Richard Tripp Interview On The POV Method - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #153

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And we got a special guest. He's kind of a trip, though, because he's very funny.

That's very funny.

I mean, not that he hasn't heard that before, but his name is Richard Tripp. And Richard, where are you right now?

I'm in my basement in Utah. And that was a good joke. That's an original.

Yeah. You've never heard that before, huh? You know, it's like when someone says to me, like, shoe polish or nail polish or polish or whatever, and they actually think they're being original, and they're.

Like, did you ever think about the.

Name Polish when you were doing stuff in the cleaning industry? No. Thoughts never occurred to me once.

Wow.

Thank you for pointing that out to me. You have a pretty interesting story, and you have a lot of insight. You have a business current day called the PAV Method Point of view. It's obviously been used very successfully in 25k genius network. You've actually taken a lot of our Genius Network clients through a PAV Method, not only for my own group, but for their groups. You've helped the company, infusionsoft, make a boatload of money. But who is Richard Tripp? And then we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. Me and Dean have some questions for you.

Okay, great. Well, I guess who am I? I'm a dad. I'm a father. I got three beautiful kids, and that's probably my proudest accomplishment to date. I came from a kind of a rough background, and I didn't know whether or not I'd ever have a of my own. And so I've got three beautiful kids. Jaden, Lauren, and Maya. And I'm married to my sweetheart Stephanie. We've been married for 18 years, and we live in Utah. And I know that sounds just so sick and syrupy and sweet, but for me, it means a lot to actually have a family and have people that I get to come home to every night who love me and are excited to see me, because that wasn't always the way it was for me. And so I'm also a businessman. I'm an entrepreneur. I think of myself more as a creator or an innovator or overcomer than just a businessman or an entrepreneur. I love to find ways to take challenging situations and turn them into things that become valuable to me and valuable to other people. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about That I think about that all the time. When I wake up in the morning, I go to bed at night. I'm thinking about challenges people are having and ways to turn that into stuff that's valuable. And I'm a proud member of the entrepreneurial community. I love to be around other innovators who do the same thing, and I get a huge kick out of that. And it's an exciting time to be alive. Right? I mean, I think there's never been a time where people like us, who really aren't just consumers, we're not always just out shopping for something we can consume and falling into postures of life that are about consumption, but we're instead looking for what's next and are forever thrilled with new ideas and genius concepts. There's never been an easier time for people like us to get together and share our ideas and benefit from one another's thinking. It's just like this incredible period of TED talks and masterminds and genius networks and podcasts like this. I think about Gutenberg, the press, and back then when it was so hard to access ideas. And then we went through, like, this explosive information phase where so much information was flooding us. But now what's happening is all this information is starting to get curated and people are starting to find each other and very, very meaningful. Interesting conversations are starting to happen that have never happened before. And we're creating ideas and approaches to life that the world has never had before. And so I love. I'm an idea guy and I love that kind of stuff. And it's one of the biggest reasons why I love being a part of 25K. And it's one of the reasons I'm really excited and honored to be here and talk with you guys today. Hopefully, we'll have some great ideas and conversation for people to hear.

Yeah. Awesome. And, Dean, before you jump in, I want to mention that, just for context, that Richard has studied over 4,200 different small businesses, like many of the people that are probably listening to us right now, 3,500 of them, while he was the Chief product officer at Infusionsoft from the years 2010 to 2013. Another 680 while he was a senior leader at Intuit's Small business division from 2005 to 2009. Of course, he's spoken to hundreds of CEOs about the companies and helped many of them basically experience big pivots and growth in their companies, infusionsoft included. He's also started an operation, six different small businesses. And so he has a background with many of the challenges for growing a business, sustaining a business, getting the right clients, customers, prospects, patients, getting rid of the wrong ones and that sort of stuff. So that's kind of what we're going to dig into and figure out kind of what is his thinking behind the process and how all of our listeners can, you know, get a lot of improvement in theirs. Because so much of the application and implementation of effective marketing has a lot to do with, you know, you're thinking about it and you're just, you're thinking about your business growth in general. So, Dean, I'll start with you, let you kind of.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm excited to have the conversation because it's one thing to have the skill and the ability to overcome problems or to find solutions to problems, but it's another thing altogether to solve them and then understand what you did to solve them and create a methodology that somebody else can use and you can duplicate again and again. So that's an even rarer feat. So I'm really excited about. I love systems and I love methodologies and I love kind of that kind of thinking. So I'm, I'm excited just to have the conversation.

Yeah. Richard, you kind of touched on, when you're talking about your relationship, that life was not always this way. I never thought I'd have a family and that sort of stuff. And we could. There's two different approaches there. I can jump right into just business stuff and some of the successes you've had and what you did at infusionsoft and all that sort of stuff, or we can kind of see if there's some lessons that, you know, come from, you know, the very beginning, including, you know, handing the keys to your shiny BMW over to the rough looking guy who came to repossess it, which you've, you know, shared that story before. So I always, you know, so wherever you want to start, I think it's good to.

Was there ever anybody that's. Is there any dapper looking repo guys? I mean, that's really. You really get the picture when you say that.

