Jeff Sass is Chief Marketing Officer of .CLUB Domains and Paw.com and he is author of the book “Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER.”
Jeff has over 35 years of experience in the technology and entertainment industries and has co-founded several start-ups including mobile commerce pioneer BarPoint.com in 1999. Jeff joined the .CLUB team in March 2012, and has led the company’s marketing efforts throughout the process of acquiring and launching the .CLUB top-level domain. In 2019 Jeff also took on the role of CMO for pet product e-commerce brand, Paw.com. Previously, as Vice President, Chief Evangelist at Myxer from 2007 to 2012 Jeff played a significant role in growing the mobile entertainment company into one of the top 15 mobile websites in the U.S. He is a Co-Founder of Entrepreneur.Wiki, and Social Object Factory. Jeff has also written and produced for film and television and has a deep understanding of the content business that is unique for a tech executive.
A graduate of Cornell University, Jeff is a frequent speaker and panelist on domain names, mobile marketing, digital music, entrepreneurship, and social media. He has been an online instructor for the University of San Francisco’s Mobile Marketing Program. Jeff has had articles published in AdAge, Forbes, Entrepreneur, DMNews, Mobile Marketer, iMedia Connection, and others. He was a co-host of the Cast of Dads podcast and has written regularly for a number of blogs including Dadomatic.com, SocialNetworkingRehab.com, and his personal blog, Sassholes! He also served as an Intel Advisor and Sony Digidad and is currently a member of the board of directors of The Domain Name Association (TheDNA.org).
Check out Jeff’s book here:
Date: Aug 11
Episode: 13
Title: In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces Jess Sass, a senior level digital media, marketing and business development executive. He is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for .club domains and several other companies.
Subtitle: If you don’t ask, you don’t get it
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/13-jeff-sass/
In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces Jess Sass, a senior level digital media, marketing and business development executive. He is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for .club domains and several other companies.
His creativity and his love of writing led him to work with big names in the Entertainment and Gaming Industries in the 90’s like Troma, Satori, GameTech and Intercorp. He wrote a book titled, Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER: (One Man’s Journey to Hell’s Kitchen and Back).
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Jeff 0:00
Norm, Norm, it’s Jeff Sass again. I know we just finished recording, I Know this Guy, your great podcast and I feel terrible at the end there. When I had to tell you I Know this Guy. I mentioned my friend C.C. Chapman and I blanked out on the name of his books and I feel terrible. So just wanted to make sure you knew he wrote two great books. His first book was, Amazing Things Will Happen, which is a wonderful book. He also is the co-author of Content Rules and he co wrote that with Ann Handley so those are C.C. ‘s books. I Know this Guy, you should talk to him. Thanks again for having me on the show. Take care, Norm.
Norman 0:41
Everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know this Guy, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know this Guy wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, my kids want me to say something about ringing a bell. What the hell is a bell?
Hayden 1:07
Alright dad, who do we have on the podcast today?
Norman 1:10
We have a buddy of mine, Jeff Sass. He’s an interesting guy. A matter of fact, I would call him a branding genius. He’s also an author of Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER. Now, do you remember the Toxic Avenger?
Hayden
Not at all.
Norman
I didn’t think so. It was a cult movie back in the day and he was actually part of it. He worked for the company. Anyways, I’m gonna let him tell his story. But it’s way more than just talking about the Toxic Avenger. This guy knows his stuff.
Hayden
All right, awesome. Well, let’s dig into this.
Norman
You know, we’ve been talking for a while. We’ve actually known each other for some time, and we’ve actually been on stage together.
Jeff
Absolutely. There’s a quick, quick funny story about that, if you don’t mind me just jumping right in me. So when we were on stage together, standing side by side, I had set up my video camera to record the session because I wasn’t sure if the conference was going to be recording it. And of course, I set it all up before you got on stage. So I use myself as the dummy to set up the camera and make sure that I was in frame and everything. And then we went back and then I hit record and then you and I get on stage. And then when I looked at the recording afterwards, basically, it’s me and you up to your neck, because you’re considerably taller than me. And so it’s a pretty much useless record of a wonderful presentation we gave together because I basically cut you off at the neck. I decapitated you on video.
Norman 2:48
Well, that wasn’t the first time but most of the time it’s intentional. So Jeff the whole premise for this podcast is interesting people and we’ve had many nights sitting down, well, having a cigar talking. And you have got to be one of the more interesting people that I know. So I just want to dig back a little bit and talk a bit about your backstory. And you know, what makes Jeff, Jeff?
Jeff 3:21
Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for saying that I’m sure it’s not not nearly true. My reputation exceeds myself for sure. But yeah, so I’m a past middle age guy. So I’ve been around the block a few times. I’m 61 years old and I’ve had a really fun and very varied career and life that really just ties into the things that always interested me as a child and I’ve managed to fulfill them in various ways in various industries along the way, and that’s really just, I love to be creative, I like to perform. As a kid I was in a child theater when I was 10 years old and I played the lion in The Wizard of Oz. I can even to this day do a very good rendition of King of the Forest, which I would often do to charm or scare my children when they were young. I grew up in Queens, New York at a time that was very special, really, I was a kid through the 60’s and had a very fun and enjoyable childhood as I look back on it. I went to college, studied. I thought I was going to college to be a biology major in pre-med and then realized very quickly that that’s not where the things that’s, although I liked biology, it’s not really what I wanted to do. I ended up switching to become an English theatre and creative writing major, and that’s really what I studied. Right out of college, which was Cornell University, right out of college, I went to work for a small production and distribution company in New York called SATORI ENTERTAINMENT. I really wanted to be in the entertainment industry and this was a great opportunity. We were more on the distribution side than the production side. At the time in the early 80s, we became the leading importer of English language foreign films. So films from Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain and it was a lot of fun. I got to travel quite a bit when I was very young, going to London and going to the Cannes Film Festival every year and traveling to Australia, and other places for the purpose of finding these films for us to import into the US. From that business, I went to work for myself for a period of time and had an independent production company and did a clay animated live action special around the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty called My Friend Liberty back in 1987, when the Statue of Liberty turned 100 years old. Then eventually went to work for Troma, the independent film company known for such very deep and meaningful fare as the Toxic Avenger, and Class of Nuke ‘Em High and actually spent seven and a half years working for Troma. Wrote a book about it, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. Then my career has always been one in my kind of life philosophy. Has always been kind of Go with the Flow so I’ve never had a master plan, although I’ve known the things I like. But as opportunities presented themselves to me, I generally kind of went with them and then always managed to work the things I liked into those opportunities.
Norman 6:33
I want to know about being on set with the Toxic Avenger. What was it like? I mean, I remember the Toxic Avenger and I think most people my age do, I mean, it was a cult film. So tell me a little bit about that.
Jeff 6:50
Yeah, so when I went to work for Troma, which I was there from 1987 to 1994. The original Toxic Avenger was done before I joined Troma so that was already in the can and had been released. And in fact, in my book, there’s a chapter about how the very first time I visited Lloyd and Michael, the founders of Troma at the Troma building in New York. They were actually editing the trailer for the Toxic Avenger. I actually, as a visitor to their office for the first time meeting them actually reviewed the trailer with them. Lloyd asked me what I liked. I didn’t really like the direction it was going in the tagline and said, Well, what would you say? And I came up with the tagline on the spot, the first superhero from New Jersey, which ended up being the tagline that they used for the Toxic Avenger to this day. But I worked very intimately on Toxic Avenger part 2 and Toxic Avenger part 3, which were both shot at the same time actually. I also was very instrumental in the creation of the Toxic Crusaders, which was the animated cartoon spin off of the Toxic Avenger. Probably one of the miracles of my career when you think that we were able to take a character from an R rated, bloody, gory, disgusting, campy, cheap, tasteless, great movie, the Toxic Avenger, and turned that crazy character into a children’s show, into a Saturday morning cartoon for kids. So that was pretty remarkable and a great experience.
Norman 8:27
Oh, man, and you, Okay, you were in it.
