IAM1298 – Founder Creates a Smart Business Card
Podcast Interview with William Carroll
William F. Carroll II is the founder of Fewer Cards (Develop For LLC) a smart business card company located within the Washington DC Metropolitan Area. The modern smart business card was invented, introduced to the world, and patented by Mr. Carroll. With sustainability and technology at its core, Fewer Cards's mission is in its moniker—to reduce our carbon footprint with bamboo touchless smart business cards that allow people to transfer contact information and other functions in a touchless way with QR codes and NFC technology.
In a world still in the throes of the COVID pandemic and to slow down climate change, this card has all of the elements of a product that needs to be successful, to make a cleaner environment and economically impactful change. It helped to solve a problem in a new way. Together we can reverse the effects of climate change and do more with fewer cards.
- CEO Story: William would go to events, and carry a lot of business cards to hand over. Hoping people would remember him and contact him. To solve the problem of taking/giving a lot of cards, it’s really the information you want to pass on. And so his idea came to fruition on making the Fewer Cards with just a tap on the phone.
- Business Service: Different cards with different scenarios. Either for Sms, Email, or Social Media. Depending on the strategy/ approach to a person.
- Secret Sauce: Taking away the hurdles from another person. Just scan, and you can do more in networking business with others. It comes with a timestamp.
- CEO Hack: Having the Fewer cards all the time to seamlessly build connections and relationships.
- CEO Nugget: For new business owners, essentially have a business strategy. The idea and where you want to go.
- CEO Defined: Being responsible. Someone who is willing to go through the challenging times and take it and stay focused
Instagram: Fewer Cards
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Transcription
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00:44 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, start-ups, 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.
01:12 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have William Carroll of Fewer Cards. William, it's great to have you on the show.
01:21 – William Carroll
Thank you for having me.
01:22 – Gresham Harkless
Yes. Super excited to have you on. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about William so you can hear about some of the awesome things that he's doing. William is the founder of Fewer Cards, a smart business card company located within the Washington DC Metropolitan area. The modern smart business card was invented, introduced to the world, and patented by Mr. Carroll. With sustainability and technology at its core, Buick Cars' mission is in its moniker to reduce our carbon footprint with bamboo touchless smart business cards that allow people to transfer contact information and other functions in a touchless way with QR codes and NFC technology.
In a world still in the throes of the COVID pandemic and to slow down climate change, this card has all of the elements of a product that needs to be successful to make a cleaner environment and economically impactful change. It helps solve a problem in a new way. Together, we can reverse the effects of climate change and do more with Fewer Cards. William, great to have you on the show. I think we connected years and years ago at a networking group, so it's great to see you in this new world that we have. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
02:29 – William Carroll
Yes, I am. It's great for you to have me here. I am very excited to talk about Fewer Cards and hopefully engage with some of your members and see how they can use Fewer Cards to operate more streamlined way and be more economically eco-friendly.
02:46 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. I think when we first connected, I loved the concept and the idea. But I guess before we jump more into, Fewer Cards and everything that you're doing there, what I wanted to do to kick everything off is rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I like to call your CEO story.
03:01 – William Carroll
Yeah. So the way I got started was I would go to a lot of events and I would carry a ton of business cards in my front pocket. And I would hand it to people, and people would take my cards, but then sometimes people will leave it on the table or they'll just lose my business card. And that really annoyed me. I was like, well, how can I actually get these people to have my information? And when I really did a deep dive and thought about it, it's like, it's not I wanted to give them my business card.
I wanted to give them my information so they could follow up with me. So that's when it dawned on me, well, where how can I get into the person's device? With, smartphones, today, we have, lots of ways to send data back and forth. You can send it through text. You can send it through email. So many different ways. You can send it through, like, Facebook Messenger, or Instagram.
But one of the ways that would have been really beneficial if for if I didn't create it, would have been to actually, either tap it or you can scan it. So, basically, operates in a peer-to-peer way. So what I have here is fewer cards, and if you tap it, you just see it goes to your profile. So the nice thing about that is that it allows people to operate in a more streamlined way.
