Transcribed by Descript
Erin Marcus: All right. Hello, and welcome to this episode of the ReadyUp podcast. Interestingly enough, I'm excited about this conversation today with my guest Robert Brill because he's good at something I suck at. So that's always good, right? That's always, so this might just be a conversation just for me.
Erin Marcus: You never know. I might be the only one who gets something though. No, I'm excited about it because it's, a piece of the puzzle that's so important, and I've shied away from it because of the technology involved, truthfully. Really, it's just the technology that frustrates the bejesus out of me.
Erin Marcus: Before we get into all that, why don't you tell everybody what's going on? Wait a minute, what is she even going to be talking about? So tell everyone who you are and what you do.
Robert Brill: Hi, I'm Robert Brill. I am the CEO and owner of Brill Media. We're an advertising agency. And just briefly about, about me.
Robert Brill: I've been in the advertising business for 20 years. And for the last 10 years, I've been growing braille media. And what we do is we run ads to generate leads and sales for clients. Most of our customers are going to be agencies and we work with some businesses and a lot of agencies are going to outsource their ad buying work to us.
Robert Brill: So they'll do creative or PR or build websites or search engine optimization. Their clients are asking for running ads and we'll do the ad buying part for them.
Erin Marcus: Love it. So here I cannot be alone. I'm going to be very sad if I'm alone in this. I doubt it. Ads I get. Yeah. Target market. I caught, maybe it's an age thing with television.
Erin Marcus: I have a journalism degree. The newspaper ads, I get all that. The thing that made that world frustrating to me was social media. Because it come to me, it complicated the process by changing the algorithm every time you find out what works like TV didn't do that. TV, newspaper, radio, we did the op back in the day, right?
Erin Marcus: As I sound like the get off my lawn guy, right back in the day. The goal was to make it work. Yeah. Find your audience, find what lands, give you that spot. And I feel like they flipped the script to say, I'll give you a period of time to figure it out. But as soon as you figure it out, we want to make more money.
Erin Marcus: So we're going to change the process.
Robert Brill: And
Erin Marcus: I got annoyed and stopped,
Robert Brill: so let's take a step back. So for everyone listening, what we're talking about, so what's the difference between marketing and advertising in general is when you are spending money to deliver a message. So if you're posting on Facebook posting on Tik TOK, but you're not in a Spending money to deliver the message to people.
Robert Brill: That's not advertising. It's not advertising. I agree. Marketing is the sort of higher level idea. It's, you're doing press and PR. You're doing SEO, websites, creative development. Advertising is one thing that rolls up to marketing. Absolutely. Posting on social is another one. So the challenge is that the, you're right.
Robert Brill: The algorithms change. dramatically and frequently. And social media for the last 15 years has primarily with meta with Facebook has incentivized businesses to post a lot of content and then slowly take away access to the audience. And so the way to reach more people more effectively is by spending money with ads.
Robert Brill: There's 10 million businesses on meta that are advertising. Most of them are going to be small businesses. And a lot of those companies are boosting posts. What a lot of companies don't realize is that boosting posts is advertising. It's just not called advertising. It's called boosting posts. You're
Erin Marcus: spending money.
Erin Marcus: I agree.
Robert Brill: You're spending money. The challenge with boosting posts I think is fundamentally broken is that it's the easy button. There's no strategy. There's no thinking. There's just, you can spend money, spend 30 and get your ads in front of a few hundred people or your messages in front of a few hundred people.
Robert Brill: The challenge with that is that the default setting for boosting a post is engagement, likes, comments, and shares. We all know you can't pay the bills with likes, comments, and shares. So if you don't do anything, you just boost a post, you're already doing the wrong thing because you don't need likes, comments, and shares.
Robert Brill: Maybe as part of a larger strategy, that's relevant. But for most people you're advertising to generate sales. And so you're actually telling Facebook to do the thing that is not relevant for your business, right? There's a setting inside Facebook where you do optimize to a lead. So people share their information with you or a sale.
