man, I'm so frustrated because I tried this thing and it didn't work. I'm like, well, what didn't work? Well, I ran Facebook ads and they didn't convert like I thought or whatever, right? I put up a webpage and I didn't get any traffic. I'm like, yeah, but you learned how to build a webpage. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, you learned how to run Facebook ads.
00:42:31
Speaker
Oh yeah, yeah. You learned something. That's knowledge. You got paid, right? 100%. Don't forget that. That's huge. Just like your podcast, the first two didn't work, but you learned how to produce a podcast. When you finally got to the podcast that did work, your first episode was a whole lot slicker than it would have been if you didn't quote unquote fail at the other two, right? And maybe it wouldn't have succeeded if you didn't have that level of polish when you first started. Who knows? Maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn't have.
00:43:00
Speaker
So, you know, there's always something that you can learn from it. A hundred percent. All right, guys. So I think that covers off. Just just to sum it up, get in touch with people first. What is it? What is it, Scott? Your catchphrase here?
00:43:15
Speaker
Take action. Yeah. Get off your ass or don't sit down on your ass in front of the computer right now. It probably is. Wishing that you could do it. Please let me somehow magically, you know, I'll create like a wish list and hopefully it'll come true. No, you have to do something.
00:43:31
Speaker
Yeah. Get in touch with people. If you're stuck at home right now, get on the computer, find them on Facebook, find an email, reach out to them, talk to them. If you're listening to this, when things open up, when the COVID thing starts chilling out, go in and see them. If they've got a bar that you can go and have a drink at, go have a bar. Go and have a drink, go have a bar. Go and see them.
00:43:54
Speaker
I think that's covered that off pretty well. Let's talk a little bit of marketing 101 for the guys that are thinking potentially about starting their own distillery, if they're thinking about making that
Marketing Strategies for Distilleries
00:44:06
Speaker
leap, because
00:44:09
Speaker
A lot of these guys are either, they even know that marketing is super important, but potentially that's just not the world they're in. Or they're so caught up in thinking about the technical side and the craft of distilling that maybe they haven't given us a thought. So let's lay down some 101 to get people inspired here on that side of things.
00:44:31
Speaker
Well, let's speak to someone that wants to start and then someone that's already up and running, because even if someone's up and running doesn't mean they're doing it right. Right. It just, I mean, I see a lot of businesses just failing at good marketing and basic marketing.
00:44:48
Speaker
I actually just had Dave Manley from MMA Bobblehead on. Okay. Now this guy is a classic example of how you're going to do what I'm going to explain that all of you can do as well. And his business went from doing okay to doing freaking unbelievable from making this one shift. And that is be very open and transparent showing behind the scenes of your process. Take people
00:45:20
Speaker
Are you talking to me or your wife? Yeah, no. And the funny thing is that I've just had a couple of other discussions with people about this. So yeah, carry on. I'll catch you up after you. Well, I've got I've got an episode coming out next week, depending on when you're listening to this. And you'll hear Dave Manley. Dave Manley is an awesome guest. He's got a lot of energy. He's in the MMA world. He's got a great story. He got turned down hundreds of times to make a bobblehead. Now, this bobblehead is not your typical bobblehead, by the way. It's not like the cheesy one. It's like
00:45:48
Speaker
Handcrafted artists like it's goes through a whole bunch of different renditions the fighter actually helps with the look and the feel and all that stuff but anyway. He started to do more of behind the scenes and then building up.
00:46:04
Speaker
This is the marketing side of it to building up the anticipation for this thing to release. So if you're in a, if you're distilling, there could be certain batches that you're creating that could create buzz for you locally, even, and being like, we only got three barrels of this stuff or whatever. Right.
00:46:20
Speaker
We're going to be opening it, releasing it on May 17th. If you want to get your hands on this and you want to test it and try it, would taste it, whatever, we're going to be having this here. You'd build up so much momentum in like the course of four to six weeks or however long the distilling takes. What? Three? I don't know. I don't even know that part of the process too front to end of when you can actually serve it. But whatever that timeframe is, you got to talk about conception.
