IAM1104- CEO Helps Businesses Transition to Selling Online

David is the founder and CEO of Warm Welcome and was recently named a Top 100 Tech Innovator and Influencer.

• CEO Hack: Silence
• CEO Nugget: Your network is your net worth
• CEO Defined: Being in charge of creating and growing things to increase value

Website: https://warmwelcome.com/

Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE

Transcription

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today! 

Please Note: Our team is using the AI CEO Hacks: Exemplary AI and Otter.ai to support our podcast transcription. While we know it's improving there may be some inaccuracies, we are updating and improving them. Please contact us if you notice any issues, you can also test out Exemplary AI here.

00:28 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:55 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have David Jay of Warm Welcome. David, it's great to have you on the show.

01:03 – David Jay

Thanks. It's great to be here.

01:05 – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Jay David so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. David is the founder and CEO of Warm Welcome and was recently named a top one hundred tech innovator and influencer. And David knows a few things about startups. Just looking around, he's done so many phenomenal things, and he is gonna be a wealth of knowledge. So super excited to have you on the show, David. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

[restrict paid=”true”]

01:28 – David Jay

Yeah. Let's do this.

01:29 – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it then. So, to kinda kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about what I like to call your CEO story. We'll let you get started with all the awesome things you're working on.

01:40 – David Jay

Yeah. So I have maybe a typical tech, story where I dropped out of college and, was living literally under under my roommate's bed and, started a photography business. So I was in a service business and then started to hit all the scale problems that every service business has. And, in that process, started to build communities. And then from those communities, started the different software companies.

That was back in the thousands five and have been doing that ever since. Just one startup after another bootstrapped everything, but have been enjoying the variety, I guess, that you have, with startups nowadays. You can do something in an artistic industry like most of my products are. And then we're moving into more general communication, trying to help every business transition to a whole new way of, communicating with their clients digitally through video, less, like, brick and mortar shops, and more online stores. So that's a quick recap of the last twenty years.

02:54 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you for sharing that. I love hearing about the journey, I guess, you can say. And I love how you talked about starting with that service business. And it sounds like you've been able to pick out those, I guess, problems that maybe a lot of business owners and people go through, but be able to create a solution from there and continue to do that.

03:16 – David Jay

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's an important thing. I would encourage just about anyone starting a company is start in a service company because nowadays in tech you hear about stats. Right? Software as a service. But everyone forgets about the service part, and they focus on the scalable parts. They focus on the software, and they spend so much time thinking about their product instead of thinking about the customer's problem. And I think we all need to just recalibrate all the time, think about the customer's problem, talk about the customer's problem, and live, and breathe the customer's problem, instead of thinking and breathing the product all the time.

03:55 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think as you're innovating, you start to make those software or that technology, that we focus on. We sometimes forget. I always call the human aspect of business, and I think I saw that's one of the things that your dad told you that it's so important to keep that front in mind when you are building something because we can lose sight of the problem that we're solving, the impact that we're open hoping to have to make.

04:17 – David Jay

Absolutely.

04:18 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more about Warm Welcome and what you're doing there. Could you take us through how that works and how you serve the clients you work with?

04:29 – David Jay

Yeah. So Warm Welcome started as just a kind of test prototype of a project, and we wanted to personalize communication a little bit more. Everyone was moving towards bots and AI, and it just didn't sit right with us. Like, we want a relationship with our customers. We want to, understand what they're going through, and we think we just think business is better that way. And so a friend of mine came over, and he was looking at some other technology we're building. And he's like, hey. Could I use that to send personal videos to all of my customers and just welcome them to our business? And, his name is Eric Knopf. He has a company called WebConnex.

And I was like, wow. That's a cool idea. I was like, I'm gonna steal that. I'm just gonna make a whole product about it. And he's like, just give me the first copy. And he or his company sends thousands and thousands of these video greetings to their customers. But it's a fun space. I would say new space, but, I think we're on a six-hundred-year transition in how people communicate. Right? Six hundred years ago, the printing press came out. Ever since then, we've been obsessed with written communication because it was one of the first things in the world that scaled. Right? You can write a book or write something down and print a million copies of it.

So the printing press allowed us to do so. But today, with the advent of the Internet as well as, everyone has a camera on them all the time, we can communicate a lot better through video, and it can scale. So that's where warm welcome came about as we said, you know what? We need a more personal way for businesses to communicate, and we need a way that, I think brings a lot more life and joy and and personal personality to the conversation. So that's where Warm Welcome came from.

06:25 – Gresham Harkless

Yes. Absolutely. And so I wanted to ask you for your secret sauce. This could be for yourself or your business or a combination of both. But what do you feel kinda sets you apart and makes you unique?

06:36 – David Jay

People in general, everyone kinda has their their genius, and, each business has the opportunity for that as well. And I think you mentioned earlier the quote that my dad shared with me when I was sixteen, and he sat me down. And he said, David, if you make your business about helping other people, you'll always have plenty of work. And so that's what I've tried to focus on and focus the businesses on how can we help people? How can we serve people?

Because we all need help. We all need someone to come alongside us and give us a boost or, you know, help us over some hurdles. And, so making a business that does that, business that is a guide, is a Sherpa to use some of, Donald Miller's language, like, those, I think, are more fulfilling ways to go about life. But also it it reminds us that, like, making a business in and of itself is not really that important. But when it connects to other people and it can help other people, that's what brings value.

