Join us today on The Hero Show as Adam Akins shares his incredible journey with Inhouse Advertising. From taking over his family's business in 2017 to growing it by over $5 million, Adam dives into the challenges and successes he's faced. 

Discover how staying adaptable in a changing media landscape has been key to their success, and why blending digital with traditional media is still essential today. Tune in to learn valuable lessons in leadership, marketing, and more with Adam Akins.

that makes heroes heroic

is that they live by a code

so I want to talk

about the top one

maybe two principles

that you use regularly

in your life

that you run

your business by

maybe something

you wish you had known

when you first started out

your own

entrepreneurial journey

Adam Akins: Can I tell you 5

So it's communication

respect

integrity

excellence

and discipline

Communication by far

the most important thing

we can do

it just happened yesterday

it's so hard to read emotion

through email and text message

so we had someone

send over an email

Someone else read it

and just took it

to complete

a complete 180

from what the email

was even about

and so had we not

have communicated immediately

it could have spiraled

so far out of control

so communication

first and foremost

can eliminate

so many problems

but then

it's respect

and then of course integrity

and the excellence in discipline

but communication

integrity

respect are massive

because if we don't have those

I don't know

really what the point is of

​

Adam Akins: Yes, sir.

Richard Matthews: Awesome! And before we get too far into the interview, I always like to start these interviews off with just a little introduction that you guys send over.

So my audience knows who you are. So we'll get into that. So you are the founder, what's the name of your agency again?

So what I want to start off with, start the interview off with is what is it that you are known for, right? What's your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

I tell people all the time that we really work with anything brand related from, we have a website division. We have a in-house production team. We have three graphic designers. We have seven salespeople. We have a five person digital team. So, there's really not anything that we don't do when it comes to advertising. Our bread and butter is digital media and then traditional media placement, which as you guys know, that is on the downward trajectory.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it's actually, it was really funny because we've been traveling in an RV for seven years and pre pandemic. We didn't really have to plan. You could just drive around the country and stop where we want to stop. And there will be places for you to stay. And now, we have to plan like three months in advance, because there's so many people are being that every RV park is always booked all the time.

So, there is significantly. So, if anyone's listening to this and you want to get into a space that there is more demand than supply, RV parks. Good business tip right off the bat for uh, people who are paying attention.

Adam Akins: You know,

Richard Matthews: What's your story?

So, she kind of pimped us out for free of charge. But people would come up all the time in grade school, and middle school, and high school and say, "Oh my gosh, it's so cool! You're on TV commercials." And I'm like, It's really not that cool. I promise you, by all means, if you want to be on one, I'll get you on one. And so, fast forward through high school, going into college, I knew I wanted to be in sales. I knew I liked freedom and flexibility.

And so, it just, that's when I knew. That's what I wanted to do. So, after graduation from Oklahoma State, I go went to work for one of the former sales girls that sold at the WB and she was a general manager of a radio station. And so, she hired me and I had a lot of quick success in radio. And then, from that point, moved to another radio group.

No, she wasn't retired. I don't think she'll ever retire. But now, I'm running the day today and we have 26 employees. And, like you said in the introduction, yeah, we've grown by over 5 million dollars in the past five years. And it's been a very fun ride. I've learned a lot. I failed a lot, which is good because I think without failure, you lose the opportunity to grow. So that's kind of my origin story. I grew up in the industry and just through, watching and learning, my mom, and her friends, and their lifestyle, and they never seemed to be too stressed. Like when my dad would get home from work, he would be stressed or angry or dirty or whatever it was.

Richard Matthews: And so, you've got a fun story. Because you got to watch the business grow up as a child. And so, this is the business is like second generation now which we

Adam Akins: It is.

Richard Matthews: lot of second generation businesses. So, they say what it was an average business, like doesn't even make it past five or 10 years.

And here you guys going on a second generation for the business. Do you think there's anything special or unique about what you guys are doing, that's allowed you to have a business that passes from generation to generation?

I mean, our average client has been with us 10 plus years. Whenever I came over from the agency, I brought over customers that had been with me for my entire career. So, it's doing what we say we're going to do when we say we're going to do it. We pay our bills on time. We treat our, reps with respect. A lot of agencies are notorious for being jerks, and not paying their bills on time, and beating the reps up, and just the old adage, you get more flies with honey than vinegar is as true today as it's ever been. And so, we just do the right thing. And I call it leading red with relationships, excellence, and discipline. And that I think is what sets us apart.