Robert Brill: That's what you should be spending money on. Yes. And you can do that a little bit with boosting posts, but in aggregate, it's hard to like, look at data over time. It's hard to look for calibration points. It's hard to really gain an insight about your business by boosting the post, which is why we tell all our clients a hundred percent of the time, never boost a post because it's, I, in my opinion, you're wasting money.
Erin Marcus: I totally agree with you. One of the things that I tell. My clients all the time and that I talk about is and I love your definition of marketing versus advertising. I think a lot of people do not get these definitions correct and so they've got wavy lines instead of solid borders in between what they're doing and they're not understanding what they're doing.
Erin Marcus: But to me sticking with social media for a minute, unless you are spending money and unless you are truly for most of us engaging with someone like you who really knows how to do Social media is a credential, not a sales
Robert Brill: funnel.
Erin Marcus: It's a re engagement and that organic connection and storage social. Until you intentionally turn it into a sales process.
Robert Brill: Yeah. Look, every business is looking for predictable, repeatable and scalable. That's what you need. So if you can take, if you can create three videos a day and post to take talk and that brings in business, do that all day. But for most businesses, it's really hard to create good content in a way that compels people to buy stuff for a lot of reasons.
Robert Brill: There's a lot of friction points there, right? You don't know how to, a lot of people don't want to be the face of the brand. A lot of people don't know how to film and create content that is interesting. A lot of people. The most interesting part about it is I think a lot of people don't know what their customers resonate with.
Erin Marcus: I was just, Oh my God. I was just going to say, I was going to ask you, what is the biggest mistake people make? And to me, that's it. They don't do the work before they go to work.
Robert Brill: And it's hard. Like you're not, if you're not a marketer, you're not really going to know exactly how to, what your audience wants or how to even find what your audience wants.
Robert Brill: You're going to do what you think is relevant. Or you, because you have a very inside baseball perspective on what your business does, which is why it's so incredibly difficult for the business owner to market your own business.
Erin Marcus: Yes.
Robert Brill: So there's a way around that.
Erin Marcus: Wait, you're not just so too close to it where you've got your own fears and stories and limiting beliefs involved.
Erin Marcus: You're also too close to it, meaning you've got too much jargon, too much about your topic. So you're talking over people's heads. It's bottom line, you're way too close to your own stuff, right?
Robert Brill: Exactly. And I've had this trouble myself. You know what, the way we approach client business The way we approach client business and our own business is we take we take a testing approach.
Robert Brill: So we work in 25 sprints. The idea on 25 sprints is that I'm gonna, I'm gonna write out problems that my customers have. And I'm going to work backwards from there. So understanding the problems your customers have can come from your sales calls. It can come from feedback on social media comments. It can come from people on Reddit or on Twitter or X who are talking about the general topic, the general industry that you serve.
Robert Brill: So if you understand exactly what your customer's pain points are maybe there's 10 possible pain points. You go into meta advertising, you run a sprint and you understand out of the 10 or 15 or 20 ads that you've created, which language is most interesting to your customer by click through rate and cost per click.
Robert Brill: You then start to understand. what you should focus on. You don't have this wide world of opportunity. You're narrowing down into exactly what resonates. And this does two things. Number one, it helps you sell better. And number two, you're achieving product market fit. Product market fit is this idea that you understand how to talk about your business in a way that will get people to buy from you.
Robert Brill: And by the way, it also includes pricing, right? So for example, in the United, in Los Angeles, you never see Caribbean fast food. It sounds great to me. I would eat it, but there's no Caribbean fast food because there's no market for it. People don't want Caribbean fast food, so you can have the absolute best Caribbean fast food in the world, but if you come to Los Angeles with the concept, you're not going to be successful.
Robert Brill: And I'm sure companies have tried. You have a product, could be the best product in the world, but there's no market.
Erin Marcus: There's no market for it. I see that all over that you've created your product in a bubble. The other thing I see people do is try to create a product where there's the best, the absolute best competition to their product is free.
Erin Marcus: I see that. I see that in financial services. I see that in I come out of financial services and the companies with tons of money, the insurance companies, the financial service companies are giving away free content that is masterfully created. In order to get clients. If you're trying to sell what they're giving away for free and theirs is better than yours.
