The Hourglass Strategy Decoded: Kasim Aslam's Path from Generalist to Specialist to Empire

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Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. And as long as you just keep that in mind, manage your downside risk with that one little nugget of truth, go out there and fail with everything inside of you. Every opportunity, every chance, every endeavor, every attempt, and not just in business, fail at life. Like, go talk to that person you're attracted to and work up the courage to cross the room and just get rejected. You know what I mean? Go on an interview for a job you have no intention of going to. Go to apply for a school that you never want to go to. Go audition for a film or for a stage play. Go, like, just— because the thing that's really interesting is on the other side of Every failure exists some kind of success.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Annika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. I am having awesome Qasim Aslam on the show today. I'm really intrigued by some of your story, so I wanna start there before we get into everything that you're doing now, right? You've described yourself as the world's greatest failure, but you've built 6, 7, and 8-figure businesses. But you were raised in Albuquerque by a blind single mom. You dropped out of school, right? You spent time acting in films that you've described as terrible. What changed in your life? What was that early chapter like? And then what led you to become an entrepreneur and a very successful one?

I haven't tested this thesis. I don't have data to support it, but my anecdotal experience is that quite a few entrepreneurs, they're really hustlers in hiding. They tend to be kids from different, maybe more diverse backgrounds. They've probably made an attempt or two at things that are morally questionable and The entrepreneurial spirit is one of, it doesn't do well with instructions or maps. You know, it's kind of folks that, that are okay with off the beaten, I didn't, I, you know, I didn't go to college. I have a 10th grade education. And so there's a lot about entrepreneurship that just feels innate. And I don't know that I had much of a choice, to be honest with you. I personally think, and this will probably be a little divisive, but I think most of the best entrepreneurs are actually in prison. And we just have a, you know, we have a societal substructure that doesn't necessarily reward their prowess in a way that it should. And so they find themselves in, you know, on the wrong side of whatever arbitrary line we've all drawn. But yeah, I don't think it's a good thing per se. Like it's, it's like everything, it has a light and a shadow. Like I think the entrepreneurial endeavor is one of creation in a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways it's also one of manipulation. So you kind of have to constantly calibrate. And I still find myself doing that, trying to figure out like, where is the real line here? I'm launching a new agency right now called AEO with the Smart Marketer team. And the thing that's so funny to me is we're back in a world where the best product doesn't win. It's the person with the best marketer behind them. And we all know that, but if you really spend some time with it, it's actually like, it's horrifically unethical. You know, like what I do and what I've done for a living, I'm like, I drive traffic or I have driven traffic for people. That's been a big staple of my career. And it's weird to me that, you know, kind of like an attorney, like an attorney doesn't care if you're innocent or guilty. If you sue me, the same attorney that you hire would have worked for me if I got to them 5 minutes beforehand. And I've always hated that framework. It's always felt to me very just divorced of principle, but it's easy to point at the attorneys and be like, oh, you guys are bad. I do the same thing. You know, like I'll run ads for this company because they found me and paid me. But had their competitor found me 48 hours earlier, I'd been like, sorry dude, I'm already papered up. So I don't know, like it, there's a lot of yin and yang to it all. And I love, I love building businesses. That's like just the thing I get the biggest kick out of. So that was more of an answer than you wanted, and you could forgive me.

No, it's actually taking me down rabbit holes that are not in my questions. But I, I do, I understand what you're saying about a lot of people who would make the best entrepreneurs being in prison. They likely weren't given the same opportunities to build.

