Ep. 127 Setting up an agency with Keane Angle

Escaping the 9 to 5 with Keane Angle

Today, Keane Angle helps founders and entrepreneurs win the hearts and minds of investors by creating powerful pitch decks that land funding. STORY Pitch Decks provides pitch deck creation services for early-stage startups – and soon online courses and coaching services. He spent the first decade of his career in the advertising agency world as a global creative strategist for Fortune 500 brands like Coca-Cola, GE, IKEA, Burger King, Diageo, P&G, and many more. Since 2018, he has focused exclusively on pitch deck and presentation writing and design, and finds it incredibly rewarding. He comes from a long family of entrepreneurs going back several generations and firmly believes that people who start their own business are the gateway to a better future for us all. He is also the CMO and co-founder of a language learning startup called Prismatext. He lives in Newport, Rhode Island, with his wife and bulldog.

You can connect with Keane over on his website and on Twitter and Facebook.

*Resources mentioned during the episode*

Join The Outsiders Business Incubator – This is your roadmap to transitioning from a corporate job into setting up a meaningful business that will bring you more freedom, flexibility and fulfilment outside of the corporate 9 to 5. www.onestepoutside.com/9to5

Level up with The Outsiders Business Accelerator – This is a mastermind for entrepreneurs, freelancers and small business owners who want to create a long-term sustainable brand and business. www.onestepoutside.com/accelerate

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Transcript:

Anna: Before we get going with this week’s episode, I wanted to do an extra little introduction for you because this is a new format this time, starting for you here on the podcast after last week’s new Ask Anna format. So some of you may know that I’ve been interviewing people who have, like myself, left the corporate 9 to 5, as I call it, to start a portfolio career, to work for themselves, to freelance, to go on an adventure. And those interviews have been living for the last five, six, seven years on my website and blog. And in fact, I also pulled 50 of them together a number of years ago into my book, Leaving the Corporate 9 to 5, stories from people who’ve done it and how you can too. And I thought, actually, why not bring these interviews into the podcasting medium? Because I know many of you, like myself, don’t have time to sit and stare at the video.

Perhaps you don’t want to sit there reading the transcript either. And there’s so much value in these interviews. These are inspirational, encouraging, reassuring interviews from incredible people like you yourselves as well, who have been there, done that, are doing it, also full of lots of words of wisdom and concrete tips and advice. So without further ado, this week’s first interview is going to be… this month’s first interview, I should say, with Keane Angle. Lots of parallels with my own story here, actually, in terms of leaving sort of the marketing/advertising world and playing around with different business models, perhaps coming up against a few unexpected hurdles and ultimately finding something that really works for him from the business perspective, from being financially viable and profitable, and he’s doing incredibly well right now, as well as allowing him to live the lifestyle, have the freedom of flexibility that he really wants. So I hope you enjoy this new format. Hope you enjoy this interview with Keane, and happy listening.

Anna:               Hello everybody and welcome to this month’s interview. I’m here with Keane Angle, another recruit I was going to say from the mastermind I’m in this year. So Keane, thank you so much for joining us today and why don’t we dive right into your story. What were you doing before and what are you doing now.

Keane:              Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. My name is Keane Angle. I am currently a Pitch Deck writer, designer consultant. And before that I was in the advertising agency world for about 11 years. I got my start in the Connecticut area at a Connecticut based agency. Went right into the strategy team, doing brand strategy, working on Diageo brands, mostly spirits, Tanqueray, Smirnoff, all those fun spirit brands, also a couple of beer brands. And as a strategist, I started focusing on digital and social, just kind of early days of digital and social. Did that for a few years and then wanted to specialise in it.

Went to a New York agency called 360i and I was there. Did the commuter thing from Connecticut to New York. Was on a train for three hours a day or more, and didn’t want to do that anymore. So after about seven years or five years of doing that, I went to move to California. So then I started working remotely pretty early in my career. Started working remotely from California and lived basically on the beach in Santa Barbara for three years. It was amazing. Loved it. Just recently visited and I was like, oh man, got to go back.

