Jeremy Weisz 14:10
I love that. All right. You got to be getting in the forward game. I’m way behind with a copy. That’s totally — so why cyber security and SaaS? So you go, okay, we’re gonna niche. You’ve been in this niche for a while. Why those niches? Because you kind of set off the bat. There’s only 7,000. Well, I’m like, well, thinking, okay, why then?
Mike Krass 14:39
Yeah, so cyber security, in and of itself, is too small, right? You’re talking about 7,000 businesses, not all of whom are even in a position to hire a marketing agency, even if they wanted to, right? So like that, that kind of funnels down into a very focused number, and that’s why we also work. With SaaS businesses. If you look up, I think I was on Statista or something last week, globally, there’s over a million software or SaaS businesses. Keep in mind that number accounts for like, Mike created, like, a Firefox widget extension that helps you, like, find good prices on Amazon. Like, I mean, it’s those all the way up to a huge fortune 50 company, or fortune 100 company. And the reason we made the connections there is that the product delivery of a cybersecurity product is almost always, unless you get into physical security, which is kind of a subset of cyber and related, but not the same.
It’s almost always a SaaS delivery, like you go to a computer terminal, and whether it’s a web application or actually download like a physical desktop application on your machine, that’s how you’re actually accessing the product. And so when we looked at those two things, we noticed a lot of similarities. We also noticed some differences. And so for us, it was like cyber alone is too small. SaaS alone, frankly, is probably too big, but when you look at what they share in common, we generally do work with some startups, but it’s generally more like mid-market and larger enterprises. And so what they all shared in common is long sales cycles, right? So like, they really need somebody that understands, hey, I’m not selling a pair of Nikes, right? I’m not Michael Jordan in the mid-90s, where it’s like, people know they want them. They’re lined up around the block to get into Foot Locker at 6am when it opens on a Saturday morning, you know, with the new shoe release. Like, you know, it’s like, here with the Foot Locker, man, I know, yeah, I know some of your customers might be like, what?
So those long sales cycles, that’s kind of our point of view of where we stand out is anything that has a long sales cycle, which is often a SaaS and/or cybersecurity product, we work really well with those types of brands, because they can’t just do a bunch of bottom of the funnel lead generation, like hire a call bank and just dial for dollars like they won’t get there on any of their revenue goals. They’ve got to have a full representation from generating awareness to some consideration in their product, maybe even some trial. That’s where, like a trial or a demo request shows up all the way down to like, Okay, I am ready to purchase, and it’s between you and you and we just want our clients to be positioned through that decision process as really a leader in the process. So those long sales cycles, that’s the common thing that they have, is it’s going to take a long time to close this deal, which also means that, as an agency, if they’re going to hire somebody, I always tell them, if you’re not ready to commit a minimum of six, but more, like a minimum of 12 months to an agency at any price point, you shouldn’t hire an agency.
You should. You can accomplish getting this work done other ways, but it’s going to take a while. And I don’t want you to look at our engagement eight months ago. You know, it’s really saying we’d have more closed deals. And it’s like, well, you know, it takes eight months to close the deal, so really, like, at this point, we’re just now starting to get our deals that we’re generating or influencing to the finish line. And by we, I mean, like, we generated them, and now your sales team is working, then.
Jeremy Weisz 18:22
Yeah, I’m like, we’ve definitely experienced that, you know, maybe it’s a couple months and, yeah, we haven’t gotten any kind of like, well, how long is your sales like, oh, a year. Like, well, it’s only three months. So, maybe that’s why. But I like how you think about the fit of a client, they have a long sales cycle. What about from a size and personality perspective for you?
Mike Krass 18:50
Yeah, the size of the business, we’re really we really shine, and we’ll show the most impact in an organization that’s somewhere between 105 100 employees, and I use that word intentionally, of showing the impact, because they’re just big enough where they can afford somebody like us, but they’re not too big that there’s so many things happening that it’s hard to kind of show like, yeah, like, I see your report that says you did these things MKG, but also there’s like, I got, like, a bunch of other vendors and internal team, like, I got a lot of people doing things all focused on helping this business grow. So one to 500 is awesome in terms of us not just doing strategy, but executing and activating that for you, when we get to working with the larger clients, 1,000 to 5,000 employees, 5,000 plus. Generally, I like to say that we’re the tugboats steering that tanker ship through the harbor. They already have enough resources. And usually the problem statement they come to us with, and they never actually say it this way, but this is what they’re saying.
