IAM630- Founder Shows People How to Create Business Relationships

James Carbary is the founder of Sweet Fish Media, a podcast-first company that guarantees new relationships between B2B companies and their ideal clients, and the co-host of B2B Growth, a daily podcast that has been downloaded over 3 million times. His latest book ‘Content-Based Networking: How to Instantly Connect with Anyone You Want to Know' breaks down a 3-part framework that shows people how to create the exact relationships they need to grow their career or business.

• CEO Hack: Book: The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
• CEO Nugget: Learn to communicate and regulate your ideas, know what to share and when to share
• CEO Defined: Setting culture for the organization

Website: https://sweetfishmedia.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jamescarbary
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescarbary/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jamescarbary

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

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

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today James Carbary of Sweet Fish Media. James, it's awesome to have you on the show.

James Carbary 0:37

Great. Thank you so much. Gresh, this is gonna be super fun. I'm really excited to be on the show.

Gresham Harkless 0:42

Yeah, absolutely. It'd be loads of value. So super excited to hear a little bit more about how you got started and all the awesome things that you're doing. But before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about James so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. James is the founder of Sweet Fish Medium, a product podcast-first company that guarantees new relationships between B2B companies and their ideal clients, and the CO host of B2B Growth, a daily podcast that has been downloaded over 3 million times. His latest book content-based networking, how to instantly connect with anyone you want to know, breaks down a three-part framework that shows people how to create the exact relationships they need to grow their career and of course, their businesses. James, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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James Carbary 1:20

I am ready, man.

Gresham Harkless 1:21

Awesome. Let's do it. So I wanted to jump in and hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. Where did you get started with the business?

James Carbary 1:27

Love it, so, I had a very weird path to entrepreneurship. I was not the kid that sold baseball cards, or started lemonade stands when I was young. I really had no clue what an entrepreneur was the thought of owning a business never even crossed my mind. I just wasn't what didn't grow up around anybody like that. And so whenever I got out of college, I just kind of did what all my other buddies were doing, which was going to work at you know, these big corporate companies around the city that I went to college in and so did a couple of corporate gigs and just realized that I hated it. And so pretty quickly, I knew okay, something's something's off here.

Fortunately, I got an opportunity in 2008 to be a part of a sweepstakes. So my roommate's brother-in-law won this sweepstake through the old phone company, Alltel, where if you text a certain number to, you know, one 800 hotel or whatever it was, you could win an all-expense trip to a professional football game of your choice. And you have to take a private jet to go there and hang out with some celebrities while you're there. And it's one of those things you see on TV, and you're like, nobody ever actually wins. These are my roommates, brother-in-law wanted, and he had just moved to Oklahoma and didn't have a lot of connections in the area. And so he asked his brother-in-law who happened to be my roommate.

He said, Hey, do you do you have anyone that would want to go on this trip? And so of course, my roommate knew lots of people that would want to go on a trip like that. So he asked me if I wanted to go. While we were on that trip, I ended up meeting the guy who was kind of overseeing all the logistics for the trip. So this is the guy that had charted. The jet rented the limo bus was getting us around, getting all the different experiences that we got to do in New York City that day, we went to a Giants-Cowboys game in New York City. And, and so I hit it off with this guy, his name is Jeff.

And by the end of the night, come to find out here's the CEO of this global logistics company, he was an entrepreneur and had been running this business for 10 or 15 years at this point when I met him, and so stayed connected with Jeff after that trip. And I was sitting in my cubicle one day at the oil and gas company where I was working. And he called me out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to move to Orlando and run the helicopter logistics, part of his business so prayed about it, and ultimately decided to move across the country and help him run the helicopter division of his business. Got to do that for three years. And that was my first taste of entrepreneurship, getting to work for an entrepreneur that had built a business from nothing.

Up to that point, I think it was doing like 10 million in revenue annually. And so it's a really good size business and got to get to learn from him, you know, only 10 or 15 employees. So pretty, you know, pretty small and was in real proximity to Jeff. So that's really what launched my entrepreneurial interest, ended up leaving his company after about three years just for wanting to kind of grow and continue to develop my skill set. And so I worked at a couple of other corporations not really knowing what idea I would start in and after, I think two years of that, realized that content marketing was something I was really interested in.

And so I ended up deciding to start a content marketing agency, which then pivoted into podcasting. When I saw that there was this massive thing swelling up and that B2B companies were not capitalizing on this thing called podcasting yet, so I ended up pivoting our agency into being a podcast agency. And now I've since pivoted into becoming a podcast-first media company. So excited about the direction we're going but that's been my story, a little bit of my journey up to this point.

Gresham Harkless 4:53

Nice. I definitely appreciate it because I think so many times we skip past all the first parts of the chapter, we go straight to the part where you have the 3 million downloads, and you're doing all this rock and roll, we never forget and see how that process flows. But I love how a lot of times I used to say you sometimes become your environment or whatever you surround yourself with kind of manifests itself in your life. And as you said, you didn't you weren't the person selling the baseball cards or the lemonade stand. But once you got around that person that was doing the 10 million in sales, it started to kind of sound like fire up that entrepreneurial itch this as you might have had him.

