John Corcoran 11:28
Then you How did you manage your running web? You are kind of designing websites for individuals or for companies and and then using that to pay for your school?
Paul Bresenden 11:37
Well, I did yeah. So that was my that was how I had put myself through college, right. Like, my parents didn’t have money for that. So all of that was the same for all of my siblings that wanted to go to school, like some did, some didn’t, most did. And so I started building computer networks, right? The church didn’t have a computer network. And so I built them a computer network and a server and they didn’t have a website. No one had websites back then, you know, is like, they were flash websites that had the most clicked button on the internet was the skip here, Flash intro button. And so we started like, trying to figure out okay, which, you know, my church needs a website, no one else has one. Let’s build one. That’s like, what does this website do? And then for people, the church say, hey, I need a website. And you started kind of walking through that. And you know, they started building websites for businesses. And then you start learning the lead gen model here, tap my network, like, let’s go out and find other people to build businesses for how do I expand my network. And by the time I put myself through school, I finished graduating, I worked at the church at that point as a youth pastor for a while, and I was graduating, and I had to figure out what’s going to do with my life. And I put it on, I don’t know, 200 300 resumes. And I got, I think this is 2003, the economy just kind of took a dump.com bubble had crashed. And so I like getting job offers for 10 $12 an hour, and I’m already billing at $45 An hour building my own stuff. I’m going to take a pay cut, to go work full time for someone when I can work with my existing clients that work a quarter of the time and make more money. Yeah, so that’s where I started a company, my parents attic. The next day, I hired another employee on day two hired my third employee the next week, and just started going from there. And so we were doing it and web development, we ended up transitioning to just doing web development, dropping the IT stuff, because I was the only one that could do the IT stuff. But you know, the I hired a high school kid that I was in my church, small group and taught him how to do web development. So he started and he owns a web development firm now and we still subcontract out a bunch of work to him. He’s amazing guy. But that’s how that all started is you just kind of start picking down and start leaning into what’s working. And, and that’s we quickly moved from being a web development shop, because we realized that people were coming to us wanting to build something that we knew would work. And I didn’t want to hang my integrity on hey, we’re gonna build this website, and then you’re gonna be really mad at me when it doesn’t deliver the outcome that you’re looking for. So instead of me like
John Corcoran 13:58
it, like leads, they want to clients, that sort of thing. And so it wasn’t, it wasn’t ultimately serving the end goal that they wanted. Yeah, I mean,
Paul Bresenden 14:07
you think about it, every project wants more revenue at the other end of it. Yes. And then have no idea how that website connects to more revenue. And so as you start picking apart that process, you realize, it’s not just this one. At that point, websites were the shiny object, right? If I could just have a website, more clients would come to me, the shiny objects change for business owners like now every day, they went from websites,
John Corcoran 14:31
but just had a TikTok channel, then I would have more revenue. And
Paul Bresenden 14:36
all these customers. And this was the aha moment for me. As we built out. We started doing Facebook app development where we were building out these Facebook business pages. And at that point, they were really highly customizable. We like you had this very fancy scanning option that went in and sold products and did all of this stuff. And we just launched this fairly large one for Beyond Meat and this is beyond me way back then I should just extend on that one. Stock? Are you kidding me?
John Corcoran 15:01
Yeah, no, right?
Paul Bresenden 15:03
We built that one for beyond me. And literally the next week Facebook shut off that whole platform said, No, you’d have to use the standardized testing functionality we had built. And they didn’t blame me. But I carried this high degree of guilt of like, shouldn’t we have seen this coming? I couldn’t, I realized that all of this stuff that we view as being owned, right, we view our web presence as something we own our SEO ranking or something, we own our social following. We built all of those fans, we own that none of those around, those are all rented on our platform, we don’t control the algorithm, we don’t control the audience, we don’t control the reach, you have to view that as something that you rent and you play their game, and they get to change the rules whenever they want. And so that really was this aha moment for me is okay, how do we get down to solving people’s problems in a way that they have the most degree of control that is as flexible as possible? So I started changing, it’s more important to start selling strategy rather than selling development work,
John Corcoran 15:59
is that the point at which he decided that I’m going to basically rebrand the company started started in you and say, this is this is our new focus, did you feel like you had to kind of put your foot in it, and, you know, plant your flag, so to speak, and say, like, we’re not this anymore. We’re a marketing agency. Now.
