Dennis Yu & Tanner Laycock - Mapping Out Your Topic Wheel

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float. Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey, this is.

Episode 200.

Whoa. Is that why I'm singing?

I don't know.

I totally Forgot this was 200.

No, this is a. This is a big milestone.

200.

200. For this big milestone 200th episode, we brought back probably our most popular guest to date, Dennis. You, Mr. Dennis Yu. And he also brought along Tanner Laycock.

Who is a guest. Co guest.

A co guest.

Yes. Yeah.

And we. We cover a lot of ground in this episode. I wanted to ask some questions that people asked after listening to the first round with Dennis. So we did kind of clarify some things and go a little bit deeper on some of the things that he talked about. In the first episode, we did things like the content wheel and the dollar a day ads and things like that. We did dive a little bit deeper on, but this time we really wanted to focus around systematizing your business.

Right.

Because one thing that Dennis and his company has done an amazing job at is building checklists out of everything in their business so that they can just hand it to pretty much anybody, and anybody can fill any role in that business. That's the power of having amazing systems. So that is really the topic that we go the deepest on in this episode.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. His company, Blitz Metrics. I mean, if you. If you have the honor to just spend some time with Dennis, he travels like a madman. So I'm like, come on, you get. You have no excuse. He's going to just show up on your doorstep sometime.

Yeah.

So at least go attend a workshop, an event. Go to his academy, I think, @blitzmetrics.com we didn't mention this on the show, but the guy's like, he gives away the best stuff for at least free or dirt cheap, like $14 courses. Like, come on. So. But yeah, like, we laid down not only systems, but whole thing. This concept which we talked about in the first episode, you know, the one month ago, or actually maybe last year now.

Yeah.

About this thing called the topic wheel. That thing is like the. That originates, like, everything. All your connections and all that stuff.

Dennis's own words, he said, in your business, if you don't have a topic wheel yet, stop everything else until you have your topic wheel and then continue on with your business. That's that important.

He said that should be the name of this episode is Build a damn topic wheel.

Yeah. And then regard. You know, Dennis is constantly traveling. Every time we talk to him, and he's In a different city. In fact, the first time we met him, he was in San Diego. And then the next day he was probably in a different country. And every time we talk to him, he's somewhere else. So we thought, this guy has to have some killer travel hacks. So at the very end of the episode, we do get into a few of his travel hacks to get around cheaper.

And not only his, but Tanner's as well. And they have different ones. And yeah, you'll learn to how to get some cheaper flights, how to. Yeah, fly fricking private for next to nothing.

Yeah.

So a lot of cool stuff. So you gotta kind of open loop. All right, so there are a lot of notes on this one. And I'm not just saying that to get you to go get some notes, but you'll want these notes.

No, you are saying that to go get them, get the notes.

Oh, yeah, that's true. But get these notes and be quick because they're free. And I don't know how many pages these notes are going to be, but our note taker is probably going to go crazy on this.

Yeah.

So thank you.

This is going to be some amazing notes. Hustle and flowchart.com comp you can download those notes for free if you're quick. Those notes are available within about a week of them being out. And then after that they get locked down in our vault. And you can still access them in the vault, but, you know, get them for free if you can. Right.

You might as well snag those bad boys for free. Hustle and Flowchart.com company and we're also sponsored by our main SEO tool that we love and endure. And we were so honored that we were approached to do some sponsorship stuff for this.

And that company is called Ahrefs.

That is correct. And that is God's honest truth of how this actually shaked out. It was so cool. Yeah. So Ahrefs, it's spelled A H R E F S. And you can find them@ahrefs.com, you can find them on YouTube, their blogs. They give away a lot of stuff for free. A lot of SEO tutorials. It's how we kind of stay in our game, more or less. And you can also get a seven day trial to their big old software tools. It's kind of like a big suite of tools. So seven days, you could try them out for seven bucks buck a day.

Yeah. Bad@ahrefs.com One thing that's really cool about Ahrefs is they Got this, this feature where they'll actually do a website audit where you go in and you plug in your URL. Like I can go and type in evergreenprofits.com and it does this in depth website audit. I think the first time I did it, it took like 15 minutes for it to process because it goes in and it looks for like URL structures and it looks at like the code and is the CSS properly minified? And do you have this plugin that might be slowing down and it just does this in depth process of like finding every single thing you can do on your site to up the technical SEO aspect of your website. And the first time I went on there, I was just blown away by how much advice it gave on actually ramping up the technical SEO. Like when it comes to SEO, there's really kind of three areas you got on page SEO, off page SEO and technical SEO. And that, that specific feature, the audit really dives into the technical SEO, but it's also gonna look for how many backlinks are you getting, how much internal.

Linking are you doing, the history of all your, how your keywords have ranked on your pages.

Yeah, it's just, it gives you this exhaustive report of everything you can do right now to just really shore up your SEO. And that's one of the features that I really love about Ahrefs. And I don't know if you've noticed, but on these various episodes, I'm giving you like little tips about the ways that we use Ahrefs. And if you listen to the last like four or five episodes in a row, you're kind of getting like lessons of how we use Ahrefs in every single little intro.

So why would you ever skip this section? So if you've skipped any previous episodes, like the last four, ish five. Just, just go check out the intro. You'll get. You're going to get some SEO nugs.

Yeah, I'm giving you a little bit of SEO advice in every single intro. But what you should really do, my best piece of advice is go buy Ahrefs. $7, 7 days. You're going to love it.

Boom.

All right, let's go talk to Dennis Yu and Tanner Laycock about Facebook ads, systematizing and travel hacking and whatnot. I'm pretend like I said that, right? Let's go talk to him.

It's like what Matt said. Yeah. Hey, guys. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

Hey, Matt and Joe. What's going on? We have a special guest with us. I'm Dennis Yu.

Awesome.

Yeah. This is what I always love about how you always bring someone with you. You're always tag teaming, you know, always.

Smarter with other people. You never want to be the smartest guy.

Right? Yeah. No, I mean, we've seen that live in your workshops as well. You know, you always have someone to help you out there on your team and yeah, I feel like it just allows you to do probably what you can do better. You know, just think a little clearer and, you know, you got to get some help to kind of shore up everything else.

Yeah. And the last time we had you on the show, your, your episode, I think was the number one most downloaded episode for like, I want to say, like 12 months straight. I think it finally got topped by another episode just last month.

Well, this is going to be our new number one episode.

That's the goal. That's what I emailed you. I was like, let's make this another number one.

Somehow the episode that you did with us, the download numbers went up every single month after it was released. Typically you have a new episode, it's a big spike in month one, Month two, it's a little bit less. Month three, it's a little bit less. Once the episode's been live for nine months, that episode kind of doesn't get many downloads anymore. Somehow the Dennis Yu episode that we did last time had a big spike in the first month, dropped off in the second month. But then after the second month, month over month, it grew. And we're still scratching our heads about how that happened, but we're not complaining.

Dennis probably knows why.

Yeah, Dennis probably did some sneaky.

And that's going to be part of what we're talking about here, which is how do you get more power on your existing content? How do you cross post? How do you get word of mouth so that your greatest hits can work across Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube and Spotify and all these other channels without having, like we talked about before we pressed the record button, how do you have a system in place? You call it a closed loop system. We call it the social amplification engine. And when you can push these tasks out to vas, then the people. The main thing with podcasters or personal brands or authors, speakers and coaches is that they're just not seen. That's why Grant Cardone and Gary are so loud, because they keep saying the number one problem is that you are not known. And it's not to say you need to broadcast. It's when you have. When we get to Hang out with Matt and Joe. That's absolutely awesome. Why don't we make sure that the other people that are super busy but are subscribers of your podcast or know about you get to see this and get to see the top hits. Get to see like a 15 seconds snippet that then brings them in to download later.

Yep.

Yeah. And yeah, we were chatting about, prior to recording how we've taken a lot of. In the dollar day episode that we did, which the two of you listening, if you have not heard that episode with Dennis, go back and listen after this episode. But yeah, we. We've now implemented that to give this show a lot more legs on all the different social channels and, you know, try to bring more discoverability for the podcast by targeting other people's, you know, targets on Facebook. It's been really cool. Yeah. And there's so many other ways that we can dig in and probably relate to all these repurposing systems that you guys have.

Yeah. So you guys have heard of Influenceive, right? It's one of these personal brand sites where you see Tai Lopez, Grant Cardone, all these guys are sharing their top advice on personal branding and entrepreneurship.

