EP 4: Scaling Business, Parenting Children, and Believing in Your Mission with Dave McCready

Welcome back to the Impact Warrior podcast!

In this episode, I talk to Dave McCready,  CEO of Positive Parenting Solutions. He and his wife, Amy McCready, have built an impressive and growing business while bringing their positive parenting message to millions of parents with online courses, TV interviews, books, and more.

Positive Parenting Solutions has made a massive impact on parents and their children worldwide, and it has certainly impacted my family and how we parent. Amy and Dave have answers to those seemingly impossible questions that many parents struggle with, and are a fantastic resource for all parents-- I can't recommend them enough!

I asked Dave about parenting difficulties of my own, and what advice he has for navigating stressful times such as those we all experienced during the pandemic. Dave also generously goes into the inception of Positive Parenting Solutions, how they use EasyWebinar, what is on the horizon for their business, and more.

I am grateful to Positive Parenting Solutions for what we've learned about parenting from them and to Dave for coming on the show! If you’re navigating being a parent and running a business, I know you’ll love this one.


We’ll be releasing new episodes each week, so subscribe to Impact Warrior wherever you listen to podcasts to be the first to see when a new episode goes live.

Don’t forget to check the show notes after each episode for links, free gifts, and additional resources for our listeners! All episodes can be found at www.CaseyZeman.com.



What you’ll hear in this episode:

[11:20] How discovering and implementing automated webinars changed Dave and Amy’s lives

[14:40] Casey asks Dave about patience and keeping to positive discipline during times as difficult as the pandemic

[22:20] Casey asks about the hardest moments of running Positive Parenting Solutions, and Dave explains the importance of having belief in their cause and building up the great team that they work with. 

[30:43] Dave talks about the sales funnel and reach of Positive Parenting Solutions. 

To find more about Dave and Amy McCready and their business, Positive Parenting Solutions, visit their website at the link below.

Links mentioned in this episode: 

• Positive Parenting Solutions
• EasyWebinar
  
  

Where to Find Dave McCready: 

• David McCready LinkedIn
• Positive Parenting Solutions Contact

Special Offer:

> CLICK HERE TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF EASYWEBINAR’S 14-DAY FREE TRIAL AND START MAKING YOUR IMPACT TODAY!

Transcript

Impact Warrior 

Episode 4:
Scaling Business, Parenting Children, and Believing in Your Mission with Dave McCready

Full Transcript

Introduction:  00:00

You're listening to the Impact Warrior podcast. This podcast was created out of a vision to have like minded entrepreneurs who have faced similar battles and understand how difficult entrepreneurship can be. We will feature guests who are here to share with you how rewarding the journey can be, if you stay focused and disciplined to achieve the desires of your heart. Every business owner will face a certain level of difficulty at some point, regardless of the industry. And we are here to share with you the story of warriors who have knocked down massive walls to inspire you to keep fighting on this journey. Let's conquer the journey together. And here's your host, Casey Zeman.

Casey:  00:43

Hey, everybody, welcome to another podcast episode of Impact Warrior and I am so excited to have someone who I've known for quite some time I consider him a friend, Dave McCready. And Dave is the co-founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, along with his wife, Amy McCready, and I've had the pleasure of having them in our community as one of our top 1% customers. And I've also had the pleasure of meeting with them breaking bread with them, and just hearing all the wonderful things that they're doing. And I wanted to bring Dave or Amy on, or both, but But Dave was able to come on in to talk about what they do in the world. And as you know, this podcast is all about highlighting people that are impacting the world in a big way. And our mission, of course, is to continue continue to help those who are impacting the world, to grow their own platforms, and continue to impact in a big way. So I wanted to bring Dave on, because he's doing, he and his wife Amy are doing amazing things for parenting and as a father of three, you know, I, I've been, I've come to him, he and Amy both multiple times about different situations, and they've given awesome suggestions, and their programs and courses are out of this world. So Dave, just, I'm so excited that you're here today to share some of your story with us. So thanks for thanks for being here, my friend. I'm glad to be here and honored. Thank you very much. So I wanted to I wanted to start off, you know, you know, yeah, you have, you know, you guys, I know your stats, you know, obviously you guys are running webinars on EasyWebinars, you have, you know, 80,000+ registrants a month, oftentimes, and, and you know, so I know I know where you're at. But I don't necessarily know where the beginning started. How you how you guys started off. And I know you have multiple children. So I'm assuming it started off that way. But do you want to dig into maybe a little bit of your, of the backstory, like, you know, the journey? How where did it start? You know, it's much different now. But we're, where did you guys start from?