Paul Bresenden 16:17
Um, I never really had a definitive moment of like, we’re not a web development agency. We’re a marketing agency. Now, like, at some point, you just say, this is what we’re selling now. Yeah. And so there was like a lot of aha moments in that process, like, Hey, we’re no longer pitching for websites, I’m not going to sell you a proposal for this big website, without understanding strategically how to get you from point A to point B. And usually, you don’t know how to define that. So I’m gonna charge you for that. So we, the first thing that came to me one of the big shifts there was, they were going to charge upfront for a website roadmap. And we’re gonna lay out exactly what you need, and how you’re going to get there. That’s independent of the development work that we’re going to do for you. And so that was a huge shift for us. And that was one of the big shifts of moving into right charging for strategy charging for your thing. And there’s a lot of firms that do that now.
John Corcoran 17:03
Well, we do something similar with our company as well. And it’s critical. I mean, I’d say to every other company that’s out there, especially in the b2b space, you should have some kind of like roadmapping process or something like that. So you can least try out whether you’re a good fit to work together in an ongoing capacity with with another company.
Paul Bresenden 17:21
Right. And if you don’t know how to get to the end, right like that. And if you haven’t defined what the end is, and it’s some loose, fuzzy thing that sitting out there, there’s the chance of that project being completely derailed as on a remote chance is pretty darn high. Yeah, it’s, you get to the end of it, and you push, ready to launch. And there was a there’s a lot more of those back before we did this process. There’s now there’s still one or two that squeaked by a year that you’re like, oh, my gosh, you guys, you guys invested so much. And you didn’t follow the process. And so your CEO got to the end and derail that by saying, Nope, we’re not doing this. Your marketing manager didn’t do their process. And now everybody else says, Yeah, this isn’t what we wanted at the end of it, and it doesn’t watch. And that’s so rare that it happens. Now we I mean, I don’t know, we probably do 30 decent projects of size that are like that. And it’s maybe one that doesn’t go live. But that’s what I would categorize as waste. The role of blean marketing for me, and that’s sort of one of our tenants for our team, is we actively look to minimize waste. And one of those things is you spend a bunch of time doing stuff that doesn’t actually hit the hit the market hit the public space. And so if you do your marketing, and you do your stuff, and we deliver all of this creative to you, we deliver this campaign to you, and you don’t push go, that’s all waste. Right? That never got the chance to do the work that was supposed to do which is generate more revenue for your firm. Yeah. What if some
John Corcoran 18:41
of the challenges been for you? It sounds like I don’t know. Other than the paper out, have you had a job? Not a lot of jobs.
Paul Bresenden 18:52
I’ve worked as a janitor in our church. I’ve worked as a
John Corcoran 18:55
since college. Have you had a job
Paul Bresenden 18:57
since college? No, I’ve only done 44 since college. Yeah. My
John Corcoran 19:01
bizarre Jerry’s like that. I think his last job. I think his last job really was some point in college maybe?
Paul Bresenden 19:08
Yeah, yeah. At some point, you’re just like, I’m all into what I’m doing. I make way more money for myself and for my clients doing what I do. I have this conversation a lot, especially with like nonprofits is I wish I had more money to give away and I give away a fair amount. I mean, we’re all pretty blessed and have tons more than we need. But there’s so much more that I generate even for the nonprofit’s we serve by jumping in on their board and helping them figure out how to grow or achieve their objectives and like, you know, massive growth potential but a lot of times it’s it’s just as important to give our expertise it’s probably more important to give the expertise to the things that we’re uniquely gifted at than it is just to write a check and walk away. Yeah, what society needs right people like us that are entrepreneurial, ambitious, have honed our particular expertise are our craft that can step into an organization and say, Hey, let me help you transform these things that you’re stuck at.
