 Take notes Steve Zanget everybody According to Wikipedia perseverance means continuing in a course of action without regard to Discouragement opposition or previous failure. I don't know leave this slide up for a second because we're gonna talk about a few of these things During this next 20 minutes. I want to start with a quote. I live my life Like there's no tomorrow this was spoken by One of the geniuses of my childhood David Lee Roth I Started Zeke in 1995 Right at the beginning of the internet we started as a CD-ROM company and we quickly formed ourselves into a casual games company And that's what we did throughout the 90s In 2000 I hired several animators from Cal Arts and we were starting to make some of our own original animation We had our client work. We were working on some of our own products And then March of 2000 happened Does anybody know what happened in March of 2000? the NASDAQ crashed tanked Pick your synonym Now I didn't have a lot of dot-com clients But the entire industry was gone Overnight I Couldn't get my clients on the phone. We couldn't get paid We were done And so I had to do the toughest thing that ever happened in my career. I Laid off 12 people in one day Now if you've ever heard me speak I've talked about firing employees And that's hard But typically if somebody's gotten to the point where they need to be fired It's deserved Laying off is the hardest thing you will ever do as a business owner And if you've never done it, I guarantee that and so I Dusted myself off. I Found the clients that would return my calls the ones who still had money I moved my business home Into my garage and I became a one-man shop and there was a project that I was working on that needed database work And I wasn't a database programmer So I called my friend Eddie Hartman Eddie Hartman started a company called legal zoom His Twitter handle I believe is at cake fart my memory might be fuzzy on that one And Eddie came in and he taught me how to program databases And I sat there night after night and lost I got no sleep and I fulfilled this project Because that's what it took to keep my company afloat And you know what Eddie said to me after it was all done. He said Steve You've got moxie You've got gumption Or again pick any synonym for perseverance But that stuck with me now Complacency isn't exactly the opposite of perseverance, but it is in my world and so because I went through that I Live my life like there's no tomorrow That's how I run my business I Know what it's like to lose everything and have to start over So every day I go in and I look at the financials and I look at the cushion and I look at how we're doing and I'm always on my toes and Thinking about what happens if all of our clients are gone tomorrow Because it does happen And I promise you you can't know what that feels like unless you go through it Don't call it a comeback. I've been here for years And this comes from one of the greatest thinkers of our time Mr. LL Cool J In my mind is one of the best examples. I can think of a perseverance So LL started as a rapper when he was 16 in 1984 he cut four albums and he did pretty well, but he wasn't great He wasn't at the top of the charts, but you know what he did He just kept going and it wasn't till he came out with mama said knock you out Until he won his first Grammy in 1992 after eight years in the business LL didn't quit then He reinvented himself. He started acting in movies He's been in TV and now you can see him in NCIS which has been on for several seasons That's perseverance. That's longevity So several people in this room. I look to As the LL Cool J's of WordPress Karim Maruki has been in this business as long as I have selling client services for 21 years Chris Ford was up here earlier and she talked about how she graduated design school in 1996 Tony Perez started in 2000. That's longevity Chris Lemma was taking clarity FM calls in the womb Again, my memory might be fuzzy on that one. So let's talk about the hustle Since we're talking about Mr. LL Cool J This is what it takes There's something my dad used to say to me and it used to drive me nuts He used to say there's no free lunch and I hated it Because what it meant was you've got to work for everything you have Nobody's gonna give you shit You don't deserve anything You've got to work for it and this really didn't Resonate with me until I started my business Because I didn't make a dime For two years. I thought I'll go talk about I'm gonna date myself here Macramedee director to anybody who would listen and they're gonna hand me checks That's not how it works it takes hard work to succeed There are no free lunches Nobody's handing out anything Does anybody remember a Michael Douglas Sean Penn movie called The Game? Okay so Zeke Interactive Got an RFP To build the website for the game in 1998 Ish we loved this script I had a business partner time named Dan wool and we read the scripts and we were totally into it We wanted this project and So we put together an amazing proposal and an amazing website and we described this awesome project And we only have one competitor and so what we did To be creative and show polygram that we were creative is We sent out our initial email that said Zeke Interactive has decided to pass on this project and Then we sent out a follow-up email that said your game has begun And we'd let them on an adventure To find our proposal. They didn't read the second email This is a true story The other agency got the project This was a hundred thousand dollar project. I called out a mistake I don't get creative with proposals anymore My proposals are very clear and it's very clear how to find them And I'm sending a word doc and a PDF and a link to a Google doc and following up with the facts And then following up with a phone call to make sure you got my proposal