John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mark Schaefer, a globally recognized keynote speaker, college educator, marketing consultant, author of books such as The Marketing Rebellion and Cumulative Advantage. But we’re gonna talk about his latest book today, belonging to the Brand, why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy. So Mark, welcome back to the show.

Mark Schaefer (01:17): Thank you, John. I love writing new books cuz it’s an excuse to talk to you. .

John Jantsch (01:22): . Well, I think this is at least your third appearance, if not Martha,

Mark Schaefer (01:25): At least. At least. Yeah. Yeah. And thankfully we do get a chance to talk to each other, you know, once in a while in between, but it’s always nice seeing

John Jantsch (01:33): You. That’s right. I did run into you recently. Where in Boston? Marketing? Boston.

Mark Schaefer (01:39): Oh, Maine.

John Jantsch (01:40): Oh, well is it been that long?

Mark Schaefer (01:42): I think it might have been Maine, yeah.

John Jantsch (01:44): Oh, okay. I thought we ran into each other at a, at another, another event more recent than that. That seems like eons ago. That was like pre covid.

Mark Schaefer (01:51): Well, that was pre Covid.

John Jantsch (01:53): , yeah. That’s gonna, that’s gonna be the new like, like BC and AD now it’s gonna be pre Covid, post Covid. I don’t know. All right, let’s get into your book. Um, first off, I want to get a definition what’s, I mean, what’s the difference between community and like audience or even customers?

Mark Schaefer (02:09): Yeah. Well I think that’s an important janan one I hit right up front in, in the book. You know, I think there a lot of people might have a blog or a podcast and they say, this is my community, but it’s really not. It’s an audience and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I look, I owe a lot to my audience. I have a deep emotional connection with my audience, but it’s one way. Mm-hmm. . And if I go away, the audience goes away. It’s a sort of a cult of personality. The beauty of community is it brings the emotional connection to the brand to a new level. Because not only do people love you, they love each other in the group. I’m sure you experienced that with your own, you know, your duct tape community. So from, for, here’s something so interesting, John. I mean, I went down a lot of academic rabbit holes on psychology and sociology when I was writing this book. But it suggests that the bonds built in the community, that those friendships and that love spills over to the brand. It almost suggests it’s more important to build these relationships in a community than to build the relationship between the customer and the brand. And it builds this emotional switching cost. Because if people have friends in the community, well, I can’t leave this brand. These, this is my place, these are my people. So it’s really quite profound when you get into the marketing benefits of community.

John Jantsch (03:45): So a couple things I want to touch on that I heard you say, one of the key differences is, is instead of one to many, it’s a true network. Yeah. So to speak. And there’s not, well, there might be a leadership structure or guide, you know, it’s really the individual. Like you don’t have community if people aren’t talking to each other. Right.

Mark Schaefer (04:02): . Yeah. Yeah. And I, and it’s a great point that you make that when you talk about the leadership structure, and I think this is one of the most important values of the book, is it talks about really the new leadership mindset required this friend over in the UK who had a B2B marketing agency and he created this community and the community is now bigger than the company. He’s gone all in on this community. This is where he is getting his revenue. Yeah. And he said it’s so intimidating and disorienting to, you know, just all the stuff we learned at the university is turned upside down about leadership, about giving up control, about nurturing people. You’re not trying to build a staff. You’re trying to, you know, build leaders in your community. You know, in marketing that you and I do over the years, it’s ephemeral. You know, you have a campaign, right? When the money runs out, you start something else. A community, there’s like this implied social contract. Yeah. That’s new for marketing. , that’s new idea. But what I hope people get out of this book is that community isn’t added through the lens of brand marketing is. Yeah. You and I have been around a long time. When was the last time you and I, when was the last time you’ve been to a marketing conference where they’ve got a track on community and it’s this obvious opportunity staring as right in the face and it’s just almost completely overlooked by the world.

