Last week our Chanty team has visited Growth Marketing Stage conference where we’ve interviewed Josh Fechter – co-founder at BAMF media. We believe, many leaders and company founders reading our blog should find Josh’s thoughts quite inspiring. We hope you find lots of value for yourself in this interview.
Olga
Hey guys, I’m super excited to be here at Growth Marketing Stage and have a chat with the most inspiring growth hacker, a person who believes in grit much more than he believes in luck – Josh Fechter.
Josh
Thank you for having me, it’s a pleasure.
Olga
So Josh, you’ve launched the fastest growing Facebook community, you’ve co-founded BAMF media, you’ve written five books, you are constantly traveling the world waking up at 5 a.m. That’s certainly a lot of inspiration for your followers I must say, but I bet it’s a huge pressure for you too. So how do you manage the stress and how do you take care of your mental health to stay sane with such a hectic schedule?
Josh
Yeah, great question! So, a couple of things. One is I don’t drink any alcohol, I’ve been alcohol-free for like I think eight months now. Doesn’t mean I don’t smoke weed. I don’t know if that can be on it. But besides that, I try to do yoga every day.
So I do an hour and a half to two hours of yoga every day and then I do a lot of endurance training so a lot of running to get all my stress out. Endurance training in the morning, yoga at night and that’s pretty much… even when I’m traveling I still do yoga.
Olga
Yeah, that’s cool, you look really calm, you know.
Josh
I’m trying. It’s a hard life. There’s definitely a lot of ups and downs to say the least, but in the end of the day it’s like a very long road if you are here for, you know, ten, fifteen years in a business like no moment can really shake you if you know that at the end of the day.
Olga
You know, when I look at your LinkedIn feed, I say: Wow! His keyboard keys must be really fading from all that typing. And I know from your blog that you write more than 1000 words every day. And that’s huge! And I’m pretty sure, well, I know that it’s not only about writing. You obviously work really hard. So is there some kind of a secret or a hack that keeps you that productive?
Josh
Oh Gosh, I would say I’ve created hacks for myself which is one is I’ve actually created Chrome extension that blocks all of my news feeds online, I don’t have any social media apps on my phone. Those two things are huge.
I think, I also don’t follow anybody online. Like I don’t follow Gary Vaynerchuk and whoever anybody is following today. To me that’s totally irrelevant to anything I’m trying to do.
I’m not looking for motivation or inspiration. I think motivation comes from within and momentum, so that just saves a lot of time right there. Today, you know, looking at how people spend their time, even I won’t say my employees, but a lot of employees out there would spend like four hours a day on their phone. That’s insane.
Just getting nothing done cause they are so addicted to social media and if you can remove that you have so much extra time to do what you want to do. And here goes the creation mode, where you need it to be.
Olga
Yeah, I can totally relate. You know, apart from being Quora top writer and top B2B marketing influencer, innovative founder, you happen to be a great manager. So what would be your one advice on effective management of a fast-growing company?
Josh
Yeah, so this is really interesting, it’s actually been really hard for me to learn how to manage people. I’m not a manager by nature. I’m more of…I consider myself an artist. Very less of a manager and having been put in a management role I try to learn everything I can on it. And there’s a couple of key things.
One is people don’t really care what you get them like if you buy them a standing desk or new espresso machine. All they really want is for them to be heard. If you sit down with an employee once a week for half hour or forty-five minutes and just listen to them and ask some questions about their life, where they see the company going and the mission and the vision that they have for it that is worth gold to them. And people, I think, tend to forget that. So it’s so much just about sitting them down and listening.
And then second of all is actually understand what is a vision for a company, always putting that forward. So for example, our mission is to empower a million founders, right. And it’s gonna take a while to get there, but it’s the best part, it’s not something that’s gonna be grasped right away. It’s gonna be something that takes time and people know what it is. Everybody knows what it is in a company, everybody knows why they are there.
Olga
There are a lot of business owners out there who wish their companies grew faster. And since growth is your expertise, maybe you could share how do you think what is it usually that prevents those companies from growing at the pace they want?
Josh
I think a lot of it just comes down to well, a lot of it depends on the company itself, but most of it comes down to management and communication at the end of the day.
For example, if you go and raise money and it doesn’t work out you can keep going and pivoting in a long enough timeline, you know, thirty years, whatever it is, you’ll eventually become successful. But you have to be able to sustain that momentum. So first of is one is what you’re doing is like purpose driven enough to where you can fail enough times and still keep going, right?
So I failed plenty of times, with a difference between me and everybody else is that I just keep going. Like, the first, I think seven startups that I was part of all failed. And it was all before the age of 25 so I got them all out of the way and then everything started working afterwards, but I just kept going, right.
And most people don’t wanna do that. And that’s, I mean, it’s hard. But at the same time if you know that you’re learning then it’s going to become easier.
Olga
It’s obviously very difficult to keep on hustling nonstop. So what is your plan for the future – are you going to continue the hustle or probably slow down at some point?
Josh
I don’t like… the word hustle is I don’t know if it’s the right word to say it. I think it’s more of just trying to create something that’s meaningful and has an impact, right. And that’s always important, it always makes you feel good at the end of the day.
Like one of my favorite writers, his name is Lev Tolstoy and he wrote this book called “The Kingdom of God is Within You” and he talks the purpose of life is help others because it helps you find purpose and so I have this big tattoo on my arm, right. And I really believe in that. As long as you are helping others, you always have energy.
Olga
Josh, I just wanna say thank you so much for finding time for this interview and let me wish you the best of luck in everything you do and all your projects. And guys, I strongly encourage you to follow Josh on LinkedIn and also join his Facebook BAMF community cause it’s tons of value. And thanks again, keep up the great work!
Josh
Thank you, appreciate it!