John Corcoran 20:06
And that’s one of the things that you’ve done with Entrepreneurs Organization. So when did you get involved with the EO? How long have you been a member of EO?
Paul Bresenden 20:14
Ah, I think it’s my third pushing three and a half years now.
John Corcoran 20:18
What were you so after so many years of entrepreneurship, what brought you to joining a community for entrepreneurs?
Paul Bresenden 20:25
I’ve been in several others, right? I’d been in distich, maybe? Yeah, I was in a couple of groups. And then we, you know, my kids are young, they’re little, at some point, my wife said, Hey, you’re in too many of these groups just kind of start dialing it back. And to be honest, I got involved in some of the other ones, like I was at a Christian CEO, peer group, and it was great. But most of the guys were significantly older than me. They’re sort of at the tail end of their career, kind of talking about how to transition out or sell. And I kind of liked that group. And it was fancy, and we would meet at the, you know, super fancy resort.
John Corcoran 20:59
Sounds fun.
Paul Bresenden 21:00
You know, it was fun. It was, you know, staring at the ocean on the world’s you know, California’s most beautiful golf course. So bad. Not so bad. It’s a great light. Yeah. I remember thinking like, Ah, shoot, like, this isn’t really driving what I’m looking for. And I got invited to speak at a couple of EO groups. And, you know, they would, you know, they would bring me in to talk about marketing or talking about where the markets headed, or, you know, whatever. So I’d give my 1520 minute pitch and I was thinking, shoot, I suddenly started as I was getting invited in those, I realized, Oh, my goodness, there’s a fate like, 20 30% of our clients that are email members. Like, I should just join EO and go speak around these groups. And I’ll use this for lead gen, this will be this is the new easy ticket. So I joined EO, and then I realized, Oh, there’s the non solicitation clause
John Corcoran 21:49
is worse, damn it.
Paul Bresenden 21:51
Noise. I really liked this. I actually liked more than the other stuff I was doing. So I was like, well, maybe I’ll go speak there. And I’ll just enjoy this one of you, my group. And my wife was like, hey, you need to cut like, you can do one of these groups, pick whichever one you’re gonna do it. So I got rid of all the rest. I stuck with the yo. Yeah. And then very quickly, I think Orange County is sort of marketing numbers market here, Orange County had this attrition problem where we were losing more members than we are gaining. And I hadn’t really realized that. But one of our clients was the president that year. And so he, he asked me to join the board, because he knew, he knew what I did, is like, oh, let’s like my number, our number one priority is to solve this sort of attrition problem. And so we had two objectives, a newly new male members. And so the goal was to add 25 new members to a chapter that was roughly 80. And then, to keep our retention above 92%, which would have meant, you know, then we would have been net positive, I think we would have added 15 to 20 members at that point, which would have been more than the chapters ever added. And so that was I mean, a pretty ambitious goal, considering the last three years had like, continually shot and negative numbers. And I didn’t even know that I don’t think anybody actually knew that until I pulled the numbers for like, normally what I do for a process like this is I write the case study, before we start, let’s say, here’s what we’re gonna do. Here’s the problem set. And as I started pulling the data, I’m like, holy cow, this is a serious issue. So what’s been what’s been done before and previous people had done stuff, right? The, the guy that was the chair before me as a social media guru, and so like he didn’t produce leads, he produces a ton of leads for the problem, membership just didn’t couldn’t convert them. Now, you’re gonna have this is what always happens in organizations, you have finger pointing that starts to happen, right? Like, you’re not contacting these leads in time, these aren’t quality leads, and that becomes this ever sort of shifting cycle. And that’s one of the things that like I work to solve before we start, right, like, whose responsibility is that? What’s the SLA agreement? What’s the handoff and an email context between the marketing role and external marketing role and the membership role? So there’s a bunch of process that we went in to solve that. And it was a fun sort of challenge, right? We did a bunch of innovation that I love. And you know, working with other CEOs is like herding cats. They also have a little bit of time on a volunteer basis. But we also have these high degree of like, responsibility. Well, some, I guess everybody’s degree of responsibility is varied. And there are plenty of people that make decisions and don’t execute. So you got to find the ones that do. But I was really fortunate in terms of working with our marketing chair and finding some really great stuff. We ended up blowing through that 25 number. I think we brought in 32. That year, I saw the retention problem we have the highest retention, I think in our region. And so you know,
John Corcoran 24:38
What is one or two things that you did that you think helped achieve those results?
