Well, hey, Adela, thank you for joining.
I wanted to let you know I really appreciated our original chat and getting to know you a bit.
I was hoping maybe you could tell me a little bit about the background that you've gained your experience through that brought you to becoming, I'd say, a leader in the space of
email.
and I'd say digital marketing overall.
Could you give me a little bit of background from your perspective on how you've gotten to this point of really being a thought leader in this space?
Yeah.
So I think one of the important things to realize is digital marketing didn't exist when I went to college and it didn't exist when I quit college, right?
So the, I guess that's one of the things that I would say is a piece of advice right early in is it's hard to tell, especially today, the world moves faster today than it was when I
was first started working and
our parents and our parents' parents, the world is exponentially quicker.
And it's really hard to figure out what you want to do on a 50 year timeframe when we have no idea what the tech's gonna look like or what jobs are gonna exist or don't exist.
So kind of always be prepared to take up an opportunity.
And with mine in college, I studied agricultural economics because I kind of wanted to do something around the economics of agriculture and helping the world feed itself back in
the day.
Feeding ourselves was the biggest problem that we had and we spent a lot of time thinking about it.
So I kind of did a degree in that.
It was meh.
I was good, but not that engaged.
I spent most of my time working.
And so when I sort of got out, I hadn't gone through the sort of job rounds and trying to find a job and applying for jobs and everything else.
I'm like, my God, my God, what am gonna do?
And so I just started looking for a job and there's an ad that said...
Earn money in London.
Pound, pound, pound sign, right?
And I'm like, dollar, dollar, dollar sign.
I'm like, okay, I'll go.
And I went for an interview and it's like a sales job, selling advertising.
I needed money, I needed work, I wanted to live in London.
Boom, took the job.
Didn't even think about it.
In fact, I went down for three interviews in the same space because there's a recruitment headhunter, recruitment company that put me for three interviews.
I got all three jobs and I picked the one with the last money.
Go figure.
That's another story.
They kind of sold me into it.
The point about it is media, digital is media, right?
And marketing is media.
That's really eyeballs.
That's what you're selling.
And that's what media and digital marketing is all about, getting eyeballs.
So that space was pretty interesting.
It was called business publishing.
And what they did was they would get in a...
databases of 10 ,000, 100 ,000 lawyers, accountants, you call them CPAs or IT consultants, right?
They would print a magazine full of content just for that audience, send it to them for free subscription, some were paid, some were free, but ours was free, and make the money
on advertising, right?
And I'm like...
How does that work?
Okay, and this is one of the things, when you're in college, there are a bunch of jobs that you could never understand.
That's why all kids want to be firefighters or nurses or doctors is because that's the only jobs they understand or a teacher, right?
In fact, one of my daughters once said to me, dad, your job running a company is I like being the head teacher.
I'm like, I guess, because that's the only thing they can think about, right?
So.
I started doing this job selling.
never particularly liked selling.
I mean, I'm good at it, but I hate it, if that makes sense.
It's just one of those things that you kind of have to do.
And so the idea was to bring people up and say, hey, we've got this magazine that's read by a hundred thousand of these sorts of people.
Why don't you put your advertising?
Now, remember this was a tech, my title was a tech title.
So it was in the same space as PC week or computer world.
I don't know if you remember those titles from back in the day.
PC week, yeah.
right?
But the digital versions only.
So I went to work with them and we were just selling advertising.
So all I was doing was ringing up all the tech companies.
Microsoft was a tiny company back then, right?
And ringing up saying, hey, do want to put that ad in our magazine?
It's read by all these guys and blah, blah.
The point of that piece of the story is that it costs even then, let's say $5, $10 a unit to print this title, have all the editors and writers writing the stories.
printing it, bagging it up, sending it by courier or mail to 100 ,000 people.
That's a lot of money.
And it was made with the advertising.
And the way I figured out what was going on was it's basically eyeballs.
So the more eyeballs you have, the more you can charge and the more people want your magazine, right?
And I began to, and the quality of your eyeballs matter, right?
So.
list quality, right?
That's always important and all that sort of stuff.
So the bigger the list and the better quality it is, the better the advertising will work and the better the advertising works, the better the advertisers come back to you.
Simple, right?
But in my head, I saw the pages of the magazine and I didn't have the language then as the user interface or the interface between the eyeballs, which is IT professionals or the
people you want to sell to, right?
And the advertiser.
So I started, so I did that for a few years.
worked with magazines, then I went to a national newspaper, The Times of London.
I worked there.
I set up a whole IT section showing my age now, but we did a special supplement for the launch of Windows 95.
And I was all over that and created something like, I don't know, $1 .5, $2 million worth of revenue for the title in one day for a section never been heard of before.
And I was taken out to dinner by the, you know, like,
the managing director and everything like that for doing a great job.
But it was that, and I just saw it always as the more eyeballs you have and the better quality you have, the better your title.
