Making A Difference Around The World: On Digital Marketing And Traveling With David Reske
Finding a team to support you can be quite difficult and costly, especially if you’re a small to mid-size company. David Reske, Founder and President of Nowspeed, sees outsourcing a digital marketing team as more cost-efficient than hiring one marketer. In this episode, David shares his life journey and business goals, taking us through his discovery of outsourcing and his love for traveling. In building up Nowspeed, a digital marketing company, he had to live frugally for a year with no income. He could've switched to plan B, but he was dedicated to helping other people succeed in their businesses with his expertise that he never gave up. Join in the conversation and let David inspire you to grow and explore. Tune in!
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Making A Difference Around The World: On Digital Marketing And Traveling With David Reske
I'm here with David Reske, the Founder and CEO of Now Speed. What a cool company. We're going to dig a little bit into that, but we're going to spend a lot of time getting to know David. He is in Massachusetts just outside of Boston by way of Ohio where I went to my first game and saw a sea of red. It was an amazing game and I wouldn't trade it for anything. David, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Chad. It's good to meet you. It’s great to be here.
I'm excited to dig in. This show has been around for a few months. We've already had a number of interviews and are starting to see what the common threads are with people and us as humans. It seems we all have one of those inflection points in life or multiple where it feels like the biggest mountain we had to overcome. Yet we do, we thrive and we continue. I'm going to dig into that here. Before we do that, I'd like to understand when you were younger, I often think at age 5 or 6, what are some of your first memories when you walked out of the house in the morning or when you woke up? What were you passionate about then?
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I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland. The house that we lived in, my dad built it which was cool. We lived in this place that backed into a creek. When I was 5, 6, 7 or 8 especially in the summertime, nothing is better than getting up and going down the creek, playing all day. My parents must have had no idea where I was. It’s different from the way kids are raised now. We play all day in the creek and have a blast. Those are some of my best memories growing up.
I remember crawfish or crayfish, depending on which part of the country. That's all termed differently these days, but we would always turn the rocks over and collect those things. Exploration and just digging around. Did you have a bunch of friends that you did that with?
We play games down there. It was cool. I found out later that it was downstream from this big waste dump area. We always wondered why the rocks were orange, blue and yellow. It is not the healthiest place to grow up but I'm still alive.
It’s the things we think about when we get older. That's wild. If you think about what you liked to do then, did you do any sports? What was your thing in school?
I was not a huge sports kid in high school but I loved sports in junior high. I got out of it then but I played football, basketball, baseball, all that growing up. It was a lot of fun. I remember in high school, I started to get into the debate team. I started to think a little bit differently about sports and activities than a lot of my peers were in high school. Those are all good experiences.
I've got a picture in my office of a fingerprint and it's got verses in it. I think about how all of us figure out our pathway in life. No one fingerprint is the same. When you can live into that and realize that you’re different from the other person and that's awesome, you step into yourself. It sounds like that's what you started to figure out in junior high school when you said, “All the sports things. I think debate is more interesting.” What was interesting about the debate for you when you've moved into that part of your life?
I enjoyed learning about the world in a different way, getting a little more serious about issues. When I did a high school debate, you picked a topic. Ours was energy policy which is so interesting and relevant now. We were debating the merits of solar energy versus nuclear energy versus more traditional sources. In the debate structure, you have to argue both sides and create an entire argument for the affirmative. You have to create an entire argument for the negative. On the same debate day, you have to debate one argument passionately and win, then you have to debate the other argument passionately. It helps me now to look at arguments like political arguments and all kinds of things from two different perspectives. I don't get too emotionally wrapped up in one perspective because you realize that there's another perspective. If you dig a little deeper, there are usually good arguments on both sides.
If you flew a chopper up or a drone and looked at it from the top, side or the bottom, that's a 360 view. It's not one answer or one size fits all. If you take the playing in the creek, the orange and blue rocks to the debate team a little bit later in life to what you're doing now, if you were to draw a line between those things, what's the secret connection between what you love to do then and what you're doing now or is there one?
