376: David Ledgerwood: Revolutionizing B2B Sales and Podcasting

David Ledgerwood 00:00:00:

You had to fail lots of times to get there. You know, experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. Right. So you had to screw up a lot. Like, I don't know that I couldn't have done that at the beginning, but I am able to leverage then on top of it. And then we have this fourth value which is called like shared abundance. Right. Like, look, if we're going to all make money together, I'm going to make sure it's in your pocket too. That's been the formula. So I think, you know, 20 some odd years later, it's finally hidden, so.

 

Harry Duran 00:00:30:

David Ledgerwood, thank you so much for joining me on podcast Junkies Harry.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:00:36:

I am definitely a junkie. It's good to be here. Maybe not in the full sense of the word, but podcast, yes, absolutely.

 

Harry Duran 00:00:41:

So. So I was going to give an attempt at mentioning your revenue specialties with B2B companies, but then I realized it's probably better for you to summarize it for the listeners. So when folks ask you what you do, how do you answer that question?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:00:56:

Yeah, I say that I own several different companies that I run and all of them are related to B2B services. So that's going to be consulting agencies and professional services. My area of focus is in the full revenue function. So sometimes I'm just the sales guy. Many times I'm the strategy guy. I've had to wear a lot of different hats for each of the functions in the business business. So, you know, I am a serial entrepreneur. This I think I'm running on number 17 now. I like to say, you know, some singles, some doubles, maybe a triple. No home runs yet, and quite a few strikeouts and hit by pitches. So currently I'm the owner and managing partner of three different companies. Add one zero rig and Listen Network.

 

Harry Duran 00:01:49:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:01:50:

Two of them deeply involved in the podcast space and the third one just likes making money for everybody involved.

 

Harry Duran 00:01:56:

That's good. We'll get into the specifics of how those got started because I love origin stories, but when I was looking at your LinkedIn, I noticed that you looks like you got your start in programming. Is that right?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:02:06:

Mm, yeah, it was. I don't know, I came out of school in like 99, so anybody that's now old enough to remember that it was just hot, man, coming out of college in 99, everybody wanted to hire you. They were going to turn you in into a coder. You know, when I was the Internet, boom, boom, Y2K. Yeah, I mean, it was just like Looking back, it was pretty ridiculous. But it was the start of a really cool, you know, sort of web revolution and different things like that. And yeah, I ended up, I knew how to code. I love doing computer science. It was my minor. Really enjoyed being a coder. I still think, I think I would still enjoy being a coder. It just I moved to the business side and yeah, I wrote bash scripts, which I mean, like, I mean you gotta be a super, super nerd to even know what that is.

 

Harry Duran 00:02:55:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:02:56:

But I just got good at it and people kept hiring me to do that for a few years.

 

Harry Duran 00:03:01:

That's awesome. I dabbled in it. I mean, my dad was into computers. He got me in. I mean my first computer was at like Texas Instruments Tandy 1000. I had the gateways, Learn Basic, you know, all the stuff.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:03:14:

I started with DOS 5 I think was the first time I played with like, you know, something like that. And I would. Even then I was writing batch files and like, okay, messing with the system. My dad be like, well, I just deleted all this stuff, you know, I was like, oh, sorry. I, you know, I had to figure it out. And I remember going back to. Do you remember like elementary school even. They had like logo and different programs like that. Like you could write little.

 

Harry Duran 00:03:40:

Yeah, yeah, something like that. Yeah, yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:03:41:

It was like Commodore 64 or whatever. I don't even know. Like I was fascinated by it.

 

Harry Duran 00:03:46:

So I always learned enough just to be dangerous. Like I started to learn a little bit HTML CSS and there was a. But it was enough to just like get basic stuff up. I love using visual tools like Dreamweaver, you know, when it came to website development.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:03:57:

Yeah, well, front page.

 

Harry Duran 00:03:58:

Yeah, front page. That's nasty. Like that was bad.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:04:01:

What a disaster. Yeah, I think I launched my first HTML in like 97. I was even behind but you know, it was like I hung out with the Linux nerds who, you know, we're obsessed with like could we run Linux on like a floppy disk and you know, had like Windows 95 beta. So I was always just like a nerd, you know, with like bulletin boards and dial up and you know, the whole thing.

 

Harry Duran 00:04:24:

So anyone who hears that sound of.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:04:26:

A dial up modem, modems negotiating, this is a lost sound to so many young people will never understand the joy of getting kicked off in the middle of downloading like a 5 megabyte MP3 from like Napster or something.

 

Harry Duran 00:04:42:

I don't know. Well, are the joys of upgrading from a 14, 4 to a 56 modem you're like blazing.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:04:49:

We actually, I was the dorks who. We bought a bunch of phone lines so we could have. We Daisy, changed 56k modems.

 

Harry Duran 00:04:55:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:04:56:

I mean, we were crushing it, man. Like, we almost got over one megabyte down.

 

Harry Duran 00:05:00:

Okay. Back then's a lot. I saw that we had a bit of an overlap because I worked at JP Morgan Chase and I was there in 2001. I was in there like banking area, just doing some QC stuff. And I was living in New York for 9 11. It was crazy.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:05:14:

I was at that location.

 

Harry Duran 00:05:17:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:05:17:

At 9 11. Yeah. So down in. What was that called?

 

Harry Duran 00:05:20:

Chase Plaza.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:05:21:

Chase Plaza, yeah. Yes.

 

Harry Duran 00:05:23:

We're probably in the same. We were working in the same building at the same time.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:05:26:

That's funny. There was two buildings.

 

Harry Duran 00:05:27:

Oh, no, wait, I was in 2001. No. Yeah, because it wasn't Chase Plaza. Yeah. Yeah. Because I did a stint in.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:05:32:

There was the old crappy building and the nice pretty one. Which one were you?

 

Harry Duran 00:05:35:

I was in a nice one. Yeah. Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:05:36:

Oh, I was on level three of the old crappy one.

 

Harry Duran 00:05:39:

Okay. We were on the sixth floor, I think.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:05:42:

Yeah. I have a whole story of 911 because, I mean, that was a crazy day, obviously. And we were, you know, I was looking out the windows at the stock exchange. It was right there in my. And my window was at the roof level of like Federal hall at the stock exchange. And so it was quite a harrowing experience. I wrote it all down within a few days so that I would always have that. And somewhere I have my, you know, sort of story of chaos from that day. Don't want to go do that again. But that was the day, in fact, though, that I realized, like, right after that I was like, look, I don't want to die under a desk doing things that I don't like. And so I'm going to figure out how to be an entrepreneur. And at that time, there wasn't. There was no education for that. You know, it's just like nobody talked about doing a startup.

 

Harry Duran 00:06:25:

No.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:06:25:

You know, unless you were maybe in Silicon Valley or something. You know, it was just. It wasn't a thing. So everybody thought I was nuts, but I was going to go start companies.

