Scaling Simplified: Your Go-To Solution for Business Growth

And so that's what we're up to. You know, you all start as a lean startup and then what we want to do is get you over the hump and there literally is a gap. Geoffrey Moore described it in Silicon Valley. What got you here will not get you there. And that is one of the largest constraints. And that's going to be my theory really this morning is let's take a look at what are the things that are constraining us from being able to scale up. And there are the results and our real goal, and I want to state it simply to help you achieve software margins. I don't know a business that we have worked with that you can't get the kind of gross margin and net that you would expect if you were a software company. And so I don't want to talk about Apple, but I want to talk about Apple Tree. So John, come on up here. John's my partner. One of the reasons why we are in Wilmington, Delaware. Here's a guy that rolled up what I consider the sweatshops of the information age, call centers. And in an industry that has 200% turnover, employees, he took it to 18%. In an industry that has 4% profitability, he actually took it to 22%. And he bought these companies for three times their earnings, put in this magic that we talk about, plus his own. And he turned around and sold the whole thing to a $2 billion company for 14 times earnings. So just do the multiplication. And it was a 25x on every dollar invested and it was all debt. John didn't put a single dollar of his own money in it. And he earned the ultimate, what I consider entrepreneurial award, a tail number. And so he gets to fly into these events privately, which is very, very nice, though he does commercial. This is a long flight. But what we want to talk a little bit about is that this ultimate constraint first is between our own ears. And John and I do these CEO boot camps down in Marathon, Florida. And one of the guys we've had a chance to really become friends with is Michael Singer. And we want to recommend a couple books. I want John to share his quick story. I recommend you read Michael Singer's second book first. It is one of the great entrepreneurial journeys called the Surrender Experiment. How many of you have read it out there already? Not enough of you. He goes on to build a multimillion dollar construction company and a multi billion dollar software company. So it's a great bio on how you scale. Then you read his first book second called The Untethered Soul. How many of you have read that? You've heard folks talk about it. So, John, real quick, share what happened. You were at this meeting.

Yeah. So since nobody's complimented Joe this week, I figured I better get up and say something nice about him. So it may have even been a year ago today, but it was in that time frame was actually the first hundred K meeting. And I signed up to be in 100 K. And I said this last night at the dinner. I'm probably the least likely person in the room that belongs in 100k. I'm not a marketer. We don't have an email list. In fact, I think I spent four or five meetings trying to figure out how to build an email list and I'm still not there, but. And I wasn't even really sure why I was in the room. But the second day we come in and Dean and Joe are great about kind of giving stuff out and resources and that kind of stuff. And there's a book in front of us called the Untethered Soul. And so the backstory for me is as long as I could remember, literally back to like my childhood time, certainly my teenage years, I battled depression and I battled it very quietly. In fact, my family didn't even really know. And it manifested itself in some really interesting ways with me. I was, you know, every time I tell someone that, you know, from my past that I had this lifelong battle with depression, they always laugh because I was the life of the party. I was always happy. I was kind of, you know, outgoing and all those things. And that was really just a manifestation or kind of my, I guess, protective mechanism for the depression. And the way that I describe or kind of explain depression, what it was like for me, it was like wearing a blanket all the time, morning, noon, night. And sometimes you'd forget you had it, but you were always sort of aware it was there. Sometimes it was really, really heavy. And I battled depression from mild to medium to severe, at times suicidal, and didn't tell anyone about it, didn't talk about it, didn't see a therapist. And I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs, we are unbelievably predisposed to this. I won't go through all the statistics, but by self selecting into this lifestyle of entrepreneurship, a lot of us are like being the life of the party and being outgoing. It's sort of our way of kind of protecting ourselves from our depression. And the statistics say right now in this room, probably over half of the people have had some battle in their life with depression. But more importantly, there's probably two or three people in the room right now. Look around, it's about 250 people. There's probably two or three people in the room right now that are contemplating or in the last couple weeks have contemplated suicide. It's become an epidemic, obviously. So, you know, part of my depression was I lost the ability to read. I sold my company in 2012. I was a prolific learner. I was a student of earns, and I'd read 30 or 40 books a year. And over time, it just got more and more difficult to focus. And I sold the company and I literally lost my ability to read. So it was kind of ironic. This book's on the table and I looked at it and I thought, yeah, another book, whatever. So I tuck it in my briefcase and because Phoenix is a long way, I happen to. I fly commercially like once or twice a year, but happened to be on a commercial flight. So somewhere over, I don't know, Oklahoma or something, I see my briefcase and I just pull the book out, which is ironic because I lost the ability to read. And I open it up and I read the first page and second page, and I look up and I'm like 40 pages in, and I'm kind of surprised that that's happening. And then I get to this section on why we get depressed and kind of what's going on. And he talks a lot about energy. And you get energy, kind of all your negative past experiences, all those things manifest physically in your body as energy. And we have a predisposition to kind of push those things down and try and forget about them and. And, you know, just sort of let them, you know, linger, but not. Not deal with them. So he talks about this idea we've pushed all this negative energy down, and if we could just figure out how to relax. If you're into, you know, the chakras, it would be your heart chakra, Call it whatever you want. All the different traditions have a different name, but right here in your kind of center, your heart center, where we've pushed all that negative down. If you could just relax and re experience that negative, but just let it go. We have an unlimited capacity for positive energy to kind of flow in from the bottom is how he describes it. So here I am sitting in first class. I'm on page 65 of the book, which is its own miracle to start with. And I literally just imagine, okay, what if I did relax here and kind of let everything go? So I do it. I sort of, you know, totally in the moment, I relax. All of a sudden all this stuff just starts coming out of me and all this incredible tingly, sort of incredible energy starts flowing into me and I literally don't realize it, but I am like crying to where the tears are like dripping off my face. And then I'm like, my God, these people must think I'm a complete lunatic, right? I'm looking around first class, people are looking at me. Finally, I actually took my sunglasses and put them on. But for about the next two hours, I just had this amazing sort of energetic kind of thing. And what happened in that moment was the blanket came off. Now that was about a year ago, probably almost. It could be today. Today could be the one year anniversary, but the blanket came off and it hasn't been back since. So I know there's people in this room that are, that are fighting this privately and publicly and personally and not talking about it. It's now my mission to talk about it every chance I get. The fact that mental health and the way our society's going with mental health, that it's, you know, it's like addiction. It's a badge of honor now to talk about this as opposed to, you know, being ashamed about it. So. Cannot recommend these two books enough, Vern. Thank you, Joe. Obviously, you know, everyone says, everyone says, why in the world did you pay 100k? I would have paid $100 million that day for that one moment. So thank you.

All right.

So that's the first constraint you've got to address is right between our ears. Now I want to put a question out to you and I consider the best strategy question ever created was by a guy named Clayton Christensen at Harvard. And that is what is the job your product or service really does? And if you've not seen Clayton Christensen's Job of a Milkshake video, how many of you have seen the Job of a Milkshake video? All right, I want you to go to YouTube. I, I want you to look up Clayton, just put Clayton, job of a milkshake. And I want you to watch that four minute video because that's ultimately what you've got to figure out if you're going to be able to communicate any kind of value, is what's the job that we ultimately are doing for our customer through our product or service? So I want to give you guys a generic question. What's the number one job of all of our companies? At the end of the day, just shout it out. What's the number one job Create value. Maybe we only get one word. What, profitable? Maybe. Serve.

Maybe.

By the way, maybe means no. I'm just trying to be nice here. Let me just cut to the chase. And it's something we learn from nature. Now, I don't know if this is right, but I find it's useful. All right? And that's what we try to do, is find ideas that are useful, that are practical. What determines the route of that river. It is seeking always what happens for safety. That's right. Easy. I just want to suggest, if you will, obsess on one word moving forward, and that is look, think about what Amazon's done. And we know this for a fact, that every week, Jeff Bezos with Jeff Wilkie, who's a good friend of mine and the other team, they obsess about one idea. How do we make it this week even easier for folks to get stuff quicker? And ultimately what your product or service is geared to do is to make someone else's life easier, not harder. So just take for a moment what's not easy in doing business with you. Is it easy to find you the website? Is it easy if you have an app? I don't care how killer it is, if it's not easy to use, the thing's going to die on the vine. Is it ultimately does your product and service, Is it easy and make their lives easy? So I want you to go back with that question with your team and begin to obsess on it. Here's a dear friend of mine, Hank, just moved to Barcelona because he can. And for 20 years he's had one business. They own 70% market share in the United States in this very narrow niche, and that is if you're going to drive your car as a US citizen down to Mexico, you need Mexican auto insurance, and you can't state it any better than that. The easiest way to buy enter info, buy print policy. He makes more money than any human should legally make, and he does it with seven employees and a dog. And that's his entire team. Now, there's a lot of talk about leadership. There must be thousands of books every year. Let me suggest, you know, we know, and I'll come back to that. We know that in a word, if you'll just focus on one thing, the number one job then of the leader of the company is to what, figure out how to make it easy for your employees. And that's what John did at those call centers. He obsessed on one thing. How do I make the job of that call center rep even Easier from the quality chair that they sat in to the technology they used to the apps that he developed, if you will. Just obsess on that. Two questions. What do I do to make it easier for my people? And what do I do to make it easier for my customers? And you will pound on that for the rest of your life. You'll continue to move in the direction that nature would be seeking in order to build and scale the business. And that's what Ikea did when I mentioned it yesterday, which is they said, look, to make it even easier for the elderly to take advantage of our flat pack furniture, we're going to make this purchase of TaskRabbit. Now in order to scale, you got some decisions to make people, strategy, execution and cash. So we created some tools and I want to look this is normally a two and a half day course, but we've got about two and a half minutes if you feels like. And so I just want to give you kind of four practical ideas. What I consider the number one question you must ask about people. What really is branding? How do you decide what to focus on? And what's the universal truth about making a ton of money? Not that that's the only reason, but hey, I'm interested in that as well. And you've got these growth tools. As Joe had mentioned, I am a tool builder, mechanical engineer by training and I think it's through tools that we change people's thinking and I want you to think about them like su Sudoku puzzles or crossword puzzles. Anyone a crossword puzzle fan in here? How do you do crossword puzzles? You start with what?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

The easiest first, right? If you're a person says look, I'm not going to go to box two till I figure out box one. You are going to be absolutely stuck. And that's the same way with our tools. You pick around on these boxes and over time the full picture will come into view. So I just want you to kind of relax with the process. So let's open them up. In each one of our areas is anchored with a question. People. Would you enthusiastically rehire everyone in your company knowing what you know about them today? And you've been seeing that question asked in various forms and fashions over the last two days by Clayt and others that have spoken about it. By the way, if you're here with your team, they don't want to make eye contact with you right now.

Right.

