Ep 40. From Chaos to Calm: The Battle Plan for Entrepreneurs with Kevin McGrew
Chaos is every entrepreneur’s shadow… but it doesn’t have to run your life.
Kevin McGrew breaks down how to master strategic entrepreneurship while balancing ownership, delegation, and trusting your team, even when it’s messy, imperfect, and uncomfortable.
In this episode, you’ll get the SMACK Framework [Shoot. Move. Adapt. Communicate.] Kevin’s battle-tested system for:
Acting with intention, not just activity
Moving faster than your competitors
Adapting before yesterday’s “best practice” becomes obsolete
Communicating clearly so your team and customers rally behind you
Here’s what you’ll walk away with:
Design your own exit: Build your business on your terms and leave when you’re ready.
From player to coach: Empower your team, trust them, and let go without losing control.
Focus on outcomes, not perfection: Consistency beats imitation every time.
Move fast, adapt faster: Action creates clarity, waiting creates doubt.
Outsmart the giants: Use your unique edge, hit the weak spots, and stop playing by their rules.
Stop being a “player” in your own business. Step into the role of the wise leader calling the shots, and building a legacy that actually lasts.
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Kevin McGrew is a battle-tested Navy veteran turned serial entrepreneur, known for transforming military discipline into marketing strategy. Over his career, he’s built six companies, from a lost-and-found tech startup to a national franchise network, and successfully exited three on his own terms.
He’s the author of The New Rules of Marketing Warfare and the creator of the SMAC Framework (Shoot, Move, Adapt, Communicate), a system designed to help underdog businesses outmaneuver industry giants through speed, focus, and adaptability.
When he’s not rewriting the rules of digital strategy, Kevin can be found sharing stories over coffee, bourbon, or a fine cigar, reminding every entrepreneur that business is a battlefield, but mindset wins the war.
Connect with Kevin:
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00:00 — Kevin’s story: from Navy veteran to serial entrepreneur and author.
03:00 —The first missed opportunity, what “selling on your own terms” really means.
06:00 — Why founders treat businesses like their babies (and the cost of holding on too tightly).
10:00 — Learning to let go: from player to coach, and what leadership really looks like.
14:00 — The emotional shift from warrior to wise man, finding purpose beyond profit.
18:00 — Exiting to something, not from something: redefining “retirement” for entrepreneurs.
23:00 — Introducing the SMACK framework: Shoot. Move. Adapt. Communicate.
28:00 — Marketing as warfare: staying agile as the David among Goliaths.
36:00 — Building a personal brand, finding your voice, and showing your scars, not wounds.
42:00 — What legacy really means — and why it’s never just about you.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Having a mindset, a forward thinking mindset. Adapt before best practice becomes yesterday's news.
Welcome to the Legacy Branding Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Beauparlant, here to guide you through the journey of selling your business, and building a personal brand that leaves a lasting impact. On the show, we'll explore real life founder stories, expert insights, and actionable strategies to help you navigate the transition, avoid post sale crisis, and create your impact driven legacy brand. Whether you're thinking of selling, building to sell, or already on the other side, this podcast is your go to resource for making your next evolution, your best one yet. Let's dive in.
Today on the Legacy Branding Podcast, I'm joined by Kevin McGrew, a battle-tested navy veteran, turned serial entrepreneur who's built six companies and exited three of them on his own terms. Kevin is the author of The New Rules of Marketing Warfare, the Founder of Everzocial, a digital growth agency, and the creator of the SMAC framework designed to help underdog businesses outmaneuver the giants. His experiences give him a unique perspective on what it really takes to build scale and sell successfully. And when he is not rewriting the rules of digital marketing, you'll find him swapping war stories over coffee, bourbon, or a good cigar. Kevin welcome to the show.
Wow. Who is that masked man? I'm glad to be here. Thank you, Laura.
I love that. Well, I'd love to swap war stories over coffee. Maybe bourbon.
I'm not sure about the cigar.
Oh, I'll have to teach. Once you've gone there, you don't go back. You know?
Yeah. There was a time many, many moons ago, but
Just don't inhale. That's what I.
yet. Oh, yes. All right, so this is where I wanna start. You've built six companies and you've exited three on your own terms, and that's a powerful phrase, specially for founders who often feel, they're pushed by burnout or market pressures to sell. So I wanna know what on your own terms means for you and how did you achieve that?
