How to Make $10 Million and Become Your Best Self with Allen Brouwer

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now. Welcome to Make More Marvels. My name is Brad Hart and I am so freaking thrilled because everybody wants to be their Best self. But not everybody gets to interview the founder of Best Self along with Kathryn Lavery, Mr. Allen Brower. How the hell are you, sir?

I am great, Brad. I am freaking great. How are you?

So good, brother. Thank you so much for taking the time to jump on the show. And I wanted to ask. It's Alan Brower, the fourth, right?

It is. There's three before me.

I know. An AB4 and now a PS4. Peter Scott is another fourth. Good stuff. Love it. All right, so where are you calling in from? Are you still in Jersey, by the way?

I am in Jersey and I'm still here. My wife won't let me leave because we're tied to the family and I said, all right, you know what? If I'm going to stay here, I'm going to enjoy the hell out of life. So we just bought a home. It's right. It's on the water. I'm looking out over the water right now as we're doing this. I can have the boat in the backyard in the summer. It's great, man. I love it.

Now you just need a camera so you can show it off like me.

I know. I almost want to rip mine.

Hello, brother. Well, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here. Alan is the founder of Bestself Co, which is a. It's a journal kind of similar to, you know, like a five minute journal. A lot of the other popular journals out there, but they've been unbelievably successful at putting this in the hands of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people at this point. We'll get some numbers here in a second, but if you don't know what it is, check it out. It's Bestself Co. And essentially it's a journal to help you become your best self. And it's really effective at doing that. I've known Alan and Kathryn for a very long time, and they're dear people to me. It's just been incredible to see them win all these contests and awards and get to do all this cool stuff. Let me just rattle some off. So you guys did the build A big business contest with Shopify. You got to meet Tim and go and do the Great Gatsby thing, ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Super cool. And then you did the bigger business competition. I think it took you to Necker. Is that right?

No, we went to Fiji.

Oh, right on. That's awesome. Yeah, so you get to do all kinds of cool stuff with cool people and it's just really just doing what you do best. But I think what also separates you guys from the pack is you're incredibly good at telling your story and marketing it as well so that people know that you're winning. It's not just some, you know, hey, we're doing this thing. And you're kind of behind the scenes like a lot of entrepreneurs. And that's cool. You're building a better system to serve more people, but you're also inspiring other people to think bigger and grow bigger businesses as a result of that. So I think that's really cool. So, Alan, for people who don't kind of know who you are in your journey, if you could just kind of ground us for a minute here. Talk about the journey up to this point.

Wow. The journey up to this point. It's been a long and interesting road, to say the least. Went to college. Partied my ass off in college. I knew I wanted to start a business. I just didn't know what I thought. I wanted to get into parasailing and own a parasailing company. Company so I could spend time on a boat all day long. I thought that that would be cool. I ended up working for a yacht manufacturer. So I ended up spending time on and I ended up spending time on boats and doing marketing for a large yacht manufacturer. Then a strange turn of events happened. I lost my mom and she was 48 years old. I sort of had a quarter life crisis and said to myself, is this how I want to live the rest of my life? You know, partying, hanging out, not really having any definite purpose, if you will. And I said, life is too short. I'm going to make the most of it. And that's when I dove into the world of entrepreneurship. Started reading blogs and figuring out a little bit about this thing called Internet marketing and all. What was capable for individuals, like ordinary people like myself, to do extraordinary things. Fast forward. I met my now business partner, very good friend Katherine, in an entrepreneur program. So I couldn't find anybody in my close friend network. And none of my parents or peers or relatives had any entrepreneur experience. So that's why I joined this entrepreneur program. That's when Kathryn and I ran into one another. And we said, hey, we're doing, like, cool things, and everyone else in here is blowing smoke. Let's hold each other accountable. And we became accountability partners for a year, growing our own businesses. And then we decided to, after a year of being accountability partners, we jumped into business together with a joint venture. And that became very successful only because during the path of building our own business and then building this business that we were in together, which was completely separate from Best Self, by the way, we started to find out what worked for entrepreneurs, what made successful people successful, what were some of the big levers that we could pull on a daily basis. Because now we're solopreneurs instead of running a single business. Now we're solopreneurs running two businesses. And now we have a lot of balls in the air. So we were being really intentional with our time and what we were focused on, and we were able to have. Have massive growth because of it. And that sort of became the framework of one of our flagship products called the Self Journal, which we launched on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter was so successful, and we had so much fun with it. We said, kathryn came to me on a Sunday. She's like, alan, you're gonna think I'm crazy, but I really just want to focus on this Self Journal thing. How do we do more of this and less of what we were doing before? Because we were just like, selling crap on Amazon. It wasn't really anything fulfilling, but this really juiced us. She's like, let's. Can we just kill it? And I said, you know what? I feel the same way. I feel like we should be focused on this. We had so much fun, and it's like the customers that we care about, but instead of killing the other business, why don't we sell it? So she's like, good idea. Let's keep going. So now to fast forward to today, we're rocking and rolling and we're scaling and we're building teams, and we're having a lot of fun doing it.