Adam Akins: Yeah, correct.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely! So, I want to talk then about your superpowers, right?

Every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that's their fancy flying suit made by their genius, or their super strength, or the ability to call out thunder from the sky. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius. Which is either a skill, or a set of skills that you were born with, or you developed over the course of your career that really sets you apart, and allow you to crush the villains in your client's life, right? And the way I like to frame it for my guests, is if you look at all the skills that you developed over your career, there's probably a common thread that ties all those skills together. And that common thread is where you'd find your superpower. So with that framing, what do you think your superpower is in running this multi generational agency?

It's very evident on those appointments. And then, also being on this side of the desk, where now the, sales people call on you from TV, and radio stations, and newspapers, and billboards, you really find out who has it and who doesn't have it. And so, it's been very interesting. And I've learned a lot about people, which again, has helped me and molded my superpower, so to speak, as I go out and meet with potential clients on a daily basis.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. And I like adaptability too, because it's very reminiscent of like, every person has, and especially in the business world and B2B, and you guys aren't all in a single category, right? So, you guys operate in multiple different categories, and it's a language skill, right? Cause every category has their own language of like how they talk.

You have to be able to speak to them so they can, uh, so they trust you really.

Adam Akins: Right, no, you're, I mean, you're 100 percent right. If we were to walk in and start throwing out jargon, like cost per point cost per thousands to a brand new advertiser, we've lost trust immediately. They have no idea what we're talking about. But if we can break it down to their level to where they fully understand it, then that's where trust gets. Formed at that point, because now we're a true teammate, rather than just another vendor that is trying to get their dollar.

That's like, That's like super obvious, but that's really the point is you have to know, what are they talking about? Like restaurants, talk about the number of covers, right? The number of tables that are being covered. And so you have to understand the jargon of the industry that you were talking to, if you want to help them grow.

Adam Akins: Yeah, no, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. Yeah, you have to be able to talk the language of the customer you're working on.

Richard Matthews: So, how do you teach that or train that to your salespeople in an organization? You said you have seven salespeople, which is a pretty large sales organization. How do you make that a, I guess, a baseline skill set that your team has, since you guys operate in so many different verticals?

it goes back to, it's okay to fail. There's nothing you're going to do that is going to kill us. We can fix any mistake. So to speak of. And so, it's just a lot of hands on approach that I have found that has worked the best for us, and how we train our people. But also, I don't hire a lot of rookie salespeople either. Most of the people that work for us have worked at a TV or radio station for 15 or 20 years.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that makes sense. So, when you're talking about you guys have an organization large enough to support seven salespeople, I'm curious, do you guys treat yourself as your own client for Legion purposes?

Adam Akins: We do. Yeah.

How

Richard Matthews: How do you guys manage that to like, is it a seven people salesperson team requires a large amount of lead flow?

I would imagine.

Yeah. Yeah. Finally, it just, I sat down one day and looked at what we were doing and it's like, we've got some mouths to feed. We need to start putting our money where our mouth is, and building our brand. So, we're actually building out a podcast studio right now that we will do ourselves. We will offer it to our customers. We run social media ads. We run targeting to specific categories of businesses that we want to target. We do a lot of lead forms and landing pages. We market our production arm of the company. And so, just as leads and call ins come in, we get a ton of referrals. So we pass those out quite a bit as well.

And I realized for myself, that's why I asked, I framed the question that way. It's like, we had to start treating ourselves as our own customer. So, we took our company, and ran ourselves through our own onboarding process, and through our own, put ourselves in our project management system as a client, like the whole bit.

And I was like, nope, we are a client. It's just a client. That's not paying us money, right?

Adam Akins: Right, it's actually costing us money.

Richard Matthews: It's actually costing us money, which is fine. But we need to do that work. So, and you guys same way, you guys drive leads and whatnot. You have to do all the same work for yourselves.

Adam Akins: Right.

Something that you struggled with. For me, it was things like perfectionism. I struggled with perfectionism for a long time, kept me from shipping anything. Which then you don't actually have a business. Or lack of self care, which really came out for me and not taking care of having not good boundaries with my time, not having good boundaries, clients, stuff like that. But I think more important than what the fly, is, is how have you worked to overcome it?

So our audience might learn a little bit from your experience.

