From Ground Zero to Kingdom Growth - Brian Boyd | Faithly Stories

00:01 - Speaker 1 Isn't the goal of a clergy, or pastor or missionary to reach the lost? We may not all agree with X's platform or Facebook's platform, but that's where people are. I mean, Jesus went where the people were. He went to the mountainside, he went to the sea and he spoke to the people where they were congregated. If podcasting is where millions and millions of people give their content every day, there's no better place for you, pastor, than to create your content and distribute it there. 00:30 - Speaker 2 Welcome to Faithly Stories, the podcast that brings you inspiring tales from conversations with church leaders as they navigate the peaks and valleys of their faith journeys, through their ministry work and everyday life Brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders. Learn more at faithlyco. Get ready to be uplifted and inspired on the Faithly Stories podcast. 00:57 - Speaker 3 All right, here we go. Brian Boyd, welcome to the Faithly Stories podcast. 01:05 - Speaker 1 Thank you. 01:06 - Speaker 3 It is great to have you here, my friend. You are, of course, the founder and CEO of CCB Marketing, which I want to talk about, but before we get there, I want to talk about our first meeting. Our first meeting was in a diner in downtown New York City, where we discovered that we were both 20-plus year New Yorkers. And when two people who have been in New York City for 20-plus years, when they meet and talk, the conversation inevitably goes to 9-11, which is coming up very quickly. So I want to ask you a few things, because I know that you had a very deep and impactful experience around 9-11. So the first question is you know, as the anniversary approach us, take us back to where you were, Brian. 01:58 - Speaker 1 Wow, well, yeah, literally I've got goosebumps. Just you bringing it up, it's, it's. It's funny. Um, you know, it seems like yesterday and it's funny because the kids who were born after 9-11 are now over 21,. Right, they can drink and dance whatever, which is weird for me to think. But on that date, my wife and my two kids the four of us lived about two blocks away in a neighborhood called Battery Park City, and it's pretty much a residential neighborhood that borders World Trade Center and Tribeca in lower Manhattan. So if you're looking at Manhattan, it goes down like this it's over here on the on the bottom right. 02:49 - Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean it's basically ground zero, right? 02:52 - Speaker 1 It, it really is. You know when, when the towers fell, pieces went into Battery Park City. So I mean it's, it's, it's literally right there. But on that day I had gone to work over on Wall Street and I forgot the exact time. It was 8 o'clock, 8.48 or 8.45, right. My wife had dropped off our kids at school, which was about one block away from World Trade Center, and then she was actually going to head to the World Trade Center to have breakfast with a friend. 03:28 So on that day, at eight you know whatever in the morning, my wife was getting ready to start walking from the school to the World Trade Center and she was with a friend and they got held up walking there because they ran into another friend that they hadn't seen in years and years and years and they had a conversation on the sidewalk that while they were having that conversation, the plane came overhead in the first plane to the tower. And you know, we kind of call that a. It's not a coincidence, we call it a God wink. That's what we call it, because what are the odds that that would all happen? So she immediately runs back to get the kids at the school and calls me Brian. A plane just ran to the tower, Brian. A plane just ran into the tower. By the way, for those of you who are younger than 20, our phones back then weren't nearly as good as they are today. 04:35 - Speaker 3 I had what was called a Blackberry phone, and it's a technology that's not around anymore, but it's like a phone with a keyboard, so, anyway, Well, but the interesting thing about it is that those calls were able to go through Like that's how close to the actual event your wife was, because just minutes later no calls would be going through to anybody. 04:54 - Speaker 1 That's right. She was able to call at that point, and you know, I forget which tower had the antennas on it and stuff. Maybe it was tower two, I don't recall. But when those towers fell, the antennas went down too, and then it was tower two, I don't recall. But, uh, when those towers fell, the antennas went down too, and then it was, it was nothing, was good. 05:08 But she calls me and says, hey, Brian, a plane just hit the tower and I'm like oh, wow, that's crazy. And I'm like that's horrible. Um, and then back in my head, I'm like, well, I hope nobody got hurt, I hope they can fix it, type of thing. And and I said, well, just stay there with the kids. And, um, and I'll, uh, you know, I'll see you after work. I mean, at that point it wasn't, we didn't know. And and if you didn't live through that time, maybe that doesn't make sense, but we just thought it was an accident, a horrible accident, right? So I go around the other side of my building