Yeah. Or, yeah, I think you're exactly right. My little brother did 6 years in a 4-yard. So, I, you know, I have a, I have a personal vendetta as far as this narrative is concerned. And the thing that's interesting is my brother was never convicted of anything but nonviolent, victimless drug crimes, drug crimes. And the more interesting than that is the drugs were prescribed to him. He broke his back. He owned a moving company, fell off a balcony, hit a parking overhang, broke his back. Doctor gives him, I forget what, oxys or Percocet, whatever the thing was. It's basically synthetic heroin. And, you know, flash forward, he's addicted to these things that are demonstrably addictive. And in order to feed his addiction, he turns to the commercial route, let's say, of basically selling it so he can use it. And I don't understand, you know, I'm 40 years old, about to be 41, and a PhD would have a difficult time explaining to me the difference between what my brother did and what the pharmaceutical companies did outside of the fact that my brother doesn't have a congressional lobby. So I think there's a lot of just made up arbitrary, you know, I think most psychedelics are majority, what would you call it? A positive influence, right? Like I've done 3 psilocybin mushroom journeys and they've been the most profound thing I've ever done in my entire life, but they're illegal, you know, but the entrepreneurial, it's like the gravity of entrepreneurship would weigh in the direction of the psilocybin, not against it, regardless of how you feel about the use of it. So I just feel like so much of what we do, you know, the entrepreneurs— Nassim Nicholas Taleb had just a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, like, soliloquy. It reminded me, if you've read Ayn Rand's— remember, like, 45-minute radio telecast John Galt goes on? Nassim Nicholas Taleb had his own about entrepreneurship, and he's like, you know, we celebrate everybody. We celebrate athletes, we celebrate soldiers, we celebrate celebrities. We don't celebrate the entrepreneurs, but they're the ones that move society forward. And it's so true, you know, like people are going to continue going to prison for psilocybin distribution until an entrepreneur finally cracks the code. I got to sit there with Governor Rick Perry. I watched him be interviewed as part of a documentary. My buddy Jeff Hayes invited me just to— Jeff Hayes is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant filmmaker. And I'm just like sitting there watching Rick Perry talk about the use of ibogaine. Which again, it's another psychedelic that's meant specifically for therapeutic practices. And here's this guy that's like, used to throw the book at him, you know, I mean, mandatory minimums, all this garbage. And, but then it went and it helped him. And because it helped him, now he wants to let it help other people and it's helped some Navy SEALs. And, and I think that that entire, that way of thinking, the idea that the way that we're doing it isn't the way it should be done, or there's a better way. Anything that exists outside the confines of the rulebook, that to me is entrepreneurship. I don't think that's the technical definition, but that's, I don't, we don't have a better word for it. You know, it's like all the people that want to go off the beaten path and what we do from a societal perspective is we literally lock them up. So to repeat the original thesis, I think all the best entrepreneurs in prison because that's where we put them. It's like, oh, you're not, my children are in school right now. They go to a Montessori school. I use air quotes because it's not traditional Montessori. I wish it was. And they hate it. They hate everything about it because it's, it's sit down, shut up, do your work. Here's 15 pages of homework. Here's your standardized test. It's a charter school. So they have to play these games. And, and I'm like, that's actually exactly what they want. They want rule follower, you know, like follow the rules, read the book, stand in line. And they beat all. And so I've told my, my sons, it's, you know, it's close. It's the closest thing that we have to Montessori. I'm obsessed with Montessori pedagogy. I think Maria Montessori was an absolute—

my daughter went to Montessori until kindergarten, but then the school she went to was, it was really great. A lot of freedom and a lot of hands-on learning still.

Yeah, that's what, and that's what we should be doing. It's like cultivating people who can think and do. And I actually think, you know, this is more or less stated. I don't think that's what we want as a society. I think we want people that will, will do as they're told.

Well, this could be a really big discussion because obviously there's a whole—

sorry, Anika, I didn't mean to take your spot.

No, no, no. But yeah, there's so much research about the school system and the school system was made to have factory workers. Well, that no longer happens. And also the—

yeah. And there are no more factories.

If you don't, you know, if you're not literate by 3rd grade, chances of going to prison are higher. But I also, I mean, I'm a Gen Xer, so we had so much freedom and flexibility. Our parents never knew where we were. I went on, I grew up in Kansas. I was always on going on adventures, like with friends, hey, let's drive to Oklahoma and see what's going on. There's this club that's supposed to be really good in Tulsa, drive down, dance all night, drive home, you know, oh, this university in Iowa doesn't have any DJs or a good, any kind of club scene. Let's take the club to them. Or I've never been to Minneapolis after debate camp in Wisconsin that I drove myself to. I'm gonna drive to Minnesota. I'm gonna drive a new friend to Minnesota. No cell phones. We were completely free range. But I think that also helped us use our minds in a very different way and a very different approach because we had the freedom to fail. We had the freedom to experiment. And thankfully nothing ever happened to me, but there are so many times, you know, nowadays, of course, we think about that because, oh, this is happening. That's happening. So many times things could have happened, but whether it's because I have an angel looking over my shoulder or because whatever situ— you know, whatever, I got to learn from those experiences. And kids these days are not given that same freedom. So I think entrepreneurship looks very different. And I also agree with you, so many times people who have brilliant creative minds and are creating art and businesses, You have to play a little bit of the game. Like I have a lot of organic traffic for my podcast, but I also do look at how am I posting on social media? How am I sharing things with my guests so that they can share it to their audiences? What do I want to spend for advertising and where am I allocating those dollars? Am I doing my SEO research? I still have to play the business game, but that also opens me up to be able to have conversations like this where we can be really open and talk about things that are important. You know, but I might have my next conversation might just be about SEO. So, so it's a wide range, but it gives me that freedom and flexibility to do this and to have been a multi-time founder and to have been okay with failing upward and learning those lessons, right? And so I think that's a lot of what we get to do. And it sounds like that's something you've been very open to in your lifetime.

