Richard Lindner - The "Back Of The Napkin" Bar Ideas That Led To DigitalMarketer

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey.

Welcome back.

Hi.

You actually let me go first this time.

I know you weren't expecting it, huh?

No, I was like, I was just leaving silence, thinking Joe was gonna be like, hey, and try to get in first.

Saw that. I like to change it up here. Yeah. That's what puts a little bit of a. I don't know. Interesting. Yeah, we got to change it up, man.

Every once in a while, you got to keep things interesting. This was honestly one of my favorite discussions. Like, I genuinely enjoyed this conversation. Not that I didn't enjoy conversations with other past guests, but I just. I really appreciated this conversation.

Let's say it resonated the most for you.

It resonated very much with me. Yes.

Connected it.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things happening in our business right now where this episode, we was, like, fricking touching.

A nerve, you know?

So we're talking to Richard Lindner today from. He's actually the co founder and president of Digital Marketer.

Yeah.

So super cool because he gets into how he actually, you know, his story. We always get into the story thing, but we hear some really cool, fascinating ways that he actually got into Digital Marketer and helped create this company. Now that has exploded. Yeah. And everybody in the digital online marketing space has probably heard of at least one of their assets or their core, you know, products or. Or events that they have out there.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, his story about how Digital Marketer got started and how he met Perry Belcher and how he connected with Ryan Dice and how they came together to create Digital Marketer and how Roland got involved and. And just hearing this evolution of Digital Marketer, I found was really, really fascinating. But there were so many just, like, little lessons along the way. Like he was telling the story of Digital Marketer while at the same time kind of weaving in, like, here's why this worked, here's why this didn't work. And I just thought it was a really, really great episode. And some of the things that we talk about on this outside of the story of Digital Marketer is how to effectively manage a team, how to effectively lead people. When you have four partners in a business, how do you divide the roles between four people? So you guys aren't kicking each other all the time.

They're not all, like. They're all kind of remote. Some of them, you know, Ryan and Richard are there in the office with their team of. I believe he said, about 50 people or so. So, I mean, they're running a, you know, a real business.

Yeah.

I definitely have a feeling we'll be chatting with Richard again soon just because of, you know, I feel like we could have probably talked to him for another two hours and it would have felt like a short episode still.

We hopped in like we. We've been chatting for a very long time.

Yeah. I think this was only the second time we've ever conversed with him.

But you'll walk away with a ton of different assets and different things that you can take in your business and think differently. You know, he's lining out all these different ways that you run ideas through your company. So you're not constantly just chasing ideas and not knowing how to implement or which ones that you should just probably catch, kill, and not move forward with. But he has all these processes. He's a very process guy. But at the same time, you can explain this stuff very clearly to folks to actually implement. And it's really cool. I think my favorite part was the four things, his spiel that he gives every single person that works at Digital Marketer. And literally that four things spiel, it's basically like four little sections. Anybody can replicate that in their business, and immediately you'll become way more effective with you and your team's time.

Yeah, that's kind of the last rabbit hole we dive in right before we wrap up. So definitely stick around for that because it's definitely a huge highlight of the episode. Let's tell them about the notes.

The notes are going to be a very good one on this episode specifically. I'm going to be, like, foaming at the mouth for a while until we see them. So we take notes. Basically, they're like little action guides. That's how I like to see them, is that you don't have to worry about taking all these crazy notes. But in Richard's case here, he's going to give you a whole ton of different strategies. Very specific word for things like the four things, like uses very specific wording. Those are the kind of things you want to see in written form. So we got yo back and we did that. If you go to hustleandflowchart.com comp c o m p. That's hustleandflowchart.com Comp. You can get that for free if you act quick because they do kind of rotate around there. So you got to be quick. You'll get the full notes for this one, the action guide, and all these different things that we discuss. It's going to be really cool.

So.

Well, let's go talk to my new best friend, Richard.

Hey, Richard, welcome on the show.

Thanks, guys. Happy to be here.

Yeah, man. We're just doing a little chitchat right before this, talking about the fine dining out in nyc and it sounds like.

I was doing some sit ups right before that. Because of the fine dining out.

Yeah, no, it's pretty cool because on Facebook and you know, we've had Roland on the show and we're chatting about him and he always, he always shows off the, you know, the finer things in life. The hotel rooms and, you know, the chef's tables and whatnot.

It's just pretty cool. He is definitely one of the most amazing people to travel with.

My guess is he's one of the worst people to unknowingly befriend on social media. You got to look at this dude's life and be like, I am woefully underprepared for this thing called life. I mean, you know, it's funny because everyone I know gets to experience Roland and small spurts, but I don't think anybody actually realizes you're just stepping into his life for a day or so. But when you leave, it's still just as amazing.

Well, it's a good. It's that perspective change I think is healthy. You know, it just shows you what's possible in life, what's out there. Because most people don't open themselves up to that.

That. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, that was actually one of the topic of our lunch conversations is how do you, how do you continue to in a healthy way or have a healthy relationship with a desire for growth. Right. Without, you know, kind of self loathing. Right. Or without being blind to what you have, you know, you don't want to aspire to have or to be more at the cost of belittling who you are or the accomplishments that you've had in your life. And that's just, you know, those types of conversations for me are always fun. All right. Because it can be really dangerous to start hating who you are because you want to be something better. But it can also be just as dangerous to become complacent. Especially if you've got something that could change the world or change some aspect of the world or change, you know, some subset of the population's life. Like you've got kind of a responsibility to go do that.

You know, I don't know. Those are the kind of geeky conversations we talk about after we Nerd out over wine and the appetizer list.

Wine and whiskey.

Wine and whiskey. There you go.

I feel like Matt and I have similar conversations all the time.

Because you're right.

I think those are some of the most important conversations we can have with ourselves and others, is to hold ourselves to a higher standard but not beat ourselves up about things either.

We talk about it a lot here at Digital Marketer with the leadership team. You've got to be really careful about your ideal self versus your actual self. Right. Like, who's your ideal self? And then how are you, you know, how are you grading that person?

And who's your actual self? And what are kind of those milestones along the way that you can look back and go, I'm making progress. And how are you grounding your ideal self in your actual self? That again, just. You avoid self hatred, self loathing. When you look in the mirror, you need to say, you know, I like this person. I like the people around me. That's why I want to be better. But let's be honest, who I am is good. It may not be good enough for what I want to do, but that doesn't mean it's not good enough. And, you know, I mean, I think that's what we miss in this. In a culture of just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow is, you know, this. I don't know, this idea that you have to also go back and say, not everybody gets a ribbon. Not everybody's good enough for what they want to do. But that doesn't mean you're not good enough. Right. And I think that's. That's tough. We can. You look at the people who don't break through and get just addicted to these personal development or professional development books, but never actually develop. To me, it seems like they're just in their own head with increasing the knowledge of the ways that they aren't good enough. Not actually taking pieces out of these books or this information and putting into play to become better. So that's something that I'm always fighting, dealing with an executive team that I'm charged to lead. To grow these different companies is to make sure that they have a healthy relationship with themselves.