Robert Brill: Yeah, you're going to have problems.
Erin Marcus: You're going to have problems. You're going to have problems. And it's really knowing your entire, what is it your compensation is directly tied to how hard it is to replace you.
Robert Brill: Yeah. The moving, what's it called? The change costs, like changing banks is ridiculous.
Erin Marcus: Oh my God. I wanted to change banks so many times I've gotten so mad. And here's the thing. Not only is it a pain in the butt, but I know the next bank's not going to really be any better.
Robert Brill: The next bank's not going to be any better. And inevitably the best, the completely off topic, but in terms of one thing that is relevant to entrepreneurs is organization.
Robert Brill: Take a moment. Take. Take a few hours over the next week, look at your bank account and write down every recurring fee that you have in your bank account. Every transaction that's automated for personal or for business, because eventually your account is going to get hacked at some point, or you're going to click on the wrong text message and you're going to get phished or whatever the case is.
Robert Brill: Eventually it's going to happen. And when it happens, you will be so thankful that you had a list of all the transactions that need to be changed. Like I paid for Aflac for a decade and then we just forgot about it. We had to change banks. And now two years later, I'm like, Oh, wait a minute.
Robert Brill: Where's Aflac? Where'd
Erin Marcus: my Aflac go? Where'd my AI go? It's cause
Robert Brill: we just lost track of it and we changed. It's
Erin Marcus: crazy. That's a really good point. Before, when we were chatting, before we hit record, we were talking about AI. We were talking about using AI tools for efficiency as opposed to replacing people.
Erin Marcus: And I think. It's a really good indication. Okay. So you lost track of a DI policy.
Robert Brill: Yeah.
Erin Marcus: What are we losing track of in our businesses?
Robert Brill: Yeah.
Erin Marcus: Cause they're on autopilot.
Robert Brill: Yeah. Look, I think there's two ways about, I'm sorry. There's two ways about it. In my opinion, there's, I made a tick tock video saying that if you make AI systems customer facing, you're going to hurt yourself.
Robert Brill: You're going to hurt your business. And someone must be like. Gen Z was like, that's an L take. That's a losing take. That's a you're wrong about that. I'm like, okay, first of all, I learned something new. How did you just say,
Erin Marcus: I'll take,
Robert Brill: But there's clearly some people who believe that they can automate everything.
Robert Brill: It put AI. Into the market as a representation of their business. I disagree with that. Because I think AI is not ready for that. What I think AI is good for is accelerating your business. I think it's good for Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has a private WhatsApp chat. What's up a chat group where they're taking bets on when the first billion dollar company will be created with one human being and a bunch of AI.
Erin Marcus: And a bunch of it. Here's the thing. I think the caveat to this, and I agree with you, I think the caveat is what you're selling. I think if you are selling a low risk, low price product. Okay, fine. What you and I are selling, you don't sell what we sell without a conversation. Nobody's going to give me the amount of money I charge having never spoken to me.
Robert Brill: 100%. And it could, AI could be good. There's, I had a video go viral off of a demonstration of AI making sales calls and It was great. It got 260, 000 views on take talk. That was the only time I ever went viral on which speaks to one of the challenges with social media content posting.
Robert Brill: If you can't do it repeatedly, you don't really have anything to scale on. But the idea is, it's good for, it could be good for appointment setting, like it could be. And I think, but fundamentally the challenge is you have to be really good at. Making AI sound like people.
Robert Brill: And that's very hard for non experts to do.
Erin Marcus: And. It depends on your business. One of the things that a small business have, and I'm going to say anything under 10 million, we don't have room for redundancy in personnel. We don't yet, if you're under 10 million, you don't really have enough money for the redundancy.
Erin Marcus: Like when you're in corporate and you have, I remember in corporate, like you're lucky if for the eight hours that people are in the office, if you're getting 90 minutes of quality work out of someone, it's like a modern miracle. The small business doesn't operate on that. So maybe if your business is so huge and your volume is so large that your work to success ratio is almost irrelevant, right?
