Discussing Technology + Innovation for Scalable Growth with the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Podcast

Episode 845: Tech + innovation for SCALABLE growth w/ Danny Nathan

From: https://www.thewantrepreneurshow.com/danny-nathan/

Ever wonder how massive companies manage to shift gears and innovate like nimble startups? Danny Nathan, the growth maestro with a storied 20-year career, sits down with us to unravel the secrets of scaling and innovation that have been the hallmark of his journey through the realms of product and technology. With a history that spans the early days of advertising to the launch of Apollo 21, Danny's unique perspective bridges the gap between the scrappy startups and the powerhouses of industry such as American Express and Dyson, offering a practical masterclass on steering the corporate behemoths towards groundbreaking success.

As the conversation unfolds, Danny unveils the art of cultivating innovation within the colossal structures of large organizations. He emphasizes the indispensable role of leadership in championing new projects and creating a fertile ground where ideas can thrive. It's a testament to the importance of commitment and embracing the learning curve of failures—after all, each misstep is a stepping stone towards the next big breakthrough. Danny's engaging discourse is a treasure trove for those seeking to inject a spirit of exploration and experimentation into their business culture.

To top it all off, we probe into the transformative influence of technology in the corporate landscape, where Danny accentuates the necessity of strategy and a profound comprehension of the issues at hand. Apollo 21's Mission Control becomes the centerpiece of this narrative, as we illustrate how custom tech solutions can catapult businesses into newfound efficiencies, whether it's managing customer relations or the most unexpected of events—rodeos included. This episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs and seasoned business professionals alike, packed with insights that spotlight the monumental impact of technology and visionary thinking on business evolution.

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Transcript:

hey what is up welcome to this episode of the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast as always I'm your host Brian L

formento and we've got a guest today I already love this guy's energy he is going to really open our eyes about all

the possibilities when it comes to growth and one thing as I dug into this guy's work what I really respect is that

we are the people of ideas as entrepreneurs ideas are never at a shortage but Dany today's guest is

someone who takes those ideas and actually turns them into ible growth so let me tell you about today's guest his

name is Danny Nathan after 20 years of product and Technology experience Danny

has developed a habit of helping companies create new products and services and launch new ventures in the

past he's been called a product person a ux person a designer a strategist a marketer a creative and a few other

choice names like the cleaner this guy will do whatever it takes to Foster growth Danny has led product build and

launch efforts at an international scale he's run countless design Sprints and he's founded multiple companies of his

own he's applied all of his expertise to a variety of companies ranging from precede startups to Fortune 100

corporations he's got a really awesome client roster like American Express Dyson General Mills Getty Images

legendary pictures and so many more we're going to learn a lot so I'm not going to say anything else let's dive

straight into my interview with Danny [Music]

Nathan [Music]

Who is Danny

all right Danny I'm so excited that you're here with us today welcome to the show thank you for having me I'm excited

to be here as well especially with the energy this morning it's a it's a good Tuesday heck yeah listeners don't know

this obviously this will Air when it airs but you're the first interview of the day and Danny it's always a little

rough for me the first interview of the day but you have helped lift my spirits so let's get this party started by you

taking us beyond the bio who the heck is Danny how did you start doing all these cool things that you you're up to oh wow

um let's see I started my career in advertising and um realized very quickly that the most fun I was ever going to

have working in advertising happened during AD school and I wasn't particularly satisfied with it and so um

I kind of took it upon myself to create a crash course in all things digital and

what digital meant to working with Brands and how Brands could interact with customers and things of that sort

and um that led me to an opportunity at an innovation consultancy here in New York called poke like poke uh where I

really kind of cut my teeth in the world of digital and was introduced to the world of Entrepreneurship and startups

and of course working with a bunch of amazing corporations some of which uh you rattled off a moment ago during the

intro there and um it's just sort of been a you know a roller coaster ever since I've been holding on tight um I

left poke to start my own company uh served as had a product for a variety of different startups in the interim um did

a short stint at legendary pictures where I met a really awesome group of people that uh became my partners and

co-founders at my next company and then eventually that led to the formation of Apollo 21 um almost three years ago

exactly we just rolled over three years about a month ago and uh so that's been my pursuit of late and Apollo 21 is

focused as you said on uh helping companies solve problems using technology and helping organiz ations

utilize Venture driven growth and new Venture opportunities to create scale and uh reach more people yeah I love

that overview Danny especially because I know having been in the game as long as I have and and you have we know that all

of these things when you listen to podcast episodes they sound linear they certainly were not you had all those

twists and turns along the way but what I really like is that overarching theme throughout your entire career and

obviously heck three years with Apollo 21 congrats on that Milestone that's huge but what I I love about your career

