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BizSchool w/ Alex Rasmussen Guest: Dr. Kyle Fagala  Wednesday, April 22   INTRO Alex: Welcome, here it goes, this is the 2nd episode of BizSchool, With me, Alex Rsmussen, where I am going to be teaching you all things business.    On this episode I am going to pick up right where I left off in the 1st episode, telling my story and what led me to where I am today. We will wrap up that story today when I bring in my business partner in both Neon Canvas and Signature Advertising, Dr. Kyle Fagala.    The cool part about this story is that I was also on the ground floor of Dr. Kyle’s other business, Saddle Creek Orthodontics, which he started back in 2012 and has grown into a multi location and multi million dollar operation.    He runs that practice with his amazing wife, Anna and I am proud to call Kyle, a friend, confidant and the yin to my yang businessman, yang.    On the show tonight, we will discuss…  My Digital Marketing Career How Dr. Kyle and I met What led us to start Neon canvas Why we decided to purchase Signature What the future holds for our businesses   So let’s get right back to it. When we left off in episode 1 I was telling you why I thought digital and online marketing was going to be and is the future of commerce.    I saw this coming as far back as the early 2000s, sold my first website in 2001 and by 2010 I was a full-time business consultant teaching companies how to leverage digital marketing.    I was still in my 20s yet I was well into my professional career consulting to business owners that were easily twice my age.    But I had what they did not, which was a native relationship to technology and social media. New media as it was called back then now commonly referred to as digital marketing.    The reason I was so passionate about digital marketing was because I realized that unlike traditional marketing, you could easily track ROI (return on investment) with digital marketing.    So by 2010 I was mastering how to drive traffic into a website then convert that traffic into dollars for my customers. I certainly was not the first one doing this but I was learning from the best. I self-taught myself SEO with Google's Webmaster Guide. Now called Guidelines and they literally gave me the damn book on how to rank sites on SEO.    I was also one of the first advertisers on facebook ad platform. I was neck deep in this stuff everyday, trying to get every advantage I could get so that I could build a career on this knowledge and expertise.    I knew from day one that I wanted to have my own book of clients that I was helping achieve their marketing and sales goals and that in return I could have the career I knew I was destined for.    The skillset I did not want to acquire was coding. I tried it, I was good enough at it to be dangerous but I was not a designer and so I found that the User Interface was lacking and I needed to work with other professionals and bring our strengths together to create these websites that would do everything I needed them to do.    They had to rank well on google, they had to convert, they had to look great and function well, load quickly and have great copy.   This was not a job for 1person yet every website was being built by 1 or 2 people. A guy that could code but whose designs were terrible or a designer who had a great eye but didn’t know how to code or convert traffic into dollars.    So after working to perfect this for a couple of years I approached a guy in my hometown who I thought was building great websites. I called him up out of the blue, told him who I was and what I did and asked him if I could come build the digital marketing division of his company.   After a long interview process and I think much trepidation on his part, I don’t want to speak for him but I think history will bear that out, he offered me a job.    It was a fair offer and ultimately I would be rewarded for the success and revenue I was able to generate. I started with this company in 2012 and by 2016 I was selling and managing over 2 million dollars in annual revenue.     The company had tripled in size, I had an awesome team, close to 100 clients and  my career was humming along quite nicely.    (Here is where I want @Kyle to come onto the screen by simply turning on his camera.)   One of those clients was Dr. Kyle Fagala, an Orthodontist in Memphis, TN.  I had 5 or 6 other clients who  were also Orthodointist, scattered throughout the country that were working with me based on the recommendation of Dr. Kyle who we will bring onto the show now.    Kyle was not getting anything from me to refer these folks to me, other than the occasional donut run for his team or a night out, on me, to see our favorite team, the Memphis Grizzlies. Kyle was referring his peers to me because what we were doing together was working and folks in other markets around the country wanted in on the secret sauce.    I want to introduce Dr. Kyle Fagala to my audience. First and foremost Dr. Kyle is a great friend to me and many others, he is a devoted father and husband to his 4 beautiful children and wife, Anna. He is a man of great faith and he is an incredible businessman. He is an Orthodontist, that means he is really smart, and has a bunch of degrees and is also a pretty decent drummer, from what I have witnessed.    Kyle, thank you for being here with us.    Here is the thing about our relationship that I want people to know.  Dr. Kyle has a set of skills in marketing that are not my strengths. I have a set of skills that are not his strengths but when we first combined our strengths and worked together with our teams to bring our ideas to life, big things started happening. We were able to formulate ideas, test them, and use our monthly strategy and planning sessions to formulate high ROI marketing campaigns. This was at a time when I was simply a consultant for Kyle and we had no plans or inclination that we would ever start a business together. But eventually we decided to create Neon Canvas together and I want you to tell everyone, why that was.    Kyle Selfishly, I wanted to have an agency that could market my practice through my vision and that agency did not exist, even though the situation Alex and I were in was great, there were still too many decisions that we weren't able to make for one reason or another that was slowing us down.      Before we go  too much deeper into Neon Canvas, I want you to talk about your first business, Saddle Creek Ortho Tell me about the humble beginnings (No patients, working an associate job to pay, big debt etc) When did you start to see that this was going to grow much faster than you had anticipated? What are the top 3 things to led to your success? How did you handle the growth? What were some of the challenges Talk about your KOL development in Orthodontics  Tell me about Saddle Creek Ortho now Team, Revenue, Locations How has Covid-19 affected your business.        Obviously I am very proud of you and what you have accomplished with Saddle Creek and I am very happy for the role that you have let me play. Let’s get back to Neon canvas.  We had joked before about starting a marketing agency together but when I approached you and said, I am doing this, are you in? What went through your head?  Did you think about saying no?  What were your fears? Why did you ultimately say “yes” Talk about from an Orthodontist owner view, how is neon built to take care of your practice’s marketing needs?       Did you ever think that Neon would grow as fast as it has?  What has attributed to that success?  Talk about owning and being heavily involved in more than one business? How do you overcome the struggles? How do you balance it all? How do you know when to say “no”       Early in 2019, I approached you with an opportunity for us to acquire another agency, Signature Advertising. Talk to me about what made Signature attractive to you and why we ultimately decided this was an investment we were going to take on.  Kyle, I don’t know how you do it, you own 3 companies, you host a wildly popular Podcast, TDO Live!, you are heavily involved in your church and community can all look to you for inspiration.      Before we let you go...   Let’s end the show with something fun, I am going to give you 3 things.  You have to choose the one you want, the one you will discard and the one you will give away. Here we go:    Your 3 things:  1 Million Dollars Top of the Line Drum Set  Immortality CLOSING I want to thank Dr. Kyle Fagala, my friend, my business partner, for coming on with me today. Please join me on the next episode of BizSchool, when I will be joined by my favorite power couple, Judy and Mickey McLellan. Judy and Mickey will sit down with me to talk about how they have built their business with strong  relationships and savvy marketing. I promise you won’t want to miss it, so please, subscribe to this podcast, share it with your friends and do me a quick favor...click on those 5 stars and help us grow this podcast. Thank you, that is all for this episode and the rest,  the rest is history.