 

Harry Duran 00:06:34:

Yeah. I mean, I definitely have always had the bug. And then in 99 I left. I mean, I left the position to go work at a Latino portal startup. Like, everyone was jumping to portals and like everything.com in it and did that for like a year and a half. Wasn't getting paid. I had cashed out my 401k. I was like, this is it. This is my golden ticket. And needless to say, I got a ton of experience, made a great new best friend that still. We're still friends to this day. And just came back and thankfully I had a corporate godfather who always kind of looked out for me. So came got me a position back, I think. And then I eventually ended up at E Trade working with him as well. But it was. But eventually, like I just. Even in 2004, I left again to go work for my half brother in Atlanta at a construction company. Because I was like, there's. I just like I gotta. Not necessarily maybe be in business. Cause I was kind of riding still coattails at that point, but just kind of being the second person in charge, you know, the right hand man. And that didn't pan out. You know, family businesses never do, but just each one was a step in the right direction. And then in 2014, 2013, my consulting stuff was winding down. It was. The writing was on the wall and it was like not my future. And I just went to go learn how to podcast. I went to a podcast conference in New Media Expo in Las Vegas in 2014.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:07:48:

Yeah. My first podcast adventure. My more technical friend. Like we had started, I think in about 2001, we started like a website development and hosting company, you know, and this is like you had to have bare metal and like, I mean, you know, it's like it was amazing to have virtual servers or anything like that. You know, we were cutting edge, man. We would charge you, you know, it's just ridiculous looking back now. But we built, you know, sort of CMSs before that was a thing, you know, like there wasn't a good cms. And we were just like, well, what if we built a tool where people could manage, you know, all their own stuff and it would go live on. The site was written in classic ASP. Okay, total mess, but sort of like WordPress. Wow. Gosh. Not even. When did WordPress even come out, I think. I don't know if we were like ahead of the curve or whatever. Just crazy probably. But then what was the point of that? Oh yeah. So this guy was like just. He was more technical than me. Still my best friend to this day. But he's like, there's this thing called podcasting and you can use RSS with audio.

 

Harry Duran 00:08:53:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:08:54:

And there was no infrastructure, so we were recording. We made a podcast. I use that term loosely. Where we would just do phone calls and Skype calls.

 

Harry Duran 00:09:04:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:09:05:

And we would record it and then he would hand code the RSS so that people could go get it. So this is like, yeah, 2001 ish. And then 2007, we were doing similar. Thank God this can't see the light of day anymore because I'm sure that was, like, wildly inappropriate. But my real first adventure in podcasting in the sales world was I was running sales for a company and I wanted to have more conversations with my target market. And like, 2013, 14. Yeah, we all now know as ABM podcasting, or like, duh, make a show and talk to your ihcp. Like, that wasn't really a thing, but I did it and I did millions of dollars of business with people that I should have no business talking to. That's great, you know, and it was just like, wow, that's crazy. And it went on and I kept doing that and so talk about that.

 

Harry Duran 00:09:55:

Experience, because that's really important and it's still a strategy that works today. And something we talk about with clients is like, have your ideal prospect. So as you were putting this together, what was the structure and how much prep did you do to figure out who were the specific decision makers that you needed to have on the show?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:10:16:

So at that time, this particular company that I came in as, like, I'll say like second stage Helper founder, you know, I didn't start the company, but it was at the point where it's like, hey, could we grow this thing? We need to actually do sales. And I came in and the target customer was ctos, VPS of engineering. We were selling basically like freelance developers, very high end, very expensive. At the same time that Near Shoring was coming out and people were like, well, why should I pay you 200 bucks an hour when I can pay, you know, 20 bucks an hour in Costa Rica or whatever?

 

Harry Duran 00:10:52:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:10:52:

And there are reasons, and it's still good reasons to this day, like, where, you know, like sort of premium talent is valuable. But it was hard to make. You couldn't make that argument in outreach even at that point. LinkedIn outreach or email, like, nobody was going to listen to you. Especially, like the Real Deal people. We wanted to hire us. What I came up with this idea is like, what if we used our scalable outreach, but we asked them, will you come be a guest on the podcast? And we made a podcast about, and I was the host, just about the practice of software engineering leadership. Okay, so who wouldn't want to be a guest on that? Like, we're going to feature your quality level of leadership and talk all about the management of how you do great.

 

Harry Duran 00:11:37:

Software teams, what types of positions? So it's people who are running and leading software teams in these.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:11:43:

Yeah, in our case, it was CTOs, CIOs, VPs of engineering, principal software engineers, like, people like. Like that who led software teams. And Shocking. But people actually were like, yeah, I'll talk to you. That sounds like a great idea.

 

Harry Duran 00:12:00:

Well, you're always stroking the ego. And I always said. I remember sometime I heard a couple years ago that someone was looking for a position as an engineer. And I was like, you should. We were at a barbecue and I was like, you should start a podcast called it Rockstar Engineers and then interview the people who do the hiring these companies where you want to work at.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:12:16:

Yes.

 

Harry Duran 00:12:16:

You know, and I was just. I always think about these ideas and just how.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:12:19:

I mean, it became the new coffee meeting. Like, that's what you used to do. Like, I used to spend all my time. You go around town, have coffee all day with people, maybe do some business.

 

Harry Duran 00:12:27:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:12:27:

And I was like, shoot, I can do three or four of these a day. They're just sales calls.

 

Harry Duran 00:12:32:

How did you structure the podcast episode slash interview conversation in a way that didn't seem like it was overly salesy, but made it feel like, you know, you're getting value, both parties are getting value from the conversation. And then how do you segue into, like, the sales recording? Or did you make it all a part of the conversation?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:12:56:

I think beneficially, and this maybe is why I've been successful in sales, is like, I actually was just curious. Like, I wanted to know about this, so I would just. I just nerded out with them. Like, be some. Like, who's the most interesting guy at the party is the guy who asks all the questions. And I really did want to know. Like, I'm that kind of nerd, you know, like, tell me about this. Like, I actually want to know the stuff. And I guess it was, you know, it's just. It didn't. It came naturally to me. Like, people always ask that question. Like, I don't know. I mean, same way I always do sales. Like, I. I just genuinely want to talk to people and just be curious. Yeah, well, I do shows. Yeah. I just want to learn. And I guess by being receptive to that, like, sure, I had that secondary motive. Like, that was my job. But, you know, ultimately, if the recording stopped, you know, and we had the little green room time after, I'd say, man, Harry, that was super cool. Like, I just learned a lot from you And I really appreciate that. I love those things you said, hey, no sweat. I didn't call you on here to pitch you. But the kind of culture that you just described and the kind of leadership you just described, that's the kind of people that we want to work with. If there's ever a time that you're looking for augmenting your team, I would love to be on the list. Then I just left it there. And 10, 20% of those people ultimately, over the course of five years, like, just remembered that that existed. And then we would post on social and be like, hey, look how smart Harry is. Like, he said this brilliant thing, you know, so repurposing before it was a thing. And this took. The ridiculous part is now you. We were talking about, you know, descript and all this, like the one man show stuff that you can do now.

