Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Ryan Unfiltered - Why Credibility and Experience Matters and why following your passion is B.S.

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

Welcome to a special edition on The Radcast. Get ready for a full episode filled with a quick history on both Ryan's and The Radcast's journey. This episode uniquely dissects Ryan's perspectives on hard-work, passion, and more.Ryan also gives a bonus 2021 marketing trend involving Live Streaming in Ecommerce.If you enjoyed this episode, share it on Instagram and tag us @the.rad.cast | Do you want to hear more from our host? - Give him a follow @ryanalford on Instagram. | The Radcast is a product of @radical_results | #theradcast If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now? You're listening to The Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. You're into Tuesday. You're rounding the corner to Wednesday. You're getting there. You're getting there. Anyway, don't wish your weeks away. You got a whole week. Make the best of it. I hope everyone's doing good. You've got me today. No guests. It's interesting when you run a podcast, and we've been doing it for two years. We just crossed over 100 episodes. I get guests on and talk about their points of view, and I ask a lot of questions and interject and do all those things. And we've added so many different channels to how we're doing the podcast with Open Mic, with News, and now AdGab. You know, I haven't really stopped in a while to kind of give everyone a little bit of your host perspective, and that's me. And I think it's important for you to know, you know,

what's really shaped some of my opinions, both in marketing and in the world. And so I wanted to spend time doing that before we get into, because we're about to get into the thick of our guest episodes here for 2021. Got a killer lineup. I mean, some heavy hitters, heavy hitters coming. We're going to be interviewing them actually this week. I won't drop any names, but just know they're big. They're coming. It's going to be wonderful. Really excited. Riley's lined up a great, great list of episodes for you

guys. But a little bit about me. I've been in the ad agency business for 20 years. I started right out of Clemson with a marketing degree. One of those few people that used their degrees for what they were going to do. I've always been a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit into kind of sales and those kind of things. So I went into marketing at Clemson. Go Tigers. Lost to Ohio State. Damn it. But we'll get over it.

We're coming back hard next year. But I digress on that. But started, had a marketing degree, right out of school went to work in an ad agency and worked at the same agency for 13 years. And I actually helped open up their New York division in Manhattan, where I lived for just under five years and worked there with some of the largest brands in the world, particularly working on Verizon wireless business across many segments. It felt like many brands within one brand because we did every major smartphone launch with them,

working with Samsung and Apple, the first iPhone launch for Verizon, and then all of the Droid work with the Droid campaign that I worked a lot on, if you remember that, the anti-iPhone that was the Droid. It was a really cool campaign, a lot of fun. I'm missing some of that competitive juice that comes with those types of campaigns now. It seems like everyone kind of patty cakes around a little bit. Other than maybe Burger King smacking McDonald's here and there, you don't see some of that competitive juice flowing. But we'll get back to that.

So spent a lot of time working on lots of brands, firehouse subs right when they were getting started and off the ground and growing into a national brand. Also worked with Denny's and locally in a regional setting, Fats Cafe, which is actually still here in South Carolina and a few other states, and a number of small and large brands. So I worked in Manhattan for almost five years, worked at the highest levels, really learning from some of the best in the business.

And so after that stint, moved back to Greenville, where I'm from, Greenville, South Carolina, where we host the Radcast here in our studio in the lovely downtown and beautiful downtown. Not beautiful today. It's cold and rainy, but typically speaking, beautiful downtown Greenville. And opened, you know, shortly, I had a couple stints here in Greenville. I worked as a chief marketing officer for a startup and then another agency and then started Radical two years ago. And so I've been in the ad agency and marketing business for right at 20 years. I'll age myself a bit at the ripe young age of 43. I don't mind aging because I'm somewhat proud of that. Just knowing that some things that you see in marketing now is everything's a little bit of the here and the now and not valuing the experience that it takes to understand branding and marketing and seeing both the analog and the digital worlds that have come together in the last 10 years. And so I've been very lucky to experience both of those things, working on print and television, where we'd spend six months doing a 30-second spot,

