Transcript for "Bill Rom's Scaling Masterclass": It's the last week we're gonna hear these bangers, everybody. Oh my gosh. My heart. My heart. It hurts. I'm seeing everybody in the chat literally saying we need a motion support group. We are here for you all. Okay? But the thing that I'm most curious about is that these are bonus sessions. There's so many goodies in here. So what I'm curious about is is number one, where is everyone dialing in from? Because I see people from Cambridge. I see people from Beirut. I see people from India. We got the global community here. Put your hands up. And I am from Toronto, so Toronto in the building. So keep throwing in wherever you're dialing in from. And then the other thing I'm curious about is who's been to or how many sessions have you been to? Do we have people where this is your first session that you've attended? Do we have people who have been to 10:10? I'm seeing a bunch of 10 tens. This is incredible. All of them. All of them. Oh my gosh. Eight of the 10. This is insanity. Montana in the building. This is what I'm talking about. Everybody, you see the chat going insane. This is the type of community that we want to cultivate, the type of people we wanna be around. If we haven't met before y'all, my name's Evan. I am your trusty spirit guide along this journey of creative strategy. And today, we are in for such a freaking treat. But before we get there, as you know, I just wanna kick us off. Let me go ahead and share my screen so we can walk through some things together. Okay? Amazing. I'm seeing everyone say I've been rocking since day one. Oh, my heart. It's so sad, but it's so full at the same time. This is incredible, y'all. This is incredible. So just for context, everybody, like I mentioned, if this is your first time around, we've been hosting this amazing creative strategy boot camp where we're going through the process of taking people through a curriculum so they can become expert creative strategist. So we've gone through this curriculum here that you can see so far, and we're in our final session, week 10, with Bill, who's gonna be joining us, the last of our, our bonus lectures here. So he's gonna be talking all about a scaling master class. We wanna make sure that we ask him all the questions when it's be it's gonna be such a good one. But before we get into the meat and potatoes and invite Bill to stage, I wanna go ahead and set the stage a bit. So if we haven't met before, I'm sure a lot of you can do this better than I can now, but we are Motion. We've been championing creative strategy for the past five years. As you can see on the screen, we've literally written the book on this thing. And on top of all the content that we bring to the market, we also have a product. So this product is meant to serve the best and the brightest creative strategist as a lot of you have been able to try out through a lot of this homework. So why are we qualified to train you on this? First things first, you see the events, you see the content, but on top of all this, we work with some of the biggest brands in the industry who are working with, like a large dataset and the best ads every day. But on top of this, the final part, as you all know, which is my favorite near and dear to my heart, is all of you. Take a round of a sec. Take a round of, take a second to give yourselves a round of applause. This has been an amazing ten weeks, y'all. Like, give yourselves a pat on the back. We're not at the end yet. I know that for sure. But you all have been rocking with us since the beginning, and it's been such an amazing journey, and we have to cap it off right. Now on the housekeeping side of things, if this is your first time, take a look to the top right. You're gonna see a docs tab. There's a lot of goods in there. The second thing I'm gonna notice in the top right is that q and a tab. So if you have any questions for Bill, please be sure to throw it into the q and a tab. I'll get to it right at the end. And then on top of that, we have the recording section. So these recordings are definitely gonna be made available. If you are not already in our Slack channel, our Slack channel, I think, is, like, 13,000 people strong at this point, let us know. We'll get you a link so we can get you in there, but you'll wanna be in Slack. We're posting all of these goodies that you're gonna have access to. Now in addition to the housekeeping, a lot of you are probably curious about the certification process. So I've brought this up before. Take a look through. Take a screenshot. Those LinkedIns are gonna look nice and shiny after this. So what I will say here is that there are some key dates. So as of this Thursday, the final exam is gonna be made available, and you have until June 1 to complete that. Okay? Now a couple things to note here. I've been getting a ton of questions about this, but number one, a study guide. So we're launching a study guide today that you're all going to have access to. And then the second question I've been getting a lot is, hey. How many times am I allowed to take this thing? So we are giving you two shots. You have two shots to be able to crush it, knock it out of the park so you can make those LinkedIns look all nice and shiny. Alright? Okay, y'all. So that's the certification process, and I always have to call this out because I know people go wild for it. It's the swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag. Swag the people. And we gotta celebrate what we've got going on here with Creative Strategy. But, this is your last chance. We're gonna be pulling some winners. As always, we're gonna send some swag out. Okay? Fantastic. So today's session is gonna be all about scaling. But before we have Bill join us on stage, I thought I might just do a quick bio for anyone who might not be familiar, and then Bill can help fill in any of the context that we might be missing along the way. So the TLDR that I've gotten, which I'm freaking so excited by and so impressed by, it's that they have had over 1,000,000 lifetime orders on Shopify. They were at around 40,000,000, and now they've jumped to over 200,000,000, and they had a date where they had, like, literally $5,000,000 in sales. So that's absolutely incredible. And what started out as just an Instagram adjuster. What started out as an Instagram influencer account is literally one of the biggest brands in America that's followed by, like, everyone and your favorite, your favorite baseball player, your favorite, whoever it might be, favorite marketer. So Bill is the cofounder and chief strategy officer of Baseball Lifestyle one zero one, and it's gonna be a true master session here. Okay? So for anyone who isn't super familiar with the brand, I thought I'd bring it up here so a lot of you can see what's going on. So they're playing the long game with content. It's not just relying on ads. You can see that social proof that's been built up on the organic side of things. And in addition to the channels that they've built out here, you can see TikTok shop is starting to hit for them. We're gonna talk about it a little bit more, but they're hiring. And in house live shopper because it's going to be absolutely insane for five days a week at a time. And on top of all this, we have some ad examples we can get into. So what they're bringing to market, as you can see, is a mixture of the brand they've built for the audience that they know and love. And then what we can start to look at here is if I share a couple of these examples, we can watch a couple ads. You can got get caught up to speed on what we have going on. Let me know if everybody can hear it. Okay? Okay. I think we can all appreciate a big tune as everybody knows when it's starting off with our events. But everyone see the first one. Let's check out the second one before we invite those at a stage. Huge. Everybody, this is going to be a fun one. We've now reached that point in our journey where we finally get to to welcome the man, the myth, the legend, Bill, to the stage. So everybody show some love in the chat. Alright? What's going on, everybody? How are you? Everybody in the chat, let Bill let him know let him know how you're doing. Bill, it's so exciting to have you. Thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate you guys having me on. Hey. Okay. First of all, on my end, when, the team told me you were gonna be here, I've been tapped in through, like, your influencer network. So I think when I saw, like, the, I always forget his handle, but it's something around, like, the king of something, like Eric. something. Whenever I see his videos there we go. Eric's in the St. Ajuko. King of JUCO. There we go. Whenever I see a king of JUCO is because I, I played baseball a little bit growing up. Whenever I see a king of JUCO, I have to tune in, then he's always plugging the product. So this is my introduction. So I'm super excited to have you here, man. I appreciate you having me on. Yeah. That that was a really interesting one. I think we'll probably end up talking about that at some point in time today. I think so. I think so. Okay. So one of the first things I wanted to do here to kick us off is, like, we got a group of people of aspiring creative strategists, some people who are farther along in their creative strategist journey and some, like, really great marketers overall. So I wanted to pull up a tweet that you had a little while ago, like, earlier this year. So let's pull it on screen so everybody can take a look. If you hire a creative strategist who only focuses on paid, guess what, y'all? You're not gonna make it. So I feel like we need to give the people context on on the tweet around here and and what's your perspective is on what Yeah. this I think that we're, like, role you think about classic marketing initiatives, everybody's always trying to find that alpha. be? So terms start to jump forward. as being key things. Right? So as paid media buyer shifts into, okay, it's a black box. Let what do we need? Oh, creative strategy. Creative strategist becomes this elevated position. And I agree that it is because I said I think analyzing your creatives and understanding which ones are performing and which ones aren't, it's vital to any business. I'm I'm a founder of a company. I need to know all of the different data points inside the business. Right? There's thousands of KPI that I can look at. You need to be able to sift through the noise, understand how you make impact. I think what I meant with this one specifically is we've been optimized for so long. Right? We've hired our first full time videographer on our team back in 2018. Content has always been a part of what we do, and I think that if you're looking at only the opportunity to run paid behind your marketing, and you're not running an organic strategy that sits alongside it, you're also limiting your creative strategist and what they're gonna be able to do. Because both algorithms are hitting interest based. Right? They're trying to find the person who's either gonna stay on the platform the longest, or the person who's gonna purchase for you in that inside that event. So if you if you look at your organic ecosystem, right, that creative strategist has the opportunity