$100 Million In Sales, 1.2 Million Followers, and 1.7 Million Emails (All In 12 Months) w/ Joel Marion #TheOnePercent

People have a scarcity mentality, are afraid to invest in their business, they're afraid to go negative. And that's understandable if they don't understand their metrics. But again, if I know with a very high degree of confidence and I'm a spend $1 and eventually make two, even though I'm only making 40 cents up front, I'm going to spend that dollar and know that again, I have faith that down the line because I know my numbers, it's worth $2. It's going to work out for me in the long term.

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Hey, 1 percenters. Ryan Daniel Moran here. Welcome to the show. Today we're going to be joined by a true one percenter. His name is Joel Marion. Joel is the co founder of BioTrust Nutrition. We've had his co founder on the podcast before and he's spoken on our stage a couple times at the Capitalism conference. His name is Josh Bazzoni. And Joel is the other half of that equation who, who has really mastered the art of scaling companies quickly.

Yes, he built BioTrust to $100 million.

In 12 months, but he's also built a personal brand to eight figures in 12 months. He has also built a personal following of over a million people in less than six months. He has really dialed in scale and scaling very quickly. So I had to get him on to ask about what the heck he's doing differently than everybody else. How is it that he is able to go into seemingly any market, take any business and bring a flamethrower to a stick fight. What, what is he doing? And he tells us on this episode, I won't spoil it for you. So he opens up about how he thinks about business, how he scales businesses and, and how he looks at the numbers to decide what it's gonna take to be able to grow the business that he wants to build. He also compares to business as his ministry. Joel talks about how, just like yours truly, he thought he was going to be going into the ministry at one point in his life and instead he discovered business as his ministry, which got a real oh hell yeah from me. And he talks about how he developed social media following, he manages his email lists and how he manages his cost per acquisition in order to get basically infinite scale. This is a huge eye opener to anyone who wants to scale a business. So, and one other thing, Joel also opens up about the personal side of running a $100 million company. It's not all roses, ladies and gentlemen. And he opens up about all of this and more in this chat with Joel Mar.

Hey, 1 percenters. This is Ryan Daniel Moran, and today I'm joined by an extra greedy capitalist, Joel Marion. Joel, thanks for hanging out with us.

I don't know that that's the adjective that I use to describe myself, but yes, I am certainly all about making money and giving back to make an impact.

Well, Joel, you've made a lot of it. And I have realized in my life that when somebody is as successful as you have been multiple times, you're either very lucky or you have some sort of a special skill. And I would like to find out which is the case. You've built $100 million company in 12 months. Of course, we've had co founder Josh Bazzoni at our events and also here on the podcast. But you've also run a really successful personal brand. You've grown an Instagram following to over a million followers in like eight days.

So you're either doing, you're thinking about things very differently or you're lucky. So can you tell me which one it is?

There's a little bit of luck involved in everything when it comes to catching breaks and all that stuff. And I'm a firm believer in telling people, hey, keep going, keep pushing until one of those lucky moments comes to be. But obviously you gotta be doing a lot right at the same time to line up those opportunities for yourself. So everything I do is obviously very methodical and thought out. I'm not somebody who is just throwing things out there and hoping it works. Of course, we do that from time to time and we see that sticks. And then from doing this for over 10 years, have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't work when it comes to tackling something new like Instagram. I haven't prioritized social media in any way. I'm an email marketer by trade. I guess that's where my specialty lies now. I didn't even have a Facebook account until as part of a mastermind recently and they had a private Facebook group and I had to sign up for Facebook just to just to be able to communicate with the group. And then Instagram, I, you know, I had no Instagram account until I started and wanted to reach a new audience with a different message. And that's why I got on Instagram in April. And when I did, you know, that was my very first post was on April 21st and we grew that to over a million followers in just shy of five months. All these things when you build a company from 0 to 100 million in the first full calendar year of business. And I recently got back. I came from the E. Publishing space. I got back into that just a year ago. And we've already built that email subscriber list to over a million subscribers. And of course, in order to do that, you have to have some strategy and some methods to the madness in order to achieve those kind of results. I'm sure as we go on with the call, we'll probably get into kind of what that mindset and what that strategical vision is.

Yeah. So I would love to hear, because there's got to be some sort of a lever that you can scale there.

Right.

It's not like you are not putting out 50 pieces of content per day. You're actually posting less than a lot of people. You're posting less than I am. Right. And yet you have 100 times the following that I do. So what are you thinking about? Or what are you doing differently? What's your flamethrower that you're bringing to a stick fight? I guess is what I'm asking, what are you doing differently than everybody else?

