How Networking Can Transform Your Job Search with James Stewart (DF#171)

James Stewart [00:00:00]:
Networking is the number one leading indicator of a person getting hired. Regardless of degree, the actual final selection process usually comes down to some level of networking.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:11]:
Hello, folks, and welcome back to Degree Free. This week, we have James Stewart back on the podcast. He is a second time guest. The first time that we had him on was in February of 2023, and we get to catch up a year and a half later on everything that he's been up to and everything that he's gone through going from his last job that he was in to now being the CMO of the company that he is at currently. It is a great episode for anybody that doesn't know who James Stewart is. I definitely suggest going back to his first episode and listening to it. If you need actionable tips on how to get into marketing right now, the first episode is evergreen and it is jam packed with actionable advice for you to get into the marketing field. If you are going to go listen to that, I'll put in the show notes degreefree.coforward/podcast.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:06]:
Just make sure that you are sitting down with a notepad and a pen to take all of the notes in this episode. We do something a little bit different. We do have a bunch of actionable advice, especially for the young adults that are entering the workforce. That is at the end. At the beginning of the episode, we wanted to talk about his struggles, finding a job after he left his last job. And that is what the bulk of the beginning of the conversation is about. We're very lucky to have James come on and be as candid as he was about the struggles in finding a job. If that is you right now and you are in it, please listen to this episode.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:47]:
He gives a lot of actionable advice and tips for you to start networking and finding that next role. If you want to say hi to James and follow along with him, you can do that in LinkedIn. I will put a link to his LinkedIn in the show notes, degreefree.coforward/podcast as usual. Let us know how we did on this. I thought James absolutely killed this episode. Let us know in the comments, what you thought. I definitely want to bring James back on. So let me know if you guys want to bring James on back on as well.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:16]:
We have already talked about it offline. We are going to try to make it happen without any further ado. Please enjoy this conversation with James Stewart. James. Welcome back to the podcast. I am really excited to have you on, this is awesome for me because you are the second person that has returned as a guest. And I am really excited that you're on for those that don't know James Stewart came on last year. I think it was around February of 2023 when your first episode aired.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:56]:
It was absolutely amazing. For preparation for this episode, I went back and I listened to that episode. It's nothing but actionable tip after actionable tip. And I knew then that I would eventually have to have you back on. And I'm glad that a year and a half later, we can make it happen.

James Stewart [00:03:13]:
Stoked to be here. It's been an interesting and tumultuous journey this last year and a half. And happy to be here, share some of the experiences. Almost all of it is gonna be relevant to you, your audience, and the world you're in.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:25]:
I would love to start with your current role now because in a year and a half ago, you were the head of acquisition at Go Hunt and love to catch up the listeners to where you are now.

James Stewart [00:03:39]:
I'm still in startup land, but it's a very different experience. This time around, I am currently the CMO and a cofounder of a company called Claim Climbers. We do VA disability paperwork processing for veterans that are working with the VA. We've been around since April of this year, and I think we are in the somewhere in the twenties for our total staff and employees. It's growing rapidly. Keep up with demand.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:02]:
We cheated a little bit on this catch up because we had a meeting prior to this where we downloaded each other's lives and everything, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you back on. I would love to dig in to what that transition was like from your last job to this role that you're in now because as we've discussed it before, you're the CMO now, but when you originally got hired, was that the case? And it's a long story. I'm sure we're gonna get all into it, but I would love to just start with how that process was for you. Hey there. I hope you're enjoying our conversation and getting a lot of value out of it. Here's a little behind the scenes. We don't pay our guests to join us. They come on purely to share their stories and experiences in the hopes that you can learn from their mistakes and take some lessons away so that you can change your life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:51]:
The more our podcast reaches people just like you, the more brilliant degree free people we can have on as guests to come and share their stories. So if today's conversation resonated with you or you've listened to multiple episodes, please take a moment and share this episode with a friend. Just a simple click on that share button or a shout out on your stories will make a world of difference. More shares means more listeners, and more listeners means more amazing guests for you. If you could do that right now, you would play a huge role in keeping this chain of knowledge going. Thank you for being a huge part of degree free.

James Stewart [00:05:24]:
If you're up for it, let's just start from the original transition last July. So Go Hunt was one of those companies that rode the wave of the pandemic. The pandemic hit. Everyone wants to get outside. There was a bunch of outdoors companies, backcountry.com. All of them expanded, and Go Hunt being a bit of a start up, when I came, their numbers year over year were just amazing. But what I hadn't realized, what I didn't understand at the time was that was because everyone's getting outside. I'd been there a year and a half, 2 years.

James Stewart [00:05:50]:
There have been some risks, some reduction in force. We trimmed the fat a little bit, and then I got fully under the hood and realized how bad it was below the line, if you will. When I joined, I was employee number, like, 95. When I left, I was employee number, like, 42, and there's been at least 2 more rounds only off since I left. That was unfortunately a failed experiment. The entire data and acquisitions department was dissolved when I left. That was July of 2023, and it was harrowing. This is your livelihood.

James Stewart [00:06:16]:
The world's a little crazy right now. The job market was not what it was a couple years ago. And so I'm out figuring out what I'm gonna do, and I go straight to what we all do. Hop onto OTO and LinkedIn and Indeed and all the places. Get my resume cleaned up. I make, like, 4 or 5 versions of my resume, base templates for whether it's more marketing or analytic. I've worn a small number of hats over the years, and I start sending them out. And it's aggressive.