The problem statement is we have a lot of resources. We got capital and agencies and internal head count and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we just kind of need to help steer it right. So you think of like a series of tugboats as a large ship, like a container ship, is coming into a harbor. They’ve got the ropes on them, like they’re just there to make sure that, for whatever reason, like the ship doesn’t start veering too far in the wrong direction. So our council becomes really important for them at that point. And so it’s just a different need and a different pain point based on the size of the organization they like us to activate stuff, but frankly, they have enough people to execute on things that like they’re not short on that. The only thing that all those clients agree on is that they don’t have enough money or resources, which is awesome, because it’s like you’re a 50 person company, a 500 and a 5000 yet you all don’t have enough time, money or resources, which is interesting to us.
Jeremy Weisz 20:49
What about from a personality perspective?
Mike Krass 20:53
Personality? Yeah, so we’re looking for somebody that their personalities are generally, they are, I don’t want to say aggressive, but they are motivated. They really enjoy building teams and managing teams like that’s kind of our points of contact directly, and they also do a great job. The most successful client personalities for us are the ones that appropriately shield us from things we don’t need to know, or from taking flack that we oftentimes didn’t deserve. Right? It’s really easy to throw a vendor under the bus because they’re external to the company, and we’ve had client experiences where we found out after the fact, where it’s like, oh, we took the hit on that one. We didn’t know it, but there was an executive meeting, and here’s what came up. And by the way, our client just chucked us straight under the bus.
Jeremy Weisz 21:54
Was it because, what’s the scenario like? Is the person worried that there’s something going on in the company? They’re worried about losing their job, so they place job, so they place blame somewhere. Or what’s going on internally when that happens, typically?
Mike Krass 22:08
Yeah, what’s going on is usually a mistake has occurred, or a number or, like, a target wasn’t hit. And so the question usually comes on, I from the executive leadership team of like, okay, why do we think we didn’t hit it, you know? Or let’s have a little bit of a retrospective here and discuss. And some ELT teams are a little bit more diplomatic than others. Some are more like, we didn’t hit this. What the heck is going on around here? And others like, truly want to make this a collaborative experience. So usually there’s something that’s not going right, and so that’s what comes up on a number being missed, maybe an overspend. That’s happened to us a few times. So as an example, we’ve done this multiple times over the years, where we overspent on a client budget. And it wasn’t actually always our fault, because sometimes our clients, we found out after the fact through the change log in, the ad platforms went in and made the change, and then they look at themselves and like, oh my gosh.
Like, I’m gonna get fired if they figured out that I just spent $10,000 more this month than I was supposed to. Well, MKG, like, part of your statement of work is you do budget management on our paid ads accounts. So hey, let me launch you straight under this bus. And we’ve always, I’ll say this to listeners. We’ve always made it good with our clients, whether it was truly our fault or not, and there’s been instances of bull. We’ve just out of the importance of the relationship. We’ve just made the client whole and said, you know, what we ever spent by 10 grand? 10 grand is coming off your next bill, or the 2500 is going to come off your next four bills. They’re like, we’ll find a way to make you whole, but we want you to have the trust that, like if we put it into our statement of work and something goes wrong, we want you to trust that we’re going to make it right.
Jeremy Weisz 23:52
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And this kind of touches a little bit on I’d love for you to talk about the triangle assessment.
Mike Krass 24:06
Yeah, so our point of view, and this is relatively new for us, so you’re getting it fresh. All the listeners are getting it with all the bumps and the warts attached, we believe that when you’re hiring an agency, it’s like a triangle, right? So three points on it. The top point that is almost never talked about is, can a marketing agency even address or solve the problem that I’m asking them to do? Like, is that even, do we have some sort of confidence that that’s even possible? Like, is this the right problem and will an agency be able to address it. The bottom left corner of the triangle is the agency itself. This is where everyone spends their attention, right? So they go out and they put together some sort of RFP or RFQ, whether it’s formalized or not, they just put it in writing. Here’s what we’re looking for, here’s our budget. Here’s the things we expect you to do, here’s the things we need to see from you, to evaluate you. Yeah, so it’s all about outwardly facing. Let me put together a list. I’m going to evaluate you. I’m going to whittle you down. I’m going to pick one.
