#92 Strategic Insights for Business Growth: A Conversation with Kyle Golding

Jonny Ross: 00:00:13

Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us. We are live on LinkedIn. We're live on YouTube. We live on Facebook. Perhaps you're listening to us on the replay, on the podcast, or maybe you're watching on YouTube on the replay. It's brilliant that you're here. We are going to be talking about mastering marketing and strategic growth with Carl Golden. Carl, how are you?

Kyle Golding: 00:00:33

I'm doing fantastic today. Thanks for having me on. Jonny.

Jonny Ross: 00:00:35

You're you're joining us from where abouts are you right now?

Kyle Golding: 00:00:39

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Jonny Ross: 00:00:41

And this you're the founder and CEO of the Golden Group. Correct. And you also have you have two offices. So you're also in Philadelphia.

Kyle Golding: 00:00:52

That's right. We have a second office of Philadelphia that's embedded with specific client okay.

Jonny Ross: 00:00:57

And you you do business across well many verticals lots of different verticals. We're just having a quick chat there, lots of different verticals typically working directly with C-suite. And so whether this be, you know, CMOs or whether it be directors or owners or founders or C-suite, C-suite level.

Jonny Ross: 00:01:19

Yes. And all about how to be more strategic, how to grow, how to not just dive in, but to think about it first.

Kyle Golding: 00:01:30

Yeah, to do things in the right way. A lot of people say the word strategy, but being strategic is is a very specific process. It's different for every business, but the structure, how it's organized, how it gets started, and how what you need to do before you implement. Because that takes time and money and and attention. All of that needs to be done in a certain way so that you are making really good decisions. As you move forward, you're as informed as possible, you're as focused as possible. You know, everyone isn't your client. You need to really dial down into who your client is, what you're presenting them, your value proposition, your position in the industry, how you compete, how you compete. The best, and then how to move forward incrementally with with sort of based on what your brand represents. But then, you know, adjusting to the market, to competition, to what's happening around us, etcetera.

Jonny Ross: 00:02:24

Well, there's lots of things you just said there that I want to immediately dive into. However, let's do a welcome to the show. Let's let's give Kyle what he deserves in terms of an introduction. So welcome back to the Jonny Ross Fractional CMO podcast, where we delve deep into the mind shaping the future of business and marketing. I'm your host, Jonny Ross, and today we're venturing into the world of strategic planning and marketing innovation. Joining us is a special guest, Kyle Golding. He's the CEO and chief strategic idealist of the Golden Group. With over 37 years of diverse business experience and a keen focus on marketing and branding, Kyle stands as a beacon of knowledge in the industry. He's not just the mastermind behind the Golden Group success, he's also a med tech startup, CMO podcast host. You've got two podcasts. Is it more than two or is it just two?

Kyle Golding: 00:03:12

Two are mine. I host a third podcast for the Oklahoma Venture Forum, which is a professional organization here in Oklahoma City.

Jonny Ross: 00:03:19

So you've got the Saturday morning hustle and you've got the Strategic Growth Podcast as well, haven't you? Correct. Yeah. So recognized as a thought leader in strategic growth, in today's episode, we'll explore Kyle's unique journey, dive into the nuances of effective marketing strategies, and unlock insights from his extensive experience in shaping businesses. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a marketer, or just passionate about business growth, this conversation promises to offer valuable perspectives. So sit back, tune in, and let's get inspired as we unravel the secrets to strategic success with Kyle Golding. There's an intro for you.

Kyle Golding: 00:03:59

That's fantastic. I feel good about that.

Jonny Ross: 00:04:01

I'm glad. I'm glad. Listen, there's a unique approach on how you got into this, so think it would be really helpful to set some context and just give us a bit of background on the the story on how you ended up where you are right now.

Kyle Golding: 00:04:18

So, so you mentioned my 37 years of business experience, because I started my first business as a teenager and I didn't actually know I was starting a business.

Kyle Golding: 00:04:28

I definitely didn't know I was being an entrepreneur or being entrepreneurial when it happened. But essentially I was in a band. I was trying to play music with a bunch of guys, didn't necessarily get better very quickly, and the band decided that they could replace me with a better. They could find a better bass player than what I was providing them.

Jonny Ross: 00:04:46

Oh no.

Kyle Golding: 00:04:47

But of course I wanted to be in a band. I was a teenager and I thought that was really cool. And it was a good way to, you know, hang out with cool people, maybe, you know, press some girls. So they said, well, you're a good guy, but, you know, we're going to replace you. Do you, do you know anything about, you know, how to set up the speakers and how to run, run the sound, how to how to do the mix? And I said, yeah, I know how to do that. I had no idea what I was doing at all.

