Neil Patel Shares Crazy Marketing Insights In Interview With Brad Costanzo

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Now, here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome to the show. This is Brad. And if you are a longtime listener, I welcome you back. And if this is your very first time listening to the show, maybe you saw the guest that I'm having on the show today and you tuned in because you saw the guest, Ann Bacon. Well, hit that subscribe button on the itunes app or if you are listening to this on the blog, go ahead and subscribe. There's a a link here to subscribe to the show and to the newsletter, and I think you'll love it. Today's guest is Neil Patel. Neil is one of the most prolific content marketing experts and just marketing experts in general, really in the world. He is responsible for businesses such as crazy egg and kissmetrics and quicksprout.com. you've probably heard of him. And if you've Googled anything on marketing or digital marketing, you probably come across an article on neilpatel.com Neil is one of the brightest, most successful marketers and business growth experts out there. And today he's joining us on the show to talk about some of the strategies that are really working in his business and that of some of his clients. And he's going to talk about his new book that's coming out called Hustle. So let's see if Neil is on the other line. All right, so Neil Patel, are you with me?

I'm here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, dude, it's good to have you on the show. I've been looking forward to this, dude. It's been funny. I've followed your rise ever since back in. I mean, was it crazy egg? Was the first thing like big publicly that you did? Was that your first big breakout success or am I missing?

Yeah, you're right. No, it was my first big breakout success where we had like a ton of PR and press. We even had people writing articles. We didn't pay them or tell them to write this, but people were writing articles like Google should acquire this company and stuff. So I would say that was my first big success.

Nice. I love it. Well, for my listeners, one of my favorite memories of you is one time when we were all hanging over At Kent Clothier's house over here in La Jolla. And you were in town, I think it was for traffic and conversion summit or something like that. And I guess it was a little chilly out and you came over to the party in a bathrobe.

Yeah, that's right. I was freezing and I didn't bring a jacket. So I just took the bathrobe from the hotel and I'm like, this is my jacket.

That was awesome. It was like. It was a pretty pimpin thing to do, I gotta admit. Especially because I think you had like some Gucci shoes on or something like that. Like some really fancy shoes and all you saw was like, I don't know, I don't know if it was like alligator shoes or whatever. Just real fancy. And a white bathrobe. Amazing.

Is there an alligator? That means they're a Tom Ford. But yeah, I was wearing Tom Ford shoes then at that time and.

That was great. So, man, you've been really blowing up a lot lately. I mean, I think there's probably no one more prolific than you and your company with content creation and the long form. Content creation and the. Holy crap. He just wrote a book on a podcast, on a blog post, and he did it three times this week. Kind of content. And you've kind of made a real name for yourself in producing the, you know, the type of content that is, you know, just really makes people take notice.

Yeah, we just go above and beyond. And what's crazy is the amount of time and energy it takes to create that kind of content. It's just a lot. And most people don't realize it. And then on top of that, what most people don't even see, we do that in English, we do the same in Spanish, we do the same in Portuguese.

Are you kidding me?

German? Yeah.

Like you guys translate it?

We translate it manually. So each week just on neilpatel.com I'm publishing seven blog posts in English, seven in Portuguese, seven in German, seven in Spanish. But yeah, so we're cranking out multiple languages. We'll add more like Arabic, we'll add Italian or. And then we'll add French and a few of the languages over time.

You know, Chrome will translate that for you. Right?

It's not the same. People don't realize there's so much traffic to be had internationally and no one goes after it. We're almost at the point where we're getting more visitors from Brazil than we are from the United States.

Really?

Yeah.

I would not have thought. Is Brazil just hugely Growing with digital marketing.

It's huge. So think of it this way. I've been doing Brazil since November of 2015. Okay.

Okay.

I've been doing the US version since 2014 sometime. Alright. So when you think about it that way, in general, the Brazil page on my about page, it's a lot newer, has 234 comments. My US about page has a whopping 232. I have more comments in Portuguese than I do in English on my about page.

Wow. So I just went there. Neilpatel.com BR that's how I get to the Brazilian one, right?

That's right. And if you click on Sobre at the top, that'll mean that's their version of the Bell Man.

So you translate this into how many languages then?

Right now the main site is translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English. So five languages.

More. Yeah, you guys, I mean, you spend a lot of money too. That's what people don't understand. It's. You're not just throwing out content like, hey, I'm just gonna sit here and type, type, type, type, type. I mean, you spend a lot of money. I've seen like on everything from infographics to the research to everything else that you can tell when you're reading this. It's kind of overwhelming. Like, is one of the reasons also to say, look, go ahead and try to compete with me on this. You're, you know, good luck.

