AI Will Destroy Your Business If You Don't Do This Now with Scott Clary

If you don't, if you don't even try and attempt to understand it and they're not that complicated, you are going to be left behind. Like your company is, you will be disrupted. Like I know it's a cliché word, but, and a buzzword, but you will be absolutely demolished. I get so frustrated with business owners that think they're just going to sit on their ass and not adopt these new tools. The knowledge gap is getting more significant and more significant with the, with how these tools are rolling out. And there's new tools every single day because I, live on Product Hunt and I live on AppSumo and I have tons of friends that are entrepreneurs who are actually building in this space as well.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Unemployable Podcast. I'm Jeff Dudan. If you cold called your way into tech sales straight out of school with no connections and no safety net, if you built the Success Story Podcast from zero to over 400 episodes, 1.5 million downloads without a single investor backing you, and if you've interviewed everyone from Gary Vaynerchuk to Grant Cardone and still believe the most important interview you ever did was the one you had with yourself about why you were grinding so hard, your name can only be Scott Clary. Welcome, Scott.

Appreciate you, dude. Thank you so much for bringing me on. And yes, I heard you catch yourself when you said successful in all the things that he's done. Because I have definitely not been successful in all the things that I've done. So the things that you know about I've been successful at, that's because I've kept them up. But yes, like anyone who's tried to build a whole bunch of stuff, a lot of it has been good, a lot of it has not worked out. Even like before we started recording, there's been businesses I've tried to launch that have not been, that have, that we've gotten rid of, shut down, sold off, whatever. I think that's a pretty normal path for an entrepreneur. But yeah, thanks for having me on, bro.

It's a killer point and let's just double-click on it. I have learned through all my failures not to promote something until it's permanent. You know, I operate in the franchise industry and you'll see people that have an idea and before they fully make the business model or start to have success, they're gonna be, they launch it, you know, as if it's real. And then, you know, if it doesn't work out as well, then, you know, it doesn't, it does, it's not a good look. And you know, we, we've gotta put the foundation of businesses in and, and you gotta try things and not everything's gonna work. You've just gotta know when to pull the plug.

Mm-hmm.

And, and what's the experiential learning that you got from it? But yeah, man, if you're, if you're not, if you're not failing, then you're probably not trying hard enough.

I mean, everybody who's built anything significant has failed multiple times. And it actually, it's so interesting because like myself, you're in this world of entrepreneurship and you create content and you consume content around entrepreneurship and personal professional development. And these tropes or these sayings, like, You live them and you experience them. Like you, you know, you have to fail many times before you become successful or whatever the version of that is that you've heard. And when you're in this space, you hear it so much that it almost, it's almost like if I say it again, it's gonna sound like I'm just a, I'm just a broken record. But when I tweet something about it, the rest of the world has this very negative autoimmune response to the concept of you have to fail. And they're like making fun of me and they're ripping me up in the comments of whatever post that I put out. And it's so interesting to me because it shows you how far the, I say, quote unquote, regular world is from entrepreneurship. And I think there's like a huge, there's a huge gap between what the world thinks entrepreneurship is and what it actually is. And that gap is what I think really screws up a lot of people that want to go build their own thing because I, yeah, I guess if I'm in a 9 to 5 W-2, the concept of failing repeatedly does not really hit home with me that, that seemed to throw me off. But then when you actually go down this, this rabbit hole, this path of trying to build your own thing, it's like a rite of passage almost. So it's very interesting how the rest of the world perceives entrepreneurship and how, and I think that probably hurts people that are ambitious and want to become entrepreneurs when they actually try it and they get a harsh dose of reality versus what entrepreneurship actually is. So we could talk about whatever, but that's a very interesting thing that I just thought of like this past week actually.

Yeah. You don't get to the end of the road without all the rashes. And you know, and, and, but the po— but you just have to keep getting up. Yeah. Like I, you know, when I, I, you know, I built a business over 25 years and there was 4 inflection points where the debt was high. The, the headwinds were heavy and, you know, I just, I, the risk to my family, to college educations, to, to everything that I was trying to build. I mean, I took providing as a serious thing. I, I was, I was a provider and I, you know, and I was risking a lot. But thank goodness in every scenario, I just decided to continue. And I looked around the room at the people involved and I said, do I trust these people are gonna stay in here in the pocket with me and in the foxhole, and we're gonna fight our way outta this thing. And now it, it's, I don't even have those thoughts. Like, I just like the, the thought of, of, you know, quitting or not finishing, it doesn't even, doesn't even register with me anymore. And I think, you know, those rashes become, scabs and then, you know, and then you become tougher to it. But I think the transition from moving to a 9-to-5 into entrepreneurship is different for people. What was your journey like? Because you started out in sales.

Yeah. So the first part of my career that like sort of first season of my professional life was 9-to-5 W-2, mostly because I came from a family that was very risk adverse. Like, Dad worked for the government, mom worked for universities. She took some time off when she had me and my brother, but then she went back to work and it was always very safe, secure, as safe and secure as you can be with pension kind of employment. And I, there was a combination of factors. I think that one of the main factors that I really, that really influenced my career and I didn't go into government. I went into tech in sales and moved into sales leadership and then sales and marketing leadership. And then saw one of the companies that I was working at get acquired by a private equity firm and then started to understand the concept of ownership and equity. And then that, it was like, it was a, not just one event, it was a lot of different events that pushed me towards entrepreneurship because then when you start to see a founder that had a company doing $10, $11 million get an exit that was significant, a multiple on that, and then you're like, okay, so how do I architect this into my own career or my own life? Or what do I do to sort of emulate that success? Yeah, it was, it was just a whole bunch of experiences I was very fortunate to have that moved me away from the type of career and life that my parents knew into something that was way more risky. But it wasn't just one thing. It was really just me keeping, you know, my eyes open and understanding what was happening in the companies that I was working for and wanting more. I guess it sounds corny, but wanting more out of life. And I alluded to something that I want to mention. I think one of the main things that I understood very early on was that cost of living was increasing. I wanted to, at the time, have, you know, the stereotypical American dream. I'm Canadian, but same thing. So, you know, nice detached home and family, and that's like really, really what I wanted in life. And I'm doing the math as to what that would actually cost. And it seemed like working for somebody or working for a salary, especially a government salary, could never get you there. And then I also started to realize that the pensions that a lot of our, well, I mean, I'm 34, so I'm young, but our parents and even grandparents had, a lot of companies don't offer those pensions anymore. So I'm trying to figure out and do the math about, okay, if I want to retire at 55 or 65, and keep in mind my dad had a, a pension that gave him 70% of his best earnings, his 5 best years until he died. So that's a beautiful pension that doesn't exist anymore. So if you made, you made it, you made more than this, but say just for easy math, you made $100,000 per year. When you retire at say 55 or 65, you get $70,000 every year till you die. That doesn't exist with many companies anymore at all. I mean, in the US you probably have 401(k) matching. In Canada we had RRSP matching and you have other types of investment pensions, but they're not the same as, just work, get a great salary, and then the company's going to pay you for the rest of your life. And if that doesn't happen, then you have to think about, okay, when I do retire, how much money do I have to have in the bank or in my investments or wherever it is so that I can take out X amount of dollars every single year until I die? And I was doing the math and it just seemed like a lot of money and it didn't seem like me working for a salary after tax. And keep in mind, in Canada, your tax rate, depending on how much you make, can push over 50%. So after tax, it wasn't a lot of money left in the bank. And I, and I was just trying to figure out this math and the math didn't make sense to me. So I'm like, okay, I gotta find a better way or a different way to make a lot more money. So that's what pushed me into private industry and tech. And then all of a sudden being in tech, then I saw the exit event and then that's what pushed me into entrepreneurship. So that's really the pathway that I took, but it was really just being aware of my circumstances and thinking about where I wanted to end up in the future. And having my north star, which has constantly been, been readjusted through my life. But at a very early age, I knew that just following what every— everybody else was doing and even what my parents were doing wasn't going to bring me to where I wanted to be. So that was the, the thought process.

