The SECRET MARKETING FORMULA That Elects Presidents And Builds Businesses | Phillip Stutts | The 2%

2018, in response to Trump winning the election, Facebook started banning ads in politics. And everybody loved it. Yes, thank God those ads are gone. Not about Trump. Just like no one wants to see those political ads. That's great. And I just said at the time, if they're coming for us now, they'll come for me later. So this is what censorship is all about. The successful companies that market today understand that they're a data company first, and then they offer a product and service second, because if you own the data, you can't be canceled. What I'm preaching to people is whether it's my story or whether. Whether it's your business and you're building it all on Facebook or Amazon or Pinterest or wherever you are, if you're renting your customers from these platforms, eventually they're going to take them away.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the 2%, where, as always, we're interviewing peak performers in all walks of life. Why? To help decode excellence, help give you tips, tools, strategies that you can use for your benefit, for the benefit of those around you in both your work and life. And I'm super honored to have on the show today Philip Stutz. Welcome, Philip.

Ah, honored to be here, man. Love what you're putting out in the world. Love that I'm in Florida and you're in Portugal, and we are doing this. So I'm ready to roll.

Awesome. Now, you have a pretty storied background, which of course, we're going to be getting into on the show. But just to give some people some highlights, you've become an absolute expert at helping politicians win political campaigns. You've participated in over 1400 elections, I think, and you've helped wins.

1400 wins. Right. And help three presidents get into office win their elections. I mean, that's a nice place to start, obviously. So which three presidents?

Enlighten us both. So let's just start out. Nothing is all success. So I've worked on eight presidential campaigns, right. Three of them won five or. Yeah, five of them lost. So my track record, I mean, you gotta think like, just in the last, in 2020, the Democratic primary had something like 25 candidates. So if you choose one, you know, you got a one out of 25 chance. So.

My first campaign, I'll give you an example, I was on Bob Dole's campaign in 1996, and that didn't win. Clinton won that. And then eventually I've worked on others, but the winning ones have been George W. Bush twice in 2002, thousand four. In 2004, I ran his get out the vote operation. And then what you'll learn about me in this interview is that I'm actually not partisan at all. So when I tell you these names, I don't care if you're turned off or not. I really don't care. But I'm not doing it because I'm some rabid, crazy partisan. I believe in candidates and I believe in issues, but I can also separate. And so the other one was Donald Trump in 2016. We were helping a super PAC, and a super PAC is kind of a political action committee that supports the candidate to win. And we were brought in to help him win North Carolina and Florida and a couple other states. And we were part of that as well.

Amazing. Now, there's an interesting story, of course, that you have to share that has been widely publicized with the whole Facebook banning of the book. Yeah. Oh yeah, fill us in. What happened there?

Well, this is, this is like. So, yeah, if you want to know where I'm actually probably very biased, it's in cancel culture. I just, you know, I cannot stand it and kind of experience this. So like In December of 2020, my book was, you know, we were finalizing sort of book covers and things like that. And my publisher said, hey, here are eight different book covers. Which one do you like? So I did like whatever any good entrepreneur did. I ab tested this with my friends. I sent the eight book covers to about 50 friends and I said, please vote. And the top three each got 12 votes each, like the top three book covers. So I was like, oh cool, okay, well, I got three, but I don't have one that stands out. So I was, I went to my marketing team at my firm, at my corporate marketing agency and I said, let's do the ultimate ABC test. Let's test all three of the top vote getters on the book cover on Facebook and then let's just see what gets the most click throughs. And we were going to put an ad campaign behind it, all that stuff. Yeah, we submit the ad and all of a sudden Facebook comes out and says, we've not only denied your book ad campaign, we are officially banning any attempt to do it and the COVID of your book. And I went, hold on, why? And my ad operations team came back and said, well, the subtitle, the book title is the undefeated marketing system. How to grow your business and build your audience using the secret formula that elects presidents. The fact that I said elects president in the subtitle made Facebook say that I was trying to influence an election, an election that had already happened. It was over with. And therefore they said that they were banning the book cover. And so I went to my team and said, okay, this is like the logarithm caught the word elect. So let's just go appeal to human being and get this set. Because obviously it's a business book. It literally is not a. It talks about how we run marketing campaigns and politics, but it is not a. It's a. It's an absolute 100% business book. Eight out my team does they submit the. The.