They don't want to get this screwy look. But by the way, that's all relationships. Your bank John finally had to sever a relationship that's been long lasting with the bank. He's had partners, investors, and even certain companies and customers that you've done business with. Now turn to the first tool. We're not going to have time to take a look at it, but we do think you can't separate personal from professional. So we've got a one page personal plan that allows you to kind of lay it out long term, medium and short term men in the U.S. i want to share one really sad statistic. You report that your best friend is your spouse and that does not match what spouses report. We are absolutely lonely and I recommend at least you write down the names of the six men who would carry your casket. You need at least that. And as you start to think through the list, I'm like, I think they may be busy, probably out of town, not in shape and so begin to pay attention. Particularly men building out your faith, family, friends, fitness and finance. And those are really the organizing fashions. What I want to do is turn to the page and look at our both what we call face and pace tools. And Jim Collins said, look, you got to get the right butts and the right seats. He just didn't give us a list of seats. And so we've got a tool we're just going to look at. I want you to fill out here very rapidly. We call the function accountability chart. Every one of these functions has got to exist, even in a startup. And what I want you to do is I want you to go down that list. We've given you a couple of blanks. The Reard Medical center has got a chief medical officer that's not on the list. Every industry will have something. So I've given you a couple of blanks here, but I want you to put a name next to every one of these functions. By the way, if you're a startup whose name is next to every one of them. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. And all scaling of business is figuring out how do I delegate this to somebody. And somebody asked, how do you know if you got the right person? We have three tests, number One, they fit our values. Number two, they don't need managed. If these people need managed, you got the wrong person. And number three, they wow you if they're not wowing you. So I remember I launched Gazelle 1997. The first thing I wanted to do is give up bookkeeping. And my neighbor across the street, Claudia Smallwood, who had been doing books for her husband, a very, very successful entrepreneur, I, first of all knew would get and understand an entrepreneur and the values that we would share. Number two, I did not have to manage at all. I would just send stuff over there in boxes and information, and she would often wow me. Vern, I know you're busy. I remember those early days when Bill was launching his company. But let me show you something interesting here. I'm seeing in the numbers.

Wow.

All right, so go down through the list real quick. And by the way, if you say, who's doing marketing? You're like all of us, then that's no one. So be honest. If nobody's doing these things, go real quick. Put the initials. If it's you, fine. Who's had a company? Who's driving marketing? Who's driving R and D? Who's driving sales? Who's driving operations? You want to separate treasury and controller. Somebody counting the money going out versus counting the money going in, or you'll end up with embezzlement. The sad stories I've heard over the decades. I'm sure Dan has as well of that. Who's handling your it? By the way, these can all be outsourced. There's no problem there if you're outsourcing that we have. Our HR has been to TriNet. We've been with a PEO from the very beginning, professional employee organization. It's handled it with a company for us out of Hyderabad, India, in talent development and customer advocacy. Just blast down through there. Now, at the bottom, we ask four questions. Number one, did you put more than one name? And that happens if you've got partners, family members, you brought somebody on to drive sales, but you haven't really let go of it. And the rule of accountability can only be one person. So if you put more than one name, I want you to circle that box. Second, did somebody's name show up a lot more than anyone else's? It's probably yours. I had head of company marketing and R and D and I became the constraint within our own organization, our own company. And the person whose name showing up a lot is either going to die young or one of the balls that they're juggling is going to get dropped. Number three, circle those where you have no name. And then last. Hey, I've got a person doing that for us. But I'm telling you, they don't pass Verne's tests. Circle that. Now, you may have a lot of stuff circled. And the reality is this, unless you're venture backed, growing 100% a year, you can mix people around inside an organization. But you can only bring one outsider in about every six to nine months because it takes that long for you to inculcate them, get them paying for themselves and get this thing working inside the organization. So about every six to nine months, you, you're gonna start to fill a hole there within the organization for me. We brought in finally a chief marketing officer and revenue jumped 60%. Wish I'd made that decision sooner. Now I'm bringing in a head of the company. I only like R and D. And that's one of the things you need to get very clear as an entrepreneur. Randy Amen. One of my early students built a company called ABL Cables. His card. Founder and head of customer service advocacy. He then brought in folks who filled in all the other boxes, didn't change ownership, and when he sold the company to a $2 billion firm. Today he is on the exec team of a $10 billion division. This $40 billion company. What do you think he does for that firm? Head of customer service. He has continued to follow his passion. So don't get stuck in thinking you have to be the head of the company. By the way, you're never too big. When Michael Dell took back Dell in 2007, even though there were 22 reports to Kevin Rollins, there was nobody driving marketing and and nobody driving customer advocacy. And those were the first two decisions Michael made. Brought in Mark Jarvis from Oracle. Only one outsider shifted some boxes inside and took his dear friend Dick Hunter and brought him over to head up the customer service side. Revenue jumped 20 billion the next 24 months. So that's how it happens. You're never too small or big. It's plugging the next who hole. Now, if you look at what we consider the three barriers to scaling. First, it's your own development. That's why this is absolutely critical you're here. It's why I'm here, to learn. I've got notes, I've got things. I'm going back to change our company on Monday. Scalable infrastructure. But the function that's most critical is marketing. I want to share a second idea under people. So in 1983 I'm launching Ace association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs. It morphs into Yeo. And I figure if Regis McKenna is good enough coaching Steve Jobs at the time as he helps him go to 2 billion by his 29th birthday, he's good enough for me. He's helping intel and Genentech and all that. So I cold call Regis now. You better have like Naveen said, a hell of an elevator pitch, which I did and he took us on as I was his only free client. He tells me in the history of his firm, you know you don't get anywhere if you don't ask. He says, all right, I'm going to put you through exactly what I put Steve. So he sends me out the big booklet and he said the first thing you have to do is have an hour marketing meeting. I mean it sounds so friggin basic but how many of you actually have an hour? Same time, same bat channel? Ours is 10am every Monday for 30 some years you have a marketing meeting separate from sales, even if it's with yourself. All right, first thing you do is I want you to go back next week and I want you to set a specific time when you are going to think about marketing. You may be doing marketing all week, but you need a marketing meeting in order to make some decisions. And the first decision Bill Gates considered the best question he had ever been asked. And it was the thing that anchored Regis work based on his book Relationship Marketing that was this. You take a piece of paper out, you've heard it and you make a list of the top 25 influencers, people, partners. You heard it shared earlier with Stacy. Now the issue is if you're Naveen, you can put out your elevator pitch and they come to you. Honestly, the rest of us in this room are not Naveen. And even Steve Jobs when he wanted to launch itunes, took a piece of paper out every time, made a list of the top 25 key points players in the music industry. And he did no A1 and not A1 would return his phone call. The only guy he knew was Don Henley, the drummer for the Eagles. And so that's how you get started. You invite over whoever you know. He did his walk and talk and at the end of it he goes all right Don, know anybody on this list? Yeah, I know that guy. Get me to him. And you network your way around until you get to it. Now actually, how do you do it? I wanted to get to Herman Simon. Herman is the Drucker of Europe. He wrote the book Hidden champions of the 21st century. He runs the largest pricing consultancy in the world. This guy is God in our world, in Europe, you get to know their assistant very well. You then take their name and you put it and their company name in Google Alerts. All the people you want to try to get to, you put in Google Alerts. And then Google Alerts you. Ah, Herman just got chosen to keynote Peter Drucker's hundredth anniversary celebration in Austria. And you use as an excuse to send a thoughtful note through their assistant to them. Now it feels like stalking. But it's okay. I did the same thing with Greg Brennaman and anyone else I've needed to when I made that first list I'll never forget. Look, he said, the bigger the name, the faster you scale. So I'm young and dumb and an engineer, so not a lot of fun. And I'm 23 and I take a piece of paper out student at Wichita State University and I write down President Ronald Reagan. I wanted to be the first president to utter the word entrepreneur, which he did later on. And I got invited in then to advise both Dan Quayle and President Bush on their entrepreneurial policy. I put down Steve Jobs, I put down Michael Dowell. I put down I didn't know who owned it, but I got to have Inc magazine and Venture magazine behind what we're doing. And then all we did was spend an hour every week figuring out how to get to that person on the list. And what was an idea in 1983 had gone global in 36 months. I led the first official delegation of young entrepreneurs to mainland China. I hosted the first public speech of Steve Jobs post being fired from Apple at the Bonaventure hotel. With almost 1200 of the top entrepreneurs, including I've got sitting next to Steve, Michael Dell, Mark Cuban, who still is a good friend. Michael just had me coach his son. They still remain acquaintances, if not good friends. And President Ronald Reagan had agreed to fly in and give the opening address. He got diverted by a war. And so he asked his friend Mayor Bradley, one of the most respected leaders at the time, to do it instead. And rent read a telegram from the president from our stage with Inc. Magazine doing a six page story on us that led to Wall Street Journal and everyone else and Arthur Lipper, still a dear friend of mine, today giving us full page ads for everything that we were doing to move forward. It was a miracle. Make the list and work it. So right now, start the list. What are the top five people? Relationships, partnerships that if you could get them behind what it is that you're doing, you're going to scale fast. Start the list. We knew we needed to get Sam Zell behind this. Barcelona Housing Systems. The guy invented the real estate industry in this country, and we orchestrated it and made it happen. And we didn't know Sam from Adam, by the way. It's harder now that you're not young and cute.

All right.

It seemed to be easier back then. I never was cute, but I was young back then. And the beautiful part is being in the genius network, you're about to one or two degrees of freedom, not six from any human being you need to get to on the planet, and that's key. I'm gonna. I'll tell it right now. My wife, you'll see in moments. She's launched an olive oil business. My daughter's got a body care business. And I asked Joe last night to introduce us to Randy Zuckerberg because she cares about that and we've already. The communication happened last night from Randy, and my wife couldn't be more stoked. My daughter knows that there are five people, four bloggers, YouTubers, and Vice President Biden's daughter. That if she gets those five behind her, she's 14. Her natural body butter business, the rest takes care of itself. I was just at University of Delaware. I put it out to the universe. And the introduction is going to be happening here shortly between Joe Biden's daughter and my daughter. That's how it works. All right, you got the list? Then I want you to buy this book. You don't even have to read it. I just want you to set it on your desk. I think the number one KPI key performance indicator of everybody in this room is how many people every week. And I want you to track it. Do you break bread with. Do you have a breakfast, a coffee, a lunch, an afternoon break, a second lunch, a third lunch? I don't know there's anything more important as an entrepreneur than for you to take your time to go out and meet the people that are going to help you scale your business. Everything else you can optimize, Automate, and the things that Ari teaches you. And he's been our advisor to our company as well. And so never eat alone. And I hope that was the case at this event. Never eat alone. All right, strategy here. We anchor it with. Can you state it simply? It doesn't mean it's simple or simplistic or everyone would nail it and have a unicorn overnight. These two words made this guy $4 billion. Deliver pizza. Who Are we talking about Domino's? Domino's. And Tom Monahan gave it all away to the Catholic Church. But 4 billion. Now, let's add to it. We deliver pizza 30 minutes or less. We're going to call that the brand. So the two words I own deliver pizza. I'm going to deliver it in 30 minutes or less. The brand promise, or it is free. There's the brand promise guarantee. Not unlike the 997 offer I signed up for. Because if I don't use it, I get my money back. I'm just confirming that in front of Joe. All right, just so that we get this all straight. Now, a lot of folks say, yeah, you can do that selling, you know, bad pizza to college students, but serious companies can't do this. Well, Larry Ellison has always done it. He knows his core customer. He owned the back cover of Fortune magazine that I write for all these years. And his message was always been simple. I want to burn into your mind the exadata server. And he knows where his core customers hang out. He is not. He doesn't do all digital marketing. He's right there in international airport. Airports where he knows his customers are hanging out. And he has a very simple message. It is 5x. This is an ad he runs on the front cover of Wall Street Journal. The other place where he knows his people hang out his customers. We're not four, we're not six. We're five times faster or you win $10 million. Now, why would Larry do this? Because it works. Now, who hated this? IBM. What do you think Larry said to IBM?