Yeah. In franchising, there's actually a small subset of problems that people are trying to solve. It's saving for retirement, which is really interesting that in your 20s you were actually thinking about retirement. I think that's rare. It's very rare. Some, yeah, yeah. Some people are concerned about college education for their kids. Other people are concerned about getting— they've been downsized 3 times, so they want to bet a little bit more on themselves. But, you know, then there's— or some people that we actually have a lot of people now that are, you know, they have a family office or they have a suite of businesses and they're saying businesses are now a part of a diversified portfolio of assets. And they want to add to that. And I mean, more and more, especially taking advantage of the tax code and taking advantage of the flexibility to do what we want to do when we want to do it. Yeah, there's more risk inside of it, but like you can really solve these problems in a material way. And I find it interesting that you were young and you realized very quickly by doing the math that like what you were doing wasn't going to get you there.

But also, I mean, like We now know about buying businesses and franchising and investing in real estate and the tax write-offs that all of that can bring and the cash flow opportunities. I mean, we're in this world now and I, when I, like when I, the world that I came from, none of this existed. Like none of this existed. Like the investment was, and this is a world that's very real for a lot of people. Like again, we have to sometimes remove ourself from where we're at right now to really understand some of the psychological hurdles that people have to get over. So if you're working a 9 to 5 your their whole life and maybe you invest in real estate. I mean, I think real estate is one of the least risky classes of investment because you're secured against the actual land. Do you think that somebody who's worked a 9-to-5 their whole life knows that if they're never invested in real estate, they're talking to their financial advisor who works for their bank most likely, and they're the ones that are giving them their investment advice. So there's such a huge knowledge gap and that's why I love speaking about people that are like, financial content creators and financial educators because they just solve this huge knowledge gap that just going to school, just going to college, university, if you even go to college, university, just getting a 9-to-5 job, you're never going to learn any of this. And that's a huge knowledge gap. And then there's so much opportunity out there that, yeah, it's difficult, but it's doable. It's very doable to invest, to build, to acquire. And people need, that's a knowledge gap that hopefully, I mean, like your show, I'm pretty sure this is what I try and do on my show as well, to be quite honest. We just try and bridge that knowledge gap so that life's a little bit easier for people.

Yeah. I mean, I, I got a couple of years on you, but when I was growing up, I, I remember everybody had a job.

Yeah.

In my neighborhood. And I think there was a car dealer, there was a real estate agent, and then there was the guy that owned the restaurant. You know?

Yeah.

And that, like that, those, but, uh, you know, business ownership was not something that, Hardly anybody I personally knew did, and it didn't really cross my mind until my father started his own small engineering firm. And then I watched him just work 7 days a week with a partner and maybe 2 or 3 other engineers. And like, that was an early entrepreneurial experience that I had. I was probably 12 to 18. I watched him try to build that business and, you know, maybe I owe him a lot because, you know, I've, I've had very few jobs in my life after I was 20 years old, but Well, let's talk, let's get into your stuff because there's so much good stuff to dig into. How, how, when did you, when in your entrepreneurial journey did you decide that the podcasting was going to be a way for you to leverage your knowledge and kind of as the basis for meeting interesting people, creating a name, creating a personal brand? Like, tell us about that, the podcast journey.

Sure. So about 4 years ago, a company that I was, I was, so I joined a company at the time it was called Excitum. We renamed it to Swift. It was a broadcast software company. That company was about 10 years old. I joined the, the founding team as CRO. I helped them scale it, and it was eventually acquired by a company called Grass Valley. And while I was helping that company grow and going through that exit event, that's when I realized that this exit was going to happen, um, and I would have to start again. And I didn't want to start again, and I didn't want to start again from scratch. And I realized that I could just be— I could I could start something new after this. I could bounce around. 'Cause like at this point in my career, when I started the podcast, what I was doing was basically I was CRO. I would go into a company that had some traction, fix a couple things, help build out a sales and marketing funnel that actually worked. Sometimes take them upmarket. At the time when I joined ExciteM, there was a little bit of enterprise activity. It was mostly B2C. We moved upmarket to enterprise and we were selling to some of the largest broadcasters in the world. It was That was what the SaaS, that's who the SaaS was for. And I realized that I could keep doing this role 'cause I was good at it, or I could build a name for myself that would accomplish a variety of different things. It would allow me to start a new company much easier because I'd have an audience. It would allow me to, if I wanted to bolt myself onto another company, it would allow me to bring an audience with me and some thought leadership. It would just, I think it would just sort of make everything easier. It would reduce the friction in anything I wanted to do in my life because I saw at the time what Gary Vee was doing with VaynerMedia and he was launching companies off of his name. So he launched like Empathy Wines and VaynerSports and he launched his NFT project and I think there was other, he launched a speaker bureau. So he was launching companies off of his name. So I'm like, like light bulb moment. This company's gonna, this company that I'm currently working at, and working with is going to be acquired and then I'm going to have to restart. And yeah, I have a good resume, but really no one knows my name. So the podcast was, I want to create thought leadership and personal brand around my name, speaking about topics that I want to speak about. And at some point in my future, that's going to be useful to me. I don't know exactly when it's going to be useful to me, but I know that, listen, I know marketing. I know how to, how to build a brand. I know how to do audio video editing. I know how to create content on, like, I know all the mechanics of it. So let me start now. I've seen, you know, a use case in the market of somebody that's done it very successfully for the past 10 years or however long Gary was doing his thing at that time. And let me just do it for myself. I mean, it's not rocket science. I can reverse engineer his process and how he creates content, and then I can look at other great creators and understand how they create great content. And then I can build a name around myself and I'll use it to kick off businesses in the future. Or like I said, like I can bring an audience to a business that I want to collaborate with or work for or whatever. So it was really just a, again, it was sort of future-proofing myself. That's the best way to put it. It was future-proofing myself and it was a medium that really resonated with me because when I think about all the different types of content I could create, I could write on Twitter, I could write on LinkedIn, I could try and figure out some way to create great content for Instagram. I could do a whole bunch. I could tweet, but podcasting to me seemed to have the most ancillary benefits. So not only was it great content and I enjoyed doing it, I enjoyed talking about entrepreneurship. And sales and marketing and all the stuff that I was kind of doing in my day-to-day. It allowed me to scale my content strategy across every platform because that one long-form piece of content could be turned into 1,000 pieces of derivative content. And it allowed me to create great relationships with people that normally I wouldn't have access to. And the last benefit would be when I first started my podcast, nobody gave a shit about who I was. So if I wanted to attract people to me, I needed to bring people into my universe that people actually cared about. And that's really where it started. Like that was the thought process that went on my, on, in my mind when I first started recording.

