Billion-Dollar Business Tactics: Perry Belcher on AI, Positioning, and Disruptive Growth

Foreign.

Hey, guys, welcome back to the show. This is Brad. And today I've got a friend and a guy that I've looked up to for a long time. Learned a lot of business marketing and AI strategies from over the years. The man is none other than Perry Belcher. He is known as the Billion Dollar Man. He is a man of many talents and many fun personality traits.

That's a nice way to put it.

Right? Yeah.

See it nice and how politically correct.

How politically correct. So I met you, Perry, way back when, in the days of digital, when you were with Digital Marketer and Traffic, specifically Traffic and Conversion Conference, back when we were doing this in Austin and, you know, this was. I think the first one I ever went to was like 2009 maybe, and probably 300 people.

Probably 300 people, yeah, that's about right.

One of the. It was still those. Those glory days of the early days.

Of traveling conference got up to 7,800 people at one point.

I always talk about how we always felt like we were the. These ninjas who knew magic tricks. And it was one of those conferences that you never saw people in the hall during the events because everybody was in there taking copious amounts of notes. And it's kind of fun to go back. Many of my best friends in the entire industry, many business partners, were spawned from people I met at your, you know, your conference. And over the years, you've been always on the cutting edge of marketing and sales and even most recently, artificial intelligence. I mean, I think it was maybe a. When did you do your first AI and bot summit? Was that few months after OpenAI came out or was that maybe one year after?

Yeah, it was a few months after, but I had already been. I'd been using AI going back to. I taught. My first talk about AI was in 2017 at Traffic Conversion Summit. So eight years ago. Yeah, so I talked about AI eight years ago, and I was playing with the, you know, IBM, Watson's API and a bunch of stuff. And then Jasper came out in about 2019, I guess, and it was called. What was it called back then? Jarvis.

Until they got the cc.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I got into JARVIS and then I got into Jasper and I kind of figured out what they were doing and I got into OpenAI's playground area and started building things. And so by the time Chat GPT came out, I'd already been four years, a solid four years deep into AI. So I had a pretty good head start on everybody.

That's great. You know, I. Similar to you, I Wasn't as deep into like Watson, et cetera. I was deep into Jasper and a lot of these other little things, but they were always kind of like cute little tools. I would use them, but I was.

Not a power user. Right.

And then it was when. But at least I had a good running start once OpenAI came out and changed the world with ChatGPT and then everything changed. And I remember, you know, you did the AI Bot summit early on, sharing some of the really cool things and I got a lot out of that and you know, since then have been head down and very AI, AI focused, helping businesses, you know, understand it, implement it, et cetera, but then also try to bridge that gap between the human side and the business side and then the technical side and it's crazy industry because it's changing so quickly.

But tinker every day.

You're a big time tinker, right?

Oh, I'm a huge tinkerer. Yeah, I'm a huge tinker, I think, you know, if you ever want to do something fun, if you've got, if you had memory on your. I've got one account, Open AI memory on one. I don't and I count as memory. Go ask your account sometime. Describe me in one word. Take everything you know about me and describe me in one word. And I'm going to do that. Mine was curious. That was the, that's the word the AI gave me. So yeah, I brought a lot of queries.

Take everything you know about me and describe me in just one word. Let's see what my chatgpt has to say. Catalyst.

All right, there you go. That's core catalyst.

I dig that. It says every pattern, decision framework and prompt you create is designed to spark motion. It didn't listen, but it did say catalyst. But then it's designed to spark motion. Mental, emotional, strategic. You don't wait for opportunity, you accelerate it.

Thank you.

If you notice, it's really good.

Stroking your ego. Pretty good there.

You know, one of the things I, I recently did, just speaking about the humanization of AI and you know, I, I created a little product. I, I started doing this for myself and then I, I showed my clients how to do it. They loved it. And I just recently created a little $10 digital offer that maybe a listening to this have now called the future you AI coach. And there's three little parts to it. I'll send you the information on this. I'd love to hear your opinion, but so I always, you know, I've done a lot of just work with this Concept of future self. I think any entrepreneur has. We're always trying to live into our potential and whatnot. And, you know, I've done things from like journal letters from my future self to my current self, but it's always felt static. And it wasn't until AI came around, I was like, I wonder what it would be like to actually be able to talk to a future version of me. So the first thing I did. Yeah, so the first thing I did is I. I said, tell me. This is a pretty robust prompt. I said, tell me everything you already know about me, like, all my character traits, et cetera. And then in the second prompt, I.

Don'T want to know that.

No, I know it's scary. It is scary. The second prompt was something about, like, it asks 10 questions that fills in the gaps and talks about, well, which, how, who do you want to be, how do you want to show up? Not just what do you want to achieve externally, but like, how do you want to show up? What traits do you want to get rid of? Like, if you're a procrastinator or whatever. And then the third prompt is an instructional prompt, and you just throw this in, like a chat GPT project or a custom GPT. And the essence of it is it teach trains the GPT to talk to you as you from the future. And when it gives you advice to do it in the past tense. So I can go to my chat GPT or I, I've got other platforms I do this on. And I'll say, man, I'm just facing a crossroads. I got two opportunities here. I can go this way or this way. Here's what I'm frustrated with. Here's what I want, what should I do? And my future, you, coach will say, ah, Brad, I remember when we faced that decision and I remembered blank, blank, and blank. And then I decided to do this, that, and the other. And it gets really specific on the path it took, I took. So instead of saying I should do this, it just says, here's what I did. And like, psychologically, it's just this fun little thing to go. Oh, I guess all I have to do is that. And I'll be damned if it doesn't give great advice.

But, yeah, I've got some. I've got some bots that I converse with a lot. I build. I've gotten to where I build very differently than I used to. I build three different levels. I have an advisory level, a management level, and then I have doer levels. So I've built about I'm over a thousand different agents now.

That's great. Are those mainly like custom GPTs or are you using another system?

I'm using mostly quad.

Oh, okay.

But I use different, I use different ones for different reasons. I use Claude projects for advisory, I use Gemini Gems for management and I use chat GPT custom GPTs for all of the task related bots.

So any reason that you decide you just get better results out of those.

