The Power of an Effective Branding | Thrive Marketing

In this engaging and informative episode, we take you behind the scenes of the DB Brand's successful marketing journey. We sit with Monica, the driving force behind Thrive Marketing, who shares insights into how they've taken it from a small venture to a thriving business.

From discussing diverse business ventures to the importance of understanding your target audience, Monica sheds light on effective marketing strategies. She dives deep into the challenges faced in marketing, the role of digital trends, and the necessity of investing in it.

00:00:39 - The brains behind
00:01:41 - How Thrive started
00:04:32 - Talk about challenges we encountered
00:09:27 - The number one driver that determines your business success rate
00:11:20 - New tools at our disposal
00:13:18 - That big guy called "algorithm"
00:17:00 - What your audience can implement in their own brand TODAY
00:24:49 - One note, here's what you should do, too...
00:29:06 - Here's why you need a team

🙋🏻‍♀️CONNECT WITH ME:
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Transcript

0:00

Hey, what's going on, everyone? Hey, welcome back to the Duran Beth podcast. That's right, a dB podcast. I got my secret weapon with me today. Ms. Monica. She's right here with me. Hey, we're gonna go in deep. I told y'all in 2024, we're gonna be focused on my brand over been many, many years where I had my head down, and I've been focused on the business, working hard on the business now stepping out, and we're going to be focused on the DB brand. But behind all this DB brand, we have a thriving business and a thriving marketing team called the thrive marketing with Miss Monica. She's a director. We got to jump right in there. Monica, how you doing? I'm doing good. Thanks for having. Hey, so, like I said, you are secret weapon, right? You are the kind of like you and broadage are the face behind all the marketing in our businesses. And we got the bands and brothers investment group. We have anytime fitness. We got vacation rentals. We're doing luxury vacation rentals. We also doing tri city. We're doing a whole lot of multifamily. But, hey, I want to jump in. I want you to tell us some of the things that you're doing in our business right here. What are some of the things? How were we able to even create, thrive? So can you give the people and let them know all the great things we got going on? Yeah. So it's actually very interesting. I mean, I know we've been friends for years now, and it kind of evolved into a professional relationship between me, you, and Broderick. So it's funny thinking back, because I know when we were starting off, I was just helping a little bit out with that first conference with Broderick, and that kind of established that we have a pretty good workflow together. And then I was managing your personal brand. Before it was db, before it was anything, it was just an instagram. And kind of. It was a little bit of a shot in the dark. We didn't know exactly what we were doing. We just knew that we needed to post content. We needed to get your message out there. So that, in a sense, is the term that we talk about a lot where you're building the plane as flying it. Absolutely. It's definitely been quite a journey, and we've learned quite a lot along the way. And something that I think is interesting, too, is we were doing all the services that we're doing now. It's just that we didn't have an in house team for it. Right. So with Broderick and I, he's kind of the internal guy and I'm more of the external. So we actually have a really good balance of our strengths versus weaknesses. And so we've been able to fill those spaces and start to grow out our team. But I would say the big first practice with that was definitely the conference. And the first conference that we did was very successful and we were able to sell out. And that kind of gave us the confidence that we could really go down this venture and be able to be productive and produce real results. Right now, a couple of years down the line, we've been able to do a lot with it and the brand has grown and it's evolved. And instead of it representing different companies, every company is kind of a branch under the DB umbrella which has been able to fill services for all different types of clients and needs. Yeah, all types of clients, all our businesses, anytime fitness. And I tell people when you're in business, especially in the franchise business, they automatically think the franchise is going to do everything for you. All right, those of you who don't know if you're looking to get franchises, normally you're going to pay like a royalty fee, 6%, 8%. But make sure you're going to know that it's going to be like a 1% or 2% charge every month and they're going to tell you it's going to marketing. But I would tell you got to do a little bit more, right? Because in business you should be spending about somewhere around 10% of total revenue. Some companies spend more than that. Some companies all the way up 15%. If you launch in a brand new company, maybe 2020, 5% of your budget of revenue should be going to grow your business. So you can grow it and scale it. So it's very important with branding, give them talk about a little bit, maybe some of the challenges of marketing, because when we was doing a whole lot of things, I'm like, Monica, you got to cut it up. And you're like, yo, d, it takes much longer, it's