62: Build Connections Using Proven LinkedIn Formulas with Doug Brown

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Online marketing started to come around in the early 90’s. Some businesses lost the opportunity to scale, but others quickly figured out how to deal with the disruption. Doug Brown, LinkedIn marketing pioneer and founder of Szeak.com, was sitting right in the middle of all of this as a financial adviser in Wall Street who turned into an internet marketer. He saw that the disruption that came with the internet didn’t mean people were consuming less, they were just consuming in a different way. He made the shift and co-founded the third largest PR distribution platform in the world, Newswire. But just like any other business, this did not keep going in a straight line so Doug made another shift and developed LinkedIn formulas for people to follow and build connections. Learn how this became a breakthrough in PR marketing and how his new company Szeak.com is making another disruption. erzincan escort

Build Connections Using Proven LinkedIn Formulas with Doug Brown

You may never have heard of my guest but you’re likely to have used his services if you’re in business. It turns out that over 12,000 press releases a year are sent using his company’s resources, and that number grows by 15% every year. He co-founded Newswire Network and that grew the company into the third largest PR distribution platform in the world, competing against Warren Buffett’s company and two other public companies to boot. How did this incredible track record happen? It turns out my guest pioneered breakthrough marketing methods using LinkedIn where he became one of the leading LinkedIn marketing experts in the world. He is pioneering another new service for those of us who market on LinkedIn and he’s here to tell us his story. Welcome, Doug Brown, to the show.

Thanks, Mitch. I appreciate the chance to get on and chat with you a little bit.

You have a fascinating story because like most of us, we didn’t make a successful life in a straight line from childhood to adulthood. I know a little bit about yours, but I want you to share it with our listeners. Why don’t you go back to the beginning, Doug, and tell us how you got into the Newswire business and how you evolved to that place to be able to create such a powerful enterprise?

A lot of things are not a straight line and this certainly wasn’t. I started out a few decades ago in finance basically. I was a financial advisor and worked on Wall Street. We were really in the retail stocks and bonds business. Anybody that knows the progression of that business and how it changed from the early ‘90s with the advent of some of the online services knows that I went through a bad spot. We went through having a great little spot on Wall Street and within a decade, that retail business had pretty much gone away. It probably should have gone away. Back in the day when I got into the business, commissions were set by the New York Stock Exchange and they were extremely generous. It was easy to make a great living as a broker. Along came some online services and really decimated that whole model. It’s been great for investors and put a lot of stock brokers out of work. I was one of them.

In the late ‘90s, as internet marketing was starting to come around, I was trying to rebuild a career as an internet marketer. I had some good times and some bad times, some good years and some bad years with that. I made a way and had a bunch of clients and we were doing some of our own products and doing some different things. One of the really cool products that we had a great success with was Rush Limbaugh neckties, of all the goofy things. Probably a lot of people that are on this if they’re a little bit older, may have even owned a Rush Limbaugh necktie. That was one of the first big internet marketing things that we did. It was very successful. We sold millions of Rush Limbaugh neckties.

I’ve got to just tell you upfront though as a confession, I don’t have a Rush Limbaugh necktie. I just have to tell you that so that you understand that I just don’t relate to that.

I don’t either and it was always a funny thing. Rush was a marketing thing and whether you agree or disagree with his politics, he was a heck of a stalking horse for ties, so we had a good time with it. At any rate, that came and went and we had a bunch of different products that we’re doing things with. The big change happened in 2003 when Google started Google News.

I think all of us who are alive for more than 40 years or so can relate to what you went through. It’s happened in several markets where all of a sudden, everything is incredible, the businesses are growing and sales are increasing and then some environmental change happens. All of a sudden, you find yourself from being a hero to literally being a zero. It sounds like that happened to you as a broker.

We had a place right on Wall Street. We had almost 100 brokers. We had 100 desks and it came and went a little bit. It was a going operation and a big deal. Literally within a couple of years, with the advent of E-Trade and some of the others that came around right then, the model just left. It was just gone.

This is what disruption is. This is how disruption works. The thing about disruption is that it leaves some people permanently crippled and it makes opportunity for others. I’ve been through this in several occasions myself. From your perspective, how did you see it? How long did it take for you to realize that this was truly an opportunity and not the disaster that it appeared to be at first?

YFTC 062 | LinkedIn Formulas
LinkedIn Formulas: There’s going to be a lot more disruption and a lot more things are going to be impacted by online businesses.

