Paige Velasquez Budde 11:33
Yeah, yeah, the great thing is, there is a lot of opportunity. And it’s kind of like music. Now you don’t have to go through a big traditional publisher, to put out a book, you can you can self publish a book, you can do hybrid publishing, or you can go the traditional route. And so there’s many more options. But a lot of it comes down to how do you market it? And how do you build a platform for yourself as an individual thought leader long term. And so we encourage authors that come in the door, think beyond the book, the book is just one portion of your overarching strategy over time. So whether it looks like you you’re writing a book to grow a company, or you’re writing a book, because you want more speaking opportunities, or you want the opportunity to be selected for boards, it’s different for everybody. You know, some are really focused on what’s that one too many impact with what they’re doing and translating a one to one to one to many. So So I would encourage everyone to look beyond the book and think about what is that end goal. And then let’s work backward from there and leverage the book in order to help accomplish that. And so for authors, one thing that’s going to be incredibly important for them is going to be the email list that they build over time. And that’s what we call kind of that owned media audience, that’s the biggest opportunity that we see in the landscape today is that you no longer have to go through that traditional media, you no longer have to go through just social media, you can actually start to own the relationships. And we’ve seen it really need to be prevalent just in terms of their strategy, because the shifts that are happening with social media are happening so quickly, in terms you know, LinkedIn owns the algorithm, Instagram owns the route algorithm, Facebook owns algorithm. And we learned that lesson the hard way, really back in 2013, when they started to make those switches, I think Facebook was the first one to do that, where they said, Okay, now you have to pay us to reach everybody on the platform. And so that’s something that we really focus in on with our clients is how do we start to build connections to an audience that we can own and start to circumvent all of those traditional aspects of media. And it’s, it’s important to have great press, it’s important to have a solid social media presence, but we don’t want to keep them there. We want to siphon off as much of that exposure as possible to build the relationships that we need to and grow the type of audience that we need to that’s going to be loyal over time.
John Corcoran 14:13
You’re very interesting approach because it’s very digital media, aware, focused. It’s kind of from my perception and a hybrid. There’s there’s PR elements to it. There’s digital media, media elements to it. I’ve asked almost everyone this over the last two years, in March of 2020, when the pandemic starts unfold, we see this is gonna hit everything. What did you think? How did you think it was going to affect your business? And what just take us back to what that experience was like?
Paige Velasquez Budde 14:42
Yeah, you know, thinking back to March, that was a time where I feel like every business owner really didn’t know what was happening next. But for a lot of our clients, especially those that were heavily event based, it was so important that we had had that digital foundation built out, so that we could fall back and put all of our focus into growing that. And it was so important that we had those owned media lists that that we’ve built with our clients over time so that we can activate them now more than ever. And so what was important for us was to make sure our clients were successful number one, throughout this, and that they had a good long term strategy. That was event proof, because we couldn’t do gatherings, we couldn’t rely on speaking opportunities that they had in terms of revenue, we couldn’t rely on the heavy, you know, events and shows that they were part of. And so that was something extremely important for us was one how to how do we look at what’s going on right now, some of our clients, you know, especially in the healthcare space, had a lot of thought leadership around that, and even in the business space, have had a lot of thought leadership around how to transform that business side of things. How do we make sure that we’re speaking to that, but also making sure that we’re being respectful of everything that’s going on in several people’s lives. And so again, a lot of that was having that foundation there, and really being able to lean in on that and continue to grow that but press the gas more than we had ever before on those areas.
John Corcoran 16:25
What about for, I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile here, and it says, I’m not always 100% accurate to the month, but it says in summer 2019 is when you became CEO of Zilker Media, about as is not your clients, but you as, as the head of a company. You know, it’s like eight, nine months later, after you’ve become CEO, and oh, crap, this huge pandemic is hitting, what were you thinking in terms of how it would affect your business?
