070 | RESET with Mark de Grasse, Entrepreneur and President of DigitalMarketer

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So I had a big reset when I was in my late 20s where I went broke, partnership broke up, I got divorced, I lost all of my money.

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I was very depressed and so that was its own thing and it took a long time to claw my way out of that.

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I wouldn't call it a failure though because I am where I am now and all that happened even with that reset, because I had been successful before.

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I had owned property, I had made money, I had my nice car, I had owned my home, and this is all in my early 20s.

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And I was like, and then to have everything taken, not just, they're not taken, but you lose it all.

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And it's, yes, that sucked, but it would suck more if it happened today.

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If I hadn't learned all those lessons, then it happened when I have a family and I have a lot of stuff going on.

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A lot of people rely on me.

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I'm Mark DeGrasse and I am undone.

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Hey friend, I'm glad you're here.

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Welcome to another episode of Becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily and grow relentlessly.

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I'm Toby Brooks, a speaker, an author, and a professor.

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Over the past two decades, I've worked as an athletic trainer and a strength coach.

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And over those years, I've grown more and more fascinated with what sets high achievers apart and how failures that hurt in the moment can end up being exactly the push we need to send us down our own path to success. Each week I invite new guests to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. This is your first episode. I really hope that you love it.

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Closing in on my first full year here, I've had the pleasure of interviewing some incredible guests.

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Check out some of the other episodes of high achievers who didn't let failure or setback stand in the way of their eventual victory.

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And if you're a regular, I am thankful for you.

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2023 is one word for me was discipline.

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But 2024 is gratitude.

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I'm forever appreciative to you for the kind words and the encouragement to keep going.

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From the bottom of my heart, thank you for joining me on this journey and for being an encouragement and inspiration along the way.

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I'd like to emphasize that this show is entirely separate from my role as a professor, but it's my attempt to apply what I've learned and what I'm learning and to share with others about the mindsets of high achievers.

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Mark DeGrasse is one of those people you meet who seem to operate on a higher voltage than most others.

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The guy just exudes energy and confidence in an uncommon way.

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An aspiring business owner for as long as he can remember, Mark moved from jobs and roles that would appear on paper to be completely unrelated as he grew as an entrepreneur and a communicator.

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However, today he reflects that it was a painful period of struggle and loss in his late 20s, a period he refers to as a reset, that ultimately led him to where he is today as president of Digital Marketer, a skills and talent development firm that served over 100,000 students in 174 countries and counting.

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I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with Mark DeGrasse in episode 70, Reset.

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This week we have a name that's familiar to many in the digital marketing space.

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Mark DeGrasse, thanks for joining us tonight.

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Thank you.

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Excited to be here.

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Yeah.

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So as I was sharing off camera a little bit before the show, this show is focused not so much on the wins as the losses and what we can learn from those losses.

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And certainly you have carved a pretty mighty place in the digital marketing space and AI for sure, set yourself apart as a front runner on using and leveraging that technology.

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But your background is certainly not exclusively in that.

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And for that matter, when I went to college, when you went to college a little bit after, AI wasn't even a thing.

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So it wasn't like you could even study it then.

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Right.

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So I always start off with a little bit of a softball.

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What'd you want to be growing up and why?

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Oh man, that shifted all over the place.

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I think one of the earliest like professions I want to be was a architect in like second, third grade.

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And even back then I had a computer cause my dad was a computer engineer, but yeah, my parents got me a protractor and a compass and a graph paper and I was super happy.

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But yeah, that all changed.

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I really wanted to be a business owner since I was like super young.

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I used to stay in at recess with my friend Jack and we used to write these stories about our success when we grow up and then we'd build our mansions using the architect stuff, but yeah, I had some, some big influences that kind of pushed me towards having a business, that's what it's all about and I've done both.

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Yeah.

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Business owner.

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That would be it.

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Yeah.

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I got sent to the principal's office almost every year for the same thing, selling candy on my bus that I would buy at Walmart and sell.

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So that entrepreneurial DNA, uh, shows itself early there.

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We've definitely had a varied background and it looks like from what I gather from your bio, started in the fitness industry and had some experiences in grant writing and even design work, what do you think those previous experiences that on paper aren't directly linked to what you're doing taught you that has served you well in your current pursuits?