James Stewart [00:06:41]:
I'm I'm an efficient person. I'm a hard worker. I set goals for myself on how many reach out, phone calls, email sends, applications. I sent out a little over 1200 applications over the course of about 6 months. Of those 1200 applications, I got 8 responses. Of those 8 responses, I got 6 conversations. And of those 6 conversations, I made final round interview twice. Of those 6 conversations, 5 of them were warm intro applications from people I knew at the company.

James Stewart [00:07:10]:
Those are abysmal numbers. I know for a fact that this is one of the first times I've been out in the market having to cold apply, And the amount of auto rejection emails I got from these HR systems, there's no way anyone read something in that amount of time. I'm seeing hundreds of people applying for these jobs. It's one of the first times where I truly felt punched smack straight in the face by the paper ceiling. I'm not gonna lie on my resume. I own my education level, community college drop out. And these auto denials were just crazy. Probably 800 of them were stopped or denials.

James Stewart [00:07:39]:
So I'm sitting here going, like, this isn't working. The only conversations I've had have been through networking. So I'm gonna stop putting this amount of time into the application process, the interview process. It's just demoralizing. I've got this LLC that I've kept on the shelf for years. By the way, first bit of actionable advice, depending on what your state laws are, Washington is pretty easy. Get an LLC early. Pay the business fees.

James Stewart [00:08:01]:
Keep it on the shelf. A consulting LLC is gonna cost you, like, $1,000 all upfront to get yourself filed and 50, $75 a year here in Washington to keep it maintained. But the ability to pull an LLC off the shelf and have legal protections and then what I did next was go out and pick up some contract consulting gigs under my own umbrella helped me keep the lights on. I've got a couple of contracts coming through. DMP RFP for someone in Germany, an AI company in New York having me do their paid search and SEO tune up. I'm just right back in the trenches, piecemealing jobs together wherever I can. Worked about 10 contracts all in over this time. There's games you play, and I'm gonna pay myself this month, and then I'm not gonna pay myself next month.

James Stewart [00:08:42]:
And you bridge it along. Actionable point number 2, please, everyone who can, build a savings and a nest egg for when inevitably in your career you end up between gigs. Between a nest egg, drawing unemployment, and consulting fees. I made it work. And then this buddy of mine, one of the other co founders actually of the company I'm in now, calls me up and he's like, hey, James. I know you're still doing consulting and whatnot. I've got a couple of guys I'm working with. We have a website.

James Stewart [00:09:08]:
We have an idea. We have a back end process for how we do this. We've never seen a client, and we don't know how to track our data. So marketing and data, that's what you do. Right? Fam, I gotcha. I get in. I take a look. I do the research.

James Stewart [00:09:20]:
Very first thing I'm doing on all these type of things is I take a look at what is the market? What is the niche? What is the TAM? What is the publicly available information? Who are the competitors? And it's VA benefits, secondary market, processing documents. We have a in house network of providers, vetted everything. And I'm like, this has a lot of potential. And you're a startup, so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna gamble a little bit. I'm gonna sign a contract with you, $0 retainer, $0 per hour, but I want a percent of gross. Now the original 2 cofounders were, you know, you'll talk to Sam, one of the other 2 original cofounders here soon. We're like, okay. Yeah.

James Stewart [00:09:54]:
That's no money out the door unless we're making money. And we signed a percent of gross contract. 10 days later, I had drained our entire capital account to 0. 5, $6,000 in our pocket. Not a dream. I still remember the day. I'm calling up one of the other cofounders, Derek. I'm like, hey.

James Stewart [00:10:09]:
Bank account is about to be overdrawn, but we have money in Stripe that'll be deposited. So as long as the crossover is okay, we're gonna hit 0, but, like, it's coming back. I promise. 10 days in, we hit 0. Day 20, we're profitable. And day, like, 45, we're in a leadership meeting, the 4 of us. And the 2 original cofounders go, James, we expected to get here 12, 16, 18 months down the road. We thought we'd be here way in the future.

James Stewart [00:10:33]:
I was like, I know. This is why I told you it was gonna happen. The data says it's there. The TAM says it's there. I'm all in. It would cost you less to bring me on than to pay my contract as a structured because my cut of gross is before all of your other offerings. I will take a reduction in total compensation, rip up a 2 year contract, and go all in. I already let go another client to make more time for this.

James Stewart [00:10:53]:
If you want me, let's do this. And that's really how it's structured, coming in with that contracting approach. I took a big risk. I needed money. I could have said, no. I'm gonna take an hourly. I'm gonna take a retainer. I'm gonna guarantee I get paid on this.

James Stewart [00:11:04]:
But seeing the bigger picture of where the company was at, what they were doing, I am the old man in the room now as far as professional experience and background. 2 of the cofounders are veterans. 1 comes from Infosec in the Air Force. 1 was a medic in the army and then EMS stateside. It was pretty scrappy, and I'm like, where are we at on talking about hiring a CPA? Where are we at on talking about getting a p and l in place? What are our bylaws looking like? I'm coming in with the boring stuff. I'm like, aren't you supposed to be the marketing guy? Where are the pretty pictures? I'm like, no. No. No.

