Corporate to Creative: A Digital Marketer's Journey to Entrepreneurship

What happens when the corporate companies in the corporate world longer serves you? You start your own!

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking to Darrel Noe, a creative who spent many years in corporate advertising. After realizing that he could do much of the same that he was doing for larger organizations for himself, he jumped at the chance to start his own entrepreneurial adventure. He started his own Digital Marketing company called Seventy Seven Collective.  Join us as we chat about the good and not so good about entrepreneurship, and learn about the evolution of Seventy Seven Collective and their offerings. If you're on the fence about making your dreams of entrepreneurship a reality, you won't want to miss hearing about the things Darrel enjoys about his own journey.

Follow the podcast on Instagram: @rebootloadingpodcast

Interested in becoming a guest? Email me: rebootloading@gmail.com

Get in touch with Darrel and his team  here:
Website - https://seventyseven.co/

Insta -https://www.instagram.com/seventy7co/

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPbs5EFTFLqGwCR_rOjjSPg

LinkedIn  https://www.linkedin.com/company/seventyseven-co

Transcript

00:04
Hi, welcome to the Reboot Loading Podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie. Hello everyone, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Reboot Loading Podcast. I am here today with Daryl Noe. He is a native of New York, moved down to Georgia, worked in the ad agency world, and that's where he spent most of his career until he started his own business. It is called 77 Collective.

00:32
And I would like to welcome Daryl to the Reboot Loading Podcast. No, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's cool to be here. So tell me a little bit about how you ended up where you are now. Sure. So like you said, I moved down to Atlanta 25 years ago, which dates me, but, and I've been here ever since I did the ad agency tour, I did a little bit of internal creative departments. I found that there is a large.

00:59
of working at a corporate environment. There's one thing to be managing people, but there's another thing to be managing people, the process and just everything that goes into that. And when you grow up doing creative and coming through the creative ranks, while I do love managing people, managing people's problems and managing the strife and managing the process was very grating on me, especially at my last job and working internally.

01:26
I'm a huge fan of internal creative departments. I think if companies have the budget, the patience, the time, they should build out an internal creative department. But for me, I felt like I was doing so much selling in my own company for people to use our creative department. But that's how I ended up starting my own thing is I said, if I'm going to, if I'm going to do this much sales and I'm going to do a lot of sales and a lot of networking and a lot of talking to people, I might as well just build my own business. So that's what I did. I left in 2019.

01:55
which probably was one of the worst times to leave, but none of us knew it because four months later, we went into a pandemic. But what ended up happening because of that, which was a really nice surprise, was that people cut down all their budgets. So while we were all stuck in the house and we had nowhere to go, people still had a market, people still had a plan to how people were gonna buy their products after the initial shock of COVID and everything past that, after the first month or two.

02:22
Then everyone's like, okay, well, life is not going to stop. So we have to still market our businesses. So how do we do that on a limited budget? In comes me, someone with 25 years of experience and can bring big agency thinking, but at a smaller price tag. Now that doesn't mean it's as small of a price tag as maybe you'd find on Upwork and Fiverr. And those people have their place for sure. But, you know, able to offer.

02:45
small and medium sized businesses, the marketing that they need and they deserve to survive. Because they're a very underserved community, right? You have a lot of small businesses that will go to Upwork, they'll go to Fiverr, they'll pay $50 for 10 logos, and they all come back crap and it's a process. And then once the logo is done, then they gotta go find somebody else to build the website or God forbid, try to do it themselves. And...

03:11
I just felt like there was a really strong opportunity to come and bridge that gap. That's a long-winded answer on how I got to opening up 77 Collective and sort of how we've sort of positioned ourselves in the market. I think that is good timing because also I know from coming on from like the e-commerce side and logistics side, during the pandemic, that is when things went through the roof. I mean, we hit our peak seasons in the summer.

03:40
People were buying a lot online, even then, you know, I started a small business and it went crazy. And, you know, of course, afterwards, probably around 2022, everything kind of slowed down. But there was that small window right there where you probably had a lot more people looking, like you said, for help, suggestions, answers, but on a limited budget.

04:06
Well, yeah, because I mean, when you think about it, right, the trend in the stock market is you buy low and you sell high. Right. So in marketing, it's terrible. It's hard to clear that budget. But when something goes wrong, something goes bad, the economy takes a dip or there's something that goes wrong in your particular industry. That's when you need to market. You may not be able to afford to, but that's when you need to market the most. When the economy is great and everybody's selling stuff all over the place, you don't need to market as much. For sure.

