entrepreneur on fire episode 166 welcome to entrepreneuronfire.com where remarkable entrepreneurs share their inspiring story. Let their journey illuminate your path to success. And now, you are host, John Duma's Fire Nation.

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Okay, let's get started. I am simply thrilled to introduce my guest today. Andrew McCauley. Andrew, are you prepared to ignite?

I am John. Absolutely. I love it. Andrew is a social media bloke who is an Aussie living in the States. He is the co founder of auto pilot your business, a digital media and publishing agency. And he is also the publisher of online footprint magazine on the Apple News stands.

I've given fire nation a little overview. Andrew, but why don't you take a minute, tell us about you personally. We want to get to know you and then take another minute and give us an overview of your business.

Sure, John. Well, I guess I grew up in Australia, obviously. And I cut my teeth in hotels and pubs. And in Australia, pub is a pretty, pretty big cultural sort of thing. You know, we have one on every corner sort of thing, almost like a Starbucks over here.

And it's not a it's not a CD divey reputation sort of place. It's a generally a family orientated place. It's just part of our culture. And I grew up, as soon as I left school working in pubs and I started managing those.

I was one of the youngest licensees in in the state to hold a liquor license in in Victoria. So I started learning about pubs and I was in pubs for 17 years.

And one of the things that I really loved about pubs was to get people in the door, you know, and you instantly knew whether your marketing was working because if you had an empty pub, you knew your marketing wasn't working.

So I sort of loved working me in that sort of environment, thinking, how can I get people inside the door? How can we start making money?

So I was a very active student of marketing, you know, from a physical point of view. And I learned so much in pubs, you know, you had to, as a manager of a hotel, you had, I think something like 37 hats in one shift, you know, you might be, you might be the gaming room attendant looking after poker machines, one minute, then you're dealing with staff crisis the next and then you're dealing with some security issue with someone who wants to, you know, jump the bar and have a gap.

Some of your staff, so, you know, you could be the plumber at two o'clock in the morning, all of a sudden, so you learn to deal with a lot of things that were thrown at you and you had to think on your feet.

And I think that was one of the best training grounds I could ever go through because thinking on your feet in a situation where particularly alcohol is involved.

It puts it puts a new dimension to the way you've got to think. So I learned a lot about pubs, but it got to a point where I was just had enough of pubs, you know, I didn't want to lock up a pub at four o'clock in the morning and sort of, you know, have an argument or a fight with some patron that wanted one more famous last drink.

You know, so I just said, I've got a, there's going to be a better way. So I got out of pubs in about 2006 and I started my own business consulting business and one of my very first clients said to me, hey, Andrew, what's his Facebook thing I've heard about Facebook and somebody was doing some marketing on it.

You know, can you help us with that? And I'm like, yeah, true entrepreneur fashion. Yeah, sure, sure I can. And I went home and had to learn about what Facebook was.

But it got me involved in Facebook in 2006, late 2006. And from there, I found it fascinating as a marketing perspective of how to actually use people from the internet to get them into a physical business.

And that began my love affair with social media, you know, Twitter came along and there was YouTube and LinkedIn, all of those coming along and it was just fascinating for me to see how to use those mediums to actually drive business.

And that's where I started getting involved with a lot of internet marketing. And now, you know, I've started my own company, auto pilot your business with my business partner. She's actually from, she's from the States. She lives in Sydney and I'm from Australia living over here.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag there, but we look after a lot of people. We put a lot of products online for people. We create websites and membership sites and so forth.

And now we're also getting involved with publishing. You mentioned the online footprint magazine, which we've just launched and your lovely faces on the cover of the first issue.

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