Episode 265 – Nancy Bono

Richard Matthews: I’m gonna go right to your guiding principles. One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. I want to talk about the top one maybe two principles that you regularly live your life by maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.
Nancy Bono: Mine is definitely loyalty that is a number one principle you must be loyal to the people that you work with the clients that you serve the principles that you believe in their loyalty is the number one characteristic that I pride myself in and that I look for in the people. I surround myself with people can go to a different job because it’s more money or this. I respect that all day long but at the end of the day your core the way you treat people the way you talk about people the bringing people together in relationships. I think loyalty is really important and you can’t really teach loyalty.
Richard Matthews: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, and today, I have the pleasure of having on the line, Nancy Bono. Nancy, are you there?

Nancy Bono: I’m here. Thank you, Richard.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Glad to have you here, Nancy. I know, we were chatting just before we got on. You guys are based out of North Carolina, is that right?

Nancy Bono: We are. We’re in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Richard Matthews: As we’re recording this, it’s May and summer has just started here in Florida. You guys starting to get the warm weather up there yet?

Nancy Bono: We are, actually, I’m just back from a vacation, a two week vacation to Sicily, it was cold there. And so, it was definitely warmer here yesterday than it had been in Italy when I was there.

Richard Matthews: Nice, yeah. One of our staff members, she just went to Italy as well. So, they just got back.

Nancy Bono: If you’re an Italian, they will tell you that there is a difference between Italy and Sicily. My husband’s heritage is from Sciacca, which is in Sicily. And so, I have been repeatedly corrected, that the Bono heritage is from Sciacca, Sicily.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. So, before we get into the actual interview, I always like to make sure our audience knows who you are. So, you are the founder of Media Partners, Inc. or [00:01:00] MPI, and you guys are a marketing agency based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. And you guys have staff in Virginia as well. So, I always like to start the interview off talking about who you are?

So, I want to find out basically, who you are? What do you guys do? What’s the main, service offering you have in the marketplace? Just so we can get a foundation for the rest of the story.

Nancy Bono: Sure. As we said, Media Partners, Inc. is a marketing agency here in Raleigh, North Carolina. I am the founding partner, I started the company on my 35th birthday. And this upcoming year, in 2025, we will be celebrating 25 years. Which therefore makes me 60. So, it has been an eventful 24 and a half years at this point.

MPI, which is what we go by now, actually, is our incarnation of becoming a full service agency. When I started the company, it was a media only agency. And basically, we had creative agencies funneling their creative product to [00:02:00] us and we were doing the media placement. We were just an agency for media buying and placement.

And that really is the side of the company that I continue to oversee. But in 2009, I brought on a 50/50 partner and we became full service. He oversees the creative and marketing and I continue to oversee the media and account service. So together, 15 years, we have been a full service agency.

Richard Matthews: That’s awesome. And 25 years is an impressive run for any business. The average business only doesn’t make it past year one. So, that’s really cool that you guys have been running as long as you have. And so, congratulations on your almost 25th year anniversary, that’s really awesome.

Nancy Bono: Yes, thank you. That is where the gray hair has come from.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I got all the little grays coming in. All my friends are like, Oh, you’re great. And I’m like, yeah, I know it’s cause I’m an entrepreneur and that’s just part of the gig.

Nancy Bono: I will say, that I do blame COVID. Because I had very dark hair for a very long time, thankfully, because of dying my hair. But during COVID, my hair grows really fast and it was ridiculous. I [00:03:00] was pulling my hair up every day, and I looked like I already had gray hair. So, I cut off my hair, let it go gray, and I’m dealing with it. So there you go.

Richard Matthews: It looks nice.

Nancy Bono: Thank you. I did say, I was going to be 60 next year.

Richard Matthews: So, 60 is a good round number, I’ve got a little ways to go before I get there. But it’s impressive that you’re still running a company and growing it. It reminds me, one of my favorite stories in the entrepreneurship world is, Colonel Sanders of KFC started his company at 65, which is 5 years from where you are now and grew it into one of the bigger companies in the US.

Nancy Bono: Interestingly enough, I love the KFC story, expanded their menu at one time and they were offering hamburgers and hot dogs and all kinds of other foods. And I believe, it was Dave Thomas from Wendy’s fame. Who actually came in there and said, this is ridiculous, do what you know, do chicken.

And so, they turned it around and KFC became completely just chicken again, and the rest is history. So, Kentucky Fried Chicken had a real reformation under Dave Thomas. [00:04:00] And then of course, Dave Thomas left and went to Wendy’s and did the world’s square hamburgers.

Richard Matthews: I love that. I need to read some of those biographies. I think, they’d probably be really fascinating nowadays. But I always like to start our interviews with your origin story. Every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made you into the hero you are today.

And we want to hear that story, were you born a hero? Or you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to start a marketing company? Or would you start in a job and eventually moved to become an entrepreneur? Basically, where did you come from?

Nancy Bono: The irony of that is, I went to school for Pre-Med. I loved science and math, and I went to a Jesuit University in Scranton, Pennsylvania of office fame. And I really thought I wanted to be a doctor because at that time, doctors and lawyers, that’s what your parents wanted you to be. And I was 2 and a half years into the program and thought, this is not what I want to do.

And I had also been working in a photography studio. And in the photography studio, I did a lot, I would refer to it as paste up and layout, which is, again, remember, this [00:05:00] is a long time ago. And I really liked the idea of presenting photos in frames, presenting pictures in albums for clients to consider.

And so, I really found myself being pulled towards a presentation and sort of an advertising like environment. And so, I went to the Dean of the college and I said, I’m miserable, I love biology and I love math, but I really hate chemistry and physics, and I think I’m in the wrong place. And so fast forward, I actually graduated in 4 years.

Cause I said, there’s no way my parents are going to let me go longer than 4 years and need to get a degree in 4 years. So, I got out with an interdisciplinary degree, which had a tremendous amount of science credits in it. And a equal amount of advertising and marketing classes. And I will tell you, the minute that I switched over into advertising and marketing, boom, the light went off for me.

I just loved it. I loved everything about it. I [00:06:00] loved the storytelling. I loved the ad campaigns, since the time I was a child, I would remember ads, the Poppin’ Fresh little guy. My mother said, I used to come running in the house, whatever room I was in to say, Poppin’ Fresh and laugh.

So, I have always followed advertising, I’ve always liked it, and it just happened. And so when I started out in advertising, I started on the creative side of things, not realizing that I was not really a very good artist, that I was really more of a tactical organized, very neat, tidy preparer of things, not necessarily a great artist.

And so, that led me to the creative side of things, I moved cross country. Let’s see, I graduated college. I worked for the photography studio that I had worked with since I had been 16. And I also started working for a print shop, and the print shop did a lot of typesetting and paste up. And again, on the creative side of [00:07:00] things, I did a lot of menus and a lot of, now I laugh at it because, now you can do it on a computer in 5 minutes. But then, paste step required a lot different process. So, I was still on the creative side of things and I decided, I was going to move to California with a bunch of friends.

So at 24 years old, I moved cross country and I started working for a company there called, Paragon Cable. And that was when 24 hour still frame advertising started coming into the equation and still frame advertising typically was real estate. So, they would have a voiceover, they would show three frames of a house, they would let you know about real estate.