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Oh, there's so many.

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And it has been even before that, because the fitness industry, I was in for about 10 years.

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But prior to that, I was actually in educational tech.

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So out of college, I joined a startup called TeleParents and we put together systems to communicate messages from teachers to parents in their home language, which in the mid 2000s was actually super unique and cool.

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And then prior to that, and that's where the government grant writing and the RFPs and all that kind of stuff came about, which is really content is what I found.

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Cause I was doing a lot of data collection, organization and layout design.

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And so I learned about that, learned about insane deadlines, learned about crazy specific specs that organizations, especially the government will come up with and it'll just be like, oh my gosh, how do I meet, how do I get that answer on page 68, line five, section D and fit everything else and if that goes there, how do I reorganize?

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So that's where that kind of stuff came about.

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But even prior to that, I was in real estate.

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And so in real estate, even, and this is in the early 2000s, I was still doing website design.

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I was learning about how to get a marketing.

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That's what real estate is all about.

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So building a farm and then doing conventional networking and in-person kind of marketing, you drop a flyers.

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Learned a lot.

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That specifically in real estate, I learned about speaking to people.

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Cause I realized when I was a teenager that I was super introverted.

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Don't seem like it now, but this is all learn.

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Talking to people.

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That's a learned skill.

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And so I realized that's what was the most uncomfortable profession I could think of, which was real estate and had to do cold calls, which was insane.

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I love this insight.

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Mark thinks of himself as an introvert and someone to whom communication skills didn't come naturally.

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However, you'd never know it judging by his confidence and the way he speaks so freely and easily.

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That didn't just happen.

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He cultivated it.

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He grew it.

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He worked on it, because he knew that it would be a critical part of his future plans.

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And while it's tempting to run away from discomfort, Mark did just the opposite.

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He intentionally sought out work in real estate, the industry that he thought would make him the most uncomfortable.

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Winston Churchill once said that fear is a reaction and courage is a decision.

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Mark felt the fear and made the conscious choice to run toward his discomfort and the decision has served him well.

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And then fitness, of course, taught me about organization, progression, the value of content and how you could connect content to products, which I did by importing equipment from other countries and then selling it through an e-commerce store using, it wasn't GeoCities, I think it was Yahoo stores.

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I learned about paid traffic.

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I learned about content marketing, SEO, all elements of digital marketing with, with fitness.

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Made a magazine, sold that magazine.

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So I learned how to essentially create a company that you can sell a hundred percent organic because I did not use much paid media for that one.

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Then sold my company and there's other stuff in between, but yeah, in fitness, I was actually a marketing executive for a commercial fitness brand too, that actually was totally different than consumer fitness, which I had a gym and certification and magazine for.

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And then I went into Onnit, which was supplements.

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And so I learned about how to do supplements and how to do kind of bigger level e-commerce.

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Then I wrote a book about the process and made an agency where I worked with about 300 different companies to develop different brands, learned all about web development and project management with 300 different organizations, which was tough.

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And then digital marketer learned even more about higher level.

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And so I had never dealt with the kind of those high ticket sales and I got high ticket sales.

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And it's been a journey, but yeah, that's the gist.

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There's way more stuff in there that deals with failure and stuff too.

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Sure.

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I grew up blue collar and I can distinctly remember when I was young, my dad was a mechanic and I remember him saying his boss worked in a coal mine, left for another job. And I said, dad, are you going to apply for that job? He said, no, I don't want to be the boss.

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And that just, I didn't understand that in the moment. I'm like, why wouldn't you want to be in charge? And I think entrepreneurs are wired differently. And I think one thing that when I hear a story like yours is you didn't necessarily niche yourself into a specific market.

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You hone skills as an entrepreneur that you could then.

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Leverage to other successes.

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And so on paper, it might appear, oh, grant writing doesn't have anything to do with artificial intelligence, but those skills, whether they're emotional intelligence, whether they're soft skills, whatever they are, certainly carry over.

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The focus of this show is really, A, normalizing the fact that successful people fail.

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And I think a lot of times we can be our own worst enemies and perfectionism can really deter us on our attempts to build something new, to be a serial entrepreneur.

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What would you say has been your biggest failure in business and what did it teach you?