A client could call it six o'clock at nine and say, "Hey, I need this, or this." And I know it's not urgent, but because we are a customer centric customer first agency, I would stop what I was doing. And if we were in the middle of dinner or a birthday dinner, I would do it. And I learned really quick that I need those guardrails. I need to learn to say no. And it's still, it's a struggle I deal with daily, quite frankly. So, I would say that would be my biggest you know, kryptonite is that.

And that, it is help to, help me with that. And the other thing of what you said that learning to say no, I actually found, It was interesting.

And it wasn't, until we started saying no to things that were outside of our core competency that our business really started to explode. So, it was like learning how to say no was a growth was, is a growth hack.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And I know what was interesting for us is, once we started saying no to things that are outside of our core competency, and realizing that like we could actually survive saying yes to just the stuff that was good. It also allowed us to say yes to more things inside of

areas. And then, we've able to grow our business a lot because it was like, now we have a really clear line of does this fit or doesn't it? And if it does fit, we just say yes to it, and figure it out. And it took learning how to say no before we could learn how to say yes well.

Adam Akins: Right. Yeah, that's good.

Adam Akins: So, that's it. That's interesting. I would say, there's 2 of them. So, it's the clients that think they can do it themselves because they've watched a YouTube video in like social media ads, for example, right? Adam, I've been learning how to do this. I'm like, then if you can do it, save some money and do it yourself.

Richard Matthews: I had a client that we no longer work with anymore. But we worked for a number of years that the head of the company would always be like, I want to spend a dollar and make 10

Adam Akins: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: I was like, that's, it's nice that you want that, but that's not the way it works in advertising.

He's like, it used to work that way when back in the 80s, when he started the company, I was like, but it doesn't work that way now.

Adam Akins: No, yeah,

Richard Matthews: And so, that was a big struggle all the time. And I know, like in our agency now with the podcast stuff, but the podcasting is definitely a branding authority, like trust building play in the marketplace.

And it's not a kind of thing where you're like, I put out a podcast episode today and tomorrow I'm a millionaire like Joe Rogan, right? Like it's just, but

Adam Akins: We wish we could be.

Richard Matthews: A lot of times that's the expectation is that I see really successful podcasts. I start a podcast. How come I'm not really successful yet?

Year four, we ate ex to our company off the back of the podcast. But it's like flat until it's not. And that's where we have to, we talked to a lot of our clients about, okay, how are you making money now so that you can invest in something that will compound over time? And return a lot of value, but you have to be able to afford it.

During the first part of it to actually get the work.

Adam Akins: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Because branding and authority is different than almost any other type of advertising. It takes time.

Adam Akins: Oh, 100%. It takes time.

Richard Matthews: It takes time. I was like with Facebook ads, at least if I put the ads in now, I can know in a little while, whether or not I'm at least getting views or clicks and you can work on things, but still it's a,

Adam Akins: We do.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that TV is I would imagine it's more difficult to track, and just to see like how it's actually working, and what the ROI is, and managing expectations for that would be way outside of my ball field. I have no idea.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, and what's interesting about what you're talking about being able to track results in some of the more digital advertising, like the programmatic advertising, you can get really good data. And the really good data can be attractive to the business owner.

And then, sometimes they'll take that and be like, I can't do that with TV and advertising, or you can't do that with podcasting or maybe even blogging. Some of the other things that aren't as programmatic, it doesn't mean those things aren't valuable. It just means you can't track them the same way.

And so, one of the things that I found really interesting is like, for podcasting in particular and this probably applies to almost anything content marketing that, what you'll find is it'll actually reduce the cost of your direct response ads, because you're getting more audience and whatnot.

Adam Akins: Skyrocket.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, they'll skyrocket. And so the guests will never get any attribution, because of the way programmatic advertising does attribution. If you take it out of the equation, it doesn't perform as well. And so it's hard to, it's hard to gauge that with people and actually help people understand those, understand how these things work together.

I would imagine the same kind of thing happens if you're doing TV and advertising all over the place that your Google ads probably perform better, if you're on the TV all the time.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And that includes like some of this stuff, you'll be able to do direct ROI stuff for, and some of it you won't. But that doesn't mean it's not valuable or it's not doing its job.

Adam Akins: Right. Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Which I, as well as I do, that's sometimes a hard conversation to have and to help people understand. Cause if they're not in the world of advertising, I mean, you're talking to a car dealership or a lawyer, like they're experts in their area.