Erin Marcus: You got more money to throw at the problem. All right, fine. Because then your lower success rates are built in your business. You're under 10 million. That's just not our world.
Robert Brill: You need everyone to work twice as hard. And to get some of these systems set up, it takes anywhere from starting at 25, 000 just to get there's no guarantee it's going to actually work.
Robert Brill: So it's a bit. And
Erin Marcus: to me, I'm looking at it as a huge opportunity and having fun with it. We use it. We use all sorts of AI tools internally makes our lives so much easier. I'm a podcast is. A couple, a few years old now, what we can do now versus what we had to go through when we started this, it's like, Oh my God, a click of a button and poof, it's amazing, but most again with that 10 million mark really is such a delineation, you're going to run out of money before you figure it out.
Robert Brill: Yeah, I think there's small things you can do, but I think at scale it's going to be really hard. I would experiment with, I would experiment with a lot of things, I just wouldn't base a business around that until it's proven it. At every step of the way, unless you're like, like you said, a massive corporation you set a hypothesis, you test it, either it works or it doesn't work, and you move forward.
Robert Brill: But at the end of the day, if I, if I can spend 10, 000 on LinkedIn and get clients every year or every month, I will 100 percent do that. If you can use AI to generate calls and leads that are turning into business, do it. You've got to tinker. I think it's important for people to be a tech tinkerer in this moment.
Erin Marcus: Yep, absolutely. So how did you get into this? What's the origin story here? How did we decide that this is the thing we're going to do?
Robert Brill: The origin story is 1995. I got a computer and I thought it was the most amazing thing. I was 14 years old.
Erin Marcus: Are you serious?
Robert Brill: Yeah, I was 14 years old and I already felt like I was behind it.
Robert Brill: Cause I, like my friends had like dial up. AOL like in 92 or 93. I was like, oh, I
Erin Marcus: did have a fri I do want to say I had a couple of friends in high school. This would have been in 86 and
Robert Brill: 87. Oof, yeah.
Erin Marcus: With the dial up bulletin boards. No one could reach the phone while they were doing the thing.
Robert Brill: Yeah. And yeah. And I was really excited about it. I thought there's so much opportunity. And then I went to college, got a, an internship working for a startup advertising agency, which never went anywhere. But they told me what you could do in advertising and the math part felt really interesting.
Robert Brill: Anyway, graduated from college. Actually while I was still in college, I worked at Universal Music which was doing social. It was basically social marketing before it was called social, it was called guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla
Erin Marcus: marketing, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Robert Brill: And,
Erin Marcus: how did we go from guerrillas to influencers?
Erin Marcus: I don't understand.
Robert Brill: And which is where, which is better and which is worse. And which is worse. Yeah. And so two weeks out of college, I got my first job at an ad agency, Universal McCann. And I've been working in advertising for the last 21 years.
Erin Marcus: And you decided screw this. I'm gonna do it all by myself.
Robert Brill: Yeah. It just became a moment. I think I think there was about a year and a half where I was thinking about it, but I was like, yeah I don't know. Like I, I have a good job. There's a book called, actually, I don't know what the book is called, but it's the concept Good is the Enemy of Great.
Robert Brill: Yes. If you have a good job that's paying you enough, like it's going to be challenging to leave that and start from zero, but anyway, circumstances allowed me to the business that I was working for the man at the top was doing something. Maybe not ideal and the company went bankrupt.
Robert Brill: And so basically I was like, okay, if I'm going to start all over. You
Erin Marcus: got pushed off the cliff. You didn't jump off the cliff, but you got pushed off falling off the cliff. 100
Robert Brill: percent got to get pushed off the cliff. And it was good. And but I immediately. Started the business and then took a full time job because I just wasn't ready to deal with all the challenges, the risk the stuff I didn't know.
Robert Brill: I knew how to do ad buys for corporations like ConocoPhillips and whatnot, but I didn't know how to run a business. So it's very different. It's so true.
Erin Marcus: It's so different. And this is where I see people one, not get it right, but two beat themselves up. Like you could be the absolute best at the thing that the business does.
