Blake: [00:00:00] Awesome. On the podcast today, I've got an old friend, Mike Carroll, who was on a previous podcast that I hosted, and we're running it back today. Mike, how are you doing?

[00:00:12] Mike: [00:00:12] I'm good, buddy. How are you?

[00:00:13] Blake: [00:00:13] I've been fantastic and I'm excited to have you on. Mike knows a ton about sales and marketing and blending them together and growth and all that good stuff.

[00:00:21] So we're going to talk about bootstrapping and growth in general when you're just starting out. But before we get into all the details, I want to give the audience a little bit of context as to who you are and what you're doing. So if you wouldn't mind just giving us a brief history of your career so far.

[00:00:36] Mike: [00:00:36] Yeah, sure. That's a, well, I'll, I'll try to give you the, like the TLDR version. it's been short. So I graduated from, from college and went to grad school and got a master's degree in journalism. I worked in politics and ran political campaigns from like, you know, aldermen all the way up to the, to the U S Senate for about six years.

[00:00:52] Then I freelanced for a while, jumped into an agency, did that for six years. And now I'm at nutshell, as the head of growth. And actually in the very near future, I'll be going back to the agency side. be the VP of growth at marketing supply co, which is a digital growth agency in Detroit.

[00:01:07] Blake: [00:01:07] That was, that was pretty brief.

[00:01:08] That was a much more brief than a, than we usually

[00:01:11] Mike: [00:01:11] get resected who does

[00:01:13] Blake: [00:01:13] the short episode. I figured

[00:01:14] Mike: [00:01:14] I'd keep it through it. If you want to dive into any part of that career,

[00:01:17] Blake: [00:01:17] yeah. Be a little crappy. Oh, you only got like 20 minutes here, so let's, yeah. yeah. So I'm curious, if I were to ask you what you think professional superpower is, what would you say?

[00:01:27] Mike: [00:01:27] Problem solving? Without a doubt. You know? And that sounds like a really weird, like, nebulous, thing to say like, Oh, I solve problems, but, but my superpower for sure is I think my ability to take any situation, any challenge that you're facing, break it apart into its, its requisite components. Figure out which of those components needs to be fixed first and then draw on a really kind of strange and diverse background and skillset to figure out what to attack, how to attack it, and then, you know, and solve that problem.

[00:01:56] Well, that's a business problem, a marketing problem, a sales problem, political problem. You've been, that's, that's definitely my superpower. That's thing it's served me well. Just the ability to kind of like take a 30,000 foot view of any type of problem and then dive into it and bust it up and figure it out.

[00:02:10] Blake: [00:02:10] Well, let's solve some problems today then.

[00:02:12] Mike: [00:02:12] All right,

[00:02:13] Blake: [00:02:13] let's do this. So one of the problems that we see often when you're a side hustler, you're just starting out on a project. I don't really know where to start in terms of the growth. You maybe you have an idea, you kind of have a game plan of what you want to accomplish, but then you feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to do on social media to grow it and all the sales side of things and, and you might feel tempted to immerse yourself in buying all kinds of different tools.

[00:02:39] I'm curious what your thought process is that early on actually having tools or if you even need them.

[00:02:46] Mike: [00:02:46] personally, I don't think you need them. I think the only thing that you need to start any type of side hustle or project as a whiteboard. So, yeah, and what I mean by that is that whatever you're going to do up front, whatever your side hustle is, the most important thing is just to, and actually I read one of your posts this morning,...