Chris Guerriero - How To Scale And Acquire Companies

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. What's up?

How you doing?

I'm doing good.

Yeah.

Just wrapped up a fun interview.

We done did that. Yeah, man, this. So Chris Guerrero, we're talking to him today. And the dude has built a lot of companies. We'll just say that. And he advises even more companies than the amazing companies he's built. So he's built what, four eight figure companies and is an advisor and investor equity holder and something. I think he said something like 20 something companies.

Yeah, he says it on the podcast. I think he's an owner investor in 7 and then an advisor on 20 something. So I don't remember the exact number, but we do get into that, into.

The episode and, you know, immediately Matt and I were like, oh, my God, how do you do that all? So where do you think we questioned? Yeah, that's kind of the rabbit holes we went down is like, how do you do this?

Yeah, I mean, there's some other cool little things that we talked about. Like, we talked about how to get on radio. Like, his company actually leverages radio, unused radio spots. And we wanted to pick his brain a little bit about that. He mentioned that he launched a book and managed to get the book in like hundreds of thousands of hands, like within the first month of it going live or something.

And he got the attention of. Well, he wasn't even an Internet guy so much. But then he got the attention of all these big Internet marketing, you know, guru types seeking him out because he's like, you're doing something different. And he kind of laid out exactly what he did on the podcast.

Yeah, we wanted to. We wanted to dig into that. Like, how did you make this book just go crazy like this? And the way he explained it, like, what they were doing is crazy. Like, I literally never heard anybody else doing it that way. What else? I mean, we covered a lot of ground.

I mean, partially, like, my big aha was how systematic he is with everything. And I mean, I guess you have to be if you're managing that many companies all at once. And he's actually an employee of the companies he owns. You know, he has his own skill sets. So he talked that he has time invested as an employee in his own companies too, which is cool. And he lays out literally to the time and every single day of the week how he breaks up his days, his work days, and then also his advising days. So, like Just how formulaic it is. And then he still has, like, he's doing a lot, but then he said he's off by, like, what, three o' clock to hang out with his family every day, except for Wednesdays. That's a long day.

Yeah. I mean, he's doing stuff with direct mail. He owns all these companies. He's doing stuff with radio. He used to run up, like, work with personal trainers and morphed into what he is now.

Yeah, yeah.

So lots and lots of really cool ground covered. You know, I was really digging the part when we talked about, like, how do you manage so many companies all at the same time? And he kind of broke down his processes to manage all the companies all at the same time. And just some really cool stuff. And some of the stuff he does is like, kind of, like, kind of ninja.

Well, he's.

Nobody else is talking about some of this stuff.

Yeah. It's a systematic way to basically create headlines. The best headlines for his postcards that he mails in the mail. But it starts with PPC ads.

Yeah.

And then he talks about the evolution, like, how that all is strung together into a very formulaic process. So by the time it gets into physical mail, it's all tested, and he knows what's going to resonate. It's super cool.

Yeah. Super cool stuff. And of course, our guy, our girl. Our girl sue is taking some great notes on this episode for you.

You're going to need the notes on this one.

Yes. You're going to want the notes because we cover a lot of stuff. I want the notes for this one because we covered a lot of stuff. And I'm looking forward to seeing these notes.

Dude, this is literally stuff. Like, it's so timely in our business. We can swipe these notes and Shannon's going to basically, you know, crack the whip on us and the rest of our team to get shit done. Yeah.

So if you dig our podcast and you want to support us and you want us to keep on making more podcasts like this, go and subscribe to our EGP letter over@egpletter.com Also, you can get the episode companion for this episode for free. If you get in within, what, a week or so of this episode going live, you just go to hustlinflowchart.com computer going to that link and we're going to give you the notes for this episode. Hustleflowchart.com comp Also, again, the best way to support this podcast, if you want us to keep making these episodes and you love what we're doing. Very inexpensive way to do it. Become a member of our EGP letter. There's a community, there's a newsletter. We put new training in there. Like, we pretty much pour every cool thing we're doing in our business into this newsletter in this community that we do. So make sure you're signed up for EGP letters@egpletter.com and go get the companion for this episode over@hustleandflowchart.com comp c o m p. Yeah.

All right, let's go see what Chris has in store. Hey, Chris. Welcome to the show.

Hey. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to going through some stuff with you guys and having some fun.

Yeah. So we got connected from Amber Spears, which I know you guys have, kind of have a little background together. And Amber was on the show maybe two months ago here, and she was just, she was awesome, man. Just the way she broke down how they do affiliate marketing kind of on all ends, you know, the management and then themselves too.

Yeah.

Very.

No bullshit approach.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I love it. She was breaking it apart and then. Yeah, she said that. We got to talk. So. Yeah, Chris. And you know, we don't really have a lot of background, you know, connection, you know, the three of us here, but you're up to some fascinating stuff. Amber said that. Yeah. I think you've helped her out with a lot of stuff in the past as well.

Yeah. Let's get into it a little bit about your backstory. What got you to this point? Managing all sorts of companies, advising, investing and things like that.

Yeah.

So I'll give you the, I guess the unabridged version, long, boring version. And you could stop me or move me in any direction that you want to. But I don't know what year I started in business, but I started basically as a personal trainer years and years ago.

And I had the same goal back then as I do right now in each one of the companies that we have our hands in. And the goal was always help the greatest number of people possible. Now, as a personal trainer, you can't really help too many people because you're doing this one on one stuff. Right. So I started putting ads in newspapers to work with other personal trainers to help them find clients underneath my brand. And we ended up growing that company into almost 150 personal trainers up and down New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And I learned probably my very first business lesson back then, which was, gosh, if you're going to deal With a whole bunch of independent contractors, you're going to, you know, you're going to lose a lot of sleep. So we ended up converting that into, or I should say housing several of those personal trainers in a health club. So I started my very first health and stopped the personal training thing, but actually just did a little bit of it in my club. And we had some really out of the box kind of marketing that we did back then. And as we grew and obviously struggled a lot to grow because that was a brick and mortar company that I had to pay so much money just to turn the lights on in those buildings. I mean, it was really a shock to me to go from this personal trainer business where I lived with my folks and I was running this thing and making some good money to now having this electric bills and employee bills and insurance and all these other crazy things. But very shortly we grew that into a chain of health clubs on the east coast. And that was a lot of fun because we went from being able to help a few people in my own personal training company, to then being able to help hundreds of people with the other trainers with me, to being able to help tens of thousands of people in the clubs, which was just mind blowing to me. However, it was stagnating because I used to show up at the office towards the end and feel like I was just trapped because I wanted to keep expanding, but I couldn't without actually adding more locations on.

