Empowering Businesses Through Data with Jeffrey Nicholson: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Like that, Sparkfire Nation, JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Marketing Made Simple. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be talking about empowering businesses through data. To drop these value bonds, I brought Jeffrey Nicholson into EO Fire Studios. Jeffrey is the co-founder and CEO of Tracer, a data intelligence platform built to solve complex data equations. Jeffrey is a serial entrepreneur with a 15-year track record of building and scaling businesses across multiple fields.

0:35In today's foundation, we'll talk about the biggest factor of being successful is mental willpower. What gets measured gets improved. And when you invest in the valued relationships with your partners and clients, they will recommend you and owe so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Jeffrey and our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship.

1:09A recent episode discussing the billion-dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must-listen. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. I have a question for you, Fire Nation. Do you feel like your life is optimized, or do you feel like you're leaving a lot on the table when it comes to health, wealth, and relationships? If you think you could use some personal guidance in optimizing your life, let me help. I've created a program called Optimize where I will personally work with you one-on-one to get to know you, your life, your goals, and your dreams. If you want to learn more about this program, visit eofire.com slash optimize.

1:47Jeffrey, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, everybody? Jeff Nicholson here. I don't know how many people would disagree with this. I know some do, but I believe that the biggest factor of being successful is mental willpower. I think there's a lot of different reasons people claim, but for me, you know, focus and fortitude on how you apply yourself every day, being disciplined is fundamentally the biggest thing you can do to be successful. And Fire Nation, as you heard from the introduction, this is a person who has found his share of success.

2:29So we're going to be talking a lot about that, specifically empowering businesses through data. So your company, Tracer, Jeffrey, has quite the story. So why don't you tell us about this journey to get Tracer started? Yeah, absolutely. So Tracer is a data intelligence platform. And the founding story is pretty interesting. I actually met and pitched Gary Vaynerchuk, I mean, seven years ago at this point, almost, on two really simple principles. One, building a media department inside of his already very successful creative agency. And then two, simultaneously incubating Tracer, which we used to call Green Man, code name Green Man, inside the media department, knowing that we would eventually split the business out.

3:18And lucky enough, Gary is a savage entrepreneur and both a mentor and a great business partner. And he was excited to go on the journey with us. So, you know, we did that, ran the company for three years in stealth. Then we split it out as a separate entity under the VaynerX umbrella and continue to sign different clients, including other agencies, and then officially have split it out. And now we are, you know, kind of a completely separate entity, but they're one of our biggest clients and close partners. Savage is definitely a word I would use to describe Jamie Vaynerchuk when it comes to all things entrepreneurship.

3:53I mean, that guy is just 100 % beast mode, 100 % of the time. And I got to give my hat tip to him for all of that stuff. Looking forward to his new book that's coming out, actually. And it's a little disappointed, though. He did say it was his best book ever, where he featured me in his most recent book before this, Crushing It. So I was kind of hoping he would think that was his best book ever. But apparently, whatever he's working on, that's the best thing. I can't blame him for that at all. Now, let's just call a spade a spade, Jeffrey. I mean, a data intelligence platform built to solve complex data equations.

4:35That is the one-liner of Tracer. And it sounds pretty boring. How do you make Tracer not boring but relevant for our listeners? And how does Tracer stand out for the competition? To your first question, I really try to explain it in very simple terms so everyone can understand. even, you know, someone's grandmother. So we talk about everyone's business as a data equation. And if you take a very simple e-commerce equation, let's say they use Shopify, they advertise on TikTok and Google and Facebook, you know, that's four different partners that you need to ingest data and then infer what's happening, right?

5:10Now, none of those companies talk to each other. So you need, you know, a process or a product or both or people, usually all three, to aggregate that data and then make sense of it so you can drive insights and make better decisions for your business. And so that's their equation, right? One source plus two plus three plus four. Now, when you go to a very large business, the equations get extremely complex. They could be buying from a thousand publishers. They probably have three creative agencies. They will have an internal marketing team, an external marketing team, and you have silos and segmented data and fractures all over the place.

5:46And so we try to be the glue in between so that people are operating in an efficient and effective way to drive their business. So what I want to do is really dive into specifics because I feel like that's how our listeners are really going to get to what you do and why you do it and all of that jazz. What is the one specific problem that you are not just trying, but actually solving for people that have these specific problems? Like you have the solution. What is the specific problem that you are trying to solve? A lot of this problem, and I've been in the space for 15 years, ran ads for a very long time, is that people are mostly doing this still in Microsoft Excel with humans.