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The original business, the one that I sold to Ana, that actually came after the actual business that we had started broke apart.

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And so originally it was a gym, it was training, just an actual service.

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Then it was the e-commerce and then it was the magazine.

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And so we split that business up.

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And I'm pretty convinced to this day, if we hadn't, if we had just pushed through and figured out the partnership and had just built the thing together or continued to, it would have been enormous.

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It could have been like Dick's Sporting Goods or something.

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And that may be a bit big, but you never know.

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We were the first ones in that space and we just, stuff happens.

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I had a lot of personal stuff.

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My partner had personal stuff and then everything that he collapsed in my life.

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And so I had a big reset when I was in my late twenties where I went broke.

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Partnership broke up.

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I got divorced.

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I lost all of my money.

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I was very depressed.

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And so that was its own thing.

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And it took a long time to claw my way out of that.

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I wouldn't call it a failure though, because I am where I am now and all that happened, even with that reset, because I had been successful before I'd owned property, I had made money, I had my nice car, I'd owned my home and this is all in my early twenties.

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And I was like, and then to have everything taken on just, they're not taken, but you lose it all.

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And it's, yes, that sucked, but it would suck more if it happened today.

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If I hadn't learned all those lessons, then it happened when I have a family and I have a lot of stuff going on.

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A lot of people rely on me.

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If it happened now, that would be much, much worse.

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And so in a way it's, I would say that's a pretty big failure, but the, at the end it's rather than the now.

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Yeah.

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And sometimes that setback teaches us things about ourselves like resilience and grit and just recognizing that if I've done it before, I can do it again.

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You touched on something that I think is really important.

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And it's something that has frequently come up on this show, and that's depression and the mental health side of high achievers, whether it's perfectionism and feeling like we never measure up or whether it is in the midst of things not going according to plan.

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And there's certainly a stigma associated with being vulnerable, being open.

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What role would you say your mental health has played in your success today?

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And what are some strategies or tips or just some things you've learned along the way in consideration of your mental health that's helped you be successful?

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Oh my gosh, it's 100% today.

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Because before, and this is what led to my original big reset failure, was that I thought I knew how to plan everything.

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Here's my life, here's how it's gonna go.

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I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this.

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Finish school, get married, blah, blah, blah.

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You do all the things.

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And then when that all collapsed and it all fell apart, then I realized like, oh crap, that wasn't, that's, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. This isn't how I thought it was going to go. And so I had to really revise and really humble myself to understand that one, I don't have control over everything.

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And at the end of the day, as you mature, even more, you realize you have control over nothing. Like the only thing you actually have control of is how you perceive your current situation. That's the only thing that matters because the person could have great success and zillions of dollars and still be depressed and still be miserable.

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And so when I finally realized that, and this actually took longer than just that original failure, it actually took me gain my position as president of digital marketer.

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When I finally achieved that, and that was after I sold a business, I built another business, I had money, I had done work for a ton of different companies, and then I got the house that I always wanted and my family had money and I had the car I wanted to drive and I had all these things and then I sat there and I was like, I'm still not happy.

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Oh my God.

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And then I looked around and it was a shocking moment where I was like, oh my gosh, I can't remember being happy ever.

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And what had pushed me through was just even during the failure and the struggle was still like I'm working, there's a goal, I'm going to get the goal, I'm working, I'm working.

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And just this discipline I had, it enabled me to just push through this feeling that nothing I did really mattered very much.

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And I had no happiness and I was miserable.

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And it was always just, I was just the work helped me get through.

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And when I finally realized like, oh my gosh, like my happiness and my mental health has nothing to do with my success, nothing to do with my achievements, nothing to do with my goals.

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Like it had nothing to do with it.

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I had completely missed.

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I had accomplished nothing, essentially.

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And so when I realized that, I was like, okay, my mental health is off.

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I'm doing something wrong.

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You're not supposed to feel like I feel all right now, especially after everything I've done.

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And so at that point, and this was probably like three and a half years ago, I was like, I have to change, and I obviously can't figure it out, and so I need to do stuff.

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And so then I signed up for a marathon and I started going to therapy and then I started doing cold dips and I started doing daily meditation and I started reading the Bible and I started doing supplementation and I did a gut biome check and I gave up alcohol and I gave up beef and pork and eggs and broccoli and I completely changed my entire diet.

