The Dead Pixels Society podcast

Personal Development and Career Pivoting Insights from John Chan, 2X Growth Agency

July 11, 2024 John Chan Season 5 Episode 174
Personal Development and Career Pivoting Insights from John Chan, 2X Growth Agency
The Dead Pixels Society podcast
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The Dead Pixels Society podcast
Personal Development and Career Pivoting Insights from John Chan, 2X Growth Agency
Jul 11, 2024 Season 5 Episode 174
John Chan

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Ready to unlock the secrets of turning athletic discipline into entrepreneurial success? John Chan, the dynamic founder of 2X Growth Agency and a dedicated taekwondo athlete, takes us on his journey from Hong Kong to Canada. Discover how his immigrant background and sports discipline shaped his entrepreneurial spirit and career choices. Chan's transformation from a designer to a marketing agency executive showcases his adaptability and the endless opportunities available.

Join us as Chan shares lessons from the startup world, inspired by design-thinking icons like Steve Jobs. Gain insights into balancing product focus with customer needs, recognizing market opportunities through intuition, and the importance of staying updated with emerging technologies. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur, this episode is packed with strategies to build credibility, pivot your career, and stay ahead of the curve. 

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Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Edited by Olivia Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

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Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

Ready to unlock the secrets of turning athletic discipline into entrepreneurial success? John Chan, the dynamic founder of 2X Growth Agency and a dedicated taekwondo athlete, takes us on his journey from Hong Kong to Canada. Discover how his immigrant background and sports discipline shaped his entrepreneurial spirit and career choices. Chan's transformation from a designer to a marketing agency executive showcases his adaptability and the endless opportunities available.

Join us as Chan shares lessons from the startup world, inspired by design-thinking icons like Steve Jobs. Gain insights into balancing product focus with customer needs, recognizing market opportunities through intuition, and the importance of staying updated with emerging technologies. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur, this episode is packed with strategies to build credibility, pivot your career, and stay ahead of the curve. 

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at gary@thedeadpixelssociety.com

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group, The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Edited by Olivia Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Erin Manning:

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by MediaClip, Advertek Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau:

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by John Chan, the founder of the 2X Growth Agency, Tae kwon do athlete and serial entrepreneur. Did I get all that right?

John Chan:

That's good. Appreciate it.

Gary Pageau:

First tell me a little bit about your story, because the story of how you just got into North America is kind of interesting. And then you started out as an athlete.

John Chan:

For sure, and thank you for having me, gary. What you're alluding to is I'm an immigrant. I was born in Hong Kong but raised in Canada, vancouver, canada. So I immigrated in 93 before the British return from Hong Kong to China, and so what kind of gives me was this sort of upbringing, of sort of roots from back home but learning a new culture and environment.

John Chan:

In here and you hear a lot of immigrant parents and I guess immigrant families talk about the greatest sacrifice and the reason why they immigrated first place was that the kids and children would have a better future. And so part of the as we tie back into running a business and why we run businesses, the way for me was recognizing that, especially when you travel from our country, if you go to different places, you realize that the biggest opportunity that we have that our parents have given me, or at least for me, was the opportunity and freedom to explore career paths. And so if you had a free market and you had a stable society, how could you not try to exploit that? How can you not try to figure out how to find a career in business around, make the most out of in front of you? We have a Western education, we can speak language. There's a lot at stake and for me that's a really big, important driving force for why I do what I do.

Gary Pageau:

Now speaking of driving forces. Early on you started becoming a competitive athlete. Was Taekwondo something you were interested in, or is this something in your family?

John Chan:

I grew up watching a lot of Kung Fu movies. My dad was really into it, and so I'm the youngest of three siblings, so I have three boys in the family and because I guess my dad in his upbringing, in his years, in his former living years, he recognized both in the stories that he told and some of his firsthand experiences, you know, when he was growing up, that being well-educated was a competitive advantage in the market and also being able to take care of yourself, and sometimes that also meant like physical safety, right, and so our environments have shifted in the sense that we're no longer in unsafe environments where you actually need to get into physical fights. Um. But the martial arts and that sort of spirit, you know it wasn't something I picked. I got into taekwondo when I was five and interestingly, my dad you know, because I was shy my dad um, took classes with me when he was in his 50s. We both wore white belts to start and uh, but he kept kept going after a certain point, and so I don't think I would have wanted to be a competitive athlete.