04:34
Do you have a particular specialty or a particular type of business that you work with or is it kind of just anything and everything? So when we started, we did not for sure. Because of my background, I have a heavy background in automotive. We did get a couple of automotive clients. So you could say that we do have a focus there. We have a knowledge there. Also, we've gained a couple of solar clients.

05:01
So we know the solar space, we know how to market in the solar space, we know what people are looking for. I would not want to just do solar marketing or just do auto marketing, but the fact that we have a focus in that and we know about it, I don't mind growing that practice, but our niche and our focus is more in what we do. We help either stand up or relaunch brands that need

05:28
marketing services, right? A startup isn't our perfect ideal client because they usually don't have any money, but a startup that's in funding rounds would be a perfect client for us. We either get people who come to us that want their businesses stood up or want their businesses re-stood up and a refresh on their logo, a refresh on their website. And then when that's done, they say, okay, now how can we drive traffic to this beautiful business?

05:54
Or the reverse is they come to us and they say, we need to drive traffic to our business, we need to grow. And we help them do that, we get them results. We're very results focused, which is a little different than most creatives out there freelancing that just wanna make things look good. We wanna make things look good, but we also wanna make sure that they work. And then once we're in with them, then maybe they wanna redesign their website, redo their logo. So the end goal is always the same. We wanna help them drive traffic, get results from their digital marketing.

06:24
But the niche is how they sort of come in. Do they come in from the bottom level where they need a new website, or do they come in from the top level where they need to drive traffic to their current website? So if somebody was coming to you, let's say a new person, they're thinking about hiring someone, do you typically do a consult with them? I know a lot of times for me personally, if I were to want services from your company, I may not-

06:52
really know what I want just yet or what I might need. So would you provide that kind of guidance through those steps? So like if a client comes to us and they say, I wanna drive traffic to my website, what we would offer them is two parts of a free consultation and it's absolutely free. One, we do a little bit of research into their website and their competitors. We'll look at some key search words and we'll see what words need to be on the site and then we'll cross reference with, are they on the site?

07:20
We'll do a little bit of an SEO. I wouldn't say deep dive. They have to pay for a deep dive, but we'll do a little skim and see is their SEO set up right? Are they ranking where they need to be? And what are the pitfalls and the holes there? And then if they come to us, like I said, and they want traffic drivers, then we also will do a little research into their market, what their competition might be running, what their competition might be spending, and spit back out a report that shows them where the opportunity space is.

07:48
Oh, that's that's really good, though. I mean, they get a lot for that initial consult. For sure. For sure. I mean, we've had people come to us and say, you know, we're working on a client right now that we're hopefully going to sign in. And they were very much the latter. They're like, I I don't want to light deep dive. I want you to spend four weeks. I want you to research my business. I want you to research everything that we're doing. I want you to dissect my social accounts down to the copy. I'm going to forward you.

08:16
15 emails and I want you to dissect those. Let us know what we're doing wrong in SEO. Give us a full deep dive on what advertising platforms will drive what results if we target these businesses and these types of personas. That's a scope of work right there that we'll action on. I have another client, a dentist actually, that came to us and is just like, listen, I need more leads. What can I do with that? And we did a little bit there in Dallas. We did a little bit of research into their niche in Dallas, specifically what keywords are.

08:45
high search volume, low competition. We spit that back out. We set up a couple of dummy ad account, you know, text and not even write imagery, just to sort of see what the numbers of Google and Facebook and Meta gave us back. And then we showed them, well, this is what you kind of expect if you're gonna spend this much. And this is what we can kind of drive. So if you convert 5% of those or 3% of those, then, you know, this is the new clients that you're working with. And they were like, cool, let's roll.

09:11
They don't need a deep dive. They don't need a huge strategy session. So that was completely free. And then it's just making the decision to roll forward. Yeah. These are all like music to my ears because working on this podcast alone, when I want it to be successful. So you're putting in a lot. I'm doing all the marketing stuff myself. I'm doing all the budgeting, all of the interactions, the SEO.

