Hustling as an Entrepreneur with Guest Clark Benson: MakingBank S1E51

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Summary

There is one element to the art of entrepreneurship that isn’t artistic at all…hustle.

Hustle is something that can’t be coached, refined, or enhanced—it’s bred.

You either have hustle or you don’t, and if you want to be an entrepreneur, you had better hope you’re not in the latter camp.

In the world of business and money-making, hustle will make up for just about anything.

Lack of knowledge? Absent credentials? Lousy network? Missing expertise? Low capital?

Whatever the obstacle, enough hustle can get you up and over the wall.

And it’s with the idea and importance of hustle in mind that we are excited to introduce today’s guest on Making Bank—Clark Benson—a man who’s no stranger early mornings, late nights, and 80+ hour work weeks.

Clark’s interest in entrepreneurship began to surface in his early 20s when he enrolled in the only entrepreneurship class at the University of Illinois. By 1995—at the age of 27—he was starting his first company, a music marketing business, and by 1999 he was capitalizing on the dot-com boom with an online dating business, eCrush.

When dot-coms went dot-bust in 2001, eCrush survived the collapse thanks to a heavy dose of Clark’s legendary hustle, and would later be sold in 2006 to the Hearst Corporation. Today, Clark works as the founder and CEO of Ranker, a leading digital media company that specializes in crowdsourced rankings.

Tune in to today’s episode to hear Josh and Clark, share a number of fantastic insights, including:

• How to evaluate the risks and rewards of working with a co-founder
• Why hustle is the most important ingredient for success
• What to do when timing is not in your favor
• The importance of zeroing-in when it’s time to scale
• Why business should never come at the expense of your children

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Transcription

Josh Felber: Welcome to Making Bank – I am Josh Felber – where we uncover the success strategies of the top 1% so you can amplify, and transform your life and your business today. I’m excited to welcome Clark Benson to Making Bank. He is the founder and CEO of Ranker, the leading digital media company for opinion-based crowdsourced rankings on just about anything that you could think of. He launched the company in 2009. Ranker is Benson’s fifth startup. Ranking creates editorial lists to vote on about virtually every topic, and the 25 million plus monthly audience’s opinions shape those rankings. Prior to Ranker, Benson’s company eCrush, an early social network for teens was brought by Hearst Corporation in 2006. Benson lives in Hollywood Hills with his wife and young twins, which is really cool because I have young twins as well.

Clark Benson: All right.

Josh Felber: Welcome to the show, Clark.

Clark Benson: Hey. Thanks for having me, Josh.

Josh Felber: I guess tell me a little bit about when you got started as an entrepreneur. I mean, it sounds like you’ve had roughly over five different startups. Just a little background.

Clark Benson: I started at my first business in 1995 when I was 27 years old. This was long before they had all the, you know, blogs and shows like yours that really helped entrepreneurs. You were really flying kind of blind. I remember I took the only entrepreneurship class. It was like a 25 person class at University of Illinois when I was an undergrad. Things have changed so much since then, I think it’s fascinating. I started a business in 1995. I kept working and expanding that business.

I sometimes tend to move a little bit too fast at times. When I get an idea up my head I’m like, “I got to do this. I got to do this. I got to do this.” I actually opened up a record store as a second business while I was running my music marketing company, and then juggled two things at once. We started another music marketing company simultaneously. I started eCrush in 1999, so for about three years, from ‘99 to 2001, 2002 actually, I was running four businesses. Let me tell you, it’s really hard when you’re spread that thin do to even one of them well.

I cannot tell you how many props I give mister Elon Musk for doing, what? Two or three huge businesses, because I had a hard time running four relatively small businesses. The only one that ever had investment money at the time was eCrush and we raised $900,000 from angel investors back in the 1999, 2000, 1.0 dot-com boom. We actually almost died a number of times when that bubble popped and kept it running as a real business, got it to profitability and sold it to Hearst about seven years later. We grinded it out. I think the theme of my entrepreneurship has been a lot of grinding. I’ve been called a grinder in the LA entrepreneur community quite a bit. I don’t know if that’s a positive or a negative. Sometimes it’s not always said as a positive, but it’s the way I am.

Josh Felber: For sure. A lot of entrepreneurs, I know myself included, has been in that position where you’re running those multiple businesses and, like you said, it’s hard to really focus and get that one, that time and attention to really scale it and grow it how it should. That’s awesome that you guys were able to build that up and then sell that off seven years later. Did you have partners or anything? Was that just all you?

