An Unexpected Email, an Unplanned Deal, and 60 New Clients - Crowd Digital Marketing

Company: Crowd Digital Marketing

Owners: Alex Schupp

Year Started: 2017

Employees: 1 – 10

Most agency acquisitions are long, strategic, and carefully planned—but what if a growth opportunity landed in your inbox out of nowhere?

That’s exactly what happened to Alex Schupp, founder of Crowd Digital Marketing. One day, an unexpected email led to an opportunity to acquire another agency’s clients. At first, he almost dismissed it. But after looking closer, he realized he could scale his business overnight.

In this episode, we break down:

• How a single email led to an acquisition deal
• The smartest way to absorb another agency’s clients
• The biggest mistakes to avoid in an acquisition
• Why the best growth opportunities aren’t always obvious

If you’re thinking about agency acquisitions—or if you just want to hear a wild business story—this episode is for you.

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.

Russel: 0:40

Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I'm your host, Russel. In this episode, we're joined by Alex Shoup, the driven founder of Crowd Digital Marketing based in Denver, Colorado. Alex takes us on a journey from his early days, managing social media for iconic brands to building a people first agency that partners with nonprofits and underserved industries. Hear how Alex's strategic risk taking including discounted work and acquisitions. laid the foundation for his agency's growth. And how a chance encounter on a ski lift turned into a new client and a write off. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Alex Schupp with Crowd Digital Marketing with us here today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Alex.

Alex: 1:23

Thank you for having me, Russel. I'm excited to be here and talk about marketing.

Russel: 1:26

I'm excited as well. Other than my business partner, as long as I can remember, I think you're the first fellow Mizzou grad. Go Tigers, glad to have you on here for this. If you don't mind, start us off. What does Crowd Digital Marketing do and who do you do it for?

Alex: 1:38

Yes. Crowd Digital Marketing, we're a digital marketing and advertising agency based in Denver, Colorado. Our team's virtual so we got team members kind of all over, but we're based in Denver and we have a lot of clients in Denver and Colorado. Our specialty is working with growing brands to help tell their stories. We work with individuals and nonprofits and organizations who have marketing goals and dreams, but they don't have the resources to make those happen. We partner with them to help tell their stories and drive tangible business results for our clients every day.

Russel: 2:07

Perfect. Beautifully put. Want to hear about all the things that you're doing in that space and in your business. I'm sure there's tons and tons of paths we can go down, but before we get to all that, uh, tell us what a young Missouri boy like yourself was wanting to be when he grew up. Take us back in time.

Alex: 2:23

Though I think there's a nice line to where I'm going, I didn't start off in kind of web design and digital advertising like I am now. My background is really in social media management and social media marketing. When I was in high school, that's kind of when this whole Facebook thing took off, I remember emailing Mark Zuckerberg when he still had a public email address saying, I want to invest in your company. They never got back to me, but what a story that would have been right? Different podcast. My background is in social media marketing. What I loved about that was this very real time, authentic interaction. People in brands. That's something that's always spoken to me. I went to school for journalism and again, kind of that organic storytelling was always really special and powerful and important to me. When I left college, I went to, as you've mentioned, University of Missouri, go Tigers, M I Z. When I left Mizzou, I went to a large, super large agency in Boulder, Colorado called Crispin Porter Bovesky. There I had a really awesome opportunity to manage social media for some big, large brands. Bigger than I'd kind of really dreamed about, like Domino's pizza and, uh, RockShox, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Some really fun, diverse and loud brands as far as the social media spectrum. After that, I followed a girlfriend at the time to Boston, Massachusetts, where I joined a social media startup. There we were actually working with small brands, very small businesses, small, medium sized businesses. After a couple of years, I was like, I miss the mountains. I miss Colorado. I want to get back there. I got hooked up with a really awesome boutique digital marketing agency out here, led the social media marketing team. I kind of started getting more into the web end of things. Web development, SEO, managing different forms of digital advertising. That allowed me to, from this boutique advertising agency, go to a web development company where I managed the North American team and we produced 100 to 200 websites a month. It was a sweatshop for websites. In fact, when I, when I interviewed, it was something they made very clear. I kept talking about advertising agency and they were, this is a website production facility. We make websites, we make them very quickly. It was interesting taking my advertising background and applying it to kind of a mass production facility, a digital production facility. After about two years or so there, I left not 100 percent sure what I was going to do next. The corporate world had jaded me a little bit. I left this company a little frustrated kind of how large companies work with small, medium sized businesses. I felt that they were out to make a profit more than, and nothing wrong with making a profit, but I felt they were out to make a profit more than they were out to actually fulfill their partner's missions and dreams and goals. After a year or so of interviewing, I'm thinking like, what do I want to do with my life? I was like, I want to do this myself. I want to come up with a business where I can kind of set the terms and set the client relationships and do this myself. At the time it was called Denver Crowd. I want to focus on Denver based businesses. I want to work with people who are local people who understand the importance of relationships and interconnectedness with the people that you work with. I grew some really amazing businesses and brands in Denver before pivoting a little bit and starting to work with a more national audience. Now we work with people, it's not just national, it's global.

