IAM204- Leader and Consultant Helps Re-position Businesses Within Their Specialized Areas

After graduating college and successfully completing Air Traffic Control Academy in Oklahoma, John was recruited by the FAA to work as an Air Traffic Controller in the Oakland, California. Working in this field he quickly realized that photography, design and marketing were really his passion.

His love for technology, websites, and marketing led him to develop Wedding Stub. Wedding Stub was an online daily deals site that helped local brides & grooms find great deals for their wedding day. While the company never reached the fame of other daily deals, like Groupon or Living Social, the learning experience was absolutely invaluable.

In 2005, John became the proud owner of Photography In Style, and an entrepreneur who still considers himself a, “young student of the arts.” Photography In Style, is a wedding media firm created for brides who want to laugh, play, and shine on their wedding day. This philosophy has earned the company the “Brides Choice Awards” from WeddingWire.com Five years in a row.

In 2013, John made the decision to lend this expertise to other businesses by creating a media marketing company known as Fine Touch Marketing. As the leader of this marketing agency, John has successfully repositioned other businesses within their specialized areas.

Fine Touch Marketing is a marketing agency that provides all forms of marketing and advertising to small and big brands. The mission is to connect clients with their audiences in the most direct and engaging way possible.

Today, John helps business owners with website design, SEO, Facebook Ads, Google Ads and consulting services to clients and doctors.

• CEO Hack: Analytics; WordStream and Spyfu
• CEO Nugget: Ask some simple questions e.g will what you're doing make a difference
• CEO Defined: Sense of freedom in terms of decision making

Website: http://finetouchmarketing.com/

Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/john.davydov?_rdc=1&_rdr

Full Interview

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:26

Hello, hello, hello! This is Gresham from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have John Davydov of Fine Touch Marketing. John, it's awesome to have you on the show.

John Davydov 0:36

Thank you for having me, I am very excited. I'm very excited to be a part of this community.

Gresham Harkless 0:41

Yeah, I'm definitely excited to have you on and I think there's gonna be a lot of great value for everybody who's listening. And what I wanted to do just to kick everything off is just to read a little bit more about John, so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing after graduating college and successfully completing Air Traffic Control Academy in Oklahoma, John was recruited by the FAA to work as an air traffic controller in the Oakland, California. Working in his field, he quickly realized that photography, design, and marketing were really his passion. His love for technology, websites, and marketing led him to develop wedding stuff. What he said was an online daily deal site that helped local brides and grooms find great deals for their wedding day.

In 2005, John became the proud owner of Photography and Style, a wedding media firm created for brides who want to laugh, play and shine on their wedding day. In 2013, John made the decision to lend his experience to other businesses by creating a media marketing company known as Fine Touch Marketing. Today, John helps business owners with web design, SEO, Facebook ads, Google ads, and consulting services for clients and doctors. John, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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John Davydov 1:47

Yeah, definitely try it out.

Gresham Harkless 1:49

Awesome. Let's do it. So the first question I had was to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. What led you to start your business?

John Davydov 1:56

Yeah, so definitely, it was always kind of an entrepreneur, even an as a kid, like shoveling snow outside, was always looking for opportunities to kind of make money. And it came from an immigrant family that was kind of led to believe, you know, you got to go to college and get a degree. So you know, even though I did that I still on the weekends when I was going to college, I was actually shooting weddings, as a professional photographer, and kind of making money that way talk to people and networking.

So I just like the sense of freedom. But yet at the same time, I went to college for Air Traffic Control to kind of make sure that I have some sort of security. And I thought, you know, that's the way to go. So in a nutshell, that was kind of the CEO type of journey. And as I saw more and more opportunities and technology and what's going on in the world, I just figured you know what, maybe the Air Traffic Control path wasn't really for me. And that is where I just decided to go and integrate other ventures for myself.

Gresham Harkless 2:56

Nice, nice, nice, it sounds like you've done a phenomenal job. And in air traffic controlling takes so much kind of attention to detail, because you have to really take control of so many different things that are going on at the same time. Is that correct?

John Davydov 3:09

Yeah, definitely. It's, it's a really, really a challenge. Because not only that, you have to like graduate college and get a degree and also get into the program. But when you do go to Oklahoma to the academy, they give you the first week I remember they give you a map, just picture a subway map. So in New York City subway map, something like that, and they tell you, okay, you got one week to run it to run the whole map. And what we're going to do is you have to like name or the intersections and stops, even though it's the airways where you can't really see anything or in the sky from but there are like different routes up there that the air traffic controllers and the FAA uses and they tell you, okay, here's the map, or in a week, we're going to give you the same type of map, but it's going to be totally blank. And you have to memorize and draw it and name each stop.

So that alone just scares you. But thank God the passing grade was 85 for the whole class and we all kind of went to Staples and got the markers and you know, made a blank piece of paper and started memorizing and drawing and nonstop just learning and learning it was it was pretty, pretty amazing that I can't believe I did it.

Gresham Harkless 3:09

Yeah, more power to you. It's funny, I went to bartending school and we had to remember how to make I think it was seven drinks in about 10 minutes we only make three mistakes or you didn't pass needless to say I am doing podcasts and websites I did not pass and that is not my gift. I don't have the greatest memory. So more power to you for being able to remember all that stuff. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your digital marketing company. Could you tell us a little bit more about that and what you feel is kind of like your secret sauce and what makes you unique?

John Davydov 4:52

Yeah, definitely. So digital marketing company was actually designed out of necessity because I kind of got coined for myself through doing photography, and I got it through the internet, basically doing online marketing for myself. And eventually, more and more people started to ask me like, hey, look, you're in this niche title community, the Jewish community, you know, you're getting all these clients, but they're not really Jewish. They're, you know, kind of Italian, Greek, Spanish. So how are you doing it? And I said, look, I'm just, you know, I build a beautiful website, I'm just doing it online.