So, I was out there for a couple of years, loved working remotely. It was kind of… it allowed me to start to kind of get a feel for how to run my days and how to structure projects the way that I wanted to. Actually, I remember I would take all of my conference calls, this is back in the day when I was just doing tonnes of conference calls with just long meetings all day back to back, not really doing anything, just talking to people all day, talking to clients, but you’re definitely, you’re working.

And I had a huge painting on my wall and I would actually paint walls on conference calls. And I actually, I produced like a whole body of work that way over the course of a couple of years-

Anna:               Amazing.

Keane:              … And that’s when I was like, oh man, working remotely is pretty cool. I really like it and I would be out at 3:00 PM every day and go play volleyball on the beach. And I was like, man, this is the best. But after three years of doing that in Santa Barbara, I was like, I haven’t really travelled anywhere. My wife, we got married. We’re like, let’s move to London, let’s travel, I’ll take a job with my London office, and we did that for two years. So we moved to London. We had a wonderful time. Lived in Fulham and I was the head of strategy for our London office at 360i. And did that for a couple of years, travelled everywhere. Did a new country every month kind of a thing. Scratched that itch. Then after that, I was like, okay, let’s move back to the US. We kind of wanted to get back home, been away for a couple of years. So moved back to Colorado, moved to Boulder, Colorado.

I had a job offer on the table for a different agency, but still as the director of strategy. I was being brought on to help them grow a different ad agency in Colorado. When I landed, they were kind of sketchy and then they closed their doors. They closed their whole shop down a matter of weeks later and then the offer was obviously pulled off the table. And I was like, oh, well, that’s fun. Now I don’t have any income for like the first time in my life. I’d been a salaried person for 10 plus years, 11 years.

And when I landed, I was like, okay, well maybe this is the time to give that whole freelancing thing a shot that you’ve been thinking about forever, which I had been thinking about for a long time. And so I was like, okay, let me jump out. Started doing brand advertising strategy for… I started out on Upwork because I thought it was a big marketplace, maybe I can… just billing very low hourly, it was $25 an hour. Me, Fortune 500 global brand strategist billing $25 an hour because I had no idea what I was doing.

Anna:               Wow. Mm.

Keane:              And no one, I realised very quickly that smaller brands just didn’t need what I had to offer. My skill skillset for 10 years was, how do I help Coca-Cola sell, increase their spend with a certain demographic and come up with a new campaign to increase sales by 1% year-on-year or whatever? So that was my skillset, was for big brand advertisers and just small brands just don’t need that. So I floundered around for a while. This was back in 2017 and I was like, oh man, what am I going to do? And so I started doing a little bit of smaller kind of strategy and I’d always had kind of a little bit of a design knack as well. And I started just doing just basic brand work, logos and brand development and stuff. And again, super undercharging for all of it. I had no idea how much I could do charge for this stuff. And worked with a bunch of smaller clients, but realised kind of very quickly that this was going to be a lot harder than I thought it was.

I struggled for several months of just… I remember I had one month where I paid rent on a credit card. It was just like, oh man, this is bad. We need to start making somebody here. And so that’s when I was like, okay, well, I have 10 years of experience in brand strategy, but also my favourite part of advertising was always the weirdest thing because my favourite part was always making presentations, and going in and talking to big boards of directors for Fortune 500 companies and talking about trying to sell them on an ad campaign. I love that. I love going in and talking and talking to people and just making the whole connections and also building the presentation. You get there’s storytelling, the design side of things, everything, and working with the team to make it happen.

So I was like, well, why don’t we just start trying to see if presentations is an area I can specialise in and at the same time, make a little bit more money. And this was kind of early 2018 and I very, very rapidly – I switched all my Upwork profile over and everything – very rapidly started getting invited to jobs. Built a portfolio really quickly. Just things started kind of taking off. Still doing low hourly rates, we hadn’t quite got that far yet. But then over the course of 2018, started to specialise more in presentations, both writing and design.

