2385 - Finding Balance Between Tactical Hobbies and Business Growth with CJAM's Behdad Jamshidi

0:03Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Bedad Damshidi. Bedad, you are the founder and CEO of C-Jam, the marketing connector. You're found on the web at cjammarketing.com. To our friend that's listening, we've got the direct link in the show notes. You just kind of click on the cover art or the information icon. You should be able to find it. Bedad, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah. Before we get going talking about C-Jam and the work that you do, So you always love hearing what high-level leaders are into when they're not at work, kind of stuff that they explore and kind of geek out on.

1:28What have you been into lately? Yeah, lately I've been trying to find more ways to use my hands because, I mean, we do a lot of brain thinking. So I thought, hey, let's get into the hands and work on those things. So I did a painting lesson with my wife. I did my second ever painting, which I was actually very proud of. I did some hand pan two days ago. What's hand pan? handpan uh if you go on youtube and look for like relaxation meditation music it's that big like round ball that people like are hitting with their hands and it makes that like low frequency sound um so i was like maybe i'll get into instruments and test that out and then realize oh this thing is like three to five thousand dollars and then i have to put a lot of time and effort into learning it um maybe i don't have the time to do that right now uh maybe just let someone else buy the handpan and just get together with a group and play around with it.

2:15So you'd mentioned specifically that getting involved in something very tactical, because again, you know, as, as, as high level leaders or as, you know, business founders, you know, like we're constantly exercising that brain, but you mentioned something very specific about, you know, the kind of this very tactical activity that sounds intentional. Yeah, it's, it's super intentional. And it kind of comes from watching like more of my elders around me. So obviously I'm an engineer. I do the marketing stuff, right? But I've noticed that with a lot of the seniors around me, they went from really high end engineering jobs, founder jobs.

2:51And as they get older, they're doing something with their hands. So my neighbor in the Netherlands, when I used to still live in the Netherlands, he started doing glass work. He started creating frames that were gold, refurbishing things. And he was just like, man, I used my whole brain my whole life. Now I just want to use my hands. and two other quick examples would be like my my wife's father he ran a 200 person company um he makes bread like better like baguette bread better than the french do because he has like literally excel sheets on excel sheets of just like different things he's testing and he's just making bread every single day it's the best baguette bread you'll ever have um and one of my mentors he makes leather leather um wallets for his friends and so he'll just once he's done work he's like that's it i'm done i'm gonna use my hands i'm gonna build up so i'm like seeing this pattern and I'm like, well, if they're going to do it in 20 or 30 years, why don't I just do it now?

3:37Like, you know, and find the thing I like doing. That is so cool. Thank you so much for that. So here's your first assignment to our friend that's listening to our conversation, go find a tactical hobby. You know, I started during COVID. I said, you know what? I've always wanted to be a much better cook. And so I just started obsessing on like YouTube videos and just learning everything. And of course, now I use AI and I, and I actually built a custom GPT. That's the personification of Alton Brown. And so, you know, you know, for the past few years, I, you know, make at least, you know, three to four really good meals every single week and try to find new things to make.

4:18I also picked up the bass guitar a couple of years ago. You know, of course, all the, you know, just the typical like fitness stuff, But you're absolutely right. Like it's it not only is it. Oh, man. You know, it's it's it's edifying. Like it just like it like I feel it's you know, it's like the work when I go out and work in the yard, you know, it's like, is it work? Yes. But it's just a different type of work. It's meditative. It's a I feel so useful from a very physical standpoint. and you know it allows my brain to relax like I'm still productive so I feel like I'm creating but then you know my brain doesn't feel as taxed and I think it gives me in that moment too it's almost like that shower time where the brain now can um can think a little bit more deeply and integrate a lot of like integration time yeah because you're learning new skill sets and those new skill sets are going to synchronize across different things like so i read a book a while ago called make it stick and it talked about like the how to learn really effectively and part of it is like you know some people you know how they read like two or three books at the same time and they read a little bit of this book and a little bit of that book and a little bit of this one and all of a sudden the ideas and all the thoughts are actually cross-pollinating um i find that to be very similar to the activities that you do in life the reason why i can make so many connections in my head is because i've done so many different things i've read so many different things and so I can go from picking something from soccer and going this applies here I pick something from working out applies here something from the books I've read and applies here something I just learned from painting where I was like oh there's different layers like I just learned one simple thing and in two hours I was able to draw better than I thought I ever could draw they're like oh look if you're going to be doing acrylic paint you can actually like let's say that the top of your photo is this like blue right like the blue sky they actually say color the whole portrait blue and then add the layers on top so then you add the next color of blue and then the next cloud on top and then the next color of clouds where now when i look at the world i'm like oh this is all in layers everything is just done in layers um anyways that's just kind of like i just learn a lot from just doing different things and they help me within business and personal life and just all the other aspects yeah uh and of course there's always principles when you learn that stuff um you know like um it's i don't know if it's kaizen or you i forget what the japanese term is but this has been one for uh is it it was either utori or kaizen or i think it was kaizen um where it's just like you know when you're gardening this was so valuable for me i promise we're going to get to i like this topic man this is fun but but this idea of like you know for me you know especially for those of us who are high achievers and sometimes we're like oh, I have the bandwidth, I can do more, I can work harder, right?