Jeff 8:32
Yeah, like Alfred Hitchcock before me, I tried to have a cameo in pretty much every movie every Troma movie that I was involved with. So yes, I have a brief appearance in Toxic Avenger 2 and 3. Then Sgt Kabukiman and other movies that I’ve worked on.
Norman 8:50
I am going to search for that clip. If I can, I will insert it into this podcast.
Jeff 8:57
I think in the Toxic movies, I don’t think I had a speaking role, but I do have a cameo appearance. But in Kabukiman, which I also co-wrote with Lloyd Kaufman, Troma President, I do have a short speaking role. I play a doctor in the scene there, which is pretty funny.
Norman 9:14
Oh, that’s cool. I just wanted to go back because I know I’ve heard you talk about the Toxic Avenger. And yeah, I didn’t want you to skip by that too quickly.
Jeff 9:24
Well, actually now that you bring it up, and since you said we can go all over the place with this, the other I had two speaking roles in Kabukiman. So one was as the role of the doctor and had a speaking role in a seat in the hospital. But I also did the voice of the monkey. And literally, I’m credited in the credits for the voice of the monkey. In the story of Kabukiman there is a monkey as part of the story and appears in a number of scenes and speaks in a monkey voice and I did the voice of the monkey. Now why that is particularly significant today is to have a monkey in the film, we had to have an animal wrangler and in the script for Kabuki man, we had a monkey, we had a tiger, and we had a lion. It was all tied into this mystical plot of the story where the Jaguar and the tiger and the monkey come together, blah, blah, blah. So we had to find an animal wrangler who could provide those animals and have them on the set and manage them. And the person that we hired, and the tiger, and the monkey, and the lion that we used belongs to Doc Antle. Doc, who is now world famous thanks to Tiger King, Netflix. So he was one of the leading storylines of that show, Doc and his entourage of nubile young women. Quite a long time ago, he hired Doc and at the time he had long hair and was kind of a hippie, kind of a good looking hippie, almost like a character erratic Godspell or jesus christ superstar on Broadway. That’s kind of how we look. Then he had his entourage and his animals and I remember Lloyd and I driving up to at the time his farm was in upstate New York and we drove up there and it was such a bizarre experience. It was kind of like a trailer park / junkyard with wild animals all over the place. From zebras to elephants to lions and tigers and bears, oh my. But we hired Doc and he actually appears in the film. So if you watch Kabukiman, Sgt Kabukiman, NYPD and there’s some scenes that were shot along the Hudson River in Hoboken New Jersey where there’s a tiger in a cage and and the handler of the Tiger in the cage as the tiger gets out and attacks a woman is Doc Antle himself and the woman he attacks is one of Doc’s entourage. Wearing a wig to match the look of the actress she’s portraying.
Norman 11:53
So the camp, was the camp really as crazy as it’s shown on TV with the beautiful women?
Jeff 12:04
Again it was a different location because they had back then it was in upstate New York and they had subsequently moved. They’ve moved more than once to the zoo they’re in now. But yeah, it was wild because it was a big property, lots of acreage. There was, I remember, kind of a house, one kind of main house almost like you’d expect like a farmhouse on a big property. But then as you went along the property, it was more like a junkyard than a zoo. You know, they were kind of trailers and piles and the odd cage hearing there. It was a very interesting experience. But we got the animals we needed and the people to manage them and for a low budget Troma film, it’s certainly added to the production value to have all these crazy animals in the film and Doc and his crew made it happen.
Norman
But it’s great. Now, The Lion King, Simba didn’t show up, did he? The Tiger King didn’t show up, did he?
Jeff 13:03
No, and it was so funny because I heard about Tiger King when it was first bubbling over during, yeah, everyone’s staying at home. I wasn’t paying attention and it was on a Zoom call with a group of people, it’s probably a business call, and someone mentioned it, and they mentioned Doc Antle and I was like, like my mind was blown, Doc Antle. Because I hadn’t watched the Tiger King yet. I just heard about it and then this person said, Oh, yeah, Doc Antle, like, big part of it. So then I had to immediately watch it and that was pretty funny.
Norman 13:36
So okay, so let’s take the next step. Now we’ve gone Doc Antle , what next?
Jeff 13:43
What next? So when we launched the Toxic Crusaders, when we successfully turned Toxic into this children’s character, we got involved in licensing and merchandising. Because at the time, and this was 1989, 1990 the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were peaking and a lot of people in that industry felt like the Toxic Crusaders because they were a little bit edgy just like the Ninja Turtles, that they could become the next Ninja Turtles. So we were being wined and dined by all the licensing and merchandising folks who wanted to get the rights to do toys and games and everything to do with Toxic Crusaders. We ended up on you know, again, a lot of this is in my book, I ended up after being pitched by pretty much every licensing agent in the industry and all of them wanting to keep their third of the profits or third of the revenue. I went to Lloyd and Michael and said, look this can’t be rocket science. We’ve got the property, why give away a third? Let’s just do it ourselves. I’ll do it right. So we set up what Troma licensing and I just dove into the licensing and merchandising world and we ended up doing about 70 licenses for toxic Crusaders products worldwide. Everything from pajamas to coloring books to toys and games, and also video games. So in the process, we did a deal with Sega, and Nintendo. Nintendo, we did a Gameboy game. If you remember the Nintendo Gameboy, the handheld game device, we did a Gameboy game for Toxic Crusaders. In dealing with these companies, I became really interested in that interaction of traditional entertainment with interactive entertainment. Then one of the other bizarre and amazing things we did was while we were doing licensing for toxic Crusaders, we were kind of the new kid on the block and we were in demand because there were high expectations for Toxic and Toxic Crusaders. So we had great relationships with all these manufacturers and once we had those relationships, we realized, well, we can handle more properties than just the Toxic Crusaders. So why don’t we seek out other good properties that are looking for licensing deals and we have all these relationships now and we could present these other properties to these manufacturers. So we started to look for other properties and for a while we represented the Japanese cartoon, Gigantor. We were picking up properties here and there and through a miracle we ended up becoming the licensing agent for Reading Rainbow. That’s right Troma, home of the R rated, gory, Toxic Avenger became the licensing and merchandising agent for the Emmy Award winning PBS series with LeVar Burton, Reading Rainbow. That in and of itself is an amazing accomplishment. I remember you have to go up and meet with the show produced in cooperation with public broadcasting of Lincoln, Nebraska and Buffalo, New York and they’re the ones who controlled it and I had to win them over with some creative ideas of how we would handle it. It was a challenge because even Though Reading Rainbow was such a terrific and respected brand, the brand itself really didn’t have much IP because you need to show LeVar Burton would be highlighting various books. The IP was the books so there wasn’t anything about Reading Rainbow that you could license. We came to them with some creative ideas of creating some characters and images and things that we could license out and ended up signing a deal with them and we did a Reading Rainbow book deal and some other deals for them. In the process of representing Reading Rainbow, I made a deal with a company here in Florida, where I am now called Game Tech to do interactive, educational CD ROMs based on Reading Rainbow. This was in 1994, 93,94, which is really, when CD ROM was just emerging, it was just on the cusp of happening. In the process of that deal, I went down to meet with that company several times to work on that project with them and really fell in love with what they were doing. I was just fascinated by the whole computer game industry and I liked the people and Florida wasn’t so bad. At that point, I’d pretty much done everything I could possibly do in TromaVille. So I wrote a letter to the chairman of that company who I’d spent some time with during my visits, saying that, look, this is who I am, this is what I like, this is what I’m good at. If there’s ever an opportunity, I’m very interested in what you guys are doing. I really think the game industry is the future blah, blah, blah. I sent him out that letter and heard nothing. Then about three or four months later, out of the blue, I get a phone call from him, Oh, Jeff, about your letter… One thing led to another and an opportunity arose and I ended up deciding in very amicable terms to leave Tromaville and head down to Florida, moved my family down to Florida and take a job directly in the video and computer game industry with this company, Game Tech, and that’s what moves me down to Florida. Kind of started the next phase of my career so it’s pretty interesting. And of course, for those of you who are fans of Guardians of the Galaxy, I should mention that when I left Troma in 1994, they hired a kid to replace me and that kid was James Gunn, who credits Troma for giving him his start in the film industry and of course, he’s going on to have a phenomenal career. So one could argue, not very successfully, but one could argue that if I hadn’t quit Troma, James Gunn you never know.