Russel: 5:17

You really got the full swath of experience. You've got big agency, small agency, uh, boutique, more bespoke to factory. Really completed the gauntlet of agency experience or a real world experience in that sense. If I heard you right, you said you just quit your job and didn't exactly know where you were going next is that, did I, did I hear that right?

Alex: 5:39

So I was at this company. Things were going well, the company was growing, but, um, when you're out there, we were a, we're a white label reseller. We were doing work on behalf of other parts of other large marketing agencies. There's a huge disconnect from salesperson to fulfillment team. Then you throw it over to another company and they start fulfilling it, and the customer is like, what, what the hell is this? This isn't what I bought from Tony, who I have never met in my life. I don't even know a guy named Tony. For me, there was this, you know, both there's this personal idea of like, it, it sucks that I'm fulfilling things that people didn't really want to buy or pay for. But also for me, there's this opportunity of there's all these people out there that can't get the marketing services that they, that they need. I left the company without knowing what was next, but, um, it wasn't completely blind before I do this, done this, I have friends that are business owners in Colorado. I said to them, you know, if I was doing my own thing, would we work together? I had past clients from past agencies that, that I kept in touch, hey, same thing. If I had my own agency, could we do some of this work that we used to do together? I had a little bit of a net in that there was at least some people who in theory would be willing to work with me.

Russel: 6:44

Did you think you were heading down an entrepreneurial path, or, or was it just, just kind of more just figuring yourself out?

Alex: 6:51

I had had enough of a career to understand what I was looking for, but not enough to know exactly what I wanted. Actually during that year, I didn't just interview for, for like marketing management roles and things like that. I worked at a friend's restaurant. I thought maybe one day I wanted to own a restaurant. I still want to own a restaurant one day but what I learned out of that was I don't want to manage it. I want to sit at the bar with a drink and hang out, you know? This year was about it exploring a little bit, like where do I want to spend the rest of my life? Anyone that's been in marketing, especially in kind of a corporate marketing agency, can probably identify with the idea of getting burned out and not really knowing that you've got a skill set, knowing that you can help people but also not really being sure if you want to go back there. There was a lot of thought behind my next move. Really the reason that I ended up kind of fully taking the plunge was one or two of these clients that I had talked with, they were like, you know what, let's, let's just do this thing. My first year, so I, I, I think that I registered my company in January. I had a full first year of billing and stuff, but it was a terrible year, financially. You know, um, and we'll, we'll talk about this a little bit down the road, but I was doing a lot of things to invest in a business down the road that weren't paying off right now. There were a lot of different angles that I was pursuing and even while I was at that previous company, I was starting to think about what are the next move. I had bought the domain for my website like a year before I left the company, so I was starting to think about the idea of entrepreneurship. But I didn't, I hadn't taken the plunge. I'm in marketing in Denver. It's saturated. There's enough of us. We don't need any more marketers in Denver. But what I found was there was a specific need in some specific groups of small businesses and organizations for a type of marketing that's really not, not as much being served over here. After a year or so kind of testing the waters and having a few kind of test clients, we'll probably talk about that in a little bit. I said, let's just, let's just do this thing.