No.

If you can prove otherwise, I'll write you a check for $10 million. Put up or shut up. And the rest is history. Larry has had this kind of simple message from the very beginning of his company. What's the word or two you own? What's the promise we make? Very measurable. And then what are you going to do if you don't deliver on it? So you take the fear out of them, possibly doing a sales job on you. And we have what's called the 770 rule. And I hope you've experienced that over the last couple of days.

You.

Absolutely. And I've advised several of you. I've talked to several of you privately. The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is they think everyone's their customer. You absolutely want no more than about 7% of any market you're in. When Apple hit its highest market cap the first time, two months prior to Steve Jobs untimely death, their entire global market share was only 7%. Yet that 7% represented 50% of all the profitability of the entire industry today. Let's speed forward. They're over twice the market cap, yet their market share is only a whopping 15%. Yet it represents 89% of the entire profitability of the industry. Would you rather have market share or profit? Yeah. Now the niche you choose, you want to own 70% of so Mexican auto insurance for US drivers. The percent of the total insurance industry that my buddy Hank owns is such a small fraction it wouldn't fit in this room. All the zeros until you got the number. Yet he owns 70% of that niche and he owns two words. I need Mexican auto insurance. I remember when Julie gave birth to our oldest son Cameron. She absolutely wanted the safest car. What did we buy back then? Avoid. There was no question you can't own auto, but you could own safest automobile. And so we have this seven strata. If you'll take a look at it. It's one of the first blue sheets. All of our stuff's color coded. And I went through the one phrase strategy in my 10 minute here. I want to focus on what in essence is branding. And the constraint is you never get about owning a word or two in the minds of the market. That's the essence of brand. And if you don't do that, and most of us in this room will never accomplish that. And how do you know if you do? You just Google it. Now I own Growth Guy. Any place you Google it on the planet, I own it. Here's the problem. Nobody cares. When's the last time somebody sat around and said, man, I'm looking for a growth guy, unless that was like Viagra related and that ain't my deal. And so I screwed up. Now I know the two words. And we went out like Tim Ferriss. Tim had the stupidest title for his first book that thank goodness the publisher pushed back. So Tim, being the analytic nerd that he is, who I got to meet here at this event, one of my heroes went out and did a whole bunch of Google testing. In what two words does Tim own? Four hour. And that guy has taken that to the bank. And so what two words do you own? And I guarantee you if you're not narrow enough focused, then you're nothing to anybody. And that's what's killing you. And what does brand give you? Unbelievable pricing power. I'm in Australia. I love this. We're number one in the number two business. Do I need to translate? If I do, we poop we pump poop. And if you don't need poop pump, then they don't care that you know who they are. But that's what we mean by brand. I'm passing through the Turkish airspace and I read this article about Ali. Now this is a guy whose passion was carving wood and he got a job doing it for a furniture company. But then he began to focus and he wanted to carve wooden doors. But not just any wooden doors, wooden doors for churches, but not just any churches for Christian churches. And today this lone artisan owns that mind space. By the way, when you do, I mean literally worlds seek out world churches seek out this lone artisan in this small province of southern Turkey because he owns 70% of this space. By the way, when you own this kind of branding, what happens to your marketing costs? They plummet. What happens to your pricing power as a result? What happens to your profitability and margins? Software like which is where you want to be. I want to see you at three. I want you to be at a million to get an EO and then get to 3 million and net a million. If you're not netting a million on 3 million, you're screwing up someplace within the business. That's the kind of margins at a minimum you should have. And so we've got a tool. Keep flipping. You're going to see what we call our one page vision summary. And in essence, if you can't state it this simply, these components, what are your handful of values you heard you got to hire against those values. You got to decide when you wake up in the morning what you're going to work on first based on those values. You've heard that over the last couple of days. You need to know what they are. And they're discovered. They're not defined. What is our purpose bigger than just making money? And then what are. And look, Robert Cialdini, who I you know, dear friend, we got to hang out together at the 100k event. His research is clear. You want to convince somebody to buy your product or service, you give them three reasons. Three crushes, two or four or a list of 10 Southwest Airlines from day one low fare. There's one you lead with lots of flights. Four in the morning, four in the evening, point to point and lots of fun. They've called it the 3LF's or the 3F's and it's powered that company for 46 years. And so what are the 3 promises? And then ultimately where are we taking this thing? The big hairy audacious goal. And if you know those four components, you have got a more aligned vision than most than 99% of the companies out there. Then you figure out, all right, what do we have to do this quarter, this year, in the next three to five years? And then you sit down with everybody in the company, say, all right, what can you do in the next 90 days to help us get there? And that way everybody has a very, very clear roadmap on a page. So my wife launched this olive oil business. She's fed up with the crappy oil that the Italians and Greeks dump on the stupid American population. It's all cheap and rancid with no nutritional value, yet it's critical to brain health. And so last September, we sat down over lunch, she had a coach, not sure it was a good idea, but she just penciled out what are the things that she really values? What's this purpose? To transform the olive oil industry through educating the American people. Three promises. First, most stuff healthy for you tastes like crap. So she has won. Her products, won five London Food Shows. It's the only olive oil in the history of the entire London Food show that's gotten what's called a gold dash three. That'll be significant in a moment and a very clear, big, hairy, audacious goal. Then you start to narrow in. And she said, in this first year, I got to win the New York City Food Show. She knew it. She knew the one thing, she laser focused on it and the rest is history. She did. She's got her chart and she's tracking up the sales. And she's in Barcelona this week going through now their second harvest as she brings in the new stuff. So from startup, it's pretty simple just to kind of get clear about what I've got to do. 90 days, one year, next three to five years with a clear vision moving forward. Now, once we've got that, we got to execute. And here the key question is, do you have relentless repeatability? It's getting not from there, but down to this level. And that's what it looks like. Basically, Julie has put a stake in the ground. She's put a flag up there and said, that's the Everest I'm taking. And by the way, why does it need to be at least 10 to 25 years out so nobody can debate you. This was supposed to be funny, but it's actually accurate. Anything shorter than that and folks can talk you out of it. They can bring stats that say, but man, we're going to put a man on the moon this decade. I mean, who says we're not going to these 10 to 25 year out goals? The kind of challenge that Dan put to Peter Diamandis is precisely what we're talking about here. A flag in the ground. Then you begin to back up to it. But let me suggest this so you can take down the stress. There are no straight lines in nature and there are none in business. And so there's only two points you need to be absolutely clear about, and that is where you're headed and what is the next step. Everything else in between we call a wag, wild ass guess. Because, man, the weather can change in a minute and you've all seen the movies and read the books and that's the way life is. So it's all about constantly readjusting and just making sure the next step you take doesn't send you off the cliff. And then you begin to make your way in the most crazy circuitous, hopefully following the easiest path. Quit hitting walls, go around them, go over them, find somebody like Stacy did. I don't know how to get to any of those folks. So she lucked out, somebody showed up, she put it out to the universe and she found the human who got her inside all of those particular deals that she needed to. Simon Lim is a client of ours in Malaysia. He does commercial cleaning. I love the fact that he has kept the chart, actually of his particular climb of his business with the Asian financial crisis, the subprime crisis. I just, I love that that's the journey that you're on and that's how bumpy and irregular that it'll look. And I'm telling you, you can tear your fingers off. And so I want to tell you a story about my friend Gene Brown. Gene, it's not Apple, not Google, not Facebook. He's doing garbage collection in Galway, Ireland. He's got 60 employees. He's in one of the big countries. The economy's collapsed. He's just trying to make payroll. And he scrapes up some bucks, comes down to our workshop and he said, all right, I know this. Without a vision, as they say in the Bible, the people will perish. And so we put out there. So I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I want a million customers by 2020. This was in 2010. Now we're talking about a city that's got only 70,000 humans in it. If you got everybody in Dublin, it's only 100,000 households. He's not going to get 100%. He's going to have to move way out beyond Ireland, through Great Britain, through Europe, all into the Middle East. But right now he's got 60 employees hauling trash in God forsaken Galway, Ireland. But he put it out there and then you start to climb. And the key is coming back to what I talked about yesterday. It's identifying what is the most important next constraint you need to move. And so as things began to clear, he said, I need, and you need to be Precise, I need $40,000, in this case euros more per month cash flow. That gave me a half a million for the year so I could get this thing back going again. And so he turned it into a game. Let's hit the big 4, 0 and win. He put up these kind of posters to track. That's the thing sport has that most of our businesses miss is a scoreboard. That's why the first thing Julie put up was that kind of handmade, bigger than live bottle of olive oil, so she could begin to mark it off immediately. And they did it. Then he said, okay, what do I gotta do next? My team's not really working well together as one. And he put a theme around it and it was all about job sharing days. I want sales to go out and work in a trash truck. I want accounting to go out with the salespeople. Because coming out of the crisis, they were still mad at each other. And he began tracking it off and let's have 180. I don't know if it was right, but it brought the team back together. And then next quarter he said, all right, I'm walking by my assistant, she's working on this spreadsheet and it's like, what are you doing? Well, I'm doing this spreadsheet you asked me to do. I didn't need that for the last two years. She didn't want to just say anything. You know entrepreneurs, you're scary. Even if you're not scary, you're just running around really fast and your team doesn't want to say anything. And so he knew he needed to give his people permission to tell him that the king had no clothes on. So if you see it's wasting time, energy, money or space. And it created a new language in the company that still serves them well today. They found another 25% productivity gain in three months, plus a lot more cash savings. They even did one focused around pricing. We're really big on the fact that most entrepreneurs got into business being cheaply priced and they never let it go. That's One of the things that got you here will not get you there. And they were able to go back and write price everything and increase their average revenue per customer that quarter 7%, which is huge in that market, went right to the bottom line and basically tripled the profitability of the industry just by taking a quarter and focus on pricing. They even did a cool, not cool. What's the result? I just got an email from Gene this weekend. He has partnered over this time with now a $350 million private waste management company called Averta in the Middle East. He runs so much better than they that they basically gave him their entire commercial division. He's now scaled it up and he's already crushed. He literally was. Email him. He sent his latest onepage. He said, vern, we already hit the million and it's just 2017 from a company at 60 employees in Galway, Ireland. It's all about setting the goal and taking one step at a time, understanding what is constraining me next, whether it's between your ears, inside the business or ultimately what Gene's figured out and I can't tell you what is the constraint in the industry. And he's got control of it. He's grabbed control of it and that's allowing him to be the dominant player in this entire region as I guarantee he takes his company to a billion cash. What is your cash conversion cycle? We got a whole chapter set of chapters on that.

