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Michael Blanche is changing the world of marketing and advertising. Previously CTO at SITO, Head of Product at Momentum and Founder of Comsite, he is a serial entrepreneur who’s revolutionizing the way brands can market to customers with Surfside.
Since its inception, Surfside has been on a mission to build an ecosystem of products that make customer acquisition smarter, faster and more engaging for modern brands.Â
By combining a single customer view with advanced audience modelling, media activation, and cross-channel measurement, Surfside empowers clients to find and attract qualified consumers through monetization of their online and in-store audiences.
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SUCCESS STORY PODCAST
Stories worth telling.
On the Success Story podcast, Scott has candid interviews with execs, celebrities, notable figures and politicians. All who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas and insights.
He sits down with leaders and mentors and unpacks their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs and everyone in between.
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Machine Generated Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
data, consumer, business, advertising, platform, understand, people, brand, larger, sale, podcast, surfside, opportunity, build, called, based, location, measure, vertical, user
SPEAKERS
Scott, Scott D Clary, Michael Blanche
Scott D Clary 00:06
Welcome to the success story podcast. I’m your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses. To learn more about their life, their ideas and their insights, I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons on to others, through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Without further ado, another episode of the success story podcast.
Scott D Clary  00:37
Alright, thanks again for joining me, I’m sitting down with Michael Blanche, who is the co founder of surf side, a customer acquisition platform that empowers clients by leveraging data from existing customers to not only retain but acquire a new customer base. Prior to finding surf side, Michael served as DTO. At Cyto. He had several executive and lead roles, including head of product at momentum, cloud, and co founder and head of product at operations at comm site services. He began his career with yakka media services that he founded straight out of the university. He gained his global perspectives from working with companies ranging from startups to corporate and publicly listed companies, and from his time traveling the world and obviously going through all these roles between 2012 2013 It’s been a long time since then, so I you know, I appreciate this. I just pulled this off your LinkedIn, but I really want to understand your career. What led you, you know, you, serial entrepreneur, a lot of different types of roles, different types of customers, different types of companies? Walk me through, you know, first of all, thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. But yeah, walk me through your career, your origin story, your past, what’s led you to surf side? Why surf side? Why do you? Why are you doing what you do now? And
Scott D Clary 01:57
all that all that stuff?
Michael Blanche 01:59
Yes. So first, thanks for having me on. I really think you’ve built a great foundation here and a great platform. So appreciate the opportunity. My pleasure. So, for me, I grew up, you know, about an hour outside of Sydney, back in Australia, small sort of blue collar town. My parents and my family were immigrants to Australia, as everyone is, but really focused on building a family owned and operated construction business. So my grandfather initially ran that. And then my father later on, took that over. And what that taught me was the value of a good day’s work and, and that real hard work, I think, no, I witnessed my, my parents, my family, work incredibly hard for a long period of time, many years. And my parents had me when they were very young. So, you know, we grew up and we didn’t have a huge amount of money. But one thing was that they always had a very solid work ethic, and that commitment to a larger goal. And, you know, through that, I learned a couple of real tenants from my, from my family, which was the that value in a good work ethic coming in being committed to a larger goal, and then being able to recognize that goal. And I think that was something that I took through all of my companies and even when I first started working, you know, it was always have a job always be employed and working towards something. So I went to school, I did a commerce degree at the University of Wollongong, which is, you know, a local university. And was fortunate that right around the time that we’re graduating, I took a job with Apple. And what I was doing for Apple was larger than educational sales, and was selling into my local university. So it was great. It was part time job while I was rounding out a business degree, wasn’t necessarily the best student, like the social aspect of university than anything else. But was always working and always connecting. So what the, the job at the Apple saw afforded me was essentially a dialogue with a number of professors and academic leaders at my university, and one of them was head of the computer science faculty. This guy by the name of Peter Eklund, and what happened was, we essentially started building our relationship, you know, just based on me being interested in what he was up to know he had a lot of his early works around this idea of a digital ecosystem, which is thinking of digital technologies in a way that is more akin to biology, right, and the living and breathing ecosystem. So how can we create these, you know, binary machines and turn I mean, more human experiences. So from that, we actually connected with another gentleman that I met through the Apple Store as his heart. And he ran a telecommunications business. So what we did was we found a partnership. And we built some software that allowed us to measure and understand all of the safety risks associated with the telecommunication industry. And this was a really good opportunity for me because I thought like it was a somewhere where