So the idea behind fewer cards is that you're basically transmitting your information to one from you to the actual device, and your information is on the phone. So instead of having to hand out business cards and somebody follow-up with you, you can actually be directly onto their phone again or a tap.
04:37 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I absolutely love it. And just especially, understanding like, I think so many times with things that we can kind of invent or create, we sometimes lose the purpose of what it is that we're trying to do. And I love, what you said in the very beginning. It's like, at the end of the day, what I want is for that person to have my contact information.
So at the end of the day, we can hopefully build a relationship connection, might even get clients or customers, whatever, and however that manifests itself. It can be various ways, but at the end of the day, you want that person to have your information. I think when we create products and services, sometimes we lose sight of that. We fall in love with the sexiness or the bells and whistles, but at the end of the day, we wanna make sure that what we're doing is solving a problem.
05:18 – William Carroll
Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So it's not so much you're handing a card to someone just so they have it. It's so you get an actual result when you're actually giving your information to them. So, like you just said, you can actually follow up with them. You can get more business. That's what we want at the end of the day, and that's what Fewer Cards allows you to do. It allows you to streamline that connection with the person that you're meeting.
05:40 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. Absolutely. I know you touched a little bit upon Fewer Cards and everything that it does. So is it as simple as I'm at a business I'm at a networking event. You're at a networking event, and we both have that opportunity to try to connect and send, I guess, the information to each other without having to transfer the business cards. Is that how it kinda works?
06:00 – William Carroll
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, essentially, if each party has a card like this, they could essentially tap it into each other's phones, and then they can have each other's information. I do have a card, that's actually in existence. It's called the SMS card. I like this card the most in that when you tap it, it goes directly to SMS SMS text messaging. So when the person sends you a text message, both have each other's information because you will have their number, and they will have your number.
So it's a two-way, connection. So it's also time-stamped, so you can see, like, when that connection actually occurred. If you had to ever go back to it, it'd be like, we met at this in such a time. So yeah, it allows if you have the SMS card, both parties can have each other's information. The personal contact card, allows the person to save your information, onto the phone. So each card has a different functionality. So I can go through all the different functionalities, but it might be overwhelming to a lot of people. So I just try to stay focused on this a couple of times.
07:08 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. No. I appreciate you, touching on each and just, the opportunities and functionalities for each because I think, it probably can't hurt to have both of the cars just because depending on what scenario you're in or if you want that person to have your information or you just wanna be able to share that, do you have that opportunity to build that relationship? Do you find that people use it in you could use both in either way?
07:30 – William Carroll
Yeah. I think so. So I feel like some people, want to be able to exchange their personal contact information, but they don't wanna actually engage in a text message, maybe because they're too busy. So they want people to either follow up with them through email. With, SMS, the way I like to operate is I want to follow up with the person immediately, and I want to build that connection. So, you and I don't have to write a long email saying, like, it was nice meeting you at such and such a place. I can just say, hey. You wanna grab lunch? Because they already have the entire log of our messaging, that was built up before.
So it is more informal. There's also a card I have is, it's called the social media card that allows people to connect over social media. So it depends on, like, what the person's strategy is and how they want to engage the audience that they're working with. Some people only want to deal with people on social media. Other people wanna have a more personal relationship, and that's me. I like this SMS card for that purpose.
08:29 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. That makes so much sense, and I appreciate you going down the line in each of those different scenarios because, like, if you're a quote, unquote influencer, you might want to use a social media card to draw people back to your social media versus, okay, this is a person that I wanna grab coffee with, grab lunch with. It's gonna be maybe a little bit more of an SMS-type of interaction or just anything in between. If you just wanna give somebody your information, you have that option as well.
So I think it's so important, but I think the biggest thing and I don't know if you would consider this to be, like, what I like to call your secret sauce, which is, like, for yourself personally or the business, what you feel in essentially, a part of makes you unique. But it almost seems like a big part of it is it takes a lot it takes away a lot of the friction, the steps, the additional things that you have to do at the end of the day to just connect, it sounds like. So I don't know if you consider that to be your secret sauce.
