280. Ross Pomerantz: From pro baseball to Corporate Bro, the BTS of navigating his career identity, making over $100K on LinkedIn, Super Bowl commercial with Matthew McConaughey, and beyond

Summary

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Trading Secrets Episode 279: Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro) on Pro Baseball, Career Identity, LinkedIn Monetization, Super Bowl Commercials & More

Release Date: February 23, 2026
Host: Jason Tartick
Guest: Ross Pomerantz (aka Corporate Bro)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Jason Tartick welcomes Ross Pomerantz—better known as Corporate Bro—for a candid, hilarious, and insight-packed discussion. Pomerantz traces his path from hopeful pro baseball player to Oracle enterprise sales and, ultimately, becoming a leading voice and satirist in the B2B content world. The conversation dives deep into identity transitions, the realities of sales and content entrepreneurship, building a personal brand, the secrets to viral content, monetizing LinkedIn, working with giants like Salesforce and Matthew McConaughey, and making business a family affair.

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Key Discussion Points

1. From Pro Baseball to Corporate Sales

• Ross's Baseball Journey

  • Played in independent leagues ("not affiliated is the equivalent of single A" – 04:24).
  • Low pay ($1,000/month for three months; 04:35), challenging odds to make MLB.
  • "That's why there was the whole lawsuit with minor leaguers not getting paid fair wages...most minor league guys still work construction or do camps all summer." (04:48)

• Transition to Sales

  • Identity crisis as a former athlete—“You’re always the pitcher to your parents’ friends. It’s weird to lose that.” (07:36)
  • Entered Oracle “not knowing what business development meant…just that it sounded cool.” (07:40)
  • The grind: “Just started training to make cold calls. That’s where the sadness began.” (08:03)

2. Identity, Longevity, and Evolving the Brand

• Corporate Bro vs. Ross

  • “There’s also the side of Ross who plays Corporate Bro, making business decisions, thinking about the next brand step.” (09:17)
  • Need for strategic evolution due to “bro” connotations in tech: “I had to differentiate…or I’d miss brand deals and gigs.”

• Managing Longevity

  • “The content has to evolve. I’m not a single Marina bro anymore, now I’m a corporate dad.” (10:24)
  • "If you’d told me offices would basically go away and people would WFH, I would’ve said you were insane. You have to keep thinking about what’s next." (11:10)

3. Navigating Enterprise Sales and the Creator Leap

• Enterprise Sales Realities

  • Missed the 'true golden age' of tech sales but “there were still reps making millions…mostly in their 60s” (12:11).
  • At 23: $60k base, $60k OT ("on-target earnings"); potential to over-achieve but “your commission is like 0.0002% of the deal" (13:10).
  • Highest sales year: ~$250k (13:41).

• The Leap to Content

  • Ran Corporate Bro as a side gig for 8 years during his sales career; felt dismissed as the “funny guy”.
  • “I do think sales is the most important skill there is...but I was done doing it in tech.” (14:59)

4. The Power of Sales Skills & Negotiation

• Jason's ask: trading secrets, tips, or tricks for everyone, not just sales pros.
• Ross’s Sales Nuggets:
  • “If you’re negotiating, it means they’re in.” (16:44)
  • “Don’t chase maybes. No’s don’t hurt you; wasting time on maybe does.” (17:12)
  • “Timing is everything. There’s a lot of luck in sales, but luck is the residue of design.” (17:49, quote played up at 18:16)

5. Stanford MBA, Privilege & Financial Literacy

• Ross grinds to get into Stanford’s MBA: “I studied for 8 months, took the GRE five times.” (19:56)
• Paid $200K for the full MBA, family supported: “Whatever you want educationally, we’ll pay for it.” (20:55)
• Reflections on privilege and teaching kids about loans and money management (21:03).

6. Content Creation: From Vine to Virality

• Vine origins: “Six-second jokes. No algorithm. No monetization. Vine was ahead of its time.” (22:08)
• Pivot to Instagram as the platform shifted to support longer form and more discoverability (23:12).

Monetization Journey

• Didn't monetize content for ~7 years: “As soon as I was getting paid to throw pitches, it was less fun…same for content, so I waited.” (23:36)
• 2020: “B2B started embracing content; that’s when the money really hit.” (24:32)

Audience and Content

• Audience: Now about 57% male, 43% female, increasingly diverse (26:22).
• “Majority B2B deals—just more money in it. I don’t love creative energy spent on brand deals.” (27:01)

Revenue Milestones

• Matched sales peak in 2021; now revenue is “mid-seven-figures” yearly (28:48).

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7. Systems, Team, and Making Viral Content

Running Lean

• Core team: “It’s me, my wife (manager), and one comedic writer/editor, Jesse.” (32:12)
• Use of recruiting firm for hiring.
• “Editing is my favorite—timing’s everything in comedy.” (34:49)

Process & Analytics

• Weekly structure: Monday meetings for pitching/planning, midweek writing/shooting, Friday editing. (37:04)
• Analyze performance two weeks back, rating each vid 1–5, discuss insights (“Are people laughing with us or at us?”).

What Makes a Hit Video?

• Virality formula: “Relatability. Shareability. Music and facial timing. People want to share it and feel seen.” (39:32)
• Content for niche vs. mass audience: “Some niche bits are for executives and insiders; martini video is for mass sharing.” (38:59)
• “You have to decide: Who is each video for? What benefit do they get?” (43:37)
• Scripting is key: “Most videos are written out…frontload the value and funniest lines.” (46:27)

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8. Money Talks: Brand Deals, Speaking, LinkedIn & Investments

Brand Deals & Speaking

• Most lucrative: Salesforce Super Bowl/Olympics ad campaign with Matthew McConaughey (“Equals one year of SaaS salary—$250k”; 49:17).
• Speaking gigs: “My profile lists $20–$30k, but it’s more.” (56:43)
• Range of events: keynotes, emceeing, hosting corporate gameshow/roasts, etc.

LinkedIn Monetization

• “Everyone thinks LinkedIn is cringe until it works. It’s like YouTube in 2010.” (52:07)
• 170k followers on LinkedIn; charges about 10% more for LinkedIn posts than Instagram.
• LinkedIn alone: “Yes, I’m making over $100K.” (54:58)

Angel Investments

• Runs an angel syndicate called Corp Capital (“Just an opportunity to connect sales folks and tech; around $1.5M deployed so far”). (58:08)

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9. Team Is Family: On Working with Spouse

• Wife as manager: “She’s very operational. We run the relationship like a business…quarterly check-ins, personal and professional goals.” (59:33)
• Biggest challenge: “Turning it off—work-life separation.” (61:01)

10. What’s Next? Scaling & CPG Ambitions

• “I want to build a CPG beverage company—functional, canned, maybe a little caffeine, ideally in every corporate fridge in America.” (61:23)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On sales & negotiation:

  • “Don’t chase maybes. No’s don’t hurt you.” (17:12, Ross)
  • “Luck is the residue of design.” (18:16, Ross)

• On content creation:

  • “As soon as I was getting paid to throw pitches, it was less fun…same for content.” (23:36, Ross)
  • “You have to decide who you’re doing it for—algorithm, you, or the audience.” (35:40, Ross)

• On monetization:

  • “My highest year in sales was $250k. It took me 10 years in content to match that—but now it’s mid-seven-figure revenue.” (27:43/28:48, Ross)

• On authenticity and following your passion:

  • “Everyone wants to be rich and famous, but for what? Find what you love so much you can't stop talking about—even on hard days." (62:46)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• On pro baseball salary/odds: 04:24–05:33
• Transition to Oracle/sales grind: 07:27–08:32
• Identity crisis and creator leap: 08:32–10:24
• Comp and realities of enterprise sales: 12:11–13:41
• Sales secrets & negotiation tips: 16:44–18:18
• Stanford MBA and privilege in education: 18:35–21:40
• Monetizing social/content strategy: 22:08–24:32
• Audience breakdown & relatability: 25:54–27:01
• Revenue milestones in content: 27:43–28:48
• Content production system/team: 32:12–37:04
• Viral video: the martini at happy hour: 39:32–40:11
• LinkedIn monetization details: 52:07–54:58
• Speaking fees & diversification: 56:42–58:08
• Angel syndicate: 58:08–59:21
• Wife as manager, work-life boundaries: 59:33–61:01
• Scaling & CPG beverage ambitions: 61:23–62:16
• Trading Secret (Passion = Longevity): 62:36–64:48

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The Trading Secret

“Find what you love so much you can't stop talking about—even in the darkest days. For me, it was making people laugh about the pain of my job…If you speak your truth and go all in, the passion leads to the money.”
— Ross Pomerantz (62:46)

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Where to Find Ross Pomerantz

• LinkedIn: Ross Pomerantz / Corporate Bro
• Instagram, TikTok, Everywhere: @corporate.bro

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Summary: Why This Episode Is a Must-Listen

Ross Pomerantz offers a masterclass in blending authenticity, business acumen, and raw humor to build a distinct, lucrative brand in a “boring” B2B niche. He breaks down the psychology of sales, the science of virality, and the realities behind creator monetization—especially in untapped platforms like LinkedIn. Ross is as strategic as he is funny, giving listeners actionable advice, inspiring transparency about money, and a window into the evolution of both business and personal identities in a digital world.

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For listeners in sales, content creation, entrepreneurship, or anyone curious about how to monetize skills (and personality) in the modern age—don’t miss this episode!

Transcript

[Jason Tardick]

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[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Welcome back to another episode of Trading Secrets. Today we're joined by the hilarious corporate bro and Ross Pomeranz. They're actually two different personalities under one home. We'll talk all about it. Someone who's lived in the high pressure, high performance world of corporate finance and selling at Oracle and actually has the scars and stories to prove it. Ross brings a real unfiltered, hilarious perspective on what enterprise sales really looks like behind the scenes. From ambition and burnout to the funny trade offs nobody talks about unless you're deep in it. He's covering at all. In this episode, we get into the psychology of how sales sucked turned into a massive empire. He's a speaker, investor, entrepreneur, and massive creator. Ross, let's get into it, man. It's good to have you on Trading Secrets.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Honored to be here. Welcome to my city.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Let's go. It's good to be in your city. So you called. I mean, you are born and raised in Atlanta, right?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I moved when I was 13.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

So, you know, I'm still a Braves fan.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I was a baseball player, you know, that was my still play baseball, but you know, sort of adopted the warriors when they were terrible and the Niners when they were fine. Like, I just, I was always a baseball guy in Atlanta, so I just stayed true to that. And then I guess now I'm a bandwagon fan is what everyone want to call me.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Jealous. You know, as a Bills guy, I'm jealous of that. You'll like this story. Actually when the Braves won the World Series, it was in Houston and we got tickets through the Braves team somehow and we were able to sneak into their after party. So we were at the after party with the Braves with the World Series partying our ass up. My cousin's from Atlanta was like the best that would be like if the Bills won Super rule. And I snuck into that. So anyway, I had to put that, that out there.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Wow. Well, all right, I'm jealous.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Well, that actually connects to where I want to start with you. So you, I read at LinkedIn you were a pro baseball player in an independent league, right? Not affiliated with minor. Correct.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Not affiliated is, you know, the equivalent of single A. Yeah. You got guys who are former Japanese major league guys or guys were in triple A, sort of guys on the way down and then guys on the way up.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay. And so you're weird mismatch. You played that for a year and a half?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I did. So two seasons. Yes, two seasons. And was like, I guess I could toil around here, but when you're making thousand dollars a month for three months just your playing season, it's not a lot of money to live off of.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Damn.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