09:39
I'm working on a blog to complement the podcast and it is a lot of work. It is so much work. There have been days where I'm like, I'm just going to pay someone to do this for me and the investment upfront is going to be worth it. What you're talking about, I'm over here going, okay, well, these are all the pros in that column. I can't really think of a con just yet, but it is frustrating.

10:07
with a lot of the things that you handle, if you're trying to do it on your own, it's extremely frustrating, especially if you are trying to do it from the standpoint of someone never done that before. Like if you've never looked at SEO, that's a big thing for me right now. Knowing what to put on your websites, knowing what keywords to use. I mean, there's a whole tactic around it that you can watch as many YouTube videos and take as many courses or whatever, but it's...

10:37
It's not very, I don't want to say intuitive, but yeah, maybe intuitive because you're wanting to write certain things out there that it's like, no, you need to phrase it this way. And my brain's like exploding. Anytime I try to read anything like that or watch a video on it. So, yeah, there's great AI tools and there's great resources out there for people to use and they should use them. But it becomes a point where do you want to spend time in your business?

11:07
on it, right? Even for me, right? For the initial, you know, four years ago when I started this, I started to learn SEO myself and I found a really great WordPress AI plugin that did all the SEO for me. And it was good for a couple of really small early clients. And then I realized I needed to hire someone that knew what they were doing for SEO so that I can service my clients even better. Could I have continued my path on learning it?

11:35
Absolutely, I could have, but now I'm spending time in the business, not on the business. And then you run the flip side of that, which while I wanna give my, obviously the clients who sign on, well, that's the best experience. I didn't grow up in the SEO world. So hiring somebody on our team that performs those searches that knows how to read that stuff back out and then can physically go in there and make the changes that benefit a client.

12:03
I mean, it's a no brainer for me because I want to give the best to my clients. And that's the same for other people in their own business. I like that. How much time do you want to spend in the business versus on the business? And you brought up a good point about the managing piece. And within now, you know, you have your own company, you have your own employees as well. Do you like that part of it? Do you like that aspect of kind of driving the direction that your company is going in via?

12:33
having employees? I do, I do. I like, it's so funny. A lot of people will ask you as an entrepreneur, man, that sounds like a grind. It's a lot of work. And my response is always, yes, it is a lot of work and it is a grind, but it's my grind, right? When I'm grinding, doing a lot of different things, at the end of the day, it's to build my business and the, whether it's the contractors that work for me or the few full FTEs that we have on our team at 77,

13:01
I'm grinding for them so that we all can have a good life and we all can have fun and make some good work and get great results. And that's worth it to me, but it is, it's tough. I mean, you are wearing all the hats, especially in the beginning, right? Before you can say, oh, I could siphon off 600 bucks a month to hire someone to help me with the billing and the finances, right? In the beginning, you're doing all of that and you know it. Same thing with, like I said about the SEO, in the beginning, I was trying to learn it and I was using tools and I was doing an adequate job of it,

13:31
you know, when we brought someone on to help us, that's when that discipline of our agency really exploded. Same thing with the media. I actually never tried to do media myself. I didn't wanna learn it. So, you know, we have some media people on the team and they all have different roles and they have different specialties and we're able to offer that to clients. And, you know, what makes it fun is that we're, you get to see how you're building it. And, you know, we've made mistakes, we've lost clients.

13:59
And we've also won some really big clients and kept them for years. So, you know, seeing that progression and seeing that growth and seeing, you know, in the beginning, you're doing websites for this amount of money, and then eventually you up that and you up that again, and then you're at a spot where you're like, okay, I'm comfortable with this now. We're bringing in business, we're getting clients that we really like, that we love. We're selective about the clients that we work with. We don't just take anybody. It has to be the right fit. They have to be the right, dare to say, a culture fit.

14:29
We have to like them just as much as they like us. And we're watching it grow is really, really cool, but it is a lot of work. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a lot of pieces that you're juggling and then having to delegate them on sometimes, especially if you were the one who started it. It's like handing off your baby to their first babysitter. That's tough. It can be tough. And I like what you said though about the.

14:57
the grind, but it's your grind. And that is something where people that I've talked to that aren't really, they don't really have that entrepreneur mindset where they're okay with working in a corporate environment. They're okay working in something for someone else. They don't really get that when I say, I want to do something on my own. I want to do something for myself. I want to have my own business. I want to have my own something.