Yeah. Have you ever read the book you Squared by Price Pritchett?

I haven't.

Check that out, man. It's. John Assaraf was on the show and he recommended this to us like seven years ago, but he reads it like multiple times a year. And it's exactly. What you're talking about is there's a lot of Roadblocks or knowledge that we all have. And most of us try to, you know, as entrepreneurs, I feel like we're all ingrained. Even folks working for dm, I'm sure digital marketer, a lot of them have these tendencies, entrepreneurial tendencies to always be better, Push, push, push, work harder. There's always more. But a lot of us forget, like, oh, yeah, you might not have to, like, break the wall down. You could just, like, open the door that's behind you or next to you that you're not looking at.

So there's usually a better way. Why do you want to grow? And one of the questions that I, you know, that I'll. I'll ask people who report to me or who I'm charged with, with leading in one way or another is, you know.

Who are you grading yourself against? Like, let's come up with really healthy figures, and let's make sure that depending on what areas of life you're focusing on, that you understand the cost of achieving those things. Right. If you want to look at. If you want to go out and take, well, I'm going to take Elon and Howard Schultz, and then I'm going to take a little bit of Branson and oh, you know what? Let's also kind of pepper in Phil Knight. Let's do some stuff. There's. Well, it's great to look at everything they were really, really exceptional at, but the flip side of every coin. Like, you know, do you believe that the relational collateral that. That comes with some of those native genius is worth it and even necessary? So how are you gauging yourself? Who are you grading yourself against? What can you learn from their failures and their successes to try to achieve what they've achieved or your version of it without the collateral damage along the way? Like, you owe it to them for putting themselves out there and documenting what they've done in whatever narrative to learn from their mistakes and try to do. To do that without those same mistakes?

Yeah, anyway.

Yeah, anyway. Marketing junk.

We'll definitely be circling back around to a lot of this, I think, because this is all stuff that just fascinates us. And it's very topical for us and where we're at in our business right now as well, 100%. So I definitely want to circle back around to this and talk about the leadership philosophies that you guys have and that sort of thing. But before we do, I'm kind of. I'm curious about your journey to where you are today. You know, how did. What were you doing before this, how did you get involved in Digital Marketer? You know, what was your entrepreneurial journey? You know, just kind of let us know how you got to where you are and let's, let's kind of start there.

Yeah, it's, it's definitely. And I'm guessing like most people not, you know, it wasn't intentional or the direct path or even what I thought I would do. My family's always been pretty entrepreneurial, but kind of early on, at least in the last endeavor, they got popped pretty hard. My dad quit an amazing corporate job, left and opened up kind of a convenience store gas station. I remember I was about seven years old, I got to name it. I remember where. I remember when I. Where we were at in the car when I named it. We're gonna call it the family market, and that's what we called it. And just through a series of unfortunate events and zoning, couldn't end up getting gas pumps. My dad had done his due diligence, had really modeled everything around the profitability of having this convenience store located where it was in proximity to a couple of neighborhoods and having the revenue from gas, but ended up not being able to permit gas. Kind of broke my family in a way. Not like relationally, but just, you know, we got super lucky though. My dad had built up such an amazing career at this corporate company, he was able to go back to them same position, like do all some really amazing stuff. So I was always encouraged entrepreneurially, came from an entrepreneurial family, but also saw the perils early. So I think in growing up and in these different entrepreneurial endeavors that I've always kind of gravitated towards, I always kind of remembered the family market. Right. What is the thing that you're not thinking about? The best plan in the world could destroy all your due diligence gone because of this thing. So Digital Marketer came about. My passion kind of towards Ryan and what he was doing when we met. I think the undertone of how do I provide.

That X factor. The things that maybe could have kept my family, like did they need gas pumps? Right. Was it really necessary? Or was that the logical lie we told each other? Cause we didn't know how to better sell what we had. So kind of, you know, that entrepreneurism has always been in my blood, in my family. I've always kind of gravitated towards it. But then at some point I decided I was going to go into business and, you know, be a businessman. I was actually. First I went into accounting and then later transferred into Finance.

Graduated, was going to go to work at Morgan Keegan in the fixed income division, which I think everything that I can think of to thank that I didn't do that, because had I just a couple short months later, things would have kind of fallen apart. So graduated, had worked and built a strip mall with a friend's dad, put a couple of businesses in that sold my interest in the business, sold the strip mall, you know, graduated college, went to my kind of first day at Morgan Keegan and quit at lunch.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, it was tough. I remember walking in and saying, like, man, the opening speech was, if you work really hard for the next five to seven years as a sales assistant, then you can move up and you can get your Series 7, your Series 11, and become a junior broker. And you're just a couple of years away from making 100 grand. And I'm thinking, holy crap, I'm only gonna make 100 grand. Like, what? I've made more than that already. Like, last year. I'm taking a giant pay cut. And if opportunity is measured in decades, then this isn't for me. And I told the guy, and I walked away. And along kind of the course of this, I'd gotten married, met my wife. My wife went to work for this crazy guy who sold stuff on the Internet. He and I met. His name was Perry Belcher. He's crazy best friends, super crazy guy. But we became best friends in Memphis, Tennessee, and he became a mentor. And I remember he called me the day that day, said, man, how did it go? How was your first day? And I said, dude, I've been at the bar at the Fox and the Hound since lunch.

Oh, man.

And he said, I'll be right there. And we left at 2am and I don't know if there was a bar napkin left in that place.

Wow.

And they were all covered with ideas and business plan. Like, what if we did this? And it couldn't have been. These ideas couldn't have been further apart. I think the first. The next thing you know, I was the king of blank.

DVD or DVD media. We were importing DVD rewritable DVDs from China and selling them in bulk and all these just random things. But it came from that.

Quitting and hanging out with Perry. And it hit me when I was driving home. I feel pretty damn good for just quitting my job. My entire plans were out the door. And the fact that I just sat down with one of those brilliant people I'd ever met. But also one of the scariest Guy who didn't really seem to understand consequence in life. Things like, if I don't have money, how do I eat?

And I was more calm. And this when I kind of knew, like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't know why, but it's what I'm supposed to be doing. This dude seems crazy, but one of the most amazing and giving people in the world. And I think I'm supposed to be doing it with him. So we were in a mastermind. Here he was, and I would go to the mastermind and this guy had. Yannick Silver, had two masterminds. He had kind of an eight figure or seven figure earner and a six figure earner. And Perry was in the seven figure. And then there were a couple guys in the six figure earner that were waiting to move up and he'd always do this kind of co mingling thing. And that guy's name was Ryan Dice. We met, we became friends, and then a couple years later, we decided to start working together. And a few years after that, Ryan and I kind of shared our vision for what Digital Marketer could be. After the third year of Traffic and Conversion Summit, we decided we were pretty in line with that vision and both passionate about the same thing. So we kind of co founded Digital Marketer, all of us together, but really with Ryan and I taking the lead on building this platform out while Perry went and handled our consumer divisions.