That's why there was the whole lawsuit with minor leaguers not getting paid fair wages. And that's why most minor league guys still work construction or do camps like all summer long. You only get paid in season unless you're a bonus baby, you know, drafted early rounds, you get a seven million dollar signing bonus, you're getting paid next to nothing.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

That's crazy. How many of those people in single A will make it to major league?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Maybe a couple.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay, so it's hard.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, I mean there's, there's 40 rounds in the major league draft. It's not like the NBA where all the first round guys end up making the second round round guys don't. I mean there's a thousand plus guys that get drafted every year that come in.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And you know when you get drafted in the first round, the major league draft, you're not necessarily going to be a star. They're kind of like, this guy might be good enough to be a contributor at the major league level. You might not even be like a starter. You might just be a reserve guy and you still get drafted in the first round.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Interesting.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

So it's not like the NFL or NBA where if you're a first round guy, they kind of expect you to contribute heavily.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. Interesting. When you were in college, did you actually think I just said interesting And I saw that you just did a video making fun of people saying interesting.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

That's really interesting.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So yeah, I know you don't give a shit.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You're like, I could not give. I don't care about that.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Next subject. Moving on.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

That's okay.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I'm going to say interesting a lot today. No, I'm just playing. When you were in college, did you have the like, was the pipe dream real about being a major league player where you're like, I'm going to ride this out as long as I can.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Oh, in my head it was real, you know, I mean I was, I had my sophomore year, was talking to a couple teams.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I actually got like, everybody else got hurt. I was at a, I was a D3 guy, so I was already a long shot. I would have been drafted probably after like the 30th round. Basically, they'll pay for your playing ticket and let you come out and play for a season. If you suck, you're gone. But I ended up tearing my lad my senior year and that kind of went out the window. Went into selling luxury apartments in Oakland, California during the Occupy Wall street thing. Was training like a minor league team was coming to the Bay Area.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

So I was training in the parking garage at night.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Oh my God.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And just throwing into a net over and over again. I went to that, I got invited to that spring training and ended up

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

making that team interesting.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

So I like, I kind of had this dream. I was like, I know I've got a little more in the tank. I definitely punch above my weight class. I mean I'm 5 10, 5 11, left handed pitcher. I didn't throw that hard and you know, probably went about as far as I should have gone.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And when you're selling luxury apartments, how much can you make in a business like that?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Oh no, I mean not much. You're like, you're just a leasing kind of like sales associates. You know, I think I was probably making 85 grand.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You know, it was a brand new building but people were moving in there like it, it was not a hard sell.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It was like, you know what, it end in 2013. Right. So you know, 13 years ago, comparatively to what you're making a thousand dollars a month. I mean like you're hitting the chest compared to baseball.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, well, I didn't know I was gonna take such a pay cut to go back down and, and, and do that. You're living with like homestay families with three, you know, three of your teammates and so forth. But good crash course in sales.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Good crash course in SaaS, which set you up for enterprise. SaaS sales. Tell me about that transition from playing pro ball to going into Oracle was your first stop, right?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, I mean I think a lot of people when you're an athlete your whole life, you, that's like your identity. And I definitely went through an identity crisis of, you know, people would see my parents. How's your son, the pitcher? How's your son? Is he still playing ball? Like. No, he's, you know, and you're sitting there like, what the hell am I doing with my life? What am I going to do next? And like many washed up athletes, I ended up in sales. And there were a lot of ex baseball players at Oracle. The truth is I didn't know I was going into sales. It was called business development. I was like, fuck, yeah, let's go develop some businesses. I don't know what that means. Let's do it. Oracle. Oh, the same place the warriors play. I didn't know what Oracle did. No one, most people listening don't know what Oracle does. Yeah, sure, it's basically the, the piping of all things tech, you know, every, everything that like supports banks and airlines and stuff. You never see. Yeah, unimportant but it's very expensive. And so I got there day one and just started training to make cold calls. And that's where the sadness began. That's where the pain and suffering. Calling people who don't want to talk to you, you know, that's what you get trained on.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And we'll get into your current career, but a quick transition to it. You had mentioned identity crisis. That was then, right? 85,000 and you made a thousand bucks to pro ballplayer. It doesn't work out. Now you got to go into sales. Cold calling. Yeah, I want to just transition to where you're at today. In my estimation, you're making millions. Do you still have an any crisis? No, not in this space at all.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I mean, I have like the. The like, am I Ross? Am I corporate bro? Right. That's kind of where I was going with that. Yeah. I mean, I think there's. You're always trying to think strategically about the business itself. Like, for the longest time, I mean, people still call me Corp. Most people call me in the streets, they're like, what's up, Cor? How's it going? Like, I love that. But at the same time, there's also the side of Ross who plays corporate bro.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Sure.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Who's making business decisions, who's making the. The, like the next brand step. Because that's important, I think when your name's corporate bro, especially during a time in tech where bros, and, you know, even the world today, bros are not necessarily seen as a. Not a positive, you know, concept. I had to differentiate and sort of say, hey, guys, I played this character. I also do these other things because that would prevent me from brand deals, that would prevent me from speaking gigs. We can't bring a guy named corporate bro in here because people didn't. If they didn't know who I was, they didn't know that I was satirizing the space that I was making fun of. This is the commentary on the space.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

They think, oh, he is that sales douche. Yeah, I mean, I am that sales douche.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But you know what?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I mean, like that to me, to that degree that, you know, I'm embellishing and playing that character fair.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

That makes sense. I think with Oracle. When you look at a career like that, though, it's very safe. Right. You can make a ton of money, you know that you can live there the rest of your career. I think in this creator space, which you've been in for 13 plus years, started at vine and you talk about that, but do you? I mean, you've done it for over a decade now, but a lot of creators that come on here or if we get, like, super hot reality stars, like, right off the next show and they're blowing up, their biggest concern always is longevity. Do you have that concern at all in this space?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You know, I. Yes and no. I believe I'll evolve to whatever that needs to be. You know, a lot of the content early on for me was I'm that classic, like, 20 single tech bro. And then, you know, now I have a kid, you know, I'm married with a kid. And I was like, well, is this content going to play? But the truth is, like you mentioned, I've been doing this since 2013 on Vine. I have a lot of people who have been with me since then. They've grown up, they've gotten married, they've had kids, they've progressed in their careers. So, like, you know, you can always kind of find a corporate spin at least I've realized, you know, becoming corporate dad. What are all the identity crises that I deal with? Going from, like, closing business to changing diapers. Right. And I think the longevity thing is a fair concern because if you would have told me years ago that offices would go away, Covid would happen, all of a sudden, there's a whole generation, people that don't know what it's like to be in an office. Like, that's insane.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Crazy.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And so there is an element of that where it's like, well, now I got to work in the. Work from home content to be relevant to those folks, which, you know, I did work from home. So luckily I can. I can deal with that. But, yeah, I think you. You always kind of need to plan and think about what could be next. But at the same time, it. It has to come from a place of truth. And I think that's what I struggled with. It was like, it got harder to make contact. Is like, I'm not a single bro in the marina, like, partying as much anymore. Like, that's not who I am. How do I stay true to myself? Like, that's where the best content comes from, I'm sure, you know? Yeah, the best stuff comes out of inspiration.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. Vulnerability, relatability, connection. Right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

The authentic piece. Just like that shit hits, it makes sense. So I had been going through that identity crisis for a while, actually. That transition of, like, what is the adult version of corporate bro look like?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Interesting. All right, we'll come back to corporate bro. If there's anyone listening right now, that's thinking about getting into SaaS or enterprise sales at all. Talk to me about back at Oracle. I mean you did it for seven years but with different companies. Right. What did it look like as far as compensation? Day to day at the high bonuses give me like the full breakdown on the industry.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. I mean I think the unfortunate truth was I kind of missed the, the true golden age of like tech sales. People wheeling a deal and making millions and millions of dollars. Not to say that there weren't reps making millions of dollars. They were like in their 60s though. They had been like you know, early days of Xerox, like printers coming up like all through the evolution of tech and this amazing amount of value that was created. Kind of what I think is happening now with AI and now you're seeing valuations of companies go so crazy. Like there are certain people now that are making that much money and back then that were too. But I was a 23 year old. I think my base was 60k and then my OT on target earnings was 60k. Mean if you, for those out there, OT basically means if you hit your quota you make an additional X amount. And so it's usually most of the time in tech, half half. So 60 base, 60 more if I hit quota and I could make more than that if I, you know, did 200%, 110%. There's accelerators and things that allow you to make more money. But you're closing million dollar deals.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Sure.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

But Your commission is like.0002% of the deal and you're like what the.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. Then there's the subjectivity part of it.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

At least it was in the banking industry. Right. There's like the performance piece of commission and then there's another pool that's like well it depends how the company does.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Exactly. Let you know what percent.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Exactly. And then there's other people on the team who are involved and like don't get me wrong, there are other people that are helpful and like with a big million, you know, multimillion dollar deals, you do need a lot of people have their hands in it, but everybody's getting a little tiny piece.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. So in all those years, what was the highest year you had in enterprise sales?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I think the highest was probably like, I mean like 250.

[David Ardoin]

Sure.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. You know when you were in it, did you say to yourself like at some point I will get out of it or do you think for the like the longevity of your career you thought you're going to be doing that?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I Think the truth is I started to get kind of bored. I felt like I understood sales. Like, like a lot of the checkpoints are the same in terms of like how you run a sales call, how you negotiate, how you like align problems and solutions, right? All that kind of cliche stuff. But there was a part of me that was like, okay, what's next? And I think corporate, bro. I was doing this on the side for eight years. So I think I ended up selling for like close to 10 years. Decided I want to go to business school. Because I was like, I felt like, because I was the funny guy, the goofy guy, I was a little bit discounted. Oh, he's just like the goofy dummy who's like class clown, right? Not smart. Like we're not gonna like, yeah, you know. And so I kind of had this chip on my shoulder. I was like, well, you guys, I'm gonna go figure something else out. I'm kind of done with sales. What's the way to get out for me was study and go to business school. And I do think sales is the most important skill there is. Like, period. It's like what you guys do every day at the agency. It's like, you know every little decision, every little thing you want in life, like you can sell your way to it and it just opens up everything, entrepreneurially speaking. But I was done doing it in tech.