more to it and all those things like that. But just give some of the challenges that you see when it comes to just marketing so that everyone is listening to this. How can they be successful in their business? Because a lot of things that we know a lot of people is going away from just paper mail and all this, everything is digital and you can do everything right here. Most. A lot of things you can do from your cell phone, right? So what are some of those things that you can give to people, some challenges, some best practices and things like that. Yeah, I mean, I think starting out with the challenges is really important because it's important to be authentic and let people know that it's not easy. And this is why investing in marketing is very important. And I know you heard it from me a thousand times, Dee, this, this takes a lot longer than you think. And I'm up on canva. If I ever have to use canva again, I'm going to go crazy. So I would say that's the most important part, is having the right tools and just being efficient. Canva is really great for certain things, and it's really great to start out with, and that's been a really big stepping point for us to be able to build into what we're doing now. But you have to be able to upgrade and evolve and adapt to new features and tools that are going to allow you to run your business more efficiently. And then I would say that kind of what we talk about, having the right person in the right seats always got to be good, extends to everything, even marketing. So you want to make sure that someone who's really good with video editing is dedicating their time to that. And then you can allocate your skills to a different area of your business and making sure that you're not just spreading yourself thin and now your business is going to be affected by that, and maybe you're neglecting a different area of your business. So I would say one of the challenges was definitely time. And when you're first working and starting a new business, and Broderick and I could definitely attest to this. And I know, of course you can. With all your businesses, you're wearing a thousand different hats. So you're a salesperson, but you're also a video editor, but you're a graphic designer, and you're learning so many new skills, but you're only able to give 10% of yourself to that different section opposed to this is what I'm good at, and this is what I'm going to focus all my time into. So when you're starting out, that's really important to understand which seat you need to be in. And then as you build your team, now you have someone dedicated to video editing, now you have someone dedicated to graphic design. For me, I really like graphic design, but I think I'm better at sales. And so you start finding that position, and then in that way, everybody's positioned correctly and they can start bringing in money, because at the end of the day, it's a business and you want to make money for your business. So that would definitely be one of the biggest challenges is time and just making sure you're allocating time for that. And then I would also say a lot of people are really hesitant. You're just starting a business and it's exhausting. You're putting all of your time and money into it, and now you got to write another check and invest into marketing. But the keyword is it's an investment. Yeah, it's an investment. And I talk to people, as you know, I talk to people all the time, helping them with their business, giving a business strategies. Also be buying a lot of businesses. And most of the time when I'm looking and I'm looking at the P L statements, right, I'm looking at the P L. I'm saying, oh, my God, a lot of these companies, they're not spending no money, $0 in marketing. So for me, an entrepreneur like myself, I'm like, oh, that's the easiest fix, all right, because I know you have to spend money. Why do you think people just don't like spending money on marketing? I think for them, part of it is that they've already given so much to the business and they feel like part of it is another expense. And then I think another part of it is everyone has a lot of faith in their own business, and I think that's great and you should have all your value pushed into that business. But it doesn't reach the amount of people as you think it does, because everybody has a really great idea and everybody's working really hard on their business. But if you're not getting it out to the masses, then it doesn't work. And so I think a lot of people go into it not realizing what the competition is out there and how quickly the market is constantly changing and how important it is to adapt. So you might think you're killing it in one sector. And when you start out a business, it's usually word of mouth that are going to attract people, but then you have to take that next step. You can't get comfortable just with business. You can't ever get comfortable. You have to be willing to evolve. The same thing as with marketing. There's going to be new tools all the time. And I think people just kind of assume the business is going to come, and if their product is good enough, then they're going to get the business. And unfortunately, that's just not the way this environment works. And we all have our stories of failed businesses and people we know that went into it a little headstrong and then collapsed. And I talked about it at the conference at the Hawaii Millionaire mindset this past year, and we were just talking about, like, I was getting the statistics of how many business fail, right. Within two years, three years. But listen, within seven to eight years, 70% of business fail. And the number one thing, the number one driver is cash flow. And what drives cash flow? You got to get customers in your front door. And that is the biggest part when we're looking at those PNLs and acquisitions, that's the driver. That's why doors are closing. They don't want to be innovated. They don't want to invest in marketing. But it's important that we must invest in marketing. