I always knew that I wanted to be in marketing From the time I was a junior in high school, I wanted to be a partner at an advertising agency. But I ended up in insurance for years and then finally got a chance to do public relations for the governor of Michigan on from there, Got a chance to do some of the advertising for the state, finally got a chance to dio advertising. But then Social Media Marketing came along. And, uh, I've realized back in 2007 that it was gonna be important and so was able to start the first social media agency created from nothing in the United States.

there's sort of two companies I have. One is ignites social media and one is Carousel. And when we started ignite back in 2007 there were just two of us. The nice thing about working and consulting where services is, you don't need to spend a lot of money before you have clients. You don't need to build software on DSO. We spent a lot of time learning about Social media marketing, which there wasn't much written about writing a book about social media marketing. I'm blogging about it. Um, and we spent every day. We would either worry that day that we were too late because some people seem to know it better than we did. And the next day we would think we were too early because clients would say, What's a blawg? Um and you know, took us still about six months and we realize we're about in the perfect time. We were just at the time where people were ready to start spending and once they started spending, then we could add other people to work with us

We like to use a mix of of other people's software and then and then and are a little flavor to it. So we don't build software. I don't know how to do that, Um, and so I stay away from doing it so we'll use a tool for influence or marketing, for example, called Tagger Media and Tagger follows 3.5 1,000,000 accounts. We can see not only influencers, but what's the makeup of the influencers followers? Is it really eyes a fake? Are they interested in the same things? So we really like those tools. But then we want to take the data out of those tools and put them into pretty sophisticated Excel databases that let us stack rank performance algorithmic Lee So we can see what contents performing the best, what influencers air performing the best and then make our decisions that way, we found, if if the software does exactly what we wanted to do, then there's probably a lot of people doing exactly the same thing, and then we don't have any real differentiators, so we have toe, take the software and then add are sort of secret sauce onto