Growth and Scale

Arc is that it's it's always followed growth and scale which I feel like are two words that we throw around so much

within the world of business and when we layer Tech onto that it's so sexy to talk about these things but why is it

what is it about scale and growth that has really always resonated with you and and made you say this is my passion this

is where I want to serve businesses and people uh I sort of fell into it I

didn't I didn't pursue the ideas of growth and scale as kind of a career path it's one of those things that has

just as you pointed out has become kind of a thread throughout my career and so um a lot of my efforts have been focused

on helping companies launch new products bringing new business lines to Market things like that and when you really dig

into um the kind of business need that underpins growth and Venture building

and the creation of new products when push comes to shove it all kind of comes down to growth and scale and companies

trying to figure out how to become more successful how to reach more customers more people and so uh that's really just

kind of become an underlying through line throughout everything that I've done um over the years so yeah Danny I

want to ask you this really early on in our conversation here today because obviously as the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast a lot of listeners

are saying Brian ask Danny about these huge awesome businesses that he's worked with and I can't help but think when I

think about that client roster that you've had the chance to work with whether throughout your career or on your own Ventures and I it's kind of

what I teased at the top of the episode is that we all have ideas like no entrepreneur has a shortage of ideas and

I'm sure the same is true if not 10 times more at big businesses what is it about the ideas that actually cross the

Ideas that cross the finish line

finish line and make it out into the world you've helped Usher those ideas across those Finish Lines what does it

take what's the differentiating factor between ideas that forever remain ideas and those that actually

launch um I mean my Pat answer to that Brian is execution because of course execution is everything in a world where

we're all full of ideas but to dig a layer deeper into that a lot of it especially when you're talking about

large companies and large organizations comes down to uh top- down support and so you know we talk a lot at Apollo 21

about the ideas of venture driven growth and what it takes to Foster Innovation particularly within large organizations

and it's it's one of our kind of Hallmarks we love working with bigger companies to help bring Innovation to

life and the the um the kind of Guiding Light that we have there is a set of a

few principles that we ask these organizations and particularly the leadership to sign off on uh before we

ever get started on a project because without that top- down support from the executive level you're destined for

failure um you know folks have to be able to commit the resources to understand the timeline and to

understand that um Innovation and growth and bringing new products to life isn't something that happens overnight it

takes time and you know when you talk to particularly larger organizations and those that you know see how quickly

startups move and young Ventures move they want some of that magic and we try to bring that to the table for them but

at the same time there is the reality of being in a larger organization and I

always kind of mentally picture really big organizations almost like really big ships where um you know they kind of

gain momentum as they move through the water and you know turning isn't as easy as just kind of spinning the wheel like

you do in a car you know it takes a little time to create the the change that you need so that you can direct

that big of a a boat or an organization uh into the direction that you're looking for yeah gosh I love that visual

analogy of the boat turning because it is so true and it does show that at different stages we have our own unfair

Our unfair advantages

advantages how quick and Nimble is a car when it comes to Turning versus those big cruise ships so I love that analogy

yes but there's also the flip side of that Brian that's also interesting and what I think a lot of larger

organizations either don't realize or struggle to take advantage of are the unique differentiators that that they

have at their disposal and the level of talent and resources and even to your

point just the number of ideas that are floating around within large organizations give them a huge advantage

over what we tend to think of as startups and part of what we at Apollo 21 try and bring to the table is helping

organizations capture that value and capture the opportunities that those resources represent so that they can

take advantage of them in ways that frankly most startups only dream of yeah Danny I'll tell you what I'm a big

stickler for the words that we choose and I can tell in talking to you here today that you're very intentional about these words and it reveals so much about

the way that you think about these things you said this this word combination Foster Innovation I love