Norman
I’m with you.
Jeff
He’s a pretty talented guy and a lot more talented than I could ever imagine being and I’m sure he would have done just fine with or without me quitting Troma, but makes a good story.
Norman 19:43
So licensing way back, I was involved with promotional marketing and licensing was not a big deal and I’m talking back in the early 80s. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, licensed companies were coming up and they were just grabbing everything. How easy was it to do licensing back then compared to now?
Jeff 20:07
Well, I think that a lot of it had to do, remarkably, it was relatively easy for us to get into it only because there was a perception that we had a hot property. So in other words, as I mentioned earlier, that industry wanted the Toxic Crusaders to become the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and therefore, we were in demand. I had a much easier entree into that industry than just some unknown property trying to go out and make deals and meet these people. There was a preconceived notion of what we had, which was very beneficial to us. I have to be honest and say that. That said, once you make the introductions, it was a wonderful and is a wonderful industry, and especially back then many of the leading manufacturers we’re still family run businesses. Businesses that have been through generations. Worms or pajamas where Edwards or was running the business that his father or grandfather has started and that kind of thing. It was a very warm and friendly industry once you kind of got in there. I don’t know, to be honest, if it’s as small and intimate today as it was then because there’s been a lot of consolidation and a lot of big corporate players getting involved. Disney gobbling up so many companies in so many properties, so I’m sure it’s slightly different than it was then. But the basic structure of a licensing deal, I don’t think has changed very much. In terms of making minimum guarantees, and defining the rights and the exclusivities and then paying a royalty and the royalty rates. I mean, the basics of the industry, I think remain the same, but the players, I’m sure are a lot different. And of course, there are different aspects to what makes a hot property today than there was then. There, was all based on television. Today with the internet with influencers, YouTube stars and Instagram stars and other places. There are different types of properties that can become popular for licensing than they were then as well. It’s an interesting business and I still occasionally have opportunities to stick my hands back in the waters there and it was a great experience and a great time for me and for Troma for sure.
Norman 22:29
I remember coming home one day, my dad owned a skate manufacturing company up in Canada, and it was called a Roose. It was a high quality good skate, great skate, not just because he owned it, they were good. Anyways, he came home and he says he was really ticked off. He’s bloody agents, blah, blah, blah. He was trying to get Wayne Gretzky. It was Wayne Gretzky’s first year in the NHL to sign off on the skate. And he couldn’t believe it, the thieves, these guys, these agents, thieves. They wanted $10,000 for Wayne Gretzky to sign the skate. So nowadays that’s a blink of an eye but back then 10,000.
Jeff 23:15
Well, because we had this perceived hot property, I mean, we were being wined and dined and again, Troma, we’re a little rinky dink company. Very little money, low budgets, etc, etc. and working out of a four story walk up brownstone on ninth Avenue and west side of Manhattan. Hell’s Kitchen, literally and we were having these big companies come to us in wine and dine us and we had one licensing agent come in and literally handed us a check for I think it was either 25 or $50,000. For Troma at that time, that was a lot of money and he just literally handed us a check. He says here, we don’t have a contract here to show you I’m serious here ust take this keep it whether you do business with me or not, obviously we would never do that. But it was that kind of craziness going on. So we were happy and enamored but also that’s what indicated to us that maybe we should just do this ourselves. Because if people are throwing money at us, there’s something to it, literally throwing money at us.
Norman 24:16
Why doesn’t that ever happen to me? So now that you’ve moved down to Florida, you’ve got Game Tech going, Yeah, what happens now in your life?
Jeff 24:28
I joined Game Tech and that was really kind of my first official sort of marketing role. I mean, I’ve always done marketing as someone who earns a living as a CMO and has always been a marketer. I shouldn’t say, but I’ve never actually taken a marketing class. This is all, I became a marketer by doing and obviously I do read up and educate myself but I was not trained formally as a marketer. I just became a marketer because it really embodied all the things I like. The creativity, the writing, the performing, all the things that I like, actually, you can do in marketing which I really enjoyed. I joined Game Tech as director of marketing and that was really my first marketing title. When I was in Troma, I was more involved in production and in sales than marketing, although marketing was a lot of what I did. So I’ve always done marketing and Game Tech was the first time that was sort of on my resume so to speak. It was an interesting time in games because everything was shifting to CD ROM to computer games, etc. and the World Wide Web what I was starting to say. The web was emerging, and I was a believer because I had these experiences with CompuServe . I had some independent filmmakers we were doing business with and they worked for a university so I was communicating with them by email. Because in the early days of email, people may not remember a no, it was almost limited to the educational market like schools, email addresses, and you can only get an edu email address. But through CompuServe, I was able to email them. I was doing stuff in email and CompuServe and things very early on. When I got to Game Tech, I really believed that the internet was going to be an important part of marketing for games going forward and then having a website. This was still at the time where not every business had a website. Many businesses and even big brands didn’t see the need or didn’t think it was anything that was that important and I lobbied pretty hard. We had a website at Game Tech and I lobbied really hard that we needed a webmaster. We needed an employee who did nothing but focus on the website. Right now, we had one of our engineers who was just kind of poking around and part time kind of managing the website and I saw that there was an opportunity for us to do much more with demos of our games and things like that. They weren’t on board with that and so when I eventually left Game Tech to join another game company, this time as VP of Marketing. Part of the appeal of going through this other company was in the interviewing process. I say, I believe we should have a dedicated employee for the website, they said, Absolutely. They were on board with that and that was a big decision point for me in agreeing to leave one entity and go to the other because they were going to do that, which I believe was really important. So I ended up leaving Game Tech and then joining another game company called INTERCORP ENTERTAINMENT in Miami.
Norman 27:25
What year was that?
Jeff 27:27
I left Game Tech and joined edge Corp in 1995.
Norman 27:31
Wow. So very early in the scheme of things.
Jeff 27:35
Yeah. So in 95, INTERCORP was an interesting company in its own right, because we were the first licensee of the doom game engine. We were the first ones other than in software, who were licensed to make a first person shooter using the doom engine. So for you gamers listening and watching,, I’m sure know exactly what I’m talking about. We did some great First shooter games including a game called TekWar, which was based on William Shatner’s book TekWar. I ended up getting the opportunity to work very closely with Mr. Shatner with Bill, Captain Kirk, whatever you want to call it. I was a VP of Marketing so I ended up going on, when we were releasing TekWar, I went on East and West Coast press tours, with Bill Shatner. I traveled to LA in New York and was with him as we did appearances on everything from the Howard Stern Show to Jay Leno to David Letterman, promoting the game and it was just a lot of fun and a great experience spending some time and getting to know Captain Kirk. I’ve got lots of Captain Kirk stories I can share, but he’s a terrific guy, very talented, very funny. It was a real pleasure to have the opportunity to spend that kind of time with him.
Norman
Canadian
Jeff
And Canadian.
Norman 28:56
Yes.
Hayden 28:58
So to bring it back to you facing resistance and creating a website for that game company, how did you feel the time when you saw this opportunity in a kind of, I guess, an unproven technology at the time but you seem certain that you had to do this and you were facing resistance from that one company. What was your thought process there and pushing through that?