So let me answer that question from a strict business sense. A lot of the stuff that I'm doing on social media is really investing profits from other businesses for more of a goodwill reason and a bigger impact, more about impacting as many people as possible for a bigger reason, a bigger purpose than just selling products and services. But all of that. The success that I've had on Instagram has come from my ability to scale businesses. And when it comes to scaling businesses, it's all about knowing the numbers. And I think the problem with most businesses is that they don't truly understand the numbers. What is the cost to acquire a new lead? What is the cost to acquire new customer? And when you understand those numbers, then you can understand how much I can pay for traffic. I think a lot of people are out there guessing or they're trying to say, okay, well, I know my Average order is $30, so I can afford $30 to acquire a customer and break even. Everyone's kind of playing small ball out there because I would probably say 99% of people who are buying media on the Internet are all trying to break even on that first sale, which is a very conservative way to do business. And it's fine if you want to run a business that does six figures a year when you want to get into seven, eight and nine figure businesses, you're going to have to learn the lifetime value of a customer. And then how much am I comfortable spending up front? That exceeds what I'm going to bring in on day one. That will allow me to then get two to three to four times the traffic or two to three to four times the customers. When we started BioTrust again, we're a small company only, only about eight people and we grew that to over 150 people in the first year, the first full calendar year we did over 100 million in revenue. And in order to do that, we very quickly learned what our average order value was. And then we projected out, based on reorders that were coming in and other trends that we saw in other businesses, what we could expect, where we could expect to be in three months or six months. And then we started buying all of our media with the intention not to break even on the first sale, but to break even on day 90 or 120. And when you do that, when you can afford to pay 50% more for a customer, and when you go back and the conversion rates and all, that all comes out in the wash. But all things remaining equal, if I can afford to pay 50% more than my competitor, I'm going to outbid them every single time when it comes to buying media because it's all an auction one way or another. You need to be able to spend, afford to rent a certain email list, you need to be able to afford a certain cost per click on a Facebook ad to get the lion's share of the traffic. If you are setting bid caps at a lower amount to break even and your competitor, all things else remaining equal, is willing to exceed that bid cap by 50% who's going to get Facebook obviously is going to award all the impressions to your competitor. And that's what I've seen time and time again, is that people don't understand the numbers. There's also this fear based mentality of losing money up front and they rather have a small number of break even sales than a very, very large number of sales where they're losing money up front. But at the end of the day it's really just an investment into the business and your return, as we all know, is going to be based on the amount that you're investing.

So your thesis is having the ability to buy more media than your competitors and as a result you're able to have more eyeballs, more leads and more sales even if you're not profiting for 90 days, you know you're going to make that up on the back end, correct?

Yeah, well, well, on the Internet, there's almost limitless amount of traffic. You know, this is how we go from zero to nine figures very, very quickly. When you know your numbers and obviously a lot of else has to be in place, you have to have great marketing in place. You have to get conversion rates and all that. But again, all else remain equal. Same great marketing copy, same conversion rates, same average order value, all that. But I'm willing to go three to six months in the hole and outbid them by 50%. They're not going to be able to compete with me. We're running on all the same channels, right? We're Facebook ads, Google display network running on various email channels, the other display networks and native advertisements and articles and all that type of stuff. It all costs a certain amount of money. And when you can afford to pay more, you get more of the inventory or you get awarded by the Facebooks and the Instagrams out there the majority of the ad impressions. And when you can do that and you can spend more, you can be confident because you know your numbers. I'm not saying go out there and just lose a bunch of money and hope for the best. Everything needs to be dialed in, especially when you're going negative upfront. But when you do understand your numbers. And if I know that for every $1 I invest, I'm going to eventually make two, but maybe I'm only making 50 cents on day one per dollar. Maybe I'm only making 50% of my money back, but if I know eventually I'm going to make $2 with a very high degree of confidence, I'm going to do that all day, right? I'm going to trade $1 bills for $2 bills as many times as possible. But so many people are stuck on like, hey, I don't want to spend a dollar and not make a dollar back on the first day. I want, hey, everything that they spend extra is going to be profit, but my gross profit dollars is going to be astronomically higher, even though my profit per customer is smaller because I can afford to buy and acquire more customers than the next guy.

So, Joel, this mindset of basically delaying the immediate gratification and reinvesting to be able to get the most media you possibly can has obviously panned out for you. But I'm curious, going back into the E. Publishing world just in the last year or year and a half and building up an email list of, you know, over A million people that quickly you had to have some sort of, either your conversions were really dialed in or you had some way to really boost that customer value. What do you think on the personal brand, on the, on the digital side, the elearning platform, what was the magic there? Was it any different than running the physical products brand?

So that business is mostly a lead generation business. We do do some direct customer acquisition, but on those funnels we haven't really been able to get them to scale and for any number of reasons, just on certain, on the channels that are available and especially with compliance issues. In our category in health and fitness, you know, to run on Facebook, you really, really have to dumb down the advertising. And we just haven't been able to get those to work. However, we have been able to lead with free on pretty much every channel, giving away free reports, free videos, things of that nature, all free content in exchange for an email address. And then because my email marketing skill set is so strong, I understand data and analytics. And we have a full time analyst on staff who runs all the numbers based on the traffic source that we're bringing people in on. And how is each traffic source individually backing out for us. So if I'm paying $2 for a lead and then we show them a special offer after they opt in to receive something free, a one time offer, and maybe we're making 40 cents on the dollar back on day one. So now I'm making 80 cents on a lead that I paid two bucks for. I need to make up $1.20 over time. And we have analysts that are running, okay, would we pay $2 per lead for this traffic source? Of course there's going to be plenty of leads who spend no money. You know, they don't buy anything on day one, they don't buy anything ever. And then there's going to be some of those leads that turn to great customers and spend several hundred dollars with you. But on average I only need to make $2 per lead. So when we take a look at those traffic polls and we say, okay, I spent $10,000 to acquire these names, I made four grand back on day one on six grand in the hole. At what point do I make 10,000 from this pool of email subscribers? And then we have data analysts run reports on that and send me updates every week on how things are maturing and we can see like, okay, this particular traffic source is backing out very quickly. We're already at, within 30 days, we're already at the $10,000 that we wanted to make now we're break even. The rest is profit for me. I don't need to be break even that quickly. So I'll go back to that traffic source and say, hey, if you can send me more volume, let's say it's an affiliate, for example, I'll go back and say, hey, I'm paying you $2 a lead. The numbers are looking good. If you can send me a promise, you get double the amount of mailings in next month, I'll raise your cost per lead to $3. Now, that may put me at breaking even at day 90, but some people would say like, hey, this is awesome. I got a great lead source and it's backing out for me, you know, at 30 days. It's tremendous. However, in my mind I'm just like, okay, I don't need to be break even that soon. And I know I'm sacrificing volume by leaving it at $2. Let me go back, incentivize the traffic source to send me more volume. So again, I'm scaling. The faster, the more names that I have in my file, the more money I'm able to make as a whole. And if my profit margin is only 30% instead of 40%, if I can get double, then obviously I'm still way, way ahead of the game when it comes to net profits in the business. So I'm always going back to traffic sources and saying, where's my sweet spot on where I want to be? Break even. If it's breaking even much before that, I'll go back to the traffic source and try to incentivize them so I can get more volume. I'd rather have more volume breaking even at day 90 than a smaller amount of volume breaking even at day 30.