It was devastating and it was a complete loss and a complete setback. We had a lot of overhead associated with the business and all those things. We were slow to recognize the change probably. Some maybe were faster, some were a lot slower than we were. If you look at the names that have changed on Wall Street, if I looked back and thought that some of the names that were institutions when I was there would be gone a decade or two later. It’s just amazing to think about. We were probably middle of the pack in terms of recognizing and getting out. Not great at it by any means. What it really left me with was a sting that said, “There’s going to be a lot more disruption and a lot more things are going to be impacted by online businesses.” That was my resolution coming out of it was that I had to be doing things online. That some of the things that I had grown up with and seen as a child and seen as a young adult and seen at college and all those things, that lots of them were going to change. Frankly, I thought probably more would change than have changed. I’m a little surprised looking that the insurance model hasn’t disrupted more than it has. I was surprised that retail hasn’t been disrupted quite as fast as I thought it was, but it’s certainly happening right now.

We used to have a word for this back in the early days of the dot-com era. It used to be called disintermediation. Do you remember that word?

I do remember that word.

Before we move on to disintermediation and the way this has rippled through our world and our economy, were you the Jordan Belfort of your world? I’m sure you saw the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, which I thought was absolutely hilarious. I love that movie. Was that what your shop was like?

We were somewhere between that and Goldman Sachs. We did a lot of bonds but a lot of low-price bonds. We did a lot of that kind of thing. We did a lot of underwriting of small and mid-cap companies, but we weren’t really the penny stock slucksters that those guys portrayed. We were somewhere between that and Goldman Sachs. However, when I say Goldman Sachs, that’s for everybody else’s consumption. Goldman Sachs is a lot more like The Wolf of Wall Street than most people believe.

Let’s get back to the theme of disintermediation. Also let’s talk a little bit about some of the industries you mentioned because I think it’s relevant here. What started to happen back in the late 1990s was this word disintermediation which simply means to completely disrupt an economy or a business model with a newer, more efficient one. Many of those ideas of these young twenty-something dot-com entrepreneurs emerging as disintermediators absolutely fell flat on their face. We learned a lesson back then. The lesson was that people liked change but they don’t like to change too quickly. We saw companies like Furniture.com offer buying furniture on the internet, shocking people. What they later found out was that 40% of everything they sold got shipped back because it’s never really worked for people. It turns out that there were three Fs that you should not sell on the internet. One was furniture, food and footwear. Yet, all of those things now have changed. Isn’t that incredible?

You’re right. I’m wearing a pair of shoes that I bought on the internet. Most of our furniture and most of the little things around our house are bought on Overstock, so it has changed. Even the three F rules have changed. We’re not big internet food buyers right now, but my daughter who lives in Seattle does. Amazon has such a cool service up there. They have same-day delivery. You can order it online and all that kind of thing. I don’t think that’s sacred anymore either.

We’re in a world now where if you cannot adapt to change quickly, then you cannot adapt to life. You need to go get a job where you end up at the end of the money with a lot of month left over. That’s not good, is it?

It’s not. Let me give you one more thing, Mitch, to think about. I really am not a real estate guy, so I’m going to give you my observation as a guy around town. I’m in Salt Lake. I’m wondering and betting that you’re going to see the same thing in lots of cities throughout the United States. What we’re seeing right now is that big-box retail stores are being ripped down and what’s going up are apartments. For all of my professional life, all of my business life that I’ve been thinking about things, the idea of commercial has been the highest and best use for any piece of ground. Everybody wanted to upgrade or change their zoning so they could build commercial on their property, which was seen as much more valuable than residential. The trend right now around here is going the other way. Commercial is being ripped down, retail is being ripped down and apartments are being built in their place. Residential is being built in its place. I don’t know if anybody else is seeing that. I think that’s one of the most astounding things that I’ve seen in my professional life. It’s not that people are consuming less. It’s that they’re consuming in a different way. They’re not going to department stores and not going to the retail place to do as much of their shopping. It’s being delivered by the UPS guy.

It’s happening all over the country. I live in Massachusetts. I’m 35 miles outside of the city of Boston and we see this all the time. In fact, right off of 495 in the Marlborough area, a brand new commercial real estate building was built, a beautiful brick and glass building, literally a business class A space never ever rented. For the last seven years, it’s been sitting there idle. It’s now being converted into apartments. Not any type of apartments. Apartments that will be used to sell Airbnb services. It’s this move away from commercial space to either temporary or permanent residential space as rental apartments. We’re at the beginning of that trend, so I think you’re right. You’re seeing it in Seattle. I’m seeing it here in Massachusetts. I bet every listener who’s listening and tuning in is probably seeing it in their neighborhood too. What does this mean, Doug? Tell me what this means to you.