 

Harry Duran 00:14:37:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:14:37:

It took a staff of five to pull this thing off. I mean, it was ridiculous. Like ultimately. And I, even back then I had to make the argument like, hey, we're spending a lot of money on this, but I guarantee you this, like, look at the return on investment.

 

Harry Duran 00:14:52:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:14:52:

And at that time, it ended up being, you know, we were talking about millions of dollars of revenue. So I think I calculated a 5 or 6x return on all the spend that went into that show.

 

Harry Duran 00:15:04:

That's great. I love that.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:15:05:

And I don't think we would have got those relationships otherwise. What else were you going to do?

 

Harry Duran 00:15:10:

No, I mean, there's something about the face to face and I've discovered it firsthand. Like I said, between the, my first show podcast junkies, this one, and the vertical farming podcast, I've had over 500 conversations. And there's just something about the face to face on the podcast side. I'd go to the podcast conferences and Harry'd be like, hey, Harry. And I'd be wearing a similar yellow podcast junkie shirt and they'd be like, oh, thank you. I had a great conversation. So from like building that network, it was really critical for me that time to just get a name, make a name for myself in the community and on the vertical farming side now because I focus on CEOs and founders, you know, we've. That show's generated over a hundred thousand in sponsorship revenue and it's again from building relationships and it's. I got flown to indoor farming conferences in Dubai and Germany on their dime. They put me up at a hotel and that's having zero visibility in vertical farming in 2020. And now I've created a Spun it off into, like, the AgTech Media Group because I partnered with another website called IGROW News that does the content, the newsletter content, we do the media content, the podcast side. So that's awesome. It's wild how that happened. So I.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:16:11:

But I think it comes from a thing, like, of general. Like, genuine interest is the key. Right. You can't inauthentically do this. Of course, first of all, it would be freaking exhausting, like, if you don't want to learn this stuff. But, I mean, I would, like, genuinely ask people about stuff. And I. I talked to one time, like, I can't remember the guy's name now, but, you know, it's like principal engineer of Stripe.

 

Harry Duran 00:16:32:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:16:32:

And he had just released, like, the book that I have on my shelf, and he sent me his book. And it's like, about how we manage software engineering teams for success. And it's just like, I still have that stuff. And I mean, this is, what, 10 years ago? And I'm still in contact with some of those people. It's like, hey, Nick, what's up, dude? That's awesome. And, like, he was my guest one time. How many.

 

Harry Duran 00:16:55:

You made an impression, though. That's good.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:16:57: Who you maybe, but who you have coffee with 10 years ago? Yeah, you know, like, you know, I don't know. It just was a thing, and it stuck. And then we started saying, hey, well, we should make a company that does just this. So I partnered with other guys who had a content agency, but I said, I think this is the future. And that became a big B2B podcasting agency that we did millions of dollars of sales. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Jake. Jorge, man. Jake had owned the company that did the outreach that powered me getting guests.

 

Harry Duran 00:17:31:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:17:31:

And he was doing a thing which was, again, now a lot of people do this. It's like, go interview executives, not for a podcast, but just interview them in order to drag out thought leadership content.

 

Harry Duran 00:17:43:

Yeah, yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:17:44:

That was innovative at the time, but it, you know, became getting a little saturated, as did the outbound. And then the podcast space was just taken off because it was like, 2019.

 

Harry Duran 00:17:53:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:17:54:

Like, hey, why don't we do that? Just focus on that. It's the same thing.

 

Harry Duran 00:17:58:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:17:59:

But it's novel and people aren't and doing that. And we hit the curve right at the right time there. And that company grew, and Jake still owns it, and that's awesome. And then we. We did another podcast there. Leaders of B2B.

 

Harry Duran 00:18:14:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:18:14:

And leaders of B2B was the same thing. Like, well, I know that the people who are going to make effective B2B podcasts for big brands are in fact leaders of B2B.

 

Harry Duran 00:18:25:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:18:26:

And I can talk pretty much at all the levels of business. Like, I'm just like, guy, so let's go get them. So we got the CMOs of major companies and we got like, just. We used the same mechanism when we built another company that way.

 

Harry Duran 00:18:40:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:18:41:

And that's where Listen Network came from. Because then we realized there was problems with podcast promotion and proving ROI and, you know, all the things that agencies run into. So we built Listen Network because it's like, just keep solving problems. And that's where rig came from. It was like, that's weird. Like, there's a lot of weird production problems. What if we solve that too? You know, and so talk about, let's.

 

Harry Duran 00:19:03:

Go through them one at a time. So talk about Blissen Network. Like, what's the business model there and who do you help?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:19:10:

 

So Listen Network primarily serves podcast agencies.

 

Harry Duran 00:19:14:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:19:14:

And I discovered running sales for a podcast agency that like, there's a critical problem with getting a podcast funded from a business endeavor. And that was that no matter what you did and all of us podcast people, like, podcast is a long game. You're not going to have lots of downloads at the beginning. You're going to go in. And we would be coaching these people on what to say to go get.

 

Harry Duran 00:19:38:

More budget and coaching the agency owners.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:19:42:

Not the agency owner. Like, we were the agency. So we were coaching our clients who were the podcast marketers at brand companies. Right?

 

Harry Duran 00:19:50:

Yep.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:19:51:

And we kind of go, okay, here's the things to say, here's your data. You know all this. But they go back and like, hate to say it, but 30, 40% of the time they just couldn't make the pitch the way we could.

 

Harry Duran 00:20:02:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:20:02:

And they were going into budget meetings and they were asked, they were sort of presenting this long tail editorial type of discussion. Well, people who control marketing budgets were by and large performance marketers.

 

Harry Duran 00:20:15:

Yeah, yeah. They want the roi.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:20:17:

They're sitting across the table and you could see this meeting and there's like sort of money driven roi, CMO or cfo, whoever's in that meeting kind of go, why should we keep funding this expensive thing when right across the table there's the paid media people and they're going, we drove a hundred thousand MQLs.

 

Harry Duran 00:20:37:

Of course.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:20:37:

Right. Like, it's just like a misalignment of language. So Listen Network and MQL is just.

 

Harry Duran 00:20:43:

For the listeners, not up on the.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:20:45:

Text, I mean, who knows what it is, right? Like you know, how many listeners, how many downloads.

