How to Make Life Choices You Won't Regret

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Yeah. So let's start streaming. Start streaming. And this one should start. You can just hit manual start if you want, I guess.

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And then you will have— here you should have your— you should have a chat overlay too somehow. But for now, you can.

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Chrome. So we can do this. Pull this up.

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That thing doesn't work.

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I'm manually starting.

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Okay. And then you got the chat there?

You're good to go? Yep, good to go. Hello, Rosh, good to see you. We are starting in 3 minutes. We're getting everything going in a second. Let me pop out the chat over here. And then we will be good to go. GTG, GTG. Um, right in the chat. Hello, by the way. Um, I think the simulcast is working, so it doesn't matter where you're coming from— YouTube, Facebook, whatever. Uh, Mike, hello. Manav, hello. Good morning, Eric. No voice. Uh-oh, are you saying you can't hear me? Volume is too low. Okay, let me, let me fix that. So volume is too Too low. Oh, how's this? This is— this sounds much better now. I guess I just need to be closer, right? Let me see if I can crank the volume up. How's this? Steve says he can hear me good. Very low volume. Let's see. So, Mike says he hears me fine.

Okay.

I'm not sure if it's good or better now. Westlake Village, Trevor's coming from Westlake Village. Well, if it's better now, there's no issues, that's fine. We'll try to get this addressed next time. I think I did crank it up. Okay, volume is okay now. Thank you for that. So, we're gonna get started in about 2 minutes and then we'll be good to go. And guys, start asking your questions right now so I can start to address them, whatever questions they are, whether it's starting a business, growing a business, talking about habits, talking about entrepreneurship. And then I'll talk this way because I forgot we're talking to this camera and not this camera over here. So look, I'm trying to do at least one of these a week right now, a little more extended. That way everyone can, you know, I can at least get one video out and then we're basically following our content sprouting method. Which is basically where we're taking a piece of content like this one and then making it into multiple pieces, multiple blog posts, multiple podcasts as well. And, you know, really just kind of articulating my thoughts on a, at least on a weekly basis, in addition to the Marketing School podcast that we do, the Growth Everywhere podcast that we do. So Jerry's yelling at me. He says, you are good now. Thank you. Manav says he can hear me well. So great. He's— and Manav says this is awesome, awesomer now. Um, Rosh says it's a little loud. Okay, so let me bring it down a little bit, and we have 1 minute before we get started. Start asking your questions now, and then we're gonna get going. So I cranked it down a little bit. Uh, hopefully this works now. So guys, what I wanted to talk about today to get started is to really, um, think about The decisions that you make, right? And so this— I was thinking about a friend recently, and there's just a series of decisions that have led to kind of where he is right now. And I'm like, man, like, you know, every single decision you make, whether it's who you go work for, like, because who you go work for might cause you to go move somewhere, right? And who you decide to marry, that's a big decision as well. And, you know, all these little decisions. Or, you know, if you decide to start multiple businesses at the same time, like at the time it seems like an innocent little decision. But what happens is you start to make all these decisions and it's like, you know, you wake up in the morning, you decide, oh, you are too lazy to go work out. You're too lazy to take care of your body. You eat unhealthy, right? Like all these little decisions you make are compounding, right? Like people talk about compounding interest all the time. It happens with your life too. So you want to have good habits. And you want to be able to establish, you want to be able to establish the right habits. That way you can you can have good results at the end of the day, right? So you know the person I'm thinking about right now, it's like okay, you know there's there's issues where you know this person didn't find the right relationship, right? And then that led to a that led to a divorce, right? And then you know what happens is this person has you know multiple kids too. And what happens is when you have multiple kids. You know, you get into these child custody battles too. So you're like, you're basically splitting your attention because now what would have been a good partnership— and I'm not here to talk about relationships, right? I'm just giving you an example. What would have been a really good partnership where you two would have been helping each other out? You have now split the partnership. You put the time you sunk into that investment too. And then also now you're spending this time, you know, fighting these child custody battles too. Not only that, But you're working on not one business, but 2, but 3, but 4, but 5 different businesses at once. So you're just spread too thin and you're just working on too many projects. And it's the decisions that you've made in your life that have led to where you are. And there's nobody else to blame but yourself when you make bad decisions. So again, all these little— this is why it's important to establish like small little habits in the beginning. Like, you know, go to bed, you know, at a normal time and then wake up Maybe in an earlier time, you do what normal people aren't doing and then you get abnormal results, right? Because you're willing to go the extra mile and you're making these small little decisions every day. And then whereas like I've seen this person, you know, this person will go from a little overweight to, you know, trending towards fit. Like you can see this person's getting fit really quickly and if they continue with those habits, they're gonna be like ripped, right? And then all of a sudden this person kind of regresses and goes back to being, you know, unhealthy habits again, goes back to being unfit. And it's just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, right? And so if you do that same thing, you take those habits, which are like— habits are hard to create in the first place, and bad habits are hard to break, right? So when you don't have good habits to kind of hold you in check, everything just starts to kind of fall apart. So your business starts to fall apart, your relationships start to fall apart, everything starts to fall apart. Whereas if you can kind of hold— the one thing that you can control is the decisions that you make and Well, trying to control the only things that you can control. Like, can you control going to the gym in the morning? Most people, I would say yes, or in the evening, whatever. Can you control— can you control how hard you work? Yeah, you can. Can you control who you decide to spend your time with? Absolutely you can, right? So again, these are all little decisions, and then you tie it over into business, you tie it over into marketing as well. Like, did I want to start a blog when it was already competitive in marketing a couple— like, you You know, let's call it 6 years ago? No. Did I want to start a podcast when I didn't know how podcasting would go and I knew it was just a big question mark?

