Co-owner - www.audiencelab.io

Co-owner- The PDOCS Method

Snapping neck and cashing checks

Welcome to 12-Minute Converse with Jesus Believers.

God chose first to have a conversation with us, His creation.

Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.

Praise God for you, Raymond.

Thank you very much, my friend.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Tell us, what part of the world are you in today?

I am in the Northeast here in the U.S., Massachusetts to be exact.

Born and bred.

Born in Florida but moved here when I was one.

I don't really remember my first year of life, so I'm going to go with yes.

Although, I'm a one-year transplant, but I've been here 45 plus years, around 46.

Have you been back to Florida since?

No, I haven't been back to Florida since.

Even though I have a son living down there right now, I haven't personally been back to Florida.

Have you been to other states?

Yeah, I've traveled the majority of the U.S. I've probably been to 32 out of the 50 states.

Is there anywhere else like home?

No, maybe someday, but I made a promise to all my kids.

I still have a daughter in high school, and there's been opportunity or times I've looked into relocating, but not until all my kids are grown on their own and at least graduated high school am I ever thinking about relocating.

It's just I can't be a good father from miles and miles away, so I want to stay close until all my kids are grown up and finish high school.

Two out of the three have already done that and they're in their 20s and out living life and still got one in high school, so I'm here at least until she graduates.

Does that mean a lot to you, being a good father?

100 percent, yes.

It's one of, if not my most important job and responsibilities, personally.

That's the way I view it, yeah.

It's always been very important to me.

I've always told people, you know, people will every once in a while give me a compliment, oh, you're such a good dad, you're this.

I think there's a lot of great dads, number one, so I don't like to really be praised for it, but number two, I've always said, as a father, you can just keep the promises you make to your kids.

That's all they really care about.

Be there when you say you're going to be there, you know, do what you say you're going to do.

Unfortunately, you know, we do see people that are disappointments as parents, unfortunately.

They don't keep the promises to their kids and they're always wondering, is dad going to show up to pick me up this weekend?

My kids never have to worry that.

They know if there's a time and a place I'm supposed to be, dad's going to be there.

What cultivated that as an important factor that you needed to hit?

You know, it's hard to say.

I think I've always kind of loved and known I wanted children in my younger years.

You know, I had younger cousins and nieces and nephews and I was always the one that was babysitting or we used to go on this and we still do this family traditional camping trips where I don't mean just like my family in my household, but like nine or ten aunts, uncles, their kids.

We go up to this campsite and it got to a certain age where Ray was watching all the little ones while the parents went up to the to the bar and enjoyed the festivities.

And so I've always been around children.

Then I had my first one when I was at age 20.

And I think I grew up with a really good example of a great dad.

So I kind of I kind of knew what to expect.

And I wanted my kids to hopefully be able to say the same someday.

How far are you reaching into the future?

I don't think I'm focusing on that.

No, I think I just try to set the right example and give them, you know, let them see my values, how I grew up and hopefully as much of that rubs off on them as possible.

But I still want to give them the freedom to make their own decisions, live their own lives, come up with their own value system, no matter what I've instilled in them.

So it's very hard to kind of be focused on that if it's outside of your control.

I mean, one of my kind of my core models and something I always say to myself and even other people is like, I try not to worry about things that are outside of my control because that's what drives people nuts.

You don't really get productive there.

You just start to get almost making yourself crazy.

So if there's something out of my control, I try not to focus or worry about it because it's out of my control.

Why should I?

You know what I mean?

But I am blessed to say that my son, who's 23 living down in Florida, is married to a great woman and they are actively trying to have my first grandchild.

So I'm excited about that and certainly pretty hands on with wanting to know all the details.

But again, I want to give him the freedom to live his own life.

How did you come to meet Jesus?

I went 34 years without opening the Bible or going to church.

Quite a big gap from the time I was about 13, 33, 34 years, time I was about 13 until just about six or seven months ago.

And then that's kind of when I really found him again and been going to church, Bible reading every single day.

I have a cool Bible study group that we meet every other Sunday online and do readings and chit chat together.

And it's been a kind of a great full circle comeback for me.

When I was a child, my family wasn't super religious.

And I started attending church with a neighborhood family that, you know, we all have that neighborhood family where they used to be the cool parents, let the kids sleep over, take them to family events.

So I just tagged along with this other family for years, went to church mass, went to the youth group.

I remember we did this mission back in the day, still living in Massachusetts, but as a youth group, maybe 12 years old, we did a two week bus trip to Kentucky where our youth group went and built the roof for a couple of very, very poor men and families.

I remember the father that we did the roof for, the guy named Ed, he had about a six month old baby and his roof literally had holes in it where water was going into his baby's room.

And it was just great seeing the satisfaction of helping the guy, seeing how grateful he was.

And I remember the last day we showed up to the job, this is still crazy.

He had got up there early in the morning and wrote all over the roof in chalk, God bless you guys.