Getting the playbook, it, it's not the problem. It's getting the SOPs and the, and the people and the talent and, and somebody, you know, it doesn't take a lot of people, but it takes some curious people that are just really dialed into, oh, I'm, I wanna, um, I wanna see, and I know that you've talked before about what is it, Facebook ad manager. It's all available. People can go and see what other people's ads ads are. And then if you, if people are curious and they want to learn from that, and there's lots and lots of, you know, just there's playbooks everywhere, but you know, who's going to actually do it? And then the other side of it, and I'd like to get your opinion on this, somebody told me when you start your podcast, if you're not going to commit for 3 years, don't do it because it takes time. How long did it take for your commitment to your podcast before you really started seeing the kind of results that you were looking for?

So it's a good question and I'll respond this way. So the podcast, I've been doing it for about 6 years now, and you have to understand what results you are truly looking for. And what I mean by that is 6 years into the podcast, it makes good money. It does not make as much money as if I had built a business for the past 6 years.

Okay.

Not even close. Not even a fraction of what a good business should do after 6 years. Why is that? Because I'm selling audience. I'm not selling a product or a widget. Now, if I was selling a product, it would make much more money, especially something more high ticket. But that's fine because what I'm building is a kind of leverage. And I'll answer your question, but I just want to frame it so people understand. So I'm building leverage that allows me to connect with some of the most influential people in the world. It allows me to take equity positions in companies because of the reach of the podcast. It allows me to start new businesses. It allows me to go on stages and to give you the, it's not just small little stages. I just spoke at Inbound, which is HubSpot's been a big supporter of the show for the past 3 years now. And this is the 3rd time I've spoken at Inbound this year. They had 112,000 people between in-person and online. So the access and the career trajectory and it sort of, you know, there's things that have happened because of the podcast that I, I would never even have thought possible and the doors that it's opened. So that's incredibly useful. Now, if you look at the revenue that just comes from advertising, which to answer your question, revenue from the podcast started around the 2.5-ish year mark. That was when we had enough downloads that advertisers, and there was agencies that I worked with, but advertisers were like, yes, this is enough downloads. We can either sponsor your show on its own, or sometimes what an agency will do in the podcast world is to bundle your show with other shows as well. So let's say we're gonna sell you 100,000 impressions of business shows or entrepreneurship shows to LinkedIn or something like that, or an Indeed or any of these other big podcast advertisers. And I knew though when I was starting it that it was not going to be a get rich quick or a huge moneymaker. 'Cause again, I come from the marketing world. So if you look at the biggest podcasts that are doing a million downloads a month, I mean, at the time, the benchmark for podcast success was kind of Entrepreneurs on Fire by John Lee Dumas, who actually publishes his earnings, and he was doing about $200,000 a month. For somebody who, and also listen, I've had career success, so the money wasn't super important right away, but from somebody who's never done a podcast and is working a 9 to 5, $200,000 a month, oh great. For somebody who has built a business, that's not a lot of money. In fact, like it's okay money, but like you're running just under like $2 million a year. So I mean, really, is that a business? It's a small business. And if you have employees and overhead and costs, I mean, podcast is pretty high margin, but it's a very small business. So understand what you're getting yourself into and understand how you're gonna use it. But again, how I'm using it is not just for the advertiser revenue, which is CPM-based. So if I get a million downloads and I'm at $20 or $25 CPM, I mean, you could do the math and you could figure out how much the podcast makes per year. And there's probably about 4 to 6 ad slots per show and not everything's filled and not every deal is that CPM, but that's pretty close. You can understand how it can make some money and it's good as a, as a nice little side income, but it's, again, you have to use it for something else and you have to, if you are in this game and you don't just want like a nice lifestyle business, it pays a couple hundred thousand bucks per month, which is great. But again, if you want to really, really build something significant, then you use it as a piece of leverage for that thing and then you productize it and you can, again, I think the best way a creator can actually productize or monetize their audience is actually to take small equity positions. In startups and let the operator do their thing, and then you just act as a marketing arm for that startup. The other ways that people do monetize their audience, podcaster is no different than any other type of creator with ads. I mentioned that, but you can also, I mean, like courses, masterminds, coaching, consulting, whatever you want to do, but you should find a way to monetize it outside of just the eyeballs. That's really important. So long-winded way of saying, It was, you know, by definition successful, turned from a hobby into something professional 'cause it was making money around the 2.5-year mark. But even then, I'm still, I'm happy with the growth of the podcast, but the growth of the podcast alone is not my success metric. It's what I can use it for in my career to sort of really, really get the most out of it.

More and more as I work with people that are career transition, companies or anybody that's providing coaching or growth type services to individuals, whether they're trying to grow within their company to get a promotion, trying to go laterally to another company or start a business. That seems to be like the 3 ways that people are trying to grow. Personal brand is now talked about earlier for people, even if you're within an organization, creating a personal brand, being the one that they put up to speak. you know, having, you know, creating a following on LinkedIn would be important. I mean, peop— custom companies will pay for people that are good on social media and then will bring that with them to, to the organization. What if, if you were gonna talk to a small business owner and it could be in the home services space, or it could be in like $2 to $3 million business.

Mm-hmm.

And they said, they said, Scott, give me a plan. Give me a minimally viable plan to create my personal brand. On a small budget that's going to help me grow my business? Would you suggest to them that, you know, doing a podcast might be a little much, but what about creating a YouTube channel for themselves and interviewing customers and, and things like that? Or doing something on TikTok or, or LinkedIn? What, you know, what would you say would be the right balance for them to start down the journey of building personal brand?

Sure. So first of all, I think the first thing that I would tell a small business owner, because some of them are very skeptical about, not everyone, but some of them are skeptical about the time investment or the money investment required to build a personal brand. And personal brand is media. It is, you're building an audience and media is one of the 4 types of leverage. So types of leverage are people, finance, technology, and then media. If you do not tap into, I mean, the more types of leverage you tap into, the easier it is to build your business. So it's not even a question of is it worth my time? It's a type of leverage. It's a form of leverage. These are universal laws that are applicable to business. You wouldn't build build a business without people. You wouldn't build a business without investment. You wouldn't build a business without technology. You shouldn't build a business without media. Now then the question becomes, okay, how do I do it at scale so it's not sucking up all my time? And we're very fortunate in 2024 to have some AI tools that help significantly. So my recommendation is to start once a week, you do an interview. It could be an interview with a customer or an inter— yeah, I think it'd be an interview with a customer would probably be the best bet, or interviewing with somebody who could become a customer. Or how about a referral?