Now, in order for you to be able to do that, you've got to have enough offers to cycle them through to be able to get that lifetime value up. So what type of team do you have in place in order to be able to cranking out offers and sales letters and manage?

I literally could run this business without having any offers and just promoting other people's stuff on the back end. I do have two ebook funnels currently, and then we have a VIP subscription digital newsletter that's $14 a month on the back end. And we're getting ready to come out with a third funnel. So there'll be three front end products we have, plus a continuity newsletter, recurring revenue. But even if I didn't have any of those three, there's just a way for me to acquire more customers directly. Instead of leads, I actually get full price customer up front. And we can actually do that, break even on the front end. Most channels, especially with affiliates, we pay, have a good converting offer. We pay somebody 100% commission. This is another thing. It all goes back to mindset, right? Some people may be listening and they're hearing you Pay your affiliates 100% commission. Well, it's a digital product to have no hard cost and I want the offer to do as well as possible for affiliate. So if it does do very well, they're going to repeatedly send for the offer because it's better than other things that they could send for. So if I can pay 100% commission, I have great marketing, great conversions, and they do really well. Let's say that particular affiliate makes $5,000 every time they send an email blast. If they're making 10 grand when they send for me, what do you think is going to happen? They're going to send for me over and over and over again until it falls below their $5,000 average threshold. So I'm going to get three, four, five mailings instead of just one if I paid them a 50% commission or 60 or even 70% commission. So again, I'm always just going back to like, hey, what can I afford? I want to be as generous as possible with all my affiliates. I want to pay as much as possible from any traffic source that's available out there. And when I can do that, then I can scale the business as big as it possibly can be because I'm getting maximum traffic from every single one of those channels. And with email marketing, again, the beauty of that is that in the last year, for a while we only had one funnel. Now we have two, plus the continuity newsletter. But there's so many offers that are out there to promote as an affiliate. Get behind other products that you believe in. Obviously I send a lot of traffic back to my supplement company. BioTrust makes total sense for me to do that as just promoting other products that we have. And we have a lot of funnels available for BioTrust. That certainly helps. But even if I didn't own the supplement company, even if I had no offers of my own, I could still be running the same business that I'm doing, have a million person plus email list that's growing very rapidly and back out whatever I'm paying on the cost per lead simply by monetizing it with other products and services that I believe in. Or they're paying me an affiliate commission.

You mentioned that Email was kind of your superpower. And obviously this process is highly centered around getting email leads so that you can promote products, your own products and other people's products to them. And a lot of people are down on email right now as a conversion mechanism just because inboxes are overwhelmed. So what do you do differently than everybody else in order to still be ruling the email world?

