https://www.listennotes.com/e/c24dab7fa7ee4ad19013a6da55028a4b

Welcome to Executing the Vision podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hunter, president of Emerge Labs. On the podcast, we'll get to know the person behind the vision, their successes, their challenges, and their plans for the future. If you're interested in becoming a guest or know someone who might be a good fit, stick around to the end and we'll discuss how to apply. Now, enjoy the show. Hey.

Hello. There we go. I was trying to get my. My iPhone camera working and it wasn't. And that's what made me a little late here.

Don't you worry at all.

There we go. Let me turn on some lights and get this all nice and working. How are you?

Yeah, great.

Good. Good day?

So far, so good. The week seems to be starting off just nice and calm and normal. I haven't had any big fires yet.

Oh, well, hey, you know what? That's. That's always good. You're in San Diego. You were born in Michigan, I think I heard, in your thing. But you're. Are you in San Diego still?

I am, yeah. We're up in Carlsbad.

Oh, cool. I. I love San Diego. San Diego is one of my favorite places. I spent not long. I like. I'm in Toronto, so I'm Canadian. I don't have the Canadian flag behind me, but that's where I'm at. And we're. But my wife and I love San Diego. We spent a few months in Encinitas, so just up your way and. Yeah, it's a good place.

Nice. And it looks like you've done tons of podcasts, right? Yeah. Okay, cool. And yeah, for the most part, I like to focus on the idea of just getting to know you as a person and your kind of story about growing up, that type of thing, and then transition more into work.

Yep.

And overall, not trying to throw any questions and stump you or anything like that, just trying to have a fun conversation. I would say the only couple. Just questions I do like to ask. Just at the end, a couple of things.

Just.

What would be a piece of business advice would be a piece of life advice.

Okay. That you would give business and life advice.

Yeah. And then I'll. Once we get near the end, I'll ask those. And usually to it, I'll just give an example of something that's like on the top of my mind for today or whatever. So help to make it, like an easy transition there, I'd say. The only other thing I like to ask that can be a little. Is just that idea of what from childhood. What lesson from childhood have you been able to bring into your current, like, business life.

Into the business life? So my, My. The piece of advice that I was going to give for my life advice is very much all centered around my childhood and also if there's a big business advice. So.

And the goal behind that is so that those things is the idea of. When we get all done here, what I like to do is immediately do the editing.

Yep.

Immediately pull just so we have a couple good clips to share on social media and stuff. So that's the goal of those questions is no matter what happens in the whole conversation, I feel like I always have a few easy nuggets of here's a. A real cool shareable clip, for sure. And if. If one of them's a repeat or whatever, that's totally fine. And we could even just skip the business one because we'll answer it another way earlier.

Yeah, I think they'll all. They'll all line up and anyways, we'll have fun with it and we'll just kick it and see what happens.

Yeah, sweet. Okay, so let's make sure I'm not getting any weird calls and messages.

Yeah, let me do that too. Let me just make sure I put clicked I do not disturb sign on here. All right.

Okay. And it is Michael Dia, right? Is that how you say Mikel?

Mikel.

Oh, Mikel. Okay. Mikel. Mikel.

Dia.

Okay, got it. All right. Okay, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Executing the Vision. I'm your host, Brad Hunter, and today I have Mikel Dia with Fun analytics joining me.

How's it going?

All right. Great to have you on. So I was like, how this works on my end is I see a list of people that are interested in getting on the podcast, and so then I can click on their stuff and see is that somebody I want to talk to. And when I clicked on yours, it was very much so. Something that, to me seemed like such a cool, unique idea and not my specialty, like in general marketing and funnels and things like that is not what I master in the business world at all. So from twofold, just looking through your website, it was an instant wow, that's super cool. I would really like to learn more about and understand that. So that was just one of the main drivers to me. It seemed the product and things you guys have created to me seems really cool. So I'm very excited to learn and understand more about that. But first, I always like to start with just getting to know you as a person. Like, just tell me about life growing up Where'd you grow up? What was it all about?