What it means to me is that there’s probably never been more opportunity for small businesses if you can deliver online. Whether it’s a service, a product or whatever it is. The idea of being an entrepreneur and going out and renting space and selling something retail is very dicey right now. That is not the way that I would go invest my hard-earned money or my time right now. Obviously, there are exceptions to that. Looking overall and looking on a macro world, if you’re in retail and you’re spending a whole lot of money on office buildings and presents, you’re probably going to get beat up at some point by someone that doesn’t have the same overhead that you have. The same can be said for employees. We outsource about 90% of what we do here at Newswire and at our new little company. By outsource, I mean there are people that work for us maybe even full-time but they don’t come into our office. They work remotely. The great thing there is we just don’t have the overhead. I shudder to remember the overhead that we had on Wall Street. It was incredible and it’s just not necessary any longer.

It was an arms race on Wall Street and it still is. I’ve seen people install millions of dollars worth of computer servers, and I have a friend on Wall Street who tells me about some of these stories. Within nine months, they’re ripped out and upgraded because there’s faster stuff available. First of all, I want to mention as a little plug for my own book, The Invisible Organization, if you are in a position where you’re watching your own retail business or your own commercial business shifting and want to be part of that, then read my book which is really a blueprint for taking your company virtual. Then the super powers you acquire after your company is virtual. Doug, after Wall Street, what did you do next?

At that point, we basically decided that we were going to start looking for products and services that we could sell online. This was mid-90s now and it really was just the very start of anything retail on the web. One of the first things we came up with is this Rush Limbaugh tie thing. We literally crushed the trunkline between Denver and Salt Lake City. We put so much traffic through it in such a short time that we crashed the internet. That stuff doesn’t happen anymore. We were fairly early adopters in terms of online retail.

What happened to that business? Did it continue to grow and flourish?

We sold it off. We were marketing guys, not clothing guys, so we sold it to a clothing manufacturer who fell out of bed with Rush and Rush got a divorce. The business went away right after we sold it. It was a good sale.

Timing was excellent. Not so much with the stock brokerage but certainly with this, it was excellent. What did you do next?

The next thing we did was we went from product to product looking for things that we could market. We had some winners and some failures, nothing really notable. Finding a homerun product to market online is obviously tough. I don’t feel like I’ve got a great system to do it. We actually went through a crash again. After the big high with the Rush Limbaugh thing, we muddled around with a few different products. We tried to do some more apparel products. We had a license with the NFL and Major League Baseball and did some of that stuff. It just wasn’t tremendously successful. We just kept looking for little products. That’s where we got into the Newswire thing.

In 2003, Google came up with a new search which was called Google News. At the time that they did that, it was actually separate from their normal Google search, their web search. We were one of the early adopters. Most of the things we were doing were search engine marketing based. We were doing search engine marketing is how we were trying to get all these different products sold. We started Newswire in order to get into Google News really with the idea that it was going to augment our search engine marketing. We looked at it as another search engine at that point in time. The search market was a lot different than it is today. We were trying to be in all the different markets. We saw Google News as just a new market. We applied for it and became a feed to Google News. That was Newswire.

For a few years, we used Newswire really as our own little organ to help with our search engine marketing. After a few years, it became apparent that the press release business was changing. We thought that there might be a way to disrupt there. People that have been around for a long time know that press releases used to be something that you would send out to the local newspaper or somewhere else, trying to get them to republish what you were doing. About the same time in mid 2000s, that’s when the newspaper model was really starting to change fast again and it was being disrupted by online stuff. The whole press release thing was changing along with that. Press releases through the mid 2000s went from something that were written with reporters as a target, to something that was written with readers as a target.

Targeting where those readers are obviously, which would be websites and the search engine itself. Let’s dissect this because what you did is you almost accidentally discovered the business that basically became your top line business for a long time.

Everything that I’ve ever done has been just blind luck by getting into it. Both good and bad, we just try and be there. We’ve suffered with changes and we’ve benefited from changes. I do not consider myself a great seer or forward-thinker. I’m just there and can give you my experiences that I’ve experienced as the ground has moved underneath my feet.

There used to be a TV commercial about this. Ideas arrive ugly. There’s a germ there somewhere that needs to be discovered and then the surface needs to be finely polished until it’s ready to be presented. Do you know the story of Federal Express?