6:24And the process is extremely slow. It's extremely costly. And so we're solving a process problem across a wide spectrum businesses. We deal with Fortune 100s. We deal with small e-commerce companies. We're agnostic to the business problem. We just want to add value. But if you look at, I'll go through those two examples and give specifics. If you have an e-commerce company that's, let's say, $10 million to$25 million in top-line revenue using Shopify, there are difficulties in understanding correlation between how they spent money on advertising, both in physical aspects like a billboard or online, and then tied to their revenue data, especially if they're also going to have a brick-and-mortar store, which might use another POS system.

7:06So you're joining multiple services to basically understand, okay, what is working? Or where am I best performing? And you might identify that a certain product and SKU is outperforming in a certain area, and you want to translate that into your creative and double down on that performance. And then when you go to large-scale businesses, a lot of it is simple collaboration. When you're running$200 or$500 million in North America, for example, you're likely using one to three agencies to run that media, and those companies hate each other. They're actually direct competitors, and therefore, it's very difficult for you to have a collaboration across, you know, frenemies in this case on your benefit, and also have everybody operate on the same data sets on continuity and consistency.

7:50So we solve kind of different problems for different scales and sides of businesses, but it all boils down to having your own data in one place, and having something set up where you can understand what's happening. And there's a quote that I've always lived by, I think it's a Peter Drucker quote, which is what gets measured gets improved. And so many people are just blind, Like they don't even know what's being measured in their company. They have no way to actually have any kind of irrelevant data at their fingertips. They have no way to compare it to one month, three month, 12 month. They have no idea how to compare it to their competition.

8:22And it's just like these individuals that are running these companies are the blind leading the blind. I mean, they're just literally moving from one thing to the next without any real idea, without any North Star, without any real data. And this is really interesting, Fire Nation, because the people that are going to come out the other side are going to be people that really have their finger on the pulse of all of these things. We're going to be breaking down a few things in this area and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you're a marketer, then you know what it's like to feel like you're moving in a hundred different directions at any given time, like you're spread too thin.

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10:51I have a question for you, Fire Nation. Do you feel like your life is optimized or do you feel like you're leaving a lot on the table when it comes to health, wealth, and relationships? After interviewing over 4 ,500 successful entrepreneurs, I have found that every one of them have optimized their life to a high level. In over 12 years of running a multi seven-figure a year business myself, while staying healthy and raising a wonderful family, I figured out how to optimize my life to an amazing level. It didn't happen automatically. There was a lot of struggles, but through mentorship from others and a lot of intentional work, I got there.

11:25And if you think you could use some personal guidance in optimizing your life, let me help. I've created a program called Optimize, where I will personally work with you one-on-one to get to know you, your life, your goals, and your dreams. Then over a three-month timeframe, we will create a fully optimized life that will set you up for a lifetime of optimized health, wealth, and relationships based off your goals and your dreams. An optimized life does not happen automatically. It only happens through intentional work and guidance from someone who has reached that level that you are striving for.

11:58My goal is to turn you into a fully optimized human based off of your life goals. If you wanna learn more about this program, visit eofire.com slash optimize. We'll jump on a call. We'll discuss the specifics of the program. And if we both feel to fit, we'll talk about next steps. eofire.com slash optimize. So Jeffrey, we're back. And something that I feel like you've done really well is you've chosen great partners and you've worked with great clients. I mean, we talked about Gary Vaynerchuk and your whole experience, you know, with VaynerMedia and just what a savage partnership that's turned into because of all the awesome ramifications that come along with that type of partnership.

12:39Because partners and clients, I mean, they make or break the company literally. So how could you recommend, based off your success and experience, Fire Nation choose their partners and clients? I think people need to remember that your reputation is dictated on your decisions. And that includes who you work with, who you invest in, both on the client and the partner side. You know, if you go to our website, we're actually invite only for a reason, because we want to cherry pick the positions that we can add value. And also the, you know, the client feels like we're adding value as well. and it's a mutual relationship of growth and respect.

13:16And I think a lot of companies tend to focus on sell as much as often and as possible. We take kind of reputational retention and management very seriously in how we drive the business. And I think that's paid dividends. And if you invest long-term in the value creation for your partners and your clients, typically they're going to recommend you to other people in similar positions and other opportunities. And we have the benefit of completely growing organically based on what we've produced and I think how much we value the relationships that we do invest in. So let's really maybe give an example or two of a way that you've gone ahead and chose a partner.

13:54And then let's give an example or two of a way you've gone about choosing a client that's kind of made sense with this philosophy. I'll use a very simple one. Good Life is one of our smaller clients, actually. They're an e-commerce business that mostly sells T-shirts and other kind of like men's and women's essentials. And we chose them as a client because at the time of our business, we wanted to learn about their specific business model, knowing that there's a lot of businesses like them that could probably use the services we provide and make sure that we're fine-tuning our products so that we want to go very large-scale commercially, that we're confident and, you know, we're respecting the opportunity to work with these businesses because they don't have necessarily as much money as, let's say, a Fortune 100.