I wrote my very first book in the health field back then and very quickly, without any publisher, without any clue where to begin, without any contacts, without anything like that. We used the same kind of out of the box marketing that we did in the health club industry to grow so rapidly now online, which was tremendous. And we sold so many books. The very first book sold 60,000 copies in the first 60 days, 319,000 copies in the first year. And it's the combination of help books that we've got now has sold millions of copies. It's really tremendous because now we're able to go out there and help so many people. But we sold the clubs in 2004, did a lot of the book thing back then, and I got approached by two really big Internet marketers who hunted me down. And by the way, again, I didn't know what the heck I was doing as an author. So I actually built this website myself and I put my home phone number on it. I mean, I did everything completely, notably wrong. So these guys literally on two different occasions called me up and started talking to me And I didn't know anything about Internet marketing back then, so I was fascinated by the stuff they were doing and they were fascinated by the fact that my book was showing up so many places online that they wanted their products to show up on. So we picked each other's brains, became friends, and they asked me to speak at some of their events. And that turned into a seven year speaking gig where I, I traveled around the globe speaking to these businesses about how we honestly, ethically, morally spread our message so quickly to our target audience and do all these cool things. And that was fun. But after I sold. I'll take a step back. After I sold the clubs, we had a big chunk of change come in and I went from club owner to author, but also I had to do something about money. And I had a buddy who was in a venture capital firm and I became partners in a venture capital firm. And I started to use the stuff that I had really learned in growing these clubs and everything else that we were working on. I started to use those tactics with companies that we were investing in to grow that. And that was just a tremendous amount of fun. And anytime that I wasn't traveling and speaking, I was working there, like really getting my hands dirty and going into systems that we are, I'm sorry, going into companies that we were funding and working with their systems and their teams and their people to make sure that, that they were being restructured for growth so that after we invested a little bit of money in them, we would be able to get our initial investment back in three to five years and still maintain an active interest in that company. So that we kept building our portfolio. And that was a lot of fun. And since then, I've had my hands in many different companies. Class action noticing firm out in California, our branding company that we have, and our consulting firm. Which brings us to today, right? So today I have four of our main companies, which are eight figure companies. I have my hands on a couple of smaller companies, and then on Wednesdays I consult with a small group of other companies in a program called Club 28, which is these brands that I advise, which range from a couple million dollars a year to a couple million dollars a day that they're grossing and helping them to do what I do in business, which is basically scale, using really great systems, understanding how to develop leadership teams, understanding how to acquire other companies, understanding how to sell when the time is right, all that kind of good stuff.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here. This is good stuff. Oh, man. All right. So I want to go back to the personal trainer days because you said something about basically not getting sleep with all the contractors that you had to manage. I thought that was interesting. Was there a reason why specifically that was causing you that kind of stress?

Yeah, well, definitely independent contractor. So if you look at it at its most basic, I was out there trying to find clients for each one of these trainers, which was great. I mean, I had a stupid human trick that I was able to pull off this thing and find clients very, very quickly and easily. And this is way back when before personal training was as popular as it is now. So it was easier, in my opinion, to be able to get a client back then and have them stick with us. Challenge was is that as soon as I did that, the personal trainers, again, as independent contractors, would work with those people and develop a great relationship with those people using the systems that I had given them train. And eventually they would just say to the clients, hey, instead of paying Chris's company, why don't you just pay me directly and I'll give it to you for a little bit less?

Got it. What were some of these, like, it sounds like you had the rock, like the secret sauce for getting clients. Was there something specifically that you just were doing better than anyone else out there to get the.

Yeah, well, there were very few trainers out there back then who were actually training people in their homes or in their offices. All the personal trainers back then, or I should say most of them, were training them in gyms. So they would go to a gym, they would get a job at a gym, and they would get clients from the gym as opposed to. What we were doing was we had these ads in newspapers that were just constantly in the local newspapers and really, really inexpensive for us to purchase. And every time somebody would call up, I would talk to them, I would sell them into a system, and then you'll get a personal trainer to dedicate time to that particular client.

Yeah, got it. So that makes sense. Yeah. After a while, it sounds like management. It's like herding cats almost, if you have that many trainers out there.

I got it. Okay. That's cool, though. I mean, that just seems amazing. And then you said something about being trapped at your clubs. So, like, the evolution. And then it seems like the bottleneck was you had to grow to more clubs.

Did you actually end up ever getting out of that? I wouldn't call it a trap because it's a good problem. It sounds like because he ended up selling the company.

Yeah, selling was how I got Out.

That was the. Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

I think that most entrepreneurs have this, or at least they eventually have this disease, which is, I want to grow, and I want to grow, and I want to grow, and it's exciting. I mean, what I get, other than my family, what I get the most juice out of in life is growing things. Right? So understanding how to look at a company and say, hey, these are the things that we need in this particular company in order to reach our target market greater, faster, and stronger, or this is how we dominate this particular market and we get more market share than our competitors. This is how we do this. This is how we get our message out to millions more people. You know, understanding all those moving pieces is what just excites me. And.

So definitely, as a personal trainer, I outgrew that. I didn't realize that was a passion of mine back then, but I outgrew it very quickly in the club business. I didn't. Again, I don't think I realized that growth was the goal. I just knew that, hey, we need to meet better numbers. And in order to do that, we can't fit any more people into this location because we're getting visits from the fire marshal. So now we have to go to another location. So how far away do we want to look for a location so that we're not stealing our own clients? Right. So, yeah, that's saga.