No.

Did I want to take over this company when it was negative and the business model was failing? Yeah, I kind of did because I thought I could do something with it and I thought the risk was low. So yeah, I did.

Do—

would I do it again? Probably not, right? And also, let's look at my senior living business that I had with my 2 high school friends. Would I do it again? Probably not. Because you know why? Because I made the decision, right? And it was a $75,000 decision. I made that decision to say, I'm gonna try something completely new and then come out of my area of expertise. And you know what? I'm gonna go try to do this thing where I'd have to relearn from scratch. And then like, I've built this audience around entrepreneurship and marketing, it's starting to, you know, grow. And I decided to completely deviate, right? So— And I use this analogy a lot. It's like, you know, success is a circle and you start in the middle and success is on all the edges. And then what happens is I'm this little dot in the middle and I go this way, I go this way, I go this way. I just, I never reach the edges because I keep trying different things and I keep making these bad decisions that compound over time. And when you try to do too many things, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna go start this senior living business and then I'm gonna go start this ecommerce business that I have nothing, that I know nothing about. Like, I had this magic ecommerce business Okay, I had a senior living business as well. I probably had another e-commerce business too. I had this, I had this website that talked about light shows, and I just all over the place, right? Like, where am I going? What, what am I trying to be? And when Neil and I were recording Marketing School the other day, Marketing School the podcast, check it out. By the way, we're doing that event in downtown LA. It's gonna be June 15th, guys, in downtown LA. That's a Saturday. Go to the app if you want to fill out an application. Go to singlegrain.com/dtla. It is going to be an amazing event. It's free. The caliber of the people is gonna be very high, and we're doing a dinner as well for those of you that would like to join a private dinner with Neil and I. By the way, it's not gonna be cheap to do that. You can see that in the application itself. All right guys, I'm gonna read some questions right now and see what's going on. So Kamal's coming, coming in from Kathmandu. Great, Kathmandu near— I believe that's what, Nepal? And that's near Mount Everest. So thank you for watching from all the way over there. I'm really grateful for that. Jeremy Muscadine says, how do you suggest I build a consultancy agency and apply all the knowledge I am gaining through the Digital Accelerator program? So Jerry is actually a part of our Agency Accelerator program. So thank you for that. It's basically how to build your consultancy up. So Jerry, I think the first thing that you have to do is you can spend your time learning all day, but you actually have to start to implement. And this is like when I first took over the agency Single Grain, I had no idea how to run a company. Like I had an idea on how to run a marketing team, how to run a team, manage a team. But in terms of like, you know, taking over the company and being thrown into the deep end, that's what I did. Like I did a lot, I failed. There's like, you can watch, you know, you can learn from the videos, like those will help you sidestep mistakes. But at the end of the day, you're still gonna have to go out there and you're gonna have to implement, you're gonna have to go out there and make mistakes. It's just that, you know, going through a program like that is gonna help you get there faster, right? Without having to, because this is the reason you go to school in the first place too. So you don't have to make the same mistakes that other people have made. This is also why you go to college too. This is why you do an internship. You learn, you draw from other people's experience so you can make less mistakes and get to your goal faster. That's what you're trying to do. By the way guys, if you guys are interested in growing your consultancy or building an agency, go to singlegrain.com/live. That's L-I-V-E. Go there, you can apply for a call, talk to our team. We can talk to you about our entire program on how we basically built this agency from negative in revenue. Bought it for $2 and it's multiple 7 figures now, going for 8 figures, right? So Damien's coming in from Switzerland. Glad to catch me live. I'm glad to catch you live as well, Damien. Manav says, how would you market a local roofing company? I have a Facebook Ads client from California. I have some good ideas but like to listen to your ideas. Look, Manav, I think what you have to focus on, like, you have to— when you're marketing any type of company at all, is where are those customers hanging out? Are they hanging out on— you just mentioned Facebook ads client. Are they hanging out on Facebook? Are