On this episode we have founder of Davidson Learning Company and former professional skateboarder John Davidson. John tells us how he went from touring across the US to transitioning into a new career in business, running his own design studio and eventually recording a TED talk. Not only is his life story fascinating, but he also makes a point of providing actionable tips throughout the interview.
YouTube:
https://lnkd.in/gV8fQNn
Spotify:
https://lnkd.in/gwAp_AC
Amazon:
https://lnkd.in/gaq2UGh
Date: October 23, 2020
Episode: 27
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces John Davidson, Founder of Davidson Learning Company and a Former Professional Skateboarder.
Subtitle: “Luck Is When Preparation Meets Opportunity”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-27-from-pro-skating-to-e-sports-john-davidson/
In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces John Davidson, founder of Davidson Learning Company and former professional skateboarder.
John shared how he transitioned from being a professional skateboarder to a new career in business, running his own design studio and eventually recording a TED talk.
If you are a new listener to I Know this Guy… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!
In this episode, we discuss:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Our favorite part of recording a live podcast each week is participating in the great conversations that happen on our live chat, on social media, and in our comments section.
In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:
Join our discussion network here!:
Hayden 0:00
Hey there guys and gals, we’ve got a special announcement for you. Since Halloween is upon us, we thought we would do a Halloween giveaway. Because Halloween is the official holiday of I Know This Guy. All you have to do is click the link in the podcast description, fill out a short survey, and you’ll be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card to buy all those online snacks for yourself. That’s enough for me and now for the rest of the episode.
John 0:33
It was just so mind boggling in such a trip that I was skating this park that I’d seen on websites every single day for the last 10 years and the guy who filmed the best skaters in the world was actually filming me.
Norman 0:51
Hey 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’s a bell?
Norman 1:21
All right, so Dad, who do we have lined up for the podcast today?
Norman 1:24
A couple weeks back, we were talking with Bob Heere, Bob recommended John Davidson and John is this former professional skateboarder and he’s just done some amazing things. He’s an incredible guy. He says he’s not an entrepreneur. But I tell you, this guy seems to be two steps ahead.
Hayden 1:44
Yeah, it’s pretty awesome. I mean, he’s got such a diverse background. He also gave us a little sneak peek of his upcoming business DLC, Davidson Learning Center and we’ll be talking about that on the show and we’ll have links for that on the website and in the podcast. So make sure to check it out.
Norman 2:01
Yeah, and he’s just a cool guy. So let’s get started.
Hayden 2:05
All right, let’s do it.
Norman 2:08
All right, John, welcome to the show.
John 2:10
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
Norman 2:12
Hey, it’s our pleasure. So when Bob Heere told us about his most interesting guy, and he told us about you, I had to reach out right away and get you on to the podcast.
John 2:22
I appreciate that. Bob’s awesome. So he knows a lot of really interesting people. So that means a lot coming from him.
Norman 2:29
He blew me away, just hearing what he had to say. Like, for example, just to show you, I’m an old guy, right? I always thought eSports was, okay, let’s go and grab something from EA Sports and go and play Madden football. So when he’s explaining to me how big of an opportunity eSports is, I’m sitting there going, Okay. I haven’t even heard anything about this whole lifestyle, that’s how out of it I am.
John 3:00
Well, you’re not alone. That’s actually pretty, that’s a pretty common misnomer, I would say is that people who do not come from the eSports world or have a deep background in gaming, they think young people just want to do what old old people do.
Norman 3:15
I’m not gonna take offense.
John 3:19
You see these big companies that don’t have Madden tournaments. They’re doing NBA 2K tournaments, and I’m nothing against these titles, those are great communities, but those are second or third tier audiences in the eSports space and so people see like Madden, and NBA 2K, and, even MLB the show, FIFA is actually a really big one. Kind of the exception to the rule, I would say, but they see these games, and they’re like, oh, let’s do sports games. Because my generation likes sports, kids like video games, the answer must be video games sports, right? The truth of the matter is gamers are not just looking to do what old people do. But virtually, we just like to play good games and so those games may represent traditional sports, or they may represent something completely different, like jumping out of a base or a bus that’s flying through the sky and then trying to kill 99 people before they kill you. So, which would be Fortnight. There’s all sorts of things like that. So you’re not alone. If that makes you feel any better. I hope it does.
Norman 4:26
It does. Yes.
John 4:29
We’re starting off on the right foot.
Norman 4:31
Perfect.
Norman 4:32
So the very first thing I usually ask our guests, I want to get dig into your background. I don’t want to skim the surface. I really want to know, what makes John John?
John 4:44
Okay. Yeah, that’s a deep question. How much time do you have?
Norman 4:48
I got a few hours.
John 4:51
All right, what makes John John, that’s a really loaded question. That’s a complicated answer. I want to say I’ve been very blessed. I’ve had so many different experiences of I think something that probably separates me from most other people in business or in skateboarding, or gaming, or public speaking, or these other things that have been part of is that I have not stayed in one lane, I’ve kind of done all sorts of things. I want to say a big part of that is probably just the continual search to find what I love to do, in addition to never settling for the place that I’m at. I don’t have a super clear vision of where I want to go. But I just want to do great things and I kind of let my passion and opportunities lead me there. I think if anything, I have a gift for vision and seeing opportunity. So I can see things that can or should happen based on where I’m at now and the steps to get there. So I definitely, you would definitely not draw a straight line from Reedley California, on South hope Street to Dallas, Texas, that’s for sure. But I think just to I guess better answer that and then you can ask any deeper questions to kind of lead the conversation. But what makes me me is, I think, first of all, it’s my faith. My faith is like really important to me, it’s really a foundational thing for me and like the lens that I see everything through and my motivations of also growing up in a small town in Central California, Reedly, I don’t know, I think they’re just where you grew up shapes you and the people I grew up with my brother, who we’ve been best friends our whole life and then, I was very competitive in traditional sports up until high school and then skateboarding took off and I’ve been tremendously shaped by skateboarding. I think I have a better understanding of youth marketing because of skateboarding. I think I have a strong work ethic because of skateboarding, falling down, getting back up. I’ve always thought I was fortunate to be good at something that was cool. Something that was popular at the time, which gave me more opportunities. So, getting two free pairs of shoes every month when I was a junior in high school was pretty cool. My mom definitely lucked out with my sponsorships. She didn’t have to buy me anything since I was 14 years old. But the other things that have shaped me too are living all around the country, Orlando, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Sacramento and touring the country non stop for six months at one point, just a lot of different experiences, a lot of hard ones. So, it hasn’t been easy, for sure. But I think what’s kept me going is that there’s been very few times where I was focused on my current situation. Most of my life, I’ve been looking forward and looking at where I’m going, which has enabled me to live through some pretty crappy situations or some challenging jobs or living situations. Because I am not focused on what I’m doing now. I’m focused on where I’m going and then I would say, lastly, the last two things that kind of define me are my love for business. I really love strategy, marketing, business development, my mind is just going 1000 times a second all day long with ideas and it can be a curse and a blessing. But also my love for the gaming community. I kind of came into the gaming community, from a professional standpoint a little later but I just love the community, I understand them. It’s just been something that I’ve really gravitated towards, and my main mission nowadays is to help people, but also to help enhance the experiences of the sports community through both improved business practices, which I do through the eSports trade association, through reimagining the event experience, which I’m working on through PRG and helping brands better connect with gamers into space that adds value to our community and enhances it, which I’m doing through my new company that I have not announced yet. But by the time this comes out, I think it’ll be announced, but my company DLC will be focused on that through content, public speaking and consulting to help brands and subcultures connect in meaningful ways.
Norman 9:39
When was your aha moment that skateboarding was going to be your short term, professional career?
John 9:49
Boy, not for a while, I was so involved with every sport. My brother really had the passion for skateboarding. He had the passion, the love for it. I had the talent. Skateboarding is really unique in the fact that you probably have to be more natural at it to be successful than any sport. Other sports have fundamentals. If you hustle and you have the fundamentals, you could maybe not be the most talented person but you could go pretty far in traditional sports and skateboarding is just you have it or you don’t, it’s more about style. It’s more an art form than a sport and it’s just, I’m not the most naturally talented skateboarder. So I’m here saying, Oh, yeah, you have to be natural to them so great. What I’m saying, as I’ve been fortunate that I had a natural talent, but it’s just a really interesting activity that it’s you have it or you don’t, you can fall on concrete all day and love it, or you can’t, and so, for me was just kind of another physical activity that I kind of was good at naturally and my brother had the passion for it. So we really, he would bring me all over the place, I probably would have quit skateboarding a couple times if it wasn’t for him. But it was around, let’s say, I started when I was 11 and then I got sponsored when I was 14, so around 13 years old skating for about three years. Now, keep in mind, nobody was sponsored at this time. So it wasn’t like nowadays, everybody’s either got a shop sponsor, or their goal is to get sponsored. Back then to the small town, we didn’t know anybody was sponsored. So it wasn’t really a thing. So after about three years, two years, my brother was like John’s pretty good at skateboarding, we should start filming. So we started filming, made a video, I won a contest that a new skate shop put on got sponsored by this shop and things kind of went from there. But I think the aha moment that I could really do something with it was shortly after I graduated from high school and what happened was, after I graduated from high school, I really had this moment of safe self realization, like, Oh my gosh, I got to go to college. I guess skateboard, I got to get a job. I guess skateboarding is just gonna be a thing for fun and there was this company in Orlando and they sent out these flyers to everybody. This was right before like MySpace had kicked off and stuff like that. So there was no social media. It was just flyers sent out to skate shops. So they sent out flyers to every single skate shop in the country, I believe, and it was enter with your sponsor me video and the one who wins the contest gets sponsored by the company. Now I have no idea if I was the only entrant or if there were millions of children across the world who submitted videos, or somewhere in between. But all I know is I won that contest and so I got this sponsor, and it just rejuvenated me, it gave me new opportunities and about a year of doing that, while still living in California. They called me up and he said, john, you should move to Orlando and I said, Yes, I should. Let me drop out of school real quick and buy a one way ticket and so that was really when I realized, like, I remember my actually vividly. It almost is like an emotional moment for me thinking about this. But there was a night, the night before I took that trip to Orlando, me and my brother went and skated in just this empty parking lot. It was just kind of like a brother bonding time, before I go to chase this dream, I never thought I’d have the chance to do it and it was just skating flat ground in an empty parking garage. But I was skating so incredibly well that night and I spent a great time with my brother and I remember him to say like, man, I remember when you first got sponsored. I was thinking, I wonder how much free stuff we can get and now, you’re doing it, you’re taken off to really chase this and you have a chance at doing it. So that was a special moment and I didn’t get as far as my dream was. But taking that chance to go after that opportunity, put me in a place to take advantage of other opportunities, which has been a long road and many of those forks in the road. But yeah, that was the moment, it was right after high school.
Norman 14:21
It must have been such a change going from California to the middle of Florida. The heat, the humidity. Does that affect, I’m kind of curious, because you take a look at football players who are playing in Texas, and then they go up to Buffalo in the middle of winter. Does the weather affect your performance?
John 14:40
Greatly. Yeah. It’s a major challenge or a big reason why the whole skateboarding industry is in Southern California is because the weather is so great. I mean, a big part of it is because it started with surfing, in San Diego and then skating pools and all that but you could skate year round in LA. Here in Dallas, the humidity is kind of medium. So I typically skate at night nowadays, but it does cool off. But yeah, there’s been plenty of times where I got heatstroke because I was skating too much. In fact, I did a video with Ult Apparel and DC shoes about a month ago and I think it was like 105. I did a shoe review video, just like middle of the day because it was the only opportunity to do it and literally, I had so much water with me, fortunately. But I would be sitting in the shade like chugging water and then I would tell the filmer Okay, I think I got three tries at me and I would try a trick like three times and then I would have to go back in the shade and just chug water until I could skate again. So if there’s a will, there’s a way. With skateboarders, we follow concrete for fun, like, if you think about it, skateboarding is not where you get hurt, it’s when you’ll get hurt and the way we view that is, it’s worth it. So it’s just a different type of mindset where for me, that feeling of rolling away from that trick is a higher priority for me than breaking a bone, or getting a heat stroke or pushing myself to the limit.