and look out our window and the timing I don't remember the timing, but I look out the window and I watch the second plane go right into the tower and as I recall this for you, Alicia, I can actually see the fireball and I can picture it again in my head. At that point I'm like, well, this is not an accident, right? And so people are at my office. They're saying, do we stay at work, Do we leave? And I'm like I'm out of here, I'm going to find the kids. So I try calling Fran. Can't get a hold of her. No connection at this point. So I say I got to run to the school and see, because I last I noticed they were going to stay at the school. So I started running to the school. But but you know what, Alicia, between my office and the school, as the crow flies, you go directly through the World Trade Center complex. And so that's what I did, because I was trying to get there as quickly as possible. 06:55 As I was running to the school, on the sidewalks in Manhattan there are these metal usually they're yellow metal grates in the ground. What are they? Well, they are the exits for the subway. So they open up somehow and there's stairs and people can exit out the subway. There are emergency exits on the subway system. So, as I'm running this way towards the school, people, these things are opening up and people are coming out of the ground. I'm like, I'm like what is happening and they're going this way, but I'm committed to go this way. So I run to the school. I get there, I found out later that just behind me one of the engines had fallen and landed on the sidewalk, and so it's. You can look that up and it's a public record. 07:49 I get to the school and I'm like I'm looking for my wife and they're like she's gone. She took the kids. And I'm like okay, she's really smart, she's evacuated somewhere. I know she's out of the under control. So what do I do? I go around the block to our apartment and go up to our apartment to just collect myself and think about next steps. 08:15 I dropped off my briefcase, I think I changed into my sneakers because I was in dress shoes and dress clothes for work, and I actually got my camera and I took a few pictures from my balcony little teeny balcony we had and I'll share those with you, Alicia, if you want to edit them into the podcast, you're welcome to. So I took some pictures to kind of record the event. I don't know why. My wife still asks me why'd you do that? But I was just, we didn't know what was about to happen. So at that point I'm like well, let me go find my wife and kids. So I go downstairs to the first floor of our building and I'm sitting there just for a second and there's this incredible, thunderous shaking of the ground. It felt like an earthquake. Do you know what it was? The first tower was falling. 09:12 - Speaker 3 Yeah. 09:13 - Speaker 1 And then I'm like we got to get out of here. So a bunch of us leave our building and go to West Side Highway, which is on the west side of Manhattan, and we start running up the highway and there's this cloud, or you know, coming down the highway, this, this gray cloud of what we found out later was cancerous dust, right, cancer, carcinogenic, carcinogenic dust, and it kind of slowed down so we started walking again and then at some point the second tower starts to fall and we start running again because here comes more, you know, and you know it was just a bunch of us on the highway all escaping and if you look at the footage, the people are running into boats, there are people running over bridges, everyone is trying to get away from that area. So I get up to the Soho area of Manhattan, which is a little farther north and my BlackBerry phone can't make any local calls at all. But I'm able to reach my sister-in-law in Michigan and her name is Karen, and uh, and I get ahold of Karen and she's like, oh, you're alive. 10:38 I'm like, yeah, I said I can't reach Fran, and uh, and I said can you call Fran, my wife, and can you call my mom in Seattle and tell them I'm okay and we're, you know. So she's able, from Michigan, to call Fran and call my mom, and she calls me back and tells me where Fran is and she's up in Soho at a friend's house. So I slowly make my way up to Soho, and it was quite a bit later. The timing is a little off how I'm explaining it, but it was it was mid afternoon. Uh, by the time I got there and I get there, my son comes running dad, you're alive, dad, you're alive. And uh, and we, we, we were able to, uh, um, have a reunion there later that day, on the 11th. 11:27 - Speaker 3 Wow, now, at any point did you think to yourself maybe you're not safe in Soho, maybe you've got to get further north or get somewhere else. 11:37 - Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, I think none of us knew what the extent of it was terrorism or whatever. I think none of us knew what the extent of it was terrorism or whatever. And so my main thought was how do I keep everyone safe and some sort of normalization of life? So I thought, well, this isn't practical. We can't stay at somebody's house and we couldn't go home because that area of Manhattan was closed. So we actually went to my wife's sister's house up in the uh hell's kitchen area for a night and then the next day, uh, we went to a hotel in columbus circle which is at 59th street yeah and I asked the manager can we work out something to stay? 12:23 we need a place to live. And the manager her name was Susie, we're still Facebook friends today said move on in and we'll figure out the whole payment situation later. And so all we had was one of our backs. We had no, we couldn't go home, so we just had what's on our backs and we ended up staying at this hotel until Christmas. 