Adam Akins: Yeah, no, it's very hard and it's, gets harder with everything that comes out in technology, right? Being early adapters, it just, it's a very difficult conversation to have.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. That's one of those things. And I'm still on I don't know how to deal with this as a company. Yet, there's things like the technology is changing all the time. And so, as someone who's doing advertising and marketing and content delivery and all these things that our clients pay us for which technology do you have to pay attention to, and which ones do you not?

So, how early do we need to pay attention to? Are we building systems for this? Do we understand it? Those kinds of things. And I imagine, it's the same in a new social network comes out for you guys, or different ways to distribute things. There's always something new.

How do you guys manage that? Keeping eye on what's coming down the pipeline so that you're ready for it when it's comes out for the clients. Cause you guys are all the way back to your mom started this company in the 80s, right? So, you've been through this a lot.

Richard Matthews: a,

probably, the most recent one is TikTok, exploded onto the scene in the last couple of years.

Adam Akins: it

Richard Matthews: Advertising, you guys have to at least pay attention.

Adam Akins: You know, you do. And in the, ads are different on TikTok than they are on Instagram. And so, it's, we have to have different creative because a TV commercial is not going to work on the TikTok platform.

We do not give them enough credit. And so, it's really finding out how they're engaging with the latest technology. if we can get in there with excellence, then we'll do it. But if we can't, and we don't, can't speak to it with authority and wisdom, then we don't recommend it.

Richard Matthews: I giggle with my wife regularly about TikTok, because there are you can tell as someone who does advertising. You can tell when the companies are, I don't know how to say this, because it's a strange phenomenon. They are professionally producing videos to look not professional.

Adam Akins: Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent.

But I'm like, but they're, but it looks like a home set, and stuff like that. I'm so, it makes me giggle because as someone who's in the industry, that is in no way an organic video. That's, it's an ad that was produced by a really smart advertising company to make it professional.

Adam Akins: Yeah. So we, on a lot of our production shoots, we will use cell phone, an iPhone and shoot in 4k. But it still looks a little not fully produced.

Just to capture content for the client, so we can then post it on the channels, because we know that if we put a high end production on there,

Richard Matthews: Yeah, on TikTok.

Adam Akins: People can see it through.

Richard Matthews: But go to YouTube and you don't do a high end production, people won't watch it. So you're like, you know those things.

No, but if we run a really high end, beautiful video for that Mercedes dealership on TikToK, it's not going to work. So, it's just learning those trends, and what that research shows, and the consumer behavior when it comes to engagement on that stuff is really what we have to be on the forefront with.

Richard Matthews: That's where, I was like, I took my son, and we went and demoed the Apple Vision Pro just to go look at it. And after we played with it, I was like, this is going to be one of those devices that I'm going to have to like expense to the company and buy at some point, because

And so, it's nice to be early and be ahead of curbs. But, everything changes so quickly now, that you just have to pay attention. You have to keep up with those things. Especially, when your role as a company is to help other companies stay on top of the current trends in advertising so they can get in front of their markets.

Adam Akins: It is, but then, it's also knowing when to punt and not get caught up and still be operating on MySpace.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. This stuff that is like flash in the pan or stuff that's dead.

Adam Akins: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

And

they just don't, they don't last. I was like, what is it?

Adam Akins: That's what I love about traditional television and radio. It's been around

forever,

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: You're not your own

customer. That's one of those things that I like, it always, it makes me giggle in the advertising world. One of the things that's really common is to talk to when people are trying to convince companies to advertise with their particular way of advertising, right? If I was going to go out and you should do a podcast.

A lot of times, you'll see other agencies be like, email marketing is dead. Try podcasting. It's dead. Try podcasting, right? Radio is dead. And I'm like, the first fight in my thought now is anytime someone says insert some sort of marketing thing is dead, they're trying to sell you something. Trying

Adam Akins: To sell.

Even though it's 30 years old now, if you don't have an email marketing position in your company, you're probably leaving money on the table.

Adam Akins: It's one of the highest ROI marketing tools you can use,

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely!

Adam Akins: You know? It's funny. Yellow Pages about five years ago, my 12 year old daughter, we pulled up to the house, and there was someone delivered Yellow Pages, and she was like, what is this? I go, it's for your little brother to sit on. So he can be high on the dinner table.