my point is You're going to make mistakes. I promise you we all do it. I've done it several times I still do it, but if you don't learn from those mistakes You got issues Never burn a bridge and again This is a quote straight up my dad's rulebook. I don't care who it is. I don't care how you've been treated. I Don't care what happened on the other side of the table Treat everyone with respect and treat everybody With the attitude of you have no idea where they're going to end up Or who they're going to talk to or what they're going to tweet or what kind of yelp review they're going to review They're going to leave We lost out on a really big project recently It was a quick one. It probably wasn't the right fit, but it's a project that Sarah and I really really wanted We traveled for it. We spent a lot of time on the proposal and in the end They said we're going to keep the agency that we're already working with we have another we relationship with another agency and So I sent an email and I said go f yourself That's not what happened. I Said an email. I said thank you very much for this opportunity I really appreciate it. If there's anything that we can ever do for in the future for you in the future Please let us know in my 21 years of experience I've worked with several clients And they've gone from one large company to another large company or from a small company to a large company And they've taken us along with them So no matter what you do Take the high road no matter how the relationship ends take the high road. You don't know where that person is gonna end up You don't know who they're going to refer you So never burn a bridge the thing I learned from What happened in in March of 2000 is That you should always diversify What this means is if you have one large client and one large project that you're working on You might want to review that Because if that client pulls out You're dead meat It's much better to have a lot of small projects that you're juggling If you're a product company and you have one large product you might want to review review that Get some other skews Explore some other verticals. It's important This is the way you protect yourself if anything goes wrong I've talked about this rule in many many talks one thing I've always done and I believe has really Kept me in business is I've always done my best to surround myself with good people They represent me It's an extension of of me So when my people are talking to a client or they're at a word camp or they're anywhere and Representing Zeke. I want the best representation that bit that there is and I also strive To hire people that are smarter than me and along those same lines Reputation is king. I make most of my decisions Based on how it's going to affect my reputation. It's what's gotten me this far We're not perfect Zeke is not a perfect agency, but we have a great reputation of Treat our clients right delivering on time delivering on budget delivering and I say that because we've picked up a lot of our projects from other developers that just didn't deliver if you're not good at networking This is something you're gonna need to figure out You're here at a word camp Talk to people Figure out your circle and network within that circle But networking is very important and again. It's another skill. I got from my dad It's how I got ahead in this business. It's how I got ahead in every industry. I've been in in within digital I do my best to talk to people and just figure out what's going on because ultimately That leads to sales and my friends make fun of me and that's okay But coffee is for closers second places second places set of steak knives third place you're fired Does anybody not know what movie this is from I am always closing I am always selling But I do it in a way, which is not a hard sell. I sell by networking. I sell by talking to people When somebody talks to me they know what I do and they start talking about an app idea Or or a project they've got going on or something that's going on in their company And so that's where I steer the conversation so if you don't know who David Lee Roth is or Who LL Cool J is then I've chosen a quote That the under 30-somethings can relate to don't do nothing bless your hearts in it Don't do nothing Unless you're all in it and of course This is from the greatest motivational speaker of your time Justin Bieber in 1980 I got a trash 80 80 80 or 81. I got a trash 80. This is my first computer That's what it looked like it connected to the TV and that was cool And I got to play games on it and then I figured out that there was a way for you to write Software on this thing, but what really changed actually let me take a step back Raise your hand if you owned a cassette tape Keep them up if you owned a leaderless cassette tape That's a leaderless cassette recorder and what that did is it allowed you to save your programs off of the trash 80? It never worked right like a jazz desk I'm segmenting the audience by age right now But it allowed me to write programs Save them to leaderless cassettes and then come back to them later so that I can add to them And I didn't know that at the time, but I was learning code And what mr. Bieber was talking about in his quote is passion It's important that you know your passions. My passions are movies music basketball poker and technology That trash 80 gave me a passion for technology. I'm gonna leave you with this It's important that you ask yourself Why you're sitting in this room? It's important that you ask yourself Why am I in this industry? And if the first answer that came to your mind had anything to do with money or paycheck I Encourage you to do some self-reflection Passion is critical. It's critical to your success. It's critical to your longevity and it's critical to perseverance I'm Steve Zangit