Totally. Yes. I am from just outside of Toronto, Canada. I was born in Montreal, which is about a six hour drive from Toronto if you're not familiar with Canada and the region there. But obviously Montreal is a more French speaking. I grew up, that was my first language is French. I didn't learn English until I was in grade three, I believe. And I moved a lot between Montreal and Toronto and really the suburbs of Montreal and the suburbs of Toronto as a kid I moved every two to three years because of my dad's job. Again, I was born in Montreal, moved to Toronto in grade three. Three, moved back to Montreal in grade five, moved back to Toronto in grade six, moved back to Montreal in grade nine, moved back to Toronto in grade 11.

And now are we bouncing back and forth between basically the same like town, suburb area?

Exactly. Every time was the same suburb. My dad was a banker. He worked for our BC Bank, Royal bank of Canada and, and he just kept getting promotions and, and moving up the ladder and, and part of that was just, just transfers, right. And going where where he needed to go. So my, my childhood was very much kind of living in that world of constantly changing now even though we were moving to the same suburb, we were always moving in different areas. So I never really went back to the same school and I always had to make new friends. So growing up I never really had a lot of friends. Like I would make one or two best friends for a year or two, spend all my time with them and then we'd move and, and I have an older sister, I have a younger brother, but I spent all my days, I was a very active kid. I played every sport all the time. So basically I would meet somebody on the street in my neighborhood, I would find out that they like to play road hockey or basketball and I would go all in, we to meet up every after school, every day, play a whole bunch of sports and then two years later I'd move and do it again. And that was my childhood growing up.

Nice. Okay, so from there what's next then?

Yeah, so I, I moved back to Toronto, the suburb outside of Toronto, in grade 11 and then I went to university and I stayed in Toronto afterwards. So I went to university in, in, in downtown Toronto for Civil engineering. So I did a degree in civil engineering. I always joke about this. I hated it so much that I decided to do a master's of civil engineering. And people always look at me and I'm like why, how does, how does that work? Why would you do that? So I didn't mind the actual learning of engineering. I'm good at math, I enjoy structures, physics, that kind of stuff. But then as I worked as an engineer for about six months, English was so terrible. Like I was basically commuting in traffic for an hour and a half. You're in San Diego, so think of LA traffic. That's basically what Toronto is. It's just disastrous all the time. So I would commute for an hour and a half, go and sit in front of my computer and do AutoCAD drawings all the time. So AutoCAD is those line drawings where you're basically like drawing a bridge or sewer and it has to be to the millimeter, like those big blueprint drawings. I would do that for eight hours a day, every day. And then I would get back in my car and drive an hour and a half back home and that would be my life for about six months. And I hated it so much that I decided I'd rather take out a loan and go back to school and study engineering. Because worse comes to worse, at least I'll have a higher paying job if I have to stay in that field with a Master's of Engineering. And in the in during that process, I actually started learning business. I. On my own, I started learning on. I dove into the world of online business and how to make money online and all of that rabbit hole that was early 2008, 2009, Google, when you typed how to make money online, it was a wild west and all sorts of stuff popped up. So I, I actually thought that I would basically be a millionaire with my online business while I was doing my Master's of engineering. Didn't happen, but that's basically what happened. So I, I ended up doing my Master's of engineering. You know, I wasn't a millionaire afterwards, so I need to figure something out. So I actually moved to London to the UK for three years. Did a Master's of business this time. So I have two master's degrees, which is crazy because I don't use either of them to this day. Just. Anyways, I stayed in London in the UK for three years. I ended up building a Mandarin language school, which is very random because I've never been to China nor do I speak Mandarin.

Yeah, it is very like how I need to understand how that came to be.

There's, there's a lot to unpack here. Right? There's a lot to unpack. And so I, I'll tell you the story around that one. Eventually I started learning so much about this online business stuff that I. I ended up starting my own agency where I would consult clients and build their kind of marketing strategies and help them really convert strangers into customers, as I like to say. And that kind of led me to building my own software company called Funnellytics, which was really centered around solving my own problem while I was running my agencies.

So that.

That's the timeline over here. That brings us to kind of present day. I've been running Funnel lakes for about eight. Since 2018 is when I launched it. So that kind of gives you the timeline. We can go back anywhere in time if you want to dive deeper. Yeah.

