Why Some Businesses Scale Faster (And It’s Not What You Think) Ft. James Colistra

What is up, everybody? Welcome into another episode of Vision Pros Live. I've got James Colistra in the house. He's the founder and principal of Wonderfish. He has an excellent background working at the coveted, I would say, Forbes.com as well. I mean, as an entrepreneur, that's like one of the holy grails, in my opinion, of publicity. And him being behind the scenes at that venture and also having built out the power podcasting circuit as well, I mean, there's, there's so much opportunity for us to lean in and learn from James. So we're gonna be talking about why some businesses scale faster And it's not what you think it is either. So we'll talk about that from a couple different angles. But again, I've got somebody who's a legend. He's been behind the scenes at Forbes itself. James, welcome to Vision Pros, man.

Hey, Jackson, I'm so excited.

Well, me too, and I hope the audience is excited. You guys get ready for this. So let's dive right into that and hit hard. Why, why is it that some businesses scale faster? What are some of those secrets, James? You give yours, I'll give mine, and we'll just give everything we can to this wonderful audience of visionaries.

Absolutely. I think it comes— I mean, obviously it comes down to a lot of different things, but if I were to simplify it, I actually created a 4-part framework for the way that I approach podcast guesting, which I don't necessarily need to get into every detail, but there's 2 of the details within that framework that I think really answer the question, which is having a good frame for how you approach whatever problem you're solving. and whatever your mission is.

Mm-hmm.

Because that's the number one thing that, that you need to clarify. And before you can, before you can scale, you have to have that figured out. And then the second word, believe it or not, is feel. Because if you're able to connect with individuals, with your target audience, with potential prospects, customers on an emotional level, that really gives you such an amplifying factor times whatever you wanna say, times 1,000, where I just feel this is everything that I've studied the past handful of years has pointed to this fact that while we're driven in some regards by logic, we're driven first by emotion. And that part of our brain is really what helps activate us. And that's— there's a reason why all these big brands, whether it's Nike or any car brand, you know, we worked with all these brands when I was at Forbes. There's a reason why You see music and you see emotion and storytelling in their advertising. And you could put that, you could infiltrate that into your whole message and your content. So that's how I would answer your question.

That's huge. I have the great blessing, my friends, of being the color commentator. He gets to do all the hard work when I ask the question. I then get to add some little pieces of silver lining. I'm gonna add a huge one right now. So problem, problem, problem. I do agree. to an extent. And then the mission aspect. We're all about vision. We understand you've got to have a clear vision. I just see too many people falling in the trap though of trying to exacerbate the problem and the market's used to it. And so they teach in sales that people buy because of 2 reasons. And those of you in sales are like, yeah, because of problem, because of pain and pleasure. And you guys are right for the general population. That is not how elites make their decision though, and that is something that's critical for so many businesses to understand. If you're going to work with the elite market, if you're going to work with high ticket, you have to understand that people like LeBron James, you can't convince him not to do his workouts no matter how much pain it's in. In fact, it's going to drive him away from you if you try to leverage pain to convince him. In addition, if you try to get him to change Taco Tuesdays to taco every single day, No, he is not going to listen to that. He has disciplined himself to master his pleasures. Why? If it's not pain and it's not pleasure— purpose. Purpose is the third layer and level of being able to attract and understand audience. So I'm not saying that you can't talk about pain and that you can't talk about pleasure. We have to get more sophisticated though. And so James is right on track, but my friend, so many misinterpret this and get it wrong. They end up using AI to create something about pain and pleasure, and it's just so gaudy. And it's so awful and it's so manipulative that you're not actually going to gain traction with that market. Anything you mention about pain or problem, pleasure, and purpose has to be so authentically aligned with where that person is at that if you miss that, you are going to end up creating really, really trashy garbage content that is not going to resonate with people. James, further thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely— there's a lot of nuance there, and I agree with everything that you said. And one of the words that stood out to me was manipulate, because I was on a sales call with someone recently. I'm not going to name his name, but he was going through the, the motions, like the, the sort of typical drive the pain, you know, the how many leads are you getting, how many you're going through every single factor, and how much, how much, what would it mean to your business if you did this. And it was, it was actually uncomfortable. And I, and it's my natural reaction, I just kind of giggled a little bit. And he looked at me and he was like, I don't think it's funny that you're blah, blah, blah. And it was like, he was like trying to make me feel bad. I saw—

I thought he was trying to do the Grant Cardone thing.

Yeah. So I think there's a, there's a balance where you have to, like, people can read through whatever you're trying to do, especially someone in the— I'm in the marketing sales world. Right. Right. So people will, and, and I think that's why advertising tends to get a bad rap where people see it as advertising. That's why content tends to perform better 'cause people just read right through it and say, oh, this is an ad, they're trying to convince me to buy something or whatever. So, but I think you're right, everything that you said there.