But.

But I want to finish. So what's my what and my who? What we do is we help companies scale. But why? So my dad had a very, very, very successful company. My grandparents were entrepreneurs. He was a rocket engineer with a titan. He and three buddies left founded a company called Hire Electronics. This baby went through the roof. And then we lost it all in the 73 recession because a decision the SEC made that shut down one of our major customers and froze their bank accounts. I heard some similar stories in the room. And you don't declare bankruptcy back then. And so we poured it. We sold everything we had. All of our homes, our toys, our boats, our snowmobiles, our mountain property, everything. We grew up. That was wealth. And in a couple of wheat trucks. On my 15th birthday, we moved out to Kinsey, Kansas from heaven. Littleton, Colorado. We became maintenance engineers. Fancy word for janitor. I cleaned 50 bathrooms and 100 rooms every night after school in my $50 Camaro. I got it that cheap because I had a small problem. I'd been hit by a train, but I could still get there. And it Ultimately destroyed my dad, became an alcoholic, destroyed the family, the marriage. My sisters had to make a tough decision. I couldn't eat. My dad was living with me. I'm taking care of him, but he's driving and drinking. And so they called the police and had him put in jail for a year. He never forgave us for that. And I lost my dad last year. And I said, you know what? I'm going to dedicate my life to not seeing that happen to any other entrepreneur on the planet. Now let's speed forward. I take my company. Half million, million, 2 million, 4 million, 8 million. I'm getting ready to be an Inc. 500 and boom. 9, 11 hit. I lost a million bucks in about eight weeks. I wasn't really. I was spending money to make money coming up and I was out of business overnight. I thought, oh my God. Like father, like son. And then we happen to have this guy come in to speak to our EO chapter. And this idea is that if you really want to make 2,000 pounds of money, which by the way is almost a million bucks, you got to give away 200 first. And you've heard this message over and over and over. And Robert Kiyosaki came in and I thought he was a get rich quick guy. But he talked about how his rich dad, whenever he got in trouble would give money away to get things to start. So our church has the largest capital campaign launch in its history. I'd throw a little money in the till. I went back to Julie. We're going to lose our home. I said, hon, let's try something here. What have we got to lose? And we made a commitment to a three year gift to the campaign magnitudes beyond what I thought we could ever first all forward right now, let alone. But we did it. You heard Adam Grant's book Give and Take talked about from the stage. It was Lynne Twist that taught me about money. It's like water. You got to keep it flowing or it'll kill you. Like stagnant water. And sure enough. I don't know how it happened. I know how it happened. The World's Fair. Ultimately, I ended up getting 10x back what I had committed to donate that first year. And my only regret was what I didn't invest more. And so four practical ideas to wrap up here. I'm two minutes late. The number one question. Make your list and work it. Number two brand is about owning a couple of words. That's it. Four hour.

Three.

Focus your effort on the constraint any other place and you're absolutely wasting your time and effort. And number four, the universal truth. If you want to make a ton of money, you have to give and give right first. If you get the a team together around a very clear vision, then start the climb. Keep making sure that you don't fall off the cliff with each step that you take, then you can keep scaling. And so I want to finish up with just a little final video as we wrap up here. Look, you guys are the economic engines. You are the innovation engines of our local and global economies. We, what you do matters. And so you got to take this serious. You got to take yourself serious. You got to take your health serious. You got to take this job serious. Because leadership is a privilege. It's not a right. And so you've got to get it right. And so thanks a million. We'll see you@scalingup.com. thank you so much.

Please help me welcome Allison Azee.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Awesome.

Oh, my goodness. Thank you to all of you and to Joe. You all are like family to me. It only took me three years to get up here, so I feel that scaling has been kind of the theme for the weekend. So I feel like this fits perfectly. And the question that I want to answer for you all in this 10 minutes is how do you get off the hamster wheel and scale your team so that your company can ultimately run itself? How many of you would like to see that happen? Raise your hand. Awesome. Good. All right, Well, I know that many of you are building big companies. Some of you already have a big company. So I want to share with you a little bit of my journey that will hopefully help you avoid some of the pitfalls. I started my first business, I was 19 years old, and I was doing greeting cards for companies. And they would say to me, you know, Ali, we really love these greeting cards, but do you do brochures? Do you do radio commercials? Do you do television commercials? Do you do public relations? And I would hear my dad's voice in my ear saying, ali, if someone asks you to do something and you feel like it's worthwhile even if you don't know how to do it, just say yes and then figure out how to do it. And so I pretty much, does anyone have that philosophy out there? I pretty much used that strategy to get my company off the ground. It took off very quickly, and by the time I was 25 years old, I had built a full service advertising and public relations firm called the Borali Group in San Diego. And I was Making a lot of money. I was traveling all over the country. I had clients like Ben and Jerry's and Supercuts and Allstate. And you would have looked at me back then and you would have said, wow, young lady, you have got it together. And outwardly, yes, I did. Inwardly, this was me. Can anyone relate to this feeling? All right? I was miserable. I was working 24 7. I had absolutely no life. I felt like I was trapped in my own success. You see, I didn't know how to scale a business. I had a team. I didn't know how to delegate. I was a boss. I didn't know how to be a leader. I thought it was all up to me. And from the stress of it all, I ended up having a terrible car accident that it was a miracle that I survived. So when I walked away from that, I also walked away from this very successful company. And I walked away from a difficult marriage. And I set out into the world as a single mom. No money, no idea what I was going to do with my life, and happier than I had been in years. And I made a decision to take a year to figure out what was I doing wrong and what was I doing right so that I could do it differently moving forward. So why do you think so many businesses get stuck at that 1 million, 5 million or 10 million dollar level? It's because you're sucked into putting out fires, right? Taking you to what is urgent instead of what's really important to take your business to the next level. And we are creatures of habit. That's what we are as human beings. We do what we're used to doing. But that will only get you so far. If you're using the same mindset to scale your business that you did when you were starting your business, it's not going to take off. If you're using the same marketing strategies or operational strategies. It's not going to get you to that next level to take the leap from entrepreneur to enterprise. What got you here will not get you there. What got you out of Egypt is not going to get you to the promised land. So to scale your business, you literally have to reconstruct the business from this higher level. Once you're here, you need to build a new company that will scale. Otherwise it's going to be like a ball and chain. It's going to keep you small, it's going to keep you stuck and only have incremental growth or even worse, going backwards. So Fast forward over 35 years, I went on to build nine more companies that I've had an absolute blast with. And what I found are there are five phases that a business must go through to truly scale, to make a lot of money and make an impact. So you can also have a life too. So phase one, you are the seeker. You're the solopreneur. You're passionate, you're out there, you're ready to make it happen, but you're doing everything. Phase two, the pioneer. You are forging your own path. You're getting your hands dirty. You're building a small team, maybe an assistant, a marketing person, a bookkeeper. But again, you're still approving everything that goes in and out of the business. Some of you might be there. Phase three, the ringleader.

Why?

Because it's a circus out there. In phase three, you are beginning to build teams, but you're holding on too tightly. Some of you may be control freaks. Anybody here? Right. Phase three, though, you're also getting clear on your vision. You thought you knew what your vision was in phase one, but you really didn't know what you were doing. In phase three, you start to see a vision and what the possibilities are. You start to put processes and systems in place. You start having meetings. But the truth is, your team is still frustrated. You might have people in the wrong roles. They always feel like they're disappointing you because you're always jumping in and correcting them. Right? Does anybody have that experience? And I know this is true because as was discussed earlier, 70% of employees are disengaged. And my guess is that some of those 70% of the are your employees. You can die in phase three. It's a dangerous place to be. You have to go through it. But there's hope, because there is Phase four. But you have to be willing to take the leap, like I do and have done on the trapeze for the last 20 years. You have to be willing to let go of that bar and be in the air so that you can be caught by the catcher. And some of you are like, well, I can't let go, Alison. It's a scary thing. What if they make a mistake? What if I fail? But oh, my darling, what if you fly? Because there is hope. There is Phase four. Phase four, you are the co creator. You are working with your team and your team starts to step up and you see the leaders shine or you recruit leaders in and they start asking important questions like how do we increase profit? How do we create a better customer experience? They start to own it and run with it, which moves you into phase five, where you are the visionary. And that's the ideal situation, like we were talking about earlier. You can step back because they've got it and you need to trust it. And your biggest tip here is to shut your mouth. So my client, Christine Sanchez, she came to me, owns a cold storage construction company. She'd been running it for 10 years and was stuck in phase three. It was chaos. She was the bottleneck. We moved her to phase five. Within two years, she went from 500,000 to 6 million. The best part is she finally has a life. Now there's a woman named Jan Arnold who founded a little company called Creative Nail Design. For you ladies, it's the shellac on your nails. She sold this little company for $600 million to Revlon. And she spoke at one of my events, and she said a quote that I feel like sums all of that I'm saying up. And that is, for me, it's all about finding the right people that are passionate and have a love for the brand. My job is to sell the moon. If I can get them to see that it's there, it can be ours. And once they own it, we can do anything.