Russel: 8:34

There's a couple of things that I think are fascinating is, one, just the courage to, you know, kind of leave something that's probably safe, but not fulfilling you and not necessarily having where you were going next in stone, but taking the time to just search yourself and figure some things out, you know, both from a business planning and like you said, working at a restaurant. I too have never worked in food service. I feel like this is still a box I might want to check someday. I don't know if I want to own it, but I feel like I need to have the claim that yes, I've worked in food service. But also even thinking about your product, you know, I think a lot of folks when they, when they know they don't want to work for a company anymore, that they go, you know, immediately into selling whatever skills they have are more staffed or feel like they can sell, versus thinking about this in terms of a, hey, what is the service and the product that need the market needs, and how do I start to plan and build that? As you were kind of saying, slow to start, um, or planting some seeds that wouldn't get, wouldn't bear fruit until more down the road. I'm curious, just since you mentioned it, what are some of those things that you felt like you were doing in the early days that weren't going to have any sort of instant gratification?

Alex: 9:36

I think this can be a controversial opinion in marketing, but it's worked for me very well, and I'm very proud of where we've gone, gone from this. I'm going to preface this by saying, my friends in the agency world, always, something that they're always aware of when doing free or discounted or trade based work is devaluing themselves. Don't devalue your work. Don't do work for free because it devalues you. I disagree with that wholeheartedly. Most of my first clients were, if not free clients, they were paying for costs or paying for the cost of tech or doing some sort of trade. What this allowed me to do is have a client. We're doing very serious work for it. We get some real tangible business results. Then when we go and turn this into a case study, I'm not saying this was a free client or this was discounted. This is a client. This is very real work we did for a very real business organization. First five or 10 of our, not of all of our clients, but, but many of that first five or 10 client group was people who were getting a hell of a deal on digital marketing services because I was, I'm a new brand. If you look at my portfolio in my book from the past, you know, I've mentioned some really great brands that I've worked with, but, but I didn't manage those relationships. I didn't manage the relationship with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. They don't know who I am. What this allowed me to do was build up my presence and my, frankly, my persona a little bit in Denver. I have a lot of friends who own businesses or kind of tangential to that. They're in startup, in the startup world or they help people start businesses. It was a really great opportunity for me or us to prove ourselves before we had to land a really big client. I mentioned first year wasn't great. Financially, it was, like a 30th of a 40th or something of maybe what we're doing now, what we did last year, but what it did was set the seeds of success. I still think of Denver as a cow town. We got the rodeo that comes here every year. If you go out to eat with somebody, with somebody who's in the community, they're going to run into somebody they know. It's not just running into somebody you know at dinner, these things apply in business too. If I can get good results for my buddy, who's a restaurant owner down the street, well, there may be another restaurant or another small business that wants or needs those same services that they're willing to connect me on. My first few websites were very unprofitable. I either broke even or lost money on them, but they all made more connections to new clients, new people who are very much paid clients who are excited about the work that we can do for them and excited about the results that we could get.