Yeah, we've actually contributed to that site.

Yeah, yeah, I have.

So we have the number two most shared article on that site among everyone and everything. There's 11,000, 12,000 shares. When you go read the blog post, I think it was something like why I'm not a personal brand or what I learned from failure is like some article like that. And the reason why it's number two instead of number one is that number one is Mark Lack. And that title was something like what I've learned from interviewing 730 billionaires and millionaires. And the reason he's number one is because we used the dollar a day tactic where we took a Facebook post that was promoting that particular URL. And what happens on all these websites that have the counters on how many likes and shares there are when someone clicks, like on the Facebook post, that registers on that article.

So Mark was number one. And I said, hey, I could be number one next week if I want. I'll displace you. But then I'm like, nah, because then he'll put more. So I'll just stay at number two.

I love it. It's very noble of you.

So basically you're going and you're sharing in the direct link to that post on Facebook and then you'll advertise to that post and anybody who likes it, even though it's an advertisement Those likes show up as the share count on that post.

Yeah. And so that's an example of cross channel authority, something that does well on Facebook, can also show authority on the web, can also be your pinned tweet, can also be recycled into YouTube, can also be turned into an article, can be put into an email roundup. Summary of the top 12 things from last month. Take something that works and copy it to the other channels.

Right. Holy moly. Already? Matt and I just looked at each other like Jesus.

Yeah, I mean that seems like such an easy concept that we've just overlooked.

But no one's doing it. See, I'm sure everyone's nodding their head saying, oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Oh, but I'm not doing it. Let me give you another example, which is a little bit out of left field. So you remember the whole Facebook controversy, Senator? We run ads and Zuckerberg or Congress and that whole thing, right?

Yep.

So we got a call from cnn. Tanner and I got the call to fly into Atlanta, their headquarters, to be on TV the next morning in front of three and a half million people.

Imagine what that's like, how you must feel, right, with, oh crap, it's CNN. We better hop on that flight right now.

Right? 100%. How did that go?

Yeah, it was Tanner.

Yeah, it was. Listen, I dropped out of college probably a month before that. And I was sleeping and Dennis wakes me up probably 2:30 in the morning and he's like, we gotta go. Like, nah, no we don't. We don't gotta go anywhere, Dennis. And so.

Within an hour we're on a plane pretty much headed to cnn. We rest and then the next day, because it's international, they show it at like 2 in the morning. We met with George Howell a few hours before that. We had tapas and he gave us a little bit of little pieces of advice on how to talk in sound bites and whatnot. Anyways, to get into cnn, it's the craziest experience. Have you guys ever been to cnn?

No, not at all.

So you might not know this, but it's the, I think the first or second most heavily bomb threatened location in the U.S. i've heard that though.

Yes.

Yeah. And so you have to get these ID cards printed. There's security at every single door. And George Howe forgot his ID when he came to let us in. He was the CNN International anchor and even he wouldn't be able to be let back in because he didn't have the id.

It's him and Anderson Cooper as the top two anchors.

Right. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So how did he get in? Did someone.

We had a secretary basically come and have to let us back in.

And then I'm sitting there watching my mentor talk to within 30 minutes, just talk to three and a half million people for a few minutes at a time. And I'm trying to get B roll kind of out of the way of the cameras, but it's scary because all the cameras move around. Don't want to be the guy that falls in front of a camera on international.

Yeah, that'd be a blooper.

That have been great for the brand overall. Right? Blitzmetrics. Yeah.

So Dennis wrapped up. I think he was on for four or five slots at five minutes each. And then George Howell gave us a tour of cnn. And while he was giving us a tour, I interviewed him and I took videos with him. Just us walking around, giving him kind of a behind the scenes look. And then I interviewed him for a one minute video. And so what I did was I took that one minute video of me and George Howell just casually talking. He gave me some advice on speaking in sound bites. And then I boosted that to everybody that likes CNN International on Facebook. And then what I did was I took a picture of just me at cnn. There's not even CNN anywhere except for the color scheme on the back wall. And I boosted out to people who like CNN as well. And it got over 60,000 likes with I think only 40 bucks of ad spend on Instagram.

Wow, dude.

That kind of set off the trigger for me that what Dennis was saying was right, that if you can a take the subjects that you want to be known for. So I want to be known for public speaking, which relates to your topic wheel where the topics that you care about and you create videos with people of authority in that topic that is George Howe. And you lose that to the people that already like that topic. So, for example, I took a video with George Howe. I knew that people that like George Howe, if I just show them a video that came from me instantly, I'm going to take a little piece of their pie. Right, right. So that was just such an aha moment because I could do it at such a low dollar amount. And that's a good example of a why story.

Now imagine how that's different than just taking a picture of yourself in front of a Lamborghini or a mansion.

Because now you're interviewing the interviewer, thus being behind the scenes where you're capturing how do you speak in sound bites? What is it like in the newsroom where they're deciding what story they're going to leave with. How is it that you behave on tv and which camera do you look at? That sort of inside view is something that everyone craves. And when we're able to share that, even if it's in little 15 seconds, 60 seconds pieces, the reaction is so strong, even today, the algorithm is going to reward you. And I think this is what people don't understand. The algorithm is so strong that if you feed it the right signal, you don't need to hack anymore. You don't need to use all these crazy tools for automation. You don't need to create complex campaigns. You don't need to spend a lot of money. You need to put content out there, like these one minute videos that we've been preaching about, done vertically on your phone, captions turned on automatically, no editing, no fancy camera, no lighting. And then this is what we talked about before we started recording. Take that and put it into your other materials.

Exactly.

Tweet it, put it as an Instagram post. Take a still like one frame out of that video and put an inspirational quote, stick it in your speaker reel. Last month, Tana and I, we had the opportunity to keynote in London and in Romania and in Budapest and in New York. We got to meet all these other people. Was crazy. I'm sure Tanner has some jet lag. I'm used to it. And so here's what happens when people first see something from Tanner. Oh, look, he's hanging out with George Howell and these other important people. He must be someone important. I've never heard of this Tanner guy, but if he's at CNN and he's interviewing these other people, he must be somebody right now. You know, the way remarketing works is our ads follow you around. Now, technically they're ads, but we don't think of them. We think of it as like social postage. Then the next thing you see is Tanner is with this other military entrepreneur who has served 18 years in the Marines and owns this company called Salute the Suit, helping thousands of folks transitioning from the military into real jobs because they have These suits for $249, the full thing, better than Men's Warehouse and all that. Then they with folks who have founded $100 million and billion dollar companies, having podcasts and interviews, being at their house, and each time another nugget, at each time another piece in that jigsaw puzzle until after six or ten little touches, then they see this picture that we call the topic Wheel where they see, wow, Tanner is working with entrepreneurs that care about fitness and about. About patriotism and about helping veterans and about health and about mindset. And thus, now you get it. Now it's like the power of an infomercial, power of word of mouth, but nowhere along the lines did Tanner have to say anything, because it was all said by other people that were high authority, which is the best kind of personal branding. And then we asked you, hey, how are you guys making money on this? Well, you have sponsors, you have services, but why wouldn't. No one would hire you for services unless they saw how awesome you guys already were with the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, right?

Yeah.

And so it's about. I don't think it's cheating. It's not a hack. It's something that will always exist. Even if YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or whatever go away, this technique will still work because people are still consuming content in another channel. So when people are sequenced through these pieces of content that we stack together, that's what we call why, how, and what the why are these stories? The how is the different pieces of expertise, and the what is, oh, now we offer these services. So every single personal brand that we work with has something that they're selling, but they never lead with that item that they're selling. I always lead with these stories to build the authority which moves people through, know, like, and trust until they buy. And so without going cross channel, you won't be able to monetize your personal brand. And we talk to a lot of podcasters and we say, that's great. You've interviewed this person, this person, and this person, and playing checklist bingo, I happen to be one of the boxes to check for digital marketing for some reason. Right. But then we say, okay, hey, you know, I'm actually a person and I'm willing to be on your podcast, but I feel like you're treating me like a box you're trying to check, and you're trying to check as many boxes as you can. Like, okay, great, I get that, you know, you've got to crank out two episodes a week in your podcast or whatever, but let me ask you this. Are you making money? And where are you going with this? So let's say you've got 100 episodes. Okay, great. Let's say that you're successful now you're able to land, you name it, and now you're at 200 episodes. Will you have any more clarity at that point? Do you have any sort of direction to what you're doing? Or is this just a hobby where you're producing a podcast or a blog or a. Or courses or public speaking or you've written a book? Doesn't matter. They're all the same thing. They're all broke. I know a ton of them. They're all broke except for a few, right? And so the question is, do you have a business? And the answer is, 99% of the time, no. But I hope that if I keep interviewing these other people, that I'll be able to have one. No, that never works like that.