Well, and it's awesome 'cause it just goes hand in hand, right? There's all these elements. Business is not easy, my friends. It is hard. Just like doing 100 pushups a day, 100 sit-ups and 10,000 steps. Do that, you're gonna be in pretty darn good shape. But getting somebody to do that is another story. And so we've gotta discipline ourselves to do it. 2 of my other favourite elements, my friends, of being able to scale businesses faster, it's people are, you know, you gotta have a team. And they're like, well, I have a team. There's a right team and a wrong team, right? Look at any sports league. There are teams that lose every year, and then there are teams that win, and there are those that win consistently year after year. Knowing how to create an infrastructure that attracts the right teams is a huge aspect of this, and we'll be talking about that a little bit later as well.

Yeah.

So James, before we cut for a quick break, Um, let's, let's dive in a little bit further into unpacking some of these hidden drivers behind scalable businesses that you're working with right now or with clients as well. And of course, the hidden drivers that are helping Forbes scale their business because they've obviously outpaced all of us.

Yeah, absolutely. So where, where would you like me to start? Do you want me to just get into kind of, uh, how how I'm approaching my whole mission and what I'm doing with Wonderfish.

Well, that or any hidden drivers that are driving Forbes forward. I mean, you can go with this. We're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about a ton of stuff.

Yeah, so Forbes is an interesting model where, 'cause I started at Forbes in 2014 and they were about 4 years into this whole digital transformation because as most people know, Forbes started as a magazine, a print publication, right? that was gradually losing interest, particularly from advertisers. I mean, readers were still reading the magazine, but you saw the advertising subscriptions or the advertising spending in the magazine just going down, going down every year. Right. And I think it was around 2010, Forbes decided to launch what Forbes called the contributor model, which is still around today. You can be a Forbes contributor. And I think Forbes was in a way very much a pioneer in that space, particularly in the business content. model when it came to opening up the platform, because previously you had to be a staff writer to write for Forbes, right?

Right.

And there was this concept, there was this sort of, um, assumption that you had to go to journalism school to be a writer for Forbes. And it was kind of a stigma if you opening it up to these other outsiders. It got a lot of bad press when it happened at first because People thought it was gonna diminish the quality of the content. And to a certain extent, sure, like it might not be as well written. It doesn't read like, you know, Emerson wrote it or something. But the idea is that they did a lot of things.

The publishing world did a ton of things to screw up journalism. So yeah, we might even cover that a little later too.

But they opened it up and it, it gave topic, what we called topic experts, the ability To join the conversation, right? And thanks for showing my website. And that's, uh, wonderfish.xyz. And then the landing page that I just launched this morning that you're showing is for a webinar or workshop I'm doing Thursday. If you go to go.wonderfish.xyz, um, which I could get into. But I think the idea was it created more content, it created more conversations. But that was the secret to Forbes scaling, believe it or not, was opening it up because In that day and age, as Google was taking shape and getting bigger and bigger, and that was kind of the entry point for a lot of people, and then social media, it was allowing Forbes to have so many eyeballs and so many impressions because the content just kept growing and growing and growing. And then eventually we opened it up to what we called Forbes Brand Voice, which allowed brands to join the conversation. It was just clearly labeled as Brand Voice. There was a little bit of a pushback. in later years, I think in the past, maybe, maybe 5 years ago or, or maybe 4 years ago, I'm not sure exactly where Google actually changed their algorithm and they penalized Forbes content writers that weren't staff. And so I think, oh, interesting. I think to this date, yeah, it's because for the longest time a contributor—

I can see why they did it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit that hard.

Yeah.

Because it's one of the things that pisses me off. Um, every time I read an article that is contributor, it's like, okay, what's he selling? And you can see right through it. It's like, obviously this person has a book, obviously this person has a program they're selling. And so sure, they, they unfortunately ruined the integrity of that process.

They were, they were trying. And, and I think to, in their defense, if you're a contributor, they're doing, they're not, most of them aren't getting paid. Yeah. So they're using the platform to get their message. And so I think, yeah, they, they probably should have been smarter about the way you have to be smart. That, that was the way that we always advised even clients that were using Brand Voice. Don't make it salesy. We always said that. Don't make it salesy. Make it relevant, make it useful, add some sort of utility to people's lives, interesting, inspirational, entertaining, whatever it might be. But the minute you start to sell, that's where people turn away.

Well, it comes back to using problems, right? And pleasure. And it's not a matter of like they failed, it's just there's an optimization at all levels, right? So Forbes is the opportunity to optimize all of us for our brands as we prepare to scale. These are things that we can watch out for as we're driving. It's like, okay, how do we make this— how do we make this pay-to-play, but how do we make this as authentic as possible, and how do we keep learning as we go? So those are all really, really valuable aspects. And it is neat to hear about those— that business model transitioning from traditional to digital. Some people think that nobody's doing that anymore, like everybody's already arrived, and that's not true at all. I just helped a renovation company who's never had any online leads whatsoever. They started getting into SEO a couple months ago. I mean, we're in 2026, and people are like, wow, this doesn't happen. Oh, yes, it does. Fonda San Miguel restaurant in Austin, it was 2012 when I started working with them. I mean, our online reservations and websites, all that was really off to the races, and they were still using pen and paper. And you might, you know, y'all might laugh about that. Like, didn't they have a system to run their— no, they were a top 50 restaurant in the world at that point with pen and paper still. So the transition continues.

Yeah.

