Real-World Strategies to Solve Marketing, Sales, and Business Development Challenges with Lael Sturm of LPSS Digital Marketing

Plan Better EventsSmart Event TipsLeadership Insights

Apr 21

In this episode…

Finding unique insights and tools that allow your organization to grow and scale can be a daunting task. There are companies that know how to monetize, particularly through online marketing, but where can you find them?

In this episode, Paige Buck sits down with Lael Sturm, the Founder and General Manager at LPSS Digital Marketing, to discuss top tips for adding value to your business. Lael talks about the three things that LPSS does for its clients, the importance of having a mentor, and why you need to update your strategies to get you to the next level. Tune in to learn real-world tactics that will solve your business challenges.

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journeys. Now let's get started with the show. Paige Buck, here I am the co-host of this show where we feature top entrepreneurs and business leaders sharing their stories. Upcoming guests will include Franco Winchester, co-founder and Managing Partner of Pacific Crest Group, Rudy Mutter, co-founder of Yeti, and Rob Castaneda, founder and CEO of Service Rocket. This episode is brought to you by EO San Francisco. The Entrepreneurs Organization is a global peer-to-peer network of more than 140 plus influential business owners with 198 chapters in 61 countries. If you are the founder, co-founder, owner, or controlling shareholder of a company generating more than a million a year in revenues, we want to connect you with other like-minded, successful entrepreneurs and EO is for you. The EO San Francisco chapter enables leading entrepreneurs in the Bay Area to learn, grow and achieve greater success. The Eosf Chapter was founded in 1991 and today we have over 100 members and industries ranging from marketing to agriculture to tech and professional services. To learn how it works or to come to a test drive. Join us@eonetwork.org, San Francisco this episode is also brought to you by my company, Kennedy Events. Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate needs, from in-person to hybrid and virtual events. You can learn more about us at Kennedy Events dot com and my guest today is Lael Sturm, the founder of LPSS Digital Marketing. LPSS has been in business since the early days of Internet marketing and provides digital marketing solutions and strategic advice for companies of all sizes. Leah is also a dear friend of mine and a member of the Bay Area Accelerator Program. Welcome, Leo. Thanks, Paige. It's great to be here. Yeah, we're going to have fun. So how did you get started with LTS? What was the impetus? Well, the short version is I came out of college right around the time that the Internet started happening, and I didn't go right into the Internet. I went into the music industry and a friend of mine did a start-up and immediately sold it. And I was like, oh, there's something there. So I started teaching myself about the Internet, learned to code a little bit, parlayed that into a job in the kind of burgeoning tech sector in San Francisco, and sparing you some of the gory details, wound up working in that industry before going back to the music industry in New York and supporting a number of companies there in their early Internet efforts. Ultimately, I wound up at MTV. MTV sent me to business school, and at the time in business school, everybody well, not everybody, but most people were bankers and big firm consultants, but a lot of people had startup fever, and I was one of the few people that they knew who had any startup or Internet experience. And so I was over beers, giving advice on people's projects. And that eventually turned into consulting. And consulting led to starting a practice doing that for money, not just for beer. And one thing led to another. And over the course of many years, the firm evolved from a consulting practice to an agency, with the distinction being that consultants give advice and guide people, and agencies do. We're an execution firm. As an agency, we've made the pivot. Now to almost entirely supporting businesses with their digital marketing efforts. Sort of plugging in as an outsourced marketing team. Wow. Okay, so you're certainly not doing this for beer anymore. Sometimes I like your distinction that consultants advise an agency is due and you've been doing now for quite some time, but it sounds like you've been doing it since before there were phrases like SEO. What does some of the doing look like for your clients? Or what are some favorite examples of things you've done for clients to make a difference in their digital strategy? Yeah. So to your point, we started in the earliest days of Google. Google was a brand new thing. Facebook hadn't been dreamt up yet. There weren't even kind of the precursors of social media. It just wasn't even a concept. In the early days, what we were doing was a lot of what you might find in, like, radio promotions, when a chance to do whatever, sign up here to get a free whatever. Dancing babies. There were no dancing babies in my career, but yeah, that was a meme. So that was a thing for a while. But through the years, we've really refined the offering, and now we do three things and three things only, and we're happy to make referrals to people who do other things. But the things that we do are organic social media, where we're crafting posts for our clients, business profiles, posting that stuff out, generating engagement, building audience, really demonstrating expertise through these online channels. