Branding Doesn’t Have To Be Difficult

Branding Doesn’t Have To Be Difficult

Tim Fitzpatrick
Branding can seem a little bit like black magic at times, but it doesn't have to be difficult. In today's episode, our special guest will help you understand how to get started with branding and some of the most important elements you cannot miss. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth, and marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have with me today Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing. Nate, welcome and thanks for taking the time.

Nate Freedman
Awesome. Thank you so much, Tim. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I'm looking forward to digging into this with you. Like I said in the intro, branding can be this nebulous thing for a lot of people. You're going to help demystify it today. Before we do that, want to ask you some rapid fire questions. You ready to jump in with both feet here?

Nate Freedman
Let's go.

Tim Fitzpatrick
All right, man. When you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Nate Freedman
Outdoors with my kids.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Anything in particular outdoors? Or just The park?

Nate Freedman
Right now, it's going to be canoeing today.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Canooing? Okay. I love it, man.

Nate Freedman
Yeah, park's good, too.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What's your hidden talent?

Nate Freedman
I actually like to draw. I've got another Instagram account outside of my business one where you can see me doing drawings.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you draw anything in particular or just all whatever inspiration hits?

Nate Freedman
Mostly wrestlers.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Wrestlers? Okay.

Nate Freedman
yeah. So if we got any old school WF fans. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Oh, my God. That's so funny. Okay, cool. I love it, man. Wow. You're going to have to show me some of your drawings. What's the best piece of advice that you've ever been given?

Nate Freedman
When I was starting my agency, Tech Pro Marketing, one of the things I wanted to do, I had this idea that I was going to be a LinkedIn lead generation agency for MSPs. When I went to one of my mentors, a friend of mine named Jake Jorgavan, he told me, Nate, I don't know if you want to dive and exclusively lock yourself into LinkedIn. Think what a lot of MSPs want is they want to win new customers. If you can make that the focus of your business, I think you'll have a lot more success. Since I did that and I made my focus, not limited to my service offering, but actually the end goal of what I want my target market wants, that really made the biggest impact.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. It's a fantastic piece of advice.

Nate Freedman
Thank you, Jake.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. What's one thing about you that surprises people other than the fact that you draw wrestlers?

Nate Freedman
I think that was what I was thinking, but probably the red drawing the wrestlers. It's my talent.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What does success mean to you?

Nate Freedman
For me, it really is about financial freedom. I think there's a lot of studies out there that if you make a certain amount of money, you're not going to feel differently or things like that. But I just personally believe that so many problems in our lives can be solved if we have a certain level of financial freedom. I know people put it different ways, however you want to call it, whatever term you want to call it. But I think reaching a certain level of financial freedom, I think that gives you the freedom to do the things that you want in your life. So in a business setting and a life setting, I am the type of person that believes you need this type of freedom. I think in this world, it comes through finance.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I think it just gives you a lot of choices and a lot of flexibility in the choices that you make that if you lack in that regard, there's a lot of limitations. So where's your happy place?

Nate Freedman
Yeah, for me, actually, it's snorkeling. There's one spot that I like to go to. It's in the Southern tip of Taiwan. I haven't been there in about a year, but definitely want to go back over the next few years. It's called Little Bali, that's my place.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Little Bali, I love that. I was actually on vacation in Kauai last week, so we did a little bit of snorkeling there in Kauai. Hawaii is a fantastic place to snorkel.

Nate Freedman
Oh, my gosh, yeah. I just went to the island with Honolulu, but I think it's called Hawaii Bay. O'ahu, Hamona Bay. I did snorkeling there about six years ago, and I just loved that place.

Tim Fitzpatrick
There's so many different cool places to snorkel there. Gosh, for you from the East Coast, that is a heck of a flight to get to. But what qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Nate Freedman
Just honesty, straightforwardness. I don't like to beat around the bush. I don't like to play games. I think things are much easier if we're all just straightforward and just straight shooters. So that's who I am and that's what I appreciate in the people around me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Tell us more about what you're doing with Tech Pro Marketing. You touched on it a little bit, Nate, but share a little bit more with us there.

