The Drive???Business and Growth with Dan Nedelko

I brought the band back together (it's just me, I'm the band). If you're interested in Business, Growth, Technology, Sanity Saving and Productivity without the douchey guru angle then I hope you enjoy The Drive. ??

I'm going to talk about Business and Growth.

I took a little break from The Marketing Drive (my first run at podcasting) a few years ago and refocused on "Live at the Hive", a weekly live stream, podcast and YouTube series, with my other business, Honeypot Marketing.

I've been thinking and talking a lot with my team, some of my peers, my friends about what I wanted to do in the world of content creation.

I landed on "The Drive" in a podcast format, the reason I landed there was:

I want to expand my content beyond the limitations of Marketing and what many perceive of me as being in the Digital Marketing, SEO, Communications and Lead Generation space, which is the focus of Honeypot Marketing.

Honeypot Marketing has been around since 2004, it's a Digital Marketing Agency (with a different spin, Marketing Agencies are broken, more on that topic later). I've got a great team around me at The Hive, and I have a lot of fun working with clients and the right types of clients.

I want to focus a more on some of the things that I've learned over the years in business and, differentiating some of the things that we're seeing out there these days.

We're hearing a lot about hustle, grind, side hustles, start-ups, and scaling.

And I feel like a lot of people are using the wrong words (that's another podcast topic, words matter, definitions matter) to assign to what is a traditional business, and what is a small business.

I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. I can't remember the last time I had a traditional job.

I am an entrepreneur with over 25 years of start-up, entrepreneurship, small business growth, creative content creation, communications, software development, team management, and business finance experience.

I created Honeypot Marketing, creating safe harbor, both for my family, for my team, and for the clients that we've worked with.

However, we're not a start-up and we're not intended to scale (scaling and growth are two different things). I think a lot of people get that mixed up these days just because of the sexiness of the start-up business.

Looking at businesses like Airbnb and SpaceX and Elon Musk and all these things we see on social media.

We need to take a step back and understand the difference between being an entrepreneur, and having a small business.

For example, in the province I live in, in Canada, Ontario, 97.8% of businesses are small businesses, between one and 99 employees.

Now, where I live in Canada (we won't get going about taxes...yet), the vast majority of the focus of what is discussed online are about these major mega-corporations: Facebook, Google, Meta, Shopify, and good on them. You know, they've gone public and good for them.

Sidebar: my personal opinion is that Google should be smashed into about 100 different pieces. I don't think that companies that size are good or healthy or have a conscience or have ethics or morals. They're more amoral. But I won't go down that rabbit hole right now. I'm trying to focus on what this podcast is about.

I'm going to freewheel on the podcast. I want to talk about my experiences with business, with digital marketing, with software and technology, with building a team, with building scalability, building stability, and how to do it.

I bootstrapped Honeypot Marketing and a few other businesses from nothing and I hear many people have very, very highly polished presentations on how to do this and how to do that (courses, communities, playbooks, blueprints), good for them, I'm not here to stomp on anyone else's approch. I am going to give you the real-life experience of what it's actually like to build a business, to build a team, to build scalable, stable operations, and to grow.

So, buckle up and join me on "The Drive" as we explore the world of business and growth. ??