James Stewart [00:11:35]:
We're gonna cover all of this and make it work. There was a probably a month after the original proposition of negotiating back and forth terms and details of me coming on as a cofounder. And I joined as the last of the 4 cofounders, equity owner, and partner in this endeavor. And since we launched, we went from 5 k capital in our pocket to broke to profitable to 6 months later, and we just hired our 22nd employee with active interviews going and the business scaling. We have in house software engineering coming in from offshore efforts. We have people managers who've done this before, helping us organize and structure and create process. We have a knowledge base, nerdy stuff you don't think about. We have a confluence in our knowledge base.

James Stewart [00:12:21]:
I can go query all the FAQs and information and processes that we've built for ourself, and it's just probably the most exciting part. But as exciting as it is, it's a symptom of the fact that the only way I was ever gonna uplevel again was either someone I knew giving me a shot in an existing company or stepping into a new company and taking ownership of my future. And So like I said, tumultuous. It's been ups and downs for sure this last year, but I think the 4 of us have built a sustainable rocket ship. So we're holding on as tight as we can and working through the rules. I've really gotten some of the cofounders to adopt my rules of business. Rule number 1, don't be a liability. As exciting as a startup is, we have to be squashing the things that could disrupt, stop, or blow up our opportunity.

James Stewart [00:13:07]:
And then rule number 2, as often as possible within a work life balance, be an asset. Really loving that you got 4 millennial bosses. And when one of us says, hey. We're out this day, the others are all blocking and tackling to make sure no one is calling you. That work life balance of, like, when you're on, you're on. But, like, when you're out, respect it. We all have daughters. So we also refer to domestic time.

James Stewart [00:13:28]:
Like, hey. I gotta go pick my kids up. I'll be back in 90 minutes. This 90 minutes is domestic time. Silence for 90 minutes. It's great. Rule number 3, as often as possible within a work life balance and as natural, develop interpersonal relationships with your coworkers. Part of what we delayed this couple weeks is we just had our first off-site.

James Stewart [00:13:43]:
Getting everyone together, meeting, breaking bread, really important to me. And then rule number 4 is simply avoid unnecessary confrontation. Document everything, get to the facts, and most problems will resolve themselves. That journey, those applications, the mental beat up of coming from a place where you've been shut down and you're just kinda scrapping together. I still remember being home and my wife and I having some of those conversations. And I'm like, I think I'm gonna structure this way. I think I'm gonna take a gamble on it. And she's over there as pressure test.

James Stewart [00:14:12]:
Are you sure? Is this a good idea? Let me tell you. Standing on the precipice and deciding to jump in both feet on something completely unknown is horrifying and is unfortunately a required element to make progress. The mental challenge of draining the bank account to 0 and being challenged, I'm here. I'm confident. I I swear I know what I'm doing and have it actually pay out and pay off a few days after. Like, it's stress, it's pressure. It's a lot of fear to come out the other side this quickly of all of it is one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire professional career.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:42]:
Thank you so much for taking us on literally this wild ride that you've been on for the past year and a half. That is amazing. There's a bunch of things that I wanted to double click on in there. The first thing is that 1200 applications, so just going all the way back. Why do you think you were getting auto declined as much as you were?

James Stewart [00:15:03]:
At the level I'm at professionally, I was a senior director at realtor.com and then a head of director department lead at Go Hunt. So my last two stops were that director senior director level. Applying even for senior manager, even some grunt work, every one of them had a requirement of a bachelor's or a master's degree, especially in the technical field. I come from a data and marketing background. And the only thing I could figure talking to recruiters, talking to people I knew in my network was that my education level, I don't have that piece of paper at the bottom of my page. The ones I wasn't getting auto declined from were the ones where my education wasn't a listed requirement on the application itself, which means they were having to parse my resume to catch the education level. So the ones where I'm having to do a drop down and say this education at this college in the programmatic application process, those are the ones when I looked at the data had the highest propensity for auto decline within 2 hours of application or 24 hours of application being submit.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:10]:
That's amazing that there was 800 of your 1200 applications that were completely auto declined. What I find even more interesting was how you analyze the data and saying of the 6 conversations that you had, the 5 were from people within your network. That is very congruent with what we've talked about in our last conversation. And I don't remember completely, but I'm pretty sure from listening back to the conversation about you getting the go hunt job as a director there. Was that networking as well?

James Stewart [00:16:48]:
Yes. It was. Even outside of the degree fee space, networking is the number one leading indicator of a person getting hired. Regardless of degree, the actual final selection process usually comes down to some level of networking. And I've seen stats from other reports that it's, like, 80% of candidates that make final interview were a second degree connection or closer referred in even though soft referral, in my type of space. It's a big portion of it, which doesn't, in my mind, justify that, like I said, the auto denies was crazy. And of the ones that weren't auto denied, the amount of them that just went into the data pool warming list of, will maybe never respond to you again. I still get thank you or please reenable my keeping your data emails a year and a half later from things that I applied to.

James Stewart [00:17:35]:
Like, it's crazy. But the networking side, the 5 that I had conversations with weren't the only 5 that I attempted networking with. When I had the emotional capacity, which is a hard part of stating it in the job search, there were weeks where either between shame, depression, or energy, I just didn't have it in me to work my network, which is such a terrible way to say it. It's really like I'm gonna have calls with people I respect, people I consider friends, or at worst were colleagues that I could tolerate. You've got your different buckets. But even making the reach out and having to deal with the, alright. I'm gonna have to again explain my situation to someone, and it's a place of humility and candidly shame sometimes. I'm reaching out to someone who was my employee asking them for help.