Kyle Golding: 00:05:12

It was mechanically and technically inclined, but I really didn't know what I was doing. But I said yes. I said, I can do that, I can be the sound guy. And so I took the equipment home, practice with it, learned. Also, I was 15, but I was already driving because which, you know, you should I should have been 16 here in the States, but I had a truck and I was driving because I grew up on a farm. So I was doing these things so I could carry all the equipment around. I wasn't afraid of of carrying heavy things and then learned how to make it work. So I wanted to I said it would be the sound guy in the first band that got kicked out of, and then found out that no matter what kind of show it was, the band usually at that point, high school bands, garage bands, they didn't really make any money, but the sound guy always got paid. So I was making money when they were making none.

Kyle Golding: 00:06:02

And that seemed like a pretty good setup for me. And essentially I'd created a business without knowing that I'd done that. Luckily for me, one of the one of the groups that I started working with in high school became pretty popular, got a record deal started, started playing with other established bands and allowed me to kind of meet a lot of people and do some work for them and just kind of hustle my way up the chain there. So by the time I graduated high school, I was working with people that were really actually into the music industry and named acts that people would know, and eventually just started loading trucks. And being a roadie and being a tech and being the lowest guy on, on the on the call sheet to someone who became more and more important in that industry, learned better how to how to work in that industry, and paid for my college by doing doing shows and working on concert tours and doing things like that. Did that through college, did that after college, eventually made my way up to where I was managing tours and working with big tours like the Lollapalooza tour and things like that.

Kyle Golding: 00:07:07

Working with big artists, working on projects that went gold, went platinum, earned Grammy nominations, etcetera, and eventually owned a recording studio and was working with artists in the studio working on live shows. Some artists kind of asked me to help them kind of manage, manage their careers, do some some, some marketing, some promotions. I was also kind of fell into graphic design because at that point in the 90s, not very many people had personal computers, really. And I was a mac person from, from day one, since since 84 I was using a mac back in junior high, so had some graphic design software and some graphic design skills, and which went really well for the music industry and did all of that up until right about my 28th birthday and right, right about the time I turned 28, I had a mountain bike accident and broke my neck. Oh, and the idea of going on tour again and working, you know, 18 hour days and not sleeping and just the things that were really exciting when I was in my early 20s was not as exciting to me in my late 20s, and coming closer to 30 and coming off this catastrophic industry and injury.

Kyle Golding: 00:08:23

So I transitioned. I started using my college degree, which was my degrees. My university degrees were broadcasting and public relations. Okay, so I took all this experience as someone who had managed people and logistics on tour, someone who had done scheduling. And the thing about producing music with artists is it's really about managing their egos and getting people to agree to things they really don't want to agree to, which sounds a lot like management of business, right? So I had all these skills and a little. Bit of a design portfolio and things like that, and transitioned into into marketing at that point. So sort of started over from the music industry and to the marketing side of things, and went in as a graphic designer, eventually became a creative director and was working on the creative side of marketing, sort of in corporate marketing departments, which has its ups and downs as well. And when 2 or 3 times in a row where I had a nice corporate job with a nice budget and, and, and all kinds of things to do and the again, the C-suite, the CEO or the the cow would come in and say, well, we're going to go through an audit because the company is going to be sold.

Kyle Golding: 00:09:38

So the marketing department is all fired. You guys got to go because we're a cost center. And of course, it's dumb to fire your marketing department. People do it all the time. So a couple of times jobs just completely eliminated out from underneath me. And then my last corporate job, they they kept just giving me instruction to we need to drive sales. We need more sales here. We need more customers in this way. But no. No direction. How and why? What motivates them and what sets us apart from the competition? And what do you want me to say? And they would just say, just make it. Make it sexy, make it pretty, make it attractive. Tell them we're the best. Well, we all know that's not how marketing is supposed to work, and that's definitely not how successful businesses operate. At that time, I was like, just frustrated. Like, why? Why can't I get more information? Why can't I know more about who it is I'm trying to influence and how to influence them with my marketing? That's when I decided to understand the strategic side.

Kyle Golding: 00:10:37

You know, understand that the things that are necessary, the questions that the answers to those questions before you get into execution, before you get into creative, before you get into all that stuff, that colony and and those, you know, CEOs and CEOs that didn't know what they were doing, just looked at the cost and weren't being very strategic in their decision making process. And so for the last 20 years or so, I've been really focused on understanding how strategy works, how really good marketing is built and developed from from the first bit of research all the way through to execution measurement and then return back to, you know, back to the top and make sure that your focus is right. Make sure that your audience is right, that your differentiation is correct, and that you're doing things in the right way with a really educated thought process, as opposed to make it look cool or make people think we're great because that's just not productive.