And then just some things that I had noticed with doing a little research. It seems like very big into just learning in business. I noticed a lot of stuff around masterminds, a lot of stuff around just reading different books. It seems like that's kind of part of your life.

Oh, man. I love learning in general. I try to learn as much as possible, but business in general is the key. And. And masterminds, I. I love being centered or surrounded by people who are smarter than me. I. Because it just gives you fuel and motivation. Like, entrepreneurship is such a lonely road. Right. Like, you do this and you're by yourself. You look at a whiteboard, you come up with ideas, and you're like, I don't know if this is the right idea. A lot of times you're just. You feel like an imposter because you're like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Like, I. I'm running this business and making multi seven figures, but I have no clue what I'm doing. Is somebody gonna find out soon? Because I'm just making it up as I go. So it's good to surround yourself with people where, oh, you don't know what you're doing either. Okay, good. I'm not the only one who's going through this mindset of, all right, it's just a matter of reps. It's a matter of. We've gone through this a few times. We've all wet through the mud. And so, yeah, going through masterminds and constantly learning is key.

Yeah. And I think too. So I do, like, a decent amount of business consulting and talk with different entrepreneurs and this and that. And another, like, element of the whole thing that I tend to find is that idea of, there's so many possibilities. Which one do I. That overwhelm of, oh, my gosh, there's this, there's that there's all these different things in just having that group of people that like, you can throw that against the wall and then feeling confident that somebody's gonna be like, no, that's the one you want to focus on. Focus on that one. Right? And then that. Okay, yeah, you're okay, good. That's the direction that just that kind of. But yeah, it's pretty neat. The just that ability to have that sit around with different people that have been there and done that and are cool to just be around and be able to learn and take away from is great.

What's funny, you do this because you consult when you run your own business, it's so hard to consult yourself. It's. It's one of those weird things that you go through. It's when you're in the business, you, it becomes. It's almost like you have all these blind spots. But then if you look at somebody else's business.

Yeah, yeah. It's very clear and easy to see.

Very clear what you should be doing. And we tend to put ourselves in that mindset in this constant as entrepreneurs. Like we come up with all the possibilities and all the possible solutions and then we second guess everything. And then you get into a mastermind or you get a coach or a consultant and it just starts to give you that clarity of like it's clear. Focus on this. It's in front of you. You're just can't see it. You can't see the forest from the trees.

I feel like I have, I tend to have the 24 to 48 hour lag. Like I'll meet with a new client, we'll go over everything. I'll be like crystal clear of do this, you need to do this, that. And then boom. And then all of a sudden I'll just sit there and think about huh, that stuff applies to my own business. And then all of a sudden I just spend a little bit of time looking at my own business. Oh, lo and behold, what do you know? Look at that. Which I never would have even looked at that way at all. But it's like giving this advice to somebody else suddenly. Yeah, I've been around.

You learn more when you teach, right? That's the saying that they. It's like as you teach, you're like, oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense. I didn't even know. I articulated that pretty well, so must make sense.

Okay, so talk to me now then about Funneltics. You guys are a digital ad agency or you guys are just selling your software to ad agencies to different clients?

Yeah, yeah. So we're a software. So I used to run a marketing agency and I used to do ads for clients and I used to basically build them funnels. And for those who are listening, who are like, what do you mean by a funnel specifically? Just think of it as what are the series of steps and touch points that you build in order to get a stranger to become a customer? Right. So you're going to set up an ad on Facebook and then they're going to go to a specific page and on that page they're going to put in their name and email in in exchange for some sort of download or white paper, let's say. And then they're going to receive five emails and those emails are then going to tell them about your product and that's going to send them to a sales page and then they're going to go to an order form and side. Right. So that's a simple journey that we use to take this random person on Facebook and eventually get them to buy this thing. And, and what I would do for all of my clients and what I still do today is I, I would basically architect that journey. I would map it out on a whiteboard for different types of businesses, whether it was E commerce or info or E learning, whatever. And I would just do this consistently. Then the problem came where, okay, it doesn't work right away, it never does. So what's working, what's not, what do I need to fix? What's. How are people flowing through this, what's actually moving? And then I would have to log into Google Analytics and I'd have to log into Facebook and I'd have to look at charts and graphs and I'd have to connect it with spreadsheets and try to understand like this picture that I would draw on a whiteboard and then this numbers and data and spreadsheet to understand like what's working versus what's not. So as I was building my agency, it just came on me. I was like, wouldn't it be just cool if I could just have a digital whiteboard, like a Miro style diagramming tool where I can map all these different touch points but then just click a button and overlay all of that data right there. I could like literally see how people are moving through these pages where the drop offs are, what the conversion rates are and, and basically just put numbers to my strategy as opposed to having numbers in one hand and strategy in another, and try to merge them and force them together. So that's what we did we built a canvas, a digital whiteboard that is powered by data. You can map out your entire strategy, click a button and see exactly how are people moving through your website, what are they doing, what are they not doing, how are they converting? Who are the people who are converting the most and what paths did they take? And it's just a really cool tool that kind of visualizes data for you.