I think the only way up is failure. When you look at the staircase of success, it looks like it's made of success and it's not. Success is like the carpet that sits on top of the scaffolding that is the failures. You know, every failure you have is like, and what I tell, especially, I hate to use this word because it makes me feel so old, but what I tell young people, you can manage your downside risk. And a lot of people, I didn't do that as a young man, like the first, my very first really big swing. I maxed out my credit cards. I bought all this insane equipment. I was like, I'm going to go all in on myself. That's what Tony Robbins would say to do. I believe I, you know, and then I, and then it was like digging myself out of the hole was, it was insane. It was near impossible at the time. You don't need to do that. Like you can manage your downside risk. And as long as you just keep that in mind, manage your downside risk with that one little nugget of truth, go out there and fail with everything inside of you. Every opportunity, every chance, every endeavor, every attempt. And not just in business, fail at life. Like, go talk to that person you're attracted to and work up the courage to cross the room and just get rejected. You know what I mean? Go on an interview for a job you have no intention of going to. Go to apply for a school that you never want to go to. Go audition for a film or for a stage play. Go, like, just because the thing that's really interesting is on the other side of Every failure exists some kind of success. And my experience has yet to be, you know, I've never had that, like, that Natalie Portman moment where I guess she was discovered on a bus stop. But I don't know if this is true or not, but she's just hanging out and somebody's like, oh, you should be in movies. And now she's like, you know, a superstar. I don't think that that really happens as often as you sort of collect grains of sand. And on a long enough timeline, they kind of fill up this little scale of success. And then you look back and you're like, oh crap. I actually kind of have, you know, I sort of got something here, but it only happens after the failures. And I don't, I don't think there's a failure that can't be alchemized as long as you're managing your downside risk, you know, and there's pretty obvious things, you know, messing with drugs, downside risk, messing with crime, downside risk, getting pregnant, downside risk, like all those, those are things that can negatively impact depending on the context and situation. But if you can manage your downside risk, especially in your 20s, man, dear God in heaven, like All those kids, I feel so bad for them. I see, I see a lot of them just because of where I live. I'm in North Scott still. It's wildly affluent. And there's this certain class of human here who's very obsessive with like, you know, like their kids are going to Harvard, you know, like, and their kids are neurotic already. And I'm like, you're a child. Where's the neurosis coming from? And they have a 10-year plan. And I'm like, dude, go get drunk, get laid, get high, travel. Like, you know what I mean? Like, go be a human. Because here's what happens when you get drunk, you get laid and get high. You realize like, oh, that wasn't worth it. I've compromised myself. I've compromised my body. I've compromised my psyche for things in, you know, that I actually don't want to do that anymore, as opposed to the people that never, ever, ever touch those lines and then find themselves in a position where they actually can't control or contend with an environment where that's not necessarily managed for them. So man, no, I think, I think failure is just the most important. I mean, it's, it's got to be a religious truth. It's like the most important thing you can do for yourself. And then putting our kids— I'm still not good at this as a dad, as I think through it. My children are 8 and 10, and they're so different. My 10-year-old is super autistic. He's like, he's very— he loves science and biology, and he wants to be a roboticist. And then my 8-year-old is an athlete and just a bloodthirsty killer. And I, I don't know that I do enough to create an environment where they, they can really fail. I still feel like I catch them too soon, too early, and too You know, with the all-new Audi Q3, the answer is always yes.

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Oh no.

Like your older son. No, like your older son. She's known since she was 12 or a young age that she is going to get her PhD in cognitive neuroscience.

Oh, she's one of those.

So yeah. So it made it really easy to parent her. She's never talked back. We have an amazing relationship that we always will have. She puts more pressure on herself than we could ever put on her. But she is a very high achiever. She's not neurotic or any of those things, but she also, like many of this generation, she's not, she's not interested in drinking, not interested in partying. You know, her brain, like your older child, is very like into science and she doesn't like to make small talk about boys or parties or music. And so it's almost like from my generation, we got to experience all of that. We could be smart and, or like you, you could have different types of smarts, not the kind that were expected in the school experience, but that still were very valuable. And I, I feel like we kind of have to push kids a little bit, at least kids like ours, um, like your oldest and mine, to go out and venture out a little bit more and try those things. She's probably going to go to university. She's gonna meet one person and maybe that'll be the person she's with the rest of her life.

Maybe her friend of a friend. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's what I see in her more than I see the other things. But again, but she's also been privileged. She's traveled a lot, but that's also where we have to step in and make sure that our kids really understand the world around them, how people work, how things work. That just because you come from a place of privilege, you still need to care for others. You still need to look out for others.

Yeah, I think that's beautifully stated. I, I'm in a group called Front Row Dads. It's one of the best things I've ever done for myself. It's, I think it's 350 people now. It's just men that wanna be better fathers, better husbands. And one of the things that's interesting, I didn't anticipate hearing this, but in the, we have this message thread and one of the dads asked something like, do your kids sneak out? And the dads are like, no, I haven't. Like, and all of us were like, no, nobody's had, you know, there's some dads in there with teenage kids and we're like, we haven't actually had to deal with that. And we had this conversation where I was like, dude, I never didn't sneak out. You know what I mean? Like every weekend I was sneaking out to do, and we were, we were just kind of wondering, we're like, what is happening? With the youth, you know, like what's wrong with kids these days? Like they're not sneaking out. They're not really making attempts at some of those things that if somebody were to tell you 20 years from now, you're going to have a child. They're not going to sneak out. You think like, oh, thank God. But now I'm like, oh man, I'm actually a little worried about that. I'm a little worried that, you know, maybe to make a more, a dicier argument or discussion, my children haven't been in fights. I haven't been kickboxing. But by the time I was 10, I'd been like, I was a pincushion, you know, I was a nerdy 6-foot-tall Pakistani kid in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like, I'd just been whooped. Wow. And, and that's not good either, right? Yeah. But there is something about understanding, like, this is where I am and this is where you are and this is how we contend. And I just think that that's really important. I think that all of those things, sneaking out and like you said, like, just, I'm just gonna drive, I'm just gonna go and I'm gonna experiment. And I don't know, I think losing that feels—