John Chan:

Growing up I felt like I was really bad at the sport I used to compete. I got beat up a lot. But what was kind of like a chance encounter was that there was one of the first nationals that I attended was in 2003. It was junior nationals. It happened in my city and so it was kind of convenient that it was there. So I got signed up and got enrolled into it, um, but during that process I got exposed to the training of other schools in the local area because it was provincial you're a provincial team competing a national team and so I just started realizing that the environment that I was in, that I the first school that I joined wasn't necessarily conducive to being a great athlete. But being exposed to other environments kind of sort of opened the floodgates for me and set the direction for how important it is to be in a good environment to develop myself, whether it's in sports or in something else.

Gary Pageau:

So that was kind of an interesting lesson that you learned was that you came from another country, you came to North America and then you realized how important environment was to improving yourself. Right, you have to put yourself in a position. So, from using that lesson, how did that translate into businesses? When you look at starting a business, are you looking for the market? Are you looking for technology, or what is that you're looking for?

John Chan:

It's a great question because there's a lot of stuff built into that, and so, in order to get to the later stages of how that formulates and thought, it helps to talk about some of the earlier stories and so maybe it's helpful to think about. You know. So right now I run a marketing agency it's 2x Growth Agency. We do performance marketing for e commerce and software brands. But if you look at sort of the special power that I personally have, I think it's really important for both the companies that we work with and for ourselves to lean on your unique strengths, and part of that is your upbringing and your environment and your training. And so for me you know come back to this thought my superpower has always been about going from zero to 60 for any particular field quickly, because I learned things very quickly, and so that plays out in both from a consulting perspective, so that when oftentimes, when I meet with brands or founders or you know different owners of different businesses, I'll get the reaction from them where it's like, oh, you spent 15 minutes on my company and my business, but you already know so much about it and you're telling me new things I hadn't thought about before, because I connect with thoughts very quickly, but going back before, I knew that was my superpower.

John Chan:

So my career path was I had three major arcs. The first arc would have been I was a designer between 2006 to 2012. I was still I'm still a designer in the design thinking sense, but I'm not a practice designer in the same way it used to be. But I had this phase as I was a professional UX designer, a user experience designer. And then the second phase that I got into was I got into software development. And then the third phase and that was maybe between and running a tech startup, and that was between 2011 or so until 2016.

John Chan:

And then the third phase of my career is I'm a marketer now, where I take the earlier skill sets and translate into helping products go to market. And so, again, the common theme is learning very quickly. What led to it before that was just this notion that at school, when I was 19, I dropped out because I realized that I probably learned faster on my own and that I had basically the internet available to me and I can pick up a lot of things quickly. In each of these phases, what I've always noticed was I need to solve and learn the next available skills to solve the immediate problem, and so I had UX design skills from high school and then, when I worked in an organization, that I realized that the UX design skills and the user experience design skills wasn't serving me as much anymore. I need to learn a different skills, and that's how I got into software, and I'm skipping some details for now. Maybe we can get into it later.

Gary Pageau:

No, no, that's fine. What was that like? To tell your folks you're dropping out of school at 19?

John Chan:

It was relatively easier in the sense that I was the third kid right, and so it's less about skills and about being the position, and so I think I can appreciate a little bit more now that it's not something that a lot of people could afford to do. Especially, you know, in my case I had two older brothers that was seven, eight years older than me and they had like a proper degrees or an engineers, and so I think for me I had more creative flexibility and freedom. But it also helped at the time that I had. That also wasn't, you know, quote unquote wasting my time, so to speak. I was training, you know, pretty extensively, and so I think it gave my parents a bit of a. You know they were worried, obviously, but I think they they had a certain sense that, um, if I wanted to pursue a certain thing, that I was gonna go find my way there, and there's always like the back pocket of like, okay, if I need to, I can always go back to, to it, right, and so it wasn't. It wasn't like a, a decision that was made in such a way that it felt like we couldn't go back to Right If I, if, if things didn't work out. It is very organic and maybe what's ironic is that the story was I dropped out.

John Chan:

I was 19 and I started freelancing for for about a year or so. Wasn't very good at the business aspect of it, was a decent designer. But um, when I needed to basically take care of my bills I got hired back at the university. I dropped. So my first real time, my first full-time job, was back at university, so it kind of like worked out what appealed to you about ux design?