[Jason Tardick]

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[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

We'll get into Stanford. That's where we went for your mba.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

All right.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

In a second we'll do that. Before we do, I now know that your wife is your manager, so she's doing your selling and negotiating for you. But let's also. God, thank God. We'll talk a little bit about that. It's a wild dynamic, but as far as, as far as like sales and negotiating, like trading secrets, tips or tricks, people back home that aren't in sales and. Or they could use any type of insight you could give them, whether it's they're negotiating, their annual raise, whatever they're doing. What kind of sales and negotiating tactics can you provide the listeners?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, I mean, the first thing that I think is important is if you're negotiating, it means they're in. Like a lot of people like, oh, teach me how to negotiate. I'm like, you've already kind of closed them. Like, if they're negotiating a price, it means they want what you're selling. Right. I think that's the first part. It's also about figuring out your, your position of power. Like, where, where, like, how badly did. Do they need this? How much have you conveyed that they need this? How much do they understand that they need something? So it's about kind of exacerbating their problem and kind of point it to light.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

The problem is people are emotional and they may say, well, I've got a million dollar problem. And you're like, well, it only costs $10,000. Like, oh, that's so expensive. And you're, they're like, you're like, well, you just said it was a million dollar problem. It's only $10,000. Is that like, going to save you a lot of money? People don't always work like that. I think don't chase. Maybes the worst thing, like no's don't hurt you. I think a lot of people think rejection is, is the pain. No, the pain is chasing something that you think could be yes, but you just waste all this time getting ghosted. You know, it's kind of the principle in the relationships, I think, like, yeah, don't just ghost people to tell them no so everyone can move on.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's really easy that way. Also, the reality is, is like timing is everything. There's a lot of luck in sales.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

That's true.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Like, the reality is, is sometimes people are shopping for a solution. You happen to walk through the door that day. And then, you know, there's other times where it's like, yeah, I appreciate it. But the reality is, like, our contract with this other vendor doesn't End for three years.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Those are three good ones. Timing. Timing is everything. Don't chase everything. And if they're negotiating, they're already interested. I think the thing with timing is everything too is you have to. If you're not doing the work, you're not going to get lucky. Right. Like, you have to put yourself in a position to get lucky. And. But that takes, that takes a lot.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Luck is the residue of design.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

There we go.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Look at the.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Drop them, baby. Drop him. All right, we'll get back to negotiating. So, Stanford, NBA. You take your gmat, right? I mean, how. You're, you're, you're, you're working at Oracle, you're slinging the phones, cold calling pro baseball player. There you go. Stanford, one of the best NBA programs in the world. Tell me about what you had to

[Jason Tardick]

do to get in.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Well, it was. I basically said, okay, I'm going to put all my post work time into this. And so I got a tutor, you know, and I obviously had to relearn high school math. And even getting in, they were like, we're gonna have you take an extra math class. Cause you like coming from sales. There's not. There was no other salesperson in my program with me, it was all bankers. It was all, oh, yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

There's no sales guys.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

No sales guys.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Which ended up being a huge advantage

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

for me later on, especially for presentations. Yeah, let's do the work. I'll do the present.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Or any of these. These come in and say, like, I want to found a company. Wait, how do I do it? Yeah, well, you got to sell something. Oh, how do I run a sales call?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Right?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Who they call?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's true.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Your boy.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Which is great.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

The modeling was tough, though.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

The modeling just buried me. Low pass in accounting. Low pass. And finance scraped by an operations. There's like all these things that just. But it gave me enough to be dangerous. Like I was. I didn't know a balance sheet literally balanced on each side of the sheet. That's why it's called that. He knew that, like, yeah, that's where I was coming from. So there was a lot of extra learning that I had to do. But it was basically, as soon as the workday was done, I go hide in the conference room at work, jump on with my tutor. I got my, my books and, you know, I think I took what I take. Jury. Jury. I didn't do the GMAT because it was a little bit more math heavy.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

So I took it the max amount of times. I took it five Times.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Wow.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I was just like, I have to just keep going. The best one I had was like, my third one, too. I can't even. Can't remember what my score was. My sister, she's an MBA now, and she's trying to figure out what my scores are. I was looking them up. I can't find them anywhere, but that's what it was. It was just like, I am so committed to this, and I think I studied for eight months or something. It was like I skipped kind of a year to kind of keep hammering it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. Did you go full time?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And how much was it?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

How much was it? I think it's like, all in. 200.

[David Ardoin]

Damn.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's like 100 a year. Ends up being.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Did you have to take student loans for that?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

No. Well, I come from a very fortunate background. My parents are willing to pay for my education.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

That's awesome. Did you. What did your parents do professionally?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

My dad's sports journalist. Oh, wow. My mom just works in finance. Works in financial services. She just retired. And so I think, like, one of the things that I think is super cool in our family and that I will do for my kids, they're like, whatever you want, educationally speaking, like, we will pay for it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I love that.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Like, you want to chase an extra degree, you want to take a class, you want to, like, go learn something. Like, whatever it is, like, they'll. They'll do that for us.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I think my thinking is, when and if I'm lucky enough to have kids, I would have the kids go to school, take out a loan, understand what their loan is, work while they're in school.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And then assuming they just do all that, like, at graduation, give it, check for it.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

All right.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Like, we gotta learn this, too.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

No, I think that is.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

My parents paid for my undergrad, my MBA paid for. But that's a great principle by your parents. Like, if. If we're gonna spoil you, the one way we're gonna spoil you is education.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's awesome. And I was always like, you know, I mean, that's, like, cool, but, like, felt like something cool.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Like, I want a car, you know? That's pretty sick. No, I think it's a great principle. I love the loan thing. We just don't teach enough finance in the. In, like, school.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

We just don't.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

There's a. Financial literacy is just terrible.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's terrible. It's.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's a.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's a mess. And all the numbers continue to show. It's a mess. Right. But it's nuts. All right, let's talk about your. Your content creating career. So you started with Vine. My understanding with vine is that they went out of business essentially because they weren't paying creators. And creators. Creators really couldn't monetize through brand deals. When you started, did you have any ability to monetize where you have none at all. And how are you performing? Like, were you growing? I mean, you're growing exponentially right now. Were you growing at that same rate then?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Absolutely not. I mean, look, the re. The reality is vine was ahead of its time. There was no machine learning algorithm. There was no like, like suggested sort of like content the way it is now, where you see stuff that you're not following. Like, it was. You had to go tag someone in a comment on a post to get someone to know who you were, you know, and it was. People still reminisce about the days where it's like, you see what you follow and that's like, wasn't that great? It was chronological and all those things, but they just didn't figure that out. In fact, like, you could kind of see the trajectory of vine dying around 2014, 2015, engagement sort of falling off the table. In fact, my friends were like, dude, like, I'll download Vine just for you, but like, I don't use Vine.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And it was when Instagram basically came out with their 15 second videos that the big transition started to happen. I remember they went from 15 to one minute. I remember this because Gronk, who I know you had on this podcast, like, he posted a one minute video. And I was like, holy shit. They won that video where they.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Rob talked about for a minute.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I don't even. I don't. I mean, it probably one thing very

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

steadily, him catching a football. Yeah, yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

But I just remember, like, how the hell did you get one minute video? Like, is this a thing? And then they rolled it out to everyone else's. So you went from six second jokes to 15 seconds where it's like, okay, make two jokes now. I got a full minute and I can do a little sketch, a little storyline, a little. A larger piece of content.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

That's what I think is really interesting. Which I want to talk about is kind of like your system, your approach, your writing, your scripting. We'll get into that. When did you start making money on social media?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I always pretty much say it took me about seven years. Not because I couldn't happen earlier. I just. It was the same thing with baseball where as soon as I was getting paid to throw pitches. It was a lot less fun. I felt like I was playing for my life every day, which I was. You know, I was just waiting to get cut after a bad start. So I sort of pushed it off because I was like, the money will come. If I can grow this thing. If I can build an engaged audience, the money will come. I also wasn't putting out a piece of content every day. Like, I was still working. I was still doing lots of other things in my life. I was. My goal was to put out one post a week.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I would go nights and weekends to an office that I had access to, bring a couple friends, like buy them coffee, Starbucks, whatever it is. And we would just fuck around and, you know, if we made six videos, great. We've got six weeks content that I can go write and get inspired just by shit that would happen at work. And now it's a lot more operationalized. We're a lot further ahead in the content. I still think we post for Maybe probably average three to four times a week.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Three to four times a week. So 2020, though, is when you started making money.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

2020 is when we started making money. It was, you know, little things here and there. It wasn't really until I would say B2B started embracing content.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Sure.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Which is a really interesting niche. I think I got lucky that I worked in tech. I understood tech and these tech companies didn't understand content. There's a lot of lifestyle influencers.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Even three years it was. That was lacked. I think I took a while.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It took a while.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. Because obviously, like, for, you know, unless you write B2C, like your beauty, your skincare, consumer packaged goods, things like that, that right now is ripping back in The Kardashian like 15, 16, right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

We'll give you two bucks a bottle or whatever you sell.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You people easy to understand, but nobody knows what Salesforce does.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Correct?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right, right. Nobody knows what IBM is doing. It's like, well, they're computers, right. But, oh, there's what's an AI agent? And there's only a few people kind of in this space that I know of, besides myself that are able to talk about it, because we lived it, you know, and again, it's not going to hit for everyone. It's not going to go viral because you're talking about AI agents. But, you know, the value of one person converting to Salesforce is potentially hundreds of thousands to more likely millions of dollars. Or an IBM agent, tens of millions of dollars. You know, the. What they're looking for. They know that no one's gonna come watch a corporate bro video and be like, boy, I should rip out HubSpot and use Salesforce CRM.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

But a lot of people just didn't know what CRM was stands for. Yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

What's your, what's your demo like? What's your audience look like?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

If you had to, if you had

[Jason Tardick]

to guess, I, I always thought so

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

with Corporate Natalie, right. She's been on the podcast. She's a friend we've talked about. You guys have a podcast together. I've always thought with Corporate Natalie, it's probably like a 50, 50, 60, 40 split towards women. And then I saw Cor like, oh, this is like the male version of what she's doing. It's going to be like a 70% men, 30% women. That's what I would guess.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's maybe 80, 20. It's 57. 57. 57 male.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Wow, interesting. That's moved. I guarantee in the last two years. It has.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Absolutely.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It was more male dominated, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now your stuff is just so relatable. Oh my God. When you posted the one about when you're having a martini and like you got a buzz, but then you get like, you're actually drunk. The amount of times that's happened to me as a banker, you have like one or two o.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It hit, okay, now it's time to network.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But for 5743 and, and like, what, what's the like, do you know the average working, like, profession of your audience, etc?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, I mean, it's overwhelmingly like corporate professionals.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Interesting.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Like you're still.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But still, you could still sell B2C. Are you still doing majority B2B deals?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Majority B2B. There's just more money. There's more money there. I don't want a lot of the brand deals. Like, I just, I really try to be selective about which ones I work with. You know, obviously I'd love to like make as much money as possible and that's great. But like, for me, I don't love spending the creative energy on brand stuff. Especially when the brands are really tough to work with.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It becomes tough.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You're just like, let's put you in a box. Yeah. Or they're like, you need to say this product marketing, like this game changing tech, you know, agentic software will, you know, increase the roi. I'm like, no one talks like that. Yes, no one fucking talks like that. Why are you making me say it like that?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Exactly.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

So will I do it? Yeah. Everyone's got a price, but like I just don't want to do it that often makes sense.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

You made 250, your highest point, enterprise sales. How long did it take you to make 250 in content creation?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I think it probably took me 10 years. 2021.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay, so you're, you're getting your MBA, you're not working at this point and you're making.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I wasn't full time yet.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But you're making more as a content creator than you were at your highest point in enterprise sale. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's substantial.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Totally. And it was what, it's one of those things was like, you know, you, there's a fear to go into content creation and own your own business and do your own thing because the business only goes as you go. If you have a bad day, the business has a bad day, there's nobody else going to pick you up, you know, close another deal and the team is going to hit quota because if you're not working, nothing's moving forward. Yeah. Which is terrifying.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Terrifying.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And I was kind of doing the like 70 in on my real job. 70 in on the, you know, which I know that doesn't have to 100. But the point being neither was I was going all in on.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

At what point did you go all in with content?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right after graduation. I graduated in 2020. So it would have been 2020 and 2021 were probably where I matched the SaaS. 2022. We regrew 100, 200% each year. Now we're kind of in like a low mid seven figure yearly revenue.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's beautiful.

