Episode_2_Joel_Final
[00:00:00] This is Outfoxed, the podcast brought to you by hunter.io, the trusted lead generation platform built for every B2B professional. Get ready for no playbooks, no posturing, and no egos. This is the show for the builders and not the theorists. Your host is Hunter, CEO of Matt Fab, and his guest today is Joel Simkins from XST Capital.
Let's get into it. Welcome, Joel to, uh, outfoxed. It's great to, great to have you here. Hey, Matt. Great to be here. Excited to have this conversation. Same. So one thing, uh, you know, you're coming in sort of mid conversation to something, so I'll bring you into it, see what you think. We've been talking about seasonality, and there seems to be a trend in sales conversations about summer being seasonally down, especially like June and July.
This, by the way, seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everybody starts to think it's low, and then before you know it, everybody is talking about July, like no one works at July. I'm curious, in your space, is that, is that true for you? Is this a seasonal issue? No, we're really, really busy. We [00:01:00] launched our business a little over a year ago, and we've got a pretty big pipeline of clients and deals that we're working on.
But interestingly enough, our, our business is somewhat counter seasonal just because we focus a lot on the digital gaming industry, which is really fast growing. At a big facet of that digital gaming industry is sports betting. So as we have this conversation in late July. A lot of my clients are gearing up for NFL, which is a critical time for the industry.
So we're actually trying to stay in front of people ahead of this ramp and activity. So we're honestly always prospecting, always out there, touching upon people. And our business sort of ebbs and flows around different industry trade shows and, and other kind of key milestones like the NFL season. For those who don't know as much about the gaming industry, which I'll count myself as one of those, talk to me a little bit about, I'm sure that category is broader than I expect, so kind of who fits into this digital gaming category.
So, um, sports betting, online gaming are still a relatively new phenomenon in the us at least from a legal and regulated perspective. So I've been in the [00:02:00] gaming industry for almost 30 years. Call it. 25 of those 30 years were heavily focused on land-based gaming. So I've probably been to Vegas 300 plus times for my career.
But with sports betting effectively being legalized in the Supreme Court in 2019, that opened up a flood of activity in a sector. Sports betting, online gaming had been legal in Europe for, call it 20 plus years. So we're sort of seeing the role that of that space. So you could have traditional big companies that most people are probably familiar with, like Caesars Entertainment and MGM, and then you have sort of the new.
Powerhouse companies like a Draftings and a FanDuel. We're focused on a lot of the smaller earlier stage startup companies that are around the entire ecosystem. That could be marketing affiliate companies, that could be FinTech businesses, that could be B2B technology providers, that could be sportsbook or online casino operators.
So there's a really wide industry, and the thing I love about the space is it's, it's still a young industry and we're really working closely advising and helping a lot of these companies grow. So fun fact, I've been [00:03:00] doing software for 20 years, and about 16 years ago, I got a chance to visit Gibraltar because we were working with a bunch of folks in the gaming space.
So now that it's legalized, how do we not have Betfred posters on every wall in big cities Now? Yeah, that's a great question. I'll say it if you asked me that question five years ago, I think that was the expectation. A lot of these European companies would be dominant. The reality is you had that big land grab where Bandel and DraftKings, big brands, the land-based guys have sort of entered the space.
But you do have some European players, probably the most notable players. BET 3, 6, 5. Very massive company. Some companies just realized it is a local kind of boots on the ground game and it was gonna be a significant number to be really, really relevant. But this is an incredibly dynamic industry, and I could talk for like five other podcasts on the different nuances.
You have daily fantasy sports like Price Picks and Sleeper, which people might be familiar with. You have what's now [00:04:00] sweepstakes casinos like fff. Which if you ask somebody under probably 25, they probably have that app on their phone. So there's a whole lot of interesting insights and innovation, but it's an incredibly fast moving sector.
This is primarily the sector you've been in for most of your career. Yeah, I fell into gaming, uh, literally right outta college. I started my career as a bond analyst at Moody's covering the gaming industry and, and versus, you know, widgets or something really, really boring. I just happen to luck out. Then fast forward, you know, 28 years later and you're running your own investment bank, uh, focused on the gaming industry.
But, you know, again, what really gets me excited is a, being an entrepreneur and founder, but also working with early stage startup companies who move fast and, uh, we really help them, again, from a capital raising. MA and strategy perspective, and that's kind of really how I found Hunter as a tool, because when I was working at a large investment bank, we had other prospecting tools, but there was a whole special team that did the prospecting for us.