John Jantsch (05:44): Well it’s interesting because as you noted, well first off, you know, churches were communities, schools were communities, small towns, you know, talk about, you know, community. So as you said, we’ve always had that tribes and the initial native tribes were communities. But then when I think when we all went online, all of a sudden we had access to people outside of our community who believed the same thing we did. And so we have been talking even in marketing circles about community for, you know, at least 15. But I think there are very few people that have actually activated a community in the way that you’re talking about as a marketing strategy. ,

Mark Schaefer (06:23): Right? Yeah. I mean, if you remember when the internet began, the first thing a lot of people tried were communities, right? Coca-Cola I remember had a community, most of the big brands, even like one of the oil companies like Exxon had like a community thing, right? I mean you can see that why that wouldn’t work very well , but everybody tried it. But you know, in the early days they were built to try to sell stuff, right? They didn’t really have the right bandwidth. We didn’t have the right technology. You couldn’t do video and it just didn’t work. So most communities failed. The communities that survived. Almost all of them are transactional. It’s customer self-service. Oh, your problem with your software, go into our community. And I think the way the world, the reason the world went that way is because it’s easy to measure. You can see the ROI of that kind of community because it’s cost avoidance. And we completely overlook this idea of if we have like-minded people coming together, we can collaborate and co-create and it builds trust and it builds loyalty. And you’ve got customer advocacy and you have di a direct line to consumer information. And it, it’s just, I think I put together a very compelling case in the book to say, Hey, yeah, wake up and at least consider this idea.

John Jantsch (07:55): Well I know over the years, you know, I have sold for years, I’ve sold courses, I’ve sold training, I’ve done one-on-one. I will tell you some of the most beneficial programs that I’ve ever run have been small cohorts of people coming together Yeah. In a group. And I think that while I wouldn’t call that a community necessarily, even if we come together five or six times over, you know, so many months or something, people get very connected. And I think that that in some ways what I’m witnessing is just a real hunger that people have for this, right? I mean, it’s not just that people need to create this, it’s that there, there’s a real hunger. There’s a, you even start the book talking about, you know, a lot of this is driven out of loneliness, which has probably gotten far worse. , you know, for a lot of people that aren’t going into offices anymore.

Mark Schaefer (08:38): Yes. The first chapter of my book is probably the most depressing chapter in the history of different books, . Cause I start off talking about my own childhood loneliness and how I was lost. I I something happened to when I was a kid that just made me a shadow. It just, it made me someone just a ghost of a person. And then a miracle kind of happened in high school where I was embraced by a community and I was always haunted by this idea of what if that didn’t happen? I mean, I was going down this road of isolation and depression and this is why it’s significant. And this is one of the reasons I wrote the book. I saw this headline in the New York Times that said the loneliest generation talking about our children and our teenagers and the pandemic didn’t cause this. No. It was, it’s been creeping up actually for decades.

(09:38): But the pandemic really amplified things. And just like you said, that we’ve got generations like just living in their rooms. And one, one of my students said my, my my daughter graduated college the last year and a half of college was spent in her bedroom cuz it was remote. Then she got a job that was remote . She said the last this important two and a half years of her life, the big change in her life has been moving from one room to another. And she’s so lonely and she’s so desperate to see people. And so we are, we do long to belong. And I’m not being Pollyannish John, this is a business book. It’s based by data, it’s based by research. You know, that’s sort of a hallmark of my books. But there’s also this aspect that community heals. It not only works as a marketing idea, but it really heals.

(10:40): I mean we need this, as you say, psychologically, sociology, sociologically even there’s a little bit of research in the book that shows h helps us physically to be happy and belong. So I mean, it it, it is a business book, but I think it also sort of creates this sort of new meaning to marketing. We, it’s the only marketing I think our customers would actually embrace because they need it. And I think that’s a powerful idea. If you create not only marketing that works, but marketing that, that heals. That’s, that’s something that appeals to me. Hey,

John Jantsch (11:18): Marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. You actually introduced what for me was kind of a new, it’s probably not a new term, but it’s the genesis of a business being community based. That that actually being the way that it starts as opposed to a bolt on channel.

Mark Schaefer (12:18): Yeah. It was new for me and really inspirational. And I guess you’d have to say this was another sort of seed that was planted in the book. You know, I was writing, it was like 2018, I was writing Marketing Rebellion. So I was like on the lookout for new marketing models. Mm. And I was at the social media marketing world and was at this, uh, breakfast held by Andy Costadina, one of our mutual friends. Mm-hmm. and Dana Malstaff was there, first time I ever met her. She started telling me she had, she was an entrepreneur, she had been pregnant and didn’t feel like couldn’t find a lot of support for being a mom and being a business leader. So she created this Facebook group, cut Boss mom. Long story short, in the first nine months she was making a six figure income. She now has 70,000 members in this group.