James Carbary 5:23

Yeah, exactly right, man, so much of what we do is influenced by the people that were around. And when you can tap into that and realize that, you know, you're the average of your five closest friends, so to speak, and we have agency we have a choice over who we who we surround ourselves with. That was a very serendipitous thing for me to meet Jeff and the way I did, but, having gone through that experience, and seeing how being around him ultimately influenced me to start the business that I run today makes me think now about what types of people do I want to be surrounded by in this season of my life? thinking about starting, my wife and I are thinking about starting our family.

And so looking at things like you know, I want to be around great dads, I want to be around, other other entrepreneurs, I want to be around, people that are passionate about their faith, because I'm a Christian. And so like, thinking getting very strategic about what,  if I'm the average of my five closest friends, who are those people that I want to surround myself with, and being very intentional and thoughtful about pursuing those types of friendships and it just, it makes life a whole lot more fun. Whenever you're being thoughtful and strategic and intentional about who you're surrounding yourself with.

Gresham Harkless 6:29

Yeah, absolutely. It's like, we're definitely always kind of writing our story and writing our script by the people that we associate ourselves with. And I love that you use the word intention with intentionality because that sets that waterfall moment as we start to surround ourselves with those people, we start to manifest and see those things in our lives. So definitely love that. So I know we touched on it a little bit. I wanted to hear a little bit more about Sweet Fish. Can you take us through exactly what you do? How do you work with clients?

James Carbary 6:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we produce between 80 and 90 podcasts right now, the majority of those podcasts are owned by our customers. So we have companies that come to us and say, Hey, we want to start a podcast. But we don't know how to do it, we don't have the bandwidth on our team to pull it off. And so we come alongside them. And we've got a team of producers and writers and audio engineers. And so we'll come we'll come in and help them brand, their show will bring it from nothing into existence. And then we help them maintain the show. So companies sign on, and we typically work for, you know, they sign on for six months to a year. And hopefully well, for a long time after that.

But we do a lot of times we'll do their guest outreach. So figuring out what guests need to be on the show, helping them outline some of that content and figure out what kind of content they need to be creating. And then we repurpose that content into a lot of different formats. So content that they can use on social. So we do a lot of graphic design stuff for them, and then turn their podcast content into written content that they can use, both for Social links and status updates, that kind of thing, as well as blog posts. And then obviously, the audio gets engineered and dripped into their feed as well.

So that's, that's what we do on that side. And then what we're really starting to focus on is building out our own media property. So we've got the B2B sales show, we've got our flagship show B2B Growth, got a show called The Manufacturing Show, another show called Crafting Culture for HR Leaders, in another show called the CIO Show. So with those shows, companies pay us to become co-hosts of one of the shows that we run. And we do all the social media for those shows, we do a lot of video stuff, we bring our co-host to Orlando, and we do what we call 48 hours to industry influence. So we'll film them for 48 hours, we film all 12 of their episodes upfront and help them plan what those episodes are going to be, what keywords we're going to try to rank for with the written content that comes out of those episodes.

And then all of that spits out on social and, and different content that comes out on a lot of different channels. All they have to do is really spend 48 hours with us here in Orlando to create six months' worth of content, so ends up saving them a lot of time and creating a ton of content for them. Because our team does all the heavy lifting there. So those are the two different ways that folks work with us. They either join a show that is already running and already reaching an audience or they have a start a show for them from scratch.

Gresham Harkless 6:54

Nice. I definitely appreciate, you know, you cover both sides of that. And I think so many times and I don't know if you find this with the clients, like they're an expert, or they really want to be known and seen in a specific niche or specific, I guess industry, but they don't want to necessarily do all the podcasts or they want to do all the content stuff. So they know that they're good at what they do. And it sounds like you guys are able to kind of have that partnership and that strategic relationship where it's able to become a win-win for both of you.

James Carbary 9:05

You're exactly right. Yeah, I used to you know, I used to think that our customers wanted a show. And in the last year, I've realized that what our customers really want is an audience. And so that's what led us to pivot into being a media company that really focuses on growing audiences for the shows that we own and operate. And so that's been a real eye-opening experience for me. Because for you know, for the last several years, we've been just producing show after show after show and you know some of that some of the customers stick around and they get results because they're using it for content-based networking and their strategic with who they asked to be as a guest on their show, and they end up doing business with the people that, that they asked to be on the show.

And then other folks don't, don't necessarily get those results, because they're looking for an audience, but they're not necessarily willing to, you know, repurpose the content into the video, they're not willing to, you know, do a whole lot on social. And so by being able to craft a secondary offering that's quickly becoming our primary offer, to say, hey, you can be a part of the shows that we already run. It's just it's making a whole lot of sense for us. And so I'm really excited about where we're going in the future.