I stumbled onto it to be honest. I've always had a entrepreneurial edge to me, is there's a better way to do this. Even my mom said, she'd tell me to do something, I go, just a better way to do this, kind of thing, right? So yeah, that's a constant seeking the next level, why isn't anybody doing this and solving problems? I think businesses is all about building something to solve people's problems or other businesses problems. So I'll kind of work backwards. What my own terms means is that over time learn to be ready to sell.
So that I could be in control of my own terms. The first opportunity I had, I missed, a big opportunity. I could have been a gazillionaire very young, but I think God had other plans. But yeah, I learned that you don't always have to want to exit. I don't think any of my businesses, I started with exit as a desire. But I knew that if it's kinda like selling a home, if your home is always ready, looks like a nice place to visit. People can drive by that, it's ready to sell. If somebody came along and said, Hey, I'm, here's a check, and it's the right money, you go, I'm ready. Let's go. Right. That analogy, don't have an empty home when you're showing it. Make sure it's a staged. Get it know what they want, know what they're looking for, and have it ready to go. But it's a nice place to operate from while you're operating as well. So that's what my own terms means is knowing I didn't always know what I wanted for it. I didn't know what the valuation was. I didn't know those things, but I knew that I didn't want to be on the defense. I don't like to negotiate from a defensive position.
I think that's a great lesson, and I love that analogy of the house, and I think if you let a house fall into total disrepair, like if you have your house for 20 years and you do nothing to it. You're either gonna be having to spend a ton of money to get it up to shape in order to sell it, or somebody's gonna low ball you for the house. You could translate that story directly into a business. If you don't have things aligned. You don't have systems, receipts are in a shoebox. You haven't filed taxes in years, you have no contracts, whatever, like any of those things. You don't own your domain name. That's one of the things that I always red flag for people. Those things are the things that you're then scrambling, and so even if somebody came check in hand ready to buy your business, you would not be near ready.
Even though I knew that, it happened to me. I kicked my butt 'cause I had HP Hewlett Packard comp wanted to buy me. We were a part comp partner with comp. They literally just offered me $5 million for my business. I don't think it was worth that, but they wanted to tie me into, we had just done some, a lot of work to help them really look good on a few projects. Long story short, I didn't have a due diligence, but I didn't even know what that was. I wasn't ready and I'm, and the, this beautiful cruise ship pulled up and sailed off without me, basically. And I said, never again. Never again. And so that kind of led me into understanding better. How do you prep for exits?
I love that. So you exited three on your own terms, and then you had three others. So you just mentioned
One. Yeah.
The cruise ship left without you. Can you share any stories or lessons from those other ones?
That, that didn't sell.
Yeah.
Yeah. Company I developed, called Sherlock Online. It's the World's Lost and Found. And I was in New York in a taxi kinda like Toronto, in a rainy fall day and it was dark and I was beta testing the Palm Pilot. I don't know if you remember the Palm Pilot, but I was one of five people that got my hands on one before it came out to the public. I'm not used to having a Palm Pilot in my hand, and I'm trying to pay the taxi driver back in the day where you had to pay with cash and stuff. Anyways, I left the Palm Pilot on the seat and got out of the cab and, did this and go, oh my gosh, this is like priceless. Nobody's got one. And I just, now I gotta tell the founders that it's, there's one in the wild there. I said, there's gotta be a better way. So again, on the journey, I had an asset tracking business at the time for that we dealt with B2B companies, but I go, there's gotta be a way to track lost stuff. And so I founded Sherlock Online. I raised. $20 million in venture capital. That's a whole story about raising money. I did 60 different VCs up and down the coast from Vancouver all the way down to San Diego and New York and you name it. And I learned a lot through that. People don't invest in horses, they invest in jockeys. I learned that at the very end. But yeah, I didn't prepare to sell. That wasn't again it was my baby. Nobody really understood it like I did. It was a real passion story, origin story from it, and I didn't package it in a way that it wasn't tied to me. The market tanked which was 9/11 basically.
And no, a lot of uncertainty like COVID and I didn't think about selling. It was a fire sale, basically. I had to let people, my investors, everybody, the world was gonna end. Nobody knew what was going on. So then, I was tranched investing. I didn't get the tranches in time. We were close to hitting our milestones, but not there.
It was all these reasons. But I would've planned for an exit, I could have exited at any point. And by the end of it I was starting a fire with rocks, kind of thing to keep it going. And so I didn't get anything out of it and I was worth a lot on paper.
Some of my partners bought Lamborghinis and stuff. My wife wouldn't let me stop driving the Honda Accord, kind of thing until the money's in the bank, kind of thing. There's a lot of things I learned from that process and I think God was trying to teach me not to hold on to things so tightly. And, that was a big lesson, but it prepped me for future exits that I came upon. So I think we always learn the hard way as entrepreneurs. I think we always learn the hard way, but it's better to learn from Laura's hard ways and Kevin's hard ways than your own hard ways. Right.