How interesting.

Crazy story. Yeah. That I could go into any one part for the rest of this episode and we could laugh and probably hit the bleep button a couple of times.

There's no bleep button here.

You're good, but yeah, that's as short as I think I can get it. But definitely nothing you would have planned.

That's all right. What's the craziest idea that came from that bar experience at Perry?

Okay, I'm going to say this, and I don't know if he wants this. I try to forget this. I remember where. So Perry being Perry, who again, is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. I mean, his brain just operates in a different way. He came up to me, he was like, hey, living wills. I was like, what? He goes, have you. Have you heard? Have you been following the story in the news? And this is forever ago. I don't expect anyone to remember this and I'm not making light of it. So Terry Chavo, right, was there, was big national news. She didn't have a living will and her husband and her parents both had different ideas about what should happen. And Perry, we were at the bar, and this comes up. He's like, I own a law firm. I'm like, wait a second. Let's stop right there. What did you just say? He's like, yeah, I own a law firm in Washington, D.C. is like, wait, I don't understand. Normal people don't just own law firms. Like, I don't understand what you mean. He's like, yeah, it's on Pennsylvania Avenue. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? No, I own a law firm. I got a guy, we've got a mailing address here. He's a. He's an amazing lawyer. Here's the law firm. And I really think that right now there's an amazing amount of awareness, oddly enough, what this dude does. Living wills and estate planning. We can launch a site tomorrow and start selling living wills online. And I'm telling you, we're just going to ride kind of this media wave right now. Plus, people need it. And that was the cool. He was like, people need this. Like, look at this.

It's there. We have the opportunity to do it. And that was a really big lesson. Like, sometimes it's what you think you're gonna do, and then sometimes that opportunity is just so big and the need is there. And while you always have to gauge opportunity cost, sometimes we put too heavy of a weight on that opportunity cost when we don't really know how big it could be. So next thing you know, were selling blank writable media and living wills.

Wow.

And that was, I mean, that was about a 20 minute conversation. Perry built the website that night himself. I think that night was like a Friday night. And to qualify that Friday night we drank the Fox and the Hound out of not one, but two types of vodka. So he went home and did it after that. Several years ago, he went home and he built the website after that. And I think I woke up Saturday morning to him saying, hey, you need to call the guy in D.C. because we've got some orders for the living will. I was like, wait, that's. You were. That's a thing?

Okay. Wow. Wow. That just shows you how, you know, it's. It's, you know, analysis paralysis kind of whole thing. Like, Perry doesn't have that, obviously, you know, And I think a lot of high level people that just know how to get shit done, it does that. Like, you see a concept, you're like, yeah, what's the worst thing that can happen? It didn't sound like much, you have a website and a connection to a lawyer. Cool. All right, let's try some leads.

Yeah, that's easy. And this was back when you could, I mean, you go on to Google. We're not far from the overture days. I mean, you'd go on to Google and you could buy, you could start a campaign immediately. Page rank, page score. That wasn't a thing. You could buy traffic to anything and know whether it was going to work in minutes. I mean it was, it was where Google then was where Facebook was three, four, five years ago. Probably three years ago seems like a lot further. But you could just buy traffic to whatever you wanted and it kind of worked out. But you knew it wasn't Google that came in and slapped you or banned you for life or anything like that. So it's a very different time. But yeah, I mean the funny thing always was and waking up on, you know, Friday or any day really and figuring out what Perry decided we were going to make him sell and built the website. He'd log into one shopping cart, he'd pull up front page, knock out a website, write amazing copy, create the virtual pics and create the Google campaign. And everyone else in the company would wake up to orders and then figure out how to fulfill it, which is amazing. And you're right, like there are people that just aren't tethered by the same constraints as the rest of us are.

Yeah.

The thing that took a really long time to realize is that does, that does have a, have a cost. Right. There's a price to pay for that if you never mature as a business or a brand. And that price is usually people because the people who do.

Who do have those constraints. Right. Your operators.

You know, your implementers, they can't live in that world without being burnt out or broken for large periods of time. So it's great. And you've got to know how to go there as a company. Even mature companies, you just have to know when you've been there long enough to call it a success or a failure and then move it into a real business with real processes designed by people who. That is their native.

Yeah. Do you guys ever, these days, do you ever like jump at ideas like that anymore? Do you ever kind of like have a late night idea session and then like the next day you're like, let's, let's just build this and see what happens? Or are those days kind of a little bit harder to. A little bit. They don't come quite as frequently, I guess.

Yeah, it's a good question. And they do. They don't come not. They don't come as freely. And if they do come, they're not as. Without constraints. Right. I mean, we have partnership agreements, both legal binding agreements and agreements with one another on the units that we will own the P and L, that we have an operating board, and we kind of agree to what we're going to do and what results we're going after and how we're going to get there. Because we believe that we're building something that's valuable and we believe that we can build value and profit at the same time. So when we have those sessions, they're typically constrained by at least the holding companies that we have. Like there's no spin up a new business overnight or spin up a new product. And when we do spin up a new product, like Ryan recently dove in and then he and I him doing most of the work, me jumping in after just enough to be categorized as us, you know, so I get some of the credit. Yeah, yeah. You know, but created kind of a totally new product line here at Digital Marketer that we'll be releasing in the next, hopefully 30 days. But that was done, you know, diving in and building everything without the team. Now, instead of just going and launching it and saying. And waiting for someone in customer care to come in and say, hey, what is this question this person's asking? Or what the heck is this order that someone's asking how they access, which happened for several years now, we go in and we make sure that we innovate, we create, then we inform the company, partner with the stakeholders to roll it out. So it's a different process. But the key for us has been how do you still have that. Have that spirit, right, that entrepreneurial spirit. How do you still have that blue ocean and capitalize on those things without disrupting your company or at least controlling the chaos or controlling the disruption? Because if you can't harness it, if you're just breaking your people, then you're not going to have a company that builds upon the native genius of everyone there. It's going to be people who've outlasted. And I'll tell you, some people that can outlast that, you want to be there and others you don't because they're just numb to it. They just outlast it because they're oblivious. They don't. They don't feel anything.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's interesting. I remember we had Roland, he's actually been on the show twice and the first time we had him on, he actually broke down this massive process that he follows with spreadsheets and scores and his idea scorecard. Yeah, yeah, the idea scorecard where he breaks down every single potential opportunity at the moment and then score scores them and then figures out which opportunity to pursue. So, you know, I'm kind of envisioning like those. Those sort of idea sessions happening, and then the next day, Roland going, okay, let me plug it into the spreadsheet and see if it makes sense.