Yeah, yeah, this guy was. That was a heck of a day, you know, and it was the beginning of a journey and I'll touch on that. And I appreciate you kind of bringing up both angles, Joe. And we'll probably just kind of work back and forth between them because for me, that's. So Dean, I also am a huge systems thinker and I love methods. I love getting into situations that are really complex and challenging. And then finding a way to. Someone once said to me, you know, they're simple on the near side of complex, and then there's simple on the far side of complex, and there's simple that emerges after you've waded through the complexity. And the simple on the near side of complex is arrogant and simplistic and caves under the, you know, caves in under its own weight after a while. But simple on the far side of complexes is very elegant and is kind of perennially true and always seems to just be true. And so I love looking, I love wading through complex systems and trying to find really simple insights that are true in most scenarios. That's a huge aspiration of mine and it's one that I've. It's a, it's a, you know, Dan Sullivan talks about unique abilities that we have as people, and I feel like that's one of my unique abilities and it's one I've been using to get myself out of very complex challenges and problems for a long time. And in as much as my past is relevant to a bunch of entrepreneurs who are listening, it's only in that many times that's the situation an entrepreneur is in. You know, an entrepreneur is in a very complex situation. Lots of variables coming at them fast from different directions. High stakes, you know, high stakes. It's your living on the line, it's your reputation on the line, it's your sense of self on the line. And so how do you find your way out of that? You know, how do you create success out of that? That's one of the biggest things that entrepreneurs face every day. And it's a lot like some of just the life challenges that I found myself in. And I think entrepreneurs really can relate to that because most entrepreneurs, it's funny when you get most of the people who've actually succeeded, who've actually made millions of dollars for themselves, or who've made billions of dollars for themselves even, or people who've really paid the price and succeeded together. What they're often just as interested in talking about is their epic battles and failures and pains and they're overcoming through those experiences. And sometimes they're even more excited about talking about those experiences than they are about their recipes for success. And that was a hugely reassuring thing for me to discover after I went through those challenging life experiences that Joe alluded to and the quest that led to this product, which really began with, with this burly looking dude standing on my front porch asking me for the keys to my shiny BMW. You Know, and coming to repossess it. And it was on the tail end of this business where I'd had what felt like success, you know, for two years straight. I raised a very little bit of capital and I grew the business to $1.1 million the first year. And then I grew up by 100% the second year to $2.2 million. And I just thought that it was, I thought I was really successful. And I went and bought that BMW and I was just so convinced that everything was just going to turn up roses. And then all of a sudden we're out of money and all the financials just turned blood red and I'm left losing my house and going bankrupt and handing away that car, man, that car. Damn it. That car was like, it was so meaningful to me. I loved that car. That was the one thing I really wanted to hold onto, you know, And I. And when I handed away the keys to that car, I found myself kind of in this mess where I just was like, this is awful. And I was bewildered, you know, I was just totally bewildered and shocked. And then that gave way to just depression, you know, sitting around all day in my bathrobe. I remember reading a book about the founding fathers and one morning I think I was reading a book about Alexander Hamilton. And one morning at like 11am I'm sitting there reading about Alexander Hamilton. I'm like halfway through page 300 and I realized I think I'm pretty depressed. You know, I'm sitting around just reading about the founding fathers in my bathrobe and I like, I can't bring myself. And so I finally like decided I need to get myself out of this mess. And I wasn't sure how, but because of some earlier life experiences, I knew that I could. I. And I'll just touch briefly on that. You know, I, I was raised in Detroit. I was in a blue collar middle class neighborhood and lower middle class neighborhood and it was a rough town. You know, it was so funny to me. When I moved to Utah, I realized no one fought, you know, no one got into fights. But in Detroit we got into fights all the time. Everybody was fighting all the time. Every you'd go to a party on a Friday or Saturday night and people would get into fights and it was just kind of this angry town. And now when you go to Detroit today, you know, I took my dad, my brothers and I took my dad back to Detroit last fall for a tour through the city to show him all his childhood homes. And it seemed like a good idea at the time we thought, we'll get dad in front of each of his houses and we'll have him tell stories about growing up there. And like 90% of these houses were just completely blighted. You can't even conceive of how rotted out Detroit is. And it looks like a third world country, but it's not. If you've been in a third world country and you've seen the poverty there. But like, third world countries are like, sterile by comparison. Detroit was once this boom town and it had all this infrastructure and all these homes, and so really it's third world, but there's this sense of decay. Everywhere you look, the city is just crumbling. And so here's my dad standing in front of all these crumbling homes on crumbling streets, in crumbling neighborhoods, in crumbling counties. I once heard that you got 142 square miles of home of inhabitable space in Detroit. And if you consolidated all the blight, it would be over 40 square miles of blight in Detroit. So, you know, I'm looking around and what I realized was back then when everybody was so angry and everybody's fighting in Detroit and everyone's so desperate, well, what was happening is the city was just dying. It was just dying. It was going through its death throes. The economic engine had failed. The mechanics of 20th century capitalism had failed. You know, all this infrastructure was just crumbling. And my parents and I, big family and big orthodox religious family, and my parents kicked me out of the house because I was angry and we were angry and no one knew what to do. So I ended up getting kicked out of the home when I was a teenager and. And I didn't know what to do. So I moved to another state where I had a brother who'd just gotten out of a federal penitentiary and he beat up a couple of police officers. He was an aggressive guy. He always fought. And he'd been there for four years and he just got out. And I thought maybe he and I would be able to kind of live together. But then a few weeks later, he kicked me out. And I found myself not knowing where to go. I mean, I remember walking out of this suburban neighborhood and just not knowing where to go. And I didn't have a place to go. And I ended up being homeless for a number of weeks. And I, for the first time in my life, was able to experience what it's like to just not have food, you know, and of course I went around to the supermarkets and gas stations and I stole things, you know, to try and Feed myself. But after a while, they kind of got. They were aware of me, you know, and they wouldn't let me in. And I finally realized what it's like to be hungry and to sleep in the rain and, you know, just be alone. And I finally found. But I could rap and I could dance. That was something I liked to do. And so I'd go to nightclubs, and I'd try to hang out in the nightclub parking lots, and I wait for people to come out, and we'd, you know, kind of hang out in the parking lot and talk. And before long, I'd maybe occasionally get invited to, like, an after party. And so I made a habit of occasionally staying at an after party and then just trying to fall asleep on a floor and raid their fridge the next morning. And finally a gang took me in, and this gang that took me in. This sounds surreal, but this is the truth. This gang that took me in, they were members of the Bloods gang. And they took me in, and they liked the way I could rap and dance and that I was from Detroit, and I was kind of a tough kid, and they just liked me, and so. But not too much, you know? And once they realized I just wanted to freeload off them, I think they didn't really like me at all. And one night, we got into a pretty nasty fight, and I found myself sitting on a park bench after getting beat up pretty bad and thinking to myself, wow, I'm in a pickle. You know, this sucks. I mean, I don't know what to do. I'm not sure how to get out of this situation. And I just made up my mind right there. 17 years old, I am not. This is not for me. This is not the life for me. I'm getting the hell out of this. And I started to climb my way out of that situation. And when people get this idea of I want to climb out, you know, often they don't have a lot of resources and help. That's one of the cool things about today, is that those of us who have overcome. You know, there was no Internet back then. You know, it wasn't like I could go just hop on the World Wide Web and find another person like myself who had gone through what I'd gone through and listen to their story. We kind of just had to pioneer. But now those of us who have pioneered can share our thinking and our ideas. And I decided to go back to high school in Detroit. I'll never be. I'll be endlessly grateful for my mother and father you know, they had a hard life and they chose to let me come back and live in a little apartment off the back of the house. And the counselor at the school laughed at me. When I told him I wanted to graduate the next spring, he said, well, you missed half your junior year, you know, there's no way. And you failed the first half. And a year later I did it. You know, it was hard to do most mornings up at 5 and most nights to bed at 12. And I had to innovate. I had to innovate my ass off. I had to weave together night school and co op jobs and, and dig into the college, the high school catalogs. And again, none of this was online, it was all paper based analog stuff. But I had to figure. But I wove together a system where I was able to actually get the credits. And then I walked across the podium and I got my diploma and I remember I got this picture of myself kissing my diploma as I walked across the stage. And there were 276 kids in the graduating class and I was ranked number 275. I don't know who number 276 was. And I've actually made this offer, I want to know who number 276 was. Like Walled Lake Central, class of 1991, bottom of the class, 276. If I can find you, I'd love to take you to dinner and I'd love to talk to you about your life, I really would. But I was 275, 276, and my cumulative GPA was a 1.27 for all four years. And I'd never been prouder in my life. And it was in that moment that I realized that I was an innovator and the innovation was where I was going to find my way out of problems. So here I am handing the keys of my shiny BMW and that's how.