Appeal. And eight hours later, Facebook comes back and says, nope, you're denied and you cannot appeal again and the book is banned. And that. That was it. And you know, Eric, I. I just realized that I have a platform. Most people don't can't scream from a platform and make noise. And I knew I could. So I just decided, you know what, I'm going to make some noise here. I'm going to. As Seth Godin would say, I'm gon ruckus. And so I wrote a blog about it. And Fox News, you got picked up by Fox News. And Fox News contacted me and said, we want to run a story on this. They did run a story on it. The next thing I know, a national publication reached out to me and said, hey, would you write an op ed on this? You know, an opinion piece on it for a national publication? I said, yes. And in that time that the Fox News story ran and I wrote this article, I started having all these people come out of the woodwork and say the same things that happened to them, even though they don't work in politics, they just have businesses. And one of them was a guy named Justin Donald. So Justin wrote a business book that hit number one on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list in January. And it almost didn't happen, because when he submitted his book to Amazon, the whole book was about how people invested during the coronavirus pandemic and made money. And that's what he wanted. The story he wanted to tell in the book, hey, this is how people made money during the pandemic. And because he used the word coronavirus, Covid.

And Covid, Amazon said they would not upload his book onto their platform unless he removed those words from his book, even though it had nothing to do with the medical condition at all. And I went, holy cow, I got to tell this story. And then what was. This is even crazier. So then we had a charity reach out to me, and the charity was they helped rescue sexually and physically abused kids from these homes that are where this stuff is occurring. And they decided that in the. They had the most cases they'd ever had in 2020 because of lockdowns, but they raised the least amount of money because of the lockdowns and the economic uncertainty. So they came and said they wanted to Facebook and they said they wanted to run a fundraising campaign in October of 2020. Facebook denied them because they said that they were an issue. It was an issue ad which fell under some ban of theirs, the election law ban, and therefore they weren't able to raise money. A charity that is trying to rescue sexually and physically abused kids and under lockdowns we've never had so much of it has ever occurred, and they couldn't do it. And so I wrote this article and I told these stories in my story. Look, my story's not that big of a deal. I got my book cover banned. Ooh, big deal. But the fact is, is that, look, I tell this to everybody I know. In 2018, in response to Trump winning the election, Facebook started banning ads in politics. And everybody loved it. Yes, thank God those ads are gone. Not about Trump. Just like no one wants to see those political ads. That's great. And I just said at the time, if they're coming for us now, they'll come for you later. So this is what censorship is all about. They're never going to.

It's a never ending censorship.

Well, I mean, in hindsight though, I look at it and I go, wow, what a stroke of good fortune, actually for the marketing of the book, because you get to talk about how Facebook banned it.

And then as a marketer, I totally get that and I totally took advantage of it, don't get me wrong. But it is also a massive amount of BS and a little bit scary. And I mean, I have so many people in your space, Eric, and you may have know people that have experienced this, but they do online summits, they do in person summits, they do teaching programs. And Facebook has banned their ads. I know one in particular who's a friend of mine, she was about to do a $12 million online event and they, in the two weeks running up to the event where they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every week on Facebook, Facebook banned their ads and gave them no reason whatsoever. And the fact is, is that they're coming for everybody. And they just, you know, they got my book covered. You know, again, not the end of the world. But when they come for charities, when they come for people that are writing about financial investment and when they're coming for teaching, you know, platforms, they're coming for everybody. And the reason I say that is because one of the things I really emphasize in the book is how important it is that the successful companies that market today understand that they're a data company first and then they offer a product and service second. Because if you own the data, you can't be canceled and you've got to position your company. Can I give you one great example of this?

Yeah, please.

About three weeks ago, a business owner reached out to me and said, hey, I need help. And it got through our funnel. And I did a phone call with him. This guy is running an eight figure business selling baby toys, but high end baby toys, all this stuff. And he built it on Amazon and he's doing eight figures a year, like $20 million. Okay. And, and so he reached out and said, I'm in big trouble. And I said, well, what happened? And he said, well, I built this thing in two years, I sold it to a private equity firm, but I have an earn out. So for everybody, that's how it works. He has to earn out, he has to make more money in the company and he gets to earn all the sale out. And then he said.

Some low cost competitor trolls, so people that were making cheap baby products realized that he was dominating the space in this particular niche on Amazon and they all got together and started going on to Amazon and leaving him one star reviews. Then if you've ever dealt with one star reviews, you know there's, you get a box when you leave a review, it's is it helpful or do review, Report.

Right?

It's report or helpful. Right. So all of these cheap baby toy competitors started upvoting helpful. So the first review that anybody saw on this guy's products were hundreds of one star reviews and they were all at the top of the page. And he obviously pressed report and all he got was basically a generated response that said nothing we can do. He talked to somebody, they were in India and they said nothing we can do. And then he all of a sudden went from literally making seven figures a month to making $80,000 a month. And he didn't own the data for his own company. And so obviously that was how do we market my business now to own the data? But what I'm preaching to people is whether it's my story or whether it's your business and you're building it all on Facebook or Amazon or Pinterest or wherever you are, if you're renting your customers from these platforms, eventually they're going to take them away. It's 100%. And so what I teach in the book more than anything else is how do you win the game of marketing? And I'm a big believer that the game of marketing right now is rigged for 99.9% of businesses. And then I walk all through it. We can go from there, but that's how I look at it.

