Ep. #1119 - Accidental Entrepreneurship

Matt Watson 00:00
And we’re back for another episode of the Startup Hustle. This is your host today, Matt Watson; excited to be joined today by Steve Ohanians from Clear Digital. He works at a digital marketing agency, and we’re gonna learn more about his background. But we’re also going to talk a lot today about accidentally being an entrepreneur. I’ve done it three times and was excited to hear about his experience with that. Usually, those are the best entrepreneurial stories. Before we get started, today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by FullScale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult. Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably. And it has a platform to help you manage that team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Ohanians 00:38
Thanks for having me.

Matt Watson 00:41
So before we get started, tell us more about your background.

Steve Ohanians 00:46
Sure, how far back do you want me to go?

Matt Watson 00:50
Preschool? Preschool? Yeah, maybe part of that? Is that when you started as an entrepreneur? Lemonade?

Steve Ohanians 01:02
Yeah, for sure. No, it was a part of St. Brown, actually. So anyway, I’ll go back a little bit. I mean, growing up, there were a couple things that I knew I was good at. And I actually liked doing the right one as I was really good at math and science. And I really enjoyed figuring out how things work and problem-solving in general. And at the same time, I really loved arts and music; I was constantly drawing and doodling in my notebook during class. I taught myself how to play the guitar and piano; not really well, but enough to give myself a creative outlet and keep myself entertained, and I like to write music for myself and all that. But then, when I got to college, it felt like I had to choose one world or the other right to go either the Bachelor of Arts direction or the Bachelor of Science direction. And I chose aerospace engineering out of everything as my career decision. And I went to school at USC in LA, and I had a dream of working on designing flight simulators that I thought would be a really cool thing for me. Kind of apply engineering and design together. But man, it was just way too much metaphysics for me. I was bored out of my mind; I didn’t have a creative outlet. It just wasn’t working. So I dropped out and started a rock band in LA. My next obvious choice. Yeah, so I’m like, alright, the engineering thing didn’t work. So when he tried a music thing, yeah. So anyway, I started a band with friends and had the best time of my life doing shows around LA and living that lifestyle and all that, but I always knew that wasn’t going to be my career, my career choice, and actually kind of missed that nerdy engineering stuff while I was doing the rock band. So this was probably in the mid-90s. And the web world was really coming on to its own. Right. So browsers were becoming better at displaying websites, and standards were being written around CSS and HTML. And you know, there were tools in Macromedia Flash that people don’t even know what that is anymore. But there are tools to create and design websites that make it easier. And I became obsessed. I was designing and building websites at any chance that I had. I created it for my friends and family, for where I would work, and for businesses that wouldn’t even ask me to create a website for now. I would just design it and send it to them and say, hey, what do you think? And for me, that digital web world was the perfect marriage of art and science, right? I could use my creative side to conceptualize something, and I can use engineering to build it. So that’s kind of how I started in this digital agency world.

Matt Watson 04:12
So tell us more about your company today and what you guys do today.

Steve Ohanians 04:16
So Clear Digital, we design and develop digital brand experiences and websites primarily for b2b organizations. And especially at the moment when their business is evolving or changing, right. One thing we noticed a few years ago is every time we are sought out for new work for, let’s say, a new brand design or a new website or a new digital experience, that company is almost always going through some kind of a big change. There’s a new CMO or marketing VP of marketing that wants to see a new direction for the organization, or they’ve just got funding and they need to generate leads right away. Just struggling competitively. If they want to set themselves up for acquisition, there’s always a big change. And what we’re good at is helping these b2b organizations really competently navigate that change and provide that clarity that they need to approach the design, development, and execution of their next web experience or their next digital brand experience.

Matt Watson 05:20
So Are most of your customers smaller customers where you’re dealing with the founders and the entrepreneurs, or are they bigger corporate accounts?