Yeah, so email is still the highest converting back end marketing channel out there. There's no disputing that. I mean there's so much data available to say that where the people run into the problem, it's not that email is not converting is that their delivery is. Delivery is much harder. It's much harder to land in the person's inbo. It's much harder to. As opposed to the spam folder getting blocked completely. It's much harder to land in the correct. You know, we have these tabbed inboxes now. I think Yahoo is coming out with one. Gmail has had one for a couple of years now where they have promotions tab. Obviously if you're landing the promotions tab rather than somebody's primary inbox, they're going to pay less attention to you. No one really wants to be promoted to, but if they see a message in their primary inbox, that's the inbox that they spend the most time in, that tab. And that's the one that I open the most, the most messages. Then we found that being delivered to the primary inbox versus the promotions tab, we could double the open rate at Gmail. I taught a two day conference all about email delivery and maximizing inboxing. I know we don't have two days to go through all that, but really that's, that's really the secret that allows me to kind of be able to pay a maximum amount and back out leads very quickly because they understand how to deliver. And a lot of this goes back to the same type of mindset. So many people think one of the reasons why they have poor delivery is because they, you know, let's say they have an email list of a hundred thousand people. Now out of those hundred thousand people could be any percentage, but let's just say on average, maybe, you know, depends on how old the list is. But some, let's say maybe 20 to 30,000 of those people are actively opening emails that are sent to them from that sender. But people continue to blast to the every single name that they own. They figure, hey, I paid for all these names at one point. These are customers of mine or email subscribers. They signed up at one time, they didn't unsubscribe, so I should just be sending to everybody. Problem is all the email providers, The Gmails, Yahoos, AOLs, Hotmails and everyone else, Comcast and the cable companies and all that, they understand that there is a problem with inbox overwhelm. And if inboxes are getting too cluttered, they're going to stop using email or maybe switch to a different provider, start a new email account. And they don't want that to happen because they're obviously making money from people using their platform through advertisements and other things. So in order to protect their customer base, they're saying, okay, this sender, 80% of the people are never even opening their mail. So we're going to start sending them to the junk folder. Because 8 out of 10 people say it's not important. Even though 2 out of 10 do. It's not a high enough metric for that provider to give you priority over somebody who has 50 or 60% of their audience engaging. So now you're getting filtered to the spam folder and not only did you lose the eight that weren't opening, but you lost the two that were opening. So what we do is we only send to 30 day actives as a role, as a rule, that means people have opened a message in the last 30 days. Although I have 1.7 million emails still subscribed, which I could legally still send to them, they haven't unsubscribed, they're still subscribed to my newsletter. We only mail about 800,000, so a little less than half over the last year are still active in the last 30 days. By doing that, I get really, really strong, great delivery to those 800,000 instead of really poor delivery sending to 1.7 million. And the difference is this, if I can get a 30% open rate sending to 800,000, which is about average of what we get, whatever that works out to be, let's call it 250,000 opens or something like that. 250,000 opens versus if I send to 1.7 million. And then I started getting filtered by all the big mailbox providers and I get a 5% open rate. Well, 5% of 1.7 million is much, much lower than 250,000. So again, it's like, hey, I don't, I'm realizing how do I maximize the people, ensure that person who is hasn't opened in 35 days and they fall off what they potentially open yet. But it's not worth me to continue to send to people who have not engaged in any message that I've sent over the last month, especially for somebody like me who's mailing every single day. So you didn't engage in the last 30 messages I sent you. Whatever you would be worth down the line is certainly not worth me sacrificing my delivery to the people who are very responsive.

Got it. So your thesis on email is essentially keeping your metrics as healthy as possible so that your service providers prioritize you and don't add you to the promotion box. And by being relentless about that, you're able to keep your delivery really high on the people who are engaged, is that correct?

And the people who are engaged are the ones that spend the most money anyway. So I have to protect my deliverability to those people. And if that means that I lose 10% of people who may have opened a message if delivery was perfect, so be it. Because the longer I continue to mail, people are inactive. Eventually I'm not going to be gaining anything anyway. I'm going to be way further behind where I want to be than if I were just mailing the engaged contacts.

Yeah, well, what's really interesting about that, Joel, is you're basically forcing yourself to top grade in each area of your business. Because if you're basically counting on some customers opening a lot and some customers purchasing a lot for being able to defer, prefer profit for that long and for you to mail only a percentage of your list, so you're basically top grading super fans. And as a result, if you're able to scale that, you're going to get more super fans than other people. Because the model kind of depends on that. Which would kind of explain how you're able to get such a raving fan base on multiple businesses so quickly.

Yeah. The name of the game really is don't have a scarcity mentality and don't be greedy. People have a scarcity mentality, are afraid to invest in their business. They're afraid to go negative. And that's understandable if they don't understand their metrics. But again, if I know with a very high degree of confidence and I'm a spend $1 and eventually make two, even though I'm only making 40 cents up front, I'm going to spend that dollar and know that again, I have faith that down the line because I know my numbers, it's worth $2 going to work out for me in the long term. And then the other part that I mentioned is don't be greedy. We Give a couple examples of this. Number one, people don't think that they're being greedy, but like, hey, I don't. And this goes back to scarcity mentality as well. It's like I own 100,000 email addresses, I want to mail all hundred thousand because I feel like if I stop mailing some then there's like a couple dollars here and there that I'm missing out on. Yeah. And it becomes a scarcity minded greed type thing when really they're screwing themselves and shooting themselves in the foot because they're messing up the delivery. The most engaged context. I'll give you another example in the BioTrust business and this is, you know, learn from my mistake. We got introduced to a channel that was a survey company and a very, very high volume of traffic coming through all of their various survey points and they would, at the end, at the survey they would give the person an opportunity to opt in for a number of special offers. So they call this co registration. So we found a very, very high volume co registration company and we got really excited about it because very quickly we were doing like 30 to 40,000 leads per day on this channel but we were only paying a very small amount for them, like 15 cents a lead because the quality was really low of the names. Maybe only 10% of the names actually opened up an email. And those 10% were great quality subscribers. But the 90% ended up at such high volume of low quality we got greedy for a little bit and we just ran a lot of low quality into our email file and even though that they were a low cost, it started affecting delivery to our high quality names that we're paying $2 for. Now those names that we're paying $2 for that we're backing out in 90 days. Now it's taking six plus months for them to back out. And then all we did was just gain a really high volume of low quality leads that we weren't making a lot of money from in exchange. So although the email list was growing by leaps and bounds and we had at one point in time we had over 5 million active emails that we were mailing on BioTrust. Probably about 2 out of the 5 million were those really low quality names that just hurt our delivery overall. So while the number looked great, we made less money as a whole from the entire email list. We make more from the two and a half million that we mail right now than we did when we were mailing 5 million because the delivery is so much better as we're sending to the Right people and the highest quality people.