Jonny Ross: 00:11:35

Well, I'm sorry to say you didn't make it in the band.

Jonny Ross: 00:11:37

Really.

Kyle Golding: 00:11:39

I still have plenty of friends in music industry. I still have some relationships. They're about once a year. I go and sit in a studio with a couple of friends and do a little bit of that work, but not like I used to.

Jonny Ross: 00:11:50

So you're tapping into stuff that I love talking about strategy, marketing, etcetera, etcetera. What what what are the you must have seen lots of mistakes organizations make over the years where they where they do dive in. I was just wondering if perhaps you can give some examples of some of the common things that you see that were where businesses, organizations, there's certain things they just don't consider, don't think about, and what are the typical things that they dive in and and what mistakes are they making?

Kyle Golding: 00:12:28

The easiest mistake is to assume that everyone is your client because everyone is not your client, no matter who you are and what you sell. The second easiest assumption is for a leader, whether it's it's the marketing director, whether it's the CMO, whether it's the CEO or the board of directors, they're sort of vanity about they think the world sees things the way they see things.

Kyle Golding: 00:12:52

So if I like it, everyone else likes it. If I would, if I would pay $100 for this, everyone else will pay $100 for this witch. And there's just no basis of reality there. That's just two, you know, one is too small of a sample size. So. So assuming everyone is your client is your easiest mistake to make, assuming that your opinion should be driving the conversation is probably the second biggest problem. And then just from there, even if you want to just drive a little bit more of, can we get more information as opposed to, you know, just because the CEO likes it? People stop short. You know, they do a little bit of market research. It's kind of when you see people go on on a shark tank or Dragon's den or something like that, and they say, well, this is $100 billion industry. Well, that's too broad. That doesn't mean anything to anyone. Right? And they usually chastise them for that. But what is your segment of the industry? How much can you participate in? What kind of market share could you get within that? And that's just the beginning of it, along with cost benefit analysis.

Kyle Golding: 00:13:53

And again, who your real consumer is, who your competition is, what their strengths and weaknesses are. A lot of people make the assumption that they're just going to be better than the competition, and better is a subjective idea. What's better to to these ten people over here? Maybe different than these ten people over here, and there may be 100 groups that think what is better is different. So it's really hard to run a business on being better because again, a subjective but you can be different. You can set yourself apart from your competition. You know, they have things that they're good at and they have strengths. We all have strengths and weaknesses as as businesses and as people. Right. And you have to admit the weaknesses that you have. And when your competitors have strengths that are your weaknesses, you just want to avoid those conversations altogether. There's no reason to try to market with, you know, we have the best price. If you're the most expensive, you're going to get your head kicked in with reality.

Kyle Golding: 00:14:52

Same thing if you say our technology is better, but consumers like the technology that your competition has, you're going to lose that competition. So you're going to spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort to market. And then you're going to create an expectation you can't meet. And so setting and meeting expectations that you can meet is that is really the key to good marketing. And that's the biggest mistake people make is they want to try to force an expectation, as opposed to lean into the reality of the expectation. And whatever your organization is big, small, new, 100 years old, you have strengths and weaknesses and you really have to pay attention to that and pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of your competition. You have to understand your position in the market and how to set yourself apart. Differentiate not better.

Jonny Ross: 00:15:40

So I'm hearing that differentiation is definitely a strong tactic, but I'm also going to guess that it's not just differentiating for the sake of differentiating. It's about really understanding why you're different and what the strengths are to to to stand out as why you're different.

Jonny Ross: 00:15:57

So so so talk to me more about how, you know an org would start understanding what their differentiation is.

Kyle Golding: 00:16:11

It starts with being very, very honest with yourselves. This is a conversation, you know, kind of a leadership conversation where you shut the door and you let everyone know that we're going to talk about things in this room that no one outside this room ever needs to hear. But you need to be honest with yourselves. I said, everyone wants to focus on strengths, and no one ever wants to talk about their weaknesses or things that at least they're not good at. And but that's really where you learn how you can create value is by not not trying to go down the path of the things that you're not good at and just focus on, and not 100 strengths and not ten strengths, 1 or 2, 1 or 2 core ideas that not because you say you do them well, but because history has proven and measurement has proven. And organizationally you can point to something and say, we are really good at this.