James Stewart [00:18:18]:
Most everyone is at least pleasant or positive in response. Someone's a about it. Let's face it. That part is true. So it's more in my head. It's my own mental barrier of getting there. Yeah. I was reaching out to old bosses, mentors, some of the CEOs or hiring managers I was applying with.

James Stewart [00:18:34]:
I was seeing who I was interconnected with on LinkedIn and saying, hey, Nate. Can you give me this warm intro to Ben? I think it'll help. But when you think about the ratios, I probably had 24 warm intros, and of those, 5 turned into something. So we're talking the difference of a 20% success rate versus a 6 in 1200 is a way too small of a percent success rate. Point 0 5, it's dumb. I think it's part of the inherent problem with the way applications are handled. Like, we don't have a, air quote, better way, especially with the way resumes are generated these days and AI generating resumes, reverse engineered based off the application, recruiter specialists, grooming and writing resumes for people. I've seen candidates when I was on the hiring side stuffing every technology they've ever heard of into their expertise list.

James Stewart [00:19:19]:
It's such a messy, noisy way to try and judge a person by what's on a piece of paper. And I think that's where networking continues to be king is when people know a person, they go, back to rule number 3, back to breaking bread with someone, back to actually being in the trenches with someone, you know that person differently, and you know the substance behind the resume. And that really helps for advocating for talent. It's definitely important. The other really important part of it is networking can't be transactional. I've got a dozen people I text with at least a couple times a year. Remember her birthday and anniversary, checking with them. You know, you watch for positive updates on their LinkedIn and open up a conversation.

James Stewart [00:19:59]:
Had someone I care for back when I worked at Adobe reach out to me because they were interviewing for an ad tech job. And they're like, can I borrow an hour of your time and prep for this interview and make sure that I'm buttoned up on this? And there's the give and take. People are looking for help and mentorship or insight. You give it. When people are just doing something good, you acknowledge it. And when it's just a birthday or an opportunity or you thought of someone, send them a text or give them a call. All of that keeps your community alive. Your network, your community is a living thing.

James Stewart [00:20:28]:
And if you're not feeding it and nurturing it, it's gonna be a cold, dead, shriveled husk when you need it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:34]:
I view friendships as investments, and I really always have. They'd be like, oh, can you take me to the airport? Or something simpler than that. Like, you wanna hang out? Well, I got this thing to do. This is not super important. That's the only day that you have off in 14 days. Let's make it happen because it's an investment in our relationship together and whatever it is that we're going to do together, bringing that to the professional world. I've even struggled with it, even as somebody who has viewed my personal relationships as investments. I have a hard time in the professional realm to do that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:07]:
And one of the things that I struggle with is finding a reason to reach out to them. And this is somebody that I have a really good reason to reach out to people like what we're doing right now. I have like one of the best reasons to reach out with them, but even I struggle with, Hey, how are things going? And to be quite frank, even this interaction that we're having right now, it wasn't me that reached out to you. You saw a live that Hannah and I were doing packing books for our new books that you reached out to Hannah and I, and that's what got us here. That's goes to say, yes, it's investment in people, but I also recognize from the professional setting how difficult it is. And this is coming from a guy that has a podcast that depends on other people coming on it for the regular Joe out there. Who's just thinking, okay, well, how do I do that for just myself when I don't have really good reason to reach out to them?

James Stewart [00:21:58]:
One of my mentees, if you will, very similar, he struggles with all of it. I recommended to him and and he does this. I said, put on your calendar, a biweekly reminder, Friday afternoon, that just says, think of someone else. And once every 2 weeks, he gets this little 15 minute block on a Friday afternoon that says, think of someone else. And for that, that just triggers for him to be like, is there anyone that came to mind recently? Just shoot them a note. It doesn't have to be much. I've got one guy, Skyler. He and I, big fan of the Canadians from South Park.

James Stewart [00:22:30]:
And so every time we'd see each other, it's like, what's up my buddy guy? I'm not your guy, pal. And so anytime the Canadians from South Park come across my worldview, I'll shoot him a, hey. Just thinking of you, buddy guy. I've got another guy, Max. He's a creative. And something that he and I bonded off very early on was the movie Tombstone. And all the time when we were like, I got you, it'd be like, I'll be your huckleberry. So now when I'm out and about and I see, like, a huckleberry mimosa, I'll take a picture of it and be like, thinking of you, huckleberry.

James Stewart [00:23:01]:
And you just find a little thing about the people that you connected with. You find an inside joke or reason or a thing to trigger a thought, and you make that your excuse. If you don't have that inherently and organically or it's just not natural, like I said, just put a little placeholder, a little self reminder on your calendar. Think of someone else and get yourself out of your head and out of your bubble and out of your worries and just think of anyone that's come to mind and shoot them a note. And even just keeping that, just a little bit of a heartbeat will take you a long way.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:30]:
And that ties beautifully in with your third rule of business, which is to develop the interpersonal relationships. If you invest the time in developing interpersonal relationships while you're working with them in a very natural environment where you're forced to talk to this person, and instead of talking about the marketing performance on this one ad creative for the 2nd time this week, you could take 5 minutes out of that day and just be like, Hey, what did you do this weekend? I used to say this, which is I hate small talk because I just have an allergy to it. Like, Oh, what did you do this weekend? Or, Hey, did you catch the game last night? Or anything like that. I would much rather just go really deep, really quickly. What are you struggling with in your life? When you go to bed at night, what can you not stop thinking about? I would much rather go really deep, really quickly, but I've recognized just in the past few years that there really is a place for that small talk. And it is to build some sort of relationship to bridge the gap between where you are right now and where that person is at the moment and just to get you guys talking about something. And hopefully, as you said, just find some sort of common ground and to bring it back to networking that you can use later on.

