Adam Torres and Wayne Stanley discuss leadership and team building.
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Show Notes:
Building a successful team and culture is no easy task. In this episode, Adam Torres and Wayne Stanley, Founder & Chief Inspiration Officer at Bowe Digital, explore Bowe Digital, its culture and Wayne’s views on leadership.
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About Wayne Stanley
Wayne M. Stanley is the owner of Bowe Digital, a marketing agency offering custom services for small businesses with hundreds of clients all around the United States. Bowe Digital works with businesses of all shapes and sizes on website creation, email marketing, social media, video, design and much more. In 2023, Bowe Digital was named one of the Best Places to Work in Indiana for the second year in a row by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. Wayne received the 2023 October Research “Exemplary Leadership Award” during the National Settlement Services Summit (NS3) for his contributions to
Bowe Digital and the title Industry as a whole. Additionally, Wayne was a named a 2023 Marketing Leader by HousingWire in recognition of his leadership in marketing within the real estate industry as a whole. Wayne is part owner of Title Success – Powered by Bowe Digital, which helps real estate title companies through the mergers and acquisitions process. He also owns Railroad Marketing, a turn-key marketing company for real estate professionals.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of mission matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Wayne Stanley. He’s a founder and chief inspiration officer over at bow digital.
Wayne, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Adam. This is, this is great. I’m excited to be here. All right, Wayne. So big topic for us today, inspiring your team and audience through effective leadership. Lots of business owners, entrepreneurs and executives watch this show ’cause they want tips, they want inspiration, they want insights.
And we’re gonna be talking about leadership today. So, so great to have you on. But to get this episode started, we’ll start it the way we start them all with what we call our mission matters minute. So Wayne, we at Mission Matters, we amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission.
Wayne, what mission matters to you? The mission that matters most to me is helping small businesses tell their story. I just don’t feel like marketing should be that difficult in 2024 or beyond. And it’s something that a lot of people don’t understand or don’t want to put time into. And so for me Helping to tell a story to even the most mundane of businesses or industries is, is really exciting.
And what I love. It’s great. Great to have you on. And I guess just to dive right into the topic like entrepreneurs being an entrepreneur, like, like, when’d you get into that? Were you always an entrepreneur? Like how’d that, how’d you get the bug? Yeah, I, my family jokes that I was an entrepreneur from a very early age.
I would go over to my grandparents house, grandma and grandpa bow, which my company is named after. And I would take all of their belongings and I’d put a tablecloth on the couch and I’d set up a store and I would sell all of their things back to them. And how old were you? Hold on. How old were you?
I was probably five or six. I mean, I was, I was pretty young and they indulged me. They, they bought the things from me. I would make a couple bucks or a couple of quarters from from their own things, but you had your supply chain figured out exactly, exactly. So from there, you know, I did all the traditional graduated high school, graduated college, wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do.
Always had in the back of my head that I wanted to do my own thing eventually. But in 2017 is when I really got the bug and that’s when I started both digital and went out on my own at that point. But I knew that being my own boss and creating a place for. The team that I wanted to put together was super important to me.
So lots of entrepreneurs out here listening and, you know I’m an entrepreneur and, you know, we get a lot of ideas, right? Like, and, and settling on an idea or picking a niche or a lane, it can be difficult, right? Cause we’re creative. How’d you know, bow digital was going to be something that you, you know, would spend a significant amount of your time in life on.
How’d you know? That’s a really great thing that I think a lot of people. Miss these days. And that is for me, I figured out Bo was going to work and what I wanted to do When it finally became clear to me the value of the network that I had built I think there are a lot of people that go out there and purposefully build a network from day one and are doing that and that’s Fine, but I think it’s even more powerful for those of us that have organically Created relationships through various experiences that then can lead to one really pivotal moment.
For me, that was the case. I, after college, I worked on Capitol Hill for several years and I made a great network and a name for myself there, which led to the real estate trade association that I worked with where I was able to really work on a number of projects and meet with Hundreds and thousands of businesses all over the country that specifically needed marketing help.
And I, I gained their trust when I was there. I would I proved that I knew social media. I sat there and taught them how to sign up for Twitter, for example. That’s how long ago this was and all of that kind of thing. And it was during that process of hearing some of their consistent concerns and grumblings of this is something that they really need.