Yeah, pretty much. I just go so above and beyond. It's hard for people to compete because they think I'm crazy. Like, this is my personal blog. I spent more than six figures just on credit card expenses on the personal blog. Plus there's employees and team members and other miscellaneous expenses. But just I'm spending six figures purely just on credit card. Right. So if you include the team members and stuff like that, the expenses are way more.

Yeah, yeah.

That's able to compete when you're burning that much cash.

So in terms of content marketing, for people who are starting off, like you came to the blog, you had your success in software and other stuff like that. So you came to this with capital before you started, I'm guessing before you started spending a large amount of capital on the content and the blog, et cetera, what advice do you have for people who are starting off and they don't, they don't have a big, you know, capital stash to, to invest in this to get really quality stuff, but then, you know, not being able to drop six figures every month on their blog.

Yeah, most People don't realize you don't need much money to make it work out, so. Even me. Yes, I had money from the software realm, but the blog was profitable. Probably from like the third month burning anywhere near six figures. I wasn't even burning four figures a month. I was just putting in my own time and paid for hosting and I would pay for. Which probably cost me like 30 or 50 bucks a month for stock photography. So my expenses weren't that high. Produces more than whatever it costs. That's the only reason I'm burning so much money, because I'm just trying to expand as quick as possible.

Right. So tell me, let's zoom out. Tell me kind of like what a week in the life of you looks like. And by the, what I mean by that is I know you. You do client work. You're, you know, you've got your own stuff. You're probably involved in a bunch of other cool opportunities and things. Like, how are you spending your life? What's your business and life look like right now?

Yeah, my business life is really boring. It's just filled with emails.

Yeah.

Meetings and books. And that's really it. That's a day in my life. I travel a lot, I blog a lot. Yep. I just don't do much more than that. It really is just email. If I had to pick one. I spend most of my time in emails.

Okay. When you're working, you work with clients of all sizes. I know you've worked with some really big companies in the past. Do you still do that?

We don't do much consulting at all. And that's also how I'm able to pay for a lot of the burn on the blog. Get really big consulting contracts that are pretty easy and we'll take them and then I'll use that money and I'll just burn it. I'll be like, okay, go translate X content into international transit. Like, I just locked in a contract with a travel company. Mm. Where they're paying me a hundred thousand dollars. Is a really big publicly traded travel company. And all I have to do is meet up with them like twice or something like that for the hundred grand. It's not much work. So there's no real cost other than like airfare technically. They also live close enough to me where it's, you know, I don't even have to get a hotel. You just get like airfare or whatever it may be, fly back and forth or one night hotel. So I'll just take the money and I'll burn it on the blog, but I don't do much consulting. Really.

Nice. So most of the. Does the income off the blog come from. What would you say then?

The income is mainly coming from. The income is mainly coming from ebooks, digital products. That's mainly it.

Nice, Nice. So the. On the consulting stuff with the, like, whether it's the travel company or some of the larger ones you've done, I've always been curious about this. I've done some pretty big deals. But what are you. What do you find some of the bigger companies typically really need help with? Because a lot of times I found personally that it's stuff that I think is really simple and like, oh, my God, you're seriously paying me for this. Do you have those situations where I can't believe you're paying me $100,000 for doing something I could do in my sleep?

Not necessarily. Because the way I look at it, it's kind of awesome in that aspect. It's shocking on my end, but you have to think about our roi. If a company is making hundreds of millions of dollars, are billions of dollars, would you pay someone 100 grand or even a half a million or a million dollars to come in and teach you a few simple tweaks that you can make or tweaks you can make to grow your business by 5 or 10%?

Yeah. Are you. Are you finding that they typically want help with their content marketing strategy, SEO, conversion, rate optimization, direct response? I mean, what. What do you find? Some of the biggest pain points in the companies that you have worked with have been.

They just want me to help them make more sales. Yeah, like revenue. That's it. They don't even tell me, hey, Neil, help us with SEO or conversion.

They don't say how. They just say, we just need more money.

Yeah, here's our business, here's our stock price. We have slow growth. You know, we have issues with Google. We have issues that. Can you figure out how to help us grow by another 5 or 10%? These companies are just pretty much, they have growth issues. Right. When you get to a size, when you're making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, it's not easy to keep growing 10, 20, 30, 40% year over year. Right?

Yeah.

So you're just coming to me and be like, neil, do you know any ways we can grow? We'll pay you whatever. Just come in and tell us what's wrong.

