IAM1336 – CEO Runs an Email Marketing Agency that Drives Results
Podcast Interview with Danavir Sarria
Danavir Sarria is a 12-year digital marketing veteran and entrepreneur. He started out as a 16-year-old writing email for internet marketers. Today, he runs an e-commerce email marketing agency that consistently drives results for 6, 7, and 8-figure e-commerce brands.
- CEO Story: Started when he was 16, into fitness. Met a fitness guru who gave him the advice to help someone for free to get started. Danavir was able to offer his service to a street magician who has a growing number of YouTube viewers.
- Business Service: Email marketing for e-commerce brands.
- Secret Sauce: Having the results, the process of getting the results. Client services, customer service at a higher level.
- CEO Hack: Habit. Whatever is most important to you, do it at the very first of the day.
- CEO Nugget: It’s more of skill, on what you are good at. Look at your strength and build that. Focus on what you’re good at.
- CEO Defined: The person who architects the business plan, motivator, someone who focuses on people rather than the specifics of a business.
Website: supplydropmedia.com
Twitter: @supplydropmedia , @danavirsarria
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Transcription
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00:18 – 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 Harkness 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.
00:45 – 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 Danavir Sariah of Supply Drop Media. Danavir, it's great to have you on the show.
00:56 – Danavir Sarria
Hey man, it's great to be on the show.
00:58 – Gresham Harkless
Yes, excited to have you on. And before we jump to the interview, I want to read a little bit more about you so everybody can learn about all the awesome things that you're doing. And then over here is a 12-year digital marketing veteran and entrepreneur. He started out as a 16-year-old writing email for internet marketers. And today he runs an e-commerce email marketing agency that consistently drives revenue for 6, 7, and 8-figure e-commerce brands. They're very super excited again to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:27 – Danavir Sarria
Yeah, let's get started.
01:28 – Gresham Harkless
Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
01:37 – Danavir Sarria
Sure, so the way I started, like you said, I started when I was 16 years old. Basically, at the time, I was really into fitness and I just happened to be, you know, when you go into fitness, you know, you're a 16-year-old kid, you start Googling stuff. Eventually, you get, you start getting into like the fitness gurus and it just so happened that one of those fitness gurus was a guy named Craig Valentine, who these days is like a, he coaches other people to do like productivity and stuff. But back then he was just like, he was just a fitness guy making 6 figures online, selling workout programs, which is what I wanted to do.
And, But he said, you know, if you want to get started into this into this kind of stuff, you should go out and help someone for free. And this is where a little bit of a turn here. I happened to have that time because of Craig and other people. I followed other internet marketers. One of them was a guy named Gideon Shalwick. And Gideon, he had a case study. He taught me about how to grow on YouTube. He had a case study on a dude, a street magician, who grew his YouTube channel following Gideon's advice.
And so I literally cold-emailed the street magician. And I, because at the time I also like street magic. And I just told him, hey, can I help you free? You know, whatever it is you need. And after a couple of months going back and forth between him, I mean, I eventually told me, hey, I'll pay you 200 bucks a month to write emails for me. They're really easy. And then I was like, yeah, I was 16 years old, you know, I know all the way to make money. So let's do it. And that's, that's literally how I got started in internet marketing and digital marketing in general.
03:17 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love kind of hearing that story and I think so much is you know said for you know going after your passions and things that you're interested in. I think especially with the way the internet and everything has been people are making you know sizable amount of revenue from being able just to follow their passion. So I love kind of hearing how you leaning into that and going to help people out kind of took you to everything you're doing now.
03:40 – Danavir Sarria
Exactly. Yeah, that's that's it's it's the lowest hanging fruit. And it just so happens that the people who I was following at the time were into like also teaching business and stuff. So I guess I kind of got lucky too.
03:52 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. Little luck is definitely needed for success. So definitely, of course, love to hear that. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear how you're working with your clients now. Could you take us through a little bit more on how that works and how you're serving the clients you work with?