And I’ve been. Built this not only this network, but this, this, this circle of trust with such a large group of people. I think this can work out long term for me. Yeah. What do you think was, I want to stay on that, on that building relationships and networking side of things. What do you think made it so effective for you?
Like, cause I, I, some people have false starts on that and I’m just curious, like what made it effective and what made it like lasting really? Cause you, you’re, you obviously have deep relationships that have lasted many years. You’re talking about signing up for Twitter. I mean, come on. Exactly. I mean, I think that one, you have to show true dedication to the people that you’re building relationships with and showing a real, Interest in what they’re doing.
And I you know, listening is one of the hardest skills for people these days because our attention spans are all over the place and there’s so much media in front of us and all that kind of stuff that it’s hard. And so I think the more disciplined you can be to show that. You actually care about these people.
And even if it’s a professional network where you’re like, I’m not really getting into the personal side and all of that, and you can care about them professionally and, and, and still be able to show that dedication. And then I think the other one is to, especially as you’re starting to this, this sounds negative, but really limit your expectations.
I think that sometimes you get that false start that you’re talking about when. You go out there and you’re trying to purposefully build something in terms of your networking sphere that if you push too hard toward the box that you specifically wanted to check for that, you should be missing out on really big opportunities that you wouldn’t see otherwise.
So I think, like, letting yourself be free to not have. Super strict expectations can be super helpful. You mentioned you knew that this would be a great this would be a, you know, the one, so to speak, and that those are my words, not yours. When, and by adding value, like, you knew you were adding a certain amount of value to your network and otherwise, like I always like when an entrepreneur figures out something like how they’re adding value, whatever the particular value is, and then takes it to market.
When you are. I’m guessing everybody wasn’t like, Oh my gosh, this is the greatest idea ever. Where have you been all my life? Like, what was it like, like starting out? Like talk to me like that first client. I mean, in the beginning, yeah, I mean, I will say that they’re like, Oh, Wayne, finally, we’ve been waiting for you.
So I know that my story is not normal, but I, The two things that happened were number one, when I told my existing employer that I was going to do this, they immediately said, great, we support you. Can we be your first client? Oh, wow. So they did do that. Oh my gosh. That’s amazing. I know that that that’s not the norm.
And I know, I knew in that moment how special and how lucky I was, but I still know how hard I worked for that level of respect. Amazing. But besides that, you know, there were the folks that I was working with when we very first started, those first few customers were the ones that I had laid the groundwork.
And I said, you know, if this is something that I did, if I went off on my own, would you support this? Could this be helpful to you? And a lot of them said yes. And figuring that out, you know, what that looked like and. Practice. It’s one thing to say, yes, we’d love to work together. That proverbial let’s work together.
It’s one thing to say that it’s another to put it into practice. And so that took a little bit of time to figure out what exactly does that, that puzzle piece look like? And there were a lot of people that just. They said, look, we even have, we even have marketing people on our teams, but they don’t, they’re not creative or they, they can follow a map.
Can you, can you draw them the map? Even if you’re not the ones pressing the buttons and pulling the levers and figuring out that more, you know, there was a specific vision for sure, but then figuring out what does that look like in reality? It was harder than I expected at first. And so now you’re out there, you’re you’re building, you know, a business and now you also have to, you also have to build a team, right?
Yeah. Like that, that, that, like going from, you know, just the idea to concept to team. Like, where did that take you? One of the best pieces of advice I got when I started the business was don’t wait too long to hire. But that’s a big problem with a lot of startups and entrepreneurs is that they worry about the money side of things and they wait too long to hire.
And so that was heavily on my mind, even though, you know, I. I bootstrapped this myself. There’s no, no partners, no investors, no money for my family or parents or anything like that. And so you know, I, I was very conscious of it, but in making my first hire, I basically said like, I need someone that.
Knows me and has instant trust in me. And so I didn’t know whether that would be a family or a friend or what that looks like, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be a traditional hiring experience for that first teammate. And that is, you know, Heather, that’s on my team. She’s our COO and my number two.
And she’s, she was our first full time hire and I’ve never looked back since. And now we’ve got 21 full time total and all of that. But figuring that out. For the one that opened the door for everything else and being able to say, This is what I want for. I know that most people work to live, but they don’t work.