15:23
They're like, we'll be working 24 7 or you'll be doing this. And I'm like, but it's mine. It's all mine. Like I'm doing it for me and for whomever. If I do get employees, it's for them. And that's the biggest difference. But I found through talking to many people that not everybody thinks that way. And I'm like, how can you not? Yeah. I mean, it's listen, having a full time job has some fantastic benefits. And I don't mean health benefits and that sort of stuff.

15:53
I just mean like literal benefits, right? I mean, I miss sometimes even though I have my own ad agency, but I used to work at ad agencies that had 200 employees, 100 employees, and there was disciplines for everything. There was your copywriter and your proofreader and your this and your that, and I won't lie. Sometimes I miss having all those layers of different people to run things through and you always had a gut check.

16:18
You had a QA department, you had your project managers and your account managers and your sales team and everything was nice and neat and tidy, right? And those, there's a lot of people who just want to fall in that job that they do and do it really well and rock it out and that's great. There's zero wrong with that. I was that for 25 years. So, or technically 21 years, I guess, but for the last four years, it's been great being on the other side of that and seeing.

16:44
how you can build it and how you can grow it. Especially as a creative, I think a lot of creatives get a rap that, you know, they're introverted and they don't wanna talk to clients a lot and they, you know, a lot of them could never imagine trying to be a salesperson and trying to run their own shop. And they just, you know, wanna make really kick ass design and they do it well. And they have the whole career doing that. And I love that. I thought I was gonna be that for a long, long time, but.

17:10
This has been a nice detour and seeing where my journey has taken me and seeing how it's helped give a couple people some jobs and do some really good work for clients. It's been fun. That's great. So now that you're able to work more on your business, what's your favorite part? What do you love to do? I actually really enjoy the sales process. I'm not great at like, I don't want to cold call people. I'm not great at that part of it.

17:38
So actually I have a sales guy helping me with that right now. But when you get me that meeting and put me on the phone with them, my close rate is pretty good. And I enjoy that part of it. I enjoy you talk about the free consultation and while they get a lot, I enjoy that part of it. In fact, we're finessing that now to where I don't need to have two calls. I don't need to have that introductory call. And then I talk to them three or four days later and present some rough stuff that we've researched for them. I try to

18:06
push that initial call out a day or two, and we're like refining our process to be able to just get on that first call and just be like, hey, in advance of this call, we researched your business and here's what we found, and here's some numbers. I need a little buffer to do that, but you know, it's been great. So I enjoy that part of the process. It's definitely out of my comfort zone, but I've enjoyed that the most. Because the creative stuff, I'm super tied to the creative stuff. I always will be. That's where I grew up as a,

18:35
designer and an art director and a creative director. And, you know, went through that ranks, not the sales ranks. So I'll always take an interest in the creative, but I've done that. Right. And I have an awesome person on my team. He just rocks out all the creative. He does 90% of it. I come in with some things here and there when I have the time. So, you know, you build a good team with good people and you're able to step away from

18:59
where your comfort zone is and push yourself into some of the uncomfortable zones. And that's the one I'm enjoying right now the most. When you said that you can take the sales piece and, you know, you're not a good salesperson by nature, but you're taking it and you're closing out these deals, which in my mind is like, that's because you believe in your product. You believe in what you're giving to these potential customers. And.

19:27
that is that speaks volumes, especially on the receiving end of that, because people always feel that tell that, you know, you don't have to be your typical salesy person. I'm a horrible salesperson. I'll be the first to admit that I tried real estate. I've tried all kinds of sales things and it is just not me. But when it's something that I wholeheartedly believe in. Well, here, here was the turning point for me and every industry will be different. But because we do digital marketing and run ads,

19:57
Mm hmm. That's not all we do, but it's very black and white. And now that I'm a couple of years into it, I have case studies and I can comfortably say to people we've done. It's not BS. None of the numbers on our website are made up. We've done this and it produced that. We've done this and it helped with X, you know, and.

20:23
and were able to do that. Some of them haven't even been ads. We just finished tweaking a Shopify store. Someone set up a Shopify store. This is a great story, right? They should set up the Shopify store themselves. They did a fantastic job for someone who's never touched it before. But they missed a couple of key things. And I mean just a few. And we made a couple of tweaks. And within 30 days after we stopped making the tweaks, their sales were up 82%.