Yeah, well, and Roland, I mean, one, Roland's Mensa. So to understand kind of Roland's algorithms first, like, I mean, be the kind of smart that geniuses go, wow, that's smart. But if you want kind of a simpler version, Sean Ellis writes about kind of his ICE system in Hacking Growth. And it's a simple rating scale that's going to look at impact, confidence, and ease. And for us, internally, that's what we're looking at. What's the potential impact this could have? What confidence level do we have that we can pull that off? Do we know how to do it? Have we done it before? Has someone that we know, or do we have contacts in our Rolodex of people who have done this that we can call on if we get stuck? And then the ease. What's the ease of doing this?

Like, you guys, when it was launch a podcast, and that was an example I used forever.

When I was kind of teaching our version of this inside of a marketing growth aspect and saying.

If you were going to rewrite homepage copy or an indoctrination campaign versus launching a podcast, you know, what impact could it have? They both could be pretty high. What confidence level can have? Well, I mean, lots of people have big podcasts. Lots of people have.

Very successful indoctrination campaigns that get people kind of indoctrinated with their brand, get them to kind of go all in. And then we came to ease, and it's like, well, I can write an email campaign. I can change homepage copy. I mean, when we were launching podcasts, we talked to you guys, we came to you guys because my guess is we may be completely flipped on those two. If you were like, you may. I don't know. I don't know your email marketing prowess, but you may be like, man, I'd much rather launch a podcast, both because I know how to do it, because it's fun, than write an email campaign. And that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, your Rolodex, right? Who do you know that it may not be your native genius, but it's theirs. And as you start to build that, that's why places like War Room are so fantastic, because everyone's native genius combined and you've got just this distinct tank.

Yeah, man.

We do have a rating system internally. And again, that hacking growth book by Sean Ellis is a great read.

Yeah, nice. It's a little simpler than Roland using his big old checklist all the time. And I like how you said Roland's algorithms because he is like a computer. He's basically Google.

He is. Roland has an ability operating system and an algorithm that, that not only can I not legally disclose, but I don't think I can articulate because I'm not smart enough.

So. Mere mortal, I'm curious. So there's, you know, you kind of mentioned, you made a comment about how like each, each team member, or I guess each owner, each co founder sort of owns an element on the profit and loss sheet. And I'm kind of curious how that, that team dynamic works with i4 owners.

Right?

There's, there's you, there's Ryan Perry and Roland, right?

Correct.

So how does, how does that dynamic work between the four of you? And, you know, how does, how do you guys not step on each other's toes in the business all the time?

So that is the secret sauce, right? That's the thing that we struggled with forever. I say secret sauce, it's what? It's not the secret sauce. It's a great question. We, for the longest time, the things that would paralyze us were more decision by committee. Right. And at the end of the day, when looking at it, it was like, man, had we just done either of these two or three or four or however many people had a decision, everything, it doesn't matter. The result would have been somewhere exponentially larger than nothing, which is what we have now. So we started to go in and realize that was kind of the same time we realized that we have all these companies and we will switch our focus from one company that we've got built up to a lot of momentum and kind of trending in the direction that it needs to be. Now we've got either a new project or an existing project that maybe dipped a little bit that everyone moves their focus over and it becomes spinning plates. And just keeping them all spinning is difficult. So we're having these conversations about how do we, how do we simultaneously grow all of the companies and then how do we also establish lanes, roles and responsibilities so that there's some autonomy between the different partners. And we kind of came to two decisions. One, we need to document and systemize all of our processes, and that's where Digital Marketer was born. And two, we needed to look for existing frameworks. And what we came up with is almost the VC world, right. When you look at these portfolios that are managed by different partners. And that's what we moved over to. So we all kind of decided that Perry had a ton of history in kind of consumer goods and taking products to retail, dealing with buyers and manufacturing and that whole deal. And Ryan and I had none whatsoever. So Perry would head up the consumer division, and then Ryan and I would head up kind of the business division. So. And then Roland actually bought in. And when he came in, you know, Roland was not only the smartest person. I don't think we knew that yet. We knew he was incredibly smart. I don't think. I think. I don't think he let us know that he was the smartest person yet. He waited a couple of years, kind of just sprinkled it out over the first.

He wanted to set his roots in the digital marketer first and then be like, that's right.

And he wasn't a living trust attorney at the time in D.C. was he?

He was not. Definitely not him.

Thank you for clearing that up. Although wouldn't the story be so much better if he were?

I didn't put it together, but yeah, that would have been amazing.

So if we happen to edit this, let's just lie and say, yeah, because it makes for a better story. I'm joking.

We'll send it to Roland right after.

Yeah, there you go. I am encumbered by the truth, unfortunately. Yeah. So we looked at these kind of portfolio companies and split them up and had the autonomy and said, okay, basically we're going, going to act as a board and we're going to act as a mastermind. So we need to. We need a framework for sharing what's working because we don't want to swing the pendulum too far the other way. It's stupid if we're both solving the same problems or if I'm solving a problem that you solved two quarters ago or a month ago or a year ago, if you just have the answer. But how do we not step on each other's toes? We make sure that we know what decisions are made by the board, what decisions are made by the GM or the portfolio holder, and we go from there. Roland came in and he headed up just basically M and A. Right. That's where he came from and looking at all of our stuff. Roland was basically, how do we think bigger? I mean, that's his. On top of being ridiculously smart and good at figuring everything out and kind of good looking, he also is just the biggest thinker I know. So he's able to plus everything and come in and just force everybody to think bigger. And that was kind of his role. And that's when things really kind of started to take off for us. So, you know, and that I think we can all look at things and say, what was the secret sauce there? What made that work? And then how do we apply that to all aspects of our life here? I think it's really cool because we had a bunch of people that were really good at what they did. There was a lot of overlap in skills. So everybody did everything.

Yeah.

So when we, we were able to clearly define who does what, establish a communication and kind of guidelines. Right. Set expectations for the relationship so the other person either knows that they're exceeding or falling shy of those expectations, then it became healthy and then things just got really, really fun.

Yeah. Is there a time that you've seen when working with other companies, you know, outside of dm, but maybe some of your clients where it's, there's a point in time where you have to do this like with a partner. Do you think you should do this from the very beginning, like have these clear expectations or is it just kind of like hustle and grind for a period and then once you reach this point, then you can kind of start laying out more of the, I guess the corporate type structure, kind of like what you have, you guys have.

So I think begin with the end in mind. Right. So what kind of company, I mean, you got to have the conversations like Roland and I just had this conversation in New York where it was like, okay, what do you want to be? What do you want, Roland? So I think step one is make sure that if you're going to have a partner that you're like, you're in an alignment. The thing that we're always seeking in all of our companies is alignment. Right. I want alignment between the compensation structure and goals of my employees and the goals and the profitability of the company. As long as those things are in alignment. Companies work if the people are growing professionally and financially.