 

Harry Duran 00:20:49:

It was always download leads. Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:20:51:

We all know that downloads is, you know, quasi useful metric that, like a massageable metric. But it was the KPI and whether like it or not, people were asking about it. So we surmised and said, okay, people are going to count that whether or not we tell them it's a good idea. So if they're going to count that, what if we could say, we know that these downloads came from your exact icp, your target market. And if we can do that, we can make, we can use paid media to make that number go up and the targeting capabilities of paid media to say we know it came from your target market. If we built the middle piece that would connect ad network to download. So we set up and we did that. And then we can use all that business intelligence and draw. And now with AI, it's even better because we can draw strategic insights and editorial guidance from the data and saying this is what the targeted audience is doing when they interact with your show. So we can now say time of day, gender, contextual alignment, intent signals, job titles, firmographics, like all these things that ad networks have. We can directly connect that and annotate that download. And we can do that for agencies white label.

 

Harry Duran 00:22:21:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:22:22:

So the agency can say, we drove exactly this many downloads to your exact target market and here's all this amazing data out of it.

 

Harry Duran 00:22:32:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:22:33:

And what happened when we did this? We did it internally and before we spun the company out. So it's independent now, but we did it first with our own money on our own clients, and it drove 40% better retention. Podcasts were not churning because they weren't getting canceled. We kept our clients and because of the way we built the business model, the agency made more money.

 

Harry Duran 00:22:55:

Yeah, that's great.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:22:57:

And so all that exists now for consumption, buy and to power other agencies. Because I simply believe that our podcast agency world is still operating as if it's 2022.

 

Harry Duran 00:23:10:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:23:11:

And what we ought to be doing is being like, how can we be more strategic? How can we be AI data driven first? And sure, we need to drive those metrics. We get it. Let's do that. But people aren't doing podcasts as a hobby. They're doing it as a business driving mechanism. We need to hook into the broader strategic alignment of marketing. And that's what this does. So it's been really, it's been fun. Like I get to say, podcasting matters in A way that it didn't before.

 

Harry Duran 00:23:42:

So. And when you work with these types of shows or these types of agencies, what type of shows are they producing? Is it a lot of B2B type stuff where there could be anything?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:23:52:

Yeah, yeah, could be anything. We have comedy. I mean, because it doesn't matter. Right. Like I can drive audience awareness of your thing.

 

Harry Duran 00:24:01:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:24:01:

And tell you important data about that audience that will help you do other strategic marketing stuff.

 

Harry Duran 00:24:08:

Okay. And for anyone looking or companies looking to get involved at this level, is there like a minimum spend to make it viable because of the work you have to do with paid marketing or anything like that?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:24:18:

Yeah, pretty low though. What we have found is that we do paid media campaigns one to one on episode. Right. So what you would say is I want X number of downloads per episode.

 

Harry Duran 00:24:30:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:24:31:

To target Z. Right. And the minimum that we can get that to work because of the thresholds necessary to actually get a campaign to do anything is 250 downloads.

 

Harry Duran 00:24:43:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:24:44:

And we can't make it cost effective unless an agency spends at least a thousand dollars at a time.

 

Harry Duran 00:24:53:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:24:53:

So it's not too bad.

 

Harry Duran 00:24:54:

So if it's a weekly show, could they do.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:24:58:

It's like 250 downloads per episode is the smallest that we can do.

 

Harry Duran 00:25:02:

And if you did. If it was a weekly show and you did that for a month, that's. Is that the spend right there?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:25:06:

That could be the. Yeah. So at volume, agencies buy at an agency rate. They can sell to their clients on a larger rate.

 

Harry Duran 00:25:13:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:25:13:

Okay. So at that volume. Yeah. I can get it down to certain networks. We can get it down to about a dollar per download for the agency. And it goes up to. In other contexts, like $5 per download. Greater targeting, more expensive marketing. They just whatever the agency gets, we make sure that there's room for the agency to mark that off.

 

Harry Duran 00:25:33:

Yeah. And then we had a brief discussion about this last time we chatted. But talk a little bit about the difference between what we're seeing on the audio side, IAB and all that sort of stuff, and then what people are looking for, expecting on the YouTube side.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:25:46:

Yeah, YouTube is a little different beast. You know, obviously lots of migration too. So I believe, you know, a podcast is a conversation that you can consume however you want, like the delivery mechanism or channel of that you ought to be exploiting whatever distribution you can to meet the customer where they are. And YouTube operates based on a little bit more of. I'm not gonna say vanity metric, but different behaviors. Right. So we can do it on YouTube. And there's two things you care about there. It's like how many views does each video have and how many subscribers does the channel have?

 

Harry Duran 00:26:20:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:26:20:

So my recommendation strategically would be there if you're gonna put paid behind YouTube. And I know all the YouTube experts are like, oh, don't do that. It'll drive down your watch time and you know, whatever. Like there's all kinds of strategic stuff around there.

 

Harry Duran 00:26:33:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:26:33:

But bottom line, like particularly in a B2B show, you're going to want to pay to get attention to that thing because otherwise no one will care.

 

Harry Duran 00:26:40:

The metrics matter.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:26:42:

Yeah. So if you want more subscribers in aggregate for your channel, we could do per subscriber. And I recommend that people put a little bit of money sometimes behind driving views, at least to level out the view thing. There again, all the cat, all the YouTube experts are going to be like, dude, that sucks. Like your watch time is going to go down and you know it's going to kill you organic and all these things. Like, I get it. Like, believe me, the simplistic version of this is what I can tell you is particularly in a B2B world, people want to do some paid and they want to spend some money to get views up. So they don't look like six people watch this.

 

Harry Duran 00:27:20:

Of course.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:27:21:

Right. You know, so that's what tends to happen there. So you got downloads on the audio side, you got subscribers on the video side and views on the video side. We're also exploring all kinds of other ways to think about. Well, from my podcast, I want to drive additional email subscribers or maybe I want to drive traffic and think about like, I'm building my substack property or like, so all these things are what you call mid funnel conversion. That's going to be like your problem aware audience doesn't know that you exist and that you have the solution to their problem. But they are problem aware.

 

Harry Duran 00:27:58:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:27:58:

So we need to try to reach the problem aware person and provide them with your expertise and solution. So that's the same type of thing you might think of, like register for a webinar.

 

Harry Duran 00:28:11:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:28:12:

Subscribe to an email list, download a white paper, whatever thing. Right. Like we're going, we're thinking of it, like when we call it Listen Network, it's like, who's listening to me?