Paige Velasquez Budde 16:54
Yeah, um, you know, that’s one of the hardest transitions I’ve ever been through, just because once I took that role, it was very shortly after that something like this happened. And it was looking at, you know, I think our leadership team has done a wonderful job of painting our vision, and making sure that we are adaptable. And then we’re always looking at, you know, what happens if there’s an economic downturn, what happens? If, and, you know, that was something that I felt like we were pretty prepared for in terms of this is our mission at the end of the day, and how we deliver that for our clients can look differently based on the landscape. And so we had to go through a lot of those changes. And I think the team was so resilient through that. And that’s the mindset I had to have was, how do we take care of our clients? How do we make risky bets, which we did, you know, we had a lot of clients that came to us and said, Hey, I don’t know what’s going to happen. So, you know, we’ve got to reduce what we’re doing. And we fully kind of went in and said, Hey, we think this is the most important thing for you to do at this time. So we’re gonna do it, no matter what. And, you know, we’ll have a conversation about that on the back end. And so we took, you know, some of those risks and really leaned in with our clients during that time, which is what we felt was the right thing to do. And, you know, I think we saw the results of that later in terms of their businesses flourishing and ours in return. And we were, you know, lucky enough to be one of those businesses that grew during the pandemic. And we learned a lot, you know, we learned we had to hire remote. We’re such a culture focused company, that that was a big learning curve for us. And it was, you know, how do we how do we continue activating our team and giving our team you know, the time we enjoyed happy hours and fun events that we did throughout the years? How do we translate that in a different way, with our team, so we were just adapting and adapting and adapting. And, you know, I felt like that has made us one really resilient, but to, you know, our team is so quick to shift strategy we were we were going day to day, in terms of how we were pitching the media, we were going day to day in terms of you know, what’s going out on on social today, based on not only the news cycle, but what was going on with each of our clients, businesses. And so whenever you have to do that, you have to come together really tightly as a team, and we were able to do that.
John Corcoran 19:35
It’s funny, I follow a few like, kind of media advisors or immediate influencers on social media. And I feel like whenever something big happens, like a pandemic, some of them will tweet out or they’ll say something like, now all your social media agencies out there, it’s time to pause all of your scheduled tweets, because, you know, it never really happens that you see in the news like, you know, Kim Kardashian tweeted right after some big tragedy happened, something that was tried, you know, and maybe there’s a greater awareness now, the fact that these things are pre scheduled in advance, or maybe agencies are better at being like, Okay, guys, we gotta pause everything for a little bit.
Paige Velasquez Budde 20:15
Yeah, absolutely. And unfortunately, you know, we had to do that in Texas last week, you know. And so that’s something that we need to be so mindful of, and also pitching the media on the PR side, we need to be mindful that they’re, you know, they’re incredibly important stories to report on. Obviously, if our clients can support that we’ll we’ll come in at that way. But if not, we want to be completely respectful to what’s going on in the world. And there’s other avenues that we can continue to really focus on bringing the mission alive.
John Corcoran 20:48
You mentioned, your mission, your values, I love that one of your values. The first one listed is good vibes. Yeah, I mean, here I am in California, like, How can I not like that? Oh, first of all, what does that mean to you? And secondly, how do you instill something like that within an organization? And especially as you mentioned, when you start hiring a remote, how do you make sure that those good vibes continue? It’s one thing to have good vibes on a Friday in person, happy hour, but it’s another if everyone’s virtual?
Paige Velasquez Budde 21:20
Yeah, absolutely. Good Vibes is one of our favorites, that I think if you talk to any of our team members, that’s probably the first core value that a lot of them will mention. And it’s the one I hear most from our team. But it’s all about where our attitude is rooted in for us that that’s that good vibes mentality where we have mutual respect, mutual support, mutual candor, and everything that we do. And it’s not only to one another, but it’s the partners that we work with. We have wonderful, wonderful partners that do a lot of work with our clients as well, you know, based on their area of specialty, we also have, you know, good vibes with our clients. That’s the they all know that that’s one of our core values, because they hear it from us consistently. But it’s all about, again, the attitude that everybody shows up with every day at work. And when we were virtual, you know, a lot of those things, were just picking up the phone and calling one another and seeing how each other was doing nothing about any of the transactional work that we were doing. We did the same thing with clients just, hey, I’m calling in to check in on you and check in on your family. How are y’all doing? You know, that stuff is so so important to us far beyond, you know, the day to day is making sure that we’re there for one another, we’re supporting one another. We’re jumping in whenever we need to. And one thing we do to keep that alive is you know, every week in our team meeting, we talk about our core values. And we we have everybody point out what they’ve observed from that week from team members. And I’ll tell you good vibes is one of the ones that gets pointed out the most.
John Corcoran 23:02
Joe gave me good vibes when blank that kind of right,
Paige Velasquez Budde 23:04
right? Absolutely. It’s like, Hey, I saw good vibes, they went above and beyond to support me or they went above and beyond to do something special for me or my family. And so, yeah, something that we want to continue carrying out for not only each other, but for our clients and the community that we serve as well.
John Corcoran 23:25
How do you think as we look forward? We’re recording this and what end of May June of 2022, hopefully the pandemics in the rearview mirror, but life most certainly has changed. Business most certainly has changed. What are some lasting long term changes that you think that will stick around?