Right, Right. And that's a great position to be in. And I imagine that the content marketing that you've done does Most of the heavy lifting for building your credibility and getting on their radar.

That's right. It really does. So it's like most of these guys read the blog. That's how they find me. They read the blog. Right. I have a book coming out which will help even more. I speak a ton of conferences. I released a podcast, which I think is doing okay. I don't know what's good or bad, but we're on episode release. We're getting around six to 7,000 downloads a day.

When did you release it?

10 days ago. Oh, yeah. That's good.

That's really good.

So I was like, oh, maybe we can get to half a million within the next 30 or 60 days. Right. Per month or whatever. Maybe.

What's the name of the podcast?

Marketing school.

Marketing school. Nice. Yeah, I'll definitely check that out. And, you know, for my listeners, you guys can go listen to it. Are you doing, you know, do you do much other, like, investing in other companies? Whether it's, you know, angel or anything like that? Do you kind of get involved? I know you've got a lot of friends in Silicon Valley and.

Yeah, I've invested in a ton of startups. I don't know how many. Like I said, like 30 to 40 over time. I don't invest too much in startups. I've been doing that for seven years now. Yeah, I found that the highest ROI is investing myself. For anyone listening, if you have a talent or a skill, invest in it. Your best ROI is going to be yourself.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's. It's funny. I've actually had to really dig into that with some personal stuff on my own in the past. You know, many years ago, I went broke twice. Like, just lost everything I had through investments that I made in either other people, other things, things that I had no control over. And I just thought, okay, I've got some money here. I'm gonna put this in. And I'm, you know, I'm talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I just ended up going all in because I thought that that might be my lottery ticket. Right. And without fail, both. Well, both of them failed spectacularly. And every time I've invested in myself, whether it was my own business, my own education, or whatever, it ended up working out. So I've had to kind of. I almost need to tattoo that on my arm, so.

Well, think of it this way. You made it back and you're still kicking and you're alive and you're doing great. Now, how do you make it all back yourself.

Yeah, exactly.

It's the best investment someone can make. I look at education too, right. Not necessarily just a college education. I'm not saying you should go to college or you shouldn't. I'm saying life experiences, what you learn, the time, the energy that you spend. It could even just be reading and learning online. Online videos. Listen to this podcast, right? Yep. You can learn in many different ways. The best investment is always going to be yourself. The more you improve yourself, the better off you're going to be in the long haul.

Yeah, I agree. What, what are some of the areas that you're trying to improve yourself in right now? I mean, you've got a good mastery of a lot of areas of marketing, but where are you trying to improve?

My biggest problem right now is focus. So I do too many things. I've been really good this year at cutting that back.

Yeah.

I now mainly only focus on Crazy Egg and that's it than that. I've just been focusing on building my brand and I'm trying to learn how to get better and better at that. I think I'm doing a good job because I look at it. I do a ton of guest posting each week. I blog on my own blogs. I've been building up my social media profiles. I released a podcast, but there's a few more things I knew. Right. I also speak at conferences. I eventually want to get into YouTube videos and have a YouTube channel. Just really focusing on how do I build the biggest brand in marketing. So I could be the next David Ogilvy of digital marketing right now.

That's a really nice big Harry Goel. It's David Ogilvy's the Man. Or was the guest posting. I remember hearing one of your strategies on guest posting back at an event you were speaking at in Orlando. And I remember taking a lot of notes because I've done some guest posting and I've always seen that as a really valuable strategy. And you talked about reaching out to some of the. To some of the other people who are. Who are guest posting or who have relationships there and working your way in in order to get on these publications. Can you explain a little bit more about your strategy there for people like myself and others who would like to do more of that?

Yeah. So think of it this way. You guys all listen to this podcast. Brad, as you mentioned, you guest post, right? Yep. And you guest posted in a few places. So instead of just hitting up Entrepreneur magazine and sites like that and saying, hey, Entrepreneur Magazine, can we guest post chances Are they're going to ignore your email. But if you email Brad and you say, hey Brad, amazing article that you wrote on marketing. Love it to death. Have you thought about covering X, Y and Z topic that you didn't discuss in this article I think would benefit a lot of your readers and listeners like me? The chances are, because I'm giving you solid feedback, you're going to be like, oh, sure, thanks. Appreciate the feedback. Maybe you'll implement it, maybe you won't. It doesn't even matter. But I'm giving you solid feedback and you're just going to appreciate it overall. The same goes with any type of networking. When you network with someone and you give them feedback versus asking for something, they're much more likely to want to work with you, help you out or whatever it may be. So after I send you that first email, you're going to typically respond back. Then I may wait a few days or a week later and send you off another email. Hey Brad, I read another article of yours, Love it to death. And I noticed you covered a B and C tool, but you actually missed out this tool and here's how you can actually use it to do what you're trying to do more efficiently. Right? I'm just trying to give you more feedback. Shows that I'm an expert, I know my shit. And eventually after I build that rapport with you and I give you feedback, I may end up shooting you an email and saying, hey Brad, I have a quick question for you. I want to follow in your footsteps. I love what you're doing and my goal one day is to be like you. And one of the things is guest post like you're guest posting. Any advice that you can give me. Or better yet, maybe you could even do an introduction between the editor Entrepreneur magazine. I love to write content for them, just like you, your number one fan, Neil.

