Ep 105 – Ryan Rhoten, The Distilled Brand – Messaging That Converts
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Featuring: Ryan Rhoten, The Distilled Brand
In episode 105 of Agency Bytes, I’m joined by Ryan Rhoten, founder of The Distilled Brand, who helps entrepreneurs and agency owners develop crystal-clear messaging that actually connects. Ryan shares the structured process he’s refined to help business leaders articulate their value—not with jargon or vague promises, but with messaging that speaks to real human emotion and need.
We dig into his “four O’s” framework, why niching is essential (even if you resist it), and how standardizing your offers can streamline operations, boost profitability, and make your marketing 10x easier. If you’ve ever felt like your agency’s message isn’t landing or you’re reinventing the pitch every time you meet someone new, this episode is for you.
Key Bytes
• Ryan helps entrepreneurs align their internal expertise with external perceptions.
• Messaging should address both objectives and the emotional obstacles clients face.
• The Four O's: Objectives, Obstacles, Objections, and Outcomes are crucial for effective messaging.
• A messaging playbook provides a structured approach to communication across all platforms.
• Niching down helps entrepreneurs become known for their expertise.
• Standardizing offers can lead to increased efficiency and profitability.
• Clear messaging is essential for team alignment and customer understanding.
• Customers are primarily concerned with their own needs, not your company's history.
• Effective messaging should focus on benefits rather than features.
• Incremental improvement is key to long-term success in business.Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Agency Bites and Guest Ryan Roten
02:26 Understanding Brand Messaging and Positioning
05:44 The Emotional Side of Messaging
09:16 The Four O's of Messaging
12:40 Creating a Messaging Playbook
15:01 The Importance of Niching Down
18:42 Standardizing Offers for Efficiency
20:22 Crafting a Clear Elevator Pitch
22:04 Identifying Red Flags in Messaging
25:05 Rapid Fire Questions and Closing Thoughts
Have you ever struggled to communicate your expertise in a way that truly resonates? Ryan Rhoten, owner of The Distilled Brand, understands the challenge and has developed the Brand Messaging System to help. As an expert in brand positioning and messaging, Ryan guides his clients through a proven process to distill complex ideas into clear, compelling messages to communicate your brilliance and connect with your audience.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:06.1)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the agency of their dreams. Today I'm thrilled to have Ryan, shit, I didn't ask how to pronounce your last name.
Ryan Rhoten (00:19.448)
Take a stab and I'll tell you if you got it right. Yep, nailed it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:21.3)
Rotten? All right, take two.
Ryan Rhoten (00:25.806)
but
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:27.508)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the agency of their dreams. Today, I'm thrilled to have Ryan Roten, owner of the Distilled Brand on the show. Ryan is a true expert in brand positioning and messaging, and he's helped develop the brand messaging system to help business owners communicate their brilliance in a way that connects deeply with their audience. His proven process simplifies complex ideas into clear, compelling messages.
something every agency owner can learn from. I'm excited to dive into your insights and hear more about how agencies can sharpen their messaging to stand out in today's crowded marketplace. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Rhoten (01:12.088)
Yeah, Steve, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:14.826)
Yeah just a couple of good looking guys with the hair in all the wrong places on our faces so yeah.
Ryan Rhoten (01:18.446)
Yeah, exactly. you grow it when you're bald, you grow it on your face because you can't get it up top.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:25.878)
That's it, that's it. So the distilled brand, what's the story there? What do you do and who do you do it for and how did you get into it?
Ryan Rhoten (01:36.221)
So, so what we do is we help really entrepreneurs align what I like to say sometimes is their internal expertise with external perceptions, which is a complicated way of saying, I help them communicate their brilliance so that everybody knows who they are and what they do without guessing, which is a very common problem that I run into with agency owners. You're so close to what you do.
it's really hard to talk about it. you feel like I should be, you know, I own the company. I should be the person who can talk about my company succinctly, but that's absolutely not true. So.
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:15.52)
Well, yeah, that's not true. They're too close to it. And or every time they meet somebody, it's a different story. So it's right. Not a succinct message that they're just delivering out.
Ryan Rhoten (02:21.794)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Ryan Rhoten (02:26.018)
Yeah, exactly. So that's what I do. I do it with entrepreneurs and coaches, consultants, authors, a lot of leadership development folks I work with. I think that's also just because of my past, kind of my past career. originally the company was called Career Brand and I did that type of work for people. people would still gravitate towards me. But I think because of that experience, a lot of leadership development type folks kind of gravitate towards me.