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think, too, a lot of people don't know who they're marketing to. They're just kind of putting avatar, right? Yeah. Creating the avatar that represents you and being able to reflect that in your marketing, but then also understanding your consumer base. A lot of people don't know who their consumers are. They don't know the demographics. And you can do your basic research and that's just step one. But you really have to get to know them because you might attract a customer once, but you want to have a repeat, loyal customer. You want them to refer people. You don't want this to just be one and done. And there's 1000 examples of big companies who didn't know their market and had some type of advertising that backfired and you can see their stocks have collapsed. So it's really important to understand who you are and who you're selling to because you can't sell to everybody. It's okay to focus on a specific type of person and not have to give your attention equally to everybody in the market. And you also got to be adaptable. Right. You want to be adaptable. You want to be okay with changes in the market. We got baby boomers, but we got a lot of Gen X and Y's coming up. Right. So what are some of the things that you're seeing that's new? Right? When I say new, I'm saying new innovation. A lot of AI coming out. What are we seeing out there with AI and things? So AI is definitely the hot talk right now and for good reason. I think a lot of people are a little bit hesitant with AI, but it's exactly what we talk about. If you don't implement that into your strategy and use that as a tool, you're going to fall behind because I will say I do sales for thrive and so I meet with my clients all the time. And the number one thing that everyone has in common is that they don't have enough time. It's not necessarily that they aren't creative or they wouldn't know how to market. A lot of them are familiar with marketing and some of them start their company out marketing and doing their own marketing, and then they just fall off. And that's the worst thing you can do because let's say, for example, with social media, if you're running your own marketing for that, you might post five times a week and be super consistent and then you fall off for a month. And so that's a really big problem. So the number one thing is everybody just runs out of time and they need to focus on other areas of their business. So I would say a really great thing about AI is that it gets you your time back. You don't have to sit there trying to come up with all these. On the surface level, the first thing we think of with AI is Chat GPT. Everyone's always talking about Chat GPT, and you definitely want to take advantage of that. There's a lot of ways that Chat GPT can be really useful and we've kind of discussed that as well. But there's so many different types of AI. I mean, you can use AI to compare reviews across different companies, even your competitors, and you can find keywords of complaints that people are having, and then you can zone in on that and make those changes. Yeah. So there's just so much AI out there. And it's not just with marketing. You see AI with medical technologies. So this is a tool that's not going away. Right? And not only that, I think let's talk a little bit about the algorithm because you got meta right there, this king of social media. And how does people like to get ahead of the algorithm so you can get more views, right? Because it's just more about views and watch time, more importantly that instead of clicks and things like that, or you want a lot of watch time, how does that algorithm works? So kind of to touch on your point of challenges and this is something that you need to invest your time and attention into. That's a whole other position is just staying on top of the algorithm. And the nice thing about that is you can even follow accounts that will give you the latest updates on how the algorithm has changed. Sometimes it could be something as small as you want to have as many hashtags as possible under your post. Now it's only five. We're going to keep it short and sweet. The algorithm can also change on how often you're posting what type of posts. The short form videos are really important, and the algorithm is also influenced by other social media channels. So it's not necessarily when we're talking about algorithm, it's going to be different on YouTube versus TikTok versus Instagram, but they're going to influence each other. And a lot of times the younger generation is what's going to drive that. And that's also important to think about, too. That even though there might be a certain sector of the population that is influencing and driving influences, there's also going to be a different sector that's actually making purchases. So you have