That's beautiful. Alan, can you give us some numbers right now? Like, where's the business at and what's the growth been so far?

So our Kickstarter was 34 days. That was in August into September of 2015. And we did $323,000 in that 34 days.

Nice.

Then we spent a little bit of time preparing our website, which was a Shopify store, custom designing the whole thing. And also Waiting for our products to arrive from our manufacturers. And we launched that on January 1, 2016. We ended 2016 at 2.4 million in sales. So our first year of real business we did 2.4 and, and then fast forward the second year in business, which is 2017, which just ended December. Still shaking out a little bit. We more than 3x star growth.

That's awesome. So you're sitting around 7 million right now?

Yeah, just over.

Okay, fantastic. Congratulations. First and foremost, that's incredibly epic growth story. Is it just with this best self journal or is there other products contributing to the sales numbers as well?

There's more products, so we don't want to be labeled as the Journal company. And we were actually working very hard to diversify what our product base is and we've been very successful at that. So now our Journal only equates for maybe 30% of our business. We'd like to get that down to 20 though.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

What are the other things you guys offer there? Services on the back end? Are there other products?

So there's digital products. So there's an online community, there's a free one and then there's a paid one. So like a VIP club. Then we have digital course. It's called the Self Mastery Academy. Dives into more of what we've learned while building our business and scaling our lives. So that's a digital course. We are getting it. We have a software product called Win the Day. Win the Day is a Chrome extension that helps you keep your goal in front of you and remind you of how many days left you have to hit that goal. And it keeps your goal top of mind.

That's awesome. That's just available for free on Chrome.

Yeah, awesome.

Check it out. I didn't even know that was there. See, this is good. We didn't get a chance to check up for a while. Now I actually learned a few more things about your business. This is exciting. Check some of these out. Thanks. So Alan, what do you think if you had to give people one or two takeaways that you've learned from growing this product business, pivoting away from the original product now into more digital products, what was that done? In a sense, because you mentioned, hey, we want to make it like 20%, 30% of our revenue right now. Did you assume that there was some risk in having one product? What was your thinking that led to creating other products and how did you go about that?

Absolutely. So we launched the Kickstarter as just a product and then by the time The Kickstarter was over. We had a business. We realized people want other things besides a journal. We don't want a single product. You know, if you watch Shark Tank and you see people pitching to the sharks, hey, I have X, Y and Z. Why don't you give me money for equity? They say, okay, you don't really have a business, you have a product. So we were very intentional from day one not to have a product, but to have a business. Now I forget because I've been rambling what the original question was.

It's all good. I was thinking, like, what? That's a great answer to that question. But also, like, what was kind of the way that you brought about new products as well? So you had this audience. You had 320 some odd K in Kickstarter revenue. You had this kind of, you know, I assume you have an email list that you generate as well when you have a Kickstarter. So now you're like, okay, what do we want to bring to the market for these people next? Was it, okay, let's go digital course Word. Some of the ideas that maybe flopped or, you know, thinking along the way that got you where you're at today, where now you have this larger product suite and an actual business, as you mentioned.

Yeah. The thought process was, it's two things. One, what problem can we solve that our current customer base is facing right now, and what can we produce for them that's better than anything else on the market, or at least has a better spin on what's on the market currently? So that's one way that we look at things. Okay, what is our current customer base or what does our ideal customer. What are they having a problem with? And do we solve that problem with a physical product, or do we solve that problem with some content which is also a product? Or do we solve that problem with a digital product, like an application, whether it's iOS or Chrome or whatever it is?