When you're. Running a, a small lean [00:05:00] organization, you know, you, you find tools like Hunter that, you know, make your job a lot easier and allow us to be efficient and just, not to plug you guys too much, but like when we're running an m and a process, like we're working on a deal right now, can't name the name of the company we're working with, but they wanted us to run a very broad process and we went out to call it 200 plus buyers.
I legitimately knew. A third to half of those buyers really well. But there were certain emails of CEOs and corporate development people and other strategy folks that we want to get to, and versus having to pick up the phone and call my friends at X, Y, Z, firm, H you know, this person, can you connect me?
This is the way it obviously bypass that and we've had a lot of accuracy and success and really kind of running down anybody that we need to get to. So it's been a nice way to look a lot bigger than we are and move a lot quicker than I could have in the past. My recollection of the gaming space is that it was, what's the right word?
Insular a little bit. It's like if you wanted to get in, it was tricky, but once you were in, you could kind of get established. So like [00:06:00] how do you build your target market? How do you build your audience? Yeah, it's definitely a cottage industry and people often say that really owings the fact that it is generally a highly regulated business and, and I would also say.
I think, you know, we could be talking about gaming. We talk, talked about FinTech, other sectors. I think at the end of the day, people do wanna help each other out, and it is fairly collegial. I've always been a prolific networker. That was really how I was able to kind of launch my own business. I, I sort of had my own brand.
Being a former equity research analyst, one of those talking heads you see on CNBC in Bloomberg. People do know who I am, but obviously when I was going from large investment banks with really nice logos and calling cards to starting my own firm, X capital, right? Well, I know Joel, but who's X capital and what are you guys doing?
Are you guys investors? Are you investment bankers? What's your modus operandi? So we've been doing a lot of kind of traditional marketing, whether it's speaking at industry conferences and trade shows. We've also kind of hit on a very successful formula. I'm, I'm not in the [00:07:00] podcast market yet, but we started a newsletter not long after I launched a business.
And being a former equity research analyst, I came up with an idea of basically interviewing different CEOs and other folks in the gaming industry, companies that could be clients of ours. Companies that we might want to be clients or people that we felt like, you know, we could really be helpful in terms of building their brand.
So we put together a pretty exhaustive database really from what I've had over nearly 30 years in the industry. In addition to supplementing it with tools like yours. And I think we've published 21 newsletters since I launched. Really? These newsletters probably started last September. So we've been pretty prolific at these newsletters.
We're using things like constant contact to track our metrics and readership and the metrics honestly have been off the charts versus the industry versus other kind of read rates from when I was an equity research analyst. And it seems to be working and now it's really people coming to us saying, Hey, we wanna participate in your reporting of the industry.
So it's, [00:08:00] uh, it's been really helpful and that's been a way to really kind of turbocharge our brand and, and help kind of create lead generation. That's great. So have you seen, like you said, it's kind of gangbusters or leaps abouts, like gimme a, an approximate growth rate sort of quarter over quarter for the newsletter.
It just continues to grow month by month. So right now we go out to call it, let's call it roughly 3000 industry investors, strategic executives in the space. That newsletter maybe had 1500 names on it when I started it. So it continues to grow and also pretty active on LinkedIn and being an investment banker, we're really limited in terms of what we can do from a regulatory and compliance perspective.
So to come on your podcast, I had to get that approved by our broker dealer. So I can't be out there on Twitter and, and other sort of traditional social media pumping up or really, really hard advertising my business. So I, I need to do things like this newsletter. We are allowed, you know, within reason to highlight our business on LinkedIn.
I'm pretty, you know, anybody that Googles me, we're, [00:09:00] we're on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active in either publishing, just anecdotes about running our business day to day, different wins. We have day to day different team building events and the culture that I'm developing at my company. So it, you know, we're really kind of working all the channels in our, our toolkit.
It sounds like a great thorough B2B motion. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I'd highlight too is we do have a big NFL kickoff piece that's gonna be out in mid to late August where we're gonna interview roughly 30 gaming industry CEOs. And this is similar to what I did last year, but on steroids a lot bigger.