This company was doing something new, with they had a 24 hour channel that was all still frame, but they also incorporated restaurants and retail and local business. And so, I was behind the scenes doing all of these ads and doing a lot of voiceover work. And then, we hired a second person, cause we had so much work. And that’s when I realized, [00:08:00] I was not a designer because she was a designer. And so, from that moment forward, she did all of the design and I did all of the detail. I started keeping track of all the sales revenue of all of the money-in, money-out. How many ads we were running, keeping track of all the traffic and the detail.

And so, that’s when I realized, I was not creative, I was definitely more detail oriented. And I started having a lot more interaction with clients, and what they really wanted that ad to look like? What they really wanted that ad to say? What their budget really was? And so from there, I was in California for 3 years. When I moved back to the East coast, I went to the largest cable conference in the country, which is in New York City. And I went there without a job, and I was a guest of the cable equipment that I was working on in California.

I called them and said, I’m moving to the East coast, I don’t have a job, I’ve worked on your equipment for the past 3 and a half years. Do you have any companies on [00:09:00] the East coast that have that equipment? Because I felt like it would be an opportunity for me to do that, to get a job. So, they told me they were going to the cable conference and they said, listen, if you’ll come and showcase our equipment, we will pay for you to attend the conference.

So I thought, Okay, I lived in Pennsylvania, I could drive to New York City. So, I drove to New York City with my mother because I didn’t want to go alone. I was 28 years old, I did not have a job, and I drove to New York City and I went to the largest cable conference in the world, without a job and not knowing a soul.

And while I was there, I met my future husband. Who had been in the industry for a long time and he showed me around and he introduced me to people. And ultimately from there, he and I obviously got married, several years later. But it was interesting, because I went there not having a job. And I didn’t leave there with a job, but I left there with a confidence of, these people are in the same situation I’m in, they’re jumping from company to company. [00:10:00] They’re still figuring their skill sets out.

So right after that conference, I got back to Virginia and I found a job with a cable interconnect, which I did not know what a cable interconnect was. A cable interconnect is a company that sells advertising within cable systems. So, I went to work for a company that had one cable system.

And while I was there, they added 2 other cable systems. Somebody has to schedule and traffic ads for these systems. So, the irony of this is remember, I decided I wasn’t a designer. I definitely kept track of a lot of detail. Well, I went to work for this company and ironically, the guy that ran it was a former bookie.

And I know that sounds ridiculous, but if you have ever filled out a spreadsheet or a bracket, it’s all about the number of spaces, what you have to fit in them, and making sure that you do it as [00:11:00] efficiently and as accurately as possible. So, I will tell you that for 3 years, every Thursday, for 3 cable interconnect companies, on the outskirts of Washington, DC, I worked with the guy and managed these schedules.

Which was hysterical to me that he was a former bookie and now he’s running this scheduling, but he was an expert at it. And it really got me comfortable with, how you can put the puzzle pieces together so that, every paying client got what they were expecting. But also at the same time, the clients that were good long term clients, they got the added value, they got the extra placements.

So, I learned a lot and I learned it from a former bookie. So long story short, I came around to the business side of advertising and that really is where I have been able to keep those puzzle pieces together of making sure that money-in money-out, everybody’s getting what they pay [00:12:00] for, added value goes to the people that are long term clients and people that you want to take care of. And it’s a behind the scenes function that I don’t think that people pay attention to getting into advertising that if you start out in traffic, you can really know and understand the whole ad business.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So, you had this long sort of storied career before you even started MPI. So, what was the impetus to start MPI?

Nancy Bono: It’s funny, future husband that I met, he was living in Roanoke, Virginia. And I was living outside of DC. And so, we were commuting for several years. He was looking for jobs up in DC, I was looking for jobs in Richmond. We were going to have this, come together in a halfway point.

And he and his brother moved to North Carolina. I had no interest in moving to North Carolina, but I obviously wanted to be with this person. So, the company that I was working for with under the bookie, had a client, which was Mid Atlantic Steel, which is a national chainsaw [00:13:00] company. And they bought advertising all over the region, Mid Atlantic region. And they had advertising on our station, on our interconnects.

And so, it was in Raleigh, North Carolina. And I knew, the agency was in Raleigh, North Carolina. And I knew, that if I was going to Raleigh, North Carolina, I was going to need a job. So, I called that agency because the person I was interacting with about the schedule, wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

And I thought, if she can work at an ad agency in Raleigh, I could work at an ad agency in Raleigh. So I called the ad agency. The irony of this is, fast forward, this company, Media Partners ultimately bought that company several years later, which is ironic. So, I called the company, I came in and I said, I have a degree in advertising, this is what I’m doing. I don’t know how it fits with what you’re doing, but I feel like I could be an asset. I can keep track of a lot of detail and I really want to learn. So, I was hired by the president of that agency and no sooner did I get hired and [00:14:00] lots of her staff kept leaving.

And I just kept saying, I have a college degree, I’m smart, I can help you. I went from being the receptionist to being a vice president over the next 5 years. And that really is how I came to know and understand media advertising, media placement, actual advertising, actual avail requests, putting spots and dots together.

And so, while I never really was a media buyer, I oversaw that whole process and I did all the account service. So, I really was her right hand for 5 years. And then, I went out and started my own company, which was Media Partners. And I really had intended it to be a small company. And it started out, we had 10 local clients. It was myself and another partner and we only worked together for 1 year. And in that 1 year, we added 10 local clients.

So, we went from 0 to $100,000 in our first year of business. And I remember thinking, Oh my [00:15:00] God, we’re successful. And so, $100,000 made for success back in 2000. And so, 9/11 happened, and every local client pulled their budget because obviously, 9/11 happened, no one knew what was going to happen in this world.

And so, all of my little local advertisers, while I had 10 of them, their businesses were suffering. And so, all of a sudden, I went from having a $100,000 in billing to 0 in billing. So, I went to work for someone else who needed to grow a media agency. He had a creative agency, but he didn’t know media and he was outsourcing it.

So, I went to work for that company and I did all of their media buying and his ability to pay me to do the media buying instead of outsourcing it, allowed for me to have a salary. And I kept Media Partners on the side, and I only had 2 clients. I had a television station, which I still have. So for 24 years, I have had this [00:16:00] same television station as a client.

They were my first client, my first TV station client, and I’ve kept them for 24 years. That is almost unheard of in the world of advertising, it’s really unusual. And actually, the general manager now is somebody who was a sales rep for me in a different market when he first started out.

So, he’s now the general manager of the station. We are great friends, we have worked together for a very long time. So, relationships are everything in this business. But I had that one TV station, and I had UNC-TV public television. I was doing their recruitment advertising, which at that time, was all through newspaper.

So, anytime they had an add up, they would say, we have a job placement, we wanted in these 5 papers and it was a state awarded contract. And those 2 pieces of business, I kept on the side for all those years. So, even though I worked for someone else, I still had my company on the side.

Fast forward to 2009, when the recession hit and I lost my job. And [00:17:00] so, I was devastated. I had worked for this other company for 9 years. And I still had Media Partners on the side and I still had those 2 clients. And so, from those 2 clients, I brought in a partner, 50/50 partner, and we took Media Partners from an media buying agency to a full service agency. And we’ve never looked back.

When you think things are really in a bad situation, I had lost my job in California, moved home, started over. I had lost my job here in Raleigh and thank goodness, I had Media Partners on the side. And so now, Media Partners, it’s been around, as I said, for almost 25 years, my business partner, and I’ve been in business together for 15 years.