Yeah. So if somebody's listening, hopefully they'll get something from your stories, and that's the whole goal of this podcast is to really share the stories of founders who have exited in different ways with different results, different personal experiences, money experiences, all of those things. So they can see what it's like. Because while there are people who have had multiple exits like you out there, there's very few that actually sell their business, let alone who've had who've done it multiple times. And if you're doing it for the first time, you don't know what you don't know. So if you can learn from other amazing people like you, then you're coming in that much more prepared.
It's definitely learn from those who plowed that ground before. Why reinvent the wheel?
And I think what you said about it being your business baby, I mean that's gonna resonates with me. That resonates, I'm sure with many people listening. I remember years ago, it was shortly after we had our second son. People were like, oh, are you guys gonna have another baby? I always find it interesting when you have just had a baby and people ask you when you're having your next baby
I know. Just getting used to this one.
a break. But I said, well, no, we actually have four babies. And they'd look at me a little strangely and I said, well, we have two human babies and two business babies. My husband and I are both entrepreneurs. If you're an entrepreneur, you get it. I'm not sure that people that weren't entrepreneurs got it quite as much,
Right.
it was true. And your identity becomes very wrapped up in it. It is who you are, how you identify, how people identify you. It's something you've built. You've grown, you've nurtured it. You fed it just like your children, like I can see a huge correlation to raising a child and growing a business, and so there is an emotional attachment for so many people.
I think that's the biggest you need that in some ways when you're starting out. I think it's like how God gives a mom the gift to really look out for their babies, because it's yours, right? And a business, you're gonna have a lot of whispering, a lot of, bankers and people telling you ways to run your business. And without that passion and that deep sense of ownership, you can lose it. So I think it's really the art of moving from a player to a coach is what I tell people. If you think about a soccer team or something like that, you were a player at one point.
You have to move into coaching from the sidelines. You can't jump in there and score the goal. You can't do that. And as soon as you can make that transition, now you start to let go a little bit more. It's like being a parent, sometimes you want to go and save the kid from falling, sometimes they gotta fall themselves and you gotta cheer them, get up, you can do it, kind of thing. And I think that was the hardest thing for me is working with letting go to my employees. 'cause I have this superhero complex of nobody can do it as good as me, and that's my own problem. But I don't think everybody has that problem. But I think with that comes that holding onto things too tightly. And my wife taught me a really good lesson when we had kids, if I can share it. Probably in the nineties when we were having babies and they had a new kind of diaper service where you can get cloth diapers. And it was brand new. And my wife, I'm like, I'm not doing cloth diapers. I like throwing things away, especially when they stink. So, she went for it. And so one night, in the middle of the night she goes, can you get up and change the baby? I was like, oh yeah, okay. I'm gonna go in there. What I learned is usually they go a couple times and I'm usually up a couple times, so I'm, this time I'm not gonna, I'm gonna make sure they don't leak. So I put on three diapers, she woke up and the baby's like, fine. But it had three diapers on it and , and she goes, why did you waste your diapers? I go. Is there any leakage? Is there any mess? No, don't tell me how to do it. Let me do it my way right? And what I've learned is not everybody's gonna change diapers the same way. And in business sometimes people don't operate a business the same way you would. And unless you're willing to do SOPs and write everything down and dump your brain into a way of a system, you gotta let people SMACK, shoot, move, adapt, and communicate. So that's kind of the transition I had to make is to not everybody's gonna do it the way I do it, I see it very clearly how it needs to be done.
I need to ask them questions. How do you see it? Buy into their, collaborate with them. And it might not be as good as mine, but it'll get done. Let them do it.
I think when you can start doing that, you're starting to prepare yourself to be not so tied to the business.
Yeah, and I think for me, I have teenagers now
You are too young to have teenagers. Come on, Laura.
Well, thank you. You know, 14 and 18, and I'm having to let go in so many ways. So I think a lot of what I'm experiencing as a mother. Letting them kind of, okay, I can't control everything and they're not gonna do everything the way I would or I have to just allow them to do the things.
It's so hard. Yeah, absolutely.
But it's also same with the business and creating that doesn't mean you love it any less. But it's also filling your life with other things that fulfill you. One of the things I talk about a lot with my clients or that I've heard stories on the podcast is when your only thing is your business, when that goes away, who are you? So finding those other things in your life so your life is full and it's more than just that one thing. It can be hobbies, it could be sports or other activities.