I mean, was blown away, that it was that thick. I'm like, Oh my gosh, people are still doing this. So yeah, it was fascinating.

Adam Akins: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Working for someone

Adam Akins: It's working for someone.

Richard Matthews: Working

for someone.

So, I want to switch. So we talked a little bit about your common enemy. I want to talk about the flip side of that, which is your driving force, right? Just like Spiderman fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world's information.

I want to know what it is that you fight for with your company? What's your mission, so to speak?

Adam Akins: To brand the name of Jesus and all that we do. And it really is just to deliver incredible campaigns for our clients. To do it with relationships, excellence and discipline. And by doing that, we fulfill our mission of what we were called to do as Christians. And I tell our employees it's how we interact with each other.

Just like just that.

Richard Matthews: to make the best damn tents on the planet, right?

Adam Akins: That's right.

Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Nerdy joke there. For those of you who are not in the religious space, Paul is known as a tent maker in the New Testament. And uses and builds tents to build his income where he can continue to do with his work for the Lord. So in our case, you run your company, your advertising agency is your tent making.

So, I want to talk then about something really practical. We call this your hero's tool belt, right? And just like every superhero has their awesome gadgets, like their batarangs, or their web slingers, or their laser eyes. I want to talk about the top one, maybe two tools that you couldn't live without in your business.

Adam Akins: Cell phone, as much as I hate it, it is my lifeline to the world. It has my calendar because if it's not on my calendar, it does

nothing,

right?

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Adam Akins: But then, it's the way, obviously I engage, it's how I research, it's how I find new customers. It's everything. That is probably the biggest tool that I have in my warchest.

Richard Matthews: That's interesting to me. Something I, ran an experiment with this, and as a, like a C-level in the company, your job is not usually to deliver work product to clients, right? It's to manage the company. And to make it go forward, and to manage uh, the team and the staff, and the, processes, and all the things that are like C-level type stuff.

It helped. It forced me to do a lot of things, and to really think through how I was delegating, and how I was building systems, and some of those kind of things. And go back to being able to use my laptop regularly and whatnot for other things. And I use my laptop for things that I had to use it for.

I couldn't do this podcast without the laptop. But like, for the day to day managing of what's going on in the company, I was, it surprised me, how much I could run the entire company from my phone.

Adam Akins: right.

Richard Matthews: It's nuts.

So, I have everything on that device. And as much as I despise it, if it's not with me, I hate it. However, when I get home, I really do. I try to put it up on the charger. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier and being present for my family and learning to say no. And having clients respect my work hours, which is still very hard. And I'm not saying I'm, perfect at it and that I I don't check it, but I really try to, when I walk through the house, set the phone down.

So, I'm present for my wife and my kids.

And one of the things that I tell all of my clients is like, Hey, I'm going to tell you our company priorities, or my, our personal priorities. And it's profit first, right? If we don't have a profitable company, we can't do anything, right? We can't actually serve you. So it's like profit first.

And then, it's our family, and our team, and our clients. And it's in that order. And so, and I tell my staff, the same thing. It's your family comes before our company does, comes before the rest of the team. And I was like, so, I tell all my clients, I was like, if you're not okay with being fourth priority, we probably won't be good fit. And I was like, it doesn't mean, we won't do an excellent job for you, cause we will. But the only reason we can do an excellent job, is because we know our priorities. And so, what's interesting to me is I thought starting to communicate that to our clients would actually lose us business and it's done the opposite.

Adam Akins: Right. Yeah. It goes back up to the guardrails, right? And setting those so you know, you can't drift too far right or too far left. But you have those warning things on the side that shake you to death, before you hit the guardrail.

And so, I think that's great. I love that idea. Cause I don't, I have, again, I have everything that just beeps at me. So, if it is an emergency, I can run up there. So, I'm cheating that whole thing.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So just switch all of the notifications off on your watch. You can do it on your phone. Just go in there and just turn everything off, and then see which ones you miss and turn those ones back on.

Adam Akins: Love it! Advice. I love it.

I don't find that outside of the entrepreneurial world. Not as much, anyways. And so, it's really fascinating to me how important it is to run a company, to manage your time.

Adam Akins: Oh, time blocking is massive for me. If I don't like this morning, I'm working on a big media campaign in Scottsdale, Arizona, right? There are two hours behind me here in Oklahoma. So when I get to the office at seven, It's 5 AM there. So, I know I can't call anyone, but it allows me to put together all the media plans without the craziness of the office, and people coming in, and phones ringing, and things like that.

