Money Making Expert: How to Turn Attention into $$$

Automation is to your time, what compounding interest is to your money.

If you have ever wanted to grow on social media, to be seen as an expert in what you do, to leverage audience, to make more money, to get more sales, and to figure out how the biggest names in the world actually got there, this interview is for you. This is an interview with Rory Vaden, who is a multiple times New York Times best selling author himself. And he has created what I would say is the formula for four growing online, growing audience, and then figuring out how do you make more money in your business and your life once you become an expert.

When you have a genuine passion for helping other people, and if you can obsess about it the way that Dave's obsessed about getting people out of debt, the way that Louis obsesses about helping people overcome self doubt, your world starts to change and you start to change the world of people around you.

You have a lot of systems and ideas for how you get people to change.

Think in frameworks, think about it like a rocket. Your personal brand should be the sort of side boosters that you use to get the business off the ground. But then once you get it launched out into space, then your personal brand falls off and the business can just sort of follow a trajectory and live on without you.

Interesting.

The best form of marketing in the world is a.

This is the Big Deal podcast and I'm Cody Sanchez. This interview is really interesting. It's hyper tactical. If you, you don't want to learn about how to make more money online and you don't want to learn about how to grow online, you're going to hate this interview. But if you do like that, I would sit down, grab a pen, listen up, maybe listen to it twice because this man has not only done this for himself, but for many, many others. Without further ado, I want to bring you my dear friend Rory and I want to get into it. So when I was thinking about writing my book and then I was thinking about marketing my book, there was sort of one human I called all the time, which was you. And we talked about, man, you know, how do I get on the right stages? How do I make this go really viral? You know, who are the people that are behind sort of the biggest names in the world? And your name obviously came up and we've shared many a stage now across the country. But you know, today I thought we could start.

By the way, that book went New York Times bestseller, baby, didn't it? It sure did.

And you said we were going to too. I Was like, I don't know. Is it?

It was. It was awesome. I'm proud of you, dude.

Well, thanks. You helped a lot. We many a late night text and we were joking, but I hate voice. You love voice notes, so I had to outlaw them.

Conflict.

I know. Exactly. Except they were so good that I had to listen to them, which was so annoying for me too.

And then you. I learned a lot because you were like, hey, I need you to communicate with me in writing. And I was like, okay, that's good. I will write it. I will write it out for you.

Cody is honest. Cody is too honest. But where I thought we could start for people today was I believe that the Internet and attention is the most powerful weapon that you have today in the 21st century. And if you have money, you can buy attention, but if you don't have money, you can't buy attention. And so for people today, I was kind of thinking, if we could break this down from let's say right now you have no audience, no followers, where would you start?

Yeah, I mean, you have to start by changing how you think about online. I mean, I think when we talk about personal branding, people, their mind goes crazy to like TikTok and, and. And algorithms and brand guidelines and colors and logos and fonts. The way that we define it is that personal branding is simply the digitization of your reputation. So what I would want, if you're just starting out, what I would say is remember that this is reputation. It is as old as time. Like, what matters more than the number of followers you have is the depth of trust that your followers have with you. And so people get all freaked out about, like, who they're going to be on camera and what they're going to say. And it's like, be who you are in real life. Be someone that is an expert. Be someone who adds value to people to that. Be someone who adds value to people's lives and. And build trust first and foremost.

Love it. So if we were going to get super tactical.

Yeah.

So first we got to start out with getting an online following is really just reputation increase. Right. But if somebody came to me and they were like, I want to grow my personal brand fast and I want to follow your system. Rory, what would be the first couple of steps that you would tell them? Do you have like a steps 1 through 10?

Sure, let's. Here's what I would say. Don't start with why start with who? So I love Simon Sinek and. But when you're building a personal brand, what matters most is being clear on who you're talking to. The sooner once you're clear on who you're talking to, every other downstream decision becomes clear when. What are their problems? What content will attract them? What can I sell to them? How much can they afford? What do they need? Where are they? How do I reach them? If you are unclear on your who, every other decision becomes fuzzy. Like what do I say? What do they want to hear? What topics, what. It's if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. So you have to get crystal clear on who you're talking to. Now the shortcut on this, to figure out who is your who. What we realized is that for all of us, you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. You are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. That's the fastest path to get clear on your who. And once you nail that, now all of a sudden I go, I can serve that person in the deepest way. And now all of a sudden you have a, you have a chance to make content that breaks through the noise. So that's the first place you start with who.

That's so true. Which is basically just like in business, you build an avatar, you build your digital avatar, who's going to be the person you sell things to. And if you're selling attention, it's the same exact thing, right?

Absolutely.

And the biggest problem I think most founders have is they think, oh, it's my product, you know, I need to sell this coffee. The coffee's not selling because the coffee is not perfect enough. But often your problem is actually you don't know who you're selling to and so you never can.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, look what you're doing, I mean you, you are, you are serving the person you once were. You're teaching people how to do all of the things. Same with us, right? What are we doing? We're helping experts, entrepreneurs, speakers, authors, coaches, whatever. Because we've been in this space our entire career. That's the shortcut.

Let me guess, you've got one tool for email, one for SMS and another for forms. Maybe a separate dashboard for analytics. And somehow you're still not sure if anything's working. That's I think the reality for most e commerce brands. Bloated tech stacks that eat time, wreck your margins and require a full time ops person just to function. Omnisend changes that it's a single platform where email, SMS sign up forms, automations, segmentations, analytics, all live in one clean dashboard. You get powerful tools without the learning curve or the price creep. You can launch campaigns in minutes, not hours. And you can buy customer journeys that trigger automatically based on behavior and the data. It tells you what's working, what's not, and where to double down. Whether you're running lean or managing a growing team, Omnisend makes your marketing operate like a real system, not a to do list. So if your stack feels like duct tape and prayer, it's time to upgrade. Omnisend was built for brands that are serious about scale. So after you've figured out your who, what is next? If you want to grow online, be.

