Digital marketing is pretty much essential for businesses these days. But, says Jared Laidlaw, too many companies just want to throw money around without considering the right marketing strategy for them.

Even though he offers digital marketing solutions he’s not afraid to turn away potential clients who aren’t ready to follow his advice.

We also talk about how Jared manages to run his business from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. It’s been a rewarding experience but not without its issues.

Listen in to find out…

• Where every business must appear online
• What you should be worried about with Google
• The best way to find out your client’s real goals
• How to identify the top service providers
• And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in This Episode: www.ellawdigital.com

Episode Transcript:

David Elmasian: Welcome to the Hub of Success, I’m your host Dave Elmasian. Today I’m excited to talk to Jared Laidlaw, co-founder of Ellaw Digital, a digital marketing company. Jared helps businesses with their digital marketing by developing a strategy and then thorough implementation and analysis and data, and he creates a custom solution solidly built on ROI, or return on investment. His company manages the process and continually works to improve the results, which are always impressive. Along with his analytical skills, Jared’s mindset is to offer the best possible value to his clients. Along with his wife and co-founder Nicole, they share a love for travel and are constantly circling the globe, living in many places through the world, using the technology we have available today. So it really doesn’t matter where they are, or where they’re living, they can still service and help their clients. Well, welcome to the podcast Jared.

Jared Laidlaw: Thank you. That was a pretty good introduction.

David Elmasian: Are you impressed with yourself now? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah, I’m trying to figure out if you’re talking about me.

David Elmasian: I was talking about you. Yeah. Absolutely. So Jared, let’s get right into it. How did you get started in this … And am I summing it up correctly when I say digital marketing? Is that a good description of your business?

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. Yeah. It definitely is. I feel I cover a lot of … I cover the digital marketing industry, maybe not so much implementation wise, but if a client comes to me, or a business comes to me and wants a certain service, I’m not just going to sell them that service, I’m going to actually give them some kind of advice beforehand. Like if Google isn’t going to work for them, or Facebook isn’t going to work for them, I’m going say that. So yeah, I enjoy digital marketing, I enjoy all aspects of the industry and helping businesses.

David Elmasian: So Jared, you missed out on that sales class in college. You always say yes to a customer, take the money, and then figure out how to do it. Come on you’re doing it about all … You’re going about it all backwards.

Jared Laidlaw: I used to be like that.

David Elmasian: Yeah, you live and learn, right.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. There’s a few yeses over the years that turned into quick noes for a couple months or so, but yeah, it’s been an interesting journey, interesting ride so far.

David Elmasian: So tell me how it all got started. What got you into this field to begin with?

Jared Laidlaw: Well, I was studying in college marketing and entrepreneurship, so they were two separate majors. And I always enjoyed business. I was always going to do entrepreneurship and a million ideas would come up, and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m going to do this thing, going to do that thing.” And I ended up taking an elective paper on the marketing side of things, and it was Electronic Marketing. And I walked into the first class ten minutes late and not too many people in there, must have been 30 people in the class, but we were in a 200 seat hall. And there’s the lecturer right down the bottom, sitting on a table, just talking. It was very different. And yeah, it turned out that the lecturer, he was an entrepreneur himself, a serial entrepreneur, multi-millionaire. He’s like, “I don’t need to be here. I’m doing this …”

David Elmasian: So that lent a little credibility to what he was saying, I could imagine.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. And just like he was completely different. We weren’t standing up there reading from the textbook. Unfortunately I had already bought the textbook, and then first day he’s like, “Yeah, we don’t need this. I’m just going to tell you what I did in my businesses.” And his was online businesses, and then from there it just started a kind of passion.

David Elmasian: So give us a little context for timing on this Jared, meaning was this, you’re talking a few years ago? You’re talking 10 years ago?

Jared Laidlaw: This was 2014, I believe.

David Elmasian: Okay, so four, five years ago.

Jared Laidlaw: No, it was before that. 2013. That was a while ago.

David Elmasian: Ago. Well I guess it’s all relative now. When somebody says 2013 to me, being the old guy that I am, that’s like new. That’s just like yesterday.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. Yeah.

David Elmasian: So, this professor, was he a professor, or was he just a guest lecturer, do you recall?

Jared Laidlaw: No, no, no. Yeah. Americans would call him a professor. Yeah, we ran the paper … We had 12 weeks with him just saying how he used SEO for his business and how he used paid ads and how he used email marketing and how he used XYZ marketing method, digital marketing method to help his business grow.