to know, this is why it's so important to know who you're selling to, because, for instance, with you, we're doing a lot of marketing for some of your real estate investment deals, and we do have a presence on TikTok. But TikTok a lot of times is a younger crowd, and I know a 16 year old is not pitching twenty five k on a deal. So as much as it's important to follow that algorithm and be present, we also want to know exactly who we're selling to. So kind of, to go back to your question, the reason the algorithm, it's kind of like this big challenge for a lot of people, including us. I mean, we've learned it along the way, too. And this is why I always say time is really important, is you got to stay on top of it and know that it's changing, too. Right. And consistency is key. Right. You got to be consistent. It's everything. They award you the algorithm, God, he award you you consistent, continue to post. And like I said, I had my head down. You know what d what I've been doing? I've been focused on the business. I just retired last year, so it's been hard to be on active duty, serving this country, running businesses in different states, and multifamily real estate, all types of crap. So I was, like, trying to prioritize what was important to me at the time, and it was my business. It was about cash flow, growing systems and processes, like I said. But now I have been able to retire from the military, and I said what I'm going to do with the extra time? Do I double down and still put 18, 20 hours of just all in the business? Or do I put eight and 9 hours my business and four or 5 hours now into marketing. Right? And so that's what we decided that we are with thrive, the company that we own. The most important part is right now is building our brand or building my brand, the Ron, but they Db brand, which is everything, because now we go in the back, not only that, we want to teach, and that's why we have in this podcast we want to teach people because, look, we're doing this as we go, right? We went from posting what all the things that we've been doing that someone else that's watching this right now can implement and say, man, you know what, man? I know d. I know. None. None. All right. That's my childhood nickname. I have seen him involved. I remember this guy. He was on the block. I remember this guy who's this bad tail kid, class clown kid. I know that guy. If he can do it. That's why I always tell people, now, if I can do it, you can do it, too. Always remember that. All right, so what are the things that right now someone's watching us? What are we doing right now as far as branding? How are we rebranding? None. None. How are we rebranding? Drill sergeant chief bethe? There's going to be people up here that knew me when I was a drill sergeant, knew me when I was in Iraq, knew me in Afghanistan, but also knew me in the block. You know what I mean? Yeah. So how are we doing to rebrand debt? I've been doing a whole lot of phenomenal things. Got all these awards. We was SBA owner of the year last year, 2023, right here in Hawaii. We top 1% anytime fitness operator. We got tons of real estate. We're just doing a whole lot of good stuff, but we want to put that out. So what are some of the things that we're doing that someone's watching and they can implement? Right. They can implement some of the stuff that we're doing or giving them the structure and the blueprint on how they can start to build their brand. Yeah. So definitely doing a lot is an understatement. And we've been kind of picking this up on the tail end where you have accomplished all of these things before. Social media was a really big presence, and so now we're kind of catching up to that opposed to watch me along my journey. I've already done this. We want to catch you up and then also continue to go down that path with you. So as far as branding goes, this is a big part of, and this was a theme that we kind of held onto the past year is building your brand, building your avatar. We always talk about brand guidelines, and for those of you that don't know the brand guidelines, it's basically the Bible for who you are. This is something that you're going to live by. It's not just who you are, but. Your business and what's your core? What's your core focus? Yes. Right. Yeah. This is interesting, too, because you're doing so many different things. And typically a client that we have, they're going to be focused in one area. So maybe this client is a dentist or a teacher or whatever with you. You wear a million different hats and counting. Don't have no time. Calendars stay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We're getting texts at two in the morning like, hey, I need you to fill this out. Tell them Monica is real. Mr. No days off. Oh, yeah, I got to silence him sometimes. Roll to 100. She putting me on salad. It's real. It's real. So you're doing a lot. And so I think what people, just as a starting point, everybody's going to be starting at a different point. And so some, some of the people we're talking to are seasoned and they've been doing this for a long time. Some of the people that we are talking to have never stepped foot in this. For those that are just in the beginning, I would say start with your brand guidelines. I could talk for an hour on that, but figure out who you are, the way you talk, the way you act, the colors you use, the color codes, the fonts, everything. And what type of theme