Secret Sauce: Media company mindset – a framework where we need to approach every site or every opportunity.
- Hammer home the Marketing philosophy.
Making an impact on the platform, content, and especially the clients that we serve.
- Donating digital marketing services to the community and non-profit organizations.
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Transcription
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00:24 – Intro
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.
00:52 – Gresham Harkless
Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. And this is episode number 1229 1,2,2,9 of the I AM CEO podcast. In this episode, I'm focusing on the secret sauce. This is always one of my favorite questions. Just because you get the opportunity to hear everybody's secret sauce, you get to hear what sets them apart and makes them unique. The whole structure of the podcast is basically as you're hearing in each of the episodes. You get to hear somebody's story, you get to hear what they do, and then you get to hear why they're unique.
That rounds out that visibility piece, in addition to, of course, the bio. Getting to read and hear about the person and, you know, some of the accomplishments and things that they have. But I really love the secret sauce because it builds up in a very structured way so that you learn not just about a person, what they do, but you hear about what makes them tick, what makes them go them personally, and, or it could be their business as well, too. So it's one of my favorite questions just because I feel like it really puts a cap on the visibility part of the podcast.
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You get to really hear that story and that background. And I think the awesome episodes that I've been able to kind of listen to and be a part of are created in such a way that you often hear the secret sauce before you hear the secret, secret sauce before you get to the question after you hear that. And if you listen to me on the show, I often ask if this person thinks that their secret sauce is x, y, and z, because I often like to try to guess and say, hey, I think it's this. Or hey, I think it's that. Hey, it's your ability to communicate. Or maybe it's your ability to translate something and kind of dumb it down for us.
So I'm always excited about trying to guess and, you know, each episode of what I think a person's secret sauce might be. But with that being said, it's something that I asked for from a digital marketing perspective, I always ask people about their secret sauce. And I think that as your organization starts to grow and expand, and even if you really think about your organization, the impact that you have beyond just sometimes the people that are on the team, you start to maybe use secret sauce synonymously with a culture. What's the culture that you're creating? What's the impact that you're having?
What's the legacy that you're leaving as a result of who you are, especially of your organization? So I find that a lot of founders, especially their secret sauce, can be very entrenched in who they are. And that often becomes a little bit more of a challenge to be able to kind of, for lack of a better term, divorce themselves of the identity of an organization being within the person that started it, or even the leadership that started it or the co-founders that started it starts to become, what is my secret sauce into what is our secret sauce? What is the secret sauce?
Is probably another step to kind of take it. And I think really great leaders are going to be able to kind of divorce themselves and create that detachment, for lack of a better term, where they don't become the company. They are a part of the company as well as everybody else. So it's always great to again hear those things, because when you hear a story, typically the first question that I ask, you'll sometimes is why somebody created something, what led them to start your business, what led them to start that new thing or create that widget, or decide to go a different way.
And a lot of times it's built-in things. Not being there. The true entrepreneurial way, alchemy, some people might call it, is saying, okay, this doesn't exist, so I'm going to go and create it. This is what I love about entrepreneurship and business and CEOs and founders, whatever title we might give, is because you realize that something doesn't exist, so you decide to take it. So the secret sauce, often some of my favorite answers are hearing I'm the secret sauce. And it's largely because it's the truth.
You know, your story is unique, your experiences are unique, and the things that you go through are unique. So a lot of times when you're within your organization, that's going to be the thing that's going to ring true. But again, creating and further submitting that secret sauce is really going to be the thing of any CEO, entrepreneur, business owner, and any leader who's trying to really make impactful change is going to leave that legacy within the organization. So the secret sauce for us is really around what I like to call that media company mindset.
Obviously, I can say I'm the secret sauce, but what I really want to do is try to hammer home the marketing philosophy and even let people know that it's not. You have to do X, Y, and Z or you have to be A, B, and C. It's really built across those three questions. And as you start to serve different clients in different ways, you're going to see that the way that you create that recipe is going to involve and change. So case in point, if we are trying to serve the b, two b audience, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners through blue 16 marketing as we've been doing, we understand that one of the integral parts of our secret sauce is going to be creating a community.
They get that visibility and those opportunities to tell their story, talk about what it is that they do, trade secrets, tips, and tidbits, hacks, and nuggets, and all those things. It's going to be integral to helping the CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners that we work with to be successful. But if there's somebody who potentially works for the government and maybe doesn't have that desire to start a business, do they want that visibility? No, they might want something else.
They might want to know how to have a better relationship with their spouse, or potentially how to help out their kids, or potentially get the best out of their, the best training for their dog or whatever that might look like it's going to manifest itself in different ways. So it doesn't make sense to create a platform that allows you to be visible if you're a government worker just trying to figure out how to train your dog. So you start to look at things in a different way because your ideal client, your goal, and of course your resources evolve and change, which is why I like to call that media company mindset a lot more of a framework.
So the reason that is such an integral part of the secret sauce is because it's a framework by which we try to approach every different site or every different opportunity that we have. It's not something that we hoard, we don't want to share, we don't want to talk about. It's in fact something that we preach to our clients. And the biggest part that people really want to understand, it doesn't happen overnight. You build your secret sauce. Over time, it starts to develop. Then, the recipe changes a little bit. It tweaks here and there. You see different ways to improve it.
You put things that you think will improve it and actually aren't as good, but it starts to evolve and change. But from a blue 16 media standpoint, our secret sauce is really that media company mindset using media and technology to change lives. It's a way by which we are able to hopefully make that impact and change within the organization, but also for our clients and customers that we work with, and even further than that from the clients and customers that don't necessarily work with us, but sometimes come across our properties.
So we want to make that impact. And I think that's the true essence of the secret sauce, is not necessarily letting the ingredients, the media, the content fail you, but you actually making that impact for that platform and that content for the clients that you're trying to serve. So that's definitely our secret sauce the thing we feel kind of sets us apart and makes us unique. If I can add some other things to that, it's really being dialed into our community. We donate services from a digital marketing perspective.
So if you are a nonprofit organization, please go to blue. Sixteenmedia.com gives g I v e s because we also donate services to nonprofit organizations. It's something that was important to be on multiple boards. It's like, how can we help support these great causes, even though we can't necessarily be on the board for all of them? So it's something that I wanted to develop to kind of help support these organizations. And it's just so important that we kind of bridge that gap towards helping organizations to be successful. So with that being said, givers, with a giver mentality, try to make an impact.
That's what we try to do, and we do that through the media and technology that we try to implement. So again, episode number 1229 of the Imceo podcast is Gresh signing out. As we ease into the holiday season, into the new year, I want to wish you and yours a happy new year. Please enjoy these episodes. This is a little bit of a unique spin on what we've been doing, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of that.
09:21 – 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.
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