It's true.

You could have a thousand hurricanes going through a junkyard, and you're not going to get a 747 million monkeys for a million years on a million typewriters. You're not going to get Hamlet. Right? And so the answer is the structure of the topic wheel of saying there's something you have to. That you sell. It could be consulting services. It could be you build websites. It could be you do coaching. It could be that you run ads. It could be, you know, you're a videographer. You do something to make money. Everyone listening now, unless they're just doing it for fun and daddy's got a lot of money, they're doing it because they have something that they're selling, some product or service they're selling. And the trick is that when you can tie that why and how and what, then you're able to make money. So we don't. Most people are listening to this, so they can't see it, but we're drinking right now Cocoon water. I was showing you a bottle that it's alkaline water with lots of oxygen. And we're not. I mean, that's the. What. We want people to buy the water. We want people to take the baths and take the treatments. We have to talk about the why, about cancer, about losing your mom to cancer, about winning a prize or winning an Olympic medal or whatever it is, right? And the knowledge behind it and how hypoxia works and about how the brain uses oxygen and about why alkaline water is good or why certain other kinds of drinking celery juice in the morning, like, whatever it is, why that's good. And when people sequence all the way through through other people they already trust, the algorithm is going to feed them more of what they like. We're relying upon the algorithm to feed them that next piece of content, which is why Facebook's so addictive, why it should be regulated like cigarettes, right? Until eventually they get to the point where they want to buy water or they want to buy baths. From Cocoon. We have another example like Phil Randazzo. He's got American Dream University and he's helping vets transition. And Tanner is working on his brand. But Tanner is also working on other military entrepreneurs that are selling products. And so they tell their stories about being in the battlefield, multiple of them. Then they share their expertise around how do you prepare for an interview, how do you tie a 4 in hand knot or for a tie, how do you do whatever. And then it goes to the product, to the course, to the suit, to the water, to the flip flops, to the black rifle coffee, to whatever it is. We believe that every entrepreneur, whether you're big time Elon Musk or you're just someone who's getting going, it's not just that you're interviewing these other people. You have to interview them in such a way you have to pull out the snippets like you guys do into topics and those topics then tie back to the thing you're selling. And I'd ask you how, how often, what percent of the time of the people that have podcasts or blogs or courses or whatever, books, what percent of the time have they figured out how to tie that back to a product to monetize or service?

It's very rare. I mean, at least in the podcast space, this is what I'm. What we see the most of is, like you said, it's a hobby. There's no marketing thought that usually passes by that. And we know, you know, prior back in the day, blogs were very prevalent in that kind of regard. No one really knew exactly how to monetize it. Like Matt, you had a whole business on learn the blog and how to actually make a good living with your blog. Same idea. Like you said, books. Countless marketing type books for publishers out there. Yeah, yeah.

I mean we work with a lot of people in the podcasting space. We talk to a lot of podcasters and I would say nine out of 10 of them have not figured out how to monetize it yet, which is what we help them with. But most people have not figured out how to monetize a podcast because anyone.

Who has a podcast, llcl, you want people to hear it. You don't want to interview your next guest and find out that only 27 people downloaded that episode.

Yeah, yeah. And that's. And what you said and what's really cool and we mentioned this, you know, prior to recording is a lot of what you've taught us and everyone else listening with the dollar a day strategy, we apply to our podcast as one way. But there's, like you said, it's repetition, the whole, you know, the how, why, what? We're constantly doing that every single day, where by the time they write into our support, it's like they know us. They already love us. They've listened to I don't know how many podcasts. Each one's an hour long. And our engagement retention is usually around, what, 75 to 90% typically per episode. And those are an hour long. Like, just. It's such an intimate kind of thing. Typically, it's all with your headphones. You're not hanging around with 20 people listening at the same time.

Yeah. I don't know how many times we've jumped on a call with somebody, you know, for a consulting call or for, you know, maybe a sales call to sell them on consulting or something like that, and they jump on the line and go, wow, this is weird. I almost feel like I'm talking to a celebrity or I feel like I've known you forever already because I've been listening to you for so long. And I mean, that's. That's really where we see the big benefit of the podcast.

They already trust you. It feels like you guys are already friends. Like, Tanner and I will be in the airport in some weird country somewhere, and someone will come up and they'll say, I've been listening to your stuff for years, and blah, blah, blah. And I've never met them before, but they feel like, you know, we're friends, which is cool because we get lots of free meals all the time to post on Facebook. Hey, we're in London. Who wants to hang out? Right? You get like, 50 people.

Sure.

That's cool. That's something. Actually, we wanted to circle around to maybe. Maybe we'll do it towards the end of the show is maybe talk about some of the travel hack ideas that you have, because we know you're always on the move, so you must have some really cool, like, little tips for people, you know, Roland Frazier, another mutual friend. Same kind of idea. We always like to get little travel hacks out of him when we talk to him, as.

As well.

Oh, yeah. So we'll circle back around to that, though. Let's open that loop and we'll close it later.

Yeah, Sounds good. Yeah. I really love everything you're laying out here. So it seems like what the topic wheel, once you have that, you layer that on. It sounds like you Layer that on with something like the dollar day strategy distribution.

So the cross channel authority, I believe is what you called it. And from there. Yeah. Is having solid systems because I know that's the whole scaling your agency or whatever it is you' doing. Even one. One person show. Ideally you have some good systems and VAs and team around you. Yeah, let's dig into that. Maybe some kind of how that ties into where we're starting with the how or. Sorry, the why, how and what.

The topic wheel is your strategy. And a lot of people say strategy and it sounds really good. Ooh, your strategy. Well, your strategy is mechanically and specifically defined as the unique combination of your goals, content and targeting goals. Meaning you have to monetize. Right. Content. What are you saying? Organized into those six topics and targeting. Who are those different people on the outside of the topic wheel? So we go why, how and what? Which is outside Middle center. We have all the stories, like all the people you've interviewed. Those are who. Right. And those people are able to explain their why. That then ties to the topics which you're showing step by step how you do something, which is the meat of this podcast, which then goes into the what, which is products and services that you're selling. When you have that alignment in the topic wheel, you will find that certain stories will just resonate that you could have never predicted before that we're going to kick some serious ass. So we were in, Tanner and I, we were in London a couple weeks ago and we were with our buddy Matthew Janusek, who is the CEO of Escape Fitness. He is the one of the top fitness entrepreneurs because he sells when you go to like a lifetime fit. Do you guys work out at like lifetime fitness or 24 Hour Fitness or Equinox or.

I do stuff my garage, CrossFit stuff.

Yeah, I've had memberships in the past. I don't currently, but I have.

But even the CrossFit gyms, you'll see his equipment there. He's the top player in Europe and one of the top players in the U.S. he's the CEO of that company, has his own manufacturing in China, factories, all this kind of stuff. On his podcast he's interviewed the who's who. It could be like an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Lee Haney or Frank Zane, the CEOs of these other companies, like anyone you would name on his podcast. But then how do we make money? And then how does he make money? And Tanner will give us a view to show you kind of behind the scenes how that really works, not just to be a successful entrepreneur, but to use content marketing and personal branding. And the topic wheel, which, full disclosure, they're our client. How do you use all these things in combination even if you don't have any money? You don't have to be a giant company to do this.

Yeah.

So.

Basically I'll overview the process, but Matthew Janicek has a podcast called Escape youe Limits. His company is called Escape Fitness. What we do is we create a public figure page on Facebook and what we'll post, there is different snippets from his podcast that we just cut up, just similar to what you guys are currently doing, but take the little 1 minute to 2 minute videos out of that and create a story via the six topics that Dennis talked about. And what that allows you to do is you can use different programs.

That transcribe those videos. And now you have blog posts and articles about those.

Yeah, right.

What you can do is you can post that on LinkedIn, you can post one minute videos, you can post pictures of the videos, you can post memes where it's just a quote of something that the Haney said. And what does it. What our process is, is we take those videos and post them on his public figure page. Because people don't want to buy from Escape Fitness, they want to buy from Matthew Janusak. Mm, right.