Norman 16:18
I used to play hockey and you think, Oh, it’s a pretty heavy contact sport and when kids play rugby, oh, pretty heavy contact sport. When I take a look at skateboarding, you don’t think about it at first of how many bones are broken. But like, if you come up in my generation, like skateboarding wasn’t in Canada, wasn’t really around until I would say probably in the 80s, it started to take off in the 90s, and I was already old then. But I mean, you guys have balls. You really do like going out there and like you said, not knowing if it’s going to happen, but when it’s gonna happen. That’s like being a goaltender in hockey, just loving having pucks being shot at you at 50-60 miles an hour.
John 17:19
Yeah right. Well, there’s all sorts of different things like that, right? I mean, there’s things I’m scared of. There’s things I’ve just naturally, this way, for whatever reason and yeah, there’s, yeah, there’s a lot of focus, skateboarding is probably 90% mental when you get to a certain point, because it’s all about scaring yourself, I mean, you have to will yourself to do so that you’re terrified to do and a lot of it has to do with the first try. If you can get that first try under your belt, without dying. Usually, it’s like, Okay, I got this. But sometimes getting yourself to even try that first one, especially a trick that you have to commit to 100%, there’s some tricks that you can kind of feel out, and you can kind of like, okay, just tap the rail or kick out or whatever and then there’s some tricks that man, you just have to, if you don’t 100% commit, you really get hurt and those moments, it’s just such hyper focus and so what I try to do is I try to break down the trick to the most simple components and so what I’ve done, one of my favorite tricks, which is actually the last trick in the STC video, which is a kickflip, backside lipslide around and so essentially, what you do is you approach a rail with your back facing it, so that’s backside. A lipslide is I’m going to use this as an example if that’s okay. So your back is facing it. This is the front wheels, this is the back, you ollie up, your back wheels go over, you slide in the middle, and then you turn back straight. So, I’ll use my key here as my skateboard. This is really getting interesting. So a kickflip backside lipslide is you ollie and you kick flip, you flip the board and then you catch it above the rail. Back trucks go over land in the middle slide and then you trough straight new land. So that’s one of my favorite tricks to do and it’s one that you, there’s no way you can try it halfway and so I’ve been on rails where, if you don’t land that you’re really going to get hurt and so I just break it into the point. I’m like, okay, all I have to do is catch the board above the rail. So my entire focus is just catching the board and then everything else is just auto autopilot. Your body just does it.
Norman 19:51
How do you practice for something like that? Like you can’t just say oh, I’m gonna do this, do the trick. The flip, catch it. How do you train so you don’t do it the first time and you just don’t land on your head or your butt?
John 20:04
It’s a good question. So what I’ll do, explains how that trick works. So what I’ll do sometimes is I’ll just get a lot of good kickflips down. For one, make sure my kickflips are flipping right, I’ll do some backside lipslide on the rail, which is a trick I am very comfortable with. So that tricks are not really very scary for me and then I’ll do some kick flips, just on flat ground where I turn backside. So if the rail was on the ground there, I would do it. Sometimes you might have a smaller rail or ledge that’s nearby that is easier to practice on. But sometimes you don’t and so sometimes you just do a few kick flips on flat ground, turning it and you’re like, Okay, that’s the feel, that’s the way to do it and then you just have to, not hesitate.
Norman 20:54
I do have a skateboarding story and so in my other career, I work on e-commerce, I help people bring brands online. Anyways, one of the brands was a skateboard and it’s a very unique patent pending skateboard that was being made in China and so they were going through the inspection process. So part of the inspection was the skateboard had to go straight. It had to turn right, it had to turn left and it had to bear so much weight. So, it was hilarious because it was custom made in this shop and the inspector had come in, they’re taking video of these Chinese people that were trying to put, like, go on a skateboard for the first time. Try to go straight, try to go to the right track or to the left and then they were sitting on the skateboard with these bundles of wait. It was really hilarious. But all the skateboards pass each inspection they got shipped, but it was pretty funny.
John 21:57
What’s funny is like, my balance works really well on the skateboard going side to side. But if I’m trying to balance going straight, like roller skates are something which I would never wear roller skates to start with. But if I did, hypothetically, or skis, like my balance, I’m not great at balancing straight, like going forward, backwards. But on escape like sideways, right? I mean, I’ve ridden a skateboard longer than I’ve not ridden a skateboard at this point. I’m 37 and I’ve been skating for 26 years. So it just feels so good just standing on the board. I think I remember a friend of mine in high school. He said, John, you look more natural riding a skateboard than you do walking, but you also walk kind of funny.
John 22:48
Like, that’s fair.
Norman 22:49
So you’ve been and I’m wondering, because you’re in a variety of different businesses, you go for it, it seems like you seize the opportunity and does that have anything to do with you having to adapt going back and forth to all these different locations and having to adjust?
John 23:08
It’s a good question. Yeah, if there’s one thing, I think that’s what really helped me is just, I’m not afraid to do things I’ve never done before, not afraid to move across the country with a little way ticket, not knowing anybody, just going for it. I don’t know, I’m kind of a laid back person. So I think that has resulted in helping me quite a bit. Because you can identify an opportunity. You can be in the right place at the right time. But if, unless you go for it, unless you stay dedicated to it and you persevere through the hard times, you won’t be successful in that thing. So I think moving from city to city is actually more the result of that rather than the cause. I think empathy is probably the biggest reason why I’m involved in a lot of different things that might seem disjointed or not connected. I just identify with people really well and I’ve always been able to kind of walk in a room and talk to anybody about anything and I’ve been able to really see things from other people’s perspectives. In fact, actually, there was a moment that really enabled me to be able to do this and I think it’s helped me a ton of seeing things from other people’s perspectives, which is, I had to debate class in college in Community College, Fresno City College shout out, go Rams. I’ve gone to a lot of colleges too by the way, it’s not a point of pride. It’s probably more embarrassing. But I have to shout them all throughout the podcast. But anyway, Fresno City, I had this debate class and we had to debate. I love debate, by the way, but we had to debate a topic that we didn’t believe ourselves and this was really such an eye opener for me. I had to debate that drinking should be legal for 18 year olds. I was arguing to lower the drinking age to 18 and boy, let me tell you, if I could have bought alcohol at 18, it would have been more of a disaster than it was before. But so I don’t believe that. But I was able to frame it. From the standpoint I got on that debate stage and I said, look, we either need to lower the drinking age to 18 or we need to move the legal adult age up to 21. Because how is it that we can send our young men and women to die for our country, we can vote to buy cigarettes, you can legally be married, but you can’t enjoy a drink after any of those activities, and that moment, when you position it that way, that’s hard to argue against, right? Because nobody’s gonna make the legal age 21. But it’s far easier to make the drinking age 18 and so by convincing myself of it enough to argue it to win a debate, it’s just really opened my mind to be able to see things from other people’s perspectives and so, I think business is all about solving needs, and it’s understanding what the other person is trying to accomplish and so when I’m in a boardroom, where whether it’s with executives or whatever, I can put myself in that place, and I can fit in, and I can talk the business talk and I understand that I can connect with them in unique ways. But also, when I’m in the room with gamers or skateboarders, I’m fully at home, and I’m one of that community as well and I can talk the talk and I can enjoy it and I can see things from their perspective and then I can combine those things, and so I think something that’s been successful in my career is being the middleman, be the middleman between two groups of people who can’t talk to each other or don’t understand each other. So whether that be running a design studio and explaining to client’s design process, who have no idea why it’s a big deal, to turn the the color of the logo blue at this stage, but it’s not at this stage, or trying to make something tangible that’s intangible in somebody’s mind, or whether it’s talking to brands and agencies about how the eSports community resonates with brand activations that enhance their experiences and then talking to gamers about why we need to let in the right people to help professionalize the space in ways that help us grow more sustainably and create new monetization models of I’m just kind of comfortable at all, just different spaces and I think it’s unique, I guess that a skateboarder or a gamer loves and understands business and it’s rare that a business person loves and understands gaming or skateboarding. So I’ve kind of been fortunate to find myself in the middle there, through probably empathy.
Norman 28:10
Interesting, because when we were talking to Bob Heere last week, we got on the subject of professionals, different types of professionals and he was talking about great professionals, or when you walk into a room, and you can feel when they’re talking to you, that they’re all about you that they understand you and then you’ve got the other, they might be great. But they’ll never go on to do other things. They might have that sports attitude, the competitiveness, but they don’t have the personal approach that they’re really great professionals can do and it sounds like that’s an attribute that you have.
John 28:55
Well, thank you. I think the other thing is, I’m able to identify certain things. I think when I observe things, whether I’ve read a case study or observing somebody’s behavior, I’m able to pull out of their certain insights. So, one of the things I’ve done for a long time is watching interviews, being around successful people, watching people interact with others. I remember being at a skateboard contest with Rob Dyrdek and he’s really famous guy and the MTV in the skateboarding space and I remember seeing him meet people, meet kids, one on one and this is a guy who, people, they do the maker wish stuff, and it’s like, I want to spend a day with Rob Dyrdek and that really blows him away. It’s super cool. But I noticed how he made a personal connection with every single kid and that’s what I strive to do. That’s what I want to do. I want everybody I come in contact with the field, society places different values on different skills or different positions or different experiences. But I see it all the same way. I think everybody’s designed a certain way, we all have our own gifts that we have naturally and that we develop and some people are behind the scenes, some people are up front. I’m fortunate that just my skill has happened to be more up front, but I could not survive or be efficient, or do what I do well, if I didn’t have people who did the things that I don’t do well, so I tried to focus on that and, I mean, you could totally make somebody’s day, you could save a life, by the way that you interact with somebody. If you think about, just feeling heard is so important, not necessarily solving everybody’s problems, but feeling heard and I just think that’s so important. So what I strive to do is to come into a room, and to get to know people for who they are, not for what your role is. It’s so funny, you go to a conference, and everybody’s wearing these badges, and all the business professionals are looking each other up and down, you meet eyes, and then you look down at the tag, see you’ve got all these dudes who are like, look like they’re checking each other out. It’s kind of funny. Like, is that person’s role, or title worth me introducing myself, and it’s just the worst feeling in the world when somebody looks you up and down and then walks away. You’re like.
Norman 31:42
Hey, that’s the story of my high school life.
John 31:47
Yeah, so. But no, I hope I do that to people that I meet. But what I’ve seen people who are successful, the thing that’s blown me away the most, I’ve had the opportunity to meet a few billionaires and what I’ve noticed is a level of humility, and a lot of listening and admittedly, I’m a talker, I’m working on talking less and listening more. But it’s really, that’s really surprised me, like when I’ve seen like, super successful people, you have like, kind of semi who are, maybe talking a mile a minute. But I think that like the Uber successful people, they listen more than they talk, they ask more questions than they have answers for.
Norman 32:37
We’ve had a few billionaires on the podcast, and they haven’t been published yet. But they’ll be coming out shortly and what you just said, sums up everyone that I met. I’m sure it goes from one, it does a whole 180. But two or three that we’ve had on, we’re exactly like that. They were very humble. They didn’t talk about themselves. They talked about their team, nothing went on to them. It was always either it was we, that’s what I’ve noticed. There was never an I. It was always we, they always went back to their team and each one of them has been extremely, just extremely humble.