That's awesome.

And it works really well.

Flattery will get you everywhere. It's absolutely true.

Yes. And the key is flattery after you give feedback. So that way they're engaged.

Yeah. There's an art to it and I like how you don't go for it right up front. Hey Brad, I saw you writing for Entrepreneur. Can I be on there? One of the things, I actually have not done this yet, but it made me think we've all got a million ideas we just haven't pursued, which was because I do have a platform on the podcast and I get really good listenership and everything else and I have the ability to give value. I Notice that there's a lot of people, you know, potentially like yourself. Right. If I just found you, didn't know you, and I said, hey, Neil, I love what you're doing. I love crazy egg. I saw you writing. I read your article on Entrepreneur or whatever. I'd love to have you on my show or reaching out, because I can offer that as a value, is interviewing these people who are. They're also business owners, but they're guest posting on some prominent places, and that's me giving them a platform, giving them more exposure, which is obviously what they're looking for, and building a relationship like that and maybe even casually asking, yeah, so how's that going with Entrepreneur? But it's one of those things that I probably should do to leverage my platform to get, you know, to get even more exposure.

I never thought about that, but I'm going to use it now.

Well, especially now you got the podcast and everything else.

It's.

Yeah, reaching out. It's. There's a lot of creative ways to kind of get in. There is, by the way, the number one reason that I do this podcast is for. It's. I say this online all the time, but it's selfish. Like, I do it for the relationships I get to build with my guests and the opportunities that that facilitates. And I want to have these conversations with people like yourself and the other guests anyway, I may as well record them and let other people eavesdrop. But it's been an amazing door opener.

I believe it. And funny enough, when we're doing our podcast, we're not even doing guests. I'm like, oh, that's too much work. I'm just going on there and just chatting away.

See, to me, that's too much work. I'm like, I sit down in front of the microphone and I can. I always thought I could talk to a wall, but I sit down in front of a microphone and nothing to say. I go, I got nothing. I got other stuff to do. I think having the guest scheduled keeps me on point to spend. Okay, I got to do the podcast, but that's really cool and I love the guest posting strategy. Would you say that if somebody's just starting off on or just getting going on content marketing for themselves, that they should probably. If they're going to focus more effort on their own blog or versus guest posting, what would you prioritize?

If you're not going to blog consistently, do guest posting. If you can blog consistently, eventually do your own blog and guest posting. You should always do guest posting because you're just leveraging someone else's traffic and platform so it's easier to get started. It doesn't quite amazing results. Everyone's like, oh my God, I'm on Entrepreneur Magazine, my career is made. Or I'm going to get a ton of traffic, my rankings are going to boost. None of that really happens. All that happens is you get on these guest posting sites like Entrepreneur Magazine or Forbes, more people are seeing you, but unless they see your name over and over again, you're not going to do well. So what you need to do is do it for a year. And after you do it for a year, then you're going to start seeing some name recognition from it and branding and then you'll start seeing business come from it. But it takes a long time to kick in.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's a credibility builder. It helps if you're working with clients, if you're working for other people. You know, when they Google you, things like that are going to come up and it's going to be great with when it comes. This is more of a technical question on that. So when you're doing a guest post for somebody else, it's totally original, right? You're not taking that and then later reposting that article on your page?

No, yeah, it's totally original.

Okay, that's what I, that's what I thought. Switching topics a little bit on just marketing in general. What is there anything that you see is providing the most amount of leverage besides content marketing? Anything that's working tremendously well for you, whether your clients, your businesses.

Sorry, video based advertising. We find that it works extremely well.

Okay, can you go into more detail?