So a personal, very personal, branded type page it sounds like.

Right. And it's the same for you guys. People wanna buy from Matt Wolfe and not from the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for sure.

No, you're right.

So what we like to do is.

Via YouTube, via LinkedIn, via Facebook, is create a platform to funnel a personal brand to build a reputation so that people go to Matthew Janicek's page and then they see, oh, what's this Escape Fitness stuff?

Mm, right.

Yep.

So now they're going on a warm touch and they feel like I've already developed this personal relationship. I already know what Matthew Janicex about. I can tell he's a good person from the stories he's told. I can tell he's authoritative from the people that he's interviewed. And so it leads into money, but it's never selling. Right. We never sell Escape Fitness equipment on the podcast. It wouldn't make sense. It's not what people are coming in on. And so how it works for me is I get to create videos with Matthew Januset the same way I made videos with George Howe. And now what I can do is I can boost that video picture or whatever it may be to his audience. And now people will see me. If you imagine that his audience is a huge ocean and I take a cup, and I take a cup of that water and pour it in my bucket for my personal brand, then I'm slowly and surely filling up my bucket to elevate my reputation.

Yeah, that's brilliant. And that's. Yeah, we do such a thing. I know it's super influenced from the first time we had Dennis on here is totally. Just use the podcast as that. You know, it's a great networking tool. But there's a lot of ways to elevate our brand when we're associating ourselves with people like you. And then we layer that on with some cool ads that are strategically positioned to your audience or someone else's. And yeah, you're right, it works great. And Matt and I do have those public pages, those figure pages, because all the ads just work a lot better. That's the entry point. And then from there, it's just showing cool shit that we're doing. Maybe cool places we're at with cool people. And you're right. Sooner or later, they're going to kind of reach out and start a conversation about something of ours. Products or services.

Yep.

And this is. This is how this really helps build your agency. Because now that we've been posting Omni Channel, which is through all the different platforms for Matthew Janicek, and people have seen him 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times, what will happen is other people in the space will hit up Matthew, Janice, I can hit, say, hey, what's going on? How you. How are you everywhere? I feel like I'm seeing you everywhere, right?

Yeah.

I bet you're spending, you know, $100,000 a month. Where are you getting the money for this? But what happens is if you take care of your clients, they'll send you other clients, even in their space, because it all meets at one specific threshold. Right. So for. For Matthew, we could also work for personal brands of his gym trainers, because the gym trainers can help sell fitness equipment that is needed from skate fitness. Or maybe it's a specific product that he wants to add to his product line so we can partner with the companies that make that specific product. So you can share your list. In a sense, now you a sustainable business because you're being known for fitness and you're tapping into the fitness industry. Now you have four, five, six clients in the fitness industry, and you can do that across all of your niches.

Yeah.

As we have so much relationship power with Matthew for years. And Matthew has so much trust in Tanner and me. He's been referring us other business. And now Tanner has grown this micro business where he has multiple clients that have all come from Matthew's referral. And they're so strong that Tanner flew private a couple days ago just to fly back to have dinner with Matthew and then fly back here to Vegas just to close another deal. And think about the power of that to close deals. It's not because Tanner is a fantastic negotiator. Right. He's decent. It's not because he lies and knows all these sales techniques. It's because the results speak for themselves. It's clear he's documented everything he's demonstrated. He has a team, and he lets the client do the selling. So a couple days ago, I pissed off thousands of people on LinkedIn. I don't know if you saw the post, but I basically copied a post from somebody who sent me a message on LinkedIn offering me IT services. Okay, I'm sure you get those too.

Sure.

And I said something along the lines of, hey, bro, don't cold call me. Show that I'm a human being. I know you're mass blasting this out to thousands of people. And I pissed off people because there are a lot of folks who. There is 600 people that replied on my LinkedIn post saying, Cold calling is good if you know what you're doing. And why are you pissing on all the cold calling? People said, I'm not doing that. What I'm trying to show you is that people are so inundated, all of us, with these sorts of random requests from people that are trying to, like, hustle and sell. I'm not saying don't hustle or whatever, but why not work with the algorithm? Why not treat everyone like humans? I mean, you could force your way there to try to get a sale, but why not do it the elegant way? Someone asked me yesterday on Facebook in the Digital Marketer Engage group, saying, hey, I've been cold calling and cold calling, and I started my agency. I don't have any clients, and I just need to get my first gig. I'm willing to work for, like, almost nothing. Please, what do I do? No one's returning my calls or when I do get on a call, they don't want to hire me. I'm really desperate now. I need to pay rent. It's. You're gonna be bad.

That's really annoying.

And what I said was, find an agency that you can where the owner or whoever Will mentor you and you can be a sub. Either you can work on the smaller components there because they already have enough power that they've got plenty of clients, like we got plenty of clients, or you're in a particular niche that they don't service, or you, you service clients that are smaller and they can just push those ones over to you. And that way it's more elegant and it's a warm touch like Tanner talked about. And also it's not spammy.

Yeah. So Tanner and I, we've spoken all over the world, we've flown all over and people will say, well, how did you get to keynote at such and such conference? Right. What did you apply? Can you like show me how to apply the right way so I can get on stage? And I said, dude, it's not applying having those relationships and then I'll ask them. So I've spoken 750 times on stage in the last 23 years. My first keynote was over 20 years ago in front of 2,000 people. I was the closing keynote at the Epiphany conference. Right. Imagine that, 2,000 people and you know, the stage is black and they play the music and all that. Guess how many times I've been rejected in terms of applying to speak at conferences? By the way, a good percentage is 1 in 3 places you apply to accepts you.

You.

I'm gonna guess you're about a hundred percent success rate.

Yeah. Why is it a hundred?

Because of all the branding that you've done and then just seeing you everywhere from all the branding work you've put in.

Because I never apply.

Well, I was thinking that was gonna be the case.

And then if you look at our client base, I don't want to brag, but we have some well known companies that we work for and we're very grateful to have these guys clients. Can you imagine having like a Nike or a Red Bull? Like there's think of how many agencies hit them up all the time, right? Yeah, but how did we get these guys as clients? Is it because we have a really good sales team? Guess how many salespeople we have.

I'm gonna guess none.

None. We have over 100 people in the company and we have zero salespeople.

That's so cool. It's leading with content, leading with value and results and just being everywhere. It's the consistency, it sounds like.

Yeah.

And Tanner, he's 21 years old. He just celebrated his 21st birthday, went to the Bahamas after we were in London. All these crazy things. Obviously he's very smart. He's a genius. He's been doing SEO for a few years, so he's had some agency experience. So let's just call that three years, maybe four years of experience. But how is he able to service an Escape Fitness and service some of these other clients we have that are world class? And I would argue it's because we have a repeatable process. And that's what people don't understand. It's the process. It's not a lot of people think it's me or it's Tanner or it's the magic of being on stage. Anyone listening? It's the process. Anytime you hear someone successful talking about what they're doing, listen carefully for the process. And that's where the nugget is. What are the steps they're doing that you can repeat?

Yeah.

And if you don't have a checklist, I challenge that your business probably isn't doing that well. If you don't have a repeatable process, we can see it. And it's not going to be evident that you have repeatable success with your clients.

So let's talk about that stuff. So where are the starting points of creating a solid process? Are there certain areas in a business that you prefer to start with?

You start with whatever you have already done successfully. We call that learn do teach. You learn from someone else. You could be watching YouTube videos or friend told you or whatever. You do it yourself. Show that you can do something three times repeatedly. That's called a recipe document that. And if you don't like to write things down, then just do a little Skype or zoom recording or whatever it is. Camtasia. Right. Just record. You can record on your iPhone, record how you do something. Let a va or someone else turn that into a mini course. Or they can just follow your, you know, 30 minute video instruction step by step where you say how you do something and now you don't have to do that anymore if you've written it well enough. Now, if you've never created instructional material before, then the odds are your first couple times you will have skipped steps. You will have made assumptions. You will have, you know, and you just can't make any assumptions. You really have to spell out every detail, especially if it's from the Philippines. And it's not because they're like not smart. It's because you just need to be really specific. Okay. And then that's one thing that you can turn into a task that's repeatable. As you start to stack these tasks together you can turn them into a package. For example, let's say that you're offering podcast services and there's transcribing and there's putting up the show notes and there's a landing page and there's dollar a day and there's scheduling things and there's publishing to be. You know, there's all the different mechanical portions of producing a podcast. If you've documented those, you never need to do it again. I would challenge you. What percent of the things that you do in your life are repetitive and if you had them put into a checklist, you wouldn't have to say them or do them again.