Paul Bresenden 24:43
I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder and that I like I wanted to prove that we could do this without spending a penny and so no ads. All we did was and I you know borrowed one of another EO members zoominfo credits, we built a lead list out of zoom info of all the entrepreneurs in orange, Canada. qualified, we tightened up the criteria, but instead of doing 1 million, I think we did two to 14 million. Because that built roughly built us a list of, I don’t know, four or 5000 in Orange County. And then I don’t know, anything I did the first year was email sequences, I would send out a monthly email that would invite them to a predefined happy hour before that membership would meet with each prospect individually, we tried to qualify them. So we would pass along the lead. And it would take the membership team, they would round robin assigned it out. And by the time the person got a phone call, it was a week to if we were lucky later. So what I cheated was I would send the email and the minute that Sunday response that yeah, I’m interested, I would just say, Great, what’s your cell phone number, we have a call here right now. So I would respond within two or three minutes. So I’m blocked my afternoon whenever I sent that email, and just, we do have a workbook for something else and an email come through. And I would spend 15 or 20 minutes and say, This is what he knows about this, what’s unique about us, right, we’re nonprofit, we do this is sort of our format, I think it’d be really, if that sounds interesting to you right now, high degree of commitment, it’s different than Vistage is different the profilers in these ways. If you’re interested in joining me for happy hours, love to buy you beer. And so then we would have 10 prospects, eight to 10 prospects every month, happy hour, and I would facilitate the handoff to a membership. So what it did is it provided a human relational connection, this works in the business context, you don’t send a proposal that
John Corcoran 26:20
absolutely right,
Paul Bresenden 26:22
yeah, needs to be a person. And it has to have a person that’s bought into the product. Yeah, what better to sell the value via than the CEO that’s already committed his time and energy, both to the process to being in an EO forum, but also, like sold off to be on the board, right? Like this sort of access, if you want that sort of sales engagement from me as a consultant or a fractional CMO, I build lawyer rates for that, right to do it in this context is a different, you know, it shows that it has value and people get that,
John Corcoran 26:52
yeah, you care about it to me, you care about what you’ve gotten out of it, and for helping other entrepreneurs as well. It’s
Paul Bresenden 26:58
not a sales pitch from a coach that’s responsible for his forum that’s getting paid off of that. It’s a bunch of business owners that say no, this really is impacted my personal life, my business life, like you should. So speaking
John Corcoran 27:10
of other things that are meaningful to you, you mentioned, you have three young kids, and you want to teach them about financial literacy. And you read a book called die with zero, which is on my list, I need to read it, which really inspired you to start another endeavor that you’re working on right now called KidCEOs. Tell us about that.
Paul Bresenden 27:30
Yeah, well, you know, entrepreneurs little add, course,
John Corcoran 27:34
it’s been six months without a new initiative, you need a new initiative.