James Stewart [00:24:39]:
I would say that my network is it's split 5050 between personal and tactical. The friend calling me up asking to pick my brain about MarTech and AdTech, while she and I very much have a friendly relationship. The basis of it is tactical and built on mutual respect. But we were in a somewhat enough space doing the same work that that is our mutual point of conversation and contact where, like I said with my creative, I don't do the sight, sound, emotion part of marketing. That's not my world. And he does. He and I needed each other. But if all we ever did was talk about work, we'd always be running parallel, and there's never that orthogonal mutual point of connection.

James Stewart [00:25:15]:
And so that's why it's almost more like you're doing a bit of drilling. You're trying to mine deep. You need to do some sample drilling spots along the way to find that nugget to then go deep. Small talk and what you do this weekend and personal interests are just threads that you can start pulling on to get deeper into a bigger picture. So I just wanted to keep it surface level and broad until you find that thing that you can then drill down in with each other.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:41]:
The last thing that I wanted to talk about with networking. So you spoke about this time when you were looking after go hunt and you were looking for your next gig. You reached out to CMOs, different colleagues and everything. The last time that you were on here, you gave a tip to everybody listening that the people that you want to network with are salespeople. Now that you actually went through it, how many salespeople did you reach out to when you were networking? I

James Stewart [00:26:10]:
would say at least a third, if not half of those people I was reaching out to were people that worked in sales. One of my closest friends, Adam, he is over in New York. He was probably one of the biggest emotional support elements for me in the professional space as well through the journey. And he and I were talking regularly. Dennis in Texas, the sales guys that I developed relationships with, unfortunate that right now, the entire market was in a bit of a constriction. So all of them were happy to make intros and do what they could, but half of them were struggling and dealing with their own fear around quotas in the market. And especially 2023, interest rates were still holding high. There was no concept when the Fed was gonna drop.

James Stewart [00:26:49]:
Big SaaS purchases and changes at companies weren't happening. So these guys are all puckered. They are I stand by it. People in sales and presales and solution consultants and business consulting, they exist in a one to many relationship. They are in a bunch of clients, a bunch of businesses all at the same time. If we talk about power, networking with the CMOs and CEOs and VPs was one approach because an access to power is definitely key. You can talk to your friend who is an entry level employee. Their referral into the HR is gonna be a little bit less than VP or the head of the department putting in a referral.

James Stewart [00:27:26]:
It's a real thing. So the power is 1, and then the one to many to cast the wide net is the sales approach. Right? You talk to your sales and presales consultants types, and it's like, hey, do you know of anything? I know you've got your finger in 24 businesses in your patch. Do any of them need a James right now? And when I look at both going from Adobe to Realtor and Realtor to Go Hunt, both of those were sales guys who made those introductions and ended up leading to my career trajectory. It's definitely what I would say one of the biggest hacks for networking is 2nd degree networking. If you don't have it in you, if it's not your game, if you will, to build a big and solid network yourself, then find those who have and inherently do professionally build a big and solid network and ask them for help.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:12]:
I wanted to switch gears a little bit. I don't wanna spend too much time on it. Made my ears perk up in your story and you were talking about having just an LLC on the shelf. I thought it was funny because that is what Hannah and I do as well. And we have an LLC literally on the shelf to this day. We've been doing this for years. Just in case something happens or if we need to do anything else, we have that ready to go that has the protections of an LLC. It's set up and we can invoice them through that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:42]:
If you're already an established professional, I mean, actually, even if you're starting out to do contracting work and everything like that as well, it's a very underrated thing. I guess I'm only saying this because I've literally experienced that in my life as well. We better go get some contract work because the bills have to be paid.

James Stewart [00:29:00]:
It's one of those things where I would actually recommend, as young as possible, get your own LLC. Your full name consulting. LLC is James Michael David Stewart Consulting LLC. No one else has that LLC name. Trust me. There's also, as I'm finding now, and I wish I had started it sooner, there's value to length of established business when it comes to things like the BBB or certain applications or considerations by others. Or when you're trying to sign contracts, it's very different where, hey. This is an LLC that's been around for 6 months versus, oh, yeah.

James Stewart [00:29:36]:
This LLC has been established and on the books for 6 years. You're gonna get a different response from people, and that's one of those things where I didn't even think about the inherent value of what I'd done for myself during this last transition until I needed it. But I would definitely tell my younger self and anyone out there that's just getting started, if you've got the scratch and you can get it done, go find yourself a CPA, have them file it with the state and the feds. Again, that's about avoiding liability by having a CPA file it and a lawyer sign it. If anything's wrong with the initial filing, they hold the liability, and they have insurance for a reason. So it's gonna cost you a few $100 more, but I would rather pay a few $100 more now than be a bedfellow with the IRS later.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:18]:
When you first heard of Claim Climbers and you had first heard about the opportunity, you mentioned the deal that you negotiated with them was basically you were doing it not for free, but you just weren't doing it for any upfront cash. And you were doing it for a percent of gross revenue or gross profit. Which one was it?

James Stewart [00:30:35]:
We had a really flawed equation for gross profit. So it was gross revenue minus processing fees and ad spend, but before literally anything else.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:47]:
Was it all of the top line, or was it just off of what you brought in through your ads?