Yeah. And I like the fact that you're not hung up on, like, it's got to be this thing. A lot of creative people or inventors or whatever, they're like, oh, it's with this item. It's like, no, what?

Start with the problem.

How do we solve the problem? I don't care if it's physical, digital, whatever, right? Maybe it's a high five. Maybe people need a high five. I don't give a shit about the product. Yeah, most people are like, oh, look at my cool, shiny new product. And it doesn't serve the people that actually Want and buy it. And they wonder why nobody buys it at the end of the day. So take me through kind of the life cycle of taking these ideas. Like are you doing surveys? Are you talking to people, getting on the phone, how do you get the data that you need? Because this is like the ask method, one on one, right. This is really great. But I think people need to hear this again and again. Understand it's not frickin magic. It's asking people what they want and then providing it.

Sure. So yes to all that. So we have sent out surveys. Hey, what big problems are you having in your personal life, in your business life, in hobbies or whatever you want to add to it that you're struggling with? Our biggest resource in where we find and listen to our customers most is in our free Facebook group inside there. Not only has it become a way to feed, to pull and extract ideas from the community, but customers come to us and say, hey, I bought this product because I wanted to solve X, Y and Z and it's an okay product. But I love your brand so much and I love your company so much. You guys should do it better. We're like, oh wow, that is actually pretty cool. Why don't we take a stab at that and see what we can do and what we could put together. And just by skimming the group you could extract ideas out of it. And there's also another benefit from that group. People come in for a product or to solve a problem, but they stay for the community. So we're able to build lifelong fans that way.

So you have the Facebook group, everybody's a part of it or they have to opt in.

You have to either purchase or download the cell. You have to be a self journal user.

Okay, so they've already bought from you. This is a list of buyers essentially that you now have to say, hey, what else you guys struggling with? And let me do it. And then how do you kind of roll out a product? You beta test it with a select group to raise some money or how do you do it?

Sure. So normally we have a full blown product team now and we'll go to them and say, hey, how could we take this product and make it better? How can we? Why don't we start with just some mock ups, some renderings or some wireframes of what this would look like and we go from there and we'd flesh it out and see and try to poke holes in it and see are we really doing something interesting that's better or are we just Doing a me too thing. Sometimes it's me too, me too stuff. And we say, now that doesn't feel right for the brand. But sometimes it's like, awesome, let's get this started, let's get some samples. Then that's when our VIP community comes in. And we go to the VIP community and say, hey, we have a small batch run of this. You guys get first dibs, take a look at it, let us know what you think. They're like our beta testers or alpha testers if you will. And then we get customer feedback from there.

So you're kind of selling it at that point. Right. It's like you make a limited run, you've got the wireframes out, you already talked to your customers and now you've done like a little beta pre launch to your VIP group.

Yep.

So what do you think the critical mass of audience size of buyers is for the products that you're rolling out? Like how many people did you have in your group before that became a really good resource? Because I know Facebook, you know, some people have 40,000 person groups and no engagement and then there's other people have like 800 and they're crushing it. It's just all over the map. So what did you find was that tipping point?

I would say right around the 5,000 person mark. Okay, right around there, we. So before the 5,000 person mark, it was work, it was okay, every day I'm going to go in, I'm going to contribute, I'm going to respond to customers questions. We're going to be the main focus inside this community and really put in the effort to make it something that we want. After that 5,000 person mark, it was self generating. Customers started helping one another with their own issues and then we slowly were able to take a step back.

Okay, cool. So it sounds like if I were to sum up the product cycle of what it was you guys had the idea, you went on Kickstarter, you raised the money, built the product, you built the audience around the product. You took however long, let's say a year plus to build it up to 5,000, you know, consistently pouring money back in the business and keeping it going. But it sounds like you've hit pretty much right on the mark. And the reason I really love this story is because, you know, had it not worked out for Kickstarter or you had to pivot, you would have known that then instead of going down the road, all these people that build audiences and they have no money coming in and they're just Kind of like struggling just to get by. I'm guilty of this to some extent, too. Make More Marvels. Didn't really have a product for about a year and a half while I was figuring out what my message is going to be and what I really wanted to do in the world. And I see so many people that I just don't want to see them struggle in that way. It's like, get the data. However, you have to learn what people actually want and need. Try to find something that's differentiated. Right. It's not just another me Too that actually adds value. It's not that there aren't other journals out there. We've mentioned a couple on the show, right? UJ and Mimi. And then they do the Five Minute Journal, which is great and has a ton of great endorsements, but I think they solve slightly different problems. Even, you know, I think that a journal is one thing, but there are so many different ways you can position a journal to make it. And even you said, you know, hey, I don't want my whole business to be journals. We don't want to just be the journal company. So this best self brand allows people to be something else. It's not the Alan Brower show, it's not the Catherine Lavery show. It's something else. So, you know, if you're picking out these little pieces, you're understanding, all right, this is branding. This is how to serve people. This is how to create a business. And not one product. You're managing and mitigating risk, and you're doing it in a smart way. Because at every stage of this puzzle, you have a reasonable amount of certainty to move to the next phase.

