Greg Rollett - How To Leverage Massive Existing Platforms To Grow Your Brand

And I think differently about distribution because I've never been the one who's been handed, you know, a million subscribers on a golden spoon, right? And I think this is where a lot of people start out, is they're like, yeah, I want to start a podcast or a YouTube channel or I want to start. I want to be the next Gary Vee or, you know, who. Insert whoever. Right? It doesn't matter the name. But it's really hard to build an audience. Like, it really is. Like, you have to work your tail off. And. And so it's not that I don't want to work my tail off, but I look at all right, if I want to build an audience who already has my audience that I can tap into that I can add value to in some way. And, you know, going back 10, 11, 12 years ago, that was blogging. And so if you guys remember, like, the golden era of blogging, it was like you guest blogged on someone else's site.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and float. Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, we're back. Yeah. My favorite place.

Yeah, The Internet.

Living in other people's ears.

Living in other people's ears. Yes. It's a little creepy that your favorite place is this person's ears that is listening to us right now.

Well, this one's not my favorite place because this one's actually a little dirty. They need to Q tip up, take a shower.

Got a little too much earwax in there. Let's get that out.

Yeah. Come on. You can't hear our velvety.

All right, now they can hear our velvety voices.

I'm sorry. For anybody listening with headphones right now.

We're trying to blow the earwax out.

Well, they probably needed to clean their ears.

Yeah. Jim, your ears are really dirty. Brian. Brian, I know, is listening powers.

Oh, yeah, you're actually calling out first ed last names now. Jeez.

No, no. He knows I like him. He might need to check his ears, though.

Well, we're talking to one of his good buddies today, so it's all good.

And, yeah, Steve, Dale, I think you got to check your ears.

Now. I'm just calling out all the boys. All right, so, yeah, Greg Roulette is. Is the guy we're chatting with today. And the reason I called out those two guys is because they work with Greg. So I'm sure they're listening to this and laughing. I hope. Don't hate us, dude.

This episode was, like, the energy of Greg is always amazing. Like you cannot be around Greg and not have a huge smile on your face and have like energy. Like, Greg just brings it, dude.

We could attest to that because when we met him at Rich Sheffrin's event back in February of this year, we had dinner with him and Rod Kosberg, Rob Kosberg, who's been on the show. We had a steak dinner. It was just the four of us. It was this like really freaking nice place. And we walked like a mile or two to get there, I think like in this Delray, Florida. And. And Greg was fricking like on it. And he's been up for 48 hours. Freaking documentary. This whole thing, like, documentary.

I think you just made a new verb.

It's a new word. Greg, you can take. You're welcome. Like, the dude looked fresher than we did. And we had sleep. We had. I mean, this was like a 24 hour live stream plus all this other stuff. He was up for 48 fricking hours or so.

Yeah, yeah.

High energy. So.

But so on this episode we do cover a lot of ground with him. It's a really, really cool episode. But so we did a Mastermind when we were in Orlando for Pod Fest and we asked Greg to come speak at this Mastermind and what he talked about at the Mastermind blew everybody's mind in the room. Like to this day, everybody, like that was in that Mastermind comes to us and goes, dude, what Greg said was fricking phenomenal. And he was basically explaining how he got a partnership deal with like entrepreneur.com and got like his, his reality show on Amazon streaming, Amazon Prime. And so we asked him to come back on the show and sort of reiterate what he taught in this Mastermind about how to, how to make these deals with companies like entrepreneur and Amazon.com and get a show that's like on a very high profile platform. And he literally broke it down. Like he's giving away resources that I don't think he wanted to share with us.

Well, some of those we actually, we literally, we did this. But he was like, should we just censor this out? And he was like, nah, we're going to put it out there, but we probably won't put them on the show. Notes. So you have to get the notes.

Yeah.

And that is a bribe, of course, to get the notes, but it'll be worth it.

Yeah, for sure. And then, you know, one of the, one of the interesting things we were talking to about Greg is, you know, as we're filming this. Joe and I are. And, and Greg. We were all in separate locations due to the whole Covid thing that's going on right now. And Greg's business had a, had to take a little bit of a hit because he, he did a lot.

Huge. The freaking. Basically died.

Yeah, he took a six figure hit.

Is what he told us. Yeah.

So just, you know, so he had to reinvent some stuff and he basically reinvented his business in the last 30 days and created a brand new six figure business. And so we get into that as well.

Yeah, yeah. So let's just, let's leave it there. Greg is absolutely amazing. It feels like we've known him forever. Like we just have this kind of like flow and I don't know, just. It's a good people. It's a sign of good people. So. Yes, you're going to love Greg. Get the notes. Let's start there. Because I mentioned them. So notes. I mean the companions to this episode. You have two weeks by the time this thing goes live. Don't wait longer or you are not going to get them for free. At least you can get them in the membership. There's a way to get that. We're not going to talk about that now. Just get the notes. Hustle and.

Your mom comp C O M P.

That's actually sort of difficult to do when we're not in the same location.

Especially when I say your mom instead of comp.

Yeah, don't go to hustleandflowchart.com your mom go to hustleandflowchart dot com comp. Should I make that redirect to slash comp now that we said it? No.

Well, yes, but with a picture of our moms. I don't know. Why not? Who knows? Let's make him famous.

My mom listens. I don't know about your mom.

My mom was on our live stream. She was commenting during our livestream.

Not good enough, Trish. All right, so go to hustle and flutchart.com comp or three, dial in your old rotary phone.

Doesn't work on a rotary phone.

Don't tell them to do it. Can't text on a rotary. Okay, get your phone out and text the phone number. 38470.

You got it. 38470.

I was using my mental memory, closing my eyes. Text the word comp. C O M P238470. You'll also get the notes that way. The show notes.

Not the show notes.

The companions.

You're gonna want the companion. Because there's some stuff that we're putting exclusively in the companions for this one. And you'll hear it in the show.

We haven't mentioned this actually in a while. I know it's another cta, but hop in. Our freaking Facebook group. It's absolutely. Guys like Greg are in there. So you can actually chat with him. It's@flowchart group.com flowchart group.com go there. There are literally like, it's well over 2,000 people in there now. But like, I think last week we added close to 50 fricking people. Like, dude.

And we're doing live streams every week right now. And we're doing. We're bringing on interviews and doing interviews live to the group. We're sharing resources. I shared like a content calendar for members a couple weeks ago.

Breathing exercises with instructors. I mean, like flowchartgroup.com, it's free. There's nothing, no strings, no nothing. It's literally a way to connect with us and our guests and everyone else. And people are just having a good time and we share a bunch of cool stuff there too.

Yep. And then a final call to action.

Yes.

Check out our sponsor. Ahrefs.com is a SEO tool that we love. We use it ourselves. Like I say in every episode, we used it long, long, long, long before they were a sponsor. And we're still using it to this day as a sponsor. And we still actually pay the monthly fee. They don't give it to us for free because we're a sponsor.

True, dad.

But we love it enough to continue paying for it anyway.

Come on. So go to a hrefs.com and there's a seven day trial for $7. And what I actually like, I know Matt's in there actually a lot more than me, but I just love how you could set up these kind of like. Like you could basically save your website and you have like these alerts and like, just for a dumb, dumb like me, I can click into there without. I mean, I actually really do like Ahrefs. It's not that to use. But I'm just saying it, for a dumb, dumb like me, I can just add a glance, almost have like a dashboard of the health of my website, of how it's looking on the interwebs.

Which set up a weekly email.

There you go.

Weekly email alerts inside of our. Inside of Ahrefs, where every week it's like, here's what keywords you moved up in rank for. Here's what keywords you Moved down and rank for and all you got. If you really want to keep it as simple as possible, you just check those emails every week. And then if you see a keyword you move down on, you go into ahrefs, look at, you know, try to figure out what happened and figure out some new ways to push that keyword back up the rankings.

Thank you, Mr. Matt. I'm going to stop logging in Ahrefs now. It's one less thing I gotta do, but I'll still get the info I need. So go, go there. It's cool. They have a lot of education. $7 for seven days of a trial. You get just experience the dang thing. It's a hrefs.com ahrefs. All right, let's go over to Mr. Gregory Roulette. Greg, my favorite ninja. How are you doing?

I'm doing fantastic. I've literally been looking forward to this. Like, I've been waiting, like, counting down the last like 10 minutes, like nine.

Minutes till we go.

Eight minutes. Like, I'm super stoked, man. Thanks for having me.

Of course. Yeah. It's been a pleasure getting to know you. And I feel like we go back really far, even though maybe we do in a different lifetime or something. But, like, it's only been since February of this year, meeting out there at Rich Jeffrin's event, and you were the guy that was, you know, quietly in the corner, like, running around for 24 plus hours. Actually, it was like 48 hours, I think for you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Pretty much. Yeah. It was a. Because we did the mastermind the whole day, and then we did 24 hours, and then I drove from Orlando to Del Rey. So attack on three hours there it was. But it was a heck of a lot of fun. But it was a lot of work, man.