And I'm already working on different ways to kind of blow that up in the media in terms of just other traditional publications, you know, whether it's the Journal or Bloomberg, other verticals that would hopefully. Take some of our takeaways and kind of more wisely disseminate it. And the other thing I'll just add too is you have to find other champions in the industry to help you out and tell your story.
So in addition to our database, there are other industry [00:10:00] trade publications in our sector, and we've worked out partnership agreements with those trade rags who also republish our. Product either on their website or will take snippets of it and send out to their equivalent of a substack, so that that really sort of magnifies.
So the true reach is much greater than the 3000 that are on the database. You actually got to the question I was gonna follow up with, which is a lot of people will tell you email is dead or newsletters are dead, or you know, it's too difficult to get an audience going. Talk to me about the first few tactical things that you did to try to get the the newsletter out there.
You talked about finding other industry voices that can help amplify, which I think is great advice, but what are some of the other great tricks that you've figured out? You know, call people that have, that have done it and ask them for advice and, and tricks and tidbits. So I think when we first put it out, the first one or two versions, they're, you know, using Adobe and other kind of different templates.
And I did it. I'm, again, I'm 49 years old. I'm relatively [00:11:00] tech savvy, but after a couple of those. Versions. I was like, okay, that's good. But I had my 20 something analyst who's much more technologically literate, kind of jazz it up and kind of get us a fresh perspective. And I also asked other people, um, there's another person I knew quite well who's in the investor relations space who does a similar newsletter.
I've been reading his newsletter for years and good friend of mine, and he's always got some interesting hooks in his newsletter. I find it an interesting read. Hey, what are your best practices and learning? I also think in the age of AI and other, you know, technology can use some of those tools just to kind of make it a bit more punchy.
And also now that we've got. A library of content. For instance, at the end of 2024, we published and, and the newsletter's called the Next. It's the Next For the Next Capital. We kind of created a best of the next, where we basically fed all those into the chat EPT and said, okay, what are the most interesting quotes, takeaways, tidbits.
Kind of a CliffNotes version for somebody who wants to kind of hear what all these different CEOs are saying about the industry. So we'll [00:12:00] certainly do another one of those at the end of 2025. And I think there are other kind of versions of the document that we could come up with, but I'm certainly thinking about ways to continually make this interesting.
And you're able to look at our constant contact. You're seeing that the percentage reads, the click rates, all that continues to track higher. And I honestly tend to geek out on it. I'll look at it the day of. The end of the week, a week later, just to see how it's sort of incrementally flowing. And then we'll, we'll obviously redistribute it on LinkedIn and we ask our clients or anybody that's participating to kind of go out to their own saddles that they've got to, uh, distribute it.
So now this is how you promote the brand, how you promote yourself. But when you were first spinning out, you said you've got a name. People know you in the industry. You've been in the industry for a while, but when you split off onto your own, I know you had to probably go out and get your first couple clients, talk a bit about how you went out and did that in the very beginning of the business.
Yeah, no, it's interesting. I honestly was torn between [00:13:00] going to traditional investment banks like I've worked at in the past. I worked for a lot of big companies or doing my own thing, and quite frankly, I just had a lot of folks coming to me directly and then saying, Hey, you know, when you're. Back and able to work with people, and I had a non-compete, so I'd be very careful to now not tripping it, but once, once the clock is ended on that non-compete, we should stay in touch and, and figure something out.
So I had enough interest where I felt like this is gonna be feasible. And I think every, every deal you get done, every client you are, you're successful with and onboarding with. You just try to, you try to get a little bit more aggressive in terms of making sure you're getting the value that you think your brand and your name and kind of your capabilities are, are worth.
And obviously it was much different. It was just myself doing this at my kitchen table. And now I've got a team of almost 10 people, including our full-time employees and interns and other people kind of involved in the business. So we have. A little bit of scale and operating leverage, and we can really just be aggressive.
Not to mention a track record, like anybody that's [00:14:00] signing up with us now gets a chance to see how high quality our materials are, how we run a process. They see that, okay, X capital has gotten other deals done. They know what they're doing. It wasn't Joel at x, y, Z bank. That was the only reason he's successful.
It's really the team and, and the capabilities that, uh, we have and our collective knowledge. That's present state. Right. You're, you're up and running. But I have to imagine, especially since there's a lot of founders or entrepreneurs or maybe even sales leaders who are thinking about making this jump for themselves.