Steve Ohanians 05:29
So we, when we started, used to be a lot of smaller companies. Nowadays, it’s mostly funded by startups to midsize and large corporations. Okay.

Matt Watson 05:40
Okay. Well, love to talk more with you about being an accidental entrepreneur. And I guess the first question is, your company is getting close to 25 years old, right? Congrats on that. 25 years old? Um, yeah, you’re, you’re almost there. Right about there. What was an accident when you first started it?

Steve Ohanians 06:03
Yeah, I mean, I like to say it was an accident. When I first started. I started my agency because I love designing and building websites. And it was simple as I love doing the work. I love seeing the difference made for people in organizations. I didn’t start it because I wanted to be an entrepreneur or take on the challenge of scaling and growing this massive business. That wasn’t the case. That wasn’t my thing. Now, those are things that I’ve come to appreciate nowadays, right. But I was; I didn’t think I was born to start a multimillion-dollar business. That was, that wasn’t my; I didn’t start a lemonade stand and was trying when I was a kid as entrepreneurship came about because I just wanted to do more of the work that I love to do.

Matt Watson 06:54
So when you first started, where you were hands-on, like, were you, you know, in Photoshop, designing websites using HTML, like, were you were hands-on doing all that kind of stuff.

Steve Ohanians 07:04
Yeah. So my co-founder and I started a topic from a creative design Photoshop guy. He was a coder developer. So. So yeah, it was all hands-on.

Matt Watson 07:16
So at what point there? I’m gonna guess you guys made the switch where you don’t. You don’t get to do much of that anymore. Right? Yeah, you have teams that do all of that now.

Steve Ohanians 07:26
Yeah, we’re close to 100 people right now. So I would say when I first realized that I needed to, I needed help. And I need to get out of the way is probably when we grow to go to about 20 people is where it started to feel like, as before, when you’re smaller than that, you know, things go a lot smoother without any processes without any like actual writings, or, you know, you can just call the person going next door and say, Hey, like, what’s going on? Like, can we do this this way? And it’s just a much more conversational way of doing business. But once he wants to hit that 20 people, then all of a sudden, you need to think about what is a QA process, right? Like, how can we make it? Man, I have three developers? How can I make them follow the same exact process that we’ve set for this organization and think about HR now and apps think about operations?

Matt Watson 08:33
You get your marketing, and you get to think about everything except designing websites.

Steve Ohanians 08:35
Exactly. All the things that, you know, I was never good at are somehow on my plate now. And you know, and then you’re also hiring nonbillable people. So Right. So you can just hire another designer, another developer, another writer; you need help now. So you need to hire nonbillable folks who are operations for HR to create a culture that’s important. Now these people have careers that are in my hands that I’m responsible for. I mean, all these things start to matter a lot more. So that was about the time when I figured out, well, then fine, as much as I needed to focus on some of the things.

Matt Watson 09:17
Well, the reason I asked that is, you know, a lot of us, we love what we do, right? You’re like, oh, I love building websites, and all of a sudden, you get a lot of people asking you for help. But eventually, you don’t get to do what you love to do anymore, right? Because you, like, all of a sudden, you outgrow it, and you’re like, now I’m like a business person. Like I’m not a dog. I’m not a web designer. I now like to run a business. And they always say, like, it’s like the business owner would rather spend their time doing plumbing and as the plumber would rather spend their time running the business, right? Like everybody almost always wants to do the opposite job, right? Absolutely true. And that’s the hard part about being an accidental entrepreneur, especially as a company grows. You know, you go from these days of designing stuff in Photoshop and building websites and So now dealing with crazy HR issues and like, you know, all this other crap that nobody wants to deal with. But that’s the job now. And that’s the hard part. My point is that’s the hard part about being like an accidental entrepreneur. Like that was never the goal. Like the goal is like, I just wanted to build websites.

Steve Ohanians 10:17
That is the tough part. And it’s tough. I would call myself a work in progress as far as kind of delegating and letting go. I always still sweep, improve on some projects, and whoop and poop.