It will, continue for decades and decades and decades. And our opportunity as visionaries is how do we leverage these scalable factors? Go ahead, James.

That's funny. Sorry, it made me think like I— we have 2 doodles and we take them to the, to the, uh, to the groomer, which is a nightmare in terms of the cost. It's insane. It's like over $100 to get these dogs groomed, but you have to do it because they get all matted and stuff. So I take them to the groomer and the, the the woman, she's, she's Brazilian and doesn't speak very good English, but, um, I'm trying to explain who I am. She's trying to look through the card. It's all on paper. Yeah. Oh, this is who you— this is what you did last time. I'm like, you need to—

I'm down in Ecuador right now. Like, there's— everything is done on paper.

Done on paper. Yeah, I mean, that's the old school way. And I'm just like, you know, you could put this into a computer, like put into a system.

Yeah.

Yep, it is wild.

And like, like even the hotels down here, I mean, everything is done on pen and paper still. You got 600 million people down here that could use systems and structure and learn from it. And there's such a great opportunity for all of us to be able to contribute to that. Abundance is huge, Visionaries. So being able to see that there's opportunities outside of our own little paradigms, right, and be able to see what's behind the curtains too of other other different businesses. We're going to come right back. We're going to dive in even further on how to scale your businesses faster. But my friends, how to do it responsibly, that is critical. It's not talked about enough. All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson Callum. I'm your show host. We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guest leaders who are building fantastic visions out there. What's up, everybody? Welcome in again to Vision Pros Live. I got James Colistra with me today. He has become a friend. We met through LinkedIn comments, probably thanks to Alex Sanfilippo. James, feel free to correct me right when we come back, when we bring you back on, if it was somebody else. We always want to give credit where credit's due. And he's got this, this podcast, Power Circuit. He's got his brand called Wonderfish. He's worked for Forbes. That's what we're really focused on as well in the initial part of this conversation. We're going to be talking about everything that we can to help you scale your visions out. And I also want to, of course, provide a few other resources that are super important because I just, I love to help, my friends. These are not paid sponsors, by the way. These are brands that I actually love and care about. And yes, 2 of them happen to be clients, but they didn't become clients because of a transaction. They became clients because of the transformational relationship we built over time. Speaking of that, Dr. Justin and Dr. Shannon Pierce of journeytowellnessplan.com, I've known them for 8 years. I met them when I was speaking at a conference to help chiropractors and holistic professionals in Plano, Texas. Shannon was known as this miracle worker with diseases and illnesses, symptoms that people, their doctors were telling them like, hey, you really don't have much you can do for this. What a hopeless situation to be in. If you know somebody who has health like that, especially people who are women. She works in women's health and does these miracles. I shouldn't call it that, probably. It's not a magic wand approach. She just understands how the testing works and how to use the testing because she went through her own health life crisis. I've sent 3 people to her over the last 8 years, and all 3 people that met with Shannon and that I ended up following up and say, how'd it go? Every single one of them, within weeks and months, said, Jackson, I've never met anybody who's been able to help me the way that she did. She's my go-to if I find somebody who's got something that seems incurable. I'm like, hey, go talk to Dr. Shannon. She's amazing if you want to meet her. So if you want me to do an introduction, just let me know. But you can also go check out and see what they're doing with their, their 6-phase webinar and their Epstein-Barr virus webinar as well. Uh, very, very good information for those who, um, who are in, in having health struggles. Then there's— excuse me— Practice Makes Permanent with Jennifer Reed. Um, guys, culture. For us at Vision Pros, it's vision, culture, and leadership that drives the marketing. Vision, culture, and leadership. If you get those things nailed down, you're probably going to do far better than if you kind of forget or put that on the back burner. Put those front and center. That's why I really like promoting Jennifer Reed. She's a culture facilitator. She helps people understand how to tap into EQ and SQ. That's emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence. When I'm looking to bring somebody in to help me with these matters, I don't really care what piece of paper they have on their wall. I really don't care where you went to school. I also don't care what certification you have or who you studied with that much. And maybe who you studied with a little bit. But I want to know what your experience is like. More importantly, I want to know why it matters to you. My friends, when you ask Jennifer why this matters to you, bring a tissue box. You're going to need it. She has every reason in the world for wanting to make sure that we all improve in terms of our emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence and the byproduct of leaning into that for any of your brands. Is profitability, is cultures where people want to belong and come to work, is the opportunity to create more holistic relationships, which creates more holistic abundance with your wealth as well. And we're going to go to the Water Project. The Water Project, I'm not associated with. I just support it. We give a little bit to it every single month. One of my old colleagues convinced me to take a look at it. And honestly, I didn't really care. I didn't know to care. I had never been thirsty in my life, and so why would this matter to me? And then I saw pictures like this where this kid's getting water out of who knows where, and that's probably the water they're going to drink, or the water that they're going to boil and drink. At least I found out here in Ecuador, by the way, when you boil water and drink it, it still doesn't do the trick here. You've got to do other things. And it's like, wow, that's, uh, that's kind of scary. And so these, these parents, imagine them having to leave work to go find a source of water Uh, for their kids, or their kids having to leave school to go find it. There are millions of people who don't have access to one of the resources we take for granted most. And so my hope isn't that— one, I don't want to shame us. Um, I don't want to make you feel bad. I do want to inspire you to at least talk to friends and family members about this project because it's so uplifting to get to see these pictures. These— this picture of these next kids, they're celebrating water more than my kids celebrate Christmas Day, and my kids freaking love Christmas Day. But can you imagine? how humbling it would be to be that grateful for the water that we have. Perhaps it would do some good for our lives as well. So, if you can contribute to it, great. You can select a project like one of these projects right here. If you end up clicking on them, you get to see what they're building, how they're building it, when they'll build it by, how many people it's helping. And then, when you donate to it, the company actually shows you that that project's coming to fruition and what it is they're doing. I think it's one of the most transparent, coolest causes I've ever seen. So, My friends, we got 8 billion people to help in this world, and there's causes outside of this. If you know a cause that you'd like to see me talk about on the show or look at and perhaps even donate to myself, just drop the link. I promise I will take a look at any of those causes that you put out there, and I'll do my best to try to help out with the process. Let's go back to helping all of you though. James Colistra, thanks again for being here on VisionPros Live. Let's keep diving into scale.

