Noob School - Building Local Media Success: Insights from 6AM City's Ryan Johnston

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

Today on Noob School, we’re joined by Ryan Johnston - co-founder and CEO of 6AM City. With a successful background in publishing, Ryan has been a driving force behind one of the fastest-growing local media companies in the U.S. In this episode, he shares his journey from the early days of founding 6AM City to leading a team dedicated to delivering hyper-local news to communities across the country. Ryan offers valuable insights into the evolving media landscape, the challenges and triumphs of entrepreneurship, and his strategies for building a thriving sales culture. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned sales professional, you won't want to miss this engaging conversation.

New School. All right, welcome back to Noob School. I've got a good friend, another local friend, Ryan Johnson. Ryan, welcome. Thanks for having me. Yeah, Ryan is the co-founder. Co-founder. And CEO of 6am City.

And he also has a great background in publishing before that, which is one of our themes. It's a good idea if you're trying to be successful in business, is to find something you like and stick with it, which he's doing. So right now, I know 6 a.m. City is in a whole bunch of markets. How many markets now? I believe it's 26. We're launching in Dallas, Texas, June 17th. Okay.

And just launched in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 6 a.m. City, I'll give you my definition, and you please correct me. But it's a one page or so email newsletter that goes out every morning at 6 a.m. given city like let's say Greenville and it gives you the highlights of what's going on in that city that day and leaves out anything political or any kind of bad news any kind of divisive kind of news so it's kind of like the interesting good news of the city every morning at 6 a.m. which is kind of what I used to skim the newspaper for you know back in the day I would look through it looking for what's going on and, you know, what interesting happened, but trying to avoid the

other stuff. Yeah, I mean, 200 local newspapers closed their doors last year. Yeah. And so we've got, because of that, you saw a lot of talented storytellers that wanted to get into this field that didn't necessarily want to get into PR or go work for an ad agency. And so we have attracted a lot of lot of that talent. And those, these, a lot of the, uh, our staff happens to be, um, so well versed in social media and technology. I like to describe them as full stack, uh, storytellers, because they're publishing and the way they look at content creation is totally different than traditional, uh, journalists.

And they're, they're creating content in a more engaging way that they're used to, uh, consuming it. Yeah. And because of that, I think it registers really well with our audience. That's good. So you're essentially replacing the local news portion of the newspaper, of a local newspaper, with a digest that goes out every morning. Yeah.

And it's being written typically by someone who lives in the market who knows something about how to report on this kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, not typically. We have two full-time editors that live in every city that we've. we're in and it's their job to consume the local content landscape for a living so that you don't have to. So the value proposition is that we meet people where they're at on their phone whenever they have a moment to skim and to learn about the best things that are happening in their city. So the way that I describe it is is that we help people start their day and point them in the right direction to get the absolute best experience out of their city.

city so they know how to plug in based on their interest and maybe things that they're not interested in. You know, we live in this world where it seems that because of the algorithms that you're served, you know, the things that you already know about are already passionate about. And if you don't like or click, you might not continue to get served these things. And so we, and that's funny. Like my wife is always on Instagram and says, I follow. you all and consume all your stuff on Instagram and don't get your newsletter. Well, that does,

even if she's following us on Instagram doesn't mean that she's necessarily seeing anything that, seeing all of the content that we're posting on Instagram. So the reason that we use a newsletter format is that we can control and guarantee the user experience with the product. Right, right. Okay. And when did this venture start? Man, we started this venture form. Normally, I believe, in 2016. Okay, okay. All right, 2016. And it was started as a product innovation that we built out of community journals.