David Elmasian: So this was an aha moment for you, it sounds like.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah, it was. It was just like, this internet thing is real, and you can … He’s a real life success story, not just some spammy looking ad or YouTube video.

David Elmasian: Right. Right. So you take the class. You continue your college career. And did you start out in this field right off the bat, or did you do something else first?

Jared Laidlaw: So we had … When was this? We finished college and my wife and I, or at the time were boyfriend and girlfriend, we were dead set on going to America, moving to America. There was a visa we could get, an exchange, a post-graduation exchange for a year.

David Elmasian: Yeah. And we neglected to mention one small thing. Where were you at this time?

Jared Laidlaw: I’m sorry, I was in Auckland, New Zealand.

David Elmasian: Okay. Right. Because some of us started listening that didn’t … I know that, but some of us that were listening that don’t know you may not have realized that. They might have thought you were from Australia or something, you know, very similar accents, right.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah, kind of talking funny and … I mean, I always get that. No one ever picks up New Zealand.

David Elmasian: I’m teasing you, but I’m sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. So you get a visa to come to the US, you and your then girlfriend, now wife, are committed to that. So tell me about that process. You pack up your bags and you head over. What was it like?

Jared Laidlaw: So in New Zealand we’re a small country at the bottom of the world. We’re not on very many maps, which is quite funny. We’re that small. And it’s generally a lot of people move to London after they complete college. And so it’s traditional for New Zealanders to go to the UK and do a bit of an OE, or overseas experience for a couple years. But we were … We traveled to New York for a couple weeks and yeah, a long time ago, and we really loved it, and we found out that we could get this visa, so yeah, saving as much we could in college, we had a year of … Nicole, my wife, she was able to get some jobs in marketing. I had difficulty getting jobs in marketing because I was leaving in 11 months, 10 months, 9 months.

So I ended up coaching basketball full time for yeah, it was essentially the year before we left, so I was just coaching basketball full time, which was great. And then on the side at night, just learning more about digital marketing stuff. And then when we got to New York that was the position that I was looking for, we were lucky enough to get jobs in the same company, in the same digital marketing company. It was pretty small. There was only five of us in the office to start with, but yeah, she ran the Facebook and social media side, and I was running the Google side and yeah, it’s been that way ever since. That was in, start of 2016.

David Elmasian: Yeah. Okay. All right. So it’s been a few years now. So you landed in New York. You started in this new profession. What was your experience coming to the US? You said you’d been here previously on a vacation, am I correct in saying that?

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah we traveled. After high school, my then girlfriend again, she went to a summer camp in Florida, and I met up with her after that. And yeah, we traveled round the States for about three months, mainly on the East Coast, and just really enjoyed New York and we found out that we could get a visa and actually live there for a year. So we had our hearts set on that for a while.

David Elmasian: Sure. Okay. Well, one of the things you’re doing Jared now, you’re mentioning New York a lot, and I teased you a little bit about the whole New Zealand, Australian thing, you know, and so maybe you’re aware of it, maybe you’re not, there’s a Boston, New York thing as well too. So being a Boston guy, when you keep mentioning you like New York, I cringle a little bit. But that’s okay. I know you’re a good guy. I know you’re a nice guy. I know you don’t mean it that way, but just be careful. You don’t want to give too many props to New York, all right.

Jared Laidlaw: You know, Boston was nice. We went to Boston for a weekend.

David Elmasian: See, they always said you were a fast learner.

Jared Laidlaw: No, that was surprising. I don’t know what I was expecting with Boston, but we got there and I’m just walking around like, “This place is so clean. It looks like New York, the older English style buildings and whatnot, but it’s clean. Is there rubbish around here, or … ”

David Elmasian: It depends on what neighborhood you go to, I guess.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah, probably didn’t go to the dirty ones.

David Elmasian: Right. So you live in New York. You get the job there. You know you can only be in the US for a while, so what comes after that? What was your next adventure after New York?

Jared Laidlaw: So we actually got sponsored by that same company for … It was supposed to be for … Indefinite. That doesn’t end up working out. There’s some issues with the company. And we signed a one year lease on an apartment, then a couple days later found out that we had to leave the country.

David Elmasian: Uh oh.

Jared Laidlaw: So that was a stressful couple months.

David Elmasian: I’d imagine.