And I will tell you that COVID was surely another huge hit to our business. And we have had to rebuild over the past few years. I remember this, ironically, from the person whose company we bought, she said to me one day, when you work for [00:18:00] somebody else can walk down the hall and tell you, you no longer have a job.

And it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how good at what you do. It doesn’t matter because you don’t control the strings. So I remember her saying that, and even though It has been a very difficult 2 or 3 years here in marketing and advertising overall. There isn’t anybody that’s going to walk down the hall and tell me that I don’t have a job anymore.

And so, that is really something as an entrepreneur, I would never say that I started out as an entrepreneur. I would say that, I fell into working for myself because I knew I was working harder than the people that I was working for. But over the past 2 or 3 years, I can tell you that being the owner of a company is very difficult.

However, keeping people in their jobs has been a real success for us over the past 4 years. So, I’m proud to have a partner that’s in the boat with me. And the fact that we have kept people employed during [00:19:00] COVID, following COVID through all of these ups and downs, that to me is not something that you train for and it teaches you a lot about yourself.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I mean, you’ve been in business for 25 years as a long and you’ve been all over the place for your journey. And I have one curious question just that stuck out to me when you were telling that story, you had this long career before you started a company in the marketing space. And I’m curious, how much do you think that impacted your ability to grow and build and do what you do now with the career that you had before?

Nancy Bono: I think that everything leads you towards where you need to be. And to that point, remember, I started out in a photography studio, and I worked for a perfectionist, who absolutely hated my handwriting. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but he was a perfectionist and he would complain all the time about my handwriting.

And so because of that, I started printing and I have really clear, excellent printing that is so much better than my penmanship. [00:20:00] So, I carried that lesson with me through, but also working for a photography studio, I had to match negatives and when they would go out, it was a father and son on the weekends.

Sometimes, they would do as many as 4 weddings. 4 weddings could be 4,000 photos that come through. And when I was negative matching on Tuesday mornings, they were off on Mondays, on Tuesday mornings, I would come in and I would have to negative match thousands of pictures. Where sometimes, the only thing that was different on a negative was moving a finger on a glass.

So his perfectionism is what made me be such an attention to detail person. And after college, when I went to work for that print shop, he was a client there. He got all of his printing done there and no one wanted to work with him because he was a perfectionist. And once he knew I worked there, he wouldn’t go to anybody else.

And so that early training, working for a photography studio, working for a [00:21:00] perfectionist who complained about my handwriting and forced me to adopt a way to communicate, actually led to my success in the next job after that. So, those bosses that are the hardest on you, I think are the ones that treat you the most, teach you the most.

And I’m very grateful and thankful for that experience when I was 16 years old, because it has led me to be a person that really pays attention to detail and a person that really pays attention to relationships. Because he would only work with me when he would come through that print shop and everybody was afraid of him because he was so persnickety, but he trained me.

So, it’s just ironic that the person that everyone was afraid of is actually the person that I aligned with because he paid so much attention to detail. And then from there, again, I think one of the things I learned along the way is pay attention to what you’re not good at and know you’re not good at it.

Like the minute that I saw that designer and how beautifully [00:22:00] she pulled together these ads. Mine were very organized and very symmetrical and always proofed well, and didn’t have errors. Hers were stunning, so once I realized, all right, I’m not really an artist here. I’m more of a detailed person.

I realized that, and then I moved to a different path and then keeping track of sales and numbers. I can’t tell you how appreciative a salesperson is when salespeople are not detailed people, typically. And they have no idea most times of what their commission checks are going to be? Or how much sales they have in the pipeline?

I kept track of all the detail for them. So that they knew, this is everybody I have on the air, these are my collections. So, I realized how beneficial that became to your team around you. The things that they’re not good at, if you’re good at, you create this really good dynamic. So I think along the way, I started really paying attention to what I’m good at? What I’m not? Letting other people do the part that I’m not good at.

And I [00:23:00] think that as a business owner, you have to be able to do everything, which is really horrible when you don’t really want to work with benefits and that kind of information. I don’t think I’m good at that, but it’s necessary. So in business, you have to learn it. And I will tell you, the smartest thing I did was add that partner here at MPI, because when you’re in the boat by yourself and you’re the only boss, you can’t bounce things off anybody else.

You can, but they’re not invested in the same way. So, having a business partner that’s 50/50, that is in the boat with you, that has different skills than you do, you really aren’t alone and there’s huge value to that. Because during COVID, I don’t know that anybody anticipated the world to do what it did.

We had 9 TV clients and 3 travel clients. We had a couple of other clients too, but 9 television stations and 3 travel clients, that budget dried up overnight and it didn’t come back for [00:24:00] 2 years. So, being in that boat alone, I think would have been devastating. Having a partner to be able to say, all right, what do we do next? And we were able to pivot during that. 2014, we started a second company that only worked with nonprofits. And the irony of that is, we had this very strong performing MPI media budgets, anywhere from $50,000 to millions of dollars and it was robust.

We started the second company to work with nonprofits so that we could give back, not just when there was a Pro Bono project, but to work with clients. And it wasn’t Pro Bono, it was paid, but it was using a senior level staff in a nonprofit environment to deliver year round, not just when they had, a Pro Bono opportunity.

And I will tell you, that shift is what kept MPI alive during COVID, because MPI 2, second company, worked with [00:25:00] opioid addiction, suicide prevention, anti vaping, teen alcoholism, domestic violence, all of those nonprofits, which skyrocketed during COVID. Because people were home, not at their jobs, financial issues, mental health, all of those things still had grant dollars.

And so the irony is, the robust company was actually kept afloat by our second nonprofit company, which we would never have anticipated, that would have been the case, but it was the case. And it really kept our people employed, it kept us working, it kept us in front of clients. It kept us continuing to grow relationships. And still, now we have 2 companies which are very different, but equally successful in their own rights.

Richard Matthews: That’s really cool. So, you guys have just been all over the place. The nonprofit world is one of the worlds I’d like to move into at some point with our company as well. But man, you guys have an incredible story for what you guys are doing. I [00:26:00] would love to talk a little bit about the superpower that you have developed over the course of your career, right?

So, every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s your fancy flying suit made by your genius, intellectual ability called on the thunder of the sky. In the real world, here’s what I call a zone of genius. Which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with, or you developed over the course of your career.

And this superpower is really what sets you apart. It allows you to help your people slay their villains, come on top of their journeys. And the way I like to frame it for my guests is to, all the skills that you’ve developed over the course of your career, and then a couple of companies that you’ve started and run, you probably have a common thread that sort of tied all those skills together. And I want to know what that superpower is? What is that common thread for you?

Nancy Bono: I call myself a Gladiator, which is slaying the dragon. And so, I will say, if I have a skill that other people don’t have easily or embrace well, is the ability to have difficult conversations. So, I feel like it’s much better to have a difficult conversation to let somebody know that they owe money, to let [00:27:00] somebody know that doing what they think is a good idea, isn’t a good idea, telling them that and being nurturing and educating them along the process.

Those are the conversations that I think I do I have. I have those conversations every day and I think I do it well. Because I’m not condescending, I’m not letting people think, Oh, you’re stupid, you don’t know, it’s not that way at all. It’s really more of a service of, if you need help, we are here to help you.