Partner, like our guys, a referral partner too. Yeah. Like we have, we have a fencing franchise. They need to work with pool companies.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah, no, 100%. I thought, I thought you were going somewhere. I thought you were gonna say something else after that, but yes, 100%. A referral partner would be great because what you're gonna do is you're gonna jump on Zoom. You were gonna, or, or Riverside. I mean, it doesn't really matter. Riverside is what we're using right now that records high quality. You record an, a 30, 40 minute piece with that customer. Okay. So now all of a sudden you've, you've had a conversation, you've built rapport, you've learned what the customer cares about, the questions that you prep for the customer, you've made sure they're questions that you're whole, like, you know that other customers in your target, you know, avatar customer care about their pain points that are obviously major things that drive people to buy your product or service. And if you really want help prepping for the podcast and figuring out what those questions are, I mean, if you're a business owner, you should know some of these, but you can go to, Answer the Public or Ask Socrates. And what those two websites do is they actually show you the highest volume search terms for your particular industry or product. So, and the index, it does this by looking through all the search queries on Google. So you can actually find out through data what those highest searched questions are. And those are questions that you should bring into a conversation with a customer. You're gonna record it after you record it. You have audio and video, and you mentioned before starting a YouTube channel, this would go up on your YouTube channel. So this would go up as a video on your YouTube channel. You can turn it into a podcast as well. And I'm gonna, I'm walking you through like my process really. And so far the only time you've committed is about maybe 30, 40 minutes for the interview and then another 10, 15 minutes to upload it and write a few show notes and, and press publish. You're gonna take that audio video, you're gonna put it through, oh, sorry, my bad. You're gonna take that audio video, you're gonna put it through Opus Pro, which is gonna turn that video into tons of short-form clips, and those also can go up on social. You're gonna take that video and audio, and the audio you're gonna put into otter.ai, which is gonna transcribe that audio. I think if you use Riverside, it does an auto transcription already. You're going to take that transcription and you can use some sort of generative chat tool. I like to use Claude or Perplexity. These are AI tools and they're tools that you just go to Perplexity or Claude and on Google you'll find them. And you're going to take that transcript and you're going to plug it into, you're going to plug it into, you're literally copy and paste a doc into Claude or Perplexity. And you're gonna say, I'd like to write 10 Instagram captions, or 1, 10, actually not 10 Instagram captions. You're gonna say, I want, 'cause Opus will do that for you. You're gonna say, I wanna write 10 tweets and 10 LinkedIn posts around topics that we discuss in this transcript. And also, if you could give me the outline of a newsletter that I could write from this transcript? And then after you get that outline of the newsletter, plus your 10 LinkedIn posts, plus your 10 tweets, you could say that outline of the newsletter, now actually write, you're gonna ask the AI tool to write out that newsletter section by section, and it's going to give you output. And then you're going to start to massage it. You're going to, obviously you're not just gonna post that, you're still gonna have to have some sort of human editor, marketer massage it, reword it, change a couple things. But through AI with one pillar piece of content, which is your audio video that you recorded with your customer, you are going to have tons of different short-form video clips to choose from that you can post on your social. You're going to have long-form video and audio that you're also going to post. So long-form video is going to go on YouTube, long-form audio is going to go on Megaphone or Libsyn or Red Circle or any other platform that you choose to use. And then those posts are gonna go up on your social media. You're gonna again have the AI do the majority of the initial effort and lift, and with a little bit of massaging, then you're gonna have all these derivative pieces that you can post all over your social, and that's how you start to build a personal brand. So it's really not a significant amount of effort. Everything I just discussed could create more than a week's worth of content in maybe about 3 or 4 hours of work, an hour of the CEO's time, and maybe 3 or 4 hours of work for a marketer on your team. And that is how you would start. And I like, that's why I think the lift is so insignificant. Even when I started, which there was no AI, a lot of this stuff I would still do myself except I would do it on like a Sunday evening or something like that because I wanted to prep all my content for the week. Now with generative chat tools and AI tools and LLMs, I mean, it's like an afternoon you can create enough content for a week or two. And yeah, that's, that's, that would be the playbook that I would suggest to a small business owner.

Boy, that is a beautiful, concise, complete SOP for building a personal brand.

It's very simple.

It's a small— it's very, very simple to do. You know, I was— I'm part of something called the Genius Network, and I was out there.

I know it with Joe Polish.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, Mike Koenig?

No, I don't know.

Okay. He's a great AI guy, speaker. He's built, built like 4 marketing companies and sold them and, you know, he's, you know, he's sharing that with all the AI tools that we have, they're so underadopted. Like we are just people, you know, we are such creatures of habit and we want to wait, you know, so like so many people just want to wait until everybody else has proven that it works until they start doing it. But it's already been proven.

It's already been proven.

It did.

Like everything, it's already been proven. Yeah. I'll give you another example that you could use for this little scenario I just described. Everybody cares about SEO. Everybody cares about driving organic traffic. Small business owners usually underinvest in SEO because it's a very long tail strategy. It takes a long time to see results or longer than ads, for example. But I mean, if you look at the work that Neil Patel and Eric Siu have done, Neil Patel's obviously a huge SEO marketing influencer, Eric Siu as well, and they've done a case study testing out AI-generated articles. That they've touched up with humans, but they're AI-generated articles that they touch up with a human editor. They post it on their website and it outperforms 100% human-written content because Google does not care whether or not it's AI-generated or human-generated. Google just cares that it's helpful. That's what SEO is. Is the article helpful in answering the question that the searcher is looking for? And if it's helpful, then it indexes it. So there's already proof that all of this works. I think the gap, there's a couple gaps. The first gap is when people use AI and they don't, they use it for the entire output and they just post it as is. That's the first, that's the first issue. 'Cause then it feels off and it feels wrong and it feels inhuman and that can, that can hurt your brand. Even when I use Opus for video clips, I don't just take the video clip that Opus gives me. I will, it's done 95% of the work, but I will maybe clip a little bit at the intro. Maybe I'll put a hook at the intro, but it's like, it's easy because I didn't have to sit through an hour. And some of my podcasts are getting longer because I just actually started doing a lot more in person than people, like when they're hanging out in person, like they talk forever. So some of them are like 2 hours, right? Plus you look at like Lex Fridman, he does like these wild, like 4 or 5 hour podcast, but I don't want to listen to a 4 or 5 hour podcast to get the best clip. So what Opus actually does under the hood is it has the full podcast, it transcribes it, and then it uses a generative chat tool or an LLM to understand what the juiciest parts are. And then it clips out the podcast into like 20 different clips or any video you create, to be honest. You could create just a talking head video. It doesn't have to be an interview style podcast. So it's done all the heavy lifting for me, so I don't have to listen to a 4-hour podcast again after I've recorded it to get 20 different clips from it, and then I can then massage and edit a little bit. But again, most of the work's done for me. So that, and you know what, one more thing, sorry, this is a rant because I get so frustrated with business owners that think they're just gonna sit on their ass and not adopt these new tools. The knowledge gap is getting more significant and more significant with the, with how these tools are rolling out and there's new tools every single day because I live on Product Hunt and I live on AppSumo and I have tons of friends that are entrepreneurs who are actually building in this space as well. And if you don't even try and attempt to understand it and they're not that complicated, you are gonna be left behind. Like your company is, you will be disrupted. Like I know it's a cliché word but, and a buzzword, but you will be absolutely demolished by somebody who just comes into your space and can build a business cranking out 100 pieces of content per day and putting up 100 SEO blogs per day. Like your business will be decimated into irrelevance if you don't adopt AI.

