CEO: I Am Cutting My $200K/Year Employees in Favor of $50K/Year Employees

All right, everybody, we haven't done this in years. Neil, when's the last time we went live? Like 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 4 years? Something like that. Something like that. All right, guys, so type into chat wherever you're coming from. We're going to start this marketing school and then maybe we'll address some of the comments as we go through it. But my take on this, Neil, is live streaming is making a comeback. You see Gary Vee live streaming, you see Hormozi live streaming, everyone's live streaming, right? And then, Even us doing webinars is livestreaming as well. And so, I think there's a good argument for us to even livestream these and the engagement has always been good. I think it's always good to build community around it and we can clip from it. So, maybe that's a good place to start because your ass didn't put any ideas in this thing again.

I'm sleep deprived. I've only been getting 3 to 4 hours of sleep for the whole week.

Oh, that's no good.

Per day.

You know what you need for that, right? Let me tell you what you need for that. You need 20 to 25 grams of creatine and it cancels out your lack of sleep. Did you know that?

Really?

Yeah, I did that this morning because I only had like 5 hours of sleep the night before, and then the 20 grams, I'm like, I'm good, I'm sharp again. Huh.

I do the 10 grams. I don't take it when I'm traveling.

Yeah, you need to superdose it when you're low on sleep.

Yeah, what I started doing because I've been getting lack of sleep is taking— and I'm not recommending this as medicine advice or medical advice or health advice— was, uh, I started taking some NyQuil. I had some pills that helped a little bit, but I ran out.

Yeah. Oh dude, look, when I type, there's 2 responses. Thanks, Sean, from Main Street. So there's a, by the way, so you're speaking at a conference I think right now. I just spoke at Main Street Summit Capital Camp earlier this week. So we can even talk about some of our learnings from that as well. So, but the sleep thing, trust me, once you take the 20, 25 grams of creatine, not health advice guys, but it's worked out really well for me. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I'll check it out. I usually do like 10 grams, but cool. Let's get started.

I'll start. So, okay, let's— so I was at this conference this week called Capital Camp and Main Street Summit. So a lot of good friends hanging out there. So Eric Jorgensen, who wrote the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, was hanging out with him. The guys from Prey.com hung out with their co-founders. They have 4 co-founders. Hung out with a guy I used to intern for, Sean Kelly. And there's a lot of capital allocators there. And Tim Tebow, do you remember the guy that played football?

Yeah, the religious guy, right?

He's religious. Yeah. So by the way, get this, I didn't know that this was a super religious business conference because I've been going to this conference for 3, 4 years or so. And I started looking at some of the talks. It's like, um, you know, faith-based business or whatever. I was like, wait, huh? And so I saw a bunch of these things. I didn't realize, I didn't put 2 and 2 together. But during my talk, because it was like a room of, it wasn't a big room. It was like a very intimate room of like 100 people or so. So I dropped a couple of F-bombs in there. You know, said, you know, and then, and then, and then my, um, my friend who used to be a pastor, he's one of the co-founders of pray.com. He's like, yeah, you know, this is like the Coachella for, um, you know, for, for pastor businesses or like Christian businesses. So anyway, all that to say, there's a couple things I want to share and then I want to hear kind of your learnings from this week as well. Um, one of my friends, he is, he's basically saying, look, all the people I have on my team, um, and he has a smaller team, but he's like, the more senior people on my team who are making $200,000 to $300,000 a year, I'm cutting those people. people, I'm cutting like 5 of them on Friday in favor of the people who are making $85,000 a year. I'm like, okay, why are you doing that? He's like, because those people are way hungrier and they're getting— they're just shipping way more stuff. And they're running circles around the people that are used to making a lot more, right? Because when you're older, you're typically— you don't want to change your— or more further along in your career, you don't want to change your way of working versus these younger people. They're just all in on all the new technologies. So I thought that part was interesting. Another part that I thought was interesting is there's a well-known investor that I'm not going to name, but a lot of these people are kind of moving up the stack. They're no longer doing early-stage investing and they're all kind of focused on later-stage investing. So I thought that was interesting. But from a marketing angle, I'll have to— I'll share. I was doing a talk with Kevin Espiritu of Epic Gardening. So he has like 8 million YouTube subs or so. So to him, his blogging is dead. But for my talk, I'm like, blogging's not quite dead yet. You still want to milk it as much as you can, which we can go into a little deeper. But after our talks, one guy came up to me, I forgot what his name was, but he named 2 interesting tools, which I'm going to check out. I've kind of done my research on this, Neil. So Neil, when people text your company at NP Digital, You might not know this, but do you guys send text messages to these leads?

No, we do, but it's done in a certain way because every country has their own rules and regulations and privacy laws.

No, are they green boxes or are they blue boxes? You know what I mean?

Yeah, green is Android from my understanding, or we look at it as Android. We look at blue as iMessage.

Yeah, right? So are they, when you get a message from NP Digital, is it a green or a blue box?