7:08But that's not always the best tack, right? When you're constantly feeling like you have to be added so hard, you know, and then this principle, and I'm sorry, I'm not remembering the right, it's one of those two terms, I think. But it's like, you know, for gardening, you know, once you kind of do what you're supposed to do, now you have to let the plant, you know, or the flower or whatever, do its job. You know, it's like you can't keep watering it, because then, you know, it's too much. And so, and I've really like, that's been a great moment of reflection for me professionally. And again, I'm sure you've learned lessons and, you know, and you're kind of your tactical endeavors that have come back and helped you to become a better founder, CEO, and leader in your company.

7:51Oh, a hundred, a hundred percent. And some of the stuff that you talk about, like for me, the biggest question I look at when I'm a founder and I'm running stuff, I'm like, I'm doing a lot of things. Like, you know, there's multiple channels running within CJM and all the stuff that we're doing. but I don't ever want to lose sight of I'm going to get old at some point and I'm going to look at this time and be like I didn't actually live life and so that's kind of like the other reason why I was doing some of the stuff with my hands and learning new things and doing little hobbies because most people will say I can do that when I retire when I get older I'll have time but we don't really have that much time um and there's always going to be time for work like there's endless amount of work and I in both you and I know if there's like a little bit of wall time we can likely create something new and that's going to create more work for us um so for me for me it's around really living intentionally and going, I want to spend time with my family, my friends.

8:36I want to learn new skills. If someone's having a dinner, I'm going to go hang up with my friend and have dinner, even though I have a lot of work because I know work is never going to end right now at the end of the day. So for me, it's just like, I don't want to get to the point where I'm like 60 or 70 years old and go, I have all this money. I built all these things, but I don't have any memories to enjoy. And I don't have any of those like deep friendships that I want to have. Life is just, it's meaningless if I don't have that stuff. Right. So I'm very intentional around that. In the age of AI becoming more and more, you know, just a part of our regular life, I really love how C-Jam is positioned in a very human connection place for an area that I think oftentimes is too commoditized at great risk.

9:26And I'll let you explain kind of what I'm talking about here. I'm kind of doing some table setting here for you to, you know, knock it out of the park here. Do you mind? Well, I'm sure you won't mind at all. Tell us what C-Jam is all about, because I love the concept. And I think as we continue to move forward, I think the way that you're positioned is going to become more and more and more vital and valuable in an otherwise very artificial commoditized world. Thank you. Yeah, no, you're signing up very well. For context, the background of what I do, I mean, I started out as an engineer. Most people don't realize that.

10:02Like, I'm in marketing now, but I started out as an engineer. And a lot of my work on the engineering side was I was working as a sales engineer. So I worked with midsize companies, understanding what's happening from a C-level perspective, IT perspective, and building out roadmaps. Like, how does the business get from A to B to C within the organization? And I got to work with the lushes of the world, not-for-profits, law firms, manufacturing, just a whole host of different businesses. and a lot of my business consulting sales leadership and technology experience came from that side, right? Did that for close to 10 years.