(13:14): It’s nearly a million dollar business. She always corrected me. It’s not quite a million dollar. She said, mark, don’t call it a million dollar business. I’m almost there. But in a short period of time, her business has been doubling every year. No sales department, no marketing department, no marketing budget. Sort of a remarkable idea. She’s a, she’s created this million dollar business in a short period of time with no marketing budget. Because if you have this community of 70,000 people, she just, they just are eager to buy her courses, her videos, her events, her coaching, her workshops, because they believe in her. They love being in this place. They belong to her as a brand. And so she doesn’t have to sell. She was careful to say, I can sell . Right. Yeah. She knew it if she needs to, but she said I don’t need to.

John Jantsch (14:11): Yeah. I suspect a lot of people underestimate, you know, how much selling probably is, but not in the traditional negative way that we think about it. Yeah. Right, right. I mean you’re, you’re selling the vision, you know, of belonging and that’s, that’s still, you know, a sales job in some ways you call this, I mean it’s in the subtitle last great marketing strategy. So you, there’s nothing left. Like there’s no more. This is it.

Mark Schaefer (14:33): Well it’s gotta be my last book. Right? Well the reason, yeah, I know it’s a very, it’s a provocative subtitle, but this is the way I looked at it. First of all, it was the first marketing strategy. You know, when, you know, my, my grandparents lived in Pittsburgh and they shopped at these neighborhood stores and the people at those stores knew my grandparents, they knew their family, they knew their kids, they knew their birthdays. They would talk and it was a community. It was a community atmosphere. And I’m just one generation away from that and I’ve never experienced that and I just long to belong to something like that. So it was really the first way that the first marketing is you belong there. And I think we live in this community, in this world now where we have this streaming economy, you know, last night, you know, I was batching it last night, so I got on to Netflix and just binge some show and then, you know, tomorrow I’m going on a trip and I’m gonna listen to Spotify for hours and hours and I might listen to an audiobook and all these hours I’m consuming content.

(15:46): I am not going to hear one ad, I am not gonna hear one brand messaging. There’s gonna be no PR spin. And so we’ve gotta find something new. Yeah. And I think when all the interruptive advertising and the spam and the robocall finally go away, the last thing we’re gonna have is community. Because we’ve always had community, we’ve always needed community and we always will. And so I think this is the one thing in this fast, crazy world we can really count on. Our customers need this. And I think this could be a long lasting strategy if it’s done the right way.

John Jantsch (16:32): It’s one of the points that you make, I think in probably has its own whole chapter. If I recall, you know, I’m envisioning somebody listening to this going, we need to do community, we need to increase customer retention by 12%. So let’s start community. Yeah. And you suggest that actually if you don’t start with purpose first, yeah. You’re doomed to fail right outta the gate.

Mark Schaefer (16:53): Well, most communities fail. That’s the hard fact. And the main reason why they fail is because the communities are created to sell stuff. Right. And that’s great and we gotta do that, but it’s not a reason to gather. So you have to think about what is the intersection between what you do and what you believe in and this and the purpose of your customers. And one of the things I’m proud of in the book is I have dozens of brand new case studies, diverse b2b, b2c, big companies, you know, small companies. There’s even a stay-at-home mom with five kids that has a community of 50,000 people in this book. So it’s very inspirational. Yep. But I will rely on good old Harley Davidson. It’s a worn out example. But you know, here’s a, it’s a transportation company, but they don’t have these crazy ads. You know, we’re going crazy.

(17:56): Come down, it’s President’s Day sale. You’ll never hear that from Harley. You never will because they’ve got points of differentiation, right. About their look and the leather and all this stuff. But the purpose that unites them, and this is, this unifies that company and I have firsthand experience with this. I’ve worked with Harley Davidson. They are obsessed with everything they can do to make you a badass. That is what, that’s what if you wanna be a badass, they’re gonna help you do that. And that’s why they never need to have a sale. That’s why they’re never in your face with all these stupid ads. Because you know, you can really only be a badass if you have Arnold Davidson . Right. So it’s all based on this pur on this unifying purpose. You wanna be a badass, we wanna help you be a badass. And that’s the way it goes. So I spent a lot of time on this in the, in the book helping cus helping businesses think through what do you want to accomplish in the world? And you can do it better if you’ve got your customers with you. There’s lots of prompts I think to help businesses think that through. And, but it does, it, it it does start with a, not just a purpose, but really a unifying purpose.