04:06 – Danavir Sarria
Right, so I do email marketing for e-commerce brands, anywhere from startups, always 8 figures. And the way it works basically is a lot of e-commerce brands, they are, e-commerce is very, very driven by paid advertising, but a lot of the profit, the actual money you get to keep is made through the email marketing side of things because there's no customer acquisition costs and stuff like that. And so a lot of e-commerce brands will hire e-commerce marketing agencies to make that profit.
And so basically clients who are not doing so well with email marketing or they might be doing okay, but they want to do better. They'll hire me and my team and basically just send emails for them so they can make a bigger profit with the ideal goal of making, depending on the type of business, up to 30% of their online revenue from email marketing and SMS.
05:03 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. That makes so much sense because it automatically seems, it almost seems I should say, like, you know, the advertising, the things that they do is what kind of draws people in. But in order to keep it, I imagine, engage, probably even upsell or do, you know, cross-sale and things like that. That happens a lot of times when you're able to really execute well from a marketing standpoint, am I right in saying that?
05:23 – Danavir Sarria
Yeah, that's exactly exactly it.
05:25 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes sense. And I think so many times and I don't know if you have found this, but it's such an integral piece to be able to keep, you know, engage and you know, have your clients, you know, stay around. I think it becomes people get more obsessed with getting their name out there. But once you get the people in the door, even as virtual as we're talking about now, how do you keep them? And I think a lot of people sometimes miss that piece.
05:48 – Danavir Sarria
Well, okay. So that's, yeah, that's a very, always a very interesting question. So one is, the most important thing is results, right? You got to have, you know, they pay you, you know, 3, 4 to $5, 000 a month, you got to make them, you know, 50, 60, hundred thousand dollars a month or whatever it is that you're making for them. So one is always results. That's, that's probably one of the biggest differences between B2B and B2C. B2B like people are very not stingy, but they, they look at the numbers And so that you cannot, you can't get past that.
You gotta get results. And then 2, I would say is the process of how you get results and not so much like the literal, send this email at this time or whatever. Like I'm talking about process as in going from, as in like the way you talk to your clients and how you turn conversations from clients and whatsoever under business and brand or whatever, and turning that into results. So that, you know, you don't, for example, you don't want to bother your clients too much with what you're trying to do.
They're paying you so they don't have to do the work themselves. They want to feel like they're heard like their concerns are all being answered and stuff like that. So it's really, you know, agency work is basically, it's also called client services. And so you've got to service the client. And a lot of that is based on not relationship building and just like how the way that you, you know, it's like customer service basically, but at a higher level, I suppose.
07:18 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, and I think so many times, and that's, I imagine, part of the secret sauce and you being able to kind of do that is, so many times people forget about that aspect of servicing clients. So many times we fall in love with our product and service and the things that we do that we forget about the part of like why we're actually doing it I imagine.
07:36 – Danavir Sarria
Yeah, and it's one of those things that yeah that no one really thinks about too much because people think it's just about results but I found that client services and agency work is actually a very, it's a very emotional business, both for the clients and for yourself. It's very, that's why I guess a lot of agency owners and people looking from the outside or from the inside, they're like, the agency is very hard work, not necessarily because the actual marketing or whatever is hard because that is what's hard, is servicing the client. Like, you know, having being calm, even when things are going bad, which things will go bad. And as well as just like communication and things that go beyond just the marketing aspect that you're doing.
08:26 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, and it kind of just reminds me of I don't know if you've heard of the book, The E-Myth, where a lot of times people really great as something as we mentioned, we've been talking about obviously about marketing, but we sometimes forget about those other, I don't know if I wanna call them soft skills, but they're probably just as important and not as important as you being able to execute is being able to connect and speak with the clients that you're working with.
08:50 – Danavir Sarria
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I said earlier, it's client services. You got the service part, but just the client part too. And so it makes it so emotional. And if you can do both things, then the agency business is actually pretty, it's pretty sweet. It's like pretty, you know, stable, like economically the cash flow is great there. It's very, part of market fit, easy to find and stuff like that. So, you do have to learn soft skills.
09:21 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. And usually, a lot of people have, you know, one or the other, you're either really great at, you know, speaking with people, engaging, maybe even closing sales, but you may not be able to execute or on some end, there's people that are able to execute well, but a lot of times the stressors, the things that pop up and all those things, they're not able to navigate that as well. So you wanna be able to marry the 2 of those? So it's awesome that you've been able to do that.