Three, maybe way better results. Yeah, it. Claude, if you, if you build advisors in OpenAI, go rebuild them in CLAUDE projects and watch the difference in the quality. It's really, really, really good. And I do a lot of what I call pressure prompting. So I, I really press the AI to dig deeper and give me better answers. And, and it seems like in, in I've written prompts to do that, which is kind of weird. I have prompts that push the prompts. It's like these generic pressure prompts and CLAUDE just gives me really next level stuff without a lot of hallucination and all the way to the point that by the time I get two or three levels down, you can't use it. It's just psycho. Right. But out of the 50 psycho things, there'll be something in there that's like, holy crap, that's huge. Right?

So when you say pressure prompts, can you just, for, for the folks. Listen, I think I have a good idea of what you're talking about. Can you just elaborate a little?

Yeah. So basically you, you probably already know, but, but basically that all these API, all these AIs are the same, they're meant to please you. Right. So when you ask the AI a question, it's going to give you back an answer it feels will please you. And if it's a general question, it's going to give you back an answer that will please the general public. So it's going to say, it's going to basically think, well, will this answer serve the broadest spectrum of people? Does that make sense?

It does.

So if you really want advanced tactics and methods and things like that, you're probably not going to get them on the first question. So if you go back and say, okay, that's cool, but this was really, really basic. I'm looking for more advanced, you know, thinking and, and I always think harder and try again. Yeah. And the next level will give you mostly I, I, and I'll say I want tricks, hacks, secrets, things that only the 1% know. Right. And it'll give me back, I got a prompt written for that. But it'll give me back. But that's fundamentally all it is not complicated. And it'll. It'll give me back, you know, a whole new level of thinking. No, when I'm. Yeah. When I'm training my GPTs, I train them to have three gears. So I have. Gear one is. Gear one is basically best practices, gear two is advanced, and gear three is damn near illegal. Right. I literally use in that prompt, now, I want you to tell me the stuff that's so out there. Asymmetrical thinking, contrarian thinking, disruptive thinking. I want tactics that are so advanced they feel illegal.

That is not.

Not that they are illegal, but that they feel illegal. And. And most of those are unusable.

Yeah.

But, boy howdy. Well, every now and then you'll hit something that'll just blow your freaking socks off. Right. That you would have never thought of. I'll give you an example. So I own Sourdough starter dot com. It's a little site that sells sourdough bread. Starter. Don't go buy anything from there. It's under development now, but we were working on it a week or so ago, and I have a. I have a positioning engine and it helps me to position products. And we've repositioned a lot of our businesses with this position engine. It's amazing. And. But anyway, I said, you know, sourdough starter.com and I start the conversations very differently with these bots. I was like, hey, I own Sourdough Starter and I want to be successful. What do you think? Yeah, like, that's the prompt, right. Because I've. I've trained the snot out of this. It's trained on Al Reese and Jack Trout and a bunch of other positioning experts. And it'll say, well, you're. I looked at your site. It looks like you're trying to sell Sourdough Starter, which everybody's trying to sell Sourdough Starter because people think they buy sourdough starter to bake bread, but people really don't buy Sourdough starter baked bread. You don't understand the secret. And I'm like, what's the secret? And the secret is that people. You know about sourdough bread at all?

A little bit. Yeah.

Yeah. So you raise a thing called a starter. You have to feed it, you have to discard from it. You have to keep it alive. It's. It's a. It's a live germ. Right. And it said people see their sourdough starters as pets. So we started selling the sourdough starters, we call it the mother starter instead of what we were calling it. So now you buy a mother starter, you birth your starter, we've got name tags for your jars. We sell cute little jars for your starter. We even sell starter treats to give your starter a treat when it's not. When it's not. If your starter is not.

Dude. Now are you saying you got this. This concept of like, people see them as pets from the.

Yeah, it went out in the market. I ran a deep research on it. I said, I want to figure out why people really buy these things and what their mentality is. And it came back with it. I would have not thought of that in 100 million years. Yeah, but we're now, we're now out running those positions in the, in the groups and saying, hey, what do you think about this way? We're running all of our case studies to groups and everybody's like, oh, my God, that's so cute. I want it, I want this, I want that. It's like, holy crap, it's like you invented and I'm selling a 15 cent package of stuff for like $20. You know, it's crazy.

Yeah. But it's really one of my favorite things to. To use AI creatively for is like, find those things. I never would have or I may have thought about, but it would have had to be one of these lightning in a bottle Eurek moments that hap. That are.

So I have them all day now. Every day.

Yeah, all day. You just keep pushing and pushing. I remember actually this, this is tied to you because I remember during one, I think it was a war room mastermind. We, the small table of us had lunch with you and Robert Cialdini and some people. And I remember, I remember that. Yeah, I remember.

Yeah. Yep.

And I remember one of the things he was talking about is he, you know, he was like, there's four things that the human mind will like if you want to bypass the. Oh, what, what does he call it? The. Almost like the skeptic in the mind. Right. Like, it's like music and images. People just hear what they hear, they see what they see. Stories, obviously, and metaphors and, you know, I've always. Questions and questions.

You can't. You can't argue with a question. Yep.

Yeah, that was the other one. And then. So I. But I've always loved metaphors. I've known how powerful they were. He really cemented it. But then. And in working with different clients over time and sometimes helping them with their copy and creative I would have like an idea for a metaphor in mind and I'm like, ah, this is not quite it. But sometimes coming up with metaphors can be like backbreaking work. And this was an early stage use of ChatGPT. I just went in there and I said, here's the metaphor I'm kind of playing with. Here's the background of what they do. Come up with like 10 or 20 different metaphors. And not only did it do a great job, then I was like, all right, these feel too masculine. And he had a more feminine audience. So then it feminized them and it found a winner that basically doubled this guy's conversion.

And it's crazy.

It's little stuff like that. Can little hinges swing in big doors?

Well, we, we kind of figured out that I've got an order now. I teach and you know, it has a lot to do with caveman behavior, but other things. But in our own business, we have this five star thing that we do now when we're either retroing one of our businesses, which we've been doing a lot of, or we're starting a new one, or advising somebody on one. And really it's positioning, aesthetics, words technical and service. And those five things are like most people are really, most people have campaigns that they, they got lucky with. And you know what I'm talking about, you know, and, and the thing is, most people's campaigns are not positioned well. Their positioning is what's wrong. And it's almost impossible to sell somebody positioning. Yeah, I'm a positioning agency. What the hell is that? Right? And you know, you, it's hard to position your positioning agency right. But, but if you're aiming at the wrong target, you're right. I'm sorry, I don't know the particular rules on here, but if you're.