Dave:  03:05

Well, it has to go back to actually before Amy created this training program. And it was, we were living in Boise, Idaho, and she had, you know, our two sons, they were probably three and five at the time. And she tells the story, how she gets to the end of the day, and her throat was sore. And she'd think, "Oh, maybe I'm getting sick." And then she realized the reason her throat was sore, cuz she was yelling at these two cute little boys. And they weren't doing anything wrong. They were just being normal kids, sometimes listening, sometimes not listening, sometimes doing something-- exploring as kids do, especially boys and running the risk of hurting themselves. And it's just what kids do, as you know. And then she realized, “Wait a second, there's something wrong with this. Why am I yelling?” So because she has a training and development background. She thought, well, let's dig into this the root cause of this whole thing. And she realized that was the way she was dealing with the children. And she basically was not meeting their needs. So you know, when kids miss- what we would call  "misbehave," a lot of the time it's because we as parents are not meeting their needs. And we're not talking about food and shelter and sleep. I'm talking about other needs longing and significance. So Amy started mentoring with someone that she had met in Boise started doing training programs with her and, and then she started doing her own study. We moved to North Carolina shortly thereafter. And she took some courses. And because she has a training background, the things that she learned she thought there's a better way to teach adults how to take these tools and implement them for greater success. So she developed the training program. And then she started with training at churches and YMCAs, and Montessori schools here in the Raleigh area. And, my apologies, they are cutting grass outside my doors, it should go away here in a second.

Casey:  05:18

It's okay. It's okay. It's, this is the beauty of podcasting. It's, you know, we're always doing it out of our house. I still, I've yet to tell everybody I'm doing this literally in, in a lake house bathroom. Of my parent’s lake house bathroom. 

Dave:  05:35

It'll just be our secret. 

Casey:  05:37

That's Well, yeah, exactly. Unless it's not everybody will see if it goes out there.

Dave:  05:43

So it was a, it was a labor of love for her, it was a six-week course that she taught. And I was doing my thing traveling, I was working, working for a company, running this company and traveling a lot. And then one day, I was reading a survey that she did after every week, she did a survey and she'd asked, you know, how are things working? And "What do you what do you think?" and I read from week two on after they've had one week of tools that they were implementing, and you read this, and I was blown away by the parents saying "You've changed my life, even after one week, this is making a huge difference. I didn't yell at my kids, I only yelled at my kids a couple of times this week." And I'm like, "What is going on here?" And I started learning more about what my wife was doing. I was embarrassed to say that I was focused on my own little world, and not paying attention to what she was doing. She had really come up with a course that was making a difference. And it's based on positive discipline. That's not a new training thing. But that she took that and implemented these tools. It was making such a huge life, huge difference in these people's life, both in terms of their relationship with their kids and a lot of times in relationship with their spouse. Because a lot of times, you know, the more that kids act out, misbehave, talk back, yell, whatever, the more friction it creates in the home. So it was making such a huge difference. But as we looked at this and thought, "Hey, well, there's a great business opportunity here." Both of us have sales and marketing backgrounds. In addition, she has a training background, we thought, "How do we scale this?" because she's only one person, and she's got little kids, and she can't be doing this seven days a week. So she, we thought, well, let's put it online. And you know, this is the early days of digital marketing. And on January 1, 2009, we had a website, we had this video training program. And we went online. And for the first couple of years, these two people that have brick and mortar backgrounds were learning how to do digital marketing on the internet. Some things worked, a lot of things didn't. And then come about, I think it was about our second year in, and we were off, we were doing some things that were starting to work, we're getting some traction. And this is where, you know, you can take your skills, and you can do things that work and don't work. But sometimes it's just dumb luck. And we had been working hard on the PR side of things. And Amy was contacted by the New York Times to get it to quote, to get a quote in an article, asked about a topic and the topic was about spanking. And they quoted her multiple times in this article. And the next day, the phone call came in from MSNBC, from Fox News, from the Today Show, all these places that wanted to get her on TV to talk about this. And that was probably the thing that put us on the map from a legitimacy standpoint. It wasn't just two guys in a basement anymore. Now, she's quoted in major newspapers, she's on multiple TV programs. And then she went on to she's done. Pretty much any daytime TV, you can think of program, Rachael Ray and the doctors and different things that she's done over the years. Steve Harvey, she's been on all these programs, which helps with legitimacy. So little thing, like being quoted in an article, even though we had been working for the on the PR side of things to try to get these opportunities, you know, we just we just lucked into it. It's really what it came down to. 