The other thing I learned, which is kind of interesting and it speaks to something I'll talk about later, is that in publishing, if you think about it, an annual is more
expensive, sorry, it's cheaper to produce than a quarterly and a quarterly,
It's the other way around.
So an annual is cheaper than a quarterly, a monthly is cheaper than a quarterly, a weekly is cheaper than a monthly, a daily is cheaper.
It's the other way around.
So it's more expensive to produce, right?
But you actually make more money because you get more readership, because people have to advertise more in order to get the same eyeballs, right?
That's the first thing.
The second thing is that...
Your readership per issue is very different from your readership over a month's worth of issues if you're a daily, right?
Or a month's worth of issues if you're a weekly.
So you actually get more engagement with higher frequency.
That costs more.
So you have to make more money, right?
That's the simple thing.
So when the internet came and the web came and like, my God, first of all, the interface has become interactive, right?
And secondly,
the cost of production is nearly zero, right?
This is amazing, right?
I was just like, I've got to be in this space.
So I was actually one of the first people who was relatively senior to move across to the digital space.
And I headed up sales in Excite across the whole of Europe for about four or five years, four or four years, time flies.
And so that's how I started.
And while I was at Excite,
Again, we're talking a long time ago.
You remember the information super highway and Al Gore and all that kind of stuff and all of that kind of stuff?
Now, at the time, governments were taking the web as something that they could control and they could own.
And so the information super highway, so the government could do that.
And the government said they were going to create an email address for every kid in the country.
I mean, can you imagine they were going to spend millions of dollars creating
a system that was specific to school kids and giving everyone in the country.
The Swedish government did something like that as well, right?
And at the time, Hotmail had just started and Excite was offering a free email product.
So I just went to the folks and said, listen, why don't we just get a big PR hit by offering free email addresses to everyone starting tomorrow.
Everybody, every school kid in the country can have one tomorrow.
We'll create a special environment with special rules.
So for example, you
You had to email out to get an email in or you had to have a safe list of your school teachers.
we said, we put some stuff together to make it a safe product for school kids.
Launched it, got loads of press and blah, blah, blah.
And it was at that point I realized, wow, email.
So I'm selling eyeballs, right?
So I'm excited.
At the time I'm one of the biggest sites of traffic in the whole of Europe, okay?
After AOL and Microsoft and your own, okay?
And people are...
begging me for traffic.
mean, everybody used to come to my door saying, Hey, listen, now can I pay to advertise?
I want to sponsor this section, et cetera, et cetera.
And they were all crazy about it.
And I then thought email, if I have your email address, I don't need to pay anyone for your eyeballs.
I can publish myself.
And that's the Genesis, right?
So I thought email, this is amazing.
And I set up an agency to provide content.
for brands who wanted to email their customers.
Remember I came from a publishing background, right?
So my idea was create a weekly magazine full of interesting stuff so that their subscribers are gonna like it and blah, blah, blah.
And the first client went, yeah, great, I'll do it.
But I haven't got any way, I haven't got any ESP.
I don't know how to send an email and can you do all of that?
And that's when I realized that actually an email, the devil's in the detail.
Production is incredibly labor intensive and that hasn't changed a great deal over the years.
And every time...
We fixed one thing production -wise to reduce labor intensity, then we put something else in there and say, you've got to personalize to this and the other and everyone's now
manually doing shit again, right?
So it's kind of, you know, that...
That's the weird thing about the email space.
And I realized there was an opportunity and I just was forced by what people wanted to pay for to start delivering production, building the emails, HTML, know, getting them in the
inbox, working on deliverability, although that was less of an issue back in the day than possibly it is now and doing all of that.
So.
If this sort of speaks to a number of questions that you're going to allude to and people are always interested, how did you get there?
And the answer is, I had no idea, right?
And it's sort of, and I'm sort of flowing into, I highlighted something for the next point, which is describe a key turning point, right?
And I went, there isn't any.
Is that good or is that bad?
I mean, I find that human beings have an amazing capacity to retrofit intent to just random stuff.
That's how we, you know, when we predict the election, we always get it wrong.
And then two years later, we go, well, you know something, we knew exactly what was happening.
The rooms were there.
The reason they got it wrong on the day was because of X, Y, and Z, but really we did know anyway, right?
So I'm tempted and I'm always tempted.
to sort of build a resume that makes me sound like some genius who sat down and figured out where digital was going.
I'm not.
All I did.
So every experience you had.
impacts every experience after and is impacted by every experience before.
It's how I describe email marketing in general.
Too many people try and optimize every email that goes out to be perfect.
Human beings try and do the same thing.
Every move they make has to be perfect, right?
And they've got to, it's all got to be great.
And we've got to plan it all, et cetera, et cetera.
And my view and the way I describe it, and when I first thought of it and coined the idea, I went and Googled and there are a couple of sites that do this.
I'm saying it's like,
It's like optimizing a movie one frame at a time.
Okay?
So I Googled it and there was a Top Gun one frame at a time and I think the movie studio made them take it down for destroying their work.