Totally. Which allows us to take risk successes. Yeah. Which also allows us to take risk, because now we're mitigating the risk up front by getting customer feedback immediately and seeing if someone would purchase it then, because we know we have that stable base. It's like, all right, let's go off the wall. Let's create an app. What? All right, let's do it. And that's how that started.

So let's talk about big company problems. Now. You guys have $7 million in the door last year.

Right.

You crossed the eight figure mark overall. Congratulations, by the way. That's a huge milestone in any company. Most companies will never make it that far. What are the next things on the horizon? How do you keep yourself from getting shiny object syndrome now that you have a lot of money coming in? It's like, okay, this all looks cool. And we could go down so many rabbit holes. But if you read stories like Marc Echo and a bunch of bigger brands that get so big and it's like, you know, becomes just 800 rabbit holes and, you know, we don't need the Times Square, 30,000 square foot flagship office. You know, just stuff like that. Like, how do you keep yourself grounded and how do you say no to stuff, I guess is my question.

Overall, it's very hard to say no to stuff. We're trying. I think it's easy when you have a mission and a purpose and you're like, okay, here's where we're going. Let's go there. I feel like when you don't have the mission, don't have the purpose, you don't have how the core company should be operating, that's when everything looks appealing. Oh, we should do this. Oh, we should do that. Oh, this is great. And at the sacrifice of what we're big believers in, there's opportunity cost in everything. So anything that we say yes to today hurts us tomorrow in an opportunity that comes up. So we're very diligent about what we say yes and no to. And also we're at the point now where we have employees who rely on us, who support their families with us, who help the business run. We wouldn't be able to run without them. And therefore, it's like, okay, we can't only think about ourselves and a dollar mark. We have to think about everybody that this impacts. So that's a whole different beast in. In and of itself.

Yeah. And I love that you said that, because that's another thing that I'm obsessed with. Ray Dalio. I don't know if you know who that is. Yeah, I'm always reading his book Principles, and he's got another one coming out. Do you already have a copy of this? If not, I have it.

It's right over here on my bookshelf.

Fantastic. Right? And he talks about thinking in second, third, fourth, fifth level consequences. And that's essentially what you're describing is like, if you're just thinking about you and your own desires, that's a first level consequence. Typically, to get what you actually want, you have to ignore those for a time. Right. It's not that you don't get them, it's just you have to, like, prioritize. All right, what's the long term benefit of this? And then when you're in your position, it's like, what's the third and fourth and fifth level consequences of everybody else? This interacts with so really, I was just thinking about this over lunch earlier. And by lunch, I mean I jammed some food in my face in between calls. But I was thinking about, like, as entrepreneurs, all we're doing is aligning reality in the way that serves the most number of people. That's all we're really doing. At the end of the day, it's like people want, need, and desire things. We want them to have their manifestations, their wants, need, and desires realized. What's a system that works with reality to actually get that done? How do you incentivize? How do you use capital? How do you move products around? How do you move service around, how you market? How do you bring those people in the right place? And all of those things need to work for a business to work and grow. And only one of those things really needs to go wrong for that whole.

Business to go toes up.

So it's a little bit of a balancing act.

Sure, Absolutely.

I was just talking to Alan before the call. I'm like, I really need somebody who's, like, learning multiple businesses that can help mentor me, because I'm at this point now where I'm running three businesses and I'm on the board of two charities. I'm maxed for time, man. It's all about leadership systems, and scale at this point.

Totally. All I dedicated my time and resource and energies to in 2017 was managing and leading teams. Yeah, literally every book that I purchased and read was on managing and leading teams. How can I be a better manager? How can I be a better leader? How can I navigate this ship without me, you know, doing everything on the deck?