I would guess it's almost 90% or more.

Maybe it's probably a lot. I mean, a follow up question to that same concept is, what about the stuff that requires a little more creativity and subjectivity to, to complete? You know, for example, there's things in our business that I know both Joe and myself have had a hard time letting go of because we feel like it's our creative brains that are what make it work. Which, whether that's true or not, I don't know. That's probably up for debate. But one example is I'm still the one who writes every single email broadcast that goes out to our list. And my sort of justification in my brain is like, it's my knowledge base and my creativity that makes our emails work. What is your response to that kind of thing where people feel like they can't let it go because it's the stuff that it's the creativity that's sort of locked in their brain that they feel is what makes it work.

That's the E myth. That's the entrepreneur who says, I'm not going to give it out to anyone else because no one else can do it as good as me. And then you're stuck. Now, if you like doing that, great. But writing copy, my goodness. Ryan Dice is one of the best copywriters I know, but do you think he's writing all the letters for digital marketers? They have a copywriting course. Why do you think they have a copyrighting course? Because they want to teach other people how to do it. And they did it for themselves because they did. Marcus and Justin and Ryan, they didn't want to write all the. There's just a ton of copy to write for them. Right. You think Michael is writing all the copy for Social Media Examiner?

No. At all?

No.

They have what, 10,000, 20,000 articles by now?

I feel like it's stuff that we intuitively, we are, you know, not necessarily intuitively, but we read about it and we kind of know, like, we're not probably the best in the world at it, but we just struggle to let it go.

Give you an example, imagine how hard it would be to have repeatable success when you're filming a video. That's pretty hard because everybody has a different story, right?

So you have to kind of have a framework for it. So the way that we like to tell a why story, for example, we like to break it into When I was. So it starts out the story immediately, because that's the most important part. If people talk about, oh, you know, I was putting on my shoes and then I zipped up my pants, you already lost people, right? But if you jump right into the story, kind of like, when was the last time that you went up to Matt and was like, dude, you won't believe what just happened? And then you got straight into the story, it's kind of the same thing.

That leads into a realization that, say, for example, my story. When I was in college, I completely tore my shoulder. It was the only goal that I ever worked for. And at that moment, I didn't feel pain. I felt numb because I knew that I would never play another down of college football in my life. And what that led me to believe was, which this is the important part is beating into an emotional realization is I believe that if I can help other college athletes, other professional athletes, build their personal brand, build relationships in the industries that they care about, then they can have success whether or not they play in the NFL, whether or not they play in the NBA. I am. So this is where you sell your products? I am Tanner Laycock, and I help businesses, entrepreneurs, and athletes build their personal brands so that they can have success outside of college, or at least or their professional sport.

So think about how that goes, how that ties in with creativity. The irony is that if you don't have a clear process, you can't be creative. You have to have this kind of framework. So Tanner talked about the three components of a why video? When I was, I believe, and I am now, you can still be fully creative with it. Imagine, do you remember, if you're old enough, I'm older than both of you guys, but Crayola used to have this 128 crayon thing or 64 color, or even the ones that have just eight colors. Let's imagine that you were poor and your mom could only afford the thing with the eight colors.

Does that limit your creativity? Having Only eight colors, eight crayons?

Not at all. It probably strengthens it more than anything.

Yeah. And that's the way we think about it. If you have the building blocks in place, if you have a kitchen. So Gordon Ramsay, other chefs talk about mise en place, where.

Your kitchen, your working space has to be clean. Because if it's a disaster and all the pots and pans are not put away and there's just crap on the floor, and the center area is just the island just got, like, leftovers from yesterday and crap just, like, laying out. You can't be creative, can you? Can you imagine, like, have you seen that TV show Hoarders?

Imagine going into one of their houses and trying to be creative and trying to, like, cook. Imagine going into one of their kitchens. If you could even walk there, step over to get there. Do you think you could be creative? Even if you're a fantastic chef, you're a Michelin star chef, and you go into a hoarder's kitchen, do you think you can be creative in their kitchen? Even if they have the finest ingredients all over the place and they're not rotting?

Not at all. And this further solidifies. Have a checklist first so you can foster that creativity. So checklists or clean up your stuff first?

Well, checklists and frameworks.

Yeah. Figure out where everything's at. Check checklist frameworks, and then freaking go. Go to town with your creativity because you know exactly where to pull from now.

And you know, some burn people because. Because a lot of people, they give us pushback, saying, I don't want checklists because I don't want to do cookie cutter, robot, mindless stuff. I'm creative. Okay, so when you're creative, when are you creative? Oh, want to take a shower? Or when I'm driving or I'm out jogging because I have my 30 minute jogger. Okay, great. Why is it that you feel creative then? Is it because you're more creative then? No, it's because you don't have all these other distractions that allows your brain to start thinking. So the only way to be creative is when you have enough space to allow your mind to do that. And the only way to create space is to be organized and have checklists and systems and delegation that takes care of all that other nonsense to make space to allow you to be. If you walk into a beautiful industrial kitchen, everything's in the right place. It's all nice and clean. You can create whatever you want. And my buddy Alan Gannett wrote a book called the Creative Curve. The idea is that anybody's creative. Creative doesn't just mean someone who's an artist and, you know, smokes whatever, Indian organic tobacco and is a hipster. Like, no, anybody's creative. You don't have to be a musician. You be creative in the way you think you can be creative in the way that you go about your business, in your style. Right. Not just artistic people. And all of us are creative. It's not something that you're born with. It's not like some people are more creative than other people. If you create the right environment, then it's just like Steph Curry is great at shooting three pointers. Forced him to practice his slam dunk all day. That's probably not the best thing for him, right? Or Shaquille o' Neal to focus on his three pointer. Like, that's. If you put people in the right environment, which means process, which means doubling up on the things that you're good at and the things that you don't, finding other people to do those and having a clear checklist on when you push tasks out. And when things come to you, then you naturally will be around the people that will complement you, which is why you hear, oh, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Because guess what? That's your topic wheel. Whoever you're spending time with. That governs your topic wheel. That governs the stories you have. It governs your mindset. It governs and limits the knowledge that you can acquire.

Yeah, that's. That's part of organizing your life too, right? It's. It's with the right people and it's what you're talking about. It's what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. This is. This is cool. Is. Is this why you travel so often? So you can have a clean, like, hotel?

Because I want to fly first class. It's not because I want to tell everybody how many. Like, I just hit 5 million miles. Miles.

Wow.

Not because I want to boast about that. So yesterday, Tanner and I spent time with a buddy who's a billionaire. And it's not because it's a billionaire and we want to go hang out in his mansion. We're going to go see him next week, too. And I'm going to eat all this food, too. And he knows I do that.

But it's because. How much money would you have? Like, we spent time with Naveen Jain and Jim Bunch, and you name it, like all these other people, right? Under the guys that we're working on their brands. And how much money do you think you'd have to pay a billionaire for them to spend a day with you? What would that be worth to them? Right. What would they have to give up to spend a day with you?

You gotta build some good value there for them.

Yeah. I mean, at that point, I would imagine the money isn't the motivator anymore.

Right, right.

Richard Branson charged, I wanna say, at TNC in San Diego back in March. I think he charged $700,000 for a 40 minute keynote. But for a multibillionaire, that's nothing for him. Right?

Yeah. So there are other value ads in the mix there where it wasn't just money. Yeah.

So Tanner and I were able to spend time with folks like Naveen Jain and Jim Bunch and have dinner with them, spend the afternoon with them. Can you imagine, like if we went to Jim Bunch, who we talked to yesterday and said, hey Jim, I'll give you $100,000 if you'll spend the afternoon with us? Like hell no. My time is worth way more than that. Right. I make more than that brushing my teeth. Right. But guess what, how much money did he pay us? Or I'm sorry, how much money did we pay him for his time yesterday?

0.