I started my first company in my 30s. I started a digital marketing website development shop in the ‘90s and grew that up to a significant degree and then sold it to a very large company. I was a senior partner there for a few years. It’s this idea of not having limits and not following the rules. When you're playing in the creek, you're not on a prescribed team. You don’t have to show up at a specific time. You don’t have to play by their rules. You’re just playing and you make it happen. If I had to connect that dot to starting a company, you get to make up your own rules. You get to play the position you want. You get to hire people to do the things you don't want to do. You get to grow it or not grow it. You get to make it happen. That was a great experience. I grew that company up and sold it. I realized that I didn't want to be a player in somebody else's team. After a few years, I left that and then decided to do it again and started this company. I continue to make it happen on my own terms.
I absolutely can connect with that. I remember on a Zoom one time, the former CMO of Harley Davidson was on. She had the same realization and it’s about the book Corporate Rebels and there's a tagline to it. She realized the same thing like, “Why am I doing this? Why am I working at a big company?” She connected the dots. To me, we're all born in a certain way with the fingerprint or the unique snowflake. There's never been a snowflake that's the same as any other. How's that even possible? It’s figuring out what our unique fingerprint or snowflake is. It's the key to having fun in life.
Along the way, I'm sure there was a speed bump or two or several running the business. I just watched this Wish Man about the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the story of Frank Shankwitz and how he created that. He ran into some buzz saws through life. If he didn't, Make-A-Wish Foundation wouldn't exist and 450,000 kids wouldn't have been able to make their wish. What are the buzz saws or the speed bumps or the mountains that you've faced? Maybe share one that you're comfortable with that caused you to be a better person?
There are tons of challenges along the way. When I started my first company, I worked for no income for a year. It sounds exciting to be starting an internet company at the dawn of the internet age. We were building websites when nobody knew what that was. It's exciting but back home, we were living on savings, eating beans and rice as often as possible. We have a couple of young kids at the time. It was a very frugal time and it took a lot of sweat equity to build that up and get it launched off the ground until it starts producing income and growing money. That startup experience stayed with me for a long time. You just got to do what you got to do.
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Do you remember any tactics at the time that helped you get through it? A friend of mine, TK Kader, a former CEO of ToutApp, sold his company to Marketo. He became head of the strategy and then sold that company to Adobe. All this was within ten years and the rest is history. He wrote a book called How to Punch the Sunday Jitters in the Face because as a founder, it's like, “Here comes another Monday. How much money am I going to burn this week?” What were some of the tactics you could share? How do you wake up and go and take the next step in that journey?
You got to have a good plan, stay focused and work hard. In those days, I was working harder than I ever was. I was working Saturdays and half Sundays. The thing that drives you when you're in that mode is you're focused on the goal and you want the goal. You have to stay completely focused on it. It's so funny as I grew up in that company, you get more successful and get more money. It's easy to have a Plan B. It's easy to say, “I'll try this thing but if it doesn't work out, I'll be fine. I'll do this other thing,” or “We'll work on this initiative but if it doesn't work out, that’s okay because we already got this other thing going on.” You're not as driven in those situations.
When I started that first company, I’m totally driven. There's no Plan B. You burn the ships. I quit the job. There's no going back. It forced me in those days to be 100% focused on the goal and to wake up every day to say, “What do I have to do to make this happen?” I love Mondays because I can get into them and make things happen. It's amazing what your mind comes up with. Your mind creates the opportunities and finds the opportunities to make those things happen. On Sundays or Fridays, it looks bleak. When Monday comes in, you're like, "I just thought of something. I'm going to try this." That worked exactly as I needed. That experience happened to me so many times so just keep going forward.
That makes me think of something that Gerhard Gschwandtner from Selling Power often says, and I'm sure he's quoting somebody so you may know who said this, “The bigger the why, the bigger the try.” You can understand what's next after your next thing. You sell your company, then what? If you can, keep going to the bottom of that. Why do you want to do that? It took one guy driving in my car one time. He asked me 50 times, "Why?" I was like, "I thought there were only three why's to answer. What's with 50?" It's not obvious to a lot of folks.