And I took those skills and acquired them into the marketing company that we have today. So we basically help clients to get new clients. We service small to medium-sized businesses, and we do it in different ways. So one of the ways is AdWords, Facebook, ads, and SEO, it all depends on what the client needs. And we try to not only help them with getting clients but also deliver the right message to them. And a lot of websites. They're beautifully designed, but the messaging is just not there. So we kind of tried to consult them in a way as well.

Gresham Harkless 6:00

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And it's definitely obvious in this day and age, it's kind of sounds like you're ahead of the competition, because you saw something and people saw value, and they're like, why don't you do that for other businesses? And all of a sudden, you start seeing that there's a great opportunity there. It sounds like

John Davydov 6:13

Yeah, definitely. I think as far as the secret nugget, as you said, the special sauce is just that we're always persistent on finding new things, and, and finding what's the next thing out there listening to different inspiring podcasts, inspiring people to kind of see the vision, you know, and we try to see, okay, where would technology be in 5-10 years from now? And everybody's talking about AI right now. So we're trying to see, okay, how can we use AI for our, for ourselves and for our clients.

Gresham Harkless 6:42

Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. And I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

John Davydov 6:53

Yeah, so we like to use a lot of analytics, you know when we do a survey of a website, or when we try to do analytics of the different campaigns that people are running, so one of them will be Work Stream, we love using Work Stream. SpyFu is another one, it just kind of definitely gives us an overview of exactly what the company is doing and how we can implement our own strategies onto helping them get more and more leads and clients.

Gresham Harkless 7:23

Absolutely. And correct me if I'm wrong, you know, analytics, kind of a name of the game because it kind of gives you eyes in the back of like, your website or whatever campaign you might be running. So it's not just a shot in the dark, but you can actually see what's working, what's not make adjustments, and go from there.

John Davydov 7:36

Yeah, definitely. I think with today, like having trackers on everything, you know, Facebook tracker, Google tracker, it just really can really dive in and kind of do if this then that type of approaches as well, so that when people do log in, they see a certain page, and we then we you know, we can read retarget them and actually see, okay, what's working, what's not working? So it's definitely a lot of technology out there today. Yeah

Gresham Harkless 8:02

Yeah. And that's a great hack because you have the opportunity to have eyes and ears literally everywhere. So take advantage of all the analytics tools that are out there that you can and I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. If you can happen to be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business?

John Davydov 8:20

Oh, I just think as entrepreneurs, we have a lot of ideas and a lot of things that we just want to do. One of the phrases that actually my wife uses for me all the time, she goes, Don't be trigger happy, even Hyrule is trigger happy and like, oh my god, this idea, let me go and find out and do this and do that. So I will definitely tell myself like, look, if you're going to do something, just make sure that it kind of aligns with your goals and values, make sure that first you kind of answer like four or five different simple questions that I have for myself. So number one is is it going to make your profit?

So is it going to provide any type of need or service to other people, you know, is it going to make a difference in the world? You know, are you gonna make sure that this is something that everybody can use, and then only then okay, then you can start kind of putting together a business plan, start investing money into it. So yeah, definitely go be trigger-happy even though we get inspired, every minute. But try, you know, try to kind of calm yourself down and start doing the research first and kind of then dive in with all three.

Gresham Harkless 9:30

Yeah, that definitely makes perfect sense. And a lot of times when you're entrepreneurial, or you have that entrepreneurial kind of itch, you can start to see opportunities literally everywhere. You kind of like a beautiful mind where you see all this stuff everywhere. There's an opportunity here, here, here. But it's great that you have that checklist and kind of that framework where you say, Okay, I have this idea, but does it hit on all these different questions that I have, and you can take it through that thorough kind of framework, so you can understand that okay, I'm going to move forward with it or I'm going to maybe just keep it as an idea.

John Davydov 9:57

Yeah, definitely. It definitely does help a lot.

Gresham Harkless 9:59

Yeah, makes sense. And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners on this show. So I wanted to ask you, John, what does being a CEO mean to you?

John Davydov 10:14

Definitely a sense of freedom. But not only that, it's just that you can always create a lifestyle that you want for yourself. And I think that's really great. And being an Air Traffic Controller, I would come into a room and you know, look at different monitors. And it was that moment where you see all these airplanes going left, right, and in different directions. And you know, you are, they're just stuck sitting, basically controlling them. And at the same time, as a CEO, you just stuck there. So, you know, being CEO is just a sense of freedom, that you can just go and actually be on the airplane and go to Fiji or whatnot. And, you know, make different decisions that will inspire others and get you to the next level that you want to be at.

Gresham Harkless 10:55

Yeah, absolutely love that kind of metaphor. You know, with your experience, just being able to be on an airplane, you're directing it wherever you wanted to go, whether it be to Fiji or DC, or New York, or wherever you want to go, it's a great thing to kind of keep in mind and remind us as, as CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners. So John, I truly appreciate your time, what I wanted to do is pass you the mic just to see if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and our listeners know, and then of course, how best they can get a hold of you.

John Davydov 11:21

Thank you so much. Again, thank you to the whole community for having me. It's really, it's a treat and an honor. I think if anybody wants to connect, they can always email me, at john@finetouchmarketing.com. Or they can always check out different links. I'm sure you're going to have it in the show notes. If you need a photographer, they can always find us at photographyandstyle.com as well.

Gresham Harkless 11:45

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yes. And we will definitely have those links in the show notes so that they can see all the awesome work that you're doing, John. I truly appreciate you and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

John Davydov 11:54

You too. Thank you so much. And thank you for having me again.

Outro 11:56

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co

I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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