10:29On the marketing side and where I've kind of positioned myself for the last seven years, I started building out websites, Google ads and SEO, right? Like most agencies that start out, but I hated doing ADR websites on the weekend. I was like, this is not what I like doing. It doesn't fire me up and I don't need the money. I made very good money as a sales engineer. So I started looking for different marketing agencies to work with. And as I did that, I noticed most marketing agencies didn't understand business and most businesses didn't understand marketing. And so it was always that gap in the middle.

10:57And at the time I was a very foolish engineer. I didn't know fractional CMOs existed. I didn't know people that could bridge the gap somewhat existed. So I started thinking, I'm going to find 10 marketing agencies. I'll talk to businesses, see what they need to match. And as I did that, as I put people in the same meeting, they didn't speak the same language. Every marketing agency says they can do everything. The actual number is 93 % of marketing agencies are not good at anything. Like they're just good, which doesn't do anything. And 7 % are good if really matched well. And so I've talked to over 1 ,123 different market makers and experts over the last seven years.

11:32So I feel like I can say that with a lot of confidence. And the entire thing that I do is I matchmake. So I talk to businesses, see what they need and go based on what you're telling me, here's what makes sense. And that's essentially what I do. All right. So how do you work with folks? And like you, so you know a lot of marketing professionals. Explain what engaging with CJAM and engaging with you looks like. Yeah. So for example, a customer would come to me and say, hey, Beta, this is our business. This is where we're at. So what we're trying to do, these are the resources that we have in-house.

12:04These are the agencies we currently have. Here's what we're paying them, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll do a business discovery call to really understand the business and where they're at currently today. And then based on that, I go, well, where are you trying to go? what are you trying to head to, right? Like they're trying to get to a certain number, certain revenue numbers, certain metrics that they have, they want to hit. And I go, based on what you're telling me, this is the path that I think I would take, whether it's execution marketing agencies, or it's, you don't actually have a strategy within your business.

12:30So if I give you execution people, they're just throwing stuff at a wall, hoping something sticks. And that usually doesn't work that well. And so once we build a plan or a bit of a roadmap of like, what do they need and how they move forward? I then do the matchmaking, whether that's a fractional CMO that they need, whether that's a new branding partner need, website, paid ads, SEO, social media, influencer marketing, whatever that is, I basically build them a list and say, these are the people that I think you should talk to based on what we chatted about and where you're trying to head to. I love that.

13:00And I think about all of the ways that we typically will hire somebody. And some of those ways are just not really effective. Like, hey, my neighbor Jim Bob said, you know, these guys are the best or whatever. And Jim Bob doesn't know crap, man. You've been around the block. You know what makes a good marketing professional. Do you mind just kind of blasting to smithereens some of the inefficient ways that we find and hire professionals? Because I know how painful that is. And I don't mean to make too much light of this. Because again, we're all kind of doing the best that we can. And, you know, a lot of times, you know, we might ask for opinions on social or something like that.

13:42And again, that's not necessarily going to get you the best person. And I know how painful this is when we make a suboptimal decision, because for a lot of us, especially for your, you know, more smaller SMBs, you know, a bad decision like this can be I mean, it can be, you know, it could knock you out. That's how critical and how important these decisions are to a lot of these founders. 100%. It puts you back quite a bit, especially the smaller you are and the lower your marketing budget. It takes a long time to recover. So some of the ways that businesses are typically finding marketing agencies today, one is Google, right?

14:21If you look at anyone that's ranking on top of Google, typically it's a very like volume heavy focused marketing partner, right? You're getting a very specific type of plan and they're going to run you through it and they're going to put you in it and it's really not going to do very much. Two is, like you said, write your social posts. People say, yeah, you should talk to XXX. They know nothing about your business and they're recommending someone. Yeah. Doesn't make a ton of sense to me either. Or you go into a business group and you're in the business group and you're like, hey, I'm looking for an X found person.

14:49This is slightly better. But at the same time, the person that's referring you is likely not going to be in the same industry that you are, not the same size that you are, doesn't have the same resources you have internally. So the recommendations don't actually work. What you typically want to use those recommendations for is going, hey, this company thinks you're an A player. Do you know any other A players? Like as a secondary, right? Like usually A player agencies know other A player agencies and you might be able to build your network that way. But it also is a full-time job. There's so many other ways that businesses try to find them.

