The Secret To Building A $1M Brand Without Building An Audience w/ Amber Spears

TikTok, YouTube, Facebook ads. Where's the best place to get exposure for your brand or your business? Well, there's one platform, there's one source of exposure that has not changed and is more effective today than ever, but it's been around for thousands of years. And it's relationships. I build my brands on the foundation of strong relationships with, with people who can support the business and the brand. Most people build their business to try and get around building relationships. Most people build their businesses on an advertising platform that get them exposure to a lot of people, but they never use that as leverage to build deep relationships with the people that can completely change their business. Russell Brunson likes to say that you're one funnel away. I like to say you're one relationship away from anything that you want, whether it's getting exposure to millions of people that will pay a premium price for your product, or it is a system in your business that needs to be developed, or it's maximizing a new advertising platform that you don't know how to take advantage of, your one relationship away from that completely changing your business. That's why I invited my friend Amber Spears onto the podcast, because her business is relationships. In this conversation, we talk about building relationships that lead to money. We talk about how to avoid relationships that can completely derail your business. And we talk about why relationships are the greatest white space. They're the greatest opportunity that almost no one is pursuing right now. Before you watch this, I would like for you to know that there are people out there right now that can completely change your business with one post or one email or one insight, and they would be happy to collaborate with you. But most entrepreneurs neglect the relationship part of their business in favor of the tactic that they think will get them to the result. I would like for you to know that it is faster and easier to build relationships with people to that make you a lot of money and change your business if you put some effort into becoming the person that other people want to do business with. That's what we talk about in this episode with Amber Spears.

Amber, hello. Hey. So in a. In today's marketing world, it's so common to talk about white space. As we're recording this, Gary Vaynerchuk is launching his book Day Trading Attention. And his entire thesis is looking at where there's underpriced attention. And sometimes that's TikTok, sometimes that's Amazon, sometimes that's Instagram ads. But in my experience, it's always possible to have white space and opportunity when you have relationships with other people. Yes, especially relationships with people who know other people, which is everyone. And you have a positive experience with those relationships. And I've basically built my career on this. So have you. And that is basically what you do for your career. So could you comment on that idea of relationships being white space?

Yes. I think that the, the white space part in relationships is a trust factor. Right. So what I mean by that is just thinking through this really simple example, which is if you think about the Internet now, right. With everybody being like a guru or trying to be an influencer, right. They're. There is such a lack of, I think, true trust in that because there's a lot of people online that I follow that I don't care how much proof they have. I don't trust them. Right. I don't trust them because the things that they're saying are not authentic or they don't make sense. Right. From like a pure business perspective. As a business owner, you probably sometimes look at what they're saying. You're like, that's, that's not true. That's like a Ponzi scheme, or that's not how things work. Or I know the back end of your business. And it's a total show. Right. You know what I mean? Like, you, you have that there are.

A lot happens, way more than most people realize.

Totally. And there's a lot of people like that that I see that I don't care how much proof you have, I still will never trust you. And so that comes over time. And on the flip side, there are people that I trust that it doesn't matter if they have no proof of something, I'm still going to trust them. Like you. Right. So if you came to me with an opportunity, I would raise my hand and say yes, because of the quality of man that you are. Your consistency over years, decades, some would.

Say stubbornness, but that's fair enough.

That too. That too. But with you playing at a level of super high integrity, you've always played the long game. Yeah. And that's the game that I'm playing is long term games with long term people. And so I think that white space of trust is really what we're looking at when we're looking at relationships. It's like, you know, I've had people say, oh, Amber, you're an overnight success. I see you absolutely everywhere now. And, you know, I never feel that way because I've been here doing good work for 15, 16 years now consistently. And I built up trust for that so now if I want to do something, I can leverage my large group of amazing relationships to launch whatever I want. Right. Because I have that trust. It's, it's not just a relationships. I know a lot of people, I'm sure you do, that know everybody. But no one actually really likes them or trusts them.

No one tells them that.

No one tells them that. But we all think that. Yeah. And I think deep down inside they also know that. I don't think that they're oblivious of their position in the world. I think they take shortcuts, and I think it's those shortcuts that they take that makes us not trust.

I think that's well said. Because in the, in the Internet space, it is tempting to look at how we get somewhere fast.

Yes.

How we get to a big following as quickly as possible. And so the temptation is to project like you have enough, like you have authority, like you have proof, like you have integrity. But you haven't earned those stripes yet.

Yes.

And what people don't realize is that once you start to make connections, it opens up real opportunities that are not necessarily short term transactions. Short term, transactional relationships exist.

But.

But they're short term and they're transactional.

Right.

They don't actually build the foundation of a business. But every major breakthrough that I've had in my career was because of someone that I met as a result of who I was. And when you know that and you realize how few people you actually need in your corner to make things go crazy, you can relax into doing the hard work of building trustworthiness.

Right.

So you, your business is advocating for other people to start to open up doors for these relationships. I'm curious, what makes someone really easy to refer and what makes someone really hard to recommend?

Oh, that's such a great question. No one's ever asked me that before. I think if someone is hard to refer, it's because I see that they have a low emotional iq. So that's a first trigger for me, like, if you cannot handle my referrals with care and love and attention and pay attention to them and their specific needs, I don't care how good you are at your job, I don't want to refer you because I'm such a emotionally based person like that, I have to feel good about that referral for me. Right. Not for everyone. Right. So I think one is if you and I know people like this, I'm sure you know people like this too, that, like, they're great at what they do, but they're miserable to actually interact with.

I'm thinking of three.

Exactly. Right. And you just know you're going to that text, you're like, that guy's great, but God, he's so difficult to work with. That's one thing that I don't want. I want it to be easy and I want it to feel effortless. And there's going to be problems in business no matter what. But on the other side of that, I want to have the trust that they have the capability of being able to repair what goes wrong in business.

That's a really important point. So with something, there's always going to be times when things go wrong.

Absolutely.

So what you're looking at is not, does this person on paper have all the proof and all the talent and all the skill set. It's one of the, one of the factors you're looking at is if things go wrong, how are they going to handle it with this other person, with this relationship?

Yes.

How are they going to make it right?

Yes.

Would you give an example of that going well or going wrong?

Yeah. Let me think of a good example. I'll give you one for my personal. I have a really good friend of mine that's amazing at sales and Mastermind, kind of high ticket offers and I hired him last year to help me with my big event that you spoke at and absolutely crushed again. Thank you. And he had some really tough things happen in his personal life. Right. That really interfered with his ability to deliver on working with me. And so the first few conversations that we had was me being like, hey, I paid you a lot of money to do X and it's not been done. And it was like, okay, I'm going to fix it. We had three conversations like that and then by the end I was like, dude, if you weren't my friend, I would have already charged your ass back. And I would have like, but I understand where you're at. Right. But this needs to be cleaned up. And I had that conversation with him because I knew that he could do that. And he ended up doing that. Right. He ended up because I had patience and I knew who he was. We've had a 10 year relationship, so I knew this was a temporary issue in his life that was affecting me and my business. It was a lot of money. Right. But I picked him because I knew that he's amazing and I needed that particular skillset. And after that third conversation, which by the way, if I had one and then two, I wouldn't have had the three Normally, but he has trust with me because we have this long relationship. He was able to come and really clean it up and he heard me and he ended up fixing it at the very last hour. He fixed it, but it was fixed. Right. And then we had to have all those other conversations during, you know, previously, during and after, about how we're going to make sure this doesn't happen again. And he's really fixed it. And he stood up, but they were really hairy conversations. But I trusted the ability to have that conversation with him because I've had those conversations with him myself. I've watched him have those conversations with people in our peer group, and I knew he was capable of it. Not everybody is capable of it, nor do I think a lot of people would be able to give grace. That's actually something that I talk about with my partner a lot, is I think my partner is on one end of the pendulum and I'm on the other. She's over there looking just gorgeous right now. But like my partner, when you. When you infringe on boundaries with her, she is very strong with that. And it's done. Right? And I'm on the other end of the pendulum where I'm recovering people pleaser and all this other stuff. And so I would let people go too long. But now I think I'm really good in the middle where I can just say, hey, people make mistakes, okay? They make mistakes. And I do think going back to Esther Perel, trust is made in the repair. So I don't really think you know how good your relationships are until you test them, because something will break. But I knew that this person had my trust over time, and I trusted that he would clean it up no matter what was happening in his personal life. And he did. Other people, I would not have given that opportunity to because I don't have that history with them. Right. And I have seen some people where they have every single accolade on paper and I see their testimonials and I get swooped in by them too. Right. I get caught up in the look at all the stuff they're doing, and then we inter. We start working with them and it goes terribly. And I'm like, okay, so really what you are is a really good marketing engine.

