“Methodical hustle”. Every so often you come across an origin story that just blows you away. Today’s guests have that story. In just six short years, Garrett Mehrguth went from selling social media calendars on Fiverr to being the Co-founder and CEO of Directive Consulting, a top-rated and award-winning Customer Generation agency. Garrett joins us, along with Directive’s Senior Director of Growth, Drew Choco to talk about their journey.

“So I'm not really hustling in the sense of like how most people hustle so much as I'm driving towards a vision and okay with being bad at stuff. So I'm constantly trying to take on new initiatives that if you were just to sit down, put it on paper and say, “Hey, what's your greatest opportunity for the business? And like, if you could do anything, what would you do?” And I kind of just live in that world.”

Garrett and Drew discuss their journey over the past six years, share their experience with explosive growth, talk about the importance of intentional capital allocation, R&D and placing value on people and culture.

Main Takeaways

• “Learn, engage, and create.” This is Garrett’s mantra and quite possibly, his superpower. According to Garrett in action this means, learn something new every day, engage with it by practicing it, integrating it and executing it and with that, he creates more value for himself, his company and his customers.
• Intentional capital allocation “You show me where a company spends its money, and I will show you what it is good at.” Directive learned that a high-level awareness of where it allocates its capital was imperative to the longevity and success of the company. For them, this meant heavy investment in people and culture.
• Get better at business and marketing will take care of itself. “If you want to get better at marketing, get better at business.” To Garrett this is just common sense. If you get better at all the parts of your business (i.e., product, sales, finance), you can’t help but get better at marketing.

Key Quotes

Garrett 08:11 “I always just asked myself, what do I enjoy? What am I good at? And then what'll someone pay me for, right? And so when you're 21 years old, I like solving problem. I'm good at solving problems. People think I know the internet because I'm younger than them and they'll pay me to help 'em with digital. I should go learn the internet. And so we, I kind of just like read as much as I could on digital marketing and I'm a pretty avid reader. I really enjoy learning. And so I kind of just came up with little mantra were called learn, engage, create. And the idea was if I could learn something new every day, engage with it, by practicing it, integrating it, executing it that I could create more value for myself, my company and my customers.”

Garrett 17:55 (Intentional Capital Allocation) “You show me where a company spends its money and I'll show you what it's good at. And I think what Directive learn and does well now is it has a very high, high level awareness of where we allocate our capital, why we're doing so, and then what we want to accomplish and how that fits our vision.” 

Garrett 33:23  What if you're really honest with yourself, what you realize is the clients that are successful have very little to do with you. that like you get a great client with a great culture, a great product, a great marketplace. You really can't screw it up and you look, look really smart because you help 'em with this thing that you're good at. You help 'em with that thing. And so I think the key, if you want to get better at marketing is to get better at business, to get better at product, to get better at sales, to get better at finance marketing should just be the application of other spheres of influences information.

Bio:

Garrett Mehrguth is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Directive, the award-winning Customer Generation agency for SaaS. Andrew Choco began his career at Directive as a paid social specialist running campaign promotions and advertising for multiple clients and now serves as Directive’s Senior Director of Growth.

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