Many years later.

You know, sitting around in my bathrobe. That was So I was 17, that was 1990, that's in 2004. So 14 years later, you teen years, it's like 14 years later, 30, 31 years old, it was about 10 years ago and I'm sitting there in my bathrobe and I just don't know what the hell to do. And I got no money and I got a nasty investor suing me and I'm declaring bankruptcy and going out of the bankruptcy court and sitting there in the damn court just feeling utter humiliation and shame. And I'm like, but wait, I've been here Before I've had my mouth full of blood, my jaw damn near broke, my ribs cracked, two in the morning, not knowing where to go. And I found my way out of that, I'll find my way out of this. And I started thinking about what happened and that's often a great place to start, is to go back in and look at what happened. And what was interesting to me is I discovered this weird thing. I discovered that the, the business that I had thought was my best. So the business was this door to door model. So here in Utah there's these companies that are very, very popular. They're up and down the I15 intermountain corridor where these companies will go in and they'll recruit these students from these largely Mormon colleges who have spent a lot of time knocking doors on their mission. And there's this culture of door knocking, proselyting. And they'll go around and recruit these kids and send them out to US cities and have them sell home based services like pest control, home security, Dish Network. You've probably had some kid in a tan pair of shorts and a white shirt with a collar knock on your door and try and sell you some home security or pest control, particularly during the summertime. And most of these kids actually come from Utah. And at the time it was this very sleepy little industry, you know, a few hundred 500k, 800k companies, a few million dollar, maybe 2, 3, 4 million dollar companies, but nothing big. So just last year a guy friend of mine named Todd Peterson, who I was competing against back then, he took a 2 billion billion with a B dollar investment from Blackstone Equity Partners in his company Vivint Technologies. He's running Vivint Solar. That was the single largest private business success in the history of Utah as an individual. And he's running this door to door sales company that just 10 years ago we were similarly sized businesses. And Todd has, I had vision and Todd had vision. All of us were looking at me like this could be bigger, this could be big. You know, this is a huge amazing sales force. And so I was looking at it and trying to figure out what went wrong, you know, why did, why did my business fail. And I discovered this very curious thing that just shocked me, just shocked me. I found out that my Riverside California office, which was the one that was the biggest in terms of revenue and I was going out there and taking these kids out to dinners and giving them TV sets and high fiving them, I found out that that office was my absolute worst performing office in terms of profitability. And sustainable business. The customers all churned out. The employees were robbing me, stealing equipment. They were offering ridiculous discounts. It was just this very unhealthy business. And yet I, the CEO, thought it was my best. And then I discovered that my Louisville, Kentucky office, which I never visited and which was full of these much more kind of reasonable, moderate, kind of ordinary people who were just doing their work every day, had profited me more than any other office and was a really, really healthy, sustainable business. And then I went over and I started looking at Todd's company, You know, this company that went on to become this gigantic success. Mark my words, Todd Peterson is on his way to becoming a Fortune 500 company. Within the next 10 years, you'll see him on the COVID of Fortune magazine. And I went over and studied him, and I found out that Todd was building his whole business around offices that looked more like my Louisville office. And he wasn't interested at all in these kind of shiny, cool, you know, where the cool kids are offices that I was throwing all my resources into. So, of course, I felt like a total jackass when I had this epiphany. And I decided, well, I must be the only idiot who's ever made this mistake. What business did I have thinking that I could be an entrepreneur? And I was just really ashamed. And I was so. I remember one day I was in the airport, and Todd and I had competed aggressively with each other, and we'd even sued each other. It had gotten, like, really aggressive. And I was walking into the airport, and I was getting on a plane to fly somewhere, and I was in the first class line, and I turned around, and there's Toddler. And I was just like, oh, crap, you know? And I did the only thing I could think to do. I took my hat off, I shook his hand, I said, look, man, seriously, hats off, dude. What a freaking great accomplishment. And I'm just trying to learn from you, you know, and having the humility to recognize when somebody else is winning and just kind of paying attention to what they're doing. And so I put this key question of, like, how in the world did that happen? How did I. How did I get to a point where what I thought was the best was actually the worst? And what I thought was the worst and not even worth my time was actually the best? How did that happen? And I became very curious about whether or not that was something that happened on a broader basis. So I started to kind of talk with other CEOs, you know, because of course, one of the first things you learn when you get to a 1, 2, 3 million dollar business is that the only people that you want to talk to business are other people who've built one or two or three million dollar businesses. Nobody else even really understands what's going on. So I started talking to these guys and I ended up discovering that many of them were suffering from, if not as quite as fatal, very similar problems to the one I was dealing with. And then I started to realize that this was a rampant problem. And so when I had the opportunity to join Intuit's small business division as a senior leader, I jumped at it because I really wanted the opportunity to really dig in more systemically to figure this out. And as Joe mentioned, we studied 680 companies on my project and I talked to 60 of the CEOs myself. And these guys really, you know, at first they thought I was some MBA stiff, you know, and they were kind of nervous. And they were kind of nervous. But then I just opened up. I was like, no, no, no, let me tell you a little bit about my background. And then they just completely let the walls down. They're like, okay, dude, let's talk. And it would often open up their financials and they were dealing with the same problem. It was shocking to me how many of them were chasing this business model that was kind of making them sick. I call it polluted revenue. Not all revenue is good. Not all growth is good. Cancer grows. And small businesses, they need. They need revenue like our bodies need water and air. And so it's forgivable that they're out there trying and they're in eat what you kill mode. And they don't have capital. And so you can forgive them for being kind of not too discriminating about where they take their revenue from. But revenue is like air and water. And if you drink polluted water, if you breathe polluted air, it's going to start to make your body sick. And there is