Gary Pageau:

because I'm trying to remember that time period that was very different than it is now. So what was appealing then? Was it just because, hey, this is a booming area, there's a lot of opportunity here, or this is innately something I feel like I'm good at?

John Chan:

It's interesting that you ask that, because when you look back, when you hear about narratives about people's backgrounds, it's easy to think of it as, oh, they got it all figured out and they sort of work backwards from there. Of course, it's not like that right. There's a lot more organic. And so when you think about the uncertainty of, hey, I need to make a certain decision about my skill sets, or if I'm trying to think about what services do I offer, it's never that clear, and so I think you should find some solace in that uncertainty. But at the time, what was happening was that I wasn't looking at the markets and deciding what I was trying to do. All I was trying to do was solve the next immediate problem that I personally was running into. And so, going back, I knew how to code from high school. So this is 2001,. 2005 was when I was in high school.

John Chan:

I was lucky that I was exposed to some basic coding skills and I was really good at drawing. And so when I started my full-time job, I was hired as a web assistant. So I wasn't like a full-blown designer, I wasn't doing user experience or user research. I kind of created that role for myself, because what I was trying to do was, when I created a web page, I wanted to ask how was this impacting other people on the other side? And I was asking that because after I hit publish, when I was learning how to code, that wasn't really a concern. But in a work environment where I hit publish, I have to start asking oh, there's people on the other side, is this thing that I'm doing was working or not? And so you start learning about analytics.

John Chan:

I was lucky in that sense that during that time I got exposed through conferences and through talks about other practitioners in the space of how they approached it, and so the term at the time was usability. Right, I was thinking about usability and user research and I brought that back to my work and realized, oh, there's an entire field within this kind of by chance exposed to it. And afterwards I kind of pulled on that thread and that exposed me to oh, you know what? I can go set up usability labs, I can do user research. And oh, you know what, I can go set up usability labs, I can do user research. And it became this whole other world, and that's why I eventually became their leading user expert at organization, because I kept asking and championing for within the organization that we need these other things.

Gary Pageau:

Which is sort of weird. Looking you know how many years later, because it seems to me like it's all about that right now.

John Chan:

The usability piece is like that's what it's all about right now, 100%. I think what you're referring to is kind of this notion that design thinking is a very valuable and important skills because we know it's business impacting, it's revenue generating. And I would even go back and say I think what really pioneered that initial thought and made that quote unquote cool was Steve Jobs for a while was really pioneering and saying that hey, design is a really important aspect of product development because it sells really well. And so you start seeing all these design-led organizations. It's a lot more popularized now when you look at all these trendy tech startups and you look at the way they approach it. Everything is well-designed and well-branded because that does impact user perception and business value.

Gary Pageau:

And then you had your own business software company made you decide to kind of take on the whole enchilada. I guess is the question no for sure.

John Chan:

And again, the common theme and thread about how my career progressed was I always solved the next incremental problem. So at the time, starting the software wasn't kind of like an off-the-cuff decision. It started from going back to my design career when I was doing user research and was leaving that within the university. At the time that I was working at, I realized that no matter how good of a user experience I delivered for that specific organization, it didn't matter because they were donor-based. It wasn't based on users and customers that were having great experiences that led to better businesses and better business outcomes. And so when I had that realization, I realized that I was basically capped in that environment. Going back to that, that's why it was important. So I started exploring other organizations, other companies to join and I realized that in order for me to really have my skills valued at a better environment, I need to work for a for-profit business.

John Chan:

Software and tech at the time has always been in the back pocket in the sense that I've always followed and kept up with that type of news.

John Chan:

I was an avid tech user myself, but one of the companies that I joined at the time was a company called 37 signals.

John Chan:

They make a very popular project management software called base camp, and at the time they were pay years and thought leaders around. They're very unconventional business owners and the way that they run the companies. They pioneered and championed remote work before it was popularized and one of the things that were known for was being a great software company. And so when I joined them as one of the designers, I got exposure to see how they ran their software business from internally and that kind of seeded the idea that I could start figuring out, hey, I could make this work, and so I started coding. There's a bit of chance encounters, but I started coding on at night and on the side and learning how to become a better coder. And the the first software company wasn't really meant to be a company, it would just be coding on the side and practicing, and so I got user traction pulling on that thread and so it was kind of organic again, based on solving the next incremental problem. But that's how that came to be.