No rules.

But if you're a, you know, you ain't going to sell me tampons. I mean, I don't give a how good your tampons are. So they're, you know, your, your messaging has to, there has to be discovery in the messaging, has to be unique in some way. And, and you know, there's a differentiation. But, but it really has to do with, you know, being clear of who it's for and what's in it for me. The old John Carlton, you know, what do you got? What do you, what's it going to do for me? What do you want me to do next? It's kind of truer than ever, but it, but now it has to be Nuanced a little bit. But I'll tell you, people have gotten too clever. They've really gotten too clever where they're masking what they do. And, you know, the. The biggest evidence of that are trade shows. But I just. I laugh every time I walk to a trade show. You know, big. Somebody rents a $20,000 booth and they got a big wall and. Synergizing the dynamics of your. Whatever, just fluffy bullshit words that mean nothing. And you walk right by the thing because they had no positioning. There was no positioning at all. I've got pictures. I take pictures of bad trade show booths as a joke. I've got a collection of them just to remind me to not be stupid. But. But somebody's position. Well, you know, that's 90 of the battle, right? If you. Because everybody's looking for a tribe to join. That's what everybody really wants. They're. They're not really buying a product. They're joining a tribe. You know, you. You don't. When's the last time you've been to a Kawasaki rally? There's no such thing, right? There's Harley rallies. So you, you know, you sell a worse motorcycle for three times the money because it's. You're in a tribe.

But.

And then aesthetics and man, aesthetics have been my big epiphany this year.

I've heard. I saw you talking about that on a Facebook post, I think it was. Or you or. And it wasn't as long ago. We were like, listen, your design really matters. Which I kind of hate to hear that because it is one of those things, like I'm. I will get. I'll get a. Become a perfectionist about it to where it'll stall me. And if I don't have the design I like, it'll. Sometimes it'll get pushed off. Push off, pushed off. And sometimes I've had to just go, screw the design. Let's go really dirty and ugly just to get it out the door. And then.

So.

But I do also know that aesthetics freaking matters, I guess, if you're.

Well, there's something to the. There's something to the clean and dirty and get out of the door. But. But the answer to that is clean and dirty.

Yeah, clean, right?

So if you. If you go look at apples, you go buy. You go buy electronics from Apple. If you can't be good, be clean. That's great. You know, that's. That's the thing. Like, we're. We're moving right now to, you know, if you can't be good Be clean. And our first round of retrofitting all of our stuff, we. We're getting some really interesting tests right now. So I fell into the. Well, you know, everybody's doing the sleek, charcoal dark background designs, right? Guess what? Cavemen are afraid of the dark. Yeah, the dark. So we found that our. Our bounce rates 20% higher on a dark background. Our time on page is two and a half times longer on a light background, and conversions go up by about 35% on a light background with exactly the same copy with exactly the same everything else. The problem is they did a. In that post you're talking about, it came out of a study I read from Stanford and Google. They did a study that. That the average person spends. Fit in 50 nanoseconds. I think that's 5% of a second, I think. Yeah, because I think a nanosecond would be a thousand nanoseconds to make a second, would it not? I think it's either a hundred or a thousand.

A lot less than a second.

Let's just say it's somewhere between that.

The speed of light the second you see.

So you can't read the word the right? So I've been a guy my whole life. I've been a copywriter. So I'm like, although I can write a great copy, I can fix everything. Great copy, dude. They don't see your copy. Great design will not sell stuff for you. A great design will kill your ability to sell things. So it. People are repelled by it. And if you really understand how the caveman brain works, you get it, right? Because the caveman's looking in the cave going, this cave has bones in it. It's. They're scattered all over. It's disorganized. The roof is leaking. I ain't going in there. I smell danger, right? And we've only evolved about that much from cavemen, right? So you, you know, it. It is really impactful that you, you know, great organized design. We move toward order and we move away from chaos. So when you have lousy design and your color theories off and just color theory can make all the difference in the freaking world, man. You know, if you. If you stick with browns, blues, browns, blues, and greens with light backgrounds and black letters, you're probably going to always be okay. You know, there are just certain colors, like red. Red to the caveman is fire, blood, poison, berries, right? It's like if you. If you can learn to write. And not just write, but write, design, talk everything as if you're talking to A caveman. You'll win. There's. There's a copywriter named of all of Aldo Albuquerque. Do you know about him?

Oh, yeah. Sixteen word sales letter.

Yeah.

By the way, also the most misleading book title ever. It's a 16 words to describe what goes into a sales letter.

Right. So Evaldo, but Evaldo basically didn't speak English, came to America, got a job at Agora, and three years later, he was the number one copywriter in the world. It was the highest paid copyright in the world. And his big thing, I sat in a room with him in Baltimore for like three or five days or something like that. And when, when I was working with Gora and he just writes to the caveman brain, he just, he completely ignores the logical brain. Yep. Because the logical brain is pretty crazy. Like a lot. The logical brain, our. Our neocortex, it thinks, but it can't react.

Okay.

The little brain in the back of your head, the reptilian brain, can't think and it can only react. And in the middle, you've got the limbic brain that kind of wrestles between the two.

Okay.

And most people make a decision to either take. To take action, whatever action you want them to take, they make that decision less than seven seconds. And then if they're on your site longer than seven seconds without taking that. Without taking that action, they're second guessing themselves. They're looking for a reason not to take that action. Seven seconds.

Wow.

It's pretty crazy. So you. And we make all the decisions we make in seven seconds while we're thinking about making the decision. We've already made the decision in every case. Not almost every case. Every case. We made the decision as soon as the. Before the question probably came out of the other person's mouth, we made the decision. Now we just argue with ourselves. That's that amazing book, Thinking fast and Slow.

Oh, yeah. Good book.

Really explores that. And it, it's. If you begin to think and write only to that reactive brain and you're understanding, you know, the very core fundamentals of what cavemen needed, which is mostly to be in the tribe. Everything they did was to elevate to a better tribe. They. They tried to learn skills, they tried to be more attractive, they tried to be better hunters, all those things, so they could get in better tribes. Because if you were in better tribe, guess what? You get to live long.

Yeah.

You didn't die.

Yep.