Yeah. I like to use the word disintermediated. You will be disintermediated, but you and I like someone will disintermediate between you from your customer because they'll never see you like that. They won't know where you went. You went into obscurity because you just weren't up with what was going on. And, and you know, some, You know, 22-year-old kid, you know, took a large language model, created the chatbot, put 3 or 4 other AIs with it, and now, you know, they're smarter and faster than you are. Have you seen Delphi AI?

Well, that name's familiar, but I don't know why.

The clone?

Is that like— well, I know, I know, I don't think I know it then. I know like ElevenLabs, it clones your voice, and I know people that are creating like video with AI, but is this what it does?

So Delphi is relatively new. I got it and for the year. And basically, you know, I have a lot of content out there. I've been floating around here for the better part of 20 years and, you know, written some books and things. And, and then, you know, this, this is probably episode 120 on the podcast. So you take all of that content and then it just chews it all up and it creates a clone of you that will be conversational and visual and everything. So I can have a clone. So people will be able to, will be able to get into a room with me and ask me questions and it would be just like me talking, probably smarter. You know, it will take out all of the— it'll take out all of the ums and pregnant pauses everywhere. But, but, but I mean, think about that. Like, how can you be— how can you be everywhere all of the time? And now, on one hand, if you don't have a big body of content, then it's probably going to— it's not— it's not going to have enough context to really answer the questions you want to answer. But You know, I'm really excited about it. I think I'm gonna meet myself next week.

That's so cool. No, I haven't played around with that one yet. I will definitely though. I will definitely. Yeah.

That's a very cool, I'm wondering if I can attend my board meetings for me.

You should try. I wonder if you should, you should try it. You should just imagine your board, like just like on a Zoom, like just like find a way to stream it to a Zoom and just see what it does.

Yeah. And just put it in there. I'll get a text message afterwards, Jeff, I don't, I don't know what was going on today, but you were so much better than normal.

Yeah. Phenomenal. Like, well, what is that? Yeah. You got some good sleep last night.

You've been great. Yeah.

Yeah. You're never going to show up to another board meeting.

No, it's going to replace you. No, that'd be, that'd be great. But like you, but we say that in jest, but seriously, I mean, the, the, you know, the flattening of organizations and the, the processes are just being absolutely destroyed inside of companies because you just, you, the, the old infrastructure of the way that information had to flow and the way that things had to get done. I mean, it's just, it, it almost, we look at what was cutting edge 5 years ago and now it feels like we're chasing windmills, you know? I mean, it's crazy.

I agree. Yeah, I agree. It is, it is, it's fantastic. I mean, the, it's just lowering the barrier to entry even more for entrepreneurs. And it's creating a more competitive landscape.

Yeah.

And I think that's where business owners have to keep up.

Look, that was a brilliant piece on that. And I, and I think, you know, our listenership is entrepreneurs, small business owners, people either in franchising or interested in franchising. I think that's gonna be a super high value piece of—

And you have to, you really do have to disrupt yourself before someone else disrupts you. Like you have to disrupt yourself. Yeah. Thank you.

I heard you say something interesting about employment or people that you get to work with you and that you cut a 2-year deal with them. And it's basically, look, I don't— I know you're probably not going to be here 5 years, but if you want to come in here and you want to be better and you want to reach an income goal, or you can, you know, you can, you can grow a side hustle or you can go off and do something else. But, you know, give me 2 years and I'll invest in you if you invest in me. Talk a little bit about that. How does that work for you?

It works. It works very well because it is It is a dynamic of our current job market. And I think the issue that employers have and leaders have is when they assume that somebody is going to give their whole life to you and they're not, because people value things differently than you and me. And some people will want to work for a company for their whole career. But I think that people are placing value on— younger generations of workers and employees are placing value on different And I think that COVID pushed that along. So what is happening and what led to this thought or this idea was the concept of people quiet quitting and people working multiple jobs during the pandemic. And you're remote, so you can work 3 jobs at once. And there's Reddit forums and threads on how many jobs can I stack on and how much money can I make simultaneously. So the goal is to understand that The people that are working for you are not going to be there for forever, and it's great if they are, but understand what their motives and their incentives are and then align on shorter goals that accomplish their objectives as humans, as people, as employees, and your objectives as a business leader. But when you ignore how— if I'm hiring somebody who's 20 years old or even like a little bit older than that, If you ignore what they want, then what will happen is they will get multiple jobs or they'll start a side hustle without telling you, or they'll quiet quit and they're not gonna be performing at their optimal, but you're a business leader and you're not gonna notice it right away because you have 1,000 other things going on. So maybe you'll notice it in 6 months, but for 6 months, what they're doing is on their lunch break, they're interviewing for other jobs. So instead of all that BS happening, when you hire them, say, listen, We're gonna enter into a contract and you're gonna give me 2 years of your life and I'm gonna give you 2 years of this company. And what we're gonna work towards is where you want to be in 2 years. So whether or not it's more salary, different job title, you wanna start your own business, and maybe in 2 years we don't even have the size of company that can support the job title that you want. So we're gonna upskill you. So in 2 years, I'm gonna give you a letter of recommendation. You can go somewhere else. Else. But what that 2-year does is it confirms commitment. So we're making this agreement not just for you to work for us, but you're making this agreement so that that person is committing to you and they're not doing all this other stuff without you knowing. So if they do have a side hustle, then you agree to that upfront because you're okay with that or you're not, but that's fine. If they do want to quit after 2 years, when people quit, they don't just quit at that point, they quit in their mind. Like months ahead of time. So you want, you don't want that person to be 50% as productive as they were when they first started. You want that person to be working and you want that person to be as productive and as contributing. And that's why you actually make this agreement saying that I'm gonna get you to where you need to go in 2 years. You're gonna commit fully to us as an organization for 2 years. And I think it's just a much healthier and more realistic way to to build a business because it's hard to hire people. It's hard to get buy-in and it's harder with even more options and places for people to work to get people to care about a business even a fraction as much as the owner cares about a business, especially in an SMB. And I just feel like, listen, it can be hard for a small business owner to get that, that people don't care, but it's true. They just don't give a shit about your business as much as you do. So instead of pretending, And even this was not the case like post-COVID, this was the case pre-COVID too. People still didn't care as much about your business, but there weren't as many options. People didn't have the option to just jump on the next remote job and work from home. So now there's more options, which means that there'll be less loyalty and understand the dynamic and the environment of work. And that's why you do these shorter-term agreements where you're aligning that person's goals with the company goals, and you're also helping them achieve their personal goals. And that's. It's not perfect, but it's one step closer to, again, navigating how people work, operate today. And I think honestly, it's, I think that if you don't adopt some sort of strategy like this, I think that those people that quit where you are scrambling to cover their work, where they are quiet quitting and interviewing for other jobs, I think that's going to hurt you in the long run. And this is something that I think I really am very bullish on business owners, especially SMB adopting, because they don't have the resources to backfill gaps in their team.