they hanging out on Instagram? Are they targeting a local area? If you're targeting a local area, well then what's the geo? What's the geo target, right? Or can you geofence the ads? So the way I would think of it is systems, right? So, you know, when you mention local roofing company, okay, where are those people hanging out? Guess what? With Google ads, with Facebook ads, with Instagram, whatever, the 2 biggest platforms out there. You have the power to target locally. Because you mentioned local, right? They're not going to target the entire nation. So, when you think about that, okay, that's one part of the system. Okay, roofing. Who needs roofing exactly? What's the demographic? That's another part of the system too, right? Number 3, when you're in a system, I'm talking about systems thinking right now, you are also thinking about, okay, well, who are their competitors in the area too? Because the competitors are trying to eat their lunch. What are other people doing? There's so many different things that are going on when a company is active, right? And if you're running the company, if you are the owner of the company, guess what? You got to think about your employees too. How do you keep your employees happy? How do you retain them for longer? There's just so many systems out there that you need to think about, that you need to be aware of. And from there, it makes life a lot easier, okay? So that's that. I feel like I need to go through the course first, finish all the modules, and then then back and apply into the business. So Jerry, I would say you could go through the course and if you find something that really resonates with you, I'm talking about the Agency Accelerator right now, go through it and then if you find something very actionable, take action on it immediately. Don't wait to go through the whole thing. And maybe do it step by step because you have access to the course and you might as well go through it and then you have access to the group coaching as well. Daniel says, hey Eric, what paid channels do you use to generate client inquiries? AdWords, paid social, etc.? Daniel, I actually don't use any of them. We actually, most of our leads come through, 50% are SEO and content, 15% are through our podcast, and then 35% are through networking, speaking, throwing events, things like that. You know, we do get leads, you know, we do like retargeting search ads on AdWords and, you know, retargeting on paid social too. But those haven't generated the best leads for us. Like they generate leads for sure, but I wouldn't say it's, it's generated like the best things for us. So just keep that in mind. I'm gonna have some tea real quick. I'm gonna put it over here. All right, Jerry says, I suggest you invest, you all invest in the course because it's one of the best I have paid for thus far. Jerry, thanks, thank you so much for that, really appreciate that. Mike says, hey Eric, would you let me intern for you? I'm certified by Digital Marketer in all 11 of their certifications. I'll do whatever it takes. I'm passionate about digital marketing and hungry to work. Mike, if you email me eric@singlegrain.com, and if you also just email me first, eric@singlegrain.com. If I don't respond to you, you can DM me on Instagram @ericosiu, and I will try to respond to you. I do appreciate the fact that you have actually done something and that you're actually reaching out to me. You're watching me live right now. I think that says a lot. From there, I think we would just have to see if you are a culture fit and then kind of go from there. But San Jose, you know, we can figure something out there. Jerry says, I'm applying some of the knowledge gained from you, Eric, but when it comes for content marketing, I don't know if I should post it on my website or link to other websites in my arena. Jerry, I think you should post on your own website because it's your own property and you can build equity over time. Again, you're building, it's compound interest, right? You're building on your own site, it gets stronger and stronger over time. When I first came into Single Grain, our website was only getting like 4,000 visitors a month. 4,000 hits a month, right? Which seems like a lot, it actually isn't. Now we're up to about— we're approaching, you know, 250,000 visits a month, right? But it takes a long time to compound. So you want to build on your own, right? You want to build on your own property. So that's something to keep in mind. My leg's kind of dying right now or falling asleep, so I'm kind of trying to move it. And Jerry, by the way, you can link to other websites in your arena too. There's nothing wrong with that. There's no need to be kind of, you scarcity, to have a scarcity mindset. Have an abundance mindset and be willing to share, be willing to kind of link to other people if they have good resources out there. Eric, in another video with Neil, you recommended starting an agency only if you could keep the team small, 4 to 5. I'm building my