we saw a clear opportunity, and there was true value in the solution. So we built a software platform that essentially managed and mitigated all the risk and concerns around gaining access or telecommunications. So we would do things as that platform evolves over time in multiple pieces of technology, we would make an adaptive so that based on weather conditions, by hitting, let’s say, a wet Weather Service’s API, we could then say, No, you’re not permitted to access this site, because of the pending safety concern. Now, we will take credential databases to ensure that at that time, you are actually certified to enter the site. And we took this sort of approach. The thing that I really got out of it, though, was this spatial aspect of the data center, each color communication tower was in a real world location anchored by a lat long. And that was the start of me getting interested in sort of location intelligence. That company was great, we ran it for a while, and then ended up offloading it to a large scale telecommunications provider back in Australia. And I thought, hey, this is great, you know, a couple years out of university, I’ve made it, let’s go travel. So I, I went and traveled to sort of Southeast Asia and spent a bit of time in India, I’ve got a longtime girlfriend, who’s now my fiancee who resided in America. So we came over here for the first time, and really just tried to enjoy the world and broaden my experiences. That was great. I did that for a couple years, and then realized, hey, you know, I’ve got to come back to the real world, because we’ve got to get back to work. So with that, that’s when I started working with momentum. And what momentum was was a way for us to digitize every aspect of the student learning experience. So essentially, with comm site and our first business, that the idea was to create almost like a CMS for occupational work and safety, using the cloud to to underwrite it. With momentum, it was not dissimilar, but now we’re pointing that capability at the education industry. So the data points I want to collect, no student attendance, behavioral issues, absentee rates when a certain piece of learning was taught, so that then you can associate that back to learning outcomes or create personalized learning plans. And that was a really good business, something that I slept very well with at night. Just, you know, the, the objective of that and where you want to get to you want to make every student’s life better. And I love that. So we put that through a small accelerator in Australia, called Mirror day, which is backed by the largest telco, Telstra. And it was, as we were just coming out of that, that we announced a raise in the same day that we did that though the company here in New York, called Schoology, that announced a raise that was several orders of magnitude larger, you know, we’ve done a couple of million dollars. And they’ve done I think it was like 45, or something to understand. And the problem for me was like, no matter how hungry or driven I am, the things that they can just do better based on the capital they have access to, how can I compete with say $2 million when they’ve got this war chest to apply to the problem in such a bigger market. And that was really the inflection point for me when I decided, alright, we have to move away from Australia and come and chase opportunities in the larger market. So that led me to to moving over to the United States. And the thing that was really good with that was I moved over. And it was the easiest transition in the world. Because of the people that I’ve met along the way. I always joke that like I moved halfway across the world and I didn’t even have to show a resume or anything like that. You know, there was no notion of a job on because of people that I had met during university and the relationship I’ve made so that there I think is one of my biggest kind of tenants for anyone is make sure you can go when you just continue to invest in building out that network and those relationships and be genuine in those. Because then it it will open up and pay dividends in the future. So that led to me moving over to New York. And that was about 2015. And we build a, what’s called a DSP. So this was in the advertising space, it was something completely new to me. I hadn’t hadn’t thought of it too much. But once I, I knew that I was going to be moving over here to tackle this problem, I really started looking into it, and what were the main sort of drivers for and from an engineering standpoint, working in like the advertising space offers a number of challenges, which are really, really interesting, in that you have billions of events of data coming through. So that’s sort of one large scale engineering problem. But where that compounds is that you also have to be able to make near real time decisions on that. So I need to be able to say, all right, every opportunity that’s coming through, do I want to bid? Do I want to place an ad? How much is that? Am I prepared to pay for that? And who do I believe that individual is? So from an engineering standpoint, that problem started to fascinate me. And that’s why we build out this demand side platform. Now the other opportunity that we saw there, and this goes back to kind of my my first position was with location stores, because what has happened is that the smartphone has risen to prominence. And now obviously, everyone has one all the time. But it was the first truly personal device. So because it went everywhere with you, and gave us a new lens into the consumer. And that was really the opportunity that we started to build a platform for. Now, kind of high level that that journey was essentially, you know, we came founding the company ended up being acquired by a public company, and then visited onto the NASDAQ. And we ran that company for several years ago. micro cap stocks, but great experience and great exposure. We then moved beyond that with Surfside me and my co founder John Lowe and left sido and those outside with the hypothesis that there was something more that we could do there. Rather than just think of location data, and a location based narrative, we wanted to incorporate all the different touch points of consumer data. So that’s really what we’re doing today.