By the same activities that are causing the company to grow in value and profitability. Do you think stuff's going to kind of work out?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

As long as you have a good product and you know your market Cap, your market's growing, not shrinking, all those other things. But so alignment is super important. We're looking at the same kind of alignment from go. So when you're going into business with someone, you have to say, start with alignment. Like, make sure you're aligned in what you want the end result to be. Like, are you building some billion dollar company or are you having a lifestyle business? Are you wanting to build something up that employs hundreds of people or thousands of people, or you want to keep a super lean team, which it has a ceiling. Do you want to go into an office every day or do you kind of want to work from home? Start to have these conversations, make sure there's alignment, but after you know that you're in alignment with vision. Now talk about operating alignment. Someone has to be in charge. I love the book. Gino Whitman, who wrote Traction, I think also Rocket Fuel, which is amazing. I love that book. It says, okay, basically here's your visionary and here's your.

Implementer.

Right.

So visionary implementer, understanding those two roles. And it's contradictory as he goes through and breaks down the roles and responsibilities. When he talks about the implementer, which is usually your number two, your president, your coo, whatever the heck you call it. I'm more of an implementer. Right. If we're looking at that framework, that's me. When you're looking at your implementer, your implementer is the one who has ultimate say over a lot of the resources that are deployed. So like you're at Digital Marketer, Ryan's the CEO, I'm the president. When we're talking about the resources, like I own the P and L, it's my responsibility for the pnl. So when Ryan wants to make a, an investment, we talk about that. I'm going to say based on these things, I don't think we can make it. Or based on these things, yeah, man, I think we can. Same thing with projects. So I think say all that to say someone has to be in charge. Yeah, because if you're partnering with someone, you're just building in kind of a stalemate. If you've got two people that are going into business together and they both are equals, there's what are you on the cap table and what are you on the org chart? And by God, they have to be different. Someone has to be in charge. You may be 50, 50 partners on the cap table, but who's going to ultimately make the decision? And maybe you split the decisions down the middle and you say these decisions are sales and marketing or these are revenue decisions and these are operational decisions. And here's who kind of has the ultimate say over these different ones. But. But if you start with a structure that allows both people via authority and charges them both with making a decision, then what you have to have is agreeance. And not only is agreeance hard to come by, it's rarely the right thing for a business.

Interesting.

Yeah. No, I remember when we were at War Room actually a few weeks back in Beverly Hills, Ryan actually made a comment about how if you've got partners and you and your partners aren't fighting fairly frequently, then one partner in your business is probably irrelevant. So, you know, it's kind of a good thing if you're challenging each other and not. I mean, the vision needs to be on the same page, but, you know, the mechanisms to get there. I think it is okay to have a little bit of controversy and a little bit of debate over it.

Yeah.

As long as it's constructive. Yeah.

Friction, you know, I mean, they may not be irrelevant, but they're definitely checked out. Which. Which is just as dangerous. Right? Yeah. I mean, we. When we're on our off sites with our leadership team, one of the things that. I mean, I love Patrick Lencioni. Everything he writes is amazing. I love the five dysfunctions of a team. As he goes in and he talks about these, you know, this. This fear of conflict. You need to have a healthy amount of conflict in your executive team. So we really set the ground rules and empower people to be challengers. Right. But we also give a framework. Do I need? And when we're asking for or when we're laying something out, we'll say, I need you to be the critic right now. And that's. You are free to challenge. You're free to innovate. You're free. Like, tell me why this can't work. I've done a lot of research. I put a lot into figuring out. Or we have, you know, blue Ocean. I need you to think bigger. Which one do I want you to be? Do I need more ideas or do I need you to attack critically the one that I've presented? So we want conflict because if everyone's in agreements, then we're growing at this. We're growing at the speed of relaxation. No one's. No. No one is at all put out. No one is forced to grow. Everyone can still kind of dial it in. So if we're not forced to grow, then no one's challenging. If no one's challenging, then we're complacent. So we need. And I believe at Digital Marketer, we've got a mission that matters. I believe at all of our companies.

We are changing segments of the world, segments of the business population. We are doing good work. So it's our job to get that out there. And I believe everyone who can say the same thing, like, you've got to put people in place that are hungry. You've got to keep hungry people hungry.

That's huge, man. And that's the difference between. And you kind of alluded to it is incremental growth to something that's exponential something. And even if it's just small things, you know, it's like, let's not just be comfortable all the time if that's not what you want. And I don't think DM's a lifestyle business.

Always pushing it.

Yeah, it's. I mean, we've got a big office and we come to work and, you know, Ryan and I are here every day because I think, I think lifestyle businesses are tough. They don't align with me and what I want to do because I want to go all in on something, right? And then I'll go all in on something else. So I truly believe. And I didn't know I believe it until I heard Ryan said it. He said, man, if you put me up against a lifestyle business, I'm going to win because I'm just going to outwork you. When you're on the beach, when you're over here, when you're doing these things, I'm going to be at the office for 12 hours a day in the beginning, maybe more. I'm going to build a team so that when I'm sleeping, they're working. I'm going to invest in systems and software. I'm going to build something that has value and it's going to gobble you up. Not because you're not smart enough, just because it's going to outwork you and that, you know, I want to build something that is going to do. That is going to have massive value. And then when I'm done building it, decide whether. What. What relaxation looks like for me. You know, I mean, is that consulting? Is that chilling on the beach somewhere? Probably not, because that sounds terrible, but that sounds terrible to me.

Funny.

People who love.

Yeah, well, what is the vision? Say it again.

I was just going to say the kind of last thought there is, like, you can't grow at the speed of your own comfort because that's not growth. At best, you're treading Water.

Yeah, you would really like that book. You squared, actually, because this is exactly what it says.

That's awesome.

Go for it.

So I have one more quick question along these lines. It's more of just to feed my own curiosity, but I know. So digital marketer, you're kind of like an umbrella with a bunch of brands underneath it. You know, you've got your DIY site and you've got a business in the prepper space and you've got all these other businesses. Are those like individual owners, like babies? Or was that like a. Like you all came together and decided, like, we need to do something in this space, we need to do something in this space. Or was like Perry going, hey, we need to. We need to have something in the prepper space. I'll head that one up. Like, do people kind of own the different assets in the business, but not like own from like an equity standpoint, but like own is like the taking ownership of those.

Yeah. So we have to have a gm. I mean, that's one of our roles, is one of our rules. As we, as we have these, someone has to ultimately be in charge, right? Someone has to. While we can have shared resources.

A GM makes for a terrible shared resource because they're never going to fight for one brand and one brand only. So that's kind of the question of ownership. Get that one out of the way, because that one's easy. How we got to the portfolio of companies we have now is very entrepreneurial. Right.

Every opportunity and every idea was fed at the same rate, which was challenging because a lot of good ideas died along the way. A lot of good ideas scared the hell out of mediocrity. A lot of good ideas did a little bit better, but nothing just crushed because we were on this shared resource model which we had to fine tune. And when we split ownership in these portfolio companies, we were able to build teams in and around those businesses. So we built teams that specialized at B2B. We built teams that specialized at B2C because they're fundamentally different models and.

They serve different people. So you have to understand who you serve and be able to understand their average day to be able to speak to them, whether or not you're speaking to them from a customer service standpoint or from a marketing or sales standpoint. So splitting those out into those two groups really helped to build. So actually, the companies that you were talking about, kind of the diy, the survival life, and those aren't under the same umbrella as digital marketer, so.