Jesus loves you, just all these messages that he must've got up there at five, six in the morning before he left.

I still remember this guy that had no family car, the guy had to walk four miles each way to his job and back, just a really dedicated guy that couldn't make ends meet.

And I really enjoyed that feeling.

I enjoyed our group, but I don't know what it was.

Something just being a teenager and getting involved in my own life and music and smoking some weed and things I did back in my teenage days.

And it just took me away from everything.

I think I always felt somewhat connected, but I was also very distant in terms of that.

And I'll be, again, very transparent.

It was the Charlie Kirk incident and Charlie Kirk really brought me back to Christ.

What's the difference when you compare now and knowing Jesus back then?

The difference for me is more relief.

It's the most liberating feeling.

It's very hard to put into words, but just knowing your relationship, having full belief in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and growing my relationship with him and God, even over these last six months, as much as I've doven into it, it's hard to put into words, just liberating.

Now that you're in the space, are you feeling like you want your children to know God the way you know God, or you're simply going with the elements of, hey, let me model life.

And as you mentioned before, let them choose what they want.

Do I want or wish that for them?

Yes.

Is it something I am very active or will push them into?

No.

So for instance, the first time I went back to church, I had mentioned I have three kids and my youngest is still a local here and in high school.

I had asked her and I wasn't going to force her.

Her name's Brooke.

I'm like, Brooke, I want to go to church tomorrow without Karen.

Would you like to join us?

Yeah, I'd love to go.

That's my involvement.

I will give them the opportunity and I want them to be a part of it.

So me and my son, I don't want to say we're distant, but we haven't, because he's in Florida and I'm here, it's been a few years since we've seen each other in person.

Yeah, we talk on the phone and we text quite often.

But I was even telling him, I'm like, hey, you wouldn't believe it.

Your old man actually reads the Bible now.

I was just joking with him.

He's like, it's a great book, dad.

I've actually learned a lot from it.

I never even knew my son opened it.

So just to have him tell me that was really cool for me.

Tell me a bit about Audience Love.

That is the company that I am a co-owner of.

I have two business partners.

We have a team of about 30 people and we just did five years in business.

We got a very good software company, which is actually, we are a major data provider in the ad tech space.

Any brands and advertisers using meta ads, paid ads, they use our data in their campaigns to target a better audience, to save money on cost, to lower their cost per lead in acquisition as opposed to standard meta targeting.

So we built this super data platform.

And then we started selling these different features within our platform to brands and advertisers.

And now we have a little over a thousand users on our platform currently.

And I think we're going to break about 8 million in revenue this year if we just stay on pace.

The odds are our growth rate over the last year, we're probably going to crack that number, but I can say it pretty safely.

I'm really blessed to have a team of about 30 team members now.

It's the largest our company's ever grown.

About two years ago, maybe we had 10 or 12 team members.

We've grown so much.

We're up to 30 or two more last week, which got us up to 30.

But I also have some great faith examples in my organization.

A couple of my other employees, once they started seeing my post and me getting into it, they're like, Ray, I've been talking to you about God for three years.

I've been on your team and you never really even winked at me.

I was like, yeah, I just didn't want to mix religion with business.

And of course I was kind of separated for a while.

I mean, I'll just be straight up with it.

So I got some really good team members that are very supportive in that aspect.

My favorite part of the business is watching my team members grow both personally and professionally, their skillset, their maturity, how good of people they are.

I think hiring off of character and getting people that match your kind of internal core values is very, very important in growing a business.

So I've took a lot of my personal values and kind of embedded them into my business and who I work with, who I hire.

And it really makes the thing so much more rewarding seeing all these other people getting raises, making more money than they ever were.

Getting to one of my best sales guys was just able to propose to his girl over the weekend with the rock of his dreams, you know, in the picture on her fingers.

So I love that I'm a part of that and making people's dreams come true.

Five years from today, you're listening to this conversation.

You heard yourself transition from the timeline of teenager to adulthood to currently.

What's a message you'd for future you listening?

You know, number one in when it comes to parenting, keep the promise you make for your kids, but almost as a byproduct of that.

And it's something I've always said.

So I imagine I'll still be thinking and analyzing this if I was to listen back to this five years from now.

But it's also keep the promises you make to yourself.

I think that's very, very important as a person.

I think it's sometimes we don't value ourselves enough, where we actually look at what we say to ourselves and kind of put our self worth up there enough to the promises we make to ourselves.

And lastly, something I've always talked about that I like to say to people is also protect your environment.

And I mean, part of is keeping a clean workstation and an orderly but I mean, like the people you let into your life, and the people you really give you know, your time and effort to, I think it's important to really protect that and surround yourself with people that would reciprocate if the you know, moment called for it.

Amazing audience links in the show notes if audience lab caught your attention, and you're thinking, alright, let me check that out, then hey, go click the link.

A pleasure, a treasure.

Thank you for being on what is inspired by Toa Minneconwu.