Yeah, yeah. There was just something. We're like, all right, Greg, we got to get to know you. I think you said the same thing to us. And then from there. Yeah, we had dinner turn into. You went to our mastermind over there in podfest in Orlando back in March right before all this craziness, lockdown stuff happened. And then you blew us away in the mastermind. We're like, holy crap. And I think everyone in that room, 20 people or whatever it was, I know you partnered with some of them now, and you just opened their minds to all these lateral ways of thinking. I think that's what we're going to dig into here.

Yeah, I love that. And first, just I want to say thank you guys for putting that room together. I mean, just incredible people who have all kind of come together around, I guess, the concept of, like, podcasting and growing their brand and influence through that. But, I mean, there was just incredible people in the room. And as you said, we partnered with one. We created a really cool resource for parents as they went through this homeschooling. And like, within, like, days, like, we had created a resource, built a landing page, built a website together. Really, really cool. And just. But just. It just speaks to the quality of your listeners and the people in your community. So thank you guys for doing that.

Appreciate you, man. Yeah, no, I was blowing. I was blown away when Brian Powers. I'll give him a shout out. Yeah. He was like, dude, you connect me with Greg. This is so cool. And then he showed me the planner. I'm like, how the hell do you guys release that so fast? It's, like, beautiful. And it's. Yeah. So, I mean, we'll link it up. You know, we'll get the link from you. We'll throw it in the show notes of this episode. So, Greg, I mean, where do we go for. I kind of want to hear the story because you do a lot. I mentioned ninja. You do a lot of American Ninja Warrior. Whatever. I don't even watch the show. Matt does.

My kids love it. I love it.

That's like one of our family Sit down. Like, when it's on, the whole family sits down and watches American Ninja Warrior together because the kids love it just as much as I do.

It's a really quick. You have that in your backyard?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we built one in the backyard. So I've always been, like, a fitness guy, and I did CrossFit for, like, four or five years. Got out of it for, you know, whatever reasons. And then I was looking for something else to do, and I didn't want to just go to a gym.

Right?

You don't want to just go to LA Fitness. Like, nothing wrong with that, but it's not. I wanted something that challenged, and I. I saw a groupon, of all things, for this place called Ninja Fit. And I was like, oh, my God, this is. It was so. It was like CrossFit mixed with, like, Spartan race kind of stuff mixed with Ninja Warrior. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, this is amazing. And I went to, like, whatever the class they give you with the Groupon, and, like, I gave him my credit card on the day. I'm like, I'm coming back here. And I've been going there for three years, and Just incredible. Again, it's just always testing yourself with. With fitness. And then as my kids started getting older, they started seeing the show and they want to try crazy stuff, right? They're doing the monkey bars to, you know, doing laches, and just. It is an amazing way to bond with your kids and teach them skills, and, you know, if you fall, get back up again and teaching them all kinds of technique. And it has been. It has been so much fun. And my quick little cliff note story there is. I got invited two seasons ago down in Miami to go be a tester for the show. So what that means is the day before they do the taping, they invite a bunch of people that they kind of know in the community to test all the obstacles to see if they're, like, the right height or the right length. So, like, you're doing all the obstacles at, like, pretty much like, they're like, good luck, right? And so, you know, they're like, oh, wait, that was too far after you, like, face plant and, like, kill yourself.

Yeah.

So I remember I did, like, the. One of the broken stair ones, you know, one of the balance ones, and I took, like, two steps, and it was, like, so far apart, and I ate it, and I flipped over, and I still have a scar like, Wolverine slashed me, like, across my. My torso from doing it. But I, you know, just. It was really, really cool to be on the course, but it's fun, man. I know it's a no marketing segue at all, but it's still cool. It's what us marketers do on. On the side, right?

Yeah.

You watch it on tv and they make it look so easy. Like, you know, you see all the. The actual athletes that get approved to be on the show, and they go through those balance obstacles, and they're just, like, one foot at a time, like, leaping across it, and then you go see it in person. You're like, that actually is a lot harder than make it look untidy.

And it's also just larger than life. I was testing one obstacle. Like, you fly from, like, one of these spinning circle things to another spinning circle thing, and you're probably 70, 80ft in the air, you know, and. And you're holding it, and then there's water below you, and then there's, like, the ground, and you're like, oh, my God. Like, this is.

You know, I hope I land there.

Maybe just make it into the water. Don't miss.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. No, I just thought that was cool. And next time we're in Orlando. I know we didn't make it happen last time, but we're running that course at your house or wherever. Shout out. But you. Let's talk about your story about the. Just interesting things. I don't even know where to start. I don't know where it starts. I know it involves Emmy award winning producing and reality shows with Amazon and new businesses in the last 30 days. So take us.

Yeah, it's wild. Yeah.

What were you doing before you were an entrepreneur and then like, you know, how did you transition? Let's just kind of like go through this story and we're going to, we're going to pick, pick at stuff that we find fascinating.

Yeah. So the Cliff Note version. When I was 18, in my senior year of high school, they let me do a senior project to get out of school at noon. And like, of course you'll do anything to get out of school at noon. Right. And so I started a business and I started a record label. And this was 2001. So it was right in the era of like no Limit Records and Cash Money and like Roc A Fella. It was like the era of where I like to say, like it was all these hip hop moguls were the cool entrepreneurs before all the cool like the Zuckerbergs and the jobs is and the Bezos. Like, it was like you wanted to be Jay Z or Baby from Cash Money or Master P. And that's when.

Dr. Dre 2001 came out right into.

Exactly. And so you get west coast, throw it down, you know. And. And so I was like, dude, like, that's the business model I want. And so Master P was like the guy who's like Empire. I saw. I was just like, all right, there's Master P. He's got his two brothers on his record label, you know, C Murda and Silk the Shaka. And then he had like. And then he basically just hired everyone, you know, on his block. He's like, you have an album and you have an album and you have an album. Like the Oprah style.

Yeah.

And I was like, this could be awesome. Like, what if I start a record label? I just sign all my buddies from the football team. And so my senior year of high school, I worked at a Mexican restaurant, took all the money that I made from tips and went and, you know, found a recording studio. I mean, this is again 2001. So like there wasn't pro tools and like the cool stuff that we have now. Went to a recording studio, spent all my money, got an album out and we sold a thousand copies my. My senior year of high school. And I was like, all right, cool. Spent the next 10 years touring the country, had a recording studio that paid for college. I've had everyone in my dorm room at ucf, everyone from Bone Thugs in Harmony to JT Money to Trick Daddy to, you name it, rappers were. That's how I paid for college and got out of that. I found this guy, surfer dude who was selling this course that would teach me how to mass control people. And I was like, mastermind, I wonder who this mysterious figure is. And to me, it was absurd that you were gonna spend $2,000 on some videos that were gonna make you rich. Right? I know. And I'm, you know, he's a great guy and I love him. I've probably spent more money with him than anyone. Sure, good old Frank Kern. And. But I bought the course and I was immediately like, all right, I'm gonna be the music industry's Frank Kern. And I created my first info product. It was called the New Music Economy. And it was teaching musicians. Again, this is like probably 2004, 2005.ish, like really early how to do all this stuff that we do now, which is as a musician, instead of. We don't give away like free reports, we give away free songs. But we can build an email list. And then when we get them on an email list, we can sell them T shirts and buttons and hats and pins and hoodies. And, you know, so I taught musicians how to create a real business and sold, you know, thousands of those courses to musicians all over the world. And, you know, that was. That was kind of the kickoff point.

That's my. Joe and I probably could have been clients of yours because back around that era, Joe and I. Joe and I were both in bands. I mean, we weren't in the hip hop side. We were more the like pop punk, emo side.

But a great place to be during that era. Like, that was the cool place to be, man. You know? You know, I probably seen Fallout Boy more than anyone other than Snoop Dogg.

Yeah, buddy.

Actually, my.

My.

One of my. My first band ever is little. Little known fact. My first band ever was called Fallout Boy. And then it was actually existed before Fallout Boy. And then that Fallout Boy got big and so we. We changed our name because we're like, yeah, we'll never catch up to them.

Don't need to mess with that trained bark infringement or whatever.

No. Yeah.

So. And then leverage that I met my. My. My current business partner, Nick Nanton, who said, hey, all that stuff that you're teaching for musicians, I got a bunch of business owners like lawyers and doctors and financial advisors who we help to publish books, and we help them become celebrities in their market. Can you teach them all this Internet stuff and how to create court? And like. And he's like, they pay more than $27, which is like what I was selling my course for. And I was like, wow, this sounds fantastic. So the same thing that I'm charging $27 for, I can charge $2,700 for.

Yeah.

And, you know, and so we partnered.