Kyle Golding: 00:17:03

You know, whether it's it's how well you organize, how quick you are to make decisions. If your customer if you're going to put your hat on customer service, like how much training, how much commitment, how how much that you are talking to your team without the customer on the line about you did this really well, do more of this or this wasn't as successful, do less of this. You know, all of those commitments and focus to 1 or 2 core strengths is the beginning of that conversation. And honestly, if you can't get to 1 or 2 strengths because a you're not being honest enough with yourself and you think you have 50 strength or b you, you really can't come down to our organization does this better than anything else. Then you have a different problem like you're if you can't identify your number one, number two strengths, then your organization is probably destined to fail anyways. And if you're not willing to do the work and focus on 1 or 2 and you want to focus on 10 or 20, then whatever comes after that, the decision making that comes after that, whatever strategy you craft, and then absolutely whatever tactics you put into place are going to be so watered down that you might get lucky.

Kyle Golding: 00:18:15

Lucky. Of course, luck is not a good strategy, but if you don't get lucky, you're probably going to fail. The odds are very much against you, so you have to have those hard conversations. You have to be honest with your internal team. You have to be willing to say, we're not good at that and we could work on it. But the reality is we're not going to get there or not get there soon enough. And we really have to double, triple, quadruple down on what we do, lay into it, understand how it creates value for our clients, and and live and breathe it, just go as opposed to we're going to do that, but we're also going to work on all these other things. And really focus is the key that an organization has to have extreme amount of focus. And it starts by being honest with themselves internally about what they can and cannot do. There's plenty of things you can say we'd like to improve on, but you got to wait until you have improved on them before you can change the conversation about what your strengths are.

Kyle Golding: 00:19:09

Well, what we.

Jonny Ross: 00:19:10

Should say here is that that you don't just focus on marketing, you focus on all business growth and the all strategies, whether it be system sizing for growth, whether it be internal or external comms, whether it be you scaling, market positioning, all sorts of different things. My background is heavily marketing, and that's probably why why we'll focus a bit more on the marketing side. But whilst you're talking, you know, I can even picture myself in a room with my stuff thinking, you know, we've got 30 strengths here. And, and I'm curious how how you really what are some of the questions that you could be asking or that you could be, um, using against yourself or with your team to try and really decide, is that a real strength and how, you know, is is it something that's strong enough to be a strength? I guess that's the point, isn't it? So, you know, we might we might call it a strength, but actually if if it's the same as everyone else, it's not really very strong.

Jonny Ross: 00:20:21

So how what are some of the questions that we could be asking ourselves or our teams?

Kyle Golding: 00:20:26

The first question is when you compare what you call a strength versus what you see as a strength from from a competitor, especially your main competitors. You know, if you want to be one of the top five in your industry, you definitely have to understand the other four in the top five. If you want to be in the top five or the top ten, etcetera. And so you need to and this is another the second half of being honest is being honest about your competitors. Your competitors all have strengths. They all have things that they do well. And your willingness to say, you know, competitor A actually is really good at this and competitor B is better at this. So now you you understand the differentiation between the two and competitor C and D. And by the time you get to yourself hopefully you can find a spot a position with. In all of them that you can place yourself. But the back to the original question about your strengths.

Kyle Golding: 00:21:17

Most people do start with about 50 strengths. You know, we have and it's and sometimes it can be very generic. We have great people, we have great culture, we have a great building. And like, okay, like so you have a great facility. So does everyone else. Everyone thinks their team is really good. And when you get down into the real like, is your team really that great? Like, well, we like them, but we could do better. That's true. But I find if you have 30 to 50 strengths listed on that side of the swot, right. Most of them have a common theme. So it might be your logistics or it might be like your decision making processes, or it might be the actual units that you produce, the widget that you produce. You might feel like really proud about it, and you might say that it lasts a long time, that it performs well, that a higher rated by customers, that it you know, it has all of these advantages.

Kyle Golding: 00:22:12

And that's maybe eight strengths that are really the product strength or something else that you could sort of group together. And so I typically find, you know, if you have 30 to 40 to 50 strengths listed, you should have 5 or 6 kind of basic themes that come together. When we did this, when we launched the Golden Group, we talked. We did the same thing. We took the four partners and we were all like, oh, we have all these strengths and all this background and all this stuff. And when I went through and tried to find themes and commonality, the word that kept coming up was growth. And so that's why strategic growth has always been a part of that is being strategic, you know, didn't want it to be focused on creative and growing businesses. And so we found that common theme. And essentially you could take all of our strengths and our Swot and put them under one of those two things, which is being strategic or doing things that allow businesses to grow.