 

Harry Duran 00:28:26: Does that require a podcast, that other case study? Because if you're trying to drive your email list to awareness, to a problem aware audience, you don't even need a show for that. Right.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:28:37: You may or may not benefit from any particular type of content. Because this is where, like, again, like, my I advocate zoom out. Yeah, this is a full picture of content for strategic purposes. Yeah, I don't know what the right solution is for any given company because where's your customer? Sure, we got to figure that out. It's the same thing you would do for any marketing. So now what am I a strong advocate for? Like, I'm pretty damn sure that you should have a podcast. You should be able to, you know, essentially have a place to have authentic conversations. And from that, if you do video first, you'll be able to derive a lot of other types of content from it. So, of course, yeah, I do think that is the best, most authentic entry point. And let's face it, like, as AI moves up the stack, the only thing we're ever going to have left is this type of conversation where it's like, sure, I could have produced this conversation. I mean, like, how? What are we, like, a year away from, like, you know, like, Avatar of Harry and Avatar of Ledge. God help them, like, why would anybody make an avatar look like me? But, you know, yeah, I think at that point then you're still at the point of, like, humans crave connection and authenticity. So, sure, you can generate a bunch of content, but that's the same thing that people started doing with like, oh, just publish 2,000 white paper. Like, nobody cares.

 

Harry Duran 00:30:02:

Nobody cares.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:30:03:

Nobody thinks about the world in terms of white paper or MQL or any of these marketing buckets that we've applied to it. They care about, like, authentic, integral relationships. And it's going to be hard to argue that podcasting still isn't the best way to do that. Unless we move back to all in person events, which is fine. Do that too. Like, I think, why meaningfully or intentionally exclude part of the pie. My intention would be, like, how do we remove the friction to producing all those pieces and make them work strategically in concert?

 

Harry Duran 00:30:42:

That makes so much sense. And I think there's this pushback and this craving for the analog world. I was going up north, driving with my partner, and I saw a billboard caught my eye. It was Polaroid coming back with the Polaroid, like physical picture coming out of the camera to return to analog. I think that was the tagline. I was like, wow. And I grew up DJing. I mean, in my office here, I've got my turntables with my vinyl collection. So there's something lovely about the tactical feel for all this. And the same thing with these conversations, like, you want to know it's almost like this podcast is human certified or whatever. It's going to be labeled.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:31:20:

Right, Right. I think you're completely right. It's like what's going to be left when we flood the zone with like, AI crap, Which is already happening.

 

Harry Duran 00:31:32:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:31:32:

I'm not against using tools that help you distribute better or create better or better. You know, so like the conversations now that people are having about AI, it's like, hey, this is about, like, providing maximum context.

 

Harry Duran 00:31:45:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:31:46:

So like, I don't know, like fun things. Like, I took a chat log export of like 10 years of me talking to my friends.

 

Harry Duran 00:31:58:

Wow.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:31:59:

That like this group from college.

 

Harry Duran 00:32:01:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:32:02:

And I found this paper about, like, how academic paper about how you could analyze the quality of relationships from text chat interactions.

 

Harry Duran 00:32:12:

Wow.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:32:13:

And I fed all the stuff to chat gbt and I was like, make me a chart essentially of like, I'm just playing with it because I'm like, this is a great example of what, like, we couldn't do before.

 

Harry Duran 00:32:25:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:32:25:

So then imagine that, like, it comes out and says, oh, it's interesting how you guys have evolved over the course of whatever. You used to talk about being drunk and like, whatever. And now you talk about your kids. You know, it's just stuff like that. Imagine that in a business intelligence context.

 

Harry Duran 00:32:42:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:32:43:

And so, you know, find me the unique, differentiated or underappreciated insights that came from these six interviews. Cross reference that with the transcripts from my 200 sales calls and tell me, am I making the right LinkedIn posts? Like, oh, wow. There's a level of stuff, intelligence wise, that you just simply couldn't do because we all didn't have a supercomputer in our pocket. And now we do.

 

Harry Duran 00:33:08:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:33:09:

But contrast that with like, write me a LinkedIn post.

 

Harry Duran 00:33:12:

Exactly right.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:33:13:

Like, that's dumb. So tools are good. Maximum intelligence is good if you use it in the right way. Yeah.

 

Harry Duran 00:33:22:

When ChatGPT first hit, like, the mass consciousness, I was like, I had this like, aha. I'm like, the most important skill we need to learn is how to talk to the robots.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:33:31:

It's still coding, man. Like, have you played with any of the automation stuff? Like, you know.

 

Harry Duran 00:33:35:

Well, I got into a rabbit hole because I was. I'm creating a new directory called the Potter Sphere. This. It's been. I've been working on this for like 4 years. I started with no code tools. It was like, I think it was like airtable. Started with airtable, then I went to like, webflow. Then I ended up in Bubble because I was working with a co developer and then it just sat there on the shelf because I was like, I don't want to learn bubble. And then the vibe coding stuff came online so I jumped into Replit Bolt and then I started getting to the Reddit forums and they're like, this code is horrible. It's spaghetti code. And I was like, ah, I don't want to do that. So then I went back to Claude, which has apparently got the best coding prompt engine. And I just basically said, hey, this is what Bolt created for me. Fed it the screenshots. You can give it screenshots. I was like, oh, this is a nice look. We can use the styling. And I just started from scratch in Claude and I just. Now I've got Supabase set up as my database. I'm using GitHub, you know, which I barely touched, but starting to familiarize with myself and like testing it locally. And it's been an interesting exercise because there's something like satisfying about. Adjust this code, refresh the screen, See that it works. Going very slow, but knowing I'm walking a fine line here because. Or a high wire because I don't know what's happening in the code.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:34:51:

Right.

 

Harry Duran 00:34:52:

Quite honest. But I'm going very slow. I know enough, like I said, to be dangerous. So, you know, I just make sure I save it a lot. And I'm now I'm creating like branches on GitHub. So I'm like, this is really good, let's not break this and then we'll keep going. So I think in a week or two I'll send it to you to take have a look at.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:35:07:

You still need to know the stuff. Yeah, that's what I've discovered like with this, you know, it's like I know enough like I can read code still, but I mean like, I don't know what to do. It's been years, you know, like, I can't set up environments, I can't do anything. But you're giving me the bridge to get back to where I can start to do interesting things. Like yeah, I need a dashboard across all my companies and it's really annoying to log into eight different bank accounts every day.

 

Harry Duran 00:35:34:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:35:35:

Could I get a Google spreadsheet?

 

Harry Duran 00:35:38:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:35:38:

Using Apps Script to go out to my bank and get the balance and put it in that cell. So I set out with like just basic business stuff that I wanted to do.

 

Harry Duran 00:35:47:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:35:48:

And it got me pretty close, but it was still didn't work. And then I was Able to look at the documentation and actually have a chat with the thing and it goes, I think you're calling the wrong endpoint. Like, I don't know how to call an endpoint, but I know what an endpoint is.

 

Harry Duran 00:36:05:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:36:06:

And I can still look at the documentation. I look at the JavaScript example and then I look at what it's doing and I'm like, I think you have, you're missing the prefix from the secure key or whatever. So it's a partner that's smarter than me. Yeah, right.

 

Harry Duran 00:36:23:

I love when you point out a mistake that it made and it said, you're absolutely right, Harry, you're absolutely right.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:36:28:

I'm so glad you found that. I was just testing you, you know, and I'm just like very agreeable. But I've gotten into that loop. I'm sure you've done the same thing. Like, still doesn't work. Still doesn't work.