Awesome. And just to correct you on one thing, while I love Alex from PodMatch, the guy that connected us just through chance, through a comment, because he was on your show, was John from Book Leads. John, his last name is Jaramillo.

Yeah, Jaramillo for the Americans, Jaramillo for those down in Ecuador. That guy, he did the best podcast episode interview of me that I've ever been on. John is incredible. So, I'm really glad you brought that up.

And one of my clients is going on his show next week. So, I'm excited about that. Scott Abbott has a book. So, he's going on that show to talk about it.

Oh, fantastic. Yeah. John is a champion. So, I'm really glad you brought that up. My friends, those of you who don't know, when people like us are name-dropping, write the names down. Go look them up. Go connect with these people. Like, it's time to live bigger. And you want to build a great vision? find great people to build with you. That's another huge aspect of making sure you find the right teams and scale. So, let's go into why many great strategies fail to deliver the results leaders expect. And before you answer that, James, my friends, you're not alone. Like, I've launched so many projects in my life where we've half-baked it or where we thought that this was gonna be the magic cure and help us grow and scale, and it just fell flat and didn't get to where we wanted it to. So, James, what are some of those reasons, the big reasons why people end up launching something that feels so awesome and it just does not hit home the way that they're hoping?

Well, I would say number one is not having a really clear call to action. I think we have so much— there's so much noise out there. There's so much going on, whether it's advertising messages or— I mean, there's a million decisions we're all making. You know what, we— if you could find a way to decrease the cognitive load on your audience and just make it super simple, like, this is what you need to do and why, uh, that's, that's it, right? And that's, that's one of the things that I help people with when, when they're going on podcasts is having a really, really strong call to action. So my, my, my framework, because they're all F words, I call it the F word framework. And so that for the call to action, the F word is fetch. And I told it to someone recently and she goes, stop making, stop trying to make fetch happen. Remember the Mean Girls?

That's right.

You know it. But fetch is basically like give someone an incentive, give them something to do. Where do they go? Why? You know, another word for it is lead magnet, but in the, in the marketing world, but just make it super clear what, what you need them to do.

Absolutely. And so we've got Wonderfish pulled up. This is your website. Tell us about Wonderfish and what you're doing with it, and we'll talk about how, for instance, on here there's a form. It's pretty easy what to do, know what to do with the form. You get a call to action. This is book a call, very easy to understand. So the call to actions, I agree, that's a very important element of making sure that people know what action they can take with our brands.

And you just clicked the other one that I was going to mention is the authority index, which I designed this just to give people—

yeah, I have a team.

That's not you. Sorry.

I got a team.

That's your, uh, team is key for me behind the scenes. I need to add more stuff to my blog, by the way. That's really, uh, spare right now.

But you mean it's on point and clear?

Exactly. So the Authority Index gives you the ability to get a score based off where you stand when it comes to your authority in the space and how much trust you're able to deliver and earn. So it's a really good starting point. And then what I help people with, and that kind of gets to my mission, is I help typically founders and really any experts. I help them find their voice and gain more visibility. And we do that in a number of different ways, but podcast guesting is right now the number one thing that I've been focused on. And eventually I am gonna expand to, I know event speaking is the next area that I'm starting to open up to some of my clients. I've done some digital sort of just regular article PR stuff, but what I've done with podcast guesting is create a really efficient and effective system that leverages, you know, we do leverage AI all along the way, but the idea is to create a seamless experience for my clients. So my clients, like I said, they're founders, they're CEOs, they're people that have a lot of expertise and, and insights and they wanna get it out to the world. And so I give them that opportunity, but make it a super seamless experience where they literally just show up and they don't have to do a lot of work. I give them, right before the show, they get a preparation document. I mean, I know you do that for your guests, but not every show does that, right?