Foster Innovation

that because it applies a verb to Innovation that Innovation is not just something that magically happens what is

fostering innovation look like uh fostering Innovation for me I

kind of comes down to what I was talking about just a moment ago it's it's more than just a statement of we want to be

Innovative or we support Innovation and you know you hear a lot of companies talk about Innovation it's one of those

buzzwords that you kind of can't help but just hear all of the time and to me

an organization that truly tries to Foster Innovation and figure out how to grow those opportunities within its own

walls are differentia by the level of support that you see from the highest levels so when you have an executive

team in a seite that understands the value of innovation and the opportunities that it brings uh for an

organization and the way that it can imbue itself across the culture uh it

really does have to be fostered and ushered and kind of like cared for throughout the organization so that you

have these almost like parental figures that are helping to guide the growth of that culture and the belie in Innovation

and the opportunities to execute to try and to be frank to fail um talking about

words failure is one of my favorites and it's one that a lot of people are scared of that um I try to embrace and

everything yeah I love that as a lifelong soccer player I really picture when you talk about fostering Innovation

I picture the best soccer coaches on the sidelines they know how to bring those things out of us those things live

inside of us relentlessness fire passion aggression they live inside of us but it's really those coaches you talk about

the top down and the the parental approach to it those coaches are able to get those things out of their team so I

love the way that you view that I have to ask you this because it came up in all the research I did about the way that Apollo 21 works is it's a word that

you use frequently which is solving complex problems to unlock that growth in Innovation talk to us about those

Solving Complex Problems

complex problems cuz a lot of people listening to this will think sometimes I've got simple problems sometimes I've got complex problems but we all have

problems Danny take us there yeah absolutely um you know it's interesting

one of the things that I find in the work that we do at Apollo 21 is that it's always different but there's always

kind of an underlying similarity and to me the underlying similarity is how do

we solve complex problems and so you know as I look back across the clients that we've worked with over the last few

years they've uh they've run across a really broad selection of Industries we've worked with folks in the um remote

guarding and video security space we've worked with folks in the western Sports space so think Cowboys and rodeos and

you know hats and all of that stuff um one of our clients right now runs a commercial kitchen out of which they

operate about 30 different delivery only restaurant Brands and obviously they all

have very different problems you know thinking about how to approach connecting uh you know professional bull

writing fans to the athletes is a very different uh different problem to tackle

than figuring out how to make a commercial kitchen as efficient as possible but the underpinnings of each

of those efforts is the idea that technology can be utilized to help solve

a problem and so often we find that the work that we're doing is focused on um

streamlining internal operations putting technology in place to guide how people get work done and to streamline the

types of communication that they're utilizing to pass work around an organization for example and whether

that's literal in terms of you know being in a kitchen where a dish is getting prepared and passed to the next person to get packed or whatever it is

or um you know looking back at one of our our clients was a financial services organization that came to us and

basically had very little documented process um they came to us and said we're drowning in emails can you help

and uh to make a long story short what we discovered was that they were drowning in emails because their process

was when you need something email this person and obviously that gets a little over whelming at scale and when you've

got 50 60 or 100 people emailing the next person on their list every single time they need something um you can

understand why they were drowning in emails and so that simple question of we're drowning in emails can you help us

turned into an entire internal operations platform that dictated kind of how their process unfolded how

communication was managed who had access to what clients what data uh etc etc and

so that's kind of the complex problem solving is figuring out how do we take a simple symptom like too many emails and

understand the underlying issues that are leading to that problem and then come up with a solution that that we can

execute within a reasonable time period uh to kind of help solve that problem yeah Danny I'll tell you what as a total

Tech junkie I love the fact that you view clearly technology as the solution to real life business problems whereas

where my head goes is I always think about maybe Generations older than us maybe people who aren't as into Tech as

us who probably think back to all those times that Tech was a further problem for them where you know we see so many

companies applying all these different Band-Aid Solutions where they end up with 30 different softwares trying to

make them all talk to each other they probably don't so there's probably more manual stuff that goes into it you've given us that real life example of

communication emails being one area that you can fix that problem with better Tech Solutions so talk to us about that