Jared Laidlaw: So we took a couple months, this would be back in 2017 now, took us a couple months to find someone to take over the lease. And then 10 days later we packed up, had to get rid of all of our … You know, you acquire so much such when you live somewhere. We literally donated, and it was so hard to do this, we donated 29 shopping bags full of clothes. The weekend that we left there was a snowstorm, so we couldn’t walk it to anywhere, to the clothing bins or anything. And we went to call up someone to come and pick up these 30 shopping bags full of clothes. But yeah, so we packed up all our stuff, or as much as we could and moved to Montreal for … Well, we went to Montreal for six weeks, don’t know if you can call it moving. And from there we just started traveling and working remotely.

David Elmasian: Yeah. Okay. Now we’ll circle back to your … I’m going to use the term lifestyle. And that makes it sound like it’s something unsavory, but it’s not. But we’ll circle back to that in just a minute. So your focus at that time and continues to be primarily Google, Google AdWords, that type of thing. For somebody that has been in a time capsule for the last 10 years and maybe never had heard of what SEO or Google AdWords are, or maybe just a new client, how do you describe that to them as to what you do and what’s involved in that?

Jared Laidlaw: So Google is the major search engine across the Western world, at least. So if you’ve got a business of any size, you should be wanting to show up in Google. So when someone searches for ‘best pizza in Boston’ or ‘best burger joint in Boston’ you want to be-

David Elmasian: Have you been checking my search history Jared. Come on. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Jared Laidlaw: Just a little bit. Google knows everything about you David.

David Elmasian: Yeah, I know, unfortunately.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah, so as a business you want to show up there, in the Google search results. There are two different, not two different, I don’t want to get too technical, but there’s a couple different areas where you can show up. One is paid, so you say to Google, when someone types in Boston and burgers, I want to show up. And I’ll pay this much, or up to this much for someone to see my ad. And then there’s organic which is a lot harder, but it is long term, it is something that businesses can, or should be prioritizing as well.

David Elmasian: And organic is more reputation in essence, right. From an outsider’s perspective, meaning, let’s use your example of Boston burgers or Boston pizza. So if you’ve been in business for many years and you have many, many thousands of satisfied customers and there’s a lot of buzz and you have that long history and a great reputation … In the old days it used to be called word of mouth, and I think word of mouth is still there, but in essence this is kind of electronic word of mouth when you’re talking about organic. Am I summarizing that correctly, or am I way off base when I say it that way?

Jared Laidlaw: Half and half, I think. So I think word of mouth now, in this example at least, if you’re a food company then word of mouth, I feel like it’s transferred into social media, especially on Instagram. So if you’re a burger joint, you want to have tons and tons of photos of your food on Instagram, on Facebook, no, mainly just Instagram. Organic search is similar in terms of the history. There’s other factors that go into it, obviously, but yeah, you’re right, a lot of history, good history, reviews, your Yelp page, in this example. That’s all important for a business.

David Elmasian: Sure. So what separates you from your competitors? Every business, every industry has a lot of competition. So if I was, no pun intended, if I was to Google SEO strategy, or SEO service, or what have you, obviously we’re going to get a lot of hits there. So with all those choices out there, where do you feel like you’re different?

Jared Laidlaw: That’s a great question. I feel like with our approach, we’re not necessarily, we’re not focused on our competitors like everyone. Anyone and anyone could be a digital marketer these days. I think what we try to do, and what I try to do especially is take whatever business is in front of me, or whoever I’m speaking to and actually try help them. And I mentioned it before, if someone’s coming to me with a request to do XYZ service and I don’t feel like that’s the right service for them, I’m going to tell them that.

There’s plenty of times when a business has said, “No, I just want to do this,” and I said, “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. That’s only going to cause … That’s not worth your investment, and that’s not worth my time investment to work on something I know isn’t going to work by you just waving your wallet around or your credit card.” So I feel like I’m very customer focused, and I want to work with people who themselves are customer focused. I had a call one time with a financial company who they were from New York. And feel free to dig them if you want. They were from New York.

David Elmasian: It sounds like they’re not going to be a good prospect. So I like this. You see, you’re connecting New York with bad things. This is great.

Jared Laidlaw: They were a typical New York financial people, I guess. And they wanted to do some stuff in Texas. And I spent a couple calls beforehand. I’m like, “You should be doing this instead. You can’t just slap a Texas sticker on your website and you’re going to help them. You have to tell them why you’re going to tell them.” Then I asked just a simple question. “So overall, what do you want from this marketing campaign?” And they just … Must have been three or four of them in the office on a conference call. And they all just laughed and was like, “Make us a bunch load of cash.” And they were all laughing and I’m like, “This isn’t why I do what I do. I want to help people who are helping people and not laughing about profits or anything.” No. I mean, just to sum up, I just want to help people. Help people help people.