That’s where everyone focuses today. The other part of the triangle, third corner, is also like the problem that is never actually thought about by most clients, and that is, as the client, as the brand manager, whatever my title is, am I actually in a place to affect change, to solve the problem at the top of the triangle? So you’d be surprised. We’ve been hired before and paid significant sums of money, and when it comes down to it, it’s like, oh, by the way, like I’m not empowered as the brand manager, to make these changes that are now critical to this program, showing impact and success. Sometimes they know it, sometimes they don’t, but it’s that triangle. Is that point of view we’re trying to share with folks as they’re considering any kind of marketing agencies, which is, are you sure that this is the right problem an agency can handle it? Are you sure that as a brand, you’re ready, and you’re actually empowered and able to make the changes required within your organization.
That gets tricky in larger matrix organizations, because sometimes they do and sometimes they find out after the fact they don’t, and then the one that everyone thinks of in the triangle, that third corner is okay, well, how am I going to find an agency? So for us, those three have to marry up, right? Like, are we the right agency for you? Are you going to be able to empower us and collectively, can we work on this problem and affect change together? And that point of view really stops a lot of clients and makes them think. Some of them hate that thought process. And so they like, I can see that we’re clearly being dismissed from the process others actually appreciate it. They’re like, actually, no one’s really framed this point of view before in a way that made me really think, like, is this a good idea, and do I have some sort of structure to think about that?
Jeremy Weisz 26:52
What do you do at that point if they are not in a position to move forward, they’ve hired you do? They just have to try and move it up the chain somehow or wherever, maybe up across wherever it goes. What do you do in that situation?
Mike Krass 27:10
Yes, well, what we do, and this is, this is new for us, and it’s centered around a universal truth that we have found, which is all clients are liars, and we as clients of other people, we lie. We inadvertently lie to our suppliers all the time. And I’m not trying to make us sound dishonest. It’s just like these lies of omission, right? Like, oh, I left that out because I didn’t know it was relevant to what you were working on, Jeremy. Oh, well, it is relevant. Let me tell you why. So I don’t look at the clients pessimistically. I just know that, like it takes time to work together so we can actually suss out all the details of what’s happening. So what we’re doing now, instead of signing, like most agencies will show up, let’s say Jeremy, I’m going to send you a contract for 12 months. Or if you want to lock in the pricing. No cost of living increases. I’ll send you a 24 month contract, and you can sign that instead, what we’re saying instead is we’ve got a triangle assessment, and that assessment answers.
We’re going to just do some work together for a couple weeks, and in that couple weeks, we’ll understand, is this a problem that can be solved by a marketing agency like us, are we the right marketing agency, and are you right for the problem and us, like, is this triangle gonna get lines drawn between the three points? Or are we going to have, like, some polls in our triangle? And so the outcome of that is first, the first finding is, yes, the marketing that we do at MKG, we’ll solve this problem, and we feel confident that we can do this together. So yes, we should move ahead, and this is what moving ahead looks like. The other outcomes are one of those three points is off. So say the client and the problem are right, but we’re the wrong agency. Hey, no harm, no foul. Like this was a two week exercise. You didn’t lose a whole bunch of time and energy here. You didn’t spend a lot of money doing this. And I’m actually going to introduce you to somebody who I think is way now that we really know what’s going on. I’m going to introduce you to somebody. I’d like you to sign an NDA with them so we can disclose the findings from our triangle assessment.
And as painful as it is for me to say they’re better than we are what you need, but that’s the honest truth. What doesn’t happen very often is the client is the problem, but it does happen by looking at an assessment like this, we understand, hey, for whatever reason, like you are not in an empowered spot, so you really shouldn’t hire us or anybody else, because this problem is not going to get impacted in the way that you want. Fact is probably going to balloon, and then you’re going to have the expense of higher nos.
Jeremy Weisz 29:48
It makes me think of my background, I guess I’m a recovering chiropractor. Mike, so people are coming. I have no idea why my back is hurting, right? And then I discover, well, six months ago, I tore my ACL so I’ve been limping, I’ve been in crutches. And then I said, you know, all these things, well, I didn’t think that they just don’t know, like, I didn’t think that was related to my back. I’m like, well, yeah, you’ve been hobbling around on crutches. And whatever it is. So yeah, it totally messes up your back. So it’s not on purpose, but yeah, it’s like, sometimes the connections aren’t made there. I totally relate to that. And I’ve done the same. I’ve left stuff out of a doctor’s appointment. Like, oh, I didn’t think that was relevant at all to what I’m talking about.
But like, no Jeremy, it definitely is. So I love that piece, so I could see the niche part. Mike, I want to talk about the evolution of your role and how it’s changed. So, take us back to the beginning of the agency. What did that look like? And then we can kind of hit some of the high points of how your role has changed.