Oh my gosh, no. Their shows are awful, freaking awful. And back to that failure, it's like, okay, if we don't take the time to think through customer journey mapping, What does the experience look like from start to finish? If we don't make sure that every single component of what people touch is on point, we're going to look like every other brand that's out there in the market, which means that we're going to struggle and fail because 96% fail within 10 years and 4% survive the 10-year mark. Got my friends, visionaries. You've got to move from creating things that to you feel clear, but to your audience aren't clear at all. All. We have to move towards clarity. So I'll, I'll add a little stack on this. So when it comes to why many growth strategies fail to deliver the results leaders expect, I want to hit on this at an angle that I don't think anybody else ever would. And that would be, it's because of what you expect as a leader. Expectations, my friends, are a vice. And we have fallen victim of that for years with quarterly expectations. Expectations aligns with the word entitlement. Entitlement is a word that ultimately puts us in a pretentious category. And now we end up condescending. We feel disappointed. Shakespeare said it hundreds of years ago. He said, expectation is the root of all heartache. So, what's the opposite but the virtuous component of still caring and wanting things? Aspirations. Hope. Hope, really. Now we've destroyed that word too, my friend. We say, oh, I hope he doesn't screw that up. But no, the idea of hope back in the day was a sure belief that something was going to come to pass that is good. Without feeling entitled, without being self-righteous enough to say, I deserve having this. And so if we can let go of our expectations and put less pressure on our teams, but put more support into helping them fulfill things and realize that, you know what, maybe if I launch this campaign, I shouldn't do as well as Forbes.com. Why? Because I'm just Jackson and my brand is just Vision Pros Live and my brand is First Class Business. with a few thousand followers, not millions and millions of followers worldwide. So I think sometimes we get so addicted to what it is that we feel entitled to have that we end up setting a bar for ourselves that we can't possibly achieve. So you can lower your expectations without lowering your output, without disappointing yourself by diving into what's called aspirations. Use AI, look it up, see how it might be able to bless your life. So that's, that's one other angle that we'd add there. I'm going to put another subject out there for us, James.

Yeah.

Why is it that some companies accelerate while others end up stalling out in their process of growth?

I think that there's one of the words I'll throw in there is system. And I know this is something that you talk about a lot is having a really good system, right? And so I learned that the hard way because I'm a very creative person. I never really had good systems in place. In my job, I would just show up and our job on the marketing side was to come up with ideas for our clients to give. We, we were on the—

Brother, that's why I talk about it so much. I got my butt kicked for years screwing up my systems. I use a worse word for it. I use infrastructure and that term.

Infrastructure. Yeah, exactly.

Um, but yes, I'm with you.

It's like, I, I don't want people to go through the same path I went through. Yeah. And I, then I moved into a management role and I realized that things were slipping through the cracks because we were working on RFPs where Clients would come to us and they would say, you know, we wanna give you this RFP. And there's, there's a whole process that needs to happen. So anytime you have something that's like a repeatable process, that's like, that's the perfect time to put a system in place. So I spent a whole bunch of time, and this was not a skill that I had intuitively or just was born with, but I, at that point in time, this was a handful of years ago, I started working with a company called Smartsheet.

Mm-hmm.

And there, there's a million other project management— Asana is— I've, I've, I've worked with Asana as well. They're all, they're all great. But the idea is you have a, a single source of truth where you put the information once it comes in, and then you could sync it along the lines with other— you could sync it with Slack, you could sync it with Salesforce or CRM or whatever it might be, right? And so that, that's— I kind of learned that at Forbes, and now in my business at Wonderfish. I, from the beginning, have been making sure that I have a really good system in place because at the end of the day, while I am a service-based company and providing a service as far as getting people on podcasts, I'm also kind of a data company where I have to have the infrastructure, like you said, in place so that I have a repeatable mechanism to deliver this ideal service, right?

Yes.

And so I use HubSpot and I've actually automated a lot of the process. I've been working with a certified automation partner to help automate a lot of the processes, and that's helped out a lot. And I'm also just making sure that everything is, um, everything is put into HubSpot as far as the all the data about the shows. And now that I'm expanding to other platforms like event live events, so I actually created in HubSpot it's like custom objects. So instead of a company, I have custom objects for each of all the podcasts, all this all the events, all the websites. So I'm creating a system and a process, and I'm kind of in a way becoming like a data company, if you will, with like my own first-party data and information on these different shows and things like that. But I think it's very important to have a really good, uh, system and infrastructure in place.