Or new business.
Exactly. It could be so many different things. But relationships and connections. It's really finding what's important to you and how you wanna live your life. Your business is only one piece of that.
A hundred percent. That just brought up something in my head that I've been struggling. I'm 59, but I look in the mirror until I look in the mirror. I think I'm 18. And then I look and I go, what happened to you? I'm transitioning from warrior to wise man, more legacy and I don't know how to do it. I am very naturally a warrior. Let's go to war. Let's lock and load. But I have to lay down the sword. I have to teach others how to use the sword. And that is a thing I'm trying to replacement therapy, if you will. Like when I think warrior, I gotta think, give the sword teach how to use the sword. Back to your point, of identity I think that's the biggest we talked about the baby thing is just like a parent. Sometimes when the kids leave home,
Yeah,
they go to college, they got accepted and you weren't ready for it. A lot of people lose their identity's tied up in their kids. So I think people can relate to that, even if you're not a business owner, but business owners, that is our problem is, that's where I say transition from player to coach it's not as hard, it's always hard. It's never, it's still something that's part of you, right? And nobody will know what the early days looked like and what you went through to . I still see that picture of Bezos kinda sitting there at that cheap looking desk and he had hair still. And that was the early days of Amazon. Everybody goes, oh, look at that picture. That's Amazon when it first started. But those were the days when you didn't know. I mean, you didn't know it was, you're gonna be a gazillionaire. You didn't know what the future held. You were taking a lot of risks and that. All those anxie angst and you miss those in some ways, those moments . So for me, I'm not any younger. I keep on thinking I'll just start another business, but I'm at this with ever social, I'm 18 to 24 months out from probably exiting. I've got a lot of people asking, the book has brought a lot of attention, but I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet. Not yet is what I'm saying. I'm not saying no, I'm saying not yet. The other thing I'm doing is, like you said, hobbies, these kind of things. I don't think I could ever retire personally.
And I think there's a lot of people like me. 'Cause I hear that a lot. Oh, find a hobby. Go play golf, do this. And I was like, shoot me, right? Yes, I want more free time. I want more time with my granddaughters. I want, all those kind of things. But I need to be active. And I think most men do. So what I'm doing is. Using this book as a way to help others do what I did, but also I'm helping, I'm moving into more of a coach in a sense, or speaker sharing my story, helping others, and pass, being more legacy driven than revenue driven. And that's given me the excitement of what the next steps could be like. But you gotta have that goal in mind. It's like, when my kids are little, like they'd have something valuable in mind. I would go give that to daddy. And they're like, no, but I said, oh, look at this, and to give that to them. You swap it out and they were good with it, right? So sometimes we need that thing to go to before we let go of the other thing.
And that's kind of what I'm trying to do right now, even with ever social is how do I create these systems? How do I make it so I can go to Portugal for a month and nobody even knows I'm gone? That's my tests, kind of thing. You always say like, oh, nobody's gonna take care of my kids.
You know, I can't leave them. You do that in a business owner, but you gotta get to, you gotta test these things. Go for a week. Nobody die. Okay, you're good. You can go for longer, but you're not gonna go from zero to hero. All of a sudden. You gotta kind of start practicing these exit exercises or habits ahead of time.
📍 Somebody I just had on the podcast said, she talked about, rather than thinking of exiting from something, think about exiting to something.
What a good, good saying.
I was like, oh, that is brilliant. Because I think we.
Often think about the thing we're leaving behind, but forget about what are we doing after?
What happens when you have that blank calendar?
Yes,
I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, the idea of retirement isn't something we are really striving for. I guess I recently had, I don't know if you saw that episode, Derek Coburn,
I did.
Let's Retire Retirement. He has a book all about that, and I think this idea of retirement can look so different. I think it could be retiring from maybe working and hustling and being as revenue and money driven as you might be in your earlier years because you need that and doing it for purpose, doing it for legacy, doing it because you have so much wisdom. Now to go from a warrior to wise man to share with people. And that could be shifting into speaking and coaching and you've already got the book. And I see that transition happen for so many entrepreneurs and that's why I love this place of where you're at and other entrepreneurs are at, where they're in that state of transition where they can't imagine retiring, but they have so much more to give still.