Kyle Golding: 00:23:05

So you'll have a lot not all of them are priorities. Not all of them are real strengths. It's okay to list them. It's okay for them to be in your business plan. But understanding the 1 or 2 top themes and the top two ideas, and then the second half of that being the position, how does that position against your biggest competitors, your main competitors, and how do you find ways to get into conversations about your strength, your differentiation, as opposed to their strengths?

Kyle Golding: 00:23:35

What is.

Jonny Ross: 00:23:36

It? I'm not sure if it's chicken and egg. This. What do you start at? The identifying the audience first or the positioning or the the. I assume the differentiation must come early on, but what can just, you know, in terms of. Because the reason I ask about audience is I'm thinking with my marketing head, if I'm going to go and do some tactics, whether that be, you know, pay per click, whether it be search engine optimization.

Kyle Golding: 00:24:00

You're still too early.

Kyle Golding: 00:24:01

You got to start with yourself. You have to know yourself, understand yourself, be honest with yourself, get get this part. That's why you start with the swath. The strengths and weaknesses, right, are the primary reason to do the Swot. We could talk about opportunities and threats, but really strengths and weaknesses. What you need to understand. The second thing you need to do is you understand the market, and then you understand your competition. And understanding your market is a pretty easy practice. You know, here's here's the general area we eat in. Here are the things we need to know about how to deliver, if there's any legal issues and technical issues and kind of understanding all of that so that you can narrow that down, that conversation back down to, again, who are our top 5 or 10 competitors? Some markets have three competitors, some have 3000. But you know, someone's got market share, someone's get the biggest market share. And someone is second and someone is third and you're competing with them.

Kyle Golding: 00:24:55

And so if you're honest about your your strengths and the opportunities, you can create the value you can provide, the expectations that you can live up to. And you have that honest assessment of, of the market, what you can expect, how much money can be made, not because the whole market's $100 billion, but because the actual the actual niche that you work within that you deliver within. What's that scope of that? From there, you can understand who is the industry leader, who has the biggest market share? Who are we really competing against? Again, being honest about what their strengths and weaknesses are from that, from that whole exercise you should have. Here's what we do. Here's who we're competing against, here's how we compete a position. And from there, then you can start talking about how does that our position, our strength, our expectations, we can meet match up to what consumers are looking for. Who is the audience that matches what we have to give them, and who is the audience who's more likely to go with competitor A, B, C, and D because of their strengths and the way they position themselves? Because you want to not spend any time or money, definitely not money marketing to those people and spend all your time, all your money, all your effort and all your energy on that consumer most likely to be excited not just okay with, but excited and willing to put their money down for what it is you're offering.

Kyle Golding: 00:26:25

That they see the value higher than the price you're charging for your product or service. So that's where it starts.

Jonny Ross: 00:26:31

I'm just wondering if you can bring to life, perhaps with some kind of example on where you've identified a competitor and you've identified because what I was interested there was you were talking about how really identify in terms of understanding your audience. You need to understand who wouldn't buy from you, who would buy from competitor A, who would buy from competitor B? And I'm just curious how because I'm very used to working out who are target audiences, who are organizations talking to audiences. I'm not very familiar with working out who competitors target audiences. So just talk me, you know, maybe if you've got any examples or.

Kyle Golding: 00:27:12

So the easiest way to kind of think of that is, you know, your your company can really excel at one of three areas, sometimes two and absolutely not three, but price technology and customer service. These are so that's a three kind of three piece pie that you need to start with right.

Kyle Golding: 00:27:31

If you can identify that you're within the customer service wedge of that pie then price and technology. So people looking for low cost typically if you're the best customer service and you have a decent product, you're not going to be the lowest cost or the quickest to market, etcetera. So people looking to buy low cost can go somewhere else. If you're a steakhouse with good customer service, you don't care about fast food. You're absolutely don't care about fast food or even quick casual. If you're a steakhouse, you have great staff and then a great product you're not worried about. Anyone who's looking for can get dinner for $5 tonight or $15. You're not looking for someone who wants a drive thru option or something that's very fast, so you can again, not focus on them. And if the if the drive through Burger Place across the street has a line of cars out the door, but you have three cars in your parking lot, it doesn't matter because you're not competing with them. And so you can ignore them.