Yeah, I would say it does for sure because like I said to me it was like stumbling across your website. Okay, what do these guys do? Funnel Linux. Something about sales funnels and instantly scrolling, looking and right away it was like oh wow. Oh wow, what a great idea. I It does that visual of having all those things there and then you can see how everything is instantly performing and how it's all interacting together.

Yeah.

To me was just a very. That makes perfect sense. How in the world is these guys first guys to ever come up with this. That's the way the thing should have started from day one. See, when you see it, right when you see it, it's totally. That's how it should have been designed from the beginning.

Yeah. And to be honest, I understand now after trying to build a software where it's like data on a whiteboard, I fully understand why people haven't been doing. Because it's not, it's. It's actually really complicated. But we've gotten our product to a stage now where it, it works incredibly well and we can really look at data in a way that you just can't in, in other, in with other tools. And, and it really helps, it helps people who are visual. And I think the number is like 65% of the population are visual thinkers and visual learners. And most of us, or a lot of us didn't like math in school. And there's a reason who likes to look at charts and graphs and spreadsheets to try to accountants maybe. That's about it. Right. And data analysts. So this. Yeah. I don't know, it just helps the average person, the average kind of entrepreneur to better understand.

And if I'm a customer and I'm creating these sales funnels and using your platform, how is it am I putting in what I'm expecting or hoping for with conversion rates or things like that, or how is it giving that feedback of this part of the funnels working great. This part needs adjusting.

Yeah. So it's really cool that you can do. So first and foremost we will show you your real data. So we will show you. Oh, okay. From your sales page to your order form. You had 10,000 people on your sales page, but only three went to your order form. So you'll see the conversion rate, you'll see how people are actually moving in real time. But one of the cool things that we built is this ability to do exactly what you said, which is a forecast. So now I can go and say, okay, this is my real data, but what if that conversion rate was not 0.2%, but it was 5%, right. So I could just dial that up and now see a forecast. This is your real numbers. But if you were to hit 5%, this is actually how all of these numbers would have flowed all the way through. So now as a marketer, you can go and play with this and you can say, this is my real, what's actually happening with my website. But if I tweak this over here and I tweak this over here, boom, this is how much more money I make in the back end. So now it gives me a very clear focus as a marketer. Okay, I'm not going to pay attention to any of these other things. I just need to move these two buttons right here and get these up and this how much more money I make, that's what makes it really powerful. Is that forecasting alongside real time data.

Sweet. And then. So who is your typical customer?

Yeah, good question. So our typical customer, we divide into two categories. We have our, the businesses who have the kind of marketing team, like a small three to five person marketing team. And the reason we say that is because what we find with smaller businesses where basically the entrepreneur is the marketer, it, it becomes secondary. As a marketer, as an entrepreneur, I have so many things to think about, right. I'm not, one day I'm putting on my marketing hat, but then the next day I got to put on my sales hat and the next day I got to put on my success customer service hat and I got a team management hat and all these things, right? So it becomes a little bit more challenging because you still need to look at this, you still need to use it and operate it and it's a command center at the end of the day. So typically businesses that are doing 3 to 30 million dollars and are have a performance team, like a small marketing team, who's responsible for, let's acquire customers, right? Let's make that happen consistently. Them or more specifically for us, right now, our better ideal customer is agencies who do this for clients, Right. I built the tool for myself as an agency. Agencies who come in and work with these types of businesses who are their goal and their responsibility is let me help you acquire more customers. We're going to use paid advertising, we're going to build these pages. Basically becomes a way for them to communicate to their client what's working, what's not, what are we going to do next, what's the strategy that we're going to deploy, etc. So agencies and small businesses.