to take a lot more shots in the organic side, only on the cost of production. And if they're having to push everything to paid, I think people are wasting a lot of money. I think they're gonna find a lot of frustration with their creative strategist. That's not the strategist's fault. It's just the execution of how you use them's fault. Huge. It makes so much sense. It's honestly, like, in a sense, free creative testing that you can then scale across the board, but the skill set still remains same. So I feel like I'm on. board with what you're saying for sure for sure. I the the piece that's quite interesting to me is, like, you mentioned in 2018, you hired your first full time videographer, which I feel like is a bit rare back then. Like, people weren't necessarily doing that. So, I would like to hear more about the story of, like, why you started with that decision, and then I'll jump to a second follow-up question that I have. But, like, the decision making around, like, why making that full time in house hire in 2018? Yeah. So in 2018, we didn't run any Facebook ads. We didn't run any Google ads. We did no paid advertising. Right? So we did a million dollars we did a million dollars in sales in 2018 only on our organic social. So for for me, it was I just understood that the content side was the biggest, you know, impetus for us. So we we wanted to build that community and then as we went from, you know, an influencer account truly, that was just posting curated content every hour on the hour, we needed to trans translate that to how are we doing stuff for our brand, how are we interjecting ourselves into the conversation more. Right? So it's one thing for all these memes and all these little videos and posts to go out, but how do we create this opportunity? So you look back at when we started our account, like, we launched on our Instagram in 2015. Right? And if you guys go to our Instagram today, we have, I think, about 24, 25,000 posts lifetime. So at one point in time, my partner posted every hour on the hour from noon to midnight for five straight years. And as we did that, we just weren't finding the quality of content that we needed. So we're like, okay, we we we can understand that a videographer for both YouTube long form, right, from, what we were doing with, Instagram's change, because at the time Instagram was trying to roll out all these different pieces, different stuff, and we were always testing. And every social media always gives you an advantage when you test out the new thing they wanna do. And it became difficult to test new things on these platforms by only using other people's content. So in order to do it specifically to what they wanted us to do, we had to start to create. So that's when we got out in front of the camera, started to adjust more things, started to take more risks. But, yeah, we the the videographer just, at the time, just seemed to make all the sense in the world, and over time, it just paid off for us immensely. Bill, that's incredible. Like, literally first principles thinking, making sure that it happens. Do we have a lot of in addition to, like, the aspiring creative strategy and the creative strategist who are here, we have a lot of solo founders who are looking to pick this skill up. But I think the piece that I'm curious about is, like, in 2026, on May 19, if you were building out the team in the same way you're like, yo, we need a videographer, and it's 2018. Who what how are you building out that team and who are you hiring first, Yeah. 2026 main ID. I I I think I got the craziest take of anybody in any session in the world right now. I've been saving this to not tweet it so that I could say it to you guys all. I think if you look back in time, you know, in in maybe 2016, people were saying that it you should go out and the number one person you should hire is a media buyer. Right? Because if you can find somebody who knows how to segment audiences, get out in front of them, do all the math, you could scale a business, you know, leaps and bounds. Right? We were everybody was getting five, five five ROAS on their spend back in the day on, on Meta. Right? And it was easy to grow and easy to do things. So that was the position you looked at. I think if I were today, I think media buying has gotten to the point to some degree that it's it's such a vanilla just table stakes thing, and there's so much information out there about how to do it that most founders people can do an objectively decent job. The challenge out here the most is strategy and content. So I think that when we're looking at it, I would hire today, I would hire either a videographer or somebody who is both an on camera talent and a behind the scenes editor, and find somebody who's got three, four thousand followers, you like their their content, you like what they're doing. Say I've got a brand, I've got this opportunity, I've got the other skill set, do we marry this together inside this niche, and do we run up a business and we do something together? And I think that there's opportunity there, whether it's equity or just paying somebody. Everyone's paying tons of money to these, you know, UGC influencers, bonus structures, let's have 10,000 people posting video content for us. And, like, that's a method that can work, but I think that also requires an immense amount of scale that people aren't aren't given opinion to. Having someone who can make content for you all day, then when that goes well, put that in paid. And now all of a sudden you have a high converting ad that's gonna sell your product and it's gonna do a great job. So I I think number one, I would start with if I'm a founder and I'm a solo founder, I'd find somebody who knows how to make content, and I think that'd be my first thing that I looked at. K. There's so much to unpack there. I feel like there's two large buckets. There's just, like, profile, then there's approach. Like, you talked about the in house hire versus, like, building out this creator network. Let's start with profile first. So something that, you had mentioned is, like, finding someone with, like, a couple thousand followers. But one thing we've talked about in this course a lot is, like, understanding your customer. It's like this person who can think and should think strategically ultimately understand the customer like the back of their hand. It's like they can speak to them in a way that just, like, cuts through all the crap that exists in the world. From a profile perspective, how important is it to find someone who's already a member of that community versus, like, bringing someone else in and training them up? Yeah. So that's a great point, and I think that every every business is in a different phase of its life cycle. So there there's different tolerances for for where you're at. Right? The best creative strategy out strategist out there for your specific niche is probably also not the one that you mostly can afford, right, in the early days of where you're getting going. So you gotta kinda live in that ebb and flow of where are you at and what can you do. So if you're if let's let's say more like you're you're somebody who's like $5,000,000 and you're you're looking out there, I would say that finding somebody who you know knows your niche, if you're not doing anything, should be the first thing you go and do. But I'm also of the opinion that the the great people that I've hired over time who were not full time with me, either I did a try before I buy, ultimately, they they they do some stuff with me and then I find a way to fold them into our system, or I find the person who has all of the things I want to work with me, and then I go out and I find the creative strategist, the people, the experts to then teach us. But when I go back, like, right, we said in 2018, like, before that 2015, 1617, like, we were making all the content ourselves. We were doing all the stuff ourselves, we were just using phones, buy a $300 Canon Canon camera, and we were making all the different things, doing the edits, chopping everything up. I think you also should if you're a founder, if you're if you're somebody who is working for a founder, if you're out there, like, you've gotta learn by doing. Because I I don't think it's easy to know what works and what doesn't work, unless you've done either one. Right? If I go and I try something and I'm terrible at it, I now know that if somebody says to do what I was doing, they're not a good fit for me, because I need something different than that. But if I've done it and I've had some success, it's also I then start to know what what commonalities we maybe should have, and that's worked for me across my entire brand. Right? So, to put it in perspective for those who don't know. Right? 2022, we did two point, $7,000,000. 2023, we did $5,000,000. 2024, we did $35,000,000. 2025, we did a $135,000,000. And then this year, we'll do about 250,000,000. So I don't say that to impress everybody with the number today, it's more that, like, in 2023, I was a $5,000,000 brand. So three years ago, I was you guys. Right? I was a lot of the people who were in this bubble. So when I say, like, hey, you can do it, this is how you invest, I'm not coming from some place where I've forgotten what it feels like to be the guy grinded down the side. You guys are looking at where I am taking this call right now. We built this as a podcast studio, started yesterday, so none of this existed twenty four hours ago. And I think the reason why we did it, and if I could turn it around, I got lighting over here, and I've got all this different stuff. Like, I I used my content team to kinda put this together, but also to show, like, this room was soundproofed today. Like, the lighting and everything got set up today. The photos on the wall got put up today. Right? Like, last night, the bats and that custom Nerf blaster got put up. I we're a $250,000,000 company. I have a content piece I need to do. Let's go get it done. Here's what we have to get done. So, like, we're still doing it today. And I think that you need to do it, you need to execute, you need to be willing to make some mistakes to find that person, and then and then lead their expertise. Because it's easy in this industry. Right? When things change, everybody's now a creative strategist. Right? If you've run ads for five minutes, you're like, I'm also not only am I a media buyer, but I'm also a creative strategist. It's like, well, what makes you that? I think coming to all these events and spending time, energy, and effort, like the certification, like, those are areas where you're leaning into, I know this is important to me. But for the customer or the people or the brands out there, like, how do they choose between who's good and bad if you've never done it? Right? So I think a little skin in the game is always still important for everybody. Bill, this is incredible. I wanna I wanna keep pulling on the thread of, like, building this business and watch it grow. So I have a had a chance to talk to a lot of, founders in our community and also people just starting out. And there's just a general sense of overwhelm in all honesty. And as a build as a business is building and growing, like, a big part of your