They have a, a Rolodex, although half the people listening to this probably know what a Rolodex is. I appreciate that you do, Joel, but like, what was that moment for you when you were like, okay, non-compete is done. There's something here where I'm like, okay, this is the next step for me. What, what was that trigger for you?
I would say the moment it all sunk in was when the first check came inactually, before I landed an investment banking assignment, we were doing a kind of a biz dev exercise where a company, um, [00:15:00] I can reveal this now, but a company called Mojo, which I've had a great relationship with, their management team in the past and various respectful, interesting group.
Uh, mojo has raised a bunch of money in sports betting, online gaming. They pivoted from their original business, which was operating an athlete stock market to being a B2B. Odds provider for the industry. So I, I had a great relationship with that team. The CEO and co-founder guy named Vin Barara. Vint, uh, was the co-founder of diapers.com, which would a massive exit to Amazon.
Many years ago, his business partner is Mark Laurie, who went on to do jet.com and Wonder and a lot of other successful startups. So I got to embed in their office basically being an outsourced sales guy for them. And when, when that first check flared and I was able to go back to my wife and say, we got money coming in, like somebody, somebody actually values me, it became really like, okay, we're onto something.
But you know, I think. You have to be always pivoting and looking for the different way to kind of, to ring the register. And our logo says capital M and a strategy and it, it was initially the [00:16:00] strategy piece, which is where this business development. Fits in. The other sort of epiphany moment for me was again, being a former equity research analyst.
I kind of know how the game is played. I know investor relations and dealing with the investment community, whether it's buy side, your, your mutual funds or hedge funds, or the sell side being the former equity research analyst, of which I did that. For a long time, so we've actually been doing some investor relations, what I call strategy for people.
I'm not writing press releases or doing quarterly earnings prep for people. I'm really helping management teams recraft their investment narrative, helping them get access to investors, and that's become. Almost a bit of a side hustle for us, but it, it does pay well and it really leverages something I, I can do in my sleep that I've been doing for, you know, a long, long time.
And we've had one really successful client and we're about to hopefully onboard, fingers crossed probably two more in that vertical. So it's interesting, some of the people that, um, you investor relations in the gaming industry think I'm encroaching [00:17:00] on their curve and I'm like, well, not really going into your business, I'm really.
Think of the golf coach who says, okay, tuck your elbow and Matt, you know, keep your head down in your swing. I'm really giving, you know, the CEOs or CFOs, particularly, these are small cap companies that don't have a lot of coverage or following or, or have never run a public company before. Just kind of that advice of here's how you can be a more successful telling your investment story to people.
And you know, we've done some prospecting, probably using Hunter in terms of expanding this IR practice. We did a big push. Recently got a lot of very quick response 'cause we've had a good case study. We got a recommendation from our clients that we're able to leverage and that's, it's working out well.
That's amazing. And not just because of the plug. For those who don't know if you're listening, hunter is obviously the sponsor of Outfoxed slash our day job. So James and I get to do this from both sides. Both we are the buyers. We're saying, Hey, outfoxed, put together something, what we wanna sponsor. And then, and then here we are.
So this actually you, you bring up an [00:18:00] interesting topic indirectly, and so that is that you mentioned. A bunch of things about business development and sales. You wouldn't call yourself a salesperson, would you? No, but I'll tell you, when you're an investment banker, right? We are, you know, I don't, I don't wanna say we're like real estate agents, but you know, we are in the sales business.
Like, yes, AI is gonna take over the world, but we are still for, let's say, maybe the rest of my career, hopefully, we're still very much a human to human relationship. Business, and I'm just making really high level sales calls at the end of the day to CEOs and board members and other kind of CRI CFOs and other critical decision makers.
So well, I definitely have competitors and I think we've got different strengths, and I'd say way more nimbleness than than others, but. For me, it's really just taking collectively almost 30 years of industry knowledge, relationships to kind of do my job. But I'll tell you, people often ask me, and I've spoken at my alma mater many times and a lot of other panels, like, what was the most influential job that prepared you [00:19:00] for your career on Wall Street and.
I often chuckle and if my, my 81-year-old father's listening, I did actually work two summers as a high school telemarketer. My father had a business that he was doing some consulting for back in the day that ran some telemarketing activities and I was selling cable television packages, Showtime and others, and.
