How To Be Simple and Consistent in Marketing

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. And so if you have not yet discovered your why, go to whyinstitute.com, discover your why, and then come back because. This will have much more meaning for you when you know your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. And so today. Today we're going to be talking about the why of Simplify. Now, Simplify is a very rare why. There's less than 6% of the population that has this why. And so if this is your why, then you are one of the fabulous people that make everyone's life better. You have the unique gift of reducing the number of steps required for almost any task. If most of us believe that a procedure requires eight sequential steps, you see how to do it in six. You constantly look for ways of simplifying, from recipes to business systems to how you organize your garage. You feel successful when you eliminate complexity and remove unnecessary elements in a process. You streamline things for the benefit of all and break things down to their simplest form. You operate from a perspective that the world would be a better place when kept simple. As a result, constantly find ways to help the rest of us improve efficiencies, save time and reduce aggravation. So today I've got a great guest for you. His name is Evan tardy. Now since 2010, Evan has built and led Dr. Axe Organization from $0 in revenue and no employees to over 150 employees with revenue exceeding 100 million. He cut his teeth in digital performance, marketing and E commerce where he helped build profitable direct response campaigns of one million plus a month. He then led the company to grow to 2 million plus person email list, over 4 million social media subscribers, and an SEO traffic reaching 20 million plus visitors per month. As the president, he landed the company on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in America list two years in a row, becoming the fastest growing company in Tennessee in 2017. In 2018, they sold a portion of the company for 103 million Evan, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Well, let's start with from the beginning. Tell us a little bit about how did you get into this world of Internet marketing?

You know, in 2010, I just graduated from school, and my degree was in advertising, and I got connected with this guy, Dr. Axe, and he had a local chiropractic clinic here in Nashville. So my background was in. My granddad and my dad were both entrepreneurs. Is I have this kind of entrepreneurial blood. You know, my degree was in advertising, and so, you know, I just was passionate to try something. I got connected with this chiropractor, and he said, hey, you know, I'm wanting to build something online. I want to build an online brand and help kind of take this message that I have to a broader audience. So we talked. He shared a little bit about the vision and kind of the mission behind what he was up to. And I was just a believer in the message. And so he said, have you read the Four Hour Workweek or Crush It? These two books? And I'm like, no, I've never heard of them. He's like, okay, well, those two books kind of explain and lay out the process to build what I want to build. And so I called him back a week later, and I'm like, I read both the books. You know, I've never done any of this before, but how hard could it be? You know, I'm sure I could figure it out. And so he's like, great, you know, call me when you get to Nashville. I was in Texas at the time, and a month later, my wife and I are packing up the U Haul. We drive across the country, and at a gas stop halfway between Dallas and Nashville, my wife asked me. She's like, okay, this all is happening really fast. So you do have a job offer or you don't?

Technically, I did not have a job offer, but I'm like, you know, I gotta get a feeling about this. You know, let's. Let's just kind of see how it goes. So, you know, obviously, she's amazing. We got here, and I got started, and, you know, the first day, I met up with Josh, Dr. Axe, and he's kind of. He's kind of sharing some of the things that were going on currently, but he's still running his local clinic full time. And so I show up with my laptop and we talk shop for a little bit on Monday morning. And he's like, hands me this sticky note with some lines, letters, and symbols on it. And I'M like, what's this? And he's like, it's the password. I'm like, okay to what? And he's like, everything.

So I'm like, you know, and he's like, good luck. And he heads off because he's got to run the clinic. So there I am, you know, it's 8:30 Monday morning with my laptop at this guy's house at his kitchen table, and no idea what I'm doing and no idea where to go other than we read a couple books and now we're setting down on this path.

Hey, how did he find you?

He went through. Dave Ramsey has a. If you're familiar with Financial Peace and kind of Dave Ramsey, he has a division called Entree Leadership where they train and do business coaching and training kind of around Dave Ramsey's business principles. He went through that. He met my brother at that event. And then, you know, me and my brother were talking when I was graduating and he introduced us. Wow.

So you walk in cold. Here, take these two books. Go figure it out. Now you're sitting in his house alone. What did you do?