And then early 2019, I believe it was, I was actually invited by Comscore, which is one of the largest media measurement companies in the world. They’re second to Nielsen. You’ve probably heard of Nielsen ratings, basically second to them. And the president of Comscore, which I actually used to work with, she invited me in to do a presentation training for, I think it was 400-700 staff around the world, and it was a live three-part webinar series that I did. And I had to put together this training for 700 people around the world and each webinar I think was three hours long and a…little bit too long or was it three hours? It might have been two hours, anyway. They were a good long time and super interactive, basically trained a whole bunch of people. And that’s when I was like, oh man, like maybe I should focus on training.

So then all of 2019, pretty much, I was well, what I want to do is, I’m going to try and package this thing up that I just did, right. Because I worked in the agency world for so long and I know that people in the agency world, they’re dealing with data, they’re dealing with storytelling and a lot of the people who aren’t on the creative side, they don’t have the skills needed. All the way up to the senior level, not just the juniors, they don’t have the skills needed to create world-class client deliverables. If they’re working with a Coca-Cola, they’re still delivering reports that aren’t suitable for your local tyre store sometimes. So the level of quality just wasn’t there.

And so I was like, well, why don’t I just start focusing on that? So that’s when I started a company called Deliverable Coaching. And Deliverable Coaching basically just focused exclusively on training for agencies. And so I was like, that’s my niche, I’m just going to go train agencies on how to make better presentations and better clients deliverables.

Interesting thing was, after so much sales stuff, I got the LinkedIn lead gen company. I was like, screw it, I’ll bite on that, right. All those people that hit you up on LinkedIn, I was like, sure, let me just see what one of them works. And they were firing off hundreds and hundreds of friend requests or whatever, LinkedIn requests per week. And after three months of that, the only response I got – and this is hundreds and hundreds of potential leads – the only response I got was from the head of the Wall Street Journal’s marketing department, the chief marketing officer, head of Wall Street Journal. And he hits me up. He goes, “Wow Keane, canned response, low effort, no thanks.” And I’m like, oh.

Anna:               That doesn’t surprise me.

Keane:              Wow. And that’s when I was like, well, there are no shortcuts in this game.

Anna:               Mm.

Keane:              There are no shortcuts in this game and it’s not about spam. And this was people doing it. They have the whole… they sold the crap out of me on their whole system.

Anna:               Mm.

Keane:              And I printed that out. So I printed out the message from the Wall Street Journal person and put it right on my… it was the only thing in front of my desk basically for a year. And that’s when I was like, okay, I need to change my strategy of how I’m outreaching. And so after that, I started changing my outreaching strategy, more personal stuff, more networking, doing webinars, doing all this kind of stuff.

I had a couple of sales. I had small couple of clients starting to get things going in the agency world, doing these training programmes that were four to eight weeks long, one hour a week, really transformative stuff. By the end of it, the students were incredible. They were producing incredible work by the end of it. And I ended up selling a couple of retainers. I just couldn’t get it to scale. And what I learned was, you can’t really sell something to someone if they don’t think it’s a problem. So no advertising agency in the world that makes them, they make all their money off of client retainers and making reports and doing pitches and strategies and all these kind of things. That’s how they make… their ultimate output is actually just a deck.

And they all believe that their decks are perfect. So you can’t sell someone to someone that doesn’t think they have a problem. So that’s when I was like, okay, I need to pivot. I want to just focus on pitch decks. Made that pivot in 2020. And I’m booked solid several months in advance now. I’m basically doing several pitch decks a week. Happy to tell you a bit more about that, but that’s kind of my origin story. Probably a little longer than you wanted, but that’s the origin story there.