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And then I started doing sun gazing and then I started, and so it took me a while.

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It took me probably two years, two years solid of doing like proactive mental health work.

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And then I finally had a breakthrough and this is after I had completely changed my diet and done all these things.

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And then I had what they call a Kundalini awakening.

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Kundalini is a type of yoga.

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And then I broke, everything broke and I was free.

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I had realized that I had essentially built up this shell of myself that I thought people wanted to see.

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And while I presented this shell to everyone, it prevented me from connecting to anyone.

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Because I never shared anything I really thought.

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And I never showed actually who I am.

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And so once that broke, so that was gone.

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Again, and if you go through this, it's an hour of crying is what you do.

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And it's not out of remorse, it's out of gratitude was mine where I realized like oh my gosh I've accomplished so much and I was so miserable and I could have ruined everything and I did it and I still have everything that I Have and that's just incredible That is a lot the list of things mark rattles off here as part of his self-care journey is impressive It's also aligned with the model that I've tried to follow from Luke 252 in the Bible where it says Jesus grew in wisdom stature favor with God and man there are mental physical spiritual and social aspects to mark's journey and while it would be tempting to zero in on even just one of them he's leveraged them collectively to put himself into the best mental and physical condition of his life it's not easy to commit to carry such a varied load but he's done it well with an eye always toward new opportunities to improve.

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Then I had this big breakthrough and then I started realizing like, oh my gosh, I could just tell people everything.

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I could just share everything.

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And when I do that, everybody else shares things too.

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And then I was able to connect with people like I had never connected to people ever in my entire life.

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And this was when I was 39.

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And then everything else happened.

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And it's progressing from there.

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But I'm a different person than I was then when I started and it all has mental health.

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Yeah.

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Thank you.

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That's incredible.

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I think certainly it's a process and for myself, I don't give myself grace to go through.

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Growth doesn't happen overnight and sometimes we can be our own worst enemies in allowing ourselves the time it takes to grow.

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So kudos to you for going through that process and continuing, I'm sure.

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Thank you.

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And I will let you know that it was actually from fitness that allowed me to do that, because what it was progression and understanding that just like in fitness, you don't get buffed by spending 30 minutes in the gym once a year.

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You know, it's daily and you keep on hitting it and keep on going and you measure and you optimize and progress, so.

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You alluded to digital marketer.

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That's what you spend your time on today.

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And you've certainly emerged in this AI space as a leader.

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So talk to us a little bit about what digital marketer entails and how you're leveraging artificial intelligence in what it is you do.

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Sure.

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Digital marketer, we teach all aspects of digital marketing, which is all marketing at this point, but it's a systematic framework.

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We call it the customer value journey.

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It's an eight stage process, allowing people to know nothing about your brand, find your brand, engage, subscribe to your content, convert with a low price offer, get excited after that purchase, ascend through your funnel, become a passive advocate, and finally an active promoter.

00:18:38.039 --> 00:18:45.720
And so it's an H2H system and everything we do is derived from this process and involves all the methodology, which is what people think of when they think of digital marketing.

00:18:45.720 --> 00:18:49.960
Oh, it's email and it's SEO and it's social media, paid media, it's blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:18:49.960 --> 00:18:51.059
Those are just techniques.

00:18:51.059 --> 00:19:00.299
And so you need to have a core strategy to apply these techniques to, otherwise you have one-off success or random acts of marketing is what we call it.

00:19:00.299 --> 00:19:02.259
So we teach people how to do that.

00:19:02.259 --> 00:19:16.599
And then we also set up communities and networks through our mastermind and through our certified partner program to help marketers engage each other and each other's knowledge in order to have us all succeed and share information so everybody could have more successful marketing.

00:19:16.599 --> 00:19:17.680
That's what digital marketing does.

00:19:17.680 --> 00:19:29.519
Now, AI is the realization of all of my dreams because people don't realize that most of the time we spend doing stuff and I've been using computers since I was probably five, so this is like the mid eighties.

00:19:29.519 --> 00:19:32.279
My dad was a computer engineer, so I was always around computers.

00:19:32.279 --> 00:19:34.440
Is dumb.

00:19:34.440 --> 00:19:37.519
Like most of our time is dumb.