you're going to stick with and how that's going to be represented on different channels, how it's going to sound via email, how it's going to sound on YouTube. And then figure out where you want to have a presence across social media, because social media is a huge part of it now. I mean, I know it sounds kind of juvenile to say that you're a social media expert, but it's important. You have to know it. So figure out who you are and then have a big growth mindset and think of the big picture. It might just be you right now, but your team is definitely going to grow. And one thing that's really important is your team might have ten people, but if a consumer is interacting with any face of your business, they need to feel like they're talking to the same person. They need to feel like it's one character, one personality, one avatar. They don't want to talk to someone on email versus on the website versus text. And feel like three different people. Yeah, right. And it's not just the same message, it's also just the personality and the way that you deliver and the type of experience they're going to have with your company because that's what produces that returning customer that's loyal to your brand. Because at the end of the day, the prices might be the same, the services might be similar, they're looking for an experience, they're looking for a story to be a part of. So I would say definitely start out with that and that's phase one. But then there's a lot of people who are actually starting to want to scale their marketing in the way that you're scaling your business. So that phase is, that's a whole other thing. So now you already know who you are and now you might want to double down on your strategy and maybe you want to start hiring more people onto your team. Something we talked about a little bit earlier was short form videos. Maybe you double down on that. That's really important to have a presence with that. And people more and more want to see who's behind this company, who's the face of the brand. So that's why it was really important for us to really build up DB. And I've been really happy as the timeline with the DB brand, everything we've been doing. But I see that we get a lot of customers and a lot of customers don't have the basic stuff. Again, let's talk about the importance of having just a website. Yeah, the website is really important. Not just having one, but even the way it looks. I mean, we could go into SEO and how important that is and being able to just discover what can you search engine optimization. And a lot of people, when they think of SEO, they're kind of skimming the surface with it. There's a lot that goes into SEO. So you definitely want to have a professional team that you trust that can implement. It's not just keywords that's really important, but even being able to discover you and stay on your page and actually make a purchase, there's a lot of stuff going on on the internal side. And that's why our business partner, Broderick, that's why he's the champ with that because he knows the ins and outs of that. And that's not something that you can really teach yourself right away. And that's why we keep going back to having enough time. You're kind of married to marketing for a little while. While you're nurturing that into your business. So yeah, I would say that's definitely the first part to it having an optimal website. A lot of people don't spend a long time on anything nowadays, so they might not spend more than a couple of seconds on your website if they can't find everything they're looking for immediately. And they need to be able to see their options right away. It needs to be organized. I mean, I'm a perfect example of that. If I'm on a website that's inefficient, I'm just not going to stay on it. There's so much competition out there and people have options. And with anything with marketing, if a video is uninteresting, after the first couple of seconds of watching it, I'm scrolling to the next one. So we have to be able to adapt to these short attention spans that people have too. It's getting shorter, right. It's getting real short. And we talk about videos, there's a such thing as too much content. Because I know one of the things, what we doing are we post a lot of stories, right? And we went out, went to two countries, no, nine countries, 28 cities a few months ago. Yeah, right. You came along with the journey. Right. And we took a lot of video, we post a lot of content out there. And I think when we left we only had about 13, 400 Instagram followers. And right now I think we somewhere over 4000. Right. And we're talking about in a short course of time, about five months ago. It's growing, right? Yeah. Because I know someone's probably watching this man and maybe shy or other camera or whatever the case may be. What do you tell those people? Keep on posting, don't give up. Because again, we got the algorithm guys out there, they reward you for all this posting and all those things that most people don't like doing, right? Yeah, I think a big part of that, a lot of people are not comfortable in front of the camera and that's totally understandable. There's certain steps that you could take with that. You don't always have to make a video where the person is in front. But like I said, people do want to see who's the face of the company. But I think that's why branding is really important. Understanding the personal brand, because