Jeff
It was a long time ago, but I think that we did have sort of a part time person paying attention to the website. He was one of our developers and engineers. When they wouldn’t commit to having a full time person, I would just lobby. I became very friendly even though I was on the marketing side. I became very friendly with the game developers. I played games myself. I understood a little bit of programming. I tried to be one of the things I always tried to do is, a lot of companies there’s a big separation between sales, marketing and product development and I always felt that that’s a triangle that goes together. All three points of that triangle really need to interact and work closely together and I tried to be that kind of marketing guy who was very close to the sales team, very close to the development team. I just basically got that guy to do as much marketing stuff on the website as I could get them to do within the constraints of the time he was allowed to spend on the website. Because in the game industry the websites became very important, because back then file sizes and transfers of files were difficult. So getting demos in the hands of customers was very important. And, there were demo CDs that were being distributed at stores and stuff and you might recall that. But we also were trying to get to the point where we can have smaller downloadable demos of games, and all that stuff. And of course, the website became a very important distribution point for that information and those demos and things like that. Today, it’s hard to think back to a time when every company didn’t have a website, but there was a time and it wasn’t that long ago in the scheme of things.
Norman
No, I remember just being blown away. You’ll remember this to Jeff, using your 1200 baud phone connecting it. I think it was probably AOL or something and all of a sudden, you saw these lines going like this back and forth. Five minutes later, you had this picture and I’m saying to my wife, you gotta come down here. There’s a picture on my computer. Oh, my God, this is going to change the world.
Jeff
Oh, yeah, in the first time there was a multimedia video, even on a CD ROM, even on a disk, the video was a postage stamp size. I mean, it was literally the size of a postage stamp. That was the video on your screen so we’ve come a long way. It’s been really fun and fascinating to watch and enjoy the benefits of all the changes. The technologies continue to improve. We played LAN games so today everyone plays these multiple player games over the internet. You go on Fortnight and you’re playing with friends. I play with my grandson. He is in Tennessee and I’m here in Fort Lauderdale. We play Fortnight together, and it’s so easy. Back then, there were no games over the world wide web. All the games, the network games, if you wanted to play with other players, you had to do it on a local area network. Now, only businesses had a local area network so it was very common in 1994, or five, six, for the geeks amongst us the gamers in a company to stay after hours and use the company’s network to play these network games, right? That was the only time in place you could do it. There was no such thing as playing over the internet. So it was really funny. You’d have these offices at nights and weekends with all the geeks and gamers in there playing LAN games and we had William Shatner come to the office and play because we wanted him to experience the TekWar game and what it’s like playing the networked version of the game. He came to his office, he was sitting by someone at someone’s desk and everyone else is at their desk and we’re all playing these you know network games in our office so things have come a long way. But you know, the basic premises and the fun and the strategy behind these games hasn’t changed as much as the visuals and the graphics and everything else, still the same.
Norman 33:28
Did he take control of the office like he would on Star Trek?
Jeff 33:32
He was having a blast and you can hear him again. We’re all distributed throughout the office in these different offices to play on all the various networked computers and you could hear him every time he shot someone or did something he’d scream, Oh, I got him and he got me. It was great.
Norman 33:48
So Jeff, what happens after Game Tech?
Jeff 33:51
Game Tech, so gosh, this is I didn’t realize we’re gonna be doing this, Jeff Sass, this is your life. You’re gonna bring out my third grade teacher in a minute to surprise me?
Hayden 34:03
Oh, just wait.
Norman 34:04
Just wait. Yep, it turns into this is your life.
Jeff 34:08
Okay? So the game industry actually took a turn for the worst back in around 1997ish, if I’m getting my dates correctly, but things really crapped out in the game industry and it was a bad time and we had to scale down INTERCORP dramatically. A lot of the big game distributors went out of business and they owed us money and it was a bad time. We actually ended up, that company ended up filing for chapter seven bankruptcy, which was horrible, but also a wonderful experience just from a business standpoint, as an entrepreneur and as a business person going through that process was, in retrospect a really interesting learning experience, but we had a skeleton staff because chapter seven is reorganization so you’re still in business. I mean, we filed chapter 11. Chapter seven, you’re out of business. Chapter 11, you’re still in business but you scaled down. So we were trying to figure out what we could do. We had this game engine, we had this Doom first person shooter engine and we had this wacky idea, again, way ahead of our time to do virtual reality real estate walkthroughs using the doom game engine. So we still had a skeleton staff of two or three game designers and developers and we went to some developers in Miami who were building these new developments. Convinced them to let us try taking their blueprints and taking their plans and everything and creating it virtually inside a game engine so that the player, the person who wants to look at the home can actually virtually walk through just like it would walk through a map and in a first person shooter, they can walk through this home or apartment that hasn’t yet been built. We would map it to all the designs and everything else and it was really cool. We actually got the name VR Tech, I wish we had held on to that domain name in today’s world, but somehow we let it go. But we started kind of a company called VR Tech using our Game Technology to do these virtual reality walkthroughs for developers in Miami. It was a great product. We’re way ahead of his time, but it was a lot of fun. And you could actually get a good sense of what the property was going to be like. We did a few tests for some developers we actually sold. I remember in one case, the first day we set it up in their little trailer on the property where the house was going to be built. They sold a $750,000 home, literally by just the couple who bought it just going through our game and walking through the house and getting a sense of it. So it was very effective. Unfortunately, it was very costly to do because we were using Game Technology. So it cost almost as much as developing a game to develop these walkthroughs. So it wasn’t something that the builders or developers, even though It worked, It wasn’t something they were willing to pay enough for, for us to actually do it in any sort of a profitable business fashion. So unfortunately, that didn’t really, really work out and so that was kind of the end of that business. The biggest challenge is never the technology, the biggest challenge in business is consumer behavior, right? So the technology that we’re experiencing today, buying stuff on our phone, doing all that stuff, the technology has existed for a long time. It’s only taken until now for consumer behavior to catch up to the point where people are comfortable using that technology and the challenge of changing consumer behavior is much harder than the challenge of developing new technology. New technologies developed all the time. Getting people to use it, getting people to be comfortable with, getting it to become mainstream is really the bigger challenge. It was very interesting, we went public in 1999, we rode that .com wave through the bust when the markets crashed and in 2000 and then we lived through 911. It was a crazy ride. I mean, there’s a lot of crazy stories of things that happened during that ride. But eventually, we had a number of issued patents scanning barcodes from your phone and all that kind of stuff and we did sell the company in 2004. Those patents are actually still being used today by a number of big companies because they’re underlying a lot of the things we’re doing today. So it was interesting. It was a very interesting run. We grew the company from two, and we went public with two employees, and then grew to 89 employees at our peak. Then of course, at the scale down when the world came crashing down. Very interesting ride but learned a great deal as it was a great experience.
Norman 38:58
You know, people talk about entrepreneurs and risk takers. But there’s a lot of different types of entrepreneurs and one of them are what you’re describing, the innovator. And when you have to be that entrepreneur who is that risk taker, launching something, and then having to change people’s attitudes on how to buy or what to buy, that is a scary process. There’s very few. It’s tough and everything you’ve been talking about is interesting, because you’ve got this bug. I hate to tell you, but you’ve got you’ve taken the hardest route because everything that you’re getting involved with, it’s up before it’s time. So it’s really tough. Like how do you deal with that, bringing out a product and knowing I just live this experience. Is it getting the right one? Is it just doing it until you hit the home run? How do you deal with that?
Jeff 39:53
Yeah, it’s hard. Arguably, I don’t know if I’ve done it well, because you know, I keep moving from one thing to another, from one industry to another. So you know, in my career, I’ve been in entertainment, technology and e-commerce and this and that. But I kind of like that to be honest to me. And again, going back to what I said earlier. Personally, I’ve always managed all of those moves in all of those industries.I’ve always managed to focus on the things that I really enjoy doing. So I love to write, I’ve always been a writer since I was a kid. As a marketer, I get to write almost every day, whether I’m writing marketing copy, or press releases, or even writing emails that resonate with the message I want them to resonate with. I get to write and of course, on the side, I was able to write a book. So you get to do stuff, I love to perform as a kid. I was acting. I studied acting in college. I do a lot of speaking we talked at the beginning about being onstage with Norm. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to always have the opportunity to be the one at the company, to make the presentations to go on stage to speak at conferences. So I get my performance bug fed through that. So that’s why for me, I love marketing so much, because it’s been the one thing across any industry that I can still satisfy myself with the things I’m really passionate about doing, that I really enjoy doing and I think that I do well so that’s one way to get around it.