We had a really lean management team. I was running the upstate business journal working with my father. Mark Johnston had a great time doing that. It was getting a little stir crazy. We'd built out a successful product. We had filled it with a lot of staple. advertisers and I was reading every headline that I might not have a career in the space. And so, you know, it was perfect timing for the model because we were seeing it on a national

landscape that people were using a newsletter format. Newsletters, there was nothing new about newsletters, but newsletters were traditionally used by media to deliver a headline, a photo, to drive traffic to a website, not to actually deliver all the content in that format. And one other thing that was happening is these national or niche vertical newsletters were being written in a much more conversational tone. And they were coming out with consistency. So it formed habitual behavior. And the last thing they were doing is they were aggregating. So, and, you know, it's kind of funny. When you watch CNN or Fox, they've got a Wall Street Journal.

headline behind it and they're talking about the news on air. Well, we have the unique opportunity each and every day. So for example, in Greenville, South Carolina, we've got 80,000 people that get Greenville today. So what we like to do is say that it's 80,000 people talking about the news together. And so that creates an environment right out the gate that encourages that participation around these topics. So we start the day talking about XYZ. We carry it across our social media. and we engage through comments and polls and questions and come back and reward that participation by providing that input in the next day's newsletter. And most of that conversation, is that happening on Instagram?

It's interesting. It might happen on Instagram in the comments. It might happen. We use what's called an engagement module. So pretty much every day in the newsletter you'll find an asked question. That asked might be an open-ended question. question. We might be talking about the state of the city and the budget for 2024, and we might ask our readers, you know, if you were playing the city, if you were playing budget master,

what out of the following five priorities would you rank higher? And then we come back the following day and provide that information in the answered module. And sometimes we use social media to engage those different audiences as well and then pull that those that feedback into the newsletter okay so we understand now 26 or so plus growing different cities greenville was maybe the first city uh greenball was the first city of course and there's 25 others and each one of those has two editors in the city doing the content how does the sales model work so when we first start We were fortunate that we literally, Ryan Heafy and I, my co-founder and our COO,

he and I, with my father and my mom, who had many of the larger relationships, we pre-sold 18 months of advertising contracts without a prototype. And a lot of that was coming off of the back of, my dad has always said that all of his products were both reader and advertiser driven. And so I think that a lot of the same is to be said with all

our product is that the readers wanted this different format. They wanted, they didn't care who and where the content was coming from. They just wanted to make sure they saw it. And advertisers wanted a more native format to be front and center with those readers. And so they brought in their core advertisers. I said, hey, we've got this opportunity. They jumped on it and we were off to the races. When we first started in the first in the Carolinas, both in Greenville, Charleston,

in Columbia, we took an exclusive offering. We had a pamphlet that said we got 10 spots once they're gone. They're gone, and they read the tea leaves and knew that if I told them we really wanted a bank, that we most likely were going to be meeting with their competitor after, and if they missed the boat, then they're not going to be participating. And that's how we grew it when we first started. We initially hired our first two sales execs. They started on the same day, and that was after we were in a few cities.

And they were initially responsible for two markets apiece. As we grew to two more markets, we hired a third sales rep, and then all three of those reps were on two markets as well. And primarily focusing on selling out the, the more legacy of the two markets that they were currently on because there was more brand recognition, the audiences were larger. And then as we expanded, we continued to grow the sales team. And we found the most, at least in the early days, the best sales hires were users of the product. They would read the product and go, man, I wish I had this ability to prospect with an actual thing that had my

prospects news in it, I could actually see the amount of engagement with it and follow up with them, and they believed in the product. And they were probably at an institution like, you know, not to throw anybody on the most, but maybe a legacy media company that they were hearing the same interests from their prospects and clients of what they wanted the advertising medium to do for them that they weren't getting, and they saw that in what we had. And so, you know, when a seller is selling a product to you and they don't believe in it, you can tell. And so that energy and belief in the product has been core from day one. And everyone on our sales team knows that one of our best sellers, one of the things that I love is I once heard somebody get back to me and go, you know, I bought this package and I don't even know what I ended up.

I have no idea what I even bought. because they were so excited that the product was going to solve the solution that they were looking for and then they got excited and bought you know and so I think that a lot of times we're brand new into a market and we don't have that brand authority yet and so we're already up against kind of a hill that someone's going to take a chance on something totally new that they want that that that excitement and belief that the seller has in the product, in the ability to talk to how others have solved those solutions in the same situation, really helps get them over the concern of trying out something new. So in general, what you're looking for is somebody who's in the market already that the product's going to be in, let's say it's Greenville.

and probably they have some experience selling this type of advertising through another similar media, radio, TV, billboard, newspaper, you know, whatever, you know, journal, you know, whatever it is. And then those people would, another filter, would they already know about this thing and they like 6am City and they think it's better than the other stuff. Yes and no. No. So one of the big, one of the big things we got raw. was when we triple the size of the business because of the way that we had built the revenue model, it was hard to show a direct correlation between the age of the market and how in the revenue.