And I, the previous job I was at, I’ll never forget that one day they said it was a great organization, but they came to me and they saw my very first week and they said, this is the place where you’re going to get your gold watch one day. And I just thought, do not shackle me to this place for 40 years, just to get a gold watch at the end.
Like that’s not, I’m just millennial enough. But that is not what I’m in it for. And I didn’t want that for the organization that I put together. I wanted it to be a place where people could really integrate work and life because I don’t believe that it’s ever balanced, but I do think that you can integrate it much better to have a better life experience.
Yeah. And so as you’re, you’re building this team now, you got, you got, you have your you have Heather on board and now you’re obviously succeeding and, and you’re, you’re adding to the team, like, when does this concept of, and maybe it was in the beginning, so I don’t want to say that it wasn’t, but when does this concept of leadership start to really, like really matter in your world?
And I only, and one reason I’m asking is that as you know, in the beginning, you’re leading yourself, right? It’s just you, but as the team gets bigger, like when did that. Concepts start to evolve for you. In general, I’ve been pretty fascinated by leadership since I was a kid. I was the one signing up to be the leader running for student council, president, all of that kind of stuff and all through college and everything else.
So that’s been important to me. I actually, in college, I minored in leadership. So even the study of, of leaders and leadership skills are, Super important to me where it really came into focus for me was especially during the pandemic. I know a lot of people, a lot of businesses struggled during that time, but that’s really when we had our biggest period of growth because businesses needed to be out in front of their customers more than they ever had before.
And a lot of them didn’t know how to do it. And so it was the first time that we really started to grow in a fast way outside of my existing network and figuring out. How I fit into that, my role in the company, my role externally as the face and voice of the company, adding a salesperson, because we had so much going on that was now speaking on behalf of the company and all of that was, was, and as we added people to the team, you know, and what’s, what’s my role there and what do I want people to see me as and what resource do I want to be and all that kind of stuff.
That’s where it really started to, to come together. And, and definitely not what I. Thought in the beginning either, but three years in, at that point, you know, in 2020, it all started to come together pretty quickly. We had no choice but to adapt and grow at that point. Did, did it surprise you like during this time?
Cause you’re hearing all the outside, like, you know, some, and I, I mean, I, during that time period, by the way, I probably did feel it. 1500 interviews, maybe more. And and I remember hearing like, you know, some people are really winning. Some people were, you know, not so fortunate. Did it surprise you that that was like your big, your big growth spurt?
Like, like, how’d you handle that? Oh, yeah. I mean, in the first, I’m probably like most folks, even no matter where you sat on that, you know, success during the pandemic, the first couple of weeks. We made really difficult lists and we said, this is where we’re going to cut the team. And this is where we’re going to cut expenses and all of that stuff and just preparing for the worst.
And then all of a sudden, you know, I couldn’t hire fast enough and we were, we were growing in such a pace. And I just, I also, I think the hard part for me was we were still. New enough in business that I wanted so badly to be able to celebrate it and felt like it wasn’t fair to do that in that moment.
Or at least I couldn’t, I couldn’t find a constructive way to celebrate wins that we were having when so many weren’t having that. And so that was, that was hard to feel like I’m like privately celebrating for everything that we’ve got going on, but it definitely was surprising. Yeah. And at this time, I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, you, you went fully remote like many other businesses.
Am I off on that? we started fully remote. And yeah, we’ve never had a brick and mortar. I always wanted to be a fully remote organization. So you were kind of like prepped for that as well. Whereas maybe some others had this downtime for you. It was a business as usual in terms of your processes. I mean, by the way, of course.
Oh, for sure. We, I mean, we would We would do prospecting calls and we signed up for zoom in 2017 and people would not, they wanted no part of a zoom call or they would think, you know, that they would say, well, you’re doing this all remotely. Like, you know, this doesn’t seem like a legitimate company.
And we lost a couple of deals because people were like, you don’t have a brick and mortar. That’s just not the type of company we want to. You know, business with, and I thought, okay, that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s up to you, but then fast forward three years, but now it’s like, it’s, we laugh about it a lot internally for everyone that was here then, because I’m like, do you remember when we got pushback for this stuff years ago?