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Joel, I have to ask, at this point, you obviously have the mindset to be able to scale anything that you want to put your attention on. You can scale a physical product company, you can scale a personal brand, you can scale a digital company, you can just build a big audience. Since you know that you can bring that mindset into any business, how do you evaluate your best opportunities?

Well, at this point in my career, I really think of it from a lifestyle standpoint. One I'm still heavily involved in supplement company which takes a lot of my time. Anything else that I want to take on has to be one very fulfilling for me. So that re energizes me. Just put that energy back into the supplement company. The biotrist business, although it is extra, it's like a recharge, it's like anything else. If you start putting too much on your plate, although the opportunity may be solid, you have to learn to say no to even some solid opportunities because you can't do everything well, right? So for me right now it's one it has to be a no brainer financially, meaning if somebody came to me with an opportunity and said, hey, and somehow magically it worked out that like you're going to make 10 times the amount of money doing this than you would biotrust and it was non competitive and I could legally do it many I might consider it, but it has to be like exponentially financially make more sense or it has to be re energizing for me and fulfilling for me to do now and then. There are plenty of opportunities where I can make an extra 50 to 100 grand a month consulting or partnering on people with products. I just don't have the time to do it with everything else that I have going on and it would have a negative impact on my ability to run my own companies.

Joel I think a lot of entrepreneurs get into business and into entrepreneurship because they wanted a different life, because they wanted to make money, because they wanted a different type of lifestyle. And so many of us get caught up in that train of always pursuing the next thing and the next thing. I can imagine that if once you pass nine figures, you're either really chill or that voice gets louder. Of wanting to pursue the next thing and the next thing. How have you managed that and what does managing your lifestyle, as you put it, look like once you've crossed $100 million?

I would say that, you know, whether I got chill or the voice got louder, I am somebody, you know, I probably have that entrepreneurial bug. That's why I do what I do. And that I get bored by pretty easily. And if something is I feel like I accomplished a certain amount in a certain area, then I want to try something else new. So therefore starting Instagram knowing absolutely nothing about it, that was fun for me to grow that and learn about that. This was new and it was challenging. The supplement company for a couple years there was just kind of running and we were rinse and repeat and doing everything was working. And now we're in a position where we're making a lot of transitions and now it's actually giving us some fresh perspective and new energy because we're doing new and different things. The other thing is I want to see things through to the end. Our goal, obviously the supplement company, is to build it and then eventually exit. I don't want to allow myself to get sidetracked off what the main goal is. Hey, why did I get into this business in the first place and did I achieve my ultimate goal? Sure we did. $100 million in revenue. We've had years where we've done in excess of $20 million profit in that business. But again, the goal that we started, the reason why we wanted to see this through and we wanted to eventually exit the company or sell a healthy percentage to, you know, an equity firm or a strategic partner who could help take us to the next level. And we haven't quite gotten there yet. We're getting close. But for me, I realized that we haven't achieved that big milestone yet. So that keeps me going. And then on the other stuff, again, it's just kind of more about recharging and getting involved. It helps alleviate the boredom, but it also is fun and it recharges me at the same time.

When you say it helps alleviate the boredom. What is the boredom when you're at the level that you're at?

Just the monotony of some of the things the day to day. Also people think it's this glorious thing to be running a $100 million company and why I certainly wouldn't.

Have traded the opportunity and I do it all over again. I have realized over the years that it's a lot more stressful than an e book company. And although it has a higher potential to go a lot farther, to scale bigger and to be sellable, if I just wanted to run a lifestyle company that made me seven figures a year, I would not be doing what I'm doing right now. You wake up every day, you're managing a lot of people. Most days you wake up and there's problems waiting for you in your inbox. You know, we've had times where because we are investing at a loss on all of our acquisition, be it leads or customers, everything on the back end has to be really dialed in and running almost perfectly. And there's times where our email delivery, for one reason or another, Google changes the algorithm or something and for a month it's like scrambling, trying to get things back to where they were. Because we know that every day that ticks on or we don't resolve this problem, we're losing money and we may not be able to potentially back out our ad spend and we're going to have to slow down ads. And then when you're trying to sell a company with ebook company, I don't have to worry about, you know, I just get the P and L every month and say, okay, we made a few hundred grand and this looks great. With the supplement business, it's like this month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year growth that we have to hit. And when you run into a problem like, you know, we had our Google advertising account suspended for three or four weeks, and when we were running at $3 million a month spent. So when $3 million a month spent goes to zero for four weeks, that obviously affects the numbers that you were trying to hit on the budget for that month. Which means, like, now I'm going to have to make this up next month or the month after. How much harder am I going to have to work yet alone, I'm dealing with all the stress and the problems, trying to fix it just so we can get back to where we were. So there's a lot of stress and a lot of pressure that comes with running a large company, especially if your goal is to sell it and the numbers that you have to hit and you put out these goals in this budget, and it's almost like, hey, if we don't hit it, then it's going to devalue the company by this much and you don't want to see that happen. So you have a tremendous amount of pressure that's on you constantly. And going back to the boredom thing, it's just like when you're dealing with that type of stuff every single day. And although there are a lot of enjoyable elements to it, when you are dealing with a lot of stress and a lot of challenges and problems and obstacles, and as the company gets bigger and bigger, they just, those things, they don't get smaller, they become bigger and probably more frequent as well. You need to have other things that you're doing that are recharging, whether that be finding some time to exercise, to get in the gym. And then there was a period of time in my career where everything came a very distant second to BioTrust and to work. And I was really running myself into the ground. I wasn't being a great asset in my family. My health was took a turn way in a different direction than where I need to be, especially in the industry that I'm in, health and fitness. And then I couldn't be the best that I wanted to be for the company either, because.