So if you think about it, so the point about it is never forget the story, be flexible.
And I think that's probably what it was, is that it's not so much that I knew where I was going or even could envisage.
I mean, that's the thing about it.
Growing up,
probably even for you, you just couldn't envisage how much tech has taken over the world.
Anybody 40 year old, anybody who's been working 40 years, that's definitely true.
Even 20 years, you're probably in a place where the internet was just, in fact, 20 years ago, can tell you right now, I had more bandwidth and more access to the internet,
ability, access to anything digital than 99 .99 % of the world.
And that's only 20 years ago.
So.
So it's just about getting there and most people in digital just got there because no one knew what they were doing, but they just knew a bit of something.
And that's what I mean about everything you do before informs everything you do afterwards.
And it's why when, when, when times are tough and I've said this to my kids, listen, I would, I would flip burgers in McDonald's in a heartbeat rather than not work.
And I don't mean that in a bad way and be dismissive of people who can't work.
I mean it in the sense there's two things.
When you're working, guess what you can't do?
Spend money.
Right?
because you're too busy.
So you're working.
The second thing is if you just go in there and do your best, I'll guarantee you, I would be a manager of the local McDonald's in under six months if I went to work there cleaning
the floor, sweeping the floor.
Why wouldn't I be?
Right?
And it's because I would care and I'd want to do that and I'd put everything into it and blah, blah, blah.
So now you're flipping burgers and you meet someone.
or you're at the till and someone comes in and says, hey, you seem like a cool guy.
You're very well educated.
You speak well, what's that?
say, I finished college, I haven't got a job, blah, blah, blah.
And they go, that's interesting.
Here's my card, give me a call.
That wouldn't happen if you were in bed.
It wouldn't happen if you were in bed.
So the point is keep doing, okay?
There is one small proviso that people will tell you is that flipping burgers, if you just do that and don't save time and energy to think of something else or just indulge another
pattern to make yourself grow, you'll probably be in that job, but you'll be very senior.
I mean, you could end up heading McDonald's in 50 years.
It's possible, right?
It's absolutely possible.
So don't...
restrict your thinking by your understanding of what the total job thing is.
Just be prepared to keep learning, give everything you can in every job you do, right?
And take opportunities.
Well, and I mean, I'll say just from the beginning of the conversation where you talked about where, you know, the fact that you got a degree in something that you ended up not
doing at all, like it seems like there's a trend throughout your entire career of maybe commit to a process, but be flexible to the outcome.
Yeah, you know something, it's really, I sound incredibly entitled when I said this.
I could not not go to college.
Everybody in my family, right?
Now this is the thing.
So I'm of an age where that's quite unusual for everyone in your family, to have your mom, your dad, all being to college.
There was no expectation for me to do anything.
Now I actually think that I probably wouldn't have gone to college if I'd thought about it.
I don't know what I would have done and I don't know whether the outcome would have been better or not, but it's like,
Might as well.
And I did.
And it was great fun.
I had a good time in college.
It gave me that piece of paper that says he got a degree.
That's all it's for.
And I don't mean that to be negative about it.
Education is huge.
But what you do with your education is even more important.
But there's certain passports that you kind of have to have, but you need a visa, right?
And a college degree is a sort of slightly better visa than not having a college degree.
That's all.
And that's the only reason I did it.
You could also look at it and say it's one of my weaknesses.
Maybe if I had planned, maybe if I had worked harder and thought it through.
Two things, one, I wouldn't be me and two, I guess maybe there's hope for folks who don't have, I mean, we use neurodiversity a lot, right?
Who don't have the type of mind that allows them to put their head down and...
Stay, you know say I want to be a lawyer and do the degree.
know what?
mean, there's some people whose brains just don't allow them to do that And you know, I've known enough people with ADHD Now without a Diagnosis and it's extremely easy to do these
days, but I have some of that in me.
I just know that my
the space you're working in, it seems like a natural fit, honestly, and maybe even a strength in that space.
So one of the things you were mentioning, like you've talked about the flexibility of iterating, I'm gonna say, a lack of better term.
So in all the spaces you've described that you've been working in.
Iterating is almost better than landing on perfection from the beginning.
rather than, as you're mentioning, taking the movie frame by frame or trying to perfect every email, it's the process of iteration to try to get more content out there, to reach
the right people, and to improve each time.
It's probably, based on what you're describing, sounds like it's more valuable than analysis, paralysis, and not getting anything out there or trying to only perfect one
thing at a time.
you
I think you're right.
The one thing I would say though, and I said I did economics, I was always better at macroeconomics than microeconomics, right?
I've always been better at the big picture.
It's my gift.
I see patterns that other people don't see, right?
And the reason I see patterns is that I'm not fixated in, and this is another question you're gonna ask me, that this is in this space, so it stays in this space.
I've seen this behavior before.
Right?