Paige Velasquez Budde 23:48
Yeah, you know, I think, I think just in terms of businesses in how they’re ran moving forward, I think so many of us found opportunities to focus more on the value that we’re delivering, but also become more efficient with that. And so I think that’s something that, you know, bringing our team together, everybody working on the same page, one thing that we did during the pandemic that has absolutely changed our business, and at that time we were doing it because of the situation we were in. But you know, that’s something that we’re going to continue on with is we started open book management. We had just implemented EOS the year before the pandemic. So starting in 2019. And then we oh, we started open book management, the year of 2020. And the goal was with that was on all levels of the business, everybody had transparency into our goals financially and where we currently were. And so at every level decisions could be made by those individuals to help focus and accomplish our goals. And so we just wanted to bring that in powermat to everybody on the team so that everybody was rowing in the same direction. And that has been just an incredible in terms of the what we’ve seen financially for our company, the growth that we’ve been able to have and the excitement amongst the team to truly make an impact and understand how everybody impacts the growth of our company and where we want to go.
John Corcoran 25:25
Yeah. I’m sure we could do a whole interview on that topic alone, because that’s, that’s a meaty topic. I’ve read a few books on it. How long did it take you to prepare for that decision? Because there’s one thing I’ve read frequently is that you can’t just like jump into willy nilly, right? Education has to be a big component of it. You can’t just throw numbers out of context. So the entire team has to be educated on what the numbers mean. So talk a little bit about that.
Paige Velasquez Budde 25:55
Yeah. So we did six months of education, before we started really reporting and having everybody track what they were doing individually. And so that those six months, I mean, our leadership team just poured and poured important to our team, because of course, our leadership team was entirely focused of how do we continue to grow the business and do what we want to do in this current stage where the world is changing day by day, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like tomorrow. And so, you know, our CFO took a lot of time preparing, you know, special reports for the team to look at. And educating them and quizzing them and doing one on one session. So it was a partial group sessions, partial one on one sessions. And we also did something that was really interesting. We also did a few personal financial sessions. So how do you look at your budgeting, you know, how do you look at what you’re investing in? You know, how do you do your at home kind of type, p&l, that type of thing, just to give our team member life benefits alongside, you know, this is how we’re running the business. But this is also how you can, you know, translate this to your personal life. And we had so many awesome stories from our team members, completely transforming the way that they did their personal finances, which was, again, at the end of the day, far beyond what we could imagine this type of program doing for our company.
John Corcoran 27:27
That’s really cool. All right, I want we’re almost out of time. So I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of gratitude. And if you would look around at your peers and contemporaries, however you wanted to find that could be others in your industry. I know you’re active in Neo like I am in the Austin chapter. So it could be other EO members, Entrepreneurs Organization, so however you want to define it, could you respect who do you admire? Who would you want to just publicly call out just kind of thank them for being there for you along the way?
Paige Velasquez Budde 27:55
Yeah, and you know, if I’m, if I’m looking really big picture, just in terms of an entrepreneur that I followed that I don’t know, personally, but I feel like I do because of how personal they are online. You know, one that’s, you know, Sara Blakely. I mean, she’s done a phenomenal job. And again, you know, I don’t know her personally, but you remember, but my goodness, I mean, look at what she has done, and how she has completely just trailblaze you know, not only creating her own field, but also you know, how business is done. And I love even just listening to how she talks about, you know, being a mother raising her family, supporting others that just resonates with me, and I love her the way she does her social media strategy. Even I mean, she announced her Blackstone partnership on her personal social media channels before it ever hit any type of official corporate news wire press release social media channels. And to me that says a lot. It says a lot in terms of how she’s built her business and the type of influence that she has.
John Corcoran 29:02
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more actually. We have a book club in our company where we pay our team members to read a book and we talk about it on a regular basis. And the first one we did wasn’t even a book. It was masterclass, and it was Sara Blakely masterclass, we went through and everyone enjoyed it. They all loved it. Paige, this has been amazing. Where can people go to learn more about you connect with you ask any question?
Paige Velasquez Budde 29:25
Yeah, so you can go to zilkermedia.com. Also, all my social media is at Paige Velasquez and we also have a new program coming out. So for those of you interested in PR, maybe you’re not quite ready to hire a PR firm yet. We have podcastguestinsider.com coming out and you can learn more about it on that website.
John Corcoran 29:48
And that is for people who are interested in being on more podcasts getting exposure, but maybe they’re not ready for the full level full package. You know, hiring any you just need to manage it for them. Is that right?
Paige Velasquez Budde 30:01
Yes, absolutely. It’s all about teaching you how to pitch yourself to podcasts and giving you the resources that you need in terms of the actual podcast to target who’s upset, accepting guests and also how to pitch them.
John Corcoran 30:15
That’s great. Some of my best friendships, relationships, my business partner, I connected through podcasting. You know, all those things have come through podcasting. So I love that I encourage more people to do it. So that’s wonderful you created a page. Thanks so much for your time.
Paige Velasquez Budde 30:30
Thank you so much, John.
Outro 30:32
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.