Mike Krass 31:07
Sure. So as you can probably imagine, you know, having been in business for yourself and a lot of your audience and entrepreneurs as well. You know, our first cat life was me doing everything, me and my business partner kind of just running around. We were doing our own marketing. We were selling, taking sales calls, we were doing the work. We were building out the KPI reports, it was just everything. And so I think calling it an individual contributor is probably an understatement. It’s just like you are the only contributor. So you are contributing, or you die. Now in the second stage, and when we once, we started really the second life of our cat lives. We started focusing on just tech companies in general. What we did at that point is we actually got we were on in front of a whiteboard. We wrote down every client we’d ever worked with, and what we did for them, just at a high level, like SEO, web design, ER, backlinks, podcasting, whatever. And then we went through that whole list, and we used color coded markers. Red is not good. Green is good.
Think we had a yellow in there, which is, like, we’re not so sure about this, undecided. And we actually just color code circled all the services we did and the types of clients we did them for, because before we started focusing on tech clients, we were working with nonprofits food. We worked with a pet food company. And I can tell you so much about fish, fishing for tuna in Thailand, and how it gets into your cat’s can of food. Like, it’s embarrassing, the amount of cat food info that I know to this day. And so we circled in green. Here’s the types of companies we actually performed really well for. So not who we subjectively felt like they were cool companies or we thought it was fun. It was like, who do we actually move the needle for? Circle, circle, circle. And then what do we do for that? Circle, circle, circle, circle, circle. And that’s how we got into doing SEO and paid ads for tech companies. And at that point we had a small team, it was still as Jeff Bezos would call it like a one pizza team. We were probably six or seven people in total. So you get an extra-large pizza made from Costco, and you could feed that whole team at that. And from there, I started to transition more into, well, what is, like Vern always talks about, what is working on the business look like to you?
And that was a pretty scary thing to go from a whole contributor to a, oh, now I need to, like, trust and empower some other team members to just do really good work and kind of, support them in that effort. But they need, for them to continue to have paychecks like we need a steady flow of new leads, and I need to go to a conference and network every once in a while. And I need to understand, like business finances, so that we can actually be in a strong financial position. So it really started to force me to work on things of which I was never professionally trained, and, frankly, had very little academic training too. People always ask, if I go back to college, like undergrad, what would I take more of and I say, I always say economics. I was like, I wish I took ecomm classes. I avoided them because they were hard and people got low grades on them. And I was like, Oh, they’re just going to dig my GPA. I don’t need that. And in hindsight, I’m like, I think GPA, like, doesn’t matter compared to what I probably would have learned in an academic setting that I’m now catching up on years after the fact and then transitioning into the niche that we’re in now, we really decided like, are we for all tech companies, or do we tend to work with some over others?
And so my role, we run EOS. Gino Wickman was part of the whole EO and burn tribe there. As an owner visionary seat, it’s my responsibility to do a little bit of visioning. And I say a little bit because somebody wise once told me, for any non-large corporations, the amount of visioning you need to do is pretty minimal. Like, don’t, don’t overestimate the amount of work you need to do here. You’re not Mark Zuckerberg thinking about making smart clothing connected to your Facebook account or WhatsApp or whatever, like you’re just not and that’s okay. You can get there one day, but like Mark Zuckerberg needs to really think about that kind of stuff. You need to think about what do your clients really need? And as an example, I was like, well, the clients that we work best with are long sales cycles. They tend to be within tech, SaaS and cyber security, and now even today, this is five years after we made that niche decision. Now we’re thinking about the point of view of our offering of like, well, how would you go about hiring somebody like us, not just us, but like us? And that’s where the triangle assessment came from, because there’s so many false starts and the price of getting it wrong, because all your prospective clients are going to lie to you, and you’re going to lie to them too a little bit.
You’re going to omit some things. It’s just going to happen as you get to know each other and get more comfortable. That triangle assessment is how we think the future of what an engagement should look like. You shouldn’t spend, shouldn’t agree to spend $100,000 immediately. You should spend a fraction of that to understand if you should spend 100 behind that. And if I can spend a fraction, tell you it’s a bad idea, you can take that capital and invest it elsewhere in your business. And I think that’s really like where we’re going right now, and what I’m working on, and I think I’ve demonstrated, is like something that in the first cat life of our business I never would have even cared to think about, and the second cat life might have started to think about, but probably not a whole lot. And in this life, we’re like, oh, this is really like, where my attention needs to be right now.