00:46:45
Speaker
Why are you coming up with this blend? Why are you coming up with this, you know, whatever, and then lead them through the process of you actually doing it, getting the ingredients, putting it in. First round is this, then this, and every week you would post stuff on your Facebook page, drive Facebook ads, maybe even to your town locally.
00:47:02
Speaker
Showing them that guys are gonna be they're gonna be looking at it trust me and guys that are into brew into breweries or or to distilling they're going to be into it and they're gonna be fascinated by it then they're gonna be brought into it. Once you do that it builds up anticipation for these releases then when they get there guess what they're gonna buy other stuff they're not just gonna buy that right yeah that's how we can create buzz around that.
00:47:25
Speaker
Um, so that's just like one idea, but he did that and the business went from, like I said, just okay to freaking have it. He's going to have the best year ever right now. And it's, it's just crushing it because he's just leveraging the, uh, the attention, but also the buildup or the behind the scenes, right? You're letting someone behind the scenes. And that is powerful, really, really powerful.
00:47:51
Speaker
I've talked with multiple people about exactly what you're saying, which is crazy. It's really interesting that it's come up again. The last person I really talked about it in depth was Roy from Agravite, which was episode six, guys, if you haven't listened to that yet.
00:48:10
Speaker
And so just to catch you up Scott, Roy is very much on the whiskey appreciation. So he's not a whiskey reviewer, but that's kind of the space he slits in. So he's much more about, he's got an awesome little community of people and he does sort of live streams and talks whiskey and gets whiskey guests in.
00:48:29
Speaker
And when I asked him, what can someone do to really market a spirit that he went straight away to the idea of being open and collaborating with people. So the whiskey industry, especially, and I think the spirits industry in general traditionally has very much been our secret blend, our secret recipe. We'll give you little tastes of what we do, but we can't tell anyone because it's super secret. You know, it's the 11 herbs and spices type bollocks. Right. Right.
00:48:57
Speaker
And I guess that worked for a while, but that's not what that's not what people want anymore. People want to know what's going on. They want they want to peek behind the curtain. They want to have a buy in into the product from a conceptual level and sort of from an emotional level in terms of understanding how something happens. If you can understand what goes into your glass of whatever it is you're drinking.
00:49:20
Speaker
and you understand the toil and the love that was put into it, it becomes more than just the drink, it becomes an experience overall. And people get to know you, they get to love what you're doing, you become someone in the local community, like you're saying, Scott, right? That develops into more than just a sum of its parts.
00:49:39
Speaker
And he was sort of suggesting even from a step further than that, rather than just opening the doors to the consumer, opening the doors to your quote unquote competition. So be open and help other people out in the industry, even look at doing a blended product together or a commercial collaboration as well. And I think that ties into all of that, of what you're just saying.
00:50:04
Speaker
It does. And you know, what would also be a fun experiment, which I think would work really well is you could do like a duel, right? Like you can do like, you know, brewery, a brewery, be whatever, right. Or distill here, here, you're going to have a friendly little shootout and then you, you both document process you both. And then the finale is going to be held at one of the venues and then you're going to have a taste off.
00:50:31
Speaker
You know what I mean? Like kind of thing and bringing people in. So that would create some really good friendly buzz, you know, around that. The other cool idea I had here, and this kind of came from Dwayne The Rock Johnson. He just came out with a tequila, right?
00:50:47
Speaker
What if you, what if you got ahold of an influencer and said, how would you like to come with us and we'll basically create a spirit with you and you're going to have like the flavoring and the testing and we're going to build it to your liking. Other fans are going to want to buy that, or they're going to want to actually watch along that process. So whether you have people come in, uh, and I'm not sure how it would work because it is alcohol. So it's going to be hard to like maybe ship that or whatever, but yeah.
00:51:13
Speaker
the same breath, still get a lot of tension and a lot of buzz. So I mean, again, what I would do if I was a distillery of any kind, I would have merchandise always. And I would sell that whether people can come into my location or not, I would have things to sell online. I mean, period, there's got to be something you could make a transaction online.
