BGBS 061: Beau Haralson | ScaleThat | Find YOUR Success In Its Season

Beau Haralson has over a decade of experience launching products and building brands both big and small including Google, Traffic & Conversion, DigitalMarketer, OfficeMax, and many others.

Over the years he’s worked with celebrities such as Lebron James and Arnold Schwarzenneger, and entrepreneurs that deserve to be celebrities, doubling over 15 businesses along the way. 

As the co-founder of ScaleThat, Beau is the creative force behind all campaigns that ScaleThat Select works with. He regularly consults for brands and speaks surrounding his unique approach to marketing strategy, campaign architecture, and generating traffic and conversions predictably.

In this episode, you’ll learn…

• Be patient and pursue things fully, but don’t pursue them all at once. You can have your definition of success in its own season.


• We think that our career and worldview have to be binary and put in a box, but there is so much we can do and learn in one lifetime. Get comfortable trying new things—you never know what you’ll find.


• Small brands may want to be big, but big brands want to be small. A small brand’s greatest advantage is that they’re nimble and able to create amazing relationships early on. Big brands study that!

Resources

Instagram: @beauharalson

Website: scalethat.com

Quotes

[31:40 ] I think success is iterative. I think that people think success is like, “Man, if I could just buy a Lamborghini one day…” That would be the marker of success for some people and that’s great. If that motivates you, fast cars are cool, I get it, go for it. But I think like your definition of success can change every six months if it needs to.

[38:17 ] I wanted to be a great husband and be a great dad. And if I had to be a “good businessman”, that was okay. I’d rather not be a great businessman and a good husband and a good dad, or maybe potentially a bad dad because I run out of hours.

[44:15 ] A lot of people want success now and they define it in a certain way. But I think you can be patient and have your definition of success in its own season.

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Podcast Transcript

Beau Haralson 0:02


And it all felt complicated at the time. But like, in hindsight, he was right, right, like life does have a propensity to get a little bit more complicated as you go on. I still encourage people that are that have that call to entrepreneurship, no matter the life stage, but but I’m glad I took the dive then. And you’re right. It was admittedly scary at that time. I think I remember the first time I got like a 15 $100 check from our first client. And I felt like it was like, This is crazy. Just like felt so real to me. So scary. And then I was like, well, like, would I get the check to, you know?

Just like it all gets real. Like, oh, yeah, there’s no departments for anything. There we go.

Marc Gutman 0:50


podcasting from Boulder, Colorado. This is the Baby Got Back story podcast. we dive into the story behind the story of today’s most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like big backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, and on today’s episode of Baby got backstory. We were talking with Beau Harrelson, the co founder and brand strategist at Scale That and dedicated parent that the Harrelson family.

Before we get into the show, here’s a not so gentle reminder. If you like and enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over at Apple podcasts or Spotify. Apple and Spotify use these ratings as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on their charts. Today’s guest is Beau Haralson. Beau has over a decade of experience launching products and building brands both big and small, including Google traffic and conversion, digital marketer, Office Max and many others. Over the years, he’s worked with celebrities such as LeBron James and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and entrepreneurs that deserve to be celebrities, doubling over 15 businesses along the way.

Beau is the creative force behind all campaigns that Scale That works with and is regularly consulted surrounding his unique approach to marketing strategy, campaign architecture in generating traffic and conversions predictably. But what is really fascinating about Beau, is his decision to put family first and build a company in life that supports that. A little side note, if you would have asked nine year old Marc what name he wished his parents would have chosen for him. They would have been Beau, inspired by Beau and Luke Duke fame. But I always wanted to be a Beau. Let’s get back to today’s Beau. Beau Haralson talks about working on the now famous of yourself campaign with officemax what big brands really want, and how small brands can compete in this is his story.

I am here with Beau Haralson, the co founder and CEO of Scale That Beau, thanks for coming on. And let’s get right to it. We’re both digging out of snow and dealing with snow here in Colorado. So well, we’re running a little late. But I wanted to start off with real simple thought of a question of what is Scale That? that’s the name of your company. Tell me a little bit about Scale That.

Beau Haralson

Yeah, number one, thanks for having me. I’m really honored to be here. And Marc, it’s been great to I felt comfortable wearing hat today. Because I know you love a good hat. And so anyway, thanks for thanks for that. But the name Scale That ultimately came from, I’ve been doing agency work and help them grow brands for the better part of a decade plus, and fortune 500 brands and everything in between. and the number one thing I see folks get wrong is they just scale the wrong thing. And as long as I want, like, it’s not like we woke up that day and said, you know, let me just grow my business in the wrong way. We’re all well intentioned people. But one of the things I’m really passionate is helping people find the right thing to scale. It’s not a matter of if people want to scale, that’s usually not the conversation, it’s usually figuring out the right thing to grow. And the right way to grow a business and so, so getting a little bit cheeky with it, we’re like yeah, let’s call it Scale That.

Beau Haralson 4:24


because those those are the moments we look for and conversations with folks and help them grow their business and go, Hey, hey, that’s nothing skill that. So taking a bit of that excitement, and that’s how we ended up the name. Very cool, you know, and I think that we hear this word scale all the time, you know, scale this, scale that I want to scale. You want to scale, let’s all scale right. But I think that much like the genesis of your name, you know, it has different definitions. I think it means different things to different people. What’s it mean to you? Like, how do you define that? Yeah, it’s interesting. I think people

Definitely romanticize the concept of scale. I mean, you know, I think it’s definitely every entrepreneurs dream to find that that predictable path to revenue is words that I hear tossed around, there’s a great book of that title, written by his name escapes, I think, is Aaron

Rodgers, but one of the early guys at Salesforce and talks about this idea of predictable path to revenue, and everyone kind of caught on to that idea of like, Okay, if marketing can get predictable, if sales can get predictable, and we can scale, then like, that’s the that’s the golden ticket. And and to some extent, you know, marketing has gotten to be somewhat predictable. You can you can figure out your customer acquisition costs, and figure out some of the customer journey. But there’s, there’s part of this lightning and bottle that’s just elusive. And I think, to answer your question, ideas, scale, to me means finding that as close as you can, finding that algebra equation, if you will, going, Okay, if we do this, and we do that, it’ll cost us x, and the output is y. And if we, if we do that consistently, then we’ll grow in scale. The challenges is those inputs change, marketing changes, people change, we’re kind of complicated ourselves.

So it’s an ever-complex kind of system of variables. And then deep within that is the question of scale readiness, a lot of a lot of companies will get into it. And they’ll find that path to scale. And then, you know, they’ll break. we’ve, we’ve run a lot of folks out of inventory, we’ve broken some companies, and I think, like, part of our questionnaires we get to know companies is are you ready to scale. And you know, there’s assumptions within that. And often in fixing those things and taking a half step back, you’ll find more efficient ways to scale, you’ll

just get more exciting from there. But so I think, as much as I love to talk about scale, what I love to talk about is growth, readiness, and close proximity to that as well. Because that’s the thing, you can control some of those variables, you can’t kind of at the top of the funnel, but the things you can’t control is like if you were to say, sell 500 units or whatever you’re selling or fulfill, I have to fulfill five more contracts this this week. Would it break you? Are you ready?