And then is it very. So recently, I don't know, several months back now we implemented High Level.

Yep.

Just on our. We have our own like direct account that we do our own stuff from. But in learning that platform is. Oh, that's a very smart way they designed it. It's like they designed that thing to be super scalable and white labeled.

Yep.

So is that your tool? Like a similar thing? How does your tool work? If I'm an agency and I've got 10 clients, how does that work?

Yeah. So similar. You can add clients and workspaces as an agency into the following account. And then one of the things that we set out at the very beginning that we didn't care about as much is we never wanted to be a tool that would work with one tool only. We wanted to be platform agnostic in that way where you can collect, connect your high level data into Funnellytics so you could visualize whether you built your website on WordPress or on Shopify or on High Level or ClickFunnels or whatever platform. We will pull your data into the. Into Funnel Analytics. Funnellytics is there to help you visualize your strategy and your data. It's not there to help you build your landing pages. There's enough tools out there to help you send emails and do automation. And we don't want to deal with that. We just want you to be able to pull data from any of those tools into our canvas so you can visualize it. Okay.

Yeah. That's certainly the downfall of High Level. Right. It's that amazing. It can do everything and then you start using it. Oh my God. It can do everything. I know.

Exactly. So it actually can do everything. This is way too much.

Like a thousand tabs and sub tabs and I don't even know.

I don't even know what to do anymore. Totally.

And let's see, you've had. This has been since 2018, six years that you've had Funneltics. It seems like a great platform. Where are the struggles in the business then you have a great product man.

What year do you want to talk about? Every year we've had struggles there's always something challenging in the early days. So when I first started Fun analytics again, I built it for myself. I didn't really know what I had. So in order for me to grow, I. What I did was I, I mentioned that we have this mapping tool and then you overlay data. So the mapping tool was built first and I didn't have the actual data aspect. It was in my mind and it was a vision that we had and we started tinkering with it from a development standpoint. But what I did is I actually started advertising the mapping tool and I did it for free. I basically said, hey, here's this free mapping tool that people can use. And it started really growing pretty fast. Like people started signing up, telling others about it. And I put everybody into a Facebook group and started building a pretty large community in those first kind of two years. And in 2018, when I launched the paid product, which was really the analytics, it wasn't working really. It was like a prototype. So in order for me to make money, instead of charging people on a per month basis like you would in a typical software, I, I decided, okay, I'm gonna buy the lifetime value of these people up front by giving them a lifetime deal. So instead of somebody paying me $99, realizing it's not really working, and then canceling after a month, let me charge them 700 so that they can get access to this tool lifetime. So that was our first kind of two years. We started pushing that a lot. We did very well. We grew pretty quickly. From a revenue standpoint, however, there was no recurring revenue. It was all one time payments. And what we started to realize was because we did this lifetime deal, I knew nothing about software. I had no idea how anything about like server costs or any of that stuff. Like our AWS bill started ballooning up to. It was like 2000amonth. Okay, we're selling enough of these right now. That's okay. Three, five thousand, ten thousand dollars a month. Okay, we better start getting some recurring revenue because 15, 20, $30,000 a month on these lifetime licenses. Oh, we better pay attention. We got to switch something. That became a pretty big challenge. We started realizing, okay, this isn't scalable, obviously, that was our first big switch. How do you go from lifetime to subscription? And then churn started happening right then. We really started to see where the flaws were in our product. Who are these customers? Are they even the good fit? They're coming in. They're buying this lifetime license because they don't want to miss out Most of it is FOMO based and all that stuff. So that was one of the biggest hurdles is like, oh man, we're constantly churning customers, always we're adding one and we're losing one. And it just became this flatline for a long time. We raised money, we raised VC money in 2020 and another extension round in 2022. So understanding how to navigate the VC landscape and working with investors was a challenging and interesting thing. We eventually solved the churn issue and understood who our ideal customers are. But then we grew our team and team challenges of having the right leaders and having the right people in place. And so, man, there's so many. There's so many. As every new level is just another challenge at the end of the day that you haven't solved. So it just never ends.