Matt Watson 10:29
I never heard that one. I’m like, Yeah, I’m gonna steal that one.

Steve Ohanians 10:33
Yeah, well, that’s what my team calls it. Because Steve swooped in and pooped on us on this project. So yeah. So I still do that. I’m a work in progress, I’ll tell you that. But I learned pretty quickly how much of a bottleneck I could be. As a business owner, I can’t just be designing this. And then, the other thing is you have to learn to love being an entrepreneur, right. So at some point, that switch has to happen where you know your love starter from doing what you’re doing. But then, if you can’t make that jump to loving the entrepreneurship portion of the business now, that might not be the right thing for you.

Matt Watson 11:15
Well, I think the key for people that want to be an entrepreneur is just keeping their eyes open to the problems out there and looking for opportunities. You know, the first, the first kind of entrepreneurial part of this, the first entrepreneurial thing I ever did was helping a software dealer rewrite some software for their car dealership, just like a little database, and I actually was selling computers at Sears. And the guy came in, and he was looking for a computer to run the software. And I ended up having a chat with them and ended up helping them rewrite the software like I was just open to opportunities. And if I had been at lunch that day, my entire life would have been totally different. Then taking that opportunity. Because ultimately, a couple years later, I started a company in the automotive industry because of that relationship and what spawned all of that. And it’s, it’s just all about looking for opportunities and being open to them. And just, you know, being open-minded about it being a problem solver.

Steve Ohanians 12:16
Yeah, and I look at being an entrepreneur as almost like design problem-solving as well. Right. And I do feel like there are certain traits that you need to have as an entrepreneur. To be a good entrepreneur, even though I started under a competition that was never mine, that I might never have had when I was growing up, that hey, I want to be this. In fact, what’s funny is nowadays, I see all these kids growing up wanting to be an entrepreneur, right and, or every other person I meet as an entrepreneur, or startup owner, or a startup founder.

Matt Watson 12:49
And so they’ve got a side hustle; now, everyone’s doing it.

Steve Ohanians 12:53
And when I started doing this, it wasn’t very cool to be an entrepreneur, right? Like you need to go to school, you need to get a good job, get a good salary; my path was pretty cool. But I think you also need to have a little bit of that risk-taking mentality to kind of take something on and try and see where it goes. I think that is pretty much a common thing that I want to see in an entrepreneur.

Matt Watson 13:22
Yeah, and then my company, Full Scale, that we started that does software development was sort of the same thing. It’s like, I needed to hire software developers in the Philippines. And I said, you know, what, if I can make this work for me, I can probably make it work for other people. Like, can we make a business out of this thing? Like, you know, it’s just looking for opportunities, and especially the expertise in something you can solve a problem for yourself, it’s like, well, how do we help other people do the same thing? You know, like, you’re like, Hey, I’m really good at building websites, but there are other people that need help building websites, right?

Steve Ohanians 13:53
I think that’s a great point, Matt, about looking for opportunities. I think that’s a good trait to have, or a trade and entrepreneurs should have, and that’s something I found in myself when I was doing it. Like I said, I Love building websites, but really what motivated me was I could see it help organizations. I could see it move the needle for them, so I saw an opportunity in that, and that made me excited about it even more.

Matt Watson 14:18
So what do you have a great story about a company that Clear Digital has been able to help and, you know, was really kind of transformational for their business based on your guys’ design work and marketing they do and all the things?

Steve Ohanians 14:32
I mean, we have tons of everything from, you know, setting that that company up for acquisition or generating their, their leads, I mean, increasing the lead generation, we have tons of them, and those are all things that we track, and it’s all part of the initial KPI settings and benchmarking that we use when we approach any Project sees kind of where you’re at, where are you? Where are you with your engagement metrics? And then, how can we move that needle for you? Yeah, for, for every organization, that’s a little bit different, right? So yeah, all of our projects have some kind of component, and moving on.