Oh my gosh. Now it’s just totally mainstream. That’s amazing. So what so what, what do you think is the secret between like, or be behind like leadership, especially with the remote stuff? I feel like many leaders out there are still adjusting to that even, you know, a year, year or so, whatever later. And I think I’ve seen a lot more not all or the other, but a lot more hybrid models or even just hybrids in terms of days or other, or even positions.
So like, what’s the, how does the leadership component play into that? Like what have you found successful? I think one of the biggest reasons that Some, some leaders will never find success with it is because in the way that I talk about it, even when we’re hiring is that having a fully remote organization requires the utmost amount of responsibility on the end of my team and the utmost amount of trust on my end as the leader.
I think that if you are an organization that is built on. Micromanagement or even not even that, but just a lack of trust that your employees can get work done without the traditional, you know scope of looking over them and feedback loops and all of that kind of stuff. I think that if you. Can’t figure out how to get past that remote.
Probably won’t work for you. And so we are very honest from the beginning that I’m not there. I cannot see what you’re doing. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t care if you have a flexible schedule. I don’t care if things with kids and pets and laundry and whatever else. I want you to be able to have that work life integration, but also I still expect all of the traditional amount of work that I would get from an employee in an office.
So you have to figure out how to make that work in exchange for me providing this level of flexibility. Yeah, I, I think that’s a it’s an interesting concept and I’ve seen, I’ve seen again, some organizations that have really been able to do it and adapt well. And I’ve seen some others that couldn’t wait to get back couldn’t wait to get back into the office.
And then, you know, right, for whatever reason, their productivity went, went, well, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna comment on one way versus another. But I feel like culture also plays a big part in what you’re doing to be able to, to create that type of workplace where that trust can be that type of bedrock and also where you can like, you know, the growth you had over the last couple of years where that can happen and you can adjust and add the right people to the team.
So maybe talk to me a little bit about culture and what that means to you. It’s something that we talk about from the very first interview that we have. It’s why we do a lot of team interview type stuff to make sure that people really understand. That want to work here because we get, I mean, it’s wild to me, the honesty that some people apply, they see fully remote, you know, description and they’ll say, well, I can’t wait to save money on child care, or I can’t wait to be able to be done in the middle of the day or all of this.
And I’m like, yeah, We put the work in remote work, you know, like I fully expect we put the work in remote work. I love that. I expect you to get the work done. It is not a a memable type job. I know that a lot of remote stuff can be a meme these days, but that’s not it for us. And so that’s a big piece.
But then, you know, our culture in general, I think the other side of companies that maybe tried remote and then went back, it’s easier for me to say at only 21 on the team, I get that. We’ve also put a premium. I know how important the in person pieces too. And so for example, one of our culture pieces is that every other month we all gather in person for a full day together for that day.
Our, Unprogrammed where it’s just time for people to talk about how life’s going, really connect on the personal level and then some of its training. Some of it’s just doing catch up. Who knows what it might be, but we’re together for about 6 or 7 hours in that day. And even the ones that live out of state, we fly them in for it and make sure that.
Everybody’s there because that, that is super important. We do other more traditional in person things throughout the year. We do a family day at the baseball park in Indianapolis. We do a fall event for families. We do a all families are invited to our Christmas event that we do, you know, all of that to try to give each other time to be together.
Yeah, culminating. And at the end of the year, we do a two and a half day planning retreat for the next year. We’re all together on site and there aren’t trust falls or anything like that. But there’s a lot of really purposeful. How do we work together? Who is this? And there’s some, I say this all the time.
There’s some magic there and getting it right for how much you’re remote versus how much you’re together. Cause I tell them all the time, they, my team, if you met them out on the street, you would have no idea that they worked remotely, but they really enjoy each other’s company and sometimes they love it so much.
They’re like, Oh, I really do sometimes wish we worked together. And I’m like, the magic is gone at that point. You know, you know, That Sarah eats stinky fish every day for lunch or that James smacks his teeth during each call. And like those little office idiosyncrasies that we don’t have to deal with remotely, you pick up on the more that you’re together.
So there’s a little bit of magic there in finding how much time do we give to each other individually, remotely to get work done versus being together, to appreciate each other as colleagues and humans. And so I, I know that That we’re lucky that we’ve kind of figured that out. And I think that’s hard for a lot of organizations to figure out what works for them.