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:53.438)
Interesting. So leadership development more in the corporate America space less than the creative entrepreneurship space.
Ryan Rhoten (02:59.136)
No, no. So there are coaches and consultants who are doing leadership development within a corporation, right? So they typically will go into a company to make individuals or the organization better in some way. So they're taking with them, you know, like their own proprietary knowledge or process, and they're going into a corporation and they're helping that corporation become better in some way. So that maybe they're teaching leadership development, change management, all kinds of different stuff. Career coaches also fall into that category as well. But
I don't just work with them, I work with a broad spectrum of folks. In fact, I just signed a contract today with the person who does WordPress training. everybody needs help with messaging. I help people distill down what they should say, how they should say it, and when they should say it in a way that makes sense.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:45.034)
Love it. Can you, I guess, talk through or walk through what is, you know, some of the key aspects of your process that agency owners can learn from?
Ryan Rhoten (03:52.814)
Yeah, sure. So I love to look at messaging in a way like an obstacle course, right? So you have a starting point and you have an ending point. And when you start at your at your at the beginning of the obstacle course, you have an objective. There's something you're trying to achieve. There's something you want. And as you move along the obstacle course towards the end, your objective, you run into these things called obstacles, also problems, pain points.
probably heard him refer to in that, you know, previously. So when you hit a problem or a pain point or an obstacle, as I like to call them, you usually get stuck. And what I find is most people, especially entrepreneurs, smart, creative people feel like I can dig my way through this. Like I can, I can figure out how to do this on my own. And so they spend lots of time reading books, listening to podcasts, taking courses.
Even hiring other marketing agencies. I'm actually kind of surprised how many people come to me after they've gone to a marketing agency. But they try to figure out kind of on their own or with a little bit of help how to get past this obstacle. And that obstacle creates within them objections, fears, feelings, know, things that they think, say and ask themselves. Usually it's in your brain, but you start to feel a certain way about it, you know, and when people buy from you,
They don't actually buy because they're trying to get to this objective at the end. Although they justify their purchase because of it. They buy because they want to remove these objections, these feelings that they have, the anxiety or frustration that they have because they can't figure out how to talk about something. So you buy based on those objections and a lot of messaging leaves out those things. We don't talk typically to the human side of it. We only want to talk about the outcomes.
and the objectives people are trying to get to, and we forget that there's a human that's trying to get there. And so my process looks at the objectives with the obstacles, those feelings that they create. Your offer is the thing that gets them up and over that obstacle so that they can then move to the end of the obstacle course and achieve whatever outcome or objective is that they're trying to get to.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:07.766)
So what are examples of, let's say an agency is currently messaging targeting pain points, but you would flip that more into the emotional side of who's making the decision on the other end.
Ryan Rhoten (06:20.44)
Yeah, potentially it depends on who their audience is and how receptive they are to that. audiences just want to, they don't want to, people don't want to get into the emotional piece of it, but it's that emotional piece that you weave into your copy that captures people's attention. So you'll, you do want a message to problems. You do want a message to objectives or in outcomes that people seek, of course, because that can capture people's attention. But if you really want to get them up and over that obstacle, you have to talk about the emotional aspect of the
of what those problems create within somebody.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:53.206)
So give an example and like I look at that as here's what I solve, but here's the benefit of solving that. And I think that's kind of a twist to what you're saying is the problem.
Ryan Rhoten (07:02.456)
True. Yeah, so what are you, the problem that you're solving, how does that problem make you feel? Does it stress you out? Does it make you frustrated? Does it make you overwhelmed? Like a lot of people get really overwhelmed with stuff and it just stops them. Like they can't go any further because their brain just won't let them go. Right, so you have to address those things. You have to tell people that you understand them. And when you can make that connection with them,
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:06.282)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Rhoten (07:32.427)
because you're talking to the feelings that they're experiencing, they immediately make a connection with you and you start to already build trust with them and their brain goes from, can Ryan help me to, crap, Ryan understands me. And when somebody says Ryan understands me, they immediately start to assume that I can help.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:52.99)
Interesting, okay. And so what you're delivering is more than just like that, you know, one line positioning statement that they'll throw on their website or the 30 second elevator pitch, but it's more positioning that they would integrate through their website or pitch deck or, you know, literally anything that they would need. Yeah.