I've seen this behavior before and I'm gonna bet you anything, fact, I'm not gonna bet, I'm just gonna act on the fact that this will happen again.
And if it doesn't, then I failed.
And if it does, I've not wasted my time testing something that I know.
Right?
And one of my, possibly an anecdote, I learned very early that human beings are very predictable in large numbers, right?
They're almost impossible to predict as an individual.
Right?
That's our dilemma.
Sure, that's it, yeah.
so You know the you know if you watch a PBR and you see the wildebeest Migration a million will be is going crossing the river and the crocodiles are waiting blah blah blah and
they're crossing the reason that crocodiles are there is that you know that within the three -week period a million forms of lunch are gonna come in front them, right?
Right.
The reason the wildebeest all go together is they know that if there's a million of them, they can afford to lose 30 or 50 or whatever it is, herd wins, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah.
But you can absolutely predict that within a three or four week window, a million or so wildebeest are gonna come across this river.
Okay?
Unless something exceptional happens, a black swan or death.
So I take a picture of that and then I show one wildebeest and say, now tell me he'll be here next year.
Right.
Yeah.
too many variables drought, pestilence, lion, poacher, hunter, you name it, disease, you name it.
So that's, that's one of the things that gives me comfort is that my brain allows me to be comfortable anywhere.
And I guess that's probably another reason why I was so quick to move into digital.
I didn't need anyone to tell me that it was going to be big.
Right.
And it's the same thing with lots of the things that I've understood, you know, in terms of iterating and testing.
I just don't waste my time proving every negative can't happen before I take a step forward.
That makes sense.
And I mean, I...
people in the micro who love that, right?
The spreadsheet warriors who are very good at that.
They like to get stuck into like dig into the variables and just spend their time there.
Yeah, no, I totally make sense.
But I think
People that are running their own businesses that are trying to figure out the next steps It's easy to get scared and then lock yourself into like I need to solve this problem and
I need to solve every variable before I take a step forward and I think that's where lots of people and at least my conversations get really stuck to not want to iterate because
they're committing to a process that they don't know what the results are going to be and then decide is that the right place to spend my time and energy
Is that, like when you're talking to clients that are looking to you for advice, is that something that you run into a lot or do you have to help people through that process?
Well, there's, clients has two bits.
There's what I did before, right?
Which is selling agency services and helping clients have better email marketing programs.
And there's what I do now.
And what I do now is I try and, I've said this to you before, and in fact, that's how we got to know you sort of, we're trying to take advantage of my service.
So basically it's, like advisory stuff, right?
I like having conversations with people.
I like learning from people.
And I do love solving problems and I have a huge amount of expertise in digital marketing, right?
Agency stroke business running and hiring people and nurturing people for, you know, I, not all of those are my absolute skills, but those are things I've had a lot of experience
in.
So if you come to me today, then absolutely that's what I'll be telling you.
Right?
Because this is you as an individual.
Okay.
If it's a business, there's no point saying that to someone who has to report to the CMO, who's then got to report to the CFO and get budget signed off the next year that may or
may not be.
That's a completely different process, right?
And it requires different skills and different output.
we spoke ourselves and I sort of was joking saying, I was hoping you'd be calling me to ask for my advice because what people don't know is...
I sort of said an ask Stella or anything, ask me anything thing is because it's, it's bringing problems to me, right?
And I'm enjoying it.
even if I, happens apart from the 45 minutes free advice that I give, first of all, it's free advice.
take it or leave it number one.
And number two, you can't say that's not good enough.
It's free.
And secondly, it, it, I just enjoy it.
And you know, the, the, the feedback you get from people who said, you made me
really flipped the way I thought about things.
So yeah, absolutely.
mean, telling a client the world of your story requires a different narrative.
Does that make sense?
From me telling you about how business works?
Does that make sense?
And blah, blah, blah.
So it depends on the layers of management in between.
I hope that makes sense.
yeah, it does.
think when you've got people coming to ask ask Della anything, mean, one, how long have you been kind of thinking about this kind of an idea where you were going to come to the
market and you were gonna give options, give people the opportunity to reach out to you?
And then maybe what are some things that you surprised you once you kind of put yourself out there when they started asking?
Hmm.
So I probably been thinking about it ever since I finished with the company I sold, is Alchemy Works, right?
So I had a very protracted, out, stroke consulting engagement with them after I sold.
It was like more than five years.
I'm still very, very close with the current owner and, you know, lot of the folks who worked there with me over the years and everything else.
So.
It was like, what do I do?
Okay.
And not in an existential way.
I'm lucky that that isn't an issue, but certainly in a sort of, it's nicer to see the pot staying the same or growing than it is to watch the pot draining, however big it is.
It doesn't matter how big it is.
Watching the pot draining is not a great thing.
And also you've got to keep your mind active and stuff and keep going.
So I just, I've been thinking about it for a while and I'm going, how am I going to get people, how am going to find people to engage in everything else?
And I just thought maybe just do ASTL or anything and start promoting it and effectively bringing the freemium model.