Richard Matthews: All sense.

Speaking of heroic tools, I wanna take a few minutes to tell you about a tool we built that Powers the Hero show and is now this show's primary sponsor.

Commercial: Hey there, fellow podcaster. Having a weekly audio and video show on all the major online networks that builds your brand, creates fame and drive sales for your business. Doesn't have to be hard. I know it feels that way because you've tried managing your show internally and realized how resource of intensive it can be.

You felt the pain of pouring eight to 10 hours of work into just. Getting one hour of content published and promoted all over the place. You see the drain on your resources, but you do it anyways cuz you know how powerful it is. Heck, you've probably even tried some of those automated solutions and ended up with stuff that makes your brand look cheesy and cheap.

That's not helping grow your business. Don't give up though. The struggle ends. Now. Introducing Push Button podcasts, a done for you service that will help you get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger. After you've pushed that stop record button, we handle everything else.

Check us out@pushbuttonpodcast.com slash hero for 10% off the lifetime of your service with us and see the power of having an audio and video podcast growing and driving micro-celebrity status and business in your niche without you having to lift more than a finger to push that stop record button.

Again, that's push button podcast.com/hero. See you there.

And now back to the Hero show.

Richard Matthews: So, I got one more question for you here, as we get to the end of the hour, and that's about your own guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to the Arkham Asylum. So, as we wrap up the interview, I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you use regularly in your life that you run your business by.

Maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out your own entrepreneurial journey.

But communication, integrity, respect are massive, because if we don't have those, I I don't know, really, what the point is of doing business?

So, I just realized that recently. And what is funny to me is as a principle, it's one of the things that I tell my kids all the time. I was like, communication is one of the few superpowers that you can develop. You can learn to become an excellent communicator, and becoming an excellent communicator is one of the most potent superpowers that you can develop in any category, right?

It doesn't matter if it's business, or elite athleticism, or any category you wanted to. Communication is, it's a superpower.

Richard Matthews: It's the one thing as a parent that I spend more time on my kids with than anything else. My wife and I both. And it shows in the way that the rest of the world interacts with our children. And hey go, they're just like, wow! Your kids are incredible communicators. And I was like, it's 'cause we put a lot of effort into teaching them how to be incredible communicators.

And where it makes me giggle is I didn't realize, I should do the same thing with my staff . I teach them how to be communicators. 'Cause that's, it's an important skill. And it's an important skill everywhere. Whether you're a toddler who's trying to tell your mom why you're mad right now, or you're a project manager working on your client's project. It doesn't matter where you're at, like, communication is the skill.

Richard Matthews: Completely agree. I think that's a great place to the interview. And I do wrap every interview with something I call the heroes challenge. And I do this to get access to stories that we might not, otherwise, find on our own. So the question is simple. Do you have anyone in your life or in your network who you think has a good entrepreneurial story?

Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the hero show

Adam Akins: Oh, man, I could tell you 20 different people right off the bat.

All my clients, right? So, one of the best is Joe Davidson with Oklahoma Joe's Barbecue.

Richard Matthews: He haven't had any restauranteurs on here yet.

And now, he's got a massive company and sell smokers all over the world. And is a world, he's in the barbecue hall of fame, and has won every barbecue competition you can think of. He has one of the coolest stories of any of my customers and friends. So, he's the first person I think of when you ask that.

Richard Matthews: Awesome! We'll see if we can reach out and maybe get an introduction to him. Maybe he'll come on the show. We don't always get a yes, but when we, sometimes the stories are really cool. So, our last little thing here is in comic books, there's always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism.

So our analogous to that here on this show is, we want to know where can people find you if they want your help? If they're looking for help in their creative agencies, where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak, say, Hey, Adam, we really need your help. And I think more importantly than where is who are the right types of clients to reach out?

I really appreciate getting to hear what you do, and how you do it. And just getting to hear a little bit of how a multi generational company is put together. Because all of us in business want to get to the point where we can have a company successful enough to pass on to our children.

So that's a cool.

Adam Akins: Thank you very much. I appreciate your time and your research into the company and just all your good questions. I really appreciate you taking time to get to know me, means a lot.

Richard Matthews: Awesome! Thank you very much today and we'll see you soon.

​