I mean, this conversation about parenting, about kids, and our— the way we grew up versus the way kids grow up now is very in line with talking about being an entrepreneur. Because as kids, we took risks, we tried things whether we were supposed to or not. We took things to the edge, right? Probably there's a lot of stories that Nobody would ever guess from looking at me now as a college professor, having a top podcast, coaching people, right? On and on and on and on.

Yeah.

They were like, really? She did that?

But that's why I always take it back to when I am teaching, I take it back to, I started out promoting clubs and DJs and throwing raves, and that is what organically built up all my skills that I learned for business. Right. And that's so funny.

I never would've guessed. Yeah.

Yeah. But that really is, it's still a through line, like that rebel girl who was a high school cheerleader but wore combat boots and blue lipstick is still who I am today.

Yeah.

Right. So I wanna ask, you talked a little bit about your credit card, right? Like taking it to the limit, going all in. You've talked about going broke as being one of the best things that ever happened to you versus being something catastrophic. And you, you keep mentioning this concept of going all in, right? And testing things. What happened at that moment in time and what was the gift that you took away?

You know, the 2008 financial collapse, if that was a meteor that hit the earth, I was in the building the meteor hit. I was building banking software at the time. I was 20 years old when I started my business. Right place, right time. Just lucky in a lot of ways. And I was making more money than a 20-year-old should make.

Yeah.

Especially, you know, broke kid from Albuquerque. I'm a welfare baby. So the worst thing you can do to poor people is give us money 'cause we're like, You know, making it rain. So I buy this house on the hill that's 3 times the size of anything that I'll ever need. I'm driving this idiot's car. I'm always picking up the check. I'm just like, you know, I'm in this Scottsdale thing. And then within 2 years, it was, it was gone. The bank that brought down Lehman Brothers was called First National Bank of Arizona. It was owned by a billionaire out of North Dakota named Ray Lam. I was working, I was in that bank building on Bank Failure Friday when the FDIC pulled up with their big black SUVs and kicked down doors and shut the bank down. And that was the lead domino that cratered my entire financial life. I lost my house to foreclosure, my car to repossession. I was trolling Costco with an expired Costco card. That's how I was eating, is I'd walk around Costco and get the free tryouts. I knew the little lunch ladies, like everybody knew I was coming. And if I was lucky, I had $1.50 to buy a hot dog. And I remember I went to Target and I applied for a job. I lived in an apartment, or I lived in a place right behind a Target. And I went to Target and I applied for a job as a dock worker to unload the trucks at 4 AM. And I wasn't qualified, like, because I don't, you know, like I have no, I don't have an education. I don't have work background. I've always just been kind of a, you know, me and my brother called stone soup hustlers. And so I just realized then I was like, oh, I just got it. I can't even unload boxes at Target. So I just have to make this work. And I had a laptop that didn't have a battery. It had to be plugged in to be powered on. Which made remote meetings really embarrassing. I used to lie and tell people that because Phoenix was so hot, I was afraid to have the battery in the car because I wanted to blow up. Just like, you know, and so, but slowly but surely I worked my way back out. I was in multi-six figures in debt. I never declared bankruptcy. There's a key to getting out of debt, which is to create your credit and then they'll negotiate with you. And I started trolling Craigslist for web work and web led to SEO and SEO led to marketing. And I started to make a little bit of money and I started to pay off my debt and And going broke was the most important lesson I'd ever learned as an entrepreneur because I realized what money is. Money is fuel, you know, in this weird game. I see it again because of where I live. I live in kind of douchebag alley, to be honest with you, on some levels. Like, you know, you can't go outside without seeing a McLaren. And I don't want to wealth shame because I know there are people that just really love cars. And I think those people, like, God bless you. If you really love cars, if you're a gearhead and you just can't wait to get behind the wheel of that car, I salute you. I think you should, that's how you should spend your money. I don't think that's most of 'em. I think most of those people just want Instagram McLarens, you know?

Well, yeah, I think about a certain place I lived before I moved back to California that I had a really great time and met really amazing people, but also I was in the art fashion scenes, the charity scene, and there were a lot of people who were very performative, right? Why are you at this event? Is it to show off your brand new dress? Fancy label to raise your hand, to donate a lot of money so that you can be that person, that savior.

Yeah.