Matt Watson 15:18
I do want to remind everybody that finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit FullScale.io, where you can build a software team quickly and affordably. Use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs, and then see what developers are available to join your team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. So one thing I wanted to ask you about is that the name of your company was originally web inertia, correct. And then you guys recently rebranded that, so how did that go? Like, brand recognition, changing the name, like, that’s what you guys do, right? Your digital marketing and you help people do this kind of stuff? I was changing the name.

Steve Ohanians 15:53
Yeah. So Well, the funny story is how we came up with the name. So like I said, we may be co-founder, and I were, I don’t know if I mentioned this, but we’re so finishing our I ended up going back to college, and I went to San Jose State University to study art with I think, digital art with a minor in computer science, so and I had one of my good friends that was in class with me, and he was studying programming. And we both had a physics class together. And we’re learning about inertia, this amazing property that keeps objects in motion. And we thought, hey, that’s a cool concept to be an inspiration for our company, not necessarily thinking that it’s also the exact same property that stops things from linking, right, which was pointed out to us several times throughout the years. And then this was the 90s. And IBM had coined the E-business around everything that had to do with the Internet. So we misspelled inertia with an E. And then, we added the word web in front of it. So pretty much every bad decision around business naming, we made web inertia. And it actually worked great for us for a while. It was kitschy, it was quirky, and it said exactly what we did when we needed it, right web. But once we grew and we started doing a lot more than the web, a lot of our work now starts from the fun foundational brand work like brand strategy before we figured out what that web experience is going to be. So it became an unnecessary barrier for us to both win new business and grow; you grow even within our customer base. So we knew it was time for a change.

Matt Watson 17:42
How long did it take you to make that change? Was that like a several-month project to do?

Steve Ohanians 17:49
Well, it took me a year and a half to convince my partner to do this. And then the process itself took almost a year. I mean, we went through hundreds of names. Nowadays it’s hard, it’s hard to find something that’s easy to remember, that fits you strategically, and has trademark availability as an easy URL that’s available. It’s almost an impossible task.

Matt Watson 18:19
So I’m gonna guess your domain name was not available, and you had to buy it at any cost.

Steve Ohanians 18:24
A pretty penny.

Matt Watson 18:25
Yeah. You won’t, you won’t probably share the amount probably, though, right?

Steve Ohanians 18:30
It was five digits. Okay. Yeah, my last company was called Stock Fi, and we bought, I think we bought stock fi dot-net or something like that.

Matt Watson 18:33
And then nobody used the.com. And I’d message somebody, and they never responded back. And then finally, like, a few months later, I messaged them again; I think it was something like RIA that I did. And they responded back, and I bought it for five grand. So awesome. You just, you just never know.

Steve Ohanians 19:00
Now the other side of that story is so clear.com is actually available. And I reached out to those guys. And it was one of those sites where it says hey, just give us a bid. And we’ll get back to you. So I put in a $10,000 bid. And then the guy emailed me back and said, Are you going to put in a bid? Like, I did put in a bid. It’s $2,000, and he’s like, No, we’re only considering strong seven-figure dang seven-figure offers for this. And I’m like, alright, okay.

Matt Watson 19:30
I don’t know. I’m starting to think less and less that domain names are nearly as important as they used to be anymore. You know? You don’t even see them in the web browser like URLs are hidden half the time, and it’s slowly a different world, I think.

Steve Ohanians 19:46
But it is.

Matt Watson 19:50
So tell me more about different things. You guys do it, Clear Digital.