Able to answer this one question in one word. What problem do you solve for that person? If you look at some of the biggest personal brands in the world, you know, I think of like Brene Brown. Brene Brown owns the topic of shame. She has studied shame for decades and she became one of the world's leading thinkers, one of the most influential people in the world because she owns that topic. You look at Dave Ramsey, Dave Ramsey owns the topic of debt. Like he owns that. He owns that word. This is part of how I broke through the wall originally in our first company, all I did was study procrastination was the psychology of getting people to do things they didn't want to do. Right. My, my first book was Take the Stairs and it was just a metaphor for how to get yourself to do the stuff you hate doing. Brand Builders Group. Now the word that we solve is obscurity. All we do is help people become more wealthy and well known. So most personal brands cannot speak with a level of clarity about what is the problem they solve for people. And in order for people to pay attention, I have to be able to solve a problem for them or at least have to be useful for them. So I would try to narrow that down to one word. And then I would also make a list of maybe 52 questions that your prospect has about the problem that you solve for them. And I would start systematically addressing them. And I'm just trying to go, how can I be so useful that they can't ignore me? How can I be so valuable that they have to pay attention? You know, when I got introduced to you that it's like when you meet high profile people, you can't just jump in and sell them stuff. The goal should be how can I be so useful they have to pay attention to me. At least that's the goal. That's our strategy.

It's actually so true. A lot of times people will Say, how do you get a mentor? How do you get a mentor? And I think the answer to how you get a mentor is exactly that. Make yourself so useful that you become so valuable to them for $0 that they end up eventually wanting to pay you a lot of zeros. And it is this weird flip. And I think a lot of people struggle with that early on because they're like, well, I don't know anything. How am I going to be useful to a Rory? Right. Or how am I going to be useful to a Dave Ramsey? But they don't realize that all of us, we have actually just massively more needs. The more successful you become, the more holes you have to fill. And so anywhere that you find some curiosity for a super famous person or for a super successful person and you think, God, I just want to go down this rabbit hole. And I looked at their website and I found all the spots that I didn't understand and I went to their social media and I created like three ideas for videos that they didn't have and I just gave them the scripts. It's almost like this upfront work gives all of this back end opportunity.

Absolutely. And I would say philosophically, that's another thing that, that the best personal brands in the world do is they, they give first, they serve first, and they allow the money to show up second. It's like paying in rears versus paying in forwards. Right? So there's some services, we pay and then we get the service. But in the online world, it's like I have to automate trust at scale. I have to be, I have to. One of our, one of our, our mantras that we say is save the best for first. Save the best piece of content you have for the very next thing that you teach. Like the, the, you don't have to be scared about giving away all your good stuff and, and then no one buying. You have to be scared about not giving away anything good enough that nobody ever comes back. So you have to always push yourself to be like again. It's just that it's that value throttle and it's like, how can I increase the throttle here on adding value to everyone around me? And that applies, I think, offline and online. But I mean, the reason people pay attention to you is your content is so freaking good. It's so useful. And I think when you're picking your content strategy, I mean, high level, it's one of the three E's, we call it the three E's. You're either entertaining and I'm not that entertaining. But some of you are. Some of you can be. You have encouraging. So you can be inspiring and uplifting. And I try to be a little bit about of that. But for most of our clients, it's educational and it's going, what can I teach? And everyone thinks, oh, I don't have anything to teach. And you go, unless you're serving the person you once were. Then all of a sudden, all of us are qualified to teach because we've experienced the pain, we've overcome the obstacle, we've walked through the setback. And now all of a sudden, that's all the credibility that I need.

Yeah, it's such a good point. You know, and it's, you know, one of my mentors said to me, when you get in rooms with people who have more zeros than you, they can actually see into your future because they've been there. And so it's the same idea of, you know, I remember the first time before I was making a million dollars a year, before the business was making eight figures, before the business hit nine figures. I just got lucky in being in rooms where other people already had the business that I wanted. And, you know, it was wild, is because I got to sit next to, you know, John, who had a business that was already doing, you know, $8 million a year back when mine was doing a million dollars a year, John basically said, oh, here's going to be the next five issues that you have. And so, because I knew that since he had already been through it, I got to steal his 10,000 hours. I got to compress seven years into one year from his interaction. And so it is. It's a real value, I think, that people don't realize that if you have something to share from your historical lessons, you know, you're doing the world a solid when you put it out there. And I didn't realize that at first because I thought people who taught me just couldn't do. We've all heard that adage. And I also thought, well, God, if it works so well, why are you telling other people? You know, why wouldn't you just go do it yourself? And I remember seeing like, a clip. We could actually play the clip here, which is from Mark Cuban. And his clip basically said, if they're telling you about how to do it on the Internet, it doesn't work, because if it worked, they just go do it. And I thought that was so funny. Sounds great. Except it's wrong. Because what actually happens is when you give more, you get way more in return, you know, why do you think some of the richest men in the world, Ray Dalio, for instance. Instance. Are out telling his theory? Because he gets more clients from it, he gets more deals from it, he gets more hires from it. So I think it's super, super powerful to do all of this.

Yeah, well, and I would, I would purport that there's another massive piece of the transaction that you don't hear enough about, which is, yeah, you get money. Yeah, you get followers. Yeah, you get influence. The other thing you get is significance. Yeah, you get purpose. You. There is nothing like the feeling you get when you help somebody else succeed. Right? And you go, well, if you're so rich, why don't you go do it? And it's like, well, there's a point where you go, I'm not playing because I need more money. I get my thrills. Like, no kidding. When I walked into your office downstairs, the thing I was so excited to see was right next on your wall is a picture of your book cover that says New York Times bestseller. I get, I'm so much more excited when a client has a level of success than even with our own these days because you climb that ladder enough times and you realize it's great and it's, and it's, it's worth doing, but it's still, there's always, you're moving the goalpost. There's always, there's always someone bigger than you, something better. There's, there's, there's something you know ahead. But when you help somebody succeed, it's not just, it's a feeling you get. It creates context and value for your life. And I think that's what not enough people are talking about with the Internet. And the other thing is you also don't need to have millions of followers to make millions of dollars. One thing that the people watching this need to need to understand is very few people are going to be you. Very few people are going to reach millions and millions and millions.

