The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast Planable.io Co-Founder Vlad Calus

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

Planable.io Co-Founder Vlad Calus

Hi folks, it's Voss here from thechrisfossshow.com, thechrisfossshow.com. Hey, coming to you with another podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. We certainly appreciate you supporting the show. Be sure to refer it to your family and friends, all that sort of good stuff. Get them involved in the show. You can find the show anywhere on the interwebs. It's pretty amazing how that technology works. You got iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, iHeartRadio. There's a Luminescence or something podcast thing that's out there that's kind of popular.

And it's got a lot of big podcasters on it. We are on there. So you can find us syndicated all around the world on any different podcast app. Be sure to check us out. Download us on your favorite app and all that good stuff. We certainly appreciate it. We've got a really cool guest on the show. He's not only an author of an extraordinary book, he is also the co-founder or the founder,

I should say, of Planable.io. And he is the co-founder, so I had that right. I'm reading his bio right now. Planable.io is the command center of social media collaboration for marketing teams, digital agencies, and freelancers to collaborate with their teammates and clients on content calendars, uh, in the most visual way. Uh, planable is used by more than 5,000 brands worldwide, including mini BMW, Volkswagen, sky team, Wendy's, and many others. This is the reason you have great burgers at Wendy's, evidently. Vlad founded two nonprofits at the age of 16. Look at this guy.

Then he dropped out of college, moved to another country with two friends. He built Planable at 19 years old, and he became an honoree in Forbes 30, under 30, at 22 years old. Wow, that's awesome. And he's been featured as a guest writer, marketer on multiple publications, includes social media examiner. We know, what's his face over there? Entrepreneur, We RSM, Fresh Desk, SubSign, Digital Agency Network, and many others.

Welcome to the show, Vlad. How you doing, buddy? Good, good. Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me thanks man you're coming all the way from Romania Romania yeah that's correct Eastern Europe love this place nice nice it's beautiful over there too I need to get over there and take some photographs because you have some really old architecture and and beautiful buildings and things like that and probably some really great culture and food because that's usually what i come for is the food definitely yeah especially the place is now really green uh especially if you go to to the woods and to the mountains uh in this part of the season it's really really beautiful i don't know how i'd feel

about going to a country that has dracula if i was staying at night in the woods but i don't know it depends you can take a chance. You can see what the risks are. It's a beautiful country. I'm sure the food is good. I'm sure it's safe. I haven't heard anybody. But maybe there's a reason you don't hear about anybody.

Never mind. I'm just kidding. I'm doing my best. So we want to talk about two things. You've launched two different products on Product Hunt, and you've done very well. My good friend Robert Scoble, in fact, recommended your book. I think you contributed, you said. You have a book called Marketing Teams of the Future.

Is there a.com people can go look that up and order that? Yeah, so the easiest way to find the link is to find it through my LinkedIn page. It's Vlad Kailas on LinkedIn. Or it's planable.io slash book marketing teams of the future. And I'm sure they can get it on Amazon. Is it on Amazon? Unfortunately not. We launched it as a free book so far. But we really plan to get it on the Amazon by the end of the year

because we want to print it to print a version of it. Nice. Well, there you go, folks. It's free. So definitely hunt that baby down and get it. Were there a lot of contributors to the book? Yeah, there are more than 20 contributors for the book from several companies, including G2 Crowd and many more people with really, really solid marketing experience, people that are managing multiple marketing,

especially content marketing teams, that I spoke with them to find out more about their process, their collaboration tools, workflows, frameworks, and anything in order to understand how to become a better marketing team. Awesome sauce. Awesome sauce. So you love marketing. You're a young marketer. You're kicking butt.

I started my first company when I was 18. So it sounds like you've got the entrepreneurial drug in you. And good luck because once you get that drug in you for being an entrepreneur, you're going to spend your whole life just, if you're not working for yourself or running the show, you're going to be very unhappy. Definitely, yeah. I see myself building companies in the future and trying to build awesome stuff for great people.