Yes.

And not.

You're really good at talking about yourself.

You're really good at that. And actually, your delivery is horrific. Right. So again, what I should have done instead of hiring person, you know, the second person I'm talking about is I should have gone out to my network and said, hey, have you ever worked with this person before? And I, when I did that after, what I heard was same result, that same thing happened to me. I was swept up in the testimonials, I was swept up in the marketing and the delivery actually wasn't good. So then I spent all this money, time, energy, effort, frustration, when I could have just gone to my network and it's a good reminder to get back to basics.

So you have a lot of brands who are listening, that listen to this podcast.

Yeah.

That have great products that are okay at marketing, that know how to get customers. But that's not what you mean by delivery. Right. Having a great product and even having happy customers is not what you mean by delivery. What you mean by delivery is actually the connection with the other person that you're building a relationship with. Whether that be an affiliate or that be an influencer or it be a blog that has a big following that wants to feature you in a guest post. It's the person on the other side that can open up a lot of doors for you. Yeah. So delivery on the product side is one thing.

You has to be good.

It has to be.

It has to be good or else why are we doing it?

But that's, that's just a base level requirement.

Yes.

I mean it's not in a lot of the marketing world. But, but, but for all intents purposes, having a really good product, we're assuming that you are thinking about your customer and their experience.

Right.

But it's a different conversation when we're talking about the connection with the promoter, the affiliate, the influencer. That's what you mean by delivery. So would you define what good delivery looks like when you're building a relationship with a strategic partner in business?

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so I think one of the things to note on, why does it work when you partner with an influencer or another brand or a blog? And I think it goes back to the very beginning of what we started talking about, which is it's a transfer of trust from one brand entity, influencer to another. Right. Like that's really what's happening. Like that is. So if you referred me to people, then I'm going to be banking on your good relationship and your good word to then take care of those people. Right. And to make money off of that referral that you gave me. Right. And my job is to take care of that person with excellence so that your reputation is intact and maintained and that they thank you for that referral. And for that introduction, that is always my goal from a delivery standpoint is when I'm going out and finding brands to work with my clients first and foremost, the delivery part from a product perspective and how they take care of their customers has to be top notch because it doesn't make sense for me to solely my reputation and my good work in the industry by bringing people that are not going to take good care of their customers to my clients.

Absolutely right.

So that's. Let's just pretend that that is a factor on the other side.

And I want to add to this that I know that whenever I talk about another product or I promote something, even if I tag something on Instagram, I know that I am at risk of compromising the trust that I have spent 15 years building with my audience. I run that risk. And so I better be damn sure on the other side of that that I feel pretty good about what people are going to see on the other side. And, and the, the. If. If I lose that trust, I lose my most important asset because now it's going to be way harder for me to build relationships in the future. So I just wanted. I'm thinking about it. That is what I endorse, it's what I talk, it's who I have on the podcast. It is all things that I touch that I know other people are going to go over to. So there better be trust on the other side when I am talking about something. And yet when we're running businesses, often we forget when we're like, promote this thing and tag me on this and become so transactional.

Totally. Yeah. You know, I mean, your trust is so strong that you said some. You tagged something on Instagram the other day, the world's most expensive bread. And I tapped on it. I was like, wow, it is the world's most expensive bread. But I'm gonna try it because I trust your judgment. And I'm gluten free. And like, this looks amazing, right?

Just because I trust I have some in my fridge. If you want an advanced copy of.

Bread, I'm down to try that advanced coffee. Right? But, like, I trust your taste, right? So that's like one thing. I don't just trust your business acumen. I trust your taste in things. I trust who you're picking. Like, I. I started working with Chris because I met him really through you, and I loved everything that he creates for you. And now he's working with me, my community. Right. Like, I trust your taste to not just your experience. And I think that's a level of depth that I have with you that I don't have with a lot of other people where I trust them in every category. Like, when I look at trust, I look at not just how, how have you done revenue wise in your business. I also look at who are you as a person. Like, I see you, I'm like, man, what an amazing dad. Like such an amazing father. Someone who's willing to be vulnerable. Like the way that you showed up at Capcom. And that last talk was the last thing I expected you to do. But you talked openly about what you were going through. It was the hero's journey, man. Like, we didn't know you're going through that. You know, many of us and now are watching where you are. But like, that builds trust inside of me when it comes to you because you're check. You're checking off all the boxes for me, which is like you. Yes. Financially successful. Yes. Ambitious and growing. Yes. Does a great product delivery to his company and his community, but also always looking to do personal development and growth. Always showing up for his children, always doing things with integrity. Like, that means that I would open any door for you that you ever asked me to open and I would be your soldier.

Well, thank you. And that's, that's what I look for. We've known each other for years. I'm curious, do. Do you think that that can be built? Meaning it. Meaning if somebody is in business, most of us are hiding behind screens.

Yeah.

Most of us are isolated. Most of us feel lonely. Even if we won't admit it, we have built this very bizarre business world where we're totally fractured yet craving connection more than ever.

Yeah.

And trust is required in order for that. Those relationships to be built. Do you think that there's. Do you think that that muscle can be built? How do you, how would you practice the trust building part of relationship building and so that you can start to build the network of people who can actually support you.

That's a great question. I mean, I can only answer from what I've done. Right. So I think other, definitely people are different. But like for me, I think getting into the arena and going in person to meet with, with people, so a way that I catapulted my career and at the time, listen, I don't, I didn't have kids. I still don't. But I have kids in my life now. And it's different. Right. I've, I'm, I'm at a different point in my career. But when I first started my career What I would do is I'd fly to places here, like Austin, and I would go to like the IM party, or I'd stay here for a week or two and I just get a hotel. Or I'd stay at, like, somebody's house that I really wanted to meet in the industry. And then I'd just meet up with.

Everybody, text them FaceTime with people.

Yeah. I'd. I'd be in here physically present with them. Because what I've seen, especially over Covid, is like, everyone went to Zoom. Dude. The luxury is the in person now.

Y.

That is.

What's a good way to put it, that it's a luxury.

It's a luxury, and it's something that I could spend 50 Zoom hours with you and we'll have some trust. Right. We'll have that rapport. But I could spend three days at a conference room, a conference with you, like I did at capcon. And like, now me and Sam Prentice are like new besties. Right. Like, because we had. There's something so magical about that and also being able to see for me how they're interacting with other people. Right. How do people respond to them? Like, is there trust? Because I look for people I trust and I see how they respond to new people and I'm like, okay, that's a signal. If I see them being like, I know that this person did something to them or they know something that's out of integrity.

Yeah, I completely agree. You can Fast forward about 50 Zoom calls in about one meeting.

Just be there.