Clark Benson: With eCrush I had co-founder. I had two co-founders, actually. That was really helpful. With my other businesses I have not had co-founders, so I’ve done … Well, no. That’s not true. I had a partner in my record store. So goes both ways. I had both experiences. It’s an interesting question because often I wish I had co-founders. At Ranker, I don’t have co-founders, but over time some of my key team members have elevated to that level where I more or less consider them co-founders. Up until that time I would constantly find myself just like, “Ugh, this is too much to do solo.” Then you can have a conflict with co-founders, right?

Josh Felber: Yeah.

Clark Benson: I’ve had that before too.

Josh Felber: Definitely. Yeah, like you said you have both. You see, you can either have the conflicts or, like you said, it’s all you and then you’re doing everything for a long time until you get a team.

Clark Benson: Yeah. I’ve been there many a time. Timing has not always been in my favor, like when I started Ranker. Ranker has gotten really successful, certainly in the last two or three years especially, but when we launched I started working on the site in 2008 and then was launching the business in 2009 right when the economy was just at its absolute worst, right?

Josh Felber: Yeah.

Clark Benson: Raising money two years prior was a real easy task and then all of a sudden, in 2009, it was very, very difficult to raise money, so I got stuck wearing too many hats and grinding that out longer and slower than I had ever thought I would again. I had a successful track record so I’m like, oh, it’ll be easy to raise this time. Good evaluation, ta-da-da-da. When the world changes on you, you’re like, oops, things are not what they were and I must deal with this.“ You batten down the hatches and work every waking hour, basically, which I’m laughing about, but it wasn’t very fun at the time.

Josh Felber: Yeah. You’re in that struggle and you’re like, “Okay, how am I going to get through all this”?

Clark Benson: Yeah. Ranker wouldn’t have even survived if I hadn’t had somewhat deep pockets from my prior successes, so I was able to say, all right, I can keep this thing afloat, but it’s painful when you’re spending … I don’t mind committing my own money to a business, but I ended up committing over 3X what I planned on committing for Ranker before we got to a stage where we could get outside VC money and whatnot. Everything turned out great at the end of the day, but it was a grind and a grind and a grind for years.

Josh Felber: With the multiple businesses and even all the way back your eCrush and stuff, what was the one challenge that you would consistently run into as you built your businesses?

Clark Benson: Each of the businesses was a little bit different, but I think the biggest challenge … Ranker is like a consumer destination site, right?

Josh Felber: Right.

Clark Benson: The biggest challenge we’ve had with Ranker, which we’ve conquered now but it took a while to get there, is that the online consumer … Acquiring visitors has changed so much in just the last … changed a ton in the last three years, but if you go back to the last 10 years or so, it’s entirely different. You’ve got this world now where Facebook … For a while it was like Google was your main source. Now Facebook is eating everything and you can’t relax. You can’t just be like, hey, we’re accomplished and we’re doing good. Stuff I always changing.

With Ranker that’s been the big challenge, but with other businesses I’ve had the big challenge has been doing sales because I’m not a born salesman, and I far prefer to be the guy … I look at data and twiddle the knobs and do product, and all that kind of stuff. I don’t find that to be work. I can do that all day long. When I have to go cold call somebody or hype things and be seller, that’s just not my born nature kind of way to be, so that’s always been a big challenge in my other businesses.

Josh Felber: Cool. How did you find … overcoming those? Obviously you probably had to do some selling and things like that in the beginning, but I guess is that just creating your team? Is that what helps you get there?

Clark Benson: Yeah, exactly. In all cases, frankly, it’s like, know what you’re good at, right?

Josh Felber: Right.

Clark Benson: In all cases when it comes to the sales side it’s like, bring in somebody who’s better than me at that. My music marketing company is actually still in business. It’s been around for over 20 years. I’m not really that involved in it on a day to day basis anymore at all and I haven’t been for a while, but I brought in somebody to run the day to day and run sales. That person, I ended up just making a full on partner and even handing the business off to him at certain points. I can’t tell you how much my life improved when I … He wasn’t good at what I was good at. I wasn’t good at … Just the right fit. That’s hard. You can make the wrong choice and drive it into a ground if you don’t find that person.

You probably don’t read or hear as much about the people side of entrepreneurship, but when you are your own entity trying to just survive or make it or grow, there’s some people that are perfect fits for those environments, that just thrive on that kind of like, “I like getting things done. I like the tangibles.” Then there’s many, many more people who really just need a lot more hand-holding and direction, and panic in those kind of environments. I’ve developed over the years a pretty good radar for knowing which type of person I’m talking to if I’m talking about bringing somebody on, but it took a while and there were mistakes.