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The good news is you don't not everybody has to. It's actually lot. It tends to be easier for the average person to make more money by serving fewer people in a deeper way. Right. Than it is to serve lots of people in a very shallow way. It's. It's like you have to. Don't be so focused on the width of your reach that you overlook the depth of your impact. Because just because you have a cat video go viral and you get lots of followers, that doesn't mean that people are going to trust you and buy from you. Right. Just because a lot of people are watching doesn't mean they're going to give you their money. Now, you might make money from the platforms, but even that tends to be pennies on the dollar.

Yeah.

If I can serve a really small audience in a deep way, if I can be their favorite, if I can be their most trusted, if I can be the person that they look forward to consuming their post, that they don't just look in their feed, that they search my name, then I go, that person is likely to hire me and not just buy a $20 book, but someone who might spend a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars in a program for most people watching, that's the actual path to get rich. It's to serve a smaller audience in a deeper way. At least I think that's the more scalable way to do this.

Give some examples of that, because I totally agree with you and I think actually there's a lot of downsides to super Big reach, which is you have to almost water down your message slightly to go so wide. And it has a direct anti correlation to conversion, AKA getting people to buy things from you. And so there's plenty of people who make way more money in their businesses with much. With a much smaller audience set. But like, give some examples. Like, what would that be?

Well, one example would be us, honestly. So, you know, many of the. A lot of people have heard of our clients, right? You know, like Ed, my led and Lewis Howes and Amy Porterfield, like these really amazing clients that we work with. Lot of them have millions of followers. Yeah, we do not. Right. But we're generating multi eight figures and you're going, how? We only have a thousand customers. And it's actually because of a technique that we call fractal math. Have you. Okay, we need to talk about this. Okay, so for those of you that aren't numbers people, just stick with me for a second. I'll keep it simple. Fractal math is a strategy that we teach that says 10%. Your customers will invest at a level 10 times more than they just did if you give them more intimacy. So let's say you have a thousand customers and a $30 product. Okay, that's 30,000 in revenue. If you said, how can we double our business? Most people would think, go get another thousand customers. That's not wrong. But that is the most expensive way to double a business, because the most expensive customer is a new customer. So it's not that you shouldn't do that or that you can't do that or that it doesn't work. It does work, but there's another way to do it. The other way to do it is to use fractal math. So if you had a thousand people give you $30, fractal math says that 10% of those, which would be a hundred, will give you $300 if you give them a level up in intimacy. And then 10% of that, which is, by the way, that's another 30,000. And then 10% of those, which would be 10, would give you $3,000. And 10% of those, which would Be one, would give you $30,000. Here you've quadrupled the revenue without a single dollar in customer acquisition cost. That's what I mean by going deep. It's by serving a smaller audience in a deeper way. And again, there's nothing wrong with wanting to serve millions of people. But the very definition of reaching millions of people means you have to create content that is applicable to millions of people, which means it tends to be money, relationships, spirituality, health, politics. Right. Like. And you tend to kind of have to stay high level to play that game. It's hard to also serve people in a really, really deep way. It takes a lot of resources to play that, that with game. So anyways, it's just realizing that there is another way to do this. So you could be a chiropractor and go, I'm going to service a small number of clients in a deeper way. You could be a counselor and say, or say you're a marriage coach. It's one thing to have viral videos about marriage. You also can sell books. But you go, are there a few couples that I could truly counsel and go deep with? And you know, as intimacy increases, price increases.

Yeah, you know, it's wild. So basically, if you wanted to quadruple your business with one move, it would be that. And it's not so much more sophisticated than pricing, but it's really understanding that there's this correlation between pricing and intimacy when it comes to, let's say, knowledge products. You know what's wild? Over the last two weeks, you are the only reason this podcast has grown. I don't know if you're new here or you've been here for a while and y' all just started sharing more, but you were the only reason that we continue to climb the charts and hopefully provide more and more value for you. We just moved up from top 100 to top 50 in biz on Spotify, which is cool. So thank you for sharing with your friends and thank you for sharing with your employees and thank you for sharing in your black groups and social media and everywhere else. And if you like this podcast, please do send it to another human that you care about, because you are a big deal to me and I know they are a big deal to you too. So that's a beautiful thing to do. Thank you for sharing the pod. I know you have something special for anybody that's listening today if they want to go and get a free.

Yeah, absolutely. So. So we do. We work with people one on one. We work. We work in a very intimate way. So if anyone is listening to this and they. They feel the calling to go, I want to share my expertise with more people. I want to share my story with more people. If you go to freebrandcall.com Cody, you can request a call with our team and we do the first call with everybody for free.

And you'll tell them if they're. If it's not a good idea for them?

Yeah, I mean, the first thing, honestly, what we're going to want to do is we're just going to want to hear your story. Yeah, we want to go. Tell us your story. Where are you at on this journey? How fresh is this idea? Do you have a team? Do you not? And we can work with people at all different levels. Not everyone we work with is Cody Sanchez. Most of them are like, start starting.

You don't want more than one of those. She's a handful.

But the. Yeah. And we will tell people. We'll say, hey, we feel like we can help you.

Yeah.

And there's. There are certain people that we go, we can really, really help you. We call them mission driven messengers. It's the people who are not just trying to make money, not just trying to grow their reach. The people who are on an absolute crusade to go, this isn't, this is a calling for me. Those people, culturally, are going to be the best fit for us. And, you know, there's certain parts that we can really Help them with. And if we can't, we'll point them, we'll point them somewhere else.

I want to talk about. You've worked with, you know, a million different celebrities and sort of online influencers. You run the real, real gamut. Who do you, what celebrities do you think are nailing personal brand the best today?