Awesome. Awesome. And of course, the book, once again, that we're talking about is one that you just wrote, the Undefeated Marketing System, which is doing really well, I can see.

Yeah, thank you.

And.

And, and I think it's just genius that you're applying all of these insights from politics and from the campaigns that you've participated in into the business world. And you've been described as a result, as a marketing maverick. And so if we kind of just go to that word, maverick. So what is it about you that's so unorthodox? What's so different within this book?

Well, I wrote a book three and a half years ago called Fire Them now, which tried to shed the light on the corporate marketing industry and all the unethical work that marketing agencies were doing. So that was like my, my entry into the market. So that may have made me the maverick.

Right.

And then for this, it was like, okay, you know how the game is rigged. This is how you can win the game. The game is a thousand. The marketing game is 1000% rigged against 99.9% of businesses. Why? Because the marketing.

And what do mean, like, who's, who's doing the rigging? Like.

Yeah, so the way I tell you is like this, like a casino, the house today always wins.

Right?

Right. You as a business owner, you may get a hot hand. You know, sometimes I walk into a casino and I tell my buddies, I'm walking out in that limo out there, right. And then check back about three hours later, and I've hit the ATM six times and I'm out all my money.

Right.

Like, this is exactly what a business owner goes through in their marketing. They may get a hot streak. Don't. No doubt. But ultimately they're going to lose every time. And the people that win the game of marketing are two different people, marketing agencies, because they get paid whether you succeed or not as a business owner. And the second one is the big tech companies. Again, let me go back to what I just talked to you. Facebook is a data company that does social media. Uber is a data company that does ride sharing and food delivery. Coca Cola is not a soft drink company. They're a data company that also does soft drinks and water and everything else. God bless you. There you are. And my point is this, is that what every one of these companies knows, all these billion dollar, trillion dollar companies know, is that they're a data company first. And what the guy selling the toys on Amazon or what the average business owner, even the hundred million dollar company doesn't know, is that.

The Googles, the Facebooks, the Instagrams, everybody, they change the rules so often that you don't know when the game has changed. And then all of a sudden you start losing your hand at the casino again. Let me give an example. We have a client right now at my corporate marketing agency. They are a criminal background check company. And so they work with the McDonald's and Burger Kings of the world because they have so much labor that comes in and out and they have to do criminal background checks. When they hired us about a month ago, they asked us to audit all their systems, okay? Three years ago, they started running Google keyword ads and SEO campaigns. They were spending like $15,000 a month on those. Okay? When we went in and looked, we realized that Google had changed some rules about two years ago and they had never, this company never knew the rules had changed. And so what they've been doing for two years has been bidding against themselves on their own keywords and raising the price every single month and spending $10,000 a month unnecessarily. And they had no idea. And they did it for 24 months. And this happens almost with every company that I come in contact with that they, something worked and then it stopped working and they don't know why, but then they double down on it again and then they lose even more. And then a marketing agency is like, yeah, you got to go do this. Because marketing agencies aren't starting the whole process of the marketing game with real customer or consumer or client data. They are just guessing and brainstormin on what they think are great ideas. And I walk through how in the book the Systematic Approach, like, look, the companies that successfully market today, okay, aren't by accident.

They use a systematic approach. They don't treat it, they don't treat marketing like as a hobby.

But as like a professional, systematic application.

Give us an example of one company that you, you love that does this.

Well of that, that follows the, oh man, I can give you a thousand. So let me, let me give you the one that I talk about a lot. But I think is incredible story. So we work with a national pest control company. This is crazy. I love pest control companies. You know why? Because I think there's two types of business owners. There's interested and there's committed. Everybody's interested, everybody's interested. But the committed will follow through, they'll innovate, they'll do whatever. Pest control companies are either marketing every month or they're out of business. It's like car dealerships. They have no option. Either they're marketing or they're down or they're done, they're out of business. Kind of like political marketing. Either we win a race or we're not going to be in around for very long. So we worked with a national pest control company and off the backs of the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, they started marketing on a gap and it was to market everything to discounts. And it worked for about seven years. And I mean they had explosive sales. They grew their company. I think it was like a 3 or 4x national pest control company. So they exploded, right? And all of a sudden, over a two year period leading into about 2007, 2018, they started losing money every single month and they couldn't figure out why. And so they came to us and they said, we have spent $1.8 million on our marketing and we've lost $2 million in market share and we don't know why. We have no idea. Everything that worked in the past is not working anymore. Well, I built my entire business model off data first, like the data first approach. So I have a partnership with the largest data collection, analytics and AI company in America. And I'm able to take their customer list and overlay it online and then grab those IP addresses and then track those IP addresses and track what they do, not necessarily what they say. And I can track there. We have in our database.