10, 11 years ago now, and we've been all over the world helping people to create TV shows and write books and get in the media and use media to grow their business. And as you said, we've parlayed that into a film and TV company where we get to do documentaries and docu series. We've done documentaries on everyone from Jack Canfield to Brian Tracy to Peter Diamandis to Jay Abraham to Joe Polish to Dan Sullivan to nonprofits. If anybody's been at Funnel Hacking Live the last three years, we've done the documentary that they premiered there on Operation Underground Railroad on the human trafficking. Trafficking and side. And then we just did the big one on clickfunnels that they just debuted. And yeah, so we get to do really, really cool projects. One of them in the Dominican Republic, we did a documentary on an organization called Esperanza. It was founded by a former major league baseball player. His name was Dave Valley. He's now on MLB Network, and he's the color commentator for the Mariners. And he started an organization called Esperanza because he was at a base spring training or getting ready for the season down in the Dominican, and he thought these little kids wanted his autograph because, I mean, that's what you think, right? When you're 19 years old, you're playing in the Dominican, you're an MLB player. They wanted food because they didn't have any food to eat that night. And he went to go, you know, buy him some chickens and things like that. And, you know, his. His wife turned to him and he goes, you know, you didn't really help them. You give them food tonight, but you know, they need food again tomorrow. And so he went back down there and made a promise to go back down there and help businesses. And so he does microloans for women owned businesses in the Dominican because the men, you know, like guys like us. And when as soon as we get money, we go buy gold chains and beepers, cell phones, and like, you know, Yeezys. That's worldwide. But the women, they go and they. They support their children and they do education and they get them, you know, and just all the good stuff. And so he started his organization to help women own entrepreneurs with microloans. $100 loans, $200 loans. Now they've done something like 50 million loan. $50 million worth of loans. We're talking like a 99% repayment rate. And now it's generational. So, like, you know, the daughter has now become the grandmother, and their kids have started business. I mean, it's just incredible. I was fortunate enough to win an Emmy award as a producer on that film, you know, telling the story of some of the women. So that was Cliff Note version from rapper band to. Yeah, Return. Return to Esperanza. And that's available on Amazon prime, so they can check that out there. Or I think it's Return to Esperanza. They can just Google it and they can find the trailer and all that good stuff.

So were you a rapper yourself or were you just like, representing other rappers?

Oh, no, I was the rapper. You, obviously, when you have a record label, you sign yourself as the first artist. That's the whole deal. Right?

So then my next question is like, is this music still available out there online somewhere?

So you guys have a big podcast with, like, a big reach. So this is like. This is very. This is very emotional. But, yeah, like, so on iTunes, I have two albums that are still on itunes. One is under G Row, obviously, for Greg Roulette, but that was my gangster name, G Ro. And that. That. That has some of my best, like, solo material out there. And then later on, I realized that I wasn't going to be the Great White Eminem, the next one. So we. I got a. I saw Jay Z do Unplugged, one of my favorite, like, specials ever. He had the Roots playing behind him. And it was. So I was like, I need to go find me the Roots. And so I found a band and we. We had. That was kind of the five years of touring was with these guys. And the band's called Stump S T U M P P. We.

We.

We found that name because I love the. How people find names of things. Yeah, I was during hurricane season, there were three hurricanes that hit Orlando within two months. Like, just back to back. We got cr. And so on every street corner were like, yard signs that said stump grinding because everyone's trees had blown over from the hurricanes. And so we did a lot of recreational materials and adult beverages at the time. And we thought it was just hilarious to name our Van Stump based on the Stump grinding company. So that's. I love.

Do you have like a good, like, line, like a lick from one of your hits or whatever that you just like give us? Like, are you going to make him.

Rap on the podcast?

Yeah. Why not? I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know if we'll do the freestyle bout. They'll have to come to your mastermind. How about that? They come to the Mastermind next year, I'll buy everybody a shot of tequila and we'll have a session.

You'll buy everybody a shot of tequila, take three yourself. And then.

And then we're good to go.

Yeah, here we go. We'll do that next year.

20. Now these documentaries, the, like the Joe Polish, the Brian Tracy, the Jay Abraham, like all these ones, where can people go to check those out?

Yeah, majority of them you can find on Amazon Prime. So we've had a really good relationship with Amazon prime for the last three years. Now the first, first movie that or the first part that we put on there was actually a reality show that I did called Ambitious Adventures, which I think we'll talk about in just a little bit. But we signed a deal with them for that show and then we created a great relationship with them and, you know, so we, we get distribution through them. So Amazon prime, the biggest, most commercial success that we've had on Amazon prime has been the documentary we did on Rudy, if you guys remember, the football movie Rudy. So we told his story. So the story of how he got the movie made and how his life changed afterwards. And so if they just search for Rudy, they'll find that documentary. And then last year, last March, we took Rudy to Broadway and we held a one night show. One night, one man show on Broadway. Sold out a Broadway theater, the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. And that is also on Amazon prime, the recording of his Broadway one man show. So it's called the Walk on is the Broadway show. But all that's. Most of our stuff can be seen on Amazon.

Yeah, love it. Well, let's talk about how you hacked your way onto Amazon, you know, in this like roundabout way. Because when you said this to the Mastermind group in Orlando at Podfest this year, I think everyone in the room just like fell silent. We're like, wait, how'd that happen?

Oh yeah. Everybody in that Mastermind afterwards has probably made some reference to what you talked about to us since that Mastermind. Like it was really impactful for people.

Yeah. So I think about distribution. I think this whole conversation is around distribution, Right. And I think differently about distribution because I've never been the one who's been handed, you know, a million subscribers on a golden spoon, Right. And I think this is where a lot of people start out as they're like, yeah, I want to start a podcast or a YouTube channel, or I want to start. I want to be the next Gary Vee or, you know, who insert whoever, Right. It doesn't matter the name. But it's really hard to build an audience. Like, it really is. Like you have to work your tail off. And. And so it's not that I don't want to work my tail off, but I look at all right, if I want to build an audience who already has my audience that I can tap into, that I can add value to in some way. And you know, going back 10, 11, 12 years ago, that was blogging. And so if you guys remember, like the golden era of blogging, it was like you guest blogged on someone else's site. So you would write a guest post on Tim Ferriss site or you would write a guest blog on Huffington Post or, you know, wherever, right? And so when I was doing my music business, there was a ton of like, industry people. I remember one was elitist and another one was Hypebot, which was run by the number one touring booking agent in the world. And I was like, hey, his name was Bruce. And I was like, hey, Bruce, can you write about booking and all that stuff? Can I write about ways that they can make more money after they book the show? And he was like, oh, my God, that would be amazing. Like how to build your mailing list and how to sell more merchandise. And. And so I started writing for him. And at the end of all of the blogs, you would say, hey, this article was written by Greg Roulette. You can learn more about him at Gen Y Rockstars and get his free guide, the hundred social media resources for musicians, like, whatever it was, right? And so I was doing that 10, 11, 12 years ago, and now I look at the exact same way is who has an audience that I can add value to that will send me traffic, but they get a benefit from it, so it has to be mutual. And again, this is nothing new. It's something that it's talked about a lot. And so I started looking at, all right, if I want to go and reach entrepreneurs, who has lots of entrepreneurs, entrepreneur.com, right. And so I approached them And I wrote a cold, you know, cold email to them. And then I happened to meet one at a. Meet one of their publishers at a conference. And I was just like, hey, I see that you guys are starting to get into video. You know, how do you create your. I just started asking them questions like, how do you get your. And their biggest problem was we need a ton of video for our website, but we don't have enough resources internally to create all of that video. And I was like, well, I. I can make you some like, and just get, you know, I could just like make it like, what do you guys need? Like, what are the key? And so they laid it out to me on a silver platter and I said, all right, well, you know, I have an Emmy award winning crew and this and that, we can just make all that stuff for you. And so we entered into this relationship where we sent them four to five videos every single month. They put it on the homepage, they put it on their social media, they put it on. So the first step in all of this is who has my audience and how can I find a way to infiltrate that audience in a good way where I'm almost giving them more than they're ever gonna give me in return. Now obviously with Entrepreneur, I could say, as seen on entrepreneur.com, i can say, you know, I could interview my buddies and I'd be like, hey, Joe, Matt, like, I got this show on Entrepreneur. Do you guys want to be on it? Now I have leverage because someone who just creates their first podcast and you try to go, hey, Grant Cardone or Rich Sheffrin or whoever, do you want to be on my podcast? They're like, who the heck are you? Like, you know, but you say, hey, I have a show. It's distributed by Entrepreneur. Everyone says yes, right? Because they want. They see audience already being built there. So that was kind of the first real big aha. And then we started looking at, well, who are other bigger players? So everyone looks at the obvious places, but what are the non obvious places? And this is a lot of what I talked about at your mastermind was, all right, if I want to attract and one of my big markets is financial advisors, well, you know, there's obvious places. Everyone's trying to advertise on Facebook and just typing in financial advisor as a keyword. And I was like, what if I just went to the Financial planning Association? So anyone who pays their dues and is a due paying member, like, that's probably a quality person because they pay for continuing education I sell education things. And so I just went to them and I was like, hey, like, how can I write content for you? Or how can I film video for you? And they were like, well, we don't do video, but we'll take your articles. You can write for our blog. I started writing for the blog, and I say, hey, I noticed you have a magazine. Can I also write for the magazine? Hey, I noticed you have social media. Can I take over your Instagram for a week? Can I take over your. Can we do a Facebook Live together? And what we tend to forget is that it's not just the website or the magazine. It's all the other media properties. Like, you know, for you guys. Like, you guys have an amazing podcast, but you also have, you know, a membership site. You also have a newsletter that you send out to thousands of people. You have Facebook groups. Like, so if someone could tap into that and say, hey, you know what? You know, I love being a podcast guest, but, you know, how can I also put an insert into your newsletter? And how can I also. But the key to it is making it so easy. So for me to go, all right, Joe, Matt, what if I paid for the insert? What if I designed the insert? You could approve it, obviously, because, you know, but what if I paid for that and inserted it? Well, now you guys went from, you know, that's kind of a cool idea to he's gonna pay for it and he's gonna put an affiliate link in it. So if anybody purchases, like, now, it becomes much easier for you to say yes. I think a lot of people expect the other person to do the work for them. Right? And you guys see this from an affiliate side. The best affiliates give you the banners and give you the videos, give you the swipe copy. You might want to change it to make it yours and in your voice, but the easier you make it for people. So, like, for the Financial Planning Association, I write the article. I Write it in WordPress so that I can just give them the HTML code. So they literally just have to copy and paste it. They don't have to upload images. They don't have to do anything. I put the bylines in there. I find the pictures for them. I write the Facebook post so they can just copy and paste and put it into hootsuite or whatever they use. Like, I make it so easy for them. When we did the Entrepreneur deal, like, I had my video team make Instagram story videos that went with the article. I had them make images that they could put on their Instagram feed. And so their publishers were like, this guy is the best guy in the world because we literally just need to copy and paste.