Norman
It sounds like the products or the companies you’ve been involved with, if you would’ve been able to launch them 10 years later, it would have been a whole different story. You know?
Jeff 41:36
You know, I do believe that what’s exciting to me about a long and winding career and I think that as we all age, we learn this and understand this better. Steve Jobs even said something along the lines of, you could connect the dots, it’s easy to connect the dots afterwards. I think when you look back at a career, you can connect the dots and you can see how everything you’ve done. No matter which way you turned positive and negative has contributed in some way to where you are today and that’s kind of what’s exciting about life’s journey in general and a business journey specifically is really seeing how you take every step and everything you learn along the way. I worked for Troma for seven and a half years, 20 some odd years ago, yet I can today look at things that I learned and experienced there that I’ve been able to apply to virtually every company I’ve worked for since and I wrote a book about that. There are no wrong steps we take in this crazy journey. It’s really recognizing what we can learn from each of those steps and how we could apply it to the next step. And to me, that’s what makes it fun, and exciting and interesting.
Hayden 42:47
Hey there guys and gals. This is Hayden Farrar, producer of I Know this Guy. Thanks so much for listening to part 1 of our interview with Jeff Sass. Make sure to tune in next time, which gives us tips from his book, Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I learned from the Toxic Avenger. There’s some great stories and tips that you can relate to your life and your business. So make sure to check it out. And before I forget, make sure to subscribe, like and review the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us grow this show and reach a wider audience. Thanks guys and gals. See you next time.
Jeff 0:00
I heard Spotify you know, they got Joe Rogan on board and I think they’re looking for someone else next. I think they’re gonna be knocking on your door, Norm.
Norman 0:06
I’ll take 10 million. I don’t need a 100.
Hayden 0:11
Hey there guys and gals. This is Hayden Farrar producer, I Know this Guy. Welcome to part 2 of our interview with Jeff Sass. If you haven’t listened to part 1 yet, make sure you go back and give that a listen. Jeff goes into detail about his career which has spanned everything from blowing up buildings to being on set with the Toxic Avenger. That’s pretty darn nifty if I do say so myself. So make sure you go back and check it out. Now for the rest of the interview.
Norman 0:38
I really want to get to this book, but let’s just kind of bump people up to what you’re doing now.
Jeff 0:44
Okay, so currently, I’m CMO for several companies. Chief Marketing Officer for .club domains. .club is one of the new top level domain extensions so an alternative to .com, or .biz or .org, you can get,excuse me, a domain name that ends in .club. We launched .club six years ago.It took two years and a lot of investment to get the rights to launch .club and that’s been a very exciting and fun opportunity. And we run .club from a great startup incubator we created here in Fort Lauderdale called startups.club because one of the interesting things about being in the domain industry is domain names themselves. It’s not that exciting, right? What’s exciting is what people do with domain names today. In the old days, before the internet, when somebody had an idea for a business, the first thing you did was you went out and printed business cards, put your name on them, CEO. Today, when you have an idea for business, the first thing you do is you go out and get a domain name, right? You want to make sure that you lock in your place. Your real estate on the internet for that business name and you want to get a great domain. So what’s exciting about being in the domain industry business, what’s exciting for us at .club is seeing what people do with their .club domain. Seeing all these interesting, innovative startups and businesses that use a .club domain. We’ve always been very entrepreneurial and entrepreneurs, ourselves. The founder of .club is Colin Campbell. He’s a great serial entrepreneur. The president, Michelle Van Tilburg, she’s been an entrepreneur and worked for a number of startups. Has a lot of experience in the domain industry. So we get genuinely excited about entrepreneurs and startups so we decided to move our offices into a bigger space than we needed and create kind of an incubator and co-working space, which is also called startups.club and so we promote the .club name there too. And again, everything goes full circle connecting the dots backwards. My background in the entertainment industry, we actually partnered with a production company and we’ve been actually recording the journeys of some of the startups in startups.club and we’re putting together a documentary series called startups.club following their journey. That’s been a lot of fun and again, a way for me to bring back the things that I’m interested in to the work I’m doing today. So one of the companies that was in the incubator and working out of our same office space was a pet products company. At the time, they were called treat-a-dog. And given that they’re working out of our space, we got to get more and more involved in their business just by osmosis, being nearby. That’s what’s fun about a co-working space, you get to share ideas and exchange ideas and you have the benefit of those interactions. We started to get more and more involved in helping out the young founder of treat-a-dog. Over time, I got more involved in helping them with their marketing and then last summer we had the opportunity to acquire the domain paw.com. Last summer treat-a-dog rebranded itself to paw.com, which is a great powerful domain name. It’s a great brand. It also gives the company the opportunity to go beyond just dog products. As treat-a-dog, you’re pretty much stuck in the dog world. As paw.com, any pet products are valid. I became the CMO also of paw.com. So I’m very much involved in growing that brand and that business as well. And then I also play that role as a consultant for several other companies where I basically am their CMO to go and I come in and really I focus more on the big picture and the branding and the strategy. Then work closely with their internal teams who actually do the execution of that so I’m able to be CMO or acting CMO for several other companies as well.
Norman 4:46
I know a lot of marketers, a lot of people that say that they know branding, and most are like SEO companies. They’re using old technology. These guys don’t keep up with it. I gotta tell you, like I’ve come to you on a few occasions, probably more than what you like asking for some advice on a brand or logo or copy and you really are a genius. Yeah, you can look at it. I am absolutely serious. I remember in New Orleans, I came up and I said, Jeff, just can you take a look at this and give me your insight? for free of course and you took two seconds anyway, “nah you might want to change this, you might want to change the wording over here.” You had about nine points and it made a huge difference. You just knew where to hit the pipe and I could have shown that to 100 other people. And you just found it like right away and that wasn’t the first time. I’ve talked to you on many occasions about just different things. So whatever you have done, whatever you have learned, I mean, it just comes naturally with you.
Jeff 6:04
I do think it’s good to know your strengths, it’s good to know your weaknesses. And I do think one of my strengths is I do have a good ability to quickly look at something and just see those opportunities and see those changes. And then the other thing is, and I have a chapter in my book about this that I learned over time to not worry about giving those ideas up. So in other words, the fact that I can come to a conclusion quickly, I’ll just tell you, I’m not going to sit on it and say, Well, let me think about it and get back at you. If I look at it and the answers there to me, I want to share that answer with you. I think in my career, especially when I’ve had opportunities to consult and advise other companies, I’ve always gotten that work by giving away stuff for free first by just, I have a good idea of sharing like Troma. I met with Lloyd and he asked me what I thought about the trailer. I had an idea and I gave it. They said, Oh, can I use that? I said, sure and they used it. I didn’t know I was gonna end up working for them. I didn’t get anything for coming up with that. But goodwill, which led to a great friendship and a great career move ultimately. I like to share my ideas, because the truth of the matter is, ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s the execution and I certainly as one person could never execute on all the so called good ideas I might have. So if I can share an idea with you, and you can run with it, and it helps make your product better, then we both win and I’m proud and I get excited when I see it in use. So even if I wasn’t compensated for. It’s not always about that. It’s about sharing and helping and seeing that you made a contribution to something is to me very rewarding, whether you’re compensated financially or not.
Norman7:51
Right, and you’ll see that mistake of wanting to be compensated with a lot of young entrepreneurs or people in small businesses that want to feel that they have to have that little piece of the pie. What I found is just giving it up and sharing information will get you so much further in life. The network that you build by sharing, I think by giving information out to people, I hate to say it, I hear this all the time. But you really do get it back 10 times because people are going to talk to other people about you.
Jeff 8:27
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think if you think all of your ideas are so precious, then chances are that very little will ever come of that unless you’re capable 100% of just executing all your good ideas with no help from anyone else. Then keeping them precious and secret is going to keep them from coming to fruition.