Russel: 11:44

Thank you for sharing that. I don't actually believe that it's a controversial notion that you're saying. It's funny, it makes me think of, when we actually started our agency we just, we didn't do it for other people, but we created portfolio websites that weren't real businesses. I don't even think it was disingenuous. It was a reflection of our work. We actually built the website. Probably better to, to at least give it to someone that like, for your saying, that can go out there and, and, you know, tout you and, um, you know, share, share your name and whatever in the marketplace. One of the things that sticks out to me there is, is being intentional and strategic about it versus doing it from a place of, well, I just, just whatever I can do to get the business or, um, I'm scared they won't do business with me. Makes me think of all this thing in, in probably life in general, but anytime we do a thing from fear, that that's probably not a great decision, but anytime we do it from strategy and intention and we make, we maximize that, then we're doing that from a good place. That was a great nugget that you shared there. All right. You're stepping out and, and like you said, rough first year, but you're investing. When was the first time where you're like, you know, cause I imagine there had to be at least a little hesitation. Is this going to work out? When was that first moment of like, oh, that was smart on my part and then it did work out?

Alex: 12:51

For the record, as a business owner, there's going to be those like, oh, shit moments, always. I have them all the time. Is this going to work out? I would say in the second year, we've got some, we've got, we have some clients under our belt. We have some nonprofit and, and brick and mortar store and restaurant clients and other small businesses. Real quick sidetrack, you mentioned some portfolio sites. We did those too. I had to shut down our Beekeeper site because the amount of honey requests we were getting from people. We did the same thing, but at some point in, at the beginning of the second year, we got our first RFP. A local nonprofit reached out to us and they said, we've seen your work with this other nonprofit you work with, and we want you to apply for this RFP. If anybody's, you know, applied for this stuff, you know, it's a shot in the bucket. You don't know you're going to get it. But what was interesting was they invited us specifically to apply. We kind of thought we had an in here. As far as the budgets of websites that we've produced, their budget was a lot higher than our average client. It was a really cool opportunity for us. We, of course, won the RFP and we built the website and they've been a great, and I don't want to mention them and out us completely, but they've been a great client for us since, since that inception, I don't know, six or five or something years ago now. That was kind of the big sign of, all right, we're, we're onto something here, we're building trust and, and we can do the thing. This site was a challenge because there was development that we hadn't done before. There was a lot of things that we had to kind of tie together that we had done in pieces that we had to kind of do for the real deal. It was a great test for us. It was a proving point for us. We still enter RFPs all the time. That's one of our sources of business. But I think that for me, this was the first very legitimizing, oh, shoot. People know who we are. That for me meant that we were onto something.

Russel: 14:19

Nice. You were kind of mentioned there, you know, and maybe I'm assuming some of this free work might've been in the nonprofit space, but even as your business has continued and you probably, you don't need to do the free work anymore. I understand that you do still give back to certain causes in terms of, you know, work and things like that. One, why? Just out of curiosity and, you know, how have you been able to make that make sense, um, from a business perspective or, or work it into the business?

Alex: 14:44

As a small business owner, as somebody who gets to choose what I do every day, there's a, there's something important about what results are we getting, are we getting out of things? It's nice to leave, leave the world a little bit of a better place than you found it. I don't know if the whole world is going in that direction, but my communities are, and it's really nice to be able to make an impact in our small communities. That's part of it for me. There's a more selfish reason too, which is, I don't think that a lot of these businesses get, get the attention that, that they deserve, both from like a individual marketing perspective, but also, if we're going after them with our services, I think that there is a, there's an underserved group of people in these nonprofits. I love the causes that they're working with, but I also see some huge opportunities to work with people. And actually, uh, next month we're acquiring a business that exclusively works with nonprofits. They do website design and development for nonprofits, and we're taking over their existing book of clients. What was really interesting for me in this particular deal is, nonprofits, they got tiny budgets. They have very small budgets. Most of them, 90 percent of them have a very, very small budget. The other 10 have a huge budget, but all of these people have a need for certain types of marketing and access to certain tools that maybe other industries don't have. For instance, Google gives nonprofits all sorts of free stuff like email addresses, and there's this Google ad grants program that gives participating 501c3s 10, 000 dollars a month in a Google, uh, Google AdWords budget, which is a crazy amount of money to spend. And if you're a nonprofit listening to this now, we'd love to connect about helping you with spending this money, but 10, 000 dollars, you know, let's say it's 5 dollars a click. That's like 2000 clicks to your website from people that weren't coming there before. It's, again, a free program to participate in. So as long as we can prove that we are earning our nonprofits money through, through the management of this product, it's something that we can do. We identified a few opportunities for these, for this group of nonprofits that, even as a cost conscious organization, they can collaborate with us. They haven't gotten the notification yet of the acquisition, when they do get the notification, they're going to sit, they're going to hear, you know, you, we've been working with you to support your website and your storytelling goals. Well, now here's a whole new suite of things that we can help you with. I love working with causes to help improve the world, but they're also just a incredibly underserved group of organizations in the world.