There's an example. There was a mentor that I wanted to build a relationship with. And I had met this person before, but I wanted to build a more active relationship with him. And so I shot him a message that said, I'm going to be in your area on this date. Can we meet up? And he said, actually, I'm free the following day, so we can meet up. This. I hadn't booked a trip. Right. I booked the trip because he said he was available. That. Right, right. These are the types of things that open doors.

Yes.

Right. There is a person in my network that we signed to a deal to promote one of our brands. That relationship. Relationship happened because he moved to Austin and we built a relationship in person that would have never happened if it had been just a digital relationship. So getting into the arena, as you said, of just going and having the FaceTime is something that 90 plus percent of people are just not willing to do.

I agree.

What else would you say in order to start to build that Network, do.

What you say you're gonna do. And if you can't do what you say you're gonna do, make it right. Like, I think that's one of the easiest things, right? Like if you're new and you're inexperienced, right. You don't know what you don't know. So you might think you can knock it out of a park for a client or do this particular thing. If you can't just make it right, figure it out, do a refund or you partner with someone who can fulfill on those promises or, or have the conversation. That's where I see most people getting stuck. They literally don't do what they say they're going to do.

Really. And I think that's the biggest thing. And if you, if you come in with good intention, then, and you still can't do it or something came up like, you know, you had a death or you had an injury or whatever, then just make it right. Have that. When I say make it right, what I mean is have the hard conversations because don't get into the relationship business if you can't have hard conversations. You're not in the relationship business. You should learn how to buy paid media or do something else. That's more in your skill set. I'm serious. It's true, though. I mean, because it's not going to work for you.

What's a hard conversation in your mind?

Hard conversation is when something's not right in your world. Maybe you have a hallucination that someone's doing something else to you. Right. I believe everything's happening for us, not to us. But I'm still stuck a lot in my own emotions being a human being. But what I've learned is if something's not right, let's say that we had a contract and you were supposed to do something. Let's say in this case, it's an influencer that was supposed to do a promotion. It didn't go out on the date that they said it was going to do, or they're behind on actually filming everything, right? Having that conversation and being able to come to them and say, hey man, this is not who I know you to be. So how do we get back to the, the level of you showing up, how I've known you to show up, or this needs to get fixed or what are we doing here? And being able to, to have the confidence to know that I can have those hard conversations and I can have those hard conversations with most people because I'm good at picking those people every Once in a while, a bad one will get through. Right. Cause I'm not perfect, but I think that's a big one, is like, do what you say you're gonna do and then clean it up if things get in the way.

Makes sense. So I think most people know how much money, equity, value, promotion, exposure exists on the other side of a couple relationships. If you meet the right influencer, if you meet the right podcaster, you meet the right blogger, if you meet the right investor, if you meet the right partner, everything do. You meet the right expert, you can blow up overnight.

Totally.

Right? The most expensive bread in the world, as you brought up after I tagged that brand on Instagram to really powerful people in my network, I saw, went and followed that page and I was like, all right. I mean, if those two people get involved in that brand and we bring some capital to the table, that brand is going to blow.

Right.

That. This is. It was actually fun for me to see that because I so rarely will tag a brand or promote it. And it was fun for me to see that impact and that in that trust, go over there.

You were the first domino, though.

Yeah.

You were the first domino to bring the awareness of those two people.

Do you know that my company logo is a C with a flame at the end? Because I like the idea of lighting fires. I love just being the spark that lights a fire.

Yeah.

So that was fun.

Yeah.

Now, the question that always comes up, of course, is, well, then, how do I meet those people? How do I meet those influencers? How do I meet those affiliates? How do I meet those promoters? And most people will just ask and ask or knock and knock. And this process is hard for some people. It's sort of easy for. It's kind of easy for you and me to talk about it because we've been doing it so long, and building relationships is kind of the thesis of everything that we believe in. But to the person who is still on the road to the first million, the person who's starting a new brand, the person who is still earning their keep in business, it's a real hurdle for them to cross. So what advice would you give to that person?

I would say that do as much as you can with what you have meaning, like join the Facebook group, start getting active, opt into people's email lists, like your. Your competitors or people that you feel like would be a good person to refer your brand and start seeing who they're promoting and kind of working with. Right. The. Everything leaves clues and signals. Right. So, like, let's say I was following you. I'd opt into your email list. I'd start seeing, like, what projects you're working on. I'd start seeing who you are naming and mentioning in your email list. I'd be listening to your podcast. I'd be seeing who you have as guests. What are patterns that I'm seeing? Like, I be seeing where you're speaking at. You know, maybe I could go grab a ticket to that. Maybe it's a couple hundred dollars instead of, you know, 5, 10, $15,000 to attend. Like, I would just be looking at those signals so then I could figure out, okay, well, let's just say that it's the most expensive bread, right, that you're promoting. Well, it's the most expensive bread. And why are you promoting them? Well, I know that they're in your fund now, right. Or they're a part of your community, but they're in your part.

That would show to me to get on your radar that I need to have a good product and at some point I need to be in your community in certain way. Right. So if I don't have enough money to go to capcon, at least I can respond to your emails and tell you, hey, this is what I really liked about here's what I learned, here's. And even better, here's what I learned, here's what I implemented, and here's the result. Right now you're going to be like, now you're on my radar. Right.

This is the perfect answer. Because that is exactly how people get on my radar.

Right, Exactly.

I mean, I. I don't have the world's biggest audience, but I think I have the longest unread text list, you know, from. From people who are trying to get my attention.

Yeah.

And I value having connections with people in my audience, but I literally can't get back to everybody.

Of course not.

The people who I prioritize are the people who are really active in our community, and I see their name pop up over and over again. And they come on the coaching calls and they do the work and they re. They tell me the update about what's happening. And this the example of the most expensive bread in the world. Girl who runs it, her name is Barbara. She shows up to every coaching call. She always reports her wins. We. I did a one on one with her and she sent me a care package as a thank you.

Is it like $3,000 worth of bread?

Yeah, it was two loaves of bread. Each one of them $1,500. World's most expensive bread.

So, so, you know, there's a. This is, this is a side story and we're gonna leave it in. The reason I call it the most expensive bread in the world. I think that should be her marketing hook. I love it and she doesn't believe me.

It feels booty.

So. Right. Don't you want to try the most expensive bread?

Of course I want to. I want to try it. I want to keep ordering it if it's delicious too.

And wouldn't you, if you liked it, wouldn't you describe it as the most expensive bread in the world to all your other bougie friends?

I would. I describe myself that way. I always say I'm not the most expensive. I'm the most expensive.

The most.

Why am I the most expensive in what I do is because I get the best results. Beautiful, right?

Why is the most expensive?

Because it's the best.

Because it's the best. The tastiest. It has the best ingredients. Right. Like, I think that's. I like the expensive.

So just. This is so meta. But look at what we're doing right now. I am talking about a client that I not invested. I have no financial incentive in this brand right now. But there was enough of a relationship built that now I'm talking about it openly on a podcast and I'm, I'm sharing that. I think about her marketing hooks. Right. I sit there and think about how should she talk about this bread? Because this is a person who's just been active in the community. Came to one of our events, we had some facetime. I tried the product, it was normal relationship building. I think this is what people factor out of business is they try to three step everything rather than building real human connections. And when there's always an ask coming around the corner, it's really hard to build a relationship.