If you don’t know if you need help, then let’s have a conversation and determine if you need help. I pride myself in having difficult conversations and really being able to project if it’s going to be a good relationship or not. And project ways that we can help them comfortably. I can tell pretty quickly if a client prospect is a good fit for us or not.

If somebody comes to the table and think they know everything, we’re never going to be able to help them. Because telling somebody they’re doing something incorrectly doesn’t go well with somebody who thinks they know everything. [00:28:00] So, I feel like listening to what a client’s objective is. Hearing what they’re saying and being able to say back, these based on my experience, the years I’ve been doing this, my first gut reaction, is this is where you should be, this is what you should be doing.

If you’re not comfortable going in that direction, that’s fine, but that’s the direction I would take you in. So, the superpower for me is having difficult conversations and telling people things that they might not want to hear. Including my business partner, and staff, and vendors. It’s difficult conversations across the board of telling people what they might not want to hear, but will help them improve in whatever it is they’re facing.

Richard Matthews: I’m a fan of that myself. I don’t like having the difficult conversations, it’s not like fun. But you always get the best sort of like breakthroughs for that. And yeah, I just had one of our clients, they were like, Hey, can we do a feedback call? Cause I wanted to give us [00:29:00] feedback, it wasn’t terribly difficult.

It was just like, here’s the things that we think you could do the way would, you know, that would make our experience better. And they got off the call with us with that. And they were like, it was really cool of you to actually like, just sit down and listen and take notes and really just be open to that kind of feedback.

And I was like, man, it is such a blessing to us to actually get that kind of feedback on what would make that better. Cause then, we can apply that to all of our clients across the board. Not everyone is willing to even start the difficult conversations, either to have them or to be on the receiving end of them. And that’s really where all the growth and progress is made.

Nancy Bono: Absolutely, you know, I read an article one time, I used to read Sports Illustrated, but I only would read the back column. It was a one page column and now his name is escaping me. But I would only read that particular segment. And I loved that it was concise. I would read it, it had a beginning, a middle and an end. It told me exactly what I wanted to get from the story.

And so, I find that, if [00:30:00] you get straight to the heart of the matter, there’s a level of respect that you start developing with someone who wants to hear it. So, if people don’t want to grow, if people don’t want to change, if people don’t want to actually have expert advice, you can identify that pretty quickly by just having an honest conversation.

And so, I would much rather have that honest conversation up front and see, do they really want your expertise and help? I don’t know, it’s not like I set out to develop that skill, but I definitely believe it is one that I have honed over the years. And I always refer to it as rip the bandaid off.

It’s like, have that conversation, know if you’re good partners and be prepared to walk away. I have said many times in my career, someone had say they had a $10,000 budget and what they were trying to do needed a $60,000 budget. I’m not afraid to say, if this is what you’re trying to do, and this is what you have to spend, you [00:31:00] would be better to wait on that objective, because you’re not going to support it fully.

People don’t want to hear that and other people don’t necessarily want to hear you tell a client, like when it’s not your own agency. I had a boss who said, why don’t you take their money? And I said, because it wasn’t going to work, that was not going to work for them. So I think that, if you’re comfortable with what you’re saying, I would much rather counsel a client to not do something right now and wait and do it properly.

Then to dive in, do something, it doesn’t work, they don’t trust you, you haven’t built any trust in there and it didn’t work. So I really feel like it’s better to rip the bandaid off early, have the conversation, be honest, be direct, tell them what they need to do. That’s not to say that I don’t make errors or that I’m not wrong. I make mistakes all the time. That is one thing that I have also found that, when you have employees, if you are human, and if you say, Oh God, I made this mistake, or I didn’t even know how to answer that question.

I think when you admit your vulnerabilities [00:32:00] to your staff, you also create a loyalty with your staff just by being transparent. So, if you know me, and if you work with me, you know, all of me, I don’t pull any punches. As I said, I’m very direct and I have the difficult conversations. So, I think that it is an asset, but also, people know what they’re going to get when they have a conversation with me.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it reminds me of one of the things that you know, it’s a content marketing really is where it fits in into the world. And from an agency standpoint, content marketing is, it’s like talking to clients before they are ready for direct response marketing. And building that know, like, and trust with them.

And so, I always tell all of our clients, listen, if you don’t have a successful direct response marketing campaign in place, that is driving leads, driving sales conversations, whatever your main objective is, you’re not ready yet for what we do. And so, we turn business down and we’ll tell them like, no, you’re not ready for us yet.

Cause it’s a different place in the marketplace and we’ve had that same conversation over and over again with clients. And it’s just being honest [00:33:00] and knowing where you’re at and how you can help them the best. And being willing to say no to good money, when it’s not in the best interest of both of you.

Nancy Bono: Absolutely. And I will tell you, that’s a great example where content is concerned. And one of the things that I always say about content is, if you don’t have a story to tell, then don’t start telling it. It really is that simple, you can’t hang out a shingle and expect people to come in and do business with you, if you don’t build the confidence of what you do.

So, I always look at content as PR. I make the correlation between the two because, content to me is the story that you want to tell. It’s public relations, it’s your elevator speech, it’s what you want people to take away from the conversation. So, it’s not everything that you do, but it’s enough of that hook. So, setting up that content calendar, making sure you put it in the right place, making sure that you wet the whistle of someone who’s interested. And then, I want to learn [00:34:00] more about that.

You cannot have a direct response campaign, if you are not ready to respond to the inquiry. And if you’re not ready to respond to the inquiry, if you don’t have ready content. So I get it. I hear you all day long.

Richard Matthews: It’s an interesting place in business because, people who are not in the marketing space, they’re not marketers. And so, they don’t always understand which pieces of marketing fit in which place in the journey for a customer. But it’s marketing and you’re like, but marketing is a journey that a customer goes on. And you have to start at the beginning of the journey.

Nancy Bono: Everything’s free on the internet. Like it’s free. I can put it out there on social media and it’s free. I’m like, but then what? You put it out there, how are they going to interact with you? How do you respond to that? What are you going to send them?

Why do you want them to share their information? Like it’s all of those things. And to me, a lot of those questions are their second nature. Like, you should be asking those questions no matter what, but people don’t think that way if they’re not marketers.

Richard Matthews: You have your time that goes into producing the content, thinking about the content, getting the content together. And that’s like, whether or not it’s content or if [00:35:00] it’s the ads that are going up on them. And then like, how are you managing the KPIs and making sure that the work that’s going into it is actually returning something for you. Free is the wrong word, I think.

Nancy Bono: I’m going to turn the tables on you for a minute because I see that you have a flag behind you, you talk about superheroes. So, what is your superhero? What is your superhero strength?

Richard Matthews: I tell people that my hero name, Everyone has their hero name, like Clark Kent and Superman. Mine’s are The Alchemist, and I say my catchphrase for The Alchemist is, if you learn to master marketing, it’s like the alchemy of old. If you master it, you can learn to turn your words into gold.

I’ve always really been fascinated by the ability for human beings to use words to change other people’s actions and lives, right? And that’s really what marketing is. It’s your words, changing someone else’s direction. And so, we got into the podcasting space because I think podcasting is a growing market.

Richard Matthews: So there’s opportunity there, but human beings are what I call, a story born people. And story born people, what that means is that, we judge the depth of all of our [00:36:00] relationships based on how much of someone else’s story that we know. And you can see that reflected in our language.