Nate Freedman
Yeah, Tech Pro Marketing, we are a marketing agency. We work with MSPs. I know that on some of your recent episodes, you've had some MSP owners on. So I think the audience knows what it is. But an MSP is basically like an outsourced IT company for other small businesses. If you can imagine, like in any one city, there's all these accounting firms, manufacturing companies, anything where there are computers and they might have an inhouse IT person, they might rely on an IT guy, I think at a certain level in your business, you're going to want to outsource that to a professional organization. And these are what MSPs are, managed IT services providers. What we do is we act as an outsourced marketing department for those IT companies. Right now, we have over 100 customers all across North America. They're all MSPs serving different markets, and we're helping them gain new customers.

How to Get Started with Branding on Your Own

Tim Fitzpatrick
Let's dig into branding, Nate. I'll try and demystify this a little bit for people. So early stage, how can I start to do the branding process on my own? How do I begin this process?

Nate Freedman
I love this topic, Tim, because actually, I am somebody that I don't believe in branding. I'm somebody who thinks that there's a lot of hype around it. I read this book recently. I think you've probably read this. A lot of people have. Story Brand, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes.

Nate Freedman
Donald Miller's super popular book. It is a good book. I don't want to say anything bad about the book. I use a lot of the techniques in it. It's things I actually have been using for years as a marketer. But one thing about it is people get really, they buy into all the hype. So I love the book. I love Donald Miller, but I think it created this insane hype machine. And I think that's just one example of where people are like, I need branding. I need all this stuff. And I think what happens is, especially early stage businesses, you might not need it. You might not need that type of brand yet. I think branding is a very advanced business tactic that should be used at the right time in your business when you understand the effect you're trying to get out of it. Think of your early stage in your business, don't overthink it. So we work with IT service providers, and like I talked about it, I said, they basically act as an outsourced IT department for other companies. And if I'm starting as an MSP, I don't need to be the one and the only. I don't need to be super unique. I think as long as I just do a good job at being that outsourced IT department and I make that my brand, that's going to be a great place to start. So I think my number one advice for early stage, and we only do B2B, we only work with local service providers is don't overthink it. You're not a SaaS company, you're not a startup in Silicon Valley. You might be leveraging AI, but you're not going out there and trying to create the next Google or something like that. So your branding can be a little bit more basic. And I think if anyone has seen this advertisement from, I think it's from the 80s or 90s by a company called Ron Seil, which is a British company. It's some type of wood stain. And the advertisement is just simple. It says it does what it says on the tin. And I think that's really, you know what I'm saying? That's where you can start if you're B2B. We actually do our job and we do it right. Because the truth is, how many businesses out there actually can't even do what they say they're going to do? So start there.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love your advice on this, Nate. Don't overthink it because... Gosh, I feel similarly to you when it comes to branding. I think for the vast majority of small businesses, branding should be a byproduct of your other marketing efforts. It should not be the focus of your marketing efforts. Because as a small business, you don't have an unlimited budget to throw towards general branding. The more you get marketing, you do need to generate leads that convert to revenue. You can build your brand as a byproduct of that. I think the important thing is, one, you do need to be consistent. You need to have a need to have a good looking company logo, and you need to be consistent with the message that you're putting out there. But that over time with the other marketing efforts you're doing can start to establish and build your brand. What do you do? What are your thoughts on that?