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, that sort of thing. And then we're doing paid advertising on all of the digital platforms. Most of the money goes to Google, Facebook, and Instagram. But we support clients with ads on Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn, of course. And then the third thing we do is search engine optimization, where we're helping our clients get their sites consistent and compliant with Google best practices. We're creating keyword, dense content to post on their sites, and we're building inbound links to demonstrate that other sites value the content that's being created. So those are the three things we do. Organic social media, paid ads, and search engine optimization. And the reason we do those three things is because those three things are very measurable and are consistent with one of our core values, which is that marketing is an investment. And if you're going to make an investment in anything, whether it's the stock market or real estate or Bitcoin or anything, you should be able to measure the return on that investment so that you can make an informed decision about what to do. Should you continue? Should you do more? Should you do less? Should you reallocate that investment? So we only want to do things that can be measured and that we can tie directly to the return on our clients. Marketing investment. Wow, I love that. And what you said about marketing as an investment kind of dovetails with some things. I've actually heard it recently. Okay. Talks about thinking about every dollar you spend is an investment, and some of them aren't practically measurable, and many of them should be. And you probably aren't thinking of them that way. Right. So it's great that you've honed in on measurability. What are some things when people first come to you or maybe when the wrong person comes to you for this service that they just don't understand or get wrong about what you do or the nature of this sort of work? Yeah, it's a great question and perhaps not something that I've thought about really clearly in this way before. I can say we get a lot of people who come to us either with unreasonable expectations. The example is they want to land a man on Mars. Well, that's never been done before, so I can't say that we can do that. Aside from the fact that we don't offer space travel. It's just an example of something that hasn't been done before. So our best clients have a growth mindset around their business, and they can articulate what their goals are. And ambitious goals are terrific. But unreasonable goals sometimes need to be managed. So, for example, if a prospect were to come in the door and say, hey, look, we're doing $2 million in revenue. We've been flat at 2 million for the last three years. We'd like to increase revenue by 50% over the next 18 months. Great, we can do that. That's a measurable goal. You've got a business. There's already revenue associated with it. We can look at the actual granular data to see how you're doing and tell you if we're going to be able to support you to reach that goal. If you come in the door with a PowerPoint presentation and say, hey, I've got a really good idea. I want to launch something that's going to make me $100 million or have a billion-dollar exit in the next five years. I don't know if we can help you with that. Maybe. But we work really well with businesses that already have a revenue model. They already have a profitable business, and they just want to accelerate their growth. They want to hit that next milestone. And what they're doing isn't getting them there. They need to do something different. It's like you can't lead. I was going to mix a bunch of metaphors. You can't lead a million horses to water if you have absolutely no idea if there's even anything there for them to drink. That's right. And it's a little funny saying this, coming out of a startup background and even an entertainment industry background. I was in the music industry. That's a hit-driven business. Like you want to have a single that everybody's listening to, and knowing that you have a single before everyone's listening to it is really, really tough. But the same with the startup world. The startup world is really hit-driven. You're going to hit it big, you're going to have a massive exit. Everybody's going to get phenomenally rich. We tend to work better with more boring businesses. Not to diminish what anybody is doing, but if you've got a law firm or a dry cleaner or yard care business and you want to hit your revenue goals, great, we can work with that because we know that people are paying for that service. You're not going to have a billion-dollar exit. But that's okay. You could have a $50 million annual revenue business, honestly with any of those. So we love that. We love tangible Main Street, kind of more boring, more common, more