[Jason Tardick]

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[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So you graduate with that? I just want to know. Mom And dad paid 250,000 for Stanford. Yeah. You graduate and you tell them, I'm going to be a full time content creator.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. You know it's funny, it kind of changed when I was walking down the street with them once and there were some, this group of people came up to me like, oh my God, corporate bro, what's up? And they're like, you know them, right? And I was like, no, I don't know them. They just like the content. They're like, what? Yeah, but people actually like know this is like a thing. And like mom, yes, it's a thing. You know, it's not like not Brad Pitt, but it's a thing. We're in the tech hub of, you know, the world. Sure, there's gonna be some people here who've watched my stuff. They get it. I mean, they get it now. At first it was like, well, don't ruin your job prospects by saying something offensive, right? It's like, mom, I don't want those job prospects. And I think at Stanford, the thing is, you know, they teach a lot about entrepreneurship and like going out and doing something new. A lot of people come in there and think that's what they're going to do. Then they end up going back to Bain or BCG or like McKinsey and doing what they were doing before. I was like, I don't want to do that.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

What are those job pay?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

They can pay a lot. I mean I, I think they're coming out of school. They're like 300 up to 500 and depends on like what they're, what their, what projects and stuff they're working on

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

in your peer group at Stanford, right? You're getting your MBA at Stanford. You look at your peer group, you now are making, you know, mid seven figures in content, creating and building like a material empire under it. Just not based on concrete creating but all these other services. Do you, Are you doing the best of all your MBA Stanford grants?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

No, we've had a couple folks who have built and sold tech companies who.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But you got to be up there.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I would say like on a year to year basis I'm definitely up there. But I mean we've got some folks who are just like in the craziest high levels of finance, who are like in VC and have hit a couple times that are an Aggregate have done a lot more.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay. Makes sense.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And I think it is still one of those things as a content creator, like, you're always trying to figure out how to scale yourself. I haven't figured out how to scale myself. I still have to go speak. I still have to make videos.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Really hard to scale yourself.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And, like, that's where it's like, let's do a little investment group here. Let's. I'm working on a CPG company because I don't want to do a tech company. I'm hopefully going to launch that in. In July. But, like, I just. You need to figure out how to diversify yourself and. And, you know, because eventually I love. I love this stuff. I love doing it, but at some point I'm gonna not want to do it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

You'll burn out.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I'll burn out.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And I've gone through the waves like everyone else has.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's a thing.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Do you have a team?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

My team is my wife. Okay. And we have one other guy, his name is Jesse, who's just hired him back in August. He sort of helps with writing and editing. He's just very funny, like, comic. Wrote for the Onion, wrote for Ebomb's World back in the OG days of, like, the Internet. We may.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

How'd you hire him?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Went to a recruiting firm, put it out there. Went through the whole, like, process. Interviewed a bunch of people, had hundreds and hundreds of applicants and sort of helped us narrow it down. Like, quote.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Can I ask you a question?

[Jason Tardick]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

When you go to a recruiter and say, I'm looking for a writer who's a comedic writer. Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Which, like, when you think about writing jobs, they're so hard to come by right now. AI and everything. Like, it's an end, let alone, like writing comedy. Getting paid to do that. Unless you're on, like, the Daily show

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

or something, I cannot accommodate.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

No. 100%. It can't, right? No, no, it can't. But point being is, like, those jobs are in LA if you want to write on shows and that type of stuff. So luckily this. He's been performing stand up multiple nights a week for a long time. He's helped with a lot of other comics write their stuff. He's just like a. He's. What he's done for me is kind of. And we're not Mr. Beast, but I'm just going to use him as an example, like, very scientific about the comedy now. It's like we're looking at the hooks. We're looking at, like, what's the value someone gets? It's not like a bro. It'd be so funny if we did this. Like, our conversations are more like, well, what if we flip the perspective and come at it from this angle and it's. Instead of laughing out loud, it's like, oh, that'd be funny. Oh, that's, like, a really interesting way to do it. Let's, like, explore that direction.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Give me an example of one.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Like, we just did one that was. Well, I guess I'll give a more broad example. I'm very dark humor. Very, like, satirical. Very much kind of like a jaded, like, like, existing comedy in the negative space of, like, making fun of things. He's like, well, what if we change it? Like, go from a positive space. Like, what if we just have you, like, like, dancing out of the room like, it's Friday, and, like, create this vibe of, like, feeling good. It's fun. It's outrageous because you're dancing in front of all these people in an office or in an airport. Let's just, like, try it, you know, Million plus likes. Let's take the perspective of not relating because they're upset, but, like, give them a positive feeling of, like, why they're happy.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So you would typically lead for an example, like, Monday morning misery, Sunday.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And he's like, let's lead with Friday.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You're out at Dwight party and have the best time and give everybody, like, the positive, like, vibe, and therefore, it has more engagement.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Because people probably want to feel good connecting to.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. Want to, like, agree with you because they're pissed off too. They want to agree with you because they're happy too.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. I heard you talk podcast last March, and you were talking a little bit about your system, your structure, and, like, the analytics and that. It is kind of science to you, how you put these videos together.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

What is that? I'm shocked. It's only three people that are running your entire empire. You, your wife, and now a writer.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Between editing video, everything. That's incredible.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I love editing. I think editing is just, like, so love editing. I love editing comedy.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Because you kind of have the vision

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

and, like, timing of it.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Timing is just, like, so important, you know? If it was, like, podcast editing, I would outsource that for my people that

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

are listening right now. Do you use a certain app or do you have any tips on anything?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I use Final Cuts, and then I will use the Instagram edits app. Oh, well, I used to use Cap Cut.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I love Keep. Keep it. Keep it.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Simple. Keep it safe.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

All right, so talk, talk to me about the process. Like you walk into a week. Are you analyzing certain videos that perform well? What does that analyzation look like? How are you coming up with what's the next week looks like? The one thing I also just on top of question is, I was looking at your performance on your videos. It's insane. It's like, how is every single video hitting? Do you, did you delete somewheres that.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Do you delete videos that don't do well?

[Jason Tardick]

Like, how is it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So, I mean, your engagement's insane.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. We've definitely in the recent months sort of found there's as an artist, as an artist, like kill me, but truly, like there is a piece of you that like wants to do what you want to do. Like you have to decide who you're doing it for. And I'm sure there's like the algorithm, right. There's what you think other people want, there's what you think you want and what brands want. And I think we sort of decided, we actually. Let me step back. We do a Monday morning meeting. All of us, me, Jesse, Becca. We look at the previous performance of two weeks. We always, it's kind of two weeks behind. We look back, we've rated them one to five. We talk about why we think something did well, why it didn't go well. Maybe we miss like, maybe our on screen text didn't quite give the value, promise to a viewer of what they were going to see. So they were like kind of confused. We were missing a, an angle here that left people like ambiguously. Are they laughing at you? Are they laughing with you? Are they feeling it themselves? Like we miss the marks on some of these things. And then we kind of do a, like a pitch. We do a day of pitching each other. Here's just ideas, concepts. Oh, that's a positive one. Let's put that towards the end of the week on a Friday when people want to feel good. Oh, here's like one that's more Monday morning vibes when everybody's mad that we can kind of like hit on this negative side of things. Here's some evergreen stuff. Here's some things that are popping up, you know, holidays. It's a three day weekend. Let's make something relevant to a three day weekend. Oh, it's the beginning of the year. It's recruiting season. It's. It's interview season, it's performance review season. All those things are more relevant, you know, now.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Sure.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And so we have two shoot days a week, hopefully. Like Monday is kind of a admin, like pitching, planning. Tuesdays are writing Wednesday, Thursday or often shoot days. Friday is an editing day in sort of our. Our process. And that'll flex depending on things that we. Other things we've got going on.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So for that week, this week, this content will go out in three weeks, two weeks. How far ahead?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yes, I would say it's about three weeks. But we will move. We will shuffle things in and out. If we think like. Like we have a pretty good barometer of what's going to bang and what's going to be, like, pretty good.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

How do you know? It's.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's sort of an intuition, I guess, at this point. But some things will be. For instance, I did one earlier this week that was making fun of Mr. Beast, Mark Benioff and the super bowl ad.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yep.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

We knew that wouldn't go viral. Like, we knew that had no chance. Why, though? A was a 92nd sketch. B, a lot of people don't know that Salesforce is doing an ad with Mr. Beast in the first place. Like, see, a lot of people don't know that. Like, Salesforce has done ads with McConaughey that like. Like these three people will probably be in the same room. There's just. It's just like a very niche sort of thing. If you're in tech, it's like, oh, they're going from Matthew McConaughey to Mr. Beast. What a swing of like, who's running their social campaigns? And so you know every line. And there was a joke from McConaughey about, like, if you didn't read his book where he. His book Greenlight, where he talks about how his dad allegedly had a heart attack while bang. His mom. I always, you know, I always said my dad was gonna go out making love to my mom. Like, sure you did, dude. But like, that's the first line he goes, my dad making. Matt died making love to my mom. Like, if you don't know that, you don't know that. That's a joke. Yeah. Mark Benioff talks about how he founded Salesforce while swimming with dolphins. So I had this whole bit about him talking to his dolphin trainer going, like, speaking dolphin. You wouldn't know that connect that unless you knew it's like kind of like

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

deep comedy, niche comedy. So then you're doing that with the intent for, like your. Your strong community. Yeah. This is going a very tight niche, but they're going to die. Laugh.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. And you know who's going to think that's funny is executives.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Who know this who are at the top. Like, that is for a very specific audience. That of someone saying, oh, that's smart. Because the best performing stuff is, you know, it's my martini. It's a slow zoom with a song. Me making funny facial expressions with text on screen. When you go from networking drug to drunk drunk. 15 seconds long, it's over, you're out. You got the value. There's something funny about the. The music and the facial expressions.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

If you had to depict like that video right there, you knew it was gonna pop. It did pop. What's the reason why? I can think of one reason why, but I'm curious what your reason.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Well, there's a few pieces. It's. It's relatable as the first one is. Like, most people have been there. Yep. The song built. We. We went through five or six different songs to figure out which one we felt like crescendoed at the right. I think we went with a Radiohead. I think it's exit time, which also like. It is exit time. Like it's time to go. But you might not also like the facial timing landing on the hit of the song. Like the. The crazy kind of psycho William Defoe. Like.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Things like hits at the right time.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And you know someone's going to share that to someone else and you get the whole thing in 15 seconds.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Relatability. Sure. I mean, obviously you went to detail, but the two I came up with was relatability. Shareability.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Do you think that's part of the equation to go viral?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yes. 100. I mean, Mr. Beast has said his most high performing videos are the ones where he doesn't talk about. It's just music. Music creates the feeling. You have the screen on, like on screen. Text, and people see things because it goes viral in other nationalities.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I was gonna say language doesn't matter.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Language doesn't matter. Yeah. You know, but again, you. You make certain things for certain reasons. Like the Salesforce video took us the most time. It performed the worst by a lot of like last couple weeks.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Sure.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

But I don't regret it. I'm not taking it down because I want those who know will know, and they'll know extra hard.