200 million American consumers, 550 million plus connected devices we're tracking on a daily basis. 10 billion purchasing decisions and 1 trillion searches every day. We took their customer base, overlaid it online and found out that their customer base was older, 55 and older, that kids were mostly out of the house at that point, that they had discretionary income. And when you were marketing to discounts, they saw that as cheap and unsafe. They were going to allow somebody into their home that was dangling 50% off the first sale. Why would you let somebody in your home and do that? If you had money, would you do it? No. No. And what we also found was the customer Base, because kids were out of the household. They were donating more to charities because they had a discretionary income. They wanted safe green products. This company had one. They were marketing to it. This company was donating to local charities all over the country. They weren't touting it. And they loved a good family story. This is a pest control company that started as a family business. It was 41 years old, okay? And we went, God, here's what your customer wants. And the reason I tell you that, Eric, is because in politics, I love the politician, but I'm obsessed with the voter. It all starts with the voter. I want to know what moves the voter, what drives the voter crazy, what makes them excited to want to vote for an unknown or even an unsavory candidate. I'm sort of obsessed with that, right? So for me, that's the first thing I always look at. So when we looked at this data, we went back to them, we said, you got to change everything. You got to remove discounts from everything. And they're like, but discounts.

They'Re like, that's a business.

But we did discounts. It built the company. I go, yeah, but you're here right now and it's not. You lost like a million, 2 million in market share. Like, when do you want to. When do you want to fix this?

It's not working right?

So they said, okay, okay, let's do it. So we went through the five step process with them. We can walk through what that is, but for brevity's sake, we rebranded them. You don't brand any company first. You brand them after you find out what your customer wants, and then that's the brand of the company. So why would you spend money on ads to send them to a website that doesn't resonate with the customer or the client? Why would you ever do that?

So is that step one, getting the brand right, customer driven brand?

No, it's step three. Step one is a deep dive into your customer data. And I talk about it in the book, how you do it, how you know how I do it, but then how you could do it. Step two for us is now that you know what your customers want, you have to find alignment between your vision and the customer. So you must build out a strategic marketing plan, just like you build out a business plan when you start a business. Why are we running around yelling, Facebook ads and all tactics instead of having a strategy around what you want to do? And the reason that's important is because let me tell you, the biggest flaw in entrepreneurship. And I'm guilty of this. I'm sure you're guilty of this. We love to tell everybody how great our product or service is, but what if you knew that your client or customer really only cared about 20% of your damn story? Wouldn't that be good to know? And then how would you tailor your approach from that point forward? Would it be Talking about the 80% they don't care about, or would it be Talking about the 20% that fires them up and motivates them?

Easy answer.

That's what I'm so obsessed with. Right? So for us, we build the strategic plan. Step two. Now that you know what your data, your customers want in the data, now that you align that with your vision as the owner, you go work on the brand, and you build the brand out. You don't build the brand first, because what are you going to do? What are you building it on? You need to know what your customers want. Like, I just drives me nuts. So many marketing agencies get this so wrong. All they want to do is sit around and say, you know, we brainstormed. Oh, we have some great ideas. We want to start with your brand. Well, that cost the company the business money to go brand, and then it's branding on a guess. So we don't do that first. We do it third. The fourth is you start testing all the messages that you find in the data, not the messages you brainstorm. Everybody ab tests. But I only test what's in the data. Because what happens is ultimately, let's say we find two or three.

Ideas like we talked about in that pest control company. Let's say if I had two or three, like family story green products. Oh, this was the key. They didn't want discounts in this pest control company. But we found in the data that they bundled a lot of different services. So they saw discounts as cheap, but they saw bundling as smart. So we said, start saying you can bundle your termite and pest control services. And they went, oh, yeah. And so, but that's. We had to test all these different ads.

It's also, and especially when you get customers to actually respond, you know, in a free text field or with their own words, if you can just capture, right. The way they talk, the way they describe something so that you're not using too much jargon or, you know, making it sound too complicated, you know, so you're talking in a way that. That people actually talk to each other and have that be reflected right in your copy.

I mean, you get it, man. That's exactly what it is. So for us, step four is to test the ideas we already know are going to work to figure out what works best. Let me give you an example in politics, and I'll swing back to what happened in the pest control company. But in politics in 2016, Donald Trump, his campaign would run one ad, 162 ways. They knew the ad from the data would already work, the message, they knew it'd work, but what they didn't know is what part of it would work best. So they would run 162 versions of one message. It'd be a man in the background, a woman in the ad, African American in the ad, a Hispanic in the ad, a white guy in the ad, a family in the ad. It had different font sizes, it had different backgrounds, different colors. The fonts would be in the right corner, the left corner. They would do whatever, they would test it, and then ultimately they would find eight or nine that blew through the roof. And then they said, step five is, now that we know it's going to work, let's go spend some money. So I don't spend people's money until we know it's going to work. And I can give them certainty in their marketing campaign for this pest control company.