Scott D Clary 12:57
Very, I love I love this story. And now when you look at what surf site is, it makes a lot of sense. Because every single every single influence in your life has led you to understand as a separate facet of the ability to use data, whether or not it’s in again, ecosystem location, or just insights and consuming and understanding massive amounts of data like that they’re like drive all these consumer decisions. So what are you trying to accomplish with Surf side? That hasn’t been done? Or perhaps hasn’t been done? Well, in terms of understanding how consumers by how influencing how consumers by helping businesses understand that those data points?
Michael Blanche 13:41
Yeah. So I think what we see the opportunity with server side is, you know, people, companies exist today that will shift data from A to be, you know, we’ll do basic transformations. Essentially, that’s like the plumbing of your data, infrastructure and organization, critical everyone needs. But with server side, what we’re really trying to do is to provide that infrastructure to make it seamless, focused on your customer touchpoints. So as a brand, as a retailer, you have these different disparate platforms, they’re all collecting customer related information, whether it be your retail point of sale system, your online website, but then you’re also running paid media and advertising. And that’s having an experience with the consumer as well. So that information, while it’s not as specific as some of your point of sale data, or even CRM data is still very valuable. And what we’re able to do is to collect all of these different channels of data and bring it in and consolidate it into one view of the consumer. So You can then understand that this person that received a Facebook ad then came and visited my site, they abandoned their car. We saw them come back three days later on their desktop computer, and then they purchased x y&z and being able to stitch together that narrative of the customer is something which we’re seeing a huge opportunity for, and a huge need for in the space. And that if you couple that with a proprietary data set for essentially like a contextual lens of the consumer, that allows you to, to really improve your outcomes as a brand or a market that we use. Now you’ll you’re coming from a more informed decision about all of your strategies and your your marketing and advertising. Initiatives.