And that was because we were taking our sales resources and letting kind of these markets mature, not show them near as much of attention as we were showing the more mature markets. And so what we did is we went and said, okay, let's go hire these legacy reps that have the book of business. and let's see if they can move it over. Well, it was like, this is awesome. I'll pay attention to it. Call me back next year. And a lot of these legacy reps were also used to leaning on the brand authority

that when they would call and go, hey, I'm with the Greenville News or the Greenville Journal. It's like, or they were with the Billboard Company or YFF. It's like you either wanted to buy that advertising where you didn't. But when they'd call and say, oh, I'm with Greenville today, and no one had heard about Greenville today, they weren't used to that. And so we've seen a little bit greater success

finding highly motivated, coachable people that really understand they can learn fast and they can work fast and smart. So in today's world of all these sales tools, You know, if you've got a motivated seller that understands how to use LinkedIn navigator, zoomed info, go into these chat rooms, and we use media radar to help us understand buying budgets and stuff, I've got a sales rep that one time found her way into a prospect because she went down a rabbit hole and went on to a wedding registry website or something and found the bridesmaid's friend and connected on LinkedIn. And I mean, that type of using the modern resources that we have now in running efficient outreach that's smart has been highly rewarding to some of our less experienced sellers. Because as you know, sales is about working a process. Yeah.

And, you know, if you can be disciplined and work that process and learn from it and be coachable, I think that that's what we've seen the greatest success in. I agree with you. I prefer the less experienced rep. They'll generally work. They'll make more calls and they'll do more what you say. They don't know how to do everything yet. That's right.

So let me just point out or comment on one thing you said. The one rep you had who sold the person the big thing and the person didn't quite know what they bought, you said they ended up making a decision because this route, help them figure out what their problem was and suggest that we might be able to solve it. And what I see time and time again is really the rep that listens enough

and asks enough questions to have the other person kind of lay out there what the problem really is versus like what you typically get at first. If they can uncover that, then they assume the other person can solve it. They sometimes don't even need to know what it is. They're like, oh, okay, Ryan, you get it. You get me. So you're going to solve

for me, right? Yes. Okay. We're done. Well, it also gives you a unique opportunity to passively build credibility through giving examples of how your current clients, that it might be their competitors, or that they have brand notoriety to this, within this industry. And they go, So if you're visit Wilmington and you tell me through this, you take me through this problem that you're having around tourism. Yeah. And that the locals are having a problem because they feel like Wilmington's getting destroyed. Well, you know what? I hear you.

And one of the ways that Explore Charleston did that, or Explore Charleston, they did it this way. And they're like, oh, so you work with Explore Charleston? You know? And it's like, yeah. And it's like so, so you're getting a chance to do both without saying, here's all my awesome clients. Right. I love that. I love that.

That's great. So did you put in Clemson, right? Yep. Go Tigers. When did you graduate? I graduated in 06. 06. And then let's go.

Let's back up for a second. And let's just walk through what you did between graduating from that fine institution and starting 10 years later, starting what was 6 a.m. city. Yep. Let's talk about that. So I launched two companies in college, one which was college comfort with J-orders, and it was a mattress bedtpper company. Oh, well, that's a good partner to have. Yeah, and I was entrepreneurship major. So then I started Southern Tide and did that and did it with my, at the time, was my best friend, Alan Stevenson.

That didn't work out between the two of us. And so I graduated, wanted to try to figure out what I wanted to do. And the last thing I decided I wanted to do was stay in Greenville, South Carolina. The reason for that is when your parents at that point, I guess, their company was about 10 years old. Everyone that I would meet would introduce me to the next person as Mark and Donna's son, Mark and Donna Johnson's son. And so I wanted to kind of carve my own path. I wanted to get into a bigger pond that wasn't too far away from home because I am a mama's boy. And so Charlotte was a great opportunity.