I do very well. In fact, one of my friends was one of the guys that turned him down on his million-dollar investment that caused him to head to Las Vegas.

For our listeners who don’t know the story, it’s an interesting story. Fred Smith brought his thesis to his thesis instructor who gave him a C on his thesis. The idea that Fred had come up with was to absolutely find a way to decrease the time it took for checks to clear. His idea was to load banking checks onto a plane and then have them sorted over the course of the flight. When they land, it turned out to be Atlanta, they would then be routed directly physically to the banks themselves for clearing. Fred didn’t realize that, number one, the equipment to do all that sorting and processing was too heavy for the planes to lift along with thousands of pounds of paper checks. The fuel costs at the time were going through the roof. He got a C on his paper. Here’s the interesting thing. The note that was written was the thesis instructor said, “I really like the hub idea.” That became what we now know as Federal Express. Just like you, Doug, there was a germ of an idea there and it evolved into your core business. I want listeners to stop and think about all the things that they’re doing, even if you’re struggling. What part of your current business and business activities potentially might be your Newswire, your Federal Express?

That’s how it goes. You’ve got to pick through the ashes of your last experience and say, “What can continue on?” That’s the only way that you can remain sane and moving forward sometimes.

When you started Newswire, it was a house organ. You were doing it for your own purposes. Then somebody had the idea that, “Maybe we could do this for others too.” Maybe that was you, maybe it was your partner. When that idea happened, how did it change the company?

Frankly, we stole the idea. We saw someone else do it and thought, “We’re well-positioned to do that also.” I’m going to take no credit for it whatsoever.

All businesses are about stealing great ideas, as long as it’s not illegal.

We just saw what they were doing and thought with our Google News access we had a way to do the same thing, maybe do it a little better.

You were doing this for yourself, now you’re doing it for others. How did that change things for the business? Did you then stop looking for products to market and focus entirely on this new distribution idea?

YFTC 062 | LinkedIn Formulas
LinkedIn Formulas: Chasing products one at a time is a never-ending treadmill of successes and failures and high risk and high rewards.

Yes, entirely. That was one of the things that has contributed most to my sanity. Chasing products one at a time is a never-ending treadmill of successes and failures and high risk and high rewards sometimes and high failures. It’s a really tough life. I respect the people that do it well, but it is not easy. The Newswire thing became, in a lot of ways, a lot easier because it was more predictable revenue. People that started with you tended to stay with you. As opposed to a Rush Limbaugh tie, it didn’t go out of fashion. You didn’t get full of them. You didn’t have enough ties in your closet. It’s just one of those things that was able to basically continue. A good service beats a good product any day in my book. Maybe that’s my jade of chasing products for years and year and years. Obviously, there are repeatable products. If you have a disposable that people have to buy over and over and over again, that’s awesome. That’s the same thing. We were never really able to come up with a product like that that was totally consumable, that people reordered forever. Having a service made my life a lot easier, a lot happier and a lot more predictable.

Thank God you didn’t come up with that product because the Newswire might not have happened. How did you change your internal systems once you realized that you were in the press release business?

The cool thing is sometimes it’s just an evolution. It was not that huge of a change. The skills that we developed in selling products equated very well to selling services. The skills that we had acquired in terms of marketing other things worked pretty well for marketing the service of Newswire, with the one change that our focus obviously was a little bit different. Instead of going after consumers, we were now going after more of a business-to-business deal where our primary customers for Newswire are agencies of one sort or another, people that are advertising or PR agencies or people that deal with clients. The focus changed a little bit and there are nuances in dealing with B2B as opposed to B2C, but not that big a deal. It was a fairly easy transition.

I see what you’re saying, but I think you’re glossing over some of what you had to do. I want to stop and do a little deep dive on that as well. When you decided to go after businesses, you now had to shift your focus to, number one, defining exactly who your target market was, which you said were agencies at the time. Number two, you then needed to go and figure out how to reach those agencies. Number three, you had to do an enormous amount of testing and price variations to see what would sell and how you could bundle and all these elements of building the business. Did you know all this in the beginning or did this evolve over time as well?