 

Harry Duran 00:36:39:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:36:39:

Oh, you're right. I know exactly what's going to fix it this time. The thing gaslights you. I mean it gas. It's crazy, right?

 

Harry Duran 00:36:46:

I think it used in the right hands because I know what to ask and I'm pushing it to say I don't think it's supposed to be doing that. Hey, do you think we should do a code review before we move any further? He's like, great idea, let's do that.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:36:57:

We get this error. What does that mean? Yeah, okay, let me go find in the documentation, like, okay, this particular thing, if I look at the example and I look at that, just one little piece, like I can find it, like it's getting me far enough. But there's, I don't understand how anybody could do any of this production wise without at least still knowing your domain.

 

Harry Duran 00:37:20:

Some domain expertise and maybe even some basics about what proper coding work should, what a workflow should look like that you need get, you need to understand what is happening in GitHub and you need to understand that you can create versioning and just that's. I think I learned enough over the years to know that I should be asking these questions. And so I'm just going very slow.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:37:40:

But it really, I come from like, I remember back in the day, version control was like, shit, I better save a backup of this because. But I was always the one who was like, look, I'm not going to make changes unless like I'm committed to this thing. So I would have working stuff and like, absolutely destroy it. Yeah. And I'm sitting here for the next two days until this works again.

 

Harry Duran 00:38:02:

Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:38:03:

So I was always the idiot that was like, I'm not going to commit this. There was no commit. It was like, I'm not making a backup.

 

Harry Duran 00:38:09:

You're just hitting save on the.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:38:10:

You're either in or you're out, brother.

 

Harry Duran 00:38:12:

Or save on that HTML file, dot.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:38:16:

Old dot, old, old dot, back.

 

Harry Duran 00:38:20:

You lose track of your backups.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:38:22:

Yeah, exactly.

 

Harry Duran 00:38:23:

Tell me about rigging.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:38:25:

So rig approached the same type of thinking around the production idea. And to me, it was like, why am I going to every B2B, whatever, website of a business? And invariably there's a little menu and it says insights or resources or something like that. And under that it says webinar, podcast, video, sure, white paper, whatever. I'm like, that's really weird, right? Like, why are we treating our customers that way when in fact all those things could be derived from potentially one place? Well, the answer is, you couldn't derive it from one place because, like, every one those marketing names and buckets, webinar, whatever, like, they all came from a different stack and they were created by different people.

 

Harry Duran 00:39:08:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:39:09:

So say, what if you nuked all that and you just said, we know recording a thing is important from a video standpoint. I don't care what you're going to call it. What I care about is that a meaningful production session happened. And I hate this idea that it takes forever to record two talking heads and then have raw video of two different people and then have an editor spend like eight hours to go back and fix it and take a couple weeks and eventually we have an episode or eventually we have whatever.

 

Harry Duran 00:39:46:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:39:47:

Like, what if you could do that real time? And so I found a partner and we talked about it, and it's just like, we call it real time production. And the idea is that that exact hour that you spent talking to that person, like, if it was you and me right now, we wouldn't be in Squadcast, we'd be in rig.

 

Harry Duran 00:40:03:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:40:04:

And what rig allows you to do is you go to that URL, there's a virtual producer in there who's running that thing and editing it real time. So it looks amazing. It's like a TV show.

 

Harry Duran 00:40:16:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:40:17:

That session's done. That session can be live streamed if you want. It can be streamed later if you want. It's an episode. It's a webinar. It produces all the stuff that you ever needed from it.

 

Harry Duran 00:40:28:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:40:29:

And we can do it in less than 72 hours.

 

Harry Duran 00:40:32:

That's awesome.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:40:33:

So I wanted to take the idea out that we're naming all of our content after things that are based on old tech stacks, not based on customers. We wanted to highlight that conversation in the right way and we wanted to be able to distribute it any way we want. So Rig wants to think about the real time production sequence now, given all the capabilities that we just simply didn't have three years ago.

 

Harry Duran 00:41:00:

Yeah, yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:41:01:

So agencies are all trying to shoehorn their ways. They do things into like AI. I'm just going, well, let's scrap all that because we now have these capabilities and we have the ability to tie together stuff so we can make real time video that's like freaking gorgeous, like a TV show and there's no editing.

 

Harry Duran 00:41:22:

Yeah, yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:41:23:

And then it's done. And N8N workflows with human assisted, like the whole. It's an assembly line of essentially agents and humans and whatever other things we want to apply to it. But it all moves through the production system like a factory, human or not. Which version do you want? Because I can plug and play and at any point, if there's a new tool that does thing X and it's better than the one that we had, yank it out, plug it in, put the new tool in. You don't even need to know the difference. Yeah, so remove that entire deal. My idea was as a consultant for content people or an executive producer or whatever role that is, you always got into the spot where you had to manage a bunch of freelancers or build a production team and like nobody wants to be an agency, I don't think at all. I think what they want to do is be consultants and producers and they want to have all the rest of that crap abstracted from them.

 

Harry Duran 00:42:25:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:42:26:

So that's what RIG does. And so both of those things are essentially back end providers for other people who want to actually do the thing that they wanted to do and had to deal with all the crap on the way there.

 

Harry Duran 00:42:39:

Who is an ideal client for Rig.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:42:42:

Could be an agency that wants to have do all the clients for them, you know, so just, you don't need to deal with this anymore. Or a lot of like influencer type of, you know, business influencer type. So you got a lot of followers on LinkedIn and you want to have a podcast, but like that's too much work or whatever, you know, it's because we can distribute live or recorded, but like a live session. And so we can live send whatever you're doing at any point to a video experience on any social network, real time.

 

Harry Duran 00:43:16:

Okay. That's awesome.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:43:17:

So it's streaming. It's post streaming. Like it's live. It's not live. It doesn't matter to us. It's a webinar. Yeah, same thing. We don't care. Which thing do you want to plug into? It's an entire production layer. And then you get your written and your social and your graphics and your clips and all that stuff you never wanted to think about.

 

Harry Duran 00:43:37:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:43:38:

And it's just done. And it's done fast. And you don't have to spend an outrageous amount of time and money managing all the humans.

 

Harry Duran 00:43:45:

So does would an agency owner white label that and just. And then the value add that they're giving to the client is like the consulting and the. Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:43:53:

Or it's just like, you know, I mean, so true. White label, I think, is like, you could do it if you want. Yes. We can support that. I also think that's become a little silly in the sort of collective provider economy. Like, nobody goes, oh, I desperately want a white label. Trello. Right. Like, you run your project management on Trello. Cool. Right on. Like, you're not worried about that.

 

Harry Duran 00:44:17:

Sure, sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:44:18:

You run your production on squad cast. Nobody's like, oh, I'm not using squad cast. Because, like, it's not white label. So I think of rig that way.