Josh Felber: Oh, yeah. For sure. Cool. Yeah, I’d love to dive in a little bit more about Ranker and how it’s doing and everything. We just got to take a quick break. Can you stick around?

Clark Benson: Sure. Absolutely. Pay the bills.

Josh Felber: Awesome. I am Josh Felber and you’re watching Making Bank, and we’ll be right back.

Josh Felber: Welcome back to Making Bank. I am Josh Felber and we’ve had the opportunity to start speaking with Clark Benson today, who’s been giving us a little bit of his background juggling multiple startups and selling off one of his companies, as well as creating another successful brand company that he’s built, that’s still running as of 20 years later. Clark, welcome back to Making Bank.

Clark Benson: Thanks, thanks, thanks.

Josh Felber: Cool. I’d like to dive into what … tell us a little bit about what Ranker is, what it does and how we can take advantage of that.

Clark Benson: Great. Well, look, I’m a lifelong list … I’m a lifelong entrepreneur, yes, but even more than that, I’m a lifelong list nerd because I was a list nerd before I was an entrepreneur, outside of maybe Monopoly. I’ve always loved to consume information in the form of lists, get recommendation in list format. I like to make my own lists, I always have. I used to be guy college posting lists of my favorite albums of the month up on my dorm room door, white dry-erase board kind of thing. Back around seven years ago or so I saw an opportunity in the marketplace because lists were already all over the web, and pre-web they were a magazine staple for eternity, but what wasn’t there was that lists weren’t really connected to anything and they were always one person’ opinion, right?

Josh Felber: Sure.

Clark Benson: You go to a sports site and you’d get one editors opinion of the best players of the year, and you’d go to a music site and you’d get one editor’s opinion. I think that the world has gotten so diversified and complex with regards to the entertainment, and other options that we have to consume and to be passionate about and to be fans of that one person’s opinion isn’t really … it’s just noise to some degree, unless that person is a total expert who you really know their taste and you’re in sync with their taste.

I decided I wanted to build a platform with a lot of data behind it to really crowdsource rankings of things. Alas, the wisdom of crowds theory. There was a book on that about 10 years ago or so. That’s what we did. We put a lot of engineering into the site. It’s really not just a site. We’ve got an app coming out and it’s a distributed platform that can be used … There’s about 8,000 other sites that use Ranker code, like Ranker widgets to power their own polls and rankings.

We always wanted to build it with the idea that all the data behind everything was connected and that if you … Let’s say you go to the site and you’re like, I’m a Clint Eastwood and I want to look at the best Clint Eastwood movies, or whatever. You see that Dirty Harry is ranked, blah, blah, blah. Then it shows Dirty Harry is also ranked number 54 on best movies of the ’70s and number four on best action movies of the ’70s. In all these cases, thousands and thousands and thousands of people have voted on this content, so if you believe that …

You can filter it and see, here’s what Americans think, here’s what women think, here’s what men think, here’s what millennials think, etc., so if you really just want a way to cut through the noise and the clutter of things, or if you’re just a list nerd like me, we got the site for you. It’s grown a ton. If you go to Quantcast, we’re in the top 50 sites in the US consistently, have been all year. It’s taken a while, but it’s really scaled up.

Josh Felber: That’s really awesome. I guess even just looking for data and seeing what consumer interest is or where people or what they’re looking at, and where that attention is going is definitely beneficial with that. Are you seeing more businesses? Are they going on and creating these polls or studies, or is it more consumer personal people doing it?

Clark Benson: It’s a little bit of both, but it does lean more consumer. Pop culture is by far our biggest traffic driver, but we do have practical stuff too. Even the practical stuff is more consumer. For example, we get all kinds of mobile traffic from content that’s like, best luggage brands or whatever, where people are actually in a store. We’re not a site with deep reviews about everything. We’re a site that we make it really easy to just vote on whether you like or dislike things, and we don’t actually … I actually don’t like to parse reviews and read all this text, and try to figure it out.

I just want to know quickly what’s the best. What’s the best, blank? People actually use Ranker to just find out like, they’re in the store and they’re like, do I like a Samsonite or do I like this Atlantic Brand? They use it in that context in a very practical way, but then you’ll also see best ice levels of video games on the blah, blah platform. People go really granular with their nerdy …

Josh Felber: What they want.

