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The Power of Leveraging Relationships, Building a Personal Brand, and Following Your Passions with Cody Beebe

Being a multi-passionate entrepreneur takes a lot of work, and it certainly isn’t for everyone. But, if you are ready to take the leap, ask yourself, what will you gain from chasing your dreams?

Our guest, WSU class of ‘08 alumni, Cody Beebe, followed the pack to a certain point before realizing his passions fell outside of the 9-5 corporate world. 

And in 2008, Cody decided to “take a few years off” to follow his passion for music…but those “few years off” are still going strong over a decade later. He took the leap and followed his dream – and now he’s sharing his incredible multi-passionate entrepreneurial journey with the CougsFirst! community!

How multi-passionate is Cody? Well, he’s not only a musician but a father, husband, brewery owner, co-owner of a videography company, a freshly minted cow farmer, and owner of the Chinook music festival. 

Cody is the epitome of a serial entrepreneur, and while he’s got a lot of things going on, the incredible part about his journey is that all of his businesses intertwine together and involve a lot of WSU alumni! He’s sharing all about the WSU relationships he cultivated and how they helped shape his journey as a business owner.

This conversation is refreshing, it’s exciting, and it’s inspiring because –as you’ll hear –Cody still got value from his WSU education but stayed true to himself and followed his passion outside of academia –and we can’t wait for you to hear about his experience and lessons learned along the way!

Leveraging Relationships

“I look back to WSU and thinking just about the network that it provided me, I wasn’t in the Greek system or anything, but I had a lot of social encounters as you do at WSU and made a lot of really great friends. And then as you go into the real world, after that, just kind of figured out a way to, you know, without using things, but leveraging relationships.”

Following Your Passions

“I love the first part of building a business, you know, I love that first putting the team together, putting the vision together, I’m not the best at the maintenance side of the business. And that’s why I have great team members for some of the things that I’m doing. But the most excitement I get is like having that little spark and then lighting it on fire.”

Building a Brand

“Don’t think of yourself as a one trick kind of pony. It’s not like I’m the lead guitar player, that’s all I do know, you’re a brand. And that brand is what’s going to give you leveraging power later down the road. And then the other part of that is, especially in creative endeavors, so many people have spent so much time perfecting their craft, that they think that gift to the world should just afford them, you know, some sort of payment for it, right? The reality of it is that it’s all a value based situation. So whether you’re the best guitar player in the world, or you’re the best, you know, computer coder, or you’re the best of whatever you are, unless somebody else sees that value, it means nothing. And so that’s the part that I had to wrap my head around is like, Okay, I’m not just this musician, I am a brand. And I can use that brand to build these other entities, and build these teams that can really help me operate these entities.”

Balancing Priorities

“You only have so much time in the day. And you also need to leave a little buffer because you never know what’s going to come up. And inevitably, if you have a bunch of businesses and a lot of people, all of a sudden, there’s a ton of people relying on you. And if you take that seriously, and they have families and everything else, that’s a lot of pressure. And so if something is arrived for a moment, you have to dive back in to manage and put out that fire, that’s taking time from something else.”


Where to find Cody & his businesses:

Chinook Fest: www.chinookfest.com

@chinookfest

Digital Vendetta (Videography): www.digitalvendetta.com

@digitalvendetta 

The Outskirts Brewery Company: www.outskirtsbrewingco.com

@outskirtsbrewingco

Cody Beebe and the Crooks: www.facebook.com/codybeebeandthecrooks

@codybeebemusic


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