team. What core team members would you recommend? I would actually say, you know, Shannon, like a lot of things change over time, right? And by the way, if you are interested in growing your agency, singlegrain.com/live, you can talk to my team about our agency accelerator program. There's always that. The core team members you need if you're just starting out for any consultancy or maybe even any business is if you can get an executive assistant, because what's gonna happen is you're gonna start to accumulate more and more tasks because in the beginning you're doing the billing, you're doing the work, you're doing the prospecting, you're doing the networking, you're doing everything, right? Your goal is every quarter try to take off maybe 15 to 20% of things that you're doing and then make that, that list of responsibilities, right, those tasks Make those into a role. And an EA, an executive assistant, is someone that's really good. I recommend Ramit Sethi's Delegate and Done course. So Delegate and Done, I just put that in there in chat. Check it out. It's basically templates, systems on how to work best with an executive assistant. And then those people can take you a long way. And, you know, these people will help take a lot of weight off your shoulders. So then you'll have a clear mindset and then your goal is to continue to figure out what other roles you need based on the tasks that you're doing and then create new job descriptions, right? Because, so I would first start with an executive assistant and then you can start with people that are, you know, you can eventually build out, you know, people that are, maybe you're doing a lot of client work so maybe you need more client services people. Or maybe you need a, maybe you eventually need an operations manager or a salesperson. It just depends on the things that you're trying to take off. Think about the things that give you energy Right? You're good at and they give you energy. So let's say you're good at sales, but it doesn't really give you energy. Like I think I'm good at sales, but it doesn't give me the most energy, right? I love creating content or I love creating new products. That's what I like doing. Like I my strength is in marketing, right? So that's what I like doing. And like things I'm doing with with you guys right now, like I actually enjoy this because I feel like you know you got people watching from Sweden, Kathmandu. You got you know current customers watching too. Like that. That's something like, you know, it makes me happy that I'm able to, you know, people find value in the things that I'm saying. So there's that. And then from there, again, you're just constantly looking to— hold on, let me make sure my phone goes on silent. You're making sure that you're continuing to delegate because that's the name of the game. As you want to— if you want to continue to grow your business, you're gonna have to just keep continuing to take things off your plate. You're not being lazy, you're doing the highest leverage thing you can do as a business owner, which is you're You're giving, you're employing people, you're giving them jobs, you're helping them make money, helping them achieve their dreams, right? And you're building more value because, you know, the revenue in your business, it's basically, that's the scoreboard, that's how much value you're building in society. So there's that. Manav says, hey, I've done all, hey Mike, I've also done all the courses by Digital Marketer, I even worked with them on a challenge one year ago, they are awesome. I got all their courses for free because of working for them. Good job, Manav, good job hustling there. Jerry says, how do I get people to come to my website? SEO is not my forte. Look, I mean, you create content, you don't think about SEO that much, that's going to be fine for you over time. So, it's not like, you know, I find that the least that I think, the less that I think about SEO, the better. And, you know, yes, I know all the SEO kind of basics or even the advanced stuff with SEO, but sure, that's like icing on the cake. The main thing you want to do is create value for people. Because what you're doing, like we're creating content right now, I'm building trust with you, I'm giving stuff away for free, I'm not really asking for anything right now either. So there's that, right? That's what you're trying to do ultimately. And I think everyone in here right now, the fact that you're sitting here learning means that you have something to give. And if you think you're still really early days, like continue to learn, continue to get better over time and you will get better. Alright, so— Daniel says, Eric, where do you draw the line between building your personal/single grain brand? I see many different examples across experts such as yourself, Neil, Ryan Stewart, etc. So single grain itself, I mean, we've kind of talked about this with the content team recently. Hello, Bob, good to see you. We talked about this with the content team. We