Technology as the Solution

notion of Technology being the solution rather than the problem especially because I'm sure you've seen many real

life applications where it was posing a problem because there was no underlying strategy behind it absolutely I it's

interesting that you're picking up on that too Brian because there's there's kind of one important part of that which is technology can provide a means to a

solution but often is not the solution itself and you know I I often tell people that one of the unique

differentiators for Apollo 21 is that we actually view the technology as secondary the technology is a tool that

we use to solve the problem but if you can't Define and understand the problem clearly then you can apply as much

technology as you want and get nowhere so it really has to come down to the

combination of understanding a clear-cut business need or customer need and then

figuring out how you can solve that need and I think it's important to realize

that while technology at least in this day and age where we're all walking around with a supercomputer in our

pocket has some bearing on the solution in large part because it is the mechanism through which we communicate

and transact and uh learn and make decisions it still has to serve that

underlying need in order to be in the position of solving a problem and um you

know it's interesting that you point out kind of Technology with a you know an older generational crowd as well and I

see this with um sorry Mom I see this with my mom all the time who you know calls randomly and says the is doing

whatever I I don't know how to fix it and um you know it's interesting because the the transition from technology as

problem to technology a solution is heavily age driven and it depends a lot on what you've grown up with and how you

sort of approach an understanding of the thing in front of you that allows you to utilize that technology and so again

that's part of what makes it so important to understand the problem and the person who's sitting on the other side of that problem because how you go

about solving it for my mom versus uh you know a client might be very

different even though they both utilize technology yeah really well said I can still relate to that because my parents

always call me with exactly that problem and Danny my first question to them always is what did you do what did you

do to make this happen see my first question is always have you tried turning it off and back on

again I love it but I I think that that's so revealing in the way that you answered that because you said it out

right there which is technology is actually secondary then and what you were more interested in talking about there is understanding the people and

Understanding the People

understanding the problems and I know that that's part of what you do that's so special about Apollo 21 is you get deeply embedded within the companies

that you're working with to truly understand their teams their operations their problems all of those things so

that you can build a solution that works for them which leads me to the big question of what types of questions do

you ask what are the areas areas that you're assessing when you walk into a business because I always say that

people like you Danny you have an advantage because we can't read the label from inside the jar we can't see

things that are staring right in front of us cuz we're in it whereas you can walk in and from an objective standpoint say oh my gosh this is the thing so

where do your eyes go where do your head go what are the questions that you're asking to make sense of this stuff uh

it's different every time which is part of what's so exciting about what we do is that every time we start work with a

new client there's something new to learn and it is both it's both the excitement and the difficulty of of what

we do um you know as an example understanding the world of rodeo over the course of four to six weeks is um

not the easiest thing to kind of wrap your head around especially if you don't come from a world where uh that's kind

of a central thread through your life and so um the questions change but largely it comes down to uh where is the

pain and where is the emotion for the person who is going to be using this and so you know if we think about if if we

start the conversation with the assumption that um you know eventually we're going to end up using technology

to solve a problem there is a use case behind that and that use case might be business oriented it might be customer

oriented uh you know it might be kind of user experience driven or it might be driven by business financial needs uh

things like that but in all of it there's always a pain point or some moment within the process that elicits a

motion and that's one of the first things that that we try to look for is where is the person that's there you

know that's sitting on the other side of this um getting frustrated where are they throwing up their hands or where

does that giant smile hit their face uh throughout whatever process it is that

we're trying to to streamline or make easier to understand so that we can focus there and help solve that one

particular Point we've all been there where I don't know you're trying to sign up for a new service and the onboarding

is terrible or whatever it is where uh you know you hit that point in the process you go oh my god really like

come on guys did you not think about this and that's the moment that we look for because that's where the opportunities are in my mind yeah which

I think is really revealing for all of us who are listening to this here today is is viewing our businesses our

processes you picked out on onboarding these are things that we can go through not as us the business owners but as our

potential customers and clients and I think that's such an important perspective to have that Danny you get to bring to so many different businesses

which I agree with you it's why you have one of the coolest jobs in the world I always say that I have the coolest job in the world getting to talk to awesome

entrepreneurs like you but I love hearing your perspective on all these things and I feel like kind of the elephant in the room in any Tech

