Ep. 209 - GUEST: MARKETERS CHANGE LIVES!❤️ With: GEORGE B. THOMAS - HubSpot Expert! Founder of Sidekick Strategies - INDUSTRY LEGEND!

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are here for do this not that and we have what could be one of my favorite guests of all time okay we have george b thomas now you might know george b thomas if you've ever done anything in the world of hubspot because the dude is a hubspot legend okay and he's also the founder of this incredible agency called sidekick strategies which we're going to get into which is all about the the human side of implementing HubSpot in your business. But the real reason I asked George to come on, okay, is that this guy is, he's an inspiration. When you, when we unpack his life story, you're going to finish listening to this thing and be like, you know what?

1:18I could do it. Whatever it is, I could overcome it. I could do it. That's how I feel when I talk to this guy. I'm amped that he's here. So George, welcome to the podcast, man. Jay, I'm super excited to be here. I can't wait to have this short but valuable conversation with you and I'm willing to dig in and go in whatever direction you want to. I appreciate that. All right. So let's get into it though. Most people, you know, they go to high school, finish high school, maybe they're able to go to college, they graduate, they get a job, they work their way up. And that's kind of what people do. And they just try and whatever.

1:50That's not the life that you have led. I mean, you're a very successful dude now. So what was this path? How did you become who you are? What did you have to overcome? Oh my gosh. How did I become George B. Thomas? In other words, I love this question. Listen, Jay, it has been a radical ride. I mean, at three years old, my family and I lived in a one room log cabin in Lincoln, Montana. No running water. We would bathe in a stream. By the time I was nine, we lived in Spring Hill, Montana. I literally went to a one room schoolhouse. I rode my pony to school, in which people are like, you get out of here, like little house on the prairie.

2:30And I'm like, no, it's a real thing. And by 17, I was living in Whitehall, Montana. And hey, fateful day, I had a math teacher. I think he was having a bad day. He looked at me in the middle of class. He said, you'll never amount to anything. And Jay, the bad thing is I believed him. And within six months, I had actually dropped out of high school, became a high school dropout, had my parents sign me into the Navy because I was like, well, I have no education. What else am I going to do? And so the life of George leaving home, not being a high school graduate begins with me in boot camp going, what did I do?

3:14And a lot of lessons learned. I went from 17 and a half to probably 27 in eight weeks of boot camp. 84 of us joined that boot camp. 29 of us graduated. Our company commanders, their nicknames were Godzilla and Norman Bates. That's literally what we called them. And so I thought I was going to be in the military for the rest of my life because what else is a high school dropout going to do? But I was in for a year and a half and I actually started breaking out in hives. And I don't know if everybody knows what hives are, but they're itchy. And these ones were, and I always do things in the extreme, Jay, because these bad boys were around my heart and my lungs and it was hard to breathe.

3:58And I was having a rapid heartbeat. And so literally they were putting me on Benadryl and steroids to try to get the hives down. And they, they couldn't make it work. And we were actually, this is right before desert storm. I'm kind of showing my age. We were underway test stops. And I had this doctor look at me and say, hey um not that this would ever happen but if there was a fire on board ship we wouldn't be able to wake you up and get you out because literally they couldn't wake me up to go do the job that i was supposed to do one morning so they medevaced me off the ship and jay 13 hours later i'm sitting in the barracks i'm watching tv and the newscaster comes on and says the uss cunningham missile guided ddd ddg 17 missile guided destroyer number one boiler explodes 18 people injured, one person died.

4:48Jay, the number one boiler would have been located right underneath the birthing space where I would have been sleeping. And so at that point, I was like, I'm on this planet for some reason, and I don't know what it is. And now here's another kick in the shorts. Like, again, we're saying what, like, what, what fire do you have to go through to create who you have become today at 53 years old on today, by the way, we're recording on my birthday, which who else do you spend your birthday with? But Jay Schwettleson. I'm like, come on. So here's the thing. I got an honorable discharge. So now I'm a high school dropout.

5:24I thought I was going to be in the military for the rest of my life. And now I can't even do that. And so there we land of like, what's next? And the rest of the story gets crazy. So, but let me ask you a question because even for my own life, I'm sure a lot of people listening, they'll hit a bump in the road and i'll think it's the end of the world like i'll lose a client like that's it closing up shop i'm going out of business or somebody gets fired or whatever are you just like do you wake up every like when you were younger every day be like the sun is shining i'm on this side of the ground it's going to be a great day or did you have moments of like doubt and like the world is ending because I need some of the George B.