It's important because once you can connect with it and the purpose, things change for you. By you making that leap of faith and burning the ships as you said, you now run Now Speed. What an amazing sight. The brands you serve and the way you serve them, even the pricing model is highly unique from anything I've seen out there. Good, better, best. It starts at $1,000 a month for a marketing team to help you out. How did you end up getting to that point where you price these things? How does that line up with what your passion is?
I'm passionate about helping companies grow. That's what Now Speed is all about. We're a digital marketing agency. We help companies grow using the best tools and techniques out there. Whether it's website design, digital advertising, SEO, social media, marketing automation, all the best things you can do to drive traffic, convert those traffic, leads or customers, and then grow the business. We thought about how to execute that. Most of our clients use us as their outsourced digital marketing team. When you're a small to mid-sized company and you want to do something like, “I've got a problem. I want to do social media or I want to do SEO.” The traditional answer to that is to hire somebody. If you're going to hire somebody, you're talking about $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $100,000 a year fully loaded. It's a big commitment, but by outsourcing this, we give you an expert who focuses on that with a slice of their time. You get a part-time person who can execute that. It's usually very cost-effective for companies to do that.
The other thing that we focus on is driving results and measuring all those results from end to end. If you have an employee that you're going to use to do a function, you're managing them, you're responsible for those outcomes. With our team, we had a methodology called In the Zone after the book that I wrote called Digital Marketing in the Zone. It's our In the Zone methodology. We come to every engagement with a whole process of focus on getting things done and driving outcomes in each of the areas we're focused on. It's very result-oriented.
The other thing I would think is if I hired that $60,000 to $100,000 a year person, it's a person. They have a finite number of skills that they have. You might get lucky and get a bang for your buck by getting someone more experienced than they're charging you but not most of the time. I would think that since you have a larger team of people with all different skillsets, you get to leverage those skillsets if you're a customer as well, not just stuck with one particular skillset.
As much or as little of their time, you want to get an expert. We take care of hiring the right people, onboarding, training and replacing them if they leave. We make all that happen.
Thinking about your company but even more so your next chapter. If you could do anything for the rest of your life, what would change everything for your life? It's a big question.
I have a bunch of different passions within the company and outside the company. I'll talk business-wise. First of all, growing my company by 5X is a game-changer for me. We're focused on growth. We acquired another company in 2020 and we're adding staff in 2021. We’re focusing on growth, getting 5X growth over the years would be a game-changer for me. On the personal side, I'm on a quest to visit 100 countries. I love to travel. COVID has taken a little bit of a bite out of that. It’s a little harder these days but I'm at 58 countries now. There’s nothing magic about 100 but it's a goal for me. I'm passionate about visiting countries.
It goes back to your no walls and looking at viewpoints from all different angles. I've been to China, Hong Kong, Italy, France and Barcelona. When you meet and integrate with people of different shapes, sizes, cultures, creeds, it gives you a different perspective when you face any situation. There was a book by Jim Collins. He spoke at an event one time. He was an economics speaker. I remember he taught the audience how he learned about economics by going into taxi cabs in different countries. He’d ask the taxi driver. In this vernacular, that'd be an Uber for our younger readers. It's amazing when you ask the question, “What are your thoughts on Bitcoin?” One Uber driver in Philadelphia said, “I'm a minor, funny you should ask.” I’m in for a 30-minute ride from the airport to the hotel and now I'm a better person as a result of that. I understand or at least more than most, what Bitcoin is all about. What do you hope to get from traveling to the other 42 countries?
One of the things you pointed out and is important to me is being curious about people. Whether they were my employees or friends, I'm generally known as the person who's asking all the questions and learning about people. When I travel, I love to meet people and learn about their culture and how they grew up. I've been in Zambia talking to parents who are trying to educate their kids. They're living in brick huts with mud floors. I've been to Barcelona where it's beautiful. The beach is amazing. The culture is great. What I find is that in many ways, we're all the same. That parent in Zambia, I said, “What do you want for your kids?” “We just want our kids to be happy.” They have a great community. They want their kids to be educated. They want the same things as the parents in Barcelona and the parents in Boston. I'm always amazed at how there's so much commonality in the world. I love to experience that, plus I like to see cool stuff. I took a trip to Bryce Canyon in Moab. I love to see beautiful things in the world. I want to see as much of it as possible.