And so a couple of ideas that I think are most applicable for us in this room. First is really to get out of your head what you pay people. We do these studies, comparative studies. I just spoke in front of 2,000 IT service companies last Friday, and they're all out doing their studies so that we can compete with other folks in our space. Look, I think you have a very simple decision. Would you rather have less people paid more and be smarter, or would you rather have a whole lot more lower paid stupid people? I really think it's the fundamental decision we make. And if you're familiar with the Container Store, they've always believed that one good, great employee replaces three good. Steve Jobs always thought the ratio was 20 to 1, 50 to 1. Bill Gates always saw it as 10,000 to 1. One great programmer can replace 10,000. And so I think a key number, if you're achieving what Brook was able to achieve in terms of revenue or gross margin or profit per employee, when you're at her numbers with 20 employees, you can take what off the table compensation. And so our partner, Andy Bailey Telecom stories, it's not Facebook or Google, but when he started with our habits in 2004, he's averaging about 75,000 gross margin dollars per employee. We think that's the key number. By focusing on that, he was able to quadruple it four times his industry. When you've got that, guess what, you can compensate your people a lot more and still take more to the bottom line. And so what we're seeing is that it's fairness, not sameness. I think that is the most unequal thing. And if you look at sports teams, let's just take one position on a sports team and they might have five or six that play in that position. Does everybody that plays right tackle make the same amount of money that plays quarterback in any one of those? No. And if you look at the delta between first string and second string or third string, if you look at the violinist there in the orchestra, the delta is tremendous. And so rule number one is what's the first thing? If you've got any kind of number of employees, people come into and ask I would like a career path. What is that code for? How do I make more money? But here's your issue. You don't have places for them to move up to. Brooke doesn't. And we don't want to be putting those layers in. The large companies are stripping them out. And so the first thing is you've got to have super wide pay bands. People have got to be able to make two to three times where they started in their same position but with key metrics that are driving that. So I want to take you, my buddy John Summers in Allied Printing. Look, this isn't Facebook or Google. This is commercial printing. But his customer service reps who start at 48,000 can progress through a series of. And by the way, we think you ought to give people titles that start from beginner to wizard to maestro seven ways that they can get promoted in their position. They start at 48, they can finish at 96. Folks managing print projects come in at 68 and can make up to 140 salespeople start at 60 and can make up to 600 a 10x. And so first you have super wide pay bands and is it clear what are the things they need to achieve in order to be able to accomplish that? So you take the pressure off people saying hey, I need a career path. Then we think it's critical to gamify games. I just want to share a story. So we get. Now I think it's the casino industry that understand the psychology of humans better than all of us combined. They have figured out how ways to get humans to sit in front of computer screens where we're just trying to get them to come back from break. I mean, have you been to a casino? Folks don't even want to pee. If they could pee right there, they would, right? They want to be served up food. And by the way, you're having trouble having people work all night. It's not an issue at casinos in which way is the compensation moving. And so I'm like, what has that industry figured out? So we get called into HSN and they're call centers. We're just trying to get folks to upsell. They've got this whole pile of money they can't give away. And so what we did is rather than give money, we said let's give people chances to get movie tickets, dinners for two flat screen TVs. We had enough money, we parked a car out in front of the call centers. And the result, if we promised it, we never got the contract upselling increase not 16, not 60, but 260% as a result, just by gamifying the results. And last then I think it comes back full circle. So I just want to, I just want to share one quick idea that again we got from John Sommer. And it comes back to bonuses. And so first of all, I don't think bonuses ought to be paid off anymore, paid out any more than once every year. Sometime way after the end of the year, if you pay it out quarterly, it feels like what part of the regular compensation? And so it starts to become like an entitlement. But here's what John does, because he already pays people fairly and they can make twice as much and they know how to do that within their existing position. His retention in that industry is crazy. And when you're making twice what everyone averages in the industry, you've got it right and out of sight. So John's got the base and all of that figured out. So what he does with the bonus is he only pays out 50% sometime after the end of the year. And then the other 50% vests over the next five years, 10% in each of those buckets. So as people stay, what's happening to that future buckets? They're getting bigger. And so now we play to Robert Cialdini psychology. People do more to avoid a loss than to get a gain. And so I've got to think twice. Am I going to leave? And leave five years of increasing buckets of money, which, by the way, you're doing employees a favor. First, two reasons people also leave. You make me work with stupid people and you make me do stupid stuff. And what we want as a company is if we have great people, I want you to retain them. You lose A good person, it's hurting everybody around. And number two, a lot of your folks don't have savings. That's one of the real tough things. Even those that are high paid now, they've got five buckets of money that are building out to maybe pay for college, pay for that down payment on a home or whatever. And a company's going to have to offer a huge signing bonus to make up for five years of vesting bonuses out to the future.

As you're, as you're attending this event, remember, I'm a sponsor. So you're going to know in this time that we have together the power of systems. As Joe said, you're going to have an understanding of why speaking effectively can help you grow your business. And Kara just proved to you what she's done with $150 million business by being a speaker. And hopefully you're going to feel committed to being an even better speaker. Now think of your systems. You probably have a system for new clients, for a new team member, a system on how to stay fit and healthy. And now we have a system to breathe through our nose. A system is a set of procedures, as you know, that is put into an organized framework to get something done. And when you have systems, you can predict the results and you know it's going to work. So as a sponsor, I'm offering you a system on communicating your ideas. Now, we have two other sponsors. Jennifer Houde has a system on conveying in print your vivid vision. And Bill Gerber has a system for using accounting virtually. Mine is a system to use communication of your ideas and making it even more effective verbally. So think of this. The longer you work with a system, the better the system is going to work for you. Joe, I used to laugh. Is that true from your experience, that longer we have a system, the better it's going to work?

Absolutely, because you get more, I mean, like with anything, you know, the more, the more it marinates, the deeper it goes into your behavior, into your knowledge, into your awareness, into your resourcefulness.

Well, and that's what experiences really do. So when you went to Lake Powell with me, which you had never done on our houseboat, you saw the power of systems at work. Everything worked. All of my boats worked because I have a system for maintaining them. We caught fish for dinner because I have a system for fishing. You got up on skis, which you had never done before, because I have a system on how to teach people how to water ski. Everything Joe, you experienced was part of a system. And that's why you had such a good time. Now, remember what we said, the longer you use a system, the better the system gets. So in reality, that houseboating experience of Joe's is a metaphor for what I can do for you when you hire me as your speaking and communications guide. Why? Because of my systems and my experience. You see, when Joe left our houseboat, that was my 1,689th day on my houseboat. Not 1,689 days in a row, but that was over 30 years on that boat. So I perfected those systems. And I don't know anybody that has that many days on Lake Powell on their own houseboat. And the same is true for your ability to communicate and speak. I've got 46 years of taking every part of the communication process and creating an easy to use system that you will learn and use. And as you know, a system saves you stress, time, energy and money.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

It could be the best decision that you've ever made, and it sure was for Jim do. Because Joe, you always ask people to write in the chat box what was the best idea that you got. And at a recent meeting, Jim wrote this in the chat box. Since I hired Joel Weldon as my speaking skills coach, I have made at least an extra $500,000 by growing my business through speaking. Well, Jim, congratulations and thanks for saying that. So if you want to increase your income every time you speak, go to the chat box and just say, joel, let's talk and we'll have a conversation. And when you have me as your communication and speaking guidelines, you're going to learn these systems. And remember, when you have a system, it's going to save you stress, time, energy and money. And we're going to work together on helping you learn these systems so you can make better one on one presentations. Big Joe Clark said that was one of the best benefits he got in working with me. You're going to have a system how to write powerful introductions, get your audience involved before you say your first word. How to capture their attention is a system. How to use visuals and then how to speak virtually. That's a system. What about your videos? Evan Carmichael gave us such great stuff on Friday that you can use, but you got to have good videos. That's what I can help you with. A system on how to close with impact. And one of the best ways to energize your listeners is with humor. And Devang Patel, one of our longtime members, has mastered that. And when Devang hired me six years ago, he wrote this and let me just read that to you. I believe in coaching because every time I hire a coach, it makes me even more money. Plus, investing with Joel Weldon was one of the best coaching investments I have ever made. Well, thank you, Devang. So let's talk about the investment. Unlike most coaching programs that you've been involved in, this is a one time investment. There's no monthly or annual fees. Once you're in, you got me. The investment for me to work with you one on one is normally $10,000 for eight hours. But instead of that, 10,000, if you're a Genius Network member, you save $2,100 one time. That's $7,900. But wait, there's more. As Kevin Harrington would have said on his commercials, there's no time limit. It's not going to be eight hours. Once you invest, you get me forever. That's a bonus for this annual event. Now, you might be thinking, Joel, how can you do that? It's very simple because of the systems. When you learn these systems, which are so simple and easy to grasp, you're going to be able to use them immediately and get results immediately. And once you have them, you're not going to need me that much. But yet you can always use that unlimited time. Bounce ideas off me, have me write introductions for you, check your slides. It doesn't have to be for an entire presentation. I want to make sure that I have time. So just like I have for the 167 Genius Network members that have hired me in the last seven years, I'm only going to take nine people from this annual event. That's it. At the $7,900 one time. If this sounds interesting, just write in the chat box. Joel, let's talk in the chat box. We're going to also give you a link to a handout which has some more information on it and it's unconditionally guaranteed. Plus, we do these on Zoom and we transcribe them for you. So all of our conversations are printed out and you get a copy of everything. It could be for five minutes or two hours, whatever you need. Now, Joe, you asked me to work with John Raymonds and Bill Gerber on their two presentations. Bill on the accounting and John on the investment. What did you think of those talks that they delivered?

They were both terrible. I didn't like you. No, I'm kidding. No, they were great. They were fantastic. Here's the biggest thing too with John. See if you would not helped him with that. I don't know if John ever would have agreed to do it. He probably would have, but I thought they were fantastic and I got so much great feedback in the feedforward forms about those talks. So thank you.

Well, as John said, he's not a speaker, but he has such wisdom to share. And what did I do? I just helped bring out the best of John. This was his material, but it needed to be organized and structured so you could follow it. And he was so open and willing to listen to suggestions. Same with Bill Gerber. When I came up with the dating theme, it was because he said he's a wild and crazy guy. Let's put that in. And when we work together, I don't beat you up. There's no negative criticism. I don't ask you to be like another speaker or be a stage performer. The key to this system is to be you. John Raymond was John. Bill Gerber was Bill. So what will I do then? If I'm not going to pick on you or change you, I'm going to look for your strengths and encourage you with positive reinforcement to bring out your uniqueness, to add clarity and conciseness to your message and help you connect the message even better to your audience. Now let me just name drop a few people since this is a commercial. Ask any of these people. And these are some high visibility members. Dave Berg, Jason Campbell, Jennifer Carroll, Kevin Harrington, Liz Herrera, Vern Harness, Jamie Hope, Mike Koenigs, Big Joe Clark, Mary Morrissey. Joe, you're in there too. These are all part of those 167 members. Joe, what do you hear when you talk to these people about what I've done in seven years? Do you get a lot of complaints?

No. No. I mean, everyone loves you. I mean, I think the only complaint, because I'm not going to lie, the only complaint is just your foul mouth. I mean, you use so much profanity. No, I'm kidding. You never hear. Joe, I'd love to actually hear you use profanity during this presentation while you're pitching. That would be awesome. No, I mean you have helped so many people with literally understanding the before, during and after part of their presentation. So many of the talks that you have helped people with have led to books, they have led to full length presentations. And I mean, people didn't even know how to introduce themselves or even think about speaking to many people. I mean, half of these people weren't even speakers until you worked with them. And now they're doing seminars, now they're doing events. I mean, it's crazy. So that's what I think is the biggest strategic byproduct of you helping people.

Well, that's so kind of you to say. And that's why that tagline is important, using speaking to grow your business. So just type in the chat box, Joel, and let's talk if this seems to make sense to you. So on August 6, 2017, Joe, you and Eunice called me and said Ben Hardy is a new member and he wants to give a 10 minute talk at the September meeting, his first meeting. He's 26 years old, he's still in school, and he doesn't really know how to talk, but he has a good idea. Would you help him? Do you remember that, Joe?

Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. It was.