John Jantsch (19:22): I hate to get too practical from go from purpose to tools , but you did kind of mention one of the challenges early on was we didn’t really have great tools for building community. You know, there’s a whole new breed of community platform cropping up through the, you know, I’m thinking of the circles, you know, of the world. Yeah. So talk to a little bit about both the technology but then also the practical standpoint. I think where a lot of communities fail is they think that you just put a bunch of people in there and they’re gonna like mingle. And so, you know, there has to be a community management aspect as well as the, you know, whatever the technology is, doesn’t there.

Mark Schaefer (19:57): Yeah. You know, in, in that part of the book, I stay pretty high level because,

John Jantsch (20:05): Because it’s all changed already. , it’s

Mark Schaefer (20:08): Changing

(20:09): And I can’t tell you what to do because Yeah, look some pe the only piece of advice I really give in the book is it’s probably going to help if you meet in a place that’s organic to your every, the everyday experience of your community. So if the people in your community, if they go to LinkedIn every day, maybe you should be on LinkedIn. If you go to Facebook or Twitter or Slack every day, maybe you should be there. Mm-hmm . Mm-hmm , my community is on Discord. I fought and kicked and screamed not to be on Discord , my community is about learning about the future of marketing and the community said, look, if we’re gonna learn about the future of marketing, we might as well learn about Discord. So I couldn’t argue with that. So there we are. The one thing I point out in the book that I think will be fascinating to any marketer is, are these new ideas about NFTs and Web three and the Metaverse?

(21:08): And I point out in this section of the book, talking about the future of the community, why many of the things we rely on in marketing today, like social listening platforms are gonna become obsolete in some ways They already are because Gen Z, they’re not on Facebook. Yeah. They’re not on LinkedIn. Even business majors. I gave a presentation to Esther’s degree students at Rutgers, almost none of them were even on LinkedIn. It’s like they resisted, where are they hanging out? Discord. Twitch arguably the biggest community in the world. I could even say Fortnite, right. Is a community. And guess what? They’re undetectable and like gens, when we talk about Gen Z, we’re not talking about babies. The first member of Gen Z just got elected. The Congress. Yeah. They’re here, they’re buying stuff, they’re gonna be our new leaders. You know, they punch way above their weight when it comes to culture and fashion and music and art. And I mean they’re having an incredible impact on our society and they’re invisible. And so, so, and I don’t have answers to that, but I think considering where these new communities are popping up, number one they, there’s an implication there for our own communities. Number two, there’s an implication there just to for finding these people cuz they are in communities. Yeah. But you and ie. You, you may never know it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:45): Speaking with Mark Schaffer on his wonderful new book, belonging to the Brand Mark, you want to tell people, I know the book’s available anywhere, but uh, you wanna invite people to connect with you in any fashion as well as check out the work you’re doing.

Mark Schaefer (22:55): Sure. Thanks so much John. You know, it’s just always a joy to speak to you. And so you can find me@businessesgrow.com. You’ll never remember how to spell Schaffer. You might not even remember how to spell Jan .

John Jantsch (23:10): I guarantee you we’ve both got the that S C H in common. But other

Mark Schaefer (23:14): Than that, yeah, you can remember Grow. And if you can remember that you can find my book, my blog, my podcast, my social media connections. And I’d love to hear from you. And John, thank you so much, as always.

John Jantsch (23:25): Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. Mark one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your s

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello.

John Jantsch (00:48): Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jan, and my guest today is Camden Francis. He’s the founder and c e o of a nonprofit organization called Beyond the Crisis. It’s a few food distribution charity that’s distributed over $100,000 of food items to housing communities and homeless shelters across Massachusetts. I should also tell you that Camden is 18 years old. His nonprofit Beyond the Crisis landed him on the Drew Barrymore talk show, Bloomberg Radio podcast, numerous podcasts with npr, including All Things Considered. So we’re gonna talk about his entrepreneurial journey. So Camden, thanks for joining me.

Camden Francis (01:28): Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (01:31): Well, I, I have to say you, you have a, you earned an honor. You are the youngest guest I think I’ve ever had on the show. Wow. I betcha I’m not the first person that’s told you that though. Oh, you’re, you’re pretty young to get started in accomplishment. It’s, yeah, yeah. It’s what you’ve accomplished at such a young age is newsworthy, so that’s why you’re making it on these shows. So let me, let me ask you about Beyond the Crisis, going back to when you started it, cuz I know you’ve been doing this for at this for a little while. What, I mean, what was it that led you to start, what, what made you say I need to do this thing?