job is, like, can you grow at the same rate the business requires of you? So I'm wondering if. you have any personal advice for people in the audience who are feeling that sense of overwhelm as they're building something hopefully really great. Never goes away. So I I I think I think there's there's a term, right, embrace the suck. Like, we're we're doing amazing. Right? We're up 97% year over year right now online. Again, so comping on a 9 figure business to to again have we're gonna have more than double the business this year. Like, I I I look at all of the things inside of that, like, I still get that. Now the benefit for me and the benefit that I think that we have uniquely at my culture is I have a cofounder, and we've known each other. I've known him since he's 12. He's now he's now 28. So I've known him for sixteen years. We have a deep level of trust that allows us to kinda talk and communicate pretty effectively that I know is not replicable to some people. But I think that, the overwhelm, the best the best way around it about how do you level yourself up and how do you continue to grow and and what do you do are things like this. But also I'm a big believer in reading. So I'm I'm on book, 23 for the year right now. So I'm I'm already 22 down. I'm on my twenty third. I am not the person who is the most well read in my company this year. It is, my director of strategy, Rob. He read no books the last five years. He's on book 24 right now. He he he recognizes now that he doesn't need to actually read it. He can use Audible. But there there's so much great knowledge and I think I was always, my father told me when I was very young, you know, if you take one thing out of every book, that that book was worth everything that you ever did. And I took that to heart and I now read, you know, I've read thousands of books, to be honest. And I think that that experience and those opportunities, and then building and getting into communities like you guys have created where you can ask questions and you can be, you know, open and honest about what's going on, I think that's super valuable. But if if if you're in a room where somebody's successful and they're not saying that it still sucks and it's it's still difficult, right, and, like, you still have moments where you're, like, am I growing fast enough for what it is? Like, you're you're always gonna be there. If you embrace that that'll always exist, I think you can normalize it. Right? You can come out the other side and say, how do I how do I take that anxiety that I might not be good enough? And how do you use it as fuel to continue to learn? And and I I don't know where this quote is from, so somebody will have to tell me because they'll look it up. It it's it's live like you'll die tomorrow, learn like you'll live forever. And I think that that's, that's something that you you everybody could take to heart. And if you're on this call and you've been doing ten weeks of this and you're getting to this last one listening to me, you probably commit something to that to that belief. So Incredible. These people are like, I need your reading list. Everyone's like, oh, man. I need to get back on it. So you've inspired people to definitely start reading again. I'll I'll tweet out my, the 20 books I told my director of strategy to read this year. I'll I'll tweet them out on my, on my Twitter later today. And he blew. past that. He's now in a whole new one. Huge. Huge. Huge. Huge. Okay. So the other piece I wanted to unpack going to the original answer, you had talked about, like, the implementation here being, like, some version of a creator network and what can happen there as well as building out the in house talent to be able to create content. Maybe you can shed light for our audience on the two strategies and then how you approach them. Yeah. I I I think that, you know, it's very easy to spend more money on Facebook ads because everybody has learned to just trust spending money on that platform gets you money. So I think that there's a lot of blind spend out there in the world. And and let's use a let's use a, a $5,000,000 brand, for example, who is pushing pretty hard and spending $2,000,000 on ads. And that's just just say all in. Right? Including production and including running the ads. Right? And and you're you're doing great. Right? If you're doing that, you're optimized, you're making some profit, like, you're doing a great job. I know a lot of you out there, like, I push way harder than even that. I I hear you. Right? But let's use this for the example. If I told you to just take a $100,000 and invest it in an internal team, you could do a lot. Right? And if you invested $200,000 of that into an internal team that you then supported with greater content exposure, my belief and what I have seen work for myself and other people that I've I've kinda mentored through this process is the the the long tail result is you make better ads organically, you they don't have to leverage into other agency lives. I know some people, when you get bigger, you start getting to the point that you have multiple agencies who make your ads. I I currently, outside of my linear commercials that come with a little bit of, like, down funnels, like, stuff, I I spend no money on agencies for creative. Every single piece of creative that comes out of my $250,000,000 brand is made by an in house team. And it's because we make we put out, I think, 15 to 20 pieces of content every single day, and that's not counting emails, it's not counting other pieces. So, like, we just we've gotten to the point we've done it so often that we've been able to scale. And I think that that that side is you're gonna then go and invest in a UGC creator to to ultimately do some of this and a and a number of them. Who's managing all those relationships? Who's manning managing all of that time? Do you have the time to invest there? I think what I've argued with some people is, like, if you brought in an in house on on on screen talent, who's a young person, who's in a communications major or acting program, and you bring them in and pay them $50,000 a year to learn and make short form content for you every day with your brand, out in the wild, different things, your ROI on that is gonna be wild. And it it it it to me feels like second nature, but I know some people here. It's like, is it? Should you do it? And I think UGC plays a role. Like, you were talking about, you know, Eric Sim. Eric's amazing. Right? He's amazing to work with. He has huge energy. For those who don't know, Eric's got a million followers on his Instagram, another million followers on his, on his YouTube. Right? So he his YouTube is his primary his primary thing. He connects with the segment of my audience. Really, I'm looking at him for, you know, 13 to 18, right, maybe a little bit of college. He he hits that audience really, really well, and I wanna deepen my relationship with those people. I need somebody like him today. But going back in time, what we did really, really well was, I saw somebody before in the comments was saying banana land energy. Right? Savannah bananas. So when the Savannah bananas had their first ever game broadcasted on ESPN, my business partner and our chief content officer called the game on ESPN. So we called the fourth and fifth innings, because we were bigger than the Bananas at that time, especially. And, it was just it was a we got to be out in front because we were so ingrained in the culture, because we were making content that we knew everybody else who was making any bit of content. So another person that we found was this kid Jackson Olsen. So Jackson Olsen is now one point something million followers on Instagram, he's about to be on Dancing with the Stars, He's the lead of the Savanna Bananas, and he was sitting with me in a kitchen in Omaha, Nebraska at the college world series, asking me if it was a good idea for him to try out for the bananas. And we were his first ever brand deal, but he when we found him, he had a few thousand followers, we just knew the content was good. So we got in super early, and then by the time he gets to millions of followers, yeah, I have a brand deal with him, he wears our clothes, we just dropped a collaboration clothing line with him, and and we just got out in front. I'll tell another story because I think it's it's part of the hustle that we used to have, and it's like proof of, like, the long tail. There's a, there's a group of kids, they were kids at the time, they're grown men now, but they, it's called Major League Wiffle Ball, MLW. And they have a great YouTube channel, you know, half a million subscribers on their YouTube their, and. I love their stuff. Seeing those pictures are crazy. they and they're they're they're amazing. And, right, Kyle, who owns it and has been running it for years, we reached out to him and we're like, dude, what would it cost for us to put a giant baseball lifestyle tarp on your entire left field wall and pretty much make a green monster? And he was like, oh, it's this much this much and where we do? Okay. Cool. We wanna sponsor the scoreboard. We wanna sponsor everything else. Like, it was it was probably for everything that cost me $5,000, and because they didn't have followers at the time. And then SportsCenter put it as a top 10 highlight, and a kid jumped over our wall and snagged the ball. And you're just seeing bl101.com, and on their Instagram alone, that video had, like, 2,300,000 watches in the first week. And it went viral, and now all of a sudden we had a huge spike in traffic. So that was a long, long time ago. Then a couple of years ago, we still had the wall. And Mark Rober, right, YouTuber Mark Rober, he did an entire piece of content on wiffle ball, and the dynamics of the ball, and how it goes. And the first forty five seconds, if you guys go and watch the Mark Rober video, it's pretty much my logo sitting there in the left field wall for free. Right? And I think at this point that video has probably been viewed a 100,000,000 times. So I got a 100,000,000 brand exposures to my logo on a Mark Rober video for free. And, like, that's because we were making content, we were leaning into UGC from an organic we are creator style from the beginning. And now you see the winning, and it's like there's no better time to get to five years from now than today. So, like, get out and start and and and that's how I think you can build this infrastructure on top of, again, table stakes. You still have to be good at running ads. You still have to know how to press those buttons and understand how to make it work, and and, again, leverage stuff like motion to make better decisions. Man, that is freaking incredible. So the in house side makes sense in scoping the talent. The piece that I'm curious about is is, like, there's a creator bucket and an influencer bucket, if I separate it that way. If yeah. But let me know. if you agree or not. And then. what you've spoken about is, like, being able to identify talent quite early in the creator phase that then scales the influencer. Is that a fundamental part of your strategy, or are you, like, casting a wide net and then see who grows, essentially? Yeah. Yeah. So, again, I think it's if if you get