Nate Freedman
I think in terms of being consistent, yes, you want to get a foundation. You do want to be consistent. In terms of good looking, I would say that you do not need to have a logo that's good looking. You need to have a logo that matches the professionalism of your ideal customer. So for example, if you are a, let's say, you're a marketing agency that works with fashion brands, you need a very good looking logo. That's going to be very important for you. If you are a paving company that works with commercial real estate developers, your logo needs to be clear. You need to be able to identify it. You should be able to read it. It should be legible. But looking good is not important at all in that specific situation. I think where I see a lot of people getting mixed up is they don't understand that for B2B IT comes in. We work with it's like, you guys are computer people. They want you to be good at network, cybersecurity. Nobody's expecting you to have this beautiful brand or anything like that. That's not necessarily going to be what gets you to your immediate next goal. There's a company called Electric.Ai. They are a very fast growing managed service provider. They've received tons of funding. They're now in every city. They have a beautiful brand, and it's super important for them, but they are not a local B2B IT service provider. I think you need to understand what level of design you need in terms of graphic design, but also just match your target audience. If you're working with people that have... F or me, sometimes if someone's logo is too good, I'm like, Well, I'm actually intimidated to work with them. They actually are working with bigger brands than me. I'm just going to pass. I want to work with somebody smaller. So you need to think about it, make it good, but make it right. Make it professional. Do what it says on the tint. So I think biggest thing that I want to think about just in terms of logo is, are you going to have a brand mark, which is like those symbols that people view as a logo? I think potentially you could use a brand mark. I think the most important thing is that when people see your logo, they can really legibly read it. So I think for early stage B2Bs, sometimes brand marks overcomplicate the process. And this is where when I first started, oh, my gosh, I dug myself into so many holes, being like, we're going to make you the most amazing logo. And then you get into this big, subjective debate about what the brand mark is going to look like. Now when we do it, we just do text based logos where so we would say, hey, we want people to easily read the name when they see your logo. We want you to be able to put it on a hat and people can see it. This is not Coca Cola. This is not Pepsi. You put the Pepsi logo on a hat, everyone knows what it is. People are not going to recognize your brand based off the logo. So for these purposes, let's do something where the text is really legible and easy to read. And that's the direction that we go. It also saves a lot of conflict if you're ever working with an agency that we have a particular philosophy on it. So if you come to work with us, this is what you're going to get. And maybe I've got some trauma or something that's causing my view on this, but you know what I'm going through.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You know what? I don't think so. I think it is so easy to overcomplicate branding, so just keep it simple. Don't overthink it. Too many of us can... One of my mentors talked about playing office, right? Play in the office doing these things that we feel are important, but they're really not. And it's taking us away from the things that are actually really important that are going to drive business.

Nate Freedman
1,000 %.

The Importance of Proof Points in Branding

Tim Fitzpatrick
I want to dig into proof points. You talk a lot about proof points as part of a brand. What are proof points and why are they important?