Gary Pageau:

So how long was that business around and what happened to it?

John Chan:

Yeah, so that was probably from 2013 or so I would say until 2016. And the punchline is that company didn't go anywhere. Right, we had user attraction and we had a lot of people that love the product. I still get messages today from saying, hey, I see you're like the founder of Dayboard, can I still download it? What have you?

John Chan:

And what happened there was, we built a great product, but we couldn't find a market to commercialize the product in a way that was sustainable for the company. So we couldn't make enough money to make it sustainable. And I had offers at a time for raising money or whatever to build a company out. But there was basically two concurrent problems at play. One was the maturity of myself. I wasn't thinking of building a company. I was thinking about building a great product, and at the time, for example, I wouldn't even call myself a CEO, which meant that I wasn't really good at being a leader of an organization, and that had implications of how I ran that product or company. But the second aspect of it was that I told myself that I didn't know how to get user acquisition or solve.

John Chan:

Solve user acquisition as a problem and distribution was a problem, and so that's kind of the third arc of starting a marketing company, because I started joining and seeing what other organizations did to get past that initial cold start problem of launching a new product or service.

John Chan:

We realized afterwards that actually wasn't the skills. We had the adequate skills. But sometimes in business there's aspects outside of skills right, you don't have to take it so personally. Sometimes it's the market that you're in, sometimes it's the timing of when things play out Right. At the time we started meeting with different companies and founders only to realize that they had that initial traction and they got past the half million or million dollar mark while they still haven't got all the skills buttoned up, which is why they hired agents like ours to do the fulfillment and do that type of work for them. And it was a really important lesson. So I was trying to solve the next problem of trying to figure out marketing and distribution, because I thought that that's what the company needed, only to realize that there's other consideration outside of that.

Gary Pageau:

The thing about a product, whatever, that is, air quotes for those who can't see it. The product is like you said there's a right time and there's a right place. Just because you know you can do something, you can do a service, you can make something you can doesn't necessarily mean that there's a sufficient market for it. When you're kind of making the transition from a startup, that failure launch, I guess, is the way to about that, to we're going to be the company that actually can grow stuff. Where were the places you looked that you said? These are the learning experiences. I need to get over that product focus instead of customer focus.

John Chan:

It's interesting that you ask that, because when you're talking about any type of business or any type of company that can get past the initial traction, you're not thinking about how to make a million bucks or make $10 million. You're not thinking about how big can this market be Some environments and some businesses is appropriate to ask that. But the most important thing you're really asking is can I take this past initial hurdle of $10,000 or $5,000 so that I can make it sustainable for ourselves? And so all you're really asking is you can go about this approach in two different ways. You can solve this problem for yourself and say, hey, I have this unique problem about problem to identify and I will pay money for it. There has to be other people like me, right and so, and then can I find enough of those people to meet that?

Gary Pageau:

That's the big question right.

John Chan:

That's one way to do it.

John Chan:

So you basically sort of like self-identify based on problems that you have and for people that are, I guess, good with that intuition or good with that sort of like observation about the industry and the market and that self-observation, that's usually one way to start.

John Chan:

But the other one is basically just observing and asking the market, so to speak, and there's different ways you would do this. Sometimes you would have a more concrete experiment, other times it's just like watching how things unfold in front of you, and different people have different levels of abilities to do that. But it comes down to observing what's actually happening in the market such that, oh, you know what it is. Asking that question I was saying earlier that there's it's a really big market, that there's, you know, 10 million people or however many people that want this type of thing. Even though I don't self-identify with that problem, if I built this thing, I know there's going to be people for it, and so it depends on that kind of like question that you're asking of is there enough customers and potential customers and can I access those customers in a sustainable manner? And if the answer is yes, then you're going to be able to cross that initial hurdle and threshold.

Gary Pageau:

Because I think you know you mentioned Steve Jobs earlier and I read his biography over the summer. You know the big, thick Walter Eisenstein book, you know, and I just thought it was interesting because there seemed to be a lot of about the Steve Jobs persona, how he was able to identify products and all these other things, but a lot of it was just timing, you know, in terms of technology and the things he was interested in, having to coincide with what Wozniak was interested in. And they met up and they started this thing, you know, and it grew from there. Obviously, and there are many other people, contemporaries of Jobs, who were not successful, right, I mean, there's several computer companies at the time who flamed out horribly. I guess my question is is that, you know, with timing and technology kind of being necessary, why did you decide that, hey, I'm going to get into the consulting growth business?