Scott D Clary 15:49
It makes a lot of sense, I’m, I’m looking on the website and, and now that that adds a layer that a lot of marketers don’t have access to. So if you go through this five points listed on your website, digital events, material world advertising and media point of sale and offline. So I would say that most marketers can capture digital events quite easily. advertising and media that’s that’s always measured, even point of sale can be measured to some extent. But the things that I never see measured are material or offline. And I think that that’s adding a layer that I don’t think I’ve ever seen as a marketer or people, some you know, somebody who’s worked with other marketers. I’ve never seen that ability to capture that, effectively. You see some simple tools. You know, like when you walk into a store you, you can measure how many people walk into a store, and you compare and contrast that to how many sales there are for that day. But that’s a very rudimentary basic metric, right? It’s not it’s not that. Anyways,
Michael Blanche 16:50
Ben, it’s actually funny that you mentioned that because, as CFO that was kind of one of the real differentiators that we went to market with initially. Back in 2015, we wrote a an attribution technology called verified walking. And because we had that understanding of the location data coming from cell phones, we were able to associate media exposure to that. Now, the whole reason we invented, verified walking to the solution was, it’s a proxy metric. A brand or marketer, as you alluded to before, really wants to understand like the return on adspend. So explicit transaction level data. But, and the mainstream retail Master is incredibly difficult, especially understanding like the marketing advertising landscape, quite often, a brand will engage in agency to work as a middleman. So now you’re arm’s length from being able to actually access any transaction level data. So for us being able to show the effectiveness of driving someone into a retail location was a proxy for performance. With server side, we saw an opportunity where we could kind of solve that limitation by entering one a narrow vertical to start, and we selected the cannabis industry. And I can go into that one in a minute as to why, but to ecommerce, because the hypothesis was that there’s going to be a massive influx of drive for E commerce. And this is obviously pre COVID. So no one saw this coming. But it’s fortunately been true, where we are seeing a huge migration of brands who are having to adapt, predominantly commerce or focus, pick up in store, buy online type approaches, in order to continue growing their business. So the whole reason that we build it to do closed loop measurement, is that that was what we as marketers saw as a real opportunity. But like, if we can take the guesswork out of this, and we can prove measurable results, then there should be no reason why we can’t continue to grow the business. So we wanted to kind of take the guesswork out of it. And that that really sort of touches on why we saw the cannabis space is our first vertical, right one is highly regulated. So there was a massive opportunity therefore, we we had a look at the landscape and went out to the largest cannabis convention called mjbizcon and had a bit of a look around and and just said, Hey, look, the nascent technologies here 10 years behind where we think they should be. We know that we can do better given our experience. So let’s build a solution for but prior to that one of our former board members actually had a spec and was making acquisitions of a number of dispensary groups. The first problem that he came to us with and this is kind of as a consultant initiative was I’ve just acquired all these different dispensaries, and they’re all on different point of sale system town, and how am I going to get my finances in check. So what we did was we came in and we created a data layer, data, Lake, whatever you want to call it, but essentially a normalized view of all of these different point of sale systems aggregated into a standardized structure. And through doing that, we went through and integrated with the top, you know, half dozen point of sale systems in the space. And when we then said or as we finished this project, we’ve already done this great work, how can we apply it to our space and what we know. And that was really where we be found and certified based on our capability? And then and then went off to the market?
Scott D Clary 21:02
And and can you help me understand for somebody who’s listening to this? Who is? Who is used traditional marketing, metrics, and collection of different data points? How do you and what do you collect that is offline and material? Outside of like, you know, point of sale, digital events, traditional CPM, click throughs, all that stuff. So what’s the what’s the physical, physical component, offline component that you can collect? And how do you do that?
Michael Blanche 21:31
Yeah, so the the offline comparison is really driven by us working with, you know, your mobile phone, standing, you know, we’ll have an SDK that gets integrated into publishers, and we’ll partner with partners that sell this type of data. But essentially, it’s all high quality location data that is user opted in the wall cracky compliant. And what it is, is just timestamp and roll that long, Raji, get one, but then what we’ll do is run a number of different data pipelines that allow us to contextualize that data. So rather than saying your xyz lat long, we can understand that your Starbucks on Broadway and let’s for for some developer, and that there allows us to form attributes or profiles about the consumer and their movement and behavioral patterns. So we can essentially tag you with metadata that says, you know, you’re a frequent gym goer, in the US do in a park or hiking trails. So therefore, these become attributes, again, associated with you as a user. Now, in addition to that, we’re able to, because we have an anchoring data point, which we refer to as a surf Site ID, that corresponds to a cookie ID, maybe across, you know, different advertising or marketing platforms, the advertising identifier for mobile advertising your hashed email address, data points such as this right, which gives us assistance, and how we can leverage the data so that we’re able to join together visitation patterns, with digital browsing exposure. Now, the type of site you’re visiting content you’re consuming. When we focused on a specific vertical, it becomes your ecommerce behaviors, you know, what you’re looking at items you add to car, but you have abandoned checkout from everything like that. And it’s really the convergence of these data sets into one 360 degree customer profile, and then powering that with the ability to model and scale that audience out, that allow them to go and acquire new customers for our line of business.