Let's give us our top three leadership and management books that you found were the most helpful for you.

I'll give you the best one. It was Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek.

He's a start with why guy, too.

Yeah. And I'll touch on that book a little bit. This goes back to the second and third consequences of every decision that you make. He said that if you put your employees first in all aspects of their life, not just the business of what they want to get out of their career while working there, but what dreams do they aspire to have? Like, why are they working for you? It's not just to make more money or to climb the corporate ladder. It's because they want to take their parents on vacation because they always had a dream of repaying them back on something or because they came from nothing and they want to build a better life for their children that they have or Something like that. It's finding out why they're doing what they're doing, why they're working for you, really providing for them that resource. Not the monetary or PTO days or anything like that. Because people don't get for that. Well.

Right. People don't want dead presidents. They want what the dead presidents can provide them. And when the system shifts, they'll want whatever gets them that. Right. So, you know, the system right now is, hey, we can't whip people anymore to build the pyramids, so let's enslave them into some money. That's it. That's the system now. Right. And it's not that. And I know there's two ways to look at anything. That's just a story, but really that's.

Kind of what it is.

It's like we all have to deal with money and the wealthiest people in the world don't have to deal with it as much.

Yeah.

So we all want to be wealthy for that reason because we have freedom to do the things we want to do and the means to actually do them, because money's portable power that makes the whole world go around. And that's great.

I heard a really good. So I had. I was at lunch and Dan Sullivan was at the table and he said that capitalism is the best form of bartering ever created and that money is just the byproduct of a bartering system. I thought that was really interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. There's another great quote by Winston Churchill. Democracy is the worst form of government. Except for all the others feel the same way about capitalism. Insofar as that is the best system we've got. I'm not knocking it. It's just the best system we've got so far. And whatever comes next might be even better. We just don't know yet. So that's why I'm so thrilled about blockchain impacting all these other industries. Yeah, it's exciting, but it's still so small. And crypto and everything is. People in this little niche of humanities are making money, but it hasn't even begun to take off in the way that it could. Oh, I know, it's wild. Have you been playing around in crypto at all?

I've been playing dabbling, if you will. I'm not full in like everybody else, where I'm, you know, just. That's all I'm consuming and learning about. But I would be foolish to say, I would be foolish to stay out of it. It's a little tempting, you know. Oh, wait, let Me? Take a look at that. What I'm really interested in is the blockchain behind it. Not so much cryptocurrency. Yeah. It's the software and the tech behind it.

Same here, man. And I'll. If you have the cycles for it, I'll give you access to our course so you can take a look. We just launched a course recently that helps people kind of navigate this new world.

Right.

We look at it as, like, future proofing, really. It's like, if the whole world goes this way, if this even becomes 1% of all money, there's still tons of upside from here. And the blockchain stuff could impact a lot of industries. Real estate, information technology, security fraud, banking. And there's just so many pieces to this puzzle that, you know, it's a better system that serves more people. It's just gonna take time. But I think the funny thing is, like, people look at it as, you know, like, remember when everybody was like, this is the Uber of this now it's like this. It's like this. But blockchain. I'm like, why does it actually serve anybody to have blockchain? And so you're taking startups, which are risky anyway, and a lot of them fail, and then you're multiplying them by the. The risk and failure rate of the unknown, which is blockchain in a lot of circles. There's like, maybe 1,000 to 2,000 people in the world who really understand it at a high level. So I think there's going to be a lot of pain in that market. So invest accordingly and manage your risk accordingly, because it is super risky. Most people have never. We do surveys too. Eight out of 10 people investing in crypto have never invested in anything before.

Wow.

Which is a little scary. So they're out there trying to play with dynamite, and they haven't mastered bottle rockets.

Sure. That's a good way to put it. Eight out of 10 people who invested in cryptocurrencies have not invested in anything before. Wow. That's a bold leap.

Right?

Right.

This is the first thing I've been excited about. A lot of people don't 401ks. A lot of people don't invest in the stock market. Believe it or not. Like, you know, this stuff that maybe we take for granted as business owners and investors, most people aren't doing. They're just living paycheck to paycheck. Now they have their cell phone, they can go and get in the crypto markets.

Yeah, very true.

You know, so I don't think we've seen anything yet. This is gonna revolutionize the way people invest.