James Stewart [00:30:51]:
Well, those are the same thing, Brian, in this case. No. A 100% of the business was launched through paid advertising. And still today, I would say that the paid ads effort and the marketing effort is 90% of the traffic are organic social, and 6 months of SEO is we're babies. It's just starting.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:11]:
That is hilarious. And that's what I figured, but I figured out for completeness, I would ask the question.

James Stewart [00:31:17]:
The contract was for everything. And that's part of, again, the reason for me then being able to angle that, Hey, it's cheaper for you and more stable for me. We mutually benefit. If I rip up this paper and we sign different paper.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:31]:
That is the part that I wanted to hone in on there, which is what I'll call a creative deal making. There's a bunch of elements to it. Obviously, there is the deal making in and of itself. Then there is the identifying the risk, accepting the risk. And then like, as you've said already in your story, going all in on it, having to talk to your wife about it and have to get her on board. No matter how many points of a startup you get, no matter how many percentage points of it, at the end of the day, those usually don't pay the bills until they really pay the bills later, or at least that's the hope. I did definitely wanted to hone in on that. What was going through your mind when you saw the percentage of revenue, you saw the cash payout that you were gonna get? You were out of work for a little bit or you're doing those 10 contracts.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:15]:
You drop 1 of them or 2 of them, and you now had this lump sum of cash coming your way. What made you think, let's do this?

James Stewart [00:32:23]:
So I had had 10 contracts over that time. At the time that Claim Climbers hit my desk, I had 2 others open at that moment. One of them was for a friend, and one of them was consistently for a few months there paying the bills. Consulting fees are significantly higher than your standard employee hourly. The decision to go all in really came once I understood my ability to impact profitable return on advertising. I understood the TAM. I understood the market. I understood a lot of what was there.

James Stewart [00:32:51]:
But the moment the rubber hit the road and as I could see that I put in these dollars on these ad types and we got these dollars back and the attribution was 1 to 1 and the ability to control the revenue and destiny was in our hands as a group. The moment that happened, I actually had the the one who was more of a friend for a contract. I said to him, like, hey. I can do this work. I'm gonna be slower than others might be, and I'm not gonna meet your needs the way you want to. Here's a couple other agencies that are gonna do for you in ecommerce exactly what you want done better, faster than I can. I'm conceding this because I need the time back. And that was a mutual breakup, all warm and fuzzy.

James Stewart [00:33:31]:
It's like I'm some of my time back. And then the moment the rest of leadership had responded to, hey, I'm doing the math and I'm seeing the trajectory. I'm going to get a nice chunk out of this for another 20 months. But 20 months isn't long enough for me. I see the sustainability of this. So I would rather restructure and take less. And then part of it as well is for me and for that time, I had one employee at my consulting firm. For me and my employee to come on full time, I'm gonna come on as a cofounder.

James Stewart [00:34:02]:
He's gonna come on as our director of data and technology. And our package deal was ignoring the equity portion for me. We actually took a little bit of a pay cut. But it was the stability. It was the authority. It was the voting share on the decision to growth of the business. Like, there's a lot there that mattered to me more than what could have been a substantial delta in payout over the next 20 months because, again, it's all about the balance between opportunity risk and stability. And at this point, I'm willing to factor in calculated risk.

James Stewart [00:34:34]:
I'm not banking on unsubstantiated risk. And I remember that is there's calculated risk in being a part of a start up. There's still plenty of things that go wrong, but I can control my destiny. We, as cofounders, are all meeting and talking about everything versus the unsubstantiated risk of, cool. I can ride this rocket for 20 months, but then what do I do? Signing myself up for a guarantee of future risk of either renegotiating a contract, which would never have been that favorable again, or having to find something new versus going all in on something that had the chemical makeup to be sustainable really just drove that decision for me, and it wasn't an easy one.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:12]:
It kinda reminds me, and I don't know if this is a 100% accurate to what you were saying, but it reminds me a little bit of just a saying, like, I would rather take the known unknowns than the unknown unknowns. Basically exactly what you were saying, the favorable deal terms after the 2 years. So we're going to make bank in the next 2 years and that's great, but then what happens afterwards? And where does this firm go from there? I wanted to once again switch gears. What you began to talk about is even the younger people, you know, starting an LLC young so that they can get out there and learn, get their own contracts and everything. This ties in well with your first episode that we did together, and I won't belabor everything that you went over. I mean, it truly is a fantastic resource for anybody who is thinking about getting into any type of marketing. The way that I see it, having listened to it again just recently, and and I was thinking, even if you're not thinking about getting into the data side of it and, more on the creative side of it, just to understand who you're going to be working with on the other side and what they care about and what your creative is going to influence, super helpful. And when we talked last, you said a perfect starting point for many people was to get Google certified.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:25]:
Would you still agree with that recommendation?

James Stewart [00:36:29]:
Yeah, actually. So I have a marketing intern that I hired here at Claim Climbers. She's out in the middle of nowhere, Montana. Again, networking led to a person coming across my desk. She has a degree from a junior college. She went to a high school of 18 people. I'm sitting down with pretty low expectations in the interview, and I'll get back to the Google certification in a second. But she comes across my desk to meet, and she says, well, my parents have a welding and metal fabrication business.