You know, that was. It was really life or death. And we don't realize now we're only. We're very. We're not very advanced. We haven't had a lot of time to. To advance from caveman life to modern life. So we see things that are not really dangerous at all as incredibly dangerous. Right? We. We gauge things, you know, suicide rates. There were. There was, far as people can tell, back years ago, there were no suicides. It didn't exist thousands of years ago. Now people get so freaked out, they feel like they're going to face something that's so awful they'll actually take their own lives. And it's just. It's amazing how the manifestation of something that's not very dangerous. I'll tell you a funny story real quick. I was in Philippines three weeks ago, and Emma Rangel, if you know Emma, that works for me, but Emma works with me. Works for. However you want to say it, but she's my outsource cfo, code coo. And she's rough as a cop. I mean, she is. She's mean as a rattlesnake. And so we hire this guy in the Philippines and he's taken over a division for us and. And he asked her, he says, can I ask you a question? He'd gotten a job, so. Can I ask you a question? What do you do when you're working with somebody you're afraid of? And she said, what do you. What do you mean? He said, well, to be honest, I'm terrified of you. And Emma said, you're fired. Get out.

Wow. Problem. You don't have to be.

Listen to the rest of the story. It's really good. Letters of story. She said, you're fired. You need to leave. He said, well, okay, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend you. You know, I'm thankful for the opportunity and all that. She said, sit down. And he sat down. She said, did you die? And he said, no. She said, that's the worst thing that I can do to you now. What are you scared of?

That's amazing.

And he said, you know, I guess nothing. And he's kicking ass and taking names. He's doing great. But I thought that was a really interesting experiment because people are afraid of so much, and most of what you're afraid of, you know, 90% of what you're afraid of will never come to pass. And what does come to pass, you usually can't have a whole lot to do with it, you know, so. And people stall in decisions, in decision making. It's amazing to me. I'm working on a book right now called Noise and It's just all about eliminating noise out of your life so you get more focused. But, and it's a lot of it's about decision making. And, and it's fascinating that you know, we, we have, we live in such degree of self doubt, everybody. I don't care who you are, you got some self doubt. Yeah. And it, it, you live in such a degree of self doubt, but people that are really, really successful, they just make the decisions. And I told somebody not long ago, I said, if you got a hundred decisions to make today and you just take your gut on everyone and make it in less than seven seconds, guess what if you're wrong half the time. You made 50 decisions today while somebody else is sitting in a corner doing that. Who made no decisions today. There was no progress made. You ran by, by taking your best shot at it. Guess What? You ran 50 split tests today. You're gonna be, you're gonna be right or 100 split tests a day. You're gonna be right on half those decisions and wrong. But generally speaking, your first thought is your best thought.

Yep.

99 times out of 100. So you, you know, I don't do that anymore, man. If, whatever, whatever I feel like the decision is, I make that decision and now deal with the consequences later and worst case scenarios. I learned something. Yeah. You know, you learn something you don't.

Really fascinating that you brought a couple of these things up. I love this story about that. Yeah, you're fired. I mean that's, that takes a lot.

It was an awesome story to be sitting next, you know, being sitting around that. Because it was really a brilliant example.

Yeah. And there's two things that it's. It's funny you bring all this up too because they're like you and I think a lot alike in a lot of ways. But this one, specifically talking about noise, but then also talking about, you know, dangers, et cetera. I recently created a product, I've done this a couple times. I just recently re did it called the 30 Day Reset. And it's a, it came out of something. I realized that there's so much noise right now, it's noisier than ever, especially if you know anything about AI. And I realized I, I kept on asking myself, I need to take a sabbatical, like just to take a month or two off and just there's things I want to study, things I want to focus on, things I just need to reset with.

And I.

But I can't do that. I'd lose way too much money at the moment because of all the opportunities. So I created a 30 day reset. This is an offer for my, you know, for my following and some of the people watching this may have it. If not, there'll be a link to it in the show notes where it's, it's a simple email a day. And I was like, it's designed to just reduce the noise and the clutter in your mind so that you can actually think more clearly and get more grounded. And one, I just pulled it up while you're talking. Day number six is focused on recalibrating danger and your worst case scenario response. And I talk about dangers versus threats. You know, danger is an imminent threat to your physical safety. Threats are just potential dangers. And I talk about how to really examine those, you know, once more like the worst case scenario. I mentioned Tim Ferriss, you know, earlier before we, I think we started talk. One of my favorite parts of his four hour work week. He talks about his worst case scenario exercise. Like really go through what is the worst thing that could happen? Could I die? Could I be made or maybe lose a couple bucks? And so those two things that you just mentioned are very close to, you know, the best for me. So I love the fact that you, you, you're good.

You're friends with John Ashraf, right?

Yeah, yeah, we're close friends.

So John, I got a great story to tell about John. I've probably told this story to thousands and thousands of people. Now I don't know if John knows I tell the story and I hope he doesn't mind but during COVID I didn't pivot well. During COVID a lot of other people pivoted really well. I didn't pivot very well. I'm really social and I was basically living in my basement, you know, of my house. Fortunately I had a basement house and but it was really hard for me. I felt so socially I was, I had drinking parties on Zoom with people because it was. I just had to have some, you know, that thank God for a clubhouse kept me alive. But anyway, so John called me one day and asked, asked me for about something. It was a technical thing he needed some help with. And he said, how you doing? I said I'm okay. And he said, you don't sound like you, man. And I said, yeah, funky, you know, whatever. He said, you think you're depressed? I said I don't know, maybe I've never been depressed.

I don't know.

And I just had an exit.

I had like, yeah, Googles of money.

Just yeah, it was a TNC exit. And why had two. I had two.

Also known as the best timed exit in probably history, but keep going.

That was a pretty good one. Yeah. So I had three exits in 12 months.

Yeah.