David Elmasian: Right. You care. You care. And full disclosure, Jared and I have worked together for what, it’s been like two, three, four years, somewhere in that range. Two or three years, at least.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. It’s now 2019. Yeah.

David Elmasian: Yeah. So what Jared is saying is what my experience has been in working with him these past few years in that it’s not all about the mechanics of it. It’s more so about his competency and his dedication. And one of the things … And again, this is my editorial on you, Jared, I equate Jared to some of my key employees in that one of the things that I look at employees or people that I work with is, not just their competency, but are they a self-starter. Do I have to … Do I have to keep an eye on things, so to speak. And my experience from day one with Jared has been such that once we went through the normal process of him learning more about my business and like he mentioned, what my goals were and so on and so forth, then he’s run with it. And we stay in touch, but it’s not something that I feel like, hey I’ve got the keep an eye on this guy, what’s going on here.

And I think, especially in the space that you’re in Jared, where, like you said, it seems like anybody can take a 20 minute YouTube video and all of a sudden they’re an SEO expert or digital marketing expert. That’s what really sets you apart in my view, but you’re not out there hawking your goods just because you know that there’s a lot of people that have a need for this. And the other thing that again, my editorial on you Jared, is you have a very deep analytical skill, which is super important, particularly for the type of work that you do. So I think you’re keeping it … You’re a little underselling yourself and your abilities, which is okay, I understand why you’d want to do that, but I just wanted to give a real like testimonial based upon my own experience, and others that I know that have worked with you as well too, because I have referred you to other people happily. And they all have come back with very positive experiences as well too. So let’s switch gears a little bit.

Jared Laidlaw: I’m,

David Elmasian: Go ahead. What were you going to say?

Jared Laidlaw: Oh, I was just going to say, I’m going to cut that last bit out that you said and chuck it up on our website or something. I’m going to blast you over the internet. Listen to David and yeah, come work with us.

David Elmasian: Well, we can, but of course there’s going to be a slight fee involved for that now, you know. No, no, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. But now, I truly mean what I said. And like I said, that has been my experience, which like I said, is very unique in the work that you do.

Jared Laidlaw: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.

David Elmasian: But there’s another thing that makes you guys unique and we’ve touched upon a little bit, but let’s … You know, everybody that when your name comes up, the second thing I mention to them after we talk about the work that you do is your lifestyle. So I think you gave us a little teaser, a little clue about it when you said you had to get rid of a bunch of your stuff. So, tell us about your lifestyle and how it’s maybe a little different than the average individual married couple. I don’t want to give too much away. I want to hear it in your words, not mine.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah, to summarize, it’s … We work remotely. We travel full time. And yeah, we live out of Airbnb’s, or we try to live in one spot for about a month at a time. We lie in the position between a tourist and a local. So for example, right now I’m in Austin. We’re in Austin for seven weeks. And we’re not necessarily going to do all the touristy things, and we’re living in the suburbs. We’re in a condo unit. We go down to H-E-B for our supermarket goods, and we go for a walk next to the river on the weekends, just like all the other locals do. But yeah, we just wanted to see the world a little bit.

David Elmasian: And you have seen the world quite a bit, right. I mean, let’s … Rattle off a few of the places that you’ve hit along your journey.

Jared Laidlaw: There’s quite a few. We started in Canada. Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver. We’ve done the West Coast a little bit. Where did we go? We went to Seattle, Phoenix, Vegas, LA. That was just in the first year. We’ve been doing this for two and a bit years, no probably two years now. This year we’re … Oh sorry, we’re in 2019 now. Last year we spent a good time of it in … Good chunk of the year in Europe for summer and that was amazing. I never thought I would enjoy Europe so much.

David Elmasian: So I know you were in France. Where are other places in Europe were you?

Jared Laidlaw: So we arrived in Greece. So we spent about a month in Athens and a weekend in Santorini. Where did we go from there? Went up to Belgium, went to Amsterdam.

David Elmasian: Maybe easier to say where you didn’t go. It might be a shorter list.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. Need a spreadsheet up or something. We were two months in Italy, I think, about two months. So we were all around Italy. Italy was amazing. Went to London. Then down to France for two months, and then flew from there to Miami.