Nate Freedman
Yes, thank you. So I think we talked a little bit about overall branding, and I think when people think about branding, they're actually thinking about logo. And you brought it up and it's great that we started there because I think that's... People think logo, colors, that's my brand. That's all it is. But I actually think the brand, when I'm going into it, we're looking at things like proof points. I know we're going to talk about UVP, we're going to talk about... And there's some other things we'll get into. But proof points are basically your credibility. So whenever we're working with a new customer, we're going to look at four different buckets of proof points. Number one, we're going to look at functional proof points, we're going to look at social proof points, we're going to look at economic proof points, and we're going to look at credential proof points. So functional proof points are things like numbers, things that you've achieved. I've been in business for 10 years. I think this is an amazing functional proof point. I've worked with some local IT service providers that have been in business for over a decade, but you get to their website, you can't tell them from any other fly by night startup IT service company. So using proof points like this, hey, we've been in business for 10 years. We've served over 300 customers. We're managing over 20,000 endpoints. Any of these numbers that you can pull up, I think I've seen things like cups of coffee drinking per day. Look, if you're really stretching, go there. But for me, I think you can find enough real proof points to really display these things. You just need to dig deep and understand that your proof points are not going to be what everybody else's are. So that's functional numbers. Social, I think this is a great one because you can add these really easily in. Maybe you want to... What we encourage our MSPs or IT service providers to do is join a program that we have that's called Get Support Give Support. What this is is where you offer discounted IT services to local nonprofit organizations. And you also, as a company, you'll also go and actually volunteer local nonprofit organizations. This is easy proof point you can add right to your website. And yeah, it costs you a little bit, but it also is not super challenging to go and donate, to go and make a difference in your local community. If you're a local service provider, yes, this is perfect. They might know some of those charities, they might know some of those organizations that you're working with. So for us, we're not local, we're national, or all of North America. One thing we do is every time that a new customer signs up with us, we plant a tree for them using one of these companies, like a reforestation company, and we put that on the bottom of our email signature that we've got a 200 % carbon offset for all of our hosting. And this is just an easy proof point that it's just a little bit of money for us to do, but we got it right there. We didn't have to get listed on the Inc 500 to do that. We didn't have to win a Deloitte Award to do that. All we had to do is make a donation, and that was an easy one to get into. Next one is economic. This is things like the impact that you actually have on your customers. I think this is the most challenging one to get, to say, Hey, the work that we did, the rebrand that we did directly led to a million dollar increase in annual revenue for this company. That's hard, but that has to be your long term goal to actually be able to do that. This is another way I see a lot of small businesses fail is they have this mindset that I'm not going to be able to have an economic impact on my customers. I am going to shy away from that. I'm not going to ask them about the economic impact. I'm going to just focus on providing good work and building a great relationship. They'll work with us, they'll be happy, but I don't want to go there and I don't want to know the truth about the return on investment. I encourage all businesses, if you're working B2B, find a way to get your customer's return on investment. And if you're too scared to go there, probably means that your business is not providing enough return on investment as it should be. And probably this is going really deep, this may be the reason why you're not actually growing at the pace that you want. So economic impact is super important. You need to get some hard numbers from your customers of the impact you're having. Those are amazing proof points. If you go to a website and it's like, we helped a company just like yours, increase revenue by 300 %, you're going to be interested. If they have a testimonial of somebody saying it, that's even more. And that's another type of proof point. And the last one are things like credentials. This is another easy one. So I went from the hardest one. Now I'll go to another easy one. Get certified, become a HubSpot partner. Get your comp TIA certifications. Join the Better Business Bureau. All these different things. These are all badges that you can put through out. And these are, I think, what developed a strong brand is having all these proof points. So it's like we talked about colors, we talked about brandmark, but I think things like these, especially if you get them right, they can be super powerful.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Nate, you dropped so much value there. I want to pull some of this stuff out because there's so much good stuff here. So proof points all about us helping, especially in B2B professional services, establish that authority and that credibility. Can I trust you? Which is a huge step that we have to get over for people to make that choice of, hey, do they want to work with us? And you break it down into four elements, functional, social, economic, and then credentials with proof points. Functional is all about the numbers. Social is really more about, are you doing good within the community or just as a whole, as an organization? Economic, what economic impact am I having on the clients that I'm working with? Then your credentials. You pointed this out multiple times. So many businesses overlook this stuff. They're just not thinking about it. But we all, and you pointed this, if you're just starting out, you may not have some of these things. But the social and the credentials, man, you can start out your business with those right off the bat from day one. So don't worry about, again, don't overthink this. Just get some of these things out there, use it in your message. So many of us have these things, but we're not putting it out there. It's not on our website. It's not on our email signature. We're not talking about it. And when we don't talk about it, it doesn't establish any differentiation. And to me, these four elements, that's one of the things they help establish a business. For a business is how am I different? We have to be seen as different in some way, shape, or form to be able to attract people to want to work with us. Man, I love how you brought this down. Super simple. Don't overlook these. Use them. Now, I want to transition into something else that you touched on, which was unique selling proposition. How do you define that?