Ryan Rhoten (08:08.396)
Yeah, correct. Yeah, I when you're like they get an entire messaging playbook, essentially, that talks through everything we identify all the obstacles, objections, you know, all the fourth, I call them the four O's, by the way, but all the four O's that I just talked about their audience, we talked through that I give them, here's what you say when you say it, boilerplates, templates, here's how you apply messaging to everything. So how do you put it into your
How do you put it in your emails? How do you put it in your content? Which is a really big thing for most folks because we just do content wrong. So anywhere that you need to do marketing, I teach people here's what you need to say and then here's how you say it wherever you do it. So that's one area that's a little bit different. I'm a little bit different than most folks. I specifically focus on messaging and how you can say the right things everywhere as opposed to saying, I'm going to help you just build out content.
That is a piece of what I do. I teach people how to do it, but I'm not gonna like go write the content for them, but I'm gonna show them here's how you do it. And then once you've done it, we'll take a look at it and make sure that it aligns with the messaging guide that we've just put together for you.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:16.68)
What are the four O's that you just referenced?
Ryan Rhoten (09:19.234)
So the objectives that people want to achieve, the obstacles that are in their path, the objections that get it that, you know, those obstacles create for them, and then ultimately the outcomes that they achieve when they go through the process.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:32.308)
Nice. that. And what, so what's the process that you, know, what does it process look like that you bring owners through or agency folks through and you know, steps, duration, time, et cetera.
Ryan Rhoten (09:46.348)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a super defined process, very structured. That's one thing that a lot of feedback I get after the process is that they, know, before they were looking for something, it was very structured and that, you know, had a defined beginning and a defined end, which I definitely deliver, right? So my process has nine steps. We go through identifying your audience. We do what I call identifying your ingredients, which is essentially the four O's. Plus there's a couple other things that we talk about in there, because I need to know what are all the pieces that we're going to work with.
so that when we get to step three, I can start to distill your message. Like figure out, okay, this is what you should start to say. Then I take a look in step four at their offer. Some people have lots of offers, like small little offers floating around that don't seem to add up to anything big. And so I help them take all that stuff and put it together into one succinct offer that they can sell as either a high ticket offer, which most don't have. So I go through their offer.
And that's a really important piece because the way I do it, if we do it the right way, they will have all of their marketing figured out forever. They'll know exactly how to talk about their product. After that, we then take all of the stuff we've done up to that point and I actually will put copy out for their website. So I'll tell them from the hero section to the footer, here's the story that you need to tell on your website in order for customers or prospects when they visit your site, they go, okay, I know exactly what you're talking about.
that you're talking about me. think the biggest piece of all this is the messaging that I do is customer focused. And that's where people get confused. Most of them still treat the internet and content and all that stuff as a brochure about themselves and their business. like that doesn't apply anymore. That might have worked 10 years ago, but today you have to be talking your customer's language. So I help them get their customer's language onto the website.
And then from there, what I do is I help them with LinkedIn. So we get their about section in our LinkedIn profile set up. I help them get their company page set up so that now everything is aligning. So that if I want to do research on you, Steve, I don't have to go to, you know, I can go to different places and see the exact same messaging. And I know exactly what I'm going to get from you as opposed to having to try to interpret it. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:50.358)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:02.496)
Imagine that. Consistency? What?
Ryan Rhoten (12:05.548)
Yeah, exactly. And then my last two steps are just I help them with content. So I've got some stuff that we go through to make sure that their content allows aligns with the values that they provide, talks to their customers. And then finally, we work through all the different things that they can do on LinkedIn, in order to be able to start to boost their brand, build their credibility and reputation and authority.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:25.342)
And with this playbook, then they can use, build this into a system that they can say, all right, you every day I'm doing this or every other day I'm doing that, whether it's outreach or organic content or whatever, but they've got this playbook that is their messaging system of what to say and how to say it and where to say it. And yeah, love that.
Ryan Rhoten (12:40.472)
Correct, yeah. And what some of my customers will do with it is they'll take that playbook now and then they'll take it to an agency who does social media or posting or whatever and say, this is how you talk about my business. That's where people have come back to me after they've gone to an agency because a lot of agencies don't go as in depth into messaging because they do so much other stuff for folks. That messaging is just a small piece. For me, messaging is all the piece. And so when you're done with me, you have a complete playbook that you can hand off and people will
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:50.848)
Nice.
Ryan Rhoten (13:09.858)
be able to speak in your language to your customers in the way that you want them to.
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:14.218)
Love that. Where do you stand or what are your belief systems on, niching?