Russel: 16:50

I'm all about this where if we can help the world and make it make business sense, then, then is there anything better that we could honestly do with our time and effort and energy is, as you said, make the world a better place? I love how you've been able to do that. Now you've got an acquisition kind of, um, I guess we're on the cusp of right here, it sounds like under your belt. Was that something you actively sought out as a strategy or, or how did you even come about that?

Alex: 17:13

Great question. No, and what's crazy is this is our second acquisition. We did one in 22, 2022, and neither one did I seek out. Both of these kind of came to me extremely randomly. The first one, so I, we primarily build on a website platform called Duda. Really great platform for a lot of reasons. Whole nother podcast could be done on this. We use them and we're a Duda expert, so we do podcasts and webinars with Duda and we help with case studies and how tos and things like that. Another Duda customer saw us through the work that we did in 2022, and he reached out and said, he's going into retirement. He said, my, I got, I forget 40 60, something like that, 50 or 60 clients and I no longer, he's a one man shop. I no longer have the capacity to manage this stuff and I want to pass it along to somebody else. There was a really cool opportunity. He was based in Colorado. I'm based in Colorado. He worked with a lot of nonprofits, brick and mortar stores and restaurants, and we already work with those three groups of customers. Incredible opportunity to not only make sure that their businesses are being covered, but we're experts. We are on the platform you're already on. Who better to hand it off to you than the guys you can watch videos talking about this software about all day? A couple month or two ago, I got an email from a agency owner out in San Francisco and he said, we're looking to offload offload this portion of our business. Would you be interested? When I first saw the email, I thought it was fake because who wants, you know, if you've got a profitable business or if you've got a business that has a semblance of profitability, why are you going to go sell it to someone else? But I was like, let's go hear this guy out. We got in a couple of phone calls and talked through their needs and really, their, their niche is in the software space. They kind of got into the website development and management space so that they could begin engaging with these nonprofit customers. Then they found they really didn't have the capacity or the, the, the, the team and the workflows in place to manage these websites and manage requests for keeping them up to date and active. It's not a very profitable business for them, but we've already got the infrastructure to do this so it's a, it is a great connection for us. Next month we'll be taking over the management of, I think it's like 65 or 70 new nonprofit sites. The challenge of this now is, well, we got 75 people to onboard or 70 people to onboard and get in touch with really quickly, let them know who we are, what we do. Say, hey, we're not going to change your price, but, but we have these awesome opportunities if you want. For me what's been so cool about this is having done it before. The first one it went well and the former agency owner and I are still colleagues, we go out for lunch, you know, a couple times a year and catch up. But I learned so much from that that I was able to navigate this one just, just smoother. Understanding how the agreements work and how should this transition work and from a technological perspective, how do we move 60 clients in one day and not cause outages? I'm very excited for this opportunity to reach out to, so I mentioned now we have 10 or 15 nonprofits. We're going to have 60 or 70 more. This is a really awesome opportunity to kind of, to, to specialize within this niche for us.

Russel: 19:53

What I love there is, is it, it aligned with what you were already doing. It wasn't the shiny red ball that you, you know, it was causing you to chase, right? Serendipitous opportunities can, can align very well, and this sounds like that has in this case. You've learned some lessons. Curious for folks that, you know, might be on the cusp of, or thinking they might want to do this someday. What is two lessons learned, one, what you should do. Second is what you shouldn't do as far as lessons learned in this particular instance.