They'Re in A different brands or portfolio company that's owned by the same holding company, not in the same group of brands as Digital Marketer. Digital Marketer has Digital Marketer and War Room and Praxio and True Conversion and Online Marketing Institute and Traffic and Conversion Summit. Those are the six brands that are kind of under of this holding company because all of those different products serve businesses. So again, back to making sure that we're grouping people together that are talking to the same people, that understand the same model but that understand you're going to have to deal with a business owner or a professional differently than you're going to a consumer. And you can't toggle back and forth being empathetic to those two people.

One support ticket after the next. Right. Eventually it's going to become generic.

Yeah.

So there are owners, there are GMs, we split them up based on who you serve, not what you sell. And kind of the. Yeah.

Rest kind of works itself out.

Yeah, no, I can see that and I love that because it goes back to that whole plate spinning analogy because I know Matt and I have definitely hit those walls where, you know, you get the momentum building and then you kind of move focus to something else that is kind of building still and then that thing starts to go off the rails or decline a little bit and you're like, ah, need to allocate resources again. But it sounds like having a GM or at least having a good, you know, team. I didn't, I know we didn't even get into the whole marketing team thing that we were.

Well, that was kind of the next rabbit hole I was going to try to touch on.

Yeah, this, maybe this is a good time.

Yeah, yeah. Real quick. You just hit on something there that's so important though. Right. Because so every Monday morning I have a meeting with our leadership team and the leadership team is there and we go through each one of those six portfolio companies and we say, what are the one to three most critical things that must happen at Digital Marketer this week? Okay. At True Conversion here, here, here. And we have that conversation without any constraints. And at the end we then identify because we do have a shared resource model. We have shared resource in creative, so graphics and video and copy to some extent. We have shared resources.

In legal and accounting and in people and culture. So there are these shared resources. So there are times that multiple business entities are competing for the same time slot.

Right.

The same resource. Trying to figure. And that's why you need a GM to sell it. Right. But as executives we have to say kind of who eats in that meeting. There are plenty of times where we say this company has the ramp and Runway to be bigger than Digital Marketer in six months. Unfortunately, right now it's not.

It can wait a week. Digital Marketer.

Can'T. So even though we have to. Again, back to the opportunity cost. Can it wait a week? Okay, great. Digital Marketer gets the resource. Or Digital Marketer can wait a week and this company gets the resource. Someone has to make those decisions. What we've done is we've pulled those decisions up to the executive level. So every Monday we're knowing where we have.

Kind of where we have bottlenecks we get to identify. And we've got someone from people and culture in there going, hey, guys, this is the fifth time in two months that graphics has been kind of a bottleneck, that we've been fighting over this. I'm going to propose that we hire someone there. Or when looking at the shared resource, this person who's in graphics is spending over 80% of their time creating graphics for Digital Marketer. I'm going to make a recommendation that we hire to replace that person, pull that person down directly onto Digital Marketer because it's now grown outgrown. The shared resource model for this role it gives us, we are knowingly committing our resources every Monday morning. We also know what could be if we had more. So we're pointing our resources at the right place.

That's interesting. I like that a lot. So the Monday morning meetings and who's on, like. So you said it's a leadership team call. So what kind of leaders are we talking? What are the roles?

So it's Ryan, that's myself. Right. We're there kind of almost in the same operator capacity that we would be a digital marketer without the CEO kind of president role. It's, you know, we're, we're principal founders there. Then we have the head of marketing, the head of product, the head of sales, the head of partnership, the head of people and culture. I'm trying to think of, remember, I'm going to feel really terrible if I remembered it or forgot anyone. And the head of technology.

Technology. Okay, got it. Yeah. That seems to cover it all. And I could see how that is so valuable every morning or every Monday, hitting on. Yeah. The goals, I'm assuming like KPIs are probably being talked about to see if you're on track for. For the goals from previous weeks or months.

Do you guys kind of do that and have these mile markers quarterly or Things, kind of time periods you're looking at with KPIs.

Yeah. So we look at the KPIs, we have kind of just general revenue KPIs at the scalable company. Right. When we're looking at our scalable companies, which is our holding company for all of the business portfolio. And so we have certain revenue goals there. As we break down into the individual kind of platforms or individual brands, we'll have different KPIs depending on kind of what our what, what our sprint is, what our what our wig and our rocks are. That quarter. We're always going to reevaluate rocks and wigs on a quarterly basis. Sometimes we'll set them for six months if they're bigger, but we'll have, we'll break them down into milestones. But the company, digital marketer and its leadership is having a meeting every Monday as well. Praxio is having a meeting just in all hands right now because Praxio is only six people. So their all hands meeting is enough to both check KPIs, set goals and inform what's going on. We're Digital marketers, got 50 people, we can't have 50 people setting goals. So we have our kind of our wig meeting on Mondays checking in on goals and then we have our all hands which is there to inform the company on what we're doing. Are we doing what we said we would do, is it working and where do we need help? So it's interesting as these companies mature how the meeting cadence changes, but making sure that you understand what is the purpose behind this and what KPIs are we looking at at this meeting versus the next one and why.

I like that.

Now if we were to step back and maybe look at companies that aren't quite the size of digital marketer, but maybe they're adding port portfolio companies under their business. So a good example is Joe and I, we actually co own a business in the home brewing space. It's a niche business that, you know, teaches people how to brew their own beer at home and it's, it's a fairly small site. We acquired the business from another company and right now it doesn't really generate enough revenue for us to feel like we're justified in hiring a team to run it. So I'm kind of curious where, where do you feel that cutoff point is? When should they start? When should companies start building this team versus continuing to bootstrap it themselves?

So I love the hybrid model right now when you're looking at especially for a marketing team. And this works for a growth team as well. Like, you know, traditionally you kind of looked at one of two models, right? It was either I'm going to completely outsource all of my marketing or I'm going to completely insource and build this in house team. Now, I think the right model for everyone, including digital marketers, this hybrid model, to what degree? Hybrid is where the size of the company comes in.

Right.

We have a fairly large marketing team, but we still leverage agencies.

We could have no marketing team and 100% leverage agencies. So I think focusing on a hybrid model and making sure that you say, okay, one, what is our native genius? What are our core competence? Is that marketing? Is it marketing strategy?

Are we able to come up with a strategy we know needs to be deployed to achieve these goals? If so, perfect. Come up with a strategy. Figure out what you can deploy internally with your existing bandwidth and then start to open up Excel, build some pivot tables, I don't know, take your shoes off so that you can count with your toes. It doesn't matter. But figure out what is that inflection point. Right. When can you move over it? What do your revenues need to be or your profits need to be to be able to kind of move to an agency model where you can have them doing some of those things, to where you can now double down on what you're good at. Right. So with you guys, I would say a couple of things like. So.

