[00:01] – Justin McCullough
What do you do when it's your turn to lead? Well, that's a great question. The Vision, Values and Velocity podcast is all about a better way of thinking and how to get you where you are now to where you want to be as quickly, confdently and intentionally as possible so you can make an impact at work, home, and life. Hey, this is Justin McCullough and this is my show. Thank you for being here. It's my goal to give you encouragement, clarity, and confdence to tackle whatever your next big thing is. You know, that could be leading a team, running a business, taking on that new project. So I don't know, maybe it's something else. But I'm certain that these stories will help you. So let's take a look at the leadership traits of Madison Wickham, founder and CEO of Grandex Media.

[00:58] – Justin McCullough
I'm here with Madison Wickham. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[01:01] – Madison Wickham
Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me. So my name is Madison Wickham. I'm founder, CEO of a company called Grandex Media. We own and operate a number of entertainment digital media brands as well as a couple consumer product retail e commerce brands.

[01:19] – Justin McCullough
All right, so that's a lot there. Digital entertainment, consumer brands, retail.

[01:24] – Madison Wickham
Yes.

[01:24] – Justin McCullough
Let's pick one of those and talk about it.

[01:26] – Madison Wickham
Sure, let's do it.

[01:27] – Justin McCullough
How do you, how do you actually handle the retail side of the business?

[01:31] – Madison Wickham
So our retail business is actually divided into two different kind of lines of business. So we do have a wholesale component where products that we design, source and manufacture under our clothing brand, Rowdy Gentleman, we sell to third party brick and mortar retailers. But our primary business is selling directly to consumers online. So we sell the products that we create@rattygentlemen.com and then we also sell them through our online specialty men's store, which is called manoutftters.com and so man Outftters is essentially, as I mentioned, it's an online specialty men's retail store where we carry products from 80 different premium menswear brands that you probably have heard of. Patagonia, Cole, Haan, Sperry, Vineyard, Vines, all mashed up with smaller up and coming brands that are kind of lesser known that create a really cool merchandise offering.

[02:31] – Justin McCullough
Yeah, so you're kind of in the pulse of the market, right? What's hot? You're in the middle of it, I guess.

[02:34] – Madison Wickham
What's hot? Yeah, I'm in the fashion industry, I guess.

[02:38] – Justin McCullough
So who's your customer? Help us understand a little bit about who you're selling to and who you're working with.

[02:42] – Madison Wickham
So that's where it gets kind of interesting with the particular business model that we've happened into, I would say, versus I'd say somewhat mastermind. But also it's kind of evolved over time. We started the company seven years ago with a comedy website called TotalFratMove.com based on the name, you can probably gather who that content is for college frat guys for those not keeping up. And so that was an idea for a specifc type of comedy content that we felt wasn't being done the way we wanted to do it. And kind of based on the premise that anytime you see a frat guy depicted in a comedy movie out of Hollywood, it's always some very inauthentic Hollywood rendition of what some LA producer thinks a frat guy actually is. And it just becomes this like weird character that's not really.

[03:44] – Madison Wickham
It's not gonna hit home with guys who kind of like went through that whole experience in college. And it's a really interesting breeding ground for comedy because you get a bunch of 20 year olds and you stuff them into a mansion in the middle of campus and they pool their parents money together and buy a bunch of alcohol and it's this thing that goes on college campuses across the country. It makes no sense, but it's hilarious. And I went through it and some of the guys I work with went through it and. And it's just like this. Like I said, it's a breeding ground for comedy. So we decided to kind of bottle that up into a very digestible one liner format and that became total frat move tfm. So it'd be a one liner followed by that.

[04:32] – Madison Wickham
And then it's kind of evolved into a broader content offering. And then we've spun off HostGradProblems.com, which is also kind of self explanatory. And essentially what we've developed is a media company that monetizes, not in the traditional way that you would expect a media company to monetize their business, which is advertising is the typical model. We do some third party advertising, but the core of our model is entertain an audience, cultivate the attention of a large audience through original media. And instead of just selling that audience to third parties and taking a fee and being done with it, we're actually creating and curating products for that audience that we're catering to on the media side. So it's essentially like a creative way to stuff the top of our marketing funnel, I guess is one way to put it.

[05:27] – Justin McCullough
Yeah, so what I'm hearing is a seed idea around entertainment was something that was personal and you connected with the frat house right on campus and relating to that and the exaggerated character or Persona of fraternity guys in the media and repositioning that leading to. From entertainment to now a fashion business and a thriving audience, right?

[05:48] – Madison Wickham
Yep, yep.

[05:49] – Justin McCullough
So what does that look like in the beginning when you're saying, I think this is interesting versus I think this is a business? How do you go from interesting to a business with a concept like that?