Nate Freedman
Unique selling proposition. I think one book, another great book. We talked about story brand. I love that book, but I think it brought a lot of hype, unnecessary hype to the marketplace. Another book, I think, doesn't get a lot of credit. This book, Running Lean by Ash Maria, and I think it's part of a book called The Lean Startup by Eric Rice from Previous Networks. It's part of this Lean series. They really go into the idea of a unique value proposition. It's who you help and the outcome that you help them achieve. And this is back to that first point. I think a lot of B2B service providers are overthinking it. And this is where I would go back to that Ron Seil approach. You don't need to be the category leader right away. You don't need to be in a category of one immediately. You'll learn that after you have 20 customers, after you have 50 customers, after you have 100 customers, you actually will be a category leader and it'll be very obvious to you. So for us, I think when I first jumped on this call, I said that we've got over 100 customers all across North America. That is a function of proof point. And then if you go to my LinkedIn profile, definitely want you guys to find me on LinkedIn and follow me there, you'll see we're the only MSP marketing company that has over 150 five star Google reviews through a virtual employee led marketing program, something along those lines. And that took us a long, long time to build that out. We didn't know in day one that we were going to be doing a virtual employee led system. It came to us at that point. So early on, I go back to that advice I got from Jake, our unique selling proposition was we help MSPs win new customers. It's like that simple. And this is where it's like early stage, don't overthink it. We help local Denver companies manage their IT. We take IT off your plate. We become your IT department. However you want to describe it, I think this is the basic level you want to get you in the early stage as you learn your customers, as you learn your business, then you can really get into a category of one, something like I described, and really be the category leader. But early stage, just start with a basic UvP. You're not Google. We're not chat GPT. If you guys want to start that, I don't think this is the right podcast for you. There's definitely some podcasts out there. I think the listeners on this podcast, we're local B2B business owners, or maybe national B2B business owners like me, but we're in the space, we're in the trenches. We're trying to help make an impact on our customers. We're not Apple. I think that requires a different approach. And what happens is local or national B2B companies, they confuse themselves with Apple. They listen to Simon Sinick's speech. It's amazing speech. Start with Why, you know what I mean? It's really, really super inspiring. You're going to have to get there. I think you do. It's as you grow. But like your mentor said, let's just do the work that needs to get done in the business right now.

Tim Fitzpatrick
One of the ways I think about a unique selling proposition is just it's a promise that you're going to make that's going to help differentiate. One of the most popular and I'm going to botch this because it's been a while, but I don't remember it exactly. But we've all heard of the original or early Domino's delivery unique selling proposition. It's hot pizza in 30 minutes or less guaranteed, or it was free, something like that. But that goes back to what you touched on earlier. You've got to know your target market and who your ideal clients are. And they're like, Look, their clients, their ideal customers, it wasn't about quality. They freaking wanted pizza fast and they wanted it to be hot. They were hungry. That's it. That's all they cared about. So that was the unique selling proposition. That was the promise that they made. And that created differentiation for them where, Hey, look, I'm not getting Dominoes all the time, but when I want pizza hot, fresh, and quick, that's where I'm going. Super easy to remember, simple. Again, don't overthink it. We've got to have it. 

How Your Brand Archetype Impacts Marketing

Tim Fitzpatrick

Now, one of the other things that we touched on when we talked in the pre interview was we also talked about brand archetype. I think this is such a cool concept. I think this is something that most B2B professional service firm owners probably have never even heard of, like, brand archetype. What the hell is that? So can you break this down for us a little bit? What is brand archetype? And how can I start to use this to build my brand and impact my marketing?

