How To Leverage Your Brand Story To Grow Your Business: Wayne Partello -

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now Sebastian Frost. Wayne welcome to the show. What's up, buddy? How are you? Dude, how long did it take this long to get you on the podcast? How long have we known each other?

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Uh gosh, at this point's gotta be like 13 years, 12, 13 years. Yeah. I don't know. You just never asked. I actually had to ask you. It's no big deal. All right, I take all the blame.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

It's all my fault. I'm just kidding. Well, dude, finally, great to finally get you on the show, anyhow. I know we had a call uh last month and got a huge download, big catch-up uh call and found out what was going on in in both of our worlds. So it's just been so cool to stay connected with you. You and I uh first connected um when you were with my beloved Miami Dolphins. Yeah, and um I don't really remember who did someone introduce us some yeah, I think it was Dave Murphy, who was one of our sponsorship guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Murph uh was like, You got to meet this guy, met him at this event, he's wild and he speaks the same language you do. He's always talking about the social media, da-da-da-da-da. You know, I got to the Dolphins in 2010, and social media was sort of like in its early stages in the business world, and you know, especially in the sports world, like people are still trying to figure out. And um, yeah, Dave was like, This guy, he talks like the same things you're talking about. You guys should meet. He rolled into my office, bow tie and all, and uh and then cool security with this guy. What is up with this guy? But uh, it was great, man. We you know, we obviously um we're following the same trends, paying attention to the same, you know, sort of metrics and and and how business was it was in the infancy, but you know, to see where it's all gone from that point to today and you know, all the different businesses that have sprouted from it, you know, you're doing your own thing, I'm now doing my own thing. And uh yeah, it's been wild, dude. Totally has.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

So let's back up a little bit. Let's let's give some context. Let's let's help our listeners better understand the what's the whole story. Sometimes people start after high school, sometimes people start after college. Sure. Where did the beginning of your stories, you know, career-wise and life-wise, really start to take shape?

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Yeah, so I can't do it from college because I kind of skipped that step. So bad a boy. Uh yeah. So uh uh I, you know, graduating high school, I was a young kid. So I in in high school, I was fortunate. Um, we had a video production studio in our school. Um, we um in our town back in the day when you had like cable systems put into towns, they could negotiate for things, and our town negotiated for a public access. We had a public access TV studio, and they were running like uh ads for if you want to learn how to produce TV, you can take these free classes. So at like 14 years old, I learned how to edit, and then I then we had a program in the high school, etc. Um, graduating high school, I didn't want to do this as a career. Um, I wanted to be a police officer because I saw that you got a motorcycle and a gun, and I thought that was pretty cool. So graduated the police academy uh in Winter Haven, Florida. I grew up in Boston, but I went to the academy in Winter Haven, Florida when I was 19 years old. Uh, got home from the academy and started DJing. Um, and DJing kind of took off for me, doing a lot of that. Um, DJing turned into going to work for a radio station. Um, I worked in radio for uh 10 years. Um on the radio side, I was in the promotions, but I really wanted to be on air. I made my way into the marketing department and in the cluster of stations, we had a sports radio station. I wanted to be a top 40, you know, uh DJ. Um I ended up on the air uh at a rock station, at a dance station, and I was like the live host for all the sports events. My first week on the job was uh Patriots Raider snowball game um with that station. And I did, you know, through my tenure at that at the sports station, which at the time was the number one sports radio station in America. We had uh, I think it was three Super Bowls, two World Series, and an NBA championship during my tenure. And during that time was also the internet was was bubbling up. And um, my boss was uh was a thinker and a strategist and saw that the internet was coming on board. It's actually a great story. This guy from I think it was Yahoo or Google came to speak to our entire sales group. Can we swear on here? Is that allowed? Yeah, you can do whatever you want. I don't know what your rules are. All right, cool. There are no rules. He stood up in front of our office. He talked the whole thing. He's talking about the digital age and where it's all going. This is probably 2007. And he looks around and he was like, Let me tell you something. I love your radio station, it's incredible, but you're all fucked if your bosses don't figure out how to adapt to the internet because it's come, it's here. It's not that it's coming, it's here. Like, let's go. And my boss just locked himself up with like 15 books and started figuring it out. And so I worked on the dot-com side um at the radio station for a little bit and then had the opportunity uh to go to Miami and work for the Dolphins. Um, I got brought down as senior director of content shortly thereafter. I was so I was running like their in-house radio broadcast and and creating a show called the FinSiders. Um, and then got brought to overseas social media. Then I was overseeing, then I added website shortly thereafter. I had the opportunity to go uh to San Diego, where I became the chief marketing officer for the San Diego Padres. Uh, for me, that was an incredible opportunity to uh obviously take all the skills that I had acquired, also adding PR um uh to my team uh when I moved when I got to San Diego. So awesome. We got there uh in 2013. I stayed through November 2020. So I did seven years. Uh it was an amazing experience. My family and I love San Diego. Um, I had done everything I wanted to do with the Padres. I'd been given some really clear goals of things that needed to happen during my time. Uh about 2018, 2019, started to realize that I had accomplished those goals and and and the next thing for the organization was now it's time to win, which is amazing. And I can't wait for them to win. But for my career, that wasn't the best thing for me, was to sit around and wait for that to happen. The next opportunity for my growth um was to start my own business, and so that's where we're at today.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

