How Going For Short Term Profits Can Cost You Millions | Office Vlog

So I.

Regret.

Regret losing the connection with customers, and I regret not selling them more. Not just because it's expensive not to sell, but because you do people a service by giving them what they want, which is the solution to their problems. And you look at. If you look at it that way, there's no. There is no lack of opportunity in the world.

I love you. Oh, I love you too. I love you. Aww. Have a good day. Bye.

That was awesome. I made that. That's my little girl. I was. I was just thinking this morning about.

The biggest mistakes that I've made in my career that probably cost me millions of dollars. And what made me aware of this was we're starting to correct this and just realizing how much I have.

Neglected a couple areas that really cost me.

I was having breakfast with my best friend Mark, who's also one of my longest standing mentors. Really, really successful. I basically believe everything he says as gospel. I don't know if you have any of those people in your life, but whatever he says is probably true. So. So I listened to him and.

He was helping me think a lot bigger. And I realized.

How much going for the short term cost you so much in the long term. And I've done that in a couple areas of my life where just long term, that really held me back. And as an entrepreneur, if you get these two things right, I can almost promise you you will be ungodly successful. If you. If you do the opposite of my mistakes, there is almost nothing.

There's almost no way that you could fail. There's almost no way for you to not be rich if you do well at the two things that I made mistakes in. See, money. Is that enough buzz to, like, build up what the two mistakes was? Do I need to build it up? Do I need to build up any. You will be a millionaire overnight if you do these two things well.

Warren Buffett said, the secret to success in business is ensuring that your customers are delighted. Not just satisfied, but delighted. And in the Internet marketing world, specifically the. The opportunity market, even like our. My circle, the physical products world, there's so many people who just want the money, and they forget that money comes from other people's bank accounts. And if there is. If there's not connection and delight from the customer, they don't care about you and they move on. And.

When you realize.

That a customer will stay with you and spend lots of money with you, you realize how easy it is to be successful because you don't need that many customers. It's not that hard to get a thousand people to buy from you. But it takes a lot of intention, a lot of effort to get those thousand people to be raving fans. But if you do that, never be broke again, because those thousand people, when they spend $1,000 with you, that's a million dollars.

So. And if they really love you, then they bring all their other friends with you. And I.

Have realized that I made that mistake in the past and I really regret that and paid for that. So that first mistake was forgetting.

Man, I was just going through, like, a list of some of our best customers in the past that we just neglected. Like, we get. Like, once we fulfilled what they bought, we never served them again. Never reached out to say, like, how could we be of more value to you? How dumb was that? Like, how dumb was it to not go to people who gave us money and say, you had a great experience?

What would you like next? Instead it was like, thank you for buying. Here's the thing we promised you.

What was I thinking? You know what I was thinking? I was thinking, where's the next short term piece of revenue? That's what I was thinking. That was stupid of me. It cost me millions of dollars because it is seven times easier to get a customer to buy from you again than it is to get a new customer. And we spend so much energy trying to get new customers. This is advice I give to entrepreneurs. And yet I made the mistake. So dumb, so dumb, so expensive. Of a lesson to learn. But the thing is, once you get it, you realize that you make a hit list of the 20% of your best customers and you turn them into insanely raving fans. They stick with you forever. Can't go broke anymore. Always be rich. Man, I wish I had learned that lesson earlier. I had to pay for it in order to get it. The second mistake.

And this is weird.

Second mistake was not selling more. Here's what I mean, though.

I made this mistake with the tribe. The tribe is building what I wanted to be this incubator for physical products brands. And what I did.

Was stupid. I said, what's the most badass experience we could make? Let's give them this. Let's give them this. Let's give them this. And I thought I was doing this really great thing. Let's build this amazing, amazing experience.

And what happened was, people don't want things, they want results. There's, like, very few things people want. They want connection, they want survival, they want results.

It's about all people want and pay for.

Survival. And Procreation. We'll put those together. If you look at all things that are sold.

They usually fall into one of those.

I'm in the results business, right? So.

What I did was I didn't sell a result, I sold a big box of stuff.

And what I should have done was give people the minimum they need to get the result. And what I did was give them the maximum possible for us all to be exhausted and unhappy. And I've done this before with products, I've done this with.

The group, the tribe. And you are doing people a service by selling them something if it actually benefits them. So, for example, I just started working with a new personal trainer.