Steve Ohanians 19:56
So sure. So Clear Digital, as I said, is our DNA in web design and development. But as we started our business, we quickly figured out how important the brand X aspect is of setting the foundation for our website or for any website before we get started. So our services include brand strategy, which is like brand identity design, sending brand guidelines, brand messaging, architecture, and brand positioning; how are you going to tell that story? How are you going to humanize that b2b story? Before we start designing what the website is. We do digital strategies for creating workshops, creating data and analytics dashboards for our clients, and competitive audits and analysis, the research. We do UX design outside of the web, so we focus more on applications, web apps, and creating user experiences for that and design systems for UX applications. Motion graphics, and video, we do a ton of work around that. Content development, digital marketing, so helping with, you know, SEO, SEM, and even creating campaigns and social media and lead generation tools. So you do a lot of different things.

Matt Watson 21:28
So I’m curious, how do you see AI and chat GPT changing all of these things? Because it seems like it’s going to have a big impact on almost everything you just described.

Steve Ohanians 21:39
You know, I was actually talking to someone. Yesterday about this, I was talking about knowing how to do AI prompts was going to be just as prevalent in resumes as knowing Word and Excel pretty soon, right? Like, we need to have. We need to be familiar with this. And we have some programs within both our design and development teams. I’m experimenting with different tools like ChatGPT and mid-journey and those tools and seeing how we can incorporate them into both our design process and web development process. I think they’re for sure going to flower if they’re still there, right? They’re not these magic tools right now that can spit out a website for you for your next business idea. But I think they add value, and they can add a lot of value in the process of getting.

Matt Watson 22:39
Well, I’ve seen demos of things like Adobe Photoshop and Canva and, and stuff like that, where it can help generate graphics. And like I saw an example of Adobe, where it was doing all sorts of weird fonts and different things. You could tell it, like how to make the fonts look, and it would do all this really crazy stuff. And I think it’ll be a productivity tool. And I think it’ll help people create way more creative stuff than they could before. I mean, I think it’ll help somebody like me to be way more creative. Even though I’m not a graphic artist, right? If I go into Adobe and tell it, like, do this crazy thing of monkeys on Mars and playing chess, holding bananas with gold shoes and doing, you know, whatever, and it like it’s out, it’s like, really magical, you know, like, be able to be way more creative than I ever could have been before without being a graphic artist.

Steve Ohanians 23:28
Yeah, I do think that you still need some creativity to get that creativity out. Right? So I mean, it’s easy to say I want a Monte, like a horse riding in a car. But if you want it in a specific visual style with the camera angle, you’re essentially art directing, yeah. That he said, so. And depending on your use for it, you know, this could be like an ideation thing. Or it could be a final product. So like I said, I feel like it’s going to be as prevalent and a tool that designers can use, and maybe they can focus more on being creative, right, or developers can use it more on executing a product and trading clean code. We have a client right now that has this AI-based testing and automation tool where it essentially figures out all of the user journeys within the product. And it is constantly generating different tests for functionality and performance. It’s clicking through everything, and it’s ongoing all the time. As it’s learning, it generates new tests, and it’s a great way for us to mitigate project risk. So there are a lot of things out there that you can use.

Matt Watson 24:49
I feel like a good analogy for this might be how iPhones and, you know, modern Android phones have almost made everybody a photographer. So we’re not professional photographers, right? Like, if you hire a professional photographer, they’re still, like, 10 times better because they just have the eye for the skill and the creativity for it, right? But it made it more available to everybody else. Right? You know, and I feel like that’s what a lot of technologies do. They democratize them and enable more people to have access to it. But you’re always gonna have people that are still experts in the field, that still do it on a whole nother level; I think it becomes another tool that folks can use.

Steve Ohanians 25:28
And yeah, it is more accessible for folks and for the actual designers that I can actually be direct; they’re the ones that are going to get the most value out of that.