I knew it in the beginning because that’s exactly how we approached each and every one of our products. The formula you just outlined, I appreciate the way you’ve outlined it. I don’t know that I ever really have thought about it too specifically like that. The first step for any business is to define who their customer is. You need to make an avatar of who that customer is and you need to do it as carefully as possible because it’s really the most important thing you’ll ever do with your business. Not to say that it won’t change and morph over time, but unless you know who that perfect customer is, there’s no way you know how to target them. You have to, first, decide who it is. You have to, second, decide how you’re going to get to them. Then you just do the normal product stuff which is a split test, split test, split test. This is marketing 101. You have to have a method in place to split test so you can refine your message, so you can refine your price, so that you can refine your product. The one thing that we learned in almost ten years of chasing products was how to split test. Unless you’re split testing, you’re just kidding yourself.

Let’s progress the story a bit further here. When did LinkedIn come into the picture?

LinkedIn came into the picture in around 2012. We had operated Newswire at this point as a going out and getting business venture for three or four years. We were starting to see flat growth with it. What that really boiled down to is that the methods that we had used in the past to go out and get new customers were becoming less and less scalable and less and less cost-effective. We were doing things like webinars and things like PPC. Search engine marketing had gotten very tough. It’s still there. It’s still valuable but it’s really tough to break into. The way Google changes things all the time, it got tougher and tougher to continue growing through search engine marketing. It got tougher and tougher to make things pay on PPC through Google and through the different PPC platforms. The patience for people to go out and get on sales webinars started to decrease. We were stuck in a thing where the things that had worked for a while were not working as well. We were basically having a hard time continuing to grow with those things. We had a good avatar of who our customers are, so the question became, “If we can’t reach them through pay-per-click, if we can’t reach them through search engine marketing, if we can’t reach them through webinars, where can we reach them?” LinkedIn at that point in time had 200 million users. It seemed like a good place to start. We thought, “How about if we just try and figure out how to reach people through LinkedIn, where they are?” It’s increased significantly since then.

From what I remember in that era, LinkedIn to me anyway was nothing more than a place to list your resume. How did you figure out how to reach the people that you thought would be interested in your services?

That’s where a little pioneering came in. In fact, I know we’re not the only people that were doing things like that and starting to do things like that. There really wasn’t a roadmap. There wasn’t really someone we could go to and say, “Give us a course or buy a course or consult with us and tell us how to do that.” It was a lot of trial and error. The thing that we realized right off the bat is even though LinkedIn was a place for resumes, those dang resumes had all the information we needed to identify our customers. We knew what their title was, who they worked for, how long they had worked there, what their seniority level was. The information was there. We needed to figure out how to get it and use it and connect with those people and let them know about our service.

Fast forward to today, many, many more people now are selling courses on how to market on LinkedIn. I bought a course and I started marketing on LinkedIn. With your help, I ended up being very successful marketing on LinkedIn. You have a certain way of doing things and I wanted to talk about your current company. What’s the name of your current company?

It’s Szeak.com.

I’ve been a client of Doug’s now for about four or five months. I’ll tell you the problem I had and why I went to Doug about it. I learned how to market on LinkedIn and the first element of marketing on LinkedIn is to build a base of connections or to connect with as many people in your target market, using your avatar, that you possibly can. Once you’ve made those connections, the idea is to begin conversations by warming them up with messages. That could mean many things: lots of messages, short messages and targeted messages. Once I started to understand how all of this worked, I then spent several hours a day trying to build this base of connections. I don’t know about you, listeners, and you, Doug, how you feel about this but that to me is a very tedious thing to do. I know that with my short attention span, sometimes I lose interest. I don’t think that I would have kept doing it if it hadn’t been for your services. My perspective was that if I could find somebody to do the tedious work for me to build the connections and to send those initial messages, I would love to have those conversations with people who stand up and say, “I’d like to talk to you.” Doug, tell us a little bit about what your company does.

The evolution of LinkedIn for us at Newswire was we run into exactly the problem that you’re talking about. Even though it was very effective to connect through LinkedIn, it was very time-consuming and very tedious. We set about to basically make formulas out of it that could be followed by people that are less skilled than the entrepreneur; their time is less valuable than your time, Mitch. We were able to make a few little tools to help us. Basically, we were able to turn it into formulas and repeatable things that meet the LinkedIn terms of service so we’re not abusing them in any way, but a way to scale it up with little pain to the business that we’re getting leads for. That’s what we did for ourselves. Here’s the evolution. With Newswire, we started running more and more profiles for people because there’s only so much you can do in any given profile on a given day. Your experience is that it took you three or four hours a day. It was soon a full-time job around here. The sales guys were spending as much time connecting or more than they were actually talking to people. That crashed, so we had to come up with some better systems. That’s what we did.