Well, look, it's a new normal. I made a LinkedIn post where I insinuated that young people could benefit from being in the office more because they're going to have privity to, you know, to executives, to very talented, seasoned people. I know when I was young in my career, a lot of my habits were based upon my interaction and watching talented executives work when I did have a job. And then I've got everything from pictures of cavemen and everything in the comments. So, you know, it's—

No, no, but by the way, I agree with that too. I still think this is two different discussions. So the in-office is different from the commit to me for two years and I'll commit to you. I also think that there's a lot of benefit to being in office. I mean, if somebody ever pushes— listen, You can make an argument for hybrid. Okay, fine. But if somebody never shows up into— if there's complete remote, first of all, it's incredibly hard to get to know that person and to build trust with them when you're first hiring them. Like, it's almost impossible. I've never successfully built as good a relationship virtually without knowing the person as I have if I actually meet them and sit down with them and get to know them. And also, it just removes so much friction. If you are completely virtual, Not everybody's good at working async. And also for quick questions where you could literally walk over to somebody's desk and ask that question, you now have to jump on a Zoom call. And when you jump on a Zoom call, then you waste all this extra time. And Shopify did a really interesting thing during COVID is they actually found that they created this calculator internally that put a dollar value on the people that would show up to calls. And it showed the waste because it would take a percentage of that person's salary and then tie it into the length of the call. Like, you know, what's the VP of this department's hourly worth and why are they tagged onto this call and why is this a $5,000 call basically? And that happens a lot during COVID and that happens a lot during remote work. So I think that there's a lot of benefits, like you mentioned, just even upskilling. I don't learn from people when I'm virtual. I do learn from people when we're having casual conversation or I go sit down with, you know, my director or my VP for lunch or coffee, then I can chat with them. But people don't do that virtual. So there's a lost human element.

Yeah. The music is made between the notes. And when you sit down and you have a conversation with somebody and it's just, you're drinking a cup of coffee, they come in, they ask you a business question, and then you, and then like, I will go on and say, and if I can educate or share an experience or share a story and let them know why it's important, what's going on before they're doing this, what's going on after it, make them understand the collaboration and how the business goes. Like, they just learned something that they would never have learned in a structured Zoom meeting. And I think people just have to decide for themselves what they want. I mean, if you've got a dog and you got no one to let the dog out, you're going to really look for a remote job. Pet— the ownership of dogs through COVID went went through the roof. As a matter of fact, there's a whole new series of pet-based franchises out there to, to accommodate. Yeah. And pet parks and remote workplaces where you can bring the dogs and all of that. You know, you get these words, uh, I, I've started hearing this word so much lately, and I'm just wondering what it means to you, this concept of agency with your team and inside of your organization. What, how do you use that word and what does it mean?

To me, that word is, is slightly synonymous with with Extreme Ownership. I do believe that agency is responsibility for your own outcomes. That's how I interpret it. It's not only the ability to choose your own destiny and to understand that the world doesn't happen to you, you happen to the world. It also, in my mind, it means that you have ownership to, for you to happen to the world. You have to have extreme ownership over all your decisions. This is where, I mean, locus of control, like external locus of control versus internal locus of control. Do you believe that everything happens to you or do you believe that you happen to everything else and you can sort of architect and construct your own environment and your own life? And I don't want it to be more complicated than it has to be. I think that agency and ownership and the ability to architect what you want is a signal of a high-performing individual, is a signal of somebody that whether it doesn't matter entrepreneurship or not, it's a signal of somebody that really understands and is empowered to take their own career, their life into their own hands. And I think it's just a very positive attribute. Or concept. That's how I interpret it at least. There's probably, it's probably a very, it's probably a very unique, I'm sure there's like a, an Oxford dictionary definition of it, but that's how I interpret it at least.

Sounds like a blend between autonomy and accountability.

Yeah, that's pro— that's a very succinct way of saying it. Yeah.

Your writing's very good. It's, the newsletter is excellent.

I've, thank you.

I've read a couple of 'em. I'm excited to start getting 'em. On the regular. And have you always been a good writer? And what is your process? Is it now changed with AI? And do you have a, do you try to get into a flow at a certain time of the day or what's that look like for you?

So writing is, I have not always been good at writing. I've never been bad at it, but I think that writing's very interesting. Writing to me is actually one of the most useful— so I learn a lot on the podcast, but I find that what helps me at least really solidify thoughts and even show gaps in my own knowledge base is writing. I find that when I put pen to paper and I try and articulate a thought, I will know very quickly if I understand it to its fundamentals or if it's just something I've heard in passing. And I think that that's— I think for me, writing not only helps with my mental clarity, my ability to recall ideas, my ability to structure thoughts and even communicate them better. It just really shows me knowledge gaps. So I don't really know when over my career I really understood this. I think that because I was not always good at writing and I didn't always understand the benefits of it, but I understood that first of all, when I started my personal brand, there was no AI. So if I wanted to dominate that niche and I wanted to create great content on LinkedIn and Twitter and newsletter. Like, I had to become a writer. It's really just a matter of necessity. But what I actually realized after writing for years before AI is when I tried to use AI to write and completely remove myself out of the process, that's when I noticed all of those ancillary benefits I just listed. So I've tried to use AI to write for a couple weeks at a time, and then I noticed that I listened to this podcast, but I didn't write about some of the topics that were in this podcast. And now I kind of forget what he was talking about in that podcast. And also when I try and communicate something that I heard in passing or that I spoke about just very briefly prior, like my words wouldn't find me or my communication or my clarity of thought or my ability to just pull ideas out of my own mind. They were not as quick or as succinct. So I started to realize like writing has a lot of benefits in helping you think.

Yeah.

A significant benefit. And I've actually reversed and went back to, so to answer your question specifically, so I use AI to generate outlines.

Okay.

And then once I generate outlines, then I fill those outlines with my own writing. And that's how I operate right now because I found that it it was hurting me more than helping me to use AI to completely generate writing. And this is not a commentary on the quality of the output because you can prompt AI with the right context and the right examples to write very good. And I mean, I wouldn't use, if people are listening and they want to use AI to write, I wouldn't use ChatGPT to write. I would use Claude to write. It's probably the most human sounding LLM. And I've gone through different versions of testing different AI tools and LLMs and generative chat tools to write different types of content, and some perform better than others. Claude's probably the best right now at least. So you can get good output, but I find that writing is akin to reading. Like you wouldn't just stop reading. I also recommend for entrepreneurs to not just stop writing. I think there's a lot of benefits there. And I'm sure there's some, I mean, listen, I'm sure there's some actual psychological reason that reinforces what I just discussed. I don't have that answer. I just noticed it. And I like the way I think when I write weekly better than the way I think when I don't write weekly.

All right. So huge point here. I use training and speaking for that and some writing and like, it's just the way we work out comedians know. That if they don't go to the comedy clubs, like if you're, you know, if you hear the guys talk about it like, okay, I got on Carson, so I knew that I needed to work out that week. So I was in the comedy clubs every night that week because then they're sharp and they're in the flow of it. For me, I do— it's very unusual for a CEO to participate in franchise training. We've got 6 brands, we're training every week, and they accommodate the schedule so that I can do 2 hours of training. And it's in my sweet spot, building high-performing teams, culture, and all of that. But I also get to weave in all of the things that are going on. What's current? What's contemporary? What do they really need to be thinking about? And it gives me the ability to stay sharp and to stay— it keeps me in the business. It keeps me in the game. It keeps me motivated. And then when you go out and when I get asked to speak and I have to go out and I really have to look and say, all right, what do you know? You're not gonna get up in front of you know, 400 or 500 people without really thinking through what you're gonna say. And you know, what's gonna bring value to these people. And then it inevitably, as you're going through the preparation process, it's bringing things into focus that you probably should be paying more attention to. And it just, so it's just a way of working out. Look, if you wanna be a business athlete, and I wrote a book called Discernment: The Business Athlete's Regimen for a Great Life Through Better Decisions. And if you want to be a business athlete, like how do you train? Because you've gotta be, when, when your number's called, like you gotta go into the game, whether that's a meeting or whether that's evaluating a new company or a new investment, whatever it is, like you, you want to be sharp, you want to be on your game, you want to be up to speed. And I think people find it different, different ways. But the interesting thing is it doesn't, that awareness doesn't come naturally to us. It's something that you evolve to. We, you realize that when you stopped writing.