Or is it because this is a cause that you care really deeply about and you're willing to get your hands dirty and you're gonna go volunteer as well, right? And so it's a big jarring shock and it's also jarring when you go from being very, like, I grew up very middle class, right? I was making six figures in my early 20s. Then I got married and became a smug married, and then I was with somebody who was, had a lot of wealth. And it took me a long time of being divorced, having to go on food stamps, right? And having to figure things out because I wasn't, I didn't have that money anymore. Signed, didn't sign a good prenup, didn't make a good deal for myself. And also shifting your mindset after being in that for almost 2 decades to being back to like, okay, how do I hustle and how do I provide without feeling like I have to be that person who's compensating in some way by showing off that I'm driving a Mercedes like all the other moms, or I belong to this certain gym and my daughter goes to a certain school and we go to these certain charity events and promise, you know, certain amounts of money. It's very humbling when you go through these life experiences and these, some people would call them failures. I wouldn't say it's a failure. I would say that having to realize that I needed to go on food stamps was one of the most humbling moments where I'm not the one who's helping others. I have to realize that I, it's okay for me to ask for help too and then build myself back up. And, you know, I moved back to LA in 2019. I would never have thought that I would, during the pandemic, build a business that went to half a million dollars in the first year doing PR for businesses that didn't have a lot of money, so built on the backs of very small retainers, to merging that with another bigger agency, to being asked to be at another agency, to going back, getting my MBA, teaching grad school, and having a podcast and a whole other business, right? And I, I'm saying this because I feel like kinship with you, and I feel like you have had, right, those failures. You've said you failed dozens of times at different ventures, but then you built something that worked and you replic— you built another thing that worked and another thing that worked, and you're completely iterating and going, ooh, what do I wanna do next? And that's an exciting place to be at. So you have to look back at your journey and feel really solid about who you are now and realize that if you do fail again, it's okay.

Yeah, I feel grateful for sure. And I actually, I miss I miss, this is going to sound weird and you know, it's, it's not ultra literal, but I miss the hunger. You know, as a young, I did 80 hours a week for 20 years. I was hungry and I, and then I made money and now I'm fat and happy. Now it's like, I used to get up at 4 AM every single day. Like I was really driven and I was so motivated and I don't really have, you know, I imagine that happens on the other side of finding your passion or your Neo, which I have yet to do. Like there are people out there that just know why they were born and I have no idea. Why God put me on this planet. And so, you know, some of my kids, I feel kind of complacent. Like I've got some buddies that still need more money. I'm a deca-millionaire. I've hit, I've hit, I had a $12 million net worth before I got a divorce. Now I have $7 million and $7 million makes you like the poorest rich person in the world, right? Like I don't have a private jet. I don't fly first class, but I could, I can buy just about anything that I want, which means I'm not really like money motivated anymore. I still really, really want to make an impact. But I don't know, I just, I miss the hunger. I miss like really wanting, like really just, just the fire that used to burn inside to prove myself. Yeah. I'd love to be on the other end of figuring out like, what's the thing? I want something that keeps me up late and wakes me up early. Yeah. Well, you have your kids for one, but yeah, they do both of those things.

Yeah. So you also have this concept called the hourglass of niching or niching. Right. What does that mean? Because I know for me it's been hard to narrow focus because when you have a lot of interests and there's a lot of things that you're fairly decent at, right, you kind of want to, you want to play in all those fields. I mean, that may be one of the motivations for you starting lots of new businesses.

Many businesses. Yeah.

Right. But now that I've really narrowed my focus, I mean, on AI, on podcasting and education, everything has become much more clear. So talk about your experience with that and why is that helpful for an entrepreneur?

Hmm.

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We give young entrepreneurs really horrible advice. It's hindsight advice. You tell, especially young people, you say, niche down, niche down, pick a niche. Alex Hormozi calls it a niche slap. And it's great advice in hindsight because what everybody realizes is, oh, I didn't start making any real money until I niched down. That was true for me. I built the number one ranked Google Ads agency in the world. When I sold it in October 2022, we were spending $100 million of other people's money. So I, you know, $100 million a year for however many years, like I really figured out Google Ads. And Google Ads is an extraordinarily tight niche. That's not marketing. That's not digital marketing. That's not paid digital marketing. It's not even paid search. It's one, you know what I mean? Like niche, niche, niche, niche, niche, niche. The issue though, with niching down is, is if you do it without data, you niche arbitrarily. And that's what we tell young entrepreneurs to do is we tell them, go pick a niche. Well, it's like going outside and saying, I'm going to drill for oil here. You know, what happens when you get to 100 feet, 200 feet, 300 feet, 400 feet? There's no freaking oil. The thing to do, and this is why it's an hourglass, is you start broad. And so when I started my marketing agency, it was called Solutions 8 because we had 8 core service offerings, which did everything. I was like SEO and PPC and digital marketing and video and social and web and software and, and, and, and, and, and you can't be good at any of that. And I wasn't. And that's why we tell people to niche down. But what we miss is the journey of figuring out like, okay, video is overwhelming and web is low margin and SEO is actually a lot of fun, but the exclusivity rules are too, and so on and so forth. And it's like, all right, I'm not gonna do that. I can't do that. I won't do that. This is going away. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh, But Google Ads, every client, and you know what's funny about Google Ads is I didn't want to niche down into it. The thing that I identified was all the clients that were successful with our marketing campaigns were successful with Google first. And that's because Google tests your offer. You know, people who are like, I'm going to test Google. No, you're not. Google's going to test you. Google's taking your offer to the marketplace of intent. And if it doesn't work, it means you have a business model that either doesn't have the margins or doesn't have the conversion that would allow for viability. So I liked Google as a litmus test, and then I would take clients and do, you know, the SEO and the social and all that stuff, because now I knew it's a viable client. And I brought in an employee who became a business partner, and he was the one who was like, dude, let's just do Google. And we niched down and I, we exploded. Our growth was explosive, but I never could have figured that out without first kissing all the frogs. So start broad, narrow down. And then what'll happen is you'll find what I call the apex of profitability. And the apex of profitability is where I mean, we are at 40% margins, which for agency is insane. Like insane. Agencies aim at 15%. When you find the apex of profitability, now you can branch back out. And this is what's really counterintuitive. Before I niched down, I was doing web and social and software and blah, blah, blah. And I was doing it all arbitrarily and all poorly. And it was low margin and it was hard. And, you know, it's hard to be good at things. After I became a Google Ads agency, if I wanted to expand back out and let's say I wanted to start offering web services. Well, now I'm offering web services as a Google Ads agency. So the niche still applies, but now I know this is what the thank you page needs to look like. This is why conversion tracking is important for Google Ads specifically. This is why page speed is really critical. This, and everything is, is viewed through the lens of that specific type of agency. So you get to branch back out in relative perpetuity, and that's the hourglass. That's why it starts broad, tapers, and then expands back out.