09:19 – William Carroll
No. I definitely think it is. It definitely takes away a lot of the hurdles. I mean, for one, like, if you were to try to get somebody's number, that person would have to tell you their number. Then you have to ask, how do you spell your name? So and that takes, if you think, like, to add go to the contacts, to add in, you know, the person's name, then add a number, that takes around, like, two minutes.
So that's, like, two minutes of business time when you could actually be networking with another person or just going about your way. So using Fewer Cards, this card, Fewer Cards, just allow people to, like, either tap or scan, and then they get the information immediately. And then, you can just go on and do something else with your time rather than trying to ask, how do you spell your name?
10:08 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. That makes so much sense. It allows you to ultimately do what you were hoping to do, and spend more time connecting than less time figuring out if you have the person's name or information, spelled correctly. And I thought you mentioned too that there's also, some type of way that you can know where you met them, like a time stamp or something that you mentioned as well too?
10:26 – William Carroll
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, for instance, like, every single SMS message that you send on your mobile device is actually time stamped. The message has to occur at a certain point. So what you can do is if I'm attending the event, I can actually write a pre-written text message that the person can send to me. It gets sent, all they have to do is click the send button. And in that message, I can say, it's great meeting you at this conference. And then that's the idea of where the location is, and you can write your name in there as well.
You can add any links that you would like inside the message so they can have access to your LinkedIn Instagram email or any other type of pertinent information that might be associated with you. So then, yeah, so you can add all that information. And then it's also a time stamp because when they send that message, that will be the point of when that meeting or that interaction first occurred.
11:21 – Gresham Harkless
I appreciate it. So I wanted to, switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
11:33 – William Carroll
Something that makes me more effective, and more efficient. I would say, I have to be honest. I have to go with my cards. I really do. I don't I mean, I use these cards literally all the time. Like, I would go to a coffee shop, and sometimes they come with a free card stand too, by the way. But I go to a coffee shop and sometimes I'll just have the card just sitting there because like somebody might come by that recognizes something or they don't have my information, and then I just tell them just tap my card. They can just follow up with me. So I have to be honest. This is the hack that I use. I don't know if that's the answer that you are looking for, but it's literally my product. it's really useful. It's very useful.
12:22 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell a client or if you hopped into a time machine, what might you tell your younger business self?
12:36 – William Carroll
Yeah. I would definitely if someone that's starting out a new business, definitely have I'm gonna call it a business plan but a strategy. Just have an idea of where you want to go. I've tried to do so many business plans in the past. Like, I started my first business in 2003, so that's many, many, many years ago. I tried to write a plan, and I realized every time I tried to write a plan, it just didn't ever go in the direction that I thought would. I had to change it.
So rather than having a business plan, I had a business strategy. I had the idea that this is where I want to be and I'm on and just trying to figure it out day-to-day because things change all the time. It's like, what things I wanna try to do just to try to get to that destination? Yeah. So that's one of the things that I think is really important. Just have an idea of where you want to go and then try to work towards it. There's no actual playbook that I think is gonna work. And maybe everybody's different. But for me, I found that just trying to have a strategy is better than having a business plan.
13:41 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. 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, William, what does being a CEO mean to you?
13:53 – William Carroll
As a CEO, I literally do everything. So that is my definition of a CEO. I'm sure there's a more, I guess formal definition of CEO, but for me, it's literally I'm doing everything. But I'm running everything. I think it's being responsible and being able to stay focused, in times of high pressure and not allowing those pressures to get you to basically become a distraction. So it's being able to stay focused. And I think that's just being a CEO or just a leader in general, right?
It's like you have to stay calm and deal with situations because there's always gonna be a time something's always gonna catch on fire or something's gonna happen. If it hasn't happened, yeah, it's going to happen. And so when you go through those moments of really, hard times, and challenges. It's like, are you gonna be able to take those moments and get through it or are you gonna give up? And I think being a CEO is someone that is willing or that is going to go through those challenging times, and they're gonna take it and they're gonna power through. They're gonna stay focused. So I think that's what, the definition of a CEO is.