Now, you mentioned also when you were. You were telling your story there for a bit, you had these books that were just selling like crazy, and you kind of had, I don't know, like a sort of like a secret sauce that. That sort of made them spread everywhere. That got the interest of these Internet marketers that approached you. Could you give us some insights into what some of those strategies were to get your stuff everywhere?

Yeah, sure.

I guess I can narrow it down to two things. There's obviously a lot of moving pieces to that. But the two things that I think I would put my finger on the pulse of immediately are, number one.

We joined forces with a tremendous number of large online companies. So back then, it was very okay. There was no gray area. There was no challenges with approaching a supplement company or an exercise equipment company and creating an alliance with them where anytime somebody purchased something from them, our book was in their cart, already checked off, and if somebody didn't want it, they could uncheck that box. That was honest, ethical, moral, legal. It was all terrific back then. Nowadays, you'd have to bring them through an upsell process and say, hey, do you Also want this book for an additional 4 bucks or 7 bucks or 20 bucks or whatever the testing price point was.

Or at the very least, have that box unchecked by default.

Exactly. So that strategy could still be used right now. However, it would have to be used in a slightly different way. You'd have to give them a really great compelling reason to want this book. But we had agreements with supplement companies online. We had agreements with equipment manufacturers online. We also had agreements with car dealerships that after somebody would purchase a car, they would get an autographed copy of this local author's book. And we did this all throughout the state that I was in. So that was a great way to get the word out about these books. The second thing is.

We put commercials inside of every single one of our book. We put little links throughout the book to get free offers. And so which were, you know, I actually designed it this way for a weird reason, which backfired and actually became a much better reason for us. The reason why we did it was because I wanted people to. I wanted to know what parts of the books people were reading first so that I knew what to come out with next for the book.

Smart.

So, you know, the very first book had a diet in it and it had mindset in it and it had a small workout in it and it had all these other chapter on supplements had all these different facets of what you needed to do in order to really maximize your metabolism and lose this weight. And what my goal was was to track when people were downloading these extra free reports that we dripped throughout the entire thing. And what we found is that almost everybody, I forget the stats, but let's just say 80 plus percent of the people were jumping to the middle of the book and downloading the middle one first, which was our, which was our diet chapter. So they were jumping right to that. They were bypassing the mindset and all the other things that they needed to do to prep themselves for that, which was interesting to me. However, what we found was that so many of our books that were digital versions were just being passed around and they were being given away on all these free PDF sharing sites that, that became a way for us to actually monetize those people and sell them other things. So we built this tremendous database up with people who were not even buying the book. And then we were able to go ahead and monetize them by selling them other things, bringing them into our online community, or actually selling them the book that they already had. That, you know, because a lot of people with diet books will unfortunately forget they have that diet book.

Yeah, I think that's a lot of people in general too.

Yeah, I forget what the stat is, but I think what, every, every person who has a diet book on their shelves actually has six of them. They purchased six in their lifetime or something.

Yeah, I believe it.

Oh yeah. I have at least six that I haven't read.

There you go.

Sounds like gym memberships too. Everybody buys gym memberships and never uses them either.

But that's sad.

It is sad. And that's the thing with. I mean, that's. Every industry has to struggle with the inaction of their customers because. And a lot of customers don't think of this. At least this is true for us is we put all the value out there for a reason. Isn't just to make the money, it's to actually see people follow through with what the teaching is. That's why we try to give the best stuff away for free here.

Right.

And so which, which is amazing. Right. So you look at this and you look, look at your model. You look at our model and our model is always to over deliver and to give more. To really have this wow factor behind everything that we do. Yet in most of these industries, like the industries that I'm in now, the industry that you're in, back when I was in the health industry, there's so many other companies that see this and they say, oh crap, you know what? This is an easy way to grow a company and then just kind of skate and not deliver that much value and just jump onto something else really quickly afterwards. Which kind of makes your eye twitch.

Yeah, especially it's even scarier if that person or business owner knows the marketing tactics to do that. So then, yeah, the marketing might be fricking amazing, but then the product could be either shit or they just move to the next thing after they make their money in peace. So, yeah, it's a weird balance, but I like how you made the most of it. It seems like on these PDF sites it's like the Tim Ferriss approach or Ryan Holiday. I don't know if you're familiar, but back in the day they really leveraged the torrent sites because they knew their books were getting ripped off, but they figured out a way to monetize it. Grow an email list. So what did you do? Did you splinter the book out into different sections? Now that you know that that middle section with the workouts was like a hit for you, did you make that its own thing?

No, actually it was a diet one, not the workout section. That was the biggest hit, I believe. But no, what we did was we just used that to then run people through surveys to find out exactly what it is that they wanted next. And.

What we found was that a lot of people were coming, you know, we're using this database surveying people and they were coming back with these answers saying, hey, we want a workout book. You know, your, your workout here was good, but it was one basic workout. Like, like we want something that we could do faster and easier and we don't, we don't have to go to a gym. And they came up with all these things. So we ended up coming out with. I think it took me 14 days to write the second book. The first book was 200 and something pages, no pictures. It was really a well written, long, detailed book. The second book was. I forget how many pages it was, but it was only a PDF. It was never printed, so it was never in bookstores, unlike the first one. And again, it took 14 days to write. And we sold over 117,000 copies, I believe, of that book during the first year because it was what people asked for. We literally said, hey, you asked for this. Here it is if you want it. No big sales page. Just come here and get it and we'll give it to you because you're on our database. We'll give it to you at a really great discount.

Yeah, that's super cool. You just totally. Like you said, you kind of stumbled into it more or less. He had to kind of switch, but you let in there. I like the fact that you were tracking, you were trying to track at least what was popular inside of your book, which a lot of authors don't think about. But just putting a handful of trackable links, you know, you could use a little tracking thing like pretty link or something to see. Even just click numbers to gauge interest that way. Seems like a pretty cool strategy that anyone could still use right now. Dig it. What was the thinking or the mental shift you had to go through from like the gym days to moving to an online product person, like, you know, a business owner in that way, I would assume that there were some day to day things or mental barriers potentially that you had to kind of overcome or shift in your day to day living and working?

Yeah, you know.