Gresham Harkless 9:59

Yeah, definitely sounds exciting. And definitely, very forward thinking just because you're already building that platform so that now you're, well, I guess, you're having the party, and then you're inviting people to the party because they want to be there. They wanted to connect with everybody, and then you already have the party going on. So definitely appreciate that. So you might have already touched on this, but I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And it could be for yourself personally or your business. But what do you feel kind of sets you guys apart and makes you unique?

James Carbary 10:53

And I think in the business, the thing that sets us apart is the tightness of our positioning, being an agency owner single and being involved with a lot of other agency owners, I think people watered down their positioning because they want to be all things to all people. And we from the get have had a very clear positioning statement that being we produce podcasts for B2B brands. So we don't do digital marketing for any kind of business. We don't, we don't we pivoted really we've focused on two different niches actually. So podcasting is one niche, but we've got a lot of competitors that do podcasting for anyone. We said, Hey, we don't do podcasting for anyone. We do podcasts for B2B brands. And then even more granular than that, we really work with B2B SaaS company software as service companies that have 50-plus employees.

And we know that our buyer is a VP of Marketing at those companies. And so I think because we have such tight positioning on what we are, what we do, who we serve, it allows us to be hyper-focused on serving that market. And we don't try to work with small businesses, we don't try to work with E-commerce brands, we only work with b2b brands. And so because of that, we've gotten a lot of traction. And then the other piece more internally, I think our secret sauce is our culture. So we just care deeply about our people. Our number one core value is to love people. Well, we hire to that we fire to that. And, I think it's really a guiding light for what it looks like to be at three fish. We love people, well, we never stop learning. And we own the result.

Gresham Harkless 12:29

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

James Carbary 12:38

Man, I think going back to what our secret sauce was, I think the hack. It's a book that I read probably about a year and a half ago called The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. And in the book, he talks about a lot of different things, the thing that stood out to me most was the importance of having three values. So anything more than three, it becomes really, really hard for people to remember what your values are.

And we used to have seven core values. I couldn't even tell you what those seven core values were, and I came up with them. When we switched that to three core values, it just became a heck of a lot easier for me to repeat and repeat and repeat. Another thing Patrick talks about in that book is that the job of the CEO is to be the chief repeating officer. And so you just have to hammer home over and over and over again with your people. What is your strategy? What is your vision? What are your values?

Gresham Harkless 13:28

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So now I want to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And that could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around content marketing or something from your book. But what's something you might tell a client or maybe even your younger business?

James Carbary 13:38

Man, one thing I'm learning more and more is aligned with the CEO hack that we just talked about. But you know, being the CEO, you're typically the idea person in the organization, you're the one pushing things forward, and you typically how you got a business in the first place. You had an idea you executed on it, and now you're, you're managing that business? Well, I've had to learn, as we've scaled and you know, we've not been massive by any means.

We've got 18 employees, but I've learned that my ideas that I have, because I have them often, as I'm sure a lot of people listening to this, do, I had to learn how to communicate and regulate those ideas, learning what to share when to share, should I share it all, because what you ended up doing at least what I did is I would share all these new ideas with everybody on our team as soon as I would have them and it was just exhausting. Our team was busy executing the 30 other ideas I had last month. And here I am dumping a new, you know, a new idea on them.

Gresham Harkless 13:38

Awesome, awesome. Awesome. So I know you touched on this as well. So I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So James, what does being a CEO mean to you?

James Carbary 14:52

Man to me, the CEO is setting culture, and if I spend all of my days setting the culture for the organization? What is it? What does it feel like to work at Sweet Fish? What does it mean to work at Sweet Fish? What does the organization care about?

Gresham Harkless 15:08

Definitely appreciate that definition. Appreciate your time even more James, what I wanted to do is pass you the mic so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know. And then of course, how best they can get a hold of you get a copy of the book, listen to the podcast, and all the awesome things.

James Carbary 15:21

Yeah, yeah. So a few months ago, I wrote my very first book, called Content-based Networking, how to instantly connect with anyone you want to know. And the reason I was excited too, to be on this podcast Gresh is just because your audience, it's a bunch of me's so I can I feel like I really wrote this book to the, you know, me six or seven years ago, that wanted to start a business but knew that, you know, didn't really know what that meant, didn't know how to get traction with my idea, didn't know how to go to market with it.

In concept-based networking, what we learned with our business is the fastest way to build meaningful relationships with people who can actually buy your product or service, especially in a B2B environment where the lifetime value of a customer can be really high. If you're selling you know, a $5 a month product. This isn't the strategy for you, but the way that it best worked for us and we've seen it work for a lot of other people is content collaborations.

Gresham Harkless 16:16

Yeah, absolutely. Now, I appreciate you again and I hope you have a phenomenal rest today.

Outro 16:21

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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