Alex: 20:20

Due diligence is obviously important for any business deal. These are small acquisitions. We're not acquiring, you know, hundred million dollar companies or anything. For me to do due diligence It's a look and equip books and look through customer records and things like that, it's not a big deal. But for me one thing that I didn't do as adequately during the first one was understanding not just the financials, but what are the client relationships? Who are these people? How do they expect to engage with you? How do you increase your billing rate with them? Or how do you increase the services that you're doing with them? I'm still really glad I did the first acquisition. But from an opportunity perspective, again, a bunch of restaurants in Breckenridge, that, that's a captive audience. They don't need a website redesign. They don't need search engine optimization. A lot of them don't even take reservations because they're full every night on a ski season or full every night in the summer season. For me, I think that during my first acquisition, I anticipated larger opportunities from this new partnership than actually came about. The year after it did not pan out the way I thought that it would. That made me, when I went to do this new deal, think a little bit differently about numbers. Not projection numbers, but, but real numbers and calculate churn, you know, from my background in corporate marketing, calculate churn in there, do all those things so you know exactly what are we going to get out of this business deal the first year. That was one lesson. Another thing that I learned really is, is how to, how to publicize this. This is a cool thing for me. When I'm acquiring a business, there's, there's two motivations. One is increase my company size and revenue. The other is, this shows that we're a player in the industry. I learned, uh, we did, you know, press releases and social media posts and all that thing last time about it. We got some really awesome response and I want to do it better this time. Working off of those templates of how we communicated both to the clients and also just externally to the rest of the world about this acquisition. It's a big deal if we want it to be. If we don't post it, no one knows that we've acquired another company. Thinking about this from a PR perspective of how do I, how do I now spin this to let people know, hey, we're, we're growing, we're successful, we work with nonprofits and we're going to work with even more nonprofits has been a big lesson for me.

Russel: 22:22

Just to recap. One, relationships and how well they do or don't, don't transfer. That's so important in the agency space to not underestimate when, when that is happening and how many people are tied to an agency, especially a smaller agency because of those relationships. Another term I heard you say there are kind of, I think it sounded like you were alluding to is what I call revenue optimism and kind of over glorifying maybe what the deal might bring about in terms of revenue. We probably need more revenue skepticism to really evaluate the deal from, and then the last one is called squeeze the juice. You're doing a big thing, like you're saying, and, you know, get as much opportunity is all the work and an effort that you're putting in this already. Promoting it and how do we maximize this opportunity? Those are great nuggets. Thank you for sharing those.

Alex: 23:06

I love the squeeze the juice too. That's a great metaphor.

Russel: 23:08

That can apply to so many things. Got to squeeze the juice everywhere we go. Switching gears a little bit, that was so insightful. I know, you know, culture and team is a big part of the work you're doing and what you're trying to build and even doing it in a remote environment. Was that a focus from the get go? Or did you learn your way into that being something you knew you had to care about?

Alex: 23:29

It was a focus from the get go. I've talked about selling snake oil before. I think anyone who's worked at a snake oil selling marketing agency is familiar with the toxic workplace. I think that those things kind of go hand in hand. If you're not proud of the work that you're doing and you're not truly serving the people who you're charging money, I think that often you can create a place that does not value the people in the work. We're a small company, a small team, but I think that we've created a really awesome culture of a few things. The first thing is I am solutions and results oriented. There's a phrase that I say like several times a week. It's always something. Because in our business, in our line of work, there is always something breaking or broken and being able to figure out what is the best next steps. No need to point fingers, but how can we pick this ball up and get it going? I think agencies waste so much time blaming, you know, doing the blame game and doing that toxic workplace stuff of, you know, the campaign didn't do good cause Nancy didn't do her part or whoever didn't do whatever.

Russel: 24:22

Dang it, Nancy.