So the only thing I ask is if my advice is good, give me a LinkedIn testimonial.
That's it.
Don't give it to me if it was crap advice or anything else.
And
So the best way of describing how testimonial wise or what I'm doing is just going to look at the recent current testimonials on my LinkedIn profile.
It just will give you a sense.
So oftentimes people building a product, right?
Mostly they're engineers and mathematicians, right?
Yeah.
what the heck do they know about marketing?
Right?
So they fix problems that are in their own head that someone has told them about, or even if they someone a marketer said this is a problem, fix it.
It's fixed with an engineering mindset with no real understanding of how human beings normally do.
What do engineers do?
Well, most engineers and mathematicians practice zero inbox.
They're freaks, right?
which is, yeah, it seems like that's not an experience that I would have or most people that I work with.
mom, no, I mean, nobody has my mom will look at every email.
I don't think she deletes each one.
Zero inbox is just a state of mind for folks on this end of the bell curve, right?
That tiny, that's them.
Okay.
And yet they're building tools and products for marketing.
So when a bunch of engineers and mathematicians who set up a product, right.
And they go, listen, Delia here, you know, everything about this, you know, tell me what you think about my product or what oftentimes the application is very different from what
they think.
or the problem they think they're fixing is not so much not a problem, okay, but the fix is there.
And I keep trying, especially in the email space, email marketers are obsessed with doing stuff manually.
So they have fixes for everything.
And so if you say to someone, here's a tool that you've got to learn to use that will fix this problem, they'll go, no, but I do this in my sleep anyway.
So they have to understand that to understand why.
you know, a hardcore email market that might not be excited by this tool that they built that's going to make their life different.
And the answer is because not there.
It may make the life for someone who doesn't know much about email better, right?
But then don't sell it to agencies.
So it's helping people understand the market.
It's helping them understand the story that they have.
Right.
And I know enough about business and I built an agency right to show them
many of the pitfalls and starting up, I've also built software before, So the pitfalls, the things that you have to watch out for, the things you have to try and make sure you
do, I just have a ton of experience and most people are gonna make those mistakes anyway.
But being able to just run it off me and I'll say, ha, this is what's gonna happen to you.
And they go, you know, that's funny.
You just told me in five minutes, this was a quote to me the other day, you just told me in five minutes, something that's taken us four months to learn, right?
it came from a totally different perspective than they did, which is...
I just know the market inside out.
And so you need to understand that nuance in order to sort of like present your business in a way that makes it more likely to be successful.
And the other place I help a lot is careers and stuff like that.
So I'll give you an example.
If someone called up and said, hey, listen, I want to start a podcast.
I want to be somebody like you, a careers advisor, an advisory kind of person.
How do you go about it?
You know, the first thing I'm going to ask is why do you want to do that?
I asked really stupid questions, right?
Are you sure?
And when I was hiring, it was kind of a joke.
You're probably, maybe I said this to you before, but you're probably familiar with Harry Potter and the sorting hat, right?
When you got to the school, we put the sorting hat on and the sorting hat would really look deep into you and tell you which house you wanted to be in, right?
Or should be in.
I'm a bit of a sorting hat for careers.
There are three places you can go, right?
can solo, you know, build your own business.
You can...
Work agency side, can work client side, right?
Those are the three things.
So really the first thing I'm trying to do before I answer the questions about which you should do is why do you want to do any?
What are you actually good at?
What do you like doing?
Yeah.
So let me once, if you don't like managing people, then there's a whole bunch of jobs you just shouldn't do, right?
For example, and a lot of the email marketers are in the nicest possible way, control freaks.
attention to detail.
That's why they're in that space, right?
They'll never let it go out with a mistake in it.
But that makes it hard for them to delegate.
Yep.
So that's another example.
Do you realize that if you want to go down that path, you're going to have to give up a bunch of shit that you hold really dear.
Can you do that?
So it's sort of that, that, that's, that's the sort of conversation.
And I don't, I don't pretend to be an expert.
think that I, I'm always surprised.
I'm an empath.
It's, I don't even know why, because there's nothing about my persona.
It doesn't come naturally.
think that's why it is.
It doesn't come naturally.
I've had to learn to be an empath.
I've had to learn rather than it come naturally to me.
Okay.
So it just means that I am very quick and yeah, up to the point.
So I'm an empath who says it as it is.
Right.
So yeah, great.
I feel for you, but you're being an idiot.
Well, I mean, how do you, mean, you're in spaces where if you're talking to people that are like, maybe they're saying, I want to be this and this and this, I want to manage
people.
And you start asking them this question, maybe they don't naturally have that skills, maybe that's not a natural fit for them.
But.
In the process, perhaps they discover, actually, you know, now that I've thought this out with you, we've talked about and I've answered some of your questions, maybe they discover
themselves, actually, yeah, I know I need to, I have to delegate to be able to get to where I'm trying to go.