And so at his first meeting, he was going to give his talk. So Ben and I started working on his message. And halfway through the first call, he said, joel, I need what you have. You got to help me beyond this talk, because I got to learn to speak better. And that began a three year journey with Ben of using speaking to grow his business. And grow it he did on Ben's testimonial video that he made for me at last year's annual event. Here's what he said. When I hired Joel to help me with that talk, it changed my life. That talk was so well received, it got me to speak on one of the most prestigious stages in the world. That talk opened the door to riches beyond my wildest dreams. And since then, that first talk, it's led to at least 1 1/2 million dollars in revenue. Joel, I love you. Ben always says he loves you. Well, Ben, I love you too, my friend. And I know you're in church today with the five kids and Lawrence, so that's why you're not here. But let me ask you this question for you as a member. What if Ben was not prepared and confident and equipped with a powerful message three years ago, he would have missed out on that opportunity and the rewards that followed that 10 minute talk. So what about you? Are you missing out because your speaking skills aren't what they could be? And who is missing out on hearing your message? Because your speaking skills aren't what they could be. So, fellow Genius Network members, you're going to love the opportunities coming your way, and you're going to love using these systems to grow your business. And when you do, you're going to see your dreams come true.

Joe, thank you, Joel. Thank you. And, you know, I hope you read all these comments that people have posted here, because you have a lot of real respect and real appreciation, and you have, aside from, you know, just your business and helping people, you're a really great testament to living a good life. I mean, there's been so many talks about health and how you take care of yourself. And you also have built a life where you spend a lot of time doing what you love to do, which is how many times you've been on.

Lake Powell, 1689 days when you were there. But I had another week after you left. So, yeah, that's four and a half years over the last 30 years on that boat. So we've averaged two months a year while I was young and my daughters were younger. They were raised up there, and as a result, we have the family that I'd have. And now my youngest daughter is joining us at Genius Network and going to be. She's been part of our company for a while, and so is my oldest daughter.

Which is awesome. And, you know, I'll tell you, if the world ever, like zombies took over and, you know, everything got really crazy, I would probably go find you and then to have you be like, the survival guy, because he's really good at that stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, that's only because I'm the oldest member of Genius Network, and when you stay as many years as you should, you'll be treated with respect like Joe treats me as the old man in the group. But I'm not planning to go anywhere for a long time. No.

Which is so awesome.

Put a note in the chat box and we'll talk.

Thank you, Joel. So, hi, Joel.

Joel, love you.

And let me say this about when it comes to things that are offered and sponsors and things that are sold, as you know, I do not turn my events into Pitch a Thons. And I would never have anyone offer anything. And I don't recommend things that I don't have a high belief and experience with. And the. The way that I look at anything that someone's going to offer, if anyone would hire Joel and you don't, you know, consider it an incredible value, I would even back it up with. With guaranteeing it. So I'm not going to recommend anything that has a fee to it that I don't think is going to make you money. In the same way that even Genius Network membership, it's a school that pays you to attend. So, you know, those are the things that we will recommend because that's how I feel about it.

So awesome.

Most of the time, speakers wait till the end to show the disclosures. So let me just take care of that right up front. Everyone got that? I'm going to begin by borrowing from the great book A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. I went from being very happy to very sad in a matter of seconds. I left a big brokerage firm in 1999 when Mimi and I started our own wealth management company and began our entrepreneurial journey to this moment when I realized we had netted more than a million dollars from our company. But just when I was getting excited, I scanned down the tax return to see how much we had paid in taxes that year. And I remember thinking to myself, you could buy a pretty nice home for that much money. And then I was overcome with doubt. Doubt about the way I was managing our own wealth. Had we hired the right professionals on our team? Was I making mistakes? Was I missing big opportunities? And even though we lived a great lifestyle, was it sustainable? You have to remember, at that moment in time, I thought I knew everything there was to know about wealth management for entrepreneurs. So I started asking other wealth managers I respected and I kept hearing the same traditional answers. Then I heard about something called a family office. The way billionaires manage their wealth. And luckily I got introduced to a family office in New York City. I jumped on a plane, I flew out there and I met with the CEO and we hit it off. We just connected. And he shared with me how they would hire the best accountants, attorneys, legal, tax, insurance and investment professionals working for that one billionaire and his family as full time employees. I knew immediately that this was the best way to manage money for entrepreneurs. There was only one problem. You need about 200 or $300 million before that makes any sense. Then I thought, I wonder if I could create a virtual family office at a fraction of the cost for entrepreneurs like me and my clients who are making great money but don't yet have $200 million in assets I needed didn't exist. So I created it first for my own clients and our family. And now we do it for every new client. I'm going to cover three things with you today. I'm going to Cover the entrepreneur's virtual family office. So this is a structure how you should think about your wealth management as an entrepreneur. I'm going to go over stress testing which billionaires do and you should too. And finally, I'm going to cover some questions you can ask yourself for a self assessment to see where you are in your wealth planning journey. First, the entrepreneur's virtual family office. If I can get a slide up here. There we go. Perfect. So here's the framework. I want you to think about things. I believe that entrepreneurs are the reason for everything great in this country. You're the reason for the economy. You're the reason for innovation. You're the reason for giving. And I believe you deserve to make rich real. Now, that means different things to different entrepreneurs. So to one entrepreneur, it might mean something as simple as flying first class or flying private. For another, it might mean taking three months off a year to travel the world. For another, it might mean knowing that your great grandchildren never have to worry about the cost of an education. And for still others, it might mean serving a cause you care about, both while you're on this planet and beyond, which for Dave Asprey is 180 years in my 24 years of helping entrepreneurs. To make rich real, you need three outcomes. You need absolute confidence in your team. You need max wealth both inside and outside your company. And you need sustained wealth. I meet entrepreneurs all the time. They had a huge exit. They made a lot of money and they squandered it because as Joe said in the intro, it's a different skill set to make money than to keep money.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get.

A copy there to get these three outcomes, there's three main drivers. Entrepreneurs love to grow, but I'm going to leave that to third. The first is protect. Moving from vulnerable to secure. Manage, which is moving from uncoordinated to worry free and finally, grow. The part you're excited about, moving from incremental to exponential. So when you protect and manage, you get absolute confidence. When you manage and grow, you get maximum wealth. And when you grow and protect, you get sustained wealth. For each of these protect, manage and grow, I created three catalysts. And this is where the Work is really done. First, asset protection. This is having a plan so your assets can't be taken by a lawsuit. Second is wealth transfer. So making sure the right people get your stuff and money when you're done with it, at the right time, in the right way, without ruining your kids. If you don't have kids, your wisdom as an entrepreneur should be passed on through stories and videos. And then finally, the time energy shield. You should have a wealth manager on your team that protects you from other professionals, pitches and projects. Under manage business value, your business is the most valuable asset you have. You need to get a business valuation to know it's worth. You need a monetization strategy, which could be a high multiple exit. Or it could be turning your company into mailbox money, where you live a great lifestyle and you go out to the mailbox and pick up a check. If you're under 30, ask an old person at your table what a mailbox is so we can move to the next one. The next is the wealth wheel. You're gonna pick up advisors and professionals over your life as an entrepreneur. You're gonna pick up an accountant, you're gonna pick up an attorney, you're gonna pick up an insurance agent. Often they're not all a players. They're not talking to each other. And the worst part is you're in the middle trying to manage that team and you shouldn't be in the middle. And then finally, the linchpin partner. This is who holds the whole thing together. This is a wealth manager who has three distinct qualifications. First, a specialization in working with entrepreneurs. Most financial advisors are generalists. Second, experience in working with entrepreneurs at least 10 or 20 years. And third, a fiduciary standard of care in all dealings with you. That's a fancy legal term. That means the advisor has to by law represent you and your interests before their own. Under grow tax planning, your largest expense as a successful entrepreneur is going to be taxes. You should have a well thought out, annually updated and implemented tax plan investments. I put these in three categories. Private equity, real estate and stocks and bonds. You want to have a smart strategy for how you're handling those areas to build wealth outside of your company. And finally, the profit accelerator. Knowing what are your critical drivers to profitability. Having a simple way to monitor and improve those key drivers. And by doing that, increase your cash flow. Second thing I want to cover today is the stress test. CEG Worldwide did a study of 199 family offices. These are families that have more than $500 million and 93.5% of them do stress testing. What is stress testing? What does that look like? It's a deep dive with a wealth expert on everything that touches your wealth. So it's looking at your business insurance, your personal insurance, your liability coverages, your estate documents, your asset protection plan, your investment statements, your business tax returns, your personal tax returns, Your P&LS, your business operating agreements, your buy sell agreements, your debt, and even the plans you put together for your employees. At an event like this, I get asked a lot, Jim, what's the first thing I need to do on my wealth management? You need to get a stress test by a qualified wealth manager that does this on a regular basis. We do it for all of our clients and we do it to answer three questions for them. First, are you making any big mistakes? Second, are you missing any opportunities? And third, does your team consist of a players and are they talking to each other? The third is the self assessment. Within the nine categories that I went over earlier, I created a question for each so an entrepreneur like you can find out. Where are you in your wealth planning journey? I only have time to go over two today of the nine, but let's do this together. So question seven of nine is this. How convinced are you that your annual plan for paying less tax is delivering on all the legal opportunities available to you? This is one to ten. One is bad, ten is excellent. So one might be. Every year the US treasury sends me a birthday card. I hope that's not you. And a 10 would be. My plan is second to none. And most likely you're somewhere in between 1 and 10. Question number 5 of 9 How confident are you that you could completely forget about your wealth management and still know for sure that your wealth team is proactively driving your wealth forward? A1 would be it's a hot mess and A10 totally confident. We created for the nine questions the make Rich Real scorecard and this is my gift to you. Go to makerichreal.com and you can get the scorecard. There's no required opt in. I promise you're not going to be tagged, pixeled, prodded or poked. A lot of smart people in the room could show me how to do that, but that's not the purpose of this. I'm going to leave you today with this story. My office manager buzzed me one day and said jim, Steve just called and Steve and Joanne are coming in tomorrow and they said it's urgent. And that concerned me because Steve was a high flying entrepreneur. We had been working together for more than 10 years. And Joanne never came in. It was always Steve. He said she didn't care about the finances and then he handled everything. The next day I walked into the lobby to greet them. First I saw Joanne. Her face was pale and she looked sad. Then I looked over and saw Steve. He was in a wheelchair and his hair had fallen out. And I knew immediately that Steve had cancer. No one mentioned the elephant in the room. I got them back into my office and as soon as we got settled, Steve went into the meeting like normal. Started talking about our plan and the strategies about the professionals on the team. And when he finished, he looked at me and he said, very matter of fact, Jim, I've got pancreatic cancer. I only have a couple of months to live. Can we go over the part of the plan where I'm not here and it's just Joanne? I looked at Joanne and she had tears streaming down her face. So I went over the plan the way it worked without Steve when he's gone. And when I finished, I looked at Steve and I was surprised to see this look on his face, this look of peace, this look of contentment. And then he looked deep into my eyes and I looked deep back into his and he simply said, you got her? I said, yeah, Steve, I've got her. And we teared up. A couple of months later, Joanne called me to tell me that Steve had passed. And as I hung up the phone, I said to myself, don't worry Steve, I've got her. Who's got you? Who's got your family? You deserve to have a team of a players. You deserve to have a team that talks to each other. You deserve to have a team that puts your interests before their own. Now is the time to get the team that you deserve.