James Stewart [00:36:58]:
And I spent my teen years managing their social media and their advertising using the free tools through Meta, TikTok, and Canva to get there. And so already, she's coming to me with, if you wanna go even lower than the Google search, hey, my parents' business. And because it was their business, I got a chance to learn how, like, day in, day out, where's the money coming from? How do I pay for this? So the first thing I had her do when she got on was hit the books and get herself Google certified, which took some of that raw creative marketing talent and added a lexicon of language and understanding a sense of how her creative would be used of the data. And she's now fully running our organic social unsupervised after 7 weeks. It's great. But because she already had spent time working in a small business, adding that layer of Google certification meant something. And so I think that's the only thing that would augment is if you're actually truly young, if you are 16, 18, 20 years old, I think one of the best things that you could do to build out that portfolio and add context to a Google certification is find a mom and pop business and do some pro bono, organic social, ad creative, get yourself a free Figma, get yourself a free Canva account. These mom and pop shops, these small businesses, find your local pet groomer.

James Stewart [00:38:12]:
It doesn't matter. And offer to make them some ads and do some organic social and get into business. Meta and use the planner tool out for 28 days. Some of those as softer skills. And doing a little bit of that work of the creative marketing, small business work, and then getting Google certified as a fast follow, I think, will add a lot more context to what that Google certification is doing for you. If you don't have the context of how the ads are delivered and what a CPM is or how to structure a call to action, then you're just making art, which is probably better for the world than ads, but may not pay the bills unless you're lucky. So with that being said, doing a few cycles and testing some ad creatives, learning about the call to action, all that, and then adding that Google certification layer, I think there's a ton just between those two platforms, which between Google and Meta and TikTok, it's a new beast. You're essentially reaching 2 thirds of the deliverable market.

James Stewart [00:39:11]:
There's really 3 functions in marketing. There's Google, there's meta TikTok, and then there's programmatic. And you're not gonna get into programmatic until you are spending tens of 1,000 of dollars a month. So the fact that you can get into 2 thirds of the market delivery and reach through essentially free education, free channels is amazing. That is one of the most beautiful things about marketing is if you know what you're looking for there and you can find, like I said, even pro bono work to start building out a portfolio to point to and then you can get Google certified, you're coming to the table already with more practical experience and knowledge than a lot of people that are being churned and burned out of a 4 year marketing theory. Very few people that I've met with a 4 year marketing degree are coming to the table with the actual understanding of the IB ad size requirements or delivery mechanisms or optimization. They've got the philosophies, and they've got marketing standards. They've got a bunch of very heavy academic knowledge, and it will translate and it will have some benefits, some of what they did that way.

James Stewart [00:40:20]:
But compared to I spent my summers building the social media accounts for my parents business, and my success or failure determined how much money my parents business made. That is a much more compelling story for me of actually understanding the weight and impact of what you're doing. Even as I told with my story right now, I drained our bank account. If I didn't know what I was doing, we would have just run our money to 0 and cried. If you're not in there with the delivery mechanisms and understanding the reality of your impact on a business of any size, then it's just theory.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:54]:
That's exactly what I was gonna say about the marketing majors that are coming out of college and not just marketing. I mean, so many other fields. I have a friend who's in the engineering space and newly minted engineers, and I'm using that in air quotes for those people just listening. They come out of college and dude, these guys don't even know what the job is. They don't even understand what it is that we do as engineers. And then she's like, they don't even know Excel. And just like, bro, as an engineer, we're gonna be in Excel all the time. That's where exactly what you were saying, which filling in that context first before that Google certification, if you can, for those young people is amazing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:41:32]:
And I think that's what a lot of those college people are missing is they're missing that context. They might know all the vocabulary. They might have all the jargon down, but as it pertains to anything in the real world to positive business outcomes, which is essentially what we're after here, they're like, I don't know, never done it before. I wanted to go and just define one term. You said Google, Meta, and TikTok, and then you said programmatic. Just really quickly for the audience, if we can just explain what that is, that'd be great.

James Stewart [00:42:02]:
So the benefit that Google, Meta, and TikTok has are that they're massive. But when you're out in the wild Internet, just on random blogs or web pages, when you're watching Hulu or OTT, the ads that are delivered there aren't fixed. I'm going to start with the programmatic television because I think that's the thing that people can grasp the easiest. Traditional television, you would go to New York. You'd sit in a smoke filled room. You'd swap papers. They still fax in their purchase orders for tens of 1,000,000 of dollars in traditional television advertising. You're buying an ad spot on a block of time during a certain show, during a live delivery, but we've evolved.

James Stewart [00:42:44]:
We now have Hulu or Sling or all of the other on demand only television options. So why would I, as an advertiser, purchase that the same way I purchased the Super Bowl? I wouldn't. Right? I have the ability to target household IPs or user signals or just like anything else on the Internet. Well, to purchase Hulu and Sling and the rest of those programmatic television channels, well, there's dozens, hundreds of them. Samsung TV and Sony TV and VIZIO TV each have their own default channel. Each of those have ad slots that you're buying. So what a company like The Trade Desk, being the 800 pound gorilla in the room, does is they say, hey. All of you programmatic television offerings, how about you plug into my one supply side platform? And all of you advertisers that want to buy this, you plug into my demand side platform and these 2 one to many hubs will speak to each other.