Sure. So we do pre roll ads on YouTube and a shit ton of it. Right. Most people don't ever even see them. But we're like spending millions of dollars a year on pre roll ads. And funny enough, for a software company, most people are willing to spend like three months, six months worth of the user or even a year. And then they hope a user stays for three years and they make their money on year two. And we will spend money just for one month to acquire a customer. And they're staying for years. It's that profitable. We make our money back right away right when they sign up.

Oh, wow, nice. Now you're mainly doing that for crazy egg, not for just Neil Patel personality.

That's correct. Mainly Crazy egg. And the reason it works so well is most people don't want to create pre roll ads. It's a lot of work time and energy, but it's really effective.

Nice. I love that. Have you thought about doing much of it for just, you know, promoting the Neil Patel brand?

We will get into it. It's just so expensive.

Yeah.

Use that. We don't want to do it until we start creating a YouTube channel, add a lot of videos, and then we'll start doing that as well.

So, yeah, you really want to be able to kind of capitalize on it once you've got that going. So YouTube pre roll ads are expensive or they're relatively inexpensive compared. Because I thought, I've heard that they're pretty cheap to get views these days.

No, they're cheap. But if I do it for my personal branding, it's not like a monetizing.

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, that's a really good point. I see what you're saying. And it's.

I can burn a thousand dollars a day and make $0 from it.

Right. That's why, you know, with podcasts, people ask about, well, do you buy advertising for podcasts? And you know, how do you promote your podcast? It's a very organic thing. At least it has been for me because it's not a sales channel. I'm not pitching on these episodes. So it's, you know, I've purchased Facebook ads and I've done some stuff like that to kind of get a little bit of traction for it. But man, it is hard when you're. You're just spending money and there's absolutely no. It's just branding. There's absolutely no, you know.

Yeah, there's no roi. Right. Like, indirectly there is. And long term there's a huge benefit. But I'm with you. Like, even for the podcast that I launched with a buddy, he does most of the work on coming up with the topics and stuff go on and we both chat. It makes it easy for me because of my time constraints.

Right. Tell me about. What about on the video, the pre roll ads, do you kind of have a, do you have a little formula for it? Like, what's your video, what's your pre roll ad like?

Nothing. We don't even put ads in the podcast.

No, no, no. I'm sorry. On YouTube, I switch topics.

Okay. On YouTube, what we end up doing is. So we mainly make our money through remarketing blog visitors or doing targeting on YouTube for anyone looking into marketing related stuff.

Yep.

And what's crazy, because it's such a generic software that anyone into marketing or what the website should use or uses, we took all our Survey data. And we got all the objections on why people don't use it or want to use it. And we ended up creating a video that explains all the objections, answers, why they should use it. And we even talk about how it's like different than Google Analytics because some people are like, oh, can't Google Analytics just do all of this? Right. So we take it all and when people watch the video, it's like, oh, here are the problems I'm hitting on. Because so many people have told us these are the problems. Then we break down the solutions and then we break down crazy egg and why it's great and why it's unique and why you should sign up compared to using any of the other solutions.

Nice.

It's just objection handling. And it works really well. We just fine tune that whole process. It took us like three or four tries to get the right script and it converts and it's just like a little animated explainer video.

Oh, cool. How long is it typically?

A bit more than a minute. So between one and two minutes. Okay.

Yeah. So occasionally I'll see like these two, three minute pre roll ads on there. Like, what are you guys doing?

It works though. Yeah, it's too short. You can't answer enough of the objections. And yes, your cost for the advertising goes down, but the conversion rate's so low the numbers don't pan out. So we rather have longer, more detailed videos. And that way when people watch it, they're much more likely to convert. Like, look at Tai Lopez. Oh yeah, he's a great example of someone who's just printing cash from YouTube.

Yeah.

And he's figured out how to create YouTube videos. Those are more lifestyle related. He targets the right audience and can get them to convert and buy right away.

Yeah, no, it's been an amazing thing to watch. Ty gets a lot of flack for. You know, you either love Ty or you hate Ty.

Yes.

You can't deny that. I mean, the guy has dialed it in. He knows what he's doing.

His marketing methods are working really well.

Absolutely. I've been towing in the water on the YouTube video ads for. Last time we spoke in person was real briefly at the Internet marketing party downstairs in San Diego. And I was mentioning that we had. My wife Kenya and I had just launched our new clothes coffee brand, Stiletto Coffee. I don't know if you remember us talking about that.