Mm.

But they also are gonna get their asses kicked. They don't know the basics. That's okay. I mean, but I'd like to. I'd like to catch a few of them on the way to ruin and help them make better decisions. Anyway, that. I didn't mean to go off on that tangent, Rattle. I just think it's fascinating that that's all happening.

So.

Alright. Do you want to sell this business? You want to grow it to infinity? What's the next move for Best Self Co?

Oh, that's a great question. So Tony Robbins says that if you don't have an exit plan, you don't have a business. I think there's some validity to that. I want to sell the company eventually. Okay. And whether that's selling a company to the management team and I sit on the board or selling it outright, that would be cool too.

Could be like an esop.

Yeah, that's what. Yeah, like an esop.

That could be right. ESOP is an employee stock option program for people that aren't familiar with that. We learn about it in Business Mastery. We're both big Tony Robbins fans. I'm taking another 50 people as UPW. What are you doing for UPW? You want to come with us? You're always welcome. But yeah, I feel like there's a lot of stuff that goes into that. Right. Emotional stuff.

Totally.

You know, it's your baby. You built. Might come time to sell it. You know, it might come time to walk away from being an active manager of it. And I think that allows you. It's not. It shouldn't be looked at as a mournful thing because everything ends. That's. That's the nature of life. But an opportunity now to take what you've learned and now solve a new problem.

Yep. 100%. So. And. And that's not saying that we're going to sell Best Self Company tomorrow. Obviously it's got to be a joint decision between Kathryn and I, what we. What we do with the business. I can't. I could sit here and tell you all these grand ideas that I have for it, but when it comes down to it, it's a joint decision between us. But with that said, like, I don't want to sell it right now. We're just. We're still. We're still rocking and rolling. We still see and we're still having a shit load of fun, so.

Well, and you still haven't Even addressed the potential size of the market. What I mean, you got to look at it like that. Like, yeah, you guys have done 10 million so far. I think the market might be 100 million. It might be a billion for all we know. Right. There's still partnership opportunities to take it to the next level. There's still all these different pieces of the puzzle that you can do because you now have a business and not just a product. Totally. And you can always do what you've been doing and just kind of rinse and repeat.

It gets easier.

That's the other thing people don't realize is like the hardest part of being an entrepreneur is getting started. It's the first two to three to four years, depending on how long it takes you to stop sucking and just learn the lessons, you know. And then after that, like, you compound your gains every time you get a little bit better, every time you have a little bit better story, every time you get a little bit better influencing and deal making every time you get a little bit better at rolling things out and making less mistakes, and these gains compound and then you have capital to work with if you're successful. And that even makes things move faster, provided you consistently make great decisions. How do you keep your eye on the ball with when you make failures or just things totally burn out yourself? Alan, like, what do you go back to? What's your, like, go to cash strategy if you get strapped? So I know you've actually, you've had some issues in the past with that, you know, where you kind of fell flat on your face and had to start over. I remember that.

Yeah. What. Which one are we. So wait, what is the question?

So, yeah, I'm sorry, I threw a lot. As you grow and shift things, my question is how do you deploy capital? And when you fail, how do you come back from that?

So as we're growing, how do we deploy capital? We deploy capital in. There's two things. It's brand building, customer acquisition. So anything that we can do to build the brand or build the team to help build a brand, we'll do that or we'll acquire customers. And actually there's also a third one. Who can we acquire that we can ratchet into our current business.

Have you already bought businesses?

Yeah, we bought a couple pieces of software that came with, with customers and assets and couple good pieces to. To add to the best self asset list.

Are you guys doing Facebook ads still? Is that the main driver or you guys spread out to like affiliate traffic as well? What kind of customer Acquisition strategies. Are you using that? You find? Give me the goods, man. Tell me, tell me, like, what's your. What you're most excited about? Because Facebook is like, you know, old news that changes every five months anyway.

Actually, Facebook is still our number one, number one driver. It still is. Now that's not saying that we were not diversified. So we have YouTube and Google Pinterest. Good old organic traffic. Still works.

Yeah, Right on.

But Facebook is leading the pack still.

That's amazing. They're staying power. I mean, they have more data on people than any other company on the face of the planet. It's amazing.