It's so hard. And I, I want to just like double down on what you're saying right now, which is trust takes time. You cannot speed it up and you cannot outsource it. So there's a few things happening for people who are listening and wondering, how do I do this. One is she came, she invested in the community, she invested time, she bought your programs, she's doing the work, she's reporting the results that did not happen overnight. Number one, Correct. But number two for you, you are looking at that. And she's now a client. Right? She's somebody in, or at least in your community in that way. And that shows your care for the people in your community. And that sort of high integrity and, and creating that environment for her to succeed in. That's why people gravitate towards what you're doing and you show that type of care is to me, when I see you talking about it, I don't feel like you're talking about it because you're trying to get a bunch of people to sign up for your stuff. They should sign up for it, right? If they're fit, they should. I'm just gonna say it right now, they should. But you're not hawking her most expensive bread because of any other reason than you just really like it and you really like her.

Yeah, that's right.

That's it.

That's exactly. If I, if I didn't like her, I wouldn't hawk her stuff.

Yeah, you do. You like her and you like her bread.

That's right.

And this is a part of that trust thing, right? If you didn't like her, it doesn't matter how much you liked her bread, you're not going to promote it.

It's exactly right. I am thinking, right, Someone in my network who once a year comes to me with a great idea that he wants me to promote. I don't like him.

You don't like him. Exactly. You're not going to do it.

And one of the reasons why I don't like him is because every year.

He comes to me with an ask.

Right.

There's no, there's not involved in the community, no contribution to what I'm trying to do. I don't like, I don't like. I don't dislike you. I don't, I don't wish upon you any specific harm.

Of course not.

But I don't like you.

Right.

If you're at a party I'm not likely to go to see you, I mean, it's just out.

And part of that is that there's no give and receive. There's only asking. And again, this goes back to if I could build a business, if I can build multimillion dollar businesses just on my own relationships, I innately understand that it's a give and a take. And I also innately understand that for me it's give, give, give, give, give, until I see a perfect opportunity where it's perfect for them to make that request.

Yeah. And then it's an offer.

Yes.

It's not an ask.

No, it's an invitation.

Invitation, A request. Yeah, but it is it. The relationship does not depend on you saying yes to that ask.

Abs. Dude, that is so important. I always Recommend that people preface it with that, like, hey, I built this relationship with you over many, many years. And you know, even you can. Even if I'm nervous about it, I even say I'm like, I'm nervous to even ask what I don't want. Especially if it's a very high value person that has a lot of people coming to them who's really influential. What I want to say is, hey, I just want to tell. I'm a little nervous to ask you this because what I don't want is to be like everybody else that's just in line to put their hand in your pocket. But here's why I think this could be an awesome opportunity for us both, for our clients. A win, win, win all around. Because I've spent time with you and I know your very specific desires and needs. It matches all those things. Would you be interested in just exploring more? And just so you know, I don't like for me, I'm not gonna stop being your friend. I'm not gonna get salty if it's not the right time or it's not the right thing. All good. But I'm thinking about you and here's why. Goes over so much better.

I had. I had a really interesting scenario happen a couple weeks ago. I was just in a funky right right before and right after Capcom I. I have these crashes same because during Capcom I get this high and I care so much about the event that I'm worried about it. I have sleepless nights, I have nightmares that nobody shows up. It always goes amazing. But right before And I mean four weeks before and about three to four weeks after, I'm always, you know, 5050. I'm either a good mood or a bad mood. And there was a funk where I was in a really, really bad mood. And I meditated and thought like, what can I do to get out of a bad mood? And I wrote down five people in my community, clients, people who are in the 1% or the incubator that I felt like if I really mentored that person, they could have a giant exit. Just the person that I knew was doing the work that was on the rise that I can see a couple things where I could open some doors for them. And if I didn't want anything out of that relationship, if I was just like, I just know I can help that person. And then I reached out to them and just gave them some insight into what they could do. And that give turned my whole mood around, of course. But what it also did is it Started to put me on a positive trajectory because now I'm thinking, oh, that felt really good. And now they're getting results. And guess what? These are results I'm going to brag about in my emails and social media. And I kid you not, it set the in, set in motion the thesis for our next fund, for the, the next round of what we're doing in the capitalism fund is that the like.

1 to $5,000, like investments you can make across all that.

So that's, that's part of it. But the structure of the, the company, of the fund funds kind of have a beginning and an end. And so our next chapter of the fund, where we deploy capital into the next round of businesses, I said, I want to have that amount of conviction behind every deal that I invest in where that even if they don't take our capital or we don't partner, I know that if they do certain things that they're going to have that type of growth. And so thinking about the person that I could create a lot of value for, even though on the surface I didn't know how, it was just calling them and saying, I think you should do this, I think you should meet this person. And they're blown away.

Right.

Being in that mode of service and giving without any ask opened up the next chapter for me. And we as entrepreneurs are so often eager for the result that we don't think about giving first. And so this idea of give, give, give, give, and then I offer.

Yeah.

Then I, then I invite that person to be a part of the structure that we put together at the fund. And now we have a ton of deal flow that's just relationship building one on one.

It's also you seeing, though, who they are as a person. Right. Because I don't think you would have offered to open up those doors and deploy your experience, your knowledge and relation capital. And unless you had seen both that they had great product delivery, but that they were also great like operators and people.

Yeah, I've already made that mistake. Yeah.

Right. So it's both, though.

It's both.

Right. Because I, I made that mistake too, where I see like a phenomenal business, but like my alarm bells went off a little bit on the person. And I wish that I had really leaned in more into my gut instinct because my gut instinct's usually right and I, you know, you can get swept up in it. You get swept up and being like, well, but look at how much money they're making or who they're hanging out with and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, I think that is. The secret sauce is making sure that you're partnering with people that have great businesses and that are also great people internally.

And that means you have to be a great person internally, too, in order to be in their circle. Exactly. Amber, I want to talk to you about money and relationships.

Great.

So I want to talk about monetizing these relationships, and I wanted to wait until we covered the trust piece.

Yes.

The depth, the building relationship first.

Because everybody wants to jump to the money.

Of course.

Especially in your line of work, where you're often doing affiliate relationships and people are promoting one another. Often people will walk in. How. How much exposure or money can I get from a relationship? So I wanted to save this part of it. Right. There was something that you said at one of our capitalist pigs meetups, which is that you look to keep the lights on or cover your overhead with relationships and partnerships.

Yes.

That really landed with a few people in our group. So I. I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about that idea, covering your overhead with relationships and the partnerships that you have in your business.

Yes. Well, one of my dreams and the legacy that I want to leave behind when I'm gone is helping as many companies as possible put in a good affiliate program into their business. Because I know how algorithms change without notice, without warning.

Instagram can kick you off, Facebook can.

Lock you out, they can deplatform you, they can change their algorithm, and overnight, you've lost, like, all your rankings on search. Like, this all happens. Right. So algorithms are incredibly powerful to grow your business and to scale it. But I think when it comes to the things that keep us up at night as entrepreneurs, which is payroll. Right. Which is keeping the lights on, having enough money to get product and, you know, to. To get everything, all. All the basics. If we can get a good affiliate program into their business that's consistent, predictable, and lucrative, then we've really done something incredibly beneficial for these brands, these entrepreneurs. I'd also add another part that it helps solve entrepreneurial loneliness. Because when I have 20 creators, bloggers, brands that all believe in me, that are all pushing for my success, and they're sending me customers because they believe my products are good and that I'm a good person, that really helps me feel like I have a tribe around me. Right. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about doing this, is I've watched businesses like, for example, I've had a few more than a few Clients that they either added this in just in time before they got kicked off of Facebook, or they came to me after they got kicked off of Facebook and they had no way of acquiring customers. Now they have this huge team that they did have to lay off a huge chunk of team until they figured out how to get back on Facebook for some people was a week. I had another client that's a nine figure business that it took them three years to get back on Facebook. So like, this is why I say, like, let's add this in. And most people don't do it right. So it fails.