12:47 - Speaker 3 Wow. 12:48 - Speaker 1 And we didn't end up paying anything for the whole stay. It was covered by our renter's insurance, and FEMA at the time stepped in and helped the people who lived in that area, and so after Christmas we were able to go home to Lower Manhattan. 13:03 - Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this was a national tragedy. You know there's no one that at least our age right who doesn't vividly remember where they were and what they were doing at this time. But there is something about being a New Yorker and being at Ground Zero that just changes you and changes you forever. Now, Brian, I know you eventually went back. I remember you told me about eventually going back downtown and in fact, I remember you telling me about a ministry response downtown. Yeah, tell me, remind me about that. 13:43 - Speaker 1 Tell me, remind me about that. Yeah, the we have. Well, the ministry response that we, that happened to us was a church in Oklahoma Let me think if it was Oklahoma or Seattle. A church that we knew it was actually Oklahoma Sent us a big basket to our hotel and it was full of things that we didn't have and things to keep the kids busy, like a Nintendo for the kids and little food items and things like that, and that was pretty remarkable. It was very moving. 14:33 I have a photo of us holding the basket that we took that day and certainly people were, I'm sure, looking to faith at the time and what to do. People had lost loved ones. But that church outreach to us was really one of the highlights. It's interesting how that was such a highlight for us. Yeah, how they remembered and they went to do that. We also did a lot of volunteering at a couple local churches the names escape me. So I did a lot of volunteering at a couple of local churches the names escaped me, but churches were putting together backpacks for the kids and food items and everyone was donating. You know, I don't know if you recall, but there was water everywhere there were the cases of water everywhere, everywhere, and so the churches were. 15:23 you could volunteer and put together packets and backpacks and things for people. So there was a lot of effort that the churches coordinated. 15:30 - Speaker 3 Yeah, no, the church certainly stepped in and in fact, my local church in lower Manhattan. It was planted in response to 9-11 by a pastor who felt led to come into the area and and bring the Lord. And so you know, even in the darkness there were these moments of light, and light has come in. Does all of what happened impact how you live and how you lead today, Brian? 16:06 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean you know you don't get up in the morning and think you won't go home that day. I'm sure you didn't get up this morning and say goodbye to your family and get into the subway or take your bike or whatever, and you assume you're going to go home at the end of the day probably at some point, and so you definitely look at every day a little differently that way. 16:33 Every day is a gift. That's kind of cliche, but it really is. We're very blessed that we are here today. I think, you know, if my wife would have been a little farther ahead, she would have been there If I had run a certain different way. And so you know, I think there's nothing that changes your life like a day like that, a day like that. Yeah, yeah, of course we're very grateful for our family and uh and the hugs and stuff like that. 17:04 - Speaker 3 Yeah, of course. Um, well, thank you for sharing your story with me, Brian, and with the Faithfully community. Um, why don't we switch gears for a moment now and talk about CCB? So CCB Marketing near and dear to my heart. Faithly is, of course, a very happy client of yours. Tell me how it all started. How did you start CCB? It started on 9-12. Yeah, yeah, wow, perfect, segue yeah. 17:33 - Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe 9-13. But what happened is the company that I was working at at the time shut down shortly thereafter. In fact, I never I don't think ever. I did go back to the office. They opened up the offices a month later or two months later or something, but they eventually couldn't make it. Yeah, and I went back to our hotel with my box of stuff and now we're living at a hotel without a home and without a job. 18:09 And my wife and I looked at each other and she says listen, you've got a Rolodex, you're a smart guy, let's start our own company. And so we started our first company in that hotel room in Columbus Circle in New York City. 18:26 - Speaker 3 Wow. 18:27 - Speaker 1 It was an IT consultant company. 18:28 - Speaker 3 Wow. 18:43 - Speaker 1 So that eventually changed a little bit to become a. About six years later we changed it to become more of a social media agency, and then we changed to 2017, we created CCD Marketing. 