Which was crazy. And then another one a few months later. But, but anywho. And I had. So I had all this money, you know, I had a Rolled Royce, a Pork and a Maserati in my driveway, living in an 8, 000 foot house, you know, and just what else do you want? Right. And. And it was like, I don't know, it was bombed out. And he gave me the best exercise. He said, what do you want? And I said, I don't. I can't. Can't dial in on it. And he said that. Here's what I want you to do. Sometime when you get a minute, I want you to take four hours and you don't have to do this in four hours, but you can't do anything else for four hours. I want you to take a pad and on each line of that pad, I want to write. I want you to write down something you don't want. Want in your life. And. And he said, you're going to run out of things. About 50 or 60 lines. Try to keep pressing it. Try to keep going. And I ended up writing about, I don't know, 150 things that I didn't want in my life anymore. And I just kind of went out and started. He said, now when you get done, look at the things that you could easily eliminate. Go ahead and strike some of those off and get rid of them. And I did. And. And before long, man, I had that list pretty damn cleared off and I got focused in a lot more stuff and I got happier and more motivated and started churning a lot of money and figuring out things and, you know, I've been rocking since then. That was a big turning point. I thank John for that. John's.

That's such a good exercise. Yeah. So you wrote out the things you don't want and then you just tried to. Would you say make, make lists of. Well, how can you make sure that doesn't happen?

Just eliminate those things. Yeah, I just cut them out of my life. It was people and some of it was people. Some of it was, you know, some of those people in my life. I didn't really, you know, I was struggling with relationships with certain people. Yeah. Just cut them. And I didn't, I didn't. Wouldn't mean about or anything. It just was. I just didn't Let that enter my existence anymore. And there were certain businesses that I had that were dragging me down this. Got rid of them. I gave them away or, you know, sold them. I did. I had cars and all these cars I was paying, you know, my insurance bill alone was like $3,000 a month on cars, you know, and I'm like, I don't need all that. I got rid of a bunch of cars. Get rid of the big house, you get rid of an ex wife.

But that reminds me of my favorite line from Fight Club. Brad Pitt was like, the things you own end up owning you. And it's so true.

Yeah, it's really true. And it's. It was really bizarre. But it, but just getting rid of everything brought things into clarity. Yeah.

Well, I've heard Roland talk about this and maybe you've also heard about this, but I learned this originally from Charlie Munger, which was the whole inversion theory.

Have you ever heard I love the inversion theory? Munger. Yeah. I'm a huge Charlie Munger fan. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is the exact same as like saying, okay, these are all the things I don't want to.

And then.

Yeah, exactly the same. Yeah. Just. What's the flip side? What? Yeah, so I've had to actually do that because I too have had a hard time saying what do I want? Part of that is because I think I have every. I have everything I need and I.

It's a worst, worst case scenario you can be in. Comfort is the opposite of progress. It really, really is.

And it's. There's. There's a. It can be. Become really challenging. Especially. There's a lot of things I, I can say I want, but I'm not driven by like, I could say I want another. I've had an exot. Do I. I want another one. I want a jet, I want a yacht. I want all these things. Do I want one? Yeah, it'd be nice to have, but I'm not. They don't drive me. I'm not driven by those that make me go, I gotta go have that. So in the absence of that, it's like, what do I want? I just realized I just. I want very simple things. I want to be energized in what I'm doing. I want to be surrounded by people that I like and inspire me. I want to make really good money and I want to make an impact. None of those are like measurable per se. They're much more like, you know, feelings and a direction as opposed to a goal. But that, but that also Makes it hard to make goals, to go, to achieve some things. So I had to do the exact same thing, which is like, well, these are the things I don't want. Now what's the opposite of that? Like, how do I invert that and make sure that I can get what I want?

So, gamesmanship, after a while, I mean, you're, you know, when you, you know, there's a, There's a big industry of therapists that do exit counseling. Did you know that?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Because somebody exits their business and now they're, they're.

They're lost as an Easter egg. Yeah, they lost as an Easter egg. And, and, you know, I think a lot of really rich people, the Bill Gates of the world and people like that, they get into philanthropy because it's an unfillable hole, right? You, it, it, it gives you a game. And, and it really is crazy, man, because you're, you know, you, you gotta have a bigger game to play. We, we need as humans, back. The caveman, right? The caveman desperately needs discovery. Yeah, that's what the caveman needs more than anything else. Discovery. Discovery and exploration. And we're, you know, we are different as entrepreneurs. I don't know if your audience are all entrepreneurs or not, but entrepreneurs, true entrepreneurs, they're physiologically different. Our brains are different. We don't have the receptors in the back of our brains to receive satisfaction like other people do. You, it's, you're the guy that if, if you're, if you buy a car and on the way home, you're looking out the window going, damn, that's a good looking car. Or if you're getting married and as you're walking back from the aisle, you're going, damn, she's kind of hot. If you're, if you just are never satisfied with anything and you got a business and you're just churning money and you're like, yeah, but, but that guy over there, I heard of the mastermind. He's talking about his business. His business sounds cooler than my business. I want to do that. Now, you know, I don't know anything about that business, but I want to go do it and I want to figure it out. We need discovery. We are hunters.

Well, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact as well, that, you know, if you, if you are an entrepreneur and you have any degree of success, you have two traits that probably really feed that, which is you believe anything's possible and that you're resourceful and you go make Things happen, right? So when you see something you want, most people, the general populace, I think goes, oh, man, I wish I could have that. And entrepreneurs start figuring out like, oh, I could have that. I just got to do this and this. And it becomes this, this possibility. And it's what drives our business success. But like you said, it's also what drives that need for bigger, better, more.

I think it's Isaacson that writes all the bios of the great men. You know, he wrote. He wrote Elon Musk thing and he wrote Steve Jobs, and he wrote about all these amazing people. He said the number one trait that they had was just delusional belief they could do anything. They're optimism.

Yeah, absolutely.

Right. That, yeah, they just. They are unrealistic optimism that they could do. You know, they. They feel like they're invincible superheroes that could do anything. And it. I think you have to be a bit delusional, weirdly enough to be really an exceptional entrepreneur.

Well, you. Because you have to ignore enough of the risks and the things to just say, well, if it happens, I'll just figure it out. I'll survive it, or I'll figure it out. Stuff's going to come at me. But.

Do you ever see Days of Thunder? The. The old movie with Tom Cruise? The race that race car drivers don't go to hospitals or funerals? Yeah, they never go because they can't. They can't think about mortality and then get in that race car and go 200 miles an hour around a track. It makes a lot of sense. And I think that we, you know, we just can't think of. We can't even conceive of. Of not being on the top of our game. You know, a friend of mine that you and I both know will say to us, but call me not too long ago, we're talking about, so why are we still doing this, man? I got plenty of money. You got plenty of money. Why are we still doing this? And he says, fucking ego, dude. You know, in strokes, our ego. And I'm like, jimmy, I don't want you to be right, but you know, you're right.