Well, so I think I'll use the two of our most flagship clients would be Lewis Howes and Ed Mylett. And I'll tell you the story about Louis. Okay, so one of our central philosophies, I've said this already, is if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. When we first started working with Louis in 2018, we took him through an exercise that we call the revenue streams assessment. And we listed all these revenue streams on the board and he had 17 revenue streams. And he was like, really proud of that because he's like multiple streams of income. The problem is that he only had like 12 people on his team. That's a lot of revenue streams to manage with only 12 people. And so the only thing we ever did for Louis, I mean, Louis gives us a lot of credit publicly. Like, frankly, we have not done much for him. But the one thing that I did kind of do for Louis, I said, louis, what would happen if you shut all of this stuff down and just went all in on this podcast thing? Because for him at the time, he had about 30 million downloads and it took about eight years to get there. And it was, the podcast was a traffic source. He was really making money from courses at the time. But the reason I mentioned him, Cody, is because he had a mastermind that was generating multi seven figures in revenue. And in one conversation he told me, he said, look, my real vision is I want to impact 100 million people every week, week. And I said, well, if that's true and this Focus thing is true, what if you went all in on that? And he, out of one conversation, walked up and shut down a 2 million plus revenue, $2 million revenue stream in one conversation. And he went all in on the podcast. And what happened was he went from 30 million downloads in the next two years to 500 million downloads. That is a decision about purpose. That is, is a decision to stay true to what the vision is to say. I care more about making a difference than I do about making a dollar. Now, they're not mutually exclusive. Lewis has made plenty of money, but he did make a short term financial sacrifice to go all in on the vision. That is, I think, an epic story. That is not something that data could really tell you to do. It was an instinct, an instinctual decision. So I love that. The other person that I will use is. I'll use Ed Mylett. I've gotten a chance to know with Ed. We got to work with him a little bit over the years. Ed Mylett does not need any more freaking money.

No, he doesn't. I've been to his house. One of them. Yeah. They're very, very large.

They're very large and lavish and amazing. Why is Ed Byelet speaking on stages? He doesn't need the money. He's doing it because he actually gives a crap about helping people. And this is what I believe is the future of the online influencer. It's not just so much, what's the algorithm, how do I test the thumbnails, how do I split? Those are tactics that are important. They're like fundamentals of the business. But in a world of AI that solves those problems, that can generate thumbnails and can split, test things, and can optimize ad spends and landing page conversion, what's going to separate is actually the humanity of the messenger. The person who goes, I'm here because I actually give a crap about making your life better. By the way, this is the thing that attracted me to you, was that when I saw you, I saw someone who didn't need money. I know that you're financially motivated, which is great, but what really attracted me to you was that you said, I want to help Main Street America. I want to take the money. Not just take, steal money from people, but I want to teach the principles of Wall street, and I want to take that to the people on Main Street. I think the reason you succeed, Cody, is not just because you have a great team and you guys use data and you're smart and you're intelligent and you do all the systems. The reason you succeed is because people can tell that you care about helping them. You're actually on a crusade. And I would suggest that the more that AI levels the playing field of the tactics, the more that that human energy matters. That's what I'm drawn to, and that's what I think people are drawn to. So I go, who are the people that genuinely care? Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, another client of ours, When Dr. Lyon, we first started working together, I don't know she had a hundred thousand Instagram followers. I don't know what she has now, but it's many times over that I don't know how much money she's making. I know that she's impacting lots of people. And I know that when we first started working together that's what she cared about. Yeah, this is Dave Ramsey, right? I introduced you to Dave Ramsey. I've known Dave Ramsey since he had 100 employees. Like he has a thousand employees now. They do multi nine figures a year in annual revenue. There's a lot of people that don't like Dave Ramsey and there's plenty of things he says that are controversial. But Dave is on the freakin radio every day for three hours 30 years later, still why he didn't need money two decades ago. He's on the radio because he gives a crap about helping people be out of debt. Because he tells the story of what it was like to go bankrupt and have somebody come into his home and take his daughter's crib. Like that matters to him. That's what a mission driven messenger is. And I think that's the part that AI can't replace. That's the part that, that's the part that we can only feel as humans. And I think that that is the part that is going to matter more and more and more. And I'm not anti AI I love AI I'm just saying I think this is the part. I think this is the future. It's the, it's not the vanity stuff, it's the, it's the humanity stuff.

It's so true. Well, and even you know, I remember when I was in Dave's headquarters after you introduced us and what blew me away and I think transcends if you want to build a big company that lasts forever and also if you want a lot of people to care about you on the Internet. And also if you want to have a huge impact, like obsession is really hard to beat. And so you know, people might think we're being touchy feely by saying we care about people and if you care more, you'll get more. It's like it's not enough to just care, you've got to obsess. And when I walked into Dave Ramsey's headquarters and the first thing that you see is like an example of the old car that he used to have that he sold books out of the back of. You know, it's an entire huge wall and almost like museum exhibit of every single person who's now debt free. You know, it's that the public is allowed in every single day and given fresh cookies if they want to come and list to Dave talk. And it's that he brings in his family, you know, it's that. And then he's so obsessed that he, like, squeezed every bit of productivity out of me in that day that he possibly could have. I think I did three podcasts. I met with his team. We had lunch, like, because he just. He's obsessed about. About his problem set. And so I think the other thing, if you want to be really successful on the Internet and you want to grow online, it's the most competitive game you could play, because anybody can do it. And so the way that you win is by being obsessed about the thing that you're really interested in. And if you're more obsessed in something small, even better. So I. I totally agreed with that.

Yeah. I think I. I love that. And then that is. He is a great example. And that is, you know, people like, I'm so nerdy about book launches and the art of speaking and the business of speaking and copywriting and, like. And it's like, but this is my uniqueness, and I'll share with you the best piece of branding advice I've ever received. I wish this was my quote. It's not. This came from a guy named Larry Wingett. He said, the goal is to find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. To find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. To figure out that thing that other people would think is so weird. They'd be like, rory, why do you care so much about, like, books? And it's like, I don't know. It's just who I am. Right? It's the reason why Cody cares so much about Laundromats and, like, buying boring businesses. It's just who you are. But you go. That is, you lean into that. You become more of that. Here's another great quote. This one's from Sally Hogstead. She's my friend, and she says the world isn't changed by people who sort of care. Right? Nobody change the world who sort of cared. You change the world by caring so much that it's like, you'll endure tremendous pain and tremendous sacrifice. But I think that, you know, there is a certain amount of money for most people that it starts to lose its drive. There is a certain amount of followers at some point for most people that starts to, like, lose its drive. There's a certain amount. Once you've spoken on stage in front of ten thousand people a hundred times, it's not that you're not, like, excited to do it. It's just. It's not the same. But when you have a genuine passion for helping other people. It's this insatiable desire that's healthy.