Matt Watson 25:46
I really like what you said earlier about being good at AI prompts going to be a key on your resume. And it’s funny to me the other day, it’s like, you know, are, you know, the last, you know, 20 years, people have really had to become good at using Google. Like, that’s a skill set. Everybody knows, like, I can go to Google, and I can search for the weather, it’ll do the math for me, I can search for recipes, you know, I can search for travel, like it’ll do all these different things, right? But AI is making it like orders of magnitude more, you know, more difficult, like, Man, I can ask it to do all sorts of stuff. Like, I didn’t know, I could ask you to write me a country song. You know, like, there are so many things you’re gonna ask it to do that I think you’re right. It’s like a huge skill set. And I think, like, my kids will now grow up with that. And as they will, it’ll be second nature to them to use AI to do things. And in some ways, things like Alexa and Siri and stuff have already trained us a little bit on this.

Steve Ohanians 26:42
I mean, I’ve seen prompt experts as job descriptions for some organizations now, as seen in Monetize with Prop marketplaces. And if you’ve seen those, you can essentially pay somewhere between two bucks and five bucks to download the perfect prompt for writing an article, writing an SEO article, and things like that. So yeah, I think it’s going to be a big part of the work, especially in the spaces that we are gonna be a big part of the tool sets and the skill sets that you need to successfully do your job in the future.

Matt Watson 27:23
I’m really excited about it on the computer programming side. And some people think it’s going to replace computer programmers. Again, I think it’s a productivity tool. You know, there’s a lot of crap that developers have to do that they don’t remember the exact syntax for, right? But if I can’t, if I know the exact syntax, I can probably do it way faster than I could ask the AI to do it for me; I can just type type type done, right? But if I don’t remember the syntax, or I’m not sure how to do it, the AI is like the ultimate cheat code, right? It’s like, I can just ask the AI, like, how do I send her this div? And it just does it right. I think it’s, I’m super excited about that as a developer, and there’s like GitHub, copilot, X, and all these things we’re talking about. And I’ve played with ChatGPT with programming stuff. And I’m really super excited about it. And you know, your company is interesting because you guys do so many different things, you know, across the digital landscape, that AI will definitely affect you guys, and all sorts of different, all sorts of different ways.

Steve Ohanians 28:20
So yeah, even in development, I mean, API integrations. And those are all things where you just have to learn the syntax. And I think Zapier is automating all that stuff now through API. So yeah, there’s, I think there’s a lot of mundane things that, that you’re just kind of learning syntax where you can have the AI do it for you and make that do it a little bit faster. So I think this is going to make a big dent in how you approach development projects.

Matt Watson 28:53
So what tips do you have out there for other entrepreneurs like myself that maybe have an early-stage business that is trying to figure out, okay, how do I do digital marketing for my company? Like, where do I start? As a startup? You know, do you have any good tips for other entrepreneurs when it comes to their digital marketing, a kind of getting off the ground?

Steve Ohanians 29:15
Yeah, I would say one of the first things that you need to figure out is what really differentiates you as an organization or a company, or a startup, right? Like, how are you different? How are you authentic? What is your position in that space? Because you don’t want to be because that should define everything else that you do in marketing, whether it’s your logo, it’s you, it’s your website, it’s your pay-per-click campaigns, it’s whatever that is. So I think the place I would have most people start is to really start digging into who you are, why you’re different, how you do things, and have that’d be an authentic starting place for you to do the rest of your marketing. If that makes sense, especially nowadays when there’s like a sea of very similar-sounding SAS companies out there that almost look the same, or say the same things. You need to humanize your brand, and we need to put your stake in, like, who you are, and what your positioning is. That’s probably the most important place to start.

Matt Watson 30:29
How do you think things like TikTok have changed, like brand and getting awareness and audience, and how is that a common thing you see with your customers is using new short video tick tock all this kind of stuff?

Steve Ohanians 30:47
Yeah, short video. I mean, we haven’t dabbled too much into TikTok and doing that type of work for our clients. But short videos are certainly a helpful tool, and TikTok is a great place to use for those types of content. So I think anytime you can humanize your content and use any kind of social media tool to bring some brand awareness to yourself, it’s a good way to look at it.