Do you give them advice on how to move from where they are to where they're trying to go?
Or did they often just discover, actually, you're right, this isn't a good fit for me, I should have never gone down this path.
So there are more than 10 ,000 how to write a novel books, right?
And there aren't 10 ,000 novelists.
Why is that?
Okay, so it's kind of the how -to.
That's not my gig.
As soon as I go how -to, I have to give you training courses, have a list of shit.
Do you see what I mean?
Tell you this is the way you need to do it.
And what I'm trying to do is I'm teaching you how to tap into your own power.
And that sounds kind kind of crappy, but I just, you know, if you don't...
It's so much easier to do something because you want to, right?
And someone asking me, do I need to go on this course is speaking to the wrong person.
Yeah.
You're either on the course or you're wasting my time and your time by asking me about stuff that you know about, right?
So, you know, I mean, I might say to someone, you'll need an MBA for that.
And they'll go, yeah, I know I'm applying.
Great.
That's fine.
You know what to do.
You're on the path.
You don't really need me.
Where folks need me is they're going, I just don't know.
Right.
That's the thing.
I don't know what I want to do.
I know what I should do or I think I should be doing.
And then it's just about speaking through.
You realize if you do this, this and the other.
And so one of them is managing people, right?
Another one is delegation, right?
If you can't do those two things, there's certain jobs you can't do.
The other thing is, this your forever next step or it's your next step, next step.
If it's your next step, next step, next step, then just do whatever, but pick up different, try and round up your experiences.
Or it could be, I'll give you an example.
If your path is more corporate, then oftentimes it's better to stay in the same place, right?
Okay, I see what you're saying.
you know, and even then there's no rule.
Here's what I found.
At any given time, let's say I was to take one of my random friends or whatever it is, people I've known or I left college with or whatever it is, and every two years looked at
who was where in career, right?
It flipped.
So one year it's this and another year it's that and blah, blah, blah.
And the other thing is some people change, some people progress by going diagonally.
That's how they climb the ladder.
That looks faster in the short term.
Okay.
But in the long term, it's arguably harder than someone who just sat and waited until the CEO job became vacant.
Right?
They just sat there for 25 years.
I'm being flippant.
yeah, I I've seen and heard, for example, like executive assistants move into director of operations and then you've quickly moved yourself into an executive role and leadership.
absolutely.
Well, it's not quickly.
That's a 20, 30 year gig.
Okay.
It feels really slow.
There are many times in that 30 years when you think this is, know, I want to slit my wrists.
This is just terrible.
Okay.
And then you look to the left, right, that idiot who was less good than you is now CEO of that over there, or has just jumped into a startup and has made a ton of money on exit or,
know, because they IPO'd or whatever.
It's stuff, right?
Sure.
five years time or ten years time, the person who IPO'd and had a ton of money may be sitting down with almost nothing because they didn't do anything else, they spent all
their money blah blah blah and you just chugged your way to CEO of a really boring corporation and earning $2 million a year and have a gold plate of pension.
So I think the point about it is you have to, you've got to be true to yourself, right?
There's certain things and that's what I, that's the sorting hat thing, right?
No, the sorting hat didn't put you where you should be.
It put you where you needed to be, if that makes sense.
So that it's, it's kind of, yeah, that's how I see it.
It's like, look, let's, let's talk it through.
And in 45 minutes, you'd be surprised at how, and people often say that to me.
I can't believe how.
direct the questions you asked me and how random they appeared to be but I'm glad you did because you made me think and I think that's it.
Della made me think.
That's what I do.
well, like the kind of people that you're trying to talk to, I'm guessing, you know, there's pretty wide variety.
you noticed any trends in the people that you're having these conversations with?
Two main ones, startups and people thinking about their career, right?
Well, three, startups, tech startups in more tech space, People thinking about their career and then the folks in the middle of people who run agencies.
And the number one question for agencies is, how do I win more clients?
Yeah, all in the business development space.
I'm sure lots of people are trying to get that answer because it's really hard to pin down in the life cycle of your business.
toughest things that I've experienced and I'm sure many of your clients have experienced is, know, I've either hit a plateau or I know I need to grow.
And in your space, when you run into those kinds of conversations, I mean, the advice can be all over the place, but is there a trend of like, this is what I found to be most
effective to people that are running into these kinds of conversations?
Or is it always unique to the business?
I think it's unique to the business stroke person, right?
And because of that, it's hard to be more precise or whatever it is.
I mean, the answer to, how do I get more business?
And the answer is with great difficulty.
If it was easy, we'd all be billionaires, right?
Every one of us would be a billionaire.
So it's not easy and I'm not a magic bullet.
And in fact, I'm not here to change your world in that way.
But what I can do is build a better story and give you a sense of how...
to build on your storytelling.
Does that make sense?
How to understand better what your audience is actually looking for, right?
And not to project your thinking onto your audience.