Erin Marcus: And that has nothing to do with running and growing a business. And yet, there's like a disconnect there. People think Oh, I'm a great lawyer. I'm a great ad buyer. I'm a great website designer. Pick a lane. Of course, I'll just, throw my shingle out there, build it and they will come.
Erin Marcus: I'll just tell a couple people how great I am in the, floodgates will open. Lo and behold.
Robert Brill: Yeah. I think that the challenge fundamentally is that no one is really skilled at being a business owner. You got to learn it. You might be skilled at it, but usually people are good at the practitioner work of something, whether you're a plumber, air conditioning guy, advertising person, like whatever you're doing, do it really well.
Robert Brill: But, Sales and marketing, no one ever trained you for sales and marketing. No one ever trained you to be a manager of people in an effective way. No one ever trained you to manage your money in a way that's gonna last long. You don't have any advice or feedback on how to deal with the stress and the pressures of running a business in a way that's effective.
Robert Brill: Like all those things have, for me, had to be learned.
Erin Marcus: And one of the things that I say is, your business is a system and I'll give you my example, I was trained in sales and marketing and leadership, like literally, I have an MBA in marketing and executive leadership, right? I was literally trained in it.
Erin Marcus: What got me was the mindset piece. That's what got me. So I leave corporate awards, accolades, Aaron's so brilliant. What could possibly go wrong? And my big, Oh my God, was you realize you were very successful on a narrow path that somebody else created,
Robert Brill: right?
Erin Marcus: And here's your it guy. And you don't have to worry about your paycheck because this woman will make sure you get paid.
Erin Marcus: And you don't have to worry about the website because that guy's going to run the website and right. And It doesn't matter how autonomous your job was, and how high up on the ladder you go, you're still in corporate. When you have a job, you are a piece of a process that somebody else created.
Robert Brill: 100%.
Erin Marcus: And that was a very rude way to say
Robert Brill: it.
Robert Brill: Yeah. Like you think you're really great at things, and then you get, life punches you in the face and it's like your website's down. Bro, I don't have to do websites. I don't know what to do. I don't want to spend money on websites.
Erin Marcus: One of the
Robert Brill: mistakes I made is I didn't have an account, an accountant for longer than I should have.
Robert Brill: And when I realized I made tens of thousands of dollars, I forgot to invoice one of our clients for like multiple tens of thousands of dollars. I was like, yeah, I probably need an accountant.
Erin Marcus: I just want to keep an eye on that. I'm like, your business is a whole system. I don't know if you remember How It was like a vaudeville act.
Erin Marcus: And I remember it when I was a kid, the guy with all the poles and there's plates spinning on the pole is running from pole to pole. So that's your business, right? We got sales, marketing, team building, client fulfillment, where, you need branding and then mindset. That is a platter said it's a ladder on its own pole and it didn't finance legal and at any given operation systems, right?
Erin Marcus: And at any given moment, one of those plates is falling
Robert Brill: 100%. I just never stopped working. It almost ruined my relationship. Like, I'm now happily married for seven years, but there was a time when we broke up because I was so hard to deal with because I was constantly working, always stressed really frenetic.
Robert Brill: And. It's we'd go somewhere. I'd have to have my laptop with me to fix something. So how did you
Erin Marcus: change that? Cause that's my world. Not that I'm doing that. Those are my clients. I call it the folks going from me to we get over that bridge. What did you do to change? I'll say you're out of hours in the day.
Erin Marcus: You're out of days in the week. It's different work, not more work, but there's gotta be, again, it is
Robert Brill: more work. It is more work because it's different work and you're not good at any of it.
Erin Marcus: And you're not good at any of it. So you've got to do less work, but it's scarier work.
Robert Brill: Right.
Erin Marcus: So what made you decide, you know what, most people, this is like where I give you all the accolades because most people will retreat.
Erin Marcus: Most people will retreat and keep the business that they will settle for.
Robert Brill: Yeah.
Erin Marcus: Instead of get over the bridge.
Robert Brill: My wife gives me really good advice. That's, I have a really great life partner in her and she's she's very good at contextualizing things in a way that you see like the bigger picture.