20:50
And to be able to turn around and show that to a client, it's like, well, do you want results like that? Because if you do, we can help you. You know, when I love branding, but selling branding is tough. Do you need a new logo? Maybe, maybe not. You have to sell them on the value of it. And listen, I know the value of it. I could try to sell someone on the value of a redesign of your website or a redesign of your brand. But at the end of the day, just that project alone inherently has no ROI.

21:18
There is an ROI down the line. I have a better brand, it's more high-end now. People will pay more for our products, but that's down the line, right? But the immediate trying to sell it to your boss is like, well, what's the ROI? Well, there is no ROI right away. The ROI will be down the road, right? And you know, some people can sell it, some people can't sell it. We decided not to be a branding shop because that is a hard sell to go through and not that we're scared of the hard sell, but we ended up getting so much media work.

21:44
early on when I started this agency that we've sort of niched into this media agency that can now turn around and say, okay, well, here's the results we've got. Here's the results we didn't get for a client because of X, Y, and Z. And next time we would do this differently. And there was really a turning point for me in being able to point to numbers instead of pointing to creative. And ultimately the creative helps drive the numbers by all, absolutely, like a hundred percent. But the numbers don't lie.

22:13
My senior art director laughs all the time. Sometimes he sends the media person a bunch of creative and we come back the next month and the top performing creative is the creative he liked the least. And the best creative is the ones that doesn't always look so polished or look so nice. That feels like in my mind, you made it because you have gone through all of those highs and lows in the beginning as like starting up and ramping up.

22:41
that you now have tangible things that you can provide to say, hey, look at this. You know, here is proof of what I've been saying all along, but having to prove yourself by, you know, like you said, the creative side versus having like these numbers where if you're dealing with businesses, you know, they're looking at, okay, if I'm investing some money into my business, am I going to get that return? Like you said, what is the ROI?

23:06
So that's really good that you're at that point in your business. Yeah, and using that word investment is what's key. Because it is an investment. It's not a sunk cost. It's an investment. And you show me a business that doesn't have to spend money to make money. And I'd be very interested in buying that business. Because most businesses have to spend money to make money. So yes, you spend $5,000 a month on ads. But if that turns into $50,000 a month in revenue, then it's OK.

23:36
Maybe month one, it doesn't turn into ad revenue right away or lead to an explosion in sales. You know, it's a cost that you can end up pointing back to and really clearly see, yep, this is working and this isn't. One thing I was thinking of too, when you were talking earlier, is I think it's helpful to have someone take a step back and be able to look at the high level view of a business and really guide them into what it is that they might be needing.

24:04
Like you were saying about bringing all the creatives and like the one that he liked the least was, you know, the one that was the most favorite. It's like that. We can sometimes get in our own heads too much and we need somebody else to kind of pull us out and say, hey, why don't you just tweak this here? Or like the Shopify example you gave setting up that shop and you can really help people kind of take that next step. Yeah, and it's it's it's fun, right? It's, you know, because.

24:31
Most businesses these days, even if they have a brick and mortar store, have some sort of online presence that they want to drive to. So being able to provide traffic to that business is key, right? Everyone's on their phones. Everyone's using technology to their advantage, and that's how they're finding businesses. So to be able to point to that and drive to that is really cool to watch that journey for people. Yes. And I think also, like you were saying,

25:01
era, which I didn't either. So this is all kind of brand new to me. And one thing I had done a podcast recently with Monica Parker, who does career pivoting coaching. So a lot of people who want to pivot their careers maybe later in life. And we were talking about the statistics of entrepreneurs. And one of the statistics that we talked about was

25:26
women over 50 are make up the largest number of entrepreneurs right now. And you know, there's a lot of things that me even being in my 40s, I don't know about a lot of this digital pieces and what to do. Sometimes I have to rely on my teenagers to help me out there. Right, for sure. Even though I thought I did, but it's like, you know, there's a whole new generation kind of coming into a space where we're just not familiar with a lot of these things.