I love that. I remember going out to I was in San Diego for a gig, and uh, you're like, Come on by, man. And dude, you brought me I got the full tour, man. Stadium, we were downstairs and walked down. Remember, you brought us to this door, and all of a sudden we're on the field, like, this is amazing. And you had you had a good you had really, I mean, you were running the show over there.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

It was, you know, I never expected to be in the position that I was in. It was never something that was I felt like I was owed. I took every day as a blessing. And I really um I used to tell everybody when you would come visit me with the access that I have, I want everybody to be able to experience what I got to experience every day. And so I would try to find, you know, I would challenge my staff to go find fans from the stands and give them those experiences because we had the access to it, and it all it took was a little bit of time and effort to create an amazing moment for somebody. And so I just love that stuff. And and yeah, I think that's the big difference is you know, you we joked about, you know, I didn't go to college. It it also forced me to live in my career without a safety net. There was no safety net. I got one shot. And so when you know that about yourself and you're okay and you're self-aware enough to know that this was you, you went through the slalom course of life, and somehow at the end you're you're getting there and you're you're in this experience and you're at this role where uh you're getting this incredible experience, but how do you then pay that forward to to make sure and use that power to give as many this amazing access to this brand that you get to Shepherd? Uh, was was was a real awesome part of that job.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about what you're doing now. I mean, what what was next after that? Was obviously doing your own thing, launching your own business, which you've done an incredible job of. You guys are absolutely rocking and rolling, still dabbling in the world of professional sports as well. Dude, let's talk about how this whole thing came came to be.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Yeah, I've always I've always been an entrepreneur, I've always kind of done my own thing, I've always side hustled. Um, I think that was one of the things that was not normal, right? Like I was in my 20s, having three or four jobs was a weird thing. People, a generation before us, got a job and then they went there and they went home. And for me, I joke with my friends all the time. Like they take golf lessons. I like to start businesses, and that's okay, right? That's where my mind goes, and I enjoy that. Uh, I know we're both fans of Gary Vanderchuk. Like he sort of started to normalize that lifestyle a little bit, where it was like, oh, I'm not as weird as I thought I was. There are other people like me that that's where that is fun and entertaining for them to do this. So um, in my early days at the radio station, I started a promotional uh marketing agency with two buddies. Uh, we ran um beer promotions and liquor promotions from Southern New Hampshire through Rhode Island uh for many years. That was a side hustle for me, their full-time jobs. I was I was just an owner of the company. Um, and then after that, I started uh my second DJ company, which really blew up. And I was, you know, doing a bunch of stuff. I toured with Coors Light in the NFL for a whole football season, which was incredible. Flying in, hosting parties all over the country, flying home and back to my full-time job during the day. But I worked it out with my bosses to be able to do it. And so this was this was that. This was I I had sort of fulfilled all of my goals with the team. I needed to see through the final project, was the rebrand the launching of the new uniforms for the Padres that my team and I worked really hard on. Um, and that if you if you've never gone through that process, you you finish the work about a year and a half before they ever get unveiled. So you sort of have this time to like, okay, now what? And I knew I needed to see that through, um, but also at the same time realize that the next phase wasn't going to be something that really excited me. So uh I started thinking about what I wanted to do. And what was really important to me was to have a world that um I could take creative people and allow them to create. Um, I learned throughout the journey of becoming an executive that I had to really control my creative uh and allow my creatives to shine. What I realized was that when I started to infuse um my own creativity into their creativity, I started to kind of suck away the soul of their creativity. And so um my former creative director at one point pulled me aside and he was like, Hey man, let me ask you, is that wrong or do you just not like it personally? And that was a big lesson early for me as a chief marketing officer. I needed to get it to a place where it was right or wrong because we could move more efficiently, we could move quicker as an organization versus me moving this line a half of an inch over here because it felt right to me. But what I didn't realize was that line was there because the designer saw that it was symmetrically lined up with these other four elements, and me moving it a half inch really messed him up, right? And so um I think for me, that was a that was a huge, huge lesson. And so I really wanted to create that world where creatives could create and we could work, take the lessons from sports. You know, every business you go into, sales managers are using sports analogies all day long because we understand them. Well, I realized that I had all these experiences and all these lessons from sitting in the rooms that I had the I was fortunate enough to sit in to take those out to other businesses. The power of telling a story, so Cuento, which is the name of our business, it's right here. Uh, Cuento means story in Spanish. And so in sports, it's so natural to tell your story because for generations, other people have been showing up at your at your job to tell your story for you newspaper reporters, magazine reporters, TV. Well, so it was obvious that teams would start to tell their own story. Well, then players started to tell their own story, and then I realized that every business should be telling their own story. They don't realize it yet, but you know, we that that that became the impetus of what we wanted to create with Quento, which is a world where creatives create and we help businesses tell their story, define their story. Who do you want to be? What do you want to be known for? Brand is such like a cloudy word, man, right? Like, oh, it's a buzzword. But when you boil it down to like, what's your story? What do you what is your business? I mean, you know it better than anybody, man. You wear it on your shirt every day. This is what this is who I am, this is what I'm gonna be known for. There's no question you know what I do within four seconds of meeting me, right? And that's a big thing for every business needs to do it, and never missing an opportunity to tell your story.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

