Johnathan Dane is the CEO and Founder of KlientBoost, a hybrid PPC SEO agency that has grown from zero to eight figures in just the past few years. KlientBoost is a creative pay-per-click and paid social and landing page conversion rate optimization agency pushing the boundaries of ROI and profit potential for over 200 active clients in SaaS, eCommerce, and lead generation.
Johnathan is also the Co-Founder of GrowthComet, a training platform that assists agencies, consultants, and freelancers looking to 10x their service business through a community and 12-month training course.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- How Johnathan Dane talks about being a professional basketball player and his coolest experience as a player
- Johnathan talks about going to therapy and why it’s been such a great thing for him
- Johnathan’s motivation for helping clients
In this episode…
Becoming a professional basketball player and even winning the MVP award at a training camp in Denmark were certainly not what Johnathan Dane thought would happen when he got into a fight with his dad and was sent back to his mom in Denmark. Johnathan was still in high school at the time, and when he thought he could get comfortable at his mom’s, she pulled the rug from under him and sent him out of the house to go be his own man.
Johnathan has since gone on to make his own rug and has been keeping it as heavy as possible financially so no one can yank it out again. He’s been doing so by helping his clients stay profitable through creative pay-per-click and paid social and landing page conversion rate optimization.
In this episode of INspired INsider, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Johnathan Dane of KlientBoost about his experiences as a professional basketball player and his pivot into the world of entrepreneurship and digital marketing. Join in on the conversation as he discusses what has led him to the paths he has taken in life and what keeps him motivated and determined to help his clients achieve their success. Stay tuned.
Resources Mentioned on this episode
Sponsor for this episode
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Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…
Episode Transcript
Jeremy Weisz 0:19
Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinspired.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders like the founders you’ve heard of, you know, some you’ve never heard of, you know, Johnathan, I like hearing about some of the low points like challenging stories. So I you know, p90x founder 2014 talk to you and he’s obviously made hundreds of millions of dollars sold hundreds of millions of dollars for p90x, but he talks about, he was a street mine he made money with food and rent money by putting his head on the street and doing street might make street performing, actually, and Baby Einstein founder Julie Clark, she grew her company $20 million with five employees end up selling to Disney, but she beat cancer twice and some of the crazy kind of low points and challenges she had Tari founder Nolan Bushnell he was Steve Jobs mentor and Steve offered Nolan 33% of Apple for $50,000. And why he said no. And there’s many more amazing stories on inspiredinsider.com so check them out. This episode is brought to you by Rise25 which I co-founded with my business partner, John Corcoran, and Rise25 I was telling Johnathan about this. He’s like, what do you actually do? Well, we help b2b businesses connect to their dream 100 clients and referral partners and help you run your podcasts. So it generates ROI. You know, it’s been the best thing I’ve done for my business in my life. I’ve gone to people’s weddings. I’ve gone on family vacations. When Johnathan comes to Chicago, I’m sure we’ll go to dinner hopefully. And, but we’re, you know, it’s a lot more personal for me. It’s not just about business. It’s about I consider it helping my guests and me leave a legacy. And I was inspired to start by my grandfather who was a Holocaust survivor and him and his brother in concentration camps in Nazi Germany and they were the only members of our family to survive and his words and legacy Levon he’s not alive anymore. But if you go to my about page on inspired Insider, you could see a video full video of when the whole cost foundation interviewed him. And his legacy lives on because of that interview. And so it really inspires me obviously, I you know, I think every business should have a podcast period, but it also helps you leave a legacy. And so if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com or [email protected]. So I want to introduce today’s guests before I do I want to give a big thank you to Chris Dreyer, he’s the founder of Rankings.io he helps elite personal injury law firms dominate first page rankings. He was like you need to have Jonathan on you need to have KlientBoost on. They’re an amazing company. So thank you, Chris for that. And he’s exactly right after doing a lot of research and also to people I respect in the agency world Ian Garlic who runs story cruise and Jason Swank, who, you know, helps top agencies grow. So we have Johnathan Dane, he’s a founder of Klientboost. And so you can look up online, it’s k L,I,E,N,T boost, and our hybrid PPC SEO agency that’s grown from zero to eight figures in just the past few years. And what they do is they are created pay per click and paid social and landing page conversion rate optimisation agency. Basically, they help you make money. You know, they’re focused on profit. So they have over 200 active clients. So if you’re a SaaS company, e commerce company, a lead generation company, and you want more clients, call them. Now the funny thing is, some people don’t know This some people do, but they actually do content marketing, technical SEO, in conversational marketing, meaning probably everything it takes to set up chatbots and actually lead people into that sale because probably their clients are like, hey, you’re driving a lot of clients, we need more conversion. What are the other steps to conversion? I imagine Johnathan, you correct me if I’m wrong. And then they started doing that for people too, because that helps complete the sale. And they basically focus on beautiful, high converting user experiences. Fun fact is he grew up in Denmark and played professional basketball. So Johnathan, thanks for joining me.