09:45 – Danavir Sarria
Yeah, I've been fortunate enough that the clients I've gotten have been, they've been good clients. So I have not, I don't have much to compare.
09:57 – Gresham Harkless
Right, that makes sense. 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 app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
10:10 – Danavir Sarria
I wouldn't say there's like an app or a book or something like that. I'll say more habit. And that is, actually, I don't know what book this is from, but, basically, the idea is whatever is most important to you for the business or whatever, do it the very first thing today. And ideally, it's so important that like if you only did that one thing, it would be like even if you did nothing else, that'd be really worth it for you in terms of like activity.
So that's basically been by far the biggest thing, like just doing the most important thing first thing in the day, whether that's something like lead generation, right? Whether that's even or just like me, it could just be like working out, like, you know, maybe you need to work out so you could feel good. So you could do whatever work you need to do for the rest of the day. So whether it's personal or business and whatever it is, do it first thing a day. And then you kind of like, you go from basically most important to least important as you go on throughout the day.
11:12 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you for what I call now 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 your favorite client or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger self.
11:25 – Danavir Sarria
The most obvious one is what I'll tell myself. And the problem that I had when I was younger was because I got started in the internet marketing space. A lot of that space, especially in the, like I was really into like the info product, specifically info products, and the whole info product space is about, you know, get paid to teach people what you know by your passion and stuff like that, your passion about things, someone else will teach you, will pay you for your advice or whatever. And with that, it basically kind of brainwashed me that it's all about passion, right? But as I've gotten more experience in business, it's a lot, I've always come to realize that it's a lot more about skill and just what are you good at.
Because, and then once you do that, if something's working, you wanna stay at it regardless of whatever happens because success is actually really hard in business, even if it's just like making full-time money, it is hard. Not impossible, but it is hard. And, but a lot of that it's comes down to, can you do the thing that provides value? If I was a horrible email marketer, I would not have been able to do an agency, an email marketing agency, right? There's a reason why I have an email marketing agency rather than a paid media agency. I have no idea how to do Facebook ads.
So, I do know email marketing. And so if I were to go back and tell my younger self what to do differently, it would just come down to look at what your strengths are and then build off of that. And turns out that my strength in particular, because I started out as an email marketer, and copywriter was writing. So I always found that my best results came from whether it's writing an email, writing a blog post, or writing a Facebook post, whatever it is, if it is related to writing, I do well. And so that's what I would tell myself because I was very against that. I wanted to try all these different things. But yeah, I would go back and tell myself, hey, focus on what you're good at.
13:32 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely love that. And so I wanted to ask you now 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 on the show. So Dan, over here, what does being a CEO mean to you?
13:44 – Danavir Sarria
So ultimately being a CEO is just kind of like putting groups of people to, you know, heading in the same direction, whatever direction that is for you, whatever goal that is for you. But ultimately when you're doing that, you are, what you're mostly doing is handling or talking or trying to direct people. And so ultimately, I think what being a CEO means is kind of less about being like the guy who architects like a business or whatever, like a business plan, but more like someone who, I guess, I don't know, would be the right word, not like a, not like a motivator or anything, but more like a, like someone who focuses on people rather than the highly specifics of a business.
14:31 – Gresham Harkless
Well, awesome. Well, then there, I truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time tremendously even more. What I wanted to do now was 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 out of you. Find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
14:48 – Danavir Sarria
A lot of people, again, especially if you're a marketer, your instincts to go into marketing, but a lot of the, what you really need to do is find some type of unfair advantage or something, and usually that's going to come from the culmination of all your experiences and all your failures and successes and people you've met and stuff. And so if you can basically go back and look at everything you've ever done and see what's always worked for you. And then doing more of that, I guess it's kind of a shortcut. So, but yeah, other than that, in terms of where to find me, you can always find me on Twitter at Dan Rosario. And if you want to, hire my email marketing agency, go to supplydropmedia.com.