Casey:  09:43

I mean that that's, I think the influence part is a is a big factor. You know, so having the but you know have definitely having, being able to get PR, and getting found where people are looking for you. I mean that the legitimacy factor can go a long way. For sure. Yeah, that's incredible. So, so when once that happened, things started to snowball, you started to ramp up, more and more opportunity came.

Dave:  10:14

Yeah, the big scale came when we discovered Facebook ads. And that's when we were really able to scale our business. But at that time, we were doing all live webinars, and we would do two on Tuesday, one on Wednesday and two on Thursday, they were 1pm and 9pm. Eastern time is when we would do these, and made it tough to to get people from, you know, outside of the US, even the West Coast, it was difficult we would do, we even did some 11pm Eastern Time to get the West Coast. And that was very draining on both of us, especially Amy, who would then was up at 530, the next morning with our kids. She would sign off on the webinar and she'd be done then I'd have you know because we weren't that automated, I would be downloading lists from the webinar platform, then over to a CRM, or Survey Monkey or something to send emails out. So we weren't very automated at that point. And then, here's the great part, then we discovered this thing called automated webinars, and we discovered EasyWebinar in our life changed dramatically, we were then able to get more than five hours of sleep a night, because we went to automated webinars, and then we were really able to scale after that even more than when we were, you know, just doing Facebook ads and to live webinars, we're doing Facebook ads into automated webinars, and it was just the dramatic change in our life and our business.

Casey:  11:55

That's incredible. That's, I love hearing that, you know, the obstacles, you, you know, that, that that's really what it's about, you know. While you're dealing with trying to, you know, get your business... What I love is that you guys, two parents, both working in the business, and, you know, and probably very with very little help, you know, you still had your you were raising your children, but you got it done anyway. And you know, for those who, you know, really had it, I think this, you know, but at the time we're doing this podcast, you know, where all of 2020 was the, you know, the pandemic. That year was such a challenging year. And, you know, for parents who have young kids, it's like, that's the type of stuff that they deal with all the time where they have the kids in the house, you know, they're they're maybe working on their businesses. And I think more people had to deal with it, because more people had their children that, who normally would be at school, at home. And so more people had to figure out how to make their businesses work, because they were also working out of the house, even if they, you know, yes, as employees, but they'd still had to figure it all out. So we all had to figure out this thing that a lot of entrepreneurs such as yourself, and maybe myself as well, that we'd had already been doing with maybe juggling family, and, and business and career. And it was, I love that you said you got it done anyway, until you found an easier way to get it done. And I think that's a part of this is that, when you're faced with an obstacle, you get it done anyway, until you and while you're also problem solving to to solve the process, that's going to make it easier to do it, right. Because, you know, if you're doing one or the other, you're you're gonna stall out, you have to do both at the same time, you have to keep the business running. And at the same time figure out how you're going to problem solve to fix the the barriers or the worthy, you know, the dependencies that you keep hitting while you're trying to grow. And what I love is that you were doing both at the same time. And then of course EasyWebinar was that was the tool. So I love hearing that, of course changed your business and life and just, you know, got you you were able to finally get some more sleep. Yeah.

Casey:  14:39

 I want to ask you a question about parenting. So kind of not necessarily about the webinar stuff or business at this point, but parenting in this last year. You know, I found, I found that my wife and I had shorter tempers. You know, we didn't have as much, you know, we are positive, you know, positive reinforcement and positive discipline, but we noticed that we just had less, that we our capability of being positive was, was less, because of just the situation of this last year, and being on top of each other all the time, you know, kids always being in the house, right, and having to navigate the waters of, of doing, you know, virtual classes all the time, you know, the kids having to set up their, their, their classrooms, in the house, and us having to do the same thing. And, you know, just all the pieces that came along with that. You know, we found it, I found it to be, it started to, we were noticing it and, and I remember going back to my wife and saying we need to, we need to go and look at Positive Parenting Solutions, again, to kind of get back onto that track. You know, what do you say to people that are in that situation as parents in that, you know, in that, in that kind of grind that almost survival mode? What do you say about the positive parenting in those situations and moments?