Matt Watson 31:17
Especially early on because it’s like you are the brand, right? It’s like putting yourself out there. And one of the things that I saw on Tik Tok not very long ago that really stuck with me talking about your swoop and poop mine was being the best known instead of being the best at what you do. It’s like being the best known for what you do is infinitely more important than being actually the best at what you do. Because if nobody knows that you exist, like, it doesn’t matter, right? The people that are the most successful are not usually the best at what they do. They’re best known for what they do.

Steve Ohanians 31:51
Especially nowadays, right? It’s, it’s a, it’s a powerful awareness driver, tick tock so and if you need to get out there, and it’s where your prospects are, especially, you know, the future. The other thing I say is, even in our world of b2b business decision makers, like things like tick tock things, like even the metaverse, I mean, that’s where these kids are, are, and are going to be these people, these kids are going to be the decision-makers in the short few years, right. So in even b2b projects, so far in b2b sales, I should say, you need to be where they’re at. So I think it’s really important for you to look at areas where it can be an awareness driver for your business.

Matt Watson 32:40
So you guys have a lot of specialty around the b2b side, as you mentioned, so is there a certain type of digital marketing or marketing for b2b companies that you recommend these days? You know, and you know, like, maybe, and how that’s changed over the last five to 10 years?

Steve Ohanians 33:02
Yeah, I don’t know if, well, obviously, things have changed. What our focus is, is what we feel is the number one brand touchpoint nowadays, the website, right? So and the past five to 10 years, it’s a lot more about personalization. And, you know, just becoming a lot smarter and using machine learning and data learning to provide data and content to websites and web experiences and for users of the website. So that’s been our focus from a marketing perspective. So I don’t know if that answers your question. But that’s kind of our focus.

Matt Watson 33:48
Well, I do want to remind everybody if you need to hire software engineers, testers, or leaders, Full Scale can help. We have the people on the platform to help you build and manage a team of experts. When you visit FullScale.io. All you need to do is answer a few questions and let our platform match you up with our fully vetted, highly experienced team of software engineers, testers, and leaders. At Full Scale, we specialize in building long-term teams that work only for you to learn more when you visit FullScale.io. Well, so as we start to round out the episode here today, I’m curious, do you have any other tips out there for other entrepreneurs about being an entrepreneur or just about digital marketing? Or what kind of tips do you have for people?

Steve Ohanians 34:26
Yeah, I mean, again, just from my background, I would say it’s good if you love what you do, right, especially for me; I mean, that’s what worked for me. But if you can’t do that, that’s fine. At least something that you love and what you do. Entrepreneurship is hard. I mean, there are crazy hours. There’s the word work-life balance net that doesn’t exist in an entrepreneur’s life. There’s responsibility for sales and growth. There’s a responsibility for having employee careers and their growth. It’s hard stuff. So I think finding something that you really love goes a long way in being a successful entrepreneur.

Matt Watson 35:13
One I loved earlier, we were talking about starting out as an entrepreneur, you know, you’re building websites, you’re, you’re doing all doing what you really love. And then the challenge of being an entrepreneur is as your business grows, you don’t get to do any of that anymore.

Steve Ohanians 35:29
But I’m sorry, but that’s

Matt Watson 35:31
one of the best ways to be an entrepreneur, right, is if you’re an expert in a certain trade, and you get known for that, and you know, eventually, you can turn it into a business instead of just being self-employed, right?

Steve Ohanians 35:44
You can hire other people and turn it into a business and kind of evolve to the right, so right now, my love is everything that I didn’t start out doing. So it’s my whole focus. And what I enjoy is actually figuring out how I can scale and grow my business. So that’s true for sure.

Matt Watson 35:59
Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. Again, this is Steve Bohemians, and his website, or his company, is Clear Digital Clear Digital.com. Check them out. And thank you so much. And I’m gonna write a LinkedIn post now about sleeping and pooping.

Steve Ohanians 36:17
Thanks for having me.

Matt Watson 36:18
All right, thank you so much. Take care.