John 33:20
Yeah, I think I’ve been learning a lot about leadership recently, with the eSports Trade Association, being the president of the now the chairman, has really thrust me into a position to lead. I think I’ve always kind of found myself in places of leadership, just kind of naturally. So I think there’s some that’s kind of my natural lane. But the more you lead, learn about leadership, a book I’m reading right now, Developing the Leader Within You 2.0 by John Maxwell, highly recommend it and leadership, true leadership is self sacrificing. It’s servanthood. I know we’ve all seen that picture of like, oh, the leader who’s like whipping the people and the leader who’s like pulling with the people or whatever. I think that’s pretty accurate. But leadership is there’s these tiers of leadership that John Maxwell talks about, and there’s, it’s like getting results is a certain level and then it’s investing in others, where you get to a point where in your leadership, you’re making other leaders, which I’m really interested in helping to do and then ultimately, it’s like a level five leader, it’s like Jack Welch, and like some of these like, super unique guys, where you’re just like, top of the top and who knows if that’s my future or not. But it’s been so interesting to learn about leadership and a lot of people want what they think comes from leadership. But what really comes from leadership is headaches. It falls on you, you’re the one to approve it, you’re the buck stops here sort of a thing. But yeah, leadership is when you understand true leadership, it’s really humbling, because it requires a lot and if you’re going to do it well, you have to put everybody else before yourself.
Norman 35:27
It is an art form, isn’t it?
John 35:29
It sure is and it’s something that can be developed, it’s a skill. I think the greatest leaders have that talent to a point. But you have to work to develop that. So I’ve been very fortunate, I’ve had people who are helping me develop this, and it’s just like a coach in sports, right? Like somebody’s watching you play, you might have great talent as a basketball player, but somebody watching you and telling you to keep your elbow in, keep the follow through, jump off your left foot when you’re laying it up on the right hand side, sort of a thing. Use these fundamentals and so to learn those things from a leadership from a business standpoint, has really been very valuable for me.
Norman 36:15
You worked with a mentor?
John 36:17
Yeah, I am right now. I was, to be honest, I was always very skeptical of coaching. I never really had anybody in my life, who was a great mentor for me. My brother, but that was more of a peer thing, and actually, I didn’t grow up, I was going to mention this was kind of a unique thing is I didn’t grow up with anybody in my family, been in business. Everybody in my family were teachers. So my mom was a teacher, my aunts were teachers, my grandparents were teachers, my dad worked at a factory in our small town and so, we didn’t have a lot of business in my town. It wasn’t until I moved to Washington, DC at age 24. I think it was 23,24,23 that I had my eyes open to that. But I was pretty skeptical of coaches and all this stuff. Because I think sometimes you have people who can’t do it themselves, they try to go into teaching, which, that’s not a criticism of everybody. But that’s true for some. But I connected with somebody who’s really amazing and it has just been incredibly beneficial. So she knows who she is, so.
Norman 37:34
One other thing that I always heard from every single person that’s been on here is resilience.
John 37:42
Oh, absolutely.
Norman 37:44
You got to have resilience to be successful.
John 37:46
You do. In fact, I always use this quote, one of my favorite quotes, I’m not sure who it’s attributed to. But it is “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity” and I always say success is when luck meets perseverance. Because I’ve had, I’ve seized an opportunity, I’ve been prepared. But a lot of times when you do that, when you stretch yourself, when you go and you do something you’ve never done or something that’s on the edge of your experience, or the edge of your capabilities up to that point in your life. It’s hard. I mean, I can tell you, I’ve had many lonely days and nights when I moved across the country, to a city that I didn’t know anybody. I’ve had moments in cubicles where I physically felt paralyzed, and just overcome with stress. Because I had no idea what the next steps were for me to do my job that I just talked myself into getting this position. But when you don’t give up, and you’re willing to work through that, and failure is not an option and I think part of it comes from skateboarding, taking the slams, to get to the feeling that you want to have. If you can work through that difficulty, that uncomfort and that pain, sometimes depression. You’ll go far, but a lot, I don’t think, I think a lot of people aren’t willing to go as far as they need to, to develop, or to take it to the next level. I think a lot of people give up too early and so there’s one thing that I’ve reminded myself, I mean, I remember multiple times driving to work at a very tough job, and have it all sorts of things go down by life and thinking it can’t get much worse than this and that was encouraging to me. I was like, Oh my gosh, if it’s this bad, it can’t get much worse, and that means it’s about to get better. So, I think that the mindset of, can you flip? I think optimism has been something that’s really helped me, I think I tend to see things very glass half full and I used to see things a little two glass half full, where I only recognize the positives, and I dismissed all the negatives. But I try to be a little more balanced. But yeah, I think seeing the silver lining, in fact, I’ll say this is one thing I’ve really been working on the last year is recognizing the situations that you’re in, and the unique pros and cons that you’re in. If your current situation, I’m a big believer in seasons of life, actually. Seasons of life, you can have this can be professionally, or it can be personally right and so you could be single right now, or you can be married and everybody who’s watching this has been single or married knows there’s different pros and cons to be single or married, right? Like, you can be single, and you have a lot of free time. But you don’t have a partner who you’re doing life with and all the benefits that come with that. You could be married and you have that partner and the things but you have responsibilities, you don’t have the freedom you have the time and you can then take those things, and you can attribute them to what is your current job, right? Or what’s your current situation, this that the other? So I’m a big believer in taking a realistic look at your current situation, realizing that it’s temporary, not permanent and understanding what are the unique positives about this and so you recognize those, and then you find ways to maximize those. So you leverage those, those positives of your current situation to the max, as long as you’re in that season of life, to set you up for the next season of life. Does that make any sense?
Norman 41:54
It does, and I’ve never thought of it that way.
John 41:57
Yeah, so I’ll give you an example, not to get too personal here, but I’m single. So my job with PRG requires me to travel a ton and so not a ton, but more than other jobs, you could say. But my point, what I looked at in that situation, and a lot of friends are like John, you become a workaholic, you’re always traveling. Are you concerned, blah, blah, blah and I said, Man, this is a unique opportunity by life, where it’s okay for me to travel. Right? I may not, I do love traveling, by the way. But there’s some things that are kind of bummers, but a good thing. There’s nobody at home right now, who’s missing me. Does that make sense and that can be kind of a bummer. But at the same time, rather than being frustrated or stressed or depressed about that, why don’t I leverage this moment where, let me do as much as I can, let me travel as much as I can, let me accomplish as much as I can now, when I don’t have somebody asking me when I’m coming home. So that I can be in a place where I can work on my own terms and I can travel less when I am in a situation where I have other responsibilities at home. Does that make sense?
Norman 43:15
It does.
John 43:17
Yeah and so I think that’s true of anything. I think that’s true Coronavirus, like, I mean, I would just like to encourage everybody on here. Your situation, whether you’re still working, whether you’re furloughed, whether you’re working at home, whether you have to go to office, whatever, there are benefits of that, that are unique, that when Coronavirus is over are going to be different. You’re going to have different pros and different cons. So how can you look at your current situation regarding what you’re doing and say how can I set myself up better. So my next season of life is better in XYZ ways than it is currently.
Hayden 43:58
Just extend that a little too, for some reason the thought came to me, you can also kind of take that approach with the activities in your day where like, yes, you could spend an hour scrolling through Facebook or something like that and sure, you might connect with a few more friends, or see something that you missed. But you could also take the time to read a book or practice an instrument or learn a language or something and those will have their own pros as well and you can also maybe check in with yourself like how do you feel after doing those activities and what will propel you forward more? I’m not sure if you do that with your schedule or Yeah.
John 44:37
Yeah, I am a work in progress. Big time. So yeah, I try to figure out what works best for me. But, you mentioned those things and I think there’s enough time, maybe not in the day, but in the week, you could say to do all of those things. I don’t think that practicing or reading or learning a new language have to mean you don’t connect with people. But what I’ve tried to realize is I’m the type of person well, I hate getting up early in the morning, but I work best in the morning. Because I need urgency. Even back when I was in college, I would rather, rather than have an all night to write a paper, where I really did have like a deadline, I’d rather go to bed early to wake up at 5am and have to have it done by nine, to turn it in. So that’s how I work. So I’ve identified Okay, John, I’m not the type of person who can work all the time, I definitely need a break, right? So, if I can get up early in the morning, and just get into the zone with my coffee, maybe make an omelet with avocado in there, cheese. So if I can do that, then I will accomplish enough and then I have my meetings throughout the day, right and then it’s up to me to take good notes and to stay organized to understand what needs to be accomplished and how to prioritize. But then later at night, when I want to sit on my phone and watch YouTube skateboarding videos, or watch the basketball game or be on LinkedIn, or Twitter or whatever, or just text my friends, I can do that without sacrificing what I want to accomplish that day or that week. Does that make sense?
Hayden 46:21
Yeah. Definitely.
John 46:23
So I don’t do that perfectly all the time, of course, but it’s something kind of newer in my life that I’ve been trying to figure out like, what is that schedule for you? Everybody’s different. So for somebody, it might be like, No, you have dinner with the family or whatever, you put the kids to bed and then like you craic, like until like midnight, or whatever. But for me, I’m not most productive that way. I’m more productive if I hit it harder in the morning, and then let the day go from there.
Norman 46:52
How did you handle stress? When you’re in a competition, maybe it wasn’t going well? Maybe you were sick? Maybe you were depressed? Like you said, I love talking to athletes about how they handled it at that time. If you were stressed out, how would you bring your stress level down to compete at your optimal?
John 47:14
Yeah, I’ve competed in a number of things. I used to win these free throw tournaments. When I was in elementary school, I met these large metal trophies. One of them broke my foot one time when I was sleepwalking. That’s another story for you. But I always, have you ever heard of the game I never where you got to like, say I’ve never done this. I’ve never done that and like I always lose it that game. Because somebody could say I’ve never broken my foot sleepwalking, like Dang. Going for the finger down for that one. Anyway, yeah. So I don’t know. Well, one thing is, I’m the type of person, it’s a curse and a blessing. I play up to my competition, and I play up to the moment. So I’m really at my best in those moments, that’s when I thrive. But I need those moments to bring me up to my full potential, if that makes sense. So the downside to that attribute is when things are chill, or, things aren’t challenging, I actually perform poorly and then when things are more challenging, but it’s the moment or I’m on the stage, or I’m in front of the crowd. I just like hit another gear and that’s true in business and speaking, in skateboarding. Like when the camera comes out, when I’m skateboarding, it might sound funny to non skateboarders. But if I’m just skating around, doing whatever, but the camera comes out or some people roll up to the skate park or there’s a crowd. It’s just like a switch flips in my head. It’s like it’s on. So I don’t know that I can give as much advice on that from like, how you do it. I will actually, attributed to Simon Sinek, who is amazing. This is actually something I’ve done that works. Because what’s funny about public speaking, I get super nervous every single time. But what I do is I basically put myself in the position of being an actor, and I just act like I am this successful public speaker while I’m on stage giving the speech. It works. Simon Sinek has this thing. It’s called Nervous versus Excited and I might screw this up a little bit, but what he said is nervousness and excited have the very same symptoms. Nervous, raised heartbeat, right? Clammy skin. There’s probably a couple others. Excited, same symptoms. But you just feel differently about it right and so he says, you say audibly, you say out loud yourself. I’m not nervous, I’m excited and it works, it’s amazing, actually. So I would challenge anybody in something that like you’re going to speak in front of a room or you got a big presentation or whatever. Before that, say to yourself out loud, “I’m not nervous. I’m excited” and it is a perspective shift. It’s amazing.
Norman 50:25
I usually take what is it Hayden? I get stage fright. What’s the name of that?
Hayden 50:30
Heroine?
Norman 50:31
Polly something. I just crawl up in the fetal position.
John 50:35
Yeah, that works too.