00:19:37.519 --> 00:19:46.079
It's spent doing data entry and replying to messages and rewriting content and organizing content and setting a schedule and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:19:46.079 --> 00:19:51.480
Most of the time on average, your average office worker in the United States spent six hours a day on email.

00:19:51.480 --> 00:19:53.799
And that doesn't say, Oh, we're communicating so much.

00:19:53.799 --> 00:19:57.839
It's no, we're wasting a bunch of time and processes just are stupid.

00:19:57.839 --> 00:20:04.240
And all of the things we do are basically just not getting work done.

00:20:04.240 --> 00:20:09.720
I realize that because you could see a single marketer and a single marketer could do so much.

00:20:09.720 --> 00:20:32.559
If you set me loose and you said, hey Mark, I just need stuff and do whatever you want with the stuff and here's the product and just go crazy, I could build you amazing things, amazing things, amazingly fast, but it's just because I don't have to deal with the back and forth of a bazillion people around me and other people's demands and thoughts about how you think the visuals should look and what the colors are and what the copy says and blah, blah, blah.

00:20:32.559 --> 00:20:43.640
None of that crap matters because the actual system itself gets so convoluted and lost during this creation process because you have so many inputs that everything you do is not very effective.

00:20:43.640 --> 00:20:49.180
Now what AI does is allows a single marketer to be uber powerful.

00:20:49.180 --> 00:20:52.799
It's, you could do incredible things, incredibly fast.

00:20:52.799 --> 00:21:02.339
If you just have a basis of the information, a solid strategy, and then one person making decisions, you could build anything you want and you could do it super fast.

00:21:02.339 --> 00:21:31.000
And so I exemplified this and this is what I'm talking about at Traffic Conversion Summit next month, which is a brand avatar, which is basically how to turn your brand into something that you could communicate to other people, but more importantly, communicate to AI so that you could create all the content you need and all the visuals you need and all the strategy you need all within a single system and it's the brand avatar plus I presented a magazine that I designed over a weekend and I'm going to say, here's what you can do, here's what we can do.

00:21:31.000 --> 00:21:35.640
And so that's all AI because if it wasn't for AI, I did this process manually.

00:21:35.640 --> 00:21:41.240
I actually made my first magazine using Photoshop, which if you're a designer is hard.

00:21:41.240 --> 00:21:41.759
For sure.

00:21:41.759 --> 00:21:42.000
Yeah.

00:21:42.000 --> 00:21:55.680
I teach by day and everyone's crying about, oh, you know, generative AI is going to be the end of higher education, but it's a tool and you can so leverage this tool to multiply and scale your productivity.

00:21:55.680 --> 00:22:05.000
And so I'm looking for ways to integrate it into what I'm doing, not to legislate it out.

00:22:05.000 --> 00:22:10.359
For education, AI and education, and that's really what DigitalMarketer does, is we teach people.

00:22:10.359 --> 00:22:17.240
What that allows you to do is stop trying to communicate the information to a group of individuals, because that's what you do as a teacher, right?

00:22:17.240 --> 00:22:21.480
You have a lessons plan, you got to teach these things, the takeaways are going to be this.

00:22:21.480 --> 00:22:25.799
And then you have to say, how do I present this to a group of 30 people so they all understand?

00:22:25.799 --> 00:22:29.119
What AI is going to allow us to do is become formula builders.

00:22:29.119 --> 00:22:30.640
Here's the lesson I want to teach.

00:22:30.640 --> 00:22:32.259
And now I need to teach it to Billy.

00:22:32.259 --> 00:22:32.859
And you know what?

00:22:32.859 --> 00:22:34.500
Billy's obsessed with baseball.

00:22:34.500 --> 00:22:50.880
If I could take this lesson of this complex topic and turn it into baseball terms, now it's going to be interesting to Billy, it's going to be memorable because he likes baseball, and it's going to be understandable because we can apply all the rules for this lesson plan into baseball rules, which he already knows.

00:22:50.880 --> 00:22:52.160
And so it's contextual.

00:22:52.160 --> 00:23:00.799
And now you can make individual lesson plans for every one of those 30 people that will be communicated better than you could possibly even teach.

00:23:00.799 --> 00:23:02.720
And so that's what Ann is going to do for Edge.