said, look, you know, we should have a separate single grain Instagram where it basically talks about like our culture, how it is working here. We want single grain to be its own brand. And then, you know, myself, what I want to do is, you know, I want to have this whole— the book that I have coming out called Leveling Up, it's about playing the game of life, right? And I think that's what I want to tie myself closer to. I want Single Grain, the company, like any other companies like Single Grain or ClickFlow, those types of companies, they should be themselves, right? And my own little personal brand, like that should be separate from that. Like I want— because when you have— Now, Neil and I have talked about this on the Marketing School Podcast. You can build more equity in your company by having a name that stands on its own, right? It's like Single Grain, like ClickFlow, right? But when it's like a personal brand that you're selling, what happens is, well, if I decide to detach myself from the personal brand, like what does that say, right? And sure, there's companies like Michael Kors, you know, all these like luxury brands, right? But ultimately, you know, what you want to do is if you're gonna run a company, what I would say is, you know, sure, you can build your own personal brand, but But each company should have its own kind of name to itself. That way when you sell it, if you decide to sell it, or you decide some kind of exit, it's not going to be as tied to you, it's not going to be as hairy. Let's see. So, Manav says, Seth, go to Deno SEO and he ranks on the first page if you just search for Seth. Just focus on building something great. Okay. And then Daniel says, question, do you have an in-house, do you have in-house account managers who go out and see clients face to face each month? Daniel, yes we do. We have our client services team and they actually go meet with the clients. Because what happens is if you do work, you do good work for clients, let's say you're managing their Google Ads or their Facebook, right? The problem is there's probably someone else out there that can optimize better than you can. So how can you add additional value? By meeting them in person, by inviting them to an event. This is why people take people to like, you know, sports games, sports events, or they buy them gifts and things like that. It's, it's, you're building friendships over time and And that's what's gonna lead to a longer lifetime value with a client. Audrey says, how would you go about marketing blockchain educational courses? Facebook doesn't allow blockchain ads and we're struggling with traffic and conversions. Audrey, I actually think, you know, they don't allow blockchain like, you know, raising money for an ICO or anything like that. But if you're talking about blockchain educational courses, you might be able to get approval from Facebook. Twitter is a little more difficult, but you would probably be able to get approval from Facebook and Google. So I hope that helps. So guys, by the way, we're doing that live event because we broke a million downloads for Marketing School. Neil Patel and I were doing it. We're also doing a VIP dinner as well. If you want to apply to that, go to singlegrain.com/dtle. Seats are limited, but we are also recording it online. It's gonna be an amazing downtown location. And we're also— I think I mentioned this already, but we're doing a private dinner that's capped at 20 people. A couple of seats have been taken already. Guys, it's not gonna be cheap for that dinner. There's it's actually into applications of single grain single grain dot com slash dtla for that and continuing on. So I do want to again come back to the decisions that you make, right? The people that you hire make a big impact. Like whatever bad decision you make, like yes, you're going to make bad decisions, but business life overall is just about making more more more good decisions than bad decisions. Okay. So look, you're gonna screw up, right? Business, you screw up like, oh, you decide to make these, you know, you try these experiments overall. But if you have some kind of decision-making framework where you know how to prioritize things better, like, you know, following the Eisenhower Matrix, right? So that's, you know, working on the things that are important but not urgent because those are long-term. Having long-term thinking as well. Focusing on the things that you're actually good at. So you have all these frameworks that you're following and you're operating within them. And then you have good habits, right? That's my team clapping outside. I think they're giving each other high fives. That's our morning huddle. Like, by the way, that's a decision we made. We're doing these daily huddles every morning. We're talking about the numbers. We're doing high fives. We're nominating each other. We're talking about victories each week. That's a decision too. We do these traction meetings every single week. Trying to see if I have the book over here.