6:11Thomas, like a mojo here to overcome nonsense in my brain. Yeah, no, there were many years. I call them the dark ages where I was like, life sucks. What am I doing? I don't know why I'm doing this. But I'll tell you, there's a couple of things that happened along the way that give me this mojo that you're talking about that make me wake up and say, let's go. We can do this no matter what. The first thing that I'll mention is that the dark ages, actually, I can draw a line where I move from the dark ages into being able to see light at the end of the tunnel. And I'm not waxing poetic here, but it's the day that I met my wife because she literally was this transformative power of how I looked at the world, how I wanted to show up, who I wanted to be, because I couldn't be the old George anymore.

7:11There was a purpose. There was a reason. And I want everybody to hear if you don't have a purpose or a reason for what you're doing or understand it at an intimate level, you need to have that purpose or reason baked into your life. The next thing is I went from being a bouncer at a bar, Jay, in a three-year period to an associate pastor at a church. And so there was this transformative period where I actually did go to college to theology and to be a pastor and youth pastor and associate pastor. And so all of a sudden I started to have this understanding of, you know what, I'm not stupid. I actually can't amount to something.

7:54And if I want to learn it, I can learn it just because school didn't fit me, just because I was a class clown, just because I like to talk doesn't actually mean I'll never amount to anything. By the way, side tangent, Jay, today I get paid a good amount of money to talk. I get paid a good amount of money to be all the things that were not going to make me be something back in high school are the things that I am today because they were actually my superpowers. They were just in the wrong place in the wrong time. So there's a lesson there. Timing is everything, right? And knowing when to use the superpowers that you have.

8:33Okay, I got to ask you something. Okay, this is amazing. I'm not like a big in the faith world. I live vicariously through everybody else. Hopefully I'm friends with the right people. So when it all ends, they'll be like, yeah, Jay's not a bad guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got you, bro. I got your back. I need all the help I can get when I get to that point. But let me ask you a question for real. because I think that a lot of people in the marketing services world, and I would put myself in this category, I don't know if I feel like I'm doing great for humanity. I'm just helping people get stupid emails opened or get people to fill out stuff on landing pages or get people to download weird content.

9:12Am I really helping humanity? Can you frame it for everybody that's in this marketing services world that, hey, no, you're actually doing good by the world, by what you're doing, because I need to know about this because I don't know that I believe I'm doing anything that's useful for society. Oh, brother, brother. So I have been behind closed doors where your name has been mentioned. Oh, it's not just about me. I'm just saying. No, no, no, no. But I'm saying you, but but everybody like we need to understand that we can't see what other people are seeing. Here's the fun part is if you drop a rock and walk away, it's impossible to see the ripples.

9:55Most of us are dropping a rock on LinkedIn. We're dropping a rock on a webinar. We're dropping a rock on a podcast. And because of the life we live, we immediately have to walk away so we don't see the ripples. Here's the way that I look at it, Jay. I try to live life with this philosophy or methodology that I call the mathematics of one. I will do this podcast if one person gets value. I'll step on stage if one person is in the audience. I'll do the thing because if I can be the catalyst to that one person, I have no idea what ripples they will create after me. And so if you have this idea of, Jay, how many people have you taught about subject lines?

10:40Therefore, how many more emails were opened? Therefore, how many sales were made? Jay Schwedelson, we're sitting here and your brand might be worth billions of revenue driven. And by the way, all the listeners and viewers, you may have impacted billions of dollars by just interacting and helping to be this catalyst for a few humans. Like I, again, imagine being the human that brought Billy Graham to Christ. what like the amount of ripples that are attached to your like oh my gosh or or like imagine being the person who jay there's got to be somebody in your life that helped turn jay into jay schwedelson or jay shetty or jay bear or marcus sheridan or all the names that we see in linkedin that we might be getting tagged with somebody was there to help us become that person therefore they get the it's like amway they get the residual ripples of like the thing that we're doing dude that is wild i'm gonna go tell my kids that i'm relevant uh you are oh good i feel so much better about myself all right let me ask you a question let's bring this back down to hubspot and what you call the super human framework what what are you what is that what are we even talking about what do you actually do?

12:04Yeah. So first of all, what people have to realize is for the, over the last 10, almost 12 years, I've been helping teach humans how to use HubSpot and everything that we're teaching email marketing, lead conversion, conversion rate optimization, content marketing, everything we were teaching was predicated on that. You're a good human, which most humans are good humans, but not everybody had, I'm a great example, the beginnings to actually position them what it means to be a good human in a digital world or to show up in a good way. And so I started kind of doing these video tutorials and it started as an outro to the videos that I do.