Clark Benson: … passions and hobbies, so we’re really agnostic to what kind of content we would have, but the stuff that gets the most social sharing tends to be the entertainment stuff or the humor stuff. The stuff that gets the most voting tends to be sports. Guys love their lists and love to vote for the best football players or the best middle linebackers. It’s really just open-ended and that’s what I love. I didn’t want to make it about any one topic or genre.

Josh Felber: Sure. Cool. For you guys, how do you guys monetize the whole part of that?

Clark Benson: Really we monetize because of scale. When you’re doing the level … We reach about 15% to 17% of US millennials each month, about 9% of the entire US internet population, so we’re able to monetize on ads, banner ads, video ads, and stuff like that because of the scale that we have. We also make money on affiliate revenue for like that luggage brand idea. Usually people are using that shopping in the store, but sometimes they’re like, I’m going to go right to Amazon and buy something, and we get a cut of that. We’re mostly what they call, we’re an eyeballs play. We’re at the business of selling eyeballs and that’s mostly ad driven.

Josh Felber: Cool. Okay.

Clark Benson: We also have all this crazy consumer data that we’ve collected. Sorry, I didn’t mean to [crosstalk 00:19:26].

Josh Felber: No, no. That’s all right. Go ahead.

Clark Benson: We can tell you that fans of Modern Family TV show are also really big fans of this other show and these other 400 shows. Even to some degree we can tell you that they like Chipotle more than Subway, and things like that. We’ve been building a concept called Ranker Insights that we’re very close to launching that is actually a little bit more B2B because it’s business related data, and the entertainment studios are interested in it. We’ve got other clients lined up, mostly in the fast-food and the fast casual dining arena so far.

Josh Felber: Cool. Yeah, that leads me to another question since you were just mentioning that. Would this be a good platform then, since you can say, “Okay, if somebody likes X, then these are all the other things that is a high probability of them also liking,” and say you’re looking to run traffic on Facebook to a certain ad set and you know, “Hey, here’s my demographic and I know a little segment of they like” so now you can create this whole profile of information. Go back and then scout those people out on Facebook and then work on targeting those areas.

Clark Benson: You nailed it. That’s great. Wow.

Josh Felber: I see that’s a head shake and so I was like, “All right.”

Clark Benson: That’s part of the reason our traffic is growing so much, we’ve been that ourselves on Facebook, which when you dive deep into Facebook, you learn how crazy deep the data that they have is. We can layer in even more correlations on top of that to allow you to expand your audiences on Facebook without diluting the targeting aspect of it. We’ve been doing it ourselves. It’s really gunned our growth, especially in the last six to nine months. We’ve also done this with some of the, they’re called Preferred Marketing Developers. They’re software companies that work in conjunction with Facebook to drive ad spend. Yes, we’ve used our data in those ways and it works.

Josh Felber: The question is then from my perspective. I have some other companies that I own, and we’re in health and wellness and skincare, and all that kind of stuff. Do you guys have a way for me to come to you and say, “Okay, cool. Here’s what I want to do” and then let me go in and be able to pull all that data?

Clark Benson: Yeah. Literally when Ranker Insights launches – it’s honestly probably two weeks from launching – the question becomes, do we have data on what you’re interested in? We have an insane amount of data on entertainment. We know more about TV consumers and movie fans than anybody but Facebook themselves, and our data is different because we’re tracking like, best shows to binge-watch in a real granular level of detail that’s a lot different than just a Facebook like, right?

Josh Felber: Right.

Clark Benson: We have a lot of data on food and some other areas. We actually do have some data in places like skincare products and stuff like that, like beauty products people like to vote on, but the weakness of our platform is that Ranker … People go to Ranker for fun or for information. We’re not incentivizing anybody to participate, right?

Josh Felber: Sure.

Clark Benson: We’re collecting over 10 million votes a month on things and nobody wants to vote on like, best bleach brands. Surprising, I know. They’ll vote on the hottest women on the planet all day long, but they won’t vote on best bleach brands. They will vote on best fast-food burgers and things like that.

Josh Felber: Cool. Yeah, because I know with … When we’re looking at our target audiences and things, we say, “Okay, cool. They like to shop at Target” or, “Okay, oh. Okay, they also like shopping at Target, so they like to watch this kind of TV show” so we can now target those TV fan pages.

Clark Benson: If you’ve already got a psychographic handle on your audience, that’s where we can really help because that’s what … Ranker is really about your psychographic like, what are your passions?