Even talking about the heel things integrated into design. Right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's. We got that live in February and it's been doing okay. Obviously trying to grab some traction, but I kind of see YouTube as being a good place to get in front of our market with that. So I've kind of been strategizing doing some video like some pre roll ads and, and whatnot. You know what's amazing? I don't know if this would help you and what you're doing at all, maybe with the personal branding stuff, but I came across a lot of influencers do these morning routine videos and they get hundreds of thousands if not millions of views almost overnight. It's absolutely crazy. And I noticed that it's become a big trend, mainly not really business related, but anybody who's kind of an influencer on there, they end up doing this is my morning routine. So we're probably going to be doing a little mini morning routine video and then just advertising on all the people who, you know, who are putting up morning routine videos because they're all influencers who are making their money off ads anyway.

So no, it's really smart. For me it doesn't work because I'm trying to brand myself in the B2B realm category. So I have a lot of issues in which I can't go mainstream. Stream doesn't really do much. I get a lot more people who know about me, but it won't cause dollar increase in revenue. But yeah, a lot of these influencers doing well, not just from morning routines, but going mainstream with the topics that they're talking about. Right. Look at Gary Vaynerchuk. He crushes it by just talking about motivation. In my eyes, Gary Vaynerchuk will eventually become the new version of Tony Robbins.

Yeah, yeah.

So it works well for him. But if you look at Vaynermedia, they do social media marketing. His motivational videos won't get him too many more customers, but it's getting him a mainstream audience which is selling more books. And then he sells more books. He gets bigger speaking engagements and the right audience and that's resulting into more business. So indirectly it's helping, but just it's a bit of a roundabout way and it works well for him and he's smart for doing it.

Absolutely. Years ago I remember you wrote an article on buying or starting a business and I don't remember because you sold. You sold a business or two, didn't you, in your past?

Yeah.

What was it you sold? Was there a.

The last one we sold was Kiss and tights.

Yeah, that's right, that's right. And I remember you wrote an article, something about if I was going to Start, do it all over again. I might buy a company as opposed to build one. And I've actually this is a topic near and dear to my heart as well. What are your thoughts on that right now? So if you were going to go into business, would you for something else, whether it was another software, whether it was something else, would you tend to just kind of build it from scratch where you're at or would you try to find something to purchase and then use your skills to improve?

I would buy and then use my skills to improve. It's just easier for me.

Nice. Well, I'm actually glad you said that because I've had some epiphanies relatively recently too. Thinking because it is hard. It's sexy to be the startup entrepreneur who just. Who gives birth to an idea. But we all know the statistics of how many startups make it.

Yeah, it's so much easier just buying a company right now. Granted, not everyone can do it, but I prefer that route. You just buy and then you grow. That's what I'm good at is just taking something and then making it grow. That's what I know how to do. I don't know how to do much more than that.

Have you done any of that recently where you've bought companies or bought in and then came in and did that?

I haven't done it recently. Last company I bought was hello Bar and that was years ago. I'm about to one. My guess is in the next two months I'll close on it.

Oh nice. Tech software related?

Yes. I prefer doing tech software because the valuations are really high on the exits. You can get like 4 to 8x revenue, right?

48X revenue. Not even earnings?

Yeah, just revenue.

Yeah.

They're usually bought on revenue.

Right, Right. Yeah, that's. That's a whole nother. That's a whole other ball game. Are there, are there sizes of companies you're typically. You would typically look at or. It really doesn't depend. Just kind of depends on the product it looks.

I look at the growth rate and how much potential it has and we think that internal ROIs, but we don't go for. We try to shoot for anything above a million bucks to buy out. So at least 250 a year in revenue minimum for paying 4x. We usually don't even pay 4x. We probably pay like 2 to 3x but we usually won't buy anything smaller than a million bucks because it's too small and we usually don't buy anything bigger than $5 million. Because it's too big. Yeah, it's harder to grow those. But our sweet spot is roughly like buying something for 2 to 3 or 4 or 5 million bucks, paying that.

Or buying one that's doing that much.

In sales, paying that. So my ideal goal is to buy something that does at least a million dollars a year in revenue, if not two, pay anywhere between 1 and $5 million for it. Nice.

I like that. Yeah, I've ever like. I sold my last company about four years ago, and I remember that's how I stumbled into consulting, is because I didn't want to just go out and start something brand new again because I realized how much it's pushing that rock up a hill. And I have been contemplating. I haven't pulled the trigger yet. I've been searching out other companies to potentially purchase. And actually some of them are in the coffee business. As I've gotten into this industry and really kind of understood it or starting to understand it, I see some potential opportunities in acquiring some other coffee businesses. That's kind of a topic for another story, but tell me about the book that's coming out in September, Hustle. What's that about? Hustling?

Yeah, it's pretty much about hustle.

I'm a genius. How did I figure that out?