00:51:35
Speaker
And there's a whole bunch that you could do there. We don't have time to go to all that stuff, but there's a ton And so that way there you can kind of capitalize on not just being local But now you can get a global audience almost like a TV show Well, well actually that's something else that I talked about with Roy was the idea that
00:51:53
Speaker
Let's face it guys, if you want to get into the media game, which I think you should as a distillery. And I think you should be creating content that people can look behind the scenes. But if you really want to push that as your main lead generation tool, you need to put some work into it, man. It's a lot of work to create, to build up enough steam on a media platform, you know, whether it be Facebook videos or YouTube or whatever it happens to be, Instagram.
00:52:18
Speaker
You need to commit to it. Like it's not an afterthought. It is a job in and of itself. And you need to consistently be publishing quality products, quality content. And you need to remember, please guys, you need to remember that it's not about
00:52:34
Speaker
creating content that you watch, sorry, that you want the person to watch. It's about creating content that that person wants to watch. So please don't just create a series of ads for your product. That will not work. Come and buy bottle X because bottle X, awesome. People don't give a shit. They'll ignore you. They'll ignore the heck out of you.
00:52:58
Speaker
No, I think being more open and being transparent of and being raw. I think it's like, you know, yes, we all love production. We love high quality, but we also love raw and authentic. And when when you see someone following you around with your iPhone,
00:53:15
Speaker
And that video is a little bit shaky and then it stabilizes and stuff it's like you're walking with them. And i think that that's very very powerful so don't over complicate the production and if you're if you're listening to this or watching this and you're like.
00:53:29
Speaker
You know, I've got some video skills a little bit. Maybe you should reach out to that distillery and say, Hey, listen, I got some stuff. I think that we should do this. You know, these couple of guys were talking about this on this podcast. You might want to listen to that podcast episode and then we'll convince them for you because it's huge. Like I think that there's a huge opportunity for both ends of it. You know, if you want to be the one that's following around with the camera and that, that could be your end. That could be your way to get in there to be around it. Let me just follow you around and show behind the scenes and then we can build up buzz around your business.
00:53:59
Speaker
Pretty simple. Totally. And it could be that you go and do that for a month for them for free. Show them the value of it and then say, you know, look, I'll do this for you for a month. I'll come on every Friday morning. We'll make a quick video. Let's review after a month. You know, I'll learn some stuff from you. You don't pay me anything. You get some videos out of it in a month's time. You know, maybe you have another talk about who pays who and who does what for who, you know? No, it's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:54:26
Speaker
So what I'm saying is, guys, if you're going to create videos or whatever for people, you need to give them something that they want to know. So who's your target market? Who are you trying to contact? Who are you trying to tell about your product? Eventually, is it the local people in your area that are into home distilling? Cool. All right. So make videos about how you're making the product. This is an idea for a mash ton. This is how you could do it at home if you're going to scale it down.
00:54:52
Speaker
These are the products we use. This is what you could sub out at home because it's hard for you to get. Those people will eat that up. Then at the end of every little video, you've got your logo or once every few videos, you do a bit more of a hard sell on the product that you want to sell. Maybe that's not what they're into. Maybe there's a kick-ass bar scene in your little area. Now you're talking about the ingredients that you're using, the raw ingredients and how they pair with
Leveraging Local Culture and Ingredients
00:55:21
Speaker
the local tonic that's made down the road and how to make a cocktail out of that or, oh, we're known for oranges, so let's make a cocktail that features oranges. Oh, by the way, we just happen to use our product, but it's not a, here's our product. It's so amazing. Oh, by the way, there's a cocktail. It's the opposite, right? There's a cocktail. This is so great. And you just happen to get a shot of your bottle going past the screen. You have to think like that, guys. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
00:55:50
Speaker
Let's switch a little bit to some of the more technical stuff in terms of different channels that people can use for advertising. And let's just sort of glaze over a few of them. We're not going to be able to give you an in-depth
00:56:05
Speaker
education on any of these guys. But I think what we might be able to do, Scott, is skim over the top of a few different things. I mean, the ones that come to me are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and I know you have to mention email lists. And then I think maybe a quick thing about perhaps like events or local groups and clubs. So which one do you want to tackle first, mate?