You're just saving so much time, money. You're just removing hurdles is all you're doing. You're taking it a step further.

Yeah. And if you don't remove those hurdles, you're giving them a reason to say no. And I think when most people make the pitch to media, they're giving them a reason to say no. And I try to give them every single reason to say yes. And they would like be an idiot if they said no. Right. And do you get no's? Of course you do. But you know, the more that you can make it easy for them, the better. So now to the Amazon. Right? So that's like the. So there's the next league of this. So like associations, things like that entrepreneur who are other media companies that have access. So everyone wants to get on Netflix. It's really hard to get on Netflix. We've sold. Now, my partner Nick sold one movie to Netflix, a documentary that we did called the Rebound. I'm not allowed to disclose what we got paid for it, but I can tell you it didn't pay for 1/10 of the production of the actual film itself. So everyone's like, Netflix is the holy grail. Yeah, it is if you're Dave Chappelle. Right.

No royalties or anything like that.

There's no royalties. And it's. And it was a seven year exclusive deal, meaning we can't put it anywhere else for seven years and there's no royalties. So if they just put it in the bottom of their thing and never display it on that, like it's just in their inventory. And so again, we get the street cred of saying, yes, we've got a movie on it. But like, so we looked at, well, who else is out there that'll give us a better deal? And Amazon. Almost everyone on the planet who I would want as a customer has Amazon Prime.

Right.

Like those are like the greatest people. And so Amazon prime has a free video subscription program if you're a Prime member, called Amazon Prime Video, which has some great shows like Jack Ryan, the Boys and just some amazing content.

Marvelous. Ms. Maisel. One of my favorite shows.

That's right.

Hey, you know, whatever works, man. It's quarantine time. So, you know, we gotta fill our time with something. And so we looked at Amazon. What people don't know about Amazon is that they have something called Amazon Video Direct and that if you meet the criteria that they want for the show, they will guarantee distribution through Amazon Prime. And this is something that I don't really share. So you guys are getting some good, good nuggets right now. So there are some criteria, meaning you can't just take a selfie video and put it on Amazon prime. Right? So there are. There are criteria. You need to have a director, you need to have a producer. You need to have some things in line. You got to have closed captioning. You got to shoot both 16, 9, and 4, 3, because for some reason, like, someone is somewhere out there accessing Amazon Prime TV on an old school square. Like, I don't know who those people are. How does that work?

Like, function? Like, how do you take Amazon to a box?

I don't know. Like, that's like. I feel like that's like a squ cable thing. Not like, I have no idea. But regardless, you have to create your video in four, three. You got to do closed captioning, which is not the same as just transcribing your video. And so there's like, again, it's not like you need to, like, jump through a million hurdles, but there is a barrier. And then the final thing is they do have to approve the content. So, like, you know, it's not quite freedom of speech, you know, Jeff Bezos rules, but once you do that, you can. And then they can structure based on your content. If they approve you, you can either just get put into Amazon prime and they pay you based on how many streams you get. So you actually make money by having your video on Amazon Prime. So you can get. So if your video ends up getting millions of views on Amazon prime, you get really, really, really, really, really big checks, which is. Which is amazing. You can also set it to where people like itunes can pay for each episode. So, you know, just like you can rent a new movie when it comes out. Like when the Avengers comes out, you can't watch it on prime for free. You can rent it. You can say it's $4.99 for a rental, 1999, to buy for a TV show. You could do 99 cents an episode or $10 for the whole season. And so there's some really, really cool things you can do. What we've seen is, again, I want distribution. We make it free on Amazon prime. And if we hit, if we strike gold, we get some good checks. If we don't, our shows are on Amazon Prime. So I know I went on a tirade there of a lot of different stuff. So like, feel free, interrupt, you know, tell me what I missed.

So I don't think you missed much. What was the name of that again? It was Amazon Video Video Direct. Direct.

Okay, so I just have some clarifying.

Questions and feel free to not link to that because that's like a secret that, you know, I don't want.

We'll leave it as, like, how people.

Ruin, like the ebook world, where they uploaded four page PDFs and they called it a book and they ruined the publishing world. I don't want them to do that to video.

We'll censor that.

All right, sue, so you're listening to this as you're writing the notes. Make sure you only put it in the companion that people pay for and not the free will on the website.

What were you going to ask?

Yeah, so when it comes to like Amazon Video Direct, if you put it on there for free, do you get checks or is that.

Yeah, so it's based on. Yeah, so it's based on streams. So at that point, you know, if five people watch your video, you're not going to get a check from them. So Ambitious Adventures has been on there. Let's make two and a half years. Ish. We still get royalty. Yeah. 20, 18. So, yeah. So two years plus we still get checks from them every single month. They have dwindled over the last couple months. But, you know, during the first few months, like we were getting a couple thousand dollars a month off streams and now that trickles into, I don't know, like $70 a month now. But still, like, you know, it's free money and it's also a global access to us. Now the cool thing about Amazon is it's also like a huge search engine.

Right.

So when you do your show. Right. So in our show Ambitious Adventures, we had Jack Canfield on the show, Kevin Harrington, we had Jake Paul, one of the top YouTubers on the planet. Very controversial, but huge name. We had Joel Calm, we had Caleb Maddox, we had Lewis Howes. Yeah. So the cool thing is someone goes onto Amazon and searches for Lewis Howes. When you do your SEO and tags and all that for your episode descriptions, you can start showing up. And so I mentioned the Rudy one earlier. So this one took off for us because people go into Amazon Video and they start searching for Rudy and they see they got to pay to watch the actual movie Rudy. Right. Like the Hollywood blockbuster movie Rudy. And they see ours is free and they're like, yeah, I'll watch that also. Like, there is. Yeah, so there's An SEO strategy there. And so that's why I said earlier, Rudy's been our biggest commercial one because there was that built in celebrity and built in search. So if, you know, like people are searching for certain movies or films or things on Amazon, there are ways to, I wouldn't say game the system, but to leverage the fact that it's a search platform and get some benefits from that.

Sure.

And so is Amazon also non exclusive? Because you did mention you could put them on itunes as well. So you can put them in both places.

Yes, huge. So I think that was the other thing with Amazon is it is a non, non exclusive rights. So meaning you could have it on Amazon, you could put it on YouTube, you can have it on, you know, your website, you can, you know, put it on Facebook, like all of that stuff. And I think that's really, really cool. Now obviously at some point you got to figure out where you want to send your traffic.

Right.

And so for us, what we decided is that it was always in our benefit to send people to Amazon because even if they didn't watch it, they know that now I have a TV show that's on Amazon, which, you know, and it's true, like no one really has a show on Amazon, you know, and so to say, you know, that you have a tv, you know, multiple episodes with these guests on Amazon, it just, the credibility bump is insane.