Josh Felber: Right. Okay.

Clark Benson: The coolest thing about Ranker is people come to the site … I always assumed that people … Like, a hip hop fan would come to the site and vote on like, best West Coast rappers, right?

Josh Felber: Right.

Clark Benson: They do, but what was really cool was that person then gets lost in a wormhole and goes in, and all of a sudden they’re voting on, you know, french fries, and they’re voting on sodas and they’re voting on movies, and stuff like that. We really do capture the psychographic profile by combining all this data, so yeah. If you’re like, “I know the kind of person I’m trying to reach. They like these TV shows” we could totally help you, so we have to talk offline.

Josh Felber: Yeah, I know. Definitely. I’m listening to you talk and I’m like, man, this makes a lot of sense. I have lot of friends in the online internet marketing space that are pretty big. I was like, this could be a really cool piece that [crosstalk 00:24:47].

Clark Benson: Yeah. The key is, when you’re doing Facebook marketing, usually Facebook will give you some related suggestions, but they’ll give you 10 or so, and we can give you like 100. We can expand that reach out at the same level of reasonable cost per click or CMP or whatever you’re going after.

Josh Felber: Okay. Awesome, awesome. As you’re building Ranker and you guys are really scaling this up, what are several key factors that have you found that have really contributed to the success of it?

Clark Benson: Yeah, so interesting. Like I was saying earlier, the consumer web has changed, right?

Josh Felber: Right.

Clark Benson: And it’s changing constantly. We’re not even on like Snapchat yet.

Josh Felber: It’s a whole another area.

Clark Benson: Yeah. It’s like, damn, we have to figure out that thing? The initial growth of the site was heavily search based. People are googling best whatever and we’ve got great answers for it. We still get 12 million visitors a month from search, but what’s really changed the business in the last like two years has been that Facebook and using data to target audiences on Facebook … Facebook now drives half of the traffic to web publishers. Four years ago it was like 8%, 9%.

That’s a sea change and you can use it to your advantage, but it’s not an easy thing to figure out, so it took us six to nine months to really start to understand Facebook and what kinds of content would work on Facebook, and then how to get into the innards of their data and use it with our data, and all that stuff. It’s been a rocket ship ever since we figured that out, but it was a little touch and go for a period for time while we were figuring that out. I’m like, nobody is sharing this particular thing and blah, blah, blah. Then you learn there’s angles.

It’s like anything else. There’s a lot of complexity and a lot of science involved, along with making sure that you’re creating things that people are going to click on. Facebook is really eating everything. I don’t know if that’s a positive for humanity, but it’s a reality for business.

Josh Felber: Right. As you guys were doing that, what was one of the most successful things? You say, “Okay, cool. This is something that we are doing today that’s led us now to X growth.”

Clark Benson: We’ve actually grown about seven million unique visitors just in the last like nine to 12 months. We had always grown it at a nice, steady like this, and then all of sudden it’s going like that. I don’t know if anybody can see that. The thing that really changed is, we took a data centric engineering approach. We actually went and put a bunch of engineering time on taking APIs from Facebook, taking APIs from Google DoubleClick, our ad partners, using our internal analytics, and building a system that we didn’t see commercially available out there.

There’s a lot of tools for social media marketing, but they didn’t really work for our needs. We built something that we call an ROI [Q tool 00:28:22]. Once it started working, it auto-optimizes a lot of things and allows our social editors to not … it speeds up their process by giving them data centric suggestions that they can ignore, but it’s like, no, you probably want to target these audiences because we know. 90% of the time they pick that and it works. They can override it, they can add stuff, but that’s really scaled for us. People keep asking, are we going to turn that into a product?

It’s tempting. I’ve had a bunch of board meetings about it, but then we have to start selling that and that’s an expertise that we don’t have. One of the things I’ve learned a lot as a lifelong entrepreneur is knowing when you’re starting to extend yourself too far and when you’ve got the right amount of things you’re focusing on at any one time, so TBD.

Josh Felber: Yeah. Definitely, for sure. Yeah, there’s a lot of area that you could probably cover with that, but if you have a specific piece that you’re really focused on and you’re driving growth with it, if you start deviate then you pull resources.

Clark Benson: Yeah. I’ve learned my lesson a bunch of times. I think an entrepreneur who’s got to be involved in the weeds on things … I honestly don’t think you should be taking on more than three, four deep things simultaneously in parallel or you may just drown because you’re always going to be spending half of your time on just responsiveness and day to day management, and whatever anyways. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m never, ever going to have multiple businesses going at once, by the way. That was not a smart … You can’t scale when you’re diluted that much. Again, Elon Musk [inaudible 00:30:21] apparently, but you can’t really scale when you’re just not focused enough on any one thing.