[Jason Tardick]

Sunglasses, contacts, glasses. They've been a part of my. My life since I was 4 years old. And that's why Warby Parker is such a great fit for me. Seriously, nothing comes close when you talk about quality and then price and selection and then factor in the customer service. There's truly no competitor. And when you think about Warby Parker, they don't just offer incredible prescription glasses which they're very, very good at, but they have everything you need for happier eyes. That includes contact checks, online eye exams and sunglasses. It's truly an all in one place, which makes everything so much easier. And they also have 300 retail stores across the U.S. i always remember the best part about going in there is the people, they really help you find what you need, what you want at a price point that makes sense. Warby Parker gives you the quality and better looking prescription eyewear at a fraction of the ongoing price. Our listeners here are going to get 15% off plus free shipping when they buy two or more pairs of prescription glasses at warbyparker.com trading secrets that's 15 off when you buy two pairs of glasses at w a r b y parker.com tradingsecrets after you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that we sent you.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

How do you decide when you're gonna take a video down? Just flops.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, I never take it down. I just hide it off the main page.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You know, if people want to scroll and they see that it's got, you know, a tenth of the views to another, they probably infer that it's not as good. There's times when it's just like this one was for me. I think it's fucking funny.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

If you're not a weirdo like me, it's not gonna be funny to you either.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So one thing is like last March when you did that podcast, I'm sure if I asked you that same question, what makes it pop, you probably would say the same thing. Relatability and shareability. But something's changed since then. Right? I think you said you had 700,000 follow. Yeah, now I have over a million. So something's changed. So what do you think has changed? If you look in the mirror, you look at your career, you look at the content, like something else has had to change other than saying relatability and charability. What is it?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, it's a good question. I, I really think it's just like studying the human. Like it's looking at it in a more scientific way. It is just simply looking at like, what is the, what am I promising? What are they getting? What does it make them feel like? Like being able to answer more questions. Rather just be like, oh, I think like early on in comedy, like you start, you, you think things are funny. And you're not sure why. You can't like explain it, but it is, it's relatable. But like why is that relatable? Like what we just talked about. It's like all those elements have to work in conjunction. I would have said, oh, it's just funny because like it's related. Like relatable is a very broad stroke of why. Why is it relatable?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Interesting.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

The promising, the getting the feeling and the why. I think that's like a good equation right there that summarizes it pretty Right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And I think that's what we miss a lot of times. Like our on screen text might just, just send people down the wrong rabbit hole and then they're not given the payoff that they're looking for.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Interesting.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And the payoff is a mismatch and therefore like, oh, this isn't what I thought. And then it becomes one of those negative social videos that. Where it feels like you're draining yourself. Like why we hate doom scrolling. If you're not getting the. Hitting the jackpot. If you're not paying off, not laughing,

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

showing your wife, showing your friend. Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Then you just wasted time and you're like, why am I scrolling? Scroll again. Looking for the feeling that you didn't just get.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But when you guys do your two week review, when you look at where you missed and where you excelled, where often is the number one miss?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Where is our number one miss? I think it's, it's. This is so broad and lame but like execution. Like we, we have the right human insight. We just didn't deliver it the right way. Like that video you mentioned earlier about be interesting. We followed another concept that we did earlier was like if small talk was honest, it's like how you doing today? Like terrible, right? Like, like and it's just a bunch of quick hitters. Like that. This was the same thing, but it didn't quite, it didn't quite fulfill, like deliver on like the sarcasm wasn't quite there. Like there was some. We haven't totally figured it out but it was like that structure had worked for a different video. It was probably the wrong structure to apply to like an interesting, like that's so interesting video. Like now I'm kind of coming off as just like a dick. And you can't totally tell like if you're supposed to relate or you're supposed to know that person, like if it's supposed to be you or if it's supposed to be them. And so it just like didn't do well, yeah, but. But I know there's like a lot of us sit out there and say, oh, that's crazy. Oh, like there's someone's rambling on how crazy.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I think that's crazy. It's probably the most overused word.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Right now that's crazy.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right. We just didn't hit the insight the right way.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

But we know it's there. It's just like the execution of a

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

video on the different tones of that crazy. Because I feel. Oh, that's crazy.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yes. No, there is. Like, there's your insight. It's like, how do we execute that? Do we need to show someone else saying something for you to respond to it?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Like, are they saying something worthy of you being that person or not? Like, these are all the questions that we were sitting there asking ourselves, and we don't know the right answer necessarily.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But one of the things we talked about earlier, even before we started recording, was your relationship with corporate Natalie and how you guys started helping one another. TikTok wasn't your thing, it was her thing. One of your things was scripting and writing. I think majority of people that listen to this, if they're doing content, they're definitely not scripting majority at all. And I could say for majority, even creators I represent, they're not scripting. They have an idea of what they're going to do, and then they just do it and let it rip. Yeah, but you write out every single video you do, right?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Most of them.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And what does that writing process look like? And for someone at home that's trying to make. Let's say they're trying to script something for their business or for their new page. Like, where do you tell them to start with that process of scripting?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I mean, it's just kind of a brain dump. And then you, you know, it's like molding clay. Right. And just hacking things away. I think on social media, you do need to front load the value or create the hook. Right. Like, it's just in comedy for us. It's like, let's put the funniest lines at the front if they get to the end. Like, we've already given them enough value that, like, it may not end exactly as well as it started, but you've gotten them through it. Because the amount of times people just scroll past you is. I mean, it's most of the time.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Most time.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So these days, attention span is like, nothing.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's nothing. Right. And so it's. Can a video be multiple videos? Like I. I think, again, I would love to make longer form stuff and write movies and so forth, but the attention span of. Most people are on their phones now. Movies, like, I think it was. I think it was Matt Damon, someone.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yes, it was Matt Damon. Yeah. The movie was ripped.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You got to restate those premises. Like the time.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yes. Yeah. Like, otherwise. Because people are looking at their phone. Their phone.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Exactly. And so. But it's the same thing with, like writing for us is you're gonna waste a lot of time being like, wait, what am I gonna do? At least you have a plan. Like, a lot of our stuff is improv. Let's try it this way. Let's do something else. Just say. But at least we know we're gonna get what the baseline was and then it always, like, improves off of that. I think that's sort of just like having a plan. Anything you do. Yeah. Is good.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Improv's obviously great and we do a lot of that, but if. If we was just improv, we would miss the mark a lot because we still want to think about, what are these lines delivering on.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Why are they funny?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Gotcha.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You know, why do they matter? They do matter. Because you only get so many seconds of someone's attention.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. Interesting. I like it when you're talking about. Let's go back to the sales days, right? It was a. It was a dream to be like sales guy of the year or to get the Times Gone Award.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Award.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. To make the President's Club or whatever. If you look at your content creator profession, what is. What's your Top Gun Award? What's your. What's your President's club like in a deal? You did tell me about the deal. Maybe if you can.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

What you had to deliver. Maybe the amount. If you can. Whatever. Give me like your Top Gun Award for a deal.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I would say our. Well, for. For me now, the Top Gun award was doing the ad with Matthew McConaughey for Salesforce that played during the Olympics. And yeah, I got like a 1 second cameo in the ad. Fine. But you got it. But I got it. And I also did a lot of content for them on the side, like the social side of the same campaign.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

So I was kind of like the outlaw bad guy AI. I represented kind of like, what's wrong with AI? And Makan is the. The hero. And so in the ad, you kind of walks through a saloon, looks at all of us. He's kind of talking about how there's a lot of bad actors now and he Throws one of. Throws us out of the. The saloon. So I got to have a stun double get launched out of a saloon door.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

That's cool. Check that out. The resume.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, exactly. But I mean, I got to be on set with Matthew McConaughey. I got to be on TV during the Olympics and then I got to make content on the side that supported it. And we won. I don't know, we won a bunch of award Salesforce.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

We.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Salesforce won a bunch of awards for the campaign. And so that was, you know, that was. That whole thing was about all is equaled one year of SaaS sales.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

250k. Yeah, got it. It's awesome. Congrats. Now that you're at it, you obviously never studied acting, but you do acting, you have a short film and then you see a guy like Matthew McConaughey. One question I've always had about acting is, I hate to say it. How talented do you have to be to be an average actor? Like, you're seeing some of the best actors you've been around actors you've done short films. Obviously, we know there are the. Timothy Chalamet is the best of the Leonardo DiCaprio. The can't. Denzel Washington.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But like an average to above average actor. You have no training. You do it pretty fucking good. Like, what's your take on that?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

With acting, there's just such a surplus of talent and not enough acting jobs, like, which would support my.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yes, right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. Yeah. Like there's a lot of people that are like very solid actors. And now in Hollywood, unless you're, you know, the top of the top, like you're doing other. You're doing other. Like, you're not living off of acting. And also with Hollywood, they're casting such specific people that there's going to be someone out there that looks. Sounds is exactly like what they're looking for. And it'll be like their only acting job they ever get. You know, rather than like a Chalamet who can play a bunch of different care or DiCaprio who can just like morph into these people that. That is just like so elite and they can flip it so quickly. McConaughey, like maybe a hot take like McConaughey kind of plays McConaughey and everything ever that ever did.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I think majority of the best actors are the same way. Like, I think like Jennifer Aniston. Jennifer Aniston plays Jennifer Aniston. Right. Like Adam Sandler.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Adam Sandler's the man. But A.B. sandler plays Adam Sandler.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I think that's a lot of.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, but then you've got like, Daniel Day Lewis who can just like, morph into, like, that's true. Anything. And you're like, holy sh. They like, that is not the same.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

That's not the same.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

But I mean, it works. I mean, McConaughey's got, you know, he's one of the most legendary actors of all time. But I think at the end of the day, watching him on set, it was like, I don't feel like you're acting right now, bro. Like, did he nail every take? Did he have every take, like, with slight variations and not misaligned? Yeah, he did.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Granted, it was 15 second, you know,

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Salesforce ad, but, like, I mean, like, Joe Pesci. Joe Pesci is Joe Ashley.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Right.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Like, right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

There's a lot of folks that just, like, they are caricatures. Yeah, they're entertainers.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

They just play their caricature.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

They've got charisma, they got the riz, if you will. And so I think some people just kind of have it and they get identified and they get built up. And, you know, there's a piece of the industry that, like, props these folks up and gives them kind of the visibility and credibility.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Makes sense.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

And there's a lot of people that could easily do that too, because. Don't get it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Good answer. I thought. I thought we would agree on that. I want to transition to LinkedIn. Majority of people that listen here do not look at LinkedIn.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Everyone's pressing that 15 second skip thing right now.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah, I'm not talking about LinkedIn. The place where everyone just announces their next promotion. No, but you've nailed LinkedIn from a business perspective and you're monetizing off. And how. How are you monetizing off LinkedIn? What recommendations would you give people?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I mean, the first recommendation is get on LinkedIn. Like, I know LinkedIn's cringy. LinkedIn's all these things. Everyone's. Every artist, every rapper, every, like, content creator is cringy until it starts working. Yeah, right. It's like you're always an imposter. Like, I don't know, like, go listen to. I mean, Eminem is one of the greatest, but, like, his early stuff is, like, cringiest shit. But then he started to get good, and I think that's the first thing. So LinkedIn is just a very, like, it's like YouTube in 2010. Like, the opportunity is there. There's nobody else, is there? No one's there like it's, it's just an opportunity and they're trying to move towards that classic or new age social media style of scroll and algorithmic interest based algorithms. And I'm just saying like it is a great spot to get like brands are there. You're not user 1 2, 3, 4, 5, you're Ross Pomerantz, Oracle, Glassdoor. Like the users are real.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You know what I mean? And you can't really hide because it's your whole profile. It's your whole profile. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Your network.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

The individual value of a single person seeing your stuff on LinkedIn is so much higher than user 9, 10, 12 on TikTok. Who's worthless?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

How do you make money on LinkedIn post?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I mean the same thing as on any of the other ones.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Like a paper post, paper post. How do they analyze your rate? Is it like a CPM or like what type of analytics?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

No, I mean like, you know, there's no science to it at this point. Like it's sort of we charge what's my 170,000 followers on there? So a fifth of what I have on Instagram and I think I would say we charge probably like 10% more than what we would on Instagram because the value of a follower and like again a B2B again lucky in the B2B space. But like, like that's where professionals are. If you're trying to sell a professional software, a tool like people are on that.