easily understood concepts. We love that. Got it. Who are maybe not directly in your business, but in life or in the broader business world. Who are some of your mentors? Well, to your point, I'm in EOS, and EO is just full of inspiration. I actually have an actual coach who I adore. I don't always agree with the coaching that I get, but it makes me think and it inspires me to action. And I've had a number of coaches through my work with Yo. Each one brought a different perspective and motivated me in unique ways. So I would say, broadly speaking, EO coaches absolutely are some of the best mentors throughout my career. I've had other mentors and even peers that inspired me. I mentioned briefly I started my career in the music industry working at a booking agency. And the guy, you know, I was an assistant. Another assistant, basically, the guy across the desk from me had this startup idea, and he built this thing in his living room and sold it for what at the time felt like an insane amount of money in about six months, even though he was a friend and we were the same age, we both graduated College at the same time, and we hung out together here. All of a sudden, he had this idea. He made it happen. He sold it. I was inspired by that. I was moved by that. And that actually propelled my career towards technology, where otherwise it would have been the music industry, which is great. I had a lot of fun working in the music industry, but I really owe him a massive debt because he inspired me. It sparked something. Yeah, neat. I think you and I have both been in a lot of spaces in EO and accelerator programs where the phrase and I think it's the title or the subtitle of a business book. What got you here won't get you there, right? Can you tell me about a time when that phrase really resonated with you within your work when you recognize how you made a shift? Yeah. Something that's really top of mind right now because we, as an organization, have really changed our strategy in the last certainly six months, maybe a little bit longer. I'm a relationship guy. I get out in the world, I meet people, I try to add value for them whether we work together or not, and often that reaps benefits. So they then come to me and they want to engage my firm because we have a relationship or their brother in law is a lawyer in a six-person practice, and they want to grow into a new practice area. And so they refer them they refer their brother in law to me because I'm a trusted adviser and I can support people within their network. That's been great. But the phrases what got you here won't get you there. I was looking at my own business and saying, hey, guys, look, we help clients with these aggressive growth goals, and we're not hitting our growth goals. And I looked at our business development channels and I thought, wait, this is 100% dependent on me going to networking events or me sitting next to somebody on an airplane or me reaching out to somebody that I went to business school with and hoping that they've got a referral from me. 100% referral selling was not going to get me to aggressive growth goals. I had to take my own medicine, start using some of the marketing techniques that we were supporting our clients on, and also get really serious about not being the bottleneck in the sales process. I couldn't be the only person selling. So what we did was completely changed the culture of our whole business so that everybody on the team, no matter what you do, no matter whether as the founder, whether you're an administrative assistant, whether you're somebody that's actually creating content for clients. Every single person on the team does sales training every single day, whether their job includes selling or not. Plus we built out the sales team so that now I've got four people that are prospecting, that are reaching out to viable prospects, that are setting appointments, that are closing sales so that it's not totally dependent on me. So what I did was I looked at what we were doing, recognized that it wasn't going to get us to that next level, changed course, completely revamped the wholesale strategy, the whole sales approach, and now we're a sales organization and we're equipped to get to that next level. And even in the last few months, we're seeing tremendous rewards. I'm busy in a way that I've not been busy before, but because there's a lot more business coming, that's phenomenal. And you shared that recently in the slack channel that we have with other accelerators. And absolutely. My business partner, Maggie was like, copy that. Over into our level ten meeting agenda for the two of us to say, wait, Leo said this. We need to talk about this. We need to think about this with a respect to our own team. That really struck me. How is it for you? Is it freeing you up yet from that burden of being dependent on me, on the plane, on me at the coffee? Yes and no. Most of the closing still is my job. So no matter how warm the lead is, no matter how ready they are to go, I still have to walk them over the finish line. And sometimes that just means preparing the document for them to sign. But I see a day, and hopefully, it's in this calendar year, but I see a day where that's not the case where more deals are