00:56:28
Speaker
There's actually another one too that I think could probably work well, but again, it depends on. Okay. So if we're talking video platforms, if we're talking about video content, I think we got to, we got to determine what's that going to be. And there's one thing that you said that I want to highlight before we move on. And that is you said that whatever you're going to do, you'd need to treat it as almost as if it's another job. You have to commit to it.
00:56:51
Speaker
And that's one thing you did really good on your YouTube channel is you committed from day one to showing up at least once a week for 52 weeks. And that's what you made the commitment to do. And then you even gave yourself a day that it was going to be aired, a time it was going to be aired. So you were like, you know, on a production schedule. And I think that's really, really important because so many people will be like, Oh, I'm going to post one a week and you don't know when it's going to be. And you're like, Oh, it's Friday. I still haven't done it Saturday. Haven't done it Sunday. Haven't done it. I'll just do it next week.
00:57:18
Speaker
And then you just push it off and off and off. So I think you need to come up with some type of production schedule. So that way there you stick to it. Really, really important. But if we're talking video. It doesn't matter whether it's video, photo, email. No, that's anything. It doesn't matter what it is. Any marketing plan that you come up with, you need that schedule. You really do.
00:57:37
Speaker
So I would say as far, I always talk like evergreen content. So evergreen content, meaning it's not Instagram where you put something up and then tomorrow it's buried and it's gone. No one is searching on there. No one is really discovering you now is Instagram good? Yeah, it's good for amplification. Um, it's a great platform, but it's not one that I would start with. Um, and a lot of people want to, they want to get like a whole bunch of followers and they think that it's going to get a whole bunch of reach, but it's really, really, it's not good numbers. I mean, when you look at the numbers, they're compared to like an email list.
00:58:07
Speaker
It's just night and day, right? I've seen people with millions of, millions of followers and they get like a thousand views or a thousand likes. I'm like, that's terrible. Right. Let's, let's break that down. And, and sorry, Scott, I'm not saying that we should talk about video and everything. I'm just saying we should like, let's talk about completely different avenues of marketing that people could go into and gloss over them. But let's, let's dig into that a little bit more. So Instagram, Instagram to me is like the junk food of
00:58:34
Speaker
all of this stuff. Not that it's bad. It can be awesome, but there's kind of a time and a place for it. And what I mean by that is if you have a hundred people on a mailing list and you send an email out to people, you know, you might get five or six people actually following the link and purchasing something.
00:58:53
Speaker
If you put that same amount of people into Instagram and did a call to action on Instagram, you'll get nothing. You need tenfold the reach on Instagram to get the results and it's simply because
00:59:09
Speaker
If you think about the interaction on Instagram, right, you can be scrolling. You go scroll, scroll, scroll, love, scroll, scroll, scroll, heart, scroll, scroll, scroll, click, look at profile and scroll, scroll. You know, the amount of time that someone gives you for the metric that Instagram serves up to you to tell you that you were successful with that photo is
00:59:30
Speaker
is nothing compared to the time that someone takes to open an email, read it a little bit and, you know, and click a button. So the email email to me would be like if I was a local business to like if that's that's what I would have an email list 100 percent. You know, some people say, oh, email, isn't it dead? No, it's not. People actually go there because it's less crowded than social media. Right. And they still email. They might check it twice a day. Maybe they check it only once a day.
01:00:00
Speaker
But it's still really, really powerful. We use it in all the brands that we build. And, you know, all of my students, I always encourage them to build. Because if you build an email list with the right people, you're going to get them to open it because, number one, they signed up to hear from you.
01:00:18
Speaker
And the way that you do that is you give them value when you, you know, so if you were going to do something really fun, like show behind the scenes or something and do like a, you know, a documentation of like the entire process, someone would sign up probably to watch that. Well, you could get them on an email list. So every time you have a new video, you can then email them and not just wait for YouTube or Facebook to let them know. You can just nudge them a little bit and say, Hey, just want to let you know, just posted the video number one in this series. Go check it out.