You know when you're making like a hundred of phone calls a night and you're getting like people hanging up on you on 98 out of a hundred, you become very adept and resilient at taking rejection. So that's honestly been great training and our business, there's plenty of rejection. I mean, for every sales call we make, right?
Only if you are gonna lead to potentially getting hired, but you just sort of. Spring back up and just water off a duck's back and onto the next phone call so that, uh, ironically, you know, a long time ago doing telemarketing high school somehow pay it off. Today's episode is brought to you by hunter.io.
Finding the right email address for your leads can take hours. But with Hunter, you can go from [00:20:00] search to send in minutes, get started for free with Hunter's verified data, lead management and email marketing tools by visiting www.hunter.io. Okay. You've run the gambit. You've seen a lot of this. You've probably done a lot in your life.
One of the things that's interesting with our audience, there's a few a few things that we've learned. One is there are a lot of people doing sales activities. But they don't consider themselves a salesperson. And with that comes an almost aversion, it's like, well, but that's selling. It's like, like there's some sort of imaginary line that they, that they are afraid to cross.
And I think especially in the tech space, right? You get a lot of technical founders who are like, I'm gonna work up to a certain point doing some of these things. But I think I've had some experiences very similar to yours, where if you haven't had to dial and then literally have your manager playback.
Parts of your last call and tell you how you could have said this better or differently, like you've never [00:21:00] gone through that kind of grueling thing. It can be intimidating because you don't kind of understand the sort of iterative nature of getting better at it. But also, I think in most industries, cold calling is dying rapidly.
And so this idea of like just sitting there hammering out calls and having that lead to success is also kind of going away. But you use Hunter, which means you're also doing email. Can you talk a little bit about how building a pipeline is so much different today than it has been in in maybe years past?
Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not just picking up the phone, cold calling people. It's really, it's really creating warm leads. So we'll, we'll typically send out an email with our script, which explains kind of who we are, what we do. We'll try to come up up with some sort of anecdote, Hey, I saw you at a conference, or I read about you guys on LinkedIn or.
Hopefully somebody made a referral. Hey, I spoke to this client. They recommended we connect. Let's find some time, and then we'll also send some collateral. We've got call it a 15 page slide deck that explains our firm and what we do, which I [00:22:00] think is helpful. I mean, a, it looks very good, it's credible, and we'll maybe tag on a copy of the next, which is.
Newsletter and then we'll just kinda work there. But you know, every week no different than when I was working at big Investment banks. I sit down with my team and we go through our active pipeline, who, you know, the deals we're working on, companies we're talking to, that might be an opportunity. And those that we're prospecting or.
In advance of going to a, a trade show, hopefully we will able to get a list of who's attending and we'll start prospecting those folks in advance of the show and saying, Hey, we're in town. And we were just sponsoring a big conference called the Fantasy Sports Gaming Association, and we've been successful at that event.
And, you know, we were at that event in, in, in July in Chicago, and we looked at the list, we're like, okay, there's probably 10 or 15 companies on this that we ought to get in front of. So it's like, Hey, we're in Chicago. Let's drop a coffee. Let's say hello if you're. New jammed up during the conference, try.
Let's try to find some time and then a couple weeks after to circle up and chat. So it's just something you have to sort of like attend [00:23:00] to like a garden. You've gotta really just be programmatic about, uh, chipping away and, and finding out. Again, most people are willing to get on the phone and tell you a little bit about their story and, and you can sort of evaluate either real time when you're having that conversation or.
Subsequent with your team, Hey, that's one we should follow up on. Or maybe let's just put that in. Let's call them once a quarter and kind of see if there's something interesting to do there. You described going over pipeline. Is that something Spreadsheet tool, like Let's talk Tech Stack for a second.
That's one of our favorite segments. What is the tech stack that you use to drive sales for your team? Yeah, I would say listen, it's not rocket science. I think there's definitely areas for us to get better. So, you know, it originally was just an Excel tracker. Our broker dealer has a database that's kind of a Salesforce equivalent.
We are doing a much better job of inputting these calls and tracking our records and kind of creating a bit of a reminders and calendars to follow up. So we're, we're not that sophisticated. I guess to [00:24:00] answer your question at this point. As we get a lot bigger, and let's just say there's other, you know, senior investment banking platform or partners on our platform.