Jeremy Weisz 36:52
How did you meet your co-founder?
Mike Krass 36:56
We worked together at an ad agency in Seattle. So we were actually coworkers. She was actually my boss. She was brought in, and we worked together for about a year at that agency before we both decided to try doing our own thing.
Jeremy Weisz 37:11
What was that conversation like? Was I’m wondering, was she like, I’m gonna start my own thing. Do you want to join me? Were you just clay? I think we should start our own thing. What was the conversation like early on?
Mike Krass 37:27
Yeah, the conversation was, it was so…
Jeremy Weisz 37:31
It was like, Jerry Maguire, where she’s like, I’m fired. I’m taking Mike. You’re coming with.
Mike Krass 37:35
Yeah, I know everybody. All the lines are full. I can still see the phone and that scene of Jeremy, where Tom Cruise is trying to call everybody. So this scene, it was very casual, and we were just talking one day, and she was like, have you ever thought about, like, what if we could do this kind of on our own, and set our own terms, not just from a work standpoint, but from a what we’re going to do standpoint, and we started talking about it more and more, and we got to this point of, hey, why don’t we try this out? She quit that company into this full time. I did it nights and weekends. And that was our agreement of, like, nights, weekends, like, I would be more of like an operations type guy, like, operating things, pulling levers. And that was our agreement. We said, Let’s go six months. If we don’t get any clients, great, if we get a client, we can review at that point of, like, how big is the client? Could this sustainable our lives at this point, kind of like a customer?
Yeah, totally and it was about two months in that we got our first client, and she hates selling, she actually landed our first client through a referral from a friend of a friend, who ended up subbing out some work to us, from their agency to us. And I still remember we got a check for $30,000 and I thought we were the richest men and women in Babylon. I was like, $30,000 is an exorbitant amount of money, like we have taken these folks to the cleaners. There’s nowhere that financial recover from this check they’re about to write us. The company that wrote it is called Box. They were called Box.com at the time they dropped the.com and so they were competing with drop box, file sharing, security, that kind of stuff. And I’m sure when they wrote a set check, they probably like, we agreed to the terms and we were super excited. We left all like that. And I’m sure that as soon as we were out of earshot, they’re like, oh my God. We just like those guys. They have no idea how much we were willing to pay and the number that they gave us, like, yeah, we’ll do that. Sounds good.
Jeremy Weisz 39:42
It’s a win-win, right?
Mike Krass 39:45
Yeah, it was a fantastic first logo to have. And it was at a time when they were really ascending, they weren’t at the startup phase of, we have to be responsible adults. They were at the startup phase of, everyone loves us. VCs are trying to literally throw money at us, like they’ll drive by our office and throw brief cases of cash. I mean, it was fun. Like, a couple years into working with them, the fun stopped and the adults showed up, because there’s a lot of money involved. But when we started with them, they were just like the darling of Silicon Valley startups. They were just so popular. So then, anytime I mentioned box, people are like, whoa. Like they gave you, they let you do some stuff. They gave me some money. Of course, of course. Box would do that.
Jeremy Weisz 40:26
I notice on the site, Carrie is owner CEO, and you’re owner visionary, right? So I’d love for you to talk about the CEO visionary journey, a little bit from your standpoint. For people, I just want to mention you mentioned Gino Wickman. I have an episode with Gino Wickman. I have an episode with Mark Winters. Mark Winters and Gino Wickman wrote Rocketfuel. So anyways.
Mike Krass 41:01
Yeah, we discovered EOS six years ago, and the accountability chart that exists there. If y’all aren’t familiar with it in the audience just look up accountability chart in the letters E, O and S, and you’ll find out what I’m talking about, the accountability chart of visionary and integrator. So I was the visionary, and my title was CEO, yet I was also responsible for all of finance and the integrator out of visionaries kryptonite. It is not where finance should live. It’s just not. So I was doing sales and finance, and she was doing operations like client service and marketing. So you can already tell that within the accountability chart and the three functions of a business within an accountability charts like we kind of took them and just split them in half and gave half to one another. And it actually was during a free consultation with an EOS implementer, he was asking us some questions. And he’s like, do you realize that you actually kind of conflagurated this whole thing and you gave each other, like Mike, you took some integrator stuff and Carrie, you do some visionary stuff.