Johnathan Dane 4:40
Thank you, man, that intro I feel such like a little tiny peanut compared to the names that you have had on the show. I’m grateful. Thank you. Amazing.
Jeremy Weisz 4:48
I always ask since inspired Insider, what’s been a low moment that you had to push through? It’s been a challenging time and then what’s been a high proud moment. But before those two, I want to hear from your basketball career. What was like your favorite game of all time or something that you think back on? As because I just remember you telling a story like you would just dribble in your room for like hours? I
Unknown Speaker 5:11
don’t know how tall are you?
Jeremy Weisz 5:12
I’m 6161. So like you play professional basketball overseas, and so you must be able to dunk or do something crazy as
Johnathan Dane 5:21
well. You really well. Okay. Yeah, I saw it once.
Jeremy Weisz 5:25
So maybe your your game, like when you go to bed, your head hits the pillow. And that’s like the game you think of that.
Johnathan Dane 5:35
So the coolest experience was, so I had actually gotten in the fight with my dad. I was I was in high school over here in the US, and he sent me back home and my mom and Denmark and everywhere in the US. You can like go anywhere to play a pickup basketball game pretty easily in Denmark. It’s like it’s soccer first, and it’s handball, and then it’s like, probably not even basketball at that time, but it’s only like very seasonal. So you can only do it during winter or something like that. So I had a My first job was being a receptionist in a fitness center, which I thought was like, that’s going to be a very good use of me being productive, right, I can work out and I can make some money, which I actually didn’t make any money. I always got, I got free membership from doing that. So they had like an aerobics studio. And there was again, no basketball hoop, but they had this Reebok medicine ball that was rubbery and bouncy, where normal medicine balls just like, you know, drop them into large like loud thumping, like that’s it. And so I just was dribbling like crazy and my forearm muscles were getting pretty ripped. And so I was getting really good at dribbling that summer. So I came back to Denmark in February that summer. The the Danish championship team was holding a basketball camp. I signed up joined, I forgot a blow up mattress. I didn’t sleep on anything but my clothes scattered on like the cold cement floor. And so for a good week, I just slept on that only like my clothes which wasn’t a lot and then go out to play like what’s the like six hours a day and then go back to sigma concept. I won MVP of the of the camp. I got asked to join the team they gave me like a place to stay in the city and all that kind of stuff and cost me for travel. I physically never got paid money. I got comped, which was still the NCAA rule breaking. So that’s why I call myself professional and it was also the professional league. But to get to your get to your question, because they had won the Danish championship, they got invited to Europa League, and in the preseason, and you go to cut like, basically drive down to teams again in Germany or was Croatia things like that? And like, kids in Croatia, 18 years old, average height six, seven. It’s just like farm teams, and there’s biome
Jeremy Weisz 7:47
Tony, my coach from the bulls. Yeah.