coming through other people. In fact, one of my dreams, and this doesn't feel overly ambitious to say, is that I'd like to have a client who is paying us money to whom I've never spoken. That's my goal. And as a small business person, it's almost inconceivable. But if you take it to, like, the absurd extreme, the CEO of Ford doesn't know everybody that buys a Ford F-150 truck. Absolutely. They just don't. I don't know that we're going to be a publicly-traded auto manufacturer anytime soon, but my goal is that we've got a client roster that includes people that were brought in by other members of my team, that are supported by other members of my team, and then on our team check-in call, I can say, hey, who is this? What are we doing for this guy? Like, how are we supporting this business? And how can I empower you as a team to continue to work well for clients like this and future clients? It sounds like you've got a team now who knows how to woo, knows how to nurture, knows how to warm them up, and now you've just got to make the shift to what it takes to close and run with it. That's true. Nice. So this is potential. This is like you're watching a turning point happen as it's happening for your company. Can you think of an earlier turning point or shift and what that felt like? Yeah. So I touched on this when I was giving you the short version of my career. Initially, this was a consulting practice, and it wasn't just a consulting practice. It was one of those like, I'll do consulting when I don't have a job at a start-up or when I'm not working for some music industry company or whatever. Yeah, I guess I'm a consultant. And I think a lot of people come to consulting like that. They're between gigs or the thing that they were working on flamed out or something. And so they say, Well, I've got some expertise, I'm going to be a consultant. So that was totally my case. Two inflection points happen that I want to share. One is I came to the realization that I wasn't consulting between gigs, I was doing gigs between consulting, and that ultimately I liked the consulting more than I liked being a full-time employee, even though in the startup world the equity compensation was really compelling. And I like being a part of a team. I really found great satisfaction in having multiple projects at the same time and being able to cross-pollinate to connect one group of people to another and not being constrained to sit at one desk all the time. You had a side hustle before it was called a side hustle. That's right. Yeah, I always had a side hustle. Partly it's my attention issues. I just need a thousand things happening at one time in order to keep me satisfied. Talk to me a little bit about that. So what fuels you and how would you describe your attention issues, as you put it, and then what do you do to fuel it or to calm it down? Yeah, I like to have lots of balls in the air at the same time. Even though I fully recognize that multitasking is not a thing, it's not productive. So you're much better off focusing on one thing and then shifting to do something else rather than doing it all at the same time. I've gotten good at that. So I'm not doing 1000 things at the same time. But I do always have like a side passion project. There's always something else. And I know I've mentioned this to you before. We do these three services for our clients, we do the organic social, we do the paid ads, we do the SEO. What we were finding was there's a decent amount of client interaction that's required we need approvals on things before they go out. We need to make sure that they're reading the reports, that they know what's going on with their campaigns. And often busy founders don't have time to deal with it or they don't make the appropriate time and they're resource constraints, they're short on people and they're short on time and they're short on energy. So what we started doing about a year ago was placing remote assistance overseas into our client companies as kind of an extra hand here's, an assistant at a fraction of the cost of bringing on a US resource that is going to do whatever you need, whether it's research, whether it's responding to customer service tickets, whether it's booking, travel, whatever you need an assistant to do, they'll do. But they're a member of your marketing team and by extension, they're a member of our team. And so they're going to float stuff that needs approval up to you on a regular basis so that we can make sure to keep your campaigns moving and we got real traction with that. Clients said, oh, my God, this is great. We're short-handed. There's a labor shortage in the US right now. This is amazing. We can definitely use an extra set of hands. And it's great that there are marketing-enabled assistants that can do some of the low-level marketing stuff and help us prioritize marketing. So it turned out to be a real value add and it's become such a value add. And this is where it gets back to your question about my attention issues. It's become such a value add that we've decided to spin this off into a separate business. So there's going to be a separate entity that is not LPSS digital marketing. The name is TBD, but it's not literally TBD, but it will be announced shortly that