 

Harry Duran 00:44:26:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:44:27:

You know what I mean? Like, sure, you want a white label, it, fine. We'll disappear. Nobody will ever know what it's just.

 

Harry Duran 00:44:32:

Powered by rig, essentially. Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:44:34:

Yeah, exactly. And I think the distinction of white label is more valuable when it's like enlisted network land. I'm actually really pretty adamant about that.

 

Harry Duran 00:44:43: Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:44:44:

Because I want to attribute all the work we did to you, agency owner. I want you to look smart.

 

Harry Duran 00:44:50:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:44:51:

In this case, it doesn't apply to that. Right. Like, it's like a tooling more than, you know. It's like, I don't care who made the thing. Of course I care that the thing.

 

Harry Duran 00:45:01:

Was smart and it works.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:45:03:

Yeah. Now if I can accrue smartness and intelligence to you so you can get more clients and keep them.

 

Harry Duran 00:45:08:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:45:09:

That appeals to me more as a way label thing. That may be my bias as a service provider, but that's the way I think about it.

 

Harry Duran 00:45:15:

So. So what's the third company now?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:45:18:

Add 1 0. That was actually the original company. And so that innovation was having run sales for a lot of service companies. B2B service companies. Like, this is really weird. You can hire a fractional cmo. You can hire a fractional coo, cfo. Whatever. Cto, why can't you hire a fractional closer? And, you know, then I thought about that and it's like, well, it's not just a closer. It's I need an sdr, a BDR sales ops. I need, you know, sort of a person to run systems and CRM or whatever. Like, well, what if we took all that as a fractional?

 

Harry Duran 00:45:53:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:45:54:

And so an agency, a consultancy or a professional service company founder can say, I hate sales.

 

Harry Duran 00:46:02:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:46:02:

I got into this because not to sit on Zoom all day trying to sell my thing and have other people do it.

 

Harry Duran 00:46:07:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:46:08:

I got into this to be a practitioner and an expert.

 

Harry Duran 00:46:10:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:46:11:

And I really like to run a team of experts. But I've reached the point where either I'm going to be on sales calls all day or I'm going to actually get to do the thing that I want to do.

 

Harry Duran 00:46:20:

Yeah. Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:46:21:

And if they reach that point and they go, I don't want to be Chief Sales Officer, I want to be CEO. Well, cool, let's go plug in the entire thing so that we can be that for you. So whatever calls get booked, we'll take them, we'll be your expert, we'll close them, we'll run it through the CRM. The deal's closed. Won. The deal is closed, Lost.

 

Harry Duran 00:46:43:

Cool.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:46:43:

We pass it off to onboarding. We help you manage, like, make sure that it fits your CX process, whatever that is. Like, so I call it a fractional revenue function for B2B services. And it suits well from that, you know, I'm doing 500,000 of revenue to like 2, 3, 4, 5 million.

 

Harry Duran 00:47:00:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:47:00:

Depending on the type of business after that, you might be making enough money. Like, hey, I'm happy if we made you so much money you can hire a sales team.

 

Harry Duran 00:47:07:

Yeah, of course.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:47:08:

Go do it.

 

Harry Duran 00:47:08:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:47:09:

You know, that's awesome. But that piece was not sustainable. You don't hire people to run and everybody was doing that. Like, oh, I need to hire a VP of sales or I'm never going to get out of sales because I'm the only one that knows it.

 

Harry Duran 00:47:23:

Sure, sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:47:24:

So we fix that. And in nature of doing that, we've made thing well over $10 million for our clients.

 

Harry Duran 00:47:32:

So. Nice. And so that just comes out as a monthly retainer then for people to.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:47:37:

Engage at that level, it's retainer plus commission and it's Gail. Yep.

 

Harry Duran 00:47:41:

Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:47:41:

Retainer lets us do all the things and be there for you and not have other people in our calendar. Yeah, yeah, it's like buy the airline seat now let's use the airline seat. And if we win, you stuff, which we will, there's commission on top of that.

 

Harry Duran 00:47:54: Okay.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:47:55:

Same way you would pay. It's not cheaper. It's just a fractional way to consume the thing that you can't otherwise have.

 

Harry Duran 00:48:01:

Yeah, because I think a lot of, you know, and I've experienced some of this as well, you know, being the solopreneur, we don't freelance team. It's like in the beginning you got to do all the things and it's not just a sales person because like you said this all the moving parts, there's like the lead gen, there's the outreach, there's the booking of the calls, there's the having of the calls, there's the tracking of the calls, there's the CRM, there's the follow through, you know, and it's like so many moving parts, it's crazy.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:48:27:

And so we have built that. It takes about five different roles to execute fully and we know how to do that all the way through so that we can arrange that sales process to maximize the wins.

 

Harry Duran 00:48:42:

Does that include the outreach too, like the lead gen?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:48:46:

Generally not. We can add that on top.

 

Harry Duran 00:48:48:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:48:49:

So my thinking on that is like, I mean, sure, like we have teams that can do that so we can like add that in. But I think that if we were to divide revenue into marketing and sales, we live in the sales world and that's mid funnel down, you know, could we assimilate the people that run the rest of it too? But not just at the same price. It's not just like basically you just get to go screw up and like do whatever you want and we're just going to bring you money. If I was going to do that, like, I'm sorry, I'd be the other half too.

 

Harry Duran 00:49:23:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:49:24:

So, you know, it is what it is. There people who think, oh, I need more sales, but it really is. Is like no one's interested in my thing and I have no leads. Yeah, you have a fundamentally different problem. I'm happy to consult you, but that isn't a. If you have no calls and no interest in your thing. Yeah, that's not the same problem as I can't close deals.

 

Harry Duran 00:49:43:

Sure, sure. Makes a lot of sense. Well, thanks for this wide ranging conversation. There's been so much, so much I've learned and so interesting to hear, man.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:49:52:

I appreciate you having me, man. I don't know if anybody else is going to be like Dude, I just broke people's brains. But yeah, no, it's fun.

 

Harry Duran 00:49:58:

And how do you manage all this when you, when it comes, you know, because I've got a couple irons in the fire. On the podcast inside, I talked about like what I'm doing and the opportunity that came up. Because of the vertical farming podcast, I've got the Ag Tech media group now and my small agency and then I'm trying this directory as well. How. And you're doing this at a 10x scale. Like how do you think about managing your time when you're. You've got multiple irons in the fire that need your attention.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:50:26:

Yeah. So I mean, the first thing is like you got to have great business partners. Like, I am not by myself. Right. So the team matters a lot. And so over the time of being a many time entrepreneur, I like to think of us as people collectors. Right. Like, you know, it's just like my business partner and I have done something together since 2002.