I went up to Charlotte. I was interested in commercial real estate. Charlotte was growing a lot at the time. And so I became an office tenant rep broker for an amazing company called Trinity Partners that was very boutique, very family team-oriented, family meaning they really structured the workforce culture that way. And all I did every day was cold call people to ask them about their office lease that probably wasn't coming up for two to three years, which would meant that I was probably going to get paid

three to four years from that initial cold call. And so I would sit there in an open office environment and make cold calls all day long. And fortunately enough, it was I had a cubicle about the exact same size as one of the three founding partners and I would just sit there in cold call and he would get to provide me some feedback every once in a while so that was great that's good a little on-job training so you did that for a while and you boy I tell you what I haven't met anyone yet who did who had a job when they first started where they had to make a million cold calls that wasn't better off for it it was it was great I also just learned a lot very quickly I remember I thought I was going to get five

because I got the cops called on me because I was going door to door trying to get into these offices in these office parks. And my boss sat me down and he goes, so I got a call from, you know, so-and-so said that you were out at his office park going door to door. And he gave me a fist mom. He said, that's what I'm talking about. You got to get your nose bloody once in a while. You sure is hell ain't going to do it.

And so like that registered with me. It was good. it was hard too because I would drive into work and I'd be like man I'm just going to go hit the phones again and I would catch myself in these bad head spaces and I'm like man if you've got

if you're not excited about this you're certainly not going to get these meetings and get them excited about it and so yes it was it was really good experience for me but what happened is I started gravitating towards the marketing and creative side. And I'd call my dad and I said,

I just saw a Maserati. And he said, well, yeah, you're not in Kansas. You're not in Mayberry anymore. And Charlotte was growing so fast. I said, I think there's an opportunity for a lifestyle magazine up here. And I said, and he goes, well, I've really wanted to do a lifestyle glossy in Greenville.

And we said, well, why don't we, why don't you design it here in Greenville? You publish it, you build it, and then after a year, I can take it to market in Charlotte, and we will build and use all the back office out of Greenville. So that's what we did. And so they built Town Magazine, and they took it to market. It was successful. I resigned from my job, went out to try to raise $2 million in Charlotte,

and I learned very quickly that people like to invest their money, that they made their money. And in Charlotte, the timing was horrible. All the bank stocks were at rock bottom. And these guys that had these huge nest eggs in bank stock were gone. And basically all the who's who that I met with, including Hugh McCall. Do you know Hugh McCall who ran bankers? Sure. Favorite story. I'll have to come back to that. He, so they basically said, I think I'll love and read this magazine. I'm sure my spouse will too. I, but, but, but I'm just not my thing. So I remember I had an offering memorandum.

I knew where Hugh McCall lived. And I parked my car, I walked up by the front door, rang the doorbell. Here comes Hugh McCall to the door. Hugh McCall started Bank of America, so he was the CEO. And he answered... He was like one of the most important bankers. He was like the most important person. So he answers the door and he's got some popcorn in his hand.

I say Hugh McCall, my name is Ryan Johnston. I'm so sorry to drop by, but I'm really excited about this project. You've invested in Charlotte, and this is going to help Charlotte continue to grow. We'll love it if you'd take a look. He goes, well, I'm not going to look at it right now because the UNC's, the basketball's on or something. But I will, and I'll let you know. I said, that's all I can ask. I appreciate it, sir, and I've ran back to my car as fast.

Good for you. So I'm doing some laundry. in my basement. And I'm getting it out in my cell phone rings and I don't recognize the number. Ryan, this is Hugh McCall. He goes, I just want to let you know that I read through your offering. It looks like it's going to be a beautiful magazine. I wish you the absolute best of luck, but it's not for me and keep your head down and keep at it. And I just remembered like, people get so intimidated by these the harder, bigger sales or opportunities. I bet that I bet I got hardly, it was easier.