Ryan Rhoten (13:20.514)
That's funny, I just had this conversation this morning. I think it's important, especially in the beginning, to really get your offer out there and make sure that people understand who you are and what you do. It is so much easier to become known for something when you are more specialized in an area. For example, I had a guy just this morning I was working with, he said, I help purpose-driven companies. I'm like, okay, that's great, but what does that mean?
I don't understand what that means. Like, how do I know if I'm a purpose driven company? Because I think I have a purpose, so maybe I'm a purpose driven company. You know, so anyway, we started talking through all of his different customers and found out that he works mostly with healthcare people. I'm like, huh, just think about that. If you just change your language from, work from purpose driven company to now I work with healthcare people, now I know whether or not I need to be working with you if I'm in healthcare. You know, and it's one thing to know stuff.
It's something else to be known for knowing stuff. And all of us should be trying to be known for knowing stuff. And the only way that we can do that is if we're known in a niche or an area where people go, if you need this done, you have to call Steve. Steve is a guy. does an amazing job. Like that's what we should all strive for. And the only way you can get there is to really start to kind of narrow it in on your focus on who you want to work with. After you've had some time in that area and you start to build a reputation,
you know that your process and framework can work with other industries. You might be able to start marketing it to them too, but in the beginning especially, or if you're just pivoting, focus in really on what your one niche needs to be.
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:01.898)
Yeah, and I fully agree with that. you know, this is episode 105 and I bet you 80 of the previous episodes we've, you somebody has talked about the value of niching and so many owners fight it. And typically they fight it in the beginning because, shit, we got to just keep the lights on. I got to pay people. I'll take any client, any industry, any size, any whatever, you know? And so it, you know, dilutes their service offering. It dilutes their messaging. They don't know where to look for clients because they're playing in every ball field that exists.
Ryan Rhoten (15:10.038)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:31.25)
And so at some point they're like, all right, how do we lean into what we've built here? Break it down into one, two, three verticals that we specialize in, build messaging around that. And now we know where to, you know, where to find clients, how to position ourselves, how to speak to them, speak their language. so yeah, it's to me, it's just one of the biggest like light bulb moments that I think owners find. No, I don't say too late, but years down the road, you know,
Ryan Rhoten (15:31.405)
Right.
Ryan Rhoten (15:56.611)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think you have to have some experience under your belt. And honestly, you have to get frustrated with your current system. But you have to get, you have to, you have to go like, man, I'm just so busy all the time. I'm working all the time. I can't figure out what to do. You need that like pain, that friction for you to really start to kind of change. I mean, that was another discussion I was having just this morning with the entrepreneur is, you know, you'll stay the same until the pain point, until the pain gets to a point where you decide I can't do this anymore. Right? So I can either help you get to that
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:02.282)
Yeah, or lack of system.
Ryan Rhoten (16:25.804)
get past that point faster, or you can just keep doing what you want to do and then come back to me later when you're ready. And so, you know, we were talking about his offer and he's like, well, my offer can do this and this and this because he uses the word, he used the word custom. And anytime I hear the word custom, get like the hairs on my head, they stand up. Like, wait a minute, because even a custom home builder does not provide custom products, right? A custom home builder provides you with choices and options.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:42.315)
Haha!
Ryan Rhoten (16:54.508)
that for them is standard stuff. And so, you know, no one goes to a custom home builder and they hand you a blank sheet of paper and they say, here, draw your house. It doesn't work that way. They say, what floor plan would you like? And they give you a choice of two or three. Boom, you just picked one. Now as the person buying the home, I just feel like I just got a custom home because I bought it, I picked the floor plan I want. But for the custom home builder, it's just the floor plan.
And we really have to start thinking about stuff in that manner from a business standpoint is if you really look at 80 % of what you do, it's probably the same for every single client. And if you can take that 80 % and package it up into an offer that makes sense for you, standardizes your work, eliminates all this quote custom stuff that gets floating around, you become more profitable. And more importantly, from a messaging standpoint, you now know what to say.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:45.014)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Rhoten (17:51.84)
when to say it, how to say it, and who to say it to.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:55.402)
Yeah, getting rid of the customization and throwing more things onto the Chinese menu. So it gives me the ability to market myself properly. But then also now the more systemic, that's not the right word, the more systematically I can deliver what it is that I'm selling the solutions to the clients, the more efficient we become as a team, the more profitable we become as a team, the more my team knows what they need to do on a day to day. There's no surprises of.
shoot, how are we gonna create this new thing that we've never done before and waste time trying to figure it out? yeah, big fan of that, fully agree.