polluted revenue. And I started to see these CEOs that were chasing all this polluted revenue. And I started to see that the revenue came in like kind of three forms. And it was like, there was one form that was like, really good, really healthy, like, healthy revenue. Like, it comes in and it builds the business. And it's what I call, it's what I call the tribe. It's like, it's a set of customers that are basically supporters and cheerleaders who promote your business and are actively conspiring for your success and, and growing those customers. And Growing the business you do with those customers is like the key to being successful. But often the CEOs don't know who those customers are or if they think they know they're wrong. And instead they're focused on these very polluted types of revenue. And before long, I started to notice kind of like three patterns. Three patterns of polluted revenue. The first one was what I called churners. Churners are these customers who really can't afford you on the basis of time or money. And so they, they, but, but you, you sell them with over hyped up, you know, promises that you can't keep and heavy discounts. And then the churners come in and this is very polluted revenue. And they discover that they're not a good fit. And then they churn out, they leave you. And if you sell too many of them, then you catch a churn flu, which can be fatal to your company. You get a churn flu, and there's a lot of people listening to this podcast who probably had a churn flu or in the middle of one right now. And they know what it's like to look in the mirror and be like, holy crud, I don't feel healthy. And then they create brand problems for you because of course they turn around and they go back out into the marketplace and tell everybody that you're a liar and you were dishonest to them. So that's one category that's very, very different from the tribe. Very, very different from these people who support you and are your cheerleaders and are promoting you and are actively conspiring for your success. You got the churners. The second one is what I call the vampires. So, you know, vampires can afford you. They can actually pay what you ask, but you cannot afford them. You know, they don't pay you anything more than what everybody else pays you, but they sure consume a lot more resources than the average customer. And they, they aren't contemned to content to work with the teams that you have in place. And they always need to talk to the CEO. It's like these people have a bat line. Like, remember the Batman show? Or there's a bat line. These people like have a bat line? Yeah, Commissioner Gordon. They have a bat line to the CEO, you know, and they always have to talk to the CEO, and they kind of terrorize the CEO and they manipulate the CEO so that the CEO turns around and terrorizes the team and their interests. So they're these vampires who just suck the blood right out of your company. And then the third type is what I call the hobby horse. The hobby horses, these are customers who are really quite fun to work with and maybe even pay you a lot of money. And they're so wonderful that the team and the leaders love to really spend a lot of time with them. But the problem is, as a category, these hobby horses are kind of small and they're not very replicable. And so it's very. They don't represent a great growth prospect, and they're a bad investment. And so here you've got, you know, CEOs running around, focused on these churners, these vampires, and these hobby horses that will gobble up 100% of the company's time, energy, and resources and essentially make you functionally illiterate. You know, illiterate in who a. Who your tribe is. You know, most CEOs, if you ask them who their tribe is, they'll name a hobby horse customer or they'll name a vampire, but they really don't know who these tribe members who are actually conspiring for their success, paying their bills and keeping the lights on, really are. So they're like, illiterate, and their fluency is very low. And because of that, they're investing usually less than 10% of the company's resources into this group of customers that are actually the best customers to invest in. And so began to realize this is a problem. And I saw this across these 680 companies, and I started to develop kind of a solution for it. And before long, I was able to create. I left into it, and I built a business around this. And then one of my clients was Clayton Ask at infusionsoft, him and his exec team. And before long, I started to see they had the exact same problem. So. And that infusionsoft would be this great place where I could actually develop my thinking further with more businesses. So I took the position as cpo, and infusionsoft was totally in the middle of a churn flu at the time, Massive churn flu, back in 2010. And so I came in and I said, hey, I got a technology here. Let's use this technology to turn infusionsoft into a thriving tribe. Because right now, it's a system of begrudge trust. A system of begrudge trust is where everybody is kind of apathetic to your success and open to alternatives, and they might be spending money, but they're not really happy. And I was like, let's not grow a system of begrudge trust. And it was funny because there were some arguments about, but you can. And I was like, yeah, sure you can. I mean, Fortune 1, Walmart, biggest system of begrudge trust on the face of the earth. When was the last time you went into Walmart and thought, I want to linger. I just want to kind of hang out here? No, you're like, get me the hell out of here. I want to get my batteries and leave. And yet they're the biggest company in the world. So you can grow it, you can get profitable. But wouldn't you rather have. I mean, the greatest companies in the world are these thriving tribes of supporters and cheerleaders who promote your business and actively conspire for your success. I don't think anybody's out there actively promoting Walmart or actively conspiring for walmart's success. It's kind of more of an exploitative system of begrudge trust. And so we wanted to take that into this tribe mode. So we made it our. We made it our number one annual priority in 2011 to use this method I invented to get Infusionsoft focused on its tribe. And Icon 14, which is gonna happen in just a few weeks, is really evidence of our success. Infusionsoft has become this incredible tribe of small businesses that are huge supporters and cheerleaders of infusionsoft. They used to call it confusionsoft and the second most popular website. When you typed in infusionsoft on Google, you get infusionsoft's website. And the second most popular website was infusionsoft is awful. And people really mocked it. But now, just three years later, infusionsoft has been called by the New York Times the CRM for most small business. And Forbes magazine compared it to Apple. And this is what happens when you really get riveted in on this tribe. So that's what POV is. You know, it's a system for doing that. And it's come right up out of my life and my experiences. And it's about turning your customers into this thriving tribe of supporters and cheerleaders who promote your business and actively conspire for your success, you know, by identifying them clearly and getting really clear on what they want and then. And then amping down all that time and money you're wasting on all this polluted revenue and reallocating it to your tribe. And that's the. That's the gist of the method.