Camden Francis (02:02): So it was really at the height of the pandemic. I’m very ambitious. I’m an entrepreneurial minded kid, but I really wanted to do something to help my community. So it was that combined with like entrepreneurship that really turned an idea into like a mobilization to really help families in need.

John Jantsch (02:20): Yeah. So talk a little bit about the start of it. Was it, you know, talk a little bit about the challenges. I mean, starting any entrepreneurial venture is a challenge. So what were some of the challenges? And then maybe kind of talk a little bit about the day-to-day what, what the organization actually does on a day-to-day basis.

Camden Francis (02:37): Yeah, so kind of during the, like the days of like founding this organization, I did it with my 13 year old brother. We were so young at the time. One of the things that we did was we got a mentor so we reached out. I have a great network. I’m very fortunate. My dad also is an entrepreneur himself, so that’s helpful. But I reached out to the CEO of Y M C A in Metro North region. Her name is Kathleen Walsh, she’s my mentor to date with the nonprofit. And that really helped us not fall into too many kind of pitfalls because like we kind of bootstrapped the organization, which means we self-funded it and with resources from a 13 year old and at the time I was 16. So it’s pretty amazing that today we’re able to distribute a hundred thousand dollars worth of food items. But it really goes to show you that kind of it you, if you put your mind to something and if you get the right partners in place, you really have good people behind you and a community that really can use your idea, it’s marketable and it can really help people then it can really go far.

John Jantsch (03:33): Yeah. So talk a little bit about the day-to-day, what, you know, what’s the actual function of the organization, how does it work?

Camden Francis (03:39): So day-to-day what we do is we kind of reach out to kind of housing communities and homeless shelters across Massachusetts that can really use kind of food items. So we kind of have them fill out surveys and they get back to us with kind of what they need. And usually we can fulfill those requirements because we also have sponsors in place. We have sponsors in a trustee board. The trustee board is what we took from like colleges. We saw colleges and universities. They have kind of dedicated donors like every month that really believed in the mission and the CO that they’re supporting. And we saw why can’t we do this at a nonprofit level? So that’s really helping us. But yeah, also our corporate spots is a really great, they’re kind of large kind of food brands and they kind of can help with the specific food donations necessary.

(04:24): But we have a great network. We’re kind of linked with kind of governors, congressmen. One of our most strategic donors right, is Jim McGovern, who’s kind of a huge advocate for kind of the US and global food insecurity, health and nutrition. And also we’re heavily involved at even a national level with the podcast outreach. I mean the media outreach that we’ve done. And we’re kind of also involved with the White House and helping them kind of strategically use some of our research because what we’ve found is we’re food distribution charity, which is pretty unique because we’ve found that there’s actually enough food to go around, but families lack access to available food elsewhere. And a lot of food right now is just getting wasted. So we have people on our team working with food recirculation, so kind of taking food from restaurants that isn’t really used and will go to waste and redistributing it to soup kitchens. And we have people on the ground who are drivers kind of delivering the food from point A to point B. And then we have the operations on the executive board who kind of handles the operations of the

John Jantsch (05:25): Organization. What was, I mean o obviously listening to you describe what you’ve accomplished really in a fairly short time. But when you were getting started, what was the hardest thing and and again, think of anybody starting any entrepreneurial venture, what was the hardest thing for you?

Camden Francis (05:39): I would say in the most humble manner, because I was so young, I knew that I didn’t have right the knowledge that a lot of 40 and 50 year old entrepreneurs had. And it wasn’t necessarily naive to say, but it was like the ability to kind of make mistakes that was really scary. It’s scary for entrepreneurs in general, right? They don’t always know if their idea’s gonna work out. But being at such a young age, you hear feedback from like other people in your inner circle, family and friends and there’s like, they’re like, yeah, right, like this isn’t gonna happen. But really seeing kind of the progress that we’ve made so far and saying really focused and present has really been a blessing for me, my brother and the other people around this organization and my family as a whole. So it’s great seeing it come together.