Nate Freedman
Brand arch. So I think the archetypes, that's something that was developed by Carl Young. So it's like this inner quality. And I think originally, maybe he had developed 12 archetypes or something. And then that's been used throughout the years. And the brand archetypes, there's different variations of it, but it's things like the magician, the outlaw, the explorer, the every man, the gesture, the lover, the hero, the caregiver, the innocent, the creator, the sage, and the ruler. These are the ones that we use internally. And basically, what these are is your personality as a brand. I'll just say a story for myself is one thing I'm going through right now is I'm working on our brand. And so we've been around for six years. We've grown bootstrapped from zero. Now, we're just at about three million in revenue. And for us, it's been an awesome journey. Our brand, like like, was not really super important for those first six years or so. That wasn't really. We were focused on winning customers, delivering on our promise, building a strong program. Brand archetype wasn't really something we thought about. But now, as I'm going on more podcast like this, as I'm considering starting my own podcast, going on stage, different things like that, I'm like, Well, what am I going to wear? I got out of the corporate world for a reason. I think we all did. A lot of people are business owners. It's like, We don't like the stuffy suits or business casual or things like that. There's definitely a brand archetype for that. That's not mine. I was talking to a friend of mine, Ian Richardson. He's a business consultant. He's got this awesome style. He always wears this leather jacket. He sometimes wears these crazy hats and things like that. I was like, How did you come up with that fashion style? He's like, Oh. He's very advanced in business. This is the right thing for him at the right time. But he's like, Oh, I worked for the branding company and they found out that I'm the joker and the outlaw and this is the style that I came up with. I'm like, That's so awesome. If you ever see these guys like Gary Vee, or you see these people that have this perfect on brand style, but it's not corporate, you're like, How did they do that? I think a lot of this is just understanding your brand archetype, the language that you're going to be using. I love Gary Vaynerchuk. He's just super inspiring. He's definitely the creator and maybe the outlaw because he'll curse, but he's also super inspirational and he's got a little bit like an apple to him, the apple of the company, but he's a little bit edgier than that. I think for me, I'm trying to learn what that is. But I would say if you're an early stage B2B provider, think about these. I think a great place for us all to start is the everyman. This fits in with a lot of what we're doing. But definitely identifying and learning that as you go is going to be a way for you to begin to separate yourself. You know what I mean? And eventually you will have a really strong brand and it's like, oh, yeah, I wear this pink unicorn bonnet on my head every day and I'm speaking at the stages. You know what I mean? You see guys like Gary Vaynerchuk, it's like, Oh, my gosh. What is this guy wearing? How is he the number one speaker in the world right now? And it's like, he really knows his brand. It's awesome.

Tim Fitzpatrick
This goes back to what we touched on earlier, consistency with the brand. When you see Gary Vaynerchuk, you know that he's going to be wearing a T-shirt and sneakers. He might have a hat on, he might not, but he's super casual. You know that he's going to swear, but you know that you're going to get that. It's not like you see him that way one time, and then the next time you see him, he's in a suit and tie. If you saw him in a suit and tie, you'd be like, What the hell is going on? I think with brand archetype, and I love how you bring this up. There's one you touched on, you may not fall into just one archetype. It may be a combination of a few, and that's okay. But knowing where you sit and how you want to portray yourself is super important because that impacts how you dress. It also impacts your message and how you communicate that message so that you can be consistent over time. And that's what's going to help build the brand. If you've never heard of brand archetype, look, when you're done watching or listening to this episode, seriously, just go online, Google it, or type it into chat, GPT. Honestly, after our conversation, Nate, I went into chat GPT, and I said, Hey, provide me a summary of what brand archetypes are about and summarize each brand archetype. Everything that you just listed was out in a matter of seconds.

So go do that, read it, and make some choices of where you want to sit. So I love it, man. Is there anything else you want to add on brand archetype?