What drove you to that? Just give us a little background on yourself if you don't mind. What drove you to want to start your own company at 16? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that it's curiosity, because at the age of 16, I started participating in multiple personal development projects made for my communities like public speaking or project management and things like that. They were super, super small projects. But I was just trying to find something outside of school, trying to do some different stuff and get less free time and more quality time but then at one point after a couple of projects I just started to be to be bored from these projects I felt like I'm not learning anything new so I just started some personal projects and some personal NGOs in order to solve my own questions and my own problems that

I had and the first NGO was it was a media company uh I mean it was not a company it was a media NGO we built a newspaper for pupils created by people so we were writing articles for uh about schools and everything related to pupils for youngsters up to 18 years old. And it was a super amazing experience because I started to work as a journalist also at the age of 17. And then I just started working, I just started another NGO,

it was called Academy of Madness. And we were building, it was a community project for men, for boys between 16 and 19 years old to learn more about the manly manners and ethics and anything else related to becoming a better man. It was a super awesome experience. We did a couple of editions of this project. And then I learned a lot but then a couple of months later after that I just started going to college and I ended up at a small startup competition

called Startup Week in Moldova and turns out that I met a couple of my co-founders at the event right there that were pitching another project and I became part of the team. And in just a couple of months, we started building Planable because we really connected as a team. We connected as everything that we do and everything related to us. And we said, okay, let's just do it. Let's work more on Planable and see where this goes. And here we are right now.

That's awesome, Sos, dude. You know, curiosity and doing projects and stuff like that is one of the key hallmarks, I think, to an entrepreneur. You've got to be curious, not only to start new businesses, to want to start new businesses, but also to when you get your business going. I mean, I used to walk around my company going, how can we do things better?

My one rule that I always had in business was there's always a way to improve everything. I mean, whether it's a stupid paperclip or whatever your business is, there's always a way to do things better. And of course, when you start a business, you've got to constantly have that attitude and you've got to be curious about why you do things the way you do. And I used to ask my staff, I'm

like, why do we do it this way? And they're like, cause you came up with the idea and innovated it. And that's the way you did it. And I'm like, but why does this still make sense doing this two years later or a year later? And they're like, well, yeah. And then I would look into the forward and I'm like, well, we're bleeding out here a little bit. So we've got to get curious as to how we can make this better, how we can improve it, how can we make it more efficient and more profitable because, you know, sometimes you create something and it goes down the lines. So let's talk more about Planable.

Who's mostly the customers that would be in the group of people that Planable is targeting, Planable.io I should say. Typically, our customer is a social media agency working from a small to medium agency working with the clients on building social media campaigns for them, especially creating content no matter if we're

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and then also social media freelancers, people that are managing from one to 10 to two or maybe even 10 clients on social media. And also in-house marketing teams, marketing teams that several brands like Spotify, for example, or Dormify or Airbnb that are creating social media content for their brands.

And we want to make sure that everyone is on the same page and we want to improve their content collaboration process. And you guys have some wonderful clients here looking at the website at plannable.io, I should say, Wild Turkey, Sky Team, Volkswagen BMW, Virgin Mobile, Mini, Taylor & Hart, Costa Coffee. If I had Wild Turkey as a client, though, I'd be taking that in trade. I'm just...