As a member of Genius Network for the past year you've played with my head with this elf biz part of it, you know, easy, lucrative, fun. It's not that, it's. It's very simple process but it's not that hard. It's not that easy to do sometimes. You know, it's that mindset change. Anyway, getting back Paul Monaco, born and raised in Toronto. We have a an e commerce business that sells golf apparel and shoes. Our primary focus is in the off price business. In previous season we don't sell hard goods. This year we invested a lot more into inline goods. We have offices until we have a website in Canada and a website in the USA.ca.com and collectively we probably do. Between two of them around $5 million a year. Our biggest challenge, our number one challenge is database growth. In 2019, we spent over a million dollars in Facebook. And that was a very, that was a zero sum game. We pulled back on all marketing investments of that nature to start. Are we there? Are we good?

Yeah.

Occasionally we'll have people that'll make noise.

Okay.

Which we apologize for, by the way. If anyone's watching, if you're making noise in the background, please mute yourself. We'll do our best to do that. And, and occasionally we'll have hecklers that come in and they're super annoying and they will just make noise. And we do our best to meet those people, but those people will basically burn in hell. So if anyone does that, that you're putting karmic annoyances out into the world. But yeah, so just carry on please. Thank you.

So, you know, we have a database of about a hundred thousand which, you know, which, which you know, we can't get past. We can't seem to get past that threshold. And our, our course, especially over the past year, over the years has always been shoes. You know, we've been strong in shoes, but with supply chain issues, besides with supply chain issues, inventory is a little bit, have been harder to get in the off price world. So we've invested it into inline goods which our margins are not as good. However, we still want to have the diversification of that category because we have customers that want those products. But again, our number one challenge is growing our database. It's been a nightmare to get past it because the churn of people unsubscribing and the amount of new subscribers is just a zero sum game right now. So no matter what we do, we can't get past certain sales points, certain sales goals. So we believe that if our database was 500,000, you know, our business would multiply. Yeah, it would.

Right?

If only there were 500,000 golfers.

Only if there were. Well, there's two of us that I know of.

Right, exactly. That's funny.

So I think that's where the problem lies for us. And maybe I'm totally wrong.

I doubt it. You know, one of the things. Can I ask some questions about some of your metrics to see whether, you know, maybe look at it from a different perspective here. How much of your business right now, if we. You're familiar with the way we break things into before unit, during unit and after unit. Right. So in your situation, I would say that if we look at, for the, the, you know, trailing 12 months, how much of the revenue that you generate right now comes from people who were on you, on your list 12 months and 1 day ago that have not. Not new people to the list, because I'm going to ask you that next. But how many people are. I would consider your after unit to be the, you know, people who have bought. I'm talking about your customer list now, not your prospect list. We'll talk about that in the before unit, but your, your database of customers. Out of the hundred thousand that you have total, how many of them are people who've bought from you?

So we have about 50,000 customers.

So half the people are customers.

Customers. Okay. All right. And if I've answered your question correctly, we have a return customer rate of about 70%.

Okay, now that's great. So that means that they. And because golfers are golfers. And it's the kind of thing that, that is an itch that is never not itchy. I mean, there's perpetual, you need new shoes all the time, new stuff, new whatever, you know, so that they're constantly itching and the, you know, when you've got that relationship with them and they're, you know, you're a known quantity to them, it makes sense. So how much of the business. Because you save these things. 70% of the people who buy one time will buy again is what I hear you saying when you say you've got a 70% return customer rate. But the number that I'm actually asking now is of 100% of the revenue that you did in the last 12 months. How much of that came from people who are buying again who are already existing customers versus new people?

I'll try to answer this to you in this way. So a year and a bit ago, we introduced a membership program which was you pay $29 a year, you get free shipping and free returns. Perfect.

Like Amazon Prime Smart. Right.

So we have now up to, I think we're about 2,500 members of that, of that membership base. The. It represents 33% of our revenue. Perfect.

That's really good to know if that's helpful. Yeah.

Of the returning customer rate. It's, it's. Well, it stands up. 70% of our revenue comes from returning customers. Perfect.

That's, that's good. That's what I want to know. Right there.

That's what it is.

Okay. And then of the, the remaining 70%, what do you do to drive that? What, what's the driver of the new, new business?

This is where we're challenged. You know, we've done Facebook marketing before. We've done Google Ads before in Google Shopping and now we just recently invested with, you know, Kassam with regards to the, you know, Google shot. Google advertising again, but it's so early. But that's the first initiative that we've taken in the last 14 months.

What kind of ads are you running? Like, what's your objective with the ads? Are you advertising merchandise with a direct link for people to buy or what sellers, that kind of thing?

Yes. So they are product specific for the most part for purchases?

Yes. So one of the things that I would suggest to you is are you familiar with in the hotel industry, they've got a driving metric called revpar, which is revenue per available room. That's the standardized metric for the hotel industry to compare one hotel to another. So when I look at what you're basically doing is you've got. Your business is primarily driven by your subscribers, by your email subscribers, right?

Yes.

And so you've got an asset of a list of how many did you say of both prospects and customers?

100,000.

100,000 people. So what I look at is calculating your revenue per prospect. When you look at the per available prospect, Rev Pap. I look, I call it. So you would look at your $5 million total revenue that you generate, and that came from the 100,000 people. Everybody who bought is a subset of those 100,000 people this year. Right. So you generate somebody who's quick at math, can maybe help with this. But if you have 100,000 people and you generated $5 million in revenue, that means that the yield on that asset was a number per subscriber, per email, per addressable prospect that you have.

I believe that's $50 a person.

So $50 per person per year, that's in the last 12 months, right?

Yeah.

So when you look at this now, the real objective here is to take a different approach to the lead generation and separate the compelling from the convincing. The most valuable thing that you can do is build your list of golfers, not necessarily that they need to buy, because everybody who buys is a subset of people who golf. Right. And so rather than make raise the bar high when you're doing the ads to present yourself to somebody for the first time, to show them what you've got and that they have to buy something now to have that value. I would look at separating that and having your before unit objective with at least a portion of your revenue be to drive golf, subscribe, you know, golfers on your list. Because if you can do that for something less than $50, the ROI on that is tremendous. Right. So I would only be concerned with, you know, if we look at the before unit Profit Activator one, select a single target market, you've got golfers, and we'll look at some of the, you know, more granular flavors of those golfers. But Profit Activator 2 is about compelling people to raise their hand. We want to. You've got, when you're showing ads on Facebook, you're showing ads to invisible prospects, you don't know them yet. Right. You're showing the ad to everybody who looks like they've got an interest in golf. But you don't know them yet, you haven't met them, they're not on your list, you can't address them specifically. Right. So the objective that I would be looking at is looking at driving that list of just growing the list of golfers. Now I would bet that if we put our heads together that you would be able to drive golfers onto a list for under $5 per person. And if you could do that, if you spent, you know, how much did you say you spent on Facebook in the last 12 months?

Nothing in the past 12 months. But the previous time was a million dollars in one year.

So if you imagine if you did a million dollars and you for $5 got 200,000 extra subscribers, that would change the trajectory of your business, right?

Yes.

So when we look at that and that was really only your, you know, that was really only the. First year, you know, when we're looking at one year as $50 is the, the yield for that, for that list. So when you get kind of out of the expense based approach to advertising, which is what that is where you're hoping to run the ad, get somebody to buy and hopefully have a profit before the credit card bill is due at the end of the cycle, that's how people measure in this, you know, traditional direct digital marketing world. That's like a home run. If you can have a self funding kind of ad spend that you get a return on your ad spend within 30, 60 days. But when you look at it, it's very sort of short term thinking because the real value, if you take the five year value of your, of a email subscriber, if it's $50 a year, that it's $250 and you only have to pay to get them on the list one time. So making rethinking about it and making a capital investment in building the asset, that is your list of as of yet unconverted prospects then making offers. And because your incremental cost to add 50,000 people to your list is margin, very, very little. You're already, you're already preparing the emails, you're already, you know, sunk cost of the copy and the marketing and the team that's putting those together. It's not going to cost you any more to send to 50,000 more people than it is to send to a hundred thousand people. Right. So all of that cost, all of that investment is front end loaded in building the asset. And now you get, you know, you can get even better at converting those prospects with, you know, better and better offers if you do it right. Like if you start thinking about separating out the individual jobs of work that you're doing, like identifying and, and getting golfers to subscribe, building a list of golfers that then pay attention to your emails, you know, if you're adding value to those things that you're almost like creating a media property, then that also has value whether they buy from you or not, because adjacent to you, there are so many other things that people are going to buy that you don't necessarily even participate in. You know, with a group of 100,000 people, you could be putting together with a partner, with a collaborator, trips to the greatest golf destinations in the world. You could be having a travel component of this where people get to gather or come. You could create a golf league or a membership or something in the after unit where you're looking at building, deepening, nurturing those lifetime relationships with people. You know, there's, you've got so much potential there, but I don't want your head to spin so quick. We're only a few minutes, but what, what, how's that all landing? What are you hearing so far?

You know, that resonates with me extremely well, Dean, and just to share one of the thoughts that we had come up with recently, but I mean, this has been like on the, you know, in the background for a long time with regards to creating content to get people to subscribe. And one of the categories that we shine in is golf shoes. And to be really known as to do content around golf shoes because I, I believe that as golfers, yeah, one of the products that we really need, you know, help with is golf shoes. I mean, you know, polo's a polo, but shoes, there's a lot more research and development, a lot more technology and it's a little bit harder for consumers to decipher which is the best for them. And I thought we could help them you know, make those decisions whether they buy from us or not because you know that's where our expertise is, is in shoes.

Yeah, exactly. And that's, I think that's, that's awesome. You know, like thinking that way of all of really thinking about the ways that you can add value to, to people or the different topics that you could write about. How often do you email them?

Our customer, our database, we email like two to three times a day with offers.

Nice. Okay. Look at you. Yeah. Only mail on the days you want to make money. That's, that's the general rule.

And that is so true. Yeah, yeah.

Can't go wrong following Amazon's lead.

But I'd love to hear your feedback in regards to like picking like, is that a viable plan to pick a category within that, within our field, within our industry and be the experts at that, at that one specific category?