AI

conversation here in 2024 and Beyond is of course ai ai is changing the game for businesses in so many different ways

it's making things more accessible than ever before while also presenting some of its own challenges in various ways

but talk to us about how AI is factoring into not only the work that you're doing but where you see Tech going for

businesses a more macro level yeah AI is a really interesting thing to think about especially today Brian and we've

seen we've seen so much change so quickly that it's it's almost impossible to wrap your head around how quickly the

world is changing and gravitating towards Ai and when we think about business use cases one of the things

that I see a lot is companies want AI they want AI because it is the uh

conversation Point dour it's the the hottest new tech that's out there but

but in spite of you know Decades of Big Data Pursuit and the realization that we

need to be storing every little user action about every person that visits our product Service website whatever a

lot of companies are still not prepared in terms of the way their data is structured or how their data is stored

or how disperate it is across a variety of different sources so that they can make use of it in a in a fashion that

really allows them to leverage UI or UI excuse me AI for uh unique and

interesting use cases and so a lot of what we end up focusing on is thinking

about um kind of opportunities for Automation and where we can utilize

simple if this then that kind of structures to help streamline what

companies are doing and how they're doing it as we work to build out the data infrastructure that will allow them

to utilize AI in ways that they're kind of envisioning based on uh what we're

seeing online in terms of chatter and what of course we want AI to be based on you know Decades of uh of movie Magic

and things like that that have kind of guided our our view of what it should be

yeah listeners I want to call this out for all of you because obviously as we tune into the show five times a week we

start hearing incredible guests like Danny all talking about AI in different capacities but Danny I'm going to call

this out for listeners is that one overarching theme that I've been hearing from amazing entrepreneurs like yourself

and people who are far wiser and informed than a lot of us in these regards is you can't help but when you

talk about AI you also talk about data because that is going to be an intersection that is going to unlock

answers for so many businesses of literally all sizes from Fortune 100 companies to your local pizza shop I

think that there's data that we historically maybe haven't made sense of that AI is going to be able to pick up

on so when we talk about AI of course chat GPT can simply do a little bit of research for us but there's way more

powerful things that we can glean from it so I love those perspectives from you as an industry expert I almost feel bad

that I'm asking you this question this late on in our interview here today because it's the one question I knew I wanted to ask you today and that is

coming back to the actual name of your business Apollo 21 it does certain things in my head but I also know that

Mission Control

your proprietary technology Foundation is called mission control so I'm sure that we can tie these two questions in

here today but what what are the origins of Apollo 21 as a company and as a name

and as your values and then how does Mission Control factor into that because I'm sure they're related yeah awesome

question I appreciate it Bryce um so you you've kind of asked three questions in

there and I'll I'll start at the beginning so um as I mentioned I recently in my last job was uh working

as had of product for a video technology company based in LA and uh basically

about two years into that effort um we we took on some outside funding from a

family office and one of the stipulations of that that funding round was that we would help some of their

other portfolio companies um assess and execute on their technology needs and so

I became kind of this deao SWAT team leader that was deployed across uh some

of these other companies to help them do ultimately what we now do today at Apollo 21 and so I spent about a year

doing that and finally um a couple of the folks from both the family office

and uh some of my partners at my previous company kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said you know you seem

to be pretty excited about this do you want to think about you know taking an opportunity to go and focus on this and

so that led to the creation of Apollo 21 which was born uh about April of 2021

and of course you know when naming a business there's all sorts of kind of Greenfield opportunity to think about um

what you want to name it and how that name is going to both Define you and follow you over the years that hopefully

you're going to be around and so um you know I'm a I'm a big fan of space

exploration both from you know the the kind of uh final frontier aspect to

borrow from uh from Star Trek as well as the uh you know the sort of design

standards and the um the kind of cultural impact that uh that NASA and

space exploration had you know over the decades and so as I was thinking about

starting a company that is focused on helping organizations build new Ventures

you know obviously the idea of moonshots came to mind you can't think about startups without thinking about unicorns