Yeah.

You know, you just weren't, you weren't as in the game. And, and for me, I just realized I wasn't as in the game.

That's the best way to put it.

I gotta be working out, you know, like I got, I gotta be working out my entrepreneurial chops, man. And, and, you know, push myself to be uncomfortable and, you know, make sure that my stuff is not just, you know, old and, and, and, and doesn't bring value.

So, man, that's, that's, I think that that's why most, most, I think most entrepreneurs should find time to write. I think it's a very, I think just, yeah, I think it's a, I think that it's like most entrepreneurs should find time to go to the gym and work out. There was, I can't remember who did this. It was so funny. There was a guy who invested in like a fund or basically a group of companies where the CEOs deadlifted or worked out or something like that. And it outperformed the S&P, which is just funny. But the point is, I really do believe that that not just going through all of these exercises to help your cognitive performance, I also think that if you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to have some sort of physical component to keep you sharp. I think all of it ties in. Like there's not, you'll notice it when somebody asks you a question on the spot and if you haven't gone to the gym all week, I find that I'm just lethargic and sluggish and tired and I just feel like garbage. I mean, Same thing goes for reading, upskilling yourself, writing. I mean, you have to create time for this. So it's tough because if you're a business owner, you'll just try and get as much sort of like high-impact activities done throughout the week. But I think some of these leisure activities or creative activities, I think they're just as beneficial. And I think that you can overwhelm yourself with so many of these mission-critical business activities and putting out fires I feel like if you actually pay attention to your cognitive performance over time, you'll notice that it will start to decline if you just are answering the questions that you already know how to answer and you're not trying to push yourself and outside your comfort zone. This is very personal to me. This is how I've always felt. I, if I don't work out mentally and physically, I feel like I'm not my best.

Yeah. As somebody said to me in a meeting a few weeks ago, if you, if you work with your mind, relax with your hands. If you work with your hands, relax with your mind. You know, how do you recover? I thought that was pretty cool. But you know, I've gotten, you know, again, I'm getting a little older and, you know, so peptides, you know, NAD, all of these different supplements for brain function, making sure that you're getting your sleep and making sure that you're getting your fitness in. Like, it's important. You just can't, you can't be lethargic in the game. And the game is fast now. I mean, with AI, it's, it's, it's fast and you have to, again, you have to adopt or you're going to be disrupted or disintermediated.

100%.

You've moved into getting the opportunity. Well, as you mentioned, the podcast gives you opportunities now to get access to people who might be looking for investment or consulting or advising. What kind of, how, what's, what's your mechanism or your filters for looking at investments? And do you have a thesis that you've come to?

So when I look at, yeah, the one thing that I've learned about investing, because keep in mind, most of my career I was operating in businesses. The one thing that's very important to know about investing is just because you are good at building businesses does not mean you're a good investor. That's the most important takeaway.

And this, yeah, I've learned that. I've learned that too.

I think it's like, it seems like common sense, but I know a lot of people that have a little bit of an ego if they build or sell a company and they think they know what they think they know exactly what to do when it comes to investing. And that's never the case. So right now my portfolio, so my portfolio is split between real estate. I have crypto stocks and I have some private equity holdings. So like cash flowing businesses that I've invested into. I have tried to go into angel investing and to invest in early-stage, pre-seed, seed-round startups, even in categories that I know, or even with SaaS that I understand very well. And I've had, again, I think for most angels or most people with like a little bit of extra money, I think it's very hard to succeed unless you have infrastructure to support you and do the amount of diligence required and look at the amount of deal flow required to actually find winners. I think that most people would be better off going into real estate or going into private equity, looking at businesses that have historicals, that have a P&L you can look at for the past 5 years and you can understand how it's performing. And then if you do have a little bit of business savvy, you can understand how you can take that business and then you can apply some of the things that, you know, marketing or sales or otherwise or operational, and then you can help it sort of get to the next level. But I think that I've been burnt by a lot of angel investments and I think that that's only because I came from software, so it was exciting to me. And I think that when people who aren't in real estate, if they're just, they have this influx of money, they've sold a business, angel just seems to be the natural place to go. I think people look at private equity as kind of unsexy, but I would actually say it's very sexy because there's proof that the business actually works. So for me, that's very sexy. So my thesis is at this point, until I, if I want to invest in startups, I would do it through a fund. I would not do it solo because I just find it very difficult. So my thesis is to focus on cash flow and you can still get a good multiple on that. You can still roll up companies and sort of apply, not, there's a couple different ways to do private equity, but there's a, my thesis is to focus on that versus angel, super high risk. And apply what I know to the private equity or the cash-flowing companies that I'd invest into.

Yeah, I've certainly done better when I've invested with professionals inside of a fund or people like—

through funds.

Yeah, through funds or family office.

Yeah.

Family offices that have a real experienced portfolio, they have access to really interesting investments and done particularly well in several of those. I think where I made mistakes is when people were looking for more advisory from me and they were allowing me to invest because they were looking for me to help them. And advisory only goes so far. Basically, yes, I can save 3 years of your life or longer. I mean, in building a franchise company, maybe even 5 years, just by giving you the blueprint on how to do it, making some introductions, getting you a couple of the right people to hire. Giving you just good training and then, you know, maybe a monthly review for a while and then a quarterly, you know, whatever. Like that's, it's worth it. The problem is if, if the plan's not followed and the business doesn't go well, now you've got a choice that whether you go deeper to help these people.

Yeah.

And in franchising, it's particularly important that they do well because, you know, you've got franchise owners that are also investing inside of the model and and it's a high standard of responsibility when you get involved in something like that. So, you know, I think a couple of, you know, I think just some caution, making sure that you're not investing in something maybe too early or that doesn't have other avenues of support. You know, if it ends up costing more than it, they originally thought, or a lot of times you find out that the founder just isn't the one, you know, founder needs to step aside early.

You always bet on the horse, right? That's, you always bet on the founder, on the person, excuse me. Like that's the most important, that's the most important out of any thesis or ideas around investing. It's always the person. So I think that if you do want to invest, like I just mentioned private equity and cash flowing businesses, because in my mind it's the outside of real estate, it's the most de-risked.

Yeah.