Dave:  16:24

Well, let me ask you that question, kind of in the form of, kind of historically, what happened back in 2019, and 2020, last year. So, you know, I think we were all cruising along doing well, from a business standpoint, in January, February. And, you know, we started hearing more about this pandemic. And there was a-- I don't remember the exact, I think it was what, early March on a Sunday. And I said to Amy, I said, I'm not feeling good about things, I'm going to shut our advertising off. We're going to sit back and listen to our customers of what's going on here. And we were apprehensive like everybody else was, "Are we going to get sick? Is the economy going to die off? Is it you know, what's going to happen here?" there was so much unknown. And for three weeks, basically, Amy just held events for our existing customers, and even reaching out to potential customers, and listening to them and trying to help them. And the first thing was that here's the first answer to your question. We tell them, "Don't be hard on yourself, you're being too hard on yourself. It's a difficult time. This is hopefully a once in a lifetime situation. With the pandemic." Hopefully, it's only once in our lifetime. But then it was complicated by a very politically charged environment with the election, and other issues going on in our culture that just made it so difficult. On top of that, then you've got everybody working from home, kids trying to school from home, all the fears. And the first thing, Amy, tells everybody and we continue to tell everybody, "Don't be hard on yourself. It's a difficult time. So just take a deep breath, calm and relax." Then from there. What we went on to tell people and coach them on is to, okay, try to have a routine, try to get yourself and your kids in a routine. It was really easy, cuz my youngest son finished his college career on his childhood bed with his laptop on his lap, you know, finishing. And the last thing he wanted to do was to take courses online. But for him, he was done. He had a job, all he had to do is graduate, it's no big deal. When you have elementary school kids and other grade school kids, it's very difficult, and it's not going to be perfect. And how often did if the class, the zoom class started at nine o'clock, did the kids roll in there, you know, roll out of bed at 10 til nine. So what Amy would try to get people to do is follow a routine. Get them up like it's a regular school day, maybe not quite as early because there's no transportation, you don't have to commute anywhere. And try to get them in a routine. If you're eating breakfast, every day together, eat breakfast together every day, then have them get dressed. And so she'd work through the routines, even during, during the afternoon. Have them try to do the same kind of routines. It's not going to work as perfect as if they're going off to school and being in front of their teachers and socializing with their friends. It's just not going to be the same. But again, don't be hard on yourself because it's it's so difficult.

Casey:  20:01

What I love is that like you, you guys had an answer. And your answer was, "Don't be hard on yourself," you know. And we did that we, we, we said, you know, this is I mean, this is like, yeah, like we said, like this is a, this is a cancellation year like or something like that we said this year, we're kind of wiping this year off the books. But we did have a very, very distinct schedule, like we lived and died by the schedule, we tried to create structure in the chaos, and it served us to be honest with you, it served us and we got through it, and it got easier with time. And, and so, I think that your mission is so important on so many levels. You know, as as an adoptive parent, you know, like, the positive, the big, positive encouragement, and also structure. You know, love and structure are two of the most important things, from our perspective. And our kids are just amazing. Yeah, I mean, they're just, we're just so blessed. They're just amazing children. And, and again, I think the work that you do echoes, those, those scenarios for us of, you know, how to raise, you know, wonderful, you know, future, you know, you know, humans that are just going to, you know, that are just going to be, they're respectful, they provide love, they're caring, they're empathetic, like all the things. So the work that you got you guys are doing for personally, is is so impactful, and so important that I want to keep on helping you impact others in that way. 

Dave:  22:01

Thank you. Very kind of you.

Casey:  22:03

Of course, I wanted to come in, what are some of the possibilities, some of the things you guys are working about some things you're excited about? You know, in your? 

Casey:  22:15

Well, before I go into that, I actually want to I want to find out what was one of the hardest times one of the hardest moments, the time that you thought I might quit this thing. This is not gonna work. We can't we can't keep going. What do you have a moment like that, that sticks out in your brain just have one of the viscerally just, you know, so almost traumatizing that it forced that you thought, we can't do this anymore? Like, you guys literally had to sleep on it? Or, you know, you had two days where you're like this, we can't keep going? Was there a moment like that, for you?