Nate Freedman
I just think if you are listening to this and you are in early stage B2B and you are like, Okay, I'm listening to this podcast because I want to know about branding. I want to start doing it for myself. I think my lessons, and you might agree with some of these, is number one, if you're engaging an agency and they're just focused on the colors and the logo, you're definitely going in the wrong direction. I think you need to have that knowledge that branding is very powerful, but it's not about colors and logos. It's about answering these questions and understanding who you are as a business. I think that's the one thing. Then my other thing is just to wrap it up is keep it simple. It's okay when you're starting out to be like everyone else and just be good, just live up to your word, just be honest, be straightforward. This is totally fine. As you grow, as you learn your market better, then you can start using differentiation, which I believe is an advanced business tactic. But start just by doing a good job, being a good honest person. People don't always need to work with the best, the most experienced. They don't need to work with the people that are coming up with totally unique ideas. Sometimes, and I've been in the situation, I'm like, Can I just find someone who's going to do the job right? It's hard enough to find good people in business. I think if you can just... Your brand can be focused on that to begin with, you're going to have a lot of early success.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I agree. The other thing I would add to that, too, is if you're just starting out, man, you should not be spending money on a branding agency. Listen to this episode, do some of these things, and then take that money if you've got it and invest it in other marketing activities that are going to generate leads to turn into customers. Biggest take away that I picked up from this conversation, Nate, is don't overthink it. I can't remember where I heard this, and people talk about this all the time, but it's so easy for us to overlook. Speed of execution in business is critical. If you are fricking wasting your time playing office, you are not executing quickly and that's going to impact your result far more than taking the time to put together this great brand in the beginning.

Nate Freedman
Yes, 100 %. That's why I actually really love that lean methodology is because it's all about going to market quickly. And I think if there's one thing, it's like, we all have 24 hours in a day. Everybody does. And you can either use those 24 hours to stay where you're at, or you can use those 20 hours to make a big impact in your life, which then is going to allow you to make an impact in the lives of other people. I think sometimes people may be playing office. It may be deeper than that. They may be just thinking small. I think there's a lot of reasons why people think small. I think one is just lack of confidence, feeling like they don't deserve it, feeling like if they do really well in their business, it's selfish, and they don't want to earn a lot of money because it's a selfish thing. Or just, quite frankly, not even understanding what's possible. But everybody who's born, we're all here, we've all got those hours, do the work that's going to push your business forward, set the goals to actually grow something that's big, that's going to allow you to gain some freedom in your life. But then once you've got freedom in your life, then you can start making a much bigger impact. You know what I mean? And you can really start doing the things that you want to do. So yes, 100 % don't play office. So I love that. I'm going to use that from now on.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I wish I could take credit for it. But yeah, take it, run with it, don't play office, just start taking action. When we take action, we learn from it, right? And we can iterate and continually improve. Nate, this has been an awesome conversation, man. I really appreciate you taking the time. Where can people learn more about you?

Nate Freedman
I want everyone to go ahead and either connect with me or follow me on LinkedIn. So if you're watching the video, we've got it on the bottom there. It's LinkedIn.com/in/NateFreedman, NATE FREEDMAN. I'm posting my content there right now. So if you guys enjoy this content, I'm doing more things on branding, on other aspects of marketing, on entrepreneurship, outside of my work with Tech Pro Marketing, which is my agency. I'm also a mentor with a group called U Gurus & U Academy. It's a digital agency business accelerator. So if you're a digital agency, you can look for me there as well. But I would just love it if you guys would connect me on LinkedIn and help me grow my following there, which is really a platform that I believe in I think my audience is on that and something that I'm looking to contribute to help make that a better platform and actually produce some great content.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. Nate, we will make sure that is in the show notes. We'll also put in the link to Tech Pro Marketing as well. Thank you again for taking the time, man. I just love some of the stuff you shared with us today. I know people can learn from that, so thank you, Nate. Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you as well. We touched a little bit on... Nate talked about messaging. We touched on target market in addition to branding. Those are two out of the nine revenue roadblocks we help clients remove so they can accelerate growth. If you want to know which revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can find that out over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. You can also always connect with us over at rialtomarketing.com. That's Rialtomarketing.com. Thank you again for watching, listening. Appreciate you. Until next time, take care.