18:58 - Speaker 3 But it really all the impetus was, you know, us having no job and being in that hotel. Wow, that is an incredible story. I didn't realize that's how CCB was birthed and when it was birthed. So today CCB Marketing is digital marketing. Can you explain what exactly that? 19:12 - Speaker 1 means Sure. Our favorite client is someone that comes and says listen, we know we have a marketing problem, we just aren't sure what it is. Or we have a marketing team and they are so busy they can't do it all. In marketing it really is a discipline. I mean, I have one great person on our team that just focuses on email. I think a lot of companies have one or two marketing experts, or maybe more if they're big. 19:41 You know, but you can't know all the disciplines all the time, how all the email platforms work. 19:48 You know ConvertKit, constant Contact, mailchimp, et cetera, or how all the ad platforms work Meta, google, tiktok, linkedin and so what we've done is we've created silos that talk to each other in our company, where we have an expert in ads, an expert in social media content creation, an expert in email and we all work together for our clients in a holistic type manner. 20:17 So when we work with a, when a client comes to us and says, hey, we know we have some marketing issues, we'll put together a plan that incorporates all the marketing disciplines, even traditional PR, you know, getting on the Today Show or Fox and Friends or whatever. We can put that all into one plan. We're actually working right now for a new ride share company here in New York City. That's just a startup. They're coming in to upset Uber and Lyft and no one knows who they are. So the CEO and I had a call this week and we put together a plan to get them some market share. And the thing too, I'll add too, is everything we do is real data-driven, so we don't just guess Everything's measurable and we create marketing strategies that have measurable output and measurable outcome. That's really our goal. 21:11 - Speaker 3 Well, I'm proud to say that I know what all that means now, after working with you for quite a while, Brian, and so I will say for those out there who don't have a marketing strategy yet Brian and his team are wonderful and will get you up to speed and get you going. You don't have to have a marketing team or a strategy in place, and that was us right Day one working with you and your wonderful team. So you have a really diverse set of clients, which includes, you know, up-and-coming tech companies trying to disrupt Uber and Lyft. I know it includes some big corporations, but what's special, at least to me, about your client base is that it does include a lot of churches, pastors and ministries. Can you talk about why it is you serve this particular client base? 22:07 - Speaker 1 Yeah, thanks, you know, it's because what I know, it's because of what we know. When we first started our company in 2007, I actually called a friend of mine who was a good friend, who worked for Joel Osteen Ministries in Houston, and I said, hey, I've got a new company, I'd like to pitch you on some social media stuff. And he said, okay, come on down, pitch. And later we ended up creating the social media strategy for what's now called Jill O'Seen Ministries in Lakewood Church and they were clients for 10 years until I sold that first company. But because we had them as a client, of course people saw that and it just kind of people told people and we grew Um plus, we know how to how to work in that world. We know how to work in the faith infrastructure and we're learning best practices there as well. So we could combine all of that together. 23:17 I think if you only work in one vertical, you don't know everything. Yeah, so I mentioned the Rideshare company, clearly not a faith-based venture, but the experience that we're learning there we could definitely carry on to all of our other churches. I mean, we've had some amazing. We've worked with organizations that feed the hungry. We've done mega churches. We helped a pastor in New Jersey raise money by running a triathlon for a care center in New Jersey just recently. We've worked for the organization that helps persecuted Christians around the world. We have a client in India. The largest Christian church in India is one of our dear friends and clients. They have almost 50,000 people every Sunday in their church services. 24:05 - Speaker 3 Wow. 24:05 - Speaker 1 We're very proud to do them, to help them, and I mean the list goes on. We have a couple of Christian musicians four maybe now we work with that are in the Christian music space, that we're helping them with either album launches or reviving their careers their careers and a bunch of authors, including bestselling authors, and one of our Christian authors actually sold their story to Netflix, so we ended up working with Netflix on the project. 24:40 - Speaker 3 Wow. 24:41 - Speaker 1 And so that's a lot, isn't it? So it's a lot of fun, a lot of fun clients. 