Oh, it's, it's critical. We, we will stall out if we don't have those aspects in place, my friends. And systems and infrastructure is a big part. The neat thing is most of us have been some type of intrapreneur where we've gotten to work within brands and you've gotten to put your own business owner style hat on. So I can always look back in my life and say, okay, how did Sonic Drive-In do this? Um, you know, okay, what about Lifetime Fitness? Um, what was their onboarding experience like for their clients and what can I model out of those? And so if you have the ability to just ask yourself those questions in your own experiences, the neat thing is you get better and better and then you can start to see from the outside. Like, I've never worked at Slack. But I can study their brand and see like, okay, how are they doing their onboarding experience? Let me go through it again. It's been 6 months. And I can go and see and pick up little tricks. So there's lots of things you can do for yourself, but more importantly, you can also train your team members on it. Now, James brought up something that's interesting. He said RFP. For those of you who are newer Visionaries, we're talking about the ability to create a request for proposal process. And I went through this when we wanted to get the Masters Tournament of Augusta on board at Restaurant Connect. We went through that and we did. And we went through this when we went to Pebble Beach to pitch them on having our restaurant software. We didn't win them. And we did the same thing for Kiawah Island Golf Resort. We had to fill out their RFPs. We had to have our white paper presentations in place. We also had to fly out and win. These are things that are super important for you as you move towards the scale. But I'll simplify that. For me, infrastructure attracts either bad team members or great team members. And if great team members— if you're meeting people who are not impressed with your systems and where they're at, that is one of the greatest gifts to help you realize like, dang, maybe I need to improve what's going on internally rather than feel like, well, they think they're better than me. No, they don't. They just want to work in an environment where they know they can be successful and they can't be successful if you don't have a good infrastructure. So, I'm going to highlight something about this because today we have tools that can allow you to actually use R&D as my great friend Howie Nestel of Sharkmatic Advertising talks about. R&D stands for rip off and duplicate. Just kidding. Research and development, but you're welcome to rip off and duplicate what I've created at First Class Business with us. You won't get the whole nuts and bolts, but the other thing you can do is bring team members on that help. So we have what's called a preferred vendor program, and in this preferred vendor program, we literally have people request submit a request for proposal to work with us. They have to learn about our guidelines and how we're client-centric and the flexibility in our framework and consistent quality standards and collaborative growth. And you're probably thinking, wow, Jackson. Most people would just leave this page and not want to work with you. Exactly. I don't need lazy people to pitch me all day. The only people that I want to work with are the ones who'd qualify. And guess what? If Gary Vaynerchuk came along and was like, hey, Jackson, let's work together, he wouldn't have to go through this program. I would fly out and meet Gary Vaynerchuk in a heartbeat. But this is to drive away the people who are constantly trying to sell me something. And I want them to potentially work with me, but they need to go through the entire process of helping us recognize that They've actually done their due diligence to figure out who we are, how they fit into the system, and that helps us streamline the process of honoring the potential strategic partners who could help us scale and grow. I never have to sell somebody, don't sell me. I never have to tell somebody, you know, oh, why do I get all these LinkedIn spam messages? You know why we get those, my friends? Because you're actually becoming notable in the market. It's a good thing. Tony Robbins doesn't complain about the 10,000 pitches he gets per day. He creates a system to be able to handle it, and most of those people, end up buying from him because he ended up creating a system that showed people that he's got more value than they do. We can do that at scale these days so much faster thanks to AI, thanks to integrators, thanks to people who know how to do that. And James is one of those people who's able to help us do that on the podcasting side. Moving to the hidden leverage points that provide sustainable growth. What are some hidden leverage points, James, that other visionaries can lean into to drive sustainable Gross.

Yeah, before I answer that, I just want to add, because one of the things that came to my mind is a lot of times people don't want to invest in systems because of the, the high expense of, you know, the cost or whatever of that infrastructure. But one of the things you got to remember is the, the larger you get, the more expensive it's going to get.

Absolutely. You're right, it's a mindset issue. What's the least amount of water I can give my plants and still grow a garden? That's the opposite of what we have to to do to grow.

Exactly. So you're better off starting building at a— in a spot where you can building to scale, essentially, right? Where you might not need this, this huge system or this, you know, the ability to have this amount of compute power or data or whatever. But at some point you're going to want to get there and you're not going to want to have to redo your system.

My friends, go to a free AI right now instead of being hurt by this comment. Go to it and say, um, AI, how can I shift my mindset and why would it be valuable to shift my mindset if I tell myself I can't afford that? What's going on in my mind? Just ask AI.

Hmm.

Well, let it dig with you a little bit and then come and talk to people like us too, because we're here to nurture and help overcome these realities. That is not a truth. That is a problem-oriented mentality. And you can find solutions to help yourself. Every great visionary on the planet has learned how to shift their mindset to realize that those limiting beliefs do not help us with growth. I'm really glad you brought it up, James. We can lean in better. So, with that, that's one of the hidden leverage points of driving sustainable growth is not telling ourselves that we can't do something or telling ourselves we can't afford something. So, you revealed one even though you didn't mean to. What else, James?

So, you're asking for hidden leverage points to drive scale and growth?

Yep. So, to drive sustainable growth, what's something that people or visionaries are overlooking?

This is one of the things that I think people, some people are overlooking. A lot of people are starting to realize how important it is, but it's, it's not just about the brand identity of your company or your, your corporation. It's about the identity of the individual that's driving it. And the reason I say that is because we know how important it is to drive trust and even likability. Trust and likability are 2 of the biggest factors that people are taking into consideration, particularly in the B2B space when they're deciding who they wanna work with. 'Cause there's so many options out there. Anyone can build a SaaS now. Anybody can start a company, right? So you really have to have a personal brand. I hate that term 'cause it just, it's kind of a wishy-washy thing.

Why?

Personal brand. I don't know. I guess I don't hate it, but it's just, sometimes people just think of like, oh, you have to be an influencer or you have to, You know, no, it's not necessarily about that, but it is about influence. It is about driving trust. And, and there's a lot of ways which we can get into to do that because—

Like, stay, stay authentic and genuine as you do it, right?