Yeah, I'm addicted to the making chaos, calmness. I think that's my biggest fear. I keep on saying. I think my wife would kill me first because she wouldn't know what to do with me being home so much. But, I miss the chaos, and turning it into calmness. And that is something I even now even I know so much. I think I'm trying to, going through, I have a hired a mindset coach, to help me in replacement thinking because I do have this superhero. If you look in my office, I'm not gonna show you, but I have Superman posters and cards for my kids, and 99% of the time I'm Clark Kent with Goofy with the glasses and everything. But when the bullets are flying. The cape comes out. Right. And I thrive on that. And it's an addiction. So I need to let other people become superheroes and find out, teach them how to use those powers.
I love that. So I wanna talk about your SMACK framework,
Yes.
It's obviously rooted in your military background, and in that strategy. So talk me through, so it's, shoot, move, adapt, communicate. Let's talk about that.
Yeah, what I learned in the military, I was 18 years old, so it was a long time ago. It was four years of my life, but it was very impactful because I came from a very chaotic upbringing, both my parents were business owners. Imagine that. One had a pizzeria, the other had a trucking business. I was driving forklifts, fueling up vehicle. I smelled like diesel fuel half the time. And then I'm making pizzas after school. But it's all about survival. How do you survive? How do you go to the next day? And this chaotic environment, you need frameworks when chaos is around you and what I learned in the military is as I looked around all these people and we were in the middle of the Cold War, very high tensions with Russian incursions into our territory. Like we were right in the middle of it all and everybody was peaceful in the midst of the storm. I just go, I want that. I want that more than anything else. As a young man, 'cause I didn't see that at home. It was always panic and reaction. Find a way. And so, SMACK it stands for, shoot, move, adapt, communicate, shoot with purpose, not volume.
Every campaign has a strategic objective, not just an activity. So if you think of it from that way as shoot with purpose, right.
Move is while competitors stall, we prioritize speed over perfection.
Because market timing beats market research is what I tell my customers. And a lot of times, you've heard of analysis paralysis. That's the opposite of the move theory. It's kind of just move and you'll figure it out by moving. Right?
Right. Yep.
And then because you're moving, you need to adapt. Because you're not standing still. Something rock comes at you, something comes in front of you, obstacle. You need to be able to adapt quickly. So having a mindset, a forward thinking mindset is to be able to, I would say adapt before best practice becomes yesterday's news. So we're constantly iterating based on realtime feedback.
So if you have your systems in place, you have your data coming in, to go to Google Analytics or that you kind of know where to go, you can make quick decisions. And that was like in a military where I worked, it was called the Combat Information Center, and it was where all the data came in, not just for our ship, but for the entire battle group. We had to take that very rapidly, disseminate it and make decisions, war, life, and death decisions a lot of times based on that information. So in business, we need those systems to thrive in chaos and to go up against Goliaths. We're David's most of 99% of 99.9% of businesses have less than 20 employees. We need to be able to do things different. We are trying to replicate what the big guys do all the time, and that's wearing armor. Walking into battle with a shield and a sword and a spear. We're not gonna beat Goliath on his terms. You gotta know how to use the slingshot really well. Every Goliath has a vulnerability or a weakness. Find it, go after it. So that's, part of the SMACK thinking. And then the last thing in SMACK is see, communicate. So your story becomes their rallying cry messages turn into customers, into advocates. So if you don't speak clearly, your customers aren't gonna speak clearly for you. So it's amplified communications through knowing who you are, what you're about, what you solutions you provide, and being able to communicate that well, and then others can run with that message. You're unstoppable at that point. You're David going up against Goliath.
What led you to create this? Like what led you in all the businesses that you've created,
when
did you come to this framework?
It started really about 25 years ago when I was writing a letter to my kids on how to survive. I had a, like you, I think you had a near death experience. I had a situation where it scared the heck outta me, and I had young kids and I started to write letters to them and videotape myself and share my values and what I wanted for them, because I knew there could be another time where I didn't come home.