The biggest challenges or the biggest shifts were environmental, you know, meaning where I was actually setting up camp online. I actually ran a lot of it in the beginning out of my home office, whereas the clubs, I had an office inside of each one of the locations. But really, I'll tell you, I'm going to attack that question from a slightly different perspective and say another huge challenge was not falling into the online mindset. You know, we've been able to develop really great companies really significantly faster than most people develop companies these days. And the reason why we've been doing it is because we marry the online.

Lifestyle, I'm sorry, the online marketing and the online models with offline models and offline marketing and the combination of the two really work very, very well together and help us to get our message out to our target audience significantly faster and in a way that our target audience actually bonds with us much faster. Right. So with our offline companies, I'll give you an example. Most offline companies use postcards and they use direct mail and there's such a drastic, such a, such a high expense to those things. However, we're able to go out there and use postcards and even radio and local TV and profit very quickly from it. And the reason why we're able to do it is because first what we do is we throw a little bit of money at pay per click and we figure out the headlines that are going to get the most clicks for our target audience. Then after we do that, we could bring it into our email list and, and then send a series of emails so that now not only do we know a great headline that would get somebody's attention on a postcard or a great headline that would get somebody's attention when we initially say it on the radio or on a TV ad, but we also know the best copy inside of an email for this example that gets people to click or take an action. So now we could just translate that into a postcard or into a radio spot and have significantly faster conversion and go ROI positive. Much faster.

That is super cool and very smart. I love it. You're sequentially using. It starts off at the PPC as headlines. It's like crowdsourcing the data and split testing headlines. There's so many people. That is a strategy I've heard before, but I've never actually used all the way down to postcards and radio ads.

Well, supposedly that's how Tim Ferriss came up with the title of his book was he ran a bunch of ads with a bunch of different book titles and whichever one got the best click through rate was what he named his book. Sure. Whether that's like 100% the truth or not for his book, I don't know. But it's a cool Story.

It is an interesting story. Yeah. So, yeah, I love that. And is that a pretty standard process still to this day for any of your companies when you're putting out a new marketing campaign?

Yeah, well, there are other pieces of it, but that is, we run everything starting with a very.

Test that we know that we could track for the smallest increment and then we just build upon it and it's really super fast. So the great majority of people that listen to you guys may not want to invest in radio or TV or postcards or anything like that. However, if they were to jump into that area, and by the way, they may not want to because they've heard everybody else say, gosh, there's no way to monetize radio. We monetize radio on a regular basis. And the reason why we do it is because we understand how to get remnants based, how to get high conversion, how to actually go there with a message that is going to work with that target audience, how we could geotarget listeners to a radio station using pay per click advertising, how we could put it out there and then get some facsimile of that particular target audience to tell us what they're gonna click on, what they're going to respond to, and then give them what they ask for. So it makes it much easier to bond with those people. And the biggest challenge, I think, with most marketing is that there is either a disconnect in the message somewhere in the funnel, and as soon as there's a disconnect, we lose a lot of our population, or people just don't feel comfortable with us, they don't trust us. But when you're able to go out there and test things, like I'll give you an example, we used to drive a lot of traffic to. I had a TV show for a time period and we took the first season of the TV show and we gave it away for free online. Each episode was another landing page, basically. And we. And we gave this away at the end of the show. In the copy underneath the video, I told people, hey, tell me what you think about blank, which is something that I talked about in that episode. And they would chat underneath that show and they would give me such amazing material. Like they would literally tell me in their own words the answers to my questions. So the question might be, what are three things that you want to change in your body? Or what are two things that you definitely want to change in your business? Or whatever it was.

Then what we were able to do is just kind of scan through all of those thousands of replies and find out the words, whether it's a single or double or triple word phrase that people used when they described what they were looking for. Which changed everything for us. Because if I sit down at my desk and I say, oh, what do I think people want? Well, maybe people want to burn off. You know, I don't know if you remember a long time ago, people used to say, burn off. Fat like a blowtorch. That was super cool. However, it didn't freaking convert at all. And here's why. Because people don't talk about like, that's not the way they talk. That sounds like a marketing play. So it might have converted to a small target audience. But to be quite honest, if you actually talk to people in the words they use, then there's a level of trust that's immediately associated with you and your product and conversion becomes infinitely easier.

Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, we're big proponents as well of sort of combining offline marketing with online marketing. In fact, when you booked into our, our show to be on the show, you probably noticed one of the questions was, what's your physical mailing address? We're, you know, we're, we're very, very.

That's. That question's there for a very specific reason, which I'm sure you'll find out in the near future. But.

No, but bridging the gap between digital marketing in any form to offline, there's always, you know, there's an opportunity there for everyone listening in slightly different ways.

Yeah, yeah. But one thing that you mentioned that really made my ears perked up and I. And if you don't want to go into too much detail on this, I'm totally fine with that. But it really got my attention was you mentioned remnant ad space on radio and I didn't even know that was a thing. So I'm kind of curious if you could touch on that a little bit and maybe give some insights on what it is and maybe how people could do that in their business. Because that'd be something that Joe and I would probably be interested in experimenting with. Testing.

Yeah, yeah. So when it comes to radio advertising.

There'S a lot of stations that have unsold.

