Hi Inside Voice Podcast listeners, this is your co-host Keri Roberts, and today my guest is Paul Hickey, the founder and CEO of Data Driven Design and the founder of the Nashville Voice Conference. Paul, thank you so much for having me.

Paul: You’re welcome Keri, thank you so much for having me. This is very exciting. I’m super geeked up about voice and just super excited to talk to you today. Thanks again!

Keri: Yes, and I know that you started your career journey in the Sports and PR World. And in the amount of years that you spent there, what did you learn about marketing that made you want to focus on digital marketing, and now voice, specifically.

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Paul: Yeah, I was a sports geek growing up as a kid. I followed all the stats and used to pretend to be an announcer, and played all sorts of sports. I was in the NBA for seven years and had a great experience there. Mainly in Detroit with the Pistons. I learned just about everything that I could possibly learn about business at that time. At first it was a lot of writing and sports information. Then, it quickly grew into marketing and learning how you can provide value to other organizations, using your own, let’s call them “assets.”

And monetize things, sell sponsorships and sell tickets. Really, it was all building relationships. And because it was all building relationships and understanding what’s valuable to other people, and what’s going to put them in a position to succeed, and creating things, situations or deliverables that they can get excited about first, it became really, really easy to essentially accomplish my goals and my organization’s goals.

So professional sports was fast-paced, high-pressure, high-visibility type stuff. But it was really business at it’s core. So I find that a lot of what I do today, mirrors that experience, in understanding what the client’s goals are.