01:00:48
Speaker
And there's two, I mean, there's two other things that I, I'm pretty sure I got from you originally, but it's become more, it's been proven true more and more to me, you know, in every space I use this. Number one is that you own the email list. Let me say that again.
01:01:03
Speaker
you own it, it is yours. Because let's face it, Instagram is not yours, YouTube is not yours, that's their platform and if they decide to make you go bye-bye, there's literally nothing you can do about it and also let's face it guys, if you're in the alcohol business that I could see that getting to a point where YouTube says and I've worried about this, I've been concerned about this,
01:01:25
Speaker
Sorry guys, anything that even remotely is related to alcohol or promotes alcohol or promotes drinking in any way, shape or form, it's gone or it's demonetized or it's shadow band or whatever they decide to do. And if that happens, you lose everything, you know, but if you've got the email list, even if the platform, like, so if you're with get response or MailChimp or whatever.
01:01:48
Speaker
If MailChimp decides to say, sorry guys, no more alcohol advertising through MailChimp, you go, great. Okay. You download your list and you move to somewhere else. So that's number one. Number two is that even if you are paying for leads, which I guess we can talk about a little bit as well, once you've acquired that lead, you can use it as many times as you want for free. You can keep emailing people every week for free.
01:02:13
Speaker
Whereas on Facebook, the idea of having a business account and getting lots of likes and then everyone will love me and hear what I have to say is just a dead thing. Facebook is pay to play and if you advertise to someone, you put a paid advertisement out there.
01:02:33
Speaker
Once it goes to them, you got to pay again next time, you know? Right. But the cool, look, the cool thing is though, about, and let's talk about paid ads real
Effective Use of Facebook for Marketing
01:02:44
Speaker
quick. Cause I think, I think we have to talk about this and I think I'm assuming you're going to redirecting and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. A local business can really, really benefit from this because you have less competition in the paid world.
01:02:57
Speaker
There's less businesses doing Facebook ads, and if they are, they're probably not doing it right. But the way I look at it too, though, is we're not necessarily looking at running ads to people to just get them to convert to a sale. That's where people fail.
01:03:13
Speaker
OK, yeah, what we're doing, and this is getting a little bit technical and in Jim, but we'll just throw it out there. You guys can chew on it a little bit, but we can take our email list, by the way, too. We can re upload that to Facebook and we can create a lookalike audience of those people or we can just target those people again. Totally, totally doable, totally possible.
01:03:31
Speaker
I think before we get stuck into this, let's talk about what's possible on you on, sorry, on Facebook ads, your second in terms of the tools that they give you and why it can be so powerful. Yep. Okay. So, and the thing I love about this, let's say I put a video out on my Facebook fan page. Now all businesses, you should have a Facebook fan page, period. You should have, it's a must just to have it. If you ever want to run ads, you're going to need it. So just put it up there, post some things, right?
01:03:57
Speaker
But you don't have to worry about getting reach. Everyone's like, oh, I want to get a whole bunch of likes and then I'm going to post something. People are going to see it. No, they're not. They're not going to see. You're going to see that boat. That boat is gone. It's failed. So but what we can do is it's you're almost building an email list in a sense. We're building a custom audience by the by the engagement. OK, so let me just kind of outline this. Let's say I shot a video that's five minutes long, seven minutes long showing the behind the scenes footage that we talked about.
01:04:27
Speaker
And I go ahead and I put it up on my Facebook fan page and you'd be like, okay, well we put it there. And I got maybe 500 people that liked my page and like, I don't know, 20 people viewed it. Okay, great. But here's the deal. I can take money. Let's say I take five bucks and I go, I want to target everyone in my area in the zip code that I want to target. And I want them to be a male between.
01:04:50
Speaker
22 years old and 28 years old, 35 years old, whatever you wanna make. And then from there, I'm gonna show that video to all of those people. And now what I can do is anyone that views that video, I can start to create these custom audiences behind the scenes that I can say, hey, anyone that's watched 25% or more of my video, that means I know that they're interested in what I have to offer or in my business, I wanna then put them into their own list.