In Motorola. Yeah, yeah, totally. Send me the bourbon. No, I'm just kidding. So, Planable is your centralized hub for ideas, content, and feedback. What platforms does it work on? So, it works for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram at the moment. Okay. And so what I can do is I can use your guys'

platform to publish there and social media teams can take and collaborate, work together, and be able to push that content out to those different platforms in a meaningful way, whether it's pictures, video, all that sort of good stuff. Exactly. Yeah. So imagine like a visual Google Docs created for social media, because all of us work before Plannable, all of us worked in digital agencies before, and we personally struggled with creating social media content for our clients in spreadsheets and PowerPoints and anything else. And we really we really really hated it it was super complicated to use spreadsheets for social media content we

were wasting lots and lots of time just to create this spreadsheet and then send this document over the clients and then get feedback and then back and forth emails to iterate on the feedback so we just started looking for different solutions and it was Xenia, my co-founder. She had an agency before and she started really different solutions. She started looking for mocking up posts in Photoshop or faking Facebook face pages or doing different sorts of lots of stuff in order to fix this own problem. But nothing really worked. So we just ended up combining as a team

and working on a solution to solve specifically a problem that we personally had. And then this is how Plannable was born. Nice, man. And what's really cool is there's no more clunky spreadsheets. You can collaborate back and forth and embrace team productivity and with one space to collaborate on all your social contents you bring your mock-ups to life customize your posts and view them as though they're alive that's really interesting because one of the problems

that i've always had as an agency uh or my set my own posts is sometimes i'll be using some probably competitor products of yours. Uh, cause I, you know, I'm just getting aware of you guys, but, um, uh,

all posts and like, you know, the picture won't come out the other side or the video comes out jiggity or something. And, and you know, you know, I'll do some beautiful whatever.

And it just gets munched going out the other side and it doesn't appear well on Twitter. I don't have them delete it. Cause I'm like, Oh man, that, that didn't come out the other side and it doesn't appear well on Twitter. I'll end up having to delete it because I'm like, oh man, that didn't come out the other side. Right. Or sometimes I press send too fast and I guess it doesn't load the thing in and stuff. So this is great. You can bring your mockups life. You know how they're going to come out the other end.

There's no need to create test pages or rely on the imagination anymore. And you've got all your favorite formats as your fingertips. You can create text, video, GIF, link, photo, album, carousel. Wow. All sorts of great stuff and be able to publish that out. Yeah, exactly. That's a wonderful point that you made because really what sets Planable apart from all the other social media platforms is that we are helping you to preview the content exactly

100% pixel perfect experience how it would look like and it doesn't work only for social media posts we recently also introduced instagram stories so you can also collaborate on the insta stories before publishing any and we will also soon introduce facebook ads so you will be able to preview not only facebook organic content but also facebook ads before publishing any of it. That is awesome. And I'm looking at your website. This is really cool.

Content creation on steroids. You can use emojis, active hashtags, page tags, and Jiffy integration. Duplicate and sync posts. You can create contact for multiple pages at once. Adopt your posts to the intended channel separately. And drag and drop media. Ooh, that's nice. Yeah, I get tired of that whole upload.

Like I said. Yeah, that's great that we mentioned this because one of my colleagues is currently working on a media library. So we will soon be able to upload files from Google Drive and also Dropbox. So it will be a lot easier to do this and you can program and schedule with timetables the posts that you want to take and do basically build your strategy out how you want to launch it how you want it to hit social media uh this is really nice you guys have a visual calendar of of the post so i'm just not seeing well it's going to post something like i think there's somebody that I use where it shows the schedule it's going to

post, but I'm like, what, what was that? What was that? We're posting at 12 o'clock, but this is really cool. You guys have a calendar that shows the posts as it is with the picture and

everything. So I can, I can see the whole way this, this thing's going to lay out and execute. That's pretty awesome. Yeah, exactly. And besides, you can actually view the content in multiple ways. There is the calendar view, one of the most powerful parts of Planable

and also the most used views in Planable. But you can also see it in the feed view. So this is exactly like you would scroll Facebook. This is exactly the same feed interface of a page. So you can see all of your content one by one. And we also recently introduced grid view. So you are able to plan your Instagram grid in advance and also drag and drop the content in the grid view to plan how you would want your grid view to look like

before publishing any content. Awesome, Sauce. And this is really cool, too. You can keep your clients and your team on the same page. You can invite the people to come to the workspace from all sorts of outlets, your workspace owner, writer, contributor, administrator, approver, which would be your client usually.