I want, I want to take this tactically. Like, I want to translate for the people who are listening because you, in a lot of cases, you have an E commerce brand that gets their customers acquired on Facebook, Tik Tok Shop, Amazon, and they have a customer list of 50,000 to 100,000 people that they're doing nothing with except promoting their own stuff and sending Friday wrap up emails or showing the new recipe in which you know your spices, you know, and. And that's better than most.

Yeah, that's true.

But you could also be taking that list of 50,000 people if you've been doing the work that I preach about building audiences and communicating with your people and building relationships. You could also have five other brands or five other businesses that you have relationships with and promote each other and monetize that audience in a way that you feel really good about.

Yes.

And what you're saying is that you think there should be a target to pay for all the expenses with those relationships and that that's possible.

It is possible. Yeah. And it's a couple of things. I'll kind of get into a couple of tactical things. I know your audience loves that. Right. And we all do. Um, one of the things that I'll, I'll mention two things. One is the power of eight, which is something that I learned from J.J. virgin. And if you're new to this, this is what I think through, which is she and some other really influential people many years ago, probably like 12, 15 years ago, like Brendan Burchard and Mark Hyman, a few of these other guys that are very well known now, they all got together, there was eight of them, and they all made a decision to support each other for an entire year. So if one person got on a podcast, they'd mention to the podcast host these seven other people. If one person was having a launch, the seven other people would promote it. Right. So for years they did that and they all kind of Grew together because they served the same core avatar. That's why it worked. Right. So you had Mark Hyman for the nutrition and the, the medical stuff. You had JJ for the workouts and you know, you know the longevity. Right. You had just, you had Brendan for the mindset, the leadership. They, they all serve the same avatar. So if you're trying to get physically healthy, you're probably also going to want to get mentally and emotionally healthy as well. Right. I think people make that mistake all the time in affiliate marketing too, where it's like, well, if I have a weight loss product, I don't want to promote other weight loss products.

I see. Okay, so it's not I have a supplement brand. Let's promote other supplement brands.

Right.

It's I have a supplement brand for dads. And so there may be a food company for busy dads or moms who make their lunches. And I mail it to my dads and I'm like, your wife will probably love to put this in your kids lunch.

Totally.

Or it is actually I have a relationship right now with a medical center that I'm promoting the medical center because they'll do telehealth and I have a supplement company for dads. Beautiful relationship between the two. Now they have, they sell supplements.

Yeah.

That's not their primary business. Primary business is doing medical services.

Right.

For my dad's.

And you want their labs to be dialed in because you know that any supplement will help in a certain way. But what's going to help more is actually understanding what's going on in their lab work.

That's exactly right.

Right. So that's how you can help them at a deeper level.

And if we were to go just one, like a surface level, I don't, we don't sell a greens powder.

Perfect. So now you have go out and find the best greens powder man, the one that you look at and you're like, I would give my kids this. I would take it like they're going to be buying a greens powder likely from somebody. Why not go out and find the best one that you can then promote to your audience that's complimentary to your services. And I'll also say this one thing that makes me a bit controversial, which is I think I see nobody as competition to me or my clients. I see everybody as collaborators. I'll give you a really good example. I've been on the back end of many hundred million dollar plus brands and offers many. And what I've seen to be really interesting is let's Say I have a weight loss supplement. The instinct of that owner is going to be like, I don't want to promote any other weight loss supplements because I'm afraid that they'll get off subscription or that I'm going to look dumb for promoting somebody else's. Why would I promote somebody else's if I have my own? Well, the reality of it is is that if people are in pain, they're going to keep trying things until their pain is gone or resolved. And you might be the best person for them to lose the first 30 pounds, but you're not the best option for them to lose the last 10 to get shredded. They might need a higher level coach, somebody who can provide labs and provide more structure, counter, macros, kind of, that kind of thing. They might need that to get to the next level. So I would say like, look at everyone as collaboration. Because also at the end of the day you might not have all the ingredients that this other person has in their supplement, right? So why not try it? Because what I see on the back end is I see that they, they buy your supplement, they're going to buy the other person's weight loss supplement too, especially if it's good. So why are you turning that away? Why not just remove your subscription people say, hey, I'm not going to promote any other offers to my subscription people until they're off subscription. I'll just remove those people. But for the other 49, let's say they have 2,000 people on subscription. The other 48,000 people on the email list should be getting the greens powder. They should be getting additional weight loss products. They should be getting anything that ties to that core avatar. You know what crushes for weight loss dating? It crushes. Why does it, why does it crush? Same avatar, same avatar. They want to lose weight, they want to feel better. They're also probably wanting to date better, wanting to get out there, right? So it's like really think of your person as a 360 human being. Don't just look at them, be like, it's a mom over 45 who buys my supplement offers and I'm never like, I can't do anything else. Like, yeah, that mom also cares about healthy lunches for her kids. She cares about dating. She's single now. She wants to get out there. She wants advice, she wants to know how to work the apps. She wants to know all kinds of stuff, right? She wants to know how to be a mindful parent.

She might want to know how to make money as a mommy. Blogger.

Exactly. Exactly, dude. So I think just challenging anybody listening or watching, it's like you.

Thank.

Think of your person as a 360 person human being.

Amber, I'm so excited right now because I, I mean this is, this is such a. I, I'm having a brain gasm. But it's such an obvious braingasm that I'm doing one of these. Right. If I know that I can monetize a lead on the back end with other people's stuff and not just my own, it depressurizes my offer from having to be the thing that people buy in order to pay for my traffic and my team.

Yes.

So what this does is if I've got five strong relationships behind me that I feel good about promoting and that also promote my stuff. Now I can be really aggressive on the customer acquisition or lead acquisition side because even if they don't buy my stuff, I'm going to send them other offers that could help offset the traffic cost.

Yes.

That could help offset the cost of operations. And by me doing that, I'm doing a give to the other relationships. They're going to promote my stuff which offsets any loss that I have in acquisition too.

Yeah.

So it's making me realize I could be a lot more aggressive if I'm supported by these relationships.

Yes.

If I, if I don't try and be a hero and do it all myself.

And let me add something to that that you want to think about. Real tactical stuff. So one is having somebody on your thank you page that's the hottest traffic that you have, the hottest customer that you have, so you can give. Let's say that, let's say this is the example, it's supplement. And you don't offer high ticket weight loss coaching. You could have something on there where upon point of purchase you say something like, hey, listen, I know that you might be on your journey of losing weight and I want to support you. Just so you know, one of the things that works best for losing weight is both taking this amazing supplement that's proven, et cetera, et cetera, all the accolades. And also having a coach to walk you through that because you're a new customer of ours, you get a free call with a certified blah, blah, like, you know, weight loss, nutritional macro coach, whatever that's happening right now. By the way, a bunch of my clients and then that high ticket weight loss coach is going to come in, talk to them for free. They may buy, they may not, but they're going to give them some real benefit and Real value of talking to somebody like that. But if they do purchase, for example, say it's a $5,000 three month coaching program. Program, you've got $2,500 from that because it's usually 50% that they give, right? So now that one customer that bought, let's just say your nitrous oxide thing, right. Are now worth $2,500 plus X. So now you're spending a lot more. The one thing that I want people to be cautious of when they look at this is you have to make sure that those partners are good at two things. One is obviously the product itself and the delivery of it is amazing. Let's just assume that's true. But the second thing is that they have to be good at marketing because.

It has to be good at marketing.

Your partners need to be good at marketing because here's where people get stuck. They'll be like, oh, my buddy makes a great greens powder. Amazing. Let's partner with him. Well, your, your great greens buddy has not figured out any funnels, any ads. It's not working with influencers. His product is just sitting there. You want to be able to do this with people at your level or above so that they can send you.

I have an asterisk to this.

Yes.