I tell people this, this is not an easy process. I don't have a get rich quick pill. I have a get rich the right way pill. The five step system is a get rich the right way pill. It's just not a get rich quick pill. That doesn't exist. It's a big lie. In the marketing industry. You're not going to go from 0 to 10 million or 20 million or 50 million when you run $5,000 worth of ads. And I can't tell you how many.

That's not possible.

Yeah.

Do you know how many business owners come to me and say this like we were told? So my point is this. In the fifth. No, I'm sorry, the sixth month that this pest control company worked with us, they had the greatest month in the history of their company. And that's because we rebranded them. It was about green products, Family story, how they gave to charities and the communities we were advertising on. We were serving the customer first, not what the business thought would work. And I tell you this because we work with a law firm out of New York that's been around for 27 years, and they are in their 18th month with us, and they just had the best month in the history of their law firm and signed one of the biggest contracts with a partner law, national law firm that they never would have gotten without following this formula. And we work with a national furniture chain that's 105 years old. And they in April of 2021, had the best month in the history of their company. And we continue to see those. I don't see it in month one, but I see it continually as we optimize these campaigns over and over again. And I had to tell the story of how this continues to work for every business. Every business we worked with has grown by following these five step. And so I had this vision, as we all have visions as entrepreneurs. I couldn't write this book until I proved it. And so I spent four years proving it and then I wrote the book.

Awesome. So it's undefeated marketing system again. So word undefeated. It's a big word. I see you got champs behind you and world class and there's a lot of undefeatedness going on. But you also said that you worked on eight elections. One three lost five. So yeah. Is there a disconnect there? Or how do we, you know, undefeated marketing system. Was it not used in those five elections? How does that all marry up?

Well, no, in politics, it's kind of crazy. See, this is another reason why if you utilize this in business, you have an unfair advantage. Because whether you're in sports or whether you're in politics or whether you're a trial attorney or whatever, almost everybody ubiquitously uses this without understanding that they're following the five steps. And it's like an unconscious following of the five steps. Sports teams use it to win championships. Every political campaign does it to win races. So when I do it in politics, when we utilize it politics, my competitor is also using the five step system.

So all it does is drive massive innovation because I've got to out compete out hustle and I got to outsmart everybody that I'm running against because they're doing the exact same thing I'm doing. They're trying to beat me. And so the sports teams use it and they use it against each other. Which is why if you look at two of the most competitive industries in the world right now, it's political campaigns and championship sports or professional sports. Well, why is that? Because they're all following this five step system. You know, who doesn't use the marketers in corporate America?

Right? Okay. So.

Given the ultra competitive nature of politics.

The application of that marketing system to business can get you into an undefeated kind of territory.

Absolutely. Well, I called it undefeated because about two years ago I looked Around I said, every one of our clients has grown their bottom line. Everyone. No matter how much the logarithms change, no matter how much people change the rules or their customers filter in and out or whatever, we were ahead of the curve every time utilizing the system. And every business that we worked with was growing. And I went, you know, there's people out there that could benefit from this without working with us. I have to tell this because this thing is, you know, sorry, can I cuss on this?

I screamed at my team, this thing is fucking undefeated. And that's where, literally, that's where the word came. I was like, oh, that's what I should call this.

This thing. So that's.

It didn't. It got. That was where it came from, really.

Awesome. Awesome. So how'd you.

How'd you get into.

To tell us about, you know, how, how Philip Stutz started? Right. How'd you get into all this? It's, it's, you know, I've personally not, you know, the first person I met has worked on so many political campaigns.