And the clients don't have to sign up. I used to hate that with some of the competitors, stuff that I used to do, especially back in the day. You'd have to like tell your client, hey man, you got to go make an account at XYZ. And you know, and they're just like, oh, I make an account. You're just like, oh man, you have to walk them through the phone, make an account on the thing, and then how to pair them up. And it was always just, ugh, for years.

Yeah, I feel the pain. And I love this. So there's no sign-up needed for client. You can share an email invite and approval a click away. And you have your whole team. It looks like you assign different levels of administration to them. So if you're assigning different – I see different titles here. Like I said, contributor, writer, approver, administrator.

I guess there's certain people that would be able to have the authorization to publish and certain people that wouldn't. So is that correct? Do you guys have that sort of control? Exactly, yeah. Because, for example, you can invite your client as an approver, and the approver can only approve the content and leave comments. And this is the beauty of it because the client will not be able

to edit your content or schedule it or administrate the workspace or invite other people and so on. Because only if you give the access to the client to these permissions they will be able to do that i really really like that because i'm a big believer in plausible deniability i like being able to say well you approved it you know you approved it man hey and here's here's what you approve so uh don't come to me when uh you know you're on the new york times front page that uh i don't know you know just putting out some content that's highly offensive uh and of course usually you wouldn't have that go through but there but there

are times where sometimes content backfires and you don't see something and and uh uh you know and and and then the client's pissed and, you know, but I love plausible deniability. Um, I'm really big on that because number one, I don't like getting sued. I mean, I've been sued in like, I don't know, a lot of years since I think 10 or 15 years since we owned other companies, but, uh, I don't want to be sued. So there's that. And I don't, I don't, I don't want to end up on the front page of the New York Times and trending on Twitter as to like, you can't believe what these guys did.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And also, this is why we also have another feature built in specifically for cases like this. For example, when the client will say, I never approved it or anything else, because this might happen when the client approves the content and then unapproved it, because we also have an activity log. So basically, you have all the activities tracked for each and every post. So you can basically see what person approved it and when this happened and also what are the other previous versions of the content that you can simply restore.

So we try to build Flannable with transparency in mind. You should have this at the American White House because we seem to have a problem with people outputting content that's horribly misspelled or covfefe or covfefe or whatever. It's like a running joke going on with uh one of the tweets he put out but this is definitely something for a lot of brands because uh in in today's world i mean you can really muck stuff up and sometimes it's very unintended you don't have to publish uh something that's highly offensive uh although there's there's still it seems like there's still brands

that trip that baby up but uh sometimes you can put stuff out. I mean, you know, Nike recently got into issues with, uh, uh, a set of shoes and things they were publishing. Uh, there always seems to be brands these days that can, you know, they just, you know, a lot of people were sitting around going, uh, did Nike pass this through multiple approvals or what? Um, how did this get this this through multiple approvals or what? Um, how did this get this far, you know, through marketing? Um,

and, uh, you know, having a, having a thing like this, I mean, it sounds like you guys had a lot of frustrations with an agent as an agency,

uh, early on, you know, trying to do these things and you, and you guys went through and fixed a lot of your, a lot of the issues you have with other competitors and cross the T's, dotted the I's, and built a better mousetrap, if you will. Yeah, definitely. We tried to build Plannable for agencies like us.

Agile, small, the ones that want to constantly improve in the content, the ones that want to have a complete control of the content, have transparency in all of your processes, and just create better content. This is something that we want to learn the very first day. This is pretty interesting. You can keep your feedback in context. So whatever the team is talking about, say about a post,

they're all inputting on it, like I'm seeing here on your website at planable.io, that people can make their notes, like I love it, here's some other place, photos we could use, which one, you know, there's a whole record of collaboration and eliminate team miscommunications with clear feedback, you can add attachments to comments, you can resolve comments once the feedback is implemented, reply to specific comments, and collaborate in real time. That's pretty cool. Approvals made easy with one-click approvals,

and it even tags the picture. It says, this is approved. I like that because then if I get screened out by a client, I can be like, you see this right here? Yeah, exactly. It even shows a picture of the client. It says, client, I can be like, you see this right here? Yeah, exactly. It even shows a picture of the client. It says, client, I approved this post a minute ago.