0. Why? Because we're making money together. Because we have intersection in our topic wheel. If you could. Here's it. Here's a hack that almost nobody knows. If you can map out your topic wheel, which does take time. It takes effort to go into the gym and you map out their topic wheel and you find where there's an intersection. All of these people will be dying to meet with you. Even if they are super important people, they want to meet with you. They will go out of their way to meet with you if you show alignment on that vision. But you have to actually have it. You can't just say you believe in stuff that they believe in. They're going to see right through that.

Right.

Just real quickly for the listeners, can you quickly define the topic wheel again?

Yeah, I think we talked about it in the last episode, but I just want to bring it up again for anybody who maybe hasn't heard it.

Not a problem. The way that we like to think about it is it's kind of like an onion and the fact that it has layers, but when you bite into it, it won't make you cry.

So in the very center is your what? Right? The center is your product. It's what we're all good at selling. It's the offer that you're giving your consumer, right. The ring to the outside of that has six individual topics. Those six individual topics is your how. Now for me it's going to be fitness, mentorship, real estate investing, public speaking. But for you it might be something different. It might be your podcast and podcast consulting. It might be one specific niche or six specific niches, right? We like to have six because that's how you build a reputation at scale. Then what you do is you're going to take say for public speaking. For my conversion, I would want to interview people that have either perceived or actual authority in that topic. Right? So a good example would be Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez is very well known. Everybody knows his name. But would you say that Tai Lopez has more expertise than Dennis Yu at marketing?

No, probably not.

Probably not. He might have more Lamborghinis, but definitely not.

Come on, Dennis, up your Lamborghini game.

Right?

And Dennis actually has more books too. I was gonna say books. Anyways, so there's people with perceived authority. And then actual authority are examples like Dennis, who may not have a million followers on Instagram, but there's probably not many people better than him at what he does. And the experts in the industry will know that, right? What it allows you to do is it allows you to build, know like and trust people will know the people that you're interviewing. So if I interviewed Dennis Yoop people, experts in the marketing industry are going to know him. They're going to like the topic that they're talking about, that is marketing, and then they're going to trust my product, right? So it's the transfer of know, like, trust, why, how, what, whatever you want to call it. It's how you build a reputation at scale.

Think of it as a bicycle wheel too. So Tanner uses an onion, and I like onions, but only when they're fried.

I would agree.

But if you, if you use a bicycle wheel, in the center you have the hub, that's the product or service and the spokes are the topics. And the reason why you have six, it's not just, not just a numerology where like six is number of man because it's one shorter perfection, which is seven. But you want to have three that are professional and three that are personal to show that you're a well rounded person. Because if all six of your topics are digital marketing and PPC and SEO and Facebook ads and email marketing, like, dude, what kind of loser are you, right? You want to show that you care about, you know, you like hanging out at the beach, you like to travel. You also like digital marketing. You also care about kids with autism because your child has autism, you know, whatever it might be.

Right.

You want to show that you're well rounded and that will bring in the widest possible, yet most powerful circle of friends. So when you go to a party or to a conference and you see thousands of people, how do you know who you want to spend time with? Or maybe you look at the landing page and like, oh, here are the other people that are speaking and here's the other people that are going to be coming. How do you decide? And maybe there's other friends of yours that are going. How do you decide how much time you're going to spend with any of the people that you know or that you would like to know? And the way you answer that question is you look at your topic wheel because there could be other people that are famous, but if they don't have an intersection with your topic wheel, it doesn't build your business. Right.

And it goes back to, like, what Tanner said about perceived authority versus actual authority. Usually, perceived authority means that they have a big audience and they may or may not know about the actual topic. But you may find that those people with perceived authority, celebrities like Elon Musk and Richard Branson. When we see people make their topic wheels, especially when we go electric colleges, you see all of them put on, like, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, like, all right, guys, you're not, I mean, I don't mean to piss on your parade, but you're not likely to be able to interview one of those guys in the next year. Okay?

Right, Right.

But if you define those, you've heard about the riches and the niches, Right? Try to be as specific as you can. So try to be specific around those six topics when you get really specific. So not just fitness, but some particular aspect of fitness like marathon running or trying to break your pr, trying to break three hours so you can qualify for the Boston Marathon. That's getting really specific. Right. Then you start to find people who have the actual expertise but don't have the high authority, famous celebrity stuff. So maybe it's Hal Higdon, the editor of Runner's World, and he also is a pro level marathoner. There's not that many people that are going after him. You have to be a real industry pro to know who that guy is. Right?

Right.

Those people are actually easy to reach. When you define a niche and you look for someone who has actual expertise, those people, to a fault, love to help because They've gotten so deep in their area, by definition, no one would get that far unless they truly had passion and love and really wanted to help other people. And, and we're researchers. And a lot of people will say, and the reason why I mentioned this is people will say, oh, well, it's because Dennis already knows all these people and he's got 23 years of digital marketing experience, so he can reach out to so and so and they'll probably return his call. Yeah, maybe. But look at the people that Tanner's reached out to independent of me because of his personal brand. Look at the other people. Even if you didn't have that, you could. If you'd shown that you had alignment with the topic wheel where you're consuming their content before you ask them for a favor to demonstrate you actually respect their time, 90% of the time they will say yes. And that's how you start to build a real topic wheel around real niche topics. And then you can tie the why to the how to the what. So you can think of the tire as the why, which are all the different stories, one minute stories. The spokes are the topics and the hub in the center is the product or service that you're selling. If you don't have your topic wheel, I would argue that you shouldn't do anything else. You should build that topic wheel first because without a strategy, you're just running around randomly. And then you have speed instead of direction. Right. Would you rather know where you're going before, like, oh, hurry, let's go faster. Wait, but where are we going first?

Sure.

Yeah.

So for the Dennis, you blitz metrics topic wheel, what would the six topics be for that?

Business, Digital marketing, mentorship, travel, fitness. And there's another one I can't remember. Health. Yeah, that's one I've forgotten about. But in the last month I've made that a priority.

Good. Yeah. You have your oxygen devices now. This is really cool. I was just thinking about mine and I just love how this kind of visually looks. Either way, whatever works for people. But you can use this to get very specific ads running to all of your content on these six stories. See, it's all clicking. Yeah.

Last time you were on the show, you. You referred to Joe and I as the two headed dragon because there's kind of two people that built two personal brands and then we sort of merged together and created what we have now. Would you recommend people in a scenario like ours have two separate individual topic wheels personally or should we have a business sort of Combined topic wheel or all of the above?

Yes and no. So think of Hustle and Flow as a brand, as a company brand. Like Nike is a company brand. But guess what? There's personal brands. There's Tiger woods and LeBron James and other folks. Right. And so you could have many personal brands that are around different topics. I wouldn't really trust LeBron James around golf. I don't know. He might be a good golfer. You figure he's an athlete, maybe not.

Right.

Charles Barkley at golf. I could probably beat him.

Surprisingly, Steph Curry is amazing at golf as well.

There you go.

He's actually a scratch golfer. I think he's got a two handicap.

Wow.

Yeah. Anyway, he's got the golf show now going on that crazy, like, mini golf show.

Yeah. Holy moly, man.

I'm so out of it.

These athletes, they do so many random, like, non. Like, I can't believe that violates their contract because it's got to interfere with the playing and the practice.

Yeah.

Think about this. There's an overall topic wheel for the business because you guys, as a business are offering services, and you can still have topic wheels for each of you that intersect and the beauty. And this is like one of those matrix mind blown moments. You can have topic wheels inside of topic wheels.

No.

Yeah.

Oh, my God. And the reason why this works so well is that you have an amazing amount of overlap and intersection that creates multiplication. What does that mean? Well, Tanner is building a business as an intrapreneur, and he has a team of people. He's hiring more people. He just hired another person today, a guy who's really good at ppc, at Facebook ads. Wow.

I'm surprised.

I'm like, dang, I didn't even work for that guy. And he's getting more clients. The money's coming in. He's closing these deals. 10,000, $20,000 a pop. Right. He's got all the elements of a business because he has money coming in. He has expenses, of course, because you got to pay for people and all kinds of things and travel and there's all the processes necessary to run his business. So all the aspects of having a profit and loss. Right. So he has a business, but we have other people too, that are like Tanner inside our company, and they're running their own business. And that's what we call an intrapreneur. How do you attract the very best people when you give them the benefit of the freedom of being able to run a business and have all the pluses? There's but you reduce all the minuses because you have mentorship. You have all the back office systems with payroll and technology and our brand, which helps these other folks out. And that's because we have topic wheels that intersect with other topic wheels. So because Tanner cares about fitness in the military and entrepreneurship and mindset, guess what? There's a lot of people in my network that intersects with what Tanner cares about. And other people are part of our company. There are other people that are in Tanner's network that will intersect with Dan's network and Jamie's network and Matt's and Joe's network. Right. And when you start to have overlapping in the topic wheel, you would think that'd be competition, right?