Robert Brill: And sometimes, I won't listen and sometimes I do, but I spend a lot of time reframing how I see the world. I that's really it. I had to get punched in the face and stomped down really hard in order for me to take a step back, hear the world in a different way and change my perspective on things.
Robert Brill: And when I started to do that work, it turned into opportunity. And I still do that. At every step of the way there's mistakes I made. We hired people. There was one, one one summer we tripled our staff and no one was happy. I'm doing more work that I don't want to be doing.
Robert Brill: Clients are dissatisfied. The people we hired are dissatisfied. I was like, what is happening? I'm not, clearly I'm not a good, I'm not a good leader. I'm not good at motivating people. Cause I just, think like everyone is like me and then in my head. Excited
Erin Marcus: to do work 80 hours a day. Yeah.
Erin Marcus: Excited
Robert Brill: to work 80 hours and also very hard on myself, very hard on myself. There's no one else I'm harder. It's like when, and then when that starts to project outwards, that's really, it's a really bad look. So I learned from a lot of people who are far better at that than I am. And also we set up a standard operating procedure, which was very important, right?
Robert Brill: So the minute you have people. Like you need to tell them what they need to be doing. Otherwise they're not going to be successful because they don't know how to be successful because there's no goals for them to achieve the success you've created. And so with the standard operating procedure, people stay with us longer, both clients and our employees.
Robert Brill: And we've grown our team and substantially grown our revenue because there's a space for that growth to happen.
Erin Marcus: Yeah and one of the things that I watch, and I love that you're talking about how internal this was, it was internal for you, it was internal for the business that all had to be orchestrated, because the other mistake I one, I watch people retreat and give up, but the other thing I watch people do is they try to solve all business problems with marketing tactics.
Erin Marcus: Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.
Robert Brill: Oh, no,
Erin Marcus: right. Have you ever seen that? We're like I need more money and all this is going wrong. So I'm going to write a book or I'm going to start a podcast. And I have a book and a pod. That's, it's not that the tactics wrong. It's you can't solve every problem with a marketing tactic.
Erin Marcus: That's supposed to bring in revenue.
Robert Brill: Because what's the point of marketing if your operations team can't keep the client? Exactly.
Erin Marcus: Exactly.
Robert Brill: I'm very stubborn. I think that's a big part of my success. And as a result, like I def I don't, I try to do things fast. That's not always the best way of doing it, but I definitely try.
Robert Brill: I will not give up, I'm like a dog with a bone.
Erin Marcus: It's the resiliency and the persistency and the difference between that working in your favor and knowing when it's working against you.
Robert Brill: I'm also open to being wrong. Our chief operating officer, she's fantastic. She's a, uh, she's very much about empathy and people and I'm like, yeah, I want you leading our organization.
Erin Marcus: Because nobody wants you leaving right?
Robert Brill: Yeah, because I create drama and stress and I don't want to create stress. I don't want to make people feel bad. I want people, I want our business to succeed. But unfortunately, because I've been in my head my entire life, I am so hard. I'm so hard on people and myself because that's just what, that's the constant dialogue I have in my head.
Robert Brill: So it's better If it's not me that's trying to get people to do stuff, it's better if other people are doing it.
Erin Marcus: And I have the same thing. In my business, the thing that I should never be in charge of is processes and operations. I won't follow them. I will break them. I should not be the one creating the processes.
Robert Brill: Create the process and then teach
Erin Marcus: me teach me my little corner of the process. I'll do what I'm told. And I don't want to get in the mix of that. And I think it's so important, like the hardest thing you can do, and you've done it over and over again, is to have an honest conversation with yourself.
Erin Marcus: It's so hard to really have honest conversations with yourself, and then actually do something with the muck that you uncover.
Robert Brill: It's challenging because you the question I always have is, who's right? Do I trust myself or do I trust you? And I've created a, I have a shorthand for that.
Robert Brill: If it's marketing and advertising, I will trust myself and then I will look for experts to augment what I know so I can do it better, not with like with the paid media, I have a great staff and they're doing exceptional work, so I'm not worried about that, but like content creation on Tik TOK, like I'll trust that's the thing I need to do.