15:19 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, William, truly appreciate that definition. I, of course, I appreciate your time even more. What I want to do now is 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 people can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on, and, of course, get a copy of all the cards that you have.
15:39 – William Carroll
Yeah. So I guess, do you wanna learn more about Fewer Cards? That's what the product is called. It's called Fewer Cards. Just go to fewer.cards. It's online. It's very easy to set up order. If you want, you can also call our 1-800 number, which is located on the website as well. If you wanna get a hold of me, I could get a hold of you by going to, my website my website, or you can go to, my email, which is hello@fewer.cards. That's hello@fewer.cards. So we can be a more sustainable society. We can reverse the effects of climate change and use Fewer Cards.
16:30 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, William. We'll definitely have the links and information as well in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:39 – William Carroll
Thank you.
16:40 – 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.
00:44 - Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, start-ups, 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.
01:12 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have William Carroll of Fewer Cards. William, it's great to have you on the show.
01:21 - William Carroll
Thank you for having me.
01:22 - Gresham Harkless
Yes. Super excited to have you on. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about William so you can hear about some of the awesome things that he's doing. William is the founder of Fewer Cards, a smart business card company located within the Washington DC Metropolitan area. The modern smart business card was invented, introduced to the world, and patented by Mr. Carroll. With sustainability and technology at its core, Buick Cars' mission is in its moniker to reduce our carbon footprint with bamboo touchless smart business cards that allow people to transfer contact information and other functions in a touchless way with QR codes and NFC technology.
In a world still in the throes of the COVID pandemic and to slow down climate change, this card has all of the elements of a product that needs to be successful to make a cleaner environment and economically impactful change. It helps solve a problem in a new way. Together, we can reverse the effects of climate change and do more with Fewer Cards. William, great to have you on the show. I think we connected years and years ago at a networking group, so it's great to see you in this new world that we have. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?
02:29 - William Carroll
Yes, I am. It's great for you to have me here. I am very excited to talk about Fewer Cards and hopefully engage with some of your members and see how they can use Fewer Cards to operate more streamlined way and be more economically eco-friendly.
02:46 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. I think when we first connected, I loved the concept and the idea. But I guess before we jump more into, Fewer Cards and everything that you're doing there, what I wanted to do to kick everything off is rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I like to call your CEO story.
03:01 - William Carroll
Yeah. So the way I got started was I would go to a lot of events and I would carry a ton of business cards in my front pocket. And I would hand it to people, and people would take my cards, but then sometimes people will leave it on the table or they'll just lose my business card. And that really annoyed me. I was like, well, how can I actually get these people to have my information? And when I really did a deep dive and thought about it, it's like, it's not I wanted to give them my business card.
I wanted to give them my information so they could follow up with me. So that's when it dawned on me, well, where how can I get into the person's device? With, smartphones, today, we have, lots of ways to send data back and forth. You can send it through text. You can send it through email. So many different ways. You can send it through, like, Facebook Messenger, or Instagram.
But one of the ways that would have been really beneficial if for if I didn't create it, would have been to actually, either tap it or you can scan it. So, basically, operates in a peer-to-peer way. So what I have here is fewer cards, and if you tap it, you just see it goes to your profile. So the nice thing about that is that it allows people to operate in a more streamlined way.
So the idea behind fewer cards is that you're basically transmitting your information to one from you to the actual device, and your information is on the phone. So instead of having to hand out business cards and somebody follow-up with you, you can actually be directly onto their phone again or a tap.
04:37 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I absolutely love it. And just especially, understanding like, I think so many times with things that we can kind of invent or create, we sometimes lose the purpose of what it is that we're trying to do. And I love, what you said in the very beginning. It's like, at the end of the day, what I want is for that person to have my contact information.
So at the end of the day, we can hopefully build a relationship connection, might even get clients or customers, whatever, and however that manifests itself. It can be various ways, but at the end of the day, you want that person to have your information. I think when we create products and services, sometimes we lose sight of that. We fall in love with the sexiness or the bells and whistles, but at the end of the day, we wanna make sure that what we're doing is solving a problem.