where now we spend what is the equivalent of six seconds working on a 30-second TikTok video, or make it 10 seconds because attention spans are so small. But anyway, I've been very blessed to wear both sides of that fence. And it's really grounded me and also given me a perspective in marketing that i feel like empowers me to share insights and knowledge i'm a natural curiosity creature i'm very curious i've kind of taught myself a lot of the digital capabilities that the company has in the last five years while also working at agencies and and seeing it firsthand. But things that I don't know how to do, I like to teach myself how to do, whether that's been search engine marketing or SEO or Shopify and e-commerce and everything like that. It's been a blend of natural curiosity along with learning from others. And I think that's missing in today's

agency world a little bit, especially in the small to medium agencies. You know, again, not knocking anyone, but if you haven't lived and breathed it for brands or your own business, it's really hard to guide and challenge others a little bit. So I think it gives you credibility, and I want you to know that your host does have that credibility because I've done it. And so it doesn't mean I have all the answers. I still like to learn. I still like to, and that's why I bring guests on because I don't have it all. I want to share with our audience, both my perspective and the broader marketing world. And so I hope that you've, you've seen that and started to really understand what, what we're all

about. So I think it's important for you to know that. And I think what I also wanted to share today, a little bit of an unfiltered approach, was some of the things that are my perspectives on life and just the general climate that we have going on. If you follow any of my social channels, I'm very active on Instagram. That's at Ryan Alford. We'll have all those channels here at the end. If you're watching the video, I'll have those posted up, but you can look it up. And if you follow me on my Instagram, I have a real interesting blend of content. It's both, I like to show some of the personal life, but it's a lot of motivational things crossed with marketing. And so what's really kind of gotten under my skin lately is every other guru that's out there has gotten on this box about passion,

following your passion. And that's kind of become the sentiment of many of these people on, if I get on Instagram, I invariably see it where it's like, you know, you need to follow your passion. You know, whatever you're doing now, you don't have to be doing it. And I'm not saying that they're promoting quitting your job per se, but there's this notion that following your passion is some reason or ability that people have to go make money doing anything. And that's fine. I think it's very important that we do things that we enjoy. But the reality is this notion that passion will lead to income, will lead to happiness, is bullshit. And here's why. Number one, think about when you were a kid, you played a million different sports. Some things went further than

others because yeah, you would develop passion. But which ones did you develop passion for? The ones that you became good at. When you become good, it's from working hard and practicing. And so that is the notion here. Because one thing, like me personally, I grew up, my dad taught me how to play golf at like age 12. And I didn't really take it seriously till after college because I saw it as an escape and a way to grow business because a lot of executives in the day played a lot of golf. But I sucked at it. You know, I wasn't very good. I was probably a 20 handicap, something maybe worse than that. You know,, shot barely broke 100. And I'd go out to the driving range banging balls. I'd go play golf all the time. And you know what? And I wanted

to quit. But I saw that there was an opportunity that were business people playing, that there were people that did this, that had network opportunities. And I continued to get better. And you know what happens when you play golf and you hit a good shot? You keep wanting to play. There's nothing, and someone will tell you, if you ever talk to someone, the reason they keep playing, that one shot, sometimes you play a whole round, you hit two shots, but you come back the next time because you hit a good one. And so you're developing passion from that muscle memory of hard work and what you get good at.

And so this notion that passion drives the opportunity is not right. What drives that is hard work and dedication to something and trying and put your best into wherever you're planted. And so I challenge anyone out there, whether you're young in your career, old in your career, certainly try things, have hobbies, do those things. But don't think for a second that just because you have a passion for something that it makes it a sellable proposition or that there's an industry there. It doesn't always mean that. And so I only bring this up from a soapbox standpoint because of the number of people that are talking about following your passion. So just be careful with that. One other thing that I would really challenge people for is to have and try to grow their natural curiosity.

That is one thing that will help and assist in finding things that you can work at to be better. And so, again, I would really love for people that are listening that may not be following me on Instagram to follow along on the ways in which I'm trying to motivate people and to get people activated into a mindset that really stimulates growth. And so that is really my goal with all of those channels. And so when you're thinking you're listening to our episodes, I want people to understand what informs and drives my motivations. I'm a very naturally self-motivated person. I don't have to have a book or a person or whatever, but I do have coaches. I have a coach that I use for fitness and it keeps me in a certain mindset. It also allows me to focus on what I'm good at. I'm good at doing marketing.