Yeah.

And if you can obsess about it the way that Dave's obsessed about getting people out of debt, the way that Louis obsesses about helping people overcome self doubt, the way that Dr. Lyon obsesses about people being healthy and getting accurate health information, the way that. The way that Ed obsesses over helping people realize that they're capable of doing more, then your world starts to change and you start to change the world of people around you. And anyways, I don't know, I'm just. I'm a geek for this game.

You. I also think it's the way like the way that you never lose money and the way you don't lose everything is you make sure you really know who you're serving. You know, I think a perfect example of like an anti goal would be like the hawk to a girl, right? Like, so she got super famous on the Internet on Twitter for kind of like a goofy thing that she said that was kind of little, little sexual about. And she was this cute little girl from Alabama and she went viral everywhere and she got a podcast deal. And then what did she do? She confused virality for actual direction and she ended up going all in on this crypto coin and. And her followers lost tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. That won't happen to you if you know who you're serving because you'll remember what you're actually trying to accomplish. And I think a lot of people blow up spectac and lose their focus because once you do start getting a little bit of success, you'll get a lot of optionality and you'll have to make really hard decisions that make people don't like you by saying no to things. And you have to. I mean, we just had this conversation actually not too long ago there was a thing we were both going to kind of knew about a person that was doing something online that's like the most nondescript thing ever. But there was a thing that came up and you know, found out some information that just wasn't ethically aligned with me to stand on that person's stage. And so I ringed you and I was like, did you know about this? Let's talk about it. And it wasn't because I don't want to be next to that person. I don't know them. It was because I know my audience is trying to figure out how to get financially free and they trust me. Some of them and they want to move to the next level. And if I put them in any situation which might not give them the best advice or the best trust from another human, that's breaking my mission. And so if you don't really stand up for something, you'll fall for anything. And those are the hard decisions I think you have to make as you build a business and get a personal brand. One other thing I wanted to actually talk about with you here is rinse.

Takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time, you. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you said you hear about Dave. Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry, rinse. It's time to be great.

You have so many frameworks and tools and resources that you use. You talked about one, which is this revenue stream breakdown. Can you run us through that in like 30 seconds?

The revenue stream?

Yes. Yeah. How do you figure out what revenue streams you should be doing and what you should not be doing? Using your revenue streams assessment?

Yes. So simple. All you do is you. You list out all the, all your revenue streams on the wall and you. We just put them through a simple scoring process and you go, okay, what, how, how many years have you been doing it? How much revenue is it? How stressful is it for you to keep up? And what's the DARES score? So DARES is an acronym that we use. It's five criteria that make a great revenue stream. We're looking for things that are digital, automated, recurring, evergreen, and scalable. Digital, automated, recurring, evergreen and scalable. So basically like how scalable is this revenue stream and then how life giving is it to you? And you basically just fill in those numbers and. And you kind of look at it. And a lot of times what will happen is you'll. Things will jump off the page like, oh, we're doing this just because it makes a lot of money, but it's actually really hard. Nobody likes it. Sucking the life out of our team and other things, like in the case of Louis, where the podcast wasn't making a ton of money, but, oh, the other one is which has the most natural momentum? That's one of the other big ones. And it was like, it had so much natural momentum and it was so life giving and it was low stress and it was like, all right, well, what would happen if we did that? So, you know, we. We tend to not be fans of multiple streams of income early on. Yeah, I. I think most of the people who I know who are rich or filthy rich, they didn't get rich from multiple streams of income. They got rich from doing one thing really, really well. They had one business that really blew up. They focused on concentration first, then they broke through the wall and then did diversification second. So it's like, yes, many millionaires have many streams of income, but that's not usually how they created the first. Usually they create one stream of income. So most of our clients that we're working with are, you know, their personal brands or their small businesses or their executives of small companies. And so we're trying to go. If you don't have a huge staff, then you need to figure out what one revenue stream is most likely to succeed and go all in on that one thing. So the revenue streams assessment, this is like, helps us sort of spot the winner.

Yeah, it's true. I often think I'm tortured on that advice because I think you won't know what to go all in on until you try a few things. Sure. And so I think there's this, like, middle ground. It's almost like you have to actually do a bunch of revenue streams to start.

You're testing them out. Yeah.

You have a test period, and during that test period, you will actually, You'll. You'll think that one does really well. And then you'll realize, oh, wait, it's actually missing core components. And you'll have to do that for a bit of time until you do another analysis where you say, oh, man, of all of these things that we have, it's really one or two that matter. And then you double down on those.

Yeah.

And then you hit this. It's.

It's.

It's like. Is it like a. I think might be three steps. It's like first step, revenue stream test and proliferation, second test, second step is like revenue stream divesting.

And third step is meaning getting rid of stress. Yeah.

And then third step is revenue stream diversification.

Yeah.

And you kind of like do a circle all the way back to diverse. You start diversifying, you end diversifying. And in the middle, you win by picking winners.

By focusing.

Yeah.

And optimizing. Optimizing one thing. Right.

Yeah.

And even. Even like investors. Right. It's like they go, well, that's multiple streams. But it's like, well, if you're an investor, like, you're just investing like that's the only thing you're doing. You're not often balancing a whole bunch of stuff until you break through the wall and you have a team. Once you have team time, talent, like technology, capital, then you can do all sorts of things. Right. But in the beginning, when you don't have a lot of resources, If I have 10 initiatives and I have 10 units of resource, then on average each, each, each initiative gets one unit of resource. Once I become wealthy and then I can hire people to do stuff now I can, I can put more resources on more initiatives. But early on it's like more, more people lose because of a lack of focus in that kind of like, I think in that scaling phase of going, you know, I think a lot of small businesses, like, they're quick to add 70 revenue streams instead of figuring out, let's, let's keep the main thing, the main thing. But I do agree with you. You got a test early on to even know what works, what feels good, what is your audience responding to.