Alex: 24:23

Yes. One thing that, um, that I love is that we have an, a attitude of collaboration. Things don't always go perfectly, but when we do, we look through our options together, communicate them and figure out the best next step. That's been really great for me. My history is very much in management. As long as I've worked, I can't really think of somebody who didn't want to do their job. Everyone is out here to do their job, right? Even though I got to pay you money to be here, people still want to do a good job at the end of the day. I think that being able to communicate with people when there are shortcomings in a way that is, again, solutions oriented, instead of saying, hey, you did this wrong. Say, hey, next time I'd love it if we could see more of this. There are opportunities there. I think that, um, creating a culture where people are not afraid to announce a mistake is really important because then we can go and fix this thing and learn from it and move on. Things like Facebook just changed the way that they're, they're, um, they could change a couple of things, but they changed certain ad types, how much money you can spend or how little money you can spend. Things change, technologies change all the time. All of the things that we do have changed significantly from when we started, both in terms of best practices and in terms of the actual technology itself. Being willing to learn from both mistakes and changes is really important.

Russel: 25:31

It sounds like, you know, another way you can speak to that, is just embracing that this will not go perfect. Can we just learn from the lack of perfection? And if as long as we embrace it up front though, then we're going to have our feelings less, less hurt, I guess might be the word to describe it when, when things do go wrong and we can just, you know, learn from it, grow from it and business as usual if we expect it to go wrong. Very great takeaways. All right. Well now I'm curious, when you look at the future of Crowd Digital and where you're trying to go, what does that look like?

Alex: 26:02

I mentioned the nonprofit thing, and we're certainly going to go a direction with our nonprofit team members or our nonprofit clients. I see a few other opportunities as well. But the other thing is I've been making a very conscious effort to get into a new industry, a new niche. It's an exciting one for me. One in Colorado, and it's also a controversial one, which is the psychedelics industry. We have a couple of clients in the kind of wellness, psychedelic, psychotropic space and I said, I want to do more of these. The way that I'm looking at is, I mean, look at where cannabis is right now. There are some really huge players in the space. Who were they 15 years ago? Nobody. And it was illegal. They couldn't even be doing what they're doing. But I see, again, a group of underserved people in a niche underserved industry, and I see an opportunity to work with these people. These are people who, I mean, people are, people are scared to work with them on social media because they keep getting deplatformed, even if they are following Meta's rules. They're scared to work on websites or, or e-commerce stores because the legal issues surrounding those. I think that if we can be thoughtful and be smart about how we work in this space and help people tell their stories, help people do it through content marketing and education and engagement and awareness. There are some ways we can get out the word, get the words out about these organizations that fulfill Meta's obligations, but also allow these businesses to grow and be successful. It's a really cool new market to go after and it stretches our creative brains because we got to learn how to tell these stories without getting in trouble with Shopify or Facebook or Meta or whoever. There's some really awesome opportunities for us there.

Russel: 27:29

Central underlying theme seems to be, uh, you know, going back to the beginning of your story, is find a group that's underserved and serve them. Bonus if they're, the perks of that group are psychedelics or something like that on the side or you're helping the world become a better place. I'm always all about the fundamentals. It sounds like you've got a lot of those covered in your business. Love to hear that. All right, Alex. We do have to wrap this up. I've got one last big question for you. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?

Alex: 27:55

Yes, it's such a good question. I think it's a little bit of both. I spoke to that, corporatism in marketing and how it can create feelings of being like jadedness or frustration or like we're selling snake oil. I have some colleagues that have created, started their own businesses as a direct result of that, wanting to get away from this and do their own thing. I also think there's a group of people who, and I think I'm in both groups of people, the people who got jaded and then also the group of people who their whole life, have had an idea of how they want to do things. They're, for lack of a better word, disappointed time and time again, when they go to a corporate workplace or a new workplace. For me, entrepreneurship came out of being born wanting to do my own thing and set my own terms, set my own relationships, making sure that my clients are happy with the standards they and I have created together. Then there's also these people who are pushed away from their old jobs because they're not doing things the way that they want. People have a very strong sense of justice that are in the marketing world. More often than not are going to end up consulting or doing their own thing or starting a business, because at some point you say, I don't like the way that they run things here. I would do things differently. You say that enough times, it sticks.