I always say, feel weird saying that out loud because they're like, people immediately look at my biceps, like, is it working for them? I've had one session, second one is tomorrow. I've worked with personal trainers in the past and I just get better results when I'm working with a trainer, not because I don't know what to do, but because the act of giving a person money to hold me accountable makes me do the work. And I know that I know what to do, but I pay the money because I get better results just by virtue of paying the money. You are doing your clients and customers a service by charging money for the result that they want and you're doing them a disservice by giving them a disproportionate amount of things that you don't charge for. So what I wish I would have done was focused on the result and selling it, then focusing on the next thing and selling it the next thing and selling it, rather than saying, here is the empire you're going to buy.

It's going to be really confusing and I'm going to charge one price for it. That was stupid. I wish I had sold more things.

And those two go hand in hand. When you've got the relationship with the person, you know what things to sell them, what things are going to be beneficial for them along the path of their life cycle as a customer. So I.

Regret.

Losing the connection with customers and I regret not selling them more, not just because it's expensive not to sell, but because you do people a service by giving them what they want, which is the solution to their problems. And if you look at it that way, there's no. There is no lack of opportunity in the world because there's always problems with every path and every result.

So my two biggest. I shouldn't even call them regrets. I should say those are the most Expensive lessons I ever had to learn. And if you do well at my two mistakes, it's like no way to not be rich.

Yep.

So do you think you tried to make the tribe so big because team members and people in the community convinced you it would be a good idea or do you think you convinced yourself because of your own ambition?

Right. So this is, this is it. That's a great question. C money. This was, this is, this is the deal.

I'm a vision guy. Right. I want to build the empire. And what I tried to do was I tried to build the empire all at once.

So by doing that, you go, you end up going really big, high level rather than going to what people want. And so that made it hard to sell and hard to serve.

And it tired everybody out, my team, customers. And so what would have been really fun and easy would be to identify what's the thing they want to do and solve. Give them that and keep the momentum going. That's momentum. Giving people a. The whole empire at once is. No one cares.

That was my mistake.

That's good. It'll be like a good 10 minute little vlog thing.

It's painful to talk about out loud. This is kind of therapeutic for me. I think that's why I do these kind of videos. It's just like it's therapeutic for me to talk through that mistake because I know I won't ever do it again. Yeah, I know I won't ever make that mistake again. I'll make other mistakes, but that's one I won't make again.

That one hurts. That's a put you out of business kind of mistake. And when you flip it, it's a make million dollars, make millions of dollars type of lesson. So that's how you make millions of dollars by not doing those two things.

You're talking about pricing. Like, what would you, what would you suggest to other people when it comes to like pricing themselves?

So that is a dangerous question. And the reason why that's a dangerous question. How much should you charge? Or how much would you say pricing yourselves? Because you are not. You have nothing to do with the price. Nothing. The faster you can disconnect yourself from the price, the wealthier you will be. Because most people devalue themselves. We all have our own insecurities and our own junk.

So if you want to put a value on yourself, you will always undervalue yourself. Oh man, that's deep shit.

But when you value the result that the other person wants and you're not involved, that's different way. Different.

Way different. You, you don't have anything to do with what someone else is willing to pay. What somebody else will pay for a result has nothing to do with you. Nothing.

You don't have to be good.

You don't have to be confident.

Whatever you do or produce in the world just needs to be able to get somebody else a result of a mentor named Kevin who says, find out what it's worth to them and charge a little less. Has nothing to do with you. Nothing.

Find out what the result is worth to them. Charge a little less. This is true in physical products too. Like the amount of entrepreneurs who are just finding out what other people are selling things for and trying to do it cheaper astounds me. And that is a really fast way to run a low margin.

Stressful business.

Oh, I do not. I have retired. I want to retire. I have retired from low margin businesses. It's not worth it. It's not fun. Who wants, I don't want to be Walmart. Who wants to be a commodities dealer. It's so, so like anybody can do that. There's no value in that. Our products are cheaper.

And that's a result of people putting like assuming that they have no value or the product has no value and they're right. What is the result worth?

That's where the money is.

Which by the way, remember I said I didn't charge for results. I sold product.

I made the tribe, for example, a product.

I hurt instead of making a clear offer, clear results driven offer. And I will never make that mistake again.

That's really good advice. There will always be problems and there will always be people who charge to solve those problems.

Yeah. And that can be you.