So some of my best relationships have been people who are really good audience builders but are terrible at marketing. I'm thinking about one example. A friend of mine named Steve. And Steve promoted one of my offers back when I was doing the VSL affiliate before I was in the Amazon game or the physical product game. And he had a blog and he almost never promoted anything. I wrote the emails for him or helped him craft it. He sent the email and he made more money in the next six hours than he had the previous month. He said, what have I been doing with my life?

Right?

He then freaked out and thought, is Ryan secretly a scam? This is working too well. Got on a plane, flew to Austin and I was like, let's allay your fears.

Right? Look, I'm just really good at copywriting, though.

I'm gonna take care of these people. This is the offer. Here's the sequence they went through. This is, this is the product. It's okay.

This just works.

I'm actually good at this. And he became a great strategic contact. Now though, that takes more work. It took more effort, but it was a great long term relationship that we built.

And that's an outlier, I think, right? Because if you're good at building an audience at a certain point you have to be good at marketing, too. Yeah, that's true. So I think that is important. Like, you're building an audience because you're doing something. Right. And part of that is the marketing of it. How you're writing or what you're talking about. Like, you hit a vein somewhere. Right. So those people do exist and definitely work with them. But when I'm talking about people that are going to offset the pressure that you're under in this example. Financially, Financially, it's got to be somebody that's fair. Right. That has to be accurate.

That's. That's. That's fair.

That's fair. And that's what I'd be looking at, is I would have a checklist if I were you, or if it was a client. What I'd be looking at is, first, let's start with all of the. The things that our customers care about that we do not offer, that are complimentary. And then let's go out and. And research and find Best in class, both in terms of their product, but also what does their affiliate program look like? How much are they offering? What's their customer service like? Because that's gonna be important. If I send out for them. I need their customer service to be responsive. There's a problem. Right. So just kind of going through there and opting into their email list, just like I talked to you about. Like, opt in their email list, see how often they're promoting. Are they promoting six times a day? 16 different offers? That's not somebody that I really want to partner with. Right. But if they're doing it in an elegant way, I'm seeing that they have a strategy. I'm saying, okay, they're promoting this one person, this one. They have one type of bread that they promote, and it's the world's most expensive bread. Okay, that's work.

Barbara is going to love this podcast. Right.

But it'd be different if they're promoting 17 different types of bread. Right, Right. So that's what I'm saying. Like, if you want to offset the pressure, it has to one, serve your core avatar deeply or your core avatars. And they have to be able to pay you enough for that traffic, that referral, that client, for it to make financial sense for you. And they also need to take care of the customer. So whenever I'm doing this behind the scenes, here's a secret most people don't know is whatever the amount of money is on that affiliate program that they say they pay out, all the best affiliate programs can Pay you more on volume. So that would be the first thing I do is like go out and try to negotiate for my clients, like a better rate to get them onto our thank you pages or to get them into our first 14 days of the autoresponder or to do regular promotions for them. We need more. Right? We need more because it needs to make financial sense or else we're going to swap you out with another greens powder that both delivers on the product and is good and has better marketing and has more traffic and pays me more. So there are times where the relationship, we're thinking through the relationship, but it also has to make financial sense.

Yeah, it makes sense. So, Amber, this is going to make me very uncomfortable.

Okay, great.

I'm going to give you the opportunity to convince me why I should promote more of other people's stuff.

So the world's most expensive bread did not convince you of that already?

They're a, they're a client.

I love the product.

I had no financial incentive to be able to. That was just this, you giving me, but.

I'm joking, but are you talking about for your book or Capcom?

In the last 10 years, I think I've promoted three affiliate offers.

How'd it go for you?

Two of them. Two of them went really, really well. One of them, eh, fine.

And why did you not keep doing any more of those then? What was the hesitation for me?

One, well, the two that worked out really well, I promoted multiple times. But over a 10 year period, they're the only people that I've promoted. And those are still good relationships, still strong relationships. But the offer felt tired to keep going over and over again. One of them has a new spin on it just recently that I might put into an autoresponder or something. But I don't, I don't, I don't know. I don't. I feel so protective of my audience that it feels like a. A threat to the trust unless I really believe in that person. So you, I'm inviting you to convince me or tell me how I could think about this differently.

Okay. I love a challenge. Well, I, I would say this one, I wouldn't want to push you on anything in that sense because I know how deeply you do care. This is not lip service. I actually know this to be true. So.

I, I still would want to dig a little bit under the hood on like what your end goal is. Is your end goal to pick people to promote so that you can take some pressure off of you? What is the end goal of you Doing that, is it for you to increase your profit? Right? Like what is it? Is it so that you can get more people into the capitalism ecosystem? Like what is it? So I think from there we can kind of remove all of it.

Honestly, my personal goal would be to build relationships with people that I would feel good promoting my stuff because I actually don't feel good about a lot of people even promoting my stuff is the way that they position it as like a get rich quick or a fast money scheme. So I would, I would like to build relationships with people who feel good about promoting my stuff. And from a financial perspective, I would like to have sources of revenue that depressurized our sales process.

Okay.

So if the company is operating, you know, in the black without any sales, it takes a lot of pressure off of me to put more leads into our funnels. And it depressurizes the sales team from hard closing people, which is not the experience that I want people to have. And we're actually changing some things about our model so that that is almost completely gone. But that happens sometimes. Like a salesperson gets hungry and they get commission breath.

Right?

And they.

People no one wants to get onto, you know, a call with somebody, that's commission breath, they want to be served. And that is the, that's the environment that I try to cultivate. And relationships might be one of the way to depressurize that process. So that's what I'm going for.

It's so interesting that you say that because you and your community do not. Hard pressure. I've seen hard pressure. So I think, I'm sure that the commission breath exists, exists in every sales organization. And that is true. But I just think you're probably from my outside perspective, you know, I've been on the back end of over 2500 companies in the last eight years. Billion dollar centimillion just starting seven figures. I've been everywhere. Your organization does not have that high pressure sales cycle that I've seen. You do have to make the invitation and you do have to ask for it, but I think from top down you don't have that. So I'm just, I just want to note that because I have seen high pressure and that's not the case, but.

I'm aware we don't. I'm afraid to compromise in any direction that takes us.

Let's go to the compromise part because what I want you to know and I want everyone else to know that's thinking about doing this is a common fear that I hear is you can set the terms of how people talk about you and your brand. You can set the terms. So as you start to scale it, you should have brand terms. You should have clear outlines of what you can and cannot say. You should have pre written stuff that they can use. Right? You should have things that you cannot say. You cannot say this is a get rich quick scheme. You cannot say that you can make X amount of dollars in 30 days. Like you can't say any of this. Here's what you can say. You can lead that, that example. But I think you, you don't have to do that. If you do this, I bet you right now you could do power bait. You could write down seven people that have audiences at your size or above or maybe a little bit smaller, but really engaged. That would really help generate more lead flow into your business. Whether it's them promoting 12 months to 1 million and you have that funnel kicking off, whether it's I'm promoting the podcast like whether them promoted the 1%. There are going to be people I'm sure right now that pop up in your mind, they're like, man, if I had them promoting me on a regular basis then my audience would grow and that would then feed more leads into the sales team, the right lead flow. The other part of that is if they're serving the same customer avatar that you are, so are they serving entrepreneurs? Because I think that's the other part for you that's really important. It's not that, just that they have a big audience, that they have an audience of entrepreneurs. Right? Then there's another layer. They have audience of entrepreneurs that want to start an e commerce business or already have one and they need help getting to the next level. So now we're going through, through, through, right? So I would start thinking about that and like making sure that you feel good about those people, making sure that they serve your core avatar and then you going out and being like, hey man, here's my big goal is like I see that you have this product or this incubator or this service. I think it'd be really valuable for my community. I'd love to know how we can set up a joint venture that feeds, you know, clients and leads and customers back and forth. And the reason why I'm coming to you is because I've watched you over the last five years and I've seen what you've done. Here's what stood out to me and here's what I could bring to the table and I think we can serve more People together and have more impact. I don't think you need to go out and get 100,000 affiliates, promote your stuff. And now you're worried you can. You can try it with the other seven. Right.