My son was involved in a grease fire in February. He made it through the other side with second and third-degree burns on his face and hands. It’s something you would never wish on anyone. We had faith. We made it through and the prayer worked. By the time they take the bandages off, we're like, “Your nose is back to normal. How did that happen?” One of the things that came out of that is the threshold of pain. He goes, “Dad, what's the most pain you've ever been in?” You think back, “I was in a car accident. I hit my head on the windshield, that hurt. My broken arm, that hurt. My back pain later in my life, that hurt.” He couldn't relate to it. He hasn't been through a lot of pain in his life at age nineteen. The nurse would come in and say, “What level is your pain? He was like, “I don't know. How do I compare it? A three?” They're like, “No meds.” He's like, “No. It's a seven. It hurts bad.”
I asked a Marine friend, “What's the most pain you've ever been?” He goes, “I've been shot, stabbed and blown up. The worst pain I ever had was passing a kidney stone.” It’s the perspective on what pain is. Let's take that example and move it over to happiness. To your point about the folks in Zimbabwe that get to run out in the street every day and don't have walls necessarily, their parents are probably saying, “You need to be back by 9:00 PM, Johnny.” Their level of happiness compared to Barcelona compared to you and me, there are only ten possible points on the scale. I'll bet you there are days they have 9s and 10s. I'll bet you, in some ways, the Zimbabwe kid might even have more 9s and 10s than a kid playing on an iPhone all day. That's an interesting perspective.
Travel lets you see that there's happiness. There are good people. There are brilliant people. There are innovative people all over the world. There are passionate people. There are caring people who love their children. I love America, but as Americans, we often get myopic. This is a great country but sometimes we think it's the only place where great things are happening. There are great things happening all over the world. It's cool to celebrate that and see that. I've got friends in several places around the world. It's fun to see all the amazing things. Social media helps us stay in touch with those people better. It's fun to see all the things that are going on. I love exploring that. It adds a lot of richness to my life.
We're helping a school in Kenya. They have 115 teenage girls. They raise money and it's all nonprofit. It's only like $100 to $200 a month to support one of these girls. When they make it out into the world, the chances of them being an amazing nurse, teacher or professor. All kinds of good outcomes happen as a result of this one person named Jason who moved there and now changes those people's lives. They just changed their school to a bigger one. It's pretty fun. If we were to talk three years from now and you look back and say, “That was the most amazing three years,” what would you tell me at the end of three years happened?
I would love to see myself on the path of some of the goals I've talked about. I'd love to visit another fifteen other countries. I've got countries all mapped out. I've got some that I want to hit. I want to double the size of my company in the next three years. It’s hitting those two goals. Doubling the size of the company is not just about more. It's about better innovation, quality, better people and growing people that I’ve got. The thing I love about growing the company is that there are so many levels of challenge and improvement that you can make. Lots of things break when you double the size of a company. We're going to face a lot of challenges. I'm looking forward to overcoming those. We could be twice the size and profitable. That would be a big home run. If I got a chance to do my travel thing after COVID opened up some opportunities, that would be very cool.
It feels like the lights are on the other side of the tunnel. That seems like we're moving in the right direction. Two more questions with your business Now Speed, how does that align with your ability to fulfill your mission in life? We touched a little bit on that. I have to believe there's something that when you're working with this many companies, what is it about the work that you do that aligns with what your life's purpose is?
Our mission is to help companies grow but we get a lot of satisfaction from empowering our clients to be successful and making a difference in the world. We work with a lot of tech companies. It's exciting to see a client like Nokia make a difference enabling us to have 5G internet and have basic Internet access wherever we are. We're enabling that capability. On the other end of the spectrum, we work with the Robert F. Kennedy Institute for Human Rights. We run advertising programs for them to build awareness about their human rights work all over the world. They're doing a lot to bring awareness to human rights issues in Bangladesh and other areas.