Norman 8:53
So I think it’s time. Let’s get to your book.
Jeff 9:00
I think this interview, I think I wrote the book faster than we’ve done this interview.
Norman 9:05
I told you it could take up to three hours. Alright, so tell us a bit about your book.
Jeff 9:11
About five or so years ago, or maybe a little bit longer now, when I was a pretty active dad blogger, and did a lot of so called influencer events for brands that they were flying us that bloggers all over. I went to Michigan for an event for Ford. As an ad blogger, and one of the evenings they were going to have, an Ignite event. Ignite is kind of fun speaking format, where you have five minutes to give a presentation. It’s supposed to be something that’s inspirational that will ignite thinking or ignite new ideas. You have five minutes exactly and you have 20 slides exactly. The slides are programmed to change every 15 seconds so you have no control over the slides. When they say, 3 2 1 go, the first slides up there, 15 seconds. The next slide, 15 seconds, the next slide. At five minutes, the mics cut off, you’re done so it’s a really good challenge to come up with something that’s going to be interesting, exciting, visual, because you got these 20 slides. But you got to nail it in that five minutes. And I was trying to think about what I could talk about, and for whatever reason, it popped into my head that a lot of the stuff I learned when I was working for Troma I’ve been applying to business today. There were a lot of really good marketing and business lessons that I learned from making these wild and crazy movies. And I thought that would be a fun five minute presentation because it’s visual. I can use images from the movies, and it’s the Toxic Avenger. It’s crazy, so I figured I’d get some laughs so that’s what I did. So I put together my Ignite presentation and I called it, Everything I Know about Marketing, I learned from the Toxic Avenger. During the last slide, and my last 15 seconds, I ended by saying I only have five minutes. I could talk about this all day, I could write a book about this and I probably should. That’s how I ended the presentation. Just kind of randomly and I thought about that for years afterwards thinking I said, I probably could write a book about this and I should. It knod at the back of my mind and then eventually, about five years later, I actually, all the thoughts sort of came together and I started making some notes. I started to say, I’m going to write the book, and then I did so that was the genesis of it. The book itself, it’s a very different kind of business and marketing book, right? Because I really do. It’s very anecdotal. It’s very funny. It’s not dry. It’s not your grandfather’s business book, because it’s based on anecdotes of my real experiences of making these movies, but then extracting real marketing and business lessons that you can use for your business, no matter what industry you’re in, based on making these crazy movies. There’s about 35 chapters that are short. Some chapters are a page or two so it’s an easy fun read. But pretty much every chapter has a fairly specific lesson in it that I pulled from these movies that you could apply to your business. So it’s really a lot of fun. It’s the kind of book, if you’re a fan of Troma movies, you’ll certainly like it just for the behind the scenes Troma stories. But many of the people who’ve read the book and many of the five star reviews on Amazon I’ve gotten are from people who have never heard of the Toxic Avenger, who have never seen a Troma movie, and still could benefit from it, appreciate how these stories shaped these lessons. It makes it much easier to understand those lessons. So it’s a really fun and different business and marketing book, again, based on my real experiences, making these wild and crazy movies, yet learning some lessons that I’ve been able to apply throughout my career and that you can apply to yourself in your career.
Norman 12:50
So just thinking about the lessons that you have in your book, what’s one that you could sort of extract and say, alright, entrepreneurs are just for lifestyle that you can apply. What would be the number one thing?
Jeff 13:05
Well, there’s several that I would call number one. So one thing that I talk a lot about is the power of We, right? And this is, I think, really important, especially for startups as you begin to grow and as your team begins to grow, right? Even though we were a rinky dink little low budget production company, Troma had some rules and one of the rules is, there’s no I inTromaville. Technically there is the letter I in the word in Tromaville, but we were not allowed to say I, and I mean that literally, we were not allowed. If you were writing a letter, or an email or typing something to someone, it was always it always had to begin with greetings from Tromaville and it always had to say we. We want this, we want to do this, we look forward to this. And that went for everyone whether you were the founder of the company like Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz or whether you were an unpaid intern. If you were speaking on behalf of Troma, It was always, we. If I was writing a note to Norm about a lunch date, we had just the two of us, I would still say, we look forward to seeing you for lunch on Tuesday. We look forward to talking to you more about Troma, we, we. And that was very powerful, because the truth of the matter is, business, just like filmmaking is a collaborative process. There are very few instances when you are truly a sole sole proprietor and everything is done yourself, almost always, especially if you’re in a startup and you’ve raised money from other people. You have other people who were involved and we’ve all been in that meeting where someone gets up in front of the whole company, or in front of the team says, Well, I did this and I did that and I did this. And there’s five other people in the room who helped on that project, and they’re all scratching and says, what about me? I was a part of that, right? And the power of we is very strong, especially when you become a manager, right? When you’re managing other people. A good manager looks good not for themselves. A good manager looks good when they make their team look good. Your job as a manager is to make your team succeed when your team succeeds, you succeed. So as a manager using that “we” is very important. It should never be I, it’s always where you have your team. And even to this day I cringe sometimes when I hear people saying, I, and I still to this day feel uncomfortable if I write “I”. In an email to someone, I tend to use we a lot more than most people because of that training and Troma. I think the power of we is really strong and a good lesson for you for any business, and especially if you’re managing other people and growing a team. So that’s one, you want more?
Norman 15:45
You know what, I’d love more.
Jeff 15:48
So another interesting thing about filmmaking and this is whether you’re making a low budget Troma film or whether you’re making a blockbuster Marvel film for one of the studios and that is, filmmaking is very structured and very planned because you have to know what you’re doing every day because every day has unique requirements. Everyday of production and filming, you need certain actors, you need a location, you need certain sets, you need certain costumes, you need certain props, etc. So you have to plan the production on a day to day basis, right? And most businesses, we don’t do that, right. There are very few businesses that you plan things out to that detail on a day to day basis and when you plan things out on a day to day basis, a couple of things become true. Number one, you have to have a plan B, right, every day. Because if you’re filming, let’s say you’re filming on location, there are things that you can‘t control like the weather, right? So if you’re planning to film on location one day, you must have a backup plan where there is a nearby interior location where you can film a different scene that ideally involves the same actors and actresses because you don’t want to have people sitting around waiting for rain that you might need. So you want to have an alternate scene that takes place indoors that involves the same actors and actresses so that it becomes pretty easy to move from that exterior scene to the interior scene, if the weather goes bad. Having that detailed day to day planning in filmmaking is a discipline that I think many businesses lack. And we could learn a lot about that kind of structured planning from looking at the filmmaking process. Part of that too, is when you’re making a movie and I learned this early on by necessity as I became a production manager on my first film is that you must focus every day on the bare necessities, like what is really important every single day. And when you’re making a movie, if you break it down, the most important thing, you need three things. Without these three things you can’t make a movie, right? You need a camera, right? You have to have a camera, no camera, no film. You have to have film in the camera or today you have to have digital storage and battery life, you have to have a means of recording with that camera, and you have to have actors and actresses to put in front of the camera to tell you a story. If you don’t have those three things every single day, you can’t make a movie. It doesn’t matter if the director is Steven Spielberg. It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest screenplay that was ever written. It doesn’t matter if you have the most beautiful location on the planet, if you don’t have a camera if you don’t have film and if you don’t have actors, you can’t make your film. So every single day, you have to focus on those three things. How are those actors that we need to get to the set? Do you send someone to their home or their hotel to wake them up and bring them over so that they’re on time? Where’s the camera truck, right? Where was the camera truck parked last night? Do we have sufficient film? Is the camera truck going to be the first thing on the set in the morning and the last thing to leave? You start to worry about those very specific things that are essential. And I think in business, we often don’t do that. We often are very busy. We feel like we got a lot done, but all we actually working on the things that are really important to move your business forward. So I asked you to think about what is the equivalent in your business, to the camera, the film and the actors and actresses? Like what are the three or four things that are actually the things that move your business forward that are actually the things that you need to be working on every single day? You know, and I think that’s another great lesson that you can learn from the filmmaking process.