Well, also, in order to get to the point where you've had success and especially a degree of significant success, you've got so many skill sets and muscle memory and your body, or you. Not your body, but your mind just operates at a certain way. You can't just turn that off, which is, I'm looking for opportunities, solving problems, making things happen all the time. You can't just, you can't just go and I'm done. I mean I was just on this three week mini retirement and as much as I enjoyed it, I was like, I need to go back and solve some problems and do some cool things because I would go crazy if I just, you know, you put, you know, $20 million in my bank account tomorrow. I'm not just going to hang it up. I'll hang it up for a little, you know, I'm going to take another vacation or a mini retirement but I'm not just going to quit. And I think that's. Yeah, we're not wired like that. You know, that brings me to another point. Kind of back to some of the things you're doing. Like one of the things that's really impressive watching you is you're, you've got your hands in a lot of different things right from, from digital products and workshops and trainings that you've done to live masterminds to physical product business. And you know, you told me off, you know, before we started to record that you've been acquiring businesses as well.

Yeah, a few, not a lot yet, a handful.

We've got more than. More than one, more than zero.

More than zero. And we've got two right now in, in acquisition stage. We bought one, got two more on the hoof and you know, I want to do more and more of those.

Yeah. And you were, you were also mentioning with it. I love this. As you're looking for those types of businesses that you can disrupt with technology with potentially AI, with innovative.

Yeah.

Could be marketing etc. Can you go into a little bit more detail about.

Sure, yeah. So really the, the general idea is, you know, you buy a business for what it's worth, you try to get the best price you can. Right. And, but you got the. Cody Sanchez is the world pitching about the silver Tsunami and all that. It's all true. I mean there you've got most, most small businesses in America owned by people over 60 years old now. So they're going to retire and their kids don't want their businesses. By and large that may change. This economy changes, I don't know. But they don't have anything to do with this. They're going to sell it. Right. And, but, but something like 8 out of 10 businesses that go on a block for sale, never sell. There's for whatever reason they don't sell. So there's, it's a buyer's market for businesses. What's really changed it for me because I was never into everything. I know Roland's done a lot of the buy for no money down stuff. He's a very skilled negotiator. I'm not a skilled negotiator. I suck at negotiation, to be honest with you. I'm just like, I'll give you this much, take it or leave it. And I don't much care either way. That's kind of. It's a terrible way to do it. But I got into sba, and right now the SBA has made a lot of changes. So most people don't know about the changes they'd made. So it used to be when you said, oh, SBA loan that takes six months, and they put a thumb up your butt and, you know, it's the government, and the government sucks and all that, and that all probably was true. Today, it's very, very different. So during some of the laws that pass, I think this was during the Biden administration, I think. But I don't know, it might have been Trump. I don't care. I'm not political perspective. But now a lot of things are different. One, you used to not be able to pay your down payment with anything other than, like, savings. You couldn't borrow it for somebody or anything else. And you couldn't ask the owner to take back seconds. Right. Or take back second loan positions. Now you can. So the. Also the down payment amounts have really went down to 10 to 20%, depending on what you're buying. Your credit score requirements, like a 640. Now it's super low.

That's great.

And your debt to income ratio of the business. So used to be the business had to do at least, like, if you had a. If you're gonna have a $5,000 payment on the business, you had to be making $10,000 a month. That business had to be making $10,0000amonth in order for SBA to guarantee a loan on it. Now it's 1.25% or one 125%. So if you. If your payment's gonna be five grand, that business only has to make 62.50amonth in order for you to buy it. Right? And they're more. But wait, there's more. And now you can buy multiple businesses with SBA where you used to really only be able to buy one. So if you're especially for expansion. So like, let's say, for instance, you're buying hair salons, okay. And you have expertise at hair salon. You take a line, you buy a hair salon, that one's doing good. Now you don't want to go buy another hair salon. You can, they're not so keen on. You bought a hair salon, now you want to go buy a car wash. Yeah. Right. But if you wanted to buy another hair salon, or maybe you buy a hair care products company, or maybe you buy a nail salon that can slide in next to each other. Yeah. Something related, you can have, hypothetically an unlimited number of those up to an accumulative cap of $5,000,000 out at any given time. So. And yeah, so you, you buy a, you buy a $500,000 business right now, if you can get the owner to carry back 50 grand, which I've never seen an order owner on a 500k business that wouldn't carry back 50 grand, you're out $50,000. So if that $500,000 business is knocking out, say a buck and a quarter a year, which would be about right for a 500 grand business, you're buying $125,000 worth of the income for $50,000 out of pocket.

Yeah.

Right. So your cash, now, you're going to have to pay about 25,000 a year to service that debt. But that gives you 100% cash on cash return.

Yeah.

If you do nothing to the business.

Yeah. If you just maintain where it's at.

If you just maintain the baseline, you're getting 100% return. But if you can take AI, robotics, marketing automation, things that we know how to do. 2.3% of companies in America have a CRM, is that it? 2.3%. And most of them have no marketing automation within their CRM. So you're talking about 1% of businesses know what a high level is, or know how to put send emails out into the future, or know how to send SMS marketing messages, or know how to build landing pages, or know how to SEO their local setting. They don't know for peanut butter. Right.

So that is, that is a shocking stat. And it's like three or four. About four weeks ago, right before I left, I was talking to a guy, he owns plastic surgery centers, like three of them, and he's acquiring more. And none of them have a CRM at all, like, whatsoever. I'm like, how are you doing this? He goes, excel. Like that's how we keep track.

It's shocking.

And I'm sitting. How is this even possible? You're not a, like, yeah, I work.

With High Level a lot with their team over there and they gave me that data. It's amazing. It's truly amazing. So when you, you you take a business. It was funny. Like I, I built this disruption engine in AI and I ask it, you know, I wanted it to tell me how to, how. Tell me how to technically disrupt any business. That's what the bot does. And I thought, well, what's one business you couldn't do much with? And I said, show me how you would technically disrupt the hot dog cart business. Because you know, I used to.

Didn't you used to have a how to start a hot dog cart?

I made a million dollars selling that course.

That's great.

I sold a million dollars worth of. I didn't make a million dollars. I probably made half million dollars though. No kidding.

Yeah.