Anna:               Congratulations first of all for getting there. And I’m going to try to unpick some of the insights, because I think there were so many, so that’s why I let you run on, because I thought it was such an interesting story and so relevant for people who are in a similar situation. First of all, I wanted to say the initial reaction was wow, dream job for a young guy coming out of college or whatever to start in a beer marketing company, that sounds pretty dreamy. And then California and living in London. So it’s interesting how that lifestyle and the job in fact, it’s not like it was a terrible place to be, right? So sometimes we think, oh, we’re escaping some toxic work culture or something, and it doesn’t sound like that was the case for you.

What I’m really interested in looking at, are some of those challenges that you’ve clearly overcome along the way in terms of, okay, for example, thinking that you can just take your skillset from the big companies and then directly sort of offer the same thing to smaller ones. I came across something similar too. I actually wanted to start with startups and entrepreneurs, and it’s not a hundred per cent applicable, the branding and marketing strategies you do for big consumer goods brands with multimillion-dollar budgets, right, when it’s a new person. I too started [inaudible 00:11:27] work with them, not quite as low a rate, I think I’d got the message that you need to go a bit higher, but certainly, it wasn’t where I needed to be to build a business. So, that’s an interesting insight.

In terms of as you said, I love what you said, “There’s no secret, right? There’s no magic bullet. There is no formula or sort of fast track to success, I think. It’s about finding, building those relationships, as you said, and you’re smart enough to know what you’re doing, right? So it’s interesting that you experimented and paid someone to see what they’re about. I think that’s always a good idea to learn what other people have to say. But clearly, that particular strategy, which I hundred per cent agree with there, is not the way to go. And any other challenges along the way, I guess, in terms of how… it sounds very smooth now, the way you’ve told it, is that of course, that’s sort of how it happened, but was there anything along the way that had you questioning going out on your own or thinking of maybe going back to a job?

Keane:              Yeah. Every day, every hour. You just learn how to put a bullet in that head of that thing. You just learn to put a pillow and just shh and that’s ultimately, it’s all the time. You have that sort of, okay, should I go back? Should I do this? All that kind of stuff. Now that I think I’ve finally hit my strive with Story Pitch Decks, which is my main company I work on now. I’ve officially shut down my other businesses. Story Pitch Decks is, I’ve hit a, I would call it a full on stride in terms of new business coming in, closing sales, booking big projects at high tickets, and really producing high-end work. The getting to this point with Story, I thought to myself, I had to go through what I went through. I had to go through slogging. Through years of thinking that I knew what I was doing. And I didn’t, because I had to learn, school of hard knocks kind of thing.

You learn the freelancing trade and the contractor trade, and then eventually the entrepreneurship trade and the sole entrepreneurship trade, by living it and experiencing it. You can read all about it. It’s literally like reading about chess versus playing chess or reading about golf versus playing golf, or even going to the driving range versus playing the actual course. There is literally no substitute for making a tonne of mistakes, constantly learning, realising very early on that… I definitely had that syndrome early on where like, oh, I know exactly what I’m doing. Hey, I got [inaudible 00:13:57] lick websites and all this kind of stuff in the gym, whatever.

And couldn’t have been more wrong and screwed up three, four times. I even had several false starts where I was like, oh, well maybe I’ll put a small on-demand agency together, where I was reaching out to people kind of Avengers style. Like, Hey, I’m going to pull you in, pull you in and we’re going to go out and we’re going to pull up, we’re going to pitch these companies. We’re going to get business from them. So many false starts with little companies like that, but you have to try it. You have to go out and make the mistakes and fall flat on your face and brush off the dust and say, okay, what did I learn?

It’s never been, and I guess that’s the difference between a defeatist attitude and an attitude of perseverance, is saying, instead of kicking yourself and beating yourself up, you actually shrink that time down to… put a timer, right? Like get a phone, put two minutes on there. If you want to have a two minute sad sack fest, go for it. After that though, your job is to figure out the future. And after that, your job is to figure out how to make it work.

And I actually think that my financial pressures of saying, oh, I don’t have any money, I’m literally broke. I can’t find any jobs here locally, I need to make one. And that sort of financial pressure early on was really great to get me up and running, kick me and also kind of help with the perseverance factor and helping to learn from my failures. Which there were most definitely mistakes and failures and false starts, and at both of this macro and micro levels in many different areas. So it was smooth in that I think it’s everything progressively built on itself, but I had to progressively build on itself.