Paul Bresenden 27:38
So here’s what I’ve learned with my initiatives is give them away for free because I don’t have time to do them. So I will actively pitch ideas to college students, or other people say, hey, I’ll go, I’ll help you get this thing launched, go do this great idea. Because I don’t have time for it. This is one that I had sat on for two or three years that I thought, Okay, this is this is a really good one. And then I went to an EO event with Keith, if you haven’t done the journal, it’s another fabulous one. But it was kind of this picture, like, hey, what do you want to do with this quarter? What are you on this year, and so I had one that was like, I really want to connect with my wife, I really want her to feel loved in the ways that she wants to feel loved. I really, you know, and then I had some, you know, other personal goals, I want personal health, I feel like I was running ragged. And so I want a time for me to serve and have a creative day and have some time to kind of recharge and spend time with God. And you know, all those other sorts of things that go with it. My other goal was, I’ve been sitting on this idea for way too long. I want to set my kids up for financial literacy for success, because it’s one thing for me to kind of go through all the adversity that I went through to being an entrepreneur, how do i minus that adversity for my kids growing up? How do I teach them to be entrepreneurial? How do I teach them to be kind of scrappy and financially wise and, but not be
John Corcoran 28:52
greedy, right? Not having to go through the hardship you went through? Right?
Paul Bresenden 28:56
Necessity is the mother of most invention, right? Right. necessity, and you’re like, how am I right? That was sort of the endeavor and die with zero had this really great perspective of give your kids the money when they need it. Don’t wait for when you’re, when you’re dead to like, give him this chunk of money, because it doesn’t normally turn out great. A, you’re giving it to him way too late, the average age of a distribution of an inheritance is 62. They’ve already gone through all the parts of life when they needed the money. So
John Corcoran 29:22
the flip side of that is if you just give it to them without any financial literacy, they’re probably going to squander it or not appreciate it.
Paul Bresenden 29:29
So yeah, the other big point of the book was aim to die with zero in your bank account, which is a fascinating, like, we could start hours of conversation over whether you agree or disagree with that philosophy. What a beautiful liberating concept to me if I could set my kids up before they were 18. And they were wise with their money that they had a they could retire potentially wealthier than I will and if I could set them up for that success before they left the house. So that was the idea of KidCEOs. Aid it’s a it’s a Tax vehicle, right parents pay into this piece, they sign up their kids for a membership. And I’ll guarantee you that they’ll get at least $6,000 to invest in their Rifaat Roth IRA, so that if they didn’t put any more money in it after 18, they’d still end up with roughly $2 million when they retire. If they keep doing it, it’ll be anywhere between eight and $20 million, depending on how to tread. I couldn’t save that amount of money to give to my kids when I die. But if I did this small work now, this is meaningful, big stuff. So now we’re developing the curriculum around. Okay, how do I teach this kid to be financially smart? We’re talking about things like, Okay, what is a budget? What do you do with your money when you get it? How do you cultivate generosity? How do you budget for savings, and Primatte are primarily in the vehicle right now. And this early stages is, at least get them to fully funded a Roth IRA. And you can do this when the kid is old enough to create artwork. So KidCEOs buys their artwork from them from a licensing fee, pays them the fee, they can now take that money, turn around, put it all into a Roth IRA. But we’re gonna start doing more like curriculum and do kind of like meetups and that kind of stuff to teach them how to be entrepreneurial, and start, lemonade stands, paper routes, photobooth business, there’s so many people in here that do amazing stuff like this. There’s a guy in LA doing a Z tag system, which is basically laser tag without guns. Parent wanted to invest in that process. And, you know, give their kid a alone the same way that you did for your kids for a lemonade stand. Right? And teach them how to do that and pay back that loan. It’s a great one. There’s a photobooth guy that I would love to start a business with mindset rather
John Corcoran 31:31
than taking that money in putting it into like the stock market or an index fund or something like that, and investing it in a business.
Paul Bresenden 31:41
Oh, for your kid or for the kid to do that. What are you saying?
John Corcoran 31:44
Well, is that what you’re saying? The model is that’s what you’re proposing for the parents.
Paul Bresenden 31:48
I think those are two different things to teach. At some point, I think the parent, if you could teach your kid how to play the stock market, great. But that’s a different game. I think it’s important I for me, for my kids, I would rather have my kids learn how to be entrepreneurial how to how to see opportunity and gaps, where it exists. And then how to be financially where to take risk, right, how to manage that appropriate risk, and then How to Be Wise With Your Money. Because regardless, if you end up working for somebody else, or starting your own business, if you can understand how to manage risk appropriately, and how to exploit opportunity, right? The sky’s the limit, you could do anything you want.