There you go. That's awesome. Publish now or schedule for later. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. I love that. Of course, that covers all the pretty much what anybody needs to have these days and everything else. Keep your brands and project organized.

And it's got labels, filters, notifications, customer support. I love how you guys have fantastic customer support. Some of the different competitors that I've used over the years, good luck getting a hold of them. Security and version history. That's really nice, too. You've got a working version history, so you can always go back and find out who went

wrong and then you can fire them. Hopefully not, but yeah, you can. There's those times. In fact, I had an encounter with a brand that has an out-of-control political social media manager

who's off trolling people and it got connected to his brand over the weekend uh and it reminded me a lot of that gal who flew to south africa she posted something and then 12 hours later she woke up to trending on the internet and they were just yeah killing her and she ended up losing her job and becoming kind of exiled for a while. I'm not even sure if she's ever made it back. But anytime I see something like that, I just go, oh my gosh, wow, that's really happening. You would think that somebody would have a non-disparage agreement or employment in their contract.

I certainly would have a non-disparage sort of thing or something that would embarrass the brand, et cetera, et cetera. So on your guys' website at plannable.io, you can check out the features. There's a starter package that's priced really nice, around $39 a month. That's for one workspace. That's up to three users, so that's really cool. And then you jump to the premium at $99 a month. That gives you five workspaces, seven users, and self-service, customer service, I guess. Is that when you say self-service? Is that customer service-wise? And then enterprise, which is your big package, looks like that's a custom pricing thing.

You get custom workspaces, custom users, onboarding, real-time support unlimited pages and posts uh so i love this because there's a lot of there's a lot of probably some people that compete with you in the marketplace that even i won't afford i mean i can't afford it but i won't pay for it because i'm just like there's a whole lot of money i'm not that agency and maybe they are just targeting that agency you guys also offer a 14 days free trial so folks if you want check this baby out take the 14 day free trial cruise around at plannable.io and uh i love how the 39 dollar price that's that's a nice price point if you're a small agency you're just one or a few people um that's a nice entry spot and then you can catch the drug and build your agency

and move up through the pricing. Definitely, yeah. And by workspace, we also define a client. So basically, if you are an agency, then one workspace is one client. But if you have different brands, for example, you can have, there might be, for example, Coca-Cola US, and then Coca-Cola Brazil, and then Coca-Cola South Africa. You would also create three different workspaces to keep all of the three teams separate in three different workspaces.

That's awesome. So workspace, basically, what is a workspace? Find out what is a workspace, how to change between them and operate. And it's a collaborative place for your brand social media content where you can create, review, collaborate, publish posts and everything in the flow. That's pretty awesome. So if you have three clients, that's three workspaces. So I need to look at that.

Exactly. Yeah. I really like this product. I'm going to be testing this out. I'll be signing up today to get a chance to do it. Awesome. I usually sign up early on clients things when they show up on our podcast but I didn't get a chance because we've been busy moving and stuff and setting up the new

studio so we'll be checking that out we do we also want to plug your book marketing team to the future definitely yeah so I recently published my book two months ago actually I published my book called Marketing Teams of the Future. And it explores the marketing industry from the very beginning. Like, it really starts in, I don't know, like, the homo sapiens when we started

and how the marketing started. And then going through different stages of marketing, how this evolved, especially in the past 50 to 80 years. And then the second chapter is mostly about the present, like marketing teams in the present right now. What are we doing to create better content?