Hayden 50:40
Yeah, actually, I mean, I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but as a performer, I’ve had a career as a sideman musician. So I didn’t really have to speak on the mic ever. But recently, I’ve been performing my own projects and moved up into like a leader position in front of a band and audience and yeah, I came across like similar issues where like, I’d be so nervous and tripped over my words and like, I’m listening to like a monitor and like, I’m hearing my own voice and it just tripped me out so much. But I think, in my own way, I kind of almost picture it like, no, this is actually like a fun experience. I have this opportunity to just say whatever I want to this room of people and they have to listen to it.
Norman 51:25
Which you do.
Hayden 51:26
Which I do, just now it’s more of like a fun, almost like a playground on stage, rather than like this restrictive.
John 51:35
The more you do it, right, like, I think one thing that’s crazy. My voice sounds so weird to me when I hear it, like on a microphone or a podcast. Yes, but yeah, so the more you do it, like when you’re used to hearing your voice on a microphone, it doesn’t trip you out anymore. When you’re used to stand in front of a stage, you don’t go blind, or you don’t go autopilot, so I think there’s comfort in putting yourself in those situations. There’s also something to like, I think it’s like a sensory overload type of way of looking at things is when you put yourself in more challenging situations or more severe situations, and then you pull that back, right, then you’re super comfortable. So if you put yourself in a lot of crazy situations where it’s like, I’m gonna go play, I can only imagine I’m not a musician, but I can say if I was, so that sounds crazy to me, it was go play my guitar on the street corner, right? Like that would be really putting yourself out there. So if you do that a number of times, and then you go to the stage where it’s not as weird. Because you actually should be there. It pulls it back and so you’ve desensitized yourself, like to away like at this, like, real high level. So when you come back, you’re like, Oh, this is easy. Yeah, in skateboarding, when you skate really big stuff, like really big rails or stairs or something, then you skate smaller stuff and it’s super easy if you always skate big stuff. So it’s a similar thing, you just acclimate to an extreme experience and then less extreme experiences are just far more comfortable.
Hayden 53:26
Hey there guys and girls. That concludes part one of our three part interview with John Davidson. Make sure to tune in next time to hear John walk us through more of his life story and he peppers the whole thing with so many actual tips, you definitely don’t want to miss it. Also, time’s running out to check out our Halloween giveaway, check out the link in the description, and it’ll take you through the rest of the steps. As always, make sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really helps you stay in the know and helps us grow the show. That’s it for me and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:03
Hey there, guys and gals, welcome to part two of our episode with John Davidson. If you haven’t heard part one yet, make sure to go back to the first part and give that a listen. As always make sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Hayden 0:17
Now for the rest of the episode.
Norman 0:25
So right now, while we’re recording this podcast, we’re still in the middle of COVID and COVID has changed so many lives and I’m looking at, you’ve had so many different career changes.
John 0:42
Almost too many, frown on that edge.
Norman 00:44
There was a recent study that just showed, Hayden was talking about being a musician. Well, 60% of all professional musicians in Canada have to make a career change and is there any advice you can give to people that are going to have to make this change? They have no other choice?
John 1:05
Yeah, well, it’s challenging for different people in different stages of life. I think back, I worked at Starbucks when I was in college and I think Starbucks is open. But there’s probably just a waiter, or something like that and I didn’t have any experience or skills yet, I would really be in a tough spot, right?
John 1:28
So for people like that, if you don’t have any experience, what I would say is find ways to gain experience during this time. Find ways to develop new skills. Connect with somebody who needs some sort of help from you. I always tell young people, you know more about what you know more than you realize, because the dirty little secret, especially in gaming and eSports is, older business professionals just do not understand the gaming community.
John 2:04
Young people talking to you, you don’t know how much you know, because it’s so organic, because it’s just you. A really eye popping moment, which actually encouraged me to switch my major in college from welding to business. The skate shop I used to skate for when I was 18. I went, I always wanted to work there. They never hired me because I was a sponsored rider. So it was a conflict of interest. But one day I went in there, they were too busy and the girls who worked there, they’re like, John, can you go back to the skateboard wall and just help people right, like, get skateboards, help them pick up skateboards? I had no idea before that moment how much I knew about skateboarding products and skateboards are really intricate. In fact, I’ll grab this one behind me here real quick.
John 2:58
This helps at all. This is my like, ultimate board, Jeremy Ray, if you can see that. Jeremy Ray was my idol growing up and I got this in 2002. But so a skateboard, seven plies of maple, Canadian maple wood seven plies, this board is probably a 7.75. As far as 7.75 inches wide. Like an eighth of an inch on the skateboard makes the biggest difference. The trucks are different alloys of metal, some are lighter for technical skating, some are heavier for grinds and pull skating. There’s different shapes and mixtures of urethane for wheels, different grip tape based on your preference and so skateboard is so nuanced and with all these products, and I had no idea until I started selling it, that I knew it and it made me fall in love with business and I went to my college counselor the next day and switched all my classes from welding to business. So that was definitely a fork in the road. But what I would relate that to young people is, you know so much about the activities and about the communities that you’re a part of that other people don’t know. A good friend of mine, when I worked at gamestop said, Nobody knows your common sense. Which I need to remind myself of all the time, because I always tend to think everybody knows what I know. So I have trouble explaining stuff sometimes because I’m thinking everybody’s with me, the foundational part of it or whatever. or seeing the vision. Young people, what you can do is I would encourage you to connect with an experienced professional on LinkedIn, and just hit them up and say, Look, I’m involved in these activities. I’m looking to gain experience to help me get started in my career. Is there any way? Are you interested in any of these that would help you from a business perspective to understand the sentiment sentiment or the things that we love in this community and if so, I’d love to have coffee with you, my treat, and that I would love to learn, listen to learn from you anything you’d like to share. Man, if you do that, that’s going to be so beneficial for both parties. Then I would also encourage professionals to reach out to young people, I have like a handful of college kids that I stay in touch with. I help them with their projects, I give them insights, and I just, they help me stay cool. Because they tell me what they love, what they hate, what’s cool, what’s wack all these things. So yeah, I think that’s something that young people and old people can do. I think the other thing too, is to understand where the market has shifted. Because I do think I personally believe events will come back much more similarly to what they’ve been before that a lot of people do. The reason I think that is nobody’s respecting the regulations of COVID during the pandemic, so why will they afterwards, right? But I do think there’s gonna be leaps in experiential marketing, digital marketing, all these brands right now who their only choice is to do digital marketing and have stayed away from it. They’re becoming comfortable with it right now, as they have to do it. They’re getting case studies. They’re becoming familiar with the benefits of it. So that’s definitely going to take a leap. But, evaluate where everything is going. Evaluate your skill set, what you can provide, and I’ve been doing this myself, too. I’ve said, hey, how can I come out of Coronavirus stronger than I went in and for me, one of the things that I did is I said, Let me get on every single podcast that I can.
John 6:43
Here we are. So if you go to my LinkedIn page, I have like all the media and interviews that I’ve done for Coronavirus, and I think I’ve probably done, I don’t know, probably 15 podcasts. I’ve done a handful of interviews with shoe companies, done a couple collaborations.
Norman 7:04
Why shoe companies?
John 7:06
Because I love shoes. Yeah, shoes are super tied into skateboarding as well. Your shoe makes a huge difference. But there’s two companies I’ve worked with. DropLabs is one of them. So DropLabs is a haptic technology company where you can feel the beat of music or gaming in the shoe of the foot while you’re wearing it, while you’re playing games you’ll hear music.
Norman 7:29
You can feel the beat?
John 7:32
Yeah, it’s incredible.
Norman 7:34
That’s pretty cool.
John 7:36
Yeah, so I did an interview with them, I’m helping them with that kind of their approach into eSports and stuff like that, which I love doing. They sent me some free shoes, they did an interview with me. We kind of call it even at that point, until bigger opportunities come across and then the other one was with my favorite brand ultra peril. They did a collaboration with DC shoes. I have a lot of love for DC as a skateboarder and so I was part of the marketing effort with a shoe review video and they sent me some shoes I put together and edit, they put it up to their marketing channels. So kind of a win win for both of us, if you will and then also, launching my own personal brand, is what I’m really excited about. I did not go into Coronavirus with any thought of launching my own brand and two weeks ago, I had no thought of doing this.
John 8:32
So to do this, to be encouraged, to have those around me who support me to see the potential, and then to open my mind to it and then they get excited myself is something I’m really excited to start rolling up.
Norman 8:47
So if you were to take a look at yourself when you were younger, and you can give some advice to your younger self. What would you say?
John 8:58
Oh, man.
John 8:59
That’s a great question. Because I feel like I’ve done so many things that if I knew what the result of it was, I wouldn’t have done it.
John 9:10
Like, if I knew how hard it would have been, I wouldn’t have pursued it. I think part of the benefit of what I’ve done is that because I’m an optimistic glass half full guy, I’ve pursued opportunities that I didn’t think would be as hard as it was, but that I stuck with it when I was in the midst of the hardship, if that makes sense. So I’ve benefited as a result of doing those things. But had I known ahead of time, I wouldn’t have done it. So it’s a hard standpoint, from that I would probably tell myself, you know what I would tell myself? I would tell my 17 year old self, Hey, when you go to that skateboard contest, that you’re not skating in very well and you chose not Ollie the fence out of the skate park during warmups so that you would surprise everybody when you did it in the contest, when you have a herd ankle, and you’re approaching that fence, and you know you’re going too slow, don’t try to Ollie anyway.
John 10:12
Because you will break your back, which happened to be. I broke my back when I was 17. So that was definitely a perspective shift. But maybe it kept me from a professional skateboarding career that would have gone farther and held me back in business. So ultimately, you can have those things that you wish you’d never went through. But life is, 10% what happens to you, 90% on how you respond. So I can’t go back and wish these things were different.
Hayden 10:46
Hey, there, guys and gals, we’ve got a special announcement for you. Since Halloween is upon us, we thought we would do a Halloween giveaway. Because Halloween is the official holiday of I Know This Guy. All you have to do is click the link in the podcast description, fill out a short survey, and you’ll be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card to buy all those Halloween snacks for yourself. That’s enough for me and now for the rest of the episode.
Norman 11:24
Well, you talked a little bit about DLC Davidson Learning Company. So I want you to talk a little bit about that.
John 11:33
Well, thank you, this is my first time actually talking about it. So I’m still getting the elevator pitch down and everything. But the vibe around DLC, Davidson Learning Company, what I really love to do is I love to help people. There’s a variety of ways to do that. I love to help people whether it’s a kind word, or it’s helping a friend move from one apartment to another, whether it’s how it takes form in business, through the eSports trade association is helping our industry improve our business practices to have more sustainable growth, better monetization, but more tournaments, more of what we gamers love. Other ways in businesses, helping brands engage with youth in a way that helps them which drives results, but also through tactics that can enhance experiences of communities and because I loved doing those things, and my experiences really in youth marketing with an emphasis in eSports, gaming and skateboarding, I just I didn’t see the opportunity to be honest with you, other people around me saw the opportunity and they said, John, you’re really well set up to do this and so a little coaching, a little confidence building, and I decided to do it. So with Davidson Learning Company, the word learning there is key, because learning is what I provide. So I’m providing learnings on youth marketing, through content, public speaking and consulting and what we do is we add value to communities by enhancing experiences through meaningful brand partnerships that drive results. So I’m going to be creating a bunch of content, I’m gonna start my own podcast, I’m going to be talking with agencies brands of how they can engage. I’m going to be kind of open for business from the standpoint of speaking. So I’ve done that a little bit. I’ve done keynotes, I’ve done a TED talk. I speak in a lot of different colleges around the country and things like that and so I’m just excited to turn that little bit more into a business and hopefully the things that I’ve experienced and the insights that I gained along the way can be valuable to other people and it’s something that helps everybody. The reason I chose the name DLC was, I want to have a focus on youth marketing, but a tie to gaming and so DLC stands for downloadable content, for people who don’t know about gaming DLC is currency within the game. So like if you’re in Fortnite, V-bucks or DLC and so I love that tie in of adding value. When I started to develop a name for it, I came back to the word of value, right? Because I want to add value to experiences. I want to add value to audiences who hear me speak. I want to add value to brands who bring me on to help them develop a strategy, right? I was thinking about the gaming context. I was like, oh, DLC is gaming value, it’s gaming currency and so the slogan for DLC is currency for the game of business, which I’m hyped on and instead the logo which people will be seeing roll it out to has an arrow down, the downloading symbol, combined with DLC. In fact, I’ll pull it up on my phone if you want to see it. First time ever.