I love that. Never missing an opportunity to tell your story. If you're listening to this right now, you're not telling your story to your brand, you're missing out on a humongous part of the market share you could be capitalizing on because people resonate with stories. I mean, they we they we they have since almost the beginning of time, um, and it will continue to. It's just gotten a lot easier now with with technology.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

It it's gotten easier to spread the story, telling the story evolves, right? But storytellers have always been at the center of the creative universe, right? Like commercials are telling a story, everybody's connecting with that. The the gatekeepers have been removed, though. So the days of Sebastian, I just don't think you have what it takes to work on air at our radio station. Right? Yeah, okay. Oh, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna go to the next radio station. Well, today you bought yourself an on-air light, you got yourself that microphone, you know, it's just like game on, let's go. So when you remove the gatekeepers, right, everybody has the opportunity to tell their story. I've had a client and you'll love this. Like, oh, well, I saw that that podcast, you know, for that other business got 43 views on YouTube. Like that would kill my ego that it only got that. And I said, but what's the purpose? If you do things with purpose and you have a strategy, and then each tactic ladders up to that strategy with purpose, what's the purpose? And I I said, for that person, I know the purpose of their podcast. They want when you Google them that you see them having really informative, powerful conversations that are in and out of their industry, but really you get a chance to learn and see them and get to know them, and that there's a great content attached to their name everywhere in this sort of web. And so that's the difference, right? And you know, when you meet with those folks, I know the business you're in. I mean, these guys literally share the story with another client from me where they said one of the business partners didn't get the power of a podcast, didn't understand why they were going to put resources, time, effort, money behind it. And on the backside, a year later, said we sat down at a meeting. It was a cold. We we had a scheduled meeting, but we had never met the other person, and he was so excited to meet us. I mean, what? How why would they be so excited to meet us? We were so excited to meet us because he had Googled us, up came a podcast, he saw the topic. We were interviewing a former NFL player, his son played high school football. He sat down, was like called his son in, and they spent a half hour with my business partner and I. And when he sat down with us, it was like he already knew us and couldn't wait to do business with us. And he, I was like, So I shared that we he they shared that with another client, and it was like, you understand that that was the purpose of this. Of those four three views, one was the person I wanted to see it that I needed to see it, that it actually worked for our business. It was an incredible sales tool to move the ball forward. We provided a service, we provided free content, but we also provided you a a sneak peek into meeting us before we get there. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

And exactly what I teach on a daily basis. And where my you know, my life's mission is making sure that that message lands uh for everyone to understand the power behind all. Because I mean, again, it's a phenomenal example. Thanks for sharing that, by the way. Uh well, dude, it's been so good to uh to to catch up over the past couple months here and the show and uh just so inspired by the growth you've you've been able to to to achieve in just a very short short amount of time, you know, launching this this empire of yours over here.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

So you know, I tell everybody, Sebastian, you know, as as you know, as an entrepreneur, you're we're as good as we uh as our next deal, right? It is we are every day earning our spot with our partners that we don't take any of it for granted. Just like I did on sports, it's you know, there's no safety net. This is you know, like you, um, my business partner, Katie Jackson and I, we started this on our own. Uh we bootstrap this thing. We now have 10 full-time people working at Quento, um, with any given month, anywhere between 15 and 25 part-timers helping us fulfill everything that needs to happen for our partners. So um, we're working with teams on the team side, but we're working with businesses outside of sports. And at the end of the day, a story is a story, right? It's it's how well it's written and more importantly, how well it's told. And so that's where we spend our time. And it's been awesome, dude. It's great to reconnect with you. And I've been following you for all these years and seeing your journey and you know, just the your commitment and passion for what you do is is second to none. And uh I love it. And it's been a blast catching back up with you and and and you know, obviously hope to do more stuff together in the future.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Absolutely. I appreciate it and appreciate those kind words. Uh, encouraging to hear, especially from a longtime friend. GPT, write them for me, bro. Yeah, I figured it does those prompts. So what button did you push for those right now? Okay, Sebastian Testimonial. No, I'm proud of you, man. It's awesome. Likewise, my brother. Thanks again for your time and uh for hanging out with me for a few minutes here. And uh look forward to keeping in touch and I'm sure we're gonna do something one of these days here. Heck yeah, buddy. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.