15:17Some will look at ads, obviously, and go through the ads and then try to find people. Or they'll look at, like let's say you're looking for an e-commerce agency. They might look at an e-commerce company running an ad and they like the ad. then try to go find which agency is running those ads and then hire that agency. That's one of the ways that one of my customers found some of their agencies. The best, the way that I go about it, like I've just built a network through it, right? So I'm part of a whole bunch of different marketing agency networks that are like hidden. Most people can't find these.

15:45It takes years to find them. And then once you're in them, then you start evaluating and vetted. Say a marketing agency network has 800 agencies in there. There's a very less than 7 % of them are probably any good, even in a highly vetted network in that environment. So my job is to go through different marketing agency networks, building out my network, vetting people, and just trying to build the A player list to go based on when this customer comes in, these are the people that you need to talk to. All right. Million dollar question, Badad. How do you make your money? And like, obviously you're working as a broker here.

16:16And I would imagine this question likely comes up is, you know, if I ask you for a recommendation, how do I know that you're being, you're acting in my best interest and not maybe making a connection. And again, you know, forgive me for kind of the way I'm phrasing this question, but I'm, I'm thinking of like what probably people might be thinking. It's like, okay, are you just going to make a recommendation for someone that's giving you the biggest affiliate chunk or something like that? A hundred percent. Yeah. So a lot of this comes down to integrity, which is one of the values that I have both personally and in my business.

16:48So the way that I get paid, let me answer your first question. So I get referral fees from marketing agencies, all my referral fees with the marketing agencies are the same percentage. Like that's just part of my model. Great. Great. Either you're in or you're out. This is the model you kind of run with it. There are slight, um, there's some marketing industries where their, their percentages are lower. So my percentage is lower. That just, I just, that makes sense. Um, on the front end customers, I always do a business discovery session. And if I actually think I can help, I'll tell them, Hey, this is how I think I can help.

17:16This is what I would do. And then I charge an, like a, an engagement fee. So it's a$1 ,500 engagement fee. Um, And they hire me. And then I go and build up the email list after talking to a whole bunch of people and saying, these are the people I recommend you have a conversation. So I charge on both sides because the thing that I do and the value that I create is crazy. I have a customer of mine made three intros for him and within five months, they did$10 million,$3 million in profit. They had a very short timeframe to be able to actually run this offer that they were running with. It was around a little bit after COVID time where people were doing COVID tests and he was in the pharmaceutical space.

17:49And so they were able to give out free COVID tests and like beta ad we need someone to help us one get the influence of marketing out we need someone to get a really good landing page done and conversion rate optimization and literally within a week i gave him four partners um had two influence of marketing agency copywriter and a landing page developer with cro experience and he's like b we did 10 million dollars uh in five months and three million in profit um those are the types of like connections that like if you know a good marketing broker you can like pick up on opportunities really quickly finally And finally, one last thing to answer your last question.

18:21A lot of people, the way that I win is if my customers win. So if my customer comes in and spends, you know,$80 ,000 on a website and that's not what they needed, they actually only needed a 10 or$15 ,000 website. So they can then use the next$60 ,000 to actually grow their business. And for them growing their business actually means they're working with more of my partners. I win when my customers win and when the agency wins, otherwise it doesn't work. I don't like short-term things. Short-term things don't win for people. So my incentives are always aligned to the customer winning. And I'm very close with my customers.

18:53So if something doesn't work, I'm always there to step in, whether it's to bridge communication gaps, or it's like, hey, maybe this agency wasn't the right one, I have another one for you, right? Customers trying to do this themselves, will probably get it right less than 5 % of the time. right they just don't i'll give you a great example like so in the podcast guesting space you know so we've launched over 300 podcasts like i i know every podcast guesting agency on the planet and we've been working with them for years uh i am i can tell you that the ones that i mean there are there are agencies that charge i think a very fair rate and and actually do very good work.

19:34And then there are some, and, and it is just, I just, I feel so awful for those guests that come in and those clients that come in, because I know what they're paying. And I know, I know what they're, you know, what that agency is doing. I mean, it's just, they're all, they're just glorified spammers and they're charging like a thousand dollars per podcast placement. And I'm, you know, I don't want to say anything, you know, but I'm like, man, you know, It's like if someone were trying to shop around for a podcast guesting agency, oh, man, I can tell you all the stories. I can tell you, you know, but it's like, you know, no one has my insight.

