Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the first customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner. Today, I'm lucky enough to be joined by the great Tim Dodd. he's an enterprise cloud sales executive, founder of JTD group, all over LinkedIn. If you're on LinkedIn at all, and you're in the Philly area, I'm sure you have seen Tim or some of his stuff.
Tim, thanks for joining me, buddy. How are you?
Tim: Awesome, man. Go Phillies.
Jay: Go Phillies. Always good late in the season, you know, always heart attack inducing. I'm excited for the birds too, though, cause, You know, we're finally good. So it'll be, it'll be a good, it'll be a good fall. so where'd you grow up, man? And did that have any impact on you being kind of this serial entrepreneur later in life?
Tim: Yes, I grew up in Dover, Delaware, went to University of Delaware. So I brought my blue hen shirt
Jay: see that. Yeah.
Tim: yeah, I just, love trying new things. And, you know, we talked about your podcast is your first customer. So I started out as a programmer and. Either it was too social, ironically it was LinkedIn, or not a good coder, so I went right into sales and, sold, W.
L. Gore was my first, my first account as a sales rep, and just love helping people and taking a small company to bigger, and then just rinse and repeat that, so I've just kind of had that in my blood, just growing companies and going on to the next thing.
Jay: Interesting. Was anybody in your family, an entrepreneur growing up?
Tim: so my great grandfather, owned a company, so they had a company for a couple generations.
Jay: Okay, very cool. So maybe it's in the blood somewhere.
Tim: yeah, and my granddad on my mom's side, he, ran the S and B, a small business administration for the state of Delaware. So,
Jay: Okay. All right. That's a good connection to have.
Tim: a little bit of business in the background.
Jay: Little business in the background. so tell me about, I mean, it's an interesting journey. I too, went to school to be a programmer. I realized that I didn't think I was going to be a great one. I enjoyed doing it and I still love doing side project stuff, but I didn't feel like I was going to be.
able to compete at a high level, right? which is what you want to do when you're starting out your career. tell me a little bit about that pivot you made. Like, what was the, what was the, the actual switch there? Like, did you just go, I literally don't want to be a programmer anymore. I'm going to be a sales.
Tim: Did you get an opportunity to be a sales guy? And you just kind of jumped out of like, what was the, the actual,Yeah. So as a kid, I always like reading about like Bill Gates and the hackers and all that stuff. Right. So like that was always an interest when I started at Delaware. I was in engineering and I just wasn't doing really well at it. So I switched to computer science and just took all the programming classes that I enjoy doing.
And then when I got out, I worked for a company called medical broadcasting, which is now Digitas Health. In Philadelphia, so it was my first real job and it wasn't super challenging from a coding perspective, but we were doing like, you know, Wyatt and J and all these like really well known brands.
So that to me was really awesome from a non technical perspective. Then I ended up, going back to Delaware, working at a company called Diamond Technologies. And at that point, that's when like all these guys now are like architects at JPMorgan Chase or. They just have done all this amazing stuff. And early on when I was there, I was like, do I really learn and grow into that architect role in my career?
and one of the downsides of writing code is, you know, a, you own the code that you have. So some of the code that I had written, I still would have to support and I didn't like enjoy fixing bugs. So I figured as a salesperson, I could architect a solution to have someone else do the actual work. And then at the same time, I was taking my MBA from Delaware.
And I thought, hey, is there a way to start taking on projects within the business that would relate to my MBA? And so that's where my journey went. I got into recruiting and doing sales and doing some marketing for the business. And I didn't have to fix code and I can move on to the next project.
So my sales career has really been hunting. Get that land and expand and then move on to the next thing. Right? So there's no account management over the next 10 years or any of that stuff. So I just thought it was a much better transition than writing code and, you know, supporting that code for the rest of my life.
Jay: I would much rather find a bug and tell somebody else to fix it than try to fix a bug that, me or somebody else may have written. So I think, I think we both took that path away from, you know, I took it closer to bugs, but I think we both were trying to run away from them. So, tell me about JTG group, or JTD group.
What is, what, where is it? Where'd it come from? Like, I mean, you kind of mentioned you don't want to get locked into these accounts. So how did you decide to turn that into a business? Is it more of a. you know, individual sale of, of here's how you do stuff and you're on your way, or how do you, how do you kind of attract longterm clients for business like that?