I don’t think I could have jumped where I am now without having gone through the year or two or three previous to this, to understand I’m terrible with finances, and I need an accountant, and I need to get my revenues up to a level where I can pay someone $200 a month to do my bookkeeping and my taxes at the end of the year. Just basic stuff like that. At first, I thought I was terrible at sales. And then as soon as I got my sales process down, packaged, niche down, productize, flat fees, was able to raise those fees up to a certain level to where I’m not pricing myself out where I can close. Now I have an 80% close rate and I pitch probably once a day.

Anna:               Amazing.

Keane:              So, but again, I thought I was bad at certain things. It turns out I’m okay at them. Thought I was really good at certain things, turns out I’m terrible at them. But you don’t know that until you’ve tried a bunch of, until you’ve made the mistakes and learnt from them and said, okay, how can I fix this going forward? And just make or start building your own personal library of how you… have your rule book of how you’d like to live your life. And I think what I’m living with now is, the demand for what I have is very high and how do I build in personal time? How do I make sure that I’m not letting them bleed into my personal time?

My time is no longer spent on getting new business. That’s pretty much like on automate right now. They’re just coming in, it’s great. My time is now spent, okay, how do I…like online course, perfect example, I want to scale with some passive income. And I also know that I want to help more entrepreneurs out there and then I can’t do that. I’m only helping two a week right now. And there are literally in Q1 of 2020, there are 3000 businesses launched, I think, per day in America.

Anna:               Wow.

Keane:              So these are just so many businesses being launched all the time and just the influx of entrepreneurship from the pandemic especially. I think 46% of startup founders are currently full-time employed with another company.

Anna:               Oh, great, interesting.

Keane:              So this is people’s side hustles. So people are wanting to create businesses. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. My wife owned and ran a baking business out in California. Now she’s going back to school to get her doctorate in physical therapy. She wants to go into business for herself again. I love working with entrepreneurs, but I can’t do it when I’m just working with two people. And I want to be able to kind of scale that. So finding the time to say, okay, when am I going to build this stuff? When I’m working, when my days are a hundred per cent efficient from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, with back to back…

I do have a couple of employees that are employed that are overseas, that I’ve been working with for a while, which are instrumental in helping me scale and free up a little bit of time for myself. But that’s kind of where I’m at now is like, okay, super high demand. How do I take where I’m at and kind of go to the next level and continue to increase my income, and also continuing to increase my quality of life. That’s kind of my main priority for now.

Anna:               And again, so many insights to try to draw out there. So the next level is interesting, isn’t it? Because you have really overcome certain challenges and it’s great to hear that you feel like you had to go through those things. I know it’s tough to hear in a way, because we think, we hope there is someone who can help us to sidestep those and to leapfrog the issues but it’s your individual experience and journey, and to some extent it is necessary. I do have quite a few clients, recently in particular, I’ve noticed that they’ve been surprised – I guess, we’re always surprised how long it takes – and the plan you have initially when you leave a big agency job or marketing job, like we did, I think is very unlikely to be your business a few years down the line, right? But at the same time, you want to connect with this brand and business that you have now from the inside of the world you’re in now, so that is to some extent the process you need to take – the perseverance, the grit, the growth mindset versus fixed mindset versus fixed mindset, those aspects are so, so important.

And now, as you said, the business model, when we’re first starting out, we’re sort of desperate for obviously the next client and you’re hiring that guy to spam everybody on LinkedIn and so on. And now amazing, you have almost too many clients, so that’s on autopilots. So now how can you reframe, create that much-loved idea of passive income and leverage your time better? And as you say as well, not become a victim of your success by working too much, because if we love what we’re doing, if we’re good at what we’re doing, you’re getting great results. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to get sort of sucked into that and just spend too much time on the business and forget part of the reason why you started in the first place.