And I used to own hot dog cards and came back to me and said, okay, here's a list of shit you can do. A. You know, you're going to want to go get automobile traffic maps of your city and look at it from different times of the day. So you're going to want to move your car to where the traffic is basically where the flow of traffic is. So there's a. That should give you a lift of anywhere from 40 to 60% per day. Second, you're going to want to use digital menus so that you can have surge pricing. You know, during different times of the day when you're really busy, you could surge price. You're going to use AI to predict your food usage based on days and locations so you don't over buy food product, create more food waste. Hey, gosh, what all was it? Management, Social media management of where you're going to be, where you can, you, where you can blast out from social media, like where you're going to be parking the cart today and running specials.

And things that probably wouldn't have come up with just if you were brain.

All things that. It was like 10 things and I was like, you know, and it, at the end it was like you should be able to increase your hot dog cart gross revenue by. Yeah, I think it was something like 150 to 225% by adopting these technologies.

So when you think of business again.

Right. But when you think about that, and that's probably the worst example of anything you could optimize with AI, right. So when you, when you think about marketing automation, putting people on a, you know, get people's emails, get people's Instagram so you can Instagram to them wherever you're going to be, you know, for. It was, it was really, really, really amazing. And all the way down to, you know, buy A robotic arm that puts the hot dogs together for the novelty of people seeing hot dogs being put together with a robotic arm.

Yeah.

Makes a lot of sense. Right? You're. That's you. It was pretty crazy. You know, it went out there pretty heavy on the last one. But. But yeah, it's. It's. It's truly. It's truly fascinating. We've got a moving business where. Bought a moving business and we're converting it to just move big stuff.

Okay.

It only moves big stuff. It moves hot tubs, pianos, safes, and pool tables.

That's a cool niche. I like that.

Yeah, it's a cool niche, but we're doing it all with robotic equipment. So no human ever lifts more than 30 pounds.

Ah, brilliant. No OSHA.

No, no OSHA. No human lifts more than 30 pounds. Setups about 40 grand. And all the other moving companies have a list like we don't move this, this, this, this, and this. So we'll get all our referrals from them. And we're using a different kind of technology there. I'm using actual robotics. I've got robotic stair climbers and robotic moving carts and robotic dollies that the dolly. Inflatable bladders that go under hot tubs to tilt them up to put them onto carts that become a trailer. So crap like that. I'm freaking loving this. That's a great time to be alive.

Yeah. So. So let me ask you this aspect about buying these businesses. Now, obviously, one of the things I know about you, you're not on any org chart. You talked about that.

I'm not.

I love that, you know, hat tiptoe. Roland, for.

That was a. That was a hat tip to roll in Frazier.

Integrating that. But so when it comes to. So you're. I'm assuming you're not just buying these all yourself. You're definitely not operating them. Do you buy with partners? And how do you. How do you hand the handle the operational aspect?

Because good questions do this.

But I know that that's one of the things that has always been intimidating for a lot of people, myself included. I found businesses where I was like, oh, am I going to have to step in and operate it? I didn't have. I didn't have an easy answer for that. So I've actually, actually backed away from a couple of. Because of that.

Yeah. So I kind of learned and I really, you know, I'm the king. I used to be the king of headless horses. Right. Which is the worst fricking thing you can have in. And I'M still not perfect, but I met a guy, I don't say his name, but I don't want to call him out for. But he's great guy. So I met a guy in Vegas, used to own a landscape company and he. He now does $400 million a year gross revenue. And he started building construction companies of different types. He's got a framing company, a concrete tilt up company, a paving company. He's got. How are you have a landscape company. He does a bunch of other stuff and he kind of gave me a rundown of how to do it. And so what I do now, I go out like in the moving business, Right. I'm going out right now looking for the number two in all the moving companies here in Austin.

Okay.

I want to find the number two that's not being treated pretty well.

Oh yeah, the number two person, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe they're the head of operations at.

Company and, and I'll offer them 150% of what they're making now, plus 30% shadow equity in the business and give them the ability to earn in over three years. So I want to make him a partner. I got to make that key person a partner.

Okay.

And that's. That's that part. There's more to it than that. But I usually give them a company vehicle to drive. I give them a lot of other perks, you know.

Do you just look for like. Let's say you've ident. Probably identified already the company you want to buy and then you just start looking for their competitors, in essence, and looking for those.

Yeah, usually. And sometimes it'll be within the company you're going to buy, but it's usually. Yeah, like I've heard of that.

Like sometimes, you know, it's the owner, but then somebody else is running things and then you.

Yeah, you.

You keep that person on to kind of like.

Well, they don't. And so much of the time the owner just refuses to give equity to anybody.

Exactly.

And. And they don't feel true. They have no true sense of ownership.

Now are you doing the. Are you typically be doing the searching and the.

That's my job.

And the recruiting for.

That's actually my job. So I'll try to figure out who those people are, call them up for some. I come up with some excuse to call them and I'll ask him if I can take them to lunch. And my buddy that does this in the construction business has an extra special way to do it. It's really smart. So he'll Pick them up in these really fancy pickup trucks, like these really decked out, you know, $100,000 pickup trucks. And he'll take them to lunch and he'll make them the offer. And when they go outside, he'll say, hey, you want to think about it? Or you want to take your new company truck and go home? And he'll literally hand them the keys to a hundred thousand dollar truck. Which if you really think about it, it's a $2,000 a month payment. Who gives a shit? These, these people are running half million dollar month businesses, you know, really, really smart. And then.

So if they do a handshake deal there, he hands them the keys right there.

Yeah. And then from the worker standpoint, you know, you pay them better, you treat them better. But all of their incentives are all based on a lever of additional revenue versus reviews. So you want to make sure that they're incentivized, not on upselling people. Things they do get, they get incentive on that, but it's all levered based on their reviews.

Are these reviews like Google reviews, Yelp reviews, et cetera?

Yeah, Google or Yelp reviews. And you know, what are the. How many reviews are they getting? What are the quality of their reviews and that the review number is the lever that determines their additional compensation on additional revenue.

Yeah. So in other words, going out and doing growth at any cost and trying to.

Yeah, yeah. And I learned that from a Tommy Mello.

Oh yeah, yeah.

He's from Tommy Mello and from Ruben Rock, you know, and those guys are. So when you. It's not that it's not as hard to put that together as you think. So really not. Because most people are not treated very well.