Well, I would tell you that I am. I am one of the first generation of ADD kids. So it wasn't even ADHD when I was growing up. Right. I was. In the 1980s, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Attention deficit disorder. That's all they had called it at that point. And they put me on a lot of drugs like Ritalin. And ultimately, I was terrible. Like most entrepreneurs, I was a horrific student and I was all over the place and, you know, had a lot of attention issues. And ultimately, as I got older, I realized that I could only do what I was really passionate about. Like, I couldn't do anything that wasn't super exciting for me. And so I really only cared about two things when I was in high school and college. And I wasn't in any kind of political club like Young Democrats or Young Republicans. I wasn't anything like that. I just loved reading about political campaigns. I loved the art of a political campaign, the artistry of it, how it came about, what happened. But I also loved college football. And you may be able to tell from the interview, but I'm like 5, 9, 150 pounds. There's no way college football is going to be anything I pursued. And so I just decided, you know what? I'm going to go into the world of political marketing and just, it feels like that's something I could be super passionate about. And I was. I mean, you understand this because I know a little bit about your background. Like when you're in an early startup, you work 24, seven. I mean there was a three year period from 2000 to 2002 where I had 21 days off. Total, total in three years. It's seven days a week, it's 1520 hour days. And you're doing it because you do it because you're trying to build something to impact the world. But there's a payoff. I'm doing it because the payoff is somebody wins an election. Like, I don't even. Money, there's no money in it. There's no money in politics. So you can always hear, oh, they spent a billion dollars on this campaign. Yeah, like, but that's spread out. That's just not like people aren't making billions of dollars in the political marketing industry. So, you know, there's a good life to be had there. But it's not like starting Skype and then selling it one day. It just doesn't work like that. So ultimately I had just too much entrepreneurship in me. And when I turned about 38, 39, I was like, man, I think what we do in politics could benefit businesses. And I started that. And now that's in year eight or nine of that transformation of sort of going from all in on politics to all in on business marketing.

Awesome. So it hasn't of course, been smooth sailing the whole way. And like with all entrepreneurial journeys, I'm sure you've had your bumps, you know, bumps in the road. Can you share some of those bumps, some of the mistakes, what you learned from them?

Well, I spent 30 to 39 being a horrific solopreneur, so.

I made a fine amount of money. I mean, it wasn't like I was making millions or anything like that. But.

I like to say that I didn't know what entrepreneurship was. I didn't know what a P and L on a balance sheet was until I was 39 years old. I'm 47 now. I'm eight years into this thing. And so I just, literally just got clients, sent them an invoice, kept the money, siphoned off my taxes and lived my life.

And I was also.

At the time, it's a much longer story, but I was diagnosed with an incurable esophageal disease. And it brought to the forefront a lot of issues that I had with my own psychology. A lot of I, you know, when you get diagnosed with something that's life threatening, you sort of take ownership of your life going forward. And what I realized was that I was riddled with narcissism. Not the good kind of narcissism. Like that tells you how great you are. The narcissist that tells. That blames everybody for everything that goes wrong and takes all the credit for all the good things. I'm going to raise my hand. That was me. Like, that's what I did. And.

In that period of like 38, 39, 40, I just kind of went through a metamorphosis. And I think a lot of men, and a lot of women too, go through this change where it's like, you know, the first like 40 years of your life, you're going up the roller coaster and it's all uphill and you're fighting, you're clawing, but there's infinite sky ahead of you. And then you hit the top of the, of that roller coaster and then you look down and it's, oh, shit, there's the ground and I'm going really fast. And is this all that's left in my life? And am I literally just battling it out as a solopreneur every day, blaming everybody for everything? By the way, could you imagine what that's like to be married to or be a father to and all that stuff? I just came to a point where I had to make a choice. What was I going to do and how was I going to live my life? And I started a political ad agency, marketing agency in 2015.

Applying a very different leadership style. And it's much more hard work and complicated than I'm making it out to be. There's been a lot of ups and downs, but we've built that without any outside funding, without any debt. We built that to an eight figure business in three years.

Then we started this corporate marketing agency and we've grown it, I think, 15x in the last two and a half years without any outside investment and without any debt. And part of that is I literally reinvest all of my profits back into the company because I'm trying to get it to a certain level, right? I don't want it to stay at mid seven figures or low eight figures. I want it to be much bigger than that. And when you're not taking outside money, you got one other choice. Either you can stay the same or you can just roll those dollars and start adding and building and optimizing for better performance. And that's sort of the path that I've taken.

And it sounds like you really found your spot. You know, you really found your tipping point, that intersection of something you really love doing, something you've Built up a lot of skill at doing and something the world clearly needs. Right. Because as you're saying, while this is super prevalent, the marketing system and approach in your book in sports and in politics, it's much more like a barren wasteland and shooting from the hip when it comes to the business world. And I guess that's probably what you mean too when you talk in the book about eliminating financial risk. Not so much that you eliminate it completely. There's still risk that remains.

Sure.

But that you're greatly reducing it by going into it, not shooting from the hip, being customer led and data driven and a lot more wise in the decision making and the investments that you're taking as a business owner. Right?

Yeah. I mean, I would look at it like this. We turn the guesswork into a marketing guesswork into a science.

Right.

We're creating a science into your marketing or into people into business marketing to eliminate their long term guessing game. Here's why this is so important. And I talk about these statistics a lot, but it's super important.

According to Forbes, we are now seeing up to 10,000 ads a day online and offline. 10,000. 10,000 ads a day.