01:05:19
Speaker
And then I'm going to target those people with my, this Friday special, or maybe it's another video that I'm going to show them that has something else to do with my business, right? It's a way for me to build a list in a sense, a custom audience, they call it inside of Facebook that I can then retarget later. So we call this a warm, warm audience. It's they know us now because they've watched 25% of a five minute, 10 minute video, right? And you know, if it's two and a half minutes, they're actually interested. They haven't just clicked on.
01:05:47
Speaker
How much do people pay for a 30 second spot on TV? We're talking, we're saying we want to show it to these people for pennies, by the way. Like we, we sometimes get views as cheap as like five to 10 cents for a view. Right. So imagine this though, you have a billboard out there.
01:06:08
Speaker
old fashioned billboard on the road. Someone drives by it. They look up at it. Okay. Now imagine if I could basically have my little, my little robot go out there and tag the back of their car.
01:06:20
Speaker
Right. And I can say anybody that looked up at my sign, I'm going to tag them and then I'm going to show them billboards until they can't, you know, you know, they can't ever see anything else, but my signs, that's all I'm going to do. I'm just going to keep showing my signs. They're going to be like, Oh my gosh, that company's everywhere. But that's because I tagged them. Right. Because they've made an action. They've done something. You can't do that with billboards, but you can do it with Facebook ads. And that's what I love about it. Cause we can actually segment these people out and then we can start showing up all the time for pennies on a dollar.
01:06:49
Speaker
Um, it's really, really powerful. It's not that hard to do, but to some people be like, Oh, I don't know how to do it. I'm not going to do it. You don't have to do it right now. You could hire someone to do it. It's not that expensive, but something definitely that is a huge advantage that if your competition's locally, they're probably not doing it. And that's an advantage you could have over top of them for sure.
01:07:07
Speaker
Or if they are, like you said, then they're not doing it well. And no, please, please, please, guys, you need to get the idea of the amount of dollars that you put in versus the amount of dollars that you take out right away. That is not the game we're playing. This is this is not a quick game of I put $5 into Facebook marketing and then my sales go up by, you know, $15 in that week. That's not what this game is about. This game is about
01:07:32
Speaker
brand recognition, brand reach, brand amplification, which then turns into an increase in your weekly, monthly, yearly sales. But just to take it back to what we talked about before, you're not, you know, when I said you don't create straight up adverts for your product when you're trying to reach people. But with this strategy, you can. So I'm not sure if you guys heard it or caught it when Scott said this. So what he's saying is you create a video
01:08:02
Speaker
that people just want to watch like an entertainment video, a video of interest, something that is fun for people to watch and learn from or just enjoy. Then in Facebook, you can say Facebook, keep track of all the people that watch this video. Like if someone watches this video and they watch it for 5%, 25%, 50% of that five minute video, 10 minute video,
01:08:25
Speaker
tag them and keep them on the wings. We'll remember them for later. Then when you do make an ad and put it up, you go, I could spend money on, send this ad to everyone in the world, and you could waste your money. You could throw your money away.
01:08:40
Speaker
Or you could say, find all of the people that are in a certain age range, in a certain geographic location. Heck, you could even say, I've noticed a lot of the local whitewater paddlers are coming into the distillery on their way home from the river. You can go into Facebook, and Facebook will let you target people that have that specific interest in your local area with an age. So you can do all of that. But then you can also say,
01:09:09
Speaker
anyone that's watched this video that I put out before for more than X amount of time, advertise to them. So now you're niching right, right, right, right, right down. And the amount of people you can reach through that is insanely powerful compared to like you're saying the TV ad, right? If you put an ad up on TV, you get a rough, roughly niche niche down based on whatever the program is. But anyone could be watching that. You've got no idea.
01:09:36
Speaker
Not only that, now you can tell everyone knows Facebook loves to steal your data and knows exactly who you are and exactly what he does. So you can become the evil overlord and use that yourself for the sweet price of cold hard cash. But you can tell Facebook, go and look at all the people that have watched this video.