provides remote assistance overseas to support not just our marketing clients, but anybody that's short-handed, that needs an extra set of hands to get all of the work done. That needs to get done. And these are high quality, highly-skilled, well trained, well-managed team members who we actually sit in the slack channel with to make sure that they understand what's being expected of them, to support them if they encounter challenges that they're not sure how to address, and to make sure that they're a productive member of the team. That's exciting. Yeah. So it scratches my attention itch because it's this other thing that I think about when I'm not focused on my core business. And it provides tremendous value to our clients, which is another core value. And it is an interesting thing to think about. And you've already got proof of concept with one or more clients where this is effective for that client's work. That's right. That's great. Yeah. That's really great. Yes. Earlier you said you think of yourself as a relationship guy and a trusted advisor. And I had already kind of flagged in my mind that I think of you as a super-connector, someone who loves to and can't help but always be thinking of others and introducing them to one another like a business matchmaker. You need to know this person. You need to know this group. You need to join this organization. Why aren't you already here? And can you tell me a little bit about how that helps you in your business, Besides maybe scratching that attention deficit a little bit? Right. It solves a number of challenges for me to provide this sort of matchmaking or introduction service to my network. One, it gives me a way to provide value. It's sort of like giving away something that doesn't cost me anything. You don't have a bookkeeper? Let me introduce you to my bookkeeper who does terrific work. Oh, you're looking for a network of like-minded entrepreneurs. I'm a member of a group of like-minded entrepreneurs. Why don't you come to an event and we'll tell you about EO? So I'm giving something that I have that there's no cost. It's gratifying. It's like philanthropy in some ways. Yeah. But I'm also providing value to that person so that that person then says, wow, Leo provides tremendous value. Leil is a real asset. Leo is somebody that we want to continue having conversations with and doing business with. So it reflects back on me. And sometimes that means I get referrals, and sometimes it means that I get direct business. And sometimes it means that they think of me when they've got an introduction, that they encounter somebody and they say, hey, you know who you should know? You should know Leo. So it's a virtuous cycle. It's a virtuous cycle. Yeah. I was like, sometimes it's just good Karma. Sometimes it's just good Karma. Yeah. Do. Yeah. I like your comparison to it being like philanthropy. Do you have a favorite lesson from EO Accelerator that you've applied to your business? Yeah, I went to Columbia Business School. It's one of the top finance programs in the world. I was never a finance guy. I was a marketing guy. I was a technology guy. I was a media guy. All of these things, none of it was finance. And I remember my first finance class at Columbia. It blew my mind. I mean, literally 1 hour in, I was like, this is finance. This is super cool. Why did I never do this? I never thought I had math aptitude. And here I was loving finance. Anyway, I Dove into finance with both feet. I mean, I was all in on finance classes when I was at Columbia, and for a time entertained maybe going into finance. Now, ultimately, that isn't where my career took me, but I learned a lot about it and was kind of passionate about it. I loved my accounting class. When the balance sheet balances. I'm just like, oh, my God, this is magic. So I'm really into that. And as a business owner with a fancy finance degree, I thought, Well, I don't need financial advice day. I don't need cash day. I don't need a bookkeeper. I could do my own taxes. Why would I pay for these things? I got this. Well, the truth is, I didn't have it. I knew the basics. I can absolutely have a conversation about cash-based or cruel-based accounting. I know enough to be really irritating to finance professionals, but I wasn't really doing the work in my own business. I was sort of coasting on the fact that I had this fancy degree and EO very quickly helped me realize that my numbers were a mess. Everything about my financials was a mess. I needed to hire somebody else to think about it so that I could focus on making the important decisions about my business and growing and going forward, and that I didn't have to do everything. Just because I could do it didn't mean that I should do it. I'm the CEO. I should have somebody else that does it, and I should ask them questions about it to make sure that they're doing it the way I want them to do it. So long story short, not just hire a bookkeeper, but you don't have to do everything in your own business. And if you do everything in your own business, you're really limiting your growth potential. Yeah, that's a big one. That's a big one for sure. That's the whole like, you should be working on your business, not in your business. And you're like, but