There you go. I love it. I love it. So, you know, you said a couple of things that we could do. Entire episodes on. But, you know, when I. I was asked the question is selling evil? And I had that response that's now become. That video is selling evil. When someone types in, is selling evil into Google, the first thing that pops up is that video. The original version of me being interviewed for a documentary, and then the animated version. And one of the things I say in there is that everything that you do is designed to either attract or repel. And when people become very effective at persuasion, one trap that they can get themselves into is they're so good at selling that they're just selling anyone who is willing to be sucked into the pitch, into the offer. And one of the things that you're really adamant about is that's a very dangerous thing to do because you can have too many customers, too much, too much of the wrong purchases, cash flow, et cetera. And on the surface, that seems completely insane when someone listening, saying, man, I just need revenue. I just need money. I'd love to be in a situation where I have more people buying stuff. But you're saying, you got to build this thing more effectively because you built up a business that you ended up going bankrupt on. And it creates enormous amounts of complexity. You know, there's.

That's right. Not all revenue is good. You know, there is polluted revenue. And, you know, many salespeople think that their job, you know, in the. In the words of the famous Alec Baldwin and Glengarry Glen Ross, is to get them to sign on the line, which is dotted, you know, and it's like. It's like it doesn't matter. You know, I read this wonderful sales book, and I actually loved it. It was called the Closers. And it's basically like close salespeople are closers. They love the taste of blood in their mouth. You know, they want to get the deal, they want to get paid, and then they want to move on to the next kill. And I agree with that fundamentally. But too much of the dialogue about sales is this idea. It gets kind of distorted to the point where it's like, you know what? Your real effectiveness as a salesperson gets demonstrated. It's like that ending scene of Glengarry Glen Ross where you've got Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino sitting around telling stories about how they've got these people that really are not a good fit for what they're selling at all. But they got them. You know, they sold them. They were able to get them to pay. And so many salespeople are kind of hardwired to think that way. And oftentimes salespeople become CEOs and so they think, you know what we got to do, we got to go out there and overcome all the objections and sign people up. But what people are really beginning to realize, and certainly what's at the heart of the POV method is the idea that really the job of a salesperson is to, yes, be a closer, but not first. First and foremost, the job of the salesperson is to be a qualifier. The salesperson needs to actually look at somebody and say, is this person a good fit? And this really lends itself to the dynamics of vertical versus horizontal revenue. You know, a lot of times all the transactions in the past were about like one time deals. So if the customer didn't get value about what you sold, then it doesn't matter. You know, I mean, you might have some chargebacks or some cancellations, but you manage that percentage. Right? But now people are getting more into more, more and more into subscription based business models where the sale never really is closed and where what you're trying to do is get customers to keep paying you and doing repeat business and sticking around. And, and, and what you, in this case, if you're indiscriminate and you just sign up anybody, you know, this will kill you. You know, back in 2010, Infusionsoft would sign people up and they'd be gone in a year. You know, today infusionsoft signs people up and they're around for six years. That was the big accomplishment. You know, the big accomplishment wasn't just doing a bunch of vertical revenue growth. You know, Clayton Ask and Scott Martineau shared with you the other day, you know, that three years later they've almost quadrupled their revenue, but they didn't quadruple their user base. When you guys asked them how many users they had at Infusionsoft, they said they had about 15,000. Well, when I joined the company in 2010, almost four years ago, they had almost 7,000 customers when I joined. So the customers have only a little more than doubled in that time frame the number of customer accounts. But the customer lifetime value, the average amount the customers pay on a continued basis over time has gone up by more than 600% in that time frame. And this game. So when you have salespeople that are out there just saying, hey, I'm going to fill my quota and I'll shovel as much shit into the business as I possibly can and just as long as I get my commission, I don't care, and that's the fastest way to. That's just a faster form of suicide, you know, the faster you grow that revenue. What you need is people who qualify and are thinking, who's going to be here in six years? And then, you know, you got to get this vision of like, wow, when I build my tribe this way, then in year two, I'm not having to replicate all the business I sold last year. I'm actually standing on the shoulders of all these people from year one who are still here, you know. Well, you know, what's. And so it's a phenomenal way to do hyper growth.

Yeah. What's interesting, too, is, you know, I was the second, you know, customer of infusionsoft. I mean, when they first started their business, you know, well over a decade ago. And so it was so interesting to see all of this, you know, happening, taking place. And so let's talk about Richard. What is PAV method? What does it do? And how can the people that are listening, I mean, you've developed a whole process around this and you've identified one of the biggest problems. And so how does someone grow their company avoiding many of the mistakes and getting out of giant traps that for the most part, most people aren't even aware of traps. I mean, I think for a lot of people, this is the first time they've even thought about what you've described.