Right, so instead of them, obviously when they're looking for an answer to business development, you're either thinking really far ahead or you're behind the eight ball and
you should have been doing this a while ago and you're panicking and that's why I'm sure people are looking to you for a magic bullet like, I need an answer yesterday.
And sometimes it's just.
I think I've sort of alluded to it and it's too complicated to really say in a few words, but in essence, it's about why are you different?
Why are you different?
Right?
And if it's just faster, better, cheaper.
So
Right.
So how do get them to identify the story or get behind a story that they need to be telling about themselves?
Is this something that you're...
so that's when it oftentimes will turn into a long term engagement, right?
So remember, this is partly my business development.
So how do you do business development?
You set up an Astell or anything, give you time away for free, right?
And be prepared.
Yes, but that will only work if you actually enjoy doing it, right?
And also you actually deliver because there's a limit to, you know, how many people are going to...
come to you and the other thing is I've tried to make it as wide as possible.
Just ask me anything.
If you just want to ring up and say, how tall are you?
I'll spend 45 minutes with you on that.
But in that time, I'll find out a bit about you.
I'll find out how you heard about me.
I'm doing a bit of market research and the chances of you being a firefighter are nearly zero.
You're gonna be in my space because that's my network.
Right.
So I have a pre -qualified audience, right?
And it's just about coming up with a product that's a little bit different.
Lots of people give free calls, right?
Think about it.
Go look at lots and lots of people who are consultants and they're all saying, book a free call.
free consultation or yeah, yeah, know what mean.
Yeah, so I'm I'm telling a better story if that makes sense, then book a consultation with me.
Well, now that you've done this, how long have you been running Rascale Denning?
effectively about four or five months.
No, three or four months, effectively.
and you've kind of, I know you mentioned you've been chewing on this idea for a while, you actually did it as a result of, it sounds like an exit, like you've exited your previous
business, which by the way, all by itself, lots of people would be excited and interested what that experience is like.
Lots of people wanna have that experience for themselves.
But you've come out the other end of it, and now you're bringing your skills to market in a new way, people can learn about how
build their own businesses through working with you and having these conversations.
Has there been anything in those last three, four months that you've experienced after going marketing?
You were like, I didn't expect this.
This was a surprising conversation.
Because as to anything, it's got a lot of opportunity to bring surprises.
It's really open, right?
or is it such a, you know.
surprised by how much I've been able to help folks.
Right?
I didn't go into this without that confidence.
I knew I could do it, right?
I've been doing this for years, okay?
I've had well over 250 people work for me over the years.
Do get what I mean?
Just in my own business, let alone anything that I did before.
you know, I kind of...
I, yeah, I, I, I'm just, I'm just surprised at how much value I've been able to deliver, right?
genuinely good feeling, genuinely, great networking experience.
I'm learning all the time, right?
Because for someone to help someone with a problem, you have to very least understand the basics of the environment they're in or what brings them to you.
Does that make sense?
So.
was there any problem that came up that you didn't expect of any type that it was something you hadn't dealt with in the past and you were like, this has opened up new
kinds of conversations, something that you can...
I'll tell you what happened.
No, it's more about, remember I'm talking to lots of people and helping lots of people, okay?
So this week's conversation, I'll find out about a need that I hadn't really thought very much about, okay?
Sorry, my hand's out of shot.
I'm looking at this need and I'm like, yeah, I hadn't really thought about that.
That's interesting.
And so we have the conversation and blah, blah.
And then either a week before or two weeks later, or what day would it two weeks later, someone else comes up and says, I just built a tool, right, that I think does A, okay?
And I'm there thinking, this looks like it'd be absolutely what the person I was talking to needs.
Okay?
So it's great to be able to sort of put people together and just say, you know, and that...
Again, remember I'm looking for work, right?
Everybody I help, they'll remember that I helped them and remembers it.
If anyone asks them a question, they'll say, just ask Della, right?
You know, I'm just trying to build up that.
And if I was to say, you know, if I had an ambition, if I had an ambition would be have enough of a track record, give me six months, it could be less, right?
If someone's interested before, it could be less, but say give me six to nine months.
I'll probably have enough of a track record to be able to sort of say, look, I'm helping.
I'm delivering about this number of hours, right?
Which breaks down into these three types of problems or whatever it is.
These are the job specs of the folks go look for a sponsor.
It's kind of media, isn't it?
And I said this to you before.
mean, the way I see it is I'm giving people individual interviews with me, right?
It's like a, it's like a one -to -one podcast, right?
So instead of just doing a podcast and spreading it out to a thousand people, I'm getting a thousand different people to come and spend an hour podcast with me, just like we're
doing right now.
That's, that's in essence what it is.
And it should be possible to get a recruitment company or a tech company or just whatever somebody to say, I really like that idea and I'll sponsor this.
And then all that will happen is at the beginning of the call, just when I say this bit is free, I'll tell you everything for free.
But if you ever do want to hire me, these are the terms.
And by the way,
please click on the sponsor link or I'm gonna share your details.
