To the Nerds!
When I catch myself droning on for too long following a short question I’ll stop and say “Sorry, that’s a long winded way of saying…” and then try to give my more succinct answer. But sometimes I can’t help it because I’m a nerd.
We meet a lot of nerds in our line of work. These are people who all have a “thing” – the topic you can go on and on about for days. But like me most people will stop themselves after a few minutes and apologize for going on for too long or getting too into the weeds.
The truth is no one should apologize for being a nerd. For example, Joe, who runs Ad Advance, got his start selling chemistry sets on Amazon. Of course that makes him nerdy on its face, but what’s even nerdier is that he started Ad Advance because he couldn’t find a digital marketing firm that could explain how to market on Amazon better than anything he had figured out himself through relentless tinkering. And if you ask him today about what’s going on on the platform, well, take a seat because you are going to be there for a while.
We love founders like Joe. His business is his passion and his passion is his business and that shows up both in the numbers and in Ad Advance’s culture, which is precisely what needs to be the case if you are going to be in partnership with someone for 27 years. But founders aren’t the only nerds in the business world.
Our CFO Nikki was working on her computer late one night looking at spreadsheets when her husband Jon saw her and said, “Sorry you have to work late.” Her answer? “I’m not. This is fun for me.” She’s a nerd and nerds make great employees when you hire and empower them to do what they nerd out on.
And if you want to encounter some other nerds, just check out the Warhammer community on reddit. These people are incredibly passionate and detail-oriented when it comes to painting miniature orcs and elves, which is why publicly-traded Games Workshop has been such a successful business. The lesson? Nerds also make good customers!
So what do you nerd out about? And do you get to do it every day in service of others and ideally for a profit? If so, double down. If not, how might you? Have a great weekend.
– By Tim Hanson