How are the teams created? What are their processes, workflows? How are they collaborating on the content? What tools are we using? And then in the third chapter, I'm going to, I'm speaking more about the future, what I believe marketing teams should do in order to prepare better for the future. Nice. So you can future-proof your team.

The book navigates content marketing's journey from early beginnings and dives into a profound analysis of today's industry. You can also, there's a newsletter that you can get for free as well to compliment the book. Definitely, yeah. Awesome sauce. And you've got a lot of different contributors to it. My friend Robert Scoble is also on there as well.

You can find it on Product Hunt. You guys got upvoted 549 times, and it was the number four product of the day in april 25th 2019 that's really good man if you can hit number even hit the top 10 on product hunt that's freaking awesome yeah that's a great experience and also we got lots of positive feedback from the product hunt community because there are also lots of other marketers that are really struggling to create better content and collaborate with all of this abundance of tools and all of this abundance of information when you're just

trying to keep track of all the files and everything that you do when creating content and this is why this is why in order to create this book i wanted to speak with lots and lots of experts from different companies different, people that were in the marketing industry for the past 40 years and others that were just for five years in order to understand different perspectives and different people. This is why there are contributors like people from Drift or Market Advisor or Impact or G2 Crowd and many, many more. Awesome sauce, awesome sauce.

And I love how it's free too. So you can get it for free. You can download it. And Product Hunt is the place they can go for. They can search for marketing teams of the future. Where else can they get the book? Well, they can get the book directly on the website or just hit me up on the email, vlad.flannable.io.

I will send you personally the document and also you can ask me any questions that you want awesome sauce so you're completely accessible we love that as a ceo because you can do all that uh anything more we need to know about what you guys are doing there at planable.io or on the book yeah so at Planable.io, we are speaking a lot about the collaboration industry and how we really believe that this, the marketing landscape is currently changing because we started analyzing what happened in the marketing industry over the past 40 years.

And we discovered that it went through several stages. Like first was there were these tools of with the big what you see is what you get you were creating just you were creating your marketing content in just microsoft word in order to attach all the images and all the files and all the videos and everything that you do in order to create like your your page page on the web. But then everything in the marketing just went through the cloud. You saw how Salesforce appeared. You saw Adobe introducing Adobe Cloud,

Dropbox, Google Drive, and many other companies also introduced the cloud. So because of that, marketers had the chance to actually collaborate on all of your content more efficiently and start wasting less time on exchanging the files and exchanging the information between them and then there was the part that is creating right now this is the collaboration part so you see right now that 10 or 15 years ago there were were only a couple of blogs, only a couple

of websites on the web where people were exchanging ideas and everything else. But communities really, really started growing. We see this with Facebook groups, we see this with Quora communities, forums, Reddit, and everything else that is currently on the web. And marketers are also creating a lot more content with all of these different formats, like websites, landing pages, infographics, videos, video blogs, podcasts, and newsletters, and WhatsApp newsletters. And God, you can even get confused

of everything that you do in terms of marketing collateral development. And you might be pretty lucky if you still manage can even get confused of everything that you do in terms of marketing collateral development and you might be pretty lucky if you still manage to keep yourself sane and not get mad at everything on this and this is why we believe that collaboration is the key in terms of managing your content because right now with all these materials and all these media files that you are collaborating and so many stakeholders, both internal, like the people that you are collaborating from your team and also external stakeholders like freelancers, for example,

or video production teams or sound production teams and everyone else, it's super, super easy to get lost and lose all the tracks of the feedback than creating the content. And this is why I believe that it's really, really important to use collaboration platforms like Planable or InVision app or Slack or Zoom in order to stay on the same page and make sure that no misunderstandings can happen. And that's really important because a lot of teams now are international. I mean, I know a lot of marketing agencies where, you know,

one guy's in like, for example, with you, Romania, and other guys in Japan and other guys in America, you know, and so, you know, these teams are spread out. People are working from like home offices like myself. And then, of course, like you say like myself. And, um, and then of course, like you say, you have freelancers, you have different contributors. Uh, I'm a consultant, so I consult with a lot of different brands and clients and, and help them with their stuff. But usually their teams are doing their thing and I just come in and go, I should do that or that or