But think of it this way. Most people these days feel it's hard to succeed. The middle class is depleting, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and they're like, okay, if you want to succeed, you either have to be born rich or I have to gone to a good college like Harvard or Stanford, or be really well connected. But you know what, there's a lot of people. I don't know all of your background. I know we hung out a few times. But like, I think you come from humble beginnings. I don't think anything was handed to you on a silver spoon. Right?

Yeah, basic little middle class, nothing. You know, I didn't have everything I wanted, but I wasn't going hungry in the streets either. But yeah, I had to work for what I got.

Exactly. So people believe that you need to be rich or you need to be well connected or networked, and that's a bunch of bullshit. If the odds are stacked against you, you can still succeed. Right? And we teach you the concepts on how to hustle so that way you can find the meaning in life. Right? Like what you're passionate about, then you can get momentum, keep pushing forward and growing. And of course, once you get momentum, you'll also start generating money from it. But it just comes down and teaches people how to win when the odds are stacked against you. That's the main purpose of the book. And a good example of this is we teach you something as basic as finding your passion. A lot of people in life believe that, hey, you know, I'm 30 years old or I'm 25 or I'm 40 years old, I should already be doing what I love, and they're lost in it. I don't really know what I love doing. And people believe that. When you're a little kid, you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a pharmacist, or an engineer, and that's what you're going to be. As adult as we all know, the chances are, what you want to be as a kid, like, even an astronaut or firefighter usually aren't when you grow up and they're like, oh, I just think that people who love what they're doing just naturally know what they love. That's not the case. We teach you a process of trial and error on how to find your true passion. And a good example of this is you got into consulting, you figured out what you like. You don't want to build businesses anymore. You like helping people and growing this businesses, and you learn this by going through processes. The process could be, you work for someone else and you help them grow. And you're like, okay, this is fun, but I don't want to do this for someone else. Then you try creating your own business. It's a pain in the butt to create it. I don't want to create any more businesses. I like the growing of the previous business. I like owning my own business, but I don't want to create it from scratch and I don't want to grow someone else's. Then you may end up learning that, oh, I love acquiring businesses and growing them. And then you acquire one and be like, oh, this is really boring. I'm more passionate about coffee. And then you could be like, oh, let's acquire a coffee business and let me own it and then grow it. And you could fall in love with it because you love coffee and you have a passion for marketing and growing companies, right? Yep. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what you're passionate about. And once you figure that out, you're much more likely to put in the time, energy, and effort to really create something big.

That's great. And that is exactly the path that I've been on. Like, I've tried a little bit of everything. I've been an accident. I've become an accidental expert in a bunch of stuff. And by process of elimination, I kind of know when I'm trying to put a square peg in a round hole going, and I know it now ahead of time. So if I see a business opportunity come up that requires a certain skill set or mindset or whatever, like, yeah, that's definitely not me. And I know because I've tried it. That's great. Is the book written primarily for like, who's a really intended audience? I understand that probably a lot of people can get a lot out of it, but is it people who are kind of struggling to find that, like you said, that fire, passion for something?

Yeah, there's a few people. The biggest audience is anyone who feels they're just stuck in life and they don't know what to do next. Yeah, like you're just lost. You want to succeed. You don't know what your right path is and life or how to get there. That's what the book is for. If you're entrepreneur, you're already crushing and killing it. Yeah, you can read the book, but it's ideally not.

So it kind of sounds like you're taking like what you just mentioned before, how Gary started with, he was just all business, business, business. And now he's kind of widened his, his message up to where it's a much more appealing to the rest of the population as well. Is this somewhat of the same strategy you're doing? So you're not making it as tactically business oriented, but just more applicable to just driven, ambitious people in general.

So a few things. One, I wanted to do something that was a bit more generic because it helps open up more corporate speaking gigs.

Yeah, good point.

And that helps me get in the door. The second thing is I want to try to aim to be a New York Times bestselling author. I don't know if I'll hit it, but something generic does help more with that. And if I write any more books after this, they'll be pure marketing related. Like I have idea for next book after this that I'm considering. I don't know what the title would be, but I want to write something about copy and how words affect everything in life, like in marketing. But break it down to the most simplistic things. So for example, I live in Las Vegas and there's this bridge where there's a lot of homeless people and they have signs and they're asking for money and some of them aren't even homeless. It's like musicians and stuff like that. So I want to go throughout the day and change up all their signs and show how copy can affect their earnings.

Oh, my God. Have you seen. There is an old viral video that went around. I think it was from the UK about this. About the blind homeless person. Have you seen this?

I have. I'll have to check it out.