So I guess with that aspect, just to do things of your lifestyles, because I know initially you talked about, okay, you could paint. I’ve never heard that before, paint while you work, create while you’re on calls. I know I’ve seen you before on calls on the treadmill, which is great too. What are some of the… paint a picture for us. What are the best parts of your lifestyle today?

Keane:              Sure. The number one of working for yourself and having an actually exceeding income where you were previously and just getting to that nice kind of level of like, okay, I feel stable. The big number one thing is being able to go anywhere and live anywhere. We’re considering what’s our next move year or two down the line and literally anywhere we want to go is fine. Ultimately I wanted to do this last year, but pandemic was… I want to start taking a month every year and do a light work sabbatical in another country like Portugal. Go there for a month, right? Just rent an Airbnb for a month, go to Portugal, work on the beach in Portugal. Go to The Bahamas… Rent a place for a month. Do that. And then invite friends and family whenever they want to come, they can.

Work a little bit, maybe not, who knows, whatever. It doesn’t really matter. But the flexibility in terms of where you can live, is endless. My wife and I don’t have any children and we’re not planning on it. And so we’re even more kind of unlimited by we really can go anywhere. And I think that that sort of freedom is pretty incredible.

Anna:               Absolutely.

Keane:              As far as physical workspace. So right now I have my kind of upstairs third floor transformed into my studio and office, which having an office is amazing. But every now and then I go a little stir crazy. And I also look at local coworking spaces.

So being able to just pop up for a Friday and for a day from someplace, wherever I want. Again, not being confined, I think is an incredible component of freedom for me and making sure that that’s kind of at the forefront. And this is why I kind of kick myself sometimes when I book too much client work or I’m too busy. I’m like, well, you’ve taken all your freedom and you’ve taken your flexibility. And if you were working weekends and right now, I live in Newport, Rhode Island, which is a tourist town. People come here from all over the new England area. I can see mega yachts from my window. And it’s a fancy tourist area, but it’s also got amazing beaches and all this kind of stuff. It’s actually a full gamut of kind of socio-economic people who come to visit here. It’s really nice.

But not being able to enjoy it on the weekends is the lamest thing ever. In the summers, we’re living in a tourist destination and you’re not being able to go to the beach on the weekends because I’m working. That’s super lame. So finding that balance and constantly realising that. How do you grow? How do you scale? How do you put in effort, but also at the same time, how do you keep the flexibility and the freedom that working for yourself awards you.

Anna:               And what advice would you give to someone perhaps who’s in that stage that they have already decided they want to work for themselves. Maybe they’re sort of struggling. The business model isn’t quite working. They’re not quite getting the traction they want. What tips can you give? Apart from sort of keeping going as you did and learning as you go, are there any words of wisdom you can share for someone who’s a few years back from where you are today?

Keane:              Yeah, of course. So a couple of quotes of mine that I’ve kind of stuck in my head. The first one, “Everyone’s has a journey. And you’re where you’re supposed to be and no more, no less.” And just kind of taking comfort in where your personal story arc goes. Sure, you may read about people who started their own business right out of the gate and a week later left their job. And then all of a sudden making three times their income. You hear that every now and then. That is most definitely the exception, not the rule. And they may have been working on that business for three years. You don’t know that. So just trying to be a little bit more. Be patient with yourself, don’t beat yourself up, learn to learn and don’t and limit the amount of time that you kick yourself after you make mistakes and look at it as a positive. Always reframe mistakes as positive. You paid for that lesson though in many ways.

The second is… yeah, exactly. The second is a Bruce Lee quote, throw it up to Chris Ducker, big Bruce Lee fan, is, I think it’s, there are no walls, only plateaus. And thinking of your personal growth as everyone can always grow, it’s just there. And there is no such thing as a barrier to preventing you from growth. So thinking instead is, oh, I’m just in a plateau right now and there’s more growth around the corner.