Yeah. Yes and no. Yeah. It shouldn't be.

It creates collaboration, and that's what's happened in the digital age, where the more overlap you can get with the topic wheel.

It'S like magnetism. Right. And why would you interview certain people on your podcast? Because you share certain. I guess some people like to argue with other people and that's the way they do things. But you know, when you have people that have similar topics and you intersect because you had a good. You know when you have. When you just click, when you have good rapport, you just know, like, you get a good vibe when you hang out with somebody, that's when you have topic wheels that intersect. That means there's some kind of connection. If you can figure out more specifically. Right. If you actually. If each of us maps out our topic wheels, that should be the name of this episode. Like, map out your topic.

Write it down, man.

For your business strategy.

Yeah, no, that's what all things are possible.

Who do you spend time with? Well, you should look at the topic wheel. What products should you build? What should you be talking about in your podcast? Where should you be building sequences? The topic wheel answers the question for you, and then you're not fighting the algorithm. You're not cold calling. You're not trying to use sales techniques to try to close deals. They're all coming to you. Every deal we've ever had has come to us. Red Bull came to us. We didn't go like, oh, let's please try to have a meeting with you and explain what we do. Never.

Did you do some strategic advertising to make sure that your brand would show up in front of Red Bull like we talked about in our last episode?

Or oh, of course. Of course I'm doing that.

Love it. No, that's so freaking brilliant because I was actually going to ask that same question.

One of my friends is from the south and he likes fried chicken. I love fried chicken, too.

And hamburgers. And we ran some. I think we were doing some marketing for Carl's junior And for another chicken chain. And we ran. We published our analysis, which we were allowed to share. And we targeted people that work at Zaxby's in their headquarters. We targeted people that work at Freddy's, which is another chain in their headquarters in Wichita. And we got both of them to reach out saying, wow, we saw your social media analysis, so we'd love to talk with you guys about what we're doing. And I have a stack of gift certificates from Freddy's. I have a stack of gift certificates from Payway, which is the sister company of PF Chang, so owned by the same company for a few months. We were just eating Payway all the time.

Might as well.

It's pretty good. Why we eat somewhere else? Why do we have to eat a Payway? Okay, we can eat somewhere else if you're paying, but last I checked, we have a stack of gift certificates. So we're going to eat until the stack is gone.

Sure thing.

Like, we're here to be adventurous. You can change it up every time.

So here's an example of the power of the topic wheel that we're in Vegas and we get to go to shows, we get to eat and all that because MGM Resorts International is a client of ours.

And so we share so much value, so many values and friends. Because Vegas is a small market. Anywhere is a really small market. Why? Because Beverly, who's the VP of Social, who's our client, I knew her back when she ran the Grammys and before she was at the Grammys, we worked together at Yahoo. Right. That was a long time ago.

Yeah, it's the relationships and then you're just fostering them with, you know, the consistent stories you're putting out there. Obviously, keep in touch, personal connections there going. Because there's so many ways. That's where I'm thinking in these topic wheels and the fact that they intersect with just your friendships. And if you look at maybe the handful, maybe it's just one thing you can relate on. I mean, these topic wheels are kind of organically happening and you're organically putting yourself out. Well, maybe you are. It depends on if you're talking or putting yourself out there. Facebook's just one mechanism. All these social channels, other mechanisms are picking up the phone and calling some of these old friends. I'm sure you have a million Others. But yeah, it's topic wheel, I think is where it's at. So is this how you got number one on our show for the longest time?

I wanted to circle back. I felt like that was an open loop.

We've been public about our techniques.

True.

You do a lot of stuff.

So we're sharing the episode. It's that easy.

That's true. Oh, that's right. Yeah, we did talk about that at the very top of this. Yeah, the cross channel or. Yeah, feeding algorithm and all that. The actual term was.

So I have a question that is actually sort of a throwback question. The last episode we did. Because the last episode we talked a lot about the dollar a day ads and it produced some other questions after people listen to the episode. But the question that seemed to come up the most often was the question of scaling those $1 per day ads. At what point or if ever do you go and throw more money than a dollar a day at some of these ads that are working? Or is the idea to just always let them kind of trickle traffic at a dollar a day?

Yeah, I'll break this down really, really simply.

Do you know what the average watch time on Facebook is?

Something like 15%. I don't know if top of my head, but I know it's somewhere in that range.

It's about six seconds.

Oh, okay. Actual time. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

So just very simply what we like to see is we test for a dollar a day, obviously. But once we have a good or a low cost for a through play, which is somebody's watched my video for 15 seconds, which is over 250% what the average watch time is that shows that that video is performing because the average watch time is over double what it should be. Right. So once you start getting through plays for a cent, half a cent, two cents, then we like to turn up the dial because we know that it's working on such a low dollar amount that when we slow. And obviously you wouldn't want to put, you know, a thousand dollars a day on it from $1. That would make sense. You'll burn out the audience. But slowly, every day just keep adding a little bit more money. So if you're at $1, maybe make it $15 a day. If you're at $15, maybe make it $50 a day. But what we like to see is we like to see based off the standards of excellence, which is.

The repeatable metrics that we use the most often. One is how many through plays are you getting? And is the cost of the through play.

Cheap.

If it's cheap, then turning up the dial.

So the one minute video and the $1 a day go hand in hand. You cannot operate nowadays on Facebook or digital without having video. And what Tanner's talking about with through plays is the new default optimization metric on Facebook. And because a through play is defined as watching the entire video or at least 15 seconds. So if it's an 8 second video, then you know it's watching all the way through. And what will happen is the algorithm is going through something called their learning phase. Learning phase can be anywhere from three days to maybe 14 days. And so we like to put an initial dollar a day for seven days, which is $7. If you're in another country, that might be €7 or whatever it might be. Right. And if it meets our standards of excellence, meaning a good cost per through play and it'll be the top 10% of what you have. So if you make 30 videos, let's take the top three. Because every industry is different. B2B is going to have a different cost per than, you know, consumer products or cat products. So it's going to be different. And if it's good, you're not going to add budget every day because every time you touch an ad, it resets the ad rank to zero. That ad has got to crawl all the way back up in the auction. So what you'll do is that you'll put another $14 for another 14 days and then come back to it. And if you don't get back to within 14 days and it's already gone dry, that's okay. Then maybe you put another hundred dollars for another 20 days. And if it's still good and you haven't burned out the audience, depending on what you're trying to target, maybe you put some of them. We've put 5, 10, $100,000 against a post, but we still started with a dollar a day or a couple dollars a day. In fact, we had a post where we boosted for $3 million with Infusionsoft. Can you imagine that? Wow, let's take some balls. And it was so good that Sheryl Sandberg, who's the CO of infusionsoft, sent this frame poster with her signature and a copy of the ad and all that. And then the folks infusionsoft went around and said, hey, look, we got an award. Yeah, they're glad that you spent all this money. That's why we went to Facebook and made videos there. So the third piece is just because Something meets a standard of excellence. It has to. It's not that we're trying to get as many views as possible. Those views have to then result in people come to the website or give us an email address or buying a product or coming into the store or becoming a lead or whatever. The mind like going from the why to the how to the what. And so the dollar a day strategy complements the topic wheel. If you do not have the topic wheel, then the dollar a day is just pissing in random directions in the dark.

I could see that. Yeah, it's not connected to any purpose. No. What.

At the end of the day, all the spokes need to drive into the middle, into the hub. Because if that bicycle wheel has no hub, I think you're going to be. Your ass is going to be sitting on the ground.

Yeah, you should have luck.

Yeah, man, this is freaking awesome. Okay. Yeah, we're going to have some badass notes on this one, I think. Okay, so Matt is signaling to me there were travel hacks we wanted to get to because I know we're going a little long. Want to be cautious on your time over there too. Travel hacks. Like we saw one of the water and I know it's kind of an abrupt change here, but. So the water, we talked about that, the oxygen and all that stuff, the lack of sleep that comes with travel. What are some go to hacks that you guys both use? Kind of both your perspectives?

I have two main ones and Dennis will argue my first one. Freaking neck pillow.