that's something we talk about all the time, is making sure that you stay who you are. We're not trying to change your personality. This is a big part of who you are, where you came from. You're not trying to come from challenging circumstances. And then be unrecognizable. We want you to still be able to invest that back into those communities and elevate them. Never change over here. Yeah. I mean, people want to know who nun is. They don't want to skip over. So I think that's a really important part of branding and doing those videos is you're not unrecognizable. And people, especially with social media, because a lot of what we're talking about is a social media presence. And a lot of times there is quite a difference between what you see on social media and what's real life. And so we try to humanize the situation. We don't want people to feel like they don't know you. And they always say marketing, a big part of marketing is storytelling and feeling like they're a part of that. Well, we want people to feel like they're your friend and that they know you, that it's our guy. D, it's not like you stunting or anything like that. A lot of people, I don't want to post this because I want this person thinking out here trying to stunt or anything like that. It's not about that. Yeah. And I mean, the guru thing is really big, and so we kind of want to separate ourselves from that, too, that you're working really hard, and so you are showing the downside to it. And I think you've been really good about being authentic, about some of the challenges that you've come across and some of the failures that you've had to overcome. And that part of that is so that people can learn from your mistakes, so they don't have to make the same mistakes. Because. Important part. Yeah. And I think what you see, and it's false advertising on social media, and you'll hear this a thousand times from so many different people, but it really is a lot fake. It's a lot of. Everything was perfect. And maybe I had humble beginnings, but then I made it and everything was great. And success is not linear, so maybe you made it and then you dip. Oh, my God, I'm so glad you hit that, man. Because so many people and they jumping on Instagram and there was nobody. Three years ago, four years ago, right, they got that hook, got the algorithm going, and now they selling these courses, 720 thousand dollars courses, which is crazy to me. Yeah, right. You know what I mean? It's not the fact that they sell in the courses, it's the experience. Yes. Right. I'm talking about people that's only been doing it for three, four years. Because I've been grinding 20 years. I've been in the business ten years. Right. So those are the people that should be in front of the microphone. That's why I'm forcing myself to get out, because we know I don't have time. We have to block this time out for me to be able to do this. But it's important because I want to make sure that those of you that listen to DB podcast that we're going to, this is teaching. Right. I want to tell you what I did right. I want to tell you what I do and wrong. That's why I have Monica here that's on our marketing team. And we're going to give you the blueprint. We're going to tell you, we want you to reach out to us. So that's why it's important. Yeah. And it's not just a pipe dream. Like you said, you don't want to waste anyone's time, so you're not going to sell them an unrealistic dream where, hey, once you do this, everything's going to get better and you've made it. This is the end of the story. It doesn't end there, even today. You've been doing this for over 20 years now, and I'm sure you still hit new challenges all the time. Today is a learning spirit. Yeah. That's why I understand how someone been doing it for four years, three years. Oh, man. I got the niche. I got this every day. There's no secret key. If there's someone. Until you're going to get you rich overnight, you better run. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's really important not to underestimate how hard of work it is. People are going to be inspired by your story and think that they can do the same thing, and they can. Right. And that can't be underestimated. They absolutely can do what you did. If you can do it, anyone can do it. But the second half to it is you have to put in the work. Going to be hard work. You got to get up, you know what I mean? 18 hours, days. Let's go. If you want it, you can do it. Because I'm telling you, if I can do it, you can, too. Yeah, let's get it. Absolutely. And that's why being authentic and kind of going back to what we were talking about as that applies to marketing, that's why it's really important to be honest and kind of vulnerable about your experience because you're not helping somebody by selling something that's fake. But if you are saying, hey, I lost $50,000 on this business and it's because it was in the wrong location and we weren't marketing and we didn't have a good website and we didn't have a social media presence. Now, people can go into that with the right tools, and now we're evolving into new tools and new challenges, and it's going to continue to happen. So now we can equip them correctly. Because like I was given at the conference, my first business really failed, right? Actually, it was my second business, my first franchise. Your college degree. My college degree. I lost $500,000 in that BuSiNESS. But guess what? I still