He gave, I don't know, it just, that was a great lesson for me that, you know, I'll tell you one way that Kim McCall is not going to call you back, is if you never, never go out, get in front of them. Right. That's a great story. It's a wonderful story because we're looking for good sales stories. And, you know, there's just nothing wrong with swinging for the fences. And a lot of people say, do one of those a day. Just on purpose. Like, what can I swing for today?

Let me call, you know, the president or whatever I want to do. Just try something big that would change the game for you. And that's one for sure. I bet you don't get many calls. because who the hell would think that he would answer the door? Oh, nobody. I don't, and I think that you have an opportunity, you know, I think with decision-mates, certain decision-makers,

I think that they really respect the idea that somebody would have the audacity, the hoodspa to go knock on my door. And, you know, because at some point they had to do something to put themselves out there. And so I think that, and I think for our business, something that has been pretty authentic is that I am very direct when I tell someone that I truly believe, based on our experience, that we, within X, Y, Z industry, that we've seen a lot of success with similar partners. You've just taken me through a similar challenge set. and I we built this business to work with like these type of 12 businesses and I know based on my homework that you're one of them yeah and I our business will not be successful a year or two years from now if you give me an opportunity to to work with you and I don't do my part I can't

sustain my business if I can't continue to grow and provide value because I'm going to come back and ask you for more money. But the only way that I'm going to be able to ask you for more money, if you want to move more money, because it's working. And I can't afford for it not to work. So you would be calling on me, let's just say, I ran, I was Table 301, maybe. And I had seven restaurants in Greenville. You'd say, hey, you can hit 80,000 people a day, would have a different special every day of the week for a different restaurant. Correct. And you're going to, those phones, the email is going to light up or the phones are going to ring and you'll know it's there it's not, right? Pretty quickly. Yeah, and I'm going to do two things on that sales call. I'm going to do

one of which I'm going to, I'm going to tell you that based on that asked module that we use, so we train that habitual behavior with the engagement module, the newsletter, so that when we need to, we can learn about the preferences of our reader base. So if we ask you, around a guide to date night spots, we would ask you, how often do you eat out in downtown or in Greenville? And if you give me all this data, then first off, I'm going to get that meeting by saying, hey, John, did you know that out of, you know, 25% of our readers eat out four nights a week? And so those insights will help our team get in the door.

And then what we'll do is instead of just asking you to advertise, we I truly believe that good ideas help get people excited and so instead of just coming in and saying that you can put a special

in just like you could put a special anywhere else you know why it's called table you know what table 301 is right you know what it is? Yeah you sit up on table 301 but you know what the other 301 it's the best seat the spot it's a spot

it's supposedly it's the best seat so what we would do is I'd say hey we want to do a story and because you got eight restaurants. I want to do, you're going to buy eight ads. And we're going to feature each one, each restaurant, the best seat in the house is actually this table. That's a good idea. Because guess what's going to happen? People, you're going to know for a fact that people are going to start requesting this table. So then you're going to be able to directly correlate that the ad is actually working. And because that's, I hate, I hate, not at all hate, we work with

our sellers all the time when they're like, because our big model is land and expand. Because we go into these new markets and often it's like well I love it but I just thought my budget's spoken for and it's like okay well I know you said that one thing do you have a little bit of money that we can do you know behind this one specific thing yeah and if it doesn't work they're not going to give me more budget right so what is working mean so it really forces defining what those expectations are from the client on how they're going to monitor success and so I'm able to say well you know okay we'll give this a try and if it works, then I'll be more interested in doing more. Okay, well, John, well, so what is, what is it going to look like at Table 301 for it to work?

So, well, I'm going to need to figure out some way to know that, you know, that people are taking more reservations. And so, like, that immediately helps me to start framing the mouse trap or whatever, or however I'm going to build it, so that there's a better understanding so that maybe you say, look, if we're going to put all eight at restaurants, if I get a total of 300 clicks, okay? And I then get to follow up after your land, after your test buy and go, hey, John, I saw on my end, man, I saw you got 2,000 clicks.