Scott D Clary 23:59
So just it’s look alike, but the the input is just exponentially larger. Right?
Michael Blanche 24:05
I mean, the the notion of a lookalike is, is flawed for most businesses, because what they’ll do is you’ll take, say, a bid request that comes through the advertising ecosystem, and then use those features to train a look alike model, whether it’s regression or nearest neighbors. But what happens is, is that you’re looking at the creative sides, you know, the creative ID, the publisher, the type of attributes, we add, essentially, we don’t throw those away, but they’re weighted far less valuable to the actual user level attributes that we see. So we build maintain a really large key values datastore that allows us to hit with a user ID and that Service ID and immediately resolve back their profile. Now that profile will have household income lives. They demographic data. And for us, they become the features that we train now acquisition models from and those look alikes. So look alike, yes, but it’s more so like they have the same consumer competition preventing that audience.
Scott D Clary 25:18
Now walk me through this, this all sounds great at a high level of walking through a use case walk me through perhaps one of your customers that’s used this and what results do they see in contrast to very traditional set of data points and measuring and optimization?
Michael Blanche 25:35
Yeah, definitely. So the same we were to engage with and what was in the cannabis industry would be referred to as a multi state operators. So they have multiple brands, multiple production supply chains in multiple states. So with that, they might have three different groups of dispensaries. Oh, dispensary brands that they’re working with, depending on the state of the market. And they may be connected to different point of sale and ecommerce systems. So we would engage at a an enterprise level with them. And we would come in and using our software platform, we would configure the different data collection points that would be tying into their CRM system, their point of sale system, their ecommerce system and their digital side. And then once we have that all flowing in, we’re able to start understanding what that audience looks like. Okay, so we can start paying transaction volume sizes, stuff like that on the retail level, but then also, we start looking at the Digital events, the content consuming, we can track that as well and profile that audience. So that’s kind of the main hub. And then of course, is the location data as well, where we can start basically monitoring people that are visiting the dispensary locations, or their competitive locations as well. So now that we’ve got all of this data coming in, what we’re able to do is to then essentially intersect those different sources of data. So you can look at people that have seen walked into one of your retail locations, and there have also transacted online, or people that have purchased a specific SKU or product category across any of your channels, rather than you having to go and pull that from your point of sale system for separate reports. But then once we’ve got that, we can use that as essentially a training audience, to then extrapolate out and identify more people that have a high propensity to purchase or transact in a similar fashion. So that there, that capability is really critical to the strategies that we execute for our clients. Because we’ll come in and we’ll, we’ll create these audiences and training data sets that are then proven to perform in the media. And because we have all the data points connected, we’re then able to explicitly measure that coming back in to a system that allows us to show the performance lift or improvement. So
Scott D Clary 28:14
I want you to sell yourself to I want you to I want you to tell me some of the the numbers that you see, when you actually implement like, what’s the what’s the uptick on? Pick a metric, top line revenue? Yeah, I mean, conversions, all these.
Michael Blanche 28:27
So you say like, performance, traditionally, someone would give you, we can give the type of CTR like a click through rate. Okay, that’s just a rubbish manager. Because really, it doesn’t matter if you as a brand, when you’re compared about driving sales. So that’s how we speak now it’s let’s talk about return on adspend. That authority of outcome based metric, and what we’re seeing in the cannabis vertical, where we have our largest proprietary data, that we’re seeing about 4.5 to five times return on adspend. Just really good. Again, you know, so it’s what we’re quite happy with the, the success we’re seeing out of the platform, when John and I started building this, it was, it was really an idea. We thought we could do it better. And now to see, you know, in a relatively short period of time, so so it’s only been around two years. But we are being able to continue winning business based purely on that performance metric. And the fact that we can measure a dotted line that no one else can.