00:23:02.720 --> 00:23:02.960
Sure.

00:23:02.960 --> 00:23:17.099
I heard you mentioned on a recent podcast about how marketing messages are being crafted consumer by consumer in a way that you as a marketer 10 years ago, you have to market to maybe you need to down into your group, but now you can do it.

00:23:17.099 --> 00:23:20.900
Google has this mountain of data on all of us.

00:23:20.900 --> 00:23:21.200
Yeah.

00:23:21.200 --> 00:23:22.599
I want to be respectful of your time.

00:23:22.599 --> 00:23:25.599
My next to last question here is a bit of a oddball.

00:23:25.599 --> 00:23:30.900
If you were watching a montage of your life, what song would you choose to play in the background and why?

00:23:30.900 --> 00:23:40.079
Oh, what's funny is I'm not going to say why, but I'm at a point where I'm back to the same song that I've listened to multiple times in my life.

00:23:40.079 --> 00:23:43.279
Ramble On by Led Zeppelin. That's it. That's the song.

00:23:43.279 --> 00:23:53.839
Very cool. Mark, you've obviously accomplished a myriad of different things in what would appear to be disparate industries, but all related. What for Mark is left undone?

00:23:53.839 --> 00:24:04.440
You know what? I really want to help a bunch of individuals just get to like epic levels of success. And when I say success, it's not, Oh, they have all this money.

00:24:04.440 --> 00:24:07.079
The older I've gone, the more I'm like, man, money's stupid.

00:24:07.079 --> 00:24:07.940
It's a tool.

00:24:07.940 --> 00:24:12.740
That's like saying toothpaste is, Oh man, you got to get the toothpaste because your teeth will be super clean.

00:24:12.740 --> 00:24:14.380
No, it's just, it's a tool.

00:24:14.380 --> 00:24:21.059
If I could help people understand that the journey part of it is the goal, like what you're doing, you're already doing it.

00:24:21.059 --> 00:24:23.299
Like the journey is the goal.

00:24:23.299 --> 00:24:45.200
And if I could convince people of that, then I think I could help people break out of the cycle which is there's this awesome castle on the hill and if you can reach the castle you'll be happy and your whole life would be great and if I can help people realize that castle is just another thing and who cares.

00:24:45.200 --> 00:24:46.200
It doesn't matter.

00:24:46.200 --> 00:24:49.960
You're going to have to live there for the rest of your life.

00:24:49.960 --> 00:24:50.960
No.

00:24:50.960 --> 00:25:08.559
It's not going to be enough. You're going to get bored. And if you're not bored, then you're probably not deep enough to even be concerned with what I'm talking about. That's fine. Mark, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for joining us there. Really appreciate your time. Thank you, Toby. I'm Mark you grass and I am undone.

00:25:08.559 --> 00:25:38.720
For Mark, it's been a consistent climb towards success with an unplanned but unmistakably meaningful and impactful season where his definition of success was reframed and the skills needed to navigate adversity were built Thankful to mark for dropping in and I hope you found inspiration and ideas for your own growth from our chat For more info on today's episode be sure to check it out on the web.

00:25:38.720 --> 00:25:46.559
Simply go to undonepodcast.com backslash EP70 to see the notes, links, and images related to today's guest, Mark DeGrasse.

00:25:46.559 --> 00:25:51.680
I know there are great stories out there to be told and I'm always on the lookout.

00:25:51.680 --> 00:25:56.640
So if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by, tell me about it.

00:25:56.640 --> 00:26:19.640
Surf over to undonepodcast.com, click the contact tab in the top menu, and drop me a note. Coming up I'll have the second half of my peek into the depths of the 1984 classic movie The Never Ending Story. I've also got some incredible new interviews that I'm working on, but I'm not quite ready to reveal those just yet. So stay tuned. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone.

00:26:19.640 --> 00:26:30.980
Becoming Undone is a NitroHype Creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com.

00:26:30.980 --> 00:26:35.500
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00:26:35.500 --> 00:26:40.380
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00:26:40.380 --> 00:26:45.779
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00:26:45.779 --> 00:26:53.000
Listen, subscribe, and leave me a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Until next time, everybody, keep getting better.

00:26:55.759 --> 00:27:11.519
the next, video!!