And he was like, and then he started asking about that, Carrie, how does it make you feel that, like Mike knows a lot more about finance than you, and she’s like, well, frankly, like, I wish that I knew more, but it’s really is lane. I try and respect that, and I’m also so busy over here that I don’t really have time to check Mike to work. And I had a very similar answer, where I was like, I mean, marketing connects to sales and big relationships, that’s kind of a big job, task of a visionary is, what kind of big relationships do you foster over time? I was like, I kind of like, wish that I knew more that was going on with marketing, but like, Carrie just kind of does marketing things, and I just do the selling. And he’s like, don’t you think those should be more attached, even if you are not doing the marketing, like, with your own hands? Like, shouldn’t you be more involved in that?
And he asked a lot of questions that were, at the time frustrating. And so we ended up rewriting our job, our accountability spots and I took owner visionary, she’s owner CEO. She wanted to in. The CEO is really important to her. And for me, I was like, the CEO title doesn’t do a lot for me that the owner or founder title wouldn’t also do. So that’s kind of how we end up splitting those two things.
Jeremy Weisz 43:34
Thanks for sharing that. There’s a good episode I did with Dan Zwaki, who started lobster Graham, and now he, after he sold it, he became an EOS implementer. Do you know Dan?
Mike Krass 43:44
No, but funny.
Jeremy Weisz 43:46
Oh, yeah. Dan, the lobster man, yeah. So he used to, he sent live lobsters in the mail, and he was, I think at one point they talked to him on Howard Stern and Oprah and all these places early on. So it’s a fun interview. I love you to talk a little bit about mentors, right? We talked about EO. We talked about you’ve learned from a lot of different people, and maybe a few of your mentors, and maybe a piece of advice they’ve given you.
Mike Krass 44:22
I still to this day, don’t have a single mentor that I look up to, like a one person. I know some entrepreneurs do. They can point to that one guy or girl who’s like, I value this person more than anyone else. I treat it like running back by committee, if you’ll take the football example. There are certain people that I look to as mentors. The first one that I look at is a guy named David C. Baker. He’s a former agency owner now. He runs a consultancy. He’s out of Tennessee, State of Tennessee. I just think he’s an incredibly clear thinker, and he writes. So he’s published quite a few books. He’s such an art. The way he articulates his thoughts and his experience is just it’s unlike a lot of other people that I’ve ever come across. There are other kind of agency consultants and mentors out there, but I’ve never quite seen anyone like David, and I really value and look up to him, and as soon as this episode publishes, I’m going to send it to him so he knows he gets some props.
The other person that I really, I really enjoy, I put, I’d say two of them, the Phil Knight story, if you’ve read Shoe Dog, this group is just an incredible story of like, how he went from being effectively a reseller of Japanese running shoes to, like, starting Nike. And I see a lot of similarities between Phil and Richard Branson. And Richard Branson’s early books, you know, like, Screw It, Just Do It, things like that. I will argue, Richard, if you ever hear this podcast that you regurgitate a lot of your stories across your books, like, I don’t see a lot of original content that they like. I need something new, man, that’s my only beef with you. But I like those too, because they’re just, while they will roll up their sleeves and using EOS language, they can be the integrator and the bottle washer and the everything they think at such a high level, or they used to. I mean, they’re now in positions more like in Chairman type roles, so they don’t need to do that type of thinking anymore. But in getting their business ventures, the whole Virgin Empire, Getting Started by Richard Nike, Getting Started by Phil they were thinking at such a high level, and they made certain bets like betting the whole shoe division on Michael Jordan insane at the time, like he was popular, but he’s nowhere near what he became.
And so I really like just the adventurous part of it, the playful part of Richard Branson. And I really value the exercise, work, the ethics, or the work ethic around exercise for Phil Knight, because he was always said that when he was really working over a problem at Nike, he’d go for a run. So he’d be like, where’s Phil? Like, is he in his office? Like, he strapped on his trainers, and, like, we haven’t seen him for two hours. Like, I don’t know where he’s somewhere in the state of Oregon, because he couldn’t have gotten that far. But like, where in Oregon? Like, I can’t tell you, because he’s thinking through problems. And I really look up to people that use physical movement, in motion and as a way to cope and to think. And I look up to people like Richard who just have crazy high ambitions across a number of industries.
Jeremy Weisz 47:35
Mike, first of all, I want to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey and your stories. This is super fascinating. I want to encourage people to check out. You can check out mkgmarketinginc.com to learn more. You’ve seen it on there. And more episodes of the podcast and just Mike, thank you, and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, Mike.
Mike Krass 47:58
Thanks Jeremy.
