We recently connected with Casey Dekker and have shared our conversation below.

Casey, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Discipline is first a foremost for me. I, like many people, had to work a day job while starting my business. After a long day of building someone else’s dream, it isn’t always easy to work on your own. Add to that having a wife and kids at home brings other challenges. There were many times when I would get home from work and all I wanted to do was play Xbox with my sons or watch Netflix with my wife. What worked for me was creating a second work schedule. I treated building my business as a job. I had a schedule for myself. It would be 8 Pm – 11PM on weekdays. For holidays and weekends, that time frame would get extended depending on what was happening that day.

Discipline also kept me going when I got told no. I’m not ashamed to admit that my pitches got rejected more than they have got accepted. I kept driving on though and started building my professional network. Now the rejections don’t happen as much as they used to.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have currently have 2 businesses. The first is Cutman Casey. This business is the one I am most known for at this time. The main duties of a cutman are, preventing and treating damage to the athletes. Prevention starts, in what is call the back of the house. Typically some kind of locker room environment. Here we use gauze and tape to wrap the athletes hands. This helps prevents injuries to the small bones of hand when punching. Before the match starts we ‘grease’ the athletes. This is applying petroleum jelly to areas of the face to make the skins more elastic, therefore less likely tear and cut. In between rounds we treat damage the athlete may have received during the round. The three main types of damage we are working on is, swelling, nosebleeds and lacerations. Not only can this damage degrade athletic performance, they may also cause the ringside doctor to stop the match prematurely. I got into being a cutman after multiple years as a competitor in martial arts, Once I got into my late 30’s I found I didn’t recover like I did as a teenager and in my 20’s. Given that I still wanted to be involved with the sports I loved, I looked for alternatives to competing. Something about being a cutman just called out to me.

My other business is 8 count marketing. We specialize in social media marketing for small businesses. We do anything from copy writing an ad for social media up to planning a full social media marketing strategy. The main business philosophy is what I call ‘peacock marketing’. This is were we look for and promote what makes a business different and stand out from others in the same field. We take a deep look at each client to see what can make them stand out. What many in business would consider a weakness, we find ways to turn it into a positive to further create leads for our clients. I started down the marketing path working a sales for an internet hosting company. This lead to me moving into an SEO expert position at the same company. I found while working there that I had a love for marketing. I also found that many businesses were looking to copy another business. Also many marketers were wiling to take payment to provide this copying. I truly believe each person is unique and in turn so is each business.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

This is one of my favorite stories to share. I hired to work an event in Kingman, Arizona. Given that is was taking place on a long weekend, my wife an I decide to segue it into a vacation in Las Vegas. Kingman is about a 4 hour drive from where I currently live so we leave the house around 8 am. We expect heavy traffic due to the holiday weekend. Around 30 minutes into the drive the freeway off ramp we need to take is backed up. We area complete stop due to this. While we are sitting there an F150 truck travelling at 80-85 MPH read ends. This causes our vehicle to spin uncontrolled across this busy freeway. By some miracle of blind luck or divine intervention every other vehicle on that freeway misses crashing into us. My SUV is completed totaled by this. The police come and do what they do for car accidents. The EMT check us out and everyone is healthy minus a few bumps as bruises. I have to take moment to thank Nissan for the safety and crash features on there SUVs. To this day I’m still not sure how neither my wife nor I managed to not get injured. Now though we are stuck on the side of the freeway in 97 degree sunny weather. At this point I am ready to call everything off and then I realize everything the client needs for the event is sitting in suitcase next to me on the side of a freeway. Being completely shook up and in shock from how razor thin that moment between life a death felt, I had to get the job done still. We managed to talk to tow trucker driver into dropping us off at the nearest gas station. To further elaborate on how our luck had began to change, that gas station was right next to the only rental car place still open for the day in the area. We happened to get the last car they had with 5 minutes left until they closed. We made the trip, but a little late, had a great event and a even better vacation.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Word of mouth is my biggest source of new clients. I do advertise on social media, attend networking events and still cold pitch. All which do find me clients. Nothing though works as good as a client telling their friends and family about how pleased they are with my services.

Contact Info:

• Website: CutmanCasey.com 8Countmarketing.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cutmancasey/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/casey.dekker
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cutmancasey/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CutmanCasey

Image Credits
Rhonda Costa-main photo all other photos by me