[05:57] – Madison Wickham
So I mentioned that we kind of evolved into the model that we're now operating under. When we started the company, I was 25 and I had little knowledge of business in general, let alone the media industry. And to be honest, I didn't even realize that were starting a media business. I knew the Internet, my background's in web development, so I knew websites and I knew kind of how to make them. And this was a simple enough website to really. It was the thing driving us was this is a really differentiated type of content that's going to strongly resonate with this niche audience. From a business perspective. We had a really ambiguous business model, but it was essentially, we're going to use this content to capture a large enough audience to then fgure out how to monetize it.

[06:52] – Madison Wickham
I knew we could throw ads up, but we always left it open ended. There's other. Once we have the attention of an audience, then there's all sorts of things we can do to build a business around that audience.

[07:03] – Justin McCullough
So I want to close this out with a core idea. If you're in that kind of business and you're in sort of a startup mode like you guys were back then, how do you fnance this? How do you pull it together and actually bring that vision to life?

[07:14] – Madison Wickham
We bootstrapped from the very beginning. Like I said, my background's in web development, and my co founder, who I started it with, he kind of ran the content and I was doing the web development and kind of business development stuff. And we just kept it super lean. I mean, we started it when were working other jobs. About four months in, we decided to dive in full time. And even then it was kind of racking up personal credit card debt and depleting savings and just kind of pushing, pooling all the resources that we could kind of round up to try to get to a point where the company was cash fowing.

[07:58] – Madison Wickham
And we actually, because we kept expenses so lean, and the two of us were kind of doing everything ourselves, were able to get to that point pretty quickly just purely with simple Google Ad revenue. And then from there it was just this process of continuing to reinvest and then we eventually did raise some equity and working with banks and whatnot. So it's been a journey and we're still inventory business. We're always trying to fgure out the fnancing aspects of it.

[08:32] – Justin McCullough
Yeah, well, great, thanks for sharing that. In seven years you've gone from an idea entertainment business, you didn't know anything about entertainment to now a full on fashion business with an E commerce arm and retail locations. So what an amazing journey in seven years. And you did it Bootstrapped. Thank you for sharing your story with us today, Madison. Thank you. I'm Justin and this is Small Business Festival.

[09:05] – Justin McCullough
All right, so what a great story from Madison about building a business. You know, how familiar is the story of, you know, I'm just a web developer and I wanted to do this, build a website, whatever else. And the next thing you know, I was in business. It's not a lot different than somebody who says, you know, I'm a great cook, I like making burgers. And the next thing you know they're running a burger shop. And so, you know, there's a few things I want to talk to you about in this particular episode that really stuck out to me and they're really around the idea of vision, you know, and what it means to have a vision that's pretty fuid built on an audience.

[09:42] – Justin McCullough
And so Madison talks a lot about understanding a particular type of customer or an audience and essentially just following them through a life cycle of what matters to them. He was talking about the entertainment idea and curating an audience. And those are some fancy words I guess really to say that he knew the one person he had in mind and he knew that he could make them laugh and he could entertain them. And then he started saying, you know what, I've got this guy's attention. What can I do with that? Because I already understand a lot about this person's background, where they're going and where they've come from and what are the things, products and things like that would be interesting to him and how do I stack that on top of what I'm already doing.

[10:24] – Justin McCullough
And the next thing you know, he's built out several product lines and retail front and E commerce front and all those other things. And to me, while he may not have really talked about it in terms of a vision, I think it's really clear he saw in his mind a great way to connect with an audience that was familiar to him and bring them over a long period of time into things that matter to him. And so that's a pretty compelling vision when you think about what that means in terms of knowing your audience, knowing where you want to go, and I think, really, ultimately trying to serve somebody like yourself. And I think he said a few different ways that the people he serves now are people like him, and he's doing it in a variety of ways.

[11:06] – Justin McCullough
And so from a vision perspective, that really stands out to me as a really interesting business and how they brought that together. You know, I also think that when we look at it from a values perspective, they were obviously being scrappy, they were being innovative, they were being creative. They were also not taking themselves too seriously through the process and leaving a lot of room to fgure it out as they go. So I hope here you've heard some things that have been interesting to you and something can help you. You know, I want to thank the Small Business Festival and Matthew Pollard, who created Small Business Festival, for letting me use the audio. Madison, thanks for the interview. And of course, Brain Master Cylinder for the really cool and wild podcast theme music that I have here.

[11:50] – Justin McCullough
And so I hope you've enjoyed this episode. You can connect with me at mccjustin on Twitter and go to justin mccullough.com or visionvaluencevelocity.com Thanks a ton. We'll see you later. Bye.