15:37 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And to make that even easier, we'll have the links and information that show notes that everybody can follow up with you. I love that last point. I think so many times when we're looking for solutions to problems, trying to figure out what to do or where to pivot or what to change, so many times we look outward for those answers. I love that last nugget and even a hack at that is the answer is often within. And to look at the things that you do sometimes come naturally and come easily that we don't give ourselves credit for.
Those are usually the strengths that from an agency standpoint or really from any business owner on our standpoint or CEO standpoint, you want to lean into that because that's usually that's your competitive advantage and your secret sauce, as I like to say. So, truly appreciate that. Of course, appreciate your time again, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:24 – 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.
00:18 - 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 Harkness 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.
00:45 - 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 Danavir Sariah of Supply Drop Media. Danavir, it's great to have you on the show.
00:56 - Danavir Sarria
Hey man, it's great to be on the show.
00:58 - Gresham Harkless
Yes, excited to have you on. And before we jump to the interview, I want to read a little bit more about you so everybody can learn about all the awesome things that you're doing. And then over here is a 12-year digital marketing veteran and entrepreneur. He started out as a 16-year-old writing email for internet marketers. And today he runs an e-commerce email marketing agency that consistently drives revenue for 6, 7, and 8-figure e-commerce brands. They're very super excited again to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
01:27 - Danavir Sarria
Yeah, let's get started.
01:28 - Gresham Harkless
Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
01:37 - Danavir Sarria
Sure, so the way I started, like you said, I started when I was 16 years old. Basically, at the time, I was really into fitness and I just happened to be, you know, when you go into fitness, you know, you're a 16-year-old kid, you start Googling stuff. Eventually, you get, you start getting into like the fitness gurus and it just so happened that one of those fitness gurus was a guy named Craig Valentine, who these days is like a, he coaches other people to do like productivity and stuff. But back then he was just like, he was just a fitness guy making 6 figures online, selling workout programs, which is what I wanted to do.
And, But he said, you know, if you want to get started into this into this kind of stuff, you should go out and help someone for free. And this is where a little bit of a turn here. I happened to have that time because of Craig and other people. I followed other internet marketers. One of them was a guy named Gideon Shalwick. And Gideon, he had a case study. He taught me about how to grow on YouTube. He had a case study on a dude, a street magician, who grew his YouTube channel following Gideon's advice.
And so I literally cold-emailed the street magician. And I, because at the time I also like street magic. And I just told him, hey, can I help you free? You know, whatever it is you need. And after a couple of months going back and forth between him, I mean, I eventually told me, hey, I'll pay you 200 bucks a month to write emails for me. They're really easy. And then I was like, yeah, I was 16 years old, you know, I know all the way to make money. So let's do it. And that's, that's literally how I got started in internet marketing and digital marketing in general.
03:17 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love kind of hearing that story and I think so much is you know said for you know going after your passions and things that you're interested in. I think especially with the way the internet and everything has been people are making you know sizable amount of revenue from being able just to follow their passion. So I love kind of hearing how you leaning into that and going to help people out kind of took you to everything you're doing now.
03:40 - Danavir Sarria
Exactly. Yeah, that's that's it's it's the lowest hanging fruit. And it just so happens that the people who I was following at the time were into like also teaching business and stuff. So I guess I kind of got lucky too.
03:52 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. Little luck is definitely needed for success. So definitely, of course, love to hear that. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear how you're working with your clients now. Could you take us through a little bit more on how that works and how you're serving the clients you work with?
04:06 - Danavir Sarria
Right, so I do email marketing for e-commerce brands, anywhere from startups, always 8 figures. And the way it works basically is a lot of e-commerce brands, they are, e-commerce is very, very driven by paid advertising, but a lot of the profit, the actual money you get to keep is made through the email marketing side of things because there's no customer acquisition costs and stuff like that. And so a lot of e-commerce brands will hire e-commerce marketing agencies to make that profit.
And so basically clients who are not doing so well with email marketing or they might be doing okay, but they want to do better. They'll hire me and my team and basically just send emails for them so they can make a bigger profit with the ideal goal of making, depending on the type of business, up to 30% of their online revenue from email marketing and SMS.