into being a creator yourself, like, and you try to be and and everybody here, if you don't know already, right, founder ads work really, really well. So getting on camera should be part, like, of what everybody's doing now anyway. But, like, if you're making content and you have a team that's trying to make content that's that looks organic to your your core audience, and you're making fun things that matter, what happens is your your your page starts to look like your content, and then you all of a sudden find these other smaller creators, these other smaller people, and you start to recognize, like, I know how hard that is to do. I know the engagement metrics that I would think are good at my size. So when you look at that person, you really quickly get the snapshot that, like, hey, this person with 2,700 followers is really good on camera. They feel natural. And their engagement metrics are actually, like, way over comped for how small their account is. And you very quickly, like, that's when you reach out and be like, hey, can I send you a product? And it's very, very easy, again, when you're smaller to do that. As you scale and you get bigger, you can do more, but I think, like, everybody's trying to think about how do they replicate a comfort model, and I just don't think that that's accessible for most people on the on the influencer front, because to source that many people, you need, like, a 15 person team. And, like, I think making your own content and then building these genuine relationships with other creators who look like you at that smaller size becomes the alpha that that scales over time. And I I agree with what you said. There is definitely a difference between a creator and an influencer. A creator for you is somebody who knows how to follow a brief, knows how to set up your products, knows how to make the things that you want. And an influencer is somebody who's already built an audience that wants what they are saying, and you are using them to expose yourself to a net new audience. And those two things are oftentimes conflated, and they are different strategies. My recommendation is, if you cannot afford influence early, build your own by being a creator, and then finding a creator community that then feels like we're all working together to grow that ship. And it it we we still do it today. We have a his his, Instagram handle, I think is jutty the kid. And Juddie we found, he now plays for a Cosmic Baseball, the the Chili Peppers, and, we found Juddie at two, three thousand followers, and we realized he was way better than he wanted to, we gave him money, we gave him product. He did so well that all of a sudden, like, Dick's Sporting Goods, they hired him to do content around our product, other people's products, he got an influencer network, he then got an opportunity to play for the Chili Peppers because he had a big social audience that was getting exposure, and they also knew he was getting shared on my 820,000 follower account, you know, on a regular basis. And and, like, that ends up being synergistically good for me, him, and them, because as much as they're promoting him there, he's promoting me. And now, again, we have these shared audiences because we really are coming from how do we make that content. So I hope that helps answer a little bit about that segmentation of of audience and how we built it. It's such a good representation of of let me know if you agree, but it's like building a brand. Because it's not just, like, pick a random creator who doesn't make sense, and it's like, see what sticks. Like, you're being very intentional at the end of the day, and, like, everything is an extension of brand. Does that sound right? I I have argued with guys like Sean Frank, from Ridge and other people for a long time because in 2021, everybody was tweeting that you shouldn't be spending any money on brand marketing. You should just be spending money on Facebook ads. And that that is the alpha, that's the thing, that's the only way to win, don't do anything else. And I was like, that just is so wrong that it it just I I can't I can't even get, like, come around to it. And today, the brands that are finding that they are they're anti fragile have brands. And, like, all that means is just have a community. Right? Like, you were mentioning before I got on the call. Right? 13,000 people who are on this group have just recently added themselves into this this community of people. And, like, that community of 13,000 people, that's the seed audience of the of the best of the best people who want to learn, produce, and are gonna affect how creative looks like for the next twelve to eighteen months. But it's 13,000 people. Most people would tell you that the CPM of spending more money on Facebook ads to just hit everything is a better effective use of time than generating that group. But everybody, like, you're on this listening to me. This is content. You're in that group. It is a community built on content. Content marketing has always worked and helped build brands. It's the reason why Coca Cola invented Santa Claus, and it is the reason that Procter and Gamble made soap operas. They are called soap operas for a reason. They were to sell more soap. So, like, it's always worked, but we had this little sliver of time where you could do Google ads and Facebook ads and print cash, where everybody threw all the rest of the marketing away. And, like, thankfully, we're coming back to, like, you have to build a brand, do good marketing, and tell stories, and you will be rewarded for doing that. Bill, this is so for first of all, people are like, Santa's not real. I'm sorry, everybody. Sorry to burst the bubble view. But it's so true, like, to use your word of alpha. Like, for a long time, like, the, like, the targeting and, like, the minor changes was the alpha. But really, what we come back to were, like, the principles that David Ogavy has been talking about forever. It's like, how do we just do really good marketing at the end of the day? Which I think is such a good transition into one of the, another tweet that you had put out that I'm gonna bring up on screen here. Give me a second y'all. And I see a couple of people in the comments that they didn't invent Santa Claus. Right? As a concept, Santa Claus existed. But the guy with the rosy cheeks who's overweight wearing a big red suit, that's entirely Coca Cola. It's insane. They say a lot about, like, the diamond rings too. Right? Like, in just, like, what happened with those and them being such, like, a symbol of marriage in the process. So it's like there's so much that's been, built by these brands. K. Bill, we gotta talk about this one here. So, reason I'm bringing it up is, like, head of growths, CMOs. There's a lot of different takes here, and I think you've had a focus that you call, like, focus on $10 tomorrow instead of, like, the $1 today mentality. But I'm just curious in your world to help us understand, like, what does a really good CMO do that a head of growth does not essentially? Yeah. I don't think that they work I think they work synergistically. Right? But I think when you're ahead of growth, you're you're you're a scalpel, and you're asking a scalpel to be more than a scalpel. I think that's a that's a a bad intention to me. And a good CMO should understand retention marketing, brand marketing, should understand how your website should function, how it should work. Right? The relationships and partnerships. Right? I I've said for a long time, the reason why Baseball Lifestyle was able to transition into wholesale and retail so effectively is that we never looked at ourselves as an ecommerce brand. Right? We constantly were telling ourselves we're a digitally native brand, and we were born on the Internet, but that doesn't mean that we're gonna live there forever. And I think that as as you start to as you start to look at the CMO position, the shift from, okay, everybody's just running TV commercials and trying to make all this stuff, and that's on net Gary v probably is the biggest, you know, offender to this. Because Gary was like, hey, all those guys are wasting money when you could be running ads. And he wasn't wrong, but I think what happened is is that it got so math related that I think people ended up losing the point as well, which is there was alpha there, but the new alpha is storytelling, and a ahead of growth who's optimized towards get customers, add a price, look at the data, go down funnel. There's no way for them to look broad picture because they need to be so invested into that one slice. And I think a CMO's job is to know enough about a head of growth position to be dangerous, but not to be the scalpel. And I think that's where I really lean into is, like, today, there's not as much of a benefit to being all in on being a media buyer because all of the things that were most beneficial to that have long disappeared. Right? Really, you know, I iOS 14.5 crushed a lot of that entire industry and rattled the cage with exactly what you could do. Now there's still people who are excellent technicians, who know how to maximize each opportunity, but ultimately their best thing is experience, not that their actual skill is any greater than anybody else's skill. So, I think ahead ahead of growth should be thinking to themselves, how do I get myself to be like a chief revenue officer? And that would require them to then start thinking, how do I drive revenue across more things than just a digital channel? And I think that's the future of the head of growth, should be thinking, I wanna take over all new revenue generation because that's where I'm gonna grow the brand, but retention marketing is huge. Like, baseball lifestyle has a 70% return customer rate on a daily base. And we that's a that's a compounding effect. Right? You go back two years ago, and again, I keep seeing just comments randomly that are short ones. CMO is chief marketing officer for those who didn't know. But, when when when I I think ultimately the biggest thing is, like, a CMO needs to shape all of the storytelling. A head of growth thinking about revenue needs to start thinking about how do I drive it more than just this one digital channel. And that's the future of building a brand again, because, yeah, the ecommerce is growing, but that's a lot of Amazon. That's a lot of the big the biggest people in the world are shifting dollars into it, and the the there's still 86% of all purchases are still happening in person. So, like, how do you start thinking, how do I generate in real life marketing? How do I generate, you know, billboards in the right places? So again, an experiential marketing thing we did, every year there's a giant tournament in in South Florida in in, in Palm Beach. We take over the Palm Beach Airport and we put a giant sign in, it's the only baggage carrier that you can get to. So every single person who gets off the plane so 400 teams show up to this event to play in it, and I've taken over the airport with my branding. But, yeah, that's out of home, and, like, that's something that people don't look, but now I have QR codes, I have other pickup, I geo lift, I see the area, how are we doing inside that zone, are we seeing an uptick? We