Exactly. Stay authentic and genuine and be human. I think it's such a competitive moat right now. I think we talked about this the last time because in this age of AI, we are all competing with AI and being a human and having lived experiences is our competitive advantage, and we have to lean into that and be able to be human, make connections, go on shows like this, go to networking events. And if you don't do that, I feel like that's where you will be left behind.

And I'll upgrade that a little bit. Um, I don't mind the— I think there is a room for a doomsday aspect on this if we fight against. And I think that's really the, the one challenge that exists there. And so tribal leadership talks about this, how people who are I am great mindset think that you are not. And people who are, we are great, think that they are not. You see it all the time in advertising where they mudsling and say, well, we're the number one. You just told everybody else they suck. I mean, like, it's not the messaging that I resonate with because there's another level that they discovered when they wrote the book called Life is Great. And in Life is Great, there is no fighting. We realize there's enough oxygen for everybody on this planet. And so when with AI, I don't compete against AI. AI is something that I can compete with, um, and with that I can also leverage the opportunity, and so can all of you, which is why we launched the AI Marketplace, ai.firstclassbusiness.io. You, my friend, the person listening right now, you are already an AI expert, but perhaps nobody's taught you the words and taught you where you actually use it. But if you've ever curated a music list on Spotify or Pandora You have skills that should be on your resume that help you realize how to translate what you do to what you can do for a company. And if you decide not to do that, then it's not AI who's taking your job. It's you who's deciding not to become valuable in the new world economy. And so, um, let—

Mm-hmm.

I want to make sure that all of you know you can leverage these systems and you can also take the audits that we have, one for business owners where that helps you unlock your bottlenecks. Where can I leverage AI right now in my business to create the systems James is talking about, which by the way, you want systems regarding podcasting. That's something we're going to come right back to with what James does for podcasting. And then on the professional side, how do you remake your resume and how do you go into conversations for job interviews, whether it's your current job trying to get a salary upgrade or you're at your future job, you have the chance to reposition yourself as an AI expert and that's going to carry you for decades to come. You will not be replaced in the economy if you learn how to leverage the skills you already have within you. It's like me learning Spanish. I can't be effective in Spanish unless I learn the language. You can't be effective in AI unless you learn the language, but it's so much simpler than you think, and it has nothing to do with using bananas to create images online. All the hype that AI people are making, you already have it within you. You don't have to overthink it. So, James, thanks for letting me go off on that a little bit. Um, back to, uh, the— some of the items that we're talking about here. What leaders often— I want to make sure we deliver. We got a few minutes left, so we gotta go on the fast mode. What leaders often misunderstand about scaling and how to move from effort-driven growth to strategic growth. Those are both pretty complex, but let's try to do our best. I'll do my best to keep a 30-second pitch on it. You do the same thing.

Okay.

So yeah, what leaders often misunderstand about scaling and how to move from effort-driven growth to Okay, on this one, how about you go first and then I'll echo?

Oh, I love it.

Yes, man, way to reverse it. Perfect. Okay, so what leaders often misunderstand about scaling. I wrote down and thought through this, guys. I see so many people who are busy and excited and they focus on the day-to-day and the week-by-week. That's what 90% of business owners are doing versus Dr. Peter Drucker who taught us, don't measure based on days, weeks, and months, measure based on quarters. So, turn from busy and excited to productive and profitable. Is what I'm doing producing a result? And is what I'm doing leading to profitability? If not, I should probably shelve it. But instead of putting daily and weekly pressure on my team members, how about I celebrate my team members every day? I don't need to hype things up, but celebrate with gratitude my team members on a daily and weekly basis and monthly basis and measure the results based on quarters and true KPIs. Your turn, James.

And I think that's probably one of the hardest things You know, it's easier said than done in a lot of ways, but it's obviously critical and important because the ability to zoom in and then to zoom in when needed and then zoom out on a weekly or monthly basis to say, okay, where are we? Have we— where have we moved the needle? And that's super important. I guess the only thing that I would add is, um, the, the ability— And this, this kind of piggybacks on that a little bit, but it's It's, it's a, it's more about like the ability to prioritize because, you know, there's so many shiny objects out there. Like, oh, I wanna do this. And, um, I, I read a book, um, The Science of Scaling. You may have, you may, I think you might have heard of that. It's pretty—

No, but I'm gonna write it down.

Science of Scaling. Yeah. And blanking on the name, I think, uh, Blake something, but Hardy, maybe Blake Hardy. Uh, but just one of the things he says in the book is complex systems don't scale, which is obvious. But one of the, one of the problems I find most entrepreneurs, and I've, I've run into this, is that when you're starting something new, learning is not scalable because you're new to something. So like, I, I decided that I wanted to do a webinar. I, I, and I started using StreamYard, but there's a learning curve when you gotta get up on, get up on StreamYard. How do I, how am I gonna set a, a, a a registration link? Do I want to do registration through HubSpot or do I want to do it through Squarespace or StreamYard? So there's all these like learning things that you, and I'm sure there's ways, you know, I obviously we all talk to AI and it helps us to, uh, sort of become our guide. And, but I think the, the biggest thing I will say is just focus it, focus on like what exactly the problem that you're solving. Go back to the mission, back to the, the frame part of my, my framework, which is If this little thing that I'm trying out, whether it's the webinar or making YouTube channel, whatever, if this isn't lining up to that and it's not moving the needle, like you said, then is it really worth my time? And because I feel like the more things that you're doing and the more things that you're adding, um, I think podcast guesting is one of those things that it can be extremely time-consuming if, if you're doing it yourself, where, you know, you're doing all the research.