Okay, so. Oh, dude, this was so genius. It was purple pulling in my elephant memory here. Purple something. I'm gonna Google this while I'm here because you'll crap your pants. This is exactly what you're like. This is exactly along the lines, purple words. I'm just typing this in. So what happened? Okay, it's called. I'm about to Skype this to you. It's called the Power of Words. So it's a marketing agency, by the way, but it shows this. This homeless guy, and he's blind, and he's sitting outside with a little tin can, and he's got a sign that says something like, I'm blind. Can you please help? And this woman walks over and she changes the sign to says, it's a beautiful day outside. I wish I could see it. And he was. And then she changed the sign, and he was sitting there, and all of a sudden he just heard, like, make people making it rain into his tin cup. And he's like, what's going on? And she did this totally anonymously, and it was like, words have power. So I'm going to send this to you right now. You'll absolutely love it.

Sounds amazing.

Yeah. So here we go.

Yeah, that's what I want to do it on. Because marketing can be in every aspect of life. When you introduce yourself, what you say, how you introduce yourself makes a huge difference on where you go.

Yeah. By the way, film some of this. I mean, this one, I just Skyped it to you. It's got 25 million views, and it came out in 2010, six years ago.

That's amazing, right?

Yeah. So that's great that you said that. You know, you also said something a minute ago talking about. And I've given a lot of thought to this. Talking about as children, what we say we want to be when we grow up and what we, you know, then when we get older, what we say we want to do. And speaking about words have power. Have you noticed that when you're a kid, you usually say. Or they say, I want to be a fireman. I want to be an astronaut.

I want to.

I want to be a baseball player. And then when we get older, we say, I don't know what I want to do when I get older. Well, I don't know what I want to do with my life. I don't know what I do. Well, there's a big change in the language in there. As a kid, you're talking about who you want to be, and as an adult, you're talking about what you want to do. And if you look at kind of like the hierarchy of states of mind, being is so much superior to doing. And it's really funny, as children, we're not totally, you know, we're not thinking about what we're doing, we're thinking about what we want to be. So, like, instead of as an adult saying, I want to. I want to do marketing, you know, I want to do this, that, or the other. It's like, I want to be the David Ogilvy of marketing. Right. For the digital age. I want to be this. And I think when, if we change our language to that and realizing that it does have power, it can really change how we view what we're passionate about. Like, what do you want to be? I want to be amazing at what I do. I want to be this, that, and the other, as opposed to, oh, yeah, what kind of work do I just want to kind of do? But I've given that a lot of thought. So you brought that back up. I haven't thought about it in a while.

Yeah, that helps you position yourself, too, right? Like your own mindset on what you need to do to get there.

Absolutely, absolutely. So the book Hustle, it gives kind of the. That mindset. Is there anything else that's kind of in it? That's a particular.

Yeah, there's a lot of concepts in there. One of it is. One of the things we talk about is manufacturing your own luck. A lot of people believe that to do well, you get lucky. Yeah. But you can also manufacture your own luck. And I'm going to give you an example of this. So one of my co authors, Patrick, has a son, and they're in a little pond by his house looking for, like, these koi fish. And his son, Shane, Patrick points him, he's like, hey, Shane, let's just go home. There's no fish in there. Because he looks down, he looks in the pond. He's like, oh, there's no fish. Shane looks up to his dad, doesn't say anything. He jumps in the pond and starts shuffling his feet. You know, within seconds, a ton of fish just pop out. That's an example of manufacturing your luck. In essence, you got to take action to start seeing something. And that's a big thing that people forget. They believe that. Oh, you just do the right time, right place, things will happen.

Just manifest it, man.

Just manifest it.

I think I hate that word, manifest. Like, it's just been so overused and abused, especially living in Southern California.

Yes, it has.

I'm going to manifest a parking space today. Manifest lunch. Oh, man. Any other big trends you're seeing besides you talked about video marketing? Any other big trends that you're kind of excited about, that maybe you think the rest of the world hasn't quite jumped on the board yet? You're privy to a lot of cool information. Not to put you on the spot there.

Yeah, no, I actually can't think of too many trends like the ones I'm testing out right now. I'm doing a ton. A shitload of Instagram marketing, doing a ton of Snapchat marketing. And I don't do it through the networks because it's so expensive. I just hit up influencers directly and we're paying them. And we found that to bring a huge roi.

I was going to ask you about that because that's exactly what we're starting to do with Stiletto Coffee. So tell me about your strategy there.

Yeah, it works. So what we do is we'll go into markets and we look for or we go into cash.