Yeah. I never thought about that until you just said it like the idea that it’s almost like, because there’s that separation too, it’s always new. So year after year, when people come back, you know, it’s almost like I don’t know, an industry conference or something like a trade conference. You show up every year and that’s.
Like, you know, we got to talk, we got all these other things. So you get that excitement, you get those commonalities and you get to, you know, tie those bonds, but then you’re right. You don’t have to worry about who’s eating what for lunch. And does it smell and right. Or that somebody breathes heavy or that, you know, they watch videos on their phone without their head too loud.
Oh my gosh, that’s funny because that’s the kind of stuff that starts those problems in the office. It’s always something small that. Ends up, you know, in an HR file at some point. And so it’s, we don’t, we don’t have that. And that’s the magic would be gone if we were in the office. I’m confident of that.
That’s a great way. So talk to me a little bit about, about the just about what, about the services and things you offer. So I know we’ve talked a lot about obviously the company, the culture, leadership, you know, your beginning how you grew and get into it, get into what you actually do, like the offerings.
Sure. We digital’s in our names. I’ll start there first. I like to say that we’re a modern marketing agency where we combine all of the You know, facets of digital marketing these days with websites, email marketing, podcasts, video work, and paid advertising with everything you would expect from a traditional marketing company from logos and flyer design, collateral billboards, all that kind of stuff.
Another thing that we really lean into is a lot of training and planning. Like I said before, there are some folks that are just want us to create their plan for them. You know, we’ve got somebody that can carry it out. Can you just help us? Think differently or can you train us so that we can train our customers or things like that?
And so we do a lot of that work too. And so I think between those three pillars, we offer a lot, the real, the main thing that we don’t really do is we don’t do custom development for apps or for CRMs or things like that. But in general, you know, we’re, we’re launching websites every month and we’re, we’re active in that area.
But. I think our favorite thing that we do, like I said, at the very beginning, when it came to my mission was stories for small businesses and helping them really figure out what differentiates them. Because I think, and this may be getting ahead for you, but I think that. You know, their biggest downfall for some companies is that they’re just not super specific and what makes them different or special or unique.
And so some will lean on these big bucket phrases like, well, our, our customer differentiator is our customer service. And I’m like, yeah, that’s a blanket statement that doesn’t tell me. That doesn’t tell me anything. And these days where you have to, you know, depending on what I view as five star customer service, I can, so if that’s a, if that is completely different than customer B’s viewpoint of five star customers, You’re really setting yourself up for one of us is giving you a one star review because of that, because you’re great at customer service.
But if it’s not the way I want to be serviced, that’s a problem. And so we really love that piece. I love the challenge of walking into somewhere and they, you know, we’ll think that there’s just no way that we can create something better for them or more efficient. I love that challenge. Well, Wayne I mean, love to bring stories like this to my audience.
I have to ask what’s next. What’s next for you? What’s next for Bo? Yeah, we, we keep growing, which is wonderful. We’ve launched a new service that we call growth house, which is helping our partners to increase their audiences. That’s so much changes with paid ads, you know, because of the Google, Facebook, Apple war that’s going on and, and cookies disappearing and all of that.
We’re trying to help people more organically own their communities. So building out their email lists and things like that, and being able to do that as is a big push for us and continuing to follow, you know, all the new trends we were, you know, And now there’s all kinds of news about Tiktok these days, but whatever is next, we’re trying to make sure that we’re on top of all of it and to be able to.
Do the most effective work for our customers. We’re very excited about it. How do people, if they want to follow up, I know there’s only, you know, so much we cover in a 20 some minute podcast interview, but if people want to follow up with you and your team and continue the conversation and figure out how they can work with Bo digital, how do they do that?
We would love that. You can find us at any time at Bo digital. com that’s B O W E digital. com. And then you can also find me on LinkedIn by searching Wayne dot M dot Stanley. And I’m also on Instagram with Wayne Stanley. Fantastic. And for everybody watching this, we’ll put those notes in that. We’ll put all those links in the show notes.
So you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, this is your personal invitation. Hit that subscribe button because we have many more mission based individuals. Coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing.
And if you’re a long term listener and you haven’t left us a review yet, Hey, we won’t be mad at you if you do that. So take care of that. Wayne, it has truly been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for sharing your journey, your experiences and your, your thoughts on leadership. So thank you.
Thank you, Adam. I really appreciated it.