[Jason Tardick]

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[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Obviously we've talked about a mid seven figure business on your social, but like in LinkedIn, are you making over 100 grand yeah, yeah. Interesting.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I just haven't seen any deal flow on LinkedIn, so that's a.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Well, so it's like, it's so it's so early right now.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Is the truth. And I think it's like, yes, you probably do need some business. Lean sure towards it. Like, I mean, I'm sure you're putting these podcasts, like clips out there. I mean they're starting.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Like, don't even put it on LinkedIn. I have them obviously. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. But like.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, I mean, what?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

This will be the first episode.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, I mean, gotta put. You gotta put there. I mean, I think that's like the thing though is like Mark Cuban's posting on there and Kevin, like the Shark Tank folks are there. Like you're starting to see people just even talk about their creator, the businesses they're running, the business behind the business behind the creator and like people are interested in that stuff.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

How often you post on LinkedIn?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I, I mean, I post. So I have two accounts. I have my Ross account, I have a corporate bro account. That's a longer story. Mostly that I got kicked off of LinkedIn back in the day for which my videos. I wasn't a real person. That's why I was posting as corporate bro.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I had all these. I was. Anyway, now they, now they're cool with it. Now they're like, hey, you want to be part of our creator program? Be corporate bro. And I'm like, how dare you? You fired me.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

In 2019.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I had to make two separate profiles, but I think it's just one of those things where it's so early, nobody's quite figured it out. It's a huge opportunity just to put content on there and it's becoming interest based. So like there's no real risk. It gets pushed out to certain people. If they like it, great. If not, like there's just, there's just such little risk there.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. That's why not just.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

You should make stuff for LinkedIn.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Yeah. Just put what you're trying, what you're already doing.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

All right. Another question we talked about negotiating. I saw on Gotham Artists, this is public information out there. By the way, your speaking fee is 20 to 30,000. Is that accurate?

[Jason Tardick]

Is it less?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Is it more?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's not accurate. It's more.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Gotham, step it up.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, I can't. I don't think I worked with Gotham. I don't know how they know that. But I mean, the truth is I do like your profile. Yeah, I Guess so. Let's just say it's higher than that. But it's a range of things I do. I will do keynotes, I will do emcee events. It's the classic. It depends, like, how many days you want me there. I've done. I do like, game shows now. I like, host kind of corporate game shows, get people involved, like roast Be. I do roasts and toasts and like,

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

will you do stand up?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I don't call it stand up because that's too much pressure. But yeah, it's all comedy. I'll do like unhinged keynotes about why sales is the best and why marketers don't do.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's like, first of all, I love that. Second of all, I feel like stand up comedians are just like, that's the launch pad. Like, look at Rife and Nikki Laser. Like, it just seems like. Like it's the launch pad.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Well, it's for like, next level, I'm saying.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, well, yes and no. But like, you make so much more doing a corporate event than you ever will going at, you know, the comedy club. Comedy Store. Right, Those things. Like, sure, if you want to be quote, unquote, mainstream and go on like, the tours and do that thing. But it's like I could probably do five or six corporate events in a year and do like, what someone had to do for three months in a tour.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Makes sense. All right. But also there's the business side of you, right? Like, it looks like you're an advisor to a bunch of companies on your LinkedIn saw that you have a small investment group. Group like these other areas are you sell merch, you're selling. Selling mugs out there. But I'm like the advisor front and then the small investment group. Talk to me about that. What's it look like?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's just a syndicate. Angel syndicate.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Off angel list called Corp Capital. And our joke is that our little, like, logo is. Is the poop emoji, but color with a horn on it and like color of unicorn. Because we just do unicorn. Yeah, so. So that you can tell how serious it is. It is. I mean, it's small. Like we're doing, you know, there's 500 or so people LPs in our little group. I would say we've done 12 or 13 deals. Average deal size 100k. So we're just like tacking on, like, it's just an opportunity. I get a lot of deal access. I get to do a lot of angel investing on my own. And it Was kind of like, oh, maybe I can, you know, a get a little bit of carry here. It's not, it's ever going to be meaningful really, but like bring the audience in connect. Sort of the sales folks and the Stanford experience. Because sales folks, you know, like in tech it's like you got a four year vesting period, you got a one year cliff. People don't realize that you can get equity in other companies without working there. Like in sales folks, like they spend money on stupid shit. Like, so why not put it this stupid shit with me? Angel investing. And so it's all tech stuff, but it was sort of a way to bridge that gap and you know, so I think our total deployed is like 1.5 million, you know, over like a year. Of course we started in like 2022, like the worst possible vintage for tech.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Like worst case scenario. Like literally worst case scenario.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

But it's moving.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's moving.

[Jason Tardick]

Moving.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. It's not nothing.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

All right. When you have a massive exit, you're gonna come back on. Yeah. Last topic I think we gotta cover is this topic of love and money. Your wife is your manager.

[Jason Tardick]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

What are some of the challenges in working together?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's gonna make this sound worse than is, but like we run a lot of our relationship. Like it's business. Like we do our quarterly check ins, we have our personal goals, we have our professional goals. We go through those like, you know, stuff with our, stuff with our kiddo. I mean she's just very operational, very operational. Like dates, scheduling, negotiate, like tracking all these things. And I'm just like, I put one thing on the calendar that A, that's a miracle, but then B, I put it for the wrong year. So like it's just like it doesn't work. I just suck at that stuff.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Your weaknesses restricts.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yes. And I think I had an assistant at one point and it just took me as long to tell her what I needed than just do it. But now it's like we go to the gym together, we go on coffee walks together. We can discuss these things kind of in the fabric of our life as it is. You know, there are times where she will come in and I'm, you know, sitting cross legged playing video games with my boys and she's like, hey, what do you want to do this? I'm like, now, now baby got me killed. Like, you know, so we have moments where it's like, let's just not deal with this now. But at the end of the day, we work seven days a week. But we can also go on like a golf date on a Tuesday if we want to.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Oh, yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

So I think it's just, it's understand that both of us are. We have the same goal just to be like a badass power couple, like be as successful as we can. And yeah, there's times where it's like, let's celebrate some wins. Let's go out to dinner. Let's like give baby boy the grandma and grandpa.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Okay. Next time we're into a full episode of this, Becca, you're gonna be on the ones and twos with us. We're gonna get the real answers.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah. You can't. Yeah. What do you think the biggest problem, biggest issue is? I think the hard thing is turning up. Off.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Turning off for sure. Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Turn it off. She says, she says turn it off.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Turn it off, turn it on. Turn it off, turn it on.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Get on it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

All right, last thing before I get your trading secret. What's next? Like what, what's the dream career wise? Three, five years from now? What does it look like?

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I think the next piece for me is like, I want to get back to building. Like, I do a lot of the startup stuff, but I'm so over tech right now. Just generally speaking. It's like, look, I get it. It's doing a lot of cool things. I'm not a builder of tech. Like, I can't do it myself. I can build brands. And so I'm moving into the cp. I want to be in every single. Yeah, yeah. It's gonna be a beverage.

[Jason Tardick]

Okay.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Alcoholic, non alcoholic. It's gonna be a what? A functional, canned, functional beverage. Something that hopefully people will drink. It'll. Instead of an energy drink or coffee or both, it'll be in that. In that space. I'm still sort of like working on the formula of what that will be, but I want to be in every corporate fridge in America. I want to be in everybody's fridge when they need something to get. Get to do what they need to do in their life to do it better. That's where I'm trying to. I'm trying to play in there.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

All right.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

When you're ready to promote caffeinated, it will be ca. So let's just say.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Let's just say that a little pick me up. Little corporate bro. Pick me up.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah, that's the hope.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

All right, well, more to come on that we have a lot of following up to do. Because you got a lot of dreams and aspirations. I got a lot of dreams from the days of Playing pro ball to where you're now slinging in millions. All right, give us a trading secret. You got to wrap us with one trading secret. I feel like you've given us a lot today, but you can't learn it in a textbook or from a professor on a TikTok tutorial. Only from you, what can you give us? Oh, man.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Well, here's. Here's one thing I. I will say I do a lot of creator panels. I get a lot of, like, kids ask, you know, saying, like, hey, when I grow up, like, I want to be an influencer or, like, I want to be a YouTuber.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's crazy, by the way.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's crazy. And then my follow up is them is like, for what? And they're like, they don't. They don't know. They just want to be rich and famous. And I basically say, you need to figure out, what do you love so much you can't stop talking about? And that even, like, in the darkest days, you can sit there, rationalize yourself and be like, it's hard today, but, like, I still love it at the end of the day. And for me, it was making people laugh and talk about the pain of my job because I was living it every single day. And I spoke that truth. That was my truth, and it turned into a business. I wish I could tell people. I was like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna build this, like, content business. It's gonna be like a B2B thing, because that's, like, worth so much money. But it wasn't that. It was just me living my life and talking about my life, because I could talk infinitely about my life, because that's the I was dealing with. And so I think it's finding that perspective and just going hard at that. Like, if you like Dungeons and Dragons, which I do, and it's on my mind all the time, go all in on Dungeons and Dragons. If you want to talk about, like, your work stuff, you want to talk about your health stuff, everyone's like, oh, it's so saturated. It's. It's not saturated. It's like, you're speaking your truth. It will just be better. So it's authentic. We all want to be rich and famous, but it's like, for what? Find the passion. The passion is the money. Passionately money.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I love that. I love it. So that's that idea of being authentic. But to get there, like, look in the mirror, see what the hell you like. Like, what do you naturally. When you have free time, what are you naturally gravitating.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Is that how.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

What are you consuming? What are you eating? What are you reading? What are you watching? Right behind that there could be a many billion dollar businesses.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's like what I would think about like all this. Did you know you want to do this growing up? And I'm like, I didn't. But if I look back, whenever my cousins came to town, I was taking the camcorder out and shooting like home video videos. No one ever said go to film school. When I was on plane flights, I would like write these short stories that were comedy. They tried to make my brother, sister, family laugh. I would like, you know, write it by hand and then I we. I'd read it at the end and you know, hopefully they would laugh at like the signs were there that I like doing creative stuff. But in my mind I was like, oh, if I'm not a baseball player, I'm going to be successful in business.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Whatever the. Sure.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

But like it turned out content like that was the passion. It did lead to the business. It did lead to the success. But it was like I like creating.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I love it. It's a hell of a trading secret and there's many more in this episode. Make sure to give us five stars. Let us know what you guys thought and your biggest trading secret. But you got to tell us, where could people find you? Definitely on LinkedIn.