When can we meet? Because I'm sure you're going to want to do more. So I think that, I think defining those expectations out the gate is a good thing for both parties. Yeah. Now, I've talked to your, some of your reps before about this, but how do you actually do that? Like if I was your prospect and I said, I want a tracker. I want to know how many people clicked per month

from the ad. How would you do that? So on our end, one of the big things we do is we, our client success team provides monthly analytics and reports. So they will give you, because we work with brands across the newsletter and social media. We will give you everything from impressions to clicks, to engagements and comments for each piece of your creative that ran so that we can gauge what's working and what's not working so that we can dial up or dial down certain opportunities and incentives. Could you do like a link, like click here to get this special information or something like that. Yeah, what we try to do is from an attribution standpoint, we do try to do promos so they can

directly tie or you hope through a promo to push them further down the sales conversion filter. But unfortunately, you know, if I'm sitting there waiting on my son to get done with soccer practice and I'm reading Greenville today and I read a promo for a spa in Mother's Day, I'm not necessarily going to click on it and go put my credit card in and do it right then and there. And I'm also not on three days from now. I'm going to remember, well, on Mother's Day, I need to go do this. What day was that at in Greenville today? I'm just going to go remember that if we do our job well, I remember the name of the spa,

why that's the best spa, and that they have this special, that they've got a special going on. I'm not going to go back and get the promo. Could you do a click to get a 10% of it? email sent to you? You could do something. We try a lot of different things. I think you, yes, you could. The other thing that we, I was just telling a team member of this,

we've got this amazing, so we will do about 100 new contracts a month, and we will work with like, you know, thousands of advertisers a year. across like 10 or 15 core industries, really. Well, unlike an ad agency that has one or two clients, or maybe they have like a bunch of clients within a certain industry, they have no distribution. Because we have distribution, we have the ability to, I mean, we've got a front row seat learning and testing

and seeing what works and what doesn't so that we are more like, to design creative that converts. Yeah. And so because of that experience, that has really helped us in these new markets where they might not have really, they don't know us from Adam. And I'm able to say, look, I'll tell you, we work with every leading hospital system and every market we're at. And here are a bunch of those examples.

And they go, wow, we haven't done anything like that. And that's exactly what we're looking for. Okay. What about as you get bigger, I'm sure this will become easier, but national advertising across the whole brand? So the big reason we triple the size of business is we actually thought that that would really help. And we were seeing a lot of direct-to-consumer brands using newsletters at the time. And about halfway through last year, there was a large conversion where the advertisers started really writing the rules.

And what they were doing is really moving to more of an affiliate model, which I don't, we do affiliate. But I don't love it because it, and I'll tell you why, is that it's, in my opinion, it's kind of like riding the bus for free. Meaning that, you know, our value proposition, as I mentioned, is that we deliver relevant, digestible information that is rememberable. If it's not digestible, you can't remember it. If you can't remember it, you can't repeat it. And you obviously, you can't convert and become a customer at any point if you didn't digest it. So we're creating this content. and delivering it, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to convert right that second,

which is a challenge. Yeah. So do you have any nationals right now? So the nationals, yeah, we have a lot of nationals. But the problem with nationals is, not the problem, I'm sorry, I remember what I was going to hit on with the affiliate, is that they only will pay per click. Oh, okay. So if I'm not clicking, I don't pay anything.

So they're not going to be like Coca-Cola, just give me a brand. No, so that's the D-to-C stuff. So you saw that move, so that kind of dried up a little bit. The big national stuff is so on the big, big brands, unless you have scale at a certain. So we've got 1.3 million people get a version of our newsletter every morning. Yeah. Rocket Mortgage tells our sales rep, call me back when you got 3.5 million. Okay.

So, however, we work with Fidelity, you know, smart asset. we work with and they're happy to pay per click no these guys are buying brand advertising they're buying big big buys you know we work with Marriott

we work with you know a lot of bigger national advertisers across the whole I would assume that'll get stronger as you grow right it does and what really the way that we do that is we

it all starts with the local advocate that loves the product so if I really want to get in with T-Mobile, I've got to have an awesome believer in T-Mobile locally. Because these days it's still very, very difficult. If I want to work with Royal Caribbean, for example, for me to try to get, or Homes.com, I want to work with Homes.com.