Yeah, yeah. Generally speaking, that is the case. I remember the first time I talked about some of the Pav concepts. For example, at a 25k meeting, one of the guys raised his hand and said, this is the first time I've ever even allowed myself to think that some of my customers aren't good for me. You know, I've just assumed, you know, it's like, once they pay us, it's like, okay, I guess we're married now. So I now have to. Customer's always right. Okay, let me tell you where that came from. That came from some pinheaded manager that you worked for, you know, 20 years ago, who, at a fast food joint, you know, the customer's not always right. The right customer is always right. And there's a lot of wrong customers. So, you know, Joe, it's fascinating. It's awesome that you brought up that you were customer number two at infusionsoft, because this is really the heart of how the POV method works. So if you're operating in a business and you feel like you have a system of begrudge trust and you may be suffering from a churn flu and you're and you're really starting to feel some of those pains I talked about, and you're like, holy crap, I do have a hobby horse, and I'm probably wasting a lot of time on it. And I do have these vampires. I could actually name them. There's these companies that are, like, sucking the blood right out of us. And, you know, here's the first epiphany. You don't have to, like, go out and discover, like, the good customers. You know, it's not like you have to go out and sell a bunch of good customers. And it's not like you've been doing it wrong this whole time. If you've got 500 grand a year, a million a year, 5 million a year, 10 million a year, and you have any kind of solvency and sustainability to your business, then you've got a tribe lurking around already in the middle of your system of begrudge trust. Just like Infusionsoft in 2010, you know, had this gigantic churn flu where they were signing up all this business, and then it was gone a year later. They also had Joe Polishes who'd been around for 10 years. And the problem is that when the executive team or when the senior leader or just in the small business context, when the owner is so spread out across all this polluted. All this polluted. These polluted types of customers that they have, they become illiterate in that tribe. So the first key is to actually identify that tribe. And you can do that. One of the core pieces of the POV method, in fact, the first step is we help you identify those tribe members. And there's some very simple financial formulas that we have that basically allow you to shake down your customer base and discover this group that's really right at the heart of your financial success. They're the ones that have been keeping the lights on, and they're like the good wife, you know, while you've been off at strip clubs in Vegas, they're actually back home still waiting for you, you know, taking care of you. And these customers are there, and they aren't that hard on you. They've actually been around for the ride, and they're still promoting you, and they're still telling people. So you have to get back in touch with these people. That's the first step. And then the second step is you have to change the conversation with them. Because a lot of times companies have trained their companies to give them what I call reactive feedback to their existing offerings. So, like, hey, what do you, you know, what we do now, how could we change it? You know, and that shoves their thinking into this very reactive incremental box. And so they try to help you in that way. You have to pivot that conversation, get away from this reactive incremental thinking. And you have to get into something much more expansive and ideological and you have to say, hey, why? You know, we have three great questions we like to ask people. First, you know, what was your initial interest? Like, why were you even shopping before you found us? And second, what was your compelling reason to buy? You know, why did you ultimately choose to give us money? And third, as time has gone by, where have you experienced value? You know, what would you say is the value you've received? And this is a question that these kinds of customers, these tribe members, actually love to answer. A lot of companies, companies are afraid to ask it because they're so used to dealing with these hobby horses, vampires and churners who if given the opportunity, will just yell louder at them. You know, you ask a churner, what value have received, have you received? That's a pretty damn good question. I don't think I've received any, you know, but if you ask a tribe member, what's the value you've received, you know, the tribe member is going to give you a very thoughtful, very wonderful answer. And I've had a chance now to run hundreds of companies through this process and hundreds and hundreds of, of projects through this process. And it's never a shock to me. It's no longer a shock to me when CEOs and their teams call me and say, this has been the most invigorating rediscovery of who we are at our core that we've ever experienced. These people are really helping us understand what we do for them. They start to discover the real value exchange that's happening. And so I like to use the word benefits to describe that. They start to get very clear on the benefits that these tribe members value. So you identify and distinguish these tribe members from the rest and you do that with some simple financial work. And then you call them up and you ask them some really open ended questions and you write down everything they say. And then, you know, the reason I call it PAV and point of view is because what the customers say is going to occur differently to different people having the conversations, you know, and a lot of the challenge in a business is not just getting the CEO to this epiphany, but getting the team members to this epiphany. Right? Because the team members are an Extension of the CEO. And the moment a CEO hires someone, the moment they hire an employee, they've essentially given someone else in their company the ability to make decisions about where to allocate the company's time, energy, and resources. And where these polluted, toxic customers start to become really problematic for the company is when you got a bunch of employees out there that are in love with them. You know, you got some customer service people who think that, you know, the goal is to save all these churners, you know, or you've got some product people who are really focused on these vampires and giving them just what they want. Or worse, you got a few people in the company who trying to rally all the company's focus and energy around these hobby horses. And so the goal is to get this. Get this functional literacy about the tribe and what they want into the team so that the team actually understands it. So Pavilion is really a technology. It's a system for getting the whole team to this discovery. And I don't want to make it sound like this is a massively overwrought process. You know, Casey Graham, Infusionsoft's 2013 Marketer of the Year, ultimate Marketer of the Year, was one of our early customers. He was an early adopter of POV with his company, the Rocket Company. And they got their teams involved and they did, you know, a total accumulative, total of maybe like 10 hours of research. And then they got together and they had about two hours of conversation using the PAV method, which gets everyone really clear on their own individual point of view and then helps everyone discover, out of their own individual points of view, an emergent team point of view that they all share. So they spent about two hours doing that work, and it led to the incredible epiphanies for them that ended up really adjusting all of their infusionsoft messaging. You know, a lot of times when people want to get into infusionsoft, they want to talk about all these big, bold, amazing kind of marketing strategies and turnkey formulas that are supposedly going to increase traffic or lead capture or conversion rates, but really, the most important question is, who the hell is our tribe and what is it they value? And how do we get more people like that to sign up? So that's. That's the gist of it. And it's. It's actually surprisingly simple, you know, and we've taken all this work we've done with all these thousands of businesses, and we've run it through a couple rounds of kind of early Adopter products. I like to run pilots. Whenever I start a bit, I like to nail it, then I like to scale it. That's one of the things I learned from that first business. I was like, wow, if I would.

Have just nail it, then scale it.

Yeah. You know, nail it than scale it. Right. I mean, instead of trying, you know.

I actually, I came up with that. Dean, I'm kidding. I didn't.

I didn't come up. It's actually.

It's a very good line.

Yeah, it is. It's a terrific line. And I. I feel like the, you know, it back then. A lot of times when we do our first implementations of something, we're thinking like pie in the sky success, like, how do I make a million, $10 million? Right. We shouldn't be thinking that way. We should be saying, how do I make sure I don't lose more than five grand? And how do I optimize this to kick up the maximum amount of learning that I could? How do I get 90% of the learning I would have gotten from a failed multimillion dollar business without losing more than five grand and without killing myself? So we like to optimize and create pilots and shake out a ton of learning in a really inexpensive but massively optimized way. So that's what we've been doing ever since I left infusionsoft last year. You know, when Clay hired me, I accepted the job on the conditions that he'd let me leave in two and a half years and come back and run my own business to continue development of this solution, which he very graciously accepted and let me do. And so now, you know, we've spent about 10 months doing pilots and we've run a number of companies. Joe mentioned that Genius Network is one of them. And there's a number of members in Genius Network, and then there's a lot of people in my own personal network that signed up as early adopters. And we ran all of them through this to kind of shake out a bunch of learning and understanding about how to do it. And now we've turned all that into a very, very consumable, very, very easy to use, Very, very actionable minimum time required, maximum return on investment activity for a small business owner and their teams to engage in POV so that they can focus their resources on this thriving tribe of supporters and cheerleaders and amp down their focus on all this polluted revenue that they brought in and make the shift. And that's, you know, it's been proven, it works. Very well, and it creates a lot of success. And so we're relaunching that product. I think I'm going to call it tribal Knowledge. For anyone who hears this, this is kind of an early hat tip. I think we're going to call it tribal knowledge by the POV method, because it's really about getting familiar with your tribe and building your tribe and getting this tribe of active supporters. So that's pop. That's what it is. Joe?