So you know what's funny? We set modest budget per day to do global targeting and do dynamic ad placement. So we're pretty much targeting everybody on Facebook and we're telling Facebook, here's a dynamic ad. Make sure our cost per acquisition is underneath this, this amount. And here's the budget that we have every day for it. It's getting better and better as the days go on. And we're not doing anything. Facebook's doing all the work.

That's awesome though, because you're just saying, hey, I don't want to spend more than this. Go make it work. And they do it.

Yeah. Yep.

But technically you're giving them an unlimited budget within those parameters.

Correct.

But it keeps finding more leads and driving the cost down. That's amazing.

Yeah.

Do you guys have an ads company or do you. Do you do it yourself?

It's internal. We have a team. That helps.

Yeah. Because Facebook ads is a full time job, man. I know a lot about it, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert. And the expertise keeps changing. But if you can get to a point where literally you just say, hey, Facebook, I want to you to go spend my money and you can do better than anybody else, like that's pretty cool, I gotta say.

Now, I will say that's only just one test that we're running. That's not our entire strategy. Right.

Just write up a check and everything.

Seems to work out. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, that's just one little piece test that we're doing.

All right, so you guys got the model. This is good. I like picking your brain. I appreciate you taking the time. So Kickstarter was the first green light. Right. You did obviously really well there. There's huge verified demand. You had the cash to make it happen. How was deal with China? Do you guys get manufactured in China or where are you at?

Yeah, so most of our paper products are manufactured in China. Leather Products are manufactured in Mexico. We have a couple, like one off things that are manufactured here in the US and in the uk. But what was it like dealing with China? So the business that Kathryn and I had before Best Self was white labeling products, rebranding them, selling them on Amazon. So we had a system in place already of dealing with manufacturers in China. So for us, to answer your question, it was easy.

It was pretty easy. Because you already had that skill set. Because I know it could be challenging with everything that goes on over there and I've flown out there myself. It's not for me, I just put it that way. But yeah. Okay, cool. So then after you had the product and lifecycle and manufacturing worked out, you move into the marketing phase. Mostly Facebook ads are driving traffic now. You've been able to grow pretty consistently. You have a relatively mass market product, for sure. Is there any group or demographic of people that just doesn't buy it for whatever reason? You're just not sure why or.

I won't say that, but what I will say is the opposite of. So all of our messaging when we first started was based in targeting entrepreneurs, business owners, high achievers, people in personal and self development and self improvement. So that was all of our messaging. And what we found through building that Facebook group and surveying our customers is all of a sudden this person would come in and they were in a health goal and they were working on their health and making that what they were working on. And then there was a writer who came in and now they're working on writing. So like, those are two big demographics that have come in, even though our messaging has nothing to do with that. And then there was a third or fourth one, I guess you could call it, of a demographic that came in that we had no idea we were targeting, but somehow we resonated with them and that was people who were jobless, didn't have a job, and their whole mission was to get a job. And I thought that was fascinating as well. So I don't know, to answer your question, I don't know who doesn't buy. All I know is who has bought that was out of the blue and created like a little subgroup.

No, I like that too. It's kind of like that divide and conquer strategy, right? You can't be everything to everybody. But if you really niche and laser focus on what one thing that grants you the success to then target a larger number of people and then you'll start to find, you know, maybe you'll find like health is a huge niche that people are buying this for, and you can make a product that's specifically for that or whatever. Right? Because if you try to be everything to everybody, you just end up failing and you don't make any money and you burn out. As opposed to just niche, laser focus. Get this right? You have to go so niche in the beginning, and then you can widen out because the risk is lower. As simple as that.

Right.

And you're already targeting more people than you realize. I've had people come into my doors that I'm like, all right, yeah, you want me to work with you, I'll work with you. And it's just I have no idea until I get the message out. But that's so important. And I think that comes back to just one of the old maxims is like, your brand and your messaging are really the driving force of any company. So getting clear on your swim lanes, getting clear on your values, getting clear on your mission, and then branding and messaging around that for a specific type of person is so important. Because if you can talk to one person that feels like you're perfect for them, that begets another sale, Another sale, another referral, Another referral, and pretty soon you have enough money to really go after the bigger market.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so to sum up, we kind of threw a lot of people today, but BestHealth Co is crushing it. Love to hear it. Awesome. What are some parting words of wisdom for people out there that are working in their business and want to eventually work on your business so they can scale it to the level that you have scaled it?