Well, one person sees that in a day.

One person. So I tell people that, let's say, you know, we talked to a shoe company recently. I said, you're not competing against other shoe companies. You're competing against lighting companies, computer companies, hair care product companies, clothing companies. You're competing at 10,000 businesses. Unless you break through all that clutter by resonating and connecting with your customer, you're going to lose every time. And this is why it's so much noise. Here's another one. According to Compuare, if a potential customer has one bad experience on your website, 88%. Excuse me, 88% of all consumers have one bad experience on your website. They'll never come back. And you know this is true because you've like seen an ad on something, you're like, oh, that's interesting. You click on it and it's like this, you know, the font goes all the way to the corners. It's this weird video. Like the fonts are all different mix ups. Like you, you're like, whoa, this is a weird website. And you swipe out. But so many businesses don't even get mobile right? In their, in their websites, right? And it makes someone feel unsafe. They're not going to do it. And then the last one, well, there's, I mean, let me, I'll give you, let me give you three more. According to Bayard Institute, 69.80%.

There's a 69.80% cart abandonment rate for all e commerce companies right now. On average. 69.8 cart abandonment. That means it's like $260 billion in lost orders every year. Because nine out of ten businesses don't even know how to go back and remarket to the people that abandoned the cart. Now a lot of people do, but I talk about it in the book, like, how do you avoid that pitfall if you're an e commerce company?

This is the craziest one. These two are the craziest one. They just came out. According to Media kick, there are three, around 3,000 YouTube influencers that have over 1 million subscribers.

How many?

3,000.

3,000. Okay.

That have over a million. While up to. There are around 5 million YouTube influencers that have around a thousand subscribers.

Every One of those 5 million thinks they're going to be in the 3,000.

Yeah, every one of them. But the 3,000 know that they followed a systematic approach. And you know, on YouTube it's like it's delivering content at a specific time constantly.

Right.

But people never get that there's a systematic approach that those 3,000 people making millions of dollars that they follow and they never deviate from. It's the same thing. I talk about marketing. And then this is the other one because everybody, you know, all these businesses we talk to go, well, I ran Facebook ads and nothing work. Guess what? In 2016, there were 3 million advertisers on Facebook. In 2020, at the end of 2020, there were 10 million advertisers on Facebook. And that's not even.

That is not including the people that just pay to boost posts. I'm talking about like real ad perform ad campaigns. If you add in the people that are just boosting posts and taking up space, that's another 200 million.

Yeah, yeah. It's phenomenal.

So you think you're gonna win that game of marketing knowing these statistics now and you just going out and playing whack a mole with your tactics or the things that you've always done or the way the marketing agency you've worked with has always told you to do it? It just doesn't work that way. You're going to lose. You're going to lose money. And this is what frustrates so many business owners. God, I've lost so much. Damn, I hate marketing. I hear this all the time. Time. I hate marketing. I gotta get it.

Well, because that. Yeah, because it's really. It feels like guesswork. It feels like that story that you said earlier. We're pumping a lot of money in, yet the bottom line isn't growing. And. And we can connect back to, you know, the. The word in the. In the title of the book, the Undefeated Marketing System. You know, the word undefeated in the sense that everyone that you've worked with who's applied the system, they're growing their bottom line, and that's ultimately what people want to be doing with the business. So you have a lot of businesses and efforts going on at the moment. One of the focal points of this show is to also help people to kind of just keep it all together in their heads mentally and make sure that they're not overwhelmed with the work, especially with high achievers, because it can be easy just to focus on achievement one thing after the next. What do you do to kind of maintain a sense of balance and calm between your work and life?

So this is something I actively work on and I have failed horrifically for years on.

And I would just tell you, in the last three months, I feel like I've finally made some progress.

I love how you just said you finally made some progress rather than you just said, I cracked it, right? Because it's not about cracking it. It's about just getting a little bit better.

The work, I call it the work. The work never stops. It'll never stop. You have to enjoy the work and work. Know that it's the process of, like, climbing a ladder forever.

You know, I thought I had a drinking problem. I really, at the end of 2020, even though I really didn't drink much during the pandemic, consciously, I wondered to myself, you know, I need to stop drinking. I'm drinking, you know, am I drinking too much? And I'm not a. I'm not one of these people that goes out and has 20 drinks. I'm a guy that goes out and has two beers and is done. But I can drink two beers every night if you give it to me, right?