[Jason Tardick]

Definitely on LinkedIn.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Where else can they find real name

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

on LinkedIn or corporate bro on LinkedIn. Corporate bro. Everywhere else. Corporate dot bro. Good stuff. The important dot. But yeah, I love it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Well, when you go a list actor, when you sell the CPG company. Yeah. You and Becca are coming back on. Yeah.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

She's got a lot to say. So I'm sure that would be a wonderful episode.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I'm looking forward to that. We're running it back. Corporate Pro. Ross, thank you so much for entertaining secrets.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Of course. Thanks for having me.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Ding, ding, ding.

[Jason Tardick]

We are closing the bell to wow. Corporate bro episode. But David, before we even get to Corporate Pro, we got Jason Tardick, born and raised, Buffalo, New York. The American, David Ardoin, born and raised. Oh, Canada. How you feeling after that game today, huh?

[David Ardoin]

Oh, man.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

We got a.

[Jason Tardick]

By the way, by the way, we have a lot of Canadian listening. So to our Canadian listeners. Love you guys.

[David Ardoin]

So I'll say this. I'm. Do I have permission to. To kind of just go for a little bit here? I'm not going to make it too

[Jason Tardick]

long, but I'll give you a. A stop clock of. We'll call it two minutes just because, you know, Gurney's got to edit this. And who knows what Gurney was doing this weekend.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

You know, he might need, he might, might be, we might be celebrating the

[David Ardoin]

gold medal a little too hard.

[Jason Tardick]

So he might be celebrating, might be on dates.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

We'll have to ask him, we'll have

[Jason Tardick]

to bring him on the podcast.

[David Ardoin]

All right, so two minute drill here. Tons of mixed emotions. I am a Canadian born and bred, came to the United States for Hockey in 2008. I've been pretty much in both countries for half my life. I will always cheer for team Canada hockey until I either get my US Citizenship or have a player that I've coached play on a different country team. That's kind of how I'm going at it now. Now, watching the game was number one first and foremost, I do believe the best hockey game I've ever watched in my life. It is hockey in its highest, most purest form. And just, it was breathtaking. It was absolutely breathtaking. And when you're 39 years old and you can still feel those feelings, watching something that you care so deeply about was amazing. Hockey wise. I, I, I am, I can't believe that Canada didn't win. They had so many chances and they had, they had so many and us came out firing and they had the one nothing lead after the first period. They had so many chances when, when Taze misses the open net, when McKinnon, one of the greatest goal scare scorers in the world, misses an open net, when Hellbuck is literally standing on his head like it couldn't believe and the game was going back and forth, both teams had chances. You had hits, you had five on three penalty kills, you had had the penalty kill, the, the four minute penalty at the end. And then they take a high sticking and we get the power play and it ends. At the end of the day, Jason, at the end of the day when us is celebrating and they bring the Johnny Goudreauer jersey on the ice and they bring his kids on to celebrate. And you're, you're a Canadian hockey fan, but you're a human being. I had tears streaming down my face and I, I, in my hockey network, I have a lot of people that are really close with the Goodreau family and with, with Johnny and Matthew Goudreau. A lot of them, they're, I'm so glad that the Americans won because I know the USA Hockey brotherhood is so close. I know they've been through a lot and I know how much this means to them. And at the end of the day, it just adds to the rivalry. It's good for the sport, it's good for my business in USA Hockey and in what I do. But, man, what a roller coaster. Emotions. I had a headache after. I was sweating, I was out of breath. I was drinking at 8 in the morning. It was insane.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I. I mean, I really can't add much to that. That was beautifully said.

[Jason Tardick]

I too was like, like, Catherine looked

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

back at me and she was just

[Jason Tardick]

like, oh, my God. Because when the, when they, they got

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

the kids to come out, I started crying too. It's just like, hit me and

[Jason Tardick]

I don't. Dude, if you like.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

The odds of us winning that game had to be so low so many times.

[Jason Tardick]

I remember in the third period, there

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

was a moment I was like, let's not embarrass ourselves.

[Jason Tardick]

Like, let's, let's lose, like, second period. I'm like, let's lose 2 to 1, 3 to 1.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And to see the result of that,

[Jason Tardick]

a lot of grit, a lot of, A lot of heart, a lot of dedication. And, you know, one thing I can't stand about it, I just gotta say, hey, I hate the, like.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Like,

[Jason Tardick]

the Canadian US Hockey rivalry goes

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

so deep and so far, but is

[Jason Tardick]

also so connected because these guys are playing with each other all the day. Like, so they hate each other, but they love each other.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And it's like.

[Jason Tardick]

And you know this better than me, but even like, you know, I remember growing up in Buffalo, Canada, across the board we had. We'd go against Burlington, we'd go against where Paul Bisson at played. Fuck, I'm blanking on the name of it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It'll come.

[Jason Tardick]

Well, we used to go up to Ottawa.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Oh, my God. Well, and holy shit.

[Jason Tardick]

That was it. Well, and those guys hit so fucking hard. They're the first people that like, taught us how to get hit in Ottawa, Toronto, we do it all. And like, we hated each other, but we fucking loved each other. And like, so that's what I think sometimes with these people that don't know anything about hockey are missing. They're just seeing like two countries and like, it's. No, it's not like, it's so much greater than that. I'll kick it to you. You could speak to this.

[David Ardoin]

Well, it is. And I just. Hockey is the greatest game on the planet because when you win or you lose, you shake the hands of your opponent, first and foremost. You celebrate with your team, and then you give respect to your opponent. Sound like a playoffs. It's the Best tradition. When you win the trophy, your captain goes over and he lifts the trophy. It's not like the NFL, it's not like college football, it's not the NBA where these owners get up in front of all the players who do all the work and take all the credit and the coaches are next and this and that. I love Kirk Signetti, I love Nick Saban, I love all that. The players have such respect for each other. The coaches have respect for the players who do all the work. The owners stay out of the way, they stay out of the spotlight. It is such a gentlemanly game. It's just such a, a, a game of life lessons in class and, you know, the culture of hockey. Yeah, there's, there's some things that have some toxicity to it, but overall, high level, like you said. Yeah, it's, it's USA Canada. There's a lot of political things going over that spills into any sport, but that's why sport is beautiful, because it's competition. At the end of the day, you get a winner, you, you get a loser, and, and you win with class and you lose with class. And it was just an amazing hockey game. Like I said, it builds the quote unquote rivalry and it's, it's great for the sport. So what a way to cap off the Olympics. Shout out Olympic. I will miss you. It was just amazing to have on the TV and to watch and to watch all these people who are so elite at what they do, but you know, this is a business podcast and it's probably. They have to work two jobs just so they could do their Olympic sport because some of them just don't pay in the realm that they should in these obscure events that we're watching. And man, it was great. Shout out the Olympics. Shout out Team usa. Shout out Team Canada. Shout out hockey.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Shout out everything. Shout out everything.

[Jason Tardick]

I can't even imagine the endorsements at Jack Hughes doorstep. Four teeth knocked out, pushing through, blood

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

coming out of his mouth, slammed in the boards after he scores the game on a goal. Wow.

[Jason Tardick]

We could go on, have a whole podcast about this, but again, we gotta, we gotta get to my man. David Ardwin, curious Canadian transitioning from Olympics to corporate pro. Wow, what a, what an absolute beauty.

[David Ardoin]

Listen, he was funny. You could just tell with how witty he was, how quick his reactions were. I admire guys like, I love guys like that. I want to be. It challenges me to try and be like, funnier and wittier and on my toes, but he was super smart too, like, super Engaging, gave great insights and into kind of where he's been, how he's gotten to where he is. But I will be honest with this, Jason. In all of my, all my years, my way too many hours spent on tick tock, my stupid screen time on these apps, my algorithm has never, ever brought me to corporate Pro. I had never seen one single video of his until I listened to this podcast and went and watched his. Watch some of his content.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Wow.

[Jason Tardick]

I am, I am. Part of me is surprised by that. Another part of me is like, you know, David Arwin, the, the hockey guy, the pop culture guy, prob, you know, his audience, a lot of like corporate bros, like the things, like the things that he does connects with me so deeply from my banking days. I don't know if you saw that video that I talked about, but the

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

one where it's like you finally hit

[Jason Tardick]

that, like that buzz where you're like, buzz. And then you're like up at the, at the, at the happy hour at work, you're like, oh, I got to get out of here. I've never related more to something when I was back in my banking days because you're so miserable going, but you're

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

just like, all right, let's go, let's socialize.

[Jason Tardick]

Then you have a couple drinks.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

You're like, wait, this is fun because I just had too many drinks.

[Jason Tardick]

Like it, it connects with the people that are in that corporate.

[David Ardoin]

Well, I also have in my notes there, there has to be some level of connection between you and him because how he needed to separate his personal brand, Ross from corporate bro for business purposes to get brand deals, to be able to have speaking events. Like and for you, you must have trading secrets for that whole mission of like, hey, at some point I gotta have my thing. I can't just be Jason from the Bachelor and Jason for the Bachelor only gets you so far. And now you're Jason the businessman, the rewired trading secrets. You're talking about these things. So I saw a real genuine connectivity between you two and a real respect between you two. And a lot of you guys are both really detailed. Like you're. Nothing is happening by happenstance, by surprise. Like you guys both put a lot of thought into your craft and that, that really shined through, through your guys chemistry in this episode as well.

[Jason Tardick]

I put a lot of thought my craft.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

But the thing is is that like

[Jason Tardick]

I'm not as diligent as him and I'm a little spread too thin like what they like to me. I, you know, listen I've, we've, we've managed, you know, 100 plus creators on our agency and we broker a lot of deals through others. I don't think I've ever, I have. But it's very rare you come across people like him, him where he's that detailed, he's that scripted. Like, dude, they have writing days, they have analyzation days.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

They, they, they met under the hook.

[Jason Tardick]

The, the, the, the tone of the music, the way the music hits. Like then they have. There's not, think about this. There's not one video he does where they haven't written out a script. It's unbelievable. Yeah, he's not, that's a, that's a media company. That's a production company. That's unbelievable.

[David Ardoin]

He's not getting on recaps with his, with his boy and just like, like he did you listen? Yeah, listen, you got some notes. Listen it, let's just b, let's just talk about it. But you know, that's, that's us and I love us and we're, we don't want to change that. But I, I do have in my notes, like, but he's like traditional.

[Jason Tardick]

Like she's like, it's like act. It's almost like it's like filming like videography. Like we're unscripted, we're just. You're being you, I'm being me. We're talking. They're doing a bit, they're doing an act, they're writing it out. It's like, it's, it's like film production.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

It's unbelievable.