So the first thing I do, I open up my laptop and I start logging into the social media and the email list and kind of the traffic data because I'm a pretty data oriented guy. So like, let's just start tracking what are we doing and what's working. So I remember I pulled up a spreadsheet. I just started logging. At the time we had, I don't know, a thousand or so, you know, followers on each of our kind of platforms, email and Facebook, our Facebook page. And I pull up a spreadsheet and I remember logging day by day, our growth rate. We grown by one person, maybe two people a day. And I remember looking at guys like Tim Ferriss, who wrote the Four Hour Workweek. At the time, he had 50,000 likes on his Facebook page. And I'm just like scratching my head thinking how there's some exponential leap between where he is and our one or two, you know, new subscribers a day growth rate. And we could not crack it. I couldn't figure it out, but it was something I wouldn't let go of. And we just kept at it. And so what we ended up doing was really focusing on a few key kind of channels that really resonated with, you know, Dr. Axe is really amazing on video and he's really passionate about the topic and really educated and able to share. And so what we ended up landing on was, you know, video was really powerful for us. Our email Newsletter and video, specifically on social media and Facebook became Facebook. And our email newsletter kind of became our two big channels where we grew our platform.

So when you talk about video. So if I'm a small business right now that's wanting to do something like you guys did, what was so special about the videos? What was so special about the newsletter? Because there's lots of videos out there, there's lots of newsletters. How did you design them? What was your thought process?

Yeah, such a good question. Because I get asked this all the time. And I think one of the things that I've discovered is it was the same thing for me on when I was getting started is that it felt like there was something in this mysterious black box of the Internet that if I could just get like all the tactics and answers, then finally we would get success. And what I found was, because we've been doing this for 10 years, is consistency. It's the secret sauce. Consistency. Consistency mixed with give value, give value, give value and then ask for business. And if any of your followers follow Gary Vaynerchuk, who wrote Crush it, that's kind of what he's famous for, is just give value. You know, serving and giving value and educating and doing it relentlessly. And over time, it's like the snowball. It starts to grow exponentially as it rolls down the hill. But at first when you just have a little bitty snowball and you roll it over, it doesn't feel like you're gaining much momentum. And that's where I think a lot of people stop. They either abandon the channel or they don't get enough kind of quick wins. If they're trying to grow their Instagram or their Facebook or their email is not growing fast enough. So they learn about a new tactic and then they kind of tactic hop and they jump to a new channel and then that didn't work fast enough so they switched to a new channel. And so one of the things, the biggest recommendation I have around this is just consistency and continuing to put out educational, value oriented content. So that's the umbrella. And then under that, platforms like YouTube and Facebook, specifically YouTube, is consistency on the day of the week so your subscribers know when to expect new content from you. I'd much rather someone, you know, record 10 videos and then drip them out every Monday morning for 10 weeks, rather than record 10 videos all at once and just, you know, load them all up for 10 days straight and then go silent for a few more weeks. So that consistency in posting is really useful as well.

So You've simplified this process for us.

There you go.

So when you took the why discovery and you saw the why of simplify come up, what did that feel like to you?

It totally resonated. You know, one of my favorite quotes that just kind of stayed with me or concept is this idea that Albert Einstein didn't know his own phone number. You know, and so he's famous for saying, like, why would I, like, spend brain power memorizing my phone number when I can look it up in a phone book? And so that's always just stuck with me. I'm like, why would I. Why would I memorize some of these trivial things and I can just go quickly Google them or look them up? And so that's kind of been my simplification approach for a lot of stuff. And so, yeah, when I read that description of the simplify, it totally resonated.

Why is it important that things are simple?

Great question. I think for me, if I can simplify something, I can. It feels like I can access it more quickly in my brain. Like, I can. I can live more of a minimal life, and I can have less clutter in my head. So if I can simplify it down to its essence and that I can memorize the essence, and then when I try to recall it in my brain, I remember the essence of it as needed, and then it expands into all the other, you know, things needed, but all the other things needed to accomplish the project. Does that make sense? Yeah.

So if it's simple, it's useful.

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

And complexity doesn't allow anyone to do it. Right. Only the people that know the complexity can actually use that information.