That's a really great framing. It's something that I'm gonna have to think about a little bit. So I'm like, hmm, we're gonna have to have further conversations after this interview. So talk about delegation because I feel like that is one of your businesses right now, correct? You have Driven Mastermind, you also have Pareto Talent where you're really helping people get the assistance that they need. And that, that's something that we sometimes overlook until we're drowning. That's actually where I'm at right now and I have I have one executive assistant starting next week, but I already see all of the other places I need people to come in and work on things.

Every entrepreneur needs an EA. And, you know, I've been saying that since before I owned an EA agency. You're the least scalable part of your business. And if you don't have somebody to help you, then you're taking the least scalable, most important part of your business and you're, you're putting that asset to task at some things that are just not worth the time. What people do though, from a delegation perspective is, is they bring in generally a competent person and then they ruin them. When I say I have 240 trained EAs, we have over 100 placements. We've been placing EAs for almost 2 years. It takes 1,000 applicants to produce 1 executive assistant at Prosto. Like, we, our people are the best of the best of the best of the best. And we put them through the training and the boot camp and they have the support. And so then I take this person who really is elite and I place them with an entrepreneur who's already demonstrably successful. And what I've observed over 2 years, and I have enough data now to say this with confidence, 99% of the time that relationship doesn't work, it's the entrepreneur, and it's usually the entrepreneur doing things that they don't realize are catastrophically damaging. My favorite example is authorship creates ownership. Authorship creates ownership. So you're a hyper-intelligent individual, obviously. If I asked you, let's say, for the sake of argument, I said, hey, Anika, can you do me a favor? Would you work on this project for me? And you take it and you run with it and you're excited about it. You sink your teeth in, you do all this work, all this research. You really start to build something that you're proud of. And then I just peek my head in one day and say, hey, do me a favor, change the square to a circle, change red to blue. And why don't you tweak that line this way? I don't like the way this is working. From that moment on, that's not your project anymore. It's mine. And every little tweak damages the connection you have to this thing. And you're a hyper-intelligent, hyper-successful human being that I just ruined. I'm never going to get the best out of Anika now because that's my project and I get to come in and tinker with shit. And the stuff I'm tinkering, by the way, it's probably wrong. It's probably like, hey, why don't you let this smart person do what smart people do? So they'll do stuff like that. The other thing they do is they start people slow. You want to expect miracles. You know, I only hire the best of the best, but if you hire the best of the best, treat them like they're the best of the best. To have somebody come in and be like, all right, we're going to start you off slow, watch these training videos for 2 weeks, and then you can shallow. It's like, don't, you know, a horse is never going to run faster than they do when another horse is on the track, number 1. So put them in a position of like, you're like, people are competitive and they need that fuel and people don't work any harder than they do in the first 90 days of employment. So I tell my entrepreneurs, max out, but don't overwhelm. If there's 10 things a human being can do in a day, make sure they have 12. Now I'm going to come to you and say, hey, I don't want you working nights and weekends. I don't want you to die. I want you to enjoy your work here. But something called Parkinson's law says that work is going to expand at the time allotted. So you have 12 things to do. There's only 10 that can get done. All I want you to do is manage me. Let me know. These are the two things that I'm going to push off to the side. And if I start sending you more, you can tell me when you get busy. And that type, delegate messy, you know, entrepreneurs, especially the control freaks, man, which is a lot of them. They won't delegate a project until it's done. You know, like if you're building a website, like, all right, I need all the content and all the CSS files and all the brand guidelines and all that. And I'm like, you just built a site, dude. Like, what do you need a competent person for? You just hand that off to any VA. But you should, the way I delegate is, it's almost appalling. I'll be in line at Costco delegating critically important things about my business, being like, hey, can you research a new project management tool and tell me what— and because I have the best people in the world, I am the dumbest, least competent, most inept human that's ever worked for any of my organizations. And everybody knows it too. That's the best part is I'm not even on the org chart. You know, I have a portfolio of 16 businesses. I'm not meaningfully involved in all of them, but there's not a single one where You call me for anything, you know, I don't even sign the checks. It's just somebody else manages. And I think that's the way to do entrepreneurship because then I'm free now to have conversations like this and dream shit up and think and, you know, do the things that I think entrepreneurs need to do. Everybody's capable of this. It's actually competence is your Achilles heel. The better you are at the job, the less likely you are to give it away. And there's no way there's not somebody, there's 8 billion people on the planet. There's no way there's not somebody out there that's better than you. There's no way, you know, I don't care if you're Steve Jobs, I don't care, you know, Elon Musk, like, and maybe you are and God bless. And there's some things that people keep just because they like to do them. That's great. Fine. But there's a bunch of stuff that I see entrepreneurs not giving up that I think it's laughable. They're like, oh no, I'm the only one that can do this. Okay. You know, like, okay, Superman, like, see how long or how far that carries you.