07:41 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. What's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

07:54 – David Jay

I would say the thing that makes me more effective, but I think we could all use it is silence. Silence is so underrated, and just being still, stopping, pausing for a moment is something that our world just doesn't allow, and we've gotten more distracted. Every single moment is filled up with dings and messages, and things are pulling out of so much that, we don't take the time. It's hard. It's increasingly hard to take the time to just step back, pause, and be still. And I think that's where a lot of people's genius can come out. The ideas can come out. And the real-life transforming, things can come out when we get away from the noise of our world.

And we say, you know what? What is it that I uniquely am created to do? What is it that I'm supposed to be doing? Not what is the world kind of pulling me to? What's gonna get more likes on Facebook or what's gonna,  get more shares? Like, those are all, I think, distractions more often than not. And so getting into a quiet space and taking that time is, is important. And I don't know. I think, I think we need to be pushing for that. And, so, yeah, I try to do that. I try to commit to taking that time in in the morning and before the kids are up and, just get into a quiet spot and recalibrate my day and my life focusing on the the things that I value and making sure my life's moving towards that.

09:39 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on this, but this is kind of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine.

09:50 – David Jay

Yeah. Well, a mentor of mine, Tim Sanders, said something years ago. He said your network is your net worth, and I think we're seeing that play out a lot right now. For example, if you sell something on Amazon, you have no idea who bought it because Amazon owns that network. If you publish a podcast, you don't know who's listening to it. Right? If you post something on Facebook, you oftentimes don't have any control over who's gonna see it. The network owns all of that. And so I think it's more important than ever for people to own their network, whether you're a podcaster or an author. Anyone who's selling anything needs to know who their customer is.

And so finding ways, to capture that, nurture that network, and continue to build off of that is, I think, what's gonna really separate the people in the next in the next era of business as we get away, as we get out of having these networks own and control everything, and it gets back to, essentially direct to consumer communication. Right? Like, we've moved and transitioned to direct-to-consumer in terms of selling products, but we've lost the communication in all of it. And the only way for us to communicate with the customers is, you know, through these networks that are owning and controlling everything. So, that's something that I think for for everybody, we need to start making that switch. We need to start, owning our network and communicating directly with it instead of communicating through other networks.

11:27 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So David, what does being a CEO mean to you?

11:39 – David Jay

Well, I think it means different things at different stages. And sometimes I'll see people and they'll have CEO on their title, and they're the only person at their company. It's like, well, what are you the chief executive of? Like, there's nobody else here. But you gotta start somewhere. Right? So I'm not saying that's not an accurate title, but what CEO means to that person is something very different than what the CEO of Apple means they're employing tens of thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of people. So, to me, I would put it in the category if I was putting it in a general category across the line. I would say CEOs, are in charge of creating things and growing them to increase value.

So I know that's a bland definition, but I think that, oftentimes, especially early on, people early, CEOs who are maybe going out trying to raise money or whatever. There's a lot of talk about company culture. The problem is early on, early-stage companies don't have a culture problem. They have a customer problem because they have no customers. Right. They need to focus on the company, not on the culture of the employees. And they get that messed up, and they spend all this time and all this money building this great wonderful culture, but then they don't get enough customers to pay for it, and then they go out of business, and that's bad for everybody. And you see that. I mean, how many people do you know that have just gone from one startup to another? This one's venture back, they go there. Oh, great. We have a free keg in the office, and we have yoga parties, and we have this.

And then we go out of business two years later, and they go to the next company and they do that. And we're not teaching this younger generation how to survive and succeed and how to create something valuable. And so I think the CEO's job should be that is to create a valuable company that can employ people, can take care of people. I'm all for that. That's great. But in the early stages, I don't think there's enough conversation around, making sure that the company is set up for success so that the company can take care of the people. We often put the cart before the horse on that one, and too many companies are dying because I would say the CEO isn't doing a good job of challenging the employees to show up and do the work that matters. We're not having yoga parties and kegs in the office if you don't hit your number sort of conversation. Right?

14:28 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Right.

14:28 – David Jay

It's all party after we win. Don't party when you lose. And so I think we need to have some tougher conversations with the workforce right now and say, hey, show up and win, and we'll have a good time. But don't expect to be having a party here for losing.

14:45 – Gresham Harkless

Yes. Absolutely. Well, David, truly appreciate that. And, of course, appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:01 – David Jay

Thanks, Gresh. I appreciate it. I appreciate the time and just being here with you. It's fun. I like this. I like videos. I think we can talk about things even if we don't agree on things. We can talk about them, and hear a lot better than we can type about them. And I think the transition from typing to talking is an important one for our society. And if you're gonna type something on Facebook to somebody, would you say that to them if you're sitting down having a beer with them? If not, then shut up and, go call them up and have a beer and talk to them about it because we don't need to be so polarized.

We don't need to be so binary about everything. But when we type and we become these keyboard warriors, it is like, society is not better. People are not happier. Like, it's not good. So, if anything, send someone a video. You know? That will be, I think a way of balancing things out and getting us back to talking person to person, soul to soul. It's much much better way to go about life. So I appreciate this, appreciate what you're doing, and, am excited to keep following along.

16:09 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I'm happy and excited that you had the opportunity to be a part of it. Looking forward to having you back on the show as well too. And we will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can connect with you and see everything that you and your team are working on. So truly appreciate you again, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:27- Outro

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.

[/restrict]