James Stewart [00:43:42]:
And now advertisers, you can target a show, context, a user, an IP, an area, a location, whatever you're using, and deliver those ads programmatically. Well, that evolved from traditional programmatic, which is the wild Internet. Any random blog or website that you're on has an ad on it, and that ad either says Google or it doesn't. Well, even Google splits their AdSense between the Google Ads platform and their programmatic platform. About a third of all ad buying right now exists in programmatic. It's a heavier lift. I don't usually recommend anyone start there. That is definitely your 300 level course on advertising because you're now dealing with ad serving and an ad server technology that hosts the assets, compiles it.

James Stewart [00:44:28]:
You have your demand side platform, which is how you buy and decide when you're delivering the ad. You have the supply side platform. You have fraud and bots, and it's this jumbled collection of, like, 8 different technology platforms that all need to work for you to be able to manage your programmatic portfolio. And there's also a barrier to entry there that's very different. Using Trade Desk or MNTN, the one that Brian Reynolds bought, or a bunch of these programmatic platforms have minimums of, like, 10, 15, $50,000 a month in advertising. So it's really cute when you meet a business that thinks they're hot stuff because they're like, yeah, we're spending, like, 50,000 a month in advertising across all of our advertising. And you're sitting there going, like, cool. So if you took everything you're doing and doubled it, you could start using Trade Desk.

James Stewart [00:45:19]:
So that's why it's kind of always in the dark corner. It's the creepy monster over there that we don't wanna look at because if you're breaking into programmatic, either you're landing some really big clients or your business has grown to a level that you're officially in the big leagues. And we could do a whole separate podcast on the pros, cons, evolution, and pitfalls of programmatic, but that is what it is. That's the space it is. It's powerful. It's dangerous. It's the thinnest line between artificial stupidity and artificial intelligence I've ever seen in marketing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:45:51]:
The last thing before I ask a couple of final questions that I normally ask is we were talking about the younger generation doing pro bono work for small businesses, just to gain a little bit of context. I can't stress, just for the listener and for the watcher, how powerful that is. We just had somebody come through our launch program and he just knew that he wanted to be in marketing of some sort. Content creator is just like the job title that he knew. Because you don't know what you don't know. That's what I want to do. Okay, perfect. He was like, well, how do I do that? Well, the way that he ended up doing it, and he was really getting into more marketing than it was a content, was he started doing just audits of local businesses content and their SEO.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:36]:
And he just literally did like a one pager and he sent it out to local businesses. And he was just like, here you go. This is free. Here's my number. Call me if you need anything. And he was able to get a couple of callbacks. We haven't touched base with him since then, but just right there, I mean, that's huge. And just gaining that knowledge for sure.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:56]:
I think the underlying thing is really just confidence as well. I can do this. I can teach myself these things. As you said, I can take a Google certified thing and I can go convince somebody to give me a $100 a week advertising budget and which won't take a salary for it, and I can learn. I can do these things and build a portfolio to then keep going to the next level.

James Stewart [00:47:20]:
Having an actual set of accounts that you can point to is something that never goes away in marketing. I still see people who are pointing to, in my opinion, the wrong thing in their resume on their marketing. And what I mean by that is even at a professional level, people have their portfolio of I worked at this company. I managed these accounts. I managed x amount of dollars. And I've always found that to be such a flawed point on the resume because I don't care if you managed $7,000,000 in advertising if you managed it poorly. What was your impact to ROI? How did you fix attribution? What were the actual executables you did? What did you do? Because, again, with, like, programmatic and agencies and Google and Meta, a lot of it is managed by the systems. So when you say you manage those many dollars, that could very well mean that you checked in with an agency once a week.

James Stewart [00:48:11]:
It doesn't mean much for me. So taking that all the way back to where you guys are at from the get go, I love the idea of sending cold emails of an SEO audit. Use the Meta SEO plugin on Chrome and just crawl their sites and get some data. There are, again, free and easy ways to do this, but then to be able to be coming into the market and say, this website I optimized for this output. This account I launched with these campaign types. This organic social, I built this contact site. Here's a directory of my Figma of all the ads I'm most proud of. Here's a actual ROI of those $100 a week I was spending.

James Stewart [00:48:46]:
I took it from nothing to a 4 to 1 ROI in my first four months of managing for this month. Give me real content, real execution, actual campaigns, and results of what you did, and I'm gonna be so much more confident in talking to you as a candidate than I managed a $1,000,000.

Ryan Maruyama [00:49:07]:
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And, James, I don't wanna take up all your time. Last question is, did you have any final words that you wanted to get out to the audience before we get out of here today?

James Stewart [00:49:18]:
I pity those in this exact generation right now for what they're having to deal with. I think I said it to you before. The pervasion and expansion of access to secondary education without any increase in quality of that secondary education is just jarring. I've been around long enough to remember when online education wasn't a thing, that colleges were looked up to as a thing were not necessarily the easiest thing to get into, let alone complete and we're not to the point where we're past this bubble yet but I think we can all see it I feel like those of who are college aged right now the housing market for us in 2,008 we can all see the bubble we can see the ninja loans we can see the unsustainability of what's there. So just keep on holding on power through it and let's see if we can't make it better for the next generation after.

Ryan Maruyama [00:50:09]:
I think that's a perfect place to end. James, thank you so much for coming on for this round 2. And we have to not make it a year 8 months or whatever till round 3.

James Stewart [00:50:21]:
I agree. This time, I'll let you do the reaching out. I won't wait till my mental health is excited about something to ping you.

Ryan Maruyama [00:50:30]:
Alright. Thanks, James.

James Stewart [00:50:32]:
No problem.