Robert Brill: And then find people who could make me better at it or SEO, for example.
Erin Marcus: Yeah.
Robert Brill: Same type of thing. But with stuff that I'm not good at, I have to understand and accept that I'm not going to be good at that, like the empathy part of it and I will defer to other people and actively learn from them. So being wrong, accepting being wrong, I think is one of the biggest ways that I can improve because then I can accept that maybe someone else is doing it better than me.
Erin Marcus: Love it. I watched a Gary Vee video, it caught it on TikTok, and it was Talking about making decisions and wanting to be right versus being scared to be wrong and that what's holding most business owners back is they want to make three decisions and they want all three decisions to be right. They want to be 3 and 0.
Erin Marcus: He's I'm trying to be 117 and 82 by tomorrow.
Robert Brill: Like just get me to the success part. Don't get I don't care who's right.
Erin Marcus: Yeah. I
Robert Brill: could be wrong. It doesn't matter. I could be wrong
Erin Marcus: all the time. I'm confident. I could be
Robert Brill: wrong all the time. It's still my business and I still win. So it's actually worked out.
Erin Marcus: Exactly. It's the same. That I think is one of the difficult things because as entrepreneurs, small business owners, there is so little, if any, separation between us and our business. And yet. If you really only see your business as an extension of yourself, it can get real hard to have that open conversation, the honesty with yourself and make those decisions.
Robert Brill: There's a lot of emotional and the feeling part of the business that I think a lot of people don't talk about. It's hard. Like when things don't go well, it's it takes a toll on the person, the family, the household.
Erin Marcus: It's
Robert Brill: not about the money. It's about. The feeling of stress and anxiety.
Erin Marcus: So how do you alleviate your stress? Let's get a little I
Robert Brill: don't, I don't alleviate the stress. I let it I just I let it fuel me. It always what it is. I like going to Dodgers games and whatnot, but I'm all like, I'm always like, I'm always thinking about. How do I, how do things improve?
Robert Brill: I want to improve things.
Erin Marcus: I think if it's, I think if your intention, I think it really, whether or not that harms or helps you is dependent on your intention underneath it. If you're doing, if you have no stress relief and you're doing, taking action to heal an unsolved inner wound, you're going to have problems.
Erin Marcus: But if you're truly striving for more and it's exciting and you're creating.
Robert Brill: Yeah, it's a little bit of both. Sometimes it's I'm very I really enjoy the work that I do. So that's a big part of it, but also the stress component or the individual things that are challenging me, I try to solve for. So it's a common My wife says that this job is both my job and my hobby.
Robert Brill: I really like doing it. I really like the work. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing. But I also like winning. Winning is fun.
Erin Marcus: Winning is fun. I say that about myself all the time. I have no attention span, which makes me good in Vegas. Because winning is fun, but losing is not fun. There's nothing in me that says, just keep going, it'll turn around.
Erin Marcus: Because by the third hand in a row that I've lost, I've now lost interest. It's worked really well, like I've had some good trips, right? I've had some good, I've had some good runs in Vegas, all because winning is fun, losing is not fun, and I have no attention span, so it's worked out really well.
Robert Brill: That's funny.
Robert Brill: The last two trips I went to in Vegas they were both work trips and I didn't do any gambling. I'm very happy about that because I just realized like I don't want to lose. I don't know. I'm not in the, I'm here to win. I'm here to get clients. I'm here to learn stuff.
Erin Marcus: And what I unfortunately or fortunately have learned that if I go shopping in Vegas, you always come home with something.
Robert Brill: There you go.
Erin Marcus: So if people want to continue this conversation and learn more about how you can help them and what you do, what's the best way for them to get ahold of you?
Robert Brill: Our website is brillmedia. co, B as in boy, R I L media. co. We run ads, we do consulting, and we help people solve their marketing challenges.
Erin Marcus: Love it. Thank you for your honesty and your openness and your frank conversation and a topic that I'm not great at because I get frustrated with the tech. Nice. Thanks for having me, Erin. Appreciate it. Thanks for hanging out.