Tim: Yeah, so for anyone that's in the Philly area that did hosting, I worked at host my site and then it. Became hosting. It's now an interiority. And there was a guy in New Jersey that started a company called, quote Colo, and you could email him and he would tell you like, here's all the different color providers.
So right after I left toast, my site, I went on to a different company called XCM and I kept getting hit up by people for a referral business. Or, you know, Hey, do you know, you know, someone needs a app development project. So I just kind of had that as a side hustle. And then at the start of the pandemic.
One of my better clients was like, let's do this full time and I went on as a contractor. So all of COVID, I was basically doing fractional sales, for tech companies. So web developers, cloud computing companies, and then like, you know, MSPs, outsourced IT, cyber. And then that just is how it kind of blew up after COVID.
But before it was just more of like a side hustle. And, you know, a lot of people on LinkedIn are, obviously have different side hustles. So,
Jay: Interesting. yeah, I didn't know that was the Genesis at all. That's a, that's, that's very interesting. tell me about the transition from. You know, obviously, God, COVID is like, I'm so tired of talking about it, but like, at the same time, you can't not talk about that, that time in the, in the world. But, from a side hustle to a main gig perspective, tell me a little bit more about like, how did you make that transition?
Right. How did you just go, I'm going to actually do this full time and really sink my teeth into it. And what did that difference mean to you day to day?
Tim: so, so most of my career, it was like, you're full time, you're hunting and you're not doing delivery, right? I mean, you're just like get a sign, sign contract and moving on. So and the full time employment side, that's, you know, where I'm passionate. And I like, When I transitioned, I was much more about the early stage of the sale.
So how do I get a lead and turn into a sales qualified lead and then really hand it off to the business owner to, to do the proposal and close the business. So then that's where I spend most of my time was just getting sales qualified leads.
Jay: How did you get those?
Tim: so I use LinkedIn a lot. I use, now I have an auto, you know, an auto dialer that I use and then email.
But during COVID, there was such a transition from everyone being on premise that you could get people on their cell phone. Now you could get them on LinkedIn. There's just a lot of activity that. you could do like before you would call into like a big bank and you have to do the phone tree or, you know, you'd get that person's assistant, you know, a lot of that stuff went away once you work directly on LinkedIn or, you know, started calling people's cell phone numbers.
Jay: Tell me about the LinkedIn stuff, man. I mean, it's, you, you've got a presence on there. I've, I've kind of watched you grow it at least from the tail end of, of what I've seen, you know, since I, we started kind of being in the same hemisphere, what was your approach initially and what is it today?
Tim: Yeah. So, so early on in LinkedIn, like when I was at host, my site, it was just connect with as many people as possible. So I have people that were like, you know, off shore, they were programmers. I mean, there were. You know, I have one that, for anyone that, you know, knows Amber, from, you know, Amber Wainer, I have like her interns are connected to me.
So my relationships were very much just like connected whoever you can, then, you know, like, as I got deeper into COVID, I started getting rid of all the offshore relationships or people that I just connected to using automation in the past or whatever. So now most of my relationships are people that either.
They follow me or I follow them. There's some level of engagement on my profile. And then most of my LinkedIn activity is, you know, direct messaging of first degree connection. So I might still reach out to you if I think you're interesting, or want to connect with you, but a lot of it is really, you know, data mining, your existing relationships, not just connecting and adding to, you know, to new people.
and then, oh, God, go ahead.
Jay: I was going to keep going. I have a question for after you've gone.
Tim: So, you know, so then what I did is I. Now can leverage my existing network and relationships for you. So if you're my customer, I can't, you know, you tell me these are my ideal customer profile, I can build out, you know, build out those relationships and help you drive business. And then a lot of it now is going to be, so I use this thing called the Justin Michael method where, yeah, I pick up the phone, I call you.
And then I drop you an email, I drop you a LinkedIn. So if I do that in my first degree, I generally am getting like third of those. We'll take a meeting with me. So if you think about, you build out your network and then you just stay on top of those people and you add value to the conversation or you're giving them something relevant, that's, you know, that's generally how I'm booking meetings using LinkedIn today and they got my newsletter.
So the newsletter, you know, my first week of the newsletter, I got a thousand subscribers to it. And now you can see like, are there people that are interested in what I'm doing? I've got prospects that I've been talking to about business transactions that are on there that aren't salespeople. I've got architects on there.