Yeah.

So I like that.

But I like the dares analogy. I would totally use that on top of a business analysis. We use rice often.

Oh, tell me.

Which is so typically it's reach, impact, cost. And what's the last one that's bad? There's one that basically says like, I can't remember what the word is, but it's like how much time it takes for your team. And so it's a literal formula and, but I changed mine from reach, which is like, I think could be touchy feely to revenue. So how much money do you make impact to the business? Which might mean like how many people need to be on the assignment for it costs, how much is it going to cost you and then how long will it take you? And so you actually lay out this, this revenue model that at the end gives you a number and the number, then you can stack, rank them and decide, okay, what's the next thing that we're going to do? And every time I come up with a new idea now, I try to make myself run it through a RICE model because otherwise you have too many, too many brilliant ideas that turn out. They're not so brilliant when you compare them through your opportunity cost. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Opportunity cost is, is huge. It's like the, it's like the biggest. And the biggest invisible cost that people don't pay enough attention to is just going like, well I could do that. But what does that pull me away from? Like that, that being being able to calculate the opportunity Cost, I think, is one of the. It's hard, but it's one of the things that people like you do. And, and going back to what our conversation about trust, it's like never doing anything that compromises the trust of your audience, because that trust is the big opportunity cost. It's like, even if I could sell you something, right? It's like, sure, we could sell them some T shirts. Is that, is that the right thing, though, at this moment? It's like, we can make a quick buck doing this or that or whatever, but it's. It's going. Don't ever compromise that trust of your audience.

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about. So if I want to get paid for my expertise, what's the roadmap like? How do you go? Okay, I right now am a chiropractor. I do want to become an expert. That is known publicly. I want to break out of obscurity. I run a. Maybe I even run a service business. And I want people to know who I am. What. What is the process that you take people through? Yeah, so we've gone through the first two steps, I think.

Yeah. Finding your who. Right. And. And then you got to figure out, what problem do you solve? Then you figure out, how do you solve it in one sentence? It's really tough. Is going, how do I solve that problem for that audience in one sentence? The next thing we do is we figure out what one revenue stream matters above all in my. In my business. Then the next thing is we create. We. We take people through a process called captivating content. So we then extract out of their head what is their system that they use for solving that problem. And we want to create original thought leadership, truly innovative intellectual property. You know, my, my TED talk that went viral was called how to Multiply Time. There's thousands of books on productivity and tons of people who talk about time management. But the focus funnel, which was the, the thing that went viral, my talk, you have to get that from me. Why? Because it came out of my head. So we really work on that to go, you can't be someone. You're not going to be paid at the highest level if you're playing cover tunes. You know, it's not wrong to play cover tunes. Like that can be fun. But don't expect to be the person that sells out arenas if you're playing cover tunes. You got to learn to write your own music and expertise. To is the same way. So we teach you how to create, you know, quotable moments, how to create Visuals, we call them frameworks. You know, charts, tables, diagrams that are unique to your, your methodology, the way that you do it. And, and this is why, again, we come back to serving the person you once were. Because the credibility is not that you get somebody else out there who waves a wand and says, oh, you're credible, or you have a designation. The credibility comes from you've walked the freaking path. Like, you've overcome that obstacle and you go, this is how I did it. And as long as you're teaching people how you did something that you actually did or how you helped other people to overcome that, we bottle that up. Then we put people through something called world class presentation craft, which is preparing their content for the spoken word. So in our universe, the spoken word is the fastest path to cash. To take someone from an absolute stranger. I've never heard of you. To a lifelong fan can happen in one hour. If you have a world class one hour presentation, which can be a podcast interview, it can be a webinar, it can be on stage, it can be a breakout workshop. But if you do it right and you structure your content, someone can go like, how have I never heard of you before? To all of a sudden I am binging every book you've written, every podcast episode. Then in phase two, we do all the digital stuff that's social funnels, you know, copywriting, etc. Podcasting ads. And then you get to phase three, which is often a book. A book still to this day is the primary way that you break through the wall of the mainstream to become recognized as a true thought leader. So we do a lot with that. Also the business of speaking. And then we really focus on sales and how to have a sales conversation. And then phase four is scaling the infrastructure.

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You're of the team. You need to like, pull all of this stuff off.

It's so good. I mean, the. You know what the funny part to me is? Is one, books suck to sell. So I think the so hard to sell. They're hard to sell. And yet I think a lot of people want to hit the New York Times. You and I Both know what it took to hit that even with a giant audience. It's a lot of work. And. And anybody who says that it's not. Not a lot of work, by the way, is lying. Can we talk about that? I mean, see, like, I'm. I. I giggle so hard. It's like, oh, I don't care that much. And then I talk to you, and you're like, well, I know what they're really doing. You know, it's so good. But. But the interesting part about books is you don't have to sell a ton. And that was one thing that, you know, you opened up my eyes for a lot of our portfolio companies and our CEOs, who are the best, you know, painting company in the world, that one painter, you know, who run an incredible franchise company, Resi Brands, that we run. And I'm talking to him about a book because I'm like, man, you know, you don't need to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, actually. You just need people to know that they have an opportunity to go deeply into your mind and decide that they want to trust you on your venture. And a book does that in a way very little else does.