These other areas of my life were suffering. So I've learned over the years to kind of have things work in more of a harmonious way and find harmony between faith, family, exercise and also the career stuff. And by doing that, I feel that I'm able to bring my best to each one of those. And that means that ultimately the business, the business has the opportunity to do better because I'm able to bring my best game each and every day.

So Let me ask you about that because you said something very telling, which is that we often think it's just glamorous. The bigger the business, the more glamorous it must be. But what I'm hearing you say is that there's times when it can really suck too. And there's a lot of, there can be a lot of stress and overwhelm. And you mentioned that the higher level you get, the more of those things you need to have in order to rejuvenate you. So there's plenty of people who run million dollar businesses who still struggle to find that rejuvenation because they feel like they're in the hamster wheel when it's a hundred times the size of that. What do you do in order to maintain balance so they have the best to give to the company?

I really try to structure my days more. A good friend of mine is Craig Ballantyne, who was my very first business coach a decade ago, I believe is recently on, on the show here and he'll be speaking at the Capitalism conference as well. But Craig helped me a lot in finding a structure that would allow me to still have those pockets of time in my day to re energize and rejuvenate and then also not be working all kinds of hours. Because I was a guy who, before I had a wife and kids, before I had this family, I just kind of worked whenever and when I felt like I was getting into a good groove, I just keep going. And that could go to 3 or 4 o' clock in the morning and then I'd sleep and then wake up and try and figure out what it is going to happen the next day. But when you're running company, you have scheduled calls, you have meetings and all this stuff and then you have a family that you need to tend to. You got to be a lot more structured, a lot more organized. So at this point in time, I don't have those two three o' clock in the morning nights anymore. I go to bed with my wife at a reasonable hour every night. And we have dedicated family time. Kind of from that five or six o' clock onward, I stopped working. And I figured whatever I didn't accomplish today can wait until tomorrow. And at the same time I get up fairly early, six o' clock in the morning. I have a gym here in my garage. I go, I get, you know, 30 or 45 minutes of good intense exercise and take my kids to school. And then by the time I get home after school, it's like 8:30 and I already got my workout out of the way, had, you know, had a family activity, taking the kids to school. And then I have like 8:30 and I, and my endorphins are going because you know, the, I got a good, good exercise session in, so I'm focused. So from 8:30, 9:00 time period to 4 or 5:00 clock and being really structured, putting those five top things I want to get accomplished on my to do list and making sure I scratch those five things off before I even get into my email inbox, all those types of things. I'm able to be a lot more productive without sacrificing the rest of my life for the company. And I'm not working as many hours as I was before, but I am being a lot more productive. And a lot of it comes down to the strategies that you put in place and making sure that you're, when you sit down to work, you're in the right frame, you're rested. When you get that exercise in, you kind of have that mental high going on. And you can be a lot more productive in a shorter period of time when you set it up properly.

When you are setting it up properly, what have you found to be the things that when you put your attention on, actually move the needle. And I ask because it's so easy to be overwhelmed, you could put your focus on anything. And when you're running an eight, nine figure company, there's plenty of things that can keep you busy. So what have you found? Be the activities that are worth your attention, that are worth you putting time into when you're at that level.

Yeah. So three things really. One is getting eight hours of sleep a night, which is something that I sacrificed for a very long period of time. But I know if I'm well rested I can be the best I can be for those 16 hours a day that I am awake versus trying to have 20 hours on the clock that are running at 70%. I rather have those 16 hours where I'm full, high energy, ready to go. So number one is making sure I get the sleep. Number two is getting my exercise done earlier in the morning. One, it's not a distraction in the middle of my day to step away and have to go exercise. It can be a nice break for certain people if they had the leisure to kind of do it whenever they want. But for me, I rather get it done early again. It increases, you know, just my brain power because of all those benefits, additional benefits, physiological benefits of, of exercise. And then the other One is just making sure I get some time outside every single day. Fortunately, I live in a warmer climate in Florida. I was just before I hopped on this call, I was just out on my back patio and working at the table there. And when I do those three things, one, make sure I'm well rested. Two, get my exercise for me first thing in the morning, sets my day up great. And then I try to get some time outside, whether it be with my kids when they get home from school, or whether it be actually take some time to work outside or just hopping in the pool with the kids for 20, 30 minutes. Not a huge chunk of time, but it is rejuvenating, re energizing. I get to play with my kids, have some good family time. All those things combined together, I would say have really made a huge difference in my life as far as my energy and my productivity is concerned.

How about work wise, what are the things that you focus on at work that are actually worth your time at that level?