[David Ardoin]

It's talent, it's hard work. And I did love, I, I loved the behind the scenes of the insights into how he plans, you know that they do the two week review, they go back two weeks and they kind of look at trends and all those things and they have their Monday meetings every Monday about you know, all those little, you know, micro details that go into a successful video and they calendar of what's relevant in terms of you know, hiring season and intern season and all these different elements of like what's relevant in, in terms of like reviews and, and negotiation tactics. And I just thought like that behind the scenes scenes to like what you were saying, like this is, this guy's funny and there's a lot of funny guys that probably watch content creators and like I could do that. I'm funny, this guy's funny. But to really see like there's a business, like you said, this guy's a pro. He's a pros. Pro and you want to see guys like that get rewarded. And he, I just loved his transparency with numbers. I loved how he talked about how long it took him to get paid. I like how, you know, how he realized this was his thing. Like, I just really. There was a lot of really passionate takeaways, I guess. And I have a lot of respect

[Jason Tardick]

for this guy and I, I like this. The part of the dark humor going.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Talks about dark humor versus like the

[Jason Tardick]

positive humor and adjusting it. I will tell you, of all the

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

people I've met in this space in

[Jason Tardick]

this like content game or whatever that he reminds me so much of John.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

You know John. You know John.

[Jason Tardick]

Like, he reminds me so like they both have dark humor. And so, so after this, we had the super bowl house in. Because we filmed this in San Francisco super bowl house. Had him come over. He came over, hung with everyone.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Greatest guy. Like really, really just an awesome, awesome dude. Met one of his buddies. Him and John have very, very similar styles.

[Jason Tardick]

Just an impressive guy.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I mean just, I mean just the

[Jason Tardick]

guy like it that you talk David, a lot of times you and I did I just cut.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Wait.

[Jason Tardick]

I might have just come up with this.

[David Ardoin]

Okay, hang on on.

[Jason Tardick]

You and I talk a lot about after the recap.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Like buy or sell.

[Jason Tardick]

Like, am I investing in this person?

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Am I not?

[Jason Tardick]

I like if I, I'm investing at

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

all in him, like he's, this guy

[Jason Tardick]

is like, he's just. It doesn't matter how he's going to win or what he's going to win. He's going to win. Like he's just going to win.

[David Ardoin]

Well, I had a massive takeaway from him business wise that he said when he, you were like, well, people listening in here. If you can give him a sales tactic or negotiation tactic, like you know, know what do you got for them? And he was like, this hit home for me too is in the simplest realm. And I didn't even realize it because he's right. If you're, he said if you're negotiating price, then they already want in. Like you've already kind of won. And I was like, me, I'm in contract season right now for my hockey academy for like people renewing and wanting to come back in. And like, it's just so funny. You get so fearful of people like, you know, maybe like thinking of a player or family leaving and they want to, they want to talk and negotiate. It's like, oh, or like a recruit, like same thing. It's like a recruit comes in and like they want to negotiate the price, which means they want in. And I just love that. And figure out the position of power. How badly do they need this? How much have you conveyed that they need, Miss? How much do they understand they need this? And then I loved. Don't chase maybes. Like, no's are okay. Yeses are great, but, like, stop wasting your time with maybes.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

I just.

[David Ardoin]

Just loved those. And it was like, man, he talked about going to Stanford business school. He talked about how he's the only sales guy with, like, a bunch of bankers and a bunch of, like, you know, finance guys. And, like, how you could tell his. His separator skills are so elite, and that's what makes him who he is.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Don't chase maybes.

[Jason Tardick]

Unbelievable.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Trading secret.

[Jason Tardick]

Yeah. I mean, it's.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It is no wonder why he is where he is. He's crushing it.

[Jason Tardick]

He's killing it.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I felt.

[Jason Tardick]

I don't know, David, if you felt like this, but I felt like I

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

was asking him a lot of questions

[Jason Tardick]

for the best perspective of the listener who's trying to, like, make this happen, but also for me, Like, I learned

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

so much from him. Like, I was just taking notes and taking notes and taking notes.

[David Ardoin]

I don't know if you felt. But I. I felt it. It. I felt it because I know when you're not in that mode and your effectiveness as an interviewer is night and day, like, let's call spade a spade. Can we do that? Like, you and Hillary, and you're just trying to move the conversation along and get to the next topic and stop the story and, like, get through the interview. Compared to, like, Jason who's, like, the note taker and Jason who's, like, like, curious questions, like, you bring a little curiosity from the curious Canadian into your brain with the person that you're there, it's. It's infectious, it's energetic. And I. I felt that. I felt that in the YouTube segment for sure. And you're like, God damn, this guy's making six figs on YouTube and I haven't even put trading secret clips on there. Like, what am I doing? Like, it's a business podcast. I gotta get on it.

[Jason Tardick]

Oh, like LinkedIn.

[David Ardoin]

Oh, sorry, sorry. LinkedIn, idiot.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Duh.

[Jason Tardick]

LinkedIn. This guy's a LinkedIn MA. I mean, he's a master of all LinkedIn.

[David Ardoin]

Of all.

[Jason Tardick]

I mean, it's just. Yeah, it was great.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Exactly.

[Jason Tardick]

You nailed it. There are episodes like Hillary where I'm just like.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

I'm playing, like, referee. Like, we gotta push this thing along

[Jason Tardick]

and Then there's episodes like this. I will say this, David. There's a lot. We have delayed the JTA like no other. And I got a lot of people pissed off about it. But you know what? Also a lot of hype about it, David. Last week wasn't feeling good. It's okay, you know, but we're gonna battle back and somehow, some way this week, David, we gotta record. I'll be in New York City Saturday. What are we gonna do?

[David Ardoin]

We gotta record and then.

[Jason Tardick]

And you want me to fly up to Rochester early before I go to New York? Like, what do we gotta do do?

[David Ardoin]

I would love that. I listen at the end. Might have to do at the end of the day. I need it there. If we recorded JT last week, you might as well have just like, I don't even know. You might as well just had me record with duct tape over my mouth. I would have been useless. Absolutely.

[Jason Tardick]

There's way too, way too much hype for you. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

And.

[David Ardoin]

And we got new. We got a new, A new lighting setup. We got new A camera for me coming in for JTA in case we can't get together. And then also for 30 minute Thursdays, which we'll talk more about in JTA and, and our big plans for that.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So.

[David Ardoin]

So sometimes good things come to those who wait. And we will make sure that JTA is the juiciest and the most. I don't want to say intense because I don't. I don't think intense is the word. I think we're both at a place in our life where we just want to talk and we want to get deep and we want to stop sugarcoating things and really just. Just talk about things.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Just talk about them.

[Jason Tardick]

The other thing too, for those that

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

are listening, that jta, when you start

[Jason Tardick]

late, we also get more information. So if we start filming this next week, we also have two months of information into this year. So we could do a little bit of like, what's going on this year? How's it looking? You know, things like, what are you projecting? So, yeah, a lot of action, a lot of excitement. What else, David, what else is going on in your life? Everything good?

[David Ardoin]

We're getting there. We're getting there. Hockey season.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[David Ardoin]

I don't know, man. I might need a segment where it's like, give me like, you know, you know what I loved about this episode, Corporate Bro, where he's like, yeah, like, do you ever worry if you're gonna like, run out of time in the content creator space? Like no, because my audience like grows with me and like, as they grow with me, I could become a corporate dad. Like I talk about like going from corporate dad, like changing diapers. Like there, there has to be a segment, I think for us where it's just like, maybe it's. We give an example and you talk about it as like someone who's not married yet. And I talk about a. Someone who's like, absolutely in the trenches, the war trenches, with like two kids. And we like talk about like, hey, Jay, talk about like what going to dinner is like on a Friday night. And I'll talk to you what it's like for me, the before, the during and the after, like just little things like that. So I'm just.

[Jason Tardick]

Oh, I'm. That's why we're getting the mic, that's why we're getting the lighting. That's why. I mean, I was at a dinner tonight. I had, I went over to Sean Johnson, Andrew Reese house. They had a few families over and I all had kids. Catherine and I were there. The only ones without kids.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Kids.

[Jason Tardick]

Kids are just running everywhere. Is like the best thing. I was like, this is hopefully our future. And you're just like, wow, this is

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

like, it's just like, holy.

[Jason Tardick]

It's a different.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

It's like, why, you know, this kid

[Jason Tardick]

stubs his toe over here, this kid's over here, and then dad's gotta go wipe the butt of the other kids butt. And then like, you know, we're in the middle of conversation and the princess

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

comes out and I'm like, oh my

[Jason Tardick]

God, this is like, this is the best thing.

[David Ardoin]

I'm laughing because you're like, this is the best thing ever because you have no kids. I was at a first birthday party today. Not the best thing ever. When you have kids, it's just not the best thing ever because you have kids there and they're ripping around and you're the one having to wipe their butt. And then you're trying to feed them and they're not feeding because they want to run around and the only thing they eat is cake. And so when you get home, the only thing they've had is cake. So then you want to wind them down, you want to put them to bedtime, but then they don't want to go to bed sugared up. And then you're. They're. They have a temper tantrum because they're playing with people. They don't want to come home with mom and dad because mom and dad are boring. They want to Stay with their. Their friends at the party. So. So it's great for the kids, don't get me wrong. But it's just like, simple as that. It's like, you know, now you come home, I see you sipping on a little Michelob Ultra. Like, life is good.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

You're.

[David Ardoin]

You're spinning in it.

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Yeah.

[David Ardoin]

You're spinning in the chair. And I'm like, okay. I just hope that my kid doesn't revert back to four hours of sleep like he did last night and puking his bassinet again.

[Jason Tardick]

So meanwhile, my biggest concern is that John Gurney's had a long weekend going on dates. And this recaps 19 minutes. I told him V10. He probably wants to go to bed right now. He's probably up till 4 in the morning.

[David Ardoin]

At least John Gurney will listen to this recap and he'll get a few chuckles in. And Johnny, let us know how he did. I'll. I'll.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

So we're gonna have to have Johnny come in live, edit this so that he could just, like, enjoy it.

[Jason Tardick]

You know, that would be good. Any single gals out there, go give John Gurney a follow. He is in the game, ready to go, ready to play. Corporate bro. Thank you for coming on Trading Secrets. He's asked a lot. Corporate Natalie's coming up soon. Amanda Batula coming up soon. Katherine Hurley coming up soon. Jesse Solomon coming up soon. Andrew Spencer coming up soon. And David, I'm thinking, you know, we do talk in the recaps about buy or sell. Maybe we do. Like, I'm trying to think, how do we. It's the Bachelorette's gonna be on, right? There is so much hype behind, behind this season. I don't want to just be a read recap podcast.

[Interviewer (Host of Trading Secrets)]

Not who we are, what we do.

[Jason Tardick]

We're business. We should, like, talk about. Based on what you know about my career of doing this and like, I know about the content creation game and everyone's saying there for the right reasons, we should do it. Like reels every single time after an episode. Who we're buying, who we're selling and why.

[David Ardoin]

That's a great idea. And 30 Minute Thursdays, we're gonna. We're gonna do a really authentic, you know, uncut recaps, not even of the show. We're gonna do a recap of everything surrounding the show. The noise around it, the business around it, the decisions around it, the choices around it, the impacts around it, the direction around it. We're gonna do that. It's gonna be electric. I'm looking forward to it.

[Jason Tardick]

Five stars. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Training Secrets. 1 Hopefully you couldn't afford on me

[Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro)]

Making that money Money Living that dream Making that money

[Jason Tardick]

Making that money Living that dream.

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