So even though the, you know, like the newsletter is all about cloud sales professionals, you know, the people that actually subscribe to it are either people that the cloud sales professional sells to, or, you know, like people that are getting value out of the technical world. Content in the, you know, in that newsletter.
Jay: And what was the process for pruning that down? Because I've, you know, I read a while back that actually they made it a lot harder to like do stuff like unfollow people in bulk and like do a bunch of different things. It's like a pain in the ass on LinkedIn sometimes, but how did you prune through everything?
Did you have to go through all, you know, the thousands of your connections and literally just like unfollow each one? Or is there some sort of automation or tool that you used when you did that? Or is that something you recommend people do?
Tim: Yeah. So I was adding like a hundred, I think this is when they reduced it. So they, now they have it where you basically can do a hundred connection requests a week. So I would just manually go through. So I would pick, you know, like India. And then I would say anyone that's not a C level in India, I want to unconnect with.
Now, if there's someone that I personally knew from Oracle, I recognize their name, like I would still keep those people. But in general, I was just using Sales Navigator to find out, like, you know, you're an intern or you're entry level and using those just to see that list. And if I didn't recognize the name, I would just pull them out.
And then that increases your social selling index for Because now my connections are generally, you know, VP and above, which is what you want as a social seller.
Jay: And do you use that? I mean, is that a good strategy to, also have your feed filled with, with people making posts that you want to get in front of, right? Like that's a problem that I had originally, and I kind of got around a little bit by pulling a bunch of people off, but should your feed be. Mainly consisting of your targets, right?
So you can engage with their content and reach out to them. That sort of thing.
Tim: Yeah. So I don't know if you could do this now, but what I did is you can do a mass unfollow. and that's where I think you're like the rules might be a little different, but then you go in and you identify your ICP. So just because you and I went to college together, I may want to stay connected with you on LinkedIn, but I don't want to see your feeds about, you know, biology or whatever.
So. That's what I did is I unfollowed everyone. Then I targeted my ideal customer profile and then manually went in and followed those people. So a lot of the people that are on my connections aren't people that I actually get. I don't see their feet at all.
Yeah. I think they did change that. I, there's some tool that I was using something ghosts, something. Yeah. There was one that I used like a couple of years ago and I shared it with someone recently and they said it doesn't work
Jay: I think it was me. I think it was you, me and you talking about it. I think we were talking about it and I tried to do it. And I like, I just lost patience of it. I was like, I'll just have, one of my VAs just.
Tim: Exactly. So that,
Jay: be easier.
Tim: yeah, so that's what I've generally recommended to someone is like, have your VA basically go in there and unfollow, you know, like if they're a programmer, they're not an executive, like, You know, just go in and unfollow those people, right? Like you'll interact with your friends on Facebook, so you don't need to see their, you know, their professional feed.
Jay: No, it makes a lot of sense. so you mentioned you kind of picked up another full time gig, so you went from, you know, side gig to main gig back to side gig. Is it, would you consider that the, the evolution? Are you, are you, is JTD kind of just like, you know, even with your main gig, how are you kind of balancing things today?
Tim: Yeah, so I, I think from a company perspective, you know, I definitely want to like keep my head down on my full time job and like ramp the pipeline. So everything that I've been doing and for my customers, the last couple I'm basically doing a hundred percent for me right now. And it's really interesting because now that I have a much bigger connection and network, like I published a, an article about the other day, like for me to go out to Google next, I just, I hit everybody up and I got a bunch of meetings out of it.
And even if they weren't going to Google next, I have meetings with them next week. So it really. For me, and I don't exactly know where JTD group is going to end up, but I think a lot of it is learning how to do it the right way. And then the sales rep doing the work, right? It's a lot, like it's a lot easier for a business owner to say they want Tim to do it, but if you train your reps to do it, I'm getting ridiculously good results by doing the work myself.
So a couple of months ago, I started doing some coaching and training. Of a couple of companies and, so I may consider continue to do that in the fall where, you know, find people that want to do that. but if there's still ways to help a handful of companies on the side, then, you know, I'm still.