Norman 19:30
Let’s talk about some of the quotes that are in the book. The first one that comes to mind is, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Jeff 19:38
Yeah, so if you don’t ask you don’t get. I have a chapter about that in the book and I think it’s a lesson I was fortunate to learn early when I was working at Satori Entertainment, actually, even before Troma. I was a young, green production assistant with very little experience, if any, and had the chance to go on a business trip with the CEO of the company at the time. I think we were in London and so we were having dinner together just him and I at a hotel in London. I had been with the company maybe four or five months, pretty fresh out of college, didn’t know what I was doing, and I asked him for a raise because why not? I figured I’m there with the CEO or one on one. First time, a kind of one on one and I asked him for a raise and he kind of laughed at me and said, A. you don’t know shit, B. you’ve been here for months. But I’m going to give you the raise. And I said, really? I was shocked and he said, Yeah, because you asked for it and I’m gonna tell you that if you don’t ask, you don’t get so I want you to remember that. I’m giving it to you literally. You don’t deserve it. You don’t know anything. You haven’t proven yourself yet. But I admire the fact that you asked so I’m gonna say yes. If you don’t ask, you don’t get and I think that that was a really good lesson to learn early on because it’s true. In other words, if you’re sitting on the sideline and thinking something in your head, and don’t stand up and ask, you’ll never know what the answer was going to be. And what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? Your request gets denied, they say, No. You’re not going to physically get hurt by asking. You may throw up later because you got nerves in your stomach or something. But sometimes we keep too much in our heads and we assume or we think through, well if I asked for that, they’ll never say yes, or if I asked them this, I’ll never say yes. And so we don’t ask and and you’re just removing the chance of it. Yes. If you don’t ask. It’s like who is it? I don’t know. Maybe I’m giving the wrong quote to the wrong person. But it was someone like Wayne Gretzky, or Michael Jordan or some sports figures said, you miss all the shots you don’t take, right? I’m paraphrasing someone so I apologize.
Norman
Yeah, it’s Wayne Gretzky. I think.
Jeff
Okay, so it’s Wayne Gretzky. But it’s true. You don’t ask, you don’t get. That’s been a good lesson and that served me well in Tromaville and in filmmaking. Because when you have no money, you got to ask for things right? When you have no money, when you have a low budget film and you want to film in someone’s home, or blow up a building in Westchester that’s being demolished and all these crazy things we did in Troma movies, a lot of it boiled down to is just having the nerve to go to the authority in charge and ask. Go to the town manager and Croton on Hudson and say, Hey, we found out through public records that you’re going to be demolishing this building over there. Can we blow it up instead as part of a scene in our movie? First time I asked that question, the city manager looked at me like I was crazy and said, What? You want to blow up a building? I said, Yeah, for a movie. This is for a movie. I said, Yeah, and by the way you could make it a training exercise for your fire department, right? Because how often do they get to put up a fire from a building that blows up? Not very often. So let’s make it a controlled training exercise and we’ll film it for our movie and everybody wins. And they said, yes so you have to ask, right? You have to not be afraid to ask. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. I think we can all use that in many aspects of our life, right? Sometimes we keep too much inside our own head. We try to think through what the answer is going to be and we make an assumption that may or may not be correct and we keep our mouth shut because of that assumption. So I say ask.
Norman 23:34
You know, the second quote, this is real. I have horrible stage fright and even this podcast is out of my comfort zone. I’m doing it because, first of all, I love the idea. But secondly is to just do something different. Get out of my comfort zone. And so this quote hits home. Don’t let self doubt stand in your way of self improvement and gaining a new experience.
Jeff 24:05
Yeah, so I have a chapter in the book that talks a little bit about that And it really has to do with not being afraid to take a chance, not being afraid to do something that’s outside of your comfort zone, as you mentioned about this. Because everyone, virtually everyone was in that position. You know, everyone had a first time. So if you’re given the opportunity to do something, and this chapter in the book is about when I had the opportunity to direct for the first time, I was sort of thrown into it the opportunity to direct an infomercial, kind of a spoof of infomercials we did called the Troma mercial and I had never directed before anything obviously I’d seen what went on on the set before and I was super nervous about it and almost wanted to say no, no, no, but but when you’re given that opportunity, take it because guess what, virtually every direction A film from Spielberg dimensioned him again to James Gunn to anyone else. They all had a first time. There was in every one of those careers, there was a first time they directed when they had never directed before everyone starts with the first time in any business in any career in any task. There’s always that first time. So if you’re given the opportunity for your first time, don’t talk yourself out of it, right? Because you’ll never get to a second time without a first time you need to take that leap, you need to jump forward, you need to, to step out of that so called comfort zone and try and and almost always, you’ll get it done. Will it be perfect? No. Are you going to make mistakes? Yes, but that’s going to make the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth and the 10th and the 15th and 100th time, that much better. But everyone started as a novice, virtually everyone. Just remember that and don’t let self doubt stop you from taking those opportunities because not everyone’s going to work out but some of them will and you’ll have a chance to move forward and do something and be good at something that maybe you never thought you’d be good at because you never tried before. So that’s what that quotes all about.
Norman 26:08
So you mean there’s a chance that I’ll feel a little easier each podcast?
Jeff 26:14
Yeah, I heard Spotify. They got Joe Rogan on board and I think they’re looking for someone else next. I think they’re going to be knocking on your door, Norm.
Norman 26:21
I’ll take 10 million. I don’t need a 100. So Jeff, let’s talk about success. If you look back in your life, it could be it could be family, it could be business. What is your biggest success?
Jeff 26:41
Well, I don’t want to get all philosophical. But I think my biggest success is just being happy. Like I’m generally, I wake up every day pretty much happy. I know there’s a lot of crazy things going on in the world but I think I have a pretty good attitude about it. I’m blessed to have a healthy family and be in a great relationship and work with people I enjoy working with and I’m not by any means wealthy, but I have enough. I’m not wanting anything. I’m very happy and I think it took a long time to figure that all out and I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way. I think part of that is just getting older and wiser. But I think I’m successful because I’m happy. I know a lot of people who are far more financially successful than I am, who are not happy. Who don’t wake up with a smile on their face and aren’t healthy and orange taking care of other aspects of their life. So to me, that’s how I measure success. I exercise regularly, I’ve been meditating for 45 years, I feel I eat well, I’ve been a vegan for a long time, and I just feel like I’m in a good, well rounded place that I feel good about. So that to me, that’s success. Now, I’ve had some success in business and I’ve had plenty of failures in business too. I could argue that I’m not a success financially as to where I could or should be, perhaps, for someone my age and my skills, but that was not always the driver, right?
Norman 28:25
Right. So, did you see a progression like back 30 years ago, 20 years ago. Did you have to do something to get to happiness or were you just naturally like this?
Jeff 28:42
Um, I think that I’m generally an optimist. I would generally lean towards happy versus not happy. But I do think that earlier in my career and certainly when my kids were younger, I was way too focused on work. I was the classic workaholic to the point of it being a negative impact on myself physically and my family in a real way. I’m sorry that I did that, but I hope that I’ve learned from that and so I think I’ve avoided and I do avoid that. It’s interesting because I should have learned, I had a good example when I was back in the film industry. I won’t mention names, but we were doing business with a company that was pretty well established and was very well known. And to this day still is and is a family business where the father It started in the son was running it. And the son, who was at the time probably in his 30’s. He had a young kid, and no matter what we were doing, and we were working on some projects and stuff and whatever we’re doing at five o’clock, he would literally just stop and leave and go home to be with his family. It didn’t matter how stressful the situation was and I’d be the one staying there till midnight 1 a.m. trying to get stuff done and scratch my head said, how can he left? He was so dedicated to that notion in his family that no matter what and we were sometimes it was like, from a business perspective, life or death situations where this could fail and we could lose money. And this didn’t matter to him. Five o’clock, he was out the door, heading home to have dinner with his family. I didn’t learn from that, from being exposed to that lesson and I probably should have. It was right in front of me and I didn’t treat my family at the time the way he treated his. He was out the door to go home and I was there till midnight trying to solve the problem that he had turned off for the day. It was interesting. I look back on that a lot, actually. I thought at the time, I thought he was nuts, right? But he was right, I was wrong.