01:09:58
Speaker
Look at all the people that have watched those video and then find more people that are just like these people and advertise to them specifically. That's your lookalike. You can just keep redirecting people all over the place, from ad to ad and group to group, and it becomes very, very powerful if you have the foresight to map this out. We can't get into all of this now, guys. No. You could do a four-hour podcast just on Facebook advertising, just for a distillery and not get to the end of it.
01:10:28
Speaker
It is daunting when you first open, you know, like don't just use the boost. Dear God. Dear God. Don't click boost. Yeah, don't do that. You will waste more money there too. I mean, you won't waste it necessarily, but you're gonna, you'd get way more bang for your buck if you use the actual ad manager.
01:10:45
Speaker
Yeah. But I think the big takeaway here is for people though, Jesse, is that there's a ton of opportunity to let people inside your business locally or globally. You can do it all. But if you're local, you have just a greater advantage because you could be everywhere to those people, the right people. So again, imagine having three, 400 people
01:11:10
Speaker
you know in a room that you know would wanna probably come to your place cuz they're interested in that right and you can just start just sending sending ads to those people in an ad necessarily isn't selling something. Add could be just a call to action to do something right like.
01:11:28
Speaker
enter your contest or get on the email list or whatever, right? That could be another way for you to get them to take an action. Now, one thought I did have, which I think would be really, really incredibly powerful is let's say that you have people that came into your place and you just had random videos of them, like having fun or doing one of your samplers or that the taste tests or any of that stuff. That could be one of your videos that if people are watching the reaction of what the taste test was.
01:11:58
Speaker
Well, now we know, oh, they watched 25% of that video. That person's interested in coming in our place and maybe doing a taste testing themselves, right? So that's a great way and people love that. It's not about you, the owner necessarily. It's
Collaborations and Networking Opportunities
01:12:09
Speaker
about the people.
01:12:10
Speaker
right? Yeah, I think that's brilliant. I think people should do that. So obviously, guys, we haven't given you any, you know, real nitty gritty specific stuff. But I'm hoping what we've given you is a little thread, something that you can follow, you can pull, you can start unraveling, you've got a few things that you can Google, you can jump on over to Scott's podcast, and, you know, learn a whole lot more about specific brand building and marketing from Scott. But one final thought,
01:12:38
Speaker
wherever you are, there's probably a really high chance that there is someone that is, their game is creating content, right? And you can let them do the work for you, invite them in and tell them to make a video for you. Yeah. Once again, make sure you give them something of value back, you know, say, Hey, look, we're thinking about setting up a
01:13:00
Speaker
whatever it happens to be, a cheese and gin pairing night. Do you want a free ticket? Come along, record it, you know, and we'll give you access to the head chef and the distiller and stuff as well. I mean, why not? What have you got to lose? Like drop an email, like leave a comment on someone's YouTube channel or podcast or whatever it happens to be. I mean, I know you'd be interested in that, right, Scott? You probably won't be able to show up in person, but if you can talk to someone that's doing something cool, a local business, like why would you not talk to them?
01:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, no, I actually have a, uh, somewhat of a story real quick that we'll, we'll finish here with, uh, just to kind of show you guys what we're talking about about, I think it's about three years ago. Now, maybe four years ago, we had a little in person, uh, like a little workshop. It was like 25 people, people paid 1200 bucks to be in the room. We taught marketing. We taught like how to really grow and build their business. And it was for people that were started, but they wanted to grow.
01:13:56
Speaker
And so I wanted a videographer to come in and record so we could then give them the recordings, but then also use it as a sizzle reel to sell the next event. Right. So I reached out to my audience and I said, is anybody a videographer? I'd be interested to see your, your work.
01:14:13
Speaker
possibly either hire you or give you free access to our event and so i had probably about six people reach out to me one really qualified and so we ended up they didn't do it for a hundred percent free we actually paid for their flight and their room okay but they gave us their services for free.