offer a free thing, like how many people are converting to the free shipping, and like, all of that is we're no longer just thinking that I have to win by by having one better ad. It's about how am I just doing a better job marketing. I think CMO and marketing in general should just be going back to think broadly, and you're gonna find really, really cool ways that you didn't realize, could do things. So much of it is just how do you grow them. Sorry. Go. Go. w. Go. b a is the other tournament. I see Craig in here with perfect game. Perfect game has one too, but so does WWBA. They have a 400 team tournament in October. People know balls. They're ready. They're ready in the chat. Bill, what I was gonna follow-up with was just, like, ultimately, what we're saying is, like, there's so many more ways to grow the business and just don't get tunnel vision on that one thing. I think you talk. a lot about, like, four specific levers. Can we just label them for our audience just to put them in the buckets so people can, like, walk away with those insights? Yeah. So, I think I think for me, right, organic content has to be part of everybody's ecosystem. Because if you're not doing organic content, I think I think you're you're missing the boat. Number two, customer retention. I just talked about it. 70% of my customers are returning all the time. I also have an insane stat, I know by the SKU, my customers who bought in the last ninety days, what their repeat rates are. So I know that if you if you have every single person who buys a youth medium, that 74% of those people are gonna come back and buy again in the next ninety days. 74%. Right? So, like, I I also can then optimize by SKU size. That then informs creative, age demographic, what those things should be, how I'm thinking about my influencer network, what pieces of content resonate with people who buy that size. Right? Like, there's lots that then come into it, but, retention is the key metric inside of making sure that experience for them is great, which takes me to another one, customer experience. We crush customer experience, more than everybody else, and and the other one's product quality. From a a product standpoint, we have constantly thought, how do we make our products better than Nike? How do we make our products better than Lululemon? How do I make my products better than Vuori? How do we just continue to lean into how are we making the product better? And there's been opportunities where we've been we've we've had manufacturers and people say, hey, you're guys quality, you're actually not you're not making enough money for how good you're making your products. You should you should actually, like you could make your socks worse, and you'd still make the same money. And I I I literally had a, like, a a crash out moment where I was like, if if we ever say that again in a room, like, I I'm I'm gonna lose my mind. Like, I only needed to go up. And and I think that if if we have that commitment, it also then serves into a better customer experience, because the people who are shopping us know that they can trust the quality. It it goes back into retention. They're gonna wanna come back more and more because I'm over delivering on quality from what expectation is. And then my organic content is gonna connect them to the community of people. You know, so we have our own VIP group, and our VIP group has, I think, 12,000 people in it. It's all of our, you know, top people, everything else, we manage the group, we give them early access, we give them discount codes, free shipping days. Sometimes, I just will randomly send a screenshot, Do you guys like this? Do you not like this? I'll get product feedback way before, what's happening, what's going on. So, like, we lean into those things, and and and again, it continues to just crush for us. Bill, dropping gems. People are walking away with so much here. So there's four levers, the organic side of things, the retention side of things, the experience, and then product quality. So I'm thinking back to those people who are just starting and growing their businesses at this point. I know it's hard, but if you had to pick one of those areas to focus on, which one should people pour all of their energy into? Oh, man. That now it's tricky. All four. It that's why they're pillars. I I think I think how do I how do I express this? If I hope people on this call played an RPG before. You you don't wanna put all your skill points in only one thing. Right? If you've never experienced the game before, because you don't know if what you're doing is the best place to put all the experience points yet. So if you're newer in the game, I would I would actually say, you wanna try to push as hard as you can in each of these. They just may not be equal early. Right? Like, we couldn't our product quality was terrible five years ago to what it is now, but it was the best quality I possibly could. The thing that you can be amazing at right now today is customer experience. Like, there's nothing holding back you being an amazing customer experience company. So case in point customer experience side, like, last year we had that you mentioned it in my in my intro, we had a $5,100,000 day where we generated $5,100,000 on our very first day of our sale. And we had just implemented a brand new WMS and ERP. Right? So NetSuite, all these things that track your orders. And our implementation had a data transfer issue. And we had thousands of people's orders not flow into Pick, Pack, Ship. So the order was being processed, but then it was disappearing. You couldn't find it even if you looked at unfulfilled orders, they didn't exist. We found that they were getting bucketed into this strange place. So we're getting to the point that we weren't getting things shipped out, people were mad at me, I'm doing Facebook live calls telling everybody, hey, this is what it is, really apologize, I'm out here saying it, I'm not having a PR company, I did a live talk for ninety minutes, answered as many questions as I could. We got to a point that we're like, okay, we're gonna fulfill as much as we possibly can inside the time window that we're allowed. And as we got closer to the end, we realized we weren't gonna get stuff out. So we actually refunded $1,200,000 worth of product. Not just from that day, because that whole week we did $11,000,000. So 5.1 on that day, $11,000,000 in the week. We refunded $1,000,000 plus of that stuff. And then when the product was able to be shipped out, we still shipped it to all those people. So we shipped a million dollars in in MSRP out to all these people. Now we relate to some people, there's some people who will never forgive us for what we did. You've gotta just accept that some things will never be enough for some people, and that's okay. As long as you think that you're trying to do as much as you can to go above and beyond, and to do everything in your power to be a good person, we found that if you're doing the community building and the organic stuff, the people in your comments are gonna support your effort, and the bat the person who comes in and says you're a bad person, you're gonna have 15 people who come in and be like, dude, they're great. They're trying everything that they possibly can do, like, you're the problem. And I think that that's why, again, organic and community. is still such an important thing. The retention mechanism, I would argue, from a tactical standpoint, like a a less touchy feely, but more of a tactical standpoint, like, emails and SMS come with you no matter where you go. Right? You can leverage them in so many other opportunities. And I think that's another thing, like, in 2015 when we were just an Instagram account, we were collecting emails on giveaways. Right? So, like, the like, comment, and subscribe thing, I I joke around, but, like, I don't know who did it before us. So, like, my my business partner was a young kid at the time, and he was 15 years old, and Adidas was sending us all these free gifts. We're getting free bats, we're getting stuff. And I'm like, dude, you can't swing that in the game. Give it away on the on the channel. So he's like, what should we do? And we're like, tell people to like and follow us. Right? And if they subscribe to the channel, they get entered to win, we'll give it away to them. It didn't exist really then, like, we were early in the game, but, like, we were we were building email list then. So now, like, today, I think we have, like, 250,000 people on our active 90 list. And we just looked it up, like, I have, 39,000 people who signed up on our email list more than a year ago. They've never purchased, but they've opened an email in the last thirty days. So, like, I know that I have some people with long windows that they're shopping us, post purchase survey, 25% of people have known about us more than a year before they buy. That that cohort is gonna crack. Right? I just need to show up for them every day with all of these other things, build the trust that I haven't earned yet, and I I win. So, yeah, it's hard Evan to say, hey, only do one thing. I think a lot of these things are things that everybody can do. I would just say lean into whatever you can with as much energy as you can. If your natural affinity is I am an excellent email marketer, I make the best converting emails on the planet, my my my my everything is perfect, my copy is excellent, do that. Lean in every energy and be excellent in that area and do the best you can in other places. But you should constantly be trying to think about those four pillars, growing as much as you can, and and feeding them with all your energy. A lot of the other stuff is is like I said, there's table stakes. They're baselines. There there's there's not a lot of people focusing on it at a high level. I love it, Bill. There's something, like the RPG example actually resonates a lot with me. It's like spreading those skill points out makes a lot of sense. Because when I really think about it, the founders who I'm have top of mind are those that get so caught up in the product quality. Like, it's not ready yet, and it's not there, and they'll sit in that one bucket where they haven't distributed those skill points appropriately. So I think that's really good advice, and it stands for sure. Yeah. Those those people get caught up in in it it's another form of, analysis paralysis. Right? You never think that the product is good enough to go out to market. Our first t shirts were print on demand. Right? Well, from from from whatever, you know, Printful or whoever else was the company that we're using at the time. Right? Like, that was the best we could do because we couldn't leverage ourselves in inventory. Right? So just in time wasn't as profitable, but we also didn't have to have excess warehouse. We didn't have to worry about operational flow. Yeah. And and at the time, because we were such a small company, right, like, the people were doing it more because we spoke directly to their audience with a product and content, things that were sold for them that they just wanted to support. And then when we got big enough that we could afford better production, we we always leaned in and said, how do we make this even