You said you have it.

I guess I don't have the book over here. But look, that's a decision too. The decision to go live and then, you know, first we're doing every single day, now we've changed it, right? You're making all these little tweaks, all these little optimizations, and it's the billionaires in the world that know how to make these optimizations over time. Because if— again, this is why most people are most people. They make bad decisions, okay? It's really frustrating because I'm animated about this right now because that friend, You know, everything was going well, and then it's just like, man, it's big decision, big decision, big decision. And at the time, it seemed kind of questionable already, and I didn't say anything. But like, it just starts to stack over time, and you start to see like this person—it gets tougher and tougher and tougher, and it's really hard to see that, right? Versus the people that I see, like you know, people that I've hired in the past that have become really, really that I thought would be successful, and they've actually become very successful. It's because they have good habits, and they made the decision to have good habits. Right? And that's led to them leveling up to where they are now. So anyway, I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but guys, also if you're starting a business like a consultancy or an agency, it's making good decisions, right? It's, you know, if you don't have the money, you know, listening to a podcast like, you know, there's also ours, Growth Everywhere, there's Marketing School, those are— that's free content or even videos like this, like, you know. And then you can, you know, there's other tiers too where you actually have to pay for it like our Agency Accelerator. Program, you know, if you go to singlegrain.com/live, you can learn more about it, talk with our team. But that's all our templates in there so you can sidestep the mistakes. And again, that's making a decision, right? Yes, you got to spend money on it. There's the free stuff, you got to spend money on stuff. But you know what happens is, why did my— why do people tell their kids to go to college? For the most part, it's a good decision, right? For the most part, it's, it's, you know, college is, you know, the, the returns are kind of diminishing now, but there's still value in in going there because you at least get to explore different things, you get to meet great people, and that's gonna help you hopefully make good decisions for the long term. Then, you know, you decide whatever you want to do. Guess what? Here's another example. I had a friend who's a roommate in college, and he was trying to be a dentist, and it didn't work. Like, he would— he just, no matter how hard he tried to go through the dental program, he just couldn't get in, right? And then what happened is he made a little pivot and he decided to go into business. He went into business with another friend of mine, elementary school friend, and they're doing well now. I mean, their business is doing over $15 million a year. And we all grew up in elementary school. And, you know, he made the decision to get away. Like, it was a tough thing to do, even though there's pressure from, like, maybe pressure from his parents, pressure from peers, things like that. Man, you know what? I'm gonna go in another direction and I'm gonna start a business and I'm gonna power through it. I'm gonna make mistakes. I'm gonna get better and better over time. And now all of a sudden he's a completely different person. Same with his partner, completely different person. And it's because they decided to cultivate good habits. I mean, they're— look, they're all fit, they all take care of their bodies, right? And that says a lot when someone takes care of themselves. Like, that is a big signal that, you know what, they know how to make good decisions, right? And that's how you— That's how you look about— like, that's how you look at— I mean, here's the thing. When I look at like the different groups that I'm in, like the ones that are really optimized growing the fastest are typically the ones that like you can see what's going on the outside too. Like mentally they're strong, fitness it's strong too, and then the way they articulate themselves is strong. There you can see they're sharing new stuff all the time about the things that they're learning. They're just getting stronger and stronger, and that's a very— that's a very contagious type of feeling, which is why like I'm going to— I'm going to Mexico, you know, later this week with our Growth Accelerator Mastermind and Everyone in there is like, they're doing amazing things. Their businesses are doing amazing. You know, they've got amazing families. They've got amazing kind of, you know, life partners as well. There's— and that, that's contagious. And that when you hang out with people like that, again, that's another decision, right? To hang out with people like that, that's gonna make you exponentially stronger. So guys, I mean, look, you know, we've gone for 24 minutes today. I'm just looking at kind of what other people are saying. So, let's see. Ahmed says, what should I do for getting local clients for SEO consulting? So, what I think you could do for getting local clients for SEO, you can reach out to people locally and then offer to work for them for free initially and then ask for references. Ask for a testimonial, ask for references, that's how you start with consulting, all right? Michael or Mikkel says, Eric, do you have a dashboard recommendation for tracking all, a full digital campaign and reporting to clients all in one? Not agency analytics. Mikkel, we actually just signed up for a program called TapClicks, and it's about $300 a month. So if you can afford that, that one sounds good. High five sounds fun. Jerry says, don't, don't