And so, a stranger is someone that you don’t know their name or their story. An acquaintance is someone you know their name, but not their story. And a friend is someone who you know their name and you know some of their story. And a best friend is someone who you know so much of their story that the only way that you deepen that relationship is to go out and create new stories together, right?

Or go out and have experiences and share them with each other, right? And so, we judge our relationships by how much of someone else’s story that we know. And so, we got into the podcasting space because, it’s my passion and skill and everything. The thing I spend most time looking at and figuring out is, how do we tell stories? And how does storytelling fit into all the various categories of our life?

And for business, it’s like learning, how do you tell your story in a way that attracts the market? That helps you build that thought leadership, that helps you build that know, like, and trust in the marketplace? Helps you move strangers through their buyer’s journey. So, when they get to the end of the buyer’s journey and they’re ready to purchase something that they’re like, man, I really want to purchase from Nancy.

Because [00:37:00] I know her story and I know who she is and I like her, who she is. And I love that as a marketer, whatever your tool is, we use podcasting as that tool. You can change the decisions that someone’s going to make in the future based on the stories and the words that you say today.

Nancy Bono: That’s spot on. And how about this? Where your podcasting is concerned, who would have thought 4 years ago, that podcasting would have hit the level that it’s hit today? Like, I don’t know that there’s a single person that doesn’t listen to podcasting. It’s crazy, so much so that even the radio industry has started referring to themselves instead of radio.

They’ll refer to themselves as audio because so much of their product, iHeart specifically, so much of their product is now through podcasting. So it’s just amazing, it’s absolutely amazing. They were already doing book on tape, but they didn’t make the correlation that book on tape could actually be synthesized into just a shorter program, which is what podcasting is.

Now, people are listening to [00:38:00] podcasts and while they’re getting ready in the morning, instead of listening to something else, just brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant. And it just fell out of, people actually having time at their homes instead of in the office environment to continue to learn. It’s crazy how much it’s taken off, crazy.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’s crazy to me too. We ate extra business last year, which is, that’s not normal, but we did it. And we started doing some research into it. Podcasting is actually the fastest segment growing of content on the internet. It overtook radio and listenership a couple of years ago.

And your big companies, Apple of course, invented the term podcasting, but it’s ballooned into an entire industry outside of what Apple’s podcasts were. And it’s starting to refer to almost anything that is serialized content, serialized fiction, nonfiction, more episodic content, like what we do here on this show.

All of that sort of fits into podcasting. You’ll see even major media companies refer to their shows as podcasts, right? The Daily Wire calls all of their shows, podcasts. And that’s just one, there’s lots of them that do that. And what’s fascinating to me is even Google, like Google this [00:39:00] last year, sent me a 36 page document.

They were like, Hey, you guys are a podcasting company. You should know this and they made all sorts of changes to the YouTube platform specific for podcasters. And so, they put podcast features in and they were like, as a company, we are focusing on making YouTube a great platform for podcasters, and they’re like all of our clients, every single one of them has their podcasts on YouTube.

Because YouTube’s a great discoverability platform for podcasts. And then, a lot of times, they’ll go from YouTube to Apple Podcasts. And yeah, it’s a fascinating, huge growing industry. I’m excited to be a part of it, but yeah, to answer your question, that’s where we live and do all of our work, is in the storytelling world.

Nancy Bono: It’s crazy. Today’s youth, a few years ago, my daughter in law, we could not get the seatbelt out of the car for the car seat. And we’re trying to figure it out, and while we’re there, she pulled up YouTube and she typed in the type of car seat that it was, so that she could see how she could undo the latch. And I looked at her like, that’s the [00:40:00] superhero. We couldn’t get the car seat out of the car, and she whips out her phone and I would never have thought to go to YouTube to figure out how to solve that problem.

But I will tell you since that time, I have done that very same thing. And I will also tell you that from the podcast world, traveling out West, I didn’t know the radio stations and where I was. And so, my husband said, want to listen to a podcast? So I was like, Okay, I didn’t usually do that.

We’re listening to crime dramas, which I love, of course, crime dramas. And it was to me, even better than book on tape. So, I don’t do it nearly as much as I would like to, just because I don’t have as much time as I would like to have. But the idea that we could be in Montana, driving down the road and be able to determine what we want to listen to based on podcast selection. It’s just amazing.

Richard Matthews: And our world is changing a lot. You talked about the youth, right? Our generations, the YouTube generation, then our kids’ generation, like my [00:41:00] kids, they’re like the AI generation, which is crazy. AI and voice activation, and I’m like, I tell my son, I’m like, you have to learn to type.

And he’s like, why do I have to learn to type? I can just talk to the computer. And he hasn’t learned to type, but like over the last couple of years, he does things with technology that I never would have thought of. And I thought we were the technology generation. Us, elder millennials and stuff like that. And you find out like, Gen Z, I think my kids are in what they call Gen Alpha. They are starting with technology that we only dreamed of when we were kids.

Nancy Bono: Crazy. To that point, I remember one time I wrote a story, I think I was in 4th grade, and I wrote a story about in the future, it was going to be like the Jetsons. That I could just say, this is what I want for dinner. And I could just poke it and it would come out. That’s what DoorDash is, so it’s just very interesting.

Richard Matthews: One of the things that cracks me up is, I remember when I was in school, my teachers used to tell us, you can’t use a calculator because you’re not always going to have a calculator with you, right? To do math work. And now my children, they have a math problem, they just yell the math problem out into the ether. They’re like, Hey Siri, what’s 5 plus 4? And Siri just [00:42:00] responds with the answer. I’m like, not only do they have a calculator, they don’t even have a physical device on them.

Nancy Bono: And it is very funny to that point, I’m going to tell you a joke. So not really a joke, but just as a story. So, my husband was downstairs in the house and I was upstairs in the house and I heard him saying, Si ri, play blah, blah, blah. And I’m upstairs and I’m like, what is he doing?

And I hear him say, Siri, play rock and roll, and he said it like 3 or 4 times. Now I’m hysterical, because he’s yelling the wrong name. So, I’m trying to tell him from upstairs. It’s Alexa and he was like, what are you saying? I’m like, it’s not Siri, it’s Alexa.

If you want music to play in the house, you have to say Alexa. So it was just hysterical. And of course, his kids make fun of him all the time. But it was just so funny to me that we’re trying to use technology, but we’re still not quite as advanced as we should be. So now we have both in our house, we have Siri and Alexa.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, and you can always get Google [00:43:00] too. And I think Microsoft has Cortana. You get all of them and then just yell random names to see who responds. We spent a little bit of time talking about your superpower, and slaying the dragon, and having those difficult conversations. I do want to move on and talk a little bit about the flip side of that, which is your fatal flaw, Just like every Superman has his kryptonite or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. You probably have a flaw, something that’s held you back in your business, something you struggled with?

Nancy Bono: I’m a huge procrastinator. I am a procrastinator, while I have gotten a lot better at it. And I hate to even say this out loud, but it’s the truth. There’s something about the adrenaline of having very little time to get something done that gives me more creativity or forces me to focus. So, I have learned and I’ve gotten a lot better. Procrastination might work for me, but it doesn’t necessarily work for the team. And so, when there are people that are waiting for pieces from me, there’s a certain amount of guilt I now feel if someone’s waiting for something, but I will tell you, I’m a huge procrastinator.