Well, whatever the big projects are that I want to accomplish, you know, I make a list of. All right, one, what's going to move the needle the most as far as revenue? Well, it's probably, for me, it's probably going to be building the next marketing funnel, writing the copy, getting the graphics designed, all that type of stuff. So I have whatever the big project is. And I'll want to knock off at least one or two things related to that project first and foremost before I do anything else. And then I'll have some scheduled calls and stuff like that. I try to lump all my calls together on one full day and then maybe if there's additional calls needed on like one other afternoon and the rest I have just focused work time so I'm not constantly distracted. I think a lot of people make the mistake of just allowing other people to interject time into their schedule. I see a lot of people are like, hey, just go here and schedule a call with me. You know, I'm like, man, if I did that, I get absolutely nothing done because every other hour I'd have a call. And you can't really get into a great groove where you get a lot of focused work done when your day is constantly being distracted and broken up by all these phone calls. Same thing with cell phones and stuff like that, right? I mean, they're, they have this addictive property to them and it takes some real self control and self restraint to say, okay, I'm going to set this to the side, put my phone on, do not disturb and I'm only going to check it every hour, every couple hours to see if I have any important messages coming in rather than I've seen people that I work with, you know, like even if I go to a coffee shop or something to work, I see some people that are just like picking up every phone call that comes in, they hear an alert go off on their phone, they're looking, texting people back. And very easily you can spend an eight hour time bucket where like half the time is wasted just being distracted very easily. So I try to put those focus time blocks in place where I am not distracted. I don't have something going on. That's why I like to get my workout done first thing in the morning. Because then I don't if my day gets busy, busy or I get into a good groove like, oh, I don't need to stop at 1pm because I have that session scheduled or whatever. I can just keep going with my work, get done what I want to get done. And then I try to time block my calls and things that would otherwise be viewed as a distraction in the middle of the day for me. I tell my wife like, last thing I want to do is like have a 10 o' clock in the morning phone call or 11 o' clock because I'm gonna wake up, do my thing, drop the kids off from school and then from like 8:30 to 10 I'm going to do absolutely nothing because I don't want to start anything big when I know like I'm gonna have to stop at 10 o'. Clock. Especially that last half hour leading up to it. You're just watching the clock the whole time. So I make a very conscious effort not to schedule things until this one. I chose to. You gave me a lot of timeframes that worked. Some in the middle of the day and I chose at the end of my day to do this. That way I can work all day long up until this point and then have this call interview with you. And when I'm done with this now, I'm gonna go help my wife with dinner and my workday is over.

Joel, you could put your energy in so many places. You could scale whatever you wanted to scale. Why start or amplify a personal brand now? Why even think about building up an email list, starting the podcast that I know you just launched, building up an Instagram following to a million followers in six months. Why put your energy there? What's the play you're going for here?

For me, it's entirely about giving back. I See, I heard an interview with Kevin Harrington. He's one of the first sharks on, on Shark Tank and he was the as seen on TV guy. He's invented the infomercial pretty much. But he said beginning part of my career out of college, I just was obsessed about becoming an entrepreneur. And then second act of my career was me being the as seen on tv, very successful entrepreneur. And the third part of my career, the third act is me empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs. And for somebody like me who has achieved a certain level of success, I've made quite a bit of money. I live in a very nice home here in Tampa Bay on the water. One of the nicest homes in the area. Apart from eventually exiting, seeing this to the end of the road and exiting this company, there's not a whole, a whole lot for me to do that I haven't accomplished that I have a desire to accomplish. Like I don't need to be a billionaire or anything like that. Like I don't have goals or aspirations to do that or be that I'm very comfortable with where I'm at with my lifestyle. If anything, I would just love to have less stress. But I see that will come in time. I'm only 36 years old. I will, you know, hopefully have exited this company and have a nice chunk of change in my pocket before I'm 40 and I still have a lot of life to live. But as far as the personal brand is concerned, this is just a way of me giving back to people who were once in my shoes. I started as a high school teacher. I taught health and physical education, making $40,000 a year while I was trying to get some of this health and fitness stuff off the ground. I wanted to be an author. I had a print book I wrote for some trade magazines and then I had a print book that came out before I even got into marketing. And the catalyst for me getting into marketing was failing at all these other things that I was doing at a print book that, you know, I thought I was going to be this New Times best selling author and that was going to be my career path. And I'm glad that it didn't work out because it would be making nowhere near the money that I'm making right now by writing books. And even if they're all were New York Times bestsellers, there's only so much couple million a year maybe for the Tim Ferriss out there, you know, they're only coming out with a book every couple of years anyway. But for most people like you, you're looking at making a few hundred grand a year. Like, I've had weeks where I've made more than that. So I'm thankful for the struggles that I had to go through. But I see so many people who are in that same position. Number one, they're in a job that they don't really feel is they're passionate about. It's not really why they were put here. It's not their purpose. They're not really fulfilled by it, which was me as a teacher. But most people just settle there and think that's the way it's supposed to be. You're supposed to work from 9 to 5. It's something that you don't really love and then try and enjoy the rest of the like. For me, I want to show people that, hey, it's possible to love what you do to get and move into an area that you're actually passionate about and make great income and have an awesome career doing something that you love. You don't have to work for somebody else. This is option in America where you can work for yourself. Capitalism as the name of this podcast is in your upcoming event. We have so many opportunities here. Most people are not grasping onto them. So I'm trying to inspire people to do just that. Another part of my reason of the catalyst for me getting onto Instagram was I restarted my ebook business and we were sending out these inspirational newsletters once a week, six days a week we would publish fitness content. And then one day a week we would send out something inspirational. And a lot of it was sharing my faith. We talked about some heavy topics like depression, anxiety, forgiveness, unconditional love, all this type of stuff. Things that I really feel like are the topics that matter in life. You talk about business all day, talk about health, fitness, weight loss, to help somebody lose 10 or 20 pounds, which is awesome. Those are all great things. But for me, I felt like there's so many people who are out there hurting, they're struggling in these other areas. And I want to. I have this platform, I have this ability that God has blessed me with to build these significant size followings very, very quickly. But I had, I just treated them as business things as instead of a way to impact other people. As a teenager, I had a lot of people speak into my life and tell me like, hey, God has his hand on your life and you're going to do great things. You're going to really be a kingdom builder and all this stuff. And I thought at the time, like, okay, I'll appreciate that. And I heard a lot of people tell me that. So I guess it's supposed to be an evangelist or a pastor, a missionary or something, right? Like, you know, like my thinking at that time, being a younger kid and even into my business career was that when I got into business I thought, oh, all those people were wrong. And now doing what I'm doing now I realize and God just kind of had to crack me upside the head and say hello, like giving you all these special gifts. I bring you into this industry where you become one of the top email marketers. You're able to grow these followings, you're able to scale businesses so big and so fast. You have all these eyes, you know, and ears that are reading your emails or listening to what you have to say. And how about you start talking about some of the things that I've been putting on your heart that really matter. And this platform with Instagram and then my other email list where we still do the inspirational newsletters have allowed me to use my God given gifts of marketing and building companies and platforms and followings to get a message that I view as being even more impactful than just health and fitness or even business.