Oh my gosh, I could never do it. Ever, ever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's why a lot of the clients that I work with, they, they like to say that, um, you know, working with someone like me basically gives them more leverage. It takes— because if you were to add up all the hours that they would have put in something like that, yeah, I think it's smart knowing where to outsource. Yeah, things like that.

But, um, that's a big one. I'm gonna, I'm gonna move to the next one. We're gonna do a 30-second one this time. Oh man, because we're running out.

But let's do it, guys.

I'm gonna tie podcasting right into that. I said something important. I said I would— I could never do that. I can never do that and be profitable. You can do it, but good luck being profitable. Don't go that route, my friends. Make sure that you're working with teams. So how to move from effort-driven growth to strategic-driven growth. This is so much easier, but it goes against our human nature. And so the real secret on this, if you're using AI or you're working with team members, either one and both, when somebody finishes talking, Say the words, tell me more about that. Tell me more. Dive deeper, my friends. We've got to take interest in what others are saying. If we're so busy with our own agenda and we've got our own, as they say, when you start selling hammers, everything looks like a nail. We all want to fulfill our own needs. And so we do a horrible job of actually diving deeper. And then also when we tell me more about that, we can say, all right, now AI or team, We need to build the full-scale project outline before we get started. If we don't scale the outline of what's the forecast, what are the benchmarks, what components have to be built for this, then we're going to end up building something super shoddy. And yes, we're going to put a bunch of effort in, but busy is broke. We've got to become more strategic with what we're doing. Back to podcasting and James. This is why Wonderfish and companies like his are so important because When it comes to PR and media, that's one of the greatest things that you can do for your brand is to get more and more exposure and awareness of what you're doing. Of course, you need to build the systems for scalability as well, and you need to make sure your promises align with what the market needs, and they need to be as— you need to be as honest and authentic as possible and transparent, much like Elon Musk was when he sold 180,000 cars from stage that wouldn't exist for 2 to 3 years. He was super honest about how long things are going to take. And so if you lean into that with podcasting, Go share your vision on podcasts because the danger level is low. If you share a vision on a massive stage and you fall on your face, that's not going to be helpful. Or you get 100 phone calls and you can only take 2 of them, you just make a bunch of people upset that you can't fulfill for. So if you can go on podcasts, get your feet wet, fall on your face a little bit, learn how to become better at what you do, and you will find so many opportunities to realize, oh man, my call to action wasn't very Like James talked about. Oh man, I didn't really know how to talk about the problem or the pleasure or the purpose. Use the podcast opportunities to learn how to become graceful with your messaging. And that will also be one way that you can, you can help yourself move to more strategic growth and be prepared for it. James, your thoughts on moving from effort-driven growth to strategic growth?

Yeah, it actually reminds me of something that happened to me the other day when I was driving my car and my cell phone charger fell in between the seats. And I went to pull it out and it— in the bottom, the base of it where it plugs in got stuck. And I'm sitting there, I'm yanking, I'm yanking, and I can't get it out of my seat. And finally I just realized that like no matter how hard I pull, it wasn't coming out. And all that I had to do is literally move the— adjust the little thing on the side of my seat and I moved my seat back and it came right out. And I think it's kind of a metaphor because I feel like sometimes like the most obvious things are just right in front of us. It was like, oh, you just had to do this. You just Like it's right there. Like just, and in my current situation, I've been lucky enough. I came across someone named Miriam Katz, who's a, she is an amazing public speaking coach. And she's been helping me a little bit, tell my story, find my voice. And she does everything from like voice exercises and things that I know that I can improve, but also things that I can bring to my clients. So that's why I'm doing a workshop with her on Thursday. But I just had this aha moment where I said, I can introduce her to my clients and, and basically embed her as like part of my package where they come. Because I'm not just selling getting on podcasts, I'm selling, you know, a transformation, if you will, that you could become someone who is more authoritative, who's more trustworthy. And, and she's someone that can help me do that, and I don't have to do it all on my own. So—

No, absolutely. Collaboration's huge. You pull people together, my friends, 1 1 equals 11. We have a compound effect when we bring great people in. Disney probably never turned people down who were willing to come in and help him build his vision. We gotta find greater ways to collaborate. So Vision Pros, if you'd like to be on this show, click on the button visionproslive.com. It says be our guest, book your time, come and talk to us. We'd love to have you and hear about what you're up to. James Colistra, you can find him on LinkedIn, you can find him on Google as well, Wonderfish. You can check that out. And of course on Thursday you can go check out and see what this, what this webinar looks like and what you might be able to benefit from on it. So you can also get on podcast And we will see you guys all on the next episode of Vision Pros Live. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.