You have a noob if you have a neck pillow. Not a noob.

Don't think it looks corny. You're going to be wishing you had a neck pillow like I did when I'm sound asleep and you got a dude snoring on you.

All right.

Buy a neck pillow. And the second one is we like to get flights from Skip lagged or Hipmunk. So skip Lagged, Basically what it is is say you have a flight from Dallas to la. What it'll do is they'll find a flight from Dallas to say Washington, but it has a stop in la. As long as you just check your bag or carry on your bag and you get off in la. Usually it's cheaper because that flights gonna be longer and this they're not as full. So you can save a ton of money just going through those two websites alone.

So what was it? Skip lags.

You said skip lagged. Okay, lagged and then Chipmunk without the C. So hipmunk.

Hipmunk. Okay, got it. And for your neck pillow, do you have a brand specifically that you use?

Ooh, no. I just look for the comfiest, most fluffiest one.

Is it memory foam or is it, like, cotton memory foam?

For sure, because you got to be able to fold it.

Yeah, no, I hear it. And I'm only asking because I've gone through about 30 fricking pillows and like. Yeah, I hear you, man. Dennis, I'm sorry. I agree with him.

All right, Dennis, you're up.

A lot of us are going for the cheapest fare. I get it. Some of us have so much money, we'll just fly first class all the time. But even if we're flying first class, we want to save money. Most people don't know that there are regional airport codes. So if you're going. Going into la, there's lax, there's Orange county, there's Long beach, there's Ontario. Burbank.

Burbank. Jfk. Yeah.

No, not jfk.

Ronald Reagan. No, John Wayne. John Wayne. There you go.

Yeah. So there's five regional airports in la. I grew up in la, and instead of checking for every single city, which would just take forever, you type in qla, which is the regional airport code, and most Priceline, Travelocity, Hipmunk. These guys will recognize it. And the same is true for, like, Washington, D.C. where you've got Reagan and BWI and IAD, which is Dulles, you just type in WAS. And if you're in London, oh, by the way, if you're going to Europe, the cheapest flights have a connection in London, but you're going to have to reconnect to another airport to then go on EasyJet or one of the other airlines. So if I wanted to go to London tonight from Vegas and I didn't know what I was doing, and I went to Priceline or Expedia or wherever, I'd probably have to pay $800 one. But if I look for a fare from Las, which is Vegas, to Lon, that'll be probably $200, and then maybe $300, and then from Lon to Budapest or Oslo or Paris or Milan, wherever I want to go, that would be a separate flight. And if I'm willing to do the connect in London, I might have to go from Gatwick to Stansted or Luton or one of the regional airports. I'll save a ton of money. The same is true in New York. You got a lot of flights to go into New York and then out of New York. So it's Building upon what Tanner said with skip lag, which is called hidden cities, and drop segments, where you're skipping, you're throwing away a segment because you really want to go to Dallas. So you buy a ticket to Oklahoma City, which is a, a cheaper market, but you just drop the segment, you get off in Dallas and don't continue on to Oklahoma City.

Right.

Number two, for the people who are really pro and already understand what we're talking about with hidden segment, hidden cities and regional codes is you use the Southwest combo. Southwest is the only airline that doesn't publish to the regional fare databases, like arc. I used to work at American Airlines. That's how I know this.

Okay.

You go search on Expedia, Hotwire, whatever. They don't show Southwest.

Right, right.

Because Southwest doesn't want to pay the booking fees from using the Central, the gdss. Right. And so what you'll do is see, like if you're going LA to dc, you probably going to connect in Denver, unless you have a direct flight. So you might look at Southwest into Denver and then try like Frontier or United or American from Denver into that next city. But often if you can fly Southwest as one segment connecting through Denver, it's going to be a lot cheaper. So sometimes you just. It's a crazy period or, you know, maybe a relative died and you got to get to some weird city by tomorrow. And the fares are all $800. Try that Denver Southwest trick. You can alternately use Chicago, but Southwest flies out of Midway and all the other airlines fly out of o'.

Hare.

So that's.

That'd be tough.

An hour connect. Yeah, I'd like to go out of Denver because Denver's actually one of the only shared airports Southwest flies. Instead of into Miami, they fly to Fort Lauderdale.

Got it. So you gotta make sure you find a hub, more or less.

Yeah, it's good too.

Oh, jet suite, which is on my private. Yeah, Tanner did that last week. It's basically halfway to private jets.

Yeah.

You don't have to wait and you don't have to go to security. You don't have to wait in the line. You just get a nice chair and some snacks. And I think it's 99 if you book more than two weeks out from anywhere in California to Las Vegas.

Ah, okay.

Nice. How we're traveling to Vegas from here on out.

Yes, we'll go meet you guys there tonight.

Well, it seems like where we end up in Orlando a lot. It seems like all the podcasting related events are in Orlando and I don't believe there's direct flights from San Diego to Orlando. We always have to stop over and it's always a nightmare. So I think we're be in Orlando next month. So I think we're going to try to figure out some ways to hack our travel over there.

Well, I got some ideas now.

Well, Orlando is mco, so there's all the majors are flying into there, especially Southwest. With Southwest, well, especially leisure markets, you got to book at least 21 days in advance. And I also prefer booking everything as one ways instead of as round trips because if you want to change one of the segments, it doesn't change the whole itinerary.

That's what screwed us last time we went to Orlando, actually. Matt.

Yeah, yeah. No, sometimes it's cheaper. International. If you're doing business in Miami, then you might fly into MIA.

Or FLL and then take the train or the bus up to Orlando. Orlando tends to be a little more expensive.

During like certain holiday periods.

Yeah, we've. We've. For whatever reason, this will be our third time going to Orlando in like a one and a half year period. And every single time we've had issues getting in and out of Orlando with our flights.

Oh, man. So, hey, we're going to find something. We're going to try something new.

I kind of like the idea of going to Miami and taking a train up.

Never been to Miami, so let's do.

Miami is a monster airport too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. All right, so I have like four pages of notes, like front to back. Maybe we should wrap it up just so I could digest some information here. You guys are amazing. What's. This is always what we ask is some impactful book that you just find yourself recommending others. Dennis, I forgot what you said last time. Tanner, we haven't heard from you, obviously. Dennis, maybe you could think of one in the meantime.

I like Principles by Ray Dalio.

Oh, that was.

I'm very much about systems. I believe strategy is more important than tactics. I'm starting to get old now. So I like things that if I learn it, it doesn't just go out of style in the next few months for sure.

And that book's amazing because Ray Dalio even put out an app. It's totally free. If you just download it on the app store has all this interactive stuff to it too you can engage with. So good book. Great book.

Cool.

All the free stuff too.

Yeah, totally. Tanner, you got one?

Yeah, I used this a lot when I was a little bit younger and a lot of the Principles still applied to just how I talk to people. And it kind of builds off of how to win friends and influence people. But it's how to Master the Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins.

How to Master the Art of Selling. Okay. Yeah, I think someone's recommended that before.

It's an older book, but it's. I mean, it's pretty good.

Hey, that's cool, man.

Have you, Dennis, have you read Checklist Manifesto?

Yes. A lot of people say that we base our systems on that and partially. Yes.

Yeah, that book's been recommended a lot and it's one that's on my bookshelf, but I have not read it yet.

Easy read. You can read it in a two hour flight.

Okay, perfect, Perfect.

There you go. You have a one month deadline. Matt, you got an Orlando flight.

There we go.

Squeeze it through there.

So the site is Blitzmetrics. Is there anywhere else you would want our listeners to go? Check out social media accounts, anything like.

That, follow us on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's where it's @ right now. Yeah, look for me TANNER On.

LinkedIn. Yeah, my LinkedIn is just LinkedIn.com. tANNERLACOCK Dang.

It. I wish you didn't say that because now I have all sorts of questions about LinkedIn, which we'll have to save for a future episode because I don't want this to turn into two hour.

Episode. A ton of hacks on LinkedIn. LinkedIn deserves its own.

Episode. Okay, well, we just opened that loop and I guess we'll be rescheduling another. Reschedule another one pretty.

Soon. Awesome.

Awesome. All right, guys, thank you both for your time and have fun in Vegas. You're 21 now, so I don't know what's going to happen there, but you're in the right.

Place.

Yeah. Thank you for your time. Yeah, of course. Anytime, guys. Have a great.

One. Take.

Care.

Thanks.

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