Yes, it's useful. It's transferable. That's another one that sticks with me. It's the more simple it is, the more. More we can execute against it and the more we can communicate against it. This is another thing I found. You know, we went from zero to 150 employees, and if it's at all, if I'm confused, like my manager, you know, my managers that are reporting are double confused, and their team is double confused, and it just exponentially gets like. We get off track really quick. So Bob Iger of Disney, you know, I really, really respect him, and one thing in his book that he talked about is he really only focuses on one to three key things per quarter or per business year, kind of depending on what it is. And I'm thinking, okay, if the CEO of Disney can give himself the permission to really only focus on one to three key things like me at a company of 150 people or even a company of 10 people, I think it's okay to focus and keep things really, really simple as well. There's.

So how have you simplified the process? What are the things that you did to simplify online marketing to get exponential growth?

Yeah. So you have to have lead gen and you have to have predictability in the business. So those are pretty much the two big things. So I'll tell you kind of a quick story that goes back to the early days, right when we're getting started, where we didn't know what we were doing. And I'm logging our growth rate by one and two new followers per day.

That's fun.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, and at the time, my friends are graduating med school and getting these $250,000 salaries and I'm like, you know, doubting myself. I'm beating myself up. Like, am I like, have I just made a terrible choice here? You know, and so all the. All the noise and the head trash that went along with that, that was real for me as well. And I hear it a lot from people.

Give us a sense of how long it took you to go from one to two people a day to something significant that made you feel better.

Yes, yes. So back to my story. Alright, so we're about a year and a half in and we've tried a bunch of stuff, a bunch of Internet tactics. We continue to be consistent in posting, but it's not working for us yet. And we kept dabbling in different things and nothing was working. And, you know, personally, I just. I wanted to get my wife, she was graduating. I wanted her to finish her degree. I wanted to be able to start a family. And we're making a few dollars per week. This isn't happening. I'm not buying a house anytime soon.

All right, so we're struggling.

I love this. I love this.

It's not working.

So we had just spent basically the rest of our business savings, a big chunk of it we spent creating a video or a video series all about health. And it was a very kind of broad. It wasn't focused on a niche, it wasn't super specific, but it was great content and great information. But we didn't have a very narrow niche in mind with it. So we got a lot of people from the clinic to show up to this live workshop. We filmed it. We had a big production crew there. It was about a $50,000 production to get this whole thing put together. And we had this idea that we Were going to go cold call me. I was gonna go cold call churches and corporations and sell them this, this kind of corporate health program that they can take their either congregation or their team members through at the time that developed. So we ordered about a thousand of these DVDs and they show up. And we were also in conversation with another group who already had a church program and a corporate health program. And we're talking about working together. And they said, you have to cancel the entire project if we're going to continue this conversation because we don't want to compete on this project. So we're like, you know, we're kind of far along. So we said, great, we'll put this on pause. That partnership fizzled. It didn't happen. And we lost all the momentum we had on this other project that we, you know, all the DVDs and they're literally collecting dust in the garage. And so, and that was a lot of our, the bulk of our money that went to that. And so here we are, the partnerships out these DVDs, they've totally lost momentum on the project. And I listen to a podcast and I learn about webinars and I hear someone talk about just kind of the basic overview. So immediately I sign up for all the webinars I can get on, you know, other people that are doing them. I start to try to reverse engineer what are they doing, what's kind of the loose structure or the trends that I'm seeing when people are selling information products on webinars. And so I spend the next month, I learned what people are doing and I spend the next month stringing together all these different softwares. But again, we're out of money. And so, you know, a lot of the softwares had these free trial windows, either seven days to 30 days. And so once I got them all lined up organized, I didn't sign up for any of them because they all had different links of free trial. So I needed all of them to kind of hit at the same time so we could do our first webinar without actually getting charged for all the softwares to prove if it was gonna work or not. So I signed it up, you know, sign up for all this. It takes about a month to get all the sales copy and everything written. And I'm like, alright, Josh, we're gonna do a webinar. You know, do a normal. Because he teaches and does workshops, I'm like, do a normal workshop. But at the end, instead of, you know, telling people to go to the clinic, we're Just, I want you to go through the. Selling the program. And so I, we. It's so funny now because it's like it's so backwards to what a normal person would think today. But we created this program, we ordered these physical DVDs and then I ripped one of the DVDs and turned it into a digital thing. And so I'm like, these DVDs are literally collecting dust. We turn it into a digital program. And so he's like, great. We do a webinar. We have a small, small email list at the time. We just send an email for people to go register. And again, we're making two, three dollars a week, like nothing. And as you can imagine, like being the biggest L on the P and L, my salary, it created some urgency, right? So we do this webinar and I'm watching the stats. You know, Josh is at his house doing it. You know, I'm at my house kind of late at night watching it go. It all went off smoothly. And I'm thinking, maybe we'll get a sell. It was a hundred dollar program. I think maybe we'll sell one or two. And he's, you know, he says the pitch and good night and signs it off. And so the webinar's over. I pull up the stats, and we had like five orders. And I'm thinking, hold on, was that my mom? You know, like, did she just order it five times and mess up or something? And I kept refreshing it. In that next hour, we sold 100. And so we made $10,000 in one hour, this webinar online. And so that, for me, even though I knew that wasn't a business changing amount of income, it was a light bulb moment for me where I had the epiphany that, hey, this actually works. Like if we follow this and focus and have a very specific, predictable path to take people through, to educate them, give value, and then make the offer, it really worked. It's not some like, genius, you know, super complex thing that no one can figure out. It's very, very simple. Yeah, and it's a very simple process where you educate people on a, you know, a focused format, give them a lot of value, and then you sell them your thing at the end. And so from there we went and rather than kind of.