I procrastinate on everything in my life, and I really have tried to [00:44:00] force myself to not try to do that. I’ve probably listened to podcasts and watched things about procrastination and people that are late. And I’ve gotten so much better about that. And it’s not so much I have learned.

It’s not about like, people will tell you if they’re late, they’re inconsiderate of other people’s time, or they think they’re more important. And in reality, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about trying to pack as much in as you possibly can. And so, that’s where time management comes in. So, I will tell you a combination of making sure I’m on time, properly scheduling out my time management has helped me where procrastination is concerned. But I would be lying if I said, I still get that exhilaration of not having enough time to get something done. And so, I do believe that is a flaw.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I feel that, I’m not really as much of a procrastinator. I’m on the other side, I’m more of a perfectionist and I’ll start early and then work on it forever and never ship [00:45:00] it. It’s the opposite problem.

Nancy Bono: It’s the opposite problem. But see, what you do though, is you find people that are the opposite of you, and then they balance you. And I will say, I do believe, that I have that in my business partner because he is much better with the bigger picture and I’m better with the tactical and the detail.

And so, I think if you surround yourself with people that have the skills that you don’t have, then you make for a stronger team. So, I genuinely believe that people that forecast and people that are, they can’t get it over the finish line.

They map it out, they have all the resources, blah, blah, blah. I can get it over the finish line. I’m working on getting it over the finish line sooner. We actually had a deadline yesterday, and we were 16 minutes early. That’s a huge improvement.

Richard Matthews: So, it’s funny cause it reminds me of your superpower, right? Slay the dragon. You’re like, I’m knowing I’m gonna take it over the finish line and just get it done. And I have to have those people in my life. That’s actually how I overcome that, the never wanted to ship things, is I realized that, Hey, the thing that I like, the thing that gives me energy and makes me excited and gives me that burning passion that you [00:46:00] were talking about when you have the deadline, is having the problem to solve.

I figure out the problem, figure out the solution and do the thing and build all the stuff for it. And then it’s like, the last couple of things that you actually need to ship it or to maintain it afterwards. As soon as we’re at that point, I’m bored and I don’t care anymore. And so, I have to have someone like you around to do all of that stuff.

And actually ship the product that’s where, having the partners or the staff that works that way is really useful for me. Because I’m like, I know now that I’m an 80 percenter, right? Like I can get something to 80%, but I’m never going to ship it. I’m never going to hit publish. So, I need to be like, Okay, this is where I’m done, it’s yours now, take it over the finish line.

Nancy Bono: The trick is surrounding yourself with the people that have the skills that you don’t have.

Richard Matthews: It was funny. It was actually like, right before I got on this call, I was on with my executive assistant and we were talking about some stuff we needed to build with expenses. Just set up like a monthly review so we could get rid of things we’re not actually using. And I’m sitting with my executive assistant and like in 2 seconds, I built a dashboard and we got all the expenses imported and built a couple of fields on our project management system for all these things.

And he’s like, how do you just solve problems like that so [00:47:00] quickly? And I’m like, because I know, I can set all this up real rough for you and then hand it to you and you can finish the project. Because if I actually had to go through and actually do the expense review, never going to happen. It’s never going to be done, but I can set you up with all the things you need so you can do it quickly and efficiently if you’re that type of person.

Nancy Bono: And so, we can say that one of our superpowers is, realizing and acknowledging that we have these flaws so that we could have the person who has that superpower in our back pocket.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, we all need to have our Justice League, right? The people around us who are going to help make us better.

Nancy Bono: I agree. I don’t know that, you know that in the early part of your career, I think in the early part of your career, when you’re trying to prove yourself and you have the mentality of, I could do it all. And then age and wisdom and life, I think gets you to a place of, I’m better by having strong people around me that do the things that I don’t do well.

And in turn, they are better in surrounding themselves with people that do things better than they do. So, I really do believe that, [00:48:00] as we mature, we learn how to use the assets around us to the best effect instead of thinking, I could just do it better myself. Or that is one of the things I definitely struggle with here is that I will say all the time, we need to have interns.

And then people will say not so much now, but previously will say, I don’t have anything for them to do, or I don’t have time to spend with them. And I’m like, listen, the only way that you can clone yourself is by creating more of you. And the way you can create more of you is to take the time to teach people for the skills that you have to teach them.

And it’ll be amazing when you can say, I’m not going to be here the next 2 days, while I’m gone do this and this. So, I swear it is such a struggle to get people to give up responsibility until they start realizing how much more efficient they could be by having somebody do things behind the scenes while they’re not here.

We have a very strong intern program and I have been doing internships for 30 years of my career. Because I think it’s valuable to take [00:49:00] people and to teach them from the ground up how critical it is that intern, they’re learning and you have to teach them. This is one of the most difficult things in an agency, I think, is to get people that are middle managers to realize and understand that they have to take the time to train people behind them, so that they will go up the ladder. And then, as they move on, they have that right hand behind them. So that really is a skill that I think you learn over time.

Richard Matthews: We’re at the beginning stages of that, we don’t have an intern program yet. We probably should, that’d be useful. But the thing that sticks out to me is, like realizing that you can’t operate and grow by yourself. Human beings are best when we’re in a community of people.

That shows a lot in business, right? You have to have the people who shore up your weaknesses, the people who are going to learn from behind, learn what you’re doing. You’re interns, and in our case, like our assistants, other people that we’re bringing in and the more people you bring to bear to solve the problems, the better you do at solving those problems.

I [00:50:00] was just reading a book, this last week about the only scarce resource on the planet that we actually have as scarce is human time, right? And he went and proved it. It’s like everything that we care about and we use from a resource standpoint, water, gas, oil, steel, iron, gold, anything that we direct human attention to, we have more of.

We’ve never run out of anything and anytime we put more attention to it, we get more of it. But the only thing that doesn’t, is human talent. And so, anytime you have more people to bring to bear on whatever problem, the better results you get. And man, that’s really fascinating to me. And the more I learned about it, the more I’m like, we are certainly better together.

Nancy Bono: I used to say this here, too. When I think about diversity within a company, everybody always thinks, of course, of gender or race or just diversity, right? I always think of age as a diversity, and I know that sounds really weird. But we have a lot of senior level people here that are in their late 40s, 50s, 60s.

And so, I love when we bring in interns because [00:51:00] they force me to think about things differently. Now, I’m never going to do things as quickly as they do as it relates to technology. But I like being able to say, and I think it builds a trust too, we have an intern right now.

And one of the things I said to her was, I’m on LinkedIn in every single day. And I am reading stories and I’m sharing stories and I feel like we could do a better job. I just don’t have the time or the resources to be like, Oh, I want to do this. I want to do that. So I said, let’s talk through what I would like to see in our LinkedIn profile and where we currently are and then run with it.

Show me at the end, how this could be better? And so, she looked at me, she said, you’re going to let me do it. And I said, yes, I am. Cause you’re going to be better at this than I am. So let me tell you what I want to do, which gave perspective to her, like for her to be like, this is an owner in a company who is in this environment and sees how valuable it is, but doesn’t necessarily know how to tap into all the resources.

And here I am as a student who, she’s [00:52:00] going to trust me enough to give her ideas and suggestions. And then, I put her in charge of it. So I’m like, at the end of your internship, I want you to come to me and say, this is what you asked for, this is how you’re going to achieve that. And this is how I’m implementing it.