I'm at the place where I'm intentionally trying to train people to take over Everything. I mean, with the podcast, I still vet the guests and I still manage my calendar, which I'm, again, things I wanna turn over. I still create the questions, but then we do the interview and then I just hand it off to my team and they do everything else. I'm like, okay, what else can I have people take over? And, you know, because I want to be able to just show up, be really intentional with interviews, and then say, okay, we're gonna have another meeting. Where we're not doing an interview, but we're gonna follow up about this, this, and this. I'm really interested in your business process, or I have another podcast that I think you should be on, or whatever the case may be. So, I aspire to be where you're at, where I'm not on the org chart, where I'm just showing up, doing my thing. And for other parts of my business, the same thing. I'm, I'm actually in the process of training people to take over all of our production for clients so that I can pop in, but they can really handle all the meetings. They can handle every aspect of production, whether it's guest management down the line to fully finished product and promotion, right? I'm doing the same thing for my coaching program of my business. So I'm really— this conversation is one of those ones that I'm like, this is coming at the perfect time because these are all things that are really top of mind for me is who do I need to identify as the next piece of the puzzle, right? So I think it's really great for all of us to think through this because I, Too often as entrepreneurs, we don't wanna spend the money to build the right team, but the better team that I build, the more money is flowing in because I'm able to do what I'm best at, whether that's get on that sales call, you know, which eventually again, somebody else will do, or just do the best at what I do, right? That is not replicable necessarily because I'm the face. 'cause I'm the one who's the host or whatever the case may be. So, you talked about, you know, your company, but your, your 16 company portfolio. You also mentioned at the top of the podcast another company that you're building out. So, it, it sounds like you're always actively seeking out like, what's the next thing? What's an issue that I'm seeing that I can help fix?

It's just 'cause I'm stupid. I think if I, if I really stuck at one thing, I'm sure I'd be a much wealthier human. But it's just fun for me. I like this, you know, what is it? I'm good at having babies. I'm not good at raising them. I like the beginning. I like launching and starting and then handing things off. I get really bored. The AEO thing is it's SEO, but for answer engines. So search engine optimization becomes answer engine optimization when the conduit through which we view the digital world is, is AI based. And I, I have a 5-person data team who've done nothing for the last 18 months, but study how LLMs source their citations. And we wrote a book called the AEO Blueprint. It was the number one selling book in the English-speaking world in the categories of marketing for a while. And I think I've cracked the code on answer engine optimization. I partnered with the folks at Smart Marketer. Shout out to my partners, Molly Pittman, Ezra Firestone, John Grimshaw, Pep. And we are running a 10-company cohort test. So we brought in 10 guinea pig organizations that all, you know, they paid us a little bit of money, but a fraction of what the service should cost. And we're going to go proof concept and I'm going to run 3 cohorts in total because I want to be able to like prove, you know, and have the case studies. Everybody's running around. I might, my, you know, it's funny you asked me about LinkedIn. I pulled up my LinkedIn inbox and I bet you 20% of these messages are people telling me that they can get me to rank inside of ChatGPT. So all these people—

Probably more than 20%.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing is, I mean, I don't know where they're getting their data. I have more data on this topic than any human on the planet, I think, and somebody would have to convince me otherwise. So I don't know where they're pulling their data, but like, we've studied this and I'm going to put it in play. And then once that agency starts to run, I'll walk away and get bored and I'll go do something else, I imagine.

But you have an upcoming book, Hire, right?

It launched. Yeah. That was also, that hit number one. It's a proven model for finding top remote talent. This is the exact blueprint that we use at Pareto Talent.

Wow.