Ryan Rhoten (18:25.614)
Right. Yeah, that's why I said if you design your offer the right way, your messaging becomes easier too, and you basically take care of all of your marketing. Like you don't have to sell sell anymore because your marketing will be selling your offer every time you talk.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:42.294)
So then how do you kind of future proof, I guess, if you can even consider that where services may adapt over time or may change over time, where we're bringing in kind of adjacent new services of now we do this and now we do that. Not just we'll do anything kitchen sink under the sun, but this is a strategic move we're going to make. How do you kind of future proof for that?
Ryan Rhoten (19:05.89)
Yeah, so I work with my clients to implement a very specific structured again, in case you can't tell I'm kind of process driven. used to be a Six Sigma black belt in the corporate world. So like everything to me is a process like I see and think in processes, right? So I work with them to use a very specific methodology to define their offer. And as they look at new services, they want to introduce, you know, what they learn is the way that they should approach.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:12.662)
It's a most ED there, I like it.
Ryan Rhoten (19:35.16)
Creating that offer and putting it together so that they experience the same types of efficiencies the same types of standardizations and profitability from new offers and More importantly it focuses them and prevents them it gets them to say the word that entrepreneurs do not like to say which is no No, we're not going to do this Super hard for people to do but one of the one of the biggest things you can learn to say It'll help your business tremendously if you can learn how to say no
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:05.086)
No, it's a complete sentence and it's easy to do. So as an example, your elevator pitch, how do you, you meet somebody in an RV park or at a meeting or whatever, how do you introduce yourself or what's your kind of honed message that you use for you?
Ryan Rhoten (20:22.156)
Yeah, most of time I just say something along the lines of, I help entrepreneurs clearly articulate who they are and what they do so people don't have to guess. Because, you know, that when it comes down to it, that's one of the most important things that you'll ever do as an entrepreneur, in my opinion, is really nail down how you talk about your business. Because it's not just you. If you have a team, your team needs to talk the same way about your business. They need the same messaging. They need the same kind of playbook.
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:30.538)
Yeah, clear, clean.
Ryan Rhoten (20:50.882)
your sales guys, gals need to know how to talk about your business. And you can't have people saying things that are different than what you want them to say. So creating a messaging playbook that you get everybody on the same page for is what you want to do. To me, it's the most critical thing that you can do as an entrepreneur because it drives everything. If your ads suck, it's probably because you don't have the right messaging, right?
If your marketing's not working, if your website's not converting, if you just don't feel like in a conversation like this that you can answer what you do in a succinct manner, people feel that and they start to lose a little bit of confidence in your ability to help them solve problems.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:36.308)
And so those are, guess, some of the identifying red flags agency owners can look for that you just kind of rattle off. Websites not converting, ads aren't converting. The owner, the sales team, anybody on the team doesn't know how to communicate, articulate what you do, the benefits. Are there other things that you've seen that are just like, know, pumped at forehead? Like, how is a marketing agency doing this? Fill in the blank.
Ryan Rhoten (21:41.315)
Yeah.
Ryan Rhoten (22:02.062)
Well, I mean, so I focus specifically on messaging. And one of the things that I always look for is, can I go to anybody's website, about page, LinkedIn, any marketing materials? And can I figure out what they do quickly? And if I can't figure out what they do in their hero section, then I'll scroll down a little bit further. And if I get to the bottom of the page and I can't figure out what they do, I mean, that's just me from a messaging, like I'm a geek like that.
I even look at billboards on the highway and try to figure out what they're trying to tell me. Are they saying it right? And they're saying the right way. If you can't get there, then people are going to move on. I'm going to move on. Somebody else is going to move on. How many times have you gone to a website? I tell people this, and this is big mistake people make, is they want to tell me about the history of their company. the truth is, I don't care. Your customers don't care. In the funnel, as you move them down the sales funnel,
That stuff might become important from a credibility and authority standpoint, but hitting them with that on the front page of your website, for example, which I see a lot of people do, nobody cares. We just don't. And here's why our customers are selfish. When you and I are shopping for something, we care about us. We don't care about you. Imagine if you had to go to Amazon and you were buying something. And before you could click the buy now button, you had to read about the history of Amazon and how Jeff Bezos founded the company and all that stuff.