05:18 - William Carroll
Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So it's not so much you're handing a card to someone just so they have it. It's so you get an actual result when you're actually giving your information to them. So, like you just said, you can actually follow up with them. You can get more business. That's what we want at the end of the day, and that's what Fewer Cards allows you to do. It allows you to streamline that connection with the person that you're meeting.
05:40 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. Absolutely. I know you touched a little bit upon Fewer Cards and everything that it does. So is it as simple as I'm at a business I'm at a networking event. You're at a networking event, and we both have that opportunity to try to connect and send, I guess, the information to each other without having to transfer the business cards. Is that how it kinda works?
06:00 - William Carroll
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, essentially, if each party has a card like this, they could essentially tap it into each other's phones, and then they can have each other's information. I do have a card, that's actually in existence. It's called the SMS card. I like this card the most in that when you tap it, it goes directly to SMS SMS text messaging. So when the person sends you a text message, both have each other's information because you will have their number, and they will have your number.
So it's a two-way, connection. So it's also time-stamped, so you can see, like, when that connection actually occurred. If you had to ever go back to it, it'd be like, we met at this in such a time. So yeah, it allows if you have the SMS card, both parties can have each other's information. The personal contact card, allows the person to save your information, onto the phone. So each card has a different functionality. So I can go through all the different functionalities, but it might be overwhelming to a lot of people. So I just try to stay focused on this a couple of times.
07:08 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. No. I appreciate you, touching on each and just, the opportunities and functionalities for each because I think, it probably can't hurt to have both of the cars just because depending on what scenario you're in or if you want that person to have your information or you just wanna be able to share that, do you have that opportunity to build that relationship? Do you find that people use it in you could use both in either way?
07:30 - William Carroll
Yeah. I think so. So I feel like some people, want to be able to exchange their personal contact information, but they don't wanna actually engage in a text message, maybe because they're too busy. So they want people to either follow up with them through email. With, SMS, the way I like to operate is I want to follow up with the person immediately, and I want to build that connection. So, you and I don't have to write a long email saying, like, it was nice meeting you at such and such a place. I can just say, hey. You wanna grab lunch? Because they already have the entire log of our messaging, that was built up before.
So it is more informal. There's also a card I have is, it's called the social media card that allows people to connect over social media. So it depends on, like, what the person's strategy is and how they want to engage the audience that they're working with. Some people only want to deal with people on social media. Other people wanna have a more personal relationship, and that's me. I like this SMS card for that purpose.
08:29 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. That makes so much sense, and I appreciate you going down the line in each of those different scenarios because, like, if you're a quote, unquote influencer, you might want to use a social media card to draw people back to your social media versus, okay, this is a person that I wanna grab coffee with, grab lunch with. It's gonna be maybe a little bit more of an SMS-type of interaction or just anything in between. If you just wanna give somebody your information, you have that option as well.
So I think it's so important, but I think the biggest thing and I don't know if you would consider this to be, like, what I like to call your secret sauce, which is, like, for yourself personally or the business, what you feel in essentially, a part of makes you unique. But it almost seems like a big part of it is it takes a lot it takes away a lot of the friction, the steps, the additional things that you have to do at the end of the day to just connect, it sounds like. So I don't know if you consider that to be your secret sauce.
09:19 - William Carroll
No. I definitely think it is. It definitely takes away a lot of the hurdles. I mean, for one, like, if you were to try to get somebody's number, that person would have to tell you their number. Then you have to ask, how do you spell your name? So and that takes, if you think, like, to add go to the contacts, to add in, you know, the person's name, then add a number, that takes around, like, two minutes.
So that's, like, two minutes of business time when you could actually be networking with another person or just going about your way. So using Fewer Cards, this card, Fewer Cards, just allow people to, like, either tap or scan, and then they get the information immediately. And then, you can just go on and do something else with your time rather than trying to ask, how do you spell your name?
10:08 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. That makes so much sense. It allows you to ultimately do what you were hoping to do, and spend more time connecting than less time figuring out if you have the person's name or information, spelled correctly. And I thought you mentioned too that there's also, some type of way that you can know where you met them, like a time stamp or something that you mentioned as well too?