No, that's fantastic. Now let's have you talk about the snow leopards and the walking catfish. You always have these funny terms, and we only have a limited amount of time here. And part of it. One thing I want people to be aware of, the PAV method, you know, this requires you to do some thinking. So, you know, this is a very Socratic sort of system, which is you're well served to be guided through it. And I'd like you actually to talk about who your best clients are, if people want to, you know, obviously be taken through the system like we have, and like many of the early adopters that you've mentioned, talked about and stuff. But it is something you can. We can explain things all day long, but this required you to really start asking questions, not just listening to answers. And so describe like, the. Paint a picture of who the snow leopard is, the walking catfish, and then talk about how someone can engage in POV if they want to.

Got it. So, yeah. So, you know, in addition to these churners, the hobby horse, you know, the vampire, I identified a couple of other really suboptimal companies. Another one is a snow leopard. It's kind of like the hobby horse. I actually kind of renamed the hobby horse the Snow Leopard as a hobby horse, but the snow leopard is just this extremely rare. It's like Secret Life of Walter Mitte. You know, you could search your whole life trying to see one, and you might never get a photograph. So it's very rare, but it's exotic, it's big, it's beautiful. A lot of times companies have a client like this, you know, like one client that is massively, disproportionately bigger than all the rest of the creating even as much as 50% of the company's revenue. And a lot of times the pain that they have to go through is detaching themselves from this customer because that's a customer they're never going to replicate. They're never going to get another one of those. And yet they're allocating so much time, energy and resource Particularly the senior leaders to that customer. And so if they want to grow, they kind of have to break themselves away from that snow leopard and find the tribe that exists in the other 50%. And then the other one is the walking catfish. So the walking catfish, it kind of overlaps with some of the other customer types as well. But the walking catfish is actually a real phenomenon in nature. There's a catfish that actually originates out of Asia that has evolved its fins into a type of leg, and it can pull itself right up out of the swamp, right up out of a pond, and it can walk out of water for like an incredible distance, you know, like several hundred yards out of water. And I have this terrific picture of a walking catfish literally walking across an asphalt road. And it's an invasive species and it'll move into ecosystems that weren't designed for it. So, for example, Joe in 25K, I think a perfect example of a walking catfish would be somebody who shows up in the network who is only thinking about how to get JVs or pump money out of the people there. The ecosystem really wasn't designed for that. It was designed for, for brilliant geniuses who want to get together and talk about ideas and connect with other people who love ideas the same way they do, and so that they can experience this massive exponential return on that idea. Investment in their lives, you know, in their business and their personal lives, and the kindred spirits and the peer to peer connections they experience there are huge and off the charts. And that's what we learned is really at the core of the tribe of 25k. So when one of these walking catfish kind of shows up, it like stinks up the room, you know, I mean, it's like one of these people who shows up and the only thing they're thinking is like, how do I pump money out of this group? You know, how do I get money from this group to funnel into my business? And so a walking catfish invades your ecosystem and tries to gobble up the resources. And if it doesn't get there, and the best thing to do with walking catfish is to make sure they don't get the resources, because then they'll walk on, you know, they'll leave your swamp and they'll go into another one. And so that's another example. Now in terms of PAV and who our target customer is and who really works well for us, well, it really comes down to this. So first of all, PAV is not a startup technology. I do recommend using pav, like principles to start a company. It's a great way to think at the outset, but PAV works best for somebody who actually has revenue. Like they've already demonstrated the ability to get revenue. So I don't know what the low end of that is. I don't know if it's 500 grand or a million dollars. But you know how to get revenue, you know, you know how to sell. And you've been able to demonstrate that for a while. Your problem is now differentiating between the types of revenue you get and you want to actually get the clean. And so the next thing would be you actually look at your company and you're like, you know what? This resonates. I feel like I do have some pollution, you know, I feel like I have some polluted revenue that's come into my business. And I do feel like we have some of the cold, we've got a churn flu, we've got some challenges. And you know, this resonates. I do feel like there's a tribe in my core. I'm afraid that I'm not very clear on who they are. I'm afraid I'm. And often the best thing to indicate that you're not is that maybe that growth that you experience starts to flatten out, you know, or goes in the wrong direction and you're looking at a little bit of a dry spell in terms of like the products and services that are a good fit for us. You know, we've just found a lot of people gravitating us towards us who are in like in an idea type business, you know, whether it's information products or software or masterminds or peer networks or knowledge products, you know, these are people who get into ideas and tend to have a real strong sense of mission driven purpose in their company. And we haven't really targeted or experienced any growth with companies that tend to be very transactional and they have a product and they're really just focused on how to move volume and crank out margin. Those churn and burn models where it's basically business between strangers over an essentially commoditized product between them. That's really not for pov. It's more for people who want to experience. They love this idea of a tribe. They love this idea of really connecting with their customers and they really view themselves as a value add in their customer lives. And so they tend to be very mission driven. Now the companies that have the easiest time identifying the tribe within their revenue set tend to be recurring revenue based. These are people who actually have a customer list and they can see which customers have paid them the most over time. And so that's like the easiest place to discover it. But if you don't have that and you just have lots and you still have lots of repeat business amongst your customers, but maybe it's not as easy to discover, that's not really problematic. The key is that you're in a repeat business model. You actually do have repeat business. And then the last thing is just that, you know, usually POV becomes most applicable in a situation where you've got a leader, you know, a CEO, a company owner who now has a team, and the team is starting to control the allocation of resources within the firm. And getting that team, not just getting the owner, but getting that team clear on who the target is, who the tribe is, and getting them to a place where they are vigilant about making sure that the company's precious, precious resources don't get frittered away on the suboptimal customer types and instead get massively focused on the tribe is the order of business. You know, it's like the most important thing. And so those are the criteria for who really makes a good fit for us.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. That's great. So, Dean, do you have any questions? Because we got to wrap up here soon, but I want to give Richard an opportunity.

I know there's so many.

The questions I have would take another hour.