You may get a call from a salesperson.
That's it.
And if you don't wanna do that, then you can leave now.
But it'd be nice to have a sponsorship because then it means that more of my time could be free, if that makes sense.
Because I do have to, I do need to have some paid time.
So.
in that vein, listeners that have had a chance to hear your expertise and some of the people you've helped, what would be...
the kind of person you're saying that you would like to say, hey, ask Bill anything.
I'm opening up to try to help this particular kind of person.
Is there anything you'd like to share to get them inspired to jump on that call with you that would kind of demonstrate them as a good fit for the kind of person you'd be able to
help right away?
Or is it truly anybody at any level?
Anybody in digital marketing really at any level.
mean, it's kind of, yeah.
And you know, somebody's son or daughter who just wants to get into digital and knows me, right?
They can give their kid the link and they can ring me up and I'll say, Hey, what are you doing?
What are you thinking of doing?
What is about that?
What are your skills?
So it could be that.
could be lots and lots and lots of startups built the products.
It's here.
We're ready to go to market.
Haven't raised any funds, blah, blah, blah.
What am going to do?
This is my audience.
What am I doing wrong?
What could I do better?
What do you think of the product?
A lot of people just want to hear what I think about the product.
So it's what I said to you before is, is I can probably, I guess I'm very good at communicating.
You may have gathered that.
sure, sure.
Another thing I just have, I'm, riddled with weirdness.
have a funny thing called a fantasia.
think again, not diagnosed, but I spoke to someone I'm like, my God, now I know what happened.
It's a P H A N T A S I A right?
A fantasia.
I can't visualize anything in my mind.
Right?
If I walk out of a room, well, I have to verbalize.
I, I, I, I, I see conceptually.
So the best way of example, like my brother.
I can't, the only visualization my brother I have is a recent photograph that I've memorized, right?
I can't see his face.
I don't see his expressions.
don't, there's no picture in that comes into my mind.
What comes is the word his name, but with a concept wrapped around it that makes me know that it's not any other Chris, it's my brother, Chris.
Does that make sense?
And so because of that, I'm really good at painting pictures in people's minds.
because you have to do that to communicate.
That makes total sense, Right.
the time, right?
So, so, so that, that, so in essence, and I, you know, I've, practiced it, I enjoy doing it.
So that, that, that's what helps me help people, right?
I, it's really about.
Just so that they feel what I'm saying and they feel motivated to do it themselves because I'm not holding their hand.
I'm not a tutor.
I'm not like, it's not my job.
Though I describe it as I'm additive, not fractional.
I'm not there to do any part of your work.
No.
Not one piece of it.
sounds like, especially for startups, like having, if I was running a startup, I was just creating one, having somebody that could give me advisory level support, specifically in
marketing, that's a high level expert, something I would not be able to, very rarely am I gonna afford that in a startup space.
exactly.
as, as I think where I was going when I was telling you about a fantasy and describing is the ability to communicate 50 years of knowledge or six months of knowledge or learning
into like five minutes.
I'm good at that.
and that's what businesses need.
They don't have 50 years to try to catch up to you, so they're not gonna do it.
right.
And if they want more than that, which they can have, that's when it becomes paid for.
Does that make sense?
as I say, it genuinely is free and it's genuinely good advice.
Well, I mean, I'm thinking about this from the perspective of having done startups myself, specifically in tech space.
Like, do you see yourself also as like an equity advisor?
Like, yep, I can give you advice.
Maybe you don't, but like startups, you know, maybe somebody's...
yes, I have discussion, I'm in discussions about that sort of stuff.
It's always on the table.
It's not always, I'll give you an example.
Anyone who's raised any funds, that becomes really difficult because now you have to get the VCs to approve and everything else.
So has to be probably even pre -Angel, right?
Or as near, maybe very early Angel, you can get in with something like that.
So very, very happy to look at that.
Sure.
the gap comes and sometimes it's the only way to bridge the gap between you need my help now but you can't afford to pay anything for a while, then it's absolutely on the cards
for discussion.
Something that I'm sure that they could discover in the 45 minutes of Ask Andella Anything is like, what's the good fit for us as a long -term commitment?
45 minutes is enough time to decide whether you ever want to see me again or not.
And if so, how much you're prepared to pay for it.
That's right.
Can you do this again?
All right.
Well, it'll cost you.
Well, I think that I really appreciate your time, by the way.
And I think it makes sense how you fit and support.
I know.
Yeah, we've really covered an hour and I
We're gonna go through this, we're gonna distill down, but I did wanna say thank you for the time that you did spend with me.
I feel like it may be even taking longer than I had on your calendar.
So just appreciate the time.
I know that you're gonna be out there giving other people advice.
Can you share with me what the link would be that you want them to go to to learn more about ASTL or anything?
Yes, do you me to send it to you or put share it in the chat?
What do you want me to do?
Hold on, give me one second.
The other thing that I was going to say is if we have like, have you stopped recording?
I'm