We’re back! In this episode, Drew talks about where he has been the past 7 months, and 3 things listeners can expect from upcoming episodes of the podcast.
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Highlights
- A little look at where I’ve been the past 7 months
- The podcast is back (obviously)
- Over the next few sessions, I’ll be talking about buying more assets
- I’ll share some lessons I’m learning with my other company, Growth Engines, Inc.
- I’m developing a course on e-mail marketing
Links / Resources
Transcript
Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can request the text transcribe and I will send it to you as a PDF.
Drew: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. I’m back. I am back. It’s 2018. I have been on hiatus for seven or so months, and I have just been overwhelmed by the number of people out there who are asking, “Where’s the podcast? Drew, where’s the podcast, how come you haven’t podcasted in a while?” That’s just among my two kids, and even people on my e-mail list are asking for the podcast to come back. I don’t know why. It’s not something that I think adds a lot of value to anything, but some people like audio, so I’m going to roll with it.
In this podcast, I wanted to kick of 2018 and set the stage a little bit, catch everybody up on what’s going on in nerd marketing, like you care, but there is some things in it for you. Give you a little trick I’ve been experimenting with, and then we’ll move on to some content in the next couple of podcasts.
The big thing is, I just got back from a seven-month trip with my family. We left back in March, came back to the States in early November, or I guess around Halloween. This was awesome. It was life-changing. It was really an incredible time. We went to the Caribbean, we went over to Europe and did the Clark Griswold thing. Again, yes, this is with the kids. I’ve got a five and a three-year-old now, but at the time they were two and four. Brought the wife also. Yeah, it was just amazing. It’s too much to put into a podcast. A lot of falconry and boating and beach time and visiting museums and eating cheese and all the good stuff that comes with that.
I think the big thing for me was that it really allowed me mentally to punch out of the system, or the systems. I think when we live in a place, we are at the mercy of several systems. It can be the career system where you feel like you’ve got to do something in your career. There’s the housing system, you’ve got to own some sort of housing or play that game. The school system, where in New York it’s just a nightmare. You got to get your kids into the right schools, and there are all sorts of things you got to do to get that kid into the right school. It was really liberating to just eject and break free of all those systems. The rent system, I didn’t have to pay rent for six or seven months.
I think if you’re really enlightened you can break out of those systems without needing to break out of them geographically, but moving geographically can’t hurt. It was really liberating for me and my wife to leave for seven months and just be this nice, independent, mobile family unit without a lot of constraints. It allowed me to think about a lot and to plan for what I really wanted to get out of the next couple years in my life, and that brings me here. It brings me back to New York. We came back to New York for the holidays. We are planning on travelling again, maybe in a month, and this time we’re talking about the West Coast, Asia, and the idea would be that we get back to the States in time for my five-year-old to start first grade. We are homeschooling him now, which I thought he would end up really weird, but he’s great. Because home-schooled people are always really weird, but my kid is fine, and it’s kindergarten so all they learn there is how to stand in line and do stuff. I think he’ll be fine.
Yeah, we’re going to punch out probably in another month, and we’re talking about the West Coast, Asia. If you are at all curious about following these travels, check out my Instagram because that’s where I update that stuff. I don’t put it on the blog. @Drewsanocki on Instagram. My wife’s is even better than mine in general. That’s @saraclemence. Yeah, follow along. If you are anywhere in my path, would love to meet you. That happened a couple of times in Europe, in Berlin met a couple friends, and also up in the UK, so that was a lot of fun.
That brings us to 2018, and I had four updates I wanted to share. The first is that the podcast is back. I enjoyed writing some long form copy in e-mails over the last few months. If you were on my e-mail list you probably got some of those. The challenge is those take me down for a while when I want to crank those things out, and if anything heats up, like family life heats up or work heats up, I have trouble being consistent with them, and yet I want to be consistent with content. So, I’m going to sprinkle in some podcasts. I think the podcasts are a little bit easier for me to bang out. I sit in front of my computer and talk into a microphone and pretend that there are thousands of people listening to me, and it works pretty well.
This year I’m going to do a lot more podcasting, and I’m going to try to break them up and make them a little bit more interesting by focusing on topic areas. We’ll call them seasons. I think that’s something I’d like to do. The first couple seasons I think will be about buying a business and selling a business. Maybe we lump that together into one season, call it Private Equity or Private Sales, M&A, whatever we’re going to call it. Got to figure that out. And I think I’m going to do a season on e-mail marketing. Those are two big topics that I think will require a lot of episodes, so look for those seasons to kick off soon.
The big reason I chose those two is, number one, I’m trying to buy one or more businesses right now, and that was a goal. I came away from my trip really wanting to create some assets and think about what I wanted in my life in my 50s. I’m in my mid-40s, 50s are right around the corner, and I don’t want to be busting my ass seven days a week, 24 hours a day on a startup in my 50s. I want to own assets, and I think now is the time for me to prepare for that. It’s my goal to buy one or more businesses this year, get some equity in some deals. Right now I’ve got three in the works. I’m going to be expounding on that over the next couple podcasts and exactly what those are, what’s going on. That would be one season.
The second season I think will be all about e-mail marketing, and that’s because I’ve got a course in the works. I’ve got an e-mail course in the works. It’s going to be soup to nuts, everything you need to know about running e-mail for, let’s call it, an advanced e-mail marketer. Anything you need to know for a direct consumer brand. It’s all going to go into the e-mail course, and I’m really excited about that one because I think it’s based on a lot of feedback I get through the blog and from my clients, so I’m going to run it with. The goal is to make that the best course out there on e-mail. That’s coming soon, as is the content around that.
The last update is growth engines. Growthengines.io is my agency. I run that agency with my partner Michael Epstein, and lo and behold, that agency, which started maybe a year and a half ago, or it was formalized a year and a half ago, has continued to do really well. We work with direct to consumer brands. We also get involved with private equity, buying and doing diligence on these brands. It’s continued to grow. What that means to you, the listener, is I’d like to share some of the stories and successes I’m experiencing there. If we work with 10 different companies, some of them might be experiencing things that you’re experiencing, and I would like to share some of the techniques and tactics we’re using there with this audience.
Those are four things. The podcast is back. Got the e-mail course in the works. Growth Engines, I want to share some of that with you, and buying companies in 2018. Those are four big things I’d like to dive into over the next few months.
The last thing I want to leave you with is just a little hack I’ve been experimenting with. If you are on the mailing list, you have not experienced this, but I think it’s because I traveled so much that I really like this idea of putting my content on automation. I’ve been experimenting with what I call the shadow newsletter sequence. You sign up to my list, and like any good direct to consumer brand, I put you in a welcome sequence, but I’m extending that welcome sequence up to six months, and even my goal is to get it to a year. The idea is that over the course of the year you’re going to get fresh content. I write the content once, publish it once, and then every new subscriber I get is going to get that for the next year. What that accomplishes for me is that I get off that hamster wheel of having to produce content every week.
I think a lot of you are in that boat. If you’re running a small retail or midsize retailer, you always feel compelled to the newsletters out every week and get some content up. Well, let’s take that welcome sequence idea and really blow it out and see if it’s something that can help you scale up a little bit. I’m going to be sharing how I did that and how it’s working out also over the next few episodes.
That’s it, quick update on 2018. It’s good to be back. Reach out anytime, [email protected]. Let me know what you want to hear this year, and look forward to talking to you again. Thanks.