Time frames. Right. So whether it's 2 o' clock in the morning or whatever the case is. Now, what they normally do with that is they normally go out there to their best advertisers and they say, hey, we've got, you know, thank you for advertising with us. What we're going to do is we are going to give you a bonus. Couple commercials here and there and it's, it's usually a pain in the neck, but they give it away to their existing people. However, if there's a way for them to profit from that, where they're selling it at a discount to somebody else, they're going to always want to do that. So with radio, we look for remnant space. We're not always able to get it, but we always look for a few other things. Like we look for talk talk stations or banter stations. Like I want a banter spot. We would never go out there and buy, rent or trade or put any of our time or effort or money into a normal 30, 60 or 90 second spot, which is what most radio stations sell you. And so if you go to a radio station, you say, hey, I'd like to advertise. They're going to say, oh, tell me a little bit about your target demographic, tell me a little about this. And then they're going to be a proposal which is going to say, we'd like to sell you blank amount of time. We'll break it up on these four shows. And here's our demographic. We think you're going to become a multimillionaire overnight if you just sign this contract with us. But it never works out. And it doesn't work out for many reasons. One of them is because people in the audience don't believe in advertisements. It takes 15, 20 different times for them to hear your show if it's just going to be a regular 30 or 60 or 90 second spot. And the only reason why they begin trusting it is because they say, oh, well, this guy's been advertising on this for the last several months. I guess he didn't go bankrupt, so maybe he's trustworthy. But what we do is we say, listen, if we're going to invest anything into this, whether it's time or money or whatever it is, we are going to go just with bance response, which means I want the, the host to say they're using my product or my service or whatever it is. And if I can't get the host to say it, then I want somebody inside the radio station to be utilizing our product or service so that the host can say somebody in there is using it. And we could go into almost any advertisement and bump our conversion by 40 to 60% just by moving it from a 30 or 60 spot over to a good conversion banter spot. And the second thing I would want to do is I'd want to go in there and I'd want to be able to understand their target demographic first and I'd want to weave my story somehow into what their listeners are listening to them for so that there's no disconnect there. And the message is portrayed in a way that they're going to say, oh crap, this is good shit. You know, I believe that blank, blank, blank. The host of the show is actually using this because he's talked about wanting to lose weight or look younger or build his radio station or whatever it is. That makes sense.

Yeah, it does, totally. Because you see that all the time in the podcasting space. You know, the host, guys like Joe Rogan, you know, and if it's true or not, you know, he promotes all these different products but supposedly he's using some of them, I would assume.

Well, at one point he was a sponsor of the Fleshlight. So I mean you can to debate whether or not he was actually using it.

But he'll be the, he'll be the judge of that one. But yeah, it's, it makes sense with the banter and then also the disconnect if like you're not gonna go run some 32nd spot on a rock station. You know, if you're talking about friggin business or, or in your case health or something else like that. It's that disconnect. And it's interesting because when we were looking India a little bit more, I see a common theme in things that you post like on social and whatnot is looking for patterns and not really thinking in pieces. I believe in these little segments. Can you kind of explain what you mean by that? It seems like it relates here.

The great majority of companies look for little bumps here and there. They look for little strategies and they're chasing shiny objects here, here and there and they just make moving all over the place with stuff as opposed to creating this pattern and looking at your company from a 30,000 foot view and planning out exactly where you want to go and reverse engineering that. When we go out there and create an annual target for one of our companies, or when I go into a company as an advisor and help them to create a target that's either 8 or 12 months in the future, the very first thing we do is we get onto a whiteboard and we, we figure out what kind of numbers they've been able to achieve so far for each one of their products or services or whatever, we look at everything and we do a really great deep dive into it and then we pick one number which is their big goal that they're going to be aimed at. And to be quite honest, if I were to really be truthful about this, we never pick one number. We always have a high and a low number. So if their number.

Revenue goal you're talking about.

Right, exactly. Well, it could be a revenue goal, it could be a reach goal. The number of people we're going to reach with our message first. Shits and giggles. Let's just call it a revenue goal. The goal is $25 million. We'll write that down on the top of the whiteboard. And then we get the entire team involved in this, and we brainstorm on every product or service they have and every single action that they would need to take in order to improve the numbers that they have achieved so far to this day for each one of those products or services. So we get super anal about every single product or, I'm sorry, every single action that needs to be taken to grow each one of their products or services. And what we end up with, and the term that I use when I'm talking on stage about this, is we end up with a whiteboard that kind of looks like a whole bunch of people just vomited all over it because there's literally notes everywhere on it. And we delegate to one person in the room the ownership of taking each one of those and then putting it onto somebody's project sheet. So if you've got 11, let's just say you have five people on your team, and one person gets up there with a marker and they say, okay, here's one action. This one normally falls under Ted's category. So, Ted, you take ownership of this? Yes, I take ownership of it. But if I'm going to do that, then I'm also going to need the traffic team to do this or the customer service team to do something else. Now, we have a couple of other actions which now get put onto somebody else's project sheet. At the end of the day, every action is fully thought out and put onto somebody's project sheet. Everybody leaves that meeting with a list of whatever it is, 10, 20, 100, 150 different things that need to get done that year in order to make sure that the company hits its target.

And.

And if we meet or exceed our goals, then we will meet or exceed our, you know, our big target for the year. So the end. The. In the end, the only thing I, as the driver of that particular company is in charge of is every single day, we have quick meetings with each one of our leadership team. And I make sure that everybody comes to that meeting with their daily top five list, which is the top five most important things from their project list that need to happen that day. And as long as I manage that properly, every single one of those actions takes place that year. And we meet or exceed our quarterly targets and our annual target.

I love that. Now, how many businesses are you involved with today?

Well, right now, seven. We just sold earlier this year. We sold the last stock I had in our. In the last health company that I had my hands in. So I'm out of the health industry completely. I mean, I still have an email list of about 3 million readers that is kind of sitting there, and we touch it every once in a while, but that's it.

It's. Yeah.

Yeah. How does. Go ahead, Matt.

Well, the reason I asked that question is just, you know, thinking from mine and Joe's, like, our own business experience. You know, I think right now we're. We work with three different companies. You know, we own one, we own two companies, and then we're advising on. On one other company right now and.

Multiple little assets, you know, podcasts and whatnot out there.

Yeah. But I'm just. I guess my question is. I don't know if it's more of a question or more of a statement, but we have a hard time just juggling that few amount of businesses on our plate. So I'm. That's kind of where I want to take the conversation next, is just how do you manage so many companies at once? How do you. How do you keep plates spinning? How to. Like, that's been a struggle for us just trying to maintain two or three companies at any given time. So that's kind of where I want to take the conversation next. Unless, Joe, you had something else you wanted to.

That's a good thing. Let's talk about that.

Okay, cool.

So just as a point of clarity, those were the companies that I have a stake in. They're not the companies that I Advise. We have 28 companies that I personally advise over and above that. So I'll explain to you exactly how it works, because I think.

It'S well thought out the way we've been able to grow into this. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday are my business days. Those are the days that I work on my companies.