 

Harry Duran 00:50:46:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:50:46:

And so you get that mind reading sort of like, you know, sort of bulk and brain thing going on or whatever, the mind meld. And that helps a lot, you know, and otherwise, like, it's just ruthless prioritization. So like I'm a revenue first guy and that's what I think. Like if we're going to do a company, everything's about revenue.

 

Harry Duran 00:51:04:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:51:05:

The second thing is like, all right, let's do that in a high integrity way. The third thing is thinking about like, how do I calmly address that? I call it calm confidence. It's just like, I know we can do this really well and I can approach sales in that way. And so like I do think, you know, whatever skills I've developed as a salesperson, none of these things go unless we close stuff. Right. So, you know, have an expert in business models and revenue models and you know, sort of polymath or whatever, you know, sort of business. Like you need to have that experience. And nowadays, you know, you had to fail lots of times to get there. You know, experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. Right. So you had to screw up a lot. Like, I don't know that I couldn't have done that at the beginning, but I am able to leverage then on top of it. And then we have this fourth value which is called like shared abundance. Right. Like, look, if we're gonna all make money together, I'm gonna make sure it's in your pocket too.

 

Harry Duran 00:52:02:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:52:03:

And that's been the formula. So I think, you know, 20 some odd years later, it's finally hidden in. But that's okay, you know?

 

Harry Duran 00:52:13:

Yeah. What is that? 20 year overnight success.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:52:16:

Yeah, right, right. That's exactly it. I mean, I just look back and laugh at some of the early ones. I'm like, dude, if old me brought me that idea and that team, I'd be like, dude, idiot, get out of my office.

 

Harry Duran 00:52:28:

He'd laugh him out of the room.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:52:30:

Yeah. I mean, it's a joke. And I mean, I can remember the conversation. I was just working on a LinkedIn post about this. Like, here's the time I didn't listen to somebody and I lost a million dollars.

 

Harry Duran 00:52:39:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:52:39:

You know, and because I was an arrogant little bastard and, you know, it's like I try to like look back and have grace for that whipper snapper.

 

Harry Duran 00:52:48:

Yeah, yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:52:50:

And that's fine. You know, it's a little. Back in my day, it's like all of a sudden I'm like the middle aged, like grizzled dude.

 

Harry Duran 00:52:56:

I'm like, I mean, it's important. That's why they call it wisdom, you know, it's quite.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:52:59:

Oh, man, it's not, you know, it's wisdom is the accumulation of like, error, you know, I mean, like, that's what I really think. It's like, why do you know that? You know, like, because I did it wrong so many times.

 

Harry Duran 00:53:10:

Yeah. A couple of closing questions as we wrap up. What's something you've changed your mind about recently?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:53:16:

Something I've changed my mind about. You know, I would say in our. I took put this the right way, like, sort of. I had bought into the narrative of sort of like the dopamine addiction of our society. And so, like, part of like managing my time is like being hyper focused on. So I quit social media.

 

Harry Duran 00:53:40:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:53:41:

I quit drinking.

 

Harry Duran 00:53:42:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:53:43:

I focused on was like my kids, my workouts, my business.

 

Harry Duran 00:53:47:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:53:47:

You know, and I think like, it was the idea of like, I used to be deeply wrapped up in, like, well, I'm gonna argue on Facebook about, you know, things and whatever it was like, I just, I removed all that and I lived kind of in the country a little bit. And I was like, I don't have a lot of contact with any of the chaos. And so I think I used to try to do things the hardest way just to create chaos. Because I liked complexity.

 

Harry Duran 00:54:13:

Sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:54:14:

My flip has been like, no, I need to remove everything. So it's like, this is the simplest, most executable version of life so that I can think about, like. And leave space for what's important. That's probably the biggest change I've gone through in the last, like, two years.

 

Harry Duran 00:54:30:

That's awesome. That's great advice. What is the most misunderstood thing about you?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:54:37:

That guy's abrasive. You know, he's like, I don't know. It's like, I was born and raised in New Jersey. Sometimes it still comes out. It's like, man, the first five times I talked to you, I thought you were such a jerk. But then I realized, like, you were actually shooting me straight and just nobody shoots straight like, that.

 

Harry Duran 00:54:52:

I could totally relate that. The biggest adjustment for me coming from. I grew up in New York and living in New York City is coming to Minnesota and just, you know, just like, my partner would be like, why don't you say hi to anyone? Like, don't. And you don't, like, talk to people. And I'm like, no, you just. That's not what you do. Like, you just like, go, go, go. And I had to learn, like, when you go to a restaurant and you show up, you're like. Instead of just saying, you know, reservation from Harry or. And they're like, ask them how their day was. And all these, like, little nuances of, like, human connection that are normal when you spend enough time away from the city. I was just back in the city, and it was jarring to be there because I didn't feel like, well, it's.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:55:30:

Just like, I think anymore. People don't realize when you grew up, like. And that's just like, if I said hi to everybody, that's all I would do. Right. You know, Now I live in, like, you know, sort of country town. Tennessee.

 

Harry Duran 00:55:41:

Yeah.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:55:41:

It's like, how y' all doing? You know? And instead of, like, in New York, it's like, get out.

 

Harry Duran 00:55:46:

That's what I mean. I tell people I'd be on the subway. It's 100 people in the subway car, and no one, how you doing?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:55:52:

It reminds me of, like, that, like, was that old Crocodile Dundee movie, You know, he's trying to say hi to everybody in New York. Like, you just can't. Right? You know, and it. I don't know. Yeah, that. That's like. It's the shifts over time that I think have made that big difference. But I like exploring those other different cultures.

 

Harry Duran 00:56:10:

Yeah, for sure.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:56:11:

But can be abrasive and direct in a way that I have to learn to be a chameleon sometimes. Like, my base instinct to, like, just get right to the point, be like, tell me your deepest fears, man.

 

Harry Duran 00:56:23:

Yeah, that's good.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:56:23:

It's like, oh, wait, wait. I should kind of smooth that out. Yeah.

 

Harry Duran 00:56:27:

What's your name? Right. Well, thanks so much. This has been really enjoyable conversation. Where's the best place for folks to connect with you if you want to learn more?

 

David Ledgerwood 00:56:37:

You know, because I have so many things going on, I love connecting with people on LinkedIn. So, yeah, my LinkedIn's open. Anybody that hears anything wants to talk about startups, business, B2B services, podcasting. Like, I. I very much enjoy my chats on LinkedIn. I think that's maybe how you and I met. And, yeah, you know, I just try to get out there and be authentic. So that's the place to do it. David Ledgerwood. And I'll help you filter through to which of my pieces of my adventures might be best suited to make you some money.

 

Harry Duran 00:57:08:

Yeah, and he'll go easy on you when you first meet him and John, and with less F bombs than normal. But we'll make sure all those links in the show notes. Thanks again, David. I really appreciate it, Harry.

 

David Ledgerwood 00:57:19:

Thanks, man. Appreciate it.