whatever. Let's take a look at what's going on. Uh, that are sometimes their teams, uh, aren't up to par, uh, on what they're doing. So I'm helping babysit. Um, that's a horrible thing to say, but it's true. Uh, so it depends on the client, you know, it's just, it's just some people are new and they're setting up and, and, and they're being taught and we're doing some education programs with our consulting, but I love this. This is really really beautiful i love how you've thought through all the different holes of of some of your competitors and different people that uh have built stuff and i i can see a whole lot better way to go through this especially from my background as an agency i'm going to be testing out playing with it today and uh uh yeah i mean i

love the way it puts together everything with the timetable. I love the way it shows me what the post is going to be. I love how I get a preview of the post before it goes out because I can really muck stuff up with Instagram. Instagram and I don't get along. And then sometimes video or pictures with me or, you know, one of my big things is, too, is I'll publish something and I'll think, OK, everything's right. And I'll forget the hashtag and uh and and sometimes it gets lost when you look at the timetables schedules and calendars you're like what was that post again what do we put in there you're like oh yeah we forgot to put that in there oh that went out and then you know you gotta delete it and people are going what's going on with you man uh so that's really awesome yeah and you also and you also

want to build this digital story because you also want to make sense between these tons of social pages that you have because you want to create something interesting for your Instagram audience, but also something interesting for your Twitter and Facebook audience. And you try to keep them engaged

and you try to create these different formats for them like images or just short tweets or just links. And yeah, it's super important to make sure that you can actually see the content. All right, folks, we'll check it out. You can go to plannable.io, and there's a 14-day trial, so be sure to check that out. Free is always good. You can get the book from Vlad, Marketing Teams of the Future as well,

so you can be sure to check that out. You can read a lot of different contributors that contribute to that book and made it awesome. In fact, I'm going to order one up, a copy here. So if you want, I think you have my email, Vlad, so maybe we can just get one. But we'll take a look at all that good stuff. Anything in part you want to throw in here, Vlad?

That's a great idea. I was wondering, actually, what's the brand that you admire on social media um that's a good question i i do like starbucks although starbucks does tend to step in it they recently got into trouble with uh i think uh asking some uh police officers to leave their thing and you know they're kind of subject to uh you know sometimes crazy baristas that are working yeah they got like 50 million employees anything go wrong at that point uh but uh you know it's not really a social media faux pas but i've always liked starbucks i don't know why uh i think they handle things really well um i i have a lot of

respect for starbucks i mean i like coffee so coffee, so I might be a little biased there. Yeah, definitely makes sense. One of my favorite brands on social media is, especially for marketers in the stock industry, this is Drift. Drift, one of the co-founders also is a contributor in the group. And I really love what we do on social media and would highly recommend following them on social media

just because they are super active, tons of new stuff, tons of interactive media content, landing pages, different conversion campaigns, like super, super awesome stuff and lots of great examples that I would really recommend folks to check out. And it's Drift?

Yeah, Drift. Exactly. Drift.com. Drift.com. So check that out. Check out their social media channels. See what they're doing. Because if you're like me, as an agency, you like to see what your competitors are doing.

You like to see what's rocking and rolling because you want to copy them. Creative swiping, as they used to call it. I believe Tom Peters published that term off of somebody else who gave it to him. you want to copy them creative swiping as they used to call it i believe tom peters uh published that term uh off of somebody else that gave it to him but creative swiping you're not really stealing ideas you're taking them and making it better kind of like steve jobs you know he found the mouse at ibm worked on a secret lab and he went that's a great idea i'm gonna run with that baby and he did and the rest is history so there. Well, Vlad, thanks for being on the show. We certainly appreciate it. It's been great to get a chance to know you. You're going to, I got to tell you, as somebody who