Right. And that's the whole thing of, you know, you don't want to, you don't want to just contain everything to one platform, but it sure as hell you want to use that to leverage for credibility in your case. Distribution is huge. And yeah, I mean there's, there's, I'm sure there's other ways you can just get that audience to move with you somewhere else if needed if it, you know.

Yeah. There's also nothing in the contract there that says that you can't have until this is something that, looking back, like playing Monday morning quarterback, that I would have done is I would have had like lower thirds that popped up that says like text hashtag ambitious. Louis, to say your favorite line that Louis just shared, I'm making this up. Or pop up and be like, you know, go to ambitious adventures.com Lewis to get a breakdown of our 10 top tips. Like we should have embedded calls to action into the actual show that, you know, sometimes you're just creating a show and you forget about that. But I think that's a huge thing that I would have done is I would have embedded and I would have done it very, you know, I wouldn't have been like in your face. Like, hey, if you're watching this video right now, there are 10 tips right now you need to get from Lewis. Like, you know, I would have probably put up a lower third. That's like, if you love this interview from Lewis, imagine getting the full three. Like, we interviewed Lewis, I think for six hours and like nine minutes made it into the show. Right. And so, so, like, I would have loved to been like, get the whole 2 hour edited interview with Lewis at. But you know. Yeah, yeah, you win some, you lose some.

But, yeah, and then so with Amazon, you mentioned, like, if you have something on there and I guess if it starts to get some traction, then Amazon sort of helps boost the traction more. So if you drive some traffic to it and get some eyeballs on it, then Amazon's more likely to feature it themselves.

Right, exactly. So it's just like Netflix, when Netflix, like recommends, you know, like other shows for you to watch. Well, Amazon has the exact same feature. So, you know, ours was like entrepreneur based. And so if someone was on Amazon, let's say watching Shark Tank or they were watching the Profit or something like that, if enough people were watching our stuff and there were similarities in it, their recommendation engine would be like, hey, you might also like Ambitious Adventures or this or this or that. So again, the recommendation engine really starts to kick in once they know that, all right, there's organic traffic coming to this people. You know, it's same thing as like a YouTube, right? I know you've had a lot of YouTube experts on is watch time is really important. Well, Amazon's the same thing. Like, like, wow, a lot of people are going to this. They're watching the whole episode, then they're binge watching another episode, then they're watching like, we need to get this to more people. So it's same concept as like a YouTube or a Netflix when the recommendation engine hits.

I'm actually on the page now and it says customers who have watched this item also watch Seinfeld.

You know, I never said we had the smartest audience, but maybe we do. Like, I mean, it's a great show.

So it is, I know, not dying.

The Bachelor, you know, Bachelor in Paradise.

Well, so, all right, so I want to go back to entrepreneur.com because that was where it kind of kicked off, it sounds like, for this specific show, Ambitious Adventures. Right. So what was the whole take from entrepreneur.com? how did that transition into Amazon? I mean, was it just like, all right, more distribution was that with them or.

So with Entrepreneur, what we did is we gave them 30 day exclusive rights. So meaning at the time, they would get the episode for 30 days after it had been on their site for 30 days, could then go and, you know, do whatever we wanted to do with it. So we went to them first. And what it's not even. We negotiated it, but we did. Some of the things I talked about earlier is when the episode came out, we were like, how can we leverage every single one of their channels to get the most attention and eyeballs? And I think that most people would be like, all right, we're going to give Entrepreneur the file, they're going to put it on their website and they're going to promote it because they're Entrepreneur. And we never thought that way. Like, we wanted them to think that way and we hoped that they would, but we didn't, like, leave it to them to do it. And that's. This is not a knock on Entrepreneur. It's just that, you know, they post something like 50 articles a day. So if word one of 50 a day, which is like 350 a week, like, we're nothing to them unless we did something. So we looked at what are all the different distribution channels on Entrepreneur that we might at least ask. The worst they can say is no. So the first thing we did is the day the episode was going to be launched on entrepreneur.com we asked them if we could go live on their Facebook page. At the time, their Facebook page had about 3.5 million likes on the page. And we said, you know, to again, incentivize it, we said, hey, what if we could get Lewis Howes live to introduce the episode? We'll do a live Q and A with Lewis and then we'll play the episode live. And then when it ends on the website, it would go live. And they were like, you could get Louis. You get like you could. You. And. And so we did that whole trick. Then. Then we went to Louis and we said, hey, Entrepreneur wants you to do this really cool thing live with a. And so we had Louis live on Entrepreneur's Facebook channel, where people were asking him questions. And we got to talk to him about the filming and he said how awesome it was. And then we did the episode. So we ended up with 100, 200,000 views of the live before the episode even went live. Then, like I said earlier, we made the Instagram stories. And so what we did is each episode had about three to four guests. So we made a different Instagram story. Like five to seven minute gif style image for each guest. So there was one for Lewis Howes, one for Jack Canfield, one for my partner Nick, one for Carlo, who was in that episode. And then every day for the, you know, the five days the episode went out, we were getting Instagram story stuff we created. It's like so. And then I wrote an email. Right. And so that they, they didn't end up using the whole email, but what they do is they send up like a weekly roundup kind of email. And you know, we were always in that weekly roundup because again, we gave them all the material. So at the time I think it was like 1 or 2 million people on the email list. There was 2, 3.5 million people on, on Facebook. There was, you know, a million or two on Instagram. So we use their entire ecosystem.

Yeah. Now four or five different distribution points just from one company media source. Yeah.

And that's what again, people tend to forget. So even like going to the Financial Planning association, you're like, well, they're not entrepreneur. Yeah. But if that's where your target market is, they have a magazine that goes to 30,000 financial advisors. They have a Facebook page, they have a blog, they have an email list. Use every piece of media at your disposal. Don't just think that like, oh cool, they're gonna put me on their website. Yeah, that's cool. But like leverage it to the max. That's how you're gonna get ultimate eyeballs on your stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And then take it a step further. If you want, go to somewhere like Amazon where it's just blow the hatch open, you know.

Exactly.

I think it's just clever, man. And I love the whole thing of, you know, you're bringing value to entrepreneur.com in this case and Lewis Howells. And you know, I know someone like Lewis, high demand guy. He gets approached a lot and you know, there's reason like he's going to say no to most opportunities because of just distribution. So if you're think, thinking and this goes to what Jay Abraham, a quote by him is what solve other shoot. It's on, it's on your cover. And I've, I've, I've voiced this to Jay perfectly. And he was like, yes, that's it. And I forgot it. Now it's basically like solve other someone else's bigger problem is, is basically a solution to your own problem. And so you're solving, you know, Lewis Howes wants more distribution. Cool. You just paired him up with entrepreneur.com entrepreneur.com probably wants Lewis Howes because he's a hot rising brand. Boom. Mash them out together. You're just in the middle, and you made it happen.

Yeah.

This is somewhat controversial, and I shared this at the Mastermind as well, is that sometimes, and people don't like to hear this because they like to think that all people are great people, and they do it for the. For the love of what they do. Sometimes you do have to pay to play, and sometimes you do have to recognize what. What people want in order to get them to do what. What you want. And so in. In the case of a couple people that we worked with, with, you know, we knew that they had a book coming out, so we would say, hey, you know, we'll buy 500 copies of your book if you'll do an interview for our show. Or we'll do, you know, you know, Louis, like, we bought tickets to his event. You know, he wanted to sell seats to his summit of greatness. Like, I don't think that that makes him a bad person. I think that he has, look, again, like you said, his time, super valuable. He's, you know, at the upper echelon of what he does. And so if you want to get his attention, like, he was trying to sell tickets. So I'm like, hey, we'll go in, we'll buy a bunch of tickets, and we'll give them away as like a raffle. But he gets the revenue, he gets what he wants. And we got, you know, and, you know, we've done this with all kinds of stuff we shared. So great resource, you know, charity buzz. You know, you can find celebrities who will give. Give up a lunch or maybe invite you to their gala or whatever it is if you make a donation to their charity. And, you know, one of the biggest ones that we did was with Larry king. It was $10,000, and we got to have breakfast with him. And so my partner Nick flew from Orlando to Los Angeles to the spot that Larry King has breakfast at every single day before he goes to the studio. Had breakfast with him, and there's a shot that nothing's gonna happen other than having some eggs and bacon with, you know, Larry King.

Sure.

Luckily, Nick is a really good negotiator and salesperson, and we ended up doing a ton of stuff. We ended up doing a book publishing deal with him, and we ended up doing a documentary on his life, which I think is also also on Amazon. And, you know, but like, so a 10,000. Like, again, people don't like to hear that they like to think that, you know, I just. And does it happen? Like, I cold emailed Larry King and he said, he's like, does it happen? Of course it does. But sometimes to accelerate things, you do have to show people that you're in their league. And it's not something that people genuinely want to hear, but it's a way to buy speed, to get you what you need in order to play that game.