Making something that we had already created, try to like, repurpose it, you know, the program. We, we started to look at social signals that our audience was already telling us that they were really engaged with or really interested in, in terms of topics. So One of those for us was Detox. So we would put out articles once or twice a week about natural health topics. And most of our articles would get anywhere from 10 or maybe even 30 shares, you know, because that was the size of our audience at the time. But when we put out a few different pieces of content related to detox to our audience, it had 3,000 shares. Like, this stuff went totally viral within our community. And 3,000 shares was bigger than our audience size. So we're scratching our heads like, huh, maybe our audience, rather than us inventing something, you know, in a vacuum, maybe our audience wants to hear more about detox.

So then Dr. Axe put together a 30 day detox plan to help people walk through his detox. And we did the same thing. We did another webinar for that, and that was a $60,000 webinar. And each time it was triple ish what we did the first time on our first webinar. And so now our confidence is starting to build and we're starting to, and our focus is starting to pay off, you know, for ourselves. Then we just kind of followed that exact same trend and looked at what is our audience saying that they want to hear more from and how can we create something very specific that helps get them the result that they're looking for related to that topic. So then we went on, we've launched, gosh, 15 other programs since then. We've done fitness programs, we've done programs about essential oils, about gut health. And each time we went from that $60,000 launch, then we did 150,000, then a $500,000 launch, and then ultimately a $3 million launch in three weeks. And it was all following the same format. And it was really, really useful for the business because the information programs, it's all online. And so there's a high margin there, there's a high margin, which is great profits that we're able to reinvest back into the business to hire more team members and acquire inventory as we're growing our product side of the business and then also get in front of new customers. And so the information based revenue was really, really helpful on growing the physical side of the business, but it was also really helpful in educating and creating a really loyal and raving tribe of fans who were paying to learn more from us. And then they were going through these programs and getting a transformational experience and then becoming fans for life. And so the program side of it really was powerful, not just because of the revenue, but because of the impact it was making in people's lives.

What was do you think? So when you took over, there was a thousand people. You sat on your. Did you get most of your business from social media or most of it from email?

Okay, the four pillars. Yeah. I would keep it simple for everybody. So email.