05:03 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. That makes so much sense because it automatically seems, it almost seems I should say, like, you know, the advertising, the things that they do is what kind of draws people in. But in order to keep it, I imagine, engage, probably even upsell or do, you know, cross-sale and things like that. That happens a lot of times when you're able to really execute well from a marketing standpoint, am I right in saying that?
05:23 - Danavir Sarria
Yeah, that's exactly exactly it.
05:25 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes sense. And I think so many times and I don't know if you have found this, but it's such an integral piece to be able to keep, you know, engage and you know, have your clients, you know, stay around. I think it becomes people get more obsessed with getting their name out there. But once you get the people in the door, even as virtual as we're talking about now, how do you keep them? And I think a lot of people sometimes miss that piece.
05:48 - Danavir Sarria
Well, okay. So that's, yeah, that's a very, always a very interesting question. So one is, the most important thing is results, right? You got to have, you know, they pay you, you know, 3, 4 to $5, 000 a month, you got to make them, you know, 50, 60, hundred thousand dollars a month or whatever it is that you're making for them. So one is always results. That's, that's probably one of the biggest differences between B2B and B2C. B2B like people are very not stingy, but they, they look at the numbers And so that you cannot, you can't get past that.
You gotta get results. And then 2, I would say is the process of how you get results and not so much like the literal, send this email at this time or whatever. Like I'm talking about process as in going from, as in like the way you talk to your clients and how you turn conversations from clients and whatsoever under business and brand or whatever, and turning that into results. So that, you know, you don't, for example, you don't want to bother your clients too much with what you're trying to do.
They're paying you so they don't have to do the work themselves. They want to feel like they're heard like their concerns are all being answered and stuff like that. So it's really, you know, agency work is basically, it's also called client services. And so you've got to service the client. And a lot of that is based on not relationship building and just like how the way that you, you know, it's like customer service basically, but at a higher level, I suppose.
07:18 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, and I think so many times, and that's, I imagine, part of the secret sauce and you being able to kind of do that is, so many times people forget about that aspect of servicing clients. So many times we fall in love with our product and service and the things that we do that we forget about the part of like why we're actually doing it I imagine.
07:36 - Danavir Sarria
Yeah, and it's one of those things that yeah that no one really thinks about too much because people think it's just about results but I found that client services and agency work is actually a very, it's a very emotional business, both for the clients and for yourself. It's very, that's why I guess a lot of agency owners and people looking from the outside or from the inside, they're like, the agency is very hard work, not necessarily because the actual marketing or whatever is hard because that is what's hard, is servicing the client. Like, you know, having being calm, even when things are going bad, which things will go bad. And as well as just like communication and things that go beyond just the marketing aspect that you're doing.
08:26 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, and it kind of just reminds me of I don't know if you've heard of the book, The E-Myth, where a lot of times people really great as something as we mentioned, we've been talking about obviously about marketing, but we sometimes forget about those other, I don't know if I wanna call them soft skills, but they're probably just as important and not as important as you being able to execute is being able to connect and speak with the clients that you're working with.
08:50 - Danavir Sarria
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I said earlier, it's client services. You got the service part, but just the client part too. And so it makes it so emotional. And if you can do both things, then the agency business is actually pretty, it's pretty sweet. It's like pretty, you know, stable, like economically the cash flow is great there. It's very, part of market fit, easy to find and stuff like that. So, you do have to learn soft skills.
09:21 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. And usually, a lot of people have, you know, one or the other, you're either really great at, you know, speaking with people, engaging, maybe even closing sales, but you may not be able to execute or on some end, there's people that are able to execute well, but a lot of times the stressors, the things that pop up and all those things, they're not able to navigate that as well. So you wanna be able to marry the 2 of those? So it's awesome that you've been able to do that.
09:45 - Danavir Sarria
Yeah, I've been fortunate enough that the clients I've gotten have been, they've been good clients. So I have not, I don't have much to compare.
09:57 - Gresham Harkless
Right, that makes sense. 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 app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
10:10 - Danavir Sarria
I wouldn't say there's like an app or a book or something like that. I'll say more habit. And that is, actually, I don't know what book this is from, but, basically, the idea is whatever is most important to you for the business or whatever, do it the very first thing today. And ideally, it's so important that like if you only did that one thing, it would be like even if you did nothing else, that'd be really worth it for you in terms of like activity.