So if I can work with Homes.com, if I've got to work my way through an agency and 15 versions of XYZ agency out of New York, it's going to be very difficult for me to get to. the right decision maker. But if I can find a true believer in the product and start there, we can really ramp it up and grow. We just start working with Wayfair. That's great. Because we have a Boston product and their decision maker was in Boston. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've seen that work, that model worked great in other ventures as well where you know,

you don't want to spend two years trying to get to the top of Michelin. If you're trying to sell Michelin, it just takes too long. But if you find a plant manager at one Michelin factory who just loves your product and will sponsor you, then you walk right up to the sea level with that person. Well, and so that's been, to that, we've also had to do that backwards with agencies, meaning that if the agency won't give us the time of the day, but the local marketing in-house person loves us or the local bank president, we go look, uh, Ms. Bank president, we would really appreciate if you could make this intro and tell the agency this is something you believe in and that you want to do. It'll really go a long way. And so we really lean into those opportunities where we can. Okay. I'm going to summarize real quick. Then we can ask a few closing questions. But, you know, for the people watching, you know, that want to be successful in sales, in life, in entrepreneurship, I mean, Ryan is a very good.

example of somebody certainly I would have wanted to be when I was in school or come out of school when I went to a school he wanted to go to he majored in entrepreneurship you knew kind of you wanted to be an entrepreneur I think you got some good you actually experimented with some businesses while you were in college one of which was a home run as it turned out I don't want how the orders product ended up but that's a pretty good partner in the in the betting business anyway you've got some legit experience with the P&L and L and cash flow and all that stuff when you were in college.

Great sales training up in Charlotte, that sounds like. And then you got into a business you'd kind of grown up in. We didn't really cover that, but your dad and mom had been in this weekly magazine publishing business and newspaper before that for their whole lives. And so you kind of re-entered that with an idea in Charlotte. But, and then segue it into the 6 a.m. City, which, you know, that's only been, what, eight years? Only, it seems. Only eight years?

It does go fast, but it's been, it's been a lot of fun. I mean, we've got 130 people that work with us across the country now, a lot of which are put into positions that I don't know if they'd be in if they were at a larger organization. and to see the growth that has happened with a lot of these individuals. I mean, our director of sales was one of our VP of sales came in in their interview and said, I just graduated from Clemson's MBA. Yeah. And I want to work here because I want to be a sales manager. Now she's VP of sales.

Our VP of editorial started as an editor in the market. And so these people have a lot of pride in our company. They have a lot of company equity and their understanding of how the business works and what we've tried and what we haven't tried. And I've got a lot, I'm really proud of what we've done over eight years and proud of the people that have, that no longer are working with us, that have made major contributions to the team. That's right.

The thing that I didn't get to mention on is that, yeah, we're in, we distribute content around how our communities are growing. That's what I learned from my folks in what they did, and what is that, you know, and my dad's always talked about this, is that strong cities are built and have to have strong communication vehicles. Because if people don't know what's going on,

they don't know how to participate, engage, and get involved. And when people get involved, things happen. But for people to get involved, they got to get excited. And so one of the things we do with Greenwood or with 6am is we talk to our journalists about the difference between being journalists and marketers. Yeah. That marketers are excitement-based.

Yeah. If you want to get people excited, you don't write fact-based. You've got to write with the right type of words in tone to get people to want to be buyers, to consume their communities. Yeah. Well, I guess to my point, you know, you have. have prepared yourself for this moment. Probably the important moment was 2016 when you started this current venture. And people, again, people, when they're in college, they'll look at you

and they'll think, I want to be him. Well, okay, that's great, but there's a path to get there. You don't just have this idea one day, hey, I'm going to do a newsletter email. You know, you don't have, that just doesn't work because you don't know what you're doing. So anyway, I think people should prepare themselves as much as possible to be ready. But having said all that, I need to know your favorite book. I want to reflect just, I know we're about out of time, but I wanted to tell you one thing real quick. The best way to prepare yourself is to make sure that people read a lot about entrepreneurship. And it's just, it's uncomfortable.

