Rich Quarles is a marketing strategist focused primarily on startups, technology, and marketing . Rich founded glassCanopy in 2001, a specialized B2B marketing agency based in San Francisco. Rich and his team help market hard-to-describe products to hard-to-find audiences through content marketing and digital campaigns. He has advised startups that have collectively returned over $2.5 billion to founders and investors.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Jim Huebner founder of White Label IQ
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I had no money and no clue… My first business was back in the late nineties nobody really knew what they were doing on the web so we sort of had an excuse for not knowing what we were doing… With Glass Canopy the initial launch was much harder simply because there was a big recession. That said if I had to choose between launching a business in a bubble boom or a bust, I would take the bust because I think you make smarter decisions for the long run”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
Tales Of The City: Tales of the City 1 Book by Armistead MaupinFavourite Quote:
- “send the damn invoices” Dave Wood
- Click the following link to listen to the Dave Wood podcast episode on The Entrepreneur Way
Recommended Online Resources:
- Podcasts
- YouTube, LLC is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries.
- Xero connects you to all things business. It’s online accounting software connects you to accountants and bookkeepers, your bank, and a huge range of business apps
- Also mentioned:
- Agency Management Institute (AMI) – AMI serves small to mid-sized ad marketing agencies so they can grow and increase their AGI and profitability, through peer networks, workshops, and more
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“find other people in your industry, other business owners, even competitors. It’s better if they are not a direct competitor. But find them, talk to them, be open about your business because I think it’s very easy to feel like your problems are unique and it’s very hard as a business owner to get support around what you need. Because when people… When strangers ask you or friends or family how is business there is only one acceptable answer which is great. And maybe that’s true in the greater sense or maybe it’s not but for sure there is going to be a lot of footnotes to that great. And so, find a network, build a network of other folks doing similar things to what you are doing and don’t hold your issues and operations as a secret and think of that as a weakness. Talking about them I think is a real strength because everyone else has those problems to and unless you are in a business where there is only two or three competitors talking to a dozen folks is not going to sink your business but it might save it”…[Listen for More]
More About Rich Quarles:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Twenty years from now you’ll be more disappointed by the things you did not do than the ones you did.” Mark Twain
Other Quotes From the Chat with Rich Quarles:
- “it’s okay not to be the entire solution for a client… You can just be a subset of that”
- “it’s very hard to fail if you don’t quit. And so, the secret to success is to just keep plugging away. Just keep iterating until you have got something that is working until it stops working and then start iterating again ”
- “I think everybody who starts a business it’s a point where they want to quit. And if you choose to quit then that’s it the journey is over. But you get to decide”
- “we are in control of our destiny and we get to decide when it’s over”
- “I think it’s that critical mistake that keeps coming back to haunt you. Because It’s really hard to provide the service that you need to provide to give an excellent product or an excellent result to your clients if you are under charging. And so, it becomes a vicious cycle.”
- “A lot of times the answers are sort of spelt out there in the numbers. It’s almost never as… When I think things are good if I look at the numbers they are never as good as I feel that they are. And when things are bad, they are never as bad as the way that I feel that they are. And so, I find that to be very grounding and very useful for planning and thinking rationally about my business”
- “it’s hard to fail if you never quit”
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