So my EAs are expensive. They're $3,000 a month. You know, you can get a VA for $1,200 if you want to, but what I tell people is there's nothing more expensive than a cheap employee. And, you know, $3,000 a month is $20 an hour. If you feel like you can't afford that for whatever reason, you can do it yourself. And my book is everything that anybody would need. It's just a funnel, but it's, it's again, very, very, very counterintuitive. It's 20 years of my life bundled into one endeavor, which is the only thing I'm good at, which is You know, finding and utilizing top talent. It's free. You can go to thehirebook.com. Your audience can have not just the book, but the book, the workbook, the cheat sheet, a global job hiring board. There's no upsell or ascension. We have nothing to sell you other than an EA. We also have a delegation mastermind, I guess, that meets every Friday for entrepreneurs that need to figure out how to use their EA. It's free to my Pretto clients and for other people that want to join, they can join. But that's been a really, really fulfilling part of the job is helping people in emerging nations find meaningful work. It's like just really positive residual impact.

Yeah. Okay. We're definitely gonna have some conversations after this. Just bringing a lot of ideas to my head and thoughts that I've had over the last few months, cuz I, I have projects in Africa, nonprofits that I work with for kids. I also just went to Vietnam and it's like, ooh, there's so much opportunity for industry here. I have amazing people on my team in the Philippines, but I'm also a dual citizen with Thailand. And so there's opportunities all over the place and just figuring out what the right opportunities are, right? So I'm gonna have to pick your brain a little bit, but I love the fact that you're offering this as a free resource to people to really understand the process. I think masterminds, I think coaching are essential things that every business owner should also invest in. It can be hard to find the right people. You might have to test a few and fail, right? Before you find the people that you really are gonna work well with and that will continue to hold you accountable. And that's part of why you co-founded the mastermind. Is that correct? Because you believe that entrepreneurs should be part of one.

Oh yeah. We actually, I mentioned earlier that, you know, the failures tend to be the entrepreneur. We started the mastermind for retention at Pareto 'cause we'd have people come to us. We didn't have many cancellations, but the cancellations that we had, they were all apologetic. They were like, dude, I'm so sorry. I know I screwed I know I can do better. And I was like, dude, we're just going to teach people how to delegate. The thing that I'm finding is people are actually sometimes, I think, just afraid to ask other people to do the work, especially when there's not a defined role. Like if you hire a graphic designer, you can ask the graphic designer to do graphic design work. Content creator can create content. An engineer can engineer. But if you're just like, man, I need to book time for my kid's dentist.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, it feels weird. It's like, I'm not a Kardashian. I don't want to play devil's red pride. It just feels weird to ask somebody to do this. And we break them out of that mold too. It's, man, it's anything that's not your absolute realm of genius goes to somebody else. And the EAs are, they're trained for it and they're better than we'll ever be at any of this stuff. You know, like it, it's almost like how could they not be? Because you have more important things to place your focus on. And so your time is worth some 4-figure sum if you're an entrepreneur. That's a fact. If you look at the valuation of your business from a position of the multiples that a private equity firm would pay for, there's no way that your business can't, that your time can't be worth $1,000 an hour or more based off of what you'd ultimately be able to sell your business for if your business is at all profitable. So any task that you would do that's less than $1,000 an hour, that's the other thing that's really funny is I've seen people delegate and then take the work back and I'll be like, what happened? And they're like, well, it took, 4 hours to do something I can do in an hour. And I'm like, yeah, dude, she's $20 an hour. You bill out $500 an hour. Like, that's great arithmetic, bro. What are we doing here? Yeah. So, you know, if you've been doing something for 30 years and you delegate it to somebody and they're not like 80% done, man, go. God freaking signed, sealed, delivered. God bless. That's a stamp of approval in my book.

Amazing. Gosh, I think there's so much There's so many nuggets from our conversation and we've gone through many different areas. So I, I'm really appreciative of that. Single source of truth, would that be your website? Which is your name?

Oh yeah, I'm rebuilding it right now on behalf of the AEO thing. So, but if somebody wants to know how to engage, they can go to kasim.me and I've got, you know, my hot links there and wherever you, various businesses they can engage with. All my free stuff I've got, my book is free. I have a free Forever School community where I teach entrepreneurship. Yeah. So however it is that they want to connect.

Okay. Fantastic. Do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto?

Yeah. Khalil Gibran has a quote, work is love made visible. I like that a lot. And I like him a lot. He wrote a book called The Prophet that's really worth a dig. It's, you could read it in a sitting.

Yeah.

But it's like every time you read it, it's just, you know, more surfaces for me.

Any other last words that you wanna leave our audience with today?

No, thanks for having me. I really appreciate you. This has been awesome. Thank you.

Yeah, it's been a, a wild ride, but I'm here for it. So thank you. And thank you to everybody who is listening or watching this episode. We will have all the links for you, including thehirebook.com and qasim.me so that you can find out more about how to work with Qasim. Maybe how to get into his mastermind, how to hire executive assistants and all of the other things that he's currently putting into the world to help all of us, even though it's creating more work for him. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.

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