David Elmasian: Wow. And one things I know about you. You like to stay in the warmer climates, right.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. Well, it doesn’t really snow in New Zealand too much, and especially not where I’m from. And we had two winters in New York, one and a half, two winters in New York. And that was enough. Like it’s nice, snow’s nice for that first day or two when it’s clean.

David Elmasian: Yeah, it gets tired really quickly.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah.

David Elmasian: So this, and again, am I using the right word when I say lifestyle, because like I said, I don’t know maybe it’s me, when I say a lifestyle I always have these strange connotations to it. But is this something that you feel like you’re going to continue forever? Is if for just a short … And again, I don’t want to get too personal on you, but I’m just curious.

Jared Laidlaw: No, I think we had the realization in the last week or so, to be fair, which is ironic that you ask. So we went back to New Zealand for a wedding. So we were back home for two weeks. And being away for so long and it’s just the two of us, and we see friends every now and again, if we know people in the country or whatnot, but we just spent two weeks having dinner every night with someone else, someone new … Or not someone new, someone from college or high school or whatever it was. And the amount of love, I guess you can call it was …

You know, I think we figured out that we really miss that, and miss having friends and for me personally, I miss playing basketball in a competitive environment. Here you can go down and play at the park or whatever, but having a team, coming back every week and having that camaraderie, I definitely miss that. So I think this year in, I think it’s April or May, once our schedule clears up, I think we’re going to settle down for about a year in Australia. And again, a warm environment, we’re looking at Brisbane. But yeah, just settling down for a little bit.

David Elmasian: Sure. Yeah. Sounds like you’re a little homesick. That’s the term we use right. Is that an appropriate term in New Zealand, homesick? Does that translate?

Jared Laidlaw: I wouldn’t say homesick. I think the aspects of being homesick we definitely miss. Also, there are challenges with constantly moving, not having reliable WIFI … Turning up and the first thing we do at an Airbnb or at a hotel is we check the WIFI, because we can only have the lifestyle if we have work, and work relies on internet, so it’s very tough asking people. Because people say like, “Oh no, we have WIFI.” And then it’s like, what speed to you have WIFI? Like we got to this place and it was five megabits per second, which is …

David Elmasian: Not good.

Jared Laidlaw: I don’t know, you might be your TV streaming at that point. We had to upgrade that, and now we have some ridiculous speed I’ve never seen before. But yeah, just some challenges that we’re getting a little bit tired of having to deal with.

David Elmasian: So did this idea of traveling the world, is this something that you guys collectively came up with? Was it more your wife, was it more you, or what?

Jared Laidlaw: So I read … There’s a book called the 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris, and I read that years and years ago. That was a book that that professor I talked about previous had. And in that book …

David Elmasian: Hold on a second. Was the professor the author of the book, or he referenced it?

Jared Laidlaw: No, he told everyone like this was a great book, you should read it.

David Elmasian: Okay. All right. No, go ahead.

Jared Laidlaw: So I listened to him. And yeah, so it was sitting in the back of my mind. When we were in New York and we found out that we had to leave, it was an interesting time. It was stressful, again. And we thought like okay, well can we work remotely, and for how long. And you know, we did some calculations and we figured out how long we had. So we knew for example, that we needed about three grand as a safety net so if anything happens that’s about the price of two tickets back to New Zealand.

David Elmasian: There you go.

Jared Laidlaw: And then if anything bad happens, we just buy tickets and then we start again.

David Elmasian: Yeah. Yeah. So you must be world class travelers in the sense of efficiency, right, at this point? I mean, I think if … When you see people pack their suitcases or you’re in airports and you see the luggage and the bags and you say to yourself, “Huh,” kind of laugh at yourself and you say, “We used to be like this.” I just have this picture of you looking at people like, “Huh. Okay. Well we traveled the world for two years and only have these three bags.”

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. Sometimes we’re like that. Security lines are definitely an interesting experience. For example in Newark, we flew out of Newark a couple months ago, in Jersey, and you don’t have to take your shoes off. You don’t take any of your laptops out now. You just throw everything on. I’m like, “Okay cool.” Then we get to LAX and LAX is completely different and you’re all paranoid and stuff. It’s a challenge.

David Elmasian: I would say you could write a book, and probably could write a book at this point about your experiences.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. I mean, we could. There’s a lot of people who do what we do end up creating courses our blogs and try teach other people to do what we do, but we’re not really interesting in that kind of stuff. It’s a little bit, not slimy, but I don’t know, teaching people how to teach people how to do stuff is little strange. I can help in other ways.