Kyle Golding: 00:28:29

That's a that's a good starting place for that. Same thing if if someone else is one of your competitors. Technology is really high. I like to use Apple all the time as a good example of that Apple technology. And I know people are real passionate about whether they're Apple or PC, you know, people, but people who love Apple products. I'm on I'm on an Apple laptop right now. I've got, you know, I've I've got all this stuff right there. Price is high. Their time to have a new product is going to be long and their customer service service stinks. No one is excited about the customer service at the Apple Store or on the website. There's no like, you know, little chat bot where I can go in and talk about my laptop and they're like, bring it in, bring it in. Like Apple doesn't focus on customer service. If you need customer service with your technology buy, you're not going to buy Apple. And they're perfectly okay with it. They're perfectly okay with the fact that their price is much higher.

Kyle Golding: 00:29:29

I tell people all the time, like, I could buy three laptops for what you pay for that one. Cool. That's not what I'm interested in. The laptop does what I wanted to do the way I wanted to do it, and so I'm willing to invest in it. I'm willing to keep it longer, but it's also it's a better piece of technology. It's going to last a lot longer. So Apple does not fret that competitors have lower cost, have better customer service, have speed to delivery, have new versions of their their hardware software. They just don't care at. And it's easy to say when you're at when you're a, you know, multi-billion dollar company, it's easy to not care about your competition. But it's the same attitude you can take if you're if your business is producing $10,000 a year in sales is do what you do. Be extremely laser focused on that. Deliver. Create an expectation you can deliver on, you know, product, service, customer service, technology, etcetera.

Kyle Golding: 00:30:20

And then just 100% go with that. And when people say you're too expensive, okay. And people say your customer service isn't very good, okay. If that's not your focus now, you can work on those things and you can try to improve them and you can make them better. But at some point, you can only train up your team on customer service so much without spending so much time and money that it becomes a drag on the company. And so if your focus is the technology of to focus is something else, it's going to deter from that. You're always going to run into those barriers, but staying super focused on what you do, not worried about anyone else. Literally when something goes, I'm going to do business with these guys because I like I like what they do, okay, keep doing that. Now, at the same time, this will sound a little counter counterintuitive, but it's true. You. But you do need to pay attention to what your target audience is telling you about how well you're actually executing on what it is you're trying to do.

Kyle Golding: 00:31:15

So if it's your focus is customer service, and you've put all the training into it and you put all your focus on it and you really feel like you're winning a lot of those those battles on the customer service side and your customers are telling you it could be better. You do need to pay attention to that. You do need to continue to up your game and make your improvements and make those adjustments. Because is it because your team isn't trained as well? Is it because they don't have the latest piece of technology? Is it because they're not getting guidance from the top? You know, and that's, you know, that continual decision making process of running a businesses is we did great this week. How do we do even better next week. So you ignore people that you can't ever make happy, but you pay a lot of attention to the people who should be extremely interested in what you're trying to do and how you're doing it, to make sure that what the way you see it and the reality of the market are matching up.

Jonny Ross: 00:32:11

You loved the analogy of the steakhouse and and could just imagine there'll be many business owners out there that, you know, imagine they have a steak house. It doesn't matter. It doesn't need to be a restaurant. But, you know, we're imagining it's a steakhouse and can totally and it's high end and it's unbelievable steak. It's phenomenal. But they have this ridiculous idea that they should have a drive thru as well.

Kyle Golding: 00:32:44

One of my favorite clients ever was a high end seafood restaurant here in Oklahoma. Now we don't have a lot of seafood restaurants here. They were bringing their seafood in fresh every day, flying it in every day. Clear differentiation. But seafood is not cheap. Fresh seafood daily flown in is definitely not cheap. But they were great at that. They had all that business that they wanted and were wanted. More lunch business. And at lunch, people want something a little faster. Lower price point, a little bit more kind of pedestrian, if you will. And it really frustrated that that owner that their lunch business was at what they wanted to be.

Kyle Golding: 00:33:29

But then when said, fine, let's stop bringing in the fresh seafood and let's do this on the dinner side, they were like, new, never doing that. So you there's always give and take. But the key is really being comfortable with saying no to the stuff you should say no to. That just doesn't work for your business. It's hard. A lot of owners, every time they see any person walking down the street, they're like, oh, there's business right there. That person has ten bucks in her pocket. Want to do business with them? Oh, if it cost you $20 to drag them in the door to get their ten. It's a bad idea, but too many, too many owners really get stuck on. I'm missing an opportunity somewhere. It's like you're not missing an opportunity. You're missing a chance to lose money. Stay focused on what you do extremely well, and you're always going to be doing business with people that you get profit out of.