What I'm processing as you're saying this is, is if I think about being on podcasts and people that I'd be happy to have on my podcast and have books that I could promote.

Yeah.

This is. They might also have programs, but as soon as you said podcasts and books, I started to think about other people.

Yeah.

And all of them have things that they sell, too, that I would feel pretty good about.

Yes.

And. And that was. For some reason, in my mind, I'm thinking about promoting their shit means selling their course, right?

No, but as soon as I started.

To think about promoting their content and promoting their book and yes, also maybe promoting some of their stuff.

Yeah.

It was like, oh, those are the people that I actually want to work with.

And I put some gasoline on them and push them to, like, a. A Legion, like a great. Like a killer ebook or something awesome at the end so that you can keep building your community and actually track that. Because it's hard when you're just doing podcasts. Right. You don't. You can sometimes see the bump. But, like, get their email address. Right. So now you can get them into your ecosystem, but have it be something awesome and pay them a dollar, two bucks a week. Because how much is it going to cost you to do your funnel? Right. Like, pay them for that? Because I think that's a good idea. Big problem.

That's a really good idea.

Good at this one, right?

Yeah, that's what I mean. I'm. I'm. I'm just milking that because I think a lot of people are going to miss that one. Dude, it's so important you pay people per lead.

Yes.

Even if it's a dollar per lead, it's less than you're going to pay Facebook. It's going to be endorsed traffic. The promoter is going to be thrilled because it pays per lead.

Dude, very few people. That's what I'm saying. That's why I think people put such a strain on relationships. It's like, oh, I have to do this thing for free. Like I said, spend all this money building time, building up my thing. Like, yes, I love Ryan, but dang, like, you know, it's like, that's why.

I'm not gonna mail you to my list. I'm gonna spend 10 years. We know each other six months.

Right.

I I'll pay a dollar a lead.

Done.

Okay.

Different, right?

You know, our. Our mutual friend Justin Goff told me that he ran an experiment or was running an experiment. He was like, what if I just paid people 10 bucks a lead, dude, to promote my email list? Of course I was like, that. That's. That's a really damn good idea. From endorsed traffic from people who are recommending you onto your primary distribution channel. That's really freaking smart, dude.

I'm telling you, you can do that, right? Like, a dollar lead for something like what you're offering is considered a little low on the spectrum, but I still think it's a good thing to test. You'll probably want to end up at least 2, if not 3, 4, 5, just given how specific your type of avatar is. But I think a dollar per lead at the beginning is amazing because then you're not losing your shirt, right? And you can then look at, like, the quality of that lead flow. And then what I do is once you identify the person who's blowing the doors off, we figure out how we do more with them. I'd want to create a moat around that person. I'd be like, all right, so now I'm on your podcast. How do I sponsor your podcast? How do I get onto your email newsletter? How do I get as a sponsor of your email newsletter? How do I get on your stage? How do I, like, put a moat around it? Like, hey, you're sending me a hundred great leads a month. How do we get to 200? Maybe I jump you up to $2. As long as you're over a hundred a month, right? Like, I want to build a moat. I want to be the guy that's teaching them how to scale and exit their e commerce companies and no one else, right? So really starting to think through that. Because there's some people who like, I'll read everything on their email newsletter, but I don't listen to their podcasts, right? I don't go to the live events. And there's a lot of people like that. Just because they like your email doesn't. Your newsletter doesn't mean that they're on every other entry point. And that's the same. I mean, think about that. Like, the people that you really like, you're probably not following. You're maybe following one to five people on every single thing that they do, or they put out everybody else. You're like, right, but that's what I'm saying. When you're building a moat and you find those people that are really great affiliates for you. You don't want them to go to somebody else. You want to own that audience. And that requires being generous with your time, with your money. And also, what's really cool that I didn't mention before about having, let's say a power of eight or having these other brands and creators, et cetera, promoting you, is that what you find is we start sharing what's working and what's not working. Right. So I like to take and do like a mastermind at the end of the year with clients with their top affiliates.

That's good.

That way we can sit down and, and open up the kimono and like really help each other be like, listen, man, what's really working for me is working with Chris. Right. That's what's really been working with me. Just giving you an. And here's why. Here's how much has increased my views, my engagement, my et cetera, et cetera. Right. Like he's working. This other vendor that we hired isn't. It's been a nightmare. Let's. I know he's big in the industry, but like, here's what happened to me. Don't hire him. Or hey, you know what? Here's what's really working for us. In the past, it used to be webinars. Now it's creating these like 45 page super in depth lead magnets that are working better for us. And here's the traffic and here's all the testing that we did. Now we're sharing and we're a true kind of mastermind community. We all serve the same avatar. So we can take a lot of that learning and apply it. Like that's what I mean about not being lonely. There's so much more value than just the money. The money's there.

And you're. The way I'm hearing you talk about is in kind of like a marketing context. Yeah. But one of the things that a lot of brands will overlook is if you bring in your affiliates, the influencers, the people that you want to build a relationship with into a mastermind setting will blow them away.

Blow them away. Yes.

I teach this thing called the owner's model. And part of that owner's model is that you partner with audiences and people will say, well, how do you create the equity? Deal with those influencers and those audiences? And there are cool structures that I can show them, but half of it is just getting in the room with them. Yeah, give. Bring them in, show them a great time and invite a couple people to have Equity in your company, the whole company grows.

Exactly. And teach them something that they don't know. Right. They're really good at building an audience. But a lot of them, in my experience, are not great at running a business.

Correct. They're broke, they're.

Right. So now you're helping them make money. You're getting them equity into companies. They're starting to understand their value. Right. You're helping them grow their business acumen. And then they're helping you by driving a lot of customers, being loyal to you. Like, you know, they're not going to go to anyone else, they're not going to promote anyone else's expensive bread if you've taught them. Right. How to, like, get in there. I'm just telling you. Right. But this goes to the core of taking care of your relationships. I just don't think people think that way. Like I tell my clients all the time, like, we. If you're worried about people leaving, because if you, if you pull back the layer of robust affiliate program that's working at scale, what you'll see is there's a lot of inactives and a lot of top affiliates that are ghosting and no longer working with them anymore. And that's actually one of the biggest drains and suck on a program. Everybody wants more, more affiliates, but they have existing holes in their affiliate program in terms of the customer service that they're providing for these top affiliates and influencers. Like, your friend hasn't updated his funnel in forever while your audience is growing. Right. You could send it and still make money, but if he's not updating his stuff and giving it a facelift, that hurts me and I'm going to disengage. If you have a new affiliate manager in there who's never talked to me and I have no relationship and you haven't called me in forever and you've decreased my CPAs. I'm going to leave. Like, there needs to be that human element inside of the affiliate program where I look at every single one of my top affiliates and I'm like, I want to make sure, number one, that you never leave me. So we need to figure out how to talk to you regularly, make sure.

That we're getting sounded really close to a therapist session right there. How do I make sure you never leave me, dude? Unless you got a business more money.

Well, that's always the instinct, right? Every business owner that calls, like, I know how to get them to not leave. Pay them more money. That's all they ever want. That's not true. Yeah, that's not true. Yes, money helps. Of course it does.

It's the. It's. You know what it is? It's the same psychology as having the cheapest product. It's a way to stand out and get a customer. But it's the laziest way.

Totally.