better next time? And it was just iterative over time, you know, and we're still not there. I wanna have the best products in the world. Right? But, like, I gotta get I love it, Bill. I have a couple more questions for you, then we gotta open it up for q and a so people can get their stuff answered. The one. that I'm thinking. about here is is I saw something in the chat pop up. It's like storytelling. What is storytelling? Like, we use it quite broadly. I. I think I'm extrapolating that too. So I'm curious to know your definition, but it's community. Like, you built something here that's hard to do at the end of the day. So I'm curious. about how you think about storytelling and, like, community building. Yeah. So I I think there's there's a lot of great books. Right? Building a story brand, brand scaping. There there's a bunch of good ones that that help you understand that. I would say building a story brand for for those who are thinking about getting back into their reading, that's a good one for everybody to get into. Storytelling is everything that you're doing if you think about it. My customer experience is a storytelling. Right? Because the person who has a great experience with us is gonna leave a good review, is gonna tell everybody that we over delivered for them, and guess what? They're now storytelling their experience of me. So if you think that everything is is is some version of storytelling, You start to think differently about how you want people to speak about you, how you wanna speak to them, how what content you need to resonate. So I think when I'm speaking storytelling, it's how am I supporting the product? How am I supporting my team? How am I supporting the game of baseball? How am I supporting an ecosystem of influencers trying to make it in the game? How am I supporting the mom who watched her kid get cut from his baseball team and come home and he cried in his room, but she knows he loves the game. Like, how do I let her know that she has a community and she has people who know what that feels like? And that now means that, like, there's billions of stories I can and should be telling to these little pockets of thousands of people. Because though this thousand people, they know what it feels like for their 14 year old to come home, who got cut from their high school baseball team. Meanwhile, they were the best kid on their travel team, and they don't understand what just happened. And, like, I know that story because I've invested in understanding that ecosystem, and everybody can do it for each of them. Right? I think that, you know, taking taking, let's take the Wubbles for an example. Right? I think the Wubbles have an amazing product. Right? That, like, let's teach people how to crochet. But now you have a whole more people now crochet because the Wubbles exists. But the storytelling of the Wubbles is it was accessible. Right? Well, I don't know how to crochet. How am I gonna get there? Everything you need is already here. You don't have to go shop yarn. You don't have to go and find things. You don't have to find an instructor. Everything is laid out for you. There's videos. There's supporting documentation, and there's a community of other people. Also, they do these licensing things that then say, you like, k pop demon hunters? We've got k pop demon hunters. You like monopoly? We have monopoly. Right? You you like this other thing? We have something for you. And I think that all of that is the storytelling uniquely to each of those little pockets. Right? So so so product development, your marketing, your hiring, everything should be thought of as is a part of a of a connected story. So I think people use storytelling very, very broadly because it is broad, but I think people misinterpret the specificity. Right? When they say storytelling, they think I only need to sell people more stuff. And I I truly don't. I mean, you have to just tell a story, and not everything needs to be transactional in that moment. And that trust that you build with people resonates when they want to when they feel like they have an overwhelming pressure that you are the person speaking only to them. And and there's no way to have those shots on goal when they when they're only looking at your paid advertising. You need to hit them when they're relaxed and they're thinking that they just wanna see a story that inspires, that makes them sad, makes them angry, makes them excited. Right? Makes them, you know, throw something at the screen. Right? Like, you wanna generate all those emotions because we're humans, we have tons of them, and we have a different amount of them we meet all the time that make us feel good. And if you're only storytelling for action, you're gonna find people who tune out because because they want a romance story. And and you gotta figure out when to when to show them what they're what what they're looking for. Goosebumps, man. Freaking goosebumps. Bill, gotta tap the last one that I have is tapping more into that visionary side of things. So we've talked about the experience so far. I wanna wanna talk about the rest of 2026 and 2027. What are some of the bets that you're placing over the next year in a bit? Yeah. So we've been exploring, you know, TikTok shop for us and and trying to do live shopping and seeing the opportunities. We found some good and some bad, but I think what we've really resonated with is we we recognize that there's a portion of our audience who wants this style of content. Is, we're hiring an in house, an in house talent to be on our our our, TikTok lives, and then also eventually probably whatnot. Where we're going to have, somebody on five days a week, curating a collection, curating opportunities, answering questions. It's gonna be an extension of our marketing content and customer service teams. Right? So people are gonna have questions like, how long does this ship? How does it wear? What does it do? We're gonna bring in guests on the show. Hey, our head our VP of customer. experience is on. How do we answer these questions? Hey, our head of marketing is on. Our head of partnerships is on. Hey, we have a surprise guest, it's Eric Sim. And we're gonna have all these little moments where we now can have these live opportunities. So just, again, story tell in the style that we know that these people wanna partake in. So that's one thing that we're gonna lean into a little bit more. I I always say to everybody, we gotta get to the point that I feel like I can afford a full time person with the money that that channel is generating. So our lives now generate 5 figures every Friday. So I know that I can I can go and get a person five days a week because that one day a week is already supporting their their salary and, we were slow? I didn't just dive in and build a huge massive team. I took a junior person on my marketing team who wanted an opportunity to show that he could step out and lead a strategy and lead a weekly meeting and put data together and craft and try, and he did an excellent job and and he over delivered and he got to do that. Now it's time to build infrastructure around it. He then can manage and support that, but we did it in a in a already what our resources were kind of way, and I think that that's that's one of the areas. The other one, we're gonna go way harder on YouTube. We've been going hard on YouTube for about eighteen to twenty four months. I think we're about 70,000 subscribers. In the start of 2024, we were at about, 2,600. So we've added some. subscribers to that channel or all organically. How do we continue to earn those people's respect? Have a couple of videos go go over 250 k. We should hit a 100,000 subs this year, get our plaque. But we'll move we all we already have opened up another channel. It's our behind the scenes channel. So it's showing in house content, behind the brand storytelling, things that are going on. I don't care if it has 500 people who watch it. I don't care if it has 200 people who watch it. If you're watching that content, you're a superhero person in my world, and I need to make sure that I'm giving you what you desire, because, again, so so not to name too many names, but we have multiple, shoppers in our in our ecosystem who will spend over $15,000 this year. How am I those people want more of us. And I can't only give them more by dropping more products, I have to give them more by supporting more other things. So we're also doing a lot more VIP events, and we opened up our retail locations around the country, so we're actually bringing VIPs out to baseball games, we're paying for everything, we're bringing them to events where we're hosting, we're having local celebrity chefs come in, serve tasting menus. to moms and people in the area. You know, we're gonna do mimosa sundaes and things with with some moms in different regions and areas, have them come in and do stuff. We're also gonna change a little bit about how we drop product in store, because what we found is while we're catering a lot to mom, and getting her to come in and her shopping experience we've been going for, what we haven't been doing is allowing the kid who wants to wear the product that we have an opportunity to be there at drop day, and see the hype and do some stuff. So we're actually gonna move our drops in store to a week before the drop, do a do a nighttime release. We're gonna shut the store down for an hour or half hour, let a line form, build up and change out how the product is displayed, invite these people in to release the product, they'll be the first ones who see it, they can buy it before other people. That'll also drive people to our stores, we can have real relationships with them, create some experiential marketing opportunities. So those are some big bets. And then the last one is like real TV shows. So we've been doing content for a long time now. We actually hired a woman, she worked before us, she was at Nickelodeon. Before that, she was at, AMC working on The Walking Dead. So she's done show scheduling, show purchasing, inventory management, how things show up, data analysis for. what fans are liking, what they're not liking, how does that inform production. We hired her in to start to develop more high end YouTube channel, shows, but ultimately we're gonna do a couple of pilots that then we're gonna pitch and try to sell to Hulu, Paramount, Netflix, other people, and take this to another level. Bill, you freaking banged off, like, five separate things. Jeez. I I I'm. a big company. Gotta gotta try a lot of things. I love it. I I think the the last one that's coming to mind to me is just, like, your time. So I don't know if these are the right buckets. It's just what's kind of come through my head as we've been talking. Okay. But there's, like, the strategy work. There's the implementation, so the work that's actually happening in the execution. Then there's, like, the coaching because you have a lot of, what seems like a lot of junior team members that you'll build up who will then take over. So when you look at your days and your time, how are you determining where you spend it? Yeah. Great great question. I think I think you have to leave yourself open. Like, everybody wants the perfect schedule, and they