Kyle Golding: 00:34:19

There's a huge.

Jonny Ross: 00:34:20

Power in the word no.

Kyle Golding: 00:34:21

Isn't it? Absolutely.

Kyle Golding: 00:34:23

And people are bad at it. Yeah, really, really bad at it.

Kyle Golding: 00:34:26

Yeah, yeah.

Jonny Ross: 00:34:27

Um. I can't believe the time. We're far out of time here. You've done over 600 podcast yourself, podcast episodes yourself. We've got the Saturday morning hustle. We've got the strategic growth just in a in a in a nutshell, the Saturday. Tell us about the Saturday morning hustle.

Kyle Golding: 00:34:42

So I started that in 2017. I was going into the office every Saturday because I practically never sleep. I just I'm up all the time, even on the weekends, and I would putter around the house and my wife likes to sleep in on Saturday. And she said, why don't you just go to the office and leave me alone on Saturday mornings? So I was just going in the office and I was sort of having a little fun with that, like, hey, real hustlers work on Saturday. And I was, you know, taking pictures of selfies of me with a cup of coffee, you know, am I'm hustling.

Kyle Golding: 00:35:14

I'm grinding. What do you got? You're sleeping in. Come on. You know, it was it was 2017. It was a little younger and a little bit more full of full of myself. And social media was, you know, still kind of relatively new. Right. So I was started off social media post, started off with posting photos of literally donuts and coffee was was one of my first hashtags and then started shooting little 32nd videos, Instagram videos, right? Like, hey, let's hustle this weekend and you know, what are you working on? Here's what I'm doing. And then podcasting sort of became popular about that same time. And we jumped on the anchor app, which was a free app on the on a smartphone for five minute. What they call micro podcast, five minute episodes. And I'm like, oh, I can I can knock out five minute episodes. So every Saturday would roll in the office, pour a cup of coffee and just pull out my cell phone. And whatever I was working on that week was working on a business plan.

Kyle Golding: 00:36:10

If I was working on marketing, if I was working on creative execution or PR, I'll just go, hey, you guys, you know, this week I was I was working on this campaign and I have this kind of problem. And here's how I solved it. And here's a tip for you maybe that helps you. It's five minutes quick when you're, you know, trying to create some content. So that's the first podcast where five minute little micro podcast on the on the anchor app. And then eventually they expanded the time period and eventually got traction. A lot of people making comments about, you know, hey, I'm hustling on Saturday. I saw you on Saturday. And and because I was sharing it on social media. And so it just developed into this full blown 30 minutes every weekend podcast that is very focused on trying to help people with our entrepreneurs or running a business, just giving them some really practical advice on how to do different things, whether it's marketing or PR, imposter syndrome, how to speak in public, how to be really good at making mistakes, saying no when you need to say no.

Kyle Golding: 00:37:13

These are some of the topics that that I cover. And so I give myself 2 or 3 bullet points and I just talk and just kind of like we're doing right here, right now. Just imagine another person in the room and have a conversation with them and try to be helpful about people who are starting a business or being entrepreneurial.

Jonny Ross: 00:37:30

Well, if you're watching or listening right now, I do suggest you tune into some of Carl's podcast. Carl, I wanted to ask you before we finished The Future of Strategic Planning. We're in an ever evolving digital world. We've got AI going very fast at a ridiculous pace. I'm just, you know, if you've got the answer to this, but I'm just wondering what the the future of strategic planning looks like in terms of this rapidly evolving world. And and will we have the will the younger generations have the right skills in terms of being able to really hone in on the strategy?

Kyle Golding: 00:38:13

So the good news about AI is the way it kind of works now is, you know, does really good at collecting a ton of information, sort of common knowledge, and putting it together in a in a very short amount of time in a very kind of easy to digest format, which is the beginning of research.

Kyle Golding: 00:38:32

You know, everything we talked about earlier is just starts with research. Good strategy, good business always starts with research. So using AI to help you collect information, collect what's happening in your market, collect what your competitors are doing best practices, etcetera. And kind of put it in one central place. Is the best in history like the best research. We could ever have. What you do with that information is going to be the key. Mostly because even if we talked about 100 businesses that are in the exact same vertical, if we had 100 businesses that all make cell phones. All 100 of them have different technology, different people, different locations, different. Are they brand new in the market or they've been in the market 20 years, etcetera. And so the conditions are different. So you can take all this, this information, but if you don't know how to translate that into what your organization does and back to again to strengths and weaknesses, position, etcetera, that's where that's where the magic happens.