Yeah. And I mean, with this podcast, you know, being fully transparent, we've had people on the podcast where we're like, hey, hey, can we donate to your favorite charity in order to get you on? And we've done stuff like that to get some of the names on our podcast. You know, we like to put out the perception that all of these people are our homies, and we can just get them up on the phone anytime we want. But the reality is, a lot of these people, we didn't know them before we got them on the podcast, and we did things like that to grab their attention.

Well, the beauty there is that, yeah, you do that to get the door open, but once the door is open, they can be.

If you can deliver.

Right.

If you deliver the goods. Right.

Yeah, yeah.

So. And by the way, the roulette retirement fund account number is.

Love it. Oh, man. I mean, there's so one question about this whole, you know, Amazon talk and distribution, working with a big company. So you mentioned, you know, a whole producing team, director, all that stuff. And crowdfunding is something that you've done before for some of your projects. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because a lot of folks probably just thinking, well, I can't afford to do that.

This. Yeah. So I couldn't either because, like, you know, we run a business. And when I went to my business partners, I was like, hey, I want to go spend a ton of money to do my own reality show. They were like, you're nuts. Like, great idea, Greg, but how are you going to fund it? And so I initially funded a pilot out of my own pocket, you know, spent about $10,000 out of my own pocket to even just see if there was validity in the idea. Ended up that it was the crappiest, like, pilot of all time. It was, like, unwatchable. It was. It was really bad. But then, you know, I sent it to a couple of people, and we course corrected. And I met a guy by the name of Brandon Adams, who at the time was doing a lot of crowdfunding projects. His big one he did was the. The Freedom Journal, I think it was for John Lee Dumas. So he did his whole Kickstarter campaign. And I was like, all right, well, this guy, he wants to be like a celebrity and he does crowdfunding. Well, what if I allow him to be a co host of the show and he runs a crowdfunding campaign for me? And so again, it was like I knew what he wanted. He wanted to be on a TV show show. I had one. I didn't have money to produce it. So, you know, we found a way to work together. And so we ran a Kickstarter campaign. And again, I'm all about speed. Like, how fast can we put things together? So we met. I flew to Iowa, which is where he was from at the time, just to speak at his event. I wrote a check to be a sponsor so that I could speak at the event so that I can meet him. So, you know, I asked him, hey, would you come down to Orlando and do a consulting day to see if we have validity to this project and see, you know, that was a week after the event. He was in Orlando. Seven days later, our Kickstarter campaign was live. Right. That fast. And so I think people too often are waiting. They're waiting for permission, they're waiting till the timing's right. Like, the timing was not right. Like, I just had my second child, my wife needed me at home, Our business was going up and down. Like I should not have been focusing on a show, but if I didn't focus on it, then when would I?

Right, right.

I'd be 40, I'd be 45, I'd be 50, I'd be way past my prime. I would, you know, have a, you know, not be doing Ninja Warrior. And I'd have an extra, you know, know, 40 pounds at the waist. Right. And so, you know, no one wants to watch that on tv. So. So speed of execution. Now Kickstarter in and of itself, I do think is a great platform for certain things. What I didn't like, well, so a, we ran a 30 day, 28 day campaign. Four weeks. We raised $52,000 in 28 days, ranging from, you know, $1, you know, back us to all the way down to $10,000 to be actually in the episodes. And we ended up selling three of those, which is how we got a lot of the money, which is where in some of the different cities, we don't like to disclose that, which ones, but they paid to have a segment essentially in the show. So, like, hey, Lewis Howes and me in the same episode and so that was really, really cool. And then we had a thousand dollar tier where they got to come to the premiere and we hosted an event and stuff, and it was really, really cool. The downside of raising $52,000 on Kickstarter is that we had to give Kickstarter like $10,000, $15,000 in fees for it. Then we had ad spend that we had that we drove people to the Kickstarter campaign. So, and so when all was said and done, I think that we ended up with just shy of 30 of those $50,000 and it was costing us about $15,000 an episode. So we raised enough money to do two episodes essentially, which again, that's great. It's awesome. It's an amazing way to kind of grow the business and get some funding. What I really see Kickstarter as is validity that you have an idea that people will actually pay for.

Yeah, yeah.

How would you do it differently now if you were trying to raise some funds?

Great question. I would do the exact same thing. I would just do it internally. And this is actually how we fund our documentaries now. So we just did one called Dreamer a few weeks ago with Giovanni Marshuko and we had some amazing people in there, Anush Asari, who was the Ansari X Prize, which is the first X Prize. Just some amazing people in that. And so what we did is we went to our list, they went to their mailing list and said, hey, hey, we're putting together a documentary. Do you want to be there for the interviews? Do you want to be named as an executive producer? Do you want to come to the premiere? Yada yada. And you know, we say there's 10 producer spots, 10 executive producer spots. It's $10,000, 20,000, like whatever the pricing is. And we do internal crowdfunding. When you do that, all you do is pay the credit card fees. And so I would do it the exact same way. I just wouldn't do it publicly. I would do, I would do like a launch to say, hey, we're getting ready to do season two of ambitious adventures and we're looking for 10 people who want to come on this journey with us to be a part of it, it to be an executive producer on the show, to have a segment like whatever that it is. And I would just do it internally instead of on a platform like Kickstarter. Again, it's not a knock at Kickstarter. I just need every single dollar that I raise. I actually need it to fund the thing.

So I'm just thinking like the way I'm just like, I just got an idea. I'm like, oh yeah. Because we use Thrive cart all the time for our payment process. I'm like, you can do a whole pay what you want thing right there and like, basically do a whole internal crowdfunding thing with a purpose. And like, yeah, anyone can do that. And you never know what's. And if you, if you bribe, ethically bribe them with something that they really want, you never know what's going to happen with the list you're already sitting on or social media following that you already have.

Yeah, you just rile them up, right? They like, we all want to be a part of something, right? Like, we're recording this. I'm dating in this now for you guys, so you guys can hate me forever. But like, we're recording this in the middle of like the COVID thing. Like, everyone wants to either be a part of the conspiracy theory or they want to be a part of the health side. Or they want to be a Donald Trump fan or a Donald. Like, they all want to be a part of a, of something, right? They all want to identify something. And if you can create that in your marketing, like, you know, you know, for this film we just did the dreamer one. Like, people wanted to be a part of this because they wanted to share the fact that you can dream something and it can become a reality. Like, they wanted to be a part of that and attach their name to that so that they can share it with their, their followers, to share it with their kids. Kids. To be a legacy, play to, like, if you dream it, you can achieve it. Like, they wanted to be a part of that movement and we've seen it with all kinds of movements, right? And so, you know, if you can build that fire inside of someone to say, I want to be like going back to the music industry, right? Like, everyone wants to be in that inner circle of the band before they make it big.

It's true.

Like, oh, I knew, I knew Metallica when they were just playing at 25 person dive bars in on Santa Monica or whatever.

Yeah, I just want to show off the fact that my band was once called Fallout, but boy achieved.

Matt, you finally got your opportunity.

We all want to be that person that, that supports them at that level, to be a part of that movement, to be the original Swifty before Taylor Swift became what she was like, you know, and so if you can create that 100%, like you can create your own internal crowdfunding thing and they want to people do genuinely want to help you.

Definitely.

You know, and you just got to give them something that they can, they can latch on to. I think that's again, going back to we. It's the whole point of this whole episode really is just you have to provide enough value for them to want to do it.

That's it, right?

Yeah, that's it.

That's it. It's giving value and just getting creative and solving that problem, your problem. Mash them together, beautiful things can happen. And distribution on a higher level that you can ever build yourself. That's the thing. Building your own audience, man, it's tough. It's tough. Expensive and long and there's a lot.

Of shortcuts to it.

Yeah, this is a great one. So I think we got about, let's focus like the last 15 minutes or so on this new project of yours. You told us in the last 30 days you've completely revamp your business. Well, you've kind of had to.

Yeah.

And share as much as you want. I mean, obviously this is all new and fresh, but I would love to hear what you're doing, how people can, you know, check it out because I think it parlays perfectly into the video stuff we're chatting about here.