Dave:  22:55

Yeah, I'm you may be disappointed. But I'm going to have to answer that there was not a single moment. However, I will say that through many days, in the first couple years. I wouldn't say I was ready to throw in the towel. I'm probably too stubborn for that. Hate to fail, hate to admit failure. That's, you know, one of my one of my faults because sometimes you need to, you need to throw in the towel and move on and do other things. But we never, we never were we're close to doing that. Because we believed in the cause. And our cause, it has, it has changed and expanded over the years. But our cause the one thing that hasn't changed is, if we could help one parent a day, have a better relationship with their child, if there can be one less kid that gets spanked because the parent didn't have a better discipline technique that we could teach them. If if there's less, one family that has less fighting between the spouses, it's all worth it to us. And that's why we do this. And fortunately for us, as we have grown, our mission has expanded in that we now employ virtually all moms, it's me and one other guy, the rest are women. They work part-time around their kids schedules, their family schedules, they're absolutely fantastic. It is amazing the things that these women do on our team. And that's a big part of our mission as well as be able to provide employment and also belonging and significance for them. We're just one big team and you know, we had a we had a team meeting just this past Sunday night. And you know, we just we have constructive business things but also we joke around as well. There's a it's just a good group of people. So, you know, our mission, as I said, started off and it's expanded. And we're, we're really committed to that. But there was never one time there were one big event, but there were times where it's like, "Hey, is this really going to work?" But it did work. And we haven't had days like that a long time.

Casey:  25:24

You know, what I take away on that, from that, and this is this has been a common theme is that if you believe in the mission, you'll put the work in to accomplish and push through. And that has been a common theme and in our other in other interviews, that, that, our other guests have believed in the mission, they, and that's what kind of filled their coffers when they when they had depletion, right, when they were faced with obstacles that they thought were, they just couldn't break through, you know, or, or moments where more challenges arose, you know, they that their mission, they always went back to their mission. And so I, I think that's part of this, like how you can stay that, "warrior" and create that continue to create that impact, you have to know that you're creating impact in the first place. And if you and I love that you said, you know,  your initial mission was if I can just help one parent, you know, have a better relationship, you know, positively discipline their child, you know, we've done it, and I think that's what it really is all about. I also love that where you're at right now is you have a growing team. And you know that, that maybe that leads us into the possibility piece of that, you know, what are the, you know, what are you working on? What are you excited about? How are you? Where are you going next? Because you're growing your team, you're talking about how you're creating even more impact, and you're, you're bringing in more moms, and they're getting, they're on your team. And, you know, what's your plan with all this? Where are you going with this? Because I love the sound of it. I'd love to know more about where you're taking it.

Dave:  27:22

Yeah, that's a good question. We, we actually spent a lot of time talking about that. And, you know, they're not going to stop making parents and they're not going to stop making kids that talk back to their parents. So we feel that, you know, we have a good market size, and we do reach around the world. I think I've counted, we have customers on six of seven continents, I think Antarctica is a continent, I don't think we have any customers there. So we have customers on six of seven continents. But the next thing for us is, you know, to continue to grow what we're doing, because we can, we can do a better job than we are now and reaching out to people, whether it's with our advertising, whether it's with our copy, whether it's with promotions, our pricing, whatever it has to do. But I think the next big leap for us is going to be something that a business we acquire, I started looking for different businesses that would fall under a parenting umbrella. And I'm not going to get into rental cars or anything like that, but it would fall under the parent under parenting. And there's a couple things we started to look at, probably that also follow the same type of training we do with our, you know, we have video training supported by live coaching would probably be a video training course possibly is what we're looking at. Or anything that just helps parents. That's that's what we're looking to do right now. And I think, you know, it's difficult to continue to grow your market share and continue to find the growth that we have been very fortunate enough to see over the years without getting into another area with other products to sell. 

Casey:  29:22

Mhm. Which totally makes sense that you know,  you have parents that are probably thirsting for the next what else can we what are the resources do you have? There's a lot of awesome opportunity with that, even with different partnerships and things like that. Maybe I'll talk to you offline about some people, some different programs that I know, people that are also doing some parenting stuff.

Dave:  29:52

Would love to do that. 

Casey:  29:53

 Yeah. That's very exciting. And, you know I so so with that in mind, so you're going to, you're going to start to see those moments happen and do some acquisition. How many? How many customers? What's your reach right now with? Just out there, not necessarily customers, but how many people are you impacting with your masterclasses, with your training, you know, whether they're customers or just people that have heard, heard your mission and heard, you know, your presentation and probably gained some bit of insight that they took away right away? How many people are you impacting that way?

