In this presentation, Ryan Deiss addresses entrepreneurs who feel stuck despite working hard, using a vivid "bridge" metaphor to explain why many businesses fail to achieve growth. He describes how business owners often start building a marketing or growth "bridge"—such as Facebook ads, content marketing, webinars, books, or funnels—only to abandon it midway for the next shiny idea, ending up with numerous half‑built bridges that waste time, money, and talent. Deiss reveals that Digital Marketer has identified 73 possible growth bridges, which explains the overwhelming choice and the prevalence of shiny‑object syndrome. He argues that growth is not about accumulating more information (books, webinars, consultants) but about implementation: selecting the single most impactful bridge that aligns with the owner’s vision, mission, and "pot of gold" goal. He outlines a two‑day Implementation Partner meeting process: Day 1 focuses on discovering the one high‑impact bridge to build first; Day 2 creates a concrete, quarter‑long execution plan for building that bridge, turning the metaphorical gold into real momentum, customers, and revenue. The session emphasizes clarity of purpose, focused execution, and moving from half‑built bridges to fully built pathways that deliver measurable business results.
Chapters
So let me ask you a question. Do you ever feel stuck? Do you ever feel like you're just working harder and harder and harder every single day in your business, but nothing's actually getting done? Like there's no forward progress at all. At best, you're running in sand, and most days you're just working and you can't really look back on the day and say, "Oh yeah, that actually got done." Does that describe you at all? I know it did me, and so if that's where you are, I think I might know Why? I think I might know why. And so I want to kind of tell you a story, draw something up here that if you're anything like me when I first saw this, it'll really open your eyes to something. So let's pretend for a moment that this is you, okay? Let's pretend for a moment that you're here, right? And obviously you're better looking than this particular stick figure, but let's pretend that this is you. And right now at this moment, you're not that happy, right? You're not all that happy because really what you want at the end of the day your proverbial pot of gold, right? Pretend this is a pot of gold. Your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is over here. It's on this cliff. So you're over here, it's over there. And so you're frustrated because this is the, this is the reason you started your business in the first place. Whatever this is, that's what you want. And so your goal of growing this business, the reason that you're working so hard day in and day out is to get this. So if you're going to go from here to here, Well, what do you need? You need a bridge, right? And most days, that's what we're doing. All we're doing is we're building bridges. So maybe you say, okay, I figured it out. I was reading a blog post the other day and really what I need to do is I need to get good at this whole Facebook advertising thing. So you start building your Facebook advertising bridge, right? But then along the way something happens. You read another blog post, you talk to a friend or a colleague and they say, no, no, no, Facebook advertising is great, but really what you should be doing is content marketing. You should be doing content marketing, you should be blogging and things like that. So you stop doing, start building another bridge. And then somewhere along the way, about halfway through the construction of that bridge, you say, nope, it's not about that. What I need to be doing is I need to be doing webinars. Or no, no, no, I need to write a book. Or you know what, I've heard there's these things called conversion funnels and I need to get a funnel for my business. So maybe you start building a funnel bridge. And so at the end of the day, what you're left with is a bunch of half-built bridges. And here's the problem with the half-built bridge. It takes a lot of work to do that. There's a lot of effort and time time and investment in resources and money and talent and skills and all these things built into those bridges, but they aren't really getting you here. They're not getting you to the final goal where you want to be. And in the bridge-building business, it's a zero-sum game. A half-built bridge, if anything, is actually more dangerous than if there were no bridge at all. Well, here's the really crazy thing. At Digital Marketer, what we've identified is that there are actually 73 potential bridges that you could be building to grow your business. 73. So it's no wonder you're confused. It's no wonder that we get shiny object syndrome so often. So when do we jump from one thing to another? There's a lot of choices out there, and that's the reason that it's not really about information. Business growth isn't about attaining and acquiring more information. My guess is you have a lot of information. I mean, how many books have you bought? In the last 12 months? How many webinars have you attended? How many events have you gone to? How many consultants have you hired? It's not really about information, is it? It's about implementation. It's about picking the right bridge and building the right bridge the first time. We gotta figure out what is your pot of gold? What is your vision? What is your mission? Why are you doing this? In my experience, a lot of business owners forgot the reason that they started doing this that they got into business in the first place, right? So figuring out what that is, that's goal number one, that's priority number one. Now we can usually do that fairly quickly. That's why the first day of every Implementation Partner meeting, when we're gathered together as a group, the first day is all about figuring out which bridge should I build first? What's the one big thing that's really going to move the needle for my business? What's the bridge that I need to build? And you know, it's different for every business, but here's what's not. Once you've built one of these bridges, then you get to take the gold that's over here. You get to take the additional momentum, resources, the business growth, whatever this led to, whether it was more customers or more revenue from the customers you have, or getting the customers you have to come back, whatever the bridge, whatever the benefit from the bridge that you built, you get to walk across that bridge to the other side. You get to bring some of this gold back and you get to build more bridges. So day one is all about just picking Which of the 73 bridges should I build now? It's not about just doing one thing and being done, but it is about focus. It is about saying, "This is my vision, this is the one thing that I want to do now." So that's what day 1 of the meeting is all about. What's the one thing I need to do? Day 2 is really simple. It's about making a plan and figuring out, "Okay, now that I know the bridge that I'm supposed to build, how do I build it?" 'Cause oftentimes the reason we have half-built bridges is because maybe we don't know the bridge that we should be building. We don't know with absolute certainty that, "Yes, this is what I should be working on right now. This is what's most important." Sometimes that's— since we don't know that it's the first thing, we get distracted by all the bright shiny objects. But sometimes we know something's important, we know the bridge that we should be building, we just don't know how to build it. And that's our job. It's our job to get you unstuck. It's our job to say, "Build this bridge, and here's how you do it." And that's exactly what Day 2 is all about. So After 2 days, you leave with a plan. You know, this is what I'm going to execute. This is the big plan over the next quarter that we're going to execute on as a company, and this is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to get there. This is how we're going to build that bridge.