And what's the future look like?

Yeah, so I have a big vision for funnels. I've always had a big vision. I truly believe that we can build a, a command center for every single marketing team in the world. A visual place where they can go and, and visualize their strategy and look at performance of that strategy and, and identify ways to optimize. So our vision is big. We just want to keep growing and get this in the hands of as many marketing teams as possible and continue to build this product.

And then what about AI? So my general feeling on AI, we build software for companies, like larger companies, back end systems and things like that. In, in my world, when I see a lot of the AI stuff, it's that's cute. I don't know how useful that's really going to be for anything we're doing, but it does cute stuff. But I would say that it seems to me that in the digital advertising world it is where it like really is making a pretty big immediate impact. Right. It's those types of tools today seem, oh, wow, okay. I could see how that could have a big impact. And so how is that, how are you navigating that? And I guess from looking at your tool, it'd be the idea of, okay, like what would AI do? There be the idea of the AI could potentially do some of the tweaking. Right. Make the recommendations for you of, hey, we've analyzed your funnel. This is what you need to tweak. Where are you at with that piece of it?

Yeah, it's a good question. It's interesting. AI is very much in its infancy. Right. But the potential is massive. And for us, when we look at AI, we really think of it as the insights part to this. Even Though Funnellytics is visual, even though it makes looking at numbers and data, it tells a little bit of a better story than when you're looking at charts and graphs or a spreadsheet. Fundamentally, it is still numbers, it is still data. Right? So most people still look at this and say, is that good? Is that bad? What am I supposed to do with this? And if they don't have that mindset, that insights kind of mindset, it becomes a challenge because, great, my conversion is 7%. Is that good? What should.

What am I supposed to do with this?

So this is where now if you can feed this into AI, you can start giving it benchmarks, you can start giving it data we've got, because we collect so much data from all of the different customers who've installed, finally we can go and provide you with these insights and go and say, hey, look, you've got 7% here, but looking at all of this data, this could actually be closer to 10%. And looking at your page, it seems like you're missing this and this. That could probably increase your conversions. So here's my recommendation and that's where AI can really help us take this to another level. And some stuff that we're working on behind the scenes. That is really cool.

Yeah, cool. I could definitely see that. I personally think that a lot of the AI, like chatbots and the voice and stuff like that. I think a lot of big companies are already like pushing to like full on. But I don't know. To me, I think there's going to be a bit of a pushback and a backfire. And I do think the companies that stick to the connecting with a human think that's gonna matter.

It's funny. Let me just. Sorry, just. I have to say this just because I, I literally just happened. I was interviewing someone today and in the interview, he decided prior to the interview, send me a 30, 60, 90 day game plan. And I asked him, all right, take me through the inter. Through the 30, 60, 90 day game plan that you wrote up. And as he's going through it, I could tell that he didn't know what he wrote. So. And in the language I was like, this is definitely what Chad GPT would have wrote. Like, you didn't write this. And, and I called him out, I was like, so how much of this did you write versus Chad GPT? And he got so embarrassed, he ended up like closing the interview and, and just leaving. But that's what's happening with AI. Like, it's almost as though people are starting to realize it out.

Right. Start to sniff it out and get annoyed by it.

It is. But I. There's a lot of people who wouldn't sniff it out. Right. And you've got to be. It shows you that there's some people who are. I don't know. It's going. Lot of people lazy, that's for sure. It's gonna make. It's gonna. It's gonna change. We could have a whole other podcast on. Yeah, yeah.

To me, one of the more interesting thing, the aspects of it now, I feel it's like kids in school.

Oh man.

But just seems like the ultimate cheat tool for whatever it is you're trying to do in school. Just to sit there and up here.