Parting words. I'll tell you a story. We launched our business January 1, 2016. March came around, and I was talking to my buddy Frank. I was like, frank, I'm getting a little burnt out with what I'm doing. Know, I'm working really hard. Things are going well. We're up and to the right the past couple months just starting, But I think I need to bring in somebody to do my Facebook ads for me because I was doing them all myself. And then I got nervous. I'm like, frank, if I give my biggest project away to somebody else, what the hell am I going to do? I put all my self worth into that. I was bringing in the money, right? And Frank's like, oh, Alan, why don't you just tell me to, like, tell me, describe your day. Maybe you don't even need to hire somebody and you could just work out your schedule. I said, well, I wake up in the morning, do my morning routine, jump into Facebook I create ads, turn ads off, monitor the performance, you know, keep things running and break for lunch, maybe do a little bit of admin stuff, then back into Facebook by the end of the day. Then Lauren comes home, my wife, and have dinner with her. And then before we go to bed, I do some more admin stuff. And then I'm up and I do it all over again. And I'll never forget what he said. He said, so you're telling me you just gave yourself a high paying, full time job? Like, oh my gosh, you're right. You are absolutely right. And he said, so the business doesn't move forward unless you wake up and are actually putting in the work. So you're still an operator and you need to transition to an owner where regardless if you, if you show up, if you show up, the business can run. But if you want to take the day off, screw around, if you want to go on vacation or go to a meetup or a mastermind or a conference, the business can still run without you. I'm like, oh man, you're so right. And that was the turning point for me. I love it.

So get to the part where you can delegate. Yeah, yeah. There's a great methodology from the four hour work week, which I'm sure you read once or twice. He calls it the deal methodology. Define the outcome that you want, eliminate what you don't need for that outcome. So get rid of everything that's possible, automate what you can eliminate, delegate what you can't automate, and then finally liberate yourself from the equation. I think that's time tested and proven advice. It's an incredible thing. And you can do this in every phase of your life, whether you're an employee, entrepreneur, you know, king of the moon, doesn't matter. You can always find ways. Alan, thank you so much for being on the show and I'm grateful that you're here because I feel like so few people can just keep it. Basically what I notice about people who are very successful is they're just. It's not about making things more complex. It's how simple can I make it and just do that? So I'm just grateful for that perspective for myself and for everybody in the make more morals community. We want to give back to you. Now, how do we do that? So the way we like to serve is by connecting resources, opportunities, people and systems together. And that in effect will help you move your mission forward faster. So anybody, myself, my team listening here at home can go ahead and do that. I Would love to make that available to you. So what's a way we can help you move your mission forward faster?

Geez. What's a way that you can help move the mission forward faster? Big question, man. And I am on the spot. Huh?

Don't tell anybody about this. I always get them at this. This is the very last question. I think.

You know, I just want people to take action so you don't have. By taking action, you're helping yourself help other people. You're inspiring other people who maybe feel scared to take action. So if you're on the fence about doing something, just take action. That will be the biggest way that you repay me. Because that's what it's all about. Take massive action.

All right. I'm gonna even add a bit to that. So take massive action. Let us know how you took massive action on what. Right? So result that you're after, why it was important, your purpose and your massive action item, your RPM ready. What, why, how? And then hit us back in a comment on this post on this podcast. Leave us a comment on itunes. Whatever it's going to be, we'd love to hear about it. We'd love to feature a few of them next time we do a show. Maybe we'll do a show again in the future. It'd be super fun. And what where can you be found on social media so people can tag you in that or reach out to you if they were really blown away by this podcast. I'm sure a lot of people will be.

Thanks. Best way to find me is alanbrauer.com that's where I give all the behind the scenes stuff that we're doing inside Best self company, building the business and growing the company and building the brand. And then if you want to check out the front facing piece of that, that's bestself co.

I love it. Thank you so much Alan. And that's a L E L E N B R O U W E r dot com. That's where all the behind the scenes stuff goes on. Thank you so much, Alan for being on the show. On behalf of everybody at Make More Marble, you rock. We appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks Brad.

Thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marbles podcast. For more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing abundant life in your health, wealth and relationships, whatever that means to you, head on over to makemoremarbles.com check out our cool explainer video about what we're about and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers we want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher or Google Play, wherever you're listening to your podcast. And please do leave a review. Thank you so much and we'll see you on the next podcast.