Yeah, I mean, you know, you look at. Have you heard of Wayfair.com? yes. So you know, before they were wayfair they built 270 individual category brands. They started out doing with allbarstools.com and everything that they sold was barstools. They totally built that out. Then they got speaker racks and then every grandfather clock.com and ottomanempire.com and all of these things where they went and single focus on each individual market. They got them all up, each a standalone. The Procter and Gamble model. Right. Procter and Gamble has 23 individual billion dollar brands that are all independent of each other. Right. And so you look at that, that's how the shoe market is a viable market. The golf club market is a viable. The putter market, the travel market, you know, every, all of it is a, are all viable. You know, you can build a pretty amazing like footprint that way for the people who are seeking those things. But they all would be a subset of people who are in the grand category of golfers. Agree.

Because if you buy in shoes, you're going to need other things.

That's exactly right. You can't golf barefoot in most. Unless you're golfing at John Daly's club or something.

You're one of the most well known yoga teachers, instructors, mentors in the world for people that don't know who you are. How many of you until just now had no idea who Baron Baptiste is?

Right.

Could you give them some background on who you are, how many people you've reached, what you do, that sort of thing. And then I want to, you know, my goal for today is to leave everyone here with Inspiration to go take on a practice that absolutely can enhance and transform your life in ways you can't even imagine. And I think you're the best person that could possibly direct them in that area.

Yeah, yeah. Well, in a nutshell, I was born into a family of yoga teachers. My parents opened the first yoga center in San Francisco in like 1952, long before I was born. But my parents are real like seekers and they were like, they would travel the world, you know, we'd go to Asia, they'd take me along. My sisters and I along with them would go to India and all over Asia and study with different, you know, in holistic institutes and ashrams with different gurus. And that was, you know, probably my greatest education and to a great degree, you know, when you're a kid. We started going when I was probably 9 or 10 years old and I was rolling my eyes most of the time. I wanted to be back home playing with my friends. I didn't want to, you know, so we're going to this, okay, here's some dude in an orange robe up there talking or meditating like mom K. Can we just, can I go back to the room and play a game? But you know, in hindsight, just moving forward in my life, when I got into my early 20s, I was on my own. I moved to Los Angeles and I was like, and I was grappling with my own. I was lost, confused, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I had no purpose. I really was pretty lost. Young guy without going into my teenage years, hugely rebellious, hugely destructive. I mean almost everything you spoke to yesterday, I was like, okay, did that, did that, did that. I didn't do. There were certain lines I wouldn't cross, but I was pretty self abusive and just ran the streets. So I was all out coming out of all that. I wanted to find myself. So I moved. I left San Francisco where I grew up, moved to LA to I knew I to wanted, wanted to clean my life up and find a bigger purpose. I felt something was calling me. So I started recognizing like, wait, I have some practices, things that were real gifts that my parents introduced me to and gave me and that I was around and I was like, I started putting those into practice. But I remember my dad would talk to me in my teenage years saying, well, don't go to college, you're going to become a yoga teacher. And I'd always say, the last dad. I'm like, the last thing I'm going to do on God's green earth. Is ever, mark my word, ever become a yoga teacher, right? Like, it's not gonna. I'm not gonna be like, you all. You all are kind of weird and I am gonna be normal, as Dave Sullivan would say. Yeah. And so long story short, I tried a lot. I worked in a lot of different industries. I worked in radio, I was in acting. I got into fitness. I was doing private training. And then something started happening that I do these training sessions and I was right in Beverly Hills. So I started getting these celebrities, big name a listers. That world's small there. When you're good at something, the word passes around. And I was studying yoga, I was practicing yoga diligently, but I wouldn't teach it. So I would go with people and train them in more classical, traditional fitness. And then at the end, I would do about 10 minutes of stretching, but it was really yoga practice. And then I'd put them through, talk them through a visualization and a meditation. And then what started happening is like, well, wait, could we do. I'd show up at their home to train them and like, could we do more of the, like, last 10 minutes? And then I would. And it just grew into. It just kept calling me in a lot of different ways. I went and interviewed to be a trainer and aerobic, like a cross training group fitness teacher. And the. At the. It was called Voight Fitness and Dance in Hollywood. And it was like the mecca of fitness on the planet. People would come from all over the world. It was like where trends in fitness used to start back in the 90s. And I wanted. It was a dream that was like top of the line, you know, to be on staff, be a trainer at Voight was. So I went in to not do yoga, but to do that. And I auditioned. It was a group audition, people growing up. And I auditioned and they pulled me. The owners, Karen and Hank Voight pulled me aside after and said, you know, we're not going to hire you as a fitness trainer, but we. Someone here knew you knows your background. Like, your dad was like a Mr. American, but he used like yoga. Like, you have a whole yoga background. And they're like, we haven't been able to make yoga work here in this, you know, fitness people don't. It just. We've tried a lot of different teachers and it just hasn't worked here. We'll take. We want to try you out if you'll come and teach yoga. I'm like, oh, man, are you kidding me? And so I said, okay. So they said, make up a Flyer here you're going to teach. I forget Mondays and Saturday mornings, something like that. I made up a flyer and I just coined this term. I just. What do I call it for fitness? But I go, power yoga. And then I put up this flyer and it was a Saturday morning and I was like, you know, those classes at Fitness, they had like nine or 10 different classrooms, like dance studio, kind of. And my room was up. You have to walk three stories up. And it was on this top room. And I remember walking up this long line and I. And I knew there were two rooms up there. And I was like, walking. I go, oh, man, I wonder what class all these people are waiting in line for. And. And so I get to the top. I'm like, holy shit, this is my class. There's like 75 people there. And I. And I just put in the flyer my, you know, by, you know, celebrity trainer, trainer to yada yada. I listed a bunch of cool names.

And then you knew how to market to Americans.

Barely. Yeah, yeah, barely. But I was like, it was. This is about fitness. It's about mind body fitness, you know, strengthen your mental musculature along with your phys, you know, all that. And then I led the class and I thought I sucked. And I literally stood by the door when people are leaving, almost like, sorry, like apologetic. And people are like lit up. And then Hank was there, the owner. He goes, man, people love that. And so that launched something right there. It was just the energy of. Was just there for me.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, so just that. That moment of validation where you knew you were onto something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that went. And I literally had. Well, I got stuck at a certain point. I'll stop talking a second to say this part.

Great.

I had about. It got to a point where about almost. About 3,000 people are coming through my classes every week. And they have to. They ended up in the largest room there. And it. And it was, you know, sold out bases. Whether I taught at two in the afternoon or whenever, it just. And there was nothing, nothing like that in la. It was like this. It was flow, it was heat. It was, you know, freeing and for people. And people walked out feeling different, better than they walked in, right? Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you remember, but we started talking like, what do you do? And you started telling me in marketing, and I'm like, do you know Jay Abraham? Yes. Yeah. And I just was on the phone with Jay the day before I came here. He says, hello.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And I think his daughter's watching livestream right now. Michelle.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow. But my story where I was in LA, that was, like, in the early 90s, teaching. I was stuck at a certain point. I didn't know how to get out of that, just teaching classes, and I sensed there was something bigger. And I knew Tony Robbins somehow. I don't remember. I had some connection there. So I was on his list, and I was at home. And so my wife at the time, we had just had a new baby, probably a year old. We're living in an apartment in Bel Air, and I was barely making ends meet. I mean, now looking back, I made those Voight people rich, but I was. They were paying me 25 cents a person, 25 cents a head. Yeah. And you're talking a lot of people. And they were charging, I think, you know, $12 a class or something, and they gave me a raise. Everyone, like, yeah. Anyhow, that's another story. So. So, yeah. And I'm grateful for the opportunity. It gave me my start. But this is what I'll say. I was at home one day, I got a call, a cold call, and it was this guy selling me, trying to sell me a $5,000 weekend. And it was someone from J. Abraham, sales guy from J. Abraham's office. I'm like, I don't. Dude, I don't have $5,000. I'm a yoga teacher. I've got a wife, baby. I could barely pay rent. He's like, no, we'll guarantee you'll get your money back. And if you don't, you won't pay something like that. And so he signed me up for $5,000, $500 a month anyhow, for 10 months. And my wife wouldn't talk to me. She was so furious, right? She's like, are you freaking nuts? Like, we can't even pay rent. Like, we can't even. Like, I go, look, the guy guaranteed. So anyhow, I go to the jraham thing.

It's the same conversation most people have with their spouses coming in.

I put it out. You know, it's like when I hear the 100,000 membership, there's something about, you put it out. You're playing a bigger game. It's a bigger force field, you know?

Yeah.

During your. So I was like, no, I'm putting myself out. And my wife didn't understand the talk at the time. She was like, no, I've got a baby. I've got. Like, you know, we need food. So I understood. But I was like, no, I need to do this, and I'll figure it out. Just trust me. So I. Anyhow, I did the whole thing with Jay the weekend, and I got one thing, and it was like, write a letter. Just write a letter. Like, you know, get, you know, like I got something to get off my chest. Write it to my community, right? So I was like, okay. And do a workshop. I had never done a workshop. I was just doing classes or retreats. So I found a facility in Ojai, which is about an hour and a half hour outside of la. And I wrote this whole letter, like, telling people, this retreat is gonna change your life. We're gonna do yoga, meditation, personal growth, and it's going to change everything for you. It's going to be a transformation. And in those days, you know, it wasn't online. You couldn't register online. So I had the perforated. The flyer, and it was perforated. And then you send in a check or you could write your credit card on paper and you had to mail it to my house, right?

So.

And I was like, okay. My wife's like, I have to put money up now to hold the retreats center money. I didn't. I didn't even have money to make copies of Kinko's of the flyer. Hardly. And so it was. Anyhow, I sent the letter out and I'm like, look, we're going to charge $250 to come to the retreat. All I need is 10 people to pay for the J. Abraham seminar, right? And then so I did the math, I sent the letter out, and I did. And then mail started pouring in, especially as the retreat was getting closer. The retreat facility only fit 40 people. Like 39 people. And 250 people registered.

Oh, wow.

And we received all this money and the room, literally the yoga room there, only fit like 40 people. And I had 200. Yeah, 50 people coming. And I'm like, okay, this is a problem. This is a problem. And I'm like. I looked at my wife, I go, we have to send the money back. She goes, we're not sending the money back because this is going to pay off my college debt. So anyhow, that got me started into doing retreats.

Did they all show up? And what did you do?

I got so creative. I created a schedule for. I found how, you know, we found housing outside that property. And then I worked my butt off. I taught. Yeah. 12, 15 hours. Like, morning, like, got everybody out hiking, you know, on a morning hike. That's easy. Get everybody out, you know, 6, 7am Do a long walk. And then, and then the classes I put in rotation. So there was like a 8am class, you know, 9:30 class. And I built in 15 minute windows for myself to, you know, take a piss, get some water, drink a smoothie. And I. And I rotated people through and made it work. Yeah. You know, and that opened up a whole world for me. Oh, and the other thing is I didn't know how. I've never taught any personal development and I know how to teach yoga and I could lead meditation and I. So I'm like, oh wait, I. Way over promise, like I don't know how to deliver on this promise like it's going to change your life. So.

Anyone ever done that before?

I'm like shit now.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that'll be useful and awesome, click here.

Go ahead. They're over here. Do it now. Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.