Absolutely. Absolutely. One of our other mantras around books, as we say, bestseller lists don't change lives, but books do. Yeah, books change lives. Books automate trust. Books automate trust. Just like content automates trust. But it's a deeper. It's a deeper level. There's a more intimate experience when you're holding the book or you're listening, you're right in somebody's ear, and they're hard to sell. And yet you pour years of your life into, like, get it captured in the book. And so. And by the way, that's also how you speak, is, like, people have either seen you speak or they've read something you've written. Those are the two reasons why you. Two ways you get booked to speak. So I think books continue to stand the test of time. Ironically, as it becomes easier to post social content and faster to just fling something up, it still takes muscle and hours and hours and hours to edit a book. You know, to write the book, edit it, pore over it. And so when you're reading a book, you're getting this concentrated, you know, this most concentrated bit of wisdom, and it demonstrates your credibility. It demonstrates your credibility. Go, you know, you want to know who I am? Read this. And some people will look at it and go, oh, yeah, I'm not interested. Great. Other people will read it. And you go, you cannot Read that this entire book and not want to do more. Right. You cannot read Main Street Millionaire the whole way through and go, oh my gosh, like, I want to work with these people. Yeah. So it's, it's still super, super powerful. And you know, I love books. I hope they're around forever.

Yeah, me too. I want to talk really quickly about some more of your frameworks and systems. You talked in the beginning about, you know, creating graphics and named frameworks. I think this is super underrated. We call it productization of services. So like, when we buy a company, one of the first things that we do is we teach them about how do you turn even a service into something that is a product because otherwise it's not repeatable. And so this weekend is our, our scaling workshop where we help people build companies. And one of the biggest things we take people through is like everything that you do that you think is a service is actually not in fact a service. It's a product. And if we can get you to think about how the fact that it be really bad if every time I bought a coffee cup like this, it looked totally different and they didn't match and they weren't the same and they had different quality levels, that would mean that I had a bad company. And yet we allow that in service businesses and we don't name and frame them. You have a lot of systems and ideas for how you get people to think in frameworks. Can you talk through some of your favorite systems and frameworks you train people.

Through to help them come up with frameworks?

Could be that. And also what you take them through to create this personal brand, because you're kind of the framework that guy like you have one for everything. I feel like, well, yeah, so we.

Do believe in that. So, so one of this is actually from the My, my How to Multiply Time, the TED Talk. One of my favorite lines in that book is a concept that came to me while I was writing that says, automation is to your time. What compounding interest is to your money. Automation is to your time. What compounding interest is to your money. Inside of commoditizing a service based business is the way you automate it. You make it replicatable, duplicatable, scalable, repeatable. Right. So for experts, we have to be able to do that. If my expertise lives in my head, the only way you can get it is from me. If it lives in a book, it's scalable. It also, you know, we have strategists at Brand Builders Group. Right. So we have about 50 employees. And our strategist can teach and expand because they're teaching a body of knowledge. So the biggest trick to this is very simple is you first have to clarify the idea. And we say, say it ugly first. Always just say it ugly first. You know, write. The first rule of writing is to write. Then you edit and get clear on what you're trying to say. Once you then say it clearly, then you go, say it with a picture. So say it ugly first, then say it clearly, then say it with a picture. So once you're saying it clearly, you go, how could I show this visually? And if you train your mind to think in that way, I mean, then all of a sudden it resonates with people and it becomes more transmittable, which is a part of virality, right? Is it's going, in order for me, in order for it to transmit, someone has to be able to share that idea. So anything that makes that idea more shareable, either the way you package what you say or the visual representation of what you say makes that idea more transmittable. And, you know, we're as concerned in going viral offline as we are in going viral online. And so if, if you can ask yourself that. The other question that we always ask is, how can I forward the thinking of what's been done? So there might be an existing visual or framework that's out there. And you go, okay, how can I add to this? That's what a thought leader does in the true positive sense of the word, is to forward the thinking that's been done. How can I add a layer of usefulness or utility on what else has been written in my space? And that's why it's like, we can all talk about topics that other people have talked about, but don't play cover tunes, right? Advance the thinking, do the work for the people. This is another framework is we try to. We try to go, how can I do more of the thinking work for my customer? So if you use the revenue streams assessment, it's one thing that I'll say, hey, go think about your revenue streams and think about which ones are the ones you should focus on. But if I turn it into a tool and I do the thinking for them, I create a tool that forces them to think in the sequence in which I would think, or another successful client of mine would think, that's where great visuals and frameworks and tools come from.

It's so true. You know, it's. It's wild because it's personal brand. All of this personal Brand is exactly related to building a business. I mean, if you want to be a leader in a business and you don't want to hate your business and hate your life, you have to name and frame everything so that you can automate things and then eventually delegate and outsource it. Otherwise you don't have a business, you have a job. And so it's, it's actually kind of the same. You know, I think about it with some of our businesses, it's like we have something called the rule of three. So every time you do a task that has more than three steps and you do it more than three times, it needs to become an sop. Right? And so rule of three. And so I don't have to say, hey, remember that you need to create an SOP on this XYZ thing. I just go, rule of three. And they go, yeah. And so then you get to say less words and your people get to be an extension of your brain, which is, which is so smart. And it's funny because I never thought about it in that way, but if you could think about building your business the exact same way as building a brand, it would be so powerful. Like, we have something called the Empire Builder Survey, which basically takes people who own a business through a series of about 13 questions to tell them what value their business has and what areas they could do to make their business more valuable. And the reason why is because we did all these consulting calls with people for like, okay, you want to come in? You might be a fit for us to help you by investing. You might be a fit for us to help you by coming to our workshops. But it was all this one on one consultation until originally I was. And until finally I was like, no, no, we can. Here are the questions, here are the buckets of answers. If they answer this way, I want to talk to them about investing. If they answer this way, they need to build the business first. Let's put them to, to our build. And so it's, it's really applicable not just for a personal brand, but across just about everything. And you also have like a survey or a. Some tools and resources for them, don't you?

Yeah, okay, absolutely. Yeah. So, so we invested about over $100,000 conducting a national research study called the Trends in Personal Branding National Research Study. So it's weighted to the U.S. census. Right. It's statistically valid. You know, we followed all, you know, traditional academic rigor. It's PhD led to understand how much does this personal brand stuff matter to businesses. So it turns out 74% of Americans say they are more likely to trust you just because you have an established personal brand. 63% of Americans say they're more likely to buy from you because you have a personal brand. 58% of Americans say they're willing to spend more money on the products and services that come from founders, where they know the personal brand and the values of the founder. I mean, this. And if you stratify the data by generations, like the age range of people who filled it out, all the trends show that in the next 10 to 30 years, it's going to matter even more. Even more. Now, it's ironic. Where our worlds collide is to build a business that has value. You want it to be independent of a person. That's the whole thing that gives a business value. But ironically, what attracts people to a business often is a personality that they can attach to. Right. We don't do business with companies. We do business with people.