Let'S flip the roles here. I'll interview you guys for a second. You obviously bought this company from another person, probably one. Because it was an amazing opportunity. I'm guessing that one or both of you also enjoys microbreweries or brewing at home or has some interest or passion in it. Would that be somewhat accurate?

That is? Yeah.

Has the business grown since you've bought? Since you acquired it?

Since we acquired. Not revenue wise, but in terms of traffic. Yes, traffic and list growth.

Yeah.

That's fantastic. Why would you. Okay, let me ask. Pause. Let me ask that differently. What if you spent an additional 10 hours a week on it? Would it grow exponentially? Would it have mild growth? Would it have marginal growth, no growth at all?

I would say it has the potential for exponential growth. 100%. Yeah.

With 10 hours a week, is it time and focus? So keeping you from that.

Yes, that's 100% it. Yep.

Do you know what needs to happen?

Yeah, actually, I would say we have a pretty good vision.

Great. So it seems like you need to deploy the hybrid model. In some capacity. Because if you already know what needs to happen, you can clearly articulate that to someone. It may not be time to hire a full time person, but to speak to someone who could do that either. Heck, maybe you partner with another person. Maybe you partner with an operator. Maybe what you're missing is an operator. You guys have the strategy. You bring in an operator who wants to be there day in and day out and you dedicate some resources. Obviously you're going to expend capital. Potentially depending on how large you've grown the business. Maybe you could have someone buy in, reinvest that capital. Either way, someone should be doing those things, you know, need to be done. I would recommend going and saying we understand marketing. Right. So I don't need someone who's gonna be marketing strategy. That's more of what we already got.

Right.

We could probably do it. Most of us don't do stuff that we could do. Like at home. I don't cut my yard. Not because I think I'm too good to do it, but I start to, I start to weigh out what I could be doing. Right. My family, I love spending time with my family. Believe it or not, I spend a lot of time at work. You guys can probably relate to that. So.

I don't get joy from cutting. I don't derive any joy from cutting my yard.

Right.

It needs to get done. That's why it gets done. At some point I could do it or I could spend time with my family. I'm not going to take a principal stance and handcuff myself to a lawnmower because by God, I could do this. But when we go into a professional standpoint, we do that. You guys obviously have a talent, native genius at marketing and the things that you're doing. So they're not being done as often as they should be over on this other side. And you're not hiring someone or partnering with someone or hiring an agency because you should do it.

Yeah.

Because you know how to do it. You have the core competence. At some point you're not doing it because you're not doing it. There's a reason and it matters, but it doesn't. The only thing that matters is it's not being done. So you can be fundamentally right or the business can grow.

Yeah.

Doesn't mean you have to go higher. Right?

Yeah.

And you know what? Sounds like you got a business teaching people how to do something that's enjoyable. Relaxing is a passion. As a hobby could maybe turn into a career. So you kind of fall into that category of your responsibility is to get that information and to promote that business or those products and get them into the hands of the many people as possible.

Doesn't have to be you that's doing it.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think, I think in retrospect, the thing, the mistake we made was actually not keeping the original owner around to continue to run it and then just deploying our assets and expertise into what he's already doing. But that's a, you know, that's a whole different rabbit hole.

But that's a perfect.

We learned from Roland. If you're going to buy a business, go in and don't buy all the business. Go in and buy most of the business. Keep the operator there, Give them a salary and the ability to increase their ownership. And that's the. Especially if you bring in that marketing skill, if you can increase the value, if you can increase traffic, increase leads, increase sales, whatever it is that you bring to the table, that doesn't negate the need for someone to be there and operate the business. Yeah. So that's a lesson we've all learned by not doing it and going like, what do you know? I couldn't actually run 14 businesses.

I could do everything. I'm an entrepreneur all the time in the world.

But I think so big.

Yeah.

When it comes to compensation, I'm curious, you know, specifically for in house team members, obviously not agencies. Do you have any sort of compensation for plans that are tied to performance? Are they getting bonuses based on revenue? How do you keep employees motivated financially to grow with the company?

Yeah, that's a good question. And there's so many different opinions on this out there for us.

I'm not of the camp that everyone needs to be on some form of variable compared, especially as we move into.

A millennial workforce.

I'm talking to our executives now. And our executives want to know that they're a part of something, that they're paid fairly at or above market, that they have the opportunity to grow. But more importantly, that.

They are being invested in personally and professionally in their growth. So making sure that, you know, kind of what the workforce cares about. For me, I am, listen, I'm a pure capitalist. Like, I love that making an impact. I have to have some purpose in there. But if it's not making money, then that's not enough. Right. It needs to be purpose plus profit.

But that's just not how the new workforce is motivated. So for us, it's culture. We bring people in with culture. We bring people in with a mission, with being a part of something. We train them. We give people skills.

I make sure our leadership knows that we're not in the business of trading time for money with our employees. That's not what it means to hire someone at any of our companies. We are charged with making them better in every way, shape, or form. I heard Chris Hogan say one time, a manager can make someone better at their job. A leader can make someone better at their life. We are to leave people better than we found them. Like, we invest in people and how to have difficult conversations, how to set, like, time management and how to prioritize things in your life. You don't get real good at conflict resolution at work and go home and be a giant jackass. Right?

Right.

You're better with your spouse or your significant other. You're with your siblings. You're better with those important relationships in your life. And you feel that, right? You feel that?

Oh, yeah.

And when it's appropriate, we pay variable comp. But I'm not trying to contort my business to pay variable comp because it's not what's motivating at or above market rate. And let them be a part of something. Give them an opportunity to grow. Tell them how that's going to happen. Empower them to do it. Educate them. And you know what? Maybe they'll grow internally, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll grow here to a degree, and then they'll leave. They'll always leave your company in a better place than they found it. And you'll always leave them in a better place than you found them. And that happens. Business is not family. You can't fire a family. I mean, she can, but we rarely fire a family member.

Right.

Right. It's really like, you're not sitting around in the holidays and you're like, you know what.

Aunt Cindy? Get the hell out. Never come back.

I'm tired of your casserole every year.

You were late again. This has to stop. That's not gonna happen. But we tell our offices that we're family, and then we fire family. It's difficult, like, get okay with people leaving. If not, you're gonna be constantly disappointed. You're gonna apply the wrong framework to the relationship, and then you're going to be inappropriate. And I don't mean in like a HR violation inappropriate kind of way, but I don't know. So compensation. I want to get to a level where the executive team or a leadership team at a holding company where there's some sort of Profit share because you need to compensate on the things that are important, like top line revenue is going to increase the value of a company. But really what matters. And companies that you have no desire to sell or you just want to be profitable as profit, so you know, compensate people on. On profit when they can affect all aspects of it.

Yes. They have to be in control of that KPI. That was something that Roland told us. We actually posed a similar question to him about compensation. And if they can control a KPI, especially like profit, for instance, then you can kind of build in something that way.

Yeah, right. If not, it's just mean it's true.