24:49 - Speaker 3 Yeah Well, with so many ministries that you work with that have deep impact, can you call out maybe one campaign or one experience that was like it just stood out to you as like a God moment that just brought light into your life? 25:06 - Speaker 1 Okay, good question, Alicia, you're a good interviewer, you. 25:12 - Speaker 3 I've gotten pro tips from the best Brian. 25:17 - Speaker 1 There's two items I'm going to bring up. One was it's been a lot of years ago, it's way before COVID but we were doing the marketing for a Joel Osteen stadium baseball stadium event Joel Osteen Stadium baseball stadium event and they don't do them much anymore, but they basically rent out an entire baseball stadium and had a big church service so Yankee Stadium, nationals Park all over the country and we were in the middle of doing this event and we had set up a digital online prayer room where people who watched via streaming could come in and ask for prayer. Um, and the minute we turned it on, it broke because too many people wanted prayer and we're like we didn't think about that. Next time you figure that out. But, um, if you go back to my childhood, all my family are pastors. If you go back to my childhood, all my family are pastors. My cousins are pastors, chaplains so many pastors in our family and so they all thought, well, Brian going to be a pastor too someday. 26:24 I went into technology and marketing, right, but it was during this one Jill Osteen event where I looked at the counter in our little chat room thing and I want to say we had a quarter million people participating in viewing and chatting Wow, way, more than 30,000 in the stadium, right. And I called my mom on the phone and I said, mom, look, we are, we are, we're reaching quarter million people with the gospel right now. You know, and she goes you are a pastor, you are a pastor. And so I think, um, that moment I'm never going to forget that moment. My mom passed away two years ago and so it's a special moment that I carry with me, uh, now, yeah, um, so that that's. There's probably more stories, but that's one that really stands out. 27:17 - Speaker 3 That is a beautiful one, Brian, and it definitely resonates with me. I mean, I, through building Faithly, have met a lot of pastors and ministry leaders, and some of the most on-fire ministry leaders aren't pastors pastors but are serving the kingdom in really unique and special and needed ways, like in technology, and of course, it's one of the ways that we want to be able to serve All right. So I want to switch gears again and sort of pick your brain for advice for emerging pastors or emerging ministries that might not have much of a digital presence, or emerging ministries that might not have much of a digital presence For someone who's just starting out, who really doesn't have much of a presence but kind of knows that they ought to what is one piece of advice that you think they need to hear right now? 28:09 - Speaker 1 Well, you know, I'll go back to our favorite client story. You know it's good if you have content. We've had people come to us and want a marketing plan and they don't have any content. They have nothing to talk about. That's a little bit of a problem. So having something to say or produce is important, so think about what content you're going to put out there. Number two is important, so think about what content you're going to put out there. Number two is consistency. 28:43 I've seen too many people put out one or two posts, three posts, and stop for six months, or they'll produce a podcast and then they'll stop. You need to be consistent. You need the algorithms to do their thing right. So, even if you're not getting huge amounts of listens or something, be consistent. You know we produce a lot of podcasts here at CCB, so if anybody wants a podcast, give us a call. But one of our podcasters is a church pastor out of Southern California. We're heading into three and a half years on his podcast now. He's really done no marketing for the podcast at all, but he's been consistent twice a week every week for the last three and a half years. Year one 20 listens, 30 listens, 100 listens. Year two more. Year three more. Now we're getting 50,000 listens a day. 29:36 - Speaker 3 Wow. 29:38 - Speaker 1 I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, so nobody quote me on this, but it's in that range, it's in the millions, and really it's the consistency that really is key. And then I think, probably, diversity. You know, don't just do a YouTube video and hope that it lands. You could take that same concept. Let's say you're a Sunday, you have a pastor, you're a Sunday, you do your Sunday sermon, you produce a sermon anyway. You could take that video of the sermon on Monday, put it on YouTube, then you could take a same sermon, strip the audio from it and make an audio podcast out of it. You could take that same sermon, take the audio, run it through your favorite AI program and you can make a blog out of it. And you could take that blog and make an email blast out of it. And now your one Sunday sermon has created five, six plus social media pieces of content. And you're really working smart, not hard. And so I think off the top of my head. Those are the four or five things I would really focus on. 30:41 - Speaker 3 Brent, I can almost hear the pencils and pens scratching as our listeners take copious notes here. I asked you for one piece of advice, but we got like four or five for free. Thank you about that, okay. So let me ask you something else. So I think that some pastors and ministry leaders are a little uneasy about platform building because they've been, they've been warned about, right, the dangers. We all know the dangers, right, but you know, what would you say to that leader who knows that they have a vision or a message from the Lord that they really want to share? How do you think about that uneasiness or the pitfalls? 