Social media, paid advertising, and then SEO. So those kind of became our four pillars that we ended up focusing on. And what was really cool about that is that all four of those feed each other. And so there's a real synergistic relationship between all those, starting with our SEO. So SEO, how we grew our website to over 20 million visitors per month is by putting out really, really high quality, valuable, useful content and doing it consistently. We grew a team. At one point, it was over 20 people that were on the team, specifically working on writers, editors, medical editors, graphic designers, videographers, project managers that were all focused on putting out amazing, real content. So we did that. And again, we didn't start there. We started with me and Josh. And so it grew into that. So don't feel like, you know, for the audience. Don't feel like you have to have 20 people to build your SEO and your traffic. It can start small, but because we're putting out really useful content on our website, we're starting to rank in Google and then starting to attract more visitors that way. That content we were also able to repurpose on social and then also able to in our newsletter. So we're able to really nurture our audience. Whether they came in through Google or they're following us on social, or they're on our newsletter, they're getting high quality, really useful content from us. And then as each of those platforms grew, our Facebook ad costs. When we're primarily running on Facebook ads, our Facebook ad costs went down because we're able to advertise to our continually growing audience. And so the cost to engage our audience from an ad perspective was considerably lower compared to some of our competitors, because we were nurturing and serving our audience on these three platforms before we started running ads.

So it sounds like. So if I'm going to try to even simplify it more, it sounds like the number one thing is great content done consistently.

Yes.

Yeah. Because that's. I've experienced that myself in that you want to. You try something, Right? Let's go try that. And you don't get that immediate gratification and you're like, well, that didn't work. Who only works for that guy?

Yes.

And then you switch and you're like, go to the next one. For whatever amount of time and that didn't work. So then you're like really ticked off and you've wasted all this money and all the rest. But I see what you say, even like with this podcast, you know, when I first started this, it was just me in the, in a room. Well, kind of where I am now, but just feeling like I'm talking to myself and nothing's happening. And you're like, well, why am I doing this? And then if you keep it up, it's amazing how it just compounds and compounds and compounds to where we are today. It's pretty fascinating.

There's an author, founder, Naval Ravikant. And if you want some, like, startup business growth mixed with like zen just amazingness, follow him on Twitter. He's amazing. But he has this quote that I love. He says, all great wealth comes from compound interest, relationships, health, finance, anything of value. I just think that's so true and it's been so true in my life as well, that it's not the home runs, you know, where you're crushing it out of the park. It's just consistency again and again and again. And another thing I think people do is, you know, the time to stop dipping the bucket in the well is when it comes up dry. You know, I think people dip the bucket in the well and it might not work a time or two, but then it starts coming up and it works and they abandon it to go start a new project.

And so those two, hand in hand, consistency, compound interest, a compound effect. And then, you know, don't get, don't bail when it's working. Yeah.

So talk a little bit more about social signals. So for a lot of people are probably not familiar with that. What do you mean by social signals?

Great social signals. Just very simply is now I'm like, aware of it. It keeps coming up in my language. Very simply is things that people are doing that are basically raising their hand or saying, yes, I'm interested in this topic. So if someone shares an article related to detox and they don't share an article related to balancing their hormones in your audience, and every time you put out a hormone related article in the health space, no one reads it or opens it, opens your newsletter or engages it, but when you put out a detox related article, people go crazy for it, that is a signal from the social group saying, we're interested in this topic. So it's kind of following the data. And rather than, I think one thing a lot of people do in the lean startup, Eric Ries talks about this. He says a lot of founders will come up with their say they're in the software world, they're brilliant programmers, so they'll come up with an idea, a brilliant thing that they can go program, and then they go in their garage and they start programming away and they build this amazing solution. And it takes them a year and they have this amazing solution and then they go look for a problem to solve. And that's the wrong way to go about it because usually it's ineffective, there's a lot of waste and inefficiency, and usually the results aren't there. So rather, Eric Reese flips that whole thing on its head and says, start with customer development. If you can get really, really clear about the pain that people are having and how you can solve it, then you go create it. The sales typically end up taking care of themselves, but I think a lot of creators and product creators or founders, they get so excited about the solution or the idea they have in their head that they kind of get tunnel vision and they lose track of the customer's pain point or they don't even validate the customer's pain point at the expense of creating this amazing product. And then there's a lot of waste. And so social signals are a very, very simple way to kind of validate your idea before you go build it. So if you don't have a big following or a blog, that's totally fine. It doesn't have to be on your own site. You can go to BuzzSumo. Great resource. Go to BuzzSumo and type in the topic that you're interested in. So maybe it's detox or maybe it's hormones or like, if you're business, you know, having a business program, type in whatever that niche is and buzzsuma will show you the top article and they'll show you what articles have the most shares for that topic. And so you can use that as a way to kind of do a very. Kind of quick pass, but a very quick way to validate your topic or the idea or the direction you're headed. Wow.