Norman 14:39
That’s pretty cool. I like it. I really like that logo.
John 14:46
Thank you. I’m really super hyped on it. Had a fellow skateboarder who helped me pull it together and so it’s fun to work with skateboarders. Steve, shout out, hire him up. Hire him for your branding, logo designs, pay him lots of money.
John 15:04
So yeah, I’m really excited and I think it’s going to be cool. There’s something that happens, I always, you referred to being a serial entrepreneur before and I really don’t see myself as that at all. I see myself as driven and ambitious. But I see myself as semi entrepreneurial. I’ve never done my own thing by myself before. I’ve been the number two guy. I’ve earned some experience in leadership with ESCA eSports trade association. But there’s a ton of, there’s a team there, that helps me and I help them. But it’s pretty cool. I want to encourage people who haven’t thought about doing their own thing, definitely consider it because there’s a switch that definitely flips when you’re doing your own thing. Where all of a sudden, it’s like, yeah, let’s get it. Like, I’m really hyped to get this going and another thing I realized, too, I heard Gary Vaynerchuk say this, he said something about “Don’t waste time on trying to convince people who don’t get it.”
Norman 16:10
That’s such a good quote.
John 16:13
Right, I mean, how much time are we trying to explain to people who don’t get it and he said, anytime you’re spending with somebody who doesn’t get it is time you could be spending with someone who does get it, and you’re making that sale and you’re moving forward, right? So bringing that back around, when you think about when you’re working in a job, a lot of what you can accomplish is not your decision. You have one boss that you can convince or not right? Sometimes we have bosses that are awesome, that we’re able to convince of all kinds of cool stuff we want to do. Or sometimes you have a boss who doesn’t get it and your only option through your employment is to work for somebody who doesn’t get it and it’s terribly frustrating. I’ve worked for a number of people who don’t get it. But think about this, If working for somebody else, you have one person who either they get it or they don’t, right? But if you work for yourself, now you have your choice of the market that’s available to you to find the people who get it and so instead of being funneled, everything that’s funneled through whether business priorities from the C suite, or your managers focus, who doesn’t have experience that you have, so they don’t see the vision that you have. Move that over to the side and invest and believe in yourself and now you have more of an opportunity. I mean, what I’m thinking about is all the cool ideas I’ve had for just cool stuff I want to do, now I can do it, because I just have to decide to do it and then I have to manufacture it. Whether that’s a campaign idea, whether that’s a T shirt, whether that’s a hat, whether that’s a logo, animation, whether that’s a talk I want to do or a podcast, I want to have a theme I want to have an episode on, like, there’s so much freedom and encouragement just to say, Whoa, all of a sudden, whatever I want to do, I can do it and I get too excited.
Norman 18:23
On that point, so many people are afraid of doing it on their own, they may not have done it before. So how do I do it? Well, work with your passion, all the other stuff, you don’t have to be the expert in accounting, or the marketer or the branding person or there are experts out there that you can hire on Upwork, FreeUp, you can get good people that can help you as you progress. You don’t have to be the expert in everything. But now is the time like, to get that, to go out there, find a course, do some reading and just do it. There’s no better time than right now.
John 19:06
Yeah, I’ll tell you what. I just humbly and transparently am here as not somebody who has it figured out or I’m not this super entrepreneurial dude who’s like not afraid and going for it. I’m terrified of not being able to make ends meet. Like today, I have no revenue and I talked to a lot of people about this decision and I thought to myself, I said, I have a window of time, I have a little bit of savings. I have a window of time where I can try and I don’t do this as a either or, or either. This is not I have to leave PRG to do this. This is not I can’t work for somebody for a company and do this or it might be that I just do this full time at some point, right?
John 20:00
But I struggled with that a lot too, what you were saying about not knowing how to do everything. There’s many things. I don’t know how to do that I’m thinking, Oh my gosh, if somebody brings me on for a consulting contract, like, how am I going to report the results back to him? Right? Like, I can figure that out. But today, I don’t have the tools, I don’t have the knowledge. Well, guess what? I have a tremendous network and I have people I can partner with for those things and I love to partner with people. I’m a big fan of collaboration and I’m a big believer that you can do more together than you can apart and so I would say think about that, too. This is an opportunity for everybody to get very entrepreneurial, to understand everybody sitting at home, and everybody doesn’t know how to do everything. So if you’re an accountant, think about this. If you’re an accountant, and you have been furloughed, and you’re not a super entrepreneurial person, accounting isn’t like a real B to C thing. But know this, every single person like myself, who’s out there, who’s maybe has expertise in marketing or speaking or whatever, I guarantee you their expertise is not in accounting.
John 21:19
So here’s a kind of action step for you. Go on LinkedIn, if your expertise is in a supporting role, let’s say accounting, what would be some other? Let’s have a conversation about this. What are some other supporting roles? I’m trying to think.
Norman 21:34
All right, well, I’m looking at marketing, you’ve got Oh, geez, Google advertising, social media.
Norman 21:44
Geez, if you’re doing let’s say you want to get into eCommerce, there’s so many other supporting roles. There’s people that know how to do an Amazon Optimized listing, your photography, your video. Yeah. So there’s a lot of different components that make up the business as a whole.
John 22:05
Absolutely. That’s very well said. So what I’ll say is, there’s not many people who have the willingness or the interest to do public speaking, right? It’s like, most people are terrified of it, whatever. So there’s, let’s say, I think by that we can take away, there’s a small group of people who are public speakers or public personalities. But they’re kind of like put on this platform, right? I think we look at those people and we think those people know how to do everything and sometimes you know how to talk about something and teach it, even when you don’t know how to do it, as well even. So, maybe an action step for people who understand marketing, understand SEO, understand how to write contracts, tax firms, all these supporting disciplines. Find people who you look up to on LinkedIn, who are these more public facing personalities, connect with them and send them a note about how you can collaborate as an independent contractor. They don’t have to hire you on, they pay you on an hourly project basis and you do this, connect with 10 different people, and just see what happens and what you might find out is that you today might be an accountant sitting at home furloughed because your company can’t afford to keep you on the payroll and tomorrow, or a week from now or a month from now you have your own accounting business, because you’re supporting all these people like myself, who have certain skills that are complementary to yours, but their weakness is your strike.
Norman 23:41
You got me thinking about something. John, have you ever heard of dynamic equity?
John 23:48
Dynamic equity? I’m not.
Norman 23:51
It’s really cool. Somebody brought to my attention, I did some reading on it. There’s some books out there very simple, small books about dynamic equity and doing what you just said, is perfect for this. So dynamic equity is getting a group of people that have the idea, the person, the entrepreneur with the passion that has the insight on what he wants there, or she wants to sell. Then you’ve got all these other people, what you do is you give them an hourly rate, okay, whatever that would be and everybody works to build this company, but nobody gets paid. At the end, when the company is launched, and everything is out there, and you’ve got a solid company, the company gives an evaluation, and then you pay everybody for the hours based on the time that they put in, and you can create Yeah, it’s a great concept.
John 24:50
We’re moving this economy more and more all the time. It’s like the gig economy, right? It’s like Uber is a great example. But we’re getting more and more away from a company, like a big company that employs a bunch of people and we’re going much more towards individual contractors. It’s expensive to hire somebody and it’s hard to hire the right person, and you hire the wrong person, you gotta do it all over again, after going through all the heartache and the headache, and the money to have the wrong person on for a short time. It’s so easy for a company to hire you as an independent contractor. Because guess what? They don’t have to pay your payroll taxes, they don’t have to pay your insurance and also, you don’t have to work unless you want to, you know what I mean? Like, I might have somebody who wants to give me like, maybe, let’s say I had a deal with an agency, this is just an example, a deal with an agency to connect them with brands, right, and maybe I get a referral or I get a commission. I would be much more required to sell if I was their employee, because I would then have a quota or I get fired, right? But if you’re an independent contractor, you don’t have to do that, because it doesn’t hurt them when you don’t sell and so that makes it easier for them to take a chance on you. Now, I would urge you to sell.
John 26:25
But also if you do that, and you develop a number of complimentary independent contractor situations, you’ve now rounded out a number of different avenues, where you’re the point person, and anybody who connects with you, you can now help them connect in the right way but you’re the filter. Does that make sense? Yeah. Now what we’re also seeing in this economy, we’re seeing a lot of the middlemen go away because of the Internet, and that would arguably be a middleman thing. But to avoid that being solely middleman stuff, you need to identify what is the benefit that you add to that, in addition to just being the middleman. So for somebody like myself, I would say, Okay, I might not have hard skills in, let’s say, tracking all the marketing from a campaign. But what I do have skills in is unique insights and building the strategy in a way that connects with the audience you’re trying to reach. Now, let me bring in my friend who does the tracking, right, who now has me as an independent contractor. Oh, guess what? We need videography, we need photography for this campaign? I have friends who do that too, right? All the sudden, you’re pulling together teams of independent contractors of your network to solve unique challenges and that’s how I kind of see the world and what I’m hoping to work on an establishment DLC.
Norman 27:56
Yeah and it’s so important to establish a really great network, people. So many people sort of push that off to the side, they think about every sale, it’s everything. Yeah.
John 28:10
Hundred percent. Yeah, I’ll tell you this story. I’ve been so blessed to the network and a lot of it had to do with my time at gamestop. I had a fancy title for a big company, had a lot of people wanting money from me.
John 28:22
So, seasons a life leverage maximize the opportunity, right? So you build a network. Now, obviously, I had to add value to that network to keep them. You can get them but how do you retain that network? Right, the way you retain a network is by consistently adding value, so that they are better off connected with you regularly than if they did not right. I really had an eye opening situation when I got my job at PRG. It was really just such an amazing thing and I remember somebody told me it was actually Jason, like from complexity gaming. We’re sitting at a table at the Tempest Award in Las Vegas, and it was right after I got this job and he said, Dude, how did you get that job that fast? That’s something you have to know somebody to get, and It dawned on me, I said, Yes. I didn’t know somebody. In fact, the person who pitched the role was happy at their current company, and they recommended me so I got the Surefire, like, the HOV Lane to the interview, and I got it. Now, of course, I had to smash the interview and everything, but knowing people, everything comes down to relationships in business. It’s for a variety of reasons. One is just knowing, hey, like I’m so thankful at the position I met with my network. I feel like I don’t know someone, I know the person who does. So that’s like, a super cool place to be in. But the other thing is like you do jobs, you do work with people you know, and I always say this is a big part of business most of business comes down to are you cool to hang out with?
John 30:06
Like, because at a certain level, everybody’s talented, right? At a certain level, everybody’s got expertise, they got a skill. But Hayden, if I am locked in a room for a weekend with you because we have to hit a deadline. First of all, hopefully, you’re funny, that would be about it.
Hayden 30:24
I try really hard.
John 30:26
Yeah, that’s a skill that can be developed. But, you think about if we’re stuck together in a room for a weekend, or let’s say we’re doing a startup, but we work in a spare room for a year together, which I’ve done with somebody too. How well do you get along with each other? Are you cool? When things aren’t the best? When things aren’t ideal? When a deal, what if we do a deal to see other Hayden, and it’s not going the right way? Or I’m not receiving the ROI that was promised? Or you’re not or whatever? Can we come together with a solution based conversation? Or is one of us just gonna yell at the other and we’re gonna explode, right? Like, ultimately, a lot of things come down to, are you cool to hang out with, and then obviously have to deliver results, if people like to be around you, and you have a servant minded focus of putting others before yourself, and you’re a hard worker, I really think you’re unstoppable.