Josh Felber: For sure. How do you balance or manage all your personal life and entrepreneurial-ship side of things?

Clark Benson: Yeah, that’s a good question. Honestly I’m really, really efficient with my time. I don’t sleep that much, but I make sure that I get a good night … I try to get my six hours, six and a half. I’ve had long periods in my life where I was working 80 hours a week. I’m not necessarily at that stage right now, but I’m certainly not working 40 hours a week either. I get all kinds of people talking to me about entrepreneurship as like, “oh, I can’t wait to do this. I can’t wait to do this.” I’m always like, you got to be ready to commit. It is all in.

If you want to have the best chance of guaranteeing that something is going to succeed, again I use this term, you got to grind it out. You’re going to be hit with so many things that you’re not expecting. I don’t think I could have … If I started Ranker at this point in my life with my kids at the age that they are, I would have a really hard time with it because when you got young kids …

Josh Felber: Yeah.

Clark Benson: It sounds like you know.

Josh Felber: Yeah.

Clark Benson: That time will go away if you don’t spend it with them. It’s a once in a lifetime thing and thankfully … I had about three, four years of Ranker where I was working a solid 80, sometimes 85 hours a week and that takes its toll. I exercise every day. I get sleep, but I would have like one hour of free time a day and half a day on the weekends or something.

Josh Felber: Half a day, yeah.

Clark Benson: Yeah, but if you’re passionate about something those 80 hours are not all work, but still you need your outlets, right?

Josh Felber: Definitely. Cool. That’s exciting. It sounds you guys, you have a lot of really great stuff happening out there and it’s definitely an interesting perspective just to hear another entrepreneur similar to myself. A lot of the other people that I’ve interviewed, everybody has that same process and that same outlook similar as you. They do what it takes, but then they also work to really integrate as much times as they can as well.

Clark Benson: Yeah. I’m looking at you and you’re wearing your shirt that says, “Hustle.” It’s like, I totally get it. I can’t think of a time in my life, really, when I haven’t been hustling because I’ve been an entrepreneur now for like 20 years. You’re always, always, always hustling. It becomes part of your DNA.

Josh Felber: Yep. I agree there for sure. Well, cool. Tell us where can people find more information about you.

Clark Benson: Yeah, so go to Ranker. I’ve got lots of lists. We’ve got over 100,000 of them. I’m a music nerd, so if you want to know about … I have a top 500 bands of all time, not a top 10. You can certainly find that personal information about me from my tastes, I guess. Ranker Insights is launching soon. I think we have a placeholder page up now that you can check now for the data that we have, and that’s something I would recommend from a marketer’s point of view, if anybody is interested in what you were actually just describing. I’m on Twitter. I don’t tweet that much because I’m running the business, but I try to spend time on that. I’m on LinkedIn and stuff like that. I’m out there in the social web, but Ranker is really my baby and all in on that, and have been for a while and continuing to grow it.

Josh Felber: Cool. That’s awesome. One last question is just one piece of technology that you couldn’t live without.

Clark Benson: One piece of technology that you couldn’t live without? Well, there’s not just one. You know what’s funny is? I’m certainly an iPhone person and I’m relatively addicted to it as most of us probably are, our smartphone, but I absolutely couldn’t live without my Mac or just a laptop. I’m constantly just typing things. I think I could live without almost every other piece of technology except for a computer. I’m old school in that regards, but don’t do the thumbing as much as I like. If you’re just trying to output spreadsheets and stuff, which I’m always doing, you need a keyboard.

Josh Felber: That’s true, yeah. A phone doesn’t cut that. Cool. That’s great. I just want to thank you for coming on Making Bank today. It was an honor to have you and learn some about what you’re doing, and sharing some of your insights with my audience and everything.

Clark Benson: Awesome, Josh. Thank you so much. I hope everybody heard something they liked to hear. It’s tough being an entrepreneur and I don’t want to be always saying it’s a grind and it’s piles of work. It’s also, I couldn’t be happier having chosen this path. It’s just I do like to caution that you need to know what you’re getting into. It will suck up your life, and that’s usually both a good and a bad thing.

Josh Felber: Right. For sure. Cool. I am Josh Felber. You were watching Making Bank today. Get out and be extraordinary.