Dave:  30:45

You know, one of the things that maybe we haven't explained here is exactly how our funnel works. And that'll give me an opportunity to answer your question, because parenting is obviously near and dear to everybody. We found in the early part of the years of our business, back in 2009-2010, that people were skeptical about buying something that was going to affect themselves, but especially their children. So the way our funnel works, most of our sales start by, we bring in customers the top of the funnel, and we take them to a one hour free webinar. So they get to meet Amy, they get to start hearing about the different, her training philosophy, the course. And she actually teaches them tools that they can use once their webinar is done, that they can use immediately in their families. So it's not it's not a sales pitch. It's 55 minutes of content. And then hey, if you're interested in want to learn more, here's what we have. So obviously, our sales are less than the number of people that start at the top of the funnel. And the real answer is, I don't know the answer to your question. Because I've never stopped to count up. But we've probably reached over the years, well over a million people worldwide. It may be even the multiple millions, I'd have to punch some things into a calculator. As to how many people have, you know, seen Amy do a training program?

Casey:  32:30

Well, even if you looked at how many people have seen your ad, how many people have registered for your webinar? You know, I imagine that's in the multiple of millions. 

Dave:  32:42

Many millions of seeing the ad. Yeah, yeah.

Casey:  32:47

So your reach in that regard has been great. Whether they clicked on the ads or whether they registered, you know, gone deeper. They saw they Amy, which is pretty incredible. Let me go let me go into another section in our in our podcast. I want to ask you some questions. What's one thing that most people don't know about you?

Dave:  33:16

Oh, one thing? Probably that I like the mountain bike. And my son, my oldest son got me into this about six seven years ago and I love mountain biking and love going into the woods and doesn't matter if it's hot or cold. I prefer warmer weather. And I just love going out there that's it's just you know, I don't I don't wear ear pods or anything I want to I want to hear the wind through the trees I want to and then see nature. See deer runaway as I ride by, and just have a blast going in there is kind of my place to get away from everything.

Casey:  33:59

Oh, I love that. I love that. I was I was just on a four-wheeler going through the forest a couple days ago. Of course there were deer but they could hear me from a mile away. Yeah, you on the other hand, I love that. That's actually so awesome. And I love that you're doing that. I know my dad is actually a cyclist but he's not doing mountain biking. So mountain biking, I've tried it a couple times, it can be brutal. At the same time, it's like it's it's not only a great workout, but you're just basically one with nature because you're out there. 

Dave:  34:36

Yeah, for sure. 

Casey:  34:38

So let me ask you another question. What's the biggest surprise or setback you've had in the last few months? And why? 

Dave:  34:44

The biggest what?

Casey:  34:46

Setback. If there's anything that happened the last few months. What was that?

Dave:  34:52

Oh it had, with our business with our business. It has to be the effects of the iOS 14.5 update and how it has affected Facebook. And what has been surprising to me is how unprepared Facebook was for this, when the Apple had been announcing this 14.5 update for a very long time. And it's, it's, it's been disappointing that, you know, their majority of their revenues come from their ad platform, and they just keep taking tools away and visibility away. It's just very frustrating. That's been the biggest setback. So in some ways, we've had to, you know, when the way to optimize with Facebook and really with anything else is you have to test. And, you know, we've been testing for years. And as they make algorithm changes, which they make all the time, we're able to adjust and you know, we do different testing, well, we've almost had to go back to the start and start start testing from scratch, which has been rather frustrating just because we have so little visibility on things.

Casey:  36:11

And I completely understand that that's why we at EasyWebinar were working our butts off, we're trying to create ways to make sure that not only from, you know, creating the ability to do custom domains, but other things that would help you figure those things out. While you're while we everybody was going through it. So I completely get that. Um, what is the one thing that you're curious about right now? And why? 

Dave:  36:45

The one thing I'm curious about? 

Casey:  36:47

Yeah, like, yeah. In regards to the role that you're doing right now, you know, this is all about self-improvement, you know, do you consider yourself the COO, or CEO of the company?