own that BuSiNESS. And I do not regret me losing that money whatsoever, because that $500,000 is reasoned here. Wow. Ma'am, today to talk about and give you the tools, I wasn't spending money on marketing, right. I was in a bad location, LOcation, location. We talk about partnership. I wasn't in a good partnership, right. But what happened was I was able to go Back and Look what I was doing wrong. Open up a SecoND location, which the other location was failing, double DOwn and increased my budgeting on marketing, you know what I'm saying? And blew it out the water. I spent so much money on marketing that in presales before I opened up the doors, I was already break even. And we sold that business 18 months for $1.6 million. Power of marketing. MaRketing. That's what we teaching it right here. LEt's go. I love marketing. And that's why, I mean, when we came in swinging in Europe, all of a sudden we just came in with a new know. I don't think anybody knew who DB was. It was nun. We even changed your name on. We changed everything. We got to get really none. Who's the Ron Pate? Yeah. You know what? Coming up, as a kid, we talk about marketing, branding, keywords. Now, I'm learning from you and everybody else, but DB Duran Bethe, I'm the only one out there, me and my son, you know what I mean? So it felt Duran Bethey like that. Right? So that's the brand. That's the brand. I'm not like my name Jane Johnson or whatever. I got a unique name, and I want to brand that name because I want to leave a legacy for my family, but also want to leave something back for my community. Yes. Right? And that's. We use marketing. Marketing gives me the opportunity to help people get what we're trying to do, get it out there for the massive. When we're doing things for our foundation, right. Because even my nonprofit foundation, we do a whole lot now we got to let more people know what we're doing because the more marketing we do so that people that's interested, even if they want to create their own foundation, we can teach that this is how we do it. But it's give us the opportunity to reach more people. And when we reach more, we're able to do more, right? Yes. When we doing more, we impact onto my impacting people, homeless people from my hometown being to do scholarships and book bags and all these things that we've been doing for years. I haven't skipped the know. I've been having writing checks. But now I want to do more for more people. So I'm here in Hawaii and we working with a whole lot of people and marketing is giving us the opportunity where our key focus out here is feeding the homeless and we reaching more people again like through marketing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's also too, we're not just speaking to them, we're including them in the process. What you were just saying because you're getting busier and busier and busier. So it's going to be harder to allocate that time towards one on one coaching and giving everyone individual support. So that's why we were able to get creative with marketing. And so we're able to do online courses and online virtual events that are free and we're showing coaching DB talks that we're doing. Like marketing is like, I don't have the time because of my schedule, but we'll do a once a month DB talk. Table, right? Table talks. We just rebranded. That's why we don't know yet. What was it? We use it called a roundtable. We use roundtable. Got to evolve. So Monica was like, hey, listen, we're going to change it up. Mr. Duramba day roundtable. We're going to go with the DB table talk. Just when you all thought you'd get sick of us, we're just going to change it up. Absolutely. But like you said, being able to be willing to change and we're doing a whole lot in the background, but we want to help more people, right? Yeah. So that's what we want to do right now. If someone want to really reach out to us, some of the things that you can help out. What do you think? Well, I know what it is, but tell them what is thrive marketing, saying, what is your niche? How can you all help companies? How can you help individuals brand or scale the business so they can create cash flow revenue. Yeah, so thrive. I know we talked about thrive as it applies to DB and bands of brothers, but we actually offer services to a lot of different clients and we don't specialize in a certain niche here either. So as you can tell, you're doing 1000 different things and we've managed to market for that. So we want to be able to provide services for everyone. And I know we've talked a lot about social media, but we also offer email marketing, website development, we could even do blast text messages and we've done events as well too. And we also have a video team and so that's kind of what, by the way. Yeah, we've definitely. Yeah, I know we talked about the blueprint, I'm sorry, the conference, that's the biggest business and real estate conference in the state. And we didn't really spend a lot on ads. It was really just a lot of natural marketing that we were pushing out to email social media. We were developing and building a relationship with our prospects and with past attendees. And that's one of the biggest things we always talk about referrals, right? So we got this big database because right now, 2024, we're going to go for our third conference. We first conference right here in Corollina, we sold it out and then we hopped on the plane and went over to the