Oh
And it was called, it was something my dad taught me, it was called the FAW principle. FAW find a f-ing way, basically. I was a young kid, I remember eight years old calling my dad. I wanted to play baseball, and I got home, all my friends, Hey, can this go play baseball? And let's go. And I had to mow the lawn and I knew if I didn't do my chores, I'm toast. And so I wanted to get, I'm really good at getting outta things or talking. So I called my dad and I go, dad, there's no gas for the lawnmower. And he goes, FAW. He hung up. 'cause my mom wouldn't let him cuss. He's a marine, cuss like a sailor. And so his way of not cussing was find an effing way. So yeah, I figured it out. I went to a neighbor, worked in their garage to clean up their garage so I can get some gas. I didn't owe anything. I didn't say let me borrow gas. I owned it. I used it. I played baseball came in when the lights got dark. My dad got home. He was happy. Good job kid. Everything was good. And the philosophy is it takes just as much energy to find a way or find a solution than it does to make an excuse. But our brain, our lizard brains tell us not to do things like, to try not to use energy. It's just a natural thing. So we try to get out of doing things. So it's a mindset. FAW evolved into SMACK in that it's a proactive framework you use when you can't think. We need frameworks when the bullets are flying, you have to go from muscle memory and that's why you train so much in the military. And so when chaos ensues in the Navy, for us it was general quarters. Everybody knew their job. We'd sat there, we practiced it bored to death, for hours doing it over and over and over again. So when the real thing happened, you're like, calmness in the chaos, right? So we have to practice when there is no chaos for when there is chaos is, and that's what SMACK is for, is business owners are in constantly in chaos and a framework is what's going to get you through that chaos. You just follow the plan. They become muscle memory. And before you know it, you're a superhero, you're a commander, a field commander versus a reactor. Shoot is knowing who your audience is. If you know who you're shooting at, you don't have to spray and pray.
You're gonna be a sniper. You can take one shot, one hit, right move is that proactive movement. Don't stand still like in the military. They teach this SMC, it's called shoot, move, communicate. When you're going through like Fallujah or these urban centers is if you stay still, they're gonna rally against you.
Like they did in Somalia when the helicopters went down, they didn't keep moving, so they were able to get 'em and they, some men died, right? But if you're constantly moving, your enemy's constantly reacting. And as a small business owner, that's the advantage that we have is to be agile. Big guys can't be agile. They're like aircraft carriers. We're like, fast attack submarines. Use that advantage. And so that's move and adapt is knowing, like in my Combat Information center, I know I can read things very quickly so I can make business decisions very quickly. A lot of people live, I say, business is war, marketing is a battlefield, and most business owners are going to war blindfolded.
And just lack of data, lack of information. And 50% of businesses according to the American small business administration will do not make it after five years. 20% go out the first year, 50% by the fifth year, and 75% by year 10. And that's lack of marketing. In marriage, finances is the number one killer of a marriage.
Poor financial management In business, it's the owner doesn't understand marketing. They outsource blindly, not without knowing enough to be dangerous. My job, this book here, is to help 1 million businesses for the next 10 years, not be a statistic. It's your battle plan. Basically. That's the whole, that's why I wrote this. It wasn't so I could be popular or make money, if anybody wrote a book knows you're not gonna make be a millionaire, right? That's why I give away all the proceeds for this to a special needs organization, 'cause I'm not gonna make money from this. But the bigger thing is you need battle plans. You need road. When you're going to battle, you need to know. Intel you need. I'm not gonna send guys in if I don't know what I'm going into, right? And a lot of times we spray and pray and that we blow through a lot of budget. We try advertising and didn't work. I tried that. I hear that all the time.
Most business owners hate marketing. They actually hate marketing. So I'm an agency. I'm helping them navigate that. We're a fractional CMO. We're like a Navy SEAL team for small businesses that want to grow. That's what we do is we basically is, they hit a ceiling and they go, I can't do this anymore by myself. I need a team. We're an instant team, instant leadership commander. You're gonna get guidance and you're not gonna die on the battlefield. So, there are a lot of armies out there that are marketing armies, but that's where people, they try to operate like a big company and hire a big agency and they spend a lot of money and not, they don't have enough money to operate like a big company. So that's that whole David versus Goliath mindset. The book is the New Rules of Marketing Warfare is what it's called. I'm gonna do a plug here. It's a battle plan for winning customers, scaling quickly, and beating competitors. That's the purpose. It's here you go. Hopefully millions of businesses and whoever chooses to read it, and we have a community for it where once you read the book, you're gonna start talking like a military commander.
You're gonna want other people that think that way. And so we built a community of a small community, but of knowledgeable, how do I apply this to my business now? And so that's,
Looking forward to
thank
you. I wanna send you a copy, obviously sign. I have this, I have a special author stamp and everything I wanna send to you.
Yeah,
I'll send a signed copy of mine
I'm dying for it. Yes.
a book exchange
I love it.
love it. I love your passion and I totally agree. I think small businesses we're much more nimble, as you said, like we can make those quick decisions and shift the needle so much differently.
Yes, they may have more budget, but we have a lot of things that they don't have.