Totally. So, yeah, I mean our core business, you know, 60 days ago was getting people to jump on an airplane and fly down to Orlando to be in our studio. And you know, whether that was to create their own online TV show, whether that was for, you know, video, like high end video production, social media videos, we did a lot of like, like the Gary Vee content model where people will come in and we create 30, 60, 90 days worth of content in a day. And literally, obviously, with the world changing the way that it did, with a snap of a finger, a, all of our, all of our existing people who had booked something in the month of March, in April and May, had canceled and asked for refunds and you know, ballpark, six figures in refunds within, you know, within two weeks. I don't care who you are, you get that like it, it messes with you. Yeah. All the proposals, everything that we had out there that was, you know, incoming, gone. Everybody that was on like a monthly retainer, you know, we're the, like you're spending 2, 3, 4, $5,000 a month on content and all of a sudden their business model gets rocked. Like we're the first person that, that, that got knocked. So, you know, we pretty much lost 80, 90% of our revenue within a two week period. And, and then you like it? So I was. It was dark, and I think my partner Nick and I, so we have a couple different businesses, but on the ambitious side that I run, you know, I was like the guy who was like, I was at home and I was sick to my stomach like every day. Like, what am I going to do? And what I want to tell everybody is that a. It's okay to be sad, it's okay to let out your emotions. It's okay to not know what you know. It's okay, right? As entrepreneurs, like, we always got to be the alpha type and grind like we're going to. It's okay to, like, mourn, but then you got to. Then you got to get. Get your ass in gear. Yeah, don't stay there. Yeah, right. Don't stay there. And so, you know, I had. It was a Friday afternoon and I was just thinking about all, so what are we going to do? Like, how are we going to hit payroll? How are we going to pay people? And I had this idea. I started thinking about all the things that I'd done that had been successful in our businesses and everything was related to speed, right? So I mentioned the Kickstarter, flew to Iowa. A week later, he's in my office. A week later, Kickstarter is up. I remember right before my third son, Ashton was born, I was supposed to go speak in an event. And this is our internal big annual event. And I get about a third of my revenue for the whole entire year at this event. And I wasn't going to be able to go because my son was going to be born during that event. And so I go, oh, crap, I'm about to lose a third of my revenue. What do I do? And I stayed up all night. I wrote like an email campaign. I sent it out. I didn't have the whole program worked out. I invited two of my friends to the office the next morning and I started just booking strategy sessions on the fly. And I built the offer on the whiteboard while talking to people. And he was like, you promised that guy four videos. You promised this guy three. And I was like literally making packages up. And it ended up being our best selling program for like 18 months, our virtual video program. Because my back was against the wall and I needed to do something fast. So we started to see, like, everything that I had done had been from taking action and doing it in a. In a very, very fast way. And so that Friday afternoon, I said, I'm gonna teach people how to do that. I'm gonna teach people how to stop thinking about the things that they want from life and actually use this time that they have now to do it. And so that was Friday. Saturday, I had my wife film the sales video. And so just again, a fun media thing. So I've been watching a lot of Jimmy Fallon at home.

It's amazing, dude.

It's amazing, right? So his wife is the camera. Kids do all the graphics. So I'm not smarter than Jimmy Fallon. So my kids made all the graphics. So it was a five module course. So they drew out like module one was about content module two, and my wife was the camera person and I had my wife film it and I held up graphics that my kids made and I filmed that on Saturday, built the funnel on Sunday, started selling it on Monday, sold it out by Friday, and did deliver the course live on Friday. Saved my business, right, from a Friday to a Friday. And then because of the amazing friends that I have in this industry, guys like Todd Brown, Rich Sheffrin, just jumping on the phone with them, jumping on zoom. And they helped me build an entire new, you know, and obviously my business partners, Nick and Jack, we all got together and we built an entire new business that didn't exist 30 days ago. From today, we're recording this. And now we're on track for a six figure month. This month, you know, from front end, back end sales, we've hired two salespeople. Like, like it's growing. Like we leads because we didn't wait. And I think every. Everybody who's listening to this, I know you had amazing guys like Rob Cosberg on a couple weeks ago about book stuff. I know you guys talk about Pocket. Everybody wants to write a book, everybody wants to write a podcast. But I jump on the phone with them, and then I jump on the phone with them. Six months later, I'm like, how's that podcast coming? They're like, still thinking about a cool name.

Yeah, bro.

Six months went by. You do four, you should be 24 episodes in, right? And so, yeah, and so just getting people to think about speed of execution. And Mark Ford, who was at the Mastermind, you guys were at Michael Masterson amazing book. Ready, fire, aim. And that's the philosophy that we teach in Velocity. It's most people screw up when they get into the aiming phase. They go to an event, they listen to a podcast like they're listening to right now. They're jacked up. That great guy was cool. I want to go do this. And then they aim forever. Well, what's the name of the show? What should I like? The problem with aiming is it's subjective. You could go a little more to the left, you could go a little more to the right, a little more down, a little more up. You could. And all of a sudden you never fire. I'm the kind of guy who I get ready, I fire. And I usually screw like 99 things out of 100 up, right? Like the tech doesn't work. They bought and they didn't get the right land. Like, yeah, but guess what? I got real customer data and feedback. I got real customers who gave me money, I validated and now I can aim and fix all that stuff because everything else is fix, fixable and people.

Are forgivable as well. That's the thing. People, people think that they're going to. You're going to be hated.

No, sometimes you do get haters, but like, but, but the majority of people, they totally get it. And I'm just like, hey man, we launched this yesterday. I'm still figuring out the tech, but I think the other thing that I'm willing to do is like, I'll call somebody. Hey, Joe, just saw that you ordered. We're working on the membership site as fast as we can. Give me like an hour and I'll, I'll shoot you the. You know, and just that customer service. But you know, it's that idea of like people are just, they're waiting for the perfect, like this Covid thing. Like if you didn't have a job, like maybe you got furloughed or la and you got all this. Even if you are working now, you're not in the car an hour day. What could you be doing with that hour a day? And this isn't, I'm not one of those people who say you should hustle your face off work 24. Like that is not me. I have kids. I know you guys, you know, family people. Like, I want to spend as much as time as I can with my family, but during the hours that I'm sitting in front of the computer or a microphone or a camera, I'm going to make it count and I'm going to help as many people as I can today. And so anyway, long story short, we built this whole business around this concept of Velocity. So the program's called Velocity. We have a Velocity business program, a 12 week program to get people, people the skill sets that they need to just launch things at warp speed. Very Star Trek, you know, kind of thing. And, and dude, it's, it's literally changed my life. But I Think more importantly, I think the reason why it's working is because people are going through the program and they're going, you know, I went through this, Greg, on a Friday, and on Saturday I launched my podcast. I went through this on a Friday, and I wrote my children's book, you know, you know, over the weekend. And now it's. I'm publishing on Amazon. Like, it's giving them permission to do it now, you know, imperfect action. And anyway, it's just. I'm excited, man. It's really cool.

I think that's great.

I mean, you're.

I know Chris Kitos, you know, podfest owner, one of the creators, wrote a book, Start Ugly. Same exact kind of idea. Obviously you're. You have an action plan, but that, it's the concept of so many people stay over here or they, it's not, it's not perfect action. You know, they're either stuck in perfection or they're just stuck in the thinking phase of not doing. And it's like, okay, just. Just break out of that. And it's just interesting because that's, that's where the best things happen with pivoting.

Or we on the wrong things. Right. So in business, you know, I learned this from Todd Brown, from Rich Jeffrin to my biggest mentors. And it's just like. And Dan Kennedy, the other one is like, the purpose of a business is to make money and help people.

Right?

Right. And I think most people do not do revenue generating activities. Right? Like, they go through their entire day and they're like, oh, I did like 9,000 things today. And I'm like, well, which one of those helped you to get a client or to get a customer? And they're like, none. I'm like, well, how. You know, coaches are the worst. Like life coaches, business coaches. I'm like, if I want to hire you to coach me, how can I do that? They're like, well, you got to go on a strategy journey with me. And then I'm like, no, like, like, literally, can I give you $500 a month and you'll jump on the phone with me once a month to coach me? That's an offer. Let's launch that offer today. And they're like, mind is blown because they focus on all the wrong things that don't. And again, I think it's because they replace doing those activities with actually growing a business. And that's not what a business is. And so, yeah, velocity helps to give them the skillsets that actually generate revenue at the end of the Day, like, that's the only thing that matters. Right? Like, you know, again, I love people that create a podcast and they want to help people and change the world. That's awesome. But how are you going to fund all of that? Like, you need to generate a customer.

Yeah, no, I think it's. It's fabulous and it's timely. I think you're going to help a lot of folks, you know, who are out of work right now or just some business owner that's just stuck in this whole pivot phase because they could experience exactly what we know, a lot of people and agency owners and all that stuff where customers just dried up. Like you said, there's a reason why their business dried up. So then the clients, you know, that are the people with their clients in those spaces. Good luck. Luck. But, yeah, there's a way out. So what's. I know you have a little planner thing. You were giving it out, I believe, at the Mastermind, but is that part of this whole thing or something we could offer here?