it's me and one other person. Who else is going to do this slowly pulling out? Yeah, I resonate with that. So what's an ideal business day for you? And do you have any daily rituals that are essential? Yeah. So I'm really happy talking to people. So I want to have meetings. Like, my ideal day includes meetings, but not back to back all day long. So Zoom is exhausting and much rather meet with two or three people in person throughout the course of a day than do eight back-to-back Zoom meetings, even though eight back-to-back Zoom meetings give me far more reach. I mean, there's far more opportunity in talking to eight people than in talking to three people. But my ideal day includes talking to people, and some percentage of those people should be prospects. I like selling because I believe in what we do and I believe in the results that we deliver for our clients. So I like pitching. As far as rituals, I have all sorts of rituals. I am Mr. Ritual, so I get up early every day. I exercise. I have a meditative practice that I do. We do sales training on my team, everybody, including me, every single day. Sales training, there is a daily sales rally that we have access to through the sales training that we subscribe to, that hundreds of people turn up to every single day. I do that. And really, I'm a firm believer that everything you do has to be done the same way in order to get the results you want. So it's as simple as if you're not having success, where is your life? Out of order. So my bed is made every single day. I don't get out of bed and leave it unmade. My dishes are in the dishwasher. They're not sitting in the sink waiting for somebody to pay attention to them. My house has to be in order in order for my work life to be in order. So I really believe that how you do anything is how you do everything. And so it comes down to my ritual. That's great. I really perked up when you said this but I'm not sure I had appreciated it. But when you were saying that your whole team does sales training, you're talking about daily training. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a bunch of programs out there, everybody can find the one that's right for them. The program that we use includes hundreds of hours of prerecorded videos, but it also includes these live daily sessions, daily, Monday through Friday at 07:00 a.m. So at 07:00 a.m., I get on this Zoom call with 200 other people and there's role-playing, and there's questions, and there's learning. And then I also do these recorded videos and some of it's new to me and some of it's not new. Some of it is repetition, but repetition is what it takes. I need to be reminded I don't have everything top of mind. I'm in a different place today than I was yesterday, so I bring a different perspective to it each time. My team is expected to train every single day. Now, because of various time zones, it's not always appropriate for them to join the 07:00 a.m. Sales rally, but they must watch a pre-recorded video, at least one every day, Monday through Friday. And we're a data-supported operation. Everything we do is based on data. I've got data on who's training and when. And actually, compensation is based on training. So if you miss a day of training, your compensation suffers. So in order to get your full compensation, you must train every day. It's a little bit tricky because initially when people come in, it feels like a burden. It's like something they have to do in order to get their compensation. But what it has turned into is actually a bonus where they're learning something that they otherwise would not learn, that's theirs forever. And if this is not the last job they ever have, which, let's be honest, it's probably not the last job they'll ever have. They're going to take this training with them and they can apply this skill elsewhere. So what I'm doing is I'm encouraging them to get in the habit of training, but really, I'm giving them the gift of training to make them more successful in their career. Love that. Wow, that's huge. Aha, I love it. Okay, fun question for you. What is the craziest thing you have ever done? Ever? Sales training. Oh, man. I definitely was not prepared for this question. I spent a large part of my career in the music industry, and there were all sorts of terrible, terrible choices that I made late at night in strange places. It's a mistake you ever made. Some of those are not safe for business conversation, but I can say, okay, here's one that I definitely have some regret about. So I'm being vulnerable here, but it's also not too alarming. When I worked at MTV in New York, we bought the company that owned Country Music Television. And Country Music Television, naturally, was based in Nashville. So as the promotions guy, I used to have to go down to Nashville to work with them on promotions. And in Nashville, I was at a barbecue at the then-President of Country Music Television at his ranch or something, and it was a super fun party, but he was given out. Not him, but at the party, they had Mason jars with moonshine in them. And so I went. I was drinking moonshine out of a Mason jar, and that stuff is potent. So I wasn't totally in my right mind. And I jumped off something that was much higher than I should