and moonshots and all of those fun terms and um I started doing some research

about the old Apollo programs and what I learned was that um Apollo 177 was the

last Apollo mission to fly but 18 19 and 20 were all scheduled and then ultimately canceled for financial

reasons and so given that we were starting in 2021 and the idea that

Apollo 21 would have been the next Apollo mission on the docket um just sort of created this really nice

alignment in my head around um companies today taking moonshots and the idea of

revisiting uh these attempts to go further in life and in business and to

explore and so that led to the naming convention around Apollo 21 which then of course at the Brand level has

trickled down to um much of what we do including uh the naming around our

foundational technology which is Mission Control and um Mission Control

effectively I I describe it as a box of Legos it's a bunch of pieces of functionality that aren't really a SAS

platform but give us the ability to spin up um platforms focused on internal

tooling and data management and operations and Analytics and insights and ultimately AI integration and the

use of AI to better understand those data sets um and we we often use that

kind of pile of Legos to put together something that then becomes the operational platform for our clients and

we've you know we've used it many times over now for anything from uh basic CRM

functionality to uh a platform designed for the management and execution of

rodeo events do uh the process management platform for the financial services company that I talked about

earlier and so it's really this kind of um a Malgus thing that we can shape uh

to create whatever we need for our clients but because we have that foundational technology we're able to

get those platforms built usually about twice as quickly as we would than if we were starting from scratch and so the

idea that usually these platforms that grow out of this box of Legos um form sort of an operational or an

internal facing toolkit that was where the notion of Mission Control and the idea of where do I go when I need to

understand my business and my data at a glance kind of came to life and so Mission Control Apollo 21 uh you know

you'll notice we've actually toned it back a little bit on our website and things like that um and just sort of let

colors and names uh speak a little bit more to the Space theme than perhaps we did previously um but you'll still catch

you know a little Spaceman icon hanging out in the corner and things like that so it it still follows the brand around

uh much of what we do yeah I love that overview Danny especially because as the son of an immigrant Mom for me in my

family coming to the United States in 1969 that was the year that we put a man on the moon so that's such an important

thing that for my family and my mom's family who came to the US they saw oh my gosh look at all the possibilities so

the fact that that's still driving so much of when it comes to us being Visionaries and dreamers in the world of

business you extrapolated it out which I love that we do that in business conversations to life to humanity to

society I love the fact that that so deeply plays in your mission and your vision and when you talk about Mission

Rodeos

Control what really strikes me is that you talk about it as a foundational technology here is the foundation that

we can then build on in adaptable environments like rodeos I love how much you've used rodeos a dude sitting in

Brooklyn New York using rodeos as the example here for so many more about rodeos over the course of a year and

change working with our client than I I ever had and I grew up in Texas I mean I grew up going to the rodeo and still you

know had no idea what I was looking at and so uh you know that's part of the fun of what we do though is we get to

learn about things that we would never otherwise be focused on you know Rodeo doesn't really play a role in my life in

Brooklyn as you've kind of pointed out uh but learning about it has been so fun and seeing you know what people are

passionate about and how it drives them is always such an exciting thing and so whether we're talking about you know

rodeo and the events that underpin that and how it brings people together you know particularly in in the western

areas of the country or thinking about um you know how we make kitchen

operations more efficient um this kind of comes back to the problem solving or the complex problem solving that we were

discussing earlier when push comes to shove it's all the same thing you know everybody's got a problem that they need

to solve a lot of it comes down to communication efficiency and

understanding of what's Happening either with customers or within a kitchen or you know how

processes kind of unfold to serve a business need and to serve a customer need and so um it's always exciting to

think about new and interesting uh passions that you know may not resonate for me

personally but obviously resonate for large groups of people and it's so exciting to be involved in that to

understand sort of what drives other people and to think about how we can

help businesses create touch points that drive that passion and how technology

can be used to help people connect with those passions yes really well said and

well articulated Danny I want to Echo that because I think it's something that we do that's so dangerous as

entrepreneurs as business owners as people is when we go down that path of convincing ourselves that we are so

unique different from anyone else or anything else that we don't have the same problems and we can't leverage the

same foundations and Frameworks in order to find Solutions then we really trick ourselves into believing that there

isn't a way out so neither you nor I knew that we'd be talking about rodeos as much as we have here today but I

think it's actually the perfect illustration that as you said it's all the same when we really get down to the roots of it business is not rocket

science so I love that we can weave those in but in spite of the naming no it is not yes I think it's so powerful

though for us to realize that business is really about matching products and services with customers and clients who

need them and I think the more we complicate that the more we set ourselves up for failure so Danny I'm going to ask you this question that I

ask at the end of every episode I don't know how you're going to answer it because you've dropped so much so many

nuggets of knowledge on us here today but what's your advice for listeners tuning in knowing where the entrepreneur