So to me, it’s a phenomenal project to have over the course of an internship. That’s 100% self managed by their own time. So, they can get as much out of it as they put into it. So, I find that is very helpful for me. But it’s also helpful for them because you’re giving them ownership of something.

So I think that, when you work with interns and you give them a responsibility that they can control the environment of, you get the best work out of them versus micromanaging. There’s enough micromanaging going around. There’s going to be tasks that have to be micromanaged. There is a way that we have to do this. There is a way that we have to do that.

But when we have an opportunity to give someone a task that doesn’t have to be [00:53:00] micromanaged, that’s where they’re going to really get their wings and see where they could excel. So, that’s the part of the intern program that I really like.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And I love the diversity of age thing you talked about too. My audience knows this, we travel full time. So we’ve been on the road for 7 years, we’ve been all over the country. And one of the things that’s fascinating to me as a traveling family is that, traveling at our age is not as common as traveling at your age.

So, we have a lot more of the people who are maybe 30 years further along in life than we are, that are our neighbors regularly. And so, the people that we hang out with and invite over for dinner and it’s always been fascinating to me, how much value there is in having relationships with people all over the age spectrum.

Nancy Bono: I agree 100%.

Richard Matthews: You realize, our kids are the same way, as we meet people and talk with people, we’ll invite an older couple over for dinner and play games and drink wine and have a good time and let them hang out with the kids and sing and do all this stuff. And they’ll be like, I can’t believe you guys invited us over. No one your age ever invites us over for things.

And it blows me away. That [00:54:00] there’s not more of that because there’s so much value in those relationships. And so, looking at people older than us, but it’s also the same thing. Like in our company right now, I’m working on training and one of our social media managers, who’s Gen Z.

She’s 20 years younger than me. And for the same reason, because she plays in social media completely differently than the way I do. I value her perspective and what she’s thinking through and why she’s doing it.

Nancy Bono: Absolutely. We have to be the gladiators that still teach that to the next generation. Because my family was the same way and my husband’s family was the same way. You’re not going to spend time with an older generation, you learned to spend time with an older generation, to invite them to the table, to ask the questions, to hear about the history.

A few years ago, my mom, she was getting ready to pass and I would spend time with her and we would talk. And I found out the most interesting thing in this conversation in that my mother was married. When she was 20 and she was married in October and there was an election in [00:55:00] November and my mother couldn’t vote. In the election because she wasn’t 21.

And I remember thinking, Oh my God, she could be married, but she couldn’t vote. And that was the weirdest thing for me. So, I wouldn’t have known that had I not spent time with her. She happened to be here during an election cycle. And we were talking about, when she was able to start voting and blah, blah, blah.

It’s just really interesting to me that she was married before she could actually vote. And that was bizarre to me. And I bet, obviously, an 18 year old now would not even know that. Because, you wouldn’t ask that question. But talking to an older person, things were so much different.

I think that we benefit a lot from including an older generation. And I think as middle aged people we also learn a lot by including a younger generation. A few years ago, we were doing a bunch of political campaigns. And of course you have both sides of the aisle. And there was someone here who was very young, but I really valued her perspective and we had [00:56:00] different opinions. But I would love to ask her questions, and see how she responded to them because it gave me a different perspective, not just from the other political side, but also from the youth.

And the reason with which she brought to it. So, that helped me open up my mind to different topics. If you don’t open your mind up to hear another person’s perspective, you’re never going to learn. So, I say all the time, whenever we fill out a bid and we check the box for diversity, I always say, not only do we aspire to have a diverse organization, and we’re an equal opportunity employer.

We also look at age diversity, because I think that is a huge, especially in advertising. So that Kentucky Fried Chicken story that we had here, today’s generation isn’t going to know that unless, we continue to keep those flames.

Richard Matthews: One of the things that cracks me up is, there’s like at least 4 or 5 generations that I’ve care about their opinions for. You got the little kids, you got the teen to 20s, and you got like the 30 to 40s, and you got 50 to 60s, and you have the older [00:57:00] than that. There’s like the 5 generations. Because they experience the world very differently, and I’ve got a bunch of littles, so we got a lot of friends that have kids in the little area and in the sub 15 age range.

And little kid comes up to me the other day, and I can’t remember what we were talking about. But he pulls up YouTube and he’s like, did you know on YouTube, they have these horizontal videos that are long? And he was like, they’re like long form videos that you can learn things from on YouTube. And he was blown away, because he was only aware of the short form videos. And it’s such a perspective shift for someone like me, who’s, we’re a content producing company.

And we’re helping businesses put content out in ways that their consumers are going to watch. And to realize that, there’s a whole subset of our generation of the next generation that isn’t even aware that YouTube makes long form videos. But it also brings to bear for us, like how important it is for our clients to be producing short form content. It’s that perspective from the different age groups really helps inform what we actually put into the [00:58:00] marketplace.

Nancy Bono: I agree.

Richard Matthews: I think this has been a fascinating conversation so far for my regular listeners. I’m going to skip a couple of questions that we normally ask. I’m gonna go right to your guiding principles, One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code.

For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So, as we get near the end of this interview, I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you regularly live your life by. Maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey?

Nancy Bono: Mine is definitely loyalty. That is a number one principle. You must be loyal to the people that you work with, the clients that you serve, the principles that you believe in, loyalty is the number one characteristic that I pride myself in and that I look for, in the people I surround myself with. People can go to a different job because it’s more money or this, I respect that all day long. But at the end of the day, your core, the way you treat people, the way you talk about people, the bringing people together in relationships, I think loyalty is really important and [00:59:00] you can’t really teach loyalty.

Understand its value or you don’t, and so, we say all the time, we can hire people and teach them skills, but we can’t hire people and teach them doing the right thing, personality, like all of that stuff. So, the biggest culture for me is, I want a loyal staff, I want loyal clients.

So, loyalty is definitely the number one guiding principle for me. And then the other is that direct approach. I do not like tire kickers, I do not like people that pussyfoot around a situation. I have much more value in someone saying, I don’t want to work with you because of this, or I can’t go forward because I don’t have the budget.

So a directness, I think, is the better way for me to do business. I like to do business with people that are direct. So, guiding principles are loyalty to the people that I work with, not just employees and partners and clients. But loyalty around the board, directness, because [01:00:00] they’re going to be those difficult situations.

And there’s going to be the times that you have to deliver bad news. And so, if you’re direct about it then the devil is in the details. As I said, I go back to the photographer’s studio when you’re matching a thousand negatives on a Tuesday morning. And the only thing you’re looking for is a finger moving on a champagne glass, you’re paying attention to the details. I think you can avoid a lot of problems by paying attention to the details. So, those are guiding principles, loyalty and directness and paying attention to the details.

Richard Matthews: Loyalty, directness and details. Man, the loyalty is something that’s interesting to me because, you hear a lot about how people move job to job. And the average person stays like less than 3 years at a job nowadays. And realize that as a business owner myself that hires people, like our longest standing staff members been with us for 13 years and the company is 13 years old.

So, it’s good and you realize, you can’t just ask people for loyalty. You’d be loyal to me, like you have to actually provide an environment where it is more costly to leave because of the [01:01:00] intangibles that come with working for you than it would be to stay. Even if it’s more money here or something slightly different somewhere else. Where you realize, no, you’ve created an environment that fosters loyalty and I think that’s a it’s a key aspect of that.