The third thing is if you’re starting a business, like getting real practical here. If someone does not type into Google, how to blank or type in the problem into Google and your product does not answer that directly, you have not identified the product or the service that you’re selling accurately enough. And if some people, so for instance, perfect thing with deliverable coaching, no agency in the world is typing in advertising agency deliverable training, advertising agency report training, advertising, agency presentation training. No one is searching that. The only time when they do do that, is because their clients say, Hey, your presentations suck and we need you to go. We need you to do some training and then they want to pay rock bottom because they hate investing in their staff.

You have to have a problem that you’re solving And that problem has to be searchable on Google. Not for necessarily SEO. SEO is important, but I’m using this as a lens, a framework to say, okay, is the solution that I provide a direct solution to a problem. And that problem could be entertainment focused. It could be if you’re starting a YouTube channel, for instance, you want to be an influencer in the cinematography space, showing people how to learn more about cinematography, doing cinematography breakdowns. Those are all problems that people would still search for. They’re just searching for it on YouTube. So thinking about that, if you’re not solving a problem that someone is literally typing in a question into Google, then you haven’t done a good enough job identifying what your problem actually is and what your product is. So as soon as you fix that, you’re able to kind of position yourself a lot better for success in the future.

Anna:               I’m so glad you mentioned that one because you dropped that in earlier on. I didn’t pick up on it and it’s such an important insight, and I haven’t heard it phrased that way before. We often say, and I say it all the time, oh, you need to make sure, the best businesses solve a problem. And, but as you said, if your audience, if your client target doesn’t of all know that they have a problem, they don’t value your solution, they’re not aware of the problem, let alone the solution and willing to pay, then that’s quite an issue. And I think, again and again, we see people who are, let’s say taking the course, right, we just obsess about what’s the content I’m going to put in and how many modules and so on [inaudible 00:26:59] what’s the A to B journey.

You’re taking someone, what problem are you solving with this course? And I have a lot of people at the beginning of the journey, I guess, wanting to launch a course or a group programme, wanting to get that passive income before they figured out, as you said, that problem. So if you’re listening, I think that’s a really great way of framing. It is somebody actually searching, asking, Hey, how do I do that? So the really simple way, but a really challenging way, I think to really make sure that you have that solution that somebody after. And I personally really loved the first two things that you said, and I have had a couple of children very recently, and I’m feeling my love, that message that you said that we’re each on our own journey. It’s easy to look at other people and think, oh, I’d like to be further along.

And that plateau, as you said, I’m working a handful of hours around sort of childcare and everything else going on and a move and all sorts of other things right now. And it’s easy to think you want to do so much more in my ambitions to get the better of me, but there’s a time and place for everything. And I’m still growing, albeit slower perhaps, and I want amazing people. And so on in those handful of hours that I have, I appreciate personally those two, I’m sure they’re very important for the wedding.

Cool. Perfect. Sounds good. Great. Let’s thank you so much for those really clear, really succinct insights and again, the really interesting story and some important messages to hear there. I think about just letting it sort of unfold, knowing that where you are is what you’re meant to be. Of course, not just sitting back, because as you said, there’s also the perseverance, the hard work, the learning, picking yourself back up again, after you’ve fallen down and so on, right? So it’s not just sitting around there and waiting for the clients and the money to come in, but a great mix of positive inspiration, but also some practical tips there. So Keane, where can we find out more about your very successful business now and I guess look out for your course that’s coming up soon. Tell us more.

Keane:              Sure. Yeah. You can head to storypitchdecks.com.

Anna:               Perfect.

Keane:              Story as in read a story. Pitch decks as in pitch decks.

Anna:               Absolutely. That was pretty clear. No spelling needed, but I will make sure to link to it in the show notes and on the website. So I can thank you so much for your time today. Really exciting to hear for me again, personally, and for everybody who’s listening as well. The twists and turns in your story, it’s always interesting to hear the parallels, but also the differences and [inaudible 00:29:10] as I said, thank you so much for your time.

Keane:              Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Anna:               Thank you.

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