Well, Joel, I'm. It's been a pleasure to watch it man. And, and I think you have already stretched my thinking even though we've only spoken a handful of times. And so to watch that growth has been, I mean if that's your ministry, then I am a part of your.

Part of your church, if you will.

Yeah, I truly believe it is. You know, and, and like you said, I, this is my ministry. You don't, you don't have to be within the four walls of a church. My friend Carl Lentz, two different things that he talks about. One is occupy all streets and two is church in the wild. And it's like, yeah, it's great to have this community where people are meeting in a building every Sunday and most of them are already have some faith based background. They're coming there to be inspired and fed and spiritually fed to go on into the next part of their week. But there's this whole other world out there that needs to hear the same message. And it's wherever you go, occupy that street, that path that God has given you for the day and whoever comes along your path, that's your ministry and doesn't have to be in the four walls of the church, but it's on the outside. The four walls of the church is probably even more meaningful and more impactful.

Amen to that, brother. Well, I know the podcast is called Born to Impact. You're olemarion on Instagram and you'll be at the capitalism conference this January 21st through the 23rd. And I consider it an honor and a privilege to have you my man. Thanks for so much for sharing with us today and I can't wait to share the stage with you this January.

Yeah, man, I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be a great event. You always put on world class events and everyone who's going to be in attendance, I know that I can speak first and foremost, that I will certainly bring as much value to the conference as I possibly can and you can even expect to see me hanging around the hallways and I would love to shake hands and meet with anybody who's there and listening.

Joel, thanks so much, man. Keep on changing the world, buddy.

Thanks, brother. It's a pleasure to be on.

It is this kind of mindset that determines the 1 percenters from everybody else. You figure out what it's going to take and you go full throttle or you settle for the scraps with everybody else. Joel stretches me. He inspires me. And we've invited him, his mentor, his business partner and one of his peers all to the capitalism conference this January 21st through the 23rd. In those three days you will be surrounded by success that stretches you to move faster, shows you a new level of success that you can sprint into, and gives you the strategies and the tactics and the insights for you to make it possible. That's what we do at the capitalism conference. It's January 21st, the 23rd. You can get tickets at the Capitalism Conference.

And it will sell out. I'm not sure what day you're listening to this, but it might have sold out already. So if there's tickets available, it's@capitalismconference.com and it would be an honor and a privilege to help you grow over those three days. Thanks for listening to the 1%. I believe it's greedy capitalists who scale what matters that make all the difference that we want to make in this world. More than government, more than any other source of change, it comes from entrepreneurs and people like you and me. Thanks for being one of them. You keep on changing the world and we'll keep on bringing the people who are doing it and leading the way. We'll see you on the next episode.

Hey, real quick.

I'm doing a test in my business right now that I think you'll be interested in. We have a training called Million Dollar Brands. And it helps business owners and entrepreneurs get clear on those first three to five products that they're going to build that will get to 25 sales a day at 25 to $30 and thus be a million dollar business. And we sell that for $297. And I recently had the idea of what if at the end of that training when somebody completed it and they filled out a form saying they know what their three products are going to be, they know how they're going to launch the products, let's refund them the cost of the training. Let's incentivize the action of actually making some decisions in your business and getting clear on your business. And I did this because someone challenged me with the thought of what would I change in my business if I only cared about my customers results and I didn't care about profitability. And I immediately said let's incentivize action. And then I said, well, would I really spend however many thousands of dollars a month I spent on Facebook ads or would I take some of that money and put it into a scholarship fund and then fund some of the cool ideas that came from my training? And it was like this whole world.

Of creativity opened up for me.

So this is a test right now that we're running. If you are starting a new business or you are still under that million dollar threshold or even that 25 sales a day threshold, then we have this training called Million dollar brands. That's $297 and it's refunded to you.

When you complete the training.

And I figure if you walk out of that training, you're going to leave with such a clear business plan that you're going to want to work with us on ongoing. So you can find this@capitalism.com brands and depending on when you sign up, we're also opening up strategic windows where you can qualify for a scholarship and have your business funded. So this is all an experiment. If I lose my rear end on it, we'll probably shut it down. But for now you can find it at capitalism.com brands.