31:28 - Speaker 1 Interesting Isn't the goal of a clergy, or pastor or missionary to reach the lost, reach eyeballs. 31:37 - Speaker 2 Yeah. 31:38 - Speaker 1 And you don't do that by locking yourself in a closet. So we may not all agree with X's platform or Facebook's platform, and certainly you don't need to send your money to any sort of an organization you don't feel comfortable with, but that's where people are. I mean, Jesus went where the people were. He went to the mountainside, he went to the sea and he spoke to the people where they were congregated. So if podcasting is where millions and millions of people get their content every day, there's no better place for you, pastor, than to create your content and distribute it there. I'd say each pastor or each content creator needs to feel their own ethics and what they feel like. I've seen plenty of pastors who said I'm leaving X because I don't agree with so-and-so's protocol. Well, that's fine, but if you want to be where the people are and have your content be exposed, then then it's just something to think about, I think. I think everyone needs to come to their own conclusion, but but uh, certainly you'd want to be where there's people listening and people participating. 32:54 - Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, that's good. Um, okay, Brian, you've mentioned podcasting two, three or four times in this conversation. Podcasting is becoming a key part of digital marketing, not just within its own channel, but as a source of content that can be repurposed for diversity, as you very smartly pointed out. For someone who's looking and, of course, you've helped us, I should point out, level up you know on our podcast abilities a great deal, which we're very grateful for. So what are the two or three things that you could share with someone who's thinking like podcasting might be an interesting channel for them to explore? 33:33 - Speaker 1 Sure, I think, kind of go back to that other comments, unfortunately but one is have a content plan or a content calendar, build up a little calendar, a six-month calendar, and put in on the dates what you think you'd like to talk about. Number two don't be afraid to have a guest. I don't think I have anybody who I've asked to be a guest on my podcast. It's called Conversations with Giants and on our Conversations with Giants podcast, every person I've asked to be a guest on my podcast it's called Conversations with Giants, and on our Conversations with Giants podcast, every person I've asked to be a guest has said yes, even somebody super important which I'm interviewing this week, which I can't believe. You said yes to me, so you'd be surprised who won't jump to tell their story or something. 34:20 - Speaker 3 Yeah, I was super nervous to ask you, Brian, but thankfully you said yes. 34:23 - Speaker 1 Oh yeah, sure. No, you're talking about the next guest. 34:26 - Speaker 3 He's the next person. 34:30 - Speaker 1 And then back to consistency. You know, even if it's a five minute podcast, stay consistent. You know, every time you produce a podcast, a push notification goes out to everyone. You know, every time you produce a podcast, a push notification goes out to everyone, and so it really is a very powerful tool. We do a lot of stuff behind the scenes to make our podcasters really get out there, and that's why we have millions of podcasts a month being downloaded off our network, and I won't go into that here. But there's more than just actually talking. There's a lot of metadata and other distribution that you want to do correctly, and so I feel bad when someone doesn't have all the effort to get they put good content but they forget how to do the distribution, for instance. So we love helping our friends with that stuff. 35:14 - Speaker 3 Yeah, you bring something really special to the table with all of that, Brian. Okay, so last question for you, Brian, you sit at a really, really unique spot the intersection of the church, digital marketing technology, working with all different kinds of companies, not just churches. From your vantage point, what really excites you about the future of the church and digital about? 35:42 - Speaker 1 the future of the church and digital. You know it's Alicia. That's a good one, Alicia. We had a project recently that crossed several different mediums at the same time and that was pretty exciting. There was a book, there was social media, there was video, youtube, and then there was this Netflix film, all on the same topic and it wasn't a, you know, hit over the head evangelistic product, but it was a faith-based product and that was really exciting because we got to see everybody work together. 