Norman 31:29
I’ve been in those situations where you are locked in a room or you’re working with somebody over a period of time and you might have a good relationship. I feel that people attract each other with this, for the most part with the same attitude or personality. But what I’ve found is you really get to know a person once there’s stress, greed, fear.
Norman 32:01
Then you have to sit back and go, Okay, this guy’s just turned into the most complete jerk on Earth. They did this, they screwed you over over here. That’s something I’ve seen in business, too. I’ve had incredible business partners, we’re great friends today and then I’ve had people that Oh my God, I could tell you stories.
John 32:24
Yeah. It’s unfortunate. Business can tear apart friendship,and it’s sad but that’s reality.
Norman 32:34
I mean, you gotta move on. That’s the resilience, John.
John 32:40
That’s right. Yeah, you need to, there’s a lot to be able to move on, I’m not great at this, this is something I’m working on too. But just like to let the past be the past, like, whether somebody has hurt you whether you’ve hurt somebody, whatever, like do the work to make it right. But at a certain point, you’ve paid for it. At a certain point, you’re only hurting yourself by holding on to that situation and even so, too, like if somebody has hurt you, I’m a big believer in forgiveness. I’ve been forgiven for many things and so I say, How can I be forgiven not forgive, right? Yeah, I think one of my favorite quotes on forgiveness is “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” So like, we have to let go of those things, and sometimes this can be involved tied to business relationships, which is tough. But it relates to traditional sports too, to football. One of the things they say that’s a great attribute of a quarterback is a short memory and I hear this all the time, I love watching the NFL, and they say, if you throw an interception, and then you get back on the field, and then you’re able to throw a touchdown, if you’re able to leave that interception behind you, if you think about it, did you get fired from a job? Did you have this relationship fall apart? Did you, I don’t know. Did you lose out on this deal? Did you get furloughed, and you have no idea what your next steps are going to be until you watch this podcast and you see all these action steps were provided?
John 34:18
Can you put that behind you and put your best foot forward now or tomorrow? Right? That’s a tremendous ability to develop, that I think we all are better off when we’re able to realize. You can’t do anything about the past. You can do something now and in the future. Have self awareness about what you’ve done in the past that you should do differently and then apply those things and then just leave it back there and just run ahead, like, you can’t apologize forever.
Hayden 34:48
Hey, guys and gals. That concludes part two of our interview with John Davidson. We have our first ever three part series so make sure to check in next time for the end of the interview. John has given us so much valuable stuff, I decided to keep it in. As always make sure to subscribe to the podcast. This is also the last call for a Halloween contest. Make sure to click on the link in the description and it’ll take you through the rest of the steps. That’s enough for me and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:01
Hey guys and gals, welcome to our first ever three part interview with John Davidson. If you haven’t heard the first two parts, make sure to go back and give those a listen. There’s so much good stuff in there. You don’t want to miss any of it. We have one more bit of housekeeping before we start today’s episode. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Halloween draw. It means a lot to us that you took time out of your day to fill that out. So thank you. That said there can only be one winner and the winner is, Asher Skylark. Congratulations, and make sure to check your Facebook Messenger. We’ll be reaching out shortly with your prize. Now, for the rest of the interview.
Norman 0:46
So I got a couple questions about PRG. You’ve mentioned PRG a few times during the podcast. What is PRG?
John 0:54
I have no idea. Yeah. Still trying to figure that out a year later. Yeah.
John 1:01
PRG is an amazing company. It stands for production resource group and PRG was founded by Jerry Harris, who founded his own lighting company when I was 16 years old, and started doing lighting on Broadway. That was about 33 years ago. PRG today is the largest entertainment production company in the world. With 73 offices worldwide, it produces a ridiculous amount of shows a year. This is the company that produces the Superbowl Halftime Show. The fortnight World Cup. The Grammys, Emmys. 90% of Broadway lighting is PRG. Global tours for YouTube, Beyonce. Most major artists.
Norman 1:39
Small company? Yeah, small events.
John 1:44
Right. So like anything that has to do with production, we provide unique solutions for movies. So there’s a great case study on the PRG website where the movie The Joker, did you guys happen to see the movie joker?
Norman 1:58
Oh, yeah.
John 1:59
Yeah, so there’s a really iconic scene in there, where he’s in the subway, and he kills those three dudes who are picking on him. Well, they were trying to figure out how to shoot that shot to make it feel like he was really in a subway and so PRG was able to offer a technical solution to achieve the results that they wanted for that shot and so we did that for Marvel movies, for Netflix specials things like that and so, most importantly, I talked about comes down to being cool to hang out with. It is such a tremendous culture, so many wonderful people that I just really love, and it’s become a family and so I’ve created some amazing relationships with these people and they’ve brought me on to lead eSports for them globally, which is just a tremendous honor and a lot of people have, there are some people like John, you’re at GameStop, you’re doing marketing, and then you go to a production company, like, how does that make sense and if people understand my further background, I have production, I’ve been a producer. I produced a or associate producer, Tony Hawk documentary that just came out too. Tony Hawk Pro Skater documentary. But what I do for PRG is help them learn how to engage with the space in a way that adds value to the community. Right. So what I look for, I really see myself as a gamer, and a member of the eSports community who’s on the inside with this tremendous company with unmatched capabilities. So when I say that is like, Okay, I understand what gamers want and need.
John 3:29
I have the ability to leverage unmatched technology and patented solutions that we’re working on the Super Bowl. How can we take that and how can we reimagine and enhance the eSports fan experience in a way that makes for cooler experiences for fans. so it drives attendance. So that’s a KPI for leagues and teams, right? Driving attendance. It’s an unforgettable experience. So that’s a tremendous value to the community and then also the brands with sponsorship is the largest revenue stream in eSports right now. So how can we help brands, at those iconic events, better activate in ways that are memorable and create loyalty and positive sentiment and ultimately sales for your brand? So that’s a little bit of how my mind works about joining a production company and they do a tremendous job to support me, and I’m just really thankful to be part of that team.
Norman 4:27
So just by your voice, there’s no passion in your job. Right?
John 4:31
Right, right. I mean, you have to, I did a LinkedIn post here the other day. I’ll say this, if I can get on the screen, you can see that. My mom gave me this for a business card holder. But what it says as my name and it says, find your passion and make it your career and I was talking to Jerry Harris, the founder of PRG at our national sales conference last November, I did a speech on a new idea for revenue stream and I connected with him afterwards, just to thank him for asking the employees of the company, how to improve the company, which is rare. A lot of leaders don’t enable the people doing the job to tell them how the job should be done and they know best because they’re doing it and I just asked him a couple questions. I said one more thing. If there’s one piece of advice that I should take away from you and your experience, what should it be? He said, Don’t spend any time doing stuff that you don’t love and that was really an interesting thought to me. I don’t know if I agree with that 100%.
John 5:39
Because I’ve done a lot of things I don’t love to get to a place where I can do something I love, if that makes sense. Because I’ve mapped it out, I’ve seen how I need to get there and what I need to accomplish.
John 5:54
But I’m a big believer in developing a launchpad for yourself. Is that something you have an interest in discussing?
Norman 6:02
Let’s talk about it. Yeah.
John 6:03
Okay. So this is like, partially why my hair’s falling out and when I’m stressed so much. I continually find myself on the edge of my experience and what I mean by that is, I think it’s part of just kind of how I’m designed. I have a knack for seeing the vision, to see what will come or what can come and steps to get there. So I tend to look at my own personal situation and I say, How can I use the work I’m doing now to get myself to do the work I want to do?
John 6:39
So what that means I’ll give you a great example, I used to manage a design studio and this is really, a shout out to the guy I was working with there because he understood that I learned this from him. Which we were doing, we were going to pitch Cabela’s for an ad campaign and my friend who I worked with, got the opportunity to design a magazine cover for Photoshop magazine and they said, just use the word type T Y P E and you do whatever you want, right?
John 7:12
So my friend who’s this credible illustrator and designer and animator, he did a Photoshop cover that was all, like very nature themed with animals and nature and trees and stuff like that and do you guys know what Cabela’s is like Bass Pro basically? Yeah. So essentially, my friend did this and he was a master at it and so I’ve learned how to do it myself, but how to take something. If you think about this moment, he was getting paid to do the magazine cover, right? So he used a piece that he was paid to do as a pitch piece for something that he wanted to get paid to do. Does that make sense?
John 7:56
So I’ll give you another example of how I’ve done this just recently, and this hasn’t happened yet. But by the time this comes out, it will have happened. As I’m here at home, and trying to build my network during Coronavirus, and stuff trying to add value to as many people as I can. A friend of mine reached out who’s very close with the Gary Vaynerchuk team and Gary Vaynerchuk is amazing. He’s a really inspirational figure to me, I’ve met him one time and had a great conversation and it was really an unforgettable conversation. I never thought I’d have the opportunity to have with somebody like that. His team was pulling together a panel for a conference and his right hand person basically needed brands for this panel and she was having a hell of a time pulling anybody together and it was like two days before the conference and they needed three brands. So she was at a tough spot. My friend who knows her said you need to talk to John. John knows all these brands, right and that’s a benefit of my time at GameStop and then continued to build those relationships. So I just thought in my mind, I was like, I don’t know where this is gonna take me. But I do see opportunity here, right? What’s the opportunity? The opportunity to add value to somebody who I want to create a relationship with. So I said, let me just kill it for her. Let me just put my day aside what I had planned, and I’m just gonna go for it. So I was fortunate to bring four different brands to the table for them in one day, which it was an easy sell. It was like, Hey, you want to get one on one with Gary Vaynerchuk? I can hook you up. Who’s gonna say no to that, right?
John 9:31
They were so thrilled that I helped them in a time of need, that I got on the phone with this person and she said, John, what can I do for you? What can we do for you? What can Gary do for you and I was like, Whoa, Never thought I’d have somebody asked me that. So I said, Well, I’d love to do some content with him, whether that’s a podcast or whatever, like I want to align myself with his brand and with him. I want to create a personal friendship over time. But more immediately, I want alignment with somebody like that can help lift your brain, right? So we came up with an idea and she said, Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we do an eSports roundtable John. Where you bring together leaders of the eSports community of the industry, you host and moderate it, and Gary is your co host and I was like, that sounds incredible. Never thought I had that opportunity and so I took it to another step, right? Or two more steps.
John 10:36
I said, Okay, I know, Gary is an easy sell, because people want to get in front of him. So let me not just bring together the people I know, let me bring together people in this roundtable who I don’t yet know. So I can build relationships with them and they’ll have just an organic gratitude that I connected them with Gary, right? So half of this panel are people I know, and literally half of this panel, or people I’ve never talked to, but we’re gonna become great friends, because we’re now creating a networking opportunity and then the next level is this was right around the time I decided to launch my own company. So I’m going to announce it at this roundtable. Because I believe that the content will probably be highly viewed and so I’m using that launchpad. So do you see how through that situation I saw opportunity and set and then created a couple different launchpads?
Norman 11:36
Oh, absolutely. That’s incredible.
John 11:39
So that’s basically how my brain works all the time and so that’s what I just continually try to do is like, what am I doing now that can give me a launch pad and how can that launch pad not get me to where I want to go. But how can that launch pad get me to the next launch pad and I see infinite launch pads. I don’t see a desired goal. Which to me is the most exciting because I’ve been in places where I achieved my goal of like a dream job or something and the fantasy never is the reality. Right? So it’s like, I don’t know if you know this, but did you know like racing dogs? like you know how they have that little rabbit that they chase? I’ve heard maybe it’s a myth. I heard that if that dog catches that rabbit, they never race again.