In the next year, I think we'll be much more rigorous in our approach, but our prospecting is in the, you know, hundreds, not thousands. We, we can only do so many deals at a time because, you know, they take a long time. They're very demanding. Our clients, when you're an investment banker, it truly is a 24 hour a day job, and I'm always accessible and reachable no matter where I, I am.
I was on vacation. Recently in, in Latin America with my family and we're like, we're about to go river rafting in the middle of nowhere in a jungle. And I'm like sitting there like, you know, in the, in the van, like on my phone responding to emails. 'cause you have to be accessible. So we have to be very selective during the day.
Now, now we can afford to be selective in terms of the clients we're gonna onboard. So you've got CRM Hunter, of course you gotta have that. Are there other tools you use like automated dialers or is it all fairly manual? [00:25:00] It's all manual. I mean, it's mostly email and email and lining up calls and we're, you're using your Zoom and other channels.
We are using a lot of other kind of AI tools for just our, you know, note taking and things like that. This seem to be very commonplace right now, and more often than not, a client reaches out to us. They've got their Zoom call recorder, you know, taking notes in tandem, and we'll use that to some degree when it's available.
Kind of getting the most out of our calls and making sure we can leverage things and listen. That's the beauty of a lot of these tools. When I was working at big banks, right, that was something, you know, we had, I had a nine person team at my last firm, and I could have a first year analyst taking copious notes, sometimes better than others.
But now we have these tools that we can leverage. We'd go back and run the traps for different factoids or other detail that we wanna get out of it. It's great though to hear you talk about that because there's a misconception out there that tech stack is what's really gonna determine your sort of success or failure.
And while it's true, there are certain [00:26:00] things that everybody should do and my bias is aside. I think verifying the data in your database is a pretty good place to start. But like, yeah, just getting it organized in a single place that you know is a source of truth. Verifying that data, keeping it clean, like these are kind of the standards, but beyond that, it's the tech stack isn't make or break and hearing you.
Talk about how you can build that business with a fairly minimal, always been a strong believer that let the demand on the business drive how much tech you need as opposed to trying to do it the other way. And it's great to hear you say that. I think a lot of people need the encouragement that a couple of tools is a good place to start.
For sure. Yeah, we could get a lot better at those. And um, you know, again, we're, we're affiliated with a broker dealer that really handles our back office compliance, legal, regulatory. And uh, I've become very good friends with the CEO of our investment bank, Stonehaven, because we're power users are growing rapidly and, you know, he is often ribbing me like, you know, Joel, you've got all these tools in house, you guys could do a better job leveraging.
I'm like, I know. I'm in the middle of executing deals [00:27:00] and the team's busy and it's like, it's, it's on the roadmap to get there and do a better job leveraging that stuff, but it just takes time and we've gotta kind of pick our battles where we can. How big is the team that's doing sales related activities with you?
It's, it's a couple. So I basically have farmed that out to our analyst and associates and one of them, basically his role. And again, when I was at a former large invested bank, we, we had an entire team. That did prospecting then had tools like Hunter amongst other tools. And again, I don't have the budget to hire a person whose sole job is prospecting.
So that's just on their list of daily activities. And Andrew, on our team, he does a lot of the prospecting. You know, you sort of have an agreement like every Monday you need to go out and. Paying five or 10 people. And he's very good at finding just different ideas through industry, podcasts, other trade rags of, Hey, this person appeared on this show, or there was some news story about this company.
We ought to reach them. And, and the reality is we [00:28:00] have such a big database and Rolodex where again, a lot of the calls are inbound now as opposed to outbound. But I think you've always gotta be prospecting and kind of, um, finding out about new potential clients and opportunities. I agree, but I have a concerted interest in that being true.
But I think, you know, look, channels change, industries change. If you're not constantly trying to keep that awareness out there and keep building that pipeline for the future, no. It's not gonna be there when you most need it. And I think that's the, the hardest part. Yeah. And our business has been eight to back to our earlier conversation around cottage industry.
It's only so big. Right. I'm not. I'm trying to sell to millions. I'm trying to sell to like tens every year of people, right? So it's, we might cast a a relatively wide net, but it's nowhere near other kind of technology tools or services or companies that you're probably engaging with who leverage it in a different capacity.
This is great. Alright, a couple pieces of advice for people who are listening. So the first question [00:29:00] I have for you, has anybody ever sold you via email? Meaning have they opened the door, got the whole gut thing going? Have they cold emailed you and then turned that into revenue for them? It's possible.