36:27 And you know there's a lot of talk about influencers and creators and just about anybody could be a creator these days, um, but but there are some pretty dumb stuff out there getting a lot of millions of views on YouTube right now. So I I would get excited if there was a pastor or church who wanted to explore how do I do something different, stay true to my values, my values and my faith, but utilize all these platforms to the best of their ability to reach the most amount of people with the gospel. Like I mentioned, we had this one project where we saw Netflix and YouTube everything weigh in on the same campaign, and that was really exciting. So I think those multifaceted campaigns can be very exciting. They don't need to be millions of dollars, but I think if you can take your campaign and hit all the channels, ways to share the gospel, as long as you're willing to sort of chambers and west side highway with like a flipping, flipping sign flip, flip, flip and they were handing out ziploc baggies with water bottles and like spearmints, mints and gum to anybody who walked by in a car and about the church terms was inside that Ziploc baggie. 38:19 Right, that's marketing. Yeah, that's also marketing, you know. I'll leave you with an anecdote. It's been a few years ago but I was driving off of a highway onto an exit ramp and I came to the bottom of the exit ramp and there was somebody trying to raise money. You know, somebody was actually asking for money at the bottom of the ramp. 38:46 So, you come to the stoplight and you wait and they come through, you know, and he was holding up a sign, but I couldn't read his sign and I said what this gentleman needs is a better marker, right? So marketing isn't just a Facebook post. It could be the sign flipper on the road, it could be your podcast, it could be, you know, standing up on Sunday and saying, hey, everybody, take a second, scan this QR code, let's make this thing happen. It's all marketing. And I think step back and look at your entire plan and see if your whole plan is holistic and talks to each other. 39:27 - Speaker 3 Yeah, I love it. Well, Brian, I am a client, I'm a friend, and I still learned something today in this master class on marketing. 39:38 - Speaker 1 I'm honored to be partnering with Faithly. I think everyone on my team I know everyone on my team thinks the world of Faithly and we know that you have an amazing future and we're excited about Faithly and your launch and we just hope everyone has a chance to go to faithlyco, install the app, create your membership and it's really an amazing, amazing organization. 40:08 - Speaker 3 We really are proud to be part of it. Thank you, Brian. I know I keep saying last thing and you keep saying last thing you'll say, but this is the last, last, last thing For those who are following along in the Faithly journey. We are in the very final stages, at the time of recording, of testing our new app, which will hit the App Store on September 1st, and it took Brian to take a look at the test app to say, hey, I think you may have forgotten your logo on the app and really, like I mean that's you know we're so busy trying to make sure all the you know widgets work and all the buttons take you to the right place and it doesn't crash. 40:48 And when you work with Brian, that's really the kind of person that you work with is someone who takes a step back, looks at the big picture. It's not just about you know. Are we hitting the specific digital channels, but are we marketing? There are so many opportunities to market and when it comes to sharing the gospel for ministries, church leaders, pastors, you don't want to miss an opportunity. 41:11 - Speaker 1 Yeah, and listen, you're doing everyone. You have beta testers on your app and all that sort of stuff, and everyone has different eyeballs and sees different things, a different lens and all that sort of stuff, and everyone has different eyeballs and sees different things, a different lens, and so I'm sure I missed things that other people saw. So I'm glad we had a chance to work with you on that. 41:27 - Speaker 3 Well, thank you so much, Brian. Like I said, this has been a masterclass and also just a really fun conversation with the friends. I really appreciate it, Brian. 41:35 - Speaker 1 Thanks, Alicia, and we need to have diner French fries again very soon. 41:39 - Speaker 3 That's right, coming right up All right. 41:42 - Speaker 2 Thank you, sir. Thank you for tuning in to the Faithly Stories podcast. We pray this episode gave you the encouragement you needed to continue on your journey. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff and volunteers. Committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff and volunteers. The Faithly digital platform offers innovative and practical tools and resources to enhance connection, foster collaboration and promote growth within the church and ministry space. Remember to subscribe, rate and review our podcast to help reach more listeners like you. Stay tuned for more uplifting tales from the front lines of ministry on the Faithly Podcast. Stay bold, stay faithful and never underestimate the power of your own story.