So that's basically been by far the biggest thing, like just doing the most important thing first thing in the day, whether that's something like lead generation, right? Whether that's even or just like me, it could just be like working out, like, you know, maybe you need to work out so you could feel good. So you could do whatever work you need to do for the rest of the day. So whether it's personal or business and whatever it is, do it first thing a day. And then you kind of like, you go from basically most important to least important as you go on throughout the day.
11:12 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you for what I call now 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 your favorite client or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger self.
11:25 - Danavir Sarria
The most obvious one is what I'll tell myself. And the problem that I had when I was younger was because I got started in the internet marketing space. A lot of that space, especially in the, like I was really into like the info product, specifically info products, and the whole info product space is about, you know, get paid to teach people what you know by your passion and stuff like that, your passion about things, someone else will teach you, will pay you for your advice or whatever. And with that, it basically kind of brainwashed me that it's all about passion, right? But as I've gotten more experience in business, it's a lot, I've always come to realize that it's a lot more about skill and just what are you good at.
Because, and then once you do that, if something's working, you wanna stay at it regardless of whatever happens because success is actually really hard in business, even if it's just like making full-time money, it is hard. Not impossible, but it is hard. And, but a lot of that it's comes down to, can you do the thing that provides value? If I was a horrible email marketer, I would not have been able to do an agency, an email marketing agency, right? There's a reason why I have an email marketing agency rather than a paid media agency. I have no idea how to do Facebook ads.
So, I do know email marketing. And so if I were to go back and tell my younger self what to do differently, it would just come down to look at what your strengths are and then build off of that. And turns out that my strength in particular, because I started out as an email marketer, and copywriter was writing. So I always found that my best results came from whether it's writing an email, writing a blog post, or writing a Facebook post, whatever it is, if it is related to writing, I do well. And so that's what I would tell myself because I was very against that. I wanted to try all these different things. But yeah, I would go back and tell myself, hey, focus on what you're good at.
13:32 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely love that. And so I wanted to ask you now 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 on the show. So Dan, over here, what does being a CEO mean to you?
13:44 - Danavir Sarria
So ultimately being a CEO is just kind of like putting groups of people to, you know, heading in the same direction, whatever direction that is for you, whatever goal that is for you. But ultimately when you're doing that, you are, what you're mostly doing is handling or talking or trying to direct people. And so ultimately, I think what being a CEO means is kind of less about being like the guy who architects like a business or whatever, like a business plan, but more like someone who, I guess, I don't know, would be the right word, not like a, not like a motivator or anything, but more like a, like someone who focuses on people rather than the highly specifics of a business.
14:31 - Gresham Harkless
Well, awesome. Well, then there, I truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time tremendously even more. What I wanted to do now was 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 out of you. Find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
14:48 - Danavir Sarria
A lot of people, again, especially if you're a marketer, your instincts to go into marketing, but a lot of the, what you really need to do is find some type of unfair advantage or something, and usually that's going to come from the culmination of all your experiences and all your failures and successes and people you've met and stuff. And so if you can basically go back and look at everything you've ever done and see what's always worked for you. And then doing more of that, I guess it's kind of a shortcut. So, but yeah, other than that, in terms of where to find me, you can always find me on Twitter at Dan Rosario. And if you want to, hire my email marketing agency, go to supplydropmedia.com.
15:37 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And to make that even easier, we'll have the links and information that show notes that everybody can follow up with you. I love that last point. I think so many times when we're looking for solutions to problems, trying to figure out what to do or where to pivot or what to change, so many times we look outward for those answers. I love that last nugget and even a hack at that is the answer is often within. And to look at the things that you do sometimes come naturally and come easily that we don't give ourselves credit for.
Those are usually the strengths that from an agency standpoint or really from any business owner on our standpoint or CEO standpoint, you want to lean into that because that's usually that's your competitive advantage and your secret sauce, as I like to say. So, truly appreciate that. Of course, appreciate your time again, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:24 - 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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