After running those systems for a year and a half or so, we had another one of those little ‘pick the pieces out of the ruins.’ Not that Newswire was in ruins, far from it, but we started thinking that maybe the systems that we’d come up with and the tools that we’d come up with might have value of their own. Indeed, they do. We formed Szeak as a LinkedIn marketing consultancy and resource for businesses that want to sell to other businesses, leveraging the power of LinkedIn. That’s how we were able to do what we do. That’s what we do for you is we’ve taken some of the systems that we developed and the tools that we developed to implement those systems and standardize them in a way that it’s repeatable and really turns into a service that we can provide for you as doing for you maybe a little better than you could do for yourself, but basically what you could do for yourself. Maybe doing it a little better but doing it painlessly.

That’s the key point to me is that it’s painless. The other thing that I want to mention here is that I’ve been a software developer and I started that many years ago. I understand that world and I know that you’re glossing over the fact that there were many iterations of defining these algorithms, perfecting them and then automating them and then building durable systems that will run reliably without attracting negative attention from LinkedIn itself. I know that that was part of it. It had to be.

It was a huge part of it. I glossed over that part of it. Newswire itself was a big software development project. We have some resources and some skills there in terms of making user interfaces and making software as services. We were well-equipped to do that and used resources that we had here to do that. It took a lot and still takes a lot. LinkedIn is an ever-changing target. When it was acquired by Microsoft, it started changing faster. It continues to change. It’s a moving target that we stay on top of continually. It works great. There were plenty that went into the software side of it for sure.

Doug, the company is in existence today. It’s growing. You do a great job because I’m a client and I can say that. At this stage in your life, you’ve evolved to the point now where you have effectively two well-run businesses. There’s got to be a shift in your attention and that must mean, like most of us, that there’s a bigger picture. I want to talk a little bit about that bigger picture if I can. I have a question for you and that will help me better understand what that bigger picture is for you. Who, in all of space and time, would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch or an intense conversation with?

Abraham Lincoln.

Tell me why.

I hope that I wouldn’t be disillusioned with that talk in the park, but I don’t think I would. I think that Abraham Lincoln was an extremely forward-thinker in terms of the human condition. That’s my passion outside of business is the human condition. I spend a little time working on a non-profit that deals with education in Central America. Just the human condition interests me and the equality of people and how we don’t always see that and how we can work on the human condition. I just think that Abraham Lincoln was extremely forward-thinking in terms of the human condition and how we all should figure out how to get along with each other.

Abraham Lincoln was mentioned and for very much the same reason, so you’re in good company. This is a perfect segue way into the second question which is, what is it that you’re doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to literally change the world?

The little charity that we work on in Central America is called One Life At A Time. That’s how I view it. I don’t think that the world can be changed by somebody like me. What I can do is impact one life at a time. If we do enough of that, the world changes. One life at a time, I can understand that. I can pick one person that I can make a difference in their life. If enough of us did that, everything would change, so one life at a time.

Doug, we have a lot in common in that regard as well. I see your mission and I salute you for taking the time and resources to move people one life at a time. Thank you for doing that. It is a contribution to changing the world. I think it’s a valid one.

Thank you. That’s the thing that I like to preach. The world is a really weird and scary place right now and maybe weirder and scarier than it was even a few years ago. That just can’t deter us from individually doing what we can do and not getting lost in the forest, but just pick one little tree out that we can improve. That’s what I can do.

Doug, we talked a lot about your history and your background. I think it’s been very inspiring to hear your story. Honestly, I know that there are going to be people who listen to this show and say, “How do I get a hold of this guy? I want to learn more about who he is and what he does and in particular, this whole LinkedIn thing.” How would people do that?

Just email me or go to our website and there’s contact there, Szeak.com. You can contact me there easily enough. My email address is [email protected]. I have a lot of training on my website for people that want to start this out on their own. Don’t think that you need to hire us or whatever. There are things that you can do. If you want to dip your toe into LinkedIn, I’d love you to go on to our website, see some of the resources and see if it’s for you. Once you figure out that it is for you, like we did for Mitch, if we can help you do it faster and better, great. If you’ve got it figured out to the level that works for you, even better.

Thank you very much for offering that. I know that there will be listeners who go to that website and seek out that information. I’m glad it’s there. Doug, this has been a fantastic conversation. I want to thank you again for being on my show.

Thanks for the time. Thanks for the platform. I appreciate you.

 

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