David Elmasian: There’s you go. So let’s wrap things up a little bit. We have a segment, and if you listen to any of the podcasts, it’s called Check Your Tech. And it’s fun. That’s no right or wrong answer. It’s just really being in technology field myself I’ve got to throw a little bit of tech in there. So don’t feel like it’s a quiz. It’s not. It’s just for fun. So are you a Mac or PC guy? And some of these I know the answers to, but others don’t, so that’s why I’m asking. So are you a Mac or PC guy?

Jared Laidlaw: I’m a Mac. I think I emailed you when my PC blew up and,

David Elmasian: Right. Yep, I remember that.

Jared Laidlaw: Yes, that was not a good time.

David Elmasian: No. How about iPhone or Android?

Jared Laidlaw: Mac. Apple.

David Elmasian: Ooh, you’re an Apple guy through and through. All right.

Jared Laidlaw: As much I can, yeah.

David Elmasian: All right, now this one should be interesting. Are you a Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, all of the above, none of the above, mix or match?

Jared Laidlaw: All of them, but in their own unique way. So you can’t just put the same thing up-

David Elmasian: It’s like picking your favorite kids, right. You can’t just say it’s one. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. One’s good at basketball, the other one’s good at reading books or something. They’re all different.

David Elmasian: There you go. Right. Now but here’s the question. Which one, when it’s for leisure, which one do you open first?

Jared Laidlaw: Instagram, for sure.

David Elmasian: Okay. All right. Now this one may not be applicable, but I’ll ask anyway. Alexa or Google Home, any of those types of devices?

Jared Laidlaw: No. We don’t … What would we get? Probably not Google. I feel like Google, yeah, no. Does Apple have one? I don’t know if Apple has one.

David Elmasian: Yeah, they maybe they do. Let’s move on from there.

Jared Laidlaw: It’s probably not very good though.

David Elmasian: Well, it’s an Apple, right, come on. Don’t say bad things about Apple, being an Apple guy, you know. How about Netflix or Hulu? Any of those types of things? Streaming services, or maybe one I’ve never heard of.

Jared Laidlaw: Well Netflix, but it’s not my account.

David Elmasian: No. Okay. I won’t go there. We won’t go any further than that.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah, we can cut that bit out.

David Elmasian: All right. Here’s an easy one. Gmail or Outlook.

Jared Laidlaw: Oh, Gmail.

David Elmasian: Okay. Now this one, you know, this one might be a little more challenging. But I want an answer. I don’t want to give one of these wishy washy answers. All-time favorite basketball player and favorite team.

Jared Laidlaw: Ooh. Well team is tricky. So team would be New York Knicks, even though they’re horrible.

David Elmasian: I’m a little dumbfounded by that, but that’s okay. You know, everybody has their personal opinions, but there’s probably a reason for it, right.

Jared Laidlaw: Something about the Knicks I’ve always enjoyed. So Knicks, but then also the Thunder, because Steven Adams from New Zealand, I have to support his team.

David Elmasian: Of course. How about player?

Jared Laidlaw: Players.

David Elmasian: Now you only pick one.

Jared Laidlaw: It’s horrible. It’s Carmelo Anthony, but he’s terrible. He’s trash. So, yeah.

David Elmasian: All right. Okay.

Jared Laidlaw: Yeah. I’m a suffering Knicks fan, so I will be suffering Carmelo Anthony fan as well.

David Elmasian: Obviously, which the two go together. There’s no such thing as a non-suffering Knicks fan, right.

Jared Laidlaw: Exactly.

David Elmasian: Well Jared, what a story. I know we could talk for hours about this, but we’re running out of time. Before we finish up, tell people how they can reach out to you if they’re thinking about, maybe they need some help with the type of work that you do.

Jared Laidlaw: Well not just help, but if they want any advice or anything, any double checking anything. You can reach out to me, jared@ellawdigital, so E-L-L-A-W digital.com. Yeah, jump on LinkedIn, I’m Jared Laidlaw, that should pop up with the smiley face in Toronto. Yeah, that’d be good.

David Elmasian: Jared, thanks for joining us today on the Hub of Success and sharing your story.

Jared Laidlaw: Thanks for having me.

David Elmasian: You’ve been listening to the Hub of Success. I’m your host Dave Elmasian.