Open to doing that, but in terms of trying to scale it, I just. I couldn't figure out either hiring the right people or managing the right people. You know, I tried so many iterations to get the thing to scale and at the end of the day I was the single bottleneck that had to do the work to make the company work So I don't have a good solution to turn that into a you know, a growing company But there's definitely opportunities to freelance and do you know do some side hustle stuff
Interesting. We could
Jay: yeah, no, I love the journey from programmer to sales guy to business owner to kind of recognizing that it's not the most scalable option because sometimes it's just not right. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that just require a very talented person to do, which is what you're applying back to your full time gig now.
right, let's, let's jump to the last question. business related. If you could do anything on Earth and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?
Tim: do anything on earth and I couldn't fail I mean, I would just travel the world man. I mean, that's what I would do.
Jay: My favorite
Tim: i've done That's, you know, I did around the world trip at 1 point. I did a solo trip to Africa at 1 point. I mean, you know, and ironically, you do fail a lot, but it teaches you a lot actually for business for.
Being an entrepreneur, doing sales, like cold calls, rejections, like all of those things I've learned traveling. You know, what do you do when you, your credit card doesn't work in a third world country? What do you do when you're solo and you're sick on your own? Like, there's so many good life lessons learned from traveling.
But, yeah, unfortunately you have to fail at it to be, you know, to be good at
Jay: You went around the world?
Tim: it. I did, yeah.
Jay: Like, you left somewhere and went all the way back around it in the same spot?
Tim: Yeah, so I left Philadelphia, flew down to Peru, hiked Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail. Then I went to Colombia, then I, so that's a little bit of a backtrack because Colombia is a little further west, but other than that pivot back, everything else is, you know, the other direction for the most part. So then I went to Petra in Jordan and went to Dubai, met a guy in Petra and crashed with him for a couple of days in Dubai, like him and his roommates.
so you think about like our culture in the U. S., it's always like you get your own room in the dorm and, you know, then you get your own place and. In Dubai, you got a bunch of 20 something kids making all this money, you know, like living in, you know, bunk beds everywhere and then, you know, luxury cars, it's like the most bizarre culture.
and then I did two, two months in Southeast Asia, so I went to Thailand, Burma, Burma's where I, my credit card stopped working, so that was fun. At the time, there was one international, phone number in the entire country that a foreigner could use and it was at the airport. So I had to use that to get to my bank and then, went to Vietnam, then went back to, or then went to Cambodia and then went back to Thailand and then flew home.
So,
Jay: Wow. That's a pretty incredible trip.
Tim: yeah, so three months around the world, you know, I had three rules. I had to go to Petra, Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. So I had to do those and I did backtrack a little bit on flights or trains, but for the most part, I went all the way around the trip, so.
Jay: That's crazy. Wow. Well, travel the world is certainly a, a very popular answer for that one, and one that I, would do as well. And I have, a bunch of kids, so... failure is certainly an option, for me trying to travel around the world. if people want to get in touch with you, Tim, if they want to hear more about what you have going on today, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?
I have a, I have an inkling what that is, but you tell me, what, what's the best way for people to reach you?
Tim: yeah, I mean, LinkedIn's great. I got my newsletter actually after this. I've got my happy hour, so I got a cloud social happy hour Thursday, or on Fridays at three o'clock. So anyone that wants to just talk cloud. and then, my podcast will be starting up, so I'll probably have you on at some point.
But,
every Thursday at 12, we're gonna do the audio format in LinkedIn. So I'll have, you know, a guest on, we'll talk about stuff. People want to join or ask questions or contribute. you know, we'll do more of an open format on audio, versus like your formats, price looks more similar. What I did last year where, you know, brought people on, interviewed them.
So,
Jay: No, I like that.
Tim: so, yeah, so connect with me on LinkedIn. That's the easiest. And then we can keep the conversation going.
Jay: My, LinkedIn. Tim, you're awesome, dude. you've got a lot of really cool stuff in your background. I hope people reach out to you. I wish you the best of luck with the new gig. I hope just selfishly that you can get back into the, you know, to figure it out, JTD and, and making it, kind of a scaled up thing.
just cause I love to see people run their own business and I feel like. You've got all the right stuff. So, keep at it, brother. it's great to see in person or at least virtually, we'll get together in person soon and, enjoy the rest of what's left of summer.
Tim: Yeah, man, sitting right by Lake. So you can't
beat it. All
Jay: can't complain, brother. All right, buddy. Be good, man. See you later, Tim.
Tim: right.
Jay: Thanks, man.