10:26 - William Carroll
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, for instance, like, every single SMS message that you send on your mobile device is actually time stamped. The message has to occur at a certain point. So what you can do is if I'm attending the event, I can actually write a pre-written text message that the person can send to me. It gets sent, all they have to do is click the send button. And in that message, I can say, it's great meeting you at this conference. And then that's the idea of where the location is, and you can write your name in there as well.
You can add any links that you would like inside the message so they can have access to your LinkedIn Instagram email or any other type of pertinent information that might be associated with you. So then, yeah, so you can add all that information. And then it's also a time stamp because when they send that message, that will be the point of when that meeting or that interaction first occurred.
11:21 - Gresham Harkless
I appreciate it. So I wanted to, switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
11:33 - William Carroll
Something that makes me more effective, and more efficient. I would say, I have to be honest. I have to go with my cards. I really do. I don't I mean, I use these cards literally all the time. Like, I would go to a coffee shop, and sometimes they come with a free card stand too, by the way. But I go to a coffee shop and sometimes I'll just have the card just sitting there because like somebody might come by that recognizes something or they don't have my information, and then I just tell them just tap my card. They can just follow up with me. So I have to be honest. This is the hack that I use. I don't know if that's the answer that you are looking for, but it's literally my product. it's really useful. It's very useful.
12:22 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell a client or if you hopped into a time machine, what might you tell your younger business self?
12:36 - William Carroll
Yeah. I would definitely if someone that's starting out a new business, definitely have I'm gonna call it a business plan but a strategy. Just have an idea of where you want to go. I've tried to do so many business plans in the past. Like, I started my first business in 2003, so that's many, many, many years ago. I tried to write a plan, and I realized every time I tried to write a plan, it just didn't ever go in the direction that I thought would. I had to change it.
So rather than having a business plan, I had a business strategy. I had the idea that this is where I want to be and I'm on and just trying to figure it out day-to-day because things change all the time. It's like, what things I wanna try to do just to try to get to that destination? Yeah. So that's one of the things that I think is really important. Just have an idea of where you want to go and then try to work towards it. There's no actual playbook that I think is gonna work. And maybe everybody's different. But for me, I found that just trying to have a strategy is better than having a business plan.
13:41 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. 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, William, what does being a CEO mean to you?
13:53 - William Carroll
As a CEO, I literally do everything. So that is my definition of a CEO. I'm sure there's a more, I guess formal definition of CEO, but for me, it's literally I'm doing everything. But I'm running everything. I think it's being responsible and being able to stay focused, in times of high pressure and not allowing those pressures to get you to basically become a distraction. So it's being able to stay focused. And I think that's just being a CEO or just a leader in general, right?
It's like you have to stay calm and deal with situations because there's always gonna be a time something's always gonna catch on fire or something's gonna happen. If it hasn't happened, yeah, it's going to happen. And so when you go through those moments of really, hard times, and challenges. It's like, are you gonna be able to take those moments and get through it or are you gonna give up? And I think being a CEO is someone that is willing or that is going to go through those challenging times, and they're gonna take it and they're gonna power through. They're gonna stay focused. So I think that's what, the definition of a CEO is.
15:19 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, William, truly appreciate that definition. I, of course, I appreciate your time even more. What I want to do now is 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 people can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on, and, of course, get a copy of all the cards that you have.
15:39 - William Carroll
Yeah. So I guess, do you wanna learn more about Fewer Cards? That's what the product is called. It's called Fewer Cards. Just go to fewer.cards. It's online. It's very easy to set up order. If you want, you can also call our 1-800 number, which is located on the website as well. If you wanna get a hold of me, I could get a hold of you by going to, my website my website, or you can go to, my email, which is hello@fewer.cards. That's hello@fewer.cards. So we can be a more sustainable society. We can reverse the effects of climate change and use Fewer Cards.
16:30 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, William. We'll definitely have the links and information as well in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:39 - William Carroll
Thank you.
16:40 - 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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