wanna know, like, how you maximize your day and your opportunity. And I think that if if you make yourself so rigid to a schedule that never changes, you don't leave yourself open to to to finding what I call wonder inside. Right? I play the Kanye West song wonder all the time on my marketing team. Said, how are we thinking different? How are we dreaming? How are we thinking bigger? But I I think that, I try to create some general guidelines that I think are important to me. Right? So, number one, I have consistent meetings that are same time every week that I've been dedicated in line to for for years now, and those are immovable objects for me. I just make sure I show up, but I need those to be valuable so they have to come with all the information I need. I'm then ruthless about the rest of my schedule. If I start seeing that I have too many meetings on my schedule, a purge is coming, and I I start cutting meetings and, you know, I only got we I have an EA, Ariel. She's who actually built this entire room, so shout out to Ariel. Gotta give her her flowers on this. Ariel, we came on sometime in January and I had never had an EA before, never needed one. I think what what working with her has been is, like, how are we just rigid about what I say yes to and when, because the place I wanna be more generous and it's the thing that helped us in the early years is, you know, my former life, if anybody Googles back in time on who I was before this, I was a strength conditioning coach. I trained professional athletes. And the biggest thing that I was good at was coaching and and developing people, and making somebody who was good feel like they could be great, and creating a a path for them to be great and the opportunity for them to be great. And in the early days of BL, we were able to get people who are c's and b's, and I could make them a's and s's. Right? Because I I think everybody talks about getting a players, but I think sometimes you got an s tier out there, that you you gotta start to consider exists. And we were able to get people for cheap because I was able to get a lot out of them. And then as we got bigger and more meetings, more people, I got drawn away from leaning into as many people. So I needed to find a pocket of people that I could lean into, and I got one person right on my side, Rob, who knows everything I know. I have every conversation in front of him, and he can then duplicate me in a lot of ways. He can go and do a lot of the things, but he also covers things that I'm terrible at, that he makes up he copies. I I then have another another person we added to that team, Casey. Casey is completely different than Rob and I, and she covers other bases that I don't have. So I think it's also, like, the self reflection of who you are and knowing where you need to be spending energy. I am the vision. Right? I'm I'm chief strategy officer. We used joke around, I'm Tyrion Lannister. I drink and I know things. My partner is the chief execution officer. Right? He is better at implementation dot dotting the i's and crossing the t's. I can see what we need to be doing and get people moving, but you also need to make sure that you cover your bases on do you have people who can execute? I am a great executor when you measure me against the world. I am terrible when you measure me up against world class performers at executing. And it's always the game you play. Right? I'm I'm Brian Scalabrine, I don't know if you know who he is, basketball player. He had a very great quote after a bunch of guys said they could beat him in basketball and that he stunk. He's like, I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me. I think I I have always been good at looking at that and saying, in this situation, I'm Brian Scalabrini. Right? I'm better than all these other people, but I stink when it comes to the greats. So I need to go and find and cover those holes with people. So for the founders who were spinning their wheels, I think you have to self reflect on are you doing things that are actually making you money, or are you doing things that make you feel like you're busy? And that and that's the hardest thing for people to recognize because if you're if you're also good at a skill, you'll lean into doing the skill more and more. Oh, yeah. I'm I'm I'm designing more clothes because that's what I'm great at. It's like, well, you haven't gone to market with anything, like you were saying before. Like, you should be going to market. You gotta take risks. Like, you have to act. And that I think a lot of people just get caught in get caught in the bubble of I'm comfortable at the level I'm at, and if you don't expose yourself to being uncomfortable for that next level change, it doesn't happen. And I think I I have just embraced always feeling like I suck, and that that just makes me then look at my time and say, am I spending it on the stuff that I like to do, or am I spending it at the stuff that's gonna drive real value? And I think I've I've gotten in the last couple of years, I know where my bread is buttered and where I should spend my time, and and that's helped the company tremendously that I just leaned into my strengths and I support myself with people who can do my weaknesses, and that's helped us grow fast. Incredible, Bill. I think I was gonna pull up on the coaching thread because it's like even your business partner, like, started out in the coaching sense. So I'm curious. if you have any gems for folks, like, on on how they can, like, coach their team to realize their potential. Oh, man. So I think I think anybody can mentor a person if you come into the position of being humble. And I think that good education and good mentorship comes from letting go of your expertise to allow yourself to think with a beginner's mindset. And when you're in the start up, you'll a lot of people will get frustrated, like, why is everybody not doing this right? And it's because you probably haven't taught them well enough, and you think you did because you gave them the cliff notes version of how you do it, but you've internalized all this experience. So I think what you have to do is is make sure that you take a step back and be humble with the people that you're working with and the people who are working for you. And come from their mindset and say, if I was them, what would I need to know? And then how am I generous with how much I share with them? You know, I think that I am very a very open book as a founder and as a as a as a person in general. Like, I've got nothing to hide. Like, I'll I'll give everybody what they wanna know because I know how much effort has gone into being me today. And if you think today you can get enough out of me to to beat me, right, I'm not I'm not doing as good as I thought I was. So I think that if if you look at that, like, a lot of people guard their stuff. Oh, what if this person leaves me? I teach them how to do all this and then they go somewhere else. Like, that's a good thing for me. Right? That Alright. if they outgrow me, it means that I need to grow. Right? And if people outgrow you because you taught them you need to grow, because they've gotten to the point that they've they're they're able they're not able to continue moving themselves because you're not moving yourself. So if you if you're humble, you you you have a beginner's mindset, I think that's the first start, and then be honest about who you are. Don't try to coach somebody in something that you don't feel confident in. If if you're if if it's okay to say, you know what? I'm not good at that. And I I think on multiple times today, I've been like, I have no idea how to do that, and it's why I need you guys here. And they're like, well, that's not true. You you have some experience. I'm like, Brian Scalabrine. Kinda like, I I know how to be better than these people. I don't know how to be as good as you. And I I need that. I need I need that. And, yeah. That that again comes back to being humble in a beginner's mindset. Last follow-up I have on here, it's just, speaking to the founders who are out there. It's more like, a lot of this probably appeals back to hiring. So it's like hiring that right type of person you know to take through this. But I'm curious if you have a point of, like, I don't know a better way to say it. It's like belief. It's like you have belief in this person versus when that belief ends up going away and why, essentially. Yeah. So, again, everybody has different talents. And because I spent so much time around talented people when I was a coach, like, I got to see professional athletes at the highest level. Right? Like, all stars, all these people. So you get to see a different level of work ethic. And I think that oftentimes, that's the biggest gap that people have, is they don't understand, like, the difference between them and somebody else. Right? Like, years ago, there was another tweet and somebody said, what's an event that you could train four years for and you know you could win a medal at the Olympics? And all these people are, like, saying all these different things. And I tweeted, I'm like, nothing. The difference between an average person and an Olympic athlete is so far that they can't even comprehend the gap. Some of the best founders and the best people out here, the gap between them and and every day is is is quite large. Right? So, yeah, I think I think that that just becomes a challenge, in in your personal development. It is is is really being honest with how far do I need to go and how far am I willing to work. Good. This has been incredible. Do you have time to get to a couple questions from the audience? Sorry. I kinda. just took over. and jumped jumped into the bunch. So let's. bring it. let's. bring it back to the marketing sphere here. So one of the questions that popped up actually plays really nicely into the, the micro personas. So sells to multiple personas in one brand, the kid, the parent buying, the MLB Pro, the casual fan. How do you nail persona angle fit, separate creative from persona, or one universal angle that cuts across all of them? And how did you figure it out, gut or the data? Pascal, that's that's an amazing question. I would argue that we're still not as good as I would wanna be. I think that looking at it from from what we try to do so we always say, right, we have a different our customer and our consumer are two different people. Our customer is the parent, our consumer is a kid most often. Right? So 70% of our business is in, you know, younger people. So when when we're looking at that, it is about how are we storytelling for each of those people. So if you go to our main social media feed, we have a lot of, you know, micro skit content that's funny, and a lot of that content is supposed to resonate with the core audience. That behind the scenes content that I talked about, that's speaking to the mom and the dad. The community that we have, that's speaking of mom and dad. When we do a tour of the University of Miami, we get a behind the scenes with a kid who's been wearing baseball lifestyle since he's 11, and now he's a a big division one, you know, star player for the University of Miami. Like, that video is for the everyday customer. And I think