Did I pay? Paying more. Offering more. I will pay you to this. Even if it's. I'll sponsor your podcast. It's a good way to get in the door when there's no other way to get in the.

Totally.

But it is the laziest way to keep a person and to keep a relationship.

Yeah, man. You solving a key problem for them is a huge thing.

That's right.

You bringing them into new opportunities is a huge thing. You answering. I've never, I never understood this, why I created a whole training program for affiliate managers. Because when I was one, I. Everyone's, you know, chip for lunch, dude. I would run circles around them. I'd be doing two, 10, $20 million launches and everybody else be doing 300,000. Why? Because I take the time to get to know my affiliates. They're loyal to me. I call them when I don't need something, when I don't need something to check in on them. I'm liking their stuff on Facebook. I'm. When I talk to them, I'm like, hey, I saw your daughter just had a birthday. It was so cute. Love to see her.

You're building an actual relationship, dude.

I'm building a relationship with them. And maybe my what I can offer as a CPA may not be as high as somebody else, but they like me and I answer their emails when they email me. This is your all commission sales team. Usually is your affiliate like people. Right. So the other brand, the influencer, they're working usually on all commission. Yes. Of course, there's hybrid deals where you're paying them to create the marketing as a flat fee. And then you're also giving them CPAs and all that stuff. Right, there's that, but usually they're all commission, which is why your marketing has to be good, right? Not just the product. The marketing has to be good enough to get somebody to take an action and a buy. But like, at the end of the day, dude, like, you can go really far and make millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year by treating people well and making sure that they don't disengage and leave. Because that's the biggest killer to affiliate programs. I was just talking to somebody two days ago that was doing 5 million a year in his affiliate program, has a $20 million year, business dropped down to $2 million. And I'm like, oh, no, why did that happen? What changed? She was like, well, we decided we didn't need an affiliate manager, and so we let them go. And now my VA from the Philippines is doing everything. And I'm like, well, that you get what you pay for the va. Unless you're going to send the VA from the Philippines to events on your behalf to be talking to your affiliates the way that they need to be talked to, that has marketing knowledge to understand, hey, these assets are getting fatigued. They need a personalized landing page. Like, their numbers are going down. Like, we haven't heard from them, they're ghosting. Then you get that result, right? And at the end of the day, it's about having somebody who has the personality, the experience, and the understanding to get stuff done.

We're, we're, we're starting to get into the weeds and we, we need to wrap. So I want to bring this out into, like, some action things that, that I wrote down. So number one, I'm thinking about if you have a brand or you're, you're building an audience, which everybody who's in the 1% or the incubators is trained to do. Everybody who's building a brand should be doing. Everyone who was an entrepreneur should be doing in some capacity. You should be building relationships with five to 10 people that are complimentary to.

Your space at your size or above.

And I mean, even, even if all you did was if you have a brand or a podcast, for goodness sake, and you reached out to people who were complimentary to that, if that was all you did, you would grow a lot faster.

You would.

Number two, if they have offers that you feel good about promoting, it's a way to pay for overhead and offset your acquisition costs. Number three, my big BrainGasm was that when you do that, you can be more aggressive with acquisition because you've depressurized your own sales process. And number four, the way that you build those relationships is actually being a trustworthy person who over delivers and does what they say that they're going to do and goes and gets in person facetime with people that you want to do business with.

Yes. And I'll also add one thing to that, which is on average, 90% of the time, your, your promotions from an influencer or a brand, they're going to convert at a much higher rate than coming in cold from Facebook or Instagram. So the conversion rate usually 90% of the time is going to be significantly better. The stick rate is also typically going to be significantly better. Even if it's one more month on subscription or three more months on subscription. It's usually happening because if Ryan said it was good, if Tim Ferriss said it was good, if Andrew Huberman said it was good, I need to give it a little bit of time to make sure that it works for me. Whereas I feel stupid if I bought it off of a really good Instagram ad. You know, chargeback refund didn't work for me. I'm done. Right? So I just think that that's another reason to think through. Yes, that can cover my overhead and cover some of my spend, depressurize it. But on average, the. The other side of it is it's usually not as scalable as having a credit card that can just be pinged all the time. But I see it every single day. And I want everyone to know that you can do hundreds of thousand dollars a year, you can do millions of dollars a year, you can do $100 million plus a year. I see it every single day with just affiliates. There is a lot of scale in that. I wouldn't recommend you to only do that. I do this for a living and I still get nervous when I look at the back end of someone's business. I'm like, man, you're 100 affiliate. That. That makes me nervous. Right. But it can and should be at least 20 to 30% of your business and make it a really stable arm of your business that you never have to worry about if you get kicked off of Instagram or deplatformed in some way.

You don't create a lot of content online. So how do people find you?

You can find me on Instagram probably Amber Marie Spears is my Instagram. Or go to forooms. Mastermind.com jump into our email list. Also you can find my East 5th Avenue.com which is my affiliate marketing education company. But you can also just email me amber@east5th avenue.com and I always answer, amber.

Good to see you.

Good to see you too.

Happy birthday.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

I'm in this game because I want more partnerships. I create content because I want to have more connections with my followers, with my customers, with my partners. That is what I am optimizing for.

The deeper the connections that I have.

With customers, the more my business is going to win. That requires that I think about them first. That requires that I be a leader, that my Community and my customers need it means that I build connections with people that can support them because ultimately I want to build partnerships with people that are building cool things. And the long tail of that is not that they subscribe to a channel, although you should do that. And it's not just that they buy a membership or join a community or come to an event. It's so we do business together and we all win in the long term. There are people in our community that start out at zero, build million dollar businesses, have an exit, and then come back and invest in our fund where we empower the next group of million dollar case studies. That's how I want to be remembered in this space. Because if we can build community and connections, then the entire pie gets bigger. One of the misconceptions about capitalism is that it is I win and you lose. That idea is ludicrous. Real capitalism is I win and you win and we win more together than we ever could have if we had done this on our own. It is the active practice of service to other people and through other people. That's how we're making the pie bigger. It's through relationships and connections. And I want to be remembered as an entrepreneur who built deep connections with people who built really cool projects together. And we were all financially rewarded as a result of those connections and those relationships. If you resonate with that, hit the subscribe button. Get plugged into what we do here@capitalism.com because we're the best in the world at empowering entrepreneurs to build million dollar businesses, to have a multimillion dollar exit and to build a business that they're proud of and then create partnerships and relationships for the next project with people that they want to do business with. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism.com thanks for watching.

And now a quick word from Tristina.

Tim, one of our members from the capitalism.com community.

We joined the incubator because we knew the things that we didn't know. So we didn't know E commerce at all. And we needed that. We needed somebody to tell us where to go and what to do right now. Now we are on track to hit the 3 million mark this year. However, I think next year is just.

Going to double that.

We have so many plans for the future and just executing the plan that the incubator brought us, it was fantastic. It was step by step, what to do, how to execute it, and then if we did fumble the ball, we had somebody there to help us through it and walk us through our plans. For the future, of course. This year we have 3 million and then next year 6. And we're hoping to get to 10 million within the next three to four years. Freedom is everything to our family. I homeschool and I love that our family can wake up together every morning. Nobody's running off to school, nobody's running off to work. If I had to work at like a 9 to 5 job, there's no way that I could also homeschool. I get to set my own hours and they're not as many hours as a normal job would be. So that's really fantastic. But again, freedom is everything for our family and I don't. It's strange that our kids don't know any other way. Mom and dad are home every day. I would describe the capitalism community as family. You get so many tips from people. We give tips and I think that we're going to start to work with a lot of our fellow community members and everyone really is rooting for everybody else. Nobody is like in competition at all. Like everyone is everyone's biggest cheerleaders.

If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over@capitalism.com Inc. That's capitalism.com income.