Advice for listeners

to entrepreneur audience is they're all different stages of business growth from people waiting on the sidelines they're

more like the the idea people who haven't taken action to the seven figure eight figure SAS owners who tune into

this show which I so appreciate all of you listeners Danny what's your advice for them if they're tuning in saying

gosh Danny's given me a lot of food for thought where do you want to see them start taking action oh I love this

question because it comes right back to the word that I threw out earlier but didn't really get a chance to dive into

too much which is failure um my biggest piece of advice and kind of my personal

Mantra is um I frame it as fail beautifully uh which to me is just kind

of a reframing of the idea that in order to succeed we have to embrace failure

and um ironically it hasn't come up much today in our conversation but this is something that I talk a lot about um you

have to kind of move beyond the idea that failure is a bad thing we are we're taught from a young age and uh it's kind

of ingrained throughout you know our school years and things like that that failure is bad uh you know a failing

grade is negative um you know if you fail then you haven't accomplished the thing that you set out to accomplish and

where I kind of take a contrarian view to that is uh the opportunity for learning so failure is the manner in

which we learn and without kind of applying that learning to the idea of

Entrepreneurship the idea of getting started the fear of failure will always stop you from pursuing the thing that

you're after and so if you can shift your own mindset out of the idea that

failure is a negative thing and start to view failure as an opportunity to learn an opportunity to understand what

doesn't work and an opportunity to understand um what might work for your business and what might work for your

customers then all of a sudden that reframing becomes almost a Guiding Light That You go Okay where can I fail next

so that I don't fail in that same way again the next time around yes really well said and I think you you hit the

nail on the head it's been conditioned in us since we were children that failing is bad but the older I get the

wiser I get it's it's to your point I think that failure is not only not the opposite of success I think it's

essential on the road to success so I love that you highlighted that for us here today you've dropped so many of

those nuggets of knowledge that I know that listeners are going to be keen and eager especially since we drop so many conversations about your actual brand

itself so drop those links on us for listeners who are eager to go deeper into your work and all the cool things you're up to with Apollo 21 where should

listeners go from here yeah come visit us at Apollo 2.io and everything kind of branches out

from there um we're pretty active on LinkedIn we're not super active at the moment on other social media because

we've been focused on uh solving complex problems using technology and launching new Ventures so if you're interested in

that uh please check it out I also run Founders dinners in New York City once a month where I gather up uh five Founders

or senior level tech people who with no agenda just want to meet other like-minded folks over a great meal and

see where the conversation takes us uh and then actually this week I'm launching my first uh Roundtable

Workshop as well which will be a virtually hosted uh Zoom based event

where we tackle problems live for a small group of business folks and

entrepreneurs to see how we might be able to help them solve their own complex problems yes I love that Danny

you are someone who really practices what you preach and you also are out there to further embolden and enable

other businesses and Business Leaders to actually grow so I love that you're so active in this space you so share our

mission which is why we're so grateful for you coming on the show today listeners you all know the drill find the show find in the show notes down

below a link to Danny's Business website which is apollo2 that's the number two the number one Apollo 2.io I'm going to

especially shout out that Danny actually doesn't just talk about all these things in theory he actually has real life case

studies on his website so if you want to see the way that all of these things enable real business growth tangible

business growth definitely go check out Apollo 2.io you'll find that link down below as well as a link to Danny's

personal LinkedIn if you want to get all this business goodness that Danny is putting out into the world definitely

connect with him on LinkedIn otherwise Danny on behalf of myself and all the listeners thanks so much for joining us

on the show today thanks for having me it's been a ton of fun I appreciate it

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