I remember in school they used to get mad at us if we had calculators. And it's really now. Like now it's okay. Why didn't you let me use freaking calculator back then? Like when. When do I ever need to do this math on a pie? But I think this is where schools don't have a choice. You either fight it or you say this is the reality of the situation. So how do we make students smarter in terms of leveraging it? Because it will. It's not going away. It's only going to grow and evolve and adapt and get better. Is just the reality.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've definitely heard really good arguments on both sides of that thing. I do think that schools are going to start banning phones. I think that's going to become a. A thing where just whatever. You cannot bring a phone, a cell phone into a school anymore. Which makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

But yeah, I have heard some good arguments with you. If you look at it the right way of having a younger child, having a chat. GPT type tutor right there could teach them anything. Yeah, we'll see how. Okay, so a couple more questions for you.

Yeah.

Growing up. What piece of advice from growing up. What lesson did you learn growing up that you feel applies in your business today?

Yeah, we were chatting about this before, before the call, and I was trying to think of what is the biggest thing. And I think for me, it's something that my, my dad always taught me from a very young age, which is you can have anything that you want. There's really only three things that you need to. To do and focus on in order to make that happen. Number one is you have to have a very clear, vivid vision of what it is that you want. You need to know precisely what it is that you're going after and it needs to be clear in your mind. If you aren't clear, then you're just moving in, in any random direction. Number two is you need to take action. You need to actually move towards that vision. It means you need to take steps towards that thing. And number three is you need to have 110 belief that vision can become a reality. If you have any sort of doubt in your mind, then you will start to stop yourself. You will start to basically tell yourself or your mind is going to start telling yourself when things get tough that maybe we shouldn't keep going down this path, maybe we should switch and go down another path. The reality is, no matter what you plan you have, it may not go according to plan. It may not go according to the timeline, it probably won't go according to your plan or your timeline. However, if you know what you want, if you keep taking action non stop and you just keep going towards that thing that you know you want and you have 100 belief that it will happen eventually, that thing will happen again, may not happen in the timeline or frame or plan that you've laid out, but you're willing to deviate, you're willing to adjust, you're willing to keep moving because you have clear vision, clear action and 100 faith and belief that it will happen. Honestly, that is how I've carried my, I, I've taken that lesson throughout my whole life.

And yeah, that's great advice he provided for sure.

Yeah.

And what about drives outside of the work world, life, this life in general? What would be a piece of advice for people on that front?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is fulfillment. And I, I think that a lot of things that we end up doing is we end up starting to realize that work and life are two separate things. And we talk a lot about work life balance and we try to define that these two things are separate. But the reality is to me they're, they're the same. You only have 24 hours a day and you, if you're lucky, you live 90 plus years. But ultimately that's just one life. It's just one thing. We're, if we can't get up every single day and feel fulfilled doing what we're doing with our family, our spouses or our partners, our kids, our, our friends, and the thing that I'm doing on a regular basis, which is my, my job or my career and your own personal kind of hobbies and stuff for yourself, if you can't find that fulfillment across all three of those things, the people around you, the thing that you do on a day to day basis and your own internal hobbies, your own internal piece. Then you end up separating all of them and then you try to find a balance between all of them. But again, now you're just splitting up time and time frames and say, I'm going to dedicate some time to this and some time to that. To me, I look at it holistically and I've got to live a life that creates fulfillment as a whole. I don't know if that's.

Yeah, no, I think that's.

But that's just how I think about life.

I think that's a wonderful way to look at it for sure. Anything else from your side here? To me, it's been a great conversation. Certainly if people want to get in touch with you, learn more about your. Your company, where should they go?

Yeah. So if you want to learn more about Funnellytics and use our platform, you can go to Funnel IO. Funnellytics is just funnel and analytics mixed together as a. I wasn't that clever with my naming. It was just literally put those two words together or really my social media of choice is LinkedIn. So you can always check out Mikel Dia on LinkedIn. I think there's probably only one. You'll find me with the phone and.

We'Ll put both of those, we'll include both of those on the show notes there.

Cool.

All right, great talking to you today. Thanks so much. I think what you're doing is amazing.

Appreciate that.

So good luck with everything. Keep it up.

Likewise. Thank you for having me.

All right, thank you for listening to Executing the Vision. If you'd like to be a guest, go to EmergeLabs US and click on the podcast page. If you like what you heard, please share the episode and subscribe. Ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show. You can find us on instagram @brad emergelabs as well as x Facebook and LinkedIn where we strive to provide valuable information on business and life. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the show and what you'd like to see in future episodes. Thank you again and have a great day.