John Corcoran 32:23
Yeah, for sure. One thing I’m a little confused about in the model is you said that one of the problems is that this generational wealth that changes hands tends to happen way later in life. And if you’re setting up a Roth for your kids, wouldn’t the kids still be getting that way later in life? And they’re not benefiting from it when they’re younger? Right?
Paul Bresenden 32:43
Well, part of this is to teach them to earn money. And then what do you do with your money? So if we can put 660 kids, you know, 10 years, $60,000 worth of funds into a Roth IRA, and that’s their first part of their savings vehicle. Right? The question is, what do you do with your money and where is the most valuable? So yeah, we could spend $60,000, in their 16, and buy them a really, really nice BMW. Right? And that may get them you know, some extra dates and way too much fun in high school. Or you could take that money and teach them how to be wise with that money and put that and delay that gratification and say, if you don’t touch this money until you retire, right, that’s $2 million that you can retire with. If you don’t if you keep funding that for six $6,000 a year, which is I mean, think about how much we’re having to stock away into our retirement plans now, because we didn’t learn that when we were kids. Our parents didn’t know any better than my parents, even if they knew better couldn’t afford that. Right. But this is a gift that I can give my kid that will set them up to be, you know, in a 10s or 20s of billions, right? With minimal effort now, now, that doesn’t mean that that’s all the money that they’ll learn. There’s plenty of other businesses that we can start and say, Okay, now what do you do with this other element of it?
John Corcoran 33:53
Right? I love the I love that you’re taking this on financial literacy for kids and families and helping to tackle that, because that’s such a, such an important lesson. I know we’re about out of time. So I want to wrap things up with a question I was asked, which is my gratitude question, a big fan of expressing gratitude to those who helped you along the way. I know you’re grateful to a lot of people who would you want to acknowledge for helping you?
Paul Bresenden 34:17
Oh, this is good. They’re probably so I’ll just pick one because there are like 10 that I could mention here, just off the top of my head. I think when you had mentioned this earlier, my like, there was not a hesitation in my mind of like, Oh, these are the people. There’s a lot of people but I’ll pick Randy Sapp. He was my mentor in high school and college. He worked at the church that I worked at, and he taught me everything about audio recording. And to be honest, there’s so many different like, ventures that he pushed me out on to where he did the selling and all I did was that fulfillment and reap the reward of the profit from all of that. And so like, from a technical perspective, I think he set me up from an entrepreneurial perspective more than anybody right I learned to be scrappy, I learned to execute at a professional level in ways that, like, I don’t know, most other people didn’t, I got to, I got to see what you know, recording with $4,000 microphone sounds like versus a, you know, $50 microphone, I got to go out and do it with him as opposed to just trying to invent my way. And it really helped me set up the beginning parts of my, you know, entrepreneurial journey. So it’s funny to watch that in a church context, because
John Corcoran 35:27
not usually the place you’d think that entrepreneurship.
Paul Bresenden 35:32
Yeah, but you you I got access to people that operated at a professional level that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten access to. And they willingly poured their lives into junior high high school kid and drove me around and did all that stuff. I mean, I went to Sri Lanka with him and installed you know, a sound system sound audio video lighting into a 5000 seat auditorium there. We were always like the latest technology latest like JBL donated all the equipment, all this cool stuff. Like the experiences that I got through Randy, I don’t think I’ve ever I don’t know. It was a gift in and of itself.
John Corcoran 36:07
Yeah, Paul, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about 454 Creative and also KidCEOs, and anywhere else to connect with you?
Paul Bresenden 36:15
You can connect with me on LinkedIn pbresenden. My 454 Creative 454creative.com and then KidCEOs is kidceos.org. But yeah, very easy to find.
John Corcoran 36:28
Alright, Paul, thanks so much.
Paul Bresenden 36:30
Thanks, John.
Outro 36:31
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.