And that's the one thing you gotta lean into Patrick, beat David, I don't know if you heard of him. He's a big podcaster, very well known right now all this tariff talks and all this kinda stuff. But anyways, he did a, just a quick like TikTok saying, I want to share with you why successful businesses, business people are successful. And he goes, I get ahold of a lot of very famous people and the ones that are the most successful are the ones that get back to me right away. It really freaked me out because the ones that are successful, they're very popular, but they don't get back to you. They send your assistant to get back to you. They're not as successful in my eyes. And the re he goes, I got it now. He goes, I realize that successful people make quick decisions. They don't want someone else outsourcing their decisions. They wanna just make it and live with it. They have that innate compass in the fog of which way to go, and that is a trained thing. It can be trained. But you gotta practice it like anything. When in the military, when we would be shot at your natural instincts to run, and so they would just train us They would train us. They would do an ambush over here. We would run towards the bullets, you know, run over here, run towards the bull. After a while you just, like, you hear a bullet, you start running towards it. And that's what the, it's more, that's the Marine Corps training. But my dad would. Just constantly do that with me is, when other people are running, that's when there's opportunity. He had a safe moving business and nobody wanted to move a 5,000 pound safe, Lionel Richie into his new home, right? And he goes, I'll do it. I'm like, dad, we've never moved a 5,000 pound safe before. He goes, we're gonna FAW. We're gonna find a way. And when we did that, Lionel Richie told all his friends and we were the exclusive movers of Hollywood, basically for safes. But sometimes you gotta run towards the bullets. That's where the opportunities are. So anyways, I, that's my ramble there, but,
I love it. Okay. I definitely have a few more questions. So let's,
Fire.
rapid fire. I wanted to touch on this because I know you have a business brand and a personal
Yes.
that I was like, oh, yay. I was very happy to see that because that is what I advise all founders is to
Yes. So important.
and a business.
So I wanna know what led you to that decision.
I like being behind the scenes very honestly. I am the wind beneath a lot of founders' wings, and I know how to coach them. I have a TV doctor who I coached her all through her, like she's very good on camera, like amazing, but behind the scenes, very insecure, not knowing what to do, she need a lot of direction and what I realized is we all have those insecurities and I had, I struggle with it. And so I read this book called The Alter Ego Effect
Oh
It
one.
opened my eyes and I go, I need to alter ego. So I started a Instagram page to start with, I have one called, I am Kevin, so if you wanna follow me there. That's my business, my personal life. It's Kevin. I am Kevin, and then I have one also that has 20,000 plus followers. This one has 20,000 plus followers. It's called Cigar Man Official. So this is my most interesting man in the world, persona. It's a, I'm not, I'm goofy Clark Kent over here. This is my Superman look. And so that alter ego, right?
I start, I practice 'cause it was a challenge. I manage a lot of user generated content for my clients and stuff. I deal with creatives all the time and it's like herding cats. Right. And so I go, I can do this too. And so I did it built 20,000. Now I get free bourbon, free cigars from Cuba. I realize you need an alter ego. We have a lot of self-doubt, a lot of limiting beliefs as founders. A lot of scars from the battle. We don't wanna show our scars, but that's when we can get to that point. That's where people love us the most.
Yep.
And so you gotta start small.
That's why I started with the Instagram thing, but it led to LinkedIn. And I've been preaching this to all my founders, all my customers like you. And they're like, well, why don't you do it? And literally it wasn't until last, I think it was last summer. 2024 that I said, okay, I'm gonna do it. I mean, just a year ago, and it's not like I got tens of thousands of followers, but I got a really good community and I'm getting business from it 'cause I'm sharing my journey. It's also helping me to let go of my identity in my business.
I'm building my identity in myself on LinkedIn and I have a voice and I'm sharing my voice, and it's been goofy at many times. I've used AI and used emojis all over the place, and now I cringe going, oh my God, what was I thinking? And I've made a lot of mistakes, but making the mistakes is what makes you you. We're human and I think the more AI comes out, the more people crave humanness.
I say that all the time.
And so that's my journey. I do all my posts. I do have an assistant. She kind of ideates with me. She knows me. She's just in the chaos she can give me like, we have war for Wednesday this week.
What are we gonna talk about? We talk about movie, we take a movie and turn it into a marketing play. So she'll put my script up and I'll go and I'll do the video, but she'll edit it and get it up right? Because I can't, I know how to edit, but it took me forever. And if you want a real like hack guys, here's a hack zync, zync.ai, it will do everything for you. Even edit and do B roll in short form or wa long form and even post it to your LinkedIn. It's real cheap. So zync.ai you'll thank me later and Tom Kevin sent you, but yeah, you gotta find tools like that that you try doing manually and then you automate everything, right? But back to your point, find your identity in who you are versus your business. And when you let go of the business, you still have your identity.