37:01

I am the CEO of the company, and my wife is President. And she is focused on customers and content, I'm focused more on the financial side and making sure the operations work, day in, day out. And if there's a technical problem, it comes to me no matter what time of day it is. Of course, I don't fix any of it, I go out to the developers and get things fixed. Now, I think you know, probably just a general fear of the unknown, you know, is because we rely pretty heavily on Facebook ads. And probably the one thing that keeps me awake at night is in seeing a little bit of what's happened with our business as a result of Facebook. And I think we're going to come, we'll come back to where we were, once we get our ads optimized and everything and get our spend back up. But just the fear of you know, if Facebook disappears tomorrow, if the government breaks them up. You know, what, you know, what challenges are we going to face and of course, that's why we're spending time and focus on diversifying in terms of looking for other businesses, as well as other methods of bringing in customers other than just Facebook ads, you know, we're working with different affiliates. So there's, you know, I just think any CEO will tell you that it's the, it's the unknown that's the biggest concern, because you can't plan for that. If I know something's going to be coming down the road, that's going to cause us a problem, that's fine. I'll plan for it. We'll work around it, we'll cut back we'll do whatever we need to do. It's just the unknown is always a concern.

Casey:  37:22

So what I hear you saying is that the things that you're curious about, or that you're working on are different acquisition methods other than paid traffic that you can lean in on, if any storm sort of hit with how you're doing your paid media right now. 

Dave:  39:20

Right.

Casey:  39:21

Whether that's affiliates, or SEO or what have you, you're kind of looking at other avenues to take as well. 

Dave:  39:28

Yeah. And, you know, everyone that you mentioned, SEO and social and it is certainly in, you know, market share increases. All of that will provide incremental growth, and that's wonderful. And I'll take that all day every day. But to get that big leap, that you don't get necessarily in year, we're in year 13 or 14 of our business, you know, it's hard to get those big exponential growth years, that was when you were starting from smaller basis. To get that you almost have to be looking at an acquisition,

Casey:  40:10

You have to look at acquisition, I also think you need to look at big partnerships. Right? 

Dave:  40:15

Yeah. That's in that affiliate bucket. You know, I talk about because we are looking at the partnerships, and, you know, some people that I'd like to be introduced to pursue some partnerships.

Casey:  40:32

Mhm. Yeah. And I, so I love that that's, those are some of the things you're thinking about. You know, as a CEO, that's what you need to think about, you need to think about the unknown. And I kind of wake up in the middle of the night feeling the same way. So I agree with you, as entrepreneurs, business owners, we don't have a safety net. Right. So we're always sort of thinking about the next move. And I think if you know, your business and keep you up a little at night, then you know, you wouldn't be thinking ahead too much, you know, right.

Dave:  41:11

Absolutely. Worrying as long as it's not too bad. And, yeah, debilitating, keeps you on edge as well.

Casey:  41:19

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean, if you don't want it to be do, you know, you don't want it to disable you as a human right, but just being able to function and think, "Okay, what are some things I can veer into, zigzag? If I need to?" That's right. Um, so, Dave, I just want to thank you so much, man, this was great. How can people get to get to know you more? Where can they find you, connect with you? What are the best avenues to take for our listeners?

Dave:  41:51

Oh, well, probably. Like, if you asked me what my LinkedIn, exact LinkedIn URL is, I don't know the answer to that question. But PositiveParentingSolutions.com. Any of those emails we have on the contact page, email addresses, I'll be told about it. So I'm happy to talk to anybody. You know, we do get, we do get a lot of questions about, Amy and I both get questions. "Hey, how did you get started?" You know, "Any advice?" We're happy to help in any way that we can, you know, at any time, because if we can help somebody, maybe not make some of the mistakes that we made early on, then you know, that's nice that we can help somebody.

Casey:  42:43

Yeah, absolutely. And I know you've done, you've just helped me tremendously as a parent. So thank you, I've learned a lot from you, as well. And it's been my honor to be able to give you a platform that will help you to get your message out there more. So again, Dave, thank you so much. links will be in the show notes, everybody. And I will of course be talking to you more and more, Dave. So thanks again, my friend.

Dave:  43:14

That is my pleasure. And I'm looking forward to now that the you know, pandemic is coming-- at least it's a little bit better. We're going to be traveling out west and maybe we can get together and have a meal together again.

Casey:  43:27

I would love that. I love that. If you're coming to Los Angeles, my friend definitely hit me up, okay? 

Dave:  43:32

Sounds good. 

Casey:  43:34

All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Dave. 

Dave:  43:36

Thanks, Casey. See ya.