And I have my key metrics delivered to me before 9am and they're sitting on my desk and I go through them, and those are the key metrics for every company that I have a personal stake in. And I Go through them and I call that time numbers and notes. That's usually from 9 to 9:30. I look at the numbers and I take notes next to anything that is a red flag for me, whether it's a number that's too low or a number that's too high. Whatever the case is, I take notes on it. And then from 9:30 to 12:30, I have meetings with my leadership team for each one of my companies. And those meetings might last from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, depending on the size of the company, depending on the amount of growth that the company is going through right now, depending on several factors. But for the most part, they're 10 to 30 minutes each. And we, and there's several things that we go over with every single meeting. Number one, we go over, what have you accomplished so far? So today is Tuesday. So today's meeting was what did you accomplish yesterday? So far this week yesterday. But if our meeting is on Friday, then I would be asking them, what have you accomplished so far this week? And then the second question that we go over is, what are you focused on today? So what is your top five today? Because like I was saying before, everybody in my companies run their days with top five lists, so they go over their top five. And then the third thing that we go over in every single meeting is, where's there a rock in your path that maybe as a team we could brainstorm and push that rock right out of your way, which it normally falls on my, you know, my plate to make a phone call to somebody or to send a personal email out to somebody and get this rock taken off of somebody else's plate in my company so that they could continue to move, you know, fast and furious forward. And that's what that looks like. So 12 to 12, I'm sorry, 9:30 to 12:30, I'm in meetings from 12:30 to 3:00'. Clock. I am an employee of any. Every company that I and part of. So I do what I'm good at and I push things forward during that time using my core competencies. And then from 3 o' clock on, I'm with my family on Wednesdays. That's the only day that I'm not doing that on Wednesdays is the day that I advise other companies. And we've got such a terrific group of companies.

It is a program that I'm super proud of because we've been doing it now for a decade. And, and I've got brands in here that are small, you know, just doing a few million dollars A year, but are really growing rapidly now. They just needed a little bit of hand holding to get past a bunch of hurdles. And they're growing rapidly. And we also have companies that are billion dollar companies in here and they're doing great, but for a different reason. And from early in the morning till late at night on Wednesdays, I am on the phone with them and back to back phone calls. And those phone calls are normally either weekly or every other week, depending on the company that we're talking about. And they're anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes and I'm literally one on one helping them to move the rocks out of their path or introduce them to people that I know, or helping them out in any way that I can. And although that program is a month to month program, the great majority of our clients have been with us for four plus years because they just keep growing. So it's a lot of fun. And almost everybody who gets into that program becomes a friend of mine because we shed blood together as we're growing.

What's the structure look like for those advising calls?

So the call starts exactly on time, so I'll get an alert on my end. Okay. This is the person that we need to Skype and they're video calls. Every single call that I have, with the exception of one, is a video call. And I'm a firm believer of video calls because I want to be able to see what the other person's doing while I'm talking to them. And I want them to be able to see that I'm giving them 100% focus when I'm on the phone with them. And there is a much different dynamic when you're talking to somebody face to face than there is if you're actually on the phone with somebody. I find that people get distracted when they're sitting on the phone, but when they are on a video call, it's much different. Some of the people in the higher programs, they actually fly in once a month and sit down with me or they fly parts of their team in once a month and we have an hour to get together.

Got it. Okay. And does the actual. So your time together on those calls or video calls, is it very similar? Is it more higher level on these advising calls since they're, I guess if they're weekly or, or every two weeks, you know, bi weekly, it's. Are you kind of taking the similar approach as you would in your own companies with these calls?

Oh, absolutely. So. So I'm. I'm making believe that I'm Sitting on their board.

Got it.

And every single thing that I believe I can touch and help move forward faster doing. And it works out really phenomenally well. I mean if you go to our website, you could see on the results tab you'll see freaking. I don't even know how many people we have over there that say we've tripled, we've 10 times our revenue. We have this, we have that.

It's heartfelt. I mean it's really, it's nice. And those are not testimonials that we go and seek out. Those are just things that people send into us as a thank you.

Yeah. And these are not any people to sneeze at as like Darren Hardy from Success magazine, Mark Victor Hansen, Bob Proctor. These are names that everybody listening are going to hear. And they're running amazing companies.

I'm curious of like a common hurdle that you find a lot of your clients or your company like a bottleneck that just keeps coming up that maybe people like us with our team should be kind of aware of throughout all your experience.

Two things.

Actually. Gosh, I could, I don't even know how many things. Definitely developing a leadership team is one of the biggest hurdles that most people find. And here's the reason why. It's because depending on what stage you're at, it's who's the first person to hire or who's the next person to hire or how do I take a team and actually develop some of them into an actual leadership team so that they are running the team instead of I am, or we're merging or we're acquiring a company. How do we absorb somebody else's team into our team without killing the culture? Right. So developing a leadership team is just an ongoing thorn in most companies side because the system or the process that you use right now to develop culture in your system. And please anybody who's listening to this, don't get scared when you hear the word culture. If you don't have any employees yet, there is still a frickin culture in your company. And if you fail to have a culture in your company, you'll never have anybody working for you. Right. And if you have only a few people, you'll be able to have significantly better retention and much more motivated people if you have the right culture. But culture is killed when you don't have certain things in place. Right. When you don't take care of people properly or do some of the other things that we're talking about today.

Yeah. And that goes for any kind of online Business like with us, our leadership team is really three folks. It's Matt and I, and then Shannon, who's our ops manager and kind of runs a whole bunch of stuff. And we actually had a call with her this morning. And it's very similar having a core group, and especially one I feel like you can kind of bounce ideas around from their own skill sets because we each have our own kind of what we're focused on and our perspectives.

So in our case with the three folks, it seems like this has been the best culture we've had in our business, and that's important even to the other people all working remotely. There still is a culture, like you said. And with the leadership team, are there key people or qualities of a leadership team that you kind of recommend?

Yeah.

Definitely. I wouldn't want anybody on my leadership team who was not emotionally intelligent. So I would want to want to know that they are emotionally intelligent and that they truly do want to grow in the organization and help the organization grow, not just say it. Because I'm a firm believer, and I say this constantly, is.