But if you wanted to go into something, it's a little bit, I don't consider franchising as high risk as angel investment 'cause it's a proven business model. So it's really just finding the right person. Like you have the, like it's worked, it's worked 100 times, it's worked 1,000 times. You have to find the right person. But having a framework, because after, like once you see enough P&Ls and once you look at enough businesses and once you understand the value add that you bring to the table as an investor or even an advisor, the X factor is how do you vet, how do you vet the right operator, the right franchisee? And I think that's a skillset that you have to I mean, that's outside of them doing the thing previously and then hiring them to do it again, which is probably the easiest way to vet. It's like, I can give you some other ideas about how to find this person, but you're always going to have misses. So I think that would be the X factor that you have to get really good at. You have to get really good at finding and evaluating and auditing The people that are going to be running the businesses, because anybody who invests will tell you that's the hardest thing to find out. It's not which industry, it's not the TAM, it's not the— even in private equity, when you buy a business from a founder or an owner-operator, you still have to deploy a new operator into that business. So you still have to find somebody that's going to act as CEO or an integrator, if you know what the EOS system is, whatever. You have to find somebody. That's going to go in and take that business. So it's still finding the right person. It's just that now I only have to find the right person, not find the right person plus hope the business model is viable. I'm trying to like eliminate the risk of the business model being potentially not viable, but still having the right person. You just eliminate your variables and your chance of success is higher. Kind of like in franchising, you know which franchises have been around for a long time, which ones have the biggest brand and which ones have been successful. So at the end of the day, it's like, okay, I know this is successful, so it's just a matter of how do I find the right person to actually run it? And again, if they've done it before, great. If they are a person that is a high agency, A+ player, you know, they take accountability for their mistakes, they're highly coachable, they're a self-taught individual. Like these are all things that there's different ways to test for, and you could probably do a whole podcast just on hiring these types of people. But those are the people that you want to, they're radically candid. So if something doesn't go right, they're not going to lie about it or hide it away for like 6 months. They're going to talk to you right away. Yeah, these are all things you have to look for in somebody that's going to be running a business. And then if the business model works and you apply that specific kind of person to it, then you'll have a higher chance of success. That's, it's very simple.

Awesome. Well, Scott, we're heading towards the barn. I've got a couple of questions for you before we get out of here. Your personal North Star, where, what can you share about what you're looking at in the future? And, you know, and also inside of that, you know, as a second part to that question, man, what, where's the next big platform gonna be?

The second part is not so easy to answer. Yeah. Well, I know what I'm aiming for.

That's a throwaway. I mean, you know, who knows?

Let's see what, well, Okay, so what's next for you?

What's, what do you see for you?

Yeah, so what I would like to do, so I'm an entrepreneur, business operator turned, turned into a creative, right? So I'm, I'm building a creative asset, but I'd still like to use that asset to accomplish sort of my business objectives. And what the North Star that I have created for myself is to create $1 billion worth of value in this world. And what, what does that mean? So, I would like to create, invest in, build, acquire companies with a total aggregate value of up to $1 billion. It's a very random number, but in my opinion, that's the north star that I'm heading to. It's going to drive my actions. What do I mean by that billion-dollar value? I mean, I have an asset right now that's a podcast. I have a couple investments. I would like to use the podcast to grow an audience. I would like to use a podcast to get equity in companies. I would like to use the podcast to even potentially in the future, raise a fund that would allow me to start my own private equity fund and go out and acquire companies. Like I want to use it strategically. And right now the number that I'd like to have is $1 billion AUM for no reason other than I think it's very doable. And I've seen a lot of people that, you know, we're pretty average people figure out how to do this. So that's the goal is to build or scale or acquire or build a portfolio of $1 billion AUM. And I'd like to use media as my tool to do that. And that's something that I'm actively doing. So I'm always looking for new investment opportunities and not raising money. It's just my own capital or my own audience that I deploy against investment opportunities now. But that could change in the future because I actually have tried to start a private equity fund before and it was, it's just, it's a significant amount and I would actually like to deploy more capital to the infrastructure of that before I take it on again because it was just me sort of running around trying to do too much on my own. So that is something that I think is very fun though. And then when you have that kind of, when you have those kinds of resources or if you raise, you can help a lot of businesses and business owners grow and succeed. And if you're focusing on the right businesses, I think you can do a lot of good in the world as well, not just financially, but you can do a lot in terms of building great businesses that create great products that can help a lot of people. And I think that will be, that will sort of be my future. Right now I'm in the season of building my own personal brand and my podcast, and in the future, that's what I would like to look at. Finding a way to build a billion dollars worth of value in this world as sort of my little mark on planet Earth.

Hey, that was Dr. Evil's number in—

Very different reasons as to why, because yes, it's not useful to become a billionaire. Yeah. But I do think that when you start to have significant impact, impact that sort of ripples out, that's because I mean, like if you build a business and you sell it for, say you sell it for $100 million, congratulations. You've sort of enriched yourself and that gives you capital to play around with. But at the end of the day, you built one business for one group of people and now it's been acquired and now you have a nice house and you have a good life, but you haven't really impacted at scale. You've impacted a portion, but you haven't impacted at scale. So I'd like to not just, you know, money's great, but I'd like to sort of have an impact at scale and hopefully in a positive way. And there's a couple ways that I've thought through doing that, but that's sort of for the future.

Yeah. You know, we have a small family office and we're constantly working on the types of leverage, the one of your types of leverage, which is the finance chops. I mean, if you're going to, if you're going to do what you're talking about, like you're going to be constantly working to get great finance people because at the end of the day, you know, understanding finance at a high level, where to invest, how to invest, how to create the leverage inside of that, like that, that's the magic. I mean, there's a reason that those people make generate so much cash and create so much wealth is because they really, really understand what they're buying and then what it needs to look like for them to move it on to the next group at the next level. And so it's, you know, I was a marketing major, but, you know, so I'm late in life working hard to understand finance better and how it works. I've been fortunate enough to be part of a few transactions where I got to observe Um, but, uh, you really, you really, that's kind of where the rubber meets the road. Well, cool. Um, yeah, this has been awesome. I got one last question for you.

Yeah, sure.

If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what would that be?

The people that you look up to who have accomplished the things that you want to accomplish are not that special and they're not that unique. So understand that whoever you're looking up to has accomplished your dream goal and living your goal life. Is the same, if not even slightly more incompetent than you. So you can go do it too.

That is very inspirational in an odd sort of way.

That's how I look at life. That's how I look at life.

Well, and it's so true, right? I mean, it is.

Yeah.

When you really get underneath the hood of people that have been wildly successful, they were sometimes just too stupid to fail and they just stuck with it and, and really were committed to it and, and, and got it done. So I love it. Perfectly said, sir.

Thank you.

Well, thank you for being on, Scott.

I might— thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it. This is fun. This is very good. I like it.

Oh, awesome. Well, that's, that's high praise from you, sir. We, we, we, I, I do look up to you in the podcasting world, but I do not think for a moment that you're incompetent. So there you go.

So it depends on the day.

But yeah, we all, we all have our moments.

But this was a great, this is a great show. I appreciate what you're building and this is a lot of fun and and I mean, for people listening, it's, listen, I've been doing this for a while, not as long as some people, but you listen to a lot of podcasts and you consume a lot of content where you're in this space and the research and the questions and the thoughtfulness and the conversation, it does stand out. So it was, it was a lot of fun. It was really, really enjoyable. So thank you.

Awesome. I really appreciate that. This has been the amazing Scott Clary here with Jeff Dudan, and we have been On the Home Front. Thank you for listening.