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John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch. My guest today is Frank Cowell. He is a speaker, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, and currently serves as the chief revenue boss at Revenue Ranch. He works regularly with business owners and executives who are looking to grow faster, and he’s also the author of Building Your Digital Utopia, which details the concept he pioneered to help brands create digital experiences that systematically accelerate growth. So Frank, welcome to the show.

Frank (00:40): Hey, Jon, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

John (00:42): So a couple of things I want to get in a little bit into your, I love always to hear people’s entrepreneur during like, how’d you get here? Right? But I want to focus on one thing. Revenue Ranch is your company. You’ve given yourself the title Chief Revenue Boss. Does that imply automatically what you think is the most important role for you currently in that business, or is that just what needs to be filled?

Frank (01:06): I think for me, the play on the Revenue Ranch aspects, so Boss is a common term on a ranch, and then revenue tying into the company name. Ultimately it’s my job to create direction for the company, but in this chapter of my life, after having exited an agency, this business is less about growing a massive team of people and more so about working with agency owners as they try to navigate this journey of being an agency owner. So I help guide them on that journey and we put a program together to make that happen. So Chief Revenue Boss is more so just a tie into the company name and that kind of ranch theming.

John (01:49): I guess what I was getting at a little bit is I see a lot of business owners, let’s call them rather than CEOs, who really think revenue and vision and maybe culture are my only real jobs because they’re so down in the weeds doing everything else, and I think it almost feels like a luxury if you get to a point in your business where you can say, look, these are the only three things that I need to focus on because they’re the only three things that matter necessarily to scaling.

Frank (02:18): What’s interesting about the CEO role is the CEO is responsible for what I call true North, and it sounds simple, but it’s a massive decision to make regarding what goes into creating true North. And then, oh, by the way, making sure that the decisions within the company and how you align the team so that they all are inspired by, they’re clear on True North, and they also make decisions about True North. That’s a very big deal, even though it sounds simple on paper. And then ultimately, if we look at the KPIs, if you will, of the other functions in the business, the major functions, those aren’t directly the responsibility of the CEO, but indirectly they are. If you were to go to the shareholders or the board, they don’t really care that there’s a head of marketing responsible for active lead generation that ultimately is going to fall on the CEO’s shoulders as to why the company isn’t growing at a respectable rate. So it’s kind of a yin and yang thing there.

John (03:19): Yeah, no, I actually agree with you. I think that a lot of people, it’s easy to explain the concept and a lot of books do of True North, it’s probably the hardest thing to actually get around to getting right, and I think that’s where people are really struggling. Give us a little bit of a snippet of your journey to how you got here. You talked about owning an agency already, and obviously, we know what you’re doing today, but it’s always kind of fun, I think, to go through what molded you to this place.

Frank (03:47): Yeah, so I’ve always been a salesperson at heart ever since I was a kid. I was in love with this idea of product and creating a business and selling things and moving something into a market and satisfying the market. Even as a kid, I would order these products that I was responsible for selling and my parents would be like, what did you just commit to this? Hundreds of dollars of stuff that’s in our house now that you have to go and sell. I was like 12 years old, and so I’ve just always been that way, and if we fast forward, along comes the information superhighway. That’s what we called it back then, the internet, the world wide web, we called it the Information Superhighway, and there was a big theme back then of the information Superhighway is coming. That was the big message out there, and none of us knew what that was.

(04:38): Well, me being very curious, I started dabbling and trying to figure out what is this thing. And it wasn’t long before I said I could probably sell stuff on this thing, and that’s when I launched my first web page through my America online web space, and I paid some guy 50 bucks to do it. I found him on America online, and at the time, 50 bucks, I had to ask my wife for $50. I said, Hey, is it okay if I spend $50? That was a big deal to me back then. And so she said, sure, I believe in all your crazy wacky ideas. So I got this thing uploaded and I was selling some information products, and then I decided I wanted to change it, and I was like, oh, this guy’s going to want 50 bucks again. And then I thought to myself, Frank Computers, and back in junior high, you did a certain amount of programming that you learned, I could probably figure this out.

(05:31): So I cracked open a text editor, and lo and behold, I saw the words on the screen that I wanted to change. I changed it, saved it, uploaded it, and my mind was forever blown. I was like, oh my gosh, the power I now possess. So that led me on a journey to teaching myself how to program. I started programming in flat file databases using a language called Perl. Back then we’re talking, this was the late nineties, by the way, and so when it comes to the internet, I’m an old guy, and so that led me into creating my own content management system, and then I launched a web design shop, and then that eventually morphed into a branding agency and creative agency, and I went through that whole journey, did M&A type stuff, and then last year I exited my agency. So yeah, it kind of was a roundabout way of this sales marketing career that was underpinned by my desire to build things and deliver things to a market.

John (06:29): Yeah, it’s funny, I started my agency over 30 years ago, so yeah, pre-internet as well. But I always tell people the only thing I was sure of is I could hustle work, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of have that bug, and sometimes it could be a weakness, right? We don’t stay focused because we’re able to do that. Talk a little bit about,

Frank (06:48): That’s such a point, John, such a

John (06:49): Great point, and we can come back to that. I want to talk about the book Building Your Digital Utopia. You talked about this idea of creating an experience that systematically accelerate growth. So kind of unpack that idea fo