Yeah, it's possible. I mean, funny enough, even my personal accountant, she actually sent me a letter, which is really, really ancient, but you know, yeah, she, yeah, she sent me a letter and it was kind of personalized and, uh. At the time, I was like, I need a new tax person. I need to just kind of get a little more sophisticated.
And she kind of sent me her background so it was like right place, right time and need. That's not always gonna be the case, but sometimes these old fashioned channels work. But, uh, maybe because I was a telemarketer in a, a former life, I'm a little more empathetic, but sometimes, yeah, I'll, I'll get a cold outreach that might be effective or at least, you know, uh, okay.
Hmm. Maybe I should hear it. Or just willing to take that pitch and see where it goes. So if you're gonna give last piece here, if you're gonna give advice to anybody who's going to be writing an email to try to get into somebody [00:30:00] in, in the finance industry or gaming or what have you, like what's, what's a piece of advice that you think people need to hear?
You know, you just try to make it look like it wasn't written by ai. You know, I think people are really honestly leveraging these tools a little bit too much right now, where it comes across as really. Cliche or cheesy or a little too, they'll find out something about me or my business and it'll be like, oh, I heard about all the success you're doing, you know, or I went to this school.
Or just try to come up with a unique hook, I think, to, to, to get people versus the obvious flattery. I think the really, the best way is to referrals. So I think it's finding that one degree of separation. Or two degrees of separation is somebody that can be your champion. So for instance, this investor relations business that we've been kind of trying to, to grow this client that was our first client investor relations, developed a really good relationship with the CFO of this company.
And I just said, Hey, you know, it would [00:31:00] really mean a lot to me if you could be a reference and write sort of a generic. Letter that just talks about how we were helpful and what we've been doing with you. And he wrote, you know, I really didn't give him much feedback. And he wrote a glowing review that it could couldn't be any better.
So as we were prospecting for new clients, we obviously had our out on here's what we do from an IR strategy perspective. And if you wanna hear it, here's what the CFO said. Happy to put him on the phone with you anytime. And that was instant feedback. I mean. Hopefully, fingers crossed, two of these clients that were looking to onboard.
I mean, I literally got responses from their CEO and CFO the same day that we sent this email out of like, you know, this is exactly what we're looking for. I'm glad we connected. So for me that was a really, it was a nice, uh, moment. Was it a long email or was it fairly to the point? No, it was, uh, probably four paragraph email.
So pretty tight. And then along with this reference letter and then an overview of our services, and that was sort of like a, a five pager on kind of what we do. And the other thing, just [00:32:00] to go back to your question around advice, right? You've gotta be really, really tight with your delivery. We all have a DD.
We all don't have enough time to read our email. We're just gonna scan the first thing that pops up. Just be really crisp in your messaging and your storytelling. And one kind of valuable lesson I learned early in my career was when I was working at a hedge fund and. Kind of pitching stocks into my portfolio manager, and I go in there like being a former equity research analyst, I would go in and give my whole, I was ready to give like my 15 minute monologue on x, y, Z stock.
And he goes, Joel, lemme stop you there. If you can't deliver this story in two minutes, then get the blank out of my office. This is not gonna work well. So I learned to be really 1, 2, 3, boom. So I think, you know, whether it's on the phone or on an email, really, really tight. Messaging that shows you know the story and you can deliver kind of the nuts and bolts of your product or capability or service.
That's critical. That is huge advice. I feel like. [00:33:00] Everybody's gonna complain when they have that one boss who's like, if you can't give this to me in two minutes, get out of my office. And yet you, me, like everybody I know that has a great story of like, this was this thing that someone told me and it actually changed, really changed my trajectory.
Getting kicked outta somebody's office. 'cause you weren't succinct enough is a good place to start, but like we all need that boss at some point. I feel like that's somehow fallen out of vogue, giving people that direct feedback. But that's huge advice. And also listening. So you do the talking. Let the client talk, hear what their questions, concerns, motivations are, and use that to inform your dialogue.
That's great. Once again, thank you to Joel Simkins for joining today's episode about Fox. If you liked what you heard, please like, subscribe, and explore even more. The Outfox community are visiting www.outfoxhunter.io. Here's Joel Simkins. That was Matt Tharp and we're out of time.