Right.

But the way that I think about it for small businesses is, I think about it like a rocket is going. Your personal brand should be the sort of side boosters that you use to get the business off the ground. But then once you get it launched out into space, then your personal brand falls off and the business can just sort of follow a trajectory and live on without you. But it takes. A personal brand can help tremendously early on. So there's a bunch of data if you go to freebrandstudy.com Cody. Freebrandstudy.com Cody we actually give the whole research study away.

That's cool.

I want to say that out. Yeah, it's, it's, it's powerful stuff.

You know, I, I didn't, I didn't start a personal brand to have business success. I think I just was curious about what's happening in the world, and I wanted to write a newsletter, and I like writing, and so that's sort of how it started. And I thought we weren't talking very much to each other, and this was in 2020. So I was like, you know, here's a way that we can maybe start having some conversations. But now that I think about it, it's. It's pretty pivotal to a lot of our portfolio companies. I don't think every human needs to have a personal brand, but I think there needs to be a brand that is associated with you. Because in the age of, of AI and in the age of mass commoditization of content creation, you got to have something that feels human to your point. And you Got to have something that feels unique and high trust because I think going forward AI isn't going to make us have to do less work and for things to be easier. It's actually going to, everybody is able to be pretty good and you're going to have to be great to stand out. And one of the ways that you do that is, is by being, you know, weirdly authentically you and your brand can be that too. Like we have a, we have a portfolio company, Pinks, that's a window cleaning company. And they're just, they're two young guys who, they're uniquely them, they're kind of hipsters, you know, they're really faith based, they're fun, they're energetic and they, they attract all the rest of franchise owners at Pinks are very similar to them, a lot of like ex vets. They're like these like young, kind of clean cut, wholesome, good looking dudes and they don't have a very big social following but they have a pretty big social following for a cleaning company. And so if somebody wants to go start a window cleaning business and they want all the systems and processes, these guys have earned a lot of their trust. And so even for window cleaners, I think it's something relevant.

It absolutely is. So let's talk about trust on a data point really quick. So one of the things that we, one of the questions we asked in this study is which piece of marketing collateral matters the most in influencing a purchasing decision. And we ask things like they have a large social media following, they have a large YouTube channel, they have polished like a podcast. We said they have a blog, they have a nice website, they have a book, a best selling book, a New York Times best selling book. And we wanted to, we had people rank them and none of those things were the top on the list. 62% of Americans say the single most important piece of marketing collateral that will influence their purchasing decision. Testimonials from other customers. It costs nothing. You can have it by this afternoon. It costs nothing. What, what do they want? They want human validation. They want some, a human that they can trust to say if a human said it then I can believe it. Not just, it's pretty, not just there's lots of, lots of people saying this but like show me an individual people and what they have to say about you. And I thought that was super powerful. The other, the other topic, the other top ones are that they've been featured in media and that they've been paid, they've been paid for Their expertise.

Interesting. You know, it actually tracks because I was just talking to one of the members of one of our companies and they have testimonials on the website, but they made a fatal error. And the error is it says this nice testimonial, no picture, no name. That could be. That's almost as bad as not having testimonials on your website. And now there's a lot of ways you got to make sure compliantly you share them, which is a whole other issue. But I, I, we have a segment that we do for our build group that is all about exactly that. We talk, we think about them as reviews because a lot of these are service businesses. But, you know, there's a lot of data that shows people won't buy from you if you have less than three and a half stars, which is crazy. And they will pay more money for you if you have more than three and a half stars and more than 100 reviews. And so that's really interesting. Probably a great way to get more testimonials and reviews is basically being online and having and sharing other people's.

Yeah, it is. And there's, there's online and there's off. There's online and offline too, right? I mean, if you. Look, look, I believe that the best form of marketing in the world is a changed life. Yeah, right? You change someone's life, they'll tell people. You don't even have to ask them. You don't have to incentivize them. You don't have to send them a coupon. If you change someone's life, you know, they'll tell people about you. Now when you're cleaning, you know, doing Laundromat and you're washing windows, like, are we changing people's lives to them? Well, maybe, maybe there's ways that we can do that. But you've got to have your customers. You should strive to be so good that your customer force becomes your sales force. Right? It's one thing for me to go, hey, I know what I'm talking about. It's another when Cody Sanchez says, hey, Rory is someone that I've hired from time to time to help me. Like, that's freaking powerful, right? Because, because you trust that there's that transfer of trust, and it's human. And I think it's going to just continue to matter, to matter more. And I actually think video testimonials are going to matter a lot. I mean, you can already fake. You can already deep fake a video. So even as that happens, you Go. What matters the most? What matters the most is someone in real life coming up to you and saying, have you read that book? Have you been to that restaurant? Have you watched that movie? You need someone to clean your house. I have the person. You need someone to fix your car like you want your H Vac broke like, I have the guy. Nothing will ever be more powerful than that. So, yes, online, yes. Social, yes. AI but don't forget, at the end of the day, this is about reputation, and reputation is about trust. And these concepts are as old as time. So the medium is changing, but the foundation is the same.

Rory, you're the man. Follow Rory on all. Where do you like people to follow you the most?

Well, so the one place I would say go to freebrandcall.com Cody so if you're serious about building this and you really want to be an expert entrepreneur, build your brand. Request a call with us. Freebrandcall.com Cody if you're not so serious about it but you want the data, just go to FreeBrandstudy and then we'll get connected from there.

I love it. Rory, I really appreciate you. You really did help me a lot. I'm not just saying that. So I can't wait for the next book so I could put you again through more text as opposed to voice note misery. And I hope you guys listening out there take this to heart. I think there needs to be more good humans who are willing to share their expertise and actually do the thing that most won't, which is teach and not just take. And so thanks, Roy. You're the man.

Thanks for having me.