then we're talking about product fit, or designing products that fit each of these personas, while we're also generating organic content that fits each of those personas, and then we're trying to create buying experiences from a marketing perspective that meets them where they're they are. Right? So, that's then where you have to start to sliver, but I don't think you should ever get away from just the general baseball lifestyle either, because you wanna make sure that like your our tagline has been for a very long time, baseball is more than a game, it's a lifestyle. That means something different to all of these personas, but it means something to each of these personas. And I think you have to make sure that you have the core that that that that that that sun that all the rest of the planets are gravitating around. And if you start to move from your sun, that's when people get lost on messaging. They try to be more, they try to be extra, they try to be different, try to be two suns. I think what we've been able to do is just we are a baseball lifestyle, and the planets is how we think about it, not new solar systems. And we're just focusing in on that. But, yeah, I I think we could be better. I think that there's a huge opportunity for us to be better. We've worked again with the motion team, so, like, how do we create even better reporting on our stuff? How do we segment even greater on our things? Building out these custom dashboards boards and things to allow us to see what we think is important a little differently. We've used, you know, AI to leverage how it's analyzing our organic. We do a scraper. The scraper scrapes our socials, grades our performance, our competitors, other influencers. We built all of that using cloud code. So again, anybody here could build it if they really wanted to spend the time to get there. I think that's another lever that that helps get there. And, yeah, like, I now look at Because of AI. I was talking about those thousand person pockets. Yeah. Pascal, I think I'm going to, you know, hundreds of personas that I'm now having these little thousand person, you know, cohorts that I'm trying to speak to. That's the challenge that I'm at, trying to get to a billion dollar brand. Bill, something I'm curious about as I hear you use the analogies, throughout our conversation is communication. So communication wise, has it always been the superpower of yours, or how have you honed it over time? So I've always been able to speak. Right? My, my my my family used to say I I was I was not very talkative as a kid, as a baby, but, by the time I I really learned how to talk, I never shut up. So I have a lot of experience in that realm. But, yeah, then just being a coach, you know, I I I would see, you know, 200 people a day. Different people, different things, and not every person is, you know, their their favorite thing is your favorite thing. Right? This this person loves anime. This person loves, you know, jazz, this person over here only wants to talk business, this person wants to talk cars. So you start to be able to hold the conversation because you're spending one on one time, especially when I was a one on one trainer. You spend a one on one time with, you know, 20 people a week, and then you're spending group time with another 500 people a week, you have to be able to communicate. You have to have people wanna spend some time with you, and that's just permeated and and it's it's it's given me an opportunity, a platform to talk and and then have a lot of that. And I think that these opportunities then start to come up, and I I've gotten used to coaching, teaching, and communicating, and, yeah. It's it's it's something that I I naturally had an affinity toward, but I 100% have spent a lot of time trying to craft. Hello, Bill. Okay. Let's get one more in here. And the one that I'm gonna pull up is is Mary's, but I've seen a bunch of questions that pop in like this. But how can we apply this approach of storytelling or founder content to a SaaS brand? But I've seen this not just SaaS brand. It's like any industry outside of ecom direct to consumer or is the is the is the general question. Yeah. I think I think it's SaaS brands that he's just wanna do. And I I think that that that guys, we're we're we're we're on a SaaS content piece right now. I don't know if you guys knew. We talked about a little bit before. Right? But here here it is. I think that you you've just gotta look at content as a more broad approach to what you think. Right? So let's imagine, I'll run through just a bunch of different things that off the top of my head. Right? If I owned a restaurant, I would sit down on the other side and I would have a conversation with the camera eating different food I had. So I'd have spaghetti, I'd have this, I'd have that, and I would just have, like, lunch with Bill. And I would do different things where, hey, I'm setting up that I'm having lunch. Create a personality. I'm I'm now gonna have lunch with, you know, Vincenzo, and hey, me and Vincenzo, what are you doing this weekend? What are we talking about? You you you then are showcasing the food. Oh, dude, this food is amazing. I love it. What'd you get? Oh, I got this. I got this. You you can make simple content that resonates to small pockets, and you should only be trying to win those small pockets. You know, there's fun stuff and people look at me today and they're like, Bill, well, you have baseball. It's always been easy. When we got started, everybody told us we chose too much of a niche, that it was too small of a of a group. Right? Like, so I went from there's not enough people to now I have an infinite people and everybody's here, like, you're so lucky. Right? And I think everybody, you know, luck is where preparation meets opportunity. You you think about what you like, think about the the thing that you're trying to solve for, but also just think of the customer that you want to have, what are they interested in that supports what you do. Right? Motion today is providing you guys an opportunity to hear from me and have this conversation because it's important to all of you to get better and to hear and to get experience and get motivation, get inspiration, get confirmation of the things that you're currently doing. Right? But it we're not talking about motions, core, or subject matter. Right? We're talking about an adjacency that ultimately helps. Right? All of us do better. I think that each of you has that opportunity no matter what you do to talk to an adjacent audience. You know, we did a we did a collaboration with Nerf. Right? I have that Nerf blaster that's up above me. We sold out of sizes in the first day. Well, why? Because an 11 year old kid who likes baseball also plays with the Nerf blaster. Right? We did a monopoly collab. Why? Kidu plays baseball, also likes to play monopoly. We're gonna do a one with a big video game coming this September, October that I can't mention on the call, but everybody here has heard about it. And that that's a huge company. Why? Because when these kids are tired and they're done, these people are tired and they're done, and they wanna sit down at the end of the day and decompress, they play video games. And I I can then make any content I possibly want in the entire world, because nothing is out of bounds if you think creatively enough. Hello. This is incredible. There are unlimited people who now want to work for you. That's popped up in the chat. There's unlimited people who want your book list, so that's all popped up as well. I'm wondering if you have any final words for our audience before we get you out of here. Yeah. I'm gonna steal it from Ted Lasso. Be be curious. Right? I I think be curious is the biggest opportunity, because when we were getting going and and I was making decisions, people would tell us, oh, why are you investing in content? This is the right way. And I think if I hadn't been curious, I wouldn't have asked questions like, you know, if if that's the case, why do big companies sponsor podcasts? Why do why does the ultimate fighter why did that help the UFC win and make millions of dollars by having a TV show? Why have why is, you know, reality TV growing and growing and growing? Because people want content that speaks to this tiny sliver of a thing, And it has always worked, but people people weren't curious as to why. And you get into this, I'm gonna follow somebody's flow. And for the people listening to me today, kill your idols. Right? Get rid of me. Like, I'm just a person. I'm just a a dude doing things. And and if you're just curious and you ask good questions of yourself and you ask good questions about why, you're gonna find some things that are best held beliefs that were wrong, and you're gonna find some wins that people never expect. But you gotta be curious to get there. Bill, this is the best way to wrap up. Everybody, blow up the freaking chat. Your favorite emojis, how you're feeling right now, but, oh my goodness, though, you're gonna see the thank yous continue to flow through. You're the best, man. I sincerely appreciate the time. This is amazing. I really appreciate everybody. Thank you guys for having it. Thank you for listening to me. Appreciate all that time and the time you took out of your day to listen to a guy talk about baseball and clothes. Much more than that. Much deeper than that. Everyone's a Bill Romp fan. Amazing. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Everybody, oh my goodness. This was the right way to bring it home. This was the right way. I I found myself getting lost in the conversation. There was things that I wanted to talk about on the marketing end for sure, but found myself just curious about certain topics as I saw them go through. So, everybody, I think this was the right way. Our hearts are full. Our minds are stimulated. This was the best. Everyone, I can't believe we're not gonna see each other next week. How do we feel about that? Are we sad? Are we happy? But I can't believe it, everybody. Oh my goodness. Sad faces, boo crying. Oh my gosh. Everyone, we have the exam. And, honestly, we're all on Slack still. So if we could keep hanging out on Slack, I feel like that's such a good opportunity for us to continue to just stay close together. But I can't believe it. I'm not gonna get on the stage. You're not gonna talk so much every time. I don't know how I'm gonna get my fill from people now. Oh my gosh. I'm sad. I'm crying too. I'm crying too. But this has been incredible. I think after the ten weeks, hopefully, we've learned a ton. Hopefully, there's a bunch of certificates about to go after the fact. No more lurking. I know. It's all done. It's all done. But everyone, hopefully, we can do something virtual even if it's just like a hangout on Slack or something like that. But this has been absolutely incredible. This has been absolutely incredible. You all are the best. Yeah. I'm gonna talk to you really soon. Okay? Good luck on the exam. If anything pops up, let us know. We've got your backs. Good luck on the exams. But everybody, sincerely appreciate it. We will see you around. We will see you around. That's the best I can say this time around. Okay. Yeah. I'm gonna go have a cry. I'll see you.