look at mistakes as bad. Look at it as an opportunity to get to grow. Have a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Absolutely, Jerry. Well put. Manav, the book right now, what I'm doing is I'm spending about 6 hours a weekend. So again, hey, that's a decision on the weekend to improve the book. Okay, because it went through an editor and then we're probably going to go through self-publishing, so that I'm very excited about. And hey Eric, I have an executive question, can I call in? I have a really good question, too long to type here. Unfortunately, Prezi, we don't have a call-in type of deal right now, but maybe you can ask it here. So, Mikkel, I disagree with you actually. I think if you're starting out, you have to work for free. Nobody knows who you are, consultancies are a dime a dozen. If you don't have a name, you got to go out there and work for free. That's how I got started. That's how Neil got started in the early days. But it's not like work— you work for free for a long time. You do it to get a name, your name out there, and you negotiate terms. You say, look, you know what, I'm gonna work for you for free for a month or 2 months, right? Or maybe a month only. What I want to do is I want to come back to the table at the end of 1 month, and I want to actually— I want to negotiate a longer-term contract, right? If you like the work, I want a longer-term contract and I want a testimonial and I want you to give me, you know, 1 or 2 referrals. Can you do that, right? And like if you're gonna offer to work, like if you're starting out, if I'm 21 years old, even if I'm 18 years old, nobody knows who I am, I've never done any work, I have no credibility, why in the world should I get hired? Like no way. But if I show I'm hungry, if I show I understand that guy's business, if I show I'm smart, like yeah. Sure, why not? You work for free for 2 people that you really admire for a month or 2, then you get a retainer. Maybe the retainer's, you know, maybe they'll pay you $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 a month, $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, like who knows? But at least you got started. And I think that's why Neil and I, we really advocate working for free for a period of time, right? There's always like little contingencies with it, but you got to be smart. You got to look out for yourself and you got to set the terms. One thing about any type of deal-making at all, It's not— look, price is only one part of the deal, right? Like working for free, whatever, that's only one part of it. But it's the terms when you're doing a deal with someone, it's the terms that matter. Like there's all these little terms like, oh, if you want me to pay you $100,000, sure. What if I pay you over 20 years? That's a term, right? So you've got to be able to set good terms for yourself and learn how to negotiate really well. That's gonna help you for the long term. All right. Manav says that's what he— that's how he got started. Damien says, I work for free for testimonials and experience. Great. How do you resist working on more than one thing? Is it true that it's best to focus on one thing at a time and why? Ishmael, Neil and I talked about this on Sunday when we recorded Marketing School. Look, I think it's better to focus on one thing. And even Neil and I, like, we still kind of struggle with this. Like, there's so many opportunities out there. The problem is the opportunity of the century, of a lifetime, right? It comes every single year. There's always a new opportunity. So, you know, Steve Jobs talks about this. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates both agreed that the one thing that leads to success is focus, right? And the people that are really successful, they focus. They focus on one thing. And then like Apple, okay, Apple focused on one thing first, the Macintosh, and then it became different things. You focus in one area, but they're still kind of in hardware and electronics. Now they're in services. But what I found, what I'll say is this. When I focus around the niche that I've kind of, you know, grown in, which is marketing, that's always worked. We built software, the agency works, our podcast works, our live events, they work as well. Just everything, like I get invited to speak around marketing too, like that all works, that's great. Now, when I start to go into different areas like senior living, the problem is I don't have domain expertise. I have to go out there and learn everything, I have to go out there and build completely new relationships. There's just so much more friction in terms of getting started. So if you're gonna, if you're gonna try to do different things, at least try to stay in the same industry. And then, you know, again, you're gonna have to learn to, you know, grow your revenues first, add value to the world, and then hire more people to help you take things off your plate. Then you can continue to build scale, continue to build leverage into what you're trying to do. All right, so guys, that is it for today. Actually, I'm gonna answer this question from Prezi because he actually asked it over here. So let's see, I'm just making sure that I don't have a next call. Oh, I do have a next call. I'm gonna have to run. So Prezi, I'm trying to find a new tool that I can use as a central cloud platform. AWS, Google Cloud, I'd recommend either or because they have really cheap plans in the beginning. AWS, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud to get started. Guys, I need to actually jump into my next call. So that's it for today, guys. Go to singlegrain.com/live, L-I-V-E, if you want to learn how to get started building your consultancy or building your agency overall. That's going to take you a long way. So that's it for today, and we will see you in the next live.