So I was really diving into, what is it that. Do I have a drinking problem? Right? And I thought it was that simple. And the more. And I've done psychedelics, I've done MDMA and I've done LSD stacked on MDMA with a therapist and my wife in the room. Like, I've done it all all right? And I've made a lot of progress. But this one was really, just to answer your question, but it was really driving me a little bit insane. And then it Dawned on me through there. I mean. I mean, I'm in active there. I mean, therapy every week. And one of the. My therapists was like, you know, I don't think you have a drinking problem. She goes, I think you have a. You have an addiction to distraction. And I went, oh, shit. Shit. And then I started writing out all the things that I do to distract myself every day, to not be in my own thoughts. Okay, so here's what I do. I'd be on my phone four hours a day. I'd have a drink at night. I'd go to the gym. I hated going to the gym, but I did it to distract myself from having to think. I would listen to three or four hours of podcasts a day.

Just to distract myself away from my own thoughts, to be in my own head. I was so scared to just think, leave my brain alone for a minute, and just let it sit. And what would happen? And that is a revelation that changed my life because I don't really have an alcohol problem at all. I have a distraction addiction.

So how do you. How did you work on that?

So I don't check social media. I'll check it early in the morning and maybe, you know, right before I go to bed. And that's. I mean, like, literally just check to see if there's anything interesting. But it's literally like maybe 20 minutes at the most.

Right.

I put it up when I get home at night. I try not. I mean, I maybe drink one or two days a week. Maybe one or two days a week. Sometimes I go a month and I don't drink. And then the big one for me is I live in the next to the beach in Florida. Now, I know not everybody can do this, but I literally will leave my office at 10 in the morning, and I'll just drive out to the beach, and I'll leave every device I have in the car, and I will go walk on the beach and I'll go sit my butt in the sand. And then I start digging my feet into the ground and just staring at the ocean and thinking and thinking. Because here's the deal. The only way.

To grow is to work through whatever it is you're doing. And, like, I didn't know. My therapist said to me last fall, in the fall of 2020, you've got to feel through your feelings. And I went, I don't even know what that means. I don't even know what, like, I didn't feel. Like I literally was incapable of feeling nine months ago. And so now I kind of understand that if something's bothering me, I can't distract myself out of it. If a client is a jerk or somebody's mad at me or I've done something stupid or I misspoke or I went on a podcast and I said something that's gonna get me in trouble or banned by Facebook. Like, I typically would just immediately throw a podcast in, start thinking about some entrepreneurial idea and all this stuff, and instead, now I literally drive in silence in my car and go, okay, what happened there? And I think through it and I feel through it, and then.

Instead of it getting pushed down, now it just gets pushed out and I deal with it and I process it. And then I don't have any stress or any reason to be distracted. And I actually kind of like my thoughts. And I didn't know that because I've always just distracted myself away from everything, from feeling anything. And so for me, I guess as an entrepreneur, it's. How do I find more balance in my life?

Yeah.

And I love working and feeling through whatever I'm feeling through, no matter if it's painful or wonderful.

And I like how practical you were with the distractions. Right. Because it's.

If everyone's trying to become their superhero self, then taking some time to think about your distractions is equivalent to taking some time to identify the kryptonite in your life.

So that, you know, God, I got a lot of kryptonite, man.

Right. And you know, to stay clear of it and not have it too close and when the most dangerous times a day are and all that stuff. That's. That's awesome. Love it. So, Philip, where can people learn more about the undefeated marketing system? Where can they pick up a copy of the book?

Well, you can buy the book anywhere, so Amazon, obviously, itunes or ibooks, anywhere you want. Barnes and Noble, I don't know, wherever I have a free. If you're sort of interested in the approach and you're like, I don't even know how to get started on data. I write about it all in the book. But you can also do a free data assessment with us. My team will do a 30 minute call and kind of walk through how we look at data, how we look at it for your own business. And it's free. And you can go to philipstuts.com insights for that. It takes you literally 20 seconds.

Great.

I have a companion podcast to the book called the Undefeated Marketing Podcast. Just had James Altucher on, had Cal Fussman on, who is one of the great storytellers of our generation and interviewed almost every major celebrity in the last 30 years. I've got Jay Abraham coming on, but some of the great minds in business and marketing come on and we explore some of these ideas and really dive deep into them. And so another free aspect. And then I write a blog@philipstuts.com that you can subscribe to. And it's not a funnel. I don't. I don't sell anything. I like to write about marketing and ideas, and I like to try to help people. And so if you can go subscribe there as well.

Awesome. Philip, it was so cool to have you on the show today.

Yeah, I was really honored to be here, man. I love what you're doing and keep serving people and helping people because you're doing a great job.

Yeah, thanks a lot. I'm going to be sharing the book with everyone in my network, so, yeah, thanks very much and looking forward to the next book and the next time when we get to chat again.

My wife said if I write a book in the next two years, she'll divorce me. So I. Yeah, well, maybe I'm going to write another one, but it's not going to be for at least two.

Or three more years or wait for the next lifetime.

All right, thanks, man.

We'll see you soon. Thanks. All right.

Sam.