John Jantsch (06:26): Was there ever a time you felt like chucking it? It’s like why am I bothering, this is just too hard. I mean, I know what I was doing when I was 16, 17 years old, , there was a lot of other things that, you know, that I wanted to go do. I mean, did you ever have a moment where you just felt like, I just can’t do this anymore

Camden Francis (06:43): many times because it was really during the beginning that we, I’ve had that moment now, not so much because I see kind of what it’s doing for families, right? Who really could use and benefit from it. But during the beginning when like my friends kind of wanted to hang out constantly and some of the plans I couldn’t make, it was definitely hard to kind of make those sacrifices. But knowing that they paid off to date is really great. But yeah, I really, I did this nonprofit to learn about to, in addition to help people to learn about entrepreneurship as a whole. And I’m currently launching a, like a tech startup right now that’s even more kind of, I would say interesting and almost unique.

John Jantsch (07:24): Awesome. So would you say you are, you hinted at this a little bit, talking about how in some ways you were so young that you didn’t know what you didn’t know and you weren’t afraid to like ask because you weren’t maybe embarrassed by, you know, by not knowing. Would you say that your youth or your age has been a help or a challenge or both?

Camden Francis (07:45): It’s definitely allowed me a platform, right? To really kind of tell my story to uh, kind of communicate what I’ve done and what I plan to do and kind of how I plan to continue to help families in need. That’s really the main goal of the organization and it’s really important with nonprofits to just really stay focused on the goal. Why are you doing it and how can it help people? But being so young in the beginning, I really wasn’t taking seriously, I was sending so many emails they were getting bounced back, rejected, rescinded ghosts. But yeah, it really kind of gave me perseverance and it’s good to be young and kind of have developed these skill sets early on. So when you’re older you kind of have this knowledge, you have skillsets developed and you can really kind of make an even bigger difference because that’s what I plan to

John Jantsch (08:31): Dos. So was there also, I talked, I asked you if there was time you felt like quitting. Was there also that moment or like one day that you remember, you know, maybe you got some buddy to say yes, you know what where you, where you said yourself, this might actually just make it.

Camden Francis (08:46): Yeah, I, for us, really one of the greatest days for us is kind of being on the Drew Barmore show and being able to tell our story mainstream in front of a live audience and have it also make national coverage on c V s. And that was kind of like a breaking point because at that point we kind of had an audience, we, we had listeners, we got volunteer opportunities from that, more donors, we had partner opportunities. I had the ability to network with even um, more powerful influential people such as CEOs of companies. You name it like governors. It was, yeah, it was a really kind of, when I look back at it, it was a almost gonna be a core memory probably in my experience as a young entrepreneur. But yeah, there it’s been a rollercoaster ride

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John Jantsch (10:31): What would you say, and I think you’ve already hinted at this, but I’m gonna ask you anyway, has been the most rewarding thing about doing this, putting in the work?

Camden Francis (10:39): I would say the most, yeah, the most rewarding thing for me was kind of doing it with my younger brother. We’re so close, we’ve gained so much knowledge about entrepreneurship and just having him as a partner. You know, we’re very close and eventually kind of when our parents kind of pass us on the baton, it’s really great to have like a best friend who you can trust and who you can bounce ideas with, idea with and just grow together. And I would say that’s definitely one of the best things for me.

John Jantsch (11:10): Yeah, that’s awesome. So I think I read this somewhere, your college bound?

Camden Francis (11:19): I am, yeah. So I currently applied waiting to hear back. I applied to a select number of colleges, a few Ivys, Vanderbilt over in Tennessee. I applied to Duke, so like top, top colleges and I’m playing to, I study either entrepreneurship or finance. So yeah, it’s exciting waiting to hear back, but

John Jantsch (11:38): So what does that mean? Assuming you’re gonna go off, what does that mean for the organization?

Camden Francis (11:43): Yeah, so right now because of how we run the organization, a lot of our kind of staff are virtual and we have a really great volunteer base. But we’re planning to grow the organization super organically. And what that’s gonna allow us to do is kind of just keep growing at small and steady rates and keep making a small impact. When I’m in college, we’re probably not going to grow and scale anymore, but we know that we can kind of retain what we have and continue to help like a specific number of families, which we’ve already kind of kind of assessed and worked through. So

John Jantsch (12:17): Yeah, so that was my next question was, you know, what’s the vision for the future for the organization? But it sounds to me like you almost want to take where you are now and just get better at doing what you’re doing

Camden Francis (12:27): Exactly. But we also have vision for the future. We really wanna stay focused, stay present, but we really want to turn it into a family foundation to kind of establish a a long lasting legacy of giving and have something in the family where either I can donate time or resources to my brother or kind of even maybe 10 years down the road, who knows if the organization’s still gonna be running, but kind of having this be like a family thing. Like the Francis family founded this and this is what we do, here’s our impact and kind of this is our legacy. So that’s the play.