started as 18, as an entrepreneur and you having that wonderful, curious outlook on life, that's going to be one of the things that's really going to change you and make you super successful as an entrepreneur. That's the reason I've been on adventures all my life. I'm always curious about stuff. This is one of the reasons I have a podcast because I'm curious about people like you. They come on the podcast. I'm curious about what makes them tick, how they got to where they are, why they chose the path they did in life. It's interesting to me the world is just just just this client this giant flavorful catalog of

different tastes and and uh lifestyles and journeys that people go on and and of course it's it's not about the destination it's about the journey so that's always fun as well definitely yeah i was i was always saying that this is this is any entrepreneurial experience has to come with lots of patience because i really believe that patience is also one of the key parts of it it's about the journey that was the hardest thing for me to learn in my life and even in my entrepreneurial years uh with having a lot of add you know i started uh we started a lot of different companies before you finally hit the one that went rock star. And once we did that, a year and a half later, I was bored and I started another company.

Because I was just, I mean, we were still building another company, but I was so curious and so interested. And so, you know, like, I'm like, well, I want to do this too. So I started another company. And then we started another company. And we had three core companies at one point. And then we started a whole mess of other corporation. We were trying to get into probably a little too much for us after three companies. But that curiosity is really good and being bored and trying to always make things better.

That's going to do really well for you. And anyone in my audience is hearing that as an entrepreneur. Utilize those tools. Curiosity is one of the most important things. In fact, we used to offer loans to troubled entrepreneurs, usually to see what they had. And if they had any assets, we could seize or not seize, but a white knight, if you will, same thing. But what we do is we'd look at their business plans, what they were doing wrong. And nine times out of ten, and people always ask me, why do entrepreneurs fail? Nine times out of ten, what I would see with entrepreneurs that failed is they would launch their business with a marketing plan, or not a marketing plan, but a business plan.

And they'd be like, this is the way we're going to do business. And they would run that damn marketing plan right into the ground for a year or two years, burn through all their money. And about the only time they would get curious about, well, maybe we should change this marketing plan was right before bankruptcy. And that's usually when they'd be calling us for a loan. And we'd be looking at them over going, well, tell you what, we'll give you some money. You hit the road, we'll fix your business, but you're the problem. You need to go back to McDonald's and flip some burgers, buddy, because that's what your thing is. And so having that curiosity is really important because you can change your business model as you go. You can see what's not working. You can be curious about what can work better. Curiosity,

just a huge thing when it comes to being an entrepreneur. I think that's going to make you successful in everything else you're doing. Bud, you're doing a great job. Awesome sauce. Thank you. Keep in mind, though, man, once you get hooked on this drug, it doesn't come off. So you're probably going to have to be an entrepreneur for the rest of your life. I've tried working for other people over time or investors and stuff.

It can be challenging if you're not the boss. I'm usually the CEO, but usually there's investors or a board you have to answer to. Once you go corporate, it's like, you should lose your mind. Like, yeah, I want to go back and just run my own company. Anyway, man, it was wonderful to

meet you, Vlad. Be sure to check out his book, Marketing Teams of the Future. Go to plannable.io. Check out the 14-day trial so you can try that baby out before you have to spend any money and all that good stuff and away you go um in parting today thanks for tuning in the show guys we certainly appreciate you guys if you notice a sound difference in the show and hopefully an improvement uh we are using some new mics. We're testing this out on a review product. It's from mxlmics.com. We're using a new boom that they sent us and a new mic and they've got VPS visual podcasting bundles. It's really cool. They even have like a thing that goes in

our computer that convert the cartoid to USB thing, which is really interesting. So be sure to check that out. You can go to mxlmics.com, and they won 2018 Best of Show at Radio World. Anyway, you'll see those reviews on the Chris Voss Show, and they sent us a whole mess of other stuff that we'll be reviewing as well. Thanks for tuning into my audience. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you guys next time.