25:56
And I really like the fact that you can offer now, especially with being able to have grown your business to the point where you are now, that you have a lot more specialties that you can offer in help, which is pretty awesome, I think. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's been cool. It's been cool to see where you can push a lever or turn a dial and ratchet things up for somebody. And we have an automotive client that

26:25
we've been running ads for it. It's been very successful. And just today we had a readout and we saw some of the performance numbers and it was like one tweak. Our media person made, they didn't get any more leads in May than they did the month prior, but they spent $1,500 less to get them. So that's a win, right? Yeah, we offer, we offer a good amount of services, but it's been, it's been interesting just to see it grow. And you know, what we ran an ad campaign,

26:51
couple of months back for ourselves. And because January, February is always a slow time. And our ad campaign that did the best was the one that we talked about, hey, you don't have to watch 30 hours of videos to learn how to run ads yourself just to get mediocre results, right? Because that's what people are doing and that's fine. If you have the time to do that and that's what you wanna spend in your business, then do it. But if you want to spend time on your business growing it,

27:19
and doing what you started a business to do, you know, it's good to get that external help but get that external help from people that know how to drive results. For sure, yes. And you know, we talked a lot about the good things in having your own business, the entrepreneur part and all of that. What is the most stressful part for you? So I love the fact that we're small and scrappy. Being small and scrappy is wonderful for many, many different reasons.

27:47
Being small and scrappy also sometimes means that mistakes get through the cracks that may normally not. No creative I've ever known is a good speller. None, including myself. Grammar is terrible. And sometimes those will get over to a client, right? We have a project manager, we have a copywriter, there should be checks and balances. There are, we very rarely send something over with a mistake, but it happens more frequently than when you're at a large agency.

28:17
because there's just less checks and balances. And then the other part to figure out that can get frustrating is just quoting and scoping jobs. And I know I'm sort of maybe in my own way, but I've been very big on not having packages that we just post on our website and this is the price, because every client is different. Every single client, some don't want email, some do. Some want this, some want that.

28:45
and digital marketing is so fragmented that if you had like a small baseline price and then you had, oh, well then this is an add-on, you'd have 15 add-ons on the website. But doing scoping is always tough. Very rarely does a client come to you and say, I have $10,000 for this project, please stay in that budget. They're looking for a deal and they want you to, it's like who comes first, you come first with the price and then they come with a counter and it's the cat and mouse game. And so sometimes that gets a little frustrating.

29:13
but that's all part of the journey, I guess. Yeah, there's a lot of logistics that have to happen on both ends. So like the half the half side where you get to do your creative things and learn a lot, like now you're learning the sales piece and that learning that growth, you have that. But then on the flip side, of course, you have those juggling pieces that you have to, they all fit together, right? So in the end, it all balances out, right? It's not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's all.

29:41
I was going to say either too, too much happiness or too much sadness there, which makes it good. No, it's just all part of it. And listen, again, I mean, you talk to people at any company anywhere and there's days they love it and there's days that they don't love it. And there's days that, you know, a coworker pisses them off and there's a day that they love every coworker they work with. Right. And you go through those up and downs, right? So, I mean, you know, owning your own business is going to be no different, but at the end of the day,

30:11
anybody out there thinking of starting their own business or has just started it, I think that's the key going back to the earlier conversation. It's your grind, you own it, you're in control of your destiny and you're in control of how things go and how you react to situations. And as long as you keep that in mind through the process, I don't know, I don't ever feel like I've had as many highs and lows even being an entrepreneur as I did it.

30:37
at other companies. And maybe some of that comes with maturity later in your career, which is why people later in their career sometimes start their own thing. I remember when I was younger in my career, every client change to a design was like the sky was falling, right? And I think, you know, you get into your forties and you start your own thing and you're like, you know what, it's not really like that. But it's hard when you're younger, you want everything to be beautiful and you want everything to be pretty and you want everything to look the way you wanted it. You want the client to love it. And that's just not reality.

31:06
It's just not reality, but you don't sometimes accept that until later on. So I don't think it's any different than working at a company. It's just different headaches, different problems, different good days, different bad days, but they're still the same roller coaster. Yes, I agree 100% there. And it got me thinking about even my own journey. And when you said when you were younger, like we hardly ever know what we want to do.

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know, the 20s, 30s or whatnot, it shapes us and really gets us figuring out. And there usually is probably something like that straw that draw the bigs, the camel's back. Is that the... CB That's the expression. KS When that happens, you know, and it's like, screw this, I'm leaving corporate, I'm going to finally do, you know, something for myself. I think...

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there is a point in time where we've learned so much, like that maturity comes in. Some people may have it a little bit earlier, maybe they have it in their 30s, I don't know. But I do feel like even just for myself, it gets to that point to where I'm like, I am finding more and more about me and what it is that I would like to do in this second half. And you find those important things throughout that journey. So it's not all horrible, you know, corporate can be fun too.