So when you do a. When you're fine. When you're looking for some of these businesses, I mean, are you going through broker brokers and sites like.

You know, I try not to.

Yeah, I can there.

But there's a business brokers that eat the business broker is the greatest person that fuck a deal up that ever was. I agree. Yeah.

So you're not using those?

I try not to. Yeah, I try not to. A lot of times what I'm doing is I'm half the time, dude, I'm just buying a license. You know, I'm finding somebody who's barely just struggling, you know, number 19 in the market, but they got a license. So I'll buy number 19 in the market and then just like a license.

To operate in their space.

Yeah. Depending on what it is. If it's something that Needs a license.

So do you. Do you try to identify the types of companies that you're looking for and then go look for those or do versus just finding out? You know, I'm.

I'm going, yeah, I'm going that direction versus seeing what's out there. Yeah.

Because that's always been an issue of mine that has caused me because I bought a few businesses, more digital businesses, but it's kept me from doing more, I guess, hunting for them. It goes back to that, what do you want? And I'm like, well, I don't know. I'd want something that I don't have to operate, that has all these other things. But then it could be in a number of industries.

That's what everybody wants. Right. So if it for me, I'm always looking for, you know, not. Not too long ago, back into Amazon and my, My buddy Kevin King's like, the king of Amazon is very smart guy. And he said, yeah. I said, just somebody else was telling me I was one of say, just stay away from chemicals, foods and pesticides. And I'm like, cool, chemicals, cool. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing chemicals, foods, and pesticides. I only want to do the things that everybody else wants to stay away from. Interesting. I want to move pianos and hot tubs because nobody else wants to. If I can. I'll tell you one more story before I have to go. I know I got another call. I think you did. I was in. I'll tell you a funny story. You know Randy Garn?

Yep.

Yeah. So Randy Ray, Greatest guy in the world, by the way. So Randy flies into Vegas with a jet full of people to go to Raiders game and says, do you want to go with me to Raiders game? We're going to skybox. Like on the 40 yard line. Yeah, I'll go. I'm not a sports guy at all, but I like going to skyboxes. I dig on skyboxes. If you've not been to one, by the way, they're freaking cool. So we go to the Raider skybox, which they're known to be the best skybox in the country right now. They're really, really amazing. So we go up there and Randy and I are there with a bunch of people. It was all Mormon, by the way, which is hilarious because there was only, like sodas and snacks. There's all these people at a football game. There's no beer, there's no drinks. It's crazy, right? And outside you have unlimited drinks and nobody's going out there, you know, pretty funny, but that's not the story. The story was. So there's this older gentleman who I guess cleans up, right. He's kind of hunched over, and he's going around picking up the soda cans and picking up the snacks things and all that. And I noticed him kind of milling around in a circle, and Randy says, hey, Perry, come here. I want you to meet his name. I'm gonna call him Chuck. I want you to meet Chuck. This is his suite. And I said, hey, Chuck, how you doing? He said, oh, I'm doing. Doing good. And I said, man, this is really cool. How'd you get this? He said, well, Mr. Mark, I think, who's the guy that owns the Raiders?

You know, I can't remember his name.

Mark somebody, I think. Yeah, he saw Mr. Mark got me a good deal on it, and, you know, and I can see my little girl. And he points out his. His daughter is a cheerleader for the Raiders. He said, yeah, Mr. Mark let my little girl be a cheerleader because she wanted to do that. And we've been friends a long time. And I'm like, this is cool. And now I'm super curious. And I'm like, man, what do you do? And he kind of giggles a little bit, and he says, well, I just clean out toilets for a living. And Randy said, tell him how many toilets you clean out. He says, about 17,000. And this guy has the contract for all the bathroom sanitation for almost every major stadium in the United States.

Wow.

Yeah. He employs something in the neighborhood of 6,000 people and nets out around $10 million a year.

Goes back to that. Dirty jobs. Right.

And I came. I said, man, how in the world did you ever decide you were going to do that? He said, well, I never was good in school, and I didn't know much about business, so I figured I just better do something that not too many other people wanted to do. That was the whole lesson. And I was like, holy crap. That's a big lesson to learn right there.

That's brilliant. That's brilliant. Well, I know we got to wrap this up, but last question. Any big nuts you're trying to crack right now, whether it's something that I can connect you with or maybe one of my listeners, like, hey, I can. I can solve this, man.

All I'm looking, dude. I'm looking for ambitious people, want to make a lot of money. I. I would love to find I have more business opportunity right now than I have people to run businesses.

Yep.

And. But I think that's not a unique problem.

Right.

I think a lot of guys like me, you know, I'm at a point like it's pretty frustrating because I used to always bootstrap and struggle and all that. Now I'm at a point in life where I've got much more wisdom, a lot of capital, a lot of connections, all sorts of, you know, 185 people that work for me that can do damn near anything. And I just don't have leaders to put in the front of these businesses. So that's probably the thing that I need more than anything else.

That's great. Well, where can people find more about you?

Or then go to perrybelcher.com or go to growthhacking.com we've got a conference coming up. You were talking about tnc. This conference is at the same hotel, same time of the year that TNC used to be at, coincidentally. And that starts mid September sometime, I forget what, but it's@growthhacking.com you can go learn about that there. You can contact me there. If there's something I can do to help you in any way, shape or form, let me know. I don't have anything to sell. I got nothing to sell people, really.

Well, you always got something to sell somebody. You'll figure it out.

If you sell my body, man, that's a sign. The only person by my body is science. Maybe.

Start the auction.

Start the auction now. France, good to see you, buddy.

You too, Perry man, thanks a lot and I look forward to talking to you soon.

Take care.

So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with me and Perry Belcher. We covered a lot of ground, as I'm sure you noticed, and I hope that this was something that you enjoy talking about. You know, here at Accelerated Intelligence, we try to talk about the things that really matter in today's market. We covered entrepreneurship, buying, businesses, primal cavemen style, persuasion, and marketing. We talked about some of the personal fears and roadblocks and head trash that a lot of us deal with. And going forward, I'm going to be doing a lot more of these style of conversations and I just hope you join us. So if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. And if you need any help, whether it's with artificial intelligence or growing your business without complexity or overwhelmed, just go to AcceleratedIntelligence AI send me an email and I look forward to helping you out. Thanks a lot and I'll talk to you soon.