We judge people by what. We don't judge people by what they think or they say only about what they do. Right. So. And it's the exact same thing with ourselves and with our leadership team. We don't judge ourselves by what we think we're going to do or by what we say we're going to do. We can only judge ourselves by what we've done in the past and what we now have proven that we're going to do in the future. And great leaders understand that. So they understand it in themselves and they understand how to see that in other people. So they don't get jaded by somebody who comes in with a resume who says, oh, my God, look, I worked for the President of the United States, and then I also built five companies of my own, and I also did this. And now I want to be your receptionist. And I think I'd be the best receptionist. And it's not what they say, it's not even what they think they're going to be able to do, but show me what you've done in the past. And great leaders know how to see that and read it in other people.

Yeah.

Do you ever. Do you ever build leadership teams that span multiple companies, or does every company have its own leadership team inside of it?

So, interesting question. So we in the bench capital firm, certainly we have a stockpile of people that we can. That are. There are such great leaders and so good at what they do, whether it's a CEO, a CEO, a cto, or even just a general manager or somebody who is great at customer support, that we can pull over to a new investment, a new company that we invest in and have them just accelerate the results that we're getting in that new company or accelerate the results we're getting in that company while they train somebody to take over their spot, one or the other. So, yeah, we can cross industry a lot of people. However, best case scenario, we breed somebody to not just excel well in one company, but to excel inside of that company and grow to be a stronger part of that company. So they plant their roots deeper.

Yeah, this is sort of a selfish question because it's just like, like my, how my brain works. Do you ever have the drive to. To get into any of the businesses that you're working with and pull levers yourself and be in the weeds and.

And actually, yeah, I do. So in my company is I am in the trenches every single day, which is, I believe, one of the most important parts of leadership. Like, if you're not doing this stuff, if you're not building companies, you should not be talking to people about building companies. You can't read 20 books and say, I know how to build a company, or read 10 books and say, I know how to build a leadership team. Definitely I'm in the trenches and I enjoy doing that stuff. And that's what juices and jazzes me most of the time.

However, if your question is, do I ever start working with a company in the advisory program and say, hey, I want to take an active interest, Give me a piece of your company or let me invest in your company. I've done that a handful of times and it's worked out great every single time. The challenge is my mental bandwidth is limited. Right. Just like all of us. So I can only do that a certain number of times. The payout in my enjoyment has to be pretty large for me to do that.

Yeah, that makes sense. I was, you know, from the angle I was coming at, you know, there's a lot of roles in our current business. You know, I mentioned earlier that we kind of feel like we're spinning plates a lot of times with, with managing a handful of businesses right now. And a big piece of that is, I think, think that sometimes myself or Joe or, you know, Shannon, our ops manager in our business, we are the bottleneck because we are trying to be the ones pulling specific levers that other people could be pulling for us.

Yes. So what I would do if I were you. And we do this in each one of the companies that I'm part of is we create something called a process org chart. And a process org chart is slightly different than just a regular org chart in that we've got all the boxes in place and all the right arrows are drawn so that people know who reports to who and all that kind of stuff. And yours would have three or more boxes because all your vendors would be on there also. But then there would be bullet points inside of each one of those boxes which would describe the most important tasks that that person who fills that box needs to do to get the company to where it needs to be in eight to 12 months. We don't build a process org chart for where we are today. We don't build one for where we want to be 10 years in the future. We literally build it for where we need to be at the end of the year or within 12 months from now so that we have something that we can very clearly see who we have to onboard or what tasks you need to take out of your box and put into somebody else's box in order for you to have the mental bandwidth to push the company forward. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I'm just like picturing this kind of big mind map, process map kind of thing with the people and. Yeah. The goals. And then I guess I would imagine there's like, it's all the different tasks, the action, things that are needed by that specific person on the team.

Yeah, we'll make it simple. So I think a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in the quagmire of, oh my God, that seems like a lot of work. And it's going to take us hours or days or whatever. And I don't even know where to start. But this is simple. Like, most of the tools to grow a company are simple. The problem is that people don't use tools. So once we go in there and we say, hey, just here's a tool, like, don't make this too hard. It's a process org chart. Let's do this together while we're on the phone. And by the time we're done with this hour, you'll have your process org chart done. And I'll do it, like, I'll literally take notes and help people fill them in. Or we'll screen share and I'll say, no, no, no, don't put that there, put that over here. Or no, you already said that you don't have the time or capacity to do that. We need to either onboard somebody, by the way, I've got somebody, let me refer them to you. Or you need to delegate that to somebody else on your team who happens to have that core competency anyway. Right. So anyway, it'd be pretty easy.

Yeah. I love this because this is something that we can all implement and it doesn't seem like there's ever too soon of a time to do this either, for sure.

Oh, yeah, no, it's. It's a good thing. It's a good. So what is the number one most important thing in business? It's clarity, right. Clarity on where you are, where you're going, the tools you need to get there, all that kind of good stuff. And this is a simple way to get clear. And if you, if you fail to do this, then it just literally makes things so much tougher. Even if you're a one man or one woman show you do this and you could figure shit out so much faster.

Yeah. Now, I have one more quick question before we start to wrap up around the acquisition side of things. How do you decide what companies to acquire? Is there a specific type of company, specific things you're looking for? What's your criteria?

So I want to, number one, I want to, I want to acquire a company that has skill sets or assets or database that I can immediately begin to monetize.

Number two, I want to make sure that it's a good deal for me. Meaning, and by the way, it's a win. Win all the way around. But the great majority of people selling companies, they just want it to be a win for them. And that's a mistake because the company needs to survive. Even if I'm going to cut the company up and monetize it in a different way after I get it, I still need to make sure that it is a win for everybody involved. I will always have meetings with the owner and I'll go over stuff with them and I will talk to them about, hey, what are you going to do with the money once you get paid? Are you going to retire? Are you going to sail around the world, Are you going to start another company or are you going to fund your kids college funds? I want to know what they're going to do and I want it to be pretty personal and I'm going to share a lot of personal stuff with them also so that they feel comfortable opening up. Because once I know what they're going to do, then we could come to a much better negotiation. Right. So we may be able to say, hey, okay, I Understand, you want to fund this other company. You want to get out of this and company. And by the way, this is a specific example from a client of mine. You want to sell this particular company in order to fund your next venture. Great. How much do you need for that next venture? Oh, okay. Well, that's a lot less than you're asking for this one. Well, yeah, but I need living expenses and I need this. Plus the company's worth a lot. Got it. So if you're asking for. And I'll just throw numbers out there for ease of math. If you're asking for a million dollars and I believe it's really only worth six or seven hundred thousand dollars, I may go to the person and say, all right, listen, I've done all the math. I see how much you need for your next venture.