That I don't know. I haven't seen my own message to myself.

Now, if you were to guess which, which, which color gets a higher response rate?

My guess is blue.

Yes, exactly. So I didn't know of this, this product. You might know of this, but there's a product called Sendblue, which hooks in with your CRM and everything. And it basically sends blue messages and you can react emoji. You can send voice messages almost as if you're responding from iMessage. You can set automations in there. And so this guy walked up, walks up to me after, he's like, he's like, dude, I'm like, cause he, I think he works with like 400 or 500 local clients. He has like a local SEO business. I'm like, how much of an impact has this made for your business? He's like, 9 out of 10. I'm like, wow, 9 out of 10. He's like, yeah, because the response rates are 3 to 4 times higher. I'm like, okay, I'm going to check that out and we're going to test that. Um, but also, um, there's a, there's a product called iClosed.io and, uh, it's like a little scheduling tool. And that he said that helped a lot for his business too. And interestingly enough, our mutual friend Yaniv, He sent that to me separately this week saying, hey, have you checked this out? Right? Um, and so that's like a little widget that you have on the bottom right of your screen. Um, and it has like a little like, hey, we're running out of meetings, right? And then once you like, you know, do like a form fill or do like a partial, it'll collect your information and it'll expand it out more. But, um, you know, these are all interesting things that I think are worth testing, but those are just a handful of takeaways. One final takeaway I'll give you and then let's move over to you, Ruth.

I'll keep going.

Because you're in London. So, so This event I've been going to a couple years. I was like, I don't know if I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back, but it's, it's because it's a pain in the ass to get to, right? It's in Columbia, Missouri. Great town that they do it in. They basically took over the entire town. Um, and one of my, uh, they, they basically— the food's amazing. So I don't know if you saw the, the, the picture of the fridge that I showed. Like, the fridge had like steak, chicken, and like salmon, hard-boiled eggs, like yogurt, chia seed puddings, and like, you know, nice, nice juices, right? My point of saying all this is that They spent $1 million on food for this conference, um, and they went all in on it. And that's a very remarkable thing. And when you do a conference and you basically take over the town and you can do talks in like coffee shops and things like that, that's also very remarkable. So the way that they've, they've done their marketing is remarkable. Um, and that actually gave one of my friends an idea to go buy a town in Japan and go buy a town in, in Italy, right? Because he wants to, he wants to market it and make it like a super epic thing. And you actually can buy a town in Japan and Italy for not that expensive, right? And the final thing I'll say, I don't have the card pulled up here.

Wait, they sell a town? I thought it was a per-home deal, so he's going to have to buy a lot of homes.

Yeah, I don't know what the deal is. I don't even know if you— you sound like you've kind of looked into this. I haven't looked into this at all.

I was just in Italy, so I was talking to people about it. It's these remote towns that are pretty much dead and they're trying to bring them back to life, so they'll give you a home for dirt cheap. Very few people live in the town. They're trying to you know, reenergize it, get people to spruce it up, but you're far from everything. It's like, imagine living in a countryside. Those, that's typically where you're going to get like the free homes.

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Yeah, I can see Eric looking like a real-life Mario brother.

Yeah, this is funny because this doesn't even look like me. I look Mexican here. I look like Filipino Chinese here. But so here's the interesting thing.

It's hard to tell because you're sideways, so I have to bend my head, but yes.

So those of you that can't see on the screen right now, this is a picture of— it's a card. So this person basically did all these cards of the speakers from this conference, right? And they're like AI-generated. They're really interesting, like Chris Powers, right? Brent Beshore. And so it's interesting, like this guy over here, Dave Perell, right? And I don't know if you know this guy, Jesse Pujji. I think you did a little thing with him recently. Yeah.

Yeah.

So anyway, all that to say is I was like, okay, this is really cool. I retweeted it, right? Get this. I was walking down the street with one of my friends and then this guy walks up to me. He's like, Eric Siu? I'm like, yeah. He's like, hey, I'm the one that did the cards. I'm like, what? No way. And so he handed me like a physical, like the physical version of this card. where it has like the holder and all that. I'm like, how much time did this take you? Hold it up. It's in my backpack somewhere. I'll go get it afterwards, but like once you talk. But like, my point is like, he spent a lot of time making these and he has like entire decks of all the people who spoke. And that's a good example of remarkable marketing. 'Cause what's people's favorite subject? Themselves, right? And I think he went last year and then what he did was he bought a van and he like toured people around in the city. And so my point of saying all this is that, When you do marketing, it's all about, you can call it standout marketing if you want, but it's the things that get noticed that where you go when you go the extra mile. So anyway, those are the things that I had from, that I learned from this conference.

So a few things on mine. I did Milan, few events there, same with Madrid and then London. So I don't know how many events I did total this week, maybe like 5 to 7.

That's a lot.

I'm losing count.

You must be tired as hell.