Scott D Clary 29:36
Very impressive. I have I have some questions, less about suicide and just more about you, serial entrepreneur and an incredible career history and profile. So I want to I want to ask those before I switch off from surf side on what you’re doing now. Is there anything that I didn’t ask about surf side, what the how the process works, how the technology works, that you wanted to cover? The floor is yours if you want to bring up anything else
Michael Blanche 30:05
that Luke I think those that listen to the podcast and are interested, definitely jump on our website so site.io and you’ll be able to see a little bit more about what we’re doing. But from that, from a platform standpoint, we’re incredibly excited to the fourth quarter of this year we’ve got some great location based intelligence insights that we’ll be rolling out as a complete SAS offer as well as making our our audience measurement capabilities widely available. So definitely are
Scott D Clary 30:35
interested in getting that out. Now, these are these are more questions for yourself as an entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, in terms of where you want Surfside to go, do you where do you where do you want to see the company go in five years? Do you want to go into different markets, different industries just grow, expand exit what’s what’s your vision?
Michael Blanche 30:54
Yeah. Where we’re proving it out in a highly regulated vertical right now. Because it lends itself to the strength of the platform. And, but everything that we do with suicide is entirely scalable across adjacent industries. So now we’re building out this proprietary asset and the cannabis space. And that’s where all our direct sales efforts are. But at the same time, we have, you know, a number of partnerships and other verticals that we’re starting to open up to. For us, it’s really about that the platform itself is industry agnostic. But in order for the platform to really run, right, you need to engender with specific industry specific data sets. And so for instance, will open up into the automotive vertical in the near future. In order for us to do that. I don’t want to be getting point of sale system from dispensaries, I need to be getting lease agreements, I need to be seeing transactions based on individual dealerships and categorizing that type of information. So that’s definitely something that we have the ready to go other other verticals that will expand into in the near future also, obviously direct to consumer huge today. And it’s incredibly easy for us to measure that, because we already have all of the integrations with a from a systems from our historic was. So then likely into another highly regulated industries such as healthcare. And a lot of that is just based on our ability to ensure that we adhere to all of the privacy and user regulatory requirements of an industry. But then also, because we understand who that user is explicitly, it allows us to be far more brand safe, and reducing risks for our clients. By ensuring that, you know, we’re not bombarding people with sensitive messaging, we’re not sending too many messages or communications to them. And really being aware of that. And that works across channels. So we’re not just talking about a you’re sending targeted email, you’re sending SMS messages to these people. But it allows us to stitch together that full user journey.
Scott D Clary 33:27
Now, one question I have for you, you’re so heavily involved in very disruptive marketing, I think that we can say that this is very much on the on the leading edge, you’re bleeding edge of what marketing technology is today. So what what are you curious about or what are you researching in the world of marketing, technology and consumer trends that you think will be something that we’ll see in five years or 10 years from now?
Michael Blanche 33:51
Yeah, it works a couple of different ways. In terms of like back of house actually powering the industry, there’s huge changes to the way that identification can be made digitally. And these are all really positive initiatives. So in your piece of something called GDPR, come out. In California, we haven’t had something similar called CCPA. But essentially starting to click the wings of digital companies being able to identify users across platforms and track with cookies and the big change in the way that that’s being handled both by Google and Apple. But I think it’s incredibly interesting to see how that shakes out. So that’s one one side, but then also consumers and consumer facing applications. Very, very bullish on augmented reality as opposed to virtual reality, and the push to sort of augmented reality in shopping and commerce. I think that will be huge. Other than that, we see We expect to see a continued migrating to ecommerce and the online experience, the think it will become more how you can put new creative and immersive ad units in front of consumers.
Scott D Clary 35:13
Very, very, very interesting. Now as an entrepreneur, how do you are going through all these different industries yet still underlying with with data driven technologies? How do you stay on top of new trends, emerging trends? Where do you go to learn yourself?