have jumped off it and shattered my ankle into a million pieces. It blew up like a sideways football in my leg. They added more moonshine to kill the pain a little bit, threw me in the back of a classic Cadillac, and rushed me to the emergency room. At the emergency room, yeah, it was bad. The doctor said you will never walk on this ever again. So it was bad judgment. It was stupid. Ultimately, they pumped me full of morphine and put me on the airplane back to New York. In New York, I went to a surgeon whose waiting room was covered in pictures of New York Knicks and New York ballerinas. So I was like, okay, I'm in the right place. He said you're going to walk again. You're going to be just fine. My right ankle is full of metal. I mean, it looks like they just opened it up and scooped a whole bunch of metal. In fact, he rebuilt the whole thing. So I'm part Bionic, and I walk just fine. And I ski and I play tennis, and I do all of the things that somebody with a regular ankle should be able to do. But that was bad judgment. And I wouldn't say it haunts me every day, but I definitely look at it and think, what was I thinking about? Wow. That is a crazy story. Wow. And so many takeaways. Besides, don't drink moonshine and jump off of something really high. Sometimes the worst news you get isn't going to last that's big. That's right. All right, I have a closing question for you. You don't have to be as vulnerable unless you choose to be your favorite tool and software for getting the job done. Okay, good question. So we rely pretty heavily on Slack for internal communication, but also as a part of this new remote assistant business that we're rolling out, we sit in our clients' Slack rooms to make sure that the assistants are doing what's expected of them. When a client says to me, hey, we don't use Slack or I don't really know about Slack or something, that's a bit of a challenge. It's not insurmountable, but I would say Slack has definitely proven its utility. Obviously, Zoom is a super important thing for meeting over distance, and then we rely incredibly heavily on our CRM. So when I encounter businesses that have growth goals and are not using a proper, powerful CRM, that's an opportunity for us to say, hey, look, you should try this. What's your CRM? Of choice. We use copper CRM, which has been great. Integrates really nicely with the Google suite, which we built our business on. It works nicely with the phone software that we use for dialing prospects. There are a lot of advantages to it. I've used probably half dozen other CRMs. They're all great and terrible. Every single one has its advantages and disadvantages. So it's worth finding one that fits your business and fits your goals and also be prepared to outgrow it. You might get started on something and it's not adaptable enough and you have to move. We had a prospect tell us that their CRM shut down the other day. We said that it's not sustainable. You have to get set up with something else. Fixing this thing and having it break it again. It's not going to work. You cannot go back to a Rolodex or a spreadsheet. That's right. That's right. And you also can't keep it all up here. You're not going to remember as much as you think you're going to remember or you're going to remember it, but you're not going to know who to attribute it to. Who's the one who said that his wife was going to the hospital and that I should call back in two weeks. Was it this one or was it that one? So you have to use tools to keep track of that stuff. Oh, yeah. 100% great guidance. Cool. Well, I have been talking with Lail Sturm, the founder of LPs digital marketing. Lail, where can people find you? How can they get in touch with you? Yeah. So best bet is to visit the website LPSS dot co. Now. It's important. It's not a dot com; it's a co, so LPSS co is a great resource. We're also available on all of the socials: LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook are all great, and I’m happy to connect with anybody that has marketing questions or is looking to expand their team using remote assistance. Awesome. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, Leo. Thank you. Paige. Thanks for listening to the Rising Entrepreneurs podcast. This episode is powered by Rise 25. Please subscribe and check out future episodes.

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PAIGE BUCK

Paige Buck is the co-owner of Kennedy Events, a large-scale event management company based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our team creates stress-free conferences and events with a positive impact, which allows our clients to resonate with their audience. Kennedy Events specializes in producing flawless product launches, award ceremonies, fundraisers, and multi-day conferences while keeping our eye on retention and engagement goals.

About Kennedy Events

Kennedy Events began with one goal in mind—to produce high-level corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Maggie founded the company in 2000, found her match in Paige, and in 2011 the two became official partners. Since then, these two resourceful and brilliant creatives have pooled their strengths to build one one of the most the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.