Norman 30:56
Yeah, this just happened recently. You know, I called somebody and I wanted to talk to them. And then I said, hey, why couldn’t I get ahold of you? Because everything is instant nowadays, right? How come I couldn’t get a hold of you? Well it’s Sunday, Norm. Oh, I’m looking at the day going on. I work seven days a week. I kicked myself. Why am I calling this guy on a Sunday? Like he’s got a life? But yet so true. Have you been able to do that now, just turn it off?
Jeff 31:28
I’m better. I don’t know that I completely do it. But I’m definitely much better. I think , again, it comes with age you learn that nothing, Things are rarely as bad as they seem or as bad as you let your mind make you think they are and most things that you think are the end of the world or not. If you let it go or wait a day, or put it back a few hours, not gonna make a difference so you can err in favor of your own mental and physical health and the mental and physical health of your family and things will still be there the next day.
Norman 32:04
Let’s go down the other path now. You’ve talked about success. What about the failures? What’s been your biggest failure? What did you learn from it? How did you get out of it?
Jeff 32:16
Well, I think I mentioned earlier. When we were in the game industry, that the company I worked for at the time, INTERCORP ENTERTAINMENT went through bankruptcy. First chapter 11 and eventually chapter seven and that by definition of bankruptcy is a failure, right? But that experience was really good. I mean, good to understand how that works, good to understand as a business person, the legal aspects, the rules, and behind it, dealing with the attorneys dealing with the courts. Understanding what it means to file for reorganization. In fact, as I mentioned, the person who was the CEO of that company, and I went on to start another company thereafter. As we went around trying to raise money for that company, that company being bar point that I mentioned, we actually did not hide the fact that the previous company went bankrupt. We actually used that bankruptcy as, I won’t go so far as to say a badge of honor, because it’s not great. You know when sets out to have their business go bankrupt. But the experience was somewhat of a badge of honor. In that, it showed the potential investors that we were experienced business people. We were not looking at things with pie in the sky that we understood that if you don’t do things right, or things can go wrong. We understood the bankruptcy process. We actually were very upfront and open about that. It actually became a positive and not a negative in the fundraising process, because it did demonstrate that, okay, we were not first timers, we’ve been around the block. We had businesses that succeeded. We had businesses that failed. And then that became, actually, I think, a benefit to the process of raising money for bar points. So it was an experience, like every experience is going to lead to more knowledge. And having that experience of a business going bankrupt, I learned a great deal from it.
Norman 34:17
That’s interesting how you’re able to spin that.
Jeff 34:20
Yeah. And we had discussions about it beforehand, because we had advisors, who said, Oh, make sure you don’t mention the bankruptcy and he and I were aligned, and that we didn’t believe that it was something to hide. Look, it is what it is, right? And it’s not like you can hide it as a secret, anyway. It’s public information. It’s like you look foolish if you make believe it didn’t happen and then someone digs in deeper and says, oh, wait a minute, your last business went bankrupt and you didn’t mention that. That’s even worse, right? So to us, there was no other way to approach it than to be upfront and open about it.
Norman 34:55
I’m almost thinking that people were shocked and you’re right. They probably, it depends on the person, but they probably look at you as, Oh, first of all honest, truthful. Yeah, you went through it. But at least the circumstances behind it, you learn.
Jeff
Yeah.
Norman
Like I’ve had to go through that process too and you learn a ton by going through a bankruptcy.
Jeff
Yep
Norman
So Jeff, we’re winding down the podcast and I want to make sure that people get this book. I have the book. I’ve read it. It’s fantastic. How do people get it and how do people get a hold of you?
Jeff 35:35
Okay, so thank you, Norm. So the book is called a very short title, Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER. And the subtitle is, One Man’s Journey to Hell’s Kitchen and Back. The good news is, you don’t have to remember that. I actually and this is kind of a cool domain name, tip and hack for you from a marketers perspective. I actually obviously want you to go to Amazon and buy my book. Now if you go to Amazon, you could search for the title and you could search for my name if you remember it. But you’ll also see other things in the search result and maybe instead of my book you’ll see the Toxic Avenger movie and decide to rent that or buy that instead of buying my book. So I registered the domain name, toxicavenger.marketing. Marketing is another new extension like .club we talked about earlier. And toxicavenger.marketing, it’s easy to remember, it’s relevant to the title of the book and that links directly to my books page on Amazon. So if you go to toxicavenger.marketing, you’re literally one click away from buying the book. No distracting search results or anything else. So that’s a great tip for you in your business. If you want to send someone to a particular page within another platform to avoid them searching and getting other results whether this is Facebook or Amazon or somewhere else. You can register a domain name that’s relevant to whatever your business is or your destination is. And then point that and a lot of companies do that for their Facebook page now they’ll get a domain name and say go see us on Facebook go to the domain name. And that way they’re not searching for you. They’re not going to see other results that are going to distract them and also you can change where it goes. So in the future maybe I’m not selling my book anymore on Amazon maybe I set up my own storefront and I want to direct people there. I don’t have to say now, Oh, don’t go to Amazon go here. I just continue to say go to toxicavenger.marketing, and I can change where it points to. So that’s a good hack. So long story short to get my book go to www.toxicavenger.marketing and that’ll take you right to the book on Amazon. It’s available in Kindle and paperback. You can find me on Twitter @sass. You can go to JeffreySass.com or JeffreySass.club and that will pretty much link to anything and everything else more information that you’ll ever need to know about me. If you’re interested in more about .club, you can go to get.club, www.get.club. If you’ve got a pet and want an amazing pet bed or other product, go to paw.com, paw.com. And I think between those things, you’ll have no trouble finding.
Norman
At least you have one point of contact. That’s great, Jeff.
Jeff
Yeah.
Norman
And by the way, thank you for the little nugget at the end.
Jeff 38:28
But it’s actually, it’s a really good tip.
Norman 38:30
Yeah, it is. Alright, Sir. At the end of every podcast, I have one question.
Jeff
Yep.
Norman
And I’m gonna pass the torch over to you. Jeff Sass, do you know a guy?
Jeff 38:46
Norm? I know a guy. So the guy know and I hopefully he won’t mind me mentioning him. So his name is C.C. Chapman. And I mentioned at the very beginning that I was a co-host of a dad podcast called Cast of Dads. C.C. was one of the other dads on that podcast with me. And C.C. is actually one of the very early podcasters. He’s had podcasts going back as far as 2005. So he’s an extremely knowledgeable guy. He teaches digital marketing now at Wheaton University, I hope I got that right, in Boston. And he’s just a terrific guy, a lot of knowledge. He’s written a great book and that will kill me because I’m having a brain fart and forgetting the name of his book. But he’s an author as well and I think that he would be a great guy for you to talk to.
Norman 39:38
Fantastic. Well, we will definitely reach out. I appreciate that, Jeff.
Norman
Oh, hey, by the way, Jeff contacted me just now and he remembers the name of the book.
Jeff 39:48
Norm, it’s Jeff Sass. Again. I know we just finished recording, I Know this Guy, you’re a great podcast, and I feel terrible. At the end there when I had to tell you I Know this Guy. I mentioned my friend C.C. chapter and I blanked out on the name of his books, and I feel terrible. So just wanted to make sure you knew he wrote two great books. His first book was, Amazing Things Will Happen, which is a wonderful book. He also is the co-author of Content Rules and he co-wrote that with Ann Handley so those are C.C. ‘s books. I Know this Guy, you should talk to him. Thanks again for having me on the show. Take care, Norm.
Norman 40:22
Hey guys and gals. Thanks for listening. For more great content, please like, subscribe and follow I Know this Guy on all social media platforms.
Norman 40:33
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