John 12:35
I think I saw that in a Disney movie. So I don’t know if it’s true. But if it is, it’s appropriate for the analogy. But so my thing is like, rather than having like a rabbit to catch, just have a continuous pursuit and see where it takes me.
Norman 12:57
Do you play chess?
John 13:00
No, but I might start.
Norman 13:02
You always sound like you’re one move ahead.
John 13:05
Thanks. I try to be, I play pool. I love playing pool and pool, we are under a certain level. I have a pool table in my house and so coronavirus has been good for sharpening my pool skills because a lot of my evenings are just me, a little music and this pool table and when you play pool at a certain level, you’re planning at least three shots ahead, where you’re running a ball, a table of nine ball or something like that. But what I love about, I would say about something like pool beyond something like chess and I’m not criticizing chess, but chess has strategy, right? But all it is a strategy. Like there’s not a question of can you physically move the piece to that square. But in pool, you have strategy plus execution, right? Because I might be able to look at the pool table and see my next three moves. But I also have to execute to not only make the ball but position the cue ball to set me up for the next shot. So I love having that next level of challenge, if that makes any sense.
Norman 14:21
Yeah, it does. Now, with PRG I’m not sure, I’m sure you have an answer for this.
John 14:31
Thanks for setting me up. Yeah, here we go. Okay.
Norman 14:37
Okay. Do you see any collaborations or do you foresee any collaborations between live events, live sports and eSports?
John 14:47
Absolutely, yeah. This is something that’s happening a little bit. You have a variety of things happening here. So basically, every traditional sports league has created at least an integration with eSports through the video game simulator. That’s their sport so FIFA, Major League Soccer, MLB The show, Major League Baseball, NBA 2k League Basketball, NFL Madden. Major League Soccer and FIFA have really lucked out because it’s just an organic fit that just happens to work out. But what I always urge teams, professional players and people to do is don’t engage the gaming community through the sports games, because those are second turn third tier. The really the main games as far as eSports. Now their main games as far as sales every year, and that can be confusing. People say, oh, like NBA 2k is a top three seller every year, the league must be very successful. Well, it’s not because NBA 2k turns out, it’s a lot of fun to play. It’s a lot of fun to watch. So the watchability is a really strong piece of what you’re playing. But I would encourage teams, leagues and players, instead of playing these sports simulator games and trying to pull people to you, go to them and play the video games that they want to play and those games those eSports games are going to be League of Legends, Valorant, Super Smash, Counter Strike, Fortnight, FGC Games, Dota 2, Overwatch. There’s 20 plus games that make up eSports. But so I think that’s something that you see, like NASCAR naturally falling into a great situation, because that’s an actual simulator. You see FIFA naturally fallen into a great situation and people see that and they say, we can replicate that success with basketball, with football, with baseball, whatever and it’s just not that simple and so I would encourage people to, hey, reach out to me, and DLC can help.
John 16:57
Plug.
Norman 16:59
Okay, so do you foresee any cultural shifts in eSports? If they’re given the same visibility, technology, platforms as traditional sports?
John 17:10
Yeah, I think it’ll go much more mainstream. What I personally want to see, well, this is a big difference between my two backgrounds, skateboarding and in gaming. Skateboarders, what nothing to do with any company that’s owned or operated by skateboarders.
John 17:28
Which actually hurts the space, it does two things. It keeps the space pure, but it doesn’t enable it to grow. For a variety of reasons. eSports there’s what I call a healthy skepticism, which is actually healthy for the space. Because there’s initial skepticism as far as like, Wait, you’re not from the space, what do you want? But when these brands integrate and engage in a way that is meaningful there for the community, what do you give the community things they want, that they can attain for themselves. That’s when they’re embraced and that enables growth, that enables more funding in the space, a number of things and so I think we’ll see more tournaments. We’ll see I know Vindex, which my buddy Sundance, shout out his head of over there. They just acquired the Belong Gaming Arena. So they’re going to be doing like gaming arenas all around. They’ll be interested in how that works in the American culture. It’s very successful in Asia, parts of Europe. But it’ll be interesting to see how our culture adapts to it. I think the biggest thing is going to be education and so one of the things that I’m doing right now, I’m involved in writing an eSports business curriculum for SMU Southern Methodist University, here in Dallas, and I’m writing the business development and revenue strategies course for this curriculum, which is really exciting and I’m actually going to be teaching it online next semester. So go sign up, but I think you’re gonna see, it’s gonna be more obvious the benefits of gaming from an educational perspective, especially for young people. We really fear what we don’t understand, and a lot of parents don’t understand gaming and so the drawbacks or the concerns about gaming are obvious. You could be concerned about shooting games. You could be concerned about screen time. You could be concerned about talking to people in line that you’re doing your kids talking to, but there’s a lot of the benefits are less obvious and so I really think that as people are more aware of the benefits, and we start to prove out with some curriculums, some cool integrations in high school, in junior high as well as college, it’s really going to bring up the space from a technological perspective and then over time, we’re also going to have some people running these teams and leagues who have business backgrounds and are also gamers, which is currently a pain point for the space. Currently, you kind of have two groups of people you’ve got is this people over here and you’ve got gamers over here, and they can’t talk to each other and they don’t know what the other knows and so my hope with writing this curriculum is that I’m going to help with other people, of course, but I’m going to help bring up gamers who understand business and then over time that’ll result in a sustainable growth for industry.
Norman 20:29
One move ahead, like I said before.
John 20:35
Corner pocket.
Norman 20:36
We talked before, just before the podcast about this, but I have been, I guess, left in the dark about eSports. I had no idea. Until I talked to Bob Heere last week, about the industry. I had no idea of the size. I had no, I thought eSports is going out and buying EA Sports and playing it yourself. But yeah, this is incredible. If I understand it correctly, it’s bigger than any sport, if you combine sports together, is that correct?
John 21:18
Well, yes and so there’s a little more context that needs to be added to that. One, I don’t have the latest numbers in front of me. But I will tell you that eSports is bigger than most other things, traditional sports. That’s a global number. So that needs some context. The majority of eSports enthusiasts, as the data analysts like to put it are international, not in the US. So that provides some context too. Also eSports, this drives me crazy. But eSports and sports are not talked about in the same way. Like you just talked about, right? You just said, the eSports community, the eSports audience. eSports is comprised of about 20 different games, which comprise even more leagues, which comprise even more teams, right? When we talk about sports, nobody says, Have you reached the sports enthusiast? It’s 7 billion people globally.
John 22:18
Almost evenly split, male, female, like, we don’t say that because we understand the demographic differences of soccer, football, baseball, basketball, hockey, etc. Right? So what we don’t understand yet well enough, are those demographic separations between titles. So what I’m hoping and this is a big thing that’s going to come to I think within the next year is my prediction. But it’s these Dennis Ellis companies are gonna be able to provide to say, look, the Dota 2 audience is this demographic, the League of Legends audience is this demographic and the thing that’s going to do is it’s going to enable more targeted marketing. Because the concern right now is you could, if you’re a brand, you could sponsor a league or a team or content creator, whatever. You don’t have the data to ensure that you’re accurately targeting. So you could sponsor eSports, target incorrectly, have a poor ROI and just believe that all of eSports is a bad investment, when in fact, there just wasn’t enough information to make an educated decision. Somebody else could get lucky and they could just target properly based on pure luck and they’re saying, Oh my gosh, eSports lifted and sales in 20 years, whatever, this is great. Well, lightning doesn’t strike twice too often. So be careful with your next investment. Expecting the same thing, and the other thing, I will say what is bigger than eSports. You have to the eSports and you have gaming, gaming as a whole or non competitive gaming is larger than the film and music industries combined. That’s the big piece of the pie. eSports is much, much smaller. The reason why it’s gained so much attention is I would say this eSports makes gaming sponsorable. It’s very difficult to figure out how to sponsor and regularly integrate through marketing in a non competitive game. Right, like, imagine this. The game Red Dead 2. Are you guys familiar with Red Dead Redemption 2 by chance?
Hayden 24:33
Yeah.
Norman 24:35
I’m an old guy.
John 24:36
Yeah, I thought the chances were maybe one out of two.
John 24:40
So 50%, so it’s basically this country western game. It’s Grand Theft Auto in the country, back in the 1800s, or whatever. So you run around on a horse. You’re going through these amazing country sides, and you’re killing people sometimes or you’re skinning a bear all sorts of stuff. How do you as a brand integrate authentically, in a way that enhances the experience of the community, it’s really difficult. But if you look at eSports, there are traditional sponsorship assets that brands see and are familiar with from traditional sports. Teams, leagues, social media, events, merch, right? See these things and you say, Oh, I know how to integrate into video games, which is what all young people are doing, instead of watching sports, instead of watching traditional TV, I’ll reach people through video games, through eSports and so that’s a major distinction. But I will say the people, and I’m working on this to ideate on a few things. But the people who can figure out marketing with a non competitive gaming, that is embraced by the community will hit the homerun. That’s the big thing to figure out.
Norman 25:53
That is interesting. So what are you looking at? Is it like brand ambassadors that are gonna go out there and promote?
John 26:00
No, really what you do is, you have to identify what the community wants, and what the opportunities are, to accomplish those things, and then do them consistently over time. So I have five pillars of ways to add value to the community. So a lot of it is based around experience. We understand that young people value experiences over owning products and there’s a variety of reasons for that. But so there’s different types of experiences, there’s a fan experience of going to a tournament, or watching online. So how can your brand make that better for the fan? Competitive experience. The community wants to compete just as much they want to watch. So how can you enable them to have unique opportunities to compete that they can’t do on their own? Unique experience. How can you connect them with their hero? How can you give them a trip to the GameStop Performance Center, with Complexity gaming, or whatever, and then the two others are content. Content is king. Develop content that matters to the community, optimized for mobile, because everybody’s watching it on their phones and then lastly, most valuable, but also most difficult, is in game integration. If you can naturally integrate your brand into a game with the video game publisher. A lot of it is like hey, if you do this thing physically, you get DLC, you get currency, you get unique skins in the game, things like that. Those are incredibly valued by the community. So those are just a couple of snippets and so that’s also a little bit of a tease as to what I want to provide my clients with is helping to navigate that.
Norman 27:51
All right, I can’t wait to hear more about this when you get this thing rolling, because it sounds like it’s just, it could be a goldmine.
John 28:01
I hope so.
Norman 28:03
Yeah. Again, one step ahead.
John 28:07
Well, and being a gold mine is not like a goal, I hope. I want to be able to support myself, of course, but I’m a big believer that, if you put people first, if you put passion first and you if you go on that mission, that you feel so strongly about and you help people in the ways that matter to them, the money will follow.
Norman 28:31
Everyone we bring onto the episode, they’re all successful and people think a lot of people think that they are lucky, or they’re just handed it, but they don’t understand what it took to get to that position. So I like to just kind of talk a little bit about some of your hurdles.
John 28:52
Yeah, how much time have you got?
Norman 28:55
Okay, I’ll kick back. Yeah.
John 28:58
Yeah, I mean, I’ve definitely had quite a few, probably more than I wished I had, but one or two that are very significant that really stick out in my mind. One is just college. My last semester of college, I was able to squeeze four years of college into four and a half. So that was pretty good on my part. But my last semester, when I was set up from all my classes, I thought I would have to take five classes, depending on how many units like three, like 12 units is a full load, so that’s either three or four classes and so I was like, Okay, I’m gonna have to take five, and then I signed up for everything, took one last look at the requirements before I logged out, and there was one red dot still on the screen and that red dot meant one more requirement that was still not met and I thought to myself, screw it, you can do anything for one semester.