John Jantsch (13:01): So little bro, you’re ceo, is that it now?

Camden Francis (13:04): Yeah, I think I’m gonna give my brother some of the reigns for sure. I’ll definitely be on call helping out. It’s great kind of with Zoom and Google Meet and all these apps, right? You can kind of do conferencing like we’re doing now. But yeah, I think that I’ll just kind of keep it small, keep it manageable, that’s really kind of the main thing.

John Jantsch (13:22): So are you able to talk about the tech startup that you’re working

Camden Francis (13:25): On? There’s a lot of disclosure around it, but I can give a few specific kind of details and really what I’ll go into, I’m not gonna go into the design aspect of it because it’s very, but we’re gonna almost our kind of like partner or the organization, our main competitor is gonna be LinkedIn and we’re gonna make this app almost like kind of how Facebook started it around college campuses. LinkedIn is, it’s a great app, but I’m finding that it’s hard to find internships on the, on the app. It’s hard to find job opportunities, especially for really young, talented, um, individuals and students out of college, right out of college. So by making a platform that’s very user-friendly and allowing it to be college-based, have students kind of make groups and be able to kind of establish whether that be like whatever groups, life groups, fitness groups, stuff like that.

(14:19): And in addition, it would be a great networking app, which is also, which also allows students to kind of not just waste mindless hours on social media, but kind of use social media to kind of allow themselves to impact their futures and really kind of create core connections. And then with that corporations, right, we can go on our app and they’ll pay us like a fee, a costing fee, but over time, right? If we get corporations, large corporations, there’s so many of them costing fee or if you have their fee, the retention there is going to be pretty great. And also if we kind of get, get a user base right when these users grow up, it could be the next big app because they’re gonna already know how to use it, they’re gonna be familiar with it, these college students, then they’re gonna get maybe older thirties, forties, then their kids are gonna also be familiar with it. So it’s a great time to launch something like this.

John Jantsch (15:07): Awesome. So here’s the hardest question I’ll save for last. Do you see yourself as an inspiration be seen as such?

Camden Francis (15:13): I’m so humble that I’m really trying to grow my skillset, grow my mindset, stay concentrated, stay focused, and in the future who knows where life will take me. But as of right now, I’m so grateful for the work I’ve done so far and I’m very motivated. It’s great kind of to have motivation when I wake up in the morning, I’m excited, I’m ready to go. And that’s just, it’s great. It’s really great and I’m super blessed for it. But eventually I plan to kind of keep growing my platform too.

John Jantsch (15:45): Are you a reader?

Camden Francis (15:47): I am, yes.

John Jantsch (15:48): Yes. So, so where, what books does give us your top three or four latest reads that you think everybody ought to

Camden Francis (15:55): Read? Yeah, off the top of my head, I think I might have a few of ’em listed somewhere. Hold on one sec. Sure. Sorry about the delay here. I just, off the top of my head, hard to remember. Okay. So How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. That’s on my list.

John Jantsch (16:14): That book’s older than Me even. Yeah,

Camden Francis (16:17): great book. It’s a Relic, the lead startup Crushing it by Gary Vaynerchuk. And then I also am big into podcasts, so I look at kind of the Harvard Business Review and kind of how this was made podcast and a few other podcasts such as that. But yeah, I’m a big reader. I love to kind of learn and that’s kind of how I ideate how I get these ideas, how I network big part of. Awesome.

John Jantsch (16:41): Awesome. So Camden, tell people, is there someplace you’d wanna invite people to check out beyond the Crisis or obviously any way to connect with you personally?

Camden Francis (16:50): Yeah, sure. So I have LinkedIn, a Camden Francis, uh, you could go check me out there. I’d love to connect. I’d love to answer questions regarding the organization, what I do, and also be on the crisis’s website. Go check this out. www.beyondthecrisis.org. Everything’s up there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:06): Awesome. Well, Camden, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and good luck wherever your next ventures Legion. Maybe we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Camden Francis (17:16): Yeah, maybe. So thanks again for having me. It’s a pleasure.

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