John Chan:

There's two aspects of it. The first one is it's always important to focus on things that don't change. So, for example, in my world I learned a lot of new skills from a design perspective or from a programming perspective, and one of the takeaways as I was doing web development, was that I noticed that the design, thinking of typography, of layouts, of information hierarchy, the delivery of clarity, information, being able to think about how user consumer behaviors change, how they evolve, those things don't change. And so if I were to spend time and energy developing those skill sets, those things are fairly timeless, right. But if you look at certain aspects of that same field of web design, the browsers change, technologies and tools change, screen sizes, screen sizes change, and so there's a halftime of that skill that I develop in those areas. And so if I spend a lot of time and energy in those areas and if I don't know where the future was going to head towards, then those skills become quickly obsolete. Future was going to head towards, then those skills become quickly obsolete. And so I have to balance, from a market learning perspective and a skill development perspective that I'm trying to figure out, which aspects of that is timeless versus which aspect and pays dividends, the better I get it over time, versus what skills am I going to develop that will become obsolete a year or two or three years from now, and so that kind of like balancing was really important. And so, going into marketing, consulting, every business today and in the future is going to need distribution, right Marketing and direct response and brand awareness. Those type of skills are not, you know, go out of vogue. They've been around 20 years ago, they're going to be around 20 years from now, and so if I develop the skills and even if I train my team members, it's really important to separate that aspect of it.

John Chan:

But from a timing perspective, what was also emerging was, again in our environment, was paid search and paid social advertising. Paid social advertising was a fairly new field, and so when there's a new field that emerges or there's new techniques that are being evolved and again, going back to my unique strength of learning things very quickly, it allowed me to stay competitive that if there's a new thing that comes out, I know how to exploit that, in a sense, that you know what, I can take that skill and translate it to other people that have not, and so, in a sense, whenever there's a new market, a new thing's emerging. I'm dealing with the cost benefit of this new platform is emerging. I can go learn it and I can go teach it or sell it, but it may go away anytime soon. And so it's kind of this delicate balance of developing new skills so that you can be an emerging quote unquote thought leader versus balancing skill sets. That I know was not going to change over time.

Gary Pageau:

Right. If you came out with all typefaces need to be lime green, it's like well, that's not readable. So you're breaking some basic rules there A hundred percent. So when you launched this 2X growth agency idea, you didn't have expertise really in that area that when you're going to get clients you could point to a portfolio. You could point to a portfolio on some work that you've done, but not being a growth consultancy. So what is the secret sauce of convincing people to hire you for something you have no track record for doing?

John Chan:

No, it's a great question, which is basically what every beginner needs to go through for free. It also, you know, I mean at the time we just worked for a reduced cost to build the case study portfolio, because at the time we didn't actually start off the growth agency as a marketing consultancy. I actually started going back to the skills I already had, which was a design consultancy. So 2x growth agency if you actually look at the legal name, it's actually 2x uh, consult conversion design. So for a while we actually did design consultancy, where we're doing different redesigns for different companies on homepage or the product page, and then you would do a test to see which one was performing better. And so I would use that as sort of like the gateway to lead into hey, we're designing pages where traffic is already going to, but it looks like you have problems with traffic leading up to it, and so in order for you to convince anybody to work with you, you basically have to do better or work harder than what they're currently doing. And so because we have existing skill sets around design and about design thinking, it led to us being able to explore hey, if we took on this service, then we can basically you know, approach that and then, and and so. That's why, when you launch a new idea or service and you know it's a good direction to take, it's always important to figure out not what the price points are willing to charge, but also what you're willing to give up to get those case studies.

John Chan:

And so nowadays, we talked a little bit about the growth agency, but what we haven't really touched on is that we're always trying to start or buy businesses that are adjacent to our category, because it also gives us a sandbox or environment to say, hey, you know what, If no one's willing to hire us for this type of work, I'm willing to do it myself on my own dime, for my own purposes, because those are also ways of of of getting yourself that experience that you need. And in the current market, in the current environment, a lot of those things are quite accessible to you. You can learn a lot of stuff on YouTube. You can learn a lot of stuff on the internet. It's a matter of rolling up your sleeves and getting through it. And so, if you have that tenacity and that ability to spot that, a lot of these skills are not elusive to you.