John 30:08
So I ended up taking six classes by last semester of school and I had essentially two and a half jobs. I worked at Starbucks 28 hours a week. I ran a skateboarding program at a local church and then I also was doing skate demos every other weekend with the skateboarding company that I was sponsored by. So that on top of the six classes and then it turned out, I had some car issues that I won’t really get into. But so on top of all of this, six classes, two and a half jobs, I also had to ride my bike five miles to school, and three miles the other way to work uphill both ways in the snow, of course. Now, one thing you realize when you have to ride a bike versus having a car, when you’re in school, is how much stuff you typically keep in your trunk versus how much you have to lift on your back in your backpack to carry with you for one day. I got in really good shape that semester. But the other thing was, I remember looking back on my taxes and that semester, or that year, the amount of money I made. I made $12,000, my junior year of high college, and $14,000 by junior or my senior year of college with no credit card and accrued no debt and so I think that was something that just required so much sacrifice, so much prioritization of what you can afford and what you can’t. The reason why I didn’t get a credit card was I knew that I had such little money, that if I had a card, if I went anything over what I had in the bank, I wouldn’t be able to pay it off. Right. So, I would go, my friend who owns a skateboard company Ambassador Skateboards that I’m sponsored by, he gives me crap about this all the time. But I used to go grocery shopping at the dollar store all the time and boy, I learned how to leverage that dollar store man, I could get more of that dollar store with seven bucks than what you could believe and what else, I get free meals where I was able to I was able to wrangle like a really good read deal with where I lived. I remember a couple years earlier, I was in in the Bay Area, and I was on a $2 a day budget, which was I could not afford to spend more than $2 a day and so what I would do is I would go to Red Robin, the restaurant, which has bottomless fries, and their bottomless fries are two bucks. So I would literally roll up to Red Robin, order a water and a basket of bottomless fries and just like get down, see if I could take some to go.
John 33:17
As for other obstacles, I’ll tell you, I’ll share this one with you, which is sometimes we think a dream would be what we’d always want and then it appears to just fall apart. But then it results in something that taken you you’d never thought. It results in something taking you a place you never thought you’d go. For me I was on the skateboarding for six months straight and so what that means is I sold everything I had. I bought a one way ticket to Boise, Idaho, which was the headquarters of this company and I thought it was getting on the tour for two months. My first day, they said we got more funding, we got more tour dates, you’re gonna be on tour for six months straight and I was like, perfect I’ve nowhere to go and so I was on this tour, and I thought I was like I think I found what I love to do. I’m gonna do this for the next 10 years. This is awesome. Well, I broke my ankle really badly at the end of this tour, like one week before the tour was gonna actually end. So I ended up in Washington DC with a broken ankle, only staying for this girl I was dating and she encouraged me to go to a temp agency to apply for employment. I’d had all these terrible jobs until this point. Telemarketing, I sold Kirby vacuums door to door. I’ve been that guy at the mall at the cell phone kiosk that you try to avoid eye contact with. Been that dude a couple of times. Hey, man, are you looking for a phone? No. could have guessed that. So I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living and so I went to this temp agency and I remember vividly there were four ladies in the middle of this room. They were calling people offering them jobs. So I was there doing my test, filling out my paperwork, all that stuff. I could overhear. There was one lady who, from what I can tell the person on the other line of the phone didn’t want this job and I didn’t think much of it, but I’m signing my paperwork. I’m turning it in and I literally open up the glass door, walking out of this place and there’s a woman comes after me grabs me on the shoulder, and she says, John, do you want a job starting tomorrow and I said, Yes. I don’t really care what I’m doing. Just give me some income, ASAP and it turned out she said, Well, the place is called Beers & Cutler and I thought alcohol and knives, this is perfect. I was wrong. It was a tax firm, founded by Jim Bears and John Cutler. False advertising, if you ask me. So I started as a temp, just delivering mail, filling up printers with paper, cleaning out conference rooms, covering the receptionist lunch hour, when she was on lunch. Basically, everything nobody wanted to do. But my mom raised me to, you do everything to the best of your ability and I worked hard, made great connections and the culture in that tax firm was so amazing and what it did was it opened my eyes to the idea of working in business, that work in an office could be a cool and enjoyable thing and so I got hired on there full time, work there for a couple of years and then I went back to school to pursue my marketing degree. But that’s an example of a tremendous hurdle, like literally not being able to walk. A hurdle that keeps you from being able to hurdle quite much of anything, because you’re literally, in a wheelchair, but it opened doors for me, that I never thought I would be aware of and I’ll tell you this one thing too. There’s a guy there, who is a mentor to me, and he was giving me some advice on what I would do and this is the best advice and this might be this would be great advice for young people. But maybe it’s also good advice for people looking for a change in their career and he said, John, don’t plan out what you’re going to do after you graduate from school, just go to school. He said, in four years time, which turned out to be four and a half. He said, you’re going to have new interests, you’re going to meet people, you’ll be aware of things you were never aware of, technology will have developed, you’re going to have opportunities that if you plan it out today, you’re gonna be way off. So just go, enjoy the journey and keep an eye out for opportunity and just kind of that fly by the seat of my pants mentality has really enabled me to do a lot of different things. But I think that some of the best advice because, I mean, when I was taking those six classes and riding my bike at the beginning of that semester, I literally had no idea what I was going to do when I graduated, but I wasn’t worried about it. But I made relationships. I had an opportunity on the horizon and when it came, I seized it, and still, with this DLC thing, with Coronavirus, with all these things. I have no idea where this is gonna take me. But I guarantee you it’ll take me somewhere and if I don’t do it, it won’t go anywhere.
Norman 38:29
It’s just that network again, you never know where it’s gonna lead, another door opening up. Right? Yeah, I’ve been there myself and, it’s just people that do nothing, take no action. They have good intentions, they only end up with good intentions.
John 38:46
Right? True. Yeah and, like we talked about earlier, about not being able to know how to do everything. That’s been something that’s kind of kept me, held back from doing my own thing. But it’s also important to have goals. I don’t want to encourage people just to like fly blindly. But don’t have such stringent goals, that it doesn’t enable you to end up where you can. Like the person who’s mentoring me right now. We’re working on the mission statement for DLC and she said, John, there’s a difference here, there’s a mission statement and there’s been on a mission. The mission statement is about what your company is about, right? Being on a mission is what you are about in life, and what you’re going to pursue regardless of whether your job has anything to do with it. If you can tie your job, if you can monetize it in a way, you’re going to be much more fulfilled and happy in your work that you would otherwise. That’s what I strive to be is just be on a mission and so understand. If you have an umbrella goal, like my umbrella guiding light is I want to help people, right? So if you look at how that manifests under that, okay, if everything I want to do helps people, what does that look like? Well, I could end up in a variety of industries and do that. I can do that, personally on a weekend to volunteer somewhere. I can do that in my business with networking or with a campaign, how you help people can manifest in a number of different ways and so I would encourage people to kind of have an overarching goal, and then just see where it takes you.
Norman 40:38
Now that we’ve talked about the hurdles, let’s talk about some successes.
John 40:45
Okay.
Norman 40:46
What do you consider your biggest success?
John 40:50
Oh, man. My biggest success is being a great father and it makes me even emotional thinking about it. But I have a five year old son, and he is just the light of my life and so, I hope to achieve things in business. I love skateboarding. I’ve had some mountaintop experiences, and we can talk about some of those businesses, but if we’re just talking like me, as a person, the greatest accomplishment I think, is that I know that I’m a good father, who loves his son and his son loves him.
Norman 41:34
I kind of thought we’re gonna go down that direction and that’s awesome. I love it when I hear, people in general, talk about family. So now, what about on the business side?
John 41:52
Yeah, I would say I’ve had a couple opportunities that I never thought I would do. I’d like to say, these were not bucket list items, because I never dreamed they’d be on the bucket. Or they weren’t even on the list. Right. But I think one of them was doing a TED talk. It’s been just a launchpad for me, talking about all these launch pads and so just to be able to say, you’re a TED talk speaker, you’re a keynote speaker, to have something tangible that you can share. I worked so hard on that, to make sure that it was a talk that was both beneficial to people, but also well done, and I felt like I accomplished that and that’s kind of so there was a moment, a lot of that was, it was in a kind of a tough time of my life, too. So it was just, it was a symbol to me personally, as well as professionally, as far as like, you’ve done something. I remember standing on that stage and what’s funny is, I’ll tell you this, if anybody watched the TED talk, and if you want a link to it, you’re welcome to. But there’s a point in the talk where I started laughing a little bit and fortunately, I thought quick on my feet, I kept going, but I tried to make the talk kind of funny, and you can’t really hear the video, but the audience was laughing quite a bit. So that was helpful. But there was a point in this talk, where I knew if I got to that point, I did it, and it was about three quarters of the way like the last three quarters was just smooth going, but there’s a little bit of nerves during the rest of it and when I got to that point, it was almost like an emotional thing of like, and it made me laugh and I said, I cracked myself up. That was definitely a real cool moment. The other one was being featured on The Berrics, which we can provide a link there too. The Berrics is the most visited skateboarding website in the world and I had done a video, we talked about these launch pads as another launch pad thing. But I had done a video with a supplement brand that was focused on like training and weightlifting and stuff. I did a video for my 36th birthday, 36 tricks for 36 years and we plugged the product, helping me to have the energy and the stability over skating for three hours to get all these tricks done. Well, I sent it to a friend who works at The Berrics, and I met him when I was at GameStop and he shared it with their creative director and they’re like, Oh my gosh, we should do a feature on John. Like he’s this eSports business guy who skates and he’s still pretty good in his old age. So the people who are skateboarders who know will know this, but The Berrics, it’s a private skatepark in LA. Like it’s really hard to get in there and if you’ve ever been somewhere where you’ve seen it on TV, and then you see it in person. There’s that moment, but also their head of filming, his name is Chase. He’s kind of a celebrity in the skateboarding world and so you see him filming the best skateboarders in the world. So for the first, we skated for about two and a half hours, the first 20 minutes was just so mind boggling and such a trip that I was skating this park that I’d seen on websites every single day for the last 10 years and the guy who filmed the best skaters in the world was actually filming me and that was just, that was a moment of just complete gratitude and thankfulness that my business career helped me accomplish a dream in skateboarding that I never thought would be possible. So it’s like, and what’s cool is I’ll have that piece of content forever, I’ll be able to share that with my son. Regardless of whatever happens, I will always have that. I was asked to be there and they did it and we did together and it’s a cool thing to look back on every now and then.
Norman 45:53
You have had a very interesting life and I know why Bob chose you or recommended you. We’re getting down to the end of the podcast now and what I ask every one of our guests is if they know a guy.
John 46:12
Yeah, I do. I know a few guys, but I’ll mention one specifically is my good friend, my Nacho brother in Latinas. What that means every time I order nachos, or he orders nachos at a restaurant, we send pictures of them to each other. But he is the co-founder and head creative of my favorite apparel brand ULT eSports apparel. Nate Ackman is a guy I know, and he’s got an incredible story too and he’s an amazing individual.
Norman 46:45
Well, based on Bob recommending you, now you recommending Nate, I can’t wait to interview.
John 46:51
You’ll love it. He’ll love it, too.
Norman 46:55
I’m sure I will. So, John, thank you for being on. Man, I could talk to you for another hour. But this is already gonna be a two parter it looks like.
John 47:04
Well, thank you. I could as well. So I really appreciate you having me on and, all of this time and huge thank you to Bob for recommending me and I love doing this stuff and I hope that some of the stuff we talked about is beneficial to the people who are watching.
Norman 47:22
That’s why we’re doing it. So once again, thanks a lot.
John 47:24
Thank you.
Hayden 47:28
That concludes our interview with John Davidson. Make sure to tune in next time to hear our interview with Philip Yang. Philip is an urban planner based on Sao Paulo, Brazil. His company Urbem, focuses on how to create social change for a proper implementation of low income housing, and many other things as well. But you’ll have to listen to the interview to hear about it.
Hayden 47:52
That’s it for me and I’ll see you next time.