12:45I'd be like, don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human and do some happy HubSpotting along the way. And that the four H's there ended up growing into these 10 H elements of me kind of reverse engineering. Like, what is it that gives me, Joe, I love the word, Jay, that you use the word mojo. Like, what, how can I reverse engineer that? And so we literally built a superhuman framework that we use when we're helping customers. And by By the way, people that don't even use HubSpot. This is so beyond HubSpot, it's crazy. But we teach people this framework where there's four pillars, four cornerstones that is love, purpose, passion, and persistence.

13:30And on top of that, we have these 10 H's. So things like hustle or hungry, holiness, happy, helpful, humility. And so there's this framework that is literally the gauges of how to do good marketing, how to do good sales, how to do good service, because now you have this framework. But it goes past that because it can be used for individual, like personal growth. We've seen it crazy activate into teams and team dynamics. But where we love to see this is when leaders grab it and it's actually impacting company culture. And this is where I sometimes jokingly, not joking, say for the last 10 to 12 years, Jay, I've helped hundreds of humans make millions of dollars with HubSpot.

14:21But the next 10 years in my life, I'm excited because I can actually see where I might help them save billions by creating better company cultures, better teams and better employees in the organization. So, Jay, going back to you, like, is are we really relevant in the world? Are we making an impact? Like imagine impacting an entire team of humans that impact the entire organization that impacts the city that then impacts the county that I'm waxing a little bit like, you know, philosophical and like aspirational. But you could change the world a couple of humans at a time. And anybody can do this, by the way.

15:04dude i love this because honestly i think it makes people feel better about the path that they've chosen because sometimes like how did i wind up doing this and you really you're so right the way that you frame it is so awesome we're going to put in the show notes all the different ways to connect with george check out his business to follow him to all that stuff but before we wrap up here i want to know something you seem like a very smart dude you seem like you do very cool things but i want to know do you have like guilty pleasures now you're sitting there you're watching TV. Does George watch like the same garbage that I do?

15:37Is he watching like, you know, the new penguin series about the Batman? Is he watching, you know, some horrible reality TV or is George only watching like, you know, some really intellectual crap? I mean, what is going on? Nah. So, so don't get me wrong. I love me a good audio book. I'm more of a listener than a reader. I, I definitely had a time in my life where I would have said education trumps entertainment. right because i was on the grind up the hustle of becoming like a hubspot guy um but i'll be honest with you my guilty pleasures man i should i say this in public like i bro i love fast and furious nice um i love marvel movies um but i gotta be honest with you i'm not a guy who complains when i actually sit down and watch the hallmark channel with my wife either i agree like it just it's just something so like a beautiful day is where I'm like watching movies that probably I get made fun of can go out to my back porch, smoke a cigar, maybe have a little sip of whiskey, come back in, watch a little bit more TV with my wife and know that Monday morning work will be waiting for me and I can impact the world again.

16:51Well, let me tell you how big of a loser I am. Okay. This is not a joke. I saw yesterday. I liked the Hallmark channel because nothing bad ever happens on the hallmark right ever ever and i saw they just released their schedule of how many new movies they're going to have just for this holiday season between like october 1st and the new year how many new movies do you think that they are releasing i counted in just that time period what do you think the number is of new movies i'm gonna take a guess and say 52 oh well you thought it was 32 and it blew my mind. I'm like 32 movies over like, I don't know, two and a half months is like crazy, but they're all the same movie basically.

17:33Exactly. Yeah. They're amazing. Well, you're amazing. Uh, listen, George, how does everybody find you connect with you? We'll put in the show notes, but what should they do to get in your world? Yeah, definitely. I mean, listen, if you're on socials, you can go to LinkedIn, George B Thomas, uh, on X George B Thomas as well. If that's where you hang out, to be honest with you, you could head over to Sidekick Strategies, which is the place you're going to find all the agency and HubSpot services. If you like the kind of personal growth tinge that you might have heard on this, you can also go to beyondyourdefault.com because we've created a personal growth podcast and newsletter over there.

18:08But honestly, like depending on how in-depth this conversation needs to be, you can also email me, george at georgebthomas.com. Open email door policy. I am literally here for all the conversations with all the humans to try to make their life just a little bit better than maybe it was before. Oh, amazing. You are a great human. Thank you so much for doing this. And I can't wait to catch up again soon. Thanks, Jay. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers.

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