So it makes so much more sense what you're saying to just figure out what the problem is first. What I think I'm hearing you say is send out a lot of content consistently. That's really good stuff. And then monitor what people are actually interested in and what they're replying to, or like you said, raising their hand and then give them more of that.

It's crazy. Find out the pain. Ask people what the pain Is. Or just find out through social signals and solve it using how cells work.

What a concept, huh? That seems too simple.

It does, yeah. Way too simple.

So you did this and it took you how long? So people are listening now and they're just starting out and they're going through all the same mistakes that you made. I make. Still make. And they're thinking now, how long did it take him to actually make any money? Because everybody touts all this and get rich quick stuff. And then when you go to do it, it doesn't work that way for you. And then you're like, ah, this doesn't work. So how long did it take you guys to actually see anything come back?

I have good news and I have bad news. So I'll start with the bad news. The bad news is it takes three years, in my opinion. That's what I found as a trained. That's the bad news. Now the good news is that it takes three years because if you're committed, most people give up at about 18 months in. It's not working. Kind of right where we were, we had that kind of make or break kind of moment. Most people give up. So the good news is if you're committed and you stay at it consistently, that's what will separate you from your competition. And over time, just like the snowball, you know, our first four years, we did four years to go from zero to about 1.8 million in revenue. And then the next four years we went from. And again, this is not totally normal. But I'm just saying, like, most people give up in the 18 months, then the next four years, we. Within those next four years, that's when we had sold a portion of the company for over $100 million. So like, if we had given up way over here, we could have written off the whole thing, that it doesn't work. So the good news is it takes three years and just if you stay committed and disciplined, it will pay off over time. But, you know, most people give up.

I like what you said there. Because the good news of it taking three years is that most people will give up and you'll be left.

Yes.

With all the.

Yeah.

With all the experience, with all the knowledge, with all the, you know, you're an overnight success in three years, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's it. And I mean, again. And most people really talk. You're absolutely right. People talk about the success story and kind of hide from the fact that they've been in the game for even they've been in the game for a long time. And even if you look at case studies or examples on other programs or softwares or tools, you know, it can be really discouraging because you're like, they'll highlight some of their best students or some of their best stories about, you know, Joe Blow from, you know, no Name, you know, Tennessee figured out this one little hack and then, you know, next month he's retired on the beach with, you know, mansion. And what's actually true is one, that's either just not true, or two, there were a lot of other factors that went on and that was the way oversimplified, like only highlighting a very specific vantage point of the story. Or Joe Blow is actually really smart dude. He's been at it for 10 years and building up something. And then this was the Spark from year 10 to 11 where things blew up for him. And people look at that and they think, you know, why is it not working for me? And they're starting where Joe Schmo started on year one. So it's just, you got to give yourself some grace and like, you know, pace yourself because it really is a marathon.

So now we're going to simplify it again. And it's going to be send out great, high quality content, collect the data, find out what the people want or will raise their hand for, and do it for three years.

Do it for three years.

Don't stop and don't stop. And that's a hard thing to wrap your head around when you're not getting a paycheck.

Yes, absolutely. So, okay, that's. So glad you brought that up at the time. So our first two and a half, three years while we're going through this dip, I was doing side hustle. I had maybe five, six clients that I was doing a little bit of marketing for doing the, you know, I would volunteer for people, and then that would kind of turn into a paid gig just to be able to pay rent. Josh, he had a few side things as well. He was running his clinic, he was doing a few other kind of partnerships just to kind of pay the bills. So it requires some elbow grease for sure, and some late nights. And especially if you don't have funding, you know, if you're bootstrapping it. So. Which is what we did. So, yeah, there's some late nights involved for sure. Yeah.

It's not for the faint of heart, right? I mean, it's not. You got to be willing to work hard. I'm sure you guys worked your butts off, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And so I think people need to know that and hear that. And you don't just go to a weekend workshop and all of a sudden you're an overnight success. I don't think. I've never seen that.