Kyle Golding: 00:39:34

And that's where the human beings will always need to be, because it's a little bit of intuition, a little bit of gut, a little bit of conversation. There's a lot of stuff that I'm black and white. It's like, well, it looks like this. But when you have conversations, you read between the lines, so think I can help you speed up the research, maybe bring in more information than you would have before faster. But what you do with it is still going to take human beings having really difficult conversations about what you should do. And then and this is the key to with when you have that conversation with that leadership team, when everyone understands their role, you go out in the world to execute it, right. So you're putting the strategy into place. You get into tactics. 100% of the tactics won't work like we've none of us have ever had a campaign work 100% right. Hopefully it's working 70, 80, 90%, maybe 50%. If it's working 20%, you're in trouble.

Kyle Golding: 00:40:28

But the stuff that's working really well, you want to double down on the things that didn't work. You could say, well, I don't want to do that anymore or try to learn why it didn't work. Maybe make some adjustments so that you can move forward with it. And that takes human beings paying attention to things and asking good questions and being vulnerable in the fact, like we put this in motion, we thought it would work. It's not. So now we need to make a change. And that takes humans. Machines are not really good at having kind of a gut like that, and some people may say eventually they will, but I don't see that in the foreseeable future. And then, you know, also but also at the same time, you should be doing a little bit of experimentation, you know, 80% of it works and 20% experimentation. And that experimentation sometimes is what feels like a dumb idea like this doesn't make sense, but let's do it. And let's see what happens in sometimes those dumb ideas or random experiments turn into something that catches, and then you incorporate that back into the main what you're doing.

Kyle Golding: 00:41:27

And all of that has to be human beings kind of paying attention and allowing themselves to be wrong about things and admitting it and finding the nuggets when you're wrong, you know, it's everyone makes mistakes, but what you learn from it is the key. And humans are good at that. Machines are not good at that, yet machines are good at this work. This doesn't. But the why is is still not there yet. So until the machines learn that part, the human beings are always going to be involved. At the end of the day, when we're running a business, we have we have audience, we have consumers, we have people who buy their product or service. Their opinions change, their attitudes change the way they do. Things change and things change around them. And so it's up to us as humans to put that human factor on that relationship. Ultimately, people don't do business with businesses, they do business with the people that are in the business. And so if you keep that your focus, you can use AI as a great tool to help you move forward.

Kyle Golding: 00:42:24

But the human beings have to make the gut decisions.

Jonny Ross: 00:42:27

But what I'm hearing, though, is the future is adopting technologies to give you more power to be able to do better research. ET cetera. Listen, the reality is I've got a thousand other questions here, but. But I'm going to have to stick to my strategy, which means that we are at the end of the episode. Um, and Carl, it's been brilliant. I could I could honestly chat and chat, um, if people are, you know, and one of the things you focus on, you mentioned, you know, you might be hitting 70, 80, 90%. One of the things that the Golden Group focus on is getting that last 10% as well. So perhaps you're a CEO, a CEO listening or watching right now and you think you need to speak to card. You need to rethink the strategy. How where do we find you? Give us we're going to put all the links in the show notes, but just bring it to life.

Jonny Ross: 00:43:16

Where do you hang out online and and give us some call to actions?

Kyle Golding: 00:43:21

First place is the Golden group. All the information about what we do, who we work with, all of our history, all the partners. ET cetera. Is all there. You can find me. I am, I'm on Twitter. I'm I'm Kyle Golding at Twitter, I'm the Kyle Golding on Instagram. I am definitely LinkedIn. One of my favorite places to be. I am not on TikTok, but so I'm the main core there of social media. Our website is as well. The Golden Group is on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook as well, so we're easy to find. You can Google this if you find a high end luxury travel agency, you've gone to the wrong golden group. Or if you found real estate in South Africa, you have fallen the wrong golden group. But if you have found marketing strategy business process. Development business plans. ET cetera. Here in the Midwest and in Philadelphia, then you have found the right place.

Jonny Ross: 00:44:14

And I'd recommend the Strategic Growth Podcast, as well as the Saturday Morning Hustle. Kyle, thank you so much. It's been fascinating. As I said, I could ask you so many more questions. Perhaps we'll get you back on another episode. Thank you for joining us. If you've been watching, if you've been listening, thank you for being fabulous. Please do subscribe. Tell your friends, come back for more. I've been Jonny Ross on the fractional CMO podcast. Kyle, thank you very much indeed and we'll see you all soon. Take care.

Kyle Golding: 00:44:42

Thanks, Jonny.