Uh-huh, because I'm working both PST and whatever the local time zone is, which is, you know, doing it for a few days isn't too bad, but when you had to do it for— I've been gone for almost a week now. Technically, today is a week. It starts getting a little bit tough, but most of the people I met up with were really large corporations. And when I say large corporations, almost everyone that I met up with and the audiences were people working at companies that generate billions and billions of dollars in revenue, majority publicly traded. One thing that was interesting is marketers are facing a lot of issues with AI slop. Everyone is starting to complain that AI is causing them to start doing more work because of the slop. And I'll give you an example. In London this morning, I was talking to a marketer, And he works for enterprise B2B SaaS company that's waiting to go public. They're massive, right? They'd probably go public between $5 and $10 billion. And he's just like, you know, we give ChatGPT hard rules and it breaks the hard rules every single time. And he's like, it just can't follow instructions a lot of the time and it just gets irritating and it costs us a lot of time and energy to fix these things when these tools should be really useful. Now, I'm not an AI expert by any means. I wouldn't even say I'm knowledgeable in AI from how it works and how it's coded Or any of that. When I was talking to someone, what they were telling me is the reason it messes up on hard logic is because, and again, I'm not an expert here, but this is what they're telling me, and they work for one of these LLMs, is because they're saying if you hardcode it, it's like software, black and white, like accounting software. It does this or it doesn't do this. It helps you do X or Y. AI, these LLM platforms are supposed to think on their own and get better and improve over time. So, if they put them in a little box and restrict a lot of the things that they can do, it restricts how they can think and grow. And they were saying because of that, they can't put as many limitations. And this is their excuse. I don't know how true this is, which is why you have a lot of basic problems. Like when you ask someone, again, I was in Italy and this girl's like, I'm looking for whey protein without this ingredient because she's allergic to it. And it shows her 3 whey proteins. With that ingredi. And she's like, I said without. And they're like, good catch, here's 3 other options. And they still had that ingredient in there. So she's like, screw this, let me just go on Google and search for what is the best whey protein that doesn't have this. She found a thread and then found a product from there. So a lot of people are having issues with AI creating slop. They still think it's great, it's helped them in many ways. The ways it's helped them has outweighed the slop that they're dealing with, but people are starting to really get frustrated with the slop. And the second thing that I saw is a lot of these companies, because we're starting to get to 2026, they're getting pressures from their CFO being like, so how are you going to use AI and what are we going to cut? How much money can we save next year? Because they're all doing budgeting and they're going back to their CFOs and they're struggling with this saying, hey, this AI has actually made our job harder. There's more channels now, more things that we need to do. We have to keep things more up to date. It's more competitive ever. We can't actually do all of this with less team and use tools and cut down. That's the feedback I'm getting from most of these corporations, and they're pushing back on their CFOs. And on that same note, they're talking about how they're making cuts. They are seeing some efficiencies with AI, but a lot of them are telling me internally, and some of these are C-level execs within their region. So if you work at a big corporation, that's global, they'll have a lot of CEOs, CFOs, et cetera, for each country. So they're not maybe the parent CEO or CFO, but they're the country CEO or CFO or CMO or whatever it may be. Still important role. Many of them are still running divisions that do hundreds of millions, if not billions a year. And what they were saying is, yeah, our company, we like painting the narrative that we're cutting a lot because of AI, but the majority of feedback I got, because a lot of these companies are doing layoffs, was we're actually cutting because we overhired during the COVID eras and we're not seeing as much growth in some of the business units. It's either one or the other, or sometimes both. And they're making cuts, but they're painting the narrative of, hey, we're being efficient with AI. And one of them said to me in a funny way, He's like, you're a marketer, right? I'm like, yeah. They're like, imagine this. You have 2 options of narratives. Which would you pick if you were in marketing? Narrative 1, we hired a lot of people. We realized we don't need those people. And we were hoping that we would end up needing them because our business units were growing fast enough, but they're actually, some of them are not growing fast enough and some are actually shrinking. So we got to do layoffs. That's narrative 1. The second narrative is, is, hey, we found a lot of efficiencies because of AI, so we're restructuring our organization and becoming more efficient and adapting this new technology. That's narrative 2. They tend to pick narrative 2 because it just paints a better picture. It's marketing instead of narrative 1, when they are saying sometimes AI is making them more efficient, but a lot of it is in the reality which they're not getting the growth, so they're cutting.

Yeah, I think ultimately AI is going to— it's, it's, we're just going to be doing more, if I'm being honest. Like we talked about this a week or two ago, like, that's a nice water bottle, but we're gonna be hiring more engineers for sure, right? We're gonna be doing a lot more than what, like, for example, you and I are excited that we can do a lot more. We talked about it becoming like a video game, right? So, um, but that's also 'cause we look at business as a video game too. And for those that don't, people that don't wanna do that, by the way, that's okay. Like go find something that you like. I think it's going to enable us do the things that we like and to do more of it. And that's how I see it.