Michael Blanche 35:31
Yeah, a lot of content online. And I say that, I’ll ride into the office and listen to one podcast on the way in one podcast on the way back, while I’m working at night, the same thing, just finding different ways to continue to consume. I also have a tendency to continue to read a lot of articles from academia and a right at the forefront of it in the marketing and advertising space, there’s some incredible people out of Stanford such as Michael Kosinski, you know, that that are just right on the bleeding edge of how they think about these problems. And not just from a technology standpoint, but also from also from a psychological and cultural standpoint and understanding the impact that these technologies will have. And then me also a founder of, I’m very, very interested and naturally curious about the area that I work in as well. So I think because of that is, if you’re passionate, and you’re hungry and inquisitive about a body of knowledge, learning at and becoming an expert in it is essential. Here to say we’re not necessarily coming to work, we all care about where we’re going with the business now. No, we work in marketing and advertising. So take that with a grain of salt. But we’re passionate about the capability and what we can do with it in the future. Our idea is that if we understand the consumer better, we can create more complimentary advertising experiences for you, rather than just, you know, exploit the fact that we have information about you as a user, and no one wants that. But I definitely envision a future where you can cut the middleman out of that directly incentivize the consumer to share their information. And because of that receive a more personalized or tailored experience with their ads.
Scott D Clary 37:35
What would be advice that you would give somebody who would like to start their own business
Michael Blanche 37:42
don’t do it on your own. I, I’m really fortunate that I have a co founder, you have many guests that self made entrepreneurs have gone out and done it on their own. And I have the utmost respect for anyone that can. For me, there’s just not enough hours in the day, we’re already working around the clock as it is. That ability in that I mean that in that it becomes a counterbalance, you can’t be on all the time. And through having that is really gives us the ability to switch off but the business to continue moving forward. So I appreciate that. The other thing would just be hungry, being inquisitive. For me, I remember like flying over to New York, and I knew nothing about the advertising space yet. I was moving over here to build what became one of the largest advertising platforms. So you know, being up for the challenge being hungry. But that’s it.
Scott D Clary 38:51
Yeah. And almost in line with that same question, but I’m curious if it’s a different answer, what is the lesson that you would tell your younger self
Michael Blanche 39:00
is going to be alright? It’s going to be I, I remember losing sleep as a kid. Just thinking about, you know, how will I be able to support a family or anything like that? And these weird sort of, I guess, insecurities that I didn’t even acknowledge at the time, but later on, it’s like, wow, you know, just respect the journey. May people be open communicate network, and everything will be alright.
Scott D Clary 39:36
Good advice. And and the last question, I’m going to get some websites. I think you mentioned one before, but I’m going to get some socials and websites for you. But before I do that, what does success mean to you?
Michael Blanche 39:51
For me, so being from Australia and having a lot of my family back in Australia, is it means the ability to Go back and forth as as we need to. My fiancee, she’s from here, work is in New York, it becomes a matter of how you can blend that lifestyle so that we can be with our family and enjoying our time with them. Without any limitations, we need to be able to travel the world a couple of times a year, unfortunately. So that is definitely my measure of success would be the ability to live that lifestyle the way I want.
Scott D Clary 40:31
Very good. And then, of course, most importantly, where do people connect with you? Go find Surfside. What are all the links and socials?
Michael Blanche 40:39
Yes, I said it surfside.io is our website and then on obviously LinkedIn and Twitter. We don’t do Instagram for this type of business. And then myself you can find on LinkedIn and Michael Lynch.
Scott D Clary 40:57
That’s all for today. Thanks again for joining me on another episode of the success story podcast. You can download or stream this podcast wherever podcasts are available, including iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, I heart, radio, and many others. You can also watch his podcasts on YouTube. If you haven’t already. Please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, family, coworkers and peers. Please leave us a rating on iTunes takes about 30 seconds as it allows other people to find our podcast and lets our amazing guests reach even more people with their message. And remember any rating is fine as long as it contains five stars. I’m Scott Clary from the success story podcast signing off