Gary Pageau:

There's kind of some philosophies on making acquisitions at companies. I kind of want to touch on that a little bit. There's the idea that I want to buy current customers. Right, I want to buy. You know, I've got 100 clients. Now I want to buy another company that's got 50, so I'll have 150. But it sounds to me like your philosophy is more like I want to acquire capability, not necessarily customers.

John Chan:

Yeah, it's not always based on that one criteria of learning new skills. They're from a certain new thing or acquiring a new thing. It's not always about that. It's definitely one aspect to it. But this notion about building something versus buying something. So if you're starting something from scratch, a lot of companies and businesses have this problem of the cold start. When you're starting with zero traction and zero customers and zero traffic, how do you actually grow this thing? And you don't know if things aren't working because the idea is sort of not the right idea or if it's just something that's not quite there yet.

John Chan:

Or you could just be bad, right, like you, just don't know. But acquiring a company and acquiring a business has the benefit of looking at the historical data to see what's working, what isn't, and so this notion of buying versus building has been seeded to me, that I'm realizing as I'm getting to my marketing career that, with the problem that we have with the previous company, wasn't necessary because we're bad in terms of capabilities, but because we have the cold start problem that we could get past. And sometimes it's not a matter of skills, sometimes it's timing, sometimes it's actually pure capital. You just didn't last long enough to see it come to fruition. Being able to take something that already has a running start was kind of largely an exercise of us realizing that our skill sets was actually much better from going from one to 10, rather than go from zero to one right. Taking something that's existing and optimizing it and making it better was a better skill set for us than-.

Gary Pageau:

Or even going from four to 10,. Right, right, exactly.

John Chan:

Whichever way you want to start, but having an existing start is a reflection of oh, I have this better skill set around that.

Gary Pageau:

When you're negotiating with somebody you want to acquire, does that affect your objectives, how much you're willing to pay, because you may not even be paying for their existing business per se, right? Oh, of course, because one of the challenges that I see when people acquire businesses is the seller has a number and the acquirer has a number, and sometimes the numbers aren't very close because the acquirer thinks well, I've been running this business for a long time and I deserve a reward. And the acquirer is like well, you got reward when you got paid earlier.

John Chan:

I'm buying future potential Absolutely, and of course, that happens a lot in any type of market, and I think the way that you think about it is that acquiring a business may not be something that a lot of people are familiar with and even our case I don't want to talk about it like we have an extensive history around it. It's not so much about that. It's more around when you think about a reference that you already understand, which is like think about buying a home. When you buy a home, there will be a range that people are going to be able to negotiate around, but it's going to be within the baseline because the market dictates that and the more businesses that are in a similar category, then the more market it's going to be, because there's only so much upper or lower ranges that you can get based on.

John Chan:

Oh, I want this house specifically, so I'm willing to pay a little bit more, or this one has these issues that are built into it that I find during a home inspection and you're going to find a similar conversation show up in a business, unless it's hard to find comparable. So in a marketplace that either has less transparency or there's a wider range of the different types of things that people are asking for. A lot of these people that are selling the businesses are also doing it for the first time too, and so when you work with brokers, you'll find that the brokers help normalize some of that pricing, whereas if you find marketplaces that don't have any type of third-party guidance or intervention or anything who won't call it, you'll see a much wider range of pricing.

Gary Pageau:

John, you've been sharing a great amount of information, but where can someone go to get more information about you, your companies and what you do?

John Chan:

For sure. So our website is 2xagency. That's the URL, and so you can always learn about what our marketing services are, what kind of sample ad work that we've done. The other place to find me is either on LinkedIn, so I'm going to be kind of tough because there's a lot of John Chans out there, but John Chan from Vancouver that runs 2x Growth Agency, so you can just look me up and just add me. I always have to connect.

Gary Pageau:

Well, thank you, john, great to talk to you. I really learned a lot from your journey from immigrant to Thai condo champion to business owner and more. So thank you so much and look forward to talking to you another time.

John Chan:

Thank you, gary, it's a lot of fun.

Erin Manning:

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.

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