Yeah, well, we can do a follow up too, because I think the beauty of this is it really identifies a lot of stuff. And as Dan Sullivan says, he says many things, but one of my favorite Dan Sullivan quotes is the problem is not the problem. The problem is how you think about the problem and what Richard has done a very good and unique job of identifying for himself. For POV clients on this podcast is just a think about a problem. And a lot of people have a festering problem that is killing their business, stunning its growth, and could potentially destroy its ability to ever become successful because of a problem that most people, until Richard articulated it, weren't even aware that it exists. It's like this festering sort of disease. It's like identifying the polluted air and water that they're breathing and drinking day in, day out while they think they're nourishing themselves and growing a company, and they're actually not well.

And all too often they end up thinking that the answer is to just grow harder. Which, in the pollution context, it's like, I'm starting to feel a lump in my chest. Maybe what I need to do is suck in more wind.

So it's almost like giving someone an oxygen machine who's gasping for air until you can get them sustained. So, Richard, awesome. I mean, Dean, anything you want to say before we wrap up? Because I just want to give.

Richard, what would you say, Richard, like, just quickly, what would be the first kind of action step that somebody could do to use this information just even to evaluate their own business? What would you say would be the takeaway that somebody could do?

Well, you know, the first thing I think that they should do is they should start to look for other people who think this way, because you need support and you need to be around people who actually are helping you maintain this kind of framework. And one of the things we're very committed to doing is creating a tribe, a tribe of people who actually think this way and can actually come together and have these continued conversations. So certainly, you know, come Visit us@pavmethod.com Pavmethod.com is where we're starting to build out some of those communal resources and just start having the conversation. The first thing I would recommend is, after listening to this podcast, go sit down, rally the team. You know, pull the team together and play the podcast for them too. You know, and just sit down, and all of you consume this conversation and then have the conversation. Do we have some polluted revenue? And do we even know, you know, do we even know who our tribe is? And is it possible that your answer and my answer and your answer, your answer are all different and that we're all kind of pulling in different directions? Allow yourself to kind of feel what we're talking about here and let it just sink in. Sleep on it for a night or two, have three or four more conversations. And then when you're ready, when you start to feel like, yes, this is a challenge, because a lot of times this stuff takes a moment to sink in. It takes a moment to kind of reorder the way someone's thinking. But then what we found is that people will come back and they'll re engage with the concepts, and before long, they're ready to start taking some steps. And so that would be my first recommendation, is just absorb it, talk about it, think about it, and maybe even. Maybe even take a swag at, like, naming some people in your customer base. You know, that one's a vampire. You know that one. That one might be our hobby horse. You know, that one might be our. Holy crap. We got a lot of these churners we can see them and just let yourself kind of. And maybe also just let yourself experience the blasphemy of, you know, the customer's not always right. You know, there's so much shame in America, in an American business. And we feel ashamed when we start thinking something like, I'm lazy, I'm incompetent, I don't work hard enough because I have a customer who's complaining to me. Maybe ask a different question. When a customer jumps to you and says, I'm not getting value, I'm not happy. Instead of just immediately saying, oh go, you know, that's evidence of my failure. You know, I need to change something, I need to do something better, maybe insert a new question, which is, should I even be in business with this person? Is this a polluted customer? Is this someone who's actually robbing my focus from the tribe that actually does support me, does cheer for me and is actually out there conspiring for my success? This is a real breakthrough. It's similar to the kind of thinking that people often never arrive to in their personal lives, but should, you know, they need to go through their list of friends and say, how many of these people really add value to my life? And when we're together it's a real value exchange. And how many of these people are just blood sucking leeches who demoralize the hell out of you every time we talk?

Yeah, no, I love it.

And just let yourself feel that blasphemy and think about it. And if you guys want to do a follow up podcast, that would be great. You know, I think something that might be useful is, let's see, is there a good, there's probably a good discussion thread. Let's maybe see what some of the most popular questions are that pop out after this. You know, what some people really want to know or what this provokes for them in terms of thinking. And maybe we can take it to a level of new actionability.

Yeah, I would love that. So if you want to post your comments on ilove marketing.com if you heard this interview there or wherever you happen to hear it, please go ahead and do that. That would be very useful. It reminds me in a different sort of way. Richard, on the interview I did with Arianna Huffington on her book Thrive, which hit New York Times one, which is awesome since I kind of headed up that marketing campaign. One of the things that I said in the interview was a lot of people, they're looking for love in all the wrong places and how they live their lives. And this is what you have really described in a business context is people are looking for money in many cases in all the wrong places, from the wrong people. And like you described, it's the blood sucking leeches. And they wonder why the hell are things not working when they're working so hard. This is a great insight. I think we definitely should do a follow up and I will say from all the people out there thinking in terms of marketing and selling, when you go through the paw of thinking, when you go through the method, you actually will uncover why people do business with you, what your tribe actually gets from you. And then you can utilize all of that in your messaging, in your packaging, in your conversion, in your sales copy. And that's what we do with Genius Network. It's absolutely shifted what we say, how we say it, who we say it to. And that as marketers is what we're looking for. So the reason we wanted to bring this wisdom to you through Richard is because this is something that you're probably not going to hear anyone else. And this is a guy who's really had incredible success with absolutely shifting the course of companies headed in the completely wrong direction. And I believe from infusionsoft it has and will result in probably just tens of millions of dollars. And so that's it. So again, how do they find you? One last time.

Go to POV Method POV method.com and if anyone is interested in communicating with me directly, you know, you could email me. My email address is Richard Trip T R I double P. And of course we'll be at Icon14 InfusionCon in Phoenix the week of April 23rd through the 25th. We got a booth there and you know, for me, that's like going home. I get to be around all my old crew. And you know, Clay told you the other day that he had 450 people in his company and I used to manage 150 of them. So a lot of these people are dealing with dear friends of mine. I hired a lot of them, gave them their jobs and so I'm excited to be down there with that tribe. If you're going to be there, definitely come by, say hello, we'd love to talk to you. And so, guys, it was such a pleasure to talk to you and it's an honor to be on your show.

Absolutely. Thank you. We'll do a follow up. And so thank you so much, Richard. And so we wish everyone the best of success. And I will say, whoever is on your team that makes any decisions, which should hopefully be every single person that has to do with getting clients, getting the right clients, building the tribe. Definitely have them listen to this episode and certainly, you know other people out there that this could really save their ass if they're aware of what we talked about here. So please listen to this episode a couple of times. There's so much value in it and share it with other entrepreneurs that you want to conspire to their success. So awesome. Thank you, Richard.

Okay, guys. Thanks.

Thanks, guys.