And we'll all do the things that we are incentivized monetarily to do. Right. So where comp plans go poorly is when the activity that will allow someone to earn more isn't in alignment with the activity you want them doing. Because it's just human nature. If I have the opportunity to go earn more, even if I'm not financially driven, I'm, I'm logical. I'm going to go do that thing. And really I should because the person putting together that comp plan should put one together that is in alignment with the company's growth goals. And if it's not, then it's not my fault for logically going, well, okay, if they're giving me more money to do this and these are the activities I should prioritize.

Yeah, I like that a lot.

Yeah, no, that's been something we've been juggling lately because we don't have a very large team. I think we're working with about eight people right now on our team total. And we had one week a couple of weeks ago where I actually had two people leave our team in the same week and kind of, you know, lit a fire in our business. But we've since got past that. But I'm always kind of curious, you know, what are some other ways other companies are keeping their team motivated? And you know, it doesn't always have to be financial motivation, although I do know that is a big motivator for a lot of people.

Sure. I'll give you the steps. And I don't know, we may be nearing the end, but let me just leave you with some steps on what it looks like. Thank you. In our company. So one, I have a spiel and it starts off with the only thing that you can earn at this company is an opportunity. And let me be very, very clear, your butt in that seat means you already have one. Because the role that you currently occupy is an opportunity for a list of people who aren't inside of these walls. So never forget that what you're doing now is an opportunity. And you can't get the next opportunity without doing the following things. Step 1. Be ridiculously good at your job, even if you don't like it. That's it.

That's how you know that you're a professional. Yeah, be ridiculously good at your job, even if you don't like it. Step 2. Step 2. Document the systems and processes that allow you to be ridiculously good at your job. Step three, Train someone else. Grab a buddy. See if they can do your job to 80% of your competence following those documents and systems. If so, good chance that you've done a good job documenting. If not, go back through them again until they can.

Step 4. Wait for an opportunity to present itself. See, alignment is such a big thing in our company. Just because you're ready and you've earned opportunity doesn't mean that the company should expedite opportunity. We take the social responsibility of hiring very seriously. When I'm hiring someone, I'm taking them and I'm committing to them and their family and the people who love them and the people that care about them. As long as they do what they say they're going to do that we're going to do what we say we're to going going to do. And if I don't know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I can do that, I can't hire.

Because if you hire them, you're going to look them in the face and fire them if it comes to that. That's just it. Right? But those are so if I open up an opportunity early because I like you, I put everybody else's job at risk. So you earn the opportunity. And you know what? Sometimes you wait and sometimes you wait and the opportunity becomes available inside this company. Sometimes you wait and the opportunity becomes available outside of this company. And you know what? If you have to take it, we'll wish you all the luck in the world. If we can't in good conscience give you that opportunity right now without jeopardizing everybody else. Can't do it. Or without changing the plan or the focus of the company's trajectory. Can't do it. Doesn't mean you didn't earn it. And I end with I need you to separate your self worth from your salary. Because you know what? I will never be paid what I'm worth. There is never a time where I will be paid Where I'm worth. There's never a time where Ryan will be paid what he's worth. Never time. Roland will be paid what he's worth, or Perry or anyone else for that matter. Worse than what you get paid. Have to be separated because one is determined by the market and the other is determined by you.

The only thing you can ever earn here is opportunity. That's how you earn it, man.

You're growing. You're educating people for life right there. Those four rules right there can be spread so far and wide anywhere in life. It's amazing. Thank you for those. I'd say it's a pretty good way to wrap up there. We did want to ask and just. And this is going to be a total quick one. Is the vision or the mission for DM Digital Marketer? Because you kind of hinted at that. I just wanted to kind of wrap it up and hear it from you. What is the vision for Digital Marketer? Maybe in the next handful of years coming up here.

Yeah. So our mission is to double the size of 10,000 businesses in the next five years. That's our vision. We want to do that by open sourcing strategies that we've proven that work, you know, by.

Enabling business owners or dentists or whoever you may be with the marketing chops to go and do what needs to be done. See, we believe that the best dentist should win, not the best marketer, marketing dentist. So how do we do that? Like, I don't want our dentists to be amazing marketers. I want to be able to create certifications and trainings and systemized processes that the best dentist can hand off to someone and create an amazing marketer to grow their practice. So we believe in the democratization of kind of marketing information. We believe in leveling the playing field. So we want to double the size of 10,000 small businesses by doing that. It's the vision of digital marketer. But as we stepped into this portfolio of brands that serve businesses, we realized it's the mission of all of them. Our job is our passion. Our goal is to enable businesses to grow right, to take what we know or to go find that. To create processes for systems that are proven and to open source them. So whether it's software or education or tools or templates, doesn't matter. That's what we do because we do believe that entrepreneurials or entrepreneurs and small business are the backbone of this economy. We believe that we can change world economies if we enable the right people to win. So we want to enable the right people to Win the people who truly care about their customers, who truly have an exceptional product or service. By God, we want to get the word out there about them. We can only do that so much, but we can definitely walk beside them and enable them with the things that we know work. So that's our mission. That's what we wake up passionate about.

That's awesome, man. You guys are doing it, too. You're rocking it in so many ways and all the different businesses you have. Yeah, man.

Really appreciate that.

No, this is. This has probably been one of my favorite discussions we've had on this podcast. And I. I say that in all sincerity. This is honestly just. I really love this conversation. We've gone an hour and eight minutes now, so we're a few minutes over what we promised you, but sorry about that.

Thank you.

No, thanks for spinning that extra time with us. We really, really appreciate it. Obviously, we want people to go to digitalmarketer.com after this. Is there anywhere else that you'd want to send people after listening to this episode?

Yeah. Check out Praxio.com if you need to kind of document your systems and processes. We believe that Praxio is going to be a way for you to have an internal knowledge base to duplicate your best people. Right. You talk about those four steps and how do you earn opportunity? We realized that there was a need to create a platform that became kind of the brains of your company, and we think, selfishly that we've done it. So if you're looking at how to document the things.

That are really working in your business so that you can build upon them, if you need to figure out how to train people or onboard new people, I wish you'd go to praxio.com, check it out. We've got a free trial I think you'll like.

I just went to Praxio and I don't know why I've never been there. I'm sorry, Richard And I just looked at it. I'm like, dear God, this is really cool.

We think so. It's been on the hush hush for a little while. We've been developing that internally and in alpha and beta phases for about a year and a half, a little bit longer. If you look at the technology that we built, that powered digital marketer that we kind of pulled over into this, we're really excited about it. Hopefully we're going to kind of put on our marketing hat in the next couple of months and really get the word out. But for those of you guys listening to this, amazing podcast. I hope you'll go check it out, give us your feedback.

Awesome, man. Cool. Well, thank you very much for your time, and we'll let you go. I know we're already well over, so appreciate this, Richard, and we'll definitely chat soon.

I appreciate it, guys. All right, Matt, Joe, thank you guys so much.

Thank you. Have a good one.

You too. Bye. Bye.

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