Absolutely. That's what I preach every day, is that you get to take your personal brand with
Right. Build a personal brand. Everybody needs a personal brand. Start small. Crawl, walk, run, crawl. Babies crawl before they walk, before they run. Right.
Yeah. And you mentioned about the scars, and I have a saying that I heard years ago, and I don't who to attribute it to, but it's to teach from your scars, not from your wounds.
I love, love that. Can I borrow that?
oh, yeah, you can credit me, but
I will. I'll credit you because I learned from you. Yes,
It's something I've talked about for years because I don't believe we can teach from a a wound.
Like
true.
people need to hear from us. But it's the after, when the wound is healed and you're in a place where you can share the lessons and help somebody, maybe not to have to go through what you went through or something. And that's what humanizes you. But if you share in the moment, and I say if you vomit your personal life all over the
internet
Live in the moment as everything's happening, it can repel people. But when you are intentional and you choose the stories to tell, and you teach from those scars, that to me is where the gift is, and that so much learning both for you and the audience.
Thank you for that. That is like gold. Thank you. I love that 'cause that has been the struggle, I think is we don't wanna share our wounds with people. We do, but really we should teach 'em our scars. I love that. Yeah.
The idea for me is that you have to, and I have a whole framework on storytelling that's around this idea of, is now the time
Is it a course that we can buy?
No, it's a talk. And, you know,
It's on YouTube.
maybe a course down the
you should. I, I'll buy, I'll be your first buyer on that one.
Awesome. Yeah, but it's a powerful framework because so many people don't, they hold back and hide themselves because they're like, it's too personal. I don't know what to share, and therefore they don't share anything. Or they're the opposite. And they overshare everything. But if you looked at every story through that lens of is this a scar or is this still a wound? It'll help you make better decisions.
Wow.
not every story is going to be have a wound or a scar to it. Some are just funny stories but those ones that are deep and personal. It's really identifying is now the time to tell it or will this story hurt somebody?
Or even continue your wound, yeah.
Amazing. Okay, I have one last question. Legacy, obviously we've kind of touched on it, and it's the name of the podcast, legacy branding
Yes.
What does legacy mean to you?
That's a great question. I think it's been a moving target as I've evolved as a owner, as a entrepreneur I think it's really, legacy is not about me. I think it's about everyone else and I think we moved to too much of a thinking of like, what is my legacy? Right? But it's the, my part comes out of what you leave behind.
I think that's the evolution was like, what is my legacy? It's like football game. It's halftime. I better start thinking about the end of the game here. And I'm in the fourth quarter myself. I'm 60 years old. Right. , And I'm, selfishly thinking of my kids and my grandkids.
But what's it's evolved to is what can I do with what life has taught me? My scars leave to others that will help them not have scars or those scars, and that's essentially this book. That's exactly why I wrote it. I took me a long time to write that book, it went fast once I had that purpose, when it was about others, not about me. So that's what legacy is to me, is what has life given you to share with others that you can leave behind and it will help people long after you're gone. That's a legacy.
Piece. So how can people connect with you and buy your book and learn more about working with you?
Yeah, I think the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn if it's a business connection. If you wanna continue the conversation. I'm very approachable. I care. And so, I'm the one that accepts and not accepts people on LinkedIn.
So yeah, please. It's Kevin McGrew. Then if you want to kind of follow what I'm doing and like follow a little bit of the journey, Instagram is great. I am Kevin is my personal kind of journey and cigar man officials, more the fun side of me. I would say. My website, if you are interested in what we do as a business or looking for help, we offer kind of some free we call it, ask me anything 45 minute consultation to help you. Just talk to somebody who knows what they know and help you think through it. everzocial.com with a Z or Zed if you're in Canada. So EVER, Zed, O-C-I-A-L. So instead of social, social L one word. And kevinmcgrew.com is my personal brand. More about my book and things there. Yeah. Thank you for asking.
Amazing. Everyone go check this out. We'll make sure to add all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much, Kevin. This was a long one, but absolutely worth it.
Thank you. It's been a real privilege and I'm super thankful that I met you.
Yeah, same here. Thank you LinkedIn.
Thanks for tuning into the Legacy Branding podcast. I hope today's episode has inspired and empowered you on your journey to building a brand that truly matters. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with other founders who you think would benefit from listening.
And if you're ready to take the next step in building your legacy brand, visit our website, labcreative.ca to learn more and book a call. Don't forget to join us next time for more conversations that will help you navigate your transition and create your legacy. Until then, I'm Laura Beauparlant.