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Two last questions I had for you. No, that's great. One was word of mouth versus advertisements. Does the majority of your business now come from referrals or is it more organic? Yeah, so we get a ton of referral business from two different spots. We either get people that I've worked with or people that people on my team have worked with in the past careers that they're like, oh, you have your own thing going on.

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We'd like to use you, you know, and then that that happens or referrals from clients that are active clients Or even past clients that you know have worked with us. That's like the experience and they recommend you I lied. I have one more question on top of my other question as many as you want Do you work with clients across the US or is it just strictly in Georgia? No, we work with clients all across all across the country. Okay It's a my last question for you is probably either

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It's going to be the easiest question or the hardest question for you. I'm guessing it's the easiest one, but what's your favorite hockey team? Oh, the New York Rangers. I knew it was going to be the easiest one. Yeah, yeah, of course. Although I'm really hopeful that Atlanta is going to get a team here in the next year or two. I think I think we're going to get a third crack at it, and we better not screw it up.

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Yeah, let's see. Let's see. I know you you mentioned that your family is a big hockey family. We're we're big and we're big in the hockey. And listen, not to bring the entrepreneurship into that, but that's actually a blessing because my son made a double a travel team this upcoming season, and we're going to have a decent amount of travel. Some of it will require leaving early on a Friday or coming back on a Monday. And I'm able to do that. I don't have to ask for time off. I don't have to do whatever.

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My senior art director, his daughter is super big in a volleyball. He's actually off the rest of this week in the beginning part of next because they're down in Clearwater doing a big volleyball competition. And he he's doing that. You know, that's the benefit of it. I like that you did point out the entrepreneur part of it, because that is something that is a definite plus there with when it comes to family time, it's invaluable. The way I want to run 77 Collective is we have invested employees

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them do what they need to do for family time, do what they need to do for their wellbeing and perfect example. And I hope he loves the fact that he gets this, is the same guy I'm telling you about, our senior art director, Mark. He had to go to volleyball practice with his daughter last night, and he actually lives in Decatur. He came up here to Roswell, which for anybody who doesn't know, that could be anywhere from a 25 to 50 minute drive, depending on.

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on traffic and he broke at three o'clock, he drove her up, he found a place to have dinner and a beer and he opened his laptop and he was messaging me until eight, nine o'clock last night. And that's totally fine. I want people to have that freedom and that flexibility and a lot of companies offer that flexibility and some don't. And I think that's a culture thing that you have to think about. What do you want your life to be like? We have a very small travel trailer. We don't do it often,

35:47
Sometimes we'll take the trailer for a week and just go camp somewhere. And I have wifi and I'm working from there. Some companies would totally allow that. And other companies would be like, well, wait, you're working from where? What are you doing? Those are the benefits that when you're grinding away and you're like, man, I left this big corporate job and I'm making two thirds of what I made before. But the benefit is that I'm able to work from my camper. And when I end up building it, I could make...

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three times what I was making before. But right now, you're grinding through it, but those benefits have to help. You get to spend time with your family, you get to do what you need to do when you need to do it, as long as the work gets done. I will not take credit for this saying, but there is an ad agency in Atlanta, and one of the owners, he's a small agency, but they're much bigger than we are now. But they started very small, and I freelanced with them just a teeny bit before I started 77.

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And I loved his pitch, well, as bed, beach or bar, as long as the work gets done. I love that. Daryl, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you. I appreciate your time and giving us a peek into the life of your ad agency and the digital marketing that you do, the offers that you have. I will have all of your contact information in the show notes for anyone interested in getting in contact with you.

37:08
I again, really appreciate your time and wish you the best of luck. I would like to invite you or anyone affiliated with 77 Collective to come on the show and chat about, you know, what they like about their job and kind of do the same thing here. So that would be really great if you guys would join me. Yeah, that'd be great. But you can't ask them what they think of their boss. Write that down right now. It's going on record.

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But yeah, no, thank you so much for having me. This has been great. It's been a great discussion and I appreciate you reaching out and inviting me to come on. It's been great. If you're interested in becoming a guest on my show, all the information on how to contact me is available in the show notes. Also, if you're enjoying the content and would like a shout out in an upcoming episode, a link in how you can support this podcast is available in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening and until next time.

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you