Russel: 28:58

Does that work with anything?

Alex: 29:00

No.

Russel: 29:01

No. Dang it. Awesome. Couldn't agree more. Great perspective on that. If people want to know more about Crowd Digital Marketing, where can they go?

Alex: 29:10

You can go to denvercrowd.com, D E N V E R C R O W D. com. I'm Alex Schupp, you can find me on LinkedIn, S C H U P P. I have conversations like this all the time with small business owners, and whether they're in marketing or another industry, just picking each other's brains. I often get just as much out of the conversations as they do. If anyone ever wants to connect, I love talking about this stuff. I love talking about how to draw results and how to tell businesses stories.

Russel: 29:34

Beautiful. There you have it, folks. You know where to go. Thank you so much, Adam, for taking the time out of your day to share your story, your lessons learned, and just really intentional and methodical and making the world a better place approach to which you take your business. So many great things you were able to share today, and I really appreciate you taking the time to do it.

Alex: 29:52

Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation. I really enjoyed chatting with you. I love talking about small business and business growth so it was a really fun opportunity for me.

Russel: 29:59

Likewise. M I Z.

Alex: 30:00

M I Z Z O U.

30:05

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.

Alex: 30:40

The most interesting to me thing to me about owning and managing a business is getting to be flexible with my own schedule. I live in Colorado, on a Tuesday, if it's dumping snow, I can get out there and go snowboarding. I carry my business cards with me in my, in my ski jacket. I can't tell you how many business deals have been started on a ski lift. Just talking to, hey, what are you doing? Why aren't you at work today? Oh, I own my own business. I do too. Something that's so awesome and fun about being a business owner is being able to be open to these sorts of conversations. Leads come from everywhere. My colleagues, my fellow business owners who are having trouble with sales, it's because they're not open in conversations. And I'm not like a classic sales guy. I'm not trying to sell you every time I talk to you. But I do have an eye for opportunities and when I see that there's an opportunity for us to work together, I love pursuing that. I have no shame in saying, look, I got a digital marketing agency. I want to tell your story. Let's work together. For me, I think the funny story is getting on a ski lift, chat with somebody, finding out that they own a small business or an e-commerce store and finding a way to work together. That's been just really fun and rewarding for me, especially when you're playing hooky on a Tuesday.

Russel: 31:38

I hope those listening, the biggest takeaway is that they can get out and do more of those fun things that seem like it's so far removed from business, but just go make it, make it viable business opportunity as well. Then you can do more of the things you want to do and love in this world. Another great perspective.

Alex: 31:52

Yes. Write off that ski pass.

Russel: 31:54

Exactly. Write off the ski pass is, oh, that's funny. Do you actually write off the ski pass?

Alex: 31:59

I gotta talk to my accountant. I forget if she accepts it or not. Probably not.

Russel: 32:03

Those accountants always want to play by the books. But I don't know. I feel like it's a valid, uh, and especially in your case, it's a valid expense. Product testing.

Alex: 32:10

Several of my clients are in the snow sports industry, and I actually did, I made a, this is a good funny story. I purchased a, a snow skate. A skateboard snowboard hybrid. They're allowed at the resorts. I bought this thing on a website, then I emailed the website and said that sucked. Let me rebuild it. Now these guys are my clients. I actually did get to write that off. I wrote it off as, uh, I don't know what, what, what she, you know, categorized it as, but it was product research and we sold the client so that was a great write off.

Russel: 32:36

There you go. Find a client and the thing that you want to do and love the most, and then you can definitely write it off because it's all product research.