01:14:32
Speaker
So basically they didn't charge us for that. It would have been about a four to a $5,000 bill. Um, and we ended up just saying like, Hey, come on, you know, you you'll be there. We'll leave an answer. We'll give you an hour to yourself that will actually consult you, whatever. And they showed up, they soaked in after they had the cameras all set up pretty much. They didn't have to do anything other than just make sure that everything was still working. And they soaked up so much information. They were, they were just so grateful that we allowed them to do that. And so again,
01:15:00
Speaker
They came there with their equipment and they gave us their time. We just provided them a flight and room, and obviously we fed them. And that was it, right? So that's how it works. People are willing to do that if you have a skill set and you want to trade your services in a sense so they can learn.
01:15:19
Speaker
So I think that you really just need to take advantage of that. Either you're the one that's going to be the one that's providing the service or maybe there's someone that you know that might be interested and you can offer it to them to come on in and do something and just kind of barter with them a little bit. Yeah, totally. But please guys, do a little research on the value of what it is you're asking someone to do. Like if you've never worked with a videographer, have a look at market rates because that is not cheap and there's a reason it's not cheap. It's a lot of work.
01:15:49
Speaker
you know you see people all the time saying oh you know come and cover this for me and do this and this and i want this as a product and you know i'll give you this ticket to the $50 event like dude you give me a $50 ticket and that's a five grand package you're wanting you know yeah don't do that to people i agree no but not at all but like for me example for example if if you run
01:16:13
Speaker
a craft distillery or a micro distillery or any distillery. Have a think about what it is that you do that's special and different from someone else. Get in touch with me, send me some samples so I can taste what you're talking about. In short, if there's something there, if there's a discussion that we can have that's of value for my listeners, then yeah, dude, I'd love to get you on the podcast.
Conclusion and Gratitude
01:16:34
Speaker
That can be advertising for you as well. Go and find other people to do that with.
01:16:38
Speaker
It doesn't have to be someone that's in the whiskey or the distilling space either. Find someone that's in marketing or find someone that's into cooking and do a pairing night with them. Someone that's into growing their own corn and talk about how you can, whatever, you get the idea, right? Find a way to cross pollinate. I think that's awesome. It's beautiful.
01:17:02
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Thanks a bunch, Scott. This has been absolutely awesome. I appreciate it, man. I appreciate your time and I'm sure the listeners appreciate it too. Please, everyone. Actually, Scott, tell us where the best place to find you is right now. Yeah.
01:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, you can just go to brand creators.com and you'll find all the information over there. That's really what we specialize in. You'll also find the information on the podcast and everything over there. So just brand creators.com. We've got some free resources there for marketing and things like that. So check it out. I would love to engage with anyone that has any questions or anything. I'm always available so you can find me over there.
01:17:42
Speaker
Awesome. All right. Cool. Thanks, Mike. All right, Jesse. Thank you, man. Hey, once again, I want to say, man, I'm proud of you, man. You've come a long way. And now look at you. You've got your podcast. So I just I'm truly proud of you. And I just think it's awesome. And I think you've got a bright future ahead of you because you get it, man. And you make the commitment. And I think anyone listening, just follow what Jesse's doing. Just make the commitment. Stick to it. Show up. Put in the work. Take action. Thanks. Means a lot coming from you, mate.
01:18:13
Speaker
So a huge, huge thank you to Scott for taking some time out of his day to hang out with us and talk marketing and general ways of getting into an industry and making yourself valuable. It's very much appreciated. I hope you guys have enjoyed this. I know it's very different to the normal content we create. But let me know guys, if you're into this more meta sort of ethereal content that fits around the distilling space and around the community and around the industry rather than being specifically about it,
01:18:38
Speaker
I'd love to hear from you, let me know if you're into it. Once again, thank you so much to Gladfield and to the Patreons for making this possible. If you are finding value in these podcasts or anything else that's still at or Chase The Craft produces and you want to know how you can help ensure its continued growth, feel free to visit chasethecraft.com slash support to find out all the ways you can do so.
01:19:03
Speaker
Thanks a bunch for hanging out guys, this was an absolute blast. It's always fun for me to do these things, so thank you. Until next time, keep on chasing the craft.