Steve / Agency Outsight (23:25.494)
You
Ryan Rhoten (23:29.678)
You know at some point you're gonna be like screw this. I'm out. I don't even remember why I'm here and I see that so often on so many websites and so much marketing material You know your story is great. It should be a part of your messaging somewhere and in your content somewhere But people don't care about it initially With you know, we're all selfish. We have a problem. We're looking for a solution I want to know whether you understand me
so that I know if you can help me. Once I know those things, then other stuff starts to become a little bit more important. But I still have to have the confidence that you can help me solve a problem. Not a confidence that, you know, like you've been in business 150 years, great. Like that doesn't help me understand if you can solve my problem.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:17.14)
Yeah, no, I love that. Yeah, I agree. Bury that nonsense. It doesn't need to be the most paramount piece of information. also kind of look through things through the lens of what are you saying and who are you saying it to and what's the benefit here? And same thing, if I see a product or a billboard, I'm like, who are you and who are you even talking to? It doesn't make any sense. So, yeah.
Ryan Rhoten (24:31.598)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Rhoten (24:38.764)
Yeah, I think that's another mistake. People confuse benefits with features. A feature is this has 6,200 RAM. Whatever, I'm making that number up. What you really need to get to is what's the benefit of that? I don't care that it's 22 ounces. What I care about is the benefit, which is I can have water anytime I want it when it's full. I can carry it around with me.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:49.493)
Yeah
Ryan Rhoten (25:05.774)
I don't have to find a water faucet. don't have to buy a bottle somewhere. I have my own bottle. That's a benefit to me. The features is it's all, 22 ounces of water. It's made out of this material. A lot of people like to talk about that kind of stuff, especially if they're a product specific agency.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:21.866)
Yeah, love it. Wanna just kind of throw a couple random rapid fire questions at you to wrap things up here. The first is what is something that you are binging that you just can't get enough of these days, whether it's a hobby or a book or a podcast or a show.
Ryan Rhoten (25:28.514)
Sure, hit me.
Ryan Rhoten (25:38.402)
Well, I would say Arvind, but I have been binge-watching Solo, or Silo, sorry, on Apple TV. And like that one, I can't get enough of it right now.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:44.64)
Silo. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:49.942)
Yeah, that's a pretty good show. I'm digging that too.
Ryan Rhoten (25:51.862)
And that's my new one. just finished, and this is embarrassing, but I'll admit it. I just finished watching the Great British Bake Off show. My wife and I binge watched that over the last holiday season. But we're moving on and I didn't learn how to cook anything in that program.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:08.074)
My fiance loves that show, so I get dragged into it occasionally. It's fun, I'll jump in do it with her. What's a gadget or a tool or something you recently integrated into your life that you look back and you're like, how did I live without this coffee mug or whatever thing you use in your life?
Ryan Rhoten (26:12.718)
Yeah, it's fun.
Ryan Rhoten (26:23.5)
Yeah, interesting. I would say, and it surprises me to say this because I'm looking right at it right here. iPad mini. I've always been an iPad person. I draw lot on the iPad, especially when I'm explaining concepts or models to people. And I always thought I got to have the big 11 inch iPad Pro. And I recently just decided, let's just try the mini out for fun. And it has become indispensable. Like I can take it anywhere with me now.
It does everything that the iPad Pro does just in a smaller form factor, which means that it's easier to carry around with me where I go.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:02.88)
Sweet, I dig that. Yeah, I've never used the mini or at least it's been ages since I used the mini probably since the first iteration. And then finally, what is an invaluable piece of business advice that you could have shared with your younger version of yourself if you can go back in time?
Ryan Rhoten (27:19.286)
Yeah, two things. One, have fun and two, you don't need to know everything tomorrow because you're not going to figure it all out tomorrow. You know, I'm looking at my youngest son now and he's buying into this hustle grind, you know, get it all done. Like you can't, you just can't do that. And I did that when I got out of school too and got into the workplace. spent 25 years in corporations before I started my own business.
And I felt that urge when I started my business. I got to learn this. I got to do this. I got to do that thing. No focus, prioritize, get everything in alignment and move forward at a good pace. There's a reason why Kaizen means to take small steps for incremental improvement, not giant leaps. And if you're taking small steps and you look back over the course of a year or two years, you'll realize that you've made significant progress and you can't make that same kind of significant progress.
grinding away all the time, if you will.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:17.78)
Yeah, I love that small progressive steps forward. Ryan, I appreciate you spending some time with us. Folks, if you are interested in checking out Ryan and the Distilled Brand to move your messaging forward, go to the distilledbrand.com, see what Ryan's got going on, connect with him on LinkedIn. Ryan, thank you very, very much. I appreciate you and your time.
Ryan Rhoten (28:40.46)
No, thank you, Steve. I appreciate being here.