I haven't seen it. If someone finds out about it, you know, I mean, amazing, but it doesn't happen. And, and I think the other thing is, you know, I'm sure a lot of people have heard there's so many great documentaries or like little exposes about people who win the lottery and typically I forget what the stats are, but not surprising amount of time they're broke again, they're right back where they started because they didn't develop the habits that got them to be successful. They were just given a paycheck and then they had the same habits that kept them poor and they just amplified it and then they were right back to where they started within just a few amount of years. So that three year period is not just about your platform building, it's also about your habit development and your understanding. So there's an asset that you're developing in those three years beyond, you know, the business platform growth and things like that. There's a mental asset that's being developed as well.

Yeah, it's like you're not ready yet. The leader is not there yet. You can only be as good as you are, right?

Yes, exactly.

And you're not there yet. You're not developed enough yet, but you're on the path to learning. Just like if you go to med school, right. Or dental school, you're not ready to see patients yet. On year one, you're ready at the end. You're just barely past dangerous after four years.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. You know, med school is such a great example because.

Yeah, I just, I just really want to encourage people who are feeling discouraged or beat up that it's not happening fast enough because it takes three years. Yeah, it's like, who would expect to become a doctor over the course? A weekend workshop, like, it takes discipline and commitment and time and nurturing and you're learning stuff. There's a learning curve to it. And yeah, sure, some people are a little bit quicker to it or faster on it, or some people take a little bit longer. But that's one thing. And then the other thing I would encourage people is to enjoy the journey. And some of the things that are the struggle right now, if they're just getting started, it's like the late nights, they're exhausted, they're not feeling it. I tell you, on the other side of it, those are going to become the hero stories that you look back at and you're going to tell your kids about, you're going to tell your team members about, and those become the foundation or the backbone of the business and the culture as it continues to grow. So, you know, be excessively gentle with yourself as you go through this journey. It's a lot, you know, you're taking on a lot and it takes time.

And those are the fun things. Don't you think those are the things you remember?

Yes, exactly. Yes. There's so many great stories that are like, you know, the rush of it, we didn't know if it's gonna work. You know, it all broke down, but then we saved it and yeah, it's fun. If you can just enjoy the journey, it becomes a whole lot of fun.

Yeah. Okay, so what is next for you, Evan? Where are you going? What's. You've already created this amazing thing and now you're. It sounds like you've handed a lot of it off to maybe other people or. And now what's next for you?

Yeah, so right now I'm working with other eight figure entrepreneurs and business owners in the health and wellness space who really want to reach that next level. I'm looking for the next Dr. Axe to be involved with and to help them blow up their things. So I love it. There's a great book called Rocket Fuel and it talks about you have your visionary and you have your integrator. And those two working really, really well together are a synergistic combo that most companies have. However, most people don't know about the integrator. So Walt Disney as an example, his brother Roy Disney was actually the operational genius that made the whole thing actually work. And Walt was the visionary creative genius. And so the two of them working together is kind of one of the secrets to what they were able to create. And same thing, Steve Jobs and even others like Henry Ford, he had an integrator. So there's a lot of these visionary leaders that we know about now that are legends, but their integrator, who's more of the behind the scenes person, a lot of people don't know about them, but they're actually really, really key and pivotal to helping make the vision come to life. And so Josh was, in my story, Josh was the visionary, the kind of out in front of everyone. And my role was the integrator. And I love that role. It's like I wake up early, you know, or in the middle of the night, like, I can't wait to get to it. Like, it's just how I'm like wired and so, you know, so I really. So what I'm up to now is working with some other individuals that are more of the visionary that need some of that integrator to really blow up.

Awesome. So if people need to get a hold or want to get a hold of you, how do they do that? What's the best way to connect with you?

Yeah, bring me on Facebook and just send me a message. That's the best way to connect right now for me.

Awesome. Evan, man, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for simplifying this crazy thing called Internet marketing and you've broken it down to just a simple couple actionable steps and so thank you for doing that for everybody.

You bet. My pleasure.

When I look forward to staying in touch as we both go on our journeys.

Yes, likewise. Thank you, Gary. Thank you.