20:14No one has been working in my industry like I have, you know, or, you know, a typical, I should say, a typical guest just doesn't have that. So your job is really just kind of get on the inside and really understand, you know, what makes an effective, you know, paid ads or, you know, Facebook ads agency or something like that. And you can really do a little bit of digging on this so you can make a, you know, a very good recommendation. And then, of course, once they perform for someone that you've referred to them and you know that they're solid, well, guess what? they're probably going to get referred more often.

20:50So now the incentive is set up to make sure we got to make sure we take care of Bidad's clients. Otherwise he ain't going to send us anybody else. That's exactly it. And the interesting thing is the marketing agency world, even though there's like 160 ,000 marketing agencies just in the U S there's a lot of people that talk behind the scenes, right? Like there's people that you see online, there are these influencers, they have massive, and you're like, I know how terrible that marketing agency is. Every single person that just signed up for that is not going to have a good experience yeah or one of my facebook adages be like hey you know that agency that you were just talking to yeah we've taken like six customers for the last from them last three months because they're just they having a retention issue and so like a lot of the times i will ask around in my in my network of like hey has anyone heard of this or anyone done this and so there's like another layer of filtering like there's no perfect solution just like yeah there's no perfect solution but i can get my matches right about 70 of the time like it was just way higher imagine if like so So imagine a business comes in and needs to hire a marketing agency.

21:49They don't actually realize they need multiple marketing agencies. There's no one full service agency. I'm actually working with a customer right now, literally telling him that. I'm like, do you know how hard it is to find like an agency that does these seven things? It's like near impossible. So you need multiple partners. And if your hit rate as a business is less than 5%, you might be able to get one partner, but it's impossible for you to get two, three, four at all in one go. Versus like when I'm doing it and I'm going to get 70 % of the time, you're probably going to get three or four partners that you're going to like one of them might not fit and there's so much like hidden stuff that people don't know like even if i work with an agency let's say six times it doesn't promise that on the seventh time they're going to hit it out of the park for my customer because the agency is also a growing business as well right so they might pass a certain threshold of employees and they need to restructure their sops and their processes and all this different kind of stuff or it was just not a good communication match because most businesses think if i hire a marketing agency i can pass everything off and I'm out like, it's like, no, you actually understand your business better than they ever will.

22:50And so you need to be there communicating with them, working with them on your campaigns. And if you can't do it, you need to have someone as an intermediary, whether that's a fractional CMO, a marketing director internally, or whatever it is, there are certain structures you need to have to make these really, really work well. And the more I do this, the more I can educate my customers to what allows them to be successful and just not taking on things that don't make sense. Right. Mm-hmm. We've gone a few minutes over. I hope you're okay. Okay. So, I mean, last question to our friend that's been listening.

23:22You do such a fascinating thing. You know, we pretty much have been talking about your superpowers this whole time. But to our friend that's been listening, so they're going to be in one of two camps. You know, either, you know, they're like, well, listen, yes, we're going to need to make some very intentional hires or, you know, contract some services, you know, over the next six months or so. And then you've got the other pool. They're like, uh, but can you send us some business? Uh, so which are those two for those two lanes, you mind maybe kind of explaining the path? Yeah. So the path is if you're looking to hire people, like you're a business looking to hire marketing agencies or partners, uh, the path is go to my, go to my website, um, and basically just reach out and book something on my calendar.

24:02That's, that's pretty easy. Or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Um, if you're an agency looking for business. A lot of my work is like, I'm not taking as many agency calls. So I actually have somewhere on my website at the top where it says for marketers. You can basically put yourself in your agency, a contractor or whatever it is, fill out all that information. Now you're in my database. So you're at least there. And then whenever I'm looking for something for a customer that might not be in my vetted network, I go to my wider database and list and then start vetting people and setting up calls when it makes sense.

24:30So those would be the two ways for people to connect with me the best. Badad Jamshidi, your website is cjammarketing.com, the marketing connector. Badad, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Josh. Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed.

25:07We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com. You can start for free with your Podverified score along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews, and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success.

25:55Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time. We'll be right back.