What I'm willing to do is give you the amount that you need for your next venture, which might be half a million dollars today or may just be $200,000 today. And then I'm going to give you the full amount that you're asking, but I'm going to give it to you over the course of three years. Give me 36 months and I'll pay you in full for this. No negotiation. I'm not going to try to knock you down on anything. I think it's a fair price, but it's not really what I consider an easy nut for me to crack right now. So the negotiation will probably become, how quickly do they absolutely need their money? Because, number one, I want to make sure that they've got the skill sets or the assets or the people or database that I could profit from. I want to make sure that I get it for a doable number and a good payment plan. And then I want to make sure that no matter what I can monetize, I have contingency plans. So I could monetize that purchase multiple ways, at least three. So, number one, I may be able to acquire that company and use their customer base to sell my products to, or.

I may be able to take some of their team and bring them over and drastically accelerate my team. Or I may be able to just chop them the heck up and take their database and sell their database or whatever the case is. I want to be able to find three ways that if shit hits the fan, I'm going to be able to be made full with that purchase price on there.

I freaking love those. Yeah, because you're just optimizing your time here for this company and you have all these different Ways to kind of last ditch salvage the company if you really have to. I'm assuming for you you don't have that issue too often with these processes.

Well, if you go through the exercise properly and you're not emotional about a purchase, then you're going to walk away from a lot of deals. Because most entrepreneurs are really die hard in the number that they want, which is, hey, I want a million bucks or I want 10 million bucks or I want, you know, $30 million for my company. Meanwhile the damn thing's worth half a million bucks. They've just got so much time and effort in it that they believe they deserve more money. It's just not realistic. So when you actually create a relationship with them and you understand what they're doing next and you share everything that you're going to do, you have to find out what they're selling for. There's a strong possibility that they don't want to be in the business anymore because they don't think they could service those people anymore. We bought a company, this is going back years ago. We bought a company because the woman who was in the company, it was a health company and she didn't want to be in the health business anymore. She couldn't continue to service them properly. She wanted to be in the coaching industry. So she was making a wide right turn but loved her customers in the health company. So we were able to negotiate a decent price because we had a very strong customer support team in the health industry and a lot of great products and programs to service these people and we were going to over deliver to them and she brought the price down because of that and it was really a tremendous deal for us.

Yeah, you worked a great win win it sounds like. And she was just. You just made it easy. There was no friction there, it sounds like. That's brilliant, man. Yeah, Cool. I love that. And there's a lot of specifics that were lined up this episode that we're going to have some good notes on about for everybody to download. So yeah, Chris, I think we're going to wrap it up here. I know we gotta get you going, but we always like to ask, so like what's a book or maybe a resource? Could be a podcast or something that you recommend. Maybe it's your clients, let's say that what do you most often find yourself recommending to them to check out?

Gosh. I mean your podcast I guess is the right answer.

That is the right answer. You were right.

Wasn't vision for that. Just if something was Topping of mind.

Do I win that one?

You do.

Now.

There'S very few books that I recommend. I think the majority of books that are written in the business world unfortunately, are written by authors or researchers who actually aren't building companies. So they're looking at things from a thousand foot up instead of being in the trenches. So they say, Google did this and Amazon did this and all these big companies are doing this, so you should be doing these things also. But they're missing all the little golden nuggets that are hidden in there that actually make those tactics work. So people who read those books and they take it to heart and they actually implement those things end up getting frustrated. And that's frustrating for me to see also. But if you're educated and you read books just looking for one or two little ideas, then it works out. There's a book called the One Thing by Gary Keller, which I think is really great because I'm fascinated, always, always fascinated by really focusing on the few actions that create the biggest results in our companies. And that is pretty much what that book is about. And I like Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker. It's a short read and it is something that I believe should be a study in every entrepreneur's life, which is becoming a better person, understanding how you perform better mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually on every single front. So it just kind of goes into understanding yourself as a leader.

Yeah. And that is the most important part because that resonates in every other part of anything you touch in the world. I love it, man. Yeah. I haven't read that book. Chris, this has been amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And like I said, we're gonna have some solid notes on this one because this is very actionable. And like you said, you're obviously a practitioner, not just some research person out there who's writing a book on this stuff. Where's the best place folks can go, read more about you, contact you, and check out what you're up to?

Well, they could go to ChrisGuerrero.com hopefully you could give them a link because nobody's going to be able to spell that stuff. They could go there. But also we have a test that you could take. It's called the Build to Grow review, which we just created and went live with about two months ago. And it's actually an excerpt from what we do with our clients and my personal companies as well. Every six months, we put ourselves through this review. The entire company looks at several key factors inside the company to Find out what is breaking. Because as companies grow, other stuff breaks that we take our eyes off of and that's what slows down growth. So we've been doing this inside of our companies and our clients for the last decade or so. We put a scaled down version online so that people could literally go there for free and just take this test and find out right now where you are right now, what are the things that you need to focus on. Whether it's becoming a better leader yourself, developing leaders inside your company.

Creating systems inside your company, finding stuff that's breaking or that's about to break, and then a whole bunch of great solutions. It gives you a score, and you could literally just try to increase that score each time you take it. And again, it's built to grow. Review.com nice.

Built to grow review.com and we will link all this stuff up in the show notes. If you have any questions about that, just go there.

Awesome.

Chris, thank you very much for your time and this has been super fascinating.

Hey, I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

All right, man. Have a good one.

YouTube.

Thanks, everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com, find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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