I'm not necessarily good at coming up with 17 out exercise routines that keeps me in shape. And so, you know, again, this is all about how we drive our mindset and how we get into the best position possible. But again, it isn't just about passion. It's about finding your niche and getting and working hard wherever you are, because wherever you are planted, if you will work hard, you will see success. If you see success, you will then have passion for what you're doing. The last will work hard, you will see success. If you see success, you will then have passion for what you're doing. The last thing I'll tell you is, you know, a lot of my content, you'll see, and I've talked about this from New Year's, you know, it kind of crushes me when I see people that wait until January 1st to start getting into shape. But I don't think you need to,

you're never going to create core discipline and change your behaviors and make it lifestyle changes when you wait for certain dates on the calendar for things to happen. You have to decide what you want your lifestyle to be and you have to start living behaviors that do it. And that creates additional muscle memory that allows you to then check off those goals. But what happens is we set arbitrary dates and they come and they go and one month after killing yourself, you're tired of it and you give up on it and you don't stick with it.

You have to make these things attainable through priorities and through making these goals reachable by setting realistic markers all the time and deciding what you wanna do and and what you want to be. And again, you'll see a lot of those tips and pointers and things in my personal content. And I hope and wish that you will follow along with all of that because, again, we can't get into every one of those perspectives

on the Radcast with every episode. And a lot of my job or what I'm trying to do is to bring you guests and other perspectives. But again, at a certain point, it's time to kind of dial it back to understanding, you know, what's informing mine, what's my background and all those things. The one last thing that I do want to leave with you today, you know, it is a marketing podcast and I've been studying the trends. We did our trends episode, which you should check out. Josh and I talked and broke down five or six major things that we see are coming. But there's one thing that I do see in e-commerce that I think is a great opportunity. We work with a lot of e-commerce brands. And one of the big things that's been

happening in Asia that's coming into the U.S. this year, and it started last year a little bit. You saw it with Amazon and some of the large players, but I encourage you, if you're a brand that's looking to sell online, to think about ways to do live streaming of your content or your store. So you think about everything that's going on with COVID right now, and there's a real challenge because people don't want to go to brick and mortar locations. They're scared. You still have a pandemic. We don't have a vaccine out there. So people are shopping online. But the challenge with that is getting that perspective of how it looks, how it feels, all that. Of course, you can't feel through the computer screen. But what happens when you do these organic live streaming events. You can show more of the store. You're

connecting the dots between the physical and the digital a little bit more, showing, demonstrating product, doing things in a way that creates engagement that you might would have had in store. They get to know you. They get to know your products. They get to know things like that. So I encourage you to think about ways. And there's platforms that are growing. There's going to be ones where you have these direct links and everything. Instagram has some of this, but you're going to see it baked even more into things like TikTok and Facebook and others where literally you live stream and you can link straight into products and buy right within the same platform. You're seeing some of that. Some of those you may be seeing in beta.

There's going to seeing some of that some of those you may be seeing in beta there's gonna be more of that but that's your uh one i'll say extra trend for 2021 that we didn't talk about uh you can only talk so long when you get to a 30 or 40 minute episode but i think that's going to be a big one this year did want to drop one piece of knowledge on you so again really appreciative of all the growth that we've seen on the Radcast. And thank you for, you know, all that you do with the comments and the feedback we see on social channels and continue to bring those. You know, when we hear from you, we make the show better. And that's our only goal is to make this the best marketing advertising podcast in the U.S., and we're well on the way. So again, follow along at theradcast.com. You can follow me on Instagram, at Ryan Offord.

And as always, we'll see you next time. Yo, guys, what's up? Ryan Offord here. Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it. But do us a favor. If you've been enjoying the Radcast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else. We'd really

appreciate it and go leave us a review at apple or spotify do us a solid tell more people leave us some reviews and hey here's the best news of all if you want to work with me directly you want to get your business kicking ass and you want radical or myself involved you can text me directly at 864-729-3680. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going. 864-729-3680. We'll see you next time.