Johnathan Dane 7:49
My favorite thing was talking to these other American players who were on these teams that were playing against that were like, bench players for USC or like massively You know, successful college programs and I was like, This is wild. And I again, I wasn’t a starter or anything like that I came off the bench, but I got decent playing time. That was just the experience to say that you’ve done that was incredible. And I actually came to the US get this wanting to be a marine biologist and play basketball. And the whole thing didn’t work and I hated chemistry. So I stopped bringing biology and I found marketing.
Jeremy Weisz 8:30
Were you just a light out shooter? How did you win MVP?
Johnathan Dane 8:34
Um, I guess I guess the competition wasn’t that great when I look back at it, but I was I’m a I’m a decently good shooter. I can obviously you know, be too cocky, but I’m pretty good. All right, well, Chicago
Jeremy Weisz 8:47
dinner and then horse is like the agenda. But um, you could probably be me We’ll see.
Unknown Speaker 8:54
So, low moment, challenging time and proud moment. While we’re
Johnathan Dane 9:00
Um, so I, people ask me what my motivation is today and I think I’ve I go to therapy pretty regularly. I, it’s such a help. It’s amazing with my wife as a psychologist, by the way, so if she Okay, awesome. She’ll give me a high five on normalizing therapy. I think it’s gonna happen very, very soon. It’s amazing. But what we basically found out was so my dad sent me home. My mom kicked me out. Again, it sounds really bad. And I wasn’t growing up in the hood or the ghetto or anything like that. It’s all relative, right to like your own circumstances. Then I came back over to the US. And I wasn’t on terms of my dad yet. But I was with my grandma, his own mom. And she kicked me out. And these are reasons that are like, why I was like, I was like a problem kid. He seemed like such a
Unknown Speaker 9:49
nice guy was
Johnathan Dane 9:50
well, let me let me give you the reason so my dad, I was I got a girlfriend in high school, I started losing focus on basketball or losing focus on school and like my grades have dropped mean all that kind of stuff and we got in a fight and I was like that, why don’t you just send me home and he was like, cool. He printed out a British Airways itinerary that day’s got me to the airport. And like, send me off. My mom had because I lived so many years in the US had basically, um, you know, continues her own life got a boyfriend at the time moved in together, they moved to another part of Denmark, which is called Jutland, which is like the south, you know, in the US equivalent. And I just didn’t get along with the boyfriend. And it was more him being threatened by me. I was actually pretty chill. But I was 18 at the time, and my mom was like, can you get, you know, your own place? And I was like, Sure, I did. I got stress induced asthma, like literally couldn’t reach an apex of my breath, like the peak of it. And that’s like, the most frustrating imagine taking a deep breath and not being able to like I’ve experienced it
Jeremy Weisz 10:47
like a couple of It’s so frustrating. Yeah,
Johnathan Dane 10:49
yeah. So that happened, um, how to get my first job and all that kind of stuff too, which sounds easy, but it’s not easy when both your parents are not there to really support you. And then my grandma kicked me out because I didn’t change the light bulb in my own bathroom fast enough. And I had a tiny little dent in the bumper that I didn’t get fixed fast enough, either, she just decided to send me out. So my point is, is that I had people who have controlled my life to pull the rug out from underneath me that since then, there’s an hour. So that’s my down part. My highlight is that since then, I’ve been so focused on making my rug as heavy as possible, financially, that I have this drive that I have today, because I had this fear in the back of my mind that somebody can just yank it out. Um, so I took my bad things and turn them into good things, which I’m really thankful for.
Jeremy Weisz 11:40
Yeah, thanks for sharing that is a lot of times I find that hard charging really motivated people. There’s some pain that’s driving them
Johnathan Dane 11:48
or fear that they don’t want to really fear and
Jeremy Weisz 11:50
pain. Yeah, exactly. So you know, thank you again, Johnathan. People check out klientboost.com and you know, everything that you’re doing, I really appreciate
Johnathan Dane 12:02
your time and knowledge. Thank you, my man. It was so fun being on here.