It's not supposed to feel perfect at first, but the best way to really know if it's, meant for you is to put yourself out there and to have action and to show up and to put up your table and start a sign that says bed pads for sale. And if you hate that and you don't want to ever do it again, then don't do it. And so I think that the more you can give yourself practice to see if you like the taste of it, the more you're going to want to do it. I think the next, the last thing I wanted to mention about 6 a.m., you know, we would never have been successful. I am the idea guy. I'm excited about product. I'm good at product. I'm good at sales. But 6 a.m., our model was built on the ability to scale. And so knowing what you don't know and finding, if you know to make something work, you're missing something. You've got to figure that out. And like I mentioned earlier, my co-founder and CEO Ryan Heafi is like a black belt ninja at a

like systems and process. And so one that, you know, we've talked a lot about the fact is that the majority of our IP and our company is eight years of process and making iterations so that we can, with consistency, spit this stuff out across for both our readers and advertisers. So book, I don't read as much as I used to. I do have three little kids. Works a lot. I try to work out first thing in the morning.

So by the end of the day, after I've had family time and time probably watching Jeopardy with my wife, I like to wind down watching some shows on Netflix or Apple TV or something like that. My favorite, I really liked Titan about Rockefeller. But probably one favorite book is Tipping Point. The reason I like Tipping Point is because I truly believe I love the idea. that for something to actually hit a tipping point, you've got to have, you can't just have one thing. You've got to have this intersection, you know, the salesperson, the maven, and the connector. And I believe a lot in the idea of synergy and how a strong, highly performing team can lead to much faster and quicker success.

Yeah, that's a good book. What about favorite word? I get made fun of this by the staff, especially some one of the older person people at our company. You're old. It's like, you know those signs on the wall that say like Synergy or and with like the team of sky drivers holding each other's hands. I believe in synergy. I believe that with that you need to learn, fail fast together, succeed fast together, share, count on each other, show up with energy

and the faster you can do that with the right group that there's power, it can be extremely powerful. And so we operate our company across, you know, 26 markets and every day we have this amazing amount of feedback that we can learn from and we get a lot of right and we get a lot wrong and the faster we can learn together about all of that,

the faster we're going to be able to beat the shit out of everybody else. Yeah, yeah. That's a good one. And then favorite band? Man, I just, I listen to a lot of Chris Stableton radio. We're all spoiled these days. You know, I just turn on Chris Stapleton radio, and it introduces me to new music. But unless you look at your phone, you don't know what you're listening to.

Right, you just like it. And I like to do a lot of work out in the yard and be outside with my kids. So I just put the speaker outside and just put stuff on. That's cool. And then in terms of promotions, I thought we might go over how someone. can sign up for this because it's a free newsletter. Totally free. 6am.com?

6amCity.com? So you can just Google 6amCity. It'll come up. You can click on our different markets. Like I said, we're all over the country. We're in, you know, Austin, Boston. I'm not going to keep naming them. You can go there.

You'll see all of them. But for those listeners in the south or in Greenville, we have Greenville today, and that's gvL today.com. But 6am City, google it.com, google it, and then all. All the places will show up, pick your city and decide it's free. It's free. Yep, and you'll get it the next day. 6 a.m.

Yep. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here today and for telling your story. You definitely are going to have more to say, I'd say, a year from now. Yeah, I think we are highly focused on building out our audience and building up our revenue and the markets that we're in. So how many, when you come back, how many will you be in then? So most likely next year probably will be in 30. Okay.

I think we have an opportunity with a lot of where AI is going. We've got a big strategic partnership with Tegna, which owns a bunch of local news stations around the country. So figuring out how to take our newsletter digest and pull it into audio and video formatting for those different user capabilities is something that we want to build out. And I think that we're in enough markets that we don't need to keep going to net new markets. we can keep getting and going deeper with the audience that we do have.

That's good. Well, thanks for being here. Great job, and we'll see you in about a year. Thank you. Appreciate it.