14:40And every dollar they spend is important. And the price point we're going to charge for them is probably going to be a big deal. And so, you know, we chose them because the CEOs who have become good friends are great people. They have a really good kind of foundation around their brand and wanted the assistance. It was an opportunity where we could add value and it was just very mutually beneficial and something that, you know, we've grown a lot from as a product and partnership with them and continue to get deeper with their business and have replicated that success with other businesses. And so I think that goes back to my initial point around, you know, reputational management.

15:13We took the time to come out with a product that was adding value to a business that a lot of other people, you know, struggle with in certain aspects. And And I think that's paid dividends. And then, you know, as far as partnerships, the one that I would probably talk about is making sure that you focus on the core players that are most important to your clients. So, you know, we've heavily focused on Google, Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, etc. Because we believe that those partnerships are imperative to our success and making sure that we're, you know, bringing top tier service to our business. So it's also based on the strategy of what you're going to deploy on where you invest your money and time as well.

15:49So a business is only as good as this decision is, Jeffrey. So how specifically is Tracer empowering other businesses to make better decisions? I mean, what are a couple of the examples? And again, if you need to keep the business name anonymous, we get that. If you can share it, of course, that's even cooler like you do with Good Life. But what are you doing specifically? What is Tracer doing specifically to empower businesses to make better decisions? One of them is just business decisions. So you talk about decisions or everything, you know, how you spend your money. And that's including, you know, technology, product, time.

16:25Every aspect of that is extremely important. So one of the simplest ones that I love is a lot of the classic global Fortune 500 are spending millions of dollars on processes that are a waste. And that is as simple as humans in Excel. And so one of the proudest moments I have typically is we'll take a report. You know, we've had this multiple times over where we go in and we diagnose their data equation. We walk through their processes and they'll say this report takes us two weeks and four people. That's a lot of money. And when you can replicate that and now produce that in the matter of 10 minutes or even two minutes, and that person gets literally two weeks of their time back or four weeks or whatever that report may be representative to their time, that is amazing because it's validating, it's simple to prove, and it's something that shows companies that you're creating more value for them where they can reinvest in other areas that are probably going to drive growth as opposed to what I joke is drowning in data.

17:23And then if you look at some of the more e-commerce-based companies or product-oriented companies, showing them their purchase skew density and giving them insights on what products they might want to test in their seasonal marketing or what they want to think about on color variations and how they drive their product innovation is something that is really fun to watch and something that we've had a big impact on as well. I mean, think about that, Fire Nation. Think about people on your team who are spending so much of their time doing this work, this potential repetitive, this potential, you know, questionably useful, but it's just, they're literally, they're drowning in data.

18:03People maybe aren't even looking at the data. And it's just stuff that doesn't have to be done by these four individuals that Jeffrey shares that are just spending all their time doing it. I mean, these people, you're paying salaries, benefits, all these different things. When you could be utilizing these individuals for actual profit-producing activities. I mean, this can make and break a business. It makes and breaks businesses every single day, literally. So Jeffrey, with everything we talked about, what is the one key takeaway you really want to make sure our listeners get from everything that we talked about with Tracer today, with the problems you're solving, with the partners and the clients and the decisions that we're making?

18:46What is the one key takeaway you want to make sure we really walk away with? How can we connect with you in your company? Any call to action you may have for our listeners and then we'll say goodbye. I would challenge every business owner in a good way to make sure they know what their data equation is and feel like they have control of it and make sure they understand how they're measuring success, how they're measuring the decisions they make, and that that is independently controlled from all the partners and kind of the players and the people that they operate in because everything's going to change.

19:16But the reality is you're still responsible for your business and therefore you need to have control on what kind of works and what doesn't. How can we connect with you, your business, any call to action you have for us? Tracer.tech is our website. Feel free to send us a form if there's of interest from a business owner perspective. And then I'm, you know, at Jeff J. Nicholson on pretty much every social platform. So anybody wants to hit me up, feel free. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JN and JLD today. So keep up the heat.

19:46Head over to EOfire.com, type Jeffrey in the search bar. His show notes page will pop up with everything we've been talking about here today. Links to all that jazz. Jeffrey, thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, knowledge, value bombs with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you so much. Appreciate having me. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Jeffrey and Fire Nation. Are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Well, if so, check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free.

20:23Freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side.

20:54your podcasts. I have a question for you, Fire Nation. Do you feel like your life is optimized or do you feel like you're leaving a lot on the table when it comes to health, wealth, and relationships? If you think you could use some personal guidance in optimizing your life, let me help. I've created a program called Optimize where I will personally work with you one-on-one to get to know you, your life, your goals, and your dreams. If you want to learn more about this program, visit eofire.com slash optimize.

21:24Thank you.