Nancy Bono: To that point, I think that loyalty and directness go hand in hand. Because you can’t expect somebody to be loyal just because you want them to be or because you tell them to be. But if you create an environment where people feel like they could be direct with you, then if they’re given an opportunity to go somewhere else, I would like for them to say, I’ve been given this opportunity. This is really great for me.

We actually had an employee, we talk about our intern program. Pre COVID, we had 5 employees that had come up through an internship program to director levels. And we lost some of those employees during COVID for a variety of reasons.

But that being said, if given an opportunity to say, Hey, this global company has poached me and I have this, and it’s not about the money, but it’s about this opportunity. Those kinds of conversations, I support all day long. [01:02:00] I encourage you to go work for an international company.

We are not an international company. So if that is what you’re seeking, let me help you do that, let me help you get there. So, I think that loyalty and directness go hand in hand. And if your employee knows that you’re going to take care of them and if they have a better opportunity, you’re actually going to be supportive of that, that’s loyal.

Just because somebody leaves your company doesn’t mean they were disloyal. It means that, you guys were direct and honest with each other and this became a better opportunity for them. I’m about that all day long. In fact, we had an employee leave this past year. I knew she was getting ready to leave just based on dynamics, but something happened the other day that was good news for our company that she had worked on while she was here.

And I sent her a text and I said, Hey, I just want you to know that this happened and I know you were a part of that while you were here. And I think that you would want to know. And she immediately sent back a note and was like, Oh my God, thank you so much for letting me know. So as an employer, [01:03:00] just because somebody leaves doesn’t mean you can’t continue to have a relationship with them in some way, there should be a respect and a value.

They’re not disloyal because they took another job. They took another job because it worked for their circumstance. The disloyalty part is, if they’re interviewing on your time, they’re not getting their job done because their job prospecting. So, those kinds of things, those are disloyal.

So, I feel like if you are loyal and you are direct. Those things will go hand in hand and it makes for a better situation. If you are disloyal and you are not direct, then you don’t need to be here. So, I think that those are guiding principles for me.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I love that. And I know we do the same thing. I had one of my video editors. He works for us again, but he had an opportunity that was better for him. And he brought it up and I was like, Man, that’s a great opportunity, take it and he took it and left. And a couple of years later, when the opportunity was over, I was like, Hey, we’ll have a place here if you ever want to come back and he was, he’s back now. He’s our lead video editor still.

Nancy Bono: I think that’s the very adult [01:04:00] thing to do. We had someone who was an intern, she was at a director level when she left. And we said, is there anything we can do to keep you? And she said, you haven’t done anything for me to leave. It’s just that I’ve been here since I was an intern. I’m now married. I’m getting ready to start a family. I’ve been here for 9 years, I’ve not done anything else. I feel like I need to do something else. So, that had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with a change in her life and her environment.

And again, loyalty and direct conversation. It takes the sting out of losing an employee that you’ve had for 11 years from an intern to a director. Because they were honest about the decision as to why they left.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I love that. I think that’s a good place to end our interview too, on loyalty and directness. But I do always finish our interviews with something I call The Hero’s Challenge. And so, The Hero’s Challenge is simple, and I do this to help get access to stories that we might always find on our own.

Cause not everyone else is out doing the podcast rounds like you and I might do. So, the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think is a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are [01:05:00] they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on The Hero Show?

Nancy Bono: The first person that comes to mind is actually a client that we’ve been working with for only about 6 months. And I genuinely like this person, again, in the category of those direct conversations. The client has not evolved into what we had anticipated it being by this time. However, I do believe that he is a phenomenal person.

I think that he bought his company at a bad time because of COVID and the change in the economy and all of those things. But he’s somebody that I believe, I want to help guide him over the course of time to surround himself with strong people and strong leaders. And I don’t know, being second generation owner.

Being male, being African American and having a very large company with a lot of employees, I think that there’s a lot of boxes there [01:06:00] that he is checking. And what he’s not checking is the box that I am worthy and I can do this. It’s just a personal feeling that I pick up in our meetings that he’s needing to prove something.

And the reality is, I think he’s a great client and I think that he can be a much better client if he gains confidence. And I will be happy to make that introduction for you because, I do believe that I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the past year and I think that there’s a lot of second guessing that goes on that I don’t think needs to be happening. So, I would love for him to see his real talent and know that doesn’t have to make excuses for the past, doesn’t have to make excuses for being second generation. Doesn’t have to make excuses for the things that are in the past.

I think that focusing on where do you want to go and where you want to be and you are the superhero. You’re the person that’s going to take you there. So I would love to see him do that.

Richard Matthews: I love that. We’ll see if we can [01:07:00] get him to come on the show and maybe see if we can tell the story and find help him out in a way. But for this interview, we always do our sendoff. And just like in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism are analogous to that on this show is, where can people find you if they want your help, right?

Where can they light up the bat signal and say, Hey Nancy, we need help with our full service marketing stuff. But I think more importantly than where, is who are the right types of clients for you guys to actually reach out and ask for your help?

Nancy Bono: I think, again, remember that I oversee the media side of the house here. So, I would say that, the ideal client for me is someone that knows that they know their business and they know their challenges, but they don’t necessarily know media. Especially in today’s world, the media environment of everything from podcasting to outdoor billboards, to television, to OTT, to radio, like there are all of those resources that are out there.

So I think that if a client is in a situation of knowing, I have a media and a marketing budget, I don’t [01:08:00] necessarily know how to spend it. And I want to work with somebody that I can trust, that is going to be honest with me to say, if this, then that. I think that’s where I really shine in helping a client understand the things that are available to them and know how they work together to get them success, what their goals are.

So, Media Partners specifically, is a full service company. However, I do believe that the core of media is what I do best. It’s making the complicated selections and stories of the media that’s available into a digestible story. This is where you should be and why? Because, it is very mathematical of if this, then that, if this, then that.

And so, I like to be in the situation at the table with the owner to say, what is it you’re trying to achieve? Where are your pain points? And then let me help get you there. So, that’s basically my sweet spot is, if a client knows that they [01:09:00] need to advertise and do marketing, but they’re not sure how to do it. I can come in and help them to understand the media tactics that will help them be successful.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. And where can they get ahold of you?

Nancy Bono: They can get hold of me at Nancy@MediaPartners-Inc.com or obviously my cell phone as well. But our website is MediaPartners-Inc.com. And you can see the work that we have on there, the clients that we’ve served, how long we’ve been in business.

We are hub certified, minority, majority owned as female and small business. And again, we do have that specific nonprofit focus on our MpiToo.com. So, if you need help? I’m here to help you. If you want to be sold? I’m not the person to sell you. I always say, I’m not a salesperson, I’m a service person. If you need help, let me help you. If you know it all, then don’t call me.

Richard Matthews: Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us today, [01:10:00] Nancy. I really appreciate just getting to hear the depth and breadth of your knowledge and being able to hear from someone who’s been in business for 25 years. That’s a very impressive feat for anyone. So again, thank you for just taking the time with us today. Appreciate that. Do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?

Nancy Bono: Thank you for having me on and definitely continue to realize and appreciate how important content is. So, I will sing praises all day long for how important content is. And I love the stories that you told me today about your company. And I definitely support what your mission and what you’re doing.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you very much, Nancy. Appreciate that. Have a good day.

Nancy Bono: Thank you.