Yeah. So still the. The best place for people to, you know, enter into my world because of what I do and my background is the video side. And so we have a really cool tool. Dude, it is so simple. Like, this thing is not rocket science. You know, sometimes people are amazed that, like, that's all it is. And I'm like, yeah, use it like, four times and just tell me that it's all it is. And it's a video planner. And what we've done is we, like, there's. There's 52 ideas. They're just like, questions or prompts. And then there's 52, like, blank pages with a really simple outline, a big idea, an intro or opening hook to your video, three bullet points, and a call to action. And that's the same strategy I was using back when I was selling courses to musicians way back then. It's the exact same strategy that I use now. And, you know, it's the. Again to speed. It's the fastest way that you get this planner. We give it to people both digitally so they can start using it immediately, and we send one physically to them in the middle mail. And that same day, like, the best emails I get or Greg, I just downloaded this. I just put my first video on Facebook. 20 minutes later, I bought your thing. 20 minutes later, there's a video online. And I'm like, you win. Like, you. You are going to win at life. And. And it's. It's. It's really, really cool. And that's like still the front end. Because if I can get people to do that.

Sure.

Well then I can get them to do a call to action. Then I can get them to figure out all like. So for me it's just like if you can take action even in a small way, just creating that first video, putting it, putting yourself out there in a vulnerable position, I can teach you anything. And so that's still the starting point of our entire business is getting you to take that action. Because if you won't even do that, there's no way you're going to build a funnel and like the, all the like crazy like there's no. If you won't even put point a camera at your face for 45 seconds, you're not going to do the rest that it takes to actually grow a business.

Yeah. You need that momentum and this is kickstarting that momentum. I saw a lot of people in our mastermind when they saw this and flipped through it and a lot, you know, a couple of them have become partners or clients of yours now. Now just from that interaction in talks like this, I think this one even was longer. I don't think it was an hour or so. But yeah, that planner I know lit them up. Yeah. And we've, I keep getting people from our Mastermind talking about you and a couple other folks, but I hear your name often so I'm like, okay, this is, this is just kind of a no brainer to have you on the show. But also the planner. So what's the, what's the link? I believe we what the ambitiousplanner.com hustle is what we said.

I think that is what we said. Ambitiousplanner.com hustle yeah. And we put something together special for you guys just for, for listening to the show today, so.

Right on. Appreciate it.

Do you have any books that you tend to recommend to people or you, you know, refer back to often yourself? I mean it could be, in your case it could be documentaries too because those are always fun.

Yeah. So I'm a, I'm a marketing nerd. I think the, the marketing book that changed everything for me when I read it and I grasped the concept of it was it's actually a Dan Kennedy book and it's no BS Marketing to the affluent. And what I learned from that was that it takes just as much effort to sell to somebody who's broke as it does to sell to somebody who is affluent, you know, who has the means. Right. And it's going from. All right, my story right $27 courses for musicians to $2,700 programs. Now to a couple hundred thousand dollar programs if they want to go to the documentary side. It was just changing that mindset of, of the who, who are we going to sell to? And that book, Dan lays it out perfectly, talks about the difference between, you know, the salesman who shows up with like their eight PowerPoint slides and you know you're going to get pitched some life insurance versus like the guy who prescribes something and they just bring out like a napkin and they like map out your whole plan. Now he probably maps out the same napkin plan to everybody he talks to. But because he does it on the napkin like, oh, this guy is. He's prescribing something specific to me. It's just like those mindset. Amazing book that I recommend Everybody. It's like 14 bucks on Amazon or something. It's really, really good money spent.

I want to get that again. It's been. Or it's somewhere around.

I haven't read that.

I've got it.

One of my shelves over here. You can't see it on the camera. Like this shelf right here, the pen is pointed to that one is like half that shelf is just Dan Kennedy books. Like I pretty much buy everything. Although I don't think Dan writes any of his books anymore. I think most of the time they're just ghost written by other people. But regardless, they're all great.

Yeah.

Awesome. Greg. I mean, anything else before we sign off here, man? Because I think, I don't, I don't even know. We covered so much ground and I think there's a lot of aha's here.

But yeah, I'll, I'll leave with this because I think it's something you guys are really, really good at too. And it's that having access to people's mailboxes is very, very underrated. And you know, I would, I would save a lot of money and make a whole lot more money if I didn't print my video planners and send them out to people because the majority of people just print out the PDF and that's good enough for them. But there's something about getting into people's mailboxes with the video planner, like you guys with the newsletter. Like, like I'm like a kid at a candy store. I know what's in it. I listen to all the freaking episodes, right? But there's just something about Joe and Matt coming into my mailbox. There's something about when I send the planer out into the Mailbox. There's something about, you know, Dan Kennedy, like getting his newsletter. Like there's just something really, really powerful in that. And that's beyond the marketing capabilities putting in inserts and ride alongs and product samples or affiliate or like there's just some different connection that you have. And so I don't want that to be lost on people. And why we send the physical version out again, it would save me a metric ton of money by not having to mail out like right now. Like, and just in the last 30 days we've done 4,000 of these things. Like, you know, you know, so I mean the cost is like I cry every time I see the statement from the fulfillment company. But now that's 4,000 people's homes that I get to go into do and they have me now. Like, like you said, you have Dan Kennedy right on your shelf. Every single day you walk by that shelf. Even if it's subconsciously you see Dan Kennedy because he's there all the time now. I'm on everyone's desk every single day for the like, for as long as they keep this there. And it is so powerful. So I know it's a weird kind of tangent, but I know you guys do a great job of that with the newsletter and the things that you do. And I know you guys have a book that you send, you know, send out to people too. But like, it is so cool to have physical to like take up space in someone's life on their death, on their bookshelf, in their mailbox, that it transcends the relationship you have with them. Yeah.

I mean, just another little quick anecdote on that is we actually, because of the whole Covid thing that's going on right now, we've had some issues shipping to certain countries. Right. Some countries have stopped allowing mail in from USPS just to sort of be on total lockdown. And we had to inform some of these customers, hey, you're not going to get a print version this month. We're going to have to send you a digital version because we literally cannot get it to you. And the people that we mailed about that, they flat out said, well, when mail starts working again, can you send me the print version? Because I'm collecting every issue.

It's so cool.

It's wild, man. And I know Dan Kennedy used to talk about it all the time. It's like as soon as you go to a digital version only of that, the evergreen profits letter, you will get drop offs because people wanted. And I get it it would save you guys a ton of money, right? But it is so worth it. So, yeah, just a little, little antidote for everybody listening.

I love it.

Love it, man.

Well, yeah, well, so. Theambitiousplanner.com hustle. Go get it. I know. I'm going to go grab that because I think we gave all the physical ones out to the people at the mastermind.

We ran out.

I got one bastard.

I managed to keep one winning. Yeah.

So go check that out. Greg, this has been awesome, man. Thank you.

Thank you, guys. This is a lot of fun.

Thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you dug it. I know Joe and I dug it. I actually, I actually kicked Joe out of the room. He's not here right now. Cause I wanted to tell you about a tool that I really, really dig. We use it in our business. We recommend it all the time. It's called Easy Webinar. And it's a tool that lets you do live webinars, automated webinars, hybrid webinars, and, you know, pretty much any other kind of webinar, if there are other kinds of webinars. But anyway, this tool is kind of like your all in one, do it all tool for anything webinar related. It's easy webinar. It's put out by a dude named Casey Zieman. He's been on the podc. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's a killer episode. He's a really smart dude, but his software is amazing. It does everything. It's, you know, the title tells you exactly what it does. It's an easy webinar platform. And we use this in our business to run automated webinars all the time. We don't do a lot of live webinars these days. We like to do the kind of automated webinars where somebody can register and then it, you know, they can either watch it like 15 minutes later or they can watch it the next day, but it's just kind of always running. And it's a system that helps us make autopilot sales off of our webinars. Super cool tool. If you haven't tried it yet, you know, it's, it's, it's an amazing tool. And Casey is actually hooking you up. He said for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart, I can't believe he's doing this, but he said for listeners of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, he's giving 25 off of the membership to use Easy Webinar. It's already super, super inexpensive for what it does and all the cool features it has. But he's hooking you up with 25% off because you're a listener of Hustle and flowchart. Go to easywebinar.com hustle. That's where you can get that 25% off discount. That's easywebinar.com hustleen It's a awesome tool. You're going to dig it, so just go grab it. Check it out. Easywebinar.com hustle See ya. No, not see ya. You'll hear me in the next show. I don't know. I don't know how to close these things. Go get Easy Webinar. Talk to you later.

Do you want to learn the hard skills necessary to support your favorite shows? Well, cool. Our friends Gina, Hayley and Mel created something called Podcast Production School. Now it's an online course designed to help you master the skills and strategies needed to launch, manage and grow podcasts, including things like audio editing, show notes creation, and promotions. So download their free podcast production or their launch Checklist today at podcastproductionschool.com Go Flowchart. Again, that's podcastproductionschool.com Go flowchart.

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, 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.

Go get it Wiki Wiki.

We love you.