big island and we spread it. And now we have this database, right, of customers, we got emails, we have past attendees, and we still are nurturing and standing contact with all our attendees. And now it's word of mouth, so we don't have to spend money. So once you put the money up front, on the front end, it's going to be easier as you continue to go, as long as you deliver that message. And so it's make a little easier for us now. Oh, yeah. And this is why it's important to also have a product or service that you believe in because the results will speak for themselves. So if you can just get them there and they have a good experience with you and they feel that you're part of that story, then they're sold and they're going to want to come back and they're going to want to bring their friends. And something that I've thought of in this way too, is marketing is really a relationship. You have a relationship with your consumers, and so the more present you are and the more you're nurturing that and you're reliable and you're offering something that they can gain value from. That's going to grow it. It will naturally happen. You don't have to try to sell something fake to anybody. And we're not pushing for that. We want to be able to best reflect you. And this is why it's important for us, too, to have a relationship with our attendees from the conference. For example, we don't just get them to the conference and then that's it, and goodbye. It's not just that we want them to come back. We want to see the results of what we've taught them. So that's why we do check ins. That's why we interact with them. That's why we want to nurture their success and help them reach milestones in their business or real estate endeavors. Because it's important to us, because we actually believe in the service that we're providing. And so we're not going to work with just anybody. We want to make sure that these are people that really believe in their service or product and want to help people. Right. Because you all helped a lot of people just from the conference. You got some success stories or someone or anybody you want to share from the conference? Yeah, I mean, we've picked up some clients from the conference. One of them, Debbie, if you're watching from scout and seller, I mean, she's been great. We love you, Debbie. Know, make sure you hit Debbie up. She got the best wine she delivered and coffee now. Oh, yeah. Hey, I got you. We market scout, and, I mean, and I've had a really great experience with Debbie, but it's because she really believes in the products. Scout and seller makes everything clean, crafted. That's the big thing. And it's real. Their products are natural, and they use natural ingredients. So it's something that I believe in and she believes in, and I can tell. And I've had a good relationship with her, and so it's been easy to market for her because another big part for me is I do sales, and my job is to get to know my clients. And it's not just a job I actually enjoy. I like building connections with people. So the more I can understand you, the more I can build your avatar. Right. And for you. And I, for example, I feel like you're an older brother to me, so I know you very well, and so that's made it easy to be able to represent you. I mean, if you were to look at us. Yeah, we don't have a lot in common. We come from totally different backgrounds, but we've still managed to understand each other. She know me all the way. She is the behind the scenes of all my posts and she sounds just like me when she. There are sometimes I've been a little nervous. I'm like, this doesn't sound like him. But yeah, if you think she knows me, yeah, but that's the important thing is understanding who you're representing. You don't want to falsely represent them. And so I've taken the time to get to know you and to get to know Pam and your family and your kids. And I feel very close to you guys. And that's allowed me to give an honorary service to what we're doing here. I feel like I've been able to represent it well and give it justice, but it does take. That's an investment, too. You should go into it wanting to get to know them and really connect with them and be able to understand their mission and their values. You really have to kind of put yourself into that position and put yourself in their shoes. So we're going to go ahead and wrap this up, but before we wrap it up, someone right now is probably watching. And like I said, how do they get a hold of you? Or broader thrive marketing? Yeah, so we'll drop it in the screen, but you definitely want to visit our website and you can also shoot us an email. You would be talking to yours truly. So I would love to jump on a consultation with you guys. And I really do want to get to know your goals and help you reach those and to be able to best reflect your business. And I just want to take time off your hands. Absolutely. We want you to be able to trust us enough where you don't have to be completely involved in the process. And you know that we're representing you well. So I'd love to talk to you. Hit us up and we'll go from there. We'll build your business. Absolutely. And make sure you again, reach out to thrive marketing. Miss Monica. Because we don't want you working in the business. We want you out working on the business. So check it out. We're going to end it right here. Like my boy, safe and JC. Hey, I'm not a business, I'm a businessman.