By helping these companies with communications and marketing to be more successful, to bring awareness, to grow their businesses, it's part of how we're making a difference in the world. Does marketing make a difference in the world? Maybe not by itself, but it makes a difference by helping the companies that are leveraging marketing get their products out. We work with some amazing companies that are doing everything from helping us be safer through cybersecurity to enabling our technology to work every day. It's pretty cool.
The one thing we haven't touched on necessarily yet is what role does faith play in your journey? Some people go to church when they're a kid, other people never even heard of spirituality. There are all different faiths and religions. What's your path? What role does faith play for you?
I was brought up in a church-going family and very religious when I was younger. I’m not as involved in church but I still have a very strong faith in God. That’s a very important part of my life. I read an interesting book by Napoleon Hill called Think and Grow Rich which delivered some interesting perspectives. It was written in 1937. Aside from the faith part of the book, it's so interesting his perspective on the world in 1937. He was saying things like, “This is an amazing time. The world is changing right before our eyes. The old rules are gone. The new rules are there. Look at these amazing CEOs’ profiles, all these amazing CEOs who are changing the world.” You could say the same thing now and take those same principles fast forward to 80 years and bring them to now. With faith, it reminded me about having a deep perspective and having a very clear goal. It’s a strong desire to make that happen and believing that a God and the universe will help you make it and get there. It’s having a strong faith in that goal and believing that you have what it takes, and that God can play a role in helping you get there. They can help you get to where you want to in life.
I would say something similar. As a kid, every week, we're never missing a Sunday. At that point, I was like, “We're going all the time.” You go to high school and college and start to maybe I'll go once a month or I'm going on Easter or Christmas. Things then happen in life. I'm in a car accident in 2000. I get pulled back to, “Time on planet Earth is short.” Believing that there's more to the world for me and the people that I love.
When my son's situation happened in February, there was nothing we could do but have faith and belief. That was our knee-jerk reaction at the hospital that night in the burn center when you're in tears and all we could do was pray. Day one was like, “He's going to be okay. His face is still Brendan.” It puffs out over five days. You can barely see out of his eyes. The lips are bloody and you're going, “This is terrible.” All you can do is have faith. Six to seven days later, they unwrap the gauze and you're like, “He's back.” When they unwrapped the nose part, you want to push on it.
It made me think that no matter what problem or hardness you're facing in life, in your small business that you have to get through, if you can turn it over and say, “There's going to be something that I'm going to learn from this.” Even though it feels like a mountain or it's a speed bump, how do we push forward? I tell you that because we're going to launch this app called 77 Pray. There's an app called 75 Hard that is a mental toughness app. Seventy-five days of two workouts a day, 45 minutes each, a gallon of water, read ten pages in a book and no alcohol for 75 days. You come out of that and you're like, “I’m on top of this.” I did it. What's missing was the spiritual toughness piece.
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The purpose of 77 Pray is to get 77 people to go through 77 days of following this structure and get 77 other people to sign up, one per day. It's going to be a $1 subscription per month. All of those dollars we're going to use to help people when they pray through the app. Maybe little Johnny says, “I need a bike.” Guess what Johnny is going to get? A Diamondback bike shipped to his house. I'd love to continue the dialogue because Now Speed could probably help us as we go forward with this app that gets rolled out here very shortly.
It sounds like it could change the lives of a lot of people. I hope it's successful. That's great.
Thank you. When I watched the Wish Man and realized that he helped 450,000 people. We talked about the bigger the why, the bigger the try in this conversation. That was one of those where I’m like, “I can puff up my chest now because I know that that's the mission." If you just know it in your mind, then it will work. There is no burning of the ship. This has been outstanding. David Reske, CEO and Founder of NowSpeed.com. They work with a lot of companies. It starts at $1,000 a month if you're looking to improve whether you're a small business owner or a big business owner. What you see is what you get on here. I'm comfortable with that. That's why I want to work with David as we move forward. David, thanks for joining the show.
Thanks. It’s great to be here.
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About David Reske
Founder and President of Nowspeed Marketing. Internet Marketing Veteran with significant experience in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Web Analytics. I also enjoy creating and building companies.
